We'll get started and we're pretty much on the campus of Shepard's Bible College and also Lincoln Avenue Bible Church. This is Dr. Phil Fernandez with the Institute of Biblical Defense. We're going to have a friendly discussion here between Nelson LaPlante, who takes the free enterprise position, And Blake Kilbourn, who defends what he calls nationalism and economic theory, and we'll ask him to explain what that is. And also, we're going to have some dialogue here. If this is the first time you've seen either one of their mugs, you can go to our website, instituteofbibliodefense.com, click on CERN and Audio, and then look for the interview I did with Blake on the alt-right, and also the debate on what we call fascism versus limited government, and then also the interview that I did with Nelson LaPlante on free enterprise. So Blake, we'll start out with you. If you could tell us, what do you mean by nationalism in reference to economic theory? Economic nationalism, well, first and foremost, it's very heavily related to corporatism. I am a corporatist, but the idea of economic nationalism is nobody in their right mind actually believes in purely free markets. And to what degree we have free markets, we have to ask the question of freedom for what? What is the telos of what our businesses, our stock market, everything we have, where does that go and for what purpose? I'll say to you right now, the only places in the world that have a purely free market are places like Somalia, with a 60% unemployment rate. They have a very limited government. There's very little interference. That's the same thing with Liberia, but Liberia has cannibal warlords. OK, a purely free market isn't something that you're going to actually want. The government is going to be involved in some way, shape, or form shaping the economy. Whether that's a high level of interference, should be malleable. Generally speaking, you want a low level of interference, you want a free-ish market, but if the situation calls for something for the government to step in, that's a good thing for the government to do. For instance, nobody here, and I'm sure nobody listening, unless you were to drag out Murray Rothbard's skeleton into the room, believes in, say, child labor being legalized. Well, when you outlaw child labor, you are saying that the state has the power and authority, and ought to use that to interfere by limiting the supply of labor into the market. That's intervention. That's not free markets. If you want to say that, oh, well, we shouldn't be able to sell methamphetamines to 12-year-olds, that's interference of the market, because you are saying that you can limit by this power of the state the demand for a service. Unless you're an anarcho-capitalist, which C4SS and some other groups are, those policies aren't something that a normal person would really disengage with. But, also as a matter of economic nationalism, we believe in trade protectionism, because the problem with most economic theories right now is they see humans as materialistic units. shelter and once you have a grasp on what to do with these people and to actually help them out in getting a job and provide for themselves, that's great. We need to actually look at them as people and protect them from some of the dangers of international trade. So with Franco in Spain, do you think he did a good job, the proper balance of free enterprise and government interference. Yes, Franco and General Pinochet actually had a wonderful success story with what they did. In fact, Franco learned from his mistakes and demonstrated the power of an economic nationalist system by incorporating what was known as the Spanish Miracle. He tried to develop an autarky, which is when the state by itself provides for itself in all economic matters. He wanted isolationism. And that didn't work. He was willing to fest up and say, hey, this isn't working, so we're going to open up everything to trade, again, with the TLAW, so the goal of national benefit. And that expanded the Spanish economy about 300% within two years. And what about Mussolini and Italy? You know me. I'm a big fan of Mussolini, but I think his problem... He was impatient with what he had. He was a very low-time preference, wanted everything immediately, wanted to jump into the war, and instead ought to have done what Franco did and stayed out. And he probably would have had the same success story as Feynman. And what about Hitler and Germany? Not my area of expertise. While the German economy did balloon, right? There was a marked evidence that he lowered the inflation, he got people working again, and all the testimonies of people living in the 1930s not to Germany, they were happy. Everything was working out the way they wanted it to, but most economists today will tell you that his bubble was artificial and was doomed to crash if the war had not happened or if he had stopped Okay, now, does your form of nationalism, which apparently, Mussolini's fascism works really well with it and all, but your form of nationalism or fascism, whatever it is you call it, that level of government interference, does that necessitate some type of a dictator or at least to a certain degree a heavy-handed stake? Yes and no. You can advocate policies that, well, yes, I'm a fascist. I believe in having a large authoritarian, not large, strong authoritarian government. The question is, are liberty and democracy compatible with each other, or are they mutually exclusive? You might tell me that you believe that corporations should not be able to lobby the government. You disagree with crony capitalism. But then I'm sure when it comes to Arlene's Flowers here in Washington, you would say that companies should be able to do what they want with their capital. Well, in a state where you have a democratic republic or any sort of a situation where you have companies being able to run interference, isn't it legitimate to say that with their capital they ought to be able to lobby the government? Or are we saying that the state should intervene and prevent them from doing something like that? Okay, and I'm going to ask Nelson now, just from what you didn't even meet like until tonight, just from what little you heard about his nationalism or his fascism, and how would you as a free enterprise economist, how would you respond to that? Well, there's a lot of points that he brought up that I would absolutely reject. One, what do you mean by corporation robbing the government? Because you have different types of corporations, right? You have a sole proprietorship, partnerships, you have actual corporations, you have private corporations, you have public corporations. Regardless of the distinctions I'm talking about, I think it is very important. Because if you have a private individual, Arlene's Flowers, that is an individual engaging in the marketplace, which is just trade. That's all the marketplace is, is individuals exchanging goods and services. They should be able to do what they want with it, right? I mean, I think you brought up and wanting it in your debate, the First Amendment. And yeah, you have the absolute right of disassociation. We're both married. We chose people. And we didn't choose other people. As an individual, does that extend to, say, fines are asking for a subsidy from DC? Well, what I am advocating for is a government small enough that you would not waste your money asking it to give you handouts. there would be no handouts to give. So what is the whole purpose of lobbying? Why would a company spend millions and millions of dollars lobbying the federal government for money? It's because the federal government has millions and millions times ten to give them. And so when I talk about companies doing what they want with their capital, if you're a small individual company, you should have the right to associate and disassociate. But if you're a corporation held by thousands, maybe millions of individuals in terms of stock, then that's a different thing as far as what you're doing with your capital. I mean, let's talk about the right of disassociation or, you know, I would advocate for private individuals discriminating as they please. But if you're a public corporation, then the idea of discriminating, well, you're discriminating against your own owners. And so I think they're two different things. But you avoided that, even in a limited government context, where, let's say, Von Mises' fever dream comes true, and we have a government impotent when it comes to economic matters, or Ayn Rand's proposed constitutional amendment in Atlas Shrugged. The United States federal government shall never, ever, ever, ever, ever interfere in the economy. In such a situation, well, should corporations be able to still try to lobby, or try to... Well again, I would say corporations should be able to do, to lobby as they wish, that's fine, but the purpose, the thing that we're advocating for is that you have a government small enough to where nobody's going to waste their money advocating for it. If you have parents, say you're a child and your parents have no money, nothing to hand out, are you going to go buy things for your mother so that they can give you money, like inheritance, for instance? You go and you buy lavish gifts for your grandmother, hoping that she writes her inheritance towards you, or you have a grandmother with no money to give you, and I know this sounds But you're spending thousands of dollars on somebody with the hopes they write you into their will when they have no will to write you into. You're not going to spend money doing that. And so that's what we're talking about. And then there's other aspects. The idea of Somalia. First of all, Somalia's better off than they used to be. But second, I wouldn't say that a series of warlords. I would just say they're a series of small governments trying to be one big government. It would be like a series of dictators. That kill people and eat people. Yeah, but that's what government does. The governments of Liberia and Somalia are so small and so powerless that they can't do anything to stop this kind of thing. Well, you just have other types of smaller governments warring against each other. And you're perfectly fine with that disorder, that violence. But individuals should be able to rise up and defend themselves. The problem with a lot of countries is you have individuals that have no ability to defend themselves. They have no control in Somalia. Well, I don't know the exact laws of Somalia, but I do know that most people there don't have guns. The warlords do, yes. But again, you just have a bunch of governments worrying with each other, trying to be the big government. And I'd also say surveillance. Should one win? Shouldn't one? Yeah, isn't that a good idea? Shouldn't we have somebody win so that they can crush all these other violent movements? They would crush the other violent movements, but that's to say they wouldn't crush everybody else as well. So no, I think individuals, hopefully individuals within those warlord societies would decide not to warlord. We'll make up a term here. But the other thing that I mentioned is, no, I'm not. I'm not for child labor laws, because, you know, what is a child? What kind of labor laws would you institute? Eighteen? For me? Seventeen? I'd be fine with eighteen. So purely subjective, so you can't work under eighteen? Well, in general, you're... If you have four individuals, you can't afford anything. ...around seventeen or eighteen years of age, which, if we want a fully developed populace with the experience necessary to put themselves in under education, training, or employment, We don't want the needs, the not-in-education employment or training. If you're saying that we shouldn't have laws to prevent that and you're fine with 12-year-olds working, welcome to industrialism America. they vote that child, and the parents choose. I mean, would you be against it? Well, you can do a lot for money. Well, that's totally unofficial. That's under the table. It's ridiculous to say a kid can't decide to mow the lawn. So it's OK to be under the table, but it's not OK to be above the table. When you have parents forcing their children into labor in a factory, or you have a system. But that doesn't happen. That's a misunderstanding of economic history. There was child labor, but it wasn't forced by the parents. It's a lack of productivity and a lack of money and productiveness. I mean, do you think that just suddenly you have children working? Back in the 1800s, everybody was poor. It took, I mean, you can look at today, right, in third world countries. It takes a family of five working to feed a family of five. Without the productivity, it's not like you can just suddenly say, OK, no child under 18 is allowed to work. And suddenly, two people are making the amount of goods that five people used to make. By restricting the supply of labor, the demand for it is going to go up. Don't you think that wages would go up for that? But that doesn't mean, no, wages might rise. But who cares about how much money you make if it doesn't buy anything, right? We've seen since the 1950s that the average wage of lower class workers hasn't gone up in parity with the economy. That's why a lot of people are crying out now. And I think way too much for complaining. But that's not true. I mean, what was McKinney writing about? It kind of brought up income inequality because one of the problems is that we have a flood of labor coming to the market from both immigration and in the 1950s after World War II, we had all these women working. It exactly doubled the supply of labor, which meant that you don't have the possibility now, with wages going down in response, for a family to have only one person working. But are you saying that we are no better off than we were in the 50s? I would say we definitely are. But again, America... But is that the whole point of working the wages? To do what? Provide for your family? To buy things. To buy things. To make life better. I mean, I thought the point of it, I mean, like I said in the, if you watched the previous thing, we were talking about income inequality. Market-based income inequality is a good thing. I am an advocate of that. I'm fine with that. So I think he should make a lot more than his workers. Everybody's fine with that. I'm fine with people even trying to get more money for themselves. But the problem is, is when you advocate policies that flood the market with labor and cheapen it, as we have seen in America, it gets harder and harder and harder. One of the reasons we see people doing so well in America is because America has actually adopted a lot of policies that would be on my end of the scale, where we allow people to get some sort of workfare. I don't like welfare. For workfare, I think we need to put people to work or have some sort of requirement on their part if we're going to help them. Well, I want to get back to the idea of the 1950s. We, real wages have gone up. They've gone up very slowly compared not just wages, but compensation. Compensation has gone up rather dramatically. And not just that, we are vastly better off than we were in the 1950s. When I was a child... What's the reason for that? Productivity. I mean, we make more stuff. And it's not at the low end of the scale. Most productivity is at the high end of the scale. It could be medical services, it could be like accounting type of things, computer-based industries, right? We have computers now. There's a great 1980s Radio Shack ad, and it's kind of one of those mean type things. And it shows how everything on this Radio Shack ad that adds up to something like $4,000 or whatever, you can put it on today's $600 iPhone. And so productivity and technology and advances mean our wages in actual, I could say, the numbers compared to inflation may not have exploded like they did in the 1800s, which they did, they exploded. Poverty drastically fell. And again, it's all about productivity. We're vastly better off. We can buy more things. You look at the number of poor, the relative number of people that are below the poverty line that have refrigerators, air conditioners, cars, washing machines. So it seems to me that you're saying the key to prosperity is productivity, whereas you're saying the key to productivity is the right amount and the right kind of government interference, you said. The right amount and the right kind, I believe, should be also somewhat divided into sectors of corporate economics suggests. But here's my problem. You say that the big point of money is to buy things. Well, I don't see why we have jobs and everything is to buy things. Yes, on a basic limbic, totally bottom reductionist definition, with the T-Laws for what you were talking about earlier. Money doesn't buy happiness. Money buys you things that make you happier. It's kind of a very basic way to say that. I'm not against people having money or seeking prosperity. The problem is the T-Laws. What are you buying things for? You mentioned in your interview with Phil Hernandez that a lot of the reasons Americans are poor is a lot of them are really bad with money. They can make a job that makes $100,000 a year, and they waste it on crap. And we are currently in late-stage capitalism right now. We have a whole lot of crap that's flooding the market, and people telling them that this is their God-given right, and it is, in fact, not even a right. They're convincing them through advertising, this is what they need. They need to buy this. They need to have a talking tickle toy that they can nail to their wallet. Well, do you think that it's government's job to tell them what is best for them? Well, I mean, but good is a subjective term to whoever the government happens to be, right? So, if we had, here we are, Hillary versus Trump, right? So, Hillary has a completely different view of what is good and what is right, and that's why, see, it doesn't matter whether it's the right boot or the left boot that's on the throat, it's whether or not it's our boot. Well, I would rather have my own boot. To me, it seems like that's your view, because you're going to be a lot of interference he's saying uh... business uh... you're saying that he is certain amount of uh... it's like well how much and how do we restrain what what is the guy control and so the issue about who do we want to have their foot on our throat, somebody from the left, somebody from the right, I think that's a false dichotomy. We don't have to have somebody with their foot on our throat. Now it would take a mature, spiritually mature populace But I don't see where your view is any different than that. We just get a different dictator. And it seems like you would have to get the spiritually mature populace first to go and elect these spiritually. Well, anyway, I belong to a group called the American Banner of their chaplain. We believe that we need to have a state that's actually going to encourage a right populace and actually bring that about. And you can do that with reaching out to the youth. the closer it becomes to becoming a religion. This is why, do you know who Brad Stangler is? He was one of the super libertarians out there with Citizens for a Safer Society. They were all about MAMISAs, but preferably Murray Rothbard. And when he came out and admitted he had been raping his seven-year-old daughter, there were thousands and thousands of people on the free market side of everything arguing that, hey, you know what? Who's good is this? And you know, he's not doing it in a forceful way, so we can actually sympathize with this guy that turned himself in to police for raping his daughter over and over and over again. Because we believe in freedom. We're talking about economic freedom. must watch no government with laws like, thou shalt not rape children. So I think that's a red herring. I think that's kind of an accusation. Well, if we're talking about our child, we're saying, hey, if the kid wants to do it, why not? Well, if the kid wants to have sex with his dad, why not? No, no. Those are two different things. The problem I see with things like, I would say that economics and social matter meet. They touch each other. And the way people act outside of economics is going to affect the economy and vice versa. The more prosperity you have, one of the things that we bring up, you brought up Weimar Germany as well and hyperinflation. People don't talk about how Weimar Germany had a huge divorce rate. They were advocating homosexuality publicly. They were turning churches into theaters where you could go watch porn. And guess what? The more this happened, the more you had conspicuous consumption of late-stage capitalism, look where it got them. So somebody steps in, because you can only take so much of this, and all of a sudden now we're looking at him like everything that the common man advocated for in Nazi Germany was completely irrational. That's silly. No, but I think when you have a horrible problem, And things are going south. I think it creates the environment through which people would be more likely to elect a dictator to do all their thinking for them. But it seems to me that's what you're advocating, not what you're arguing against. And again, with child labor, I'm saying that a lot of countries out there, if you don't allow the child to work, to work in a factory, which is the best option available to them. You go to Bangladesh, there was a great podcast, Planet Money, they did on a t-shirt project, and they went to, there were two sisters, and they were only about four years apart, but they had two other sisters. Because they lived in the countryside, they were so poor, they ate dirt, they got sick, they died, because they couldn't afford a doctor. One of the older sister goes into the city, gets a job in a factory, the youngest gets married off first, was married off, Because in these societies, you don't really have any rights as women. And gets married off to someone, but then they go into the city and they get a job in the factory. The younger sister goes into the city, falls, lies about her age, pretends that she's, because they have child labor loss, but who cares? Because the productivity and poverty is so high, productivity is so low, it really doesn't matter. Because the whole idea of child labor is not because, I mean, isn't it amazing, like Tom Wood says, isn't it amazing that the worst parents in the world are all concentrated in third world countries? I think it's pretty incredible that These terrible parents are all in these terrible countries making their children work. Well, no, they're not making their children work. They're saying, if you want to survive, we're going to have to have all of us working and producing things. You don't want the state to do anything to prevent that or change that. Well, what happens when the state comes in and prevents it is they have three choices. They can work at a factory. They can starve to death, or they can go into child sex slavery. And if you say, well, you can't work in the factory, you're taking away one of their basically three choices. And by far, vastly better than the other choices. And what actually happened is when, I think it was Oxfam went in and looked at this. And when you had Bangladesh collapse, it killed 900 and some people. It's a tragedy, yes. But what happens is they went and boycotted Bangladesh factories because they were producing things with children. And those children that had those, what were considered great jobs, I mean, these people, they could buy TVs, they could rent their own apartment. And especially with women, who no longer have to be, rather than being sex slaves, actually can work in a factory and produce TVs and have rights. They have their own, they can make their own choices. So that's what happens. They went back to where they would have been before, which is either starve to death or become a prostitute. And I would rather that folks get a copy. Well, no, this is a true to copy. You think that, I mean, yeah, it's great. You look around. We've got tables. We've got chairs. It's a really nice society. It's very comfortable here in the United States. It's not like this everywhere else. Would I rather have them go to school Oh, well, you know, I'd rather have him go to school. Well, no. It's factory, starve, or sex slavery. That's basically their three choices. Yeah, that's not their three choices. What else do they have? Okay, so right now, what's going on in the Philippines? President Duterte, right? Duterte went ahead and lowered the crime rate by 85% when he told everybody in the Philippines, hey, don't go to the military. He's cracking down on the drug trade and all that? Yeah, right. Yeah, he's bad. He's murdering lots of people. I think that's great. Kill them. If somebody's willing to kill a lot more than those people, look, he killed a lot of innocent people. So you're not, I mean, you're pretty sure that he's, okay, well, let's assume he only killed bad people, which is very unlikely. And one of the plans right now is there are thousands and thousands of people. One of the things they're doing is they're working with the market, with private enterprise, to say, hey, you need labor and you need production. OK, while we are in this transition, and this is something Moniz has advised Mexico to do, we're going to have the government give in subsidies. You're going to help take care of these kids. Yes, they're going to do some labor to earn their keep while they're there. You're going to raise them. And hey, if you need them for labor, we can do that as well. Moniz himself advocated during World War II that Mexico do this. Well, you should allow children to work if they need to work. Because that's the only way they're raised. And you need to transition from that. I mean, we had that in our society. We had child labor in the 1800s. And once you get productive enough to where a family of five, now you only need four people working to feed them. Now you need three people. You know, how is it we have a 40-hour workweek? Now you're going to need extra people. Now you're going to need four or five people. What is it? Why do we have a 40-hour workweek? Do you think who's going to be in jail? Raise your hand. Who here has a 40-hour work week? You or me? I've got a 30-hour work week, so I think 40 is rough. I don't know how you guys do it. And for me, I think that the reason why so many people have to take on a part-time job above their full-time job, to me, I'll be honest with you, Blake, I think it's just too much government interference. You start cutting my taxes, you start, of course, now I'm at the point where I like both my teaching on my hours and accept lesser money if the government wouldn't tax me so much. I think it's the government interference that I think is the problem, not the solution. I think when it comes to parents, you know, some parents don't love their children. Well, that's true. But more times than not, I don't think the government loves the kids more than the parents do. And so this is blind trust. in government that really, really concerns me. So blind trust in the economy, though, in the free market is just as much idolatry. I don't know. Yeah, why on earth is it that Wall Street supported Hillary Clinton? $1.2 billion spent on her. But that's because of big government in handouts. Because they know the Fed is going to cheat money for them. Yes, but that's big government. That's exactly what we have advocated for. So if you have a limited government situation in which it can change and people can elect people that are going to grow or shrink the government, you're going to have businesses that are going to lobby to try to grow it. That's why I'm trying to get Carnegie Capital to the problem. Well, they're not going to lobby to grow the government, to get it to where they're at. They might advocate that you have a bigger, more powerful government, but they're only going to lobby the government if the government has something to give them. Panhandlers only ask people with money. Panhandlers don't go to each other. There was a P&P old joke where they had two Panhandlers is like panhandling each other. Hey, you got cash, brother. Can you spare a dime? No, how about you? Can you spare a dime? No, they only go to people with money. The government has the power to tax. So today, we have a lot of the private sector lobbying to grow and make the government better able to fund them. This is why, honestly, I'm fine with free-ish markets. You have Pinochet in Chile. He brought in Milton Friedman. Yeah, the Friedman School. But that was a free market. So I think Friedman was great, because he said government government has basically three responsibilities. Yeah, we can say national defense. I do believe in borders. So I'm not a pure libertarian. I'm not an anarcho-capitalist. But I am closer. I am vastly closer to that than I am to a statist. And so I think that government has a role in in a legal system. So I think government should provide a legal system. Now, you get a lot of corruption and cronyism in the legal system, and it's very problematic. But still, that's a basic fundamental aspect that government needs to provide. Here's the thing, though. What Pinochet brought into Chile was a system that could not be fudged. He actually unleashed the whole semi-anarchic Chilean libertarian economy, that this is the reason for which Chile is now the third largest in his police state saying, we're not going to do favors for you. And you can't go ahead and shit up the people to make that happen. Well, I would also point out that you don't need political freedom to be wealthy. You need economic freedom. So these are two different issues. I mean, we're talking about just political freedom is important. If you want to be well off, you can start with political freedom. At least Hong Kong's never been free. They're rich. Singapore has never been free. They're rich. So India is free, but not economically. They have a democracy, but they're not politically free. They're economically free. They have a heavy, thick bureaucracy, and so there's a lot of poverty in India. But they've done better than they were 20 years ago. They've cut the policy for that. Well, obviously, they're no longer trying to castrate people on the night that's India does under, quote, unquote, national emergencies. They did that back in the 70s. So that's the case. India's starting to do some rather awful things. Oh, they're still doing that. But aside from instances like India, there is a point in which you can say that liberty and democracy are mutually exclusive because so long as you give the people the right to lobby whatever they want from the government, what you're getting from the state, you're going to get businesses, you're going to get markets, you're going to get people trying to turn the government into something that can give them whatever they want, more or less free. But again, you're talking about a big government with a lot of power, and that's what you're advocating for, but you seem to be advocating against it as well, because if you had a big fascist state, how... I guess you would have corporations controlling the state, right? I mean, fascism is state control of corporations, but you're kind of saying that backwards, right? Because corporations with control. So what I'm asking for is you need a state that is not fat, but is strong. Not state ownership, but state privately owned ownership, but state controlling those owners. That's how it was in Germany. The state would say, well, you're privately owned, but you're going to do this. That's not fascism. That's not fascism. There's a difference. There's a huge difference. Somebody should be able to own their business. And if it's corporately owned with stock and everything like that, that's fine as well. You can have that. It needs to be directly engaged with the state as well. There needs to be an actual relationship there instead of gimme, gimme, gimme for money, money, money, gimme, gimme, gimme for money, money, money. We can't have this give and take in terms of financial transactions only. There's a telos of people themselves. For instance, the carrier. What Donald Trump did in keeping jobs here in America was fantastic. Carriers promised a tax break. OK, well, these 700 people are going to, over the next few years, make 10 times over and pay 10 times over in taxes the tax break that carriers themselves would get. OK, that's great. That is corporatism in the nationalistic economic position that I can get behind 100%. But it was just a tax break. I haven't actually studied what he actually did specifically. I know there was a lot of tax cuts and things. And hey, tax cuts, sounds good. I think if you want to bring, they're not going to bring business back to the U.S. You're not going to bring these production jobs. But if you want to bring some of them, don't throw money away. But I think the regulation is the problem. It's not It's not just wages, right? It's expensive to make things here. I always say, there's a company here, and they have two hats. One made in Seattle, one made in Taiwan. What would you pay for a baseball hat? Typically, people say $20, $25. Well, you can buy one made in Seattle for $50, right? Would you pay $50, or would you buy a hat made in Taiwan for $22, take the other $28, and go out to dinner? Well, back to the carrier thing real quick. It's a regulation. Yeah, that's the same thing. That includes airplanes. We're all crying for them. Crony capitalism. Remember this deal Trump made with carriers? If nothing had been done, these 700 people would be out of a job, period. And these jobs would have been shipped out. And you can have the Keynesians and you can have the libertarians arguing with the people over principles and what you do. In the meantime, people are losing their jobs, actual people. How is it that both on the left and on the libertarian side of everything, you can have so much spirited debate and still come to the same conclusion that people are just economic units, that we are just blobs of material The Austrian view is that you cannot. Adam Smith said that they are not chess pieces. He was advocating against mercantilism, which... You're the collectivist. Yeah, he said there is only an individual, right? I mean, that was basically Anne Rand, the smallest minority in the world was the individual. Yes, Anne Rand who took Social Security. She paid into it, so... I mean, a lot of people... I know a lot of people that were going to collect Social Security and You know, they paid into it, they're going to collect more than they paid into now, so get rid of the individual, the all-powerful individual. There is nothing else, there is only individualism. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it's the same thing. No, it No, it doesn't mean the individual was gone. It doesn't mean it was given to her. No, no, no. See, the individual, I'm not an objectivist, but the individualism. All choices are made by individuals. When we say government did this, that's kind of a big balloon type of, or an umbrella term. What we really mean is people in the government have decided, and they've got together, and they've decided that they would act this way. Corporations decided to, well, that's individuals in the corporation. It's not like this big entity that's called a corporation decides stuff. No, it's individuals make decisions. And that's where, that is honestly where, in the Austrian business cycle, you have all these supposed solutions that people bring up. You have the monetarists claiming that you could change everything with quantitative easing, as we've seen. Probably is going to lead to a collapse, let's all be honest. That was more of a Keynesian quote. The monetarists and the Keynesians have, the Keynesians want just deficit spending, whereas the monetarists think you can just fiddle around with the currency and inflation. But Milton Friedman called for a constant growth in the money supply, so you could reduce the possibility of inflation. Keynes said, you know, you could kind of give a little more credit than, he doesn't deserve that much credit, but he did say, save during good times, spend during bad times, to make credit, keep that aggregate demand at some, and again, this is like a subjective level, right? How do we know what GDP output we ought to yield? Nothing. Yeah, that's great. 1921. Market crashes. Market crashes don't exist. The Treasury Secretary himself said we should just let the rotting flesh die off. That's not true at all. Hoover was the biggest interventionist, FDR, but his entire deal was Hoover. The Treasury Secretary himself was saying do nothing. No, but that's how it happened. Hoover got together with the corporations and he said they would fix prices, they would fix wages, He got together with the unions, made contracts, he spent lots and lots of money. Hoover bills, all those things. Yeah, he got the... it was just like George Bush got the ball rolling. But what you were talking about was Harding, right? The 1921... Yeah, it was Coolidge and Coolcow... In 1921, there was a depression. I believe Harding said it's none of the federal government's business. the private sector will work this out. So that 1921 depression doesn't even show up in our textbooks, because it's just a little blip on a map. But in 1929, Hoover got the ball rolling. Government interference, government involvement, FDR picked up where he left off, just like Obama picked up where George W. Bush left off on the bailouts. Government interference, and that's what turned what could have been another just blip on the map into this long, drawn-out depression, I think the more government interference, the worse. Yeah, FDR ran on the idea that he would reduce government spending. I'm against it. FDR is a frickin' Marxist. Yes, but he was a Keynesian. But he ran against Hoover's interventionist policies. And then he got in, and he said, oh, I'm going to blow the bucket to 10 times. Yeah, because he's a proto-Maoist. I understand that. But Herbert Hoover's treasury secretary, Mellon, that's the guy's name, wanted to do absolutely nothing. Well, that's not what happened. I don't care what they say. Because I want to know the consequences of what happens when a government does absolutely nothing in the case of a catastrophic crisis. 1921, that's what happens. It was a bigger drawback in GDP and the money supply than there was in 1929. Did the Dust Bowl happen in 1921? 1921, sorry, but there was an extreme drought, where there's no food, no ability for people to move. Well, people can move, they went to California, so... Not all of them. In fact, it was a government intervention that the people that couldn't move were probably half as skin sick. There is some intervention, which is a good thing. Do you think that the government... Are you saying the government pulled us out of... depression? Illegitimately. FDR finally realized that the only way he could, with his hyper-statism, his communism, the only way he could solve it was World War II. And that was only a semi-recovery. But again, we were much worse off in World War II than we were in the 30s. And in the 30s, you would start to get this recovery. And then you'd have this intervention by the Federal Reserve. They would cut back on the money supply. You'd go back down. And then you'd start to recover a little bit. You'd have more government intervention and Federal Reserve intervention. And you'd roll back down. What about the military-industrial complex, which has people still employed there afterwards? Well, employed in the military, yeah, you're employed. But it doesn't help society. It helps produce factories and companies. Yeah, but what do you do with those things? Well, they brought us into Korea. We blow them up when that's not a good thing. And so what happened is after World War II, they started to pay down that debt and produce actual hikes. I'm not advocating for Keynesianism. To be honest with you, my ideal economic state, the baseline for which everything ought to operate as free markets within the borders, protectionism without, sometimes you're going to have to change that because not every situation has a cookie cutter solution. It seems to me, though, it seems like you're moving in the direction of free markets. state with some kind of a dictator or some kind of state that has tyrannical powers. I don't know how you can guarantee for us that the guy who ran as a good guy is going to remain a good guy unless you've got a system of checks and balances that comes pretty close to our Constitution and the free enterprise system that America was supposed to be built on. The check and balance in a fascist state I don't see the guarantee though. Once you give a guy the power to confiscate the weapons, but he says he won't, I want him to be held in check. Did Papadopoulos? Did the Vela? Did Pinochet? Did Mussolini? Did Tronco? Not even Hitler took guns. He actually lowered the gun control in Nazi Germany. People had guns. I just think once you give a human being, or a group of human beings, pretty well unchecked power. Who are the angels that will rule over us, right? Well, I want to know who are the angels that are going to govern themselves. America. Great. America has free enterprise. America has also killed 60 million children. Great. But that was funded by government as well, so... We got fallen humans, so we need government. But fallen humans are going to lead government. so there's got to be a way to check the leaders and I don't think a fascist state is the way to go on. The problem with the left, the left say, oh these people in corporations, big evil individuals, what we need is we need government to control the corporations, but you just have people that are horrible evil people in corporations that go into government suddenly but somehow benevolent angels. They're not, but that's the mentality, and even from you, when I say that's That is the direct mentality of the left, and that's pretty much exactly what they say. But it seems to be the same thing that you're saying, that you need some benevolent dictator. What is everything going towards? The socialist wants redistribution of wealth. And what's it? They want to contract the amount of money in the economy, because they want some sort of a Spartan economy with no money. Well, again, if you were a pure socialist, you would say, just eliminate money altogether. Period. Yeah. We'll just have government. We'll hand that over to you. The communist wants to, they want a stateless, classless society by increasing the power of the state. And you have to eliminate trade altogether. And that's why you have no business. None of us here have no business. I'm advocating for, I'm saying there is only the individual and as far as a boot on the neck, you know, I'd rather have our wives boot on our necks than some states boot on the neck, right? Or, you know, some family member or somebody, my own boot, you know, control, a little bit more control. The small, localized, the problem is that you don't, somebody I can admitly even check the balances against governmental power in that on the people that are not in the government. Period. You want them to be able to do exactly what I'm doing? Even before the start of your talk about drugs in our society and decriminalizing it. That's insane. Why? Question. Well, I mean, I agree that it's probably true that making drugs criminalized has a great cause. In 2013, there were 62 marijuana-related auto deaths. Can you go up to every single one of those people's parents and go, I'm so sorry, but at least I can get high? I don't take drugs at all, right? I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't do drugs, I don't do anything. But should you go up to them and say, I'm so sorry that your son was killed in a car crash because But are you actually going to tell me that if it was illegal, that would not have happened? Are you actually going to say that if marijuana is illegal, nobody can smoke it? Or that because it's legal, if we actually enforce the laws and gave the state the power to do it. So are you saying that you would like the power of the state to go into your closet and check on periodical whatever it chooses to? Doesn't it already? Doesn't everyone do that with regards to the NSA? I don't have them knocking on my door and walking into my closet right now. We're further away though from the NSA than you are. You're standing in the NSA in the closet. I like this, guys. This is really intense. Well, but you've got government. It's almost like as long as it's your dictator who's ruling, You act like government knows best. I think that's a bunch of bullpoof. For instance, the government will make marijuana illegal, but they've got prescription drugs that almost killed my wife. And so does the government really know best? You can get opiates. government officials. So I'm at the point where I think, man, not only does government not know what's best for me, government doesn't even care about me. And when politicians get up there and tell me how much they love me, I mean, I can read for you speech after speech about how Adolf Hitler loved the people and was a Christian and all this other stuff, and then behind closed doors had other conversations. So I think the issue is not knows better, the individuals themselves or the government. None of us are anarchists, so we do believe in limited government that enforces thou shalt not kill and things of that sort. But the idea of blindly trusting government leaders, I don't know. I think America's had a long tradition, we're losing it, of telling King George to take a hike and saying get out of our lives. And I don't think we should exchange King George for a George Bush or an Obama or whoever else. So I'm just going to give you guys about three minutes each for closing statement. And then we'll close out the program. And then if you want to just have a discussion with others. But just about three or four minutes, if there's anything you didn't say that you want to say about free enterprise, about nationalism, just your closing comment. I'd say, again, I think the power lies with the individual. When you have a decentralized power where individuals choose for themselves what they wish and what they believe is best, mistakes will be made, yes, but very, very small mistakes. So if I screw up, I screw up my life, right, and maybe a few people that are directly connected to me. But when you have a central power, or a command society, a command economy, one person screws up, like a Mao says, let's get rid of the sparrows, and you create a famine and kill 40 million people. If I say, let's get rid of the sparrows in my yard, I kill nobody. Very small, big, big mistakes at a small individual level have virtually no ripple effect. But big mistakes at a high level have massive effect, and they are deadly. They not just can be, but they virtually always are. And so we're talking about the individual right to decide for themselves what is best. Government doesn't have your, well, government doesn't really know what's best for you, because they're not living there. I mean, they're over in DC, right? So we're talking about a central authority out in DC that's about 3,000 miles away. If we're going to have, I believe government has a role in society. But it is to protect the individual's rights, and I think border protection protect the country itself. have a basic defensive military, and a legal system. And a legal system is there to enforce contracts and various things. I don't think government should be involved in some kind of police state where, I don't do drugs, I don't do any of that, but I don't think government should be wasting resources doing sting operations on a massage parlor or things that individuals decide is, whether you make it legal or not, they're going to go out and they're going to do it. Drugs are legal now. You mentioned, what, 68 marijuana driving-related deaths? Possibly, perhaps, not necessarily. Not necessarily from marijuana. You wouldn't be able to show that it's actually directly from the marijuana. But even if it was, Marijuana was illegal, and it didn't stop people from using it. If we decriminalize drugs, I think we've got five people in the audience. We're going to have five. We decriminalize marijuana, five new marijuana users, right? Anybody here? I mean, you would do it, but it's illegal, so you don't do it, right? So if only it were legal, like murder. Murder is illegal. If only it would be legal, I would be killing people. I'd be killing everybody, right? No, I think people don't not do things simply because it's illegal. They do things because they don't want to. They don't do things because it's not in their best interest. So every individual knows what is in his own best interest and how to use his own resources as he pleases. And that's how society works better, is when individuals decide for themselves, rather than have the government come down and take from them and then decide what they should do with their money. OK, Blake, final statement? has his best interests in mind, and you might have the agency to be able to do it, the capabilities and the education in order to accomplish your goals, dreams, and desires. Not everybody is. There are so many people in America and all over the world that cannot take care of themselves properly and the same standard of living that we would. To assume that everybody is just like you is foolish. And to put people in brute freedom is to put us in a system which will lead to the failure after failure after failure that you see in Africa, that you have seen in East Asia, that you've seen all over the world when you have complete, utter, totally free markets. I'm not against the ability for the individual to better himself and better his situation. In fact, I think that's a great thing. And the government shouldn't be able to tell you that you cannot do such a thing to advance your own causes. That is why I'm not a leftist. However, You and everybody else should be held accountable to your nation as much as you are to your family, perhaps a little bit less. This way, we don't have Okay, that's about all we have time for tonight. If you want to stick around and just dialogue a little bit for a few minutes with the two speakers, but let's give them a round of applause.