 This is Mises Weekends with your host, Jeff Dice. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of Mises Weekends. We're joined today by a friend of the Mises Institute comedian, stand-up comic frequent guest on Fox News, and host of his own part of the problem show, Dave Smith, coming to us from New York City this morning. So Dave, thanks very much for joining. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here. Well, I don't know you personally. I know you're friends with Tom Woods and some other people who are close to the Mises Institute. Tell us a little bit about how you came to be a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist. I'm told you grew up a Jewish kid in Park Slope. Is this correct? That is correct. And I was always, I think I considered myself fairly left wing always because that's just what you have to be there. I mean, I remember reading Murray Rothbard said, when he was being a Jew, I think in the 40s or something, he said that the choice was between being a communist sympathizer or a card-carrying member. Like that was the range. And to me, it was like growing up in Park Slope, it was like you could either be like all the way radical lefty or a Democrat. Like that was the range of acceptable opinion. And then I got, I was very anti-war during the George W. Bush years. And then I saw Ron Paul in the Ron Paul Juliani moment. And that was my introduction to libertarianism. And then I made the huge mistake of reading all about it. And then I got sucked in the wormhole and now I'm here. But yeah, I found Tom Woods and Peter Schiff. And then once I started reading Murray Rothbard, it was all over from there. Well, it's interesting that you say you were anti-war as a lefty. Was that in the true sense of the word? And that, because a lot of people on the left support fomenting certain revolutions when it's for the right purpose. And then they're not always opposed to what the CIA does or what the US military does if it's for, you know, purportedly humanitarian purposes. Right, well, I guess when I was, so I was like, I was born in 1983. I was 18 or 19 when 9-11 happened. So I was just coming in, it was under George W. Bush. And so when it was a Republican who was, you know, getting us into disastrous wars, the left was all in being anti-war. So at the time I saw it, we were like really anti-war. And then as I went in the more libertarian direction and Obama came in, I got, I found out that it wasn't, as you're pointing out that it wasn't really, the Democrats weren't so anti-war. And the left didn't even really seem to care about being anti-war. And then, you know, I mean, Ron Paul really made, because I kind of felt like the Democrats were the anti-war candidate, were the anti-war party. And then when I saw Ron Paul, I was like, wow, this guy's really anti-war. And that was kind of one of the things he revealed was then looking back at the Democrats and then starting to read about the history of the Democratic Party and you realize, oh, they're not anti-war at all. And in fact, all the Democrats who are celebrated by all the modern liberals, like every one of them, were huge war mongers. Like every one, it's like Wilson and FDR and, you know, LBJ, like all the guys who they still have no problem praising were all the worst defenders when it comes to, you know, the tiny little problem of mass murder. Well, but now there's this connection in the left's mind, unfortunately, that anti-war means provincial. That, you know, if you're anti-war, you're also anti-globalism, you're also anti-universalism, and that this is some sort of fevered isolationist mindset, as opposed to a peaceable mindset, which I think was the point that Ron was trying to make. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, today it's gotten so crazy that all I see now, the only anti-war movement I see is actually coming out of the right. And I see a lot of people who are upset with Trump for not following through on his campaign promises to get us out of some of these wars, but that's right. It seems like if Trump can bomb the heck out of the third world, and that'll be like the only day that the left leaves him alone, like that day they're like, okay, fine, but he better not say anything offensive to transgender people. That would be like a really big offense, but just bomb a third world country. Okay, that's normal, that seems to be where we're at. No, it is sad. You know, I want to talk to you a little bit about your professional life. Is being a libertarian part of your identity as a comic? Does it come through? Is it something that's hurt you or helped you in your career? Well, it definitely comes through, and I mean, I'm putting out my debut comedy special. It's coming out this month. It's Dave Smith, Libertas, so you can look for that. And there's no question. I mean, in the same sense that I think, does being a libertarian come through for you in terms of being a parent or being a, it's like, yeah, it's a part of your life. I mean, it's kind of, it becomes who you are. And I personally think, I mean, I just think we live in profoundly hilarious times. And I can't not, so that bleeds into my comedy. I mean, literally, what you're, the whole thing that the ridiculous, baseless, like accusations that come at the Mises Institute, I find hilarious. I mean, like you've got, you've got, like, while you're accused of being the most diabolical dog whistler of all time, like your plan is gonna be to spread Jewish philosophers who believe in freedom. And then once you've got everyone suckered in, you'll dog whistler. Like this is the plan. And then we have a party whose candidate openly said that Jews have to make Nazi cakes. That's them. And they're slamming everybody else. Like, I just see that as hilarious. I see the anti-Trump thing as hilarious. You know, the fact that Obama was deporting people and was at war every day and they don't care. There's just so much funny in that. So that does bleed through in my comedy all the time. Now, whether that's helped or hurt me, you know, I don't really know. I guess I could have played it a different way and maybe gone down a different path. You know, when I go into the Fox News gigs, I have the distinct feeling that if I was like a really passionate neo-conservative, I would have moved up the ranks a little bit faster. But, you know, who knows? The whole thing about Fox News, I've gotten to know Judge Napolitano a little bit and I've spoken to John Stoss a little bit. I mean, no offense to any of your colleagues at Fox and I want them to have you on. I want them to have Michael Malison. But when I'm watching any cable news show, I get the strong sense that the people on those shows are not necessarily any smarter or better informed than me or any other viewer. I get the sense that there's a dumbing down and kind of an unseriousness to the affair. Oh, it's unbelievable. I mean, I'll tell you right now, there are people straight up on these shows who don't read, who will tell you that. Like, I don't really read books. I mean, there's people who are doing these cable news shows who do a little 30 second, you know, like the panel, they come to each one of you, who could not do a podcast. They could not sit down and talk for an hour and a half on these issues without exposing themselves, just exposing themselves. I mean, and then of course you also have a few people in there who are very, very smart. And there's not to say everyone who disagrees with us, like there are, you know, smart people, there are smart neocons and smart other, but there's a lot of that, a lot of that. And then the issues are just incredibly dumbed down and even the really brilliant people, like Judge Napolitano, you know, he gets like a minute to get off the one thing that they want him to get off, which is like, okay, so why should Hillary Clinton be in jail now that move away from, you know, why also the Republicans are just as bad. And so, I mean, look, when he had freedom watch, he got a lot of really good stuff off on that show. And then you saw how that ended. Well, but you're out there, you know, you're performing, you're in New York City, you're going on Fox News. There's a cultural component to all this. And you and I were talking off air about how libertarians are bad at inserting themselves into the cultural flow of things. And Michael Malus has talked about this. He said, you know, the libertarian think tank model isn't working, it's kind of dead. And that doesn't offend me. I don't consider the Mises Institute of think tank because we're not trying to influence policy. We're trying to get directly to people. You know, talk about how libertarians are bad at culture and how we, we don't have a lot of cultural icons and people on the left have plenty. Yeah, well, the left, I mean, if you don't think culture matters, like if you're a libertarian who's, and this is what I've really learned over the last, you know, like year and a half, how much I didn't realize this at first. But I mean, if you don't think culture matters, then just take a look at the left and what they've done over the last 50 years. If you don't think culture matters. And if you think we're, you know, like the left has created this culture where saying me in words is worse than, you know, any state offense. And that just can't work for libertarians. Like we need something. So yeah, I think you're right. I think far too often like the establishment wing of the libertarians, if you want to call that, they just suck up to the left. So they suck up to this culture that will absolutely doom us, that we can't. So they have that. And then I guess what we haven't done a good enough job is, is kind of branding a libertarian, like, like libertarians, which I think what I try to do, and I think what Eric July, if you're familiar with him, what he tries to do is just be like, I'm out there, I'm just an artist just in the world, just like you are. And I happen to be an unapologetic libertarian too. And just at least make it like this thing that there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing, because far too often, what we have out there are like people who, and this is why Gary Johnson was so terrible as a defender of, as a promoter of the message, because you'd have this thing where you go like, well, you know, I think a pot should be legal. And it'd be like, well, what about heroin? It'd be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're probably right. That would be really, really bad. Well, what about freedom of association? Oh, no, no, no, that would be really bad, really bad. You know, if we're out there constantly running away from our own message, and this is like what I learned from Ron Paul, I think you got to go out there, be unapologetic, stand for what you stand for, and be willing to face the booze if they come. Like that's what Ron Paul was always willing to do. It's like, hey, if I get booed out of here, then that's fine. And then he did that to the point that he was getting cheered out of the stadium. But at first, if you remember, I mean, you were there closer than any of us were, it seemed like he was just like, look, I'll just go do this, I'll get booed out of the house, and then that's fine, I'll stick to my principles. And like, we all come around in this age of the internet, we're like, I'm 34 and I get to go out on the road and I have like all my fans come out and I have a podcast with a big platform now. Like I have so much more support than he ever had. He didn't have that until he was in his 70s, probably, you know? And so I look at those guys like Rothbard and Ron Paul, it's like, oh man, if they could keep doing it, then we got to keep fighting. I think I got off from what your question actually was there. But there's this tension between libertarian desire to have a cool factor and libertarian, you know, which Ron didn't have, but by being so pure and sticking to his message, he actually won a lot of converts that maybe Gary Johnson didn't. And the only analogy I can think of is that if you look at mainline Protestant churches, they're trying to have happy, clappy services and let people wear shorts. And of course, they're losing people in these denominations, whereas the denominations that are more orthodox or sticking, you know, as a matter of doctrine, more to scripture, are gaining interference. So it seems like when we try to water things down, it doesn't work. No, I completely agree with you. And I get the idea that maybe kind of a left-wing idea that you don't want a culture that like is really nasty or demonizes people who live an alternative lifestyle, right? Like, and we don't want that either. We want people to be free to do what they want to do. If you wanna go live a crazy alternative lifestyle, that's on you, go do that. However, it seems like today you have almost a cultural split where one side kind of prefers the traditional lifestyle. And then the other side just wants to praise anything that is an alternative lifestyle and is completely hostile towards traditional, which is just, that's like unworkable. I mean, like that's not gonna create a society that is gonna have self-reliant people who are like smart enough to not think they need to depend on the state. There's no chance of that. So I'm just kind of come to the conclusion that we do need to at least, libertarians kind of need to learn our cultural lesson. And a lot of these other people need to learn their economic lesson. I think I'm badly quoting Hapa who said something on this line. But like, I've just kind of come to the conclusion that, okay, maybe the right-wing isn't perfect in their culture, but we have to have some type of traditional order, like some type of promotion of family, like raise your kids, don't abandon them, be good to people, have communities. I mean, this stuff doesn't happen with left-wing culture. Well, I mean, you know, elaborating on this idea of the cool factor, I don't know if you saw this, I didn't watch it, but I read some accounts. Apparently the MTV video of Music Awards the other night were this dreary affair and there's this conformity that's just enforced on anybody who wants to be in the performing arts or who is on the left side of the culture. And I think, I certainly suspect that the left is kind of freaking out over having lost some of the cool or the edgy factor to some of these new self-appointed journalists, people who have platforms on YouTube, people who have platforms on Twitter. I think they're really worried about losing the cool factor, especially among young people. Yeah, I think you're right. And I think the fact that there's just something, you know what they'll say, like being establishment or being traditional is the new counterculture or like not having a tattoo is the new having a tattoo. You know, it's like after a while, you get to this thing where it flips where the establishment, the media, Hollywood, your college professors, like everyone's in line with this same way of thinking. So how cool is it really to just agree with all the, look, say whatever you want, right? Like we may, I may sit there and be like, you know, there might be like some Trump guy who's saying things that like we don't necessarily agree with, you know, like say he's like, you know, protectionism and bomb the crap out of the Middle East. And, you know, some of the stuff we didn't like, maybe that Trump was saying, right? But I would still recognize that a kid who puts on a make America great again hat on a college campus, he is demonstrating a lot more courage than somebody who throws on a Black Lives Matter shirt on a college campus. That's just the truth, whatever you agree with either of those sides at all. And I have seen a thing where the right, and I think this is something that I hesitate to sloppily use the term alt, right? But like a lot of the more popular right-wing people who have come up, you know, people like, like Lauren Southern and like some of those like people, they've been able to capture on what you're talking about that there's like almost a cool factor that's up for grabs that it's like, well here, you can actually rebel against the system in a way that's kind of like, that takes a little bit more courage. So I think I see what you're talking about. The left-wing is upset because they might be losing that, but that's something maybe positive. Because like you said before, Ron Paul almost went, he almost did take the cool factor after a while just because he showed so much courage. So maybe we can reclaim that. Part of our ability to reclaim that has been new platforms in the internet, which has obviously been a huge boon to Libertarian movement because it was such a great equalizer. It's not hard to imagine a world in which let's say, comic Dave Smith loses his platforms. Google says, you're a bad guy, you no longer show up in our search results. Twitter says, Sayonara, YouTube takes your videos down. Libertarians tend to talk about state power, talk a little bit about corporate power and whether we should be worried about it. Yeah, well, I remember Tom Woods made this point on his show a couple months back that there's no debate about it. That's the real threat to free speech right now. It's not the state in America, which I'd like it to be. That fits my narrative a little bit better. That would be a little bit simpler for me, but no, and this is part of my realization over the last few years that it's like, oh, that's not enough. So the fact that the government isn't infringing on free speech, like, okay, that's, or not at all, but we want them to not be. That's one thing. But then you realize if anybody who's to the right of Hillary Clinton can't speak on a college campus, well, that's a pretty big problem too. And what you said, yeah, look, I personally had that fear. And that's why I have, you know, we set up our own podcast network. My friend, Lewis J. Gomez, who's a comedian, he set it up at gasdigitalnetwork.com and you guys have like the Mises Institute, of course, and you want to have your own thing. I'm prepared for the fact that, yeah, I could get kicked off of iTunes and Google, but just to get back to what we were saying before, it's like, that's one of the things that woke me up to like, oh no, we actually need as libertarians to like promote a culture that says, oh, we believe in free speech. You have to kind of have like, we have to get on board with almost like a backlash to like when Google or YouTube or any of these people do pull someone off, there has to be another market force that's like all of us saying like, no, we support this being a platform for free speech. I mean, I saw was one of Ron Paul's videos got flagged, recently as being inappropriate for children. I mean, if Ron Paul is inappropriate for children, Ron Paul has delivered thousands of children. He's responsible for children and he's the most family friendly human being on the planet. So, you know, yeah, look, I share your concern. That's a very dangerous slippery slope. But there's a little more to it because we tend to think of corporate power in terms of its nexus with the state and fascism. In other words, when Google shares data with NSA, we say, okay, that's a meld of corporate and state power. That's the path to fascism and we rightfully worry about that. But to the extent Google is a private company, when it simply says, as a private company, we control our search results, we control our algorithms. We've decided Dave Smith's a bad guy. And so when, you know, we're not gonna have his videos or whatever show up in our search results. In a sense, that is private action by a private company and it then becomes incumbent on you, Dave, to go build a new search engine that finds your results. But our critics, certainly among them, the alt-right, would say, ha ha ha, you libertarians. Look, you've been focused on the state all this time and it turns out it's awfully hard to build a search engine that competes with Google. So now what are you gonna do? Well, right, so I agree with you and the first part of what you said is correct. I mean, look, they have the right to do it. I'm not, like the only thing I think the libertarian, right, just purely being a libertarian has to say about that is like, yeah, we can't write a government rule that says they can't do that. Like we have to fight this fight in the market. And that's why I'm saying like we have to get, roll up our sleeves and get into the cultural fight. So you can still maintain the complete libertarian, like look, they do have a right to discriminate. They do. I believe in the right to discriminate. I don't want Google to discriminate based on these issues because these companies are so big. So we gotta just be like, okay, I hope enough of their customers put a lot of pressure on them. Look, the alt-right can laugh at us all they want for not having a state answer, but they don't have one either. They just say, let's write a law that says we have to have this and you'll never get it. As you see, they got Trump in there. And now we know if the government does get more involved, they're just gonna get more involved on the side that we don't want them to be on. It's not so much that, like there is a market failure there. There is, but government is still a worse failure. So I think we still have to fight that fight in the market. But when you talk about libertarians being involved and getting out there, I'm a little older than you. I've always had a sense that libertarians are kind of over here. And then the Republicans and Democrats and mainstream media were over here and that we've been a part. Part of the talk I gave a couple of weeks ago that weirdly turned out to be controversial was to try to integrate libertarianism more as just a part of ordinary society. In other words, your neighbor is six foot tall. Your neighbor has blue eyes. Your neighbor's a particular religion. Your neighbor's a libertarian. In other words, just making that sort of part and parcel of ordinary life and the world as it is as opposed to this kind of off to the side ideology that we, in other words, how do we escape this libertarian ghetto that we sometimes find ourselves in? And it's also an echo chamber. For all of our infighting, we do tend to talk to each other more than when we ought to be talking to other people. So how do we escape the ghetto? Well, I, God, I actually kind of hate saying this, but I've been convinced more and more over the last year that we do need a good leader in the political realm, not for anything in terms of the operation of government just to do what Ron Paul was doing. And I just look at the libertarian movement and I feel like we've lost a lot of juice since Ron Paul left politics. And Ron Paul is still doing phenomenal work, by the way. I mean, the guy's got the work ethic of God. Like it's unbelievable that the man could retire and he's contributed more to liberty than any of us, but he's just still writing multiple pieces a week and doing podcasts every day. But as you said, he's kind of just talking to us now. He's not getting up and talking to the world and being in a debate where he's kind of clowning all of these other people and exposing them. So I don't know, to me, I look at what Ayn Rand did with novels, really spoke to a large group of people. I don't think novels are really where the culture's at in 2017, I don't think, I think like you said, podcasts are more likely to do it than that, but I do think that Ron Paul being in the political game, so maybe we need like another great leader to get up there and kind of help in that sense, but I do agree with the point that you were making in your speech, the point that you were actually making for anyone who cares to listen to it, which is just like you have to look at what actually motivates human beings, what people actually care about, and it's not just the things that we care about, but the thing that I've kind of really, I guess as like the left has been more and more openly just hostile to Western civilization and capitalism and white people and the whole, it has kind of woken me up to the fact that I guess I took for granted how far we had come culturally. Like I think maybe we all took for granted the fact that non-aggression is basically accepted in every realm except the state. Say like not maybe not so much with Antifa rallies lately, which is like what we're losing kind of, right? But for the last say 50, 60, I mean, you could make the argument and we all do when we're arguing about like libertarianism that we would go, okay, well morally speaking, what other group can do this besides the state? You know, like what other group can do this and people would be like, well, no, you're right, morally speaking, I can't decide, oh, I don't like the plant you're smoking. I built a cage in my backyard. I'm gonna throw you in there and I'm giving money to a charity and if you don't give me money, I'm gonna throw you in that cage with the guy who smoked the plant. Like we all be like, no, you can't do that. But you know, if you were to just like land in the middle of, in the middle of like, I don't know, in the middle of Palestine tomorrow or something like that. And you go like, oh, well that guy's a Jew or something like that. Like they're like, we're gonna go get him and you were like, well guys, the government couldn't do that. They'd be like, yeah, they can and we can do it too. Like, you know, there's a lot of cultures that haven't accepted non-aggression. So it's almost like now that I see the left is actively trying to tear that apart. I do think it's not unreasonable for libertarians to be like, let's kind of like culturally join the fight with the right-wing people, support that kind of Western civilization. Because within there, we can still make the argument for non-aggression. You know, like so, I don't know. That's kind of how I see it. Dave, let's wrap up by going a little bit deeper into what seems to be this left and right divide that even infects libertarianism, but it certainly infects the greater culture. I mean, it's really more of a cultural preference between people, how they wanna live. But if we can all agree at least among libertarians that our goal is to significantly reduce or even eliminate the role of the state in society. And beyond that, let people live peaceably but let the cultural chips fall where they may, can't we sort of bypass this left-right debate and say, hey, we're willing to accept the consequences of a world where the state has very little role. In other words, you can certainly have a socialist enclave to your heart's content in Ron Paul's America. You can't have an enclave that opts out of social security in Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton's America. And I would argue that's the difference. Yeah, look, I mean, I completely agree with you. I think that to me was one of the most compelling points that sold me on being a libertarian in the beginning. It was kind of like, oh, well, if this, if what all the socialist economists say is true or they've kind of given up on this argument, but they always say this is gonna be more efficient than fine, go do it and good luck. It's the fact that you need to rule over the rest of society kind of reveals how inferior your economic system is. Yeah, I agree with that, but it just seems to me like if you're talking about like within libertarians, the cultural split to me seems to be like, okay, so you've got like the Mises people, Ron Paul, you know, Tom Woods, Bob Murphy, like that whole wing who are like consistent libertarians and who have the attitude you just had. You know where it's like, okay, you let the culture play out however it will. Because truthfully speaking, we kind of know how it's gonna play out absent of state interference. It's like, yeah, you can go have an unstable lifestyle, but no one's gonna subsidize that at the end. And like that's fine. But the thing is that the left libertarians or the mainstream half and the half that I'm around all the time, you know, I just did an interview for Reason Magazine yesterday and I talked to these guys and this half of people, well, some of them are very nice to me. I mean, they think that saying like a no-no word or if maybe someone wrote something 30 years ago that was racially insensitive, they think that is like more of an outrageous offense than nominating a person, a vice presidential candidate who supported the war in Iraq. Like that's where their mind states at. So I don't know how we bridge that with them. This is what's been getting me more frustrated lately. It's like, I don't know how, you know, that seems to me to be someone who's more concerned with sucking up to the left than actually reducing the state as you were saying before. So I think maybe in a way we gotta, I don't know, we gotta figure that out. I would love to see, you know, I would love to see the LP like nominate a really great libertarian candidate that we could all get behind. But I just, I don't know. I wish we could do what you're saying. We could all just come together as like, look, we're against the state. Let the chips fall where they may. But I don't know. I don't know how to bridge that divide. Well, Dave, we gotta leave it there. How can people find you on Twitter and how can they find the part of the problem show? Well, part of the problem is on gasdigitalnetwork.com. You can also find it on iTunes and YouTube for now. We'll see about that. But Comic Dave Smith on Twitter. Also I'll be on the Contra Cruise with your favorite people, Tom Woods and Bob Murphy. Next month. So if you guys look for that. Hey, thanks so much for your time. It was great talking to you. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend. 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