 This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to Mises Weekends. This weekend our show features an interview really with me by our friend, a great friend of the Mises Institute, David Gornoski. You might know his name, he is a Christian libertarian writer whose work is frequently featured at the American Conservative and also at FI. David takes inspiration from the work of the late Rene Girard, a Stanford professor who was a huge influence on a young Peter Thiel. So David likes the idea of using Girard's work to ground libertarianism in cultural anthropology, in particular Girard's idea of scapegoat theory. In other words, there's a human tendency to want to seek out a scapegoat or scapegoat, so why not let the bad guy in the story be the state? And to this end, David urges us as libertarians to use culture, like progressives do, art, music, movies, drama, literature, to tell a better story. And in that story make the state the villain as opposed to capitalism or rich people, or all the things that our friends on the left do so well. So with that, I think you'll enjoy this conversation with David. And on behalf of everyone at the Mises Institute, we of course wish you a very Merry Christmas this week. So stay tuned. How long have you been now with the Mises Institute? And, you know, assume a lot of our audiences are relatively familiar with Mises Institute, but you could just do a little background quickly to summarize what your specific mission is with the group. Well, it's interesting. I guess I've been here three or four years now, and our founder, Lou Rockwell, created the Mises Institute way back in the 80s. And the idea was that the Austrian School of Economics in particular, which is a loose term. I don't define it rigidly. There are people who sort of straddle various economic outlooks. That the Austrian school really needed a home base and a promotional mechanism, especially for Ludwig von Mises, especially for Murray Rothbard, who was still alive at the time. And so that was our mission to help put and keep Austrian economics on the map. And it's kind of strange in a sense because, again, this loose term, what we might today call the Austrian School of Economics was basically mainstream economics from the late 1800s right up to the 30s, right, to the Great Depression. When John Maynard Keynes wrote his famous book, and communism and socialism were on the rise, especially among academics, then things shifted dramatically. But really, up until less than 100 years ago, lots of things that people knew to be true about economics would have been considered Austrian viewpoints. Today, we're in a very, very different world. We consider the mainstream somewhat Keynesian, even though a lot of working economists today don't really read Keynes and don't necessarily interpret him accurately. But nonetheless, we find ourselves in an environment today where both government and central banks think that there's this need to create demand. That if we just make humans want to buy enough stuff, that they'll magically also have the means to buy enough stuff. And as a result, we'll all be prosperous. So what most modern economics deals with today is on some level how to create demand. And we've convinced ourselves, David, that prosperity comes through consumption. And for many, many millennia in human history, people thought that prosperity comes through consuming less than you make and saving the difference and building that up, which we would call capital accumulation, and giving that to your next generation, either individually as a mom or dad or collectively as a family or even more broadly as a society. Prosperous societies accumulate capital. Poor societies deplete capital and don't accumulate. And somehow in the last hundred years, we've gotten very, very far away from this. And that's one of the reasons the Mises Institute exists, to plant the flag and to say, no, Austrians understand money and capital and interest and productivity and human preferences and subjectivity. And we can explain some of these errors of modern economics. And from a civilizational standpoint, I don't want to be too grandiose here, but economics is not just some dry study for a few people who have PhDs to engage in. It's something for all of us and it affects the arc of civilization. So as far as I'm concerned, our mission is to provide an alternative and to give the intelligent layperson the ability to access economics and understand it because it's not something that ought to be just left to academia. It's interesting you mentioned a comment about this Austrian school is about teaching people that it's not all about just consume, consume. And yet it's a popular conception of capitalism and libertarianism that it's totally wedded to the notion of greed and consumerism and materialism. And yet what you suggested there is that perhaps not. Perhaps it actually would be much more anti-consumerist way of doing things if it actually was, if you know, Austrian economics was actually followed in our culture. Well, I wish greed was a concept that people applied to politicians. Nobody ever talks about greedy politicians who want more power and more money, I noticed. But yeah, absolutely. The idea of consuming less than you make is really at the core of human development, human history. Touches on, as we were talking about off mic earlier, anthropology and development and culture. There's always been sort of a cultural bequest handed down to the next generation and that wasn't just information or traditions or attitudes. It was also material. There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with materialism. That's why we have roofs over our heads and hot and cold running water at our fingertips and electricity at our fingertips and things that previous generations couldn't dream of. And we ought not to be ashamed or apologize for those things. But we also need to understand that how they came to be was that people engage in acts of forbearance. They didn't just hedonistically spend every last penny they earned. So it worries me. I have kids and maybe someday I'll have grandkids. It worries me very much that really for the first time in human history and I'm going to have to throw a little shade on baby boomers here. For the first time in human history, we have a whole generation that won't focus on leaving something to the next generation. There's lots of people in this country in their 60s and 70s and 80s who have debt, which was unknown 100 years ago. People in their 60s, 70s and 80s moving to Florida and getting a 30 year mortgage. David, imagine that. And I would suggest that in a sense they're responding to incentives. The Federal Reserve from my perspective has made the cost of borrowing money artificially low and that this has an effect that sort of cascades throughout the economy and makes people make bad choices and turn savers into chumps. Because again, in my view, I think inflation is much higher than reported. So this is really not just some dry technical issue about central banks and the Fed and academic economists fighting over some technical changes to what Janet Yellen's proposing or Ben Bernanke proposed a few years ago. I would say that this is actually a civilizational question and anyone who cares about America and our future in the West ought to be informed about it. So this is ultimately a moral question that you guys are tackling at Mises, would you say? Well, I suppose it is. Again, that sounds grandiose, but economics is about choice. Choice is about human action. And on some level, I think we all agree that humans ought to deal with one another peacefully and voluntarily. And yet you could certainly make an argument. Libertarians make this argument that what central banks do and what the U.S. Treasury Department does in tandem is a form of violence that we are forcing people to pay taxes to a system. We are forcing people to use the U.S. dollar as a currency even when we feel it's manipulated by the Fed and that this isn't a peaceful, voluntary way to organize an economy because an economy is not just the goods and services that people buy. The other half of the economy is the money that people use to buy those goods and services. And that money is basically being centrally planned by a Politburo of a few dozen people. It's every bit as Soviet as when some grain commissar sat around under Khrushchev and said, well, how many bushels of wheat are we going to produce next year? And how many workers are the farms that produce wheat going to hire? And what's the price per bushel going to be? A typical Wall Street Journal capitalist in America would say, gee, that's central planning. But when we sit around and do that with money, somehow that escapes people's view. We just assume that governments and central banks have to control money. And most people in the Austrian school strongly disagree with that and think that the marketplace can produce money just fine. And more importantly, that when the marketplace doesn't produce money and government does, that there's a violence to that and an inefficiency to that. So, you know, most people who are Austrian or libertarian really focus and talk about money more than conservatives and liberals do. Yeah, that's interesting. So how would you define the state, the government itself? What do you have a definition you like to use? I would define the state as an organization that calls itself the state. A group of human beings, by the way, not omniscient experts or technocratic gods but a group of deeply fallible human beings who organize together and say, well, we have a monopoly on who controls this turf. First and foremost, even in the digital age, states are defined by the physical geographical borders over which they claim to assert jurisdiction. So states are defined by two things. One, the physical geography over which they exert dominion and two, the human beings within those physical confines or borders over which they assert jurisdiction. And it's interesting that our conception of the state hasn't changed much in that sense, even in the digital age. It still involves borders and humans, which are both flesh and blood and tangible and physical. So I don't view states as magic creations that somehow the people involved in governing it are imbued with some kind of metaphysical wisdom when we send them to Washington, D.C. or to our state capitals. But not to sound like a public choice theorist, but I view states as just a bunch of people who have an undue monopoly power over violence and force and jails and cops and guns, who are every bit as fallible and who respond to incentives just like people in the private sector respond to incentives. So they want to get re-elected and they want to have power and they want to have name ID and they want to have money and they want to have influence and status in society. So I view the state as a very, very dangerous thing. Where do you think the first state came from? What was the origin of the state in history or what was that first proto-state, so to speak? How did that come about that someone said, yeah, let's go with this? Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? And it's a very tough question for libertarians. We shouldn't shy away from it. When we don't have great answers for things, we ought to admit it. And let's face it, there's an argument that can be made coherently that says, well, gee whiz, Jeff and David, there's kind of a market for government, isn't there? Because it keeps cropping up in human history and in cross-human societies. I would respond to that by saying, well, look, criminality keeps cropping up across time and across human societies. So maybe it's sort of an inherent bug or feature in the human psyche, but that doesn't mean we ought not to oppose it. Nobody shrugs their shoulders and says, look, wherever you go throughout history, people murder each other. It's just part of who we are as humans. So we ought to just let it go. But there's something special about the state. For example, murder, yes, we've always had murderers and we've always had thieves. And I know, I think, Hoppe has a theory about the history of the origins of the state from an Austrian perspective where he suggests that it's expropriators joining together as a gang and figuring out how to steal and expropriate other people's property. But there's something sacred about the state, if you think about it, the way people treat it. The flag, standing, goosebumps, the language we use, the sacred honor of the sacrifices made for the state in the war, the sacred dignity of the presidential office. Everywhere we go, when we look at the state, we have holy days for the state. We have rituals. We have these rights of passage that people who want to become leaders of the state have to engage in. Where do you think that came from? Do you have any idea? Well, humans have a desire to be part of something bigger than themselves. We're pack animals. We like collective organizations, at least when they're voluntary. We like being part of a religion, some people. We like being part of, you know, a particular sports team's fan base. You know, we like being part of a family. There's all kinds of many nations within human societies. So I suppose it is hardwired to an extent. But what changes with the state is, as you mentioned, there's this religiosity to it. And there's also this respect. The state isn't just the biggest, baddest, most successful gang. Nobody thanks the Crips or the Bloods when they pay them their 10% in return for allowing them to operate a crack corner somewhere. They mutter under their breath and they pay the 10%. I don't know what the Crips and Bloods are charging these days, but they pay the money because something very bad will happen to them if they don't. But it's so fascinating how governments have made this leap in people's minds where they actually sort of say thank you. Thank you for providing roads. Thank you for providing military protection. Thank you for providing police protection. Thank you for providing courts and dispute resolution when you and I might know or at least argue that these are all illusions. The state doesn't provide any of these things. So it's look, it's a thorny question. And maybe, you know, maybe Doug Casey, the great investment advisor and guru has the best answer. He says, you know, maybe this is just maybe libertarianism is a DNA thing. Maybe 10% of people are wired with this gene to question all of this and maybe 90% aren't. In other words, he's arguing for the nature over nurture case. So I don't know. I think this is getting above my pay grade, but it's part of human nature. And sometimes we have to appeal to our better angels and fight certain tendencies in human nature just like we have to fight our ability maybe to get out of our car really angry when someone cuts us off and take a baseball bat to their window, you know, maybe on a bigger scale, we have to fight this impulse to form states. Yeah, I think if you look at the, you know, more ancient forms of states, they didn't call them states, I guess, but, you know, look at the Aztecs or the Incas or, you know, even Greeks and so forth. The marriage of culture and state and religion was pretty much one. There was, there were like synonyms and there was no sense of distinction between the sacred and the role of politics. And, you know, later on, it became the divine right of kings as we became to modernize a little bit, but it was still a totally church function. So I would say that the state is just a vestige of sacrificial religion. That's all it is. It's just a, it's just a holdover from the way ancient societies and even before that archaic communities made their, their ritual, you know, kind of remembrance of who they were and who they are as a people. And so maybe it's just a bad habit that was picked up along the way and something we need to grow out of from, you know, maybe we as a species need to evolve out of this kind of antiquated framework of having community. Well, that would explain the religiosity that surrounds the state. We all see this in progressives and conservatives today. They, they view the state with religious fervor and they react to criticisms of the state with religious hostility. So I think there's, there's a lot of parallels and I think for in secular cultures in the West, the state has replaced religion. And as you mentioned, state and religion were one in the same. Even in recent history, you know, you just go back a few hundred years for civil state functions like property records. The Church of England, for example, held those records, marriage and birth certificates, death records. You know, maybe it's just part of a long tortured process of human evolution. So we'll, we'll see what comes. But, but here and now in our lifetimes, I think we have to deal with these stubborn creatures known as humans the way they are. And the way they are is they do a lot better when they're less governed. So at least less governed externally. So that, that's our challenge. Right. And I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I just think that the way we deal with moving people away from the state has more to do with aesthetic and art and symbolism and those deeper gut things than it does with, you know, changing people's minds. Ultimately, we can, you're right. Maybe there is 10% of the population that is hardwired to, to receive deep, rational, beautiful principle and to master economics and so forth. But for the vast majority of the population, I wonder if we're never going to get anywhere with them. If we always appeal to reason and facts about, hey, you know, the facts are this about the state. It's more that we have to tell a story that makes the state ugly and shows the state for what it really is that the emperor has no clothes, so to speak. You know, for example, why, why do we send people into cages, human cages where they have a high likelihood of receiving violence or even sexual assault, you know, for doing a nonviolent thing like getting high or not paying a minimum wage. You know, that comes with actually go to prison if you don't pay the minimum wage. They find you first and if you keep going, you know, they'll put you in jail. So you can go to jail for not paying your wages properly that the collective deems are appropriate. You go to jail for, you know, having a broken tail light. That's what killed that one guy. The cop came to him and, you know, drew a gun because he had a broken tail light and he ended up dead. You know, so we kill people. We put them in cages. And if you just think about that, how barbaric it sounds like something from thousands of years ago, doesn't it? The idea that you put someone in a rape cage because they got high is crazy. Yeah, it is crazy. And we're not very good storytellers. I think you're right. We need more people who are. I freely admit this. You know who told the story was Donald Trump. Donald Trump told a story and it went off on a lot of tangents and it wasn't necessarily that easy to follow and it seems crazy in some ways. But he told a story that was better than Hillary's story and he was a better storyteller than Hillary was a more confident storyteller. So the idea that Libertarians needed to tell stories is very, very interesting. And of course, I ran Atlas shrugged in the fountainhead that are two examples of stories that gripped a lot more people and won a lot more people over than, you know, here we are on the other side, the non-storytelling side, the fact side, the reason side. I mean, here we are. We're still having to explain how minimum wage hurts the poorest people the most and creates unemployment among low skilled people. We're still having to explain rent control. We're still having to explain the same old tired, tired, tired arguments that have been absolutely eviscerated 100 times over by far better people like Hayek and Mises and Milton Friedman. It just goes to show you that what you're saying is so important. We have a hindbrain that oftentimes is a lot more powerful in terms of our motivations than our fully conscious rational brain. I think if we're going to really take a stab at the heart of the state, we've got to really look at what makes the state so attractive at such a guttural level and take that apart and really tell a better story. And it's really easy to do, really. All we have to do is tell the victim's story. If we tell the victims of the state's story, it loses its mystification. It loses its mysterious power. It's aura. Look at, for example, Erwin Schiff, you know, Peter Schiff's father. Erwin Schiff was a tax protester. Now, I personally disagree with the, you know, the ideas, the method he was trying to use to get people to know, hey, you have to pay income tax. I think you should pay the income tax for the same reason that Jesus says when they come for your cloak, give them your tunic too. Just don't let the mafia beat you up any more than they have to, you know. So I believe that. But yeah, Erwin Schiff had a different opinion, you know. And what they ended up doing is they, they caged this elderly man and he died of cancer chained to a hospital bed away from his family. You have to think to yourself, what is the great taboo? This human being, you know, made in the image of God. What in the hell do you have to be to cage an elderly man dying of cancer, not allowing him to get fresh air, not allowing him to see his family because the greed of what he was promoting people. If you wanted to be like the state's best argument, he was greedy and God forbid if we let everybody get an idea about what he's saying, everybody will be greedy and we can't build roads or whatever crap they can come up with. And so what I want to get people to see is if I was talking to an ordinary person would you cage an elderly man and keep him from seeing his grandchildren as he's dying because you want, you think that's the only way you can have your trash picked up. You don't think you can figure out a way to pick up trash other than a state mechanism like putting people in cages if they don't pay. You don't think there's a way to solve building roads other than to sacrifice an elderly man like me. You see, once we tell the story of the victims, the emotional power that we connect with them, if you tell that story long enough of people like Irwin and there are thousands and millions more drug users, whatever, tell their stories, tell what it was like in the hidden confines of the state, they can't survive that. That's what I'm going to get out of this. If we tell the victim story, if we take the camera away, the camera is run right now by the population and their ignorance, we take that camera and let's say this is an ongoing movie of history and we take that camera, we put it in the hands of the victims that the state chews up quietly and we don't see the story and if we tell that story and I'm talking literally tell it in a article and just push it, push it, push it, push it every day. Just like this me too thing. If we're really going to deal for example, just as a little tangent to the same point I'm making, if we're really going to deal honestly with sexual assault then the state won't exist because the state's very existence is predicated on the threat of sexual assault. I mean if everybody knew that if you didn't have to pay taxes, you'd go to a hotel Hilton where you're taking care of breakfast, lunch and dinner and they're really peaceful nice people. I don't think anybody would pay taxes. It's the threat of physical violence that makes people obey and pay some ridiculous tax so the CIA can protect poppy fields in Afghanistan. The only way we do this stuff is that we have these dirty little secrets about what makes the state function and if we just stop making them secrets and start telling them from a human interest perspective, I think is the state's evil in such a powerful and profound way that we'd be amazed that we're not doing it already every day. Isn't it interesting Erwin Schiff shares a lot in common with the younger guy Ross Albrecht who's currently in prison for his involvement with the Silk Road dark website. What's so interesting is that both Ross Albrecht and Erwin Schiff not only do they engage in these opting out activities but they made the fatal mistake from the state's perspective of talking about it. In other words Erwin Schiff published books and Ross Albrecht spoke or wrote too freely on emails some of which ended up in the hands of the FBI and of course the whole notion, the whole charge potential charge that Ross Albrecht had solicited murder for hire was completely false and it was just used as a tactic in his negotiations with the federal government and that charge was never actually levied nor brought and he certainly wasn't convicted on it so both of these men languished or now languish in jail exactly as you suggest and the question becomes how do you tell stories in the face of a bigger, more powerful apparatus of the state in its own storytelling because you said we'll put it in a documentary well if we made a documentary about Ross Albrecht imagine the pushback there would be people saying oh well that's great David but that site was used to buy drugs or that site was used to launder money or it could have been used for human trafficking what about the children don't get to tell our stories in a vacuum or without pushback there's a lot of people on every side these days but here's the good news the good news is that the ability to tell the story is so much cheaper and easier than it was 30 years ago and all we had we had to sit there and listen to Walter Cronkite on the evening news for 20 minutes just lay down how things are and there was no pushback today it's unbelievable how cheap it has become to produce podcasts to produce books to produce videos to produce feature length films it's been a great equalizer and maybe we need to well I like the idea of our own campaign and me too campaign something that powerful but maybe we need to have a movement or workshops under the auspices of organizations like the Mises Institute that promote libertarian filmmakers and you know because some of the old libertarian movies are kind of schlocky and they need to be better so that's a really fascinating thing and I love the idea of documentaries yeah I think it's all about telling the story if you show the story see that's the thing libertarians get too left brain they're talking about the facts right just tell the story put a camera you know what I've been doing is I've been going around finding people who've been imprisoned right and I filmed them sharing what happened to them in prison you know just tell me what happened what the smells were like tell me what the sites were like tell me what happened in your first time in prison and it's fascinating that the human interest stories that are told and when you tell that and you just show the victims family show the person who's thrown away in a cage for getting high show the children that are crying when they see their parent is gone just show that story and then keep teaching the principle all along no violence for nonviolence well there's no question that the US prison system is probably well maybe apart from public schools the most shameful thing about America today and I would love to see prison crime statistics we almost think prisons are outside of of you know our crime stats because these people are sort of off the record but I would love to see criminality that occurs in prison I'd love to see those stats glommed on to whatever state or community so that the governor had to own up to the true stats of rape assault murder illicit drug use etc in his or her state let's say as a governor because I suspect very strongly that we don't include what happens in prison in our crime stats it's just one of those things we tend to think about and care about what's closest to us and what's right in front of us and that can be on social media or whatever it is and when you take people out of the game and put them in jail we warehouse them stack them on top of each other we forget about them so that's the very lifeblood of the state the state depends on that right to do that you know they are the only institution that can richly sacrifice nonviolent peaceful people bar none nobody else cared you know now marxist will try to tell people that the market is a sacrificial machine because you know if you want a Lamborghini and you're poor you don't get to have one therefore you're a sacrifice stupid stuff like that but the real violence actual physical violence against nonviolent peaceful people is the prerogative only of the state the state is the only one allowed to do that and all we have to do is just challenge that assumption by telling stories to undermine their ability to obfuscate our violence against people because if you ask someone like if you take anybody who's like an average status-deferring normal person you're on a jury panel you say you know do you really want to you know this person got high okay or this person was driving with a suspended license do you really want to walk that person to the cell you know do you want to put the cuffs on them yourself do you want to be the guy that says no you can't hug your child tonight you're going to be stuck in this cage do you want to be the person that guards them and they go to the common areas where there's violent gangs and they have to decide oh crap I'm not used to this I don't know which gang to join and I guess I got a threatened violence or else I'm going to be physically assaulted you know I've asked people I've asked John Bayser he was a former corrections officer I asked him you know I was like what's the percentage chance that you're going to have to engage in violence he says pretty close to a hundred percent you know if you want to survive a prison even if you were in there a nonviolent victim was crime so it's basically a hundred percent chance you're going to have to engage in some kind of violence or else violence is going to visit upon you I mean look how barbaric that system is even if you for example were to say well it's not guaranteed that someone's going to be sexually assaulted well even if it's a twenty percent increase in the probability that someone will be assaulted sexually if they're in a prison cage versus not in a prison cage you're still immorally you know you're it's still an attack for you to have done that you know that's so insane the idea that we can exonerate our more responsibility if we sat on a jury panel that sent someone into a cage where they can't leave with violent social paths that's what a sick barbaric concept that is right you know it's like all you have to do is just think about it and just talk about it and it's so dumb and evil that it kind of kills itself just by being talked about honestly you know well juries ought to be told about that they ought to be told about the extra sentencing realities of prison life but yeah it is pretty amazing when we think about it that apparently more men than women in the US are raped when we include prison statistics for one but you know getting back to your point about storytelling and explaining to people of violence it's interesting a lot of people in this country really don't see the state as a form of violence I mean they would push back on what you just said they would say look you know we have laws and some guy chooses not to pay his taxes or not to comply with some law or regulation and the police issue a warrant for his arrest he doesn't come in and submit to that arrest and so the cops go look him up at his house and he won't come to the door and so you and I would say well you know he hasn't done violent but yet they're going to bang his door down and they're going to physically grab him and handcuff him and haul him off to a very dangerous place it's interesting how a lot of people don't see that as unjustified violence I mean they understand that there's a physically violent element to what the cop does they get that but they don't see that more broadly as the state is inherently violence and they think that the cop is entirely justified in his actions there's no question that I would argue the majority of Americans view things that way so that that's a very tough hurdle when we start talking about the state as violence as much as that appeals to me as a rhetorical device and also as an objective reality I also have to be honest and say that really rings false with a lot of people including our progressive friends they don't like the way that sounds they don't want to engage that line of argument they want to dismiss it and they want to dismiss the people who use it as cranks or you know people who just use hyperbole that you know gee whiz if the cop pulls you over and you don't comply yeah he's going to have to drag you out of your car and this is just this is just part of the game but that doesn't mean government is violent I mean what would be your response to that well there's a couple of things there one I would say if you talk to the average person who's mildly politically involved or what have you every one of you can find someone with a few scapegoats that they'll admit the state wrongfully scapegoats people about so if you go to a progressive you'll get them with the drug war right they'll go with you on that real big a lot of progressives that you'll talk to they'll say yeah it's violent for a state to calm and arrest poor people for doing drugs they'll tell you that at least they'll give you lip service it's not the top thing on their agenda but they'll tell you that right so you start where you can find an entry point with everyone so with your average conservative they'll tell you it's violence for the state to force you at the barrel of a gun to buy health care they'll say yeah that's Obama that's unjust immoral violent law you know if you say yeah that's violent they'll say yeah that is or you know certain conservatives will go with you on other economic regulations violence it's coercion to force someone to use minimum wage you know whatever the minimum wage is so you can get each faction will agree with you that the state uses violence against scapegoats they only have their own pet scapegoats so the one thing we have to do is tell stories in a way that unites the principle across the board that's all we gotta do so you take their entry point scapegoat for the left it may be sex workers it may be prostitutes I mean it may be drug users drug dealers for the right it may be economic regulation violators people who you know I know that a lot of conservatives don't like the fact that the EPA throws people in jail for messing with their water you know the river area access or something or changing their backyard so the nanny state people there's a lot of conservatives mainstream conservatives that hate the nanny state and they see it as violent and wicked government but you just gotta unite the principle you gotta say no violence for non violence if there's no victim there's no crime victimless crime there is no crime just keep repeating that mantra either rhetorically or symbolically in the imagery that you show and just keep tying it to the unifying principle if you make a law progressive if you make a law to criminalize heroin you have given you have ceded the principle for criminalizing every other nonviolent behavior once you say that a state has the power to draw guns on someone who's done nothing he's not hurt anybody he's not stolen from anybody he's not assaulted anybody once you say the state has the right to draw deadly force on anybody for a singular issue you see that moral principle to the state and they can expand it to every area you hate so conservatives you know you tell that to conservatives just say hey look I know you don't like drugs but here's the deal you know how you're worried about the state having the privilege to you know you put you in jail if you don't make a cake for someone you don't agree with well guess what that principle exists because you let it exist for things like drugs once the state has the power to criminalize any nonviolent behavior you've given them a moral paradigm that they can just push and pool and adjust accordingly as popular opinion sways you see and so that's the thing that we have to unite left and right on and say hey we each have our own scapegoats that we think yeah give it to them put them in a cage but if we really think about it we wouldn't do it ourselves you know if you ask a leftist who loves big government would you put caged would you put cuffs on Erwin Schiff yourself well no that's I wouldn't do that you know would you put him in the back of a car and kidnap him yourself no I guess I wouldn't do that you just walk them through when you walk them through you see the humanness opens up right and so it's all about telling the stories of specific cases and just walking people through well I think that's a great application to domestic policy of what we try to apply to foreign policy I know sometimes even at libertarian gatherings I will be challenged on the principle of non-divisionism and people say well Jeff what would it take for you to authorize US troops to invade how bad would a dictator have to be you wouldn't have gone into World War 2 you know that sort of argument and having just finished Michael Malice's book on North Korea you know there is an example of society so horrific that you can imagine even the most pacifist libertarian saying oh my gosh maybe we ought to do something about that but I always offer a very simple test and it's similar to what you're saying would you put the handcuffs on everyone's shift and most people would say no but this relates to foreign policy I say you know I cannot in good conscience ask the government using a proxy of some probably less affluent kid who signed up for the Marine Corps of the Army I cannot ask government to use that kid as a proxy for something I wouldn't do myself or I wouldn't send my own kid to do so if you ask me right here right now Jeff will you give up your job potentially no job to return to will you leave your marriage and your house and your mortgage payments for an unknown term of years for much lower military pay leave my wife and kids to go don a uniform and fight to overthrow the regime physically fight to overthrow the regime in North Korea as bad as it is my answer is no I wouldn't and nor would I send my son who's not old enough but if he was so in less until the answer is yes I don't think I have the right to send anybody else now I happen to live in Auburn Alabama if a foreign power sent a bunch of ships into the Gulf 120 miles away from me and they started lobbing cruise missiles into Mobile or Pensacola or something well yeah I'd probably go down there and help try to fight off those ships that would be a conflict that I would fight in without any need for the government to have a draft or anything else I would fight in it out of self-protection and self-interest so I like the application of that idea to domestic policy would I personally go do something for a lot of people the answer is probably going to be no right they wouldn't do it they wouldn't be the guy that keeps the cell locked as someone beats a man up for being greedy right I mean if you're in jail for a victimless crime you're being put in a cage where you cannot escape there's no way you can get out if someone says hey we're a gang we don't like the way you looked at us we're going to beat you we're going to beat the hell out of you or we're going to do whatever else we want to do to you we're going to make you so script of your humanity you won't know how to think straight for the rest of your life and we do that with such a flippant carelessness that the only way we're able to do that is because someone just doesn't tell the story I know that sounds weird you're like whoa I mean people are thinking and I think well is it that simple yeah it really is I'm not saying you make a movie and then you're done I'm saying you keep telling you make it a contagion where other people are using art they're interviewing a guy with a webcam you know they're interviewing they go down there's people all around our cities who are thrown away by society because of victimless crime laws and just tell their stories and then link it back to the principle no victim no crime no violence for a non violence no violence just keep reiterating that mantra that's the only way the mainstream will get on to stuff that's how they get into that cone that remember that whole thing they got into the Coney 2012 and everybody got into that so you just what we have to do I am convinced 100% is we have to move libertarianism away from the book club set which is they'll always keep them there there keep developing that but if we really want to make a crack at the mainstream we have to we have to go into the heart strings we have to tell the emotions and we have to we have to tell a better story and and that's the way that it'll become we had to basically make libertarianism a humanitarian crisis not like oh well there's Marxism and there's libertarianism and there's conservatism and just pick which tribe no no no no screw that we don't have time for that there's people right now that don't have the luxury of being able to flee an attacker we can if someone comes to our house you know you can get a weapon you can leave you can run you can do stuff but if you're in a prison cell you can't you're confined to be inflicted upon violence you don't have any way to defend yourself or anything and we're okay with that as a society as long as we're not making we should be screaming about this every day that this is a humanitarian crisis and that it's it rests at the very heart of the state's existence see what I have found the culture see we really are in a great place if we just reach out and grab it see in terms of our cultural power watch you know think about it right now it's extremely popular to talk about criminal justice reform it's bipartisan it's like one of the few feel good bipartisan things that left and right says like Rand Paul and all that because he does that you'll see you know you'll hear liberals talk about that and so what you do is you take that starting point it's already become a humanitarian crisis issue it's already got leftist churches and Christian progressive groups and conservative groups like Chuck Colson's group of justice fellowship and prison fellowship they do a lot of stuff with this and they're very arch you know conservative evangelical friendly so you take that and then you take the left groups because they won't listen to us about anything else but you take the criminal justice thing and you use it as a bulwark to say hey if we're really honest about this we don't need to just trim around the hedges we need to make a new reform that there if there is no victim there is no crime and just and just let that principle through storytelling you tell stories of the raw milk farmer the alternative medicine seller there's real stories of people in cages for this tell their story show their children crying on camera show I mean not that an exploitative way show the natural emotion show what it's really happening just tell their story let their tears speak for themselves let the pain and the immorality of the whole thing just unveil itself and if we do that you create a snowballing trend where now it's unfortunately the hate to use his word but it's now trendy for people to talk about me too when it comes to the very existence of victimless crime loss and now we can talk about man we should never put human beings in a cage why are we putting poor black people and brown people and white people and every people women because it's not just men being assaulted in prison it's women too they're being assaulted why are we doing this you make it a humanitarian crisis that's where I think libertarianism needs to go I think in some ways this is kind of paradoxical we need to die in order to become alive right and what I mean by that is we need to die as this like I said a camp that you choose from and we need to become more transcendent where it's like no what liberty is about is a humanitarian crisis in our own backyard where people are being assaulted and the children the moms I mean kids are begging for their parents to come home at night and they're not coming home and they're being left fatherless and motherless on the streets and the cycle of evil continues and it's all because of us because we refuse to withdraw our consent from victimless crime laws and guess what victimless crime laws includes ultimately laws for taxation as well so the very heart of the state is gutted if we take criminal justice reform the cultural appetite for it and we just keep using it as a wedge to open the whole Pandora's box yeah I agree completely it's tough it's tough sledding because we are so tribal you mentioned Rand Paul even people who really like what Rand Paul has to say on a couple of things you know you start talking to him deeper and they'll oftentimes say oh he's crazy though or he's a libertarian or he's this and that because we have this not only do we have tribalism but we have two big tribes and as opposed to what I would much prefer 50 or 100 or 300 tribes in America coexisting peacefully as opposed to democrat and republican so it's a challenge but you know something has to be done differently than we've been doing it for the last 30 years because I think while libertarianism is growing and the libertarian mindset there's no question it's growing there's no question there's a lot of success stories at the individual level you see people's lives being changed but the population is growing too that's the question are we any bigger than we were 30 years ago per capita and so I hope the answer is yes but it's not so clear right and yet still people 70% of the country still says they're Christian so we have this unifying tribe so to speak that supersedes some of the other things I am a Christian and Jesus says do not resist evil with violence and turn the other cheek so I guess I have to think about does that include turning the other cheek when it comes to dealing with the drug user does do not resist evil with violence as Jesus commands his followers does that include people who sell raw milk and I'm afraid raw milk is going to poison people do I resist that with violence if the state says I can't well maybe not if it's people that are in juries you can not guilty because you find the law to be immoral maybe that's another area where we can infect the culture by saying hey when you go into your jury duty you know hashtag me too say not guilty not guilty if it's a victimless crime let your neighbors go if they haven't had a victim so there's a lot of interesting angles that we can explore and I think the Christian identity that you don't even have to be a Christian to understand if 70% of your neighbors believe in this thing make them accountable to it you know what I mean it's like if you really believe in Jesus here man this is the way you would live that out it says right here do not resist evil with violence where's the asterisk what does it say unless you're on a jury panel you can then throw away a guy for selling milk from a cow's udder and throw him into a cage you can't do that and the only way people are going to understand that is if you just show that's actually what's happening you just got to tell them well all I can say in response to that is if you're going to a church that has a bunch of American flags up behind the pulpit and the minister or pastor or priest is giving homilies to the state you know you need to speak up that's something you can do right here right now locally you know are you a Christian or are you a subject of US FedGov very important question well very good and I just I wanted to tell you thanks for coming on I've really enjoyed our discussion and throwing back and forth ideas it's been fun thank you David