For me, the concept of anarchy is the concept of private property.
So the extent to which the state exists is the extent to which it violates property rights,
because the state is not a productive institution, because it does not receive its money voluntarily.
It receives its money coercively.
So nobody paid them for any of the bullshit that they're doing for you.
And that's why they suck at it, because they don't own that stuff, so they don't know how to perform economic calculation.
There's levels to the game of how far you get along with Austrian economics.
And I think, you know, if you come through the Bitcoin rabbit hole, the first mind-blowing thing from the Austrian perspective is the fact,
hey, you actually don't need to be printing money all the time.
Money can work, even if the supply is fixed, believe it or not.
And then you start digging in and you realize, oh, OK, that's because of the socialist calculation problem.
Where else can we apply this thing?
And then the entire world begins to fall into a big, giant paper mache installation of lies that just comes crumbling down with the searing truth of Austrian fire.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow pubs.
My name is Walker, and this is the Bitcoin podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 839682, and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is Bitcoin Talk, where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and whatever else comes up.
Today, that guest is none other than Saifudin Amous.
Saifudin is an economist and internationally best-selling author of the Bitcoin Standard, the Fiat Standard, and his latest Principles of Economics.
Saif and I cover a wide range of topics, from Austrian economics versus Fiat-Kinzian economics, to private property and how it relates to capitalism, socialism, and communism, the role of law and the state, monarchy versus democracy, anarchy, and even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and its connection to private property rights and money.
I think you're going to enjoy this episode a great deal, because Saif is as knowledgeable as he is hilarious.
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Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Safedin Amouz.
I won't tell anybody what you said off camera about cast iron actually being superior to stainless steel. Don't worry, that'll just stay between us. It'll be our little secret.
Okay.
Well, we'll save. Thank you so much for joining here. I've got to say also, I don't know if you have enough copies of your books behind you, but it looks like a pretty good collection.
I've got all three of them here. I was doing a little re-upping on my studying prior to this conversation.
I've read the Bitcoin standard that was foundational for me in kind of my Bitcoin journey earlier on, I think for many people that was the case.
The Fiat standard was a great follow-up to that. And I have not finished Principles of Economics yet, but I'm really enjoying it.
And I love that you're doing it as basically an open lecture series as well, because I found those to be really, really helpful.
And so thank you for coming. It's great to, well, it'd be nice to see you in the flesh, but virtually we'll do as well. How is life?
How is life in the world of one of the last Austrian economists?
First of all, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be chatting to you.
I wouldn't say last Austrian economist. I think the numbers of Austrian economists are trending upwards.
I think we have number go up technology on our side. Probably a lot more Austrians and a lot more people identify as Austrians today than did 40 years ago.
And I think that's a trend that's likely to continue thanks to Bitcoin and thanks to the wonders of Bitcoin's own number go up technology.
But yeah, life is good. Can't complain. Getting by.
It's actually an excellent point with the Austrian economist number go up, because seeing Renato have that post-fight interview where he basically said,
private property, Mises, six lessons. I honestly thought that it was in some sort of AI dub it first. Like I thought that a Bitcoin or had gone in there, you know, and decided to dub it with with AI and put in just the most based thing they could they could think of.
And then I realized, oh, no, this is actually real. This guy has clearly read Mises and a lot of Austrian economics. I saw your he was asking, you know, say, say, I'd love to come on your show.
I'd love to come on your podcast. I saw you on Lex. So that I can't wait to check out that interview when you do with them. But the Overton window is shifting. Like this is beautiful.
It is. It's quite incredible. I think you got to say something about just the fact that the ideas are so strong that they give people enough conviction to go and try things like this.
And it's not just him, you know, even people like Ron Paul and so many other people are just motivated so much to go out and spread these ideas of liberty.
So I think that's just one of the many reasons that allows you to be optimistic about the future. Bitcoin, of course, being the main reason.
And this is a nice secondary thing because ultimately, let's face it, if it wasn't for Bitcoin, none of that would matter.
You could keep shouting into the void forever as gold bugs are done for 40 years, 50 years.
And it's not going to get you anywhere if you rely on political processes.
And that's what's so beautiful about Bitcoin because it doesn't. It doesn't care. You're free to ignore it and become poor.
Ignore it, your own peril. You know, I think actually that the so the Mises six lessons that Renato was referencing are from his economic policy thoughts for today.
And tomorrow it was the group of lectures that he delivered in Argentina, I think in 58 his wife, I believe, later combined it into into a book.
I like that framing as and it's a good recommendation to give people for kind of a first intro to the Austrian way of thinking, I think, because it's he breaks down his capitalism, socialism, interventionism, inflation, foreign investment,
and then policies and ideas in general. And, you know, maybe a good place to start before we get too deep in is just from your side.
Can you just tell me safe and this is, you know, I think everybody listening to this show will certainly know who you are.
But in your own words, who are you and how did you get here today to be a guy who is now teaching online courses about Austrian economics.
You were an actual professor at university for for many years. You've gone down the Keynesian rabbit hole. You've gone deep down the Austrian rabbit hole.
And now here you sit as I think, at least in my mind, one of the people that I look to for really coherent, logical and facts based approaches to thinking about the questions of economics and how that should actually not just thinking about it in a philosophical sense,
but what does that actually mean in the real world, not just in our fantasy land. So can we can we start there? What was that journey for you?
Well, it's a pretty long journey. I'm 43. So how much time do you have? There's been a lot of ways, places on this long journey.
So I guess we could start from the end, maybe from where you began. I was a university professor at the Lebanese American University in Beirut in Lebanon.
And there I was already very much into Austrian ideas. I had developed these ideas, developed a familiarity with these ideas back when I was doing my PhD at Columbia University in New York between 2004 and 2009.
So there I was doing a PhD in Sustainable Development, which was basically an economics program. It was mainly economics, but it was grounded in more multidisciplinary fields, focusing on sustainability and all kinds of fiat things,
which I don't spend much time worrying about today, but you know, carbon dioxide changing the weather and some such superstitions of some modern tribes.
But at that time I was more or less on board with all of that stuff. So I had a major change in my perspective as I became familiar with Austrian economics around 2007, 2008.
And at that time I shifted my understanding of all kinds of issues quite drastically. And then I got a job, I finished my PhD, got a job as a university professor in Lebanon, where I was teaching economics.
And I taught mostly, or well, maybe half of what I was teaching was mainstream economics, because I was familiar with it, I learned that I could teach it. But I was out there learning all kinds of insidious, subversive Austrian propaganda on the side,
and smuggling into my students as much as I could. And that led to me chancing upon Bitcoin, somewhere upon the dark dungeons of the internet.
I'm not sure how I first came across Bitcoin, and I don't even remember when. But it was pretty early. I was familiar with Bitcoin quite early. I don't even remember when.
But I was extremely skeptical of it from the beginning, and I never bothered to research it for quite some time. And it's initially, as a gold bug, you just completely can't see that anything can replicate what gold has, because this is ultimately just how money has always functioned.
It's always going to be yellow shiny metal, and you can cry about it if you don't like, but that's just how it is. And all of history is a bunch of shit coiners. From the gold perspective, really, all of history is a bunch of shit coiners who come and say, we've got something better than gold, and then they don't.
And then it ends in tears. So this was very obviously just going to be the latest line, latest in the long line of shit coins, pretending to be the next gold.
And so for that reason, I dismissed it for quite a while, never really paid attention to it. Only really in 2013, 14, did I begin to start paying attention to it.
And I would say even at that point, it was just kind of like a sports team that like, yeah, we're going to make this little hobby money one day grow into everything.
And you said it to your friends and they laughed at you and you laughed as well. But you know, it was better than it was better than continuing to labor with no hope.
But over time, you know, you hang out on Twitter and you run into toxic bitcoiners. You read the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute, you get radicalized.
And you know, Fiat World continues to radicalize you further and further and further. And you start to realize Bitcoin really can work, Bitcoin can function.
And so then you start taking a little bit more seriously, at which point you think, well, you know, I need to be publishing something, I need to be writing.
That is my job. I can't just keep reading all the time. So you start publishing about Bitcoin and then one thing leads to the other.
And all of a sudden you've got a hundred thousand word manuscript in your hands and you try it out and you publish it.
I assume that that manuscript was the Bitcoin standard.
Yeah, well, and I've got to say thank you for writing it because it was I had also, I think like many people heard about Bitcoin.
I mean, I heard about it through some friends during the Silk Road days and said, you know, I don't like, okay, whatever, nerd, I don't care about that, you know, like back back to whatever Fiat shit I was doing at the time, you know, heard about it again at the
in 2017 and when, you know, it was back in the news again because it's pumping and kind of was like, well, I don't think I'm going to I don't really have the money to buy a full Bitcoin because that's what I think I have to do.
So let me buy a litecoin because that that that'll probably appreciate more in value.
Maybe it'll be worth what Bitcoin is some that, you know, just really stupid stuff.
And then it wasn't until 2020 when I saw that they were just they were locking people down.
They were handing out checks from where I didn't know.
And I said, okay, I need to I need to start looking back into this Bitcoin thing because I remember that it seemed to be a fixed supply sort of thing and went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole went down the monetary rabbit hole.
And during that journey found the Bitcoin standard, of course, because, you know, it's one of the things one of the most I would say most recommended books for people who are beginning their journey as just a foundational way to to look at money to look at Bitcoin to look at the world in which we which we inhabit.
And that for me is what kind of kicked me off into this much deeper rabbit hole of still in Bitcoin, but of the Austrian perspective.
And that is, first of all, there's it seemed at first as though it was this small school of thought.
And then I realized that it was just this this bottomless pit of knowledge, but knowledge that was that was ultimately so fiercely logical and realistic.
That actually made sense, versus the, the like one macroeconomics class I was able to take as an elective in college outside of my engineering program, which I just thought was absolute garbage made no sense to me not that it was a difficult class.
It was just it didn't make much sense.
And then contrasting that with the Austrian school, which is again, ruthlessly logical, and completely lacking in the hubris that I seem to see in the fiat economics world.
So can you can you talk a little bit about just because I think you break these these things down really well.
The professor and you shines through always.
Can you break down what is the the contrast that you see between the Austrian school and let's say what is conventional quote economics but is is fiat Keynesian, you know, inflationary economics basically what how do you break that down for people that you know, how would you explain it like like I'm Elizabeth Warren, for example.
Okay, so I would say.
Similar to you I also studied engineering and undergraduate when I did my undergraduate in Lebanon, also in the American University of Badooth I did mechanical engineering.
And I also took one class of economics, I took macroeconomics I remember it.
And I remember being extremely interested in it and I remember taking it and usually what happens is, as an engineering student you basically just need to turn up and look at the exam paper and you're pretty much going to be fine like it's just a bunch of easy equations that you could very
easily handle as an engineering student probably by high school.
So, and there's not much talk about economics is just here's this simplistic math.
So I did okay in the course I thought it was interesting I was still very curious about it and I applied for graduate studies in that general kind of field.
But I say I have to say like you notice the difference in terms of the rigor between engineers and economists in general or people who study things other than engineering.
And I remember this also from being a professor because for 10 years I was teaching this stuff at a university.
And I would always when I'm teaching macroeconomics which I taught for most years I teach basic intro macro.
And in those courses I'd cover the material of what the Keynesian textbook basically says.
And then I've asked the students so does this make sense.
And there's always a couple of students just looking at me like like I'm really trying to con them and I can see it in their eyes and they usually start asking questions and they say no this doesn't really make sense.
And I walk them through why it doesn't make sense and explain to them that yeah you're correct it doesn't make sense because this is basically just a bunch of made up bullshit to justify printing money.
And that's what's really going on here.
And then I asked them what's your major and it's always the engineering student who busts it.
It's always the engineering student who gets it because it just doesn't add up like you with engineering you have to like make everything add up at the end of the day everything needs to work together.
And they sit there they have the focus they have the time preference to be able to sit and listen through this very basic math which is very elementary for them.
It's laughable like when you move away from you're making as a mechanical engineer we were looking at the gases in an air conditioner.
And then you'd look at Keynes is kindergarten level drawings of you know here's a curve and let's pretend this is GDP and this is this pretend that's aggregate demand and this goes up but then that goes down and.
And it was it was very easy to follow through no matter how long they made it and it just didn't add up.
And it never really added up for me and it's part of the brand in academia is to market this kind of intellectual uncertainty as being a hallmark of just how cutting edge we really are that there were simpler times in which people had simple answers to simple questions like let's just use gold which has worked for 5,000 years.
And these people were idiots now we know better we know it's better to sit and pontificate endlessly about what we should do with money and everybody should have an opinion and everybody should get a vote and we should have this private bank that's not really a private bank but it's kind of owned by the banks but you know it's a public utility but it's also hired by the president but you know it's also owned by the
governments that asked too many questions and get back to the math is essentially what it boils down to so now ultimately it's very difficult to maintain this illusion, I think in the Internet, and what we're seeing more and more of is that people are just breaking out of
Even though you go through this stuff in school and university, ultimately you leave and this is very common experience.
And it's kind of the motivation of writing principles of economics and I write that into introduction.
It's so common. I'd run into a doctor or an engineer or a developer, somebody who's obviously smart and successful
and capable of performing high level intellectual tasks ably and reliably and professionally.
And it was very common that they would say something like, I took economics at university and none of it made any sense.
I still got an A but it made no sense. And it's really common.
And the reason is it's not really meant to make sense. It's just meant to give you the impression that this is very complicated stuff
and you just trust the big brains that are in charge.
And that's really all you need to know about that stuff.
It's like a spectator sport for most people. You just sit there and you watch what's going on on TV
and who's going to print how much money and who's going to get how much of the latest run of the printer.
And you sit there and you indignantly have opinions about what should be done with the printer and then maybe express them in the vote.
But that's what it ultimately comes down to.
Now, Austrian economics is very different.
Ultimately, I would say the main difference. I've gone on a very long rambling meandering rant,
but I don't think that's going to be the last time that happens tonight.
Good.
Yeah, but the main difference to get back to your original question,
the main difference is the issue of subjective valuation versus objective valuation.
And so for the Austrians, the Austrians believe that value is something that is subjective.
It's something that can be expressed or measured objectively.
And the reason for that ultimately boils down to the fact that there is no measurement unit in economics.
There is no constant in economics.
So with all physical phenomena, it's very clear what a meter is, what a kilogram is, what a second is.
All of these things are very easy for people from all over the world to establish.
And so that's why you're able to buy electronics that are assembled from pieces made all over the world.
Because everybody knows what a millimeter is, and everybody just builds their things according to that.
There is no such thing in economics.
In economics, we don't have any kind of objective constant measure against which we can measure things.
And so therefore, we are always measuring things according to us, our subjective valuations.
And so that doesn't make for very big, pretty graphs, maybe like Keynes would like.
Well, not Keynes, but like the people who popularized Keynes and gave it a scientific mathematical sheen.
Essentially people like Paul Samuelson and these kind of post-World War II economists.
Keynes was not very good at math.
He never really, I think he just took one class of statistics and he I think almost failed it or something like that.
But in any case, or no, I think he was a statistician, but he wasn't a very good one.
In any case, it doesn't matter.
He's an inconsequential piece of shit.
But in any case, so because you don't have a constant unit, you cannot measure things in economics.
And so therefore, you cannot express things and you cannot express economic valuations with cardinal units.
You can only express it ordinarily.
In other words, you can say, I like this thing more than that thing.
But you cannot express how much you like things in terms of a fixed measurement unit.
And if you try to do that, it's very quickly obvious to you why it is unworkable because then you'd have to put a price on your child in terms of your house
and a price of your child in terms of your wife and the price of all kinds of things which you value, which obviously isn't how we as human beings work.
And so the valuation that we give things is not some numerical inherent value that can be assigned to things.
It's not a cardinal number.
It's an ordinal thing. I care about this thing more than that thing.
And it is something that is determined at the time in which we make the caring and the judging.
It's not something that is inherent in things.
So things can go from being very valuable to being very unvaluable or not valuable.
It's not inherent in things.
It's entirely a product of our processing power, our ability to process ideas and think of objects.
That's what gives them value.
Yeah. I think that that's... I appreciate the primer and also the rant.
And again, this is a rant, a safe space.
You can rant as much as you would like. Tensions are welcome here.
What I think is just so... It'd be hilarious if it wasn't so sad about fiat economics is that you have this veneer of self-proported,
numerical superiority. Because we're putting numbers to things, because we're creating these graphs,
that gives us... It's an appeal to authority, ultimately.
It's trying to say that, look, we have all these numbers to back it up, all these fancy models.
Now, please don't try to test the models because you can't.
And also don't look at historical examples of where these models kind of were put to the test and the models completely failed.
And one of the things you talk about in principles of economics is that in real hard science,
you use the noble gas law as an example.
You have this law, and if any scientist around the world were to experimentally determine that that is not the case,
that law would be invalidated. It would break, because the whole point of the law is that it is the same everywhere.
It's applicable everywhere under all of these conditions.
In fiat economics, you do not have that. You have these... What they claim to be laws, these different nice curves on the graph
where everything is supposed to measure out great, and thanks to that, our benevolent, anointed central planners
can perfectly decide how much money to print every year to keep the economy in its perpetual boom and bust cycles.
And the just wild thing is that you have... I think you use the example of unemployment versus inflation,
and how they have these ideas of how these curves and how they should work with high unemployment.
You should have low inflation and vice versa, but the problem is that we have very direct evidence of that not being a law at all
with the stagflationary periods that we saw, like in the 70s, where you had high unemployment, high inflation,
and so these laws are very easily invalidated.
And it's this strange... I guess perhaps it's this hubris that they seem to have where they say,
well, sure, the law may have been invalidated there, but it's still good. We should still base all of our economic calculations around this.
And you see this today, even though we have these invalidated laws, you see the way that the politicians,
the way that their media talking heads, the way that the central bankers talk about these things,
we have to get unemployment up so that we can bring inflation down.
And it's these crazy assumptions that are made about adding causation where there barely is even correlation.
And it just seems insane to me. And that's why I think the Austrian school is so attractive to so many people,
because it says, look, that's all just this numerical mysticism bullshit, and we need to look at how humans actually behave.
And it almost seems that it's like a complete lack of almost empathy on the part of fiat economists,
because they truly just treat people like numbers instead of free thinking individuals,
and assume that, yes, they're going to just keep acting in accordance with our models, but our models don't even work.
So I just find it so logically incongruent that it's hard to believe that this has persisted for so long.
And it seems that people are waking up to your point earlier, you know, of Austrian, there's more Austrians now than ever.
But I mean, do you think that eventually we've reached this breaking point where things just get so bad,
it becomes impossible to perpetuate the lie anymore, the Paul Krugmans can no longer say mission accomplished on inflation,
the politicians can no longer say, you know, ah, we fixed everything right before the next election.
Like, what is the breaking point?
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So, I think a good place to start would be this Phillips Blob, a chart from Jonathan Newman, who's an Austrian economist,
as well, he's on Twitter. And so, what you were mentioning, this idea that there's a trade-off between unemployment and inflation,
is called the Phillips Curve. And this is supposed to be a curve. You're looking at it right now.
This blob of blue stuff that's battered on this white canvas that looks like a modern art painting,
is actually supposed to be, according to Keynesian theory, a curve wherein you have high unemployment
or high inflation. But you don't have the two. It's supposed to be downward sloping.
This is the ratio of the two. I mean, I can't even repeat that. These points show us all of the points of inflation and unemployment.
So, this is the, on the x-axis is the unemployment, on the y-axis is the inflation.
And so, supposedly, according to Keynesian theory, you should have only instances wherein unemployment is low and inflation is high,
or unemployment is high and inflation is low. And so, this should look like a straight line that goes from this top left corner
to the bottom right corner of the curve. It doesn't have to be a straight line, but there should be a trade-off
wherein we have a line that goes from the top left to the bottom right. But that does not happen, because this is not a science,
because they're not running anything that is in any way like a scientific experiment here.
There is no data that shows why this should be true. It's taken at face value, and it's just been accepted because Keynes said so.
And instead of trying to convince you with this stuff in the macro textbook, they'll have a couple of pages about the life of Keynes
and how Keynes is the greatest economist that ever lived. And so, you learn about this guy, and then you feel like, wow,
he must know what he's talking about. So, clearly, that's clearly the answer.
We need to raise the level of inflation in the economy in order to get people back to work.
And so, yes, money printing is the answer, always. As I used to tell my students, like the cheat code for this class is,
if you don't know the answer, the answer is almost certainly print money. Look at the options. It's a multiple choice question.
Find whichever one that most closely approximates to print more money, and that's your correct answer.
I mean, it's a pretty good cheat code, and it seems to be the ones that all of our politicians and central bankers naturally go back to as well.
I mean, and MMT takes that kind of to its logical extreme, which is, well, government deficit is private sector surplus,
and we should just, you know, I kind of love MMTers in a way, because they have a similar view of bit coiners in a lot of ways when it comes to taxes,
which is like, well, why do we need to pay them when the government can just print money? And bit coiners say that in a, you know, kind of like, sarcastic way,
like, come on, guys, we don't need to pay taxes, you guys can just print the money. But the MMTers are like, no, really, just, of course, that's the answer.
It'll make everything better. And so I find that to be rather fascinating.
So thank you for the, I appreciated the nice Phillips blob curve as well, because I think that visual, and it did look like a bit of pointillism, maybe, you know, from an artistic perspective, which was nice.
I want to talk a little bit about private property, because it's something.
Yeah, actually, had I not gone on the rant in the previous question, I would have gotten into this because the next point, you know, the logical conclusion of this issue is that since you don't have,
remember, we said we don't have a unit of measurement and a unit of reference with which we can use to formulate these kind of laws in a scientific manner, like with the ideal gas law,
where every scientist in the world can run this experiment in their own lab and verify that these constants are really correct and that the predicted relationships will hold.
We can't do that in economics because we don't have that. And so what are we left with? We're left with our own subjective valuations, and we're left with our ability to perform economic calculation.
And the only way that that can happen is this is really, I think, the most important insight of the Austrian School of Economics in terms of their contribution, theoretically.
Perhaps politically, what is most important about it is that they explain how money doesn't have to be from the state.
But perhaps intellectually, I think the socialist calculation problem is perhaps the most significant contribution of Austrian economics.
And that's what Mises wrote about in 1923 or 22 in a book called Socialism, which is a great book.
And I try and summarize some of the main ideas in Principles of Economics, but ultimately comes down to the fact that the only way in which economic production can happen in a market economic system,
in the only way in which we can have an extended order for the division of labor, all of these concepts are built up to in the individual chapters leading up to this.
So each one of these big terms has a whole chapter dedicated to it as you've come across so far.
But so the only way that we can have a large division of labor, we can have a market order in which people are able to buy and sell goods from each other without having to know each other,
without having to have intimate relationships with one another. The only way we're able to coordinate economic production in these kind of large economic sectors is by entrepreneurs performing economic calculation.
And the only way that they can make economic calculation is if they are making calculation according to real measures of opportunity cost for them.
And so that is inseparable from private property. If they don't own the thing for which they're performing economic calculation,
or if they don't work for somebody who owns the thing, who is performing economic calculation, then they are unable to perform economic calculation.
It doesn't matter how smart they are, it doesn't matter how good their computers are, it doesn't matter how well-intentioned, how hard-working they are, how motivated, how much incentive they have to work hard at this job,
unless they have private property in the things with which they want to produce, they are unable to perform economic calculation.
And this is why really the only working alternative to this system of economic capitalism, where people have a system of private property, is conflict, eternal conflict, and descent to the jungle.
We can't have any of the nice things that modern civilization gives us. We can't have anything of all of the things that have become commonplace in our life over the last 500 years, unless we have that division of labor.
We can't have engines. If you try to live in an island of 5,000 people without engaging trade with the rest of the world, it's going to be very, very difficult, probably impossible for you to develop the engine on your own.
But if you're able to trade with the rest of the world, you can get an engine for $900 or something like that from China or Korea or something like that, and you just ship it to wherever you are in the world, and you've got a very efficient, mass-produced engine.
So the benefits from engaging in an extended order that respects property rights far outweighs any benefits you get from aggressing against property rights, because when you aggress against property rights, you don't remind the entire system that allows us to have all of these incredibly sophisticated products,
like computers and laptops and engines and all of these amazing things. And when you destroy that, then we lose those things, so it doesn't matter how much money you have.
The poor people of 2020 get to experience things materially in a much better way than the richest people of 500 years ago, because we have all of these incredible technologies.
And they're only possible because we have an ever-growing market where people are able to produce at larger numbers, and that's only possible because we have property rights.
And so if we don't have property rights, everything goes to shit. And effectively, the only sustainable alternative to this is the complete descent into the collapse of civilization and a return to barbarism.
And that's, you know, a lot of people on the Internet like to, you know, play internet tough guys and talk about how that's going to be liberating for the human spirit.
They all need to say that to you on the Internet, on the laptop that was only produced because we are not living in the jungle. We can't have an Internet, we can't have laptops for you to make those edgy takes.
If we really were living in that world of barbarism, you'd be out there trying to run away from lions and bears and try to find something to eat and just living in constant fear and terror and horror.
That's really the only alternative to a world in which we don't, to a world of property rights, in my opinion.
You had a great tweet. I was going back through your tweet archives in preparation for this. And one of them from 2017 was, capitalism is the process of human civilization.
Socialism is the destruction of civilization. And I loved that because it's such a succinct way to go about that point.
And to, you know, as far as I think you said in your book, or maybe it was in one of the lectures, but private property is inseparable from capitalism.
And this is, I was actually, I was talking with my father-in-law the other night. He was a defector from communism. He is a capitalist.
He loves that he was able to build things in America that were actually his when he came here to this country.
And we were talking about private property. And he said, you know, without private property, you cannot have responsibility.
He said, in communism, okay, everything belongs to all of us, right, wink, wink.
But that means that nobody gave a shit about anything. Nobody gave a shit about the, the, the, all of the public goods that were there.
Because they belong to everybody, but they belong to nobody. I mean, who do they belong to? Really, it's the party, you know.
And the other point that he had was that without private property, without the responsibility that private property requires, you cannot have any sort of stability.
And that's why communism ultimately fails. That's why socialism ultimately leads to communism ultimately fails.
Because unless people have something that they are willing to work for, willing to protect, willing to make better with their time, with their labor, with their capital,
they're, they have no incentive whatsoever to actually do things that are, that are in their own best interest, because when nothing can be owned, how can something be in your best interest?
You're just, you know, trying to, trying to do what you can to not be, not be sent to the gulag.
But I'm curious, you know, we've seen the weaponization, I think, of the law as it relates to, to private property.
And I've, I've been digging into Bastiat a little bit, and, and the law, which I've now gone through a couple of times, I'll probably read it out loud on the show, because I, as soon as I read it,
I was like, wow, I can't believe I haven't read this before and more people should read it because he was incredibly prescient.
And, and he talks about the fact that the, basically the purpose of the law is to protect private property.
The only purpose that the state has in, as it's supposed to be, is to organize for the collective defense of that private property, i.e. to enforce the law.
But what we have, so it's the purpose of the law is to protect your private property from being plundered.
But what we have now is the organization of the state apparatus to pervert the law so that the state actors become the plunders themselves.
They become the very thing that the law is supposed to protect private property against.
And I'd love to just get your take on perhaps misconceptions about what the purpose of the state is.
And I know you're, you have been self described as an anarchist, which I think there's many misconceptions about what that word even means.
People think it's like Mad Max, everything's burning, it's, you know, people are killing each other.
Like they hear anarchy and that's what they think.
But, you know, an anarcho capitalist, but, you know, you've also more recently, I think, made some interesting points about monarchism.
And I think that you've thought about these two contrasts a lot more than I have.
And so I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on the law, the state and ideal modes of, let's say, governance, whether that be in a freely voluntary anarcho capitalist system,
or in a monarchic system.
Okay.
First of all, let me just say that a key contribution of the Austrians was that with the issue of socialism and the failure of socialism and communism is that they specified that the issue is not that people are just not motivated.
It's not an issue of motivation, because in fact, socialist economies, they did offer people very strong incentives to work really hard, because if you didn't work, you got sent to the gulag.
So yeah, in America, yeah, if you work hard, you get rich.
And obviously there's motivation to get rich.
But I'd say the motivation to not get sent to the gulag is a lot bigger than the motivation to get rich, for most people at least.
So likely they didn't really have that problem. And in fact, all of the discussion of Soviet economic failure, absenteeism isn't exactly a problem.
People were turning up to work and people who didn't turn up to work faced serious punishment.
So there was an issue of motivation. There was no serious issue of motivation. The real issue there was that the managers of these publicly owned economic institutions could not perform economic calculation because they did not own the means of production.
There was no market in the means of production.
So if the state assigned you the cars that you rode or told you which trains to go to, and the state also operated the car factory, and the state also operated the train factory, and the state also operated the steel factory, so they are the entire supply chain and the consumer.
They are making the decision on your behalf. They have no mechanism of performing economic calculation, regardless of how motivated they are.
So ultimately the issue with the private property is not just something that we could instill into people if we just develop them into the proper socialist man, which is the really dangerous thing where socialism goes from, that's the phase where they go from hippies making stupid laughable arguments to Stalin's for the people in Goulash.
So we are going to put you in the Goulag, because look, we are just going to make the best human possible and you are clearly not it. So we don't want you as part of our society. So we are just going to put you in the Goulag and that's going to allow us to achieve utopia.
So even if they did that, it didn't work and it wouldn't work because there was no chance for performing economic calculation.
So this, I really find it to be the most important contribution for the Austrians, because as an intellectual contribution, because upon it are built all of the important Austrian economic contributions in everything from money to the business cycle to also the state.
And I think this is really the part of Austrian economics that people are the most unfamiliar with, because a lot of people are sympathetic to Austrian ideas. They get to learn about Bitcoin, they get, or they get to learn about the Austrian business cycle theory.
And so they become interested and curious, but they continue to think, well, no, clearly Austrians are just being ridiculous libertarians on the issue of the state. You still need a government. You still need a police, because obviously the alternative is anarchy.
And the alternative is people going around smashing windows and burning things and burning tires.
Small little aside here, these are the same people who tell you that smashing windows is good for the economy. So I'm not sure why they would be complaining.
They tell you that this stuff is good for the economy because it raises GDP, but then they tell you that you can't have the anarchists because they're going to destroy everything.
But of course that's not true. The anarchists don't believe that destroying things is good. For me, the concept of anarchy is the concept of private property.
So the extent to which the state exists is the extent to which it violates property rights, because the state is not a productive institution, because it does not receive its money voluntarily.
It receives its money coercively. So nobody paid them for any of the bullshit that they're doing for you.
And that's why they suck at it, because they don't own that stuff, so they don't know how to perform economic calculation.
So there's levels to the game of how far you get along with Austrian economics.
And I think if you come through the Bitcoin rabbit hole, the first mind-blowing thing from the Austrian perspective is the fact, hey, you actually don't need to be printing money all the time.
Money can work even if the supply is fixed, believe it or not. And then you start digging in and you realize, oh, okay, that's because of the socialist calculation problem.
Where else can we apply this thing? And then the entire world begins to fall into a big, giant paper mache installation of lies that just comes crumbling down with the searing truth of Austrian fire.
And it all falls apart. And for me, I think applying the frame of economic calculation to the question of security and defense is the key toward understanding the question of the state.
And so that's what I do in the last three chapters of Principles of Economics.
So we've established that. So then let's look at the issue of defense.
So violence is something that people don't want to happen to them. So protection from violence is just another economic good.
So just like you want apples or oranges or cars or laptops, you also want something that protects you from violence.
So why would it be an economic good that is different from all the other goods?
In fact, when we analyze how it is provided, we see the same hallmarks of everything that we see with every other good.
When it is provided by a monopoly that can get its money from you without having to convince you willingly and consensually to give them your money, they go to suck at it.
And that's why private security people, you hear a lot fewer stories of private security people assaulting customers or people at malls or people at universities or people at all of these private locations that have private security.
Then you do with police because the police have very different incentives in their job.
In fact, when you look into it as an industry, you see that we already have in the world today, we already have more private policemen than we have public policemen.
So there are more private security personnel in the world than police and military.
And it makes sense if you look at a bank in any town, it's usually not the police that are guarding banks or jewelry stores.
It's usually their own security.
And it makes sense. Why should you as a citizen be paying your taxes to finance extra protection for the bank?
The bank should provide its own security and it's becoming more and more like that.
More and more people are becoming reliant on private security and private security is infinitely more efficient at doing its job than public security.
And so there are many stories of just private security providers being able to provide the services at a much lower cost than police are able to do it.
So we are heading in this direction.
And so I would call myself an anarchist because I see the market for whatever it is the state provides.
In some places the state provides money.
Well, everywhere today the state provides money.
In some places and sometimes the state provided potatoes and we had famines and in some places they provided all kinds of critical infrastructure which was failing.
And in all over the world, whenever anything is provided freely and voluntarily on a market, you see that it continues to thrive and it gets bigger and better and cheaper over time.
Because people have to continuously improve to meet the demands of the consumers.
So I think it's the same thing with defense and security.
And you see it that more and more you can see that governments are in the business of protecting governments rather than in the business of protecting people.
And if you want to get protection, you need to get it yourself.
I think you see this more and more particularly like in the West and Europe and in the US.
And security is almost entirely breaking down and well, I mean not entirely breaking down, but still a lot of a lot of crime in a lot of these cities, which is a lot higher than it used to be, say a century ago, I would imagine.
So all of this in my mind suggests that we defense and security are no different.
And having said that, so that's what makes me an anarchist.
Now on the question of monarchy, I've become more and more sympathetic to the idea of monarchy thanks to the work of the Prince of Liechtenstein, the ruling Prince of Liechtenstein, Prince Hans Adam, who's written a great book called The State in the Third Millenium,
which is a really interesting book and you can pirate it from Library Genesis as always the most important website on the internet, libgen.rs.
And they keep changing the main name because they keep shutting down, but the pro tip here is to always look up there Wikipedia page because the Wikipedia page has the updated domain name whenever they shut them down so you can always find them.
Good to know. I appreciate the pro tip.
Yeah, that's a very good useful tip that I've come across.
So in any case, Prince Hans Adams, Hans Adam has written this book where he explains the role of the state in the Third Millenium and he makes the compelling case, I think, that as people get more educated, as people become more productive economically,
they are naturally more free and they want to be more free and they seek political structures that allow them more and more freedom.
And he's a lot more diplomatic about it, obviously, than I am. But basically the idea of democracy was that it was going to give people that freedom, but it hasn't.
And we need to start asking questions.
And his suggestion is essentially that all of these things that you want your government to do, they are failing at doing them because rather than having the force of market incentives in running their business, they have government incentives
wherein they need to, they don't need to impress their customers much. And so instead of giving people more freedom through allowing them more choice in choosing which government rules them,
we're giving them the last few hundred years of human political civilization have moved toward giving them more choice on deciding the politics or the policies of their local government, of their government.
And so we move from monarchy to democracy, where you get to choose the president rather than just be ruled by the king.
But this has come at the expense of the ability of presidents to make plans for the long term and at the expense of people's ability to really hold them accountable because ultimately these bureaucracies and governments are growing into their own thing
and they protect their own interests and people don't really have much of a say.
So his idea is effectively you want your government to run more like Apple. And the reason Apple runs properly is not because you get to vote on Apple design.
Apple iPhone users have never been surveyed for what they think the next iPhone should look like. They don't get to vote on who gets to be head of engineering.
They don't get to vote for who gets to be CEO. They have one choice only buy it or don't buy it. That's it. That's all that there is to it.
And so he's essentially suggesting that for government. You want to have a system where people have the choice of seceding from their governments to form their own governments or to join other governments.
And so the idea here is that what you'd want in Europe in a place like Europe is instead of having a European Union that is trying to hammer everybody into one formulaic existence with one set of uniform rules of everywhere.
You'll have a thousand leechtisch nines in Europe. And so you've got a tiny little polity which are all open to one another because they're all too small to try stupid trade policies.
So trade is very free. And so you'd have free trade and you'd have people down to the very small local level given the right to secession.
So what he's calling for is instead of wanting more involvement, more political parties, more democracy, more parliament, more participatory democracy.
Instead of ending it in that direction, having every fiat citizen has to spend half their life working their job, half their life investing their fiat trying to beat inflation,
and also half of their life getting agitated about their politics and getting to choose the next mass murdering psychopath who gets to rob them.
And that's why they're also depressed and lost because they're basically living three full time jobs just to make do.
Instead of having all of that, just give more authority to executives so you'd have more princes, more monarchies, more or perhaps new forms, not necessarily monarchies,
but new forms that have more executive authority and they grant the right to secession.
So in return for me being more of a CEO and not having to give a shit about your opinion and survey you and acting more like the CEO of Apple than your local congressman or your local senator,
I'm going to have time to run whatever you need me to do for you as a government.
But you get the choice instead of telling me what to do, instead of messing with the pro, you just get to choose to go to another.
So in Leicester, which is a tiny little country, they have, I think it's a few villages, a handful or like 10 villages or something like that.
Each one of these villages can choose to secede and join Switzerland or Austria or just become independent if they want to.
And interestingly, you know, everywhere in the world is becoming more and more democratic. Prince Hans-Adam has bucked that trend.
And the latest referendum they had, I could be getting the details wrong. I think it was in 2005, but something around that time,
allowed him more executive authority. So he was getting more executive authority undermining the authority of the parliament, which is interesting,
but also allows him more and more freedom to decide and do what he wants.
And so an interesting episode happened where people were campaigning for the legalization of abortion in Leicester, which still has abortion, not legal.
And he said, okay, we'll have a referendum for it, but also on the referendum will be my stay as the prince of Leicester.
So if you vote for the legalization of abortion, I will quit being your prince and I will retire and I will leave Leicester and I will go and move to Austria
and just become a normal human being and you guys can sort your own mess out.
And it ran for a referendum and they voted against it and abortion is still illegal. So it's quite an interesting dynamic because he really practices what he preaches.
He views his role as being, okay, I have executive authority, but you get to choose whether you want to be part of my government or not.
I think this model is likely to prosper and grow in a Bitcoin world.
People can get agitated about it online all they like, but we are going to see this happen for the very simple reason that the only thing that killed this model in the first place was Fiat.
And so now that we kill Fiat, we are going to get all of these relics of past human civilizations like savings and thrift and family and monarchy.
I think they are going to start making a comeback.
So I think that I was not aware of his story, but it's very fascinating. I'm going to have to pirate that book or maybe even just buy it.
But the idea that there is still the ability to secede in a monarchy I think is really key, right?
But I'm curious about the nature of private property itself when you have a sovereign ruler.
Can you still have private property when the, you know, are we talking about a new model of monarchy where the king, the queen, whatever the sovereign is not, does not quote, own everything where individuals because they have the right to secede,
can they secede but still have their property or who is the, you know, can private property exist in the same way in a monarchy that it does in or that it would in a truly anarchic system?
I think the way that I would look at this question is that monarchies are just much better at thinking long term than Fiat republics.
And the reason for that is that a monarch expects to be in power indefinitely.
So they expect to pass on power to their child and their child and their child and their child.
And so they're optimizing for a long time horizon.
They want their great grandchild to rule over a prosperous nation in 100 years from now.
They want the nation to be prosperous 100 years from now.
And that creates very strong incentive alignment between you and the king.
He wants his great grandchild to be able to tax your great grandchild successfully.
And you want your great grandchild to be prosperous enough to be lucrative tax cow for the king.
And so that, you know, sounds not as nice as democracy because you've been sold the fantasy version of democracy where every four years you get a self-interested angel who comes in and thinks about the long term.
But in reality, you're getting a psychopath mass murdering likely pitified in charge for those four years.
And he only has four years to secure himself and his children and his grandchildren for as long as he can because he's only going to be in power for four years, maybe eight years, maybe 10, 15, depending on the government and republic and whatever.
So he's only going to be in power for a few years or a couple of decades at most.
And then there's no guarantee his kids are going to be around unless, you know, unless you have a real monarchy and God and religion and the church or Moscow, whatever that blesses you.
You can't really feel very certain that you're going to pass this thing on to your child.
Without that certainty, you have a very short time horizon. You have a high time preference.
You think about those four years as smash and grab. You want to grab as much as you can.
So you're willing to compromise the long term future of the country in favor of short term gains for you.
And for me, this, I think it makes countries very cheap prey for their enemies because the most attractive thing that a government can do or the most profitable thing that you could do with the government is subverted in the service of a foreign enemy.
Because that, you know, you subvert the entire country. If you have the head of the country and the people who have the executive authority able to subvert the country in the interest of its enemies, that is more valuable than anything else that the president can do.
You know, what is he going to do? Like give the corn farmers more corn? Okay, great.
But, you know, as not as big as selling out the entire country, right? Selling out the future of the country, mortgaging decades, hundreds of years of capital effectively for a hit today, that is a very lucrative thing.
And that is the most economically productive use of government for the people who actually kind of use it.
So if you understand government as being this institution that does this, you'd much rather have this done in the long term and done with a long term perspective rather than being done in the short term.
You'd rather have the people in charge of running your government business.
You'd rather have them have a long term orientation and be thinking about this business in the centuries. And you also want it to be a family business because you want the people who get into this business to have been born into this business from day one.
So that the day they're born, yeah, we're all humans, we're all born the same on the same day. That's right. But some people grow up in a king's palace and some people grow up in the gutter.
And growing up in the king's palace is probably better preparation for ruling a palace than growing up outside the palace.
And so that family is, its entire history, its entire life, its entire existence is about ruling. And it has a very long term perspective in this issue.
And so therefore it has a long term incentive. So that low time preference.
And also, you know, even fiat professors have written a bunch of papers. If you look at the 20th century, you see monarchies have had generally lower rates of inflation, more secure property rights, better, all kinds of different institutions.
They obviously have, they score lower on some of these metrics because some of these metrics are all about democratic ritual fetishism rather than what people actually care about.
But you know, if you look at inflation and property rights, which is what really matters to people in taxation, monarchies do a lot better.
I remember looking at the data for Arab countries, in particular, there's about 21 countries or something like that, data on them from the 1970s.
And all the Arab republics destroyed their currencies. Every single one of them, their currencies against the dollar is trading at less than 1% of where it was in 1970 or something like that.
And so, you know, every single republic, every single monarchy has held on to its value against the dollar relatively well throughout that period.
And so, yeah.
I was just going to say, you know, I appreciate the answer because as you were talking, I was just thinking about the fact that, you know, I was finding it hard to square the idea of property rights, legally enforced property rights in a monarchy.
But then, of course, I doubled back on myself and I thought, well, huh, in a democracy in any system of government, property, property rights, and I mean this in the legal sense, not as Rothbard would argue in the natural sense,
but in the legal sense of legally enforceable property rights, you have them in so far as the law is respected.
And then now we get back to the idea of plunder, right? So to your point, if I can summarize, it's that in a monarchy, you actually have a better long term chance of your property rights being respected because the monarch has both a low time preference.
They are looking far into the future and they have the incentive to have you be a happy citizen of their sovereign nation because you don't want them to either secede or to start a rebellion and come and, you know, throw you in the guillotine.
You want, you see, you have an incentive to respect their property rights. And then I was thinking about, you know, just in America today, you may think that you own your house, but if you do not pay the taxes that the state says you owe on your house,
they will come take it from you. And if you refuse, they will put you in jail. This is not hyperbole. This is this is literal fact. You can test it yourself if you want. I don't recommend it. But they they will come. It's amazing.
If you have any guns, the IRS can can muster. I mean, just incredible for for a tax man. And so I think that's actually a very interesting argument that, well, it all comes back to incentives, right? And if the system of government that you are in, regardless of whether
you're a democracy, if that's a monarchy, which one has the better incentive to legally preserve the property rights that have been agreed upon? And I think that that's it's it's a strong it's a strong argument.
I think people, myself included, we hear monarchy and maybe it's because I'm American. So I think, you know, fuck the British crown, you know, like I'll throw their tea in the harbor any day. You know, we have this idea that monarchies are inherently just so archaic and almost,
you know, evil and it's this top down central planning. But but your point is really look at the incentives, look at which system of government has the better incentive to preserve your rights, your social contract long term.
Is that a fair, fair summarization? Yeah, ultimately, accepting the formality of the reality of the fact that people in government have an asymmetry against you. And to the extent that you believe any form of government should exist.
It makes more sense for me that you have this as a kind of long term perspective, long term business. And, you know, my honest advice is look around the world, and you'll probably see that you find more security in the places where you have monarchies.
And this is, there's, there's a lot of evidence for this. So look at the Arab Gulf. I mean, the World Cup was the World Cup was held a year and a half ago in Qatar.
And it was a culture shock for many football fans who went there just how safe the country is. I remember a fan did a video blog where they left a car open a Mercedes car, they left it open and they left the keys on the car seat and left there for 24 hours,
and nobody would touch the car. And there was a wallet on the car seat as well with money showing from the wallet. And nobody would touch it. They put it in a restaurant, they put a wallet, left it in a restaurant and every five, 10 minutes, someone will come pick it up and go give it to the people who run the restaurant.
It was just unheard of that somebody would take something that's not theirs. And I don't recommend doing that in Chicago. Please do not do not try and add in Chicago will not end well.
I mean, I use I use that example that exact example Chicago and Qatar in principles of economics in the last chapter. So if you live in Chicago, you pay something like 40, 50, 60, 70, I mean, depends if you count inflation and all the taxes that you pay,
maybe 70, maybe 80% of your income a year might go to security and defense and your kids can't walk the street, your kids can't walk a 10 minute walk to their friend's house 10 minutes away. You wouldn't dream of doing that in most neighborhoods in Chicago, I would say.
And really think about how much money you're paying and think how much security how much security you could afford them. So if you're earning something like $200,000, you're paying something like $100,000 of for the security that the governor's providing.
Okay, a couple of parks and a couple of roads, you could pay tolls, and you could pay for private parks, you could just pay an entropy at the park and get it over with $3 a day or something.
We have tolls too in Chicago. And our roads are somehow still full of potholes, which doesn't make any sense because I was promised that if we just paid taxes, we would have roads, but our roads are absolute dog shit.
It really is shocking. And again, there's tolls to drive on those highways, which is great, perfect.
Yeah. But so I think I mean, I think these these these Gulf monarchy's are a closer implementation of what Prince Hans Adam discusses, because ultimately the majority of the population in all of those countries in the Gulf is foreign.
The majority of people who live in Qatar are not Qataris. These are people who applied to the Qatari visa in their country so that they could get a visa so that they could go there and work there.
So these are all customers of the Qatari government and the Qatari people you could think of them as essentially being the family of the they're almost like the beneficiaries of the business.
Qatar is like one government that runs a free market government system where anybody from all over the world, people from the US, Europe, South America, Africa, Asia, East Asia, Australia, they all go to Qatar and they work there and they make double or triple
what they make back in their country or 10x what they make in their country in many cases. And they know what they need to do in order to continue to do this, which is don't steal, don't do bad things, don't just don't do any of the bad things that people in the country don't like.
And it works. And that's why millions of people apply and millions of people want to go there.
It's, it's a really, I think, challenging idea for for most folks. And again, I include myself in this.
But you make a very compelling argument. Again, when I first read about time preference was in the Bitcoin standard. And that was a huge, I think, light bulb moment for me and for many Bitcoiners was to understand this idea of low time preference and high time preference
and what that actually means in terms of your incentives, how you behave, what what actions you decide to take. And it's something that again applies at both the individual level and at the the state level, the government level.
And I need to, I need to definitely do some more thinking this to read read some more on it. But I, I think it's a compelling argument again to look at the incentives to look at what the incentive of the ruling class is because we may be in a democracy in America,
but we have a ruling class. This is undeniable. We change the figure, the color of the figurehead every four years or every eight years. But we have a ruling class. Look at the people who have been in power.
They don't just come into politics for four years and then say, OK, well, I've served my time. I've been a civil servant and now I'm gone. No, they're in politics for 304050 years, some of them.
Joe Biden's been in politics for literally 50 years. I think he got in in 1971 was his first political office. So what the fuck happened in 1971?
But it's insane. We have these people who are career politicians, but they have absolutely no incentive to actually be civil servants.
I think the idea of a civil servant is such a such a joke. They're not public servants. They're not like they're they're profiteers ultimately who pervert the law for their own ends. And that's, of course, no, no group is a monolith.
There are many exceptions to that rule, but you see this on both sides of the aisle and it's it's quite disheartening. But I want to speaking of the US a little and also speaking of the Middle East, I want to get into a topic that is certainly contentious.
Oh, please, please. I'll just to cap off the discussion we were having earlier on time preference, monarchy and the private property. I think the significance of this moving forward is that all over the world, we're going to see this dynamic.
I would predict that governments that are monarchies are going to be better at hodling democracies are going to be better at shitcoining and printing money and doing all kinds of degenerate nonsense.
I know it's still too early and we only have a sample of one so far in terms of governments, which is El Salvador and I'm I will admit, I'm oh to one down, but it's it's it's not even the first inning as baseball people say.
We've got another 200 countries or so to go. So there's 200 innings left in this series. So it's still early to tell. But I would say that in the long term,
hodling Bitcoin is going to be more doable under a monarchy system. And so I think we would see are we would see regionally around the world.
Countries that go in the direction of monarchy will end up stacking more sad and having bigger stacks, whereas democracies are going to be broke.
And eventually I would say something like this, something like what Hans Adam discusses becomes a realistic option. I mean, successful Prince next to broke Democratic hellhole.
And the people in the Democratic hellhole organize a referendum saying, hey, you want to join the other country and just stop with all of the nonsense that we're doing here.
And they agree a deal with the other with the prince and then the prince takes over the nearby country and the referendum wins. I'd say we'd see this happen.
And I think it's it's it's feasible. So that's why I would say this kind of thing is is not just an it's not a kind of empty intellectual debate where we're doing this.
And it's also not a political debate where let's vote for this and let's organize for that. I think in the long term, Bitcoin is going to bring about this dynamic.
And that's that's actually quite a perfect transition, because a lot of folks who are not, let's say, orange pilled yet they're not down the rabbit hole, they don't.
They think, well, Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. But, you know, the one of the most idiotic arguments you can make these people who have not yet done the research or are too ingrained in their fiat beliefs to understand this,
they will say to Bitcoiners when Bitcoiners say things like Bitcoin fixes this that well, that's just, you know, that's so reductionist.
And and, you know, you the the other week, you had a great conversation with with Dave Smith on his part of the problem show.
It was a fascinating conversation and you were talking about about Israel and Palestine at the Middle East and the United States.
And you were talking about how you made the case that ultimately this is a monetary phenomenon.
It's a market disruption or market disturbance. You're basically, you know, and you brought it back to property rights as well.
But to some may say, well, you can't reduce what what's happening in the Middle East to a monetary phenomenon.
You Bitcoiners, you're constantly trying to to be a reductionist and to say Bitcoin fixes this and all of this stuff.
So I'd love if you could expand on that a little bit and and perhaps it relates, you know, if we look at the US's history in the Middle East,
it is to put it very kindly, less than stellar.
We have for many years found ways to use our dollars to extract what we need from the Middle East, from various Middle East countries with various justifications given with various levels of lies told from, you know,
many administrations on both sides of the political aisles.
This is not a red blue thing. This is a this is a state versus you thing.
But I'd love if you could talk a little bit about why many things can, in fact, be reduced down to monetary phenomena.
Quote, Bitcoin fixes this.
And and a little bit, you know, if you're willing to kind of expand on some of what you said on Dave Smith's show with regard to Israel and Palestine and property rights and the market disruption that is caused by that.
Yeah, so I would say, I mean, this is my libertarian perspective on this issue.
I grew up in Palestine, I grew up in Ramallah.
And so I'm very familiar with this and it's something that I spent a lot of time reading and learning about long before Bitcoin and long before I'd ever heard of Austrian economics.
This was something that I had been quite obsessed with.
And I would say the the real clarity of understanding this conflict for me only came after I read Rothbard on this conflict because it really put it together really well.
And this was this was I mean, the craziest mashup imaginable.
There's an article out there by Rothbard called War Guilt in the Middle East.
And so I'd been obsessed with this conflict all my life and then I started becoming interested in economics came across the Austrians became really insanely obsessed with the Austrians and reading Austrians all the time.
And then I consider him.
What did Murray Rothbard ever say about this?
So let me Google Murray Rothbard Palestine Israel.
And then this article comes up.
And it's just amazing because it was like everything that you read from Rothbard, particularly these brief articles.
Sometimes his historiography can be long, but these kind of short brief articles where he summarizes the main ideas.
He is such a clear writer and he is so good at getting to the real issue, identifying the most important salient facts, listing them and then arriving at his conclusion and just making it all so logical and so sequenced and so helpful and really help in understanding the world.
And he did that with the conflict.
And I think it was very, very, very informative and it really helped me develop my understanding of the conflict a lot more.
So obviously anytime you change your mind on anything or anytime you have any opinion that's different from the mainstream, you immediately get gas lit with the whole.
You're obviously just not being open minded enough.
So when I was a Keynesian at Columbia University, and as long as I was a Keynesian, nobody ever told me I need to be open minded to Austrian ideas.
As soon as I start mentioning Austrians, everybody's immediately reacting the same way.
No, no, no, no, you need to be open minded.
Here's what Keynes has to say.
All of my life have been fed Keynes.
All of your life you've been fed Keynes and now you have a three minute opportunity to listen to somebody say something different and you have to interject and say, no, you need to go and be open minded and listen to the same thing we've always listened to.
So there was always this kind of thing which always made me just want to read different perspectives on this.
And I would say really there is an enormous amount of emotional garbage being written was just people writing what they feel is right and what they feel is wrong.
And there's an enormous amount of leftist and status brain damage from all sides on explaining this.
And it's easy to lift your hands up and say, well, this has been going on for thousands of years and it will go on for thousands of years and it's pointless for me to waste my time to look at it.
But I disagree because I think the Rothbard angle really brings clarity to it.
And ultimately what it comes down to is it's not a conflict that has been around for thousands of years.
So yes, the Romans had had the conflict around there in 2000 years ago and they did expel the Jews from that land.
The Arabs came to that lands 600 years earlier, 600 years later, the Muslims came in.
And then incidentally, and this is not something that is mentioned often, but at that point it was the Muslims when they came in Omar was the second caliph in Islam after Muhammad and Abu Bakr.
He brought in rabbis with him from Arabia who looked around the Jerusalem and were able to find out where the temple was.
And the Romans had turned it into a trash dump. They cleaned it, they restored it, they built a mosque there and they allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and to pray in the temple.
And since then, it's tempting to just say, well, you know, Jews, anti-Semitism, Muslims, Christians, they all just hate each other and religion is all hate and this is what religion does.
But in fact, it's the exact opposite. In fact, from 637 up until 1948, anyone from any of these religions could own property in that part of the world.
The property system is very well documented, it's existent and it was very well operational in the 19th century and 20th century.
And the evidence for that is that all of these European immigrants came and were able to buy land. So all of these people from Poland and Russia and England and France, Jewish immigrants came to Palestine and were able to buy land
because there was nothing in the books that said Jews cannot own land or Jews cannot live here. And Jews had always lived there since the Muslims returned the Jews to Palestine in 637.
They'd always lived there up until 1948 when the establishment of Israel.
What changed in 1947 and 48 was that the property rights system there, and this is really contrary to what is going on everywhere in the world.
I think this is an important point I didn't even mention with Dave, which is you look all over the world, what's been happening in the 20th century as people become more educated, as productivity increases,
as people become less beholden to their daily manual work and move into industrialization and so on, productivity increases, people want to be more free.
And you see that the ideals of the market economy, the ideals of civilization, which is private property, they spread all over the world more and more.
And it becomes easier for people to own property, it becomes easier for people to secure their property. This is essentially how human progress has happened.
And in particular, you see that it's becoming less and less common that property is linked to identity or religion or ethnicity.
So the US is a great example of how segregation was ended and all of history is headed in that direction.
And historically, this makes sense over time as we start traveling more and more, when you go from being somebody whose entire existence or the vast majority of your existence is surrounded by people who look like you
and people who have spent all of their life within, say, 10 kilometers of you, and that's all the people that you're going to see more or less for most of your life,
your outlook on strangers is going to be different than if you live in the year 2020 and you're able, well, 2020 bad example, you couldn't travel, but 2024.
And you're able to travel all over the world and you interact with people from all over the world and you can develop relationships with people, you become more empathetic to them.
And therefore, it becomes more likely that you would want to live in a civilized order wherein you don't need to be cousins or best friends with somebody or you don't need to be part of somebody's clan in order to deal with them.
You can be like a civilized person where you respect other people regardless of what they believe.
And that's a main theme in the Principles of Economics book.
So contrary to that, contrary to this kind of capitalist civilization allowing property rights to become something that everybody can enjoy and therefore everybody can emancipate themselves and increase the productivity and acquire capital
and become a much more productive and free person in Palestine after 1947.
This was reversed completely.
And so the population of Palestine, the people who would wear the majority of the population at that time, people who were not Jewish, not the Jewish migrants, or the local Jewish population, these people essentially have been getting more and more disenfranchised over the past 76 years.
So in 1947, the Zionist organizations that became the Israeli military cleared hundreds of villages of their inhabitants and all of the big cities had these pogroms against the local Muslim and Christian population to get them to leave and something like 800,000 to 1 million people left their homes and ended up either internally displaced.
So there they still remained in Israel, but they couldn't go back to their villages.
And until today, they can't go back to those villages.
Those villages got destroyed.
Now imagine the amount of manpower you need to dedicate in 1947, eight, nine and 50 to go around destroying people's villages to make sure they never come back to it.
Even if those people can become citizens of the country, these villages had to be destroyed and many of them became refugees in the West Bank and Gaza, the other parts of Palestine that were not under Israel in 1948.
Others became refugees in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan.
But then this continues.
The main idea driving Israel is the idea of the land of Palestine for Jews, which is a problem because in 1947, when they began this violent expulsion of Palestinians and would secure more land for the Zionist movement,
the Jewish population of Palestine was only a third, a majority of which had arrived in the last 10 years, so they were effectively mostly migrants.
And their ownership of land was only 5.6% of the land.
So about 46% of the land was publicly owned, although you could argue about whether it was public or that it could count as Arab or Palestinian land.
But even assuming that all of that is public, 55% roughly of the land was privately owned, and only 5% of that was owned by effectively Zionist movement or the recent Jewish immigrants or the local Jews.
But 50% or 50% of the total land roughly or 90% of the private land was owned by people who weren't Jewish.
And so if you're going to establish a state for Jews in a land that 90% is not owned by Jews, you're going to run into some issues.
And if you did that anywhere in the world, you would also have those issues. So if you were to look at my favorite example is Louisiana, because I was debating Walter Block and he's from Louisiana,
and I looked it up before the debate and it worked out perfectly, because the French happened to be around 10% of the population of Louisiana today, which suggests to me that, you know,
imagine if you wanted to make a national homeland for the French in Louisiana and you made it so that people who aren't French, they have their communities destroyed and they get kicked out to Mississippi and Texas and other places.
And then you make it so that you have a French land authority which owns the land of Louisiana and keeps trying to acquire as much as possible and keeps trying to kick out non-French people out of their homes as much as possible.
And then continues to expand militarily and continues to ban people who own their own land from building on their land, doesn't grant them permits to build on their land, makes their land unviable so that they have to sell it and then,
or, you know, they buy it at a small price and then they allow the new Jewish migrants to take the land and build on it and do the things that they wouldn't allow the others to do it.
So you had this very systematic attempt to make sure that you essentially get as much land as possible and as few Arabs as possible.
That's essentially what Zionism has always been from day one.
And for me, that's just incompatible with civilization and that's just a formula for conflict.
If you did the same thing in Louisiana, you would get all kinds of problems.
The rest of Louisiana, the 90% of Louisiana, are not going to be happy about it.
It used to be something like 10% of the population of Palestine or 5% of the population of Palestine was Jewish when the Balfour Declaration was given, when Britain decided in World War I that they were going to make this into a national Jewish homeland.
And of course, the reason they did it was because they needed the Rothschild family to get America into the war for them.
That's why the British policy, it wasn't some policy paper that Britain announced that said, hey, you know, we have this land, let's make it homeland in it.
It was a letter they addressed to Lord Rothschild himself.
It's written, that's called the Balfour Declaration.
It's very important to look it up.
And in it, he said, we want to stop.
You know, we're telling, hey, Lord Rothschild, we will make a country there.
And the reason for that, it seems pretty clear.
I think you can even read it in the Rothschild family itself, that this was a way to try and get the US into the war.
Because the British obviously were broke at that point.
As I'm discussing the fiat standard, Britain had gotten into the war on a lie.
They double spent their money.
The Central Bank bought the bonds.
They invented QE at that point.
And the government sold bonds in order to fund the war effort in 1915.
But people wouldn't buy those bonds because British people are not as deranged as their government.
And so people just bought a third of them.
Some people are not deranged, obviously, but only a third was sold.
So what would the British government do in the Bank of England and the Treasury?
They got together, they got two employees from the Bank of England to get a credit line from the Bank of England
and use that credit line to buy two thirds of the entire bond issue.
So the two thirds of the British war effort was owned by two employees of the Bank of England
who were just given a fake line of fiat bullshit from the Bank of England.
And that's how Britain went to war.
And that's how Western civilization was destroyed.
And that's how it ate itself in this orgy of senseless death and destruction.
That's not ended essentially since then.
There was no reason for Britain to even get involved in this war at all.
But in World War I, it was in Britain's interest to just let Germany and all the rest sort it out.
And Britain continues to focus on its empire.
It had no reason to get stuck in all this stuff.
In any case, they were broke and they needed to get into the war.
So that's how they then decided to, well, what do we have?
We've got this Palestine thing.
Let's see if we can get maybe America to come bail us out if we give it to a national homeland for the Jews.
And you know, very high time preference fiat thinking, which is let's worry about this later.
And of course, it was a massive problem for Britain for 30 years trying to make this promise happen while also trying to appease the local population who weren't happy about it.
And that led to all kinds of horrific problems.
So ultimately, yeah, it seems quaint and it seems silly to talk, Bitcoin fixes it.
And in many ways, of course, it doesn't fix this because what's really taking place with the damage and the destruction and the horror that's happening is unfixable for the majority of the people involved.
This isn't just something that can be brushed under the table.
So it isn't entirely fair to say that it fixes it.
But ultimately, yeah, I think a world in which we don't have the ability of governments to manipulate money in the way that they could under the gold standard when they turned it into the fiat standard in 1914 is a very different world from what we have now.
And in that world, you don't have this massive market intervention, again, another very long rant, which brings me back to your original question, which is the market intervention in the market for land.
So ultimately, what is happening right now is that as a Palestinian, I cannot just buy land in Palestine.
In the West Bank, I could because I'm from there, but that's an increasingly tiny part of the land that's continuously eroding because Israel keeps confiscating and stealing more and more of people's lands.
And that same land is available for anybody who comes from anywhere in the world who identifies as Jewish.
So you could be an American, you could be a Chinese person, you could be a Brazilian, you could be a Finnish person.
And if you find a way of identifying as Jewish, you go to Israel and you are given subsidized housing, you are able to get the house from the Israel Land Authority.
And the Israel Land Authority owns about 93% of the land of Israel.
So Israel is just land socialism.
So 93% of the land is owned by this government agency.
You don't get to own it, even if you're Jewish, you cannot own it.
You can only lease it from the Israel Land Authority.
And so therefore, and the reason for that, of course, is that they don't want to free market it because they want to make sure that land goes to Jews.
So all that Israel is, there's a lot of romanticism.
And of course, as an American, your experience of Israel is all of this bullshit Hollywood propaganda that has been carefully crafted over many decades.
And of course, mainstream media and university propaganda as well.
It's not just Hollywood.
But in reality, it's just this socialist program for land ownership where it's a very Soviet thing.
It's the idea that this land in this part can only be owned by people who believe in this kind of God and practice these kinds of rituals.
Other people cannot own land.
And instead, we're going to have all of this enormous amount of money from all over the world go towards subsidizing this military so that could continue to kick people who have the wrong religion off of their land
and give this land to people who have the right religion.
That's really the market distortion here.
And so all of these Palestinians would pay anything to live in their land or the land that they used to own, but they can't even buy it back because the ones that were violently driven off of their land,
they can't even buy it back because they have the wrong religion.
And anybody who has no connection with that land, who's never owned it, can go and get it.
And so there's this very iconic video you must have seen me share it to Twitter because I'm always sharing it.
It's this American fat ass from New York, from Long Island, who goes to Jerusalem.
And in one of those areas where the Israeli courts are kicking Palestinians out of their homes, which is just a constantly happening thing where they invent bullshit pretext and you can't keep your home.
And they're going to kick them out of their home and they're going to bring a Jewish family to live in their home because somehow that's just how free markets work, I guess.
And so this guy is going into the family's house and telling them, get out, I'm going to take this house.
And they're telling him, no, this is our house. You can't steal our house.
And he says, if I don't steal your house, someone else is going to steal it.
So just get out of here. Don't look at me.
That's what it comes down to. It's a massive distortion in the market for land.
And in my opinion, it has failed because ultimately what it meant to do is a national homeland for Jews.
Well, more than half of the world's Jews aren't Israelis.
So this has failed to take off as an idea among Jews.
And even though they might sympathize to it, American Jews are American and French Jews are French.
And they don't feel strongly about this idea of Zionism to leave France and leave the U.S. and leave all these other countries to go in there.
And in the land of Palestine, approximately half of the population is not Jewish.
So this, I mean, it's a fiat state in a sense that we look at a land in which 5% of the population is from one group.
And let's buy fiat of British government, turn this into a land where that 5% gets to run this as its own national homeland.
And yeah, we can do that because we can just keep finding all these money printers that subsidize this.
And we can continue to store this market.
So effectively, what Israel is, is a land agency with a military.
The military kicks people out of their homes and takes the land and gives it to the land agency.
And the land agency assigns that land bureaucratically to people from all over the world who have a particular religion.
And people who don't have that religion cannot own that land.
That's ultimately what it is.
So my solution for the conflict is very simple, just a free market in land.
Close down the Israeli land authority and you just have a free market in land and anybody can buy that land.
And it doesn't matter if you're Jewish or not Jewish, you can buy land and you can own property there.
And I believe if you did that, I think it would go a very, very, very long way toward ending this conflict.
Because this is exactly how Muslims, Christians and Jews managed to live for 1300 years in Palestine because they all had property rights.
And when you take property rights from people anywhere, anytime, it doesn't work out very peacefully and very nicely.
It's just always the case.
And it would be the case anywhere else.
If you did this in Louisiana, if you did this in Texas, if you did this anywhere else, if you tried to pass this somewhere, it won't fly easily or happily.
So that's my perspective on how all of this is related to property rights.
And how Bitcoin ultimately fixes this is that without the ability of money printers all over the world to keep subsidizing this insane military and insane bureaucracy, this wouldn't exist.
And the alternative, of course, the people running the money printer for this insane military and bureaucracy would have you believe that the alternative would be that there would be a massive genocide of people for being Jewish,
which of course is nonsensical because Jewish people had lived in that area for 1300 years.
Why would it only happen now?
The problem, of course, is property rights as always.
And this is how anybody would react if this was the...
A conflict would be inevitable if you deny people a property right and no recourse.
And this is the thing for Palestinians.
For Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza, there was effectively no way out of this.
Israel doesn't want to let go of this territory, so it won't just declare its borders in the West Bank and say, all right, we don't want the West Bank, and so this is not ours and you can do whatever you want here.
And they also don't want to annex it.
So they want to keep their military in it, but they don't want to make it officially a part of Israel because if they make it a part of Israel, then what are they going to do with the local population?
The local population is predominantly not Jewish.
So they want to have their cake and eat it too, or they get to have military rule over the area, and they get to make life hell for the local population to get them to leave.
And they get to steal as much land as they can and kick as many people out as they can and keep creating facts on the ground as they say it,
in order to just bring about the day where they have the entire place and they can get rid of everybody who is not Jewish from the entire land.
That's ultimately the real vision that's driving the government.
And one of the sad things here is that for propaganda purposes, the image that you get of Israel, you get Gal Gadot or Natalie Portman,
and they talk about how they just want to be normal people like people in California, but they can't have peace because they live in a rough neighborhood.
But these are not the people that are making decisions in power in Israel.
These bimbos are put on TV.
And of course, I don't particularly mean these two particular actor bimbos.
I'd say that anybody gets on TV to defend Israel is pretty much a bimbo intellectually at least.
In that they're just pretty faces that are put there to try and emotionally sway people on how this goes.
But ultimately, the people who really run the show in the country, the Netanyahu government and his coalition partners,
they are part of a very long tradition of political parties who very clearly understood this from the 1920s,
back to the time of Jabotinsky through Meir Kahana all the way up to today to Ben Gvir and Smotrich, the security minister and the finance minister.
And they both are very clear on the idea we need to have the whole land and as much land as we can and as few as we can.
And that's what's ultimately driving policy.
That's what's ultimately driving the military establishment.
And the face that you see is the people that are trying to cover up that, the people that try and invent spin around this in order to distract from what's going on.
But the reality is something that you would not accept anywhere else.
It's something that if it were to happen in any part of America is unthinkable.
And my favorite question to ask people who defend this is, well, then why don't you argue for something similar to that in the U.S.?
And it's a fair question and I really appreciate the both historical context, but then bring it back to property rights and the monetary distortion.
Because I think that the case that or the monetary phenomena creating the market distortion, because I think that that case that you made is very powerful.
And if you look at that, you know, this is obviously a very emotionally charged issue for a lot of people, but separating out the case that you made from this, you could again apply this case that you're making anywhere in the world.
And it would hold true because again, it's about incentives, right?
When you create a system where private property is not not respected, where you do not have private property rights, you are, of course, that is going to lead to conflict, necessarily so one way or another.
And the only way to enforce such a system, which is really, I think you could argue unnatural, is that you have to have a war machine and that war machine has to have perpetual funding.
Because at a certain point, if if you are funding this war machine with just taxes, well, people get really tired of that.
People are all depending on who you talk to about which of the many conflicts the United States has its hands in. They're they're tired of it.
Some people are, you know, no more money to Ukraine, but those same people are saying, well, more money to Israel and some people are saying, no more money to Israel.
And those same people are saying, but we need to give Ukraine more money.
And so I find all of I see so much hypocrisy when it comes to America's interventionist foreign proxy wars that's rampant and you see different hypocrisies on different sides of the political spectrum, which ultimately means that you are all just biased and we're all biased in in our own ways, right?
But in the context of the US war machine, everybody has a bias in some direction. The only way for you to be somewhat objective when it comes to how you decide to think about this and the US is foreign policy is if you say, well, I don't think we should fund foreign wars,
foreign proxy wars, I don't think that that's something that we should do. And if you say that you can at least claim to have some shred of objectivity.
But if you say, well, this war is good, but this war is bad. And for these reasons, because this one is all right. I'm sorry, but you in my mind, you lose so much credibility, whatever shred of credibility you had left, because the whole point of having principles is that you apply those principles to all situations,
and that you have a framework by which you interpret what is the best course of action for yourself for your nation for your family. And I see a distinct lack of principles when it comes to America's foreign policy, as it relates to utilizing our massive war machine to put our hands in whatever whatever pot is deemed the, you know, the,
the forever war du jour. And it's sad because again, American citizens, if they if you had to ask them if you did a referendum and said, okay, do you want to fund an indefinite war in X country? Well, I guarantee they're not going to be a big fan of that if it's means they have to continue paying more taxes,
but luckily they don't. They're we still pay taxes through the nose. But luckily we have the magical money printer, which can be turned on, we can export our inflations that we're able to somewhat mask the pernicious effects of all this money printing, it's getting harder and harder to mask
now. But we're able to export that inflation to continue funding our war machine. And thankfully, I, one of the arguments that I saw that was just truly insane to me kind of a quiet part out loud was someone was making the argument that well, the money we're sending to Ukraine is actually
stimulating the American economy because it's coming back to our defense contractors. And I just thought, Oh, dear God, you know, you're not supposed to say that part out loud, right? Like we all know that that's the case. We all know it's going to fund the defense companies you're invested in and that you get lobbyist dollars
from but you're not supposed to say that but thank you for finally being honest. But I really appreciate the context you gave bring it back to the monetary phenomena and the acknowledgement that yes, Bitcoin doesn't fix everything. But it fixes the change in incentives that
a Bitcoin standard brings about goes a long way towards at least fixing the economic viability of forever wars, which are are not economically viable. In a fiat standard, you can keep the kicking the can down the road.
But eventually, you know, the the hens come home to roost like you have to pay the piper at some point. And it feels that we're getting to that place in the current fiat standard. You know, it's been what a little over 50 years since we went full fiat.
And you're seeing the effects of that you're seeing the effects of broken money you're seeing how when money breaks society breaks with it, and things start to disassociate they start to come apart at the seams.
And I, you know, I want to be conscious here of your scarce time. Do we have time for for one more. One more question.
Yeah, but can I just say one more thing about what you were saying earlier. Of course. Yeah, I mean on on the issue of of the history of the conflict. Ultimately, if I'm discussing this with an American, it doesn't really matter much.
It shouldn't matter much what you think.
Because I think any reasonable person should say that whatever is the issue on the conflict. There is no potential reason why the US needs to be spending so much money on this and the US is 300 million people 300 of the richest million people in the world.
300 million of the richest people in the world. And so therefore they're able to mobilize an enormous amount of resources and they have Israel has gotten hundreds of billions of dollars worth of funding.
And of course, the naive propaganda perspective here is look more money just means Israel can defend itself and can protect itself.
No, more money means Israel can just keep taking more land to keep killing people and keep using this enormously expensive military to destroy the residents and the land of civilians and acquire more and more land as they're doing in Gaza.
And this would not be the case if it wasn't for a money printer. I mean, and of course, I think the rabbit hole runs deep here because it's not just the billions of dollars that the US spends in supporting Israel military directly.
You could make a case that the US military is essentially a proxy militia for Israel at this point. And then the same way, you know, Americans are told Hezbollah is a proxy militia for Iran and Hezbollah fights on behalf of Iran.
Iran doesn't have to fight its enemies directly. This is very similar to what Israel is doing with the US military. The US military is this client puppet militia, which has taken out every which is working on taking out any country that is opposing any opposition to Israeli expansionist land grab.
So this is why I ultimately believe it. I mean, after 9 11, the Iraq war, Netanyahu was very, very heavily involved for in lobbying for that. This isn't just some coincidence. And he isn't just some random foreign government.
There were very, very clear reasons why a lot of the pros were people were mobilizing for this and something very similar seems to be happening now with Iran. But the reality is the US has absolutely no national interest in the Middle East. The US has absolutely no interest in what goes on in the Middle East.
The US should not be involved. And practically every single sophistry that tries to explain why the US should be involved is on the same level of intellectual value as Keynesian economics. It's exactly made up nonsense.
So if the US just kept all it took away all of its troops in the Middle East and kept the troops back home, whatever happens in the Middle East doesn't matter if Israel takes over the entire Middle East, if Iran takes over the entire Middle East, if the Saudis take over the entire Middle East,
if Bulgaria whips up an army and invades the entire Middle East and rules everything up until India doesn't matter. Ultimately, whoever is in charge, whatever is there, if there's oil or gas or whatever, what are they going to do with it? Are they going to eat it?
They can't. Are they going to drink it? No. There's only one thing you can do with it. Sell it on the market. And guess what? People in Ecuador, people in Switzerland, people in New Zealand, people in Papua New Guinea, people in Argentina,
they are not sending military to the US, to the Middle East in order to get oil, and they're still getting their oil. In fact, not only are they getting their oil, they have to pay for the oil just like the Americans.
You don't get 10 years of free oil because you invaded Iraq. And it's so pathetic that people really think this, yeah, we went to Iraq for the oil, and people think they're being smart and they're being really, you know, I'm really on to them.
We went to Iraq for the oil. You fucking moron, you have to pay for the oil. Didn't you notice? Like, how have you been siopted to saying we went for the oil? You are paying for the oil just like any person in the world has to pay for oil,
because somebody has to get off their ass and get you the oil where you want it, and that person is going to do it for free. Doesn't matter if your government kills a bunch of people far away, you still have to pay for your oil.
So America doesn't get any oil from the Middle East. America has no reason to meddle. America needs nothing from there, anything that it can get from there it can get from elsewhere.
There isn't anything special about Middle East oil, and the Middle East doesn't produce the majority of the world's oil, and you can live off not having any access to Middle East oil. It's not an issue.
But yeah. I appreciate the add on there. And I mean, it is just, it gets to be so absurd at a certain point, where you look at the fact that America, like, don't come here.
I am an American. I love America. I love America, the idea. I love America, the people. I don't love America, the massive bloated ever growing gelatinous blob of state violence that exists just to serve itself.
But that's what I do not love. I have no love for that whatsoever. But America itself has an incredible, although short, an incredible history of driving prosperity and of capitalistic practices, rule of law and private property rights, which are slowly being eroded from us now,
but maybe we can claw some of them back. But of that history, lifting up so many other parts of the world, again, not because we sent our militaries there, but because trade flourished, because technology that was invented here was able to be bought by others.
That is what America is truly great at, is being an engine for innovation and for prosperity under a hopefully becoming more, again, capitalist system.
Sending your military around the world to engage in proxy wars or direct hot wars that never end, funded by an ever expanding monetary base, does not do the American people any good, nor does it do the countries that are being being occupied any good.
I would like to see a large clawback of that personally. We'll see. I think that the appetites for war are changing. There's a lot of old war hawks who still push these same Bush era alarmism ideas that, well, you know, if we don't do something, who knows, we might have another 9-11.
And I think that people are just getting tired of those arguments. Meanwhile, they say these things, but then refuse to secure the southern border and Texas needs to do it themselves, which, you know, good on states' rights, still having some fair game here in America.
But, you know, again, conscious of your scarce time, and I really appreciate this conversation today. I wanted to just to end, you had a great, again, I dug up another quote of yours, a very short tweet thread from 2017, where you said,
Bitcoin doesn't need you to believe in its anarchist philosophy for it to succeed. People will have to use it out of self interest. Bitcoin is better tech for money than government money. Your faith in government will have to adjust to technological reality, not the opposite.
Technology imposes economic reality in the world. Gold replace seashells as money, irrespective of seashell holders' feelings. And finally, Bitcoin won't be adopted like the iPhone because it's cool. It will be adopted like gunpowder. If you don't own it, you will be its victim.
It's a hell of a statement right there. And you've used that gunpowder analogy other times. I heard you on either a seminar or another podcast use that same analogy. And I think that that's really powerful. And that's ultimately the game theory of Bitcoin, right?
It's like, okay, you can choose to ignore it. You can choose to be butthurt by it. But Bitcoin doesn't care. And you can either get on board, or become a victim of your own hubris in deciding that you're you're too smart to to buy into this Ponzi scheme of tulips.
But I guess actually I didn't even really have a question there. I just really enjoyed that quote. But yeah, I don't know if you have any thoughts on Bitcoin is gunpowder to wrap us up because I think that that's I love that analogy. And I think that people don't understand the power of what that means yet, but they will.
Yeah, I mean, if I were to end on a positive note, I would say that technology is capable of enforcing reality in a way that supersedes politics. And so for most people when they think about Bitcoin, particularly if you're familiar with just how messed up the last century has been how bad fiat is, you realize there's a money
printer and their people in charge of the money printer and it's just not going to fly with them that they're going to have to give up their power their money printer. I think the important thing about Bitcoin is perhaps that by being such superior technology, it changes the incentive for the people in charge of the money
printer everywhere in the world that instead of continuing to benefit from this instead of continuing to take advantage of this system, it's better off that we just stack sats. I think the value proposition ultimately is that Bitcoin works because whatever stupid bullshit
central banks are up to, it doesn't beat stacking sats on the long run. Just on a purely material level, assuming you have absolutely no moral qualms about doing anything, you just want to maximize your long term wealth, and you're going to be better off not engaging in this stupid bullshit
and just stacking sats, I believe in the long run. And I don't think we've ever had anything like this before because we didn't have anything that could function as money like this, because gold, you could neuter gold monetarily, because you couldn't move it around.
And so it wouldn't appreciate as money and it wouldn't leave other monies behind in the dust in the same way. But Bitcoin, as it's demonstrated very amply in the last 15 years, can and will. So deal with it.
I love it. A perfect note to end on. Safedine.com has, I believe, all of your lectures, links to your books. And anywhere else you want to send people, I know you have now have a publishing house as well, right?
Yeah, the safe house where I've got my three books, but also Lynn Alden's new book, Parker Loos's new book and a book called Fiat Food on what Fiat has done to our food written by Matthew Lysiak. I highly recommend it.
And also my podcast, the Bitcoin Standard Podcast, you can check that out and Safedine.com for my online courses and also for picking up my books.
I'll link them all in the show notes. Safedine, thank you so much. Bitcoin is scarce, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So thank you for sharing your scarce time on another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
This was really a pleasure. And looking forward to seeing you in the flesh soon.
Awesome. Thank you, sir. I appreciate the invitation. And I look forward to seeing you soon as well. Take care.
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