All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 23, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:27
4012 Libertarians Gone Wrong | Tom Woods and Stefan Molyneux
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux.
Hope you're doing well here with Dr.
Tom Woods. He is a senior fellow at the Mises Institute and the host of The Tom Woods Show.
We'll put links to all that below.
He is a New York Times bestselling author and has published 12 books, because, like, 11 would be totally lazy, including the most recently Real Dissent, A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinion and Rollback, Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse, as well as Nullification, How to Resist Federal Tyranny, In the 21st century, the website, of course, is TomWoods.com and Thomas E. Woods, T-H-O-M-A-S. Thomas E. Woods is the Twitter account.
Tom, thanks so much for taking the time today.
My pleasure. So, let's chat.
Libertarianism. See, it used to be libertarianism and the Libertarian Party, but I think we might have to replace the and with a little bit of VS dot, libertarianism versus the Libertarian Party.
And the nomination of Gary Johnson was...
An interesting choice. But when I hear that the Libertarian Party has kind of disinvited, then re-invited Ron Paul, of all people, without whom there would be very little knowledge of the Libertarian Party, that they don't invite Ron Paul to speak, that they've had their goes at you and I think at me.
It seems like things have changed.
It was the first political conference I went to as a teenager, was a Libertarian conference, And I've really liked libertarianism, and the Libertarian Party has done great work in outreach.
But it seems like there's just been a bit of a leftward drift over the last two years or so.
What are your thoughts on this? Well, as with anything, very often the people at the top are the problem, and the regular people who are doing all the grunt work and thankless work at the bottom are just You know, they're the good people, and so I don't want to say it's all hopeless and everybody's bad.
A lot of these people are struggling the best they can in the face of difficulties from the top.
Now, let me say from the beginning that it was not my idea to start talking about the people running the Libertarian Party.
I don't want people to think that I'm still in pain from their attacks on me and I'm losing sleep over this.
I am not losing any sleep over it whatsoever.
It's too bad that it happened, but I'm 100% in the right, and they attack me in an unprovoked way.
I put that behind me.
That happens all the time. When you're unfashionable, that just goes with the territory.
It's fine. It seems to me that what's happened is it's not just a drift leftward, but it's also an extremely unhealthy desire to be accepted in the mainstream.
And they think that the path to that is to purge unfashionable people.
And Even I'm an unfashionable person.
And I've got, you know, as clean an academic track record as you could have.
I mean, you know, PhD from Columbia, you know, high honors from Harvard, academic periodicals published me, you know, very prominently.
I've had books published, you know, by major, major publishers, Columbia University Press, Random House, Basic Books.
I mean, so if I'm some extremist, then I must be the most successful extremist in the history of the world.
So something doesn't quite add up here.
So I think there's a lot of it that's like that.
They want to signal to the world, look, we're good, decent people, so won't you like us, Mr.
New York Times reporter, sir?
And what they find, or won't you like us, opinion molders at Slate and Salon?
And what they find is that no matter how many times you throw somebody like Woods or Molyneux, whoever the sacrificial victim of the day is, to the wolves, no matter how many times you do that, they still don't like you.
They still smear you.
They still call you names.
The second you say something like we want to repeal Obamacare, even something as vanilla as that, They call you a Nazi, no matter what.
So you can do this to us all you want.
That's going to keep happening to you.
And meanwhile, you're just alienating a lot of your regular supporters who want to say, but okay, look, if there's something wrong with Woods, given that he opened for Ron Paul like a dozen times, and he did all these other things with Ron Paul, and he's endorsed by Judge Napolitano, whatever, then you're implicitly smearing basically everybody we admire.
What's going on here exactly?
Well, there's the moving goalpost, of course, which is when somebody says, well, if you prove this, I'll accept your opinion.
And then you prove that. And they say, OK, one more thing you have to prove.
And you end up chasing them right off a cliff.
So there's the moving goalpost.
Then there's the moving gallows.
And the moving gallows are the media saying, OK, purge this person and we'll love you.
And then you're like, okay, fine. I like love.
And I'm going to purge this person.
Okay, well, that person, unfortunately, was associated with this person.
So you've got to disavow and purge this person, and then we'll love you.
Oh, wait, no. See, this person published an article that was co-sponsored, and it just never ends.
And their goal is not to give you love.
The goal is to destroy your cohesion, your organization, your principles.
And it's like they've never read their rant.
You know, you don't go around chasing the approval of bad people And not just bad people, people who can't stand the sight of you, people who want to destroy you at the first opportunity.
And moreover, think of the double standard at work here.
Was the media morally outraged when Madeline Albright casually said that we believe the potential deaths of 500,000 children connected to the sanctions policy in Iraq was, quote, worth it?
We believe the price has been worth it.
Now, if you or I said something like that—now, of course, nobody cares about Iraqis.
That's one of the rules of American society.
You're not supposed to care about civilians in any conflict the U.S. government is involved in.
But let's say that there was some humanity in our media.
If you or I said that, we'd never hear the end of it.
We'd never be invited to anywhere again.
Our careers would be over.
But she says it, and it's not even like they say, well, what she really meant was they just ignore it and move on.
Mm-hmm. Why are you chasing after the acceptance of people who obviously are not really evaluating people according to moral principles?
If that were so, Madeleine Albright's career would be destroyed.
Bill Richardson, who said the same thing about the half-million children, his career would have been destroyed.
Instead, they were—you know, they had cabinet-level positions.
They, I'm sure, make a fortune on the speaking circuit to this day.
What they're looking to do is destroy people who represent an actual challenge to what they're saying.
That is what it fundamentally comes down to.
But that's not to say there aren't a few creeps.
You got to say, look, you're completely at odds with what we stand for.
We're going to show you the door.
But any criterion like that, that also includes Ron Paul, is a little bit out to lunch.
And then, by the way, they try to defend themselves.
Well, you don't understand the way the speaking invitation process works.
Well, whether I do or I don't, the point is their own people started badmouthing Ron Paul.
Well, he doesn't really get what the Libertarian Party is about.
Ron Paul doesn't get what the Libertarian Party is about, but some loser functionary nobody's ever heard of does?
Well, then that's all I need to know about the party.
Ah, yes. I remember the founding principles of libertarianism.
It had nothing to do with small government, free markets, private property and contracts.
I remember the central, emblazoned, written-in-dragon-fire statement, which is, let's make sure we have really good speaking contracts.
That's the goal.
Everything else is expendable, but we want to have good methodologies.
And the idea is funny because it's the old thing, like, be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
Because the Libertarian Party, of course, has been striving for relevance and striving for public recognition and so on.
And I think they're starting to achieve it.
And that's why they're now scared of the media.
They weren't scared of the media when the media had nothing to say about them.
But now that with the Trump thing, with this growing interest in pushing back against PC correctness, with all of the, you know, trolls slash gods of chaos on the internet looking to disrupt the existing system, there's a lot of interest in libertarianism, which means that the cold, fiery, sore on eye of the media is now casting its way to the libertarians.
And it's like they're like, ah, appease, appease, appease.
And it's like, no, no, no, that's not how you're going to win.
No, totally, totally.
And meanwhile, they're led to believe that if they just nominate former governors, then the media will go easy on them.
And to some extent, they did because the media was so anti-Trump and they thought they could build up the Libertarian Party as a counterweight to Trump.
But for heaven's sake, I mean, again, the double standard with supporting somebody like Bill Weld is ridiculous.
I mean, we could go through all the problems with Bill Weld, but to me, Murray Rothbard used to say, everybody is entitled to one deviation.
But my view is that that deviation probably shouldn't be support for probably the stupidest war in American history.
I mean, is there anybody with an IQ above 90 who's still defending the war in Iraq, which had no good consequences, was based on nothing, involved a huge expenditure of resources?
And Weld is trying to walk that back a little bit, but not...
I didn't see him really going out of his way to beat his breast in public.
So his deviation—they'll try to dig up an article I wrote 30 years ago or something about nothing when I was in my old paleo phase, and they'll say, aha, this is who Woods is in 2018.
Well, here's who Bill Weld was five minutes ago.
And they say, well, nobody's perfect.
Sure, he's chiming in with the entire media—because the media was for that war, make no mistake— He's with the whole media and political establishment in supporting something that led to who knows how many deaths, anywhere from 50,000 to a million, and anywhere from 2 to 4 million displaced people, but hey, nobody's perfect.
The double standard is unbelievable.
Well, there's this odd thing that's going on at the moment as well, which is when I show sympathy for the victims of totalitarianism, as I did for the people struggling against the theocracy in Iran, and when I point out that there are godforsaken concentration camps in North Korea, and it's one of the worst countries in the world— Suddenly I'm pro-war.
And that to me is, there's not even a close logic.
Like sympathy for victims does not mean, oh yes, let's nuke their oppressors.
It's just like, this is horrible stuff.
We do need to recognize how many freedoms and opportunities we have relative to the rest of the world.
Tom, I will be damned if anybody steps between me and my sympathy for the victims of totalitarianism by calling me a warmonger.
That is a heinous, heinous deed.
And what on earth are we sniping in this area of the universe for?
I do feel that we have some slightly bigger enemies out there that we should kind of unite to oppose.
Well, if I happen to know that my neighbor is, let's say, not the best mom in the world, And I say, you know, that's too bad for her daughter that, you know, her mom is just, you know, not connecting with her or something.
Does that mean that I'm saying, therefore, the UN ought to come in and be the mom for this child and take this child out of the home?
Just because I express sympathy for somebody who's in a pretty bad situation doesn't mean...
I want war. I want the US government involved.
And secondly, the point that I've tried to make is that Murray Rothbard was very much opposed to US military intervention during the Cold War, you know, for strictly ideological reasons, but also strategic ones.
I mean, you could say that given that the Vietnam War ended with Vietnam going communist way, it did not lead to the end of the world.
Vietnam is not of strategic importance to the US by any stretch of the imagination.
It tore American society To the point where we've never recovered from that.
It was a huge expenditure of resources.
It screwed up the economy, something fierce.
Maybe it would have been better just not to do it.
And even if Vietnam had gone communist, it went communist anyway.
We could have saved the money. So he was against—but all that time, he was still very anti-communist.
He would come right out and talk about, you know— The crimes of communism, how they come directly from the initial ideas of communism, they're not an aberration.
He had no problem being both anti-communist and anti-militarist at the same time.
So I don't see why I can't occupy that position today, or you for that matter.
Well, I mean, the idea that you can fight communism by...
Taking over more and more of the economy with the military-industrial complex, it's like, I mean, that's insane.
You cannot fight communism through a massive amount of military expenditures.
The warfare welfare state that really grew up in the 60s and the 70s, you can't fight communism by expanding your own state control over the economy.
I mean, that is ridiculous.
The whole point of communism is you have a huge state control over the economy, and that's what happened in the 60s and 70s.
While we were supposedly fighting communism, communism seemed to leap over the border and embed itself in academia and the media and Hollywood and everywhere.
And it's like, how is this fight worthwhile?
We supposedly smashed up all these communists, but then you turn around, it's like, well, lots of communists in America now, and the government is twice the size.
Well, if you can recall Milton Friedman's dictum that there's nothing so permanent as a temporary government program, we were told that the enlargement of the military was just temporary conservatives in the Cold War like Bill Buckley said, this is just a temporary thing, and then we'll go back to being a normal country.
No such thing. You get that kind of an entrenched interest group That exists for the sake of perpetuating its existence, they will find rationales for existing forever.
And as I gather, I'm increasingly convinced that a lot of what we see in terms of foreign policy is a matter of interest groups within the military vying for power and influence.
And it has nothing to do with—you actually think they're trying to keep you safe by intervening in Ukraine?
I mean, do you think that has anything to do with you and nothing to do with lining people's pockets?
Come on! Well, I would also say that one of the PR problems that libertarians have, because there's a lot of principle, a lot of abstraction, a lot of intellectualizing, which is fine.
It's very, very important to have clear and consistent goals and ideals.
But there is kind of a lack of heart problem that is perceived in libertarianism.
And, you know, this, well, you don't like the welfare state because you want poor people to starve, you cold, callous, you know, Scrooge, miserly duck person.
And so for me, when I genuinely feel sympathy for the victims of totalitarianism and hate what's happening to them, it's not like a huge-hearted thing because to me that's like just empathy 101.
But when I'm attacking libertarians for showing empathy, I don't think they're helping the empathy image problem that libertarians have.
Yeah, I hadn't thought of that.
Right, right, right. I mean, it's not to say that we – I mean, I do believe that our primary concern – Because we have some control over it and because we're subject to it and because we're paying taxes to it, is the regime that rules over us.
I mean, yours is Canada, mine's the US. I do get that.
But at the same time, if by accident of birth I happen to be born in North Korea, the North Korean regime would be my primary concern.
So if we do have some general concern for the run of mankind, it seems like we ought to be able to bleed over from one Regime into the other in terms of how we're expressing our sympathy for people.
So I agree with you on this.
And I understand why our friend Michael Malice would write a book about North Korea, because this is not just another two-bit dictator.
We are observing, in the age of the internet, we're observing this astonishing throwback that is doing horrible things to a great many people.
There should be a lot of attention paid to that.
I mean, the state apparatus The state apparatus of North Korea is not friendly with the state apparatus of the U.S., but it's still a state apparatus, and that is what we exist to oppose.
Well, and it's funny because none of the...
None of the communists in North Vietnam were indoctrinating American kids.
It's a different language, different culture, halfway around the world.
Communication technology was much more primitive back then.
It cost like $8 million to make a three-minute phone call around the world.
So what's interesting to me is that I was so dedicated to fighting communism.
I was reading this stat the other day, Tom, that 40% of anthropologist professors are outright Marxists.
So to me, it's like, okay, well, the North Vietnamese were not indoctrinating our kids.
So if you're going to... Can we just invade the anthropology department and liberate?
I'm kidding. But you know, that's where the virus is being replicated domestically.
And it is socialist programs of, you know, funding student debt loans or underwriting student debt loans, very socialist redistribution of wealth.
There's a huge amount of propaganda about going to college.
So we're delivering our children by the truckload into this indoctrination factories, and yet somehow you fight communism by fighting in Vietnam.
I mean, come on. I was being facetious, of course, about invading.
No, no, I was being facetious about invading.
But it's like that's where the real battle lies at the moment, and it just seems that we're turning on each other like a snarling pack of underfed dogs.
Yeah, we got to not be turning on each other.
There are few enough of us as it is.
Although it's an interesting analogy, by the way, with the universities and foreign policy.
My first principle is, first of all, don't subsidize evil.
So if somehow the US government is sending aid to some ragtag army that we think might be the good guys, but they turn out to be the terrorists, just first move is stop doing that.
Before you even think about anything else, stop doing that.
And likewise with the universities, I'm not saying we've got to take over the universities and they have to require that you and I teach all the classes.
How about just stop subsidizing them?
Stop doing that.
And of course, people, they can't even conceive of this because they think people won't have skills if they don't go to universities or they won't.
They don't have skills because they're going to universities.
That's why they don't have skills.
They're not being taught skills in universities.
I would actually argue that their skills are removed.
The skills are being stripped down.
There are studies that say that after people study economics, they know less about economics than before they started.
I think it's actually they're stripping down people.
You end up coming out of university, not just with the opportunity cost of not having had the skills and experience and contacts and income of being in the workforce, But you're massively in debt and you've been taught to hate your ethnicity or your gender or your society or the free market.
And therefore, you're going to sit, you know, with blue hair, tattoos and a tongue ring across from some guy who you think is your evil oppressor trying to get a job when all you've been taught is that resentment is the key to economic productivity.
I mean, to me, it's a human destruction device now.
It's not even that they don't gain much.
I think it costs them enormously.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a really neat new book by Brian Kaplan called The Case Against Education.
It's very provocative.
I love provocative titles.
And he dismantles every argument you've ever heard made for the current education system.
It does this for people, it does that for people, it does that for people.
Without it, we'd have this, this, this, and this.
He goes through it all, and nothing's left standing.
But one of his points in one of his chapters is he goes through all this survey data Where Americans were given simple, simple, simple, the most basic possible test in whether it's science, history, politics, whatever it is. And they get about half the questions right.
And what he says is, given how simple these questions are, these people, in effect, know nothing.
And given that they're multiple choice questions, they're going to get 25% of them right anyway.
He says, this is like It's people who know half the letters of the alphabet.
We don't say they're half-literate.
They're not literate. They're illiterate.
And so imagine, I always try to point out the double standard that exists in the way people think about the private versus the public sector.
If the private sector had generated a result as embarrassing as this, where the products of their system are this ignorant and This completely incapable of functioning in the current economy.
People are sitting around saying, it's a tough economy out there.
It is a tough economy out there because everybody's being trained as if it's 1957.
Yeah, it is going to be tough.
If you get a piece of paper where you've studied sociology and you're sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring, then it's a tough economy.
But in the age of the internet where all you need is a camera and a YouTube channel and you can reach the whole world, that's a tough economy.
It's only tough because no one's teaching them anything.
But if the private sector had done that, we would never hear the end of it.
Oh, all they care about is the rich.
They don't care about helping the poor. The poor are suffering more than anybody under the current system, and all they can think to say is, maybe we haven't given them enough money.
If Walmart were running the schools, do you think they'd be saying, maybe we haven't given Walmart enough money?
They'd say the whole thing can't be fixed.
It's perverse from the heart of it.
So this double standard makes it impossible to think.
I think I've taken us on a bit of a tangent.
No, that's fine. I just wanted to mention that the accessibility of being able to talk to the world literally turned me from a crazy person into somebody with an intellectual career.
Into a crazy person who reaches a lot of people.
No, because I would go down to the basement and just scream at the world anyway, but eventually you just turn on a camera and you go from a crazy person to somebody with an actual intellectual career.
It's a miracle! It's a miracle of transformation.
So let's talk a little bit about some of the libertarian think tanks, a kind of cluster around this as well.
It has always struck me, and I, you know, I'm going to just – I hear the click as I stand on the landmine, but I'm going to say it anyway.
It has always struck me that people who say the free market brings efficiency, the free market brings focus, the free market brings excellence – So I'm going to go get all my funding from some big giant guy who's probably a crappitalist, you know, who's getting some benefits from some government monopoly.
And I'm not going to face the market.
I'm going to face my donor who is benefiting from mass immigration and the low wages it provokes.
And I'm going to, you know, talk about open borders as if it's just, well, obviously it's two and two make four.
How is it possible to hold this double think that you need the free market to be efficient, you need to satisfy your customers, and then not face your customers, or rather face one customer, which is a corporate crony crapitalist for the most part?
Well, I will say this.
I mean, I'm not a fan of the think tank model for reasons I'll say in a minute.
But the voluntary sector is still...
Under the general umbrella of the free market, because it does involve voluntary transactions, just like there are some people, I think, who think Christmas is socialist because you give things to people, but you're giving of your own private property.
It's true, yeah. It's not a coercive relationship, yeah.
Yeah, right, right, right. But I get what you're saying, that the fundamentals of it mean that, like, for example, it's possible for academia also to be entirely free market, but in the way it actually works out, it's a lot of people who Are not ever really subject to a market test, especially once they get tenure.
Just like at a think tank, you've got the big donor.
You can just do what you want.
You don't have to worry about justifying yourself.
Well, here's what we did over the past year.
Here's our report showing all the effectiveness we had.
Yeah, I think that is an issue because, first of all, I think just on their own terms, I don't think these think tanks have a lot to show for themselves.
In what way have they pushed back and repealed things that should have been repealed or stopped things from being passed that were being passed?
The Heritage Foundation would be an example of a conservative one where my friend Michael Bolden over at the 10th Amendment Center came up with this brilliant idea.
He says, you know, We got all these—well, this is my paraphrasing of him—but we got all these think tanks who write policy reports all day that wind up in the garbage can.
I mean, there's no congressman who reads a policy report and says, Eureka!
I had no idea.
I'm actually hurting people.
I intend to help. Yeah, like that ever happens.
How about we try something that's hands-on and practical?
So Michael said, we have this gigantic NSA, National Security Agency, facility in Utah.
And it turns out that just to cool its computers, it requires, I believe the figure is, it sounds hard to believe, but 1.7 million gallons of water a day.
And Michael said, what if we just cut off the water?
What if Utah just said, we're not going to supply you with the water?
That would make it impossible to run that facility.
And there's nothing in the Constitution, even if you care about the Constitution, nothing in there that requires Utah to provide water to the NSA. And so he came up with this campaign called Off Now.
He got interviewed on CBS News.
He was in all the major newspapers all over the world for this one thing.
And who couldn't have been more against it?
This whole approach of the states saying, maybe we can try and stop this behemoth.
I mean, my view is the states are terrible, too.
So they might as well at least do something good, stop the federal government.
The think tanks, this is more than any think tank has ever done.
This one idea cooked up by one guy in his living room, and yet if you talk about the states pushing back, they think, isn't that like slavery?
I mean, you get this third grade response.
I heard the states are kind of like slavery.
You can't even have a conversation with these people.
Yeah, let me get back to my policy report about nothing.
Well, but to be effective is to be attacked.
And I think that, you know, to push a bunch of paper around and to preen about your moral purity in the mirror while collecting a fat paycheck for often delivering freedoms to capitalists, as I mentioned, my perspective.
But if you are actually effective, like, can you imagine if somebody actually did that?
And wow, 1.7 million gallons a day?
Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, I've heard of freedoms being extinguished in a whole number of ways.
I've never actually heard them being drowned, but I think I have now.
But I mean, if you were to do something like that, everybody knows that if you're effective about something, you're going to get the blowback.
And that, I think, is what they most want to avoid.
And to me, it's like, you can't be in the war if you never want to go near a bullet.
I mean, you can... But you're just not really in the war.
And the reality is that if you do stuff that becomes effective, if you actually change people's lives for the better, if you help to change something in the world for the better, then all the people who benefited from it being worse are gonna have you in their targets.
And it seems to me that they wanna just throw stuff randomly and hide in a ditch.
And that is not the kind of moral courage that we need to save the world.
Well, in my case, again, I want just for my own listeners to know, I know I've already talked to you guys about this, so don't think I'm obsessing about it.
But just for the sake of completeness, I should say that one of the things that I was taken to task for was a few libertarians nobody's ever heard of came up with a petition asserting that libertarianism is opposed to fascism.
Okay, well, to me, that's pretty obvious, because if you know what fascism is...
I know! Let's have a petition that links the word libertarian with fascism, because that's exactly how people think.
Oh, well, they must be completely different.
Well, why would you want to oppose it unless it was imminent or somehow close to your organization?
Anyway, never mind. Yeah, yeah.
I think there are people who have ideas that these guys don't agree with, but they're not fascism.
Whatever you want to call them, they're not fascism.
Because fascism is actually a very specific set of ideas.
And I've talked about it on my show and explained.
And, you know, I had Lou Rockwell on and we talked about what's wrong with fascism and why it goes without saying that we're against fascism.
But when we started to see people on our Facebook feeds whom we had known from the Ron Paul movement who came out and said, you know, Bernie has some pretty good ideas.
I didn't see anybody urging me to sign a petition against socialism or communism.
I didn't see that. And nor would I want to because I think this is just drama queen BS. That satisfies people who, you know, are of no significance, who no one's ever heard of.
It satisfies them, but again, does it satisfy the media?
The media can say, oh, well, okay, that goes to show the libertarians are okay people.
It makes it worse, again, because you're associating fascism and this whole thing is- Well, and sorry to interrupt, but there's a really frustrating thing too, which is if I say, I'm against rape in Maine.
Then there is this kind of implicit thing.
It's like, wait, what?
Does Maine have a particular problem?
Well, no. Or also like, well, if you're not in Maine, whoo, you know, go to town, right?
And so this thing is like, if leftists were taking over the Libertarian Party, that's exactly what you would expect.
Because leftists, of course, the communists are anti-fascist in the same way that one crime gang is against another crime gang.
They'll both unite against the police, of course, just as people unite against true freedom thinkers, but...
Yeah.
We're against fascism.
Communism is pretty much OK.
How about just we're against the initiation of the use of force?
We're against violations of persons and property.
And that encompasses the whole thing.
But I do not like this.
Well, that specific thing is my enemy because it gives an implicit approval to other things.
Yeah, I agree completely.
So I just refused to sign.
I thought it was stupid. I thought it was a dumb attempt.
Tom Woods is pro-fascist because he refused to sign.
I thought it was a dumb attempt at publicity or really what it was was an attempt to smear certain libertarians implicitly by saying that you're going to be suspect unless you sign this petition.
So if you say that to me, there is no way I'm signing.
I am not even going to consider – that is not happening.
And so there was – First of all, the sense of humor that people who impose petitions like this on the public, they're not known for their sense of humor.
Let's put it that way. So when I just said, look, that's just not happening.
Can you believe this?
On Twitter, the head of the Libertarian Party was saying things like, well, I guess that speaks for itself.
That I won't sign a – I mean, when everything I've ever stood for, my entire body of writing, which is pretty substantial, my over 1,000 podcast episodes, 1,100 podcast episodes, all of this is against that whole mentality of imperialism, the leader principle, any kind of controlled economy whatsoever.
Right. Yeah, public ownership and private profit, which is sort of the definition of fascism.
Of course it's all. And the thing is, too, like I hate to shock everyone, a petition is not an argument.
If all you have is a petition, you're saying, well, we have a whole bunch of people who are nodding in a row, and that's what we bring to the table.
You know, if you have a good enough argument, a minority of one is a majority of truth.
And this really is frustrating, the idea that, oh, well, let's just get a whole bunch of people.
And the other thing, too, it's like, sign this petition that's not an argument, get in line with everyone else, or we're going to destroy you.
It's like, I think that seems kind of fascistic in a way, come to think of it.
I don't think that you're really achieving what you want to achieve.
So I don't do stuff like that.
And so I didn't do it.
I took some heat from people I don't care about.
And my own people, 99.9% of them, Rallied to me and said, don't listen to these creeps who have accomplished nothing, and they're going to have some moral test for everybody.
Get out of town. I mean, half of these people have no problem with Bill Weld.
And they're going to be lecturing other people about purity.
No, don't. Just don't do it. So I didn't.
And, you know, I still have a very, very comfortable life with lots of people who love what I'm doing.
Doesn't matter. Makes no difference.
That's another liberating thing about the internet.
It just doesn't matter. And if I may just say just very quickly, Stefan, in a Late September of last year, I had, now I know for you, a thousand podcast episodes is like, you know, I did that 15 years ago, but for me, it's a big deal.
For me, a four-figure total of podcast episodes actually is a big deal.
So I had a live event in Orlando.
And it was on the same day that Hurricane Irma smashed into town.
So we had to reschedule.
And rescheduling something is the worst because half the people can't come.
And it was just horrible.
And my speakers couldn't come.
It was terrible. And yet, even with the rescheduling, anybody who's in event planning, a lot of times you get invited to these events and people say, come speak at our event.
We're going to have 500 people there.
And I say to them, I'd love to speak at your event, but you're going to have 150 people.
They say, oh, no, no, no, that's not true.
We're going to get five. They've never organized an event.
They have no idea what's involved.
And sure enough, I've shown up and it's been on the nose, 150 people.
Now, sometimes I speak to big crowds, but those are seasoned people who know how to organize events.
But the newbies have no idea what's involved.
So we got about 600 people who came to my thousandth episode.
And every person involved in that thousandth episode is an unapproved person.
You know, they were all unapproved.
Eric July is unapproved.
Dave Smith is unapproved.
Michael Malice is unapproved.
And I had a big video montage of people congratulating me of, you know, Hans Hoppe, unapproved.
You know, all these different people, you know, great, great folks.
And yet we had more energy and enthusiasm than that, whereas I don't think 10 people would cross the street to listen to one of these think tank people talk.
And when they do speak at a conference, half the time it's because their think tank subsidized their appearance to make it look like they have a big crowd coming to see them.
Nobody comes to see these think tank presidents.
That doesn't happen.
So, you know, I'm Yeah, it sounds like bragging because I guess it is.
But when you keep getting smashed by moral pygmies all the time, when you didn't start anything and all the things you're doing are pro-libertarian, you know, once in a while you want to say, hey, look, people, I did this with no institutional backing at all.
I did this. There's no way—you people would probably slit the throats of your own grandmothers to get half of that.
You know, get off my back.
Well, it's the old Superman movie.
It ain't bragging if you do it.
If you can do it and you're just telling facts, that's not bragging.
And false modesty is just another kind of hypocrisy.
And by the way, it really is a testament also, if I may say, to the decency of the people who listen to me regularly.
They listen, they know the guy they're hearing.
They say... This seems like an okay guy to me.
So I think you have to be mentally deranged to think there's something wrong with this guy.
And they've just stuck with me.
They stuck with me, even though sometimes their friends probably hear something bad thing about me, and they just still do it.
And I appreciate that, you know, and there are a lot of them.
Well, and of course, if you were looking to be effective, you would look at the various freedom thinkers and freedom public intellectuals.
And you'd say, okay, well, who has the most reach?
Who gets the most views?
And who has, you know, with reasonable levels of intellectual integrity, the purity test is something that's kind of, but doesn't mean that there's no difference in levels of consistency.
So who gets the most views?
And what's their model? And how does it work?
You would actually do your market research rather than just continue to do the stuff that doesn't work.
And the market research shows that if you're customer-facing, if you're driven by your listeners rather than one person, then you do much better.
And they would all transfer themselves to that model, which would be inconsistency with their market-facing ideas.
Now, let's talk a little bit about something that I found quite surprising about libertarianism when I got into it more later.
Because, as you know, I spent a lot of time in the business world and so on.
So, the libertarianism that I grew up with, it wasn't exactly monk-like, but it was pretty ascetic.
And most of the early thinkers, you know, like, I just, I can't see Murray Rothbard with a joint.
Like, just in my mind and in my heart, like, I just, I can't, I can't see Ayn Rand drunk.
Like, I just, I can't see that.
And so the, you know, the Freedmans and all of that, ascetic, intellectual, classy in a lot of ways.
But then when I started getting more into the libertarianism, go and give speeches and stuff like that, I don't know.
It was like pretty hippie, pretty decadent, you know, drugs, casual sex.
And, you know, I don't want to sound like too Victorian or anything like that, but there does seem to be kind of this heavy wave of people who were like, I don't like rules.
I don't like consequences.
I don't like, you know, and it's like, I hate the government because there are restrictions on any of my behaviors, even though in a...
free society, there would be restrictions on those behaviors anyway, because you wouldn't, you'd have to pay the consequences of your own bad decisions rather than foisting it off on the welfare state and socialized medicine and all that kind of stuff.
There is something quite fascinating that seems to be growing, which I do associate with the left, the left and hedonism, you know, they go from this wild hedonism, which is what they promise, and then they pull you devil-like into this layer of totalitarianism where you end up with a whole lot less hedonism that was promised.
But that's kind of like the angle of fish light that they use to snap you up.
But there does seem to be quite a lot of this anti-intellectual hedonism that's going on that does not seem in line with what drew me to libertarianism in the first place.
I think it just goes to show a lot of people are drawn for a lot of different reasons.
And if you're drawn to it because you just hate authority or you hate rules, you're going to be an extremely confused libertarian thinker because I believe in authority.
It just depends on What the authority is and did I voluntarily consent to it?
So I always use the example of the president of the chess club.
You know, the president of the chess club makes certain decisions about the club.
And I have no problem with that.
I mean, that's how the thing functions.
I'm not going to come in and pretend to be the president of the club.
We would have rules. Of course, we'd have laws, or at least we'd have a legal regime, certainly.
And, you know, even in a—I hate homeowners association examples, but you can imagine a decent—you can imagine in principle a decent homeowners association where they would say, look, after 11 o'clock, we don't want you shouting about the Fed through your bullhorn.
You know, go to bed. There's nothing wrong with that.
Everybody voluntarily consented to that.
So that's—and that's why— I don't want to mention her name because I think she maybe had second thoughts, but there was a woman who ran for the LP nomination for president who got upset at me because I made a video saying something like, look, anarchists should blah, blah, blah, blah.
And she said, you know, talking down to me like I'm an idiot.
You know, I don't understand how you can put the word anarchists and should in the same sentence.
And I thought, I don't understand how you don't get that.
I can't even say we should do something?
Well, anarchism, there's one R that they throw in there, right?
So anarchism means without rulers.
There's no centralized coercive authority.
And the reason, one of the reasons why anarchism is so appealing is not only is it intellectually consistent, but also when you have a centralized pyramid of power in society, you have no rules.
They change all the time.
I mean, just look at what happened with spying on the Trump administration and the lying about it and these allegations.
The FBI is changing records and can't find – like, there's no rules.
Look at the Clintons. So when you get this, you don't get rules.
You just get chaos and bribery and panic and manipulation and lies.
So that's no rules.
So anarchism simply says, without rulers, no rulers.
But everyone takes that last R out and says, oh, that means no rules.
And it's like, no, no, no, we want rules.
Right now we have no rules.
In a free society, the rules are negotiated, they're consistent, they're the minimum necessary, they're, you know, constantly being whittled away as new technology arises and so on.
And so this idea that anarchism means without rules, anarchism is the only way we ever get consistent objective and rational rules in society.
You're never going to get it through the state.
It's too subject to the power principle.
And the funny thing is that, of course, really the idea that we believe in no rules is basically a left-wing caricature of what we believe.
They say, oh, well, you guys don't even think there should be rules of the road or something.
Well, it just depends on who the road owner is, but of course we want rules of the road.
I mean, I would say as you're driving down, you shouldn't be slashing people's tires when they're at the side of the road.
We agree on that.
But when libertarians live down to the caricatures of them that other people come up with, that's what gets frustrating.
When people say, well, all you libertarians are about is pot.
I say, oh, come on.
That's not true. And then I actually meet people like this.
I say, oh, come on. Now you're making my job a million times harder.
And I mean, I'm not... It's not my thing.
I'm not going to do it and, you know, whatever.
But there are, I mean, for example, you mentioned Gary Johnson, and maybe we should, you know, circle back to the Libertarian Party in this respect.
I get that if you were to say to the general public, we have to get rid of the whole drug war, that means all drugs, that a lot of people, fewer than before, but still a lot of people, would find that horrifying and shocking.
I get that. But we exist to horrify and shock, because that's the only way you get people to change their minds.
I mean, They're not going to listen to us to change their views that the capital gains tax should be 3% lower.
They're already falling asleep.
But the way you get to people is by shaking them into thinking completely differently.
The problem with being a milquetoast libertarian and saying, well, we should legalize pot and then other drugs are a different matter, is that it makes it sound like libertarianism is really just your own personal habits with a philosophical rationale associated with it.
It's not really a consistent set of principles.
Whereas if I say about the drug war, we've got to get rid of the whole thing, it's shocking.
But at least people can say, well, I get why he's saying that because his view is that people ought to be able to do what they want to do as long as they're not physically harming other people.
At least I get where he's coming from.
Whereas if you have somebody like a Gary Johnson who says we should legalize this drug, but this over here, now, come on now.
Well, then what's libertarianism all about?
Just your personal preferences? Or likewise, that's the problem with, you know, an anti-discrimination law.
You know, I always point this out.
Ann Coulter said that libertarians were a word I don't want to say, but it starts with a P. And it's not pansies, but it's a word like that.
She said, because they want to talk about how much they're in favor of pot, because they know they're not going to get in trouble.
New York Times is not going to come at them for that.
But how come they don't talk about anti-discrimination law?
Because they're going to get in trouble for that.
Well, secondly, because they support it, a lot of them.
They support it, even though it's against the idea of freedom of association.
So if you're going to say, well, people should be allowed to Form this kind of group, and that should be okay.
But if they want to do that kind of group or exclude for that reason, we can't have that.
Then again, libertarianism seems like this hodgepodge.
You can't really nail it down.
It's for this. It's not for that.
You know, I think the only way that's going to make sense is just to say, I know how unfashionable this sounds.
I get it. I know the abuse I'm going to get for it.
I know I'm not going to be Mr.
Popularity. But having said that to you, now that I have the integrity to speak to you that way...
I basically favor voluntary interactions for all people.
And that means for scummy people too.
They can have voluntary interactions too.
And you decent people can have your voluntary interactions.
And that's how we're going to interact with each other.
I'm not going to try to make scummy people into decent people because it's not my job and I probably would do a lousy job of it.
Maybe their friends can shape them up.
I don't know. But I have more finite goals and expectations for my life.
I just want my neighborhood to be pretty decent or my state to be pretty decent or my friends and I to be pretty decent.
And I think we can get there by interacting on a voluntary basis with each other.
And that's it. Let's close with this because this is something from my...
Church days as a child and as a youth.
There's something that was said to me that, you know, it's like almost you go back in time, it's like my life would be so much easier if I'd never heard this statement.
You know, like if my friend hadn't been in a rush and I hadn't got into Ayn Rand.
So it was something that a priest told me.
Actually, he told the whole congregation.
Because when it comes to moral rules, there are some that come easier and some that come harder.
And they're different for different people and so on, right?
The priest said to me, he said, Christianity is not a buffet.
And that always really stuck with me.
You know, because, yeah, it's not a buffet.
You don't just get to pick and choose.
It's the whole thing. And it's the same thing if you have these basic principles.
You know, my basic rule of the road is I don't want you to force me to fund your idea of a great road at the point of a gun.
That's my first rule of the road is I don't want to go to jail for disagreeing with how the road should be built.
But this idea that...
Principles are not a buffet, and you have to stick with the principles if you're going to have any credibility at all.
The moment it becomes cherry-picking, the moment you say, well, I like pot, I don't like heroin, so heroin should be illegal and pot should be legal, then you have just...
Cast aside principle.
Now, to me, if you're gonna cast aside principle, why hold on to half of half of it?
Like, why pretend? Just go merge with the general herd and do what you like.
And of course, everybody ex post facto justifies their personal preferences according to some kind of principle, but forget even that.
If you're gonna have a principle, have a damn principle.
And if you're not gonna have a principle, then don't.
But this halfway house stuff, all it does is it dissolves the credibility I don't want to attribute motives to people that would involve reading their minds, because I can't read their minds.
I'll simply say that it's at least plausible that the reason Some libertarians seem to be weirdly inconsistent like this.
Could have something to do with something you said earlier, which is that a lot of them are in either the periodical or think tank world, which makes them subject to the whims of donors or editors or whatever.
And they realize that the market for people who want to be professional libertarians is pretty slim.
If I lose this gig, Chances are that's it.
I'm going to have to go out and work for a living.
So therefore, they blend in.
They sound like the other fashionable libertarians because they are in that precarious situation.
Which, by the way, is part of the reason that the other thing I do in addition to libertarianism is I teach people about how to build up like a side income or a side hustle using the internet, which is the greatest tool in the history of the world, so that You don't have to bite your tongue on the job.
You don't have to worry that a tweet you posted five months ago is going to ruin you.
You have a bit of breathing room to say, do your worst, because no matter what you do to me, I'm going to be on my feet.
So I don't worry about that stuff because I don't have to anymore.
And even when I did have to, I still didn't worry about it.
Well, and I think also if you have a particular donor who's funding your think tank, if your think tank runs afoul of the media and all of the bombs start getting thrown at you, I think there's a concern about the splash damage to the reputation of the donor.
So I think there's a kind of tight leash about certain topics that I think really restrict what people can do.
And I mean, I just... I really shave at those restrictions, Tom.
There's enough censorship out there in the real world without me having to self-censor for fear of attack.
That is just something that I literally could not live with myself if I held my tongue on important issues where there's strong arguments, reason, and evidence behind it.
I guess there are people who are willing to sell their voice for a certain price, but I don't think they're going to add up much in the future history of the world.
No, that's true. And I mean, let's be perfectly blunt.
Most people will never be remembered at all.
So given that, no one's gonna, 20 years from now, no one's gonna say, so-and-so said an unfashionable thing in the year 2018.
No one's gonna remember, no one's gonna care.
I mean, let's just be blunt. So given that that's a fact, Might as well live according to your conscience.
Might as well, while you're here, while you're in the spotlight, do something that matters.
I already know price controls lead to shortages.
I already get that.
I already understand the benefits of free trade.
Boom. Got it.
But is that all you have to say to me?
Really? That's all you have to say?
I could watch old videos about that.
That's all you have to say to me?
By the way, do you mind, before we wrap up, can I just mention one thing about- I've got, I can't remember if I've ever mentioned it on this, but, you know, the running joke about me is that I give away e-books all the time.
So when I did one on healthcare, it was called, Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About Healthcare.
So now I'm going to start doing a whole thing, Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About X, Y, and Z, because they are.
These people are so, these are the worst.
The last thing you want to do whenever there's a school shooting or there's some controversy or Trump says something, the last place you want to be is Facebook, right?
It's the worst.
So anyway, but I have – I do give away books on topics of interest to us.
It's over at tomsfreebooks.com.
So if you can visit tomsfreebooks.com, if you like our chitchats here, then you'll like these free books.
They don't cost you nothing.
They're just like Stefan's books that don't cost you nothing.
Oh, also mentioned, too, because we talked about the side hustle, the approach that you have with hosting sites and so on, and how people, if they want to start writing, and this is how most of us start.
You know, we've got these thoughts, we debate with friends, and then the internet came along, we started blogging, and then you start talking into a camera, microphone, whatever.
How is it that you can help people who want to start doing this side hustle called The Value of Integrity?
How is it that your site can help them get started?
Well, one thing that I've done is, first of all, I've come up with like a five-minute, because I know people want to either start a blog or get a website, put some videos up or whatever, but they feel like I have no, I don't know where to even start.
So to take that excuse away, I made a five-minute video showing you how you can be blogging or up and running in five minutes, just watch exactly what, and I was a tech idiot, so if I can do this, you can do this.
But the key thing is you're worried that you start doing it And it's just tumbleweeds.
Nobody's watching. It's just tumbleweeds.
There's nobody around. So the thing is, how are you going to get visitors?
How are you going to get people to actually go there?
So what I decided to do was, and this is in my interest and other people's interest, was I've had a lot of success with Bluehost as a hosting company.
So what I've said is, if you use my link to get your hosting, what I will do for you is I have a pretty sizable podcast audience.
I'll tell my audience about your new site, and that will get you.
And people have shown me the graph.
Like, here's the traffic we were getting.
And then Woods mentioned me on his show, and it went way up here.
There won't be any tumbleweeds.
I'll get you a big burst of traffic if you go through that.
I thought, that's a way. That helps me because I earn a commission.
But it's a good product.
Through me, you get the best price there is.
But the key thing is that primary worry of, is anyone going to care?
Is anyone going to listen?
Is there any point to this?
I'll get you over that first hurdle.
So I do that over at tomwoods.com slash publicity.
And so far, I think I've helped about 1,500 people.
Do this and get people coming, get regular visitors to them.
And I even have a private Facebook group for bloggers who do that because you will run into tech problems and you say, oh, now it's a tech problem.
We help each other out in that group.
How do I do X? Within minutes, somebody's explaining to you how to do X. It's fantastic.
And this is, you know, Tom obviously is fantastic at the free market.
His business goal of helping and training competition remains opaque to me.
No, I'm kidding. That's very nice about what you do.
Well, thanks for the conversation, Tom.
Please let us know in the comments below.
If this topic is of interest to you, I find it fascinating.
I work from home, so gossip is my meat and drink.
But TomWoods.com is to go to get Tom's podcast and great books, great writer.
Twitter.com forward slash Thomas E. Woods.
We'll put links to all of that below.
Really, really appreciate your time, Tom, and I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
This is my favorite conversation so far, and that's saying something.
▲
Export Selection