The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 31 | Matt Kibbe | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Episode Date: April 6, 2019

Glenn sits down with Matt Kibbe who is the President and Chief Community Organizer at Free the People, an education organization turning the next generation on to the values of liberty which is fitting because he is also the host of Kibbe on Liberty on Blaze TV. They discuss various dimensions of socialism as well as answer the question, "is there really such a thing as good socialism?" They also discuss capitalism and how it ultimately is the only thing that will work in terms of continuing to build this country as well as solve other problems like poverty in the world.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I want to tell you about a movie called Unplanned. I don't know if you've heard, but MPAA has decided to slap an R rating on it, and it's crazy to do this. This is so far away from an R rating. The reason why it has an R rating is because there is a CGI scene that lasts maybe 30 seconds tops, and it is of a baby CGI on an ultrasound fighting its abortion. It's crazy. It's a true story about Abby Johnson and Planned Parenthood. This, I think, is a game-changing movie.

So much so I have volunteered my time to be able to tell this story and to get people to come. So please go to unplannedfilm.com. That's unplannedfilm.com. It will change you. You and I have known each other for a long time. And I hate to use this word, but it's gotten progressively worse in the nation. Things that we thought, oh, we'd never see, never see. Things that were crazy to say 10 years.

ago are now being said every day by socialists. The media is trying to make socialists still into a bad word. They're saying, oh, the GOP is just going to throw around the word socialist. I want to spend some time with you on what a socialist is and all of the many dimensions of socialism. Is there good socialism? We know there's bad socialism. What's the difference? What's Sweden? What's Venezuela? and what are people really talking about here? Let's do it. Okay. So they say that they're talking about Swedish socialism, Canadian socialism. Yeah. But already their proposals are going further than Canada on just health care alone.

Canada said that was unconstitutional what they're proposing. Yeah. It's fascinating to me that the modern Democratic Party has not only. sort of allowed the S word into their vocabulary, but it's almost a litmus test now. Yeah. It strikes me that everybody has to pledge some sort of fealty to this idea of democratic socialism. And, you know, in some ways, they're chasing rainbows. They've seen AOC and how she's succeeded on social media.

And they think that, oh, let's go there. Let's do that. So part of it is sort of cynical virtue signaling and all of that kind of stuff. And, you know, when you talk to young people, they don't mean the kind of socialism that you and I know. So it's okay. So tell me, let's start with the socialism that you and I know. Yeah.

And the difference between what's what young people are gravitating to. So socialism as we understand it means the government owns everything. the government owns the means of production. Right. And so it's a single top-down, centralized, centrally planned, not just economy, but world, where the smart people in power are going to redesign things, presumably in a fairer way. Right. And from the top down, the way that that has manifested itself in history has been horribly brutal.

Right. the best killing machine ever designed by man. And if you go back to Marx, and he has this, he has this sort of determinist arc of history where he talks about feudalism, late stage capitalism, socialism, communism. And it's important to actually go back

and read what Marx talked about because socialism is not the end. So when someone describes himself as a socialist today, I think Marx would be sort of mystified because the goal was not socialism. the goal was communism. But the Marxist philosophy and comments by Engels and Marx and certainly Lenin and the first sort of practitioners of socialism,

socialism was a very brutal, violent thing. It was where you took out all of the unfavored classes, you took out all the unbelievers, you murdered them. And they talked about it as a fundamentally violent thing. We're going to have to reset. society away from late stage capitalism where you have the division of labor and you have work for wages and all of these things that are that are really bad in the socialist ideology but the problem is you know people are used to that sort of stuff so if they're not going to get

on the team we take them out and so there's a there's a violence built into this this theory of of social change starting with marks and you know eventually you get to this thing called communism that is, you know, there's no longer prices, there's no longer money, there's no longer workers working for salaries. And there certainly aren't any capitalists, there aren't rich people that are lording over you. No, except there are. I mean, Maduro. I mean, he was a bus driver. Right. Now he's the wealthiest man in Venezuela. And word is absconding with much of the gold. You know, if he's driven out, he'll take much of the gold they believe.

So there are, they may not start rich, but doesn't it always end with the rich people, with new rich people, lording over everybody else? And that's sort of the dilemma. They have this sort of romantic idea that we can somehow eliminate power structures if we can just get through this brutal phase of violent socialism. But that's not how it works. And, you know, one of the fundamental critiques of socialism, and I think democratic socialists are going to have a fundamental problem with this is in order to redesign society that way,

you have to centralize everything. You have to give somebody a lot of power. And Medoro is a great example of this. He is sort of the caricature of Hugo Chavez in that, in the same way that you had Lenin and then you had Stalin. And it's not at all clear that that Stalin or Maduro are sort of ideologically motivated people. They're just power hungry, willing to do anything to keep power. And that's standard authoritarian stuff. You could call it socialism. You could call it fascism.

You could call it whatever you like. But whenever you concentrate that much power, there is a rich guy. He's just not a capitalist. It's a politician. And that politician is willing to do anything. People will say that what Maduro is doing. that's not democratic socialism.

Well, yes, it is. They voted him in. And this is the way you could have Jesus as the leader of your country and everything would say, fine. And if Jesus didn't happen to live throughout all eternity, you know, he died or needed to be replaced,

it's the next guy and the next guy and the next guy that you worry about. Yeah. You know, what is, I warned Democrats on Obama. Don't give him this much power. because your guy's not always going to be in. Now they're screaming about Donald Trump using much of the same powers that they gave Barack Obama. And the Republicans, I'm warning now, your guy's not always going to be in.

Don't give them this much power. Yeah. And so it was a democratic socialist nation. It seems to always end in the same way to where they just suspend elections or they make them so dirty that it's not a real election, and that's who you have. You'd like, look at, look at the rise of Hugo Chavez and compare it to what's going on in the Democratic Party today. And it's, it's chillingly similar because he was, you know, before he was a socialist ideologue, he was, he was, he was a populist. He was appealing to the, the campasinos,

the farming, working poor class in Venezuela, saying, you're getting screwed. And, and frankly, they probably were because the, the preceding. regime was hardly free market capitalism. It was it was insider cronyism quite typical. So they were raging against the right thing, but the, but the alternative sort of populist democratic socialism, it, it quickly devolved where Chavez accumulated more and more power and eventually suspended the constitution limits on himself and eventually nationalized the oil fields and the farmland, and all the things that you look at it today. Venezuela was one of the richest countries,

maybe even 20 years ago. We're richest country in Latin America. And they can't feed themselves now. And they're sitting on all these oil reserves. But the lights just went out. It's a scene right out of Atlas Shrug. Yeah. You remember the end of this movie, right?

Yeah. The lights go out. Venezuela, richest country in Latin America 20 years ago, the lights just went out. when you're looking at things like Venezuela and Hugo Chavez and you say it looks an awful lot like what's happening to the Democratic Party. How do you mean? Appealing to the populist urges of sort of tax the rich at 70 percent, break up the media companies, break up the energy companies, hold gun companies. hold gun companies personally liable, all of that rhetoric sort of sort of at its core, sort of anti-capitalist,

anti, I hate the fact that the means of production are in private hands because those guys will exploit us. Elizabeth Warren is talking about having the United States government make medicine. I think that's the worst idea I've ever heard for multiple reasons. But one, I don't understand how the people who are for this, think that the government is so bad, so inefficient, and it is, and then want to give it more power. They think the government is so dangerous, Donald Trump or Barack Obama is so dangerous, let's give up our guns. Yeah. It just doesn't even make any kind of logical sense.

And it's not logic, and I think I sort of learned the hard way as an economist by training, and I always wanted people to sort of think through costs and benefits and perverse incentives and all that stuff. do that. That's not how, I don't think that's even how people process information. I think we process information through our emotions and the emotional appeal of, of Medicare for all is that there's going to be health care for everybody. And that's important, right? Everyone should have health care. We are, we are, um, it is a, even if you take it to God, it is a godly thing to share your wealth and your bread. I mean, we're supposed to. to. That's what we, if you were raised in a Bible-believing household, that's what you were taught,

share, share. But the difference between sharing and socialism is the point of a gun. Yeah. I want to choose to share. I want to choose to be charitable. I want to help. And I want to find the things that I'm passionate about that I can help. And some people won't do it, but a lot of people will. And we've we've crushed the soul of people wanting to help and making it more and more impossible. You go back and watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's first video, the one that made her a viable candidate. And a lot of her rhetoric, she talks about dignity. She talks about how the people in Washington, the insiders, don't respect you. She talks about the collusion between big government and big business.

And she talks about getting back to community and how we need to help each other, how we need a voice in the process, how we can come together and make things better from the bottom up. And all of that I agree with. And that's not socialism. That's precisely the opposite of that. So it's to the extent that it's socialism, it's social. And you said it earlier. And this is fundamental. Like compassion doesn't work.

at the end of a gun. You can't force someone to care about their neighbors. And to the extent that you've outsourced that to a third party, a government, particularly a government that's far away, you know, people get, they start to get cynical. They start to get bitter. And they're like, I pay so much in taxes. Why do I have to help again? Why should I do that?

So I think for people that are sort of attracted to that narrative, we should spend a lot of lot more time explaining how it is that that freedom actually works and how it is that free people do feel inability to cooperate and share their personal dreams and skills and knowledge and come together and create really beautiful things. We don't do that so much. So I happen to believe, now I come from a different place because I come from a God place and I know there's a ton of people that don't and they don't think it's even necessary. And I know people like Pendelet, it's not. He just innately is this way. But, you know, I think Ein Rand.

I love Ein Rand. I love what she says. I love the vision of the strong individuals standing up. However, she misses that point of heart. And so it seems so cold and distant. And really, I think in some ways it is. When you talk to real people who are really, diehard Ein Randers.

They're like charity is bad. Right. Yeah. And I defend her and she was very influential when I was a kid. I discovered Einrand reading the liner notes on a rush album. So she she was my first breadcrumb that led me to Adam Smith and the Austrian economists and all of that. And, you know, in context, it's important to remember that she as a young Jewish girl fled the Bolshevik revolution and think about the guts that that took. Oh, yeah. And but also the, the permanent scars, like I had to leave my family and come to America and make it on my own. So a lot of her, when she talks about selfishness, I think what she's saying is, I want to be myself. And I don't

want some brutal government to tell me who I am. So if you try to, screw you. And, in a lot of her, her sort of, when she talks about selfishness, you, you, you're sort of, when she talks about selfishness and individualism and the rugged nature of people just taking care of themselves. It's a reaction to really brutal socialist communist-communist philosophy. And I agree with you. A lot of Renn fans stop there. They focus on that. And maybe they're not, and we had this conversation once.

Maybe they're not reading the books the way I did because I look at a lot of the heroes in both Fountainhead. and Atlas Shrugged as people that care extraordinarily about society. Like they're bleeding a lot to try to save the thing that keeps the lights on, particularly in Atlas Shrug. They're all just getting beat up every day and demonized by everyone. The threats, you know, the government comes in and confiscates their property and threatens them, and yet they persevere.

That's not selfishness in any narrow sense that I would understand it. that's doing something bigger than yourself. Well, I think it's capitalism, we haven't done, would you agree, we haven't done capitalism for at least 100 years. Yeah. Okay. This is, this is a mess. A lot of the things that people that think that they are progressives, they think they agree with, it's actually, that's kind of the root of what we have right now. Yeah.

And it's pulling away from the Constitution and the rule of law and the independent. and the gathering of power in Washington that's causing so much so many problems. But as you really look at some of these characters from Ein Rand, but also go back to Adam Smith and moral sentiments, capitalism is the most compassionate when it's at its best. It is the most compassionate. And it is the best way to do charity because a good capitalist, knows. I can be a millionaire if I, if I design something that everybody needs once,

but I can be a billionaire if I design something that everybody needs every day. Yeah. How can I make people's lives better or easier? If I can come up with that, well, I get the richest, but it's like hunger. We have done so much to pull people out of starvation, to pull people out of, of poverty.

And you can't say that it, well, it was the big, you know, it was the big charities that did that. It wasn't. It was the idea that you're an individual and that you should be able to keep what you make. And there's a free market out there to exchange goods and services. You put the iPhone and connect it to the internet in the middle of the jungle. They're making money.

They're now making money. And they have things that they've never had before, like clean water. That's not charity. That's capitalism. Yeah. But it's the best form of capitalism, is it not? Yeah. And I hesitate to use the C word.

And, you know, reportedly it was Karl Marx that sort of set up this false choice between socialism and who could be against being social versus capitalism, which emphasizes one small. part of what a free market economic process is, the accumulation of capital. But that's not what freedom is about. That is a consequence and a useful tool by which people can create wealth and prosperity and lift people out of poverty. So I worry about the, except it's sort of like I don't like the left versus right thing. Are we really choosing between Hitler and Pol Pot? I don't think so. I think we have to rethink these things. But, you know, I just on this week on my show, shameless, shameless plug for Kibbeon Liberty. McGat Wade, who is a young entrepreneur from Senegal.

If she was here, she would tell you that all of this charity that has tried to help help Africa all these years has been a disaster. Bono says the same thing. Bono says the same thing. Bono says that of all the isms, capitalism is the only thing that is lifting people out of poverty in Africa. and there is sort of this perverse incentive with the NGOs, the poverty industrial complex,

call it whatever you like. Last thing they want to do is fix poverty. Then the business stops and it's over. I spent some time in Haiti. We're actually doing real harm to Haiti, where all the rice and all that stuff is coming in. It's coming in from charities. put farmers out.

They're not growing anything. How could you possibly compete? I mean, it hurts. Yeah, but, you know, I had another progressive friend on the show, and we were talking about the fact that capitalism is lifting all these people out of poverty. You know, the World Bank says something like in the last 30 years, we've halved the number of obscenely poor people in the world. And by any measure, that has to be a good thing.

What progressives are obsessed about, but is it equal? Is it fair? Is it just that in the process of doing all of this, someone like Jeff Bezos is, I don't know how many billion he's worth these days, but he's worth a lot of money. They don't like that. And I even look at the data to take it a bit further, there isn't actually a tradeoff between equality in terms of income equality and primary. prosperity, those things actually work and rise together in practice.

But again, we're making an economic argument. How do we feed people? We do it through free enterprise and taking that burden off of production of food and everything else. And the other side is making an emotional argument that it just doesn't feel right. How do you argue against that doesn't feel good? I think one way that that I want to do it is we're going to go to Senegal and we're going to talk to people. And I want to I want to sort of humanize the positive effects of what free market capitalism actually brings to that country,

but also humanize the unintended consequences of charity and government regulation and all of these top down. The theme is top down, right? all of these top-down good intentions never, ever work out. But if we're having an emotional conversation instead of an economic one, let's talk to people. Let's talk to a person that used to sell shoes and was devastated by a well-meaning shoe company that started giving shoes away for free. That person exists and he doesn't have a job anymore. And the person who gave the shoes away probably has no idea how much damage he did. Yeah, there's no understanding of what Bastiat, you know, he talked about the scene and the unseen.

The scene is making sure that kids in Africa in that village are receiving a pair of shoes. The unseen is that you just disrupted the informal economy that creates all the jobs and all of the means by which the people themselves could lift them. out of poverty without a handout. The handout is corrupting and it destroys the sort of institutional evolution that would allow people to help themselves. A lot of that has been lost. I mean, even FDR said you have to provide a man work. If you just give him welfare without providing him work, eventually, he'll just roll up in a ball.

it'll be useless. I mean, you know, the idea even of Social Security was that's for the people who didn't retire. There was no retirement. That was two or three years after, 65 was two or three years after the average man died. So it was to take care of the widows that might live to 66 or 67. Now we're looking at it as a retirement plan. That's not what it was intended for. It was social security SSI, social security insurance.

Yeah. So insurance, insurance is not guaranteed to pay out, but now it is. And we've lost sight of this was the safety net that we were supposed to provide. Yeah. You know, that we as a capitalist republic voted on and said, you know what, we do have to take care of some people. We have to do that as a people. Well, that's not what it is. what it, that's not what it ever lasts as.

And this, this is sort of the Achilles heel, the fundamental fatal flaw in, in the progressive dream, which I mean, just to be like sort of intellectually honest, I don't see a fundamental difference between progressivism as it was defined and socialism because that, it's all supposed to be top down, it's supposed to be autocratic, replacing the, the chaos of the market with the best people from the best universities and the best families, very elitist. You know this better than I do. Very racist at its core.

But the thing that they have never been willing to accept and all planners, all good meaning do-gooder planners, they don't understand power and they don't understand how power corrupts absolutely and they don't understand how a program that might be strictly limited when just a few people were living over 65 years of age as a small safety net, how that took on a life of its own and how it became a political football and how it became a weapon for the bureaucratic class to use to build itself

at the expense of people and all of those things. And even how it is that big businesses will game the system to make it difficult for mom and pop businesses to get a foothold in the market. All that stuff happens with every single government program. And, you know, when it gets really bad, you end up with Venezuela. When it is sort of under control, you end up with $22 trillion in debt. But, you know, at some point, you run, as Margaret Thatcher said, at some point. Run out of somebody else's money.

Yeah. Let me take you to, let me take you out of these. times because it's easier sometimes to see things when you're going back and talk about the past. We're living in a time much like the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, except it's going to be much more transformative, faster than that was. But you're seeing the Vanderbilt's and the Carnegie's. They just happen to be the Bezos and the jobs of the world or whatever. And you're seeing this great wealth produced. and you're seeing it even with Google.

Because they have such great wealth and such great leverage, these companies are now the size of the, you know, governments. Most governments around the world are not the size of Google and Microsoft or Facebook combined. Yeah. And so they have great power, you know, the Vanderbiltz. They pretty much laid out where the train tracks were going to go. because they own the railroads and, you know, they wanted a house over here. That train was going that way.

And when I first moved to Texas, I went in the air with Ross Perot. He's a neighbor of mine. And I went with his son. And he took me over this ranch that he had was tens of thousands of acres. And he had slowly sold it off. But they had built an airport, built a train switching station, which all the trains used to be switched in Houston. They're now being switched here. He built this beautiful airport right next to it, so goods and services could be either offloaded on the train or unloaded onto the plane.

Amazon just picked that as the head of Amazon flight operations. And as I was with him in his helicopter, he was pointing out all the different things that he did. And, you know, he was like, and years from now, this will be this and that will be that. And I thought, this is how the rich get richer, really. They have enough money to be able to say, you know what, put the freeway here. And that's where real wealth comes from. How do you, I don't agree with the robber barons. Some of them were bad.

Some of them were really good. But how do you stop people from gaining Rockefeller style power and wealth? Or should you? So I just had coffee with a public interest lawyer in D.C. And he's an old Ralph Nader Rader guy. And we were talking about this, this concentration of, I'm not sure it's concentration of wealth. It's concentration of power and how there is,

there's, there is an elite group of insiders that know how to play the game. They know how to game the system. And it, it may not simply be, you know, government insiders versus free market stuff. But I do think when you dig into that stuff and, you know, the stuff that Amazon is doing, the stuff that Google's doing, they have a lot of government contracts and they have a lot

of power in Washington, D.C. And they very much are in the business of gaming the system so that competitors can't do that. I mean, that's what I and ran wrote about. Yeah, like her whole book is really about public choice theory. about eventually you've got to get a man in Washington. And you see that evolution. You saw it in Microsoft. Microsoft was a functionally sort of libertarian corporation that didn't even have a DC office until they got taken to the woodshed with an anti-trust suit.

And all their competitors piled onto that. And they built up what is now a huge DC office. And now they use their insider connections to try to screw their competitors. That's the problem. Yeah. That's the problem. And you need to sort of sever the cord between the accumulation of wealth. Because I don't think you want to stop that because that's killing the goose that laid the golden egg. But how do you make it so that these very politicians that are preaching to us about fairness and justice?

And, you know, Elizabeth Warren wants to break up. Is it Amazon? I forget it. Like she wants to break them all up. what she's really doing is sending a signal like, you got to play ball. I want a piece. So if you come to the table and work with me, help me get elected, donate to my campaign, I'll make sure that you have a seat at the table when we craft the plan to break you up.

And over history, what happens is every time that process plays itself out, the so-called, you know, the big business that we're setting out to rein in, they write the rules and they rewrite the rules. Google wrote the internet bill, you know, for what is it called? Shoot, it's not free internet, but you know what I'm talking about. They're the ones who wrote that bill. Internet neutrality. Yeah, net neutrality.

Net neutrality. I mean, that is, that, that should make you stop in question. Wait a minute. Google wrote that. Yeah. You know, you saw this in the, in World War II in the Great Depression. I mean, if anybody looks up a visual of a cord, C-O-R-D, or anything, really, that was built in, I think, Indiana back in the 30s, as far as cars, you had the Duzenberg. Yeah.

Those things were, those were outrageous great cars. The big three were called into the office because they had the clout. You guys make the rules. So we have a fair playing ground. And they did. And it put all of those great car manufacturers out of business because they ride them for themselves. Yeah. And that's the cognitive dissidents with someone like Bernie Sanders because, or AOC or any of these sort of populist social

justice warrior types. I'm with them when they're raging against the machine. I'm with them when they talk about the collusion of big government and big business. I'm with them when they complain about permanent war and mass incarceration and crony capitalism, all that stuff. But they don't seem to understand how power accumulates because of the very policies that they advocate and how they, no matter what the program is, it could be Social security. It could be Medicare for all. It could be net neutrality. There's always a middleman.

There's always a guy at the table before you. And the voter, the citizen, the consumer, you never have a seat at the table when the pie is being divided up. So I do think there's like part of the answer to the rise of socialism has to be what I would probably call libertarian populism. like we need to acknowledge that there is a class of insiders and and that class of insiders isn't just in Washington, D.C., but it's a mutual beneficial insider club. Let's embrace that. I mean, that's what Hugo Chevez was railing against. That's what Bernie Sanders was railing against.

But the irony with Bernie is like, that's why we need to give them more power. Because if we do that, then they'll stop. I don't know. It doesn't make any sense, but we could appeal to sort of the emotions of people that know the game is rigged. They know the system is corrupt. They don't trust politicians. That's a very healthy thing. Let's focus on that.

But also get to that other thing we were talking about. What's the beautiful thing that's the alternative to this top-down insider's collusion? What's the beauty of the market? And we really suck explaining. Horrible at it. The beauty that comes out of free people. So let's go there. After one more question, please tell me the difference between socialism, communism, and national socialism.

So communist Nazis and just straight up. Yeah. You know, Swedish socialists. Well, I'll use, I mean, communism is sort of this fairy tale world where there's unicorns. And there's no more scarcity. So food's not an issue. Housing's not an issue. Health care is not an issue.

So it's very much a fantasy world. There's no government. In real communism, according to Marx, there is absolutely no government. There's no need to work. There's no need to grow stuff. So it's like this fantasy world that we're never going to get to because the gateway between capitalism and communism is socialism. And that is in, you know, in practice, it's some sort of, it's not all government control of the means of production.

On occasion, they try it, Mao tried it with a great leap forward, and 65 million people starved. Brutal, brutal, like Pol Pot in Cambodia, he studied Marxism at the best university in Paris. And he and his friends came up with this idea, this idea. that we could move society back to this agrarian state. And he implemented it with great seriousness. But the first thing he did was kill all the foreigners. So what is that? Is that socialism or is that national socialism?

Is that sort of that cultural identity that that we often associate with, with Mussolini and Hitler? In practice, they merge together. But, you know, technically socialism is, is government ownership of the means of production. Fascism is just government control of the means of production. In practice, a lot of the socialist experiments have had clear aspects of fascism and a lot of fascist experiments. I mean, both Mussolini, Hitler, you know they were socialists before they were fascists.

But, you know, it's... And Mussolini in particular was his problem with communism was he said, I fought in World War I. And nobody was fighting for the workers of the world. They were fighting for France or they were fighting for Italy. They were fighting for their homeland. And that's what brought him into national socialism instead of communism. And the same thing with Hitler, with the red on the flag. Hitler said the reason why the flag, the Nazi flag is red is to show that we are the same as the reds.

Any communist, they need to know. that's our base is is that same basic philosophy yeah and you know we're still watching that play out today it's it's a sort of a cynical strategy of appealing to national identity instead of class struggle but you know they'll throw it out there let's let's see what sticks are we are we mad at rich people today or are we just mad at at people from from another religion or another ethnicity and with pot, it was all of the above. I'm going to use all of those demagogic tools to manipulate people and to scare people and ultimately to kill people. It's, it sort of plays itself out today with Antifa. And you know the history of Antifa. It was this, this pissing match for power. Back, going all the way back to World War II, between the communists and Tifa. Same thing. and the fascists who were the other side. And by the way, the leaders of those two teams would switch teams on a strategic basis,

depending on who was winning and what was playing with the public, all of that stuff. But it was never a fight about ideology. No. I think it's a fight about power. Yeah, who's in control of it. Yeah. Who's in charge. And I see that today with the violent tactics.

It's an experiment to see if the American people will tolerate. violence as a tool for political change. And certainly the media seems to be given them a pass on that. So tell me about the beautiful alternative, because no one is communicating this. Everybody's talking about, well, we just need to fix health care. We just need to do that.

No, it's a big job ahead of us. And it's a bold vision, but I don't hear anybody articulating it. Yeah. And it's hard to articulate a very, vision that essentially imagines beautiful things that people could do if they were left free. So I always start the conversation by pulling out this guy. Yeah.

And we all know who came up with this idea. And I, and by all accounts, Steve Jobs was a total jerk. He's rude and obsessed. And in his book, you know. Are you? Yeah. He tried to get me fired at Fox.

He met with Rupert, flew into town, met with Rupert, tried to get me. fired. So you're not going to argue when I say that Steve was kind of a jerk. Steve is a genius. I actually like the stuff that he made. I don't know how he became this beloved figure because he was one of the worst human beings that anybody knew. It's because people left, right center, love the notion of entrepreneurship. What about Elon Musk? He's not getting love. Well, he should stay off Joe Rogan, maybe. Or at least have the pot stay off Yeah, yeah, smoke after the show. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We'll work it out. But I think, you know, this device, and I go like, because I'm a dork, I always go back to Ludwig von Mises. My wife hates me for this. She's like, nobody cares. But Mises talks about entrepreneurship. It's not just satisfying consumer demand. It's imagining an alternative future that's better, more awesome.

And part of his stubbornness, jerkiness was forcing. his colleagues to say this is what they want. They don't know it. Don't go market test it. Don't tell me that it has to be this way. I have this vision of a future. And if you imagine like confiscating all the iPhones today, the millennial generation would shut down.

They couldn't function. You could seize all the guns. You get rid of the First Amendment and Second Amendment. They're not saying anything. So they would. And entrepreneurship is not a dirty word. Capitalism is a dirty word with young people, but entrepreneurship isn't.

And so what I've tried to do, and it's difficult with things like health care, but I've tried to use things like craft beer as a metaphor for the awesomeness that happens when people are free. Because in the craft beer world, there's a sense of radical innovation. You know, you can make a triple IPA quadrupley hopped with hops from all over the world,

and it's 12% alcohol, and it'll make you completely, incoherent if you have two of them. But it's sort of a quest for people to create that and see if there's a marketplace for it. There's all of these sub-sub-sub communities who get together and try to find the hopiest beer out there.

There's a sense of community at these craft beer places. And it's really a metaphor for everything we love about markets. You have an entrepreneur, and he's not just trying to make a buck. He's trying to create something that he loves. He's trying to create something that he wants his community to love. He's trying to serve an audience by doing something that he's not even sure they're going to want. And so finding stories like that, we could find them in charity.

We could find them in markets. We could find them in products and services. I think one way to explain the awesomeness of markets and how it produces community in a sense of, dare I say, social responsibility. I hate it how the left steals. all these words. So if I say social responsibility now, it's got all this baggage. Like I think there's such a thing as social responsibility. Oh, I do too.

But it's not, no one's going to force me to do it. So I think I think we struggle with that because it's sort of an imaginary future. You're looking around the corner of history and imagining a world where you could get health care like you get your

Airbnb, like you get your Uber. You could actually choose from a whole menu of doctors. You could You could look at their ratings. You would know what your pricing is before you go in. This is not. There are MRIs and CAT scans that are sitting empty. I want to book a CAT scan.

Well, you can drive here and you can take that and they can compete against each other. And the free market works. The free market works. You could get rid of all the third parties and administrative hangers-ons. The money we would save by getting rid of all that. Yeah. And I think we need some actual experiments. I know they're out there.

I want to go find them and actually make some documentaries about how free market medicine actually works today. And tragically, today it works in what's called boutique medicine. So you have centralized government-controlled, heavily rationed. I can't get surgery in time for me not to die type system. and the market has responded by creating boutique medicine and who can afford boutique medicine, only the rich. But you can at least see how it is that a market price would work for an MRI. You can't see it when you try to decipher your hospital bill

or your insurance payment. It's just not there. There's no pricing. So when you look at, when you look at, let's say, the market health care, people only see the suffering of others and they and they see only the option of well we got to repeal and do what and do what what is it we're going to do and i haven't heard anybody talk about the grand design and the beauty of a radically different health care system on the right yeah

It's good. And I think for better or worse, all of the things that we've tried to fix, you and I've been at this for a long time. And, you know, we tried to fix the federal government. Yeah. And not going to happen. I feel sort of silly and naive now that I thought we could elect a bunch of people that would want to balance the budget and all that. But it was a noble fight. Glad we did it. I think it's a different world. We didn't understand what we were fighting. And we really thought that there were decent people, and there are a few. Yeah. But there's a ton of cowards, a ton of cowards in Washington.

A ton of cowards and all of the incentives are designed to grow the government, Washington class. I should call it a Washington class because it's not just people that work for the government. But I think, you know, and this is where my libertarianism comes out. I think that technology and entrepreneurship is going to hack the system outside of politics. The same way that boutique medicine is a market response to the fact that people that desperately need health care can't get it waiting in line in the UK or in Canada, they get on their G5s and they go get it somewhere else. There's actually great health care in Mexico, believe it or not, but you have to pay for it. It's a market. and most people don't have access to that stuff,

we're going to need to hack the system the same way that Uber and Lyft hacked the taxi monopoly. I have industrial organization books on my shelf that I studied that used the taxi monopoly as a classic example of a government-entrenched cartel that you will never, ever, ever break. And technology did. And of course, now they're coming back and they're trying to destroy Uber and Lyft,

But I think the innovators and the hackers and people that are desperate for an alternative, they're there. And we got to empower them. And we also got to let all of these young people that are sort of entranced by democratic socialism see that, that beautiful, positive, oh, well, there's markets helping people. And isn't that the problem with, I mean, Uber and Lyft were able in the rest of the country to run, tests, you know, to run experiments, to see if this would work before it was released nationally. And you didn't need the government to change anything. You needed the government to say, hey, this is a new thing and they have a right to exist

or enforce that right. But you don't really need the government on things. We've lost the ability, for instance, on health care. You can't do things. You can't just say, you know what? We're going to do something ourselves. We're going to do something as a state of Texas. We're going to do, you can do that.

And so the government just shackles you. And so the only ideas you have are theories that no one was allowed to try yet. You have some small things. And then you have a committee that's looking at them saying, well, is it worth getting rid of this? Because will this work? Will this be better? And if they have an agenda of one kind of health care or another, you have no chance for 50 separate laboratories.

Yeah, we just went through this absurd debate, which I think turned out right on the question of right to try. Are you as a terminal patient allowed to try an experimental drug that's gone through basic safety tests? And on the face of it, it's an absurd question. Like, who would dare tell me that I couldn't? And yet we went through that process where, where there's, and by the way, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a,

pharmaceutical companies. They don't necessarily want people to have choices. They got, they got a system that works for them. And one of, one of the unintended consequences, or intended is that, that a lot of drugs are quite expensive, a lot of drugs that you might want to try. A lot of drugs that are used in Europe aren't available here. And as a patient, I'm thinking to myself, my doctor just told me, that I'm going to die. And I'm a cancer survivor, so this is personal to me. And my doctor just told me that,

but he says that the federal government won't let me try this, this treatment that seems to be working. I can get you into that trial, but you can't do it. So that, to me, like, that's a cool story to explain why patients and doctors making choices is a good thing. And that, of course, is the free market vision. is that patients and doctors need to work this stuff out, and you don't want a politician or a bureaucrat between you and your doctor.

We produce a lot of stuff on medical cannabis for that reason, because medical cannabis is something that very much supported left of center, more and more supported right of center, like in Utah, that it just passed, and 60, 70 percent of Republicans supported it as well. But it's not about cannabis at all. It's about whether or not a patient, any doctor can make a choice. And can we see what happens there?

We did a documentary with about one of my buddies, Joel Davis, former Tea Party activist, born with horrible scoliosis. And he's had just an incredibly sort of painful experience getting through life. His doctor's response over the years was to give him more and more opioids. And I forget the number, but it was an insane amount.

He was taking the amount of opioids every day that would kill anybody else because he had developed a complete tolerance for it. And it was ruining his body. It was ruining his mind. It was ruining his life. And he decided with, he lives in West Virginia, so he had to do it illegally. He couldn't really talk to his doctor about it. But he decided, I'm going to wean myself off by using medical cannabis.

And he did it. And to me, like, I don't know why anyone would tell him he couldn't. That's the story of freedom. And it's very uplifting and aspirational because he has his life back now. Yeah. I don't know why anybody has a right to tell me what I can and cannot put in my body, especially if I'm sick. And that includes I want to die.

Yeah. The sticky part on that comes with the devaluation of life. life and getting doctors involved. You know, I don't know if you've seen the numbers. I think it's in Sweden that 30% or 37% of all of the deaths last year in Sweden were doctor assisted. That is a little frightening. Yeah.

That's a little frightening because you have incentive, as we're seeing and with Charlie Gard, and we've seen it a couple times here in America, you know, if the, if the doctor deems, there's not really anything there, they just shut you off. Yeah. And, you know, they're starting to see that now in Sweden that, oh, this guy is really depressed. And, you know, he wants to, he wants to, you know, end his life. Let's help him because he's a drain anyway. Yeah.

I mean, it's a form of fascism, authoritarianism, where you have this global budget. We're going to spend this much on health care and somebody has decided from the top down how much it is. and as you're trying to rearrange the chest pieces who are humans, our lives, and you're saying, oh, that guy's too old,

off, that guy's mentally unstable, gone. That child's not worth saving. We can't, the cost benefits is just not there. The brutal calculus of that is quite typical in authoritarian countries,

but it's also quite typical in top-down, one-size-fits-all, global budget, government-run health care. So, again, like, I think we're the bad guys that we can't sell that to young people. Because nobody wants, nobody believes in that. No decent person believes that people should die.

And I go all the way back to the Obamacare fight. I remember Robert Reich infamously saying, we're going to let old people die. And he was speaking, I think he was speaking at Berkeley. And they applauded, like, how sick is that? Really sick. Yeah. I think we have, I think we are experiencing now a cult. You know, as I define a cult, a cult is someone with a group with extreme ideas out of, out of step with the main stream, that they will, they will take you, take your children, whoever, and indoctrinate you.

Then turn you against anyone who has a differing opinion. Anyone who says this church isn't true, well, you got to stop them because they are liars and they're. dangerous and you just start building enemies. Well, that's really what's happened to the Democratic Party. They're afraid. You can't step out of the Democratic Party. And

they hold these cult-like meetings. The scary thing is, is there are also a death cult. They are, hey, let's light up the, you know, Empire State Building and shout our abortion. Wait a minute.

It used to be safe rare legal. It's not rare now. It's not rare. And they're, when you light up the Statue of Liberty to celebrate infanticide, that's a little death cultish, isn't it? I wonder how their coalition holds. Because I studied with great interest the Women's March and individuals.

visible and how it compared and didn't compare to the Tea Party movement. And you have all of these seemingly disparate values and agendas in the Democratic coalition that's showing up at the march. And of course, it fell apart quite quickly because it turned out that some of those values were at fundamental odds with others of those values. And whatever else you want to say about the Tea Party, there was a time between 2009 and 2013, where the values were almost 100% consistent.

You could randomly walk into a crowd, and I did this all those years. Like, why are you here? What do you think of about? And they would all give you some iteration of, I'm here because my government has gone bonkers. we need some fiscal responsibility, constitutional limited government,

and individual liberty. And by the way, they would have all sorts of opinions about all sorts of other things. But that was the glue that held them together. And the modern Democratic Party doesn't have that glue.

And they have to sort of, I think they have to hide the authoritarian nature of what they're getting at because I don't think that sells. So you could, you're going to go with populism. You're going to put Democratic in front of socialism.

Maybe you're looking at me saying you're way too optimistic that this doesn't hold together. But in order for it to fall apart, like, what's the alternative? Where do you go if you believe in liberty and freedom? Where does a Tea Partyer that still doesn't like Wall Street bailouts and doesn't like the national debt and doesn't like budgets that never balance and doesn't. doesn't like limits on free speech, all of that stuff. And I just described myself. Like, I'm drifting out here.

I'm trying to find a home. I think you got to go upstream of politics. I think politics corrupted the Tea Party. I think politics corrupts everything. I think eventually, you know, a guy shows up at your doorstep with a deal that you can't refuse in politics. So we got to go upstream into culture and tell stories. and connect with that,

that sort of emotional side of people that are, you know, they're worried about a lot of the same things we are, but they just process things like humans and I process things like a dork. I said something yesterday on the air and it doesn't matter what it was, but I had a friend right to me,

and I wasn't in lockstep with him, and he was very upset. and I'm like dude we're never going to be in lockstep that shouldn't be a goal I know why all of a sudden well because it was about Donald Trump well because blah blah

and uh um you you don't want to live in that world but it seems like that is the world um that it's getting smaller and smaller and smaller that we have to be in in lockstep we we

we're much better off if we can look at each other as individuals and say, I don't agree with you on that at all, but oh, well, you want to go get a shake or you want to go have a drink or whatever. Let's go work on this project together. And I wonder, like, so you look at the Women's March or the modern Democratic coalition and they're big into silos, right? They want to identify people based on the color of their skin or their religion or their sexual identity. And there's, there's no. now dozens of silos. It's getting complicated. But maybe the alternative is like if you really believe in diversity, you should acknowledge that you know what? There's not dozens of silos. There's millions. There's billions of silos in this world because we're all a little bit different. We'll have different hopes and dreams and our parents are different and our faith that we choose is different. But wouldn't life suck if we weren't different? Yes. Like imagine a world that was just me.

That would be the deepest level of hell ever. Horrible. Yeah. Especially you. I would hate it. I would hate it. I would not want to be around like lots of time. Yeah.

I mean, it is we've accentuated our differences at the expense of what, that we need each other. Yeah. You know? And this is an old idea. I mean, the pilgrims tried it. at Plymouth Rock, they tried it. They tried it in Virginia. In, what is it?

I want to say Jones Town, but isn't that the... James Town. Jones Town was a... But also socialist, but also Socialist. But they all ended the same way. And the Pilgrims had, you know, a very religious reason for doing it. James Town had just kind of a big government kind of reasons for doing it. But they ended the same way, and it just doesn't work.

Yeah. Just doesn't work. No matter what your motive is, it doesn't work. You know, we talk about who has a big vision. The group of people that should have the big vision are the libertarians. But I find they are exactly like the GOP or the DNC or the socialists to where. Excuse me. If you don't quote the right French philosopher, you're no libertarian.

Where libertarians, I mean, the reason why it appeals to me is because it was kind of the original idea of the country. Just don't, as your book was, you know, don't, don't hurt people and don't take their stuff. Don't take their stuff. that's really what it's supposed to be. Yeah. It's not. Really, is it? Well, it's, no, it's not.

And there's, there's an interesting civil war going on within the Libertarian Party. And we'd love to chase each other out of the tent. Yeah. But right now there's a proxy war for this whole cultural identity thing going on between socially conservative libertarians. And there's a ton of them and socially liberal libertarians. and I think they're missing. How can you be a libertarian on either side if you want to tell the other side how to live? That's what I'm trying to tell them.

Right. I mean, that doesn't make sense. They're missing like the. A point. The sales pitch for being a libertarian is I'm going to let you live your life and you're socially conservative. You think that marriage is between a man and a woman and you want to raise your kids going to this church. and by the way, you probably don't want to bake a cake for that couple. And I'm like, that's okay.

You should do that. And here I am. I want to go to Grateful Dead concerts, and I want to dye my hair blue and do all sorts of things that probably sort of rub you the wrong way. But in America, in a small L. Libertarian world, we're both free to do that. And in the process, we're going to probably figure out how to cooperate. how to collaborate, how to tolerate each other. We might even get to the point where we could respect each other's point of view, but we're never going to be the same.

You're never going to convince me to live just like you. So we're in this argument. I spent the last couple of years attending Bigel libertarian events for the first time in my life. And they're working through some of these things. A lot of good people, a lot of great people, a lot of great candidates. But, you know, it's a little bit like an article in New York Times I read a couple years ago where Bernie's old socialist buddies from Burlington, they think he's a total sellout because he no longer talks about seizing the means of production. And they're deeply disappointed that Bernie Sanders is successful. That's what small ideological-based movements do.

They're pushing people out. The growing pains for the Libertarian Party or any other third party. Maybe it's just the independent party is it's got to be it's got to be like what I was describing with the Tea Party. There's a couple of values that are non-negotiable. Fiscal responsibility and constitutionally limited government. Beyond that, we got all sorts of people with all sorts of views and all sorts of religions and everything else. And we cooperate. We're this beautiful, crazy quilt of all sorts of different types of people.

That's what the LP has to become if they want to succeed. That's what, I mean, that's why I'm here. I think that's sort of the vision that you and the powers that B have for Blaze TV. Like it's a place where we're going to agree on a couple things that are really important to us. Do you believe in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights? Do you believe America hasn't always been, but is the biggest force for good because of the free market system? If you believe those things, man, I don't care about anything else. Yeah.

Just, I mean, because those two things tell me you're not trying to change the fundamental system and you believe in these rights that are sacrosanct. What else is there to argue about that matters? Yeah. Really. There's not much. And so we're having a little social experiment right here, and so far nobody's died. No.

So were the founders, libertarians? I mean, was that how they would describe themselves today? Yes, and they wouldn't know that word. Right, right. They would call themselves. Classical liberals. Classical liberals are just Scottish Enlightenment types. I don't know what the, I guess they would use the word Republican.

That's what Jefferson would call it. But it was very much a libertarian vision with a healthy dose. of radical democracy in there. And they argued about how much they would empower people to govern themselves. But in the context of everything else that had happened before them, that was a radical idea that individuals actually mattered and that they could be trusted to govern themselves. So it probably is, I've never thought about this before,

but it's probably some flavor of libertarian populism. They're raging against the machine, right? the region against the king. They have this very high-minded vision of all people, self-governing. They didn't get slavery right. We eventually got that right. But the vision and the context of where they were at the time, which is so radical, pie in the sky, unicorns.

So when I think about what they did, I think we might be able to fix our problem. Because theirs was bigger. Yeah. And as far as I know, the king's not going to behead us, at least not yet. Not yet. Let me go one more place. From the founders being libertarians, you're a deadhead. The Grateful Dead have all of the earmarks of libertarians.

Yeah. I mean, hey, look, it's our music, you're having fun. You know, bring your recorder, but plug in down here. Just get a good clean copy of it. Yeah. You know, they're creating. They charged you. They saw what people were doing.

They enabled them to do it. Didn't try to chase them out. And they became the grateful dead because of that. Do your own thing. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It was a, and I've told you this before,

I modeled to the extent that I had any influence over the organization of the Tea Party. I wanted it to be leaderless. And I would always refuse to. tell people what to do. I would always say, you guys, you guys figure it out. Because the power in this movement comes from the bottom up. And go back and watch recently. There's a, was it Netflix or Amazon?

I think it was an Amazon three or four parts series called A Long Strange Trip. It's about the evolution of the Grateful Dead. And there was some interviews in there from Jerry Garcia that I'd never seen before. And he was basically in anarcho capital. He was an anarchist in the sense that he refused to tell his community what to do. And the result of that meant that it was always sort of chaos. It was beautiful chaos. It was super messy.

Things didn't always work out right. But the upside was a tremendously large, sustainable, beautiful community that had sort of self-ownership in defending the brand of the community. that to me is what is what America should be I don't want to be told what to do and I suspect that for all of our problems as individuals and all of our failings we could create something more beautiful by being free than we would ever do

by having a leader let's have what Jerry tell us what to do it's like no I'm not going to tell you what to do almost is this all upset people but he's sort of like a Washingtonian sort of figure. I'm not going to, I'm not going to be a king here. And if you make me, I'm going to stop. So yeah, there's, there's that thing. And it was a very American thing. And I think that's what the difference between the Tea Party and the 9-12 project was in the end. There was a few set of

principles, no leaders, all local leaders. Yeah. And the Tea Party had no leaders at the beginning. And as it went on and on and on, it started to coalesce around some voices. And, And I fought back and forth on, with myself, this is not going to last because there is no leadership. However, there are 9-12 projects still around. They're doing different things. All of them are doing different things. Yeah. But it is, it is a sense of community and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, this is who we are.

this is how we interpret it. The best ones, and I still speak to Tea Party groups occasionally, the ones that are still robust have gotten away from politics and focused on local stuff. And maybe it's local politics. Maybe it's a school board. But things that matter specifically to them and their neighbors, it might be public works, projects, charity type stuff that they're doing.

And if you had it all to do over again, And of course, nobody engineered this. It emerged spontaneously. And it gravitated immediately towards, we need to elect these people. And some of those people jumped up on stage and said, you know, I'll name names. Like people like Sarah Palin, she saw an opportunity. She jumped up on stage. And she said, follow me.

And I think that was the beginning of the end. and pretty soon we had a slate of candidates, and pretty soon we were defending the Republican Congress, and that's when all of the clash between defending the values, which are clear and pure versus the political expediency of just getting down the road, that ultimately tore it apart. You had the beginning when it was pure values. Look, we're standing up because we believe

these things. Yeah. And it was in the hands of the people. It was, it was magical, magical, you know. It was like a Grateful Dead concert. It was, it was. There was. Without all the drugs and.

Yeah, without the drugs and the, in the grilled cheese sandwiches. Right. And the tie-dyes. Because everyone, everyone had probably American flag t-shirts on instead. But I still remember those, those early massive gatherings where, the park police and all of the planners that manage crowds to make sure that nobody gets hurt. They had no idea what was coming. And they were caught flat-footed and, you know, as a result, that the metro's shut down and there was no crowd control.

There was no safety barricades. There were no porta-potties. And everyone just kept saying, please and thank you. They didn't burn anything. They didn't leave it a mess. because the rules were there that they did no one needed to to come in Jerry Garcia style and say I'm in charge here's how you guys have to behave they knew how to do it mm-hmm it came from the bottom up mm-hmm that they believed in restoration not destruction yeah and of course you don't see that no with the most remarkable thing is having 500,000 people on the mall that we did on 828 and what, 2010. And I saw that mall before and I saw it afterwards.

And it was cleaner after everybody left. There wasn't a scrap. People brought their own trash bags. That boggled my mind. They brought their own trash bags. And just cleaned up all the trash and just neatly put them over by the garbage cans. It was insane. So you want a real-time experiment of what free people do

without being told to clean them all, without being told not to punch their neighbors or set cars on fire. Their rules were better than any set of rules you could have come up with. Oh, yeah. And they wouldn't have done it. Had I said, and we've got to clean up the mall.

We've got to have a committee to... People would have done it progrudgingly. Some people would have done it, but this was just spontaneous. Right. Yeah. The next iteration, T-Party 2.0, is probably not a big gathering on the mall. It's probably going to be some sort of digital gathering

where people who are, you know, I call them liberty curious. They're sort of uncomfortable with the choices they have right now and they're seeking, particularly young people. They're going to YouTube and they're curating a curriculum for themselves because they know. And maybe it's Jordan Peterson. maybe it's a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of the other.

They're looking for an alternative, and I think they're going to create that for themselves. They're going to create that community. There's a great Harvard Divinity School study about how it is that young people are crowdsourcing a sense of community by joining a church or joining CrossFit or whatever it is. They want that sense of community and actually use technology. in a constructive way, unlike the way that Facebook and Twitter tear us apart. It's human nature. We want to belong. Yeah.

We want to belong and belong to each other. So, Matt, as always, thank you. Thank you. Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.