Everybody, Tom Woods here, it's episode 26108 of the Tom Woods
show and I got all Keith Knight back here with us.
You might notice by the way, that this week there are, you
know, I, I used to do 5 episodes a week of the Tom Woods show and
then I thought, well, I'd rather do slightly longer ones that,
you know, but produce fewer of them.
And because I just felt like that on balance was a better
mix. So I started to do that, but
last week I did only two. They're a long, long story.
And now I could have just moved on, You know, I had.
I've produced over 2600 of these.
No one's going to notice if I miss one.
But it's just the way I am. Keith, I'm doing 4 this week,
you know, to make up for it. So that on average, it's still
3A week. So in any case, anybody's
confused about what's going on, it's because of your Tom Wood
show deficit last week that you have a surplus this week.
Anyway, Keith Knight is managing editor at the Libertarian
Institute, and I want to talk to him about, you know, one of our
most maligned and yet at the same time most beloved and
celebrated and accomplished and influential and important
figures. And that is Hans Herman Hapa, a
name you've probably heard whose books you probably, I mean,
you're just going on averages here, probably have not read,
but we all know them from the memes, basically.
But that's that's about it. Anyway, Keith, welcome back.
Great to have you. Tom, thanks so much for having
me and letting me on to talk about one of my intellectual
heroes. All right, so we're going to
talk a little bit about the the books now.
Hans Hapa is a is a polarizing figure polarizing.
I got, I think I probably first met him about over 30 years ago
actually. And one of the great, one of the
great things about the in 2017, the one thousandth episode of
the Tom Woods Show, is that before I came out, we ran this
montage of congratulatory messages from people in our
movement. So we had Kane, you know, the
former wrestler Kane, Glenn Jacobs, we had Peter Schiff, we
had Judge Napolitano, we had Ron Paul, and we had Hans Hoppa.
We had others too, but Hans Hoppa was one of them.
And when Hans's face appeared on that screen, that room
absolutely erupted. And and he was congratulating me
on, you know, all the work I had done over the years and that I
should keep it up and keep smashing the enemy.
And when I when he said those words, they went even crazier.
So, you know, I did an episode on Hans Hoppa years ago with
Stefan Kinsella, who's a great student of Hans.
And I said at the beginning of that episode that Hans is in
some way, some ways like Karl Marx in that Karl Marx, his both
his admirers and his detractors share one thing in common.
They've never read a word he wrote.
You know, they're arguing what they've heard other people say
about him. They're arguing about what they
think he believes. But they, you know, he asked
what what was, you know, they at least they might know the names
of of Marx's books. You ask somebody, well.
What's? The name of of the most
influential Hans Hoffa book you know, you might have might as
well have asked them to, you know, to speak to you in
Chinese. So.
So let's talk about books, for instance, because first of all,
Hans is, he's an economist, but he's also a libertarian theorist
and philosopher. And he's written widely on a a a
variety of subjects in economics.
You know, everything from Keynesianism to public goods
theory. But he's also written about
theoretical questions in economics like, like the, in
other words, the theory behind economics, the method of
economics. So he's written, he's done work
on, on positivism in the social sciences and why the Austrian
method is to be preferred. So he's but, but he's also
written works of applying theory to history.
He's he's done an awful lot. But, but you say he's an
intellectual hero of yours. How did you get to use a British
expression? Stuck into his work?
It was. Probably just going about things
saying I am interested in, you know, just getting a lot of bang
for my buck, whether I agree or disagree with it.
I had come out of 12 years of government education and I was
just so bored. I said just at least give me
something to love or hate. Just stop wasting my time.
And when I came across how productive 1 short article, I
want to say it's like this four page article, I think he titled
it the ultimate justification for the private property ethic.
It's just completely lays out a totally coherent view of the
world, whether you agree or disagree with it.
And it's his intellectual explanation for argumentation
ethics, saying by using violence or by using argument, we can
extrapolate principles about how to act in, one, our everyday
life and two, what principles we should have for other people.
So I think I just wanted to read a bunch of, I wanted to look at
the smartest people I knew, see who they recommended.
I came across a bunch of names. But once I started reading some
of Hans Hapa's work, I said, I feel like I'm getting a lot of
bang for my buck. Every single page I hear an
argument that's totally new or learn a way of thinking or a
concept. I was going through my notes of
things that I wanted to bring up.
And this one just really stood out to me.
So right now you have a lot of progressives who for maybe the
last 1020 years of their life have been actively saying we
need to tack the rich more. The state needs to grow.
They need more regulatory powers.
And now this institution, which they have said needs more power
and money, they're accusing it of committing genocide in Gaza.
You'd think there'd be a little more moment of reflection about
the nature of the state that they've been advocating the
growth of for so long. They seem to think that there's,
you know, one point of view where the state is peaceful and
that's what they want. And then there's a violent
state, which they're against. My favorite Hans Hop, a quote if
I had to say is from economy, society and history.
He says 1st, we should recognize that institutions such as states
show a natural aggressiveness. The explanation is very simple.
If you have to fund your own aggressive adventures yourself
out of your own pocket, that will somewhat curtail your
natural inclination to fight other people because you have to
pay for it yourself. On the other hand, if you
imagine that if I want to fight some of you guys and I can tax
him or him or ask him to support me in my fighting endeavors,
then whatever my initial aggressive impulses might be are
certainly stimulated because I can externalize the cost of war
onto other people. I don't have to bear the cost
myself. Other people have to bear the
cost. This explains why institutions
that have the power to tax, and also institutions that have the
power to print money in later ages have financial abilities
that make it more likely that they will go to war.
Then you would go to war if the power to tax attacks was lacking
or the power to print money was lacking on your part.
Once I heard stuff like that, I'm just like, Oh well of course
all the fights we see are between big governments and it's
not Americans and Russians are really wanting to go to war with
each other, but the government's there to keep the peace, are
backing us away. It's always governments pushing
populations into these conflicts.
Brilliant ideas like that is what first made me come across
on Tapa and then get addicted to the stimulant.
Let me give away or let me say what I think people should do in
terms of, of reading and then I'll, I'll share a few thoughts
also. So the the first book to read is
a theory of socialism and capitalism.
The second book to read is the economics and ethics of private
property. I don't care how boring that
title sounds, the the contents of that book will just knock
your socks off because it, it explains the world.
I mean, it basically explains why the world is the way it is
and what the incentives are and why these what we see is the
natural outcome of that. And then what we might do about
it. And then the only thirdly,
democracy, the God that failed, even though that one is so juicy
and it's so full of controversial things and you
want to start there, But I say work your way up to that.
That's the dessert, the meal, you know, the, the meat and
potatoes is the other two books. But I will say in the democracy
book, there's an insight that that a lot of the sophisticated,
and I say that mockingly sophisticated libertarians
didn't like hearing and they they scoffed at.
But it's actually a great insight about democracy versus
monarchy. Now, Hans is not a monarch.
He's not and he doesn't support monarchy.
But his point was this, that what you have with a democracy,
think of it this way. What you have is a series of
caretakers, temporary caretakers who for four or eight-year terms
are in charge of, you know, the, the, the state apparatus with a
monarch. There's a, there's a, there's a,
a different series of incentives because the monarch can hand the
realm down to an heir. So in effect, he's like a
private property owner. So what would you expect to
happen? Now, it's true you can get some
crazy lunatic being the king, but as Hans says, you might also
get a a harmless dilettante, which you almost never do in a
modern democracy. You always get some sinister
person and and that person is presiding over a series of
interest groups that are at war with the the you know, the
general good and you can never seem to uproot any of them.
And it's you know, all all that. But that doesn't seem to happen
under as much under monarchs because they they have no
particular interest in destroying the country, saddling
it with unpayable debt, engaging in Total War that leads to
widespread debt, death and destruction, because then
they're leaving a basket case to their heir.
And so when you think about it that way, think about how would
you govern if you knew your son was going to take over the thing
someday versus how would you govern if you knew you had four
years only or eight years? And you want to do not
necessarily what's in the long term interests of the long term
capital value of the place, but you want to do short term things
that might, you know, benefit your political party, that might
make it more likely your political party gets votes.
What kinds of policies you expect to see.
And then he goes and does a comparison.
So well, let's look at some 19th century societies and let's
compare them. Let's compare them in terms of
size of the bureaucracy, size of the national debt.
And he goes down all and he says it's exactly how you would
expect it to be, that the incentives and of democracy and
the incentives of a monarch are not aligned because of this set
of interests. Now I, I know we're supposed
because we live in the United States.
Most people listening to this, so we laugh at how could people
have been so foolish as to believe in a monarchy?
Ha, ha, ha, ha. I get that.
But you got to get all that out of your head for a minute.
Just think about what, what are the incentives of somebody who
passes the realm down versus somebody who's just there on a
temporary basis? It's like with a rental car.
Nobody washes a rental car. Nobody gets an oil change for a
rental car, you know, and maybe you even very marginally Dr. the
rental car more recklessly, even without realizing it.
It's not yours. You don't have to deal with the
long term loss of the thing. But if that's your car, you're
darn right you're going to go over that speed bump carefully.
You're going to get that oil change at the regular at the
regular time. You're going to put the top
notch gasoline. And if it calls for that.
So that's that's that's just one of the many points that he makes
in that book. But that's a valuable point.
It really is. Doesn't mean you have to be a
monarch. It means you have to understand
it. It's it's good to understand
democracy better. What immediately comes to mind
for a lot of people who at least try to address this is well, you
libertarians are always saying the free market's good because
there's a competition. Yet one of your guys is
advocating not the competition of democracy, he's advocating
monarchy. And you idiots just fell for
this. HOPPA of course addresses this
where he says what we want is competition in goods and not
competition in bads. So it's very good to have
competitions and who can make the best computer, who can serve
the best food, who can provide the best service, who can
provide the most fuel efficient car?
What's not good is to have competition in bads.
We do not want to have a competition.
And who can kidnap the most people?
Let's have a competition on that.
That would be competition and bads in which you would
incentivize more bad things to happen.
He says. He he makes a very good point in
the book where he says the average person does not have the
time to get so involved in politics, to do all the research
and inform themselves on Ukraine, Gaza, antitrust,
minimum wage laws, agricultural subsidies, the truth about
Herbert Hoover's administration, that that's just too much.
So what do they do? They listen to someone who can
sort of arouse the passions of the feeble minded, and that
tends to be the demagogues who promise ever more and more
increasing encroachments on the private property rights of other
people. They promise you more and more
and more. I mean, just I, I cannot imagine
that anyone today, looking at the current situation, I think
the government spent $6.27 trillion in 2022.
Their approach to this is the government doesn't have enough
money. And meanwhile we have someone
who for two years, President Biden didn't care to call
Vladimir Putin or Sergey Lavrov while waging A proxy war against
Russia, 6000 nukes, didn't care to call the other person.
These are people with such a high time preference.
I don't know how much they think about the next week or the next
month or the next year. You see this totally psychotic
behavior as a causal result of democracy.
One of my favorite quotes from the book.
There are those who recognize, correctly, that the problem lay
with monopoly, not with elites or nobility.
But they were far outnumbered by those who erroneously blamed it
on the elitist character of the rulers instead, and who
accordingly strove to maintain the monopoly of law and law
enforcement and merely replaced the king and the visible royal
pomp by the people and the presumed modesty and decency of
the common man. Hence the historic success of
democracy. So he says.
People thought the problem with kings is the crown and the
palace and the carelessness and the pomp.
The reality is they had a monopoly on the judicial system.
They were the final arbiter in all cases and all disputes,
including disputes with the crown itself.
So this is the problem that he's trying to bring to light.
I love that book. All right, let's let's talk
about now if you, if you, you know, I, I went back and
listened to this Stefan Kinsella episode and he corrected me in
an area where he shouldn't have corrected me.
I I now realize I was telling him that Hans is excellent on
the so-called public goods argument.
Now he agrees with me on that, of course, but there, there are
certain category, there's a certain category of goods that
can't be provided by the free market and they they satisfy
certain criteria. And that's how we can identify
them as as public goods. And, and Hans points out that
the whole model of that is just sloppy.
It's obviously just an after the fact rationalization of what the
state wants to do Anyway, there is actually no way to isolate
these particular goods as being public goods.
And he explains this whole thing.
But but that is so we were talking about the book a theory
of socialism and capitalism. And Stephen said, oh, well,
that's not in that book. That's in another book.
Wrong. Stephen.
Chapter 10 is on public goods. Hans is great on this.
You've never seen a treatment of public goods like Hans's in any,
you know, economics textbook that, that's for sure.
But let's say a brief thing, even though I've done an episode
on this and it is controversial and he does have critics on
this, but he also, you know, there are also responses to the
critics. We'll say just say a little
something about argumentation ethics, because the idea of that
stated very simply is if you and I are standing there arguing
about what the best, what you know, let's say what the best
social system is, and I'm arguing for a pure private
property society and you're arguing for some alternative.
Hans would say there's something, I hate to use the
word meta, but there's something fundamental about the framework
of of our very argument that speaks volumes.
He says, notice that we're not trying to resolve this matter by
clocking each other over the head.
What are we doing? We're standing here reasoning to
see who has the more persuasive argument, and indeed, in
standing there we are presuming that the opponent we're talking
to has the right to his body, which he's using, and his vocal
cords, which he's using to argue with.
This is presumed in the course of an argument.
If it weren't, it would be a physical altercation.
But it's not. We're not.
We understand that if we're having an argument that one
person has his bodily integrity and uses it to advance his
claims and is also entitled to standing room, can we presume
that this is with the consent of the owner?
But, but these these features of argumentation, he says, if we
extrapolate from the norms that we take for granted when we're
arguing, we realize that these are actually the norms of a
private property society and that we're implicitly agreeing
to them in the very course of arguing with each other.
Now there are people who've said, oh, well, I can't be that
simple, Hans. Oh yeah, I've got 27 caveats to
this. And I I don't mean to ridicule
everybody who's been a critic. I have dear friends who've been
a critic of Hans on this, but what Murray Rothbard loved about
it was it was just that was just a hardcore approach, he said.
He said. My old natural rights approach
seems positively wimpy compared to this robust assertion by by
Hans Hopp. Yeah, taking something that
people already engage in necessarily much like it seems
very highly motivated by Mises starting point with economics.
He's like, all right, before discussing gross domestic
product, let's start with the fact that humans act.
Can we at least agree on that? And you could say, no, humans
don't act, but you're engaged in a performative contradiction.
So by the very nature of engaging in argumentation, and
he refers to it as employing the scarce resources of 1's body
that they've rightly acquired through homesteading.
Not because I worked really hard to be born.
You could say you are the homesteader of your body,
therefore with regard to others, you have a better claim to it.
And he just takes that principle and extrapolates it.
This is very different than someone who just inherently
believes in democracy. And most people who believe in
democracy, that necessarily means that the vast majority of
governments that have ever existed are inherently
illegitimate. So they're almost with us in the
case against the state there. What I think is really important
in a theory of socialism and capitalism is when he defines
the terms that that he's going about.
So he says capitalism, a lot of people would just associate it.
Capitalism means a greed doggy dog and making a lot of money.
The problem with this immediately is, are politicians
and teachers a bunch of unpaid volunteers?
Are people in socialist societies totally equal in the
amount of social status and the amount of monetary assets that
they have with regard to their populations?
Of course not. There's inequality, there's
exploitation and all these socialist regimes.
So how can we actually define this?
He defines capitalism as a social system based on the
explicit recognition of private property and non aggressive
contractual exchanges with private property owners.
Communism is the abolition of private property, and socialism
is the degree of aggressiveness against the private property
ethic. He defines it.
I'm sorry, the institutionalized aggression against private
property. That's his brief explanation of
socialism. So this rightly addresses what
national socialism and democratic socialism have in
common. This is why they're immoral.
They have a certain degree of aggressiveness against private
property and contractual exchanges with private property
owners. So really getting a good
definition is what I really is, something that really helped me
see a lot of policies much more clearly than I otherwise would
have. And with this principled hatred
of the state, it makes it much more likely to get people on
board, I think. Because as he says, you can
always say, well, that didn't work that time because that was
Castro's vision of it. Well, that was Stalin's vision
of it. Well, that was Napoleon's vision
of such a thing. But hating the state on the
principle that it's a naturally aggressive entity seeking to
maintain a monopoly on law and order, that's what makes it
immoral. That's what makes it
economically inefficient because it doesn't engage with the
principle of contractual obligations with others.
You know, let. Me say a little something here
about Hans and his he has an article called Marxist and
Austrian Class Analysis. I'm almost sure that's the name
of it. And the, the gist of it is this
he, he says that that Marxist analysis is, is wrong because
it's, it pinpoints the wrong sources, the wrong source of, of
injustice. But it's not wrong in saying
that there's injustice. And you know, now in this day
and age where we have to deal with people who use this
ridiculous expression, the woke, right?
You're woke, right? If you say that, you know,
there, there are, you know, there are classes that are
antagonistic to each other or there are groups that are
antagonistic to each other or whatever because you're just
like Marx, OK. But you know what?
The classical liberals had class analysis before there was a Karl
Marx. That was their idea.
But Hans's point would be to say that the relevant classes are
the oppressed proletariat and the oppressing bourgeoisie is
just block headed. What the classical liberals said
about class, which we know, and this is Ralph Rico has a great
study of this from the 19th century.
But they looked at it in terms of the your relationship with
the state. And so you had in effect what
John C Calhoun talked about the the tax consumer and the
taxpayer that there is. There's one group that is
getting benefits at the expense of another group, coerced
benefits at the expense of another group.
That is a, that is an abusive relationship.
That is an abusive class relationship.
That I belong to the class of taxpayer and you belong to the
class of tax consumer. So that the entire bureaucracy
that's sitting at around doing God knows what all day, they are
tax consumers. And if I'm going to think in
terms of classes, which is no, there's no inherent reason that
that should be bad. There's nothing wrong with
thinking that way as long as you identify the right ones.
You know, I mean, there's nothing wrong with thinking
about friends and enemies as long as you identify the right
people in each category. And so Hans says, look, there is
exploitation in the world. So Marx is right about that.
But he is silly to say that the exploitation is occurring when
the proletariat is employed for quote, less than the value of
their labor. And all that says, no, the the
capitalist serves a purpose. The capitalist advances them the
money that they get in their wages so they don't have to sit
around and wait the six months for the goods they produce to
actually be sold to the end consumer.
They could do that. They could quit their jobs and
they could run their own business and they could sit
around and not have income until all their work is done and the
product sells to the general public.
Most people would are a little bit more impatient than that.
So they would rather allow the capitalist a small premium in
exchange for being advanced the money.
Now that's simply time preference.
That's the economic principle of time preference.
I'd rather have that money that today than the same sum of money
at some point, the indefinite future.
And so yes, there is exploitation.
Marx is right to say that there's exploitation, but he's
wrong to to in in that he he's wrong in, in where he pinpoints
the the exploitation. The exploitation is the state
versus everybody else. The state exploits everybody
else by by interacting with everybody coercively and
expropriating people and taking property without their consent
or, you know, taking property violently in effect or with the
threat of violence. That's exploitation, not
voluntary labor contracts. Exploitation is when there is
there's no voluntary aspect to it whatsoever.
And so, so he continues to go through various layers of
Marxist analysis to say it's not that the analysis is absolutely
wrong, it's that in every single case, you can rely on this guy
to be so wrong headed that he gets the protagonists and
antagonists all wrong. So there's nothing wrong with
that. There's nothing wrong.
There's nothing wrong with that. That, that I mean, that happens
to be, happens to be right. So, so that is a, that's a very
interesting fact. I have a friend who was a
recovering Marxist. I handed him this article by
Hans Hoffa and he's he really helped him.
It really helped us. All right, so there, you know,
I, I did sense something was wrong with the world.
Yes. And I was not wrong to sense
that something was wrong with the world.
And I was not wrong to sense that some groups are screwing
the hell out of other groups. I just misidentified them.
That was definitely one that really woke me up.
If you say that the problem is the people who are engaging
contractually and the people who are really on your side are the
proletarians who are ready to riot at any point of people like
Luigi who are willing to assassinate people, you need to
really alive with those people. Not businessmen who have
drastically decreased the cost of products and services and
given you access to more goods and services your grandparents
could have ever dreamed of. No, by offering you a product or
service, they are exploiting you.
That's the real villain in the world.
Well, if the problem is, well, they're taking your surplus
value, but it doesn't address the fact that it's voluntary.
By this metric, every stay at home mom is exploiting the
surplus value of her husband. If you work for a company that's
not profitable, you're exploiting their surplus value
because they're not profiting off your labor, you're profiting
off them. It is just so absolutely
ridiculous that people ever fell for this.
And the ones making the case for egalitarianism and the
importance of equality and not having too much institutional
power with some people rather than others, well, I guess they
just hate the idea that there's a natural aristocracy, that some
people are just better than others.
Very few people can sing a song as good as Adele.
Very few people are as funny as Jerry Seinfeld.
Also, very few people are as brilliant as Jeff Bezos or Steve
Jobs and can run a company as efficiently that can produce so
much wealth for so many people. So I guess this hatred of
egalitarianism, which he has an interesting insight on, it might
have originally come from Lou Rockwell, but he summarizes it
great In getting libertarianism right, He says the egalitarian
doctrine achieved this status not because it is true, but
because it provides the perfect intellectual cover for the drive
toward totalitarian social control by a ruling elite.
In other words, egalitarianism's impossible.
So at any point in history, so long as humans exist with a
natural inequality among man, there's always going to be
inequality, which means there will always be another
justification to grow the state. Would you have imagined
explaining to socialists like the George Bernard Shaw
Socialists of the world, hey, by the year 2024, the government is
going to be heavily democratic and it's going to spend
trillions of dollars a year in welfare.
He would have thought this was the fact that this is happening
in America, the evil capitalist, colonialist America.
What a victory. Turns out they are less grateful
than ever before. You never get thanked for paying
your taxes. To even talk about school choice
is to be so evil it you just want to defund schools.
They're so ungrateful in this strive towards egalitarianism
that you end up with massive inequality between the rulers
and the ruled, and they're not even happy about it.
So the fool's errand of egalitarianism, the idiocy of
Marxist exploitation theory of the world, I thought, is very
vitally important as well. It's interesting that you make
that point about egalitarianism being something that the state
apparatus and the people in it don't necessarily believe in.
It's just that that's an idea that empowers them to intervene
in in our lives forever because it the ideal, so-called will
never be reached because that was Sam Francis's view.
And Sam Francis is like a, an ancestor of the, of the, I don't
know, the new right or whatever a term it is.
He was a, a newspaper columnist who, you know, had, you know,
hard right positions. And he said his view was nobody
believes in egalitarianism like that.
Absolutely nobody would. This is all this is a charade.
They claim to believe in it, but they know it's false.
But it, it, it sure gives them sinecures and privilege and, you
know, positions of power. And some people weren't quite
sure they, some people thought, you know, I do think some people
do believe in egalitarianism. You know, some of them really do
believe in it. But others, no doubt, are
cynically manipulating, you know, others through this, this
idea. So.
So tell me, tell me what else you got in your notes, because I
don't want to let your notes go to waste.
I mean you, you put time into those notes.
Well, I loved his this quote from the Libertarian quest for a
grand historical narrative. So, he says, because the general
public is not used to or capable of abstract reasoning, high
theory and intellectual consistency, but forms its
political views and convictions on the basis of historical
narratives, IE of prevailing interpretations of past events.
It is upon those who want to change things for the better
liberal libertarian future to challenge and correct such
interpretations and propose and promote alternative revisionist
historical narratives. The guy who immediately comes to
mind is Burt Folsom. How he totally changed the way I
saw all of history rather than, well, there were the rich and
the poor. You hear Elon Musk has been
called a robber Baron more times than I think I've ever heard
Vanderbilt called it, just in the last couple weeks.
Bezos, another robber Baron. And what makes them a robber
Baron when they're very rich and the rich or the bad group?
Folsom says we need to differentiate between market
entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs, people who gain
their wealth causal result of contract lowering prices and
getting a bigger mass market for things.
This includes Henry Ford's work with the Model T, John D
Rockefeller drastically decreasing the price of oil,
Cornelius Vanderbilt giving people access to steamship and
railroad travel that only kings of the past had access to today.
People like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos who have gained in Sam
Walton, who have gained a lot of wealth and high status as a
causal result of providing not yachts to billionaires, but
products and services that everyone really appreciates and
are able to increase their material well-being.
So that that was another one, the importance of us having a
theory of history and a way to analyze historical events.
What do you recommend people do They they say, I understand this
Hans Hopper guy. Which of the first step they
take be actually, you know what, let's pause that question.
Well, we'll come back to that question right now.
The Libertarian Institute, which does great work.
It it published, among other things, my book Diary of a
Psychosis, and made my life a billion times easier thereby.
It's run by Scott Horton and several other people we all
love. Say a word about that and what's
going on there. And let's let's get back to
Hansop. Right now the Libertarian
Institute is having our 2025 fundraiser.
This allows us to have Scott Horton take two years to write
an 800 page book Provoked explaining the origins of the
current proxy war between the nuclear powers taking place in
Ukraine and Russia. Unfortunately, it unfortunately,
it takes about two years for something like that to get
written and we have to pay the bills in the meantime.
But it resulted in one of my favorite debates ever where
Scott Horton was able to get on the Piers Morgan Show and debate
General Wesley Clark and ask him about his seven countries and
five years comment that he made on Democracy Now with Amy
Goodman. If you don't know what that is,
check out the debate between Scott Horton and Wesley Clark.
What we're doing at the Libertarian Institute is trying
to bring people together and have a free educational archive
in one website on history, economics, philosophy and the
news of the day. Kyle Anzalone summarizes the
news in about 6 bullet points. Every single day we have people
like Joe Solis Mullins writing a book, The National Debt and you.
He also wrote the fake China threat.
We have Connor Freeman constantly analyzing the issues
going on with Ukraine, China, what's happening in Gaza, what's
happening in Israel. We want to provide a place where
anyone can go type in the name Winston Churchill, type in the
topic minimum wage and get the libertarian point of view in a
very short amount of time. We want to save people on
monetary cost and more importantly, opportunity cost.
You don't have to spend 50 grand a year for four years to learn
about these very important things.
They can be summarized in audio, video, and article and blog
format. So if you're interested in
helping people see the world clearly,
libertarianinstitute.org. And, and I'll just say before
you jump back into Hans Hapa, I sit on the board.
They're great people. Nobody's riding around in a
limousine with the money. It's I mean, believe me, I've
been to Scott Horton's house, OK?
He is not spending your money on luxurious living.
The, the money goes to the ideas that we believe in.
So, so, all right, so let's get back to
solibertarianinstitute.org/donate. Probably.
I, I think you said just go do that.
I, I love these people. They're hard, 1000% trustworthy.
We all love Scott. And these things don't run
automatically. So if you're in the market for
helping somewhere, that would be a great place to do it.
So Scott. Scott.
Worked very hard to get us A5O1C3 status.
So you can write this off on your taxes too.
That's what makes it so great. You get to stick it to them just
a little bit. By donating to us every now and
then, you're able to find a little loophole in this evil
latticework of statism that allows us to fund things we
really like and write it off on our taxes.
So yes, libertarianinstitute.org/donate,
thank you for letting me plug that.
Yeah. Oh, absolutely.
All right, So what's your recommendation?
I want to I want to look into this hop a guy and not just, you
know, the the three sentences of his the the, you know, the, the,
the demonic sentences that have been quoted to me.
I want to actually read the guy. What what would you recommend?
It doesn't have to be mine. You know what would you
recommend people start? If I had to pick if people want
to start somewhere, if you go to mises.org, there's a book titled
Hapo Unplugged and it's a very short book with just his biggest
quotes from someone, a gentleman who really admires his work.
That's a great place to start. The best book I would say is
titled The Great Fiction. It's a collection of Hoppa
essays, very wide-ranging. They could be read in any order.
I'd say Big Book is the Great Fiction inspired by Bastiat,
which Hoppa produced. And if you don't have much time,
you're still on the fence, check out Hoppa Unplugged.
I think it's $3 at the Mises Institute store.
All right, so that is in fact I'll why don't I link to that
also on the show notes page and and we'll need some videos of
tomwoods.com slash 26 O 8 will be where we'll we'll put that
and any final word here? Have you met Hunt before
yourself in person? No, I haven't.
Kinsella was nice enough to give him a copy of the Voluntarist
Handbook and he took a picture with it, but I I have not met
him. Very jealous though.
But I get to meet him every single day with all the books
I've acquired of his. Fair enough, fair enough, and
and you never know when he'll make it back to the US.
So anyway, tomwoods.com slash 26 O 8 is the link.
libertarianinstitute.org/donate. Go help these guys.
They're great. They're not going to let you
down. They don't blow the money that
are these big foundations. You don't know what in heaven's
name is going on over there, but I can attest to the, the honesty
and, and, and, and decency of these folks over the Libertarian
Institute. So thank you, Keith Knight, for
joining us today, and also for the good work you do with the
Libertarian Institute. Tom Woods, thanks so much for
having. Me and thank you, ladies and
gentlemen. Make yourself and those you love
less vulnerable to the regime, both mentally and physically.
Get more forbidden information at tomsfree-books.com and be
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