06/02/15 – Jeff Deist – The Scott Horton Show

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All right.
Hey guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Wharton.
It's my show, The Scott Wharton Show.
On the line, I got Jeff Deist.
He used to work for Ron Paul, was his chief of staff for a long, long time there in his congressional office, and now he runs the Mises Institute at mises.org.
Welcome back.
How are you doing, Jeff?
Hey Scott, I gotta say, you're showing your age as a Gen Xer with that Iron Maiden intro.
I mean, I'm at the very youngest edge of the X thing.
Yeah, I guess.
You know, millennials don't know what the hell that song is.
Yeah, no, I don't know.
Yeah, I guess they probably don't.
Do they listen to Agnostic Front?
I play some Agnostic Front too.
I think the answer to that is no.
Yeah, no, I'm old.
I'm old.
I was talking to my dad on the Skype and he said, son, your chin's looking pretty gray there.
And of course he's one to talk, but yeah, I'm joining the club.
It's true.
Hey, good to talk to you again, Jeff.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
We're doing great down here in Auburn.
Great.
So listen, I got a sneak peek at your article running on lourockwell.com tomorrow.
Maybe it's already at mises.org.
Is Ross Ulbricht a libertarian hero?
Good question.
But first, who's Ross Ulbricht?
Well, he's been in the news quite a bit lately.
Just last week he was sentenced, but he was actually convicted back in February of running what feds call a dark website, a Tor site.
So he's the originator, founder and operator of the Silk Road website, which was used as a form of agorism by a lot of people to do and say and buy a lot of different things.
All right.
And so, as you say, he was sentenced and sentenced to what?
Well, unbelievably harsh sentence, sentenced to life in prison without parole for what amounts to basically a bunch of nonsensical federal charges like drug trafficking, money laundering, engaging in the criminal enterprise.
I mean, these are all sort of the alphabet soup type charges that prosecutors, federal and state, try to throw at people in the hopes that some of them stick.
And this time, unfortunately, stick they did.
Unlike your typical drug dealer, however, who might spend five or 10 or even 20 years in prison before being paroled.
Poor Mr. Ulbricht.
And when I say poor, he's only 31 years old.
God bless him.
Appears absent, having his conviction overturned, appears to be headed to literally spending the rest of his life in a federal prison cell.
So it's a it's a sad story and really a tragic story in many ways.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's sounds absolutely crazy.
So now.
OK, so we understand, I guess, a little bit of background, right?
Can you explain the tour and the dark web and whatever a little bit for people who don't know?
Well, there's a variety of ways to operate online in sites that are not necessarily in sites that are not necessarily public or that are so-called dark because they exist on different servers and they aren't easily accessible by just a general website user, general Internet user.
Most dark sites use cryptocurrencies or other forms of payment when transactions are conducted amongst users of the site.
So what happened with Silk Road was what started as an experiment in what you might be able to do with a dark website unfolded into a bit of an open air drug market or drug bazaar.
If you believe the stories that you read, I don't believe all of them, but it appears beyond any reasonable doubt that a lot of different people were buying and selling and obtaining illegal drugs via the Silk Road website.
Now that in and of itself ought not to bother libertarians and obviously we don't think, we meaning libertarians, don't think people ought to be put into federal cages for simply going about their voluntary peaceful commerce and whether that involves drugs or anything else, as long as that's amongst willing voluntary adult participants.
I don't think that it should concern us.
But the severity of the sentence and the coupling of Mr. Ulbricht's name and Bitcoin and drug trafficking in this sort of an anti-libertarian stew by this awful sentencing judge is something that concerns me and ought to concern all of us who are libertarians because in a sense our name is being dragged through the mud in publications like the New York Times.
Well now, so even beyond, you know, libertarian individualist opposition to drug wars as a policy and that kind of thing, even if you take into account, you know, for the sake of argument, the illegality of heroin, even if you think it should be legal, what if you're one of them law and order types who just say the law is the law and go run for Congress if you want to change it kind of thing.
But I believe what you're explaining to me here is that this guy Ulbricht, he never had heroin on his premises that he was selling to anybody.
He built a website and then other people who he never knew or actually even really came into contact with were selling drugs to each other.
And now, so maybe that's illegal.
But so is that what they charge him with is conspiring with people who he never conspired with to break other laws?
Well, he did have some people he worked with to create and maintain the site.
But you're true.
I mean, in a sense, it's almost like charging the phone company because two mafiosos get together and use the phone.
Right.
Yeah, I saw a comment that said he put the 7-Eleven parking lot online.
So what?
Right.
And I don't know as a factual matter, whether he himself either engaged or held any illegal substances or not.
But I think your point is, well, there's no evidence of that.
That's not what he was charged with actually selling a heroin dealer in any way.
Not what he was charged with.
He was charged with trafficking, but but through the operation of his site, not through him personally.
Well, in trafficking, they're being used in a way where it doesn't mean anything anymore.
I mean, because trafficking, trafficking typically would mean what, like you drove it was my heroin, but you drove the truck or something like that.
Right.
I mean, he's not actually trafficking.
I don't believe he was as a factual matter.
No.
And I also read that they accused him of hiring hit men to kill people, but it doesn't sound like that was in any of the charges either.
They just kind of accused him of that in the sentencing arguments or what?
We got to understand there's two different things going on here.
There's the legal case and what happens to Ross Albrecht's life as a person.
And then there's the court of public opinion.
And federal prosecutors don't like liberty.
They don't like Bitcoin.
They don't like privacy.
They don't like Internet.
So what happened was when he was first charged and arrested, they floated this trial balloon that he had ordered hit men to go after some people who were mucking about with his website.
Ultimately, they never charged him with this, which I guess would be solicitation for murder.
He was never charged with this.
They've produced what they purport to be some diaries and journal entries.
Well, I don't know why a guy obsessed with privacy would create journal entries that could be later found by law enforcement.
But that's what they allege that in some of these journal entries are supposed to contain the details of him reaching out to hit men.
His mom says that the journal entries don't read like his voice whatsoever.
And she's convinced they're totally bogus.
Obviously, she's biased.
But what I suspect is this is just prosecutors doing what prosecutors do, which is trying to try people in the court of public opinion.
And then later on, they just back away from these from these bogus charges.
And they did.
He was ever charged with this.
Well, it sounds like what really upset the judge was the challenge to this government's law more than anything else, that you think that you can do this thing where you just ignore us.
We'll show you.
We'll make an example out of you.
Yeah, that's that's absolutely what's at play here.
And I wonder, you know, he's he happens to be a U.S. citizen, but I wonder what the judge's position or what the prosecutor's position would be if the server for his site, the users of his site and the cross-border activity that took place via his site had occurred totally outside the U.S. I mean, would they still attempt to say Uncle Sam has dominion over all things?
I suspect they would.
So it's it's terrible that this guy has gotten caught up in probably what most what must be the worst justice system in the developed world.
And as a result, he's going to jail for a long time.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, there's an ad that runs here on LRN about supporting him, where they point out that, hey, even if he's guilty, he's a hero, man.
He made the the the market that government made a black market safer so that you can just go to your mailbox instead of having to go do business with scary criminals.
And so they had to put an end to that, I guess, right away.
But it's an important point.
All right.
Well, great article.
And thanks for your time, Jeff.
Appreciate it.
All right, Scott.
Take care.
All right.
So that is Jeff Dice.
He's the president of the Mises Institute.
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