 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. I'm Matthew Feene. And I'm Tom Clougharty. And we're joined today by Jamie White, a friend of mine from London but most recently the leader of the ACT Party in New Zealand, a free market, almost libertarian party. He led them through their general election of 2014. It didn't go entirely to plan and that's part of what he's going to talk to us about today, about being a libertarian in politics. But, you know, Jamie has had a pretty interesting career up until this point. He was a philosophy lecturer at the University of Cambridge. He was a columnist with the Times of London. He was a management consultant, a currency trader. And his column was called Free Thoughts, correct? His column was called Free Thoughts. Well, not the one in the Times, that one was in City AM. But then this isn't his first radio when it comes to radio either. He worked with BBC Radio 4 on their analysis program, producing such hits as Yo Hayek and the Rule of Man vs. the Rule of Law among others. Now, is that the kind of thing that could only actually come out of state-funded radio like Yo Hayek? I mean, is that an equal time kind of thing? Is that how that happened? That's a good first question, right? Well, the BBC is quite scrupulous about trying to do that balance thing. It's part of their charter. And they go wrong, not out of intent, but because most of them are such lefties that they think they're being balanced even when they're not. But the woman who commissioned me to do this work isn't really a typical BBC person. She's a little more sympathetic to our kind of ideas than most people at the BBC, which may explain how I came to have the job. And what were those? Were those like an overview of Hayek's ideas and lives and life? Well, this program is called Analysis. It's, I think, a half-hour show that looks at ideas that are behind the news. And the Yo Hayek one was done just after the financial crash, and it was looking at the argument between the Keynesian response and the Hayekian response. And we thought it was an opportunity to just introduce people to Hayek's ideas, because they always hear the Keynesian ideas. Most people get no idea that there are other people who disagree. Another show I did was on riots. Why would we be doing a program on riots? Well, because there had just been one in London. And we were asking the question, how come people are generally law-abiding? Why aren't the riots all the time when you think about it as an interesting question? And so that's the kind of program it is. So, Jamie, tell me a little bit about running as a libertarian politician or maybe running libertarian politics in New Zealand. Well, I should be clear that the party that I became a leader of in the beginning of 2014 and the election was near the end isn't strictly a libertarian party. It's as close as you're going to get in a democracy. But there are elements of the party who are opposed to legalising drugs. There are elements of the party who sometimes wanted kind of restraints on property rights that they thought might suit them. And it's an impure party. But it's, I say, it's as libertarian as you're likely to get. The main problem that I had was not really connected with being a libertarian. It was connected with being a novice in politics. And so I made the mistake of often answering questions honestly when that was clearly the wrong thing to do. The most obvious case of a mistake was when I was asked if the government ought to interfere in consensual adult sex between brothers and sisters. And I have been asked this question before too. They're not on the air, thank God, in a bar. And I said that the government shouldn't, well, since I generally thought the government shouldn't have anything to do with consensual acts between adults, you extend that principle out and you get the answer. But they knew the answer I was obliged to give. And this is one of the problems with being a libertarian. Or being a person with any clear philosophical position, which is that you can kind of predict what they ought to believe. And of course a lot of what is entailed by principles is contrary to common opinion. Most people aren't willing to take ideas to their logical limit. And they find people who do, not to be impressive, isn't wonderful how consistent he is, they think you're nuts. They think you're an extremist and ideologue and you're somebody to be frightened of. And I actually do have some sympathy with that idea even because I think humans are rather fallible. And if you can lose a grip on, you shouldn't overrate your principles. If they start producing nonsense, then you've got reason to step back. But actually, I should just tell you something I didn't earlier. After this gaffe, a chap rang up the party. So you did say your answer was, yes, I guess. No, I said, yeah, I guess they shouldn't interfere. But I said, but come on. And that's the number one position of the ACT party. I said, no, this is not party policy. It's not an issue we care about. Let's just forget it, right? It's a non-issue. Turns out it isn't quite as much of a non-issue as I thought. Because some chap rang up the party. I didn't get the call, somebody else took it. He wanted to speak to me about an organization that he runs that helps brothers and sisters who've accidentally got married. You may think, how do brothers and sisters accidentally get married? Separate it at birth. I'll tell you how. In New Zealand, up until quite recently, well, up until the benefits for single mothers, adoption was very, very common in New Zealand. So imagine a town and there's the local loose teenage girl. I think the word you're looking for is strumpet. Local strumpet and she's churning out the babies and they're going for adoption. But they've been adopted in that area and then you might bump into a girl. You've been adopted, she's been adopted, you meet at school, you're strangely drawn to each other and they end up getting married and they don't discover too much later that they are actually brother and sister. And there's so much of this. There was actually an organization devoted to helping them out. So it's amazing what you learn by being a... That reminds me of... I read about an app that you can get in Iceland that will tell you if you're on a date with your related to your date. I mean, Iceland, a much smaller country. 300,000 people or something. I mean, so I suppose the question, I mean, why do you think it's that you... I mean, perhaps your principles and that you have these weird libertarian views, but is there another reason why you were asked this question in particular and why it wasn't put to perhaps the prime minister or any other candidate? Well, partly because I was a novice and I thought it was some chance that I'd answer it honestly. The other problem is I've been a professional philosopher, been an academic philosopher and I've written a lot for the public and that means that I've laid out a lot of positions so they can kind of fish for them. Then they can put them to me. This happened on many occasions. And then they can put me in a position where I either have to admit that I believe something that is contrary to popular opinion or I have to wriggle out and then I'll look corrupt. It's very, very difficult not to be a politician. Not, as I said, not just when you're a libertarian, but when you're committed professionally to intellectual honesty as you are as a philosopher, whether you are wrong or right, you ought to have a kind of commitment to intellectual honesty. And they knew that I came with all this and so I was obviously vulnerable in a way that real politicians aren't. I had a good advisor after this and he told me, he said the way to answer these questions is to say, I'm no longer a philosopher. I am now the leader of a political party and I'm speaking as the leader of political party, but you're asking me questions as a philosopher and I'm not going to answer philosophical questions. I'm going to answer as the leader of political party. Now, that probably was about all I could have plausibly done, but I do advise anybody who wants to go into politics not to publish anything interesting. Well, Jamie, now you're not the leader of a political party anymore. I hope I can put a philosophical question to you and it's really about the roots or the basis of your libertarianism. I kind of know roughly what your answer is going to be. You're really much more of a utilitarian libertarian. You don't really have a lot of time for I guess the natural rights tradition. So if you can talk about that a little bit also, maybe put in context British libertarians, New Zealand Australian libertarians, versus those in the United States. I think that there's a clear difference between the movements and I've always wondered whether it does come down to that philosophical basis. Well, let me begin by kicking the Australians out of bounds. You don't have to do that as a citizenship test. Yeah, I don't engage with anything Australian issues. I resent your question. And Matthew, who is half Kiwi, is on board with us too. And also, I just don't know. Anyway, let me do the first bit first. I am indeed a libertarian who's... My commitment to liberal policies arises out of utilitarianism and certain ideas about what utility is. If you're a, roughly speaking, if you're a so-called preference utilitarian, that's to say, if you think that what's good for somebody is a function of their preferences, then you naturally end up... If you think we should broadly speaking be trying to maximize utility, that there are problems around measuring that and so on, but just broadly speaking, you're gonna be... If you're also a preference utilitarian, you're naturally led to a laissez-faire policy because you can know what your preferences are and you can know what your circumstances are too. They're also vitally important and strangers can't. So this is rather... It's kind of Hayekian in that it's a problem of information. Trying to... It's not just about economic planning. Hayek talks about economic planning and the problem of information, but it's across the board, social policy, these issues about personal morality and so on. That information-based argument works for all of them. And as I say, it rises out of being a utilitarian and a preference utilitarian. So that's the kind of libertarian I am. I don't believe that rights have to be created by law. I don't follow Bentham in this view, but I think they have to arise out of something. That is to say some kind of a convention. It may arise organically amongst people. They never agreed it. It just turns out that this is the way we do things around here. And so there's what you might call a law, a convention, a conventional behavior. It wasn't legislated. It wasn't created by politicians, but it's real and it's the foundation of the rights. If there were nothing, no such thing, there wouldn't be any right. So I think, for example, that's one of these declarations of human rights and nonsense. In a place like Somalia, let's say, there are no rights. There are no rights because there are no legal conventions or quasi-legal conventions. There are no customary ways of behaving that if you break the rules, you get punished and there are remedies and there's none of that. So there are no rights. I'm more broadly philosophically. If you step back from political philosophy, I'm what has come to be known as a naturalist. So I think that all facts arise out of natural facts about the world broadly described by physical science. And I don't believe in magical entities such as rights that exist no matter what else exists. You know, no matter what the world's like, there are these rights there. To me, that's just kind of crazy talk. So that's the kind of libertarian I am. And that's a standard tradition. That's Hayek, that's David Friedman. He's the same, you know, that's where I stand. Now, how do things vary? In Britain, which I probably know best, oddly, of all, I think most libertarians are like me. I would say if I'm thinking about the ones I know at the IA, the Adam Smith Institute, not too many natural rights theorists. I think there are plenty of people who are Randian or Nozikian, but they're not prominent in the libertarian movement. I think that's right, I don't know if you agree. In New Zealand, there are Randians blowing her up. In fact, a chap that I'm quite close to from my party, a good man, a leading barrister in New Zealand, sent me a book about Rand's philosophy. I can't remember who'd written it. And I tried to read it in the bath, but I just was so turgid. Dreadful stuff. And bonkers, it was all this kind of non-naturalistic stuff, so there are more of them in New Zealand. But the other thing I don't understand, New Zealand does not have, it's a small country, it's only four and a half million people. It doesn't really have libertarian organizations. It's got a think tank space in the capital in Wellington called the New Zealand Initiative. I think they would resent being called libertarians. They're very pro-free market. Some of the people who work there are libertarians, but you couldn't call it a libertarian organization, just like my party, the ACT party, is not a libertarian organization. It's just the best home for somebody who is a libertarian. You're not gonna find anywhere better. I would say it's not right that there's no libertarian movement in New Zealand. Do you think that this sort of tendency to utilitarianism, as you mentioned in UK and New Zealand, maybe that might explain the difference on gun rights, for example, that you might see between, I see even in Britain a lot of people who consider themselves libertarians are not very prone to believing in gun rights. Tom, not withstanding. I'm looking at Tom and saying. Terrible slander. When I go over there, and yeah, because there's more of a deontological claim. I think that's, yeah, I think you may be onto something. I think that may be one of the reasons. I think there's also a historic reason. The history of America is one of people coming here to get away from states that they've found in various ways oppressive, and the view of the state as something, a potential enemy, something potentially hostile against which you need to defend yourself. That's an American, common American idea, and of course, the right to bear arms is associated with that idea. In New Zealand, the general view is that the state is benign. The state is a mechanism through which you express yourself, through which you, the community expresses kind of collective sentiments, and it's there to help you out, and it's not something you need to defend yourself against. The United Kingdom is somewhere in between, I would say, because it's had a history of kings. You'd cut some king's hands off, yes? Yeah, except that they now believe that democracy makes all that irrelevant. There's a common view. I run up against it all the time when I was involved in debates in the UK that all of my ideas about the need to limit the state were wrong because the state just is you, right? Through democracy, that's like saying you need to limit yourself. That idea is very prominent in the UK and New Zealand. Not so much in America, I find. Well, some people listening might be thinking it's interesting having this conversation with New Zealand because New Zealand seems to always rank very highly on freedom indexes, and I've heard New Zealand described as a country designed by Hayekians but populated by progressives, which might be a very American way of looking at it, but what is there for New Zealand, for libertarians in New Zealand to do, given that it's supposed to be some very liberal, free place? Well, before I answer your practical question, I want to make a draw distinction. I think that what New Zealanders are is not liberals in the political sense. That's to say they don't believe that the state should be strictly limited and that people should be free to make their own decisions about things that affect only them. What they are is liberal in the moral sense, which is to say they're permissive. They think that the state ought to only allow you to do the things that they approve of, but they approve of almost everything. So, it's not that they're politically liberals, it's that what I called in an article once, they're broad-minded fascists. And that's really good. This is what the political left tends to be. You know, they don't mind lesbians, they don't mind transsexuals, they don't mind drug taking maybe, maybe they do, but the reason they're willing to have these things illegal is not out of any political principle about the role of the state. It's just because all those things are fine with them. And if those things weren't fine with them, well, then they should be illegal. That's what New Zealanders are like. And we are a very, very laid-back permissive place, but the view is that if something is harmful to people, they shouldn't be allowed to do it, even if it's harmful only to them. So, the drug laws, people defend the drug laws by pointing out that drugs are harmful. And I always say, well, yeah, everything's harmful. I mean, eating's harmful, right? You can choke, you can get fat, but it's also got benefits, and that's why we told it. Drug taking's got benefits, you know. Every Pink Floyd album. Feels great, feels great to be high. But they don't judge those to be worthwhile benefits. That doesn't count, they don't count. The leftists decide what counts and what doesn't count. And in New Zealand, there was about to, there's a rule in New Zealand that you got to wear a helmet when you ride a bike. If you don't, they find you $200. Why, right? How do you threaten other people by not wearing a helmet? No, you threaten yourself, and it's the government's job to look after you. That everybody just agrees with that. So, I wouldn't say New Zealand is a Hayekian country. That's a crazy idea. What was the rest of your question? Well, I think what, given the position of, what's there to do? Well, there's an awful lot to do. Drug liberalization is one. And again, this is typical of New Zealand. The only reason people aren't that uptight about it is that New Zealand, unlike America, doesn't really enforce the law that strictly. The prisons aren't filled with people involved in drugs. But it is illegal, and occasionally, they don't enforce it. Recently, there was a dreadful case of a woman getting a two-year prison sentence of being found to be in possession of marijuana. She was really a kind of community leader in the area where she lived. Very respectable woman. She just happened to have a dope-smoking habit, and she's had her life ruined. Two years in prison, she'll never recover her social position. So, they do occasionally do it. So, there's drugs, that's one thing. The laws concerning the, restricting the use of your property, of your land, to fit in with the government's plan. So, planning laws, as they called it, I don't know what you call them here in America, land use restrictions. Yeah, all that stuff. That's out of control in New Zealand. The ownership rights you have of your property have highly attenuated, extraordinarily attenuated. If I want to chop down a tree on my own land, and it's over 17 feet tall, I have to have permission from the local government. The effect of this is that everybody chops their trees down when they reach 16 feet. You know, but that, you can't change the look of your house if you live in certain areas. It's all very, very controlled, and it's having real effects, particularly on the price of residential property. The New Zealand dollar is currently worth about 65 American cents. The average house price in my hometown of Auckland just hit $900,000. The average has gone up. This is the average. Wow. The price of property last year went up 25% in Auckland in just one year, and it's been going up a bit. You can't, there is almost no new housing being built because of these restrictions. So that's another thing. More generally, the current government, which has been in power for about eight years, is returning to industrial policy. The reforms from the reforms of the 1980s right through the 90s, the government rejected the idea of industrial policy. The government should direct the economy because it had been calamitous in New Zealand. But, you know, people always forget, and there are people who lobby the government for favours for this and that, and the idea that the government can play an important role in directing investment has returned, even under a centre-right government, and that's just a trend that's going in complete the wrong direction. Another thing that's going in the wrong direction is they've brought under pressure from people complaining about property prices going up. The government's just started to be more restrictive in allowing foreign buying. They've always had the power to do it, but they haven't used it. Now there's kind of ad hoc and arbitrary interventions and sales, and the government just says, no, you're not allowed to sell your land to that person because he's Chinese. So things aren't, things are far from perfect. I wanted to go back to, you mentioned this, and my favourite libertarian thing out of New Zealand is what you mentioned in the 80s with the reforms, the free market reforms called Roger Nomics in mini-circles. It's one of these big examples of a massive reform, a deregulation done that I think we don't study enough because the actual how you actually deregulate an economy is something that hasn't happened. A lot of it happened in New Zealand in the 80s. We did it in the late 70s with the interstate shipping and the airlines and home brewing, and these were both done by the left, interestingly enough. Can you talk a little bit about what happened, what was it, what was it like before in the figure, Roger Douglas, Douglas, the figure behind it and what changed? The New Zealand economy leading up to these reforms, which were in 1984, was the most state controlled economy outside of the communist world. You couldn't, I remember the rules, you wouldn't believe some of the rules, you couldn't buy margarine without a doctor's certificate. The reason was to protect the dairy industry, right? Well, that law has existed here. It used to be illegal to buy it. I think in Canada, it's illegal to dye margarine in some of it. So you have to just, it looks like clear fat just to protect the dairy industry. You couldn't ship any goods, use a truck. You couldn't transport them on a truck more than 50 miles because they weren't protecting the railway. You had to ship things or move things around on railways. You couldn't import anything without a license. You couldn't bring anything into the country. The government dispensed licenses to its political friends. You couldn't get foreign currency to go on foreign trips. There was no television radio, there was one television station, it was state controlled. No, there were two, sorry, but they were both state controlled, they got two by then. And they started, TV started at two o'clock in the afternoon and finished at midnight. You wouldn't really, you wouldn't believe what it was like. And the best band was Crowded House. That was much later. Oh, that was a few years later, and the clean. I mean, those were the best bands then. And New Zealand was getting poorer and poorer and poorer. I mean, the history of the downtown was effective. New Zealand had basically been a big farm for Britain. It would sell all its agricultural produce to Britain and it was reasonably affluent. There were very low levels of unemployment, but it was very barren. You couldn't get foreign stuff and there was no entertainment goods where there were virtually none. You couldn't drink wine in restaurants. My parents always told me this story in one of their first dates, having to drink wine out of a teapot because the restaurant wasn't allowed to provide you with wine. And so they'd drink it out of a teapot. And everyone just accepted this as just normal? Yeah, that was the kind of place it was. You just wouldn't believe it. Anyway, after Britain joined the European Union, I believe in 1972, and this meant that they became part of the trading bloc and mainly under pressure from the French, there were great barriers to imports. And New Zealand suddenly was taken off the tit of Great Britain. And the government responded just by trying to take more and more control of the economy, trying to, you know, we had a kind of that model. And there was literally no economic growth between 1972 and 1984. And it was a crisis by 84, a new government came in, and they made radical reforms. They removed all the exchange rate and capital controls. They got rid of all agricultural tariffs. They deregulated transportation, all the things I've been talking about. They just went to a completely free economy, more or less, except in one regard, except the labor market. They still had compulsory unionism. In New Zealand, you couldn't, you had to join a union. Even when I was a student going to, as an undergraduate, I was required by law to join the student union. I wasn't allowed to go to the university without joining it. And the labor party made a lot of these liberal reforms, partly out of economic necessity, but they couldn't make the labor market reforms because the labor unions was still their power base. In 1990, another government, a new government, the national government came in. They had meanwhile, they had been converted to the free market ideas, and they liberalized the labor market. So by the mid-1990s, New Zealand was a model free economy. Really, you could start a business in no time for a little money, the government was almost uninvolved. Since 96, there's been backpedaling. Partly it was because of an electoral reform. We moved from first pass the post to a proportional representation system. And this meant that lots of smaller parties emerged and they got representation, and it became difficult to form a government from a single party. And this meant that it was much harder to drive through reform. Everybody was trying to stop it. And so that system had an effect. Then we got a labor-led coalition government in coalition with the Greens and all sorts of dreadful people. And they started reversing things. They reintroduced labor laws that made it hard to fire people. They renationalized some previously privatized industries such as railways. And New Zealand's actually government-owned now. And they haven't gone all the way back, just a bit. And the general tone, there's no keenness anymore for liberal reform. I can't remember the last time there was any liberalization of anything. It's all the other way around. So I wanna go back to the broad genomics, the liberalization of the 1980s. And my impression is that this was a big bang liberalization. They hadn't campaigned on it. They hadn't commissioned studies and all that. They just kind of suddenly thought, we have to do this. And they did it. And they got rid of all the agricultural subsidies overnight. What were the dynamics then, if you can speak to that? I mean, were they just terrified of what was happening? And it was necessity that drove them to these measures? Or was there someone somewhere there who was secretly a liberal underneath and had been hiding the whole time? The official story is that it was more a matter of necessity so that they, I wish I'm not gonna remember this exactly. They had one change forced on them. I just don't remember what it was. It was just basically to make some kind of payments. Then they realized that they had to compensate for that with something else and it was a cascade effect and they ended up liberalizing all these things. And this can be found, there's actually a book where you can find this. It's called, I've Been Thinking by Richard Preble. And he was a prominent figure in this government working under Roger Douglas. Roger Douglas, by the way, was not the prime minister. He was the minister of finance. The prime minister was a man called David Longhi. However, another element, which I've only recently discovered is that the treasury, which is the, what you might call the ministry of finance. It's the, you know, where the top bureaucrats around economic matters reside. And they had prepared a report for the incoming government describing the situation and recommending a whole lot of liberalization policies. And it was really the treasury that had been infiltrated, so to speak, by free market guys. And they had a hard program ready and waiting. And I think that, if you really, the main contribution of Roger Douglas wasn't that he was a visionary. It was the ballziness with which he went about doing it. I mean, he just, it was, as you say, it hadn't been announced. The population did not know what they were getting when they voted for the labor party. But the labor party was gonna walk in because it was a crisis. I mean, they were just walking in. So they kept them all shut. They refused to publish a manifesto. They had no policies before the, no, they just refused to say. And because they knew they were gonna win. And every time they got asked a question, what will you do if you get elected? They said, well, we really just don't know what state the government's finances are in. So we're going to, you're gonna have to wait. Trust us. That's amazing, they had no platform at all. No, they had no platform at all. They knew what they were gonna do, but they couldn't announce it because it would have cost them votes. So they always said, we'll get in to power, we'll have a look at the books. As if the books weren't actually publicly available, but we'll have a look at the books. And then we'll work out what we have to do. And they had no mandate for it. However, they did it immediately. We have a three-year electoral term. So they had to face election again in 1987. And they won, even though they had, the country had gone through the pain of rapid reform. But I think the people sensed two things. One was that it was necessary. The other was that they were set free. I mean, you cannot believe how the country changed. And I don't just mean the economic results. I mean the mood. Imagine living in a country where you can't get any of the normal stuff that was common in America, where you can't travel without applying to the government for foreign currency, where every element of the economy is controlled by the government. You have to get permission to do things where there are no decent restaurants. You can't, when they came in and liberalized it, the explosion of pent-up energy was amazing. And people's lives were transformed for the better. I mean, even if you weren't richer, you were so much better off. And nobody wanted to go back. And we haven't gone back. I mean, New Zealand is now a modern, free country, part of the normal world. I mean, it's probably gonna be fairly clear from what you've said to our listeners that New Zealand has a somewhat different political culture from the United States. And I just remembered a story you told me about your father once ringing up the treasury to complain. And I wonder if you could just share that. Well, actually, he rang up Robert Muldoon, who was the prime minister before this reform. He was the guy who was doing such a bad job. And my father rang him up when he got his phone number out of the phone. But your dad was a big winger? No, no, my father was never, no. My father was a ordinary kind of entrepreneur, but he never made that much money. The prime minister certainly wouldn't have known who he was. So he looks up the prime minister's number in the phone book. I'm not joking. He looks his number up in the phone book, rings him up at home, and he answers the phone. I think his wife may have answered the phone. Oh, I just can't get rid of him. So, and then my dad and he spoke on the phone for about an hour and a half. I recall very well because I was coming back and forth into the kitchen. My father was still there on the phone to this guy. And yeah, that is it. I'll tell you another story. There was the next, the prime minister of this reforming government, David Longie. He had been a lawyer who worked in a poor area, and he was a member of parliament representing a very poor part of Auckland. And out of genuine prints, we said, I don't want the prime minister's residence in Wellington when I am there. I'm just, and so he rented a bed sit. And- But what was that word? A bed sit. It's a studio flap. Studio flap. You guys also speak a different language. I'm so out accented in this entire- He rented a studio flap. And after his work at parliament during the day, he'd go back on his own to the studio flap. He was a very fat man, actually. And he, one night, he'd go there and, well, the police found the fire brigade recalled because they found smoke coming up from under the door of the bed sit. And what had happened is that he had put a tin of baked beans on the stove to cook and he'd gone to lie down on his bed and he'd fallen asleep because he was so tired that it had boiled over and there was trouble. But this is the prime minister. There's no security. He's got no staff of any kind. He's cooking his own baked beans on a pot. And it retains elements of that. I used to go to a gym in Auckland and the prime minister, Helen Clark, who was prime minister up until 2008, I'd often bump into her on the stairs. She was running up the back to do some kind of workout class. No security. She'd just give you a smile and she'd be in the class and no one would bother. And New Zealand is a very, because it's a small country. People tend to, if you meet anybody, you've probably got a connection. You say to them, well, where are you from? I've got a cousin down that way, do you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. And that mood permeates interactions and it permeates politics too. And politics is conducted in a much more, even if you disagree with each other, and you might be quite rude in the disagreement, there's no sense of genuine hatred. There's no culture war. There's no idea that you come from one part of the world and I come from another and we really are in conflict with each other. The worst, the most likely case you would have got for that would have been, my party's considered the most extreme kind of money grubbing, dreadful, you know, that kind of thing and cruel and we want to serve corporate interests, you can imagine, or the rhetoric. I think it sounds a little familiar. And then you've got the Maori party representing Maori people, but they don't, in a way, there are many very successful Maori. The head of the Bank of New Zealand, he went on, no, the ASB, it's a big bank, he went on to be the head of Air New Zealand, they went to Australia and run one of the big banks there, he's Maori. But the Maori party aren't thinking about guys like him. They're thinking about the poor, rural ones. You might think that we are the most in conflict, but after debates, I got on very well with the leader of the Maori party. He's a nice chap. And in general, when I was with others, there's some animosity, sometimes it's just individuals, just these people, there's no sense of class warfare, ideological warfare. Do you think that's because of the relative homogeneity? I mean, here we have people write books called What's the Matter with Kansas, people from the East Coast who maybe have never been to Kansas except to write that book and to talk about how bad these people are because we have such cultural differences. Is it homogeneity? It's a big part of that. Is there a Kansas of New Zealand? Well, look. Is it all Kansas? Or is it all Kansas? This is a little complicated. Compared to London, Auckland, which is where I live, is very divided city. In London, you will get a council estate. You know what I mean by that? A housing project. Thank you, Tommy. The translation is very important. You will get a housing project slapped in the middle of a really wealthy neighborhood, like Kensington or something. When I was living in Hampstead, which is an expensive part of London, I was renting a house. It was costing me, it was a cramped little three bedroom thing and it was costing me 900 pounds a week or something insane like that. And just across the way, and the kids are going to the same school, the big council houses, nicer than mine, and they're free, right? To their inhabitants. And then the kids go to the same school. Now, this isn't what goes on in Auckland. In Auckland, you've got really clear neighborhood distinctions. And as I understand the states, similar result, which is that the schools and the wealthy neighborhoods are good schools and the poor neighborhoods are bad schools. So that looks similar to America, but the thing that it doesn't generate the kind of conflicts or resentments there. And it is interesting why. And I think that one reason is that so far at least, New Zealanders do not believe that the successful people have got there out of some kind of unfair privilege. They believe that if they're successful there's probably some reason to do with them. And there's no sense of a class, a ruling set. There may actually be one. I don't think there is, but there's no sense of it. And I fear that this, and this is a rather wonderful thing about New Zealand, it's part of what makes living in New Zealand pleasant. And often, this very snobbery is considered the greatest vice. Probably the worst thing you could ever come across as a snob. But I suspect it is changing. It's changing partly for the reasons that are being discussed globally, which is that education now confers so much advantage and the kids of the rich get the better education. So it's a kind of self-perpetuating thing going on. And also now that women, this whole stuff, doctor used to marry a nurse, now he marries another doctor. That's all happening in New Zealand. And you are seeing static. Yeah, maybe it's not as mobile. Again, some of this stuff's exaggerated, but it hasn't yet caused trouble. The left, of course, politically want to stir up resentments because they benefit from them. And we've got all this nonsense going on now about poverty. If anybody, because it's defined statistically, so apparently 20% of New Zealand children grow up in poverty. And you can tell because they're overweight. Now, honestly, they reason like this. You're in poverty if you're earning under less than half of the median income you have. Which is half the people. No, no, half the median. And then you say, well, okay, now here we've defined this group. Now let's have a look at this group. What characteristics do they have? Well, their kids are overweight. They spend a lot of their income on smoking. And so on and so forth. So you can get to the preposterous position where you define poverty by excessive spending on certain things. But, and then you say, look at that poor person forced to smoke by their poverty. And drink soda and they seem to be on this horrible fit. And then of course we've got to patronize them. We've got to try and control their behavior because they're hurting themselves and they don't do it because they want to, they do it because of the victims of social injustice. So I mean, it sounds like notwithstanding New Zealand's impressive rankings in human freedom indexes, economic freedom indexes, there's a fair amount of paternalism going on. You've talked a little bit about some of the land use restrictions which seem pretty severe. And yet there's also something in New Zealand that is perhaps awkward for libertarians to admit which is that the state seems to be fairly benign and efficient. Yes. And which it is, it is efficient. It's, they're a joy to deal with. Tag. You said that at the lunch, there was a lunch previously recording and I still, my head is spinning on this sentence. Yeah, I'll tell you a funny little story. I was living in Belgium with my now wife. And we lived together and we'd had a child and we didn't necessarily want to get married but I got a job in Singapore and we needed to get married because in those days they didn't let you bring your woman in with you unless that issue you were married to it. Now they do. So we had to get married and we had to get married pretty quickly. So we decided since we're living in Belgium let's get married in Belgium. Go down to the town hall to get our license and some woman's got to interview me about all this. Can't just give me the license. During the interview, I have a British passport and she's saying, but is it a bona fide relationship? I said, look, it doesn't matter because I can live in Belgium anyway. I'm entitled to live here with my British passport. She doesn't like this, I'm getting on her nerves. Anyway, we have to come around to your house and interview you there to prove that you've got a bona fide relationship. And I said to you, you know, some people think it's immoral to live together before you're married. I'm surprised that the Belgian government requires it. Anyway, she wasn't liking me and I said, are we fine against it? I said, okay, whatever, when can you do it? Oh, January next year. Oh, never mind. So then I think I've got an alternative. We can get married in England where we've been living just before. So I ring up the English authorities in my local, you've got to go to the local council you're living in. I said, I want to get married. So she said, okay, so you come to the office to get a license on a Wednesday morning. You can only do it on Wednesday mornings and where it's only open for three hours and they're normally very long queues. So I suggest that you arrive at eight in the morning. And he said, you know, I must warn you, you probably won't get to the end of the queue. I said, so you tell me that I should fly from Belgium to London every Wednesday and stand in a queue to get. So at this point I'm getting really frustrated. I think like in New Zealand, it's our last resort. I ring up someone in New Zealand and I, I'm explaining the situation. Are you sure? The appropriate government department. And the man I remember being says, okay, so what's your name? I give my name, he goes, okay. And this woman you want to marry, what's her name? And I give the name. And I said, okay, now what do I need to do? He says, oh, it's done. I said, what? He goes, I'll put the details in when you're in New Zealand and come and pick up the certificate. He just took the information over the phone. And that's what it's like. Taxes, those taxes are really simple and very easy. You don't need a tax accountant. It's getting a little worse, but after this reforming government, the tax was so simple. They actually, one of the reasons they broke up, they were gonna introduce a flat tax. Roger Douglas was gonna have a 25% flat income tax. No, 23. And Longie, the prime minister just couldn't take it. And this was too much. And they- Too high, you're saying. No, having a flat tax. Having a flat tax. He needed progressive taxation for his socialist principles. But, because remember, this was a labor party. And the government fell apart over that. Roger Douglas quit and everything kinda unraveled. But, sorry, anyway, to answer your question, how come, right, it's interesting. Well, I think it's because New Zealand's small. It's, you will bump into these guys at the airport and they're gonna look you in the eye. That it's very difficult to be, I mean, take it down to the limit case. Suppose that I say, there's just two people in the country. And I say, I want some redistribution of wealth. That means it's you. It's gotta be you. You're the only other one. And I've gotta be able to look you in the eye and say that was fair enough. So, because we all know each other, I'm exaggerating, but you know what I mean. It limits the predatory nature of politics a little. And it also, I think, it also explains some of the socialistic tendencies in New Zealand because we don't have other vehicles for much of the stuff. Partly because the state's always been big in New Zealand. These other vehicles haven't grown up. There's a feeling that we're all in it together because it's small enough. That is, that is why I'm very much in favor of small governments. And I don't mean limited government. I mean, literally, governments that cover small areas because then they gotta look you in the eye. What lessons do you think we can learn, other than the one you just stated, but also with the Rogeronomics, with the sinusoidal element here because we had a massive disappointment, a massive deregulation to the point. I mean, you mentioned earlier that before we started recording that there were even farmers killing themselves and huge problems. And then a huge change in society and now it's creeping back. So what can we learn about the progress of government and people's opinions? Well, let me first draw another interesting distinction between New Zealand and Americans, not just size. The government of New Zealand has a three-year dictatorship. Their ability to do what they did is extraordinary. They can just do it. If they've got a majority of parliament, there's no upper house. There's no president. We have one layer of government in that sense. And because the executive will have a majority in the parliament, there's no limit to what they can do. So I think even if you had a president, let's say, who had such an agenda, he would find it extremely difficult to get done. Very impossible, yes. But doing it fast is really important. As Roger Douglas said, he said the reason he did, some people saying to him, why did you do it all at once? Why weren't you just a little bit more steady as you go? And he said, you might as well have a general strike for eight reforms as for one, right? That's the logic. His view was that if he did it slowly, they would just, the forces of resistance would have time to gather. So he did it all in one go. And I suspect that is the right way to go. Then why has it been backpedaling? Well, it's I think because he never had a mandate. They did get re-elected in 87, but as I said, there was a sense of liberation and a great energy overtaking the country. But what never happened in the UK either on the Thatcher or in New Zealand was that the population understood the connection between free market ideas and the benefits that they were experiencing. They just didn't get that connection. And that's why the backpedaling can work. Politicians can come along and promote ideas that sound kind of commonsensical. The government should fix this and fix that and so on. And the people aren't mentally trained, so to speak, to go, no, no, no, we don't like that approach. So they like the results of the liberalization, but they don't understand where they came from. And so eventually it gets eroded. I think this is a kind of natural cycle, a depressing kind of natural cycle. And I wish democracy were more constrained so that the population was more limited in their ability to impose their will on matters that don't affect that. I mean, they shouldn't have any say in, they all agree they shouldn't have any say in my shoes, but they think they should have a say in all sorts of other things that affect me. And there's no principle basis for it. So I would like to see, and since I don't trust them, I would like to see some constraints on their ability to indulge those ideas. But again, how do you do it? Because look at America, you've got a constitution which is supposed to have some of those effects. All constitutions have to have courts that enforce them and if the courts can't be trusted, you get erosion. So I have no idea how to get, how to protect liberty against populism. Well, I guess we're all in the business of trying to shift the popular mood. That's what we're trying to do. If we could get everybody to agree with us, we'd be fine. Oh, it's gonna be easy now. Thank you for listening. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.