Welcome to Keith's night, don't tread on anyone in the libertarian Institute today. I am joined by Philip W. Magnus a senior research, faculty and director of research and education at the American Institute for economic research. He is also the author of 1619 project a critique mr. Magnus dr. Magnus. I should say, where is the best place to find your collection of research? I see the main area to come to
was a ier dot-org. That's our website, like maintain a continuous publication stream on there. It also has links and everything under my profile to the academic work that I put out the books as well. Why is studying history important? Well, you know that this goes back to something that fa Hayek and Ludwig von mises and several great classical liberal thinkers pointed out is our perception of the past including See events and economic events. The vast shapes.
How we understand similar events in the present, so I always give the example, the classic one, is the Great Depression. The fact that there's a lot of misinformation out there about the way that the Great Depression unfolded, their claims that the New Deal was the solution to the Great Depression
and it worked. It turns out the empirical evidence is is not very strong on that shows actually the opposite effect but the widespread perception of that has led to now, basically A Century of recurring attempts to repeat the Great Depression story every time that there's an economic downturn. So it's a classic example of a bad understanding of the past as leading to bad policies in the present. How can I differentiate between a good historian and a bad historian?
Well, there are a lot of bad historians today. We see this all around us, I've Tangled with a few of them, Nancy MacLean. And Kevin Bruce come to mind but I would even go so far as to say that the majority of Scholars that are coming out of the week, Elite ranks of the history
profession. Ivy League's also top-tier state universities are not the most scrupulous Also, they seem to be political activists on the left figure the far left, first and foremost, and Scholars, may be a tertiary effect of their entire profession. And I see this as a very alarming Trend but it's something that is worn out. The empirical data. The history field is moved in a deeply politicized, Direction toward the left for the last 15
to 20 years in particular. And with that, you've seen a decline in scholarly rigor. So It used to be the case that, you know, you think a historian knows something about their subject matter and if they say a factual Claim about an event in the past, you can take it as a pretty good authority. They probably know what they're talking about. I would say that's no longer the case. Oftentimes historians, not only make mistakes about the past.
They willfully misrepresenting it because they are trying to argue a political point in the present day. So I would say, when reading historical claims approaching with the screw And I'm using I Look to primary sources go dig up the documents themselves especially when they quote
somebody. So I just Tangled with another historian Quinn Slobodan who published all these articles, purporting to show that would big Von mises was a racist and I started looking at the quotes that he was using. It turns out he edited the quotes chop them in half and would remove parts of the quotation where mises had condemned racism and Eugenics. And all these horrible policies that the professors are really advancing.
So it's really, you know, doing the homework doing the the necessary work to check the sources. But unfortunately it means that we as scrutinizing readers and interpreters with the past have our own homework.
Every time we encounter something like this and scholarship who are some of the best historians out there who go straight to the primary sources and are able to use a good understanding of History to build contacts and give the reader a real understanding of what happened and why bill. So, This is a never smaller field. Unfortunately some of them that will be familiar to your readers
and your listeners. So David Beto who's a professor emeritus at the University of Alabama has done some top-notch superb excavation of historical material, especially on African-American history, its relation to civil society and institutions around there. Currently. He's working on Rose Wilder Lane And Zora Neale Hurston as early, we were hearing voices of the 20th century and just really doing the Deep homework to dig up their work.
You know, I say look around to see who some of the scholars that are working, not necessarily at the elite institutions, the ivy league but some of the best historians today you find them at teaching colleges you find them at
smaller institutions. My friend Marcus Witcher is a another just superb scholar who published co-authored a book with Rachel Ferguson who's a moral philosophy and economics professor and this is looking at the title of the books, Black Liberation through the marketplace. It's looking at free market approaches to dealing with the problems of segregation and racism in the past. This is not something that's coming out of Yale or Harvard.
It's coming out of two. Very small school institutions of professors that are mainly involved in teaching. And yet I would say They have produced something that's up ended their entire field because the field is just not politically interested in looking at how markets work. What are some of the most misunderstood or underappreciated historical events? Well I'll focus on my own area and this is the economics of slavery. The economics of slavery is a
deeply complicated subject. It's constantly discussed and things like the 1619 project and it's popular among lead institutions. They talk about the new history capitalism but this is an idiot logical history. What they're trying to do is tie the notion Capitalism. And by that, they mean laissez-faire. Free market capitalism to the institution of slavery and say the two were waited at the hip emerged symbol taneous Lee and
the long version of the story. Condenses basically to a bullet point that bullet point is that America became a wealthy country on the backs of slavery on the backs of people that were forced into labor and basically beaten to perform this. And the problem here is it comes from a really flimsy. Easy set of economic claims to misunderstanding of the institution of slavery and how its economics performed.
If you dig deep into that institution, you find that slavery is indeed profitable to a very small number of plantation owners. But the only reason that it persists and survives is because it has heavy Public Finance investment from the state, from the government slavery is subsidized, directly and indirectly by the federal and state governments before Civil War, the most obvious examples.
You look at the Fugitive Slave Act, who is paying for the Fugitive, Slave, patrols to round up people that are escaping on the Underground Railroad and send them back shall to plantations into slavery. And the answer is is very clearly there. It's a government, subsidy that it's taking place. You also find military expenditures on fortifications and armaments throughout the cell are not just to repel
foreign. Ders. They're there to put down slave revolts so this is a massive public expenditure that takes place before the Civil War and it's all to make this otherwise extremely inefficient institution, one, that is premise and kind of like a throwback to feudalism and that's certainly how the slave
owner saw it themselves. They saw themselves as feudal Lords of a plantation masters of Plantation and considered capitalism, a, an intrusive invention of British industry in Northern industry and a free labor economy that was antithetical to slavery. And when you start realizing that, you find out that some of these claims that are being made by modern Scholars and by the 1619 project, several things like that or are not only wrong, they're just completely inverted
from reality. So I'd say study these complex Institutions and while deep into the sources. But slavery itself is a major area of where there's A lot of bad information out there that comes from week scholarship and I think we can serve the purpose of correcting that narrative by digging into the history of how slavery clashed with capitalism, how abolitionist, dating all the way back to Adam Smith campaign
and crusaded against slavery. He'll Someone Like Richard Cobden most famous for repealing the Corn Laws in England and delivering the doctrine of free trade. Its first major policy Victory worldwide. Also after he wins That he becomes an abolitionist and trains Frederick Douglass to Follows the same tactics, he used to advance free trade, to take them and apply them to fighting slavery. So this is an area that I think
is very fertile for research. It's something that's badly misunderstood and misrepresented in the scholarly mainstream which is mostly just idiot logical at this point. So, the main fallacy is saying that America large number of people benefited from X. When in reality, some people benefited at the expense of others, like saying, well, America really benefited from, you know, going into Afghanistan, Iraq, and all these other countries. I mean, look at Lockheed Martin's profits.
Sure, sure, that that's that. That is the heart of this fallacy with colonialism and slavery. It, is there any Main fallacy that we want to extract that we could learn from and make sure we don't repeat the same mistake today. Well thank you just hit the nail on the head. And what I think is more representative of is these are people that view economics, as a zero-sum game that they think that there's a fixed amount of
wealth in the world. And it's claimed by certain people and taken away from other people. It's the exploiters and they exploited, its the Bourgeois and
the proletariat. And really I, you know, I use these terms and Additionally because it does come back to a very marxian mindset that a lot of people approach the economic past and they cannot view the distribution and use and creation of wealth creation of resources in anything other than a material contest between the Haves and the Have Nots and therefore, everything devolves to a zero-sum game when that
stopped reality at all. Bonkers through who George Fitzhugh was and what his justification was for the continuance of slave labor. So, George Fitzhugh is a slave owning theorist from the, the South that in the decade. Or so. Before the American Civil War, he probably becomes the single most prominent intellectual proponent of slavery. He engages in debate, It's with
the abolitionists. So you have George Fitzhugh, arguing the pro-slavery side and Wendell Phillips is arguing the anti-slavery side and a famous debate.
They had with each other pitch, who publishes a series of books to ebooks and the 1850s and then dozens upon dozens of Articles and the bowels review, which was the most widely circulated in red, Southern magazine at the time and part of his theory, we'll really the Crux of his theory is an argument for slavery is a natural order of society.
He Is the market as chaotic. He used Freedom as something that's extended to an undeserving and unworthy race of people and he views Society is something that should be hierarchical e structured. But the way that he comes to this, this reasoning is really kind of a roundabout story. That's often missed in the way that historians discussed this issue because Fitzhugh is a self-described.
Socialist, he thinks that free the Plantation Slaves system has perfected, the model of socialism, because what does it do? What provides for all the workers? It gives them housing, it gives them food. It gives them clothing and gives them tasks. He basically sees the plantation is a centralized economy ruled over by a benevolent. Plantation owner and says that, you know, the Socialist will only look at this model, they have a way to him, play it to
plan their entire countries. If Factory owners would only adopt this model and he wants to Sport slavery in the factories. They done an entire way to plan their economies around this. He actually makes a an argument that presages directly what Karl Marx says and Das kapital that basically that wage labor is a capitalist institution that exploits the laborer to the benefit of the capital owner. So he comes up with a theory of surplus-value, he claims that, this is what the capital is
ceases. Away from the laborer in the amount of Labor performed and does so unjustly, and he views slavery as correcting this problem. So he's kind of like this Proto marxian theorist, that draws very heavily on earlier, social socialists. He writes on the, some of the French utopian socialists or is inspiration, and then Thomas Carlyle. The English Tory socialist historian are his major influences and this is the dominant pro-slavery ideology in
the evil. Civil War, what's a real problem for those who say that slavery in capitalism of the laissez-faire variety or wedded at the hip because fit you, in addition to being a socialist, as an avowed enemy of Adam Smith, he's an avowed enemy of free trade. He opens the first chapter of his, his first major book on slavery, social science, sociology for the self not by a defense of slavery itself, but by a broadside against free
markets and free trade. He says laissez-faire is an institution of chaos and society and says, quote is at war with all types of slavery everywhere. He says, the books of Adam Smith should be quote cast Into the Fire because they will undo the slave system. When it comes to what, what lessons can be learned, because slavery is often thrown around much, like saying that someone belongs to the National Socialist Party of Germany, it's not about really learning the
lessons. It's about making your opponent in that moment, feel small. But when it comes to what lessons can be learned from the history of slavery, what can we appreciate today? What would you say? We could learn from the history of slavery. I'd say the first lesson and most And listen is to study how we got rid of slavery, how the world came to view.
This is a bad thing. How we exterminated the institution in most parts of the world today and this is an age-old problem that goes back to ancient times. You know, the slavery is an institution in biblical times slavery. As an institution in almost every society in world history. It isn't really until the, the late 18th century Enlightenment movements that people start to
actually question this. In systematic ways, there are a few precursors to that and I'm certain, you can find if you go back into the ancient world, people that absolutely denounce slavery. But the first systematic effort to exterminate this institution emerges in the late 18th early 19th centuries. Well, the lesson here is to ask the question. Well, who are the people that are leading? The case of why slavery is wrong, and one of the earliest. Major abolitionist thinkers is
Adam Smith himself. He addresses the problem of slavery and all of his major works. It's in the theory of moral sentiments. It's in The Wealth of Nations and it's addressed in several of his surviving lectures as a college professor on questions of justice and jurisprudence in an all three of these areas, he attacks slavery as economically, destructive fundamentally immoral and politically corrupting. And it's that last point, that really gets to the heart of the
matter. Because he asked the question, why is Avery, even when it's recognized, is a moral evil as a wrong. So difficult to get rid of and his answer is, their basic, is that slave owners are basically rent Seekers there. An interest group they didn't mesh themselves in the legislature wherever they come into power. And when they do, so, what is the first thing that they, they do?
Once, they've seized the control of the legislature, they start voting themselves resources from the public treasury. It's a prop up and extend slavery. So Spencer really, one of the first people that diagnosis. Slavery in a systematic way here and this gives generations of abolitionists the tools that they need to start understanding what the problem is with slavery. The slave power is how it becomes referred to by the mid 19th century through heirs and descendants of Smithy and
economics. They start saying well slavery is in fact, a very evil pernicious interest group that has captured the reins of government. If you want to take it on you need to figure out how to undermine those. Special interest claims that it's made and subsequent abolitionists do that. The first attack on slavery, goes after the slave trade of the international slave trade itself and this comes out of England, it's a group of of free-market minded.
They call them political liberal wigs, in the aftermath of the American Revolution. They start to mount a case against the slave trade. The first bill is put forth in 1791, it's unsuccessful because it runs Head-on into the Liverpool Merchants industry, which is benefiting of the slave
system, the slave trade system. They wage basically a 20-year campaign to abolish it and succeed in 1807, and 1808 through series of of parliamentary acts by taking on the interest group in chipping away at the institution. Well, then there's another two decades log that they have to push through to actually abolish slavery in the British Empire. And this is when Frederick Douglass goes over to the Kingdom in the 1840s on a speaking tour.
He is introduced to several of the veterans of this movement that abolish slavery in the British Empire and picks up on those tactics. And realizes that there is any, a liberal classical liberal intellectual philosophy behind all of this, everything that he's doing. If you read his autobiography, he directly credits Richard Cobden and John bright for showing him the tactics that he's going to bring to the United States to fight slavery.
So I guess this is another way of saying that Libertarians classical liberals free-market, thinkers need to ensure it claimed. This is part of our Legacy. This was one of the great policy and strategic and moral victories of the 19th century, along with the elevation of free
trade. It was the elevation of the anti-slavery, cause even to the point that if you said you were a classical liberal or just a straight-up liberal and say like 1850 and the British world that meant you, Probably believed in three things. One is free markets and free trade. To anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and three abolition of slavery.
Those are the major planks of the liberal platform and the fact that we succeeded so much on the abolition of slavery as methods kind of faded into the background. We don't talk about it as much as a part of what free market theory in tables anymore. And yet, it's there in, was there from the very beginning and Adam Smith.
So is it the ideas and simply changing public opinion through spotting these ideas that slavery became weekend and then no longer has recognized on a large scale, institutionalized basis, or was it people started resisting? Or there were technological changes that no longer made it profitable, see all three of the above, but you need that 40 Foundation. There he need the moral Foundation to understand why this institution is wrong.
So, when it starts to be challenged by other labor, Moments when the South starts to lag economically behind the rest of the country. People start asking the question. Well maybe something is wrong with slavery, not only in the economic sense, but in the moral
sense. So having having both of those arguments there together, allow the abolition movement to basically triangulate the issue and make a very forceful case against it. Now, it does in mesh itself in a very violent, and brutal and bloody, and tragic War and the civil And the way that that was handled and played out I guess another way of saying it is, there are very few people that come out of the Civil War looking good. There are Bad actors to be found all over the place.
Now, the Confederacy itself does go to war to defend slavery. It's actually the union hesitates to make slavery, anti-slavery a component of its cause although on the periphery, it certainly is there and it moves to the center by the war. So you find several of these tactics basically coming to fruition but it needed that intellectual basis there. In other words, what happened in 1865 could not have happened without a previous half-century of people.
Making the intellectual case against slavery to recognize that it is wrong. The reason I think this is so important is because it's usually the monetary side that's focused on when it comes to slavery, commonly referred to as free. Labor. And the problem is you are not compensated monetarily, but if you read Frederick douglass's autobiography, they got allowances and they got food water clothing and shelter.
So if you don't have the classical liberal libertarian, understanding of it's wrong to initiate violence against peaceful, people force them to do something against their will. Well, then, I'm not surprised that both zielinski and Putin are practicing conscription and that's not really front and center at the news, I had to dig so hard to find. And something I go. Oh yeah, it's actually everywhere. But once you really look for it.
But first, you got to find like the keywords to what to look for. So that's why I wanted to. And then one final thing, I think this is the last thing. How was the average person sold on the cock? I can't imagine the average person is thinking well that fits you as making a good point. How is the average person sold on such a blatant scam? These people can own these people and they Can't even own property or make decisions for
themselves. Well, the self-constructed a mythology around the slave system and a mythology around its major output, which is cotton. It's called The King Cotton thesis and this came into Vogue in the 1850s. It basically claimed that cotton is such a crucial component of not only the national output, but the international World economy that all other Industries would come crashing down.
If the cotton trade did not exist and they construct this Story by noting that the southern cotton is exported to across the ocean, to Europe, to the factories of Europe, which turned into textiles and sent to the factories and the north turned into textiles that they're all sorts of economic Arrangements in it. And the claim here was that, it's so Central to economic production that anyone or anything that makes war on slavery.
As also making war on its own well-being, would undermine the world economy and throw. Entire country into a recession if they attack slavery and actually convince themselves of this during the Civil War. Well, it turns out they were exercising and other economic fallacy.
They were using a single product theory of production to understand and interpret the entire US economy and what happens during the Civil War will the Confederacy gets cut off from nominally National Industry but World Trade by both the blockade and they also adopt a policy of intentionally restricting. Their own exports to try to lower Europe into the world and to the war on their behalf.
Well, what happens England goes elsewhere and finds cotton produced in other ways, they turn to Egypt, they turn to India. They turn to the British West Indies and find cotton produced through wage labor. And that just basically burst the entire bubble of this notion that cotton is the driver of the world economy.
So basically what ended up being a line of propaganda in the 1850s comes Crashing Down. A mere in the action and course of the Civil War. Now, I mention this because it's it's pertinent to the scholarship today. Many of these theorists on the left that are claiming slavery and capitalism are wedded at the hip have unintentionally rehabilitated King Cotton economic ideology.
They're essentially making the exact same claim that cotton was the centerpiece of American Wealth and the American economy. Although they they take it from an anti-slavery perspective, they're coming at it from the the left.
But nonetheless, they accept the economic claims of the King Cotton theorists and all we have to do is to look at the Civil War itself as a direct debunking of that, entire economic narrative, and yet we found some of these Works neo-king cotton theorists essentially have gone on to attain Great Heights in the history profession neo-king cotton theorists is and that people today you say you don't worry.
Actually good for the economy. So we should we should continue what to funnel money to Raytheon. And yeah, hundreds of thousands of people get killed but really gets the gears of the economy going. It is the broken window fallacy over and over and over again. We heard the same thing. The the popular claim that WWII got us out of the Great Depression Wars are destructive entities, they destroy physical capital, they destroy human
lives much like slavery. So you know, here's one of the other car Cost the economic cost of slavery in the denying, individual freedom, and undying agency. To people that are suffering under this institution, the enslaved people themselves, you know, you are basically that the opportunity cost of the institution is you never get to see or realize the human capital of what people would produce if
they were otherwise free. You see, only the destruction, same thing with war, You end up waging a war. Maybe it, attains a military outcome and you claim that, hey, we put all this money to invigorate certain companies were contractors and that has jump-started their industry. Well, yes, it certainly has been an infusion of armaments into into an economy Armament production, but the question we always have to ask is Economist is what could that money have
been spent on? Otherwise what was this other use? That would never occur. That Never Was realized. When we put soldiers on the battlefield, we ask the question. What would those soldiers have done if instead of being shot down in an act of War instead of losing their lives or being horribly maimed? What would they have done with their lives and the alternative situation? And it's something that we never see.
So, it's seen versus the Unseen taken to its full fruition One of the first time I heard about the American Institute for economic research was when you and Ed Stringham and Jeffrey Tucker came out when it was maybe the least unpopular thing to do in my lifetime. Like it would have been Harry Brown coming out and talking about blowback after 9/11. And then, right after is you guys coming out against the lockdowns in like March of 2020. So the question is what
empirical methods are criteria. Can we use to determine the effectiveness of lockdowns and mandates? Well, this is a fun area that I work on in very active ways. There are all sorts of tools. From econometrics, we call them causal inference techniques. And what they try to do is look for a natural experiments cases, where one country or one state, or even sometimes. One city or Locale deviated from the policy of lockdowns to see if true.
Counterfactual that real-time counterfactual, they perform very differently. And this goes back all the way to March 2020. So, opposed lockdowns from the beginning, when the whole country was going into lockdown and when they were sweeping across the world, I had my reasons to be skeptical of it because I did did some reading in the epidemiology Read Literature. And what first tip me off is that as recently as 2019, the World Health Organization was publishing panda.
MC response, plans to influenza that said, above all else, do not walk down, this doesn't work. We have experience and data from the Spanish Flu in 1918. We have all sorts of historical evidence that shows that every time this has been tried, it is a catastrophic failure. It doesn't deliver on what it promises to do. And oh, by the way, it's extremely susceptible to
political misuse and abuse. And part of that winter, also said that the way that lockdowns Argued by some of the epidemiology and Health Professions is entirely contingent upon these. Hypothetical models, computer modeling. This was the Neil Ferguson Imperial College model that burst onto the scene at the beginning of the pandemic and basically convinced the United States and Great Britain to go into lockdowns and then eventually the rest of the world followed.
Well, it turns out, this was a computer model that had some very erroneous premises behind it, for example, a Didn't even account for the situation of nursing homes. It didn't account for all sorts of very common circumstances that emerge in the first few weeks of covid-19, which is that the elderly were, especially vulnerable. And the young not so much. So I start reading this model and asking the question. Well, why are we even following
this thing? It seems like the junk model seems like it's poorly designed and poorly constructed and there are no real counterfactual. Asked in the real world to show why we should even listen to this Niall Ferguson guy, other than that, he's on TV saying that if we don't walk down tomorrow tens of millions of people die and oh, by the way, he had done this during mad cow disease.
He had done this during the avian flu during all these previous pandemics and none of his predictions ever came true. Well, the first few weeks, the the pandemic, I noticed something very early on that the Ferguson model for the United States and you UK had been adapted to the rest of Europe. They eventually released projections for all countries around the world. On what would happen if a they walk down, be they had kind of a lighter touch approach that had
partial lockdown or see. They did nothing at all. They stayed open and the model assume catastrophe. If they stayed opened slightly less than catastrophe. If they did a mild light touch voluntary approach and the disease would go away. It would peak in June, or July, 20, 20, and then dropped to nothing. If everybody walked down that was the basis of the model and they did a country. By country that I noticed, one thing they had published results for Sweden Sweden as we know did
not go into lockdown. They were one of the only countries in the world that are only on said, no, we're going to go the other course. We're going to keep our schools open, keep businesses open and just basically whether the pandemic through usual, Normal, Public Health measures wash,
Your hands stay home. If you're sick, try to isolate the elderly, Sweden, unfortunately didn't get that plan into place early enough, so they had the same problem and their nursing homes, but otherwise, they stayed open and I start watching the Swedish numbers come in in according to the Ferguson model and some of the coffee cats that were
produced shortly thereafter. Sweden was supposed to be like in the throngs of covid Apocalypse by around June 2020 Neal Distance model was predicting, somewhere the nature of 80 to 90,000. People did by July 1st 2020, then I start working at the actual statistics in Sweden, has maybe two to three thousand dead, even though they stayed open. So the catastrophe model failed and real-time the catastrophe model turned out to be based on an error. It overstated its ability to
stop covid in an understated. Basically, the ability of a free Society to or this while staying open. And through that real-time test, we had our direct demonstration that the lockdowns were not doing what they had been sold on what they had been promised to achieve.
And that realization basically got me to the point where I started writing and Publishing on this on a regular basis and became pretty vocal, in opposing, the lockdowns, of course, Neil Ferguson some of these modelers, they eventually get questioned and asked about the L case why it's not following their course and what did he do? Well like a good University Professor he lied. He claimed that he never ran a sweet and model.
He got Imperial College is Media team to deny that they had ever made these projections and claim that they they must have come from someone erroneously using his computer model to project things which one I just said well quick-paced. Here's a copy of the link on your own website. We're back. Chin in March 2020, you published your Swedish data, you're clearly lying right now.
But unfortunately, that's that's what we've been facing for the entire pandemic is epidemiology modelers that are wedded to this junk methodology claiming causal results that they could not with Jetta mately demonstrate through the tools that they are using. And ignoring the real world evidence that contradicts them, When it comes to states in America of the 50 states, not all of them. Had the same lockdown procedures
or legislations that followed. Is there any correlation between strict, lockdowns, heavy mask, mandates, heavy vax, mandates and lower numbers? Absolutely not and I've studied this exhaustively. I've run several empirical models to try to find some pattern any pattern that statistically significant that shows an association, In between the stringency of countermeasures mask, mandate school closures, business closures, walk towns. You name it. And better performance.
During covid-19. It simply, isn't there. You cannot find a statistically significant result. What you do find is that several of the harshest walk down States especially in the northeast or the ones that were hardest hit in the first way. What you do find is clear evidence that they follow these walk down models such as the College approach and they tried to implement everything that Imperial College said to do close your school's closure businesses. Tell everyone to stay home for
months. On end prohibit. People from going out in public, the California. They were arresting paddleboarders and people that were just like walking on the beach at night. During lockdowns, Newark New Jersey had very heavy arrest patterns. Especially in, like, minority neighborhoods people that were not social distancing and we're
going outside. So, all these policies that were enacted in very heavy-handed Draconian ways occurred simultaneously to an outbreak in the nursing homes, especially in the Northeast, that was absolutely catastrophic. By the end of the first year of the pandemic, I ran some numbers and estimated than some of the states in the Northeast one-in-eight nursing home residents prior to covid-19 passed away. During that first year, just died of covid-19. Those are catastrophic numbers.
Well, you start asking the question. What's the reason why a nursing home outbreaks were so bad? Well, they adopted a policy. That was premise Toronto. Epidemiology modeling in hospitals. They thought that hospitals were going to be overwhelmed by covid cases. And therefore, they'd run out of bed space, they've run out of rooms, run out of doctors and nurses, and then Public Health catastrophe happens.
So what did they do? Well, they follow the, the Governor Cuomo plan in New York state Cuomo decided in Ordered that hospital beds needed to preserve be preserved and kept open as much as possible. In one of his ways of doing. This was to quickly discharge covid, Patients Out, basically move covid, Patients Out of the hospitals, in into other
facilities to convalesce. So, as soon as they had been stabilized, let's get them out of the hospitals and free up the beds for this coming wave of covid patients that never quite arrived. Well, what did he do? He said that the convalescent facilities need to include nursing homes. So he passed an order that forced nursing homes to readmit covid, positive patients, that
were still on the recovery. You put elderly covid carriers into nursing homes and these are closed to Silla teas, and suddenly covid is spread to the staff. Suddenly it's spreading to the ventilation systems. And next thing, you know, the entire nursing home has come down with the Copa del break. Our single most, Most vulnerable population, all because he tried to centrally plan convalescent facilities by using nursing homes, as the Overflow.
So, what we have is a queer demonstration, not only that lockdowns did not work. We cannot find any empirical evidence so that we do know empirically that they made the nursing home situation significantly worse than it would have been. Had they simply done nothing.
One of one more thing about the masks, I remember in probably March of 2020, my friends and I went to our favorite place in downtown Chandler and they said hey guys, we do require masks and I looked around, I saw everyone sitting down I go even though no one's wearing them they go you just have to wear them to your table and I go. Well this is we have to wear them to walk to that seat that I could see over there. And we're going to sit It there for four hours as we have every
weekend for the last. I don't know to two or three years and this was the policy. So I said, well, that's crazy. A lot of places in Arizona were doing that on the orders of Governor Doug, Ducey. They even did it in New York when I went there and it was just unbelievable. So if I wear a cloth mask, am I less likely just as likely more likely to contract covid-19, then if I had not won, At all.
Well, that's the absurdity that we found through this entire charade of the past two years as prior to covid-19, the medical literature on masking was extremely ambiguous. And that's a nice way of saying that they had not found. Clear, statistically significant results that masks achieve, what they promised to achieve. In fact, the Niall Ferguson model out of Imperial College the paper, it was based on.
If you read the second to last paragraph of the paper, it says we don't include masking in our our model because we don't have enough data or evidence to assume. Either way that this works, that was the state of the academic literature. Before covid-19 will covid came along and all of a sudden it became politically fashionable. The claim that masks work. So they started putting out all these junk studies badly designed.
Some of them are survey instrument, some of them were purported models that used incorrect data like the IH Ami model Came out of the University of Washington was claiming that masks would save tens of thousands of lives. And it turned out that their formulas in the model where were premised on months old mask usage rates so they were using numbers from the beginning of the pandemic.
When nobody was wearing a mask to make projections in like October November of 2020, at which point the masking rights in the public, we're about 90 percent. So, there were claiming And that there were all these gains to be had by adopting mask policies that people were already using. It just turned out that those policies didn't work. They didn't deliver on anything. That was clearly claimed them, but they did become a very powerful political signal.
It became a way to Virtue signal as you walk around in public, by wearing a mask by dressing up in these rituals, and even more. So by screaming at people who were violating the rituals, you know, we all saw the Like driving along the road in a private car windows up and everything single driver and they're wearing a mask. And you're asking the question, what's the purpose of this? It's pseudoscience. It is purely a ritualistic behavior designed to signal that. Hey, I am complying with
covid-19. I'm a good follower of dr. Fauci and and your lesser than me because you're not doing this type of ritual. Since What we ended up doing, unfortunately is because there was a mad rush to vindicate.
The science of masks. It created a over perception of their effectiveness in the general public, the media line became that masks work and what happens when people put their faith in masks and then start taking riskier behaviors thinking that the mask is going to help them and save them.
When it turns out, it's just this little flimsy piece of cloth or tissue paper, or whatever, they're made of And people are going out in public and the master really aren't delivering anything other than maybe in some very, very narrow situations. Like there's a reason that we wear masks and doctors offices and that's basically because the doctor and the nurse the medical facility Personnel.
They do not want to contaminate their patients with their own, exhale breath, and droplets that come from that. That's why they wear masks. It's a practice during surgery, but in the general public that's never been demonstrated and the stud. He's I've read several of them work through their methodology and I'll just say this, it's
extremely flimsy. It's extremely dependent upon assumptions that were made prior to the studies design and execution that basically pre assume the effectiveness of masks and then report to validate their own results now. And it's a two-year cost of not being able to see other people's facial expressions. Imagine your favorite TV show, everyone's wearing masks masks, you can girly girl. Person. But you know what? At least they just seem safe. SNL is the best.
You know, they don't wear masks throughout the whole show until the very end when they say we promised and and then they they all look at come out in it. If I get the vaccine, I'm less likely to get covid-19 true or false. I'd say generally true to an extent because it's been very dependent on the specific variants. I'm not an immunologist, I'm not a vaccine scientist, I don't know. The the isms underlying it but the everything that I've seen is that the initial variants.
They were designed to combat the ended up being relatively effective against what happens. Is this is a disease just like any other coronavirus it mutates. So what you find out is that the vaccine itself is not a preventative against the mutants, it's not a present preventive of these other variants and we've learned that in real time that people that have been vaccinated. Did have gotten covid of a different variant, six months later or three months later or maybe a year later.
But that's the nature of this particular, type of virus from everything that I've heard, and read in the medical literature, I do generally think that the vaccines were a good technological, innovation to have in the sense that they do seem to have reduce the severity of the disease, especially among the elderly, the most vulnerable.
At the same time, the way that the government Controlled the Melt was catastrophically, brain did in the way that it it plans, its economics of, it's a understood public perception of it. And this goes, even back before they started mandating it when they did the initial roll out.
If you remember there was a moment, I think it was around March or April of 2021. When just as they are opening up eligibility to non-essential workers to non-elderly tune on Bo. Herbal people, the government briefly suspended the Johnson and Johnson vaccine and what it did is it put vaccine access on the shelf for almost a month as and they were investigating some medical side effects. And yes, there are side effects for from almost any type of
vaccine for any disease. But it's always like a personal risk assessment. You want to take, but you can't race almost to the moment that fauci and the The CDC and FDA announced that they were suspending, the Johnson, and
Johnson vaccine. That's when vaccine uptake, in the United States started to plummet almost overnight, then they start mandating it and mandating it in ways that are not particularly constructive, mandating boosters, mandating vaccination, among people that are in the lowest vulnerability groups. IE young people all because it becomes a mechanism for power rather than actually fighting
the disease. There are paying attention to what's being delivered through the vaccine itself which should be a tool to help people survive the disease to help improve their chances of having a very mild case of covid-19 if they encounter, whether it's the current variant or a future variant and the vaccines do seem to do that.
But the way that they took, it was like this top-down centralized command and control and in at all, they ended up doing was undermining The public's trust and confidence in vaccines. And rolling it out in the most slipshod, haphazard way imaginable. Just a central planners always do and hence, we are in the situation that we are in. So do you think that fauci was telling the truth when he was on 60 Minutes?
And he said, people should not be wearing masks, it might block a little droplet but other than that it's no reaction. Is that actually him telling the reality of what people should have been doing at the time. And I'll be blunt. I think falchi just makes it up as he goes. Yeah I think falchi is Is is basically a fraud as it comes to
scientific knowledge. I mean at one point he trained in allergies and disease science and he probably made medical contributions at some point in his career, but he became a bureaucrat, he became a government bureaucrat.
And I've seen direct evidence that this and the Freedom of Information Act files that have gotten falchi is best understood as a public health official, who reads the cues from the media Including what the media wants, to be argued summarizes them and has has AIDS summarize them in bullet points and then he repeats them back to the same media and they use that as validation of their already existing point.
This is what happened in the lockdown science and in the aftermath of the Great Barrington declaration. We found that, as soon as the Declaration went out fauci and the other NIH officials had an email chain for the revision. Basically saying, what are we going to do is our response to this because it's challenging, lockdown science. And Just call and sent out this directive. It says, we need to take down these Fringe epidemiologist and, and discredit them. All the very first responses
that come from falchi. He is cutting and pasting articles from the nation Magazine from Wired Magazine, in PR all these media, Outlets that are extolling, the virtues of lockdowns, and sending it to a staff and say, oh, I put these into bullet points, they give him the bullet points, and he reads the media's Articles back to them. And they say well, look, see, dr. Fauci affirmed us. That's not science.
That's a circular Echo chamber and I think that's been his entire approach to the pandemic since day one were their final covid? Question, were there any studies from Pfizer or moderna or the CDC that said people X number of people are not getting vaccinated. X number of people will die, as a result of not getting vaccinated. Is there something we can put The test because the White House literally said for the unvaccinated year looking forward to a winter of death and
something. Yeah yeah yeah something like that. And I just I'm not seeing it but then again maybe I'm not. I feel like it would be being reported by like all the CNN's of the world. And if if that were happening, how can we now test whether or not all those people should have been mandated to get the shot or not? Well, I think It ultimately comes down to a personal decision. I mean, You know, your own health circumstances better than
anyone else I haven't again. I'm not a virologist, I'm not an immunologist, I don't study that aspect of medical Sciences. I study Health economics, quite a bit and I just out of necessity and I study the policies to implement these things. And I think what's where the vaccine issue is gone? Awry is the policy decisions. Not the science itself behind it. The policy decisions are basically misrepresented to the
What what is at stake here? They oversold the long-term preventive effect of the vaccines and they oversold the benefits of the mandates in the ability to execute on a mandate. And that just created just a classic Central planning problem with all the public Choice attributes that come into play with all of the in competencies that we know of bureaucracy, I guess another way of saying it would be, I know more trust the government to plan its way through it.
Pandemic that I would trust it to plan its way through an economic recession. Our data from the CDC today. Suggest, you know that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick and that it's not just in the clinical trials, but it's also in real-world data. You wrote a book with Jason Brennan titled cracks in the Ivory Tower. What is your thesis and that
book bill? So the gist of cracks in the Ivory Tower is looking at the institutions of Academia institutions of higher education, Ed from a public Choice perspective and asking what are the incentive structures that yield many of the problems we see with higher ed. If you read the higher ed press, we know that the problems of bound, there are too many PhD Seekers for too. Few jobs. For example, we know that universities are a very inefficient way of delivering knowledge to students.
We know that students don't retain most of what they learned in the classroom. We know that cheating is rampant. All that degrees or soul, but all these vague platitudes and like how you're going to improve yourself and get this career and ideas and critical thinking that yields great riches and intellectual rewards.
And instead what students are doing is they're graduating with the giant pile of debt and very little, in the way of economic prospects, we know that internal to the university system that fraud is actually not only tolerated. Sometimes it's celebrated and rewarded in academic works. So we're asking the question. Why are these things the case? Why are these problems existed in real? What turns up, the conventional answers are all in a category.
We refer to as kind of like the conspiracy theory versions who are some cases. We call them the Poltergeist theories of how higher ed works and these are things like, well, higher ed yields immoral and problematic. And Economically inefficient results in institutional dysfunction because it's been corporatized or it's been taken over by neoliberalism. Ask the question.
Well, where are all these neoliberals that are supposedly running the universities and what you get is an answer this real similar to the South Park episode. The underwear domes Underpants Gnomes, this is a famous episode or the Underpants Gnomes come along. They claim they're going just sees the Underpants.
Then there's a big question mark in the middle and then the end says Prophet I say the same thing is going on in these theories of higher ed. It's like higher ed is corporatized big question mark and mental. Neoliberal profit, is the explanation for all the problems? The evidence just isn't there.
What Jason and I do in the book is we ask what are the real institutional incentives that cause some of these problems to emerge and the answer turns out to be that human beings rational self acting self-interested human beings. Do in fact respond to good and bad incentive structures.
And if the incentives of higher ed are to hire as many people in your department, whether or not students want to take your classes and that's what you're going to do at the incentives of higher ed, or to expand the administrative bureaucracy. Even if it means jacking up tuition on students and asking them to pay for these do nothing functionary jobs that just basically absorb resources and bloat. That's what higher education to do.
I said too bad institutional designs that basically turn higher ed into a very large-scale government bureaucracy and we go through step-by-step and the area of the University by Yuri the university and identify these bad institutional designs. And it turns out if you empirically investigate them, guess what? They explain most of the problems. Who was Lysander Spooner and what can he teach us about money
and currency? So I see other Spooner is probably one of my favorite abolitionists, he is a 19th century. Classical liberal Proto libertarian thinker comes out of Massachusetts, he's very active on the New England scene, he trains as an attorney, the apprentices as an attorney, but he's a natural rights and natural law theorists attorney. And basically asked question, Why do all these institutions exist?
That commits Injustice. He's under the name of the law and says, well consistent with the natural law unjust actions, by the government are violations, violations of right. In fact, they are self discrediting. He basically takes the walkie and principles of the Declaration of Independence to their radical logical philosophical end. And basically, Is that if the government is doing something unjust, it's violated its own basic premise, of existence, it's violated.
Its own notion of a an entity that exists uphold and protect rights. So the foremost example of this that he sees is slavery, so he starts in the abolition movement and as an abolitionist, I mean this guy is a badass. There's no other way to say it. So he writes books and pamphlets argued articulating, a legal theory for why? Slavery should be deemed unconstitutional and that includes acknowledging the passages of the Constitution
that seem to sanction slavery. And he's basically saying well there are a violation of a more fundamental layer of Rights. Therefore they cannot be exercised and operated in this pattern and it's a very influential legal theory of his day. He actually makes a convert of Frederick Douglass who reads his book and then gives the famous speech on the fourth of July in. T4, where he declares that the constitution properly. Understood is a great and
glorious Liberty document. What else does Lysander Spooner? Do he becomes famous in New England, for offering his Legal Services often free of charge to fugitive slaves. And to abolitionists that harbored a fugitive slaves that helped them escape the South because they could be facing prosecution from the federal government. There was a famous case in the in Boston.
Massachusetts, fugitive named Any Burns is arrested in Boston which is an abolitionist City at the time but it's under the Fugitive Slave Act was the Federal Government Federal Government, actually deploys thousands of troops military troops on the streets of Boston to escort Burns to a ship where he's going to be taken back to slavery in the South.
The abolitionists, watch a plan where they're going to Spring burns from his jail cell at the federal courthouse and they stage a diversionary abolitionist rally at Faneuil Hall across the street. From it Faneuil Hall is the famous meeting house where all the speeches are made in the American Revolution. No taxation without
representation. So it's steeped in the tradition of American Liberty and the abolitionists are staging a rally, but it's really a diversion for a group of them, sneak out the back and they Charge on the courthouse during The Changing of the Guard. Unfortunately the plan goes awry and shots are fired during the mob rush at the courthouse and it causes the abolitionists to disperse because now they're going to be accused of murder because one of the Federal
Marshals is it? Well Lysander Spooner was the guy that had a network of lawyers ready to help the abolitionists go into hiding. And avoid prosecution from the government and to Mount Legal defense, and file. All these paperwork for them, he tried to do the same thing for some of the conspirators that were involved in the John Brown. Raid on Harpers Ferry, some really fascinating guy, quits his tools and his intellect in his trade to work for good.
The problem is it actually comes at a personal expense to him. He does he's not a wealthy men. He does not get rich by offering free legal services to fugitive slaves, but that's basically his career what he does after the Civil War as he starts shifting to other issues in in the 1870s. He he starts working on monetary Theory which is a big issue at the time because you know it's the gold standard but it's being challenged by the silver movement debasement of currencies and what a Spooner
doing. Well, he researches and reads up on it and he's one of the early. Theorists that discovers the Scottish Free banking system that had existed half a century earlier in Scotland, Scotland was under a different set of rules than the bank of England and what it did.
Is it set up it allowed basically a de facto situation of competitive, private currencies to operate in some parts of Scotland and there's some regulation on it, but it had a much looser regulatory system than England and all of this is eventually quashed in the 1840s where the bank of England succeeds in getting Parliament to regulate, the Scottish system. But scooter goes back and does
some research on this. And he finds that every time there was a recession or depression during the the Free banking error, in Scotland, Scotland weathers the crisis, much better than England And he attributes this to free market competition and currencies. So in 1876, he writes two books, basically laying out a free banking history of Scotland. And arguing for a thesis of why private entities. Any private entity should be permitted on the open market to
issue a private currency. And he basically says with the market competition between them decide, which currency currency is saying, which currency survive and that in itself will bring robust stability. The in ways that the federal
banking system has not. So it's a free banking argument written in 1876. Published in these a relatively obscure, serialized forms of books that we thought that were lost after Spooner died, part of his papers were destroyed in the fire around the turn of the century. And the Assumption had always been that these books have been lost with them. Well, I rediscovered them in a couple of archives, the It's in pieces and was able to piece back together the entire manuscript.
And what it is eventually amounts to is Spooner presages, F A Hayek theorizing unfree banking which comes out a century later in the 1970s and Fa Hayek is the priests age theorist to cryptocurrency and competitive currencies that we have today that are emerging. So I call Lysander Spooner, basically, like the grandfather Of Bitcoin initial search. What was your biggest takeaway from researching your book?
The Best of Karl Marx, biggest takeaway from that is probably really fleshing out something that I had long suspected and it seen many sides from a Karl Marx, and that is that Marx himself was a pretty obscure figure in his own lifespan. You know, he's treated today is like this intellectual giant of
the 19th century. He's put on par with what he's like the social science equivalents of Charles Darwin or one of these other major thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century Darwin lived at the same time as marks. But there's a difference here, everybody read Darwin Darwin was influential in his life span other scientists picked up on his research. Agenda and worked with it Karl. Marx, was this kind of fringe purse. For a weirdo who lived in squalor.
And wrote These manifestos claiming to correct everything that he said, it was wrong about economics. But the only people that are reading them are fellow socialists on the very periphery of society and it persists this way for another 30 35 years or so after marks died. So marks dies in 1883 basically is an unknown except for among his internal Circle Apollo Where's when economist start to notice marks in the decade after his death.
So, at the first three bottles of him, come from Economist in, 1884 and 1885. And the the main theme of them, is that marks by relying on the labor, theory of value was now obsolete because the marginal revolution had occurred. We had discovered and solve. The problem of value value is not assigned by work performed value is of Tsar is, is derived from Active preferences and some chips objective decisions made on the margin made with reflect to the next unit of consumption.
This is discovered simultaneously by a couple of Economist in 1871. So, right after Das kapital was published and over the course of about two decades at sweep to the economic profession by storm by 1890, the marginal revolution has been absorbed into economics and people are reading this and then they read Marx as they. Well, his entire system falls apart because it was premised on an old way of thinking that's
now been debunked. So by the turn of the century, the typical Economist response to Karl Marx is this guy's obsolete why are we paying attention to them? John Maynard Keynes even writes that Das capital is an obsolete textbook of no interest to the world today. It's from an earlier time. It's been discredited.
Yet we look today, Karl Marx is on the map, he's everywhere in the University's. He's one of the most cited figures across the humanities and social sciences, arguably the most influential thinker of that era and the way that we look at it today. So, ask the question, why is this the case? And this is where I tease out at the very beginning of doing this compilation, the best Karl Marx and the answer is We'll add a mirror linen, put marks on the
map. He took this obscure theorist of socialism, and a very particular brand of socialism that he adhered to. He was a follower of Mars and in 1917 by staging a coup d'etat in seizing control of the government of a major world power Russia. He was able to take the resources of the Russian State and use them to basically, propagate and promote, Marxism as a serious intellectual Doctrine after.
It had already been defeated in the economics profession and after a half century of doing that, sure. If it took hold and other professions to besides economics, other disciplines, besides economics, so that Discovery and really teasing that out and I've since empirically tested it through citation counts and it turns out it's absolutely true when inputs marks on the map. Interesting, implications for how we can get the world to find out about me sis. All right, final question.
Many people will say that those who Advocate Freedom are forgetting about all the other things in life spirituality, having a family doing what's best for your nation. Making sure other people have equal opportunities. Why is economic freedom? Why is freedom in general important? Well, so the economic freedom, goes hand-in-hand with the moral case, moral case for Liberty, This is something that's our been articulated in multiple different approaches. I'm not going to endorse anyone
theorist. I mean, Ian, Rand is very famous for making a moral case for markets, but so was Adam Smith, they come at it at very different angles. But the idea here is that there are underlying concepts of Rights. The idea here, is that there are underlying recognition of. So, for example, take the case of property rights, I recognize and I can Intuit a more Well, wrong in a Smithy and sense by observing somebody getting
mugged across the street. And I into of that in part, because I know that person is being deprived of what is rightfully theirs, their property at gunpoint or at knifepoint. And I would not want that to happen to me, and I can morally into it that, that person that's being mugged. If they saw me in that same situation, I was being mugged. They would not want the same thing. That's happening them.
They happen to me. So, there's a reciprocity in moral intuition that occurs there, And this is key to smithian moral philosophy as well as smithian economics is recognition of this moral reciprocity. And what it means is I have an intuition to intervene and help that person that's being wronged to help restore their rights to stop the wrongdoing from occurring to any way that I can.
And that maybe maybe I step in and confront the mugger, and they mean that maybe I pull out a cell phone and call the police or an authority that can come in and And and stop this crime from occurring, but I do that out of a moral intuition.
That moral intuition is very complementary to an economic intuition, that property rights should be robust and we could do this in all sorts of other categories of Liberty subjective preferences in and how I choose to spend my money also has a moral component to it. A recognition of my individual
volition comes out of that. The valuation of life has a moral component, but it's also, Conducive to a good functioning system of economic freedom, where we know that rights are going to be respected under a systematized drool of law. These things go hand-in-hand together. For very specific reasons that in order for one to thrive. The other also needs to be present there. And what you find is societies where you lose a respect for
property rights. You lose a respect for the rule of law, you lose a respect for life itself. And start infringing upon individual decisions and telling people. No, you cannot do this or going to throw you in jail or send you up to the gulag those are areas where economic freedom diminishes as well. And oftentimes it's a it's a very complex murky relationship but you can't have one and not the other.
So there's a symbiosis that I would argue is operating between the two of them and, you know if we want to call this virtue libertarianism, I'm not crazy about any particular term, but I think Is implicit there and it goes back to what we were talking about. The beginning of the interview. You look at the moral cause of liberalism in the mid-nineteenth century. Free markets, free trade anti-imperialism and abolitionism.
There's a free-market component and there's a moral component that unites all three of those things together on a firm philosophical basis. And we see that carrying Forge a day, we see derivatives of anti-imperialism today come in our aversion to war or aversion to violence. We see derivatives of anti-slavery and abolitionism carrying through today in our aversion to discrimination, whether it's in racial terms or other terms forms of collective.
This bigotry and then we see the intuition of free markets carrying forward today. Not only in those issues are still with us. Free trade is certainly still with us, but we see a moral wrong when people are deprived of their property by force or told that they cannot exercise their rights over their property because of government regulation, or that property is confiscated and taken away, my tax agent. There's as much of a moral
cases. There is as A functioning economic case, that's basically where I fall on those issues, you need both of it. Both components working together in order for it to be functional. Check out the American Institute for economic research. Today's guest was dr. Philip W. Magnus links will be in the description below. Thanks to everyone for watching Keith Knight don't tread on anyone and the libertarian Institute, dr. Magnus thank you so much for your time. Thank you again for helping me.