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Jan. 5, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:33
2067 www.lfb.org - Free Books! Jeffrey Tucker of Laissez-Faire Books Interviewed on Freedomain Radio

A great chat with the Jeff!

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Hello, Stefan. Hello.
How's it going? Good.
How does my sound sound today?
Better? It sounds...
I really feel that the only word for it is mellifluous.
No, no. Operatic.
No, wait. No, let's just go with those two.
Wait a minute. Are you suggesting I sing?
Do you sing? Oh, well, I do sing.
I don't know that I have anything...
It's Latin. You know, it's a very tricky language.
But anyway. See, you say that to me like I never spent any time in theatre school learning Gregorian chants, which I did, shockingly enough.
Did you really? Yeah. I did.
I did. It's a vast repertoire, all very beautiful, rooted in folk music.
I mean, it's very beautiful.
So, I enjoy it.
So, Happy New Year to you.
Thank you. Tell me all about the new gig.
Tell my listeners all about the new gig, the new shakedown slash CEO ship, master of the universe of print.
Yeah, well, it's very exciting.
So, Agora Financial took over Laissez-Faire Books last year, and then they tapped me to become the executive editor of this thing, thinking that I knew, you know, enough to be able to run the company.
So, I agreed, and that's what I've been doing for about two months now.
Our new site just went live yesterday, and I'm very pleased with how it's looking, and I've been pleased to see how much development has taken place over the last 24 hours.
So it's very exciting.
I'm pretty much the one guy who's sort of specializing now in the laissez-faire books catalog associated with Agora Financial.
And for me, it's a great honor because, as you know, it's a very old company.
It dates back to 1972, really from the founding of the libertarian movement.
So it's got a long history, but not that history matters that much.
What matters is the future, and I think we've got a bright one.
So what's the website?
It's lfb.org.
Lfb.org.
So what's all the snazzy new stuff that you've been digitally pumping out there?
Well, so we've got a new feature called Laissez-Faire today, and I've been writing an article almost every day now for some weeks, just trying to fill it in.
We've got some new writers. Wendy McElroy has been writing for us.
We've got other people that have been submitting things.
So that'll be a daily feature.
We've got a community coming, kind of like your community, and it's going to be very broad-minded, sort of focused on liberal ideas, generally on books and ideas, whether it's economics or foreign policy or politics or what have you.
And that will be developing over the next few weeks.
And various other features of the site, and we're opening up a blog and some other things.
But mainly, I went through the order process yesterday, and I'm just extremely impressed at the speed and the elegance of the checkout process, since it's just completely state-of-the-art.
I mean, the software that we're using just was released about three months ago or something, so...
Yeah, we've got all the tools.
I think we can make this work.
We've also got about 700 books on the site.
And I must tell you, Stefan, that I've had to kind of...
Really refresh my own understanding of the broadness of the liberal tradition.
I mean, just going through these books, I'm just blown away at how many wonderful things have been written just over the last 10 years that somehow blew right by me.
So, I'm just really excited.
I can't review these books fast enough.
I can't write about them fast enough.
So, it's just so many ideas.
So... So what you're saying basically is you get a plush office, a secretary, and vacations, and of course staggering amounts of pay for reading books about freedom.
I must say that that seems like a pretty sweet gig all around.
That's pretty good. It's pretty good.
I've been working very hard, as hard as I ever have, if not more, feeling very inspired these days, reading very quickly.
One of the things that I think we're going to try to specialize in is the distribution of e-books.
And of course, we'll make the content free online online.
As well as sell the e-book and sell the physical book.
But the thing is that it's a very broad-based kind of focus on liberalism, very much like what you've kind of done over the years, which is liberty is all of a piece.
It's not just about economics, not just about foreign politics, not just about history.
It's about life itself.
It's about everything.
So, that's the range of material that we're going to try to cover.
And I've got a list of another hundred books I want to put in the catalog already.
And you notice that you've got two books already on the front page of the site.
So, we're very happy to have it. Yeah, I know.
I've sent a bunch of copies off to you guys already.
So, I'm certainly interested to see how that goes.
So, basically, I'm just trying to picture this because I've spent most of my professional life, like prior to Free Domain Radio being a full-time gig, I spent most of it Hiding, you know, reading or getting...
So basically, someone can open your door, look in your office, and you can be reading something, like a really great, engaging book, and you don't have to sort of stuff that under and then pretend to be typing.
You're like, no, no, no, I'm working!
That's amazing. What a beautiful thing.
I remember in the late 1960s, mid to late 1960s, Murray Rothbard got a job very much like this, where he was just asked to read books and comment on them.
And he was very, very happy.
So I'm doing a lot of that sort of thing, but also writing on other topics.
And working in the for-profit world is something I haven't done in probably 25 years.
So it's kind of a different feel and a different world.
Where the profit and loss signals account for everything.
And I like it. That's somewhat liberating for me.
And like I say, I'm glad to be part of this big, long tradition that dates so far back in history, all the way to 1972 when Laissez-Faire first opened, in a world where there was no such thing as digital distribution.
So the bookstore was extremely important to the development of The ideas of liberty in those days.
And so I kind of see it as my job to make laissez-faire books once again very important in our own time in the digital age so that we can become a kind of portal for the distribution of new and old works.
And this is another point, too.
If this works, if it's successful, I'm hoping that we're going to become a kind of infrastructure that can support the publication of Libertarian books in a reliable way.
So that as a publisher, we'll be coming to you saying, listen, we would love to have a book on such and such topic.
So libertarian writers, people who concern themselves with liberty, won't be constantly begging to find publishers and groveling before conventional publishers who then ask them to sign contracts to sign away their life for 170 years or whatever the heck copyrights are doing these days.
So we're not going to have any part of that.
We want to come to you and say, Here's an opportunity for you, and we'd like to be the distributors, publishers, and distributors of your work.
So that's the goal.
Well, it's almost like there's a third wave of bookselling that's going on because, of course, the first wave was all the commie, socialistic, collectivist stuff that came out of the Fabian socialists in the early part of the 20th century.
And then, starting around the early 1950s, of course, there was the wave of the conservative book revolution in William F. Buckley and, to some degree, Ayn Rand, all these other writers who had been roundly rejected by the mainstream presses, which tend to be pretty liberal, pretty left-wing.
Yeah. Yeah, it really is.
I feel like also we're on the ground floor of something.
In this digital world, I really believe that it's creating a new world that's just been born.
We're really just beginning to see the potential here for the distribution of a variety of media types with radical new ideas, libertarian fiction, everything you can think of.
I think we've just begun this process.
We've just begun to explore.
What digital media can do for us.
You've been on the cutting edge of this in so many ways.
We're going to catch up to you and then help you, I hope, going forward.
I've had a theory about how you got the job.
I'll share it with you and you can let me know what you think.
It seems to me such a sweet gig, such a good job, that nobody would leave that position.
And so my guess is that you sort of looked into it and you decided to take the past CEO for a fishing trip.
Some place where there was lots of storms and, you know, George Clooney rolling by slowly upside down yelling about tuna.
And, you know, he just went missing.
And lo and behold, the new opportunity has opened up.
He shared with you all of his secrets before he left this mortal coil, and now you are ready to step into his oversized libertarian clown shoes and do the profit shuffle.
Am I way off base with that, or is that very close, if not identical?
I told you all I can't believe you've done this.
Really? You can't believe that I lack discretion?
I'm shocked. I can't believe you can't believe it.
How did it come about?
Well, it came about...
Addison Wiggin over at Agora had the idea, and he told his associate there that laissez-faire books seem to be on the market as an institution.
So they went out and bought it.
They said, we'd love to have a bookstore.
And he's always been interested in...
I mean, Addison's point of view is that you don't have to be a non-profit in order to promote liberty, that there's ways to do...
Good things for the world through the for-profit sector.
So he acquired the bookstore. And when they began to look around for somebody to manage the thing and to pick the new titles and to publish the titles, he saw me out there and thought I would be a cool guy for the job.
So I went and we interviewed and we all hit it off.
And that was about three months ago now.
And it took about two months to get the new site live, which is longer than I wanted.
But on the other hand, it's up now, and I'm very happy with it.
I love my colleagues.
I think it's a... Agor Financial itself is a huge company, a big multinational company with offices in, I think, 16 countries or something like that, including a big ranch in Nicaragua.
It's a really cool company with a lot of...
Progressive, in a good sense, thinkers.
So they're really backing laissez-faire as an institution to promote ideas and to help them in their work and then also just to distribute these works on a for-profit basis and to help libertarian authors and encourage the whole industry.
So, I mean, there was a real meeting of minds, I could tell it, just right off the bat.
And also, they You know, Addison enjoyed my books.
So when I went for the interview, he had my two books on the coffee table there and started asking me questions about them and that sort of thing, which is very charming and very sweet.
As long as they're not actually being used as coffee holders, that's usually a very good sign.
The what? Well, as long as your books on the coffee table aren't actually being used to hold coffee, you know, like a bunch of mugs on top of them, then that's actually a very good sign, so good.
So we've got some really cool titles already commissioned.
I've been able to work with authors already, and a lot of things...
We're already in progress. Technology has allowed us to move this process along.
In the old days, it took years to get a book published.
Now we can do it in no time at all and do it in a way that we can publish and be profitable with very small print runs and test the market a little bit more and take more risks than people were allowed to do in the old days.
That's been the long process, right?
Ever since the printing press was invented or ever since the scribes were working in the first millennium.
It's been a matter of lowering the cost of production and reducing the amount of risk associated with ever more distribution of ideas.
So the digital age has afforded us all these new opportunities like we've never seen before.
The goal of laissez-faire is to make sure that libertarians are going to seize on this and do everything with it that we possibly can.
Are you working, I mean, obviously you have the website and you have the print editions and so on.
I'm sure you'll be working with audiobooks as well.
Yeah. Are you going to be working with things like the book tours and author Q&A sessions and that kind of stuff?
Yeah, I'm glad you brought this up because there's an author that we just talked to.
I can't tell you who it is, but we were just talking to this morning and we want to do kind of book releases in various countries around the world.
We do one in the United States and then one in the UK and then we also release it in France at a book celebration there and then also in Latin America.
This is the idea that we're going to have various events scheduled for the author to speak and to do book signings and that sort of thing.
The other thing is that Agora itself goes to many places where they go all around the world just all year long.
And laissez-faire books will be at all of these events, at these investment conferences and various conferences around the world.
Anywhere that Agora is going to be, laissez-faire books will be there with them.
So it gives the authors new exposure to audiences that we don't have before.
You know, I'm sure you agree with this, but I've long believed that libertarians have underestimated their potential market for their ideas.
Do you know what I mean? We tend to sort of believe that it's just a small sector.
It's not a small sector.
I mean, the whole globe is potentially open to us.
And we just have to try everything.
We often mistake the resistance that people feel towards libertarian ideals in the semi-socialistic, post-capitalist, fascistic hierarchy that we live in.
And we forget that over in China and in India and, of course, in Eastern Europe, who went through the end result of where we are without intervention heading.
Those people are incredibly thirsty and they have incredible skepticism towards government and they're incredibly enthusiastic about small government ideals in a way that the West has not really experienced, I would say, for about 150 years.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'd say that's really right.
We've got a whole world to win.
I mean, it's a gigantic world.
And that's the other thing.
Since we're publishing into the Commons, you know, under Creative Commons licenses at Laissez-faire, translations will be open.
So any book can be immediately translated to another language and we can be completely free about those translation rights, too.
So that way an author can have his book, you know, potentially in however many languages available.
That people feel the inspiration to what I have it translated into.
And so there's a kind of liberality of mind.
I must say too, and I know that we've talked about the subject of intellectual property in the past, but I was blown away.
To discover that, you know, the new owners of laissez-faire, you know, were completely open to these, you know, sort of very advanced ideas concerning intellectual property.
And if you don't mind, there's a funny story associated with this.
So I was speaking at a university campus, it was actually University of Alabama, Birmingham, on the subject of IP. When the CEO of Agora and I were together and I said, look, I've got to go give this speech.
Do you want to come with me?
And he said, well, sure. So we went there together along with the comptroller and I spoke before the students that had come to hear me.
And so I got a chance to speak for a complete hour and a half in front of my new bosses on the subject of intellectual property.
Can you imagine? That's fantastic.
Yeah, it was really nice.
So I laid out the whole theory, the history, the law, and the rationale for going forward, and that was a great pleasure.
So it really sparked the new interest in this topic of what it's like to publish into a kind of a common style model and to get rid of the state regulation concerning the control of ideas.
So that was a unique pleasure.
I had a really good time doing that.
Well, it's something that reminds me of the section in It's a Jetson's World by Jeffrey Tucker, where you talk about the degree to which classical music flourished in a place where IP was not protected.
And of course, if we can move libertarian thoughts, arguments, and communication into as fertile an area as, say, Germany in the classical period for the creation of that kind of music, we really can lay a foundation that will last the test of time in a way that IP-protected property rarely seems to.
No, it's like it's always in a cage, right?
So if you let it out of the cage, then it can have a greater degree of influence than it ever would have had.
You know, so there's almost an ethic associated with that.
You mentioned music in the 19th century.
It was considered to be a kind of great compliment to take somebody else's theme and rewrite it for a different kind of orchestra or maybe for a choir or maybe for a piano piece or an organ piece.
It was a compliment, you know, and people were proud to do that.
And it was like a...
It's a gift that you would give the composer to take his theme and rework it.
It says, I think you're right.
I think this is beautiful. I think this is lovely.
I'm going to do something else with it.
That was the ethos of music before there was copyright.
To some extent, it's the ethos in music and jazz, or at least was until very recently.
That's how jazz came about.
And, yeah, I think you're right if we can recapture that sense of learning from each other.
It's just essential. I mean, none of us can come up with, you know, the completed theory on our own.
It's crazy. We have to learn from each other.
We have to cooperate together.
And, you know, I think a common style model or a free market style of publishing is going to make that...
Not only possible, it's going to encourage that, encourage learning from each other.
It really does help thinkers not rest on their laurels.
I always feel like, I mean, I try to be as creative and innovative as possible in the connections or ideas that I put forward, but I'm always aware that there are, you know, billions of smarter people out there who are snapping at my heels for cashing ahead.
And because you can't build that fence around what you've done already, if you don't go the IP route, I really feel the urge to continue.
To be innovative and creative.
And that sort of spurred me on to heights that I think I would not have even contemplated otherwise.
No, that's right. The other thing to remember is that When you mix your ideas with the ideas of another person, it's not just that you're learning from them and they're learning from you.
It's that together you can come up with something that's even better than either of you would have thought of alone, in isolation.
So the whole becomes much greater than the sum of the parts.
Do you know what I mean? Oh yeah, absolutely.
So you get that development of an exchange of ideas, you get a bigger result, more value than ever.
Well, watching one guy hit a ball against a wall will put anyone to sleep.
Watching two guys play tennis is something that you can put on TV, and I think that's the big difference.
Yeah. Well, so it works in the world of ideas, same as it does in the free market.
So when there's an exchange take place, it's like in the physical world, it just looks like that went here and that went here.
But really, in their heads, and this is the reality that matters, everything is more valuable than it used to be.
It's the same way in the world of ideas.
If you can keep the exchange alive and keep that spirit of learning going and remember that we don't know everything, that it's an incompleted system, that there's always better ways to put things, new things to discover, and always reasons to learn from each other and read and keep that...
That spark of creativity alive.
And that's why I think there's got to be a role for a vibrant and rich and progressive libertarian publisher.
I mean, we have to have the means to get things out there.
And somebody out there to back them, an infrastructure that's pushing progress in the things that we believe in, in the values we believe in.
Well, I mean, as the illness becomes more manifest, the drive for the cure becomes more apparent, or the curiosity about a cure.
And, you know, as the edifices of statism and its value-added nonsense is sort of falling one by one, I think that there is increasing interest.
I sort of feel like we veer between some...
I veer, I shouldn't say for other people, but I sort of veer between this sort of Scylla and Charybdis between...
You know, the Ron Paul candidacy, which is doing some fantastic work in getting people interested in libertarian ideas.
And then the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is almost in a way at opposite polls, which are getting people out there and doing stuff in a very practical way that's not specifically political.
And I can't figure out exactly what it is, but you've got this, you know, highly political and then this highly social movements that's going on.
I think if we can sort of slip through the eye of that needle, we can get some great ideas into the population.
That's right. Well, and this is, I mean, who can doubt that it's the wave of the future?
There was a big article in New York Times a couple of days ago about education in India.
I don't know if you had a chance to catch it, but it turns out that there have been vast networks of private education.
Educational institutions spring up all over India just in response to the failure of the state system.
I mean, like in India, half the people attend private schools.
So like half the public, you can't get them to go to the public schools.
Even though they're free. I mean, they want to pay for the private system.
And there's a vast range of alternatives around.
In other words, it's being run just like a business.
But in a way, the entire thing sprang up kind of spontaneously, I guess you'd use that word, and informally.
So there's this huge world that's been created of educational institutions.
And in some ways, I think you can look at that story and see it as a sort of metaphor for what's happening now.
You know, worldwide, we're seeing this kind of out of private property and the exchange economy and the individual control that people have over digital media.
We're seeing the creation of a kind of alternative sector of life, really, that exists outside the state and really doesn't want to have anything to do with the state.
And anything the state does to it is only going to be harmful and people don't want it.
You know, so that's what's happening in our time.
I mean, so there's some estimates that half of the world's workers are working in the informal, what's the so-called informal or unregulated sector of life, as it is now.
And that's only going to continue with the continued failures of the state.
I mean, the state can't do anything for us that's ever more obvious.
How is it being back in the free market or the for-profit environment after so long away?
I assume that especially since 2008 with the decline in the US economy, is it quite different?
Has it changed a lot in your experience?
Well, I mean, one thing that's really wonderful that's happened over the last several years is that globalization has touched every aspect of life.
So now it's just inconceivable that I could even do my work without reaching out to people all over the world, which I do on a daily basis.
And through Skype, I mean, it's become the major means of communication.
I mean, it's really become this sort of A global network.
We have to cooperate together because our nation states are failing us.
You know, our national economies and so much of the physical world is decrepit and falling apart.
Especially for young people, this is just catastrophic.
I mean, the recession is very much still alive for everybody under the age of 25 and 30 years old, so they have to find other alternatives.
And they're reaching out, reaching out around the world and doing new creative things.
I mean, people are not going to just sit back and let the state just destroy everything.
That's not going to happen. I mean, that's not in our nature.
I think I just listened to a lecture that you pointed that out.
It's not in our nature.
We want to thrive.
We want to grow.
We want to develop. We want to cooperate.
We want to do wonderful things with our lives.
I think people are relatively willing to submit to a myth, even if it's pretty irrational, if in return they get largely economic goodies, right?
So people will subject themselves to things like nationalism and state worship and so on if the government or if the society as a whole can dangle in front of them profitable careers and security and all that kind of stuff.
stuff, but as the goods that society can provide diminishes, particularly to the young, proportionately I find their receptivity to social myths declines as well.
The king who cannot provide gifts is not a king for very long, because that's the point of kinghood, and I think that's a very great opening in the young.
Now that we can't bribe them into obedience to irrationality, they're actually able to think a little bit more clearly, I think.
Yeah, isn't it striking too?
It's really happened over the last five years, and you can sort of see it on the public opinion polls.
There's more and more people distrustful of the state.
I think I saw one poll, I don't know, very recently that said, you know, it's like historical lows.
6% approval of Congress.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's congressmen, their illegitimate children, and their mistresses.
It's about 6% of the population, I think, so pretty much nobody except congressmen and those that they're banging.
They don't have any approval rating of Congress at all.
Yeah, if we could just take that to explain to people that the thing that you really, really should be against is not just the elected officials and that elections aren't going to fix things.
The problem is much deeper, really.
And it has to do with this thing called the state, this permanent state that would exist whether Congress were in session or Whether a presidential election were permanently undecided, or whether the Supreme Court never showed up, there's still this hardcore evil that exists in society called the state itself.
And it's kind of a permanent structure that, well, it imagines itself to be this permanent ruling elite over all of society.
And if we can draw attention to that, I was just writing on this topic earlier today, which is why it's on my mind.
People get very confused about What the state really is.
And this confusion leads people to believe that somehow electing the right guy is going to fix everything.
It's not. It might help things.
I don't know. But we've got a much more fundamental problem besides just having the wrong guys in office.
Yeah. I mean, the fundamental problem is that people recognize virtue at a personal level, but then they flip it around and it becomes something completely the opposite at a public level.
We have these sort of two spheres of life.
I mean, you and I recognize and everybody who's sane that we talk to would say, yeah, stealing is bad, killing is bad, you know, assault is bad and so on.
But we can't run society without laws.
We can't run society without government.
It's like, whoop! You know, it flips around.
People say, well, gosh, you know, the path of a criminal is as old as ancient Greek mythology, that the criminal gains some great benefits in the short run and avoids work and it looks like a whole lot of fun, but in the long run, his life turns into the crapper.
And, you know, hey, how about state action in the 20th century?
Doesn't that seem to follow that pattern at all?
People, no, no, no, no, no, that's different.
It's inconceivable. So you just have to get that plumb line.
I think Walter Block used to call it the plumb line libertarianism.
It just goes all the way through.
It's just one moral rule for all.
You don't invent different physics the moment you get above the air into space.
It's actually the same physics.
There's just less resistance.
And we just need the same moral physics throughout society.
And, you know, bing!
It's as easy as saying bing.
That's what I tell people. Bing!
We've, you know, undercut the authority and removed the oldest and most dangerous superstition.
The best thing about all of this, in some ways, I think, for our time, is that the state really isn't, as you pointed out, it's not really working for anybody other than the elites, other than a tiny sliver of elites.
There's a way in which the Occupy Wall Street people are right about this.
There is a kind of a 1% of ruling elites that the system's kind of rigged for.
For everybody else, it's just a kind of a constant rip-off.
And you experience this on a daily basis.
I mean, getting anything online...
You know, all the producers are striving to make it easier and cheaper and better for you.
If you have to ever deal with the state, it's ever more difficult.
And they make you jump through ever more hoops.
And they just kind of constantly imposing misery on us every day.
It seems to be their main job.
I mean, how long can this sustain?
I don't believe it can last forever.
I don't think that... That the people of the world are going to forever put up with this nonsense.
I mean, where the chasm is so vast between what it's like to deal with in the state sector and what it's like to deal with the private sector.
There's hugely difference. One serves humanity and one is kind of like trying to tear humanity down, you know, to benefit a handful of people.
Right, right. And this is what is, I'm sort of waiting, you know, it's like picking locks, trying to work with the collective mind.
It's like one Tumblr, I don't know how many Tumblr there are, I hope we're near the end, but just trying to get people to understand.
I've got an interview this afternoon with an Occupy Wall Street guy and, you know, the point is to say, Yes, inequality is increasing in society.
And what was the purpose of the government programs of the 1960s?
And he may know, he may not, but of course the purpose was to eradicate the last traces of extreme inequality.
And violence always achieves the opposite of its goal.
Everybody gets that at a personal level.
If I wanted some woman to date me, and she wouldn't date me, and so I throw her into a windowless van with chloroform and put her in my basement, that's not going to endear her.
The use of violence is not going to turn her into a loving...
A companion. And everybody gets that violence achieves the opposite of what you want to achieve in the long run.
And that's very easy. So you say, okay, we have increasing inequality.
What violence is being used to promote equality?
That's going to give you increasing inequality.
And that, of course, is the redistribution welfare state, the corporate welfare and all that kind of stuff.
You just have to look at what's happening.
You just know that someone back there in history...
We promised that violence was going to solve this problem, and that's exactly how you know why the problem is worse, right?
So in the post-World War II period, government got really interested in mental health because it really wanted to promote mental health, and so it started getting lots of funding going, and it was lobbied by people to include mental health In insurance companies.
And now you have, I think, 1,100 people every single day in the US who are disabled on SSDI and SSI roles because of mental health issues.
Because the government said, oh, no, no, we're going to solve the problem of mental health.
And that's how exactly you know that the problem of mental health is going to get much, much worse.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, there's very little. If you look at government programs now, there's a way in which they're far less ambitious in terms of claiming that they're going to uplift humanity and bring about some great new utopia that you've never imagined.
I can't even remember the last time a government program's been promised under those things.
I mean, what they do now...
Is they do some rotten thing like, you know, establish a TSA that harasses you all the time.
When you get really mad about it, they assure you, look, it doesn't seem like it, but we're really just doing it to serve you, you know, really.
And so you kind of go, yeah, right, and you move on.
Or like this recent thing with SOPA legislation, which is very interesting.
You know, you had this gigantic bill coming about, and everybody who had an interest in the thriving dynamic internet rose up and complained about it, you know?
And really, I think, ultimately, stopped, for now, the SOPA legislation.
So, these are the kinds of things the state is doing these days.
It's just annoying us, like, all the time, you know?
But that's a beautiful thing.
I mean, if nobody's promising you a magical cruise liner, but instead they're just trying to plug all of the holes breaking in the bottom of the boat, everyone gets it.
It's not a sustainable journey.
I mean, I can't remember, you're right, I can't remember the last time a major government initiative was put forward that everyone even remotely got behind.
The government is just trying to hang it.
It's like the last couple of minutes of that...
A Walt Disney cartoon where the Sorcerer's Apprentice, where Mickey Mouse is getting...
All he's trying to do is just control all these brooms that are drowning everyone.
There's no magic cleaning going on.
No, it's not even...
And it's funny, actually. If you read some of the history, you look back at some of the propaganda, you know, 100 years ago, say, you know, that was at the beginning of the...
Right before World War I broke out in the Progressive Era legislation where everybody thought if we could just get an income tax, just get a central bank, then we'll get rid of the problems of the plutocrats and we'll stabilize business cycles.
There's all these crazy promises.
If we just have this one big war, then we'll get rid of dictatorship around the world forever.
Just grandiose, insane things.
I don't think anybody makes promises like that anymore.
Really, I think the state is kind of in a survival mode.
They're constantly warning us all the time, telling us that, look, we're in control.
It doesn't really matter what you think.
Just remember that we've got to have this authority in society.
We're the authorities. We're in charge.
Your job is to obey.
But as far as the benefits, it's not entirely clear anymore.
I mean, it's really... I mean, that's the late stage of any addiction, right?
I mean, all addictions start with a whole lot of fun and glitter, right?
And they all end with you scouring the sewers around Las Vegas looking for one more hit because all you're trying to do now is avoid the crash.
You're not even looking for a high anymore.
And the late end of our addiction to state violence is, yeah, we're just trying to avoid the inevitable crash.
We're just propping up for one more day.
We're not looking for any high anymore.
But, I mean, all that does just mean the crash just gets that much worse.
I mean, the stimulus package said, oh, it's going to bring unemployment down to, what, 7% or whatever.
And now, when it's gone up, right, they're saying, well, but without the stimulus, it would have been 12%.
They're just making stuff up now.
I mean, like all addicts, they are in the stage of denial and ruthless.
But I think that's becoming pretty evident to everyone.
Well, you know, Stefan, it reminds me, as you're describing the situation, my friend Yuri Malsev, I remember he immigrated from the old Soviet Union, which we shouldn't forget, you know, dissolved 20 years ago this month.
You know, that was 20 years ago.
The whole thing just vanished.
And he left right before this period, but he described the later years of Gorbachev very much the way you just described, you know, the present state of the police state in the United States and Western developed countries.
I mean, this kind of clamor, this panic to preserve, you know, the system, to liberalize in some places, but crack down in others, but mainly just try to intimidate people into just understanding, look, There's one thing, we can argue about policy all you want, but there's one thing that's not going to change, we're in control.
And one day, that all changed.
And the entire vast empire of the Soviet system just kind of like melted and went away.
All the secessions all took place, and suddenly independent countries all over the place, millions of people rolled into the world division of labor, and the people who thought they were in charge woke up one day and found out they weren't anymore.
That's a remarkable thing.
And it had nothing to do with politics.
And the same thing happened in South Africa, the end of apartheid, was because of bankruptcy.
It didn't have anything to do with the ANC or anything like that.
I mean, they just, de Klerk ran out of money, and therefore they liberalized.
That's, you know, that's the way, I mean, people are driven by economic necessity.
The idealizations are all ex post facto, just, you know, they're like the dirt that people throw on the body to cover the crime.
Right. And I'm sure you've been asked this before.
People will come to you and say, well, look, what is your theory on how the state's going to collapse in our time and where you are right now?
And it's very difficult to know, right?
I don't think anybody can really anticipate the precise path it's going to take.
Do you think? Yeah, I mean, there's no, I mean, the timing is dependent upon information that maybe 20 people in the world have, which is the true state of government finances.
But I think it's going to be, I think 2012 is an incredibly important year, which is why I'm starting it off by talking to you.
That's how important I think it is.
But 2012 is an incredibly important year.
I can't imagine that the system is going to make it through the end of the year in its current state.
I think it comes down to what we as intellectuals do, which is how much passion, how much energy, how much visibility can we bring to the argument that it is freedom that will save us because it is violence that has failed.
People think that it's freedom that has failed.
Oh, look what happened in the free market.
It's increasing inequality. Like, you can look at this, like the free market.
But if we can make the case, if we can make the case that It is coercion that has failed and freedom is the solution.
then what will happen is the government, there will simply be a massive snowballing avalanche transfer of resources from the public sector to the private sector, because the government will simply privatize and sell off like crazy just to pay those in power, right?
They're not going to let the farm go up in flames.
They're going to say, oh, we have too many dependent livestock.
Let's herd them out into the field.
Oh, we've got too many buildings that we have to pay for.
Let's sell them off.
I mean, all they'll do is do what every organization does, whether it's the mafia or a company or, you know, if you're too heavily in debt, you simply sell off your assets.
So the accumulation of assets in the public sector, which has really been the quasi-socialism of the past two or three generations, it's going to be a massive and sudden reversal.
And I mean, that's what you saw, of course, in the Soviet Union.
There was just a massive sell-off of government assets.
There wasn't enough, unfortunately, to cover people's pensions to any real degree.
Right. But inflation isn't the answer.
The economic system is too tied in and the inflation game is too well-known.
They just can't get away with it.
So there's just going to be a massive sell-off.
And there's going to be a huge shock.
And then, you know, within two or three months, things will be humming along fantastically.
Of course. That's my prediction.
I was watching a travel channel the other day where they took us to St.
Petersburg, and I was just so dazzled to see what's happened to St.
Petersburg and Russia in the years since the Soviet collapse.
Everything's beautiful. The whole place was rebuilt by human hands.
Through commerce.
I mean, it's the whole key to civilization.
If you just let people be free to trade and exchange and use their own creativity, keep what they earn, to associate with whom they please, talk, communicate, and take risks, beautiful things can happen.
A beautiful world can and will emerge without any central management whatsoever.
Which is one I wanted to mention to you.
I really like The term laissez-faire.
I have some sense that it's not really popular, like maybe it once was, or if it ever was, I don't know.
I don't hear it being used very much.
And people often mispronounce it to me.
They say laissé, or, you know, they use some other kind of pronunciation.
So one of the very first things I did on the website is I wrote a big essay called, What is Laissez-faire?
Because I like the term.
And it has to do with this whole theory that society can be left completely alone to develop on its own.
That civilization can emerge through human hands, working together cooperatively on a voluntary basis.
And then you see beautiful things come about.
A social system that serves humanity.
And that's the whole theory of laissez-faire.
And with the help of Rothbard's History of Economic Thought, I traced it not back just to the 18th century, you know, in England or Scottish Enlightenment or whatever, but to ancient China.
Because this is a very old view.
It's got a long heritage throughout a whole history of writing.
There have always been people who believe primarily in control and those who believe primarily in letting things alone.
Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, I think spoke very eloquently about the degree to which the wise ruler basically doesn't rule.
Yeah. It's beautiful.
This is something that What I only got a lot later in my sort of historical education was that whenever you see an empire, you look past the empire, past all the noise and smoke and beheaded locals of the empire, what you see at the beginning is some sort of free market that unfortunately has driven technology and profitability to the point where the government can seize all of that through taxation and create an empire.
And it's true of the Greeks, the Romans, and the British Empire in particular.
I mean, they had all of the...
It was the first really...
Ideological commitment to what we would call free trade now came out of sort of 16th, 17th century England.
And so you go, yay, freedom!
And then unfortunately, a couple of generations later, you get empire.
And the same thing is true, of course, in the US. And that, of course, is why freedom is so dangerous.
It is the spark that lights the powder keg of empire so often, which is why, boy, to have freedom where you actually get that the purpose of freedom is to eliminate the state rather than to contract it, I think that's going to be a revolution that will never have to be done again.
Yeah, very interesting.
Well, you know, it's often said, at least it used to be said all the time, that the more prosperous an economy begets, the more developed civilization gets, the more you're going to need a central state to kind of manage things.
That maybe you could have anarchism in a primitive state, but the more complex and developed society becomes, the more there's a need for a leviathan.
But your point is that it's exactly the opposite.
I mean, the more developed society gets, the more dangerous the state becomes because it has more resources at its disposal.
Yes, absolutely. I mean, all the government can do is throw spanners at a delicate machinery, and the more delicate the machinery, the more damaged those spanners do.
I remember reading a book by George Stephanopoulos many years ago called All Too Human about his time in the White House, and I've got it somewhere.
I'd be meaning to sort of read it on a show one day, but there's a page where he's got his sort of daily agenda for, you know, a typical day at the White House.
And, you know, it's like, well, we're going to deal with trade barriers to Mongolia.
And then we're going to go and deal with some educational problems that are going on in Arkansas.
And then we're going to deal with, you know, cabbage production and distribution.
And, like, the list of everything that this small group of people were supposed to be dealing with.
And then, you know, we've got a defense budget that we've got to work on.
And then, you know, we've got to negotiate some public sector salaries.
And it's like, holy crap.
I mean, the vanity of statism is truly astounding.
I mean, I would feel not even remotely competent to deal with 10% of one of those issues with a year or two of study.
And it's the staggering lack of humility in these people who can get up there and, you know, swagger around and think that they know how to run hundreds of millions of people's lives better than those people do themselves.
Humility is the only virtue that human beings fundamentally need to be free, which is just the humility to say, I don't know what's best for you.
I barely sometimes even know what's best for myself.
I might eat chocolate instead of brushing my teeth.
I'm such an idiot sometimes. So I'm not going to tell you what to do.
And that's all the humility we need to be free.
Yeah, and I'm sure this comes about in the Stephanopoulos book, too.
But in the end, I mean, all these people know that the whole thing is a hoax.
I mean, they know they don't really know what they're talking about.
They know that they're fundamentally liars, and that the system is a big lie.
And partially, this instills in them a little bit of fear.
Anybody who lives and breathes the beltway, and that's their whole life, is sort of living within the state apparatus, there's a kind of a fear of life outside of the beltway.
Like, if the people out there ever really catch on, that we really don't know what we're doing, that I'm just making up these numbers, that I don't know how to run things on my own, then we're all going to be in big trouble.
So there's a kind of a fear, an us-versus-them mentality that develops among the ruling class, too.
Yes. Yeah, and that comes out through the media in the projection of external enemies to fear the population, to make the population afraid and so on.
But yeah, I mean, the only thing we have to overcome is fear and insecurity, right?
Because it's funny, you know, insecurity, if you have it relative to your rulers, and so many people say, well, I don't know how Iran should be dealt with, but I'm sure there are really smart guys in Washington who do.
That's the kind of insecurity that almost breeds arrogance and narcissistic megalomania in other people.
If we get off our own insecurity and say, I don't think...
I think these guys are that much smarter than I am.
Or if they are, it doesn't have anything to do with how my life should be lived.
I mean, there are surgeons who obviously know a heck of a lot more about how to take out an appendix than I do.
I would, you know, have someone swallow a cherry bomb and stand back, which is why I'm not a surgeon.
But I know that that's very limited, but he still doesn't get to tell me how to live my life.
He just takes out my appendix if I need.
So if we get over our own insecurity and say, no, these people aren't that much smarter than I am.
And they're certainly not smarter about what I need than I am.
Then if we get of our own insecurity, that almost tamps down other people's megalomania to the point where we can start approaching each other as equals, which means, you know, put down the gun.
You know, it's a very interesting point you make.
I wish that everybody had the opportunity to just, for example, tour on a typical day the Department of Transportation, for example, or HUD. Right.
I mean, what you would see there in office after office, those that aren't empty, and many of them actually are, are human beings just like you and me, and they pretty much don't have that much to do.
I mean, they're sort of showing up late, they're taking long lunches, they're leaving early, and, you know, otherwise just trying to find ways to pass the time.
I mean, there are no amazing geniuses in government bureaucracies.
If you talk to them individually, and you can even find this out if you go hang around the IRS building and talk to people on lunch break and ask them, what do you think about working for the IRS? Well, almost everyone will say, I hate it.
I hate this place, and I hate my job.
It was all that I could get.
Well, imagine if Steve Jobs was still alive and he's like, well, you know, I've done Pixar, I've done Apple, I've created some amazing products.
But what I really want to do now is become a manager over the Department of Public Education.
Yeah, right. I mean, people would just be like, what?
Let's get an MRI on this man.
He has to have some sort of head injury.
Now, if the head injury is bad enough, then yes, he can go and run to the Department of Public Education.
But assuming it's not, we need to keep him here.
Have you had a chance to read the Steve Jobs autobiography or the biography?
I'm listening to it on audiobook.
I'm about a third of the way through.
I haven't read it myself, but I heard one of the anecdotes where he's driving like 100 miles an hour, gets a speeding ticket, and then drives off again and once again speeds up to 100 miles an hour.
But it made me laugh because I think what you have, and Steve Jobs is something you get in other great entrepreneurs, is a kind of disregarding of the state, ultimately, of the police state.
Well, he found a way around actually ever having to license his car because he would simply buy a new car every six months because there's a law that says you don't have to license it for the first six months.
So he just kept trading in his car, so he never had to have a license for his car.
That's interesting, yeah.
Well, I guess every great entrepreneur, you know, it's all about smashing the system that they inherited.
You know, that's ultimately what all of us should do, I think, in our lives.
Well, but I think for entrepreneurs in particular, it's about smashing your own artwork, too.
Because every time he came out with a new product, he was essentially taking a flamethrower to his last Mona Lisa.
And that's the harder part, I think.
People get, oh, yeah, smashing competition, but you're also smashing your own history as well.
And that's a difficult thing to do for a lot of people.
Yeah, exactly. Just to think...
Yeah, and to not be invested in that thing that you've already created.
And remember that whether it's good or it's bad, it's in the past, and we need to be thinking about the future here.
This is one of the very good things about...
About ever more people working in the digital world, because that is an ethos that prevails for now in the world of digital media and on the internet.
There is a kind of a constant looking for progress, a constant improvement campaign, an awareness that whatever the successes of the past, they are in the past, and we now need to be dealing with the future.
That's something I think we lost Somewhere after World War II and before 1995, that's being recaptured now.
Well, of course, one of the things that, I mean, I know this growing up in England in the 60s and 70s, that war has people start driving looking at the rearview mirror, right?
Because war is such an unbelievably ugly sacrifice that the scar tissue that grows out of that loss is glorification.
And so people say, what do they say about the Battle of Britain?
England's finest hour.
No, no, no!
I mean, being reduced to hurling your young men in horrible machines skyward to blow up other men because you failed to contain Hitler, because you failed in the Versailles Treaty and you failed to contain the remilitarization of Germany, that is a massive failure!
But what it does, the sacrifice is so great that the reaction formation or the ex post facto justification is it was glorious.
But what then happens is you end up looking backwards rather than moving forwards.
And that happened because there were so many ghastly sacrifices in the Second World War.
In the West, we spent a couple of decades just looking backwards.
And look at all the movies about war and all of that.
And unfortunately, that means that war is that much more likely to repeat, although I think that cycle is beginning to diminish now.
But I think, to me, that would be why it was a couple of decades where we just weren't that innovative.
I've never heard that view before.
It's really intriguing.
But you're right. I just came up with it off the top of my head, so I've never heard it before either.
It's really good. But there is.
That's true. What is war about?
It's about constantly trying to look back and say, yeah, that horrible bloodshed, the unspeakable, unimaginable mass death that occurred, that was really actually glorious.
Yeah, I mean, if a guy smokes and gets horrible cancer and then, you know, has to have one of his lungs removed and almost dies on the operating table and has to go through six months of chemo or two years of chemo and radiation therapy and his hair falls out, I mean, does he then five years later say, oh, those were glorious times when I beat that cancer?
I'd be like, no, that was just horrible.
I wish I'd never smoked. That was a wretched thing to go through.
And for God's sake, don't ever do what I did.
But war is different.
We have artists to polish up war, artists who are almost never on the front lines.
The last honest artists, I think, were the world of Siegfried Sassoon and the Owens of the First World War, who wrote very bitterly about the nature of war, but it didn't happen again in the Second World War.
No, that's really true. And, you know, it's also true for the Crazy New Deal, right?
I mean, people constantly romanticize in the Great New Deal days, you know, oh, I didn't have a job, next thing you know, I found myself pouring concrete to make this unneeded dam over here, and You know, the South or whatever, and it was just a great time.
Look, I mean, the whole New Deal period was ghastly.
I mean, the state just...
Oh, literal starvation of significant portions of the poor.
I mean, literally people starving to death.
Mass migration. Women who were so hungry they were infertile.
I mean, it was unbelievably monstrous.
An entire decimation of the talents and energies, optimism, hope, and happiness of an entire generation.
I mean... You don't recover from, you know, 13 years of scrambling around doing farmhand work for chicken feed to eat and then say, oh, my life's going to be great from here.
I mean, it left a permanent scar, I think.
Yeah, it did. And so the guy who brought us this great thing, you know, we put his picture on the dime and say, look, he's our hero, you know.
So we have to constantly look back and make up this phony history.
You know, it's just nothing.
Listen, Jeff, I hate to break it. I've got to get to my next interview.
I really wanted to thank you, and I really want to make sure you get that website out again for people.
I'll put it on the video as well.
I've had a look. I mean, obviously, I just zoom in on my own books and lick the screen, but I'm sure that the area around my spittle is equally attractive, and so I want to make sure you get the website out for everyone.
Yes, it's lfb.org.
I found that you can put LFB in Google or laissez-faire books, and it comes right up.
We're looking forward to a wonderful future.
Thanks for giving us a very nice launch, Stefano.
I appreciate it. I appreciate that, too.
I'll talk to you soon. Okay, bye-bye.
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