TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #126: Jeff Vandrew

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Jeff Vandrew, founder of the Keykeeper IRA, to discuss: - Jeff's essay on Post-Capitalism - Distributism - Marxism - Social Democracy - Socialism - Localism - Externalities - much more Follow Jeff on Twitter Shoutout to our sponsor: Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Subscribe to our YouTube channel: tftc.tv Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

What's up, freaks? It's your boy Marty here, rubbing out the eye boogies, getting ready for this Wednesday morning. I'm here to introduce this week's episode of Tales from the Crypt. Excuse me. I had the pleasure of sitting down again with Jeff Andrew, and this time we didn't really talk about Bitcoin too much. We definitely touched on it a little bit, but the focus of this episode is Jeff's essay that he wrote about a month and a half ago called A Post-Capitalist future uh triggered a lot of people in the uh austria libertarian bitcoin space um but i thought it was an interesting paper again and that's why i brought jeff on here is because again the first episode if you freak should remember we talked a lot about the economic

philosophy of distributism which is something that was new to me at the time and i think this paper is an elaboration on the thoughts that we talked about in that episode and then expands on that so i brought jeff back to again expand on this topic because this is an economic philosophy again that i'm a bit ignorant to so i wanted to learn uh learn about and genuinely explore because i think it's an interesting idea i am definitely sympathetic towards the ideals of the ideas that uh jeff is striving towards i'm not so sure on the implementation and how to reach those ideals it's still very uh very uh it's very much of a mystery to me how that would be implemented and i'm still skeptical that it could be implemented without a lot of coercion but

nevertheless again this is a an exploration of an economic philosophy and an idea and i think it was a very thorough exploration and i think you freaks are going to like it we talk a a lot about a lot of stuff mentioned we talk a lot about marxism socialism the difference between socialism social democracy um and capitalism and uh talk about a growing trend i mean uh we talk about towards the end of the episode but there is a growing trend of people being more sympathetic to the ideas that jeff is putting out there too if you're really paying attention um so this week's episode of tales from the crypt is brought to you by the cash app as you freaks already know cash app is the simplest way to send and save money and the simplest way to stack sats all right and

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called owls lacrosse cash app's gonna send ten dollars to them too you're gonna help them out All right, so go download the Cash app from the App Store or Google Play Store today and enjoy this episode with Jeff Vandreau. I know I certainly did. Tales from the Crypt. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Bent here on a Tuesday afternoon, mid-afternoon, close to the evening. It's 4.15.

uh sitting down uh with somebody who's already been here before about to have a very interesting conversation welcome back to jeff vander jeff what's going on great to be back man thanks dude thanks for taking the trip you got it uh we scheduled this podcast on friday night while we were at uh hill country hill country bar hill country barbecue yeah yeah great night uh saying goodbye to pierre rochard great night and a sad night got to catch up with a lot of people that i hadn't seen in a while uh but also obviously very sad that i'm not going to see pierre all the time now yeah man he gave a very heartfelt speech pierre was uh the first bitcoin friend he was my first friend in bitcoin until i met pierre as i mentioned that night i was just you

know i was i held bitcoin i read about bitcoin i even had bitcoin as a small part back then only as a small part of my business but i was just a man on an island out there in new jersey didn't really have any friends who were uh particularly involved with it did you reach out to him so we met at uh the inaugural bit block boom conference in dallas which is funny because we didn't even meet here in the new york area uh and then i just happened to have been talking to him while i was there and he mentioned he lived in brooklyn and i was like kind of like oh let's you know when we get back east let's get together sometime you know this this fall and it just sort of took off from there yeah no pierre was one of the first bitcoiners i met as well i think i dm'd him

forget if he dm'd me or idea i think i dm'd him and we met here in like the east village walked around drank like meat broth talking about bitcoin and then uh i owe i have a debt of gratitude to pierre as well oh a debt of gratitude to pierre uh he was the first guest on this podcast and a very good first guest yeah well i this is actually it's funny you mentioned you met him by DMing and this is gonna sound really dumb but like I'm really glad that I started DMing people some years ago on Twitter because that's not like something I used to do I just used Twitter very passively and just kind of like read it and you know but I didn't post that much I didn't really comment in the replies on other people's stuff and then I don't remember exactly why I

started doing it but I just started like jumping into people's replies and then sometimes even DMing people and uh honestly it's been a huge positive I've like made friends that way yeah A lot of people like to use LinkedIn as a social networking tool, or excuse me, a professional networking tool. I think Twitter is far superior as a networking tool. I have absolutely never gotten a client from LinkedIn. I've gotten many, many clients from Twitter. All right, because you can, again, the conversation aspect, you can see via likes, retweets, and replies. yeah and it doesn't have that whole linkedin is so transactional where everyone's just like

want something from you all the time like i've never gotten a direct message on linkedin that wasn't somebody like asking for something right like i've never gotten a message on linkedin that just said hey what do you think about this or hey this is pretty cool or hey i just wanted to say i enjoyed this never it's always like you know they want some sort of a very transactional relationship where things on twitter i feel are a lot more natural yeah i know reed hoffman is a bitcoin bull right i believe so oh i mean it's microsoft now that's run it that's got linkedin oh yeah post uh it's a post reed hoffman world but anyway i deleted my linkedin a while ago i could have taken it i still have it but you know i hated that transactional nature and the content was

terrible and it was yes linkedin content is the most trite i mean i'm not on facebook so i don't know how bad facebook is but compared to twitter linkedin content is extremely trite like stupid motivational memes and things like that it's all copy pasta too yes absolutely yeah uh no but back to uh pierre being the first uh guest on this just bring bring that episode up somebody was mentioning it this week that's stood the test of time oh absolutely yeah he uh was very prescient in there a lot of a lot of good quotes and actually speaking of that first episode we we talked a lot about human action and i'm staring at the book right now i finally picked up the the the physical copy of human human action i'm going to start trying to do uh back-to-back cover cover

coverage of this book after seeing connor brown jump into it a couple weeks ago so i read human action a while back and i actually reread it well i didn't reread read the whole thing i went back and kind of looked back at my notes on it with regard actually in preparation for this podcast because parts of it are actually going to come up in some stuff we're discussing later. So I think that'll all kind of tie in there. It's kind of good that you grabbed a physical copy. Yeah, it's all coming to me.

Hey, if we need to cite anything, we can pull it. We can pull it right out. Yeah, exactly. All right, here. I'm going to put it on the coffee table just in case. It's going to be a loud thing. God, it is a monster, isn't it? Let's see if the mics can pick it up.

No, Marty, for those who aren't here, which is, well, everybody other than me and Marty, that's a soft cover. So, you know, it didn't make a whole lot of sense. a paperback cover it's not necessarily soft i mean softer than a hard hard cover yes but what is it i actually do not know the distinction between a paperback and a soft cover neither do i i've never i've always known it as a paperback i've always thought they were the same thing but i don't know i've never heard soft cover maybe i just made it up in my head

this is very possible jeff it would not be the first time will you stop mandela affecting our audience please yeah i'm just creating new vocabulary here yeah apparently all right so let's jump into the the meat of why we're here your your post on uh a post-capitalist where i'm just an anti-capitalist maybe it is anti-capitalist is it anti-capitalist it's an interesting question uh i mean the main conceit that i have there i don't even take a a pro or anti-position per se one way or the other it's more so that uh you know capitalism is sort of a transitory phase um that essentially has to end because at the end of the sort of competitive market period naturally capital tends to centralize in a few uh a few players right and

it will become an oligopoly in that event all right before i jump in yeah with pushback and steel man potentially some straw man i might make fun of you at some point um i'm kidding uh let's just walk through the thought experiment let's like walk through the piece yeah structurally if you can from memory sure um and then we'll have a conversation about yeah no problem so at the beginning basically i try to give i i kind of make the statement that economic systems sort of last only so long as you can sort of keep people under control right and the example i give was uh you know the ussr that system that sort of state communist system fell apart because it at a certain after a certain period of time it just wasn't it wasn't providing for its citizens as

well as the capitalist system was and the citizens knew it so there were really two parts of that Number one, people were missing out as compared to what people in the West had, you know, economically. And number two, people were aware of it. That's a big part of it, too, because if you're in North Korea and you have no access to information, it doesn't matter how far behind you are because you have no standard of comparison. You don't realize it. Exactly right. And that's really what led to the events of 1989 and then eventually, obviously, 1991 when the whole thing fell apart. So the point that I make in the piece is I sort of talk about, again, capitalism not as a permanent economic system but as a phase of development is more or less how I think about it.

It's a phase that basically – it's a phase of industrialization and perhaps is the only way that a society can industrialize. But at the end of that capitalist period, and when I say capitalism here, what I'm mostly referring to is the idea that you should have a market that, no markets are perfectly free, but you're having a market that's pretty darn free. The idea that you're striving for, the ideal, let's say, is to have a free market. And the first point that I make there is that eventually that free market, yes, it's very efficient. Yes, it's certainly the most efficient allocation of resources. But if you let that be free for an indeterminate period of time, absent interruptions like wars or, you know, there's a couple government interventions that have happened in the industrial era that I mentioned in the piece, eventually what happens is that capital all is going to centralize in the hands of a few small

players or excuse me well they're large players actually i should say centralized in the hands of a few large players and then once that happens it's just going to be in those players material interests uh to form an oligopoly right to no longer compete with each other instead sort of you know mash out exactly who gets what and then at that point we sort of end up with a society where everyone is employed by a small group of employers those employers are also the only producers in society so we don't have much choice not only in terms of what we consume but also in terms of how our just non-consuming lives are lived right because we all spend so much of our time at work um and there wouldn't really be a competitive labor market in this situation so

where i got a lot of these ideas um partially from a book by ilera balak uh that was written in the early 20th century called the servile state also his uh follow-up book which was called economics for helen is a is the uh sort of the sequel to the servile state that expands upon it further um and before i forget actually one of the more interesting uh changes from servile state to uh economics for helen is in servile state block believed that essentially he was writing about england and he believed that england would have never had this cap centralized capital problem in the first place if the king hadn't gotten involved uh taken over the church's monasteries and redistributed them to the to the big landlords so essentially block was making the

argument that absent government intervention we never would have had this centralized capital in the first place um by the time what's interesting is 10 roughly years later by the time economics for helen uh comes around he's no longer making that argument um he doesn't explicitly refute the prior argument it's just that when he talks about centralization of capital and economics for helen which as an interesting side note helen was his niece uh kind of a sweet fact a cozy fact let's say about the title there he wrote it for his niece um in economics for helen he doesn't make that argument he basically instead says that yeah the nature of and this is the more persuasive argument to me and we'll get into this later as we get more into the essay but the more persuasive

argument to me is government intervention or not um ultimately the nature of these things is that capital is going to centralize and you know regardless one way or the other and unless there's sustained positive action to prevent that from happening that's just essentially the fate right so block believed that once capital became centralized you know you transitioned out of capital into this servile state system and what's interesting in particular about the servile state is when you throw that out there people get in their heads this idea that it's like uh it's almost like the experience we had with slavery in the united states where violence is the way in which people are held in line right yeah that i'm thinking like uh feudalism yeah well actually

what's funny is he talks about feudalism as being less servile because he thought the serfs had uh considerably more control over their day-to-day lives than even even an employee in early 20th century england uh would have had so at the time he was writing so block is saying in economics for helen that the natural market forces are such that capital will centralize and then that would lead to a natural servile state right right and the servile state it should be it should be mentioned a big part of it what starts to happen is that capital and we've seen this in the 20th and 21st centuries as capital starts to centralize is it actually starts to offer workers more protections because it's really in their material interest to do so you don't want those people for instance

cause you know engaging in a communist revolution like we like we saw throughout the 20th century and in order to do that it kind of makes sense to structure law in such a way that the workers get some level of protection and in exchange for that protection they have to give up the right to ever be essentially what we would call today entrepreneurs he doesn't use that word but to ever really be self-employed or self-sufficient or anything of that nature and what's funny is I mean he's writing this book over a hundred years ago but one of the things he talks about that's obviously been something that we've had come into play in the 20th century and I'm not even saying it was a bad thing but was like the idea of social insurance programs that are tied

to employment social security medicare yeah i mean i would say it's probably a bad idea in the long run well we'll we'll get to that in a minute um but even let's say even stuff that's that's a little bit less uh yeah social security i mean i could i certainly see the arguments against it let's let's even do something slightly less controversial but still obviously that we're certainly going to have listeners that would oppose um like workman's comp insurance right The idea that if you're a self-employed person, because that's actually one of the, he doesn't use that term, it didn't exist at the time, but one of his examples. I don't have workman's comp protection because I'm self-employed. If I get hurt, that's something I have to plan for as an individual.

But if you're an employee, the law grants you certain workman's comp provisions, you're covered for that sort of thing. So that's an idea. It's basically all these things that create this servile relationship, and really, he was talking about servility more in terms of the servile relationships that more ancient types of slavery had. And he goes through the history of that, I won't rehash all of that, but the idea that it was almost a paternal relationship between master and servant in exchange for that sort of labor that was being provided. it so and i think that regardless i mean we've definitely seen that part of his prediction come true right uh i mean the the amount worker protections have increased you know and they haven't and they haven't for the most part uh in recent years been even to union tied protections they've been directly from the government they're not protections that were negotiated between you

know with a union you've got the employees they form a cartel so that they can more effectively bargain with their employer and and you've got your employees and employer hash out an agreement that works for them whereas with these more servile type relationships that are enforced at a government level has nothing to do with whether or not you're in a union or what you bargain for or anything of that nature right this these are this these are designed specifically to sort of enforce that servile relationship between employer and employee so his fear is that essentially this would have that all these things combined would create this mass centralization effect and we would never get out of it right because these uh these these legal changes that would that would

definitely come in his eye along with the centralization of capital would also reinforce the system right people would not be motivated to try and break out of the system because it would sort of provide just enough it's basically raising the floor it creates a situation where you have a very very distinct uh capital class and proletariat class with really nothing in between but you provide a high enough floor for the proletariat that you're not going to see a proletarian revolution that's sort of the idea yeah it seems to be the policy of many western nations for the last three to four decades exactly and that's by the way uh one of the major differences and i try to make this point throughout that's why like we're always fighting with joe eisenthal on twitter

like the world's getting better but like right exactly it's is it really getting better and we can i've had a lot of twitter arguments about that we can get into later but um that's one of the key distinctions one of the things i think you really need to understand to understand this piece is the key distinction between structural change which of which distributism is a type socialism is a type versus non-structural change of which social democracy is a type i make a very strong distinction in terms when i write and when i speak between socialism and social democracy so social democracy is the idea that you provide welfare state type benefits for people that are designed specifically so that they will not question the overall structure of the economic

system it seems like just like a stepping stone to straight up socialism see i don't think it is i think the reverse i think it's actually designed and one of the pieces i make in the point in that one of the points i make in the piece excuse me is i actually think social democracy is explicitly designed to be anti-socialist because it keeps excuse me conditions just well just good enough for the workers that they're not sufficiently motivated to revolt the way they did in the soviet union in 1917 for example but how can you dictate that even if under the guise of social democracy well you're not dictating anything all you're doing is you're just making people lazy that's all you're doing in other words but by raising their floor enough you're just you're

making people lazy yeah you're not necessarily dictating production right correct but that's It seems like a way, like a stepping stone to get to that point, though. I just, I don't agree. I think the idea is, at your worst case scenario there, yeah, can people vote themselves more money? Theoretically, right? But if you are an important enough, if you are a large enough holder of capital, you have influence over democratic elections. Well, socially, though, do you think it'll get to a point where there'll be conflict, right? The welfare state just leads to natural social conflict because you have the capital owners.

basically subsidizing correct most of that and they're like and they're i mean i think socially psychologically people are just gonna be like all right we're just paying all these taxes for these people to live on the dole and socially they're like they need to work for their money in the government's like all right we'll dictate that see i don't think that at all and i think the stats bear me out on this so the the largest proponent the just look at there's a chart in the footnotes on my piece there if anyone wants to look at it uh the main proponents of social democracy in the united states are the wealthiest people uh they love social democracy because it keeps it keeps the populace docile and under control and not agitating for structural change

yeah and let's be clear you're not a fan of social democracy are you no i'm not much of a fan of social democracy i mean i'm you know most of the people that would be listening to this podcast And I'm pretty upfront about this, which certainly consider me a statist. I'm nowhere near an anarchist. We'll talk a little bit more about what I believe further in the, you know, as we go through the piece, why I think anarchism. I think it's a good first principle. I've read all the Austro-Libertarian stuff. I really don't quibble with it, but with the underlying assumptions, but why I just believe that there are certain tradeoffs.

You know, we'll get into that more later. But yeah, the main problem I have with social democracy is that it's just designed to create this permanent servile class. Social democracy basically is block servile state where people like me tend to more favor structural change, which a real structural change doesn't just raise the floor for the servile class. I use the term proletariat a lot. I don't want people to think that that necessarily makes me an orthodox Marxist, distributist to use that term as well. By raising the floor for the proletariat, really you're not making a structural change that would, for instance, change the number of people that are in the proletariat, make it easier for people to ascend out of the proletariat to, for instance, the petite bourgeoisie. change the ease of ascending out of the petite bourgeoisie to the haute bourgeoisie right i mean for those that are not familiar with those terms those are those do originally come from marxist economics proletarian is basically your basic working class the petite bourgeoisie is

people like me who basically own businesses but have no real power because we don't have any substantial amount of capital and then to use just the extreme example like jeff bezos is in the the haute bourgeoisie right um that's sort of the the distinction there and some people today also make a an additional distinction when they talk about modern society by adding a professional managerial class in there um which is sort of because they don't really fit with the traditional idea of a petite bourgeoisie um that's more people that are the sort of the handmaidens of the haute bourgeoisie if you work for amazon for instance uh well if you work in the warehouse you're a proletarian if you're working in the office you're probably a part of the professional managerial class so if i

use those terms um like pmc you know through what i'm speaking here um it's not necessarily an endorsement of orthodox marxist theology i just think it's a somewhat easy way to talk about different differing people's interests in an economic system that's the only point i'm making goddamn marxist there you go are you a marxist i am not a marxist so uh but you know if you read i'm i'm a localist above all else which means i uh i uh i i very much value local control over almost any economic system i look at economic systems in a very utilitarian way in terms of what's going to provide the most local levels of control. So I'm a very heterodox thinker.

We'll get more into that. My beliefs are very heterodox and pulled from all over the place. Distributist thought has definitely had a huge influence on me. Distributists, we talked about that a little bit the first time I was on, but it's an economic system opposed to both capitalism and socialism. The distributist writers were pretty big critics of both of those systems. distributist writing tends to be a little dated however it was just written in a different era when industrialization had not progressed to the point that it had now so i'd be lying if i said

that there weren't um elements of things like syndicalism that i think are valuable um we'll kind of get into that i guess as we go along as well but no i'm definitely not an orthodox marxist uh marxists would be offended um by probably uh by me if i were to say that i was um yeah so i don't remember where we were before we got off on that tangent um and we were just uh basically putting these into silos okay social democracy marxism yes okay so if you talk to and this is confusing one of the reason why reasons why the whole social democracy socialism i think distinction is so confusing and even if you're a person that strongly opposes both systems i think it's very worthwhile to understand the differences um and by the way

i'm also aware that people that are uh students of praxeology tend to classify both of those systems all as socialism but they make distinctions between sort of different types of socialism right that's my understanding of praxeology works that way in fact praxeologically if you look at the austrians um what they believed essentially almost every economic system is socialism that exists in the real world um not the ones that they would necessarily favor um but that all that's essentially the way they categorize things i'm using the social democracy term just because to people who haven't necessarily studied you know austrian economics or praxeology it just It's probably a little bit more of a familiar term, right?

So anyway, in terms of that distinction and social democracy, why I think it's so important, I think it's important to understand because people's motivations for the two are different. And the reason why I think it's very confusing is if you just were to read current political discourse, it's extremely confusing for a variety of reasons. Number one, in Europe, all the parties that call themselves socialist today are, in fact, social democratic. They've long ago abandoned actual socialism, right? I mean, the classic example is the Labour Party in Britain literally removed socialization of the means of productions from their party platform in the 90s. Like, there's no more clear sign than that, right?

So all those parties that have socialist in their names have generally moved towards social democracy, so that's confusing. Number two, in the United States, we misuse categorizations all the time, mostly as insults in political discourse. So liberal takes on this bizarre, twisted meaning. Socialist takes on this bizarre, twisted meaning. You libtard. Yes, exactly. So socialist in the United States has sort of taken on this idea of like a very liberal social democrat, which is very odd because people that are actually orthodox Marxists and consider themselves real socialists

socialists and have actually read socialism and and you know taken a glomming to it just not some kid on the internet find that almost laughable because socialism is an illiberal ideology um so it's sort of bizarre so that confounds the whole distinction as well and i only mentioned this now at the beginning just so that it gives a better better understanding of where why i make this distinction between social democracy and socialism and why i think they have very different motivations as i said you know your your large holders of capital and again the stats bear this out are very supportive of social democracy they would be much less supportive of actual socialism in other words socializing the means of production like they're for obvious reasons they're not going

to support giving up their you know their ownership of these large enterprises which is what socialism essentially is okay so we laid the landscape we laid the landscape right of our of our choices here and let's and we're still on block or uh block block yeah so at any at any rate at this point in the piece i sort of talk i i've sort of made my case as to why i think capital centralizes one very important thing i think to keep in mind if you're skeptical of what i'm saying is i think a lot of people do not consider the extreme effects that industrialization has had on society and on economics so a lot of the early pro-free market thinkers like adam smith lived in a less industrialized era where economies of scale were much much much much much less i mean

even if you disagree with everything else i'm saying today i think that should be a pretty non-controversial statement so that's flipped a lot of those arguments on their head i'll give you a classic example smith thought that free trade for instance in his in his day all the large holders of capital hated free trade free trade was considered like a leveling mechanism it put it would actually discourage centralization because it would bring more competition in right that's generally not the way things work today right even if you're a big free trade proponent because you believe it's more efficient increases wealth it certainly doesn't increase competition Right. It actually has had the effect of decreasing competition because all and the reason that we know that is if you assume global corporations aren't stupid, which I assume that they're not stupid for anything else, they all universally support free trade because it essentially allows them to have influence across the entire globe instead of only in one country.

So that's one example of where just even the motivations for different economic arguments have been flipped on their heads by the change in economies of scale due to industrialization. There's a good book, by the way, that gives a history of this that probably almost everyone that is listening is going to hate. But I have a compulsive thing where I have to give attribution to where I get ideas from. Elizabeth Anderson wrote a great book called Private Government. and the reason why i said a lot of our listeners probably won't like it elizabeth anderson is a professor of feminist philosophy at the university of michigan um and very much uh i believe and i hope i'm i doubt she's listening but i apologize if i'm mischaracterizing your views professor anderson um but very much a social democrat uh and and very much a liberal so we probably

wouldn't necessarily agree on much but the best part of the book is the first first of all two interesting things about the book uh number one before i get into how it ties to our concept here the format of the book is incredibly interesting in that she makes her case in two chapters the next three chapters are her critics three different people one of which is tyler cohen who probably most uh of our listeners are familiar with um basically he's becoming more liberal too Yeah, but basically criticize her work from different angles. Two of them were historians, and then Tyler is an economist. And then the final chapter of the book is her responding to her critics.

So I thought, if nothing else, that was kind of a cool way to set up your book. Yeah, to your book. But for our purposes here, what's interesting about the book is the first chapter is actually entirely a history of the early pro-market thinkers, and then it sort of goes into what their motivations were and how it was all flipped on its head by industrialization as i sort of uh you know mentioned earlier on so i guess to get back to walking through the piece you know at that point i thought i feel like i've sort of made my case that um at the end of the day capital capitalism sort of has to be this transitory thing because because at the end if

you just let it go unimpeded where you end up is capital becomes very centralized the centralized holders of capital are going to have immense power it's in their material interests to collude with each other um and essentially form their own society and the last point that i make there is that this in my opinion happens with or without a government so one of the big pushbacks i got on this point in the piece was that well if we all if we didn't have a government or we had a much weaker government that this wouldn't happen right this collusion would be much more difficult And at the end of the day, the reason I don't think that is I believe that the holders of capital use government as a colluding mechanism because it's available. If it weren't available, they would just use a different mechanism.

In other words, right now, government is available. It's the easiest way to accomplish their goals. But there's no reason to think that in a country that has, I don't know, five or ten employers, those five or ten employers wouldn't get together and impose some sort of social insurance system just to keep people from being disruptive. For that same reason that I talked about in our discussion of social democracy where you want to push up the floor, it would be in their material interest to do so. Yeah, but the government acts as – like, if the government didn't exist, they wouldn't have – I'm thinking of banking right now. How hard is it to start a bank, and why is that? Banking's a really interesting one. Right?

Like, how hard is it to start a bank, and why is that? I wasn't going to get into this one until later. Licensing, accreditation, all that stuff. Like, would it be easier to start a bank without government? I think so. In the short term, right, well, actually, banking is really interesting because it controls the money, right? So let me use a different example first before we go to banking. Okay.

And then we'll get really wild. So imagine just your general production of consumer goods, right, or sale of consumer goods or whatever, that that's all set. Actually, you know, let me tell you, this is a better way to approach it. Take banking out of the equation. Just consider the rest of the economy. You've, Amazon's the only retailer, let's say, or Amazon and Walmart are the only retailers. They're probably manufacturing at that point a good number of the goods as well, because why wouldn't they once everyone else has been eliminated?

There's a few other manufacturers, let's say, involved in these goods. We have a small number of employers, this small economy, but the number of employers which are also the producers in society is small enough that they're actually pretty easily able to collude with one another right they can set regulations um they like i said they can even implement a social insurance system voluntarily you know and that could just be in the form of we agree to provide all our employees this we're going to raise prices by x percent in order to uh accommodate that and that's basically a tax you know but in that event where you're in a monopolistic or oligopolistic system that's really not uh distinctly different from a tax

So let's say it's all in their interest to do so. Well, what also is in their interest to do so? I very much think that controlling the monetary system is in their interest to do so because they are the large recipients. They essentially determine what types of currency are accepted versus not accepted. And one thing that didn't come into my mind until, it's not in the piece because I didn't think of this until later, But fiat currency is essentially an inevitable endgame of that whole system, right? Because if you have a small number of producers and a small number of employers, they're the ones that are going to determine in the society what currency is accepted and what's not.

Why wouldn't they just collude together and form their own central bank? And if you think that's crazy, right, a central bank that issues a currency that they accept and they control the supply of. if you think that's nuts i mean you can i would say mr robot if anybody watches that television series made exactly the point that i just made that's a scenario where essentially they all colluded together to create equine right yeah but yeah now the bitcoin exists like this all seems like well that's that's where i was going right so in other words one of the reasons why i care about bitcoin and i'm involved in it is i believe that it's a grand decentralizing factor in other words we'll i will come back to this but my interest in bitcoin is not necessarily to create

an anarchist society or anything even in that ballpark it's that i believe it has i don't believe it's the only solution to decentralizing capital but i think it very much cuts in that favor and that's why i have an interest in it when i talked about you know central banking sort of being the inevitable conclusion of this system where i was eventually going with that was that you know until the technology came about that allows us to have bitcoin i believe that that was the case right i don't believe even today in our current system let's not even just do pie in the sky stuff i don't believe the federal reserve exists and has its power because like some schlubs that got elected to office just dreamt it up in their heads it has that power because it's a

concerted effort correct it was a concerted effort and who really pulls the strings on that stuff it's the largest holders of capital because it's in their interest to have fiat currency so that's my point when i'm talking about the inevitability of fiat coming to four in a you know in a free market competitive capitalist system this is why that would happen and and that's why it did happen when this kind of goes to a larger point that i want to make here the two that's going to come back later when the government does something that you think is bad A lot of people tend to look at it and say, oh, well, it's because of, you know, it's because of, like, they think of the government as this separate entity that has its own ideas. No.

When the government does something that screws people over, more than likely it's because large holders of capital directed that to happen because they're the ones that are financing these elections. Your politicians are really only accountable to two groups, right? They're accountable to their voters and they're accountable to the capital holders, right? Because they get money from the capital holders and they get votes from the voters, right? So more often than not, and now this might be starting to change now with the democratization of information that we've seen, but for most of my life, the holders of capital were more important than the voters, right? Holders of capital may also be voters, but they're like one vote.

a billionaire only has one vote but he has a tremendous amount of capital uh so he obviously is going to carry more influence tremendous amount of free speech with that capital correct exactly so that's sort of you know democratization of information i believe has been a good thing for that reason but before that happened imagine when you only had a few television channels right like this is this is a tremendous amount of power i think it's a folly to assume there's this honestly what i think is a crazy idea that that government is constantly you know at loggerhead with big business oh they're fighting with each other and if only the government got out of the way business could flourish no i think that's completely wrong they're very much on the same

page and any appearance to the contrary is essentially controlled opposition um well really to make it appear so yeah i i feel pretty confident in that that that's that that's how our system works which is why again we're going to keep coming back to this i think the most positive thing you can do in terms of forming a society is creating a system in which capital is decentralized rather than rather than centralized decentralized capital creates more stakeholders it's really just that simple well and that's why i'm like so confused what did it enable like the the capitalist uh utopian competitive society that we envision not utopian but what bitcoin yeah like the sound money like you say all these capitalist systems uh eventually devolve into

central banking fiat run run not devolve they eventually get to a point where the holders of capital create central banks and create a fiat system which enslaves the people via inflation if bitcoin takes that away and doesn't allow uh the capital controllers to do that like does that curb them to a certain extent and induce their failure quicker therefore making the capitalist feedback loop go quicker as well yeah i mean it certainly cuts in that direction and that's why uh you know i in fact sorry if that was an ineloquent no no it cuts in that direction and that's why look that's why i'm involved with bitcoin i mean that's one of the points i want to make is like sometimes i say these things and people are like well why would you give a crap

about bitcoin then if you think all these things and it's like well specifically because i think it's a decentralizing factor for all it at very minimum right doesn't allow uh centralized holders of capital to control the money supply so they're not going to get to benefit from the cantillan effect another giant centralizing factor so it's it is a fact it is at a minimum a factor that cuts in favor of decentralization over centralization if that makes sense okay so if not a capitalist system run on sound money what what do you envision uh the transition in a post-capitalist world yeah so at some point right here's what i think is going to happen so the my hope if we were able to transition into a servile state system which the fiat system obviously aids that

I don't think it should be controversial to say that because the servile state system rests on essentially what we call today social democracy, and that's much easier to do with fiat currency because you can just print more fiat currency. So Bitcoin may be our way to avoid that servile state system in that you will not be able – I still think that capital is going to tend to centralize in the free market system, but you're not going to be able to placate the people at the bottom. right so they're essentially i guess a good way to phrase this would be without the ability to print fiat currency i don't believe the large centralized holders of capital will be able to prevent a proletarian revolution and my hope is that when i say that that's not a violent one it could be an electoral one we still do have elections in the united states and the democratization of information cuts in favor of that as well right it also create it reduces the ability that these holders of capital have to influence elections so if i'm right and bitcoin essentially creates

a situation where the servile state becomes difficult if not impossible to implement that that raises the next obvious question of what's next right so in other words uh if people are going to be, you know, we have this giant proletariat, proletariat, excuse me, that's all riled up. What is going to come next from there? And my hope is that it's actually not a purely Marxist solution. And I, I know a lot of Marxists. I think they're actually really well-meaning people. It's probably going to be a controversial thing to say on this podcast. Even though I don't agree with their ideas uh and oftentimes i think a lot of people conflate the identity politics they see on television with marxism when those two things are actually in fact very much at

loggerheads uh orthodox marxists hate identity politics more than you can imagine probably more than anybody here does because it gets in the way of their class-based politics um and it's worth noting that uh uh you know it was actually the cia that created identity politics this is not a conspiracy theory you can look up the frankfurt school on wikipedia and learn about that so cia has been up some shit for some for a few decades exactly that said now that i just i've by now i've probably you know angered infuriated everyone i like this car this is like an interesting conversation like think of alternative economic systems right so my problem with with marxism is i believe it's utopian to believe that you could have a marxist system without a dictator

right in other words i i don't see how you could have you can respect people's human freedom uh in a marxist system although many people in a in a in a at least at the end of the logical progression of a marxist system right a purely orthodox marxist system i know a lot of really well-meaning people that disagree with me on that point but that's my belief and you know what i'm biased my family came here from the ussr in 1917 to get away on one side of my family to get away from the revolution so that's probably you know we all have our biases and that's probably part of mine but moving on from that let's say that that i don't my hope is that we don't have uh you know we don't turn into the USSR, right, necessarily in that situation.

I see a couple different ways you could go about it. Number one are distributist-type solutions, right? And those are basically solutions based in positive law that are designed to tilt the balance towards decentralization of capital away from centralization of capital. And the interesting thing to note here in terms of Bitcoin is most of those solutions cost very little, if not nothing, so they're not really affected by the inability to print fiat currency. For instance, you can have an antitrust system

that doesn't require a lot of funding. It doesn't require the same amount of funding as, you know, providing direct benefits to people, for instance, right? So that makes, that's very much a possibility. Um, uh, you know, I give a couple examples there. Antitrust is one example. Is that imperfect? Absolutely. Because you have to have human beings making decisions about, uh, you know, exactly what, uh, what businesses need to be broke up. Um, I'm willing to take that trade off that people are going to make mistakes and there's going to be cronyism and stuff like that. If at least some people, you know, uh, there's at least some decentralizing benefit there. Um, another point would be you know i think that businesses over a certain size um should be mandated to have

something in the ballpark of a german co-determination system and what that what that is for those that aren't familiar um in germany and i am not an expert on the german i'm more i know more about the way that i envision i would want to see it than i know about the way that it actually plays out in germany but essentially once you have a business in my mind how this would play out once you have a business that's large enough over a cert you know whatever you want to set that arbitrary threshold if you want to do it by revenue or the fact that it's publicly traded or whatever certain number of your directorships are then uh reserved for your employees um so they're going to have a say in how this company is governed and that that really

has two effect actually before i even get to the effects anyone that's offended by that is anti-libertarian um your right to incorporate is not like some natural law right it's actually a franchise granted to you by the state right the state grants you a franchise that you're allowed to engage in business you can have no personal liability at all for what your business does that's what incorporation is and you can have easily transferable ownership interests that's all a bundle of privileges that you enter into a contract with the state to get that right and in exchange you agree to pay taxes you agree to pay an annual report fee you know a variety of things it is quite literally a franchise. Most states in the United States at one point, if not still,

refer to their corporate income tax as a franchise tax because it's a fee or a franchise fee, because it's a fee you pay for that privilege. If you don't want that privilege, you can operate a business in your own name and you can have unlimited liability for it. No one stops you from doing that. This is a privilege that you've contracted for. So all I'm really arguing for on this point is uh an amendment to that contract essentially saying if you want that right to incorporate you agree that once your business gets over a certain size your employees are going to have a say in how the business is run and that really accomplishes two things number one on some level this has been studied in germany on some level it's going to lead to a

less efficient business right uh some of the studies in germany have shown that it's actually neutral um some have shown that it's like up to a 20 reduction in uh efficiency depending on how they measure that you know i don't want to get into that whole thing right now but by being less efficient frankly it favors smaller businesses and smaller holders of capital i think that's a great thing uh number two is it's naturally going to create a situation where people uh smaller are stakeholders. They're not holders of capital per se in this situation, have a say in how their everyday life goes. And that's just going to change the way that the business operates, frankly, right? Because it's not going to be a purely profit-making enterprise at that point. It's

also going to exist on some level for the benefit of its own employees. And that's, you can think that that's a bleeding heart thing. So be it. I don't, and the thing I want to emphasize here is that i do not make the case that this is not that the thing anything that i propose in this this conversation is a reduction in efficiency i've read human action i don't think anything in there is wrong i don't really dispute anything in there in fact you just said it was a reduction in efficiency right that's what i'm saying that's the point i'm making i think that it is a reduction in efficiency but i'm willing to take the trade it's a trade-off right so you're trading off that for uh quality of life right and i point out that one of the one of the points made in human action

is that in the hand i believe it's in the section on hampered markets do you want to look it up uh no i wouldn't be able to find it that quickly because it's like what it's like a few sentences i believe if i remember correctly one of the points that's made in human action is you know this is how things play out this is how you maximize wealth it doesn't really talk about efficiency per se and here's what happens if you hamper the market and then it says in there somewhere that's like you know if someone makes a decision to hamper the market this this information is not is descriptive it's not prescriptive right in other words you just need to know what you're giving up if you're going to hamper the market and that's why i think human action is in fact a

very valuable book i have no quibble with it at all um i look at this sort of thing very clear-eyed in terms of what we're giving up. And it's extremely possible, for instance, that with the type of stuff that I'm talking about, you're going to end up with a system where you cannot have any product from anywhere in the world shipped to your door in two days

for no shipping fee. It is extremely possible that you are not going to get that. But to me, it's worth the trade-off, right? What is your ideal scenario? What is the ideal thing that we get out of this? the ideal is that we you know capital remains decentralized which allows people to have uh more control over their daily lives they're not living in this servile relationship that i think

would be the natural result of not doing things like this and these are two examples by the way that i just that i give right um i don't think there's a these are only two examples of ways to use positive law to encourage decentralization but my point in using those two is those don't cost anything. So there's no reason that those become impossible in a Bitcoin system, right? I mean, they have, well, if they cost something, the cost is very low from the government's perspective. So you can have sound money all you want. I don't think that those things are at all impossible to finance. And frankly, you know, there are some natural, I'll really get people riled up now. There are some things that are natural monopolies, right? It's generally

considered, for instance, that your utility company is a natural monopoly, right? That typically you're not going to have multiple utility companies willing to run lines to the same neighborhood. That's not something we've seen. And in cases like that, I don't really have any problem with those types of entities being brought under direct government control and operated for the benefit of the people. I consider that a last resort because that is a type of centralization um which is usually what i'm against but i don't think that anything's a perfect system and you know if if something's going to be a monopoly i'd rather if something has to be a monopoly and we have no way to really decentralize it and create a competitive market

which isn't going to happen most of the time but if that's the case i'd rather it be a government monopoly than a private monopoly i don't know man is the government well private has private monopoly's done a good job right yeah well i'm thinking particularly about the grid system now because i got freaked out about the grid system a couple weeks ago because uh i wrote a post about a dude who wrote a post on how to set up a blockstream satellite and he talked about how easy it would be to take down the grid system like in california and silicon valley years ago there was like two snipers that took down six generators in silicon valley right those are those are all private monopolies yeah um yeah so what i'm trying to get is like the decentralization

of the grid like isn't isn't the texas grid like more decentralized and more well i guess i mean you can decentralize a grid in terms of the number of monopoly the number of territorial monopolies right in other words and i'm not opposed i think if you're going to bring something under government control i think that is the way to go to decentralize the grid in other words i'd rather have municipalities running your uh i strongly prefer a municipality running your grid rather than the state or federal government yeah i guess texas uh is that a is that texas is my i don't know the answer to that question i don't want to say that i know the answer to that question but there i mean there are municipalities

throughout the united states that do control their own grids um it really depends on the it depends on the area uh but you know whereas say in california p and g controls the grid in almost the entire state right so that's actually you made my point even better than i could This is an example where government control actually would be a – it's a rare case where this would be the situation, but it actually has a decentralizing influence because instead of one entity with total control over the grid, you'd have a bunch of different municipalities, each controlling their own section of the grid, I'm sure cooperating with each other and also with – in terms of threats from overseas, cooperating with the federal government as well. but it at least you know creates some level of decentralized control over there so that's actually a pretty good example um you know my philosophy on government is you want it at the lowest level possible um which by the way is fundamentally what would make uh me incompatible with marxism marxism is by its own description is a centralizing philosophy the idea i mean

leninism is based around the idea of uh democratic centralization as they call it you know all decisions you have diversity in i'm not a leninist so please forgive me if you are and i'm mischaracterizing this but diversity in thought unity in action in other words democratic centralization is we all debate something we vote on it whoever got whoever lost out in this giant vote with this centralized you know uh entity they're just done they've got to play along with the rest of us, no questions asked. That's how Leninism works. And that's not what I would consider an optimal system, right? I strongly favor, I want to emphasize, decentralizing a system and bringing all decision-making, whether it be economic, governmental, et cetera, to the

lowest level possible. One of the problems with distributist literature is it was written in a time where it was easier to do that because we weren't as industrialized, right? So one of the things uh that's mentioned like in chesterton's distributist works is this idea that well we could pay unemployed people in the cities to basically become subsistence farmers and give them land well that was a good idea then that's not going to work now so i don't i don't claim that those ideas are all bulletproof or that they don't need to adapt and change with the times right so i just considered an ideal to strive towards not that we can be fully decentralized in every area but we that should be the goal that's the first principle no i'd agree that's

a good goal to strive for uh makes everything stronger more robust at the end of the day but what i'm still trying to grasp yeah over the many conversations that we had distributism in general and the way it's been framed like again the trade-offs efficiency um for potential quality of life and we've been talking about decentralization a lot does this distributism impede emergent uh action uh what do you mean by emergent action well because that's when i view like an ideal capitalist system this is very emergent just happy like new technologies oh or you mean just that the idea that uh okay i think i understand what you're competitive yeah there's a there's a lao emergent competition well i don't well

here's the thing my point is that's good the that's a really good point so because this is going to tie into this is i think is going to clarify what i'm trying to say for a lot of people believe it or not i consider the open market to be the first principle where we start and then from a utilitarian perspective we work our way back from that so i don't believe the opposite it's not like i believe the best thing is taking things out of market control i generally believe the market is where to start and we work back from there in two ways number one things where we should hamper the market i'll explain why in a second and number two i do believe there are certain things that just shouldn't be left to

you know uh to the market at all but okay i want to know about those okay uh that's that's no problem that that this is a whole tour of uh of controversial statements so we'll we'll get we'll get there um where was i going okay so a hampered market right i do not believe in central planning as the ideal right you know whether soviet style or otherwise because i fundamentally believe the market more efficiently allocates resources but what i believe is it will in fact be so efficient if we don't you know forcibly decentralize it uh it will in fact be so efficient that only one guy is i'm exaggerating slightly but one guy comes out the winner at the end and now we don't have a competitive market anymore well see that's where that's where i'm hung up okay where you

forcibly interject and like again it reminds me of the fed trying to forcibly inject with the interest rates like how many negative externalities arise from that interjection right yeah my point isn't that there aren't negative externalities i as we talked about when we were discussing human action i fully accept the negative externalities of it i just think it's better than the the alternative well my point is like how do you know what the externalities are all right at the front i mean i can prognosticate as to what they are uh and i honestly think that uh we've talked about human action a lot is probably a really good uh that's a good method for prognosticating as to what they might be but ultimately you're right i mean i could be completely wrong uh that's what

worries me that i've just said yeah but i believe the alternative is so much worse this is like i view this as a flight 93 thing like if we if that you know the alternative is that well two things number one i view it as a flight 93 thing flight 93 is a good analogy for this okay i mean i'm using everybody dies at the end right in both scenarios i'm referring to the michael anton essay are you familiar with it no no okay so michael anton wrote an essay called the flight 93 election where if for those who aren't familiar his argument was that this i'm not endorsing any particular i just completely assumed for your yeah yeah okay so the flight 93 election meant that his point was uh the point he made in the essay is trump might be terrible but and we

all might die at the end like we didn't like we did in that flight but that your only option is to storm the cockpit you know what i mean like you just you don't have another op you die either way right so why not storm the cockpit so i consider everything that i'm mentioning here essentially to use michael anton's uh uh is it an analogy or no it could be a metaphor i suppose to use michael anton's metaphor um i view everything i'm saying is storming the cockpit also it's important to say and i noted this to be in the piece i don't even necessarily think that what i'm saying is prescriptive as much as descriptive so in other words if we have a system capital is really centralized now and it's only going to become more centralized as time goes on in the

current fiat system right so let's assume that hyper bitcoinization is real and that happens uh in 10 20 30 whatever whatever whatever your idea of when that happens is and the social democratic part of the system fails because of hype because of hyper bitcoinization right let's assume that well do you really think people are just going to sit there and allow those centralized holders of capital to just sort of hang out frankly exploit them right and not be providing the benefits that the prior social democratic system did i don't think they are i think that They are, in fact, going to either find another way to institute another type of quasi-social democratic system, which maybe they can get away with, maybe because they have so few competitors they can get away with raising prices as a type of hidden tax and then provide benefits to their own workers based on those rising prices. again specifically structured in such a way that the workers themselves are not able to accumulate

any sort of real capital not enough capital to frankly compete with those existing large holders of capital that's a possibility i think bitcoin makes it harder the other option is something along the lines of what i'm talking about you can think my ideas suck and still think that something that there's a better idea and i'd actually love to hear that if anybody has like i'm still trying to wrap my head around your ideas they don't i don't think they they're definitely very interesting and thought-provoking um and i get no and i get it decentralization as an ideal is something i agree with and i'm again i'm just trying to here's i guess i can't i can't i just because i haven't thought about this enough i think a lot

of people here's visualize here's what it all comes down to it's do you believe that decentralization or centralization is the natural order of things which one do you believe and you have to think about in the con that in the context of industrialization yeah but there's like a contradiction there right in your explanation and what do you mean what's the like if you believe it's decentralization and emergent and then the hampering of of industry well i don't think whether something's emergent doesn't mean it's whether or not it's decentralized you could have a you could have a centrally you could have uh you could create an economic system enforced from the top right it's no way around that uh enforced from the top

designed to devolve certain powers down to that's a good point that's a good point yeah yeah what's wrong there um no again again and this this is purely probably because distributism is a completely new after well it's it what's interesting about it concept to me yeah for anyone that thinks this is kooky which is probably most i want to make a couple points that are kind of that i find interesting number one yeah i mean this is uh an early 20th century i well really a late 19th century the popes came up with it right as we talked about in the last podcast rerum novarum was where it all started which was a papal encyclical by the way i'm not an integralist for some reason distributism has sort of taken on this uh this belief that you have to be an

integralist to go for integralism for those that aren't familiar is people that think that essentially the roman catholic church should be integrated with the u.s government i don't believe that at all i just want to kind of throw that out there yeah um but anyway as a concept started with the popes who really didn't give any concrete solutions at all and then most notably chesterton and block in the early 20th century are the guys that started writing about solutions the reason why you don't hear about chesterton and block is their ideas never really got implemented back then partially because we had like world wars and all other kinds of stuff going on at that time and because they were never implemented they kind of got forgotten about and if you go back and read

the books now as to the specific solutions it seems silly because it's uh it was a more agrarian society then right like these they're just not going to fly you have to be willing to read this stuff more at more looking at as an ideal and having work right it's open land it's oh this is like blue ocean right in today's times what's interesting though is these ideas are coming to the fore now sometimes under the name of distributes distributism excuse me sometimes not like i never expected i'll give you one example this is not an endorsement of the sincerity of the person that i'm about to mention right now uh one thing that was very controversial was marco rubio came out in november and said that he now considers himself a distributist he's rebranding

that way i guess for the next for the 2024 presidential election i suppose right and i only he knows if this is sincere or if it's political opportunism i'm not i truly do not mean to imply one or the other of those things because i just don't know i don't i don't know the guy but the fact that a presidential candidate who's like not a free i assume will not be a fringe candidate for president in 2024 thought that this was a good thing to adopt show stuff like ideas like that don't get adopted if people don't get the get the feeling that that's the way the wind is blowing right i think like that things like that show me which way the wind is blowing that's just one example and if you fuck marco rubio though okay that's fine uh i just have a

visceral hatred for politicians i think they're all completely fine robotic no arguments here i'm not here i'm certainly not here to defend politics but i do agree it is interesting that it's just it's right that was my point i mentioned it only is that it's interesting that he found it necessary to do that interestingly uh he kind of he he did this at a speech in november and then he's written about it and it very much upsets a lot of people at you know uh i guess more some more libertarian conservatives that lean a little more libertarian were very upset by it but Rubio branded

Distributism as a reformation of capitalism rather than rejecting it outright I thought that was interesting I don't think that really means anything, it's just semantic where you think capitalism starts and ends it was probably smart to do that

just because it makes it seem less radical, I suppose and I could have easily, I guess when I wrote my piece, made it seem like an evolution of capitalism rather than a post-capitalist idea or an anti-capitalist idea. But I decided to be a little more provocative. In addition, the Rubio thing is the most punch-it-in-the-face example of this. Wake you up that this is not something that people are adverse to.

Look at if you mess around on Twitter and look at where political activists are on certain issues. on the right so traditionally in the united states we've seen libertarian ideas imperfectly of course i'm not saying that that we have like a real libertarian austral libertarian party in the united states or anything like that but they've generally crept in on the right right in other words uh ronald reagan certainly i mean a big part of his presidency was deregulation open markets small government yeah right uh even even bill clinton uh he said that the era of big government's over right we've seen this in our politics it's it's had strong influence in our politics as he

signed after yes but you know i guess well i won't even get into trade right now but um because i don't want to get too far off my point on the right if you look right now that reagan type conservativism like among like i'm not talking about just like your average you know what are sometimes called conservative inc people right in other words people that run packs or media celebrities or things of that nature no if you look at if you take a look online you look on social media what the young people that consider themselves conservative are pushing it ain't open market stuff at all it is quite straight nationalism right and in fact the term they use this is not my term i'm just this is observational is losertarian right is what they call libertarians

I don't use that term because I still think that freedom is a good first principle, individual freedom. And like I said, we work back from there. We don't look at that as a negative. It's just a first principle. When I say first principle and work backwards, I view stuff like that as the way – I'm not a physicist, so forgive me any physicists that are listening for butchering physics. But the way I learned physics in high school was you learned what worked in a vacuum, and that's what I consider human action to be. And then you make adjustments as necessary when you move out of the vacuum and into the real world. So where was I going there?

Okay, other examples that you see of these types of ideas taking hold. These people are very much not socialists, but also very much not open markets people. and they're nationalists in the current globalized world this is bizarre to say but nationalism is a type of localism i hope that's not the smallest level that we end up at but it is in fact a type of localism it very much is which is a change from most the pre-global era but that's where we are today so that's one thing and then look at who's the who do you think is the most of all those stupid talking head shows that are on all the news networks right i'm assuming you don't watch any of them but just things you hear second hand third hand whatever who do you think the most

popular one of those hosts is um tucker carlson of course right tucker carlson is like the least open free markets guy on television right now and i don't mean that negatively i kind of you know i'm not overly political uh but i kind of get a kick out of some of these takedowns that he runs on various sort of corrupt crony capitalist systems. And that's where the energy is. I only mention these things not as an endorsement of any of these people, nothing else other than the fact that the ideas that I'm coming up with, there's energy behind this.

Even if these people believe things that are different from me, they're believing things that are more directionally in my direction than certainly in the open markets direction. I never have in my life seen, in fact, so little momentum in the direction of open markets, partially because I, you know, my frame of reference is the 80s, 90s, and today. The 80s and 90s were the most free market era. I mean, they're the neoliberal era, right? I mean, free movement of labor, free movement of capital is what defined those eras, even into the first decade of the 2000s. um so that i mean just again just descriptive here not being prescriptive put your finger to

the to the wind and see where it's blowing that's not the direction you know where this is going one of my i mean if you need more evidence one of just to go back to tucker for a second one of his direct quotes um this wasn't i used one of his quotes in the piece to sort of make this point but this is not one of the two that i used um was i'm paraphrasing i'm not getting this exactly right but was i used to be a libertarian and for that i'm ashamed and i'm sorry um so like that's a hell of a statement whether you agree with that or not different issue i bring it up only as evidence of which way the winds are blowing as of today that's it no again merely descriptive no i mean libertarians more recently particularly have uh been derided for for being

weak like not uh like the the nakamoto institute versus the kato institute memes perfect example right yeah the in no action um not not really implementing anything well and i but i think it's more than that right so like the the nakamoto versus kato meme basically the idea is that kato is weak they're kind of like tied into beltway stuff they're not real libertarians etc the energy i'm talking about is more so like you know people on the streets yeah it's more and it's more the the idea behind it is yeah we tried this completely unregulated markets thing which i know people will hate that i said that but we let's let's say not completely unregulated we tried deregulating more because that shouldn't be controversial i mean if you look at the period

between 1945 and 1971 and then you look at 72 to today the markets were drastically deregulated um that that's not even controversial and people are looking back and they're saying you know what that post-war period was a lot better um and that and that's where a lot of this energy is coming from yeah no it is i've been observing it observing it as well i mean i'm a fan of tucker i don't agree with everything he says but i do think he same here and my point this brings me to another point i mean part of my belief system and the things i'm talking about are because i believe the system between 1945 and 1971 was better than today right i so describe that system well you had a system where well i mean the big part of it that we all know is we had a quasi

gold standard right so we whether or not you want to say we had sound money in that period it was sounder it was soundish at least until the it started to get out of control in the late 60s um it became the sound money aspects of it sort of became a sham in that period but for a large part of that period we had sound money another thing that i think is very valuable from that period and this will be very controversial is you we had high levels of unionization i am absolutely a huge fan of unions and this goes back to the trade-offs issue so the argument against that is well you know unions get money so they do things that are corrupt they don't always act in the in the best interests of their members i agree with god keep finishing i agree with

all of those things 100 but i think the alternative is worse uh and i the way i've seen that play out in real time you know heavily unionized country versus a non-heavily unionized country i think the unionized way is is honestly the way to go um and i think one of the big tragedies is the interest rate hikes of the 1980s just decimated unions in this country in a way to which they still haven't recovered and that's by the way that's another thing cutting against uh you know why part of the uh an argument against why fiat's so bad it created a system where it was felt that we had to do those interest rate hikes in order to control inflation and it had this horrible it came at the worst possible time when there were mass strikes going on in the

united states and just decimated unionization in this country well to push back on that point yeah or not to push back and uh thought to in a thought experiment agree yeah like i think you're talking to to uh to somebody who's whose family was built on you and so i mean not my parents my grand my grandfather was a union man both my grandfathers were um and during that period you're describing uh but do we like do we need you like do we need bloggers unions like should barstool no actually that's kind of interesting yeah like you were saying like it might be good for certain things to be monopolized in certain instances i think with unionization that might be like i think like steam fitters pipe fitters roofers they make

sense because their intensive jobs are actually building shit yeah pmc unions are silly so professional managerial class unions in other words people that are part of that class are silly uh even like these journal it's funny like one of the only things that one of the only sectors is how perverse the current system is in which unionization has had success recently as journalists of all people uh have been successful in unionizing you're right i mean i don't really favor per se believe it or not i i like to be as hands off with the law as i believe we can be so i don't necessarily i'm not like against specifically discriminating against those groups forming unions but the unions that are actually helpful are you know your workman's

unions and the best example of that man is i don't know if you've read about some of this amazon stuff that goes on in these work in these warehouses and it doesn't go on in every warehouse i saw somebody talking about today apparently people are just like pissing their pants running around or something like that i'll give you one that's much worse so amazon sets its working conditions based on the labor which all employers do this but based in the labor of the labor market where it's located right so i'm not even just talking about wages i'm talking about stuff like that so in other words like in their new york warehouse they probably couldn't get away with making people pee in their pants but they might be able to do that i don't know in missouri or

ohio or whatever right so it gets so much worse um amazon so obviously these warehouses are not air conditioned they why would they be that's that's not how it works but typically if you you know if you work in a warehouse what they do is when it gets very hot they open the bay doors otherwise you've got hundreds or thousands of people in the warehouse breathing and it's just heating up like a box in there constantly so they open up the bay doors so amazon doesn't like opening the bay doors because they think that it uh employees can slip out with packages they can steal stuff so instead of opening the bay doors they hired ambulances to just sit outside because they knew a certain number of people were going to collapse from heat exhaustion to just run in

and get them and bring them into the ambulance this is a real story like this was any this isn't like they called the ambulance when the when a guy collapsed they knew 100 what they were doing if those guys were unionized that would not happen like like you can criticize unions all you want that ain't happening in a unionized workplace i trigger a lot of people with this episode no but it's interesting to to have these yeah these thought these i think ideas battled out and i think you know i've i've talked to since the since the piece came out i've talked to a lot of people that are even so far as anarchists on this issue um and i've been really blessed in that no one's like tried to bite my head off or like taking it personally

or anything like that i've had for other you know people did that on twitter but that i don't take that seriously like more so uh friends of mine right mutual friends of ours who consider themselves anarchists or minarchists or certain or austral libertarians or whatever um have certainly you know disagreed with me on a lot of these issues but they haven't killed me over it you know what i mean so that's something that uh i hope people also extend to you that same courtesy for having me on yeah no i think there's something how many approaching his 30s who's uh probably your typical trajectory of political uh um leanings through his life more liberal when i was younger then i started getting paid became more conservative and felt that coin anarcho-capitalist

i've probably leaned towards these days and um distribute again like when we had our first conversation this this system that you're describing that revolves around decentralization it's just not talked about really right right it's absolutely the case because you know it's easier to control a more centralized system right so all the initiative you're a stakeholder or you have real power in a society you know whether it be uh laissez-faire capitalism or or marxism are more uh beneficial to you because they're both easier to pervert right for your own purposes because they're by their nature more centralized um and and we've seen that in uh countries around the world right for the past hundred years a system like this is i mean i'm not saying you

can't pervert it but it's hard to do right because there's just way more people involved and uh and again the power is being exercised at a much lower level it's really a lot harder to get exploited by a guy who like lives around the corner and you see every day than a guy that lives 2 000 miles away and has never met you yeah the nigerian prince right um so how would you implement this If you were to start, would you, would you have to get like a, would you have to have like California secede and break up into parts and one be like, Hey, no, I mean, I don't even think you need anything that radical. I mean, the, the, the stuff that I've talked about today, I mean, is not even really that

big antitrust. You just need to start enforcing it. Like, that's not, we already have that in this country. There would just have to be a political will to enforce it. Right. Um, so what would antitrust enforcement look like? Well, I mean, it's just a matter of, I mean, it's just a matter of, it's just a matter It would look like exactly the way it was done throughout most of the history of the Antitrust Act up until, like, maybe, I don't know, the 90s we stopped enforcing it.

So it's not, like, I'm not even going that far back into ancient history here. I think that that's, in terms of how to implement these things, whether it's, like, antitrust, you know, co-determination for companies over a certain size. Well, I mean, there's countries that have that already that are not, like, far-flung loony places. Examples? Germany. Oh, yeah, yeah. We talked about that. You know, what else did I mention in there?

I'm trying to think of... Oh, unionization, that's easy. I mean, card check was a major issue in the 2008 election. Barack Obama promptly forgot about it once he got elected, but that was one that came... Card check, for those that aren't aware, makes it easier for workers to form a union. Currently in the United States, the way it works is

if you want to form a union in your workplace, You have to get your employees to sign cards. Once over 30% of the employees sign cards, then they're presented to the employer, and there's an election, essentially, that goes place. And basically, sometimes hanky stuff can go on between signing. Once the election comes about, the employer knows about it. They can do some sketchy stuff to try to dissuade unionization. if more than 50 percent of the you don't have to stop getting cards at 30 percent of the employees if you decide to go over 50 percent of the employees you still have the election but the

employer has the option at that point to just scrap the election and voluntarily recognize the union immediately no employers do that right like in real world card check would basically just say if you get over that 50 threshold the union recognition then becomes mandatory it's no longer voluntary for the employer there's no election you got over half of the card signed it is what it is is that a perfect system no it makes it easier for the union to intimidate employees to sign the cards right that's very cool as opposed to as opposed to an election again what we talked about on this whole podcast trade-offs right and i think that that's people can i think really well meaning people can disagree with me here but i think that's more

than worth the trade-off uh that that you're going to get more unions in that scenario so So part of it depends on whether you look at this deontologically versus in a utilitarian way as well, and I fully accept that, and I do not in any way think the stuff I'm talking about is utopian. It's going to have significant tradeoffs. In terms of how it gets implemented, my hope – a lot of listeners are probably anarchists that don't believe in democracy or Republican government at all, and I respect that opinion. um in fact i think it's completely reasonable based on the experience that you may have had with democratically elected republican i'm using democrat and republican in the lowercase versions here not the political parties that you may had with democratically elected governments and republican uh republics republics democratic republics let's say that yeah that you may have

had my hope i'm always an optimist right there's no use to being uh pessimistic about this stuff i don't think is that until now we've had a couple things going on through actually throughout most of american history right one is in the united states we've always had this idea um that this is the best quote on it this is a fake quote there's an interesting history about behind this um this is a quote that is attributed to john steinbeck he never said it somebody just made it up at some point and i've heard a million different uh versions of it uh but the point is that there's there's no change in america because all americans are temporarily embarrassed millionaires have you heard that quote before i have not okay so what it means is everyone

in the united states even if they're down and out they hold the belief that this is just a bump in the road and that they're someday going to make it that's what they mean by temporarily that's what the meaning of that quote is by temporarily embarrassed millionaires it's yes yes yes gotcha so the uh this is very closely tied to the bootstrap smith meaning in the united states if you're willing to work hard enough and do everything right you can pull it up pull yourself up by your bootstraps the bootstraps myth is really interesting um i think about this a lot because there's an interesting duality there where with the bootstraps myth at the individual level believing the myth is extremely beneficial victimhood you know uh uh believing yourself

into victimhood doesn't do you any good right even if the bootstraps myth is false you come out ahead by believing it and doing your best and doing all you can to support yourself right so at that level it's good at the society-wide level it's actually a negative because if everybody believes the bootstrap bootstraps myth they're no longer motivated to electorally or otherwise make structural change that will be better for everyone right because they are temporarily embarrassed millionaire and they think that they're eventually going to come out on top in this system so that's a really interesting duality that's that's very much ingrained into the history of the united states i i would argue there um what's going on and for better or

worse because there are both like i said the bootstrap smith is both good and bad uh i don't have a position actually on whether it's better or worse i think i don't know i that's i one of the things i pride myself on is i'm always willing to say when i don't know whether and i don't know whether that has a net positive or negative effect but what is happening is the bootstrap smith is dying right i mean less people believe in the bootstraps myth than did uh 30 years ago yeah that's like that's bad okay so like so like my problem with distributed or my understanding of distributism up to this point or yeah post-capitalist world too is like i think it just really um that's what i'm looking for it under um

under appreciates the role that maybe like socially changing like telling people that you should be individually responsible you should yeah like stay in shape eat well learn like living oh yeah life like i'll get to that like maybe we should strive for that and not uh trying to manipulate market forces to get an outcome right the the reason you the everything you just outlined is the reason why i'm not a social democrat right okay because that's the worst system for in terms a personal responsibility it really is um and the reason i'm not the reason i'm not a social democrat is i'm not trying to say that you're not personal responsible or anything like no no i don't take it that way at all you're very personally responsible yeah um no the reason i'm not a social

democrat is for that reason and the reason i'm not a marxist is because i do believe that there's a natural hierarchy of people some certain people are more talented than others and those people should be encouraged and able and live it and be in a system where those talents are rewarded right like i don't believe in a completely flat system that's why i'm not uh i'm not a marxist however i think the distributed system is about trying imperfectly of course trying to take the best of personal responsibility and market allocation of resources versus the some of the more negative effects which create this more centralized system and again i think it's a flight 93 solution where if you don't do that you're not recognizing that capitalism is a

transition period and i don't like the 93 you know okay we all die in the end right but my point is you have nothing to lose i'll all right i'll say it's a nothing to lose situation okay because that's what that's what michael anton meant so you have no i don't think you have anything to lose because if you try to extend out this capitalist period of development as far as you possibly can i think you end up with the servile state i don't think there's any way around that it's definitely happening yes it's happening now right yes so but that's my point so i in fact like again i would argue that's the monetary system and not the economic system right that is a certain counter argument to my point i just don't believe that that i don't believe

that it's enough i think it's i think it retards the centralization of capital well like the uh like the uh conservative nature through which we approach bitcoin or not we which bitcoin core developers approach their development process in the world of transitioning economic mindsets right like you you want to you don't want to raise the block size so like going straight to distributism maybe maybe you uh interject sound money first and then see how that yeah that's fine i'm not like i don't i got i i don't know that i'd advocate for doing all this stuff tomorrow well actually you know i will push back on that a little bit for a couple reasons um one point i want to make about being conservative like laissez-faire capitalism

like really new like we can we tend to like have this idea in our heads that like this has been around forever and it's the natural order of things it is very much not it is it is like a really new thing we've had it in some very small periods it's gotten us pretty far well depends what you mean by technologically do you think what what do you think was yeah i mean that's an interesting point um we you can you can think about it this way wasn't it the competition to move cotton around the u.s led to the steam engine yeah but that was a far like that this goes back to my point where actually let me rephrase what i said industrialization with laissez-faire capitalism is a very new thing it basically goes to like the 90s like we're all we're like less

than 30 years into this um so my point is here's okay i'm going to make this well a lot of the arguments against what i say here are that oh like everything you want to propose is a market distortion right it's a distortion of distortion that's what gets me up man industrialization is a distortion man i'm proposing a far lower distortion to if you want to say the quote unquote natural order of things in terms of anything that i've talked about here today than industrialization itself here is i'm trying to correct not even in its entirety right the only way to correct the distortion brought about by industrialization would be to de-industrialize and i don't want to do that i don't want to live on subsistence farms right but if you don't want

to do that then i don't have any problem at all with introducing additional distortions to try and deal with the original one because those are really only two options right you could just let the initial distortion brought about by industrialization just run amok and i understand there might be uh you know good reasons to do that or the other is you you get in there and you start mixing it up with other stuff i mean well the money the distortion to me the biggest distortion is the money not industrialization now i see i actually disagree fiat currency is absolutely a distortion industrialization is a bigger distortion see i think that's where I think a disagreement lies economies of scale just changed so much it's a natural progression

like yeah it seems like you're trying to interject with nature I'm not actually my quite the contrary my point was actually the opposite it was that I don't think arguments about what's natural in terms of a market they're not persuasive to me because there's nothing natural about industrialization in the first place so I kind of just reject all those things What do you mean by that? Well, what do you mean by – I only know what other – this is criticism that I get. This isn't my point. I don't believe that anything is natural about the way we live today.

So I just don't consider – that's not really a consideration for me. You think industrialization is a distortion because the consumerism that produces affects our decisions? Yeah, and it's central. I mean people – the economy is a scale. I mean predominantly through the economy is a scale. if you just live let's focus on an industry here media uh well all those are post-industrial industries so the reason this comes up like i'll tell you where i'm coming from with this like the argument i always get against people so some people like when i when i wrote this i got a

million things on twitter well nothing you mentioned would be the case about centralization if the government didn't exist so my counter argument is always the vacuum the power vacuum gets filled we talked about that earlier in the episode into this episode where we talked about how this the power vacuum just gets filled by collusion between the few remaining market players to create essentially a private government you know quasi-governmental entities um is always the power gets filled by a vacuum and i the point i always make is like history bears out what i say right in other words anytime there's been too big of a centralization of capital we've gotten either populist revolutions including early 20th century united states that broke up we

had trust busting in the united states that you know that broke that stuff up um or it just you know it just it never happened it never led to anything remotely considering uh remotely anarchist even where there was even though there was no government in place and all the counter examples i would get from people were like well prehistoric ireland the celtic tribes you know they didn't have i'm not an expert on prehistoric ireland so if i'm misstating history please forgive me But, like, prehistoric Ireland is always an example I get. The Icelandic Free State, which was also just, like, a really long time ago and pre-industrial, is, like, the other anarchist example that I get. And, by the way, I don't, you know, if you're an anarchist and you're listening, my friends who are anarchists are listening to this episode.

I'm not insulting your beliefs. I don't mean it that way. I'm just stating what I think is realistic here. all those and by the way i should also say that a lot of anarchists that i've spoke to to sort of steel man their side don't believe that perfect anarchism is realistic they see it as more of an ideal to strive yeah to rather well that's the thing like none of this is implemented implementable and it's ideal so really what i'm saying really what i'm saying here is like these these pre-industrial anarchist or quasi anarchist or uh another one i get a lot is um the holy

roman empire right again all pre-industrial most people like grew their own food and stuff you know what i mean like this is not the world that we live in today those economies of scale have been completely turned on their head um and that's why i just don't think those ideas from that era are particularly applicable to today all i know is when i look back at history uh the most the best example i can think of you know as an american in terms of like uh society is honestly that period from 1945 to 1971 and it wasn't perfect uh and it wasn't even necessarily distributist i mean the the federal government actually began to exercise a lot more power over that period but it was a hampered market right and that's why i'm not against per se the idea of hampered markets i

would like them to be hampered in a decentralized fashion rather than a centralized fashion and that's where i differ from that era but i'm just making the best based on all available evidence these are the conclusions to which i've come yeah that's why i wanted to bring you on to talk about this because again said it many times for this podcast just like an idea that i haven't like thought experiment i haven't thought about much or heard about what's interesting about it what i've found talking to people you know we all live including me this is not uh me ragging on you here we all live because of the bitcoin stuff in like a an ideological bubble like because i work in bitcoin and you work in bitcoin so like we uh we we're around bitcoin people like way more than

normal people are right and people that are very into bitcoin and have been into bitcoin for a very long time so we get like a lot of the if you look at it from that prism like the stuff that i've talked about on this podcast i completely understand uh sounds like wacky as hell just like completely just really radical the funny part though is honestly i think if you put this stuff on a ballot in front of like ordinary americans i think you could get 60 to 70 percent of the people to agree with the stuff that i just said i could be wrong about that it's just the the reactions i get from people outside bitcoin versus inside bitcoin i don't say that to say that the to try to appeal to some sort of like popular authority that my ideas are right because more

people like them that's certainly a fallacy um but i just kind of throw it out there as as evidence that the stuff i'm saying is not that radical and we talked about it when we talked about just sort of you know putting your finger to the wind of the way it's blowing right now i think the stuff that i'm talking about for the first time in my life it's less radical than at any other time that i've been alive are you like whoa what the fuck people are exactly the the rubio thing it was like me getting punched in the mouth because i was like not in a bad way but just like the shock of it when i read that i was like holy crap someone just said distributism on television you know what i mean like this like obscure uh you know late 19th early 20th century

thing uh has somehow made it onto on the tv right you know my hope my era of being alive has been you know the neat well you know i want for me what was the the biggest historical influence probably i'm don't want to speak for you but in your life at your age was probably september 11th yeah uh safe to say i'm old so for me in my life it was the ussr the the end of the ussr and the consequences that that had. Because that was the beginning of the real neoliberal era. You can say it started with Reagan and Thatcher, but it was really, that's when it took off, man.

Because we no longer had this threat of communism anymore. We could really deregulate without having to worry with short-term effects. The idea always was you had this welfare state system because otherwise if we did something that went wrong, people might start to turn towards communism. and that rightfully so was a really scary idea during the soviet era so in the soviet union the point being the fall of the soviet union in my life was the big event man like that it's hard

to almost explain to younger people like how insane that was because i have no idea yeah you had you spent your whole life of free when i say afraid of this foreign entity you weren't afraid of them the way you're afraid of isis they were way more dangerous than isis man like these are people that in this a little bit before i was born had nuclear weapons 90 miles off of florida pointed at the united states right and even in the early 80s the later 80s like tensions really did start to decline but in the early 80s were a tense time afghanistan like there was a you know there was a lot going on it's not something that you can really understand if you weren't living through it even tenser than the issues with china today no one really thinks there's a real

probability that china would send nuclear missiles at the united states yeah we're not having kids hide under their desk yeah and i don't want to give the impression that in the early 80s like that that was a common thought but it was like it was out there like that i mean if you watch the americans that's actually a really good did you ever watch that show never got into it okay like if you watch the americans that's a really good synopsis feel of what the what living in america in the 80s was like um in terms of the soviet union and what was so insane about the fall marty it was the blink of an eye like it was like 89 happened and you heard that there was like unrest and there were these protests in like soviet bloc countries and then by 91 it was done

It was like this, this empire, this, this unstoppable force was just gone almost overnight. Like it was just an unbelievable thing. And part of me feels that, so sometimes people talk about like, well, these changes that you mentioned, right? Like how realistic is it? And I always think back to, well, in 85, most people wouldn't wouldn't have said that the Soviet Union ending and becoming a capitalist country was realistic. But not only did it happen like it happened, like that, like the blink of an eye, like I said, you know what I mean? So, you know, you always wonder like when when are 1989 is I don't know if there is one, you know, I don't know. could be starting right now and by the way when i say comparatively so that nothing i say is taken

out of context i am not comparing the united states to the soviet union like let me be extremely clear about that i'm making an extended uh you know metaphor here as i said lest anybody think i have soviet sympathies my family came here in 1917 to escape the soviet union yeah no i'm not i wouldn't accuse you of having soviet tendencies you're just trying to describe the situation there yeah um now it is fascinating and it does look like seem like you're just genuinely exploring trade-offs yeah that's all it is and i you know a lot of and that's the thing like a lot of people some like they'll read something that like i wrote and will say well like you know you must like have you read any of the austrian literature or do you just not get it or do you just reject

it for some reason none of the above like like we like we've talked about with regard to human action it's like no i think it's probably a pretty good description of human nature the way humans make decisions the way the way markets work to the point where i think you could almost consider it a first principle but i think you got to work back from there yeah no thank you for um it took us an hour and 45 minutes but i think we did a good job i think We covered a lot. Yeah, man. We didn't even get into some of the spicier stuff I left off the table.

So we'll have to do. No, we have plenty of time. All right. Well, I was going to say, God, there were a couple of things I think that I wanted to get into. Oh, like you talked about how to implement these things. So another one of the more controversial opinions that I have is from a local perspective of a localist.

Again, I approach everything from a localist perspective. um i do not and i don't think this is contradictory with bitcoin at all and i'll explain why i do not favor free movement of labor and capital i just don't i just i think that it creates a race to the bottom um in terms of both standards for labor and environmental standards and i'll give some examples i'll try to steel man the counter argument against me here and kind of give some counter examples um and i don't think that's incompatible with bitcoin because bitcoin allows money to move across borders seamlessly but it doesn't do anything with the way physical goods or people move right and i don't do this to be heartless or or anything of that nature i just

think that the alternative is i'll give you a perfect example okay and i'm shaped again let me go back just well i like to always disclose my biases my life has been one where i started in the pre-cold war era where things were considerably more protectionist and i watched in real time well not the pre-cold war the pre the cold war era and then i moved into the post-cold war era where we took those restrictions off and i saw what happened right uh and it has not been good um now in terms of we have iphones and ipads yeah exactly that's the point yeah we and look at this tv it was only 200 that i was getting there so here's the here's the idea the counter argument against what i say there's a couple the first one is well trade tends to be looked at in this in

terms of mutually beneficial exchange right like if something's worth more to you than it is to me we we make a trade we both come out wealthier everybody's happy how could that be bad regardless of what country you and i live in right like how could that be bad and it's based on this idea that people can make rational decisions when they buy which i don't necessarily think is i don't reject that outright but when people make their purchasing decisions i do not believe they consider mth order effects and i'll give you the perfect example with the television what i'm about to say right now is not a fully accurate description of things as they are but it's meant to make a point it's simple it's a simplification so imagine you went into a store and you could buy a an american-made tv for

300 bucks or you could buy a chinese one for 200 bucks just imagine this world right in the american-made television all of the waste products are disposed in some sort of inappropriate fashion okay the chinese one they just dump it in the ocean but you don't see that because you don't live in china and also like that will forget about bleeding hard stuff just selfishly what affects you right that is not going to affect you today five years 10 years 15 years but it might affect you like 20 30 40 years down the line halfway around the world people are just dumping crap in the ocean right and then also the fact that i bought let's assume this is not that far off that the chinese factory that's making that cheaper television assume they're equal quality

by the way the chinese factory that's making that television their labor standards aren't very good so their cost of labor is way lower even just apart from how industrialized the country is it's just it's an authoritarian regime they're able to impose whatever labor standards they want people don't have the ability to strike or without threat of violence let's say based on their working standards so they're living as slaves or quasi slaves right and this is not too far off of where things are today so when i go to buy that television which television so that's excuse me so they're obviously their cost of labor is lower right so aside from the environmental thing by me buying that television my next door neighbor who works at the television factory in town

right i've contributed to just a little bit to the fact that eventually that factory is going to close he's going to be out of work and his lawn's going to get overgrown he's going to stop paying his mortgage again this is not a bleeding heart thing just looking at it selfishly he's not going to be able to pay his mortgage and now the value of my house is going to go down right so even if i'm looking at this completely selfishly the chinese tv the chinese tv if i'm looking at everything all down the line the chinese tv is not the better deal it's horrible because if i buy the american tv my property value stays higher my kids aren't going to have to deal with like fish with five eyes and stuff like that right like this is this is the way to go but that's not how it works like

we know this everyone buys a 200 television uh the american television factory goes out of business and that's how that's that's exactly how things go because when you're making and that trade was mutually beneficial in the short term like you you did you actually even though that purchase was not in your material self-interest that doesn't matter because you believed it to be so at the time because these nth order effects were too far down the line for you to reasonably consider when buying a television that's a factor of human nature like you can't tell me that that's not how it works so that's that's one of my issues with free trade is if we don't have tariffs to equalize that sort of thing or frankly i don't think we should be this is not something that

could be implemented at all overnight because we're so intertwined now but we should not be trading with china at all we should have never uh implemented normalized trade relations with china yeah the hui 5g thing sort of freaks me out huawei huawei yeah yeah so right that's another example by trading with china we're like harming our own security interests so none of these things get considered in a purchase decision so i have no problem at all enacting uh tariffs or trade restrictions to rectify that issue and it's just one of those things where you know i live in the real world and like this is how the real world works today and uh and now by the way going back to bitcoin wait wait wait yeah before we get to bitcoin yeah jeff are you a racist nazi right

that's always the exactly that's always the thing well the term now that they like on the internet for people that i don't know if you're familiar with this term that say these sort of things is you're a stressorite i i've gotten that one before you've heard this one yet okay so we'll get we'll do a little bit of history here so the national socialist party in germany right the nazis okay were not in hitler's the time that we think about when we think about the nazis they certainly were not marxists okay like they weren't really socialists so one of the things people oftentimes ask is like why is socialism in the name that really wasn't like a part of what they were doing at least in the time period when we think about nazi germany the reason is there actually was a

socialist current within the nazi party early on they were the strasser brothers were the two brothers that uh supported that so it was basically like it was like a racist worker-based party if you wanted to sort of like they definitely hated jewish people and i'm sure would have done the holocaust too um but they looked their antipathy towards jews also had like this weird like worker-based component to it right like the jew as a worker the jews are or the your problem like they're the ones exploiting you um so this is let me be clear this is a hideous ideology which should be roundly condemned so anyway when hitler got enough power within the nazi party he expelled the uh the strasser brothers they went into exile i

forget actually one of them might have been killed and one of them went into exile i don't remember the the history i think otto went into exile i forget the other guy's name he was killed so when you call someone a strasser right you're basically calling them both a nazi and a communist like it's the comp it's the combination combo yeah that's so this is sometimes referred to as strasserism sometimes it's referred to as red brown politics brown being the color of the nazi of the nazis red being the color of socialism uh it's also sometimes called beefsteak uh politics because you're brown on the outside and red on the inside um so that's those are all the various slurs that you can uh sometimes expect to get um yeah and obviously nothing i have said here today is meant

in any way to uh endorse the idea of an ethnostate or anything even remotely in that ballpark at any rate um no no but that's what people jump to when you exactly that's a conclusion people jump to and i and part of the reason why that conclusion is jumped to remind me to go back to why that conclusion is jumped to because that's a whole other interesting thing okay where were we before i got off on this stress right thing let me finish my you're gonna get into bitcoin okay let me finish that thought really quickly and then i'll go right back okay okay so another thing about bitcoin is it does make these wild trade imbalances like that we see between the u.s and china impossible because those are dependent on fiat money um basically

essentially you can only run such an insanely huge trade deficit when you have fiat money that you're printing and then its value is being supported by the other country reinvesting the money into your financial system which is why we've had financialization in the united states so that's another reason why i support bitcoin it does help the problem to some extent i don't think bitcoin solves this problem for good i still think that there would be a race to the bottom in terms of uh labor and environmental standards to jump back uh why do these slurs come out why is every why do all of these seemingly non-racist people like get branded as racists you haven't answered the question yet are you racist yeah right so that's a funny like

the funniest part about that is like when you talk about these like i'm like an almost native level spanish speaker like so like it's weird to accuse me of like not having been around the world or having some sort of animus to developing countries i love the developing world um and and have spent a lot of time there at any rate why sorry for it's okay forcing you to it's all right i didn't mean so i was joking it's all right now i know that you were i didn't take it personally um like why do we see this because it's a great grift man it is a fantastic grift because it's easy right here's the deal this is why everyone wins other than average people when when you make that the locus of how you look at the world right so let's say

you look at the world the way that i do like as a distributist or even if you look at the world as an orthodox marxist right someone who has a class-based not identity-based politics if you look at the world that way and you look outside and you see something that you consider unfair or that you want to change what's your natural inclination going to be in terms of how to change that it's going to be some sort of structural change whether it could be communism it could be distributism it could be making the market even freer you know what i mean like all those things are structural changes okay if you're someone that's doing really well in the current system that's bad for you right like which is includes all of our largest corporations currently

that control of our media right and that sort of propagate this identity based politics so how can you get people's focus off of that you move the focus away from class and you say this is really based on race if we all weren't so racist or we all weren't so sexist or we all weren't so whatever homophobic we wouldn't have these problems all these problems that you see really come from discrimination that is a more valuable by the way this is not me denying that that real discrimination exists i want to be clear about that um but if you internalize that as the lens through which you see injustice or inequality or whatever you want to call it then you don't focus on structural change at all you maintain the current structure but you just

want to make sure the occupants of the different positions within that structure are more racially balanced which is better than it was before right but i'll give you a clear example if you have an account like a fake economy i'm just making up an economic system where there's 1000 slots for people that can be successful and then there's like you know five million slots for everybody that just kind of gets by right so if you're using a class-based lens to look at the world you're going to say whether you're an anarchist a communist or anything in between uh you're going to look at that and you're going to say damn let's like change this so that it's easier to move between that five million and the one thousand and then maybe like change the numbers or you know

the breakdown let's say that five million and one thousand it's really hard to go back and forth when you're in that one thousand like you're there forever and you know like it's really hard to get out of there new slots don't open up very often right this is a simplification just to illustrate my point but if you use a race or class-based i mean excuse me a race or gender-based lens to look at that what you're going to say is oh like this is fine we just need to make sure that more people of different races are in that top 1000 which does not help any particular race on the whole because even if you're a member of an underprivileged race in that system you might only get a couple extra slots in the in the you know in that system whereas if you made the whole

thing better and there were more slots period a rising tide floats all boats in that scenario Right. Like like more people of your of your race are going to ultimately benefit. And in terms of what I'm saying here, like if you want to like read more about these ideas, you know, from a Marxist perspective, Adolph Reed is really good. He's an African-American professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is I don't know that he's not I don't know that maybe I'm mischaracterizing him as a Marxist, but he's certainly of the left. and kind of explains that, which even if you're not of the left, I think is an important and valuable tool to remember when you see these sorts of

identity-based ideologies that are specifically designed to inflame people. Divide. Divide people. Right, why does that exist? Well, the reason it exists is because it's in the material interests of the people at the top to do so.

And none of this means that uh people shouldn't fight discrimination or anything of that nature i do not mean to imply that it means that the more effective way to fight discrimination is to start with uh you know a class-based approach or a broader based approach um and and you know address individual discrimination as it comes really that's that's the way to handle that sort of thing no i completely agree and it's crazy how it's almost taboo to have this conversation today yeah i'm gonna i i part of me like when i went in here today i kind of thought like you know it's a taboo i had a conversation uh with uh well one of our mutual friends on friday night you'll remember i don't want to

dox them about like self-censoring i don't know were you there for that i think so yeah yeah so we were talking about self-censoring and i kind of thought today i was like man how much do i want of self-censor just to like not piss people off like and i just kind of the more we talked the less the self-censor stuck in so uh yeah no you shouldn't sell something i mean it is what it is hopefully that's what this podcast offers to my guest is a place where you can feel comfortable and i'm here like i just genuinely want to explore these ideas for ideas sake and exploration sake yeah and i appreciate that and i you know i hope that people that are listening like don't think that like i'm attacking their ideas or i think they're bad ideas or that it's

in any way a personal thing it's just my only goal on coming on here was to sort of give you another way to think right that doesn't even necessarily conflict with the principles laid out in for instance a lot of austrian literature it's just a different a different way to interpret it and act on it really in my opinion um at the end of the day and you know you might not come around to my way of thinking uh i've since that piece came out there are a great number of people who have not come around to my way in fact i don't i think probably most but you know what there there have been some exceptions i'll give you two examples well two things about that number one i had a small number of people like that wouldn't tweet about it but

would dm me and say hey like i really agree with this but it really scares me to say this name names no i'm kidding i'm not i'm not to say this out loud and i had someone else said something to me really interesting on friday again i'm not gonna dox anyone but they said yeah they said you know what like i've spent most of my life as a libertarian i still believe in those ideals uh i worked for ron paul in 2012 like i don't know that he meant worked as in he was in worked for the campaign but he did whatever he canvassed he's part of the revolution baby yeah it was like a ron paul voter right and i think those are great people that have really great ideals um and he said yeah and i read your piece and i thought about what has happened you know recently and he

said to me he's like i'm really coming around on some of those ideas and he gave a very concrete example where he said christmas just happened and i looked at all of the plastic trash that i threw away after christmas like literally he was talking about like not only the wrapping paper and packaging but like single-use toys and things like that and was just like i was just disgusted those those were his words right and i think to some extent consumerism of that like hyper consumerism is just sort of a natural unfortunately evolution of the later end of the of the capitalist stage of development i think it has to be because you run out of things to monetize so you got to come up with more and more crap to to sell people trinkets baby no i get i've

been getting pissed at my mom the last two years she's like so many christmases i'm like i don't want anything like i don't need anything i try to live in this studio apartment those are good ideals man those are you know there's nothing wrong with that like you know there's nothing wrong with that well and the other thing too is like what really appeals to me uh with distributism and more localism is again like here in brooklyn and williamsburg the mecca of woke capitalism probably behind san francisco one of the one of the capitals woke capitalism uh like we have the like the paper straws it's not gonna do shit like like especially us here in the first world like i saw a video on twitter i don't know what country it was but like people just backing up dump trucks

and literally just dumping it into the ocean like we're not going to be able to control that correct that's the plastic straw thing is like a great example because uh well we can't we can control that with localism right is the argument you're making right exactly and that's all that we can do um because we can't control what's going on in china they're eventually going to have to wake up to that you know and one of the ways that we can get china to wake up this is what goes back to my trade thing if it's a condition of trading with them like i have no like uh no um hesitation right or qualms about using trade restrictions as a way for some of these issues that are global right like pollution unfortunately does affect us all uh you know china dumping

plastic in the ocean affects us all this is like we we talk about the uh the coastal town that we grew up in a lot yeah i care about the ocean i care about beaches i deeply and that's like a funny thing especially uh like i had dave colomon he's like a climate denier now and he made some very good points and people yell at you if you like if you not not even straight up deny climate change but say hey maybe these politicians screaming at you have ulterior motives and they try to paint you like you hate the environment when actually at the end of the day i was a kid picking up trash on the beach after people would all the shoobies would fucking leave yeah and and like working at the hot dog stand like i would pick up all the trash on the on the

on the beach pass so that it wouldn't go into the ocean at the end of the day like i care about the environment it's just like i don't think we're approaching the the problem in the right way yeah and that's an interesting point in that um opinions on issues like like that's a classic example i think pretty much everyone would agree on what you said and that's why i think you know left right distinctions are sort of almost meaningless today uh they're just sort of intentionally designed to uh divide people over cultural issues and i think that they're less meaningful almost than ever right because in turn you know uh you know like you to hell i mean the democratic party's pretty free trade today you know what i mean so like i i don't

i don't really that that's not really a traditional left position at least not from the 20th and early 21st century so it's more i think this whole like left right thing is more uh sideshow yeah it's more of a sideshow than anything else right it's a distraction case in point everything i've said here today i think average people would say that i'm on the right i think is the idea and i think like to the if this is like an austrian bitcoin group they probably think i'm like a communist statist yeah right on the far left my mysis would certainly call you a socialist who would misis excuse me yes well they use a different definition of the term right like they use the the term from i'm always embarrassed when i say from uh i just look at the book and i just i'm

I'm sorry, Mises. Yeah, no problem. They tend to use the term from Mises Institute guys tend to use the term the way they define it, which is fine. I don't have any problems with that. I mean, under that definition, essentially, every real world economic system that we've had falls into that socialist camp, right? And they, I don't want to speak for them, would typically most people that I've met that identify that way would want to move away from that. i think that's sort of like their whole their whole point yeah yeah very fascinating all right now we're over two hours okay my wife's about to come home so i think we got to wrap this up soon

but again thank you it's been very fascinating and again i'm still exploring this stuff when people ask me like what are you what's your political ideology honestly i'm like i don't know these days yeah a little bit of everything there's like uh within bitcoin too do i have do i'd not have conviction for not knowing no no that's actually the point i wanted to make like so among people that tend to be in i don't want to say in bitcoins what does that even mean but among people that tend to be into bitcoin i mean one thing you'll notice is like a disdain for political solutions and that's fine i mean that's a that's a political ideology itself right i mean that's probably what i trend towards yeah i mean and that's that's like i don't uh i certainly

would never like denigrate someone for holding that position um i don't only because i'm like an all of the above person right i'm happy i to me uh any work that i would do on bitcoin or any involvement in bitcoin i'm not diverting any time away from that by for instance voting right like it doesn't you actually believe it or not like it's not a bot i don't want to say believe it it's not a binary you can actually like spend a little time deciding on how you want to vote and then going out and vote and not spend 24 7 on twitter arguing about politics right like you don't have like i understand completely that if you get like really personally involved in politics you start to take it personally you watch all the cable news shows and you argue about politics on

twitter is that nauseating right or even beyond just nauseating is that diverting you from more productive pursuits of course right but there is a way that doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have that you should like not vote at all again not denigrating anyone that chooses not to vote that's a perfectly valid decision to make and in fact if nothing meets your ideals uh or you don't even think anything is close enough direct any everybody that votes i mean no one's voting for exactly what they would consider ideal but if you don't think there's anything even close enough or directionally accurate to where you want to go to vote by all means don't vote i mean i would never encourage someone to vote that has conviction to not vote but my only point is i don't think

just because like i think some people almost feel that because they're into bitcoin like you know uh that they shouldn't vote but it's like no like if you want to vote vote if you don't want to vote don't vote but like the fact that you're that you consider bitcoin an apolitical or post-political or super-political solution, I don't think it necessarily has to logically follow that you shouldn't vote at all. That's just my opinion. You're talking to somebody who doesn't vote.

Yeah, and I know. We've talked about that before, and that's fine. Yeah, it is what it is. Yeah, maybe I'll vote in the future. I don't know. Again, I don't think I've been thoroughly convinced. I would have voted for Ron Paul if I was old enough. God.

The first time around. I can't believe you're that young. It's scary to me, man. dude you're closer to my parents age than my age that freaks me out my parents are young yeah that's right we've had this my parents are born in the late 60s yeah yeah um yeah man well fuck we were i wanted to talk about btc pay and lightning implementations with you but i don't know if we have time yeah well we'll do it another time i'm sure i'll be back we got plenty more to talk about um final notes

just uh you know yeah actually i do want to give a like a little final short soliloquy here without going too far and adding two more times just you know like i fully understood that like when i went on today a lot of the stuff that i talked about tends not to be the perspective on political economy that most people that are subscribing to a bitcoin podcast have um it's kind of why i decided to do this i thought it would be interesting um and you know i just hope people take it with that spirit i'm not attacking anyone's beliefs just kind of throwing out there this was the spirit of what i wrote to uh what i think and then you know i think at least at some level it's useful because there are some people out there obviously in the mainstream

that have ideals that are similar to mine and you know i maybe i hope that some of them will see bitcoin as a way of advancing those ideals i uh i agree for you for what you just said particularly bitcoin can definitely help with what you're you're trying to accomplish i would love to have a sit down between us two and tucker carlson to go over these ideas yeah that would be awesome like that i've been waiting for like the bitcoin episode on tucker's show but like it hasn't happened yet like i for a while i've been like i think there's gonna be a bitcoin episode here i think we should hey freaks let's meme that the bitcoin episode episode bitcoin episode should be tucker coming on this podcast first and have a conversation with jeff and then go on his show

and and actually you know what 2020 is an effort to uh to get more outside the bitcoin bubble yeah um so we'll go on his show first go on his show first all right tucker if you're listening i know you are because we're going to tag you in this tweet and i think you're going to like this conversation plus you you go on his show he's got millions of viewers think of all the new downloads true true big pump big pump there all right we're gonna stew on that for a little bit we're gonna figure out how we're gonna craft a tweet to get uh tucker to respond to us yeah i'm all in man well thank you again for coming by thanks for having me it's been a blast peace and love freaks