 There's quite enough being said about the recent horrific terrorist attack in Nice. So instead, we thought you might enjoy hearing a free-willing conversation I had earlier this week with Daniel Amiduri of the Future Money Trends radio show. We discuss Trump vs. Hillary and whether there's any wisdom in voting third party, i.e. for Gary Johnson. We also talk about Bernie Sanders and Millennials and whether Bernie captured or stole any of Ron Paul's 2012 thunder. And we wrap up our conversation with the discussion of Black Lives Matter and police violence from a libertarian perspective. So stay tuned. Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. All right. Thank you for having me. Well, sir, this is certainly a year where politics are at front and center four years ago. Man, it was very, very exciting with what was going on with the Ron Paul movement. It was a big advancement from 2008. A lot of us probably, in fact, I was one of them. I thought all that momentum would roll right into the Ron Paul campaign. And just briefly, what are your thoughts on Ron Paul's presidential bid? Why wasn't it able to connect with Ron Paul's momentum and fire at all? Well, I think there's a couple of reasons. This is, by attempting to appear more mainstream and more palatable to the average GOP primary voter, Rand actually gave away much of Ron's appeal. In other words, it was Ron's purity and his principles and his intransigence, we might even say, that made him so popular with people. When they listened to Ron talking, they could tell they weren't hearing sound bites. They weren't hearing prepared remarks. It was just Ron being completely off the cuff and brutally honest. And so that didn't necessarily translate to Rand because Rand was much more cautious, tempered his remarks, tempered some of his positions in an attempt to triangulate and reach out to more mainstream Republicans. But he actually miscalculated because in doing so, he lost the enthusiasm, the appeal of a straight talking Ron. And I also think that Rand and really libertarians generally, we misunderstood the degree to which there's a libertarian wing in the GOP. There really isn't just much of one. Most Republican voters, most Republicans are not particularly libertarian. They're interventionist, neo-conservatives in terms of their foreign policy views. And thus, it doesn't really resonate with them. People have had two chances in early Republican primaries, New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina, Nevada, for instance. People have had two chances to vote for Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012. And now in 2016, they had a chance to vote for Rand, who was certainly viewed as the libertarian end of the GOP. And in all three of those instances, they delivered underwhelming votes for the libertarian ish or libertarian candidate. So I think the lesson we have to learn from this is that there's not really a libertarian wing of the GOP. And the idea of working within the right or working within the GOP, which has been around and has been debated in libertarian circles for many, many decades, either hasn't worked or isn't working, but the result is the same. And I think libertarianism does not really beat in the hearts of modern conservatives. Maybe it did in Russell Kirk, maybe it did in Senator Taft, maybe it did in Barry Goldwater, but those days are gone. Jeff, a lot of libertarians that I've been speaking to are torn up about voting for Gary Johnson, who that's where their heart is. But there is a big temptation with Trump because even though Trump is not a libertarian by any means. However, at this point, after having the Ron Paul campaign with so much excitement and so much enthusiasm, but it failed to actually be able to govern, Trump, it appears, will turn the tables over, will cause a lot of changes, at least as far as the interventionism with the foreign policy and the current trade agreements that are essentially written by globalists. So what do you say to libertarians who, their heart is with Gary Johnson, their heart is with the libertarian party, but they're also looking for somebody to finally go into Washington and flip the kitchen table over? Well, I sympathize. We might say Trump's not a libertarian and doesn't call himself one. Gary Johnson's not a libertarian but does call himself one. So we can start from that premise. Look, the argument for Gary Johnson is really that you're so sick of these two parties, you just want to cast a third party vote. However flawed Johnson might be as an individual or as a candidate or as a person, certainly as we all are, he represents the libertarian brand. And so if you vote for Johnson, you might say, hey, in effect, I'm voting for the brand or I'm voting for the libertarian party. And Johnson just happens to be the standard bearer of that this year. I guess you can make that argument. I'm not real big on political activism at the federal level. I think it's very, very hard to make real progress or to effect real change of the federal level. And I think anyone who gets elected president is going to have triangulated mightily to do so and especially is going to have appeased some of the war hawks that exist in both parties that exist in the defense contracting industry that existed within lobbies on Capitol Hill. It's very hard for anybody good to be elected president as we've seen. So I'm not so certain that Trump is really going to upset the apple cart with respect to foreign policy if in fact he prevails. But I fear that Hillary will win and that she will win by a good four or five points because you have to understand that while Republicans and libertarians are great at dividing things up. The left is really good at creating a big tent. So they start really at 46% or 47% in national elections. And it's just a matter of getting from 47 to 50 or 50.1. And there's so many vested interests within that big tent. But a union truck driver who has nothing in common culturally with some left-wing feminist wouldn't like each other, wouldn't have the same friends. One spends their time in feminist circles. One spends his time in a blue collar bar watching the New York Giants. Nothing in common but on that day every four years they come together and vote Democrat because that's in their immediate or they're perceived immediate self-interest to do so. And so the left is much better at cobbling together coalitions. However, fractious. And that's why the Republican Party is a minority party and likely to remain one, especially when demographics sweep Texas and Florida. I mean, at some point, if Republicans don't win Texas and Florida, they're done as a national party. Sure, and Texas, I mean, I would think it's still two decades away, but you never know. The Democrats are pretty good at importing people to these these deep red states. Sanders and the youth. It reminded me of a time when I went to a Ron Paul rally at UCLA in 2012. It was just a sea of young people. I mean, I'm a millennial myself. And we were all out there enthusiastically supporting Ron Paul. And I looked at the Sanders campaign and I mean the crowd definitely looked the same. Obviously, the message couldn't be more polar opposites. They might identify many of the same problems, but Sanders solutions are very violent. What is it that Sanders was able to tap into? And there are even libertarians, I know, that actually did support him during the election. What was it that Sanders was able to tap into that really fired up the young people? Well, it was just disaffection and the promise of something new. I think young people are tired of baby boomers, especially tired of the Clinton generation. But they're also tired of being in debt and paying a lot to go to school for degrees that don't seem to be worth very much. Let me say this in defense of millennials. When I worked for Ron Paul on Capitol Hill, we got a lot of resumes from young people. A lot of people wanted to work for Ron. And when I compared some of these young people at age 18 or 19 or 20 versus me at 18, 19 or 20. I had basically worked in a car wash and had a Ramada in and I was an undergrad. Whereas these kids all had some sort of internship or some trip they'd taken to Europe, much more press of it. And the big difference is that when I'm a Gen X or when I graduated from college with a liberal arts degree, that did not get you into a professional job. You still had to do other things. In my case, it was go to law school. You could with a degree, you could go find a job, let's say at Hertz rental car and work your way up into management and ultimately into a corporate job in something like that. You could go work at an Applebee's, let's say, and then work your way up into a managerial position and then into, you know, maybe managing several restaurants or a corporate job within whatever group owns Applebee's. Those kinds of opportunities, I think have really dried up for younger people. A lot of those jobs are being done by immigrants. They're being done by older people. So I honestly believe that millennials have it tougher in terms of their job prospects and also in terms of their debt obligations, the burden, the financial burden to go to school. And look, that anger, that angst has got to manifest itself somehow. And you and I might say, well, voting for Bernie is not the answer. He's going to make it worse. All the free stuff he's promising is going to come out of your own hide. But you can understand it. And if there's ever a time to be naive and idealistic, God, let it be in your 20s, right? So what I rather have Bernie than Hillary, I probably would. I'm not sure that he would be any less bellicose in foreign policy, but he might. And at this point, I would hold out hope for any candidate who's going to be less bellicose, less warmongering than the Republicans and Democrats have been for the last, you know, 30 years. The Black Lives Matter movement, you know, for what I see. And I mean, I've never actually been to a rally, so I do plead ignorance on that. But there's definitely people out there, just like you were talking about young people in general. But this happens to be a Black Lives Matter, mainly worried about our criminal justice system, protesting violence against African-Americans. Is their anger correct in channeling it at the police? Or should their anger be channeled somewhere else and then a protest be channeled somewhere else? You know, look, here's one area where Gary Johnson's really good. And he correctly identifies, and let's give him credit for it, that the drug wars is the heart of this. I mean, the number of traffic stops or street stops of a pedestrian that begin with some drug suspicion is just enormous. And if we weren't spending all of this time trying to arrest and incarcerate individuals for having a substance that just changes your mental state like beer does, then we wouldn't have so many of these encounters that escalate into tragedies. So, you know, this constant stopping and questioning of people, which occurs more in poor neighborhoods, a lot of it can be laid at the feet of the drug war. But, you know, I can't say I'm a fan of Black Lives Matter because I think it's statist at its core. I think it's being run and driven and financed by some very bad people on the left. And I think its goal is to have us all so timid and afraid and discombobulated and worried about the state of things on our streets. You know, our physical securities we go about our lives, that it's using hype and it's using a false fear of what's really a pretty safe society to engender support for more government, whether that's more cops, whether that's more welfare, whether that's more, you know, government education, whatever shibbolists the left and now the right increasingly call for to eradicate poverty, which create more poverty. I think ultimately Black Lives Matter is whether it's intentionally a bad or it's just going to be bad in effect. I think ultimately most people behind it want more government. So you can hardly say that more government's going to lead to a less violent society. Yeah, it's a constant cycle. The government makes these people victims and then they ask the government for help. It's like Stockholm Syndrome. Brexit, let's talk about the economy. Was it a significant game changer in the global monetary system? In your opinion, do you think this is ultimately going to lead to the breakup of even the European currency? Well, I think the European currency will break up, but I don't think it will be because of Brexit. Yes, I think Brexit was an earthquake, albeit largely a symbolic one, but symbolism can be important. I had brunch this past weekend with an American friend who's from England and he said they'll never let this happen. They'll find ways to, they'll use subterfuge to sort of nullify this vote without openly nullifying it. But I do think Brexit was something that very few people saw coming even a few months back. I think that it made elites very, very unhappy. I think it represents at least symbolically the biggest blow to globalism and centralization since the fall of the Soviet Union. So in that sense, I think libertarians should celebrate it. I think we should treat it as a victory. And I think this idea like, well, Jeff, your little local government in your town or your county or your state or in the case of the UK in Westminster can be just as oppressive, if not worse, than some far away government. So this is just changing things and shifting gears. This is no great libertarian victory. As a matter of fact, the Brits might actually be more statist and more protectionist and worse on trade than the European Union ministers in Brussels. And to all this, I say, nonsense. It is always a good thing to break up the turf that any particular gang claims authority over. It is always a good thing to reduce the size and scope of a government. It is always better to have to deal with or fight a power that is close to you. If you live in a small town, your mayor has to run into you from time to time. So I really, really believe that decentralization of political power is not a panacea. It is not going to create a utopia, but at this point, short of violence, I see decentralization of political power as the last best hope for people to live peaceably together when they see the world very differently. To say, hey, San Francisco, maybe you need different rules about how you pay for health care than Auburn, Alabama. And let's not use violence and force against each other. Maybe San Francisco needs different rules for gay marriage than Baghdad, Iraq. So it may not be, it may not create a utopia, nothing can. But I think that the, I mean, we'd all argue that the breakup of the former Soviet Union into Russia and then a bunch of smaller countries was a step forward. So at this point, we'll take the victories where we can get them. How's that?