Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Sheldon Richman.
Good afternoon, sir.
How are you doing?
Good afternoon to you.
I'm doing fine.
Good.
Sheldon Richman, of course, he's my partner at the Libertarian Institute, libertarianinstitute.org.
And previously, he wrote the book, The Libertarian Take on Guns, the Welfare State, Government Schools, and the Income Tax.
And lately, he's written a ton of great articles.
I don't know, a couple of dozen great articles about Palestine and everything under the sun.
Going way back for many years.
And then I really like this one today, too.
TGIF, that's what it's called.
The Goal is Freedom.
And this one is called My Most Excellent Election Day Experience.
You had me for a second there, Sheldon.
You really did.
Hey, how are you?
Oh, I already said that.
You voted?
Did you go to a polling place?
Well, in a matter of speaking, I went to a polling place.
That was the trick of the title and the first several paragraphs.
Well, I went to a place where I was able to cast my votes for the things I wanted.
Except it was very different from your typical polling place because I actually brought home everything I chose.
I didn't have to wait for a vote count.
Namely, I went to the supermarket instead of voting.
And I tried to do it in a piece.
What I did was contrast choice in the market versus quote-unquote choice in the political arena.
And I wanted to show how different it is.
I didn't really say anything new here.
I mean, people have been pointing this out for, I don't know, a couple hundred years maybe.
And it's just a very different kind of choice.
I mean, the most obvious one is, you know, in the market, in the supermarket or the store or whatever, your choice is decisive, right?
If you're looking at the shelf and you see several, quote, candidates for, say, breakfast foods, and you're looking at the whole array, you just reach up to the shelf and pick out the one you want.
And guess what?
You get home with that.
You pay for it.
That means the cost falls on you, $3, $4, whatever it is.
You know that before you get to the cashier.
You've made the choice.
You'd rather have that than the money.
And then you get to actually take that home.
It's not like you have, you know, here's another way to look at it.
Imagine we ran supermarkets the way we run elections.
Here you would go into the supermarket and there in front of you, you'd see two, you know, maybe three, maybe even four, preloaded carts, supermarket carts with a whole bunch of things in it wrapped in, let's say, plastic.
Now, all you can do is look at each cart, decide which one has more of the things you want or sort of what you want, fewer of the things you don't want, and then you mark a ballot.
I choose cart B. But you don't get to take home cart B.
You go home and you turn on the TV after the polls close, after the supermarket closes, and you watch the returns.
And then darn it, A1.
That's the one you get to take home.
Yeah, and you don't even get to see what's in the basket.
All you have to go on is what some liar claims he put in there.
Yeah, I guess to make it more accurate, let's say it's not saran wrap that wraps up the, it's a very much more murky looking thing.
So you can kind of make it out, but you're not really totally sure.
So let's say your choice even wins and you say, yeah, I got my choice.
It was the least bad.
You go get it and you take it home and you open it up and say, oh, it's not exactly what I thought it was.
In other words, the campaign promises weren't exactly kept.
That's how supermarkets would be run if we ran them like elections.
Now that doesn't seem very good.
I much prefer the current situation where you go in, you pick what you want, you take it home, and that's what you get.
And if you brought the wrong thing home, you can go back to the supermarket and exchange it or even get your money back.
I've done that before.
Also, if you don't like the thing, you don't have to buy it again.
It's more of a short term choice in a lot of cases.
I mean, sure, with some things like our car, you could make a mistake.
So your choice isn't perfect, but it certainly beats the choice that goes on, the illusion of choice that occurs at the polling place.
So we're going to talk about anarcho-capitalism or private property, security services, and these kinds of things here in a minute.
But I think at least so far already, and that aside, all anarchism aside, this is at least, to me, a very useful take on democratic elections for what they're worth.
And that is that they can be, in a sense, a check on the very worst sort of individual abuses of power by people within the institutions.
I don't have much faith in them to actually change the policies or change the institutions.
But if you have one real bad SOB judge or something or a sheriff or a state rep or whatever, that at least there is the possibility for people to make those sort of marginal adjustments for what they're worth.
And in some cases, it's worth a lot when it comes to individuals and the consequences of these people's actions.
But that's it.
That, to me, is a properly cynical take, that there's the opportunity for a mild check on the very fringes in the hands of the public.
But at best, that's it.
That's the best you could ever hope for is that.
It's too high an abstraction because we've got to remember one more thing.
We're methodological individualists here.
When I wake up on election day and I'm just trying to decide what to do, I really can't decide and make my calculation based on, oh, we the people can get rid of an abusive judge or a particularly horrible congressman because I only have one vote.
So I have to decide whether, what are the chances that my one vote is going to make that difference?
People will say, well, what if everybody thought that way?
When I say I don't vote, people say, what if everybody thought that way?
Well, the point is, not everybody thinks that way.
When I wake up in the morning, what I do is not going to have any influence on what anyone else does.
It's like if I stayed home and then tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people stayed home because I'm staying home, that'd be a different world and I'd think differently in those circumstances.
But that's not how the world works.
I have to decide what effect will my action and my action alone cause.
And so even though if we could all get together and agree to vote against Smith because he's particularly bad, that's a hypothetical world we don't live in.
And so even if a whole bunch of people want to get rid of Smith and he's going to lose, let's say, let's say somehow we know there are enough votes to make him lose.
It still wouldn't matter what I did unless it's a very tiny town where 50 people vote and then the chance of a tie are a little higher than zero.
But in most elections, especially congressional elections, where how many people vote?
I think the average is 300,000 constituents in an election district.
Now, they're not all voters.
Some of those are kids.
But nevertheless, I didn't hear of a single tie this past Tuesday.
And no vote, as I say in the piece, no election that I've lived through that I could have voted in would have been any different had I did something else other than what I actually did those days.
So that's how you have to look at it.
You're right.
That's how I look at it.
Some sense in which it's a check.
But it's not a really very great check because I can't, you know, it really doesn't matter what my action is.
I could spend that hour or however long it's going to take for me to get to the point.
Well, I mean, still, I mean, you just still recognize that the method of your way of looking at it, notwithstanding that, for example, the left half of American politics was a bit more energized to vote in House races this time because they wanted to see that extra check and balance of the opposite party against the president in power.
And so it did make a difference that they all went out and voted Democrat and changed who rules the House.
I'm not saying it made much of one.
It's a marginal thing either way.
But so that is something.
Yeah, but we just don't want to slip into thinking that it was a blob that got up on Election Day, went out and did that.
It was just a whole bunch of individuals.
And that's how it worked out.
But look, I could have voted for the Democrat who was running for the Congress, you know, the House.
We didn't have a Senate race here in my state.
So I could have, like, quote, helped the effort to create that check.
But it wouldn't have made any difference.
Not only because it's a heavily Republican district and the Republican won by more than one vote.
But if I had lived in a heavily Democratic district, it wouldn't have made any difference either.
Only if I think there might be a tie and I could be the tiebreaker.
But, you know, the chances of winning the lottery are better than that.
The chance actually, Gordon Tulloch used to say, you have a better chance of getting, you know, hit by lightning on the way to the polls or killed in a fatal car crash on the way to the polls.
And I'm changing the outcome.
So is it really worth the risk?
I decided it wasn't worth the risk.
That's funny.
That makes sense.
Stay safe, man.
Instead, I went to the Supermarket where I got everything I wanted.
Yeah, well, it's funny, right?
It's almost like galactic physics and particle physics.
There's no one theory that explains them both.
They're kind of both true and conflict with each other, too.
You know, that on one hand, people voting does make a difference.
But any one of them voting does not.
But then it's still true anyway, the first part.
No, it's true that in the aggregate, except for a presidential race, in the aggregate, the one who gets the most votes wins.
And look, you know what?
One thing that is interesting about American democracy, not that the American people make much of this most of the time, but it seems like it is an opportunity, is that the House of Representatives is divided in 435 little house districts all across the country.
And as you said, they're not that small.
They've got hundreds of thousands of people in them now and the way the nation is now.
But still, you know, it's not like they're all appointed by the president or by the governors or something like that.
And there are 435 of them.
And so that and it's an important national office when you have the House of Representatives and what they're in charge of up there.
And so that is it's sort of a shortcut to real power and influence if the American people, you know, the non-rich sort of unwashed masses out here ever really combined into power factions to lobby and insist on, you know, say things like ending the wars or whatever like that.
That there's a lot of opportunity there really for influence because they need votes as much as they need money.
At the end of the day, the money has to be able to buy the votes.
And if they can't buy the votes with the money, then the money is no good.
Well, the point gets down to my point gets down to the power of a single vote.
Look, I don't think I don't think people generally vote because they think they're going to make the difference.
I think they vote and I'm not saying they shouldn't vote for this reason.
I just acknowledge it that that they want to be part of some effort.
They want to feel like they were part of some effort, not that they think their vote is decisive.
I mean, how can it be?
You look at the vote totals and and somebody wins by thousands of votes.
Right.
How can you think you made the difference?
I mean, take away yours and it's, you know, it's thousands minus one.
It didn't make a difference.
But I think people who do vote, they either.
Well, they vote for a couple of reasons.
One, I think is something that sometimes they want to be part of.
And, you know, an effort, a campaign, a crusade or whatever it is, some kind of movement.
So that's one thing.
And that's psychological and that's subjective.
And if they feel good, then I'm not saying don't do it.
The other reason they vote is because it's been drilled into them that it's that it's a duty that it's, you know, it's a it's a public ritual.
It's a right.
It's it's part of the civic religion.
And so, you know, they're they hear they see commercials, people hectoring them.
It's your duty to vote.
I don't know how many people died for this.
I don't know how many people actually died for the right to vote.
You know, at best, people might have been dying so that, you know, that people can, you know, live their lives the way they want and be and be left alone.
In other words, died for liberty.
But I'm not sure.
I don't know how many people died for the right to vote.
And the other thing is, is it a right to vote or is it a duty to vote?
The other you know, the pro voting people can't make up their mind.
Can't really be both.
You have a right.
It's not a duty.
A right to something.
I know some refugees from Soviet communism who sure appreciate the opportunity to vote.
It means everything to them.
Well, is that what they is that what they can't?
You know, the ones that got got here while they were still Soviet Union, where they're getting here to the right to vote or the right to just live their lives unbothered by government.
Well, to them, it's all one and the same thing to believe in that it's it's the vote that guarantees that we have the freedom to do this without the vote.
They do what they want with us all together.
At least we have this to sort of try to stop them somehow.
That's the line.
But I don't really think that's.
And you got to admit in the USSR, they didn't have elections or when they did, they were only communist party members on there.
And you want to talk about a vote meaning nothing.
Try living under totalitarianism, you know.
So you can see why they would see that voting is a big part of the rest of the rights we have here, too, you know.
Well, what I'm arguing about, what I'm arguing against is that that's that the voting is really essential to the to the freedom, the freedoms they ultimately want.
Yeah, they may they may believe the right to vote is or this power to vote is is is a key to the freedom.
But I'm trying to separate the two things because, you know, you and I can imagine a society where no one's voting and they're completely free.
Right.
That's that's the libertarian, at least the.
And most people don't vote for freedom anyway.
People vote to take freedoms away only.
In fact, I had a buddy.
Did I ever tell you this one?
I had a friend who's a lawyer for.
I have a friend who was a lawyer for state senators or state congressmen here in Texas.
And he said there's only two kinds of political action up on the Hill really at all.
And that is the lobbyists for powerful interests, you know, corporations and unions and so forth, pushing for special favors for them.
And then there really is some grassroots democracy of regular voters coming together.
And in every case, it's them coming together to outlaw someone else's behavior and never has anything to do with protecting liberty at all.
Only trying to destroy some for somebody else in virtually every case.
So, well, you know, one of the great classical liberals slash libertarians of the modern time was a was a Frenchman from the 19th century named Benjamin Constant.
The word looks like looks like our word constant.
And he has a great article you can find online called The Ancient.
The liberty of the ancients compared to the liberty of the moderns.
And he's and what he's doing is contrasting the the ancient notion of liberty, which which many people today still hold, even though it goes back to Greece and the Roman Republic.
Especially Greece, Greece and Greek democracy versus the the modern notion of liberty that came in with the liberal revolutions of the 18th century and into the 19th century.
The ancient the ancient notion was liberty consisted of freedom to participate in the political process, to speak out, to vote, you know, to argue your case and then vote.
But but once the vote, once the majority has spoken under this theory, you then have to go along.
You know, Rousseau later put it as that was the general will being expressed.
And you're free when you're abiding by the general will.
And if you don't want to abide by it, we will force you to be free by making you abide by it.
The modern notion, Constant points out, is the basically the right to be left alone by the state and by and basically other people.
In other words, the right to live your private life and to make the choices you want, as long as they're peaceful.
That's the modern notion.
But most people today, I think, still labor under whether it's a more of a it's a mix for most people.
But a big part of it is this ancient notion that your freedom lies in your your right to participate in the process and cast your vote.
But then once the vote is cast, that's it.
I mean, and that typically I think in our culture today, I hear that most commonly expressed in those terms by sort of, you know, university liberal professor types on NPR interviews and things like that.
That like, look, essentially there is no right to be left alone, but you do have the right to participate in power.
And that's really the best hope that you ever have for for being free and that you'll have to settle for that as your definition of freedom.
But I think that colors the average person's notion also.
Now, they draw the line.
For example, I don't most people I don't think one would not want that extended to religion.
Right.
We vote.
Let's vote on what our religion is.
You all get you're all free to argue your side and then you're free to vote.
But then once the vote's been made, we then practice the religion that got the majority.
Most people wouldn't apply to religion because there is tradition in this in this society, this country and, you know, in the Anglo American tradition of, you know, basically freedom to to worship as you like.
So they don't extend it to that and similar and some other things.
But in other areas, you know, people, I think, feel the majority has a right to set rules.
And and so freedom doesn't lie in being able to make your own way.
It's it's being able to participate.
And once that once we make the decision, then, hey, we made it.
That's our that's that was our freedom, the freedom of all of us together to decide on, you know, these things.
And then we need to abide by it because we can't have everybody go on their own way.
I think I think a lot of people believe that maybe they don't even fully realize they believe it.
But it's not I don't think it's just university professors who think the totality of freedom is participant is being able to participate in the in the political process.
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Yeah, no, that's right.
I mean, everybody has there ought to be a law on the tip of their tongue and and really act as though that's that is or they don't really differentiate.
No one's ever really mostly broke it down to them.
The difference between being left alone and and having the authority to tell someone else what to do.
Like both of those things are defined as freedom to them, basically, or or they're defined in such kind of murky ways that that all counts.
I agree with that.
Your extra of those various elements.
And that's why, you know, in America today we have Robert Higgs calls it a participatory fascism where it's you know, it's a democratic authoritarian state in a way where that really is it.
You don't have the right to be left alone in in practice, but you do have the right to participate in power.
Look, I'm in Arkansas.
So Arkansas is a fairly conservative state.
There was no big Trump, anti-Trump reaction.
But the raising the minimum wage to eleven dollars was on the ballot and it passed.
I don't think it passed by one vote.
I didn't look at the totals, but I'm quite sure it was.
It wasn't that close because, you know, most people don't understand economics and they go in and they if they if they read the question or they see what it is, they'll say, yeah, those people deserve a raise.
And they vote because it makes them feel good.
Not knowing that they're actually hurting those people in the various ways that have been documented many times over many years that raising the raising minimum wage.
In other words, it just goes without saying that everything can be on the ballot, whatever you think, you know.
Yeah.
Like I said, most people don't want religion on the ballot, although some people, some people might.
But most people don't religion.
You know, there are a couple of areas they'll say, oh, no, that's off limits.
Religion.
I don't know what else.
I know.
So but on the opposite end of that, then, is the Menarche.
Well, most people would think, I guess, the opposite end of that would be this Menarchist view that if I can paraphrase it, I think correctly, that, look, you're going to have violence in society.
And the best thing you can do is try to channel the only legitimate violence through these institutions that you can manage with checks and balances in regular elections and use that violence for law and order and criminal justice rather than for bullying and stealing and acting like warlords.
And that that's really the best we're ever going to be able to do.
But then so you're past that and you're saying, no, man, we really actually don't need to have a state at all.
And so now, Sheldon, please give me and the audience a little five minute clinic on how it really could work.
Or even if you want to, you could do it like as a biographical sort of essay, too, or not biographical, but a bibliographical essay about, you know, these people that you cite in your article who have done really important work on how this has worked in the past numerous times and can work again.
Right.
Toward the end of the article, I address this point.
See, some people will say, OK, look, you make a good point.
Elections are different from markets and, you know, stores, shops, insurance agencies where you go in and, you know, you look at the shelf and you pick what you want and that's what you get.
But and they say, look, it would be maybe it would be nice if if everything could all choice could be made that way.
But the things that politics is is concerned with are different from breakfast cereals and, you know, insurance policies.
Of course, there's a lot of government intervention insurance policies, but forget that for a moment.
In other words, the services we expect from government are very different from the things we we get in shops.
So we can't have the same kind of selection process.
I mean, this is the dominant view even among public choice people who, you know, or are for free markets.
And so this gets us into the area known as public goods.
Right.
So the idea of a public good is it's a service.
National Defense is usually the classic that's named.
It's a service that has to be provided kind of to everybody because it's not the sort of thing you can target.
Right.
I mean, breakfast cereal.
I can buy breakfast cereal.
And then and then only I have it.
Right.
If I buy it, it's not like you now have breakfast cereal you don't want.
I buy it for me.
But if we have, quote, national defense, that's something that's provided that has to be provided all at once to everybody over a long period of time.
So that's a large area that's known as an indivisible service.
And the other the other feature which is related to a public good is that you can't exclude non payers.
Right.
If if if you want Cheerios, but you're not willing to pay for Cheerios, then, you know, unless someone's willing to give you some, then you don't get Cheerios.
In other words, the store can exclude you.
Right.
If you if you say, I don't want to pay for these, then they can say, fine, then you don't get them.
So they can exclude you.
But these public goods.
This is the theory now are you can't exclude the nonpayer.
So then you have what is known as the free rider problem.
Right.
If if if if every if if let's say again, I'm going with the classic case.
I'm not saying I agree with this.
If national defense is provided by voluntary contributions, let's say, rather than taxes, you might decide, well, look, lots of other people are buying it.
And I'm going to be I'm going to be protected under it because of the the the indivisibility I mentioned before.
So therefore, I won't pay.
I'll be a free rider.
I'll hang back.
I'm going to get it anyway.
But of course, if you think that a lot of other people may think that and then not enough money is raised and then you don't get the service you wanted.
That's the theory.
That's the logic of public goods.
And so the answer has been historically, that's what's covered.
That's what governments needed for, not for the other things that I mentioned that are that are divisible.
And where and are excludable, where you can keep people out who don't have money or don't want to pay for them.
It's only for the other things.
Now, the problem with that theory is, well, a couple of problems.
One is, you know, you can attack the idea that that even the traditional public goods are really public goods.
And I'll say more about that in a second.
The other problem is that government does a lot of things that don't even fall into that category, like delivering the mail, for example.
I mean, it does things that don't have those public goods features.
That's not kept government.
That's not been a line that government has observed.
If it only stuck to what looked like public goods, you might say, OK, I can see the rationale.
But why does it get into a bunch of other things that have nothing to do with public goods?
Now, on the first on the first point about public goods, aren't a lot of public goods, aren't public goods.
And maybe there is no pure public good at all.
It seems to me and Rothbard and others have written about this.
The problem with that theory is that it rules out the idea of entrepreneurship.
I mean, just because I or you can't think of how a given service can be provided profitably in a market doesn't mean some entrepreneur won't think of a way to do it if it's open to the entrepreneur's efforts.
I mean, the fact that I don't know how an entrepreneur might figure this out means nothing.
Who the hell am I?
Why is that a test?
If I can't think of it, then nobody can think of it.
I mean, look at it.
Here's a perfect good example.
Broadcast television.
I don't know if anybody remembers that.
But in the old days, pre-Internet, pre-Wi-Fi, pre-streaming.
The airway, the signals, the TV and the radio went out over the airways.
Now, if you bought a radio or a TV, you could capture the signal.
But how does the producer of those shows get you to pay?
Because too many people can be free riders.
Someone came up with the idea, hacking an idea.
Let's get the soap companies to put on ad, to pay for ads on the shows.
That way, they'll be giving us money because they'll and the reason they'll give us money to air their ads is because they're hoping to influence the people watching the shows to go out and buy their products.
And so that's how the money then circulates, right?
They buy the time and then they hope the viewer or the listener goes out and buys the product.
Okay, but real quick now, get to the part where we privatize the sheriff's department so people understand.
And we're really short on time.
Look, I can't get into a great deal of detail.
What I say in the piece, and I give links, is that there's a huge literature that's grown up over the last, really, if you look back the last 30 or 40 years by libertarians and fellow travelers, let's say, there's been a huge outpouring of historical and theoretical work.
And I stress historical, in other words, real examples of how all the services government provides from the mail to security to dispute resolution, like I mean courts, were provided privately at different times in different places, sometimes over substantial periods of time and efficiently.
In other words, they satisfied the people who needed those services.
It kept going and it worked.
The state often moved in because they wanted the power and they wanted the money that came from collecting fees.
And they squeezed out and limited the private alternatives.
So we know it can happen because there it is in history.
You can read about it.
Like I said, I gave links to a bunch of articles and I mentioned several books that talk about private courts.
Ed Stringham's book on private governance is about insurance and how stock markets in the beginning, beginning in London and then in America, the governments didn't want to enforce, didn't open the courts up to problems arising in stock markets, because they thought that's gambling.
We're not going to get into resolving disputes among people who go into a casino, basically.
And so private insurance and private dispute resolution arose because the government wasn't interested in doing it.
There's just so many historical examples that it smashes this myth we've been sold for many, many years now that we need the state because only it, a state that taxes, because only it can do certain things.
And if we don't have a state, those things will not get done.
This literature totally blows that story to smithereens.
Great.
And you do have links to six or seven examples here, too.
And the first link is a link that Roderick Long compiled of, oh, lots of articles and books, too.
David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom, all kinds of things.
It's really worth looking at.
Yeah, yeah.
The great Roderick Long.
I actually got to meet him earlier this year in San Diego briefly.
Hey, listen, I'm sorry I'm so late.
I have to go.
But great talk, Sheldon, and great article again.
Appreciate it.
Thanks a lot.
Good talking to you.
OK, that's the great Sheldon Richman here.
My most excellent Election Day experience.
He went shopping.
It was great.
And then he talked about anarchy.
And it was even greater.
That's at LibertarianInstitute.org.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
