 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast project of the Cato Institute's Libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Sitting in for Aaron Powell is Jason Kuznicki, a research fellow at the Cato Institute and the editor of Cato Unbound. Joining us today are Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch. Nick Gillespie is the editor-in-chief of Reason.com and Reason TV. Matt Welch is the editor-in-chief of Reason magazine, which has been a mainstay of libertarianism since 1968, and the co-host of a new Fox Business Network show called The Independence, which airs on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Together, Matt and Nick are also the authors of a 2011 book, The Declaration of Independence, How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America. Welcome to Free Thoughts, gentlemen. Thanks. Thank you. The first question is, what is an independent in the sense of both your show, Matt, and the book, and how is that related to libertarianism? I would describe the independent strictly as people who have disaffiliated from the Republican and Democratic tribes. Gallup has been asking, and Pew has been asking, Gallup, for 20 years, 25, Pew for 40, not necessarily who are you registered with, but who do you sort of feel like part of, who do you affiliate with, Democrats, Republicans, or nobody? And the nobody in 1970 was 20%. Now the nobody is up around 43%, 46% by some measures. Last year, 2013, 14, 13, we're in the future, was the highest in the history that Gallup has been studying it, which is at 43%, but at the end of the year, it was at 46. Those trend lines we argue in our book are unmistakable, and it maps onto what we are experiencing in the rest of our lives. We are no longer loyal to brands. We are free agent shoppers, mix and match kind of personal identities. So when you're independent, and you can look at poll data on a variety of questions, you're not predictable, right? So your view on the NSA does not depend on whether George W. Bush or Barack Obama is in power, quite unlike the view on the NSA of Democrats and Republicans. And so people are not just becoming more independent themselves and sort of not listening, not hearing the dog whistles, but they're also, and maybe Nick can speak to this more, using the concept, the tactic of independence as a way to exert their will onto a tired and sclerotic political system. Yeah, and I think it's important. We certainly do this in the book, and actually this I think is the most exciting part of the Fox Business Show that Matt's co-hosting with Kennedy and Camille Foster is that it's broader than politics. It informs politics, but it's this sense of independence, of detribalization, where you're not saying, okay, you know what, I come from a family that always buys Ford cars or Chevrolet's. It isn't like that. Each time you're buying a car or even making a decision to buy a car, you're rethinking that from a different position, and it's a plurality of people. It's not quite a majority yet. And when you start thinking about that in terms of racial identity or cultural identity, you know, there's a reason why independent cinema, independent music, all of this stuff is kind of flourishing in concert with one another. And it's very exciting. It's an outgrowth of technology. It's an outgrowth of wealth, outgrowth of increases in education that may not bring smarts with it, but bring a sense of like, you know what, I can make my own decisions, and goddamn it, I'm going to make my own decisions. So it does lead to an unpredictability, I think, if you're trying to say, okay, well, we know we've got this amount of Democratic voters, they'll do whatever we want if we say we're Democrats or Republicans, and what a lot of businesses have had to do, a lot of churches, and certainly politics. And one of the notes that we keep hitting in the book is that politics is a lagging indicator from where society is. It's Mr. T. of the A team, it's the last one to get the joke. They have not quite figured out how to deal with, you know, right now we have people like Rand Paul, who is fabulous on the NSA and fighting against the Defense Department, and is also talking about welfare. I mean, this is a kind of, Republicans don't know how to deal with them, much less Democrats, and we're building a new kind of consensus which is built around independence. And the overlap with libertarianism is this, libertarians themselves are much more independent than they used to be. They used to be much more reliable Republican vote during the Cold War, for example. And especially young libertarians, they are completely unpredictable, they vote for Barack Obama, they're crazy. They crave. But also, and independence themselves, when you pull their attitudes, they tend to be more libertarian than an already trending libertarian public is. On issues like gay marriage, on issues like the size and scope of government, on issues like legalizing marijuana. So they are kind of the cutting edge of where the culture and politics will end up going. And it's precisely in those areas where they and the public at large are trending in a direction and yet are not being served by the two political tribes. That's where dynamic change is happening right now. I mean, a year and a half ago, if we thought we'd be sitting around talking about having two, you know, legal states for recreational marijuana and a president changing his tune on it every single day, kind of, that you can feel the fists unclenching all around the country and politicians are now scrambling to out, you know, anti-drug war one another. That was crazy talk a year and a half ago only. But if you'd been studying the trend lines and the poll lines of independence in particular and also of the general public compared to what their useless political parties were doing, this would have been predictable. And in fact, we predicted that in the book. So do you think that there's another argument, though, that you could say that the tribalism is increasing, which I think it's a good point that, you know, it's increasing across the board. We don't watch the same TV shows anymore. Well, yeah. 80 million people watch M.A.S.H. Yeah. And only 2 million watch M.A.S.H. I mean, I think you're right in one way and off base in another. There's no question that there's larger, there's more fragmentation in terms of certain types of cultural consumption and even political consumption. You know, the TV shows, I remember writing about TV audiences back when Seinfeld was the number one show. Its ratings would not have placed it in the top 10 in the years when the Beverly Hillbillies was the top 10. Yeah, everyone watched it. Yeah. You know, it was water cooler conversations. So yeah, and yet Seinfeld was a show that still infuses our popular culture and reference today. So we can overplay fragmentation and a lot of critics, especially on the left and sometimes on the right, say, you know, this is the problem with capitalism is that it fragments, it segments people into very small niches and destroys common culture and things like that. I think there's some truth to that. We can now consume and produce the culture we want and that leads to a more varied culture. It leads to a more varied produce section in the supermarket. And when you go to restaurants and that's all good and I don't think there's that much of a loss. But you are right, I think, in saying that the tribalism in politics among the dead enders and you know, and now we're down to, according to Gallup, I guess it's like, you know, down from almost 50% of people in the early 70s considering themselves Democrats, not necessarily registering, but considering that. That's like 31 or 32. For Republicans, it's down to like 25% of the population. Those people, these are the Japanese soldier who famously said, yeah, you know, he just died. Yeah. For years later, but wait, but wait, I'm saying that these people who are still like into political identities that they think are fixed and unchanging, they are dead enders and they are getting more and more ballistic, which is why you have, you know, it's MSNBC versus Fox News, it is Republicans versus Democrats like trying to pretend they have nothing in common when in fact they're pretty similar. Well, they are pretty similar, but they also have a really big structural advantage. It's not going to go away. If you're looking at party politics, the entire reason it exists is because of the nature of our election law, the nature of first pass, the post voting and voter access qualifications for getting on the ballot. And, you know, that's not going away. That's not going to change. Nor is there. And so what you're seeing is, you're seeing is yes, people are disaffected with the system, but they have nowhere else to go. And so while identification with particular party may be in decline, the perception of the other party is getting worse and worse and worse all the time. We talk about this a lot in our book. And when we toured it, people would always ask, you know, oh, so does this mean the libertarian party is going to break through or we're going to finally break apart the two-party system and we would be perpetually disappointing to all those people because, no, it's not going to happen. Because unlike all businesses, you know, all monopolies and duopolis out there, which fail, they fail. I mean, remember when Microsoft was a monopoly, how that worked out for everybody? A&P Grocer. You know, these things fail. Kodak is failed. Unlike that, government has a guaranteed revenue stream. Now, that revenue stream might contract in some years and expand, but they have a guaranteed revenue stream. So that means it's really going to happen to that last. So what you look for is where are the opportunities where people are going, can affect and change the system. And they change the system with the drug war because they have the ability to sign petitions and do state ballot initiatives that root around. I mean, this is all a federalism experiment with ballot access initiatives that has made this thing possible in education when they were able to root around the existing system by opting out of it, by creating some school choice here and there, by homeschooling. We're seeing higher education with MOOCs and various things like that. So look for those pressure valve points where people can get around politics. Suddenly, that changes the political conversation pretty quickly on some of these issues. So you're right, it's not going to be a third party nirvana anytime soon, but it's also more inherently unstable and dynamic now, which I think is exciting. Yeah, we talked in, I guess, in the Declaration of Independence as well as, there are other cases of this, but when you looked at the way that transpartisan groups of Republicans and Democrats in Congress rose up, and they were pushed by people outside of the normal political process just to block things like PIPA and SOAP and the Stop Online Piracy Act and whatnot. We're starting to see this as true of pot legalization of gay marriage, where you see these kind of transitory ad hoc coalitions that come together pulling from the right and the left, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives to tackle a certain issue. And then it doesn't hold up because these people don't like each other very much. But so two parties, yes, but that doesn't mean that the independent voice is necessarily being shut out. Yeah, you will see, for instance, I think this year a success probably led by Justin Amash maybe in concert with people like Ron Wyden or the Ron Wyden's in the Senate of limiting, trimming the sales of the NSA. It's not gonna come from Obama, it's gonna come from this bipartisan, literally bipartisan and also anti establishmentarian coalition, because the heads of both parties are like, no, NSA is cool, we got no problems, totally legal, totally constitutional, leave us alone type of thing. They came within just a few votes of defunding the NSA last summer. I predict that this year something will happen and it'll happen partially because of a rise of independence and a feel like, and the notion, as Nick said, that you can have a single issue coalition on something. But as Jason said, so I mean, we think that sort of where the D's and the R's at least in name are here to stay, but possibly at least some of the discussion has been, if libertarians can evacuate the Republican Party and fill it back up and have R mean something different, and then of course a lot of Republicans are resisting that, calling libertarians not only just wacky, but also the fact that they're destroying the coalition and getting Democrats elected by doing that. I think there's two responses. I'm sure Matt can add to this. First is that like when you look at the governor race in Virginia, which was hotly contested and should have been the Republicans to win because Terry McAuliffe is a horrible candidate. And even the left. Even his family hates him, sure they didn't vote for him, but then the Republicans ran a very hardcore social conservative for whatever other virtues he might have, Ken Cuccinelli. And then you had a libertarian candidate with like six and a half percent of the vote, which he took from McAuliffe. I mean, the idea that libertarians are taking votes from Republicans or electing Democrats has two fallacies. And one is that oftentimes, as in the case of Cuccinelli, there are actually all of the exit poll data show that he pulled votes from McAuliffe, not from the Republican, but then it also even more fundamentally presumes that libertarian votes somehow belong to the Republicans. And one of the great things about independence and I think political independence and libertarians are starting to understand, and we flipped this a couple of times a few elections ago and reason instead of saying, how can we get the Republicans to not be so awful on the issues we care about? It was more like, you know what we have to do is we have to stake our independence as a group and say, you know what, here's what we stand for. If you want our votes, it's like the easiest thing in the world to win our votes because we want the same thing in every election. Republicans tell us what you're going to do for us instead of how can we serve you and then be disappointed by you. And Democrats, if you want to stop bombing countries indiscriminately, obviously they don't. If you want to cut defense spending, they don't. If you want to curtail the NSA, if you want to actually be liberal like you claim to be on lifestyle issues, you know, you got our votes if you'll also do this, that and the other thing or meet us part way. And so, you know, I think that's a place where independence is starting to grow and libertarians need to understand that we don't belong to either party and more importantly those parties have to understand that if they want our votes, very easy to get because, you know, libertarian voters are reliable, predictable and dogmatic about reducing the size, scope and spending of government. That's all you have to do. There's to be independent is actually is actually really important because you can you can see the opposite of that in say the pro-life movement where there's no question what party they're going to vote for and a cynic will look at that and say, well, of course, then that means the party doesn't really have to do anything for them and you get a lot of symbolic votes on pro-life issues, but you don't really see the Republican Party trying very, very hard to actually ban abortion. There's a lot of symbolism. There's a lot of work in tiny little steps along the margins to make things maybe a little harder here or there, but it's never going to happen because then they know that they will lose these votes. 90 if there's any population group of which 90 percent votes for one of those two parties, you can bet that that group is not going to get what they want in the election. It's this weird perversity and I think more and more people are waking up to that. Think of how many Democrats have been thinking that they've been voting for the party that's against the drug war for 20 or 30 or 40 years. After Obama immediately broke all George W. Bush's records of raiding medical marijuana shops, you started to see the fog slowly lifting. And deporting immigrants. And deporting immigrants. It's like it goes on. Drone attacks. Drone attacks. And what I'm heartened by is that finally and belatedly we were seeing some Democrats starting to primary one another over these issues. There's Beto O'Rourke who primaried successfully a Democrat down in New Mexico on the issue on El Paso on the issue of the drug war. And there's a recent political story saying that there's a spate of new candidates who are both primarying and also running against Republicans in the general based on surveillance and opposition to that. So once they have been studying the Tea Party's tactics, you know, all these two party politics. They're always copying each other's moves, you know, media matters and the Soros Empire was sort of a response to the Republican Revolution of 94 in some ways. And so they're going to take those tactics hopefully and start doing that the same kind of thing that Club for Growth and Freedom Works and others have been doing on the right, which is, hey, we want to impose our values and make these people wake up to issues that we really want. That will all be to the good of libertarians and independents. If we have more Jared Polis Democrats, then Democrats are a lot more interesting than they currently are now to libertarians. But where we see. So I've always said that I think the Democrat barometer is like Aaron Sorkin. Wherever Aaron Sorkin is, like in the West Wing, it's about technocracy and a really smart president, Clinton era stuff. Now they get disappointed in Obama and now he's at the newsroom, which is we need better media to get out there and shine a light on something. But we also have another thing coming in, which I think is a danger is the populism, right, from the Democrats coming in with Elizabeth Warren populism. And they might start primary people on that issue at the Tea Party type of thing who's going to give away the most spoils to the to the constituency. Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, I mean, there's no question of that. And you also see some right wing populism. And, you know, I mean, obviously people have talked about libertarian populism as well. And that's always a concern. What is interesting is that when you look at broad survey data, and of course, you know, people may say one thing in a survey and then when they're put in a ballot box, they're going to, you know, the choices are very different and what they're going to do behind the curtain, you know, might be very different. But large numbers of people say the government is too powerful and that the government spends too much money. And it strikes me that Elizabeth Warren is not the new, you know, she's not the new birth of populism. She's like the last dying light because people understand that, you know, just jacking up the government control of large day-to-day transactions never works very well. I mean, we live in a post-DMV world where, you know, we still make jokes about the DMV, but most states have privatized it or changed it into much more of a customer model. People aren't going to be going back to like, oh, you know, it'll be great. Let's go down to the block captain and see if we can get a permit to put a hot dog stand up. People are done with that because independence, and this is, you know, if we, I mean obviously we're talking about the future of libertarianism or the past, we need to get out of a specifically political phase, too, because this move towards independence, which kind of coheres well with libertarianism but it's not identical to it, but it's broadly based. It's culturally based. It's personal based. You know, it's brands. It's like, you know, we are independent now, and so people have to make, you know, people who want us to follow them or buy their ideas and buy their products has to pitch to us each time and make a convincing case. I would add that there's, I mean, we are experiencing a big sort in the country pursuant to what you were talking about earlier and like the increased tribal. People are moving. Yeah. You know, I've moved to increasingly, you know, dark, dark, deep blue cities. They're gone from L.A. Do you want your trader, Joe, to Washington, D.C., to Brooklyn? And I think the last time that I lived in a place that didn't vote for a Democrat at least 70% was maybe 20 years ago or something like that. When you were briefly in Cuba, there was more opposition to the Democratic Party. More than so than in Washington, D.C., but so part of the Bill de Blasio, Elizabeth Warren, I think, is a sign of that, of people are shorting more ideologically and geographically. But also, it's a response to the economy has sucked for six years, and it wasn't all that great for the eight years before that. You know, George W. Bush did not create a single or, you know, the country did not create a single-net private job during his presidency, which is just an atrocious record. And then, obviously, it's been a lot worse under Obama. And so there's got, there's going to be reactions to this. It's the wrong reaction on the left. And we've seen to my great chagrin, the Democratic Party, kind of the center of it, move very, very leftward on economics since the time of Bill Clinton. I mean, third-way Democrats, new Democrats, all that thing is dead. It's amazing to watch them. And I saw this at the 2008 Democratic Convention where Hillary Clinton sat and took credit for every single good thing that happened under Bill Clinton and then spent the rest of the time trashing all of the policies that made that possible, right? Like just trashing free trade, trashing NAFTA, trashing Glass-Steagall Act, not that it made anything necessarily possible. And of course, it's not taking responsibility for DOMA or the Welfare Reform Act. Well, reform, I mean, it's kind of stunning to watch. And so Democrats, I think to go on what Nick was talking about, I mean, if they think this is national saleable politics to have $15 minimum wages everywhere and to say that we really need to, you know, expand Social Security and Medicare right now as the kind of Krugmanite left is going, good luck with that because there's never been any poll support for that. And after the disaster of Obamacare, there's no appetite for grand schemes. The next grand, I can't even think of the next grand government scheme that we will see after the debacle of Obamacare. Yeah, it's actually, it's really interesting to watch the poll numbers for how many people think that the government should be running our health care system. And shortly after the implementation of the first bits of Obamacare and continuing ever since then, there's just been this dramatic slide in how many people think this is an appropriate thing for the government to be doing. So, you know, Nate Silver, when he was at the New York Times and the blogger who started at 538 as an independent blog went to New York Times as now at ASPN. Last year, I guess he had a pretty interesting thing which he was actually obviously reading a lot of reason and Cato stuff of where, you know, one of his points was that the government has gone from providing various kinds of services or regulations to basically being an insurance provider. You know, it provides more and more in terms of health care, in terms of retirement and things like that. And he pointed out, you know, nobody likes their insurance agent. And, you know, if the government is, you know, is now an insurance agent where more and more of its money or our money is spent in transfer programs and saying, OK, here's guaranteed income, guaranteed retirement, guaranteed health care, it's going to sink in popularity. And I think we're seeing that. Yeah, Ezra Klein has an analysis where he points out that if you look at the budget of the federal government essentially it is a very well armed insurance providers when he calls it. And I want to say to him, Ezra, my friend, why are you not over here with us as a morterian? Isn't that obvious? Because, I mean, and this is where I and I don't think this tracks or even into the Democratic Party, but certainly not into the country at large. You know, there's a bunch of people Klein is like this. Krugman certainly, you know, well, you know, but we'll do it smarter. I mean, they really do have that kind of Hayekian fatal conceit and it might not be as grand as, you know, the Bauhaus crowd or something that we can lay out a perfect city and order society perfectly, but they really do think like, oh, we just have to twist a couple dials here and, you know, adjust for this and give a little bit of a more of a wide-ranging tax break here and it'll work out. And it just, that's just not the way the world is going. And the way it, the reason it isn't is because people have had a taste of what happens when they have a little bit of freedom to just kind of do what they think they want to do. You seem incredibly optimistic. And if I, if I may just throw a little bit of cold water here, I recall, well, first of all, say this optimism is a really big change in the libertarian movement because if you go back and look at libertarian literature from, say, the 1970s, you will read things like, by 1985, the stock market will have collapsed, the dollar will be worthless, the Soviet Union will be in charge and, you know, just really, really horribly dire predictions about what's coming in the future. And even I've got one thing I'm thinking about that Murray Rothbard wrote for, it was a book about predicting the future and he had a little blurb in it and he said, you know, we're going to collapse. We are absolutely going to collapse and this was in the late 70s. You seem to be very optimistic. What's changed? Nothing's changed in terms of reason. I mean, Nick and I have been fortunate up to that at the magazine. And if you go back and look at the archives and Rothbard used to be a columnist and he was probably the most apocalyptic writer in the history of reason. He sort of stuck out in there because, you know, we have the DNA of actually being optimistic. There was a cover story, I think, from the late 70s talking about how all these computers are going to network with one another and you're going to be able to work out of your own home and plug into a decentralized network. It's going to empower the individual. I mean, it really kind of predicted the internet in a way without using the word. There is, I mean, to be fair, there is some apocalypticism in reason. I remember a 70s interview with Harry Bram where he was talking about, look, of course you got to buy gold, but then you also have to stash it far enough out of the city so that the hordes don't come to it when the whole, you know, shitstorm happens. But it's got to be close enough where you can get to it, you know, quickly without other people finding it. But yeah, continue. Yeah, so I mean, and I think there has always been, there's a contemporary stream of apocalyptic libertarianism. I mean, listen to Peter Schiff for a half a day or a half a minute. And you know, it's going to be a Weimar Germany. Things are going to collapse. By the way, we all are, Matt and I, we should explain that we also are buying heavily in wheelbarrow stocks. Oh, yes. Because, you know, it's the one thing that I'll hold up under a hyperinflation. But I think there's a tension there. I mean, I think sort of Austrian economic libertarianism tends to go more towards the apocalypticism kind of vein. And also, let's remember, like back in the 70s, the 70s kind of sucked, even though there were one, Nick and I grew up and we loved them. Now, this is the, this is the fund, I mean, as a macro story, as a macro economic story and as like, you know, safety in city stories, the 70s sucked. But as Nick and I wrote in the intro to the book, it was actually this incredible ferment for incredibly positive change. I mean, if we started writing our kind of libertarian moment, which is an essay that ended up becoming the book, it was targeted for our 40th anniversary, right? Issue, which we decided for some reason was gonna be the November 2008 issue. So let's remember what was happening in the fall of 2008. Nick and I were like, we're coming out guns blaze and it's really honest, we're ready to go. Financial crisis, George W. Bush says, you know, normally I'm a fan of capitalism, but the entire country goes crazy. And so we had to finish the essay under these circumstances and it was a big gut check. Like, do we even really believe this? All this kind of stuff. And we hearken back to history of 1971, August 9th when Nixon goes off the gold standard wage and price controls, like crazy stuff that we can't currently imagine. And if someone would have said at that moment, in August of 1971, yeah, the 70s are actually gonna be a decade of great libertarian change, you would have been hauled off into the one floor over the Cuckoo's Nest set and administered Spanx by Nurse Ratchet. But yet it was there. There was, you know, airline deregulation was already starting to kind of wheeze into gear. Military drafted ended within a couple years after that. Legalizing home brewing. Legalizing home brewing, all these kind of things. I mean, there were actually positive economic changes or deregulatory changes, but then there was also, you know, and it's not to say that, you know, there was violence and cities continue to climb. Crime rates went up and things like that. But by the same token, there was a massive, you know, and productive change in personal lifestyle. Things loosened up so much. And there, so, you know, I mean, the PC revolution is a function of the 70s. It didn't happen in the 60s, and it didn't happen in the 80s. It happened in the 70s. And there was all kinds of really interesting ferment going on. Incredible culture. I mean, it was a remarkable, I mean, Tom Wolf in the mid-decade was talking about how it was really finally the sort of manifestation of a real middle class where everyone could be their own kind of king. And act like it and have that sense of entitlement, like an aristocrat, like, hey, you know what? I'm gonna dress like the king. You know, men and women started dressing flashily. Cheap goods became available for the first time in the 70s, like consumer goods. And yeah, you know, you can't tell by looking at somebody's collar anymore what they were like. That happened in the 70s. So if you over-focus on, you know, what's happening in Washington and a lot of the macro stuff, and also if you come from certain traditions within libertarianism, you can get to the apocalypse really quick. But then if you step back and look at long trend lines since 1800, or even since 1970, which we repeatedly do in the book, it's really hard to be taken seriously when you say, yeah, the world is going to hell in a hand basket even though now two thirds of the world is free now that a billion people have gone out of poverty in the last 15, 20 years. I mean, the long trend indicators are still phenomenal and we should be optimistic about it. And I think that's one of the interesting points in the book. You talk about sort of mass amnesia and call out the fact that people seem to be forgetting all the time. Politically, for example, the permanent Republican majority idea in the early 2000s. And which was immediately replaced by the permanent Democratic majority, you know, because what in 2006, it was all over whenever the Democrats took over and then Obama wins and then in 2010, we're back and now everybody's predicting the Republicans are going to retake the Senate. So yeah. And another idea of that amnesia is the deregulation which you just mentioned in the horrible Carter days and how that actually happened with Democrats doing that. And could we ever imagine it would just be a part of me participating in the same amnesia to think that Democrats would ever, Ted Kennedy, just then non-Justice Breyer, now Justice Breyer. Ralph Nader. Ralph Nader, like being a part of this, could this happen again from the left? Could they get into the deregulation? It doesn't look likely in the short term for sure but who knows? And things are so important. It will flip it, like who would have thought that it'd be a Republican, you know, like a rabid Republican leading or two leading attacks on the NSA and the surveillance state and the defense state, the military industrial complex, when you look at people like Justin Amash and Rand Paul, these guys are out there, you know, leading the battle. And, you know, so maybe- They seem part of the past the Patriot Act. Yeah, you know, so and actually even the guy who passed the Patriot or wrote the Patriot Act is campaigning against them. There are a lot of people in both parties who really have no particular brief for or against the surveillance state. They just don't. And so you'll see people like Sean Hannity saying that the NSA is vital and it's doing important work and it needs to be doing this work in secret but that was when George W. Bush was president and now he's condemning it when Obama was a senator. He was against a lot of the things that he's in favor of now and it's all very well documented and they just change. There are only a very few that are consistent about anything like that, either for or against. I do worry about the- I mean, the thing that worries me the most about the contemporary Democratic Party by which I mean, since Clinton, since Bill Clinton is, he does seem to have been the last of the free trade Democrats in a really profound way and it's important to recognize, I mean, NAFTA, you know, and obviously there's issues with it, but NAFTA was a good step forward in all sorts of ways and it was ultimately it was Clinton and Al Gore who sold that to the American public and to their own party. Doesn't seem like, I mean, as Matt was saying, like Hillary Clinton is not the free trader that her husband was and it's kind of hard to find people in the Democratic Party who are like that. Yeah, and I mean, what you do with the hypocrisy is you say, welcome, you know, welcome to our side. Let's make it last a little bit longer next time we won't believe you. I mean, and then hope that you actually can get some people there who start from those principles, whether they're coming from Republican or Democratic side. And there are a few of those people now who are being elected on those principles and they're driving it. And what you find also is that, especially on these issues where there's such a gap between the American public and what effective bipartisan government ends up being, a lot of this stuff is just inertia. I mean, who at the end was really in favor of the drug war? We're starting to learn that right now. It's about five people. It's like David Brooks, Patrick Kennedy, David Frum, I'm leaving many people out like some columnist you never heard of at the Washington Examiner, Emily Miller, sorry, Emily, you know, and a few other people. And their arguments are terrible because they could use for years the point and the giggle. Like, oh, you silly people, what are you smoking? Ha, ha, ha. And you could use this sort of marginalization. Republicans when they were empowered did this on national security all the time. The 2004 Republican convention in New York was just a festival of calling Democrats and everybody's girly men and pussies. I mean, it was awful. It was disgusting display. But what it revealed is that they didn't have good arguments. And so now, you know, when we talk about the NSA, who's the other side? It's Peter King. I mean, it's ignoramuses. Talking out of their ass, have no idea what they're talking about, saying, of course, this is totally a thousand percent constitutional. There hasn't been a single documented abuse. They're just exposed as liars every day. The hearing last week, we heard about Eric Snowden. We heard about Edwin Snowden, I think. Those are his brothers or something. But yeah, I mean, these people are not well informed. Well, and again, not to sell it too much in that, like, okay, everything's coming up libertarian after this, we can go and look at our bank accounts, which have been drained of meaning by macroeconomic policy. But it is, I think Matt was talking about kind of like the establishment versus upstarts and that that's really becoming more and more into focus. And I was thinking about, because when you're talking about like who's defending the NSA and the establishment sent out of Diane Feinstein and Mike Rogers, a Democrat and a Republican who were saying exactly the same thing who could only point to two cases supposedly where the NSA surveillance actually led to the stopping of terrorist acts. It was a Zazi and Headley case, two cases from a couple of years ago, which were not done, they were done through old fashioned police work and surveillance work. One of those guys, Headley, was actually a drug enforcement administration informant who they had been tracking. So it's like, you're telling me you need the NSA to be taking in everybody's every move everywhere in order to keep tabs on a DEA informant. And it's like, it's a joke and it's really, it's the establishment versus other people who are waking up and saying, you know what, I'm really not getting anything out of this relationship and you better start coming towards me. And that's the independence. And I think libertarians, because they've been so disenfranchised for so long of never really fitting into either existing party or even a broadly based right-wing, left-wing ideology, we're at the lead of that. If you're gonna be a libertarian cynic, I mean, you're hardly ever disappointed by the establishment. Even the most cynical libertarians, I think were a little bit surprised by all of the NSA remolations. And then I would wanna ask this question, in part because we've got on our sheet here, but is it possible to be too cynical? Because I do hear that from people. When I say things that I know are, from that libertarian cynic in me, people say, you're just too cynical. You ought to trust a little bit more. And these are not evil people in our government, they're actually trying to help their well-intentioned. And is there anything to that? I don't think it's a question of people being evil. I was gonna say, I think we're talking a few days after the set of the union address, I think the gesture towards Corey Remsburg, the army sergeant, the ranger who was just catastrophically destroyed the Afghanistan War by Obama, that I don't know how anybody can look at that and not have a deep revulsion towards politics and become cynical because after a totally lousy speech, which where he was just kind of repeating the same thing he says all the time and stupid ideas like the my IRA, savings plan, and then he's like, oh yeah, and then look at this mangled corpse, walking corpse of a guy who I sent to Afghanistan. Let's cheer his sacrifice, good night everybody. I think people understand that this is a guy who did what he was asked to do, who sacrificed his life and we have to ask him, I mean, to use a biblical metaphor. He's like Isaac on the altar, we sacrificed him end to what end and Obama has, he has jacked up the cynicism quotient like through the roof on that. Having said that, I don't think people in politics are evil, I don't think most legislators are evil and I don't think that's what cynicism is about. It's more people are ready to get on with their own lives and they just don't wanna be rule bound by a bunch of people who don't know who they are or what they're about or how they wanna live in the future. Yeah, I think it's a shortcut that a lot of people take whenever they're in opposition just to assume the worst motivations on the other side and it's a shortcut to the truth, that you're actually not getting there faster. You know, it doesn't actually, it's best to understand the best of the other side's motivations because that actually tells a more true story and a more libertarian story, which is that as Charles Peters who founded the Washington Monthly back when there was that kind of skepticism among liberals, he would point out it's not enough just to have beautiful divine motivations. You actually, there's reasons why systems do or do not work and part of it is that systems, largely bureaucratic ones, tend to not work. So let's figure that out. It's been a real intellectual backslide of the Democrats, I think, and progressives writ large is that they've retreated to motivations on the other side. So you have to be one of us because the other side really is about rich white people who want to suppress everybody else. And even though Republicans always live down to that, caricature Todd Aiken most memorably, it's still such a shortcut. It's a way to not engage with Republican arguments against you and it'll shrink that tribe. They'll be more hardcore because they really do think that this predatory class is coming after them but it's not a way to actually understand what your opponent is doing. But in this, in terms of rhetorical strategy, I mean, there are people who cry when they say the President's Pledge of Allegiance and cry at the State of the Union, maybe, maybe like four people, but there are people who do this and we would come along, many libertarians come along and be like, oh, well, you know, that's stupid and be very cynical about it. In terms of rhetoric, should we, is that bad as a strategy? What other things are we doing rhetorically that work and don't work and what should we show up about? Well, I don't know that it's a question about shutting up about anything but I do think that there is, if libertarians and at reason, I mean, we're journalists but we're also in the persuasion business, we think that a libertarian perspective offers a unique set of insights on the world and also policy prescriptions and ideas to go forward with. I do think that a lot of times libertarians are trapped in a kind of Cold War mindset where there's a kind of big government on one side and then a kind of Milton Friedman rebel, you know, pure capitalist on the other side. I don't know that many people see the world in those terms anymore and so if we're speaking in those terms, we're gonna be missing a lot of conversations we should be involved in. I also think, you know, the idea of saying the government can't do anything well or it can't do anything right. Overselling. Yeah, it's actually, I don't think it's true. You can talk about the inefficiencies and you can always talk about how to make things better but to claim that the government can never do anything right, it flies in the face of most people. I think even most libertarians, basic concepts of everyday life or experience with everyday life. So we need to be mindful of that. And another thing that I'm starting to think about a lot more lately is this concept of what happens for not just younger people but people who don't orient immediately around politics. Like we take for granted libertarians and I think liberals as well as conservatives politicize people. Okay, you know, really the big major story of the day is always big government versus, you know, the entrepreneur or something like that. Other people just don't, they're not starting from that point of view and when you look at a lot of like younger entrepreneurs or hipsters or whatnot, it's that's not what they're thinking about. That's not the life that they were born into. And if we wanna reach them with the possibilities like libertarianism is not a set of dogmas that will be true forever and ever. It's a political philosophy and I think more properly understood as a temperament that's gonna change over time. And the idea is how do you get to more freedom? How do you get to more individual liberty? And where you start with that is always gonna change depending on where the conversation is. And we have a hipster expert here because you live in Brooklyn. So is he correct about that? You know, in the way that especially if you talk to people and about people on the individual basis. I mean, there's a lot of people you'll meet in Brooklyn. Brooklyn's an incredibly entrepreneurial place. See, I have all these hipsters selling you $13 pickles and this kind of stuff. And it's great. I mean, as a consumer, as a resident, I love it because the quality of the stuff is phenomenal and the spirit of invention is terrific. And what happens to them inevitably is that they get smashed in the face by the same regular story state that they helped elect and otherwise think. And so sort of talking about their experiences and stepping just one step back and saying, this is kind of what happens. We had a thing on The Independence the other day about cat cafes. This apparently is a thing in the world, the horror of the horror. And so what two cities are going to want to experiment with cat cafes? Portland and Brooklyn. Close. So what is a cat cafe? I can't imagine two things. The first thing I can't imagine is any of my cats having had coffee. And the second is giving my cat's coffee. It's going to a place where you can go in public and have your coffee or tea and bring your catalog. Oh, just bring the catalog. Not actually feed the cat. Exactly. So cat cafes. Catnip is for. Catnip is still illegal. It almost, it's a schedule one drum. Free the cat. Boston and San Francisco are the two cities that have been thinking about cat cafes. So because the type of people who live there would be the type of people who'd be into that. But those are also the type of people who like regulate psychics and stuff like that. So the regulations are stopping these cat cafes from happening. So pointing out these kind of paradoxes is always a pretty useful step. We are always, at reason, going to the individual case. I mean, there have been so many new libertarians minted by individual cases of police outrage over the last eight years. There is a category that I like to call Radley-Balco Libertarians. They just basically start by seeing a video of some unbelievable no-knock raid or something like that. And then they start proceeding from there. So when you talk about individual stories, that I think is much more persuasive to people. It's a good starting point rather than always talking about this big, big generality, which, as Nick said, exists in the mind of people who are already politicized, but it doesn't necessarily define them. You have to be careful of like soda ban, you know, Buchenwald. There's a lot of steps to fill in there. And it's not because, you know, and one of the things is that I know a lot of liberals and conservatives in different ways will say, well, look, these are small things. Why are libertarians obsessed with zoning variances? And as if, like, because it's not a matter of life and death, then we shouldn't talk about it. And again, it is kind of constantly bringing up the idea that, look, if you want because I suspect that all of us at this table are more or less consequentialist ultimately, you know that. But it's like, if you want a world that is richer, is more interesting, is more innovative, is more varied, has more possibilities for you and everyone around you, then you might be a libertarian. And here's why. And you bring it down to that level of like, you want to open a cat cafe and then suddenly you're told now you've got to get 20 licenses. But that's one of Radley's sayings that I use a lot. You brought up Radley, the libertarianism happens to you in the way he writes about. That's a very oppressive, obvious, horrible way it happens to people. But would you want to open a cat cafe? You might start looking at that stuff too. But by the same token, do libertarians sometimes scare people away? I mean, Wilkinson has this post he just recently made that said, look, if it were not for the libertarians who are weird and who have their very radical ideologies and if it weren't for them, perhaps mainstream liberals would actually be what they ought to be on the NSA. And I shot back at that. And I was not completely, I was actually quite unhappy with that in some ways. But in another sense of me, he does have a point. I have seen people say, well, I don't want to make any kind of common cause with libertarians. Sure, I don't like the drug war, but you know what? You guys are crazy. And I want to say, well, crazy is sort of in the eye of the beholder. And when we look at the system that we have right now, what words come to mind for you? Two responses to that. One is that I think Will's essay said much more about Will Wilkinson than it did about anything relevant to today's politics. Is a pretty succinct way of putting it. And another is that, I mean, the response to that tendency is that, OK, so that means you didn't want to go to any anti-war protests because international answer was there. And you're totally fine with the demonization of answer, which is a bunch of morons. But you know, and so therefore the anti-war movement was on the other side. That intellectual tendency is this tribalism and that shrinking and it's off-putting. It's the people who say, you know, we don't go to that rally against the NSA in Washington because there might be some creepy libertarians there. You're just exposed as an ignoramus if you do that. Well, to Will's credit, he does say that this is completely illogical and it's not a good reasoning at all and he doesn't share it. But he does say, well, this is reality. This is what happens with people. You know, maybe, but I'm not. Hey, it seems like there's more libertarians and libertarian fellow travelers than ever before. I've been working at Reason for 20 years. I mean, I've been a professional libertarian for 20 years. I've never been, I've never seen as many libertarians and people saying like, hey, that sounds kind of interesting. Can we talk about it than ever before? There's a sense of desperation happening right now. You see it a lot at alternetandsalon.com and Huffington Post and occasionally the MSNBC too. Don't buy into it. Yeah, I mean, Sean Mullens had an atrocious piece. Really, really just a bad, almost McCarthyite style, although he didn't have power to wheel on other people, but type of thing, trying to trash Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden and Julien Assange because Greenwald spoke at Cato a couple of times and Snowden actually seems to be a fan of either Ron or Rand Paul or both and that doesn't matter in the world. We're all like these hyphenated individuals for crying out loud and we go to single issue topics because that's how we operate. So I will make business and make break bread with people who are good on this one issue. I will hang out with Bernie Sanders on this one issue and then we'll disagree about economics. That's a normal way of looking at it by sitting around and saying, all right, are we first all ideologically pure before we go against this topic? That is a losing and unattractive strategy and I'm not too worried frankly about it and this came up in the Tea Party. There's a lot of Wilkinsonian kind of angst when the Tea Party arose, which was that these aren't libertarians, he's gonna give libertarianism a bad name and these kind of things. I don't care about any of that. I mean, what I care about is, are these people going to be advancing goals that are interesting to me? And especially at the beginning, probably less now, the Tea Party was aimed at the size and scope of government. Not at lowering taxes, not at like, harshing on immigrants, not about harshing on welfare recipients. It was anti-Obamacare, anti-big government and that to me was a healthy tradition and just because some people wore funny hats and were personally socially conservative, which I am not, is not, I don't think, an intellectually sound or interesting reason to throw your hands up at it and say, oh, you're discrediting libertarianism. And again, I think it's also worth talking, I mean, to mangle a paraphrase from Jack Kerouac, you know, on a certain level, I want to be out there with the mad ones, the dreamers, the nutjobs, because there's more, you know, they're more interesting and you know, but by the same token, we also have to, and I think a lot of, you know, this is kind of the libertarian conceit of like, oh, liberals would really like us if they realized that we have exquisite taste and discerning sensibilities about clothing and fashion and food and we're not, you know, knuckle-dragging gold bugs or something. You know, there are really just, libertarianism is not liberalism light or conservatism light. It is fundamentally different, I think, than either liberalism, as we understand it, contemporary liberalism or conservatism, and it goes back to kind of what Hayek talked about in the Postscript to the Constitution of Liberty, you know, which is that libertarianism is not a prescription for the future. It's creating an operating system that allows people to flourish in wildly different ways and that is going to annoy the hell out of a lot of contemporary liberals because in the end, and I'm not saying they're evil or rotten or they're, you know, they're, you know, they're pole pod except for the charisma, but it's, you know, they don't like the idea of other people being able to live their life the way they want. You know, they would be upset if you open up a cat cafe and then you say, sorry, cats only. You know, no dogs or whatever and it's like, there's a lot of creepy stuff, you know, in the world out there and stuff like that, but libertarians have to, you know, you don't have to be a dick about it, but you, you know, you do have to make it clear that like, no, it's not just like, we're like liberals, we're just, you know, we also like guns. So maybe you guys have already kind of said this, but if I were to ask you what kind of libertarian are you, and you know, some people would say, oh, consequentialist or objectivist, but I feel like you guys would say something different. Like, if this is like, what kind of libertarian? I'm more comfortable, maybe even than Nick is, since I'm reacting to a world that he helped create, but I'm a reason magazine libertarian. I used to describe myself, in fact, when Nick first hired me, I think it was an economist-style liberal, whatever the hell that meant. A central European-style liberal, which is to say that, you know, the post-communists and the anti-communists in Central Europe themselves were considered themselves liberal, they wanted to be able to drink wine on the streets and smoke hash, and they thought the state had no business whatsoever in any kind of industry and in telling you what you couldn't, couldn't do, and that all resonated with me and it didn't have a voice here, but I eventually realized that the voice of that was reason, and so there's an optimism with sort of reason-style libertarianism. It's more, I think, more consequential and bedrock philosophical, which a lot of people, I think, take issue with us for, but a reason has always been an outreach magazine. We're trying to talk to people where they're having conversations and say, hey, look, have you thought about this? You know, sometimes we're talking to them by trying to punch them in the jaw when they're being particularly stupid and if they have a lot of power, and this is a rhetorical punch in the jaw, not a physical one, because it's non-aggressive. Non-aggressive violence, yes. But, you know, at the same time, we're in the persuasion business, not in the purity business, and so that all resonates with me. I don't know. I like to think about using libertarian more as an adjective than as a noun, so maybe I'm like a libertarian human being, or so I don't, you know, that sounds ridiculous, but I have pronounced libertarian tendencies. I mean, I definitely drink deep at the, you know, at the font of people like Milton Friedman and James Buchanan and Mises and Hayek. I didn't come to libertarianism through a kind of sociological upbringing. I mean, my parents weren't libertarian. I was introduced to Reeves in magazine when I was in high school by my older brother. Then I started working there. I've been influenced heavily by Matt since he's joined up, but it's more, you know, I believe in free minds and free markets. I believe it makes a better, you know, richer, more interesting world that has more opportunities for everybody. And because of that, I am a libertarian. We're gonna throw some real quick questions at you. Who's your all-time favorite politician? Go ahead, Nick. It's supposed to be a lightning round. I don't have one. I'd say Vatslav Havel. And he's not, yeah, I guess he's not a politician. I like Roger Williams as my kind of political hero. Least favorite? All of them, all of them. Hitler, Hitler. That's a good answer. Do you vote? Yes, enthusiastically. Why? It makes me feel good. That's good. It makes me feel like I'm participating in the process, even though there's no statistical point to it necessarily. Yeah, no, I vote pretty regularly. I especially vote on local tax issues. And I also typically, actually, I think always vote libertarian because I'm interested in ginning up ballot access numbers. And this one is a little bit longer answer, but what does rock and roll have to do with libertarianism? Oh my God, everything. I mean, rock and roll was one of the first great pop teen cultures. It's all about individual liberation. It sparked technological innovation. You know, I mean, as much as, I mean, it's a perfect mix of social and technical technologies changing the way people could express themselves, both through production. It was, I mean, there weren't teenagers before rock and roll on some level. And it sort of described and gave people a tool around the world of saying, hey, we're gonna talk about our concerns and we're gonna shake our pelvis this way. It's an incredibly galvanizing libertarian force. And it is a ground up, you know, a kind of grassroots medium of expression. And it doesn't really mean anything, or you know, rock and roll means something different in 1950s Cleveland than it did in Kansas or in New York or San Francisco. But as a kind of general catch-all for a medium of kind of popular music that expresses where people are, what their desires are, how they're interrogating their relationship to culture through the act of production and consumption, it's been a fantastic liberatory vehicle. Rachel Maddow or Rush Limbaugh? Neither. Well, that's easy. Come on. I prefer to watch older Rachel Maddow than newer Rachel Maddow and both probably to Rush Limbaugh even though Rush Limbaugh occasionally says very nice things about reason and all these kinds of stuff. I just, the tribalism of both is off-putting to me. And it's hard to get over. I feel like I could cut and paste both of them and put together a really excellent libertarian, leaving a lot of time to be sure, but you know. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I could, but it would take a lot of work. And I can see a little bit of good in both of them, yeah. Do you have a preference, Nick? You know, and I realize this is popping out, but let me throw a mix in Glenn Beck and the reason being that Glenn Beck, what I find most fascinating about him is his kind of public search or move journey away from a kind of cartoon version of Rush Limbaugh, a JV kind of conservative, to something that in many ways approximates libertarianism or he's searching for that and he's reading and he's an autodidact who is kind of, you know, it's a ballsy move actually to educate yourself in public and you take a lot of heedy, obviously it makes a lot of money. But what's most fascinating about him is the creation of an entirely new media platform and empire that is using current technology to kind of do what he wants. And I think whether you like it, the message that he's sending or not, and sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, you know, he's creating a medium and he's the visionary the next step after, I mean, Matt has had Fox Business, Roger Ailes is the guy who really creates, like, you know, Ted Turner created Cable News, Roger Ailes reinvented it as a tool of kind of political discussion and everybody else is kind of sniffing his butt on that. Glenn Beck is actually creating the next step forward which is something beyond politics using new technology. And I think that's pretty interesting. Best argument against libertarianism, no? No, there's so many, I think, whether they're persuasive or not. The ones that you find the most persuasive either to you on some side that this is something that actually is concerning and we should be concerned with. I mean, there's the argument against kind of the objectivist flavor of libertarianism that you just don't care about nobody. You're in it for yourself, you don't care about poor people, you think that altruism in not the Randian sense, but in the common understanding of the word altruism is bad, these types of things can be an effective argument. I kind of believe that. I mean, if that was what libertarianism is, I just don't think that's what libertarianism is. Yeah, I think the ultra, the kind of categorical denial of government, government capacity to do anything. Because as a matter of fact, I mean, we're gonna have government backed armies. You know, I suspect that most of us at this table, probably at some level of education went to a government supported school and they're not perfect. I'm not making a case for them, but they are not complete calamities or incursions on, you know, on individual freedom. They're not gulag, yeah, to such a degree that we should be having an armed revolution and that overstating the inefficiency and stupidity of government is oftentimes, it makes, you know, people can say, look, you can't be taken serious. And libertarianism oftentimes has inadequately interesting things to say about foreign policy. Yeah, and final question, final question, best argument for libertarianism, in the most simple elevator pitch type of way. I would, I'd go with Greenwich Village in New York, Venice Beach in LA and the Italian market in Philadelphia. These are places where, you know, people, the relative ability of the government in their heydays to clamp down on what, you know, people wanted to do with some small or semi-large measure of freedom and ability to create communities and sub-cultures. Those were places where that couldn't happen and you end up with places that define cities and define the future and are just kind of cool and interesting and peaceful for the most part. It's the best structural path towards real tolerance of an innovation of different ways of living and being. If you don't want your values offended, libertarianism is actually better than any other way. And oh, by the way, it also generates sort of more wealth and more interest in all kinds of other great benefits. I'd like to thank Nick and Matt for joining us and Jason for filling in. If you have any questions about this podcast, you can find me on Twitter at TC Burris, that's T-C-B-U-R-R-U-S. You can find me on Twitter at Jason Kuznicki, that's J-A-S-O-N-K-U-Z-N-I-C-K-I. This is Matt Welch, you can find me at M. Lee Welch, M-L-E-E-W-E-L-C-H. And I'm Nick Gillespie, I'm on Twitter at Nick Gillespie. And thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. Free Thoughts is a podcast project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute, and it is produced by Evan Banks. If you'd like to learn more about libertarianism, please visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.