The Tom Wood Show. Hey everybody, Welcome back to the Tom Wood Show. This is episode 24136. I'm delighted to be joined by our old friend, the great Keith Knight, who is Managing Editor at the Libertarian Institute, which is a great organization. He hosts the Don't Tread on Anyone podcast, which does not have quite as many episodes as the old man's podcast here, but it's doing very well and has a
whole darn bunch of them. And he is the author and this is what brings him on to the program this particular time of the brand new book, Domestic Imperialism 9 Reasons I Left Progressivism. Keith, welcome back my friend. Tom Mutz, thank you so much for having me. Keith was a guest at my Christmas party a couple of weeks ago here in Florida, a few weeks ago here in Florida, and he came all the way across the country.
I don't. I don't know that if you would necessarily give away where you live, but you came a long way to to visit Old Woods on Christmas and I appreciate. That Oh yes, Scott and I had a blast. We wanted to get together and celebrate both Christmas and Diary of a Psychosis along with this new book. So I I had an absolute blast. Every one of your Tom Woods Elite show members was really pleasant to be around. Thank you, thank you, thank you. So all you supporting listeners
out there. You can come to my Christmas party every year supportinglisteners.com. I don't even list it as a benefit. There's so many benefits of being at the Tom Wood show. Supporting listener can't even list them all. But you can check out some of it supportinglisteners.com. Anyway, Keith, we're going to talk about your book.
And of course, with a title like that, Nine Reasons I Left Progressivism, I'd like you to give me a few reasons you joined it. Probably the initial reason was there was a dichotomy in front of me. We have two groups of people, people who want to give you food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education. And then there's another group of people who want to charge you for these things. They just create costs out of
the thin, you know, blue sky. They they want you to have to work to achieve something where's other people want to give it to you. When you're facing this dichotomy, obviously it seems like, well, am IA nice person who's compassionate or am I somewhat of a jerk? So you can almost say how is it maybe, you know, the billionaire class could believe something because they could easily buy
the stuff. But how if so many millions of people have the country more or less been duped into thinking you should have to buy things instead of getting them for free? So when I was faced with that, I said, well, one, it seems like it's, you know, much more economically efficient to give people something instead of always having to work. That seems pardonsome and it seems much more compassionate to help or not to help. So that was the dichotomy I was faced with and that's why I
probably joined. I also have to say growing up in I was in Phoenix, AZ my whole life. I went to school here and often thought of as a red or purple state, but the the schools that I went to were extremely blue. So I was always having in the back of my mind that America good place now, however uniquely bad because of slavery and because of things like Jim Crow. So when we saw this name on the ballot, Barack Obama, we were all excited that this has to be
the guy we support. This is the major hurdle that we're finally getting over this terrible, racist, sexist, xenophobic past of ours by electing this this guy. So it was both the thought of, you know, we're really achieving something. I'm really part of something unique in the rearview mirror of history as it'll be seen by getting this guy elected. And it's the compassionate philosophy. Those are the main reasons I was
attracted. To it now I would have more or less guessed that because I think that's why basically anybody joins it for the most part in in the beginning. I think people innocently become part of it because it just seems as you say. It just seems like common sense why if we have problem X and we have resources Y, we just apply resources Y to problem XI mean come on, what? What? What? Who? Who would object to that? So you you do talk about that a bit in your introduction.
I would like to ask you though, I mean yes, I know that your book is it is about, you know, reason, things that challenge progressivism. But I want to know, in your life specifically, what? Was there a particular moment when suddenly you thought I might not just be wrong about one particular thing, but my whole world view might be wrong? Was there a particular moment or particular event that caused you
to have a thought like that? Well, one of the moments was watching the Glenn Beck show, where he brought up the portion of the Affordable Care Act. Another great thing. They're making it affordable, just more generosity. And he said that there's something called the individual mandate. This is where people, whether they want to or not, are required to purchase health
insurance for themselves. Now I remember thinking, well, people probably should do that day, and they probably should eat healthy, exercise, be good neighbors, dress nice. Well, just because someone should do something, I don't think they should be forced. So this was the first time I ever considered that here is the difference between civilization and some sort of barbarism or tyranny where you have the right to claim ownership over other people.
So that was the first time that it really occurred to me. I got to say, getting that first paycheck and seeing the involuntary deductions, that was pretty surprising. But also when I was 14, I started my own landscaping business and the more we grew, the more difficult it was. I was 14 and the other guy was 16, and we would just go around and basically offer our services to mostly parents of the people
who we went to school with. We're earning very little amounts of money, and every time we try to do something legitimate, the amount of bureaucracy was staggering. We'd have to go to this place with my Co worker's mother. We had to start filling out things. We had to start declaring our income and then I had to lie about my age, which I got caught and that ended up blowing up the whole thing and then we basically had to stop and do
nothing. So stopping of the entrepreneurial spirit was just so crushing at the age of 14.
But I also saw it as well. Far from the government being something here that's there to assist me and bring about flourishing, it seems like they're putting far more involuntary hurdles in my way of achieving what I want than they are at at assisting me. So I think those were the initial things that I personally came into contact with, which really made me start questioning things that I had supported.
I was very taken aback by an example you give early on in the book that you talked about at oh geez, now I can't remember. Was it, was it actually at the house? Was it an event recently? But it was about the the attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016, and you talked about the motives of the person who did it, who did not actually realize that it was a gay nightclub. He didn't realize that. But of course it was immediately portrayed as well. This is an attack on homosexuals
and all that. But what I think most people don't know is that he contacted the police and he was very, very explicit about what his motivations were. Now there's no need, there's no reason if you're a guy like that who's going to engage in an atrocity. I mean why would you be shy about your motives? I guess sometimes when we when we quote what people's motives are, everybody's skeptical. But why would you, Why would that be the one thing you chicken out on?
But you actually go ahead with the shooting people plan. I I rather take him at at his word and he's very, very blunt about exactly what his motivation is. And it has nothing to do with well in the US you have the Bill of Rights and you have homosexual people, whatever it is, if that wasn't it at all. So can you tell the actual story? Because to me, this story and then how the US government spun it, says an awful lot about the nature, at least of the US regime.
So this was June 12th of 2016. You had Donald Trump leading in the polls and Barack Obama was the sitting president. So to show the reader how much progressivism is sort of entrenched, both the leading Republican, Donald Trump and Barack Obama more or less said the same thing that the Pulse nightclub murder which killed 49 people, injured 53. Here is how Barack Obama summarized the events. He said this was an attack on the LGBT community.
Americans were targeted because we're a country that has learned to welcome everyone, no matter who you are or who you love. And hatred towards people because of sexual orientation, regardless of where it comes from, is a betrayal of what's best in us. So that was the sitting president who has access to the director of National
Intelligence, the FBI, the CIA. This was his take away that the lesson we learned from this massacre is don't hate homosexuals, nor should we be fearful of homosexuals. Well, the goal of terrorism is not to conceal your motives. The goal of terrorism is to bring attention to something that otherwise you thought wasn't getting attention because it's sort of like a shortcut to fame for a number of people.
So he calls 911 while he's holding the survivors hostage and explicitly says you have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq. They're killing a lot of innocent people. What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there? You need to stop the US air strikes. You have to tell the US government to stop bombing. They are killing too many children. They are killing too many women. I feel the pain of people getting killed in Syria and Iraq.
They need to stop bombing Syria and Iraq. So this actually is something that was happening in 2016. People might not have really known that Syria was on the hit list. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the US government dropped 24,287 bombs on Iraq and Syria that year, in 2016 alone. So here we have an explicit example of violence being perpetrated in response to the federal government initiating
violence against other people. And The Intercept actually did some research on this and it turns out that 90% of those killed in these drone striking operations under Barack Obama were people who were not the intended target. Also to qualify to be an intended target, they usually say any military age male, so that's any male 16 years or
older. So instead of saying this is a genuine divide that we have in the world, people who achieve their ends violently and people who achieve their ends peacefully, they made it about sexual orientation or who you're attracted to and just completely blowing it. This is the guy who ran on closing Guantanamo Bay, getting out of these wars that evil George Bush started so he can carry on his father's evil legacy and only caring about the
military industrial interests. They gave this progressive guide the platform to really, you know, stand up for the people. And this is exactly what happened. So this really to me, I didn't know about this till years later. It had just come across my screen and I said, well, I'm so sick of following everything that the news media tells me too. It wasn't years later until I actually found out the truth
about this situation. But yeah, coming across this, it was just shocking that this evidence was right here. There was a primary source, but it never occurred to me. I found one clip of a woman who was inside the club and this was a local news in Florida where she had said, yeah, he kept saying that America's bombing, his country and he was really upset about that. And then, you know, the SWAT team came in and killed him. And other than that, we didn't get the truth from anyone on this.
So this is the classic progressive false divide when there really is a true divide to be had. Yeah. So that to me speaks volumes because it's typical of the regime that it does something that then leads to negative consequences. But rather than ever come clean about this, it always finds some fall guy. It always finds some distract
you with something else. So instead of saying, well look you know we really need to have this overseas empire, but you all have to understand that it is going to come with the occasional cost. I mean some people going to get angry about it. They're going to do crazy things we're never going to have. They're not going to have that conversation with us. Instead it was Oh my goodness, look he didn't like homosexuals like, but so, so that diverts attention from the issue at hand.
But it's not just there obviously we've we continue to see right with rising prices people saying that has nothing to do with us, with the the government or the central bank that's that's greedy companies. In 2008 it was predatory lenders. It's always somebody is it's always somebody. It's always somebody unpopular. It's already it's always somebody the public views as wicked they're responsible for this. We were merely innocent bystanders.
Oh, and by the way, that institution that monopolizes the creation of legal tender money had absolutely nothing to do with the with an economic downturn, you know, that's that's the that's it. And if if those types of explanations satisfy you, then you're probably not going to be prompted to look into libertarians. Well, yeah, it seems like no matter what happens, if you know, we're kept safe, well, that just proves that we need a heavy footprint in the Middle East.
Ben Shapiro's words, heavy footprint in the Middle East. And if things are bad, well, that proves that we need to really get serious about this war on terrorism. So no matter what happens, COVID numbers go up. Well, we need to have lockdowns. COVID numbers go down. Well, see, this is the importance of having lockdowns and mandates. There's no way to actually
falsify this. And it's very classic that the elephant in the brain, so to speak, will attempt to rationalize almost everything that's in yourself interest. So it's not like we have this, well, we need to elect the right people or, you know, just erect a new party. Well, that could be, you know, great in the short run as people like Javier Malay have shown us, that there can be tremendous benefits to that as far as long term solutions goes.
It is a bit of a fool's errand to give people a monopoly on money creation, The right to conscript, the right to tax, the right to have a compulsory education and say these people need to be regulated because once every four years people are going to get a one in a million vote between, you know, two lying psychopaths. That's just not going to happen. So progressivism in and of itself is a bit of a fool's errand. And it's exactly what we should
expect. Just as corporations always want more power, at least they have the genuine check and balance of allowing people to disassociate with them when they stop creating value. Politicians face no such check and balance in society. So that's why progressivism was just so vitally important that I stopped having that as part of my life. All right, let's move on. You have a lot of material in here and I like that you you kind of write the way I do in that there's no fluff in a Keith
Knight book. There is no waste of your time. There are no pages and pages of of of ranting with without facts or statistics. You feel like every single sentence has to be worth the reader's while. That's the impression I get reading your book, that you don't want to waste anybody's time. Let's, let's get the information out there. So what you learn in a Keith Knight book, which will not take
you that long to read. I mean, honestly, you're going to learn 10 times what you would you would learn from a, you know, from a book by almost anybody to be honest with you, by almost anybody and especially Oh my gosh, these I think about the book Sean Hannity used to write. You know, I like it when he was a big radio guy and all the right wing radio people, they all had to write books and Oh my
gosh, what a waste of time. It was just platitudes from start to finish with three statistics thrown in. OK And I would get that. That's what I would get in two sentences of a Keith Knight book. So. So I want to talk about the your section on government failure because that's obviously meant to be a a, a playful reworking of the concerns about alleged market failure. We're supposed to work again. Notice that we're supposed to worry about the the failure of
markets. And markets I know are boogeyman that we're all supposed to hate. But markets that just means, you know, a network of individuals cooperating with each other is what a market is. People buying and selling, making offers, people accepting or declining offers. That's really all a marketplace is. A market is just you and me. And so to be concerned about market failure, to be concerned that voluntary interaction, you know, boy, there's a lot of failure there.
But not to have a corresponding concept of government failure. Failure of an institution that is inherently coercive shows there's a bias in in in the way economics is taught to begin with. Yes. So thank you for saying that. There's a lot of information condensed in this. I remember AJP Taylor once saying most history that people learn is 90% true and 100% useless. And I go that is exactly what I want to be the antidote to. I want everything to be, you
know, generally useful to what? To the reader. So Tom Hartman is a pretty popular progressive and he said there was 1 fatal flaw in libertarianism which just takes the whole thing down and that's why it's barely even worth mentioning. And this would be the existence of imperfect knowledge and competition, which can be generally summarized as market failure. So, because when you go to buy a car, the car salesman and the owner of the company have a lot more knowledge than the
consumer, this asymmetry exists. Therefore, a state is justified in coercively intervening on behalf of the customer and sometimes the producer, if the producer has to face foreign competition for car sales. OK, so the question is, does this exist? One Of course. Experts in the field have more knowledge than the average person, but does it uniquely apply? This is a constant propaganda tactic of progressives.
They say There's profit seekers in the private sector, as if politicians and cops and soldiers and teachers are just unpaid volunteers. Yet there's always profit seeking everywhere, under anything. Or they'll say, well, there's imperfect knowledge. So the question is, can we take this example and apply it to the coercive sector? Obviously, not all voters are
informed. We have a great amount of knowledge asymmetry when it comes to the people who have access to confidential documents that we're not even allowed to see. And if you try to show it to us like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, did they end up putting you in a cage or making you run for your life so you can run away from the land of the free, which they love to constantly brag about When it comes to something like greed.
They also say that this is market failure, 'cause you don't have people, you know, sort of acting both on goodwill. You have people in the sort of doggy dog mentality, greed greedily going at each other. Well, there is an election going on right now. Pretty greedy. You have politicians constantly slandering each other trying to figure out who can get the most votes. One person wins, one person loses. That is just about as greedy as it gets.
Somehow, some way. I don't know when this happened, but the voluntary sector got the name gritty and the coercive sector, which you can't opt out of funding, got the idea that it has something to do with social cooperation and dealing with the greater good. They also say that, well, government, it needs to step in just in case there are externalities within the free market. This is where you purchase a car from me And then. You drive the car, which pollutes the air that other
people breathe. Those people did not consent to it. Therefore the state has to intervene. Notice that the existence of a state doesn't make this externality go away. Also, the state itself is a great externality. We constantly have politicians doing things without the consent of hundreds of millions of their alleged constituents and coercively imposing it. That in and of itself is the greatest externality. The final one that we get is the
short sightedness. You go in the free market, you just want to make a ton of money and you don't care what's left behind you. This was Hans Hoppa's great contribution to the idea of democracy, where much for the same reason, people don't take the time to change in oil, in change the oil in a rent a car. Very few politicians make sure that the state is kept in such a way that it's going to be beneficial for future generations. They're only there for a few years.
They have to extract all the wealth, power, social status and influence they can get until they're kicked out or until they can get a permanent job in the deep state. So we constantly see this short sightedness all around us. You have Woodrow Wilson declaring war against Germany in 1917 hundred and 16,000 American deaths of 2.8 million conscripts. You know, getting shot at, getting PTSD, getting their limbs blown off.
And it was very beneficial for him at the time, along with Colonel Edward House to gain that amount of social status and have that amount of influence in the Treaty of Versailles. He never had to face consequences for anything that
that he did. This basically applies to any politicians who advocate Boris Lyndon Johnson basically pushed and fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the August 4th incident of 1964, which never happened, justifying a further intervention into Vietnam, leaving the things like Operation Rolling Thunder, Operation Bail Roll, the mass bombing and murder of millions of people in Vietnam, Laos in Cambodia. And because of the short sightedness of politicians, they never had to pay a price and
actually they're seen as heroes by by many people. So all of these things do apply to the state as well as the market, But as Mike Munger points out, voters are way worse than consumers, even though they're the same people. But the consumer has to bear the cost of his bad decision making.
That's why you're much more it's much more beneficial to have people acting as consumers where they have to bear the price, where they get the reward, as opposed to being voters where they never feel the pain and seldom will apologize for advocating policies that ruin the lives of millions of people. I'm glad you know, I was sitting here as you were giving your answer, thinking, well, I'll point out certain aspects of this problem, then you cover them all.
So, all right, well, on to the next thing. You have a, a, a, a discussion in here on the minimum wage. And people might think, oh, this is such a tiresome libertarian concern because after all, the the real value of a of the minimum wage has been eroded by inflation over the years. It's not really a big deal. And who cares if the minimum minimum wage goes up? And for me, the main, the main problem with it is that it just shows a a lack of understanding
of what makes wages rise. Like the people who think that the key is we need to force people at gunpoint to pay workers more. I think don't understand wages are not just arbitrarily set. So that that that drives me crazy. But also, I I don't think people realize a point that you make in the book, which is frankly just how few Americans actually work for the minimum wage. Yes, it turns out I don't have the number off the top of my head, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a
very small percentage one. .4% I got it from your book. OK, yes, thank you. I promise. I got the citation there. When it comes to things like full time work, it's important to define what counts as work because as I say in the title, college essentially for me. Well, and it's actually misleading because I was kicked out of college on three different occasions. But College in general for someone could be four years of
work for $0.00 an hour. So if we start with the progressive claim that all work should demand $15.00 an hour because you're exploiting the person, you're benefiting from them. Well, the universities are getting money from the student, and the student does tons of work both in school and tons of homework.
So university basically all schooling the K through 12 violates their child labor law and then the university system violates their minimum wage law 'cause you have people performing labor and not getting directly compensated. So the question is, should universities or any form of schooling be abolished for the protection of the students? And my position is obviously not.
There's a reason so many people choose to voluntarily do such a thing, so they could gain some skills so they can be more profitable in the future. And at the time, they're usually living with parents or living with someone else who's able to take on the bills, so they might not need it at that point. So the point is, is something that progressives actively advocate. Go to college, do this.
They're telling people to work for $0.00 an hour in compensation and then get all high and mighty when they come across a small business or some other organization which is saying that, well, we can pay you $1.00 an hour or $5.00 an hour. The most amount of value that I got was in a two to three-week internship at a tech company where I didn't make any money, they gave me food and gas money.
But getting that on the job experience is so valuable because that's what builds your skills, that's what makes you more marketable in the marketplace among different employers. That's how wages rise. Now, according to the progressive worldview, we should see more or less something like 100% of people getting the minimum wage, because corporations just do the bare minimum. Absolutely necessary. So how is it that such a small percentage of workers get this
minimum wage? It turns out research by Little Wig von Mises in his book Planning for Freedom, Milton Friedman in his book Free to Choose, they make the case that wages rise as the result of a couple factors. One is capital investment by employers. I really saw this when I worked at Walmart. We had a scanning system that was very, very complex and people would send us orders. We'd scan them, get the list of orders, or you'd know where to go in the store to get the item.
Then we'd give the person their groceries in the back of the store. Well, one day this really, really, really expensive system, these things had to be probably like $2000 each. And the software, heaven knows how much it costs in capital investment. One day this went down, so we had to do everything with a pen and paper. And I I honestly believe we might have done 10% of the sales that we were able to use when we had access to those things just 'cause it was down for a day.
So this really shows how each worker is more valuable because they're more productive as a result of capital investment. The second thing, which Milton Friedman points out is the importance of competition among employers. So the employee is not necessarily protected because there's something like Occupational Safety and Health Administration, as I show in the book at place workplace desks were drastically decreasing before the existence of OSHA.
Second, he says the reason that we see wages higher than the minimum wage is because of competition amongst employers. Knowing that there's this threat that I could leave, go elsewhere and take my productivity with me, it gives the employer the self-interest incentive to give me the wage that he thinks I'm worth. So this is very important because a lot of times we're seen as, oh, you just think corporations are going to be oh so nice and generous.
OK, well it turns out just as the customers are self interested when they come in the store, not because they love me, but because they want the products, employees are self interested and the corporations are as well. But the free market allows people to constantly harmonize these self interests by making sure that they can't get a penny out of your pocket unless you voluntarily give it to them. They can't get a second of your time unless you choose to freely
associate with them. So that, again, is why the state's not only unnecessary, constantly makes people more impoverished because it stops people from getting that on the job experience. That means there's fewer employers because you're raising the cost of employing people. Customers have fewer places to shop. Places are less beautiful because you have much more Walmarts. So this leads to the very oligopolies that progressives are constantly complaining
about. So it it is just worse all around when some people claim the right to own the bodies of other people. Did you happen to see at least the the one now semi notorious clip of the interview between Glenn Greenwald and and Tucker Carlson not long ago? Do you happen to see that? Unfortunately, I did. Yeah. So that's good answer. I thought you were saying unfortunately I missed it.
I thought I'll have to fill him in, but I'll fill in the audience the the, you know, I I like Glenn Greenwald. I I I read one of his books. I I follow him. I think he's a very valuable and important voice, and I think Tucker Carlson is downright heroic. I I really, really respect the guy. But nobody's perfect. And sometimes when when these two agree on something, it's it's a bad thing. Sometimes it's a good thing, but sometimes a bad thing.
And they were having a conversation about the economy and Greenwald was leading in with, yeah, you know, all this libertarian economics. I think people are looking around and they're seeing that, you know, Raytheon is getting richer and richer and they're wondering where this all goes. And I thought Raytheon getting richer and richer would not be happening in a libertarian system.
You know like what what are you talking about what does this mean And and then it ended up getting diverted into a an argument about how how ugly our society is becoming that that it's it's the the aesthetics of it are are poor. We can all agree on that. But The thing is it's hard to blame that on libertarianism when we haven't actually implemented that. That is the real thing.
We we haven't actually implemented it this, but this is not we're not living in a libertarian system at at this point. Every major thing the libertarians have demanded, we've just been ignored. They just pay no attention to us. Unfortunately, you the way they were talking, you would have thought that in 1972 Milton Friedman became dictator of America and just has refused to get off the throne since then.
Tucker Carlson said that this sort of libertarian economic policy was completely rationalized after the rich saw that it was in their interest. So notice immediately they're not differentiating between wealth that's gained voluntarily by people like George Eastman, who made the camera much more accessible to the average person. Cornelius Vanderbilt getting steamship access to the average person. Henry Ford getting the automobile accessible to the average person.
Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos. None of that. They just say the rich. This is a classic progressive move where it's not like, you know, giving you a state. Obviously the the Nicolas Maduro and Hugo Chavez were very rich as well, So that even that is not unique to the free market. The fact that they don't even differentiate between voluntary wealth and coercive wealth is how they can make a statement so ridiculous as to say, well look at all this. Reaganomics rich get richer libertarianism.
They constantly conflate those things intentionally and they pin it on Raytheon getting all this money when there is a culprit that we could pin it on. Maybe the progressives that in spite of Allstate atrocities still say, well, the government should tax more. Well the government should regulate more. But I'm against a lot of the things they do with all this power that I advocate that they
have. This is literally as evil knowing about the mass murder campaigns of the Middle East, Vietnam, Korea, the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, Operation Meetinghouse, killing 100,000 civilians in Tokyo in a couple days. This is as bad as saying I want the Ku Klux Klan to have a ton of money and a ton of power, but I think they should be really nice and we should elect a good grand wizard. It is literally that ridiculous when it comes to what they're advocating.
So yeah, Raytheon, having all this money and power you could easily put at the feet of progressives who have had a lot more power than the Milton Friedmans and Ludwig von Mises of the world. There's also a section in your book where you you say a little something about the objection that in the society you want, the poor would XYZ, so X in this case is have no access to education. They would just be, you know, illiterate and helpless.
And I I might point out that that's kind of like what we have now. I mean, I wouldn't want to go to any of these schools. I'm not going to learn anything. Complete waste of my time. I'm going to be probably traumatized. Their chances are. So I'm not sure this accusation sticks, but I think for a lot of people it seems like a a death blow to libertarianism. I I don't want people to have no schools. Oh, and I want there to be schools as well, But one, they
should be voluntary. And two, you make the exact point by them saying, well, I can't believe people are so uninformed to have elected someone like Donald Trump. Oh, they all these people online, they spread these, you know, debunked conspiracy theories as they tell us Putin installed our previous president without a shred of evidence.
But yeah, they're the ones who are constantly saying that society's so uneducated after the majority of us have gone through 12 years of state indoctrination. So what I did was I tried to do some research and I came across the research of a woman, Pauline Dixon, she wrote. She has two studies. One is titled why the denial? Low cost private schools in developing countries and their contributions to education. So notice she doesn't say why the denial. Schooling in the Hamptons, she
says. Let me take the worst people on earth. If it can work here, and by work we mean generally yield a high degree of utility for parents and children alike, well then it is something that can be
generally embraced. So before this I actually used 2 examples of how the Statue of Liberty, something beautiful that I'm sure Tucker Carlson would also find beautiful, was voluntarily funded along with the Salisbury Cathedral in England. So that we can have beauty in the voluntary sector and we can get things like churches which so many people can go to totally for free. I have been to many churches and I have never been charged to to
to walk in the door. So we see this something that people go to one day a week, they're able to voluntarily fund and have a building and have a staff. So if people are going somewhere five days a week, they might find more value in it. And there might be a incentive on the other side of the equation for the teachers and administrators to actually produce a much higher quality
product. So Pauline Dixon summarizes her findings in the study Private Education is Good for the Poor, a study of private schools serving the poor and low income countries. She says the majority of poor parents chose private, unaided schools for their children. Just the fact that when you give people choice, they opt for the competitive voluntary sector is so important because the progressive is constantly saying we need to empower people and
let them vote. Well look, if your right to vote was taken away, there would be some psychological damage, but it would have no effect on the actual outcome of any election where you send your kids to school. Having school choice that drastically changes every aspect of your life and the child's life. So they want to give you tons of choice and something that doesn't matter and no choice and something that actually determines the outcome of your life.
Dixon goes on. Teacher costs are significantly less in private, unhated schools than in government schools. Gender equity is maintained in private, unaided, unaided school enrollment. School enrollment is underestimated. Free primary education serves to crowd out private schools and does not increase overall enrollment. Better pupil teacher ratios prevail in private unheated than in government schools. More teaching is occurring in private than in government
schools. Every single thing you can imagine that we get the objections of. She went to third world countries and found that the voluntary sector was better able to achieve these ends than the coercive sector. All we have to do is take the progressive claim that they're always giving us. They say, well, monopolies are really bad because with monopolies you have higher costs and lower quality than you otherwise would under competition.
So we need antitrust laws. The same thing applies for the state having a monopoly on compulsory education. They don't have the incentive to really get the good information out there. I I forget the statistic that I had found from Corey Deangelis. He cites the National Education Foundation. I know I put it in the book. It's something like spending on education has increased adjusted for inflation, something like 280% since 1960. And there are very few results to brag about.
In fact, the results are so bad after 12 years of schooling, progressive say, well, obviously you have to go to college. You didn't do much for 13 years. All you did was everything we asked. 5 hours a day, you know, five days a week for 10 months out of the years for for the last 12 years. They know it's so bad that they're constantly advocating you go to college afterwards because they know how little you
gained in there. So those are empirical realities, along with the moral arguments as to why the education sector should be brought under the volunteerism umbrella. Do you think most people are reachable? There's no right or wrong answer
to this, I'm just curious. Well, when I see how much things have changed in my life, being a progressive now, being a libertarian, being a, you know, drug addict for four years and then being able to turn my life around, I think it is amazing to see how much people can change when they surround themselves with the right people and start developing the correct habits. So yes, I actually do. As I said in our previous conversation, I think the really important things are social
proof and repetition. So the more people claim to be part of something, the more people want to be a part of it. So the more people who are able to, you know, proudly identify as libertarian or just wear it as a side label, as our mutual friend Alan Mosley likes to say, I'm not, you know, doing a libertarian show. I'm just doing a late night show and I happen to be a libertarian as well.
So just, you know, sort of giving people that green light that it's OK to be on our side makes many more people than we otherwise would have want to join us. And then having someone who you can really admire, who really stands up to your enemies. You got almost the entire GOP saying that George W Bush lied us into wars, which got, you know, our soldiers killed and killed tons of civilians, something you never would have imagined.
That they'd say, and they're anti CIA and a lot of them are now on board with abolishing the FBI supporting Vivek Ramaswamy. And it's not because I don't know if they read a lot of books to come to that conclusion, but what happened was someone took on their enemies, Donald Trump said My enemies are your enemies. They're coming after me. I'm just in their way, but they're really trying to get to
you. And he gave all these people a green light to completely do a 180 on all these institutions that they previously admired. So yes, I think the message can be sold correctly. You know, people like Xavier Malay really just inspire me with his ability to get on TV, make the unapologetic case against collectivism, really inspire people and show people that these ideas are worth getting behind. So, I think so, yes.
Well, that's actually kind of a nice white pill to finish with because sometimes it's very grim and Nah forget it and there's no hope. But but you are somebody who's been through quite a bit and has has come out really strong and so you you what your testimony is, is is very valuable.
So of course, as always, I I want to recommend that folks listen to Keith Knight because I I know I I don't want to call you an up and Comer, Keith, because I almost, I feel like that's condescending towards you. You have already come up and you're I don't know exactly what reading regimen you had, but you've learned a lot. You know more about this material than a lot of people who have been around this movement a lot longer than you
have. So I highly recommend Keith's book, Domestic Imperialism 9 Reasons I Left Progressivism. You'll find it linked down here in the description of the video, also on the show notes page tomwoods.com slash 2436. So thank you very much, Keith. Tom, thanks for having me. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Become a smarter libertarian in just 30 minutes a day. Visit tomwoods.com to subscribe to the show for free and we'll see you next time. Like the sound of the Tom Wood
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