Ask people to imagine two separate criminals. 1 criminal
takes a woman's ballot and instead of putting it in the
ballot box, he puts it in the paper shredder and her vote
doesn't get counted. No one thinks that that is going
to change the outcome of an election.
Even if that one vote changed which politician won?
Politicians are liars and totally ignorant on most issues,
so it's not like anything really would have changed in the real
world. But now say there's a second
criminal who threatens to imprison a woman if she gets a
job without first going from 2000 hours of cosmetic school.
Well, he has actually drastically changed her ability
to achieve her ends in life 8 hours a day, five days a week.
She's not able to do something she likes in an industry she
likes. She's not able to please all
those customers. Well, in that case, you've
really done something bad. So market regulation is far
worse than boating regulation. Welcome to the Drop the Mask
podcast, dropping knowledge and infiltrating the hive mind of
mainstream thought. I'm here to break down what's
wrong with our systems, leaders and institutions.
I'm your host, Jason, Welcome back to Drop the Mask.
I'm very happy to welcome this next guest, the author of this
great book, Domestic Imperialism, 9 Reasons I Left
Progressivism. And he's also the organizer,
author of The Voluntariest Handbook.
He's the managing managing editor at the Libertarian
Institute. Keith Knight, welcome to the
show. Jason, thanks so much for having
me, man. My pleasure.
Did I miss anything else you'd like to mention before we get
started? Nope.
You got both books. You got the Institute already
Happy. Thank you.
Very good, very good. The book is really good.
I like that it doesn't mess around.
It gets right down to the facts, just like you'd expect from
Keith based on what I've seen in other interviews.
So I was thinking that originally I might ease into
this question, but what the hell, let's get right into it
and see if maybe we can't defend somebody.
So I'll set it up like this. I grew up hearing people say to
military veterans, thank you for your service.
It's like a reflex, right, for a lot of people.
And for a long time, even before I got into libertarian theory
very deeply, I just couldn't bring myself to say it.
And I didn't know exactly why. Maybe it just felt a little bit
cringy. And I think deep down, I knew
something was wrong. Like, none of the military vets
I knew had even seen combat. And I don't know, excuse me now
I know just what a big scam the military industrial complex is,
so I just don't do it. But I heard you on a podcast, I
think it was with Dave Smith talking about this, suggesting
that maybe I should be looking for them to thank me.
Why would that be? Well, every time that you
interact in the private market, more or less, anytime you go to
Starbucks, go to a restaurant, go to a supermarket, the people
there thank you for shopping there.
They say, hey, you only have so much money that is scarce and
you're choosing to spend some of that money with us.
So they always thank us. But the police, military,
politicians, teachers never thank us for being taxpayers.
It literally has never happened. Even when I went on Dave Smith's
show and said, will any of them thank me for all the taxes I've
paid since I've been a net taxpayer?
And still it has yet to happen. So what essentially happens was
summarized by Antonin Scalia, who said that the welfare state
turns turns people who, oh gosh, I always butcher this one.
It's something to the extent of it creates beneficiaries without
gratitude and donors without love, donors without love or
recipients without gratitude, because the people who are
forced to pay are just that forced.
So they don't feel like it's coming out of a sense of duty or
general obligation. Even when Mark Cuban brags about
paying taxes. Well, the fact that you don't
have the right to opt out, the fact that you don't have the
chance to, the opportunity to choose where they go, in what
amount, based on what conditions.
All right, NATO, you got two months to wrap this war up.
I'll pay you for two more months.
But if you don't do it, then you got to pull out and I'm going to
stop funding. There's not even any conditions.
So while we constantly have standards and metrics for people
in our everyday lives, people do not have the most basic metrics
or standards for how the state should operate.
So because people don't feel like they're actually giving the
public something, even though they call it public service,
they're not. They don't thank us simply
because they're not thankful. They know it doesn't come out of
the kindness of our hearts. It's just a coercive obligation.
So this creates a great deal of friction in society, even though
it's not explicitly talked about, where members of the
military and police, no matter what happens, they don't say,
well, we only get paid if we win a war or if we get this war aim
accomplished without killing too many civilians or destroying too
many buildings that took decades to erect.
Of course, they don't even have these standards for themselves.
So because there was a coercive element to taxation, all these
services that we get are far worse than they otherwise would
be simply because we don't have the option to opt out of funding
them. And it doesn't even necessarily
help the people getting the money in the long run, because
it makes them ungrateful and makes it so there's not a lot of
pressure on them to really provide a good service for the
public. So that, along with a number of
other things, is one of the primary reasons that I think
everything should be privatized. Yeah, I'm glad of you.
Glad you brought up Mark Cuban, because I was just reading that
today. He's flaunting his $280 million
tax payment today, and we're recording this on tax day.
And he said that military service is the first thing, but
the second thing is paying taxes as the most patriotic thing you
can do. What do you think about that?
So I guess that means he has a great deal of admiration for all
the Russian soldiers risking their lives in Donbass.
He must have a lot of admiration for all the Iranian soldiers who
are part of the IRGC, must have a lot of admiration for
Hezbollah, all those Hamas fighters who are risking their
lives. I guess that's just something
inherently good. All of the Japanese soldiers in
the Second World War who risked their lives for Hirohito, he
must really, really admire them. Or it doesn't just so happen to
be the country that he belongs to.
Those soldiers have the the right to be constantly admired
for no other reason. And look, if you're a farmer and
you provide a very good service getting food to millions of
people, it's OK to thank farmers for their service or anything
like that. But that doesn't.
Just because someone provides something important doesn't mean
they have the right to have you coercively fund them.
And they shouldn't have to face competition.
And whenever a farmer tells you to do something, you have to
blindly obey them out of total respect.
So I just don't have any double standards for the police and
military and even the Mark Cubans of the world will have
tons of skepticism toward the police and military, but only
for every country that he doesn't currently reside in.
So that's that's how you know how shallow of a belief it is.
There was a joke on the office where Ryan, he like has a cheers
at a party and he goes here's to the troops, both sides.
And The funny thing is, is that if your claim as well, these
people are risking their lives for what they believe in, that
has probably applied to every single war that has happened
since, I don't know, ancient Mesopotamia.
So to say that the metric for admiration is life risking for
something you believe in, well that means Muhammad Atta is on
your admiration list. Just have some standards.
Just be willing to say these soldiers are the good guys who
deserve respect because they're fighting for this good objective
and that good thing. Then we can at least have a
substantial argument about you know what, what is it worth
achieving at what cost in what time period.
But they never say that. It's just such a simple minded
knee jerk reaction to thanking people for getting a job even
though they get tons of money whether or not they provide a
good product or service. So I just think it's so divisive
and doesn't help the intended beneficiaries or the people who
are forced to fund it. Yeah, well, Keith, come on.
Surely every other country has propaganda within their media
and they lie to them, but not the United States, right?
That's that's. Why?
I'm so thankful. Thank God.
What if we had propaganda in the media?
That would be scary. Yes.
And to be clear, I don't want to disparage veterans.
I think many of them really believe they were doing
something noble. Many people were just looking
for a job after high school. And the Army promises a lot of
benefits for those people. And I'm not mad at them.
It's the institution of perpetual war that really
bothers me. So moving on, you have a chapter
called The Unavoidable Contradiction.
This concept is something that I always find frustrating when I'm
trying to talk to people outside of, you know, the end cap
libertarian spectrum, that it's just they can't or won't put
this together. And So what is that
contradiction that you refer to? The contradiction is referred to
as antitrust legislation or it's the antitrust justification.
So this is where one of the primary roles of government is
to make sure that there are no monopolies in any industries.
The claim is that if we had a monopoly in, say, microphones,
computers, television, food, that you would have basically
the entire society very reliant on one organization who could
decrease quality without facing any check and balance.
Or they could drastically increase the cost of a product
or service and the public at large would suffer as a result
of this. So therefore the state needs to
make sure that no one company gets too much power within a
certain market. The problem is these same people
virtually 100% of the time. That's why I call it
unavoidable. Will say that the state should
monopolize compulsory education. Catholic Church doesn't have the
right to force you to fund or attend their schools.
The state should monopolize central banking and the money
supply. The state should monopolize the
right to conscript a military. If anyone else tried forcing you
to perform labor against your will, even if it was for the
greater good, they'd still be called kidnappers and enslavers.
State claims a monopoly right to tax.
If Amazon or Goodwill tried issuing taxes for the betterment
of society, even if they promised to use the money to
build buildings which will help people in the long run, people
would still clearly see it as theft.
And they have a monopoly right on the declaration of war.
If there were other tribes or groups in America where Costco
decide to declare war on Sam's Club, they'd say well obviously
this is just one group trying to reap benefits at the expense of
another and committing atrocities in the process.
So they claim these five things need to be monopolized when
their entire theory for why we need a state usually rests on
one of the reasons being you need antitrust laws to make sure
you don't have monopolies. Then they go on to advocate that
monopolies exist in the most important sectors of society.
That is the unavoidable contradiction which every single
progressive that I've ever spoken to believes in.
Yeah, Amen. And in the chapter you talk
about the progressive idea to defund the police.
How does that fit into that contradiction?
So you can see how fake this is because the police are the
enforcement arm of the progressive agenda.
If you just had Ilhan Omar, AOC, Bernie Sanders, Woodrow Wilson
writing words down on paper, well then there's not much to
enforce it. People would clearly see that
this is just a scam of trying to coercively involve yourself in
the lives of peaceful people. But if you have a state
apparatus which has a police force, well then that's how you
enforce regulations. That's how you enforce the
minimum wage, That's how you enforce diversity, equity and
inclusion legislation or affirmative action or anti
discrimination laws. Not because people like to
engage in those activities. So they do so voluntarily.
You have a political apparatus which uses the police to enforce
the legislative agenda of the politicians.
So for the progressives to say we want to defund the police,
that is for them to say we want none of the things that we want
enforced to be enforced. It's like a boxer who comes out
and says, I want to cut off my arms for the next big fight.
It's just so shocking that they even toyed with this idea.
And then, of course, the first opportunity they get to actually
vote on funding for the police was after January 6th.
There was a vote on whether or not to increase police, the
Capitol Police funding. And of course, AOC comes out in
support of it and later defends it by saying, well, this
actually had a lot to do with pensions, which were promised.
So in other words, she thinks that there's this evil, racist,
sexist, white supremacist organization who hunts
minorities in their free time, the police, but we have to fund
them because of a pension agreement.
It's the greatest threat to civilization, yet we got to keep
funding it. Apparently this belief was held
in the mind of a rational person, of course.
It was just much more of a rallying cry to inflamed the
passions of the feeble minded to support her.
They're never going to advocate for abolishing funding because
they could never enforce any of the gun laws, any of the minimum
wage laws, any taxation they wouldn't be able to enforce.
They just have to say please fund us or will provide a
product or service in exchange for it and they have no interest
in doing that. So that's why the defund the
police can't scam coming from progressives was just so obvious
from the get go. Yeah.
And so anarchists would also be in that realm of wanting to
defund the police. I won't speak for you, but I
would say I could be in favor of that under certain conditions.
What is your position on that? My position is a full
privatization of security. So when you use any form of
technology, say you use PayPal. PayPal has private security that
it invests in. Not because it's a organization
that took a big democratic vote and thinks about the public
interest because they want people who use their platform to
be safe. So they have passwords and
password requirements and they have multi factor verification.
Venmo also has this. Microsoft has this.
Google has multi factor authentication and a lot of
places for computers where your most valuable information is
stored. There are places like Webroot
security. There's places like Sentinel One
who have virus detection and things that fend off ransomware.
You have private security guards at malls.
You have private security guards at banks, shopping centers, a
lot of places. Every concert venue I've been to
has private security. I was at the Desert Ridge Mall
in Scottsdale. They have a ton of private
security, More on Saturdays when it's a little more dangerous and
less on, you know, Wednesday in the afternoon because it's in
their interest to make sure their area that they're
responsible for is safe because they want to incentivize
customers to go there. The state doesn't necessarily
have that. They don't have this equilibrium
to achieve where you want security, but you don't want,
you know, a total, you know, security area where the guards
are constantly going through everyone's purse every time they
walk in the, you know, Walmart or something.
So they have to find some equilibrium between
incentivizing people to come there and making customers
happy. Governments don't face such a
check and balance because they get money coercively, whether
you will love their service or hate their service.
So all security should be privatized.
The problem with immediate abolition is the state has
created a monopoly in this area of courts and justice.
So immediate abolition, Well, you know, other intellectuals
have spoken about, well, it would have been good to do this
and say 1913, where you just immediately abolish state police
because you couldn't have had a First World War, which wouldn't
have caused a Second World War, which couldn't have, you know,
caused proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam and created NATO or
created this crisis in Ukraine. But other bad things would have
also happened if you just immediately abolish it.
So I just support a move towards volunteerism and as much
privatization as possible, simply because all of these, the
core function of protecting human beings, their ability to
cooperate socially, and the property they acquire through
voluntary exchange or homesteading, is much better
achieved in a system with competition and voluntary
funding as opposed to a state apparatus.
Great answer. I don't have anything to add to
that. Hey guys, let's take a quick
break here for an easy request. Please like or share or give a
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Follow and share. It costs you nothing and it
helps spread the liberty message out there.
Thank you. Now let's get back to the show.
Next question. In your last appearance on the
Tom Woods show, you talked about starting your own business at 14
and how that experience shaped your world view.
Can you tell us just a little bit about that?
Because we started this landscaping business just under
the table 'cause I didn't have a work permit, I was 14 and you
usually need parents to sign off if you're under 18.
And we started making a good deal of money after some time
and then decided, hey, we want to make this legitimate now, to
make this business legitimate and stop going on to the table.
The stack of paperwork that we had to fill out was so
burdensome that we just stopped. So what the state essentially
does, also, I had to go to school at the time.
So what the state does, or else my parents would have been
jailed for violating truancy laws.
What the state does is it keeps kids in schools where they learn
very little and stop them from going into the workforce.
Now there's no difference in principle between forcing a kid
to work on school work and homework and a kid getting paid
for work outside of the classroom, the kids working
either way. So at least in this area,
they're making money, they're getting their foot in the door,
they're getting on the job experience, they're learning how
to please customers, how to work with other Co workers, how to
work with employers. So child labor is much better
than state schooling immediately.
Second thing this does is it means other companies face less
competition. So when there was less
competition, like people like my buddy and I entering the
landscaping market, you have higher prices and consumers have
fewer options than than they otherwise would if people were
allowed to freely exchange in this area.
The progressive sees this immediately when they say, you
know, I think you should have to have a license to vote, and you
should have to pass a test, both physical and mental, and then
the government can let people vote.
If they pass those tests. The progressive immediately
says, well, what if those tests are bias?
And who are they to say who can and can't vote?
They're just politicians. They're fallible.
They might put their thumb on the scale that's going to, you
know, restrict people's ability to access voting machines,
which, of course, Yeah, that is the goal in many cases.
And that is no different than requiring tests, restrictions
and regulations in the private market.
The core difference which I bring in, I bring up in the this
book. I ask people to imagine two
separate criminals. 1 criminal takes a woman's ballot and
instead of putting it in the ballot box, he puts it in the
paper shredder and her vote doesn't get counted.
No one thinks that that is going to change the outcome of an
election. Even if that one vote changed
which politician won? Politicians are liars and
totally ignorant on most issues, so it's not like anything really
would have changed in the real world.
But now say there's a second criminal who threatens to
imprison a woman if she gets a job without first going through
2000 hours of cosmetic school. Well, he has actually
drastically changed her ability to achieve her ends in life 8
hours a day, five days a week. She's not able to do something
she likes in an industry she likes.
She's not able to please all those customers.
Well, in that case, you've really done something bad.
So market regulation is far worse than voting regulation.
And the progressives are always claiming the moral high ground,
saying we believe in voting rights and increasing access,
but voting is just giving people who are ignorant on issues the
right to use the state to enforce their ignorant beliefs
on others. It's not even necessarily a
right that that that everyone has in the 1st place.
Or I'd venture to say no one just has the right to vote for
to confiscate other people's property.
But in the second case, when you forcibly stop someone from
getting a job they want and stop customers from being able to
interact with businesses and entrepreneurs which they'd like
to, you create oligopolies. You create higher prices.
They call higher prices inflation, not knowing that it's
actually an increase in the money supply.
But now if their whole thing is will inflation's really bad,
They just call it greed inflation.
Well, higher prices are the result of restricting access to
a certain industry because you have fewer choices, you have a
lower supply that raises the demand for people in the
industry as a whole. So everything they complain
about is the result of some people having a right to coerce
their way into what would otherwise be voluntary
interactions. Yeah, and then coerce people's
kids into schools forever. And as someone who went to six
years of college, and I was in public schooling institutions
for about 19 years of my life in total, I've developed quite the
disillusionment with public education in general.
So I'm happy to see that you have a chapter on College in
here. And you say college is 4 years
of work at $0.00 an hour. Why do you frame it that way?
What's the story? Because the progressive
justification for the minimum wage is one of the main things
that they run on. AOC runs on this.
Bernie runs on this, most Democrats and when Republicans
are in power, they never, you know, vote to abolish the
minimum wage. So the claim is that the central
premise is that all work is worth $15.00 an hour, and if you
can't pay someone $15.00 an hour, you shouldn't be able to
engage with them at all until you can pay them this $15.00 an
hour. The problem is the vast majority
of these progressives advocate college.
So if we can say, well, children don't have the mental capacity
to make decisions, therefore compulsory education is OK,
whatever. Now let's just talk about
adults. They believe 18 year old adults
can take out like 100 grand in student loans and do hours and
hours of work every single day out of college and not get paid
a single dime. Not only do they not get paid,
they got to pay all this money back plus interest.
So then of course they'll say yeah, college should be paid for
by the taxpayer. That's still forcing people to
pay instead of allowing them to voluntarily do so.
Whatever different issue. The claim is that most every
progressive believes in a minimum wage.
And even if they don't push college, which most of them do,
they'll say college is justified because you're investing in
yourself. You're trying to learn something
about the world so at a later point in your life you can add
more value to society as a whole.
Well, that's what internships are.
That's what getting on the job experience is.
I don't make as much now as I did in my very first job because
I had no skills. So I did this landscaping thing,
and then that didn't work out because of the regulatory
burden. So I worked at a restaurant,
then I worked at a bank, and now I got the dream job at the
Libertarian Institute. The point is, is that when
people start, they have very few skills.
So a lot of employers don't want to bear too much of A costly
burden in order to bring them on because with most people, it
doesn't work out in their first job or in any of their early
jobs, and there's a lot of turnover now.
So when you make it so costly to employ people, you end up
hurting the people with the least amount of skills and the
least amount of experience. This is what the minimum wage
does. It's why you have so many people
without stuff to do during the day.
So they end up looting, rioting and, you know, setting American
flags on fire and demanding free Palestine, which, look, they're
totally right about the Israeli mass murder campaign in
Palestine. But all these kids who were in
these riots, they don't advocate for free America.
They don't advocate. They don't say, well, Palestine
should be a land where all interactions are based on
volunteerism. They just don't want the
Israelis in there. They don't like have any
standards for Hamas. They don't have any standards
for the PA. They don't want freedom in
America. They want what I title the book
Domestic Imperialism. So it's literally just like
saying I'm against Joe Biden being bad and that's why I love
George W Bush because at least it's not Biden.
Well that's still not freedom in any sense.
So the fact that they advocate for freedom for a distant
geographical area while advocating tyranny on the area
they currently occupy, it's completely counterproductive and
the only reason they have time to do all this trash is because
it's not that easy to get a job compared to how it used to be.
Walter Williams actually looked at unemployment rates among 16
and 17 year olds in 1948 and found that the black
unemployment rate was lower than the white youth unemployment
rate, both demographics ages 16 and 17.
Now today in 2023, Bernie Sanders says racism is the
reason why there's such a gap in employment rates between blacks
and whites. Well, if 1948 there were still
Jim Crow laws, that was far more of a racist time than we have
today, and that didn't 'cause this disparity.
So because of minimum wage laws, because of all these
regulations, people have fewer options of where to work and
consumers have fewer options of what products and services to
buy and the monopolies and oligopolies, faceless
competition. So all this is terrible.
And it's primarily the result of minimum wages and regulations.
Well, the minimum wage is a regulation.
They're saying if you don't meet this threshold, you don't have
the right to interact with anyone even if they want to,
even if it's on a voluntary basis.
Jen Helfeld actually interviewed Nancy Pelosi and said, you
advocate raising the minimum wage.
Oh, yeah, we got to do this. Whatever it goes It it appears
that you have interns at your office and they make $0.00 and
zero cents an hour. Why is that OK?
To which she actually says with a straight face, well, that's
something they chose to do. So he says, well, if I choose to
work at McDonald's for less than the minimum wage, is that OK?
She is on. She is like such an MK Ultra
victim. She literally thinks that
there's a principal difference between working at this place
versus working at that place. She thinks one is public service
and, well, McDonald's is in it for the money.
Is the government a nonprofit organization where politicians
don't get paid? They're all unpaid volunteers.
The soldiers are unpaid volunteers.
All the staff members of the White House are unpaid
volunteers. No, they're both in it for the
money. At least McDonald's let's you
opt out of funding their trash. Government forces you to fund
their trash. So McDonald's is still better as
a place to work. So minimum wage is very
dangerous for the empirical reasons I mentioned.
And it's wrong in principle, which is why I tried to give it
a very catchy title of college being something that adults do
voluntarily that involves not a little work.
I'm not trying to straw man it and say, oh, so if I ask you to
help me move a couch, I should have to pay you $15.00 an hour.
This, by any metric is a ton of work to get a bachelor's,
master's, or doctorate degree and you don't get compensated
for it. And it's OK to have because some
people see the value in engaging in that exchange.
So because this is such a hole in the minds of the not just the
average progressives, the expert progressives, the Paul
Krugman's, the Richard Wolff's of the world, that I thought it
was one of the many chinks in their armor, which I wanted to
really point out to people. Yeah, agreed.
Just to play devil's advocate here, with college, someone
could argue that you're not actually working, although it is
hard work. You are paying somebody for a
service to teach you things. What would you say to that?
Yeah, that that is one way that people look at college another
way. Gosh, I can't remember the name
of Isaac Morehouse's organization.
I think it was called Praxis. But when you get a job, you are
getting on the job experience and you're learning a ton of
things in in exchange. So that too could be viewed as a
service, which is why a lot of people would pay to have a job
at a really good place just to get the on the job experience.
I don't see how learning on the job is fundamentally different
from learning at college. They both involve work.
They're both investments. There's no guarantee that either
one will yield you a satisfactory outcome.
So does that get to the heart of of your objection?
You're paying someone for a service.
Yeah, I guess that that that doesn't invalidate anything.
But if you view it like that, then I could see people saying
that's why I chose to spend that money.
That's why I chose to do that work because I see value in this
other people don't. Others see others see far more
value in getting on the job experience with, I don't know,
plumbing, welding, getting a job at a bank, but I did land
surveying for some time and well, you know, I wasn't, I was
making less than minimum wage. It was still good just to get on
the job experience. So looking back, I would have
paid for that service, but instead someone paid me to reap
the benefits of that service. So while there are surface level
differences in how people originally go into these
agreements doesn't fundamentally change the nature of whether or
not people have the right to whether or not adults have the
right to engage in contracts that are work in exchange for
money or work in exchange for experience or work in exchange
for attention. Well, we don't have to get,
well, we don't have to get into that sometimes.
So I've given when I first started giving speeches, no one
knew who I was. So I would just go to places,
work really hard on the speech and create the service of giving
people a speech to listen to. Now, unfortunately at a
different point, but that was just on the job, learning that I
had to engage in in order to get to the spot where I am now
'cause I didn't have any books published.
So if, say, you have to pay someone in order to give a
speech, well, people are already willing to pay the Hillary
Clintons of the world to give speeches, but people with no
experience are going to be kicked out of that market
because there's just not the demand for them at at that time.
So that I I would have to reconsider the exact wording of
your question. But I still don't think that
that would invalidate whether or not someone has the right to
engage in a voluntary contract that involves them engaging in
work for $0.00 an hour in compensation.
Because in both cases, on the job and in college, they're
still choosing to learn or not learn things that they come
across. Yeah, no, I don't think it
invalidates it at all, just throwing that out there.
But I I think people would, if they had the option to work for
$5.00 an hour, even $2.00 an hour, and gain those skills and
knowledge, rather than paying $100,000 in tuition, they would
take the option where they get paid a little bit and learn the
same skills and knowledge. So yeah, I don't think you're
wrong at all. You mentioned in the
acknowledgements part of your book that you dropped out of
college. Can I ask what happened there?
What prompted that, if you don't mind?
You know the that actually might be misleading because I was
actually kicked out of college on three occasions from three
different ones. I guess the dropout happened
when I decided not to apply for any more colleges.
So now it's the drop. But originally it was a kick.
I just didn't do any of the work.
I found it so boring and so counterproductive.
So the teachers would be surprised because I was always
reading, but they never assigned the myth of the robber barons or
Tom Woods. 33 Things They Don't Teach you about American
History. I loved reading those books.
I was always reading them in class.
But look, when I got to the Community College that I
attended and she starts talking about the Pythagorean theorem, I
just, I was in such a fit of rage at the lack of respect that
they have for the time of the students there.
I just couldn't believe it. So yeah, I was kicked out
because I found the topic so boring.
There was one guy at Arizona State, I think his name was Paul
Hurt. He was a history teacher.
He came the closest to getting me interested in in discussions,
but even then it was just too much work for too little reward.
And when you have to go home after working, you have to go do
homework, and it's on something very narrow that you're not
really interested in. I just couldn't.
I had already learned about opportunity cost from the
Austrian school. So I'm like, all right, I could
spend the next three hours doing this or three hours doing
something where I either make money or make friends or find it
genuinely interesting. And plus, I see all the people
who worked hard in college and, you know, got these degrees, not
that impressed with them in general, mostly on their
humility meter, where they'll say, hey, here's what should be
done in Palestine. Here's what should be done in
the Donbass region. Here's what antitrust laws
should be. Here's what agricultural
subsidies should be, even though they never studied these issues
in particular. None of them have an explanation
for the unavoidable contradiction or why college
should be legal considering it violates the principle of the
minimum wage law. So I'm just not that impressed
overall. It'd be one thing if they said,
well I went to college, I studied this.
So on these areas I haven't looked into it much.
But every metric shows that people are totally ignorant with
regard to politics. They could always say, oh, I
haven't looked into it, so I'm just not going to take an
opinion on it. Just as when you go on an
airplane, you don't say, let's take a vote on how to fly this
thing. You engage in the division of
Labor and people who are experts and people who specialize.
But for some reason in politics, people think that everyone's
income is just everyone's opinion, rather is equally
valid. And that's just absolute,
absolutely ridiculous. And I don't see a lot of college
attendees have embraced that humility when it comes to the
political realm. So that's just one of the other
reasons I didn't really find it valuable to spend so much time
and energy on schoolwork. So got kicked out of three of
them. Nice, well I'm glad you realized
that early. I really wish I had.
As one of those unimpressive degree holders, I can vouch for
that. I'll say if you have any other
option, kids out there, don't, don't do college if you have, if
you can do anything else. All right, well, let's move on.
I wanted to ask you about the social contract.
So there's this idea that we have as Americans that we are
beholden to this contract to pay taxes and do our civic duties.
What is the social contract to you and what's wrong with the
idea? So let's say that you have a
contract outside of the state. Usually what that means to
people is I will give you a product or perform a service in
exchange for you, say, paying me money or giving me another
product or service in exchange. So you say I'm going to send you
$10 through PayPal and in exchange I will send you Race
and Culture, this excellent book by Thomas Sowell.
The understanding is if you don't send me the $10, well then
I don't owe you the book. I only promised you the book in
exchange for the money. And if I don't give you the
book, if I say you know what, I'm not going to send you the
book, but send me the money, say well this is not a contract.
This is just one person putting an obligation on another person
to either give them money or a book.
So that is the nature of what a contract is.
I'll give you X in exchange for Y.
What the state does generally is Co opts this and says well there
is a social contract and that's why they have a unique right to
issue taxes because you pay taxes but in exchange you get
police, military, infrastructure, etcetera.
Well notice that there's no other side to this equation.
If you don't chip in, you will go to jail if they catch you not
chipping in. However, what if they don't
provide a good? Police force and they just let
BLM rioters do whatever they want and they don't protect your
property. What if they don't provide a
good military which doesn't bring democracy to Libya or
Iraq? Or spends 20 years in
Afghanistan replacing the Taliban with the Taliban after
killing 10s of thousands of civilians with drone strikes?
Which nine out of every 10 targets are not the intended
target. 9 out of every 10 people killed in them according to the
drone papers published by The Intercept.
What if the education system doesn't really educate people
that well after 12 years? Well, it turns out this is not a
contract of a give and take sort of thing.
This is just one group of people, the state putting an
obligation on other people to do things.
So just as we would never accept this kind of contract, that's
just unilateral obligations on one party with no right to opt
out if the goods or services provided don't meet the
standards of the people paying, we should not accept it in the
political realm for the same reason we wouldn't accept it in
private spaces. Surely if we don't like it, we
can just vote the people out and vote in new people who will fix
it, right you? Can do that certainly the
problem is that is extraordinarily costly and the
amount of time you spend it's extremely unlikely that that
will affect the outcome and all we have to do is imagine if all
right Amazon has the right to issue taxes and regulations and
has the right to conscript everyone and if you don't like
it in four years you can be a stockholder in Amazon and vote
for the next Amazon CEO and get your guy in there immediately.
People would say, well, that's just a scam from Amazon to
control you and get more money, obviously, and then give you the
illusion that voting that that your one vote would have to, you
know, take effect and change tons of things which are not in
your direct control. So there are some things which
you just don't have control over, whether it's in inside of
a state or outside of a state. But this whole nature of the
relationship between the state and the citizen, where they have
unique obligations to the state which they don't have to any
other organization in society, is what makes it totally
unjustifiable that that. That's my position.
Yep, fair enough. So I guess you would not agree
with the statement that democracy is actually ruled by
the consent of the governed. No, so I addressed this
specifically in a chapter. I won't get into the details,
but as far as the consent of the governed, it's necessarily a
contradiction because if you have people's consent, then you
wouldn't have to claim the right to initiate coercion against
them. You would just be another
organization within society. So if consent of the governed is
the justification, well then if people don't consent to chipping
in every year, if they don't consent to engage in certain
regulations, I guess the claim is just, well, we have the right
to use coercion against anyone at any time.
And if you don't like it, you can read the 10,000 page pieces
of legislation that we pass without reading it ourselves
once you decipher it and get a lawyer to explain what each line
means. Even though members of the
Supreme Court don't agree on what two sentences in the
Constitution means, you're supposed to figure this out and
then actually consent to it. So it's not based on the consent
of the governed, because when you try to opt out, you as a
human being not first getting other people's permission, they
don't recognize your right to. So therefore it's not based on
the consent of the governed. In another podcast, you shared a
quote that I really liked. It's by Chris Freeman.
It says we're vulnerable to politically motivated reasoning.
The unconscious goal of our political deliberation is not to
find truth, but rather to protect our identity as a loyal
member of our political team. How does that manifest in
politics today? Well, when I first give the
examples of how there's no good justification for the minimum
wage or there's no good justification for the
unavoidable antitrust contradiction, you have to ask
yourself, how could so many people believe something so
blindly? Not just so many people, so many
experts who have spent decades on this.
So when I came across that explanation as to why people
believe things, it made a heck of a lot more sense that it's
about signaling allegiance to a tribe in hopes of having a
community that you could fit in, that you could survive in and
you could pass your genes down into the future.
That makes a heck of a lot more sense than any response I've
gotten to the minimum wage argument or, you know, the pro
war advocacy from any of these groups.
So I was basically looking for how could so many people
believe, so many people believe such ridiculous things?
And I think that really fits the bill more than anything else
because, I mean, these things are just so shocking.
You have people saying with a straight face, we have to
support Ukraine and oppose Russia because Ukraine's a
democracy. Well, on March 31st of this
year, Zelensky was supposed to hold elections, didn't hold
elections. And they're they didn't stop
supporting Ukraine. He's enslaved all men ages 18 to
60 to fight in a war against their will.
Another word for slavery, forced labor and and they still support
him. Uses martial law to nationalize
TV outlets into one channel, bans political parties.
And all these experts with all these degrees still say, well,
yeah, they're the democracy and the other people are
authoritarian. The fact that anyone could say
that with a straight face after everything that's happened.
And I'm very pro Ukraine, which is why I hate Zelensky.
All of these politicians usually operate at the expense of their
populations and use them as cannon fodder for their own
self-interest. So that was one of the best
explanations I came across as to why people engage in political
activity when they really don't seem that interested.
I mean, I've come across people with degrees who have never
heard any argument in opposition to the minimum wage or antitrust
legislation. So if you think of, say, you get
pulled over by the police and they say, do you have any
weapons on you before I let you go, are there any unregistered
guns in the car? And you say no, and then the cop
searches you and finds out you know you lied and you do have a
3D printed gun or something. One way to approach that is to
say that's so weird that the person didn't tell the reality
to the cop 'cause they had to have known.
And the answer is, well, the goal isn't truth.
The goal is to keep yourself safe from the officer.
So when we're asking ourselves why do people believe such trash
when it comes to politics, well, the goal isn't truth
unfortunately. The goal is to signal allegiance
to a tribe. So just as your goal isn't truth
when you're talking to the IRS or a police officer, sometimes
your boss, sometimes your spouse or family members, the goal is
just survival. With politics, it's almost the
exact same thing. So we don't see a lot of truth
because the goal is not truth. The goal is survival and being
surrounded by a like by like minded people.
Yes, Scott Adams has a similar theory.
He says once you pick a side, you're basically giving up
objectivity at that point. Like once you identify with the
team, that's part of yourself. So it's really hard to change
your mind. How do you avoid that
personally? Well, I try to make my identity
the person who is willing to change, so I'm happy to concede
that I've been wrong about a number of things in the past,
and when you make your identity, I'm open to changing, then it's
a lot easier to change. The guy who has almost mastered
this is Tucker Carlson, A guy who was insufferable for so long
is now kind of likable because he will not shut up.
Shut up about how wrong he was about supporting the invasion of
Iraq. He'll have conversations with
tons of people from any aspect of life.
And because he's made his identity not I support George
Bush. His identity is I've been so
wrong about so many things. He gave a speech that I saw in
Arizona at the Turning Point USA event where his whole thing was,
I thought I'd been wrong about a lot, but last month I was so
incredibly wrong. It was one of the most
embarrassing things ever. And he was talking about the
midterm elections of 2022. He thought that he had been
saying that there's just going to be a huge Republican wave and
they're going to get more seats than they ever have before.
And that just didn't happen. So the center of his speech is,
I was wrong again. I can't believe it.
And that's why I'm open to having discussions.
So when you change your identity from these people are correct,
and this idea and its implementation are correct, too.
I'm open to anything. Here's my current position.
Once that's your identity, then it makes things a heck of a lot
easier. That's a great answer.
I have 100 more questions, but I'll finish off with this one.
Another quote from the back of the book, which has a collection
of various quotes that influence you.
It's from Larkin Rose. He says perhaps the most telling
is if you suggest to the average person that maybe God does not
exist, he will likely respond with less emotion and hostility
than if you bring up life without government.
This indicates which religion people are more deeply
emotionally attached to and which religion they actually
believe in more firmly. What does that mean to you?
So one of the reasons that I chose this quote is because if
you are an atheist, which most progressives identify as, they
are claiming that all of the expert theologians, all of the
priests, all of the rabbis, all of the imams, all of the
bishops, all of the Cardinals for thousands of years have just
been totally wrong. And the reason they're wrong is
they have a fundamental premise which is unjustified, which is
the Bible, the Torah, the Quran is true.
So this amount, the amount of confidence that people get when
they're able to say, Oh yeah, all the experts and tons of
people throughout all of history, they're all wrong on
this religion thing or this God thing.
Once you recognize that that is a position that people are able
to hold, then it at least opens their mind up to the possibility
that, yeah, the entire justification for a state is
counterproductive. All the core services the state
provides would be better achieved under a system of
volunteerism and competition. I think that was the main
reason. Also, there's a lot of overlap
between. But people who say, well, you
can have your religion, just don't force it on me.
Usually what they mean, bizarrely, is I don't want to
hear about it. Don't try to persuade me.
So what I think people should do in general is embrace the
Jehovah's Witness world view where they are constantly
ambitiously trying to persuade people of something.
And they'll give you a ton of time, they'll give you books,
they'll invite you to services. And if you choose to opt out,
then they will still recognize that, right?
Even if they think it means you're going to burn in hell for
all of eternity, they still recognize your freedom to do so.
The progressive or any statist really does not give you that
courtesy unfortunately. So it's the fact that people are
willing to let you spend eternity in hell or the
progressive things you're going to spend your eternity living in
fantasy world, believing in a God, going to a church, donating
to a church. Even though those things might
be negative repercussions, they still advocate the principle of
freedom in many cases. So because we believe in freedom
of religion, I think we, for the same reasons, should believe in
freedom of economic exchanges between consenting adults.
Those were, I think, the two reasons that that quote stood
out for me. Do you think there's any hope to
reach people on a large scale or you?
What's your outlook for the future?
Yeah, I think these ideas can become much more popular when
you have a likable personalities promoting them.
The idea that it's going to be like mass educational adaption,
I think a very only a very small portion of people have to really
get educated on this. If the goal was to get everyone
educated on or even a majority educated on Austrian economics
or anything. I think we just need better
marketers and better bumper sticker slogans.
And we need people in positions of power and influence to be
able to sort of give the green light to this idea.
Because just hearing it from guy who was kicked out of three
colleges, not a lot of people respect that.
But you have people like Elon Musk saying, well, the state's a
monopoly when you have the president of Argentina saying
favorable things, when you have the president of El Salvador,
Prime Minister speaking highly of libertarian ideas while
crushing down on criminals and human traffickers and and the
like, and murderers drastically decreasing the murder rate in El
Salvador. I think that is the most likely
way you're going to increase the popularity of our ideas and
increase the likelihood that they'll be accepted by the
average person. Very good.
Well, I'm hopeful. I'm trying.
I'm doing my part here working on getting bigger and reaching
more people. But I really appreciate your
time coming on today, Keith, thank you so much.
Anything else you want to plug or talk about before we go?
Not necessarily. If people want the book, they
can purchase it on Amazon or they can get a free PDF at
libertarianinstitute.org. Very good, go pick it up.
I do recommend it. Domestic imperialism. 9 reasons
I left progressivism. Thank you, Keith.
Have a good one. Thank you.
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