 This weekend, we're speaking with Mark Victor, the great Libertarian criminal defense attorney. Mark is perhaps the foremost expert in America on what you should do when stopped by police, and he recently delivered a great keynote speech at a Casey Research Conference. Mark and I discuss what's happening in Ferguson, our disappearing legal rights, and how having Butler Schaefer as a law professor radicalized him and shaped his libertarian views. Stay tuned. Welcome to Mises' Weekends. I'm your host, Jeff Deist. We're joined by Mark Victor, and Mark, I need to congratulate you on giving a great speech at the Casey Research Conference. Well, I appreciate it, but really, it kind of was a disorganized speech to me. People have told me those are the best ones. I get up there and just start rambling about things freedom-related. It's really my favorite thing to do, rather than sort of a well-structured, on-point kind of thing, because there's so much to talk about. Mark, it seems like a great time to have you on the show, simply because I'd like to get your thoughts on what's happening in Ferguson. Well, I like to be very, very careful in this area. Somebody who now has been doing criminal defense work for 20 years, I've interacted with lots of police officers, and it's like almost every other area. You just can't generalize people. There are some really good cops out there. I refer to them as peace officers on a regular basis. Even libertarians. I run into libertarian cops and even libertarian prosecutors, if you can believe that. They're out there. Just to try to generalize everybody, to me, is just you're going to make an error when you do that. But yeah, there's good cops. There's bad cops out there, but I like to try to focus on what's most important. In my view, what's most important is trying to win the hearts and minds of people, because if we can get enough people to change their hearts and minds, such that they are, what I'd say, pro-freedom or more libertarian minded, everything else will take care of itself. And so that's all I focus on. I don't worry about who's running for office or what happened in any particular case. Just in terms of Ferguson, I don't know all the facts, and it may be, it may turn out that this police officer was totally justified in shooting this guy, and it may turn out that he wasn't, but whatever happened in this particular incident, I don't think is necessarily indicative of what's going on in a more general sense, even though I know we're getting lots of activity in terms of police violence, but I think that's more a function of the fact that more people have cameras and more people are able to photograph and record things. I think that's why we see more of this stuff. I think there's always been a lot of this stuff. Well, Mark, it's interesting to watch the city of Ferguson and the local police there try to release information and try this case, if you will, in the court of public opinion. I know you've tried some very high-profile cases. Talk a little bit about your experience with this. Well, yeah, I can tell you I have tried a lot of high-profile cases, even cases where the press has been in the courtroom at trial every day. And sometimes I pick up the paper and I look at what they're reporting on and I say to myself, man, is this, are they talking about our case? Because sometimes they just get it completely wrong. Other times the spin on it is almost unbearable. You know, sometimes I sit and I talk to these reporters and I spend 45 minutes trying to explain things, make sure they understand it. And then I get a little clip for, you know, a little two or three minute clip that's just so skewed, it's ridiculous. And generally, I get pretty cranky with those reporters and I don't want to talk to them again. And others do a great job. You know, it's like I was saying earlier, you just can't generalize it. There's always spin. There's spin on both sides. But there's been spin since the American Revolution, right? I mean, Sam Adams was all about spin in the Boston Massacre. That's just how, and I think it's unfortunate, but that's how people motivate other people to do things. I'm not condoning it. I don't agree with it. I'd much rather get all the facts and then act at, you know, in accordance with what the facts are. But that's just not the way things have traditionally occurred. Talking about spin though, Mark. Does the average citizen who's arrested and might have a public defender, for instance, have the ability to counter the prosecution when it engages in media spin? You know, it depends. Again, it just, look, I've represented some police officers as well who were charged with crimes. And, you know, I know that this stuff isn't popular to say in libertarian circles, but it's just the truth. I mean, I've represented some police officers who I felt were treated worse than other people. I can remember talking to prosecutors and look, you're treating this guy worse just because he's a police officer. And sometimes, you know, the prosecutor's office will take a position is we're going to go out of our way to show that we're not going to give anybody any breaks and they actually treat the person worse. So it really, there's no substitute for looking at the individual case and looking at the individual facts. I mean, is it true that people in power generally in the government want to expand their power? Of course that's true. That's true of almost any organization. You know, corporations want to expand their influence in power. So do governments. That's part of the problem with the nature of government to begin with. I mean, we need to start from the beginning, which is, look, if you're going to have a government, you should know that the people inside that government are going to want to try to expand their authority, their jurisdiction, their power. They always do since there have been government. So really no surprise there. Today, in today's world, it's better because information is more free flowing. I think it's a little more difficult to sort of put the spin out there and not be called on it, especially if other people got videos of the actual event. So, you know, in a macro sense, I think we're moving in the right direction. I think the people on the freedom side are going to win this argument intellectually anyway, because, you know, freedom works. Freedom is a great plan, you know, liberty is great. And so people are going to figure that out over time. That's the reason, in my opinion, you see around the world, places like China moving towards capital and some Y, you know, because they're looking around the world and saying, Hey, I like the standard of living over there. Why are they living so good and where living so bad? Well, they got a free market economy and we don't. And so, you know, it's unfortunate that, you know, there are sort of pendulum swings. And, you know, in the United States, we've benefited from having a freer society relative to other places. And so now we haven't really valued that and that we've let the government, we've been, you know, Father Schaefer, my law professor at Southwestern University, and I think a heavy weight in the freedom crowd of today, you know, really said it best. We said all those years, we were so worried about the Soviet Union, we were paying attention to the, you know, the communists out there and socialists and all this stuff, we were overrun by our own government. I think he's exactly right on that point. We need to start focusing on freedom and trying to value it again. I get into discussions with people about freedom and they're like, yeah, yeah, freedom is important, but it's not that important. You know, that difficult to counter people, to me, should just have sort of an innate sense that a free society is a good thing for its own, for its own sake. You shouldn't have to make that case to people. Do you have any sense whether the events in Ferguson will help us make that case to people? Is Ferguson in any way a libertarian moment? I don't think so at all. You know, I wrote an article about Thomas Jefferson, you know, Jefferson's statement about, you know, when the people fear the government and when the government fears the people and he has conclusions that, you know, basically a free society is when the government fears the people. I don't really agree with that. I think Jefferson was wrong about that. I would like the society where neither side feared the other, where both sides had mutual respect for the other. And, you know, even in, you know, we refer to this other term as law enforcement officer. He's the crazy guy, the bad cop, the guy who enforces all the laws. That guy wouldn't even bother me if the laws were just consistent with a free society. In other words, if we got rid of the victimless crimes, and we just had laws that were sort of what I like to call old fashion crimes, you know, where there's actually a victim. Somebody's been trespassed upon. There's force or fraud. And imagine a law enforcement officer who enforces those laws. I don't feel so bad about that. I mean, if we could just get our freedom heads screwed on straight. We lived in a real free society. I wouldn't be bothered by the police officer who enforced all of the rules. He's just, he's a libertarian, right? So again, we got to focus on the things that matter. And what matters most is winning the hearts and minds of enough people in the community in which we live to make a difference in terms of moving towards a free society. Mark, in your recent speech, you spoke about where we are in America with respect to the current state of criminal procedure, i.e., the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, for example. Can you touch on that a bit for us? Yeah, and you know, obviously there's, you don't have enough time to recount all of that. You know, people can just simply watch my speech, and they could probably find it just by going to Google and putting Mark Victor and Doug Casey Conference or something like that. I'm sure it'll come right up. But, you know, the Constitution is only as good as the people who are interpreting it. But you wouldn't have to change one word in the Constitution anywhere. If I was in charge, if me and Butler Schaefer and Lou Rockwell and you and Ron Paul, if we were in charge of interpreting the Constitution, we wouldn't have to change one thing. We get to a free society just by the way that we interpret the Constitution. But the reverse is also true. If you put a bunch of big government people who are intent on increasing the power to the state and diminishing the power to the individual, you wouldn't have to change one word either. They could interpret things in a way that created a big, centralized, strong government. And that's pretty much what's happened. But again, that's because the parts and minds are in the wrong place. And so, you know, a friend of mine has run for governor out here in Arizona. And he's talking about all these things that he needs to do to improve the state. And I said to him, look, if you could just get the right people on the Supreme Court of the state, that would fix itself. And so instead of trying to tinker with this or that or pass a new law or get a different politician in office, I try to spend my time trying to give speeches to people and trying to write articles and just talk to people and go on TV and radio to get enough people thinking. And really, you know, everybody understands that their neighbor should be allowed to do the same types of freedom related things that they themselves do. That's an easy sell, right? To try to get the guys who drink alcohol to concede that alcohol ought to be legal. And the same with the pot smokers. Or if you're if you're gay guy to say, oh, yeah, gays should have rights or a gun guy to say, yeah, people should have rights to possess firearms. Those are wimpy issues to me. You know, to me, the question, the discussion about whether someone is about freedom starts with the the notion about do you support the rights of your neighbor to do things that you don't do things that you reject or think are even bad or unhealthy or unwise or immoral, something along those lines. Then we if we could get enough people to understand that concept and say, look, I don't agree with it. I think it's a bad thing. I would discourage my friends. But what he does is a peaceful thing that doesn't affect anybody else. So therefore it ought to be legal. If we could get people there, we could get to a free society. So that's the that's the drum I'm constantly trying to beat. Apart from philosophical arguments, should we also be making economic arguments, for instance, with respect to the drug war? Yeah, and I think that's mostly what we're experiencing now. You know, and so when I go out and I talk to you, you're probably familiar with normal the National Organization for the reform of marijuana lots. And when I talk to the pot smokers, I always try to stare them away from the arguments about medical marijuana or the arguments about why the drug war shouldn't end because it's too costly or those kinds of things. It's not about that to me. I say this is such a good opportunity for true people who said people who truly support freedom to stand up and say, wait a second, the reason this drug war ought to end isn't because of any of those things. It's because three people have a right to control what is put into their bodies as long as they're peaceful, they're competent adults. Who cares? They have a right to do that. And so this is an opportunity to use maybe the drug war as a means to make the argument that's the much more important argument about freedom. You know, and I always say the same thing to all of these groups, you know, it's same thing to the gay groups. I don't, you know, instead of just arguing for gay rights, how about arguing for the right of adults to do whatever they want as long as it's peaceful? And if we can get people thinking on a more global level about the nature of freedom, we can actually start making some progress. But as long as we're mired down in these individual issues, I think we lose the battle. And whatever means people use, like you say, if it's the wallet, hey, if we can get people thinking about, man, I'm losing all this money through my taxes. Well, yeah, I'm for lower taxes, but we need to get to the point where people understand that taxation is set, that it's long to take your neighbor's money and use it for any purpose against his or her will. It's not just about what's more convenient for me or the fact that I like lower taxes. Let's talk about the nature of the interaction between the individual and the government. You mentioned having the great Butler Schaefer as a law professor. Tell us a little bit more about how you personally came to the libertarian philosophy. Well, I guess as a young guy, I was attracted to some of the things that the Republicans were saying, like Ronald Reagan, when he talked about individual responsibility and those types of things, I was always attracted to that kind of talk. I didn't realize at the time that they didn't really mean that stuff. They were just saying it, but I was attracted to that. I hadn't even heard the word libertarian. I had just barely figured out the drug war, not for the right reasons, because people own themselves, but for the economic argument. I mean, it's a little bit of ironic that I came to this position on my own about the drug war for the wrong reasons and then eventually figured out from the right reasons. But yeah, I wandered in the law school and met Butler Schaefer, who pretty much threw out everything I believed and started from scratch and talked to me about being a libertarian. I mean, here's a guy who starts his property law courses with the Dred Scott decision, which is a slavery case. But he reads it. It has you read it to think about the nature of self ownership. Did Dred Scott own himself? Those types of things. And so he gets you thinking about things on a completely different level. He also taught us about constitutional law and started with the Lysander Spooner notions about is this even a legitimate document? If so, how does it become to be a legitimate document? Did you vote on it? If not, then how does it apply to you? Those types of things which, you know, I had never encountered those types of thoughts before. And I started thinking about things in real terms, you know. And so as I pondered through that, it just libertarianism just made sense to me. And I don't mean the political libertarian party. Nothing against the political libertarian. But I'm talking about the philosophy small L libertarianism, the notion that people own themselves and, you know, should be free to control, to pursue their own ends, their own happiness, so long as they're peaceful. I came to that really through a process that is a fun process. I can remember almost every day I'd go into Butler Schaefer's office and say, hey, Butler, you know, you know, if we didn't have government, how would we get this problem solved? And he would never answer a question. If you know Butler Schaefer, you know, Butler does not answer questions. And he would just say, well, Mark, that's a that's a real serious problem. And I say, yeah, yeah, without the government would have this huge problem. And then all Butler would do would just say, well, what do you think would happen next, Mark? And I would say, well, obviously, this would happen. And then he would say, well, then what would happen? And it just sort of walked me down the road and eventually I'd come up with the concept that, well, the free market would sort of solve that problem at some point. He would get me thinking down that road. And I sort of went through this process with him on many different issues. Eventually I concluded, I think that humans could interact on the planet quite and cooperate just perfectly fine without coercion. I mean, that's really the question. Can we live on the planet Earth without hitting each other over the head? Can we interact with each other? Can we get commerce done? Can we pursue our happiness? Can we raise our kids without coercing our neighbors? That's the question at the root of all this. My answer is, yeah, I think we could do it pretty well. And I think unfortunately, most people today say, no, I think we would have complete chaos and disorder if we didn't initiate force against our neighbors. That's the heart of the argument. We need to get to that point. Very well said indeed. Well, I can safely say I believe that Butler is the only law professor in America currently assigning Lysander Spooner as required reading. But was Butler part of the reason you chose criminal defense as a specialty? No, I always wanted to do criminal defense. I was always attracted to the notion of trying to defend people against bad prosecutions and making sure that the police were policed. I mean, who else polices the police, right? You can't, you know, there are internal affairs investigations and things of that nature. And you can prosecutors can bring can and do bring prosecutions against cops gone bad. But at the end of the day, it's really defense attorneys that serve that purpose in society. We're the ones who argue that the search went too far, didn't comply with the Constitution, those types of things. And I was always attracted to that point. And, you know, it just turned out really strange for me because I really wanted to go to Harvard Law School being from Boston. That was the big thing for me. And they turned me down. I was really disappointed. I went to Southwestern because they were the only law school in the nation. I think they still are. That has a two year program. This is not a three year law school squished into two like some others have. This is a radically different two year program. It's called the scale program. And I was attracted to that. So I wound up going there. And that's how I crossed paths with Butler Schaefer. And I wouldn't trade that for anything. Mark, thank you for your time today and a great interview. And thank you for everything you do literally to help keep people out of government cages. Ladies and gentlemen, check out Mark's recent speech. We will post it on our website and have a great weekend.