Recently journalist Philip Pilkington has interviewed authors with unconventional perspectives on economic issues, including Satyajit Das and David Graeber. I thought it would be fun to interview someone too – but the man I interviewed uses a pseudonym. This is a six-part series.
ANDREW: Some people say that you represent a fringe view, and so interviewing you is a waste of time.
CODE NAME CAIN: If people obsessed with inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom underestimate libertarians, so much the better.
ANDREW: Can you give any evidence that your ideas are taken seriously?
CNC: Well, people used to think that the financial crisis was caused by antisocial behavior in the finance sector. In September 2007, Tom DiLorenzo pointed out on the Lew Rockwell website that the crisis was actually the result of the government forcing banks to make risky loans to low-income borrowers. Although initially ignored, DiLorenzo’s thesis is now widely accepted among careful observers.
ANDREW: Is that your only convincing example?
CNC: Hardly. Did you notice how over the last year or so, everyone started to talk about how the threat of new taxes and regulations was making producers uncertain? And when producers are uncertain, the economy fails to improve? Well, the fact that worries about taxes and regulations cause uncertainty and so damage the economy is a key insight of Austrian economics that we have proclaimed for decades.
ANDREW: Wait, I thought people said that Obama was causing the uncertainty.
CNC: Obama is causing the uncertainty now. Before Obama, George W. Bush was causing the uncertainty. In general, democratic government causes uncertainty. Hans-Hermann Hoppe made all of this clear in his 2001 book “Democracy: The God That Failed.”
ANDREW: Are there things you have learned from the work of Dr. Hoppe that you had not found in the writings of other libertarians?
CNC: “Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard were great men, but they lived in a time when supporters of freedom needed to be careful about what they said. As a result, libertarians often fail to describe their ideal future society in clear detail. But, as the Cato Institute’s Patri Friedman has recognized, Hans-Hermann Hoppe is an exception to this reticence. He is willing to speak the truth, no matter how much it makes “politically correct” people squirm, and he is so logical and eloquent that I routinely quote from his classic book on the failure of democracy. Please color such quotes in red – I would never try to pass off my own ideas as if they were on his level.
ANDREW: Tell us now about the libertarian society you are working to make possible.
CNC: It will be a free society – no government, no coercion...
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