 Welcome to Mises Weekends. I'm your host Jeff Deist and we hope you are enjoying a very happy Thanksgiving weekend with your friends and family. This weekend we feature a video clip from a talk I gave at a recent Mises Institute event in Phoenix entitled What Must Be Done. And in the talk I lay out four possible strategic options for Libertarians including the political option, the strategic withdrawal option, winning hearts and minds, and actual resistance or civil disobedience. So I hope you enjoy the talk and I hope you have a great weekend. From my perspective when we talk about what must be done, when Libertarians especially talk about what must be done, the discussion tends to revolve around four common strategy options. And none of these are mutually exclusive. There's a lot of overlap between them and of course we all I think favor a multi-pronged approach. But I think we can categorize most approaches loosely into one of these four categories. So the first option we'll call the political option, right? There were to borrow a tired phrase working within the system. So this argument, I think the hippies tried that one. But the argument is understandable. It goes something like this. Look, government and the political process that surrounds it, these things are inevitable in the real world. And therefore Libertarians can't stand idly by on the sidelines while the politicians inexorably do what they do and steal our freedoms. But instead we have to organize and become active politically, maybe under the banner of a third party vehicle like the Libertarian Party or by working within the Republican Party. Because whether we want to accept it or not, politics involves itself with us. So from this perspective political action can be viewed as a sort of self-defense, something that we're forced into. Now I've noticed that amongst Libertarians this approach usually has a national focus, right? That we need some sort of national presidential candidate to carry the banner. But it contemplates political action at the state and local level as well. And it has appeal, I admit to it, especially for Libertarians in a hurry. There's a vote, there's something tangible. And ultimately, at least in theory, the political approach attempts to mimic and reverse the incrementalism that has been so successful for the political left, the progressive left over the past century. Now speaking for myself, let me just say that the political option, at least in terms of national politics, and we'll get to that later, strikes me as the least attractive alternative among those available to us today. I mean when we think about the time, the amount of time and energy and money and human capital that have been invested trying to win the political and legislative battles, it's staggering. But what do we have to show for it? The 20th century represents the total triumph of left progressivism in the political sphere. Everything we think of, central banking, income taxes, the New Deal programs, the Great Society programs, these are all enormous political victories that change the landscape forever. Everything today after the progressive centuries has become politicized. Everything from whether it's okay to engage in fantasy football betting online, to what bathrooms a transgender person should use. Everything has become a political question. So today, everything about human activity is framed with the question, what should government do? What should government do about this? It's never whether government should do anything at all. I think we need to accept that. I think we need to understand the political option, the political strategy within this context of the progressive triumph. So a second option that libertarians often consider might be termed loosely, strategic withdrawal. You might have heard of the idea of the Benedict option. This is something that's going around today in Catholic circles, amongst Catholics who are unhappy with the new pope or unhappy with the direction of the church and where it sits in the broader culture. So Catholics have been talking about this Benedict option. And of course, in Atlas Shrugged, we had Ayn Rand talking about going galt, right? Galt's galt, which we're in reference to sort of a strike by the productive class that takes place in that novel. So this approach involves separating, withdrawing, or segregating ourselves in some way from the larger society and from the political landscape. So it asserts with some justification, I think, that the current environment is largely hopeless for libertarians politically and culturally and therefore attempting to play a game where the deck is stacked so heavily against us and the rules are skewed against us that this is foolish. So it's better to retreat, at least for now, and build a life outside the state's parameters to the extent possible. And in this sense, the withdrawal option has a certain tactical appeal. It's almost like the concept in martial arts where instead of taking a force head on, you sort of move to the side and attempt to deflect it. And a strategic withdrawal can take many forms. There's a range of alternatives, right? It can be some sort of absolute separation all the way down to some very subtle lifestyle changes. You know, in some cases, this strategy can mean actually physically uprooting where you live and where you work. We have examples of this. People have tried things like the Free State Project in New Hampshire. There's a new project called Lieberland in Europe along the same lines. There's been some sea-steadying proposals over the years and some attempts to create libertarian homesteads in South America. But I asked David Gordon to find there was a great interview with Murray Rothberg where they were talking about sea-steadying. And I will say that Murray kind of joked, I don't want to go live on some blank, blank island. So he wasn't necessarily a fan, but we don't have to move to an island per se. I mean, withdrawal can take other forms. Some libertarians just choose to live off the grid, either literally or metaphorically. I think the prepper movement represents a form of strategic self-sufficiency. And simply choosing to move to a remote area, a rural countryside area, I think, is part of this option. And of course, just withdrawing from the American way of endless consumption and debt, you might call it living small, is another form of strategic retreat in itself. And it often allows libertarians to live happier lives and also to minimize one's cooperation with the state's regulatory attacks clutches. And of course, homeschooling probably represents the great example of libertarian strategic withdrawal. In the modern age, it's enabled millions of kids and parents to escape state education complex. And I think withdrawal can be as simple as just abandoning state media or unplugging yourself from the digital white noise that surrounds us. And of course, finally, expatriation, voting with one's feet, is a time-honored historical strategy for removing oneself from a tyrannical state. And this happens domestically, you know, with people moving from a higher-tech state to a lower-tech state, but also internationally. And we have millions of, well, many tens of thousands of people not only leaving the country now, but also renouncing their citizenship. And I'm sure that there are people in this room who have at least considered this option for themselves. And who could blame a young person today looking at the landscape for thinking that maybe I'm going to leave the U.S.? Now, a third tactic that we often advocate might be called the hearts and minds strategy, right? This is education, winning hearts and minds. So this approach is multi-pronged. It involves education, academia, traditional media, social media, religion, books and articles and speeches and literature, even pop culture. Hearts and minds is really the strategy behind why we hold conferences like we're holding today. And the hearts and minds strategy is really all about education, persuasion and marketing at every level. And I think this is the approach where the Mises Institute anyway has made the most headway. You know, a hearts and minds strategy argues that we can't really make any significant headway or any real changes in the world, unless and until a significant portion of the population shrugs off its bad ideas and begins to embrace what we would say are more sensible ideas, particularly in the area of politics and economics and social theory. In other words, politics is a lagging indicator. It follows downstream from culture, so we should focus more on the underlying disease, not the symptoms. So just as left progressives captured institutions of the West, they captured academia and news media and government and churches and Hollywood and publishing. Libertarians ought to focus our efforts on reclaiming those institutions for ourselves and for liberty. So it makes sense from the hearts and minds strategy to try to launch liberty-minded people into these streams of academia or business or media or religion. And this way we can begin to strike the root or at least chip away at the root, the mindset that supports the state. Now clearly, this is a daunting task. You know, wholesale attack on the institutions of our country. It's a long game. But the argument goes that something like this, unless and until we win hearts and minds, it scarcely matters whom we elect or what bill gets passed or how we arrange our personal and professional lives, the same status mentality will continue to resurface time and time again to work against us. And I think the state's education racket maybe offers the ripest target for us in terms of winning hearts and minds. So we really had this opportunity now in the digital age to appeal directly to the intelligent layperson, to bring Austrian economics and libertarian theory to them in ways that we never could before and really bypassing the traditional channels. So I think the hearts and minds strategy has a lot of appeal, but it's a long game. It's not a quick fix. It's a strategy for sober people with long time horizons. Sober in the broader sense. And so the fourth option that often is discussed in libertarian circles all just term resistance. Here we're talking about actual civil disobedience or agorism. This tactic contemplates tax protests, evading or ignoring regulations, engaging in black market activity and the like. And it also contemplates the use of technological advances. There's a lot of third way technological libertarians now who promote things like encryption and cybercurrencies and platforms like Uber, all are which areas when they were first developed sort of existed in a gray area as regards to their legality. Now, agorism was the preferred approach of the late libertarian theorist, Sam Konkin, who encouraged people to bypass the state and devote their lives to black market or gray market activities and avoid taxation and regulation as a result. He called this counter economics. And agorism had some critiques. Among those was Murray Rothbard, who found Kong's antipathy to being engaged in wage labor and white markets, legitimate markets so-called as anti-market itself. I mean, after all, was agorism offered a vast majority of workers or how will goods and services like automobiles and steel be produced in an agorist society? Rothbard saw agorists as sort of neglecting, he says, quote unquote, neglecting the overwhelming bulk of economic life to concentrate on marginalia. And I think, you know, let's be frank, the appeal of living the agorist lifestyle, you know, living without a driver's license maybe or not owning any, not being able to own any real estate, that sort of thing, might not be wildly popular. Now, as for applying new technology to bypass the state, cybercurrencies, I'm all for it. Any innovation that makes it harder for the state to govern us as a practical matter is something that we should celebrate, clearly. But we should also guard against the false hope of technology. The same technology which might serve to facilitate privacy or title transfers or stealth movement of money and people can also be exploited. It can be used by the state or be subject to its spying apparatus. And no innovation, no technology can change the fundamental questions of whether and how human affairs ought to be organized by the state. So these four basic approaches, we have politics, withdrawal, hearts and minds and resistance. These give us a framework to consider some of our tactical approaches in an unfree world when we ask ourselves the question, what must be done? So it brings us back to the aforementioned Professor Hans Hermann Hoppe and his speech. I encourage you to read it. I think we have photocopies of it outside. It's really a fascinating topic and Hans' treatment of it is razor sharp. Now keep in mind he delivered this in 1997. So the digital revolution was still in its infancy, social media, mobile devices didn't exist, and several precipitating centralizing events. The introduction of the Euro, the September 11th attacks, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the crash of 2008, Greenspan and Bernanke's monetary hyperdrive, the rise of Obama, the full rise and contagion of PC in the West. None of these had yet occurred in 1997. And each of these events intensified the growth and the scale of centralized government power. But even looking back on what now seems like relatively carefree time of 1997, Hoppe's explicit focus was this fundamental fight against the centralization of political power and whatever form it might take. So in fact, I think decentralization is a lynchpin that connects each of the four tactical approaches that we've outlined earlier. If there's one principle and only one principle that libertarians ought to apply when considering strategy, it's this. The radical decentralization of state power must be our relentless goal. The 20th century, the progressive century witnessed the unprecedented centralization of power. You see this in Washington DC, in Brussels, at the UN, at the Fed, at the ECB. So our overriding goal has to be the reversal of this terrible trend and the creation of what Hoppe calls implicitly seceded territories. He describes very much a bottom-up strategy that really forwarded by what he calls natural elites. We think of elites as the political class or we think of these connected people, billionaires like Facebook, Zuckerberg, someone like that. But Hoppe sees a natural elite very differently. It's not made up of the political class or its core intellectuals, but instead it's made up of just accomplished, upstanding local citizens. And these natural elites in Hoppe's view form the counterbalance to the centralizers and they serve as the vanguard of the bottom-up revolution. So Hoppe has three keys to this revolution in his section on strategy. Number one is that protection, defense, and justice have to be demanopinalized. And this is one of the toughest areas for libertarians to argue that police and courts and armies shouldn't be run by the state. But here Hoppe says we have to be steadfast in our advocacy of a truly free society because if these functions remain under the sole power of a central statement monopoly, then no progress towards liberty is possible because we just can't trust the state to have guns and lawyers in jails. Second, Hoppe says that political decentralization has to be ruthlessly pursued. And here he actually makes an exception and says that voting, especially on local matters, can actually be morally justified on the grounds of self-defense, which is an interesting perspective coming from an anti-democrat like Hans Hoppe. And third, Hoppe argues democracy as a concept has to be attacked and ridiculed whenever and wherever possible. Private property forms the basis for a free society while majority rule, including voting, the system that permits the theft of private property forms the antithesis of Hoppe's free society. So as you think about things today or as you leave today, I really encourage you to read Dr. Hoppe's article. I think you may just change the way you view this task that's before us. So in conclusion, let me give you a quote from Rod Dreyer writing in the American Conservative about this Benedict option that I mentioned earlier that some Chaotics have been contemplating. It's from his article talking about the fall of Rome. And he says, Rome's collapse meant staggering loss. People forgot how to read, how to farm, how to govern themselves, how to build houses, how to trade, and even what it had once meant to be human. So has the world today fallen so far into reflexive status and that we've forgotten how to be free? Are we living like Benedict on the edge of a new dark age? Or is a revolution, a radically decentralized Hoppe and bottom-up revolution, brewing? The pushback we see all around the world against central states and their cobbled together a historical borders, against political elites, against bankers, against the UN and the IMF, against the euro, against taxpayer bailouts and cronyism, against PC, against this manufactured migration that's going on and against drug laws. Is all this a last gasp or is it a sign of a worldwide movement towards political decentralization? Well the future's unwritten, we don't know. But we can play a role in this. And let us remember that every society worth having, every advanced liberal society was built by people with long time horizons, horizons beyond their own lives. And generally those societies were built under very difficult circumstances of material hardship beyond what we are likely to face in our lifetime. So let's appeal to our better natures and turn what must be done from a question into a declaration. Thank you very much.