Stefan Molyneux and Veronique du Rugy discuss the government shutdown, the impending collapse of the system, how the election system guarantees that the difficult decisions won't be made, fear-mongering and the changes that are happening very quickly.
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| Hi, everybody. | |
| My name is Stefan Molyneux. | |
| I am the host of Freedomain Radio. | |
| I have cornered and captured the elusive Eronique de Rougie, who is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Institute. | |
| Thank you so much for taking the time today. | |
| Thank you for having me. | |
| Now, you fall into the libertarian camp of economists. | |
| I think that's a fair assumption to make. | |
| It's a very fair assumption. | |
| I would be offended if I had figured it out. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, I think it's pretty clear. | |
| And so I wonder if we could just take a quick sprint through what is happening at the moment in the US. Part of me thinks maybe the Titanic has hit the iceberg this time, but they seem to be these Houdini-like escape artists that get out of fundamental mathematics so easily. | |
| It's like they're just this well-oiled machine of fiscal evasion. | |
| So what do you think is happening with the slim down and what effect do you think this may or may not have? | |
| On the upcoming, I guess it's what, about two weeks away now, the debt ceiling problem? | |
| So, I mean, like the shutdown, right? | |
| I mean, they just couldn't agree on, I mean, like, let's put it this way. | |
| The Republicans had no real organized strategy because the reality is that they don't care. | |
| I mean, they actually claim to be the party of small government, but they kind of like pretty much like all sorts of spending. | |
| And so now the government is shut down because they couldn't find an agreement. | |
| And you would think each time there's such a big fight that maybe that's the moment where they're going to realize they cannot go on forever like this and we're on a very unsustainable path and they're going to do something. | |
| Pastures don't buy it. | |
| I really actually don't buy it. | |
| I actually think that they're going to find some sort of crappier agreement. | |
| Something that will not put us on a different fiscal path and something that will probably not be beneficial for taxpayers. | |
| I mean, we know Democrats don't want to cut spending, but I mean, one of the things that people kind of like tend to forget is the CR deal that the Republicans have proposed actually had $21 billion above the current fiscal path. | |
| So they're going to find something and it's not going to be shrinking the size of government. | |
| And then they're going to forget about it. | |
| Well, of course, there is that old argument that everything which mathematically can't continue just won't. | |
| So at some point, you know, I mean, the Roman Empire fell, the British Empire collapsed. | |
| At some point, there has to be some fiscal reality. | |
| So I agree with you, but the question is, how is it going to fail, right? | |
| I mean, like, look, I mean, you have countries like France. | |
| I mean, they've been with their backs against the wall for years, but for them, what does it mean? | |
| It means high unemployment, it means high taxes, which, I mean, it's actually, I should say, high taxes, high regulation, I mean, high taxes for sure, high spending, and then, as a consequence, slow growth, high unemployment, right? | |
| But they still fail to see, for the most part, that the crap economy they live in It's a product of their own making, right? | |
| So the economy has been failing quite tremendously actually for a long time, and still they're not quite seeing it. | |
| The same is true for us. | |
| Look, I mean, we always think when this whole thing is going to collapse, it's going to take the form of like cataclysm, we're not going to be able to pay our bills and all this. | |
| I actually think it's worse than this. | |
| Actually, it's going to be a slow death, which is going to allow the force of big government, which are very numerous, to kind of pretend that what we need is more spending and more taxes and more, you know, more regulation and more interference in our lives. | |
| And they're going to be able to get away for the most part without kind of like getting people to understand the connection between big government. | |
| And the collapse of the economy. | |
| I do have a silver lining if you want to hear it, which is I do think that in the U.S. there's something that is not happening in Europe, which is that there is a fringe of the American people who actually is fed up with the government. | |
| And I actually think the distrust for government is growing and growing and growing. | |
| And that could actually really save us. | |
| Well, I mean, if you look at something like Japan has had this zombie undead economy for, what, 20 or 30 years, and they're still staggering along and doing their thing. | |
| But again, I just feel that there's that eye of the hurricane, that there is, I mean, obviously the falling birth rate throughout Europe and now growing in America as well. | |
| The demographic winter, the baby boomers retiring and drawing more out of the social safety net than contributing to it and so on. | |
| It just feels like there is this kind of perfect storm of fiscal problems. | |
| And of course, once you throw in the wars, that's really staggering. | |
| And as you point out, I mean, a lot of people on the right are very sort of anti-big government, but it seems that they're anti-big welfare for the poor government, but they're not anti-big welfare for the military industrial complex. | |
| They seem very keen on that on the Republican side, at least. | |
| Well, then the other thing is like if you want another evidence that the Republicans aren't against big government, it's not just the military, which they're very fond of paying for. | |
| Look, I mean, when they were given a chance to vote for farm subsidies without having to vote for food stamps, which goes to your point, right? | |
| I mean, they're always happy to talk about reforming Medicaid, healthcare spending for poor people, and getting rid of food stamps. | |
| But when you actually split the farm bill and got rid of food stamps, Republicans voted en masse for farm subsidies. | |
| I mean, and then when you tell them, let's get rid of the XM Bank, which gives loans to a company abroad buying products for American company, mostly Boeing, they vote for that. | |
| So the XM Bank, the SBA, which extends loans to small businesses, I mean, they're in favor of all of these. | |
| They're in favor of all of these. | |
| And of course, the military. | |
| I mean, let's, you know, that's a big one. | |
| So... | |
| One of the things that I find frustrating, I mean, it's baked into the system. | |
| I don't think there's much that can be done about it, is that everything that needs to be done will cause a lot of short-term problems. | |
| I mean, if you kill farm subsidies, which is so necessary, particularly for third world farmers, so they stop having this rain of cloudy with a chance of meatballs, free food landing on them, destroying their local agricultural economies... | |
| But if you, say, got rid of the farm subsidies, food prices would go up as the investments and as the resource allocations were adjusted. | |
| I feel you're getting French hands gestures of interruption. | |
| Please, go ahead. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I mean, there's... | |
| Part of the food prices that will go up, but then remember also a lot of what the food subsidies are doing is actually artificially increase the price of food and misallocate. | |
| And so if you get rid of this, you know, like for instance, like one of the main effects of farm subsidies is that it raises artificially the prices of land. | |
| And so that means, basically, young farmers have, like, the cost of being a young farmer is gigantic. | |
| Their profit is smaller. | |
| They can reinvest much less because they pay these totally artificially high rents. | |
| You get rid of this, there may be a transition period, but you don't know. | |
| I mean, like, I think the final effect pretty quickly Will be a very positive one. | |
| Oh, I completely agree with that. | |
| I mean, I'm a free market guy from here to eternity. | |
| So I completely agree that getting rid of the subsidies will bring prices down, will bring more people into the market. | |
| Creativity and positivity and more capital investment would go into the agricultural industry. | |
| But in the short run, there would be a lot of dislocations. | |
| I mean, it is pull the band-aid off, you feel better. | |
| But in the short run, there would be some disruptions and dislocations. | |
| The question is, how much? | |
| I mean, farm subsidies is about $30 billion, right? | |
| I mean, that's way too much. | |
| But I think that compared to the overall size of the farm economy, it's It's probably not that big. | |
| Then the question is, how much a distortion does it make? | |
| I'm always willing to complain about farm subsidies, but I'm not an ag economist, so I'm not exactly sure actually how big of a deal it is. | |
| I think locally it is true. | |
| There's a gigantic distortion. | |
| The question is, what would be the overall impact? | |
| I can tell you, for instance, One of the things that actually really makes my blood boil all the time is the way we measure GDP, right? | |
| The way GDPs measure, and especially the impact of government spending on GDP, is really actually hurting us free market people in our argument that actually getting rid of government is good. | |
| Because it's, you know, the way GDP is measured, as you know, $1 of government spending produces No matter what it's spent on, almost, is producing $1 of economic growth. | |
| The reverse being true, right? | |
| You cut government by $1, and it looks in accounting terms as if government... | |
| As if the economy shrinks, right? | |
| And you and I, we know that's completely artificial. | |
| For one thing, this is just accounting. | |
| I mean, a lot of that dollar that's spent doesn't create any value. | |
| If you hire your deadbeat nephew as a bureaucrat, His salary counts as growth creation. | |
| If you hire him in your private company, it doesn't, and that's probably the right way to measure it. | |
| So we know that a lot of this is just accounting, and it's just artificial, and we won't even feel it. | |
| The other thing is this idea that within the private sector, very fairly quickly, companies don't reallocate anything. | |
| And their resources is not correct. | |
| So, for instance, Boeing, which gets tons of government money from defense, very quickly, as it was clear that some sequestration, some cuts to defense could happen, what they started to do is shift their activities from the defense contracted business to the commercial business. | |
| And I suspect a lot of that would be happening in anticipation of cutting government spending. | |
| So the final effect... | |
| No, go ahead. | |
| You know? | |
| May not be so bad. | |
| I sort of feel like because the US is on these two-year cycles of elections and midterms and so on, that I sort of put my evil shoes on. | |
| If I was in power and I wanted to cut and all this kind of stuff, there would be a lot of short-term pain and certainly a lot of short-term complaints. | |
| like up here in Canada, whenever they talk about cutting subsidies to farmers, the farmers take their tractors and drive at two miles an hour down the major highways, bringing economic and business activity to a standstill. | |
| And so there's a lot of pain, there's a lot of problems. | |
| And then you reap the rewards sort of down the road. | |
| And I guess my concern is that the way the system is set up, nobody wants to hand a good economy to their successor, right? | |
| They're going to make all these unpopular, difficult decisions. | |
| Everyone's going to complain. | |
| There may be some reallocation problems, some disruptions. | |
| And then the Ben, so then they vote in the other guy saying, because the other guy is going to say, well, look what this guy's doing, all this terrible stuff. | |
| And then you hand a good economy. | |
| The other guy gets in power and then the transition is complete and everything goes really well. | |
| And I think that's a kind of weird way to set things up. | |
| I know it's just sort of built into the system, but I can see why it's hard to make those decisions to cut, take all the bullets of disruption and hand a good economy to your successor. | |
| Well, it is extremely hard because – you know what? | |
| I mean like the public choice economists have said it. | |
| We are totally in control of a lot of the decisions that are made, and politicians are captured by these interest groups. | |
| And I do think that, in addition, you and I, we're not walking the hall of Congress constantly Talking about the benefit of actually cutting spending. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| On the other hand, it's the farmers and the defense contractors who are. | |
| And politicians are thinking, you know what, I would rather keep giving money to these guys rather than have them be super loud. | |
| But look, I mean, for months, We've been hearing how the cut, the sequestration cuts, were going to kind of, like, you know, bring devastation to the economy and defense contractors were going to have to lay off, like... | |
| There was a study by Stephen Fuller at GMU, of all places, at George Mason University, talking about how if you implemented some $40 billion cut for defense, it would lead to over a million job loss, and it would cost the economy $86 billion. | |
| You know, not much has happened. | |
| And it's very likely that not that much will happen anyway. | |
| Yeah, there's the old story, of course, about the Second World War in America. | |
| They had all these troops coming home and the government wanted to send up all these agencies to try and help the troops find work because, you know, millions of troops coming home. | |
| And so they, of course, like all government bureaucracy, it took them a year or two to get started. | |
| And by the time they were about to start, everyone already had a job because they just expect, you know, everyone just goes and finds work. | |
| What they need. | |
| And it is, yeah. | |
| I remember Harry Brown used to say this about if you privatized government education, you know, people say, oh, these changes, it would last about a week, people would sort it out, they'd figure it out. | |
| But there is this fear of change, this fear of what's going to happen. | |
| And of course, everybody has their disaster scenarios, which are just designed to paralyze us into fear. | |
| No, I mean, I agree. | |
| And they have the bully puppet, right? | |
| I mean, they're the one who are able to say, you know, this is what's going to happen, to scare everyone to death. | |
| And strangely, they're not held accountable. | |
| They can go... | |
| On and on, making the same prediction. | |
| Paul, the great economist, the great Keynesian economist, Paul Samuelson, after the Second World War, he said, you know, unemployment will be out of control when you're going to bring all these troops home. | |
| I mean, the economy is going to be devastated. | |
| Reducing spending after basically drawing down from the war is going to bring devastation to the economy. | |
| Not at all what happened. | |
| You would think that lessons like this would be learned, but no, because politicians are in the business of growing the government and they are captured by interest groups who benefit from these handouts. | |
| Right. | |
| And of course, you know, the fear mongering, which allows you or gives us a desire to surrender to a strong leader is just constant and constant and constant. | |
| No, nobody's ever held to account. | |
| I mean, there's been no global warming for 16 years. | |
| I don't see my money coming back from taxes that went to pay for this stuff. | |
| That's natural. | |
| I know. | |
| And really quite catastrophic. | |
| And again, it's a lesson that seems really hard for us to learn, that these people just lie. | |
| And it's just one fear-mongering scenario after another. | |
| And we constantly kept jittery and jumpy and wanting to hand over more and more of our freedoms for the sake of safety from the same people who are inventing the scares. | |
| Well, not for you and me, right? | |
| I mean, we're not buying. | |
| We're not buying it. | |
| But think about... | |
| For the first three years or four years of the Obama administration, you know, the Republicans have been all out rightfully denouncing the stimulus and the ability of government spending to stimulate the economy. | |
| And they've been criticizing Keynesian economics, which is the underlying economic theory. | |
| Well, as soon as you start talking about cutting defense spending, they are becoming military Keynesians. | |
| As soon as you talk about cutting defense, defense somehow is a department that actually is not subjected to the law of economics. | |
| Every dollar spent on defense somehow increases security. | |
| There's no waste there somehow. | |
| And more stunningly, they will make the argument that if you cut defense spending, you will destroy the economy. | |
| And you're like, Seriously? | |
| Seriously? | |
| Yep. | |
| But by that theory, after the Second World War, America should have had a complete smoking crater of an economy because government spending, you know, it went down like 90 percent from the wartime peak or something like that. | |
| And the economy boomed for almost 20 years once they cut that stuff. | |
| So, I mean, the historical precedent is completely against what they say. | |
| My concern, though, is also, I mean, if I was in charge of the government, I'd say, OK, I'm going to lay off a million government employees. | |
| Well, I don't know the degree to which... | |
| I only had one job in the government once when I was a teenager. | |
| I was working for the Department of Education in my early 20s. | |
| And a lot of those people... | |
| I wasn't really sure would ever make a successful transition to a private company. | |
| I mean, they were kind of lazy, pretty entitled. | |
| They had a bad attitude. | |
| You know, they were just hanging on like grim death for their pensions. | |
| So I wonder if you cut these government workers, wouldn't they just transition to unemployment? | |
| I wonder if you'd actually end up saving that much at all. | |
| Well, maybe in the short term. | |
| I mean, maybe they will be... | |
| I suspect they will be very serious transition costs. | |
| But then again, you know, I mean... | |
| In order to free the economy from, you know, the gigantic footprint of government, free the private sector, allow resources to flow to areas that are way more productive, I mean, I think this may be, like, an investment worth making, you know? | |
| And, you know, the problem is, like, if we don't do it, look, you're like Detroit, right? | |
| Where you have... | |
| You have a tax base, Trump, because people have left because of the terrible policy of the government, which meant no business, no growth, just taxes. | |
| So people left somewhere else. | |
| And you have left with a big, big government employee base and a lot of retired employees claiming gigantic pensions. | |
| I mean, I would cut my losses now. | |
| Well, I agree. | |
| I mean, the plane is going into the ground and we either have wheels down or, you know, belly sparks. | |
| I mean, because there's no question it's absolutely unsustainable. | |
| The amount of political will that you would need, though, and of course the amount of indoctrination that people have been subjected to about the necessity of government, both from the government schools through the largely government-dependent media. | |
| I mean, you would need such a ferocious willpower of personality to actually get this across. | |
| I mean, it would need... | |
| Thatcher had a tough enough time of it when, you know, government was less than half the size it is now in the 80s. | |
| And even that revolution didn't really last. | |
| It just seems like you're propping up these tent poles of something that just keeps coming down. | |
| I can't imagine how a political solution could occur. | |
| Well, you know, I agree with you. | |
| And most of the time, I feel very negative and very pessimistic. | |
| But I will tell you something. | |
| One of the things that is happening here, right? | |
| I mean, you follow the NSA... I actually think that the FedEx and the lack of trust of people being suddenly realizing that the government is spying on them, realizing that the IRS was You know, | |
| was very abusive to non-profit because they were conservatives or they were Tea Party or had the word Constitution or Bill of Rights in their names. | |
| That is actually creating some serious suspicion towards the government. | |
| I'm not saying it translates immediately into saying, well, I guess if the government is not trustworthy and is spying on us, it means that government spending is not productive and we should cut it out. | |
| That being said, what I think it may do, it may, I'm not guaranteeing it's a given, but what it may do is it actually create spheres of total I don't want to say anarchy, but close to where people actually reclaim a lot of their freedom or try to reclaim a lot of their freedom and build. | |
| We can imagine a lot of entrepreneurs, freedom entrepreneurs, trying to actually create means for people to escape government. | |
| I do not believe that People are going to wake up one day and be like, you know what? | |
| Yeah, no, yeah, the SBA, really, it's not the role of the federal government. | |
| The money is going to small businesses who've never been able to get a loan anywhere else. | |
| Why should I put my money on the line for those? | |
| I mean, I just don't believe, it won't stop me from saying it, or say green energy loans, you know, I'm in favor of solar panels, but all these big companies who are very well connected, why should they be getting? | |
| Or to even see, you know, the malinvestment that is, you know, the product of all this, or the fact that a lot of the government money towards these green companies is actually crowding out, you know, capital. | |
| Elsewhere. | |
| I just don't buy that one day people are going to be like, yeah, no. | |
| But I do really, I mean, a lot of my hope hangs in, you know, freedom entrepreneurs in other sphere who, and that people seem to be responding to this, and will create venues for people to kind of like hide, you know? | |
| Yeah, I mean, certainly the failure of major government institutions is creating a huge marketplace for alternatives. | |
| The only time I ever got involved in a legal dispute, the idea of going to court was insane. | |
| I mean, it was going to take 10 years, a quarter of a million dollars, so we went to arbitration, which was private, and it was fantastic. | |
| We got it done in a month, and it was, you know, win-win and all that kind of stuff. | |
| So I really do like that idea. | |
| I also do like the fact that I think 83% of the federal government is still functioning. | |
| So it's like 17% or so has shut down. | |
| So we're kind of having a dry run for a government shrinkage. | |
| And look, you know, the birds are still singing, the grass is still growing, you know, I mean, everybody, gravity hasn't reversed itself, you know, fish aren't swimming through the air. | |
| And so people are so, we cut government, hey, it would be like those couple of weeks in October 2013. | |
| Remember, that wasn't so bad, was it? | |
| Well, no, and think about if they were actually closing down, it would be much better than it is right now, right? | |
| Because these national parks would be sold to the private sector, who would have an incentive for the most part to actually charge people. | |
| And letting them go through. | |
| And so, yeah, actually, I mean, you don't need to convince me that it would be much, much better. | |
| I mean, it would be much better. | |
| I do think that the big government people are overplaying their hands and predicting all these, like, you know, it's just, you know, saying that the sky is going to fall and people realizing it's not the case. | |
| I was actually, I have to say, I was also quite Taken by the lack of public support for going, intervening in Syria. | |
| You know, because one of the things that we found out was that, I mean, you and I didn't find this out. | |
| We know that Democrats are as willing to go to war as Republicans, right? | |
| Even though the public perception is like only Bush wants to go to war. | |
| Well, actually, no, Obama also does. | |
| I mean, in fact, if it didn't, he would not have You know, double the troops in Afghanistan. | |
| We would not have been there for 13 years today. | |
| You know, I mean, all of that stuff, right? | |
| We know he's a drug warrior, you know, worse than Bush and things like this. | |
| But I have to say, I mean, the very strong public opposition to going into Syria... | |
| I mean, I thought that was a good thing. | |
| I mean, obviously, people are changing their perception about things like gay marriage. | |
| I, as a libertarian, I think it's not the role of the government to interfere in marriage. | |
| It should not be. | |
| But I believe in marriage equality. | |
| If you're going to be giving stuff to some, you should give them to everyone, gay or straight or whatever. | |
| And look, People have moved. | |
| And I think that people are moving on the drug war, too. | |
| And again, because the government, again, is overplaying its hand by going into these and ordering raids on states where medical marijuana is legal or Colorado and Washington State. | |
| We'll see what the federal government—I mean, Obama hasn't told his dog at the Justice Department to stay put. | |
| And I think these are areas where we're likely to experience more freedom. | |
| Will this have a good influence on the economic side? | |
| I hope so. | |
| I don't believe it's going to be entirely the case, but I do hope that it will create a sphere free of government enough that something good can come out of it. | |
| Yeah, I mean, obviously the goal of the Al-Qaeda, as they claim, and the overseas terrorists is to do to America what they did to the Soviets in the 1980s in the war in Afghanistan, which is to – since attack is far more expensive than defense, particularly if you're – Dressing like the locals and doing guerrilla warfare is to cripple the U.S. economy through overseas engagements, and they seem to be doing a tragically great job at that. | |
| I mean, talk about just following your enemy's playbook to the letter. | |
| But of course, they can collapse 700 or 720 military bases overseas. | |
| They can collapse the war on drugs. | |
| When they collapse the war on drugs, they can collapse the prison industrial complex. | |
| When that happens, there'll be less fear of violence in poor neighborhoods, more More manufacturing companies, more stores can go in there. | |
| There can be a sort of positive and virtuous cycle where when you collapse parts of government, you need less other parts of government. | |
| And it is certainly my hope that that upward cyclone can bring us all to a higher plateau. | |
| My goal, of course, is eventual statelessness, not that I think I'll live to see it, but certainly there does seem to be, just as government swells faster as it grows, it can also collapse faster as it shrinks. | |
| And I certainly think that there's a possibility for that. | |
| I agree. | |
| I think the biggest threat that we face in the U.S. is Obamacare. | |
| This is a large and gigantic expansion of government. | |
| Government is already very present in the healthcare market in the U.S. and messing it up royally. | |
| But I see one Very likely scenario and possibly one happy scenario. | |
| The very likely scenario is the system will not collapse. | |
| Government has this incredibly dense center of gravity and as the system crumbles apart but not collapse, people are going to be demanding single-payer And, you know, I can imagine the exchanges now where people are supposed to be buying their insurance or they're not functioning well. | |
| And I can imagine that the next step, the government is going to say, you know what, let's forget about the exchange. | |
| We're just going to give subsidies to everyone. | |
| And here you have a single-payer system, right? | |
| Now, I do... | |
| I think that there is one, and then once this happened, it is such a big chunk of the economy in addition to what they were already doing, that it's impossible to imagine that we're not going to stay in this slow growth path for a very long time, lack of innovation and all of that, bad things. | |
| That being said, I can also see a lot of people stepping out of the insurance And say, you know, from now on, I'm going to start paying out of pocket. | |
| And when that starts to happen with high income people, then you will have medical entrepreneurs who will start providing services for lower income people and middle class people entirely out of pocket and completely outside of the insurance government, you know, awful alliance. | |
| That's my hopeful, low probability situation. | |
| Yeah, I certainly think that Obamacare is a step towards socialized healthcare, which is, of course, has been the dream of the Democrats for the last 50 years or so. | |
| They, of course, continue to worship the European model, which is fine to do as long as you don't have to live there. | |
| And I think that it is a step towards it, for sure, because this system can't possibly work. | |
| I mean there's just no conceivable way that this 2,500 pages of additional regulation and legislation and so on and 30 million more people pouring into the healthcare system and these – the younger people just not signing up for Obamacare because they get that it's a ripoff. | |
| I mean young men in particular – I mean you don't see a doctor usually until you're in your late 30s or early 40s if you're a man. | |
| And so from men to women, from the young to the old, it's a massive cross-subsidy. | |
| And the young people are going to say, well, I'll just pay the fine. | |
| I mean, the fine is cheap enough. | |
| And, you know, I can always go get free health care if I want from emergencies. | |
| So I think that that system is going to be so ridiculously underfunded that premiums are going to have to rise so much that people are then going to clamor for, you know, government, take it all over, take it out of my taxes. | |
| And that's going to be just another burden that's going to hopefully break the back of the Leviathan with any luck. | |
| Yeah, we can always hope. | |
| We can always hope. | |
| So, the one last question I wanted to ask you is... | |
| When I was growing up in England in the 70s, I was an annoyingly politically curious kid, precocious to the point of just being grating. | |
| But I do remember in conversations with adults about socialism, even though England was pretty much mired in socialism and the trade union problems and all of that in the 70s, they still pointed across the English Channel. | |
| And they said, yes, but France, they're the real socialists. | |
| So my question is, is anyone in France even still talking to you yet? | |
| How on earth did you come out of this socialist womb? | |
| You know, it's like my parents are still wondering, how did that happen? | |
| What did we feed her that changed her brain? | |
| And it's funny because I wasn't precocious at all. | |
| I was very apolitical. | |
| I thought it was very uninteresting. | |
| And, I mean, like, how unprecocious was I? I mean, like, very. | |
| I mean, like, it's only in my third year of college that I had this professor, Bertrand Le Minissier, who was an econ professor, who was a hardcore libertarian. | |
| And I was like, man! | |
| This is great. | |
| This makes total sense. | |
| And, like, boom. | |
| Overnight, I was a libertarian. | |
| And that's when I started reading and all that stuff. | |
| The thing that was interesting is, like, really at the time when I was in France, becoming a libertarian, so I was, like, in my 20s. | |
| See, not precocious at all. | |
| I was really at the French. | |
| I mean, it was a French movement. | |
| In fact, I mean, the other libertarians were, like, completely, like, they were still... | |
| Living in their parents' basement. | |
| They were, you know, crazy. | |
| Like, I mean, and now I go back to France and, well, I mean, most people are like as socialist and statist, really, as possible. | |
| There is this growing libertarian free market movement of people who are like educated and And actually, kind of like, you want to talk to them, and they make sense, and they have careers, and they... | |
| So, it's kind of like, it is changing a little. | |
| Is it changing enough to make a real difference? | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't know, but it is... | |
| Things are changing a little bit, but I can tell you, man, when I... When I was a libertarian, in my econ class, you know, in my third year of college, it was like 150 of us, and there were like three of us who were libertarian. | |
| And the three of us are here, in the U.S., in the D.C. area now. | |
| It's funny. | |
| Well, you know, it's interesting. | |
| Last year, I went to give a speech in Sao Paulo, Brazil. | |
| And there were a bunch of pretty high-level politicians down sort of in the front. | |
| There was this two-tier hall that I was giving the speech in. | |
| And, you know, the top tier were all the rabble, you know, the people from the street and all that. | |
| And then the bottom tier were all the high-level politicians. | |
| And I got a little fiery and was just basically telling them about the immorality of the state and the evil of the initiation of force and the theft that is taxation and the mafia club that is the government and all that. | |
| And it's funny because, of course, they were kind of shocked. | |
| But the applause that came from the sort of upper back, the rabble area, because they kind of got what I was talking about. | |
| And Brazil, of course, has suffered through, as has a lot of South America, suffered through socialism in a way that we can barely imagine. | |
| But it was interesting to see the degree to which the people who weren't part of the sort of centers of power, which dominate so much of the social and even artistic discourse, how much they connect with and really, really appreciate somebody who can speak truth to power in. | |
| And so, yeah, if you look at the glowing center of social communication, it just looks all statism all the time. | |
| But if you kind of look around the penumbra, you look around the outside, there are a lot of people out there just yearning and burning and itching to be free. | |
| And, you know, if we can connect with those, I think there's nothing we can't accomplish. | |
| Yeah, and I'm sure you are contributing to actually helping this because, I mean, think about when you and I were growing up, there wasn't the Internet. | |
| There wasn't a podcast like yours. | |
| That didn't exist. | |
| When I read Bastia the first time, I got the book. | |
| I had to get a hard copy here in the U.S. and I was living in France. | |
| I read Bastia in English the first time. | |
| I needed to have a hard copy. | |
| Now you go online and you get Bastia. | |
| You get whatever it is you want. | |
| And you can watch whatever you want online. | |
| And so I think technology... | |
| I mean, it's going to kind of like, can really be helping us, you know, towards maybe a lot of the kind of world that you and I would like. | |
| That's the best chance we've gotten. | |
| It probably won't last for long, so we've got to make the most of it. | |
| Well, thank you so much. | |
| I'm sorry, go ahead. | |
| I said, I said, but just on the off chance that technology doesn't serve us well, we should brainwash our own kids. | |
| Absolutely, absolutely. | |
| Well, thank you so much for your time. | |
| We'll obviously link to your blogs. | |
| Do you have any upcoming projects or things on the web that you'd like to tell our listeners about? | |
| In this upcoming Asia Reason magazine, I have a piece. | |
| It's going to be online very soon. | |
| I have a piece called The Kids Aren't Alright. | |
| And that actually shows how the government screws young people like big time. | |
| And I talk about farm subsidies, the military, Obamacare, healthcare, the labor market, and all of that stuff. | |
| So I hope that that's going to be the entire Reason magazine, just your article. | |
| No ads, no other articles, because that just sounds fantastic. | |
| I could have written like 20,000 words, but I had like 1,300. | |
| And the next, my article after this is about the cost of wars. | |
| And it's big, it's growing. | |
| And the part that's growing and it's unseen is the unfunded liability. | |
| Pension, disability, health care. | |
| Because a lot of our wars now, they don't kill people anymore, which on one hand is a great thing, but on the other hand is very expensive. | |
| And this is never taken under account, you know, when warmongers decide to go to war. | |
| Yeah, I mean, one of the strategies of the French resistance under the Nazis was never kill the German. | |
| You know, wound him. | |
| Because that's going to be more expensive, more time-consuming, more problematic. | |
| If you kill him, they just bury him in a field. | |
| But if you wound him, they have to keep paying and health care and pensions and all that. | |
| So if you want to economically cripple someone, the last thing you want to do is kill their soldiers. | |
| So they're being very effective in the weaponry that they're using, which is, again, another thing that's going to cripple the U.S. economy. | |
| I think the unfunded liability war costs are estimated into the trillions now. | |
| It's staggering. | |
| Yep, yep, yep, yep. | |
| The Cost of War website is a good place to go, costofwar.com. | |
| And there you have all the wars broken down by cost, cost of personnel, unfunded liability, and it's pretty astonishing, yes. | |
| Well, of course, I certainly appreciate the degree to which your very entertaining and elegant writing is bringing these ideas to the masses. | |
| It's always a pleasure to read you, always a pleasure to chat with you. | |
| I hope we can do it again sometime, and thank you so much for your time again tonight. | |
| Thank you for having me. |