The Imposers and the Imposed Upon | Jeff Deist

i'd like to talk to you this afternoon about two classes of americans and it may not be the two classes you think of but nonetheless there are two distinct classes in america and we have to break up and we have to break up sooner rather than later this is a bit of a long quote to start a talk with but i thought i'd leave it up there for a little while so you could absorb it it's written just about a hundred years ago by ludwig linda gonimises and it rings absolutely as true today as the day he wrote it and it's all about the idea of letting people go if they want to form a different political union or political entity so at the end he mentions true national and cultural policy and so i would ask all of you today to consider is america a nation at this point i would argue no is it even a country barely or is it as uh as some of you who heard my talk in florida a couple weeks ago my friend ilana mercer calls it walmart with nukes and that's what america feels like very much today it feels like we're all living in one big federal subdivision doesn't it so last night i mentioned about a hundred years ago in the inner war period mises wrote his great trilogy three books remarkable books nation state and economy first then socialism then liberalism all within a 10-year span and these three remarkable books basically laid out a blueprint for both organizing society in a prosperous and peaceful way and also a warning in socialism about how to destroy it turns out it's a lot easier to destroy than build so mises lays out this conception of what a liberal nationhood might look like it's rooted in property of course and rigorous self-determination at home and what this means is that he's always stressing the right of succession back then for political linguistic ethnic economic minorities always have the right to secede and of course coming out of the patchwork of the former austro-hungarian empire and in europe he understood what it meant to be a linguistic minority in particular so for mises any kind of nation any kind of real nationalism liberal nationalism requires it laissez-faire at home of course it requires free trade with your neighbors to avoid the tendency towards war and autarky and requires a non-interventionist foreign policy to avoid war and empire so when we think of these three books we can only imagine what the west and what america might look like today if these books have been read and absorbed broadly at the time if western governments have been even somewhat reasonable let's say over the past century consuming let's say only 10 or 15 percent of private wealth and taxes maintaining just somewhat reasonable currencies backed by gold mostly staying out of education and banking and medicine and most of all avoiding supernational wars and military entanglements if governments had just been somewhat reasonable in the west we might still live in a more gilded era like mises once enjoyed in vienna but with all the unimaginable benefits of our technology and material advances today but the truth is that liberalism didn't hold and we have to be honest with ourselves about it it didn't hold in the west and it never took root in the full messesian sense anywhere at least not for long and that's why all of us are here today if the world had listened to mises even somewhat if western states had committed to prescription of sound money markets peace all of our libertarian and narco capitalist theory might have been completely unnecessary we might be sitting here today just sort of grumbling about potholes and local property taxes and local schools instead we're here talking about the state as an existential threat to civilization so two very different scenarios but again the world didn't listen to mises so that's why i got rothbard and hoppa by the way so one of the great progressive achievements of the last hundred years which goes almost totally unremarked today goes to the title of my talk the degree to which the imposers we can call them have been able to portray themselves as the imposed upon it's absolutely uncanny we see it in every aspect of american society in every aspect of our politics today we see it in the presidential election we see it with the culture wars we see in academia and spades we see it with antifa in the streets so if we think about just the last hundred years since mises wrote those three books the past century in america progressives of all stripes of all political parties i i want to add what have they given us what have they given us they've given us two world wars quagmires and korea and vietnam now endless middle east wars in iraq afghanistan yemen may be coming soon iran who knows they impose these enormous welfare schemes that enemy schles has written so much about in the form of the new deal and great society programs which have ruined how many untold lives they created all these alphabet soup federal agencies and departments to spy on us tax us infinitely regulate every aspect of our lives and they built the military industrial complex and the state media complex and the state education complex they legislated violations of basic human property rights which would absolutely shock our great grandfathers if they were alive all along with the courts nodding along in their acquiescence and to pay for it all they gave us central banking the federal reserve system hatched up schemed right here on this island in november of 1910. so what do they the imposers call this they call it liberalism if you oppose it they call you a reactionary to be a libertarian today is to to be a reactionary against the state degradations and depredations and impositions of the 20th century and the political class either the imposers themselves or their agents what is the political class gotten us well they managed to ruin peace they managed to ruin diplomacy money banking education medicine not to mention along the way culture civility and good will and if you oppose the imposers and their elites they call you a populist for it so call me a populist all of this of course flows from the imposers from their positive rights worldview which animates them it animates everything they do and that's why they're able to scream at rand paul for example for denying them health care once you accept a positive rights view of the world then anyone who doesn't go along with your program is taking from you and this is how they see the world the imposers so if the 20th century represents a triumph of liberalism i hate to see ill liberalism but of course if you want to see it we all know what the imposers have in store for us now in the fledgling 21st century and i would add as an aside a good way to tell maybe a beltway person from a rothbardian is to ask them the simple question of whether they consider the 20th century in the west a triumph of liberalism or not i think most rothbardians would say it was not and i think most beltway types would say it was they consider the 20th century some sort of victory for liberalism so what they got us along with all of these other problems is of course a huge divide what they've gotten us is an almost unbelievably an epic divide in society between the imposers and the imposed upon and so how divided are we right and along what kind of lines i thought this was a nice little vignette which took place the other day on twitter we have chris hayes who is a a sub human who uh works at msnbc he says well you know with covid the most responsible way to deal with all these people that sounds like seinfeld those people if we survive this is some kind of truth and reconciliation commission wow that sounds fun i suggest i suspect many of us in the in the room would be candidates for that i don't know if there's box cars outside and then so he represents the progressive left i guess in american leg and then along comes our friend from the neoconservative right the great bill crystal with whom we've all had enough but we always get more i mean this guy does not go away i mean he he's he's like when you take the fish oil capsule at seven in the morning and then at noon that's bill crystal so he says how about truth and no reconciliation the degree of open contempt and hatred that these lunatics have for us is i suppose in part been exposed by trump and trumpism and to that extent we owe trump a degree of gratitude for letting us see them for what they truly are and i would ask either one of these gentlemen if you truly believe that let's say 40 percent of the united states is beyond redemption irredeemable what does that mean what do you what do you propose doing with them does that mean some sort of re-education camp i mean presumably it means that either you separate from them somehow or you vanquish them and by vanquish that could be economically politically or in the horrific scenario which we've seen repeated throughout history even physically so the divide we have in this country today is not so simple as saying blue and red states or counties republicans and democrats are liberals and conservatives or even by class it's a little more complicated than that there's a company out there called surveymonkey which took in a lot of data after the 2016 election between hillary clinton and donald trump and there was a big washington post story using this and they grouped it in a bunch of very interesting ways and i wonder how much people in this room were aware of some of these divides in american culture so sadly there's a huge divide along racial lines in voting patterns if if only white people had voted in the 2016 election trump would have won 41 states and if only non-white people had voted hillary clinton would have won 47 states so i view this as basically a testament to the democrats ability to sell some kind of sick victimhood independency and i and to the the republicans failure to sell any sense of real ownership or opportunity or capitalism but nonetheless that's the divide it's real how about union members if only union member households in other words a household with at least one union member had voted hillary clinton would have won 40 states and if no union members donald trump would have 137. now when we get into religion things get uh even more stark what about households that claim within them that the the inhabitants are either atheists or no particular religion hillary clinton would have won at least 46 states if only non-religious people voted how about if households which claim uh protestant or catholic membership would have been the sole voters trump would have won 45 states okay evangelical voters only trump would have won 47 states people who attend church weekly trump would win 48 states people who seldom or never attend church or synagogue hillary clinton would have won 43 states so it strikes me as we go through some of these numbers that these divides are awfully hard to overcome politically i'm not sure how you do that how about unmarried people hillary clinton would have won 39 states if only unmarried people voted trump would have won 43 states if only married people voted another huge quiet cultural and political gap in this country now you've heard a lot about urban versus rural voters it's a motif which keeps coming up again and again so for purposes of the survey monkey data an urban county is one with with greater than 530 voters per square mile and a rural county is one with fewer than 90 voters per square mile again only urban counties vote hillary clinton wins 40 states only rural voters vote donald trump wins 47 states the last stat i'll throw out at you is gun-owning households i know that none of you own firearms but there are people who do they lock them up and just shoot deer with them they don't have oozies or anything like that modified weapons then they know there's no weapons in this room today i feel comfortable with that statement if only gun owning households voted donald trump wins 49 states guess which one he loses okay the only one he loses is bernie sanders vermont because i think up there you just have a gun anyway just because you're in vermont but you vote for bernie so if hillary clinton if if households with no firearms of any kind were the sole voters in america hillary clinton also wins 49 states and guess which one she loses west virginia another anomaly the point here is that these kinds of divides and problems cannot be neatly solved by politics especially national politics and if you think about them they don't cleave neatly along geographic lines this isn't the mason-dixon line these kinds of divides exist in every state they exist within counties if you go to california which we all think of as a deep blue state go 20 miles inland you know what it is it's it's it's trump flags it's country music and it's mexican rancheros that's what it is okay we we don't have the mason-dixon line in america in 2020. and more importantly what we have to understand is even if you could win some national election you could somehow get 51 percent of the voters to vote for you know i don't know a candidate like a rand paul or something like that it doesn't really matter because hearts and minds haven't changed politically vanquished people never really go away this is what we have to understand this is why we have to break up okay a couple years ago bloomberg did some polling in the former soviet union now russia there are millions of russians especially elderly russians who still absolutely pined for the soviet days when they knew what their job was they didn't have to pay for their apartment etc 70 percent of people in the former soviet union now russia have overall generally beneficial views about stalin in in 2019 okay they view him as the great reformer who helped save their country from the nazis etc in other words despite all the historical examples that the 20th century provided us despite the fall and the collapse of the soviet union despite all the obvious benefits of capitalism there is still a significant amount of nostalgia for the old system politically vanquished people don't just go away okay and the hillary clinton people thought that the deplorables were going to do just that they thought they were dying they thought they were aging out and they thought there were fewer of them than there were and that's what happened in 2016 and that sent the entire country into basically some kind of psychosis which were still suffering under today so i know it sounds difficult i know that the concept of decentralization is one that's obvious and and clear to all of you i know secession seems like a tough go but i want to just throw out to you some happy happy facts some things that are happening slowly right under our noses some very decentralist impulses which are at work and of course they have been absolutely intensified by the covet issue and by these terrible riots which have been roiling across the united states this summer and now into the fall as it turns out all crises happen to be local what do i mean by that well one beautiful thing about kovid is that it has done further damage to our sort of uh credulousness when it comes to these so-called authorities not not neither the u.n nor the world health authority nor our own cdc has been able to project any sort of authority whatsoever amongst people they have been able to drive no consensus and as a result we've had vastly different approaches to covid across international lines and even within our 50 states and even within some states within various cities so we've had this very decentralized approach to covet no central authority was able to sort of seize it and and boss everyone around and tell everyone what to do of course outlets like the new york times tried to do that but that's just in the united states so it's been absolutely fascinating to watch how uh places like singapore and hong kong and sweden have been relatively open in places like schengen excuse me um the the province in china where it happened was was you know drastically locked down some places like san francisco have been drastically locked down here so there's been different approaches in this decentralized effort and none of this is because people woke up one day and said ideologically wow maybe we should try a more decentralized approach no it's just what naturally happens in crises as a matter of fact even the vaunted schengen area agreement in europe which allows free travel between the the member countries immediately broke down all of a sudden a german is a german again and and a frenchman is a frenchman and you can't even drive across who knew as far as i know i i still don't think that an americans can drive or fly into canada right now even as we speak with this liberal uh supposedly liberal uh trudeau administration up there so it turns out that when it comes to a crisis you know things really get local very very quickly i mean after all no matter who you are even if you're bill gates and you can buy you know 10 vacation houses and go to new zealand on your yacht or something you have to be somewhere physically you have to you have to exist in an analog world and that means every you need calories you need kilowatts of energy and air conditioning coming into your home or your abode your your prob you might need some health care some prescription drugs and all of this becomes unavoidable in a crisis you have to be somewhere and and even jeff bezos uh he had a bunch of protesters surrounding his house his swanky house in dc now i don't know if he happened to be there at the time but even if the point is that even jeff bezos could conceivably be contained in his home by a mob that you can't escape um so all of this idea that we had we were now on this sort of new global happy plane we're sorely tested i think by covet and i think that the the the idea of political globalism the bad kind of globalism is is showing its strain i think it's cracking very badly now here in america let's talk about the great relocation that's happening this incredible movement of people out of cities i mean what's the charm of a new york a manhattan or a chicago without the restaurants and the theaters and and the food and and the museums i mean you know it's it tends to be high rent high crime no fun uh so we might find that a lot of younger people are starting to rethink things so i think this this form of de facto secession away from these big cities which tend to be very very left-wing in orientation is a wonderful development to see because some of that political power that big cities tend to hold is going to be attenuated you know atlanta tends to control georgia nashville increasingly controls tennessee uh we we see this in a lot of states las vegas controls nevada but if people start to move away from these big cities then some of that political power similarly is going to go with them so this this decentralist impulse which is really the untold story of the 21st century we see it in companies and the way they uh organize and manage their teams now we're going to have all kinds of teleworking which i think is a mixed bag but nonetheless it's happening one way or another if we look at distribution systems you know what used to be the old hub and spoke model of getting your products your jcpenney catalog or something 40 years ago get you that sweater well now look at companies like amazon that have a very decentralized sort of system of spider webs so the distribution of goods and services is becoming radically decentralized how we obtain information it wasn't that long ago you had to go 30 years ago you had to go to your local mall or something and they might have a milton friedman's free to choose or john kenneth galbraith's affluent society they didn't have rothbard so libraries and universities and professors were almost kind of like the new versions of monks right they were the literate ones and you had to go to them to get information but that's no longer the case you have something to say in your pocket the size of a deck of cards has basically all of human history on it so that's hugely decentralizing and of course what we're seeing right now in the education revolution is just absolutely phenomenal i mean even before covet came along we had khan academy and all kinds of new platforms springing up and we had the student loan debt crisis and we had parents questioning what would you know the value of sending their kids to school for 40 000 a year so that they could get a degree which didn't get them a job and then when they came home after those four years they hate your guts it turns out that that's not such a good value proposition and of course money and banking itself is becoming increasingly decentralized we have all kinds of payment gateways now we have things like paypal uh we have things like bitcoin and so really it's just that top layer of banking that um that is happening uh at major banks so all of these things are happy facts and all these things i think are things we ought to be celebrating and thinking about when we consider the political landscape because i'm not sure that what matters for our immediate future is whether trump or biden wins i mean we all know what what biden is and what he will do we don't know what the hell trump is or what he will do that's what it means to be trump but nonetheless i think some of these impulses which are happening are inexorable i'm not sure that even uh kamala harris or or joe biden can stop them and i think we ought to celebrate that but what's interesting is that the one thing which still seems awfully centralized in our world is the political world in other words in all these other areas of life all these things i've just been mentioning decentralization is something that's happening naturally it's happening by market force it's happening inexorably and it's happening by free choice of people but the one area of our lives where we still accept gross centralization and all the inefficiencies it brings with government so many things that used to be decided the regional or at the state and local excuse me at the city level are now decided at the regional or the state level things that used to be decided the state level decided the federal level and then sometimes even at the international level that's really the political story of the 20th century is the centralization of politics at higher and higher levels which is of course anti-democratic even as though all these people are telling us about our sacred democracy every level of government that's further removed from you is attenuated by definition is less democratic because your input and your consent so-called is less and less meaningful but i wonder if there aren't even some hopeful signs in when it comes to politics and the decentralization of political power at an event last fall in vienna austria hans hermann happa was on a panel and one one thing that struck me about what he said was if you look at the nationalist impulses of the 19th and 20th centuries the patchwork of former europe came together you know if you think of germany as all these principalities and regions and bavaria and and uh prussia and all this you know these things came together he said nationalism in the 19th and 20th century was mostly a centralizing impulse that's what nationalism meant and of course when it becomes belligerent and spills over its borders you get aggressive you get nazi germany or things like that but he said in the 21st century from his perspective nationalism movements tend to be decentralised in other words they're moving away from this sort of global government model which we all thought was going to be our future in the late 20th century when remember the end of history so hapa says if we look at things like the brexit vote if we look at what's happening in in countries like poland and hungary if we look at the uh the catalon the catalonian secession movement in the barcelona in the catalonian region of spain says these tend to be breakaway decentralized secessionist movements so that's the difference between some of the national movements of today versus yesteryear and i think this is coming soon to a city near you in the united states i mean th this is this talk is really becoming reality ryan mcmakin who's the editor of mises org i saw him earlier he's here today please say hi to him if you haven't met him just wrote an article about how even the mainstream publications now are talking quite openly and seriously about secession and i think that's because on some level nervously they still think trump could win i think that's what's driving it but there have been very serious people on both left and right not wild-eyed radicals like me who who have been talking about this for the last several years frank buckley a law professor at george mason university oh we can't say that anymore i'm sorry it's gmu it turns out george mason had a slave or two sorry gmu wrote a very serious book about what secession might look like just a year ago and this is a sober conservative guy similarly angelo codavilla who writes for the claremont institute a retired professor of boston university i believe of classics correct me if i'm wrong maybe philosophy wrote an article back in 2016 called the cold civil war you can find it at claremont.org on their website again you know a very kind of uh sober serious conservative the kind of guy who still uses the lexicon of things like statecraft you know what i mean and they're talking about this similarly people at places like on the left at places like the new republic and the nation are talking about this like never before gavin newsom governor of california has used has applied the term nation state to his own state and of course if what happens in the fall in a month i guess is that somehow some way trump manages to win this election i don't know what that's going to look like i think we are going to see first of all an outpouring of grief and psychosis and outright violence from a significant portion of the country that we're just not prepared for but i think when that subsides you're going to simply see uh blue state governors saying no we're walking away and all that sort of sanctuary city talk will become more and more pronounced and i think that'll be a beautiful and healthy thing for this country now the flip side and i when i say who wins the election i should say who's actually installed in january we don't know who we don't know anything about these ballots and post you know postal delivery carriers dropping them in sewers or whatever it might be but whoever wins if joe biden and kamala harris are installed i think what you're going to see is nothing short of a new reconstruction in america i think you are going to see outright and open attempts gleeful attempts in the media class these kinds of people to impose themselves on the red states and punish them and punish them not only for having the audacity to put donald trump in the white house instead of hillary clinton whom we all knew was going to win but more importantly on a more macro level for coming along and interrupting that arc of history that progressives believe in so deeply that arc that we're always improving and we're always getting better the past is always bad and retrograde so to have that upended by trump is a sin which they still haven't gotten over so if biden and kamala harris win you're going to see things happen like well first of all the sales tax deduction for state taxes will be immediately reintroduced so that those blue states can start deducting things again but i think you'll see it in myriad ways i think you will see sort of uh an outpouring a collective outpouring uh from the left that wants to use the state as a sort of a laser focus you know to bludgeon us the rest of us and i think that in turn will cause the red state folks and and the red state voters to be thinking very seriously about an exit strategy i wish i could give you something more hopeful than that because as i mentioned before the problem here is that nothing goes along neat geographic lines but the lines are there nonetheless when we can't ignore them so i'll close with this tom woods our friend who spoke earlier he reminds us you know political arrangements exist to serve us not the other way around right who the hell said that we have to put up with all of this can we change ours without bloodshed that's the that's the question of the 21st century i think the question of the 20th century was socialism versus property i think the question of the 21st century is is uh centralized versus decentralized so in post-persuasion america where we seem to live it's not just a matter of intellectual error there's more to it than that it's not just about convincing academics and journalists and politicians that our cause is right and you should agree with us because it's also about self-interest and power and they don't see for themselves a path to greater self-interest and a path to greater power in the kind society which all of us in this room would prefer to live in and they're not just going to let us have it without some effort on our part and i swear oh i shouldn't say i swear i hope very strongly that that path does not involve bloodshed but there is reason for optimism there is a decentralist impulse that is working its way across the world it's coming to america and i think that is where we have to put our hopes and our efforts thank you very much [Applause] you

Channel: misesmedia

Views: 19,266

Keywords: Decentralization, politics, political, divorce, amicable, peace, liberty, cooperation, Mises, Deist, conflict, US, America

Id: CGKkdo1ywTE

Length: 32min 40sec (1960 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020