WEBVTT NOTE Introduction to 'Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo' 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:16.000 Bourbon for Breakfast, Living Outside the Status Quo, by Jeffrey Tucker, narrated by Stephen Ng, copyright 2010 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute and published under the Creative Attribution License 3.0. 2 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:20.000 This audiobook was produced by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. 3 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:29.000 For more information or to discover more about the Ludwig von Mises Institute and Austrian economics, visit Mises.org. 4 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:33.000 Introduction 5 00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:45.000 The title of this book is drawn from one of those defining moments in life when a small phrase shatters the social-cultural convention and reveals completely new possibilities. 6 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:50.000 I tell the story herein in the essay on morning drinking. 7 00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:55.240 A great scholar and southern gentleman, a man who has written the ultimate guidebook to 8 00:00:55.240 --> 00:01:00.360 the writing of the King James Version of the Gospels, invited me for an early breakfast, 9 00:01:00.360 --> 00:01:06.760 7 a.m., and then offered me coffee. I said, Yes, thank you. He then added, Would you like 10 00:01:06.760 --> 00:01:09.480 bourbon in that coffee? 11 00:01:09.480 --> 00:01:15.200 What is revealed in that sentence and the shock it elicited? We believe, for whatever 12 00:01:15.200 --> 00:01:21.640 And, that drinking hard liquor in the morning is unseemly, contrary to social norms, something 13 00:01:21.640 --> 00:01:28.480 to hide, a habit of the lower classes that is dangerous or even evil. But are any of 14 00:01:28.480 --> 00:01:34.920 these assumptions true? A new form of prohibitionism has swept the country imposed on us by our 15 00:01:34.920 --> 00:01:41.920 government masters and their cultural backers, even as alcohol consumption rises and rises. 16 00:01:41.920 --> 00:01:47.920 Evidently, we live two realities, the one the government imposes on us, and the one 17 00:01:47.920 --> 00:01:54.920 we adopt in our real lives. What struck me about this man's phrase was how it presumed 18 00:01:54.920 --> 00:02:01.000 that he and I were among the rebels against the prevailing ethos, that together we would 19 00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:06.600 reject the government's edicts and create our own norms and reality. This is a wonderful 20 00:02:06.600 --> 00:02:12.000 Model for Living a Full Life. This book is about seeing that just because government 21 00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:17.600 mandates certain things and forbids others does not mean that we must follow or even 22 00:02:17.600 --> 00:02:23.580 tolerate the official roadmap for our lives. The seed of truth to the morning drinking 23 00:02:23.580 --> 00:02:29.100 taboo is that doing this every morning would contribute to a less productive life. But 24 00:02:29.100 --> 00:02:34.400 on the weekends or when it is not necessary to be at your sober best, or when you are 25 00:02:34.400 --> 00:02:40.480 are celebrating some special guest. There is surely nothing wrong here. 26 00:02:40.480 --> 00:02:47.120 In any case, there must be some lost aristocratic tradition of adding a splash, else this highly 27 00:02:47.120 --> 00:02:52.080 cultivated, highly educated and scholarly southern gentleman would not have suggested 28 00:02:52.080 --> 00:02:59.880 it. In doing so, he was revealing some lost history with a sense of freedom and possibility. 29 00:02:59.880 --> 00:03:05.680 To contemplate the suggestion is to imagine a world that does not exist, one that breaks 30 00:03:05.680 --> 00:03:13.140 from the status quo and plays with the pluses and minuses of adopting a new way of living. 31 00:03:13.140 --> 00:03:16.200 Most of the essays in this book do just this. 32 00:03:16.200 --> 00:03:22.200 They imagine radical new possibilities of living outside the status quo, or perhaps, 33 00:03:22.200 --> 00:03:28.080 we should say, statist quo, because it is the state that is responsible for shaping 34 00:03:28.080 --> 00:03:35.800 in our world, in brazen ways and also subtle ones that we do not fully realize. 35 00:03:35.800 --> 00:03:41.760 Examples from the book include how and why the hot water in our homes became lukewarm, 36 00:03:41.760 --> 00:03:47.320 and what can be done about it, how our toilets stopped working properly because of legislation 37 00:03:47.320 --> 00:03:53.080 that reduced toilet tank size, how traffic law enforcement became a racket for extracting 38 00:03:53.080 --> 00:04:16.800 To see the cost of statism is to see what Friedrich Bastiat called the unseen. 39 00:04:16.800 --> 00:04:22.320 It is about imagining the existence of some possibility that the state has forbidden from 40 00:04:22.320 --> 00:04:27.040 accounting, playing with that possibility in your mind, and then acting on what has 41 00:04:27.040 --> 00:04:32.320 previously been an abstraction and making it a reality. 42 00:04:32.320 --> 00:04:37.240 Art helps us accomplish this mental feat, which is why many of these essays deal with 43 00:04:37.240 --> 00:04:42.240 literature, movies, culture and the arts. 44 00:04:42.240 --> 00:04:47.880 But seeing what is wrong with the world, Chesterton's phrase, is only the beginning. 45 00:04:47.880 --> 00:04:58.480 I try not to highlight problems without offering a solution of sorts, simply because there 46 00:04:58.480 --> 00:05:02.240 is nothing productive or enlightening about despair. 47 00:05:02.240 --> 00:05:08.160 Hope comes from imagining a better future that does not yet exist. 48 00:05:08.160 --> 00:05:13.560 Most of the essays in here deal with what are often considered trivial or light topics. 49 00:05:13.560 --> 00:05:18.640 But the trivial is quite often very serious, while what we think is serious is often quite 50 00:05:18.640 --> 00:05:21.280 trivial as I try to show. 51 00:05:21.280 --> 00:05:26.320 At the same time, I deal with topics that libertarians of my stripe don't often write 52 00:05:26.320 --> 00:05:33.280 about, like the ghastly reality of jail, yes, the article is autobiographical, and the problems 53 00:05:33.280 --> 00:05:36.360 connected with intellectual property. 54 00:05:36.360 --> 00:05:40.640 I make no apology for the fact that the topics are all over the map. 55 00:05:40.640 --> 00:05:44.280 Maybe that will make this book more interesting. 56 00:05:44.280 --> 00:05:49.900 An underlying apparatus here is my own formation and economic theory, drawn from my many years 57 00:05:49.900 --> 00:05:54.620 of work at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and the way that the friendships 58 00:05:54.620 --> 00:05:59.700 I've formed in this connection have gradually led me away from the poison of politics as 59 00:05:59.700 --> 00:06:04.400 a viable means of social and economic management. 60 00:06:04.400 --> 00:06:09.700 A parallel part of my life involves the study and practice of music, with a particular focus 61 00:06:09.700 --> 00:06:13.340 on what is called Early Music. 62 00:06:13.340 --> 00:06:18.220 Exploring the interaction between culture broadly speaking and political economy is 63 00:06:18.220 --> 00:06:22.940 something that happened inadvertently as I've been plugging away at thousands of articles 64 00:06:22.940 --> 00:06:28.140 over the years, of which this book represents only a sample. 65 00:06:28.140 --> 00:06:34.540 We all need to be part of the project of reimagining freedom, of living outside the status quo, 66 00:06:34.540 --> 00:06:40.060 Else we will go the way of many societies and civilizations before us, host to a massive 67 00:06:40.060 --> 00:06:45.780 apparatus of power and imposition that strangles the growth and ingenuity of people, leading 68 00:06:45.780 --> 00:06:51.520 to a stasis that hardly anyone notices until it is too late. 69 00:06:51.520 --> 00:06:56.400 I would like to offer a special note of thanks to Lew Rockwell, who has encouraged the publication 70 00:06:56.400 --> 00:07:04.260 of this kind of econocultural analysis, and ran many of them on his website, lewrockwell.com. 71 00:07:04.260 --> 00:07:09.620 Doug French suggested, even insisted, on collecting them in a book. 72 00:07:09.620 --> 00:07:15.980 Many friends, co-workers at the Mises Institute, associates, and loved ones will notice incidents, 73 00:07:15.980 --> 00:07:21.580 ideas, and phrases in here that draw from shared experiences and conversations. 74 00:07:21.580 --> 00:07:27.980 Indeed, there are many senses in which this book is not my own, but the result of a community 75 00:07:27.980 --> 00:07:28.980 enterprise. 76 00:07:28.980 --> 00:07:31.780 They should all know of my gratitude.