More Laws, Less Justice: Bitcoin and the Future of Government (Uncut) 01-25-2025
More Laws, Less Justice: Bitcoin and the Future of Government with Will Tanner (WiM548)
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. If you’re looking at what makes a functional society, it helps to have some history to look back to. We don’t figure out these rituals and traditions that we have, they just sort of emerge organically through time, like knowledge that has crystallized over time in our actions.
If what you think is contradictory to nature, you should assume that nature is right and you are wrong. Taxes, as they’re presently implemented, are much more a feature of the progressive era than they are of the history of the Occident up until that point. I think once it’s passed and once it’s put into practice as a social scheme, it becomes something that’s going to be constantly meddled with because it’s not sacrosanct.
It’s not like you can’t murder, you can’t steal. America up until Jackson had these landed voting rules. Were it just people who kind of were able to think of the future voting, we probably would just be a nuclear economy by now where energy would be too cheap to meter.
Instead, we’re like building solar panels on farmland that are then destroyed by hail. Things have always worked, even if you don’t understand why. How do you think about the interaction of tradition and innovation, perhaps in the context of Bitcoin and gold? Yeah, so you certainly don’t want to be on horseback when the machine gun makes its appearance.
You’ve got a bio on your ex profile. I’m sorry, a quote on your ex profile, and it says, tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. That’s a pretty cryptic quote, but also just interesting.
Can you unpack that a little bit? I was actually thinking recently that culture, we build culture, but it’s all built through the errors of our ancestors. They make mistakes, and they learn things along the way, and we accumulate those learnings. It’s those layers on which we build to be where we are today.
It’s kind of built, the somewhat morbid thought I had was like culture is built on the corpses of our ancestors. It sounds like this might be somehow related to that. What is tradition, and what does this quote mean to you? Yeah, I’m embarrassed in that now I forget the name of the guy from whom it comes, but it was something I saw on Twitter a while ago, and really liked, and kind of looked into it, and decided to set as my bio.
Because I think if you’re looking at what makes a functional society, and the ability to cooperate amongst your fellow man, rather than just either being a small tribal group or individual, it helps to have some history to look back to. But if you’re just reading about Napoleon, it’s not really all that much you can do with that other than be interested in it. Whereas if you’re connected to the past through these tendrils of tradition, whatever they may be, you’re much more alive with that, and alive with their spirit.
Which I think oftentimes if you’re looking back to a specific person, or period, or whatever it is, you see it as a better one. So a great example of the stately homes of England, Beaver Castle comes to mind, Wentworth Woodhouse, Chatsworth. They’re built of stone, very cold and drafty.
So you might look at it like a mausoleum, a funeral home or something. But that’s not really true of families to live in them. They’re still alive.
And so doing they’re quite connected to their ancestors and connected to the past. And that’s just one example. There are a bunch of them.
But I think if you’re able to keep the spirit of your ancestors, or whoever, whatever you’re trying to emulate, maybe if you keep that alive within you, it is alive in many respects. And it’s preserving what they built, and for what they fought. Whereas it’s not really sterile.
It’s certainly not. I think, however, there’s a tradition to view it as such. If you ever go to Rome and see the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and it says Marcus Agrippa, he built this.
But it’s really hard to be connected to that because it’s so far in the past, and all the things that might connect us to it have kind of died out. Whereas there’s some things that we are still connected to, and they’re still alive within us. And I think that’s, to some extent, the difference.
Interesting. The tradition is like a dynamic. We’re preserving the dynamic process by which we got there.
It’s not so static, it sounds like. Just like keeping a fire alive. Yeah, exactly.
That’s a good way of putting it. Also, it’s a way of holding on to the past, or holding on to something, and not letting it die out. Because if you look at history, if you just read it, if it’s something to which you’re not connected personally, through whatever thing, you can just kind of read it dispassionately, as Curtis Yarvin put it.
No one really has hot takes on the War of the Roses anymore, because it’s so far away, and all the families that fought in it died. So it’s really hard. Whereas there are a lot of things, I think, that people are still connected to, whether by choice or by blood.
And those things are still alive. And you see them in the emotions that are conjured up are much more. So it is kind of like a roaring fire, rather than just some scattered ashes.
There’s a book I had a guess on recently. Hayek wrote a book called The Fatal Conceit, which is really good. And he goes into the value of tradition, and how it’s not something that we consciously develop.
We don’t figure out these rituals and traditions that we have. They just sort of emerge organically through time. And he talks about how they’re very important to solving problems that we don’t necessarily cognitively even understand.
But it’s just knowledge that has crystallized over time in our actions. And so it reminds me of something that… I forget who said this. I’m so bad with attribution.
But if you think a thing, and nature says something different, if what you think is contradictory to nature, you should assume that nature is right and you are wrong. Because nature is like the collective intelligence of all these different organisms and environments sort of smashed together, and you’re just one instance of that. So is tradition something like that? Like it’s an expression of nature through us? Something that we’re creating together, rather than just any one person sort of forging it? Yeah, I think that’s definitely true.
And that it’s a collective enterprise and the interactions between people. Which is one of the ways I think you see it best, are the traditions of how should I act when I’m out in the world? In what manner should I behave? And if you’re just acting on an atomized individual level, I think you get a lot more of that like wolf in you. And you’re going to behave in a much poorer manner that’s probably socially disadvantageous for yourself in the long term, and certainly is antisocial for everyone, because it’s predatory.
Whereas if you act in the spirit of tradition, or if you say read the Jane Austen novels and say, well, the manners in that and kind of the spirit that was cultivated by it is worth emulating in the ways that remain relevant in the modern world. That’s certainly a different thing. And tradition is what leads you there.
Because if you’re just trying to recreate the same, or recreate or create something new in every generation, it’s just going to fall apart. Nothing but the most base emotions will remain. Whereas tradition helps us, I think, build something higher and collectively in terms of our interactions or what we do.
And without having to think every step, why am I doing this? But just be able to know that it is what is right to do. I think that is what enables the flourishing and building of a higher civilization. How closely related is tradition to ritual? Because I’m trying to think of a tradition here.
I mean, one that we often talk about on the show is private property. You know, there’s just like this tradition or this established practice of respecting one another’s rights to assets. And there’s a ritual component, because you’re just pretending, right? I’m pretending that you have the exclusive rights to the fruits of your own labor, in the hope that you’ll reciprocate that ritual or that pretend game with me.
And if we do that, we have very real positive consequences, right? We can actually increase productivity and peace and all these things. What is the connection between tradition and ritual? They seem pretty close to me. Yeah, that’s a great point.
Something I haven’t really thought about before. So my answer could be nonsense. But regardless, I think in some respects are quite accurate in saying that they’re kind of together in the same thing.
I do think that in many respects, ritual is something that is appended on to the traditions that remain important, and it itself might not be as much. One example of this, I just finished law school in May. In all our property classes, you have to go through the tale and entail situation, which was very relevant in England in like 1790, much less so in America.
What is that? What does it entail? Entail is the ability to preserve an estate by limiting the property rights of the future owner, typically as yours were limited. So the easiest example is, I think most people have heard of primogeniture, which is that the title passes to the firstborn son. Entail was the way of affecting that in terms of property.
So typically, the property owner of whatever estate it was didn’t receive the property in fee simple at the passing of his father, but would receive an entailed property that meant he couldn’t sell it typically. Normally couldn’t take out mortgages against it, though sometimes could, and couldn’t pass it laterally or outside the path of primogeniture. So this comes up a lot in terms of a father having no sons, and so his daughters didn’t really get much of inheritance outside of what money might’ve been saved during his lifetime, because the estate was entailed and attached to the title.
So it had to pass around, or it had to go around based on that. But most modern law, at least in America, makes that impossible outside of certain trusts, particularly dynasty trusts. We have to learn about it in law school because everyone learned about it since Blackstone’s commentaries on English law.
But it’s not really relevant now. It’s more of a ritual that you go through than the tradition itself of property rights, which is very important. Yeah, so that sounds like a limitation on individual private property.
If the son receives it, then he can’t transfer it as he wants. Yeah, I think the thought behind it is that if you have a title, say a dukedom, you really need to be able to preserve that title in the condition which other dukes are afforded. So you don’t want a penalist duke, like the dukes of Manchester really since the 1900s, because that makes people take the institution less seriously if there’s a bunch of poor people running about claiming to be dukes.
France had this problem, and it was one of the reasons lurking in the social scene behind the revolution. Their peerage got so large because everyone who was a son of a noble got a noble title that the titles really lost the respect, and people didn’t care about it. So I am getting to your question, I promise.
Oh yeah, so this is like title dilution or title inflation. Yes, yes, it is. And it was.
And it was a huge problem for them, kind of like inflation is for us today. And because of that, the English really didn’t want that, and they wanted the titles to remain to some extent sacrosanct and certainly respected socially. So it did limit the present owner as it had limited the past owner and would limit the future owner.
The benefit for that was that in remaining coherent and attached as a property. And there were times when you could get out of it because it had to be passed typically over a couple generations. So when it was received, and that generation was choosing to enact Bentail, they did have the choice and could sell some if they needed to, to erase debts or whatever.
So there were ways you could kind of get around it in ways that opened up the property rights. But I think it was one of those limitations on rights that we have in the name of ordered liberty that for them was broadly beneficial and certainly socially beneficial, and that land wasn’t subdivided into these very small units like you see in places like France or Peru. I think Peru, certainly many portions of South America where land becomes a third of acre plots.
You can’t raise a family on that. You can’t really even feed yourself on that. That was the purpose of, is it pre-mageniture? Wasn’t that the purpose of that is so you don’t, you know, you have 10 kids, you split one acre into one 10th acre lots.
And by the time you’re three generations deep, everyone’s standing on a square yard of property. So you just pass it all to the firstborn and that’s that, right? Yes. My understanding from reading about it is that Entail is like the property part of pre-mageniture.
And so once pre-mageniture, excuse me, itself wasn’t really the law anymore in terms of like, you have to do this, Entail remained the tradition surrounding it where that continued. But yes, the overall point was keeping the property coherent and large enough to support whatever title it originally supported. Got it.
Do traditions then like, I mean, obviously they influence law, the development of law to some extent. I mean, that’s what English common law is in a way, right? It’s how have we traditionally resolved these problems over a course of time. And then eventually we codify that into law.
What’s the relationship between tradition and legal discovery? Yeah, I think it’s to some extent like social manners and that we might not remember the reason why property rights had to be as strict as they are because in England, it’s not really that long ago and America wasn’t settled yet. So England’s got the easiest Anglos for example. The king could just take your estate either on your passing or during your life.
And that created huge social problems, whether it was the bloody barons wars that killed huge numbers of people or it was just the insecurity. And because it’s insecure or it’s not yours really, then you’re not going to invest in it. So things kind of rotted or fell apart or just weren’t improved when they could have been.
So that’s kind of how they came to the property rights that were, you know, you can’t take this because it is your, or the king can’t take this because it is yours. So tradition I think is the way that that accumulated knowledge is passed down without kind of like we were talking about earlier, having to rethink it each generation. So the law I think is at least as was written perhaps before the progressive era and really the common law system.
It was there so that you didn’t have to rethink these things. This is the way we do it and it works reasonably well. So rather than deal with all the inconvenience and likely injustice that comes from constantly changing this, you know what your rights are and both by looking to tradition and looking to the legal code or legal rulings, you can know that.
So I do think tradition really influences the law, not only in like how we think about law, but really what the laws are and their relative immutability. Yeah. Yeah.
The immutability is important, right? Because if you don’t know the rules of the game, you can’t really develop an effective strategy. Right. Yeah.
If the rules are constantly shifting, I mean, you’re just, you’re bewildered basically. Yes. And this is something that comes up a lot in tax law is, you know, it’s one that changes much more than the other laws.
Like murder with small exceptions on the fringes is always murder. So you don’t have to murder someone. You don’t really know in what instrument you should put your money to avoid future taxes, like dividends and interest.
Now dividends of course are taxed at a lower rate, but for a long time that wasn’t really true. And you know, that’s one small example and you know, impacts a certain portion of the population more than others, but it is important because you don’t really know. So if you can’t make these long-term decisions, if you can’t plant the trees in which you’ll never sit, but your grandchildren will, that leads to a lot of either malinvestment or just non-investment and kind of feckless spending on pleasure.
So I do think it’s very tradition when tradition ties into law, that’s important because it, I think, prioritizes better long-term behavior. Yeah. I mean, it sounds to me like we would want the law, the rule of law to reflect tradition as much as possible, right? Without any unexpected changes or, you know, the possibility of future unforeseen changes, because that just disrupts people’s strategies, basically, right? Where you’re trying to accumulate wealth and plan for the future, build a business, plan for your family’s retirement, your own retirement.
Right. It’s interesting you brought up tax law, too. Why tax law? Why is tax law so notorious for being shifty and obscure and opaque? Why is that? I think there are a few things.
One is that really taxes, as they’re presently implemented, are much more a feature of the progressive era and progressive revolution than they are of the history of the Occident up until that point. So people in like the 1500s weren’t really dealing with income taxes. Deaf taxes had existed in the medieval ages, but were very much hated, and that’s why they were gotten rid of.
So it’s something that wasn’t really in the cultural consciousness until all of a sudden in World War I and slightly earlier for England, they decided they needed that revenue, so they’re going to start implementing these schemes. But I think once it’s passed and once it’s put into practice as a social scheme rather than as something that’s kind of beneficial for the whole, it becomes something that’s going to be constantly meddled with because it’s not sacrosanct. It’s not like you can’t murder, you can’t steal.
It’s instead something that’s a tool of whatever regime is currently in charge, and so they’re going to want to tinker with it. And then the other thing is that special interests can reap large rewards if they affect section 112, subsection A, part B. Well then they can reap a windfall in something that no one’s going to know about unless they read through every line of it. So it’s the ability, if you’re a special interest group, to reap large rewards for yourself without really upsetting the waters.
Yeah, well, I have an undergraduate master’s degree in taxation, and I think when I graduated the IRS tax code had something like 13 million words in it. Like it’s unreadable. No human being can comprehend it in its totality.
And the way you’re describing it makes me think that it’s almost like the battleground for lawfare, right? You see these, because you actually reading the tax law, you would see they would introduce certain changes. Then some other special interest group that was negatively affected by it would introduce some loopholes. And then that group would counter with some counter loopholes.
And like this is a long winding, arbitrary, nonsensical legal structure. And then you as a tax account are supposed to navigate this for your clients. And it astonished me how much wasted cognitive labor goes into this.
We’ve created our own highly confused, complicated mousetrap that we are stuck in for no reason. It’s like, what are we doing? And so I guess tax is where the rubber meets the road on that, because there’s an actual transfer of purchasing power or assets occurring through that framework. There was something, I forget where I read it now, kind of bad with attribution.
It’s something I just kind of read on Twitter. But they made the point that in Weimar Germany, just because of the inflation issue amongst other cultural problems, a lot of effort was devoted not towards productive enterprises or achieving things, but rather towards either financial schemes or somehow meddling to reap a reward that would hurt society, but benefit you. And not being able to plan long term certainly came into that, as did just the social breakdown of the country.
But I think that’s something you really see in tax law, whether because it’s just paired with the regulatory state, not really sacrosanct, or because it’s just something that people can get a large reward from dealing with. You do really see that where all this brainpower, the people who are willing to not only get an undergrad education, not only get a master’s in accounting, but also get an LLM in tax law and just a Juris Doctor in law. The people who are willing to go through all that, they’re not like a doctor where they’re doing that to kill people.
It’s just to kind of tinker with the tax code. So all those years and all that brainpower wasted on something that really needn’t be an issue is astounding. It’s sad, really.
The most sophisticated form of scamming in a way, and it’s people just wasting their time scamming one another rather than being an engineer or being an entrepreneur or building something productive of value. It blows my mind. I really think we should just abolish the IRS, the Fed, all of it.
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It’s one that, it’s not really like a moral like tradition, not quite. It’s more in the legal sphere. I think at least how we view it now, there’s certainly moral things that go into it.
The moral sort of ossifies into the legal. That’s a very good way of putting it. I just think now like people kind of view it to some extent as a legal thing, but it should be treated also as a moral one.
But that’s one that I think is a big one because like we said, you can’t plan if you don’t know what’s going to happen, if you think it might be taken from you, whether through taxation or just through outright expropriation. So I think that’s a big one. I think also the tradition of ordered liberty, which is also kind of in the sphere of morality and law.
How do you define that? It’s the ability to do what you ought. I think would be the pithy way to put it. Not necessarily what you want, but what you ought, which connects to tradition.
And I think that’s where you get into these minutiae debates over gun rights or free speech, whatever it is. I think if we were willing to look at the past and kind of what people came to as a conclusion for why what was in their time the law was the law, I think that’d be a very helpful way of viewing it. I think to some extent, the minutiae could be avoided because the purpose would be clear instead of just debating the technicalities, whether for interest group reasons or for personal interest, moral reasons.
I think that’s a big one and would solve a lot of our societal bickering. If Vermont was able to have a different stance on ordered liberty as applied to these things as Texas is, because they’re different. I think that’d be very helpful and kind of important in moving forward and staying coherent as a nation rather than just endless bickering over things that people aren’t going to agree on because they don’t have the same moral foundations.
Right, right. No, that makes a lot of sense. Was that to some extent contemplated in the founding of the U.S. as a constitutional republic, that each state had really strong rights so they could decide for themselves what’s right, what’s wrong, legally, morally? And if you disagree with that, well, then you migrate to another state.
Obviously, that’s become lopsided now that we have weaker local states. That’s an interesting way to look at that. In terms of property rights, well, you already said tax law is notoriously complex and obfuscated.
Property rights are a very important tradition. Also, you said ordered liberty. Oh, this is the question I wanted to ask, actually.
Doing what you ought to do, as you defined ordered liberty, basically doing the right thing, right? That’s a very general phrase but very packed with devils in the details, so to speak. David Hume famously said you can’t get an ought from an is. So how do we determine what we ought to do? Do you think this is a matter of having this kind of free market experimentation where different jurisdictions have different definitions of what ought to be done and then you let people vote with their feet? How do we figure that out? Yeah, I think letting people vote with their feet is a big one.
I think also, at least as a Christian, the tradition of Christianity, both as a public gathering place and also as answering the ought question, is a big one. There are, of course, people of different faiths, but as a Christian, I’d say that’s the right one. I think it’s an important tradition to pass down to your kids, friends, and all that.
I think also, though, the tradition of being able to disagree without instantly reaching for the revolver is a good tradition to pass on. It’s something we really lost in bloody Kansas and the war between the states. If the solution is violence and the answer of ought is what the federal government’s going to force you to do, in some situations, it might make the right decision about ought.
I think in many, it makes the wrong ones, particularly as the progressive regulatory state builds up. So I think just the ordered liberty limiting the government and allowing people to do as they ought is a big thing. Also, the private and public traditions of how to answer the moral question is important to both allow and to pass on.
Because of the whole separation of church and state framework and tradition, I think sometimes there’s reluctance to turn to that as an answer. But I do think it’s important because I think when our countries, in the West at least, were more religious, they were much easier able to answer the ought question. And so there wasn’t as much fighting about it.
Right, right, right. That makes sense. Yeah, because the ought is pretty simple, right? It’s just basic biblical ethics.
Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t cheat. And then the rest is like, do whatever you want, kind of thing. Right.
And as a counterexample, I think the effective altruism as practiced by Sam Altman is an example of kind of rationalism, having a difficult time answering the ought question. Because if your answer is, well, I ought to fraud investors so that I could donate more mosquito nets to Equatorial Guinea, perhaps that’s right in that framework. I would say probably not.
But it’s a conclusion at which you can arrive. Whereas if you’re in any of the major faiths, I think particularly Christianity, because at least I know more about it, you can’t arrive there because the beginning part of it is fraud, which is unacceptable. Yeah.
I mean, thou shall not steal is pretty clear. But again, back to the tax code, we do every form of rationalization to intellectual gymnastics, if you will, to try and get out of that and try to rationalize why we need to do that. Or we need to steal 2% of your purchasing power per year via monetary policy, or we need to steal 35% of your purchasing power per year via fiscal policy.
It’s just crazy. We lost something, right? Was it separation of church and state that we lost our connection to this tradition, perhaps, that is now pathologizing our politics? Yeah. Separation of church and state is a hard one because on one hand, certainly, in some respects, Virginia was probably better managed or at least better organized and ruled when there was the Anglican Church of Virginia.
I do think the tradition of why we have separation of church and state is important. None of us want a repeat of just the horror that was Germany in the 1600s because of these religious conflicts. And really, even France in the low country with the wars of Spanish accession, just a disaster and kind of limiting the church’s ability to influence at least top level politics probably helped with that.
I just, it’s really hard to, I think, give an answer to that one because there’s competing forces. Yeah, that’s a great point. I mean, we need the wisdom that’s in these traditions, religious traditions, but you don’t want the centralized power structure that comes with it.
Right. Right. So, yeah.
You’ve written a lot about the history of decolonization and its effects on the modern world. What is decolonization and why is it something that you’ve taken such an interest in? Yeah, big question. I think what is, is easier.
It was just the process of removing outright European control from the non-European world. France, of course, remained financially involved in its former colonies to a much greater extent than England did. Germany lost its colonies.
Russia didn’t really have many, nor did the Austro-Hungarians. But so it was the removal of the great powers from most of the, or the non-American or Soviet great powers from the third world or non-Western world. I think why I was drawn to it, there are a couple of things.
One, I think we’re now inside Western countries experiencing internal decolonization where Europe has a lesser mindset of this. But America, we certainly think, well, America was built by settler colonists. They built all this.
Well, what if what they did was evil? We should eradicate it. And I don’t think that a lot of people think that. And so what that leads to is saying, well, we’re going to tear down statues of George Washington and pull them away.
All the things that led to this point, our present prosperity have to be destroyed because I now disagree with the moral framework of the guy who created it. And I think we’re seeing that, but to kind of know both to where it’s headed and how to stop it, I think you have to look at how it played out in the countries where it was allowed to play out. It’s probably the wrong term, but forced, it was forced on these countries.
And there’s always different conditions. But I think what you learn is that there’s this spirit inside the post-World War I West, and to something of past the 1830s, of democratic egalitarianism. So the feeling that not only are all men equal in the eyes of God, but that all are equal in terms of capability and that any differences in outcome should be destroyed by the state because that goes against the idea of equal capability, which is insanity.
But I think it was really one of the motivating forces of much of the decolonization push because both after the Great War and then after World War II, kind of the feeling that came with it was, well, who are we to decide where a railroad should be built in Mali? Who are we to decide that they should have Western medicine instead of tribal medicine or witch doctors, whatever? We shouldn’t be able to decide that. We don’t have the moral backbone or not the moral backbone. We don’t have the moral capability to say you should do this.
So they not only withdrew, but then replaced it with communism, which is insanity. But really, communism, I think, is the culmination of that forced egalitarian spirit. Yeah, for sure.
Long-winded answer to your question. But I was drawn to it because I see it happening in America and also because it represents this huge shift in public opinion in the West from, well, we know what is moral because we have these frameworks and these traditions. So we ought to help other people reach these same conclusions and see the same benefits we have reaped from practicing them to, well, who are we to decide we ought to let the communists do it? Yeah, the way you put that’s excellent.
That egalitarian spirit does reach a culmination or crescendo in communism because it’s from each according to their ability to each according to their need, right? It’s this total nonsense of we’re all just one big happy family. And the reality, I mean, that’s like this moral front that’s put on and then the reality is the opposite of that, right? The state becomes the most atrocious version of a state there’s ever been, basically. Have there been successful cases of decolonization? I mean, it seems like it’s kind of like the path to hell is paved with good intention sort of thing, right? Like we come to a point where we realize, oh, maybe it’s bad, morally wrong that we’ve colonized and enslaved these populations to a large extent.
But then in the withdrawal or the attempt to correct it, you end up with communist regimes installed. So have we had any success with this or has it just been an instance of kind of good intentions gone awry? There’s one signal case of success and that’s Singapore. Of course, Lee Kuan Yew rejected the egalitarian framework when he was establishing the state and he put it in his autobiography, taking it from third world to first.
But so instead it’s the Lee family more or less rules and there’s some democratic institutions, but whoever’s going to rule Singapore is going to have that steel in him because Lee made it so. Which worked, it worked very, very well for Singapore. And now they’re dealing with the whole TFR issue, which we’ll see if it’s something from which they can recover.
What is that? A total fertility rate? Oh, okay. After South Korea is one of the lowest. Gotcha.
So they’re relying on constant high IQ, high competence immigration in Singapore to continue, which we’ll see if it works. But at least so far, Singapore has been a huge success story after being decolonized. Whereas under British rule, it not really much was going on in Singapore.
Yeah. Interesting. China kind of, of course, now was awful.
And that whole, just his whole reign was just abominable. China since then has kind of stabilized and done better. It of course has issues.
I’m not saying China is this huge success story, but they’re no, they have fewer starving peasants than they did through all their history up until like the eighties. So it kind of succeeded. Africa has been an abject disaster.
I think South America has kind of been the disaster on the back burner where there’s this really good book, 1913 by Charles Emerson. And he describes the world before the great war. And he goes around different cities in the world.
It’s not just Europe. And one he describes is Argentina, which at the time had a higher per capita GDP than the United States. And of course, everyone on your shows probably heard that, but it was this hugely successful place that was doing well.
And then the British left and who was it prone just destroyed the country. And I think the same kind of situation played out across a lot of Latin America, which is quite sad. So there’ve been a few successes in Asia where they’re willing to reject egalitarianism either in the beginning or in the end, but it hasn’t really worked out in Africa or Latin America has colonization metamorph.
Has it gone through a metamorphosis of some kind? Because there’s an art I’m reflecting now in the book, uh, confessions of an economic hit man where he describes like the IMF and the world bank and all of these financial machinations they’re going through to basically in debt or I won’t use the term enslaved, but they financially engineer these third world countries. You know, they lend them money that they can never repay. And then they, when they default, inevitably they retool the economy to serve the first world economy and make them dependent basically.
So has colonization just gone through a metamorphosis and become something a little more subtle. Yeah. Okay.
It’s a good question. I think, uh, kind of two things there. One is that whatever forms of colonization do exist now are much more predatory than at least the imperialism of the 1800s and early 1900s.
Uh, the Dutch and Portuguese were of course horrible about slavery, which is very bad, but the British stamp that out in the 1830s and kind of moving forward. A lot of British expansion into the central Africa region was to stamp out Arab dominated, largely slave trade in the region. Uh, how I met Livingston by Stanley is a great book on that.
It’s quite fun. But anyway, so I think what exists now is people don’t care about that. They’re not there to free people from slavery.
They’re there just because they want some financial profit out of it, which generally the profit motive is good. But I think when applied to a large scale political military operations tends to go poorly, at least from a moral perspective. I think also that what exists is people kind of forgot the reasons for imperialism.
For one, it was having calling positions. You could station your battleships and dreadnoughts and do well from a Naval perspective and dominate trade routes. That still kind of exists with America’s military bases.
The, what we get out of the equation in terms of protecting the sea lanes, I think is at this point up for debate. Um, the other countries though that are still involved no longer really have that reason because they no longer really have navies. Their China is building that with the belt and road initiative, which I think is probably the closest example of modern imperialism.
Particularly if you look at what they’re doing in Africa with building infrastructure, like the great powers once did and trying to take control of local conditions. But you know, other than France, which up until recently with a few coups had a large amount of control in Western Africa and ability to affect things there and reap financial rewards out of it, particularly for their nuclear sector with uranium, which they’re buying for like $5 a ton or just 50, maybe some insane amount from Niger, Nigeria, because they had this existing relationship that was codified when they left. And there was a coup that kind of ended that, but so they were getting a benefit out of it.
But to what extent does America get a benefit out of like loaning money to Chile? I have very little, the money they pay is going to be inflated. It just causes political chaos and probably limits larger trade incentives. So I think what imperialism and colonialism now exists, other than in the case of like American bases, French uranium and Chinese belt and road stuff, is really just nonsense because there’s no benefit to anyone from it.
It wreaks havoc in these countries. It wreaks, or it doesn’t wreak havoc really in their home countries except in terms of mass migration, but it has no benefit. It’s not like having the Raj as a export market for textiles as the British did.
It’s just kind of nonsense where we’re loaning money. We don’t really want paid back and no one’s going to pay it back and it just causes chaos. So yeah.
Is this something like the Russia-Ukraine conflict where it just becomes a money laundering opportunity for those that are insiders? I think so. Yeah. But again, the extent to which they profit is kind of unclear.
I mean, at least in the Ukrainian war, you can say that someone somewhere is making money off of it. I think it’s really hard to say how that’s happening in a lot of these countries. One is Equatorial Guinea has these huge oil reserves that Exxon and Chevron kind of want to exploit, but it’s very difficult to do so because the condition in the country is so just awful that it’s hard for them to do anything and whoever would be reaping the reward off them being able to do it isn’t there because there’s just this chaos.
You see the same thing I think across a lot of the post-colonial world where whoever would have the opportunity for graft doesn’t because the chaos of the pull out and of the kind of ensuing attempts to financially enforce the same rule aren’t there anymore and it’s just a mess. Yeah. I wonder if there’s this problem explored in the book Democracy, the God that Failed by Hoppe and he just says that basically when you have he’s actually advocating for monarchy over democracy.
He’s saying the problem with democracy is you have these elected officials that get in for 48 years. They take whatever they can get and then they pass all the problems on to the next guy. They don’t have a long-term capital interest in the tax base or in the civilization at all.
They’re just on the take whereas if you’re a monarch you actually do care that the individual proprietors under your governance succeed so that their sons succeed so that your son will succeed. You have this longer term view on social cohesion that democratic leaders just don’t have. Is this something like that? Maybe that these operations are just people going in there and they’re on the take basically without any regard for the long-term consequences.
I think it’s harder to make the democracy argument regarding whatever forms of financial imperialism exist just because it’s directed if at all by the state department which isn’t really a democratic organization. People are appointed or get bureaucratic jobs and they’re often just horrible at it but they weren’t really elected to that but then what they do is either try and enforce democracy abroad or I think more problematically bring their personal egalitarian spirit into whatever negotiation is ensuing. So one of the few successful countries in Africa is Rwanda which of course had the horrible genocide but then after that the West kind of took a look at the situation saying well instead of dealing with this in the future we should just let a local strongman kind of make the country stable and not have genocides anymore which is I think a good goal and so it hasn’t had any of that and instead it’s a pretty stable country that both you can visit and you can do business in when he dies.
We’ll see what happens after I get his name but it has that at least has worked. So when they’re not enforcing this egalitarianism things can at least work. It worked in Singapore.
It’s kind of working in Rwanda. I think the problem though is if they’re bringing this egalitarianism into a country that isn’t really a country it’s a collection of tribal groups that very much dislike each other that’s not going to succeed and it’s going to be a disaster. Have you ever wanted to start a business in the Bitcoin space? If so then the Wolf startup accelerator could be for you.
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Yeah, so it kind of started in the 1880s, 1890s. Cecil Rhodes was a famous promoter of the British Empire. He wanted a few things out of involvement in the region, not so much personally but more just for the glory of empire or at least that was how he framed it.
One was the building of the Cape to Cairo railway, so you could go all the way from South Africa to Egypt. He thought that’d be a good thing for the empire to have and so part of that was extending beyond the borders of northern South Africa. At the time was a collection of four states with some Anglo influence primarily around the coast.
And so the semi-virgin territory to the north was what became Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe, Zambia, and I think parts of Botswana. But at the time there were a few like herdsmen there and there are two primarily or two primary ethnic groups, the Shona and the Nbele, which hated each other and were always fighting. And so Rhodes collected funding primarily from the British, the British upper class, the Duke of Abercrombt was the noted founder, and collected a few hundred men in what was called the Pioneer Column to establish British South Africa company rule in this region that was untamed, certainly not, certainly didn’t have any colonial settlements, and would help him complete this railroad.
And he thought that because of the Kimberley mines were so successful and other like land mines in South Africa from diamonds and gold were so successful, the same minerals would be present in this territory. So the company goes in, they get grants of land from the Nbele tribal chief, somewhat like the settlers did in America, where they paid him with guns and military service, but he might have not known that he was signing over the land in perpetuity. So you get this tricky situation, more settlers continue pouring in because though there aren’t that many minerals and there’s some gold but not much, the farmland was very, very fertile, particularly in this, I think it’s a central spine of the country is very habitable from Europeans.
It’s a little bit higher, it’s more temperate. It’s just easy to farm and very fertile. The rest of the country is hotter, but also pretty fertile.
So you could grow tobacco there very, very well. And the land is virgin. So the it’s so much more fertile than anything anywhere else with very few exceptions and good for tobacco.
So more and more of these settlers pour in to buy large tracts of land, either from the South Africa company or the British South Africa company or from the Nbele chieftains. That kind of gets the Nbele mad, of course, so it explodes in this big war in the late 1890s, kind of shortly before the second Boer War begins. And so there’s a lot of unpleasantness.
But at the end of it, the Shona, which are the probably bigger tribe, I think, at the time, at least inside what became Rhodesia, working alongside the British settlers. And there aren’t really many Boer Dutch settlers in the country. It’s primarily Anglo.
And they build this very successful farming community. It also has mining for what minerals are there. But really, it was known for farming at the time.
And what helped it was so Britain at the time was going through the fight over death taxes, income taxes and all that. So a lot of people kind of want to leave and get their wealth out of the country. But also mechanized agriculture was becoming prevalent and becoming necessary if you wanted to have the efficiencies to succeed, which is difficult in a country like Britain that’s been settled since time immemorial, where there are all these kind of small farms, stone fences that you’d have to tear down, hedgerows.
Whereas Rhodesia, no one ever built anything there up until this point other than some stone structures, but very, very little. So if you have a 10,000 acre farm, theoretically, you could just go from end to end over and over again with a tractor. You can capitalize on the efficiencies of scale, which they did to great success.
So that brings us to the 1920s. They sent some men to serve in World War One and fought well, particularly as a per capita portion. But then in the 20s, they became independent of the South African company.
It’s kind of like Virginia gradually went from Jamestown or Virginia company rule at Jamestown, the local self-government. They remain part of the Commonwealth, but were independent and continued succeeding on the same fronts as they had in the decades prior. So about three decades before self-rule.
And then for the next three decades, it was kind of the same. They fought well in World War Two, primarily because of their small population. They provided Spitfire pilots for the British and the Mediterranean theater and some bomber pilots.
But they fought well. And at the end of the war, they were offered independence if they wanted it. The British government said, you know, the empire is kind of going the way of the dodo.
It’s too expensive to keep up. We’re going to start decolonizing. At this time, it wasn’t really hostile to the settlers there.
It was more just an expense thing. Do you want independence? And the Rhodesian said, no, we think it’s beneficial to be part of the Commonwealth. We want to remain a crown colony.
We’re even going to name our new air force the Royal Rhodesian Air Force because we want this connection to the crown. We want to remain British. That was a disastrous decision because few short years later in the 50s, things start getting very hostile from the British government to the Rhodesians.
At this point, there’s northern Rhodesia, which is now Zambia and southern Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe. And first Zambia breaks away, becomes Zambia. And the government there is communist, very hostile to whites.
And there’s a lot of unpleasantness. But it’s not really like genocidal or anything yet. Then what happens is the British government continues enforcing decolonization.
And it spreads from just really the British that were shedding their colonies intentionally to countries that wanted to keep them but no longer hold on. Primarily in the early 1960s, the Belgians in the Congo, who there are a lot of lies about their rule there. Most of the atrocities of which they were accused were, I think, from the evidence we know now committed by natives against Belgian wishes, or if it were corporate Belgian wishes that the crown quickly shut down.
In any case, the Belgians had ruled the Congo well at this point for a few decades and had built it into what was then called the jewel of Africa, these beautiful cities like Stanleyville. But the rebels wanted communism, essentially. And the Russians were aiding the rebels.
America didn’t really want to participate. And if it did, it was with the UN on the side of the communists. So the Congo goes independent.
The Belgians just leave in a day and put a former, I think, corporal in charge, either a corporal or sergeant, but very low-ranking officer. And the country just runs into the ground immediately. First, there’s the Katanga crisis, which is this very resource-rich region of the Congo, wanted to break away.
The UN wouldn’t let that happen. So there’s this bloody civil war that goes on. And a lot of the Belgians who remained are killed.
But then worse, there’s the Simbo rebellion, which was this uprising of witch doctors leading the men, I think. But they were these just horrible brutes who would go into Congolese villages, kill all the blacks and whites there. Just whoever they came across would just kill everyone.
They’re on drugs. They’re eventually stopped by mercenaries from South Africa. But before they did, they just killed so many people.
So the Rhodesians, I promise this goes back to Russia, saw these people fleeing from the Congo into their country. And this was around the time Zambia was going independent. So they were seeing it in northern Rhodesia around the time it wanted to break away.
And then they were seeing in the 62, 63, 64, 65, all these people with horror stories from what was going on fleeing and saying, decolonization happened. Within a few years, there was genocide. We were being killed in the most horrific ways you can imagine.
And the Rhodesians said, well, we’re not doing that. Obviously not. We have enough people to try and fight against this.
So we’re going to go independent unilaterally. So then in November of 1965, the then-Rhodesian front government under Prime Minister Ian Smith unilaterally declared independence from the British Empire. And the British, of course, hated that, as did America and the whole communist bloc.
So you get this strange situation where inside the UN, the Americans, the British, and the communists are all working together to destroy this tiny little country of like 9 million African blacks and about a quarter million white Rhodesians. And they want to destroy it because they say, well, for one, you’re rejecting egalitarianism, which is bad. But more than that, you’re racist or all these things, which wasn’t really true.
But they just had this attack on Rhodesia’s existing. And they said, well, we’re not going to let this happen. So the West really enforces a sanctions package.
The UN passes against Rhodesia, which was the first ever in UN history. And it was different for most, and it was mandatory. To remain a member in good standing of the UN, you had to go along with sanctions against Rhodesia, which, again, is this tiny landlocked country in the heart of Africa.
But they were just infuriated by its existence. So the Portuguese sided with the Rhodesians, and they controlled Mozambique, which kind of borders Rhodesia and was its only access to the ocean. But other than that, and who else? South Africa sided with the Rhodesians.
And in the 70s, Israel sided with the Rhodesians. Other than that, the entire world, free and communist alike, joined up in destroying the Rhodesians. So they fought a 15-year civil war called the Bush War, which wasn’t really a civil war in that the internal African population generally liked the Rhodesian government.
Ian Smith had, for one, made sure there was no apartheid laws in the country. There was some discrimination in terms of what schools people went to. But other than that, no apartheid.
There’s a lot of famous stories about why he thought that. And anyway, he invested a lot in the tribal villages, building infrastructure. So the tribal chiefs quite liked him, as did most of the Africans inside the country.
And the white Rhodesians, of course, wanted to fight. So there’s this internal willingness to fight against communist aggression. Meanwhile, the communist rebels at this point in Zambia and Mozambique are attacking Rhodesians, primarily drawing recruits, either some disaffected people inside the country or some just communist recruits from outside who are willing to go in and attack.
So there’s this horrible war. It lasts first up until 1974. It’s kind of smaller scale, border fighting.
But then the Portuguese have the Carnation Revolution, which is when a somewhat socialist government took over. And this was followed the death of Salazar, who was a kind of dictator. And so the socialist government immediately gives up Mozambique, along with Angola.
And then the communists have this larger stretch of country from which they can invade the Rhodesians. So the war really escalates and becomes a lot worse. There are a lot of atrocities perpetrated by the terrorist rebels against the Rhodesians, particularly a lot of black villagers are tortured to death and killed by them because they want to decide with the Rhodesians.
And in the 79, Nicomo, who was one of the rebel leaders and backed by the Soviets, shot down two civilian airliners and destroyed them. And then when they crashed, bayoneted the survivors. It was horrible.
But the whole time, America and Britain were supporting these communist rebels. And Carter was president at the time. And his friend Andy Young, who was in charge of the UN, was saying, oh, Nicomo, Nugabe, they’re great guys.
And as he’s saying that, they’re bayoneting survivors of civilian planes they knew were civilian planes and shot down. So it was this insane war that was really awful and that we were helping the communists destroy this country. And just a bit of background I probably should have said, Rhodesia was very free.
There were some restrictions on gun ownership and some restrictions on speech during the war because they didn’t want the subversion during the war. But other than that, free speech was generally around. Property rights were very, very thoroughly protected, both for black and white alike.
The Duke of Montrose was one of Ian Smith’s advisors and was in his cabinet as agricultural commissioner. And he passed a law setting aside a good portion of the country’s farmland for the black populations. They’d have more ability to make a living and, more importantly, own property, because the Rhodesians, and this was the main reason they were hated by the West, had property voting.
So instead of just mass democracy where anyone can vote, they said to vote in the national elections in Rhodesia, you’re going to need to have the modern equivalent is about $60,000 in 2024 US dollars in Rhodesian property. So not some foreign corporation, none of that. But whether it’s land in Rhodesia or business in Rhodesia or house in Rhodesia, you need to own that to vote, black or white alike.
Some carve outs for education. That’s just a threshold, right? You just need to be above that to vote. Yeah, yeah.
Just a threshold. And then anyone above that could vote. And the world hated that, because up until 1830, America and Britain had that.
And that was how we handled republicanism, because we only wanted people who have shown themselves to be competent stewards of wealth or earners of wealth to be able to vote. Because in voting, they’re stewarding the country’s future, at least they should be. Not voting to loot the treasury, because they need debt relief or whatever it is.
And Rhodesia thought that was a convincing thing. So that’s what they enforced, where you’re going to have to have this to vote, black or white alike. There’s not racial carve outs.
Of course, the world hated that, because per capita, more whites than blacks inside Rhodesia could vote. Which was in part because of immigration, because another side note. Sorry for all the talking.
Rhodesian immigration policy was somewhat strict, in that no matter who you were, if you’re immigrating, they wanted showing that you would be able to be part of the local community, that you wouldn’t just be a foreigner in Rhodesia who was doing business. They wanted you to be part of Rhodesia, and part of the community, part of the culture, part of the society. So that both limited immigration, but also meant that a were somewhat wealthier and was kind of part of the, not genteel, but like a middle class or prosperous lower class or upper class parts of the country where they’d be able to buy land.
And so they were generally able to vote more than the blacks. But anyway, the world hated that. And that was part of the animus against Rhodesia.
And really the reason the West went against it was they said, well, you’re not democratic, because you’re not. So we’re going to destroy you. So that led to a long running fight in Rhodesia, which was this free and very prosperous country.
It had the highest living standard for blacks on the continent, had a growing economy, it was industrializing, it was just destroyed. The Civil War was going on. They were able to keep things kind of going inside the country during the Civil War.
But then Mugabe became president in 1980, or prime minister in 1980, which came after in 79, an attempt to put a moderate African preacher, he was a reverend in charge, Abel Mirzala. And the Americans and British said that’s unacceptable. Andy Young, who’s Carter’s UN secretary, described him as a fascist, despite him just being like a moderate African who didn’t want to kill everyone.
And so they put Mugabe in charge instead after this just horrible election, where his men, who were communist rebel guerrillas, were going from village to village, threatening to kill people if they didn’t vote for him. And the British, who were supposed to be overseeing the election, said that’s fine, it’s just rumors. You can do whatever.
So then Mugabe was put in charge in 1980. First he genocides the Nabele, which were the traditional rivals of the Shona inside the country, which was horrible. Andy Young supported him as he did it.
It’s called the Gurukundi. Then he confiscated the guns of the whites who remained in the country. There’s large lists of them because of kind of Commonwealth gun policy.
And then in the early 2000s, he destroyed the country, which up till then had, despite his horrible rule, somewhat remained the breadbasket of Africa because they transitioned during the war from tobacco to grains. They could feed themselves because sanctions meant they couldn’t export tobacco to import food. So it was this grain economy, or not grain economy, but it was the successful grain producer still, even up until the 2000s.
And then the economy had been doing terribly because of inflation. Mugabe confiscated the land of all the white farmers and handed it to his cronies who didn’t know how to farm. So then the country went from still being breadbasket of Africa to being known for starvation and hyperinflation.
And it was just a mess. And that’s kind of where things ended for Rhodesia as an entity. I have never heard any of that story.
I had not even heard of Rhodesia. What can we learn from all that? I mean, that was so recent. Yeah, it’s crazy recent.
I mean, what are the big lessons or takeaways that we can draw from that experience? I mean, such a mess. Such a mess. We’re raised here in the U.S. always, we go, we’re the good guys, you know, we’re spreading democracy.
I was like, clearly not the case. So what, I mean, what, I don’t know, what are the takeaways or lessons from that whole experience in your view? So one is an uncomfortable one, which is that kind of no matter how many concessions you’re willing to make, the side that wants to force this egalitarianism is going to do it kind of no matter what. Ian Smith had trouble learning that.
His book, Bitter Harvest was the reprint and The Great Betrayal was the original print. It’s all these efforts he made to kind of meet the British halfway. He traveled all these conferences.
He was willing to work with Merzawa. He was even willing to work with Mugabe after the war. And, you know, every person has their faults and Rhodesian society had its faults.
But on the whole, it was far better than Zimbabwe for all involved, black or white. But even though he was willing to meet halfway, they didn’t want to meet him halfway. They were just dragging him along to destroy him.
So I think one lesson is you can’t really negotiate with people who want to kill you. You have to, you know, build up those who don’t want to do so, so that can be resisted. But you can’t be negotiating with people who just want to send you to the Gulag.
I think the second thing is that, you know, we live in a democratic society in a democratic age where democracy, whether nominal or real, is seen as the end-all be-all and in itself a good thing, intrinsically good. I think Rhodesia shows that to be untrue. America up until Jackson and Britain until the first Reform Act and then really the second Reform Act in the 60s had these landed voting rules, which land then was the primary asset.
So it was just landed rather than propertied. Rhodesia updated it for the 20th century and then propertied. I think that there is a great deal of wisdom in that, in that no matter who’s someone is, if they’re going to be participating in governing the country, theoretically stewarding its wealth, its prosperity, its people for the future, you don’t want people who’ve shown themselves to be incapable of doing that.
So if you just have mass democracy where kind of no matter someone’s fecklessness they’re able to vote, that probably will go poorly because they’re probably going to vote to loot the treasury, which we’ve seen. Whereas Rhodesia in a way that wasn’t apartheid like South Africa, wasn’t racial, was really just meant to kind of find those stewards in society and raise them up to positions of voting, really succeeded because it was doing that. So these long-term things, they didn’t have nuclear power, but I think nuclear power would be a prime example in America.
Were it just people who kind of were able to think of the future voting, we probably would just be a nuclear economy by now where energy would be too cheap to meter. Instead we’re like building solar panels on farmland that are then destroyed by hail and poisoned. It’s just a disaster, it makes no sense.
But because people who can’t think about these things are determining them, this is what you get. I think the third is that the Cold War has to be re-evaluated. Eisenhower of course in the late 50s, early 60s, I think wanted to fight it and wanted to resist communism.
Reagan similarly did that, no matter who he was partnering with it was for the purpose of destroying communism. Really other than that, however, a lot of the Cold War was fought I think to spread these egalitarian ideals. America wanted to spread them through American liberal democracy paired with financial servility to America, whereas the communists just wanted to implement communism.
But if you look at say what we did in Vietnam, we strung the French along until they were out of the ability to fight, then yanked that away from them, didn’t give them aid anymore and they fell. Then once Diem was in charge, we strung him along, he eventually fell. That led to a disastrous situation for Catholics in the country.
And then once America was there, we just pushed land reform, land reform, land reform, which destroyed the nobility in the country and what remained of its aristocracy. So at that point, it was just an atomized society that didn’t really have any reason to fight against communism. At that point we left.
Of course, the American soldiers were not very brave, nothing against them, but I think American strategy at some of the highest levels was either horribly misinformed or meant to advance egalitarianism at whatever the cost. And you see that in Rhodesia, you see it in a lot of countries. It’s kind of what we did.
And I think that has to be thought of when you’re reading about the Cold War out of a few kind of special situations, certainly what we did to Europe. It’s fascinating. Oh, thank you for that.
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I’m just going to read the first post, and then I’ll let you walk us through kind of sequentially what this thread is about. Sounds good. So you wrote that, when was the last time that England and her glorious empire could have been saved from becoming a decaying socialist hell? Many say incorrectly, either World War I, when the empire was exhausted, or World War II, when it was bankrupted.
The real answer is 1911 with the Parliament Bill. And so this is the opening to the thread. I will let you take it from here and tell us about this.
Yeah, sounds good. So Rhodesia relates to this just in that like anti-egalitarian hierarchy that’s beneficial for everyone, this concept of noblesse oblige, and the society it creates, which is how I got into reading about the English aristocracy, gentry, and learning about it, along with just finding it interesting on its own. But so I started learning about, why did it die? Why was the England we think of, which is, or at least typically people who think of England and its aristocratic or monarch origins, the country houses, the hunting, the fox hunting, the estates, you know, why is that gone now, with very few exceptions, with really only a few of the most prudent people having survived in the 20th century? What happened? It’s not that they all died in World War I. A quarter of all the Etonians did, which is people had gone to Eden for a while, which is horrible, and they died at a higher per capita rate than any other class in England, but a large number of them survived.
It wasn’t that. You know, World War II really did bankrupt England, but she still survived after it, and could have kept things going had she wanted. So what social change led to England not only shunning its past, but just dissolving its empire, somewhat needlessly, because it interested me through Rhodesia.
So if you look at it, there are a few big social changes in England over the 19th century. One is in 1832, there’s the first reform bill, which essentially gave the vote to people with middle-class levels of wealth, essentially. That’s very broad generalization.
Then in 1848, I think it was 48, 46 or 48, the Corn Laws were repealed, which the Corn Laws had been put in place to protect domestic agriculture, so that farmers and their landlords could survive, essentially. That didn’t really matter until the 1870s, when there was an agricultural depression that bankrupted a lot of people in the late 70s, early 80s, because grain became so much cheaper. But really the big issue was in 1911, there’s the Parliament Bill, which a brief overview, then I’ll go through the history, destroyed the peerage’s power, the House of Lords power, to veto legislation.
So then at that point, Britain, which like America was intended to have, or the Roman Senate had, up until 1911, had really had two houses of equal and complementary power. There’s the House of Commons, which was democratic and really meant to respond to the concerns and common people, commons. Then there’s the House of Lords, which was much more tradition-oriented and was meant to stop anything from going too far.
So that England had to do what she ought, and they were in England too, their wealth was tied up in England, so they wanted her to succeed. But also, nothing could go too far, there could be huge changes. Is this where we get the Senate and the House? Yes.
Really Rome had some of that, with the tribunes that protected the common people, and then the patricians in the Senate. But the way Britain had that happen was common. So this is one of those traditions we inherited.
Yes. So that’s what Britain had up until 1911. Then, because of what I’ll get into, that was destroyed, and really Britain became a one-house state for all intents and purposes.
The commons, the democratic majority, could do whatever it wanted, and the king generally always gives his consent, so they can do whatever they want. Which is really when you can start tracking Britain’s decline, is right before World War I, with economic issues until the present day, when now it really needs to be said just how bad things are everywhere over there. So how did that happen? Well, first was, as I mentioned, with the first reform bill, the Great Reform Bill.
The landowners were no longer really able to control things. But the bigger issue was they lost all their wealth, or not all of them, many of them lost most of their wealth in the late 1870s, early 80s, with the Great Depression. But that was important because it kind of dismantled the state of rule that had existed in England up to that point.
So if you read about, say, the Napoleonic Wars, the officers in the war, whether Wellington or his lieutenants, or anywhere in between, they for one had bought their commissions, almost certainly, which instead of just being promoted through the ranks, they had to buy a lieutenancy, buy a colonelcy, whatever, which meant they had a financial incentive to stay in the army. But also, they didn’t earn any pay of note. Rarely were the wages they paid the officers enough to even pay for their dinner table, much less just kind of generally keep them prosperous.
That could of course be alleviated with economy, but generally it was the upper caste of Britain who officered the army, less so in the navy, but the parliament wasn’t paid until the 1900s. So people who served England in her empire did so not really out of a hope of pecuniary gain, or a hope of some position that would pay them long term, with a few exceptions, but somewhat rare ones at least considered broadly. Can I ask you, what’s the advantage of paying for one of these lieutenancy positions? What do they stand to gain from that? Well, a couple things.
One was the ability to serve in the army, which had carried its own social prestige. The second was there’s still spoils of war at this point. So, you know, say they sacked a city in Spain during the war, or, you know, whatever it was.
They had to divvy it up. Divvy it up. Okay, okay.
But it was really primarily being able to be in it, and then when they left they could sell it. Oh, okay. So it became something of an investment, kind of like those taxi medallions, though very different circumstances.
Got it, okay. And that was just the army. The parliament operated on similar principles where they didn’t earn anything, they were just there to serve because of the social prestige.
Similarly in the counties, where they were being administered, whether it’s the justice of the peace, the sheriff, judge, whatever. They were doing that really without much pay, if any at all, and often it carried a heavy financial price, but social preeminence. But they did it because they really thought they should, and because it’s how their system was administered.
So that’s all to say that up until kind of this point, the people who were serving England, at least in the upper ranks, were doing so not because they wanted to be paid for it, but because they thought it was their duty to administer the country, serve our empire, and they might have some hopes of gain in the army, but really it was to serve, and because that was their duty to serve, they thought it’s what they should do. And that had existed for a while at this point, really probably since the late 1600s, at least in the 1700s, 1800s, and so on. That’s like what was going on.
But then that started to die out, because the ability of them to do that, well, it wasn’t just good. They also had these large landed estates that produced enough income where they were able to serve, because they didn’t need to worry about money. So typically that was actually a landed estate where they received, say, a pound or two a year in terms of renting an acre to a farmer, and they administered the state, and the farmer did the farming, and they just collected the rent.
In some cases, like the Duke of Westminster, it was urban real estate. In some cases, like the Fitzwilliams, it was mines, but it was typically landed estates, which was useful because the farmers were doing the work. Those didn’t require a lot of inputs, and they were instead left to their own devices, and the good ones, at least, turned to service.
So that was their basis of their wealth and their ability to do things, and because their wealth was tied up in the country, whether it was a mine or more typically fields, they didn’t want to destroy the country, because they had to live there, and their basis of wealth was there. But then the Depression comes, or the Agricultural Depression in the 70s, 80s. They start losing that wealth.
They start losing the ability to do that, and so they start dropping out of Parliament, whether because they’re not able to afford staying there, or they’re not able to afford the elections that put them there. They start not quite being able to serve in the army, though at that point, the commission spying had been abolished. They still weren’t paid much as officers.
Whatever it is, they’re kind of starting to lose their grip on power, which pro-democracy people would say is good, because they’re just this landed elite. Why should they be in charge? But it was bad from a tradition angle, because all these people who have, over generations and over centuries, been kind of trained to rule and inculcated to rule are starting to lose it. But then comes the Parliament Bill, and so what was going on here was in 1909, Winston Churchill, who was a son of a second son of the, of course, Duke of Marlborough.
He put forward this bill that, in order to pay for both social welfare programs and pay for new dreadnoughts for the navy, would institute a new death tax, a new land tax, I think also an income tax, or new income tax. And so if you look at the taxation situation in Britain up until this point, they didn’t really have much of any of that. There was this very, very small, like two and a half percent death tax instituted in the 1880s, after the depression began, and there’s a similarly small income tax.
But even up until like around this time, taxation was less than eight percent of GDP. It was very, very small. But then with these taxes, it’s suddenly a problem, because once it’s in the 15 to 20 percent range, you start having to plan your life around dealing with these taxes.
So the Lords, of course, didn’t want to do this. They said, well, this people’s budget, for one, it’s just framed as class warfare and class struggle, because you’re calling it the people’s budget, rather than like the good for England budget. So why would we vote for that, and why would we not veto it in the Lords? But, Churchill said, well, there’s this kind of tradition, and to some extent law, although it’s unclear, that if the Lords can veto a financial bill, because traditionally the Commons was the one to pass taxes, or pass spending, and the Lords would assent to it, but it was unclear if they had a veto power.
Well, the Lords said, well, we’re going to use our veto power, because we don’t want to pay a 15 percent death tax, because that would destroy our estates. So that led to it. Is death tax just equivalent to a state tax? Yes, essentially.
So you die, you pass it on to the heirs, but you have to give up 15 percent of the state? Yes, and I think at the time it was 15 percent. It kind of quickly escalated after this point, but so they said, well, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to veto it.
That sparked a constitutional crisis in which it was unclear if the Lords could veto it or not, and so Commons wanted to say they couldn’t. The Lords wanted to say they did. The king was kind of standing in the background.
Then Edward VII dies. I think he died during this. He might have died shortly before, but it was around this time that George V became king, and he had some bad advisors, and was also not really wanting to rock the boat.
So he said that if the Lords didn’t start going along with things, he was going to start creating new peers, and the Liberal Party at the time was the one pushing this. He said he’s going to create liberal peers, and the Lords didn’t want that, because they also didn’t want a bunch of new peers. So then this leads to a second fight with Churchill’s kind of partner in all this, which was Lloyd George, and unlike Churchill, he was middle class from Wales, and he said, well, the solution of this is the Commons is just going to pass a bill that makes it clear that Lords can’t veto this.
In fact, the new bill is going to say that they can only veto things for two years at all, and financial matters, they don’t really have a veto. The Lords said, well, we don’t want that, and so this was called the Parliament Bill, and it kind of overshadowed the people’s budget effectively, and this became a larger fight, because could the peers vote a limitation on their power or not? And so eventually this turns into a much larger fight over what their powers are going to be, what society did England want to have, and it ended in a large fight between the hedgers, who were hedging things by just going along with it in the Lords, and the ditchers, who were saying they’re going to fight to the last ditch. They were led by the second Duke of Westminster and a baronet, Willoughby de Brooke, and they said, well, we’re just going to fight it out, and if he wants to appoint new peers, he can try, but we’ll see what happens.
They were outvoted by the hedgers, and so the Parliament Bill became law. So at this point, not only were death taxes higher, but there was no ability for the Lords to say, well, obviously not, we’re not going to raise death taxes anymore, we’re just going to veto it, because they only had a temporary veto on anything, and no real veto for financial matters. So then at this point, taxation starts expanding tremendously.
Quickly, by the end of World War I, I think estate taxes were 40%, which was bad, because they were all dying in the war, which in addition to just the human toll, also meant that at a time when the economy is bad, all these estates need to be sold to pay the death taxes, which just caused huge troubles with trying to sell large amounts of illiquid assets in a market that doesn’t want to buy them, which might make you think of an unrealized capital gains tax, perhaps. But so that starts going on, and income taxes and death taxes just become tremendously larger over the next couple decades. By World War II, I think they’re around 50%, and then in the 60s, they’re 90% under Harold Wilson.
These are increasing because of that market trouble, right? Yes, so for one, it’s that just they can’t sell anything, so the prices they get are lower, though inflation nominally helps with that. The bigger problem is that the lords have no ability to restrict any of this. So the commons, which was at this point largely motivated by class grievance, at least as my reading of it, was saying, well, we’re just going to do it because we want to destroy you as a class, and we believe in this egalitarian ideal, and the fact that the Cecil family, the Lord Salisbury, have served in primarily leadership positions since Elizabeth I, is not a good thing in that they’re an acclimated rule, but a bad thing.
And this is pre-Marx, right? Yes. Oh, no, this is after Marx. After Marx, OK.
So there’s that Marxist spirit. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So it’s a lot of that.
It’s this legalitarian, communist, socialist kind of mixture of ideas that just presents itself in this class grievance and class struggle, which is bad for England on multiple accounts. One is economic matters, and so at the point where death taxes are 90%, which they were in the 60s, and Harold Wilson, who instituted that, is the same one who led the British charge against Rhodesia. And that also, just as a side note, presented itself in that the Lords voted against the sanctions bill on Rhodesia, but because their veto is only temporary, within a year it just became law anyway, which is an interesting side note.
But more importantly, you’re not going to invest in anything if you know that upon your death, 90% of it is going to be stripped away, and during your life, 90% of the income from it is going to be stripped away. Destroys all incentives to be productive. Exactly, which, if you know anything about England, for what is it known other than bureaucratic red tape and all the famous industries, whether it’s steel or coal, for what is known, have pretty much died, which is bad.
Related to that, it was the investment in property continually that built England into what it was. For one, just a somewhat brief example, the agricultural revolution is what enabled the industrial revolution. The agricultural revolution was being able to produce so much more grain from a given unit of land, typically an acre, with fewer hands needed for it, that people could go to the factories.
That was enabled through drainage, which was these tiles they’d put in the land to help drain the excess water, and enclosure, which was getting bigger fields and creating larger farms out of both owned land and the commons that were bought. It created this more efficient agricultural system that enabled the industrial revolution, and it required huge amounts of capital. The modern equivalent is like tens of millions of dollars for a pretty small estate.
On a large scale, that’s a lot of money, but because they knew or at least thought that the state would be in their hands and their family’s hands long term, the investment could occur, which helped England tremendously. The same thing happened with the industrial revolution, though in different ways, whether it’s the railroads or steamships or whatever. Large amounts of initial investment, but it’s going to pay off in the long term, so it’s worth it.
That can’t happen when it’s 90% death taxes. Then England, which kind of built on that idea, whether it’s property rights or just the expectation of a payoff, can no longer occur, so all these industries start dying. The other thing, though, is that it enables rule by bureaucrats, because if you have this old society where the vote is at least somewhat property and the people in charge who are doing things are doing so because they view it as their duty, and what they do is going to affect them personally, because if you’re a land owner and you pass 20% land tax, you’re going to have to pay it, or if it’s a regulation that impacts mines, your mines are going to have to deal with it.
You know all the things that the principal agent problem, where if you’re the principal and the agent, you can kind of see where things are going, tailor your response in a more limited way that’s effective and needed, but not overly burdensome. So that’s what existed before, whereas if it’s a primarily bureaucratic government, there are a few things that go on. One is that those people expect salaries, because they’re not landed, they’re there because they want a job, and so you have to pay them a lot more, so government becomes a lot more expensive, so you have to raise taxes to pay for it.
Kind of that cycle repeats infinitely until something breaks. The other issue is that no longer is there that kind of reason for limitation. Instead, the bureaucrat’s job is really to keep his job, because he doesn’t want to lose the salary or whatever.
So then if you look at like the EPA is a great example, where it’s kind of this limited goal of not having the rivers catch on fire, and centralizing state EPAs so that it’s more efficient. That quickly becomes, you know, every little person involved wants to have his own department, because that’ll mean more power, more money, more control, and to do that, they need to expand regulations infinitely, so there are more regulations to enforce, which require more people. At least to my view, that’s kind of the mindset that comes from this focus on bureaucracy, which is needed to enable the progressive era and all the progressive goals of we’re going to regulate this, regulate that, we’re going to tax this, we’re going to tax that.
You need more people, and those people want to hire more people, so they’re more powerful. And more laws. I’m reminded of Cicero’s quote, the more laws, the less justice.
Yes. Which is in this terrible fucking feedback loop. Yes, exactly.
But I think it is the feedback loop. At least it’s what we’ve seen. What percentage of GDP is the American government spending now? It’s like 40 percent? Yeah, staggering.
It’s something staggering. Whereas, you know, before all this, it was one, two percent, and things worked pretty well. I mean, is the America of 2024 better run than the America of 1875? It’s really hard to say so.
So that’s the feedback loop, and that kind of iterates upon itself continually. Until something breaks. Yes, until something breaks.
So you get those two processes going at the same time, where taxation is getting ever higher because more people need to be hired, and then at least, yeah, that goes on. And at the same time, more laws, more regulations are just expanding out of control because they need to write the more laws to hire more people. So that’s really what happened to Britain over the course of the middle part of the 20th century, where it went from being this empire that, if it had a bigger government than America, still had less so one than like Russia or Germany, it was very successful because people were generally free and able to do things that they thought them worth doing.
And it goes from that, and kind of the gentlemanly rule that accompanies it, with primarily the gentry staffing their positions and some aristocrats heading them, to a situation where it’s just all these bureaucrats who are hired, and they don’t really care about the long-term health of the country, they don’t care about any of this, they just want to keep their job and expand their department. I think that’s what we’ve seen in England, and it just has been a disaster for the country, where now the industries it used to have are mostly gone, the few things like Savile Row still exists, and Rolls-Royce still exists, but that’s very small. So yeah, it’s been bad.
Is that then a canary in the coal mine for where we are headed, America is headed? Yeah, I think it’s very relevant to us, because aside from just my interest in English and aristocracy, I think it’s important because the same thing, you can see it happening in America, we’ve always kind of been tracking behind them by a few decades, but what is the purpose of a 25% unrealized capital gains tax? It’s certainly not to enhance the prosperity of the nation, because it forces sales of these illiquid assets, somewhat like the sales of the states were forced by the state tax, death tax of the 20th century. So if you’re selling private companies and have to sell a quarter of it, really in an illiquid market, that means you have to sell like a third, do a half, probably just to pay the death tax. There’s all that turnover that would just destroy the economy.
And more than that, it destroys these traditions. To tie back in, if you have people who have kind of been prominent for a while, not only is there a better chance they might be so, just because of how things work with a lot of traits being at least majority hereditary, but also you get these traditions where people or the duties that are expected of these traditions, where the current Lord Salisbury is deeply involved in conservative politics. And I don’t know how efficacious he’s been, but the expectation is that you serve.
And if that’s the expectation, then it at least creates better feedback loops and better incentives, because your position isn’t going to come from just stealing from the government or skimming off the military industrial complex. There are a few who did that, the first Duke of Chandos, but kind of disliked because of it. You’re instead by honorable service going to be raised in social esteem.
And I think that’s a much better food deck loop than the bureaucratic one. Which America needs to worry about, because a lot of our success is because of traditions. Whether it’s generally, internally, laissez-faire economics, some external protectionism to protect internal industry, whatever it is, or local noblesse oblige where the landlord, traditionally in American England, would at least be understanding if the tenant couldn’t pay and might forgive rent or lower it or help them pay.
Whereas if you have Blackrock as a corporate landlord, maybe they’ll do that. But it’s much less likely that a very cold and calculating corporation is going to handle things in the same way that someone who’s local and from the community is going to. Which I think is a big loss, an important one, and it’s one you’ve seen in England, and I think you’re seeing in America.
What is that term you use, noblesse oblige? Oh yeah, noblesse oblige. I forget what it translates as other than the obligations of a noble. But it’s essentially the idea that if you have higher status with which you’re born, if you have higher privilege, then you ought to use that privilege not just to advance yourself, but to lift up those around you.
That you have an obligation to the community as a whole to help out in whatever way. I think often modern philanthropy kind of confuses this. If Bill Gates or whoever leaves 90% of his company to charity upon death, that’s not really the same thing as saying, well, I live in this community, so I’m going to build some low income housing and manage it and actually try and help people out directly and use my skills to benefit them rather than just kind of a cold corporate thing as applied to NGOs.
I think there’s a big difference there, and I think noblesse oblige captures the old spirit of doing it personally as opposed to just leaving it to others. Got it. That makes sense.
In terms of social mobility, do we enjoy more of that now than we did in this old model? Because I guess I’m just trying to think from a devil’s advocate standpoint, what have we gained, right? Taxes are way up. Government is way more centralized. I mean, I guess that’d be an argument for peace probably, like we kind of had this nuclear stalemate for 50 plus years, whatever it’s been.
What benefits have we gained from this, if any? I think the benefits are that theoretically you can get a better government out of it if you’re purely hiring on merit rather than taking into account these social factors. I think we haven’t really seen that so much, or at least haven’t seen it since like the 1950s and the rocket age, just because of other considerations replacing the old noble ones. I think the problem with social mobility is an understanding is perhaps it’s more possible now.
I think in some ways it’s been trending down in terms of social mobility in America. I think what you got in the past, and you see this in, for example, the novels of Jane Austen, there were a lot of people who made industrial fortunes, you know, if they were just talented, whether it was in administration abroad, kind of on a East India Company style of administration, or they were just a good merchant, or they were a good industrialist, you know, whatever it was. Typically, they were able to make a lot of money because things were quite free.
So they had this access to opportunity, and there’s generalized prosperity that kind of helped things out. So the new men, or people who wanted to make money, could and often did. And then once they did so, they were able to kind of set their families up as part of this ruling class by buying estates and becoming part of the landed elite, landed gentry.
There are a good number of examples of that and kind of happening over the Victorian age because so many fortunes were made by it. And as that happens, the people selling the land are often the kind of dissipated members of the old order who are falling out because they should fall out. So I think there was that social turnover there, lesser extent certainly, and the hierarchy role, or the hierarchy thing certainly limits it, but it was still there.
And it kind of helped the best men become even better men and kind of help establish themselves. Whereas now, if people do rise through the different social classes, which often Americans are loath to admit exist, it’s, I think, rarely by that. Elon Musk is one example of someone who became wealthy after coming here with not much.
So he certainly did it. But often if you look at the people who are, say, going from middle class to upper middle class, it’s not by providing value. It’s by nominal service that’s quite lucrative, whether that’s as a bureaucrat, or it’s by getting one of these positions in academia, or it’s doing something that’s part of this managerial class, that it’s hard to say that that managerial class is really a good thing overall.
But it is the avenue to social mobility for a lot of people if you’re not willing to take very large risks. So if social mobility is larger, which it could well be, I think a lot of the incentives driving it and ways it happens aren’t as beneficial as they used to be. I mean, could you almost say then that the higher the average effective tax rate, the more social mobility is in the managerial pathway versus the entrepreneurial pathway? I think that’s a great point.
Because if you look at how taxes work, for one, the income tax now is much higher than the capital gains tax. So it prioritizes established fortunes rather than making new ones. But the bigger problem is it’s really hard to scale something to the point where you can establish yourself in whatever the modern equivalency is of one of these old positions.
Just because when you sell it, it’s going to be a huge tax bill, which really limits things. So it limits the ability of people to say, well, now I want to serve rather than work, and I’m able to do so. Whereas in the past, with very low taxes, that was possible.
So now if you want to do things, if you want to be involved in government, instead of making a fortune, selling it, buying something that’s going to produce steady income, and then from there serving government for no pay, you’re expected to be a congressional staffer, making little, and then eventually you might become a congressman after a lot of hobnobbing. And is that better? Maybe. But I really have a hard time seeing the social benefits to all the different classes from that in a way that you can see, at least with nobis oblige in the old system, when it’s properly applied and done well.
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Go to Emergedynamics.com slash Breedlove to learn how you can build an attractive, high-multiple company that maximizes your return when you fully exit. What do you think the right formula is given your read of history? How should we organize government? What should tax rates be? Where do you stand on all that? So, for one, I tend to lean towards indirect taxation as being far preferable to direct taxation. Inflation? Not inflation.
I mean tariffs or point-of-sale taxes. Versus income tax. Versus income tax or death tax.
At the point where you’re trying to figure out every dollar of someone’s income, or counting the bottles of wine in the cellar to establish someone’s fortunes that can be taxed, that’s a gross invasion of privacy that really goes against, for one, a lot of Western traditions, but also just is a bad thing in that it promotes the growth of this bureaucracy that’s going to be the one counting your dollars. So I think if you just get rid of that and instead have a 15% value-added tax, I don’t know if that would be best, just use the mine as an example of something other. That would probably be better.
And you can also avoid it by just not spending if you’re trying to save money. So I think there’s ways to do indirect taxation through point-of-sale things, tariffs that would require a smaller government, but I think that’s a good thing too. I think the other thing is you want to empower those people and enable rule by those people who have the longest time horizons.
In Bitcoin, something that often comes up is one’s time time preference. Low time preference is a good thing. Whether it’s property government or something else that leads to the same system, I think that’s a very good thing because it enables that successive investment over the generations and things that are good and that kind of lift society up from wherever position it may be, rather than just requiring people to either take huge risks, which can blow up, or not do things because they just don’t see the payoff.
So if you have a high time preference, you’re just going to spend money, probably not really going to invest. Long time preference, you do. I think that kind of steward’s mindset is a good one.
And you probably need to change the tax code to do that, but you also need to find ways to just inculcate virtue in people, which is much more difficult than changing the tax code. Well, taking it all the way back to private property, the lower the effective tax rate, the stronger your private property, the lower your time preference, or the longer your time horizon and your incentive to be productive and invest for the future, because you know you can keep more of the fruits of your own labor. It seems like kind of a simple formula, but for whatever reason, humanity can’t.
We’ve done it, right, a couple of times. We have these experiments where we have low and predictable taxes and stable law. That’s what this country was founded on.
But then eventually, I don’t know, we start creating the prosperity and then the managerial class or the bureaucratic class parasites onto that, and then you get these feedback loops. And now, boom, we have 40% of GDP is now government spending, apparently. It’s like, how did we go from 1 to 40? So are there ways to prevent that, to prevent these? We’re calling them positive feedback loops, but that just means self-reinforcing.
They’re negative in their consequences, but they’re self-reinforcing. So is there a way to prevent these feedback loops from taking hold? How do we create a society that has low, predictable taxes, stable law, therefore we’re lowering everyone’s time preference and presumably helping that society to flourish? Yeah, tough question. I think there are a few things you run into that become issues.
One is that the tendency of empires is to tax wealth internally, to spend it on the fringes, to keep the empire intact for reasons of either prestige or self-enrichment. So that makes having an empire quite difficult to deal with, at least if it’s one that’s administered heavily. So the British had less of that problem, at least until the World Wars.
America certainly has that problem now. A lot of our taxes aren’t going to, say, build bridges in Ohio. They’re instead going to fund gender studies programs in Pakistan, which I think was like a $2 billion expenditure.
Crazy. It sounds like a joke, but unfortunately it’s true. Yeah.
So there’s that issue, which makes having an empire very difficult. That’s something the Venetians found, where their republic decayed as they kind of accreted parts of the Mediterranean to their empire, where it makes more sense to focus inward than outward. McKinley had a lot of virtues.
I think his creation of the American empire was problematic, and then it took things outside of the continent. Suddenly we’re spending money on naval bases in Guam, or getting involved in trench warfare in Europe, which probably didn’t need to do. It was bad for America.
So I think, for one, finding those people who have closer horizons, and if they’re willing to invest for the long term and have long-time horizons, they should have kind of a focus on locality, which means, I think, devolving power from the federal government to state governments. But of course, as we’ve seen, that can change. Which is the other problem you run into, is that really the only worth of a constitution is the people who are imbued by its spirit, who keep the fire alive.
So Liberia has the same constitution as America. There’s been a meme going around Twitter about that. Hopefully whoever posted it isn’t.
I’m not getting in trouble for referencing them. I forget who it was, but the meme was funny, because Liberia does have the same constitution, more or less, as America, and Liberia is awful. So the constitution can be helpful, but you can’t be relying on passing an amendment that says, no senator can enrich himself.
So I think people calling for a constitutional convention kind of miss the point. People follow incentives, not laws. Yes.
That’s a great way of putting it. So there’s that. I think, just generally though, to kind of answer the question as best I’m able, if you’re able to devolve power to people who are local and have long-time horizons, that tends to be best, at least from my reading of it.
So in Rhodesia, that meant property voting in these large farming estates. In England, that meant these kind of manorial houses and the manor lands that surrounded them that became country houses and country estates. And that had its flaws, of course, in terms of being able to rise through the social ranks.
But it did lead to this kind of investment for the long term, and this focus on justly earned prosperity, rather than financial instruments that create the illusion of prosperity. Because it has to be real. If your focus is local, you can’t be saying, well, really, GDP went up, though everyone here is on meth or on fentanyl.
You have to actually care about the people and have them be productive. It’s just a whole different mindset. So the extent to which you’re able to do that, I think, to some extent, that’s better teaching of history and better focus on things.
I think also, amongst those who would be leading, you have to teach virtue properly, which is very hard now, because there’s just, for one, so many temptations, but also, I think, very little focus on it. How many people in high school have read any of Plutarch’s lives, for example? That was really the manual for our founding fathers, along with Cicero and the Bible. So you have to, I think, reverse history to the extent you’re able and say, though it has its downsides, we’ve seen this whole progressive era bureaucratic thing didn’t really work out in terms of advancing human flourishing, which I think should be the goal.
That concept that we don’t want nominal GDP to go up. We want people to flourish. And importing fentanyl so that Narcan stock can go up in price, which I don’t think that that’s the reason for it, but just as the example of the absurd, that would be a bad thing, even if GDP technically goes up.
Or there’s the line about breaking windows to repair them so GDP can go up. That’s not advancing flourishing. That’s just some novel thing.
Yeah, Paul Krugman advocating for an alien invasion. So you got all the factors going. It’s like, what the fuck? What kind of Keynesian Kool-Aid are you drinking, bro? Exactly.
So I mean, it sounds like you’re advocating for decentralization to some extent, like to have government be local, which makes a lot of sense, right? You’re more likely to engage the empathic circuitry of a human being when they’re interacting with people face to face versus managing people bureaucratically as a spreadsheet. I mean, that’s pretty clear and intuitive. What seems like we’re definitely flirting with decentralization again, there’s a big tug of war.
Like we’ve, our technological paradigm has changed, right? We’ve gone from industrial age into digital age, or we are going through that change. There’s a lot of centralizing tendencies, like we saw all the censorship and, you know, enforced gene therapies and all these things of the pandemic era. There’s also a lot of decentralizing tendencies with social media, internet broadly, Bitcoin’s a big one, right? Taking money, the money power out of the hands of the state.
So how do you, I guess, first of all, I don’t want to put words in your mouth. Are you advocating for decentralization and localism as kind of the solution to build that flourishing society? And then what is the role of digital technologies, Bitcoin, internet, et cetera? AI, I just want to throw that in there. Right.
So I think as to localism, yes, or decentralization, yes. But it’s to what purpose? The purpose of like decentralization isn’t decentralization. It’s enabling the people who will in turn enable human flourishing.
So I think you need to have some respect for both the like bringing in of the competent new and also the existence of the competent old and trying to rid ourselves of this just desire to destroy something because it’s old and exists, whether that’s an old family or an old fence. I think there’s a desire to destroy that. That’s bad.
And that decentralization might empower those who would try and stop that tendency by showing the benefits of Noblesse Oblige locally, which is going to be very difficult and we’ll see that happens, but it’s certainly better than just going along with the current trend of things. As to, so we’ll see how that works, but I’d say decentralization towards that end is good. And then for like digital technology, I think there are kind of twin impulses there or kind of twin things there.
One is that it’s very good and that it does in many respects empower this decentralization. Bitcoin particularly, the ability to have a bearer asset that isn’t heavy is a great thing. Traditionally we had bearer bonds or I think it was mainly bearer bonds, not bearer equities.
But if you have a bearer bond, then you can go anywhere from El Salvador to South Africa to Russia. That’s helpful. Yes.
Still with counterparty risk, though. Yes, exactly. Which eliminates.
Exactly. So I think Bitcoin is the, as for now at least, with what we currently have, the best possible bearer asset that at least exists and probably could exist with our current technology, which is vastly superior to anything that exists, but is also hugely beneficial in that it enables the ability to say, I’m out of here. And the way that, you know, having a land that a state doesn’t, because even if your country hates you, you have to stay there if you want to have some measure of wealth.
Of course. But every asset has its place. Bitcoin is really good in that bearer regard and far better than like gold or something.
I think the issue, though, is sustainability, not like economic sustainability, but in terms of how can this exist for the long term and kind of promote these long time horizons? Bitcoin is good in that it goes up and it’s immutable or immutable, but the number is immutable. And there’s all that. The issue is, I think, at least for me looking at it, it has no income attached to it.
So if you look at what enabled these people in the past to, at least if they were good, if they had the right mindset and the right virtues, do the right thing, it was that they didn’t have to worry about government service, not because they were selling off parts of the family fortune bit by bit, but because the income produced by it was sustainable, at least in the era. And so nothing went away as the income was derived from it. The problem you get with Bitcoin, and I mentioned this with Marty Bent on a podcast of his, which he’s awesome, but Bitcoin doesn’t do that.
And any way in which you could do that with it, I think would be problematic for Bitcoin. I don’t really think we want Bitcoin bonds because that kind of defeats the point. And you don’t want to lock it up for the obvious reasons you don’t have it in cold storage.
Not that you need to hear that. So I think there’s still some need for a sustainable income producing asset that means you don’t have to sell Bitcoin. Of course, no one here listening wants to sell it.
But if you’re trying to create this world in which people serve rather than try and prey on people for a gain, you need that income stream, or else you’re just going to get these same forces where eventually it is sold off. And eventually that’s a problem, even if it theoretically could go up in price to the point where that’s not an issue. But no, it’s a good point.
I could be wrong, again, on attribution. I think this is in the Jewish Kabbalah. But it recommends keeping a third of your wealth in cash, a third of your wealth in your business, and a third of your wealth in land.
And maybe it’s for that very purpose. Cash is not really meant to be income producing. We’ve sort of been hypnotized into this.
And cash is not government paper. Cash originally meant money box in French. So it was a bigger asset.
It was physical gold, basically. Physical gold, physical silver, something like that. Those things don’t really produce income.
They store purchasing power across time in a method that has no counterparty risk. But it doesn’t produce income. You do need something to produce income to replenish that store of purchasing power over time.
And then presumably the land is, well, the land can be that. It can be an income producing asset. It can also be a place for you to live.
It can be a place to run your business, whatever it is. This whole property game seems to ground out in land, as you said earlier. That’s where it started.
Because we are taking territoriality to the next level. It starts in land, but then it’s in stuff. And then it’s in complex financial instruments and all of this.
So that’s a good point. I guess the big benefit of Bitcoin is making that vote people cast with their feet much higher signal. Because typically if the government becomes excessively oppressive and you have to leave, well, you leave with the shirt on your back if you’re lucky.
And that’s that. You start over. But with Bitcoin, at least it may not work perfectly given circumstances.
Maybe it’s happening too fast or too soon. You can’t sell your land into Bitcoin or whatever. But at least it gives people something, this hyper-portable bearer asset, that they can get their purchasing power out of the oppressive jurisdiction into the favorable jurisdiction.
And then presumably they could redeploy that into something that’s income producing. One point on that, if I may. In terms of viewing the different asset classes as different, like you’re talking about with the third or third.
I think that’s really a very important thing for people to keep in mind. Of course, I’m very young, so I could be wrong. Multiple grains of salt.
But if you look at, since we’re talking about the aristocracy, who failed and why. Really, one of the issues was an inability or unwillingness, rather, to keep up with changes as they happened while holding on to what was good of the old. So land, of course, had its value and you could draw rents from it.
But at the point where railroads are becoming a thing and mines are getting more profitable, a lot of people resisted diversifying into either bonds or equities. And kind of bonds came first and then equities later because of inflation, in terms of preeminence. Just because they didn’t want to and they thought it either gaudy or too risky or whatever.
But those who did invest for the future and say, well, I’ll maybe move off a portion of land and sell it when the entail comes up and use that to first buy bonds, then later buy equities. That was a good decision and it gave them more staying power for the future. And what Bitcoin did, at least part of what it did, is create this whole new asset class that gives you that ability to say, well, land still has its value, certainly.
And some equities, I think, still have their value, particularly in terms of producing income. It’s like a company that can produce it for the long term. But in terms of growth and in terms of being a bearer asset, this Bitcoin thing is something that people should probably at least take a closer look at.
If you’re interested in the lessons of the past, it’s probably something to start investing in because it becomes that thing where at the point where you’re left behind, it’s very difficult to catch up. And it made more sense at the time to invest in railroads at a lower valuation, just as one example, than to wait to the point where suddenly they’re using steel rail and it’s very expensive valuations, relatively. If you miss the boat, then it can be hard to catch up unless you just have so much wealth that it’s not an issue, at which point you probably would have just done it in the first place.
Well, I agree with all of that. But I would take it maybe one step further. You could even be a billionaire.
But if all of your capital is deployed in counterparty risk-laden assets, you own government bonds, you own physical real estate equities, etc. But war breaks out or whatever, and these things are going belly up, you can’t liquidate them. The counterparty risk starts to show its head.
And in that situation, you would prefer to own the Bitcoin in that situation because you don’t have the counterparty risk. So Bitcoin is something you’d rather own it and not need it than need it and not own it. It’s a very strong insurance policy on basically any type of risk, basically.
Geopolitical, jurisdictional, natural disaster. Anytime shit goes down and you need to move and you need to take some purchasing power with you, that’s the lowest hanging fruit. Which is hugely beneficial.
And I think it’s starting to, or largely has, displaced gold in many of those regards. Not all, because there could be a solar flare. I know that’s not an actual criticism.
There can be issues in which these old things still have some value. I think that ability to say, well, I should change my allocation or kind of change my mindset as new things come up while holding on to what’s good about the old is a very beneficial one that those who survived knew, and those who didn’t survive largely refused to accept. Amen to that.
And then I think you have to look at the world probabilistically, right? And say, yeah, if there is, whatever event happens that we move into a world that doesn’t have electricity, internet, AI, well, then you better have some gold, right? Because that’s gold, bullets, water. These things really matter in that world. Whatever probability you assign to that happening, if it’s 5%, well, then you should probably have 5%, at least, gold allocation.
If you think we’re 95% going into a world that’s still characterized by internet, electricity, AI, well, then I would argue, my position would be, I’m not prescribing this anyone, that Bitcoin would be dominant in that world. And so that would be my, that’s how I would treat it, basically. My cash position, if it’s one third of my portfolio, I think we’re 95% likely going into a world with internet, electricity, AI, then it’s 95% Bitcoin, 5% gold.
Use dollars as needed for liquidity in the businesses, but basically, your cash reserves would be those two things. And so, hopefully, that diffuses some of the tribalism, where people are just like, no, it’s definitely gold, it’s definitely Bitcoin, it’s definitely this shit coin, it’s like, whatever. I think that’s the best way possible.
Construct your mental model of the world, assign probabilities, allocate accordingly. One other thing, if I may, I think one big change we saw alongside this rise in bureaucracy is the focus on capital gains rather than income, which certainly has its place with inflation. Of course, Bitcoin is usually beneficial in that regard, in terms of M2 and liquidity, and to some extent, not sopping it up, but tracking it at least to the point where you can maintain purchasing power.
But also, I think it’s important to remember that income that doesn’t require at least too much effort does certainly have its place, whether it’s dividends or business, whatever way you want to accomplish it, in that it enables these other paths of freedom, and in some ways helps resist, I think, the managerial revolution, or this kind of managerial tyranny, bureaucratic tyranny, a little bit better than the capital gains route, because it gives you the continuing ability to fight. So it’s one of those changes. A guy on Twitter, Dimitri, or Back the Bunny, has talked about it some, and he wrote an interesting thread on it, which made me start thinking about it.
But it’s one of those things that I think is under-remarked upon, in terms of how we view wealth, where if you read, like, Austin’s books, how many pounds in income were you getting from your land a year, from whatever, in terms of the capital value of it. It’s just a change, but everything has its place, as you’re saying, and I don’t want to go on too much about it. But I think it’s important to remember that some of these things have their place, based on what you want to accomplish with your life, and against what you’re fighting.
That’s a great point. Maybe the whole Bitcoin-gold thing, too, is a good case of that novelty colliding with tradition. Because gold is a very traditional most traditional store of value.
Historically, when things have gotten crazy in the world, people flock into gold. And so we’ve been doing that for 5,000-some-odd years, and the fact that there’s a 15-year-old emerging technology that portends to disrupt that, that’s a pretty radical claim. I don’t know, what do you think about, just to maybe put a bow on the whole thing, is there’s a lot of value in tradition.
That’s sort of like the way things have always worked, even if you don’t understand why. That’s why we vest trust into it. But sometimes, we do create new things.
The tradition needs updates, basically. Software or hardware updates. But we have to have a very discerning filtration process, because 95% of those updates are bogus, basically.
How do you think about the interaction of tradition and innovation, perhaps in the context of Bitcoin and gold? Yeah, so you certainly don’t want to be on horseback when the machine gun makes its appearance. So there’s that. I think just one example of that is General Haig, who was the butcher of World War I, who sent men to die after die after die in the war.
He had served earlier in the Boer War, and Barbara Tuchman in the Proud Tower describes this, where after the war, when the British cavalry had just been torn apart by shell cannons and machine guns and long-range rifles that the Boers were using, Haig still went before Parliament and testified that the Arme Blanche, or like Sabre and Lance, were still effective tools of war in the budding 20th century, which was absurd and disastrous and led to a lot of people dying. So you don’t want to be doing that. I think you really don’t want to be holding on to tradition at the point when it’s obviously been displaced by something better, or at least more able to accomplish something.
It might hold the ideal up, and I think a lot of people still think of chivalry as beneficial, but it occurs in different ways, and it’s important to remember that. So as applied to Bitcoin and gold, I think the probability thing is probably the best way of looking at it, both in terms of what probability is there that this actually will displace it, and what probability is there that something could happen that obviates one or the other. What’s the possibility that we can bring an asteroid back to Earth and bring the gold down, and what’s the possibility that all computers, or at least most computers, get knocked out? I think they’re both issues.
So I think it’s important to hedge one’s bets. The degree to which you do so will also limit returns. Yeah, exactly.
I have trouble giving a good answer just because I don’t know. But I just think it’s important to keep these different mental maps in your mind, where you don’t want to be destroyed either way. So based on what probability you think after trying to learn as much as you can, at least efficiently about it, is probably what you should do on that front.
Yeah, well, that’s a great point on returns though, right? Well, you have to acquire the novelty when it is still a novelty, when tradition is still being widely upheld, if you’re going to benefit in the asymmetric upside of that. But to get to that point of conviction just takes a level of study that, yeah, I don’t know. There’s not really good advice.
Well, be humble. Study deeply. Study widely.
Never take any piece of knowledge as final, right? It’s all provisional. It’s all subject to change. And I don’t know, when you get the stroke of insight or whatever it is that you feel like you’re deeply convicted in something, then go for it.
But there’s no formula for that, right? It’s just like broad strokes. But it’s kind of the Bitcoiner experience, I think. They get into it, they study it, and a lot of people go through some threshold point where they’re like, oh, I’m all in.
Whatever all in means for them, right? For some people it’s 100% of their wealth. For some people it’s 50, you know, whatever. But they go all in on that cash position, as we were talking about.
And yeah, risky. But it’s been effective for people as well. One really good, I think, signaling device with Bitcoin is that it’s important to let your convictions, if they are convictions, actually guide your behavior, whether that’s trying to be a good Christian or whatever it is.
Bitcoin is very good in signaling in that if you have the conviction to whatever degree that it is this thing in which you should be paying attention and should be putting money, you either do it or you don’t. It’s not some 401k plan that’s just automatic because the government said it’s a good thing to do. You actually have to take the effort to do it.
And that shows that you’re willing to live by your convictions for better or worse. But I think in this case, probably better, which is important, because I think a lot of people, whatever their views of self-employment being a good thing, will just remain working for the company because they’re not willing to let that conviction guide them. And it’s important to let your convictions guide you.
That’s how Columbus came to America and so on. So it’s a good thing. And you should do that.
Yeah, no, that’s a great place to put a button on it. I guess the devil in the detail there is discerning your convictions from your hypotheses, right? Yes. Got to do the work.
And then I don’t know. How do you know when you know you’ll know when you know? I don’t know. Yeah.
Hard to give good advice on that. Yeah. Awesome.
Dude, thanks so much for coming to Miami doing this. Yeah. Awesome conversation.
Tons of wealth. Sorry, wealth of knowledge. Tons of wealth of knowledge.
Yeah. Anything in closing words? Actually, where can people find you on the Internet? Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on.
This was awesome. I really appreciate bringing me down. Yeah.
For finding me, I help run the American Tribune Network of Properties. I mainly handle this part of it. So you can really find me best places on Twitter at Will underscore Tanner underscore one.
If you want to chat, my DMs are open or whatever else. Tweet a lot. And then my substack is the American Tribune dot news.
I’ve mainly been writing about this sort of thing, primarily Rhodesia and then the experience of the Anglo sphere, American, British, primarily gentry, and what happened and why and how we can learn from that to move forward. So I hope people like this. And thank you again for having me on.
It’s really awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for watching.
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