Ask people to imagine two separate criminals. 1 criminal takes a woman's ballot and instead of putting it in the ballot box, he puts it in the paper shredder and her vote doesn't get counted. No one thinks that that is going to change the outcome of an election. Even if that one vote changed which politician won? Politicians are liars and totally ignorant on most issues, so it's not like anything really would have changed in the real
world. But now say there's a second criminal who threatens to imprison a woman if she gets a job without first going from 2000 hours of cosmetic school. Well, he has actually drastically changed her ability to achieve her ends in life 8 hours a day, five days a week. She's not able to do something she likes in an industry she likes. She's not able to please all those customers. Well, in that case, you've really done something bad. So market regulation is far
worse than boating regulation. Welcome to the Drop the Mask podcast, dropping knowledge and infiltrating the hive mind of mainstream thought. I'm here to break down what's wrong with our systems, leaders and institutions. I'm your host, Jason, Welcome back to Drop the Mask. I'm very happy to welcome this next guest, the author of this great book, Domestic Imperialism, 9 Reasons I Left Progressivism. And he's also the organizer, author of The Voluntariest Handbook.
He's the managing managing editor at the Libertarian Institute. Keith Knight, welcome to the show. Jason, thanks so much for having me, man. My pleasure. Did I miss anything else you'd like to mention before we get started? Nope. You got both books. You got the Institute already Happy. Thank you. Very good, very good. The book is really good. I like that it doesn't mess around.
It gets right down to the facts, just like you'd expect from Keith based on what I've seen in other interviews. So I was thinking that originally I might ease into this question, but what the hell, let's get right into it and see if maybe we can't defend somebody. So I'll set it up like this. I grew up hearing people say to military veterans, thank you for your service. It's like a reflex, right, for a lot of people.
And for a long time, even before I got into libertarian theory very deeply, I just couldn't bring myself to say it. And I didn't know exactly why. Maybe it just felt a little bit cringy. And I think deep down, I knew something was wrong. Like, none of the military vets
I knew had even seen combat. And I don't know, excuse me now I know just what a big scam the military industrial complex is, so I just don't do it. But I heard you on a podcast, I think it was with Dave Smith talking about this, suggesting that maybe I should be looking for them to thank me.
Why would that be? Well, every time that you interact in the private market, more or less, anytime you go to Starbucks, go to a restaurant, go to a supermarket, the people there thank you for shopping there. They say, hey, you only have so much money that is scarce and you're choosing to spend some of that money with us. So they always thank us. But the police, military, politicians, teachers never thank us for being taxpayers.
It literally has never happened. Even when I went on Dave Smith's show and said, will any of them thank me for all the taxes I've paid since I've been a net taxpayer? And still it has yet to happen. So what essentially happens was summarized by Antonin Scalia, who said that the welfare state turns turns people who, oh gosh, I always butcher this one.
It's something to the extent of it creates beneficiaries without gratitude and donors without love, donors without love or recipients without gratitude, because the people who are forced to pay are just that forced. So they don't feel like it's coming out of a sense of duty or general obligation. Even when Mark Cuban brags about
paying taxes. Well, the fact that you don't have the right to opt out, the fact that you don't have the chance to, the opportunity to choose where they go, in what amount, based on what conditions. All right, NATO, you got two months to wrap this war up. I'll pay you for two more months. But if you don't do it, then you got to pull out and I'm going to stop funding. There's not even any conditions.
So while we constantly have standards and metrics for people in our everyday lives, people do not have the most basic metrics or standards for how the state should operate. So because people don't feel like they're actually giving the public something, even though they call it public service, they're not. They don't thank us simply because they're not thankful. They know it doesn't come out of the kindness of our hearts. It's just a coercive obligation.
So this creates a great deal of friction in society, even though it's not explicitly talked about, where members of the military and police, no matter what happens, they don't say, well, we only get paid if we win a war or if we get this war aim accomplished without killing too many civilians or destroying too many buildings that took decades to erect. Of course, they don't even have these standards for themselves.
So because there was a coercive element to taxation, all these services that we get are far worse than they otherwise would be simply because we don't have the option to opt out of funding them. And it doesn't even necessarily help the people getting the money in the long run, because it makes them ungrateful and makes it so there's not a lot of pressure on them to really provide a good service for the
public. So that, along with a number of other things, is one of the primary reasons that I think everything should be privatized. Yeah, I'm glad of you. Glad you brought up Mark Cuban, because I was just reading that today. He's flaunting his $280 million tax payment today, and we're recording this on tax day. And he said that military service is the first thing, but the second thing is paying taxes as the most patriotic thing you can do. What do you think about that?
So I guess that means he has a great deal of admiration for all the Russian soldiers risking their lives in Donbass. He must have a lot of admiration for all the Iranian soldiers who are part of the IRGC, must have a lot of admiration for Hezbollah, all those Hamas fighters who are risking their lives. I guess that's just something inherently good. All of the Japanese soldiers in the Second World War who risked their lives for Hirohito, he
must really, really admire them. Or it doesn't just so happen to be the country that he belongs to. Those soldiers have the the right to be constantly admired for no other reason. And look, if you're a farmer and you provide a very good service getting food to millions of people, it's OK to thank farmers for their service or anything like that. But that doesn't. Just because someone provides something important doesn't mean they have the right to have you coercively fund them.
And they shouldn't have to face competition. And whenever a farmer tells you to do something, you have to blindly obey them out of total respect. So I just don't have any double standards for the police and military and even the Mark Cubans of the world will have tons of skepticism toward the police and military, but only for every country that he doesn't currently reside in. So that's that's how you know how shallow of a belief it is.
There was a joke on the office where Ryan, he like has a cheers at a party and he goes here's to the troops, both sides. And The funny thing is, is that if your claim as well, these people are risking their lives for what they believe in, that has probably applied to every single war that has happened since, I don't know, ancient Mesopotamia. So to say that the metric for admiration is life risking for something you believe in, well that means Muhammad Atta is on
your admiration list. Just have some standards. Just be willing to say these soldiers are the good guys who deserve respect because they're fighting for this good objective and that good thing. Then we can at least have a substantial argument about you know what, what is it worth achieving at what cost in what time period.
But they never say that. It's just such a simple minded knee jerk reaction to thanking people for getting a job even though they get tons of money whether or not they provide a good product or service. So I just think it's so divisive and doesn't help the intended beneficiaries or the people who are forced to fund it. Yeah, well, Keith, come on. Surely every other country has propaganda within their media and they lie to them, but not the United States, right? That's that's. Why?
I'm so thankful. Thank God. What if we had propaganda in the media? That would be scary. Yes. And to be clear, I don't want to disparage veterans. I think many of them really believe they were doing something noble. Many people were just looking for a job after high school. And the Army promises a lot of benefits for those people. And I'm not mad at them. It's the institution of perpetual war that really bothers me. So moving on, you have a chapter called The Unavoidable Contradiction.
This concept is something that I always find frustrating when I'm trying to talk to people outside of, you know, the end cap libertarian spectrum, that it's just they can't or won't put this together. And So what is that contradiction that you refer to? The contradiction is referred to as antitrust legislation or it's the antitrust justification. So this is where one of the primary roles of government is to make sure that there are no monopolies in any industries.
The claim is that if we had a monopoly in, say, microphones, computers, television, food, that you would have basically the entire society very reliant on one organization who could decrease quality without facing any check and balance. Or they could drastically increase the cost of a product or service and the public at large would suffer as a result of this. So therefore the state needs to make sure that no one company gets too much power within a
certain market. The problem is these same people virtually 100% of the time. That's why I call it unavoidable. Will say that the state should monopolize compulsory education. Catholic Church doesn't have the right to force you to fund or attend their schools. The state should monopolize central banking and the money supply. The state should monopolize the
right to conscript a military. If anyone else tried forcing you to perform labor against your will, even if it was for the greater good, they'd still be called kidnappers and enslavers. State claims a monopoly right to tax. If Amazon or Goodwill tried issuing taxes for the betterment of society, even if they promised to use the money to build buildings which will help people in the long run, people would still clearly see it as theft.
And they have a monopoly right on the declaration of war. If there were other tribes or groups in America where Costco decide to declare war on Sam's Club, they'd say well obviously this is just one group trying to reap benefits at the expense of another and committing atrocities in the process. So they claim these five things need to be monopolized when their entire theory for why we need a state usually rests on one of the reasons being you need antitrust laws to make sure
you don't have monopolies. Then they go on to advocate that monopolies exist in the most important sectors of society. That is the unavoidable contradiction which every single progressive that I've ever spoken to believes in. Yeah, Amen. And in the chapter you talk about the progressive idea to defund the police. How does that fit into that contradiction? So you can see how fake this is because the police are the enforcement arm of the progressive agenda.
If you just had Ilhan Omar, AOC, Bernie Sanders, Woodrow Wilson writing words down on paper, well then there's not much to enforce it. People would clearly see that this is just a scam of trying to coercively involve yourself in the lives of peaceful people. But if you have a state apparatus which has a police force, well then that's how you
enforce regulations. That's how you enforce the minimum wage, That's how you enforce diversity, equity and inclusion legislation or affirmative action or anti discrimination laws. Not because people like to engage in those activities. So they do so voluntarily. You have a political apparatus which uses the police to enforce the legislative agenda of the politicians.
So for the progressives to say we want to defund the police, that is for them to say we want none of the things that we want enforced to be enforced. It's like a boxer who comes out and says, I want to cut off my arms for the next big fight. It's just so shocking that they even toyed with this idea. And then, of course, the first opportunity they get to actually vote on funding for the police was after January 6th. There was a vote on whether or not to increase police, the
Capitol Police funding. And of course, AOC comes out in support of it and later defends it by saying, well, this actually had a lot to do with pensions, which were promised. So in other words, she thinks that there's this evil, racist, sexist, white supremacist organization who hunts minorities in their free time, the police, but we have to fund them because of a pension agreement.
It's the greatest threat to civilization, yet we got to keep funding it. Apparently this belief was held in the mind of a rational person, of course. It was just much more of a rallying cry to inflamed the passions of the feeble minded to support her. They're never going to advocate for abolishing funding because they could never enforce any of the gun laws, any of the minimum wage laws, any taxation they wouldn't be able to enforce.
They just have to say please fund us or will provide a product or service in exchange for it and they have no interest in doing that. So that's why the defund the police can't scam coming from progressives was just so obvious from the get go. Yeah. And so anarchists would also be in that realm of wanting to defund the police. I won't speak for you, but I would say I could be in favor of that under certain conditions. What is your position on that? My position is a full
privatization of security. So when you use any form of technology, say you use PayPal. PayPal has private security that it invests in. Not because it's a organization that took a big democratic vote and thinks about the public interest because they want people who use their platform to be safe. So they have passwords and password requirements and they have multi factor verification. Venmo also has this. Microsoft has this.
Google has multi factor authentication and a lot of places for computers where your most valuable information is stored. There are places like Webroot security. There's places like Sentinel One who have virus detection and things that fend off ransomware. You have private security guards at malls. You have private security guards at banks, shopping centers, a lot of places. Every concert venue I've been to
has private security. I was at the Desert Ridge Mall in Scottsdale. They have a ton of private security, More on Saturdays when it's a little more dangerous and less on, you know, Wednesday in the afternoon because it's in their interest to make sure their area that they're responsible for is safe because they want to incentivize customers to go there. The state doesn't necessarily
have that. They don't have this equilibrium to achieve where you want security, but you don't want, you know, a total, you know, security area where the guards are constantly going through everyone's purse every time they walk in the, you know, Walmart or something. So they have to find some equilibrium between incentivizing people to come there and making customers
happy. Governments don't face such a check and balance because they get money coercively, whether you will love their service or hate their service. So all security should be privatized. The problem with immediate abolition is the state has created a monopoly in this area of courts and justice.
So immediate abolition, Well, you know, other intellectuals have spoken about, well, it would have been good to do this and say 1913, where you just immediately abolish state police because you couldn't have had a First World War, which wouldn't have caused a Second World War, which couldn't have, you know, caused proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam and created NATO or created this crisis in Ukraine. But other bad things would have also happened if you just immediately abolish it.
So I just support a move towards volunteerism and as much privatization as possible, simply because all of these, the core function of protecting human beings, their ability to cooperate socially, and the property they acquire through voluntary exchange or homesteading, is much better achieved in a system with competition and voluntary funding as opposed to a state apparatus. Great answer. I don't have anything to add to that. Hey guys, let's take a quick
break here for an easy request. Please like or share or give a rating for me and follow me on X and locals. That's where I'm most active at. Drop the mask pod on both platforms. If you're feeling generous, you can throw me a couple bucks on locals, but no pressure. Follow and share. It costs you nothing and it helps spread the liberty message out there. Thank you. Now let's get back to the show.
Next question. In your last appearance on the Tom Woods show, you talked about starting your own business at 14 and how that experience shaped your world view. Can you tell us just a little bit about that? Because we started this landscaping business just under the table 'cause I didn't have a work permit, I was 14 and you usually need parents to sign off if you're under 18.
And we started making a good deal of money after some time and then decided, hey, we want to make this legitimate now, to make this business legitimate and stop going on to the table. The stack of paperwork that we had to fill out was so burdensome that we just stopped. So what the state essentially does, also, I had to go to school at the time. So what the state does, or else my parents would have been jailed for violating truancy laws.
What the state does is it keeps kids in schools where they learn very little and stop them from going into the workforce. Now there's no difference in principle between forcing a kid to work on school work and homework and a kid getting paid for work outside of the classroom, the kids working
either way. So at least in this area, they're making money, they're getting their foot in the door, they're getting on the job experience, they're learning how to please customers, how to work with other Co workers, how to work with employers. So child labor is much better than state schooling immediately. Second thing this does is it means other companies face less
competition. So when there was less competition, like people like my buddy and I entering the landscaping market, you have higher prices and consumers have fewer options than than they otherwise would if people were allowed to freely exchange in this area. The progressive sees this immediately when they say, you know, I think you should have to have a license to vote, and you should have to pass a test, both physical and mental, and then the government can let people vote.
If they pass those tests. The progressive immediately says, well, what if those tests are bias? And who are they to say who can and can't vote? They're just politicians. They're fallible. They might put their thumb on the scale that's going to, you know, restrict people's ability to access voting machines, which, of course, Yeah, that is the goal in many cases. And that is no different than requiring tests, restrictions and regulations in the private market.
The core difference which I bring in, I bring up in the this book. I ask people to imagine two separate criminals. 1 criminal takes a woman's ballot and instead of putting it in the ballot box, he puts it in the paper shredder and her vote doesn't get counted. No one thinks that that is going to change the outcome of an election. Even if that one vote changed
which politician won? Politicians are liars and totally ignorant on most issues, so it's not like anything really would have changed in the real world. But now say there's a second criminal who threatens to imprison a woman if she gets a job without first going through 2000 hours of cosmetic school. Well, he has actually drastically changed her ability to achieve her ends in life 8 hours a day, five days a week. She's not able to do something she likes in an industry she likes.
She's not able to please all those customers. Well, in that case, you've really done something bad. So market regulation is far worse than voting regulation. And the progressives are always claiming the moral high ground, saying we believe in voting rights and increasing access, but voting is just giving people who are ignorant on issues the right to use the state to enforce their ignorant beliefs on others. It's not even necessarily a right that that that everyone has in the 1st place.
Or I'd venture to say no one just has the right to vote for to confiscate other people's property. But in the second case, when you forcibly stop someone from getting a job they want and stop customers from being able to interact with businesses and entrepreneurs which they'd like to, you create oligopolies. You create higher prices. They call higher prices inflation, not knowing that it's actually an increase in the money supply.
But now if their whole thing is will inflation's really bad, They just call it greed inflation. Well, higher prices are the result of restricting access to a certain industry because you have fewer choices, you have a lower supply that raises the demand for people in the industry as a whole. So everything they complain about is the result of some people having a right to coerce their way into what would otherwise be voluntary interactions. Yeah, and then coerce people's
kids into schools forever. And as someone who went to six years of college, and I was in public schooling institutions for about 19 years of my life in total, I've developed quite the disillusionment with public education in general. So I'm happy to see that you have a chapter on College in here. And you say college is 4 years of work at $0.00 an hour. Why do you frame it that way?
What's the story? Because the progressive justification for the minimum wage is one of the main things that they run on. AOC runs on this. Bernie runs on this, most Democrats and when Republicans are in power, they never, you know, vote to abolish the minimum wage. So the claim is that the central premise is that all work is worth $15.00 an hour, and if you can't pay someone $15.00 an hour, you shouldn't be able to engage with them at all until you can pay them this $15.00 an
hour. The problem is the vast majority of these progressives advocate college. So if we can say, well, children don't have the mental capacity to make decisions, therefore compulsory education is OK, whatever. Now let's just talk about adults. They believe 18 year old adults can take out like 100 grand in student loans and do hours and hours of work every single day out of college and not get paid
a single dime. Not only do they not get paid, they got to pay all this money back plus interest. So then of course they'll say yeah, college should be paid for by the taxpayer. That's still forcing people to pay instead of allowing them to voluntarily do so. Whatever different issue. The claim is that most every progressive believes in a minimum wage. And even if they don't push college, which most of them do, they'll say college is justified because you're investing in
yourself. You're trying to learn something about the world so at a later point in your life you can add more value to society as a whole. Well, that's what internships are. That's what getting on the job experience is. I don't make as much now as I did in my very first job because I had no skills. So I did this landscaping thing, and then that didn't work out because of the regulatory
burden. So I worked at a restaurant, then I worked at a bank, and now I got the dream job at the Libertarian Institute. The point is, is that when people start, they have very few skills. So a lot of employers don't want to bear too much of A costly burden in order to bring them on because with most people, it doesn't work out in their first job or in any of their early jobs, and there's a lot of turnover now.
So when you make it so costly to employ people, you end up hurting the people with the least amount of skills and the least amount of experience. This is what the minimum wage does. It's why you have so many people without stuff to do during the day.
So they end up looting, rioting and, you know, setting American flags on fire and demanding free Palestine, which, look, they're totally right about the Israeli mass murder campaign in Palestine. But all these kids who were in these riots, they don't advocate for free America. They don't advocate. They don't say, well, Palestine should be a land where all interactions are based on volunteerism. They just don't want the
Israelis in there. They don't like have any standards for Hamas. They don't have any standards for the PA. They don't want freedom in America. They want what I title the book Domestic Imperialism. So it's literally just like saying I'm against Joe Biden being bad and that's why I love George W Bush because at least it's not Biden. Well that's still not freedom in any sense.
So the fact that they advocate for freedom for a distant geographical area while advocating tyranny on the area they currently occupy, it's completely counterproductive and the only reason they have time to do all this trash is because it's not that easy to get a job compared to how it used to be.
Walter Williams actually looked at unemployment rates among 16 and 17 year olds in 1948 and found that the black unemployment rate was lower than the white youth unemployment rate, both demographics ages 16 and 17. Now today in 2023, Bernie Sanders says racism is the reason why there's such a gap in employment rates between blacks and whites. Well, if 1948 there were still Jim Crow laws, that was far more of a racist time than we have today, and that didn't 'cause this disparity.
So because of minimum wage laws, because of all these regulations, people have fewer options of where to work and consumers have fewer options of what products and services to buy and the monopolies and oligopolies, faceless competition. So all this is terrible. And it's primarily the result of minimum wages and regulations. Well, the minimum wage is a regulation.
They're saying if you don't meet this threshold, you don't have the right to interact with anyone even if they want to, even if it's on a voluntary basis. Jen Helfeld actually interviewed Nancy Pelosi and said, you advocate raising the minimum wage. Oh, yeah, we got to do this. Whatever it goes It it appears that you have interns at your office and they make $0.00 and zero cents an hour. Why is that OK?
To which she actually says with a straight face, well, that's something they chose to do. So he says, well, if I choose to work at McDonald's for less than the minimum wage, is that OK? She is on. She is like such an MK Ultra victim. She literally thinks that there's a principal difference between working at this place versus working at that place. She thinks one is public service and, well, McDonald's is in it for the money. Is the government a nonprofit organization where politicians
don't get paid? They're all unpaid volunteers. The soldiers are unpaid volunteers. All the staff members of the White House are unpaid volunteers. No, they're both in it for the money. At least McDonald's let's you opt out of funding their trash. Government forces you to fund their trash. So McDonald's is still better as a place to work. So minimum wage is very dangerous for the empirical reasons I mentioned.
And it's wrong in principle, which is why I tried to give it a very catchy title of college being something that adults do voluntarily that involves not a little work. I'm not trying to straw man it and say, oh, so if I ask you to help me move a couch, I should have to pay you $15.00 an hour.
This, by any metric is a ton of work to get a bachelor's, master's, or doctorate degree and you don't get compensated for it. And it's OK to have because some people see the value in engaging in that exchange. So because this is such a hole in the minds of the not just the average progressives, the expert progressives, the Paul Krugman's, the Richard Wolff's of the world, that I thought it was one of the many chinks in their armor, which I wanted to
really point out to people. Yeah, agreed. Just to play devil's advocate here, with college, someone could argue that you're not actually working, although it is hard work. You are paying somebody for a service to teach you things. What would you say to that? Yeah, that that is one way that people look at college another way. Gosh, I can't remember the name of Isaac Morehouse's organization.
I think it was called Praxis. But when you get a job, you are getting on the job experience and you're learning a ton of things in in exchange. So that too could be viewed as a service, which is why a lot of people would pay to have a job at a really good place just to get the on the job experience. I don't see how learning on the job is fundamentally different from learning at college. They both involve work.
They're both investments. There's no guarantee that either one will yield you a satisfactory outcome. So does that get to the heart of of your objection? You're paying someone for a service. Yeah, I guess that that that doesn't invalidate anything. But if you view it like that, then I could see people saying that's why I chose to spend that money. That's why I chose to do that work because I see value in this
other people don't. Others see others see far more value in getting on the job experience with, I don't know, plumbing, welding, getting a job at a bank, but I did land surveying for some time and well, you know, I wasn't, I was making less than minimum wage. It was still good just to get on the job experience. So looking back, I would have paid for that service, but instead someone paid me to reap
the benefits of that service. So while there are surface level differences in how people originally go into these agreements doesn't fundamentally change the nature of whether or not people have the right to whether or not adults have the right to engage in contracts that are work in exchange for money or work in exchange for experience or work in exchange for attention. Well, we don't have to get, well, we don't have to get into that sometimes.
So I've given when I first started giving speeches, no one knew who I was. So I would just go to places, work really hard on the speech and create the service of giving people a speech to listen to. Now, unfortunately at a different point, but that was just on the job, learning that I had to engage in in order to get to the spot where I am now 'cause I didn't have any books published.
So if, say, you have to pay someone in order to give a speech, well, people are already willing to pay the Hillary Clintons of the world to give speeches, but people with no experience are going to be kicked out of that market because there's just not the demand for them at at that time. So that I I would have to reconsider the exact wording of
your question. But I still don't think that that would invalidate whether or not someone has the right to engage in a voluntary contract that involves them engaging in work for $0.00 an hour in compensation. Because in both cases, on the job and in college, they're still choosing to learn or not learn things that they come across. Yeah, no, I don't think it invalidates it at all, just throwing that out there.
But I I think people would, if they had the option to work for $5.00 an hour, even $2.00 an hour, and gain those skills and knowledge, rather than paying $100,000 in tuition, they would take the option where they get paid a little bit and learn the same skills and knowledge. So yeah, I don't think you're wrong at all. You mentioned in the acknowledgements part of your book that you dropped out of college. Can I ask what happened there? What prompted that, if you don't mind?
You know the that actually might be misleading because I was actually kicked out of college on three occasions from three different ones. I guess the dropout happened when I decided not to apply for any more colleges. So now it's the drop. But originally it was a kick. I just didn't do any of the work. I found it so boring and so counterproductive.
So the teachers would be surprised because I was always reading, but they never assigned the myth of the robber barons or Tom Woods. 33 Things They Don't Teach you about American History. I loved reading those books. I was always reading them in class. But look, when I got to the Community College that I attended and she starts talking about the Pythagorean theorem, I just, I was in such a fit of rage at the lack of respect that they have for the time of the students there.
I just couldn't believe it. So yeah, I was kicked out because I found the topic so boring. There was one guy at Arizona State, I think his name was Paul Hurt. He was a history teacher. He came the closest to getting me interested in in discussions, but even then it was just too much work for too little reward. And when you have to go home after working, you have to go do homework, and it's on something very narrow that you're not really interested in. I just couldn't.
I had already learned about opportunity cost from the Austrian school. So I'm like, all right, I could spend the next three hours doing this or three hours doing something where I either make money or make friends or find it
genuinely interesting. And plus, I see all the people who worked hard in college and, you know, got these degrees, not that impressed with them in general, mostly on their humility meter, where they'll say, hey, here's what should be done in Palestine. Here's what should be done in the Donbass region. Here's what antitrust laws should be. Here's what agricultural subsidies should be, even though they never studied these issues
in particular. None of them have an explanation for the unavoidable contradiction or why college should be legal considering it violates the principle of the minimum wage law. So I'm just not that impressed overall. It'd be one thing if they said, well I went to college, I studied this. So on these areas I haven't looked into it much. But every metric shows that people are totally ignorant with
regard to politics. They could always say, oh, I haven't looked into it, so I'm just not going to take an opinion on it. Just as when you go on an airplane, you don't say, let's take a vote on how to fly this thing. You engage in the division of Labor and people who are experts and people who specialize. But for some reason in politics, people think that everyone's income is just everyone's opinion, rather is equally valid. And that's just absolute,
absolutely ridiculous. And I don't see a lot of college attendees have embraced that humility when it comes to the political realm. So that's just one of the other reasons I didn't really find it valuable to spend so much time and energy on schoolwork. So got kicked out of three of them. Nice, well I'm glad you realized that early. I really wish I had. As one of those unimpressive degree holders, I can vouch for
that. I'll say if you have any other option, kids out there, don't, don't do college if you have, if you can do anything else. All right, well, let's move on. I wanted to ask you about the social contract. So there's this idea that we have as Americans that we are beholden to this contract to pay taxes and do our civic duties. What is the social contract to you and what's wrong with the idea? So let's say that you have a
contract outside of the state. Usually what that means to people is I will give you a product or perform a service in exchange for you, say, paying me money or giving me another product or service in exchange. So you say I'm going to send you $10 through PayPal and in exchange I will send you Race and Culture, this excellent book by Thomas Sowell. The understanding is if you don't send me the $10, well then I don't owe you the book. I only promised you the book in
exchange for the money. And if I don't give you the book, if I say you know what, I'm not going to send you the book, but send me the money, say well this is not a contract. This is just one person putting an obligation on another person to either give them money or a book. So that is the nature of what a contract is.
I'll give you X in exchange for Y. What the state does generally is Co opts this and says well there is a social contract and that's why they have a unique right to issue taxes because you pay taxes but in exchange you get police, military, infrastructure, etcetera. Well notice that there's no other side to this equation. If you don't chip in, you will go to jail if they catch you not chipping in. However, what if they don't
provide a good? Police force and they just let BLM rioters do whatever they want and they don't protect your property. What if they don't provide a good military which doesn't bring democracy to Libya or Iraq? Or spends 20 years in Afghanistan replacing the Taliban with the Taliban after killing 10s of thousands of civilians with drone strikes? Which nine out of every 10 targets are not the intended
target. 9 out of every 10 people killed in them according to the drone papers published by The Intercept. What if the education system doesn't really educate people that well after 12 years? Well, it turns out this is not a contract of a give and take sort of thing. This is just one group of people, the state putting an obligation on other people to do things.
So just as we would never accept this kind of contract, that's just unilateral obligations on one party with no right to opt out if the goods or services provided don't meet the standards of the people paying, we should not accept it in the political realm for the same reason we wouldn't accept it in private spaces. Surely if we don't like it, we can just vote the people out and vote in new people who will fix
it, right you? Can do that certainly the problem is that is extraordinarily costly and the amount of time you spend it's extremely unlikely that that will affect the outcome and all we have to do is imagine if all right Amazon has the right to issue taxes and regulations and has the right to conscript everyone and if you don't like it in four years you can be a stockholder in Amazon and vote for the next Amazon CEO and get your guy in there immediately.
People would say, well, that's just a scam from Amazon to control you and get more money, obviously, and then give you the illusion that voting that that your one vote would have to, you know, take effect and change tons of things which are not in your direct control. So there are some things which you just don't have control over, whether it's in inside of
a state or outside of a state. But this whole nature of the relationship between the state and the citizen, where they have unique obligations to the state which they don't have to any other organization in society, is what makes it totally unjustifiable that that. That's my position. Yep, fair enough. So I guess you would not agree with the statement that democracy is actually ruled by the consent of the governed. No, so I addressed this
specifically in a chapter. I won't get into the details, but as far as the consent of the governed, it's necessarily a contradiction because if you have people's consent, then you wouldn't have to claim the right to initiate coercion against them. You would just be another
organization within society. So if consent of the governed is the justification, well then if people don't consent to chipping in every year, if they don't consent to engage in certain regulations, I guess the claim is just, well, we have the right to use coercion against anyone at any time. And if you don't like it, you can read the 10,000 page pieces of legislation that we pass without reading it ourselves once you decipher it and get a lawyer to explain what each line
means. Even though members of the Supreme Court don't agree on what two sentences in the Constitution means, you're supposed to figure this out and then actually consent to it. So it's not based on the consent of the governed, because when you try to opt out, you as a human being not first getting other people's permission, they don't recognize your right to. So therefore it's not based on the consent of the governed. In another podcast, you shared a
quote that I really liked. It's by Chris Freeman. It says we're vulnerable to politically motivated reasoning. The unconscious goal of our political deliberation is not to find truth, but rather to protect our identity as a loyal member of our political team. How does that manifest in
politics today? Well, when I first give the examples of how there's no good justification for the minimum wage or there's no good justification for the unavoidable antitrust contradiction, you have to ask yourself, how could so many people believe something so blindly? Not just so many people, so many experts who have spent decades on this.
So when I came across that explanation as to why people believe things, it made a heck of a lot more sense that it's about signaling allegiance to a tribe in hopes of having a community that you could fit in, that you could survive in and you could pass your genes down into the future. That makes a heck of a lot more sense than any response I've gotten to the minimum wage argument or, you know, the pro war advocacy from any of these groups.
So I was basically looking for how could so many people believe, so many people believe such ridiculous things? And I think that really fits the bill more than anything else because, I mean, these things are just so shocking. You have people saying with a straight face, we have to support Ukraine and oppose Russia because Ukraine's a democracy. Well, on March 31st of this year, Zelensky was supposed to hold elections, didn't hold
elections. And they're they didn't stop supporting Ukraine. He's enslaved all men ages 18 to 60 to fight in a war against their will. Another word for slavery, forced labor and and they still support him. Uses martial law to nationalize TV outlets into one channel, bans political parties. And all these experts with all these degrees still say, well, yeah, they're the democracy and the other people are
authoritarian. The fact that anyone could say that with a straight face after everything that's happened. And I'm very pro Ukraine, which is why I hate Zelensky. All of these politicians usually operate at the expense of their populations and use them as cannon fodder for their own self-interest. So that was one of the best explanations I came across as to why people engage in political activity when they really don't seem that interested.
I mean, I've come across people with degrees who have never heard any argument in opposition to the minimum wage or antitrust legislation. So if you think of, say, you get pulled over by the police and they say, do you have any weapons on you before I let you go, are there any unregistered guns in the car? And you say no, and then the cop searches you and finds out you know you lied and you do have a
3D printed gun or something. One way to approach that is to say that's so weird that the person didn't tell the reality to the cop 'cause they had to have known. And the answer is, well, the goal isn't truth. The goal is to keep yourself safe from the officer. So when we're asking ourselves why do people believe such trash when it comes to politics, well, the goal isn't truth unfortunately. The goal is to signal allegiance
to a tribe. So just as your goal isn't truth when you're talking to the IRS or a police officer, sometimes your boss, sometimes your spouse or family members, the goal is just survival. With politics, it's almost the exact same thing. So we don't see a lot of truth because the goal is not truth. The goal is survival and being surrounded by a like by like minded people. Yes, Scott Adams has a similar theory. He says once you pick a side, you're basically giving up
objectivity at that point. Like once you identify with the team, that's part of yourself. So it's really hard to change your mind. How do you avoid that personally? Well, I try to make my identity the person who is willing to change, so I'm happy to concede that I've been wrong about a number of things in the past, and when you make your identity, I'm open to changing, then it's
a lot easier to change. The guy who has almost mastered this is Tucker Carlson, A guy who was insufferable for so long is now kind of likable because he will not shut up. Shut up about how wrong he was about supporting the invasion of Iraq. He'll have conversations with tons of people from any aspect of life. And because he's made his identity not I support George Bush. His identity is I've been so
wrong about so many things. He gave a speech that I saw in Arizona at the Turning Point USA event where his whole thing was, I thought I'd been wrong about a lot, but last month I was so incredibly wrong. It was one of the most embarrassing things ever. And he was talking about the midterm elections of 2022. He thought that he had been saying that there's just going to be a huge Republican wave and they're going to get more seats than they ever have before.
And that just didn't happen. So the center of his speech is, I was wrong again. I can't believe it. And that's why I'm open to having discussions. So when you change your identity from these people are correct, and this idea and its implementation are correct, too. I'm open to anything. Here's my current position. Once that's your identity, then it makes things a heck of a lot easier. That's a great answer. I have 100 more questions, but I'll finish off with this one.
Another quote from the back of the book, which has a collection of various quotes that influence you. It's from Larkin Rose. He says perhaps the most telling is if you suggest to the average person that maybe God does not exist, he will likely respond with less emotion and hostility than if you bring up life without government. This indicates which religion people are more deeply emotionally attached to and which religion they actually believe in more firmly. What does that mean to you?
So one of the reasons that I chose this quote is because if you are an atheist, which most progressives identify as, they are claiming that all of the expert theologians, all of the priests, all of the rabbis, all of the imams, all of the bishops, all of the Cardinals for thousands of years have just been totally wrong. And the reason they're wrong is they have a fundamental premise which is unjustified, which is the Bible, the Torah, the Quran is true.
So this amount, the amount of confidence that people get when they're able to say, Oh yeah, all the experts and tons of people throughout all of history, they're all wrong on this religion thing or this God thing. Once you recognize that that is a position that people are able to hold, then it at least opens their mind up to the possibility that, yeah, the entire justification for a state is
counterproductive. All the core services the state provides would be better achieved under a system of volunteerism and competition. I think that was the main reason. Also, there's a lot of overlap between. But people who say, well, you can have your religion, just don't force it on me. Usually what they mean, bizarrely, is I don't want to hear about it. Don't try to persuade me.
So what I think people should do in general is embrace the Jehovah's Witness world view where they are constantly ambitiously trying to persuade people of something. And they'll give you a ton of time, they'll give you books, they'll invite you to services. And if you choose to opt out, then they will still recognize that, right? Even if they think it means you're going to burn in hell for all of eternity, they still recognize your freedom to do so.
The progressive or any statist really does not give you that courtesy unfortunately. So it's the fact that people are willing to let you spend eternity in hell or the progressive things you're going to spend your eternity living in fantasy world, believing in a God, going to a church, donating to a church. Even though those things might be negative repercussions, they still advocate the principle of
freedom in many cases. So because we believe in freedom of religion, I think we, for the same reasons, should believe in freedom of economic exchanges between consenting adults. Those were, I think, the two reasons that that quote stood out for me. Do you think there's any hope to reach people on a large scale or you? What's your outlook for the future? Yeah, I think these ideas can become much more popular when you have a likable personalities promoting them.
The idea that it's going to be like mass educational adaption, I think a very only a very small portion of people have to really get educated on this. If the goal was to get everyone educated on or even a majority educated on Austrian economics or anything. I think we just need better marketers and better bumper sticker slogans. And we need people in positions of power and influence to be able to sort of give the green light to this idea.
Because just hearing it from guy who was kicked out of three colleges, not a lot of people respect that.
But you have people like Elon Musk saying, well, the state's a monopoly when you have the president of Argentina saying favorable things, when you have the president of El Salvador, Prime Minister speaking highly of libertarian ideas while crushing down on criminals and human traffickers and and the like, and murderers drastically decreasing the murder rate in El Salvador. I think that is the most likely way you're going to increase the popularity of our ideas and
increase the likelihood that they'll be accepted by the average person. Very good. Well, I'm hopeful. I'm trying. I'm doing my part here working on getting bigger and reaching more people. But I really appreciate your time coming on today, Keith, thank you so much. Anything else you want to plug or talk about before we go? Not necessarily. If people want the book, they can purchase it on Amazon or they can get a free PDF at libertarianinstitute.org. Very good, go pick it up.
I do recommend it. Domestic imperialism. 9 reasons I left progressivism. Thank you, Keith. Have a good one. Thank you. Follow me on X at Drop the Mask Pod and join the free Locals community Drop the Mask pod.locals.com.