WBD484 Audio Transcription
Collectivism v Individualism with Robert Breedlove
Interview date: Monday 4th April
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Robert Breedlove. 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.
Robert Breedlove is a philosopher within the Bitcoin space. In this interview, we discuss useful fictions used for collective organisation, slavery as the violation of property rights, Bitcoin changing the logic of violence, and the reality of an anarcho-capitalist world.
“What the fuck is society? Is it this group of people? Is it that group of people? It’s a useful fiction – we’re describing a group of people with a fictional term, like society, or collectivist, or communist, or whatever the term is, and you don’t know who’s included and excluded from that group so you can never have clarity of conversation; whereas if you focus on the individual, that’s very clear where the individual starts and ends.”
— Robert Breedlove
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: You know why you think that?
Robert Breedlove: Because I see the world through freedom-coloured glasses.
Peter McCormack: So, I just put out a show with Marty Bent. I'm more on the European collectivist side of the spectrum, he's more on the American individualist side. When you go into the YouTube comments, half the people agree with me, half the people agree with Marty. Actually, there's a few in the middle saying, "Great discussion, thanks for having it", which is a complete reflection of society right now.
How to define society
Robert Breedlove: Yes. So, it's so complicated because, in a sense we do have to be, and I say this very delicately, collectivist in a way. We have to get on together, we have to have relations with one another that work. But the problem I think, and a lot of people point to this, like Mises and Rand, when you get into collectivism, it's like where do you draw the lines? Where do you circumscribe that group? Where do you say, "This is the group"?
When you say something loose like "society", what the fuck is society? Is it this group of people, is it that group of people? It's a useful fiction. We're describing a group of people with a fictional term like society, or collectivist, or communist, or whatever the term is, and you don't know who's included and excluded from that group, so you can never have clarity of conversation. Whereas, if you focus on the individual, it's very clear where the individual starts and ends.
So, I think that's why, to actually get groups to operate well, you need to really focus on individual liberties and rights. And that's why I just swing so hard, and I know we'll disagree on this, but regulation, policy, anything that's not voluntary, or any situation where people don't have the ability to opt out; because ultimately, the power to say no is what makes something voluntary. If you can't say no to it, then it's being forced upon you.
I think that is, and this is where we get into that term "fiat", right, that dirty word, doing something because an authority says so under a veiled threat of force; where my thinking is at with that now, that's like a corrosive acid on human interrelations, I just don't think it works. I'm just trying to go into that in my work now. I think there's serious psychological implications at the individual and collective level from trying to tell people, "This is how you have to be organised. This is how you raise your children, by the way, by fiat. Do this because I said so, otherwise you'll get punished". I don't think you can take that and map that to adult relationships in any sustainable way. Even people that want to be told what to do, that needs to be voluntary.
Peter McCormack: Well, this is where we can try and map our work to each other and what we both do. Because, you find what you think is the answer, and I always think about how do we get there and what are the implications of that; and that's why I think you get to absolute liberty, whereas I think of the consequences of moving from where we are as a collectivist society to absolute liberty, what that means and what's going to work and what doesn't work. And you talk about what is society? I don't think there's any hard definition, apart from what a dictionary will tell you. But society, for me, is perhaps the boundaries within which laws exist.
So, within the UK, you have a UK society, because they're fixed by a fixed set of laws; whereas, in the US, you have a US federal society fixed set of rules, but you also have state regulations, so you have state laws. But you can also talk about society as smaller groups. So, I think you can attribute it to multiple definitions.
Robert Breedlove: Yeah, you can, but that's the danger, right, because then you can have someone come into a position of power, inside that political hierarchy, and they can justify any action they want to take for the good of society. Isn't that what Trudeau just did, "For the good and safe --", whatever bullshit rhetoric he's pumping out, to freeze individuals' bank accounts and blatantly violate their private property rights, in broad daylight for all to see. And then, he can sweep that under the moral camouflage of, "It's good for society, and we're fixing the state".
I didn't pay attention to his rhetoric but that, I think, is the problem, because you end up with this infinite scapegoat of a useful fiction that you can just paint anything -- that's what Stalin did, that's what everyone did. They never did anything that was actually bad, or never admitted to it.
Peter McCormack: They never admitted to it.
Robert Breedlove: That's what I'm saying, it was always for the good of society, or always the greater good. Some appeal to a useful fiction, so that's the point I'm trying to make, is that there's a danger in that. We need the useful fictions to scale and organise ourselves and communicate, right. We need to talk about these different groups of people, their interests and all of that, but we have to remember that it is a fiction, all of them are fictions; the individual is real. Only the individual acts, thinks, decides, uses means and ends.
If we start extrapolating individual thoughts, feelings, actions onto a group, that's when the lines get blurry and people, tyrants in particular, can deceive and confuse us.
Peter McCormack: I agree. But I also recognise the challenges of building, excuse me for using it, a society based on just the individual and removal of coercion, because I don't think you can ever remove coercion; I just think it exists either under a structure of law, or a lawless structure, but I still think it exists, because men and mainly men, let's be honest, are aggressive, domineering, ambitious individuals. And wherever you see a breakdown in society and a breakdown in law and order, you tend to see oppression, violence, rape.
So, if we're going to discuss the problems in, say, democracy, let's start with democracy, and we want to move to a more individualist society, we have to talk about, what does that mean? Because, you can look at countless examples around the world of where it's a complete failure of society, and you see the thing is, the reason I like democracy, or western liberal democracies -- not currently, there's a lot of problems -- is that, I think it's a leveller and I think it gives the opportunity to create rules and laws and a structure for millions of people to operate under.
It is completely and utterly flawed, I get it, but I also find I can't see the world of the individual, the Sovereign Individual, that isn't one that is still governed by hierarchy, it's just a different hierarchy; and the ability to use violence against others, because you control greater wealth, or you control a great set of arms, without the rule of law, I think you would still have coercion, and you could possibly even get back to the stages of slavery and other forms of coercion. I know where you go with this, but that requires every person to be a good, decent person.
Robert Breedlove: All right, a number of things to unpack here. One, just to put a button on the useful fiction thing, so we're talking about the US society or the UK society, or the US economy versus the UK economy, again these are all arbitrary, useful fictions we're drawing around --
Peter McCormack: What do you mean by a fiction?
Robert Breedlove: When you say "The US economy", where do you draw the lines around that? Which transaction is the US economy versus an international economy, especially in the digital age, all these bright lines we have in Keynesian Economic models, they're being increasingly blurred?
Peter McCormack: Sure, but it's not a fiction; there is a US economy, which is the gross domestic product of every person who lives within that country.
Robert Breedlove: Okay, so this particular show. Your audience is presumably somewhat international.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Robert Breedlove: So, where are you actually creating economic value?
Peter McCormack: I probably create economic value in multiple places, which is fine, but my revenue is on my P&L, which is recorded by a British accountant and gets reported to HMRC in the UK. So, I contribute to the gross domestic product of the UK.
Robert Breedlove: Right, so even when you're measuring something in GDP terms, and this is why the Austrians are just so anti-measurement everything, because it's still arbitrary; you've taken an arbitrary formula, applied it to an arbitrary scope of trade and said, "This is the number that represents this". But there's an element of arbitrariness that goes into it. So, my general point is this.
Peter McCormack: Just to say that I'm not a fan of GDP, and the reason I'm not a fan of GDP is because there's that constant need for growth; and the constant need for growth, I think, distorts money.
Robert Breedlove: Yes.
Peter McCormack: But at the same time, the British economy is not a fiction; it exists.
Robert Breedlove: I think there's only one economy.
Peter McCormack: What, the global economy?
Robert Breedlove: That's right.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Robert Breedlove: Just like there's only one weather. We can say there's US weather, there's UK weather, but in the end, it's one complex system that's all interconnected, and this is a butterfly effect, right.
Peter McCormack: But you can still break it down.
Robert Breedlove: Yes, and it's useful to break it down. But the actuality, the reality that we live in, is that it's all continuous, it's all interconnected.
Peter McCormack: I think it's useful to break it down.
Robert Breedlove: Again, that's why I say "useful fiction", it's very useful. It's very useful to describe ourselves as Republic versus Democrat or leftist versus rightist. There are all these utilities to the fiction, even words themselves. Ultimately, you and I share meaning that we assign to a certain word, that's how we communicate; but that word is not the thing we're describing. There's a phenomenon that's deeper and more complicated than that word. So just like the words themselves are useful fictions, we build these larger fictions.
Peter McCormack: So, is gender a useful fiction?!
Robert Breedlove: I don't think I'm qualified for that discussion!
Peter McCormack: I think it's on your list!
Robert Breedlove: I think there are biological realities and I think there are socially-constructed realities.
Peter McCormack: Okay, so why can't we have 26 genders then?
Robert Breedlove: Go for it. Just don't coerce me to use your chosen one! It's imaginary, you're playing imaginary ultimately, and imaginary is not to disregard it and say that there's no use at all. The reasons humans run shit in the world is because we can play imaginary like no other animal, right.
Peter McCormack: By the way, people listening are now going to be thinking, "Pete's a Lia Thomas fan, he wants Lia Thomas competing against women". I fucking don't, I think it's dumb.
Robert Breedlove: Is that the man swimmer, woman thing?
Peter McCormack: Well, trans-female swimmer, who should not be competing against biological females.
Robert Breedlove: No, agreed 100%.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but do what the fuck you want.
Robert Breedlove: Well, let people just self-organise. If all the women want to go into a separate group and have a women-only competition that's based on actual biological reality, then let them self-organise into that.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. We're on a tangent, by the way, let's go back! So, I disagree that it's a fiction, I think that it's a reality which is a useful construct in certain ways and un-useful in others, but I don't think it's fiction, I think it's reality.
Robert Breedlove: Well, here we are, so we're disagreeing right now on the word "fiction" itself?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Robert Breedlove: You're taking fiction, it seems to me --
Peter McCormack: Dictionary, please!
Robert Breedlove: You're taking fiction to mean something that's false, not real, not true, storybook, fairy tale, whatever.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Robert Breedlove: Whereas, I take fiction as something representational. We are human beings existing in a complex reality that we cannot possibly deal with, so we simplify it into language, into social institutions, into even habits, right. We have routines and things like this. All of that simplification is done through fictionalisation, useful fictions. Businesses; what's a business? It's a useful fiction.
Peter McCormack: Fiction, "A type of literature that describes imaginary people and events, not real ones".
Danny Knowles: Look at the second one.
Peter McCormack: "A thing that is invented or imagined and is not true". It kind of says we're both right, because invented or imagined is what you're saying, but it's not true.
Robert Breedlove: This actually makes you look more right, but I guess I'm just taking it --
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but you see why I disagree, right?
Robert Breedlove: Here's the thing, here's an example that's useful from Peterson. Numbers; what's a number? What's one, two, three, four, five? What is that? Where is that?
Peter McCormack: I don't know how to answer that, it's strange.
Robert Breedlove: It's a category, it's a useful fiction.
Peter McCormack: It's like, "Describe the colour, green". You can't describe colour.
Robert Breedlove: Well, that's a different thing, because now we don't know if what you call green and I call green, we can never reconcile that actually.
Peter McCormack: I know, isn't that fucking amazing! I came to that reality one time. That shirt's orange --
Robert Breedlove: Yeah, but it might look blue to me.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Robert Breedlove: But I'd call it orange.
Peter McCormack: But there's no way of knowing that at all. Isn't that fucking wild?!
Robert Breedlove: But numbers are a little different, because there is a way, I might be getting outside of my scope here, but let me just stick to the useful fiction nature of numbers. It's almost like the most universal useful fiction. So, anything that exhibits the property of three-ness, being in triple, triplicate form, that I can see that there's three distinct units of a thing, I can assign three. And that's anything in the universe. So, maths is the ultimate useful fiction, and that gives us the highest resolution map to deal with reality.
Peter McCormack: Again, I wouldn't call it fiction though, because fiction says it's not real, and it is real.
Robert Breedlove: But where is the number, how is it real, where is the substance of a number?
Peter McCormack: I don't know how to answer that, but numbers are real.
Robert Breedlove: Well then, you're saying socially-constructed reality is real. So you're saying human imaginary play is real.
Peter McCormack: I'm saying the gross domestic product of a country is real.
Robert Breedlove: Real, but arbitrary.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, as is maths, but it's not fiction, because fiction says it's not real.
Robert Breedlove: Well, we have a base-10 number system today, right?
Peter McCormack: Well, otherwise, everything is fiction.
Robert Breedlove: Well, here's the deal, here's the punchline with Peterson's number analogy. Fiction is not not real, fiction is hyper real. Maths applies to so many things, it gives us this unbelievable grip on reality, like all of these amazing electronics, flying round in aeroplanes, artificial lights, everything we do in the economy, it's based on that foundational grip of reality we have through mathematics. So, it's extremely real. It's the reason we are technologically powerful, eating steak every night for dinner. I don't go out and kill the cow, I just show up at the restaurant. All that's built on maths.
So it's not real versus fake, it's more nuanced than that in my opinion, in that it's data compression. The world's infinitely complex, there's a lot of shit going on, you can't possibly take it all in at any one time, so you have to reduce it into something that's manageable, and then we can communicate in those terms, whether it's maths or language; and then, that's what gives us this profound grip on reality that lets us outcompete every other species in the world and live luxuriously at the top of the food chain.
Peter McCormack: But that's going to be the same, whether it's your version of society or mine?
Robert Breedlove: Well, somewhat, but then you can't slide into the post-modernism failure of two plus two equals five. There is an objective reality to mathematics too, right; there's an axiomatic assumption and then you deduce from that. That's what maths is based on, it's also what Austrian Economics is based on. So, if you take the axiom to be true, whatever you deduce from that, it's basically contained in a logically-coherent structure, so you can't even with it.
People get so mad at me when I say this, but the first axiom of Austrian Economics, "Man must act". You can't really argue with that, there's no argument, there's no counterargument. How can you say man -- and you have to understand the term "act". A man and woman, people, use means to pursue ends, so they act with purpose. Action presupposes purpose, let's say. And that's what distinguishes human action from animal behaviour, which is presumably just instinctual; whereas, we're actually thinking through what we do, we use reason and all of these things.
Peter McCormack: Is that all animals? Whales?
Robert Breedlove: Well, Rothbard would say that until an animal stands up and tries to protest for its own reason and its own autonomy, that they're basically in a different category.
Peter McCormack: What defines standing up for your own autonomy?
Robert Breedlove: Like actually, if you could imagine the cows got up and said, "We've had enough of this ranching bullshit, we're ready to start our own city", that's when Rothbard would say they cross the chasm from instinctual behaviour to action, purposeful behaviour.
Peter McCormack: Is it not more the ability to organise in groups? Does that not also happen, if you study the way, I can't remember which whales it is, but the way the whales work together and coordinate as a group?
Robert Breedlove: Right, to hunt and all that.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, to hunt.
Robert Breedlove: It's a blurry line.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and we've seen videos where a lion maybe is being attacked by a crocodile and then a group of lions come in, that kind of shit. But is that all instinctual?
Robert Breedlove: I mean, who knows, I can't put my mind in an animal and tell you. But I will say, when I've pursued this line of thought, it becomes quite Darwinian in a sense. The reason we dominate animals and eat them is because we can. And for better or worse, that's what we do. But I think that lens is also useful in looking at statism, that it too is a business that's just harvesting energy, the same way we harvest animal energy through ranching and all these things.
The state is harvesting human energy; that's what taxpayers are doing. They're going to work, they're working for a currency, they're spinning the currency into an economy, they're adding value, and then the state is confiscating value through taxation and inflation. There's a great book on this too, I've only read the beginning of it, Seeing Like a State, by Frederick Scott maybe, I've forgotten the other's name. But he was saying that scientific forestry was a heavy influence on the tax policy of states.
I think this was coming out of Germany in the 1800s, where they were trying to figure out how to optimise crop yields on lumber. So, you can't just grow it for a few years and hew it all down, and you also can't let it just run for 100 years, because you don't get yield. There's a sweet spot of when to harvest the lumber, essentially. A lot of it had to do with the way they were planting the trees, as far as the forest density, clearing the forest for detritus, all of these different modes of dealing with it. They figured out how to optimise lumber yields basically.
Well states took notice of this in Germany, and they started to apply this to tax collections. So, the whole premise of taxation today is to make taxpayer activities as legible as possible to the state, so they need to see you, know your identity, know all the economic transactions you're involved in, know what your balance sheet is, so they can harvest you optimally.
Peter McCormack: And isn't that what a slave owner does as well; do they not harvest energy?
Robert Breedlove: Of course, and this is -- a human being subject to a 100% tax rate; what is that?
Peter McCormack: I know where you're going with this, but where is there 100% tax rate?
Robert Breedlove: Anywhere there's ever been slavery.
Peter McCormack: Okay, I thought you were alluding to something else there. But what I'm saying is Libya, Libya has an active, free market for slaves right now, because of the breakdown, they had a complete breakdown. They haven't had a society since Gaddafi was deposed and killed. The US has a history of slavery, the UK has a history of slavery.
Robert Breedlove: Humanity.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, humanity has a history of slavery. In a society like we have with rules, yes, we have taxation, which some people say is a form of slavery if you're paying some tax, because it's coercion, it's a form of slavery. But if you had not taxation and no central government, there's every chance, a most likely scenario, where we end back with some people who will have slaves. And I would argue that person has less liberty than you or I do under a democracy.
Robert Breedlove: Yeah, so there's a couple of things here. First is the point on effective tax rate. If your effective tax rate is 100%, you are by definition a slave. This is one of those things that I don't think you can really argue about. People try to say it's a category error, you shouldn't compare them. One's like a guy in chains with a gun in his face --
Peter McCormack: No, I'm with you on that.
Robert Breedlove: This is Ayn Rand's point. If a man cannot control the product of his own labour, then there are no other rights. Property rights are the foundation of all human rights.
Peter McCormack: What about partial control? Like, I pay 50% tax --
Robert Breedlove: Then you're 50% slave.
Peter McCormack: But I don't think I am.
Robert Breedlove: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I don't believe I'm a slave, I believe I contribute to society.
Robert Breedlove: So, I wrote about this in Masters and Slaves of Money too. It's not to say you don't -- I have an effective tax rate too, I don't think I don't contribute to society because of that; I'm just saying --
Peter McCormack: But do you believe you should have an effective zero rate of tax?
Robert Breedlove: I think all humans should have an effective zero rate of tax. When you define tax as "non-consensual exchange", that's not to say you can't pay security providers fees for providing physical security, or preserving private property rights, which is the entire point of government. We also throw around this term, Rule of Law, but all Rule of Law grounds out in property as well. It's all about resolving conflict between humans over scarce resources.
So, this whole thing's based on property, the existence of the government, it exists for property; that's it, both to preserve property rights, but then it has this paradoxical situation where it prays on your property rights to fund the preservation of property rights. So, it's kind of a contradictory institution. A large contributor to the reason we evolved beyond direct, visceral slavery is because of capital accumulation.
Actually, the more capital we accumulate as a species, the smaller portion labour becomes of the cost structure. So there's less incentive to be a slave owner in a high-capital stock world, whereas if there's no capital stock and we're all cavemen, trying to survive from meal to meal, then there's much more of an incentive to be controlling of others, let's say, coercive.
Peter McCormack: I disagree. I think we moved beyond slavery because of the evolution of democracy, certainly liberal democracies, and the evolution of morality.
Robert Breedlove: Yeah, and I think a lot of that's based on, especially in the West, the Judeo-Christian mythology, inside of which democracy lives. And I'm not going to argue that, okay, authoritarianism is better or equal to democracy, I'm not going to make that argument necessarily, but I think they both fall under the rubric of statism. I don't think statism is a sustainable economic model for human beings.
We know this, for instance: we know the Austrian business cycle theory. You start to inflate the currency, you basically create distorted price signals, misallocation of capital, the boom and bust business cycle we're all accustomed to. All that's rooted basically into taxation, taxation via inflation in this case. The theory that I'm working with currently is that there are broader implications to that coercion, and that not only do we have a business boom and bust cycle, but we have a civilisational boom and bust cycle.
Peter McCormack: I agree.
Robert Breedlove: So long as coercion has any attack surface whatsoever, I think it's like a coercive agent that gets into human affairs and spreads and destroys us, destroys our culture, destroys us psychologically; and I think that I'm seeing a lot of symptoms of that today, that's what I was mentioning to you offline. I see the world driving off a cliff and I'm concerned.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. What if I said to you, I think there are natural evolutions of the way humans coordinate, and whatever you did, whatever structure you put in place, if you had the big red button to get rid of the government, I think you end up in one of three places. You end up in a democracy; you end up authoritarian, like a Saudi Arabia style; or you end up with anarchy. But I don't believe anarchy is something like what the anarcho-capitalists hope it will be, I think it's something like Somalia.
Robert Breedlove: I disagree. So again, back to the term --
Peter McCormack: But we have, what, 200 countries in the world? We've never had a natural evolution to the anarch-capitalists world that the anarcho-capitalists want. I understand that saying, no, we've not had the tools and now we've got Bitcoin, we can have that. I don't see Bitcoin delivering what they want.
Robert Breedlove: I do. Again, the word "anarchy", very bad connotation, people think anarchy literally means people running around killing each other, eating each other, whatever.
Peter McCormack: They think it's G7, G8 meetings with people in black outfits, smashing McDonald's up!
Robert Breedlove: It means "an arcon", so no ruler basically. So, it's "Rules, not rulers", as we often say in Bitcoin. People can mutually agree to rules, there's a million examples of this, that's fine, that's how we organise ourselves. And so long as people have the right to say no and, "This rule set doesn't work for me. I could negotiate terms, but I can go over to this jurisdiction and solve it that way", I think that's the way we sort ourselves out.
But to say that it's not possible, I would agree with the bitcoiners that we've not had the tools in place, because what have we always had? We've had human beings attempting to get something for nothing. The easiest path to that, if you're the monopolist on violence, is to monopolise the money. So, we've had always the state monopolising the money. That leads to the business cycle, boom and bust business cycle, misallocation of capital. I would also say, the bust of Ancient Rome, right, that debase of currency and civilisation collapses.
So, we've been saying off the very branch on which we've been building civilisation time and time again.
Peter McCormack: I agree.
Robert Breedlove: The trick has been, how do we bootstrap ourselves out of this, and it seems like the only way we've been able to do that so far is with technology. And by technology, I don't just mean tangible technologies, I mean these social technologies we're talking about as well, which I would put democracy in there. Democracy's an improvement than just the big guy model of communism.
There's this book, The Discovery of Freedom, written by Rose, and she talks about basically every mode of human organisation being communism, until we got to democracy. So, you lived in a little -- I toured this Hawaiian village when I was there a few months ago, and there are different houses. This is where the women made the food, this is where the guys ate the food, this is where they had recreation. Then you go to the big guy's house, the guy with the big stick, and he's in the nicest house and he's the government basically. He's the local little monopolist on violence in this village of 100 people, or whatever it was, so he was the state.
Essentially, that's how humans organise themselves everywhere. We are primates, we do organise ourselves in these hierarchies, but that's very animalistic, right. We've sort of scaled out of that going into democracy now. We have this 330-million-people nation state in the US. We were able to achieve economic abundance through life, liberty, property, by respecting these deep principles of western civilisation that are built on top of Christianity, I would argue.
Peter McCormack: You believe that's how the US became the dominant?
Robert Breedlove: I don't see how you argue it any other way, because you know what violating property rights to 100% does?
Peter McCormack: Of course, yeah.
Robert Breedlove: We've just described that. You're a slave, there's no accumulation of wealth, there's no upward social mobility whatsoever. So, what is the opposite of that? If you have perfected private property rights and everything that you work to produce and create value in the world you get to keep, and trade it with other self-owned people, that's how we increase the division of labour and wealth in the world; that's why the United States is the greatest experiment in socioeconomics in history.
Peter McCormack: Okay, we're going to have to dig into that. What do you mean by greatest?
Robert Breedlove: Richest.
Peter McCormack: Richest, but that doesn't make it the greatest.
Robert Breedlove: I think wealth is the best problem-solver in the world.
Peter McCormack: How much of the US global wealth has been obtained by enslaving other nations, interfering in the politics of other nations, destablising other nations, going to war with other nations, coercing other nations?
Robert Breedlove: Probably a lot.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, so it's kind of hypocritical.
Robert Breedlove: Well, foundationally though.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but what I'm saying is, you have to look at it all. Everything you've said that you're against, you've now said this is what has made the US the greatest, but they've done that to the cost of multiple regions around the world, certainly the Middle East, definitely South America. They've essentially created slave countries. They've coerced countries through the dollar hegemony, so I think there's a hypocrisy in that.
Robert Breedlove: Well, I agree with you that, again, we're back into this useful fiction territory. When I say the United States was the greatest economic success story in human history, I'm talking about foundational United States, right. We get our independence from England, we have low and predictable taxes, we have hard money, we have a lot of freedom, we have a lot of life, liberty and property in North America for the period following the Revolutionary War, up until the 20th century, until the implementation of the central bank.
1913, we get the Fed, everything goes to shit, yeah, we become a global imperialist, it's a complete disaster. So, back to the useful fiction thing. When I say that about the United States, I'm meaning the United States in one sense of the word, and then you're taking me across the line of the Fed and saying, "Well, no, you're a hypocrite". So basically, your scope is this big on the United States, and mine's looking at this. So, you can see where the confusion comes into play here.
Peter McCormack: Well no, but even if you look at the history of the United States, the birth of the United States was built on the coercion and death and destruction of Native Americans.
Robert Breedlove: That's right, and African Americans.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Robert Breedlove: Yeah, and all of this, I wrote about this too. You know the African slave trade was started following the aggry beads thing, the slave beads?
Peter McCormack: I don't.
Robert Breedlove: They were using glass beads as money in Africa, and basically once the Europeans figured this out, they counterfeited the shit out of the glass beads and started buying all their wealth.
Peter McCormack: I think I've heard this, yeah.
Robert Breedlove: And then, this led to the transatlantic slave trade. 12.5 million people shuttled through the transatlantic over a 365-year period.
Peter McCormack: Wow.
Robert Breedlove: I think 12.5 million survived, 2 million died, so it was something like 15 million total affected. It came out as a 365-year affair when you ran the numbers on it. If you assume a slave works 5,000 house per year. It comes out to 7 billion human hours of labour stolen per year for 365 years straight.
Peter McCormack: Prior to the Fed.
Robert Breedlove: Oh, yeah, this is all transatlantic -- so here's the point, okay. So, call it 7 billion hours stolen per year, direct, visceral, whips-and-chains slavery. How much has the Fed stolen per year in terms of human hours, from 1980 to 2020?
Peter McCormack: Probably a lot more.
Robert Breedlove: 24 billion hours per year, and you take this expansion of the M2 money supply divided by the average hourly rate, you get a proxy for hours stolen. The point is this, the Fed can do it at a much larger scale, because it's less visible and less understood.
Peter McCormack: Of course, but there's two things. Firstly, have you accounted for population size with those numbers?
Robert Breedlove: It's not about population size though, it's just hours stolen.
Peter McCormack: But isn't it hours stolen per man? Wouldn't it be better to at least have a like-for-like comparison?
Robert Breedlove: I'm looking at absolute hours stolen. You could do it as a percentage of population, I suppose.
Peter McCormack: For me, that would be a more useful number. But also, it's a completely different form of slavery. If you consider it partial slavery, yes, the Fed has stolen these hours, but you get to live in a fairly free and safe society. It's not a racially segregated, abusive, whips, chains and murder society, so they are two different things.
Robert Breedlove: So it's progress?
Peter McCormack: I mean, one of the things that I think democracy has brought us, certainly western liberal democracies, is it's brought a certain fairness to the world in certain places, and it's brought a better treatment of human beings in certain places. Everything has nuance, everything has grey areas, but I make this joke with Danny. It's like, I find Swedish libertarians hilarious, because they live in one of the safest, best places in the world, and they want to burn that shit down and they want anarchy, and I just think that's a really fucking weird take to have, where you've built probably one of the best, safest places in the world to live.
We know what happens when you have a breakdown in society, we know what happens in places of lawlessness; the weak get crushed, the weak get discriminated against. Why would you want to burn that shit down?
Robert Breedlove: So, let's just try to look at it this way, and this is the grand arc of human history in a way. If you go from Ancient Egypt, right, you've got two or three dudes that are sovereign, everyone else is basically a slave, more or less. There's some grey area there, sure, but most people don't have strong property rights, they're not able to build businesses, create wealth, add value, add to the division of labour, increase global capital stock. Again, the more stuff we have, the easier life is, the less we have to fight over. All of this is based in strong property, and that's why I think the United States was the best economic experiment we had in that regard so far. I would argue that Bitcoin is another order of magnitude leap in that direction.
It's progress, right. So, say we're in a democracy now and then, yes, it's improved things in the world, I can't disagree with that. But I don't think we should just be satisfied with our progress. So, "We're done here, democracy, it's all done".
Peter McCormack: No, but this is the point whenever I get into these discussions. I don't want to burn it down, I want to strengthen and improve democracy. When it's weak or when it's fraying, I want to have the debate about, "How do we make democracy stronger and better?"
Robert Breedlove: I think the free and actual anarcho-capitalistic free market is the ultimate democracy, because you're actually voting with your dollar, buying and selling what to create. And in this hypothetical world, admittedly, where property cannot be violated against, wealth creation would be maximised. So, we've limited scarcity, we've limited the things to fight over, and if property can't be violated, like this is the great hope of Bitcoin, you can't take my shit, so why be violent? There's no carrot to the act of violence or coercion.
Peter McCormack: But that itself is not exactly true, because even Jameson Lopp has a GitHub that lists all the people who have their Bitcoin violated through the threat of violence.
Robert Breedlove: Oh, you absolutely can.
Peter McCormack: So, you can.
Robert Breedlove: But if you hold it properly, as I know you hold yours properly, it's a pretty low attack surface, right?
Peter McCormack: Of course, but it doesn't get rid of it. But even with that, that's the only one form of property. We don’t live with a single form of property that is Bitcoin, so let's talk about what property I have. I have Bitcoin, I have my house, I have my car, I have my clothes, I have the property within my house. Okay, so you come to my house, you can't get my Bitcoin, because I'm super-smart and my keys are globally distributed. You can hold a gun to my head and make threats for other things. You can take my TV, you can take my car. So, it doesn't eliminate violence, it just changes what people can steal from you.
Robert Breedlove: I don't think we eliminate violence though.
Peter McCormack: Sorry, let me add to that. Also, we know in every single society, when people are desperate, when people are hungry, they will resort to violence, right. This is why there's the big fear of food scarcity right now, because we're going to see revolutions, we're going to see protests. When people are desperate, they will attack.
The great thing about western liberal democracy is we've built a society that looks after the weakest and looks after the poorest. We do our best to try and protect them. I'm not saying it's worked perfectly, but we do our best. In the UK, there are people who live in relative poverty, but people don't die of starvation in the UK. And even if the welfare doesn't support them, we have the voluntary organisation of food banks that do support people.
Now, my travel around the world, I've been to places that have real food scarcity and doesn't have a societal structure that protects the poorest and they are violent places. Venezuela is a violent place, people will kill you because they're desperate and they're hungry. If we go to pure property rights, we will have people who have not been able to get on the economic ladder, but they don't have a support structure, and they will enact violence on people and they will kill people, because Bitcoin is not the only property. So, there's other shit you can steal, you can steal a TV to sell to get some Bitcoin to feed your family, so it doesn't get rid of that.
Robert Breedlove: I agree. I want to be clear that people get real hung up on this and it's like it's black and white. Does Bitcoin end war or does war continue? It's not about that. It's, does it reduce the incentives overall to violence, therefore limiting the scope, duration and severity of violence in the world? That, I would argue very strongly in favour of.
Peter McCormack: Perhaps.
Robert Breedlove: Well again, if we're talking about governments' purpose being property, so we're outsourcing the defence of our property to the government, that's all we're doing actually, we just currently don't have much leverage at the negotiating table in dealing with the pricing of that security. I think Bitcoin gives us a much more cost-effective and high-integrity assurance of our property rights than government ever can.
It's not absolute, I want to say. The one thing I am absolute on, where you could attack me, is freedom maximalism. I'm an absolutist on freedom. I think even freedom itself, the concept is self-regulating. The "should" is, everyone should seek to maximise their own freedom, their own purchasing power, their own optionality; but they should do that within the bounds of other people's private property rights. I think that creates not only the best individual outcomes, but also the best collective outcome. And by collective, I mean aggregate wealth collection for the world, which means the least amount of scarcity, least amount of things to fight over, and the smallest carrot for fighting over anything if the first place, if you can't take my stuff.
Now, I understand your argument, Bitcoin is not physical reality, it does not secure your property rights on tables and chairs and cars, etc. But the fact that you have an option and recourse to a form of wealth, that should you be coming into coercive circumstances, you can at least move your wealth into something like Bitcoin and be very mobile. That gives individuals a lot of optionality to reconfigure themselves in a way that protects themselves from violence.
Peter McCormack: And I agree. I mean, we've seen those case studies of people who have fled Ukraine with their Bitcoin, and that's been their escape valve. As I said at the start, I am always trying to look at the implications and the journey. I completely agree with you, Bitcoin changes the logic of violence. The first interview we ever did, I think we discussed that.
Robert Breedlove: We did too, yeah.
Peter McCormack: But I also want to know, what is the net impact on the society we live in, and I know we've discussed, what is society; but let's just imagine a Bitcoin society in the UK. It's easier to do, because we're an island, a little, tiny island, and the breakdown of the state, they can't take anything, so we don't have a state.
Yes, we've changed the logic of violence, but what has the net impact of society been? Have we moved to something which is safer or more dangerous? Have we moved to something that without structure, has become more chaotic and disorganised? Have we created a different form of wealth disparity between the haves and the have-nots? Have we ghettoised large parts of the country?
I try and think of the net impact, I don't see it through rose-tinted glasses, and I sometimes feel like, it's a bit like SimCity; when you play SimCity, you can design the perfect world, because you lay the roads where you want them, put the buildings where you want them. I just think it's very easy for anyone to look at the society and look at where we are now, and break down all the ills and the problems. But all you can do with words is create a utopia, you don't know the reality of what's going to happen.
It might fucking suck, it might be like Venezuela, and it might be like bitcoiners in their citadels with a bunch of dudes with guns patrolling and protecting them. And then outside of that is a bunch of poor people, fighting and murdering and killing each other. And basically, it might just end up being like a total shithole!
Robert Breedlove: Well, look, to answer your question, on what time horizon? If it's over two decades, I would completely agree, things could get very messy. This is why I always talk about the Sovereign Individual. These transformations from one age into another, they're not fucking clean and beautiful and you just shift into a utopia; typically there's a destruction, there's an implosion of the existing structure, chaos ensues, because even in a pure, tyrannical society, there's a lot of stability in some of that hierarchy.
There's predictability, what this guy does and what uniform this guy is wearing, you can kind of get on in the world. But when all that falls apart, say when the Soviet Union collapses, people are lost, they're doing the 40 years in the proverbial desert. We could be going into something like that. But to blame that on Bitcoin, I think, is short-sighted.
Peter McCormack: I'm not blaming it on Bitcoin.
Robert Breedlove: I'm not saying you are, but I'm saying that narrative will be pushed. Should we actually get into the situation where states, their insolvency is being realised, let's say; they've been able to kick the can on insolvency through inflation, through taxation, all of these methods, Bitcoin becomes this forcing function of honesty on all businesses, all individuals, the state's the most insolvent, upside down business in the world.
So, to see it start to crack up in the emergence of Bitcoin, I think people will assign blame onto Bitcoin, somewhat rightfully so. Yeah, you gave people an alternative to a strong a more cost-effective property right, it's bankrupting the existing business of property rights. And in that transformation, yeah, things are going to get messy potentially, and no one knows, by the way, so I'm not saying what I have to say about it is gospel. Indeed, what I said to you earlier, I'm disheartened.
I see the pollution of our money, the debasement of our money, as like the debasement of our psychology, the debasement of our culture. So, I think we're going to go through this whole painful stage of realising how much bullshit we actually live in, before we start to hopefully hit a rock bottom and rebuild a society that's premised more on volition, mutual voluntary exchange, rather than coercion. I think the coercion itself is, again, it's like this dissolving agent in human affairs, perpetrating the business cycle and perpetrating my theoretical boom and bust cycle.
There's one other thing here. I'm going to talk to Tuur Demeester about this.
Peter McCormack: We're talking to him as well.
Robert Breedlove: He's got a great paper that he wrote in like 2010, and he described when you inflate the currency supply, you're actually creating more imaginary goods. So, it's an actual lie, you're deceiving people into believing there's more stuff in the world, so that's what creates that euphoric, roaring 1920's style economic boom, but that always end up in a catastrophic hangover.
Peter McCormack: You should talk to Jeff Booth about that as well, because he talks about that with regard to money misinformation.
Robert Breedlove: Yeah, exactly. So that thesis roughly is that it's a deception, it's an actual deception baked into this technology we use in our minds, called money, and I think there are psychological implications of corrupting or debasing that money on us that we ourselves don't quite understand yet. And I get this from, just go read about hyperinflations.
Peter McCormack: Dude, I've read When Money Dies.
Robert Breedlove: So you know! I think we just, as a species, discount how severely the technologies we use impact and shape who we are, because that's ultimately what we're talking about here. It's the transformation in technology transforming us.
Peter McCormack: I consider hyperinflation as war; it's as destructive as war.
Robert Breedlove: It's a psychological breakdown too though, because you lose your grip with reality. If there's hyperinflation, imagine how much anxiety is induced by that. All of a sudden, your scope of human cooperation goes from 8 billion people, while the currency is functional, it contracts to your family, you can't trust anybody.
Peter McCormack: Dude, I'm literally with you on that. We have a very similar job and we have contracts with sponsors, right. I'm discussing multi-year sponsorship contracts and I'm now adding inflation clauses in there, in preparation for this. So, I'm preparing for the radical repricing of goods and services that affect my life. That is my version of going round the supermarket and repricing things, a very limited version of that. But it is a consideration in that we're at, whatever, 7% inflation, which is really probably 15%. But if I price a three-year contract and we suddenly have 15% inflation, I've fucked myself.
Robert Breedlove: Absolutely.
Peter McCormack: So, I get it. All this stuff, by the way, I'm with you. Some people listen and they will be like, they might think I disagree with you or think I want to keep the status quo. I am with you, I am purely interested in the implications.
Robert Breedlove: Let me throw in one other thing here, so this is back to the dirty word, fiat, that I think is actual evil, it's a really, really bad thing in the world we need to try to deal with. But a lot of people think it's just, "Oh, it's this weird form of money that you lose purchasing power", if they know what it means at all. Most people don't know what the term means at all.
Peter McCormack: Well, define it.
Robert Breedlove: Do this because I said so, rather than because you want to. And behind that is a veiled threat of force always like, "Do this or else".
Peter McCormack: So, hold on, is fear evil, or is the person who controls is evil?
Robert Breedlove: Well, I think it's fear-based ultimately, so the individual speaking the fiat over another, they're scared this person will do something averse to their interest, so therefore they're using force over them. And then, the person complying with fiat is also doing it out of fear, because it's like, "Well, if I don't do this, they're going to put me in jail or hurt me".
So, it's a fear integrated into human relationships that I think is a problem, and this gets into more of the kind of, what did Jimi Hendrix say about the love of power and the power of love or, "The power of love conquers the love of power, we would know peace", something like that. There's a trade-off where you can make decisions out of fear or love, and I think when property is violable, you're much more likely to behave according to fiat, which is a fear-based mentality.
I just want to say one other thing here.
Peter McCormack: I would say my fear of the threat of not paying tax is probably much lower than the fear of a slave on a plantation.
Robert Breedlove: Well, here's where I want to make the equation. It's one thing to say, "All right, fiat currency is one thing that debases your purchasing power". But you know what else I can do to debase your purchasing power? I can cut off your left arm. You're not going to have as much earnings potential probably for the rest of your life, or I could cut off your leg. You could do something very violent and terrible to someone that would hurt their purchasing power, hurt their economic interest, hurt their ability to survive in the world going forward.
Or, I can do it in a less visible way and do it to a much larger group of people, slowly over time. It accomplishes the same effect, right. I'm reducing people's purchasing power, I'm confiscating their wealth, I'm violating their property in a less bloody, less violent way, but it's the same thing. You are stealing people's life energy, whether you're perpetrating actual physical violence, or you're just confiscating their purchasing power.
Peter McCormack: Okay, let's work through the reality of the world you want to see, because I think that's always really useful to do. You detest this fiat world, you detest the coercion that comes from the monopoly and violence a government has, you see an alternative world. Okay, talk me through it, talk me through what we have, because this is where I always struggle, because I think it's very easy to criticise from the outside and it's very easy to write a thesis on what you would like to see. But I often find the thesis ignores the reality of the way humans are.
Robert Breedlove: I don't know if it's entirely what I would like to see, so much as I'm trying to identify what is likely to happen. So, I'm not trying to paint some utopian picture and say, "This is what we should do".
Peter McCormack: But I think when we see what is going to happen, we have a position, and then we perhaps fight for it. So for example, if we were to see what would happen and think that would be a net negative for everyone, we would fight against it. I am an ardent supporter of democracy, because I believe despite its flaws, it's the best we have, because everywhere else in the world that doesn't have democracy is, again, arguably worse. I would rather be living in the UK than in Russia, some people say they'd rather live in Saudi Arabia than the UK, I understand that; but I would rather be living where we are now.
If I felt we were going to trend towards a full breakdown of democracy in the UK, and I felt that would be a worse outcome, I would fight to strengthen democracy. So, I know what I want and I would push towards that.
Robert Breedlove: So, again with a caveat that this is not what I would like to see the world do, I'm trying to make an honest, objective assessment of where I think it could go, based on what I've studied. I'm not here to "should" people like, "You should do this, you should do that", other than, I think, freedom. I guess I do "should" about freedom, life, liberty, property; I think that's a "should".
Peter McCormack: Well, let's do that, actually let's do that.
Robert Breedlove: Well, so sorry about this, the book, Democracy: the God That Failed, by Hoppe, I don't know if you've read it yet?
Peter McCormack: I've read it.
Robert Breedlove: Introduction and chapter one, so he lays out all the shortcomings of democracy. I think the world, as a result of Bitcoin emerging, would move back towards a model more like that. And when you say "monarchy", you're like, "What are you talking about? That's a regression, that sounds terrible". I encourage people, just go read introduction and chapter one of this book. Where you have smaller economic enclaves and local monopolists on violence that preserve private property rights, physical private property rights, for a fee --
Peter McCormack: Sorry, what's the closest we have to that? Would you say Saudi Arabia is essentially a monarchy?
Robert Breedlove: I don't think we have anything like that in the world today, because it's all fiat. Where is fiat not in the world today; where is sound money?
Peter McCormack: Even if Saudi Arabia had fiat sound money, they also have a monopoly on the resources to accumulate wealth.
Robert Breedlove: But people don't have the veto power that Bitcoin gives them over their government, and this is the point I'm getting to, and this is the Sovereign Individual thesis.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but hold on, hold on. Having sovereignty of your money does not mean that there aren't individuals who can monopolise the accumulation of wealth and, as such, then oppress groups.
Robert Breedlove: It does prevent the monopolisation of the accumulation of wealth to a large extent, I think.
Peter McCormack: How? Because, you would be trading Bitcoin for goods and services. And if you have a monopoly over the natural resources of a large territory, you could monopolise the accumulation of wealth, and with wealth comes power.
Robert Breedlove: Yeah, so if an individual can't make money in a certain regime and they have access to Bitcoin, they leave the regime, they go somewhere where they can make money. So, it puts a check on government; that's a reduction to the tax base for Saudi Arabia, so all of a sudden they have an incentive to start treating their citizens better.
Peter McCormack: But hold on, do they even have tax in Saudi Arabia?
Danny Knowles: I don't know, I'll have a look.
Peter McCormack: I know so many people go to Dubai because it's tax free; I'm pretty sure, because they accumulate so much wealth from their natural resources.
Danny Knowles: Yeah, no income tax.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's no income tax.
Robert Breedlove: So again, I'm not talking about anything in fiat world today, I'm talking about a world where Bitcoin is money, all of the property rights would need to be enforced by some physical provider. I think that results in much smaller scale and scope of government. Government shrinks tremendously, violence as a whole actually would be less of a thing you need to ensure against, for all the reasons we talked about. It still exists, they can still come and take your house and car and all that, but I think it becomes a localised protection service versus this 330-million-person nation state we have today.
It's all about customer optionality in the end. If you have the ability to convert your wealth into something and go elsewhere, and it's an option that no one can suspend or stop, then that forces you to deal with your customers more honestly. This is the nature of free market capitalism, this is what competition is. Competition is this discovery process, "What do people want? Let me give it to them at a price, at a competitive price", and competition keeps you honest. If some other entrant can come into the market and introduce a service better, faster, or cheaper than you, then you're out of business.
But the problem with government, it's been this paradox that we need to outsource the integrity of our property rights to something that has to be preserved. But then, that very institution preys on the property rights it's charged to preserve to fund itself. I mean, it doesn't work and you know what, empirically, looking across history, no state ever works. It either gets conquered or it fails. Why? Why can't we figure out a sustainable way to organise ourselves?
The thing is, and this is hard to talk about because we live in it, it's everywhere; fiat statism is ubiquitous, it's all around us. What I'm talking about is something hypothetical, it's something I think we can evolve towards. And that's the vision I guess I'm trying to lay out. It's like a non-coercive global society.
Peter McCormack: You'll still have coercion in that society.
Robert Breedlove: Less coercive. When I say non-coercive, I'm speaking idealistically. I don't think coercion completely goes away, but you tweak the incentives, you tweak the outcomes.
Peter McCormack: I just don't think you escape the concentrations of wealth. And with concentrations of wealth comes concentrations of power, and those people will continue to coerce to accumulate more wealth and more power. I think one of the things is, you miss out the human component of greed and violence.
Robert Breedlove: So, use this imaginary construction, which is something that Mises uses a lot in human action.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Robert Breedlove: Imaginary world, everyone's invulnerable, and you can't steal from each other. What would we do to increase wealth in that world? You can't hurt me, you can't steal my stuff.
Peter McCormack: You would invent things and build things and trade.
Robert Breedlove: Exactly. So, if we reduce the attack surface on you being able to hurt me, or you being able to steal my stuff, which you being able to hurt me is typically incentivised by you being able to steal my stuff, because hurting someone's a very risky, expensive endeavour, whether it's done individually or at scale in warfare, then you shift us closer towards that world where we just make stuff, add value and trade.
Peter McCormack: True. You shift us towards that, but I mean we're going to go round in circles, so I'll avoid this too much; we still don't know what the net impact and we can't visualise what that society looks like. We don't know what it does for the vulnerable in society.
Robert Breedlove: We know we're way wealthier. If you increase aggregate wealth, then you've benefitted the poor in society.
Peter McCormack: That's not necessarily true.
Robert Breedlove: Absolutely true. If you increase aggregate wealth, we have more capital stocks, we have better healthcare, we have more food, we have more infrastructure, and we can satisfy human wants more cheaply.
Peter McCormack: Okay, so you would say the US has been the greatest economic story --
Robert Breedlove: Pre-Fed.
Peter McCormack: Pre-Fed, okay. It's still been a great economic story since, if you purely measure on GDP, but in terms of the health system, it's a fucking car crash. And I know lots of different ways you can break that down.
Robert Breedlove: The trick is, it's so hard to talk about, because we're living inside of it. This is the old -- what is the fish and water analogy, where two fish swim by each other and say, "Hey, how's the water, boys?" and he looks over to the other fish, "What the hell is water?" We're swimming in it, so we can't even -- you need to step out of it to think about it.
Peter McCormack: We're also living through the bust, and therefore people are pissed off and they want to find something to blame and criticise.
Robert Breedlove: Why are people pissed off?
Peter McCormack: I mean, a range of reasons! The world's pretty fucked up right now.
Robert Breedlove: One main reason: rampant property right violations via inflation and otherwise.
Peter McCormack: I think if you asked 100 people that question, maybe one would say that.
Robert Breedlove: I'm not saying they cognitively understand it, there's a procedural knowing. You can know you're getting fucked and feel anxiety about a situation without knowing cognitively, being able to describe propositionally what it is, and that's what I'm saying. Coercion and property right violations embedded in our socioeconomic reality are fucking us up from the inside out, and that's what I hope to work against and paint a vision of a better world away from.
Peter McCormack: By the way, this is fucking great. I love to work through these things, because I think there's a lot of groupthink that exists right now. I think there's groupthink around statism, and I think there's groupthink around Bitcoin, and I think people see opinion-leaders and they hear them say something and they're like, "Oh, fuck" or, "I believe in that", "I've discovered Bitcoin", "Now, I'm going to be a carnivore", "Now, I'm Christian". There's a lot of groupthink that happens and I think the most important thing is to always challenge it, to fully understand it.
When I challenge you, it's not to defend my position, it's to understand yours more, and I think a lot of people miss that.
Robert Breedlove: I'm trying to understand my own more too, because again, I'm not preaching gospel here.
Peter McCormack: It's why I've come off Twitter, it's because groupthink I think is another thing that's corrosive.
Robert Breedlove: Yeah, and I think there's a relationship there. Maybe I'm just myopic on some of this, but again, if you increase scarcity in the world, people are going to regress towards their tribalist roots. You want to go back towards baser-level human instincts versus if you're creating more wealth and abundance in the world, you become more autonomous, you don't need the security of the group as much.
So again, if we're talking about humanity emerging in all these communist little enclaves and then we eventually got to democracy, and now we're looking at something that's potentially post-statism, coercion-minimised, not coercion-free, that is something I think that's very beautiful to work towards.
Peter McCormack: Let me ask you something, something I've been looking at recently and trying to get my head around. Have you read Isaiah Berlin's theories of liberty, like negative and positive liberty?
Robert Breedlove: No.
Peter McCormack: You see, that's an area I want to get into and understand a bit more about, and the debate around it. It would be great maybe if you could have a read for next time we talk. I'd love to get your views on this, and I might get these the wrong way round. But negative liberty is freedom from --
Robert Breedlove: Freedom from and freedom to?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and freedom to.
Robert Breedlove: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: My assumption is you're a "freedom from", because that's coercion; whereas, I'm a "freedom to", which is freedom to have an opportunity.
Robert Breedlove: Well, I think they're related. So again, back to that hypothetical example of, you can't hurt me, you can't steal from me, property is inviolable; that's freedom from. I'm free from all your opinions, you can't hurt me, you can't steal from me, I'm going to do whatever I want. If we're going to exchange, it will be mutual and voluntary, because I can't hurt you and steal from you, you can't hurt me or steal from me, so we'll come together voluntarily and we'll create value.
This is a key point too. You only do a mutual voluntary trade when you think it's valuable and the other guy thinks it's valuable, so there's mutual value creation. So, freedom from, strong property; freedom to, is optionality, that's wealth creation, that's capital stocks. The stronger your freedom from, the more abundant your freedom to.
Peter McCormack: That's where I think it gets a bit difficult, because I think freedom from is completely, absolute liberty, there's no coercion, that's what you're talking about. Whereas, freedom to requires, I think, rules to create a more equitable opportunity.
Robert Breedlove: That's fine, as long as they're consensual.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but then you can't have freedom to, because freedom to requires rules.
Robert Breedlove: But rules can be consensual. We drive on the right-hand side of the road here consensually.
Peter McCormack: Well, I think it's more like, what was it? It was like that guy who said, "A man is born free, but I have chains around me everywhere I go".
Robert Breedlove: Oh, this is Rousseau.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, Rousseau.
Robert Breedlove: "A man is born free, but everywhere is in chains".
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Robert Breedlove: That's bullshit though, because we're born into the realities of biological scarcity.
Peter McCormack: No, but that came from post-slavery, where freedom was given to the slaves, but they had nothing.
Robert Breedlove: No, I think anywhere you look, where there's been low, predictable taxes, strong and reliable Rule of Law and strong property rights, you've seen wealth be created.
Peter McCormack: When, in recent time?
Robert Breedlove: So, there's a period in Hong Kong, and I don't know the exact year, but there was a regime change, and -- I wish I was more prepared for this!
Peter McCormack: Don't worry about it, I've loved this, by the way!
Robert Breedlove: A guy came in and he was much more of the Austrian bent, that he didn't want to measure the economy, he wanted to give basically low and predictable taxes, clear rules, let people self-organise, and there was a huge economic boom. I think if you just look up the economic boom in Hong Kong, you could corroborate this.
Peter McCormack: Okay. But this is where I want to go towards. I support smaller government. I'm a regulations person, but I want less regulation. I want smaller government, lower taxes. I don't want no government, no taxes. If anything, it's like I edge towards minarchism.
Robert Breedlove: Again, the word "tax" is loaded, because people think, "You have to pay for the roads, you have to pay for security". I agree on all of that, I just think it needs to be consensual, and taxation is defined as non-consensual essentially.
Peter McCormack: All right. Anything you want to cover that we've not covered?! I mean, this has been super-challenging for me, and there's stuff I need to go away and read up on.
Robert Breedlove: Yeah, and it's challenging for me too, and engage with me. I just don't think this works, the statism model works, and I think we've got a lot of history to prove that out, so it's, "Can we do better?" I would like to challenge human beings to try and do better. I think there's been a lot of theoretical groundwork laid by the Austrian school. We've never even really acknowledged that hardly as a collective.
Peter McCormack: Dude, I studied economics, we never studied Austrian Economics. We had a whole, we call it a term, but a semester on Keynesian. It was indoctrinated into us.
Robert Breedlove: Same here.
Peter McCormack: I mean, for me, this is where I see the role of Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin doesn't eliminate the nation state, it improves the nation state. It minimises it and makes it better, and it makes it more accountable and reliable, it minimises taxes, it minimises laws. That's where I see it. I don't see it eliminates it all.
Robert Breedlove: I agree with you, I guess we just get on the specifics, and I don't know the specifics. I just think that coercion in general could be minimised in a Bitcoin world, and I think also our attitudes about coercion. There seems to be, especially with people that are, say, social-justice inclined, they think the only solution to the problems of the world is to go and coerce somebody like, "Hire more people of this colour [or] do more of this, carbon tax credits". It's always coercion. It's stick to solve everything; I think carrots are just much more effective. So, we have to create the proper carrots for the world. Also, you know Balaji's writing a book on this, The Network State?
Peter McCormack: Yeah. I can't wait to get that.
Robert Breedlove: I'm excited to read that. It's definitely going to take some imagination, because we've never had an incorruptible monetary base layer. Money's always been kind of a tool of state power, and now we're moving into a world where that's potentially not true any longer. One other thing I do want to talk about is my live event in Miami.
Peter McCormack: Oh, shit, yeah. I want to come, when is it?
Robert Breedlove: 8 April, 7.30pm to 9.00pm. We're going to have a little cocktail event prior and a cocktail event after. It's a live episode of the What is Money? show in front of a live studio audience, the first time we've ever done it; surprise guest, who I'm super-excited about, can't even talk about because I'm so excited about it!
Peter McCormack: I think I know who it is. I think it's one of two people. Am I allowed to guess?
Robert Breedlove: Of course.
Peter McCormack: Personally, I think it's Jordan Peterson, I think it is. And if it is, I'm definitely coming, but I know you're not going to tell me because I've already asked you.
Robert Breedlove: What's that line in the Avengers, "I can neither confirm, nor deny anything that's been said here"!
Peter McCormack: All right, I think I'm going to have to try to be there. All right, that's fair. How do people get tickets for that?
Robert Breedlove: It's online, there's a link in my Twitter bio where there's an Eventbrite page right there. There are three kinds of tickets, if you want to do the pre-event, the post-event. It should be fun. We're going to talk about some really deep and meaningful topics, hopefully more stuff like this, trying to visualise what the world looks like post-Bitcoin, and the why of Bitcoin. Everyone can sense there's something wrong in the world today. Again, I think a lot of it's rooted in property, people don't see that yet. I hope Bitcoin helps fix that.
Peter McCormack: You know what I'm thinking I'm going to say, don't you?
Danny Knowles: No, I don't.
Peter McCormack: This show's scheduled to go out after that event!
Danny Knowles: Oh yeah, but we'll put it out early, we can do it.
Peter McCormack: All right, cool.
Robert Breedlove: I appreciate that.
Peter McCormack: Listen, brother, you know I love you, I appreciate you, everything you do. I wish we could do this more often. I mean, all ours are in person now, apart from the occasional Lyn Alden, so we just have to schedule these better and find a way to do it.
Robert Breedlove: Beautiful, likewise, love you, man, and thanks for having me.
Peter McCormack: Any time.
Robert Breedlove: And I love trying to sharpen the sword on these conversations, so appreciate it.
Peter McCormack: All right, man. Peace.
