420 - Grover Norquist at Burning Man

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Grover Norquist

The final speaker at the 2014 Palenque Norte Lectures, which are held at Burning Man each year, was Grover Norquist. According to Wikipedia, “… he is an American political advocate who is founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, an organization that opposes all tax increases and a co-founder of the Islamic Free Market Institute. A libertarian-leaning Republican, he is the primary promoter of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge.” While to those who haven’t yet had an opportunity to attend Burning Man, his attendance at such an event may seem unlikely, in the extensive Q&A that followed his brief talk, it is quite evident that he has many admirers on the playa. I think that you will be fascinated as he very candidly discusses not just tax matters but also touches on what he thinks about Burning Man itself, as well as his position regarding psychedelics, legalizing cannabis, and mandatory minimum sentencing.

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic

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salon.

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And I’ve been looking forward to publishing today’s podcast ever since I first learned that Grover Norquist was to be the final speaker at this year’s Palenque Norte Lectures.

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And if you aren’t already familiar with Grover Norquist, you really won’t understand the significance of his attendance at Burning Man.

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Man. But of those who are aware of Norquist’s significance in American politics, well, I’m afraid not everyone was as supportive of him delivering a Palenque Norte lecture as I was.

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Hopefully this podcast will change those opinions. To give you an idea of how polarizing Grover can

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be, I actually received several emails saying that the senders would never go to Burning Man again

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because, are you ready for this,

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because he had ruined everything by attending.

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Now, that’s got to be one of the most idiotic things that I’ve heard in a long time.

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So, let’s get a grip here, and first of all, recall last week’s podcast, where Lily and

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Neche were suggesting that our community be more open about airing our dirty laundry in

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public.

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that our community be more open about airing our dirty laundry in public.

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And to me, some of our dirty laundry includes being extremely closed-minded about people who we have political disagreements with.

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If you’re new to the salon, you haven’t learned this yet,

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but in the 1980s, while I was living in Dallas, Texas,

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I, at the time, was an Irish Catholic Republican lawyer.

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Well, today I’m still Irish, and I am an inactive member of the Texas State Bar Association.

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But politically, there’s nothing about me that reeks of my Dallas ears.

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In brief, my political progression was from Democrat to Republican to Libertarian.

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And you probably know the joke that Libertarians are just Republicans who smoke pot.

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But after my Libertarian phase, I morphed into a little-a anarchist,

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and maybe someday I’ll explain all that in more detail.

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However, my point is that during those years when my politics were different,

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I was still basically the same person that I am today.

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I wasn’t a bad guy back then, and neither are my Republican friends who are still living in Texas.

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As we listen to Grover’s talk in a few moments now, you’ll learn that he isn’t a one-trick pony either.

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In fact, he makes it clear that he doesn’t agree with everything that others in his organization even promote.

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But on one thing, they all agree.

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The U.S. government over-collects and seriously wastes our taxes.

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What they’re wasted on, of course,

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is a bone of contention among us all. Now, I’ll have a little more to say about this after we

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listen to this talk, but as we listen, I hope the image that you keep in mind is that of the

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Ouroboros, the mythical snake, and I hope that you’re mature enough to realize that I’m not

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calling Grover a snake, far from it. But the Ouroboros, you probably

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know, is shown in paintings as this mythical snake that’s eating its own tail. It’s the symbol of

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eternal return, of something that’s constantly recreating itself. And in my opinion, that’s

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precisely what civilization is doing. Unless you’re extremely closed-minded, you most likely

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share some of the opinions of

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conservatives. And if you’re a conservative yourself, I suspect that there are still many

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issues on which you and I can agree, like legalizing cannabis, for example. My point is

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that we should all be listening more closely to people with whom we disagree, because my guess is

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that no matter who it is, there will be some things that we have serious disagreements with, but there will also be other issues on which we heartily agree. To me, being psychedelic means

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being open-minded, and I think that the talk that we’re about to listen to will bring home the fact

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that despite our differences of opinion on some issues, we’re nonetheless all in this together,

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and so we’d better begin listening and communicating better with everyone,

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not just with people whom we’re in agreement with.

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Now, one more thing before I play the recording of this talk,

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and this is for all of you fans of Gary Trudeau’s new political comedy series on Netflix that’s titled Alpha House.

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Well, here’s a spoiler alert.

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In the just-released Episode 3 of Season 2,

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you’ll see Grover Norquist playing the role of a character who had won a contest

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for being the funniest celebrity in Washington, D.C.

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And by that appearance alone, you can tell that he’s a lot more of a regular guy

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than you might have previously imagined.

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So, now let’s travel back in time to the hot August night in 2014

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on the playa at Burning Man,

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where Grover Norquist is about to speak.

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All right, everybody, welcome to Palenque Norte.

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We are about to get going here with our last talk.

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It’s been a fabulous four days of talks.

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Thank you all so much for joining us.

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So to close out the week here, we have a very special talk.

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We have Grover Norquist with us.

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Welcome, Grover.

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So Grover’s going to speak for a little bit,

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and then we’re going to have a lot of time for Q&A.

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And today’s discussion will be moderated by John Mitchell, who’s the managing editor at Burning Man.

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So please welcome John Grover to the stage.

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Good evening, Palenque Norte. For those of you who do not know me, I work for the U.S.

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Department of Burning Man. And I’m here with Burning Man participant Grover Norquist

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from Americans for Tax Reform.

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Hi, Grover.

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Hello.

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How’s your burn going?

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Doing well, having fun.

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Any highlights?

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Oh, the whole thing.

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I mean, Petra and Burning Man are the two things, places I’ve been that were

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more intriguing and

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interesting and amazing

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than advertised. Everything else

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I mean the Louvre was nice but I kind of knew what it was

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and it wasn’t any nicer than I thought it would be

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but Petra

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way beyond what I expected

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and Burning Man just deeper and more

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intense and bigger.

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Cool. Well I would love it if you would tell us a little bit about your work and how it

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brought you to Burning Man, what your goals and ambitions are for the time you’re here

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and how it fits into that vision.

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Sure. Grover Norquist, I run Americans for Tax Reform, which is a taxpayer group that

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asks all candidates for office, federal and state,

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to make a written commitment to voters, not to me, as Senator Reid sometimes says, but to voters,

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that they will oppose and vote against any tax increase, no net tax increase.

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Tax reform, fine. Tax cuts, fine. No tax increase.

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So I work on that and have done that for about 25 years now.

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I also serve on the Board of Directors of the National Rifle Association

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and work on Second Amendment rights and on the Parental Rights Organization,

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which works on homeschooling rights and making it easier for people to homeschool.

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So we put together a meeting in D.C. about this size.

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We put 150 to 180 people every Wednesday together for an hour and a half,

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90 minutes, 30 people out of that 180 will present for three minutes each on what they’re doing,

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not what their hopes and fears are, not what they think other people should do,

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what are they doing to advance liberty. And then people can participate with them or not as they

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advance liberty. And then people can participate with them or not as they see fit. We have a broad center-right coalition that works on that. And as Burning Man has sort of got

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state and regional and international spinoffs, the center-right meeting, there are now 45

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state capitals that have similar meetings, 10 in second cities, San Diego, Chicago, Orlando,

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and so on, and 16 international ones from London to Tokyo to wherever Australia is.

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And so we’re trying to build a center-right movement that advances liberty as rapidly and as firmly as possible.

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And what I want to do is just give a brief overview on sort of where I think we are

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and then take questions until you guys get tired.

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Right now, we have a two-party system, even though there are many parties,

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because of the way the laws are structured.

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And so in Europe, you might have ten parties, and if you get 3% of the vote,

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you get to decide who the prime minister is, and you’re terribly important.

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In the United States, if you get 3% of the vote, you’re officially a nut.

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You don’t get, no matter how right you are, by the way,

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you don’t get to fly Air Force One, you don’t get to be the senator.

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So people and tendencies join

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coalitions, two different coalitions, broadly the Republican and Democratic Party, but the

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center-right and the left movement. And if you want to know what guys on the center-right

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are going to be doing, the best way to understand it is you think of the meeting that we have

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in D.C. Everybody’s in the room, all of the

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tendencies and political movements are there because on their vote-moving issue, not all issues, and

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this confuses people, but on their vote-moving issue, what they want from the government is to be left

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alone. On their secondary and tertiary issues, they may have some odd views that would not make me

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happy, and I can assure you as a board member of the National Rifle Association, many of the people who vote pro

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Second Amendment have what I consider the oddest views on free trade with China. But

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they don’t vote on free trade, they vote on the Second Amendment. So around the table,

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people who vote on these issues vote center right. Taxpayers, leave my income alone.

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Property owners, leave my property alone.

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Homeschoolers, let me educate my own kids.

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Homeschoolers don’t knock on your door and tell you to homeschool.

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They simply wish to be left alone to homeschool.

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The Second Amendment community does not insist that all fourth grade children be taught books entitled, you

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know, Heather Has Two Hunters. They’re not telling you that what you have to do, they

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simply want to be left alone with their Second Amendment rights. The school choice movement,

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parental choice in education, the people for whom religious liberty is their number one

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issue, you can go around the table, everybody’s there on their vote-moving issue. They wish to be left

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alone. Now, there are tongue-wagging issues that some radio talk show hosts talk about

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that can be very frightening to people who are concerned about liberty. But I’m less

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concerned about issues if they’re not vote-moving issues. I’d like everybody to be right on all issues, but the important one is on their vote-moving issues.

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So around the table, they don’t all agree. The guy who wants to make money all day looks

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across the table at the guy who wants to go to church all day and says, that’s not how

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I spend my time. And they both look over at the guy who wants to fondle his guns all day

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and say, that’s not how we spend our time. But it’s not necessary that everybody in the center-right movement agree on how

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they spend their time and their freedom, just that the government should leave people alone

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to run their own lives. Then they can decide how they wish to spend their time. And they

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can go to church all day, they can make money all day, they can play with their guns all

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day, whatever they want to do with their time and space and energy.

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And that’s the center-right coalition.

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It’s a low-maintenance coalition because people are not in conflict on a vote-moving issue.

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I got a call when Hillary Clinton was running for Senate back in 2000.

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She made the comment that what progressives needed was one of those meetings like Grover and Orquist runs in Washington

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where we all get together and think deep thoughts.

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And what did I think of Hillary’s comment?

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And I said, I explained how our coalition works.

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I said the challenge for Hillary is that around the center left table

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you have the trial lawyers, the labor unions,

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the big city political machines,

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the two wings of the dependency movement, people who are locked into welfare dependency, the people who

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make $100,000 a year managing that dependency and making sure they don’t get

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jobs and become Republicans. Then you have all the various coercive

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utopians who have plans because they’re your moral superiors and they get

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government grants to tell the rest of us how to run our lives.

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These are the guys who make the cars too small to put your entire family into

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and the toilets too small to flush completely.

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And they have a list of things that you have to do

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and a list of things that you’re not allowed to do

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that is slightly longer and more tedious than Leviticus.

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It just goes on and on and on. So around the left’s table,

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they can get along as long as we’re stupid enough to keep throwing taxpayer money in the middle of

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the table. Because then, like the scene in the movie with the bank robbery, after the bank

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robbery, one for you, one for you, one for you, everybody around the table is happy. But if we do

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our job, if we say no new taxes, and we mean it, and the pile of money in the center of the table

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begins to dwindle, then our friends on the left begin to look around at each other at

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the table a little bit more like the second to the last scene in those lifeboat movies.

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Now they’re trying to decide who gets eaten or who gets thrown overboard. So our job is

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to stop sending money in, force the contradictions

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within the various structures of the left so that they argue with each other and gnaw

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on the guy next to them. If we don’t feed them taxpayers, they will gnaw on the guy

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next to them because the left is not made up of friends and allies. It’s made up of

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competing parasites. And they view the guy next to them as a competitor, not an ally,

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if there’s a limit to tax dollars being available.

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So what do we try and do?

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Increase the number of people who have liberty so they’ll defend it stronger

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and reduce the number of people who take advantage of the state

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to live off other people and to tell other people what to do.

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And the fewer of them that there are and the more people willing to defend liberty,

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the stronger the center right is.

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And that’s the project for the next 300 years.

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And we try and advance and make the world a safer, freer, less top-down,

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less government telling us what to do set of rules.

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And I think we’re in generally good shape on doing that.

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I would say our friends on the left say, well, demographics will help the left,

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and they view demographics as all about race and ethnicity.

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In point of fact, demographics that matter are about vote-moving issues.

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In point of fact, demographics that matter are about vote-moving issues.

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And so there are now, in 2007, there were 4.5 million Americans with concealed carry permits.

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Today there are 11 million. In those states that have more people with concealed carry permits, crime, particularly violent crime, drops much more rapidly than in other states.

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Because criminals are not stupid.

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They’re just criminals

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and they steal cars rather than break into people’s houses or mug people in concealed

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carry states. So you want to expand the number of people

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who have rights that they want protected and reduce the number of people who view the state

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as the means of living at somebody else’s expense.

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So with that general overview, I’d love to take questions on just about anything.

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I have a question, Grover.

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Yeah.

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Tell us what that has to do with Burning Man.

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Sure.

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Like, is it something about the values that you see reflected here,

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or is it more like the process by which your group makes decisions and talks about issues?

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What attracted you to come here?

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Well, Larry Harvey said, why don’t you come?

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A couple years ago we met and had dinner in D.C.

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and we were just talking about Burning Man and said, you should come. And I said,

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I’d like to. I’ve heard a great deal about it and know a lot

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of good people that go.

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And that year, 2012,

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some idiot put the Republican

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Convention the same week as Burning Man

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and

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I talked to them but they weren’t able

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to change it and

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so I couldn’t go.

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Tough choice. Yeah, it was. I couldn’t go. But anyway. Tough choice.

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Yeah, it was. But that was work. Anyway, I was able to come this year. I mean, this is a fascinating situation where a whole bunch of people come together for a week, do their

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own thing. Nobody takes, you know, the government doesn’t tell anybody what to do.

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The government does charge Burning Man

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several million dollars for which they do nothing.

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They’re very expensive to Burning Man.

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And each of the local governments gets in on the action

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on giving people tickets to other ways to make money.

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So the government does get in the way

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and the government is annoying

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and the government makes the cost of Burning Man

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higher than it needs to be

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and that needs to be called back.

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But I think Burning Man is a wonderful example

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of communities organizing themselves

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without being told what to do.

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I hear that.

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It works better than Chicago or, you know, some other examples of states.

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Well, why don’t we open it up for questions from the people to see what their sense is of that

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and if they have any questions for you about how we run our society here.

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Sure.

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Goddard Space Flight Center, which is part of NASA,

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funded a report that came out in 2012 that no one would publish.

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Finally, on the 14th of March of this year,

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The Guardian published it.

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It’s called Industrialized Civilization Headed for Irreversible Collapse.

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They went back 5,000 years with the Mesopotamians, the Mayans,

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the Romans, the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, the English, and now us.

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And they talked about, my concern is they talked about using a lowest possible depletion rate and a very small number of elites.

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Eventually, the elites consumed too much, leading to scarcity among the commoners,

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which causes a collapse of society.

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This is to be differentiated from a type L collapse where nature collapses.

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This is a collapse of society.

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I wonder what your views were on that.

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Sure.

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I mean, most societies are not destroyed by the weather.

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They’re destroyed by their idiot governments.

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And one of the reasons I got interested in taxes is you look at the history of

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the United States, the history

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of all the empires you walk through.

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The Roman Empire was destroyed by its tax

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policies. I mean, they had a tax revolt

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in what’s now modern-day

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Turkey against the Romans. 86,000

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tax collectors were killed within a month.

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They were

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really abusive.

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People were selling themselves into slavery to get out from under the tax burden.

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So the Dutch did the same thing.

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The Spanish taxed themselves out of their…

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I mean, they had all the lovely gold they could steal from Latin America,

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and they still taxed themselves into oblivion.

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The Netherlands did the same thing.

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Britain did. It’s a sad history. I just finished what’s supposed to be a 75,000 word book.

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It’s now 95,000 words. We’ll see what the editor has to say about that on the history

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of taxation in the United States. And you go through U.S. history and just at every place taxes help

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either move us in the right direction or the wrong direction. We had a tax revolt that

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formed the country, gave us our independence. Then almost immediately we had the 25% tax

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on whiskey and we had the Whiskey Rebellion. Before the country was divided north-south, it was divided east-west,

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and the tax on whiskey was viewed as a tax on the west,

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west being Appalachia and west.

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Those people traded with the Spanish, with the French, with the British,

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not so much with the other Americans.

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They weren’t necessarily all in states yet,

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and they used whiskey as a currency.

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They also used whiskey as a way to turn product

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into something you could transport.

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So all of a sudden we put a 25% tax on their ability

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to export their cash crop,

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and a 25% tax on what they used as currency,

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and they started shooting the Whiskey Rebellion.

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So when Jefferson got elected

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he abolished all of those taxes and Jefferson’s

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party governed for the next 24 years

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as a result of that. The Federalist Party,

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the party of Washington and John Adams was destroyed.

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It never came back because of their tax policies.

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It almost broke the country into two at the time.

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And then you had the tariff, which divided the North and the South.

00:21:32 ►

The tariff was the South subsidizing the North,

00:21:35 ►

which was no end of troubles for the next 40 years.

00:21:39 ►

And then we got Prohibition because of the income tax. We got World War I because of the income tax.

00:21:45 ►

Got World War I because of the income tax.

00:21:47 ►

But prohibition, you had a temperance movement that said we should stop letting people drink.

00:21:53 ►

The temperance movement said don’t drink.

00:21:55 ►

The prohibition movement said we’re going to have laws to not let you drink, which is a different matter.

00:21:59 ►

But you couldn’t have prohibition because a third of federal revenues came from liquor taxes.

00:22:08 ►

A third. And a whole bunch of them came from selling off land as people moved west.

00:22:12 ►

So when the income tax came in in 1913,

00:22:16 ►

it had as its advocates southerners who wanted to reduce the tariff

00:22:20 ►

and the temperance movement, which said, gee,

00:22:24 ►

if we had the income tax, then we could get rid of banned liquor,

00:22:28 ►

which is exactly what happened.

00:22:31 ►

Without the income tax, we probably would not have ever had prohibition.

00:22:36 ►

Without the income tax collapse in 1929, let me just wrap up here, and then we’ve got the next question.

00:22:43 ►

You want to hear this about prohibitions? Very good.

00:22:46 ►

Because we had the 29 collapse in income tax revenues, the government was looking for money.

00:22:54 ►

And 10 years of murders and organized crime and Al Capone didn’t convince people to get rid of prohibition.

00:23:02 ►

What convinced the politicians to get rid of prohibition was they wanted the money from taxing liquor. So liquor came back because of the collapse

00:23:10 ►

of the income tax.

00:23:13 ►

That has nothing to do with the question.

00:23:17 ►

No, that does too. The question was, what do I think of the idea that our empire, our American society,

00:23:26 ►

could collapse internally based on decisions made by the government?

00:23:30 ►

I think it’s very likely.

00:23:31 ►

All the comments, all the case cases he did were ones where tax policy did exactly that.

00:23:37 ►

Yes, it could happen.

00:23:38 ►

I intend to work with all you good people and stop it, but yes, it could happen.

00:23:44 ►

Well,

00:23:45 ►

I’m going to change the subject.

00:23:48 ►

This is the end

00:23:50 ►

of the lecture series for psychedelics.

00:23:55 ►

And I’m so grateful

00:23:57 ►

that Mr. Norquist is here

00:24:00 ►

at the end of the psychedelics

00:24:03 ►

lecture series. And I’m really curious what Mr. Norquist

00:24:08 ►

might have to offer on the topic of

00:24:10 ►

psychedelics.

00:24:20 ►

The great thing about being a tax proactive is you don’t actually

00:24:24 ►

have to have an opinion on all subjects, unlike columnists

00:24:27 ►

who do because they have to write every week.

00:24:29 ►

But let me expand

00:24:30 ►

that to the question of prohibition.

00:24:34 ►

No, meaning all drugs.

00:24:36 ►

All drugs.

00:24:38 ►

And that’s one where I think we’re having

00:24:40 ►

a very healthy discussion,

00:24:42 ►

maybe long overdue, but a healthy discussion

00:24:44 ►

about whether the states should have the we’re having a very healthy discussion, maybe long overdue, but a healthy discussion about

00:24:45 ►

whether the states should have the power. States don’t have rights. People have rights.

00:24:51 ►

States have powers. Whether the states should be allowed the power to tell people what they

00:24:56 ►

can and can’t ingest. And I think we saw with liquor that that was a counterproductive decision

00:25:03 ►

for a decade, very expensive.

00:25:05 ►

We’re still paying the costs of the damage done to the country by the creation of organized

00:25:11 ►

crime and government corruption from that.

00:25:14 ►

And I think that the discussion starting with the marijuana, the issues of medical marijuana,

00:25:20 ►

which is now 22, 24 states, and the discussions, the legislation in Washington and Colorado,

00:25:28 ►

having 50 states is an extremely helpful way to bring new ideas forward.

00:25:34 ►

Those people who think that legalizing marijuana will be a disaster,

00:25:38 ►

well, we’ve got Colorado and Washington, and we’ll be able to look at that.

00:25:42 ►

And if it’s a disaster, people will pull back.

00:25:44 ►

And if it’s not, more states will move forward. And so

00:25:48 ►

I’m not sure I like the idea of Washington deciding for all 50

00:25:52 ►

states yes, no. I’m much more interested in 50 states

00:25:56 ►

taking their own approaches and learning from each other. I think

00:26:00 ►

we’ll make progress much more rapidly doing that than waiting for

00:26:04 ►

guys in Washington to all flip one way or all flip the other.

00:26:11 ►

Psychedelics are part of that broader conversation.

00:26:18 ►

Yeah.

00:26:19 ►

Hi. I’m actually really excited to meet you.

00:26:23 ►

Hi.

00:26:22 ►

Hi. I’m actually really excited to meet you.

00:26:23 ►

Hi.

00:26:27 ►

Okay, I was wondering if you could talk about the liberty-enhancing aspects of a guaranteed basic income.

00:26:32 ►

Because I’m not really free to quit my job if I’m free to starve.

00:26:36 ►

That’s no type of freedom.

00:26:38 ►

And it also gives the opportunity, like, you don’t need a minimum wage

00:26:41 ►

if there’s guaranteed basic income.

00:26:42 ►

There’s probably, like, OSHA things we could get rid of. You know we could get rid of. If your job’s dangerous, you can leave without serving.

00:26:50 ►

Okay, the question was, should the government take money by force from people and give it

00:26:56 ►

to other people? And I tend to think that the answer to that should be no. I think we

00:27:01 ►

should organize society with a minimum amount of force and that

00:27:06 ►

when the government steps in and

00:27:07 ►

says we’re going to take money from you and give it

00:27:10 ►

to somebody else, you might go

00:27:12 ►

well, we could do it to help poor people.

00:27:14 ►

Okay, well, the government says

00:27:16 ►

that’s what they do, but the

00:27:17 ►

government then turns around and

00:27:19 ►

runs a farm subsidy program

00:27:22 ►

which makes every poor person

00:27:23 ►

particularly poor because

00:27:25 ►

they spend more of their income on food

00:27:27 ►

by raising the price and they make a bunch of people

00:27:30 ►

quite rich who

00:27:31 ►

are in the sugar business and others.

00:27:34 ►

When you give the

00:27:35 ►

when you allow the government to have the power

00:27:37 ►

to expropriate from one

00:27:39 ►

person and take their resources

00:27:41 ►

and hand them to somebody else

00:27:42 ►

you open up a very dangerous

00:27:45 ►

situation. And I think if you look throughout the history of the world, governments use that power

00:27:50 ►

very poorly and our government doesn’t do it very well. I do think we should focus on getting,

00:27:56 ►

making a list of things the government does that kill and destroy jobs and stop doing those and

00:28:02 ►

work on creating as many jobs as possible.

00:28:05 ►

If this economic recovery, the one that started six months after Obama got elected, July 2009,

00:28:13 ►

if we had simply grown as well and as strongly as we did in the same time period after Reagan’s recession bottomed out,

00:28:24 ►

after Reagan’s recession bottomed out,

00:28:26 ►

when his recovery started,

00:28:28 ►

there would be more than 10 million additional Americans at work.

00:28:31 ►

The cost of bad policy

00:28:32 ►

is 10 million people out of work,

00:28:36 ►

10 million families missing a breadwinner.

00:28:39 ►

That’s an awful lot of poverty.

00:28:41 ►

And that’s all from doing bad policies,

00:28:44 ►

spending too much money and

00:28:45 ►

having too much taxes rather than going in the other direction. We’ve seen policies that

00:28:50 ►

work and we’ve seen policies that didn’t work. The weakness of this recovery, the human cost

00:28:57 ►

of the bad policies is 10 million unemployed people who could be working.

00:29:02 ►

Unemployed people who could be working.

00:29:05 ►

I have another question, Grover.

00:29:07 ►

It’s about Burning Man.

00:29:18 ►

In our society here, we have principles, practices, institutions that we made ourselves, largely,

00:29:25 ►

but also that the organization that runs the event constructs for us for supporting our, you know, everyone in our society.

00:29:29 ►

The principle of gifting is what it’s essentially about.

00:29:30 ►

You’ve probably heard this.

00:29:38 ►

I’m wondering what you, how we are doing on your scorecard for taking care of our own.

00:29:45 ►

How, does this society look a lot or a little or none at all like the one that you’d like to live in? I think, look, the reason why the free market does well in producing computers and software

00:29:52 ►

and Amazons and Ubers and so on is because of competition.

00:29:58 ►

And the problem that governments have is they don’t get enough competition.

00:30:02 ►

When you go throughout history, the one part of governments that work is the military.

00:30:06 ►

Why?

00:30:07 ►

It’s the one part that has to compete in the world.

00:30:09 ►

Your post office can be pretty weak,

00:30:11 ►

but if your military is not as good as the guy next door,

00:30:14 ►

they eat you over time.

00:30:17 ►

And so you have that kind of competition,

00:30:19 ►

which is not necessarily a healthy competition,

00:30:23 ►

but it is the history of much of the world throughout history.

00:30:28 ►

I’m talking about a virtuous competition where with 50 states,

00:30:35 ►

say, look at what we’re doing in Texas, no income tax.

00:30:39 ►

Most of the economic job growth in the country has been coming out of Texas

00:30:43 ►

in the last 10 years with a series of different policies than California has or Massachusetts.

00:30:49 ►

And looking at the 50 states and saying, let’s see what works, let’s see what doesn’t work.

00:30:54 ►

That’s true with marijuana policies.

00:30:57 ►

That’s true with tort law.

00:30:58 ►

That’s true with spending.

00:31:00 ►

The question was, what about a guaranteed minimum income?

00:31:02 ►

Let Vermont try it and see how it works.

00:31:06 ►

And if it works, then we must do that.

00:31:10 ►

I’m all in favor of the most amount of competition so that states compete to provide the best government at the lowest cost.

00:31:19 ►

And right now we have this log jam in D.C.

00:31:26 ►

You have Republican House, Democratic Senate, nothing’s going to move.

00:31:28 ►

Nothing big is going to move.

00:31:30 ►

Nothing good big, nothing bad big, because one could veto the other.

00:31:36 ►

One can stop the other.

00:31:37 ►

But in 24 states, there’s a Republican governor, Republican House, Republican Senate.

00:31:42 ►

If the Republicans sit down and decide to do something, 24 states, they can do it.

00:31:46 ►

Half the country’s population lives

00:31:48 ►

in a Republican state. A quarter of the

00:31:50 ►

country’s population lives in a Democrat

00:31:51 ►

controlled state. California, Illinois,

00:31:54 ►

Massachusetts.

00:31:55 ►

The Democrats sit in a room. They have the House,

00:31:58 ►

the Governorship, and the Senate. They can

00:32:00 ►

do anything they want. So

00:32:01 ►

three quarters of the country

00:32:03 ►

has unified government,

00:32:06 ►

either Democrat or Republican,

00:32:08 ►

and there, if you have a good idea

00:32:10 ►

that you think will work,

00:32:13 ►

take it to the Democrats

00:32:14 ►

or the Republicans, whether it’s an idea from the left

00:32:16 ►

or the right, and pass it at

00:32:18 ►

the state level. And then say,

00:32:20 ►

look at this.

00:32:22 ►

That’s how we passed

00:32:24 ►

concealed carry, shall issue concealed carry laws.

00:32:28 ►

It says if you’re 21 and you’re honest and you’re not crazy or you’re not a criminal,

00:32:31 ►

you will be given a concealed carry permit.

00:32:33 ►

Why?

00:32:34 ►

We passed it in Florida.

00:32:35 ►

Crime dropped dramatically in Florida.

00:32:38 ►

There weren’t shootouts in the street.

00:32:39 ►

And then people went to other states and said, we want to do that.

00:32:42 ►

And they saw their crime fall more rapidly than other places.

00:32:46 ►

If you have a good idea that works, other states will do it.

00:32:51 ►

And if you have a really good idea that you think it’s a good idea and it fails dramatically,

00:32:56 ►

then other states will go, don’t do that.

00:33:00 ►

So what Burning Man does, what Uber does, They’re not states, but they say,

00:33:05 ►

here’s a different approach.

00:33:07 ►

We do this differently.

00:33:09 ►

This is how we structure ourselves.

00:33:10 ►

This is successful. This works.

00:33:12 ►

I think all, even non-state actors,

00:33:15 ►

can be very helpful in giving people

00:33:19 ►

a different sense of how we can organize ourselves

00:33:22 ►

without the state ordering us around with guns.

00:33:27 ►

Hi.

00:33:28 ►

I’m pretty tall.

00:33:30 ►

you mentioned perhaps anecdotally

00:33:34 ►

about your plan

00:33:35 ►

being projected for the next 300

00:33:37 ►

years and slowly chipping

00:33:40 ►

away at that or quickly chipping away

00:33:41 ►

at that. We’re going to win in the next

00:33:43 ►

seven, but okay.

00:33:45 ►

We may have to win in the next seven, but okay. Yeah, yeah.

00:33:45 ►

We may have to take 300.

00:33:47 ►

Yeah.

00:33:48 ►

My question for you is how are you thinking about the ecological crisis and the fact that

00:33:58 ►

50 years from now, if things don’t change, if practices don’t change, that our planet’s going to be unrecognizable

00:34:06 ►

and perhaps most likely very, very hostile to life.

00:34:11 ►

I think two things.

00:34:12 ►

One, when you look at some of the projections that people have made over time,

00:34:19 ►

we need to be very careful.

00:34:21 ►

Remember Ehrlich, the population bomb guy, explained that in the 70s we were going to have tens of millions of people throughout the globe starving

00:34:28 ►

and we were all doomed, and that the population was going to swell

00:34:33 ►

when now we’ve got many countries where it’s in decline.

00:34:40 ►

Those groups that have put together ideas looking forward on global warming, for instance,

00:34:46 ►

I think all studies, certainly all studies funded by the federal government,

00:34:51 ►

should be completely transparent.

00:34:53 ►

And so if you’ve got a proposal and say, we’ve got an equation here,

00:34:57 ►

and that says there’s a hockey stick and this is what’s going to happen,

00:35:02 ►

I think if you get federal money, taxpayer money,

00:35:06 ►

it’s not federal money, money taken from taxpayers by force

00:35:08 ►

and given to you, you should have to make any study

00:35:12 ►

that you put forward completely transparent.

00:35:16 ►

The government needs to do this too,

00:35:18 ►

and the whole transparency issue, September 4th,

00:35:21 ►

Ralph Nader and I are speaking at the National Press Club on things that the right and the left can agree on.

00:35:28 ►

And Ralph and I do a whole bunch of projects together where you can have principled people on the right and principled guys on the left.

00:35:34 ►

They’re not sacrificing.

00:35:36 ►

They’re not compromising.

00:35:37 ►

I’m not doing something to be nice to Ralph Nader, and he’s certainly not doing something just to be agreeable. We each think we’re moving our agenda forward,

00:35:48 ►

working together against the interests of the government.

00:35:51 ►

And one of those areas of agreement is transparency.

00:35:55 ►

And I bring this up because the projections people have on some stuff,

00:35:58 ►

I think that we should look at that and take it very seriously.

00:36:02 ►

But I think anyone who says, I’ve done a study and it proves X,

00:36:07 ►

and you’ve got to live your life and organize it around my study,

00:36:11 ►

and I won’t show you either the data or the equations I use to make my projections,

00:36:18 ►

the agreement when the government funds these studies need to be,

00:36:24 ►

that needs to be open, not for peer review, which is your friends lying for you.

00:36:28 ►

I mean, if you ever read the back of those books where people write things about how swell the book is, okay, none of those people have read the book.

00:36:37 ►

They do it because they like the author, he’s their friend, and they like their name on the back of the book that they didn’t have to write, okay?

00:36:45 ►

So they never mean anything.

00:36:48 ►

What you want is transparency so 300 million Americans

00:36:51 ►

and several billion people around the globe can look at something and have

00:36:56 ►

some sense as to how serious it is. But transparency

00:37:00 ►

is one of those great issues where right and left agree that government

00:37:04 ►

funding should be transparent,

00:37:06 ►

every check the government writes should be transparent,

00:37:09 ►

it should be on, it’s all public information.

00:37:12 ►

It’s just sitting in shoeboxes in city halls

00:37:14 ►

and in file cabinets in Washington, D.C.,

00:37:17 ►

and guys who can afford lobbyists

00:37:19 ►

can go get those file cabinets and look at them,

00:37:21 ►

but that should be available to every person in the country,

00:37:24 ►

not just a few people.

00:37:28 ►

Yeah, so the question, I think, if I may rephrase, was how does society respond to such a possible

00:37:37 ►

crisis?

00:37:37 ►

Well, okay, you start by saying, if you’re going to assert that we know X is going to happen, that

00:37:45 ►

everybody in the country needs to see

00:37:47 ►

both the data and the projections

00:37:50 ►

and how you got there.

00:37:51 ►

And we didn’t get that for many years and still

00:37:54 ►

don’t have it from

00:37:55 ►

a lot of the equations on global warming.

00:37:58 ►

Let’s get all the data completely

00:38:00 ►

transparent and then you

00:38:02 ►

can have an intelligent conversation.

00:38:04 ►

Well, let’s say that we get it and the data does not look good.

00:38:09 ►

What do we do then?

00:38:10 ►

How do we organize around that problem?

00:38:12 ►

Well, there are several ways.

00:38:13 ►

One is you say to yourself, what is it the federal government is doing that makes a problem worse?

00:38:19 ►

How can you make it less of a problem?

00:38:22 ►

Are there ways you can do it?

00:38:24 ►

I’m always a little bit concerned when our friends on the left

00:38:26 ►

every year or two come up with a new crisis,

00:38:30 ►

and the answer to every crisis is more government power.

00:38:34 ►

I would feel more comfortable if sometimes…

00:38:36 ►

We had Al Gore come and talk to our Wednesday meeting

00:38:38 ►

just before his movie came out,

00:38:41 ►

and he was quite convinced if he talked slowly, we’d understand.

00:38:50 ►

He’s a bright guy, and he’s a wonderful person. And he came and gave his presentation on global warming. And I asked, I said, I’m old enough to remember when in the 1970s global

00:38:57 ►

cooling was happening. It was inevitable. Everybody who didn’t see it was an idiot.

00:39:01 ►

And that you had to do 10 things because of global cooling,

00:39:06 ►

use less energy and so on. And now there’s global warming, or then there was global warming,

00:39:11 ►

and the same 10 things had to be done to stop global warming. Now there’s climate change,

00:39:16 ►

and the same 10 things have to be done on climate change. If the angels came down and

00:39:21 ►

sat on your shoulder and said, no change, no climate warming, no cooling, none of that.

00:39:26 ►

Are there any of those ten things that we shouldn’t still do?

00:39:29 ►

And he said immediately, no, you should still do all those ten things.

00:39:33 ►

At some point, you wonder if they want to mandate ten things,

00:39:39 ►

and they just keep changing the reasoning why you have to do these ten things.

00:39:43 ►

And that’s why I think we should be, one, very careful to make sure that the whole country sees the data,

00:39:48 ►

not just the experts, but the whole country.

00:39:51 ►

And two, if you were going to fix a problem in 1910 over the next 100 years,

00:39:57 ►

you would do it with 1910 technology, 1910 thinking, and you wouldn’t have a chance of fixing it. Part of

00:40:06 ►

what you want to do is have the most

00:40:07 ►

robust, flexible economy

00:40:10 ►

possible so that when

00:40:12 ►

there are

00:40:14 ►

challenges, ecological

00:40:15 ►

or others, we can roll with the

00:40:18 ►

punches and be

00:40:20 ►

able to move quickly and

00:40:21 ►

reform. So I think step one

00:40:24 ►

what everything is going to happen

00:40:25 ►

on the economy or weather or foreign policy, a very strong, robust, free, organically run,

00:40:34 ►

bottom-up economy is important and flexibility is key. So you can make those decisions.

00:40:42 ►

Hi, Grover. I’m also very excited to meet you.

00:40:45 ►

So first, can I ask you for an autograph?

00:40:56 ►

I think you made my mom’s month.

00:40:59 ►

Okay.

00:41:00 ►

So I find very attractive the idea of being left alone in peace to do what I want

00:41:05 ►

gay people, people who are gender non-normative

00:41:09 ►

people who have strange alternative relationships

00:41:11 ►

have not found a place around the table at the Republican Party

00:41:15 ►

and I may be all for personal liberty

00:41:18 ►

but some of the people who drive votes on your issues

00:41:20 ►

are also, they have a lot of strange ideas

00:41:23 ►

and they really want to control what other people do.

00:41:26 ►

So why haven’t you been able to find a place

00:41:28 ►

for, you know, something that

00:41:30 ►

really doesn’t leave, you know,

00:41:32 ►

really doesn’t seem to me anyway

00:41:33 ►

to have a lot of effects on others?

00:41:35 ►

Sure. Well, I think

00:41:37 ►

one of the reasons…

00:41:38 ►

One of the reasons you’ve seen

00:41:43 ►

public opinion shift, I think, dramatically on that subject

00:41:47 ►

is for just that reason, that you have the odds when you get to the marriage question.

00:41:53 ►

Marriage used to be run by churches, synagogues, and mosques and not by the government.

00:41:58 ►

And then the Protestants came in and ruined everything by making civil marriage

00:42:02 ►

in order to take it away from the Catholic Church in Europe.

00:42:08 ►

And now the government was making these decisions.

00:42:11 ►

The government should enforce contracts.

00:42:13 ►

The government shouldn’t define contracts.

00:42:16 ►

And the government should, as much as possible,

00:42:20 ►

stay out of people’s lives if somebody hasn’t hit somebody else on the top of the head with a baseball bat.

00:42:23 ►

So I think you’re, one,

00:42:27 ►

it doesn’t appear to be a vote-moving issue

00:42:29 ►

in terms of opposition to gay marriage.

00:42:32 ►

And if you actually look at the polling data on 2004,

00:42:39 ►

when traditional marriage was on the ballot

00:42:41 ►

in a bunch of states,

00:42:42 ►

it didn’t correlate with the Republican vote

00:42:46 ►

or the Bush vote.

00:42:47 ►

It is an issue that I think a bunch of people

00:42:50 ►

ended up jumping into things

00:42:52 ►

and saying stuff that

00:42:53 ►

they ought not to have.

00:42:55 ►

But I do think at the end of the day,

00:42:57 ►

obviously there are a lot of very important gay

00:42:59 ►

Republicans within the broad center-right coalition.

00:43:02 ►

At our center-right

00:43:04 ►

meeting in D.C., we have two different

00:43:06 ►

gay Republican groups in the meeting.

00:43:09 ►

And so I think it’s just

00:43:10 ►

sometimes

00:43:12 ►

things take longer than you think they

00:43:14 ►

should. I would suggest that it is

00:43:16 ►

not right of center,

00:43:18 ►

a vote-moving issue,

00:43:20 ►

and that’s showing up in the

00:43:22 ►

way things are

00:43:24 ►

moving.

00:43:26 ►

Hi.

00:43:26 ►

So thanks for coming.

00:43:28 ►

Thank you.

00:43:28 ►

I appreciate it.

00:43:29 ►

I know it’s kind of a hostile audience in some ways, so thank you.

00:43:33 ►

You’ve got to live in D.C.

00:43:34 ►

You aren’t hostile.

00:43:36 ►

So I’m curious about your views of Burning Man as a model for society.

00:43:43 ►

You talked about it being a self-organizing thing.

00:43:48 ►

I have volunteered in one capacity or another,

00:43:51 ►

sometimes for financial remuneration,

00:43:53 ►

sometimes not, for the organization for about 15 years.

00:43:57 ►

And as it has grown, the organization has grown

00:44:00 ►

because it is needed to.

00:44:02 ►

If it had like a small government civil liberty thing

00:44:06 ►

that I think so many people of your point of view embrace,

00:44:08 ►

I think there would be a lot of problems.

00:44:11 ►

You know, we have a very

00:44:12 ►

intense, you know, gate staff.

00:44:14 ►

We have DPW that works

00:44:16 ►

like crazy

00:44:17 ►

putting all this infrastructure in place

00:44:19 ►

in a pretty short amount of time.

00:44:21 ►

And a lot of them volunteer

00:44:23 ►

or are paid less than minimum wage,

00:44:27 ►

it is totally not sustainable for a model for society,

00:44:30 ►

maybe for a festival, you know,

00:44:32 ►

that’s a short thing that people do for love.

00:44:33 ►

But you can’t possibly do that in a real society.

00:44:38 ►

And so I guess my question,

00:44:40 ►

it’s going to boil down to something kind of simple.

00:44:42 ►

Do you believe that people who work to maintain our society,

00:44:49 ►

our infrastructure, whether it’s public education,

00:44:52 ►

I know you’re not totally in favor, I know you like homeschooling,

00:44:55 ►

but obviously there’s still going to be some people publicly educated,

00:44:59 ►

being a forest ranger, all of that,

00:45:00 ►

all the things that we find actually need to be done,

00:45:04 ►

do they deserve a secure wage where they can live without financial anxiety and retirement and

00:45:12 ►

have a family and all of that?

00:45:14 ►

And if you do agree, I’m sure you’re probably not going to say no, that would be kind of

00:45:17 ►

suicidal.

00:45:17 ►

How do you reconcile that with your small government cut, cut, cut, cut, cut philosophy?

00:45:25 ►

Sure.

00:45:32 ►

Look, there’s a series of good questions there.

00:45:36 ►

One is make a list of the things the federal government’s doing.

00:45:38 ►

How useful are they? We have the Davis-Bacon Act, which increases the cost of all infrastructure,

00:45:43 ►

government-run built buildings, government highways,

00:45:47 ►

anything the federal government funds in construction,

00:45:50 ►

costs about 25 to 33 percent more than it needs to because the Davis-Bacon Act was passed in the 1930s.

00:45:56 ►

It was passed as an explicitly racist law to keep blacks out of work in the North,

00:46:01 ►

and they set wage bars.

00:46:03 ►

South Africa used to do this too

00:46:05 ►

and we have this in US law

00:46:07 ►

it’s the Davis-Bacon Act

00:46:08 ►

and so

00:46:10 ►

do you really want a law which

00:46:12 ►

says a third of the money the federal government spends

00:46:14 ►

on highways, we could have a third more highways

00:46:16 ►

a third better highways

00:46:18 ►

a third more safe bridges

00:46:21 ►

but we have a law which says no we’re going to spend

00:46:23 ►

money poorly and waste it.

00:46:25 ►

And a law with the most vicious background and history and reason for being put in.

00:46:32 ►

I went and talked to somebody who was trying to say, we should raise the, the congressman,

00:46:37 ►

we should raise the gasoline tax. And I said, why do you, why not get rid of the Davis-Bacon Act?

00:46:43 ►

You’d have more than enough money to build the roads you want to build

00:46:46 ►

and repave the roads you want to repave if you get rid of the Davis-Bacon Act.

00:46:50 ►

Why raise taxes to cover a government mistake?

00:46:54 ►

And he said, oh, then you want all our highways to be built by Hispanics?

00:46:59 ►

So the law remains a racist law.

00:47:01 ►

It’s just a different racist law than it used to be.

00:47:03 ►

I think we should repeal racist laws that raise the cost of government.

00:47:08 ►

I think we should take a look at how the federal government and state governments compensate people.

00:47:14 ►

Average wage in this country, if you look at wages, salary, pension, benefits, that’s $60,000.

00:47:23 ►

Average state and local workers, $80,000. Average federal workers,

00:47:28 ►

$120,000. That’s not base pay. That’s pay plus pensions because state and local governments

00:47:34 ►

and the federal government have a pension system that’s gold-plated. And as you know,

00:47:39 ►

there’s about a $3 trillion unfunded liability from state pensions, money that they don’t have, that they haven’t set aside,

00:47:46 ►

that workers have not contributed towards, and taxpayers are going to have to pay the $3 trillion.

00:47:53 ►

We need to reform that and move, as a number of states have,

00:47:57 ►

to fully funded systems that are defined contribution.

00:48:01 ►

And there’s a new bill that I recommend everybody, Calvert, congressman

00:48:06 ►

from California, to, through attrition, phase out 100,000 civilian jobs at the Pentagon.

00:48:12 ►

There are at least 200,000 jobs, civilian jobs at the Pentagon that we could do without.

00:48:17 ►

And I say this quoting a guy who used to do budgets for the Pentagon, who’s a big defense

00:48:22 ►

hawk, but he doesn’t think it’s a good idea to have 200,000 civilian workers

00:48:26 ►

that are not part of making the country stronger, just more expensive.

00:48:32 ►

And as long as you’re spending, and that’s about maybe hundreds,

00:48:36 ►

it’s tens of billions of dollars to phase those out.

00:48:40 ►

So we start by doing the easy stuff where we know the government’s wasting money.

00:48:44 ►

We know we have, and you don’t have to fire anybody.

00:48:46 ►

You just do it through attrition at the Pentagon.

00:48:48 ►

When two guys leave, you only replace one.

00:48:52 ►

And I think those are very, very helpful steps in the right direction.

00:48:56 ►

The idea that the government is spending all of your tax money wisely,

00:49:00 ►

I think if you think that’s what they’re doing, join me in the transparency movement to get more government transparency

00:49:08 ►

so you can see what these pensions look like, what the pay looks like, what the benefits work like.

00:49:14 ►

And that doesn’t even count days worked.

00:49:17 ►

Government employees work significantly fewer days than guys in the private sector, federal, state, and local,

00:49:23 ►

even though the pay is higher, the pension is higher, and the benefits are higher. So there’s a lot of work to be done

00:49:28 ►

to just get to basic fairness and reduce the overspending that we make. And then we can

00:49:34 ►

have discussions about how important it is to have an Ex-Im bank and give a billion dollars

00:49:40 ►

to Boeing or something. And some people think that’s a good way to spend money.

00:49:45 ►

I’m not sure it is.

00:49:48 ►

I want to add my question in on top of that

00:49:51 ►

because underneath that layer of organized services

00:49:57 ►

that we provide here and infrastructure that we support the city with,

00:50:02 ►

we have the relationship with the Bureau of Land Management.

00:50:05 ►

This is federal land,

00:50:07 ►

and the event is held here in negotiation with them.

00:50:12 ►

And, yes, the fees are intense.

00:50:15 ►

Yes, their presence at the event is intense.

00:50:18 ►

But as an organization, we still find it favorable to conduct this event here

00:50:24 ►

under their supervision

00:50:25 ►

than we would be able to on private land.

00:50:28 ►

In order to have the sort of freedom to experiment that we have here,

00:50:31 ►

we found that the easiest way is to have the freedom managed in relationship

00:50:36 ►

with the federal government who protect the land that we have it on.

00:50:39 ►

Is there a problem with that arrangement?

00:50:42 ►

Should this event be held on private land?

00:50:46 ►

Is there a bad reason why this is the case?

00:50:51 ►

Again, several levels of that question.

00:50:54 ►

I don’t think the Bureau of Land Management should use Burning Man as an AMT,

00:50:59 ►

and they’ve been doing that.

00:51:01 ►

They’ve been billing you for stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with Burning Man.

00:51:06 ►

They got caught doing it, backed off for a while, back at it again.

00:51:10 ►

I think transparency here would be an extremely helpful thing

00:51:15 ►

so you could see exactly what they’re billing.

00:51:18 ►

There have been some efforts to try and, using FOIA,

00:51:21 ►

to get more information out of the federal government on what they spend things on.

00:51:25 ►

That’s how we found out that the veterans that were lying about the care they were giving veterans,

00:51:32 ►

all the guys who they claimed should be fired had all been getting bonuses

00:51:36 ►

because they were super good bureaucrats and they’d been getting bonuses for their wonderful work as we went on.

00:51:45 ►

But that’s the kind of thing that transparency would help with.

00:51:49 ►

What should you do?

00:51:52 ►

Burning Man’s not a government.

00:51:54 ►

Burning Man has lessons for how government might behave.

00:51:57 ►

Uber’s not the government, but Uber has lessons for how government

00:52:00 ►

might behave, like get out of the taxi-regulated

00:52:03 ►

business.

00:52:05 ►

There’s not value added there in the way they’re doing it

00:52:08 ►

because they do it to keep out competitors and keep prices high.

00:52:12 ►

A government whose job is to keep competitors out and keep prices high

00:52:15 ►

and let consumers be damaged at the expense of the few is not being helpful.

00:52:22 ►

And the problem is that so many government programs have been captured,

00:52:26 ►

if not designed, for that purpose.

00:52:29 ►

And that’s why we have to get some serious rethinking,

00:52:33 ►

which is why Silicon Valley and Burning Man and Uber and Airbnb shake things up,

00:52:39 ►

and they break up all of these old, you know, you go to Las Vegas,

00:52:44 ►

where I think is probably the most corrupt

00:52:46 ►

taxi government situation and the Democratic Party and the unions down there and the taxi

00:52:51 ►

companies down there have a vice grip on the city and that’s why it’s so expensive to get

00:52:59 ►

from the airport to the strip down in Vegas and they’ve kept Uber completely out.

00:53:07 ►

So, again, Burning Man has lessons for how people operate in their personal life

00:53:13 ►

and for government, but sometimes people think it’s not a government.

00:53:19 ►

It doesn’t claim the monopoly on force.

00:53:23 ►

It’s not the replacement for government.

00:53:24 ►

But I do think we need to ask government.

00:53:27 ►

Look, our government operates like it was 1930, and we all worked on an assembly line.

00:53:32 ►

And we’d all promised to die at 67.

00:53:35 ►

And, you know, Social Security would work, and all these things would work if we’d do that.

00:53:40 ►

If we’d remember to have eight kids and die at 67, the Ponzi schemes they set up would work.

00:53:45 ►

And they did work in 1935.

00:53:48 ►

But at some point, people didn’t agree to die at 67 on average anymore and ruin the government’s plans.

00:53:55 ►

And they decided not to have eight kids all the time.

00:53:57 ►

So we need a much more flexible government, and we need a government that’s more Uber and less General Motors.

00:54:06 ►

How many more questions do you want to do?

00:54:09 ►

Just keep going?

00:54:10 ►

Yeah, I’m cool.

00:54:12 ►

Cool. Next up.

00:54:13 ►

Hi, Grover. Thanks a lot for coming out.

00:54:16 ►

I’ve got to say, props to your

00:54:18 ►

tone. I did expect this was going to be really

00:54:19 ►

hostile and I really

00:54:21 ►

I mean, I’m also guilty of making

00:54:23 ►

kind of inadvertently catty political remarks

00:54:26 ►

so like your

00:54:27 ►

barbs are

00:54:28 ►

forgiven and

00:54:31 ►

all that

00:54:32 ►

I want to draw some

00:54:35 ►

parallels between what are clearly some

00:54:38 ►

expectedly

00:54:40 ►

different views

00:54:41 ►

and I’m looking for places where

00:54:43 ►

I’m looking for similarities and viewpoints here.

00:54:46 ►

And there’s some things that you said that really resonated with me.

00:54:48 ►

You talked about liberty being a paramount value

00:54:50 ►

in a society. That most people

00:54:52 ►

want to be left alone. That a top-down society

00:54:54 ►

is inimical to individual liberty.

00:54:57 ►

And I think we can all agree with that. Whether

00:54:58 ►

that’s the government staying out of your

00:55:00 ►

face about how wide your

00:55:02 ►

driveway has to be. Or the government staying

00:55:04 ►

out of your uterus, for instance. So my personal concern is about wealth disparity. I just got a

00:55:11 ►

full ride to UC Santa Cruz, and I may not be able to take it because the cost of living is almost

00:55:15 ►

unaffordable to me. And right now, rent in San Francisco is average $2,000 a month per room. I’m

00:55:23 ►

not sure what your cost of living is, but I think to most people in this room, that’s pretty unaffordable. It’s becoming increasingly

00:55:29 ►

impossible to secure housing unless you’re already owning class, like to buy a house.

00:55:34 ►

Right now, we see a lot of property management corporations that just already have massive piles

00:55:38 ►

of money, and they can just buy every cheap house in a neighborhood, and then they determine market

00:55:42 ►

rate for what everybody else is going to pay. So you’ve talked about avoiding subsidizing the lifestyles of others, right? Like in California,

00:55:49 ►

we had like a story where, you know, the kind of like ideal like welfare queen had embezzled

00:55:54 ►

like $16,000 in welfare money. But to me, it’s also wasteful to see like a landlord spend like

00:56:00 ►

$10,000 on a bottle of champagne, Recently, there were two quotes that resonated with me

00:56:06 ►

recently about solving the rent is too

00:56:08 ►

damn high issue. One was from Ann

00:56:10 ►

Coulter, who surprisingly to me said,

00:56:12 ►

and it asked me anything on Reddit,

00:56:14 ►

that if every Christian and Jew

00:56:16 ►

paid their tithe as required by their

00:56:18 ►

religion, then we could solve poverty in America.

00:56:22 ►

That sounded kind of like

00:56:23 ►

Ann Coulter talking about communism,

00:56:25 ►

like what’s going on? And there was another article

00:56:27 ►

recently about, I don’t remember what website it was on,

00:56:29 ►

but they were suggesting that a 20%

00:56:31 ►

property tax on

00:56:33 ►

luxury apartments that weren’t lived in by

00:56:35 ►

the owner, right? As a means of

00:56:37 ►

you talk about not

00:56:39 ►

wanting to be a successful business owner and then having

00:56:41 ►

a slice of your income cut off to give to people

00:56:43 ►

who don’t want to work.

00:56:52 ►

But I also feel bitter about having to work two jobs so that whoever owns my house is getting paid just to be owning class and own my house.

00:56:56 ►

So whether or not you believe in, like, a property tax increase for property owners,

00:57:01 ►

I wonder how, like, we fix this problem of subsidizing the lifestyle of others when it comes to, like, realty corporations and property owners versus the rest of us.

00:57:07 ►

You brought up the question of the cost of living

00:57:09 ►

in San Francisco and California.

00:57:13 ►

Both San Francisco and California

00:57:16 ►

have

00:57:16 ►

massively

00:57:18 ►

progressive tax structure

00:57:21 ►

and very high taxes.

00:57:23 ►

California, I think you’ve lost about 2 million people in the last five years,

00:57:29 ►

domestic migration leaving California.

00:57:35 ►

The tens of billions of dollars of income.

00:57:38 ►

You can measure the – this is scary.

00:57:40 ►

The IRS knows – census knows how many people move from state to state.

00:57:44 ►

The IRS knows how much money they made.

00:57:46 ►

And they got charts about how much income flows out of California.

00:57:50 ►

And California has been leaving.

00:57:52 ►

People with incomes have been leaving.

00:57:55 ►

People in general have been leaving, but also their incomes have left as well.

00:57:59 ►

And moving to Nevada, Florida, Texas, states without income taxes.

00:58:06 ►

So people who say that you should raise income taxes to help wealth disparity,

00:58:11 ►

California’s tried that, and it doesn’t work.

00:58:13 ►

The place that’s creating jobs, high-income jobs, low-income jobs,

00:58:18 ►

jobs for the middle class, are states like Texas, which don’t have an income tax.

00:58:21 ►

So I think we should be pragmatic and look at what works.

00:58:24 ►

Again, there are 50 states. Let’s take a look at which states are growing,

00:58:28 ►

which states are creating jobs, which states are having a growing standard of living and

00:58:34 ►

having more opportunities. One guy asked a question, suggested I was against public schools

00:58:42 ►

to clarify. I think money should follow students, not the bureaucracy.

00:58:48 ►

I think if you’re going to spend $10,000 a student in a state or 12 or 5 or whatever the number is,

00:58:54 ►

that money should follow the student.

00:58:56 ►

And the student decides to go to the local public school, a different public school, private school.

00:59:03 ►

That should be up to the parent

00:59:05 ►

and not to the government to say, you live in this neighborhood, that’s the school you go to,

00:59:10 ►

and by the way, you don’t have any say in the quality of the school

00:59:13 ►

because the teachers all have tenure and you can’t do anything about it,

00:59:17 ►

and we don’t care what you think.

00:59:19 ►

I think if every parent had, as in the state of Louisiana,

00:59:24 ►

every child has 380,000 of the low in the state of Louisiana,

00:59:26 ►

every child has a $5,000,

00:59:29 ►

380,000 of the low-income children in Louisiana have a $5,000 scholarship that follows them

00:59:33 ►

to any school they want to go to.

00:59:36 ►

So a single mother with four kids has $20,000

00:59:40 ►

that she can move with her and her children

00:59:43 ►

to any school structure that she wants to.

00:59:47 ►

A principal of the school is going to invite her in for tea

00:59:51 ►

because he’s going to want the resources she brings.

00:59:55 ►

In the old system, the principal sent a letter to mom, said,

00:59:59 ►

your kids are mine, they’re going to my school, send them or we’ll send a truant offer after you.

01:00:06 ►

I don’t care what you think.

01:00:07 ►

A lot more respect for the single mom with scholarships

01:00:10 ►

than the one who’s told what to do.

01:00:14 ►

We’ve got to get away from this business of state governments,

01:00:17 ►

local governments, federal governments moving us around

01:00:20 ►

like we were all conscripted in the draft somehow

01:00:23 ►

and tell us to move here, here,

01:00:25 ►

and here. I would argue that the faster growing economies, the lower tax economies have less

01:00:31 ►

income inequality, which has gotten worse under Obama’s policies, not better, and we

01:00:38 ►

need to move towards growth. And the best way to have the less disparity between Bill

01:00:44 ►

Gates and the poorest person is for the poorest person not to have no job but to have the less disparity between Bill Gates and the poorest person

01:00:45 ►

is for the poorest person not to have no job but to have a job.

01:00:50 ►

That’s the way we want to make income more equal or more evenly distributed

01:00:56 ►

by having more people working more successfully with higher paying jobs

01:01:00 ►

and again with an organic growth of the economy,

01:01:03 ►

not some sort of government

01:01:05 ►

pushing people one way or another

01:01:07 ►

the draft is a lousy way

01:01:10 ►

to organize the labor force

01:01:11 ►

and the draft is a lousy way to tell

01:01:13 ►

people where to send their kids to school

01:01:15 ►

this is the best dressed

01:01:20 ►

set of questioners

01:01:22 ►

I’ve ever been

01:01:23 ►

privileged to attend.

01:01:26 ►

In D.C.,

01:01:28 ►

rarely,

01:01:31 ►

maybe even never, do we

01:01:34 ►

get…

01:01:35 ►

We should. What can we do about that, Grover?

01:01:40 ►

Well, on my list of things to do, get rid of the income tax

01:01:44 ►

and get a little better dress set up in D.C.

01:01:47 ►

We’re going to get both those done.

01:01:49 ►

So one label I might use to describe myself is a bleeding heart libertarian.

01:01:55 ►

So many of these ideals that you espouse about shrinking government, lowering taxes, are near and dear to my heart.

01:02:04 ►

about shrinking government, lowering taxes, are near and dear to my heart.

01:02:11 ►

But I find that people that sit around your table and some of the examples you gave today are quick to jump on, for instance, the both sides of the welfare state problem,

01:02:17 ►

which I think can be considered a problem,

01:02:21 ►

and not so quick to jump on something you brought up much later in your talk about

01:02:25 ►

shrinking the Pentagon. So how do we get the other members of the NRA, not yourself, or

01:02:33 ►

other people that are around the table that have different views than yourself that are

01:02:39 ►

also part of the right to think maybe if we took away all of welfare and all of these programs which

01:02:46 ►

are big government spending or if we took away all of the military, which would have

01:02:52 ►

a bigger effect? How do we focus the problem on where the real money is being spent?

01:02:56 ►

You’re quite right. But here’s the good news on that. Again, I mentioned that the Calvert legislation that begins to pare back

01:03:08 ►

a lot of Pentagon spending. But we’ve actually, people talk, oh, Congress hasn’t done anything.

01:03:14 ►

Okay. In 2011, Congress passed a law. Obama even introduced half of it. He thought he was tricking us, but he did introduce the sequester.

01:03:26 ►

The sequester was about $600 billion over the next decade in less defense spending than was planned

01:03:35 ►

and $600 billion in everything else.

01:03:38 ►

So even between defense and everything else.

01:03:41 ►

Defense is 20% of federal spending.

01:03:43 ►

80% is everything else, but it was 50-50. So it was fairly heavily weighted towards defense restraint. And the

01:03:50 ►

reason why Obama introduced that idea was he thought he was tricking the Republicans

01:03:56 ►

because the Republicans said yes to that. And then he said, but if you don’t want to

01:04:01 ►

do that, we could come up with a super committee, which would come up with an alternative, which was $1.4 trillion in higher taxes.

01:04:08 ►

I thought it was a good idea.

01:04:09 ►

Yeah.

01:04:09 ►

So the sequester, he thought the Republicans, when they read the small print that half of it was coming from the Defense Department, would go, oh, my goodness.

01:04:17 ►

We can’t have this.

01:04:18 ►

Let’s do the tax increase.

01:04:19 ►

And he waited for the Republicans to do that, and he waited, and he waited, and they never did.

01:04:24 ►

And he waited for the Republicans to do that, and he waited, and he waited, and they never did.

01:04:30 ►

And the good news is that the modern Republican in Congress, post-Tea Party,

01:04:34 ►

Tea Party gets quoted as saying a bunch of goofy things, but the impulse of the Tea Party that spending matters was important,

01:04:39 ►

and that message was heard in Washington.

01:04:42 ►

And again, both defense spending and non-defense spending,

01:04:46 ►

1.2 trillion total spending restraint over the next decade, real, powerful, and doesn’t exclude defense.

01:04:55 ►

Now we need to argue with the guys who focus on national defense and say,

01:05:00 ►

how can we cut that so that we have a military strong enough to keep the Canadians on their side of the border?

01:05:08 ►

And not –

01:05:09 ►

Don’t forget the Mexicans.

01:05:13 ►

Keep an eye on the Canadians.

01:05:15 ►

They’re shifty looking.

01:05:17 ►

The good news is that there’s a right on crime effort, which we haven’t talked about,

01:05:25 ►

but one of the projects that I work on is trying to think through how many people do you really need in prison and for how long.

01:05:31 ►

If you keep a 75-year-old bank robber in jail, are you making us safer?

01:05:37 ►

Do you want to put people in prison for the length of time we’re putting people in prison for possession of marijuana?

01:05:44 ►

One of the projects that we’ve

01:05:45 ►

actually made some success at, and watch Texas, okay? Texas has actually passed more reforms

01:05:52 ►

on criminal justice in terms of not putting people in prison, but putting them before

01:05:58 ►

drug courts, deciding to have people out of prison, but higher touch probation and parole efforts.

01:06:06 ►

You know where people are, but you don’t have to.

01:06:08 ►

They can be home.

01:06:09 ►

They can be with families.

01:06:10 ►

They can be working.

01:06:11 ►

But you still sort of know where they are because they’ve been bad,

01:06:14 ►

and you don’t want them to do it again.

01:06:16 ►

There’s a lot of very serious thinking,

01:06:18 ►

and perhaps it’s a target-rich environment because for years nobody asked any silly questions about,

01:06:24 ►

all these guys were locking up.

01:06:26 ►

Is this a useful way to spend our money?

01:06:28 ►

How much does it cost?

01:06:29 ►

People are beginning to ask that question.

01:06:31 ►

And the same thing on defense.

01:06:34 ►

Conservatives are now, I won’t tell you they were 10 years ago,

01:06:37 ►

but now asking the questions on defense and criminal justice, prisons and so on.

01:06:45 ►

What are outcomes?

01:06:46 ►

Let’s not measure spending.

01:06:49 ►

Don’t tell me how wonderful you are because you’ve spent so much on defense.

01:06:53 ►

What have you accomplished?

01:06:54 ►

And don’t tell me you’re wonderful because you locked a bunch of guys up,

01:06:57 ►

or did you reduce crime?

01:07:00 ►

You can lock people up in a way that reduces crime.

01:07:02 ►

You can lock people up in a way that reduces crime. You can lock people up in a way that doesn’t necessarily reduce crime.

01:07:06 ►

Texas has been able to close two prisons by sending fewer people to jail,

01:07:12 ►

and their declining crime rates are going down faster than other places.

01:07:17 ►

So they’re not sacrificing on being tough on crime.

01:07:22 ►

They’re being serious about not wasting money.

01:07:24 ►

And we’ve made a big step forward. I know it’s a big issue for some of you. being tough on crime, they’re being serious about not wasting money.

01:07:27 ►

And we made a big step forward.

01:07:29 ►

I know it’s a big issue for some of you.

01:07:34 ►

The distinction between crack cocaine and powder cocaine used to be 100 to 1. We got it down to 18 to 1.

01:07:37 ►

Where does 18 to 1 come from?

01:07:39 ►

Some senator said 18 sounded reasonable.

01:07:43 ►

And while we wanted 1 to 1, we said we’ll take 18,

01:07:47 ►

because we’ve been working for 15 years to move down from 100.

01:07:51 ►

And that was a unanimous vote in the House, because it had to be done by unanimous consent.

01:07:57 ►

So to back off of what was the, you know, I’m holding a press conference.

01:08:02 ►

I care deeply about drugs and crime.

01:08:05 ►

I will put people in prison forever with these mandatory minimums,

01:08:10 ►

as if that was the measurement of how much you cared

01:08:12 ►

and if it was a measurement of being successful in reducing the amount of crime in the country.

01:08:20 ►

That happened, and you didn’t read about it in the papers,

01:08:24 ►

except in small print in the back pages

01:08:27 ►

it wasn’t on the front pages and it wasn’t on TV news

01:08:29 ►

it wasn’t a big deal

01:08:32 ►

because people were ready for it

01:08:34 ►

and so we’re making some progress I think

01:08:37 ►

on rethinking how much you want to spend

01:08:40 ►

California spends $50,000 per person in prison

01:08:44 ►

$50,000 per person in prison.

01:08:46 ►

$50,000.

01:08:50 ►

$25,000 in Florida, and Florida thinks that’s outrageous.

01:08:52 ►

California does $50,000.

01:08:53 ►

Thank you.

01:08:59 ►

I have a quick break from policy questions.

01:09:03 ►

Can you tell us what your first three hours of Burning Man were like?

01:09:05 ►

Yeah.

01:09:10 ►

Got on a Spider 2

01:09:14 ►

art car.

01:09:15 ►

This big black spider draped over us.

01:09:19 ►

With Larry Harvey and a couple other guys

01:09:22 ►

and my wife, Sama,

01:09:24 ►

who’s here with us this evening,

01:09:25 ►

unless she’s escaped.

01:09:26 ►

Hey, Sama.

01:09:28 ►

And we drove all out on the play

01:09:32 ►

and went to the shops, the bazaar around Burning Man,

01:09:40 ►

and we discussed how well Burning Man is going to burn,

01:09:43 ►

and we discussed how well Burning Man is going to burn and the jerk who burned it three days early a few years ago.

01:09:51 ►

We had a lecture on him.

01:09:53 ►

Then we drove out to the temple, which was very nice,

01:09:56 ►

and then actually went inside the embrace.

01:10:02 ►

They kept saying, we’re about to burn it.

01:10:04 ►

I said, you are going to whistle or something before you…

01:10:07 ►

No, tomorrow morning.

01:10:10 ►

We sort of went through that quickly.

01:10:13 ►

And then came back.

01:10:14 ►

And then my wife and I walked the whole thing as well.

01:10:17 ►

Which takes longer than with the car.

01:10:21 ►

And then sat up until 2.30.

01:10:23 ►

Stood up until 2.30 at an absinthe bar,

01:10:28 ►

which is really cool stuff,

01:10:33 ►

and it’s not bad for you.

01:10:34 ►

I Googled it.

01:10:36 ►

Wikipedia says all this stuff about it making you crazy.

01:10:39 ►

It’s not true.

01:10:41 ►

A lot of states banned it,

01:10:43 ►

and Europe, it was illegal because they believed it rotted your brain.

01:10:48 ►

It’s not any worse for you than regular alcohol.

01:10:51 ►

And now they’ve re-legalized it in many places,

01:10:56 ►

and they recommend it as part of a healthy diet.

01:11:01 ►

Oh, and then I got up at 5 o’clock in the morning,

01:11:03 ►

and I went out to watch the sun come up and watch everybody jump out of airplanes.

01:11:10 ►

Yeah, that was good.

01:11:11 ►

And then at 7 o’clock, they said they were going to burn the embrace, but they didn’t.

01:11:16 ►

And then at 7.30, they said that they didn’t.

01:11:18 ►

Anyway, they finally got around to sort of burning it.

01:11:21 ►

And I stood next to the guy

01:11:25 ►

who helped design and burn last year’s temple.

01:11:30 ►

And I got all the pictures of here’s what the temple looked like

01:11:34 ►

and here’s what it looked like when we burned it,

01:11:36 ►

and I got a running commentary on what they did wrong

01:11:40 ►

in not preparing the embrace to burn completely as quickly as it should have.

01:11:47 ►

So it’s very educational morning. If I decide to become an arsonist, I am much, much improved

01:11:53 ►

in my tech. The thing will go down nicely.

01:11:56 ►

Excellent work. You did it. You’re doing it right.

01:12:01 ►

All right, let’s have another question.

01:12:02 ►

All right, let’s have another question.

01:12:07 ►

Anyways, I praise you on being here.

01:12:08 ►

My name is Chad.

01:12:13 ►

And so basically, first of all, in Vegas, just not to correct you,

01:12:16 ►

but it’s actually free to take from the airport to the Strip.

01:12:17 ►

But anyways.

01:12:19 ►

Free to take. You said it costs an arm and a leg to take from the airport.

01:12:24 ►

Anyways, moral of the story, I’ve listened to countless interviews with you, and I praise you on being here.

01:12:29 ►

God bless you.

01:12:31 ►

What?

01:12:32 ►

And listening to your discussions about Obama and whatnot.

01:12:35 ►

And I definitely, I just want to say that, you know, this man whose face is on sheets of LSD and who in his book said,

01:12:44 ►

the influence of the 60s was soaked into my skin

01:12:47 ►

via the art and music of the time.

01:12:49 ►

I know that maybe not the influence of the 60s

01:12:51 ►

was soaked into your skin,

01:12:52 ►

or I don’t know if you know who MAPS is.

01:12:54 ►

Maybe you do, maybe you don’t.

01:12:56 ►

But the question I want to ask you

01:12:57 ►

is somebody ready to come into office

01:13:00 ►

from the Republican side

01:13:01 ►

who’s going to match the intelligence

01:13:03 ►

of the first psychedelic president ever?

01:13:07 ►

First of all, Janis Joplin was the high point of Western civilization.

01:13:13 ►

Second thought. I’ll give you a quick rundown

01:13:15 ►

on what’s going to happen on the Republican side, because I think the answer to that is yes.

01:13:20 ►

I can’t vouch for their experience with psychedelics,

01:13:23 ►

but I think they’d be fine.

01:13:26 ►

You have six Republicans who are either on stage or right next to the stage looking to jump on and could run for president.

01:13:32 ►

Every one of them has the name ID, the ability to raise resources, and the political support to run start to finish.

01:13:39 ►

Unlike sometimes, like four years ago and eight years ago, Republicans would go, I’m going to run in Iowa.

01:13:44 ►

And if I win in Iowa, then people will know who I am, and then I can have a campaign.

01:13:48 ►

So all these guys were playing for 15 minutes of fame, hoping to catch fire, and none of them did.

01:13:56 ►

I’d like to ask you a tax question.

01:13:58 ►

Sure.

01:13:58 ►

If I, as a private citizen, renounce my citizenship because I don’t want to pay taxes,

01:14:04 ►

and then I get arrested in Thailand, and I go to the U.S. Embassy,

01:14:07 ►

and I say, help me out.

01:14:08 ►

They’re going to tell me to pound sand and say, I’m not your problem.

01:14:12 ►

If I’m the CEO of a company,

01:14:15 ►

and I set up an elaborate sequence of offshore subsidiaries

01:14:18 ►

in the Cayman Islands, Netherlands, Ireland, and so on,

01:14:21 ►

and they own some assets,

01:14:23 ►

and my assets through those subsidi, get nationalized by Venezuela,

01:14:28 ►

and I go to the federal government.

01:14:29 ►

I can get the State Department to rattle some taxpayer-funded savers on my behalf.

01:14:32 ►

So can I get your verbal commitment to support this policy change?

01:14:38 ►

Prohibit the State and Defense Departments from spending federal taxpayer money

01:14:42 ►

on behalf of the interests of foreign corporations

01:14:45 ►

uh it’s legally the question is an interesting question whether you could

01:14:52 ►

how you do that are you talking about inversions is that the what you focused on the virgin islands

01:14:59 ►

specifically no inversions oh inversions where What people are generally bringing up, if this is what you’re getting to,

01:15:07 ►

is Burger King is going to be purchased by a Canadian firm.

01:15:13 ►

Canada’s federal corporate income tax is 17%.

01:15:16 ►

Ours is 35%.

01:15:18 ►

Canada has a territorial tax system.

01:15:22 ►

What you earn in Canada, Canada taxes. What you earn in other states, governments, countries,

01:15:28 ►

those other governments tax.

01:15:29 ►

The United States has won a 35% rate,

01:15:33 ►

higher than, I think, every other country in the world,

01:15:36 ►

now that it’s higher than Japan’s.

01:15:39 ►

But we also have a worldwide tax system.

01:15:41 ►

So if you earn a dollar in France,

01:15:43 ►

you pay French taxes and then American taxes on top of that. If you earn a dollar in France and bring the money back, we tax you. There’s $2 trillion earned by American companies overseas, sitting overseas. If it was brought here, it could be taxed as high as 35% to bring it back.

01:16:06 ►

What we should do is say, go to what the rest of the world does, a territorial tax system that says,

01:16:13 ►

we tax stuff that happens in America. If you earn money overseas and you bring it back, good.

01:16:18 ►

Bring it back. We don’t want these icky foreigners touching our money. Bring it back here.

01:16:23 ►

Instead, our policy is that when you bring the money back, we punish you if you bring

01:16:28 ►

it back and we, and if you don’t bring it back, you can build a factory in France or

01:16:33 ►

in Japan or anywhere else. We have a very destructive tax system and

01:16:39 ►

Burger King by inverting, by being bought, which by the way you can’t necessarily fix.

01:16:44 ►

I mean,

01:16:45 ►

these companies are on the market. Some British company could buy an American company, and

01:16:49 ►

it’s not like the CEO decided to move. He got bought.

01:16:54 ►

Should we disincentivize that, though?

01:16:55 ►

Yes, we should disincentivize it by having a territorial tax system, and then you’d never

01:16:59 ►

hear about it again. Our tax system creates this problem. And Obama has recognized this

01:17:05 ►

for the last six years and keeps promising to do something about it. And we really need

01:17:10 ►

to move now. The reason why you’re seeing inversions now is the businesses have gone,

01:17:14 ►

we give up, they’re never going to fix this, we’re going to invert. Because it’s expensive

01:17:20 ►

to be an American company if you’re interested, if you do international work,

01:17:25 ►

more expensive than being a German company

01:17:27 ►

because of our tax policy.

01:17:29 ►

This is not a factory leaving the United States.

01:17:31 ►

Nothing moves.

01:17:32 ►

Just the name of the ownership

01:17:35 ►

and you get better tax policy worldwide.

01:17:38 ►

Not in America.

01:17:39 ►

It doesn’t change any tax paid

01:17:41 ►

by any business doing any business in America.

01:17:44 ►

That doesn’t change.

01:17:45 ►

It’s how you get taxed in Thailand and Ireland and France

01:17:49 ►

and every other country.

01:17:50 ►

That’s the change, and it makes it more expensive

01:17:52 ►

to be an American firm than a Canadian firm,

01:17:55 ►

and even worse, it’s worse to be an American firm

01:17:57 ►

than a French firm, which is stupid.

01:18:00 ►

Thank you.

01:18:02 ►

I have a question about some of your past work and how it relates to your present philosophy.

01:18:08 ►

And so if this is something that is no longer relevant or something that you’ve kind of tossed aside, then I apologize.

01:18:13 ►

But you mentioned earlier that the central core idea behind the center-right movement is this idea of liberty and having the government leave us alone, essentially.

01:18:26 ►

liberty and having the government leave us alone, essentially. But as someone who worked to end the movement to defund apartheid, how does that coincide with that overarching philosophy of

01:18:32 ►

freedom by essentially supporting one of the least free governments of the 20th century?

01:18:39 ►

I’ve read that article in The Nation. It’s not true. Sometimes people fib. I actually worked with the South African

01:18:45 ►

Black Taxi Association

01:18:47 ►

fighting the South

01:18:49 ►

African government’s effort to force everybody

01:18:51 ►

to ride their buses and their trains.

01:18:54 ►

01:18:55 ►

of course as an American you wanted a

01:18:57 ►

non-racial South Africa and

01:18:59 ►

every other country.

01:19:02 ►

apart from working with

01:19:06 ►

the Zulus

01:19:07 ►

fighting the same thing

01:19:09 ►

with Budalazi and so on and with

01:19:11 ►

the South African

01:19:13 ►

Bus and Taxi Association which renamed

01:19:15 ►

itself afterwards the Black Tax Association

01:19:18 ►

that’s the only

01:19:19 ►

political work I did there but I

01:19:21 ►

was certainly supportive of

01:19:23 ►

all of the efforts to move towards a non-racial,

01:19:27 ►

fully independent society.

01:19:31 ►

Sometimes people lie because they don’t know any better

01:19:34 ►

or because they’re trying to make a point, and that was unfortunate.

01:19:37 ►

I think this is from an article in The Nation,

01:19:38 ►

which is sort of a left-wing publication,

01:19:41 ►

but usually is better than that.

01:19:44 ►

Thank you.

01:19:45 ►

Next up.

01:19:47 ►

Hi. Thanks so much.

01:19:49 ►

So some of the policies that you’ve discussed tonight

01:19:51 ►

as some of your kind of core advocacy areas

01:19:54 ►

seem like the effects of those changes you’re advocating for

01:19:57 ►

would disproportionately affect people of color specifically.

01:20:01 ►

So I’m curious how you and your organizations have worked

01:20:03 ►

to bring in voices from the communities that might be impacted, specifically people of color and other minority

01:20:10 ►

groups. Sure. Actually, the issues we’ve talked about, it’s the government impacting communities

01:20:16 ►

of color by being mean to them. And I think they should stop, starting with the Davis-Bacon Act,

01:20:22 ►

starting with the effort to not let parents have full school choice.

01:20:26 ►

Look, wealthy people have school choice.

01:20:30 ►

They can send their kids to private schools.

01:20:32 ►

It’s not even a question of color.

01:20:34 ►

As soon as he got to D.C., President Obama sent his two kids to the rich kids’ school

01:20:38 ►

and killed a 3,000 scholarship proposal, not a proposal,

01:20:44 ►

a law that the Republicans had passed giving 3,000 poor proposal, not a proposal, a law that the Republicans had passed

01:20:46 ►

giving 3,000 poor kids, low-income kids in D.C., primarily minority,

01:20:52 ►

scholarships to go to whatever school they wanted to.

01:20:55 ►

He killed that at the request of the teachers’ union.

01:20:58 ►

So it is accurate and important to point out that the policies that I have outlined today would end the government’s policies, which do disproportionately damage minorities, particularly their opposition to school choice, their continued defense of tenure, so that you can’t move out incompetent teachers and not give parents the ability to move from school to school or teacher to teacher to get the best education.

01:21:25 ►

school or teacher to teacher to get the best education. And the people, the 10 million people who aren’t working today because our policies have been bad for the economic growth

01:21:31 ►

compared to Reagan’s in terms of job creation, those are particularly minority people who

01:21:38 ►

are without jobs today. So yes, I’m focused on the government’s disproportionate, I think

01:21:44 ►

the government shouldn’t kill anybody’s job.

01:21:46 ►

I don’t think they should stop anybody from having school choice,

01:21:48 ►

and I don’t think they should keep anybody out of the business of working in repairing infrastructure.

01:21:53 ►

It is true that when the government does those things in a ham-handed way,

01:21:57 ►

as it’s done for the last 60 years,

01:21:58 ►

it has been worse for African Americans and worse for Hispanics than other people.

01:22:03 ►

Sorry, I should have rephrased that.

01:22:06 ►

I meant more the organizations you work with, not the policies you advocate for.

01:22:10 ►

So groups like the NRA or your taxation groups,

01:22:13 ►

how do they physically bring people of color to the table or minority groups?

01:22:17 ►

Because some of the communities I’m involved with really struggle with this,

01:22:21 ►

really struggle with bringing women or minority groups to the table.

01:22:23 ►

So I’m curious to learn from your experience. Well, you want to do outreach on school choice. I think

01:22:29 ►

the leadership on the fight against, to restore those vouchers for minority kids, that was led

01:22:36 ►

by African-American families in D.C. with all of the school choice groups that we work with in our

01:22:42 ►

Senate Right meeting, reaching into that community to help highlight voices on that on the board of directors the national rifle association

01:22:51 ►

we have 76 members of the board it’s a small legislature and we work very hard to make sure

01:22:59 ►

that we have strong african-american participation on the board and on staff as well as Hispanic.

01:23:06 ►

We ran one of our board meetings in San Antonio specifically

01:23:11 ►

to have all the attention that a national convention gets

01:23:16 ►

in heavily Hispanic areas and highlighting the importance.

01:23:20 ►

The NRA has always made the case, historically important case, that many of our gun

01:23:27 ►

laws flowed from southern states trying to disarm African Americans. The laws, the anti-concealed

01:23:33 ►

carry laws, the gun registration laws, and so on. And so one of the most important things to do is

01:23:39 ►

to get rid of those vestiges of official racism that you see in gun control.

01:23:46 ►

And we’ve gone state by state to do that.

01:23:48 ►

So I think it’s very important to reach out to all communities.

01:23:52 ►

I think every ethnic group, every faith community would be better off in a free society.

01:23:58 ►

And you want not only to make that case, but you want to work with people

01:24:02 ►

so that people from each of those communities can liberate themselves and take a leading role in these fights, not just benefit.

01:24:10 ►

I’m going to do all this stuff and I’ll take care of you. No, no, no. Let’s you and I do stuff

01:24:15 ►

together to make your life and everybody’s life better.

01:24:18 ►

How are you doing, sir?

01:24:20 ►

I’m good. How are you?

01:24:21 ►

Miscellaneous heathen.

01:24:22 ►

Yes. So I’m going to kind of give you a lob question here.

01:24:27 ►

As somebody who used to identify as a progressive

01:24:29 ►

and has moved along the liberty train towards liberty,

01:24:34 ►

I think that when I hear you talk about how the left acts

01:24:39 ►

and what I hear from this audience when they feel a little bit,

01:24:42 ►

I guess, divisive with you about

01:24:46 ►

it, is what they want to see is that they have a utopian view. The world could be better,

01:24:52 ►

and yet they believe that big government is what will do it for them. And what I’m not

01:24:57 ►

hearing enough of to help them understand the wrongs of government is why is government

01:25:02 ►

itself not helping out? Why would localization be better?

01:25:06 ►

And I think when I look around the room, and it’s like a room full of people that came to psychedelic talks,

01:25:10 ►

and my friend Rick Doblin is sitting in the back here,

01:25:13 ►

and he can’t administer psychedelics legally to people to treat their PTSD,

01:25:18 ►

except for in small studies that are stifled by FDA.

01:25:21 ►

He can’t bring marijuana research to people because the NIH and the DEA get in his way.

01:25:28 ►

Can we talk a little bit more?

01:25:29 ►

Because what I see is, yes, I would love to have free health care.

01:25:32 ►

It would be great to have this minimum wage or free income for everybody.

01:25:37 ►

But if I take that, I have to accept that I’m also going to take the government

01:25:42 ►

summing in and saying, no, you can’t marry this person

01:25:44 ►

and you’re going to go to jail for this,

01:25:46 ►

or you can’t ingest that.

01:25:48 ►

So maybe you could speak to that for us.

01:25:50 ►

I think it’s very important that we recognize that in the United States

01:25:55 ►

there’s a tremendous consensus on where we want to go.

01:26:00 ►

Some people think that the government is a tool to help get you there.

01:26:04 ►

And I think if we look at U.S. history, world history, the government is a blunt tool.

01:26:13 ►

It’s like a baseball bat.

01:26:15 ►

You can’t ask somebody to do an appendectomy with a baseball bat.

01:26:19 ►

Well, you can, but it doesn’t work very well, not for the patient.

01:26:24 ►

You can’t, well, you can, but it doesn’t work very well, not for the patient.

01:26:30 ►

But no matter how hardworking you are, no matter how well-intentioned you are,

01:26:33 ►

you and the baseball bat are not going to be able to do the appendectomy,

01:26:36 ►

and government is a terribly blunt tool. And when you empower government to do one thing, this really good thing,

01:26:41 ►

it takes that power and doesn’t necessarily check with you

01:26:46 ►

about exactly what it’s going to be using all that lovely power for.

01:26:50 ►

But the good news is that we can get a lot of left-right agreements on some issues,

01:26:58 ►

and I mentioned the right on crime issues.

01:27:00 ►

I work with the NAACP and the ACLU on trying to figure out how to reduce the

01:27:05 ►

impact the government has on the families of offenders and the offenders themselves.

01:27:11 ►

How long is it you have to have somebody in prison because they did something very bad,

01:27:17 ►

you know, but how long is too long? And how do you do it in a way that damages their kids

01:27:22 ►

less and their neighborhood less and their family less

01:27:25 ►

and these are ones

01:27:28 ►

where we need to make

01:27:30 ►

the case always that we’re trying to

01:27:32 ►

move forward

01:27:33 ►

to make people’s lives

01:27:35 ►

better off, to give them more freedom

01:27:38 ►

to give them

01:27:39 ►

earned respect

01:27:41 ►

earned accomplishment

01:27:43 ►

earned wages,

01:27:48 ►

and to let them have more control of their lives

01:27:51 ►

because they can do a better job with it

01:27:53 ►

than somebody who doesn’t even know their name

01:27:56 ►

and has them on a list in Washington somewhere.

01:28:00 ►

We’re just better off.

01:28:01 ►

Your question about localism,

01:28:03 ►

I like local government better than state government

01:28:06 ►

because there are more of them,

01:28:08 ►

because it’s easier to move away from them,

01:28:11 ►

because there’s more competition possible

01:28:13 ►

between counties and towns than between states,

01:28:16 ►

and there’s more competition between states

01:28:20 ►

than the federal government.

01:28:21 ►

If the federal government does something stupid,

01:28:23 ►

it’s got to be really stupid to make you want to move to France.

01:28:26 ►

It’s just a lot of work.

01:28:28 ►

But people will move more easily between states

01:28:31 ►

and even more easily between cities and towns.

01:28:35 ►

So localism allows you to experiment

01:28:37 ►

and let’s see if this works.

01:28:41 ►

I’d really hope no state would pass a law

01:28:44 ►

that somebody hadn’t tried at city level first. And I really don no state would pass a law that somebody

01:28:45 ►

hadn’t tried at city level first and I really

01:28:47 ►

don’t want the federal government passing laws that haven’t

01:28:49 ►

been done in some state first, at least something

01:28:52 ►

along those lines, to

01:28:54 ►

which you can point to and

01:28:55 ►

learn because we’d avoid a lot of problems

01:28:58 ►

if we experimented on Vermont

01:29:00 ►

or New Hampshire

01:29:00 ►

to see how they work before we

01:29:03 ►

saddle everybody

01:29:04 ►

with that idea.

01:29:07 ►

But the center-right effort to maximize liberty is the effort to give people more choices,

01:29:15 ►

more control, more bottom-up decision-making.

01:29:19 ►

Here’s the $5, 000 or$ 10,000 voucher scholarship for your kid.

01:29:24 ►

You decide how he gets educated.

01:29:27 ►

Then all of a sudden you change the incentives for the school bureaucracy.

01:29:31 ►

New poll just came out that only half of the people who work in public schools are teachers.

01:29:38 ►

There’s an awful lot of jobs that aren’t being teachers.

01:29:44 ►

Now, not everybody’s a teacher,

01:29:45 ►

but 50% is lower than I think what people expect.

01:29:50 ►

There’s been an effort to try and get a two-thirds requirement

01:29:53 ►

in some states that two-thirds of the money

01:29:55 ►

in the education department has to go to teaching in the classroom.

01:30:00 ►

Not every state can do that.

01:30:03 ►

So I have a question.

01:30:05 ►

We’ve talked a lot about what freedoms and liberties we should protect, which I appreciate.

01:30:11 ►

I’m curious what you personally believe the federal government’s role should be in society, in the market, in order to increase utility.

01:30:21 ►

In what ways should they be involved?

01:30:23 ►

Sure.

01:30:21 ►

to increase utility?

01:30:23 ►

In what ways should they be involved?

01:30:24 ►

Sure.

01:30:29 ►

Look, the Constitution is a pretty good list of things the government ought to do

01:30:31 ►

and an incomplete list of things that it shouldn’t do,

01:30:34 ►

but it’s a good list of things that it should and shouldn’t do.

01:30:38 ►

We have to have a national defense.

01:30:40 ►

It’s a dangerous world out there.

01:30:42 ►

We make it more dangerous when we go out and pick fights sometimes, but it is dangerous, and we need to be serious about being prepared,

01:30:53 ►

not wasting a dollar. Wasting a dollar on defense is not any more moral than wasting

01:30:57 ►

a dollar on something else. It’s an unnecessary expense. So you have to have a strong national

01:31:04 ►

defense. I think you need a judiciary. I think

01:31:05 ►

I’m very comfortable executing

01:31:08 ►

murderers, but I’m not very comfortable

01:31:10 ►

putting people in prison for petty crimes

01:31:12 ►

for years and years and years.

01:31:13 ►

I think we should be very tough on real crimes

01:31:15 ►

and not so tough on

01:31:17 ►

maybe not crimes, and

01:31:20 ►

in between

01:31:21 ►

decide how much of a penalty

01:31:24 ►

will dissuade people from committing crimes again, not how cool can we sound.

01:31:30 ►

I testified against mandatory minimums during the discussion of crack cocaine at the House Judiciary.

01:31:40 ►

And I had in front of me the list of all the things that have mandatory minimums.

01:31:44 ►

And they were all press conferences.

01:31:47 ►

They were the mandatory minimum for treason in America is five years.

01:31:51 ►

The mandatory minimum for dirty pictures is like 35, okay?

01:31:54 ►

So things that would get people out.

01:31:57 ►

I am outraged about this happening, and we should have a 35-year, you know.

01:32:04 ►

and we should have a 35-year… And some guy got a press conference out of it,

01:32:11 ►

but now people were spending 40 years in prison

01:32:15 ►

for selling drugs once as a kid.

01:32:18 ►

I’m not sure that the press conference was worth it.

01:32:22 ►

And there’s just an awful lot I think we can do

01:32:27 ►

to reform some of those things while being tough on crime.

01:32:31 ►

So, again, states should do most of the crime stuff.

01:32:35 ►

There are some federal crimes.

01:32:36 ►

There are 4,000 laws the federal government has

01:32:39 ►

that can put you in prison, 4,000 federal crimes.

01:32:42 ►

That’s not murder. That’s not bank robbery.

01:32:44 ►

Those are all state laws. All the real crimes. That’s not murder. That’s not bank robbery. Those are all state

01:32:45 ►

laws. All the real crimes in America are state laws. The federal laws are things the states

01:32:51 ►

have already made illegal, but somebody wanted to have a press conference about, like carjacking.

01:32:56 ►

Remember there was a spate of carjackings about 10 years ago? Every state has a law

01:33:01 ►

against carjacking. Taking a gun or a knife and stealing someone’s car is illegal, even in Massachusetts.

01:33:06 ►

We don’t need a federal law, but somebody decided he needed a press conference.

01:33:11 ►

So we’ve got a federal law making that illegal, too.

01:33:14 ►

There’s a whole bunch of paperwork that if you fill out the paperwork wrong,

01:33:19 ►

even without any proof or argument that you meant to do anything wrong,

01:33:24 ►

that can be a go-to-jail.

01:33:25 ►

4,000 laws like that.

01:33:26 ►

I don’t think we need 4,000.

01:33:28 ►

I don’t know how many we need, but 4,000 is not the right answer.

01:33:32 ►

So I would call that stuff back,

01:33:34 ►

and I don’t think there’s a magic number of things the federal government does,

01:33:38 ►

but let’s look at the things the states are already doing

01:33:41 ►

and get the feds out of that.

01:33:43 ►

Let’s look at the things that are counterproductive

01:33:45 ►

and stop doing those.

01:33:47 ►

If there’s less expensive ways to do the same thing, let’s do that.

01:33:51 ►

And then as you get closer, then you can look at other ideas

01:33:54 ►

and decide, you know, does the government have to do X, Y, or Z?

01:33:58 ►

And I think if it’s not in the Constitution,

01:34:01 ►

the presumption is that maybe the federal government ought not to do it.

01:34:05 ►

Hi.

01:34:06 ►

So I have a question about,

01:34:08 ►

you mentioned earlier that states

01:34:10 ►

that have open carry laws have lower crime

01:34:12 ►

rates. Concealed carry laws.

01:34:14 ►

Concealed carry laws. You mentioned that they

01:34:16 ►

have lower crime rates. However, the New York Times

01:34:18 ►

and the Washington Post just recently published a

01:34:20 ►

study that said that there was no

01:34:21 ►

correlation between concealed

01:34:24 ►

carry laws and crime rates. I’m wondering where you actually got your study from.

01:34:28 ►

And I also have another question. You also mentioned that

01:34:32 ►

Reagan’s administration, you mentioned it in a very positive light. However, Reagan actually

01:34:35 ►

had higher tax rates than Obama does.

01:34:39 ►

And so I’m wondering what would be your ideal version of a government that exists today?

01:34:44 ►

Sure.

01:34:49 ►

When Reagan left office, not when he started office is true. When he left office, there were two tax rates, 15% and 28% for individuals.

01:34:56 ►

Today the top tax rate is 43%.

01:34:59 ►

And all tax rates have moved up with the exception of the Bushes bringing it down, and Obama agreed to keep some of that.

01:35:09 ►

So rates actually are significantly higher, tax rates under Obama.

01:35:14 ►

It’s one of the reasons we have slower growth.

01:35:17 ►

The first part of the question was?

01:35:20 ►

The source for your study.

01:35:22 ►

There are two studies

01:35:25 ►

one is more guns less crime by John Lott

01:35:28 ►

it’s a book, it’s the only study of every county in the country

01:35:31 ►

what you have to measure is

01:35:36 ►

crimes decreasing versus increasing

01:35:40 ►

and if you look at that

01:35:43 ►

the other piece to that

01:35:45 ►

which I don’t know what study they’re talking about

01:35:47 ►

I haven’t seen the Washington Post study

01:35:50 ►

but the important thing is

01:35:53 ►

once a state passed concealed carry

01:35:56 ►

shall issue concealed carry

01:35:59 ►

you saw as years went out

01:36:01 ►

as more people got concealed carry

01:36:03 ►

crime dropped faster than other states.

01:36:07 ►

All states’ crime has been dropping a little bit over the last 10, 15 years.

01:36:12 ►

And the more people with concealed carry, the faster it’s dropped.

01:36:16 ►

So you may be able to say that in different ways to make the Washington Post case,

01:36:22 ►

to make the Washington Post case,

01:36:24 ►

but the question is,

01:36:27 ►

do more people with concealed carry lead to a faster dropping of the crime rate

01:36:31 ►

than in those states that don’t?

01:36:33 ►

And the answer to that is yes,

01:36:34 ►

and you have to look at county-by-county legislation,

01:36:39 ►

county-by-county crime statistics.

01:36:43 ►

Hi.

01:36:44 ►

Hi.

01:36:44 ►

Hey, thanks a lot for entertaining this for so long. It’s been fun. County by county crime statistic. Hi. Hi.

01:36:47 ►

Hey, thanks a lot for entertaining this for so long.

01:36:49 ►

It’s been fun.

01:36:53 ►

My quick question, I’ll try to phrase well, is that I really appreciate the notion of competition

01:36:59 ►

in generating good results and seeing what works.

01:37:04 ►

I want to know, assuming that there is some power to be had

01:37:09 ►

that could be beneficial for society

01:37:12 ►

in organizing at larger and larger scales,

01:37:16 ►

how do we bring competition to the macro level governance?

01:37:23 ►

How do we get away from this narrative

01:37:25 ►

that I hear in this room a lot right now

01:37:28 ►

that positions me in opposition to my government

01:37:30 ►

rather than as part of my government?

01:37:33 ►

Well, you don’t want the government

01:37:35 ►

to be opposed to the growth and strength

01:37:38 ►

of the American people.

01:37:40 ►

The government does a number of things

01:37:42 ►

that damage the economy

01:37:43 ►

and people’s opportunities to get ahead

01:37:45 ►

or to have control over their own lives,

01:37:49 ►

their kids’ education.

01:37:52 ►

We want the government to follow the will of the people,

01:37:57 ►

not to be pushing at them.

01:38:00 ►

I think that you have competition between states.

01:38:09 ►

There are ways to make that stronger, make it easier for people to move from state to state.

01:38:18 ►

And at the federal level, there’s a number of ways, as we did under Bill Clinton, President Clinton, signed welfare reform.

01:38:21 ►

He said we’re spending this much on welfare reform.

01:38:24 ►

We’re going to keep spending that much plus inflation and population growth.

01:38:25 ►

But I’m putting a block grant out to every state. Did we give

01:38:28 ►

you a billion last year? You got a billion this year.

01:38:30 ►

And it’ll grow with inflation.

01:38:32 ►

But by the way, we’re removing all the

01:38:34 ►

federal strings, or most of the federal strings,

01:38:36 ►

and you decide how to spend it

01:38:38 ►

so you can have control.

01:38:39 ►

So you can take a federal program

01:38:41 ►

that’s still national, but have

01:38:44 ►

it administered by the states and give

01:38:46 ►

them more flexibility. That

01:38:48 ►

allows you to have 50 different efforts

01:38:49 ►

to say what works

01:38:51 ►

to reduce welfare dependency,

01:38:54 ►

to help people who are poor that need

01:38:56 ►

it, and almost all the states

01:38:58 ►

have used that to focus on

01:39:00 ►

people who most need the help and

01:39:01 ►

the people who can get off of welfare, help

01:39:03 ►

them to get off and

01:39:05 ►

to refocus and to spend the money more wisely so i think block granting food stamps medicaid

01:39:12 ►

other housing programs jobs programs and letting the 50 states compete to do it better states would

01:39:20 ►

learn from each other what works as soon as when when Washington has a one size fits all, this is the rule

01:39:26 ►

and everybody does it this way.

01:39:27 ►

What if it’s a stupid rule?

01:39:29 ►

How would you ever know, because

01:39:31 ►

everybody’s doing it that way,

01:39:34 ►

how do you know what works and what doesn’t

01:39:36 ►

work? Somebody has a theory,

01:39:38 ►

but how do you

01:39:39 ►

compare the different states?

01:39:42 ►

So I think the more you can take

01:39:44 ►

national, doesn’t mean it’s a state

01:39:46 ►

issue, it’s a national issue,

01:39:48 ►

but it can be managed

01:39:50 ►

at the state level through

01:39:52 ►

a federal program, that gives you

01:39:54 ►

the competition that you otherwise don’t get

01:39:56 ►

in a federal program.

01:39:59 ►

Hi, I’m

01:40:00 ►

Rick Doblin

01:40:00 ►

with MAPS, a non-profit trying to

01:40:04 ►

make marijuana and psychedelics into prescription medicines.

01:40:06 ►

And we met with Stuart Miller, and you wrote a letter to the DEA trying to encourage them to end the government monopoly on the supply of marijuana, for which I thank you very much.

01:40:17 ►

Unfortunately, there still is a government monopoly on the supply of marijuana.

01:40:22 ►

Sometimes when I write them letters, they don’t do what I want.

01:40:26 ►

That’s right.

01:40:27 ►

But what I’m wondering is if we could,

01:40:28 ►

there’s two things that are obstructing medical marijuana research.

01:40:31 ►

The federal government has an extra review by the Public Health Service and NIDA

01:40:37 ►

that was set up precisely because they have the monopoly,

01:40:41 ►

and there’s also the monopoly.

01:40:43 ►

And we’ve got recently a letter from 30 members of

01:40:46 ►

Congress to the Secretary of HHS saying end this public health service review. But it was only

01:40:51 ►

four Republicans and 26 Democrats. And I think Obama is looking for political cover from

01:40:57 ►

Republicans. So I’m wondering if there’s some way that we could work together to see if we could get

01:41:02 ►

Republicans to join in in this effort to give

01:41:06 ►

Obama the encouragement to end the monopoly and end the public health service review and just let

01:41:11 ►

medical marijuana be evaluated by FDA through scientific privately funded studies. And the

01:41:18 ►

reason we’re making so much progress with MDMA, and now we’re working with the Department of

01:41:22 ►

Defense and the VA for post-traumatic stress, is we have our own independent source of MDMA, and now we’re working with the Department of Defense and the VA for post-traumatic stress, is we have our own independent source of MDMA, of LSD, of psilocybin.

01:41:29 ►

So we’re actually blocked because of the monopoly through marijuana.

01:41:34 ►

And even though we have 23 medical marijuana states and two legalization states, for some

01:41:39 ►

reason now we still can’t do it.

01:41:41 ►

So I think Republicans hold the key.

01:41:43 ►

And if we could mobilize-

01:41:43 ►

Does that need a law change? Or could the president do this by executive order?

01:41:47 ►

Both could be executive order.

01:41:48 ►

We don’t need law.

01:41:49 ►

So I think that he’s looking, I can’t imagine,

01:41:52 ►

I think he’s looking for political cover because he’s not very courageous in this area.

01:41:57 ►

But I think it could be provided by Republicans if they’re really willing to say,

01:42:03 ►

let’s end the drug war, let’s let science regulate how marijuana is evaluated.

01:42:09 ►

We need to get more Congressmen to focus.

01:42:14 ►

This also, though, I mean, the president has been fairly aggressive

01:42:16 ►

in a number of other areas in using executive orders.

01:42:20 ►

And I don’t think we should let him off the hook on this one by saying,

01:42:24 ►

oh, the Republicans might be mad at him

01:42:26 ►

the Republicans are mad at him for all the other times

01:42:28 ►

he changed the rules

01:42:30 ►

and on this one I think it’s

01:42:32 ►

legally clearer

01:42:33 ►

that he can do this

01:42:35 ►

there’s no doubt

01:42:36 ►

yes I don’t think he has

01:42:40 ►

something to fear on that

01:42:41 ►

but let’s follow up

01:42:44 ►

yeah because I think of senator

01:42:46 ►

mccain for example if you had contacts with him if he would say this is in part we have a marijuana

01:42:52 ►

study for veterans with ptsd but if he were to say let’s reform the whole process i think that

01:42:57 ►

would make a big difference is he focused on this at all not at at all. Although our marijuana study is in Arizona.

01:43:05 ►

Okay.

01:43:07 ►

Do you want to talk afterwards?

01:43:09 ►

Yeah. Okay, thank you.

01:43:11 ►

That’s Burning Man stuff right there.

01:43:14 ►

Any more questions?

01:43:19 ►

You know, white privilege in a sense.

01:43:22 ►

I read a history

01:43:23 ►

of Oakland. Oakland used to have a car plant,

01:43:25 ►

moved down about 30 miles down to Fremont.

01:43:29 ►

It cut out a lot of black people out of the job.

01:43:32 ►

They weren’t direct lines.

01:43:33 ►

That plant went through a really transformative collaboration

01:43:38 ►

between Toyota and GM, and now it’s a Tesla plant.

01:43:42 ►

And, you know, we have, after World War II,

01:43:44 ►

we had the GI Bill.

01:43:46 ►

You know, millions of white

01:43:47 ►

GIs got benefits, went to college,

01:43:50 ►

basically a huge boom.

01:43:51 ►

Black Americans got cut out of that.

01:43:53 ►

It was ridiculous.

01:43:56 ►

And even now, with the

01:43:57 ►

housing crisis blowing up,

01:43:59 ►

disproportionately, black and Hispanic

01:44:01 ►

people got the lousiest

01:44:04 ►

loans. And when I see that, you know, it’s kind of crazy because people,

01:44:09 ►

I come from Pakistan, shitty third world country,

01:44:11 ►

but, you know, I get a better shot at improving my life here

01:44:14 ►

than people who are Americans born and raised but have a long, crappy history.

01:44:20 ►

And these people are growing as a percentage of our population.

01:44:24 ►

We cut them out of our access to

01:44:25 ►

technology. You know, you might have, I don’t

01:44:27 ►

know how Reagan’s boom lasted,

01:44:30 ►

but, you know, the jobs then

01:44:31 ►

that were accessible, maybe

01:44:33 ►

good paying jobs that didn’t require

01:44:36 ►

technology, maybe auto workers, maybe

01:44:37 ►

steel, which were declining, but maybe that was part

01:44:40 ►

of the boom. Those jobs are going

01:44:42 ►

away. So, you know, people

01:44:44 ►

who grew up in my neighborhood, crappy schools,

01:44:47 ►

they don’t know what good credit is, they don’t have access to good transport.

01:44:50 ►

You know, they’re lost.

01:44:51 ►

I mean, how are we transitioning to, you know, I mean, letting them out of jail is good,

01:44:55 ►

but how do we help these people along?

01:44:57 ►

Who will be funding our retirement down the line?

01:45:00 ►

Sorry, I’m rambling, but I want to address that part.

01:45:04 ►

Well, I think the point I was making is, one, you want an overall strong economy that’s so good that people are hiring.

01:45:12 ►

I mean, we had labor shortages when the economy was strong.

01:45:17 ►

I mean, we’re having trouble finding people.

01:45:19 ►

We need an economy so strong that companies will hire and train.

01:45:24 ►

We don’t have that right now.

01:45:27 ►

But we also need an immigration policy that brings, allows more people to come in, more

01:45:32 ►

high tech guys, more STEM guys, because that actually creates jobs, not just the job of

01:45:37 ►

the guy who came, but all the jobs that are created that way.

01:45:41 ►

So there are a number of things that would be very helpful to economic growth which would, I mean, the first beneficiaries of a strong economy is the guy who gets a

01:45:50 ►

job, not the guy who gets a dividend later in the year. The guy didn’t have any job,

01:45:56 ►

okay, and now has one. Who didn’t have a career now has the opportunity. That’s the importance of the general overall job creation and I think that that needs to be the focus. Again, from a bottom up organic growth of the economy, not some I’m going to give you money to do this because I’m smarter than everybody else and I think this is what should be done with people’s money. How about an economy that grows so that people,

01:46:27 ►

300 million Americans making decisions about what they want to buy

01:46:30 ►

and what they want to do, they decide what ought to be done,

01:46:33 ►

not some guy in Washington with a brain fart going,

01:46:36 ►

I think you should do this.

01:46:37 ►

I don’t care what you think.

01:46:39 ►

Get out of the way and let’s create jobs for everybody.

01:46:42 ►

Again, the most important job that’s created, the guy doesn’t have one right now.

01:46:47 ►

Thank you guys.

01:46:48 ►

Good night.

01:46:51 ►

Thank you Gerber.

01:46:56 ►

You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon

01:46:58 ►

where people are changing their lives

01:47:00 ►

one thought at a time.

01:47:03 ►

Okay, let me begin by saying that in my opinion, anybody lives one thought at a time. Norquist, a man who I only knew about from reading mainly liberal media. Now I have a

01:47:25 ►

completely different attitude. And while I most likely don’t agree with him on more than a handful

01:47:30 ►

of issues, overall I really like what he has to say. I like the tone he uses. And to me, he seems

01:47:36 ►

to be a very reasonable person, even though we have widely varying opinions about some things.

01:47:42 ►

And should we ever meet one day in a state where cannabis is legal, I’d be more than happy to share Thank you. For a maximum fantasy toke experience, can you imagine sharing a joint with Grover Norquist and Snoop Dogg at the same time?

01:48:08 ►

And just to be clear, I don’t mean to imply that Grover smokes pot.

01:48:12 ►

I’m assuming that Snoop Dogg and I would be taking him on his first ride on the grass, so to speak.

01:48:18 ►

Now, getting back to reality and leaving my fantasy world for a while,

01:48:23 ►

I certainly hope that you found a few things about which to agree with Grover Norquist on.

01:48:28 ►

Things like wanting to be left alone by the government

01:48:31 ►

and working to increase liberty for people everywhere.

01:48:34 ►

While we may have competing opinions about how to achieve these lofty goals,

01:48:39 ►

let’s at least agree that looking at the big picture we have much in common.

01:48:44 ►

And one of the things that I have in common with most conservatives

01:48:47 ►

is a mutual dislike and distaste for Obama.

01:48:51 ►

I won’t go into all my reasons, but he is by far,

01:48:53 ►

by far the most horrible excuse for a president that has come along in my lifetime.

01:48:59 ►

And I also want to disagree with the questioner

01:49:01 ►

who seemed to imply that Obama is the first psychedelic president.

01:49:05 ►

Not so. His consciousness is as far removed from psychedelic consciousness as I can imagine.

01:49:11 ►

And I’m about as far to the left as you can get, so it isn’t just conservatives who have seen through his lying ways.

01:49:18 ►

The emperor has no clothes, and he has no honor as well.

01:49:22 ►

Well, I’m glad to get that off my chest.

01:49:26 ►

That said, there still isn’t a single national-level Republican running for president that I’d vote for.

01:49:32 ►

I’m with Russell Brand about voting, by the way.

01:49:35 ►

Like you, I suspect I don’t agree with every conclusion that Grover came to in this talk.

01:49:41 ►

However, one of his points about how the government seems to come up with one crisis

01:49:45 ►

after another and then quickly has a way to solve it, using more government interference, of course.

01:49:51 ►

In fact, this insanity about Ebola on the African continent is a perfect example. The only crisis,

01:49:58 ►

so-called, about Ebola in the U.S. is the media circus that the pharmaceutical companies are

01:50:03 ►

stringing up so as to get the government to force people to try an untested vaccine

01:50:08 ►

to stop a disease that is of no threat whatsoever in the U.S.

01:50:13 ►

And if you don’t agree with me about that,

01:50:15 ►

well, then let’s revisit this podcast in about two years,

01:50:18 ►

and then we’ll see if Ebola is still even in the news,

01:50:21 ►

or whether some new threat will be requiring the government to step in and take care of us all like the unruly children those morons in Washington,

01:50:29 ►

D.C. think we are.

01:50:31 ►

Now, while I would like to continue talking about some of these issues that were raised

01:50:36 ►

in this talk, well, I’m already upset enough and we’ve already gone on long enough, so

01:50:41 ►

I’ll restrict myself to one final observation.

01:50:46 ►

already gone on long enough, so I’ll restrict myself to one final observation. And that is that I noticed a difference in my reactions to what was being said when the focus was on an issue or a

01:50:52 ►

policy versus how they were more emotionally charged when an issue or policy was tied to a

01:50:58 ►

politician’s name. For example, I think that most of us can agree that we want the government to

01:51:03 ►

leave us alone. But when, as an example of that, George Bush’s name came up,

01:51:08 ►

my thinking drastically changed in that my ability to objectively evaluate what was being said

01:51:14 ►

was now clouded by my distaste for the Bush crime family.

01:51:18 ►

Do you see what happened?

01:51:19 ►

I forgot about working for liberty and instead began to revisit all of the reasons that I have no respect for Bush or Clinton or Obama or any of those guys for that matter.

01:51:31 ►

The question we should be asking ourselves is, is it the system that we’re upset with, or is it the people who have floated to the top of that system that we’re upset with?

01:51:41 ►

For me, at least, I have to work hard to separate my feelings about policy issues

01:51:45 ►

and the people who are on the opposite sides of those issues from me. I’d rather take sides with

01:51:51 ►

an issue, though, than with the people who agree with me about it, because ultimately, I don’t

01:51:56 ►

think it’s possible to find a politician with whom I can agree even half the time. And I don’t want

01:52:01 ►

to be backed into a corner of supporting someone simply because they

01:52:05 ►

once upon a time agreed with one of my hot button issues. It’s the system that must be changed,

01:52:12 ►

my friends. The people running the system aren’t to blame. It’s our entire system of government

01:52:17 ►

that needs an overhaul. At least that’s my opinion. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing

01:52:23 ►

off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

420 - Grover Norquist at Burning Man

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Program Notes

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