WBD221 Audio Transcription

Libertarianism & Politics with Adam Brown & Sean Finch

Interview date: Tuesday 5th May 2020

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Adam Brown and Sean Finch from the UK Libertarian Party. 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 Adam Brown & Sean Finch, the party leader and coordinator for the UK Libertarian Party. We discuss the current political landscape, the push for less government, healthcare and freedom of speech.

“This fiat currency that we have now, it is funny money, it is nothing, it is not freedom.”

— Sean Finch

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Hi Adam, hi Sean. How are you both?

Adam Brown: Yeah great, thanks.

Sean Finch: Great, thank you!

Peter McCormack: Thank you for both coming on the show, it's nice to talk to some UK libertarians. I'm usually talking to American libertarians, so that comes with a couple of different things I have to think about, in that most of them have a very different approach or thoughts on say, weapons than I do living in the UK and while I appreciate their thoughts on defence, I struggle even in my most libertarian days to even consider wanting a change in the UK for us to actually have weapons, which is something I'm going to ask you about.

But I'd like to use today as a chance to learn a bit more about what you do and your views on libertarianism and one of the starting points for me is that you are a Libertarian Party, and there are some people who believe in no government and even engaging in the world of politics is anti-libertarian. Where are you on this?

Adam Brown: I think the main view, and whilst I understand the view that if you are a libertarian political party, you are a bit of an oxymoron. My view is that the political system of the country believes in us, even if we don't believe in it. So at the end of the day, I think it would actually be great if you didn't need a political party to work in the current system we have. But as we have that current system, that current system is going to work on us regardless.

So my personal goal, why I got into it, is always just to start moving that political conversation towards a libertarian ideal. The way I looked at kind of the an-caps is they want to decide on the great destination, but 90% of the population haven't even heard that the journey is possible. So let's not worry about whether we're getting the train to Manchester or Birmingham, let's start building tracks and we can work out where we're going to stop when we get there. So that's why I got into it. Obviously, Sean probably has his own reasons, but that's why I think it's not an oxymoron.

Sean Finch: Yeah, what I've noticed is... I mean, I've given speeches about this. Many people, especially when I'm doorstep canvassing, have never even heard of the word "Libertarianism," they can barely pronounce it. They often think that I'm actually from the Liberal Democrats, and that's not the case at all. I think personally the word "Libertarianism," maybe unknown if it's unintentional, but it has been suppressed, I think, in education. I studied government and politics and the word itself was rarely used.

I've still got my government and politics books from college and even despite there being pages and pages of conservatism, of socialism, of liberalism, when it comes to libertarianism, there's one page, and it's a very short paragraph. I think that it's almost like what Henry Ford said about economics, it's not that it's not been to be taught in schools, it's that our economy is based on people not understanding how economics works.

Or he said that if people understood how our economy and how our monetary system worked, there would be a revolution tomorrow and I think if people really were taught libertarianism, the idea that you solve your own problems, don't rely on a government to solve your own problems, I think that it would therefore eliminate this big sort of state that we have now and I think that might be a reason why it's not taught. But that's just my theory anyway.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so cards on the table, I'm in complete agreement with both of you. So one of my struggles with some of the people I've discussed libertarianism with is that how do you actually move the needle forward? I've always found it quite difficult to envisage a libertarian world, and in my preparation of my interview with Scott Horton, he actually, in one article, talks about the big red button and actually it would be dangerous to press the big red button.

I kind of liked the idea or the thoughts of how do you actually wean yourself off big government. I did an interview with a guy called Erik Voorhees, and he said, "Rather than have a goal of no government, the goal should be less government, every year striving for less government, smaller government" and that's something I agree with, and I support. So I'm actually with you both, but I did want to ask that question.

So let's talk a little bit about the party because similar to you, I'd never heard of libertarianism three years ago and I didn't really start to look into it until about 18 months ago. When I try and talk to some of my friends about it, it feels like most people are conditioned to this. I say, "Two-party politics," because generally speaking it's two-party politics. I know we have third, fourth, fifth party in the UK, but generally it's left and right. I think people are so conditioned to kind of status quo that we have a party, if we're unhappy with the party, four years later we get to vote them out. But there is never really this consideration of this kind of third option of trying to reduce the size of government. Why do you think that is?

Adam Brown: Well I think if you go back to Sean's answer the last question, you have to ask who is actually in control of the education in the country, and that is the government. It's in the government's best interest to make you think that the opposite of left is right or the opposite of Labour is Conservative. I don't know how much you know about looking at the political spectrums that we look at, but we look at the quadrants where you have authoritarian at the top and libertarian at the bottom and to me, that's where the real battle is. It's about personal freedom, personal responsibility versus subcontracting out your personal responsibilities to the state.

The state's interest is in never having you see that that is a possibility. It's not in the state's interest to make you question whether we should be paying the amount of taxation that we have, whether the government are the right people to be looking after healthcare and monetary policy, is it a better situation where people can manage it better themselves? Why would the government ever promote that as an option? Similarly to Sean, my background, I've got degrees in politics and economics, and we did about two years on Marxism and on Keynesianism.

We did about two weeks on libertarian thinkers, even the kind of Enlightenment thinkers of the first Enlightenment age, you hardly touched them, other than to say they believed in individual rights and now we know that they're wrong and that the community is more important than the individual. No one's ever proved that, no one's ever actually said the individual isn't the best person to decide how to do what's right for them, it's just taken as an assumption that we need government and then we can argue about what type of government we need.

I think expecting government to actually be the people to suggest that it may not be needed is never going to happen, which is why it's important for people like us to go out and to speak to others and say, "Look, it's great that you worry about which political party you pick from, but let's actually spend some time and wonder if we need to pick in the first place."

Peter McCormack: Interesting! So even though you lead the Libertarian Party, you actually support the idea of not picking at all?

Adam Brown: So my ideal utopia would be a no government system, but I think we're so far away from that. I wouldn't like to wake up tomorrow and have no government because we've been conditioned for so many years, literally for 500 years to believe that government is the answer to all of our problems. There are large portions of the population who cannot handle the responsibility of being able to make their own choices, so I think we need to move slowly towards it, and that's why I'm a Libertarian politician.

But yeah, my goal, if I ever was in that position, would be to be the last Prime Minister of the country because I would like to expand that and move towards a much more localized system, where people have more input into the decisions that affect.

Peter McCormack: And when you're out canvassing Sean, and you're trying to explain this to people, this is a new concept for many people I'm sure you're talking to, what's the different kind of responses you get, and what is the key questions that people ask you, the key things they struggle with?

Sean Finch: When I speak to people at the door, and I explain the ideas of liberty, that you don't need government to solve your problems, the governments always make it worse, they're takers, they're not givers, they'll more likely take your rights and take your freedoms and take your money via taxation especially, than they are to provide anything, the ideas of socialism, for example, or socialist leaning ideas, is that it is a negative philosophy. I'm not a Conservative, and I give the Conservatives a lot of slack, but at least their philosophy is...

Well, they used to believe that anyway and I wouldn't call them Conservatives anymore really, is that at least it gives an idea that ultrapreneurism has said, "Don't rely on the state, you can do it yourself," whereas the other sort of big ... All of the parliamentary parties now are more of a believer in big state ideologies. They'd say that, "Oh, don't take risks, let the state look after you" and that's why you're seeing for the last couple of decades at least, that the state has grown bigger, the people because they've been conditioned through education, state education and culture itself, that's why the snowflake generation has sort of popped up because there's an idea of the state will always look after you, so you don't need to think for yourself.

But those ideas are starting to become more and more irrelevant, because as technology improves and especially with Bitcoin as well, even money is improving now in a sense, the idea for having a bigger government is becoming irrelevant and I think if you look at hundred years ago, with taxation, there were less than half the amount of taxes and regulations and what it does is that the more taxes there are, the more regulations there are, society actually stumps progression of human ingenuity. I think now it's brought us back 50 years, we should be way more ahead in advancement, but government only stops progression.

I feel that if you get rid of a lot of taxation, a lot of regulations, and allow technology to blossom more, we won't really need government! I think that it's inevitable that the government will have to be smaller, to the point where perhaps we won't even need one one day, because technology... We're doing things for ourselves. Look us now, we're on Zoom, speaking across... You're in Bedfordshire aren't you, Peter? Adam is in West Sussex and I'm in Kent. We're able to do this by ourselves, we're not relying on... This is the private market, this conversation.

This isn't because the government allowed it. I think that once you explain this on the doorstep, in a bit more of a quicker way, people start to go, "Yeah, you're right" and often when I do explain to them, they go, "Yeah, Sean, you've got my vote," because they've not heard it for the first time, they're so used to hearing Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dem, Green, "We'll get government to do it, government will solve our problem." It's like, "No, it won't. It will make it worse, guaranteed." It's like as Ronald Reagan said, "The worst thing you can ever hear is someone coming along, saying, 'Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'" It's the worst thing you ever hear and it's guaranteed to make it worse.

Peter McCormack: In some ways, I think this very strange situation we're in, where the Coronavirus has been a very good lens for observing the failings of government. But also at the same time, it's been a very good lens for observing the reliance that people have upon the state. So we've had lockdowns, but bailouts.

So I think if anything, now is a time where the likes of yourselves probably have a very good opportunity to further the ideas of libertarianism to people, to give people an alternative view, as I have seen right now with the rampant government money printing that there is an opportunity to further the message about what Bitcoin offers. But I also see it flip the other way.

I've also seen people in this process become even more reliant upon the state, even more supportive of the state's decisions and I've seen people very willing to support lockdowns and happy to download applications which track their every movement. So I'm finding it right now, it's a real lens, and I can see it going both ways. I can see there's an opportunity to further the message of liberty, but I also see people sinking further into relying upon the state.

Adam Brown: Yeah, I think that's definitely true. As they say, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." I think the role that the government has played during this crisis is to try and increase how dependable people are on them. I'm a great believer myself of the old adage of never blame a conspiracy when incompetence can be the reason, and I don't believe they're actually doing on purpose, but I think the effect of their view, because they start in the viewpoint that everybody needs government, they are then naturally trying to encourage everyone to be more and more dependent on them.

So what we're finding is the way that they paint the message of stuff, like you're going to lose your job, but don't worry, the Furlough Scheme is going to be there for you. There are small business loans that kind of like, "Look, your small business is going to shut down. But don't worry, we're going to loan you some money to get you through this." It's a government enforced lockdown of the economy. The government have forced people out of business, and now they're lending them money, and they're giving them benefits to say, "Aren't we great? Look how much we're helping you." I find the way that people are viewing the NHS at the moment is all part of just trying to incorporate into you that the government is the most important part of your life.

There is massive amounts of great work being done by doctors and nurses, but doctors and nurses are not the NHS. The NHS is the administration and the NHS has actually failed to protect people. We wouldn't be locked out if the NHS could do its job. So in fact, the doctors and nurses are doing a wonderful job despite the NHS, not because of it. At the last election, we put forward a healthcare plan based on a more European model, based on the Swiss and Dutch models, as well as the German model, which is they're localized and they're able to respond in much better ways to a crisis in a local area without having a one size fits all.

So one of the issues that we have at the moment with the lockdown is people in rural parts of the Southwest are being treated the same as people in the heart of London. Now clearly, a different approach is needed for both of those areas, but we can't have that because we have a single, monolithic health service. But the government's policy isn't to try and increase people's awareness of what they can do or how they can help us to try and make everybody dependent on the NHS, which is a government body, for being basically the heroes of the hour, when in fact actually the administration has let everyone down, no one more so than doctors and nurses that we're pretending to support.

So I think until we get away from this conversation, where we're saying, "The government is the answer or the things that government are doing are actually the cure when they're not, they're the cause," we're only ever going to get into a state where people are more and more reliant on the NHS, and in turn, the government. That's why it's important for us to put forward the other point as often as possible, to make sure people do actually think, "Hang on a minute, we wouldn't be in this situation if it wasn't for government inefficiencies."

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so that's an interesting point you raised because it often comes up, never let a good crisis go to waste. I certainly think there are leaders who abuse situations they want to control and they want to increase control. I think Erdogan in Turkey is a great example and I think what we're seeing in Hungary is a great example. I do though sometimes think, I don't know if it's always that way, so I don't know if Boris Johnson has sat there at the COBRA meetings, rubbing his hands, thinking, "Right, now I've got a chance to put new rules in place and create tighter control on the people."

Sometimes I wonder if it's just they are almost acting autonomously, just thinking, "Right, I need to solve this problem and this is how I solve the problem, I solve it with rules." It's almost like sometimes a natural occurrence for how humans think the problems should be solved, how they actually think the government should be solving the situation, rather than some kind of sinister plan. Can you empathize with that view?

Adam Brown: So I think that's exactly it. As I said before, it's not about malicious intent, necessarily. They come from the basis that rules are needed to solve problems, so therefore a bigger problem needs bigger rules. I think one of the best examples that showed this to me when I was first starting my political career about 20 years ago, they made a rule and they made a law to limit the amount of fixed odds betting machines available in casinos and bookmakers. So this made sense, they said, "This is a problem because people are betting on them, so we need to limit how many you can have in a store," so have got to limit the amount you can win from them.

So the bookmakers went, "Okay then, so what we'll do is we'll have 10 in each store" and they went, "Well, this is no good because now they've got 10 in each store. So now we need a law to limit how many stores there are and how many machines there are in each store", so they made that limit. So the bookmakers went, "That's fine, I'm going to open three stores next to each other" and they went, "Well, this is no good. Our high street is full of bookmakers. We need to limit how close bookmakers can be to each other to try and prevent this from happening."

So bookmakers started opening up all over town and they said, "Well this is no good, we've got bookmakers next to schools, we need to stop bookmakers opening up near schools." So the bookmakers went, "Fine, we'll close down" and then of course our high streets are empty. At no point did they realize that each one of these issues was caused by the earlier legislation and in fact, if you want to solve it, get rid of the first bit of legislation. It was just law on law upon law upon law, constantly funding a new problem. I think someone once said, "If it wasn't for unexpected consequences, government would have no consequences whatsoever" and that's true.

Every law they bring out has an effect they don't see coming, and then they bring out a law to try and replace it. It's like trying to chase the problem and constantly never understanding why it doesn't work. It doesn't work because their only ever solution is for more laws.

Peter McCormack: That's a great answer! Okay, I want to talk and go back to a previous point you were talking about. Let's talk about the NHS because it is an institution that's very hard to criticize in this country.

Adam Brown: Oh yeah!

Peter McCormack: Do not criticize the NHS! I haven't even approached that yet. So I've tried to talk about some tough subjects with friends recently. During the elections, I was very, very critical of the Labour Party. By the way, I didn't actually vote in the end, but I was very critical of a number of Corbyn's very socialist policies and I tried to explain to people the cost of these policies, but I didn't feel like I could vote for the Conservatives either. I just didn't vote. The NHS is a subject that I have yet to approach with some of my friends. They already think I'm a lunatic on Facebook, they think I'm the crazy one.

Adam Brown: Welcome to the club!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because it's a difficult concept to get across to people, because people, I think, are so conditioned to left and right and the government is the safety net for all our problems, rather than teach them personal responsibility. Now I'm not completely removed from the idea of some form of social safety net, I'm not removed from the idea, for example, of making properties wheelchair accessible.

There are certain things I haven't got fully away from yet and maybe I will at some point, but let's talk about the NHS. So let's talk about the problems with socialized healthcare, to begin with and then I'd like you to expand on the ideas that you had with regards to your proposals in your last manifesto that you talked about. But let's talk about socialized healthcare at the moment.

Adam Brown: Okay. Our biggest concern with the NHS, in fact our biggest concern with most of the most important things in the country is that it's full of politics. The NHS currently isn't actually a healthcare system, it's a political football. They call it... Someone said, it was "Schrodingers NHS, that is both the envy of the world and always on its last legs at the same time, and we're never sure which." We believe in this country that the NHS is great because the politicians make us think that the NHS is great. But in fact, the NHS is trying to do an impossible task, it's trying to create a one size fits all healthcare service for 60 million people spread across from one of the biggest cities in Europe through to rural countryside.

That's not an efficient system for anything, i.e. You look at any company that has so many things happening to it, it starts to go wrong and they have to break down and focus on the kind of key elements. That's what we were suggesting in our manifesto. So our manifesto is based on a market lead, but regional system. So the key thing for me has to get the politics out of it and to make it regional, so that people can actually see what's happening in their region. At the moment, we have bodies like NICE, who decide who gets the treatment. They're basically unaccountable to the people, people can't see what is there, and they're making a decision based on the entire country, where in fact in one region they may need care for a particular condition which isn't needed another region.

So until we get to a point where we can make those decisions at a local level and the people making them are answerable to the local people, I don't think we'll get to a situation where we can actually have the flexibility we need in the healthcare system. So we weren't suggesting anybody should have no access to healthcare, we don't want to go down the what people think of as the American model, even though the American model doesn't actually work as people think. But again, like the left and right politics, people seem to think in this country there is a choice between the NHS or the American system, as both of them are the extremes, and as the extremes, neither of them are the right one.

In fact, what we should be doing as adults, is having an intelligent debate and saying, "Right, this is what works for us, and that will probably be somewhere in between," which is what most of Europe has. They have a hybrid kind of private system, but with public support to make sure there is always that safety net. I don't want the world where if you break your leg you're just left in the street, and I don't think anybody really does, so I don't think that is a system that we would have because people are still compassionate. We're herd creatures as a base kind of thing, so I think we would always look out for those less fortunate than ourselves.

The question is whether we should be doing it through a centrally funded system where the money is taken, you have no control over how it's spent, or if it should be regional and you have input into how you're actually protected. With health insurance, the reason we like the health insurance system isn't because we're crazy free market capitalists and everything has to be done, but with health insurance you get choice, which means as an adult, you can decide what the right level of care is for you. If you want basic level of care and you don't want to have any of the extras, that's your choice. At the end of the day, you're an adult, so you should be allowed to make that choice.

I think most people probably pick a level of care that would cover them in the same way as they're covered now and again, that should be their choice. You should have the choice to have less care when you're younger, more care when you're older. But at the moment, we don't have any choice, and that means that we're getting a system that really doesn't work for people when they need it. During this COVID-19 outbreak, they put out a message saying you should use the NHS in the same way as you normally would and I have.

So I believed I had COVID-19 back in March, I contacted the NHS, and they said they wouldn't help me, which is the exact same way that I've always used the NHS, I've waited until I really needed it, and then I've been turned down for treatment because I'm not the right person at the right time.

Peter McCormack: But therefore, you do believe in some form of socialized healthcare?

Adam Brown: I believe in a social security net for health service. At the moment, I believe we need socialized healthcare because we've had an all encompassing socialized healthcare and we cannot go from there to a private model or to no healthcare, because people aren't willing to take responsibility for their own lives at the moment. People need to be taught that in the same way as you wouldn't take your kid and immediately get them to make them decisions, you need to learn how to make decisions for your own self.

The government have acted like an overprotective parent for far too long to just give people no care whatsoever. But going forward, I believe that, yeah, there would always be a safety net, I would always be willing to contribute towards a safety net that helped other people who are less fortunate than myself. But the idea is, I should be free to contribute to that and it should be a free decision. I don't believe we should get rid of it, I believe it should be voluntary.

Peter McCormack: But do you not fear that a voluntary system for contributions and socialized healthcare may end up leading to an underfunded socialized healthcare?

Adam Brown: As opposed to our current self-care system, which everyone says is fully funded, because I hear that our system's always underfunded itself, so I'm saying I don't believe that would necessarily be a different situation to what people are claiming now. But I do believe a voluntary service would need to balance its budget based on who it was serving, so obviously the prices would reflect how much money it needed. In terms of the social care aspect of it, I believe that people are generally good. My whole philosophy, the reason I got to libertarianism is because I believe that people are good people and will make the right decisions.

People are also incredibly generous, people donate billions and billions of pounds to charities already, despite the fact we have one of the highest tax rates in the world. If people were paying less tax, I don't see that they would then donate less money in order to help those less fortunate. I also think that people are pragmatist and as myself, I grew up in quite a poor area, I know full well that I could be back there at any point and it's in my best interest to make sure that there is a safety net, and I would be willing to contribute towards that and I think the majority of people would be the same. I don't think I'm extra special or extra generous, I'm just a normal person and most people would do the same decisions.

Peter McCormack: I think that goes back to my point of, I've always imagined how we wean ourselves off government and we wean ourselves off certain socialized aspects of the system. I also believe that it is within our interest to investigate which areas of the health service should be privatized. We always see that if there's any kind of questions around or ideas that parts of the health service would be privatized, it's immediately hit with, "This is the government selling off the health service to the US," and everyone is fearful of it. But my mother worked in the health service.

She was a nurse for 20 years, and she would often complain about the gatekeepers and the bureaucrats who did little to nothing in there, which you or I know, in a free market, in a private business, these people would not be able to survive in their positions. So I do believe that the free market for certain aspects of the health service would be better privatized. I don't know which part, so I wouldn't be foolish enough to say, "Well, I have a full plan for the NHS." I think certainly you could go through significant parts of the NHS with a fine-tooth comb and say, "Okay, this bit would probably be better privatized." Again, the answers I don't know, but I'm assuming you have similarish thoughts.

Sean Finch: Adam's right about especially two things, one, the NHS has indeed become a political football. We both stood in the last general election just gone, and I'm sure Adam will probably say the same as well, is that the candidates I stood against, so Green, Lib Dem, Labour, Conservative, all they were saying was the exact same thing about the NHS. In fact, they were trying to outbid each other by saying, "Oh, we'll give a billion extra pounds to the NHS," and the other one will say, "Oh, two billion, no, three billion, no, four" and when it got to me, "How much money would you give it?"

"Zero, because the problem with the NHS is that you can't throw money at it to solve the problems. The problem is the bureaucracy. It's not the nurses or the frontline doctors or anything like that, it's actually the bureaucracy." Even right now, during a pandemic, they're still recruiting for diversity officers. I've had personal experience with these job titles. I've been a firefighter and I worked for Royal Mail as well, and all these people do, diversity officers, is that they go and try and find problems where there are no problems. So an example I give is that in the fire service, we have layflat hoses and what that means is that when we bolt it out, say there's a house fire, we need to extend the lines, we simply extend the line by coupling the met point in the male adapter into the female adapter.

Well, guess what? After hundreds and hundreds of years of firefighting, there's now a massive problem when they call them "Male and female couplings" they want to call it "A" and "B" or something. There's never been a problem with it, so they've gone out of their way to do it, and the NHS via our taxpayer money is funding for these busy job titles. The second point is what Adam says, is that it's choice. Let me call myself an an-cap and I wouldn't call myself a minichist, I would call myself a voluntarist. Yeah, that's probably what I would say, because I think it all comes down to choice.

You don't have to decide what needs to be privatized and what doesn't need to be privatized, what you need to do is to make taxation choice that you can have your NHS if you want, but there should be an opt-out clause for people who decide that, "You know what? I don't think the NHS is a good service," or "You know what? I can take care of myself by having private healthcare or having a private insurance system." The reason why I say this is because the NHS, despite if it gives a good service or a bad service, it's always guaranteed to get money because it's done via taxation, and taxation of course is taken from you by force and you don't have a choice in it whatsoever.

That's why the free market and charities, private companies and charities are always vastly superior to a state service, is because they have an incentive to improve because if they give you a bad service or sell you a bad product, you, as a consumer, which is actually more powerful than [inaudible 00:37:13], in my opinion, you would then take your money, your business, to a competitor. The NHS doesn't have that because at the end of the day, they will always get your money. If it became about choice, and they said, "Okay, you can have your ..." I don't want to get rid of the state.

Personally, I want to make it without it being absolute choice. I'm not about absolutes. If you want to keep your state and you continue being a member of the state, for people who say, "No, I don't want to fund that bus service or that healthcare system," they should be able to opt out because then the NHS would realize that, "Oh wait, if we don't do a good job and actually get that PPE to those staff when they actually need to, we might not get paid." I'll tell you what would happen. It will start trimming the fat of, do we need these diversity officers, do we need these managers, do we need these other useless titles that are getting paid way more than frontline nurse and paramedic?

Then it will be streamlined, more efficient, more cheaper, and people will then go, "Oh, you know what? Yeah okay, I will be a member of the NHS now." But I've had personal experiences. A girl that I used to go out with, she was constantly told by NHS staff that there was nothing wrong with her, nothing wrong with her and it's been a point where they even tried to say that she had a mental issue and it's all in her head. Then as soon as she went private, guess what? Diagnosed on the first day with a problem. You won't get that at the NHS because they're always going to get the money. That's what I think personally.

Peter McCormack: Another interesting area I'd like to explore with you is that if you'd asked me five years ago my opinion on guns and weapons and ownership of guns, I would be very, very anti guns. I've got into some arguments with some, certainly Americans, about this because most of my audience is based in America. Then I went out to the States, and I shot my first gun, which was an interesting experience.

Then I went up to Wyoming, spent some time with what you would call a Republican libertarian, who explained to me the role of guns in his life for hunting etc and I've got to this place where I'm really kind of confused with the whole subject because, firstly, we don't really have First Amendment protection in our country, which I think is a shame, and we certainly don't have Second Amendment protection. But I have found certain arguments very interesting that somebody should be able to defend their home, if someone is to access it and also I find the militias that you get in the US quite interesting.

Now I'm not a huge fan of these militias during the lockdown who've descended upon state buildings with their AR-15s and I think they stood there trying to argue for the re-opening the economy. I understand their argument, just I find that a little bit intimidating. But at the same time, I can't remember the case, but there was one where a militia was trying to protect the farmland of a guy, I think it was in Nevada and I find that side of the US, this Second Amendment right and protection against tyranny kind of interesting, but I can never firmly position myself saying, "Yes, I want that or I don't want it."

I'm kind of lost with that side of things. Where do you guys fit? Because we're in the UK and very few people own a gun. Most of them have in a locked cabinet and it's because they're either a farmer or they're hunting. We certainly don't have people who walk around the streets holding guns, that you might do in some US states. I'll start with you, Sean. What do you feel about this?

Sean Finch: Yeah, you're right. We don't have a culture of liking guns or using guns. That was taken away from us about a hundred years ago because there was the Russian Revolution. Obviously, it caused the revolution, and it ended up with their royalty being killed and the reason why these sort of gun laws were introduced was because the British government at the time, they were fearful that that was going to happen here. But if you look at every single state, which give roles to a dictator, they were all from states which, guess what, had gun control laws, because what it does is it takes away ...

The whole point of, like in America, people having guns is because if there ever was to rise a fascistic sort of a dictatorship of some sort, the idea is that every single individual would have a weapon and would have a defence against a fascistic sort of state. That's why there's militias in America, whereas here, the gun laws only work against law abiding citizens. The reason why criminals are criminals, it's because they don't respect the law.

So when these gun laws are passed, what it did was it essentially disarmed the law abiding sensible people who would have never used a gun in a criminal fashion and it made us defenceless against the criminals, because criminals don't respect the laws and of course, they're going to have guns and they're going to rob us, and that's why you see, especially gun crime in central London has skyrocketed, because gun rules don't work, they only work on law abiding people.

So me personally, yes, I have a little bit of a military background, was in the Territorial Army for a bit, but I think personally that yeah, I am progun and I think that it's a fundamental innate right that people should be able to defend themselves. That's what I say when people come up to me, "Oh, are you pro gun?" I always say, "Yes, I'm pro self-defence." So even here in this country, simple pepper spray is classed as a firearm. Now I think personally women should be able to go around the streets carrying pepper spray in self-defence. Is that crazy? I don't think so.

Peter McCormack: I think the other thing is though, that I look at a country like New Zealand or Australia, and they changed their laws when they had more liberal gun laws. They've changed them usually as a reaction to some mass shooting. I think the one we had in Christchurch recently, which saw a reaction and the one in Australia, I can't remember where it was and then they certainly saw an aggregate fall in the number of gun deaths, but at the same time there is an argument that it reduces your freedom. What about you Adam? Where do you sit with this, and do you understand where my conflict is?

Adam Brown: Yes, I think I probably come from pretty much the same kind of place that you do. So my view on gun control or gun ownership, I suppose more than the control part, is I don't think it's for me. If we had no gun control tomorrow, I would not go and buy a gun because I've not been brought up around guns, it's not been part of my life and it's not something I see as being important. The beautiful thing for me about libertarianism is just because that's my view doesn't mean that it has to affect how I view other people. If other people want to have guns, I don't believe I have the right to tell them not to.

I don't think it's my job to put my views as the right views. I think they're my views, I hold them myself and if someone else wants to hold guns, if they want to have a room where they just go and look at their guns, then that's fine, if that's what they're into. People are into all different stuff, and it's not for me to say what's right or wrong. Where I do agree with Sean is that I'm definitely pro self-defence. I think in this country we have taken away the ability to defend ourselves, and we're relying on the police to defend us for us, but another saying that I've heard recently, it goes, "When seconds count, the police are only half an hour away." The ability to call the police to help you in a life or death situation isn't going to save your life.

My personal preference would be for a non-lethal kind of pepper spray or something like that. That can save your life, and the fact that we've taken away that ability... And it kind of goes to this thing that we do in this country where we will punish the group because of the actions of the individual, but we don't ever see the individuals having the rights for themselves and because some people may use pepper spray wrongly, we will ban pepper spray from everybody. In a certain sense, what that does is it means everyone who would use it in the correct way loses it, the people who would use it in the wrong way continue to use it.

So it doesn't actually stop the problem, it just punishes everyone else. It means now that hard criminals are the only people who actually have weapons to use and I think it kind of goes back to how we're using everything these days. You mentioned the First Amendment and free speech. The one thing I never thought we would give up in this country is free speech. I remember when we had the Danish Muhammad cartoon and I was speaking to a Muslim friend of mine, and he said, "This is serious, because they've basically taken the most sacred thing in Islam, and they've drawn a cartoon of the Prophet, which is not allowed."

I was like, "Yeah, I think this is going to be a real issue because in the West, our biggest and our most prized asset is our freedom, so something that impinges on freedom of speech will never be... We'll never go against freedom of speech and that is what we care about the most." Now I find ourselves here 12, 15 years later, we've given up on free speech entirely, so it turns out I was completely wrong. I don't know the exact numbers, but several thousand people are cautioned or spoken to by the police every month or every year about things they write on social media.

We've gone into a situation now where saying the wrong thing can make you lose your job, make you lose your entire kind of freedom. It used to be a case when we would just argue if people would say, "We think you're wrong." Now we have to close them down, and then de-platform them and everything else. It's all part of the same thing! We are being taken away our ability to protest and whether it's our ability to say, "We don't believe this is right," or whether it's our ability to say, "I want to have a gun," it's all part of the same thing.

It seems like anything that takes us away from the ability to being controlled is being suppressed and again, I don't think it's necessarily being done through force, it's done by the fact that some people have used things badly and therefore a law is brought out to punish everybody. But the end result is that the law-abiding people are having less and less ability to kind of say, "Actually, I don't agree with this," and the people who are doing the criminal acts are continuing to carry weapons and say what they like in the first place.

Peter McCormack: Do you feel like in the UK we are sliding down a slippery slope to authoritarianism? I would always say, "Oh, it would never happen here in the UK." But I feel like there is enough bad signals out there for us, we may not end up say ... I don't see us ending up like Turkey, I don't see we ending up with a dictator.

But I certainly see us losing many of our freedoms and liberties in this country and I personally find it quite concerning. But even more concerning is the fact that so many people seem to fail to recognize that this is happening and actually buy into hate laws, hate speech laws or buy into mass surveillance in London because they believe that they're being afforded the protection by the state.

Adam Brown: Yes, I think what people don't seem to realize in this country is any power you give the person in charge who agrees with can be used just as easily by the person in charge who doesn't. So we're slipping into this authoritarian state because the people are doing stuff that is popular with the majority. There are things that like hate speech laws, I understand them entirely, because at the end of the day you don't want to hate speech.

I would prefer to live in a world where there weren't racist people, there weren't horrible people who were saying horrible things to people all the time, but we don't live in that world. So the choice isn't between having racists and not having racists, it's between having racists and being able to identify them or having racists hidden. I think that's where we're kind of missing the point, is that we're restricting people's ability to speech on something that was like, "Yeah, we all agree that that is bad, but most of us agree that is bad, so let's restrict it." But then that law sits there, and then next week that can be used by somebody else to restrict people criticizing healthcare for example, or the government directly or politicians.

We could quite easily say now, because we've got these laws, to say anything negative is wrong, in which case what role does the press have in holding people to account? We would lose the ability to kind of criticize anybody at all. I think, as we've said a couple of times, it's not even like it's happening through a diabolical plan, it's not like an Erdogan coming to power and suppressing all of his opponents. It's just, little by little, we're willing to just say, "Actually, I agree with this, so therefore I won't stand up and say that it's wrong."

My personal view is that I don't agree with what you have to say, but I will give my life for you to have the right to say it. We have lost that, we've now gone into a bit of, "I agree with you, therefore that's all right," and what we should be saying is, "Even though I agree with this, the amount of freedom we're giving up is too much."

Peter McCormack: The real lens for me for observing how dangerous this is, I'm actually being sued in the High Court right now by a man called Craig Wright for calling him a fraud. He's a man who claims to be the inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. I don't believe he is, many people don't believe he it and the cost of the defence is hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pounds. So the cost of defending speech through litigation is beyond the reach of most people. Thankfully, I've got somebody helping me fund my case because they support what I'm saying.

But without that protection, I would not be able to defend myself and therefore I would either have to represent myself and do a poor job, bankrupt myself, or admit defeat. So what it actually made me realize is that by having controls over speech, you are giving more power to the wealthy and the elite to control criticism of them and can control what may be fair and open criticism of them, and actually also therefore restricting the freedom of the press.

That's the thing that I find the saddest, actually, because free speech, I think is a great leveller. Restricting speech creates inequality in what you can actually stand up for and that really concerns me. Okay, listen, I can't do this show and not ask you guys about Bitcoin and one of the reasons things I find quite interesting is I came to libertarianism through Bitcoin, but I've spoken to lots of libertarians outside of the Bitcoin world, and it doesn't seem to have fully caught on.

It doesn't seem that this kind of separation of money and state, this form of money which cannot be inflated by the government, that cannot be controlled by central bankers, it still hasn't been widely adopted within libertarian communities. So it would be great for me to know what your understanding of Bitcoin is and what you guys think about it, because I actually don't know.

Sean Finch: Yeah, the Libertarian Party, to my knowledge anyway, we're the only party which, firstly we take donations via Bitcoin, via our website and I think we're the only party to do that. During our manifesto, our recent 2019 manifesto, we gave a choice to all of our members, and we said how should we base our money on, because this fiat currency that we have now is funny money, it is nothing, it is not freedom because it gives the Bank of England this right, this power of just printing more money and just essentially stealing our savings, our money via inflation, it's not right!

So we gave the option of, should we do it by gold, should we bring back the gold standard, should we do it by Bitcoin? So we actually gave an option for Bitcoin. It didn't win this time around when our manifesto... The result was gold, which is fair enough, but the idea of Bitcoin is growing and growing. Even people in our party, they don't... I'm relatively new to Bitcoin, I'm relatively new to cryptocurrencies really and it is quite hard to get around because again, we're breaking the conditioning of what we've been taught via education systems, via cultural institutions, via everything, via state services that only money, only fiat currency is the only proper one and it's not.

Whenever I go to a store or a pub or whatever and I hand over a 10 pound note let's say, I know that this is nothing and there is no difference to this from Monopoly for me. At least with Bitcoin and gold and other sort of crypto currencies, at least, like you said, it can't be printed by government and it can't be constantly devalued because every time it's devalued... This is why I'm worried about the lockdown as well. They're borrowing more money and when they borrow more money, it means printing more money. When they print more money, it devalues the money and it's exactly what happened in Germany after the First World War, they had the hyperinflation.

I think this is going to accelerate it more into that and this is why we sort of believe in Bitcoin because we encourage competitions of all currency. So that's what we want, that's in our manifesto. We say that we want anything between two parties, if you recognize this as a valuable currency that has value, then fine, use it. That's what we're about! We want to take away the ability from the banks to just continue with printing and just constantly devaluing the currency because this is what's happened, the more we borrow money, the more that our children's children are going to be heavily in debt before they're even born, and I think they're going to be paying off this sort of debt for the rest of their lives.

People think that young people now have it bad by not being able to buy property, what do you think it's going to be like in the future? It's going to be even worse and with that sort of mentality, they're going to run even more to these parties that promised them the world and saying that, "Oh, we're going to give you free stuff." Well you know what, nothing is free in reality. You're going to pay for that in some way, whether it's your civil liberties being taken or your entire property or whatever it is. You're going to lose something because government only takes, it never gives.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm worried a lot about. My son's 16, so he's got two years of schooling left before he enters into the field of work, whichever field he chooses and my worry is that we are potentially almost certainly creating another lost generation, whereby the next potentially, I don't know, 5, 10 years, is we're having to try and repay back these loans. We've seen what happened with austerity, we've seen the impact, and I do worry about this quite a bit. What about you, Adam? How much time have you spent looking at Bitcoin? Is it something you've taken much of an interest in?

Adam Brown: Like most people, I probably have to admit that it's something that I've always been interested in, but I'm a bit too lazy to spend a lot of time finding out about this...

Peter McCormack: I know this great show that you can listen to that would be a good introduction!

Adam Brown: I agree, it's good! But I think in terms of adoption widely, it's probably the same kind of situation we have in the Libertarian Party, in the fact that because it's coming from such an unknown, and it is a complete reversal of system... It's always been a case of government equals money, so the government controls the money and the government decides on monetary policy. That's just what we're taught, is what everybody accepts as the fact. I don't think anyone ever even considers, for the majority of people, the idea of like a gold standard currency is long gone in the past as well, so people don't even understand how it would work.

When it first started, I was talking to a lot of people, and they were saying the problem is no-one backs it up, there's no-one to protect it like currency. Currency is protected by government, and no-one protects Bitcoin, so you can't be sure of what it's worth. I think now we're seeing the main thing is that, you can't take politics out of politics, so anything that has a political influence is always going to be subject to kind of populism of the local politicians and if COVID-19 is going to teach us anything, it's the fact that there is no politician out there anymore who doesn't believe in the magic money tree and the magic money tree only comes by devaluing currency.

So having a currency that can't be devalued is massively important in order for people to actually be able to understand what they have and what it's worth. I have money saved in cash, I am now earning 0.001% interest on that every single year, so I'll be lucky if I had a pound interest in the next rest of this year or whatever.

Peter McCormack: Well, we should throw something into that as well. You may be earning a pound interest over the next year, but actually your purchasing power is almost certainly falling with inflation, so there's an incentive to...

Adam Brown: And we did have high inflation because of the amount of money pumped into the system.

Peter McCormack: But potentially, I spoke to some economists and they're not sure if this will be a hyperinflationary event, they're not sure. But certainly we see inflation every year as a government target, so if your interest is lower than the rate of inflation and you're not investing that money, your wealth is being eroded. It is a hidden tax!

Adam Brown: Yeah, absolutely. Unfortunately, I took lots of my money invested in stock market instead to try and avoid that, then that's gone down even further over the last couple of months. So luckily, being a libertarian, I also have a small supply of physical gold and silver as well, so I should hopefully be all right. But it's a concern, the fact that everything that we try and do to protect our wealth can be undone by a politician in a second. Just talking about the inflationary effects, obviously my degree is in economics as well.

The only reason we're not going to have an inflationary effect, ironically, is because the recession that it's going to cause is going to be so bad that the recessionary effect and the inflationary effect will possibly cancel each other out or we won't know which one will have the biggest effect. It's only because we're in such an unprecedented time, there's never been a government shutdown of the global economy ever, so we don't really know what effect it's going to have. But if we don't have inflation, it's only because everything is so bad that it's so bad to stop the inflation. So I'm not sure if that's going to go in the win column or not.

So let say, on Bitcoin itself, I don't have any Bitcoin, but it's literally a case of the [Inaudible 01:03:22]. It's always been so confusing to me and I've always assumed that I've missed the boat. Then I'm like, "Oh, I've missed the boat, look how much it's worth now, it's obviously too late to get onto it." Then you see it spike up again, and you're like, "Well now I've definitely missed the boat this time." But our treasurer at the party is a massive Bitcoin fan and has always pointed out how stupid I am, so I know it's my fault. But it's just something that I feel like I've probably missed myself, but I need to put some time into it.

Peter McCormack: Well, you maybe missed the boat in certain cycles of Bitcoin and if you only purely look at it in terms of an investment, but I look at it as a couple of things. I look at it now not just as an investment, but I look at it as a hedge against government incompetence and a hedge against potential hyperinflationary events or even government seizure. For me, it is a hedge, but it's also a very long-term game I play. I don't think I'll ever sell any for at least 10 years. But I actually think that there is a more important point potentially for you guys, in that there is this potential to separate similar how...

Well, I've been reading about the US Constitution recently and I think it was Jefferson who talked about the separation of church and state, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I actually think the separation of money and state is a very, very important part of holding government responsible and even if you can't separate money and state, at least having a form of money where they cannot just print their way out of incompetence. So for me, I always wonder why something like Bitcoin doesn't become a key pillar of say, a manifesto.

Perhaps it will in the future, but I would have thought it would be very interesting thing to see as part of a manifesto. I am also disappointed you don't have any Bitcoins, so what I'm going to say is, get a wallet, go and download a wallet, send me your address, and I will send you your £100 of Bitcoin. I will be very proud to have converted you into a Bitcoiner, so please go and do that, and please email me your recipient address. Sean, teach him how to do it! Get him a wallet...

Sean Finch: Yeah, I will. I will try!

Peter McCormack: But yeah, so listen, that's where I am with that, and I hope it becomes something you look at more. I will say, I appreciate you both coming on the show as well just to talk about these subjects because this has kind of been refreshing to me, because some of the an-caps weren't like this, because that is just no government, but I actually believe there is a role for a more kind of a practical libertarianism, one which helps kind of push people towards a goal of less state, smaller state and I think that's a really important part of libertarianism.

I know not everyone agrees, but personally I do. So I appreciate you coming on the show and discussing it. If people want to find out more about the party and follow you guys, just start with you, Sean, where can they find you?

Sean Finch: We have two websites at the moment. The newest one is libertarianparty.co.uk, but the donation one, our Bitcoin sort of store is libertarianpartyuk.com. So it's there and it's also where we'll be running candidates next year, in the 2021 local elections, also the Mayor of London elections and the assembly members have been pushed back a year, and I'm hoping to stand as a London assembly member. I'm going to start possibly a GoFundMe, but if anyone can contribute to that, that'd be fantastic, even in Bitcoin if possible.

But also we've got a conference coming up, we have Dominic Frisby, I don't know if you know who that is, but he wrote a book and he's a comedian. He's a money pundit as well, and he wrote a book called "Bitcoin: the Future of Money." So we're hoping to get him to speak a bit more about perhaps not just Bitcoin, but at least cryptocurrencies as well, including Bitcoin. He's a big Bitcoin guy and that will be in Wales in October, so hopefully, it's to push... You're right, the reason why parties do not talk about Bitcoin is simply because they don't really understand economics, like all the parties in Parliament at the moment, all they focus on is civil liberties, if they even really do believe in that themselves.

Freedom is made up of two things, it's made up of civil liberties and economic liberty. We do both, parties only do one. All of the other parties, including the ones that are not in Parliament, they are what I call "Half freedom parties." You need economic liberty and I believe that Bitcoin is that pathway to economic liberty because it has a limit, it can't be printed, and it gives it does give people just more freedom in general.

Peter McCormack: Well, perhaps I can become the Libertarian candidate for Bedford at some point! And you Adam, if people want to follow you, where do they find you?

Adam Brown: So you don't have to follow me personally. Obviously, I'm on Twitter @adamgbrown. But yeah, go on to our website, libertarian.co.uk is actually our latest news, so it's the more accessible one. The other website is more about membership system. But obviously we're on Twitter, we're on Facebook, we're everywhere that you want to be. So just look for Libertarian Party and you'll find us.

Peter McCormack: All right, well I wish you all the best, really enjoyed this. Stay in touch and perhaps we'll do it again in a few months!

Adam Brown: Thank you!

Sean Finch: Thanks!