Aaron's Farewell to Free Thoughts

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0:00:07.8 Aaron Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:09.8 Trevor Burrus: And I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:11.8 Aaron Powell: We don’t have a guest on today’s episode because this is my last episode of Free Thoughts. So we’re making the, perhaps a little indulgent, move of our last episode being an hour of Trevor and me talking about this show and what we’ve learned over the eight-​plus years of doing it.

0:00:31.6 Trevor Burrus: It should be interesting it’s eight-​plus years of doing Free Thoughts and 20 some plus years of knowing each other and talking about ideas in different way, political ideas, philosophical ideas, Batman versus Daredevil, all the important events of the day. Yeah, when we met I was 20, I believe, ’cause you came to my 21st birthday, but I think you were 21.

0:01:01.4 Aaron Powell: Yeah, that sounds right, yeah.

0:01:03.7 Trevor Burrus: And it was a science fiction fantasy class featuring a professor who was heavily steeped in what some might today call Critical Race Theory or things along the lines of literary criticism.

0:01:17.1 Aaron Powell: It wasn’t strictly critical race theory ’cause he wasn’t a legal scholar, but it was certainly Marxism, and postmodernism, and psychoanalysis, and some odd combination of various left-​of-​center ideologies that aren’t all actually compatible with each other, but those seem to be incompatibilities that were happily overlooked in the CU Boulder English department.

0:01:41.4 Trevor Burrus: Oh yeah, it’s just… That’s what’s made Mark so interesting too, it’s sort of what makes Slava Dziedzic so interesting, you can just listen to him prattle on about some sort of interpretation of the Twilight Zone, and it’s probably all BS, but… Yeah, that class was interesting, they put everyone in a circle, the desks were always in a circle to discuss the texts that we would read, which ranged from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Neuromancer, then movies like Cat People, Candyman, the old Candyman of course. All this was…

0:02:13.2 Aaron Powell: Blade Runner.

0:02:14.4 Trevor Burrus: Blade Runner, yeah.

0:02:16.7 Aaron Powell: Alien.

0:02:16.7 Trevor Burrus: So, movie nights… Alien, yeah. But Aaron had blue hair, I think, when I met him, and we started chatting about various things and you were an English major.

0:02:29.0 Aaron Powell: Yeah.

0:02:30.7 Trevor Burrus: You were very committed to being an English major.

0:02:32.8 Aaron Powell: Yeah.

0:02:33.4 Trevor Burrus: But I think the most interesting thing about the way you were when I met you was you were a philosopher, but you didn’t like philosophy.

0:02:42.6 Aaron Powell: I suppose that’s true, I guess I hadn’t put a lot of time into it.

0:02:46.7 Trevor Burrus: No, you’d put no time into it. Yeah.

0:02:49.8 Aaron Powell: Yeah. So I don’t think I disliked it, I just didn’t have a liking for it because I had not spent much of any time with it outside of the philosophers and philosophy adjacent folks that one reads as an English major, which is mostly continental thinkers.

0:03:07.8 Trevor Burrus: So after we started debating politics… What’s your recollection and take on that sweep, from your standpoint.

0:03:17.9 Aaron Powell: I remember some of those early conversations about politics because I was kind of uninformedly left, I suppose. I had a lot of culturally left views, I guess I just accepted leftist views on economics because they came with the territory, but hadn’t thought about it much, and the sweep of those conversations… I think it was interesting because we both impacted each other’s ideas, so you brought me in the economic liberty direction and eventually to libertarianism, and I think I moderated some of your more, at the time, conservative and neo-​con views.

0:04:09.7 Trevor Burrus: Don’t air the dirty laundry. We don’t talk about… We don’t know. That is true, we can talk.

0:04:15.1 Aaron Powell: But I think the important part of it is that on the one hand, I think what’s made these 430 some odd episodes of Free Thoughts, what’s made this run successful is that… Trevor, you and I came into this with a lot of practice in having conversations with each other, and I have thought many times over the years, like how weird it is that we would… In college, we would get together multiple times a week and just wander the bookstore, having these long conversations and meet somehow at Cato, mostly without asking, we just decided to start doing it and no one told us no. We came up with an excuse to basically keep having those conversations, but make it for the job, and so that practice conversational back and forth, although that was… I mean the one thing I think we’ve learned a lot better over the course of these episodes is how to manage a conversation, what the difference is between a conversation meant for the participants and a conversation meant for a listener.

0:05:31.2 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, I think… It’s interesting because looking back on those conversations, you’re entirely correct that the… I did come from conservatism, but not a religious background at all, my parents are not religious, just sort of people influenced by National Review and the sort of nonreligious side of William Buckley… I mean, Rush Limbaugh, and then after my dad discovered Hayek, and Friedman, and people like that, so most of our conversations and my recollection were around economics, because my libertarianism of the time, I would definitely call myself now, if I met my past self, something of a neo-​con, especially in the eras of Afghanistan and the Iraq War, and the questions around those, but it was also nothing about my expertise, and still is in foreign policy, but I didn’t have a robust theory of the state, my reading didn’t include people like Alfred Jay Nock, or someone like this, or Étienne de La Boétie, or Anarchist… It included a lot of known… Friedman and Thomas Sowell, which are the books that I gave you, I know in particular, so was influential on you too, to get you thinking about the economic side, which I guess that’s an interesting question I’d like to ask you.

0:06:57.3 Trevor Burrus: How does that… How do you feel about economics as an entry drug, so to speak? ‘Cause some libertarians would be very coarse and say, “A leftist is someone who doesn’t know economics,” and that basically all they need is just a good read of Friedman and Thomas Sowell. How do you feel now about that idea?

0:07:17.9 Aaron Powell: I guess I can see advantages and disadvantages to it being the entrance, and a lot of this is gonna depend on knowing your audience. I think this is another thing that we’ve learned over the years of doing the show and talking to a lot of people, is that there’s a lot of different ways to talk about liberty, and there’s a lot of different on-​ramps and approaches, and one size certainly does not fit all. And so I think a lot of the frustrations that you and I have had with the way that many libertarians talk about libertarianism is that they do push this one-​size-​fits-​all rhetorical style and subject matter approach, that can turn a lot of people off. But on the topic of using economics as the entry point, the advantage of it is that it seems immediately relevant in, say, the way that a more abstract philosophy of the nature of the state or rights or whatever isn’t. It’s, this is we all can see economics in action in our lives, in the lives of the people around us and in the country, in the world, and… So you have this immediate hook, like, “I would like it if we were wealthier. Why aren’t we?”

0:08:38.1 Aaron Powell: And then there’s also something about understanding economics that seems like… That initial, like, “Oh, I’ve been taught demand and supply and incentives,” and these things seems almost like you’ve put on X-​ray specs or something, and you can suddenly just start seeing all of these prior hidden forces at work, and now you have this superpower where you can like, “Oh, I can see why… Why is it that rent is so high?” And you’d be like, “Well, I can understand how housing… ” There’s these connections that emerge and it can get very, very exciting. And it can be this really powerful tool because then once you understand it, you can start seeing how all these things that people are doing to try to help aren’t actually gonna help, or they might help in one area but create purse incentives in another, or inefficiencies and so on. And that can lead you in the direction of policy analysis in a pro-​markets, pro-​liberty direction. So that can be really cool, and the concepts… Economics get wildly complicated, but those basic ideas are simple and, once you get over the initial hump of them, very intuitive. Once you adjust your thinking in this direction, then a lot of this becomes fairly intuitive until you get into the really complicated, your expertise level stuff. So that all makes it, I think, a powerful entry point.

0:10:24.2 Aaron Powell: The disadvantage that I see has to do with the way that it then frames the broader issues of liberty, that I think that there can be a tendency, particularly among libertarians, certainly not all of them, but to see economic liberty and markets as basically the only question that matters, as the only kind of liberty that really matters as the thing that solves all problems, and as the only reasonable or justifiable or rational way to think about society and culture and interactions at the micro and macro level. And it’s not the case that there are… Free-​market economics is great, but there are counter-​weighing concerns that might push us to say, “Let’s limit free market economics.” That’s the kind of contemporary left’s perspective, not the far left, not the Marxists, and that’s… I get frustrated when people on the right think that basically everyone on the left is a Marxist. Marxists wish that were the case, but it’s not at all.

0:11:42.0 Trevor Burrus: Yeah. Go listen to Chapo Trap House, and you see what you think the Marxists think about the rest of the left, yes.

0:11:50.3 Aaron Powell: But it does… There are other issues besides economic issues. And there are other questions, and there are moral constraints that exist, and rights and human interests that aren’t merely economic. And if our entryway to libertarianism is just through economics, we can have a tendency to… Not come to the wrong conclusions on those things, but maybe weight them less than we should or care about them less than we should, or just not notice those other issues, just be like, “Well, if the market is free in this situation, our job is done. We shouldn’t care. Whatever comes out of it is fine.” Not in the sense that if it wasn’t fine we should have the government interact with it, but rather it’s fine in the sense that we shouldn’t even pass judgment on it, we shouldn’t be talking about it…

0:13:01.3 Trevor Burrus: It’s like labour is a good example maybe.

0:13:03.7 Aaron Powell: Labour, the organisation of firms, the… But other things like racial or ethnic inequalities that come out of choices, we as libertarians should recognise those things too as they can be real impediments to autonomy and self-​authorship and flourishing, and all the things that we think that markets are good at enabling, but…

0:13:32.8 Aaron Powell: And we don’t have to say the state is the answer to these. And there are solutions to these things that exist within markets, but we should recognise… We shouldn’t just kind of say, if it’s not people trading dollars for goods or services, it’s not my concern. And I think that can be the issue is economists can become so focused on just economics that they miss these issues, like you talked about, the fundamental nature of the state, it is a profoundly important thing for not just libertarians, but basically everyone who is… Interacts with the state to recognise. And it’s not an economic question, it’s a question of the nature of authority, the nature of obligation, the nature of power, what our relationships to each other can be, how certain institutions or placements in the society can or should or shouldn’t or can’t modify those relationships, like those are all profoundly important questions that point in the direction of genuine Liberty, including economic liberty, but they’re not part of just a pure… Like micro and macroeconomics conversation.

0:14:42.7 Trevor Burrus: It reminds me of episode we had with Elizabeth Anderson, we’ve had a couple talking about employer-​employee relationships, and it’s an interesting point that we should care about those, but for example, the power that an employer holds over an employee, even though everything is seemingly at will, this is a big point made by the left and one that we need to listen to, that if you are a single mother with three kids working in some sort of factory job, and we tell this… Let’s say you’re working at a pretty good one, like an Amazon factory, and we tell the story about, if you don’t like it leave, so that’s the power that the employee has over the employer, but it’s worth considering that she doesn’t really have that level of power unless it’s sort of like the idea of having enough money for the F off money, right? When you have enough money that you actually… People just don’t have power over you, that they can, they… And so you could walk away from a job or from whatever… That’s worth considering.

0:15:53.6 Aaron Powell: Yeah and I… We’re good at noticing some of those things in… So we make the argument about health insurance all the time, like that one of the problems with health insurance, with the regulations that led to health insurance being tied to employment, like because the fact that it is weird that we get our health insurance through our employers because we don’t get our other… Maybe we get some life insurance as a benefit, but we don’t get our auto insurance and our homeowner’s insurance and all of that through our employers, and that exists because of regulations, government interventions and ongoing tax incentives and so on. And we talk a lot about how that ends up making exit from bad employment situations or just the ability to improve your lot by taking your labour to somewhere where it’s worth more to an employer, that makes it harder because if you lose your job or you switch jobs, you lose your health insurance, and we recognise that until we say, there are lots of reasons why the current health insurance market is screwy and why government has messed it all up, but one of them is this tying it to the jobs, and if they didn’t do that we would…

0:17:09.7 Aaron Powell: People would be able to move around more. But we don’t tend to… In other instances, when we’re talking about people in poverty working for officious bosses at places where their employment is very contingent and they’re being controlled in all these ways, those kinds of things, we tend to take it like that’s just the market working, that’s just… Those are voluntary relationships that were freely entered into, just like the employer and the health insurance, but those are often the result of a lot of the same kinds of… It’s not the… It’s not health insurance regulations, but it’s… We talk about the ways that government policy traps people in poverty or depresses the economy of certain areas, or where bad schools, bad government-​run schools or tying schools to local property taxes and so on, means that people aren’t getting as good an education, and so if you are a lower skill employee where there’s more competition for your job, basically your bosses can get away with being meaner to you because you have few options to leave, like those are the kinds of things that we shouldn’t be proposing government solutions to them…

0:18:23.0 Aaron Powell: But if we want to be expanding the movement for Liberty, bringing more people in, these are real concerns, and a lot of people’s lives that we have good answers to, and it’s not just we have good answers, I think we have the right answers to them, and we have the right diagnosis of what’s causing a lot of these problems, and if we can talk about those things with empathy, then it can be very powerful for promoting genuine political liberty and genuine economic liberty, but if we just kind of dismiss that as meritocracy or just the effects of the market or whatever, in a way that we wouldn’t do and say the health insurance thing, then it not only means that we’re not out there making compelling arguments, but that we also look dismissive or callous or cold about the real problems that are really impacting and hurting a lot of people.

0:19:25.4 Trevor Burrus: And it seems to me that one of the biggest things libertarians can do to be better at being a Libertarian is to care in the way that you just described it’s… And I’m not endorsing the idea, the popular idea that libertarians are uncaring as a matter of course, but we’ve been doing this for a while, and I can say that there are many, many people in the professional libertarian world who are maybe less empathetic, and maybe one reason they are less empathetic is because they take a big picture view of it, not that they’re mean to their friends and family, and they don’t care about the plight of what their friends and family are doing, or other people in their circle. Is that when you talk about these things that you mentioned, what about a worker with the inability to change jobs or lack of mobility, they view it in a very big picture systemic sense and say, Well, that’s just a problem of growth in the local economy. It’s like, “Yes, that problem of growth in the local economy, that is what it is, but right now, like right now, that guy at a 10,000 person town in southern Ohio that used to have a factory, that no longer has a factory. Right now, that guy has a huge problem”.

0:20:52.9 Trevor Burrus: And it would be great to revitalize the economy and we can do it, we know how to do it, we’ve seen what… Even Detroit is coming back, Aaron’s home town. We’ve seen places like Cleveland or Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh is a wonderful place, but it takes time, the wheels of the market and the wheels of what Deirdre McCloskey calls trade-​tested betterment, they take time and in that time, that person losing that factory job can be severely hurt. And that might be one reason, and I think we’re on the same page on this, that as for me, the welfare state that focuses on the right things and not on the wrong things, is one of my least complaints about the state. Now, you and I could both go on about what’s really wrong with the welfare state, especially as a product of state pathology and all of this stuff, but I think that there is something too, and I know you agree with it too, ’cause we’ve talked about it a lot. You know the Randian critique, and I don’t like Rand and neither does Aaron. I think there’s value in Rand. And I think I know many people who… The general message of, live your life, be productive, and stop apologizing for it is not damaging, but it can lead people to criticize the “non-​productive without taking a bigger picture of what is going on to make these people be productive or non-​productive”.

0:22:26.8 Trevor Burrus: So does putting that in quote, ’cause there’s a lot of ways to be productive and reducing stuck to that economic life, so… Yeah, so the… I think you’re with me on the welfare. You asked me what’s my most non-​libertarian opinion, it’s probably the fact that I’m okay with some sort of welfare state, but I’m also radical enough to imagine many, many communal ways that we could have… We could get around the Welfare state, but those are simply not available to us now because the state has crowded it out, so I’m not the most against it, but yes, we could be a lot better at talking about and caring for other people’s plights due to their economic circumstances.

0:23:05.1 Aaron Powell: Yeah, and I think related to that is recognizing that the goal is not for an individual person, like what their liberty matters a lot, and Liberty is a good in and of itself, but it’s also creates other goods and the chief one that it can create is what I’ll call self-​authorship, that the best thing that you can achieve in your life is like what you want to achieve with your life, and that vary wildly from person to person, and one of the issues, I think with a purely economic way of thinking about this stuff, you mentioned productivity is to see, say, productivity as only expressed in dollar income, and so the person who is producing more in dollars is more productive, the person who is producing less is less productive, and this turns into somewhat of a meritocracy thing where like the basically, the reason that some people are wealthy and other people are poor, is that the people who are wealthy were more willing to work hard or have longer time horizons than the person who is poor.

0:24:20.9 Aaron Powell: And that’s the kind of talk that I think really gets a lot of libertarians and free market people into trouble with people who would be sympathetic to our message because it’s wrong in first, the regard that that person might be working extraordinarily hard, the poor person might be working extraordinarily hard, in fact, much harder than maybe the wealthy person is, but through a whole set of circumstances where they were born, what skills their parents had when they were growing up, the environment just luck, luck plays a huge role in a lot of this stuff, and I think it’s down played a fair amount.

0:24:58.7 Aaron Powell: They are working their fingers to the bone at three low paying jobs and don’t have an opportunity to start a business or whatever, and that the lack of recognition of that, I think makes it a harder sell, again, not to say, not to justify a larger welfare state not to justify more government intervention, but to say like this is… If you tell people, if you just tell people with a straight face that say hard work or time horizons is the only or the main reason that some people are rich and other people are poor, most people are gonna recognize that that’s not true. They’re gonna look around and be like, “I saw my immigrant, grandparents came over here with nothing and built a better life for themselves, but were never rich, and they work like crazy”, so clearly that can’t be true. And they’re right, and I think part of it is there’s a… Using productivity in a technical economic sense versus the way that most people use the term, but then there’s also this self-​authorship thing, that there is nothing wrong with someone choosing not to become rich, not to be successful in that sense in the marketplace, you can say, my dream is to…

0:26:32.8 Aaron Powell: I wanna teach music lessons to kids because I get a lot of pleasure out of that, and I want to serve people co… I wanna be a barista because I really enjoy interacting with people in that environment, and I wanna live in a small but comfortable apartment and hang out with friends a lot, and that’s my dream, and that dream seems perfectly rational to me. If you can achieve it, then you’ve been wildly successful, if that’s your dream, but you’re not making a lot of money. And we should celebrate that because the goal, I think, should be to celebrate the self-​authorship that Liberty brings, and to recognize that the value in liberty is not necessarily that then everyone can become rich, although the higher, more abundance…

0:27:23.4 Trevor Burrus: We all are almost all rich… Almost all of us are rich in a rational sense, yes.

0:27:28.4 Aaron Powell: Yeah, but the real goal is to maximize self-​authorship, that’s…

0:27:36.6 Trevor Burrus: Your point remind me of the thing I wrote years ago for lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org that discussed the criticisms that came on to one of the Occupy Wall Street protesters or someone in the similar sphere, who was complaining about the fact that he got a Master’s of Fine Arts and puppeteering, I believe is what he had, and he had X amount of dollars in debt, maybe a $100,000 or something, and he couldn’t find a job, and so there were a bunch of people dunking on this person saying, “See, He just wasted his life and he decided to pursue a worthless degree, and we should condemn him for this because he didn’t go into finance or something”, and of course, that’s exactly the wrong thing that we should be doing, we should be praising and advocating for a world where people who are artistic and have other desires rather than just earning money, have the ability to find some sort of living because there’s so much leisure time in society and “excess wealth” that you can now do this, and that of course, is the thing that the left often misses is that they don’t understand how much the things they like are a result of economic growth, but then the economically-​centered libertarians or conservatives tend to focus too much on top tax rates and regulations on businesses and things like this that do really matter and have long terms effects, but don’t really resonate with Mr.

0:29:12.2 Trevor Burrus: MFA and puppeteering which is maybe one reason he’s not listening to us, we actually do have the prescriptions for A why he doesn’t need to have that much college debt and B how we can create a society where there are even more puppeteers and other types of weird endeavors. And I think that that’s as I agree, it’s self-​authorship interested in your own personal journey of coming from where we discussed when we first met, sort of know-​nothing lefty, Punk Rocky dude who hadn’t examined the stuff to a Buddhist philosopher who’s thinking about liberty in a different way. I don’t know if you could describe that progression in terms of… Especially when it comes to Eastern philosophy, what brought you along that path and how it ties in with your libertarianism?

0:30:12.7 Aaron Powell: Yeah, I think it’s a confluence of a lot of things. And I think that the take a few steps back, way to describe it is a shift in my, I guess, call it emphasis in how I talk about and how I think about the cause of liberty from an economic and policy one, which remains, as you said, extraordinarily important and increasing wealth is the best way to help in basically every metric that matters to anyone, but my emphasis has shifted more to these being questions about how we should treat each other, just as people in this world, all trying to figure this thing out. And achieve success as we define it, what is the right way for us to be treating each other, and what are the ways that corrode relationships and undermine our ability to live well together, and if that’s the focus, so in more of an ethical stance, what does it mean to live well and what are the skills and behaviors and beliefs conducive to living well and living well with others? Then that’s where the nature of the state and the nature of politics comes very much to play because setting aside all of the benefits of free markets and Liberty, that it unleashes innovation and technological growth and increased wealth and tends to create more peace and all of that.

0:32:16.4 Aaron Powell: Those are all very good. We should push for them, but even setting all of those aside, like the nature of the state is to be violent towards each other, and it is to say, rather than trying to get you to do what I want through persuasion or market incentives, like I could pay you to do what I want, which just means to me giving you something of value for you to do something for me that I value. I say, “Hey, you over there, will you beat this guy up or threatened to beat them up in order to get him to do what I want”. That is just the inescapable nature of the tool that we call politics and state, that is the person… The organization that exercises the use of that tool and that relationship that replacing exchange and persuasion and empathy and tolerance with violence is so destructive and so kind of inhuman, in an aspirational…

0:33:38.1 Aaron Powell: We should aspire to not behaving that way, that I think it’s… For me, it has become just the core of the entire liberal, libertarian, pro-​liberty project, is to say we should treat each other as human beings, we should treat each other with respect and empathy, and we should organize our society around doing precisely that. And the move into Eastern philosophy came from first the move into ancient Greek and virtue theories, which are… A lot of libertarians are either these consequentialists or the utilitarians. They’re the economist people, like, “We can decide what’s right to do or wrong by just doing some math, adding things up, totalling our accounts and seeing where we come out.” That’s like a very economics way of thinking about things.

0:34:35.2 Aaron Powell: Or there’s the deontologist, the very rules-​based, like, “I want to just have a set of rules to follow.” And that’s like the… We have rights, and if you violate a right, then you’ve done something wrong. And if you haven’t violated a right, then whatever you’ve done is fine. Like that kind of thinking, so very black and white. And virtue says, “No, we should be more concerned with the kind of person you are, your traits of character, and then your actions will flow from that,” and what are the actions that are best representative of positive traits of character or negative traits of character and so on, because try to be good people, and then good people will do the right things.

0:35:12.2 Aaron Powell: And that was like the Greek, and then the move into Eastern was partially by accident, just reading randomly, but then I think in retrospect, there is… The Eastern philosophy, particularly Buddhist philosophy, is taking a lot of those same insights about virtue and marrying them to a really strong commitment to non-​violence and non-​harm, both to ourselves and others. That’s the core of Buddhism, is that we suffer because we have beliefs and values and engage in actions that do harm or violence to ourselves and to others, and we can bring about real happiness in our own lives and in the world by stepping away from those harmful, violent interactions and activities and thoughts and so on.

0:36:11.6 Aaron Powell: And that, to me, seemed like that’s just kind of the culmination of this journey that I’ve had from the economics and the policy way of thinking to the virtue way of thinking, and then the recognition of virtuous non-​violence as the ultimate thing, which then has these really deep repercussions for the state and politics, given that their fundamental nature is violence.

0:36:39.9 Trevor Burrus: I have to ask you the question. This was not intended to be interviewing Aaron, but I think I… The question that I want people to hear you answer, before I agree with you, what does the virtuous, non-​violent person do, or where is that… What commands that viewpoint in Mad Max’s universe? Because it seems to me that you should… If you have a true moral philosophy, it should be equally applicable in Mad Max’s universe versus 21st-​century America or Western world. But it’s hard to say that it is equally applicable, that you can be immoral and you can practice violence, to some degree, in Mad Max’s universe in a way that you shouldn’t here.

0:37:31.0 Aaron Powell: And then on the one hand, you can talk about defensive uses, right, or you can say that you should strive to be non-​harmful, but there are certain times when acting in a way that will harm one will, like… Is the only way to prevent. And that can prevent greater harm, and that can get into all sorts of Star Treky-​type problems, but there can be that level of, like, in really dire circumstances, you sometimes have to take actions that aren’t right, that aren’t good, that aren’t virtuous, in order to, say, survive or protect the people you love or whatever. I don’t think they become virtuous in those situations, so I don’t think that it’s like in a Mad Max world, all of those things people are doing that we wouldn’t do here are virtuous activities there that wouldn’t be here. I think they’re still un-​virtuous activities; it’s just that we are more willing to overlook them, or more willing to bite the bullet on them, or more willing to say, “Fine, I’m not going to live up to the ideal standards, if the alternative isn’t living at all.”

0:38:49.0 Aaron Powell: But I’m wary of basically judging moral standards against those kinds of worlds, because I think that in almost every instance where someone believes that they are in that Mad Max… That in a situation where the Mad Max behavior is justified, it’s not. It tends to be less a… There is a line somewhere that we have to deal with when we cross it and more a way to rationalize vicious behavior in the here and now.

0:39:21.7 Trevor Burrus: Like, say, post-​9/​11 torturing of terrorists or something.

0:39:25.5 Aaron Powell: Yes, exactly. Or the way that…

0:39:27.7 Trevor Burrus: I put “Terrorists” in scare quotes there, by the way. [chuckle]

0:39:31.4 Aaron Powell: The way that a lot of conservative, pro-​cop people talk about beating up suspects and like… That this is what’s needed to protect these cops who are out on the beat, it’s not, because there are lots of other police officers who don’t behave that way in other countries and places that are just… So it ends up being an excuse, and so I think that we should aim for the virtuous behavior all of the time, and there may be times when there are things that out weigh it. But most of us have never been in those, most of us never will be in those. And one of the issues is that I think that the State and politics tricks us into believing we’re in those far more often than we are. These people are so bad that we have to use the violence of the State to stop them, even when their badness is simply they’re choosing to live differently than us.

0:40:28.8 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, the collectivism of it is wild. That’s one thing I’ve learned over the years. You brought up my foreign policy transgressions in the past. The collectivism of the whole thing of saying, of what you just said, how the State allows us to collectivize. People don’t talk about this in… By collectivising of into something like the United States of America, we can view things as collective harms that are not really harms. We can say… So we can have people saying, “ISIS wants to destroy America.” Back when ISIS was a thing, or Al Qaeda or Taliban, but it’s a very abstract collectivist notion, fighting against another very abstract collectivist notion about whether, are you actually in danger for ISIS? So ar are you actually in danger? And granted, there are things like 9/11 that happens, that means that there’s some small chance that you could end up in a terrorist situation.

0:41:27.2 Trevor Burrus: But I advise probably not living your life by such small chances. And that’s the collectivism of that, is that we did this, they did this to us, we can now go against them with brute force, it’s just the tragedy of something like the Iraq war where convincing ourselves, people convincing Americans that somehow Saddam and Iraq wanted to attack America meant that we killed, let’s say conservatively, 200,000 Iraqis, of which most Americans don’t really give a crap about because they’re Iraqis, because they’re on the other side of a line, and then say we feel safer or something because of it, it was… Now, I realize, and I’m reading Spencer Ackerman’s book right now. So for the next episode of Free Thoughts, [chuckle] but I realize just how much of a tragedy that entire situation was and how much it depended upon the operations and collectivism of the State.

0:42:28.2 Trevor Burrus: And in this sense, the right wing loves to use the word collectivist all the time to describe the left. But describing, if you’re talking about militarism and nationalism and the collectivism of that, which of course there are many people now who looks like the virtues of nationalism type people who explicitly embrace it, just put us all into the worst moral situations, become worse people as we’ve talked about over and over again, do horrible things to people that would never be imagined if you could just sit down and have a beer with an average Iraqi, which most people could do before we murdered 200,000 of them. It’s deeply sad.

0:43:10.4 Aaron Powell: I think… And this is something, you live for 13 years in Washington, D.C, and you look at the way that people talk about policy and the way they talk about our countries role in the world, and whatnot. I think the most damaging idea in the world right now is nationalism. It just destroys humanity and empathy and understanding and willingness to not even just help other people, but to live alongside them. And it is all just based on this fantasy of… There’s these things called nations that somehow make us fundamentally different from each other.

0:44:00.6 Aaron Powell: The others, everyone else but the people who live within this loop drawn on the Earth that we call a particular country, it’s unbelievably destructive and leads to so much just basic immorality and hatred and accomplishes very little, because I think it gives people… People like to build their identity around it, but it’s like a false and cheap identity based on not really… You should build your identity around your accomplishments and your interests and your relationships and your passions, not around just like where you happen to be born. Where you happen to be born, can have a tremendous influence on those passions and relationships because those are the people you’re around and those are the… That’s the culture you are in and all of that, that influences you. But the nation shouldn’t be the fulcrum of identity because it doesn’t give you much and it destroys a lot. And…

0:45:08.5 Trevor Burrus: That usually ends up, it ends up poorly. When it ends up poorly, not many people subjectively enjoy, I don’t know the pledge of allegiance at… The National Anthem at sporting events. I find it deeply creepy. As do most people, I brought some German friends of mine to their first American sporting event one time, and they were taken a back, ’cause that kind of stuff just doesn’t happen, and that kind of patriotism rigs of Nazism, if you grew up in Germany. But there are people who generally enjoy that and it can be harmless. It’s like being a sports fan and really being happy when your team wins.

0:45:46.9 Trevor Burrus: It’s all silly. Even as a die-​hard Oklahoma Sooners fan, I deeply recognize how silly it is that my emotions can ebb and flow based on whether these people wearing these shirts win or lose, but at least it’s a little harmless. Right? Until Philadelphia fans start punching horses and waxing down… [chuckle] Where they have to wax down the traffic lights. So there’s a good side, but the bad sides of nationalism, the collectivism of nationalism, whether it’s world wars and genocide or even just immigration restrictions which are deeply rooted in nationalism. And as our colleague [0:46:29.5] ____.

0:46:29.6 Aaron Powell: Well, all the States refusing… We don’t want Afghan…

0:46:34.5 Trevor Burrus: Oh, yeah.

0:46:35.6 Aaron Powell: Refugees.

0:46:37.0 Trevor Burrus: Even the ones… Even the ones… Even the ones that we helped out… That helped us out. We don’t want them here.

0:46:42.8 Aaron Powell: Yeah. We don’t want them here, ’cause they’re different from us.

0:46:43.9 Trevor Burrus: It’s hard to figure out any other way that… And I’m not saying racism even, ’cause you know, it’s not all racism, race definitely plays a role, but you know, go to all the different nations of Europe and by that I do not necessarily mean countries ’cause at different times they’ve been countries or not like say the Serbians who were once part of Yugoslavia and they’re now their own country, but they’re… I mean the Serbians, the Croats, the Bosnia Herzegovinians, like they’re all white. I mean, well it becomes a silly question at some point in terms of how we define that. But there are some different religions going on, but it’s not all racism. It’s just the disease of that perverse collective nationalism, but okay. So we have a few minutes left. I don’t know if you wanna make any comments on favorite episodes, favorite moments. We didn’t really plan this intentionally. So maybe Aaron wants to punt on that or parting thoughts or…

0:47:43.5 Aaron Powell: I mean I think… I’ll just… I think the value… Like I certainly hope that our listeners over the years have gotten value out of this show. And that, you know, and I’ve heard from people who have listened to all of the episodes, which is more than I’ve listened to. And like, and that’s they must be getting something out of it.

0:48:08.4 Trevor Burrus: That’s actually true because if I do an episode solo, Aaron’s pretty much guaranteed to not have listened to it. And so he definitely has not listened to every Free Thoughts episode.

0:48:17.9 Aaron Powell: I’ve not listened to…

0:48:18.0 Trevor Burrus: I think I’ve listened to every episode. I think I have ’cause I listen to every episode I have not been a part of. So…

0:48:24.1 Aaron Powell: Yeah, so like that has been… I think that we have created value I think is clear and is something that I can take with me and makes me very happy, but this has… I mean aside from getting… Somehow getting to spend an hour a week, having conversations with like my really good friend and a ton of smart people and having it be part of my job, which is still crazy, but like awesome. I think for me like the really getting a sense of that diversity and richness of thought, that’s out there from talking with so many people, a lot of them libertarians, but a lot of them not from tons of different perspectives, lots of college professors, lots of scholars, but also people who aren’t and have wildly different lives than like we in the kind of wonky Washington tend to have. And seeing that diversity and seeing the ways that you can have really fruitful conversations across intellectual ideological cultural divides and that you can learn a ton from…

0:49:48.9 Aaron Powell: The people that we’ve had on who raise ideas, that even if it at the end I’m not persuaded. Like I read their book, I wasn’t persuaded. I have had the hour of conversation where I had to ask my pointed questions. I wasn’t persuaded, but I learned a lot like new ways to think about things, new perspectives to take, or even just new approaches to expressing my own ideas and opinions or ways to… Or things that I have to be aware of when I’m expressing them like counters to them that I need to have an answer to like that I think has been just incredible that the range of people that we have talked with on this show and a lot of them who I had no idea before we set up the episode kind of about their work and then was blown away by it or people who like for as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to get to talk to and I did. And they were every bit as interesting as I hoped.

0:50:58.9 Aaron Powell: And what I’m, you know… As far as that value for our listeners, it would be genuinely lovely if they could take that kind of, that lesson away from this show that you get a lot from talking with people who you might not be in your wheelhouse who might have ideas that are different from yours or aren’t exactly the stuff that you are interested in at the time. And so to just like, let yourself range widely and don’t close off potential conversations, don’t close off potential avenues of thought because they come from people who aren’t part of your tribe or they’re ex… They’re often expressed in ways that you don’t particularly like, or they make you a bit uncomfortable, like run with all of those, to the extent that you have time and opportunity because you’ll benefit like in a very rich way from that. And so, I mean that’s the kind of treasure I take away from the time that you and I, Trevor and our guests have talked over the years is just the richness of all of it. And it’s been a real honor to get to share that with listeners and to hear from listeners who have loved what we’ve done and have learned from it. Yeah it’s been wonderful.

0:52:49.2 Trevor Burrus: Here, here, doing this show for… We should have actually counted the episodes 430 odd episodes has been one of the immense pleasures of my life. So thank you very much.

0:53:02.8 Aaron Powell: Yeah. Thank you Trevor. And thank you to everyone who’s listened to me and my long-​winded questions for as long as you have.

[music]

0:53:26.7 Aaron Powell: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.