Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo

0:00Well, our next speaker is the editorial vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. And he is the man that really makes most things happen day to day at the Institute. But in addition to that, he writes a column for The Wanderer, and of course he's the author of Sing Like a Catholic, which is not on sale out front. But his book that is on sale out front is called Bourbon for Breakfast, Living Outside The Status Quo. He's here to tell you about it. Mr. Jeffrey Tucker.

0:42Thank you so much Doug. You know it's a wonderful thing to be in Las Vegas. It's my first time here and I'm amazed and impressed. Yesterday when we first got to town, Doug and I went And Doug and I went to lunch. We walked into the restaurant. The lady said, well, would you like to eat indoors or outdoors? And Doug said, well, I think we'd like to eat outdoors. So we sat down in this lovely French cafe with blue skies. And I thought, you know, the weather is really lovely in Las Vegas. And it took me five or 10 minutes to realize that we were actually still indoors. The city of illusions, I guess, is the idea. Now, Las Vegas is amazing. I mean, it's, to me, the final proof that organized crime contributed a lot more to the well-being of this country than the federal government ever has.

1:32So I hope it will be the first of many more return trips. It's wonderful to be here. I'm blogging live about it on the Mises blog if you want to check it out. So the title of my talk is Bourbon for Breakfast, which is a peculiar name. I want to kind of I want to give you some history of how the title came about in the first place. It happened when I first got to Auburn some years ago that I was invited to a breakfast with Ward Allen and it was about 7 a.m. Ward Allen is a remarkable man. He's sort of an aristocrat of the old southern sort, an expert in Greek and Latin and Hebrew and he's written a book on the King James Bible. And I don't know, to be around him is to be inspired by, I don't the scholarship and brilliance and manners of the old world and you kind of get wrapped up Tom Woods can confirm this he kind of get wrapped up into his world very quickly so he said to me

2:27Jeffrey would you like some coffee and I said well sure I'd like some coffee then he said there's a little bit of hesitation and he said would you like some bourbon in that coffee I was kind of shaken there for a second you know I said well yes I think so yeah so he got out his I was Dixie Dew and poured a splash of bourbon into the coffee and I drank it and I don't remember what we talked about after that, but the whole event kind of shattered some preconceived notions I had about everything, about what breakfast was and about the role of liquor in civilized living and the aristocracy and all kinds of confusing things ran through in my head, and for me it was an interesting moment, not because it told me something new about liquor mainly, but because it told me how experiences like that can change the way you look at the world around you, and as the years have gone on I began to think

3:28more and more about this whole topic of, in particular, things like bourbon and everything else and how it is that the government has, and government policy changes and distorts That's really the way we think about things. I wrote an article the other day calling for a repeal of the drinking age and began to look at the history of our perceptions of alcohol. You know, it turns out that in the 18th and 19th century, as far back as you look at all of human history, there is a different perception towards wine and beer and liquor than we have now. And the reason we tend to associate it now with the sort of daring do, the Federal Reserve, fiat money, fractional reserve banking, Human Action, Man Economy and State, The Theory of Money and Credit

4:39and all these other hair-brained ideas also gave us prohibition, and that lasted for many years until, I guess, Congress decided that they were losing too much in tax revenue, by attempting to ban it, it would be better to have it sold and loot people at the retail level, and that's when we first saw the age limits on drinking, before then there was no such thing in the 19th century, 18th century, it would be inconceivable. I don't know how many of you know this, I just discovered this the other day because Mark Thornton told me about it, that the father of our country, George Washington, was the largest distiller in all of North America in the 18th century. Times have changed. So it's an example of how government policy affects the way we look at the world around us, and I'm afraid that this happens more often than we know.

5:33I consider my whole ideological enlightenment to be a series of small discoveries about this very topic and part of my talk today I would like to go through ten areas of life that have been particularly enlightening for me with a series of suggestions of how you two might gain some similar insight and help to fight the state. Now, several people have read my book and they said to me, what seems to me that this book just consists of a series of observations by a guy who's walking around with ideological lenses on, you know, sort of Rothbardian, Austrian, you know, look at the world, and I thought about that later, I thought, is it really true that I have these lenses on? And I realized it's not really true at all. I think to discover libertarianism and to discover the truths of economics and the truth about liberty is not so much to put on particular lenses or glasses, rather it's to remove the blinders that helps you see reality more clearly than you ever have before.

6:40So that's what I hope that the book will do. So let me go through ten areas that I think that I would suggest you pursue as ways of either fighting the state or gaining your own enlightenment about a whole series of topics. I'm going to start with the silliest one first and it was the alternative title for my book and the phrase is hack your showerhead. This whole insight came to me because I began to purchase a series of showerheads for my shower in hopes of getting a faster water flow. I went to a hotel somewhere where the showerhead was blasting me with this hot water and I thought this is fantastic. I went home to my own shower and it was sort of dripping out of the showerhead in a pathetic way. I thought this is ridiculous.

7:26So I went to Lowe's and one of these hardware stores to pick up a series of shower heads and I kept buying them, buying them, trying to find one that would blast me with lots of water and it never really happened. I couldn't really figure out what the deal was. So I got curious and I began to take it apart and found that each one that I bought had this little stopper thing in it, you know, it was installed by the manufacturer to stop the water flow. I was amazed by this and I thought, why would a shower head, when you go to the store they're

8:23No difference in terms of water conservation whether you have that little plug in your shower head or not. It's just preposterous. So what I did is I took it out to my garage and I pulled out my power drill and drilled the darn thing out of there and put it back up and it worked. So that's what I call hacking your shower head and I strongly recommend it to all of you. That's a way to work around the state. Don't let them wreck your shower. So it turns out there was a company in Phoenix, actually, that was selling showerheads that are easier to hack. You don't have to use a drill, you just reach in there with a screwdriver and pop it right out of there. It's fantastic. So I bought one of their showerheads. I got very curious about this topic. As a matter of fact, I went around measuring all the showers and how many gallons it'll pour out per minute, and I became a temporary expert on gallons

9:15per minute per showerhead, and I had all the data and everything. I've forgotten it now, Anyway, that was my great weekend project with my kids. But anyway, this company was selling these shower heads that you can easily hack. So I promoted them in a website, in an online article, and they got lots of hits and had lots of sales. And next thing you know, about two weeks later, they got a letter from the federal government, I don't know, consumer product safety, I don't know, whoever regulates this stuff, telling them to cease and desist from the company, which had previously written me a letter of thank you. Number 2. Turn the screw. This concerns a much more serious topic. It's the heat of the water in your house, actually. I don't know where I was. Somewhere I was noticing that the water The water coming out of the faucet was extremely hot, and my own water in my own faucet was not that hot, and it was the deal.

10:24And at the time, there was all kinds of hell scares going on about what happens if you have tepid water. The germs aren't killed, and your dishes don't get that clean, your clothes don't get that clean, your own body never quite gets clean. So I began to wonder, am I just living in disgusting tepid water all the time, and what can I do about this? And sure enough, I went to my hot water heater and it was set at something like 110, but there was a little screw that allowed you to change that. You have to sort of unbolt the thing or whatever. So when I changed it to 120, it wasn't quite right, so I moved it to 130, it was getting better, finally moved to something like 145, perfect, right? So blasting hot water is amazing to me. Now, what is the deal with these hot water heaters that they don't come preset at 145?

11:15Well, you guessed the answer. There's a government regulation on this. They have to be shipped at 110. Moreover, if you're going to be licensed to install these things, you are not permitted to change them, even if the consumer begs you. So, I tried this myself. I had a guy over repairing something in the house and I said, Can you fix my hot water heater so that it's hotter? He said, ah, no, not going there. That's not something I do, you know. I said, well, why is that? He said, well, yeah, I'll lose my license, you know. So there you go. Look at your hot water heaters. Take a look and see what the government's done to you. Another favor that the Congress and the president have done and the bureaucracies have done for you. Okay, the third point. I recommend that everybody visit a coin shop.

12:04In the coin shop you find a marvelous look at the legacy of liberty through a certain perspective that you would otherwise not get. You find coins from all ages and it turns out these coins are made of real stuff, real stuff that's valuable in a market, gold and silver and other things. And you get, you pick up the coins, you hold them and you gain a perspective about what it means to be free. When you compare those coins with the money you have in your wallet, with the pictures of dead politicians on them, on paper or whatever they're made out of, and you get a short history of what's happened to us, going from a free society to a society that's preposterously despotic in every conceivable way.

12:53I always enjoy going into these shops and looking at coins from all times and all ages is an imagining just how much a freer country we would have been if we had retained a monetary system that was really linked to the individual citizen and his or her ability to change paper for gold and gold for paper back and forth to really have a profound sense of independence. Of course if you have a state that's going to be taxing you all the time and running huge huge deficits and running high debts, you have to change the money. There's no such thing as, for example, a Keynesian state that's on the gold standard. Those things are completely incompatible. And even if an ideology of a country is not very friendly to freedoms, insofar as the money is sound and secure and it's of a good quality, you're going to be able to retain that freedom much more than you ever would. And so I argued in the book

13:514. Work for Free This is some advice that I would give, in particular young people. It's poignant today because of the very high unemployment rate of new college graduates. All over the country you've got these people that have done everything right. They stayed in school like the public Service Announcements used to tell us, stay in school, they got great grades, they spent gazillion dollars on their education, they've got high college debts in excess of six figures and they go out into the job market with a degree in aerospace engineering or whatever it may happen to be and they can't find a job.

14:36And this is true for as many as 35% of our new college graduates, the official data lists it somewhere closer to 20% but if you include everybody who can't get a job it's closer to 35%. It's a particular problem for students with debts right now, because the way the whole system works is that you have to start paying the debt off as soon as you get a job. But if you stay in school and get a second or third or fourth or fifth PhD, then you can continue to prolong the period in which you don't have to pay off the debt. If you accept a job at Starbucks or Wal-Mart or wherever the places that are hiring today, it doesn't give you enough income to both live and pay off your debt. So they're in a particular quandary. It's particularly dangerous since in a very tight labor market, people are not interested in hiring a person just because they have a college degree.

15:30They're interested in actual real skills, things that you can do. and so they're looking for people, all enterprises are looking for people with some experience and some value to add to the life of the firm. Unfortunately, many young people have been told their whole lives that it's not necessary that they get a job. The most important thing they can do is stay in school. So they're in a terrible situation. So I recommend for all these people that they find some place that they can do volunteer work, whether it's an enterprise or a non-profit organization or a church or some other kind of situation, to get a job and just work for absolutely nothing and possibly live at home as long as your parents can stand having you around.

16:17And I would compare two situations, two cases in point. One was, at a clothing shop I worked at when I was about 16 years old, I remember the boss came by and told my fellow employee, I'd like you to straighten those ties, and the boss walked off and my fellow employee muttered under his breath, I'm not doing that for minimum wage, is what he said. Okay, this guy is a loser. And I compare that person to a man who volunteered his time working for Misesorg last year when our main webmaster was off on his hunting trip.

17:22This week I got a phone call from a major university in the northeast that was asking for a job recommendation for this gentleman. And I gave him, as you can imagine, an over-the-top job recommendation, and he got the job immediately as a result of it. So you see in this very tight labor market, reputation and recommendations are worth everything, 5. Deals with a topic that I try not to discuss because it consumes me entirely and nobody can get a word in when the topic comes up.

18:14In the name of property rights for about the last hundred years or so, the government has heavily regulated innovations with patents and texts with copyrights. These represent a fantastic intervention in the free market economy and have led to innumerable disasters in so many industries and these laws are getting tighter by the day. But at least in the world In the world of patents, there's hardly any work around, but in the world of publishing, there is the possibility of publishing without copyright at all, or at least not without conventional copyright, and the term that's being thrown around nowadays is creative comments, what this basically does is it takes advantage of the infinite reproducibility of texts, and you publish within that framework, and that allows anybody to copy what you do, and allows you to have complete ownership over your text, ownership rights with everybody in the world. I don't even like to talk about the term ownership when it comes to things like ideas because it doesn't really make any sense. But the

19:20best free market way to publish is in creative commons, with getting rid of the government regulations altogether. The Mises Institute has embraced this model of publishing and I believe it's one of the keys to the success of the organization over the last ten years or so. I would strongly encourage any authors to use this model of publishing and to reject any contracts with publishers that are going to take away your rights, but instead either publish it yourself or go with a publisher that publishes in Creative Commons. And by the way, this is not incompatible with profitability, as I think the Mises Institute has demonstrated. We're seeing ever more publishers embrace Creative Commons, but in this case, mainstream publishers are a little bit behind the rest of us in this respect. Okay, number six on my list of things.

20:08A Courthouse Even libertarians have, I think, a very naive view of the criminal justice system. I talk about this a little bit in Bourbon for Breakfast. I spent several days sitting in a courthouse in Auburn, Alabama, and I was amazed at just how completely benign our so-called criminal class is today. Most of the people that were in the courthouse could be turned, this is a criminal courthouse, could be turned loose on the streets immediately with no harm to society and actually quite If you have the view that our courts are filled with real criminals, I would encourage you to go to the courthouse and have a look at these poor, pathetic souls. I saw so many people that were accused of things like stealing a ham sandwich from Walmart and thereby having their license removed and fined hundreds and hundreds of dollars and basically their lives entirely wrecked.

20:59I mean, this is true for person after person after person in the courthouse, far from being criminals. Oh, my favorite crime that was committed at the courthouse was, of course DUI was there, but lots of people that were drinking while driving, but the biggest crime in Auburn, Alabama, is actually public intoxication. So what happened after they cracked down on DUI is people began to walk home from bars. Now they arrest you for that too, you know, so. So go to the courthouse. If you think our criminal justice system is serving you, see who's there and see who's getting in trouble with these arrogant judges and their outrages. Number seven, I'm listing this not because I expect you to take me up on it, but just simply because it's something that I did, which is to go to jail, and it really did happen to me.

21:49I went to jail for a time because I inadvertently failed to pay a fine for a traffic ticket I received by rolling through a stop sign about a block away from my house. I was arrested during a Sunday brunch at my house and taken to jail, and it was one of the most enlightening moments of my life. Actually, I got to know my inmates very well, nice folks, all. My experience for the first time, something that really intensified, I would say, and solidified my commitment to libertarian ideas, namely, I began to understand for the first time what it means to be completely owned and controlled by the state. If I can explain it. It's very different from being, for example, an animal. I have a new dog and I can tell you the animal is very well taken care of.

22:38that my dog is, he's beloved and valued by all of us. The people that go to jail are not treated like animals, they're treated like something far less valuable than that. What happens to you in jail is a complete metaphysical transformation where you have absolutely no value to anybody and anybody who does value has no control over your fate. I had no idea what time it was, for example, and you can't believe how important it is to just know things like what time it is. So I would holler out to the person, the warden or whatever, hey, sir, can you tell me what time it is? And this blank look would come over his face looking at me like there seems to be some sort of flesh blob across the room that's making a strange noise at me and I don't know why he's doing that.

23:24And then just go on. Very strange effect. Again, if you have a naive view of jail, you should go visit. I was astounded to discover that the overwhelming majority of people in the prison that I was temporarily in were there for ridiculous offenses, mostly petty theft and overwhelmingly drugs. And overwhelmingly among those drugs, marijuana distribution and use is preposterous. I don't doubt that there are some people who should be in some sort of jail, and I wonder what way the private sector could take care of that problem. But I can tell you that the The way the state is running its jails today is absolute despotism. The United States is the highest percentage of the population in prison of any country in the world today.

24:14We used to say that about Russia. It's now true of us. Okay, number eight. Now I'm listing this under the category of just generally improving the culture. Now I'm addressing this topic because the biggest complaint about the market from both Both the left and the right, for as long as I can remember and going as far back as you can look, is that it's unfriendly to the kind of culture that we want to have. The left complains that there's not enough art houses and the kind of culture that it wants. The right complains that the market is destroying morality and aesthetics and all the rest of it. Well, it turns out that the academics in Auburn, Alabama have been complaining about this for For years we lacked a serious ballet and we lacked enough good restaurants to sell things like food from all parts of the world and whole foods that greens like to eat. Well, it turns out this whole problem in Auburn has been completely solved and guess how?

25:19Just by a handful of entrepreneurs. We had a young woman in her early 20s start a ballet and a training school for young girls that's turned into a serious ballet and now we have that in Auburn and it's a beautiful thing to see. And we have many wonderful new restaurants that have opened up with our growing economy and a new grocery store that sells all the kind of food that socialists like to eat. And I can think of no better role for a socialist in modern life than to support capitalist production by buying their goofy foods and silly health items. Number 9. Read old literature Culture and some sort of transformation, and there's been a blank out about some fantastic pro-capitalistic novels that were written in the 1920s and 1930s, most especially by my favorite all-time author, Garrett Garrett.

26:37He wrote four great novels. How many of you in this room have read any of them? Okay, so just a few of you. And you highly recommend them, right? Do you like those novels, Garrett? Yeah, they're fantastic. One of them is called The Cinder Buggy. It's about the transformation of the country from steel to iron. Another one is called Harangue. It's about the experience of socialism in North Dakota. These are great novels in addition to being great economic tutorials in their own right. So read those books and keep them alive. I think that these books ought to be bestsellers. Okay, finally, as number 10, I have listed as just something very simple, tell the truth.

27:25And here, I'd like to address a point that Mises often used to make. He spoke about ideas as being more powerful than armies. And I think we need to reflect on what that means, more powerful than armies, more powerful than guns. Why that might be the true. Why that might be the case. There are two kinds of goods in the world. Those which are scarce and subject to limits and have to be allocated through the price system and are subject to economic law. There's a second kind of good that's out there and that's the kind of good that's not scarce. It's infinitely reproducible. It can be replicated again and again without ever diminishing the quality of that first Product. These are non-scarce goods. It's these non-scarce goods that do not need to be rationed through the price system. They can be constantly and forever reproduced. And

28:29therefore, they're the most powerful goods that we can ever deal in. They're the most powerful goods we can ever possess and the most powerful goods we can ever share. An One example of one of those goods might be, for example, fire. Then it would be used to give the example of fire, because it can start with a small match, or it can turn into a bonfire, it can burn down a whole city. And it can be shared and shared and shared again. It's the same thing with digital media, which is the great innovation in human history. Every time you send an email with an attachment, you've replicated that document. And that person who receives it can replicate it again, It can happen millions of times and on into infinity. That's the true magic of ideas, is their infinite reproducibility.

29:19If you think about Jesus' own miracles, for example, so many of them involve taking scarce goods and turning them into infinitely available goods. I always like to think of the example of the loaves and the fishes. He's given a luncheon talk, you know, like this one or something, People start to get hungry, they're starting to complain, and they say, we've got any food around here? Turns out one of the apostles has some loaves and fishes, and so Jesus does whatever he does, and turns those small little scarce goods into infinitely reproducible enough to fill up everybody on loaves and fishes in the crowd. And after everybody was satisfied, there were some leftovers, and he did again whatever he does, and he turned it back into a scarce good and said, well, we better save those for later, The Miracle is all around us in the world of ideas, this infinite reproducibility of ideas, so that, it's remarkable to think of it, if you tell the truth to just one person and plant an idea of liberty in his head, that may be all that you have to do in the whole of your life to do something magnificent and wonderful, because that person can tell another person, we can tell ten people and so on and so forth.

30:34and so on, and it can exponentially grow to sweep the entire world without anybody doing anything other than writing and talking or sharing emails or sharing links. That's an extraordinary thing. There's no army in the world that has that kind of power, that the power of ideas has. If you look at what's happening in the world today, I marvel at the effects of digital media. What Mises.org alone, the website that I manage, has done for the Ideas of Liberty is extraordinary in so many ways. I receive emails every day showing evidence of the way it's had this tremendous influence on culture. And just to be at this meeting, Freedom Fest, to see all the people here from all over the world and from every kind of demographic, how does this happen? It doesn't happen through guns. It doesn't happen through real goods that are scarce. It happens through the infinite reproducibility of Ideas. And all of human history in some way can be looked at as a struggle to find

31:36a way to share things more cheaply. When I prepared a paper for a conference we had in Salamanca, I looked at the history of the scribes. It would take 15 or 20 scribes to produce one book over the course of something like five years, and that book would be the the most valuable thing that was owned by the monastery, and look at what we can do now with digital media. We can do the work of all those people over many years in a flash of a second, just by sharing links and by sharing attachments. This is the real miracle that we have at our fingertips, and I encourage all of you to use it, to tell the truth, to share ideas, and eventually freedom will take over the world. Thank you very much.