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Free minds and free markets, with Nick Gillespie
2.3k Plays11 days ago
Freedom is under assault across the West. The US is reverting to 18th century economic protectionism, the UK are jailing people for tweets, and Australia gave up on the pretense of rugged individualism a long time ago.
How do we fight for freedom in a world that is becoming less free? To help Will with that question, he is joined by Nick Gillespie. Nick is an Editor-at-large at Reason, the libertarian magazine of free minds and free markets, and host of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
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Transcript
The Allure and Limits of Libertarianism
00:00:21
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston. The late, great American political satirist P.J. O'Rourke said that libertarians just want to get high and have sex while saving money.
00:00:36
Speaker
And really, who doesn't? I've always thought libertarianism was an easy sell for that reason. However, pure libertarian parties have never had much success at the ballot box across the West.
00:00:48
Speaker
Moreover, freedom feels like it is under assault pretty much everywhere. The US is reverting to 18th century economic protectionism, the UK are jailing people for tweets, and Australia gave up the pretense of rugged individualism a long time ago.
00:01:05
Speaker
How do we fight for freedom in a world that is becoming less free?
Introducing Nick Gillespie
00:01:10
Speaker
To help me with that question, I am delighted to be joined by Nick Gillespie. Nick is an editor-at-large at Reason, the libertarian magazine of free minds and free markets, and host of the Reason interview with Nick Gillespie.
00:01:23
Speaker
Robert Draper said it best in the New York Times magazine. Nick Gillespie is to libertarianism what Lou Reed is to rock and roll, the quintessence of its outlaw spirit.
00:01:33
Speaker
Nick, welcome to Fire at Will. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It's great to have
The Paradox of Freedom
00:01:38
Speaker
you on. Do you think that's a fair assessment? Do you think that freedom is under assault across the West? Oh, I thought you were going to ask if it's a fair assessment that I am like Lou Reed, who literally, as we were talking, I was listening to ah the Velvet Underground song Heroin to amp myself up in the morning. So, i yeah, you know, it's an interesting question and it's a paradox when it comes to freedom, you know, and and kind of, you know, which I just define as the ability to live the way that you want to, you know, and
00:02:09
Speaker
I am a directional libertarian. I've come to realize over the years I'm less interested in kind of creating a foundation that is philosophically you know firm, you know that it's it's really deep concrete that you can build and build and build on.
00:02:24
Speaker
I'm a directional libertarian. So for me, the question is is, are things moving in the direction towards more freedom or less freedom for more individuals? So that's kind of a throat clearing to say it is it is a decidedly mixed bag and it is deeply worrying because we should always be going towards freedom and we should be going faster than we are at any given moment in time.
00:02:49
Speaker
I have lately also started to rediscover... ah you know, the value of being Promethean, of stealing fire from the gods. And I feel like libertarians somewhat are not doing that anymore, but everybody seems to be cowed.
00:03:05
Speaker
You know, it i mean, we're we're in a slump when it comes to optimism, when it comes to ah belief in technological innovation. I think we're starting to come out of that. But, you know, we we should be doing better. We should be burning brighter, you know, as as beacons of liberty and freedom.
Economic and Political Freedoms: A Complex Dance
00:03:22
Speaker
And just to put a bit of a complication into all of this, there is a guy at Brookings Institution named Homi Karas, who's written a book called The Rise of the Global Middle Class. And he basically, using a bunch of UN and other numbers that are you know that are pretty solid, he says that for the first time in human history, around like 2017, 2018, 2018,
00:03:47
Speaker
a majority of people were living at the middle class level or above, which means that they have disposable income, which means that they have a little bit more of economic freedom. And with economic freedom comes, if not political freedom, a demand for political freedom. This is pure Milton Friedman saying, you know,
00:04:07
Speaker
If you liberalize the economy, ultimately, you're going to have to liberalize the the political sphere because people who have money want to be able to spend it on the things that they want. And one of the ways that you get money is by letting people produce the businesses, the goods and services they want. So in a big picture way, I think things are good.
00:04:29
Speaker
more narrowly and, and, you know, the things that you're talking about, there is something called, you know, a kind of like free speech recession or a democracy, not maybe not a democracy recession, but a freedom recession where groups like the human rights foundation around the globe show that, you know, more people now are living under a less free circumstances than they were 25 years ago.
00:04:51
Speaker
Deeply, deeply worrying. Having said that, you know, there is a, is a good question to ask. And I think this is worth thinking about seriously. Like, You know, in is the typical Chinese person, are they more free to live how they want in their daily lives than they were 25 years ago or certainly 50 years ago because of industrialization and because of urbanization?
00:05:14
Speaker
they probably have more freedom on a daily basis. They have more food. They have more money. ah When you live in a city, even if you have, you know, bizarre kind of Orwellian controls on stuff, there's just more s slippage, you know, in ah in a city world.
00:05:29
Speaker
I think that, okay, now I've coughed up my lungs completely to get to, you know, the things that you're talking about in the United States, I think in Australia, in the OECD, let's say, you know, the, the,
00:05:43
Speaker
advanced economies, yeah, there's something really bad going on. I mean, on on ah on a basic level, we can you know we can say what we want more than ever, and we can get that message out to more people. We can consume more drugs, either legally or semi-legally.
00:06:00
Speaker
We can be gay. We can be straight. We can have kids, not have kids, like ah many profound ways. We are extraordinarily free. And we need to always note that, ah you know, and, and push, you know, you know, and raise the banner on that.
00:06:14
Speaker
But there's no question that there is a, um, You know, a kind of impulse to shut things down, to shut down certain kinds of speech, so shut down certain kinds of economic activity, to shut down certain types of of movement.
Challenges to Free Speech
00:06:27
Speaker
I mean, for me, in a lot of ways, my my core issue is immigration, because I believe that almost everything that we have stems from what some people, um ah you know, we call Albert O. Hirschman, called a right of exit.
00:06:41
Speaker
You know, ah the ability to leave a place that you don't want to be anymore. And to the extent that that's being clamped down on and that it's getting harder to you know show up in America it's harder, it's getting harder to cross borders.
00:06:54
Speaker
That's really disturbing. We will get to an immigration. It is on my list because it perhaps is the one issue I think where we will potentially disagree on. But before we do, I'm interested in understanding that impulse better. You talked about that freedom, recession, and that impulse to clamp down, particularly on speech, and particularly in the UK and Europe.
00:07:14
Speaker
The US is fortunate in that it has constitutional protection for it. And this is possibly one good thing about the Trump administration. i you know i wanted... Donald Trump to beat Kamala Harris in the U.S. and I was saying up until very recently that I was cautiously optimistic about Trump's second term.
00:07:33
Speaker
I'm no longer you know particularly optimistic or cautious about it, but you know it's we're still early days in it. But one of the things that Trump did, he issued an executive order telling federal employees, like, hey, you know what? You don't get to jawbone social media companies. You don't get to tell them either wink with a wink or a nod or with a kind of implicit threat.
00:07:55
Speaker
don't amplify this, amplify this, et cetera. That is good. The Biden administration, you know and as the first Trump administration, certainly the Obama administration and the Bush administration, just to keep it in the 21st century, they all did various things to shut down speech that they did not like.
00:08:14
Speaker
The good news about it is that The government in profound ways is incapable of doing that. And this is when I say we need to be Promethean. Promethean was not human. he He was a friend to the humans. He brought us fire. But we need to become Prometheus, hopefully without you know the the liver problems that accrue at the end.
00:08:34
Speaker
but you know But what we need to be doing is to be saying, no, fuck you. You don't get to limit how we talk about things. And I think in the in in the United States, certainly through the high tide of wokeness and things like that, the main problem was that people lost their faith and belief and their commitment to free speech, to uncomfortable speech, to meaningful speech.
00:08:59
Speaker
So we need to do that. I think it's worse in England, and I think it's worse in Europe in general, where you have you know where there are governmental laws. I mean, you know these the kind of Euro hate speech laws are just anathema, as you were kind of alluding to, in in the United States.
00:09:15
Speaker
Although there's a subterranean version of that that definitely goes on. So how do you make the argument better? So in Australia, for example, the Nazi salute has recently been criminalized. I hope you didn't do that. just saw you do one. Do they have exemptions for plays? Plays. Yeah, you know.
00:09:37
Speaker
You can be able to be doing street theater of the sound of music or something just so that you can get your Nazi salutes. And yeah, that's just kind of stuff is, you know, it's, it's insanity, right?
00:09:47
Speaker
You know, because like you, you're not going to stamp things out by passing laws against certain things. And, you know, in this, we, we all know that, I mean, they're in, in Weirmeyer, Germany, you know, just, and I fucking hate using Nazi examples because it's, you know, the,
00:10:02
Speaker
reductio ad hitlerum. And, you know, it's it's stupid. But like Weimar, Germany, you know, there were speech codes against certain types of speech that the Nazis were able to get around and then they used when they were in power, you know, and and ah and a draconian government, like a government that doesn't give a shit.
00:10:21
Speaker
about human beings, like, will be worse at it. But it's it's just stupid. You know, it's like, if you allow this speech to happen, and you ignore it, or you combat it, like in the public sphere, public square, you know, it's going to be much more limited than if you somehow kind of tokenize it with this immense magical power, you know, so I mean, it's, it's no different than, you know, trying to ban, you know, satanic witchcraft in in the Middle Ages or something like that. this is This is what I struggle with because we've known this since John Stuart Mill. We've known this long before John Stuart Mill. So why does this impulse in government, and I must say across a large part of Western populations, seem to re-emerge where there is this thought you can stamp out an idea just by banning it at ah at a governmental level?
00:11:09
Speaker
Yeah, you know, it's ah it's a very good question. And I don't i don't have a good, you know, kind of deeply rooted, thick answer for why. It does seem to be, you know, part of human history. I don't know that I believe in human nature per se, but I do believe in human history. And there's always moments where the powers that be are want to suppress the speech of that the less powerful. And, you know, I think back to there were laws, I think, in in England and and other parts of Europe, you know, in the age of kings, where if you were caught writing down what a king or somebody from the court said in public, you know, they were making a public announcement. If you were writing it down, you could get into huge trouble because they demanded the ultimate right, you know, to issue a proclamation. Now, this is what the king said. Controlling speech
00:11:59
Speaker
There's always this idea that if you can control speech, you can control thought. If you control thought, you control people. And it just doesn't work. And the other thing, you know, people at groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, FIRE, in the United States, which has moved into the space that was once occupied by the ACLU in our country, the American Civil Liberties Union.
00:12:22
Speaker
You know, they talk a lot about you you don't just need laws. Laws are helpful and they are an important bulwark, but you need a culture of free speech.
The Culture of Free Speech and Personal Courage
00:12:31
Speaker
And one of the things that I recognize, like I was born in 1963. So it's, you know, like post-war America.
00:12:38
Speaker
And I grew up in an era without even thinking about it, where free speech was growing. um ah Books like Lady Chatterley's Lover and and Ulysses and Tropic of tropic of Cancer.
00:12:51
Speaker
could not be published or would were not published officially in the U.S. s until like the late 50s or early 60s because, you know, they had dirty words in them. so like i you But I grew up in this glorious moment where people were pushing the boundaries of speech codes because they recognized that, you know, if you want to be free, you need to be free to say what you think.
00:13:13
Speaker
And I took for granted, and I think a lot of people my age or thereabouts, and this is also true of, you know, Gen X, you take for granted that that's, you know, nobody's ever going to mess with that. This is, you know, this is a better accomplishment of America than, you know, the Hoover Dam or, or, um,
00:13:32
Speaker
you know, Mount Rushmore or something like that, or the Empire State Building. But in fact, people are always looking to chip that down. And this is what's really bad. You know, in the United States, it used it used to vacillate where it's like sometimes it was the left that wanted to clamp down on speech. And then the right would be like, no, we're the free speech people.
00:13:50
Speaker
And then the right would do it. And then the left would be like, how dare you? And now there are strong elements in both sides that are like, no, you know what? Like some speech is bad and it might be bad because it's dirty.
00:14:02
Speaker
It might be bad because it's hurtful. It might, you know, it might be bad because it, kind of you know, it would, it would somehow hurt national sovereignty or, or security. And we we have to build a culture of free speech.
00:14:15
Speaker
and then make it living, you know, a living being creature. And the way you do that is by doing it. You know, like you have to be brave in your commitments and your expression about what matters and of protecting speech for people who really are just horrible human beings.
00:14:32
Speaker
But also, you know, when you have something important to say, you have to say it. Like you have to put yourself, you know, in the in in the public square and, you know, and take the abuse that comes with that.
00:14:44
Speaker
I think that notion of bravery is so important. i I spoke to a former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia on this podcast, John Anderson, and he had the wonderful line that the only cure for cancel culture is courage culture.
00:14:57
Speaker
It's powerful, but again, it can be very difficult. And I think this is turning. I think we're not in that awful period around 2020 anymore, but it can still be very difficult when you feel that your job may depend on you know going along with pronouns or your position in society could depend on whether or not you go along with one of the socially accepted high status beliefs of our age. So it can be easier said than done. And you know that one ah I think one of the things from a ah specifically libertarian view, I think what happened was that there was ah fixation on the idea, well, only the government can actually censor things. you know Because like if your book doesn't get published,
00:15:36
Speaker
You know, ah that's, you know, that's a private business and, you know, they have the right to exclude you, you know, which is true and everything. But there was this fixation on merely the government as a source of power. You you mentioned John Stuart Mill a little while ago. You know Mill was very ah clear, and I think he was largely correct, that you know, the laws aren't what ultimately govern speech. It's, you know, it's the weight of ah public opinion or, of you know, the feeling that, you know, you will be going against a wide group of people whose whose favor you might curry, you know, whose company you keep, who will be like, no, you know what, like, you shouldn't be thinking like that.
00:16:15
Speaker
You shouldn't be talking like that and whatnot. And you know it's ah you know There are people who come around who are you know I think are better than others at this kind of stuff. I don't consider myself much of a free speech person.
00:16:28
Speaker
um you know The closest I probably came was at one point, I'm not even remembering what year it was, but in the wake of the Danish election, Muhammad cartoons, right, of the controversy about that, which was, if you go back and read about it, it was completely ginned up, you know, after the fact on the on the part of some Muslim clerics who actually did a kind of outrage tour of the Arab Middle East mostly. I think they might have also gone to Iran, but where they actually put in images that were not in the Danish newspaper that ran the cartoons originally and were wildly taken out of
00:17:04
Speaker
Out of context, one was a French comedian and who was at a hog calling contest. And so he had a pig nose on and and ears because it was leading pig calling, you know like hog calling.
00:17:16
Speaker
And they said that he was making fun of Muhammad. And it was like it had nothing to do with it. But we ran an everybody draw Muhammad contest. And I have a good essay, one that I'm proud of, of why we did that. And it is like at a certain point.
00:17:31
Speaker
you know You have to be able to speak what you believe is real. And like you cannot just give up and be silenced by the loudest you know group that is outraged by something.
00:17:43
Speaker
ah special you know and But there are people like you know Christopher Hitchens comes to mind. He's he's a strong advocate of of free speech. you know People like Brendan O'Neill, you know the guy who writes for Spiked. in We've had him on the show. Yeah.
00:17:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I like, you know are there are people like that. I don't always agree with them, you know, but like I really I get, you know, it's like listening to the Velvet Underground before you, you know, I don't know, you're going to go out and shoot heroin or, you know, go out for the evening or something like that. Like, you know, we we need more people like that, people who are willing to put it on the line for their truths.
00:18:17
Speaker
ah Interestingly, it's actually now being used as as a negotiating tool by the Trump administration. so They've come out and said to the UK, no free trade without free speech. They are making any sort of trade arrangement conditional upon changing domestic policy around free speech. Now, who knows how much of this is bluster and how much is actually serious.
00:18:40
Speaker
But on principle, what do you think of of that as a as a stance from the Trump administration? ah You know, it's hard to take. ah but Well, i when I was going to say it's it's hard to take the Trump administration serious, that's not quite right. It's hard to take them at their word because you never know what's going to happen. And, you know we're going we've already gone through a bunch of.
00:19:04
Speaker
phases of where you know we're doing tariffs for sure, we're not we're definitely doing them and we're never taking them but off, even if people negotiate with us, but maybe we'll pause it, et cetera. So it's hard to say.
00:19:16
Speaker
you know the the trump i think Donald Trump, and you know he very much personifies his his administration, he is a bully and a blowhard. And, you know, the things that he's done where, you know, ah the Associated Press, you know, kept using the term Gulf of Mexico after he renamed it the Gulf of America. And like, so they got bounced from the White House, you know, briefing room for a while. I don't know if that's still enforced.
00:19:44
Speaker
This is the kind of penny ante shit that needs to be laughed at and ignored and pushed past. And I don't like... You know, we need we need to stand up to bullies. so You know, the Biden administration bullied the American media in other ways. And, you know, and that it's a little bit different because the press was less oppositional. ah You know, writ large, the press was less oppositional to Biden.
00:20:10
Speaker
And there's clearly dozens of reporters and agencies that knew he was feeble minded and refused to talk about it because they didn't want Trump to win. um you know And that's that's a form of kind of speech suppression that is disgusting and awful. But also like you know when i when a president of ah of a democracy is kind trying to dictate speech codes, why not dress codes?
00:20:35
Speaker
I mean, he would do it if he could get away with it. And it's just it's pointless and stupid. And I think you know it's also in the end, a lot of it is bluster. you know And this is where I think other countries need to Stand up to their, you know, I was going to say to their adversaries, it's not even adversaries, you know what I
Economic Myths and Realities
00:20:52
Speaker
mean? The worst thing about it, you know, Trump is burning a huge amount of, you know, calories going after Mexico and Canada, which are like our second and third largest trading partners.
00:21:02
Speaker
And, you know, and he's saying that they're somehow screwing us over with their tariff policies. He renegotiated the terms of NAFTA, the trade policy, you know, the trade policy treaty that that that governed trade between Mexico, the U.S. and Canada. He did that. in this He renegotiated in his first term. And now he's saying they're cheating.
00:21:22
Speaker
It's like we're all following the rules he laid down. He's he's, you know, unstable. He's not a very stable genius, as he once claimed. Let's go deeper on tariffs. They are the topic of the moment.
00:21:35
Speaker
How did we get here? So so the this policy seems to be just based on so many flawed flawed beliefs, you know whether it be that the trade deficits are somehow inherently a bad thing, whether it be that you know there are some countries that are screwing over the US.
00:21:52
Speaker
but I saw the other day that Ethiopia- Like Madagascar. are you know like How dare they? you know they we They don't really buy much from us, but we're buying a fuck ton of vanilla. How dare they?
00:22:03
Speaker
you know yeah Until they buy, I don't you know, what, hot dogs or something from America. you know Screw that. The Ethiopians, I think, have a $12 billion dollars trade deficit surplus with America. And you've got to wonder, is that because the Ethiopians are ruthlessly screwing over the poor American economy or because Americans can't grow coffee? Yeah, they're known for that, right? you know It's like the Ethiopians are the wiliest of the people. readta It's in the Old Testament, for Christ's sake.
00:22:28
Speaker
know well And, you know, it's important when you say like it's based on so many misunderstandings. And one is the idea that trade deficits somehow reflect poorly on the country that has the deficit or that they are a sign of cheating by the other people or anything like that.
00:22:45
Speaker
This is bonkers and insane and stupid. there are There are earlier you know other parts that are wrong, like the idea that um American manufacturing has been decimated by outsourcing and things like that.
00:23:00
Speaker
The United States, I put this chart out more and more. you know It's probably going to be on an hourly basis now on places like Twitter. america The share of the American workforce that worked in factory jobs and manufacturing peaked in the nineteen forty s during World War II.
00:23:17
Speaker
And then it's like a straight line decline. And it doesn't matter, you know, when we opened up, when we, you know, the the so the great global trade story of of, you know, the post-war era was a general lowering of tariffs all around the world. That's why a majority of people yeah around the globe are middle class, you know, middle class status status or higher.
00:23:40
Speaker
um And it doesn't matter, you know, when ah NAFTA happened, it didn't matter when the WTO was created at the end of the 20th century. You know, it's just America, like every other wealthy country, the wealthier you get, the less people are employed in manufacturing, just like fewer people in farming.
00:23:56
Speaker
It's mostly because of automation. And it is a good thing. I've worked factory jobs, unlike Donald Trump. Like, you know, you know, and even now his commerce secretary, this idiot Howard Lutnick,
00:24:08
Speaker
Just a couple of days ago on TV was talking about how, you know, like, and and he literally said this, like, you know, those, that you know, those jobs where you're, you're putting in the little tiny screws where you're screwing in tiny screws on iPhones.
00:24:20
Speaker
Those jobs are coming back to America. And it's like, you know, my fucking grandparents left Ireland and Italy to escape what Marx called the idiocy of rural life. They moved to America in the 19 teens. They moved to cities.
00:24:34
Speaker
They worked factory jobs and like, you know, the shittiest kind of service jobs of, you know, being a domestic for wealthy people. ah My father fought in World War Two, managed to get an office job like his dream.
00:24:47
Speaker
It was not you know that his grandchildren would now work on assembly lines, putting tiny screws in iPhones. And it's good work. And it's better work that is better done you know overseas where people don't have as many options. And this is something that can be done.
00:25:04
Speaker
America manufactures so much more with so so many fewer workers because of automation and because of productivity gains. like you know People in America, Trump, and i'm I'm sorry to be going on about this, but this, I think, is why we're at this point in America, both the right and the left over at least the past 30 years and it's really closer to 50 years.
00:25:29
Speaker
They have been telling different versions of the story that America was once a great country. It was once a proud country. It was once um you know an economic powerhouse and you know and a political powerhouse and ah you know it dominated global production and it dominated global geopolitics, et cetera.
00:25:46
Speaker
And now it has fallen. it is It's in decline. And the reason it's in decline is because all of these factory jobs that everybody who had a factory job worked hard so their kids wouldn't work in the factory or the coal mine or anything like that.
00:26:02
Speaker
You know, we now because we don't have these jobs anymore and we have the highest standards of living that we've ever had as Americans, we need to go back to this stuff. But they're caught in this false nostalgia.
00:26:15
Speaker
For a time in Donald Trump's past or in Hillary Clinton's past, she talked a lot about this Bernie Sanders, like where, oh, you know, if we just had more union guys working in factories where the you know hot steel was being rolled, you know, and and people would lose eyes and fingers and they break their backs.
00:26:34
Speaker
You know, that that's the America we need to get back to. And that leads into this idiotic kind of concept that you need to be industrial. yeah everything Everything needs to be industrial and you need to dominate, you know, your global trading partners as if you're an occupying army, you know, as if you're dealing with Germany and Japan right after World War Two.
00:26:54
Speaker
It's so misguided on so many levels that it's a bad thing. And I just, I guess what ah I'm sorry to bloviate this long on it, but the the the biggest problem is that the reason why Trump was able to get elected on this policy, part of it is that the Democrats are useless in America. They just have no vision of anything, but on the right and the left, which or related to, but not quite synonymous with, you know, the Democrats and the Republicans, there is this belief that America is not what it was.
00:27:25
Speaker
And it's not what it was because it's not what it was during the childhood of the people in power. And, you know, Donald Trump, I mean, he says this all the time. he you know, if I can look back at the 1970s, which was not a great economic decade, it was a great cultural decade for the United States, not a great economic decade. And he's like, we got to get back to that.
00:27:46
Speaker
Hillary Clinton said that Bernie Sanders won't shut up about how great 1973
00:27:52
Speaker
Because that's when, you know, the wages between the wealthiest people and like the middle class people was the most compressed. And it's like nobody who who in their right mind would want to go back to the standard of living at any level on the income distribution that we had in 1973.
00:28:09
Speaker
Nobody.
Nostalgia vs. Modernity in Political Thought
00:28:10
Speaker
But these are the people who are, you know, kind of polluting the political environment, the political atmosphere. And now, you know, Trump, I guess, to his credit, you know, has the the the Alon Vidal to like actually project his stupid, demented, false, nostalgic view of what is right onto the world, at least for a couple of months.
00:28:35
Speaker
Where does this feeling of nostalgia come from? Like you said, you're you're not a human nature kind of guy, but but is it just a human nature thing that we look back with rose-tinted glasses or is there something else going on here? Yeah, i think I think there's a lot of that, you know, and and like one, at least in the modern era, you know, you know like, you know, post it's like, say from the Enlightenment on.
00:28:55
Speaker
I mean, one one great thing about the Enlightenment, actually, which gets short shrift these days, because you for various reasons, but was that the Enlightenment was not nostalgic. You know, and and it was like, oh, it's like we don't want to go back to being peasants like that kind of suck. We don't want to go back to being superstitious people who are like, oh, my God, like, you know, the gods are smoting us because we jerked off or something like that. And so here's the plague.
00:29:21
Speaker
But right after that, you know and you know, the great inheritances of the Enlightenment are things like, you know, Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution and natural selection, Sigmund Freud and kind of understanding the unconscious and then Marx.
00:29:34
Speaker
And Marx, you know, and and the idea that economic, you know, the economic base determines everything in society. He and Engels, I mean, what's what's weird in the Communist Manifesto, you know, they they talk about how bourgeois society is great because it actually does make everything sacred.
00:29:52
Speaker
It makes it profane. You know, it's like everything solid dissolves into air. They talk about how bourgeois society, because ah of the the vitality of economic production and constantly s things constantly changing, that like old inherited money gets thrown out the window because like new rising merchants who come up with new ways of doing things, people who and develop new technologies, produce so much more stuff that things start to break down. And you know in the early pages the Communist Manifesto, they're quite you know quite kind of powerful. They like
00:30:24
Speaker
bourgeois society. You know, it's like, it's not a bad thing, but they are also in particularly angles was totally nostalgic about a pre-industrial period, you know, and he has passages where he's talking about how, you know, what was great in the middle ages.
00:30:39
Speaker
was that people would, you know, like peasants would just walk down the street and the trees were, you know, were filled with ripe fruit where the, you know, it was so ripe that at the branch bent down and and then the fruit would just drop into your hand and you would eat well, et cetera.
00:30:55
Speaker
And you see that in the early 20th century as well. There's a series of kind of very heavily Marxist influenced writers. And I'm thinking of people like Walter Benjamin is like this, you know, some of the Frankfurt School guys.
00:31:08
Speaker
They liked the hierarchy in the, or the stability of what they saw as the stability of a medieval order, where there is a great chain of being in everything. Everybody has a role to play and everything is in a place and there is meaning.
00:31:23
Speaker
you know, shot through life because you're not alienated from, you know, whatever you're doing. So I think on the left, you know, on on a kind of Marxist left, there is a nostalgia for an ordered universe where, you know, whether it's a watch or a great chain of being or something like everything is kind of working and everything is respected and people get, you know, there isn't the enemy that comes with the rise of global capitalism.
00:31:49
Speaker
Again, I'm Promethean and I'm libertarian. I, you know, my ancestors in Ireland and Italy, I mean, for a thousand years, they were bred to be peasants and serfs and they got treated like that. And the minute that they could fucking get out of that system, they came to America, you know, and, and had a different experience, you know, and, and you know, if for a thousand years they were, you know, they were the things that were acted upon within a hundred years in America, like they're their great or their grandchildren and great grandchildren are living great lives.
00:32:22
Speaker
I'm all in on capitalism and free markets, which also brings us back to free minds. You know, Reason Magazine slogan is free minds and free markets. And the whole point of that is that civil liberties and economic liberties and ultimately political liberty These are all conjoined and we need to be able to think freely. We need to be able to speak freely and we need to be able to build the businesses, the communities, the worlds that we want to live in. so Well, the right has traditionally supported that, at least the economic liberties that
00:32:54
Speaker
Well, if I may, and I'm sorry to – No, please. I've had too much coffee this morning. But ah no, you know what was interesting, though, throughout most of the 20th century, and particularly in the Cold War period especially, you know, the right in America, and I suspect, you know, broadly in England, you know, when you think of like the, you know, Thatcher the end of things, and I'm sure Australia has similar, you know, elements. I apologize for not being as well-versed.
00:33:22
Speaker
in Australian post-war political history. But the right was like, yeah we need free markets and free enterprise because that's how we beat the communists. And we're the opposite of the communists.
00:33:33
Speaker
And in the US especially, that meant that conservatives had to roll with libertarians because we were the people who were talking about free enterprise and individualism and the right to live how you want to, as long as you are not you know openly deceiving or hurting other people.
00:33:50
Speaker
But the right always hated on a basic level, it was always deeply suspicious of capitalism because, you know, you know capitalism will you know sell you whatever you want. Capitalism is not a moral system in the sense that it is not going to say like, oh, you know what, don't drink whiskey, don't don't do drugs, don't you know don't watch TV that is racy or you know that is immoral and things like that. And I think what has happened, you know, partly in the wake of the Cold War, which is now, you know, decades ago, it's ancient history in in America.
00:34:25
Speaker
And this may be partly true throughout, throughout again, the OECD countries, you know, the the conservative right no longer is that keen on free markets because it was good to defeat communism, but it also disrupts continuity, it disrupts hierarchy, disrupts tradition, it disrupts religion.
00:34:45
Speaker
you know And people people who are free and are individualistic and are libertarian, you know they're I'm not going to say they're anti-authority, but they question authority more than most conservatives are comfortable with.
00:34:58
Speaker
That's a really interesting and nuanced take. Is there even a more, in addition to that, is there even a more simple explanation for what's going on on the right? And that is just the cheerleading effect for Donald Trump.
00:35:09
Speaker
Like if Biden was putting forward, and I asked someone this on Twitter the other day, Biden put forward the exact same tariff regime. I can't imagine the response would, well, course it wouldn't be the same. How much of this is just, and the response of conservatives in America, in the UK as well, how much of this is just the cheerleading effect for Donald Trump?
00:35:28
Speaker
Yeah, i I mean, I think that's a lot of it. I i spent many, many years at you know university and very highly trained in kind of various types of critical theory, as it was called when I was getting my PhD in American literature in the 80s and 90s. But it's a kind of structural approach where you you know people don't believe in certain things. But it's like if you're if your opposite side, if the other tribe says, we believe in cooked food,
00:35:58
Speaker
you know, then you say, well, we are the tribe that eats raw food. And it's not because you really think there's something inherent in cooked food versus raw food, but it's like, if they're doing that, we're doing the opposite. And this is one of the most kind of fascinating and in many ways depressing things about contemporary American politics, where yeah Before COVID, if the Pew Research, big you know kind of research group here surveys and stuff, in the early teens, they did a they asked people of different ideologies, like, you know are you more or less against or for vaccines?
00:36:36
Speaker
And what they found in the early teens in America was that people who identified as being on the far left were much more anti-vaccine than people on the right. You know, then COVID happens. And bizarrely, because Donald Trump, you know, did he he like made the vaccines happen vastly more quickly than they would have been through his, you know, his government program, incentivizing that and kind of immunizing you know vaccine makers from you know certain types of legal restrictions. We could argue about all of that stuff.
00:37:09
Speaker
But by the same token, he was anti-vaccine. But even then, later he became anti-vaccine and people on the right became anti-vaccine. But in 2020, in the fall of 2020, shortly before the vaccines actually came out and were being you know jabbed into people, people like Kamala Harris said, like, I'm not taking any Trump vaccines.
00:37:30
Speaker
You know, like, so it's weird. But now it's like if you're on the left, you would take any fucking vaccine that is offered you. And if you're on the right, you could have polio.
00:37:41
Speaker
You know, you could have been saved from polio and you would be like the polio vaccine is poison, you know. And so it is just this kind of weird structural cheerleading effect that you're talking about. And it's it's.
00:37:54
Speaker
You know, it's it it's I don't know what you do with it, but it helps explain why, you know, Trump has remade the Republican Party, at least in terms of rhetoric. You know, they were the free trade party and they were, you know, generally speaking, pretty amenable to immigration.
00:38:11
Speaker
And they were, you know, they were free speech, you know, whatever, you know, and then Trump is like, no, we're not doing that anymore. We're doing this. And because he won, everybody is like, oh, well, you know what you got, you got to go with, he's the coat, you know, he's calling the plays and we'll just blindly follow him.
00:38:28
Speaker
And on the left, and especially right now, it's, it's, you know I mean, I take allies wherever I find them, but you have never seen so many people who 15 minutes ago were talking about how you know the World Trade Organization was evil and we need to you know we need to stop foreign trade, et cetera. you know On the left, they're now like, you know free trade is the thing that makes us human. Right.
00:38:50
Speaker
you know, because Trump, if Trump is against it, I'm for it and vice versa. And it, it just becomes, it's a little bit lonely to be honest. And I, you know, I fancy myself and my colleagues at reason and other libertarians generally that we're, well, you know, we have a set of principles and it doesn't mean that you don't have, at various points, you have to kind of reduce the intensity of them, or you might say, okay, that was wrong, et cetera. But like,
00:39:13
Speaker
And we've been, and reason's been around since 1968, and we kind of, we have very basic points, the idea that like for you you know people should be free to live however they want, you know to the greatest extent possible.
00:39:26
Speaker
And it's like, you know we're like going on a straight line, and everybody else around us, like who's on our right and who's on our left changes on an almost daily basis.
Immigration and Cultural Identity
00:39:35
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with that. No, I feel much the same way. I consider myself a libertarian.
00:39:39
Speaker
The one area where I think there are shades of difference in in how we approach a topic would be around immigration. And don't get me wrong, I'm supportive of immigration conceptually.
00:39:50
Speaker
I've been an immigrant both in the US and in now in in the UK. I'm from Australia initially. The concerns that I have around particularly immigration policy in the United Kingdom at the moment are is it is an incredibly liberal, open immigration policy. There has been a huge influx of immigrants in the UK, in Europe over the last 10 to 15 years.
00:40:10
Speaker
That worked in a period where people were coming from countries that shared largely similar Western values. The demographics of people entering Europe and entering the UK now have changed dramatically.
00:40:23
Speaker
And you're seeing a lot of people coming from you know parts of Africa, coming from fundamentalist Islamic countries. And the challenge that you have I have from a libertarian perspective is If you have a critical mass of people coming who don't share those same values, that eventually will become a problem and infringe upon freedom and undermine the liberal liberalism of that society.
00:40:44
Speaker
how do you How do you reconcile the general belief that people should be free to move around the world, but at the same time, if people are moving into a country who may then change the nature of that liberal country, how do you reconcile those positions?
00:40:57
Speaker
All right, let me, I'll i'll run through a couple of things. And, you know, those those are good questions and it's it's, you know, it's fairly put because in the, you know, one of the problems with immigration rhetoric is that a lot of the times it immediately goes to, you know, a kind of demonization of newcomers and a scapegoating of them for everything that's wrong.
00:41:16
Speaker
And I find that disturbing. Like I have on my walls, I collected, you know, anti-Irish and anti-Italian posters from the turn of the century coming into America. you know, in England, you know, England, or I don't even know what to call it. You know, is it Great Britain or whatever? Yeah, I'm in England. it out you know England has a horrific you know history with Ireland, and most of it you know in the 19th century especially. There's a phenomenal book by a guy named David Levy called How the Dismal Science Got Its Name.
00:41:47
Speaker
And it's this cultural history of how English publications figured, you know literally and figuratively. Irish people throughout the 19th century. And, you know, and they, you know, they start out as like, but you know, ah different types of monkeys who are constantly like drinking themselves into a stupor and shitting themselves or blowing things up to just like a big hulk hulking ape by the end of the nineteenth century.
00:42:11
Speaker
So, you know, it's it's it's good not to demonize people. I mean, there's there's a lot there. And the one thing I can also say is that the U.S. has a different and it might be a unique history with immigration in that the United States allowed many people to come here, especially starting in the last, but you know latter half of the 19th century through about 1924. And and it did not officially force people to be assimilated, but it also, it allowed them to assimilate in a way that I think when you look at European and and British immigration policies, like, you know, people come to a place and then they are kind of, especially lately in the name of multiculturalism,
00:42:57
Speaker
It's like, okay, well, you're going to live in this neighborhood and you're not going to be allowed to work. And we're going to respect your the culture you came from. And so like you you can't integrate. And you know both the immigrants need to assimilate into the culture they're moving to and the culture needs to acculturate. It's going to be changed to a point where I did an interview recently with the food writer, Alton Brown, who pointed out that, you know, fish and chips, right? The ah quintessential English pub food is actually a Jewish dick.
00:43:28
Speaker
When Jews were brought back into England by, you know, by Cromwell of all people, you know, they brought fish and chips with them. So like, you know, the and this is true everywhere. The most American thing, you know, ah Italian food for decades was the most popular cuisine in America. Not, not American, right? you know, pizza, it's been supplanted by Mexican food.
00:43:49
Speaker
Also, you know what? Not, not American. um So you need to have a culture that does not force people to hold onto their culture or punish them when they try to assimilate. And, you know, this is never an easy process, but To go to a couple of quick points, I just want to point out Ireland, you know, Ireland for, you know, 500 years or so had a net out migration.
00:44:12
Speaker
And then during the EU, and I'm talking about the Republic of Ireland, you know, when particularly Polish people started going to Ireland, the Irish were livid. Like, I mean, there are fewer, still fewer people in Ireland now than there was in 1840. You know, this is a country that defines a diaspora, right?
00:44:30
Speaker
And the minute people actually started moving there who were a little bit different, they're like, oh, you know, these fucking polls are ruining everything. And it's like Ireland, you are one of the most beaten down countries in the world, you know, for a long time it was one of the poorest country. And now you have people coming here who are not going to turn, you know, Dublin into Krakow too, you know, but like you, you have to learn to kind of ah let people in on a profound level. And I think There is a certain amount of scapegoating that goes on generically of, you know, if something is happening, if something is changing, it's because of the immigrants.
00:45:08
Speaker
Immigrants in America, and you know, the big European migration was from about 1880 to 1924 when It got shut down overnight. That is not, you know they did not bring socialism or progressive social policies to the United States.
00:45:23
Speaker
It was people born and bred in the United States who enacted those policies. And then people who were unhappy with them said, oh, you know, it's Sacco and Vanzetti. We're to blame for the rise of like a big government culture in America. It's like, no, not at all. So like we need to keep these things in in perspective. And I think what America has done generally well is, you know, my my mother grew up, she was the daughter of Italian immigrants, was born in 1927.
00:45:51
Speaker
None of her children speak any Italian. You know, and it and it's not because anybody said, like, you can't do that. And nobody, certainly nobody said you have to stay in an Italian ghetto.
00:46:02
Speaker
I mean, she grew up speaking Italian until she went to public school. You know, there's that we do a good job of assimilating people. It's also true what we have done a poor job of, particularly over the past, you know, 10 years maybe, but certainly the past five years, and it's changing.
00:46:22
Speaker
was we did not control our border between the U.S. and Mexico. And it's not that those people coming across were lawless, et cetera. You know, there are many good studies and in America, I can really only speak strongly to an American experience here,
00:46:37
Speaker
Illegal immigrants cause less crime than legal immigrants who cause less crime than native born Americans. But that sense that the border was not secure, you know, freaked people out and it led to a sense of chaos and confusion.
00:46:53
Speaker
And you know it led to a demonization of immigration in America, which I think is fundamentally flawed. I live in New York City now. i was born here. I worked here. I moved away for 30 years.
00:47:05
Speaker
I've lived in parts of the country, and I'm talking about small towns in places like Texas and Ohio that don't have immigrants. I know in America... If you are in a place that doesn't have immigrants from outside the country or from within the country, you're fucked. America needs immigration. It is a way that we kind of renew and refresh ourselves. And immigrants bring with them you know not disease and not you know bad ideas and not you know female gen genital mutilation.
00:47:35
Speaker
They bring you know fresh ideas and fresh legs to really carry on the work of building and On principle, I agree, but there are harder there are harder edge cases here, right? So the difference between an Italian and an American, even in the eighteen hundreds but you know today, the difference between even the Poles and the Irish was relatively smaller than the difference between an Eritrean and someone born in London, for example. yeah And and and there and there you know there are cases now of you know female genital mutilation being imported into the UK.
00:48:07
Speaker
Those are the cases that I think worry a lot of people. Yeah, no. And and let me ah first point out that if you go back and you read the legislative history of immigration restrictionism in America, there is it people back then, you know, the the kind of WASP hierarchy in America, the the establishment, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, they hated European immigrants who were coming from places like, you know, Middle Europe and Southern Europe, particularly Italy, because they were Catholic and Jewish.
00:48:38
Speaker
they definitely saw the you know the difference between somebody who was a mayor of a small town in Southern Indiana and somebody, you know some WAP fresh off the boat from Naples.
00:48:50
Speaker
They saw that gap every bit as wide or wider than you know, then you would see between like an Eritrean, you know, and, ah you know, and somebody who traces their lineage back to, you know, Edward III or something like that.
00:49:03
Speaker
And so, you know, there is that. The difference was that the ability to keep people out for a long time was lower and people who come to, who and this is still true, people who come to the U.S. are not looking to, you know, just live the life they were living in a country they left because it was economically depressed or is politically awful.
00:49:29
Speaker
They're not coming here to live that life, you know. And, you know, when Cubans, people are always like, oh, well, yeah you know, and we we have a lot of people like the main sender countries now or sender regions are Asia, you know, both including, you know, East Asia and South Asia, Latin America and things like that.
00:49:46
Speaker
You know, people who left Cuba because of the Cuban revolution, they didn't come to America and be like, oh, you know what? Now we're going to you know build a Castro, a Castrovian, you know, social enterprise. They're like they're the hardest core people who are like, no, we we don't want welfare. We just want work.
00:50:03
Speaker
I understand that in places like Britain and and in europe and, you know, places like France. It's a little bit different, but I think it's, and and I also recognize that this is not something that gets fixed easily, but you know, when you look at the way that France, because this is, neither of us have, you know, a dog in the fight that is France, right?
00:50:23
Speaker
the way that they treated their ex-colonials, you know, and the way that they treat Arabs is, you know, kind of mind-boggling. And like for the longest time, they do not they did not allow, you know, Arabs or, you know, people from Algeria or people from Syria, you know, or whatever to assimilate really in a way. And they, you know, they were uncomfortable with it or Germany, you know, even with You know, Germany after World War II with its Turkish immigrants, they didn't want to go back to Turkey and they were not religious zealots. I mean, you know, they wanted to be in a more secular country.
00:50:59
Speaker
And Germany, which has changed its tune on this, and I think France has moderated somewhat, you know, like, ah you know, they've changed their policies because they recognize they need people. you know They need some of these people.
00:51:10
Speaker
When it comes to things like you know female genital mutilation and whatnot, this is where I think the host country does have a right to say certain things that were practiced in the old country do not apply here.
00:51:26
Speaker
You know, you want to be plural. From a liberal, classical liberal libertarian perspective, I want people to be different and to be able to live different lives. But there are limits to that.
00:51:37
Speaker
And where those limits get set will vary from time to time, place to place, country to country. But, you know, these are things where I think you know done right, immigration policy, like what you get within three generations, certainly true in all of the sociological literature in America, within three generations, nobody nobody so nobody in a household is primarily speaking the language of this the the home country or you know the the past country.
00:52:07
Speaker
Economically, virtually all divisions have changed. you know all All differences have been erased. Educationally, people outmarry. incredibly, you know, it's, ah you know, so that immigration in general works really well in a liberal democracy, because it makes sense that people are coming here in order to start a new life, not to maintain their old one. Otherwise they would stay in their country.
00:52:32
Speaker
And then all of the incentives, the natural incentives are to assimilate into American culture. But it's also important to like, what's good is America has been able to roll pretty well. I mean, and it was a battle and it was very ugly at times and things like that. But like, you know what?
00:52:49
Speaker
You being Jewish is being American, being Italian, yeah being American, being, you know, being African is being American. I've reflected on this a lot and reflected on why America has done a better job with assimilation than countries like Australia and the UK relatively.
00:53:07
Speaker
And what I just keep coming back to, having lived in each of those countries now, is the US still has an incredibly strong sense of self. It still has a strong identity. It's still incredibly proud of its history.
00:53:18
Speaker
There is this self-flagellating instinct across the UK, across Europe now. you know Woke is seen as as as part of that whole thing, basically to talk down your country and your history in a way which, look, there are certainly elements of that in the the American left.
00:53:33
Speaker
Yeah, they're it. You can't do assimilation if you are not proud of what you want the people to assimilate into. And I, you know, and I think what, you know, particularly the case with in England, and I think, like you know, using them as kind of the twin poles of ah of a kind of old world sensibility, England and France are are worth thinking about in this term. But like, england you know, both England and France were kind of de-platformed after World War II as true global powers. I mean, they're, you know, still giant economies, still massive sources of kind of cultural production and things like that. Like they really matter, but not
00:54:10
Speaker
You know, England after World War II was diminished. France after World War II was diminished. And England did have, in a way, a failure of kind of public identity. Like, if we are no longer the country that rules the world, the sun never sets on the British Empire.
00:54:27
Speaker
If we're not that, what are we? And I think that maybe they fail to say, these are the essential things that made america made Britain great. And these are the things, you know there that you know, the specifics will change, but these core principles need to be, you know, they they need to be respected by everybody who comes here.
The Melting Pot and National Identity
00:54:48
Speaker
Interestingly, France, you know which is the essentially the oldest Western country, maybe the oldest country in the world, where you know for a thousand years, it had a territorial you know integrity, you know ah a core you know territory that always ran.
00:55:01
Speaker
But it also you know has been producing a sense of what it is to be French forever to a point where many of their colonials, you know the the subalterns that they ruled and things like that,
00:55:13
Speaker
You know, i know a lot of Lebanese, mostly Christian, who grew up during a period of high French influence in the post-war era. And like all of them hate France, but they all want to retire and move to Paris. You know, like France is a really powerful identity.
00:55:29
Speaker
And I think they suffered from the idea that like, well, you know, you can't, you know, if if you're Algerian, you can't really be French. You know, even if you're French and, you know, you're French and you were, you know, a pied noire being raised in Algeria, you know, like Camus was kind of suspicious to the French.
00:55:47
Speaker
You know, it's like, you know, and that their inability to kind of like allow people their identity to incorporate other people, including their colonial subjects, you know, in a post-colonial world.
00:56:00
Speaker
Japan's another example of this. where You know, Japan now, and I believe that Japan is the only industrialized or, you know major industrial, like advanced nation that has fewer people now than it had in 2000. Like they are, you know, they are in democraticic ah demographic free fallll You know, for the longest time, they wouldn't let anybody immigrate and become citizens. And, you know, they're very rigid in what Japan, Japanese-ness meant, even though modern Japan only dates back to the late 19th century, you know, but like they, they were fixated on this idea.
00:56:34
Speaker
And, you know, they're starting to give a little on that because they have to. And I think that's where you recognize that a national identity is a set of ideas. It's not a set of cosmetic appearance.
00:56:47
Speaker
It's not the language you speak. It's not the food you eat, et cetera. And that, I think, is where America, you know, bless its heart. And it's going through a real awful period now about immigration where a lot of people on the right and the left you know, are anti-immigrant, I think, for the wrong reasons and for bad reasons and in a way that is going to, you know, screw over America, you know, just as much as putting tariff walls up, trying to block, you know, legal immigration ultimately, because Donald Trump and a lot of people in America will say, well, I'm for legal immigration. I'm just against illegal immigration. And then
00:57:21
Speaker
You know, that when I follow up with questions, say, OK, what what how many legal immigrants should be allowed? And and it always is like, you oh, well, none, because we need to assimilate the people we have. We need a timeout. We need a pause, et cetera.
00:57:35
Speaker
And it's like, you know, thriving, vibrant countries don't work that way. places like England, places like the U S places like Australia. Like if immigrants start saying, you know what, I'm not going to go there and I'm going to go to China and I'm going to go to India or I'm going to go to places where I have more opportunities, man, that is, that's the suicide of the West.
00:57:56
Speaker
in a weird way. not It's not like, oh, that we have you know Pakistani people leading you know Western countries. It's like that people who, you know that the smartest, most interesting, most ambitious, you know just most liberty-minded people in the world are choosing to go to autocracies or workplaces because we're saying, no, we can't you know, we're full up.
00:58:20
Speaker
I mean, in America, you know, this is also a difference between, you know, and this going back to the founding of America, you know, it's like, you know, it makes one, it kind of makes sense to talk about, okay, well, you know, the United Kingdom and and much much of Europe, okay, it's like pretty densely populated. It's kind of full up. Like in America, there is so much room, there is so much space and we, you know, there's there's room enough for everybody. And like you learn, there is, you know, there's something quite quintessentially American about going to a Cuban Chinese restaurant in New Jersey.
00:58:54
Speaker
that it That's the essence of it. That's the the upside. And that you have people who are you know just mixing to a point. There's a famous series of essays by a French emigre farmer to the to the colonies named John Crevecourt,
00:59:11
Speaker
who wrote, it's a collection that's usually called Letters from an American Farmer. And he lived in upstate New York, ah you know, in the 18th century. And he was, you know, he has an essay about what then is this American, you know, this new breed. And he is a bit limited in his span, but he's like, oh you know, he's part Dutch and this and that and French. And then,
00:59:30
Speaker
that he marries somebody who's from a different place and their children are something altogether different. That's, you know, the melting pot as a, as a explicit metaphor shows up at the end of the 19th century, but it's really in America. That is, that's the thing, you know, that's America at its best that like, we're going to take people from all over the place.
00:59:51
Speaker
And the common interest is that like, you want to come here and you want to build a world that that is better than the one you left and maybe one that you live in for a while and then say, ah you know what? I'm tired of that. I'm going to do something else.
01:00:04
Speaker
If I may to bring it back to John Stuart Mill, who I revered deeply, you know, he used to talk about experiments in living, you know, that the liberal order allows as many experiments in living as possible to kind of run concurrently, as long as they're not crashing the the system, right?
01:00:23
Speaker
And like part of what's great about that is that's what America is. And like you learn from other people's experiments, like, oh, you know that went wrong. I'm not going to do that. Or parts of that are really cool. I'm going to adapt that to what I'm doing. And then somebody else is looking at you and your community and your business and your cultural identity and kind of riffing off of that. it's it's you know It's beautiful. It's wonderful.
01:00:46
Speaker
It is the excrescence of libertarian thinking and liberal order and pluralism and tolerance, which does have its limits. It's a nice frame. It's a nice frame to end on.
01:00:59
Speaker
Nick, where can people read your stuff and hear more from you? you know, ah please always go to reason.com. I have an archive going back. I started a reason in 1993. So I've got a shit ton of stuff there.
01:01:10
Speaker
um And, and reason.com is great anyway um for, you know libertarian takes on politics, culture, and ideas. And then I'm also on Twitter way too much. And I'm just at Nick Gillespie, all lowercase, all one word.
01:01:25
Speaker
And, and yeah, you know, we, I, I write articles. i make videos and I do podcasts. So I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you. Well, the links to all those wonderful resources are in the show notes. mate Thank you for coming on the show today.
01:01:40
Speaker
You bet.