 Hello my friends and welcome to the 44th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Got another great one for you today. We're talking politics, we're talking philosophy, we're talking academia, the left, and a bunch of other good topics with an interesting New Zealander. My guest this week is Dr. Jamie White, who started his professional career as a philosopher, but then he got involved in politics. He was the former leader of the ACT Party in New Zealand, which is a classical liberal political party. He's also written some books for lay audiences and has a very interesting perspective of the current state of higher academia, especially in these soft sciences. Now particularly relevant for this show, as it is with every show, is the sponsor of this episode. Praxis is a company that is operating outside of academia. It's operating outside of politics, outside of the non-profit world, and it's smack in the real world. And they are in the business of giving jobs and training to competent young and enthusiastic people. The Praxis program is a three month boot camp where you learn practical job skills that is followed by six months of a paid apprenticeship. And after you complete their program they contractually guarantee you a job offer. Now that's not something that you get in the academic system, there's a really good reason for that. If you're interested in the Praxis program, go to steve-patterson.com slash praxis. And that will take you to a special page that was created specifically for listeners of this show. You can get a free module of the Praxis curriculum sent straight to your inbox. So go check it out, steve-patterson.com slash praxis. Fortunately I think more and more people are waking up to just how far left and how far kind of into the world of La La Land, a lot of professional academia has gone. The people that are graduating have been given a name, right? They're Generation Snowflake because a lot of these people graduate with no ability for critical reasoning and they are obsessively focused on protecting their feelings and protecting the feelings of what they think are minority groups. They pretty explicitly reject the idea of any kind of objective truth and therefore discussions about philosophy or the truth or about how the world works are really discussions about power and power structures. So you're going to love this conversation with Dr. Jamie White. So let's start talking a little bit about politics. First of all, I know right now you consider yourself more of a classical liberal. Was that always the case and how did you get to those conclusions? It's the result of the history of New Zealand. Most of your listeners probably won't know this. New Zealand is now one of the most economically free countries in the world. In fact we often get the top of these various indices for that kind of thing. In 1984 there was a change of government and the government leading the government, well not just the government before that but several governments before that. So basically since the Second World War, right through 1984, New Zealand had been known as the Soviet Union of the South Pacific. It was unbelievable. The government control of the economy. Just to give you a few examples to what you know how crazy it was, it was illegal to transport anything more than 50 miles in a truck. The reason for that was to protect the government's railways business. So freight had to be, you had to put your freight by law. You had to put your freight on a train and then you could take it from where the train stopped to its ultimate destination on a truck. Now was that a formal order? Yes, that was a formal order. That wasn't just like, haha we laughed at it, people actually lived. So people conformed with that law. You needed a doctor's certificate to buy margarine. And that was to protect the dairy industry. Now people lived in accordance with that as well? Oh you couldn't really get margarine for that reason. I mean there was no margarine market because you know, if you wanted to, there was complete control of foreign currency, you couldn't get foreign currency, you had to apply to the government to get it. One of the guys who was a big figure in my political party I got involved with later was, tells a nice story about his mother wanting to buy a book from overseas. And she went to apply for her foreign currency from the government. And she was asked, well why do you want this book? And why don't you just go to the library and get it? So ultimately you had to get permission from government bureaucrats to do the simplest things like buying a book. When you went on a holiday, if you wanted to go on a holiday overseas, you had to apply to the government to get the foreign currency to spend there. And the way it worked is you'd have to present your flights, your tickets, showing how, that proved how long you'd be away. And there was an allowance for how much money you could have for each day that you were away. But it wasn't enough, right, to stay at an ice hotel or anything overseas. So what people would do is they'd buy gold chains and they'd wear them as they left and then they'd sell them when they got overseas so they'd have enough money. Every import was licensed. You couldn't import anything. Cars, and the way you got rich in New Zealand was that you would get close to the government, or to politicians, and you'd get an import license. And if you got an import license you had exclusive rights to import something. One of the richest families in New Zealand is the Todd family. The Todd family had licensed to import cars. Cars in New Zealand, you wouldn't believe how much they cost. So it was an extraordinary, extraordinary illiberal country. Homosexuality was illegal in New Zealand until 1985. If you knowingly rented your property to a homosexual, that was a crime. So you get the picture, right? And the top rate of tax, my father was paying 66% income tax on the top bit of his income. So that was the situation. And it all radically changed from 1984 when the new government came in. But if you grew up in that environment and your father's living under that regime economically, and I watched him struggling. He was a businessman. He was always struggling with the government. And you react to that. And I think New Zealand has quite a large number of, let's call them libertarians, because classical liberal is quite a mouthful, on account of that history. Now it's faded off. People of my generation and around, a little older, a little younger, that's where you find this clustering of libertarians. Younger people who grew up in the more liberal regime, they're now, they're not libertarians anymore. They're probably social justice warriors. Because they take all of this for granted. They don't understand what it's like when they get what they want. If they were to get what they wanted, or they think they want, we'd effectively start going back to the old regime that we had, because social justice warriors always want the government to control the economy, because they want economic outcomes to be the result of judgments by wise people, not free transactions. Because free transactions don't end up giving them the pattern that they desire. They have a vision of society, which markets don't guarantee that outcome. So they want to take over the economy. But they would eventually end up back where we were, with cronyism. Because somebody's got to get the contract to supply whatever it is. And so it's the friends of the politicians who get it. And well, that's why I'm a libertarian. I'm not a libertarian, by the way, in any particular sense. I don't follow Ayn Rand. She's in that case. And I'm not a Nozikian or anything like that. I just mean, by libertarian, I'm just wanting a simple word for classical liberal. So I've always been one, is the answer. There wasn't some great moment when I became one. What has changed is... So it was always a gut feeling like the state should piss off, like get out of our face and leave us alone. So there was an emotional element to it. And that's always been there. Then when I started studying philosophy, I found discovered Nozik and people like that. And for a while I believed in natural rights, but I quickly gave up on them. And then later I discovered the more economically based free market people in Hayek and so on. And that's really where I'm coming from nowadays. I'm really a utilitarian. I don't believe in natural rights. I do it in a tenuated sense, but let's not get boring. I don't believe in them in the way that natural rights theorists do. And the reason in favor of free markets is that I think people flourish under them. That's very interesting. I suspect there is a similar corollary in the states that there are a lot of people right now, the social justice warriors, especially the loudest, who haven't a clue about history and about the implementation of their vision onto the world and what actually happens in the real world. When you use that phrase, are you familiar with the work of Thomas Sowell? Yeah. So that makes me think the vision of the anointed about how everything is going to be equal and distributed across every person in that particular society. And it doesn't really matter the failures of that implementation to get that vision. Even if it causes misery, it doesn't matter. It's everything gets sacrificed to try to achieve that envision. And unfortunately, at least in the states, it sounds like maybe here, the millennial generation is not particularly open to rational, reasonable discussion about the principles in economics, about the principles in history. There's the march mentality, like we're seeing in the states right now, even a little bit of violence. People that are social justice warriors are bumping up against some resistance. They're not trying to persuade. They're saying, well, you're a bad person and now you're making a threat. I agree with you entirely. And I think that the way I kind of put it is, if you know that saying it's American one, is that all you got? Well, all they've got is a profound sense of their own righteousness. They know nothing about political philosophy, about economics, about the history of political systems and what's happening. They know nothing and they don't care because they don't need to know that because they're righteous. And if you come up with all that crap, they see all these things as mere wicked tricks by wicked people to put up obstacles in the way of justice. And they're self-indulgent. It's an utter self-indulgence because they're not at all serious about what would happen if they had their way. They're just expressing themselves and it's important to them too that they're better than you. That's an important part of it too. They can't just be good, they've got to be better. But I think it's a product of the way they've been raised because they've been told that they're special from a very young age and more importantly they've been told that their opinions matter even when they're totally ignorant. My daughters are going through schooling here and they're invited to have opinions on topics that they don't even begin to understand. I think that's giving them ideas about their station. Thomas Sowell's a great example. Thomas Sowell was just studying until he was about 45. He hardly published anything. And now the guy's got such a body of knowledge. He's an amazing man. But there's a kind of seriousness about him, a kind of humility. There's absolutely no humility in the social justice warriors. And as you say, it's pure signalling. Well I think that's an interesting way of putting it, that they're invited to have opinions about topics they don't understand because what you get is the only way that they generate their opinion is by their immediate feeling about something. So it goes straight from, well this is how I feel, that's bad. Therefore that is my rationally held and stated position and that's really what you get when you scratch the surface of a lot of these people. And there's no system in their thought. So the Frederick Bastia's point about the scene and the unseen. Well they're utterly obsessed with the scene. So there's something that has grabbed their attention. Let's say, and sometimes it's just an image. Let's say it's a sweatshop in Indonesia. And they go boohoo, that's bad, we don't like the sweatshop. Those people look at them, they look uncomfortable and unhappy in that sweatshop. So obviously again everything to them, it's always obvious that the solution is the power of the state. So it should be shut down or the government should ban the purchase of products made in those places. And then now they've done something righteous. They've saved those people. What have they? Where do those people go once the sweatshops shut down? By hypothesis, the sweatshop was the best job opportunity those people had, otherwise they wouldn't have taken it. Now you've eliminated their best job opportunity because it offended you. Have you really done them a favor? You've hurt them. You must have hurt them because you took away what they considered to be their best option. If you sent them enough money that they didn't need to work anymore in the sweatshop, you've done them a favor. But of course that actually costs you. One of the other things about, they want righteousness at no cost. So they can go and cry in a march and fall on the ground in a weep and they're having a whale of a time. But it costs them nothing and it does no one any good. You know the old idea of Christian charity which was that you didn't even mention it. You just did it and nobody knew that you had done it. They're the absolute opposite of that. They do no good at all but they draw endless attention to their own virtue. I can't tell you how sickening I find them. I'm glad that you can really say that because there is very much a strong counter, it's almost a counter-cultural, the new counter-cultural movement is like a counter-counter-cultural movement in the sense that those people think, the social justice warriors think that they're railing against the man and the injustice in the world and yet the real radicals now are to reject that kind of popular social signaling and say, look let's take a rational approach to look at the problems in quotes of the sweatshops in India. Like yeah the image upsets you but like you say there's the seen and then there's the unseen and the sad reality is in a circumstance like that and a UNICEF did a study where, I don't know if it was a sweatshop it was child labor laws. They said in India too many young people are working in factories so we're going to ban people from, I don't know what it was, nine or something, 13 or something crazy from working in those factories. And then they did a study that said sure enough child labor went down in the factories, wow but there was a spike in child prostitution. There's no picture of this. About to guess that. And there'll be hungry families. Exactly. As I say there's no system in the thought and there's a dominant, what's happening it seems to me culturally with young people is the triumph of sentiment over reason. The terribly sentimental. And partly that's because the triumph over reason is partly because there has over the last 40 years been systematic undermining of the value of reason within the academy. When I was studying for my PhD at Cambridge I was associated with the philosophy faculty obviously but also there was a department of the history of science which I had a lot to do with because I did philosophy of science work. And within that there were the kind of philosophers and then there were the sociologists. The historians of science were often kind of sociologists and there was something known as the sociology of science which was a hot topic at the time. And most of the sociologists of science were so-called relativists about truth. So they didn't believe that there was any scientific reality that scientists discovered. They said that scientists kind of created a dominant narrative that got accepted. And the reason the earth orbits, does the earth orbit the sun? Well, according to these guys, well that's what people say, you know. And that narrative has won out and so the scientists will go along with it. They made that fact. They didn't discover it. It was by making that idea the dominant narrative the scientists created the fact that this was the kind of view going around. And so they didn't believe in any objective reality and they saw science as a purely sociological process in which some groups got dominant over others. And if you think about reason and reality in that way, of course there's no particular why bother studying economics because it's all just a battle of wills. And if I say to these social justice warriors, well you're wrong about what's causing the problems you think are problems and about what the solutions are. You don't understand the various effects and you bring up economic theory, let's say. They will see what you're doing as a mere attempt to bully them because there isn't any truth in them. They don't believe in all of that stuff. They are the righteous ones. You're the bad one. You can tell you are partly because you're a white man and they need to win because they're on the good side. And so the best thing is to, for example, no platform you don't allow you to say those things. It's a pure battle. It's not a battle of ideas. It's not a battle of who's right about the reality because they've rejected all that stuff. It's a simple battle. It's a simple power struggle. And they believe that they can kind of... It's totally nuts, right? But that is how they see it, I think. Okay, so forget everything I wanted to talk to you about. Let's talk about that. And you've just stated a position that I've suspected and a lot of people are talking about that I think is true, that in a very real way this movement that we're talking about, the social justice movement, is an outgrowth, an extension or an expression, a philosophy. Yeah. And perhaps a demonstration, not only of why philosophy is important, but if you get the fundamentals wrong, if your position is, no, there's no such thing as objective reality, that might have some very real consequences. Not immediately. Maybe it starts in the Oxford discussion when it gets into the general public. It trickles through. I don't believe in trickle-down economics, but I do believe in trickle-down ideology. Right. Yeah, I saw this. At the time, I just thought the people I was dealing with, because I'll give you an anecdote. After I finished my PhD, I got a fellowship at Cambridge, and I had to give a talk to my college that I was a fellow of that was accessible to non... because I was one of two philosophers there. The college is all mixed up. It's quite nice. You've got historians and scientists and very kinds. So I gave this talk. And it was called Relativism is Absolutely False. Yeah. And they enjoyed it, the general audience, because a lot of them were frustrated by dealing with relativists in their own subject area. They have common sense. And one guy, who was particularly keen on it, he was one of those guys, he was an anthropologist, kind of a historical anthropologist. He'd done great work on migrations, you know, humans around the world. But he was always encountering relativism in his subject. And in his subject, it took the form of native people saying, no, no, your theories are all wrong. You know, they're based on genetic evidence and all that kind of thing. But that's just culture. That's just intellectual imperialism. We have our own myths. The Aborigines come from the... They don't come from where you say they come from. They come from the belly of a lizard, because that's our story. And how dare you approach it your way, because that's just Anglo-Saxon or European intellectual imperialism when you tell me that the Aborigines migrated from here to there. Who was that saying this? He would encounter this when he was doing his work. Amongst his colleagues? Some of his colleagues, for example, he spoke about a particular Aboriginal professor of anthropology who would say this. This was actually a professor of anthropology who would say, we come from a lizard's belly. Again, you see, I don't think he really believed they came from a lizard's belly. It was a struggle. I'm going to force you to sit there and listen to me talking all this crap because you're scared politically to argue with me. And there was a culture of fear. He told me that when a conference where this guy was talking all this crap, he was the only one who was willing to stand up and argue with him because all the others were too scared. And this, by the way, is the early 90s. We had the same talk about relativism as absolutely false at the History and Philosophy of Science department. And it's all normal argument, philosophical type argument, but more clear than usual because I'd written it for a non-specialist audience. And it was full of arguments, and it was pretty clear. And at the end of it, some people engaged with the argument, but one guy, one of the leading sociologist types, relativist, stood up and he didn't deal with my argument at all. He said that I should be ashamed of myself for having given such a talk to this audience. He used a different example that is too historically contextualized for me to use now, but basically he said, you're like an imam who says that homosexuals will burn in hell, giving a talk to a gay conference. It's outrageous. And then everybody, when people came up and said, I've got tuttered for weeks, people were shaking their head of dismay that I'd done this. Yeah, because they're not interested in the truth, right? They're not interested. That wasn't what was going on. They're staking out their turf and you've got no right to challenge their ideas. This isn't a university. This isn't Cambridge University, right? So I should have seen all this coming. I thought it was some crackpot bunch within a little branch of academia, but of course students have gone through and been taught all this. If you do a course in almost any subject now in the humanities, you'll get a methodological chat around the fringes of it, most of which is kind of relativistic. For example, history, you'll get all sorts of stuff now about who's history, as if there are no facts of history, right? There's just different people telling different versions of events and they tell those versions in accordance with their background or their cultural context. And there's no... You can't say, no, you're wrong. You've got the facts wrong. Actually, this happened. That's just imperialism. Right. Everybody's gone through this, so it's no wonder to me that the social justice warriors are okay, so there's two points here. One, it sounds like... So this is a blunt way of putting it. There's a lot of belief by regular folk who haven't had the elite education that when you go to a university that's that elite like Cambridge or Oxford or Harvard, you get, in essence, an anti-education. Insofar as you might go in thinking, believing in such naive things as objective truth and objective facts and then you... some of that high-level relativism, you'll learn that those beliefs are kind of weak and then you'll discover the truth, which is that there is no truth and if that's a contradiction, well, that's part of them. That's the part of the pull of it. So, that's the first part. Do you think that it's fair to say that the regular uneducated in quotes suspicion of higher ed and this is back in the 80s you're talking about. Late 80s, early 90s. It seems like it's only gotten worse since I know I have an undergraduate education. Do you think that there's some truth to say there is a bit of foundational chopping at people's intellectual foundations when they're talking about something as essential as whether or not there's even truth in the first place? Well, I'll start by saying that most of the sciences are unaffected by this. Not all, actually. Some of the more sciences that interact with human matters and social sciences, let's say, are heavily affected by it. Maybe you don't think of them as sciences, but a lot of the sciences are free of all this nonsense, physics and so on. Then, within the humanities and the social sciences there is still some great stuff being done. So I don't want to say general, but I think that in general, most people who go and study humanities at most universities probably do themselves mental damage. They'd be better off. They'd have a clearer understanding of the world. Be less prone to believe bullshit if they had never gone. For example, who would believe who hadn't gone to university would believe that the son is a social construct. You've got to have some pretty good universification to be willing to believe that shit. The left there's been a hijacking of higher education and perhaps even secondary education and primary education by a world view by people who have that world view and it takes incredible resilience to go through the process and come out the other end without being imbued with that world view. In fact, I suspect I was. It took me up to a point I never went for the relativism but it took me quite a long time after leaving university to get over certain kinds of ideas about I think the mistake I made, I thought that everything had to be organized. On this world view all order, all cooperation has to be planned by an authority. I had no idea when I left how much of the world was spontaneous order and I think that the socialist world view that most people have they don't even realize it's the socialist world view or it's the statist world view is that they can't even imagine voluntary and spontaneous solutions to the problems that they think the state is the solution to and that's partly because they don't know enough they know nothing of the pre-state world. In New Zealand, New Zealand is particularly bad in this regard because New Zealand is roughly in the late 19th century it's a very young country and the state had already started to take off in Europe first in Germany and Britain followed a little later to have big state apparatus but by the time New Zealand was really developed the state was already doing a lot of things that it hadn't done in the past like for example providing railways and providing schools and all that kind of thing and most New Zealanders can't even imagine private provision of these things and I think that's one of the and of course they're hidden from them the education system never tells them but of course because they will work for the state they've got an interest in not passing on this bit of information and they also genuinely don't know I had to learn a lot of that after I left the academy and I think most New Zealanders most Brits, most Americans can't imagine food safety I remember once somebody telling me food safety, somebody telling me that they would come over to my view of things my liberal, I'm truly liberal libertarian view of things if I could do one thing and I'd never be able to do what she suggested which is to say how there could possibly be food safety without the state which is really amazing because when you think of it one thing that consumers really will demand the idea that nobody would demand it and it wouldn't be supplied if the state didn't force it on everybody is utterly ludicrous you know these grading systems in New Zealand you see them in A usually and behind the counter of a food server which is a certification that the kitchen is clean that would be supplied privately but people they can't even imagine it they say I'm against health and safety rules again they think there would therefore be no health, there would be no safety workplaces would be completely dangerous I think part of it is they don't understand price mechanisms I think that's correct and I think they don't understand the power that the consumer has because they view an exchange where I'm buying a sandwich as like a power exchange that person's got the goods and I'm like subjected to them and hoping they don't poison me with their sandwich I would discuss I think this gets to the heart of forget the metaphysical or the epistemological wonkiness that we were discussing earlier if you think about a world view that is the foundation of the anti-market sentiment that is prevalent now is seeing power everywhere in markets so they see all market interactions as being a strong party pushing around a weak party and oddly sometimes it's the consumer that has the power and sometimes it's the supplier that has the power so for example if I go shopping for food at a supermarket they see me as the victim and the supermarket is the menace if that's in that case the consumer's the victim in labor relations they see it the other way around so if I'm supplying my labor and you're buying my labor then I'm the victim it's really very very strange if you talk to actual employers they'll point out how desperately hard they find it to get and keep good stuff they feel very vulnerable similarly if you're a consumer of look at normal consumers the deal they get just keeps getting better and better why because the suppliers have not got any power they can't make you buy their stuff you've got to choose to buy their stuff and various suppliers are competing for that so of course you get a better deal the social justice warriors they would replace all of that with their own edicts you will have this because this is what you deserve but it'll be crap you may deserve it but you probably don't want it so I wonder kind of in conclusion here going back to the phenomena that happened at Cambridge and Oxford where was it particularly there just across the board so first of all it is fascinating and tragic that there would be such a popular anti-intellectual belief coming at the highest levels of academia anti-intellectual in the sense that fundamentally opposed to even the idea of the pursuit of truth because they reject the idea of there being a truth I would consider that explicitly anti-intellectual so it's sad, it's tragic it's got these consequences in society but there's a really interesting question that I haven't solved yet which is why is it so popular because it's easy well but in the higher levels of academia is it because what I suspect is it has some intimate connection with politics there's some hook that people on the left get when you undercut this idea of objective truth it's like it is a way for the left in particular I think because arguments aren't on their side for political, philosophical reasons where if they can make it not about the facts and then make it about intentions and feelings and about power that gives them a little bit of an edge well I can help to connect this to the left for you, why it's the left in particular who like this idea and it's because once you say okay there's no truth and there's no rationality there's just a conflict of ideologies or worldviews coming out of different groups then you add on which group should win well obviously the historical victims should win women, racial minorities or it would be dreadful if the already rich and powerful would win in this struggle now it just so happens that people on the left are the representatives of the poor and the racial minorities and the women and so they win by default if you get rid of truth and reason they triumph because they are the representatives of the group who must be favoured in the competition so you know all this stuff about intersectionality and the whole point is that it's the most disadvantaged like the lesbian disabled black woman whose view must carry the most weight that suits that idea suits the political left because they want to pursue the policies that they think will benefit those people so there is a direct connection let me do some big big history here and I think you had authoritarianism as a kind of intellectual model prior to the enlightenment and the authorities were kings priests what they said went then you have the enlightenment there is actually reality and we can discover what it is through scientific methods and kind of enquiry and people like you and me I suspect love that and we think this is what it was that change of attitude that explains all the progress we've made over the last few hundred years and then but then people are rejecting it actually they're rejecting those enlightenment ideals they're going back to the pre-enlightenment thing where it's authority but they're inverting it it's no longer the strong and dominant you get to tell you how it is it's the weak and vulnerable so it's a return to the pre-enlightenment authoritarian model about how you arrive at opinions but inverted socially you see this all the time so that's a long version of it think about what happened on the political left originally the left in politics in Britain was people in my opinions the left party in Britain were the left wing and they were opposing the conservatives the right wing and the liberals the left wing were in favour of free markets especially free trade they were very keen on it then the labour movement emerges a bit later and they reject liberalism they go back to authoritarianism just like the conservatives had had it's in the interest of the workers it's a similar pattern you see the thing you've gone from an authoritarian model to a liberal model then back to an authoritarian model but with a different group of people doing the authorizing so what do you think about this I like that except there's one variable here that makes me think maybe that power structure is not quite as inverted because there are many cases now of people who are traditionally in those groups like homosexuals in the United States who express conservative opinions or black individuals in the United States they express their interest in free markets and they're immediately seen as part of the oppressing group so it's not their status in terms of their their social position or their qualities if they're disabled it's more like if they're towing that party line so that makes me think it still smells like it's a powerful group of people that are just using that to maintain their yeah, sorry I agree with you Thomas Sowles and Uncle Tom they don't care about the disadvantaged groups they're using them they're pets I need to be given privileges because I'm representing the victims, it's the representatives of the victims do you really think black leaders in America these kind of hucksters like Al Sharpton and so on, do you think they've benefited black people? they've benefited themselves enormously apparently on behalf of black people but the black people are there for them they see the black people we have this in New Zealand there's something called the Maori Party who represent obviously Maori interests and they are very keen on, they're very paternalistic towards Maori I was in a debate with a woman who's one of the leaders of the Maori Party about whether there should be sugar taxes and she's very keen on sugar taxes because some Maori are overweight and she was very keen on very punitive tobacco taxes because Maori smoke disproportionately and I've been advocating the right of people to make these trade-offs for themselves and she was very hostile to this kind of view and at one point I blurted out I think she hates me now that I seem to have more respect for her people as she describes them than she does and her vision was of her as being some kind of nobility noble member and all her people as she kept saying were the little people who she would look after and she was their shepherd so to speak and of course I find that disgusting I don't want people to be sheep I want them all to be independent human beings but you can see that she wouldn't have a political career she wouldn't have a status if those people were independent human beings she needs them to be down because how else could she be their protector Now do you think this is so or do you think that this is genuinely the individuals who view themselves as just virtuous enough to be a shepherd even at the top levels yeah I don't think it's conscious I don't think they bring it to consciousness why would you bring that to consciousness that's not going to help you do a good job even you need to really pipe yourself up to believe that you believe that you're doing all this for their good you'll be a much better con man if you can do that I had a guy who worked for once who was a terrible liar and the funny thing is I watched him lie and the way he built up to lying to our clients is that he first started practicing on me a bit of being in the office and he'd say something and I said that didn't happen and he'd go he'd laugh the first time then he'd say it again and he keeps saying it and after a while I fell silent and then I'd hear him telling a client on the phone and he'd been he'd been warming up and honestly by the time he'd finished with this he seemed to believe it so I don't think if you're going to be alive you're going to do these things you need to convince yourself I think Hillary Clinton probably really believes that she was going to help women and poor people in America and all that but that somehow she has a sanctity to her I think it's a very charitable well I'm not sure if that's charitable it is either the case that she's self-deluded in that respect yeah she's self-deluded, that's what I mean see my suspicion, specifically with that case maybe not with the others that one I think is just a case of pure selfishness but others I think you're right I think on the whole you kind of have to be you have to afford yourself to do it and to do it effectively that you didn't ask which is but I want to answer it which is you ask me if I feel bad because I give these cold economic arguments it's not if you feel bad it's if you find it difficult to engage with people that keep insisting you must be heartless but I think this relates to the scene and the unseen thing because you get these characters who point to some problem which they're going to alleviate through force of the state and that looks like they care and you don't but so I want to point out there are all these other effects and they're harmful to many people and it seems to me that though not as sentimental because you're taking a systemic approach you don't pick out a sobbing child it's not as sentimental it is actually more compassionate because you're taking kind of everything not the ones that you happen to have noticed and got all your feelings worked up about so it doesn't give you the same it doesn't look as nice it's not as flashy but it's actually more virtuous I believe and I wish I could get people to see this but I can't I think this is a universal problem with libertarians I was talking to a professor at Harvard specifically about this that especially when you're talking about trade-offs so when you're talking about welfare for example you could make a very strong case that like welfare in the United States actively hurts the well-being of those that's designed to help however in changing that system to benefit more people individuals are going to lose out on benefits and may have difficulties in their lives and to make that case for the greater good kind of a utilitarian approach has this image because you can zoom in on the people that are being hurt by the change in policy it's got this image problem and I don't know exactly how to solve it other than just the rationalist approach that doesn't seem to persuade them I'll give you a very contemporary example of people only looking at one side of a problem on a vent I believe that we've just done an executive order to reintroduce the global gag that you know the thing where any charity getting US government aid money overseas can't mention or encourage or even mention abortion now there were headlines here saying that this was robbing women of their right to an abortion well first off it isn't because it doesn't get changed the law in those countries it just doesn't sponsor abortion so it hasn't removed their right actually I was pointing out Samoa doesn't fund any such charities has Samoa ever been accused of removing women's right to an abortion anyway never mind that but think of the other side of the equation this is a tax money right so tax money is removed from people on threat of imprisonment many many Americans are anti-abortion a lot is it okay to confiscate people's money on threat of imprisonment and then use it for a purpose to which they are deeply morally opposed is that okay I think that looks bad right as a principal yeah that looks bad to me and yet the people getting hysterical about this terrible action by Trump they don't ever bother to tell you why it's okay to force people to donate money to charities they're opposed to why don't and oddly enough I know this very well I know that if I brought this up in the media in New Zealand they would think I was an ideological maniac right and I'm a mean guy they would they would think I assure you and yet I just I'm out of tune with the current sentiments they don't people got no qualms about using force to have their will done so if I think abortion is a good thing I don't then hesitate to force people who disagree with me to fund it they don't see any problem with that I think that's an awesome note to end on so thanks so much for this conversation it's been great thank you it's gonna have a drink alright that was my conversation with Dr. Jamie White I'm sure you guys enjoyed it I certainly did Dr. White and I also had a fantastic conversation afterwards I probably should have recorded it about politics about the political situation in New Zealand the political situation in the United States I'm sure you guys would have appreciated that interesting classically liberal analysis if you like these conversations you appreciate the show and the project and the mission of what I'm trying to do then check out patreon.com slash Steve Patterson a patron of the show and a special shout out to all of the patrons right now I think we're about 75 or so so thanks guys you are helping make this show possible alright that's all I have for you today enjoy your week