"Classical" Liberalism and Libertarianism

Welcome back to Radio Rothbard. I'm Ryan McMacon, Editor-in-Chief at the Mises Institute.

And this week we're going to talk a little bit about the history of the movement we now

call libertarianism or classical liberalism or more accurately simply liberalism if we're

using it as a real historical term. And joining me today is Joseph Celice Mullin. He's been here

on Radio Rothbard more than once before and he has a similar interest to me in terms of the history

of the movement. I think he's a fellow disciple of Ralph Raco as a historian because he certainly

comes up in our conversations and he has a nice broad background. I think academically he's a

graduate of Spring Harbor University, the University of Illinois and the University of Missouri.

And now he teaches history and politics at Spring Harbor University and economics at Jackson

College. He is the Ralph Raco fellow at the libertarian institute and he's also one of our new

associated scholars at the Mises Institute as well. So his work has also appeared in the Journal

of Austrian Economics, Journal of Libertarian Studies, Journal of the American Revolution and

anti-war.com. So lots of overlap with the work that the Mises Institute is doing and I think

Joseph has a very similar view of the history of libertarian thought that I do in some respects.

I don't want to attribute to him any beliefs that may be different from mine but partly that's

what I'm having him on here today because he's got a new monograph I suppose we might call it

published by the libertarian institute is called classical liberalism, rise, fall, and future

of an idea. So Joseph, thank you for joining me here today.

Well, thank you for having me, Ryan. It's always a pleasure and thank you for that very kind

introduction. Yeah, it's always great to have you on because you're interested in stuff that

interests me. So I always like to learn a little bit of the few details on these things.

And yeah, looking at your book, this raises a few questions, right? We're going to talk about

what we call classical liberalism. Now this term meets some opposition, right? And you also get

opposition from people who don't like it that we say it's basically the same thing as libertarianism.

And you address this in the book as I do in where I edited Ralph Rayco's series of lectures

from 2004 where he talks he speaks on this and you basically draw upon a similar definition

that he uses is that look, we're talking about an ideological movement that began perhaps

as early as the 17th century and which had a certain belief system. And that really this is

the same belief system that we find today with libertarians. And the way I say it is that basically

libertarianism as we now know it is just the radical wing of this long historical ideology that

that many people call classical liberalism. And that they just started messing with the terms in

the 1930s. And so now people think of liberalism as basically social democracy and stuff.

But let's throw it over to you and see really what should we keep in mind when thinking about

these terms, classical liberalism, libertarianism. What terminology do you use when teaching?

What do you find is useful in terms of just the words that communicate to the reality of this

ideological movement? Well, I think it's great that you mentioned that about teaching because

this book actually grew out of an effort to explain to students last year I was teaching a

Western philosophical thought class and I encountered immediately very puzzled looks when I started

explaining liberalism because of course, as you said, in the 1600s, in the 17th century,

we're talking about liberalism, just period. There was no need to distinguish it as progressive

liberalism, classical liberalism, there was only one thing called liberalism. And I do use Ralph

Rayco's definition, which he provided in his struggle for liberty lectures because you could

get very technical with it. But I think a good simple way to explain it is liberalism was the

belief that the social and economical life of a people is not a realm for government intervention.

And it's that simple. And this was what liberalism was built out of. It was a rejection of things like

like absolutism, bureaucratization, mercantilism. It was a rejection of all of these types of things.

And you can find precursors to it. And I do a little precursor chapter where I say, look, you can

find thinkers throughout history who have had these ideas, even in places that we don't associate

with having any kind of liberal tradition at all like China. The thing is, is that it became a dominant

political philosophy for a brief window of time among a handful of intellectuals and leaders who,

for example, established control over England, following the glorious revolution,

and who founded the United States of America. Although I think America is a great example,

and I point to it in the book, because you have that great immediate divide between those who

would eventually become the wigs, who really are representative of what would become of quote-unquote

liberalism. And so I basically go through the definitions of liberalism, and then I

highlight what we call today classical liberalism, which was just plain liberalism, things like

trenchord, Gordon, Locke, all the big ones. And I talk about the physiocrats and all of those.

And then I take them into the 19th century where liberalism is seized upon by some very

unfortunate fellows who start to take it from what it was, which was non-intervention. And they

very slowly and suddenly start to twist it where all the sudden liberalism became associated with

not protection from the state against the individual, but it became using the state to engineer certain

social outcomes that these intellectuals who identified as liberals, people like Dewey or people

like Mill identified as being quote-unquote desirable. And it reached the point where when

Mises was writing his on liberalism and going to publish it in the United States, which I believe

Reiko was the one who translated that, they published it under a completely different title because

there were like people will be too confused about this, because liberalism in America now means

the opposite of what it originally meant. And so that's where the book goes. And then I conclude

with some thoughts about why constitutionalism failed, because that was the program for securing

individual liberty, was constitutionalism and representative assemblies. Why did that fail?

And then the future of liberty in deconstructing the state, delegitimizing its power,

shifting the intellectual paradigm and thought climate and towards a more anarcho-capitalist future.

Yes, and when we're talking about something from the past, if we just are using different terms

all the time, then there's no way to understand what you're talking about. If we use the term

conservatism, which is just terrible, if you're trying to use that as sort of a makeshift modern term

for the party of free markets, which it isn't even really, because everywhere I look conservatives

basically are coming up with reasons to not embrace free markets. But if that's your term that

you're using, well, so are you going to call the levelers from the 17th century conservatives?

Clearly that makes no sense whatsoever, utterly incoherent. Certainly you can't call the 19th

century liberals of Hungary the conservatives. It wouldn't even work in the 19th century,

right? Grover Cleveland would have hugely rejected the description of himself as a conservative

of any type, as even the more milk-toast water-down wigs probably would have balked even at the term.

So it makes no sense, so we can't really use those terms. We have to stick with the terms that

are generally understood by historians as this is a traceable movement from the 17th century.

And really, of course, as you know, even predating that, right? Let's look at Locke. Locke was

influenced by Hooker. Hooker was influenced by Catholic scholars on the continent in terms of their

writings of natural law and that sort of thing. So it really goes back to the Middle Ages.

So you have to, if any of this is going to make any sense, you have to be able to use terminology

that applies over time periods, not just since 1945 or something like that because that tells us

almost nothing. Now, I would suggest that the use of the term conservative was used deliberately

by people like Buckley to try and get the United States away from the actual free-market liberals

who opposed war and opposed a strong federal government. Buckley, of course, famously said that

the US should adopt totalitarianism if that's necessary to defeat the communists and many

conservatives delighted in the idea of a mass nuclear holocaust if it just meant defeating the

commies in the Cold War, which, of course, none of that has anything to do with liberalism. It's

basically just some sort of crazy authoritarian talk that they put this patina free market thinking

on top of to try and trick the masses into thinking this had some sort of longer historical

American legacy behind it. And so, yeah, the terminologist doesn't work if you use what modern

day radio talk show hosts calling themselves conservatives want you to use. But it bugs me every

time I hear them. Right, when you get these conservative talk people like Hannity and so on

refer to people on the left as liberals and they don't even use that term for themselves anymore,

right? They now call themselves progressives or they have some other term that they use rarely

do they even use that term. And so it's mostly right wingers who keep the bad terminology alive

at this point. Yeah, and of course, labels are only helpful to the extent that they clarify.

And as you're saying, most time these labels simply obfuscate. And certainly when it comes to

modern day quote unquote conservatives and that I like that you called it a patina. It's a patina

of free market stuff. It's a rhetorical arabesque that muddies the waters and gets people to think

because I do I do believe that there is a a portion of the Republican voting base that that does

want actual limited government, especially among the small business community, they don't they

want fewer regulations, they want a simplified tax code, they want a less of intrusive government,

and there is a rhetorical aspect to the Republican appeal that I think has constantly left them

feeling very frustrated and increasingly angry because of course they're just they're basically

the same. You know, it's been so telling I think in disillusioning for so many to realize that

actually the bureaucratic state and the mountains of debt and the endless spending that's all just

going to stay that's just going to keep going. No matter whether you elect a populist Republican

or a populist Democrat doesn't matter. They're all statists. Well, why does it keep going? I

thought we had this this constitution though that is going to fix all that, right? What that and

that's what we're told is the liberal thing to do. The liberal thing to do is to have democratic

republics stuff, right? Yes. But we have, right? There's elections, there's a constitution,

how come none of that stuff seems to actually work to control the state? Well, and I think here

and this is something that you touched on in a talk that you gave not too long ago and it's

something that Rayco touched on in the struggle for liberty. It's it's there's been a either

deliberate or you know, over time it's just people have confused the means with the ends.

The the idea of a constitution or an elected assembly, a limited republic. This was a means

to securing individual liberty. The end itself wasn't having a constitution. The end itself

wasn't having a representative government. And in the 19th century, you see increasingly

people demanding constitutions as though it is constitutions that that are the end state because

they looked at states like the United States and Great Britain who were growing magnificently having

wonderful prosperity and liberty and economic growth and all this stuff and newly modernizing states

looked at them and said, well, what do we need? Well, we need a constitution. And the constitution

and the processes became the end. And that's why I love the book, Democracy in America.

Where Detokefield talks about the difference between lived democracy, which is people actually

going out and freely participating in voluntary institutions, social and economic and that that's

actual democracy. And he has a chapter on soft despotism where he says, if it stops being like this,

what it's going to devolve into is a soft despotism where democracy just becomes a procedural thing

where you just show up every couple of years and vote. And there's a vast, impersonal administrative

state that takes care of everything else. And that's exactly what we've wound up drifting into where

we hear all this. There is nothing more important than democracy. We must defend the constitution.

What are we even talking about? Those don't mean anything. And it's especially problematic when we say,

well, the constitution, who interprets that? Oh, the thing that's going to restrain the government

is going to be interpreted by government courts. How weird. I wonder what they've decided.

Now we have warrantless spying on Americans, throwing them in detention camps like,

it's just so painful. It's so painful and so obvious to people like ourselves.

And it's especially painful when you hear people talk about how they're going to change it,

you know, by voting in the next election or, you know, this Republican or that Democrat.

And what we need really is more of a paradigm shift across the board in terms of how we think about

these things. Yeah, and I you wouldn't believe how many submissions I get in terms of articles

from people and emails to just saying they've always got some fix, right? If we'll just pass this

amendment or we'll just tinker a little bit with the constitution, then our freedoms will be

protected. And it's just kind of like, oh, brother, right? We've been saying this for 200 years.

And all along the way, the government just gets more centralized, more powerful. And this idea

that you can rely on these written constitutions to protect your liberties is just has been so

thoroughly debunked. It's amazing that people believe it. And then if you start talking about

real solutions, which Rayco supported, ideas of actually decentralizing the state through

secession, through forced radical decentralization, where you have sections of the country that

just simply refused to keep taking orders from the center. That's the only thing that has ever been

shown in hundreds of years to actually reduce state power from when the state is centralized and

powerful. And in doing something about it, we can see it. We saw it most recently with the end

of the Soviet Union, right? It broke up into smaller pieces. And it greatly reduced that power and

Soviet power, Russian power has never gotten back to the point where it was during those decades when

it was a centralized state. And we can look at that as that's really the only example everywhere

else we look when the state remains unified. And you can write all the new constitutions you

want till you're blue in the face. France is a perfect example, right? They went through this

process over and over and over again. And the French state is super powerful now. And they're on

the fifth fifth republic. Yeah. Didn't make any difference. All it did was rearrange different ways

that the ruling party would exercise this power. And but there's still this belief

because people fall into this certain type of liberal program, which is distinct entirely from

the liberal ideal of controlled state power, that they put all this faith in, oh, if we could just

write the laws, just write. And Reiko says the reason that the program failed, this program of

democracy and constitutions fails because it relied on centralizing state power. And Guido

Hulsman has a nice essay on that where he talks about how the great mistake that the liberals made

was thinking that they could abandon all the decentralizing institutions of the past.

Embrace instead a unified centralized state under a new constitution than that would protect

freedom. That idea failed miserably. That was the big liberal mistake. Yeah. And I was just about

to mention the intermediating institutions who had actual power to contest within the state,

to contest the state. Things like the very powerful guilds and churches and that's all gone.

That's all been destroyed. These very powerful civil institutions that we had in social

societies, those are all gone. And there's another really good book about the growth of like the

welfare state that Beto wrote about how the transformation from mutual aid societies to the

welfare state. And that's just another example of you had these people actually going out actively

participating in this process. And that that was replaced by just a paternalistic state.

And for ourselves being intellectuals and working for a think tank and stuff,

I think the best thing that we can do is help people to see the state for what it is,

which is involved in a lot of illegitimate activity and itself, probably illegitimate.

Because a lot of the problems that people have, because you said people send me these submissions

and they email me all these things, it's like you're still not quite getting it. If that's where

you're thinking is you haven't quite got to the point yet where you recognize the actual

essence of the problem, which is that you have these large unified states who no one can contest

against and who are involved in regulating aspects of our lives that are just crazy.

And that's where liberalism's philosophy, I think, can be kind of a guiding and focusing

example here of, look, the economic life of the country and the social life of the country,

that is that is no place for the government to be involved in at all. And so it's certainly not

anything like a paternal government who you have no control over at all. I mean, at least,

at least when you, because I live in a relatively small town, you know, a couple thousand people,

your vote can actually matter and you can actually get out there and talk to people who you know

face to face and change people's minds and convince them of this policy or that policy.

And your votes actually matter. I mean, but we get bigger and bigger and bigger and you have

this like kind of city state republic model, right? Everyone says, oh, we'll look at the great

examples from Western history and Greece and the the city states of Rome and stuff. It's like,

guys, what are we talking about here? We're talking about small limited franchises in single cities.

You know, like, what are you even talking about? We're talking about 300 million people voting on

something. What are we talking about? This doesn't make any sense at all. So, you know, imagine

communities are just, they're not the same thing as a real community. And anyone who's actually

gone out and been involved in democracy in the, in the tokvillian sense of participatory democracy

is not confused about what a community and an imagined community is.

Well, that's what Benedict Anderson and his work on nationalism talks about is nationalism is

this ideology that creates this fantasy that people who live thousands of miles away from you and have

different interests and a different culture are somehow the same nation as you. And

and Americans are infected by this thinking all the time, right? You could be living in a rural town

in Western Nebraska and you've been inculcated with the idea that people in New England or New

Jersey who probably hate your entire way of life. They hate your religion, they hate your ethnicity,

they hate almost everything about you. And you say, well, we're all fellow Americans, right?

Anderson would say, what level of brainwashing is necessary to convince someone that this is a

non laughable statement, but it occurs everywhere when you look at how people categorize other people

with whom they have nothing in common as as fellow Americans. And this, this happens in a lot of

places, but it becomes more feasible, more believable, the smaller you get, right? We're all the

residents of the Republic of let's say Florence of the same community. I think you could argue that

they were. They certainly weren't all members of the same socio-economic group, but they certainly

had a number of very similar interests and a very similar culture. They virtually all practice the

same religion. Yeah, and I like to that they wouldn't do voting a lot of times like individual,

what it would be is they would have voting according to like your profession or your, you know,

because they were all Catholics, obviously. But, you know, it was like a guild republic where,

you know, we're part of the, you know, intellectual guild or whatever guild, right? And so that's a very

small group of guys who all have pretty much the same notions of things. And then we put representatives

into the body. And it was just very small. I've written a lot of articles about the different,

like procedural things that go on in those sort of Italian city-state republics of the medieval

period and the early modern period because I absolutely love that. And it's so important that we

trace the origins of these liberal ideas and the foundations of liberalism back to the continent,

back to the continent because too much of thinking about liberalism is too anglicized. It's too

Anglo-centric. And part of that, I think, is Hayek, who just got very popular and very mainstream. And

his, it's in the Constitution of Liberty, if I remember where he does like a little history of

liberalism chapter. And it's like, so basically thank God that these handful of Englishmen just

have this epiphany. And it's like, no, actually, if you go look at Rothbard's history of economic

thought, which is just so great, he takes it back to the Spanish scholastics and the Italians,

back to its medieval roots, which helps you to properly contextualize these ideas, as you said,

thinking about things like natural law, which is so important. Yeah, the Constitution of Liberty

probably hikes worst book. And it's the book that everybody reads. It's very safe. It's very

mainstream. You can read it and quote it and people are, he reads Hayek. But you might as well

just be reading like Time Magazine. I mean, it has like, it's about as radical as that. He has

some other good works. Yeah, capitalism and historians. That's a great book. Yeah, that's a great

book. And his, his introductory essay on that is very important today, just as important

as it was back then. And of course, some of his economics work is very good. But yeah, obviously

reading that, you miss out on so much. And yeah, let's build on your mention of the continent,

which is so important because Rothbard always considered continental liberalism to really be

the real home of radical thinking of some of the best thinking in terms of how do we get away

from the state, state domination of everybody in modern society. And just as you mentioned,

let's start looking at some of the French liberals. So looking at what Rayco says, right,

early on the liberals made this big mistake of thinking that the state could somehow be a tool

for protecting freedom and liberty. And so you're looking at that in the 18th century. It's pretty

clear that after Napoleon leaves the scene, the French liberals had already figured out that was

a mistake. At least many of them did, the more radical ones. And so you had Constante

who's saying, yeah, clearly the centralization of the state under the revolutionaries in Napoleon

was a big, big problem. So he started exploring ways that decentralization was important. And then

to your point of really the only real cohesive political communities at the very local level,

we get Charles Dunnoier who talks about the municipalization of the world, right, is that.

Really, if you're going to have a national state of any kind, it should really have no functioning

purpose beyond, beyond something that serves as maybe a defense league, something that can provide

defense from, from other states, but that there should be no real unified governance internally.

And then that turns over and this is going to get then to the discussion of anarcho-capitalism,

right? This then takes us to some of the later French liberals who carry on with this even more.

You get into then Moulinari, right? Clearly one of the primary inspirations for Rothbard's

thinking on this. And Moulinari made the key distinction here explicitly. I mean, other

French liberals understood this as well. And we get into Moulinari who comes to us via Bostiata

some extent as well. And this is an important note that Rayco had made was that, yeah, the early

liberals, they thought you could use the state somehow for liberty, but then they gained what

Rayco calls, quote unquote, state hatred. That is, they figured out the state was not their friend,

and that really you had to take steps to break it up and to just be skeptical of it overall.

The Anglo-Saxons, as you know, went in a very different direction where they thought, no, we can

form this parliament, which will protect everybody's freedom and create this wonderful state.

That will function very, very well. It was born perhaps out of a naivete that the Anglo-Saxons had

because parliament did function quite well for quite some time. After 1688 or so, with the so-called

glorious revolution, right? But the French, after encountering what Napoleon, the revolution,

the revolution of 1830, the July revolution, they saw there were big problems with the state.

So through Bostia down to Molinari, you have a lot more skepticism about state power,

and then even beyond Molinari, right? You get inspiration for Pareto, who is, of course,

a great pessimist in terms of state power, but thinking of Molinari, he makes the key distinction,

right? Which is that the problem with state power is that it has a monopoly over everything

else within its territory. And that is the key problem. And so he was trying to address that as

you, how do we abolish this monopoly? Instead of debating a bunch of little things about, oh,

what does it mean to be libertarian on a philosophical level? You're saying, no, no, what really

needs to be addressed is the fact that the state has this monopoly and the final say. And you can

find this a lot in the scholarship of, say, Carlo Lotiario has some good essays to this effect on

Mises.org saying that if you're going to address state power, you have to address the monopoly,

and that the key issue in the formation of the state over the last 500 years was this assertion

of the state as the final arbiter, the final say on any sort of legal disputes within its territory,

any sort of conflicts between regions and between persons, that the state had this final

definitive say and didn't have to engage in negotiation of any type with its population or within

as you note, those mediating institutions within its territory. He gets just simply lay down the

law and hand down its decision and everybody just had to fall into line and do whatever the state

said. Whereas people like Molenari and other radical liberals understood that that was not

actually the system that Europe had when it developed in the high middle ages, especially

where Europe advanced so much in terms of economic prosperity in terms of state control.

And a lot of this stuff about how the middle ages was like a theocratic despotism stuff,

that's propaganda from the left, tried to justify state power so that oh, we don't go back to that.

The reality of course is that state power today is far more vast than anything it ever was

in those earlier situations. So it just keeps coming back with Molenari to that issue of the total

state monopoly. And Molenari had some interesting and novel ways of doing that. Can you tell us about

what really what was Molenari's real contribution here when looking back at it in terms of anarcho-capitalism

and state power, that sort of stuff? Well, as you said, the key distinction here is that you cannot

have a monopoly provider of something. And this is particularly important because France during

the revolution, the revolutions basically took the incredible absolute estate that had been created

by the later bourbon kings. And basically just took the whole thing, streamlined it, made it a little

bit better, more efficient, but it's that thing, that thing still existed. That bureaucracy just kept

going, that way of doing things. I mean, and that's why I say it's so important to have a mentality

shift is you keep changing the outward ornaments of it, you keep writing these new constitutions

and stuff, but the underlying thinking and the underlying structures is still the same,

and you keep getting these same results. And I like that you point that you drew the distinction

with the English there, and why were things a little better in England? Well, I think the reason

things were better in England, and I've been thinking about writing about this particular moment

in in English history here because I think it was a this was kind of the death of it, was yes,

as you said, there was parliamentary supremacy, but the lords had a veto over everything,

the lords could veto any idea that they didn't want, and you had a very tight community there

in the House of Lords that were intermarried with each other, that were the same religion, that

they just they they were basically the same, right? They had the same way of thinking about things

in the proper role of government and England's place in the world that you can debate whether that

was good, but the point is they were an actual like, you know, quote unquote, nation, if you want to

think of it that way, but it was but they had gotten rid of all the other intermediating institutions,

so it was just parliament, and then what happened is commons was able to rest that veto away from

them in the early 20th century, clearing the way for the welfare state and everything else that the

House of Lords had sworn like that's never going to happen. So that's just a side bar there,

I think that that's a huge problem there, and a moment where, you know, I look at England today,

the United Kingdom today, and it's just so depressing and sad, but yes, with regard to

to Mollenari, yes, competition, you cannot expect the state to limit itself, and the limiting

institutions of the medieval period, look, these were why it was prosperous. There was no monopoly

on violence by the central government. It was a negotiated process among these other equal power

players. What's that line from Thucydides? Right can only have meaning between equals and power,

right? And everybody wants to read that line as like some sort of like, well, he's trying to

teach us a lesson. It's like, whatever, like we can deep read it all you want. There's something

very true about that. The state only will be held in check by other equal powers, and what we have

in the medieval situation there was tons of counterbalancing, intermediating powers where it couldn't

just exercise a monopoly. And yes, as you pointed out, this was Europe's period of incredible growth,

and it was really only stopper there by the unfortunate happening of the Black Death, and

you know, that caused all sorts of really horrible cataclysmic disruptions, and the plague,

you know, recurred many times, and you know, kind of clouds our judgment there, and then as you

said, there's a lot of propaganda about, oh, it was just the worst theocracy you've ever heard of,

and you know, all propaganda. But yes, you have to have intermediating institutions,

and you have to have competition. And so Molenari, for example, took it to the place where a lot of

people, especially if they're first just getting into thinking about this stuff that they kind of

draw back like, I don't know, is competitive security services, competitive courts. And it's like,

no, this makes perfect sense, actually. And so, yes, that was a great contribution. As you

said, Rothbard loved him, Raco loved him as well. It's been a big influence on me as well.

And of course, you always end up having problems with people because they have a hard time

imagining now, what that would look like, where you didn't have a state that had the final say on

everything. You could hand that down. They've been conditioned to believe that it would all

result in warlords, right? That's essentially what they always end up being told. Oh, well,

if there's any sort of dispute in the state just can't simply force unilaterally the end result

on everybody, then everything will result in warfare. No acceptance of the reality that warfare

is actually very expensive and very destructive and really is not worth it if you simply have some

minor legal dispute or something like that. It's this idea that everybody's going to instantly raise

a militia, which I guess is free. Yeah. Well, it's very easy to write out the very cheap solution

of raising a warning. And no one will contest you. No one will contest you either. You know, you'll

just overnight have the outermed. Yeah, it's not like the outcome is dubious, right? If you're

going to raise an army, you better be pretty darn sure that you're going to win. Yeah. And then,

of course, we just know from international relations, all the obstacles to that in terms of balancing,

right? If you become this crazy person who starts raising armies every time he runs into legal problems,

we'll guess everybody else is going to unite against you. Oh, yeah. That's why I always point to like

the local things like any time. I mean, again, so many of these people and these these academics

and stuff have like never participated in a local community where I mean, people are very jealous

of potential power accumulation. Someone's getting a little too powerful in town. People are

conspiring to like curb their power. Like that's just what happens naturally. And so you want to

create an incentive structure, a social structure where that is allowed to happen. And government

just does the opposite of that. So the and of course, centralization is just simply what states do.

They always want to do that. So yeah, you're always going to have to come up with ways to talk to

centralists. We have to resist any arguments about, well, you know, it just doesn't scale. It's

just it'd be better if we scaled it up. You know, like social insurance at the local level. No,

it's just not practical. We need to scale it up. That's always another one that they come with.

Well, the left always wants that because they know that that makes taxation and bureaucratization

easier. You talk to your standard center leftist and just say, hey, I'm in favor of the welfare

state. I'm in favor of a safety net for people. I just think it should be administered at the

state level or at say the metropolitan level. And they will they will have a heart attack if you

suggest that, right? Because they know that there would be more controls on that sort of welfare

state. They know it'd be harder to expand it endlessly. They know that the that the local population

would resist forever increases to the spending. I suspect that most people, of course, would really

have no problem with some local programs that act as a safety net. And you can see this anywhere in

any small country, right? Look at a country of five million people. Finland, for example, extensive

welfare state. But it's there are also controls on that from the chief of which Finland just can't

simply print money endlessly. But it's a small state where people could actually maybe see the

benefits of the spending that exists on the welfare state because they might know people

personally are involved in this. Whereas in a country like the United States, it's something that

happens on a much different level because, oh, we're going to tax everybody. This money from

330 million people is going to flow into the pockets of bureaucrats in Washington and then we'll

use it as a huge nationwide system of building patronage with a bunch of people thousands of miles

away. You couldn't care less whether you live or die. But regardless of all of that, you just know

why the state wants to centralize because it just simply makes that easier to employ that sort of

power. And that's why you will get nonstop resistance from the left in terms of any sort of

localization of the welfare state because they know that diminishes state power. It's not even an

argument in terms of free markets or against the welfare state as an idea. What it is is they're

arguing for more state power. They think it should be centralized control. And as you said, that's

just blatantly obvious. Yeah, patronage, right? It takes away their ability to buy support from

various interest groups. So that's the main problem. But that takes us then to this issue of

Minerchism versus Enarchicapolis, right? You talk about this. And what is the distinction here?

And why is this debate even important? Right? Because we're so far away even from the idea of

Minerchism. And so why even bother? What's the what's the problem? Well, look, obviously I try not

to shoot at the person right next to me because even someone like Sheldon Richmond who's like a

Minerchist, I mean, we agree on 95% 99% of things. So I'm not I'm not going to die on that hill. There

are too many actual status out there to be resisted. All I argue for with regard to the difference

between Minerchism and and stateism. Minerchism and Enarchicapolisism is look, it's a wedge. It's a wedge

and Robert Higgs. I always recommend the work of Robert Higgs, his great book about the ratchet effect.

Crisis and Leviathan. It's like, look, if you have a state, people are going to turn to the state

in times of emergency. They are going to be conned for lack of a better word. I mean,

they're going to be conned into giving up their liberties to the state. And that is, you know,

the ratchet only moves in one direction. They're going to get this power. And then, you know,

there's going to be a new level and then the next crisis will happen. And I mean, I look at something

like income tax, right? Income tax. Okay. So the people are very smart and can safeguard their

liberties and no not to do anything dumb, right? Well, how was income tax sold to the Americans?

Because you had to go get a constitutional amendment to this thing, which is no easy task.

They just told them, don't worry. That will only apply to the super rich. Don't worry. That's

just going to be a tax on the bajillionaires. Don't worry about that. Yeah. How that work out.

Not great. And of course, it's April 15th, my least favorite day of the entire year. I'm actually

in a rather, I'm actually in a rather bad mood today. So I'm glad we had this today because this

really cheered me up getting the chat with you Ryan, because I just, I absolutely hate today.

So tax day. So, but no, I just, I think that our liberty is much, much better secured in a purely

voluntary system of exchange, which a narco capitalism allows for. And as I said, it's not going

to evolve into a war of all against all. That's just, that's silly. It doesn't make sense

theoretically. It's not born out by experience. And, you know, minarchism, I mean, sure.

If you said to me, hey, Joe, we can trade this awful social democracy that we have today for,

you know, the, the, the, the perfect minarchist state of nosic's dreams. I'd say, okay, fine.

You know, that's obviously a huge improvement, right? But I'd still say we're not safe.

We're not safe from the state. It's just going to be a question of, well, when does the next crisis

come? And when do people start trading away their liberties? Are liberties?

Well, in many ways, right? Like, I just don't even want to bother with someone who's trying to

explain to me why the state is necessary, right? That seems like just a waste of time. If one is in

favor of freedom, why even bother also using your time to argue, oh, well, we don't want too

much freedom because that would be probably, I encounter that a lot from, from virtues,

virtues are, they, they say a lot of good things. For example, about, oh, we have to cut the income

tax and we want to greatly reduce government power. But then they become downright upset.

If you suggest that maybe the constitution isn't this perfect thing, that strikes this perfect

balance in terms of state power and freedom and that sort of thing. And that just strikes me as

like, why are we still, there's no danger of the state going away in the short term. So why are we

even bothering with arguments to justify why we need the state seems like our energies could

better be spent elsewhere. But I would say I would suggest the thing about the anarcho-capitalist,

though, is that many make this seem to be making this claim that once you get rid of the state,

then you don't have to worry about it anymore. As if once the state is gone, then it'll never come

back, right? That's an important point that has to be made is let's say you somehow succeeded

in getting rid of the state. Well, there will be people immediately conspiring to recreate it.

And I think that really drives home the importance of making these arguments over and over again

on the problems of state power and really just highlighting the necessity of freedom. But you make

the point in your book, right? Is that there is an important distinction here between anarcho-capitalism

and minorcharism, which, you know, right, the average person listening to this podcast is like,

I've never been in a discussion that even was on this topic. Some of the hardcore devotees to the

world, to the movement of libertarianism, get into that. But isn't the key distinction here just

simply? Do you think a state monopoly is important? Isn't that the fundamental question then?

Yeah, I do think that's the fundamental question. And as you said, even if we're able to, you know,

get rid of the state, there's always going to be those who seek to reconstitute the state,

because the state is a very valuable thing to be in possession of in terms of being able to use it

in a cronistic manner. I mean, that's one of the great problems of state powers that it's used to

buy, to buy votes basically. I mean, you look at the policies that we have today and it's,

you know, it's concentrated benefits to fuse costs. I mean, that's what the state always turns into.

And no, there's no reason to have a state to begin with and there's certainly no reason to want one.

I think Rothbard, Rothbard has a great, a great takedown of nosics, anarchy, state, and utopia,

the immaculate conception of the state, which if, if any of your listeners have not read that,

should definitely take a look. I absolutely love that.

Well, Joseph Solis-Molen, thank you for joining me today here on Radio Rothbard. And yes,

if you are interested, I highly recommend checking out the book. You can go to the Libertarian

Institute to do that. You could also go on Amazon and just look up Joseph's name. He's got

some other books there. I think that you might find interesting as well. One on China that I think

is definitely worth reading. So thank you, everyone, out there for listening today. We'll be back

next time with more, so we'll see you then.