 Trevor Burrus Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. Aaron Powell Joining us today is Robert Higgs, senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute, editor-at-large of the Independent Review and author of many books including the Libertarian Classic Crisis on Leviathan. His new book is Taking a Stand, Reflections on Life, Liberty and the Economy. Welcome to Free Thoughts. Trevor Burrus Thank you very much. Aaron Powell So I'd like to start with your background in history particularly, how do you came to Libertarianism both in the ideas and then to become a professional Libertarian? Was this something you were just born into or did you have a moment of revelation when you were 18 or something? Robert Higgs I would have to speculate on the remote origins of my inclination toward Libertarianism. I was not brought up in a political household and was not especially interested in politics. Even when I was in college although I was interested in certain things at the time, I think I might actually date my movement in that direction to, when I was 17, I went to the US Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut and that was a very rigorous place especially in those days there was constant harassment and physical and psychological pressure being put on people constantly so the idea was to drive away or break people who couldn't take the pressure. So there was a kind of method in the madness but one of the things I learned there is that in a situation like that where there are superiors and inferiors and a chain of command, some of the superiors will abuse their power and I think that is an insight that stuck with me from then on for the rest of my life. You give people power, even petty power at your peril and there are people who enjoy abusing those who can be abused and I think that sensibility was important to me as my political thinking developed which happened during the 1960s. I didn't fancy myself a Libertarian if anything when I was in college I thought of myself as a new leftist which wasn't all bad and I was always opposed to the Vietnam War even when most Americans didn't know it was happening so that was a big influence on me too because that taught me that the government is capable of routinely committing horrible crimes for years on end for the slightest political motives. Did you read any authors around that time that helped you out? Well I used to read Rampart's magazine that was probably the only kind of ideological reading I did consistently but I dabbled in leftist books of various sorts. I read some Marx and some of the contemporary leftists. I became enamored actually of C. Wright Mills and to this day I actually defend Mills in many ways. I think Mills was an honest scholar and of course he didn't have a decent understanding of economics and would have benefited greatly from having one but despite that C. Wright Mills I think continues to be someone one can learn from and particularly his analysis of elites in his book The Power Elite and others. He also wrote a book called The Sociological Imagination which has some really excellent advice to young scholars. How do you go about your work with integrity? How do you do the nuts and bolts of it? What are you trying to do which was basically tell the truth? I'm curious how this notion that you picked up that people in power will abuse that power led to specifically libertarianism and a skepticism about state power because one of the things that we often hear especially from those on the left is that that very idea that if people have power they're going to abuse it, the big guys are going to beat down the little guys is what makes them want to embrace the state even more because they see the state as the way to correct that. The bosses or the warlords or the strongest guy in an anarchic world or whatever is going to beat up the little guy or take advantage of them or force them to work long hours for low pay and so we need the state to be the protector of the little guy, the protector of the common man. Well I was not completely immune to those kinds of thoughts by any means but I was saved from going too far down that path by the fact that I was studying economics. I think if you wanted to identify one overwhelmingly fatal flaw in the thinking of nearly all leftists it's that they don't have a clue about economics and the more I learned about economics especially after I got into graduate school the more I understood the importance of markets and the benefits of markets and even the relationship between markets and freedom in general and so by the time I got my PhD which was in 1968 I certainly didn't consider myself a conservative never in my life did I consider myself a conservative but I still thought of myself as a person more on the left than anywhere else but after I went to work as a professor at the University of Washington they kicked that out of me pretty quickly and at the same time that sometime in that first year of my teaching career I stumbled across Hayek and just loved Hayek the first thing I read by him was this great 1945 article a use of knowledge in society and at the time I thought well that's you know a really good article I can use that for my students because there's no math in it everybody can understand this but I didn't really understand it myself because being trained as a neoclassical economist I was thinking that it's a lot like what I learned from Stigler and other Chicagoans about the economics of information so I still had a lot of understanding to arrive at but it led me to have a high opinion of Hayek and so the next thing I did was to read the Constitution of Liberty which to me was a very important book now when I look back at it all I can see are all the concessions that Hayek is making you know one after another and why some people call him a socialist and all that but at the time he seemed like just a perfect classical liberal and he impressed me with his scholarship that's what won me over Hayek was this you know this great old-fashioned European scholar who knew a lot of languages and he knew about philosophy and law and he wasn't anything like the economists I had read in my education he was the real deal as a thinker and so that kind of tipped me over into classical liberalism very early and from that point on I think I just gradually evolved in the direction of being a more and more unforgiving classical liberal and late in the 70s again because of Hayek's having cited Mises I read a human action from cover to cover and I would say that was the only kind of epiphany experience of my whole life as a scholar that really hit me very hard and actually made me think that I despite the success I'd been having in mainstream economics it made me think that that everything I'd written was just garbage. I want to ask you about one of those things you wrote about around that time because it's my favorite book of yours in 77 it was published the competition of courage and blacks in the American economy 1865 to 1914 which is definitely in that old style economics full of graphs and numbers but what was the general thesis what did you generally find in that book? Well the book aimed to as it were change the emphasis practically everything written in black history took the view that blacks had been victimized from A to Z at every point in history it's almost the case of what my old colleague Morris Morris used to call the theory of infinite and increasing misery and they start on slavery and then it gets worse every year notwithstanding their emancipation or anything else and that was just so counterfactual that nobody who respected evidence could accept it and I didn't when I started reading black history but what I tried to do in that book first as a result of some research I did on particular issues about land tenure and land ownership and occupational distributions and migration so forth I built up a body of analysis and a set of facts that led me to believe that that not only were blacks not 100% victimized but despite everything working against them and there was a tremendous amount working against them they actually succeeded by virtue of their own efforts and by virtue of the fact that there was competition for their services and that's why the book is titled competition and coercion because competition and I'd learned this from Gary Becker's work and other work in the just the mainstream economics of discrimination competition is the salvation of oppressed people and that can be seen in any case you know pick your ethnic group and you see the same phenomena operating if people have something valuable and certainly black labor was valuable as and some blacks had skills beyond labor power there there's going to be potential for someone to to bid away an exploited worker a worker who's being paid less than the value of his marginal contribution to to output and so in a way my book was infused by pursuit of that theme and included ultimately some attempts to estimate what had happened to black income levels between the late 60s and 1860s and world war one approximately and I found that black income on average was was growing faster than white income was growing that was a period of very rapid economic growth in general but because blacks had started at such a relatively low level even if we if we go you know 50 years time they've only improved from about 25 percent of the white income level to to 35 or 40 percent of the white level but that's not trivial that's a lot of improvement and I and I collected a lot of evidence that demonstrated just in concrete ways how their living conditions had improved you know what kinds of things they might have in their home what kinds of clothing and food and entertainment and and what have you they had access to by the end of that period typically that they had not had access to at the beginning of that period I mean the immediate post-war period was horrible in every way because of all the disruptions of the war and all the destruction that had taken place in the south where 90 percent of the blacks lived and continue to live throughout the next 50 years but would competition in the market have done I mean do you think it did better for blacks in that period than attempts by governments to alleviate or fix these problems whether so we had the problem with separate but equal for example which is a very antique about yes that when plus cb Ferguson came down it was you're saying you had to have segregated rail cars or you're allowed to but that meant the rail companies had to have two rail cars that were half full as opposed to one that was full which would which didn't seem to really the businesses themselves in the market were not as in discrimination as perhaps the government was would you agree with that oh yeah that was another part of my thesis that whereas competition in the market was their salvation to the extent that they had salvation whenever they encountered the the government and in in their case it was at the state and and especially the local level where they made these encounters the they were totally out of luck then the only hope they had in their encounters with the government was the the protection they could get from a powerful white patron so a system developed in the south particularly in the plantation areas where blacks became beholden to plantation owners or business owners for protection from the state and and you know if they were arrested their patron would go in and pay their fine if they were you know about about to be sentenced to jail or something the guy would go in and talk to the judge and and in all sorts of ways there was an a trade going on this was a market phenomenon this paternalism there was a trade going on the blacks provided faithful services you know they they didn't run away the first time they were unhappy about something and in exchange they got the protection from the official discriminators that that stood ready to squash any black at any time how much does competition alleviate these discrimination based on race if i guess the discriminators gain utility from the racism so they you know they like not hiring blacks or they would they really don't want to hire them because they don't want to be around them or the rail cars like yes we could have integrated the rail cars but then the white customers might not have been willing to pay as much or wouldn't have patronized the service well it it continues to operate and can operate with great power so long as there are enough people who value wealth more than the exercise of discrimination and in the in the south you know between the war between the states and the first world war there were plenty of people who preferred wealth to the pleasures of discrimination and especially these wealthy people you know the blacks were hated more by working class lower class whites wealthy people didn't fear blacks you know they were they were so far removed from them by class status and wealth that they didn't see the blacks as any threat to them at all they they weren't hankering to to hurt blacks in the same way that that lower class whites were sounds a lot like our a lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric today yeah well also especially if those lower class whites were unionized and then it got really bad for african-americans yeah many of the unions that were formed and of course in the south there wasn't as much unionization as in other parts of the country but where unions were formed they usually did either discriminate against blacks or simply exclude blacks from employment so unionization was definitely a negative big negative factor but but not one that affected most black workers because there was not enough unionization in the holy con there's more in the north yeah after the great migration uh david bernstein's only one place of redress is a great book about that right but i wanted to ask about another book the one i had mentioned at the introduction uh crisis in the vio than i probably your most known book um and for those who haven't read it uh definitely if you're a fan of this podcast or libertarianism in general you have to read it can you give us an overview of what you what you looked for in crisis the vio than what you found well that book was aimed at tracking the growth of government especially the federal government from the late 19th century up to the time it was written in the 1980s and at that time the growth of government had become a kind of cottage industry among economists and to some extent among political scientists and people were people were applying various theories that uh we're lying around in economics or that they they devised for themselves to to account for why government got so much bigger in that century and uh i didn't have a great interest in that when i first started my career but my colleague douglas north uh who was the department chairman and the man who hired me and the future of mobile prize winner well that that future at that time doug was viewed as you know the expert on government economic relations among us economic historians and so he was constantly writing about this and talking about it and and we all work together the economic historians especially uh read each other's papers i was in his office practically every day just to to talk about economic history and so i talked to him a lot and in my own teaching of us economic history courses i dealt with that subject but i wasn't doing research in that area but i was getting more and more in a sense frustrated by my inability to persuade doug of certain things particularly that ideology had been very important in this process ideological change and also that the national emergency periods especially the world wars had been critical times for the growth of government neither element had at that time become important in doug's thinking uh so by the early 80s you know by 1980 81 i decided well i think i'll write a book on this and my idea was just to write about basically the two world wars and the great depression because that's where the main action was for these crises but when i started writing and started going around giving talks at other universities one of the questions that often came up was well you know there were crises at earlier times in history why didn't they produce this ratchet effect your telling us was produced by uh by the the wars and the depression and uh and that led me to decide that i needed to have a chapter on progressivism because i'd come to believe that it was that ideological watershed of progressivism that created a a condition wherein there would be a ratchet effect you have to have people predisposed to think that when there's an emergency government should jump in with all four feet and that had not existed in the 19th century it's not that nobody wanted government to come in and you know hand rinse to them or do favors for them that's always been the case but in the 19th century there was a kind of dominant ideological belief that that government should be limited or at least the federal government or certainly the federal government should be but even at the state and local level there was a belief that politicians were crooked that they wasted people's money that they were always you know engaging in boondoggles especially after what happened the 1830s and early 40s with all the bankruptcies of states and their canal projects that went belly up and and that led to a bunch of constitutional revisions and so forth so from then on especially there was a lot of thinking among opinion leaders and you know lawyers and writers and what have you that that that government was simply you know a factor that while people didn't want to get rid of it they wanted to have government for kind of classical liberal reasons they thought it should had to be kept small it had to be kept limited or it would abuse its powers or waste a lot of people's money and and progressivism altered that as the default ideological background condition and as a result it meant that the next time there was a pretext for a great increase in government action as during world war one then many people were predisposed to to favor well let's have the government do this let's have it do that if you know if we have to have a big bunch of ships built by the government to fight the war why don't we have the government build housing for the shipyard workers and it just went on and on there was always some connection whereby some immediate pretext like fighting the war could be hooked on to some other government activity and so when you government started buying a lot of certain raw materials to produce munitions well the next thing you know is that it bids up the prices of of copper and leather and and burlap and various raw commodities and then that creates pressure because people who use those commodities in their own businesses their costs are being driven up and then that creates pressure for government to use price controls and so in world war one you ended up not with comprehensive price controls but with selective price controls on these specific items whose prices had been driven up by government's own purchases on a large scale and you just see this kind of thing again and again and again and it's because nobody was stopping to say look this is a bad idea for government to create a shipping board to regulate ocean shipping rates and and working conditions of sailors that's a bad idea you know we should let markets take care of those things because by the time this was done in 1916 opinion leaders thought oh that's a good idea you know we we've got railroad regulation ship that's very similar and now shipping rates have been driven up because you know the british navy is driven from the seas and it's very expensive for americans to ship goods to latin america to bring raw materials from from there and other places and and so people who had to incur shipping rates were screaming for some kind of relief and and and it just went on and on everyone had a a similar element like that which which required that there be a predisposition to use government in a way that had never been used before so how intentional was this ratchet effect in the sense that so the way you've described it it sounds almost like government grew but people didn't set out to grow government they might have a predisposition to say like okay so government undertook this activity and that activity had negative effects somewhere else and so well we screwed that area up so we should go and fix it and you had people who naturally thought that government would be better at fixing it than markets so that's what we ought to do and then that leads to this ongoing ratchet but was there an intentional element going on behind it either like within government like people saying here this crisis is an opportunity to grow our power or the power of government let's do it or people outside of government saying this crisis and the things it's leading to are a way for me to use government to benefit myself both there were some of each and even when people entered into these expanded government activities as a simple reaction to the immediate problem at hand they quickly realized that they might have a good deal here and so later on they defended its continuation or perhaps even its enlargement you had for example after the war industries board set priorities for for purchases of different materials the government was using so that the government's contractors got the top claim on copper or steel or leather whatever it was that system of priority was something that a lot of businesses like they thought after the war we should keep this we should have somebody regulating industry because you know before we had all these dreadful price wars and and companies would have destructive competition destructive competition i made scare quotes on that if anyone couldn't see always a lot of big businesses complaining about destructive competition you know because incumbents like things the way they are they want to be the producers they want to have to be fighting off entrance all the time so if there's a regulator you know particularly if they're the guys doing the regulation they can take care of this you know they can they can normalize everything you know they can they can get rid of uncertainty and destructive competition all the rest of it but well that's sort of one of your the sort of i think at that point with crisis and the viathan which is really interesting because the first line of the book this is maybe this was um because it was oxford press or but the first line of the book and part one is and this is interesting for now because you kind of went into sociology of the state i mean that's a lot of what you kind of have end up doing how what is the mindset of people in government what are the minds of the people who work with government what are they trying to achieve but i think maybe that started with crisis the viathan but the first line is we must have government only government can form certain tasks successfully and which is an interesting uh it i'm not sure if you believe that now uh but but then you did it seems seemingly well when i wrote that i believed it in the usual way that it was taken i still believed we we had to have government as i say government as we know it you know government says they really are in the world coercive imposed uh mean uh you know you don't have any choice about this governments we're the government and you're not do what we say uh i continue to believe we must have government uh to do a variety of things to keep social order to suppress criminal behavior and to adjudicate disputes and for a variety of reasons but i do not believe that we must have government as we know it we don't have to have coercive imposed government and i'm satisfied at this point that uh that it is quite possible to have non-coercive means of carrying out all the functions that really need to be carried out to have an orderly and prosperous society that conclusion was a long time coming for me when i wrote crisis in leviathan i was still very much uh classical liberal uh still very much a neoclassical economist and those things gradually changed and i became more radical over time did that shift result from just a lessening of practical concerns so you know when you say wrote that sentence the the thought that we must have government as we know it was because the alternative well it would be better from a moral perspective might not work or did you have a shift in moral reasoning that just said that you know i now think that it's totally morally impermissible to have this sort of course of government well when i wrote that line i wasn't even thinking about moral issues i was thinking as an economist i was thinking what will work and like almost everybody else i thought anarchy won't work you know obviously that's out and you know i followed up that sentence in the same paragraph with a wonderful quotation from from mesis uh who's explaining that government is not a bad thing it's actually the most wonderful institution human beings have ever devised and uh that's that's the opposite of what i now believe but uh what what caused my thinking to change over the years was was not so much learning more about the literature of anarchy or or changing moral position although i didn't make moral changes but it it was simply that the more i learned about government as we know it government as it actually is the more horrified i became to see government as it really is with your eyes open is something that i found appalling it just seemed more and more outrageous to me that these people who had a sign over their house saying government were permitted allowed to commit criminal acts right and left to their very existence depending on criminality and everybody just took this for granted as if there's no problem here not only is there no problem but as mesis said it's the greatest thing that ever happened and uh and so eventually the the the moral outrage and the analytical change of understanding that uh i acquired joined forces to me to uh to bring me to a position where i'm just astonished that people put up with what they put up with well you shortly before we recorded this you're giving a talk here at kato on your book and during that you mentioned that things are actually a lot worse so things in washington things with the government are a lot worse than most people even think and most people tend to think no matter what where they are in the political spectrum that things aren't great yeah um so how are they worse and then relatedly when you talk about you know that people seem to be okay with this how much do people know about how bad these things are uh well i think they're they're very much worse than than most people think or understand um as i say if you if you had a microphone in everybody's office and the way you had in nixon's office this would be a revolutionary uh news item for people you know they knew what these guys are actually saying and doing uh there's one thing i've always loved about the fbi which is their sting operations against politicians they set these up so elaborately so that they get just ironclad film audio you know documentary evidence so that they get these bastards just nailed to the wall you know they can't possibly say they're innocent and i just love it when these guys are revealed but the trouble is you know you can't do a sting on every single politician on earth uh and as for the second part of your your question i think most people know practically nothing about what really goes on in politics they they watch the news they hear politicians give speeches uh that's about the extent of it there are very few people who actually study and scrutinize politics at a level where where they would begin to think about these things and even those who do usually are overwhelmed by ideology they start playing with one team or the other uh there's a lot of partisan political affiliation that muddies everybody's water they begin to think yeah these these progressive politicians are all sleaze bags but you know our guys are upright christian godfaring mother loving you know apple pie eating or vice versa and that that's just a total waste you know that that just means your understanding is hopeless when you sign up to play for one of these teams you don't understand that they're they're both committing the same crimes they just have a different set of clients are the crimes limited to you talked a lot about politicians and the politicians are up for all this stuff but one of the things you learn spending time in washington is how much of the federal government is really out of the politicians hands it's the bureaucrats the people in the agencies who dominate so much are things as bad there as well i think the politicians themselves are the most crooked but are there any good politicians are you at this point do you think that it's possible that anyone got here clean they got to dc you got to federal office it's conceivable i'm not going to name any names but then the bureaucrats are another level the the problem i think is a little different in the bureaucracy the problem there is is that these bureaucratic kingpins have a lot of discretion and they have tremendous power and they're pretty much entrenched it's uh you know you got to do some pretty outstanding stuff to to get yourself removed from power and so they're pretty confident they can wheel and deal as they as they like and of course some of them get get bought with you know cash and a plain brown rapper too but that i don't think is the typical way in which they're corrupted they're corrupted by by just the ease with which they're able to exercise power and abuse their power and by being able to think of themselves as really being right of you know the of not even committing crimes but of doing you know good things for people if not all people at least the right people i think they're corrupted by hubris more than they're corrupted by cash the politicians of course they're not immune from hubris by any means but but you know they're they're constantly fighting to collect money to run the next election and that means cash is really terribly important to them in a way that it's not important to the bureaucrats how culpable are should we regard people in government i mean of any sort whether it's dmv person up to a d8 and up to someone who you know files papers at the at the epa should we regard all them as somewhat culpable in this endeavor or do some of them get a free pass of some sort well yeah at a philosophical level if if you work for government you're culpable you're you're living on on stolen property but i don't i don't see any point in saying the janitor you know cleans the offices in the department of agriculture is a is a big criminal and of course a lot of the clerks and work-a-day drones in these bureaus they don't have anything much to do with policy at all they're just shuffling papers that doesn't mean they don't abuse people they run into you know even the guy at the welfare office he can he can give some grief to the poor so bees that go in there trying to get a month months worth of groceries but but at the same time they don't make policy they don't you know set any any rates or or you know rules about how they're going to deal with people it's the policymakers people have some influence over making policy and and i think too the a lot of the lawyers that work in the government are you know they're basically their their job is to put a legal gloss you know to throw a legal garment over whatever kind of crimes their bosses want to commit and that to me is really despicable because you know in theory a lawyer's highest obligation is to the law and to truth they all swear to this you know that's but i think you know that's kind of laughing stuff you know if you had 10 lawyers in a bar they'd get a good laugh out of that and certainly if they had anything to do with the criminal justice system where things work almost in the opposite way or lying is like built into the very tissue of what they do every day but but i i think the culpability question is not an easy one it's not a black and white thing and it's possible that there are even people at very high levels who aren't you know who don't deserve to be indicted uh sometimes they they do the honest thing they resign uh in world war one you know when when colonel house and company were were wheedling the president toward engagement in the war William Jennings brine was secretary of state and and this all this pro-british policy and all this anglophile thinking and he was appalled by that you know because in his his circles these brits were not good guys you know and the whole idea that the US was going to end up going to save their cookies seemed wrong to him it wasn't that he was pro-german he just was pro-peace and he didn't see a good reason for the US to engage in that war and and he was right but it turned out that you know he couldn't prevail so he resigned and you know this is extremely rare that anybody in government at a high level ever resigns people people you know can do this that and be called all kinds of names and whatever they just stick it out they it's as if they can't stand the idea of living without that power on that matter apiece you write in the book although i generally issue quarrels with fellow libertarians of our doctrinal matters i draw the line at the question of war and peace yes because war is as i call it the master key it unlocks every door where your your liberties are protected it opens everything up to state dictation uh it reduces everyone to the status of potential slavery you know the fact that the millions of men were were forced into the military the state told them you have a choice you can go to prison where you'll be horribly abused or you can go into the army take your pick and on top of that of course there were all the propaganda pressures and the pressures just of you know their friends and relatives and what have you because you know the country the country's been bamboozled into this kind of belief and in the nation state over time and and so it's not just that the state is out there driving people to to do what it wants there are plenty of social pressures too i i remember when i was young and thinking about what what if i get drafted uh i certainly wasn't going to go in vietnam and i wasn't going to go into the army that was fighting in vietnam either and so i had to decide and i decided you know i would leave the country if they tried to draft me but but the main thing i thought about the time is what effect that would have on my parents because i knew that would have a very devastating effect on them even though they weren't political people that was a very unsavory thing you know they'd have to face their own friends and neighbors you know their sons a draft dodger so you know these pressures are real there is a society out there that that you know by a whole variety of means has been molded into into suitable raw material for the rulers and they don't know it they think this is all how it ought to be and and it's just unfortunate that that then people don't have greater awareness of the reality of what's being done to them by people who have no right to do it is war ever okay though if people have an individual say an individual right to self-defense don't we have a right to collective defense you would if every individual had the power to decide if he would participate in that collective effort or not then it would be fine but it's never that way it's never that way it wasn't even back into colonial days when there was militia you didn't have a choice everybody was in the militia if you were able bodied so you know i think i think the problem when people try to equate the right of self-defense with what governments do when they go to wars that they're just not the same thing uh individual you know if you attack me and i i fight back you know i'm exercising my right of self-defense but but you know if if some guy's running around in in yemen and trying to overthrow the government and the u.s government sends a drone over there and kills him and 50 other people at the same time that doesn't have a damn thing to do with my self-defense or anybody else's that's just murder and uh and there's no other gloss you can put on it it people accept this because they haven't thought about it and and and in fact many people really don't have a well-developed sense of moral thinking or moral reasoning they just do what is customary or what they've been told or what they're used to habit is the worst thing in the world for those of us who try to try to build a free society because the thing that keeps most people in line is just habit it's always been this way and they would have to break away from the way things normally are get out of line get themselves in trouble make enemies well no wonder there's so few mavericks it's costly to oppose statism in a world infused by statism a lot of people uh read your new book um especially like the first section first 80 pages or so and also maybe listening to this podcast may think oh well you know professor hex is pretty angry um and uh is that accurate you also have a great essay in here about called the power of the state versus the power of love uh so is accurate to say you are angry in some way or are you more just trying to implore people toward friendly toward toward love rather than force well both actually uh i i am angry at the state i think uh it it consists of a lot of people who are committing crimes and they're hurting a lot of people by doing so uh you know when you think about what a great world it could be if we didn't have these crimes being committed if we didn't have for example so many government measures to hold down the poor you know minimum wage laws licensing regulations public schools public schools it just goes on and on and on uh we we really couldn't even have a poverty problem in a country like the united states if it weren't for public policy there are too many ways in which people could get out of poverty and would but not only not only do these policies keep them in poverty but these policies corrupt them they they make them think they deserve handouts they make them think that that people owe them something you know these are the kinds of beliefs that say a hundred years ago or more when immigrants came to the united states they didn't come here thinking oh the people that are over there owe me something they just wanted a chance to work do you ever think that you might be the utopian about what freedom can do versus government i think that there still would be problems and freedom we'd people would still be poor we have to give an actual yeah no no no i'm not utopian i know that any world with human beings in it will have trouble okay that's the nature of the raw material some of us are no damn good okay so i certainly do not believe that a abolition of government as we know it would bring about some kind of heaven on earth but it would it would be vastly better than the world we live in infused by state power and and the way in which problems were dealt with would be very different too there wouldn't be for example people punished for victimless crimes and if you look at our world the punishment of people for victimless crimes is almost like name of the game you know as a jiff tucker wrote a piece just a few days ago about about what goes on a traffic court every day it's just robbery you bring in there all these people one after another who haven't hurt anyone they haven't violated anyone's just rights and they're just being ripped off altogether thousands of dollars you know that what happened out there by st louis and that that's suburb you know it was very much tied to the fact that those those little suburban governments live off stealing from people through giving traffic tickets to people and hauling them into court all kinds of stupid pretexts and so the robber barons are not things that go back to the middle ages we have robber barons all over this country whole local governments whole police departments live off robbery outright robbery it's not just you know the fact that all taxation is robbery it's a it's it's blatant robbery you know the people people talk about oh in mexico if a policeman stops you know he's looking for a bribe well sometimes he is but what do you think is happening here it's a much more elaborate system of extracting your money it's it's no more decent in any way than that poor you know ill-paid mexican cop who wants a hundred pesos to let you off but people don't understand it they accept that it's the law it's the rules blah blah blah that's crap it's robbery that's all it is and and i wish people would come to see it is that more than they do because this is the kind of thing where something might be done this isn't like you have to overthrow congress or you know replace the president or anything it's just you you got to go to city council and say you bastards better stop this or we're voting you're all you're all butts all out of office one of the really distressing things about government and particularly powerful governments and big governments is i mean we we can go to the city council and we can tell them we'll vote them out but we're often in the minority and even if we can get a group of people together these things are so big and so entrenched that the amount of control the amount of say we have over it is vanishingly small what can those of us who recognize the immorality of a lot of this um and see the system for what it really is is there anything that we can do in our daily lives to move the needle to shift things more towards not that utopian world but the a better world i think there are a lot of things that can be done many things that can be done in the form of opting out or you know relocating yourself adjusting somehow how you live where you live what you do people don't very often at least think about their lives in that way they don't think when they think where will i live what job will i pursue they don't think about you know well how exposed am i to the evils of the state but when you can get them to thinking that way they often find there are a lot of things they can do to evade avoid lower the risks and when they do that they in a sense become believers who can sort of talk to their friends relatives and neighbors and say look you don't have to put up with this stuff you make a missionary out of them as it were as soon as they discover that they can escape some of the abuse i know friends i have good personal friends who they don't get involved in libertarian activities or groups or anything like that but they live their lives in a way that that is constructed to to maximize their actual freedom and avoid government abuse and to to to make their tax bill as small as possible to make their exposure to government regulation as small as possible and to do all sorts of things that are within the grasp of most people if they thought about working toward that so there are ways of opting out i mentioned in my my talk earlier today a homeschooling which has been tremendously successful in in removing about 10 of the children in the country from the horrors of the government schools and there's plenty more room for homeschooling or for for private schooling and i think a lot of people are are dissuaded from doing homeschooling or private schooling by the expenses and by the time demands and and by feeling they're not qualified but i think you know if you can get people to thinking about just how bad it's going to be in the public schools you know the public schools now are like prisons literally in some areas you go through you go through metal detectors there are there are security people in the corridors you know would you want to send your child to a place like that every day it's like you know okay sonny it's time to put your six hours in the city jail off you go have a good day i don't know why people people do this except that it's just inconvenient to pursue the alternative but but the truth is when you get started you get a critical mass it's not as hard as you think we've homeschooled our kids in my step kids that i have and the the homeschoolers get together and cooperate with each other in so many ways that people are aware of to to give certain classes to the kids to to give activities to them to to really flesh out a nice educational experience it's not that every day there you got to have six hours of class time as it were with with mom or dad sitting there working with the kids and there's a lot of online stuff you can do now tremendous resources for that cds you know you name it it's just all sorts of things that homeschoolers can do and when they do that they they take their children out of the control of these wicked school authorities who are are in some ways the most irresponsible people i can think of they're they're just sick with the idea of following rules no matter how much sense they make a lot of them are just are just stupidly pc they they they they ram ideas about the environment and and all all sorts of discrimination and what have you down the throats of the kids and and of course you know kids are not as easy as people might think you know if a kid has a brain in his head by the time he's eight he begins to see what's being done to him to some extent but not all of them and a lot of them just end up being affected by what's done to them in the government schools and well that makes me think of this the question that reflects a bunch of these ideas which is what is worse competent government highly competent government that's really good at accomplishing its goals out no matter how nefarious they might be or incompetent government ones that would fail in the process of trying to accomplish their goals well sir certainly incompetence is better in many many departments of government unfortunately in some cases you know where you really would love incompetence like the police the incompetence becomes fatal you know they they send the SWAT team to the wrong address very often for example so it's you really wish they'd been more competent at a time like that even though I don't I don't want them going to anybody's address to serve a warrant but you'd like the NSA to be less competent oh yeah absolutely I like to be utterly incompetent you know they just hear static when they plugged in if it were up to me so do you do you think things are do you have any optimism at all or do you think things are just kind of circling the drain well there's always hope you know sometimes people listen to me and they say and this guy has no hope that's not true there's always hope we're alive we still got brains in our head we may wake up and do something someday it's not inconceivable but what are the odds I think the odds are not good one gentleman in my talk today was pointing out all the positive trends about life expectancies and wealth and what have you and there's no gain saying that the United States and other advanced welfare warfare states are wealthy people have a high level of living they're constantly entertained they have marvelous electronic toys you know every day from four years old up has a smart phone now and and so yeah it looks it looks wonderful in in some ways but on the other hand it's a police state and the police state part of it gets worse every day and it doesn't seem to matter what anybody says about it it's as if all the protest is just part of the ritual dance you even have members of congress they you know they stand up and they make a speech or they go in and introduce a bill or something but what is different what does the NSA stopped doing I think it started doing a lot more in the past 10 years than it stopped doing so I I really do believe that there's a there's a part of government and this is the heart of it the war intelligence foreign policy part that really runs on its own power that it's really not under effective control I wonder sometimes even how much control the president of the united states has over some of these people because what can he do if he issued an order to the head of the NSA how's he going to know if that order was really carried out of course the guy will say yes sir yes sir but maybe he won't do anything and how's the president going to know he's not a techno genius and he's got other things to do he's got a golf game so things could get better but like the opposite well that's that's the short term view I hold in this country there are parts of the world where things are getting better in most ways and that's glorious you know the fact that that china went from being a centrally planned communist country to being a semi open fascist country that was a huge improvement for hundreds of millions of people that one change probably did more to improve human well-being than any other single thing we can think of look just the numbers of people had benefited people don't have famines anymore in china what a glorious thing they used to starve by the scores of millions when they had a famine they had them every once in a while same in india india is not having famines anymore they've got the technology to avoid that so yeah things are getting much better in some ways is anybody created a free society hell no not even close are most of the advanced countries moving in the wrong direction yes their freedoms are diminishing rather than increasing and it's not that it's all one way there's mixed picture all the time some things go worse some things get better but you have to evaluate the overall picture and you have to decide what's important to you is it important that you have more electronic toys or is it important that that that you not have cops breaking into people's houses with hand grenades to serve warrants so to me i don't want to live in a police state and if and if i have to go somewhere and live in relatively primitive conditions that's an improvement for me i don't think many people would like it they wouldn't consider it an improvement and i'm sorry they don't because that's that's the crux of the thing at ground level it's the fact that people don't love liberty very much and when they have to pay a price for it they won't pay much and until that changes it's hard to see how we can ever have a much freer 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