 Welcome to Free Thoughts, I'm Trevor Burris. And I'm Matthew Feeney. And I'm Tom Clougharty. Joining us today is Sam Bowman, the Executive Director of the Adam Smith Institute. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Sam. Thanks for having me. So, Adam Smith Institute, first of all for our viewers who do not know our viewers, our listeners. There you go. You're looking at me, but no one else is. Our listeners, what is the Adam Smith Institute? I hope that most listeners have a picture of you, Trevor, while they're listening. So, the Adam Smith Institute was set up in the 1970s and along with the IEA and the CPS was one of the big driving forces behind the Thatcher revolution. IEA, should we get right to fill in some of these there? The Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies was one of the three driving forces behind the privatization revolution of the 1980s. It subsequently went through different kind of brands, different iterations, but it was always a sort of free market, classical liberal organization. For the first few years that I worked at the Adam Smith Institute, alongside Tom, we were a libertarian organization and then about a year ago we decided to, under me, kind of rebrand and try to adopt and I guess appropriate this word neoliberal because there are a few reasons for that. The word neoliberal doesn't have a great reputation, but it's used as a sort of boogie man on the left to attack the right and we thought it would be nice to sort of take that back and to kind of change what it means. The word libertarian doesn't necessarily have a great brand in the UK. One of the reasons being just that it's associated with America and it's seen as a sort of foreign import and there's no reason that should be because Adam Smith and the old classical liberal thinkers were not libertarians, really, but it's also nor are they American, yeah. But it's also kind of primarily for me actually about recognizing a different strand in the kind of classical liberal inheritance that I think actually does have quite a large constituency of supporters, but prior to us putting this out there and lots of other people kind of grabbing it, didn't really have a name and that's for a kind of pragmatic, quite kind of policy focused, globally minded classical liberalism that is trying to fight for free trade and kind of relatively open borders against this sort of populist tide that we're seeing on the right. So that's really what we're trying to do and we've had quite a lot of success, I have to say. So the term neoliberal, as you said, I have only really heard it described. I've used mostly by people who do not seem to understand what capitalist thinking is. It's usually used by Marxist academics in my experience saying we have to attack this neoliberal hegemony. Usually that means that they think that there is no real difference to the left and the right in terms of how much markets, how much they're for markets, they're just a little bit of details that don't matter that much and the huge problem is the support for capitalism that is broadly enjoyed in the Western world by whether you're on the left or the right in mainstream politics and so that's what they think neoliberal is. That's the way it is. So why should we be using this epithet that they've used to describe ourselves? I think what's fundamental about neoliberalism is that it's about the world as it is right now. It doesn't really mean anything when the left uses it. They just use it to attack anybody who likes markets to any extent but there's a real strand of anti-establishment and anti-status quo thinking in the libertarian world which is understandable given that libertarianism is sort of a very radical, very, very kind of changed the world, shake everything up and have a lot of disorder right now, which is fine. But for a neoliberal, somebody needs to defend the world as it is right now. The world is very globalised. The world is very free market compared to lots and lots of potential alternatives. And I think that really since at least 1989, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we had won the argument until maybe 2015, 2016. Somebody needs to defend the way the world was between 1989 and 2016 and say, look, for all of its imperfections, this was the period where more people were lifted out of poverty than ever before in human history put together. More technological advances were spread to more people than ever before. The problem for me or the reason that I thought that libertarian wasn't sufficient or wasn't that useful was that libertarian preoccupations were so different from where the debate actually was and where the debate actually is that we were sort of losing the argument and the argument was taking place without us even being involved in it. We were focusing on very interesting things to do with central banking and stuff like that while the political center of gravity in the UK and in Europe and in the US was to do with trade, was to do with what should the specific monetary policy be, what should we do on labour market reforms. I see neoliberalism and libertarianism as complements of each other. There are different ways of approaching the world and different ways of approaching debate. But until the last six months and I don't claim credit for this, I don't think we can claim credit for this at all. But there has been I think a slight awakening among a lot of people, many of whom would have been to the center left who now think, okay, I see now the debate is should we have free trade with other countries? Should we have more or less trade with other countries? It doesn't matter what you think about tax policy or regulatory policy. If you think that free trade and migration are good things, then you need to defend these things right now. We're seeing a huge reaction against that. For me, the neoliberal thing is about making that the center of the debate that we're having and the people who like markets need to put that at the front and center of the stuff they talk about. I mean, it sounds Sam like as you define it, neoliberalism is a pretty broad church. Is that one of the things that attracts you to that kind of branding that it's much more inclusive where libertarianism may seem to be something that is determined to stand apart from everything else in politics and policy today? Yeah, exactly. The neoliberal ... If we're going to defend the period between 1989 and 2016, that includes people who I have huge, huge differences of opinion with, right? Tony Blair, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, none of whom I would necessarily classify as good, pure neoliberals, but all of whom had some kind of recognition that trade was basically good, that immigration was basically good. There's been such a sharp divide both on the right and the left with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump and the rise of populism in Europe that makes me think that anybody who is a liberal, and I use the word in the European sense of a liberal on the left or a liberal on the right, somebody who thinks that individual freedom is a good thing, and we might disagree about how you get individuals to be rich enough to be able to act on that freedom. That's where somebody might fall on the left or the right, but there has been I think such a ... Basically, my friend Steve Davies at the Institute of Economic Affairs talks a lot about this kind of political realignment where you're seeing kind of leftist and collectivist people on the right and the left coalesce around, maybe not around the same political parties, but certainly around the same positions that we need to have much more autarky and we need to have much more protectionism and look after our own. People who are liberals are completely split. They really, really haven't, I think, woken up to the threat faced by this sort of nationalist collectivist thinking. The fact that neoliberalism, as I talk about it, is such a broad church. Where we have disagreements, it should be over evidence and it should be over what particular labour market policies work best for getting people into good jobs. That, I think, is something that has a lot of potential for bringing people together on the liberal side. So far, I'm not sure how much of it has actually achieved. It's important, though, to kind of recognise. I mean, we chose the word neoliberal. We use the word neoliberal because it is a swear word on the left, right? We want to tell these people, look, we're not giving in when we talk about using evidence in policymaking. We're trying to be less brittle in our approach. There's something very, very brittle about many libertarian approaches, particularly in the UK. In the US, it's a much broader tent. Tell us what you mean by brittle in this concept. I think that when you approach policy debates with a firm eye, at least one firm eye, on the way the world should be in a kind of perfect utopia, you end up presenting arguments that can easily be broken down with one example. When you have kind of utopias in mind, you make the arguments, what I would say brittle, you make them easily rejected by a single problem that you have with them. So, getting rid of the minimum wage, without a positive side to that, most people will reject that argument, right? Getting rid of the minimum wage would be a good thing. If you say, okay, we need to strengthen the earned income tax credit, or in the UK, change the welfare system, so it's much more cash-based and much less paternalistic, then I think you have both, we need to get rid of this bad thing that government is doing, and we need to make sure that there is something that people who fall in between the cracks can get. When you don't have that second point, and you're only interested in making arguments that are incrementally bringing the debate towards sort of perfect natural liberty, I think that argument doesn't appeal to people, and it sounds very strange to a lot of people. How much of the rebranding is in part successful because of the kind of liberals or libertarians on your side of the Atlantic at the moment? So, when I was working in London and met Sam and Tom working at the IAEA, there were very, very few conversations with libertarians about natural rights, and those are the foundations of libertarianism that you come to the United States, and the landscape is much more different. So, do you find it that it's actually easier to have, let's call them consequential conversations in London or Britain more broadly, because over here you have to start with more fundamental first principles? Very much so. I mean, there are some kind of natural rights libertarians in the UK, but people that I would have, who would have called themselves libertarians a few years ago, I think had always been quite uncomfortable with the philosophical baggage that goes along with that term, and had always been uncomfortable with the idea that it doesn't matter whether this actually makes people's lives better or not. All that matters is that this coheres with our philosophical idea of natural rights. Many of those people, I think particularly on the younger end, who always had felt both like they want a home, they want an ideological kind of thing to identify themselves with, but also that a lot of this seems quite strange, and a lot of the kind of natural rights philosophy that underpins libertarianism in some parts of the world, in America especially, seems quite weird and doesn't necessarily seem true or valuable, and breaking those two things apart and emphasizing that this is purely consequentialist. If this doesn't work, then it's bad, and we should not believe in it. That has been, I think, quite a valuable step. If we take a look at the last couple of years you mentioned, 2015, 2016, I don't want to speak for everyone, but it's been a rather profoundly depressing couple of years to have these ideas, mostly because people who claim to adhere to these kind of principles turned out to not to, and elections like the US presidential election or Brexit have raised certain concerns. With that context, how many liberals do you think are out there, people that could actually be housed in this neoliberal home? It depends on how broad we want to go. I think it's reasonable to say that Tony Blair was something like neoliberal. He was somebody who believed in my ... When I say neoliberalism, I basically mean somebody who is very, very against government involvement in ... Basically, thinks that regulation is almost always bad, but thinks that some measure of redistribution done simply can be fine, and that those two things don't need to be tied up with each other, and that you can, in fact, complement a reasonably generous redistribution policy with quite a laissez faire approach to regulation, and thinks that the evidence is much stronger when we talk about regulation than it is when we talk about redistribution, and that wants to break those two things apart. The new labor agenda, even though I think it didn't actually achieve very much, was based on, according to Peter Mandelson anyway, who was the Tony Blair spin doctor, the genius really behind the new labor project in political terms. His view always was that we want to let you make as much money as possible, and then we're going to attack some of it and give that to other people. That was for a new labor project, which I think is a reasonably ... I mean, I disagree with them about the extent to which you should regulate the economy. They want to regulate it much more than me, but that's more or less the kind of position that I take. The change that we've seen in France over the last couple of months, I think is very, very interesting, and it suggests that there is a much, much broader constituency of people who would be willing to vote for a pretty much neoliberal candidate and a pretty much neoliberal agenda in the form of Emmanuel Macron under the right circumstances. Now, he's been very lucky. I think he's a very talented politician, and I think really the lesson there is get someone really good, and then you might be able to get neoliberal reforms through rather than there is a huge constituent people waiting to vote for neoliberalism. But the kind of reforms that they need in Europe that are most importantly labor market reforms make it much, much easier to fire workers in order to hire them. That is not going to come through anybody except for Emmanuel Macron's style candidates. Conservatives just won't be able to get that kind of reform through. The only other people who can are countries that are austerity basket cases like Ireland was, Greece is, and some of the other Mediterranean countries are. Do you draw a connection between Brexit and Donald Trump? I mean, this has been done a lot with this general theme of all these different countries, but if you think about it, it doesn't make a lot of sense that all of them would independently, would derive this or influence each other. We don't spend a lot of time watching British news over here. I think maybe Britain spends more time watching American news over there, but why would they be connected if they are in fact connected? At least the attitudes behind the votes. The short answer is yes. A lot of the concerns and the worries that people had that led them to vote for Brexit seem to also have been concerns and worries that people had that led them to vote for Donald Trump. They're quite interesting papers that show that trade shock, so not how much trade goes on with your area and the rest of the world, but how much that has increased in the past few years. Also, it's not how many immigrants are in the area that you live in. It's how many more immigrants are in the area that you live in compared to a few years ago. That seems to be quite a good predictor of support for both Donald Trump and for Brexit. Interestingly, on things like housing and building, the English-speaking world seems to be uniquely dysfunctional in not being able to build more houses. San Francisco, Vancouver, London, Sydney, pretty much every English-speaking country in the world or every advanced one seems to have a problem with housing that European countries don't have. That's interesting. For me, I was against Brexit. I thought it was a big mistake and I think it is a big mistake. I don't think that people who opposed it or who favored it were stupid or anything like that, but I think they might have hitched their wagon to a pretty bad way of looking at the world. That's why I think a lot of free marketeers who have very good intentions about Brexit and who think that this is a great opportunity for us to deregulate and to become a global Britain that isn't tethered to Europe so much, think they may have actually allied themselves with people who have no interest in doing that at all. The reason that for me neoliberalism is so important right now is that it's explicitly globalist. It's explicitly in favour of internationalism and cooperation between national governments and not having particular benefits for people just because of where they come from. The EU, to a greater or larger extent, was a globalist project. Freedom of movement, treating Romanians in the same way you treat English people before the law is a very, very good thing in my opinion. Do you think that there's a general reason, I mean maybe you've already articulated it there, but for why a lot of people in a lot of countries became illiberal almost at the same time, I mean it could it be, I mean I personally think that Islam could have a lot to do with it in terms of fearing the other, in terms of fearing the outside because that's a threat to Western Europe and it's a perceived threat to many Americans even though it's not really a threat to us here, but that right there is something where we need to start keeping people out because there are some dangerous people and then that kind of goes, but do you have any if you know why it's so simultaneously? Actually I don't specifically know about Islam, but it's interesting that you mentioned that. Obviously the European Union has virtually nothing to do, there are no Muslim European Union countries. Perhaps Turkey might, I mean Turkey probably won't join now, but there was a suggestion that it might join during the campaign. But there are a lot of Turks in Germany and there's free movement for there aren't that many Turks moving from Germany to the UK, but or there aren't that many people of Turkish ethnicity anyway, but what you're getting at I think probably is part of the story because so the political scientist Eric Kaufman who's at Birkbeck University has shown that Eastern European or European migrant percentage of population in a certain area, it doesn't predict support for UKIP or the BNP which is the kind of neo-Nazi party in the UK at all, it doesn't predict that kind of thing at all, but non-white share of the population does predict it for white voters. So his suggestion is that being anti-EU and voting for UKIP and for things like that is a sort of expression of frustration at the changing face of Britain that people feel like they have no control over and use the sort of EU as a sort of proxy for to kind of get their anger and get their kind of annoyance at the way the country is changing out. I really don't want to suggest that voting for the vote for Brexit was primarily racist or xenophobic at all because I think it was really three different coalitions, conservatives who didn't like European institutions having supremacy over British ones, people who were anti-trade and anti-immigration and a smaller number of sort of free market classical liberals who thought that leaving the EU would be a really great chance for bringing in sort of free market reforms. So far it looks as if it's the anti-trade, anti-immigrant people who are winning out. The conservatives are getting something, but it looks as if the number one lesson that is being learned by the political establishment, most of whom it has to say are remainers and voted in campaign for remain, is that we don't want any more Polish immigrants coming into the UK. Yeah, I mean I have to challenge you just slightly on the idea that the anti-trade coalition is definitely winning out when it comes to Brexit at the moment. Now, I don't think there was an awful lot of anti-trade sentiment or rhetoric in the campaign. I don't think there's been very much talk about that subsequent the referendum decision. Now, I mean, I think we can probably say that the government may be mishandling the negotiations. They may be pursuing a road which may not lead to the optimum outcome in trade terms, but I think that they're basing the kind of Brexit they want to pursue explicitly around continued free trade with Europe and as much free trade with the rest of the world in general. I haven't been in the UK living there for five years, but it doesn't seem to me that there's a big anti-trade backlash. Obviously I can't argue with you on the immigration point and it does look like perhaps people are foolishly putting the desire to control immigration ahead of the desire to maintain strong trade links, but maybe you see things differently when it comes to trade. I don't think it's true that trade wasn't an issue. There was quite a big story about a year and a half ago about a Welsh steel mill that was basically had to shut down and it's being wound up despite the kind of efforts of the staff because of cheap Chinese steel imports. And the argument was that the European Union is too lax. It's not taxing this kind of dumped Chinese steel nearly enough. And if we leave the European Union, we can do that. And not only that, we can spend some of the money that we're giving to the EU on fitting up these steel plants to make them more modern and so on. And this was an argument that was made quite a lot during the campaign. No, it wasn't one of the big cases that they were making, but they were very, very good at targeting certain voting demographics in a way that only they heard that argument. But I think more broadly, we've seen from conservative MPs. In fact, some of the people I would consider to be the most free market conservative MPs talk about using tariffs in a retaliatory way and that not being a big deal. If the EU raises its tariffs on our imports, then that's fine. We can raise our tariffs on their imports and that's going to hurt them. Obviously, it's actually the importer who pays for tariffs. It's not the exporter who pays for tariffs. So if we raise tariffs, that hurts us. But more fundamentally, it's, I think, partially a difference of opinion about what trade actually is or what trade deals actually mean nowadays. And I understand why people disagree with this, but because the European Union, because the single market, this kind of great, huge free trade, the biggest free trade bloc in the world, because that has been based around non-tariff barriers or regulatory barriers to trade and about eliminating those, a shift away from that that only looks at tariffs, which are really not that much of an issue anymore. I think it can only be understood as an anti-trade step. And we've seen this from almost every member, almost every conservative party MP. The Labour Party is very, very happy about some elements of leaving the single market, particularly Jeremy Corbyn. I mean, he is a Marxist. I'm not saying this as a slur. He is a Marxist. He would say I'm neoliberal accurately and I'm saying he's a Marxist accurately. But they and the kind of clique around Jeremy Corbyn, it's widely agreed that they wanted Brexit to happen, even though publicly they didn't say that, because they think that we'll be free of these rules that stop us from subsidizing domestic producers and from nationalizing things like the energy companies and the railways. So I think to downplay the kind of economic nationalism and the interventionism that drove a lot of the support for Brexit would be a mistake. So you've mentioned him just now, but I wonder what does it mean for neoliberalism if the leader of the second largest party in the UK is a Marxist? And I think it is worth for listeners to understand that when an American calls Bernie Sanders a socialist or communist, this isn't what we're talking about. Bernie Sanders has used the word democratic socialist to describe himself as any. He has, but he looks pretty right-wing compared to Jeremy Corbyn. But so what does that mean, though, for a new, because you're right to talk about these negotiations with the exit, but there could well be a Labour government in the future. Does neoliberalism look healthy in that kind of environment? No, not really, but even though Jeremy Corbyn himself is a Marxist and the clique around him is our Marxists, the Labour manifesto wasn't as bad as one might imagine. I mean, it was bad from my point of view, but it was sort of bad within normal ranges of bad. It's all we can hope for these days. Yeah, it was things like, we will get rid of tuition fees, we will slowly stop the railways from kind of being kept in the private sector. So I'm not going to go into much detail, but the way the rail privatization works in the UK means that every couple of years you get to re-decide if you're the government which company gets to run the railways and you can easily in theory say actually we're not going to put this out for private tender again. I think what's very much worth stressing is that the Corbyn coalition is not that Corbynite. Jeremy Corbyn is a very, very interesting person. Anybody who is aware of his sort of previous connections listening, I think will probably agree with me that somebody who meets with the IRA in Parliament a few weeks after the Brighton bombing is probably not a great guy. Somebody who meets with Hamas and other terrorist groups brings them to Parliament for events and introduces them as his friends. He's probably not a great guy. He sounds like Oliver Stone in the sense of just hanging out with all the wrong people. I mean he's taken money. He's worked for Iranian national TV. He's really, really not a nice guy and he's really, really willing to hang out with pretty awful murderous people. But everybody within the Conservative Party thought that that was going to kill him dead. I thought it was going to kill him dead. I'm not in the Conservative Party. But I was also one of these people who thought it was going to knock him dead when the campaign came. And interestingly what happened was that in fact what we thought was his biggest weakness turned out to be his greatest strength because people are so cynical about politics and they're right to be cynical about politics that the impression for a lot of people was that anybody who's willing to do this must be so principled that he is a really decent guy. Maybe he was misguided about meeting with the IRA. I don't know. I don't really believe what they're saying anyway. I don't think that that's actually true. But he must be a really principled guy. And that allowed him to say one thing and then have a totally different group, assume that he was only lying because he had to and that's politics. So he has created, I think it's fair to say, probably the broadest coalition in modern British political history of people who are highly educated, high earners in urban areas, people who are old labor, people who would have worked in coal mining or would have worked in industrial sectors of the economy that no longer exist, who have totally divergent views about things like Brexit. But on issues like freedom of movement, where the more educated, more urban people would be very pro-freedom of movement, he could come out and say, oh, we want to end freedom of movement, pleasing the kind of old labor industrial type voters and have all of the urban young graduates say, well, he's such a principled guy. He must only be saying this because he has to win an election. We know that really he agrees with us. I don't know whether he can sustain that, but I think it's really important to stress that most people who voted for Jeremy Corbyn, I think we're not voting for what he really believes. That feeds into the question I was going to ask actually, which was, how much is his broad coalition based around the ideas? And so in any political coalition, its supporters don't all support all of the ideas. But to what extent were the particular policies he was promoting popular? Or to what extent was it actually? This was personality politics in an age of 24-7 media and social media, and he was able to promote a brand, a kind of idea of himself, which was a very authentic principled person who'd been true to himself over many years. And it wasn't just that in isolation, it was that put up against Theresa May who appeared to not know what she believed or what her own policies were, and indeed changed her mind on those things over the course of a six-week general election campaign. Was it really the Conservatives' failings coupled with his own sort of personal brand that built that coalition? Or actually, should we be more worried about the underlying state of the climate of ideas in Britain? I think we should be... I think the answer is yes. There are a lot of questions there. The answer is yes. The Conservative Party has failed to make any case that free markets are actually good for ordinary people. And they're continuing to fail to make that case because they now think they've misdiagnosed a problem. The big problem is that not enough people own their own house. Now, I happen to agree that the system should make it much cheaper and much easier to buy a house. But their view is that, oh, well, if you... And government ministers have said, how can we sell capitalism to people who don't own any capital? I mean, that's not the argument, right? Capitalism is good whether or not you own capital. That's not why I'm not a capitalist because I think it's good for this small section of rich people. And they themselves think that this is the flaw in the argument they've made. They have failed for decades to make any kind of argument that leftist policies, not only that they are better at administering leftist policies and that they are better at drawing the line, but that leftist policies fundamentally don't work. So when they were talking about Jeremy Corbyn wanting to bring us back to the 1970s, and they themselves wanted to put union representatives on company boards, wanted to have extreme government say over pay ratios and pay levels in companies, they were offering going back to the 1970s as well, just a different kind of going back to the 1970s. They coupled that with an extreme arrogance about winning, which led them to put quite bad policies, but extremely unpopular... Not just quite bad from a policy point of view, but extremely unpopular policies, which said that, for example, if you get old and you get sick and you need to be looked after in your old age, for example, if you get dementia, we'll take your house to pay for that. Now, that might not be a good policy, but that's not the sort of thing you want to campaign on. Maybe their flaw there was that they were too honest. Theresa May's advisor after he was sacked basically wrote a piece saying our flaw was that we were too honest. But they also included things that are relatively trivial issues, but make them seem incredibly out of touch, like bringing back Fox Hunting, which is not an issue that there is a huge constituency of support for. But this was actually discussed. This was in the manifesto. This was one of the... This is a sleeper issue. This is insanely cliche in some very bizarre sense. Right. I mean, a lot of listeners will wonder why Fox Hunting is illegal in the UK, right? So I don't really have a... I don't strongly think we should make Fox Hunting illegal, but it makes you look very, very strange. This is an issue that 80% or more of UK people are against legalizing, even people in the countryside. And it's a pure serving your base policy that they only put into the manifesto because they assumed that they were going to win a massive majority and they could get away with doing. And all of those things together, the long-term failure to make an argument for free markets, the fact that Theresa May herself ended up sounding like a very strange person. She was asked on national TV, what's the naughtiest thing you've ever done? And she sort of thought about it for a while. I was like, oh, when I was young, I used to run through fields of wheat. I mean, this is just such a strange response. She sounds kind of like the conservative... I mean, conservative there means, but Hillary Clinton-esque in the sense of being very fake and going back and forth and not really sure if she has any principles and not being able to relate to people. I think that's right. And all of these things together, the arrogance, the policy arrogance, sort of thinking they could just put things in, the fact that they've never made this broad-based case and the fact that they ran a personality-focused campaign on somebody who doesn't really have a personality, all of which made the Corbyn thing much bigger than it might have been. The big problem is it doesn't look as if there's a good replacement for her. I think just to be slightly fair to Theresa May, I think the comparison with Hillary Clinton is a good one in terms of the way they may be bombed a little bit during the campaign. But I think actually Theresa May, in her own way, is quite a principal person, but her principles are all about service and service to the party and service to the country. And so a very well-meaning and probably quite principal person in that respect, but that's not enough actually, I think, to be successful in politics and in trying to run a government. And I know we've talked about this before, you've written about it, how her fundamental problem was actually the lack of an ideological framework. And the lack of an ideological framework, it left her all at sea when she was dealing with issues that popped up during the campaign with having to try and defend policies that seemed unpopular with the electorate. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit on that. Well, there is the problem that she sounded like she was on script for the whole time. So anytime there is a question that would lead her off script, she didn't have the normal framework that most of us have, most of us who are interested in politics have, which allows us to think through a problem and think through a question, even if we don't know all the facts of that. We can at least say, this is what my intuition tells me as a liberal or a libertarian or whatever. She didn't have that. She also didn't have any allied bases of support within the conservative party. She does have her own base of support. She has made a name for herself as somebody who's quite tough on immigration, somebody who is quite skeptical of the modernization project that Cameron brought in, and somebody who is actually quite skeptical of that tourism. There is a constituency of support for that. The problem was that because she never gave anything to other groups, she never had something, let's say, on corporation tax for people like me. People like me, who if there was something like that, that would keep us on board, would be much more inclined to defend her and stand up for her on issues we didn't really care about because we want this corporation tax policy to be brought in. She never did that, and she never cultivated it. I mean, she, as you say, she does have some qualities. She doesn't like the political game, and she doesn't like horse trading. The really revealing movie made about her, kind of short documentary movie made about her, where Eric Pickles, a former cabinet minister, talked about her and said, you know, think about Theresa May as she just doesn't do negotiation. She'll either give you what you want or she won't. He didn't realize that he was talking in the context of a campaign where the Brexit negotiation was the number one issue. But he meant it as a compliment. She doesn't play games. She gives you what she thinks is right or what she doesn't. But that's not a great quality in a leader because it means that she can't amass this sort of broad coalition that you need, and that Corbyn was really able to create. So all this discussion about interesting candidates and people losing elections, I suppose we can't have a conversation here without Trump coming up. And there were debates after the American election about whether Trump won or Hillary lost and what exactly is is to account for the fact that Trump won. But a more basic question. I've only been back to England once since the presidential election and didn't stay too long. So I'd like to ask Sam here, what's been the take in the United Kingdom about our current political situation? And what do you think personally? Well, I should preface what I'm about to say by saying that English people and Europeans in general make a sharp distinction between America and the American president. Even when the American president is very unpopular, America is quite popular. But having said that, the perception is that the U.S. president is basically deranged. He is somebody who perhaps isn't cognitively all there. He's extremely dangerous. And if there is a benefit to Trump, it's that it's made European countries realize that they can't rely on the American security umbrella forever. Maybe this is all part of Trump's master plan. Maybe he is playing 10 dimensional chess. But in the UK, Trump is so unpopular that being associated with him is poisonous domestically. So one thing I haven't mentioned, for good reason, the UK government's strategy with Trump has been to cozy up to him and to try and be his best friend as the rest of the world sort of turns away from him in order to hopefully get the support for the momentum for a trade deal with the U.S., which would actually be very good for the UK economy. But that has actually been very, very damaging to the UK government because the mere hint of sucking up to Donald Trump makes you look like you are like you have no principles at all and like you are completely craven. My own personal view is that Trump is not a great guy. I think he's very, very worrying. But I think that the American system seems to be restraining him quite well. And I am quite reassured actually by the congressional gridlock at everything he's trying to do. Even though I like quite a lot of the policies that the House Republican, I like the destination-based cash flow tax. And that's a great policy. I almost prefer for that not to go through and to discredit Trump as somebody who can't get things done. And it seems as if the system is working as designed for all of its flaws. But within the UK and within Europe in general, Trump is seen as really a madman. In Western Europe, in the sort of liberal social democracies that they have, and most of what all, is there an exception for a broad welfare state, high regulation? There's probably no exception in Western Europe. And you discussed that at the beginning when you were talking about neoliberalism, which to me, and maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but said some of these fights, you don't want to fight anymore. And for rhetorical purposes, or just having an effect, so minimum wage, as you mentioned, is like, do you want to fight not having a minimum wage anymore? That's a pretty core libertarian viewpoint. But I would guess that every single Western European country has a minimum wage, and it's probably a pretty generous one. And you're probably not going to get any headway getting rid of that. So are you basically saying that you should just stop advocating to get rid of the minimum wage because of the political reality on the ground? Well, no. But I think that, no, I'm against the minimum wage full stop. I think it's a bad policy. And I've actually written quite a lot of work. I've read, I think, nearly every minimum wage paper that's been published, certainly my colleague has. In terms of rhetoric, the thing is to restrain the minimum wage, to not raise it anymore, because that's where the debate is. If we say we want to abolish minimum wage, I'm happy to say it on the record. But if we make that a core thing that we're arguing when we go on TV, then we're going to sound like we're completely nuts. And we're going to sound like we have no idea what the debate is right now. The debate is how much do you raise the minimum wage by, and how quickly do you raise the minimum wage? That's where we are in the UK and where we are in most Western European countries. And that's where people like us, if we're interested in actually affecting policy, should be. But does that kind of just negotiate the terms of surrender? Because I kind of see if Western Europe is where we might be in America in 40 years, where we kind of expect once you get a welfare program in place, it's never going to go away. We've already seen that even more recently with the Affordable Care Act. It's probably never going to go away because it's a welfare program. And if we keep building these up, we'll keep defending a line that keeps encroaching against freedom and saying, well, this is the politically acceptable rhetoric we have to fight on. So for example, the NHS, this is a great example. I've heard I've never lived in the UK, but that it is just the third rail of politics in the UK to say it should be gone. The NHS should absolutely be gone and it should. But if we're just going to accept that it exists and say, okay, now we're going to moderate it up, we're not libertarians anymore, we're not advocating for cheaper, better, more innovative healthcare, but a socialized system, and now we're going to call it neoliberal, is that just negotiating the terms of surrender on something like the NHS just because everyone thinks you're radical, even though you're right? Well, if we were two Japanese soldiers on an island in the Pacific and we were discussing what we should do, we might decide that we don't want to negotiate the terms of surrender, but we'd still be irrelevant. That is for in many Western European countries, the question, do you want to be a Japanese soldier fighting until the 1960s and basically being ignored? Or do you want to take part in the debate that's actually going on and influence the debate that's actually happening as it's happening and bringing to bear other things? Because I think that free markets are good and I think there's a lot of really good evidence that they're good and that most people who say that they are interested in evidence in public policy are not and are ignoring the evidence in public policy. And if we don't step up and say within the debate you're having about the minimum wage or the NHS, this is the stuff that you're ignoring and this is the stuff that you're claiming to talk about, but actually the evidence is against you. And yes, maybe I would like to abolish the minimum wage given that the debate is should we raise it by X amount or should we not raise it? That's the debate that I want to have and that's the debate I want to win. The big, I mean, there's such a tendency to overestimate how much influence you have. I mean, we're gadflies, certainly in England, certainly in Western Europe, free marketeers are gadflies. And the best hope we have is being part of the elite debate that's taking place and just trying to be taken seriously enough that you can force them to at least acknowledge that this evidence exists and is against them. I don't think that we have the option of, you know, I don't characterize it as surrender, I characterize it as realism. It's being a pragmatist and not just not talking to ourselves because that's the choice is do we talk to the debate that's going on right now or do we talk to ourselves? And I'm not happy to be somebody who just talks to ourselves. Sorry, but just a very quick question that maybe we should have addressed earlier. So you've taught, yeah, so it's pragmatic, but I'm curious and maybe to get you on the record, is it your stance that the moral arguments for radical libertarianism are incorrect or not helpful, or perhaps both? What do you mean by the moral arguments? So if the radical libertarian view is a natural rights non-aggression principle based theory, and it doesn't have to be, but let's call it that, is it that that kind of argument is incorrect or is it just not helpful? It's incorrect. Okay, it's not true. The moral argument for any system is that this system allows people to live their lives the way they want to. It's that it gives them the choice and the control over their lives that they want. Well, I just want to clarify. So they have a choice because they have natural rights and to live however they want. You said it's not true, right? You said what Matthew said is not correct. The natural rights view is not correct. That's right. The natural rights view, the utilitarian view is correct. Okay, but then you said that the moral argument is people have the choice over how they want to live their life. Do they have that choice because they have a natural right? No, no, no. The moral choice... I mean, utilitarianism is the correct moral theory, right? So the moral... I agree with myself. Is that like you just asserted natural rights implicitly by saying they have a choice? Not at all. Not at all. What I want is to maximize these preferences that are satisfied, right? I'm a preference utilitarian. Most neoliberals, not all, most neoliberals are some blend of utilitarianism with kind of various sort of strange kind of superstitions about natural rights and things like that, but fundamentally it's a consequentialist view. And the view is the more preferences that are satisfied... This is a kind of slightly obscure philosophical way of talking about it, but the more preferences that are satisfied, the better of humans, right? Perhaps of animals as well, but mostly of humans. I mean, my preference to murder you is probably a bad one to satisfy. No, it's not. My preference not to be murdered is the preference that I hold as well, so that weighs against your preference to murder me, but there's no way of... There's no moral way of differentiating between good and bad preferences. How could there possibly be a way of doing that? This is probably going to go far, because I just was like... No, no, no. I mean... I know you're right. No, I'm just... I mean, you make a valid point. I'm just like... No, I mean... I'll call myself a... I'll call myself a bullet-biting consequentialist. I think it's both untrue and unhelpful, so I don't think you have to agree with me. I'm not claiming to speak for all... Right, right. I don't even speak for my colleague on this one, but it's neither true nor is it helpful, and it's in fact profoundly unhelpful, so it doesn't matter that much if it's true. Even if you think it's true, the fact that it's very unhelpful should be enough to make you think twice about how you approach it. It's certainly unhelpful in the context I'm working in. It might be different in the US. The fact that it seems like it's based on a very, I would say, brittle and easily rejected way of looking at the world, and the fact that it always ends up making an extremely difficult case that seems to most people completely insane. The idea that it's better for a person to go hungry than it is for a rich person to have a pound or a dollar taken away from them. That seems like a very strange reductio ad absurdum, but that's a position, if you are a strict natural rightsist, you need to adopt, right? No. I'm just going to say no to that because again, we can go, this would be another episode, but I don't think you have to adopt taxation as theft to be a strict natural rights theorist. Obviously, clearly this is not the case because Thomas Jefferson, for example, was a deep believer in natural rights, and he believed in justified taxation through a consent-based contract theory of government, so just to push back on your point, you don't have to say that taxing someone a rich person a dollar to save someone from starvation. So the non-aggression principle you would agree is wrong? The non-aggression principle strictly applied, I think, is wrong, but I think it is a morally significant principle that is morally significant because people have rights. And where does that come from? I'm going to let Matthew answer your question. I have an answer. We could go on about this. In the bar after we're done with this, we can totally hash this out, but we're coming close on time here, so Matthew. I have two philosophy degrees and escaped academia deliberately, so thank you for that trip down memory lane. So I have a question in this pragmatic structure. How do we weigh up policy preferences? So let's take, for example, a hypothetical where a government said, we plan to legalize marijuana, but we want to give a monopoly to two distributors. This is the plan. Is this something where we should just weigh up that on net it's probably better to legalize? We don't like monopolies, but it would be far, far better for people not to go to prison for smoking marijuana. What's the strategy or the way that you address questions like that? I think it has to be just based on the merits. Are there any countries that have done it this way? What does it look like there? Have they solved the problems that we care about? I would be perfectly happy to go with a statement monopoly if that was the only possible alternative. I would obviously prefer a free market in marijuana or in all drugs, really, but I would be perfectly happy to accept that if that was the only achievable way of getting that step towards drug legalization that we could get. It doesn't bother me that much if we can only get 80% of what we want, because the alternative is usually getting 0% of what we want. It's so important to me that, and part of that, I mean, I don't, with the neoliberal thing, I don't want most libertarians to say that they're neoliberals. I want a lot of people who aren't libertarians now to say that they're neoliberals. I'm not trying to cannibalize the libertarian base. I'm trying to extend this way of looking at the world to people who would usually be put off by natural rights or by the kind of all-encompassing way of looking at things that libertarianism gives you. The debate, at least in Europe, I think suggests that there is a very large constituency of people. You asked me how many people earlier. I really don't know. I really don't know, but there is a pretty big constituency of people who are very uncomfortable with the nativism of the right and the nativism of the left, the preference for your own people that is pretty much all pervasive now. But they're also not comfortable with the traditional politics that goes with cosmopolitanism. They really don't understand why it is that somebody who is just as concerned about people in Sub-Saharan Africa as they are about people in London should by default be a leftist or by default be somebody who is preoccupied with bringing back kind of state control of the railways and things like that. And that group of people are not served politically or ideologically by anybody. Our role, for me, our objective is to give them a free market alternative that isn't so brittle and isn't so dogmatic that they're put off by it. Thanks for listening. This episode of Free Thoughts was produced by Test Terrible and Evan Banks. To learn more, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.