 I'm traveling this weekend to our Mises Circle event in Seattle, but I thought you might enjoy hearing a conversation I had with two very hardcore radio hosts in Fairbanks, Alaska about a week ago. We get into a really serious discussion about what libertarianism is all about and whether libertarians should be involved in the political process at all. And we even touch on the role of the Mises Institute and all of this. So if you're a libertarian, I guarantee you will enjoy this conversation. Have a great weekend. You've given a few speeches lately about, as long as the secession begins at home, you spoke not too long ago about the alternative right and the socialist left and a little further back even was what must be done. So listen to those three again a few times over the last several days and especially last night. Can we put these things together? What do we do? What are we seeing happening now? And is it good for us? Is it good for liberty? I do think what's happening is good for us. I think the first thing a libertarian needs to do, especially in a presidential election year and especially in a year like this, is decouple themselves psychologically from the whole process. In other words, it's unlikely that a libertarian candidate or a libertarian party candidate is going to win the election in November. And and thus it is at this point appears likely to your Trump or Hillary Clinton will and I'm perfectly at ease with either of those outcomes. And I think you should be too. In other words, that's not something that we can control necessarily. I think what we can control is doing our part to increasingly turn people away from Washington. The action's not in Washington. Trump has been the de facto president of the United States for the last year. Right. He's the president. He everyone listens to him and covers him in the media. Hillary and Bernie have been supporting cast Ted Cruz is apparently his character has been killed off in this ugly play. But it, you know, it doesn't so much matter who's elected. What matters is the psychology or psychosis behind the voters who do that electing. The hatred you spoke of between left and right is not about policy. It's about culture and psychology. In other words, people on the left and right are wired differently. When it comes to Washington, the policies are all the same. If you just wrote down what Hillary and Trump want to do, it's not all that different. And as a matter of fact, the Obama administration has deported about 2.5 million people very quietly during his eight years, which is far more that I think Trump is even talking about doing. So these aren't policy differences. We have to understand that these are cultural and psychological. So as libertarians, what we want to do is we want to say, look, the question is, how can we all get along? The only way we can get along is to de-yoke from Washington. We have to ratchet back the federalization of everything, and we have to decentralize political and economic and social power away from Washington. And we need to find ways in the marketplace and using civil society for us to talk to one another and get along. You don't hate your neighbor's guts because he likes vanilla. You like chocolate. He has Comcast. You have another cable provider. He has Blue Cross. You have Cygna, right? You don't care about these things. Your neighbor is just your neighbor. He may be a Baptist. You may be a Muslim, but you may not agree with each other, but you're not throwing rocks at each other's houses either. So what elections do is they give us ways to be hateful and divisive without having to look our neighbor in the face, right? We have anonymous voting, and it really is a process that pulls us apart, whereas the marketplace brings us together. Let's say some right-wing caricature guy, some redneck in Georgia, hates Mexicans and thinks Mexicans ought to be thrown out of the country. But you know what? You go into a Mexican restaurant. There's some Mexican immigrants working there. They have a great restaurant. The food's great. The redneck enjoys himself. Everyone has an amicable time. He pays his bill. The Mexicans may not say, gee, I may say, gee, I didn't know he was such a redneck and wants to deport us, but we'll take his ten bucks. And the redneck may say, well, I want to deport him, but the food and the margaritas are good, so he gives us ten bucks. And that may be as good as we can get in terms of smoothing over human relations. But it's a damn sight better than what the state does. And it's a damn sight better than what the political process does. So our task as libertarians is to make the case for unyoking and decentralizing it. It may be a tough sell to say, get rid of the government in its entirety. Get rid of core functions like the military and police and courts, although I personally strongly believe that we should. But it may be a tough sell. An easier sell is de-yoking and decentralizing to de-escalate all this hatred and nastiness. So that's how I see it. But for your own sanity, uncouple yourself psychologically from this electoral process because if you don't, it's going to make you crazy. And how do people get out of that mindset? It's really hard to convince people to pull out of that mindset because they only know one thing. Yeah, it is very hard to get people to pull out of that mindset. But we've taken the first step. And the first step is to prove to people that democracy doesn't work. And it can't work. They may not accept that, but they might accept that it's not work. In other words, look what's happening. There are millions and millions of people in America who will simply not accept the legitimacy of Hillary if she's elected or Trump if he's elected. And I'm not talking about voter fraud or questioning the di-bold machines or hanging chads like we saw in 2000, Bush v. Gore. And I'm not talking about, well, the campaign finance laws have to be changed because they make it so that certain special interests can affect the media and shape the election in ways that are unfair and that voters' real feelings weren't expressed at the polls. No, I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about people who will say even if the other side managed to gin up a tiny majority of the electorate, not a majority of the American people, but a tiny majority of the electorate, let's say 51 to 49. I don't care anymore. I hate Hillary's guts and I don't accept her as a valid or legitimate president. Now, I may pay my taxes. I may go to work every day. I may not go to the streets and try to burn down Washington or take up a pitch for. But we've finally reached the point where politics has become so divisive in this country and not coincidentally. This is by design. This isn't just something that happened organically. This is by design. And here I'm going to blame the left more than the right. This is by design of the left. Politics has become so divisive that people just don't accept the other side. And I think that's a beautiful thing. I think that's a healthy thing. I want people to wake up the Wednesday after the election this fall and say, I don't care that my guy or my gal didn't win. I don't accept the people who voted for Trump or the people who voted for Hillary or a bunch of yahoos and they're wrong. And I don't see it as valid just because they got a few more votes, a couple hundred thousand more votes. And I think that's a beautiful first step. And that may be painfully slow for those of us who don't believe in government as the organizing principle for a side. That may be painfully slow. But look, we're not progressive. We can't afford to be children and stamp our feet when we don't get our way today. We have to have the guts to try to be building something that we may never see in our lifetimes. Right? Isn't that the hallmark of a healthy society? People who work to build something lasting rather than just try to consume and be economic or monetary hedonist during their own lifetime? How important is it for libertarians to stick to their principles? Because I've read that more and more in different comments and different articles. Well, we can't just be ideologues. We can't be so sticklers to our principle. We'll never get anything done. But getting, at least in my mind, getting something done isn't necessarily having a guy rule over me in the White House. It's for personal freedoms. How important is principle to our movement, if I don't even know if I want to call it a movement, to our philosophy? Well, I think it's everything because Murray Rothbard talked about this. He talked about the difference between voting for someone and just having a rooting interest for someone. Now, we hear a lot about factions among libertarians. And I understand that. I think factions can be healthy and good. They can help us define ideas and principles. I'll go this far. I'll say I'm a fellow traveler with anybody who wants to significantly reduce or eliminate the scope of government in our lives. Okay, that's as broad as I'll go at a definition of libertarianism. And that would bring in a lot of people, I think. But beyond that, here's what we know is that the state grows incrementally. The great leaps forward. Look at the history of the 20th century. You start off with this period of World War I and the income tax, central banking, both are new things in America. Then you enter the Great Depression, which creates FDR and some government programs. Then you get into Social Security and Medicare. Then you get into all kinds of social legislation. So all of these were incremental things. The left is great at advancing the state incrementally. Libertarians are not so good at rolling back the state incrementally. So if you look at things in human history or times in human history, events in human history where liberty took a great stride forward, it usually wasn't incremental. It was usually some kind of upheaval. Like the former Soviet Union in 1989, like our own revolution with the British. So I'm not convinced that incrementalism works for the liberty side. In fact, I'm convinced that it does it. And I'm convinced that selling out principles to try to make not even modest gains, but perhaps to slow the scope of Leviathan is not tactically the way to go. Now, there are plenty of good people whom I respect who disagree. There are people who will look at, let's say, a legislative approach in Washington, something like the Cato Institute, and say, they may not have had any big libertarian victories, but how much worse would the legislative landscape look if Cato hadn't been there for the last 20 or 30 years? Okay, I'm willing to accept arguments like that. And I don't have any beef with anybody who says I'm a libertarian, but my passion is engaging in electoral politics whether that's trying to get a libertarian LP person elected or just a nominally more libertarian Republican versus a Democrat, whatever it might be. If that's your passion, knock yourself out. But we're talking about guerrilla war, which means we have limited time, limited manpower, limited resources. And from my own self-interested perspective, I think that the fight is better waged on the individual level, on the educational level than it is trying to engage and plug ourselves into the same systems, which are so overwhelmingly biased in favor of the two parties, which require so much money, which have such high barriers to access. The digital revolution has taught us one thing, that you can use the internet, you can use social media as unbelievable equalizers. Look at what it's done in the New York Times. There are Twitterers you've never heard of who seem to have as much power as major publications do now. So why would we spend our time and resources on the same old, same old systems when those systems are biased against us? Why shouldn't we do an end run around them? So I believe that that's what the Mises Institute tries to do. Our audience is not academia. Our audience is the intelligent lay person who just wants to know economics in a way that you're not taught. So I really believe in the guerrilla approach, which means fighting the war on far more equal footing in the spaces where we can. Yeah, the fight for our hearts and minds, education, we can definitely more than go toe to toe with the state. You were in the belly of the beast when you were with Dr. Paul there and watching NBC. Even if everyone wanted Dr. Paul to be president, would it even have been allowed? I mean, we're not talking about, there is, my opinion, there is no real choice. They say you can pick A or B, those are your only two choices. But as far as representative democracy or anything, it's all a joke, isn't it? Isn't it just all a joke? They will not allow change. Hopefully they'll collapse. But as far as working quote in the system, within the system and, you know, being the Trojan horse to destroy it, I just don't see it. We have to focus on our neighbors. Well, and Ron didn't see it that way either. Ron really viewed his role as educational, not he wasn't there to pass laws, convert his colleagues in Congress. You know, there's this new book out, apparently, that's been making the rounds, or that's going to be released soon, supposedly by an anonymous Democratic member of the U.S. House, who's wrote an exposé about how banal Congress really is and how no one cares what their constituents think, and they only vote based on special interests. And their only goal is reelection because they enjoy the accoutrements and the power that comes with being a member of Congress. And I remember seeing some of the Internet reaction to this. This is just in the last week or so. And this idea that this was somehow relevantory or shocking, I just want to ask people in America, what are you, five years old? Of course this is the way it is. This is the way it's always been. There's nothing shocking or novel about this book. Do you think your member of Congress gives a, you know what, about what you think? Congress responds to the carrot and the stick. So there's, you can either help them get re-elected or you could possibly help them get unelected. If you're a moneyed or an influential people, if you're not one of those two people, someone who can help them get elected or unelected, it doesn't matter what you say. You can write them emails about how they ought to vote on Obamacare until you're blue in the face. I mean, members of Congress have 700,000 constituents in an average district. And in most elections, 100 to 125,000 of them will vote, so which means you need 60,000 maybe, 65,000 votes in an area of 700,000 people to get elected to the US House. If you go back to colonial times and extrapolate how many members of Congress there should be today, there should be something like 10,000 members of Congress. And except in remote places or more spread out places like Alaska, your member of Congress should probably live within about a mile of you and you should know him or her and you should see him at the store or whatever. And they should be a little afraid to piss you off, almost like a small town mayor who might see you around. So we've gotten wildly unrepresentative in Congress. I mean, imagine this, a country of 320 million people with cultures and economies and geographies as diverse as Miami is to Fairbanks is to Des Moines is to Honolulu is to LA, okay? And yet there's not a single member of Congress out of all those people and all that diversity from the Green Party, from the Peace and Freedom Party, from the Labor Party, from the Libertarian Party. Are you kidding me? I mean, this is not a system that's working if you look at the Constitution where when it talks about the rules for the House and Senate, it basically says that the House and Senate can operate under the rules in which they choose and write themselves. So the Constitution never contemplated political parties per se. It never contemplated a patronage system where the majority party in the House and the Senate get to control all of the committees, which write legislation and again, those committees weren't contemplated in the Constitution. So what we have is this entire extra constitutional system in Congress whereby people get reelected through having a big war chest, then they stay reelected through voting the right way. Then by giving back money to the parties, they become party chairs. By becoming party chairs, they control legislation. By controlling legislation, special interests and lobbies have to come to them and work with them. And then when the whole thing's done and they're 65 and they wanted to retire, they can go make 500K or a million bucks a year representing pharma or the auto industry or whatever it might be. So this is extra constitutional stuff, folks. And if you need to read a book in 2016 written by an anonymous congressman to figure out that the whole thing's a joke, then all I can say is where have you been?