WEBVTT NOTE How to Reach the Left 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.000 How to reach the left? Well, thank you. So how can Austro-libertarians reach the left? 2 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:15.000 Well, it depends which left. There are some left-wingers I call the aristocratic left, 3 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:19.000 and I despair of reaching them. These are left-wingers who have a particular vision 4 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:24.000 of an idyllic society and that are prepared to hammer into place anyone whose preferences 5 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:29.000 or behavior doesn't align with the vision. In effect, they see other people as their property. 6 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:34.080 Back when I lived in North Carolina, on the city line between Chapel Hill and Carrboro, 7 00:00:34.080 --> 00:00:38.840 I used to watch with mixed amusement and horror as the affluent white liberals who ran the 8 00:00:38.840 --> 00:00:43.660 city councils of those two communities competed to see which city could impose the most callous 9 00:00:43.660 --> 00:00:49.000 and intrusively micromanaging legislation. In Carrboro, which incredibly billed itself 10 00:00:49.000 --> 00:00:57.520 as the Paris of the Piedmont, the council thought that old cars looked unsightly and 11 00:00:57.520 --> 00:01:02.120 and so declare that residents will be forbidden to park in their driveways any car older than 12 00:01:02.120 --> 00:01:06.960 a certain number of years, if they get the exact number. Unsurprisingly, this law had 13 00:01:06.960 --> 00:01:12.080 a more burdensome impact on lower income households than on higher ones. So much for the idea 14 00:01:12.080 --> 00:01:19.460 these liberals are supposed to be caring about the poor. This says I'm supposed to get closer 15 00:01:19.460 --> 00:01:35.020 The chapel Hill Council, with similar solicitude, forbade a local copy shop to list their low 16 00:01:35.020 --> 00:01:40.740 prices or to use the word discount in their advertising because its emphasis on low costs 17 00:01:40.740 --> 00:01:44.580 seemed tawdry and inconsistent with their vision of an upscale community. 18 00:01:44.580 --> 00:01:45.980 I'm not making this up. 19 00:01:45.980 --> 00:01:51.740 I have to laugh when conservatives accuse liberals of practicing class warfare, because these 20 00:01:51.740 --> 00:01:55.660 regulations were class warfare all right, but just not in the direction that we're supposed 21 00:01:55.660 --> 00:02:01.020 to be thinking of. The Carver Council thought that cul-de-sacs looked unfriendly and not 22 00:02:01.020 --> 00:02:06.180 only wanted to ban new ones, but it wanted to ram streets through existing cul-de-sacs 23 00:02:06.180 --> 00:02:13.300 and sort of open up these little private fiefdoms to the wider community. So the liberal mantra 24 00:02:13.300 --> 00:02:27.580 The same council wanted to require drive-in banks and drive-in restaurants to have a downward 25 00:02:27.580 --> 00:02:31.780 slope as you drive through the driveway, so that once you're done with transacting your 26 00:02:31.780 --> 00:02:36.220 business at the drive-in window, you can drive down without turning your engine on, and as 27 00:02:36.220 --> 00:02:41.520 you can slide noiselessly and emissionlessly down onto the street, I'm still not making 28 00:02:41.520 --> 00:02:52.520 What sort of gun laws are these two hyperactive councils favored? 29 00:02:52.520 --> 00:02:58.520 I don't know how to sell austral libertarianism to those guys. They seem like enemies of the human race. 30 00:02:58.520 --> 00:03:02.520 It's not as though the free market couldn't address some of their concerns. 31 00:03:02.520 --> 00:03:07.520 They could form private communities and impose all these rules if they wanted. 32 00:03:07.520 --> 00:03:20.520 But the mentality of privilege and entitlement that these guys seem to have I think wouldn't welcome the market discipline of actually having to pay the costs of these policies rather than externalizing them onto their unconsenting neighbors. 33 00:03:21.520 --> 00:03:33.520 But that's not the whole story on the left. There are many, many left-wingers whose primary motivation is in some ways a very libertarian impulse to protect people they see as being pushed around. 34 00:03:33.520 --> 00:03:42.520 So these left-wingers look at contemporary society. They see an economy dominated by mammoth and personal corporations with enormous and seemingly unaccountable power. 35 00:03:42.520 --> 00:03:47.520 They see lower and middle income people disempowered in the workplace, struggling to make ends meet. 36 00:03:47.520 --> 00:03:54.520 They see institutions and social practices rigged against blacks, women, gays, immigrants, other oppressed groups. 37 00:03:54.520 --> 00:04:02.520 And they turn to government to address these inequities because they see the democratic state as an institution that's in principle accountable to the public. 38 00:04:02.520 --> 00:04:13.520 whereas they see these private power as something that's not accountable to the public and so we need to turn to this publicly accountable institution, the democratic state, to protect us against private power. 39 00:04:13.520 --> 00:04:17.520 So let's call this variety of left-wingers the anti-privilege left. 40 00:04:17.520 --> 00:04:20.520 Now of course there's overlap between these two groups. 41 00:04:20.520 --> 00:04:31.520 There are people who have strands of both the aristocratic left and the anti-privilege left in their thinking and so to the extent that you get one strand or another your mileage may vary in terms of talking with them. 42 00:04:31.520 --> 00:04:37.520 The Anti-Privilege Left is the left we can reach. 43 00:04:37.520 --> 00:04:40.520 They're already largely on our side on a number of issues. 44 00:04:40.520 --> 00:04:46.520 Civil liberties issues, mostly, not guns alas, but other civil liberties issues by and large. 45 00:04:46.520 --> 00:04:49.520 They're mostly anti-war. 46 00:04:49.520 --> 00:04:54.520 There are a bunch of leftists out there who didn't change their minds about civil liberties and war 47 00:04:54.520 --> 00:04:58.520 once we switched from Republicans and Democrats in the administration. 48 00:04:58.520 --> 00:05:07.520 They aren't the ones who get on TV all the time, but you talk to them, there are plenty of them who are very unhappy with what the current democratic administration is doing. 49 00:05:07.520 --> 00:05:20.520 Their chief sticking points are economic. So what we need to do is to show them that a free market can actually achieve the goals, or a lot of the goals anyway, that they're concerned about. 50 00:05:20.520 --> 00:05:26.520 I think we can do a better job of reaching the anti-privilege left than we've been doing. 51 00:05:26.520 --> 00:05:30.520 I think we've been making a less persuasive case to them than we could, 52 00:05:30.520 --> 00:05:36.520 because I think we ourselves have actually been underestimating the extent to which a free market would address their concerns. 53 00:05:36.520 --> 00:05:40.520 I think we can do a better job of reaching the anti-privilege left than we've been doing. 54 00:05:40.520 --> 00:05:44.520 I think we've been making a less persuasive case to them than we could, 55 00:05:44.520 --> 00:05:48.760 I think we ourselves have actually been underestimating the extent to which a free market would address 56 00:05:48.760 --> 00:05:50.960 their concerns. 57 00:05:50.960 --> 00:05:56.480 And I think it's also because to a large extent we have underestimated the extent to which 58 00:05:56.480 --> 00:06:02.080 features of present-day society that the left-wingers think are the results of markets are actually 59 00:06:02.080 --> 00:06:04.440 the results of state intervention. 60 00:06:04.440 --> 00:06:11.680 So to some extent we've bought a little bit too much into the left's conception of what's 61 00:06:11.680 --> 00:06:13.440 caused by free markets. 62 00:06:13.440 --> 00:06:23.440 It wasn't always the case. In the 19th century, libertarians weren't just aligned with, but often thought of themselves as part of, in effect, the anti-privilege left. 63 00:06:23.440 --> 00:06:37.440 Radical free marketers were in the forefront of the labor movement, the feminist movement, the anti-slavery movement, and more broadly movement for racial equality, a fever of sexual deregulation of various kinds. 64 00:06:37.440 --> 00:06:41.240 In the 20th century, libertarians felt largely drawn into an alliance with conservatives. 65 00:06:41.240 --> 00:06:45.640 That's because state socialism was, you know, seemed out on a triumphant upward march everywhere, 66 00:06:45.640 --> 00:06:50.440 and libertarians and conservatives agreed in being against that, and so they relied with each other. 67 00:06:50.440 --> 00:06:57.440 And I think that although the alliance didn't really last, I think a lot of things rubbed off on each side. 68 00:06:57.440 --> 00:07:03.040 What conservatives got from libertarians is they picked up a lot of our free market rhetoric, 69 00:07:03.040 --> 00:07:06.800 which they then used to festoon their anti-free market policies. 70 00:07:06.800 --> 00:07:10.600 But I think that to some extent we picked up from them 71 00:07:10.600 --> 00:07:15.040 an excessively rosy picture of the economic status quo 72 00:07:15.040 --> 00:07:20.160 and thus to some extent a knee-jerk aversion to a lot of the concerns of the anti-privilege left. 73 00:07:20.160 --> 00:07:23.880 Now in 1966 Murray Rothbard wrote the following 74 00:07:23.880 --> 00:07:27.360 quote, for some time I've come to the conclusion 75 00:07:27.360 --> 00:07:30.960 that the grave deficiency in the current output and thinking of our libertarians 76 00:07:30.960 --> 00:07:32.160 and classical liberals 77 00:07:32.160 --> 00:07:35.160 is an enormous blind spot when it comes to big business. 78 00:07:35.160 --> 00:07:37.160 There's a tendency to worship big business per se, 79 00:07:37.160 --> 00:07:40.160 and a corollary tendency to fail to realize 80 00:07:40.160 --> 00:07:42.160 that while big business would indeed merit praise 81 00:07:42.160 --> 00:07:45.160 if they won that bigness on the purely free market, 82 00:07:45.160 --> 00:07:48.160 in the contemporary world of total neo-mercantilism 83 00:07:48.160 --> 00:07:51.160 and what is essentially a neo-fascist corporate state, 84 00:07:51.160 --> 00:07:54.160 bigness is a priori highly suspect, 85 00:07:54.160 --> 00:07:56.160 because big business most likely got that way 86 00:07:56.160 --> 00:08:00.160 through an intricate and decisive network of subsidies, privileges, 87 00:08:00.160 --> 00:08:10.240 The Rothbard's lament about the pro-big business orientation among libertarians is less applicable 88 00:08:10.240 --> 00:08:14.160 today than it was when Rothbard wrote it, and Rothbard's own efforts are largely to 89 00:08:14.160 --> 00:08:15.160 thank for that. 90 00:08:15.160 --> 00:08:19.920 But I believe there still is some tendency for us to underestimate the effects of this 91 00:08:19.920 --> 00:08:25.320 intricate and decisive network of subsidies, privileges and monopoly grants. 92 00:08:25.320 --> 00:08:30.600 I like to use the term conflationism for the tendency to see the economic order that prevails 93 00:08:30.600 --> 00:08:35.760 in present-day industrialized societies as a close approximation to free market, rather 94 00:08:35.760 --> 00:08:40.840 than a more corporative system of massive government intervention, largely on behalf 95 00:08:40.840 --> 00:08:43.280 of big business. 96 00:08:43.280 --> 00:08:45.940 Conflationism comes in both left-wing and right-wing varieties. 97 00:08:45.940 --> 00:08:50.500 In left-conflationism, you look at all the undesirable features of the present-day economy 98 00:08:50.500 --> 00:08:54.160 that are actually features of corporatism, and you blame them on the free market and 99 00:08:54.160 --> 00:08:57.000 and you take that as a reason to reject the free market. 100 00:08:57.000 --> 00:09:00.760 The right-wing version is you take the existing economy 101 00:09:00.760 --> 00:09:03.080 to be a rough approximation to a free market 102 00:09:03.080 --> 00:09:06.000 and then all the things in that economy 103 00:09:06.000 --> 00:09:07.360 that the left complains about, you think, 104 00:09:07.360 --> 00:09:09.260 well, those are the results of the free market, 105 00:09:09.260 --> 00:09:13.880 so they must be okay and you reach to defend them. 106 00:09:16.320 --> 00:09:19.520 A good example is the recent debate in the US 107 00:09:19.520 --> 00:09:27.280 for Healthcare, which was billed not only by the Democrats but also by the Republicans 108 00:09:27.280 --> 00:09:33.560 as between something like a free market, the free market version of healthcare that we 109 00:09:33.560 --> 00:09:40.480 now supposedly have versus a more, Republicans would call it socialist, the Democrats would 110 00:09:40.480 --> 00:09:45.320 call it something else, but basically a more government-oriented one. 111 00:09:45.320 --> 00:09:52.800 And so we think that we're being asked to decide between our current free market health 112 00:09:52.800 --> 00:09:57.080 care versus more of a socialized health care. 113 00:09:57.080 --> 00:10:00.720 But of course, we don't have a free market health care. 114 00:10:00.720 --> 00:10:05.560 We have a deeply corporatist system. 115 00:10:05.560 --> 00:10:09.880 So if you like the free market, then you're tricked into supporting the existing system, 116 00:10:09.880 --> 00:10:10.880 which is actually corporatist. 117 00:10:10.880 --> 00:10:14.640 If you don't like the existing system, then you're tricked into opposing the free market. 118 00:10:14.640 --> 00:10:20.920 And so either way, you know, one wing or the other of the ruling class ends up winning. 119 00:10:20.920 --> 00:10:25.240 Now the right-wing version of conflationism is a lot more common among conservatives than 120 00:10:25.240 --> 00:10:26.240 is among libertarians. 121 00:10:26.240 --> 00:10:31.440 I think there's still a decent tinge of it within contemporary libertarianism, and it 122 00:10:31.440 --> 00:10:36.680 works against us because when we find ourselves sort of tricked by this way of thinking into 123 00:10:36.680 --> 00:10:42.160 supporting the economic status quo, then it just confirms the left-wing suspicion that 124 00:10:42.160 --> 00:10:48.320 free market language is just a cover for advancing the interest of big business and so we lose 125 00:10:48.320 --> 00:10:56.360 any chance we have of reaching them and you know so whenever there's a corporation that's 126 00:10:56.360 --> 00:11:02.800 under attack by the left, Microsoft or Walmart or wherever it may be, we're often tempted 127 00:11:02.800 --> 00:11:07.640 to rush to its defense because we think oh well they think that these things got their 128 00:11:07.640 --> 00:11:10.360 power in the purely free market and they're against the fairly free market and they're 129 00:11:10.360 --> 00:11:16.320 And of course, these corporations didn't get their power solely through free market means. 130 00:11:16.320 --> 00:11:20.200 We often see things like, well, after all, in a free market, no one forces anybody to 131 00:11:20.200 --> 00:11:21.200 deal with this corporation. 132 00:11:21.200 --> 00:11:24.640 Well, that's true, but what free market are we talking about? 133 00:11:24.640 --> 00:11:31.400 The existing free market, where these companies are the beneficiaries of all sorts of regulations, 134 00:11:31.400 --> 00:11:35.400 it's not so clear that they really deserve our support. 135 00:11:35.400 --> 00:11:40.960 That's one reason that William Gillis has recommended using the term freed market instead 136 00:11:40.960 --> 00:11:41.960 of free market. 137 00:11:41.960 --> 00:11:46.840 To sort of get ourselves past thinking of this is something we have and think of it 138 00:11:46.840 --> 00:11:48.280 as something to accomplish. 139 00:11:48.280 --> 00:11:53.880 As he puts it, it moves us to the idea of after the revolution, the market being freed. 140 00:11:53.880 --> 00:11:58.480 Now a lot of the claims I'm going to make are controversial among libertarians. 141 00:11:58.480 --> 00:12:02.480 They're defended by myself and my associates in the Alliance of the Libertarian Left, but 142 00:12:02.480 --> 00:12:06.420 But other libertarians, such as my friend Walter Block, who's sitting right there grinding 143 00:12:06.420 --> 00:12:10.520 his teeth in despair at my confusions and heresies, think that a lot of what we have 144 00:12:10.520 --> 00:12:17.160 to say is horribly wrong. Walter has a couple of articles on why we're horribly wrong, and 145 00:12:17.160 --> 00:12:22.880 the number of other libertarians, Peter Klein, Brian Kaplan, and so on, who've written about 146 00:12:22.880 --> 00:12:27.840 why we're wrong. So you should read those, but you should also look at the Alliance of 147 00:12:27.840 --> 00:12:31.640 the Libertarian Left website and read what we've got to say and make up your own minds 148 00:12:31.640 --> 00:12:41.880 One of the central left libertarian claims is that businesses would most likely be smaller, 149 00:12:41.880 --> 00:12:46.400 less hierarchical, and more numerous in a free market. Why is that? Well, it's because 150 00:12:46.400 --> 00:12:51.680 in addition to economies of scale, things that make it easier and more efficient to 151 00:12:51.680 --> 00:12:56.040 do things when you're bigger, there are also diseconomies of scale. Remember, the firms 152 00:12:56.040 --> 00:13:01.000 are like islands of central planning in an ocean of markets. As a firm grows larger, 153 00:13:01.000 --> 00:13:07.500 As internal transactions become increasingly dissociated from the price system and inefficiency results, 154 00:13:07.500 --> 00:13:12.500 information flow in large hierarchies is also notoriously inefficient. 155 00:13:12.500 --> 00:13:16.000 Moreover, even the economies of scale themselves generate diseconomies of scale. 156 00:13:16.000 --> 00:13:20.000 For example, suppose your economy of scale makes your business more productive. 157 00:13:20.000 --> 00:13:22.500 So you produce more. Great. 158 00:13:22.500 --> 00:13:28.000 But now, in order to sell all the stuff you've produced, you have to distribute it over a wider geographical area. 159 00:13:28.000 --> 00:13:34.000 You know, because everyone within this radius has already bought your stuff, so you've got to expand it, which means your transportation costs go up. 160 00:13:34.000 --> 00:13:44.000 At some point in the firm's growth, the diseconomies start outweighing the economies, and that puts a limit to how big the firm can get. 161 00:13:44.000 --> 00:13:53.000 Unless government intervention comes along, it can help the firm by enabling it to privatize its profits and socialize or externalize its costs. 162 00:13:53.000 --> 00:14:09.000 There are lots of ways it does this. Subsidies, eminent domain seizures, grants of monopoly privilege, all things are sort of direct help to these big businesses, but lots of indirect ways too. 163 00:14:09.000 --> 00:14:25.000 Government interventions in general, licensing, zoning regulations, taxes, fees, capitalization requirements, plus of course inflation, all these things are more burdensome to newer and smaller companies than to larger and more established ones. 164 00:14:25.000 --> 00:14:32.000 And so this work is a kind of semi-cartelization of big business. 165 00:14:32.000 --> 00:14:43.000 And that's the reason that all these regulations, which people often think of as being anti-big business, were actually historically lobbied for, and in some cases even drafted by the companies. 166 00:14:43.000 --> 00:14:58.000 And Rothbard was responsible for, or one of the ones responsible for, bringing into libertarianism a lot of the New Left analysis of people like Gabriel Kolko, who didn't like their work being used to defend the free market, but, you know, screw them. 167 00:14:58.000 --> 00:15:28.000 Another example is intellectual property laws, which libertarians are increasingly coming to recognize as not a legitimate form of property, but really a form of protectionism, a tool of government privilege, which is another way that established companies can make it harder to compete with them, because our ways of doing things, if we've gotten, you know, patents on them, then you can't do what we're doing without, you know, our suing you. Another example, transactions 168 00:15:28.000 --> 00:15:44.000 Between firms are taxed, transactions within firms aren't taxed so much, so that makes it cost-effective to move more and more functions inside, and that tends to encourage companies to get bigger, more than they would in a free market. 169 00:15:44.000 --> 00:15:57.000 Having tax funding for highways and other kinds of transportation subsidies also helps large firms overcome those transportation problems associated with larger scale that I was mentioning. 170 00:15:57.000 --> 00:16:02.740 What I was mentioning, think of the wear and tear that's done on highways by big trucks 171 00:16:02.740 --> 00:16:07.000 and shipping and so forth. Well, the most of the wear and tear on highways comes from 172 00:16:07.000 --> 00:16:11.640 long-distance shipping, but those don't bear a proportionate burden of the tax, so actually 173 00:16:11.640 --> 00:16:20.320 highways represent a redistributive tax from less affluent to the more affluent. 174 00:16:20.320 --> 00:16:25.660 So when left-wingers complain, there are all these big, hierarchical corporations with 175 00:16:25.660 --> 00:16:32.660 With global reach dominating the economy and crowding out smaller and more local production, 176 00:16:32.660 --> 00:16:36.300 the thing they're complaining about is actually a situation in large part created by the government. 177 00:16:36.300 --> 00:16:40.620 So our reaction should be to explain that to them rather than to say, oh, you're attacking 178 00:16:40.620 --> 00:16:42.060 big business, you're attacking the free market. 179 00:16:42.060 --> 00:16:46.860 I mean, they are attacking both those things because they think those things go together, 180 00:16:46.860 --> 00:16:50.260 but they don't necessarily. 181 00:16:50.260 --> 00:16:54.380 The regulatory obstacles that make it harder for newer, smaller firms to compete with older 182 00:16:54.380 --> 00:16:58.140 and more established ones and larger ones also have a negative effect on the labor market. 183 00:16:58.140 --> 00:17:02.540 They suppress the number of employment opportunities. 184 00:17:02.540 --> 00:17:07.860 If in a free market there'd be many more employment opportunities, they would put workers in a 185 00:17:07.860 --> 00:17:13.580 better position either to bargain for better conditions or to start their own companies 186 00:17:13.580 --> 00:17:19.020 either thanks to increased demand for labor on the one hand or thanks to the leveling 187 00:17:19.020 --> 00:17:23.660 of the playing field that laissez-faire would bring on the other. 188 00:17:23.660 --> 00:17:28.660 That's one reason that in the 19th century libertarians were much friendlier to the labor movement. 189 00:17:28.660 --> 00:17:32.060 And nowadays libertarians like to point out, you know, when they're criticizing the labor 190 00:17:32.060 --> 00:17:38.300 movement, oh well, unions have often engaged in violence either directly or indirectly 191 00:17:38.300 --> 00:17:43.180 through the state against employers, against non-union workers and so forth. 192 00:17:43.180 --> 00:17:44.180 That's true. 193 00:17:44.180 --> 00:17:48.500 It's also true that employers have often engaged in violence against workers, against unions 194 00:17:48.500 --> 00:17:54.340 It's either directly through hired goons or through the state. 195 00:17:54.340 --> 00:17:58.540 That's not an objection to businesses as such, that a lot of businesses have done that. 196 00:17:58.540 --> 00:18:02.380 So likewise, it shouldn't be an objection to unions as such, that unions have often 197 00:18:02.380 --> 00:18:03.380 done that. 198 00:18:03.380 --> 00:18:08.380 We live in a society where it's pervaded by state privilege and everyone wants to achieve 199 00:18:08.380 --> 00:18:13.460 what their goals, wherever they are, by means of the state. 200 00:18:13.460 --> 00:18:27.780 I think the knee-jerk opposition to unions among libertarians often tends to obscure the extent to which a lot of the goals of the labor movement actually would be more greatly facilitated in a free market. 201 00:18:27.780 --> 00:18:34.460 Now, it's true that a lot of unions nowadays are just basically labor cartels, government-privileged labor cartels. 202 00:18:34.460 --> 00:18:36.780 But what brought that about? 203 00:18:36.780 --> 00:18:39.620 In large part, it was a result of legislation that was supported by big business. 204 00:18:39.620 --> 00:18:44.300 If you look historically, big business said, well, look, if we have to deal with these unions, 205 00:18:44.300 --> 00:18:49.900 we'd rather have them sort of tamed and brought in as junior partners of the government business partnership. 206 00:18:49.900 --> 00:18:57.140 So we'll give them certain rights in exchange for their agreeing, you know, no sympathy strikes, no this and that, and so forth. 207 00:18:57.140 --> 00:19:03.140 You know, you think of, when the left talks about the achievements that unions won during the heyday of labor, 208 00:19:03.140 --> 00:19:06.180 when they talk about the weekend and the eight-hour day and so forth, 209 00:19:06.180 --> 00:19:12.980 Well, those were largely achieved through non-government action, primarily by market means and indeed over government resistance. 210 00:19:12.980 --> 00:19:17.860 And indeed, if you look at sort of the most interesting and notable victories of unions in recent times, 211 00:19:17.860 --> 00:19:27.460 they've been ones that were done outside the system of union legislation, you know, by sort of non-privileged unions, 212 00:19:27.460 --> 00:19:33.900 whereas ever since the mainstream unions got these government privileges, their membership and their influence has been steadily going down 213 00:19:33.900 --> 00:19:36.860 Because they got bought off, they got sucked into the system. 214 00:19:36.860 --> 00:19:41.500 And so when left-wingers complain, oh, unions are in decline, 215 00:19:41.500 --> 00:19:43.500 we should say, well, maybe the government 216 00:19:43.500 --> 00:19:45.980 has something to do with that. 217 00:19:45.980 --> 00:19:47.860 When the unions accepted the devil's bargain 218 00:19:47.860 --> 00:19:50.460 of help from government with all the regulatory strings, 219 00:19:50.460 --> 00:19:51.940 then went with it, basically turned them 220 00:19:51.940 --> 00:19:54.300 into labor cartels, which a lot of the time, originally, 221 00:19:54.300 --> 00:19:56.500 they weren't. 222 00:19:56.500 --> 00:19:58.540 Now, it's also important, when we're communicating 223 00:19:58.540 --> 00:20:00.700 the left-wingers, to pay attention 224 00:20:00.700 --> 00:20:03.100 to how what we say sounds to them. 225 00:20:03.100 --> 00:20:05.780 For example, we often say, oh, we're against the conservatives. 226 00:20:05.780 --> 00:20:09.540 Conservatives are interventionist. 227 00:20:09.540 --> 00:20:10.700 Well, here's how they hear that. 228 00:20:10.700 --> 00:20:12.860 Because the left-wingers assume, they already 229 00:20:12.860 --> 00:20:15.540 come in with the assumption that conservatives are 230 00:20:15.540 --> 00:20:17.100 the less interventionist one. 231 00:20:17.100 --> 00:20:20.060 So when they hear us say that we think they're interventionist, too, 232 00:20:20.060 --> 00:20:23.100 to them that sounds as though their reaction is going to be, 233 00:20:23.100 --> 00:20:25.900 oh, you libertarians are so extreme that even 234 00:20:25.900 --> 00:20:29.420 the conservatives, even these pro-free market conservatives 235 00:20:29.420 --> 00:20:30.700 are too interventionist for you. 236 00:20:30.700 --> 00:20:32.620 That's how they're going to hear it. 237 00:20:32.620 --> 00:20:34.380 So what we need to make clear to them 238 00:20:34.380 --> 00:20:40.460 is that it's not as though there's a continuum with the liberals 239 00:20:40.460 --> 00:20:42.380 over here and the conservatives here, 240 00:20:42.380 --> 00:20:45.380 and then we're somehow just a notch libertarian word 241 00:20:45.380 --> 00:20:46.660 of the conservatives. 242 00:20:46.660 --> 00:20:49.140 But in fact, there isn't really that much difference 243 00:20:49.140 --> 00:20:51.860 in degree of intervention between the liberals 244 00:20:51.860 --> 00:20:52.720 and conservatives. 245 00:20:52.720 --> 00:20:54.700 It's often an indifference of style. 246 00:20:54.700 --> 00:20:56.260 I mean, on the whole, liberals tend 247 00:20:56.260 --> 00:20:58.980 to favor more direct government intervention. 248 00:20:58.980 --> 00:21:02.340 Conservatives tend to favor more indirect means 249 00:21:02.340 --> 00:21:08.740 of sort of empowering, giving special privileges to cronies, although of course both factions 250 00:21:08.740 --> 00:21:12.620 do both. 251 00:21:12.620 --> 00:21:19.100 For example, looking back to the healthcare debate again, the whole individual mandate 252 00:21:19.100 --> 00:21:25.900 part of the democratic healthcare program is clearly a giveaway to big business, that's 253 00:21:25.900 --> 00:21:26.900 a corporatist side. 254 00:21:26.900 --> 00:21:30.220 It's probably one reason that the Republicans didn't attack it as much as they attacked 255 00:21:30.220 --> 00:21:46.300 The Point of Statism isn't necessarily any less intense for being less direct. 256 00:21:46.300 --> 00:21:50.580 We should talk about what the conservative version of health care is, how it empowers 257 00:21:50.580 --> 00:21:57.100 insurance companies and HMOs and the MA, we should talk about how it drove the mutual 258 00:21:57.100 --> 00:22:14.100 When conservatives are perceived as deregulators, oftentimes they are stripping off some secondary regulation that was meant to serve as a limitation on some primary regulation. 259 00:22:14.100 --> 00:22:22.100 The government gives some group a government-granted privilege and puts restrictions on how they use the privilege, then the Republicans come along and strip off that privilege. 260 00:22:22.100 --> 00:22:30.100 So we do deregulation, and often there's a bad result, but that's because that's not real deregulation. 261 00:22:30.100 --> 00:22:37.100 It's important for us to overcome this idea that we're just like conservatives over only more so. 262 00:22:37.100 --> 00:22:43.100 Similarly on discrimination, we often say, well, there couldn't really be much discrimination in a free market 263 00:22:43.100 --> 00:22:48.100 because a worker's wages are determined by their marginal revenue product. 264 00:22:48.100 --> 00:22:58.100 We don't have a free market, maybe so, but we don't have a free market. We have an artificially constrained market where the costs of discrimination are lowered. 265 00:22:58.100 --> 00:23:05.100 And also, when the companies are larger and more hierarchical, it's harder to tell what an individual worker's marginal product is. 266 00:23:05.100 --> 00:23:14.100 And as a result, pre-existing prejudices are more likely to guide that result. 267 00:23:14.100 --> 00:23:22.100 Likewise, when we talk about the environment, some environmentalism is just sort of the aristocratic, idyllic, impose a certain idyllic vision on everyone. 268 00:23:22.100 --> 00:23:29.100 But a lot of left-wingers are concerned about the environment because they see resources being wasted and misused. 269 00:23:29.100 --> 00:23:33.100 And we need to point out the ways in which government enables that to happen, 270 00:23:33.100 --> 00:23:41.100 in which government either by directly controlling resources itself or giving rights to these resources away to privileged companies, 271 00:23:41.100 --> 00:23:53.100 Allowing logging companies to log its sub-market rates in national forests, accessed by tax-funded roads, and so forth, is worth putting. 272 00:23:53.100 --> 00:24:04.100 Now, can this approach work? I think so. Those of us who are working in the sort of Alliance of the Libertarian Left thing are often being told by liberals or leftists of various kinds, 273 00:24:04.100 --> 00:24:07.860 I could never stand libertarianism or take it seriously until I heard it presented the 274 00:24:07.860 --> 00:24:14.180 way you guys presented it. So I think that that's evidence that it is possible to win 275 00:24:14.180 --> 00:24:21.180 at least many left wing types over by emphasizing these sides. So I think in some extent we've 276 00:24:21.180 --> 00:24:26.780 been leaving one of our most powerful weapons in our arsenal not using it and I see we need 277 00:24:26.780 --> 00:24:29.780 to take it out and use it. Fight the power.