The Tom Wood Show. Hey everybody, Welcome back to
the Tom Wood Show. This is episode 24136.
I'm delighted to be joined by our old friend, the great Keith
Knight, who is Managing Editor at the Libertarian Institute,
which is a great organization. He hosts the Don't Tread on
Anyone podcast, which does not have quite as many episodes as
the old man's podcast here, but it's doing very well and has a
whole darn bunch of them. And he is the author and this is
what brings him on to the program this particular time of
the brand new book, Domestic Imperialism 9 Reasons I Left
Progressivism. Keith, welcome back my friend.
Tom Mutz, thank you so much for having me.
Keith was a guest at my Christmas party a couple of
weeks ago here in Florida, a few weeks ago here in Florida, and
he came all the way across the country.
I don't. I don't know that if you would
necessarily give away where you live, but you came a long way to
to visit Old Woods on Christmas and I appreciate.
That Oh yes, Scott and I had a blast.
We wanted to get together and celebrate both Christmas and
Diary of a Psychosis along with this new book.
So I I had an absolute blast. Every one of your Tom Woods
Elite show members was really pleasant to be around.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. So all you supporting listeners
out there. You can come to my Christmas
party every year supportinglisteners.com.
I don't even list it as a benefit.
There's so many benefits of being at the Tom Wood show.
Supporting listener can't even list them all.
But you can check out some of it supportinglisteners.com.
Anyway, Keith, we're going to talk about your book.
And of course, with a title like that, Nine Reasons I Left
Progressivism, I'd like you to give me a few reasons you joined
it. Probably the initial reason was
there was a dichotomy in front of me.
We have two groups of people, people who want to give you
food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education.
And then there's another group of people who want to charge you
for these things. They just create costs out of
the thin, you know, blue sky. They they want you to have to
work to achieve something where's other people want to
give it to you. When you're facing this
dichotomy, obviously it seems like, well, am IA nice person
who's compassionate or am I somewhat of a jerk?
So you can almost say how is it maybe, you know, the billionaire
class could believe something because they could easily buy
the stuff. But how if so many millions of
people have the country more or less been duped into thinking
you should have to buy things instead of getting them for
free? So when I was faced with that, I
said, well, one, it seems like it's, you know, much more
economically efficient to give people something instead of
always having to work. That seems pardonsome and it
seems much more compassionate to help or not to help.
So that was the dichotomy I was faced with and that's why I
probably joined. I also have to say growing up in
I was in Phoenix, AZ my whole life.
I went to school here and often thought of as a red or purple
state, but the the schools that I went to were extremely blue.
So I was always having in the back of my mind that America
good place now, however uniquely bad because of slavery and
because of things like Jim Crow. So when we saw this name on the
ballot, Barack Obama, we were all excited that this has to be
the guy we support. This is the major hurdle that
we're finally getting over this terrible, racist, sexist,
xenophobic past of ours by electing this this guy.
So it was both the thought of, you know, we're really achieving
something. I'm really part of something
unique in the rearview mirror of history as it'll be seen by
getting this guy elected. And it's the compassionate
philosophy. Those are the main reasons I was
attracted. To it now I would have more or
less guessed that because I think that's why basically
anybody joins it for the most part in in the beginning.
I think people innocently become part of it because it just seems
as you say. It just seems like common sense
why if we have problem X and we have resources Y, we just apply
resources Y to problem XI mean come on, what?
What? What?
Who? Who would object to that?
So you you do talk about that a bit in your introduction.
I would like to ask you though, I mean yes, I know that your
book is it is about, you know, reason, things that challenge
progressivism. But I want to know, in your life
specifically, what? Was there a particular moment
when suddenly you thought I might not just be wrong about
one particular thing, but my whole world view might be wrong?
Was there a particular moment or particular event that caused you
to have a thought like that? Well, one of the moments was
watching the Glenn Beck show, where he brought up the portion
of the Affordable Care Act. Another great thing.
They're making it affordable, just more generosity.
And he said that there's something called the individual
mandate. This is where people, whether
they want to or not, are required to purchase health
insurance for themselves. Now I remember thinking, well,
people probably should do that day, and they probably should
eat healthy, exercise, be good neighbors, dress nice.
Well, just because someone should do something, I don't
think they should be forced. So this was the first time I
ever considered that here is the difference between civilization
and some sort of barbarism or tyranny where you have the right
to claim ownership over other people.
So that was the first time that it really occurred to me.
I got to say, getting that first paycheck and seeing the
involuntary deductions, that was pretty surprising.
But also when I was 14, I started my own landscaping
business and the more we grew, the more difficult it was.
I was 14 and the other guy was 16, and we would just go around
and basically offer our services to mostly parents of the people
who we went to school with. We're earning very little
amounts of money, and every time we try to do something
legitimate, the amount of bureaucracy was staggering.
We'd have to go to this place with my Co worker's mother.
We had to start filling out things.
We had to start declaring our income and then I had to lie
about my age, which I got caught and that ended up blowing up the
whole thing and then we basically had to stop and do
nothing. So stopping of the
entrepreneurial spirit was just so crushing at the age of 14.
But I also saw it as well. Far from the government being
something here that's there to assist me and bring about
flourishing, it seems like they're putting far more
involuntary hurdles in my way of achieving what I want than they
are at at assisting me. So I think those were the
initial things that I personally came into contact with, which
really made me start questioning things that I had supported.
I was very taken aback by an example you give early on in the
book that you talked about at oh geez, now I can't remember.
Was it, was it actually at the house?
Was it an event recently? But it was about the the attack
on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016, and you talked
about the motives of the person who did it, who did not actually
realize that it was a gay nightclub.
He didn't realize that. But of course it was immediately
portrayed as well. This is an attack on homosexuals
and all that. But what I think most people
don't know is that he contacted the police and he was very, very
explicit about what his motivations were.
Now there's no need, there's no reason if you're a guy like that
who's going to engage in an atrocity.
I mean why would you be shy about your motives?
I guess sometimes when we when we quote what people's motives
are, everybody's skeptical. But why would you, Why would
that be the one thing you chicken out on?
But you actually go ahead with the shooting people plan.
I I rather take him at at his word and he's very, very blunt
about exactly what his motivation is.
And it has nothing to do with well in the US you have the Bill
of Rights and you have homosexual people, whatever it
is, if that wasn't it at all. So can you tell the actual
story? Because to me, this story and
then how the US government spun it, says an awful lot about the
nature, at least of the US regime.
So this was June 12th of 2016. You had Donald Trump leading in
the polls and Barack Obama was the sitting president.
So to show the reader how much progressivism is sort of
entrenched, both the leading Republican, Donald Trump and
Barack Obama more or less said the same thing that the Pulse
nightclub murder which killed 49 people, injured 53.
Here is how Barack Obama summarized the events.
He 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 that was the sitting
president who has access to the director of National
Intelligence, the FBI, the CIA. This was his take away that the
lesson we learned from this massacre is don't hate
homosexuals, nor should we be fearful of homosexuals.
Well, the goal of terrorism is not to conceal your motives.
The goal of terrorism is to bring attention to something
that otherwise you thought wasn't getting attention because
it's sort of like a shortcut to fame for a number of people.
So he calls 911 while he's holding the survivors hostage
and explicitly says you have to tell America to stop bombing
Syria and Iraq. They're killing a lot of
innocent people. What am I to do here when my
people are getting killed over there?
You 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. I feel the pain of people
getting killed in Syria and Iraq.
They need to stop bombing Syria and Iraq.
So this actually is something that was happening in 2016.
People might not have really known that Syria was on the hit
list. According to the Council on
Foreign Relations, the US government dropped 24,287 bombs
on Iraq and Syria that year, in 2016 alone.
So here we have an explicit example of violence being
perpetrated in response to the federal government initiating
violence against other people. And The Intercept actually did
some research on this and it turns out that 90% of those
killed in these drone striking operations under Barack Obama
were people who were not the intended target.
Also to qualify to be an intended target, they usually
say any military age male, so that's any male 16 years or
older. So instead of saying this is a
genuine divide that we have in the world, people who achieve
their ends violently and people who achieve their ends
peacefully, they made it about sexual orientation or who you're
attracted to and just completely blowing it.
This is the guy who ran on closing Guantanamo Bay, getting
out of these wars that evil George Bush started so he can
carry on his father's evil legacy and only caring about the
military industrial interests. They gave this progressive guide
the platform to really, you know, stand up for the people.
And this is exactly what happened.
So this really to me, I didn't know about this till years
later. It had just come across my
screen and I said, well, I'm so sick of following everything
that the news media tells me too.
It wasn't years later until I actually found out the truth
about this situation. But yeah, coming across this, it
was just shocking that this evidence was right here.
There was a primary source, but it never occurred to me.
I found one clip of a woman who was inside the club and this was
a local news in Florida where she had said, yeah, he kept
saying that America's bombing, his country and he was really
upset about that. And then, you know, the SWAT
team came in and killed him. And other than that, we didn't
get the truth from anyone on this.
So this is the classic progressive false divide when
there really is a true divide to be had.
Yeah. So that to me speaks volumes
because it's typical of the regime that it does something
that then leads to negative consequences.
But rather than ever come clean about this, it always finds some
fall guy. It always finds some distract
you with something else. So instead of saying, well look
you know we really need to have this overseas empire, but you
all have to understand that it is going to come with the
occasional cost. I mean some people going to get
angry about it. They're going to do crazy things
we're never going to have. They're not going to have that
conversation with us. Instead it was Oh my goodness,
look he didn't like homosexuals like, but so, so that diverts
attention from the issue at hand.
But it's not just there obviously we've we continue to
see right with rising prices people saying that has nothing
to do with us, with the the government or the central bank
that's that's greedy companies. In 2008 it was predatory
lenders. It's always somebody is it's
always somebody. It's always somebody unpopular.
It's already it's always somebody the public views as
wicked they're responsible for this.
We were merely innocent bystanders.
Oh, and by the way, that institution that monopolizes the
creation of legal tender money had absolutely nothing to do
with the with an economic downturn, you know, that's
that's the that's it. And if if those types of
explanations satisfy you, then you're probably not going to be
prompted to look into libertarians.
Well, yeah, it seems like no matter what happens, if you
know, we're kept safe, well, that just proves that we need a
heavy footprint in the Middle East.
Ben Shapiro's words, heavy footprint in the Middle East.
And if things are bad, well, that proves that we need to
really get serious about this war on terrorism.
So no matter what happens, COVID numbers go up.
Well, we need to have lockdowns. COVID numbers go down.
Well, see, this is the importance of having lockdowns
and mandates. There's no way to actually
falsify this. And it's very classic that the
elephant in the brain, so to speak, will attempt to
rationalize almost everything that's in yourself interest.
So it's not like we have this, well, we need to elect the right
people or, you know, just erect a new party.
Well, that could be, you know, great in the short run as people
like Javier Malay have shown us, that there can be tremendous
benefits to that as far as long term solutions goes.
It is a bit of a fool's errand to give people a monopoly on
money creation, The right to conscript, the right to tax, the
right to have a compulsory education and say these people
need to be regulated because once every four years people are
going to get a one in a million vote between, you know, two
lying psychopaths. That's just not going to happen.
So progressivism in and of itself is a bit of a fool's
errand. And it's exactly what we should
expect. Just as corporations always want
more power, at least they have the genuine check and balance of
allowing people to disassociate with them when they stop
creating value. Politicians face no such check
and balance in society. So that's why progressivism was
just so vitally important that I stopped having that as part of
my life. All right, let's move on.
You have a lot of material in here and I like that you you
kind of write the way I do in that there's no fluff in a Keith
Knight book. There is no waste of your time.
There are no pages and pages of of of ranting with without facts
or statistics. You feel like every single
sentence has to be worth the reader's while.
That's the impression I get reading your book, that you
don't want to waste anybody's time.
Let's, let's get the information out there.
So what you learn in a Keith Knight book, which will not take
you that long to read. I mean, honestly, you're going
to learn 10 times what you would you would learn from a, you
know, from a book by almost anybody to be honest with you,
by almost anybody and especially Oh my gosh, these I think about
the book Sean Hannity used to write.
You know, I like it when he was a big radio guy and all the
right wing radio people, they all had to write books and Oh my
gosh, what a waste of time. It was just platitudes from
start to finish with three statistics thrown in.
OK And I would get that. That's what I would get in two
sentences of a Keith Knight book.
So. So I want to talk about the your
section on government failure because that's obviously meant
to be a a, a playful reworking of the concerns about alleged
market failure. We're supposed to work again.
Notice that we're supposed to worry about the the failure of
markets. And markets I know are boogeyman
that we're all supposed to hate. But markets that just means, you
know, a network of individuals cooperating with each other is
what a market is. People buying and selling,
making offers, people accepting or declining offers.
That's really all a marketplace is.
A market is just you and me. And so to be concerned about
market failure, to be concerned that voluntary interaction, you
know, boy, there's a lot of failure there.
But not to have a corresponding concept of government failure.
Failure of an institution that is inherently coercive shows
there's a bias in in in the way economics is taught to begin
with. Yes.
So thank you for saying that. There's a lot of information
condensed in this. I remember AJP Taylor once
saying most history that people learn is 90% true and 100%
useless. And I go that is exactly what I
want to be the antidote to. I want everything to be, you
know, generally useful to what? To the reader.
So Tom Hartman is a pretty popular progressive and he said
there was 1 fatal flaw in libertarianism which just takes
the whole thing down and that's why it's barely even worth
mentioning. And this would be the existence
of imperfect knowledge and competition, which can be
generally summarized as market failure.
So, because when you go to buy a car, the car salesman and the
owner of the company have a lot more knowledge than the
consumer, this asymmetry exists. Therefore, a state is justified
in coercively intervening on behalf of the customer and
sometimes the producer, if the producer has to face foreign
competition for car sales. OK, so the question is, does
this exist? One Of course.
Experts in the field have more knowledge than the average
person, but does it uniquely apply?
This is a constant propaganda tactic of progressives.
They say There's profit seekers in the private sector, as if
politicians and cops and soldiers and teachers are just
unpaid volunteers. Yet there's always profit
seeking everywhere, under anything.
Or they'll say, well, there's imperfect knowledge.
So the question is, can we take this example and apply it to the
coercive sector? Obviously, not all voters are
informed. We have a great amount of
knowledge asymmetry when it comes to the people who have
access to confidential documents that we're not even allowed to
see. And if you try to show it to us
like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, did they end up putting
you in a cage or making you run for your life so you can run
away from the land of the free, which they love to constantly
brag about When it comes to something like greed.
They also say that this is market failure, 'cause you don't
have people, you know, sort of acting both on goodwill.
You have people in the sort of doggy dog mentality, greed
greedily going at each other. Well, there is an election going
on right now. Pretty greedy.
You have politicians constantly slandering each other trying to
figure out who can get the most votes.
One person wins, one person loses.
That is just about as greedy as it gets.
Somehow, some way. I don't know when this happened,
but the voluntary sector got the name gritty and the coercive
sector, which you can't opt out of funding, got the idea that it
has something to do with social cooperation and dealing with the
greater good. They also say that, well,
government, it needs to step in just in case there are
externalities within the free market.
This is where you purchase a car from me And then.
You drive the car, which pollutes the air that other
people breathe. Those people did not consent to
it. Therefore the state has to
intervene. Notice that the existence of a
state doesn't make this externality go away.
Also, the state itself is a great externality.
We constantly have politicians doing things without the consent
of hundreds of millions of their alleged constituents and
coercively imposing it. That in and of itself is the
greatest externality. The final one that we get is the
short sightedness. You go in the free market, you
just want to make a ton of money and you don't care what's left
behind you. This was Hans Hoppa's great
contribution to the idea of democracy, where much for the
same reason, people don't take the time to change in oil, in
change the oil in a rent a car. Very few politicians make sure
that the state is kept in such a way that it's going to be
beneficial for future generations.
They're only there for a few years.
They have to extract all the wealth, power, social status and
influence they can get until they're kicked out or until they
can get a permanent job in the deep state.
So we constantly see this short sightedness all around us.
You have Woodrow Wilson declaring war against Germany in
1917 hundred and 16,000 American deaths of 2.8 million
conscripts. You know, getting shot at,
getting PTSD, getting their limbs blown off.
And it was very beneficial for him at the time, along with
Colonel Edward House to gain that amount of social status and
have that amount of influence in the Treaty of Versailles.
He never had to face consequences for anything that
that he did. This basically applies to any
politicians who advocate Boris Lyndon Johnson basically pushed
and fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the August 4th
incident of 1964, which never happened, justifying a further
intervention into Vietnam, leaving the things like
Operation Rolling Thunder, Operation Bail Roll, the mass
bombing and murder of millions of people in Vietnam, Laos in
Cambodia. And because of the short
sightedness of politicians, they never had to pay a price and
actually they're seen as heroes by by many people.
So all of these things do apply to the state as well as the
market, But as Mike Munger points out, voters are way worse
than consumers, even though they're the same people.
But the consumer has to bear the cost of his bad decision making.
That's why you're much more it's much more beneficial to have
people acting as consumers where they have to bear the price,
where they get the reward, as opposed to being voters where
they never feel the pain and seldom will apologize for
advocating policies that ruin the lives of millions of people.
I'm glad you know, I was sitting here as you were giving your
answer, thinking, well, I'll point out certain aspects of
this problem, then you cover them all.
So, all right, well, on to the next thing.
You have a, a, a, a discussion in here on the minimum wage.
And people might think, oh, this is such a tiresome libertarian
concern because after all, the the real value of a of the
minimum wage has been eroded by inflation over the years.
It's not really a big deal. And who cares if the minimum
minimum wage goes up? And for me, the main, the main
problem with it is that it just shows a a lack of understanding
of what makes wages rise. Like the people who think that
the key is we need to force people at gunpoint to pay
workers more. I think don't understand wages
are not just arbitrarily set. So that that that drives me
crazy. But also, I I don't think people
realize a point that you make in the book, which is frankly just
how few Americans actually work for the minimum wage.
Yes, it turns out I don't have the number off the top of my
head, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a
very small percentage one. .4% I got it from your book.
OK, yes, thank you. I promise.
I got the citation there. When it comes to things like
full time work, it's important to define what counts as work
because as I say in the title, college essentially for me.
Well, and it's actually misleading because I was kicked
out of college on three different occasions.
But College in general for someone could be four years of
work for $0.00 an hour. So if we start with the
progressive claim that all work should demand $15.00 an hour
because you're exploiting the person, you're benefiting from
them. Well, the universities are
getting money from the student, and the student does tons of
work both in school and tons of homework.
So university basically all schooling the K through 12
violates their child labor law and then the university system
violates their minimum wage law 'cause you have people
performing labor and not getting directly compensated.
So the question is, should universities or any form of
schooling be abolished for the protection of the students?
And my position is obviously not.
There's a reason so many people choose to voluntarily do such a
thing, so they could gain some skills so they can be more
profitable in the future. And at the time, they're usually
living with parents or living with someone else who's able to
take on the bills, so they might not need it at that point.
So the point is, is something that progressives actively
advocate. Go to college, do this.
They're telling people to work for $0.00 an hour in
compensation and then get all high and mighty when they come
across a small business or some other organization which is
saying that, well, we can pay you $1.00 an hour or $5.00 an
hour. The most amount of value that I
got was in a two to three-week internship at a tech company
where I didn't make any money, they gave me food and gas money.
But getting that on the job experience is so valuable
because that's what builds your skills, that's what makes you
more marketable in the marketplace among different
employers. That's how wages rise.
Now, according to the progressive worldview, we should
see more or less something like 100% of people getting the
minimum wage, because corporations just do the bare
minimum. Absolutely necessary.
So how is it that such a small percentage of workers get this
minimum wage? It turns out research by Little
Wig von Mises in his book Planning for Freedom, Milton
Friedman in his book Free to Choose, they make the case that
wages rise as the result of a couple factors.
One is capital investment by employers.
I really saw this when I worked at Walmart.
We had a scanning system that was very, very complex and
people would send us orders. We'd scan them, get the list of
orders, or you'd know where to go in the store to get the item.
Then we'd give the person their groceries in the back of the
store. Well, one day this really,
really, really expensive system, these things had to be probably
like $2000 each. And the software, heaven knows
how much it costs in capital investment.
One day this went down, so we had to do everything with a pen
and paper. And I I honestly believe we
might have done 10% of the sales that we were able to use when we
had access to those things just 'cause it was down for a day.
So this really shows how each worker is more valuable because
they're more productive as a result of capital investment.
The second thing, which Milton Friedman points out is the
importance of competition among employers.
So the employee is not necessarily protected because
there's something like Occupational Safety and Health
Administration, as I show in the book at place workplace desks
were drastically decreasing before the existence of OSHA.
Second, he says the reason that we see wages higher than the
minimum wage is because of competition amongst employers.
Knowing that there's this threat that I could leave, go elsewhere
and take my productivity with me, it gives the employer the
self-interest incentive to give me the wage that he thinks I'm
worth. So this is very important
because a lot of times we're seen as, oh, you just think
corporations are going to be oh so nice and generous.
OK, well it turns out just as the customers are self
interested when they come in the store, not because they love me,
but because they want the products, employees are self
interested and the corporations are as well.
But the free market allows people to constantly harmonize
these self interests by making sure that they can't get a penny
out of your pocket unless you voluntarily give it to them.
They can't get a second of your time unless you choose to freely
associate with them. So that, again, is why the
state's not only unnecessary, constantly makes people more
impoverished because it stops people from getting that on the
job experience. That means there's fewer
employers because you're raising the cost of employing people.
Customers have fewer places to shop.
Places are less beautiful because you have much more
Walmarts. So this leads to the very
oligopolies that progressives are constantly complaining
about. So it it is just worse all
around when some people claim the right to own the bodies of
other people. Did you happen to see at least
the the one now semi notorious clip of the interview between
Glenn Greenwald and and Tucker Carlson not long ago?
Do you happen to see that? Unfortunately, I did.
Yeah. So that's good answer.
I thought you were saying unfortunately I missed it.
I thought I'll have to fill him in, but I'll fill in the
audience the the, you know, I I like Glenn Greenwald.
I I I read one of his books. I I follow him.
I think he's a very valuable and important voice, and I think
Tucker Carlson is downright heroic.
I I really, really respect the guy.
But nobody's perfect. And sometimes when when these
two agree on something, it's it's a bad thing.
Sometimes it's a good thing, but sometimes a bad thing.
And they were having a conversation about the economy
and Greenwald was leading in with, yeah, you know, all this
libertarian economics. I think people are looking
around and they're seeing that, you know, Raytheon is getting
richer and richer and they're wondering where this all goes.
And I thought Raytheon getting richer and richer would not be
happening in a libertarian system.
You know like what what are you talking about what does this
mean And and then it ended up getting diverted into a an
argument about how how ugly our society is becoming that that
it's it's the the aesthetics of it are are poor.
We can all agree on that. But The thing is it's hard to
blame that on libertarianism when we haven't actually
implemented that. That is the real thing.
We we haven't actually implemented it this, but this is
not we're not living in a libertarian system at at this
point. Every major thing the
libertarians have demanded, we've just been ignored.
They just pay no attention to us.
Unfortunately, you the way they were talking, you would have
thought that in 1972 Milton Friedman became dictator of
America and just has refused to get off the throne since then.
Tucker Carlson said that this sort of libertarian economic
policy was completely rationalized after the rich saw
that it was in their interest. So notice immediately they're
not differentiating between wealth that's gained voluntarily
by people like George Eastman, who made the camera much more
accessible to the average person.
Cornelius Vanderbilt getting steamship access to the average
person. Henry Ford getting the
automobile accessible to the average person.
Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos. None of that.
They just say the rich. This is a classic progressive
move where it's not like, you know, giving you a state.
Obviously the the Nicolas Maduro and Hugo Chavez were very rich
as well, So that even that is not unique to the free market.
The fact that they don't even differentiate between voluntary
wealth and coercive wealth is how they can make a statement so
ridiculous as to say, well look at all this.
Reaganomics rich get richer libertarianism.
They constantly conflate those things intentionally and they
pin it on Raytheon getting all this money when there is a
culprit that we could pin it on. Maybe the progressives that in
spite of Allstate atrocities still say, well, the government
should tax more. Well the government should
regulate more. But I'm against a lot of the
things they do with all this power that I advocate that they
have. This is literally as evil
knowing about the mass murder campaigns of the Middle East,
Vietnam, Korea, the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, Operation
Meetinghouse, killing 100,000 civilians in Tokyo in a couple
days. This is as bad as saying I want
the Ku Klux Klan to have a ton of money and a ton of power, but
I think they should be really nice and we should elect a good
grand wizard. It is literally that ridiculous
when it comes to what they're advocating.
So yeah, Raytheon, having all this money and power you could
easily put at the feet of progressives who have had a lot
more power than the Milton Friedmans and Ludwig von Mises
of the world. There's also a section in your
book where you you say a little something about the objection
that in the society you want, the poor would XYZ, so X in this
case is have no access to education.
They would just be, you know, illiterate and helpless.
And I I might point out that that's kind of like what we have
now. I mean, I wouldn't want to go to
any of these schools. I'm not going to learn anything.
Complete waste of my time. I'm going to be probably
traumatized. Their chances are.
So I'm not sure this accusation sticks, but I think for a lot of
people it seems like a a death blow to libertarianism.
I I don't want people to have no schools.
Oh, and I want there to be schools as well, But one, they
should be voluntary. And two, you make the exact
point by them saying, well, I can't believe people are so
uninformed to have elected someone like Donald Trump.
Oh, they all these people online, they spread these, you
know, debunked conspiracy theories as they tell us Putin
installed our previous president without a shred of evidence.
But yeah, they're the ones who are constantly saying that
society's so uneducated after the majority of us have gone
through 12 years of state indoctrination.
So what I did was I tried to do some research and I came across
the research of a woman, Pauline Dixon, she wrote.
She has two studies. One is titled why the denial?
Low cost private schools in developing countries and their
contributions to education. So notice she doesn't say why
the denial. Schooling in the Hamptons, she
says. Let me take the worst people on
earth. If it can work here, and by work
we mean generally yield a high degree of utility for parents
and children alike, well then it is something that can be
generally embraced. So before this I actually used 2
examples of how the Statue of Liberty, something beautiful
that I'm sure Tucker Carlson would also find beautiful, was
voluntarily funded along with the Salisbury Cathedral in
England. So that we can have beauty in
the voluntary sector and we can get things like churches which
so many people can go to totally for free.
I have been to many churches and I have never been charged to to
to walk in the door. So we see this something that
people go to one day a week, they're able to voluntarily fund
and have a building and have a staff.
So if people are going somewhere five days a week, they might
find more value in it. And there might be a incentive
on the other side of the equation for the teachers and
administrators to actually produce a much higher quality
product. So Pauline Dixon summarizes her
findings in the study Private Education is Good for the Poor,
a study of private schools serving the poor and low income
countries. She says the majority of poor
parents chose private, unaided schools for their children.
Just the fact that when you give people choice, they opt for the
competitive voluntary sector is so important because the
progressive is constantly saying we need to empower people and
let them vote. Well look, if your right to vote
was taken away, there would be some psychological damage, but
it would have no effect on the actual outcome of any election
where you send your kids to school.
Having school choice that drastically changes every aspect
of your life and the child's life.
So they want to give you tons of choice and something that
doesn't matter and no choice and something that actually
determines the outcome of your life.
Dixon goes on. Teacher costs are significantly
less in private, unhated schools than in government schools.
Gender equity is maintained in private, unaided, unaided school
enrollment. School enrollment is
underestimated. Free primary education serves to
crowd out private schools and does not increase overall
enrollment. Better pupil teacher ratios
prevail in private unheated than in government schools.
More teaching is occurring in private than in government
schools. Every single thing you can
imagine that we get the objections of.
She went to third world countries and found that the
voluntary sector was better able to achieve these ends than the
coercive sector. All we have to do is take the
progressive claim that they're always giving us.
They say, well, monopolies are really bad because with
monopolies you have higher costs and lower quality than you
otherwise would under competition.
So we need antitrust laws. The same thing applies for the
state having a monopoly on compulsory education.
They don't have the incentive to really get the good information
out there. I I forget the statistic that I
had found from Corey Deangelis. He cites the National Education
Foundation. I know I put it in the book.
It's something like spending on education has increased adjusted
for inflation, something like 280% since 1960.
And there are very few results to brag about.
In fact, the results are so bad after 12 years of schooling,
progressive say, well, obviously you have to go to college.
You didn't do much for 13 years. All you did was everything we
asked. 5 hours a day, you know, five days a week for 10 months
out of the years for for the last 12 years.
They know it's so bad that they're constantly advocating
you go to college afterwards because they know how little you
gained in there. So those are empirical
realities, along with the moral arguments as to why the
education sector should be brought under the volunteerism
umbrella. Do you think most people are
reachable? There's no right or wrong answer
to this, I'm just curious. Well, when I see how much things
have changed in my life, being a progressive now, being a
libertarian, being a, you know, drug addict for four years and
then being able to turn my life around, I think it is amazing to
see how much people can change when they surround themselves
with the right people and start developing the correct habits.
So yes, I actually do. As I said in our previous
conversation, I think the really important things are social
proof and repetition. So the more people claim to be
part of something, the more people want to be a part of it.
So the more people who are able to, you know, proudly identify
as libertarian or just wear it as a side label, as our mutual
friend Alan Mosley likes to say, I'm not, you know, doing a
libertarian show. I'm just doing a late night show
and I happen to be a libertarian as well.
So just, you know, sort of giving people that green light
that it's OK to be on our side makes many more people than we
otherwise would have want to join us.
And then having someone who you can really admire, who really
stands up to your enemies. You got almost the entire GOP
saying that George W Bush lied us into wars, which got, you
know, our soldiers killed and killed tons of civilians,
something you never would have imagined.
That they'd say, and they're anti CIA and a lot of them are
now on board with abolishing the FBI supporting Vivek Ramaswamy.
And it's not because I don't know if they read a lot of books
to come to that conclusion, but what happened was someone took
on their enemies, Donald Trump said My enemies are your
enemies. They're coming after me.
I'm just in their way, but they're really trying to get to
you. And he gave all these people a
green light to completely do a 180 on all these institutions
that they previously admired. So yes, I think the message can
be sold correctly. You know, people like Xavier
Malay really just inspire me with his ability to get on TV,
make the unapologetic case against collectivism, really
inspire people and show people that these ideas are worth
getting behind. So, I think so, yes.
Well, that's actually kind of a nice white pill to finish with
because sometimes it's very grim and Nah forget it and there's no
hope. But but you are somebody who's
been through quite a bit and has has come out really strong and
so you you what your testimony is, is is very valuable.
So of course, as always, I I want to recommend that folks
listen to Keith Knight because I I know I I don't want to call
you an up and Comer, Keith, because I almost, I feel like
that's condescending towards you.
You have already come up and you're I don't know exactly what
reading regimen you had, but you've learned a lot.
You know more about this material than a lot of people
who have been around this movement a lot longer than you
have. So I highly recommend Keith's
book, Domestic Imperialism 9 Reasons I Left Progressivism.
You'll find it linked down here in the description of the video,
also on the show notes page tomwoods.com slash 2436.
So thank you very much, Keith. Tom, thanks for having me.
And thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
Become a smarter libertarian in just 30 minutes a day.
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