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Get ready to take a flamethrower to the official narrative and learn what the elites don't want you to know.
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You're listening to the Tom Woods Show.
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Hey everybody, Tom woods here. It's episode 2745 of the Tom Woods Show. I got a two parter for you today. First part is just me talking, and the second part is I want to bring on a guest. And the first part, I want to sit and think about what strategy has the best chance of working. I mean, here we are, those of you who listen to this program, or the sort of person who would read my email, newsletter, my books or whatever, we look at the world roughly the same way and it is not the way we want it, and our country is not the way we want it, and it's not even close to the way we want it. And the question is, what do we do about that? And, and I have heard all kinds of suggestions that are bound to not work and we've tried a whole bunch of strategies that don't work. So I think about this a lot. And when I, a few weeks ago spoke at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, which is sponsored by the Free State Project, I had opportunity to reflect on this. And I started off by saying, now they're going to post my remarks sometime soon. But I'll give you the gist of what I had to say. I reminded people of the 1902 book by Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik, the terrible tyrant of Soviet Russia. He had a book called what Is to Be Done. And in that book he's thinking about what is to be done to advance the cause of the socialist revolution around the world, but in particular in backward Russia, which is not the kind of place Marx had in mind for the spreading of the revolution. It hadn't yet passed through the economic stages that it would need to pass through for it to be ready for the revolution. But also he was asking what is to be done? Because the problem was, in effect, what is to be done with these dumb workers who, if you leave them to their own devices, they're just going to be content to form labor unions and try to agitate for slightly increased wages, but still consent to a system that more or less enslaves and exploits them, according to Lenin. And so that's not good. So how do we break them out of that way of thinking? And he had a whole theory, we need to have a vanguard of the proletariat. We need to have an intellectual class that would go and rouse the proletariat out of its slumber and make sure it understands that you can't compromise with a system that exploits you by having labor unions or whatever you need to overthrow the whole thing. So anyway, so he was looking at strategic questions. What strategy should we follow to be successful? And I said to the people in New Hampshire, we have our own. What is to be done? Because we hold a very unpopular position, like the positions that you and I hold as, let's say, I mean, you could say libertarian. That word has almost been destroyed. But I mean, I think of myself as basically a right winger who is not naive about the state. There are a lot of. Jesus, they're right wingers who are naive about the state. So I'm one who isn't. And that's an unpopular position. How do we know that's an unpopular position? Because almost nobody agrees with us. I mean, let's face it, there are a lot of people who see the world the way we do in some ways, not in others. Okay, I'm happy to have friends who are not exactly like me. But in terms of the whole package, we have a pretty unpopular position. And part of the reason that we have an unpopular position is that the state's own schools are educating people. By and large, most people are educated in the state schools. And these schools depend on your believing state propaganda. And so that is what they dutifully impart to you. You look up on the wall of your classroom and it's the US Presidents looking, you know, with their benign visages looking upon you from their perch up at the top of the wall. And that colors the way the history is taught, the way civics or quote, social studies might be taught, and so on. And so you leave those institutions thinking, well, if it weren't for the state, where would we be? We'd all be working in mines 16 hours a day for 10 cents an hour. We'd be getting our limbs blown off because our computer monitors would be dangerous without adequate regulation. The food we eat would be poisoning us. So we'd be dropping dead from that. And thank goodness we have the state. We don't have these dumb opponents of the state, you know, who obviously hate science and they hate fresh food and they hate non exploding monitors and all that. And so they think that every advance that we have is because of the state. In fact, when I was flying into New Hampshire, I actually flew into Boston. And at Logan Airport they had this display about the space program. And of course they have to give you the propaganda about the crossover technology from the space program into civilian use, which they do. Also, when they talk about the military, they say, if it weren't for all the military spending, we wouldn't have all these technologies. Now, there's a lot that can be said about that, and I've written a little bit about that. That's neither here nor there. But, for example, we were seeing that thanks to the space program, we have memory foam. Like, we would never have developed memory foam if it weren't for the. Who knows how much has been blown on the space program. But my favorite one was de icing equipment. We have de icing equipment thanks to the space program. And I thought, you know, I have a funny feeling we would have figured out how to conquer ice. Even if it weren't for the space program, we'd still figure that out. I just can't imagine we'd be standing there gazing at the ice and thinking, I don't know. I don't know what to do with that. I just. But we. People absorb that because that's the way their brains have been trained. They've been trained to take in information like this and assimilate it into a way of thinking that already presumes that innovations like that must have had some kind of state involvement. Then we have the other. We have several other reasons that it's hard to get our point of view across. One is once there's some government program in place, an interest group develops around it and it becomes very, very difficult, if not impossible, to. To dislodge it because of the strength of that interest group. Then we have the fact that human nature is such that people prefer to achieve their goals using the least possible exertion. Now, what is the way to achieve your goal with the very least possible exertion? Well, achieve it through state power, because instead of actually having to work for it, you just agitate for it politically and you get it. So naturally, people like that. People prefer that. And when we're against that kind of institution, well, they don't care for that. And then, of course, then we have the military aspect of things. Now, the military is the preparation for an execution of war has helped to grow the institution of the state. All over the world, there's tremendous scholarship on that. But in the United States in particular, there's just something about. The military is everywhere. It's at the super bowl, it's at your local restaurant where people who are on the payroll in the military getting tax dollars get a discount at the restaurant or at whatever it is. The military is just everywhere. You're on an airplane and there's somebody in the military on it. So at the end, everybody stands up and cheers. It's absolutely everywhere. And I think a lot of people think to themselves, well, yes, it may be true that milk subsidies are a bad idea or Obamacare is a problem, but the military, that's different. My uncle's in the military, you know, and my uncle's a good guy. And I think because we all have somebody in the family or a next door neighbor or a coworker or a friend or whoever, we all have somebody we know in the military. So we become very sensitive to criticism of the military. Because you feel like I'm criticizing, you know, Uncle Frank when I criticize the military. You know, wait a minute. Careful of what you say about the military. Uncle Frank is in that. So there's some of that, but there's also that they've made it so that people feel like the military is them or represents them or represents, quote, America. Do you support America? Well, America is the institutions and the people, not the government. But we have been bamboozled into thinking that. So if you say, well, this is a terrible war, it's unjust, and the US Government shouldn't have launched it. People take this personally, which makes no sense at all. If you can see the world clearly, there's no reason that should offend you. Because I'm not criticizing you. I'm criticizing these people who run the thing. And I promise you, we have all these people who will make every excuse in the world for the warmongers of both parties. They make every excuse in the world. Oh, they had to launch the war because there were weapons of mass destruction. Whatever. They run around looking for ways to defend their overlords. They dig up. Well, I read this article that said that Saddam had such and such. Long after the overlords have themselves given up these arguments, these poor souls, ordinary Americans, are still trying to find ways to defend them. I keep wanting to tell these people, if the situation were re like when you are accused of not paying enough of your taxes or violating some regulation, I promise you the regime is not going to return the favor. Looking for excuses for you. So you don't owe them this. You don't owe them the unpaid labor of going around trying to find evidence to support their war propaganda. You know, they wouldn't do the same for you. So no need to do unpaid labor for them. And I fell for this too, when I was a, you know, when I was younger, when I was growing up as a teenager, I thought war was entertainment. You know, there's a war on tv. That's pretty cool. I'll watch that. It's really great to see the US Government vanquishing the bad guys. Otherwise, what do you hate America? I mean, it was that low. That was. It was that low iq, the way I thought about it. But there are a lot of people who look at it that way that you are criticizing, quote, you hate, quote, America. No, it's precisely that I love America. This is a beautiful country. It's that I love it, that I don't want it to be run by crazy people who make crazy decisions that I know. Like, I know there's propaganda that sounds persuasive. If you haven't looked into it, you know, we've been at war with Iran for 47 years, or they've killed all these Americans or whatever, then you look at it in a little depth and you say, okay, well, here they go again. But they've got it. They've really been very successful with at least a chunk of America that if you criticize war or the military, it's that you hate the country. Now, if I criticize milk subsidies, I don't hate the country for some reason. It's just, if you criticize this one government program, you hate America. So it's very hard to get through to people like this, especially when they've had example after example of these military adventures gone terribly wrong. And it's incredible. They just learned nothing from it. So we really do have a what is to be done problem. How do we persuade these people not to believe lies or not to favor things that are gonna make them worse off? The wars are gonna make them worse off. The domestic policies they favor are gonna make them worse off. And, you know, sometimes the wars are favored by some people. The domestic policies are favored by others. Sometimes there is people who favor both of those things, but none of them are gonna make them better off. And the thing is, a lot of what you and I believe is counterintuitive. You know, if I say it's better not to have the economy centrally planned. But. Well, yeah, people kind of have heard that by now because central planning failed so badly. You can imagine people thinking, but yet, shouldn't it work? Wouldn't it be better if we had people planning out the economy instead of it being governed by a, quote, anarchy of production, where everybody decides what they're going to produce and where they're going to work and what skill they're going to cultivate? That seems like that would be, quote, anarchic and inefficient. Wouldn't be much more efficient if we had like a single mind overseeing the whole thing and coordinating it. It's not intuitive that that actually doesn't work. That sounds right on some level, doesn't it? But as we know from the socialist calculation problem, it's not right. But even Einstein couldn't get that one. Even Einstein kind of felt like, well, maybe it would be better to plan the economy that way. Or if you want something, just pass a law. You want air conditioned workplaces, force that into existence. Now that is very bad idea, but I don't want to spend the time on that right now. You would get air conditioned workplaces automatically on their own through market mechanisms. Now if you don't believe me, I can talk about that on another episode. But the point is, it sounds though like if you want something like that, you should just pass a law and get it. But if you do that, what you're actually going to do is make a lot of jobs unaffordable to businesses. You know, like when a technology like air conditioning immediately, you know, it first comes onto the scene, it would be enormously expensive to supply it to everyone. So if you demanded that right away, that would just mean, well, that's the end of air conditioning because it can't be afforded and all those jobs would be wiped out. So what actually happens is air conditioned workplaces gradually get introduced on these grounds that people would rather work in air conditioned comfort over at this firm. So this firm installs the air conditioning. A lot of people want to go there. If you're going to entice me to work for your firm, but you're going to pay the same wage that I'm getting or the same salary that I'm getting over at this comfortable air conditioned firm, forget it, you won't be able to do it. So what eventually happens is the firm will introduce air conditioning because then the only way they could get people over to their firm is either install the air conditioning or pay people more. A compensating differential. It's called pay people more to endure the heat. But eventually, as technology develops, air conditioning becomes cheaper and cheaper to the point where it would be cheaper just to install the air conditioning than to have to pay the wage differential to the worker to get him away from the air conditioned. See, I said I wasn't going to go into this and now I just did it. So that's basically the quick version. So the question is this. We have, I think, a good set of ideas that lead toward peace and prosperity. But we have a system in which we don't really have that much opportunity to convey this to the public. Now, it's true, now we have the Internet, but can we really reach quite enough people, you know, in a five minute YouTube video to overcome 12 plus years of indoctrination in the official, you know, indoctrination buildings? I don't know. And then let's also remember that most people really do just conform. Most people are not independent thinkers. Oh, they say they are. They say they are. But then I talk to them for five minutes and I can see they have every conventional view under the sun. I mean, after all, even Skeptic magazine. There's a magazine called Skeptic. And you flip through it and yeah, it's skeptical, all right. It's skeptical of witches. It's skeptical of people who were critical of the COVID vaccine. It's skeptical of people who were critical of the COVID lockdowns. That's the kind of skepticism we have there. Well, that's about as much skepticism as you get from a lot of people. They really do accept what's told to them. And, you know, here we are taking a position that involves believing kind of the opposite of what everyone has told them. Everything from money to the way the economy works to the world and war. We have some stuff to say that's very much the opposite of what people have been told. How do we fix this problem? How do we make progress in this kind of situation? People used to ask me that. You know, I used to do a lot of public speaking and I would speak on academic topics. I would teach people something, and then afterward they would say, you know, this knowledge is all great, but what do we actually do? Like, what should we do to create a better, more livable society that's more in line with our vision? And that question really did sting because I didn't really know the answer. I don't know what the answer is. I honestly don't know. I would say I'm not the strategy guy. I feel like there's no harm in giving you this knowledge. And that has to be a portion of it. Education has to be part of it. We have to be able to defend ourselves. And when you're educated into these ideas, you do find them compelling. But what do we do? And that is what I find so appealing about the Free State project, which I assume people listening to me know about. But just in case you don't, the strategy there is we pick a state and they chose New Hampshire. And a whole bunch of us move there and this concentrated group of us will not be the majority, but we will be extremely active and we will change the culture and politics of that state. And it has indeed happened. The reason I like that strategy is that that strategy does not require us to be the majority, because as I've said, that doesn't look like it's in the cards. It runs against every instinct of human nature. And plus we're up against the educational establishment that has custody of the minds of so many people for X hours a day for 12 years of their lives or 13 years. That's really hard. But what if we could take the minority that we are, but really concentrate ourselves in one place and make the numbers that we do have count? And that's what the Free State Project does. Now, let me double check here. I don't want to give you the wrong thing, so I'm going to type in something into the old computer. Here it is. Oh, that is not correct. Let me check. Good thing I looked. Good thing all. Woods took a look at this. The website is fsp.org freestateproject.org so I was there because I wanted to encourage that and because I intend to move to New Hampshire in the coming years. It'll be a while, but I. I want to be part of that. And I think also education is part of it, but as we've said, it's not enough. I don't think we can educate enough people. And even if we did educate a whole lot of people, then we could be just very oppressed, educated people. There has to be another dimension of this. So I do like the Free State strategy, but I also think that, yes, I know some people will be unhappy with me, but I think politics plays some role, especially on the state and local level. The federal level, you may say, is a lost cause, but on the state and local level, you can accomplish things. And yet I know there are some libertarians who think it's immoral to vote. I absolutely reject that. There's no reason that it's immoral to vote. Why would it be immoral to cast a vote? Lysander Spooner, who is a better libertarian than almost anybody listening to this right now, said you can use it as a defense mechanism. If somebody is pledged to do something evil to you and you can maybe help stop it by casting a vote, go ahead and do it. I was even in an argument online with somebody who thought it was immoral to vote against a tax increase referendum that it was immoral to Try to stop that by means of voting. So I like to say, if I were in a concentration camp and the concentration camp guard said to me, woods, we're all taking a vote of you concentration camp inmates and, and if a majority of you votes to be freed, we're going to let you go. Could you imagine saying, nope, sorry, I can't quote consent to the system by voting. So I'm going to stay here. You'd have to be out of your mind. Okay. And so I do think there are some things in which politics can be helpful, particularly on the state and local level. But also remember, even Murray Rothbard, who is a better anarcho capitalist than you, probably even Murray Rothbard said there are some things, it is hard to see how a completely non political approach could have solved them. Because I know there are cases where outside of politics, great accomplishments have been made. The homeschooling movement is an example that came about just spontaneously as a social phenomenon. That wasn't, you know, we didn't vote that into existence. That just happened. And homeschoolers just presented that to society as a fait accompli. You know, what are you going to do about it? We're here, there are millions of us. What are you going to do about it? Okay, so that can happen. I'm all in favor of it. When that happens, however, how are we going to get the Corn Laws repealed? The Corn Laws are of course a British problem, but still, for 30 years, basically the Corn Laws made food more expensive than it would have been otherwise, which is a antisocial, evil thing. And in 1846 the Corn Laws were repealed. Now they were not repealed because all of society became anti statist philosophically and they decided to work together to undermine the Corn Laws using civil disobedience. That did not happen. I would love if that happened. But as I told you, most people are conformists and they're normies and they're not going to do that. I wish they would, but they're not going to do that. Likewise, Andrew Jackson prevented the renewal of the charter of the Second bank of the United States. That was great. That was a great move by him. So that didn't happen because everybody got together and said, you know, the paper money put out by this institution is bad and we should stop accepting it and instead we should create our own alternative again. I wish that were the way it happened. That would be great. I would be all on board for that. That's not how it happened. And I don't think there's any Prospect of that kind of thing happening. Most people are normies, you know, I mean, we can do what we can to educate them, get the word out, but at some level you gotta just do what you gotta do. And if you have an Andrew Jackson who will refuse to charter that thing again, I'll take that as the solution because at least the right thing gets done. So that's where I'm gonna be. It's gonna take me a while because I have family reasons holding me in God awful Florida where I am now, now it's a lovely place politically. There are a lot of great things that have been done in Florida and I'm very grateful for the experience we had during COVID that it was pretty normal down here, but it's inhuman how hot it is in central Florida. It is unsuited for human habitation. So I'm getting the heck out of here and I am planning to go to New Hampshire. And what I like about it is not just that it's a bunch of like minded people, you know, who arrive there to try to make favorable changes. But you know, there is also a social aspect. Like we're not meant, despite the caricature of libertarianism, we're not meant to be alone. They think that libertarians don't want to cooperate with other people. Yes, we do. We just don't want to do it with a gun to our heads. Of course we want to cooperate. And there is a tremendous social aspect of the Free State Project. They hold events. So I think they're hitting all the different aspects that are necessary. They've got politics at just the right level where it's not the be all and end all, but it's not nothing. You don't have to be involved with politics at all to be in the Free State Project. You don't want to. You just work on what you want to work on. You do what you want to do. You just live free. So fsp.org I would urge you to check that out. So now I want to do something different and bring on my friend Mark Moniscalco. So let's see if I can get him on the screen. All right, and here is Mark Moniscalco hooked up with me. Mark is my Hawaii based friend who was at the. You were at the 2000th Tom Wood show episode, were you not?
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I was at 1,000, 2,000. I'm looking forward to 3,000, Tom.
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Well, yeah, we'll see.
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The unfortunate part about cutting down a number of episodes per week. It's going to take us a lot longer to get to 3,000.
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Yeah, I don't know if I feel like. Anyway, we'll argue this later whether I feel like doing a big deal for 3,000 or what I'm gonna do. But anyway, 3,000 episodes, what's the matter? What? Who would do that? Well, anyway, let's get to the point. The point is Mark Moniscalco, who has been out there fighting this battle for a long time. And as a matter of fact, I recall from the 2000th episode, he was one of the contestants in our little Family Feud game. And when each contestant was introducing himself, Mark introduced himself as Mark Moniscalco from the Union of Soviet Socialist Islands because he lives in Honolulu. So it's an uphill battle over there, but doggone, he's been fighting it. And he's just released this brand new book featuring a foreword by a certain Dr. Ron Paul you may have heard of. And it's called the Forbidden Idea, subtitled Hidden Truths About Individual Liberty, Economic Freedom, Political Philosophy and History. It more or less. Well, I don't know why I'm doing the telling people what the book is, because it's your book, but I still feel compelled to do it. It's going to trace the idea of freedom as you see it developing in fits and starts over the centuries. There's a big history section in here that goes from the ancient world. And then bit by bit you start to see the puzzle pieces coming together until you get to the end of the book where the whole puzzle is put together. But it's also, it's not just history, it's also a discussion of the ideas themselves, the discussion of where we need to go from here, because we're not exactly living up to these ideas anymore. So that's where we are. I can't help asking, we do have books on libertarianism out there. What's the motivation behind this?
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First of all, I wrote this book to help calm your inner turmoil. And when I say that to my friends, everybody looks at me like there's something wrong with me because that's totally out of character for me to say something on those lines. But actually, because of you, I calmed my inner turmoil way back when. I was just beginning to decide I needed to know a little bit more about libertarianism. I was a long time just a lazy libertarian. I didn't really pay any attention. I liked the big picture stuff, you know, no taxes and all the other goodies that go with that, and that was good enough. But I felt really uncomfortable not being able to explain myself in doubt. So up. I don't remember how it happened, but I came across a podcast, the Tom woods show, that the exit of the show assured me that I would become a Smarter Libertarian in 30 minutes per day. And actually it worked. Started reading you, you know, or big enthusiastic support of Rothbard. I had never read anything from Rothbard. And just reading this one for a new liberty is enough to leave you with a completely different outlook on the world. So I wanted to influence my friends that are so disappointed with the current political situation. They're disgruntled, they're angry. I mean, there's people that I can't actually have a conversation with without them starting to yell and scream. It got worse after the midterm elections in 22, when everybody expected the Republicans have this big red wave. And that didn't happen. And I don't know, people just felt like there was no hope. So this book is there to explain the fundamental philosophy, where it came from, the history that's behind it, and give them a little bit of hope, because there's concluding chapter is a lot of practical suggestions to make things better. That's why I wrote it.
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So I definitely want to talk about some of those. But guess the idea would be that these ideas that Dr. Paul defended and that we all cherish, they had to go through quite a long period of evolution to get to their final mature form. They could have been snuffed out at any time, but they weren't. And so here they are. And so they're still there as a guide, as something to aspire to, something to learn from. So let's start then at the very beginning. So the very beginning, you're just going to lay out exactly what this philosophy is. Now, this book has a lot of personalities that people will know and a lot of personalities they won't know, but should. But it also. You also made a rather deliberate decision not to include a whole bunch of the bad guys.
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B
Yeah, because you can read.
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You can read a book about Marx, you know, but this is our book. This is our book. Talk about our people and our ideas.
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B
Yeah. If you wanted to refute all of the collectivist ideas, the book would have been, you know, 1500 pages long. Right. So it had to stop somewhere. And we left out the collectivists. They're mentioned occasionally when one of our heroes refutes them, but besides that, we don't bring them up.
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Yeah. So it's a positive exposition of the ideas as opposed to defending it from critics. We have defenses from critics. But here's a here, the idea is that the ideas sell themselves. The ideas are attractive as soon as you encounter them. And here's your opportunity in this book here to encounter them. So how do you describe them? What's the basic gist of what it is that you're defending? Hey, everybody. Last month at my Mastermind meeting, which was held this time in the Virgin Islands, I spent some time with a guy. You need to know if you're a business owner or you're a high W2 earner paying at least 40k a year in taxes. Matthew Sersley is someone you need to meet. He's a brilliant tax attorney who loathes the IRS as much as you do. You won't have to justify yourself in front of Matthew. Oh, dear. Sir, this is why I would like to keep some more of my money, if that's okay. Matthew's one of us. He's been on my cruise, he's been at my murder mystery parties. As I mentioned, he's in my elite Mastermind. He's a regular Tom Wood show listener. You don't have to explain yourself to Matthew. You can say anything you want. And by the way, the state wants you to be intimidated, confused, not sure what you're entitled to. Well, when you got Matthew in your corner, you're not going to have any of those problems. He's going to make sure you keep everything you can. And remember, he's a tax attorney, not a cpa, so your conversations with him are protected by attorney client privilege. So whether you're running a business, doing a side hustle flipping real estate, or you're just sick of handing over half your paycheck to the Empire, Mr. Serley helps you stay smart, compliant, and legally minimize what you pay the IRS. So your next step? Go to www.agoristtaxadvice.com woods that's a G O R I S T taxadvice.com woods and grab your free Agorist Tax toolkit. It's full of powerful tools and templates you can use to get your business in order, track your expenses, and reduce how much the IRS takes from you. Without crossing any lines. You can keep giving the regime money you don't have to give them, or you can talk to Matthew. Not a super challenging decision. Head over to agoristtaxadvice.com woods so the
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B
book starts out with the basic philosophy, and I wanted to lay out the basic philosophy in a simple and understandable method. I'm certainly not trying to rewrite any of Rothbard's great treatises. Right. I'm not trying to rewrite the four new Liberty or the ethics of Liberty. I'm just trying to condense everything that I've been exposed to. And so I've got it in six chapters. It's only 40 pages and I think that covers the entire fundamental philosophy. So we start out with a definition of individual liberty, which that was an interesting exercise. I attend quite a few events that attract liberty minded people. And for a couple years in a row at Freedom Fest, I would walk around in the exhibit hall and in between seminars and talk to folks in the liberty movement, people that I, you know, I have a lot of respect for people that have accomplished quite a bit. And I asked everybody the same question, what's your definition of individual liberty? And there was an overarching theme that was among everybody, but for the most part everybody had a different definition that I found disturbing. I thought this is something that we all should agree on and it should be concise. So my research across all of the different philosophers and authors that we have in our liberty movement brought me to the definition that I'm going to present. And my definition of individual liberty is the absence of coercion. It's extremely short. I like it because it's got a negative connotation which we'll talk about in a minute, but it reflects the negative rights that is a fundamental part of our natural rights philosophy. So we define individual liberty. Then we move on to, interesting enough, having to define coercion. That came straight from Rothbard. There's a few others. Hayek had something interesting, but Rothbard's got this really concise, really precise definition of coercion. Then we moved on to discuss natural law and how natural law predates all government. And Bastiat says it best. Man does not have life, liberty and property because government has made laws. Rather, there are laws because man already had life, liberty and property. So our natural laws are inherent and above any man made law. The natural laws also include natural rights. There's some discussion of natural rights, that constitution.
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A
All right, so why don't I have a right to a car?
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B
You have a right to life, liberty and property. That I think we can just start with three really simple ones. And the right to life, the right to liberty, the right to property does not require anybody else to do anything. There's no services needed to be provided by someone else. There's no goods needed to be provided by someone else. You are to be left alone. No one is to kill you. That's Your right to life. No one is to steal your property. That's your right to property. No one is to enslave you. That's your right to liberty. It doesn't require imposing anything on anyone else. So, no, Tom, sorry, you do not have a right to a car.
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A
Because if I were to claim one that would. In order to fulfill that, somebody would have to do something. They'd have to go, build me something. They'd have to go. It'd have to be forced labor for me. And we already said that no can do. That's not allowed.
- [33:50]
B
Can't do that. And there's an interesting thing, and this is something that. The last chapter in the philosophy section is specifically about negative rights and positive rights. And what you're suggesting is that you have a positive right to a car, which means someone has to do something to provide you with that car. But the natural rights that we have inherently are all negative rights. No one's required to do anything for those. And what that means is that those natural rights are universal, that everybody has that right, and it's simultaneous. Everyone can exercise that right at the same time. That's a concept that when people have read the people that have read the book and we've had conversations with, that seems to be new to just about everybody, that they hadn't heard that before, they may have heard it, and they just didn't realize how fundamental it is. And this is why this is important. When you're listening to someone else and they're making a claim, and people usually dress up, you know, people that are eloquent dress up their claims and all sorts of flowery language and make it sound so important. But if you can really dissect it and try to find out exactly what it is they're making a claim on. Almost everybody's making a claim for a positive right. And once you realize it's a positive right, then you can just work through all of the other knowledge you have and, you know, you can explain why that's a violation of natural law and natural rights.
- [35:18]
A
Now, what you're describing is a system in which there's a moral presumption against coercion and in favor of peaceful coexistence with other people. Obviously, this has very radical conclusions. I used to assign Frederick Bastiat's book the Law to my students back in my old professor days. And a lot of us read the Law. It's a tiny little book, and we thought it was persuasive and a neat little exposition of the ideas. But I would say 75% of the people in the classroom could not understand it. They had no idea what the point was. So I had to explain to them, do you understand what the implications of these ideas are? He's basically saying that virtually everything the government does is illegitimate because it involves so called legal plunder. It involves doing things that individuals wouldn't themselves be allowed to do. So how do they become morally allowed to do them? When they combine together in a group and this just shocked them. This had just flown right over their heads. But likewise what you're talking about, that there's such a thing as self ownership from which a lot of these ideas then flow As a logical conclusion, this has very radical conclusions for what we would consider legitimate government action, does it not?
- [36:35]
B
I think the coercion is really the focus. I'm not saying that there should be no organized group in society that is allowed to manage our affairs. I think it would be perfectly acceptable to allow a group that I voluntarily join and I voluntarily support with my money to provide defense for me or to provide any other service that I decide that it's a good idea and I'm willing to voluntarily pay for it and voluntarily leave it if I decide I don't like the service they're providing and I get to go somewhere else. That's much different than government. Government is a monopoly on violence and it's a monop. A territorial monopoly. Hans Hoppe has a really great quote later in my book and when we get into the history section talking about how limited government is an impossibility, like squaring the circle. Like once you allow an organization to have a monopoly over a territory to enact laws and enforce those laws, it's impossible for that organization not to write the laws and enforce the laws in its own favor. And he said the same thing about money. If you allow a organization to have territorial monopoly and have the ability to print money, it's unrealistic to expect that that organization isn't going to print the money to use it to their own advantage. So that, I think, is what the real underlying issue is. That's not the first thing we can explain to people because that's a little bit advanced. They need to understand the fundamental principles first. I set the book up intentionally to do that, talking about the fundamentals, making sure that there's a base that they can work from, working through the history. And I didn't have to rearrange history. History works out this way that history builds on previous events and previous knowledge and we get more and more detailed explanations of how a society could function without coercion. Right. That wasn't something that people were talking about in 1200, but it is something that became a reasonable conversation in the 20th century. And now today, thanks to Dr. Paul and all of the other people that were caught up in that movement, we've got many people who are proponents of a society that's based on voluntary cooperation and not coercion, not violence.
- [39:16]
A
One of the reasons that I was drawn to that was that it seemed like everything short of that ultimately led to the situation we have now. So, in other words, if you say, well, we'll just let the government do this, we'll let it do that, but if you give it the kinds of powers that most people are prepared to give it, they're going to use those powers to get to the stage where they are now. Like, there's no stable equilibrium where it'll just stay at the, quote, limited government stage. That's a problem. There is no equilibrium that just keeps it there. And I realized that's clearly the case. And so, you know, I just don't want the thing expanding in any. In any way. Now, what you and I are describing, you know, a lot of times in my constitutionalist days, I would say, you know, we have to get back to the Founding Fathers and we have to get back to the old republic. And I would consider that to be a great step forward. But I also realized that if I were to describe to my fellow citizens what that old Republic looked like and what it would mean in terms of the powers of government, the vast majority of my fellow countrymen would be horrified. How do I know that? Because I look at polling data. About what areas of the budget do they favor cutting? Essentially none of them. But yet to get to where we want to be, you'd have to cut them all. So does it not seem like it's hopeless fight that we have this admittedly very attractive set of ideas, but for a lot of people, they're just not going to be attractive.
- [40:38]
B
So that's where I've noticed over the years, you and I do have a difference of opinion. I believe that it is possible to persuade friends and neighbors. I talk about building little platoons, building on the Hume concept, and I'm convincing my little platoons out here that the most important thing that we can espouse is cutting spending. Now, it's much easier to talk about cutting spending a local and state level than it is at the federal level, but I think people need to hear that, need to Hear that? That's the only way out of this. Especially with the skyrocketing debt that we're facing and the amount of money that they're printing to monetize that debt. We're certainly not going to survive on this path that we're on. And the only way off that path is cut spending. And if I was going to just buckle in and say, okay, Tom's right, we're never going to cut spending. We'll never be able to do that, then I think the real answer is you become a prepper and you buy a ranch out in Idaho and dig a bomb shelter and start filling it with canned goods, right? You know, I live in an urban area. I live on an island. You know, we're the most isolated place on earth. As soon as the supply chain breaks down, that's it. We all starve. Well, not all of us. Some of us would probably resort to cannibalism so they, they would survive, but everybody else would starve, right? So the only way out for me, I'm just not an outdoorsy kind of guy. I wouldn't survive very well in Idaho, especially if I had to like, raise my own cattle. I would be completely out of, out of place. It's too late for that for me. So my only hope is that I persuade enough people to cut spending and they go out and persuade enough people to cut spending and that becomes the battle cry, right? That, I think is the only way out of it.
- [42:29]
A
Everybody, I got some bad news for you, but then also some good news. The bad news, we're living through historic deficits, persistent inflation, and a Federal Reserve that can't unwind what it's created. That's why gold is back in the spotlight, not as a trade, but as real money. Here's the problem. Most gold just sits in a vault. It protects purchasing power, sure, but it doesn't generate income. Monetary metals changes that. They let you earn a yield on gold paid in gold. I lease my gold through monetary metals and earn a return of around 4% annually paid in physical ounces. So I keep my gold and I get more gold over time. So that means I benefit from rising gold prices and I grow my holdings in ounces. No paper promises, no fiat payouts. Gold becomes a productive yield bearing asset again. The Fed can print dollars, they can't print gold. Learn more at monetary-metals.com woods and see how you can start earning a gold income. That's monetary-metals.com woods well, I don't want to give away everything that's in it. But give me a few thoughts that you have about other than educating people about the principles of liberty. I mean, this is like get everybody to have a pocket constitution.
- [43:41]
B
Let's.
- [43:42]
A
I'm not against that. But what else you got in terms of what are practical things people can do? Not to solve the whole problem immediately, but to maybe make some noticeable finite changes in the right direction.
- [43:59]
B
So I'm going to really take it as the first step is you got to continue your education in the philosophy and history of individual liberty. So if you read the Forbidden Idea, you'll get a really condensed but thorough education and the philosophy of individual liberty. So you'll have that, you'll get a somewhat broad but still condensed version of the history of the individual liberty. And in the history, you're gonna, you're gonna learn the real heroes, the people that have done the most right. So you'll know the philosophy, you'll know the history. If you read the book and then dig a little deeper. I've got a curated reading list out on the web that I think is, you know, of course I did it, so I think it's great, right? But most of the information in my book in the Forbidden Idea comes from the texts and a curated reading list. So there's. Curated reading list has what I call the essential reading. There's 12 essays and books that cover, I think, all the different concepts that we need to have convince people to read, convince people to talk about it. So when you're trying to build your little platoons, you know, just saying cut spending isn't. That's not enough to get people enthusiastic. You can, you can talk about the principle of self ownership. And for a lot of people that, you know, they, you know, inherently they understand it, but they haven't heard it, they don't know the terminology. And that gives them something that they can use to talk to other people. So just a little bit of this is a little off the subject, but this is just about similar to being around people that are wine geeks, right? People that are wine geeks, they stick their nose in a glass and they start talking about fruit, earth and wood, all this sort of thing. And you're standing there, if you're not a wine snob, you don't get it, you don't feel part of it. You can't contribute. But once you take some time and you learn some of the basics, but then you learn the terminology, then you can interact with other people, right? So yes, you and I might disagree on that a little Bit, but continue your education, Encourage other people to read it. Next, Andrew Breitbart's doctrine. Politics is downstream from culture. So build your little platoons, right? Your little platoons are people that you're familiar with, of course, your family, your neighbors, your friends, people that you work with, people that you socialize with, people that you come across, maybe at your church, at, wherever you're a member, your baseball leagues. All of those people know who you are, they trust you and they'll listen to you. And I'm not encouraging you to lecture anybody. I'm just encouraging you to speak honestly when the subject comes up, right? When politics comes up, don't be quiet, express your opinion. When there's talk, you know, discussions about economics, don't be, you know, don't be the doormouse. Speak up, right? I, most of my life, I was the first guy, when we were in a social setting, I was first guy to say, listen, I talk about politics or religion and I look at that now and it's like that didn't make the world a better place, at least for me. So speak up. Build a little platoon. Encourage your little platoons to do the reading. Encourage your little platoons to spread that message to other people. Those little platoons multiply and our message is elegant. It's beautiful. People accept. I mean, very few people are going to argue with you when you tell them about the principle of self ownership, right? Now some people might argue about private property, right? Because they think that private property is the root of all evil and blah, blah, blah. But very few people are ever going to argue with you about the principle of self ownership. Very few people argue about the non aggression principle, right? You know, when you explain it to them, they feel like that's human nature, that we should obviously follow this, right? So get your little platoon out there, get them in a position where they can persuade others, make them the evangelists. And the overall message that the little platoon, first, of course they should understand the philosophy and the history and be able to talk about that. But the message has to be the only way out of the situation we're in today is cut spending and we have much more control on a local level. So I feel awkward saying this because this is something I really hate to do. But go to your local school board meetings, go to the park district meetings, go to the municipal government meetings, you got to show up. Because when you go to those things, look around the room, the only people that are there are all the ones that want more spending and bigger government. They're the ones who show up every day to those meetings. Every time one of those meetings is held, it's time for us, the forgotten man and woman, to show up. The ultimate goal, the ultimate hurdle, I guess to get over the cutting spending story is what do we do about the Federal Reserve? Because as long as the Federal Reserve is the same program that it's on today, you'll never cut spending at the federal level because they'll just create the money out of thin air. Now obviously, and the Fed that fixes it. If that's not possible, are there other ways of fixing the problem? Yeah, there are. Right. If we went to a sound money. Right. If you went to, I don't know, gold or Bitcoin or baskets of commodity. Not that you have to carry gold coins in your pocket, but you'll have some sort of token that is a certain value of gold that people accept in exchange. I mean, that's what the dollar was, right? first there was no printed money. People really were walking around with gold coins in their pocket and after the Civil War started printing dollars, but the dollar was exchangeable for a certain weight of gold. You could take the dollar into the bank and say, give me X amount of gold and that's what they would give you by law. That would be one way of putting a clamp on federal spending. And if you go, all right, just go back across the history of all of our federal problems, it all gets dramatically worse. In 1971, after Nixon took the US off the gold standard, the final leg of the gold standard, all of the charts underlying inflation, debt, monetary debasement, all start going straight up from that date. So we could, I guess, live with the Federal Reserve if we're not able to drive a wooden state through its heart. We could live with it if we had a currency that couldn't be debased.
- [50:45]
A
So I agree with all these things. I don't know how we get to that point. But I, like you do have some practical suggestions here that you can, yeah, you cannot overnight solve the problems of the federal government. It's beyond reform. Something very, very dramatic is going to have to happen. Like regardless of how many books are read, there are way too many vested interests. Something dramatic is going to have to happen to change that. But you can make changes in your local level starting tomorrow because most people don't even participate in that. They don't even know what's going on. That's the way the local government likes it, by the way. But that is all low hanging fruit where you can go in there and make genuine changes that make you freer. There's no doubt about it that you can start doing that. But it's not as fun as, you know, being involved in a U.S. senate campaign that goes nowhere. But it should be. It should be thought of as more fun because more likely greater likelihood of success.
- [51:44]
B
Yeah. So I'm fortunate to be part of a. I'm on the board of directors of a state policy think tank here in Hawaii, the Grassroots Institute of Hawaii. And we're supported by this nationwide umbrella organization which is called the State Policy Network, spn. If you're interested in really making a difference at your local level, get involved with one of your state policy think tanks. Every state's got at least one, some have multiple think tanks. And you'll be impressed and amazed at the amount of positive changes that they're making. It's eye opening to look through the monthly newsletters and the reports that we get, the things that are going on. And all across the states, they're not making as much progress in New York and California as they are and let's say Idaho and Texas. But there's progress being made everywhere. So just for one example, I don't know how many of you remember Janus decision, Supreme Court decision that overturned municipal unions from automatically deducting dues from the employees paychecks. But that began as a lawsuit filed by the Illinois Policy Institute. It's a state policy institute in Illinois and it went all the way up to the Supreme Court and had no nationwide impact just by working its way through the system. I'm not saying that that's going to happen every time you get involved with the state policy network, but you could easily have an impact on little things, the little things that make a difference in everybody's life every day. We're constantly listening to complaints about the cost of housing. And you know, this is hard to believe, but it appears to be true. I've done some research on my own, but what I've seen, how it's presented, the research that goes with it seems to be very accurate that approximately 50% of the cost of housing is due to government regulation all across the board. Regulation of the production of the lumber, regulation of transportation. But the regulation of building. The housing itself is extraordinarily expensive. So out here to start a really poorly maintained starter home is over a million dollars. So think about that. $500,000 of that cost could be managed to be reduced if government regulation were trimmed back. That's transformational for people. So anyway that was a long story about state policy think tanks. But they're effective and if nothing else, you'll be impressed by the people that are involved with it because they're enthusiastic. So for me, I go to Freedom Fest and it's the same thing. It's a room full of angry old white men. I go to the national meeting for the State Policy Network and I look around and the average age in there's got to be in early 40s and more than 50% of the people there are women. That is very uplifting.
- [54:48]
A
Well, that is not true of the listenership of the Tom Woods Show, Mark Moniscalco.
- [54:53]
B
But not yet.
- [54:54]
A
I'm glad.
- [54:55]
B
Not yet, Tom.
- [54:56]
A
We're inching our way up there a little bit at a time. I haven't checked in a while. It's higher than it used to be. But anyway. Well, let me. You have a website for the book, is that right?
- [55:06]
B
Yes, I do.
- [55:07]
A
The forbiddenidea.com theforbiddenidea.com Here it is right here for those of you looking at it on the screen.
- [55:14]
B
And the website has by far the most time intensive video ever produced. I've got a 45 second video. It might have taken me three weeks of my time to get that right, to get it to work. It was like, yeah, oh yeah. You could do all these videos with A.I. guess what, you're going to do it, but you're going to do it over 700 times till you get it right. But it's there. So I hope you enjoy it.
- [55:39]
A
Yes, good, good, good. Absolutely, yes. So theforbiddenidea.com is where to go to check out the book. Mark, thanks for your great labors and I'm glad you have this accomplishment under your belt.
- [55:51]
B
Thanks, Tom. It's only because of you.
- [55:53]
A
That's very kind of me to say.
- [55:55]
B
The Tom Wood show made me curious. Liberty Academy gave me the background and your Author Academy gave me details I needed to actually get it done. So it's a testament to your dedication. Thanks, Tom.
- [56:07]
A
Thank you, Mark, very much. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Make yourself and those you love less vulnerable to the regime, both mentally and physically. Get more forbidden information@tom free books.com and be sure to subscribe to the show wherever you listen. See you next time. Like the sound of the Tom Wood Show, My audio production is provided by Podsworth Media. Check them out@podsworth.com Enter code WOODS50 to get 50% off your first order. If your recording sounds rough, the Podsworth app can make it not only listenable, but professional. Remember, when you use code WOODS50, you'll get half off your first order and you'll also be supporting this show.