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- [00:01]
A
Hi. So I have some wild ass news for you. TGS is turning one year old this month. It has been a bananas year from news coverage to award nominations and best of lists, and I really could not possibly have anticipated the show's success so far, especially because most podcasts fail pretty much immediately and they definitely don't ever make any income. I'm so incredibly grateful to all of you for listening to the show, telling your friends about it, and letting us make good, accessible public history. This was really an experiment and I'm honestly over the moon and slightly bewildered at how well it's working. I really can't express how deep my joy and appreciation for all of you is. We're doing a few things to celebrate. We're having a birthday triple header week to celebrate the actual anniversary with some really exciting guests and we're doing huge discounts off of our Patreon almost month long between now and April 1st if you head to patreon.com this guy sucked. You can use the code TGSB Month like birth month for 50% off your first month on a monthly subscription, or TGSB Year like birth year for 30% off your first year on an annual subscription, which does stack on top of our normal 17% off annual discount. So the annual subscriptions this month are like incredibly discounted. The Patreon is how we can afford to make the show in the first place, and we've worked really hard to make it actually worth your money. So we thought we'd also make it a little easier to afford as a birthday treat for both us and you all. We've got lots of cool stuff in store for the year ahead. For example, I'm hoping to double our Patreon income so that we can start a K12 history classroom grant program which would really, really rock. If you'd like to be part of the Patreon and make some of our year two goals more reachable, use code TGSBYear or TGSBMonth between today and April 1st to get started. Thank you and I can't wait to see what happens next. A list of sensitive themes and topics included in this episode can be found in the episode Description. Foreign. Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified hater. On this show we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is the much requested Quinn Slobodian, who is a professor of international history at Boston University, as well as the author of a whole bunch of really incredible books, including Globalists, Foreign Front, Crack Up Capitalism, Hayeks Bastards, and the Brand New Muskism A Guide to the Perplexed. Is there anything else you want me to plug here?
- [03:23]
B
No, that's it.
- [03:23]
A
Okay. Oh, that's all.
- [03:25]
B
That's the list.
- [03:26]
A
Welcome to the show.
- [03:27]
B
Happy to be here.
- [03:28]
A
Thank you. Before we get started, I want to make some quick announcements for everybody. First, we are question mark at war with Iran as of two days ago at the time of recording. Sometimes I like to tell everyone what the fuck was going on when we recorded the show. Second, I've had laryngitis for the last three days and I'm only now able to talk again and I'm on a lot of cold medicine. And third, this is one of our biggest big one year anniversary slash birthday episode. So I'm entering this conversation feeling a little bit insane. For everyone listening, Happy birthday.
- [04:05]
B
You're at war.
- [04:06]
A
Oh, yeah. I mean, that feels fitting for the show. To be fair, this is the point where I always try to, like, shoehorn in some way of talking about what's going on right now in the world and how it relates to your work, but I don't feel like I actually have to work very hard to make relevant. How are you feeling about the relevance of the current moment and your work as a historian?
- [04:28]
B
Well, the funny thing is it's not a great way to begin a discussion of a guy who sucked. But one of the opinions of the guy who I'm about to talk about, that wasn't that sucky was his attitude about neoconservatism and the military industrial complex. So he was actually a pretty consistent opponent of America doing off the cuff actions like the one that we're watching this week. So that I guess would be my way in is like the weirdly defensible positions on foreign policy of anarcho capitalists and other radical libertarians.
- [05:02]
A
But you're feeling like, okay, at least I have a way to talk about this guy a little bit.
- [05:08]
B
I mean, I've been talking so much about Musk recently, it's actually been a nice little breather because I feel like I haven't seen a headline about him. You know, since the bombing started. So if that's what it takes to get Musk out of the headlines, then true. We just have to swallow this bitter pill for a minute.
- [05:24]
A
And to be fair, when we were planning this episode, because we were originally supposed to record it a year ago, and then your new book came out, and the whole the Muskism stuff is, like, now what we're talking about. So we originally planned to talk about this when it was like, Hayek's Basterds was the most recent book. Which is fun, actually, because you get to go back and revisit something I think is fun. You might not think is.
- [05:44]
B
Yeah, no, I mean, he's an interesting guy, as we will be discovering.
- [05:48]
A
But when we were talking about it in this iteration, you wanted to do Musk kind of. Or I think that was what you were thinking.
- [05:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, because everyone, I think, has a baseline by this time, dislike of him. But it should be cured into something even much more refined than just dislike. Like, it should be really, like, uncut hatred for this man, I think. And I think I have the bullet points to get people there at this point.
- [06:16]
A
Look, when he fits the remit of the show, I will call you back and be like, come back. It's time. Whenever that is in the future, he
- [06:24]
B
will outlive all of us. So it's a empty promise.
- [06:27]
A
But, yeah, I mean, it is funny because I'm also a noted Musk hater. Like, and when I say noted, I mean, like, there are several articles out in the world that are quoting me saying how much I hate Elon Musk.
- [06:38]
B
Oh, really?
- [06:39]
A
Yeah, like, if you look like my name in London, for example, when there was the, like, did he give a Nazi salute on TV thing, I was like, look, man, probably. Yeah. Like, and also there are other issues here, but, like, if you think that guy's a Nazi, I'm an expert on Nazis, and I think he's kind of a Nazi.
- [07:00]
B
So you're big in France for hating.
- [07:02]
A
Hating Elon Musk. Yeah, but there are a bunch of these, and I did, like, some TV interviews about it and some. Some things where everyone's okay.
- [07:09]
B
Well, yeah, you would have given me material then, for sure.
- [07:12]
A
Yeah. Cause I think he's a Nazi. Like, I think. And like, in a really classic sense, or at least is, like, I think he has Nazi adjacent beliefs for sure. And the man sure seems to like a lot of Nazis.
- [07:26]
B
I mean, having a show called this Nazi sucked might be a bit redundant, though.
- [07:30]
A
Yeah, exactly. And he's not one that we need to update his legacy so much. Cause I think right now the current legacy is bad, so we have to wait. Or we could do like what we did with Dick Cheney and be like, give it six months and then remind everyone how much, how horrible he was once the chatter has died down too. Okay, so we're not talking about Musk.
- [07:52]
B
No.
- [07:52]
A
Who are we talking about?
- [07:54]
B
We're talking about American economist and father of anarcho capitalism, Murray Rothbard.
- [08:01]
A
This is another one of these episodes we've done a lot lately where I feel like I might be totally out of my depth, which I told you before we started recording as a historian of neither economic economics nor politics. But that does also mean I'm most likely going to learn a lot through this. So I'm really looking forward to it. Can we start by having you explain what anarcho capitalism is?
- [08:22]
B
Sure. So everyone, I'm sure, has heard about libertarianism and probably has even maybe met one or two, maybe even has identified as one at some point or maybe currently does. And it is a very broad church. I mean, people probably gotten that far with understanding it to the extent that there are people who call themselves, actually, especially in Quebec, socialist libertarians. There's plenty of left libertarians out there. There are a lot of people who would call themselves anarchists in more the leftist tradition who would also feel fine with the synonym of libertarian. But then there are people who are, you know, commonly called right wing libertarians. And just to make sure you know what they're talking about, sometimes they will add the capitalist appellation into the title. So the anarcho capitalist is a person who believes in the need to eliminate all forms of government and states and allow for a complete private ordering based on monetary exchange, free contracts with not a shred of representativeness, or certainly not democracy. But all of these classic ideas of like, sovereignty the people's will are, you know, so much trash for the dustbin of history. So anarcho capitalism, strictly speaking, is usually tracked back to the person that we're talking about today. Murray Rothbard, who was born in the Bronx in the 1920s, died in his dentist's office in Manhattan in January of 1995.
- [10:04]
A
That is a wi. Sorry, pause. He dies in his dentist. Also, this proves to be that dentists are scary.
- [10:11]
B
I mean, to be honest. Yeah, like, it's almost surprising more people don't die there.
- [10:16]
A
Yeah, actually this, this confirms my priors.
- [10:19]
B
You know, like you're getting shocks to the system, you get bad news. It's just generally stressful. Yeah, and then, not to mention the sadistic tendencies of many of the people who run those places were coming out
- [10:31]
A
as anti dentist on the podcast.
- [10:33]
B
Unfortunately, this dentist sucks. Now that is fodder for a podcast. But anyway, it's worth mentioning. So the reason I became interested in Rothbard is because I've been writing about the history of neoliberalism, which is like, you know, if there's a term even baggier than libertarianism. Well, how about this one? Neoliberalism. But the way that I'd been writing about it is pretty contained to this intellectual movement associated with people like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the Chicago School, James Buchanan. People have probably heard of most of those people at least, and they have been gathering since the 1940s to trade ideas, to talk about how to get their ideas into policy. And one of the fallacies about what neoliberalism is, that's pretty common even at like the university level, even amongst, I would say a lot of academics, is that it means that people want to shrink the state to the point of its non existence or like roll back or get rid of the state. And for years I'd been writing about how that's not true. And whether you look at Hayek or any of these people, they're actually rolling out a new kind of state. They're using the state, reformatting it, encasing markets rather than liberating them and so on. And yet as I was doing that, I was kind of plagued by this thing that I knew in the back of my head, but I was not saying, which is actually there are some people even in that broad church of neoliberal who did want to get rid of the state altogether. And that small group. So let's say if you're at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, you know, like 1 in 40 might belong to that group, but that does exist. And that group is what they call anarcho capitalists.
- [12:15]
A
Fascinating. So he is like a central figure in libertarianism, but also in this even smaller. If we narrow the pyramid into this other. Smaller. More.
- [12:28]
B
Yeah.
- [12:29]
A
Was radical the right word?
- [12:30]
B
Radical is the right word. I think it's the right word. I mean, I think that, you know, if this all seems a bit like sectarian and tortured, then people just need to refer to their own understanding of left wing movements.
- [12:40]
A
Right.
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B
I mean, it's probably not as weird for people to think about like, oh, the Trotskyists were fighting with the Stalinists and then the, you know, they were exiling each other and purging each other. Sometimes they cooperated, sometimes it didn't. Well, the right and the libertarian right even has also had those fights. And yeah, the anarcho capitalists are like the most radical fringe of a movement that itself often saw itself as at war with the mainstream.
- [13:07]
A
Yeah. And this is interesting because I think most people on the left, your understanding of the left involves these internal squabbles and these incoherences like that this is part of being on the left is you've got like, at the meeting or whatever, there's all these like crazy people being like, no, no, no, this is how we're supposed to do this. And it's because I think people will seem to imagine the right in part because of how the right has successfully organized over the last 50 or so years. Imagine the right being this totally coherent, cohesive group and in actuality, like, that's not what's happening. They're just better at winning, perhaps, or working together when they have to in a way that the left sometimes, I think, or frequently fails to succeed at.
- [13:50]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you think about like the 1930s and Europe, for example, you had examples of both. Right. You had examples of like social democrats and socialists and communists sort of setting aside their differences in creating what was called a popular front. And then you have cases like what was happening in Germany where the socialists thought that the communists were actually their worst enemy, even worse than Nazis and so on. So the right has had its own ebbs and flows and waves, moments of strategic unity and then sectarian theoretical squabbles that have split them up. And Rothbard has been the protagonist in some of the biggest ones on the American libertarian right in the late 20th century.
- [14:37]
A
So if we were to characterize some of the core tenets of the political philosophy that we consider to be interco capitalism. Tell me if I'm getting any of these wrong, because this is my understanding from the reading that I've done here. So the state, state. It's because you're saying there are these sort of anti statist people. The state is a coercive institution that is violating or violates fundamentally individual rights. Yes, yes. Taxation is a form of involuntary expropriation.
- [15:09]
B
Even worse, I would say, I mean the term that one of Rothbard's acolytes is a guy named Walter Bloch who was well known for saying things like, you should be able to voluntarily enslave yourself, like enter contracts of enslavement. Sure. This is how you get at the equivalent of cliques in the 1980s in libertarian forums and on campus events. But he's described taxation not just as expropriation, but as forced labor. So it's the same way that French peasants had to do the Corvette like a few shifts of work or weeks of work for payment to the sovereign every year. He they all really, most libertarians, but definitely all anarcho capitalists see any form of taxation as a forced labor requirement being levied against you. Because for those periods of your working year when you're making revenue that just goes to the government, you are being unfairly stolen from.
- [16:09]
A
You know, this is Also what every 21 year old on TikTok thinks about their first restaurant job, which is. I'm hearing this from a lot of sources actually.
- [16:21]
B
Yes. I mean it taps into a lot of juvenile senses of justice that can't really like process complexity. Of course. This is like the endless attraction of this form of radicalism for young people.
- [16:32]
A
Totally. Where they're like, actually you're taking this chunk out of my paycheck and what am I getting from it? And in some cases, like right now, we'll be like, well, the answer is war, unfortunately. So that's not super good. There you go. And I can see why you would feel frustrated by that. Or in other cases, it's like I was just stuck in New York during the blizzard that we just had. And it was like, in some cases the tax dollars are going to paying people $30 an hour to shovel all the sidewalks and make it totally livable and walkable.
- [17:02]
B
So you're not trapped.
- [17:02]
A
Yeah, so that you're not literally trapped in your building.
- [17:05]
B
You're not in tune.
- [17:06]
A
And like, it is funny, like, and this is not a new thing to say, but the way that people understand their relationship to taxes really is how do the taxes end up benefiting them. And we can see that this is something that people like barter, like trying to figure out or argue against in the first place. What other things that I try to understand from anarcho capitalism. Law, police and defense services can be supplied by private competitive firms or groups. That's one I think he gets a lot of criticism for which we'll get to. And he's also very into natural rights. So this is not his first. He doesn't come up with this obviously. Like he's interacting with very classical liberal thinkers around this. But he's into the idea of like rights to self ownership, rights to acquire property through original appropriation and voluntary exchange, like you said. And also which is related to what you said before, a right not to be subjected to aggression and war, maybe.
- [18:07]
B
Right, the non aggression principle.
- [18:09]
A
Yeah, yeah. That's all I've got.
- [18:12]
B
Well, that's, I mean, you know, the elegance of the theory is its simplicity and its intolerance of complexity. So, you know, you've got most of it right there.
- [18:21]
A
Well, great.
- [18:22]
B
I think that the natural law part is interesting and not immediately obvious. I think if you just encounter libertarians as sort of like free speech absolutists on college campus or something. Right. Or people who just hate taxes. They really do. Like Rothbard wrote many, many books, many very long books, often books about history, often books about American history. And he spends a lot of time on what you would learn of as kind of the Lockean ideas of natural rights. So the question of property is front and center. And the anarcho capitalist idea of property is just straight from John Locke. The idea is that there is, if there are even underutilized resources, let alone in their mind, kind of empty land, then if you go and mix your labor with it, then by working on it, by cultivating it, by making those trees into a home or whatever, then you have made that into property and you've made it into private property. And there is no force in the world that should be able to take that from you except through violence. And you've already stated that you don't believe in the use of violence for expropriation. So it seems like a kind of, on its own terms, you know, foolproof, tiny laboratory version of how you can produce peace and order. Of course, completely brackets, slash ignores the existence of people living on the land beforehand.
- [19:58]
A
Sure.
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B
The problems of, of, you know, hereditary inequality, the challenges of all of the things related to especially urban infrastructure that you alluded to. You know, how do you keep a city going when not everyone lives on their own patch of land with their own log cabin? But that's the kind of toy world that is, I think, intuitively attractive to people who are just trying to imagine some kind of simple system whereby life could unfold in an unobtrusive way. Especially when you're feeling, you know, overwhelmed by all kinds of demands that feel unjust. So they kind of keep that lighthouse burning. I think for people from generation to generation, that can be attractive, especially if you're mistrustful of, you know, let's say, the kind of things that the left tends to put its faith in, like social movements or collective action. If for some reason or another you think, no, no, that usually leads to either violence or oppression for people like myself. Then you can just return to the glass bubble world of Rothbardian natural law.
- [21:12]
A
Hi there, it's Claire. The episode you're currently listening to is free for everybody, but the next one won't be because we're trying to make this show independently and sustainably. We switch off between free weeks and Patreon weeks. So if you're a fan of good, accurate public history made by actual experts, consider supporting our Patreon. It's only one tier, which means everyone who subscribes gets access to the same perks across the board. For the price of a pair of socks, you'll get access to a new episode every week instead of just the bi weekly free ones. And they'll all be ad free for you. You'll also get access to the full episode archive, bonus content, early access to merch, and lots of other fun Patreon exclusives to sweeten the deal. Just head over to patreon.com this guy sucked. Or follow the link in the episode description to sign up. Well, I mean, it also seems to be making a good argument for like becoming a homesteader or something. Right? Like, I think that's a big part of this. That what animates that, even the sort of like return to the land stuff is you're like, well, I've cultivated this land. We, like you said, don't need to talk about who was here for or where this land came from or who cultivated it in the first place before me, actually. But this thing where like you own your little space, anything you do with it is yours. Any byproduct is yours. You're only violent in terms of self defense. You see the sort of romantic relationship people have to this idea. But the romance requires, like you said, erasing all of the other background structural issues that enable the romance to exist.
- [22:46]
B
Yeah. And so, and I think that's, you know, maybe that's a place to say something more about where he fits in intellectual history. In this case, I think kind of working backwards because as I said, he died in his dentist's office in 1995. And the timing is important because he had actually reached, I think, the high point of his own radicalization around the time of his death. So he died in his early 70s, but in the 1990s. And this is sort of like the mostly the why this guy sucks argument is he had become very tight with neo Confederate white supremacist movements.
- [23:26]
A
Classic.
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B
Yeah.
- [23:27]
A
Every guy on this show, I'll tell
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B
you, here's the time for it well, this is why we'll work backwards. It's like, maybe he was less sucky when he was younger, but he died really bad.
- [23:35]
A
I was going to say I'm from Oregon, so if you say libertarian to me, that's where I'm going, actually, in my brain.
- [23:41]
B
Well, I went to college in Oregon, so I did.
- [23:43]
A
You. Where'd you go?
- [23:44]
B
Yeah, I went to Lewis and Clark College.
- [23:45]
A
Okay. Yeah, I'm from Portland, but I went to U of O. And Eugene also is a hotbed for, like, really left people and also people who are Nazis and call themselves libertarians.
- [23:56]
B
Yeah, it's just. How far from the i5 corridor do you want to see exactly?
- [24:00]
A
Exactly. You know, I've said almost that exact quote on the show where I'm like, okay, so there is a zone that you can go straight through. And then everything on either side of it is like, watch out. Don't walk around at night unless you have a gun. Unfortunately.
- [24:16]
B
Yeah, no, it's true. And then now that, yeah. Extends into like, right into Pioneer Square or something these days.
- [24:22]
A
But yeah, totally.
- [24:24]
B
Anyways, anyway, nostalgic sidebar to Portland, but the 90s. So this is why I wanted to bring it up, like, about, like, why do people take refuge in those kind of fantasies when they do? And we historians have big arguments about that. Right? Like. Or big, big claims that we make. And one of the big ones, I think, is that it is actually the process of modernization and the disruptions associated with industrialization, emergence of cities, people being uprooted from their communities, you know, pushed into these big, anonymous, often filthy, often very uncomfortable places that the late 19th century city was. That leads people then to take refuge into kind of a fantasy of a peerless past. So nationalism arrives, not coincidentally, at a time when people are, like, less rooted to the soil than they ever were, less connected to their fellow citizens than they ever were, and more normal from country to country than they've ever been. It was right then when people were like, no, there's something very special about being like a Belgian. And we have here in Belgium have always been like this. And we are very close to the earth and the landscape and so on, because they precisely weren't.
- [25:41]
A
Yeah.
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B
So you needed to take refuge in that as a kind of social, psychological compensation.
- [25:46]
A
It's re. Enchantment. Like a lot of this is this re. Enchantment where you have to be like, actually there's some magical, also blood and soil thing happening here, but there's this magical, arcane connection that we have to the space that we're from.
- [26:00]
B
And it may be it's either a distant past, but also if maybe you're being sent into war, it's a place that you're also experiencing. Experiencing kind of in the battlefield and maybe where you'll go after you die and so on.
- [26:10]
A
Totally.
- [26:10]
B
So psychologically, it makes sense. And the reason why I think this connects to the 90s, why it's relevant, is that people often think about the period of the last 40 years as being in either one of two modes. Either we were in a period of globalization, or it was like a return of nationalism. And the pendulum seems to be always described as swinging one way or the other. And, you know, until recently, that was considered, like, nationalism was considered to be bad. And Certainly in the 1990s, there was a lot of what was called neo nationalism. So you had people in Germany, people in Austria, talking about the beauty of their nation in a way that had been long taboo since the end of the Third Reich and so on. And in the US Too, people were saying, like, here comes, like, Christian nationalism. Here comes white nationalism. Yeah, these are threats. But what I think was less noticed at the time, although very much the focus of historians like yourself and others more recently, is how many of the reactive visions of the 1990s and 2000s weren't actually at the scale of the nation. It wasn't really like what Daniel Immervar calls the logo map. People weren't really looking at the lower 48 and saying, this is what we're fighting for. Actually, people were, like, going back to homesteads, carving out liberated territories in Idaho, dreaming of a reborn Confederate South. And this is actually where these toy fantasies of natural property rights, a la Rothbard and anarcho capitalists sort of converged with the racial fantasies of the far right in the 1990s. Because the question became, at what scale can we rebuild order in a disorderly world? If we feel overwhelmed, if we feel like our particularity is being crushed by, you know, global coca colonization or whatever, then how can we start again? How can we start afresh somewhere? And the interesting thing, and in fact the very radical thing, is people like Rothbart were just having these meetings and, like, best Western conference rooms. You know, we academics go to these places to, like, listlessly exchange the recent discoveries from the archives. Yeah, they were meeting up and being like, how can we, like, reformat the territory of the United States to, like, restore order in a chaotic world?
- [28:43]
A
I mean, it's also insane to think that, like, we're like, here's this Big problem. The world is chaotic. And someone was like, well, why don't we simply solve that? Yeah, like let you know, like you or I aren't being like, here's a problem I've identified that is a world structural issue.
- [28:59]
B
Yeah.
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A
We're not like, let's go to the continental breakfast, get out the notepad, set it down.
- [29:06]
B
Yeah, but that's what they were doing. And one of the things that they figured out, you know, like trading notes literally with nationalists who are visiting from Hungary and often right wing historical revisionists and even Holocaust apologists was like, well, we all believe in one thing, which is what they call the contractual community.
- [29:25]
A
Sure.
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B
So what we believe is basically we need to get away from the idea that a nation is just a territory where people are born willy nilly and then automatically uploaded into the database of people who belong. What it needs to be is we need to literalize the social contract so that that fantasy we've described, which even they know isn't true, they know that property isn't made by people kind of mixing their labor with the soil. I mean, none of these guys were mixed or they worth shit. But they do know you can create a gated community. Many of them did live in those.
- [30:02]
A
You're telling me Murray Rothbard is not working the land with a plow? He does not. I'm shocked. I'm honestly, I couldn't have known that based on looking.
- [30:13]
B
I have seen, I mean, I've seen him in like a butterfly collar, like at, in Vermont, like on vacation, but I haven't seen, you know, getting his hands dirty.
- [30:21]
A
He might be beekeeping. You know, we don't, we don't know
- [30:25]
B
if he had hobbies other than writing polemics. We don't know about them. I mean, he was just really busy with his world changing activities. But the interesting thing about him, you know, this is like he is kind of an American story in a way because he's born in the Bronx in the 1920s in the midst of working class New York City and hit by his own description, surrounded by communists, surrounded by union members. Like the knee jerk position that people in his life took was embrace of the workers movement, if not our embrace of like the idea of the Communist party. And then he goes to City College in the late 1930s I guess, and 1940s and onto Columbia and again he's surrounded by like what the New York intellectuals, these were people hashing out the finer points of leftist doctrine. All the Trotskyists who then became the neoconservatives. Later were still Trotskyists. Right. He's the weird one because he, like, was never a Trotskyist. Like, he started out on the right and he found it hard to find people he could relate to in that world and so ended up drifting downtown to nyu, where he came across Ludwig von Mises, the Austrian economist born in the 1880s. So, you know, a couple generations older than him, who had fled the Nazis from Austria in the 1930s, ended up in Geneva, and then had moved onward to paid position at the School of Business Administration at nyu and was a conservative, a right winger. And he was telling these same kind of like, just so stories about property and freedom and the need to see the world in binaries in which there's either planning over there and the illusory vision of socialism, and then there's freedom and property and individualism over here. And that just clicked absolutely for Rothbard. He ended up basically becoming, entering like the payroll of the plutocrat, funded libertarian think tanks very early, already in the 1950s. He's working for the foundation for Economic Education, ends up moving out to California for a while and ends up co founding the Cato Institute with Charles Koch in the 1970s, and then working for the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which is right across the street from Auburn University in Alabama, which started in 1982. And it was basically created for people for whom the Heritage foundation wasn't right wing enough.
- [33:04]
A
Whoa. Okay, that's a. That's a high bar.
- [33:07]
B
That's literally what it was for. Yeah. No, because the argument was Cato Institute, which was originally in San Francisco, moves to D.C. after Reagan. The Heritage foundation is always set up to basically advise the court of the right in D.C. and to someone who saw himself as an outsider and a sort of a dissident renegade, like Rothbart, you had basically become a statist. If you were just advising politicians.
- [33:37]
A
Sure. If you were interacting with them.
- [33:39]
B
Yeah. I mean, if you're delivering, you know, spec legislation to the Congress, then you are kind of just a statist. I mean, you. Tacitly, if not explicitly.
- [33:50]
A
Yeah. If your whole thing is improving the state, then unfortunately you believe in the state and the improvability of the state.
- [33:56]
B
Right. I mean, it's hard to dodge that one. And so they were like, we need to have the kind of, you know, our redoubt in like yanon kind of a thing from where we can do a long march against the state as such. And so we're building out this fortress of people, and we will accept people who agree with Us who believe that the. Basically the United States needs to be dismantled because it's a burnt project. The Great Society programs have turned it into a kind of a welfare producing machine. The state is just a conveyor belt for the undeserving poor and it can't be redeemed. So we are going to have to crack this thing up and start afresh. And then you start looking around for partners. And this is why I say he's interesting as a kind of an American story, is because in the 1960s when the black nationalist movement was kind of at its zenith, he was quite intrigued with that. So he was supporting black separatism. He said there should be like a black autonomous republic in the south and there should be a white counterpart.
- [35:00]
A
Sure.
- [35:00]
B
Elsewhere in the country, if not the rest of the country. So few people, I think, politically are that kind of labile in their thinking. You know, it's kind of grudgingly giving him his flowers that he would really follow through his principles. Like, okay, if you want to destroy the country, then you kind of look around and say, like, all right, like, who else wants to destroy the country? Like, I'm going to start with that question.
- [35:23]
A
Yeah.
- [35:23]
B
And not think about what comes afterwards, because I'm taking for granted we'll be all Balkanized and like living in kind of fortified circumstances afterwards.
- [35:31]
A
So, yeah, I mean, we'll all be in our gated communities.
- [35:34]
B
Yeah. We'll have better artillery. So, like, let them have their failed socialist utopia in the Bay Area and soon enough they'll die out.
- [35:42]
A
Now they'd say Portland and Seattle.
- [35:44]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [35:46]
A
One of the things that I noticed about him, and I don't know if this is on the good or the bad side. Right. Like, we all know that all of this is on the bad side.
- [35:52]
B
Yes.
- [35:53]
A
But like, we don't know. It's. He's very nimble in terms of his political alignments over his life. It's not like he switches sides necessarily, but he has some early associations with more of the old right stuff. Then during the Vietnam War, he's like, all right, well, I'll get with the new left because they're anti interventionist and I don't like war. And then he's like, all right, let's go to the Paleo conservatives and then we'll be libertarians. And then maybe the neo Nazis kind of have something going on here that is a strange. So far in the show, we haven't had anyone who is like that, other than like maybe the sort of like ancient Greek alabes type guys who are like, yeah, I'll just go with whoever, like, wants to feed me. But like, his thing is not that. It is very interesting.
- [36:37]
B
No. Because his demand actually is consistent. Right. I mean, his principles actually don't change. He just finds different allies along the way.
- [36:46]
A
Yeah.
- [36:46]
B
And he sees different potential coalition partners for him to get there. And I think that's, you know, it helps if you don't believe in like, the necessity of defending process. Right. Because it's not for him. Politics isn't something that is itself a collective intelligence producing undertaking the same way liberals and socialists would see it. It's like, actually we don't just deliberate to get to an end goal. We deliberate because deliberation helps us figure out what our end goal is. He already knows in advance.
- [37:19]
A
Yeah.
- [37:19]
B
So he can just say, like, look around and say, you know, which tiger can I ride this decade? And different candidates offer themselves.
- [37:27]
A
Can I make a crazy analogy?
- [37:29]
B
Yeah, sure.
- [37:30]
A
It's, it's like, you know how every election the Democrats are like, get on whichever bus is closest to where you're trying to go to. You don't have to, like, the bus driver. You have to like, whatever stop they're trying to, you know, like, there's this thing where they're kind of like, it doesn't matter if you like Kamala Harris. She doesn't have to be good on everything you want. She just. And like, everyone's like, I'm not buying this. But he's like, well, if it's. I can't actually do this with someone who's going to be closer and closer to this one singular end goal that I have.
- [38:01]
B
Yeah, well, because if, you know, people who are dubious about that proposition are people who understand that, you know, getting on that bus will end up either changing you or changing like, the nature of the vehicle or whatever. So, like, you're not likely to escape unscathed ethically from those kind of decisions.
- [38:19]
A
Yeah. And the bus driver does matter, actually.
- [38:21]
B
Actually, all of those things matter.
- [38:23]
A
All of these things matter.
- [38:24]
B
Yeah. But because he is almost like a millenarian in his thinking. Right. Like, he really does see things from the end backwards. Like, he has a scatological belief that after the moment of collapse, self ordering will begin to kick in. And then the interesting politics will start with the people that you can see eye to eye with and collaborate with on equal terms. And that will be probably a very small number of people. Right. Like, I mean, that's the great liberating quality of like, abandoning the nation as Your terrain of struggle.
- [39:01]
A
Yeah.
- [39:01]
B
I mean, as any dropout of any point on the spectrum knows, like, it's much easier to find four people who you can live in a house with than to try to manage a nation of hundreds of millions collectively. So that that attitude guided him, I would say, the whole way through and actually freed him up to make otherwise kind of perplexing alliances.
- [39:25]
A
Yeah.
- [39:25]
B
So if his goal was in the 1960s was, Listen, these hippies don't like being drafted. They don't want to go fight a war they don't believe in. Can we use that rupture in their consciousness about, like, the benevolent state to make them not just hate this government, but to hate all governments and to not just hate this set of policies, but to hate politics as such, then we actually have a wedge that we shouldn't underestimate. And, I mean, I think he's actually right.
- [39:56]
A
Yeah, sure.
- [39:57]
B
And in the 1990s, he was advising Pat Buchanan and his run for president, even though I hate that man.
- [40:05]
A
Can I just say, that's the guy. If I was doing a tgs, that would be my guy. I fucking hate Pat Buchanan.
- [40:11]
B
He's still alive, though, isn't he? Or is he dead now?
- [40:12]
A
No, he's alive. That's why we haven't done an episode on him.
- [40:15]
B
There you go.
- [40:15]
A
This man.
- [40:16]
B
That's a good one to put in the queue.
- [40:18]
A
We do have a list. We have a secret list of people, so don't worry, he's on the list, like New York Times obit style, ready to drop it. Anyways, back to.
- [40:30]
B
But, yeah. So Buchanan, I mean, Buchanan is a hardcore protectionist, not a libertarian in economic terms really at all, except in some discrete categories. But in John Ganz, who has made these points in much more forceful ways than I have in my book. But in a way, his whole book, the Year the Clock Broke is about. This is how Buchanan prefigured the Trumpian rupture. And canny actors like Rothbart were doing everything they could to kind of like, pour coal into that engine while it was running. And more recently, for example, the head of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, who, again, is like anarcho capitalist, I think he sees Dubai as basically the best place with the lowest taxes and so on. Doesn't care about political freedom, just cares about economic freedom.
- [41:18]
A
Yeah. Who cares about slavery?
- [41:20]
B
Well, absolutely. No. I mean, they just didn't, I guess, mix their labor the right way or at some point.
- [41:26]
A
Point.
- [41:27]
B
But the guy from the Mises Institute said the goal with Trump too is to open up what he called the gift of populism. So he also didn't think that Trump was great enlightened on economic libertarian grounds, which he clearly is not. But he said also, you know, we need to make this into a process by which people's frustration with politicians becomes a frustration with politics as such. And again, maybe not doing a terrible job at that.
- [41:58]
A
It's being like, let's get this bus moving towards populism, you know?
- [42:02]
B
Yeah, yeah. And put populism on the front and then like it ends at social collapse. Yeah, and that's the idea, like you subtly change out the destination on the front of the bus at the last
- [42:13]
A
minute, halfway through, you're like, the thing I'm pulling or the bell I'm ringing
- [42:17]
B
isn't once you're in, you can't see the front bus anymore.
- [42:20]
A
Yeah, totally. I mean, so much of this is so interesting to me because I think you do a good job in your work of explaining like what the problems are and like, rather than doing the sort of classic thing where I would have been like 20 minutes ago, what's wrong with him? I think we've been unpacking this as we go. Like some of the things that are so insane to me are like the view of markets, the economic view of markets and politics, this idea that they sort of are just naturally self ordering and will be naturally self ordering. But like, am I wrong in thinking that usually they end up actually being legally constructed? Like that doesn't actually happen. It feels to me like how this sort of like, I don't want to call him a child because he's very smart, but like this juvenile utopian thinking where like, if everything falls apart, it will just naturally fall back together. And I don't know if that's.
- [43:08]
B
Well, okay. So this I think is often, you know, it's not your fault that you haven't read a whole fucking like bookshelf of this guy's books. Unfortunately, I have. And I think it makes sense if you hear up front his beliefs and you think like, well, that's obviously naive because, you know, we all know that like contracts and binding law and authorities are the condition under which markets can exist. You know, that's not exactly hard to figure out. So how can they fall for this image of like self adjusting markets or something?
- [43:39]
A
Yeah, and I don't want to make it sound like I think he's some like, little kid, like. Cause I know he's like, obviously very intellectually rigorous in the things that he's Doing.
- [43:47]
B
Yeah, but, but this is kind of what I'm getting to is like, the funny thing about libertarians of this kind, I don't want to paint them with that broad of a brush, but I think you could. Which is like, because they believe in so much in individual freedom, they are then required and obligated. They take it upon themselves to figure out, okay, I want maximal freedom. I don't think I'm being given to it by the country I'm living in now. So now, shit, I have to like, start from scratch and like rebuild the whole thing. And so what does that mean? That means like, we're gonna do like a ton of like lawcraft and like, what to any naive outsider would actually just look like political institution building to be able to sustain this world of maximal freedom. So actually libertarians, you know, attributed with believing in maximal freedom are like absolute fetishists for the law.
- [44:45]
A
It's like the sovereign citizen people, right? Like where they're obsessed with litigation, these people are obsessed with the law, but they think that they exist outside of it.
- [44:53]
B
It's kind of like in a strange way, the inverse of what you're saying. Like they actually don't have a fantasy of autonomy and, and free regulation. They are actually have like a naive belief in the ability of laws and rules to structure human behavior.
- [45:10]
A
Sure.
- [45:11]
B
And they think that once you've built that cabin and now you need to exchange a sheep for wheat with your neighbor.
- [45:19]
A
Yeah, the catan system.
- [45:21]
B
Exactly. Then that exchange will be governed by a freely agreed contract, which in the case of disputes will be settled by a third party. And there can't just be one third party because that would be like a monopoly on the problem of arbitration or dispute resolution. So there will be also a market of dispute resolution services. And over time, if one does a bad job, then people will no longer go to them and they'll go to another. But from this initial premise of like maximal freedom, like, very quickly you're getting this like proliferating hedge work, if not like weed work, of rulemaking and rule taking instances that, you know, you can see where it's going. Like, pretty quick you get to like a much less efficient version of what actually exists in modern states.
- [46:09]
A
Yeah. Can I ask a stupid question? Does that not take you towards a state basically in all but name?
- [46:14]
B
In all but name? No. And that's the interesting thing with some of the people who I would say are more intellectually acrobatic or have more of a sense of irony, I would say, than Rothbart. Namely David Friedman is an example of this. So Milton Friedman's son is I would say, like the second most well known anarcho capitalist. And I didn't choose him and wouldn't choose him because he hasn't made as many outrageously unethical choices about his collaboration partners in his life. So he has not, to my knowledge, had any interest in working with white supremacists, for example. What he's more interested in, he is trained as a lawyer, is figuring out how you can import from often non Western forms of law means of basically horizontal dispute resolution and property protection that don't involve appealing to a higher hereditary or elected order. So a classic example I write about this in Crack Up Capitalism is like the Dutch guy who ended up in Somalia during the civil war in the 90s and got really into it, into the civil war basically because he was like, wow, like we have a state and yet we still have an economy. That's not supposed to be possible. We always thought that was just a theory for anarcho capitalists, and yet it's happening here. How is it working? Well, it's working in part through the leveraging of customary law, of herding traditional tribespeople in the Horn of Africa who have ways of leveraging laws of reparation and restitution that aren't about imprisonment, that aren't about being arrested, they're just about like, you committed this crime, then you give me this head of cattle or whatever and he literally starts translating that into a commercial system that his Somali elder friends suggest should be called a businessman's clan. And so Friedman is interested in stuff like this. So yes, it does aggregate over time to something that's state like, but something that ideally for them is like on a different shoot of political development than the catastrophic set of developments that began with like the French Revolution basically and popular sovereignty and nominal equality among citizens and leads all the way to the despotism of the majoritarian dictatorships of the, of the 20th century. And as they see it, if there's one thing they're most interested in, it's not economics. I would say, I would say it's law. Yeah, I think that's the royal discipline of the libertarian movement.
- [48:52]
A
It's like it starts with the tick tock 21 year old who's like, I don't want taxes. So like the economics get you in the door, get you on the bus. If we're using this analogy, they get you on the bus and then at the end you're like actually really far Away from it. And the economics don't matter anywhere as much as these other systems do that they're more interested in.
- [49:13]
B
Again, like, it's just kind of which kids in the cafeteria are we talking about here, right? Like there's some kids who will just want to like, like see who can punch each other in the face the longest. And then that person is like wins. And then there's the kids who will be into like the most complicated like tabletop board games that you've ever seen in your life in which they've like invented the idea of like the commodity system of money and there's like all these kinds of rules. And that is like the libertarian imagination, right? It's like it can be just a guy with his trad wife and an axe in a clearing, but it can also be that scaled up. Like how could this work? Through the affordances of cryptography and the vitalik buterin kind of idea of a decentralized autonomous organization. And that those are all crypto descendants of libertarianism and many of which I think are pretty politically not obviously problematic, maybe eroding faith in democratic institutions in different ways, but not in the direct kind of way of like, let's make a white only territory in the southern United States.
- [50:18]
A
Sure.
- [50:18]
B
I wouldn't have spent all this time writing about these people if it was just a question of like moral condemnation or something like that. There is a political imagination that is like alive in those domains that is kind of instructive. Like, and there's a level of like, commitment also and durability that is certainly helped by having deep pocketed benefactors. Right? Like because of that saying, yeah, you
- [50:43]
A
did mention a Coke like not that long ago.
- [50:45]
B
Yeah, exactly. So.
- [50:52]
A
I'm here with a quick shout out to tell you about other multitude shows I think you'll enjoy if you like this one. Now if you're listening to this guy sucked, that means you're a history person. Or I mean, possibly just someone who likes being mean. But for the purposes of this shout out, I'm going to say you're a history person. What if I said there was a podcast that would also convert you to being a science person? Well, great news. There is Dive into genes, microbes and other assorted tiny things that have a big impact on our world with tiny matters. Join scientists Sam Jones and Deboki Chakravarti as they take apart complex and contentious topics and rebuild your understanding of the world around you. They've got episodes that cover things like evolution, ancient sewer systems, and the history of birth control. And Sam and Deboki embrace the messiness of science and its place in the past, past, present, and future. I personally really loved a recent episode they did on the horrific legacy of race science in modern medicine, and I really recommend giving that one a listen. Tiny Matters releases new episodes every Wednesday, and it's brought to you by the American Chemical Society, a nonprofit that connects and advances chemistry and the broader scientific community. Subscribe to Tiny Matters today wherever you listen to podcasts. My name's MacKenzie, and I started a GoFundMe for the adoptive mother of a nonverbal autistic child. The mother had lost her job because she wasn't able to find adequate care for this autistic child. So she really needed some help with living expenses, paying some back bills. So I launched a GoFundMe to help support them during this crisis, and we raised about $10,000 within just a couple of months. I think that the surprising thing was by telling a clear story and just like really being very clear about what we needed, we had some really generous donations from people who were really moved by the situation that this family was struggling with. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com that's gofundme.com gofundme this podcast is supported by GoFundMe. I mean, yeah, because part of this is, like, I have to believe that people want or imagine different places because they think they will be better. The question is who they think they'll be better for. But, like, they do think things will be better. So part of this imagination is imagining a version of the world where it's better. The system may be different, but it's, in some way, there's some improvement. Whether we agree on whether that is actually going to be better or not is the question, but it is animated by this belief in a certain better vision of the future.
- [53:38]
B
I mean, one of the things that interests me about Rothbard that I ask myself is, like, where his head would be at now, like, if he had lived 30 more years. Because one of the really interesting moments that I just mention in passing in the book is when the Rodney King beating happens and the kind of uprising begins in Los Angeles, he gets very angry because he feels like it's being portrayed in a way that's too sympathetic to King himself and too sympathetic to the protesters. And he feels like the entire media class and the Democratic Party and everything is like, like even the Republican Party is bought into this victimhood narrative about African American people in America that they should be bought into. That is cracked. But the thing he openly says is like, if only we had a way to get around the media gatekeepers and speak to our supporters directly, then we could really create like a change in this country's kind of thing. This is like 1992 and of course like within a year of his death, I think the Ludwig von Mises Institute creates this website. And then Lou Rockwell, who he starts the institute with, creates lourockwell.com and also antiwar.com which was very, very big website in the 1999, 2000 moment. And then after the Iraq war invasion. Justin Raimondo, who run that website, wrote Rothbard's biography. He was close friends with him. And the reason why, I think I'd be curious to see where he'd end up now in the absence of people who are maybe as intellectually agile or nimble as him, politically nimble as him is like, how much of this neo homesteading, secessionism and so on can you do in the era of digital capitalism? Because you can unplug. Okay, that's one choice. But if you didn't want to the scale that is soon going to be necessary for any kind of effective computation or, you know, functioning in AI driven economy. How small can a breakaway right wing libertarian polity be, quasi polity be? Or can you use the kind of things that, you know, people like Yarvin and Musk are interested in doing to kind of create insulated sovereignties of their own kind that sit kind of inside the larger grid? I think all of that stuff is actually, you know, intellectually pretty interesting. And probably once they get the right, right messenger and the right thinker, could be very attractive for young people, actually.
- [56:16]
A
Yeah, I mean, I do see just based on sort of my algorithms on things like social media, because I, I think because I'm interested in some of these return to land stuff, like as. Not as in like I want to do them necessarily, but like that's as a research interest. My algorithms do have a lot of things like homesteading influencers in them and trad wife influencers, all these people. And like the thing that's interesting, is there a move right now to try to convince people that this is what they should be doing? They frame it differently in a lot of ways, but like that is happening. The only thing is the people who are trying to convince you to go do that are making money off of social media, not off their home Right, exactly.
- [56:57]
B
You're just like a streaming cosplayer.
- [56:59]
A
Yeah, exactly. Like what's keeping them alive is not the apples from their orchard that they're jarring. Certainly the money that they make from people watching them jar the apple, like pickle the whatever, that's what's actually happening. So I do think that this sort of digital capitalist thing has already infected the idea of the home setting, the return. Like that's already happening to some extent.
- [57:21]
B
Yes, it's happening in this kind of pseudo revenue creating way. But like, whether or not it could be more, like not so nakedly hypocritical.
- [57:30]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. One of the things I wanted to ask you, and I think that this goes to a lot of stuff that you've been talking about lately on a million other podcasts and with Muskism and all these other places, how do you see Rothbard's ideas living on today, like right now, in things like crypto and secessionist movements and anti regulatory politics that are like kind of fucking us over right now that are making life really bad? Not as in like he's the hand moving this, but do you see his ideas animating some of that?
- [58:02]
B
Well, I mean, if his reliable move was always to hop on whatever tiger was, you know, seemingly running at the top velocity any given moment, and in the interest of getting more quickly to like social collapse, then I think all of the things that AI doomers are worried about could be positives for him. So, I mean, he was kind of an acceleration as of on Lalette in a way, in that he thought that the things that people were worried about shredding the social fabric, like rabid competition and the removal of the safety net and precariousness. He saw those things as like virtues and things that were actually the only true form of justice and proper tests of human capacity that would weed out the less capable and allow the propagation of the more capable. So I think he would basically be like an AI accelerationist now. I think he would be doing that move not naked of any of the pseudo humanism of Sam Altman or something, just like Nick Land kind of stuff, really. It's just like actually capital is an alien from the future that is driving us towards an end that we should not try to resist. And I think that, that he would imagine that once we were spat out of the end of that winnowing out of the weak and the maximization of capacities at the fingertips of the strong, then you could kind of rebuild from that basis, I guess. And I think by Then you know, like, if you really swallow whole the right wing tech ideology, then you've kind of airbrushed out all of those concerns about democratic representativeness and popular sovereignty anyway. So they're kind of of solving his problem by a way that maybe he wouldn't have anticipated. He had no awareness, I think of like early cyber libertarian ideology died a little too early for that even to have been kicking off much at all. I didn't read sci fi as much as far as I know, although David Friedman writes fantasy novels and is very well aware of sci fi and is also aware of the fact that Rothbard isn't that you might want to accelerate the end time, but you can't really be sure about what's going to come afterwards. So Friedman anyway is more frank than Rothbard to say that if we really do go all the way, if we do shatter the state, if we do reassert the idea of individual self ownership exchangeable only through the monetary system, then the outcome might be really unpleasant for most people. Yeah, Friedman actually just comes right out and accepts that. And he actually gives you a list, a reading list. And he's like, for example, you might want to check out these books.
- [60:54]
A
Sure, the Bible.
- [60:55]
B
And then you check them out, you're like, good Lord, this is awful. Why are you advocating for this? And he's like, well, you know, he believes we live in an unjust world. So the true sign of a radical, I guess is that you're willing to take that leap and say we need to initiate this series of processes even if we can't be assured or we can't even do like a actuarial risk table on the outcome. We have to do it because we have, you know, faith in the. Wait, what?
- [61:26]
A
I don't know, some balloons just went across. Did some balloon do that?
- [61:28]
B
I guess maybe if you go,
- [61:32]
A
no one can see this, but we just had like a balloon thing happen. On my ice cream, I don't know,
- [61:38]
B
I was talking about the end of society and a bunch of multicolored balloons just drifted up in a festive way very jarringly.
- [61:45]
A
Well, I mean, I think you're so right to locate it in a sort of eschatological framework. Stick with me for one second because I, the other day, I'm teaching right now a class on anti Semitic visual culture throughout history. And my students are incredible. And they also are not or were not before the class versed in Christian eschatology. And so I was having to explain to them medieval anti Semitism and talk about Things like the Antichrist and the desire for the end times. And, like, explain it to them in these terms where I'm like, well, the end times might be terrible, but they also, if you're good, might be really great for you. And some people are gonna have a bad time in the end times. But that's part of. And you're also looking for the Antichrist. Like, you don't want someone to be the Antichrist because they're bad, but you do want an Antichrist to appear so that the end times can begin. And the students were very like, what? But also they were like, this doesn't make sense. And I say, well, yeah, that's part of it. But, like, it. It fits with this thing where you both are like, this thing is bad, but it could be really good if, like. And. And you also want this utter collapse to happen, this terrible thing to happen. Yeah, because potentially the outcome is a positive one, and we don't really know. And they don't have the conviction of Christians, for example, who are like, no, we've been told what the outcome is going to be eventually, like, where we're all going after this. But there are people like Rothbard who are like, yeah, I think it's gonna probably go well. Like, I think it'll probably end at a good place.
- [63:17]
B
The direct analog now is Peter Thiel talking about this stuff. Right.
- [63:22]
A
So obsessed with the Antich Christ.
- [63:24]
B
Yeah. In the exact same way you're describing. He's like, you know, given that we have awakened the God in the computer, we can assume some kind of apocalyptic outcome. So just, like, choose your own Antichrist, then. I mean, it will either be Greta Thunberg or whatever he imagines it will be, like, shutting down our research, or it will be perhaps like this basilisk from the computer that we can try our best to direct towards our own aims. You know, Rothbard talked about spirituality. I mean, he was Jewish. Culturally. He wasn't in any way practicing Jew. I think he was more in the kind of rationalist camp. Even, like, Hayek is another good example of someone who saw the social utility of religion, but didn't seem to think it had any, like, predictive power or anything like that. But I think that, you know, if I imagine him still alive today, I could definitely see him getting taken up in the kind of Promethean discourse and fervor about artificial intelligence and, like, joining hands with someone like Teal and saying, like, hey, you're right. Like, let's go. Like, which Antichrist is it going to be? And I'm ready, basically.
- [64:37]
A
But he's more likely to be a, an effective altruist than he is to be like a Palantir guy. Because he's like, we probably shouldn't drone strike everyone because war is bad. I don't know. These are not.
- [64:49]
B
Yeah, let's. This may be like a good, a good way to return to where we started, which is like some of his last vile traits. And it is actually one of my, like, quote unquote, favorite Rothbard moments, is because some of his stuff is on YouTube, so he has talks he gave later in his life that you can watch on, like, grainy VHS from like, some libertarian gathering. And in the early 1990s, or maybe even already late 1980s anyway, there was much discussion of already the end of Cold War confrontation. And he's saying, listen, this isn't going to be a problem for the military contractors. It's not going to be a problem for the people who love foreign intervention. He's like, we're just going to find another enemy. In fact, maybe we'll do just dig up Gaddafi and decide he's the bad guy again and use him as a way to drop. This is like 1991. It's like, damn, okay, like, respect for that one. Like, you got that one exactly right for sure. Like, 14 years later, it was exactly that guy. So the alliance that he made with the Paleo conservatives was, you know, the strongest on that point. Point which was that in his belief, the goal to export human rights and Democracy in the 1990s was just a continuation of the kind of illicit mandate of global policing that the Americans had exercised under the Cold War fight against communism. So seeing the kind of structural incentives by which, like, these ideological projects would become, you know, like, massively extractive of, like, ordinary people's work wealth is him at his more praiseworthy. But whether he would be opposed to Palantir now is an interesting question because
- [66:43]
A
we've already established that he's willing to sacrifice these ordinary people in some circumstances. Right? Like, it's not just that he is defending the Everyman, although that's couched in that. But like, he's saying, some of you guys are gonna have to die for this to work.
- [66:59]
B
Yeah, well, this, I mean, it's like the classic, like Norbert. So bobbio description of the difference between the left and the right. Right. I mean, like, the left believes in equality and the right believes in liberty, so they claim. And Rothbard was nothing if not opposed to the idea of equality. So he was an open Anti egalitarian. He thought that the claim of there being like even a standard everyman or something was itself like ideological problem. Like there were better men and worse men and, and women below that.
- [67:30]
A
Well, sure.
- [67:30]
B
And we should organize society accordingly. And we didn't even talk about this, but he had this kind of like 12 point plan to bring about a better state of affairs in the United States. And it was like, you know, cut welfare payments tomorrow, you know, close down most of the federal government and unleash the cops is the classic line from that. Basically meaning clean up the bums. Where should they go? What's not our problem?
- [67:56]
A
Look, we did a lot of this already. Can I just say?
- [67:59]
B
Yeah. I mean this is an ongoing American project since it's founding, basically doing all of these things.
- [68:04]
A
Yeah, that's. We've been doing most things.
- [68:07]
B
So I think that insofar as you could sell Palantir as just a prosthetic extension of this cleanup purge that he thought was a precondition for the return of order in the country, then maybe he would embrace the machine in that moment.
- [68:27]
A
Well, this is a deeply depressing place for us to end, but end we must. Unfortunately. I'm convinced. As I said, I knew I was going to learn some stuff and I definitely learned some stuff going in this. Least of all that he died in his dentist office, which will forever be hilarious.
- [68:43]
B
That's the best part.
- [68:44]
A
Like, that is actually a very funny place to die. So, hey, thank you so much for coming on. I learned so many things and, and I will have a lot to think about and I know that I'll be pulling from this a lot. When I look at the future or when I look at things in the future, I'll be like, ah, yes, I remember this from the Rothbard episode, unfortunately.
- [69:07]
B
Yeah, Rothbard saw it first.
- [69:09]
A
Yeah. Where Cassandra. But derogatory connotation. Where can people find you?
- [69:16]
B
I have a Blue sky account, I've got a website and I usually push out like book events and stuff like that there. This Muskism book is out in the UK at the end of March and in the US April 21st and we'll be doing a little book tour. We'll be in Cambridge and Providence and New York and then out on the west coast at some universities. So you can look at our website for that.
- [69:43]
A
Great. All of these things will be linked on our episode description. You can pre order, you can at the link go buy any of Quinn's books, but you can also so pre order Muskism there too. And you know, get a little bit more depressed to celebrate our birthday. That's what the balloons are doing.
- [70:01]
B
I think this is must be a new Amazon offering, but I noticed that you can currently buy the book on MP3 CD.
- [70:09]
A
Return to the land with physical media
- [70:12]
B
with just a cd. A book on cd.
- [70:16]
A
Are you reading the audiobook? Did you read the audiobook?
- [70:18]
B
No, no. We got to choose between a few different people, but we got a good pretty pro to do that.
- [70:23]
A
Nice.
- [70:23]
B
The Last the High Ex Bastards book. It is worth mentioning. Or was it Crack up Capsules? But I remember one they had the list of people and you could click on their IMDb and the one guy who I ended up choosing for this reason is that he had a role as an extra on a Seinfeld episode in which he was just credited as Guy.
- [70:44]
A
I love that.
- [70:45]
B
So I chose him.
- [70:46]
A
That guy doesn't suck.
- [70:47]
B
That's right, it
- [70:51]
A
thanks for tuning in to this episode of this Guy Sucked. A member of the Multitude Podcast Collective, this episode was Hosted by me, Dr. Claire Aubin, featuring special guest Quinn Slobodian, and produced and edited by witchy woman Julia Sheffini. All of our theme music was written and produced by top cyclist Marshall Dean Williams. If you'd like to support the show and get access to all episodes, including two extra episodes per month, and access to our full art archive of episodes, you can subscribe@patreon.com this guysucked or on Apple Podcasts. See you next week.