Stefan Molyneux speaks with Dr. Mark Skousen about the visible vs. invisible effects of government programs, concentrated benefit, dispersed costs, FreedomFest and the future of the United States economy.
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| Hi, everybody. | |
| It's DeFan Mullaney from Feed the Main Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| So I had a conversation with Mark Skousen. | |
| I'm a huge fan of his work. | |
| It was a real thrill for me. | |
| It was a really enjoyable chat. | |
| For those of you who don't know, shocking, get to know the man. | |
| He is an American-Austrian school economist. | |
| He's an investment analyst, a newsletter editor. | |
| He's a college professor and author of some fantastic books, which you can get at audible.com, or we'll put the links in the low bar to the video on the notes of the podcast. | |
| He also is one of the key organizers for Freedom Fest, which is a fantastic venue. | |
| I spoke there and was interviewed actually by Reason TV there last summer, and I couldn't make it this summer for health reasons. | |
| But it's really, really worth checking out at freedomfest.com. | |
| It was a real thrill to chat with him. | |
| So here it is, ladies and gentlemen, me having a brief chat with Dr. | |
| Mark Skousen. | |
| So, Mark, so for those of us who are interested in a rational economic – I mean, obviously, when I say rational and economic, I generally mean Austrian economic – a way of approaching the world, why do you think it's so tough for people to get into the mindset of looking at things differently? | |
| Because we're all interested in economics. | |
| We all live and breathe economics all the time, every single day. | |
| But to actually think about economics in a kind of systematic, skeptical, rational way is really tough for people. | |
| Why do you think it's so hard? | |
| Why is it so hard for economists to get their way of thinking across to the general population? | |
| Yeah, I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately because here the president is trying to push through a substantially higher minimum wage when sound economists have We've explained over and over again that this kind of intervention in the labor markets is counterproductive and leads to higher unemployment, especially among teenagers and among blacks. | |
| And so it's really mind-boggling. | |
| And then we see Obamacare and how the interventionist policy is leading to higher unemployment and part-time work and people trying to get around the system. | |
| These things are so obvious that they're really bad economics and the low interest rate policy by the Federal Reserve which is causing banks to fail to lend to small business which is the backbone of economic growth. | |
| There are so many examples, and I was talking to Don Boudreau about this at George Mason University, and he writes regular letters to the editor to various publications trying to dispute bad economic policy. and he writes regular letters to the editor to various And I emailed him and I said, "Don't you ever get frustrated by all of these examples of time and time again? | |
| You try to teach sound principles, you're teaching thousands of students every year, but it doesn't make any difference whatsoever." And it is very frustrating. | |
| I mean, I've spent my life educating students and the public about sound economics, but it sounds like nobody's listening. | |
| We have the answers, but nobody cares. | |
| Well, you know, I had John Allison, who I'm sure you know, on the show recently, the head of Cato. | |
| And he's got a great example in his recent book, The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure, where he was talking to a bunch of people who work for the Federal Reserve, very high up in the Federal Reserve. | |
| And he said to them, you know, does price fixing work? | |
| You know, and there's a couple of basic things that all economists agree on, you know, obviously, Minimum wage, causing unemployment among the most vulnerable in society is one. | |
| The fact that free trade, you know, the division of labor, the free trade specialization and expertise all increases growth, that's another one. | |
| And another one, of course, is that price fixing doesn't work. | |
| Price fixing, when you artificially raise the price, then you just create shortages, bring in the black market and so on. | |
| So he was talking to some guys at the Fed and he was saying, do you guys think that price fixing works? | |
| And they were all economists and they said, well, no, of course price fixing doesn't work. | |
| And then he said, well, what makes you think it can work then when you price fix interest rates? | |
| And you could almost see, he said, the short circuit, the electricity is like, wait, doesn't compute, can't work. | |
| Even experts seem to be able to see the principles that work everywhere except where they're actually involved. | |
| And then suddenly the principles go out the window. | |
| This is even true for economists. | |
| And if economists can't get it, how is the general population supposed to? | |
| I do think that in the macroeconomic sphere, they throw out all sound economics at all, and they're actually taught in the classroom in macroeconomics the Keynesian policies, which do involve And the idea that there is a free lunch in the fiscal and monetary policy, | |
| that you can artificially run deficits, that you can artificially lower interest rates, and you have all of these net benefits, I think there's a real problem with that. | |
| I'll use another example. | |
| We had at our Freedom Fest conference the sports economist, J.C. He was making the point that 95% of economists have been surveyed. | |
| There's been all kinds of studies showing that the building of sports stadiums does not provide the public benefits that they think it is, that it's actually a real drain. | |
| Yet, 95% of all stadiums are still built with public money. | |
| So these are just example after example where I think it's two things. | |
| One is sound economics is not really taught to students. | |
| And number two, there are other forces at work, like in the case of sports stadiums, the sense of community, that we've got to be all together. | |
| How could you be against something like this? | |
| There's something going on besides economics. | |
| And I also think it's a lack of faith in the In the capitalist model, the capitalist system, you have a major recession. | |
| Even free market economists, I think, are kind of bracing themselves. | |
| I hope it works that if we adopt austerity, that the economy won't sink into a major recession. | |
| If the government doesn't intervene, but most people really during a great recession that we've just gone through, I mean, everybody panics. | |
| The government's got to spend. | |
| We have to adopt TARP. I mean, Republicans voted for this sort of stuff. | |
| So it's political economy at work, and we economists, I think, have a hard time understanding the political side of these issues. | |
| Well, again, given the election cycles, as I think a lot of people have pointed out, the election cycles are sort of four years, or I guess two years, they sort of roll between Congress and the presidency. | |
| If you put in austerity, I mean, it's like, and not expecting pain is not going to happen, right? | |
| It's like, hey, I'll quit heroin, but I sure hope I don't get any withdrawal symptoms. | |
| It's like, well, no, they're going to be pretty rough. | |
| But the way, of course, it works is somebody's going to take the hit for the austerity, and then the guy who gets voted in next is going to reap the benefits automatically. | |
| Of the, you know, reallocation of resources towards more productive ends when the government shoveling towards unproductive ends comes to an end. | |
| And I don't think a lot of politicians, you know, to get to the highest levels mean you at least have to have the political sense not to shoot yourself in the foot and hand your benefits to the next guy down the line. | |
| And I think that's obviously one of the things, I mean, the government has always been fundamentally opposed to free market principles. | |
| Because if the free market works, there's really less need for government and less need for those kiss-the-ring political favors that they're so addicted to handing out. | |
| Well, I do think that we can rely on markets, that people aren't too worried about these sorts of things during the period of prosperity. | |
| It's only when the bubble bursts, like it did in real estate, that everybody really panics. | |
| And we have this sense, at least in the West, I don't know about the East, but in the West, where we just kind of feel... | |
| That we have to do something. | |
| We have to appear compassionate. | |
| So we have unemployment compensation, unemployment insurance that is extended time and time again now for two or three years. | |
| We don't want anyone to suffer. | |
| I think it does show a fundamental cultural weakness In the baby boomers, my own generation, as I told my son the other day, well, we kind of blew it. | |
| Our generation blew it. | |
| Now it's your turn to blow it. | |
| We're kicking the can down the road. | |
| Somebody's going to have to face these problems. | |
| We'll make it you rather than me. | |
| We're going to retire now. | |
| The congressmen are going to go out in the sunset. | |
| They're going to receive letters for the rest of their lives saying to the honorable congressman or whatever. | |
| Do you ever wonder about that? | |
| Why do we call congressmen and judges the honorable so-and-so? | |
| Maybe we should... | |
| We should start writing to the dishonorable for what they've done to our country. | |
| Well, anybody who forces you to call him something, it's obviously not that thing. | |
| You know, like if I say, you have to call me the cool guy, well, clearly I'm not cool, because if I was cool, you'd just call me that anyway. | |
| So, only the dishonorable will actually force people to call him honorable. | |
| That seems almost like a law of nature. | |
| Yeah, and you know, America had a long-standing tradition of calling the president Mr. | |
| President, not the honorable so-and-so. | |
| But for some reason it's creeped in that kind of European or British hierarchy and the identifying of lords and sirs and so on has creeped in a little bit to the legal profession and to the legislature. | |
| Well, of course, as the presidency becomes more imperial, the imperial nomenclature tends to creep in as well. | |
| Let me ask you something else. | |
| So if there were a couple of basic economic principles that if you could sort of wave your magic wand of intellectual enlightenment over the steadily darkening landscape, what would be the most important economic principles that you would kind of give your eye teeth for people to understand that you think would most significantly improve our discourse in these areas? | |
| Well, I do like Bastiat's what is seen and not seen concept. | |
| I think that's a really good one where we look at not just the obvious, you know, when you have a public works project or when government spends money, we look on what is not spent and industries that were hurt were As a result of this or that government program, I wish we would see more of that. | |
| I use the minimum wage law as a perfect example when I teach this to my students. | |
| We show on the graph, we show that those people who are still employed do get a higher wage. | |
| So that's what is seen. | |
| And what is not seen, unfortunately, are all those people who were not hired who didn't get a job who are sitting at home and we can show that on the graph too so it's very powerful and students really get that they're nodding their head they understand that very well but we don't unless students have really taken that and seen that graphically they don't see it so they only see the visible effects of a government program You | |
| know, the EPA, it's making our water safe. | |
| Well, what's the cost? | |
| And what jobs were lost as a result of this? | |
| It's kind of like the public. | |
| The media needs to learn this, too. | |
| I actually taught a class a couple of times to journalists called What Every Journalist Should Know About Sound Economics. | |
| And this is very typical that in the media they talk about layoffs. | |
| That'll make the front page layoffs. | |
| But very seldom do you see in the press all the jobs, small jobs, that are created that maybe really add up, but the focus is on the big company in the local press that has just laid off 50,000 workers. | |
| I just had an image of trying to teach sound economics to journalists, and the image that came to my mind was introducing sunlight to vampires. | |
| Did they scream? | |
| Did they actually turn into dust? | |
| Did they melt? | |
| Because that seems to be one of the big problems, is that the journalists put out these simplistic explanations. | |
| I've actually had a student or two come up to me 10 years later and say, I took a bunch of classes from this think tank in Washington, and the only one I remembered was your discussion, because one of the things I teach them also, which is really important, because one of the things I teach them also, which is really important, | |
| I really emphasize this idea that supply creates its own demand, that technology and new products are what really drive the economy, not the consumer just buying more and more of the same thing. | |
| It's a very difficult thing to explain, | |
| to students and to the media but once they see it they get it and and what I what I basically talk about is I use the Steve Jobs example which is really good where he said I you know what did people really know that they wanted an iPhone did they really know that they wanted a PC well no they didn't think they didn't know they wanted it until you put it right in front of them And so one of the great quotes that I use is from Henry | |
| Ford, who said, whenever I asked consumers what they wanted, they always said, a faster horse. | |
| That's right. | |
| And of course, he created the automobile. | |
| And they had no concept of the automobile until he created it, the assembly line. | |
| These are difficult things to explain. | |
| I sometimes think economics is not common sense. | |
| It's uncommon sense, very uncommon. | |
| You have to take a course in college economics to really understand all of these concepts, the nuances of economic behavior. | |
| I've written a couple of books on these. | |
| I have a textbook called Economic Logic, which is a No compromise, free market textbook. | |
| And of course, I've done my history of economics called The Making of Modern Economics, which is an alternative to Heilbronner's worldly philosophers as a way to explain how the Adam Smith model, a system of natural liberty, is the ideal way of conducting economic policy. | |
| Oh, and by the way, for the listeners here, that is a great book. | |
| I've actually made my way through the whole thing, and it's great writing, a passionate sense of history, and really gripping. | |
| It's like a thriller, I mean, the way these ideas develop. | |
| You don't have to be an economics geek like me to really enjoy it, but I'd highly recommend it. | |
| So I'll put links to the books on the show. | |
| Yeah, thank you. | |
| One of the things I try to do in that book is the first time I've created a book that actually has a plot where You tell a story of economics and you have a hero, Adam Smith, in a system of natural liberty who comes under attack and is left for dead but is resuscitated by the Austrians and the Chicago school and so forth. | |
| And then he triumphs in the end. | |
| It's a true American victory at the end, although the victory has been very short-lived, unfortunately. | |
| Well, of course, you know, one of the great Austrian analyses of public policy, it's not just Austrian, but I think the Austrians focus on it really well, is this idea of concentrated benefits and dispersed or diluted costs, right? | |
| So if somebody gets a contract with the government for $100 million, they're $100 million happier. | |
| The taxpayers are all 30 cents worse off. | |
| And so they have a huge incentive to lobby for that contract. | |
| The taxpayers have... | |
| I think it was Hayek who called it a rational disinterest or what's the point of even getting involved by the time I've learned about it? | |
| I spent too much time to even pay myself back for opposing it. | |
| I think the same thing's true in Keynesianism versus the Austrian school, that the Keynesians, if you're a Keynesian, I mean, government power is yours for the taking. | |
| You can go and work in all of these agencies without that tickling of rational conscience that bothers people who aren't into the status central planning model of economic disorganization. | |
| And so, in a sense, if the Austrian or libertarian economic school wins, then a lot of people have got a lot of concentrated power and careers and incomes and prestige and publications, the Krugmans of the world. | |
| I mean, they're going to suffer catastrophic losses in credibility and going to reveal this kind of bad guys who were leading people down a very destructive path. | |
| But the benefits are going to be much more diluted. | |
| And I think that the analysis to the economy as a whole, I think, almost applies to economic thought, if that makes any sense. | |
| What I think you're talking about is this public choice area of economics more than Austrian economics and James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock and people like that were the founders of this school and one of the points they make is why is democracy always in deficit? | |
| That was the name of one of their books and the answer is because public officials are reluctant to tax but Just enthusiastic to spend, and so that leads to these natural deficits, and so you need some kind of constitutional amendment, some kind of restraint, almost an artificial constitutional restraint on government because of these natural tendencies in political economy. | |
| You mentioned the example of dispersion of cost, and again, Bradbury, A.C. Bradbury, in his I work as a sports economist. | |
| He says, you know, how much does it cost for each taxpayer to fund this gigantic new sports stadium? | |
| And the answer is five bucks. | |
| And so nobody really cares that much. | |
| They're willing to do it, even though it doesn't really create any new jobs. | |
| And it might actually be a drain on the economy, but you feel good about it. | |
| And it's not worth the individual expense. | |
| To join in a concerted effort to stop this sort of thing. | |
| Why would you contribute $200 to a campaign to end the sports stadium to make it privately funded if it's only going to cost you $5 in taxpayers' money? | |
| It is a problem. | |
| One of the problems with these think tanks... | |
| I actually said this to an official at the Cato Institute, which I support a lot, and give them money and stuff, but name me one example where they have stopped legislation or really made a difference. | |
| Maybe they have, but it's really hard to put your finger on it. | |
| Yeah, and they tend to regroup and try it again because they have so much incentive to push through the legislation that they want. | |
| And so even if they suffer a temporary defeat, there's always a regrouping and the forces realign themselves. | |
| And that special consolation of principal people to oppose it may not be available, may have retired, may have died. | |
| I mean, as you know, of course, setting up a central bank in the United States took several runs. | |
| When the right conditions are there, which they inevitably are, the legislation always seems to get through sooner or later. | |
| The greatest revenge, I think, is not to contribute money to all of these think tanks and stuff like that. | |
| I'll probably get some criticism for having said this. | |
| But it's better to, and the gold bugs and the hard money movement actually came out as a rejection of politics as a way to accomplish things. | |
| The best thing to do is just to make a ton of money off of government policy and squirrel it away and minimize your taxes and almost withdraw from the system. | |
| And there's a great temptation to do that in today's world. | |
| I think that's the greatest fear that we'll kind of give up in any effort to try to turn the country around. | |
| Alright, so let's talk about that. | |
| You know, I've often characterized our existing system as really following the pattern of psychological addiction. | |
| And psychological addiction, of course, is when you're compelled to pursue a self-destructive behavior because of the immediate gratification. | |
| You know, you toss the long-term Keynesian, in the long run, we're all dead scenario to the wind. | |
| And you continue in that self-destructive behavior until... | |
| You can no longer kick the can down the road until the level of destruction. | |
| You have a gambling addiction. | |
| You've lost your house. | |
| You've lost your wife. | |
| You've lost your kids. | |
| You've lost your job. | |
| You've lost your pants. | |
| You're just in a ditch somewhere outside a casino in Vegas. | |
| And then at some point when you hit rock bottom, then you may have the opportunity. | |
| If you haven't learned by reason, you have to learn by bitter experience. | |
| I mean, I just did a whole presentation on Detroit, which is like torn out of the pages of Atlas Shrugged. | |
| You just renamed Starnesville, Detroit, and it's pretty much the same thing. | |
| How bad do you think it's going to have to get before people are going to give the libertarian view some credibility? | |
| I mean, we have been right for approximately 250 years. | |
| You know, is 251 or 252 going to be the tipping point? | |
| Well, you know, what's interesting is the reaction. | |
| of the Social Democrats to the excesses that clearly Detroit has gone through over the last five administrations that were all run by Democrats and they ran Detroit into the ground and of course right now what are they saying? | |
| They're saying while Detroit burns Meanwhile, the top 1% of Americans are fat cats, smoking cigars, traveling all around, and they're not paying their fair share. | |
| And if they did pay their fair share, maybe we wouldn't get into this problem. | |
| So if you look at why Rome declined, it was because they saw this insatiable needs of the state and the expanding welfare state And where did they turn? | |
| Well, they turned first to taxation. | |
| They raised taxes, especially on the rich. | |
| And once you've plucked the golden goose and there's nothing left, then you turn to this inflation. | |
| And the denarius lost 99% of its value by the clipping of coins and changing the value of the denarius, taking less and less silver. | |
| I see the same kind of scenario developing that we're going to have more Detroit's. | |
| By that, I don't mean cities. | |
| I mean the pension systems, the Social Security and Medicare on the federal level finally succumbing because no one's willing to deal with this problem and they're kicking the can down the road. | |
| They can continue to do that because we have these very low interest rates. | |
| The government's interest as a percent of GDP, I believe, is still lower than what it was in the 1990s, early 1990s. | |
| So that suggests that we can still kick the can down the road, and then eventually it's just going to blow up on us. | |
| And I don't know when that's going to be, if it's 10 years from now or 20 years from now, when the baby boomers, everybody's on Social Security, everybody's living forever, and Because of the new technology of medicine allows you to keep a person alive, no quality of life, but you're still alive. | |
| And what price for the value of one person? | |
| So we'll spend a million dollars to keep each person alive. | |
| And it's all taxpayer money. | |
| It has to blow up on us at some point for sure. | |
| Well, and there is this awful realities that are so foundational to our system. | |
| I mean, they're vastly inflating the amount of money that they're expecting to get back. | |
| Like, return on investment for their pension funds are calculated at 6% or 7% or 8% by CalPERS and other companies. | |
| I think we're good to go. | |
| I think we're good to go. | |
| I mean, this is really eating the seed crop to the future at a time when the future is going to have to be much more productive than the present to sustain a retiring population. | |
| Yeah, no, I agree with you. | |
| But interest rates do have to rise, and they will rise. | |
| And we've already seen the first leg of this. | |
| Long-term rates spiked up in the last month or so. | |
| I think that's the first of many moves because You have to remember that the government influences interest rates, largely short-term interest rates, but the long-term rates are much more difficult to handle because yes, the government can buy $85 billion a month in treasuries and try to control the interest rate on that, but that's still not the entire market. | |
| There still is a global market out there And once this starts kicking in and the inflationary boom really starts moving again, these rates are going to go up and they're going to go up pretty sharply. | |
| And the government, it's going to be very difficult for them to control it. | |
| They've been able to control it up until now, but I think they're losing that control and that's where everything starts to unravel. | |
| Well, I think it's quite a surprise to the central planners, of course, that when you have the rise of investment havens, I mean, who would have anticipated 20 years ago that India and China would have the kind of economic growth where I think in India alone, 50,000 people a month are coming out of poverty into the middle classes. | |
| And the investment opportunities overseas that are occurring are really quite striking and kind of unprecedented and I think providing alternatives that are going to end up depressing the value of, I guess, what is still currently the world's reserve currency market. | |
| As people start to flee into gold, as people start to flee into foreign currencies, I can certainly see some termites eating at the base of the US dollar. | |
| Yeah, it is. | |
| It's still the big elephant in the room, and I don't see any alternative to the dollar yet. | |
| I mean, it's not the euro, and it's not going to be a communist currency, and it's not going to be the Swiss franc that's too small, or the British pound. | |
| So it's kind of the dollar by default at this point, and I have rejected out of hand some of these extreme doomsday scenarios about the dollar collapsing. | |
| In fact, I'm still watching very closely. | |
| Like Glenn Beck is an example of a classic doomsdayer, and I heard him speak, it was two years ago, I believe, at the New Orleans conference, and he said just frankly outright that in five years... | |
| We are going to have a total collapse. | |
| So 2015, I hold these people accountable because while they may be right at some point, timing is everything in this marketplace. | |
| I think we need to be realists and we don't want to have our head buried in the sand. | |
| Corporations, for example, have done a pretty good job of dealing with this great recession and cutting costs and building their balance sheets and being in a stronger position and so forth. | |
| I take my hat out to the private sector in adjusting to this. | |
| Government is the problem, though. | |
| If there is going to be a collapse, it's going to be because of government, not what Apple or Microsoft or IBM or General Motors does. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I remain quite optimistic I mean, the reason being that I think the people in charge do know what the problems are. | |
| I mean, populist rhetoric, nonwithstanding, I think that the people in charge do understand that the government is too big. | |
| They do understand there are too many regulations. | |
| They're kind of caught up in the machinery and the logic of public choice and the general problems of an out of control democracy, which is a photocopy of all the crappy democratic endings that have happened before. | |
| But I think they know what the problem is. | |
| And I think what will happen is when the crisis is within the lifespan of a single political career and a single political election cycle, I think they'll bite the bullet. | |
| I think they will do what needs to be done. | |
| I mean, they're not going to go down with the ship. | |
| They're in charge. | |
| I think that they will – suddenly you'll get all kinds of let's pull together and you'll get all kinds of war rhetoric about fighting red tape and regulation and taxation. | |
| I think they will collapse the state. | |
| I think it will be incredibly painful particularly for the dependent classes. | |
| Naturally, libertarians will get blamed for their callousness towards the poor despite the fact that it's socialism that's grinding them in the heel. | |
| But I think that they're not dumb. | |
| They're not ideologically committed in the way that the communists were. | |
| I mean, for the communists, it was do or die. | |
| I mean, they were ideologically committed and couldn't change course. | |
| These guys seem to me a bunch of pragmatic opportunists, and they do understand that government's too big. | |
| When that crisis hits, I think we will see a very quick reduction and a very painful reduction in government. | |
| I think that then we'll just reset the clock and start again, but I think that that's more likely to me than a complete collapse. | |
| I don't underestimate the intelligence of those in charge. | |
| I'm more or less in your camp in that regard because with good leadership, we can turn things around. | |
| And I always like to use the Canadian story of the mid-1990s where they had very similar problems, maybe not as grand a scale, but still government 50% of GDP and a falling Canadian dollar and rapid deficits and a bloated welfare state and all of this sort of thing. | |
| And they said enough is enough. | |
| And this is the Liberal Party of Canada that said it. | |
| But it was a consensus among conservatives and liberals for different reasons in Canada, but they basically went on a two- or three-year austerity program, and they fired federal workers, and they balanced the budget in two or three years, and then they went on a supply-side tax cut policy, and then 2008 came, and they had nowhere near the crisis, no banks' failures, nothing like that, and the Canadian dollar recovered, and now it's close to the U.S. dollar. | |
| Canada, I always point to our northern neighbors as an example of what you're talking about, of consensus and saying we've got a problem and we've got to bite the bullet and we can solve it. | |
| But we don't have that leadership right now in this country. | |
| Obama is not even a Bill Clinton who could work with the Republicans. | |
| We don't have anything like that right now. | |
| So we are definitely... | |
| One positive thing that is happening is that Government spending and the deficit, especially the deficit, is falling. | |
| And I don't know if you've noticed that or not, but it's been cut in half. | |
| And so that's because the Republicans are in charge in the House, and that's their only good use, you know, is when they're in the defense. | |
| When they're in charge, watch out. | |
| There's all kinds of problems. | |
| But, you know, what we have right now... | |
| I think is a much better form of government than what we had when one party was in charge, whether it's Republicans or Democrats. | |
| We need to buy the government. | |
| Yeah, no, discretionary spending when the Republicans are in charge goes up much faster. | |
| And of course, the Republicans are very much against stimulus spending, unless you're talking about the military-industrial complex, at which point they get all kinds of butch and start signing crazy checks. | |
| Now, let's talk a little bit about, of course, one of your big public events is Freedom Fest. | |
| I didn't make it to this year's, but last year's I was there talking, and I highly recommend it. | |
| What a great group of people to meet and chat with. | |
| I just had a wonderful time there. | |
| You've just finished up, and you're preparing for next year's. | |
| The theme is, is Big Brother already here? | |
| Which I guess, given the recent NSA scandals and the IRS scandals and so on, is quite a topic. | |
| So what have you got planned for next year in Las Vegas? | |
| When's it happening and who's going to be there? | |
| First of all, we just came off of our best conference ever. | |
| We had 2,500 people at Planet Hollywood. | |
| Our theme was Are We Rome? | |
| It was originally intended to be at Caesar's Palace, given that topic. | |
| But we had a crisis with the hotel. | |
| They double booked this, believe it or not. | |
| And we were forced to move to planet Hollywood. | |
| And so we we dealt with this crisis. | |
| And lo and behold, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise because I was I've never felt an electricity there like I did this year. | |
| It was just unbelievable. | |
| We're just growing on top of that. | |
| We always pick a new topic each year. | |
| The other thing that was really great, for the first time, we have a major TV network coming. | |
| John Stossel doing his Libertarian show. | |
| Stossel at Fox Business actually taped his show there, and it was just a smashing success. | |
| And Fox News actually picked it up last Sunday and put it up in front of millions on the number one cable TV network. | |
| So we're celebrating. | |
| This was a real triumph for us. | |
| We have over 150 speakers, panels, debates. | |
| It's just a very intellectual feast in the most laissez-faire entertainment capital of the world in Las Vegas. | |
| So it has a lot going for it. | |
| Next year's theme is Big Brother Here. | |
| If people go to freedomfest.com, they can find the link to watch our two-and-a-half-minute video. | |
| It's not just about Big Brother monitoring and watching us, which is a major problem, this invasion of our privacy, but it's also how government regulates us and taxes us and destroys the foundation, the currency that we have. | |
| It's also about the welfare state and the nanny state and the warfare state and the police state and all these different There's so many different aspects of this. | |
| I think it'll really be an exciting conference. | |
| We always have the second week in July, so it will be July 9th through the 12th of 2014. | |
| We're going to go back to Planet Hollywood. | |
| It's just very exciting, the speakers and the panels and the mock trials and our banquet and everything. | |
| It really is an exciting event. | |
| You were there Last year and this year, I've gotten quite a few emails from people saying it's the best we've ever had. | |
| So we're very excited about the conference. | |
| Really, the idea is this is a gathering of the tribes. | |
| This is the powwow. | |
| As Dinesh D'Souza says, this is the premier libertarian event of the year where we gather together and we can energize, We can re-energize our spirits and we can learn new things and we can network. | |
| All the major think tanks come there, Cato and Heritage and Reason and Fee and Goldwater. | |
| They're all there. | |
| We have a film festival, the Anthem Film Festival, which was packed. | |
| We had our own theater there. | |
| We had 250 people. | |
| I mean, it was standing room only in these events and people get excited about what's happening in the world and they They come away with a more positive spirit that they can't give up. | |
| We do have hope in this country when you see thousands of like-minded individuals gathering together. | |
| This is why we don't do any live streaming. | |
| People say, why don't you have live streaming so that we can't make it? | |
| Well, no. | |
| We want face-to-face interaction. | |
| The idea is to actually meet face-to-face And talk to each other. | |
| Don't just email. | |
| Don't just blog. | |
| We're like a herd of cats. | |
| We go in different directions. | |
| And the idea is to come together, actually physically come together in this gathering of the tribes, if you will. | |
| And it really does make a difference. | |
| It's palpable. | |
| The buzz you feel when you walk in that exhibit hall is just... | |
| It's very difficult to describe the emotions people feel and the excitement. | |
| Well, it's the world of the future. | |
| It's the world that we're all trying to put together so that we can be among like-minded people all the time. | |
| We get it for four days out of the year. | |
| Well, yes, but the great thing about it, and I've recommended this for people to go to conferences, and I think Freedom Fest is a great one for this, is it can really last. | |
| You know, we all put on our sort of helmets to read the New York Times so that our heads don't explode, and we all turn on the TV and grit our teeth knowing we're just going to get a face full, cannon blast shrapnel of irrationality all the time. | |
| But here's a place where you can go where you can speak your mind, where you're not the odd man out, you're not the person who silences everyone at the dinner table with too much rational argumentation. | |
| You can go and meet people and then continue past that. | |
| You might find someone who lives in the same town who has the same ideas. | |
| You can meet for coffee and you can really find like-minded companions, fellow warriors for the future and these kinds of things. | |
| You go there for four days and it's really great. | |
| It's an oasis. | |
| But you can also take those relationships with you and sustain yourself with that. | |
| So I think it's really important. | |
| We do tend to isolate a bit. | |
| I think there is an isolation, more of an individualism than the sociality that That we would like to really enhance here. | |
| And you're right, people make lifetime friendships at Freedom Fest. | |
| We've had two couples get married at Freedom Fest already who met at Freedom Fest. | |
| And you're already in Vegas, so it's easy. | |
| We're in Vegas, so it was really easy to get married. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Well, listen, Mark, I really appreciate your time, and I'll put the links to your books and to Freedom Fest. | |
| Really, really strongly urge you, if you can make it, it is an incredible event. | |
| You really do get to meet people. | |
| And the speakers, from my experience, the speakers stick around. | |
| So, you know, if you want to chat with people who you admire, it's a great place to go. | |
| They don't usually just bungee in and bungee out. | |
| They're there for the duration. | |
| Well, yeah, in fact, we make... | |
| Yeah, this is a conference that even speakers enjoy. | |
| In fact, Steve Forbes is our co-ambassador along with John Mackey of Whole Foods Markets. | |
| And Steve Forbes was there from the very beginning of the conference to the end on the dance floor of our Saturday night banquet. | |
| He was there all four days, attending sessions, sitting with ordinary people. | |
| I mean, how often do you do conferences? | |
| We don't even have a speaker's room so that speakers can hide out, which is typical at these big conferences. | |
| So they're, you know, Grover Norquist, Steve Moore, Senator Rand Paul. | |
| I mean, these people are not wandering, but, you know, they're there, and you can go up and talk to them, and that's very unusual. | |
| We really try to emphasize that everyone is treated equally, including the speakers. | |
| Everybody has a backstage pass. | |
| There's no VIP access at FreedomFest, so I think that's highly recommended. | |
| So, yes, please go and check out the website. | |
| Sign up, I assume, as early as possible. | |
| For the sake of the organizer's sanity, sign up earlier rather than later, because it makes it a lot easier for my recommendation. | |
| Yeah, our last month, it's 24-7. | |
| In fact, we always have several hundred people just show up at the door. | |
| We had Barbara... | |
| Brandon, of all people, she just showed up at the door. | |
| I saw several pictures of her, and I never actually saw her because the conference is so big, but I would have honored her in front of everybody if I'd known she was in the audience. | |
| Fantastic. | |
| Well, thanks again, Mark, for all the work that you do for Liberty. | |
| I recommend your books. | |
| Definitely, people check out the conference. | |
| It's a fantastic event, and I hope to see you in Vegas next summer. | |
| Great. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Take care. | |
| Take care. |