Or I would get started. Tell everyone in the audience
who was listening, either live or listening later to the
recording of this who you are, what you believe.
Tell us about your book and we'll get started.
My name is Keith Knight. I am managing editor at the
Libertarian Institute. My belief is in advocating
libertarianism, or the belief that human beings should
cooperate peacefully, as opposed to some having the right to
coerce others, whether that's in their private lives or whether
they use the state as a surrogate to coerce others.
So basically, nothing in life is something that we do by ourself.
Even if you are just reading this book, Domestic Imperialism
yourself, you didn't build the computer which allowed you to
order the book. You didn't generate your own
electricity, which allowed that computer to work.
You didn't put the ink on the paper, you didn't chop down the
trees to make the paper. So we're constantly cooperating.
The false divide progressives are always giving us is there's
things we do together and then things we do alone.
Just by talking, you're using words that other people have
spent thousands of years working on.
So we're constantly engaged in actions that are affecting other
people, and we're constantly cooperating.
So the central question of my book is, should people achieve
their ends through a cooperative mechanism, which means people
have the right to freely disassociate with bad actors?
Or do some people, the state, have the right to coerce others
under the guise of helping the working masses, helping
minorities, helping women, or helping whatever demographic
they claim to be? So that's who I am.
That's where I work, Libertarian Institute, and that is a general
overview of my belief system. OK, very good.
So, so tell me I I immediately recognize by the way what you're
saying. Perhaps it wasn't original to
him, but it's best articulated by Leonard Reid's thesis I
pencil. So I I I believe you've you've
read that and that's I think that's really a a very
integrated way to see the world. It's a very rich way of seeing
the world and I think that it really gives form to the idea of
a social interaction as a means of both progress and
maintenance, right. Progress of of humanity and
maintenance of society, right. So I think that absolutely it's
it's beautiful. So before I get into the book
and it's contents, I want to know more about your personal
ideological journey. When was the moment the one
moment? Well, first of all, let me ask
this, when you were a progressive, what did an average
day look like to you in terms of consuming information, in terms
of, in terms of viewing certain events, certain ways in terms of
studying and reading? Were you a progressor that was
in who was intent on understanding the the tradition
which your thought came from and understanding concepts like
classic quality and workers rights and things of that sort?
Or were you simply ballast, as most people are in these cases,
simply absorbing information like a sponge without ever
actually analyzing it and interpreting it?
There was a lot of analysis and a lot of historical references.
It's very common that people don't arrive at conclusions, you
know, through a lot of logic and reason, just because the cost of
doing so is so high. You have to read so many books,
discuss so many things with so many people.
So when you have historical narratives to lean on.
For example, Franklin Roosevelt got us out of the Great
Depression, LBJ gave us the Great Society, and Barack Obama
got us over the hurdle of racism.
West America finally electing a black progressive into the White
House. So I was constantly not looking
at the ideological origins, like I hadn't read Woodrow Wilson's
The New Freedom, but I was constantly looking for examples
of history as to where this idea came from, which gives you a lot
of grounding and much more confidence that you didn't just
come up with something all on your own, you're actually part
of a historical process. So that was pretty important for
me. As far as the day-to-day goes, I
would watch MSNBC quite a bit. It seemed like there were two
groups generally, those who cared about the poor and those
who did not care about the poor at all, or not necessarily the
poor, but those who are in vulnerable positions overall.
So when this dichotomy was presented to me, I had just
said, well, looks like the Democrats are basically the
party I should get behind. But the Democrats can be very
establishment. And so, you know, some of these
places that could be called the left end up being just old boys
clubs and get bought off by corporations.
So progressivism was sort of the silver lining of the Democratic
Party that that that I supported.
Interesting. So tell me about this then.
What was that moment? OK, when did you begin seeing
cracks in the armor? At what point did you begin
seeing cracks in the armor? Because what you described to
me, you described to me. You're correct.
I think that you're correct that most people don't know why with
their political conclusions by means of a deep reason or
research. It's unfortunate because this is
not a necessary fact of human life.
In fact, it's a aberration of previous generations, right?
If you think of the the literacy of the founding generation, that
every household, at least according to most estimates, had
at least one book in it, and that one book tended to be
either some philosophy book or most commonly the Bible, then
you would see that a lot of people at least had some
anchoring to the transcendent, some anchoring something beyond
their own experiences in their lives.
Whereas today, in this I don't want to say this modern world is
rather this postmodern world. The subjective intuition is
prided and emphasized over external searching for truth and
meaning. And that has basically allowed
people to become prisoners of their own epistemic errors.
Which then of course translates into creating political errors.
Because if a entire voting populace is led by errors of
knowledge and they transfer those into their how they vote,
how they think about politics, you'll ultimately get a system
that reflects that. But also you get a non engaged
public by that as well because they can't see beyond
themselves. So why?
What's the need to engage? So no, I think that's very
interesting. So tell me, when did you start
seeing cracks in the armor, so to speak?
So here is the first major crack and This is why I opened the
book with it. I don't give my background
story, but I give the example of what really changed my mind.
There was a mass murder that took place on June 12th, 2016.
It's referred to as the Pulse nightclub massacre.
And the terrorist Omar Mateen went into the nightclub, killed
49 people, injured 53 and actually called 911 to amplify
his motives for doing this. So here is how Barack Obama
summarized the event. And it's important to know
Barack Obama was not seen as your average Democrat.
He was the progressive who was going to rein in the banks, you
know, represent the workers, initiate that equal pay for
women and all this other, you know, progressive platforms.
Barack Obama said this was an attack on the LGBT community.
Americans were targeted because we're a country that has learned
to welcome everyone, no matter who you are or who you love.
And hatred towards people because of sexual orientation,
regardless of where it comes from, is a betrayal of what's
best in us. So I remember hearing that and
being very curious as to what this terrorist would have said.
Because much like a protest, the goal of terrorism is to amplify
your motives as opposed to conceal them.
So he gets his moment in the spotlight for committing this
atrocity, this shortcut to fame. What does he say?
We actually have the 911 transcript from Mateen's call.
Here's what he said. You have to tell America to stop
bombing Syria and Iraq. They are killing a lot of
innocent people. What am I to do here when my
people are getting killed over there?
You get what I'm saying. You need to stop the US air
strikes. They need to stop the US air
strikes. You have to tell the US
government to stop bombing. They are killing too many
children. They are killing too many women.
OK, so when I first came across that, I said OK, It turns out
that the sitting president can just explicitly lie about the
motives of an attack and the press is not going to really
call him out about this. This was so mind blowing for me
that he mentions nothing about hatred of homosexuals, mentions
nothing about hatred of Christians or Floridians.
Even though the attack took place in Florida, it was against
young people. He didn't say anything about the
young people. It was a result of blowback as a
causal result of American foreign policy.
I cite the Council on Foreign Relations.
This year, 2016, the US government dropped a 24,000
bombs on Iraq and Syria, killing a large number of civilians.
According to the Intercept, research they did indicates that
nine out of every 10 people killed by these bombings were
not the intended target. So this was really big for me.
I said, you know, I was so wrong about this issue.
I had more or less assumed that the press and the president was
telling the truth. So once I was so humbled at
that, and President Bush also did the same thing many years
earlier, I was so humbled at that.
I said, you know, instead of walking into every conversation
is the way things ought to be is I should just say what do I
know? And on a scale of one to 10, how
sure am I 'cause you? I mean, it's just impossible to
know so much about so many wide issues.
I can say I'm a 10 on these issues, but on these I'm A2 or
A3 and what's my justification? So once I saw the sitting
president blatantly lying, this is not something I really
thought could take place. But that's when I really started
to open my eyes. I would say that was the unique
point in my progressive journey where I was at least open to
saying I think I could be wrong about this whole approach of
dividing people based on race, gender, nationality, income, and
there's a much more true divide that we can have and the Bible
says it. When the Bible says thou shalt
not murder, thou shalt not steal.
These are genuine principles which can differentiate good
people from bad, whereas progressives are constantly
dividing people based arbitrarily.
Yes, no, that's absolutely correct.
This thing about machine, when that story actually happened,
when it first came out, there was speculation about his own
sexuality, which of course there was never anything inclusive
found. His father said that he wasn't,
you know, that way and things like that.
He didn't seem to have any, although people did.
There are patrons of the club that claimed he had frequented
it before. We of course, we don't know if
that was true either, but it's very curious that he chose that
particular location when he could have chosen the hundreds
of other locations that may have even made more of a point.
Perhaps even like a not not getting any more ideas or got.
I'm just in like a post office, maybe something like that and
that's that. But regardless of the truth of
the connection, it's the goal of the person who does proximity
ethics, to consider though something is right or wrong on
the basis of what it is close to as opposed to what it actually
is in genuine principle to confuse these kind of things to
make, to make their own agenda seem plausible.
And I think that's what Barack Obama was doing, that's what the
progressives were doing, that's what the media was doing.
And so it's very interesting that you noticed that though,
because a lot of folks, including at that time I think
the GOP, Paul Ryan, came out after that story and said we
support the LGBT community. So if even the GOP was was
captured by this mediocre thought form, how did you see
through it? Did you just do more research?
You'd fall into a like a rabbit hole.
Did you listen to a podcast? Like, how did it happen?
You know, it's not that I didn't care to see problems with the
GOP. I just kind of expected it from
them. I did not expect it from the
progressive who I thought had my back through thick and thin.
I originally came across it when researching at the Mises
Institute. Their website has a large
collection of things just went down rabbit holes and eventually
came across this story. Wow, interesting.
Interesting. Well, and that's that's often
times that what happens, right? Often times you don't really see
a progressive to what you call yourself libertarian or Ana
capitalist or what exactly? OK, let's say libertarian as an
umbrella term. You don't really see a
progressive libertarian pipeline.
But the inverse seems to be a concept in the media.
Libertarian to all right pipeline, right.
That's a very big concept amongst a lot of folks in the
established media like the Washington Post.
What's your opinion? Do both of these pipelines
exist? If so, which one is pushing
forth more more people through it as opposed to the other?
You know that I would have to give a little more thought to.
I can say that I've met a large number of libertarians who came
over after being progressives. Because when you're progressive,
you already see the world through these divides.
Sometimes it's boss and worker, sometimes it's black versus
white. Even immigrant verse citizen can
be a big divide of Bernie Sanders got some heat when he
said that. Well, something like open
borders is just a Koch brothers policy and we shouldn't really
encourage large amounts of immigration.
That seems like a another false divide to me.
So once I already had the divides down, I started slowly
chipping away at them. So this idea that I genuinely
thought until an embarrassingly late age that America was
basically the only place where slavery had ever been practiced,
because not because a teacher at school necessarily said that,
but it was just so heavily implied when they say the unique
thing about America is the Declaration of Independence, but
also slavery. So I had never really looked
into this. So when I came across the code
of Urnamu, one of the oldest legal codes known to history, to
see the word slave mentioned multiple times in ancient
Mesopotamia, thousands of years before Christ was around, that
really surprised me. So instead of having this, well,
America's the bad guy, well, how many current living Americans
were slave owners? And does this mean that all
people who you know are descendants of potential slave
owners, that they, we should, you know, see them as potential
enemies? So once I started chipping away
at the really false divides, it just inevitably led me to all
right, we have to have some method of differentiating the
good people from the bad. So people who choose to engage
in things like fraudulent interactions, people who use
coercion or threats thereof, that's a genuine person who we
should say is evil, and we can justly vilify them.
But so many things were just based on accidents of birth that
I was ready for the divide. But the progressive divide just
kept chipping away all the time. The main one you see is the
black versus white divide, where they're constantly using
demographics to play off to play one off against the other.
So when I was just used to saying that whites are generally
the problem overall, well, the evidence lies in the fact that
there's a disparity among the black population and those who
are arrested or assaulted by police officers.
It took a long time for me to come across Thomas Olswork, who
said, well, men are 50% of the population and they're 95% of
those killed by police. What does that tell us?
The police are sexist against men.
Turns out that whites don't even have the highest incomes in this
white supremacist society. You have Taiwanese Americans,
Nigerian Americans, Vietnamese Americans.
What stupid white supremacists are running the show here?
And it turns out black immigrants who have a different
culture have higher incomes than native blacks.
So the idea that I was just vilifying people based off
country or skin color, it turns out I became the very thing that
I thought I was against. Yeah, no, I think that it's
interesting. Both the progressives and the
actual white supremacist, the actual white identitarians who
use the argument about white supremacy in that direction,
both of their points are equally disproven by empiricism.
When you look at the achievement rates of Nigerian Americans, the
white supremacist pro point is proven.
And so is the black victimhood A narrative disproven at the same
time. It took me a long time to
realize that. But it really goes to this idea
that you have also mentioned the book closer to the end of it,
when you're talking about National Socialism and Democrat
Socialism, about these things having the same genus but just
manifesting in different forms, right.
Which I want to get to that in a little bit because I found that
curious, and I've heard that before, But the way you've
explained it was very precise, but I wanted to touch on
something else. So you another one of the
reasons why you left Progressivism.
According to your book, you have a chapter called Consent of the
Governed and Game Errors. So the second part of that
interests me quite a bit. And so you you begin in this
chapter by saying that progressive victory, I quote
progressive victory to legalize gay marriage in a predominantly
Christian country. This was justified from many
different standpoints, among them being that they are adults,
straight people, that kind of stuff.
And then after you list all these points, you say that all
it took for me to lead progressivism was for me to take
this principle of free association between consenting
adults and apply it consistently in the economic realm.
So are you saying that the progressive stance on gay
marriage actually allows you to translate into a different
context A justification against progressive thinking and
economics? Yes, simply because instead of
using the talking points at some point, you repeat it so often
that you end up extracting the very principle.
So for all the objections to gay marriage, it really just came
down to these are consenting adults and marriage is just a
contract. So, well, is it OK to, you know,
marry little kids? Well, now, you're not dealing in
the realm of consenting adults. So if we say that people should
really be empowered to, you know, live the lives that they
want, interact with who they desire to, well, marriage is one
thing that you do. Some people do it multiple
times. But the economic realm is
something you're constantly, constantly engaged in in every
moment of your life. Even when you choose to do you
know nothing or just hang out, well, that's you actively
disassociating from all of the other potential things you could
be doing. So the progressive clearly see
this when it comes to attempts to restrict voting rights.
They'll say it is terrible if you need a license in order to
vote. This hurts the most vulnerable
people in society. But they don't see that having,
you know, requiring dozens of licenses and all of these
training degrees in order to get your foot in the door at a job
you really want. They don't see how that
absolutely crushes people's dreams of, you know, achieving.
Whatever career they'd like to be in.
So they go for more entry level jobs and they have a less
likelihood of getting on the job experience in something that
they want. Getting their foot in the door,
developing a network in this area and it makes people far
less successful than they otherwise would be.
So this constant restricting of choice is something that the
progressives are frequently advocating.
Now there is something, the paradox of choice, where it
turns out the more options you have, the less satisfied you
will be. Because whatever you choose,
there were 100 other things that could have been much better, and
it can get overwhelming. If there's two options on the
menu, you'll most likely be happy with whatever you got.
If there's 300 items on the menu, like The Cheesecake
Factory, whatever you get, you're like, oh, I could have
gotten something much better. So this is sometimes justified
as see more choices isn't always better.
So I can actually agree with that.
The progressive will frequently say Bernie Sanders saying, well
look at all these deodorant options and all these toothpaste
options. This is just terrible and
redundant. The question is not should
people have choices that are in high quantity or low quantity.
The question is who's going to decide either?
People decide for themselves, but when I say for themselves,
they're looking at Yelp reviews, they're looking at brand names,
they're talking to other people who have consumed the product.
So they are the ultimate decision maker.
In the end, what I'm saying is not that that's a perfect
system, but it's far superior to having surrogate decision makers
in the form of politicians who do not give you the option to
try new things to get your foot in the door without occupational
licensing, to build buildings without a very high number of
permits which make it so it's so costly to expand your
operations. This creates the very
oligopolies that progressive say we have to watch out for cause
Walmart and Amazon are constantly able to afford all
this stuff, all of these, you know, regulation, compliance
costs. But the average person is not.
So they go into lower fields and end up staying there longer than
they otherwise would. So this constant coercive
restriction by the state of progressives was really a a
major reason that I left progressivism.
And in order to really justify the move, you kind of have to
build yourself mentally a golden bridge to retreat across.
So it was hard to say no. I guess I've been wrong about
everything for you know, the last, you know 2000 Facebook
posts or something. So when I sort of had that gay
marriage bridge to retreat across of yet, you know this
thing we've constantly been saying and harping on of how
important it is to give consenting adults the option to
make big decisions in their lives.
Yeah, that's what I believe in just more realms than this one.
So yes, that is the gay marriage to volunteerism pipeline that
that that I had. Let's get a little bit nerdy in
terms of the IT matter of consent.
A lot of people don't realize, and you do because you've
covered it in your book and I've watched you on other shows as
well. But a lot of people don't
realize just how gargantuan of a moral concept the idea of
consent is, and just how radical it is in the history of the
world. More folks know how radical it
is in the history of the world than know how gargantuan is.
Because reflexively, a lot of people in Western society,
reflexively, when they are confronted with immoral choice,
consent will be the fundamental harm hallmark of their moral
thinking. That'll be the reference point.
Sometimes harm will be too. And often times I always argue
that when consent and harm are joined together in harmony, they
are able to make for the best moral decision making.
But sometimes just consent. And recently from the right,
there's been an attack on this concept.
They call it consent based morality from the the post
liberals. They call themselves people who
are skeptical of America's classical liberal foundation to
believe that the reason my society has so much decay and
chaos today is because of the excesses of this sort of
individualism. They call it atomization and
they'll call it consent based morality, where nothing is
sacred and everything is just a transactional set of two wills
merging together in space. How does Someone Like You, who
uses first principles, who very clearly cares about a certain
kind of morality, deal with those critiques in an effective
way? Because on the one hand, it is
absolutely true that to simply say consent should be the golden
standard of all morality. That's not satisfying.
It's not satisfying because the moral realm is not simply a
matter of human choice. The moral realm is also a matter
of human persuasion. It's also a matter of belief,
matter of values, a matter of social influences.
It's a matter of a bunch of things.
It's a matter of duties of obligations, so many different
things and other ideas and motivations and laws that may
inform how 1 uses their choice. And so one of the reasons that I
think, and this is one of Lucas's libertarianism, I think,
is that libertarians, when it comes to social and cultural
issues, all they can say is, well, I personally believe this
in my own capacity, but you do what you want.
OK, well, if we're thinking about these things on the
political realm, thought that is the just answer.
But the political realm does not encompass everything else, or at
least it shouldn't in all reality.
It has a lot more influence than it should, but it shouldn't.
So they're they're more thinking in terms of how politics should
be run, is oftentimes completed with more thinking on the
cultural and social level, which is concerning.
So what do you think about all that I just said?
So it's not that I'm advocating anyone do what they want, and
I'm fine. The question is, who's going to
have the standards either? People are going to choose their
own standards and associate with people who they have standards,
who they appreciate based on how they talk, how they act, if they
show up on time, if they're polite, if they're hard workers,
if they're lazy. We can constantly have this
regulating mechanism in society that's used by disassociating
with people who don't meet our standards.
What the status position is, is that politicians should be able
to coerce standards universally for basically everyone within a
certain geographical area. So it's not that there's either
standards or no standards, it's who gets to decide.
This is Thomas Soule's thesis in his book Knowledge and Decisions
that when you can both want, you know, good standards in food,
housing, medicine, people you spend your time with, churches,
you know the aesthetic pleasantness of, you know,
buildings and architecture. It's not that there shouldn't be
standards or whatever someone chooses to do is totally fine.
The question is who's going to have the standards?
Either people are going to have their own standards or
politicians are going to unilaterally decide.
It's not that I have so much faith in people that they're
always going to do the right thing and do the most efficient
thing or do the most beautiful harmonious thing.
It's that I don't trust a subset of those people who are
attracted to political power, having the right to coerce
millions of total strangers in such a way where if they're
wrong, they face very little to no backlash if they are wrong.
So I disagree that it's about not having standards and saying,
you know, so long as it doesn't affect me, I'm OK with it.
I think that's absolutely terrible.
Every time you choose to go to a restaurant or not spend time
with someone who was formerly a friend of yours, that is you
engaging in having standards and setting rules for the society
you live in. As far as the importance of
consent, all I'm really saying here is that all else equal,
consent is far preferable in the absence of extreme examples to
coercion. It's simply what differentiates
rape from lovemaking, civilized from uncivilized behavior, theft
from trade, kidnapping from spending time with other people,
enslavement from work. So that's why I think consent is
so important. So if we take that concept of
it's not what should happen, but who should decide if we look at
duties and obligations. Take military conscription, for
example. It's not that I don't think
people should fight for what they believe in and defend their
homeland against aggressors. I absolutely believe that.
The question is, should politicians be able to coerce
people against their will in fighting for such a thing?
And who should fight in what amount, to what extent for, you
know, for what end. If you know someone was going to
take all of Florida, well, you'd have to weigh the costs and
benefits of the Biden regime ruling Florida.
Or I guess it's, you know, realistic in the minds of some
people that Vladimir Putin could take over Florida or some parts
of America or, you know, use some methods of influence.
So not everything terrible is worth, you know, totally dying
for. So we could either have a method
of conscripting people against their will, or you could let
people decide for themselves what is worth fighting for, to
what extent. And since they actually have to
bear the cost, they're the person in the body experiencing
this world. They should be the ultimate
decision maker. So I respectfully disagree that
it's about, you know, not having standards and saying, well,
whatever someone chooses to do, that's OK.
People constantly have very high standards in the free market.
That's why businesses go out of business because people choose
something else. That's why some big budget
movies are total flops, because people don't want to associate
with with those sorts of things. That's why Hollywood has been
like, you know, I didn't even know the Oscars took place the
other day, and I wasn't avoiding it.
And the Oscars when I was a kid was like this huge thing.
This is people voluntarily shifting their standards away
from terrible degeneracy. John Cena had some stunt on
stage, and I'm actually glad that I missed the whole thing.
So, So people can constantly have standard standards are
vitally important. That's why they shouldn't be in
the hands of politicians. Yeah, I know.
So I I got by the way, I wasn't saying that you can't have
standards when they're kind of morality.
I was playing devil's advocate, and I'll keep doing that because
I think this is very important. Not enough libertarians think
about morality. They just don't.
They think about it in terms of being coerced or not being
coerced. That's it.
That's a limit. OK, So beyond the political
context, let's put the political context to the side because this
is how I personally face my morality.
OK, I phrase it with two categories, what is permissible
and what is preferable. So there's an objective set of
first principles in the first category that if I don't follow
them, not only will society fall apart, but individuals would be
in eminency with each other. Death will happen, disorder will
happen, chaos will happen, and ultimately society as a whole
will will be undermined. And ethics is simply the science
of according right and wrong action as it relates to other
people, IE ethics is a social practice.
Therefore, if society is gone, ethics can't really matter more
so it's important to preserve society.
So among these permissible principles is justice, which is
simply refraining from violating someone's rights, honoring your
oaths and your contracts as they're written out.
Things of that sort, veracity being truthful, right?
Those are the primary 2/2 of the sort of more than like.
These create the permissible realm.
But when it comes into the realm of preferability, you have
charity. You've got goodwill.
I think that you need. I think that you.
I think a society can. Societies can exist without
people being nice to each other. It's better if they are, but
they can still exist. If you respect people's rights,
you can solve society. If people are mean, so good, so,
so goodwill, charity, these kind of things.
We're not, by moral necessity, compelled to do them, but
society is enhanced if we do. I'm more worried about the 2nd
realm because let's go beyond the political realm, right?
I think that's that's too much of the focus because the
arguments of the people that do want to use the political realm
to impose their their moral order upon all of us.
The post liberals the national these people is that when you
divorce government from the from a sort of community ethos you
get a society that's in chaos and they will often times use
the society as a reference point to make their points to look at
transgenderism for example and or the annihilation of womanhood
as evidence of a laissez faire society run amok.
Because how do you actually prevent prevent these things?
Is just people raising their voices and trying to stop them
or is something that's going to be more assertive and more
muscular. Whether it be other, this is
other examples such can't turn into a meme, whether it be
before Elon took over Twitter, big tech censoring people, the
New York Post getting their their story censored about
Hunter Biden's laptop. There are a lot of people making
a joke out of the it's a private company phrase.
Because they're saying if there are companies that control the
most amount of resources, so much so that competition is not
effective in the public discourse, what uses it for it?
Being a private, private company.
And then there were others that were saying that?
Is it really a private company if the government funds them and
gives them special backdoor access?
You. I think that if we're going to
comprehensively answer our foes, because by the way, I agree with
you entirely, if we're going to answer our foes, we have to be
comprehensive in how we view morality in society.
It can't just be corrosion. Bad consent.
Good. Correct.
I believe it's necessary but not sufficient to value consent, or
at least have it as the center focus of your ethical worldview.
So the claim that transgenderism and degeneracy are the result of
a laissez faire society, we could say maybe the transgender
issue. We could maybe measure it from
1980 to you know 2023 where it's gone from barely anyone talking
about it to it being in a headline multiple times a day on
major news outlets. So according to that theory,
since it's the result of too much laissez faire, we would
have seen a drastic decrease in that 40 year span of government
regulation and no hands on the economy.
We would have seen major abolitions of large sectors of
the government. The Department of Education had
to have been abolished since, you know, it's a laissez faire
society and government spending of course would have drastically
decreased in that time according to that theory.
The problem is the exact opposite has happened and in
response to that they've said well there's too much freedom.
Of course, this is constantly the result of mostly college
academics who get state funding. Constantly through programs with
Sallie Mae, where the government's constantly getting
people loans. They're doing such a bad job in
K through 12 education that kids almost have to go to College in
some cases in order to get a job in the future.
And once they funnel people into these colleges, they teach them
all of these ridiculous ideas of egalitarianism, these ideas of,
you know, constant white supremacies everywhere and
things like transgenderism. So if the state really was the
solution to something like this, we would see the state either
growing and this degeneracy constantly shrinking, or we'd
see the state shrinking and the, you know, transgenderism,
advocacy growing in correlation. The problem is, well, we get the
exact opposite. More government involvement has
led to less accountability in these areas where, I mean, I
can't imagine actually voluntarily funding anyone who
doesn't think there's a valuable difference for a society to have
between men and women. I don't know.
Men have what, 17 times the amount of testosterone women do.
So of course we're going to have massive inequality in the
results of these two demographics.
The idea that people could be, you know, transracial or
transgender, I think is absolute lunacy and the state has not
done much to prevent it. In fact, people like Joe Biden
are constantly pushing it forward.
Whereas according to this theory, you'd think that the
government would be saying, hey, private sector, stop being so
degenerate, here's you know the accurate way to live.
We get trillions of dollars a year in taxes.
We're going to spend it towards, you know, fighting degeneracy
and all this stuff. They're constantly amplifying
it. Even Donald Trump had four
years, two of which he had a Republican Congress and did not
do much of. Of course, he should have
abolished the Department of Education, taking all state
funding of colleges down to 0 anyone who's promoting such a
ridiculous nonsense. So that is my response to the
claim That laissez faire leads to lowering of standards leads
to a total degeneracy. As far as whether or not private
companies have the right to do what to do what they'd like,
well, there's two ways to go about this.
One way is to have a very consolidated structure where the
state gets the final call and then they get to delegate
licenses of who gets to say what things and what news is accurate
and what news is inaccurate. Or you can say that there is no
solution, only trade-offs. And in this world view, you say
that anyone who amasses large amounts of power is going to be
corrupted with it, especially if there is coercive power.
So yes, we did see Twitter blocking the story from the
state who was the. So the state actually is the
one, you know, blaming the Vladimir Putin.
You had 50 intelligence officials come out and say this
Hunter Biden laptop, according to you know Politico, is Russian
disinformation. They ran with the story for the
second time after faking it in 2016.
Russiagate 2 point O was again and then there was Russiagate 3
point O where Joe Biden on the debate stage said Vladimir Putin
has put bounties on the heads of American soldiers in
Afghanistan. So the government was behind all
of these lies. And how did they get out?
Well, not necessarily because there was a government committee
who then brought us the truth, but it was other competing
private organizations like the Libertarian Institute,
antiwar.com, Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore.
Those were the people who actually got the truth out about
Russia Gate. So yes, there are tons of
amounts of fallibility in the voluntary sector, and the
solution to that is more competition and less monopolies.
That is the ultimate what I call the unavoidable contradiction of
progressivism is the claim that monopolies are bad.
Also, the state should monopolize taxation.
The state should monopolize the money supply.
The state should monopolize guns.
The state should monopolize the judicial system.
All of the things that they're worried about being the result
of a voluntary monopoly. That could hypothetically
happen, even though alternatives are constantly coming up.
They actually advocate that as the solution to too much
competition. So all of the problems you have
with big companies in the voluntary sector apply many
times over to the state sector. No, in the Valley.
That's a very good response. I don't want to linger too much
from this point. I could push, push, push, but I
have sufficient for where we are right now.
I just think that it's very important for those of us who
work from first principles, and I believe from what it sounds
like, you have a natural law viewpoint of ethics as well, who
work from that set of first principles as well to speak
about morality in the most expansive way possible.
Because coercion, a more preventive on coercion, is
simply one domain of the broader moral universe.
There's several other domains that I I think aren't really
touched by libertarians at great peril, and I I think people will
often times say that libertarianism is not
libertinism. Well, you're correct, in
definition is not. But in practice, many
libertarians do become libertine because they don't think about
morality beyond the issue of coercion and state power.
Well, we could also look at all the we could also look at all
the degeneracy among the elite class.
There was the Franklin cover up with the Republicans in the
1980s where there was a pedophile ring.
There was the Jeffrey Epstein pedophile ring that the 80s
Democrats were recently operating and then covering up.
So it's not like degeneracy is just some libertarian thing.
No. No.
It's not. It's not.
It's a human thing, by the way, and I and I don't like it when
people try to tie the degeneracy to a political philosophy.
It's a human thing, right? And by the way, I'm not saying
this ananimous. I was, I was a Students for
Liberty for all four years of my college.
I was steeped and Nozick and Rothbard and all that stuff.
So I'm not saying this out of animus.
I'm just saying this because in my own journey towards
constitutional conservatism, that's where I am now.
And being a much more conservative person in that
respect, I found some things culturally libertarianism that I
that didn't comport with me, but some of the values have sucked
with me. Obviously, if you look at my
political philosophy, you wouldn't be able to tell that I
that I was any different. Mostly so.
But I simply like to still man because it's important for for
those of us who do value human freedom, who do value the human
being in its fullest capacity, to be able to stand strong on
that beyond simply looking at a certain domain.
So that's all I'm just trying to do some friendly pushing and
nudging. But but yeah, so you mentioned
something that's actually quite interesting in your book and
this is closer towards the end, but I found it, I I, I found it
to be very insightful. It's in the title.
It's in the thing titled The difference between Democratic
Socialism and National Socialism is like no difference between
it. And you say that that they are
only different in rhetoric but not in terms of means to achieve
their ends. So can you extend on that?
So what I am doing here is I'm trying to extract a definition
as to what these terms actually mean.
I'm referring to communism as the abolition of private
property, as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels did.
I'm referring to socialism as the institutionalized aggression
against private property and capitalism as a social system of
private property exchanges between consenting adults,
mainly including the right to contract and whatnot.
That is what I believe differentiates capitalists from
socialists, from communists. So when looking at democratic
socialists and their blatant opposition to National
Socialism, they're in a very glassy house throwing a lot of
these stones at, you know, the terrible Nazis everywhere.
Well, it's important to ask, what is it about National
Socialism that they oppose so much?
And usually it'll be something like too much hierarchy or
judging people by race. As if the progressive is not
constantly. As if the average democratic
socialist today is not constantly generalizing people
by their race. They both believe that the state
should monopolize key features within society, including the
money supply, the judicial system, compulsory education,
etcetera. So when you look at it through
this lens that the National Socialist wants to constantly
coerce millions of strangers under the guise of helping the
nation, and the Democratic Socialist constantly wants to
coerce millions of strangers under the guise of helping the
working masses, I think they are both absolutely fallacious.
I and I do think that the average National Socialist says
I want what's best for my country.
This is the collective I'm a part of, and I want the state to
represent those values. I think they're both totally
sincere, but they both advocate one group having a monopoly on
violence to a very large extent. I'm not talking about the
average person who just believes, you know, the state is
some Hobbes unnecessary evil or or anything like that.
So because the democratic socialist has basically no
principle to differentiate what the state can and cannot do,
they're no different in principle than the National
Socialist. One of the main things that I
mentioned in the book is the Iron Law of Oligarchy.
This is the idea that any system that starts out as very, very
democratic in its origins will eventually develop into an
oligarchy. So much though, so much so that
it's an iron law within all organizations between all humans
in the human race. So you can ask, well now
communism is more about equality, socialism is in the
middle, and capitalism is about inequality.
But it turns out if you look at Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Roosevelt,
Truman, Genghis Khan, you look at Aristotle, who I know wasn't
a, you know, political leader or anything.
But all of the major people throughout history in all these
different countries at all these different times had a very, very
disproportionate amount of power relative to the average person
in the society they lived. So when the democratic socialist
says, well, we're much more about equality and getting
people involved, that is such a fool's errand that it's not even
to be taken seriously. The classic example is that of a
labor union where, say, you have the bourgeoisie who make a lot
of money, and then you have the workers who want to unionize to
fight the bourgeoisie and sort of counterbalance the amount of
power. Well, it turns out, and this is
a classic example given by Mckells, who, you know, started
the theory popularized by James Burnham.
The response is well, not everyone wants to go to work and
then attend a Union meeting. Not everyone is going to have
good ideas about what the Union should do.
Not everyone's going to be courageous enough to speak up.
Not everyone who speaks up is going to be equally persuasive.
Not everyone who speaks up and is equally persuasive is as good
looking as other people who might get more attention and
social status because of that. So what you end up is you end up
having Jimmy Hoffa and a few friends running the union for
10s of thousands of people who have very little if any
influence. So the entire democratic
socialism justification of, well, we're about empowering the
little guy just as much as anyone else.
That is not possible to do in any society.
You know, once you get more than three or four people, even if
you get four people who are related, I mean, look at the
disparity between, you know, the Baldwin brothers.
I use them as an example, one much more famous than the other.
These people are directly related in many times.
I grew up in the same household. Compare Barack Obama to his
brother George Obama. Drastic inequality in the amount
of power that they have. I also use Oprah Winfrey and her
siblings. She has much more institutional
power and wealth than people who she's directly related to.
So the entire claim that, well, the democratic socialists are
different because they're about empowering, you know, the little
people, it is the same exact thing where you end up having a
few people coercively dominating everyone else.
So because this Iron Law exists, the question is which sort of
social arrangement should we recognize as legitimate?
One that gives us an elite class as the result of voluntary
exchanges and voluntary contracts where we can
disassociate with the elites if they get degenerate or corrupt
or anything else, or one in which they have a monopoly on
violence and there is no recognized right to disassociate
from a bad elite. So elite is a constant, is a
constant throughout all societies, and we have every
reason to believe it'll always be here.
I just think libertarianism's a better approach than democratic
socialism to the inevitability of elites that will exist.
The original term I think was natural aristocracy, but that
this is what that gets into and that's why I don't think there's
a real difference between Democratic Socialism and
National Socialism. No, yeah, I agree.
I mean, wherever you have human beings of varied abilities and
potentials, you will get varied outcomes.
It's an absolutely, it's an axiom.
Although I do I I I think and just to still amend the
democratic socialist perspective, even in a society
where which is which in this world we're constructing is
based entirely on voluntary interaction and everyone's free.
Just like we shouldn't assume there will be an equal amount of
skills and life outcomes amongst people, we also shouldn't assume
there's going to be an equal amount of knowledge amongst
people either. And how people, how people use
their consent and what principles and values guide that
is almost as important that they have the ability to voluntarily
associate. How do you fix that problem?
Because Muslims are ballasts. Yes.
So tell me if I'm evading this 'cause I want to get to the root
of it, this, this knowledge asymmetry I mentioned in a
section titled Government Failure.
This knowledge asymmetry is constantly going to exist in any
society. So I just think it's preferable
to have a society where you can look at Yelp reviews and choose
to disassociate with bad actors. You can watch YouTube reviews.
Every single product I've ever thought about.
I go, I just heard about this. I wonder if there's anything on
YouTube you have Youtubers reviewing this stuff so that
that is one way to, you know, fight the inevitable knowledge
asymmetry that will always exist in any society.
So the question is having does having a state, you know,
absolve this from happening? I actually argue that it
constantly amplifies it. What percentage of Americans
are, you know, equally informed on what goes on in the education
system? How many people have read how
many laws? When it comes to reading one
law, the average person has not taken the time to read it and I
don't blame them 'cause even if you read the 1st Amendment, you
have 9 Ivy League trained Supreme Court justices who don't
agree on the interpretation of that amendment.
Let alone, you know, the Troubled Asset Relief package of
2008, which is 1000 pages, and as all the bailouts and
everything, what percentage of people understand agricultural
subsidies? There's constant knowledge
asymmetry among the citizenry. Compare it to government
officials who have access to classified knowledge, huge
knowledge asymmetry. A politician who's been in
Washington for what Joe Biden's been in there like 40 something
years. You think he has the the you
think his knowledge is equal to the average Biden voter?
Not even close. And that same applies for
supporters of Ocasio, Cortez, and anyone else who says
knowledge asymmetry is a justification for the state
coercing others. I think it amplifies the worst
aspects that inevitably exist in every society.
Yeah. No, I I I think that's right.
That's right. And again, I don't want, I don't
want to push too hard, but I, I, I think that it's often times
when no, no, it's all right. Otherwise, when when
libertarians talk about the importance of voluntary
cooperation, we're all thinking in the moral terms of coercion
being bad, the individual having some kind of moral value, human
interaction being good. I just wonder because voluntary
association, the beauty of it is that it reflects human diversity
and that leads people to different situations, right?
We can voluntarily associate. You can come on Christian
Watson's podcast at 10:00 at night EST and get grilled on
philosophy. Or you can go join a cult in the
northern, in northern northern Africa, or go join Jonestown and
get taught by a prophet who's supposed to give you the keys to
heaven. It's a political system, ideally
should be agnostic on which choice that you choose.
We agree on that. But to sustain a culture of
freedom beyond the political system, people in that culture,
I'm not so sure, should be agnostic on that.
Obviously I can't force you not to join.
Join Jemstown. If you want to go join a cult
and you're convinced at that point, OK, you have eternalizing
world of you that has dominated your mind.
It will be dangerous for me to try to stop you, to do anything.
And it will also be immoral, of course.
But there should be extreme social stigma from doing that
kind of stuff. And that stigma should be
coordinated on a mass level. But I find that a lot of people
who are into disassociation and going into their own silos, in
some cases when they when they find who they don't like, they
are, they don't like doing that kind of thing.
Well, if they want to believe that, let them go, OK, we can
let them go. But we should make it
uncomfortable in some way, shape and form for dangerous
associations to take place in the society.
Yeah, definitely. I try and hint at this in the
book. Maybe it's a larger rant for a
different treatise. But if you look at what the
Jehovah's Witness does, I think we can learn a lot from the
Mormons and the Jehovah's Witness who passionately make
the case for what they believe in.
They use, you know, bashing people that not physically, but
they use high amounts of disincentives in order to
encourage certain behaviors and disassociate or discourage bad
behaviors, provide disincentives.
I think we can do the same exact thing.
I don't agree with the Jehovah's Witness on their general world
view, but simply that tactic of here are our standards.
And even if I think you're going to burn in hell for all of
eternity, I'm still going to give you the final say.
But I'm not going to stop bringing this up.
I'm going to keep inviting you to church.
I'm going to make my church gorgeous and give you every
incentive to come and visit. I'm going to be the nicest
person, you know, along with all my other friends.
So you're going to say, well, those Jehovah's Witnesses, that
I just enjoy being around them, so you're going to want to spend
time with us. So these methods of using heavy
amounts of persuasion to encourage civilized behavior and
disincentivize bad behavior, I think it's totally consistent
with libertarianism. And you're absolutely right.
It's something that we have overlooked for far too long.
It's difficult to, you know, get a fish to appreciate the water
that it's always lived in. And when you've always lived in
a sane culture, it doesn't occur to you of, yeah, people can do
whatever they want, wait, you're smoking.
How much pot. Wait.
You're doing. What?
To your genitals at the doctor? Getting them removed.
OK, that I did not consider. Maybe I should roll back this,
Do whatever you want kind of thing.
So yeah, it's definitely the the learning curve that we as a
movement I think need to embrace.
And I think the best way to create a culture like that is I
think it's referred to as blind copying, where the population at
large will see in certain individuals within the society
who they are in awe of. And much like if I had been born
in England, I would have developed a British accent.
They start incorporating aspects of, you know, this persons, you
know, good traits into their everyday lives.
So it's not that all Asians really sat down and thought
about the costs and benefits of, you know, working hard and, you
know, showing up on time and, you know, postponing consumption
and all this stuff. They basically just started
doing it because there are other people who are leaders within
their community who did it, and they just copied them.
So I think it's on us to have people like Ron Paul and Dave
Smith and Tom Woods and Scott Horton.
These are the libertarian thinkers.
Even someone like Robert Nozick, I think is very respectable to a
large degree. I think if we put those people
up as our heroes and they simply lead by example, I think that's
the best way to build a culture which which we can be proud of.
Because I got to say, it's definitely something I envy.
Seeing Tucker Carlson walk around Moscow, that subway
state, forget the fact that he's totally wrong about the price
of, you know, supermarket goods, the fact that there was no
graffiti on that subway. Oh my gosh.
And just comparing it to the last time I was at Penn Station,
it's amazing to see what a really solid culture that has
this, you know, sort of cultural continuity, cultural connection,
this nationalist idea. That's something that I think is
totally beautiful. And I it definitely took me too
long to appreciate the the value of that.
So yeah, embracing standards and putting up people who we think
are really good leaders, I think it's got to be the next move for
us generally. Interesting.
That's an interesting thought. Hopefully libertarians,
hopefully they listen to you on that issue.
So I want to go to the question portion of the interview now.
Not my questions, but my audience questions.
So I'm giving an open invitation to anyone.
If any of you have any questions for our guests, please let me
know. Put them in the chat, I'll put
them up on the screen and we'll we'll just go from there because
this has been a very interesting conversation and I appreciate
you having it with me. You know, one thing that I do
want to touch on though, and this is more of a general issue
in politics, not necessarily relating to libertarianism, but
it's the issue of status and the Society of status.
So if we think about how Old World Europe was organized,
human value was conflated with your position, with social
hierarchy and with titles and honorifics that you had.
The New World kind of disputed that because the New World put
emphasis on how much is are your hands going to touch the dirt
and mold it to make something. How much, how much self-reliance
and personal responsibility you're going to have, how much
perseverance in the face of this, these vast open Wilds
Lewis and Clark style are you going to have.
And that informed the sort of moral, individualistic, natural
law based thinking of that entire finding generation
culture. But the Society of status still
persists in our modern day culture in many different forms
in terms of, and I was talking about this before you got on, in
terms of celebrities, in terms of influencers in politics and
all kind of things, where the value of one's voice and
contribution to society is chalked up to how many followers
they have. It's chalked up to how much
praise they have. What did Emerson say?
A man's name is found in the mass approbation of his friends,
that kind of status idea. I find that to be dangerous
because it takes the emphasis off of the issues and it makes
people who are supposed to be vessels.
Instead, the entire issue themselves and causes this
conflation between personality and ideas, which causes the
ideas to be lost, the personalities to be elevated.
And now we're living in a world of elevated personalities with
no substance and superficiality. That's what celebrity culture
is. I'm sorry I'm on a little bit of
a role, but still. So how in general, does anyone,
any keen political observer deal with this?
Because you mentioned, for example, Dave Smith, Scott
Horton, all these people find people.
But when people think of libertarianism in the
contemporary context, they may think of those people.
And if they have a problem with those people, they will
automatically assume libertarianism has the same
problem they have with those people.
That's dangerous. I don't like that very much,
which is why I tune all that out.
I don't. I don't watch anybody.
I watch like I was mentioning. I watch like Glenn Beck, and
that's about it. I don't watch anybody because I
don't want my mind to be played with by status and personality
when I'm really doing something that is putting me in the
presence of ideas. Yeah, status can definitely have
an impact on on how we see things.
I remember sitting next to a guy who was just drunk in a tank top
and you know, we were just having a conversation.
Next thing I know, he's got 600,000 Twitter followers on his
Anonymous account. And it was in that moment where
I realized, oh, I'm so much more of a sucker than I thought I
was. I thought it really wouldn't
matter. But it's it's difficult to not
be persuaded or attracted to people who have such a status.
So as far as what my analysis could be on something like that,
we simply just have to compete. And when there is a playing
field of the high status, status is currently Joe Biden.
And the only person Dumber than Joe Biden in America is his vice
president. I mean, when these are the
people who, you know, we're going up against.
I think libertarians have a much better time now than in, say,
the days of Reagan or John F Kennedy, as far as, you know,
competing for people's attention or allegiances than they ever
did previously. It has been amazing to see the
Thomas soul following that exists on random YouTube
channels because you have a guy speaking clearly, always dressed
nice and meeting you know, a lot of emotional arguments with a
very large amount of empirical research.
Same with people like Wilford Riley or Walter E Williams.
You also have professors like Brian Kaplan doing the the same
thing. So it's definitely a ground that
we need to compete on, and the best way to do it is to have
alternatives like TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, so we can at
least hopefully get our foot in the door.
I don't know where, Elsa, you would want me to go with
something like that, but I think you're definitely right.
I remember Glenn Beck was one of the first people who analyzed
the Affordable Care Act through the lens of whether or not
people should be forced to purchase health insurance
against their will. And that really stood out to me.
So. So taking that principle, that
was another one that I was able to extract.
And if I had heard it from a random person rather than a guy
in a really nice studio who was dressed nice, who had a big
following, I don't know if I would have taken it as
seriously. So it's definitely, it's
definitely something that that that we have to consider And
just just leading by example and Glenn Beck actually reading the
books, Saul Alinsky was one of his big ones where he would
actually go to these primary sources of you know, he makes
the case that this person is influenced by this ideology and
writing things on the chalkboard that really got you me at least
interested in education. Whereas I always thought
education was, you know, Pluto's not a planet and Columbus sailed
the ocean blue in 1492. So relying on the status of
other people, I think it's very valuable.
Yeah, I think it's it's certainly so.
I think that if you pick from high quality sources, you'll get
high quality results 100%. I just find it.
I find it oppressive. I find I find in the Society of
Status oppressive simply because it shuts the conversation out
from newer voices and because it relegates legitimacy to
personalities instead of ideas. I think if there's a workaround
for that, I'm not sure I I most people don't think about this,
this particular idea. So I don't blame you for, for,
for, for, for for that. It's a very, I think about very
odd things sometimes when it comes to these issues.
But I see it as impacting the quality of not only political
representation you get in government status, but also the
quality of commentators we have as well.
I'm not going to call anyone's name out, but there are.
If you look at both the left and the right, there is a deluge of
people who don't really have thoughts that go beyond the
status quo of their respective facts, whether they be
libertarians, conservatives, progressives.
If you know what one group thinks, most people who are
personalities for that group will just recite what that group
thinks. There are the few within those
factions that rise above that and go the extra mile, and that
should be praised. But a lot of these people, their
emphasis is on just being a good factionalist in a sense.
And so that's a phenomenon that's not new.
Our founders were dealing with this.
They themselves were factionalist.
In a sense. They it's it's interesting.
They anyone else in American history, they were the ones who
were the most aware of the susceptibility of the republican
system of government to lend towards factional party
politics. And they were the ones many of
them warned against that. And yet they were ensnared in
that same system they warned against.
So that should just go to show you the fallibility of the human
being. Sorry.
Go on. So when it comes to whether or
not a status society can be oppressive, I definitely think
so, and especially in the political realm.
So if you watch a lot of engineering videos on YouTube,
the average person who is, you know, going to be making these
engineer videos tends to really know what they're talking about.
When I look for tech videos and you know, my side job, a lot of
these people tend to be very educated.
If you look at the, you know, the high status people in the
realm of physics, they really know what they're talking about,
the high status people. When it comes to, you know,
anything like microphones or cars or something like that, you
see a high degree of competency. But in the political realm,
where there was so little incentive for the average person
to get informed, all the brain is going to do is take a
shortcut to which personalities they really like, because
there's so many issues which are so complex.
Just to be, I mean informed on the Russia, Ukraine war from
2014, forget about how Putin starts it in the year 882 with
Warwick, just to be informed on the events from the Maidan
revolution in 2014 to what's happening today.
So few people have the care because every second you spend
doing that as a second less, you could be doing something else.
So in the political realm, we see it much more so because
we're expecting people to be able to comment on immigration,
minimum wage, the Second World War, Israel, Hamas, you know,
the Democrats, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, all of these totally
separate things. It's sort of like the fool's
errand of expecting, you know, the five year old who says when
I'm older, I'm going to be an astronaut and a dentist and I'm
going to play in the NBA and I'm going to be in the NFL, it's
like that's just too much. So when these political
commentators are commenting on a government that's just doing way
too much, well, it's going to be impossible for them to
accurately analyze almost every aspect of it.
Maybe Ben Shapiro is the closest you can do as far as, you know,
giving a real idea of someone who was able to show themselves,
as you know, being able to be very informed on all these
different issues. OK, you have a handful of people
in a population of 330 million. That's exactly what you would
expect. When you have a huge government
that's in all these realms of society, you can't get anyone to
actually really understand these issues in depth.
So the brain shortcut to who should I listen to Is going to
use personality as the sorting mechanism of who they're going
to listen to. So the bigger the state, the the
more you're going to have people who are just attracted to
personalities as opposed to actual issues.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's it's both a product of
the, the mind as you mentioned, the custody mechanism, but it's
also an unfortunate reality of our current era and I hope that
it changes. Anyway, different story,
different day. Last question, last question,
what is the main take away from domestic imperialism?
And by the way guys, before he answers, if you guys have any
questions at all, this is the last call.
I will put your question up on the screen and I will ask.
We'll take about two or three questions maybe because I
respect my guest time and I want them to be able to of course be
able to go if he needs to. But what is should be the main
take away from your book domestic Imperialism?
And how can people find it? What it were the links to find
it or buy it or whatever? You can get it at
libertarianinstitute.org. We give the PDF away totally
free. We are a charity A501C3, so you
can get a free PDF there. Or you could buy it on Barnes
and Noble or Amazon if you'd like.
A hardcover or paperback or Kindle as well.
The main take away is that so many of the injustices
throughout history are pretty clear when looking in the
rearview mirror and when you're not really bought into one side
or the other. So in order to determine who is
right and wrong in the present, we have to have some objective
method of weighing good behavior versus bad behavior.
And this means not having double standards for people based on
race, gender, ethnicity, or even intelligence when it comes to
what rights they should have as a human being.
So this generally means this take away is the biggest, you
know, way that this issue was amplified of having double
standards is the double standard that people have when it comes
to the state. People will clearly say that
murder is wrong, yet justify mass murder campaigns that
governments regularly involve themselves in.
They say that, well, there's nothing really wrong with
taxation. You're paying for a service,
don't be so cheap. But if any other organization
within society were to begin to issue taxes on your income,
well, then you would see it as the theft that it actually is.
Military conscription being a $20 word for forced labor and
slavery. That is the big take away that
whenever you have double standards, that little hole in
your philosophy is going to attract like a bat, signal the
worst psychopaths in the society and the population at large is
not going to have a very big incentive to combat those very
few people. So domestic imperialism is just
saying that for the same reason the people of Mexico would not
have the right to coercively dominate the people of America.
The people of Washington, DC do not have the right to coercively
control 330 million strangers. All right.
And that is a very fine and very, dare I say, pro American
message. And so I am happy that you wrote
the book. I'm happy that you're willing to
come on and take some some point at questions of course done in
good faith. But ones that hope that help
flesh out, I think, the broader moral and political project of
of what you're trying to achieve, which is going to be
beneficial for generations to come, I believe so.
Keith, thank you so much for coming.
I have your, I linked your book in the chat.
It's right there. Find it right there.
And so I I hope that people go ahead and buy it, download it,
share it and things and have more conversations with what we
had today. I think that it's going to be
very, very important going forward that we center our mind
when discussing fundamentals and then work our way from there.
Do you have anything left for the audience or me that you like
to say before we go? I want to thank you for your
time and getting through the contents of the book and the
thought you put into the questions.
Christian Watson, It's been a pleasure.