Ep. 225 Buck Johnson Interviews Bob Murphy on the Case for an Independent Texas
Buck Johnson hosts the podcast Counterflow, and recently featured Bob to discuss his new pamphlet COMMON SENSE on Texas secession.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:
- The YouTube version of this interview.
- Bob’s pamphlet COMMON SENSE: The Case for an Independent Texas.
- Help support the Bob Murphy Show.
The audio production for this episode was provided by Podsworth Media.
About the author, Robert
Christian and economist, Chief Economist at infineo, and Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.
If you consider that voting is not violence, then there’s no issue for libertarians. On the other hand, if voting is violence then the other guys did it first, therefore self-defense does not count as aggression … provided you vote for the least “big government” candidate (challenging when none of them can be trusted).
This same logic applies to many activities … if the other guys are doing it to you then by definition they have given you permission to give the same back to them. You may not be in a position to do so … but you don’t have to feel morally compromised simply because you don’t want to be a punching bag.
People say, “We should be better than that” … and that’s a fine thing, but we have to be somewhat better, but we don’t have to hold ourselves to the standard of perfection. One example would be the “Mockingbird Media” telling lies about so many things these days … and protecting those who also tell lies to support their narrative. The Smollett hoax crime is the tip of the iceberg IMHO, with other examples being the supposed “Nascar Noose” which turned out to be a small loop on the end of a door pull, and what Andy Ngo was reporting before he was chased out of Portland, we have a teacher in Iowa who spread threatening notes around the school about fake gun violence … this stuff is turning up everywhere. The same media cover up the real crimes … they won’t talk about the way COVID positive patients were sent into New York nursing homes to infect the other people, and then the deaths were covered up. They won’t talk about either Epstein or Maxwell on trial … they won’t ask what happened to all the home movies and other evidence the police picked up.
Does that mean libertarians should go around telling similar lies? No, of course, in most cases the truth is our best defense but each and every case takes a lot of work to uncover and document, while the liars can produce new stories faster than anyone can deal with. Sure we should hold ourselves to a higher standard … but keep in mind that some guy who forgets to report some income to the government, or who doesn’t have quite the right license to do some job, or all sorts of other petty non-crimes … that guy is also being dishonest, but not in the same deliberately destructive way. Consider Eric Garner, what he was doing selling cigarettes and bypassing the tax system, was illegal … but only in a small way, Garner was doing a lot less harm overall than the New York health authorities have done. I do think that people on the whole should pay their taxes, but I’m a lot more forgiving on someone who finds compliance with an impossible system just too ridiculous and does his best to get by. In the bigger picture, government should spend less … need to figure out how to make that happen, which is the part where libertarians have failed. Then again, Trump failed to bring government spending under control, and Reagan failed also … this is a far more important issue than wringing hands over the morality of voting.
It’s hard to take this seriously without any discussion of demographics. Texas is already majority non white, with the white population in decline. What’s it going to look like in 10 years? Probably not even red, let alone “Texian”.
Funny. When you interviewed the other secession guy from Texas a while ago, I thought “this idea is so nuts.” Now, I’m thinking “I hope they do it next weekend.”