Libertarianism, Authoritarianism, and the New Right | Mike Brock

Thanks for having me here, Josh. And congratulations on launching this podcast and launching Project Liberal. Very excited about all the things you guys are doing, and happy to be part of this very important conversation.

Yeah, absolutely. So I've had a pretty interesting journey throughout my life. At a very young age, I found myself deeply involved in politics actually. I know that you were previously of Students for Liberty. When I was younger, I had many, many run-ins with them, attending many of their events. And in fact, some of my friends today still hearken back from those days of me being deeply immersed in the libertarian movement before I found my way back into business, first as a consultant, then as a software engineer. I learned to program at a very young age, got into politics, went back into programming. Turned out I was quite successful at it, so kept going and found my way all the way up into the echelons of executive management at Square, which became Block. Obviously, we went public and became a publicly traded company. So my trajectory was interesting. And my ideological journey, having started in libertarianism much like your own, found its way back to something more akin to classical liberalism. For me, the breaking point was quite a long time ago actually. I was writing for a Canadian libertarian journal known as the Western Standard, owned by a man named Ezra Levant, who now runs something called The Rebel out of Canada, a former friend of mine as it turns out. Him and I don't really talk much anymore. But I really broke from the libertarian movement during the Tea Party era. I recognized that there was something deeply wrong with some of the people around me and what was going on during the first term of the Obama administration. It became very clear to me that people around me in the libertarian movement were not optimizing for the same goals that I was, which was some universal conception of liberty. And I realized that there was something far more pernicious going on, which was this insistence on the primacy of property rights above all, which I then started to realize was the lynchpin of a lot of white supremacy that was connecting itself into the libertarian movement. This culminated in a very interesting argument that I ended up having at an event in Canada. I'm a dual national, by the way, US-Canadian, American-Canadian, or whatever you want to call me. You have a place to go when the country falls apart. And it was the first time I realized that I was in the presence of people who call themselves libertarians that had white supremacist views. I remember what I said to the person at the time, and it always stuck with me. I've used this turn of phrase over and over again, which was, 'I think the main reason why you're so obsessed with property rights is you just want the right to put up a 'Whites Only' sign in the front of your shop.' This led to a massive debate. Much to my surprise, the person in question, who I will not name, argued quite vociferously that I shouldn't see any problem with that as a libertarian, that I should keep my nose out of other people's business, that if people wanted to engage in racial exclusion on the back of their property rights, that was absolutely something that any libertarian should have no problem with. That was probably the moment, connected with what was going on with birtherism and Obama and the things I was hearing at that time, and I was just like, 'I don't know that I'm in the right group of people.' I was someone who got very hooked on classical liberal philosophy growing up, utilitarian liberal philosophy and morality, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, all the important texts that one might read to onboard themselves into these ideas of English and Scottish liberty. But I realized that whatever branch of liberalism I had found myself in, it had taken some pretty dangerous turns. So I started writing essays on the Western Standard, much to the chagrin of the editor there, criticizing the fetishization of property rights by libertarians and how it didn't connect to what I saw as a necessary claim on the collective good. For those people who've actually studied classical liberal philosophy pretty carefully, they recognize that all the fathers of liberal thought thought there was such a thing as a common good. John Locke, who in many ways is the intellectual grandfather of the Declaration of Independence and certainly the most influential thinker on Thomas Jefferson, certainly thought that there were concepts like the common good and the general welfare and the importance of there being something bigger than yourself. So that was for me a breaking point where I was like, 'I believe that there is something called a common good, and I think that there is a proper place for government to represent that common good because there are market failures, perverse incentives, externalities that won't be captured by our own individual action and economic activity if not properly contained in some sort of envelope of something that represents the common interest.' So that was my breaking off point. I've been in this kind of former libertarian mode now for over a decade. For the most part, I had kind of forgotten about it, left this part of my ideological journey in the past, and turned into something more akin to a boring political centrist. Trump comes along, obviously. For the first time in my life, I considered supporting a Democrat, so I supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, which felt insane to me because most people associated with right-of-center politics, that was anathema to me to have to think of supporting someone like Clinton, but I did, recognizing the threat that Donald Trump represented. And then I found my way into Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, and this is where I would come face to face with what I had experienced over a decade earlier: this malignant, absolutely destructive idea that property rights are the prime summum bonum of all our ethical system, and recognizing how dangerous of an idea that actually is. The only reason why someone would want to believe that is because they think they're going to win at the economic domination game and by extension the political domination game. I kind of reawakened, realizing that this whole crypto and Bitcoin thing was reawakening a lot of this political thought and pushing it more into the mainstream, scarily into the mainstream, even starting to convert some people I considered friends and colleagues to these ideologies. I just started tweeting and blogging and trying to provide people with counterarguments to these very dangerous ideas that are not really conducive to actually building a stable civilization, particularly in an era of advanced science and technology where the stakes are very high. We have the capacity to kill ourselves. We have nuclear weapons, the ability to print genes which we can insert into bacterium and create superbugs that could potentially kill us all. We are going into an era where the importance of there being a common good and someone to protect it, that being a liberal polity within a democratic system of self-government and constitutional government, and the preservation of that, is paramount. We have to be able to engage with this, or the capacity for human survival is very much in question. I know that sounds like a very crazy thing to say out loud, but if you just sit and think about it, you realize it's very much the case. We didn't even mention AI, and that's obviously another existential problem we need to think about.

Yeah, definitely. I'm an armchair philosopher of sorts. I think a lot about this. In fact, I'm starting to write a book on the nature of meaning and the crisis of meaning in our society, so I think a lot about what the common good means, which is obviously downstream of what philosophers might refer to as the good life, which in aggregate we might call human flourishing. I'm actually quite skeptical of quantified versions of what that means. I am of the belief that if there is a summum bonum, the highest good, for me, I think it's an existence where as many normative possibilities within a society can exist. Normative being things that are not objectively true but are subjectively true, like that you like classical music and I like hard rock. There's nothing you can really do to quantify which one of those things is good. You can make arguments about the sophistication of composing classical music versus composing a rock arrangement, which is far simpler, but at the end of the day, you're talking about subjective preferences. I am very much of the thought process of David Hume, the famous Scottish philosopher, who formed an argument known as Hume's Guillotine, sometimes also known as the is-ought problem, that basically says no matter what's true about the world, whatever facts or empirical observations you make, there's nothing you can do with that that will tell you what you ought to do with the world. That is something that's kind of at the core of what I believe as a classical liberal, which means that the subjective values that we all have are an important part of what make up that common good, and we have to negotiate that through a healthy political polity within some envelope of limitations on the power of the state to protect the individual's space in order to be able to self-actualize to a certain point, but also realize that we all can't just do whatever we want. I can't do things that harm you, I can't do things that place the collective society at greater risk. There are all these things that we have to negotiate, and the truth is there aren't really any clear answers to those. This is why we need democracy, why we need deliberative democracy, because new technologies change, trends change, culture changes. We have to constantly renegotiate all these normative possibilities that we create for ourselves through our experimentation and our cultural shifts and our kids getting into weird and crazy new trends. We have to figure out how to integrate that into our society in a way that allows us to maximize those possibilities because why wouldn't we want to let people try to experience the good life in as many different ways as they can? That for me, and I know that's just not something you can quantify. I think it's something that you can only constantly renegotiate. Our values aren't the same today that they were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago, certainly not 100 years ago. That's how I view it.

It's a good point. This is going to be a very unsatisfying answer to the stalwart libertarians among us, and honestly, it's something that I have to accept: there are a lot of things in this society that are very popular that I do not agree with, that are culturally popular, that are politically popular. As much of a classical liberal as I am, and by the way, I'm pretty free markets guy generally speaking. One of my also favorite bugbears is literally attacking the left on their local land use policies, which I think are probably the most destructive economic policies when it comes to affordability in this country, and I definitely put that at the feet of much of the left. But that's for another day. The point that I would make is, let me just back up for a second. From the perspective of defining what the common good is, we have to first accept that we live in a society with other people. We don't get to choose to not live in this society, in this country, on this planet. We are on this Earth competing for resources, yes. We use property rights in order to create a fair system, in order to also incentivize economic production and all these fun things. But at some level, I'm going to have to accept that part of being a civilized person is living in a society with people who I disagree with and sometimes having to accept that I have the minority view on some things. It is a relatively immature stance to say, 'Well, I didn't choose to be born into this world, I didn't choose this policy, why am I paying for the weapons that are going to Ukraine? I don't think we should be doing that. How dare you take my tax dollars?' My only response to you is, 'Too bad. You live in a society, and this is part of the social contract.' Libertarians will say, 'I didn't sign the social contract.' I know you didn't, but we did for you because you're part of this society. And guess what? If you decide that you're just going to ignore the social contract, we are going to use our laws and the systems of order in our society to protect that common good against your relatively immature take that because you didn't agree to this, you don't have to go along. Well, you do have to go along. We have to do this our entire lives. We have to go where our parents tell us when we're growing up. We're not in a state where we can stand on our own two feet. If there are bombers overhead and we're in a war and people are telling you to turn off the lights so bombers can't target the city, and you're like, 'I don't care, I want to keep my lights on,' it's like, 'No, you.' There's no interesting argument when you get down to brass tacks. You can get into these metaphysical debates with yourself about what you ought to have to do or what obligations you have to other people, which I think is at the core of a lot of pernicious libertarian thought. It's like, yeah, you don't actually have to act in any particular way, you don't have to stand up for my rights, you don't even have to respect my rights. But it turns out that we're an organized society, and if you act or fail to act in certain ways that are deleterious to what the rest of us, through our deliberative bodies, through our legislatures, through our courts, through all the things that we've created in order to create a liberal polity, if you're just going to basically force yourself against that grain, bad things are going to happen to you. That's just Locke, you know, John Locke, social contract. And honestly, here's the other crazy thing: we talk about this, and I know that I'm talking to a hypothetical libertarian right now who's sort of falling out of their seat, but here's the reality: what I just said to 90% of people sounds completely reasonable. This is the thing that libertarians sometimes forget. You're sitting around the dinner table with your family or some random people, and you talk about these things in these terms. I think as a lot of libertarians get older and some people move into their former libertarian state, they come to recognize this. When you actually ask people point-blank on some of these topics, people are like, 'Yeah, I think you have some obligation to society. What are you talking about?' This is actually a trick that libertarians, particularly when we're young in our 20s and we're stupid, play on ourselves, that we think that most people intuitively think in this libertarian way. That's actually not true. I think it's especially not true for a lot of women. I don't know if people realize this, but the libertarian movement was very much a movement of young white men when I was growing up, that seemed to have absolutely no serious consideration for the fact that we're part of a liberal polity where women have equal rights as well, and they don't really seem to be part of any of these conversations. That's another example of where I think this philosophy is terribly incomplete, if only by looking at the people who did not include in the conversation.

Yeah, well, I don't want to bore people to death by getting into the technical philosophy of all this, but I do want to say this idea of individual liberty and the way that we think about it, which I think is a very distinct concept from what we might think of as just sort of absolute individual freedom. I mean, what does freedom mean? Freedom means the ability to operate within degrees of freedom. We operate in 3D space. I can freely move my hands through the air, I can't move them through the camera. I'm limited in that. Obviously, this is the most reductionist form of freedom. And then we obviously get into arguments of freedom of opportunity and freedom of outcomes, all these arguments that the left and the right go back and forth on. It's not quite clear what even from a liberal perspective the perfect universal definition of what freedom is. But what I will say is that we are more free living in... it goes back to Hobbes. I think Thomas Hobbes is the original liberal, by the way, and I know that's a controversial take. But this recognition that by coming together in a society and giving up a little bit of our freedom to a government or a collective body that represents us, we all get something in return. We don't have to watch our backs as much because we're not part of what Hobbes called the state of nature. We're not constantly being hunted. It isn't just every man for himself or every woman for herself. It isn't just a bunch of primitive tribes roving about trying to compete for grazing land. We get something out of giving up quite a bit actually. This is covered in Thomas Hobbes' famous 'Leviathan', which brought birth to social contract theory, of which John Locke, who's associated with classical liberalism, developed it more into a liberal formulation. I think that to me is something that I think about a lot because if all we were trying to do was optimize for the maximum amount of our own personal freedom, then I don't know if you guys have seen Tom Hanks' movie 'Cast Away' from the 1990s, when he got stranded on an island. That should be the most utopian vision to you if completely unmitigated personal freedom, unmolested by anyone else, not having to contend with potential disagreements or contending for resources among any other humans, and just having complete dominion over the land and everything that you touch and eat and breathe. That should be quite an exhilarating idea to you. But I don't think most people would want to be stranded alone on an island with no one to talk to, no experiences, no movies to see, no songs to sing or to be heard. We live in a society, and we gain so much from that society. We gain our language from that society. I didn't invent my own language. I'm speaking the language of my family and my ancestors right now, speaking English, although half of my family's Polish and I do not speak Polish. I think there needs to be a deep recognition in any serious liberal that what we think of as freedom is kind of sitting on top of a bunch of freedoms that we have given up for very good reason, so we can move away from the politics of mere survival to something that philosophers sometimes call the politics of distribution. So I think that's where liberalism wants to be. It wants to be in the politics of distribution. It's like we all now agree that we all have certain rights, this conception of liberty in the liberal frame, and what we're really doing in our politics is just figuring out how to organize our scarce resources. That's the politics of distribution. I think like you, my answer for the politics of distribution as it pertains to economic production is I think markets and strong property rights, well-regulated markets, and generally the capitalist mode of production have proven themselves to be the thing that can raise people out of poverty. It has unleashed innovation that previous generations couldn't have even imagined. So that's where I am on that. I think there are debates to be had around what we should do with things like healthcare, for example. I used to be very much opposed to more government involvement in healthcare, but even looking at it from a free market perspective and realizing that there is a serious market failure here, I think the whole Ron Paul argument that what we need to do is add so much competition that it becomes so cheap that it doesn't matter anymore is not really a good argument when you actually tease it apart. There does seem to be a problem there with how risk gets pooled and how you get into situations where certain people, just through their upbringing, their health circumstances, their genes, are just going to be screwed. They might not be economically viable, and there might be treatment for them that would allow them to live a relatively healthy life, but it could be relatively expensive and exceed the amount of economic output that person is ever going to have. I know the argument might be that we should leave that to the church collection plate, but I think there's an argument to be made there that we should look at things like that and say, 'Look, we're still a capitalist society, we still believe in property rights, people can still become billionaires, but we're going to take a little bit of income tax and we're going to make sure that that person, because we believe in human dignity, is going to be able to live something like a dignified life.' Not just because of them, but because of the people that surround them, their mother, their brothers, their sisters, their friends, who gain so much happiness from the jokes they tell and the songs and the experiences they have with that person. Keeping that person alive because we are a super rich society and we have some excess resources that we can actually do things like that. I understand that libertarians think that's the path to totalitarian communism or something, but I think in a liberal polity, we can talk about the politics of distribution like that a little bit.

Please, please, you have a full-on debate if you want. I love that.