 This weekend we speak with David Farrar and Edinburgh on the heels of the Scottish Independence Referendum vote. David is a member of the Libertarian Alliance and the Mises Institute and writes about all things Scottish at his blog Freedom and Whiskey, a Libertarian Returns to Scotland. David is also a Chartered Secretary in the UK and he recently returned to his home country of Scotland after many years working in London. David and I deconstruct Thursday's referendum vote from a Libertarian perspective and you won't want to miss it. Stay tuned. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome once again to Mises Weekends. I'm your host, Geoff Theist. This weekend we are speaking with our friend David Farrar, live from Edinburgh in Scotland. David, how are you today? How are you feeling? I'm fine, a bit tired. I was up most of the night watching the results but slightly disappointed with the results but not completely dismayed because I think there is a case for saying the final outcome in the UK in the British trials will be the same as if there had been a yes vote, strange as that may seem. Well, let me ask you this. Is Edinburgh, was it a yes town, a no town or a mixed town from your perspective? I didn't actually see the result because I went to bed before the Edinburgh result was announced. I was so tired at that point and it was virtually the last result but it was roughly two thirds no and one third yes. The main yes votes were in Glasgow and Dundee and in some of the areas around the edge of Glasgow. And we're finding out today that there is a huge difference in voting between young and old. Approximately 70% of young folks were four and about 70% of older folks were against. That's absolutely right. I've made a note to mention that to you and if you like I can try and explain why that was the case. I think older people first of all were worried above all about pensions. Unfortunately, lots of people here as in the US think that the state pension, social security in your terms is sitting in a vault under the Bank of England or the Fed when in fact of course the contributions are spent and the pensions are paid out of current taxation. Lots of people didn't get that and they thought that if Scotland became independent they wouldn't have access to this pot of gold under the Bank of England. And then another factor is very important. I think the mainstream media was virtually entirely on the no side. One newspaper out of 37 that we can read here in a week supported yes and the BBC was predominantly on the no side as well. Whereas younger people who use social media got a completely different message because on Twitter and Facebook and things like that there was a far bigger support for yes. Politics aside just from a parliamentary perspective isn't it quite amazing that this vote was even held in this day and age? I see what you're getting at but the point is we have a SNP government in Edinburgh in the devolved government. Their whole purpose since they were founded about 80 or years ago was to have this referendum and once they had a majority in the Scottish Parliament there was no real way it could have been avoided and I think the government down in Westminster acknowledged that and that's why we had the referendum. Well speaking of Westminster it seems that there were a lot of very odious people and organizations who were aligned on the no side. We heard of course from Cameron from Gordon Brown from Obama, Goldman Sachs, heck even our own Alan Greenspan came out on the no side. How about on the yes side is Alex Salmon and some of the other folks on the yes side. Are they equally odious? Well they're not libertarians that's for sure. I mean they're probably fairly similar in ideologies to the people you've mentioned. It's much wider than that. It's the Putin, the Chinese leadership and the Australians and the Canadians. It's really quite amazing. I suspect the British government asked them to come out in favour of a no vote. But no the main yes campaign are typical politicians from slightly left of centre, some slightly right of centre to use non-libertarian terminology. But as I said there were some libertarians, classical liberals on the yes side but also some on the no side. Very good friends of mine on both sides. Did the yes campaign fail to present a coherent vision of what Scotland might look like going forward? I think the main failure was to deal with the question of the currency. At the moment of course we all use the UK pound throughout the whole of the UK and the Bank of England slightly misleadingly named because it's really the Bank of the UK. It's the central bank and Cameron and Co said that in the event of independence the Bank of England would not act as a lender of last resort for an independent Scotland. I think that was the main reason that so many people supported the no campaign. Of course from the libertarian point of view my group Welfare Nation argued that it would be a good thing not to have a lender of last resort because that would discipline the banks into behaving in a more sensible manner. Right, but I just wonder if folks in Scotland on the left have the same disdain for the Bank of England that they seem to have for the Tories and for Westminster. I think people on the left probably don't think too much at least certainly not in any rational way about money and economics and things like that. The leftists think probably supported yes or those who did support yes on the grounds that an independent Scotland they thought would be free of things like factorism and privatisation and so on. In reality had there been a yes vote I think that economic reality would have asserted itself fairly quickly and the ideas of the left wouldn't have materialised for that long. It's interesting that you bring up thatcher from what I've been reading over the past week she is still a reviled figure for a lot of Scots isn't she? That's true to some extent yes and I think it was unfortunate that she didn't seem to understand how to talk to Scottish people if she'd only just said look I understand you can have a Scottish Parliament and debate Scottish affairs but we're still all in the UK I think she would have that would have been fine but she came across as someone who was very much not just English much but from the south east of England and London which is a place that dominates the whole of the UK including most of the rest of England in a way which is a bit unfortunate and she came across as being the embodiment of that centralisation in London. David it seems like now some people on the Scottish left save their anchor for Farage and UKIP. Well that's right and that's again because he is seen as being son of thatcher in a sense. I used to live in London for many years and if I still lived there I would probably be a UKIP voter because of their opposition to the EU and they're generally more in favour of smaller markets smaller governments rather than less taxation than the Conservatives. So yes it's understandable the Scottish left doesn't like them. Well you bring up this phenomenon of seeing them as a rightist movement. Here's what's interesting to me in most of Europe nationalist movements tend to be right wing anti-Brussels but in Scotland the nationalist movement is portrayed anyway as left wing pro-EU. Yes the reason they're pro-EU it's rather interesting if you go back about 30 or 40 years when they were quite small they were anti-EU largely because of the EU taking control of the Scottish fishing grounds and destroying a lot of the fishing industry here but as they got a bit bigger they came up against this problem that it was perceived that an independent Scotland might not be able to trade with England and the rest of the world. So they changed their mind and became pro-EU as a way of getting around that potential problem and they've maintained that pro-EU position ever since. And so I guess politics does make strange bedfellows. Tell us a little bit about your participation and the libertarian element however small in the behind the yes campaign. Well I've been involved with a group called Wealthy Nation.org and of course Wealthy Nation is it comes from Wealthy Nations as in Adam Smith. And it's a group of free market oriented people, several economists, people like myself from the business and financial world. And we've had a website putting out a lot of articles supporting independence but from a libertarian point of view. There is also a quite sizable student libertarian group here mainly on Facebook and they are predominantly or were on the yes side. So I mean we're fairly small in numbers but certainly among libertarians here I would say the majority were at least sympathetic if not completely pro-independent. Well I wonder about the hangover that's going to occur in Scotland over the next couple of weeks. In the US you had your Romney and your Obama voters. They tend not to like each other too much. But I wouldn't say it's a huge social rift. People go about their day to day business. I just wonder how deep this will run sort of in the Scottish psyche. The yes versus the no people. I think it might be quite difficult for a while. But right in the beginning I said that we could end up with the same as if there had been a yes first. And what I meant by that was if Scotland had become independent then we would be cooperating so closely with England especially on things like defence and probably foreign policy that it wouldn't be that much different from what David Cameron is talking about. Although I'll believe it when it actually happens of having far more devolution to Scotland but within the UK. So I think if we were to have that and have a properly virtually a federal system or even confederal with almost everything other than defence and foreign policy handled at the level of the four parts of the UK then I think most people would be quite happy with that. Another interesting element to this vote was that you could vote if you were 16 as of the day of the vote which is interesting to us as Americans, largely American audience. And also what's interesting is that any Scottish resident regard as long as they had an EU passport or a UK passport could vote whereas the Scots living abroad could not vote in the election. That's right. I mean the 16 and 17 year old thing was quite controversial but I did see a television programme of people of that age, 8,000 of them in a big hole in Glasgow about two weeks ago. And I do say they were very, very articulate people and seem to be well up on the various issues on both sides. As far as the other things concerned, I don't think the SNP government had much choice in this under EU laws. I understand it. Only citizens of a country can vote for the national parliament. So someone here from say Poland couldn't vote for the House of Commons and Westminster. But on the other hand, for all other election people from the EU are allowed to vote or must be allowed to vote under EU law. So that's this county. There's one of those types of election. And so they I don't think they could have stopped it if they'd wanted to. As far as people living outside Scotland, I mean, where would you draw the line? I mean, there are what 35 million Americans who claim to be Scots like or similar number who claim to be Irish. It'd be very difficult to open this up to people who live outside Scotland, I think. And equally, it would be wrong to bar English people living here from voting as well. David, I have to say, when you use the phrase EU law, it gives me sort of a bad feeling. It gives me goosebumps. Well, regulation was then in closing, I know it's been a very long evening for you. Tell us a little bit about the idea behind your blog. It's entitled Freedom and Whiskey, A Libertarian Returns to Scotland from our from our English counterpart from your English counterparts, we get the sense that the libertarian movement in in the UK is more abundant. Perhaps you can offer a different perspective. Yes, well, you've discovered my blog, and you may have noticed it's been pretty quiet over the last year or so, I really got blocked out with churning out this stuff for 10 years. But the libertarian movement in the UK is still around. There's a thing called the Libertarian Alliance, which you may well have heard of, run by Sean Gab. And they continue to be active. I was their financial guide for more than 20 years. With the web, the ideas are spreading. There's no question about that. The word libertarian appears in the press now, and 20 years ago, no one would have used that word. But it's still quite small. But there again, it's sadly, quite small in the US as well, isn't it? Sure is. But we're growing day by day. David, thank you so much for your time. Fascinating interview. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.