03/27/13 – Jeffrey Tucker – The Scott Horton Show

by | Mar 27, 2013 | Interviews | 2 comments

Jeffrey Tucker, publisher of Laissez Faire Books, discusses the pathology of nationalism and war; the movie Copperhead– about northern opponents of the Civil War; technological changes that are taking mindshare away from traditional media outlets; and the rise of bitcoin – a decentralized electronic currency.

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton and this is the Scott Horton Show.
You can find my full archives at scotthorton.org.
More than 2,700 interviews now going back to 2003.
And you find the whole show archives there as well.
It's Jeffrey Tucker from Law's Eye Fair Books.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Let's do this thing.
Mr.
Scott's an impressive archive I hear.
Well, uh, yeah.
And you know what?
It all started with the Iraq war.
Well, the interview part of the show, I've been a dead radio before that, but the interview show started right at the dawn of the Iraq war, my first interview, which people I'll probably end up playing it on the anniversary of it is April 9th, 2003.
And I interviewed the great Alan Bach from antiwar.com on the empire column.
And, uh, of course the orange County register and wrote the great book on Ruby Ridge and medical pot and, uh, all that, uh, the late great Alan Bach.
And what's funny is if you go back and listen to that interview, especially him, but me too, we're both completely right about everything about all of the lies and how we got into it and who was responsible and what's going to happen next to a terrifying degree.
And I'm glad to hear the story of how you developed your pathology.
You're a very strange and perverse obsession with this idea of, you know, like peace and stuff like that.
Yeah.
Well, for some reason it, it kind of stands out as unique.
I'm not sure why, but anyway, that is what it is.
Um, no, I mean, I guess I am sure why, cause I grew up in America and, and war is fun and I'm a boy.
And so I like watching explosions and stuff.
And if they let me fly at 16 hell, I might kill people.
If I thought I really had a chance of flying at 16, maybe, you know, at least there'd be a percent chance.
Okay.
Not really, but I can understand that way of thinking anyway.
I know that's how people think.
And we got breakfast the other morning and the sign said, we thank the troops who serve for our freedom.
And it's like a religious, uh, catechism or whatever the hell it doesn't matter if it's true or not.
You know, it's just a thing people believe.
The, uh, yeah, I'd never really understand.
I really can't understand.
Although, you know, I must tell you that there was a time when it was a long time ago that I was kind of a, into the whole cold war thing.
And I imagined, you know, like the nation state was sort of an extension of my own, you know, sort of teen manual manliness just to me like that.
And, you know, when Reagan would debate a country, I'd sort of think, yeah, let's get the bad guys.
And then I had a long talk with a guy who was actually in the Marines and it was actually like, and it was a terrifying discussion.
And that snapped me of that sort of psychology of nationalism.
And I never went back.
Yeah, there you go.
That happened to me too, as a young kid.
And I think pretty much everybody, if they remember back, they've met an army guy who told them, yeah, man, I was deployed in countries that you've never heard of killing people and stuff like that, that is scandalous stuff, man.
Secret stuff that, that, and there's so many people who actually have participate in that kind of thing.
Right.
How many tens of thousands of special forces guys are there?
Former special forces guys are there around?
Everybody knows somebody who did some dark, terrible thing for uncle Sam, you know?
Yeah.
And they suffered for it too.
I mean, my, my friend's story to me, the one that like gripped me and I just can't even forget it was, in fact, I just talked to him yesterday on the phone.
The first time in probably 25 years, I talked to the guy.
I should have brought this up to him.
Anyway, he told me about, um, I said, yeah, I was going, you know, we should go into Nicaragua and just beat up those commies, you know, they said, yeah, I'm guy, I kind of see the attraction of that.
You know, the big problem though, is, is, uh, is a fungus.
I said, what are you talking about?
Fungus.
And he said, well, it's weird.
It's like you're going through and they, you know, they issue these boots that are not so clean and then you get like athlete's foot and then you have to sort of go through rivers and walk around and then the athlete's foot sort of crawls up your legs and it spreads to between your legs and then puts them on your chest, it's under your armpits and you get a whole body full of fungus and like nobody's got anything to fix it and it just gets worse every day, it keeps having to put on the same clothes and pretty soon your whole body feels kind of itchy and flaky and red and it's, it's pretty damn miserable.
And, you know, he said this to me, like my jaw hit the floor.
I was like, God, that's the worst thing I've ever heard in my life.
Uh, I, maybe it's not like a trivial point, but it sounded absolutely terrifying to me and somehow it brought the reality of like how crappy, you know, life is as a soldier, but how can I, you know, the urging that's on anybody?
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
George Carlin, when I was a kid, George Carlin put it talking about, uh, uh, George H.W. Bush and how people had called him a wimp and wimp rhymes with limp.
And so that's not manly at all.
So he had to send other people's children to die.
And the way Carlin put it, like that was the punch line and it wasn't very funny.
It was just straight to the point.
You know, that was how he made up for being such a, you know, uh, not a Ronald Reagan-esque, you know, strident Hollywood actor, warrior guy.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think really there's an element of unreality about warmongerism.
You know, they, they really can't look at the truth.
That's why all the technology, you know, leaning more and more towards, you know, higher, you know, people flying, you know, not people on the ground too much for people flying way over, you know, you can watch those videos from Iraq.
You can see how it's like a big video game.
And if you can depersonalize war and, and make the people doing the killing as distant as possible from the actual blood and suffering on the human beings, then it's actually more successful probably.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
There's a whole thing about that.
Uh, actually never read the book, but one time I was a cab driver and the guy riding, uh, we were stuck in the worst rainstorm traffic in Austin ever or something, driving all the way across town.
And he told me all about the book on killing.
And it was about how back during the civil war, they would find of, you know, the dead soldiers on the battlefield.
A lot of them, their musket would just be, or their rifle would just be full of shot and they would not really shoot because they just couldn't bear to kill another man, even when they're on the line fighting like that.
And they could hide behind all the smoke and you couldn't really tell who was shooting and who wasn't that kind of thing.
And how the U S military has made its hardest science this whole time.
How do you take a good kid out of a church pew and put a rifle in his hand and turn him into a psychopathic killer of civilians?
And they've been working on it and they come up with all kinds of routines.
And part of it is just making you and your five best friends, blood brothers, and making everything just about protecting each other, where the nature of the mission and what country you're in and all those things have nothing to do with it at all.
And then of course, distance has a lot to do with it.
Like you're saying to shooting artillery over the hill versus bayonetting somebody, you know, it's a lot easier to do it that way or from the air or something like that.
Did you get a chance to see the new Lincoln movie?
Uh, yeah, I did.
Yeah.
So it's got some scenes in there that really bring home the sort of grim horrors of war and, and unusual scenes, right?
Cause I expect they're kind of pure, pure hagiography, but actually remember the scene where they're dumping the limbs out of the wheelbarrow into the pit and then that other team at the time when I think Lincoln himself is touring the battlefield and it's just body stacked, you know, everywhere.
And that combined with a sort of a detailed accounting of how you try to keep this kid out of the war.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I thought that was great that they, you know, bothered to portray that part.
And then they have him saying actually to the general, to general grant that you and I have enabled each other to do terrible things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, that's the thing.
There's enough in the movie, actually, especially if you have some background, there's enough in the movie to actually, you know, drive, drive home the anti-war point I thought anyway, that was my takeaway.
You know what?
Speaking of which, uh, the great, um, uh, it's Bill Kaufman, right?
The front front porch Republican.
Um, he's got a movie coming out called Copperhead, which is all about New York peace Knicks during the civil war.
I'll send you the link.
Uh, Angela Keaton sent me the link to the preview on yahoo.com.
It's awesome.
Oh, wow.
It's unbelievably awesome.
Isn't it so fabulous that digital media is making the digital economies, maybe it's giving life to all these new forms of art in the old days.
He had to write books.
I can make movies and that's so great.
Isn't it?
I mean, you notice that popular culture is sort of weirdly getting better.
The more competitive, the more people that are entering into media creation and movie making and book writing and distribution of films, it's all sort of getting better.
Now I love a ton of the new stuff on television, you know, from, from breaking bad to, um, a boardwalk empire.
And, you know, all these sort of cool things that are showing essentially the history of rebel culture, you know, it's great.
Yeah.
I mean, even the formerly centralized, uh, avenues of communication, they all have to accept feedback in numerous ways.
Now they're comment sections and their personal Twitter feeds that they maintain and whatever.
And there's, there's just a lot of pushback and, and, uh, different, you know, I talked with Greg Mitchell, um, from editor and publisher, the great chronicler of the media and the Iraq war.
And we talked about how there was no accountability for the guilty in media who went along with the nonsense that got us into that war.
And yet the real truth is the accountability has been completely served up by their audience, which has abandoned them in droves and, and instead goes to the internet and looks at least for independent and alternative confirmation of whatever narrative the government is trying to push.
And they really created a lot of distrust and they really, you know, Newsweek no longer even prints.
They're, they're just the daily beast now, Jeff.
Well, have you done any coverage of the zero dark 30 movie?
What's the story with that?
You probably have, you probably done 10 shows on it.
I'm sorry.
I'm a little bit behind.
Uh, you know, I don't know if I've interviewed anybody, but I had some remarks about it before.
Sure.
Which are basically the, it's a propaganda film saying that no torture, no bin Laden.
We never would have gotten without torture, which is in fact, not true.
Um, as verified by even the likes of Dianne Feinstein and by the great Ali Soufan, who was the FBI agent who got the information personally, uh, by asking nicely rather than, uh, beating it out.
And it was a CIA came later and beat it out, beat other things out of the guy.
But so it wasn't even true.
And then the other message of course, was targeted killings too, that we would never raid a house and kill people.
And when there could be women and children there, unless the president personally gave the thumbs down on their ass.
And unless the, the nice lady with red hair is 100% sure that the bad guy is there, which is a total lie.
Of course, they kill people with their drones and their jets all day.
I'm sorry.
Did you see the film?
Did it?
Did it?
Oh yeah.
Well, I didn't pay money, but I got it off the pirate Bay.
You'll be happy to know I got the torrent file.
Yeah.
So did it drive you crazy?
I mean, was it just annoying from beginning to end?
Yeah.
Well, and part of it too, was, it was just really bad acting and bad directing and everything too.
Everybody was talking about, well, you know, the cinematography was supposed to look all fancy, like that movie traffic or whatever, but it didn't impress me at all.
And then the, the dialogue was absolutely wouldn't.
I mean, here, they're completely torturing it out of this guy.
And instead of saying, you know, talk MFR, they're saying, tell me everything that you know, or what, you know what I mean?
Where you're just like, well, like you couldn't even, the discovery channel did the exact same movie and it was way better, you know, I hate to say it.
But they had their own version and it was just much better.
I had the opportunity to see it.
And so that shows, uh, uh, Oz, the great and powerful, which is a wonderful libertarian film.
I don't know if you've had a chance to, to look at it yet, but, uh, you know, so like this, this, this guy just sort of shows up at Oz and then there's these witches that are fighting with each other and, and then the good witch wants to enlist him in a battle against the bad witches.
So he assumes that, well, he's got to raise up an army because of the townspeople and he says, all right, so who here knows a lot about sort of soldiering or has guns and they all say, uh, well, actually we don't really, are not really into that sort of killing stuff.
So we don't have any soldiers here.
We're just like farmers and tinkerers, which is a great word.
Tinkerers.
They be like making machine machines and stuff.
And, and to be so stuff, and they're just the bourgeoisie says, Oh crap.
Now we're doomed, right?
Now the butchers are definitely going to get us.
But then he has another thought.
He thinks, well, why don't I enlist these people in sort of a division of labor and create a sort of market-based illusion to just scare these horrible witches.
And that's essentially what happened.
So Oz is saved through, you know, not through warfare and guns and battles and death, but through the bourgeoisie coming together through the division of labor to create cool contraptions.
Yeah, that is cool.
No, I haven't got a chance to see that one yet.
That's fine.
You're going to find more truth in kids' movies than adult movies anyway.
I always believe that.
Yeah.
Well, it's those simple lessons that everybody teaches kids, like, Hey, don't hit and be nice and stuff like that.
That are the libertarian principles.
All the other ideologies are really just fancy excuses for violating those simple principles, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The adult movies are really childish.
And the kids' movies that are really, you know, speak the adult truth.
I thought that way for a long time.
I love kids' movies.
I love to go through them.
I'm always, I always leave delighted, you know, and happy, but it's something like you're dark, you're dark, whatever, 30, whatever.
I just, I mean, it's just the way I want to spend two hours.
So I kind of feel bad.
I feel like I should be watching movies like that.
So I can criticize myself or something, but I just can't bring myself to do it.
Yeah.
Nah, don't bother, man.
Focus on the good.
You do a good job of that for sure.
Thanks.
Yeah.
Um, and by the way, speaking of which I sent you an article by some guy, I don't know, this is a few months back, um, about how, look out, but this is actually the golden age of mankind and, uh, you wouldn't believe what all's going on out there in the world.
And there's another one that's sort of along those lines.
It's not quite as utopian about it, but it's at McClatchy and it's called UN predicts huge expansion of wealth in developing world that will shift power, which I'm not so much interested in that part, but it's just about how, you know, basically peace and more or less property rights are reigning across the world.
And yes, even socialist, um, educational and, and medicinal institutions, but in many of these places, their governments literally are the only ones with enough capital to even take on such projects, at least for now, but still it amounts to a huge leap forward from where they were.
And, and otherwise they have basically, you know, trade and property rights and peace reigning from, you know, Morocco and all the way around again, you know?
Yeah.
It's a glorious thing.
I mean, you know, the market economy is going to save civilization and, you know, God willing, someday we'll displace this, uh, the horrible war machines that are still, still a persistence in the world.
But, you know, I think we're seeing that kind of long run trend.
I was just writing an article, uh, just now, uh, for the Freeman, it was commissioned by, uh, Max over there on the Bitcoin.
And I, I kind of began it by saying if 30 years ago, somebody came up to you and said, you know, in the future, we're going to be sending in the little digital text to each other, to our little private inboxes, uh, that we can open at our leisure.
And it's going to completely replace first class mail.
You would have said, well, that's the stupidest thing I ever heard.
I mean, after all, not even the Jetsons imagined such a thing as email and yet it's happened, right?
And I mean, you can look at it, you know, in so many areas and now, you know, you see email being increasingly replaced by texting and private messaging on Facebook and, uh, you know, uh, voice, voice messaging over, over a Skype, like voice over that protocols and all these sort of new communications technologies that nobody even imagined would exist headlines.
You know, it just happens.
And it's a beautiful thing to see this new world emerging.
Yeah.
I'm looking at Bitcoins and I'm thinking, you know, I used to think, oh my God, the cashless society is the new world order plot to enslave us all with a microchip in our hand and track everything we buy and sell and, and we're all going to die.
And this was a long time ago.
I haven't been quite that bad of a kook in a while, but anyway, uh, here we actually have like real cashlessness and it's all encrypted and anonymous and you can't do nothing about it, big brother.
And how do you like that?
Yeah, it's kind of amazing.
And it keeps getting these boosts every time government like flops again, people are racing to Bitcoin more and more.
I was looking at some of the history of this whole thing and, and, you know, people had dreamed about a digital currency all the way back in the, in the 1990s.
Uh, and there were four or five, you know, uh, within the geek community, anyway, high profile attempts, but they could never solve the key problem, which was, uh, the, the, uh, simultaneous use of the same piece of property, which is the problem with the monetary system.
Right?
So like with the gold standard, all gold is interchangeable with all other gold.
It's, it's fundable in that way.
But when you, you know, when you're holding an ounce of gold, nobody else can simultaneously be holding that.
So you have a real title to the money and it's a problem in the digital world because, you know, digits specialize in reproducibility.
So every one of these previous attempts to create a digital currency faltered on this, nobody could really figure this out until this one anonymous, you know, uh, Japanese guy, Satoshi Nakamoto, uh, but he came up with a great system where that every time a user would use the Bitcoin, he would download the entire ledger and be able to check to make sure that the property titles were properly assigned.
So that solved the problem of, uh, reproducibility and simultaneous use.
And so you would have just one title to one Bitcoin and it would only be used, you know, held in the possession of one person at a time.
And so that overcame the thing that had sort of prevented previous digital currencies from taking off.
Did you know that history?
No, I did not know that history.
And I did read a thing, and this is always immediately my question is, well, who gets to invent the new ones?
Who gets to benefit and buy a brand new truck just because they get to, you know, come up with the newest Bitcoins that come out every day or whatever.
Apparently they even solve that with this mining thing, which I don't really understand, but.
That's a funny thing because like Bitcoin couldn't exist where it not for the experience of the gold standard.
And then all the, the whole open source, uh, uh, computer model, uh, algorithmic model of Bitcoin is, is based on a sort of historical experience of the, of the gold standard.
So the gold standard, you can't create new money unless you extend resources to do it.
So you have to go out and you have to mine it and you're having to spend money to dig it up.
It was a lot of work.
And then they come online.
And so he decided to reproduce that same sort of system of gold mining, except in a digital sense by having computers solve complex math problems.
And he makes it, uh, it's built into the structure of Bitcoin that it gets increasingly difficult to mine over time.
And there's an upper limit on the number that can be mined just as a, there's an upper limit on the amount of gold, uh, in the, in the world.
Um, so, and we're not going to reach that for another 50, a hundred years or whatever, but nonetheless, it gets increasingly difficult.
So you have to dig deeper and deeper into the mountain to get the gold.
It's the same way as Bitcoins.
You have to solve ever more.
Uh, math problem.
Um, I met a really cool minor, um, a couple of months ago and he was just a classic figure, you know, very quiet.
He's from China.
His English was not that good.
He had big, thick glasses and, uh, you know, he just sort of was in deep and contemplation all the time.
And he built, um, a system of racks of servers that were mining, uh, pretty quickly fast enough to be at that time earning minimal wage.
He's gotten a raise since that time.
But typically there's a new Bitcoin coming online about every 10 minutes.
But even, even now there's, there's a kind of shortage, so to speak, because it's not so easy to get Bitcoin.
Uh, the, the services that, um, you can buy them from have to limit the, the amount that you can buy per day because they would quickly run out.
Yeah.
There's not a endless number of sellers for the amount of demand.
In other words.
Yeah.
People are holding onto much like Krugman.
Hate that.
He had a very funny column.
He said, you know, the problem with Bitcoin is it's too much like a gold standard.
Uh, you're stuck in the gold standard.
People are like hoarding money and that's bad because we need money, you know, dispensed and circulating all the time.
Cause he's like a Keynesian inflationist.
So his problem with Bitcoin is precisely it's soundness.
There's a really very funny column.
Yeah.
Well, I cashed all mine in.
I started taking donations in Bitcoins last summer.
They were worth about 10 bucks.
And then I had a problem with my program.
I couldn't get it to work.
And I didn't know where the correct wallet file was in the app data folder, whatever the hell.
And so I couldn't make it work for a long time.
And when I finally figured out with the help of some Facebook friends, how to make it work again.
I had even more big going donations that I didn't even know about.
And then lo and behold, they were worth 45 bucks, something like that.
So I cashed them in so I could hire a dentist to yank my wisdom tooth out for me.
And then now I realize if I'd held on to him just a few more days, it would have been worth about 500 bucks more.
And it seems almost like tulip mania, something like that.
I wonder what you think of that.
That sometimes seems that way, but it doesn't actually make sense.
I mean, people kind of dismiss it as being a bubble, but the fact that we're seeing, you know, vast increasing demand.
I mean, what I wanted to say was.
You know, the first Bitcoin came online, like November 1st, 2008.
And I don't remember at the time, but like the entire political financial establishment was in a freak out mode.
Right.
So like housing prices were collapsed and, uh, the banks, you know, were suddenly holding all these, they were desperately trying to dump their mortgage back securities and everything was going sort of going belly up.
I mean, you know, boats were stuck in the harbors cause they couldn't get, you know, bonds to ship their goods.
And yeah, the whole world was freaking out.
And of course, George Bush is like president or something.
And, uh, he had this great idea that he would, you know, marshal all resources in existence and create those that aren't in existence to rescue everything and fill the banks back up with the coffers to make them solve them again.
And it was just a, just a nasty, nasty event.
That was a terrible time.
And, uh, that was when Bitcoin's first took off and now we're seeing another boom.
I mean, it was $15 to begin this year.
Now last I checked, it was like 87, I think this morning.
And, you know, it's, it's being boosted by the cypress situation where people practically converting their euros to, uh, to, to Bitcoin.
And, you know, it's funny when people talk about Bitcoin and people, I encounter people all the time that are trying to debunk it.
And my first question is, well, have you ever actually owned any and played with them?
And they always say no.
And so I can kind of get why a person would be skeptical of it.
You know, if you're not that familiar with the way digital economics works, which is not that familiar with wave ones and zeros are the real commodity of value today, and you never played with them, then yeah, you kind of debunk them.
But the second you actually owned them and start trading them and you see just what an amazing payment system it really is, uh, then you begin to change your mind.
I was on a Skype call the other day and I, and I had the guy download the blockchain app, remember his password and hold up his QR code to the camera.
Uh, while we were on Skype, I just quickly scanned his QR code and sent him a, sent him a half a Bitcoin.
Like, and he felt a phone buzz.
He looked and went, Oh my God.
Well, you know, I'm not sure.
Like if I had to be, you know, I don't know, Walter block or somebody and figure out exactly the definition, if it's more like gold or if it's more like paper Fiat money or whatever.
In fact, I can see how it's always going to have value.
Assuming that the government can't find a way to just crack it and regulate it and throw you in jail for it or something like that.
It seems like, um, there is certainly value in having anonymous, encryptable, digital money.
And so it's not a quote unquote intrinsic value, but sorta right.
It's never going to go down to zero.
Yeah.
And here's the thing too.
I mean, the fact that, that you have really assigned titles to these Bitcoins, uh, makes all the difference.
That's why I think people don't really understand.
It's not as if I can just sit at home and make up a Bitcoin, you know?
I mean, you really have to mind them.
And then, and then what you mind has to pass through, uh, you know, the Bitcoin community and get approved as an actual Bitcoin.
And then it's, and then it's purchased and it's really owned by somebody.
And it appears in the ledger and ledgers, public information, and it's downloaded every time you, uh, you, you do any transactions with it.
So you solve that problem and then you, you know, approach the realm of soundness really.
And, you know, it's funny.
I've had other people tell me, well, I'll never use a currency that I don't understand.
Well, you know, we use things we don't understand all the time.
I mean, I don't understand how the heck a smartphone works, but I use it, you know, every, uh, you know, all day.
Yeah.
Well, there's a certain level of understanding depending on your level expertise about computer code and stuff like that, but just think about how everybody uses dollars just on the premise of George Washington's on the damn thing, and that means it must be legit, you know, basically all we know.
What's funny about Bitcoin is there's a built-in skepticism to the government paper, and I tell you, it's very interesting, Scott, um, I've gone through this psychological change as I started using Bitcoin.
Um, if I use it several times in the course of a day to do something, whether buying or selling or trading or giving, or, you know, whatever, then I find myself sort of weirdly annoyed, you know, that when I get in a cab and the guy wants dollars, I think, what the heck kind of, you know, analog man are you?
Dollars?
Really?
That's funny.
You're way ahead of the curve, man.
You're way the right end of the bell curve on a lot of things.
There's no doubt about that.
And you know what, man, I'm so sorry.
We're out of time.
Cause, um, Trita Parsi is coming on.
We got to talk about Iran sanctions and stuff like this, but I still have more things I wanted to talk with you about.
This would probably be better for just kind of, uh, off the air, uh, shooting the S sort of conversation anyway, but I wanted to talk with you.
I had a brief conversation with Anthony Gregory yesterday about the economics of skateboarding and the cutthroat competition in pro skateboarders, video parts, and how it has pushed skateboarding, which it happens to be the thing I love.
It just, you know, way past light speed, it advances so fast.
And, and it's because of the economics of the whole situation.
You know what I mean?
The cutthroat competition.
That sounds like my kind of article.
I really get into these sort of micro sectors of, of dynamic economics like that, where you see how the economy really interacts with real human beings doing cool stuff.
I mean, it's so magical and interesting, isn't it?
Yeah, it is.
And you know, the funny, uh, silver lining, weird, uh, ironic part of that too, is that it's all the inflation in the housing market over the last generation or so, or well, 10 years, 12 years, especially that has led to the creation of these thousands of new concrete skate parks all over the country.
Cause all that excess tax revenue coming in property tax revenue coming into the municipalities and, and county governments and stuff.
And so like really Alan Greenspan is the best thing that ever happened to skateboarding by far.
That's very interesting.
I had no, no clue about this.
And they're made of concrete, so they're not going anywhere.
I mean, they're on government land and they're not going anywhere.
Yeah.
So that sounds like a wonderful article.
And maybe I'll have to look into that a little bit.
Every time you start investigating these little sectors, you know, it's because it gets so fascinating, you know, it's like, you're just sort of crawling down this rabbit hole, you know, further and further.
And it's a beautiful thing to observe the way the market, uh, works, you know, it's just infinitely complex and nowadays globalized and the information streams.
And it's just a beautiful thing to see human needs being met by other human beings, you know, through this lovely system.
Yep.
It is.
It's really cool.
I fear that everybody starts tuning out once I start talking about skateboarding, but I'm trying to keep it Austrian, you know, all right, I got to go.
Thank you so much for your time, Jeffrey.
You're great.
Really great to be here.
It's gotten good to catch up.
All right.
Everybody.
That is the great Jeffrey Tucker.
He's at Lazai Fair Books.
That's lfb.org lfb.org.
And here's a great article, top alternatives to paper money, uh, his coverage of, uh, the Bitcoin thing and, uh, and some other good stuff too.
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