00:00:19.900Awesome. So I'm a classical liberal and a very historically conscious one,
00:00:25.800And I think it's good to talk to another person who identifies broadly within that camp.
00:00:33.620So I would like to ask you to set some order in the conceptual chaos.
00:00:40.180Because right now, especially in culture wars and in social media,
00:00:45.560there are people who use terms like liberalism, classical liberalism, modern liberalism, progressivism, anarcho-capitalism, minarchism.
00:00:54.440They constantly use these terms. Conservatism is another term. I don't think that they know what they mean, or at least I think that they're using frequently these terms in a way that is conceptually untied to their historical meaning.
00:01:12.620So I would like to ask you to tell me how you understand these notions and how do you understand the history of the movement?
00:01:20.240well when i talk when i use these terms i'm generally drawing upon a historian that we
00:01:26.940value a lot at the mises institute where i am and that's a historian named ralph rako
00:01:30.760and i recently edited a book by him which was essentially a uh a history of political thought
00:01:38.140and so he uses he uses in fact similar term to you right about conceptual chaos right because
00:01:44.800if we're going to take a historical view of these sorts of terms, we have to use terms that don't
00:01:51.160change very much over time. Otherwise, it makes no sense. If we're trying to apply the term
00:01:57.340conservative today to how people use the term conservative in the 18th century, it's just
00:02:02.000where we're going to have to clarify a bunch of stuff. And so it is important to have a good
00:02:07.320historical sense of what liberalism means. And that's what historically would have just been
00:02:11.580just liberalism, not classical liberalism. We have to use the qualifier classical now
00:02:17.980and apply to liberalism because so many other groups have attempted to use the term and co-opt
00:02:23.520the term. But as we use the term, we're referring to this 400-year-old ideology that goes back
00:02:32.220really to 17th century Britain for the most part, but has even deeper roots in Western Europe.
00:02:39.820But most people would say, OK, it really in an identifiable form goes back to John Locke and also the levelers in 17th century England.
00:02:49.600And these are people who started to talk about freedom of speech, about property rights, about even what later we would call constitutional rights, legal obstacles to state power, those sorts of things in a in a very structural, very movement wide way.
00:03:07.960They were trying to put together an actual political movement. And so this is then the tradition that we're following up through the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. And for Americans, of course, very important, the influence of these ideas then on the American revolutionaries, especially, say, Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, which is a nice encapsulation of classical liberal ideals as discussed in that document.
00:03:35.420And then these ideas continued well into the 19th century, both in the United States, but also in Western Europe, especially among theorists in France and also in the United Kingdom as well, although there were variations among these people within those groups.
00:03:52.500But all through all of that time, it was called simply liberalism. And people understood for the most part what this meant. This was the ideology of laissez-faire. It was the ideology of very restrained foreign policy. It was the peace party and low taxes, very little in terms of tariffs. It was the free trade party.
00:04:13.420and that is what that's what liberalism was but in the 20th century then other groups started to
00:04:19.320co-opt it and you had john maynard canes for example who called himself a liberal but wasn't
00:04:25.720one and what you'll encounter and i don't know how it is in the uk but in the in america if you go
00:04:30.340through a political science program in college you're going to get this general narrative you're
00:04:35.380going to get oh yes you had these 18th and early 19th century liberals uh but then in the 20th
00:04:42.620century liberalism uh the the natural continuation of liberalism was into what we now call social
00:04:48.540democracy for example it was the ideology of franklin roosevelt the ideology of woodrow
00:04:54.540wilson of canes and of his followers later people who started to talk about how it was good to
00:05:00.460regulate the economy and the focus simply became on social policy right you need to uh um fulfill
00:05:07.420be yourself, fulfill whatever your sexual desires are, things like that.
00:05:13.280Those sorts of things became associated with liberalism,
00:05:16.780partly due to some errors that John Stuart Mill had inserted in there.
00:05:21.340And this is a reason why modern leftists like John Stuart Mill so much,
00:05:24.740is he kind of creates this bridge between real liberalism,
00:05:28.720that is the laissez-faire free market type,
00:05:30.660and this modern interventionist thing we call liberalism.
00:05:33.900So now you've got Hillary Clinton calling herself a liberal.
00:05:36.120We got all of these people on the left who are anti-freedom, they're high tax, they're pro-regulation, which is basically the opposite of historical liberalism, but that's what they call themselves now, and that's why we have to use the qualifier classical liberalism.
00:05:52.040But for any historian who's trying to create some sort of real story throughout history, you're stuck with the term liberalism, because that's what everybody understood it was in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, really.
00:06:06.600And the 20th century messed all that up.
00:06:09.400So you just have to keep that in mind.
00:06:12.460And there is a battle now over the term.
00:06:14.700I find that you've got some groups that don't want to be associated with conservatism, but they want to be sort of the free market party.
00:06:23.860So now they call themselves classical liberals, but they take a very moderate, mild view.
00:06:32.380And they, however, are in the same general tradition as the libertarians, as we call them.
00:06:39.060They're just simply a more radical wing of classical liberalism.
00:06:43.040So, yes, if you are encountering people who are generally pro-free market, they're free speech, they believe in rights in this general metaphysical way.
00:06:52.960Sure, those people are liberals, but there is the more moderate wing and then there's the more radical wing, which we would call today the libertarians.
00:07:01.800And that's always been true for more than 200 years now.
00:07:05.660So I don't get too much caught up on, oh, is this person an anarcho-capitalist?
00:07:10.440that's just simply if you had a venn diagram of classical liberalism that would be one group
00:07:16.100within there just the most radical group perhaps but if we once we start introducing all of these
00:07:22.480other labels that i'm not sure how constructive it is especially if people are trying to use
00:07:28.960those labels to exclude themselves from the larger liberal tradition it's better to just
00:07:32.660accept it as a big tradition that there are certainly better and worse groups within it
00:07:39.420depending on your own point of view. And so I just accept it as something that exists historically,
00:07:45.120and we should just be aware of that. Awesome. Thank you very much. I have several things to
00:07:49.800ask you here because that's a very interesting conversation. Number one, I think, speaking of
00:07:55.940John Stuart Mill, I think you're completely correct. And I would say that several leftists
00:08:01.860right now in academia, and I was in academia, I was teaching for six years. I have a PhD in
00:08:07.780philosophy i was focusing a lot on free will and i was very much interested with respect to the
00:08:13.300question of how free will ties into politics and the kind of what does it mean to respect the person
00:08:18.900and the person's freedom so what i saw was that there is a new generation of academics some of
00:08:27.800them are really young who are trying to look back to the past and completely change do completely
00:08:34.980revise the perception of the liberal tradition, and they almost invariably cite Thomas Paine
00:08:43.500and John Stuart Mill. I think one of the problems that I see in this, especially incorporation of
00:08:53.800John Stuart Mill, is that they take a phrase that John Stuart Mill took from Wilhelm von Humboldt
00:09:01.260that talks about the self-development of a person.
00:09:08.460that self-development can be outsourced to the collective.
00:09:14.160I think one of the most important ways to wake people up
00:09:19.360is to say that others cannot self-develop you.
00:09:23.440So self-development can be outsourced to any other group.
00:09:28.100I think that's one of the things that I see. I don't know if you see it as well. If you see a general trend of argumentation within academia and intellectual circles that present the state as the ultimate agent in self-realization, in achieving autonomy, which seems to me to illustrate the contradiction that you can't self-realize, self-govern, self-develop people without them.
00:09:58.100doing it themselves what do you think about this line of thinking well i think the whole debate
00:10:04.140really illustrates uh a strategy that anti-liberals anti-free market people have tried to use for
00:10:11.180quite a long time it was the same way when i was in graduate school was uh my professors uh if you
00:10:17.660if they you became known as sort of a libertarian in the department right and and they always wanted
00:10:22.700to bring it back to john stewart mill it was really quite amazing they viewed on liberty as
00:10:27.260essentially like the bible of liberalism because it fit into their conception but mill had so little
00:10:36.180focus on economics that it really sets him apart from most classical liberals is that um he did not
00:10:43.700favor free trade uh which which in those times free trade included trade with everybody both
00:10:49.660internationally and domestic this was absolute focus among liberals mill just straight up said
00:10:56.280oh, I don't really think that's very important. Mill also was bad on foreign policy. He thought
00:11:01.080interventionism and imperialism was okay under certain circumstances. So this actually really
00:11:07.960made him the opposite of the sort of liberalism we got from the Manchester School, from Richard
00:11:11.820Cobden, and so on. And his focus was, as you know, right, it was on this personal development idea.
00:11:19.140And as Reiko points out in his history of political thought, he thinks a lot of it really
00:11:23.260just stems from mill's bizarre personal problems so mill was the serial adulterer he had all of
00:11:30.820these personal problems in terms of trying to reconcile his puritanical personal views
00:11:35.820with the larger social uh conditions in england at the time so he decided oh what liberalism
00:11:42.640really means is freeing ourselves from uh social pressure freeing ourselves from social control so
00:11:49.720he took liberalism away from concentrating on reducing the power of the state which is what
00:11:55.180liberalism had always been focused on and instead instead saying oh look at these people who have
00:11:59.980morals that are constraining us we need to get rid of that we need to in fact use the power of the
00:12:06.080state to overturn social pressure and these institutions that impose on us some sort of moral
00:12:12.680view when in reality those weren't even state institutions a lot of the time so he had this
00:12:18.560obsession then with people should be able to express themselves and do whatever they want
00:12:22.560have sex with whoever they want and that became his obsession and because he was popular and he
00:12:27.460was a good writer he managed to convince many people that that was actually the proper view
00:12:31.940of liberalism when really through most of its history the true liberals have been focused on
00:12:36.700economic freedom and on restraining the power of the state because that affects every aspect of
00:12:41.260your life if you can't buy and sell if you can't save money if you can't support your family
00:12:45.440That is just devastating to you, and something far more important in the liberal view than some social issues, and being free from having some disapproving relatives who don't care for your personal morals.
00:12:59.160Right. Another thing I see is that lots of people have moved away from liberalism after the 1929 market crisis and the crash because they were sort of convinced that this was a free market failure.
00:13:20.160And you mentioned John Maynard Keynes before. I think they definitely cite John Maynard Keynes and Keynesian economics as the sort of paradigm that completely demolished free market economics.
00:13:34.500And there is sort of a general consensus in most people, I'd say most people who are very much against the free market, that Keynes won the debate.
00:13:48.880and academia now lots of lots of liberals within academia now they they call themselves liberal
00:13:56.820perfectionists most classical liberals tend to be in economics departments but when it comes to
00:14:03.040philosophy political philosophy politics they tend to to be liberal perfectionist which more
00:14:08.420like social liberal or new liberals is the the progressive status so how important is it i think
00:14:15.860it's important to go back to the to that crisis and give a new the the classical liberal perspective
00:14:23.460or the liberal perspective on it what caused that crisis and why is k why do you think ames is wrong
00:14:30.120economic history is very important right in making the case uh because philosophical arguments
00:14:37.460will help in certain circumstances but as friedrich hayek in a great essay on on markets
00:14:44.740and the historians notes that so and you see this in your daily life people's ideological views
00:14:51.500rely very very heavily on their view of history right how do they if they're convinced in school
00:14:56.760as most people are if they go through public school in america they're convinced that
00:15:01.320industrialization ruined the lives of western europeans right that everybody was living these
00:15:07.740wonderful lives on farms these bucolic paradise and then industrialization comes along and makes
00:15:13.200everybody poor tons of people believe that because that's what they were taught in school
00:15:16.560so you can you could talk philosophy you talk market economics till you're blue in the face
00:15:21.140but if they believe at the end of the day that market economics turned everybody into these
00:15:25.500poppers working in horrific uh satanic mills as the the term was right in the 19th century
00:15:31.200then you're gonna have a hard time getting them to support free markets in the same way as the
00:15:35.580great depression right people believed that uh market economics led to the great depression so
00:15:41.120it's very important to keep fighting that debate but it's a very interesting thing that happens
00:15:47.120at least in the american version of history which is that in the 19th century you had this is the
00:15:53.240way the narrative goes the 19th century you had free markets and uh but then fortunately and that
00:15:58.960led to the gilded age and extreme income uh inequality and industrialization in america
00:16:06.200that turned everybody into paupers fortunately then you had theodore roosevelt come along and
00:16:10.720he broke the trusts, and they instituted a bunch of federal regulation. They got rid of the free
00:16:15.620markets. They got rid of the robber barons. But then, magically, in the 20s, free markets came
00:16:21.620back, and America was totally laissez-faire again. And then that caused the Great Depression.
00:16:27.540And then if you follow that narrative, it keeps happening over and over again. For example,
00:16:33.520um in the 1980s america was somehow laissez-faire again under ronald reagan and there were no
00:16:40.860regulations on the market and that caused a variety of problems and then in 2007 you had
00:16:45.980the housing bubble and that was caused by so much laissez-faire uh because the the u.s economy was
00:16:51.960totally unregulated this they keep saying that again and again that magically laissez-faire
00:16:56.880keeps coming back the reality of course is that the u.s has been progressively more um
00:17:03.360regulated and higher tax and far less laissez-faire every year since the late 19th century.
00:17:11.620So, yeah, by the 1920s, when you have the situation that is leading to the Great Depression,
00:17:18.820there's no laissez-faire. What you have created in 1913 is a central bank,
00:17:23.220and a central bank is absolutely central to the boom-bust business cycle. And so in his
00:17:29.460economic history of the Great Depression. Economist Murray Rothbard, he's got a book
00:17:34.420called America's Great Depression, where he looks, he tries to take a nice empirical,
00:17:38.840hard look at what really did cause the Great Depression. And it turns out that it did,
00:17:43.820in fact, follow the general narrative that we know that central banks and monetary inflation
00:17:50.600leads to the boom-bust cycle. And if we look throughout the 1920s, you have a series of
00:17:55.140bubbles and a lot of monetary inflation taking place that lo and behold then leads to the crash
00:18:01.620in 1929 now the depression itself wasn't caused by that crash so the depression was caused by
00:18:09.260herbert hoover and franklin roosevelt both coming in and creating a vast new regulatory regime
00:18:16.440in the United States that turned what could have been a six- or eight-month crash and recovery
00:18:25.440into this 10-year ordeal because the economy simply wasn't allowed to function anymore under
00:18:32.260the New Deal and under Hoover's earlier changes. And you can contrast this then with the 1920-1921
00:18:39.880recession, which after World War I, there was a crash, but the federal government took no action.
00:18:44.620and the the u.s recovered from that very deep recession uh within a year and so you can
00:18:53.180contrast those two things the the federal government takes no action has a quick recovery
00:18:56.700also caused by the way by monetary inflation on the back of policies from the central bank
00:19:02.780and then in the but then in the late 1920s and early 1930s the federal government intervenes
00:19:08.960with tons of new regulation, tons of new subsidies,
00:19:11.840and that actually creates this long-lasting depression
00:19:36.460I mean, I understand. You did say Rothbard's America's Great Depression book and stuff, but could you give us, in a nutshell, one or two arguments that are really pithy and concise and sort of can wake someone up?
00:19:55.740Well, you simply have to impress upon people that, first of all, the idea that the central bank has saved us from depressions and from major economic dislocations is simply a myth. And so you need to present those facts, right?
00:20:11.580There's this myth that the Federal Reserve, since it was created in 1913, has prevented any serious economic problems.
00:20:17.960Of course, the Fed was there for the Great Depression.
00:20:22.020The Fed was there for repeated recessions in the 1950s.
00:20:25.440It was there for the mass inflation of the 1970s and the huge recessions of the late 70s and early 1980s.
00:20:34.440It was there for the housing bust in 2007, and it's been there for what has been since about 2010, an ongoing problem of a continually larger gap of income distribution in terms of, thanks to Fed policies, thanks to the central bank policies, you really are in a situation where you're getting wealthy asset owners getting richer and richer,
00:21:01.520and normal wage earners are making far less progress.
00:21:05.420So all of the things that they tell us capitalism causes
00:21:08.080are things that are caused by the central bank.
00:21:11.180And the central bank is central to the Great Depression.
00:21:13.040It's central to the inflation of the 1970s.
00:21:15.860And it's central to our ongoing decline
00:21:30.820you just get this constant drumbeat of the opposite so you just have to counter the constant
00:21:35.760myth making that the the economic left gives you on all of these issues and unfortunately there's
00:21:41.640no other way to do it you just have to present a different view of history for the most part
00:21:47.160but at the same time for people who are going to want to get into actual economic theory that's a
00:21:52.140very small percentage of people i think who want to get get into uh deep economic arguments some
00:21:57.920will but you have to be able to present that information as well and of course we've got
00:22:03.020there's the theory is excellent in terms of this is austrian school economics business cycle theory
00:22:09.660sort of stuff the theory is very very good uh but you're also going to have to demonstrate that it
00:22:14.740plays out in the historical data as well yes i i agree with you the question is if few people are
00:22:23.240going to read economic history and most people won't how do we fight against the myth and in
00:22:29.180what sense in the sense not in arguments but there's a question there with respect to political
00:22:34.660power because if there is this widespread myth that it's free markets that constantly cause
00:22:44.020all the problems and this myth is propagated by several parties that have vested interest
00:22:52.240to propagate it and do control major political institutions because they crave power and they
00:22:59.980have sort of taken over a centralized state and an increasingly centralized state
00:23:05.820how are we going to fight back against this is it going to be by elections by winning elections
00:23:14.540is it going to be by trying to convince the few that will be will listen is it by trying to get
00:23:22.000trying to get at the power of these institutions?
00:23:25.940How are we going to dislodge them from that position
00:23:30.460where they are able to propagate that myth?
00:23:34.720Well, on the more philosophical level,
00:23:36.700just in terms of getting people's attention,
00:23:38.460you do have to appeal to people's sense of justice.
00:23:41.460You have to explain to them that they are, in fact, being ripped off.
00:23:44.820This is a slogan we have at the Mises Institute.
00:23:48.140People are like, why do you study economics? It's so boring.
00:23:51.120The reality is we study economics so we can learn how we're being ripped off, right?
00:23:55.920You can only see the way the regime is ripping you off, impoverishing you, destroying lives, stealing money, essentially, from ordinary people, if we understand the economic mechanisms by which the regime does those things.
00:24:08.300So you have to explain that, but you do have to then appeal to people's sense of justice, right?
00:24:14.700People don't like to be ripped off, and also people don't like to see innocent people being ripped off.
00:24:19.540But they don't appreciate that the state is doing all of this ripping off because they've been taught their whole lives that the state saves them from criminals and bandits who are ripping them off.
00:24:28.840When in the reality, the most wholesale criminal in this kleptocratic regime that most Americans live under is, in fact, the central government.
00:24:39.060And so that's going to be something very difficult to overcome because the U.S. government is one of the most powerful governments in the history of the world.
00:24:44.880probably the most powerful government in the history of the world, and relies on the two
00:24:49.720things that governments rely on most to keep their power, which is propaganda and just outright force.
00:24:55.780So to go against that is very, very difficult. You can go against the propaganda very well,
00:25:00.480since there is, at least in America, some semblance of free speech still tolerated. But of course,
00:25:04.840you don't have nearly the machinery that the regime has through the school system,
00:25:08.940through media and so on. And then, of course, just their monopoly on force is just so huge.
00:25:14.880because Americans for so long in the 20th century had so much faith in it.
00:25:20.040How are you going to overcome that, though?
00:25:21.900Well, elections will be of limited help,
00:25:24.120at least as long as most Americans' ideology is currently what it is.
00:25:29.100For the most part, most Americans believe that U.S. government is illegitimate,
00:25:32.940that it does good things, and that you have to support it.
00:25:38.540It's not nearly as bad as it was during the old Iraq War days,
00:25:41.920but now to oppose the government you'll still encounter certain conservatives who will say you
00:25:47.580hate america if you oppose the government basically when they say hate america what they
00:25:52.620mean is hate the government right when they say love america what they mean is love the government
00:25:56.160because they're still so wedded to this idea that the government is this mad this miracle worker of
00:26:01.840wonderful things and we must uh support it at all times uh what's this it's like a certain
00:26:07.700conservative sickness that you will encounter. Well, they'll say, oh, the U.S. government can't
00:26:11.960do anything right. It can't run a hospital. It can't regulate markets. Then they'll turn right
00:26:15.520around and say that the U.S. military is this paragon of virtue and the most wonderful thing
00:26:20.760in the whole universe. So very unclear thinking there. But in the end of the day, they're very,
00:26:25.620very supportive of the regime. And most Americans, I would say, for the most part, are. They just
00:26:30.120don't think that the government itself is a problem in a meaningful way. They'll complain
00:26:35.940about it all day but at the end of the day they absolutely think it needs to be very very powerful
00:26:40.720and should be more powerful in order to fix all of these problems in society so we've got our work
00:26:46.380cut out for us you because elections aren't going to change anything if people go into elections
00:26:52.340and vote for people who reflect their ideology if their ideology is oh the government's a problem
00:26:57.500solver it's going to make our lives better off they're going to go in and they're going to vote
00:27:00.520for people that that think that yeah there's going to be some variations on some social policy some
00:27:04.760people are going to be pro-abortion, some people will be anti-abortion, they'll be pro-gay
00:27:10.580person, anti-gay person, those little things that are tolerated in terms of actual debate.
00:27:15.740But when it comes down to it, the things that would really weaken the power of the state,
00:27:20.740getting rid of cutting taxes by a massive amount, for example, getting rid of the surveillance
00:27:26.740state, and getting rid of all those pillars that underlie what has become a national security
00:27:32.200state in the united states massively cutting the american uh regime's war powers those sorts of
00:27:38.940things which would threaten regime power in a real way there's no real debate over those things
00:27:44.280there's only just a small minority of libertarians uh that oppose that so i in order for people to
00:27:50.780actually come around to seeing the real nature of the regime you're going to need to have some
00:27:55.200sort of major crisis you're going to need to have people uh there's going to need to be major
00:28:00.060economic dislocation there's going to need to be a significant decline in the standard of living
00:28:03.780there is going to need to be some sort of major foreign policy disaster that opens people's eyes
00:28:10.300to this because you can argue philosophy till you're blue in the face but most people when
00:28:15.800they're thinking about what is the legitimacy of this regime they're looking at the immediate past
00:28:21.380they're looking at what is their personal economic situation and as long as things seem okay
00:28:28.480then they're not going to demand any significant change there so to implement all these changes
00:28:36.600such as slashing taxes um you know destroying the surveillance state and etc one would require
00:28:44.620to possess political power so what's the best way for libertarians to gain that in order to fight
00:28:51.200against this regime that becomes progressively less respective of our liberties and your liberties?
00:29:00.560Well, the only real strategy I've seen that's actually worked in the last century or so
00:29:07.600has simply been breaking up large regimes into smaller pieces.
00:29:11.020The best case scenario is something along the lines of the breakup of the Soviet Union.
00:29:15.540I can see no examples of a centralized state that just magically gives up a lot of its power. I looked and I haven't found really examples of this where, oh, we'll voluntarily break up into smaller pieces.
00:29:31.380Oh, we'll give up a significant portion of our power and just we'll do less.
00:33:59.340oh, well, couldn't the United States break up into two pieces?
00:34:02.100oh well then they'll be constantly at war with each other really why uh americans and the canadians
00:34:07.460haven't been constantly at war with america and nor can you claim oh well the u.s just dominated
00:34:12.820canada during all that period not true since canada wasn't even a sovereign state until the
00:34:17.1401930s so really most of that history was the u.s having a peer state on its own border which was
00:34:24.340the british empire which of course governed the foreign policy of canada well into the 20th
00:34:30.100century. So none of those arguments really work. And also, we can't assume, why would we assume
00:34:37.460that Americans could in no way enter into some sort of mutual defense pact in North America,
00:34:43.920as the United States was originally founded as? The first constitution of the United States from
00:34:49.280the 1770s, not the one currently allegedly in effect, was simply a defense pact. Overwhelmingly,
00:34:55.860It was, hey, the states are going to work together for mutual defense. And everyone recognized that that's helpful. People who promote NATO can see the benefits of that. And in order to have NATO, you don't need to have a unified state in order to get the benefits of that.
00:35:13.100So this is just the knee-jerk reaction of anyone who is in favor of a very strong government.
00:35:20.860What they always revert to is, oh, there's some foreign boogeyman who wants to take over the country,
00:35:27.140so therefore you can never have real freedom.
00:35:30.800You can never have anyone free from the boot of Washington, D.C.,
00:35:34.540otherwise the Chinese, the Soviets, whoever you want to name, are going to take over.
00:35:38.460And this is why William F. Buckley, the leader of the conservatives in the 50s and 60s in America, outright said that defeating the Soviets is so important that Americans, if necessary, should institute a totalitarian government within their own shores.
00:35:54.100This is the view of the hysterical foreign policy cold warrior sort of thinker is, hey, if totalitarianism is what it takes to keep the foreigners out, I'm all for it. That's essentially, that's been their position since the 50s. And that's what underlies this whole America can never, we can never substantially reduce the power of the central government because then the Chinese will take over.
00:36:22.580even though they never present any actual means by which that would take place since, first of all, they're not on our border.
00:36:37.380There's a great book on this called Unrivaled.
00:36:40.740It looks at how, yeah, Chinese GDP is close to that of the United States, but China has a billion people,
00:36:49.400which means that, and that their standard of living is much, much, much lower, which means
00:36:55.840that this idea that they are actually a rival of the United States in terms of military power
00:37:00.560is simply untrue. That it's, where are they going to come up with all these funding when
00:37:07.600much of the population lives near subsistence level anyway? Whereas Americans, because of
00:37:13.400their free market history, have an immense amount of wealth with which to fight wars,
00:37:17.840even with countries that are larger. And the book does a lot of empirical analysis on this,
00:37:22.020showing that smaller countries defeat larger countries all the time when those smaller
00:37:26.060countries are more wealthy. The Japanese beat China on numerous occasions in the 19th century,
00:37:32.400for example, even though it was a much, much smaller country with much, much lower GDP.
00:37:37.620And you can see this in a variety of examples. Yes. So another thing I wanted to ask you about
00:37:44.700is about is has to do with mass migration and we could tie this to the previous discussion we were
00:37:51.260having because when i mentioned threats you you mentioned hard power a flood you said that chinese
00:38:00.380are not going to send the flotilla across the pacific ocean and uh yeah for fair play but
00:38:07.260when it comes to soft power examples it seems that there are such efforts and let me just say
00:38:14.700it has been found that qatar is one of the major founders of u.s universities so can you say that
00:38:22.740in in several respects um there is an issue of people trying to affect the u.s from outside
00:38:32.100to to a to an extent that is going to have a negative effect on its culture and instead of
00:38:41.460And instead of directing the culture towards where you want it to go, they're directing it towards more totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, in which case this kind of foreign interference is not going to be pro-liberty, but it's going to be against liberty.
00:39:01.720because in Europe right now we do have a problem with multiculturalism
00:39:07.200and there seems to be a very bad combination of relatively open borders
00:39:13.580and border policies that don't seem to be aiding each nation
00:39:21.980and the national interest of each nation we're talking about in every country
00:39:30.260There are stories about the kind of welfare tracks and the social benefits that people in Germany get, non-Germans, people from Syria, for instance, that you'll say they're getting many times the amount of money that a worker gets.
00:39:49.860So culture is important, it seems to me.
00:39:53.620So could you say that, what's your possession on that?
00:39:56.180On the combination of welfarism and mass migration?
00:40:02.460Well, there's a couple of different issues that need to be noted in mass migration.
00:40:06.240There is just simply, are people physically moving to your country, right?
00:40:10.860There is, how much welfare are they getting for free when they get to your country?
00:40:16.140And then the third issue is, are they given the right to vote? And how quickly? Libertarians, I've noticed, this is a very controversial topic among libertarians because they'll say, oh, well, you have to have just open borders because to be a truly free market, you have to just allow people to move wherever they want, whenever they want.
00:40:36.800uh but they they secretly insert other assumptions there as well they secretly assume that you should
00:40:44.300also give citizenship to these people almost immediately most of the open borders libertarians
00:40:49.220have actually no theory um no and no consistent position whatsoever on the issue of naturalization
00:40:55.300and citizenship it's just always oh people should move here and then a few years later they get to
00:40:59.540become voters here. So that's something that needs to be pointed out. And there should be no
00:41:07.880assumption that people who are just physically present in a polity, a city-state, a country,
00:41:14.800whatever, that naturalization and citizenship follows from that necessarily. And this is
00:41:21.260something I see that the open borders people still haven't grappled with. They almost never
00:41:24.600mention it it's just assumed all those people should get citizenship and soon and then if you
00:41:29.840try to ask them about it they don't have any particular real explanation other than oh if
00:41:34.500you live somewhere you should be able to vote so the government can't oppress you as if voting
00:41:38.740somehow kept the government from oppress you as kind of a ridiculous position anyway your one
00:41:43.300100 millionth of a vote will protect your rights absurd position uh so you could have significant
00:41:51.560amounts of immigration without granting citizenship in any way. In fact, you do see quite a few
00:41:56.700countries that function this way, especially, say, countries in the Middle East that rely a lot on
00:42:03.040foreign labor. Now, I'm not saying those should be models for the United States, but what I'm
00:42:07.460saying is that you don't have to have a connection between citizenship and immigration. And then,
00:42:13.700obviously should cut out all uh subsidies for immigrants whether legal or not uh this is what
00:42:22.700you're doing is you're creating a system that's subsidizing immigration so if you want if you're
00:42:27.480going to claim that immigration should be totally free market then migrants should not be able to
00:42:33.640access government subsidies in any way it's bad enough that native-born citizens get free stuff
00:42:41.400all the time at the expense of the actual productive people, but it's especially bad
00:42:46.260that you're holding it out as a reward for people who move to the United States.
00:42:51.340So just as a very simple sort of issue to address that is, you could simply say that
00:42:56.560anyone coming to the United States would have to sign a piece of paper saying, I disavow
00:43:03.260access to any sort of welfare or public subsidy for the rest of my life.
00:43:10.300But anyone who doesn't do that is not allowed in. And the legal, illegal immigrant distinction shouldn't even matter. It should just simply not be there as a possible subsidy. And then in a certain way, in a certain non-economic way, offering citizenship is a subsidy as well.
00:43:25.880And in the U.S., it only takes five years. But you've got countries like Japan where you could live there for decades and citizenship is not considered a viable option. So these are all things that need to be considered. And certainly, yeah, what that means, that's just taking into account the realities of political culture that exist.
00:43:47.500And this was a point that Ludwig von Mises made, the leading Austrian economist, the namesake of our institute, is he noted that ideology matters. And Mises doesn't say this explicitly, but I think he understands it, is that ideology comes out of a complex historical development.
00:44:05.300It's not just something that people just kind of learn in a few months in school. And so then to have a situation where you're inviting and say your whole population is 10 million people, you invite in a million people that have no grounding whatsoever in this in this similar history, in this ideology and an understanding of how societies are supposed to work from a liberal perspective.
00:44:28.980you're essentially what you're doing is you're courting the destruction of your whole ideological
00:44:34.280system and your whole cultural system these aren't things that can just be denied you have to
00:44:38.600actually accept this and it's unfortunate that in the united states what you've got is an extremely
00:44:43.840centralized regime that dictates immigration policy to everybody else they're telling small
00:44:49.560towns 2 000 miles away from the u.s capital what people they have to accept in their community how
00:44:55.380much money they have to give them, those sorts of things. And that's just, in my opinion, an insane
00:44:59.480way of doing things. So in that respect, you'd be in favor of relatively close borders or just
00:45:06.600against the combination of open borders and welfarism, which I mean, welfarism.
00:45:12.600Yeah. The absolute first thing you have to do is end the welfare. Right. And you have to extend
00:45:19.640the citizenship requirement up to something that's going to be much, much longer than five years.
00:45:24.420right because people have to be integrated then if they're going to become political participants
00:45:29.000in the regime this is this goes far beyond simply showing up and getting a job for a few years so
00:45:36.200those two things have to work have to change first the reality though is that yeah in terms of
00:45:41.780uh physically stopping the movement of peoples i don't see how you can get around the needs to
00:45:49.620have some sort of limits on that you've got two countries in the world where combined they've got
00:45:55.280two billion people and if you just say hey totally open border just come on over that's going to be
00:46:02.800just from a pragmatic point of view even if you didn't care about american culture or liberal
00:46:08.500ideology or any of that stuff the amount of political instability and conflict that would
00:46:15.740result from 200 million Chinese and Indians and Asians or of whatever type moving into North
00:46:22.600America, the sort of violence that would result would be shocking. And so just as on a prudential
00:46:30.000level, you can't allow that sort of thing to happen. So clearly there has to be some sort of
00:46:34.360limit. I think you can let the market to some extent lead on that. You could have a situation
00:46:39.660where, okay, if people are going to move here, they have to have like an affirmative invitation
00:46:44.420from an actual employer from someone who's going to actually support them here and we need to
00:46:49.080document that and do that so then you're minimizing the amount of uh regulation you're doing on
00:46:56.140domestic businesses small business owners right lots of small business owners rely on foreign
00:47:00.780workers we have a whole foreign worker program where these people come up and they do a circuit
00:47:04.340throughout the western united states in terms of farm work and that's where at least it did occur
00:47:08.220before trump i'm not sure what the current status is and they often just go back to their home
00:47:12.240country i mean small business should be allowed to do that sort of thing but if you're gonna say
00:47:17.300hey show up whether you have a job or not just squat in the streets right no connection to the
00:47:22.800actual domestic economic situation that that strikes me as an insane policy i i i agree with
00:47:30.320you on this and um there's a there's an objection i frequently encounter where people say well if
00:47:37.420you are in favor of a sort of controlled border, you can't justify that in terms of a liberal
00:47:43.800approach, because liberalism is pro-freedom of movement, and you are raising an artificial
00:47:51.260barrier to freedom of movement with the border. So what is your response to that? Is it that
00:47:58.380from a pragmatic perspective, you have to make some concessions and restrict freedom of movement?
00:48:06.420is that a pragmatic argument or is it another sort of argument well there's a two couple of
00:48:13.960things that need to be considered first of all as if you're going to be a hardcore liberal in the
00:48:18.100old style in the 19th century style you do have to always wonder what is the effect of a policy
00:48:23.180going to have on the central government right centralization of power is always something that
00:48:27.020the government wants for good reason because centralization by itself increases state power
00:48:35.480So first of all, what you want to do is decentralize immigration decisions, right?
00:48:41.280This idea, the central planning that goes on in Washington about, oh, we're going to accept these immigrants here, we're going to accept those immigrants there.
00:48:47.960We're going to dictate the same immigration policies to Montana as to California and so on.
00:48:54.220That's just the sort of thing where you're letting bureaucrats decide things for 330 million people.
00:48:58.740historically also in the united states immigration did was not a prerogative of the central national
00:49:05.200government until really the 1880s if you go delve into the history of it you can see that it was
00:49:10.640state policy that attempted to deal with whatever cost you might have of public charges that is
00:49:19.000people who immigrated here and then went on welfare centers because there was some welfare
00:49:22.000in the 19th century they'd come here they'd become paupers right this was a real problem that you had
00:49:26.080to address but that was done all at the local level the federal government was was in charge
00:49:30.480of naturalization and citizenship but that's not the same thing as immigration as as we discussed
00:49:37.280so first of all yes i i want to make sure we're not just giving the federal government control
00:49:43.060over everything right i don't like this idea of sending federal troops into every city across
00:49:47.960america to round up immigrants and arrest people and oh they're ice agents they can do whatever
00:49:54.940they want and by the way if you're not a citizen you have no rights that's actually not what the
00:49:58.580bill of rights says right your rights are not contingent on citizenship uh so those are things
00:50:05.040that i do not like to see however at the same time if you're going to have a community that is going
00:50:11.460to accept people in and they're going to become political actors within the community just as
00:50:18.220a reality and i guess you could call it a concession i mean a concession to reality
00:50:22.580that the point there is not to regulate free movement.
00:50:27.400The point there is not to regulate economic exchange.
00:50:32.140The point there is to prevent political actors
00:50:36.000from taking part in a political system
00:50:40.300where they have never actually invested themselves in any way.
00:50:46.780going back to the levelers and well into the late 19th century,
00:50:49.900there was a recognition that if people were going to be political actors within your system they
00:50:55.040were going to participate politically usually through voting by the 19th century is what they
00:50:59.180meant they needed to be invested in the system some way they needed to be a net taxpayer right
00:51:04.840they needed to be someone who was paying into the system not taking out and if you were a pauper a
00:51:10.720vagabond these are the terms they used uh you are someone who was a public charge then you weren't
00:51:16.420allowed to determine what the political system was for everybody else because you were essentially
00:51:21.100a you were sucking resources out of the system so you show up as a a new immigrant and they haven't
00:51:28.840contributed any to anything to the system they also they probably don't even understand how the
00:51:32.600system works just as a general liberal position going back centuries you don't give political
00:51:40.760power to those people so that's really what needs to be the real purpose of immigration control is
00:51:48.840controlling uh the way that people participate in the political system because then the state
00:51:55.200can be used against everybody as a tool as a cudgel so it's it's not about economic control
00:52:01.580it's about preventing a takeover the political system so they can be used against people
00:52:05.700Yeah, you don't want AOC's voter base to increase artificially. It's already large. It shouldn't be that large. The question that would be that even if all these issues are approached in the way you are saying, if a massive influx of people would eventually down the line lead them to say, well, we're many here, you have plummeting birth rates, we're increasing our numbers here.
00:52:35.000So, yeah, we signed those documents, but it's time for us to revise the previous agreement we had.
00:56:57.540So what you're going to get then is more price inflation, because naturally, under Trump,
00:57:02.340who's always been an inflationist, has allied with the central government to inflate the
00:57:06.660money supply at significantly high levels.
00:57:10.780Money supply growth is now at over 5% year-over-year, which is a 44-month high in terms of growth in the money supply.
00:57:19.140And so it's no surprise that now the official inflation rate, the price inflation rate, is up around 3%, even though the Fed's own target is 2%.
00:57:28.560This comes after, of course, historical price inflation, 40-year highs back in 2022 and in early 2023.
00:57:34.120And Americans have never recovered from that
00:57:36.640In terms of they lost 25% of their purchasing power
00:57:39.240Since COVID, since the COVID freakout in 2020
01:01:48.060And then the other aspect of it is the election of Trump kind of brought to an end some of the more extreme, crazy DEI stuff, like all the LGBT stuff that was just absolutely bonkers in the last couple of years of Biden.
01:02:01.100And that's a minor cultural thing, but I think it was good that the voters sent that message that, hey, we're more interested in paying our bills than in trying to create a society where drag queens are running things.
01:02:17.800Right. So, I mean, that that was that was a good development as well. But I don't see how that's enough to cancel out the insane Iran war, which is going to cost a lot of people a significant amount of their real purchasing power, also creating all sorts of global instability.
01:02:35.600that's probably going to touch off an arms race in the middle east if you're saudi arabia if
01:02:40.400you're turkey if you're iran you all have very good reason to pursue nuclear weapons now especially
01:02:46.700with israel out there talking about how once they get rid of iran then they're going after turkey
01:02:51.000they're actually saying this so that i would expect a new arms race now thanks to uh trump's
01:02:59.100uh destabilization of the region and one thing to add there though is that uh it's also erdogan's
01:03:07.580who is the turkey's president who has also said that he is going to go after them
01:03:13.580so it's it's not entirely unprovoked in that specific case yeah sure but i think this just
01:03:20.860seals the deal all the more uh and then you can just look around you say hey what's a country
01:03:25.180that the u.s isn't going to invade anytime soon it's north korea so you can see the benefits that
01:03:29.380of getting getting nukes in those cases right he has a he has a sort of personal friendship with
01:03:35.320kim perhaps uh but the you look at all of that you look at the ongoing uh tariff situation
01:03:45.400which we have no hope of just undoing once trump leaves office because you'll notice that trump
01:03:51.460raised tariffs in his first administration and biden didn't get rid of them so what what trump
01:03:57.340is doing in many ways especially since he's also supporting continuation of the fisa courts and
01:04:01.360other means of violating american civil liberties because trump is going all in on the national
01:04:06.880security state he's all going all in on more militarism both within and without the united
01:04:11.500states uh it's basically just the worst of the george w bush years that we're getting out of
01:04:17.540Trump? I mean, you could say it's like Bush's third term is what we're getting now. All the
01:04:22.700spending, all the police state stuff. And so is that enough to undo the little bit of progress
01:04:27.860he's done with regulation? I think it's a net negative. Right. So thank you very much for this
01:04:37.060interview. And I really enjoyed it. And I really think that we should be in touch. And I will send
01:04:46.240you some of the some messages if you'd like to to give me some of the sources for the economic data
01:04:53.240because this is a an issue i'm really interested in finding more about and i do think that there
01:04:58.940there is a sort of cultivation of sort of climate in the mega sphere that says everything's going
01:05:07.020perfect and everything's going to be perfect i don't think economically speaking this this is
01:05:39.660there in your website and your institute
01:05:41.740And I think for a final question, I know I said before it's a final question, I would like to just ask you, what is it that you do in a nutshell in the Mises Institute and why is it so important?
01:05:55.060Well, I'm the editor in chief here. So we're primarily an academic organization. We have PhD faculty that put out academic journals. We have academic conferences, that sort of thing.
01:06:03.500But my side of thing is to take that sort of information and package it for just the intelligent layperson, right? So if you go to the front page, M-I-S-E-S dot O-R-G, you're going to encounter short articles that take a lot of this economic history, economic theory, as well as some foreign policy.
01:06:20.360that's not really our focus, but there's some of that, especially since it impacts the economy so
01:06:24.020much, that is going to be written in such a way that it's going to be easy to read for a normal
01:06:31.020non-academic person. So that's primarily my job. We also try to make our work accessible just to
01:06:37.460members of the general public as well. Right. Thank you very much. And to those who view the