There is a popular slogan among many Libertarian Party members that goes ‘Liberty in our lifetime’. This is no good, misguided, and rather uninspiring for us, ‘Libertarians for Kennedy’ are interested in a world-wide freedom revolution within a few months and ideally even before the 2024 US election. If we are to have such a world-wide freedom revolution, we must begin by having people who are thoroughly convinced that such a revolution can occur and serve as beacons to others. All of the socioeconomic chaos and wars are ultimately the result of the economic ignorance of the masses which then funds and goes along with all the tribalistic statism and wars. As Hayek writes “If socialists understood economics they wouldn’t be socialists.” The great ‘Austrian Economists’, who are ultimately the intellectual backbone of the free world, felt like economic education was the proper way to achieve socioeconomic harmony. Hayek: “nothing could contribute more to the cure of humanity’s ills than to give people a better understanding of economics.” Mises: “all reasonable men are called upon to familiarize themselves with the teachings of economics. This is, in our age, the primary civic duty…Economics deals with society’s fundamental problems; it concerns everyone and belongs to all. It is the main and proper study of every citizen.” The Ron Paul revolutions of 2008/12 and the Javier Milei revolution in Argentina owe their success to having men who could educate the public regarding the economic fallacies that kept citizens poor via massive governments, and we believe that with 8–9 months till election, an exponential chain-reaction of economic education can succeed in the USA and be exported to the rest of the world similarly (or even better) to what Milei is doing.
We MUST catch up to the wisdom and advise of ‘The Austrians’! In his article ‘The Case For Radical Idealism’, Rothbard quotes Hayek:
“ “We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia…The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and thereby an influence on public opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote…Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.” (Hayek)
Hayek is here highlighting an important truth, and an important reason for stressing the ultimate goal: the excitement and enthusiasm that a logically consistent system can inspire. Who, in contrast, will go to the barricades for a two percent tax reduction?”
Yes! Only those of us who really understand the free market can get excited about real peace , private cities with competition in road and legal frameworks, police, and the rapid technological progress real freedom and emerging competition instead of crushing-paralyzing-coercive-competition-immune governments bring. How can people get excited about the real possibilities if there isn’t a real visible beacon of the real skyrocketing prosperity we can truly quickly achieve?
Per Rothbard we must be ‘button pushers’ and work to radically reduce the destructive government power-consumption. Rothbard:
“To the radical libertarian, we must take any and every opportunity to chop away at the State, whether it’s to reduce or abolish a tax, a budget appropriation, or a regulatory power. And the radical libertarian is insatiable in this appetite until the State has been abolished, or — for minarchists — dwindled down to a tiny, laissez-faire role. Many people have wondered: Why should there be any important political disputes between anarcho-capitalists and minarchists now? In this world of statism, where there is so much common ground, why can’t the two groups work in complete harmony….Why quarrel over courts, etc. now? The answer to this excellent question is that we could and would march hand-in-hand in this way if the minarchists were radicals, as they were from the birth of classical liberalism down to the 1940s. Give us back the antistatist radicals, and harmony would indeed reign triumphant within the movement.”
Notice how Rothbard sees no reason for the naive infighting that divides the minarchists and abolitionists-ancaps. Per Mises-Hayek-Rothbard we just have to be radicals to create a real visible beacon of change, education, and enthusiasm. And what do we need to do and focus on? Well, “viral” and clever economic education and networking-marketing of course, which is what created the Ron Paul and Milei revolutions. And which ideas should we focus on? Hazlitt explained in ‘The Task Confronting Libertarians’.
“This brings me, finally, to one more single issue on which all those libertarians who lack the time or background for specialized study can effectively concentrate. This is in demanding that the government provide an honest currency, and that it stop inflating.
This issue has the inherent advantage that it can be made clear and simple because fundamentally it is clear and simple. All inflation is government-made. All inflation is the result of increasing the quantity of money and credit; and the cure is simply to halt the increase.
If libertarians lose on the inflation issue, they are threatened with the loss of every other issue.
If libertarians could win the inflation issue, they could come close to winning everything else. If they could succeed in halting the increase in the quantity of money, it would be because they could halt the chronic deficits that force this increase. If they could halt these chronic deficits, it would be because they had halted the rapid increase in welfare spending and all the socialistic schemes that are dependent on welfare spending. If they could halt the constant increase in spending, they could halt the constant increase in government power.”
Yes! Every Ron Pauler and real fan of Milei has been educated about how prices go up because of central bank money creation. This is what allows the ‘taxation without representation’ that enables all the Socialism and warmongering. RFK Jr. fully understands this:
“The Fed is what funds the war machine. Fiat currency was invented to fund wars, and the war machine would stop overnight if the fed wasn’t there to fund it.”
The second idea is how the economic competition which only exists in the private sector is what motivates the creation and spread of superior information throughout society as private companies are motivated to innovate and copy each other’s innovations due to people’s ‘freedom to trade’ their private property for those who have the best products-ideas, and how the government is immune from the incentives and pressures that motivate this ‘competitive knowledge discovery’, leading to inefficiency and vastly more consumption of wealth than production for horrendous losses of tax-payer’s wealth.
Economic education and the faith that everyone can be reached is the key. Mises explains:
“Liberalism is rationalistic. It maintains that it is possible to convince the immense majority that peaceful cooperation within the framework of society better serves their rightly understood interests than mutual battling and social disintegration. It has full confidence in man’s reason. It may be that this optimism is unfounded and that the liberals have erred. But then there is no hope left for mankind’s future.”
At this moment RFK Jr.’s familiarity with the ‘Austrians’ is nowhere near what it is with Ron Paul or Milei. But this can quickly change. RFK Jr. is obviously a very smart, curious, courageous and open minded person. He often tells the story of how women approached him with technical papers regarding problems with vaccines and how he looked into it and decided to go against the grain in this eventual intellectual battle against the ‘Priesthood of Scientism’. RFK Jr. also overcame much ignorance as he overcame his own naive socialist-minded economic myths. He explains in a great podcast episode with the great freemarketeer David Stockman:
“The last time I had him on[podcast] I described him initially as a nemesis of mine back in the 1980s when he was Ronald Reagan’s budget director and I blamed him for…cutting the budget… many many social programs that were sacred cows to my generation of liberals, and our views on most issues today have coalesced in a way I’m very happy about.”
If RFK Jr. can further improve his understanding of economics and really preach more freedom and become a Milei or Paul-like sound beacon of education, then it is just a matter of, as LP Mises Caucus founder Michael Heise calls, ‘harpooning’ famous people or influencers so they then spread the econogospel to their followers. What will happen when Snoop Dogg and LeBron James tell everyone that Federal Reserve money creation is why prices are going up? And other simple bits of economic wisdom? How can this not be tried? That’s it, this is all that is needed, a radical beacon of astute and sympathetic economic education. Hopefully RFK Jr. and those around him can smell blood and really go after it. Or a competitor :-)
