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May 25, 2022 - Viva & Barnes
25:28
Sidebar with Author and Libertarian Tom Woods! Viva & Barnes LIVE!
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Time Text
You know this case is being televised, right?
I am aware that there are cameras.
And so this gets you your 15 minutes of fame.
Objection, Your Honor.
Argumentative.
So I stand to gain nothing from this.
I'm actually putting myself right in the target of TMZ, a very litigious organization, and I'm not seeking any 15 minutes here.
You're welcome to speculate.
I could say the same thing by taking Amber Heard as a client.
Oh, shit!
A little argumentative, don't you think?
Oh, hardly.
I find that to be truly logical.
Now, are you aware that Mr. Depp's attorneys were well aware of the TRO that was going to be presented?
Good evening, people.
In as much as you may not have wanted to see anything about the Johnny Depp trial, it was either that or Justin Trudeau.
So...
I figured we'd intro with, it's humorous, it's funny, and set aside whatever it has to do with the Johnny Depp trial, which people think is a distraction and yada yada.
I say you can learn things from this, and we've learned something very interesting right there.
You know, there's the old expression, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Ask stupid questions, you might get smart answers.
And it highlights the, like, you're not going to be smarter than everybody on Earth.
And if you want to play these types of games with people who are quick-witted and think on their feet, you go after someone's intentions for no better reason than to try to impugn their intentions.
They can come back and go after yours.
It was a very, very classic, stupid question.
There was no lead-up to it.
It was just defenses running low on time.
But it was a stupid, cheap attack on intention.
15 minutes of fame?
And he flipped it right back on her and embarrassed her.
And then she says to him, a little argumentative?
You just accused him of that.
So if he's argumentative, ask stupid questions and occasionally you'll get a smart Alec answer, as Elaine did there.
Now, standard intro just so that, you know, as people trickle in, we've got Tom Woods on tonight.
And whenever I hear the word libertarian, I think it was Kurt Mueller from Uncivil Law.
It was someone who sensitized me to the fact that there's big L libertarian, or there's small L libertarian, and then there's part of the libertarian group or party.
And one is a very sound philosophical view of the world and government's role in it.
And the other, I've been told, is quite interesting and eclectic.
So I haven't been able to forget that ever since I was familiarized with the...
The Libertarian Party or the Libertarian Annual Convention, which we might touch on.
But we have Tom Woods on tonight.
A well-known libertarian, author, host of the Tom Woods Show, well over 2,000 episodes.
I'm trying to think of...
I was doing my homework today, watching some of the older episodes and interviews of Tom Woods.
I mean, if anybody listens to Tom Woods and doesn't think he's incredibly intelligent and makes perfect sense pretty much on everything that I've heard thus far...
I dare say you're an anti-libertarian.
He's got a great radio voice and speaks some good sense.
So, we've got Tom tonight.
I'm going to bring him in.
Now, I said we'd do an intro just to let people come in for like three or four minutes.
Oh, yes.
Thank you, Nimitz, for reminding me.
I got sat down by my boss yesterday and told I have less than a month to get the jab, a la corporate.
Would you ask Barnes where I can find legal counsel in MA?
Nustip on Snick.
Is M-A Massachusetts?
Nimitz, thank you for reminding me.
Superchats, people.
YouTube takes 30% to Superchats.
If you don't like that, we are simultaneously streaming on Rumble.
Let me just make sure that we're smooth on Rumble.
Rumble has the Superchat equivalent called Rumble Rant.
Are we live on Rumble?
We should be.
They take 20%.
So better for the creator, better for the platform to support a platform that supports free speech, yada, yada, yada.
No medical advice, no legal advice, no election fortification advice, although I suspect we're going to be dabbing our toes into discussing policy surrounding COVID, government, the role of government in our lives, and Tom Woods is who made me a libertarian 11 years ago, C. Warren.
Well, without further ado, Let's bring in the man of the hour, Tom Woods.
Tom, how goes the battle, sir?
I'm really glad to be here.
Thanks a lot.
Well, okay, so I like to do a little research on every guest, you know, try to find some scandals, try to find some...
You have a pretty clean record from what I was able to see.
No outrageous scandals, no nothing that I know of.
Maybe we'll get into them.
But for those who don't know who you are...
We do the standard elevator pitch.
We get into how you got to be who you are and then some substantive issues for the evening, but elevator pitch as to who you are.
All right, I'll give you the 60-second version.
Yes, I'm a libertarian.
I wasn't always one, but I always knew, at least from my college years, that I knew I wasn't a Marxist.
I knew I wasn't a progressive.
When I got to...
The Harvard campus from the little traditional New England town I lived in, it was so scandalous to me that there were literal communist newspapers for sale that I just decided whatever these people are, I want to be the exact opposite.
And eventually, after some twists and turns, I wound up in the libertarian world where I have written a bunch of books, a couple of best-selling books.
I have several membership sites where I, for example, I teach history.
To people who feel like maybe they didn't get the whole story when they were in high school.
I have a PhD from Columbia University, so I do that too.
You like what I have to say about politics?
Maybe you like what I have to say about the past.
And since 2013, I have hosted The Tom Woods Show, which is now up to over 2,100 episodes, which is either a really amazing milestone or a sign of some deranged, I don't know, some mental defect that someone would devote himself to something like that for so long.
And what my wife says, it could be borderline addiction.
What we do, 2,000 episodes is a lot.
But I was watching one of your interviews where you say, you do it five days a week, it adds up and it adds up quickly.
Yeah.
So you said you're from New England.
Yeah.
Born and raised?
Born and raised, Massachusetts.
And there have been times when I've wanted to move back to Massachusetts.
Now, this is pre-COVID.
Now I wouldn't trust Massachusetts.
But pre-COVID, I've thought about moving back there.
And the trouble is, I love my libertarian people so much.
I love them dearly.
They're wonderful, wonderful people.
But some of them, some of them can't shut off, ever.
So they go to the movies and they have to ask themselves, is this a libertarian movie?
I just want to enjoy the movie.
So likewise, I say, I'm thinking about moving back to Massachusetts.
You can't possibly consider that.
The regime is terrible.
But you know what?
I have loved ones and friends there.
And I'm familiar with the place.
And it brings me joy.
If I can't go somewhere that brings me joy because it doesn't make me a pure libertarian, then I guess I don't care about being a pure libertarian.
You're born and raised.
How many kids would your parents do?
How many generations American are you?
All right, let's see.
I personally have five daughters, but I am myself an only child.
My parents, my father's deceased, but he was a blue-collar worker.
He was a forklift operator for 15 years.
He did not finish high school until he got his GED in his 40s.
And he was a great inspiration to me because he went to show how possible it is to be an autodidact.
He was entirely self-taught because he was so self-conscious because he didn't have that piece of paper.
So he would read and learn and study about everything under the sun.
And sure, if you talk to him, he would make grammatical mistakes.
But he knew stuff.
He read and learned.
So I...
I deeply respected that, and he helped to form the way I look at the world.
And then my mom was also trying to hold things together in a middle-class household by being a waitress for a while, and then in real estate, stuff like that.
And the two of them put together a pretty good household for Little Woods here, who went on to go from a household where neither parent had gone to college, and then I went off to be educated by the Ivy League, for better or worse.
Were your parents apolitical?
Were they politically engaged?
What was that like?
My mother was somewhat apolitical.
My father was a Republican, but he was kind of like a blue-collar Reagan Republican.
He was never a Democrat, but he had blue-collar instincts.
And but, you know, so he wouldn't be an ideological libertarian or anything.
But I have a feeling that if he had lived a little longer, I could have convinced him of the whole package.
But so I went off to college kind of like, I don't know, middle of the road Republican, which is like the thing I can't stand the most today.
Like I was like a Mitt Romney.
I was bad on foreign policy and I was unreliable on domestic policy.
But I knew I wasn't, you know, Mike Dukakis.
You know, I knew I wasn't Walter Mondale.
I had that going for me.
Now, how did you go from being a respectable, moderate, Romney-style Republican to a dangerous Michael Malice-attendant anarcho-capitalist libertarian?
By the way, you mentioned Michael Malice.
Michael Malice is one of my best friends.
And in the old days, it used to be people would say to me, I'm so glad you introduced me to Michael Malice.
Now it's, hey, I learned about you from Michael Malice.
That is not the way the universe is supposed to work, but that's the way things have turned out.
I would say the thing that changed me was going to the Mises Institute for a week in the early 90s.
Two years in a row, I went for a week for their summer program.
And I basically came out of that thinking, look, I either believe in something or I don't.
And if I believe in it, I'm going to believe in it all down the line consistently.
You've got to explain.
That annoying person who is super consistent all the time.
So explain what the Mises Institute is for people who may not know.
The Mises Institute is named after Ludwig von Mises, who was one of the only economists ever to feature in a Batman comic, because that's how badass the guy was.
He taught economics in Europe even through the 1930s, and as a Jew in Europe, that was not a comfortable place to be or an occupation to have, because he was not preaching autarky along the National Socialist model.
He was preaching libertarian...
He was preaching classical liberalism and free markets, which was not really what the Nazi regime was known for favoring.
So he eventually had to flee Europe.
His books were confiscated and papers taken.
He had to come to the United States in 1940.
He spoke some English, but it was not his first language, so he had to have help writing his future books.
He came here with no job lined up, eventually got an unpaid position at NYU.
But the significant thing is, if you think back to who was in the economics department at NYU in 1968, you can't name a single person.
Nope.
Who knows?
But yet Ludwig von Mises is still talked about.
His books are read to this day, partly because of the Mises Institute, which is basically teaching economics along the lines that Mises taught it, and which means, in general, sound money, money that's hard for the government to manipulate.
International commerce, peace, and, of course, also, frankly, a non-empirical, non-mathematical approach to economics.
You look at the typical economics journal today, professionally, it's unreadable.
I mean, they're writing it so that they can look like physicists, which they have envy of physicists, because physicists have equations, and so we have to have equations, too.
And all they're doing is adding unnecessary layers of complication to concepts that can be expressed verbally.
So you have now a situation where there was a study, maybe it was 15 years ago, asking how many people read the average article in the American Economic Review.
And the answer was two and a half.
I mean, that's a basket case of a discipline, if that's the case.
So the Mises Institute is a refreshing departure from all this, and it's plain-spoken economics for the intelligent layman.
Now, what is its relationship to, and can you give any further expansive definition of what is colloquially called the Austrian School of Economics?
Well, the Austrian School is an approach to economics that basically dates back to 1871, although you can see forerunners as with any school.
But 1871 is when a guy named Karl Menger wrote Principles of Economics.
The central thing, if I had to whittle Austrian economics down, it would be the idea that human beings act and have goals and they use means to reach those goals.
We don't need to know their psychology, which a lot of economists get caught up on.
We don't need to know why they do what they do.
We don't need to know what motivates them.
We need to know they're goal-oriented and that they use means to achieve their ends.
And the Austrian school is extremely...
It plays a lot of emphasis on the consumer.
A lot of classical economics wanted to look at the producer, wanted to look at the business firm, wanted to look at costs of production.
Costs of production are what explain prices.
But the Austrians would say, well, where did, quote, costs of production come from?
From heaven?
That can't be the ultimate explanation.
Then that just leads us to the question, where did they come from?
So the Austrians instead start with the acting person and the acting consumer.
And they say that the reason that the factors of production, like factories, machinery, equipment, assembly lines, whatever, the reason they have the value they have is that the consumer values the finished product of the thing that they make.
If there was a machine that could do nothing but produce cigarettes and suddenly everybody quit smoking, that machine would go to zero in value.
It doesn't matter how much time people put into building it.
It doesn't matter how much the company spent on it.
It's the consumer's valuation of the final product that then trickles up through the production structure and gives those things the prices they have.
So it's the opposite of what most people think, but it's correct.
I was Googling it.
The Mises Institute, it's not like it is not respected by what consider themselves to be the institutions of the day, the New York Times.
Is there a hierarchy?
With the Mises Institute, is it viewed as an eclectic libertarian, or is it well-established and respected, even among what we call fake news today?
Well, fake news wouldn't much care for.
There's just no question about it.
As a matter of fact, the New York Times, some years ago, came to visit the Mises Institute and try and get some interviews and write something on it, and the chairman, Lou Rockwell, got wind that somebody from the New York Times was in the Mises Institute.
He came...
Thundering down the stairs.
And he ordered the person out.
He said, you're a mouthpiece of the regime and you're not welcome here.
Now, that's very different from a lot of free market think tanks.
If a New York Times reporter came there, they'd roll out the red carpet.
Oh, we're so delighted to have you here, Mr. Good New York Times reporter, sir.
That's not really how we are.
So we're not the kind of group that would say, let's invite the chairman of the Federal Reserve over for a cocktail party.
No, no, no, no.
That is not the way we look at it.
We're highly, highly critical.
We want to abolish an institution like that.
So the Mises Institute has fantastic scholars associated with it.
There's no doubt about that.
But there are a lot of great scholars who are, let's say, disparaged by the powers that be.
And yet, the story of Jordan Peterson reminds us that if you have a valuable message that helps people...
To understand the world more clearly.
It doesn't matter if you have the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the whole lot of them against you.
You can still get your message out there to a people that's hungry for what you have to say.
And what led to your interest?
I kind of interrupted your narrative in that regard.
What led to your interest to want to be one of those people to be sort of what I would call a dissident scholar?
In other words, a voice that's very well informed, very well educated, very well literate, you might say, but willing to go against the regime, the cathedral, whatever language we use for the institutional establishment of the day.
I came to the conclusion that I just wanted to understand how the world worked.
And as I began to study economics, I came to the conclusion that a lot of things that the average person thinks are going to help him are actually making his situation worse.
And I hate to see people sabotage themselves.
So I wanted to help explain to people, no, don't do this, do that.
But also I came to the conclusion, especially from reading history, that the standard narrative just leaves out so much or distorts so much.
I'll never forget, I was a freshman.
It must have been the first three weeks of being in college.
And I met a guy who has since turned totally mainstream and would never want me mentioning his name, which is just as well because I can't remember his name.
But we were freshmen together, and he was asking me as a U.S. historian if I had ever read a book by Paul Johnson called Modern Times, which is a book about the whole world, not just the U.S., but it has some good chapters on the U.S. And I said, no, no, I haven't.
It's a huge book called Modern Times, The World from the 20s to the 80s.
And he said, you should read that book because if you read it, You're going to discover that everybody they say was a bad president was a good one, and everybody they say was a good president was a bad one.
He says, no, that's not true for all of them.
Some of them really were bad.
It doesn't hold universally.
But he says that if you read that, you're going to wonder what else has been left out, what other perspective you didn't get a chance to hear.
So being the nerd I was, I got this book.
What is it?
I've got it around here somewhere.
It's like 800 pages.
I sat down and read it.
I said, well, this person told me.
I remember being so youthful and energetic that I would pick up an 800-page book because somebody recommended it.
And so I went through and read it, and I thought, wow.
And it really is, in a way, a...
It's a devastating attack on the 20th century, on the collectivism of the 20th century, the economics of the 20th century, the total war, the propaganda, all the sorts of things that we struggle with today.
It is a vigorous polemic, basically against a century.
An absolutely fascinating book.
And from that point on, I thought, I want to do what this guy did.
I want to dig down deep into the sources and come back out.
With stuff nobody knows, but they need to know.
Education-wise, someone had asked, you know, how did you afford Ivy League?
But before we even get there, you studied, you got a PhD at, you said, Harvard?
Undergrad at Harvard and then PhD at Columbia.
Let me ask the crass question then.
I mean, how did you go through it?
How did you afford it?
Well, the answer is, well, for undergrad...
Believe it or not, Harvard is actually pretty generous with people, and they don't give merit-based scholarships on the grounds that, well, then everybody would deserve a scholarship because we're bringing in the cream of the crop.
So instead, it was all need-based.
And as I said, I came from a working-class family, and they came up with a package of loans that I paid off in not too long.
They weren't particularly burdensome.
Outright grants.
And I worked a little bit, and it wasn't particularly glamorous work.
I cleaned toilets for a living.
But, you know, I've since used that in some of my email marketing.
I'll say, well, you know, in the old days I cleaned toilets and I wished I could be doing this, that this product teaches or whatever.
So all these stories in my life I always turn to a marketing advantage.
But that was basically it, that they were generous enough with us that my parents, who used to take an annual trip to Las Vegas, didn't have to stop taking that trip.
They could still actually live.
They didn't have to eat macaroni and cheese and drink tap water.
They were able to actually live fairly comfortably.
I don't know if that's still how it is, but that's how it was in my day.
It is in part because of a protest I was part of at Yale.
So back when I was at Yale, it was need-based financial aid, as you're describing, need-blind admissions.
So they didn't discriminate against you based on how much need you would have to meet the gap between tuition and available family income, as it was then calculated.
I was part of a little protest organization that Yale tried to actually change it for the whole Ivy League, and we helped cause some problems for Yale that ultimately led to the Yale not changing, and so the Ivy League didn't change.
Wow, I didn't know that story.
Yeah, yeah, it's a fun little side story.
But it's a whole, as I like to say, it's another story for another day.
But in that capacity, so one of the people you studied under for your PhD was Alan Brinkley, is that correct?
Yeah, how did you know that?
I did a little bit of research.
Oh, okay.
Good job.
Viva research and then Barnes research.
So that's the next level.
Well, I've always been interested in Brinkley.
What was that like?
And can you give people a sense of Brinkley's perspective?
Well, some of the older folks listening to us might remember his father, David Brinkley, who was a newsman.
And David Brinkley, he was soft-spoken, but he had a dry wit.
Alan Brinkley was soft-spoken, and that was about it.
Now, the thing is, Alan Brinkley is deceased.
He died a few years ago.
I can't remember if it was Lou Gehrig's disease.
He had some very, very unfortunate last few years, but he was provost of the university.
He was widely published, very respected within the profession, but very, very businesslike.
So I remember there was a day when, for some reason, a friend and I had decided, I didn't have a beard.
And a friend and I decided that until we finished our oral exams, we weren't going to shave.
I don't know what, I forget what the logic behind this was.
So I showed up at his office one day looking like hell.
And so I felt like I needed to explain to him why.
And he replied, well, that isn't really any of my concern.
Okay, strictly business.
But what I liked about him was, even though I could predict every word that was going to come out of that guy's mouth, I mean, he was basically a Hillary Clinton Democrat.
At the same time, he was Extremely professional.
He directed my dissertation so skillfully.
Even though he was completely out of sympathy with me ideologically, he respected me as an up-and-coming scholar.
And he did such a good job directing it that several years after I finished the program, my dissertation, I turned it into a book called The Church Confronts Modernity, and it was published by Columbia University Press, which is no small feather in my cap.
So I don't, again, that's another thing I don't know.
About not having been on campuses for 20 years.
How many professors like that are there who have their ideological commitments, but they love their field and they're committed to their craft and they'll work with a young scholar even if they feel out of sympathy with them?
I don't know, but that was the good fortune I had when I was there.
What was your decision?
I think I read his book on Father Coughlin and Huey Long.
He had an interest and curiosity in populism, which I think today, I don't know if you could cover Father Coughlin, or you would be like, what are you doing covering that person associated with this group and that group?
And Coughlin obviously kind of fell off the res a little bit there at the end, but he was an interesting populist figure before then.
So I've always had an interest in Brinkley as to why someone like him could have that sort of discernment, because his father was known for being...
Both, you know, an iconic journalistic figure, but also maybe a little bit of a prick.
Whereas Alan Brinkley, at least in the academic community I knew, he did not have that reputation.
No, as a matter of fact, I think they put together a book of essays by some of his students after he died.
And it was just everybody praising him.
For being a good guy.
What's interesting, though, was he was the most right-wing member of the Columbia History Department.
Being a Hillary Clinton Democrat, he was by far the most right-wing figure.
And I'm not saying that to be funny.
There's no doubt about it.
At that time, Columbia really specialized in labor history, which I had zero interest in, even though my own father was a teamster.
I felt like I've learned, I've lived through enough labor history.
I don't need any more.
But there were a lot of Marxists doing that kind of stuff.
And he was not a Marxist.
And so in his classes, he would talk about the atrocities of the Soviet regime.
Now, some Marxists, as true, will say, well, the Soviet Union wasn't real communism.
We've all heard that.
But they didn't all talk that way.
Some of them did speak with some affection about the Soviet Union, even into the 1980s.
And so there was actually a brief campaign at Columbia where some left-wing group put up posters all over the campus condemning Brinkley for his right-wing deviationism.
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