So my third visit to Porcfest is done and some useful thoughts-ideas that came from it are below… I gave three 1.5 hour-long talks… All very similar and the most useful-important given all the socioeconomic chaos arising from Israel-Palestine disaster was this one shown below. My free book ‘The Freedom Intellectual Reconquista’ goes in more depth.
Ron Paul was as usual a great representative of the sort of Natural Rights, Christian-based libertarianism….. Great speech on the usual, how the bureaucrats are destroying civilization, some “good vs. evil”. I am slightly disappointed by the fact that while talking about how to proceed and keep fighting for liberty etc. no mention was made of Milei in whole speech if I recall. The “Woke” threat to liberty is treated as some conscious sorta malicious “evil”, and Soros… It never ceases to amaze me how 99.99% of people who actually end up spreading freedom, like Dr. Paul, do so simply because they are riding the inertia of mostly Ludwig von Mises and the ‘Austrians’ and the seemingly obvious fact that all the statism and chaos arises from the economic ignorance of the masses, yet they make it about morality, ‘good guys vs bad guys’, etc…. However, this makes perfect sense, as Hayek explained, it is not really reason which moves things, but tradition. And the tradition of good vs. evil is still the dominating force in the world. Naomi Wolf also gave a superb talk about CovidMania and all the corruption involved in the CovidVax Pfizer trials and she too peppered her speech an aura of ‘good vs. evil’. Thus what has been ‘naturally selected’ in terms of pro-freedom movements thus far has been moral pontification with a good dose of sound economics. Both the RP revolutions and Milei revolution are very similar in that sense.
While watching a Q/A featuring Chris Martenson and Jeffrey Tucker discussing CovidMania I briefly mentioned how former Pfizer top scientist-exec Michael Yeadon, and also Science-Nutrition hero Dr. Timothy Noakes are now solidly behind the no-virus hypothesis and if they had heard of the growing vociferous anti-virus movement (visit the Drs. Sam and Mark Bailey odysee channel for great anti-virus, anti-germ-theory content). Tucker briefly agreed that the no-virus folks are making much noise… Chris quickly mentioned how the no-virus people are easily shown to be wrong because bacteriophages which are considered as “viruses” by the mainstream are something we can easily observe, etc. I briefly let him know that the no-virus folks are aware of this, and that this is a confusion over language… Mainstream scientists treat two entities as “viruses” , bacteriophages which can be easily seen-filtered-classified, AND the other alleged “viruses” that affect human cells which no one has ever been able to see-filter, unless via the “culturing process”… anyway… I didn’t get into this… It was just interesting how the anti-germ-theory revolution is sorta growing. Ultimately what really matters is not whether there really are viruses that work as the mainstream assumes, but that we have real freedom and emerging competition of ideas in science instead of the coercive information-monopoly-priesthood that has destroyed-paralyzed competition in science leading to all the chaos in oh so many ways.
The most sort of unique-insightful thing for me was the debate between Gene Epstein and David Friedman and my brief interaction with Friedman afterwards. Debate resolution: The Austrian economics of Mises and Rothbard contains economic intuitions that are important, correct, and missing from Chicago School economics. With Epstein on the affirmative and Friedman on negative. First of all…I didn’t like the ‘resolution’… why ‘of Mises and Rothbard’??? The debate focused on what I consider to be minor subjective interpretations of stuff and overall felt like Friedman succeeded at showing how whatever Epstein brought up had also been dealt with by various Chicago economists. Towards end I think Epstein brought up the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle which I’m guessing the Chicago School has no counterpart (especially since IMHO the Austrians got it 100% percent correct here)… But there is soooooooooo much more to ‘The Austrians’ in general. I mean… Carl Menger’s monumental insights into the evolution of money and other social institutions??? Hayek’s cultural evolution, his critique of reason and soooo much more. IMHO only the Austrians have the complete package needed to provide massive complete treatises that explain the evolution of the socioeconomic order, etc. Although I’ve not read much from the ‘Chicago School’ I did recently read ‘Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative’ by Jennifer Burns and as I read the book I could not see anything about Milton Friedman and his friends that had not been treated earlier by Mises or other Austrians in a better manner. Had Jennifer Burns done a bio of Mises first, instead of Rand, her entire outlook and understanding of the evolution of free market ideology would have been different and more profound IMHO.
At some point David Friedman noticed my ‘Austrian Economics’ shirt and told me he was working on a blog post (already published here) where he further highlights some of the advantages of the ‘Chicago School’ compared to the ‘Austrians’ (as he sees them). He briefly told me how due to the success of the Mises Institute many see free market economics as ‘Austrian Economics’. I agreed and also brought up the fact that similarly ‘Austrian Economics’ itself, for many people, is tied to Mises and his praxeology and apriori approach, which I think inadvertently neglects what ‘Austrian Economics’ and its “Method”, as provided by Menger, is really about. To me ‘Austrian Economics’, as really derived from Menger’s ideas, provides a complete evolutionary worldview which IMHO culminated with Hayek.
I got to interview Friedman about 7 years ago here and I was very surprised when he mentioned how even though he had partially dedicated his classic ‘The Machinery of Freedom’ to F.A. Hayek, he had actually not read anything from him, which kinda blew my mind. I suggested he read Hayek’s final book ‘The Fatal Conceit.’ Friedman’s take on Anarcho-Capitalism as presented in his classic book, given its utilitarian approach, is definitely superior to Rothbard’s more Natural Rights approach, so the ‘Chicago School’ wins the ‘better Ancap exposition’ points there IMHO. Also, you can’t call yourself a seasoned Libertarian if you’ve not seen the true classic debate between Friedman and the great George Smith (where I believe Friedman is at his best-coolest and makes better argument):
Another great surprise was interacting with Mrs. Nelson and her son(who are Jewish and strong supporters of Zionism). In my first and third talks I described Zionism as having been a massive error. Towards end of talk Mrs. Nelson walked by and saw about last 15 mins of talk and felt that some of my history relating to Zionism was biased-mistaken. We had brief discussion where I assured her that many of the points she was bringing up I had dealt with earlier in my presentation. I assumed our interactions that day left her thinking I was perhaps a bit ‘antisemitic’ :-) …. However, two days later I ran into her and she was glad to see me, she had curiously looked at my book and liked various parts. We spent over an hour talking about ‘Austrian Economics’ and history and Zionism and much much more and we were both surprised how many great books in common we had read (early Ridley stuff like ‘The Origins of Virtue’, Dawkins, Mises of course…). This pic is NOT an endorsement of book :-)
Something really missing from this year’s PorcFest was a discussion about the Javier Milei phenomenon. Especially given the frequent PorcFest appearances by Skot Sheller who follows the movement closely, so I’ll post this recent appearance of Skot in Tom Woods’ podcast to make up:
Some friends who I’ve now seen multiple years in a row and have also taken interest in my presentations….
