WBD208 Audio Transcription

A Libertarian Response to Coronavirus with Scott Horton

Interview date: Friday 27th March 2020

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Scott Horton from the Libertarian Institute. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I talk to Scott Horton, the Founder and Director of the Libertarian Institute. We discuss the ongoing coronavirus crisis, if a state is beneficial in this extreme public health crisis and how an anarchist society would deal with a pandemic.

“I don’t think that it’s necessarily an abandonment of libertarianism itself to concede that government has a role in restricting behaviour in a public health crisis.”

— Scott Horton

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Scott, hi there. How are you?

Scott Horton: I'm doing great, thanks for having me.

Peter McCormack: No worries, thank you for coming on the show. I became aware of you last year. I took a long drive when I was out in the US, from New York to Ohio, and I was on a Tom Woods marathon and you were doing a whole week of shows with him. So I became aware of your work and for a while, I've wanted to talk to you and obviously, there's a topic on everyone's mind right now is this coronavirus thing. In doing a Bitcoin show, I became introduced to libertarianism because of this and Austrian economics, and I've kind of gone down the rabbit hole a little bit.

But I've not always been there and sometimes I'm fighting with the libertarians, so I thought it'd be good to get someone like you on and talk about what's going on with this crisis at the moment because I'm struggling with a few things. Is that okay with you?

Scott Horton: Sure!

Peter McCormack: All right, cool. So interestingly, I read an article this morning on The Libertarian Institute website. So I'll tell you what happened is that I put out a tweet this week, which riled a few people up. I used the swear word and I said, "Right now, I think I'm a statist because I actually believe that maybe centralized planning for the government is the thing we need to get through this crisis." What I was wrestling with is the idea that I should just stand by 100% libertarian principles when we're in a moment of crisis and an extreme scenario, and that riled some people up. Now is this something that you, yourself, as a libertarian, wrestle with at the moment?

Scott Horton: A little bit. I'm not sure if this is the article that you mentioned, but we are running one this morning by Sheldon Richman, founding partner of The Libertarian Institute, called Libertarianism in Emergencies.

Peter McCormack: That's the one.

Scott Horton: Yeah, so he starts out saying that look, if... And libertarians have always debated these kinds of questions, right? So obviously, we put individual property rights first, but then he comes with the example, say you're lost in the woods in a blizzard and you come upon a cabin and break in and cook yourself a meal and start a fire in the fireplace in order to survive, that that's acceptable. Yes, you're trespassing, but you're doing so to prevent a much greater harm that is your own death and presumably for the sake of argument, there's nobody home, so you're not really kicking in the door on somebody who is trying to exclude you, this kind of thing.

Or the idea somebody's house is on fire, so you have to trespass on another property to kick in their door and save them from the fire, or something like this. A de facto easement type of a situation, you have to cross somebody's property to get to somebody else's property in the case of an emergency, something like that. An emergency does not necessarily override libertarian principles because the libertarian principle is life first and so that doesn't mean that we're willing to compromise anything to the Nth degree, but it means that yes, it's possible for there to be exceptional circumstances.

I think the real insight of libertarianism is just... It starts with, as it says in The American Declaration of Independence, that everybody is born with natural rights and dignity and they have the right to their own life because they own it, it's their own and therefore, they have the right to all the property that they have justly acquired and should be protected from forced theft and fraud. Then from there, this is what Sheldon calls the non-aggression obligation, not just the non-aggression principle, but that we owe it to each other to not aggress against each other.

Now from there, people have a lot of different ideas about exactly how that plays out. Obviously, the main discrepancy or the main division is between anarchism and minarchism. Minarchism meaning the absolute least state possible, but just enough to prevent a different worse one from replacing it, so to speak. Some people call it the night-watchman state, a government that's only powerful enough to hold fair courts and have a monopoly on national defence and a monopoly on criminal justice and that kind of thing.

Then there are anarchists who say no, to have a sheriff's department at all, might as well be communism, forcing people at gunpoint to pay for security services that they don't necessarily want. Half the town is grateful the sheriff's department is here, the other half think they're an occupying army and would like for them to leave and so that's more of the anarchists' position is that free market, property rights only and no government at all.

Now I usually just side on the anarchists' side, I don't have any use for the state, but that is debatable among libertarians and it's only the extremely ideological who would say that no, you absolutely must agree with my take on every bit of this kind of thing and frankly, the argument for minarchism is reasonable, right? That we live on earth, not in paradise, that there's always going to be violence in society, and so it would be best if we channel that violence through legal institutions that are established by law and have checks and balances and accountability under the law and regular elections and these kinds of things, so that in order to minimize the amount of violence on society.

Now you look at the United States of America and our constitution and the limited republic that it describes, and then you look at the reality of the US government, which is about the size of every other government that's ever existed combined, and you can see how the minarchist argument from the point of view of an anarchist is a very, very slippery slope that ends up leading to the total state in so many circumstances. So to get back to your question about this virus and the legitimacy I guess, of government deciding for people who have not aggressed against anyone that they have to stay home in the name of a public health emergency, that kind of thing and I think that is completely debatable within the acceptance, within the confines of a libertarian argument, right?

For people who've already accepted the non-aggression principle, there's room for people to argue about that because after all, nobody has the right to tell you can't leave the house. You haven't done anything to anyone, you're not even sick as far as you know and in this case, this is an especially devilish virus here, where you can spread it without even having any symptoms and not even know that you're sick at all. So it's not like "Okay, I have a fever, but I insist on going to work." You might go to work and have no idea that you're infecting other people and that kind of thing. So these are very exceptional circumstances and that should never be a blank check for government power to get away with whatever it is they want to get away with, which is what we're seeing all over the world right now.

The excuse for the ultimate clamp down and to track you on your phone everywhere you go and who knows what other restrictions they're trying to put down the line here. But I don't think that it's necessarily an abandonment of libertarianism itself to concede that government has a role in restricting behaviour in a public health crisis. At the same time of course, we have to be absolutely as vigilant as ever or more vigilant than ever because we know that, as Condoleezza Rice and Rahm Emanuel agree, you never let a crisis go to waste when you're the state and they will take full advantage to violate as many of our rights as they can for as long as they possibly can.

Peter McCormack: So it's funny you talk about minarchism because that's about as far as I got, I never got to full anarchist. I got about as far as minarchism and I thought "yeah, okay, I can work with this." It's a big shift of me, after 38 years, of being somebody who only ever thought of a state... I never knew of an option outside of it before I was introduced to libertarianism. But I got about as far as minarchism, although I've been told that means I'm about six months away from anarchism. Is that right?

Scott Horton: Yeah, once you accept the non-aggression principle, you have to admit that your local sheriff's department is essentially communism. From each according to his ability to each according to his security needs and that frankly, as I said, in my town, half the town hates the cops' guts. Absolutely hates them! Don't consider them to be their security force at all, consider them only to be oppressors, which is correct in many circumstances. They exist to fine us to death and they're what all rednecks in the 19th century around here used to call revenuers.

They're not really here to do anything but come up with excuses to steal from us and then they call themselves our security force, and that's the reality of it. A reasonable minarchist argument accepts the truth of that, but then argues that that's really the best we can do because if you have an anarchist state or a state of anarchy, I guess I should say, a lack of a state, that then somebody else is going to create one anyway. You need just enough of a state to prevent a different worse one from replacing it, that kind of an argument. I don't think anyone argues that a minimal state is, among libertarians, that a minimal state is the highest ideal.

That would be, I think, a compromise position from well, we should have absolute total liberty, but since there's no such thing as that, we ought to have black-robed judges who are accountable to the law, which of course, is a myth itself. It's completely nuts! Look at the United States of America. I'll let you discuss and figure out how things are on your side of the ocean there, but around here, the government is essentially a completely lawless tyranny. There's no law that was ever written that says this, judges just made up that government employees have, what they call, qualified immunity, which means that they can kill your mama and then say, "Well, she was acting furtively," and walk right out of the room and there's no accountability for them whatsoever.

If a judge, a prosecutor, six cops, all conspire to falsely imprison someone that they know to be innocent, there is no accountability for them whatsoever. In fact, there was a district attorney, prosecutor, here in central Texas where I'm from, who knowingly prosecuted an innocent man, but 20 years late or something, was prosecuted for it, which was absolutely unheard of. But it was such a proven fact, the evidence was absolutely clear that he knew he was prosecuting an innocent man for the murder of his own wife and this district attorney, for the first time in the history of Texas and maybe in the history of the United States of America, he was convicted and he did one day in jail...

Oh, Senate suspended, he didn't even do the one day that he was sentenced to and the judge who sat there and presided over the whole thing, no accountability whatsoever. The cops who all lied on the stand, no accountability whatsoever and so the argument that well, you channel violence through these institutions and under the rule of law so that you can control it and all that, it turns out that that's all mythology too. There's no such thing as the rule of law, just the rule of the will of the men who have the power.

Peter McCormack: So it's interesting you say between the UK and the US. I think at different points of time, we've been the bigger bully, globally and...

Scott Horton: Sure, no question about that man. You want to talk more body counts, the English have killed far more people than the Americans, and that's really saying something when you count Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Japan etc.

Peter McCormack: And when people criticize me and go, "Well you're just from an imperialistic country" and I do say, well hold on a second, I wasn't alive then and I'm not responsible for what happened. But we also have some problems here with the extension of the surveillance state now, especially in places like London. But just going back to this, I think the coronavirus was the first real significant challenge to my views on libertarianism, and I've debated it with a few people.

There's a guy in Bitcoin called Erik Voorhees, a couple times I've debated with him actually. But it's been the first time it's been a real challenge on me. But can I read you what I put out? Because this all came with a lot of criticism, and your feedback on this would be interesting. So what I said was, "Right now, I am definitely a statist. I think we need draconian centralized planning to reduce the spread of coronavirus and the overwhelming of the health systems. I am though thinking about post-coronavirus and how we ensure governments retract from their new powers."

So that was my tweet. I think we need it right now, but I'm... Because the new laws are passing anyway, I'm focused on how do we ensure that these are essentially temporary powers. But I got a lot of criticism, Scott. A lot of, "You statist moron," "You're going back crying to the government," "You're a fake libertarian," etc and it was really difficult because I wanted to debate this, because right now, I have essentially two communities I deal with. I have my Bitcoin, online, libertarian, anarcho-capitalist community, but I also have my Facebook community, which is all my friends who aren't libertarians.

They're either Boris Johnson voters or Corbyn voters and right now, they're just people who only think of a state and actually quite scared right now about what is happening and I kind of go between the two. When I'm in the libertarian crowd, I'm like, "Yeah, but look, there's all these other people over here, what do we do about these people?`' Can you understand my confusion?

Scott Horton: Sure. Look, I think again, we live on earth where everything's a mess, right? We're either fallen angels or we're highly evolved primates. But either way, there's only room for error in human behaviour, that's just how it is. So essentially, everything is a compromise one way or the other and I think that's the only really fair way to look at it. I'm not sure that I agree with you that... My personal view is that I'm locked down, I have a wife who has lupus, so she's immune system compromised and so for our family, the deal is we have to not get this virus. It's not a matter of, well, we hope that we get through it all right when we do get it, it's a matter of we have to absolutely not be exposed to this thing.

There are other people who are possibly in the circumstances where it's fair for them to say you know what, I actually would rather go to work and make my money, and I'm not too worried about it because I'm young and I'm strong and I'm not responsible for any wives or children or anything else and I think I'll be all right. Then again, there's the question of them accidentally spreading a disease they don't even know they have to other people and this kind of thing. But I think it's also important to start with the libertarian insights about central planning in the first place and the number of errors that have been handed down by the centralized authorities.

So the news this morning is that Boris Johnson has COVID-19 now. Well, he's the same guy who had decided that everybody ought to go out drinking, everybody ought to pretend like it's not that big of a deal. We're just going to lock up the old people as best we can and then we want to encourage the spread of the disease among the rest of the population because that'll help build up herd immunity and then he got advice that said that's really bad advice. In fact, it was the same guy who told him to do that, this guy, Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College, the same guy who recommended that policy then changed his mind and said, "No, you need to clamp down on everything."

So then they announced a clamp down on everything and now that same guy, Neil Ferguson from the Imperial College, is saying, "Actually, I may have overreacted there. It seems like maybe the numbers will be much lower than I thought. Garbage in, garbage out, my model there, I kind of screwed up." So now what does that mean? Does that mean that the clamp down was a mistake, that the first policy was correct, and the third one is not? And the problem is we're relying on this one scientist and his models and a Prime Minister and his government to make these decisions for other people when they clearly don't know what to do either.

Here in the United States, and this will be probably buried as they can possibly bury it, but the story here is that the delay, not just in testing, but the delay in warning the American people about how severe this problem is and is going to be was all at the hands of the government. There are clips going around on Twitter from earlier this month, not even in February, in March, where officials in New York and in other places are telling people to go about your business, go to the Chinese New Year parade, go drinking at the pub. The Governor of New York said, "Go to the movies.

There's this great new movie out, go and see it. Don't be afraid of all this misinformation about coronavirus being dangerous, by all means." So when this thing was breaking out in January, I knew and Tucker Carlson for example, on FOX News and others were pointing out that this is different than SARS. As bad as SARS was, you're not really contagious with SARS until you have a fever and so even though it was killing people by the thousands, it was pretty obvious that a concerted effort to lock down and contain the virus should be possible, that it's a matter of having these checkpoints to check for fevers and make sure that people with the fevers are not allowed to go and spread it around and they were able to isolate the thing.

The same thing, a more extreme example, is with Ebola as well, it's very hard to spread. It kills its host so fast, it's very hard for it to spread too far. But also, people who are infected with it, essentially are showing symptoms and so they're easy to identify and contain. Well this virus will let you spread it for four or five days sometimes, maybe even longer, without knowing you have it and from the very beginning, this was obvious in January. As soon as they were reporting any kind of detailed reports about this virus, it was clear that this thing cannot be contained, that people who are sick and have...

Peter McCormack: I think we all knew it though Scott.

Scott Horton: ... No idea are going to be traveling around the world and it's going to be coming here. Then what did our government do? Our government kept planes flying in from China for another six weeks or something like that before they stopped them. Public health officials were telling the people to not worry about it. In fact, in some cases, just like in Italy, they were saying you're a racist if you want to limit the number of people who are coming back from the Chinese New Year and they're spreading the disease and killing people.

Then the CDC and the FDA, that's the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention here in the US, they both made it a crime for anyone to try to make a COVID test except them and then their test didn't work. So then it took them weeks before they were getting the tests out and then finally someone came in and shoved some bureaucrats aside and legalized competition in testing and legalized private companies developing their own tests as fast as they can and as soon as they legalized them, Scott and White, which is a hospital company here in Texas, I'm not sure if it's a nationwide chain or not, but it's a hospital chain here in Texas, they immediately made their own test and started doing drive-through testing right here in my neighbourhood and the only thing that was preventing them from doing that was a government gun to their head telling them no.

In fact, this is also another interesting aspect was, this was a big scandal in the New York Times that they ran, where in Seattle, which was the hotbed here in the US, the first real hotbed of the infection, they were already in the middle of a massive study of all of the victims of the flu in Washington State and they were collecting the samples from everyone who was coming in with flu-like symptoms and so they just wanted to test the samples that they already had and the government would not let them do it for weeks and weeks and weeks. So finally, this doctor squealed to the New York Times and said, "The government won't let us test all these samples we already have of people with respiratory infections."

I think they just finally went ahead and started breaking the rules and doing the tests anyway after waiting weeks because they were commanded to wait, they obeyed and then when they finally started testing, they could see that, oh, man, people have had this virus here in Washington State for weeks and weeks and weeks before we even knew it and it was the government who was standing in their way. So this is what the great libertarian presidential candidate and activist, Harry Browne, used to call the government breaking your legs and then handing you some crutches. "Where would you be without us?" Well we might not have an outbreak at all!

In Germany, for example, they had a great test, they tried to offer it to the Americans, the Americans told them to go to hell, rejected the test and made it a crime for doctors in America to adopt the German test and to use that kit. In Germany, that's not the case. In Germany, they've been testing like crazy and they've had an open market in the creation of the tests, so they have all the tests that they need and they've done a much better job of clamping down on the spread there than they have here for that purpose. So here, these people are, to a great degree, the reason why people are sick and dying and then they turn around and holler at us that the total state is the only solution to the problem that they helped to cause.

Peter McCormack: There's a couple of routes we can go down here and, probably we should do both. There is the, how this would've played out potentially, under a libertarian society without a state, but also under the state, what our expectations are. Because again, one of the things I really liked about that article that came out this morning, and it reflects a question I've asked a couple of libertarians before when trying to debate them, is the question I always ask is, how do we ween ourselves off the state?

And the article talks about the big red button, it doesn't exist and actually, I think it's a rational argument because it talks about the dangers of having the big red button because society isn't ready, society could collapse and they could cause a lot of harm by having that big red button. I'm not sure if you agree with that point in the article because you didn't actually write it, but that's one of the errors I'd like to focus on is even though the state has made some mistakes, some of the questions I wanted to ask, because this is where it's really challenged my views on libertarianism, is that... So firstly, in terms of restricting movement, so I, Scott, very early on, restricted my movement and specifically, my dad. My dad's 72 and he's a smoker, so he's high-risk.

He has bronchitis and he's been locked down for weeks. We've seen on the news, we've seen the people partying, we've seen them on the beaches, we know people aren't responsible and in not being responsible, they may be spreading the illness and making it worse and making people sick. So where do you sit on the creation of rules that restrict movement? And how does that challenge your own views on libertarianism?

Scott Horton: Well I'm pretty flexible on this. Honestly, I'm an anti-war guy and so I really just focus on the very worst things that my government is doing all the time and I mostly leave a lot of the libertarian theory and debates to the experts on those areas. I'm actually not that smart to do a lot of philosophizing, I'm more of a names and dates guy, but I'm pretty much in line with Sheldon. I'll tell you, at the Institute, I'm the founder and the director of The Libertarian Institute, and my own party line is locking down my own people as best as I can. My parents, my wife, that kind of thing, and giving advice to my friends who will listen, that you need to really take this seriously and protect yourself. At the same time, I've run a lot of articles at the Institute.

I guess, in other words, I'm trying to say my personal opinion is not the party line of the institute. Well actually, that's not really true. I guess I pretty much agree, but the party line with the Institute is that while some of this may be necessary, that boy, we better be even more jealous of our freedom than ever before, we better be ready to push back against all these restrictions as hard as we can as soon as we can. So as Sheldon is saying here, is this the kind of emergency where maybe we really do need to have some travel restrictions and this kind of thing? You know what? I can be flexible on that on a temporary basis, but the problem is what the great libertarian economist, Robert Higgs, calls the ratchet effect. This says that whenever there is a crisis, the government will always gain power because they're a monopoly, right?

Even when it's all their fault, we can't fire them and replace them with an entirely different security force. Even when they completely fail, they gain from it. Look at the September 11th attack for example, where the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, any one of those agencies could've stopped the attack, but because they all hated each other so much and refused to work with each other at all and put their own bureaucratic interests above the interests of the American people, the attack was allowed to take place anyway. Then what do they do? They turn around and go, "Oh, you have to give us total power over you to read your email, to track your cellphone, to do all these things in order to keep you safe," when they're the ones who actually created the terrorist group in the first place and then failed to protect us from it. Well enrage them and turn them against us and then failed to protect us from it.

So that's the kind of dynamic that we have to really be aware of. I'm sorry, I meant to finish with the ratchet effect, that means that once the crisis has obeyed it, as Emperor Palpatine put it, the power never returns to the way it was before. You never go back to the day before the crisis broke out, and that's a consistent theme through all of American history. Each and every one of the wars, The Great Depression, or any other thing like that and I'm sure this will be no different. It was a scandal when Edward Snowden leaked that they keep all of your cellphone location data for five years, that means that they can look at their computer and they can see everywhere you've gone for five years, every backseat of a car that you've ridden in and everyone else who was in that car with you at the time.

Every living room where you ever spent an hour drinking with your friend and talking about who knows what and they can go back. On this basis is how they murder Afghans every day. They go, "Well, link analysis says that this guy knows this guy who knows this guy." But they're not even talking about people, they're talking about phone numbers. This phone number is connected to that phone number is connected to this phone that, at one time, was in this neighbourhood in the Helmand Province, which we know to be a hotbed of Taliban activity. Bam!

They drop a 500 pound bomb on somebody's head based on what's essentially, kooky conspiracy theories based off of minimal data. Not even real information, but just data. Here's a phone number, bomb it. But they plan on tracking us from now on and they're talking openly about what used to be a top secret kind of a thing before Snowden leaked the truth to us. Now they're saying, "Well, this is how we'll prevent the virus, we'll just track everyone's cellphone around and make sure everywhere you've been and anyone that you've been near," and this kind of deal. So now let's pretend that they invent a foolproof vaccine next month and the problem is gone, are they going to give up that power and say that...

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but what about the next one?

Scott Horton: They don't need it anymore? No, they're not. They're going to say well, we need this for the next time and that's just one example of many. Same thing with the travel restrictions, same thing with the use of National Guard troops, who typically, they're here to pile sandbags in the event of a flood or this kind of thing. But you could have military authorities and pseudo-military authorities, like the National Guard, gaining more and more power over civilian life here and then, of course, it'll never be repealed all the way back to the way it was before.

That's the kind of thing where even if you're flexible on your principles in an emergency like this, a public health crisis like this, that you have to understand that the incentives and the economics of bureaucracy and politics mandate that they will amass as much power as they possibly can and they will give up as little of it as they possibly can, and they will only give up what we force them to give up.

Peter McCormack: And you won't have me disagree with you on any of the war stuff and I understand the fear. I would probably be even more fearful in the US. I think there's a slight difference in the UK, although it's only marginal. But I am going to push you on one thing because this is where I am challenging myself Scott, is that... And it's quite a direct question, but do you agree with the restrictions on movement, or do you reluctantly accept it? I know that's a tough question to ask you.

Scott Horton: Yeah, I reluctantly accept it. I'm sure not going to war over the mayor saying, "Everyone stay home." He doesn't have the authority to really make that stick and not for very long. On the other hand, if Donald Trump, and this is absolute worse case scenario, I'm not predicting this, I'm not saying this, but just as a hypothetical example. If Donald Trump declares full martial law and suspends the constitution and says that the US Army is now in charge, resist and be shot, then I am going to war over that. I'm not going to allow that to happen in my state and I'll tell you what too. It's no coincidence that the biggest military base in America, Fort Hood, is 100 miles up the road from the capital of Texas.

That is to prevent the state of Texas from ever again entertaining the possibility of succession, that they'll kill us all first. That's the threat. That's the reason that Fort Hood is there, no other reason and it's not like Texas is at threat of being invaded by what, North Vietnam or something?! But I should say, at the same time, I don't think the military wants to take over the country any more than I want them to, and I don't think that Donald Trump is in a hurry to make any massive changes like that.

In fact, it's funny to see on Twitter all day, the liberals, who think that Donald Trump is literally Hitler, are demanding that he nationalize all business, that he invoke the Defence Preparedness Act and take full government command control over whichever industries they think is necessary to force them to produce enough ventilators, or whatever it is and now all these people who were terrified of Donald Trump's power now only hate him for not seizing enough of it quickly enough, which is a hell of a riddle, but that's where we're at. But no, I really don't support the government doing a thing to anyone or threatening anyone, but I do reluctantly accept it because, after all, this is an emergency, a legitimate emergency and seriously, you know what? The September 11th attack, for example.

Let's go back to that. That was an emergency on one day, but they lied and they tried to make the American people believe that there could be Al-Qaeda sleeper cells in your town too and if we weren't here to protect you, you'd probably all be dead. Saddam would give Osama a nuke and kill you in your jammies in the middle of the night and all of these things, and deliberately tried to frighten people into thinking that there was a permanent emergency. When in fact, no, there were 20-something Al-Qaeda guys in the country, the hijackers and their few handlers, the handlers escaped and the hijackers all died on the day of the attack and there was not one single Al-Qaeda guy left in Dallas, in Houston, in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Miami, anywhere in this country, they just didn't exist!

Our government said, "Well no, you know how it is, it's the Islamo-fascist caliphate," which was just this made up thing. It couldn't exist anywhere in the world, there are states where this caliphate was supposed to be, but they tried to make everybody's mama afraid and stay afraid until they could build up enough troops in Kuwait to invade Iraq, was their main agenda at that time. So they will do anything they can to lie and exploit and drum up fear in order to exploit that fear to get away with whatever their agendas are. So I think whether it's a virus or whether it's a terrorist attack, we all got to put our thinking caps on and keep our own counsel about just how dangerous any one of these crises are and just how far we should let these people cross their lines.

Peter McCormack: But why do you think it happens? So I'm imagining the UK COBRA meetings that Boris has been holding, I don't imagine they're in there rubbing their hands thinking, "Right, here's a chance for new powers." I actually just think they are trying to reduce death and stop the overrun of the hospitals.

Scott Horton: But that's beside the point, right?

Peter McCormack: Well no...

Scott Horton: That's the thing of it, is it doesn't matter. It's the economics of politics, right? This is just how it goes. If you assume the very best of intentions, for example, let's pretend that George Bush and them were not deliberately trying to deceive us into supporting the Iraq war, but they were really just doing their best. A lot of people really do believe that, that they were really afraid that Saddam was going to give chemical weapons to Osama to use against us. Well that was an overblown fear of theirs and whatever it was that they did to prevent that fear from being realized was by far, a terrible overreaction.

So you don't have to read George Bush's mind or Paul Wolfowitz's mind and know just how deceitful they really were being, you could just take it at face value. They thought the guy with the clean shaven chin and the beret was going to give chemical weapons he didn't have to his enemy, Osama Bin Laden, the religious nut who would've just as easily preferred to cut his throat as any of ours. But look, they got a million people killed and then they spread the war on and killed another million people after that, at least another half a million by spreading...

No, another million probably, if you count Libya, Syria and Yemen and we're talking about at least near two million dead innocent people who had nothing to do with attacking the United States of America at all. So forget motives, that's how government acts, that's what they do. It's just like Obi-Wan Kenobi in Episode II when Anakin says, "Oh no, not another lecture on the economics of politics." But that's what it is, right? It's the principles of bureaucracy.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but you won't get me arguing with these points, I completely agree. Do you find this reluctant acceptance is a real challenge to almost libertarian identity?

Scott Horton: No, I don't think so. Just as Sheldon says today, and there ain't nobody more libertarian than Sheldon Richman. He's been one of the leaders of our movement in American society for 30 years now, maybe more and...

Peter McCormack: Because one of the problems with the coronavirus is this lag, is the fact that people are spreading it without knowing and you don't tend to know the real impact until two to three, maybe four weeks later. So this lag itself is quite dangerous, therefore a reluctant acceptance of maybe some quite draconian measures is about as far as you can go as a libertarian without actually then saying, "I actually agree, I actually want these measures in place." But to want these measures in place opens you up to quite high level criticisms of libertarianism. Do you see the...

Scott Horton: Look, it's a balance. Just like with the argument in non-virus times between minarchism and anarchism, for example, that the question is... Well, for example, the minarchist argument is that you will be more free under a minarchy than under a purely principled anarchy because that purely principled anarchy will end up leading to more violence and more coercion anyway.

That's the argument, is that that's why to accept a minimal state is because it would actually be less violent and more free than a system of anarchism, which I don't necessarily agree with this, but there are some who look at arguments for anarcho-capitalism and say "Well jeez, it seems like that would lead to a few property owners and a return to feudalism rather than everyone is a property owner", which would be my preference.

We'd have seven billion little nation states in the world, not 35 owned by private, essentially kings or something like that. So yes, it's a compromise. I'm reluctant to accept it rather than support it, as you put it, because I'm...

Peter McCormack: But you're not opposing it?

Scott Horton: ... Continually mindful of the state and its abuses and how much suffering is going to come because of the clamp down itself. Again, I favour clamp down for my own family, but I don't really think I'm in the position to insist on it for every other person. Look at the argument going around right now about the economy and how soon before people can get back to work, till they can leave their houses and go back to work and especially on the left, people are saying, "Oh yeah, sure, sacrifice human life just for the Dow Jones, God!" Or something like that. But a shut-down economy kills people too.

Peter McCormack: But how can we know which is worse?

Scott Horton: The economy is how people make money and take care of themselves. The stress of being locked up and being unable to provide for their family leads to heart attacks. The unemployment rate leads to increases in suicides. There's all kinds of secondary effects, from having this kind of level of clamp down and unemployment and that kind of thing. At some point, the balance goes the other way, right? At some point, we're going to kill more people through suicides than would die of the virus possibly.

So there's got to be a balance in there and people have to not look at these things as just one way or the other. There's got to be a safe middle ground and people got to be able to fight over that and figure out where that is. At some point, it would be better to allow people to go back to work to prevent a level of great depression that's just going to destroy our society for years into the future.

Peter McCormack: But how can you calculate that?

Scott Horton: People here, I don't know in England, but here, people are already absolutely at each other's throats. The left and the right hate each other more than ever before and you put our society through this kind of stress, it could lead to far worse problems than an epidemic like this, conceivably.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's the thing, conceivably. But how do you calculate that? How do you calculate the future risks?

Scott Horton: Good question!

Peter McCormack: And if the principle is life, then surely you have to make the decision in front of you now, which is the preservation of life of those who might get sick. At what point do you start saying, "I think there might be X number of suicides" because it really is prediction models and we already know with this, that prediction models can be wrong. So I always fall on the side of we've just got to start with life and we can't do future prediction models because we don't know what's going to happen. Again, it's something I've really wrestled with.

Scott Horton: Yeah, well it's future prediction models in both cases, right? I read a thing the other day, I don't know that this is a fact, but the thing that I read said that for every 1% the unemployment rate goes up, typically speaking, the suicide rate goes up 3%. Because I'm just a news head, I know that from 2008 and 2009, from the crash, that there was just an absolute epidemic of murder suicides where desperate men killed their kids, their wife, and then themself and it happens all the time because they lose their business, they lose their house, they lose their ability to take care of their people and they go, "What am I going to do? I'm going to give my children over to some foster father that I don't know? Nope." And they choose to kill them instead, and then themselves.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but that's extreme.

Scott Horton: This is serious consequences of the clamp down. Forget the virus, that's the kind of danger that we're dealing with.

Peter McCormack: And one of the things I think we have to admit, it's really, really complicated. These scenarios that people are dealing with are complicated and also, one of the things I've been doing is when anybody has a strong opinion, I've been pushing them and say, "Well what would you do?" And the reason I've been asking that, because if they turn round to me and say, "Oh what would you do?" It's like, do you know what? Excuse my language, "I don't fucking know!" In some way Scott, I'm glad I don't have to make the decision because sometimes...

Scott Horton: Yeah, I'm with you.

Peter McCormack: ...Whatever you do, is a lose-lose decision and I really don't know how you model it. I refer to the doctors, what are the doctors saying? And what do the doctors need? Let's give them everything they need right now. But I'm very fearful of both sides. I put out another tweet Scott, I said, "In a few months, a bunch of people are going to be on the wrong side of history, either we overreacted or we underreacted and I don't think we really know and I think it's really hard to measure it." Let me ask you another question because I think I know...

Scott Horton: No, it's going to be both.

Peter McCormack: Of course!

Scott Horton: We're going to be overreacting and underreacting in different circumstances. Let me say one more thing real quick before your next question, which is, my sister's a nurse and in fact, one of her very good friends is a epidemiologist and so she's had a very good insight into what's going on here from the beginning, and she has a lot of experience in the healthcare field and that kind of deal. From the beginning, she has said...

Peter McCormack: Is she also a libertarian?

Scott Horton: No, she's not libertarian, she's just a plain old nurse. She's not very ideological at all. But to her, the panic is worse and that's not playing down the virus at all. The virus is terrible, but people are overreacting and what's going to happen is you're going to have collateral damage, as the military calls it, all over the place, where people are dying of the heart attacks and strokes that they have every day, but now they're going to die of them instead of being saved and that's because they're afraid to call 911, or because the 911 line is completely jammed with false alarms over dry coughs or people can't get their heart medicine or whatever it is.

Again, the suicide rate is going to go up as people are desperate and afraid and all of these kinds of things and so the solution can be more harm than good, and this is coming from a lady who is treating people with COVID on a daily basis and who knows that she could die of it. She could be exposed and die of it and she's still saying that the fear and the clamp down can be worse, so everybody, put on your thinking cap, your wisdom cap, and try to be as smart about this as you can. Be concerned, be concerned enough to make smart decisions, but don't be afraid and drive yourself into the grave on irrational fear.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it really is a bunch of trade-offs and knowing when to make those trade-offs, which are highly complicated and I think anyone who doesn't admit this is complicated or anyone who is 100% sure in one direction, I actually struggle with that person. I wonder where they have such conviction in their own solution to this comes from because I think Scott that this is so hard. But let me ask you another thing and I think I know where you'll be on this. So obviously, we're having an unprecedented financial stimulus package, not only in the US, the UK, France, everywhere, every single country, where do you sit on that in terms of the acceptance that we have a state?

Where do you sit on that? There's two different areas because there is the financial package to support companies, and there's a financial package to support individuals and what I found is that when I've been pushing people, especially libertarians, they all say, "Let the companies fail," and I understand that. I've seen a mixed response with whether there should be some kind of financial support for the individuals and I'd be interested to know what you think.

Scott Horton: Well yeah, that's where I fall. When it comes to the corporations, absolutely, they should be allowed to fail and I'll get back to that and elaborate more in a second. When it comes to on the individual basis, well, we are all forced to pay into unemployment insurance, they take it right out of our checks. So if people are filing for unemployment and getting their wages compensated for that, then I don't have a problem with that, other than the fact that the government already spent your money on something else. This is new money they're going to have to come up with somehow in order to pay those benefits.

But I do not begrudge people who are on the lower end of the income scale, getting either unemployment insurance or food stamps, if necessary. There's talk about rent holidays and then mortgage holidays too. There's this crazy idea on the left, it's just so commie and ridiculous, that all landlords are these horrible, evil tyrants, far worse than a cop, as the guy who owns a house and lets you live in it based on a contract that you signed for an agreed upon price and how isn't it hilarious that you're going to have all these renters sticking the homeowners and apartment complex owners with the bill somehow?

There are massive multinational corporations that own apartment complexes and stuff, but for the most part, we're talking about relatively small businesses and single proprietorships that own these properties and who they still have to pay their mortgage, but the bank gets a big bailout. So you know what, it makes more sense, doesn't it, to give the renters and the mortgage payers a break, especially if the bank is getting a bailout, what right do they have to then insist that everybody has to pay on time or else get fourth closed on and these kinds of things? And that's the kind of deal where I think it's fair for people to be flexible in an emergency.

But then again, back to the corporations, when it comes to these banks, the airlines and all of these other major corporations who are lining up for their bailout, screw them. How dare they! Boeing especially, look at Boeing, where their stock price is through the floor and their corporation is in jeopardy because they ran it into the ground. They made the decision that it would be better to let people fall out of the sky and die than to ditch the 737 and come up with a new, more fuel efficient plane and so they created a 737 MAX, which was a disaster, where they had to move the engines into a place where it's completely un-aerodynamic and unworkable, and then tried to compensate for that with all of these fancy computer algorithms and whatever to try to keep the planes in the sky. Then as soon as you have one little sensor fail, you got 600 people dead.

Now Boeing wants us to forget all of that and they want us to pretend that the problem with their company is not them and the decisions that they've made, but oh jeez, this virus that's nobody's fault that just came out of nowhere. Well you know what? They spent the last 10 years buying back their own stock to pump up their own stock price and on money that they borrowed at 0%, artificially low interest rates and they saved none of it in a rainy day fund for when the crisis comes. It goes for United and American and all the other airlines too, they know that crises break out from time to time, they know that there's a massive boom bust cycle and at the very least, they know that there's a recession coming at some point and that air travel is going to go down, their revenues are going to go down.

Yet instead of saving for a rainy day, instead of resolving their conflicts with their labour negotiations and all the other things, they do nothing but kick the can down the road because they are betting that the government will bail them out at our expense. So what's the opposite of that? Let them fail! Now the deal with that, and people have to understand this, and I don't know if people do understand this, but if you let American and United and Boeing that makes the planes they fly fail, then they go to bankruptcy court and entrepreneurs who will take those same resources and put them to a more efficient use will buy up those resources and will put them to more efficient use.

They'll learn the lesson that, "Boy, we better save for a rainy day unlike the predecessors we bought all these planes from who refused to do so" and so the thing about libertarians that, especially people on the left misunderstand, and people on the right misunderstand this about libertarians too, they think that we are here essentially, as cover for big business. That oh, freedom means big business getting away with whatever they want, that that's what we favor is business itself, but that's not true. What we favour is capitalism, and by the ism there, I don't mean as a system of state power, I mean as a system of profit and loss among private property owners on the market and that means profit and loss.

So that means when somebody drives their company into the ground or when they don't prepare for crises like this that do happen, then they have to be made to suffer the consequences of that and the bigger the corporation, the more responsible they are. So Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan and whichever giant banks on Wall Street, all of the airplane companies and the hotel companies and all of these people who were not prepared for this, they "deserve to fail" and they should fail.

Then their productive resources will be redistributed through auction at bankruptcy court, and then they'll be put back to efficient use. But the last thing in the world that should be going on right now is what is actually going on, regardless of what the Congress passes here. This is the same thing in '08 and '09, right? The Congress passes TARP for a few hundred billion, this, that, the other thing.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve in just the last 10, 15 days has created more than a trillion dollars of new money and have spent approximately 100 billion dollars a day buying up bad debt from these failed companies, which is just propping up zombie companies, propping up incompetent boards of directors and CEOs who have gotten their companies into this mess in the first place, and then prolonging their dysfunction and on the backs of the working people of America.

Peter McCormack: That's what I thought you would say about the companies.

Scott Horton: Us regular people have to carry Boeing around on our back, how is that fair? It's crazy.

Peter McCormack: That's what I thought you'd say about the companies and let me tell you what one guy said to me. I said to him, "Well what happens if next month and there's 10 million unemployed?" And he said, "I would do nothing for those 10 million directly. It's not the government's role to do something, it's the market's role" and I couldn't help but think that sounds a little bit psychopathic. I couldn't help but think it.

For me, to try and imagine 5, 10 million people suddenly unemployed, unable to leave their home and having no money, what comes out of that? I can only imagine a rise in crime, a rise in violence, a rise in protests, social unrest and that's something I'm nervous about. But is that something I'm nervous about because I'm conditioned to the state, or are you nervous about that?

Scott Horton: Well yeah. I think as Sheldon wrote in his article, we don't have a red button that gets rid of all of the state at once, right? All other things being equal, what that sounds like is bailouts for billionaires, but not for regular Joe's and that is hardly sustainable at all. When to a great degree, it's these big businesses who've got us into this mess, economically speaking, by not having prepared for a rainy day or these kinds of eventualities.

So I think for a libertarian to argue that, "Well jeez, we're against the welfare state at all times, so we ought to abolish it at the stroke of a pen right this instant in the middle of global epidemic" is, at the very least, kind of tone deaf, but also in practice, would be destructive and would be probably more harm than good to do it that way. If you remember when Ron Paul ran for President in 2008 and in 2012, they would constantly ask him about the welfare state. because again, most people think, for whatever reason, that libertarians are just here to cover for the rich and are against the welfare state safety net for the poor, that that's really what we're here for and that kind of thing.

Well Ron Paul would always answer the same way and he would say, "What we should do is we should abolish the empire, we should bring all of our troops home from Germany, Japan, Korea, and the entire Middle East. We should absolutely downsize our military force by more than two thirds, three quarters." At one point, he told the Washington Post, "Come on, we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines," which is true. One American nuclear submarine could wipe out every major city in Russia. One more could wipe out every major city in China.

I'm not saying that would be fair, but I'm just saying. The reality is, is we can deter attack on this country with a couple of good submarines, we could save a trillion dollars a year, and then according to Ron, we would then use that money to slowly and deliberately and carefully transition away from a welfare state, one that people have been forced to pay into their entire lives and that they've been accustomed to becoming dependent on and rather than kicking a bunch of little old ladies out in the street, that we would find a way to transition away from the welfare state because it is, ultimately, unsustainable anyway. Regardless of whether you approve of it or not, it cannot work over the long-term.

As more and more baby boomers retire and there are fewer and fewer working age people to support them, it will become impossible. So what should we do? And this is a very, very principle libertarian, Ron Paul. He's against the welfare state, but also he's not crazy, right? He cares about people and he really doesn't want to see anybody kicked out on the street, so that would be his priority would be to figure out a way to come up with a system where in the future, people can opt out and where we can transition to a system where it's purely voluntary in basis wnd the way that we'll be able to afford to do it is we'll force our government to stop doing all of the worst things that it's doing first in order to shore up the things that are the least destructive.

Peter McCormack: All right, well listen, look, Scott, I'm conscious of time. I have so many things I...

Scott Horton: Oh and I'm sorry, I'm actually late, I realize!

Peter McCormack: Ah! I had three more questions for you. Can I give one of them?

Scott Horton: Yeah, go ahead.

Peter McCormack: Very last question! So my last question for you is, I can't let you leave without asking this, have you looked into our Bitcoin world? Because as a libertarian and the Austrian economists, they want to separate money and state. But I have not seen you talk about it at all. Have you looked into our world?

Scott Horton: Have I looked into exactly what now? Into Bitcoin itself?

Peter McCormack: In the Bitcoin world, yeah. Do you have opinions on Bitcoin?

Scott Horton: Oh, the Bitcoin world. Yes, honestly, I am kicking myself constantly because I'm one of the very first people to know about it. I knew about it in the very beginning of January 2009 is when I was first informed about Bitcoin and I remember thinking, "Ah jeez, how much is that ever going to be worth?" At that point, it was worth fractions of a penny, .0002 cents or something like that and if I'd invested then, I'd be a zillionaire now. I've known about it all along.

But frankly, I work for non-profit institutions for a very little amount of money. I have, to be perfectly honest with you, essentially no savings and I've never had any money to invest in anything, other than keeping the lights on and continuing to just do my job as I do and hopefully, some day I'll figure out how to make money has been my economic policy all along. So I have not focused on it nearly enough, but I do support it in principle, I think it's a great idea and I think separating society and state in every way possible is the right idea.

Looking at the amount of new money that they're creating now, I think for anyone who does have some savings, they would be nuts to not be buying alternative cryptocurrencies, gold and silver and whatever they can to diversify out of the dollar. The dollar's being propped up right now because people are fleeing the stock market for the dollar, but pretty soon, they're going to be fleeing the dollar for anything else. In fact, even Goldman Sachs the other day recommended that people buy gold as the currency of last resort, as they called it.

So I think that would definitely be a smart thing for people to look into and especially as Jeremy Sapienza says, "You take every central bank on earth, they don't know how to do anything except print money." That's all they do! That's all they know how to do is print more than. "What, prices are going up? We better print more money so we can afford the rising prices." So that's the way they all look at it and that's the way they all always will. So as long as that's the world we're living in, then people absolutely need a hedge against that.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, look, we should do it again sometime because I think there's some things about Bitcoin that you would really appreciate if you haven't gone down the full rabbit hole. Listen, look, appreciate your time, Scott, I know you're busy. I have bought Fool's Errand and I will have a listen to it before we speak again sometime. But appreciate everything you're doing and thank you for coming on the show.

Scott Horton: Great, thank you Peter! Really appreciate it!