Q&A Part 1| David Theroux

All the numbers used are from the CBO number and also the White House Office of the Budget. And so we— the numbers we believe are actually way on the conservative side because of politics. And so— but we wanted to make it as dependable as possible based on the conventional view. So even given that conventional view, what would be the outcome? And it's pretty shocking. One thing you can also find out is what would you own if the money was instead privately invested and it's really shocking, very conservatively invested. So the point here is that this is an easy way to see this and then as I said you can then, if you go to the problem page, you see there's a tab at the bottom, see it says problems, click on that and you'll see the 5 questions from the videos. And you click on those, and then that's when you can get these different shots that I showed you a few minutes ago, these different pages like the one on the left. So if you also go to— on the bottom, you'll see also a tab that says— I think it says About Us. Is that right? About or Info?

Info.

Okay, click on that. Okay, so there's a button on that page that says NSA Spine, all right? Okay, it's an on/off button. So what happens when you turn it off?

It goes back on.

It keeps on coming back on, so you can't turn it off. So the whole app is full of these kinds of jokes and things, but also it's a mixture of jokes with serious content.

So how do you see the adoption of these ideas in the millennials? Because throughout history, we've seen that these libertarian philosophies have not had the impact as socialist philosophy throughout time. So do you see any difference right now than, like, general history has shown us?

Well, it depends on where you want to start your your assessment. But I think that just looking at the current trends, there is a great disillusionment with people with Washington. If we look at the views of millennials per se, the millennial group in 2008 either voted overwhelmingly for Obama or didn't vote, and the view was that they were too apathetic. But not because they didn't trust the government or whatever, it's just that they believed that wasn't worth their time, the government would take care of them, and so forth. So the different survey places I mentioned, like the Pew Research and others, showed that most millennials had a very high level of trust in government, and over a number of years it was gradually tapering down until the Obamacare website came online, healthcare.gov. And do you remember what happened when that came online? This was October 2013. Remember what happened?

Crash.

It didn't work. It wouldn't work week after week, month after month. It still doesn't really work, right? So a lot of these young people, maybe you included, tried to sign up, and the supporters of Obamacare believed that this was going to lock them in, make them dependent on Obamacare. They already were pro-big government, essentially. This would lock them in, and from a political standpoint, they would then vote Democratic or whoever was in power who was supporting it. But what happened instead was that a lot of these people said, you can't even get a website to work and you want to take care of my tonsils or heart transplant or my mother's arthritis or whatever? Forget it. This is ridiculous. And they started asking other questions according to these surveys. One was, come to think of it, how do I pay off my student loan debt? Come to think of it, I can't get a good job. I can't afford healthcare. I can't even find a good place to live. And by December of that year, that's when the revelations came out about the NSA spying on their cell phones. So those were the 5 questions. And so that's been tracking pretty consistently. And some people think the recent election, the last November election, changed because of this margin of difference. Now what happened also was the Republicans take over the Senate, they increase their their percentage in the House, and then the people who voted realized they'd done nothing. They've done nothing to change anything. If anything, they've simply gone along with more of the same thing. So they became even more upset, right? So there's this growing group of people, and it's not just millennials, but millennials was a big part of it. And it's now really cutting across society. Now the disillusionment in Washington started really with going back with the disillusionment, war weariness about the wars in Iraq, the revelations about torture, about many other civil liberties issues and so on and so forth. And then the economy tanked in 2008. Do you know why that happened, by the way? What caused that downturn?

Debt.

Debt, that's right. What was the cause of the debt?

Cheap loans.

Hmm?

Cheap loans, interest low.

The biggest part of it was housing loans, which were created by an act called the Community Reinvestment Act. What they did is they essentially made it possible for people who didn't have good credit to get loans at subprime rates, which is the— prime rates are the best rate anybody can get. So this is below the best rate. And since these people didn't have the means to pay off the loans, they couldn't pay them. And so when the debt continued to mount, at some point it simply couldn't be sustainable and it just fell apart. So in any event, the bailouts that followed that were what created a huge backlash. That's where the Tea Party came from. That's where a lot of other And people like Rand Paul got elected because of that, many other people. So the general disillusionment is something that's been building. But your question is a very good one further about why is socialism or statism appealing to people, right? And Bob Higgs' book Crisis and Leviathan discusses how crises are used to scare people. But there's also a sort of philosophical outlook in society, a cultural outlook that the— there are no absolute truths. There's no objective morality. That what is moral is situational. And we can't know anything that will be true this year will be true next year. So economic principles don't exist. It changes over time. Moral principles change. 100 years ago, it would have been considered— 99% of the public would have thought the income tax was the height of immorality. Now it's considered to be necessary. In fact, people who criticize it would be viewed as cranks and crackpots and immoral. The same thing with war. It's the same thing with many other things. So there is a certain cultural consensus, and this is what Tocqueville talked about in his book. There was something unusual about American society society, part of it was the Judeo-Christian tradition and also cynicism about the king or the monarch being a human being also and shouldn't have special powers over others. So I think the good news is that there is a disillusionment. A lot of it also is being fed by what you guys are doing, which is using new technologies to build bridges and build products that serve people. Directly, right? And I think that is also part of what we're involved in with LoveGov.

From what I've seen, at least with other things in life, that frustration with government or whatever it might be without a valid call to action leads to cynicism and despair and frustration.

Yeah.

Where's the valid call to action? With all of this, with your app, with anything else? All you've told me to do so far is get frustrated.

Yeah, well, frustration is not the goal, but getting people to sort of wake up, so to speak, to realize there is a problem and don't just be sort of suckered into believing that things are just fine and dandy. Because if you don't realize the nature of the danger, so to speak, you will be harmed. So the app is designed to shift people so they get information that they can actually articulate and understand things and connect with other people. So ideas have consequences is the bottom line. If people, as Bob Higgs shows in his book Crisis and Leviathan, what happens in a crisis is that a politician declares an emergency and says, he or she says, I need special powers I need the constraints on my powers relaxed because I need tax authority. I need to suspend habeas corpus. I need to go to war. I need whatever it might be because without me, you're going to be threatened with this dire problem. So during this time, interest groups flocked to get what they couldn't get before because it wasn't legal. And so in the process of the crisis where people are afraid, the culture changes where people believe that You had to have government powers to solve the crisis, legal precedent changes and so forth. And people get used to this sort of involvement of government intervention in their lives. As I said, something that when Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, people could not have even conceived of it. In fact, most people at that time thought George Washington was still president of the United States. In fact, if you took polls in the 19th century, most people didn't know who the president was. Can you imagine that? Well, if you go to a country like Switzerland, who's the president of Switzerland? Does anybody know?

They don't have a president.

They have many— They have cantons, but there is a president. But nobody knows because the president doesn't have much power, right?