Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
"The government is the enemy" - Hannah Cox
1.7k Plays1 year ago
Capitalism was the driving force behind extraordinary advances in prosperity throughout the 20th century. But isolationist policies, stagnant wages and woke companies have led many to question whether the capitalist system has run its course.
To assess the state of capitalism in 2023, Will is joined by self-described 'rabid capitalist', Hannah Cox. Hannah is a prominent American libertarian writer, commentator and activist. She is best known as the co-founder of Based, a hugely popular multimedia platform that uses new media to drive real-world policy outcomes.
Follow Australiana on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
Check out Based Politics here.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction: State of Capitalism
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. Capitalism was the driving force behind extraordinary advances in prosperity throughout the 20th century. It remains the organising framework around which we in the Western world live our lives. But has that capitalist order run its course? Free trade is an increasingly polarising concept, and its downsides are on uncomfortable display across the rust belt of the United States.
00:00:43
Speaker
Real wages are stagnant in Australia, and indeed most Western countries, instilling the very real fear that my generation could be the first in modern history to have a lower quality of life than their parents. China's economic growth has led some to question whether there is indeed a more effective economic and political system out there. And many companies that were once focused on creating shareholder value now seem more interested in pushing social justice causes, from the voice in Australia to gender ideology in the US.
00:01:13
Speaker
To help me understand the state of capitalism in 2023, I am joined by a self-described rabid capitalist, Hannah Cox.
Hannah Cox's Journey
00:01:22
Speaker
Hannah is a prominent American libertarian writer, commentator, and activist. She is best known as the co-founder of Based, a hugely popular multimedia platform that uses new media to drive real world policy outcomes. Hannah, welcome to Australia. Thanks so much for having me. I wish we were actually in Australia.
00:01:41
Speaker
Next time. Next time, exactly. When the podcast goes global, we can find some budget. Hannah, many people in Australia are aware of you actually from the base podcast and from your YouTube channel. Some may not be. So perhaps to start, just tell me a bit about the journey that's led to us having this conversation.
00:02:00
Speaker
I often get asked, what do I go to school to do what you're doing? What do I go for? And I'm like, I have no idea because I went to school for music business. I was in the music industry. I had no intention or idea that I would end up doing what I'm doing. But I became a bit more politically active around 2012, 2013. I was just a bit dissatisfied with the music industry as a whole.
00:02:21
Speaker
I started working as a volunteer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness and I really just started doing that because I thought I might go back to school to be a therapist or something in that vein. I was really interested in helping people and also felt like on our side we often are saying no
00:02:37
Speaker
to the less proposals to fix things like mental health and for good reason, they have very bad ideas. But we don't often see really good free market solutions, right? And I think that that's something that we need to always come with if we're going to say no to an idea, we need to provide a better idea and actually address people's problems. So I started
00:02:53
Speaker
doing that and I fell in love with public
Political Activism and Media
00:02:55
Speaker
policy. I then started working for a Second Amendment group in Tennessee at the time and working to protect Second Amendment rights, gun rights in the state. And that sort of put me on my current path. So since then I've worked for the Beacon Center of Tennessee, which is a libertarian think tank. We did
00:03:10
Speaker
everything from past school choice legislation to protect Airbnb property rights, to overturn income taxes, to sue the government on behalf of people who had their economic liberties violated with things like occupational licenses or other burdens that our government puts in the way of opening a business.
00:03:27
Speaker
And from there, I went and did criminal justice reform at the national level for about three years. I became radicalized against the government as I was seeing more and more behind the scenes of that system and just how much injustice there was going on there. And I helped overturn the death penalty in three states during that time.
00:03:42
Speaker
And then COVID came along and shut the world down. And I found myself with a lot of time to write and produce media and start talking about the things I was working on on the ground online. And that led to base politics. It kind of grew very quickly. And I found there was a lot of people who were really interested in
00:03:58
Speaker
solutions, which is where I put myself. I'm somebody who has very strong core beliefs of capitalism, like you mentioned, of individual liberties and limiting government to protect both of those
Libertarian Ideological Tensions
00:04:09
Speaker
two things. But I'm always interested in finding ways that we can come together and find solutions to people's issues based around those ideas.
00:04:17
Speaker
Interesting, reflecting on what you've just said, some of the things that you've mentioned that you fought for may be in tension with each other on parts of the right, or the conservative right, I should say. Some of the people who would be all for your fight for Second Amendment rights
00:04:32
Speaker
would be against your overturning of the death penalty, for example. I think that's something which a lot of libertarians potentially struggle with because it's hard to find a home on the libertarian strand of ideology. How have you found that on the right in America, which can be a very team sport?
00:04:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's been a bit of an isolating experience. It's made it hard to work at times in my career because everything is so centered around Republican politics or Democrat politics. And it's very tribal. And so if you aren't falling into one of those camps, you make a lot of enemies very quickly. And there's not a lot of infrastructure in place for people who
Conservatism vs. Capitalism
00:05:07
Speaker
step out of line.
00:05:07
Speaker
I was homeschooled, and so I've never been a conformist. I've never been taught to fall in line, and I think I just had the strong enough mentality I needed to forge my own path. And I think, honestly, more people need to do that because when you do just fall in line and work for Republican entities or Democrat entities, it not only, I think, bakes in
00:05:28
Speaker
your preconceived notions and your confirmation biases. But it also makes people unwilling to speak up when something wrong is happening, right? It's easy to speak up to your enemies. It's really hard to stand up to your friends, as JK Rowling said, and Harry Potter. And I think that's absolutely correct. It takes a lot more guts to speak up to people that are on your team.
00:05:46
Speaker
if you will. So I think the right uses libertarian talking points to get elected, right? They still use a lot of vocabulary that centers around capitalism and limiting the government. But the disappointing thing is behind the scenes, they often don't mean it, their legislation does not actually reveal that. And so I find that I do have to stand up to the right a lot, even though that's sort of who I consider to be my friends or where I came from.
Libertarian Influence on Politics
00:06:10
Speaker
It's interesting. I've often reflected on libertarianism as a political force. I actually don't think it's been as successful throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, potentially should have been. My favorite libertarian thinker is P.J. O'Rourke. He said libertarianism is just wanting to get high, have sex, and save money. Really, who doesn't want to do that? There's always this kind of tension in that
00:06:34
Speaker
The right generally, and this is the case in Australia as well, will generally be socially conservative and economically liberal, and then the inverse for the left side of politics. How do you reflect on, I guess, the success of libertarianism as a political force in America today and then in the recent past?
00:06:50
Speaker
I think libertarianism in the past, let's say five decades, has actually had a lot of success, but not electorally. That's for very strong reasons. There's this perception that libertarians don't want elections so they're not popular. In reality, Democrats and Republicans have made it practically impossible for anybody to get on a ballot.
00:07:08
Speaker
much less fundraise or get into debates or be seen without being part of their camps. So it is a rigged system in that way. When people talk about elections being rigged, that's the way elections are actually rigged in this country, is you're not really given real options. It's sort of a charade. It's bread and circuses, right?
00:07:23
Speaker
So I think that when you look at libertarianism from that lens, it's been a failure, of course. But when you look at how the ideology has advanced, I think both parties have to not only pay lip service to libertarian ideas, but have had to move philosophically on core public policy positions over the past couple of years. Neither party was in favor of gay rights, right? I mean, until very recently, Obama
00:07:46
Speaker
was the first Democratic president to be in favor of gay marriage, and that wasn't until his second term when he was losing Romney, that all of a sudden he found this new revelation that he supported gay marriage. Meanwhile, libertarians have been in favor of things like gay marriage since the 1970s.
00:08:02
Speaker
I think when you look at the evolution of our core ideologies, you do see a growth. On the left, you've had to see a lot of people starting to admit the very serious issues with things like the war on drugs. That was something Democrats not only were in favor of, but many have voted for throughout the years. They're not having to change their opinions on that and recognize that it's been a colossal failure.
Misplaced Blame on Capitalism
00:08:21
Speaker
It's led to far more harm than good. There's been tons of secondary repercussions and now they're having to turn back against some of that.
00:08:27
Speaker
I often think that libertarians are succeeding more than it looks like when you examine it from that lens. But I do think right now more than ever, capitalism is facing a very serious battle on both the left and right. Here in this country, we are increasingly seeing strands of the GOP that are not only anti-capitalist as far as what they're doing behind the scenes, but they're being upfront about it. They're being pretty
00:08:49
Speaker
blatantly critical of capitalism. People like Josh Hawley or J.D. Vance, a lot of people in the nationalist camp, they're saying we need to use big government now to come in and weaponize it against people that we dislike and to go after companies. Ron DeSantis with Disney and Florida is another example of that.
00:09:05
Speaker
I think that that's a really bad turn of events because as F.A. Hayek said, I see the political movements in America as progressivism is a train that is heading right off a cliff, right? The track is going off a cliff and it's going full steam ahead. Conservatism has for many years been the brakes on that train.
00:09:24
Speaker
It hasn't necessarily always had an alternative route that is trying to go. And I think that is why you see these problems emerging. There are big issues we're facing, and they don't have other ideas to actually address them besides big government themselves. Whereas libertarianism, or classical liberalism as it's known outside, the US is an alternate track that we need to try to move that train over to. And the brakes are out.
00:09:47
Speaker
on the train. If conservatism is giving up on capitalism, then we're going to go off a cliff a lot faster. So I think that we need to be really clear about what has created the problems that we're facing in this country so that we can have a better understanding of how to fix them. And the reasons people are turning against capitalism is that they have a fundamental lack of knowledge about what public policies and legal decisions led to the issues that we're now facing, how much those were actually a direct infringement on capitalism versus the fault of capitalism.
00:10:17
Speaker
And therefore they don't have the right ideas for how to really fix the problem meaningfully to get down to the root cause of those problems and rip them out. You mentioned JD Vance in that answer. Many people would be aware of JD Vance. He wrote a hugely successful book, Hillbilly Elegy, which looked at that rust belt area within America and some of the underlying forces that have led to so much misery in parts of that, that area. What would you say to someone who grew up in the types of the type of environment that a JD Vance
00:10:45
Speaker
grew up in, you know, the Appalachian Hills and who feels like capitalism has failed them, who feels like they don't have access to a good job, they don't have access to healthcare or good education, and they're struggling. How would you make the case to someone like that?
00:10:59
Speaker
Well, I'm one of them. My grandfather had an eighth grade education. He worked in a pipe factory every day of his life. I lived in Alabama, and then I lived in Louisville, Kentucky. I know these people. I grew up around them. I've seen it. I have members of my own family who feel this way, and I think that I loved Hillbillyology. I thought it was a beautiful book and a really great portrait into the everyday struggles and what people are facing in those areas. And these struggles, again, they're real.
00:11:22
Speaker
We need to have answers to them. But the problem is they blame capitalism for those struggles. And when you look at the jobs around them, when you look at what happened with the factories, when you look at what actually created this vacuum, this economic vacuum that they're now living in, these things were not capitalism. They were big government, right? They were regulations coming in and mandating that companies pay far more than they could afford to, far more than they could actually produce in value. They were coming in with unions and forcing things like
00:11:49
Speaker
higher benefit packages and pensions that these companies couldn't keep up with. And so I think what essentially you saw was a lot of people come in and they were very unrealistic, like you see with socialists and Marxists on the side where they want to force a reality that is outside the bounds of what can actually be produced at a given time. And so what happened is those companies left, right? If you have free market capitalism, you have an infrastructure where companies can come and they can say, we're going to set these rates, we're going to produce these projects, this is what we can afford to pay for it.
00:12:17
Speaker
And then you have people who can either accept those jobs or not, they will continue to operate in that capacity. But when you come in and you try to pull
Globalism, Free Trade, and Government Interference
00:12:25
Speaker
all these strings behind the scenes, basically strong arm the companies, and then you're taxing them to no end as well with excessively high corporate taxes, ultimately, they either give up and stop producing, they'd stop working, they just go out of business, or they leave.
00:12:38
Speaker
And I think that that's true at both the individual level and at a corporate level, right? If I can work really hard and make good money and live to see the proceeds of that and see my life get better, I'm going to keep working really hard. But if I live in an environment where I work really hard and I can't get ahead and I keep having more and more taken from me and my quality of life doesn't increase, why would I keep putting in that much effort? I'm not going to. I'm going to step back and let somebody else do the hard work.
00:13:02
Speaker
think what happened in the United States is we've created a business environment that is simply not working for many, many companies. And that's a huge issue. And that is not the fault of capitalism. That is directly the fault of the government. And for those on the left, it has a lot of the labor unions partnering with the government to bully companies. And I think that that's been going on for over 150 years in this country now. And so you see a stark de-escalation of prosperity in this country of actual growth. And that's going to continue to happen until we start moving in the other direction.
00:13:32
Speaker
and deregulate and make it easy to do business here. I often tell people on both the left and right, one thing I wish everybody in this country had the opportunity to experience is try to open a business of any kind, of absolutely
Opposition to Trump and Political Strategy
00:13:44
Speaker
any kind. Try to go become a painter. Try to open anything where you're selling something. You will be flabbergasted by the amount of government barriers and fees and fines and licenses that are in your way that are making it not only extremely expensive,
00:13:58
Speaker
just to simply start working and operating, but are constantly hanging over your head to where if you don't hit the right marks, if you don't jump to the right hoops, they can come in and find you or even put you in jail. Being in business is very risky in this country. And so I think that while I have compassion for people in those situations, Americans need to educate themselves about what has been done to them.
00:14:17
Speaker
Because until they really get that knowledge, again, they're going to blame the wrong things for their problems. And in doing so, you often see them advocating for more of the very things that created the problem in the first place, right? When government regulations and all of these people in power actually created the problem, and you're arguing for them to have more power to be able to bully companies more, what do you think is going to happen? Do you think you're gonna have a lot more businesses just kumbaya and hiring you? No, they're gonna leave. Stop operating. So that's what I would say to them.
00:14:45
Speaker
It's an interesting argument. Some people would say it's a contrarian argument. Some people would argue that the problems that we were mentioning came about as a result of inverted commas globalism, as a result of free trade economics or free trade policies. And some people would argue that the kind of the rise of Trump, similar phenomena in the UK with Brexit, came about as a result of that sort of globalist posturing. How would you respond to that response?
00:15:11
Speaker
Well, I mean, trade is another issue where I think you have to dig into the weeds and really examine it. And you'll find that it's not free trade. The government's had its hands in this industry and this factor for decades and decades and decades. It's continued to entrench itself more, particularly during the Obama years. There were some very bad pieces of legislation passed around free trade. And so you don't have a situation where you have merchants who are able to communicate with merchants in other countries and set the fair market wage that they want to trade their products. That would be capitalism. That would be true free trade.
00:15:40
Speaker
Instead, we have all of these agreements and pay rates and negotiations. Basically, you've handicapped the ability for people to come in and actually make negotiations in a way that suits them. This is both when you're doing internationally and also domestically, down to things like if a farmer wants to sell a cow, they legally have to either sell the entire cow in America or they have to go to one of the
00:16:03
Speaker
few ports that the USDA controls and then the USDA gets to tell them how much per pound they're going to get that day and they have to sell it through them. They have to accept that wage or they can't do anything with their cow unless they can find somebody who wants to buy a whole cow. So basically they're forced into making these deals. You have
00:16:18
Speaker
have that happening at a massive scale across every port in this country. So I think that, again, you have to understand what's really going on. I see nothing wrong with trade as a concept. It's a beautiful concept. It's a smart concept. We cannot adequately make everything as cheaply or effectively here in this country. It's good to trade with people and to lead into our competitive advantages. This is something that I think has done more to alleviate global poverty and world hunger than probably any other thing you could point to.
00:16:48
Speaker
It's heartening to see people blame these systems that have done more to elevate the human condition than anything else I can think of, but they blame them for the problems that the government is creating behind the scenes. So I think that sort of the populist sentiments that you saw behind Trump, behind Brexit, again, we need to examine those because the problems that people are expressing, their angst that they're experiencing, they're illegitimate.
00:17:12
Speaker
they are real, they are right to be upset, but they are upset at the wrong things. And I think people like Trump, they tap into that, right? Because I think, in my opinion, Trump just wanted to get ahead for himself and they push policies that would actually make it worse. Many of the things like Trump's tariffs would actually just get passed on to the American people and make it more expensive for them to live, make it harder for them to get what they need, make it where you have less quality products. These are not things that actually help people at the end of the day.
00:17:39
Speaker
And that's what public policy should center around. It should be focusing on the public policies we can put in place to where people have the greatest freedom to maximize their outputs, to enjoy the profits of their living, and to access things that they need. I don't think that the populist sentiment so far have gone in that direction. Instead of gone towards empowering the government more, and at the end of the day, I've never seen a situation where giving the government power hurts anybody except for those in power. Everybody else gets hurt at the end of the result of that.
00:18:08
Speaker
I want to detour from the economic analysis for a second because I want to pick up on what you've just said about Donald Trump. How do you feel about being a prominent right wing commentator in the United States and being critical of Donald Trump? And has that been a difficult position to be in?
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah, I feel justified at this point. Very validated. When he first was rising in power, it was 2016. I had just left the music industry to work full-time in politics in January of 2016. And so it was very much at the impetus of this movement. And it was something that was very much a lightning rod throughout the South, throughout right-wing politics.
00:18:45
Speaker
And I'll be honest, when I first moved over, I thought it was going to be the year of Rand Paul. I thought we were about to have a libertarian president. I was amped. I was completely naive, had rose-colored glasses on for sure. So it was very taken aback by that. And I remember just thinking like, this guy's not a capitalist. He doesn't believe in limited government. I don't understand how this is happening and why people are so drawn to that. I think I have a much better understanding of those factors now, having analyzed it for several years.
00:19:13
Speaker
I, from the very get-go, just would not really bow the knee to that. I've never been a Donald Trump supporter. I actually turned down jobs. I had a job offer at NRA TV to go be an on-camera personality in 2016 and very much wanted to do that, but that was sort of going to be a condition of working there, was getting Donald Trump elected and promoting him, and I wasn't willing to do that.
00:19:32
Speaker
I certainly have had it create some issues, but I think at the end of the day, there's so few people in politics that will actually just take a stand, that will actually be principled, that will stay principled even when it costs them things. And I think ultimately people respect that. And even if they don't agree with it, they value somebody who truly is honest and that is upfront with what they are trying to achieve. And it's more than just themselves. So I think that it's come full circle. I feel like my instincts on him were right all along.
00:19:59
Speaker
very glad that I never went against my principles to support him, whether it meant jobs or money. And now I think I can look back and feel very accurate in my assessment. So I think that that's something I hope I keep in politics, right? And when you're working in politics, there's a million forces that are trying to get you to sell out.
00:20:15
Speaker
There's every opportunity to sell out. There's every opportunity to make more money, to get your name out there more, to advance further. If you're not actually more to something bigger than yourself, I think that most people end up doing that. And then you end up very far downstream from who you were and why you got into politics in the first place. So for me, I got into politics because I hate injustice.
00:20:35
Speaker
I'm trying to destroy the system of oppression that I see as the government. And I think you can build friends to do that on either side. And there will be times where that means having to stand up to your friends, and it'll be times you have to stand up to people on the other side. But ultimately, I think the more people who can get that, right, that the enemy is not each other, the enemy is not who likes DeSantis, who likes Trump, who likes Rand Paul, it is the government that is harming all of us. And if we could set some of that aside, we get a lot further ahead.
00:21:04
Speaker
Let's say that you are advising Ron DeSantis. How do you beat Trump?
00:21:09
Speaker
at this point. I mean, I don't think he can. I think he has absolutely shot himself in the foot. I think a year ago he could have. He's made a lot of very bad missteps that I don't really understand. He had a golden pathway. It seemed every force in conservative media, every bureaucrat within the GOP was behind him and wanted to see him be able to take down Trump because they all know Trump is a loser in the general election for them. But I think he tried to do this weird thing where he wanted to
00:21:37
Speaker
Pretend to be Trump, try to out Trump Trump on some issues and still wouldn't speak up and call out Trump. It was a very weird dance he was trying to do that has just not worked. It's ended up making him look very disingenuous, I think. I think all he had to do is he had a great lead with the COVID stuff. Just be a stout civil liberties advocate, a consistent civil liberties advocate, push for capitalism, push for civil liberties. He could have done that.
00:22:03
Speaker
he didn't do it. And like I said earlier, Republicans do still have to use our talking points to win, right? They don't always govern by them, but you've got to at least pretend to be a civil libertarian and a capitalist. And he didn't do that. And I think he turned off a lot of independents like me who maybe would have been attracted to him at one point.
00:22:19
Speaker
Yeah. Is that underestimating the degree of difficulty that he had though, in that arguably no politician in human history has had this kind of 25 to 30% base that will follow them regardless of absolutely anything they do this cult like following that Donald Trump has with, with a segment of the electorate. Is that, is that breakable or do you just have to say, well, look, there's 75% that we can go after. And that's where we have to really kind of focus our attention.
00:22:49
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, think about this. In the past couple of elections, none of the above actually won the popular vote. You've got 80 million people who are sitting home. So yes, Trump has a radicalized cult-like base of support. Most of those people are not traditional Republicans for the record. He has built up his own sort of hodgepodge coalition. So what you need to do to defeat him is be appealing to the people who've left the GOP, to the people who've remained in the GOP and who don't like Trump.
00:23:16
Speaker
And you need to do something to start reaching independence, reaching people outside of the traditional base. They're there. They're hungry for somebody to support. They're looking for common sense. I really do see this every day. Nobody that I speak to is happy on the left or right. You see these people online. These are the fringes that are really die hard in the Democrat and Republican bases. It's less than 25% of the country is die hard Democrat or die hard Republican.
00:23:40
Speaker
Most people realize that these two parties are both a mess. They're embarrassing. They're not working for us. They're desperate for something that can stand up against it. But I think that's what we're really lacking right now. We're lacking people of actual character of people with a plan, right? People with some kind of an alternate plan and place they're trying to go.
00:23:59
Speaker
I asked the same question of John Anderson, former Australian Deputy Prime Minister, a couple of weeks ago. And it's a trend that applies across Australia, across the US, across Great Britain in my view. And that is, I think the quality of politicians, of leaders in those countries has got progressively worse as the 21st century has gone on.
00:24:19
Speaker
those types of great figures like your Reagans, your Thatcher's in Australia would be Bob Hawker or John Howard. You don't see those people now. You don't see the same types of that same caliber of people. My question would be,
00:24:34
Speaker
Is this systemic or is it cyclical? By that I mean, are we just in an unfortunate rough trot and we've had a few bad years or is it systemically now almost impossible to run a Western democracy as effectively as it once was?
00:24:51
Speaker
Ooh, that's such a great question. I think largely my instinct is to say it's systemic, right? You've got a lot of structures in place that have continued to build from the years of Reagan, where it is very hard to get to the top without being willing to play partisan
Systemic Political Challenges
00:25:05
Speaker
politics, right? If you become... So if I wanted to run for office, right? Let's say I ran and let's say I get to be in the US House of Congress. Very prestigious, very tough competition, takes a lot of money. We're talking, you know, $500,000 plus at least to even try to get that seat.
00:25:20
Speaker
Once you're there, you're nothing. You're not known. Nobody knows your name still. You don't necessarily have a platform. And so your only hope of getting anything done would be to get on some good committees and to start getting your name into the news, right? So you could get your name in the news by doing something crazy.
00:25:36
Speaker
But if you're trying to pass legislation and do it in a credible way, you need to get on some committees. Well, to get on a committee, you have to start paying your party a certain amount, slash fundraising for them a certain amount to get certain committees to get certain positions on those committees. And the better the committee and the better the seat, the more you have to fundraise for them. So now you're locked in a room calling donors day in, day out, trying to fundraise for your party and
00:25:57
Speaker
If you do anything to go up against the party, if you vote how leadership tells you to vote, then you'll be good. But if you stand up against them on something, guess who gets kicked off their committee? You. You're out. You're done again. And that's who's going to primary you, the Republican Party or the Democrat Party. And they're going to come take you out. There is no way to move up in the system as a principled person unless you are just excessively financially wealthy to begin with and or already have somewhat of a name.
00:26:22
Speaker
to where you can get to the media without having to go through the process of building up through the congressional process. So I think it's that. But I also think that we get the politicians we deserve. I think it speaks to where the country's at. It speaks to where the electorate's at. It speaks to who they're attracted to.
00:26:39
Speaker
what they're looking for. And you know, the same is true in media right now, people largely don't want to be told the truth, they want to be in echo chambers, they want to have their ideas reinforced, they want to hear somebody tell them that they're right and perfect and deserve all the trophies in the world. And that's what they're looking for. I don't think that we have an electorate that's currently looking for people of character that cares if elected leaders have
00:27:02
Speaker
character, have fortitude, have principles. And so I see that as a massive problem within us. And also in our school system, you know, I blame the schools very heavily for a lot of things. I am very grateful I was able to grow up largely outside of the American public school system. But I think it is a hot mess. I think it's doing
00:27:21
Speaker
a huge disservice to our country. I think much of it is intentionally focused on indoctrination versus education. But I also just think because the government runs it, that even the people who are well-intentioned within it are working within a government system where they are not able to effectively educate their students. And so we have a lot of people coming out who really don't have the tools they need to participate in their democracy. And I think it was James Madison, maybe Thomas Jefferson, who said, this only works with an educated citizenry.
00:27:49
Speaker
We have to have an educated population for this to work. You have to have a moral people for this to work. You have to have people who have these values themselves to see that reflected in your leadership. Yeah, that's interesting. And I agree with it. And whilst he was maybe a tad more diplomatic, he's a next politician after all. John Anderson said something similar that basically the politicians of the day reflect the society of the day. And I think we're seeing that across both countries.
00:28:16
Speaker
I will pivot away from that because I want to get back to a topic that you have been looking at very closely of late, and that is antitrust laws and some of the antitrust topics of the moment. In Australia, we'd call it competition laws, but effectively the same thing. You think that these types of laws harm capitalism, not monopolies? Can you expand on that?
00:28:37
Speaker
Yeah, I'm so excited to talk about antitrust because it's one of those subjects that sounds really dense. And to be honest, I really never worked on it or looked into it until probably two or three years ago. And once I started looking into it, I was really surprised at what I found. So I can't speak to Australia, I'll speak to the American system here, but I'm sure there's a lot that can be applied as well. But essentially, you have antitrust law in the United States that has been housed under our agency, the FTC.
00:29:03
Speaker
Trade Commission, which allegedly exists to protect capitalism, which I just think is such an irony because the only real threat to capitalism is the government. But you've got a government agency full of unelected bureaucrats who are out here to protect capitalism. So one of their tools that they use to do that is antitrust law, where they can say if a company has become a monopoly, they can come in and use the power of the government to break it up.
00:29:28
Speaker
Over the early 1900s, this was a bit of a free-for-all, and you saw the government in the U.S. go after companies of all shapes and sizes, very few of which were monopolies, right? Occasionally, there were a couple examples that actually were monopolies, but many of the times they were going after them. It simply was not the case. They started using antitrust really just to bully companies, and it became this sort of loophole, right? Where if you want a company to do something and you don't have the votes to pass a law in Congress to tell them that they must do something,
00:29:58
Speaker
what you can do is threaten them with antitrust. And then if they don't comply, use antitrust against them. And so you end up with the system where the government can essentially force companies to behave and do what they want them to do without ever passing a law, but just by hanging the threat of antitrust over their heads, which is a very big problem for the companies, because if there's a law, you can lobby against it, you can sue over it, you can do all kinds of things to try to rectify the situation. With this sort of behind the scenes bullying, there's really not a whole lot
00:30:28
Speaker
that you can do. And so this continues to escalate. It begins to really harm the US economy in the 60s and 70s. We saw a lot of stagnation, many of the same types of issues we're starting to deal with again right now. And so you had a real recognition amongst conservative circles that antitrust had to be gotten control of, right? A lot of companies were leaving again, and you had a real decrease in GDP. And so they started advancing this theory called the consumer welfare theory.
00:30:58
Speaker
And essentially it says that in order for the government to use antitrust against the company, there should be some basic conditions that are met. One of which is that they should have to be an actual monopoly, which is really excessively rare. Typically, if you do find a monopoly in the United States, it's because the government is entrenching it and putting special protections around it and propping it up. Or you find that competition pretty quickly arises, right? We don't have any just long standing monopolies in this country. So they said you should have to prove it's actually a monopoly.
00:31:28
Speaker
And then secondarily, you should have to prove that it's actually used as monopoly power in a way that hurts consumers. That should be the end goal. Are consumers being harmed? If so, please proceed with antitrust. As this sort of grew in favorability, it started getting baked into our law. So in the US, when you win a lawsuit, you can establish what's known as legal precedent.
00:31:48
Speaker
And then many judges will go back to your case as they examine other similar issues. And they'll say, well, they decided this on these grounds. So we're going to use those same grounds. And so over time, legal precedents gets very heavily baked into the law. And that's what's happened with the consumer welfare standard. And it's been working very, very well. We saw a real turn in our economy following many of these things. But what's happened in the past couple of years is that the Biden administration, they really, they really hate capitalism.
00:32:14
Speaker
like pretty openly, they are anti-capitalist and they're very pro-union and they're very much looking at ways to go after corporations in particular. Biden appointed a woman named Lena Kahn to run the FTC. She's a very young woman. She appointed her in 2021 when he first took office and she came to prominence because she wrote something called the Amazon Paradox,
00:32:37
Speaker
where essentially she argued that Amazon needed to be broken up, it was too big, and that essentially big is bad, right? Any corporation that's big is bad. Doesn't have to be a monopoly, just big business is bad. And so he brought her in and she has been pursuing a radical agenda quietly at the FTC ever since.
00:32:55
Speaker
Fortunately, she's a very, very bad boss. And a lot of people have quit. The Federal Trade Commission is typically something that's a pretty bipartisan organization. But under her tenure, all of the right leaning conservative commissioners have left and resigned. And she is currently zero and four in her attempts to advance antitrust. But her goal, and the reason that she doesn't even mind if she loses, her goal is to get rid of the consumer welfare standard.
00:33:19
Speaker
She wants to unbake this in the law, if you will. And by doing these cases, she has said openly in congressional testimony that she's hoping congressional leaders take notice and pass laws that would overturn the consumer welfare standard on their own, which we do have a number of bills floating around with unfortunate bipartisan support from people like Josh Hawley, but typically led by Amy Klobuchar. She's the real person who's trying to push this agenda.
00:33:42
Speaker
in the Senate.
Regulation, Censorship, and Tech Industry Shift
00:33:43
Speaker
And so you have this sort of machine building essentially where they're trying to increase the ability to use antitrust. And I think the reason for that is very obvious. They want to be able to have greater control of the private market over private companies. They want to be able to direct their practices, whether it be who they hire or what kind of trainings they have or how much they pay people or whether or not they have unions.
00:34:05
Speaker
They want to be able to mandate these things to companies behind the scenes. And so the threat of antitrust is something that they're hanging over their heads right now. And by the way, we are anticipating that the FTC will be dropping a very big case against Amazon any day now, probably within the month.
00:34:22
Speaker
Yeah, I read that this morning actually. The other really big problem here is how it just erodes trust in government. So there's a comparable case is ongoing in Australia at the moment with the National Carrier Qantas Airlines, where basically they have blocked Qatar Airways from having additional flights coming into the country. And basically they've said that they are doing that because it's in the national interest and they haven't really explained what that meant.
00:34:49
Speaker
But the problem is, twofold, A, there is the perception that they are propping up Qantas National Carrier, but it's a private company now. And B, Qantas has taken several political positions that are aligned with the government's key priorities of the day, one on a referendum that we have upcoming in six weeks or so. It's all very troubling because, again, these sorts of decisions
00:35:13
Speaker
can lead to coercion. They can lead to position where government can effectively, through soft power, force companies to do things that are in line with their agenda.
00:35:22
Speaker
Well, and we saw that with us here in the U.S. with much of the social media censorship that was going on, particularly during COVID. You saw these companies really bend the knee. And this is something that, again, I think conservatives just missed the mark on. We're right to be upset about these censorship campaigns. It's not good that they were trying to shut down any disagreement from masks to vaccine mandates to COVID's origins, which I think I've been hot on the tail of this. I very much think we funded in the Wuhan lab.
00:35:48
Speaker
through a pass-through organization and did it so illegally because gain-of-function research was illegal. Everything they were doing was to shut down people who were actually speaking the truth about this. That's very dangerous. I hate censorship of any kind. But the problem is that Republicans saw this happening and they got mad at the companies.
00:36:05
Speaker
Instead of getting mad at the government who was coming in and shaking these companies down behind the scenes and saying, Twitter, Facebook, you censor, we're going to have some really big issues. You take these things. I mean, we have communications now where they're literally telling them explicitly, kick this person off. You know, these are
00:36:20
Speaker
serious First Amendment violations. I can't think of anything that is a bigger threat to the Constitution than elected lawmakers and bureaucrats getting away with this, right? There should be serious repercussions for anybody in government who did this, who participated in this, who knew about this. And instead of calling their congressional representatives and demanding that there be actual accountability and hearings over this and names to be named, they instead want to go after the tech companies and use the government against them.
00:36:46
Speaker
it just doesn't make a lot of logical sense but this is what i mean when you're mad at the wrong things you don't understand the root causes of problems you often empower the very thing that created the problem in the first place. Should the tech companies have any role in policing speech on their platforms.
00:37:02
Speaker
Well, I think as a business owner, you have a duty to make money, right? And so content moderation is something people want. It's something I want. I don't want to get on Twitter and see porn. I don't want to get on Twitter and see people being beheaded. So there are content moderation
00:37:17
Speaker
decisions that companies need to make and they need to be able to make those based on market incentives. I think that the market would handle this perfectly well. I think most people are with me, right? They do want some moderation. They don't want to be on a cesspool of a platform. And that's why we've seen the platforms that have come about that have no content moderation not do very well and also breed up.
00:37:37
Speaker
bring out some very seedy underlings as well. So I think that that's where most people are. I think what the companies need, though, is to not have this pressure from the government where they are facing fees or fines or accusations of helping steal elections. And God knows what else they're going to throw at them if they don't censor in the way the government wants to. If you come in and you try to tell companies, you have to set content moderation practices like this, right? The government setting those practices.
00:38:02
Speaker
you're opening the door for, it's never going to go the way of conservatives, right? This is what I don't get with them. It's like, if you give the government the power to come in and tell these companies how to moderate their content, that's eventually going to absolutely be used against you. It's not going to be used to promote Republican ideas. So it's a very
00:38:17
Speaker
short-sighted goal. I think that in reality, some of these companies probably would moderate to an extent that I don't like. TikTok is a great example. I personally love using TikTok. I make a lot of content for TikTok, but I also just am a consumer. I enjoy it. And their censorship practices are unhinged. They're completely crazy, right? Because they're owned by China. And so you can't even say like marijuana
00:38:40
Speaker
on the platform. Even if you're talking about like marijuana reform or anything like that, like they just have these crazy sort of policies so you can get kicked off very easily and see things taken down. That's too excessive. But what's interesting is watching people on TikTok find ways around it, right? They have made their stances clear. And so if you're going to talk about something, they like they won't say buzzwords that they know will trigger it.
00:38:59
Speaker
I am just so much more concerned with government censoring people than I am social media companies. I think when the government's not involved, the market can adapt and or I think these companies will go under as they should if they are too censorious. The way that you framed it there, which I agree with, is that there has been a lot of government pressure on these tech companies to take a more active role in policing speech.
00:39:22
Speaker
But, or I would say in addition, it seems like more and more people within the tech industry with one Elon sized exception are pretty happy to go along with this. There was once I think a really strong libertarian strand in tech and that is obviously no longer the case. I think you're seeing a lot of leaders in, in tech and in startups and scaleups and very happy to take that sensorious approach. How has that cultural shift taken place in, in that, in that sector?
00:39:52
Speaker
Well, two things. I mean, from the Facebook files that we've gotten and the Twitter files we've gotten, we do see a good number of these people trying to stand up to the government to their credit. And I do want to give credit where it's due. You had one Facebook executive saying, these are serious constitutional First Amendment violations that you're asking for. So I don't think that there's just like none of that left there. But I think on the left as a whole, you are seeing a real evolution away from their former value of staunch free speech. I think this has been a really
00:40:22
Speaker
scary evolution on the left. I've often said that watching the ACLU's trajectory away from being the free speech advocates that they once were is like watching the Ministry of Magic fall on Harry Potter. It's awful. It's terrible to see because we need them and we need people doing that work. Thankfully, groups like FIRE are rising up and filling that void now and really filing lawsuits against free speech violations no matter who's at the end of it.
00:40:46
Speaker
But as far as the tech sector goes, I think probably what you have is that it's too centralized. It's been in this one very, very progressive city for the most part. And when you're around people, you begin to think like them. I think it's a very hard thing to override your brain and not be susceptible to that. And so when you've got the vast majority of the tech sector and the venture capitalists all in this very centralized area of California, San Francisco, that is excessively progressive already,
00:41:13
Speaker
I think that that probably is leading to that. That's one thing that I think it's good to see many of these tech companies starting to move out of there. Like here in Atlanta, we have Google now. We're starting to attract various entities like that in various cities across the country. I'd like to see more of that. I think that's a good thing.
00:41:29
Speaker
I also think it's indicative of California's just completely off the rocker's economic policies. These companies are getting pushed out. They can't afford to stay in business there. They're increasingly leaving as they should. I think that you could see that really start to help the matter because when you're based somewhere else, you're hiring differently. When you're in San Francisco, your crop of people you're hiring from who live in San Francisco are
00:41:51
Speaker
very, very blue. The schools are very, very blue. That's not going to be the case if you're hiring in Atlanta, in Nashville, in Austin, you're going to have more diversity. And I think intellectual diversity is ultimately really good. I'm not somebody who likes doing equity hires or anything like that, but I think trying to hire for intellectual diversity is a very prudent and wise thing more companies should focus on.
00:42:11
Speaker
And is that the same reason why you think companies continue to make the Bud Light mistake of just blatantly ignoring the will of a lot of their customers and putting out these work campaigns?
00:42:23
Speaker
Yes, 110%. Yeah, I think the same thing happens in politics too, but these people are so far removed from the day in, day out lives of the average American. And it's hard. In America, it's such a big country, and we are so diverse, but we really are segregated still in what I like to call social bubbles, where you're very unlikely to know people who are different than you.
00:42:47
Speaker
different socionomically, different ethnically, different religiously, different politically, on and on the list goes. I had somebody a few years ago, and I'm aware of this, I try to overcome it in my own life, but I had somebody a few years ago ask me, do you have a passport? Like we were going to book a trip and I said, yeah, everybody has a passport.
00:43:03
Speaker
They're like, no, not everybody has a passport. Most people don't have a passport. It's really hard, I think, when you are not trying to break out of that to understand how people feel, how to talk to them.
Reducing Societal Division
00:43:16
Speaker
When I was working on the death penalty, I was working for a left wing company, for example.
00:43:20
Speaker
And I was, but I was working with Republicans. My whole goal was to get Republicans to work with me on this. I thought that the issues of the death penalty were core conservative issues with big government. And they would often talk to me about how I was talking about things and, you know, try to edit it or spin it differently. And I said, no, like I know these people.
00:43:37
Speaker
I know how to talk to them. I know what messages are going to land because I am them. My dad's a Southern Baptist pastor. I know how to talk to evangelicals. I know what's going to resonate. I know how they feel about the death penalty, why they feel that way about it. I don't have these strawmen in my mind that I'm making up for where they're coming from.
00:43:53
Speaker
I think that's so essential for anybody in marketing or communications or politics to recognize that you have to know people and know them pretty intimately before you can change them. This is actually one of Dale Carnegie's core principles in how to win friends and influence people. You don't change people's minds or sell them something before you actually know them and like them and have the ability to have that sort of rapport with them. I think it's a really powerful point and it opens the door to what will be my final question.
00:44:21
Speaker
That's very simply how America is, you know, it's a cliche now to say that America is a divided country. And I think that point that you made around different bubbles, just almost kind of living in isolation of each other is a really big part of that. Question is how, how do you go about breaking down those silos leading to a less divided America?
00:44:43
Speaker
I think it really is as simple as what I just said, and I actually have a speech. I talk to people about this a lot, but there's a good bit of research out of Harvard from a woman named Erica Chenoweth, and she found she studied political movements across the United States and across various countries. And she found that once a movement reached 3.5% of the population, it never failed.
00:45:03
Speaker
Never. And she also found that peaceful, nonviolent, civil disobedience was the number one most effective way to achieve change. And so combining those two things, right, are the best ways to change things and get things done, which is very encouraging because that's not that many people and that's not asking you to do anything too big, right? It is simply refusing to comply, refusing to go along with unjust things through peaceful civil disobedience and convincing 3.5% of the population to do it with you.
00:45:32
Speaker
But in order to do that, I think you have to really start getting to know people, and I think you have to work very hard to break out of your silos. I think when you don't know people, it's very easy to stereotype them, to think badly of them. It's a lot harder when you know people intimately, right? You're going to have very different opinions on immigration when you know immigrants. You're going to have very different opinions on LGBTQ issues when you know somebody in that. You're going to have very different opinions on Christians when you know a Christian.
00:45:59
Speaker
on and on the list goes. And so I think that ultimately, we all need to do a lot of work to break out of those bubbles that we're in because I don't personally find it's that bad out there. I've had the opportunity to work with a lot of Democrats and a lot of Republicans and I tell everyone I'm like, I genuinely like most of them.
00:46:15
Speaker
There's very few I've met where I just don't like them. I like them. I value them. I want to keep doing more with them. And I think that kind of attitude, it goes a long way. So if people would just sort of get out of those echo chambers, I think they'd find the same things. I think you'd find you like a lot more people a lot more than you think that you have more in common with them than you think. And also, there's always at least one or two things you could work with them on to change.
00:46:38
Speaker
with anybody. You can find at least one or two issues with anybody that you could say, you know what, I disagree with you on vastly everything, but I agree with you on this. And that was, you know, the death penalty was great for that because I was working with people from a such a wide array across the country. I had people working with me who were literal Marxist. I was like, I hate everything you think, but I agree with you on this and I'll work with you on this. And what was interesting is that in doing that work, several of them became libertarians.
00:47:02
Speaker
because they just hadn't been presented with that school of thought. So I say get out there, you know, it's kind of like I'm a pastor's kid, as I said, but it's sort of like evangelicalizing, you go around and you meet people and you try to, you know, spread information. And I think you'll find that that, yeah, the world's actually pretty good, and we can still get a lot done. And again, the real enemy is the government.
Conclusion and Future Dialogues
00:47:21
Speaker
And so that should be the goal is finding people you can work with and finding ways you can fight back.
00:47:26
Speaker
A strand that has run through a lot of the Australiana interviews has been the evolution of politics into sport and basically sticking with your team or sticking with your tribe. And Hannah, I think you are a very unusual voice in the American political debate because you steadfastly refuse to do that. I think it's why I asked you on the podcast, why I love your content both on the based podcast, on your YouTube channel, on Twitter, which we've got all the links to that stuff in the show notes.
00:47:54
Speaker
keep doing what you're doing because I think this is such an important thing for more people to be aware of and a more important way for people to think about politics. Congratulations and it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for coming on, Australiana.
00:48:24
Speaker
Thanks so much, Will.