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Trying to get these wars ended.
Alright you guys, Scott Horton Show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org and at libertarianinstitute.org.
Slash Scott Horton Show.
Introducing Dan McCarthy from the American Conservative Magazine.
And you can follow him on Twitter.
He's the Tory Anarchist, which is a very interesting kind of anarchist to be, I think, a Tory one.
Dan McCarthy.
And here he is reviving libertarianism.
Welcome back to the show.
Hi Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Very good to have you on the show here.
And yeah, boy, I was afraid of this article as soon as I saw the big picture of old Gary Johnson trying.
That's the look on his face.
I'm trying.
Ah, geez.
Well, you know, Jack Hunter wrote a gigantic thing, and a lot of people are writing a lot of things in here.
Me and my friend Sheldon Richman and Will Grigg and Jared LaBelle, we founded a new libertarian institute, and there's a lot of right wing things and left wing things going on right now and a lot of tumult and change and an outsider for a president and the start of a brand new era there.
And a lot of people are asking whether libertarianism, what is the deal?
And now you are not exactly a libertarian.
You're more of a Tory anarchist in a way, however you would like to define yourself.
That's fine.
I believe you're kind of writing this a bit from the outside and kind of asking the libertarian movement what it's going to make of itself and this kind of thing.
Is that about right?
Yeah, that's right.
I'm very sympathetic to libertarianism, and you know, I have plenty of points of agreement with libertarianism as well.
But I don't present myself as a kind of libertarian true believer, let alone some sort of papal authority in a position to issue infallible statements about what libertarian philosophy should be.
But I do think that it's important for libertarianism to be a force in American politics, simply because both the left and the right have a tendency to become very authoritarian or to become very statist.
And libertarianism is always sort of the canary in the coal mine.
It's something that's much more sensitive than other philosophies to the kinds of abuses that government engages in.
Government is always capable of engaging in abuse, so libertarianism is therefore something to be preserved.
Yeah, well, there you go.
At the very least, I'm with you there.
All right.
So now I guess best I can think of to start here really would be and I don't know if this is skipping to the end too much or something.
I hope not.
We can talk about Soren's and all this too.
But I think I got a quibble with you about Rand Paul.
And I forget exactly how you say it, but how I would say it is that the reason Rand failed wasn't because he was too libertarian.
It was because he did not embrace libertarianism really at all, and in fact, tried to run away from it.
And I think he has kind of a personal problem with people.
I've heard anecdotes like this where people say to him, man, you know, your father changed my life and made me a libertarian.
And instead of saying, wow, that's great, he goes, oh, well, you know, he's sick and tired of that kind of thing.
He wants to be his own man, which is understandable.
I mean, I'm not nearly as good a man as my father and neither is he.
So I can like sort of relate there.
Right.
But he instead of saying, look at me, I'm Ron, it's 20 years younger.
And in the Senate where I can fight with McCain about things, he he kind of ran as Jeb, not just as president, but ever since 2009, he's been running as Jeb.
And even though it was the Tea Party ticket, that outsider son of a Paul thing is what got him where he was.
He's been sucking up to Mitch McConnell ever since then.
And and so without the the dedicated support that his father had that was based really more on Ron's true blue honesty, even more than his libertarianism.
Right.
The fact that is his rhetoric and his voting record matched and that, you know, he would tell you truths that Bush's would never let you in on and these kind of things.
Without that and without the support that came from that, he was sunk.
And all he was left with was trying to pander to all different sides.
But that's a lot different than being such a good libertarian, that all different sides can find something to like about you, which was his father's deal.
Well, I'll say two things about Rand Paul here.
The first is, you know, I perfectly understand that he was trying to do things differently from his father.
He wanted to be his own man.
And I think he does, you know, doesn't want to just live in the shadow of what his father has done.
So what I argue in my piece, though, is basically that in order to successfully do something different from his father, I think Rand Paul had to create a sort of a new intellectual movement behind the kind of libertarianism he wanted to promote.
And you know, maybe it's not the sort of hardcore brand of libertarianism that, you know, Scott Horton would ideally like, but whatever it's going to be, it has to be clearly enough defined that it can at least, you know, sort of succeed or fail on its own terms.
And I think that's what Rand Paul didn't do, that in fact, you know, well, I'll tell you this.
When I talk to people in the conservative movement, and this was true whether I was talking to, for example, a conservative talk radio host with the National Show, or whether I was talking to a Goldwaterite, you know, at one of the major think tanks here in Washington, D.C.
And I would say, you know what, Rand Paul is really pretty good.
He's, you know, a kind of Goldwater conservative, he's someone that I think you guys should be open to.
And they would say, oh, no, Rand Paul is just a libertarian radical who wants to abolish the military and, you know, is going to have everyone smoking dope and so forth.
So the funny thing was, Rand Paul, even though he was not at all a radical libertarian, he was winding up getting identified with this radical libertarianism anyway, because it had a much clearer sort of brand and a much clearer sense of itself than Rand Paul was able to create for his philosophy.
And then, of course, the opposite happened as well, that other people, you know, Christian conservatives and hardline, you know, sort of radical libertarians, they would all look at Rand Paul, and they would also have a definition for him.
But of course, it would be a different definition.
So Rand, I think, was in this difficult position of not being able to define himself, because really, he wasn't connected to any kind of a more substantial intellectual movement that could clarify things.
And politicians in general, when they succeed, when they succeed at the national level, and really, you know, sort of transforming the way the country looks at politics, they tend to have some sort of intellectual base to draw upon.
So with Ron Paul, for example, it wasn't just that he himself was a very forceful spokesman for his idea of sort of radical libertarianism and constitutionalism, it was rather that Rand Paul also, sorry, Ron Paul, also had access to Murray Rothbard, he had access to Hans Senholtz, he had access to, you know, a great deal of Austrian economic literature.
And he was able to, you know, sort of promote these ideas and not just himself.
And when people googled the name Ron Paul, they very quickly discovered Scott Horton, for example, or the Mises Institute, or any number of other outlets that filled in their picture of what his philosophy stood for.
I think Rand didn't quite have that.
It's a question of whether, if something like that arises, does it help someone like Rand do better politically?
And that's a separate question, of course, from whether radical libertarians are, you know, sort of totally pleased with what Rand Paul does.
But simply as a matter of what's effective politically, I'd be very interested to see that experiment take place.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I can't help but think, I mean, well, it makes sense to me, I don't really know this for a fact, but I guess I assume and it makes sense that for 40 years, Rand saw his father get nowhere and concluded that it's because he's just too dang radical.
And of course, that was true to a great degree, right?
But on the other hand...
It is.
And I think actually Rand does deserve credit for many things.
One of them being that he has been very helpful in keeping people like Elliott Abrams, these very hawkish neocons, out of the Trump administration.
So both Abrams and Bolton were going to be resisted fiercely by Rand Paul in the Senate.
And even though, you know, there's a whole panoply of issues where libertarians would like Rand Paul to be much more radical on, including things like, you know, sort of going after Jeff Sessions, being appointed as Attorney General.
In fact, Rand Paul is choosing a few battles and some of those battles are extremely important and Rand has won them.
So I do think he deserves credit for that.
Yeah.
No, that's a good point.
And Bolton and Abrams both, especially, I mean, you couldn't overstate how dangerous either of those two individuals are.
And for that matter, I think he really tried on Yemen last summer.
He, you know, made a valiant effort to roll back that thing.
I was going to say, though, I think that if he had made a decision, as you're saying, Rand's identity is so ill-formed that people just see him as not good enough for whatever different reasons.
I really appreciate your analysis on that.
I agree with that.
And I think that, you know, the thing is, on the contrary, nobody thinks that Rand Paul wants to just abolish the military and surrender to America's terrorist enemies or whatever, because when they think about him on that issue, they think about what he actually argued, which was, you know, Bill Clinton got us into this mess kind of thing and that since we started it, we could end it.
We just marched in.
We could just march home, this kind of thing.
There was something solid there.
And also, of course, Ron is a purist, really, on the war on drugs, as far as I know.
That's not one of his deviations.
That's something where he's very libertarian.
But nobody thinks that Ron Paul is a doper.
You know, no one ever accuses him of that because he he makes his his position very clear that, like, I think, as he put it, he doesn't even he's not even certain he's ever even smelled pot before or even been around it, actually.
But he certainly doesn't think people should be locked up for it.
And then his position is is clear, even if you disagree with it.
And there were so many people in the in both Ron Paul presidential campaigns or so many kind of rank and file current day Trump voters who said things like, you know, I really don't agree with Ron on everything, but I know he never lies to me.
And I know that I can count on him to always, you know, actually care about me, unlike these other people who are clearly just trying to use me, this kind of thing.
But I think that it's too bad he didn't embrace his father's thing.
That was the that was the identity.
That was the ball that he was supposed to pick up and run with.
And he was afraid to do it.
And if he had done so, I think he could have made much more progress for himself.
I mean, I think he probably couldn't have beaten Trump.
But if he had had an attitude, in fact, that, yeah, Trump, it's you and me against Jeb Bush, who's a bush and who we must stop.
Stop Bush.
And if that had been his attitude in the campaign, even it might have ended up him versus Trump at the end, instead of Cruz versus Trump at the end, because the reason it was Cruz, it was because he was the last, quote, unquote, outsider.
He was as close as you could get to being a Trumpian outsider.
And that totally could have been Rand's role.
And he just abandoned it to run as Jeb, who was already crashing and burning.
Anyway, I'm sorry, I'm just yeah, I wouldn't well, I wouldn't quite agree that Rand was running as Jeb.
I mean, you're quite right.
People who actually paid attention to the things that Ron Paul said would not, you know, in a million years, imagine that he was, you know, some sort of lunatic who was going to completely, you know, change everything, you know, by having a kind of revolution night and day, and that he was going to, you know, do anything that was going to, you know, be as sort of defeatist or, you know, sort of just chaotic and silly as certain people might worry.
But that's the problem, is basically, there are a lot of people, especially older people, who don't look at what Ron Paul actually says, and who don't look at his actual positions.
And instead, their impression of libertarianism, well, first of all, their impression of Ron Paul is based on their impression of libertarianism.
And then their impression of libertarianism is based on this idea that it's some sort of movement that is strictly affiliated with the sort of cultural radicalism of the 1960s.
And that's actually where this article on virtual libertarianism that I wrote comes in, because it basically tries to say that this is a cultural misunderstanding of what libertarianism and classical liberalism actually are.
They don't have to be, you know, associated with a kind of affirmative, positive view of, you know, sort of drug use or polyamory or something.
But in fact, middle class morality used to be the heart and soul of liberalism and libertarianism.
Yeah.
Now, so I guess I'm not really sure where I stand on all these things.
Maybe I just don't understand them very well, Dan.
And I admit, I really am just much more kind of just single focused on the policies of the of the wars, really, and what's going on in the wars and that kind of stuff.
But I sort of it all kind of seems and this sort of kind of coincides with what you're saying that libertarianism doesn't have to be, you know, all about, you know, centered on gay rights or light tenuousness or licentiousness or whatever, however, people might define it from their bourgeois values, that it's really supposed to be a much more limited political philosophy that can include people of all different kinds of opinions and walks of life.
And you absolutely could have Christian business, family man, libertarianism.
And that was part of actually the beauty of the Rampal Revolution, as you would have serious bow tie economists standing there next to guys with big red mohawks.
And what they had in common was that they really believed in liberty and they really kind of understood this stuff and they had the tolerance for each other's view.
So you know, when I think about the gay rights libertarians who are pushing that stuff, I'm thinking, you know, think of all the lives they've saved and think of all the good that they've done.
And if it makes kind of right wing conservatives feel a little bit uncomfortable, like, OK, you know, maybe that's a little bit of a problem for the movement overall that that they kind of react against it.
But on the other hand, you know, freedom all around is is an important value.
That's why political freedom is an important value is because all freedom is an important value.
So even if someone is much more culturally conservative, it seems to me like.
I guess I don't really see the the reason why these differences even really kind of matter necessarily.
Like, why can't we all be outright libertarians and paleo libertarians and all these things all at the same time?
You know what I mean?
Why can't we be right wingers for gay rights or that was a Rothbard article, right?
Confessions of a right wing liberal, because that's what libertarianism is.
It's this, you know, it's a jumble of other people's.
It seems like a jumble of other people's views and ways of life because of the plumbline nature of the the argument that freedom is really the only thing that matters here.
Well, right.
There's a difference between libertarian philosophy and a kind of strict understanding of what libertarianism says about politics, which really is, you know, pretty much neutral or at least aspires to be neutral and doesn't try to say whether you have to be culturally traditional or progressive or one thing or another.
There's that.
But then, you know, there's also the way in which ideas are perceived, which is different from what the ideas may actually be.
Right.
So how you are seen by people is oftentimes as important in social life, even in economics, you know, and certainly in politics.
How you're perceived is just as important as what you actually are.
And it's important to be able to communicate things in a way that, you know, sort of gets your audience to trust you and that forms emotional, especially in politics, forms emotional connections with people so that they, you know, see that basically your program is not a kind of sort of left wing cultural transformation that is just kind of sneakily presenting itself as being a neutral kind of, you know, limited government or no government politics, but in fact, you know, that you understand and sympathize with the cultural values that people have.
And you want to see, you know, not just a kind of government form prevail, but also perhaps and this is something where, you know, different libertarians can have different views.
But it's important that some libertarians have traditional views so that they're able to or, you know, traditional sympathies, so they're able to form those connections with traditional voters.
And there's a heck of a lot of them in this country in order to help advance libertarianism.
So basically, you know, again, I want to emphasize this is not so much about policies.
I don't know that any virtual libertarians are talking about, you know, having a different set of approaches to something like gay marriage than progressive libertarians have.
I mean, that's not the issue, nor is the issue, you know, trying to criminalize drug use or any of that stuff.
I mean, virtual libertarianism is still libertarianism, but rather what it's saying is simply that outside of government and outside of politics, it's important to have one kind of culture or another.
And then in fact, you know, a more middle class traditional culture, which is not necessarily just a right wing thing.
It's not something actually I think you'd find, you know, sort of many people who are, you know, Democrats or who are, you know, somewhat on the left would also want to buy into.
But having this kind of affirmation of, you know, traditional ethics and traditional values can be quite a beneficial thing.
And again, it's not about, you know, sort of making all libertarians have to, you know, swear an oath of loyalty to this vision, but it's rather about counterbalancing the way that libertarianism is perceived by many people right now.
So you, you know, because of your background and your, you know, sort of close, close knowledge of Ron Paul and libertarian philosophy, et cetera, I think you don't really see a problem here because you know that libertarianism is something that is compatible with people of many different cultural backgrounds and is not something that is simply a leftism in disguise.
But there are a lot of people who don't have that understanding and who really do think that, you know, it's pushing leftward.
And there are also people within the libertarian movement who, you know, in some cases, because they've spent so long in academia, where all the cultural assumptions are to the left, that they've begun to import this kind of leftism into their libertarianism and want to sort of force other people to conform to it.
So it's a complicated picture, but I think it's an important one because so much of politics, and not just politics, but even, you know, sort of cultural, social interactions of many kinds are about these emotional connections, and they're about a larger view of the good life than simply sort of the rules of politics.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, part of the backdrop of all of this is Ron Paul's presidential campaigns, which are now over, and we just don't have another one like him.
I was talking with a friend who said, you know, Massey is pretty good, but whatever Massey is, he ain't Ron Paul, at least not yet.
And even then, he's still just a member of the House of Representatives.
And we really don't have anyone on the national level.
We don't have Rand.
And we don't have anyone on the national level to really be a good example of what libertarianism is supposed to be about, you know?
And I think that's the real problem.
And, you know, maybe if we did, we'd all cringe that, you know, because that's one thing about Ron is you can watch Ron on the news with the sound off, and you know he's saying something good, right?
What are we going to do about Social Security?
We're going to bring all the troops home from Korea so that we can afford to shore up Social Security, right?
Hey, whatever it is he's saying, like, I know it's not going to bother me.
But well, for example, we just can't count on Gary Johnson.
And you know, not to say too much about it, but I tried to teach him some things last summer and just, you know, what are you going to do, man?
This is, you know, and I think Ron is really, Ron was so great because he is so comfortable around homosexuals and around punk rockers and around whatever weirdos that come with being in the libertarian movement.
I mean, before he was, you know, stomped Giuliani and became a worldwide sensation, he'd been at this for a long, long time and was kind of a cult hero for a long time.
And because he is so square in a very nice sense, right, he's married to his girlfriend since they were together when they turned 16 years old together or whatever back when.
This kind of thing.
No scandals, no personal scandals at all.
That he's the greatest kind of character for having that broad appeal where conservative right wing current day Trump voters can really like him.
And college kids were really into it and wanted to learn all about his economics and all his anti-war stuff.
And people who are really concerned about criminal justice reform were interested in what he was saying because they knew he meant it when he was saying that the drug prisoners should be free and all these kinds of things.
And so that leaves us, I hope it doesn't leave us battling for the soul of libertarianism really because I think I agree with you completely that we need some conservative libertarians to teach libertarianism to conservatives.
You know, I mean, no question about that.
And I guess we need kind of left leaning ones for the opposite reason.
But you know, I guess ultimately, just because I'm an issue policy sort of oriented person, I think like, but really, we all agree on the most important things, which is stopping all of the worst things our government is doing right now.
And after all, we're all friends here and all that kind of thing.
And so I hope that we can hold it together, basically, because I think the left and the right are obviously mostly wrong about most things and really need libertarian leadership on the most important issues, like, for example, bailing out banks and, you know, occupying the world and all the rest of these, you know, the crises, the federalization and militarization of police forces and, and all these kinds of things that good liberals and good conservatives could be led on if, if libertarians in the middle kind of, I don't mean to say in the middle really, but sort of can bridge that gap.
You know what I mean?
I hope.
Yeah, I mean, I would say a few things here.
First of all, I should really emphasize that virtual libertarianism, even though it certainly is something that can reconnect libertarianism with the middle class, one likes to hope, and with some of the more conservative elements in society, which might help to make libertarianism more politically viable.
It's not just all about that.
And in fact, virtue is something that really cuts across left and right lines.
And it's something that part of the emphasis and, you know, you see this from Jason Sorens, you see this from William Ruger, they're the kind of thinkers who instigated this line of thought, that it's, virtue is not just about politics.
It's not just about having a particular view of the limited power of the state.
It's rather something that's good in itself as well, right?
So things like courage, things like fidelity, things like prudence, frugality, these things are all both good in themselves and also very practical in their application, because what they do is, the more that individuals are virtuous, and the more that they exhibit self-control, the less easy it is for the state and for, you know, sort of ideological movements that support the state to come in and say, well, we're going to need to, you know, increase state power in order to prevent chaos or in order to, you know, help the poor or in order to do whatever the case might be, that in fact, the more self-discipline that people have, the more virtue they have in a kind of Aristotelian sense, the better able they are to take care of themselves and their families and their communities, the less room there is for the state to muscle in.
And not only that, but also the more sort of foci of resistance there are against state power, right?
So one of the things that's nice about traditional civil society and the family and so forth and marriage monogamy, and again, it's not talking here about sexuality per se.
It's rather talking about the kind of traditional personal loyalties that people have to one another, even if those loyalties get somewhat reformed and, you know, you have gay marriage instead of just straight marriage.
What matters, I think, is the marriage, is the monogamy, is the fact that people have such close personal ties that they're able to provide for one another, take care of one another and resist the idea that they need this providential welfare state, this sort of compassionate leviathan to come in and, you know, sort of take care of them in their old age and to provide for their needs.
So virtue, you know, on the one hand, it does have, yes, a kind of traditionalist, middle class and, you know, slightly right-leaning perspective to it.
It's also something that I think really extends beyond these left-right ideological boundaries.
And the other thing here too is to kind of enrich the way that libertarians can talk about their philosophy and talk about its role in the world today.
So on the one hand, on the policy side, libertarians are extremely strong.
I mean, they've worked their muscles to a point where, you know, they're able to just flex and break out of their, you know, the sleeves of their shirts, you know.
They have tremendous muscles when it comes to policy.
They're able to talk about foreign policy.
They're able to talk about tax policy.
They can talk about all of these particular actions of government.
But when it comes to connecting libertarianism as a set of rules or restraints on government with the idea of what is it that actually makes you happy as an individual?
What is it that makes, you know, people happy in their communities?
Libertarianism is sometimes a little bit weak there.
And one of the problems right now actually is that left libertarians, not meaning people like Sheldon Richman, but meaning people who are sort of absorbed into the politically correct left-wing world of the academy, that these people, that kind of left libertarian, is becoming very outspoken about how they see, you know, things like polyamory or so forth as actively promoting liberty and not simply being optional things that people can do or not do as they please, but instead are, you know, somehow going to be a key to opening up and just transforming the way people think and live, and that that's going to be, you know, a way of counteracting the state.
Well, I think the opposite is true and that, in fact, sort of the more traditional kinds of arrangements, those are the ones that are the most effective balances to state power and sort of forms of resistance and barriers to state power.
So there's an important discussion here, even at the level of libertarian theory, but beyond the level of libertarian theory and at the level of reaching out to people where they already are and showing them, you know, how the good things in their lives can be made better through a libertarian approach to government, that, in fact, having this kind of cultural connection and this kind of bridge and showing that, you know, libertarianism is not just a philosophy for hippies is extremely valuable.
And again, I would point back to the 19th century and make the point that when you look at where libertarianism came from, that it actually had these kinds of, you know, it's unfashionable to say, but social forces and sort of class elements behind it, those elements tended to be, for example, some of the Protestant groups of the sort of 18th and 19th centuries.
They tended to be shopkeepers.
They tended to be specific walks of life and specific groups of people.
And that didn't mean that liberalism was limited only to those groups.
They tried very much to reach out, but there was a reason why some of the virtues that those groups had, some of their willingness to kind of resist conformist pressures from outside and some of their willingness to be frugal, to take care of themselves and take care of their own communities, why those elements actually led to the development of classical liberalism and ultimately libertarianism.
So getting a new understanding of this social base and this class space of where libertarianism can be rooted is, I think, again, extremely valuable because it's not just going to be a matter of kind of throwing ideas out on the airwaves and creating a successful political movement out of that.
You'll get individuals.
You'll get, you know, even perhaps a large number of individuals, but it won't be quite the kind of cohesive and socially forceful thing that it was, you know, when liberalism was in its greatest figure.
Well, you know, I don't know, man, on the other hand, well, as you said, a gay marriage can be a very stable and prosperous and decent thing.
And yet that was absolutely unacceptable 10 or 15 years ago, and especially on the right.
And didn't it take a bunch of damned PC culture warriors to push that?
No, no, just the opposite.
Gay marriage.
And this is something I think libertarians should understand, even though many conservatives don't.
Gay marriage, in fact, was a move in the direction of, you know, a more conservative approach.
So if you look at, you know, people like Gore Vidal, if you look at, for example, our friend Justin Raimondo, and look at their attitudes towards marriage back in the 1970s or even as late as the 1980s, you'll see that the homosexual rights movement was actually connected with a kind of, you know, all-encompassing cultural radicalism that tended to look at marriage as being, you know, a constraining, a useless institution, something that really, you know, wasn't necessary and should just be abolished for everyone.
Well, what happened was that you got a more conservative approach to cultural politics among the gay community beginning in the 1990s, and that gay marriage is something which, okay, it may seem radical and because it has a connection to being homosexual, but it also is very conservative in that it also has a connection to marriage.
So I think that actually is kind of an interesting example, because it shows how by bringing together these elements that, you know, otherwise just by cultural prejudice might seem to be incompatible, you can actually get something quite strong by uniting them.
And in general, I think that, you know, creating the impression that homosexuals were not, you know, sort of all people wearing, you know, sort of leather and chains and going out in parades and doing crazy stuff, that in fact, they could look just like their next-door neighbors, they could be totally bourgeois, they could be totally normal, you know, and they just happen to be gay, that creating that cultural impression and that image, which took a lot of effort during the 1990s, was what really opened the gates to gay rights today.
And it's why people, even conservatives, even, you know, Donald Trump, even, you know, people, members of his family certainly don't have a kind of instinctive revulsion to the fact that there are, you know, homosexuals, you know, that they're friends with and that they do business with and so forth.
This idea of normality, this idea of middle-class existence is extremely powerful.
And when you're connected with that, movements that otherwise are dismissed as being cringe and dismissed as being sort of hostile to everyone, instead become embraced as being movements that are actually compatible with the things that matter most to people.
That's a very interesting point, and that's like I always say, you gotta attack the right from the right.
There ain't no point in attacking from the left.
And any real good libertarian is always more right-wing than the most right-wing right-winger you got.
You want to abolish the IRS?
I already abolished it, right?
So there's always room to accomplish that, and I see what you mean about how well that worked in that case.
Well, so, but what about drugs?
Because there's, I can't find the article anywhere, I've looked everywhere for it, but I read this great thing about the kid who got, it was like one guy, apparently a college student, who got pot legalized in Colorado, was, you know, this one guy more than anyone else anyway.
And what happened was, he really went for the kind of A-B testing, focus group testing marketing strategy, and he figured out, he tested it and figured out what is the most effective slogan.
And guess what it was?
Safer than alcohol.
Pot is safer than alcohol.
And at one point he challenged the governor to a drink-off smoke-off, and said, I'll smoke some really good weed, and you drink light beer, and I bet I smoke you under the table.
And the governor was embarrassed and had to back down, and refused to show up and all these things, and ended up getting behind the effort to legalize pot.
And so, I hate the argument that, yay, it's more tax revenue for the state, of course they like to hear that, but there are a lot of good conservative arguments, like a decline in alcohol-related traffic accidents in Colorado, and opiate-related overdose deaths, because people can smoke pot.
That if you overdose on pot, you just go to sleep, and that's all, and then you wake up again.
And so, here are a bunch of good kind of conservative family value arguments for, no matter what you think of pot, you've got to admit, it's better than people drinking at the happy hour on the way home, but only halfway home, and they've got to make it the rest of the way, you know?
Yeah, that's all true, although I would also say that the idea of self-control, which is sort of at the root of most of the virtues, and this ability to judge correctly, first of all, what your actions are actually, you know, asserting self-responsibility and understanding your limits, whatever those might be, whether they're sort of limits of intoxication, or limits of sort of intellectual obsession, whatever they might be.
This idea of self-control, the more that all people, left, right, center, whatever, understand this idea of self-control, and the more that they realize that the best police are the internal police, right?
I mean, it's your own mind that is ultimately going to, you know, make you virtuous or vicious.
The more they understand that, the, I think, more manageable that some of these issues like drug abuse become.
So it's important that, so virtual libertarianism is useful here because it basically says, look, most people who are using marijuana are not becoming, you know, sort of burnouts.
They're not becoming, you know, your stereotypical sort of Cheech and Chong hippie who, you know, has trouble perhaps adjusting to working in an office or something like that.
It's a way of, you know, sort of confronting these stereotypes and saying, actually, if people have self-control, they are able to partake in something, and maybe it's even something you, you know, sort of morally disapprove of, whether it's alcohol, which many people do morally disapprove of, or whether it's marijuana, which, again, many people morally disapprove of.
But if people have self-control, they are not going to be reduced to zombies, they're not going to, you know, crash their cars, they're not going to, you know, become burnouts.
But in fact, this internalized virtue is the primary thing that prevents society from falling apart.
It's not the fact that we have people with, you know, sort of casers and batons and badges and so forth.
It's the fact that we, as Americans, are very good at maintaining the balance in our own lives.
And the more that we maintain that balance, the better we do, the less room, again, government has to intrude and to say, well, you know, if people are becoming addicts, if they're becoming burnouts, if they're, you know, crashing their cars into lampposts because they're drunk, then we need to, you know, sort of massively ramp up state power in order to correct all of that.
So virtual libertarianism, again, I think it's a very good idea.
It's not just a matter of having a more sort of right-wing and traditional libertarianism.
That's a component of it.
But it's also about this idea of emphasizing virtue, emphasizing self-restraint, and both praising and blaming people who, you know, sort of make the wrong call, right?
So if you do see a friend of yours becoming a burnout or becoming, you know, sort of an alcoholic or something like that, then it is absolutely a good thing to do to sort of intervene and say, you know, you're allowed to have whatever pleasures you want.
We're not saying that the government should step in and stop this, but we are saying that basically you are destroying yourself.
That is an objectively bad thing, and you should stop that.
You should correct yourself.
And you have the internal resources and the strength of character, if you reform yourself, to do that.
And I think so virtual libertarianism, you know, it partakes of a lot of this sort of 19th century spirit of self-improvement and of self-control.
And I just think it's a very worthwhile objective, not just for libertarians, but for, you know, everyone who wishes to see more sort of mature adult Americans as opposed to more Americans who infantilize themselves and then cry for, you know, cry for their daddy big government.
Right.
Well, and this is last topic here is it's kind of a phenomenon that pretty much everybody's familiar with now.
It's sort of undeniable, right, about how if you give people unemployment insurance, like, hey, yeah, they might need it.
And that makes total sense in a lot of ways.
But it's a double edged sword because ultimately, bottom line, you're paying people to not work and you're giving them an incentive to at least consider not going to look for a job today because if they got one, they might be better off, you know, pursuing other interests and collecting their unemployment.
This that same thing we've all, you know, heard about, which I think is true.
I mean, I don't know what all the studies are.
You may be much more familiar than me, but about the destruction of poor families, white and black across American society, especially since Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, because primarily somehow it came out that you pretty much have to be a single mother to get it.
And so ultimately, they're paying people to kick their father, their children's fathers out of the house or to not even marry them in the first place.
And how this has done so much along with the drug war to dislocate poor families and prevent them from ever getting on their own two feet again.
And I think everybody kind of concedes that even I've read plenty of liberals and leftists who say, you know, I know I hate Rush Limbaugh, too, but this is true.
You know, what are you going to do?
Pretend it's not true.
But on the other hand, and this is where I'm trying to get to my question, how do you ever take it away?
How do you say that what's best for poor people is for them to be on their own and for them to stop, you know, trying to be dependent on anyone else, because all that ever does is help them help get them further stuck in the mud.
Because even though that's true in general, in specific, what you're doing is helping people go hungry, this kind of thing.
In other words, how do you ever turn it around?
Unless you were talking about just waiting, like Ron Paul says, till the dollar breaks And we finally have to start all over again.
Because that's a thing where, you know, again, it's not necessarily, like you're saying, not necessarily conservatism or whatever, but yeah, it's a virtuous thing to be in charge of your own destiny and maybe even own your own property, at least rent it, not be on living in a government house and eating government bought food.
I saw people on Twitter screaming yesterday, how dare you dictate to me what kind of food I can buy with my food stamps?
And it's like, man, kind of, you're putting yourself in that position.
But people don't even think that way.
They really think this is how it's supposed to work, even, that government buys your groceries for you, and this kind of thing.
In America, not in Europe somewhere, in America.
So anyway, point I'm trying to get to is, how do you ever convince people to even start really moving the other direction from there, without just looking like, you know, yeah, you can afford the empire on the backs of the poor?
Well, that's a brilliant question.
And you're exactly right that we've adopted policies that not only have perverse incentives, we've also adopted another set of policies, which basically make capital accumulation virtually impossible if you're poor.
And you know, it's, you know, in banking policies, it's policies that lead to inflation, which, you know, makes savings very difficult, especially if you, you know, if you have millions of dollars or billions of dollars, you're able to, you know, get into investment vehicles and do other things that are going to keep you ahead of inflation.
But if you are, you know, just relying on paycheck to paycheck, and you have, you know, just a few dollars every month that you're able to put into a savings account or something, you're going to be completely wiped out by inflation.
There's just no point in even trying.
And the poor, you know, I mean, it's not that they've done the math necessarily, although oftentimes they have, but they know kind of by experience, by, you know, what they've seen in their lives, that they are getting, you know, sort of, the deck is so stacked against them by inflation and other things, that it makes it impossible for them to accumulate capital and be kind of independent citizens the way, you know, the founding fathers certainly expected most Americans to be.
So the first step, I think, is to make capital accumulation for poorer families possible again.
And that's going to certainly require, you know, adjusting a lot of our financial policies.
Some of these policies, by the way, really do benefit, I mean, certainly they benefit, you know, the big banks, which are extremely wealthy, and they might benefit other wealthy people a great deal as well.
So it's not just a matter of, you know, it'd be nice if we could say we're going to be able to help the poor without doing anything that anyone else would be sort of made uncomfortable with.
But that may not be the case.
And in fact, when you look at policies that will help the poor accumulate money, you know, and we're talking about, you know, sort of not social engineering, we're just talking about taking away some of the policies like inflation that caused, you know, the loss of strength of the working class and the poor, that there will be people, I mean, banks and others who might lose out on that.
So that's one, you know, sort of difficult task.
Beyond that, you know, I think a lot of it has to be done culturally, as well as in terms of state power, in terms of, you know, getting away from the regulations, from the perverse incentives, and also from the sort of top-line policies that make savings and capital accumulation impossible.
We also have to have sort of cultural and voluntary initiatives that really show, you know, how sort of self-responsibility can work, and even with all the adversity that it faces, even with all the adversity that poor people are facing.
Now, how that works is going to be, you know, that's something that has to be determined at the local level.
It's very hard.
It would be kind of a fatal conceit to come up with a master plan for doing this for everyone.
But it can be a matter of, you know, sort of community banks, community, you know, sort of self-help organizations, et cetera.
Again, I think the Victorian age actually provides us with a number of examples of things that were quite effective in this regard.
And, you know, I mean, I think there's this tendency among people who, you know, are not poor, and certainly that, you know, that historically includes me as well, but there's a tendency to kind of look at the poor and those sort of lower working class and to think, well, they can't take care of themselves.
So one way or another, you know, we're going to have to fix their problems for them.
And I don't think that's entirely correct.
I think, in fact, it's mostly incorrect that people are very, very ingenious at solving their own problems if only the ruling class doesn't keep adding to those problems.
And certainly our ruling class has been adding to the problems of the poor for a very, very long time.
And we've created a corrupt system that kind of rewards our rulers and that makes, you know, an independent existence very, very difficult for poor people.
You know, the phrase virtuous poor, which is sometimes used, it's for, you know, meant to describe people who are hardworking, but just have the deck stacked against them, and they're not able to save as much as they need, and they're not able to, you know, sort of live as independently as they should.
This phrase virtuous poor is sometimes something that people object to.
They say, well, you know, people aren't, people who are kind of lazy and just kind of take their welfare checks and aren't trying to actively work for work, look for work, that they aren't, you know, doing this deliberately, that in fact, they too are virtuous and they've simply been sort of steered in the wrong direction.
Well, I think there's truth in that argument.
I think that, you know, this tendency to write off Americans, the way Mitt Romney did, for example, when he talked about the 47% that he said, well, they're just not interested in taking care of themselves, and they're just, you know, sort of parasites on, you know, the supposedly productive classes like, you know, Mitt Romney, that that's wrong, that people really will learn self-responsibility and will take care of themselves very effectively and their families if we get the burdens out of their way.
And if we start, you know, even before we start removing those burdens, if we create voluntary societies and more effective sort of institutions at those levels that are able to take care of people.
So, again, it's not a totally satisfactory answer because it's an answer that can't be given.
You know, I'm sitting in Alexandria, Virginia, a few miles from Washington, D.C. right now.
I can't claim that I have a solution for, you know, what's going on in poor rural communities or for what's going on in inner cities.
A lot of that is something that has to be developed locally based on the local problems and the local understandings of what those solutions are.
But certainly we have to look at the extremely perverse incentives that our welfare state provides, and you've outlined those very effectively, and also look at the sort of perverse effect of our entire economic structure that the state has sort of designed, which generally prevents capital accumulation among people who are not already pretty well to do.
I think that's the key of the problem.
And then, you know, Ron Paul, I think, did a tremendously good job of calling attention to this.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a good answer.
Basically deregulate them out of their subsidy.
In other words, let them be successful enough that they just don't need damn food stamps anymore and that kind of thing.
And you're right.
I mean, there's a thousand ways.
And you mentioned Sheldon Richman.
And he can tell you a thousand ways they prevent poor people from being able to get ahead.
And, of course, first and foremost, as you said.
And this is almost entirely a libertarian argument in the society at this point.
But I'm really glad to hear you say it, that it's sound money, the debasement of the currency.
As you said, it's just the root of all evil.
They can't get away with any of the horrible things that they do.
And virtually all the things we complain about are effects of things that they do only because they can basically create money to buy government debt with, you know, this whole scam at the expense of, as you said, anybody who's just trying to have a savings account, at least most of the time, except when they deliberately cause severe recessions like in the early 80s where the interest rates went up so high that, yeah, if you were a saver, you did all right for a little while.
But boy, was it at the expense of everybody else.
And that's when they're doing a good job.
It's when it's a disaster.
You know, otherwise it's just Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen with their foot on the gas with a brick on the gas pedal.
And I think they already jumped out.
I mean, man.
So, yeah, I'm glad you say it that way, because it's the least understood phenomenon in our society.
And I think the most important one, even really more than the nature of the Pentagon and its operations, because without the Central Bank, we don't have to worry about a global empire anyway.
Well, I would sort of generalize that a little bit more because, you know, the military interventions and our the administrative state, the fact that it meddles in things like, you know, professional licensing, that it forces people who want to braid hair to go through all sorts of, you know, totally unnecessary training classes in order to get their credential to do it.
You know, that's an extremely deleterious thing for, you know, for the really ambitious and virtuous poor people who are just not being allowed to do the work that they're very skilled at doing because government regulators have come in and said, well, no, we're going to create a kind of quasi monopoly here among the people we favor by, you know, putting on these professional licensing limitations.
So whether it's banking, whether it's, you know, foreign policy, whether it's the administrative state and the regulatory state, all of these things, I think, have to be tackled.
And all of them also have to be put into the big picture, which is basically this.
But in fact, even though, you know, for an increasing percentage of the middle class and certainly for pretty much all of the poor, the system that we have is extremely harmful and is, you know, oftentimes getting worse.
There are people for whom this system works pretty darn well.
And we have to recognize that.
And, you know, it's not that all of these people who are doing well off the system are you know, sort of bad, immoral people who are deliberately screwing over the poor and the middle class.
But certainly because they're doing so well, you know, maybe they're in academia, maybe they're in government, maybe they're in corporate America, but because they're doing so well, you know, they look at the system and they say, well, we've got to this is a great system.
There's no reason to change it.
There's no reason to reform it.
And if any politician comes along or if any sort of popular public figure comes along and starts criticizing it, then that person is just an extremist and a lunatic and someone who is, you know, sort of dangerous and needs to be dismissed.
In fact, you know, I think if some of these people with real prestige and power were to recognize the tremendous harm that their policies are doing, they would realize, wait a minute, you know, we don't want to become like Louis XVI here.
We don't want to reach a point where, you know, we have pissed people off, you know, the middle class as well as the poor to such a degree that they wind up, you know, sort of hanging us from lampposts.
We actually want to recognize that the system we have is somewhat iniquitous and therefore needs to be reformed by us as well as by our opponents.
So I'd like to see, you know, a lot more maturity among our ruling class, among the prestigious people, as well as a sense among libertarians and other reformers that, you know, that we're not just preaching to the choir.
We're not just sort of interested in our own well-being, but that we're actually interested in, you know, sort of both doing good for the poor and for the middle class and also showing the ruling class how what they're doing is actually dangerous even for themselves.
And you're going to have a lot of, you know, conflicts and a lot of disagreements.
But it seems to me that the entire country, all of the United States, really needs to take a very hard look at the policies that has, you know, had ever since the New Deal, if not earlier, that has systematically created a stratified society where discontent is growing and growing.
It's growing on economic grounds.
It's growing, you know, oftentimes on cultural or racial grounds.
And it's really leading to a point where, you know, people are so angry that, you know, someone like Donald Trump would win the election.
But, you know, this is actually an early warning for, you know, for the ruling class.
Someone like Donald Trump is actually a reformer.
He's actually a moderate compared to where the system will wind up if it keeps going without correcting itself.
And the same is true, of course, with Ron Paul.
Ron Paul tried to warn everyone.
That's not to say that Ron Paul was necessarily right about everything, but certainly he realized that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way in which the country was going.
And how was Ron Paul greeted?
Well, he was dismissed.
He was, you know, sort of ridiculed.
But, you know, even if people didn't agree with him, I think by now they realize, wait a minute, this guy was on to something.
He was warning us about something that really is happening in the country and that will have extremely shocking consequences for everyone, including the ruling class themselves.
Well, so what do you think about the agorist movements and these people who are basically saying, hey, let's use our own forms of money in our own farmers markets and kind of tune in and drop out and, you know, try to not use Federal Reserve notes as much as possible and that kind of thing.
It seems like, you know, they're virtuous.
I don't think they're just sitting around eating acid like back, you know, on a hippie commune in the 60s kind of thing.
It seems like it's a bit counterculture, but not that bad.
Oh, I mean, you know, it's not.
You're right.
I mean, there is maybe a quasi counterculture element to it.
But really, I mean, it's the same kind of thing the Amish do, right?
Or at least, you know, some of the communities that are kind of, you know, aim for self-sufficiency and aim for their own version of ethics.
You know, I know that there are some groups in Pennsylvania.
I don't know whether it's the Amish or the Mennonites or one of the others, but where, for example, if you go to one of their stores, it's completely on the honor system.
So you take what you want and you put in your payment in a box in private.
There's no one there to, you know, there's no one even in the shop to make sure that you follow the rules.
So there definitely is, you know, a place for those kinds of communities, whether they are old ones like the Amish and Mennonites or whether they're new ones that libertarians or other people want to start.
On the other hand, though, I think the real challenge for people who wish to reform the world in which we live and the country in which we live in particular is to come up with a new approach to commercial society.
Right.
So most people are not going to want to become Amish.
Most people are not going to want to become agorists and self-sufficient and so forth.
Most people are still going to want to work for companies, probably.
Now, maybe the world will change and, you know, there'll be more small companies, which might be a very nice thing, actually.
But in general, you know, people will still be engaged, will be living in cities, they'll be, you know, engaged in the kinds of commerce perhaps that they've been engaged in for the last century, that that is kind of the mainstream of society.
And I think it's incumbent upon any serious political philosophy, any serious program of politics to address modern commercial society and all its complexity and all its contradictions.
Right.
So modern commercial society is not and never really has been a perfectly free market.
So that's one of the challenges that libertarians face, because they have a philosophy that's very good for perfect free markets, but that, you know, can be difficult to communicate when it comes to dealing with people who are used to living in imperfect, you know, free markets or mixed economies and so forth.
And this is, you know, this is, I think, the main challenge it's facing, not only libertarians, but people across the political spectrum right now.
It's basically how can you not just have a utopian vision, not just have a vision that works for a very small number of people, whether it's a Christian community or a libertarian community or a community of, you know, sort of enlightened progressives.
How can you actually have a vision that works for pretty much everyone or at least a large swath of your country people?
And how can you, you know, enact that vision in the kind of modern, imperfect commercial society that actually exists?
And I think the more that libertarians and others apply their strength towards trying to figure that out, the better it will be for everyone.
Yeah.
A lot to think about here.
Thank you very much, Dan.
I sure appreciate talking to you.
Thanks, Scott.
All right.
So that is Dan McCarthy at the American Conservative Magazine.
That's theamericanconservative.com.
And just look for the big picture.
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Reviving libertarianism.
Those who favor limited government shouldn't ignore the virtue factor.
Virtue libertarianism.
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