 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. On today's episode of Free Thoughts, we're tackling listener Q&A. We're joined by our colleague David Bowes, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, and author of the book Libertarianism Primer, soon in February, I think, to get a new addition. As the Libertarian Mind from Simon & Schuster. So let's start with a question that was making the rounds a few months ago. There were some, I think, salon articles on this topic. And that is, why, quote, why in all of history in contemporary society are there no Libertarian governments? Well, governments tend not to like liberty. But you know, if you say all of human history, the first thing to think about is that before about 300 years ago, all the governments in the world were based on conquest and military power. They were kings and they were pharaohs. And so, of course, there were no Libertarian governments. It took a long time for the idea of liberty and the idea of thinking for yourself and using science to find out how the world works to happen. So if we drop the sort of pre-modern world and we say, well, what about the modern world from the time of the Enlightenment and eventually the Industrial Revolution? Why are there no Libertarian governments? Well, then I think the answer is, well, of course there are. If you mean a Libertarian government that fits every word that Murray Rothbard would accept or Ein Rand or Robert Nozick, then of course there aren't any. And there's no government in the world that fits exactly what Marx said or exactly what Marcouza said. But are there governments committed to the broad principles of separation of church and state, private property, free market economies, free speech, governments constrained by constitutions, governments constrained by the rule of law? Yes, there are. And they're the most successful countries in the modern world, the United States obviously, based on a very Libertarian Declaration of Independence and a pretty Libertarian constitution, but also most of Western Europe and Hong Kong. For 99 years Hong Kong was ruled by a colonial master that didn't care what happened in Hong Kong, which was the best thing for it and which is how in a couple of decades after World War II, Hong Kong got rich because they had a very laissez-faire hands-off government. So there's no precisely Libertarianism a primer government, but there are countries in the world. In fact, the dominant direction of countries in the world is toward the broad principles of what used to be called liberalism and is now perhaps called Libertarianism. Well then if that's true, if there are broadly Libertarian countries and there are many of them, then what are we Libertarians agitating for? Haven't we already gotten it? And then to kind of take that further, what about like a concern that says, okay, if we've got these things and you're saying they work well and now you guys want to strip them down even more, take away the powers that seemed to have been working? Isn't that a dangerous direction? Well, there are good questions there. And you know, there is a good Berkian-Hiakian argument. Don't mess with something that's working pretty well. We have gone from average life expectancy of 30 to average life expectancy of 75 and maybe we shouldn't mess with that. But of course the world is constantly changing and in the developed world, especially in the United States, we have a country that is broadly Libertarian in many ways. Back when my book in Charles Murray's both came out in 1997, Fareed Zakaria wrote a book review in which he said, consider what the liberals were fighting for 200 years ago. Religious freedom. A society based on merit, not status. Markets, not mercantilism. Constitutional government, not monarchy. He went through a few more things and he said, and what do we see? They won them all and therefore he said Libertarian seem kind of like angry radicals, but it's because they won 80% of what they wanted. They won 90% of what they wanted and they're still agitating for more. So part of the answer is we got the rule of law and constitutional government and free markets because people who believed in those principles agitated for them and we're going to keep on agitating for them. A second argument is that we do nevertheless have a lot of exceptions to those rules in the United States, a $17 trillion national debt, a $4 trillion federal budget every year, police abuse, the surveillance state, all of those kinds of things that I still believe are within a framework of a more libertarian world than the pre-modern world was, but there's still plenty to be done. And the third point would be there are plenty of countries where they're not yet living under broadly libertarian governments and so plenty of libertarians in the developed world and also in the not yet developed world are fighting for the basic principles that Zakaria talked about. It's interesting too that article, I can't remember who the original source was, but the nature of it was kind of strange because we're not living at the end of history. We're always fighting for something new. Things are always progressing and you could ask anyone, well, why are the principles that you think correct out there being used in the world which for libertarianism was some sort of apparent proof that there was a problem with our ideas, but if you asked conservatives or progressives why isn't there a fully progressive country? Maybe they think there is or something along the lines. Or back when people were arguing for the spread of democracy. Yes, exactly. That monarchists were saying, well, if this works so well, why aren't we seeing all sorts of democracies? And it was very weird that it was applied to libertarianism. It might say something about us in terms of the way that we espouse our beliefs that someone thinks that it's a refutation to say there are no libertarian countries, but they don't think that about conservatives. There are no totally conservative countries. Therefore, what you're saying must not be valid. That was the implication of the piece. What would a totally conservative country be anyway? One that still had cavemen? One that still had the medieval world? Part of the issue I think is because libertarians have written a lot of books and cite books that do give a radical from the bottom up logical discussion of every issue and how it fits into this system. People want to hold us to every iota of that, which is okay because I'm in favor of a fully libertarian society and I should be ready to defend it. But I saw another article in Salon last week. Salon is like anti-libertarian central. They had another article essentially proving the headline like libertarian principles are too radical for the public. They essentially proved Murray Rothbard or Inran could not be elected president. Yeah, well, no kidding. But that doesn't mean that a political candidate who said less surveillance, lower taxes, let people do what they want to in the privacy of their own home couldn't be elected. The same thing is true with people on the left. What is the touchstone for people on the left? Is it in fact Marx? If so, there are no Marxist countries in the world and no Marxist could get elected president. And again with conservatism, it's even harder. What is perfect conservatism? If it's Bill Buckley in 1960, well, then that guy couldn't get elected either. If it's Bill Buckley in the year 2000 toward the end of his life, well, I'm sure there are things there that couldn't be elected and that no government is perfectly appreciating. So this next one, which comes from Nita Jean, expresses a pretty common sentiment when people look at Washington and the dysfunction that they see. She asks, why can't libertarians, Democrats and Republicans all work together to build up our country instead of infighting and tearing it down to build fiefdoms? Well, yes, I wish we could all pull together for the right causes. The first thing I would point out is that the formulation of libertarians, I think is wrong, I'm a small L libertarian. You can hold libertarian ideas and be a Democrat or be a Republican or be either one. So we could say, why don't Democrats and Republicans work together or we can say, why don't libertarians, liberals and conservatives work together? And the answer is, because a lot of cases we don't agree on what should be done. We think taxes should be lower. Most liberals think taxes should be higher. That's why we can't work together. We think everybody should be free to get married in America. Conservatives think gay people shouldn't be free to get married. Well, then we just disagree and hopefully we're going to disagree in the political process and not in the streets like they do in some countries. But we don't agree on what would make our country better. And as we've talked about on this podcast before and the things that Aaron and I have written, there are also elements of the political system that puts people at war with each other who shouldn't necessarily have that many problems with each other because they're trying to control each other's lives. So one thesis, the more the politics matters, the less we can agree about things in actually an inversely proportional way. Yes, that's certainly true. If the government is going to decide where your kids go to school and decide who you can marry and decide what you can smoke and whether you can run a lemonade stand, then we're going to have a lot more things to fight over than if all the government did was protect us from foreign aggressors and criminals. We wouldn't have to fight with liberals and conservatives that much. The problem from our point of view is precisely that the liberals and conservatives want the government to make all these lifestyle choices and we don't want them to and so we have disagreements with them. It's interesting too because this question, although I think it's phrased without discrimination towards any side, but a lot of times the libertarian view as it gets bigger, we get accused of being the opposite ones even if they call us Tea Party which is of course wrong but someone who's standing by these principles and that has always struck me as strange in terms of the things we can't disagree on. Apparently we're supposed to budge on allowing taxes but they're not budging on drug war or they're not lowering taxes or anything that they're not supposed to budge on. It goes back to a point about who's the extremist in this situation which I always think is a worthwhile point in the sense of we get called extremists for a package that we disagree with but very rarely does the extremist side get put on fighting the drug war, fighting innumerable foreign wars, putting people in cages for consensual crimes. That seems pretty extreme to me and again another point of disagreement makes it hard to work together on these issues. Well right, I mean how about a moderate platform we could compromise on this. Federal government currently spends $4 trillion. How about $2 trillion? I mean I'd still be unhappy but perhaps we could compromise at $2 trillion. We arrest a million people a year for using marijuana. How about $500,000? How about half a million? Could we agree on half a million? Stop there. They're not going to come down on that so why should we go up? Exactly. Let me ask a follow up on that one before we go on to the next question. Going back to something you pointed out at the beginning which was this construction of putting libertarians along with Democrats and Republicans and I should point out that in the question as it was asked I think it was written on Facebook, libertarians is capitalized along with Democrats and Republicans and this is something that comes up a fair amount at libertarianism.org we get questions where people assume that we are the Libertarian Party or that Libertarians are the LP so maybe you tell us you just distinguish those like what's the relationship between the Libertarian Party and Libertarians? Well I guess the difference is we're sort of the only philosophy where in the modern world at least people named a political party after our philosophy so most Democrats are what's called liberals these days we would say welfare state liberals or social Democrats but they would say liberals most Republicans are conservatives but those words are different so nobody confuses conservative and Republican we understand they're different even though there's a lot of overlap in our case there is a political party called Libertarian which does pretty much have a platform it reflects my political philosophy but I'm not a member of the Libertarian Party I'm not a member of any political party and so even here at Cato I have sort of a standard email I have to send a new employee sometimes saying never capitalize the word Libertarian unless you are in fact referring to the Libertarian Party or some other organization that has Libertarian in its name otherwise it's the name of an idea or case just like socialist or conservative or any other philosophy next up we have a question or actually a series of questions from Matthew Rex so he says I am all for a flat tax and would like to see everyone pay something small like 5 to 10% but what do you do when a company like Boeing pays 0% in taxes is it worth closing loopholes if they will just take all their jobs out of the country the way to create jobs in the US is with a 0% tax rate and actually using tax dollars to pay the companies to stay there's a lot of issues in that but let me suggest something radical but not that radical there was a article in the New York Times just in January and if they are the monitor of radicalness but about abolishing the corporate tax flat tax of course would be nice that's a sort of separate question but abolishing the corporate tax for a variety of reasons one of them being is that we would just be taxing people directly and not the corporate profits themselves there's also tangential benefits to it for example corporate tax structures are used to delineate what certain companies are allowed to do which would include things like 501C3 501C4 so the IRS that is a corporate tax structure but the question I see is why would you be taxing corporate profits at all in terms you could tax shareholders what the shareholders gain by holding the stocks which could be proposed taxing individuals directly you could tax the salaries of CEOs but taxing corporations themselves produces almost no economic gain and allows them to put many of these profits overseas which of course we hear a lot of complaints about and in the New York Times editorial the estimation because the guy actually created a model of you could just adjust the U.S. corporate tax rate and see what would happen many many assumptions in the model but he assumed that it would increase skilled and unskilled workers wages 12% to simply abolish the corporate tax rate get the corporations to come back over here we have a 35% corporate tax rate which is by far the highest in the entire country so although you might want to stick it to the corporations and I hear that from libertarians too just because apparently it's a popular thing to talk about think about what you're actually taxing when you tax out corporations and then you're also taxing the people who are in the corporations you don't produce any well much wealth from it there's a lot of tax evasion there's a lot of putting jobs overseas and it would be a better thing for workers and a better thing for the economy just to get rid of it all together well I think that's right when you complain that Boeing isn't paying any taxes it presumably means I don't know the details but it presumably means they have a 35% corporate tax rate and they have profits but somehow they don't end up paying any corporate income taxes they pay payroll taxes and so on it means they have lots of deductions and credits and so you have a very complicated tax code the complicated tax code is easy for Boeing to spend millions of dollars on lawyers and accountants not so easy for the startup company to hire all those lawyers and accountants so wouldn't it be easier just to have at least a lower corporate tax rate and none of these deductions and loopholes and yeah ideally why have corporate tax at all the corporate taxes is paid by the consumers or the workers or the shareholders of the corporation one way or another it's being paid for by people economists argue about who it's really a burden on so why not just get rid of all of it but the point there at the end about will they take all their jobs out of the country we live in a global economy and it's kind of crazy these days my partner asked me the other day is Mazda a Japanese car company hmm I'm not sure I don't know what the definition of that would be is if it was bought by an American hedge fund and then sold to a London hedge fund but the cars are still made in Japan is it a Japanese automobile company I don't know all of these things are complicated these days my iPad says on the back of it designed by Apple in California assembled in China so jobs are created all over the world as long as there's economic growth and there's plenty of good jobs created by Apple in the United States and there's more jobs which aren't as good created in China so we shouldn't worry about corporations taking jobs overseas we should worry that the economy's efficient and lower flatter taxes are one way and free trade are big ways that you get toward a more efficient economy which means more jobs but more importantly a better standard of living for everybody next up Steve St. Louis asks what's your favorite movie and why is it Ghostbusters you know I remember enjoying Ghostbusters and I've seen Libertarians talk about it a lot since then I should probably go back and watch it the EPA that's why the EPA is a big character I remember it being amusing and yet it made fun of the government it didn't strike me as the greatest movie or the greatest Libertarian movie but maybe I should give it another try but a lot of people saying Brazil was the greatest Libertarian movie ever and I finally watched it again and I had to tell you it just didn't do it for me movies are subjective they're art my favorite movie is Casablanca it's just a perfect movie I don't think of it primarily as a Libertarian movie it's anti-nazi it's a pretty good Libertarian message but it's a love story and it's a story about what's important to individuals I think it's a perfect movie among my favorite Libertarian movies and I have written about that and I recommend Miss Liberties Guide to Film and Television by my friend John Osborn I think that Shenandoah is a wonderful anti-war anti-state Libertarian movie Jimmy Stewart back around 1965 Amistad is a movie about slavery and specifically about using the law law is an important Libertarian concept using the law to prove that certain people despite being African and looking a lot like slaves were not slaves under American law there are a lot more Libertarian movies coming out of Hollywood we think of Hollywood as being on the left but American culture is individualist it's anti-bigness it's anti-totalitarian it's entrepreneurial and you're going to find those themes in movies and so a lot of Hollywood movies that the makers may not have thought of as Libertarian there are a lot of Libertarian themes in movies I think we're seeing a change too in terms of dystopias and going back to what you said about individualism we are living in a world where 15 year olds can have Etsy accounts and create their own little things and sell them so there's an entrepreneurial aspect that can build things in a better way than they were easier than they were able to before and if you think of movies like Hunger Games and also shows like Firefly which has been mentioned a couple times on this podcast you're seeing a different view because it used to be the case that dystopian dystopian futures like Blade Runner it happens to be my favorite the director's cut we're corporate we're very corporate controlled type of things and we've seen less of that we've seen far more state-centered control and we've seen the heroes being people who are individualistic and have their own outside of the constraints of the state that would be what Hunger Games is about Divergent would be the same thing and I think that's a good development in general which is one of these interesting things for libertarian movies one of the themes that I look for is when you see people living outside of the state you usually see this huge dichotomy between very natural type of living frontier living versus very cold modern metal type of living which I think brings in the libertarian thing of when you're outside of the control things are a little bit more rough but they're also a little bit more pure a little bit more unpredictable but probably a little bit more free and a little bit more satisfying to the individual Speaking of dystopias if there's anybody from Hollywood listening to this podcast why is there no movie of this perfect day by Ira Levin his other books have been made into highly successful movies Mary's Baby and Boys from Brazil this perfect day is a great anti-totalitarian dystopian novel somebody should make it but interestingly the Guardian is now fighting with Salon to post the craziest anti-libertarian stuff and this weekend's craziest anti-libertarian article is a denunciation of Hunger Games Divergent and The Giver because they're criticizing organized government you really shouldn't let your kids watch movies like this because they could come away questioning the state questioning government planning maybe even the welfare state it's really hilarious to see people worried that kids will be taught to have a libertarian attitude not to become little libertarian automatons but to dislike big government I mean I'm sorry this guy wasn't around to denounce Star Wars because that also was kind of critical of the empire next up we have Brandon Seymour who I should point out seems to make the confusion that we talked about earlier between the libertarian party and libertarians so he asks with the official party platform which I assume means the libertarian party being to privatize education as a whole what kind of effect do you believe this will have on impoverished neighborhoods and families educating our future generations of the utmost importance surviving as a nation should an education not have guaranteed access for all citizens not be guaranteed I assume is what this means and I think this one I mean this one there's a lot of things going on in this question that the first before I kick it over to you is the rather obvious like even if we could say yes an education is extremely important yes it would be great if it was guaranteed to everyone but even under government schooling it certainly not and especially in our most impoverished neighborhoods and families seem to be the ones that public education is failing the most that it's hard to look at the DC public schools the Baltimore public schools a lot of big city public school systems and say these kids are being guaranteed an education these kids are getting a quality education well that's right this is clearly an example of the difference between schooling and education we do I guess guarantee schooling to all children in America but it's not necessarily an education it's clearly not an equal education and we've been working for 30 or 40 years on programs to equalize access to education we've demanded that all the schools spend the same amount of money and we've tried busing and we've tried changing the consolidating districts and all of those things and we've still got bad schools in the inner city which ought to start suggesting to people that maybe having schools provided by the political system is not a good way to get a good education to the poorest most helpless people in society so yes I absolutely want to privatize education start by privatizing schools we already have a lot of privatized education but schools also and one of the things to think about is every form of information transfer in our society has been revolutionized in the past generation or two except the schools and the post office because they're run by the government so who knows what education would be if we could have 25 years of totally private education you want an education you want your kids to get an education you go out and get it you pay for it on the market it might be done through schools the way we have them now it might be done through online education it might be done through television imagine that this huge 300 billion $600 billion market is opened up to people who could make a profit by serving it I think you just you wouldn't recognize education after 25 years in the same way that you don't recognize telephones after 25 years we had a telephone monopoly for a long time and everybody thought it's the best telephone monopoly in the world but then we deregulated and telephones are just transformed but you still have to be able to afford a telephone in order to participate in this deregulated market I think that's the key part of this question is okay if we privatize education so maybe education the people who can afford it it will get better for them but at least right now with government providing education and paying for it through tax dollars even if you have no money even if you're totally out of kids to school but in a private market what if you don't have the money to pay for it well in the first place the last figures around 2011 showed that 80% of people in poverty had a cell phone that's a hell of a lot more than the number who were getting a good education in the government schools so most poor people in America have some money they can buy a cell phone they don't have zero money now education is more expensive than a cell phone except there's a whole lot of education on that so if you were organized better by profit seeking entrepreneurs it would be even better but we should also remember that in addition to private entrepreneurs providing education better education technologically innovative education to make a profit there are charities there are churches there are schools that offer scholarships to the poor I think all of those things put together you're clearly going to have better kids getting a better education than you're getting now and you're going to have middle class kids getting a much better education than they are now too because even though they're going to decent schools they're still going to schools that are sort of like the phone company in 1975 they're plotting along their monopoly systems but we don't know how much better they could be I imagine that they probably wouldn't follow farming patterns of the 1890s when the school year was set to work with the harbor I bet that that's a little antiquated and your point about poor people is good the money that they do have and what they can do because we have a book at the Cato Institute probably my favorite Cato book the beautiful tree which is about the poorest places of the world and how for-profit schools are set up there places much much poorer than slums of Namibia or India the worst places the places Americans wouldn't even go but there's a man found that there were schools set up there for-profit schools that were serving even in the presence of government schools which is that secondary part of the question because the government schools were also not serving the children in concordance with the parents wishes as is often the case with government schools so not only was it not the kind of education their children they wanted their children to receive but it was it was it was worse than what they could get for 50 cents or a dollar what they were paying next we have a question from I'm not sure how to pronounce this name but it's dj girk or girk a but he asks in the absence of positive rights which would be a right to something to be given something how does a justice system handle legal representation of an accused who can't afford it David asks this question the other day actually it's a difficult question like many questions in the libertarian world view you have to think broadly about what what is available to you as a person who has been accused of a crime and also what things have changed about the legal system away from our optimal legal system so there I think that I probably agree with some amount of publicly provided representation because the legal world now is quite literally Kafkaesque if you get caught up in it and you don't have someone to help you figure out what the laws are what they say now it wasn't always that way and in my ideal society it wouldn't be that way if it could be avoided in the sense of what would be crimes would be clearly would be clear written it would be known there would be no crimes that were regulatory crimes for example where you could go to prison for mispackaging lobster tails which happened to a man a few years ago spent eight years in prison because he put lobster tails in boxes rather than bags things like that that shouldn't be crimes in the first place so if you're living in a world where the government is constantly imposing draconian and impossible to comply with rules upon you it's hard not to say that well if you're going to do that you already messed up by creating a legal code that makes no sense then you also now have to supply a lawyer now in terms of the resources to supply that I think charitable resources can work on that and I think a voucher system would work better than where you basically give criminals defendants a voucher to go find criminal defense we would work better than the public defender's offices today but we don't live in a perfect libertarian world we don't live in a world for example where during nullification is readily spoken about and available we live in a very suboptimal libertarian world and I think in this world we could talk about the creating that kind of defense even publicly provided in order to negotiate that world yeah it's a complicated issue and it's easy for libertarians to have a quick answer you know why do my tax dollars have to pay for somebody else's lawyer but if you think about the fact that what's going on in court is first the attempt to find the truth in a legal process and therefore if we don't have both sides fairly represented how are we going to find out the truth and second the claim of some body whether that's a judicial agency in an anarcho capitalist world or the government in a limited government world the claim of this body to be able to incarcerate or otherwise punish a person maybe it does make sense that people should have the right to have a lawyer now that leaves lots of questions open like well how are you going to pay for this in your libertarian world and how good a lawyer do you get Ted Olson if you're accused of shoplifting maybe not but the idea that there should be some right to be represented in this complex process which ideally would be less complex but right now is not I think can be justified on libertarian grounds I've written in a couple legal briefs on issues along these lines and I think this is literally true that a man standing against the U.S. government being accused of a crime by the U.S. government is without a lawyer in between him and the U.S. government is fighting the largest and most powerful organization of the history of mankind just on his own the Catholic church would be the only thing that would possibly rival the U.S. government and they didn't have nuclear weapons and that level of disparity is a problem and then a final point is a rectification point one point I think libertarians should think about more often is that in situations where the non-libertarian world that we live in caused problems when the government caused the problem that the person is in might there be some rectification that is needed to fix that position that the person is in and shouldn't be in the first place but the government put them in that situation we can ask that about that for example is there a different analysis when the government was part of the problem in terms of rectifying the problem? Well it seems I mean if we have this spectrum of libertarian political philosophies that go from classical liberalism to say anarcho-capitalism until we get to that very end of just there's no government no taxation nothing we we have money can go to government to perform certain duties it's got certain responsibilities and the one that sticks around in this you know diminishing government size till the very end is police in courts is protecting our rights and so it would seem odd to say we can we can our taxes can legitimately be spent on this particular part of the apparatus of protecting rights which would be paying for police paying for prosecutors but defense attorneys especially given the complexity of the system are integral part of this apparatus for protecting rights and for enacting some degree of justice in the world and so if we're going to pay for some of it we ought to pay for the rest of it or government is in a meaningful way not protecting our rights it's instead trampling them if the defendant I mean because keep in mind the defendant is not guilty until found guilty through this process that we've set up in many cases and even guilty then so we that in order for that process to be legitimate we have to pay for all of it we can't just pay for part of it and then complain about the rest of it Christa held asks what exactly are libertarians planning to do about law enforcement given its current state we need law but we also need accountability well as Trevor was just saying one of the first things libertarians would like to do is make fewer things illegal we have over criminalized so much I didn't know about the wrongly packaging lobster tails but from marijuana to running a lemonade stand in front of your parents house there are way too many things that we have imposed the criminal law in so let's try to make criminal law focused on when you do something that harms somebody else that takes away their rights like hitting people and taking their stuff those are things that ought to be illegal these other things let's rethink whether we actually need to be arresting people and putting them in jail for growing orchids or smoking marijuana second yes I believe we need courts and we need police but we need police and courts to be accountable we need the police to be accountable to the courts we need the courts to do a better job of overseeing the police libertarians have been warning for a long time in the case of Cato at least since 1999 about the militarization of the local police and maybe the problem is that when you have so many laws that as Harvey Silverglade said in his book title we're all committing three felonies a day the police always know that any house they approach there's felonies going on in there so they come in in the SWAT gear and they throw the flash bomb into the house and they come in and the guns pointed to get an elderly guy who's selling orchids this is crazy and the same thing we saw in Ferguson a very different kind of situation it's black people it's on the street it's not an old guy in his house selling orchids but it's still the police not seeming to think of themselves as the cop on the beat who's part of the community they don't look like when they're armed like this that they think they're part of the community when we send troops to Iraq they're not part of the community they are an invading force even if they're doing it for a good purpose and they believe that they are acting in the interest of the people of Iraq they're clearly outsiders and so they come in heavily armed and hidden in tanks but that's not the way the police should be there shouldn't be SWAT raids for people who are accused of having received a box of marijuana in the mail much less people who are growing orchids so we need to be moving back to the concept of the police are part of the community the policeman on the beat is there to keep order not to look for opportunities to arrest people we need to demilitarize the police and we need the courts to be more clear about holding the police to those kinds of standards and then we need congress and state legislatures to stop criminalizing so many things the over criminalization point you make too has a variety of effects to it one of the arguments you often see in criminal cases made to the supreme court and presented before courts across the land is that if they had to comply with certain constraints on their power to do certain things that they had to get judges to sign off on things like this then they wouldn't be able to do their job right or there'd be a floodgate of too many people making appeals to protect their rights so there's a lot of decisions that constrain rights because there's so many, there's so overworked basically that they complain that they're overworked in protecting people's rights and there's one argument I have no patience for in government is it would be really really hard for us to protect all these people's rights so please don't make us do it which they make an astoundingly large amount of time and that includes things like the warrant requirement there are so many criminal laws out there there's so many things to investigate that in one study in Denver in 1999 they looked at 163 warrants in the course of two weeks that were asked, they asked for 163 warrants every single one of them was granted 158 of them were no-knock warrants and because judges don't have enough time to look at a warrant to see if they should actually check to see if you can raid this person's house with military gear because there are so many crimes that they're just constantly arresting people so it has a lot of filter on effects to it That makes me wonder if there's something else going on too that David touched on which was this you know thinking you need to bust in the door with guns drawn for someone who might have received a box of marijuana that we have a lot of criminal laws that the way we tend to think about people committing criminal acts is not this person did a criminal act but that this person is a criminal that criminal is like a character trait and if you do something that is a crime then you yourself are a criminal and then criminals are bad people we don't really kind of distinguish I mean we can say there are like really horrific criminals and then there are just like petty crimes but there's still something bad about you and bad people are dangerous and can do bad things and so if you've gotten to assume that everyone's committing three felonies a day therefore everyone in the community is a criminal or a potential criminal then you're going to get into this attitude where I better be armed I better bust in there because this is the kind of guy who gets a box of marijuana delivered to him so he's probably the kind of guy who would shoot me over it or whatever else and so you just start seeing everyone as the enemy because on paper you've created all these little rules that have turned everyone into the enemy. Conservatives complain about giving criminals too many rights and of course what they mean is giving the accused rights and those of us who don't think we are or will be criminals but can imagine one day being accused that's an important distinction and you would think even conservatives would be concerned about in fact civil libertarians sometimes say a civil libertarian is a conservative who's been indicted I suppose a conservative who had been subjected to a SWAT raid would be a radical civil libertarian one of the things I noticed in Ferguson Missouri that bothered me was one night about a week after the shooting police are out in force in their SWAT gear and in their armored vehicles and there's looting going on and I'm thinking they have armored vehicles why are they not stopping the looting can't they move the vehicles in front of the stores can't they run out in their SWAT gear and apprehend the looters it seemed like they were not there to protect the property of the shop owners of Ferguson it looks like the SWAT gear and the armored personnel vehicles are to protect the police themselves not the community and the citizens so that's the sort of thing we want to get away from and I think Aaron back to your final point about about the amount of criminals out there it is interesting because felon doesn't mean what it used to mean this is one reason why it's becoming more and more of a conversational topic I think to restore for example felon is the right to vote felon used to mean basically the worst crimes you could possibly imagine and in common law they were usually executed if not branded or things like this now felon is someone as I said who mispackaged lobster tails or someone who we have a case coming to the Supreme Court a guy who threw some fish over the side I don't know why fish keep coming back up but he threw some fish over the side of a boat to try and sort of destroy some evidence of a civil violation and they're charging with the felony and so it is not what felon means as much as it used to when it meant crimes of violence crimes of people who are dangerous to the community next up we have a good question from Alan Hawkins he asks what happens in a libertarian society to a person that planned on working till the day they died never putting away money for retirement they make it to 60 or so years of age and find that due to years of having an unhealthy vice or a bad decision earlier they can no longer support themselves on well let's start by putting this in some broad context this posits that we're in an essentially free market world where people earn money and they supposed to put some of it aside for their retirement is that world better than an alternative world what's an alternative world well there was the world before capitalism where people lived at subsistence for their whole lives and they died at 45 or they died at 30 and I guess they didn't have to save for retirement because they never got a chance to retire so probably better than that world and then there was the alternative of the Marxist world where they said the government will take care of all your needs from each according to his ability to each according to his needs cradle to grave we take care of it that didn't work out very well so now we're talking about within a capitalist world is it a good idea for I infer in this question would it be better for the government take responsibility for retirement like social security well I think social security is a system that dragged a lot of money out of the pockets of people who were earning it promise to save it for their retirement did not spent it promise then well what we're really going to do is tax your children and their children that's an unsustainable system we are approaching the unsustainability so none of these alternative systems seem to be perfect either so let's talk about okay what happens we have a libertarian society you save money but you get old and the market crashes you put all your money in one stock putting all your money in one stock bad idea that one of the keys to life diversified don't put all your eggs in one basket but let's say you did and some moral crime or anything is just a mistake then I would say you are still fortunate to be living in a society that's so much wealthier than the society that any alternative would have produced there are churches there are charities there is your family you could have been participating in a mutual aid organization which people mostly didn't mostly people quit because the government came along and said we're taking care of it so all of those sorts of things the economic growth that gave us the job by which we could save the retirement savings that we were able to save for ourselves in the event that that disappears the fact that we have a family that probably lives comfortably because we have a reasonably free economic system then the fact that Americans give hundreds of billions of dollars a year to charity and would presumably give more if they had more left in their pocket after taxes and that there are churches all of those sort of things it seems to me are a better backup than simply deciding to in a fact socialize the whole process of retirement now you could also of course have all of those things and still have a welfare system for people who genuinely through no fault of their own found themselves in need and there's no charity and there's no church and there's nothing they can get well you could have a welfare system for that it's hardly pure libertarianism but it would be a smaller government more libertarian society than one where the government socializes everybody's retirement when you look at these questions about these people I call them falling through the cracks questions or bad behavior questions and I think they're all very important one of the things I often say is that there's bad behaviors in both the predominantly state centered system that we have now and in the libertarian system there are people who make mistakes make bad decisions in both of them it's a unique problem to libertarianism but I agree with what David said I think what we have the increased welfare we have in a system that we would advocate would help solve a bunch of these questions but we also have to look at how the incentive structures of different government programs produces more people like that and that becomes more of a systemic and societal problem so social security helps incentivize people to not save for retirement for example so it actually produces more people who make bad decisions you shouldn't be trying to live on social security anyway they ask the question about unhealthy vice there are various programs and government situations that help incentivize that so for example providing health insurance without any raise of cost on different contributory health problem issues trying to guarantee health insurance without any raising your cost in a free market system or health insurance paying people to quit smoking for example or paying people to lose weight what you see more often in government based system is the people who are heavier people who have eating problems turning into a political coalition and saying you can't charge us anymore for our health insurance because we have a psychological problem so you can't do anything to make us have a different vice so some of these situations create in cities where there are more of these people in the libertarian world than there in the libertarian world but of course I think the way David said we would try and solve it would work out let's close with a question from Alex Flake he asks how do I start getting more involved in spreading libertarian ideas in my community more effectively than one on one debates when there are no libertarian youth groups around or even libertarian groups in general well I guess the first question is why are there no libertarian youth groups Alex that's one when I went to college there was no political youth group that I wanted to join so I started one so that's one answer go to studentsforliberty.org or youngamericansforliberty.org and find out how to start a chapter on your campus and if you're in fact not in college then obviously you could start a chapter of one of those organizations they're young americans not just students or the libertarian party or a tea party group or a gun rights group or an anti-war group that you can start they may take a lot to become successful but you can get one started there are other things you can do do you write letters to the editor expounding your views that's one way that you get ideas out there have you found a political candidate you'd like to work for or should you run for office believe me not everybody should run for office but possibly you should are you active in the local chamber of commerce is that a place that you could talk about opposing regulations but also opposing special privileges for business if you're a school teacher can you get the local teachers union to consider supporting choice instead of just doggedly opposing everything like that so there's lots of things individuals can do and now because of the internet and social media you can find other people in your community go to meet up and say I want to create a libertarian group in my area lots of things like that that an individual can do none of those work if you're not capable of doing any of those things then you should work overtime and send bigger contributions to the Cato Institute and we will advance Liberty thank you for listening to free thoughts if you have any questions or comments about today's show you can find us on twitter at free thoughts pod that's free thoughts pod free thoughts is a project of libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks to learn more about libertarianism visit us www.libertarianism.org