{ "episodeId": "SLP380", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "stephan_livera": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "guest", "tag": "STEPHAN" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 8.51, "text": "Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. So for this episode, episode three hundred and eighty, I recently joined my friend Jeff Deist, who is the president of the Mises Institute, and we had a chat recently for the Human Action podcast, so this is actually a replay of that on my side. And so in this one, we talk about various ideas around Around liberty, political freedom as contrasted with economic freedom, and we talk a little bit about freedom around the world, as well as these indexes and where they may be doing a good thing and where they may be falling down. We also chat a little bit about why social issues dominate. This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, and if you're a listener of my show, you're often out there trying to teach your family and friends about Bitcoin. With Swan, you can gift Bitcoin with a custom message, your recipient will get an email, and they can claim that. So they- They can create their Swan account and they convert the USD value into Bitcoin. And also, think of it like this, with Swan, you're giving the gift of Bitcoin education and Swan's world-class customer service. So this is an easy way, if you have family or friends, if someone's got a birthday coming up or if they have some special life event and you wanna give the gift of Bitcoin, go to swan dot com slash gift. Lend at Hoddle Hoddle is a peer-to-peer Bitcoin-backed lending platform where you can anonymously borrow stablecoins against your Bitcoin. So when you do You do this, you are basically putting up some Bitcoin into an over collateralized loan. You get those stablecoins, and then at the end, once you pay that back, obviously with some interest, you then receive your Bitcoin back. Now, this is done in a peer-to-peer way. You can go on the website, and you can see the offers that are there, and you can see the terms and the interest rate. And if you're not happy with that, you can put up your own offer and wait for somebody else to accept your offer. Now, remember, Hoddle Hoddle also" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:00", "start": 120.04, "text": "Form is lend dot h o d l h o d l dot com. Coinkite dot com are the creators of Coldcard. The Coldcard is a signing device, or previously known as a hardware wallet. Now you can use this to set up your wallet without even plugging into a computer. So you can plug it to the wall, and you can initialize your wallet on the device, and it'll give you those twelve or twenty-four words that you write down, and that's your backup. Now you can also use the Coldcard in a beginner mode, where you directly connect it to your computer. And you can use it easily with wallets like Specter or Sparrow. And the Coldcard has all kinds of features that go up to much more advanced levels, where, for example, you can use a microSD card to move that information back and forth. That site is coinkite dot com. Onto the show with Jeff." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "02:46", "start": 165.68, "text": "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome once again to the Human Action podcast. It's great to be with you. My co-host, Bob Murphy, is on the road this week, but we've got an excellent guest to join us in his stead, as you can see. It's a friend of mine, also a friend of the Mises Institute, Stephan Livera. Many of you know him from the Bitcoin world, from his imminently successful, imminently successful podcast, The Stephan Livera Show, but also he's a managing director at Swan Bitcoin International. And our topic this week is political freedom, Freedom and how these three things juxtapose, and of course, I'm starting to think that economic freedom is the only one we've got left, even though we don't have that necessarily in large degree, because like Stephan, who is living in Australia for most of his life, of course myself in the United States, we used to think we had a greater degree of political freedom than perhaps we have after the COVID crisis. So, Stephan, maybe we can start with the reasons why you personally chose to leave Australia over the last couple of years and also why you- We're currently in Dubai." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:47", "start": 226.91, "text": "Yeah, that's right. I was born in Sri Lanka, grew up in Australia, I am an Australian citizen, and essentially the hysteria of the last two years and the culture in Australia drove me away. I was very, very disappointed with how things went in the country, and I was extremely disappointed at the attitude of what I thought were my fellow Australians, right? This, if you are an outsider looking into Australia, you have this perception of Paul Hogan And Steve Irwin and these tough Australian men who, who don't take any, you know, nonsense from anyone, and they'll, you know, have this sort of rebel outlaw culture. But unfortunately, it seems like that culture is very much gone or deteriorated. And so it seems to me, if I had to sum it up, I think the culture in Australia is that it went very complacent. They, they had it too good for too long. They got wealthy. They were the, the lucky country, as the saying- And that essentially drove me away because I was being shut down and stopped from participating in the Bitcoin world of attending Bitcoin conferences and Bitcoin events, obviously representing Swan Bitcoin and doing various things in the community, I'm being shut out from that, and I'm paying a very high tax for that privilege of being locked down. And so it just was very, very disappointing to me. I think if you had asked me, now I've been a libertarian for Most of my life since I was about fourteen or fifteen years old. And so if you had asked me before this hysteria, I would have very much said, \"Hey, come to Australia, it's a great country. Yeah, look, you know, the taxes aren't great, but overall, it's pretty free and the people are nice and, you know, it's good.\" But basically from twenty twenty onwards, that all changed, and I just thought, \"What is the point? Why am I paying this high tax?\" Like, it might have been, let's say, obviously as a libertarian," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:46", "start": 345.6, "text": "I can tolerate this, for the certain freedoms that I'm getting, but in reality, twenty twenty showed that it was like the, the tide had gone out and Australia was shown swimming naked. Unfortunately, a lot of Australians don't value freedom, they became complacent, and so for me, that drove that search for an alternative. And so for me, the reason I'm based in Dubai at the moment now is A few things. It's low tax, it's, you know, flight connectivity, it's good infrastructure, and for the most part, it's, it's ironic, but it ties back to our theme as well, this idea of political freedom and economic freedom, because, you know, in Dubai, it's not like you all vote and campaign and so on, you just sort of, the, the rules are there, and you, you choose it or you, you leave. And I saw something appealing about that, because at least I can earn and pay very, very low tax There's other little taxes that you pay, things like license fees, sales tax, and so on. So look, but the point is, it's, I, I view it as a much better deal. And yes, that was a big- Obviously it was a big move in terms of separating from friends and people I knew back in Australia, but I was just so disappointed in that. Obviously I had my libertarian friends, my Bitcoin friends, and obviously some family and friends there, but other than that, I just, I, I, I saw myself missing an Australia that doesn't exist anymore. The Australia of the '90s and the '2000s isn't longer there. Yeah, that's" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "07:15", "start": 435.07, "text": "so true. The past is a foreign country, as they say. And the other thing we learned, Stephan, over the past couple years is that the Anglo sphere, you know, if we look at Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, didn't react any better than countries in the East. You know, we think of China as a particularly authoritarian country, and I think that's true, I think that's fair. but nonetheless, when we think of places like South Korea, when we think of places like Singapore, they were far more rational, in my opinion, both on the economic side and the lockdown side, the human side. You know, there's so many different ways of looking at this, but it's interesting that as you're in Dubai, there's actually a, a small brouhaha over here in the US. the NBA, like other sports leagues, the National Basketball Association, attempting to increase its footprint around the world, is s-s-planting some games coming up in the next season in Dubai, and there's some pushback on that because apparently Dubai has some pretty draconian anti-homosexuality laws. And so this is where these two things interact, like you are able to live fairly freely in a way that you enjoy in Dubai in terms of your personal work, your personal life, your taxes, but then other people come along and say, \"Well, if you happen to be gay and you live in Dubai,\" You have a tougher time of it. So these things always have to be weighed against one another, but I think this distinction between personal freedom and economic freedom is really quite overblown. if you look at some of the surveys that different groups have produced, the Fraser Institute and Cato produce what's called the Human Freedom Index, Heritage produces something called the Index of Economic Freedom, Freedom House produces Freedom in the World. They tend to put, to create an X Y axis, right? Personal freedom is the X, and, economic freedom is the Y, and I, I think that when it really comes down to it, every country has elites. this, this is just a natural part of life. The question is, how can an average person lead their life in that country? That's really the question, and, and for you anyway, the calculus in Australia, turn negative." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:26", "start": 565.66, "text": "Absolutely, and I think you're right to point out that these indexes are, they're interesting, let's say. Right, now I obviously in preparation, I had a look at some of the indexes, the Heritage one, the Cato and the Fraser index, and it's really interesting if you look at who they rate highly, they say, \"Oh, these are the free countries,\" and guess what? Canada, New Zealand, Australia all rank very highly, and yet- They didn't give very much in the way of freedom of movement, right? Which is supposedly one of the things these indexes should be looking at. It's almost like they take this idea and they conflate democracy with freedom. And obviously, we as Austro-Liberals, we see it more like private property rights are rights, and democracy is cutting against that. It's like this idea of, \"Oh, imagine if, if we just get nine out of ten people to vote to steal the other, the tenth guy's property, then that makes it democ-- Oh, that's democratic, right? Obviously, I'm, I'm, it's a little bit of a caricature, a straw man there, but i-it's in modern, in the Western world, they conflate democracy with freedom as though that's really the meaning of freedom, right? That you can, that you can go and like protest or the right to free speech and all of these things, when really, I think the Austro-Libertarian aspect or way of thinking is more like, no, whose property is it and who's the rightful owner of that, and you should be able to decide what happens on that property." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "10:49", "start": 649.12, "text": "If you think about your personal body and the property you own, everything flows from that, everything stems from that. If those two things are inviolable, inviolable, then you, you know, you, you are protected. But look, if you held a pure democratic vote in Saudi Arabia on gay marriage, not, you'd probably lose, right? I mean, you know, this idea that democracy and freedom are inextricably linked is of course hugely faulty. I just wanna tell listeners a little bit about some of the countries That did the best. So here's the Heritage ranking, which is an economic freedom ranking. Now, to their credit, this is about economics. They have four categories: rule of law, government size, regulatory efficiency, and open markets. And this data's a little more current, from '21, so this would include the COVID year. So Singapore comes in number one. Remember Lee Kuan Yew? A lot of folks in the West viewed that guy as an authoritarian, and no one would call, Singapore a, you know, democratic state today per se. then Switzerland, Ireland, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Taiwan, Estonia. So I thought that was interesting. but when we go to the, the, Cato Fraser Human Freedom Index, it comes out, shakes out a little bit differently. they have Hong Kong in the top position. Now, this data is pre-COVID, so I think that makes a big difference. then Singapore, then New Zealand, Switzerland, Georgia, United States, Ireland, Lithuania, Australia, and Denmark. So, I, I guess the point is that what good i-is a freedom index? If a virus comes along and all, all these little proto-fascists turn into actual fascists and tell you you can't go to work?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:30", "start": 749.61, "text": "Absolutely. I, I think it's, it's very challenging, and the thing is, on some of these indexes, you wanna also look at things like freedom of doing business. Now, of course, in these indexes, they'll look at things like, okay, how quickly can you set up a business if you're starting from scratch? But here's the problem, if you're under a lockdown or if there are mask regulations or other restrictions on that stop you You from actually doing your business, then it's not really that free to do business, is it? And, you know, I think that is a challenging thing to wrestle with because at, on one hand, you're, we, we, you know, we want people to have that freedom to do trade, but then on the other hand, there are these people who, you know, the, the public health technocrats or medicrats of the world are coming out and sort of making these proclamations, and, you know, it's, it's, it's very challenging." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:21", "start": 801.32, "text": "I, of the last few years is, waning and we can sort of start to see more economic actual freedom instead of sort of, \"Oh, we rate this country high on economic freedom, but in practice, how much was there?\"" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "13:35", "start": 815.23, "text": "Well, I think first and foremost, all of these indices have to be updated to have a, a medical freedom component. I think that first and foremost, you know, are you under the, the subject of so-called public health experts every time there's a sniffle or a virus or a bird flu or whatever, I think that's important. What's interesting, I wanna read a little bit from the Cato Fraser, Human Freedom Index, because they actually break it down into what they're weighing, in far greater detail. I thought that was interesting. Saying they have some categories like you would expect, like rule of law, but they have safety and security, things like homicide rates and, and, gang violence. They have freedom of movement, freedom of religion. Then they have the assembly, association, civil society, the expression information. So you get into more of what we would consider the political or social rights. They have re-relations like same-sex marriage. So that's all sort of on one axis, but on the economic freedom, the size of government, the legal system, the tariffs, the, regulations, the taxes. But is they have a sound money category. And so this goes to inflation and money growth. And so I took a quick gander at the, top ten countries with this, least inflation in twenty twenty-two, and the only major one there is Japan. The rest are very small, like the Maldives and, Vanuatu and Bolivia, Saudi Arabia, but, you know, Japan actually has low inflation despite all of their other problems. So, you know, that would be very interesting to view inflation as injurious to human freedom. I think that's very important." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:09", "start": 908.69, "text": "Absolutely, but a-as, as I'm sure you and listeners are aware, they always play with these metrics, right? They always get, you know, there's hedonic adaptation, it's a subjective thing, and as we saw recently, the recent CPI statistic in the US was eight point three percent off the top of my head, which obviously nobody believes that, it's obviously much higher than that, and then it's not just that, I mean, even in the Japan case, the yen seems to have gone down a fair bit, because it seems like a lot of people want the In the case when there's supposedly low inflation by the government, that doesn't necessarily mean the value, the purchasing power, the buying power is, staying stable. Of course, in general, I would agree with you that, having low inflation is a good thing, but of course, you know, it's, it's a time where people need to be thinking more carefully about where they store their value." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "15:59", "start": 959.39, "text": "Well, obviously, US federal government was doing anything and everything it had to do to make sure that that number was not double digits. It wasn't gonna be a ten or an It's probably eighteen-ish or something like that in reality, but nonetheless, it's interesting to think about economic freedom and personal freedom and, and what you'd be willing to trade individually. So for example, when Fraser and Cato talk about religious liberty, a lot of people are atheists or agnostics and would say, \"I don't really care about that. That's not an important value to me. I'd gladly trade that for maybe some other kind of freedom.\" So I guess the question, the rhetorical question for our audience is Would you give up voting, for example, in exchange for paying zero taxes in a jurisdiction? Would you give up any kind of political expression, even, you know, mouthing off on Twitter about politics in your country or any other, in exchange for zero taxes? Would you give up other kinds of political freedoms in exchange for zero taxes? I think a lot of people, myself included, would take that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:00", "start": 1019.87, "text": "Right. And I think if we really think about the impact of taxation, that over the course of your lifetime, like especially if you did this when you were young And you went overseas and you started making money, and then imagine once you compound, right? If anyone just runs a basic compounding calculation on a spreadsheet, you'll find that the saving for you is massive by the time you get to later stage of your life, you have all this additional wealth that you could then put into whatever cause you believe in, right? Whether it's Austrian economics education or whether it's, Bitcoin open source development, there are all kinds of aspects that you could devote and put into cause This is where that you believe in, and I think that's something we all have to really think deeply about, right? is what do we really see as a life purpose, a life mission? And of course, you know, family is a big part of that too for many of us, but you really have to trade that off because at the end of the day, even if you were in one of the more supposedly Western free countries where you are meant to be able to be more free, well, guess what? Even in Australia, there were literally, There was a pregnant woman in, Victoria who basically got arrested on camera because she was organizing, anti-lockdown protests. So what kind of freedom of speech is there even in the so-called Western free nations when that is the case? Right. Right. And so, right? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "18:28", "start": 1108.16, "text": "Well, I think a lot of the freedoms which are being measured here And a lot of the countries which are scoring well in these measurements, the, the point, the important point here is that these freedoms go out the window the minute there's a crisis, the minute there's a stock market crash, the minute there's a terrorist event, the minute there's a war, the minute there's a virus. So freedoms only really matter when politicians are under the gun, right? And, and public officials are under the gun, and that's when they dispense with them. So we've always had wartime emergency suppression of speech and that sort of thing. I mean, this isn't And when we look back at, let, let's talk about voting rights. I mean, fast forward to twenty twenty-two, women have been able to vote for quite a, a while, black people have been able to vote in the United States for quite a while. What has that given us? You know, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton. I mean, this, this isn't a great value for most people. I, if we look at freedom of speech in the United States, which is, to be fair, I, I'm gonna argue more robust than most, most countries in Western countries. Judge Andrew Napolitano, great friend of the Meese Institute, he's given a talk about the, the First Amendment in America and said, \"You know, if you look at the Supreme Court jurisprudence surrounding it, it's been a lot more robust than surrounding the Second Amendment or the Fourth Amendment or some of these other important freedoms we, we thought we enjoyed.\" So the First Amendment has been pretty good overall in the United States, but again, you know, what has that gotten us? It gets us this political class. I mean, look at Twitter. Look at woke, look at clown world. I mean, you know, what, what does speech get us at the end of the day? So the idea that freedom of speech is more important in a country than, let's say, the tax rate, I think is, is arguable." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:17", "start": 1217.23, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. Now, with Unchained Capital, you can get a multi-signature vault setup. Now, the cool thing with Unchained is they really are strongly aligned with the no rehypothecation message. You can set up your vault and they- It will help you if you need, they've got a concierge onboarding program where you can pay upfront and they'll ship you some hardware signing devices and you can then create your vault and deposit some Bitcoin in there also. So give yourself that peace of mind, eliminate single points of failure and upgrade to multi-signature with Unchained. You can get this over at unchained dot com slash concierge, use the code livera for a discount there. Next up is Brains. Brains are the operators of Slushpool, which is the oldest Bitcoin mining pool, now with Brains Brains, they have Brains OS Plus. This is firmware that you should be looking to see if you can install it on your Bitcoin ASIC machines. So if you go to the website brains dot com, you can see which models are supported. There are people getting efficiency by as much as twenty-five percent. So with this feature, you are just leaving sats on the table if you're not thinking about it. So over at that website, you can find the information there, and they've also got an analytics platform which is over at insights dot brains dot com. Over there, you can find a mining profitability calculator Might be really handy for those of you interested in further analysis on this space. That website is brains dot com. And finally, Voltage, those of you who are listening and thinking to set up your own Bitcoin payment store or maybe you want to build on layer two, you wanna do some kind of Bitcoin or Lightning business. Lightning is the future of a Bitcoin payments, and you can't overlook it anymore. Voltage will make it easy for you. You don't have to waste time with maintenance and integration deployment. You can use Voltage, they can spin it up really quickly, whether that's a Bitcoin node, a A BTC pay node, you can set this up, you can route payments, you can build your small business or you can scale your enterprise company. Don't stumble on your own infrastructure, go and use Voltage. The website there is voltage dot cloud. Back to the show with Jeff. Absolutely, and I think to echo a point I believe you've made as well, is that a lot of people are just overly fixated on the social. They don't really think about the economic part, right? So they just think-- they get caught up into the issue of the day, whatever that issue is, as long as it's a social issue. It's very, very rare that people will really get up in arms about an economic issue, about taxation, about currency controls, capital controls, business tax rates, right? Like, if anything, it's sort of people are getting riled up about The things, whether it's, you know, the climate or whether it's, you know, all these other issues, but it's always done in a social context, and it could be that maybe there's, who knows, maybe there's some kind of mental aspect or sort of natural biological thing where maybe that is more interesting to a lot more people, and so that plays more on the news, on the media, on whatever, and so then people just get riled up about it, as opposed to people who should-- I mean, obviously in our case, we, we should rightly be getting riled Economic freedom too, right? Why, why, why, where's the outrage? Where's the outrage over the high tax nations of the world?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "23:23", "start": 1403.36, "text": "Well, the capital controls issue is very real, and I think COVID accelerated it. The idea of unbanking people, whether they're-- it's because they're gun manufacturers or because they're Canadian truckers protesting COVID, if you look at countries like Turkey, which has had a nasty currency crisis over the last few years, they have absolutely imposed, capital controls on money headed- out of the country and on bank deposit withdrawals, that sort of thing isn't unthinkable absolutely in the West at all. Yeah. And, you know, if, if you ever had to, to become an expatriate and leave your Western country, you know, that might be very, very difficult. You may not be able to move money electronically as easily as you thought. You may not be able to move physical gold as easily as you thought. And I think that's why a lot of Bitcoiners make the argument that in a, in a really ugly situation, Bitcoin is able to be transportable in a That other stores of value or not, I think that's a valuable consideration. But I'll, I'll tell you what, I, I think Americans care more about social issues until it really hits them. I think at some point, Americans are very soft and fat and weak and lazy. I mean, this is just-- This is, it's just a fact. And so, I think the slightest material hardship, heh heh. Is going to cause a lot of Americans to, to have a real meltdown, and we're seeing that. You know, gas prices have nearly doubled, inflation on groceries and other necessities is rising now, we have a baby formula shortage in this country. So it is gonna happen, but somehow the, you know, the social issues just engage our brain in a way. You know, nobody's out there protesting in front of a Supreme Court justice's house over, abuses of the Commerce Clause, right? But abortion just triggers that Heinbrain, I guess. I, I wonder how much longer that'll be, because whatever divisions or fissures we have in society are gonna be far, far worse if we have a really nasty economic meltdown." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:21", "start": 1521.44, "text": "Exactly. And so I think what happens is education is so important here, economic education, and that's why I, I am a big fan of the Mises Institute. I, you know, I owe a great intellectual debt to the Mises Institute and the scholars of the Mises Institute, because here's the thing, right? Things will break down, and then they will be able to blame Population aren't economically educated, they'll just believe that. So, for example, the common one, \"Oh, the prices are rising, why is that? Oh, because of the corporate greed.\" It's like, wait, corporations have been around for how many hundreds of years? How is it that all of a sudden they just became greedy, right? And obviously, as, as, you know, when we study Austrian economics, we can understand that, no, no, it wasn't just like they became greedy all of a sudden in the last month, it's that they are stuck resolving their own issues You know, these other issues that have been caused by other problems, things like lockdowns and stopping of business and commerce. So I think maybe that's part of it, is that economic issues can sort of manifest and then the root cause might be economic, but then the downstream, the impact is a social one, and that's what gets people triggered per se, that, that triggers the hindbrain more, but, oh, I can't feed my baby because no baby formula." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "26:35", "start": 1594.67, "text": "Yes, I think that's, what Renee Girard described in, when he talks about scape Scapegoating. And I think it's easier to scapegoat the other, on social issues than it is on pure economic issues. But if we have widespread unemployment, you know, rising prices, homelessness, starvation, that sort of thing, I mean, certainly people will probably coalesce, along nasty groups, whether that's racial or, or whatever it is, regional, territorial, ethnic, religious. So we certainly don't want that in the West, and we've been free of that in the West. For, you know, more than a hundred years, and I think we take that for granted. We forget how close most people really are to the bone in terms of their personal saving or their ability to live without a paycheck very long, or, you know, to their, the, the degree to which they would be dependent on neighbors or, charity or government very, very quickly. So let's take a quick look at Singapore, right? Because I've read Li Quan Yu's, a few different Li Quan Yu biographies, a very fascinating guy. And, you know, Singapore has been called fundamentally undemocratic, in the Press Freedom Index. Actually, I'm, I'm reading here, it has a, a Public Order Act. Which means you need to have a police permit to have any kind of organized protest or to even hold a conference which has political elements to it. That actually Singapore ranked one hundred and fifty-first out of one hundred and eighty countries in this press freedom, index, and of course, it's infamous for Some of its draconian criminal laws with respect to littering or spitting out your gum, or vandalism or graffiti, and there have been some Western tourists who've been ensnared and had harsh treatment by caning. So a, a lot of people would look at that and say, \"You know, this is a, an authoritarian regime,\" but it's been called a competitive authoritarian regime. So what do we make of Singapore? I mean, if you go there, it's unbelievably modern and, and apparently prosperous, really a hell of a place to live, but not free and" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:39", "start": 1718.64, "text": "Yeah, I think you're right, and I, I recall my visit to Singapore around December 2019. I thought it was really cool. Like, so Changi Airport, the Singaporean airport, is, I think it's literally rated as one of the best airports on Earth. Oh, yeah. The infrastructure is excellent, the service is excellent. I, I, you know, I had a great time in my short visit there. And so it's really interesting to see that parallel. And so the way I see it is, when I'm in these other countries Countries, you know, of course, make sure you respect their culture, their rules, but as long as you do that, you can obviously set in the COVID stuff aside because they've been a little bit on the more authoritarian side there, but setting that stuff aside, it has been relatively prosperous, it has been very prosperous, to, yeah, for its citizens and people who go there to work, and it's quite a common expat working destination. I, I, yeah, I think maybe the last few years has kind of shifted that a little bit, but on the whole Still a really great place, and I think what happens is maybe there's a little bit of a cycle, almost like a pendulum swing to these things, because let's say if you were to go to Singapore, it might have been much easier to get set up there, say, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago than today, because now you sort of need more money to get in, or you need a company to sponsor you to get in, and, you know, of course, there are ways in, you know, in so-in most cases, if you buy property or things like this," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:08", "start": 1807.76, "text": "Sort of causes the downswing, right? So they, they sort of have a, you know, that, that, that said, I, I, it's not that I think Singapore is going to go on a downswing, but it's kind of like, you, you wanna find the places that are on the up and see, okay, is that where I'm gonna place some of my chips, so." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "30:25", "start": 1825.11, "text": "Well, that is interesting. You want to find places that are on the up, and that's what Jimmy Rogers said about Asia at the turn of the twenty-first century. And you look at a place like Singapore, and, and things work, right? Everything works, everything is clean, everything is modern, safe, as well. It's safe. If you fly Sing- it's safe. If you fly Singapore Airlines, internationally, let's say, and then compare that experience to a domestic flight on a thirty-year-old seven fifty-seven from Detroit to Seattle, where- Or your, you know, your, the tray in front of you is half rattled off. you know, I mean, you look at some of these countries in the East and you say, \"Well, wha-what is it?\" I-it's not just explainable by what, you know, you and I would consider unfettered or free market capitalism. That doesn't explain everything about why things just sort of work. And things work in Dubai, too. Now, there's an underbelly to that. There are people who suffer to make things work, and we understand that. We don't wanna discount that. But nonetheless, if we're increasingly becoming authoritarian in the West You know, it's like, it, it, you could have authoritarian and nothing works or authoritarian and things work. I mean, I, I hate to think that that's the choice in the twenty-first century." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:38", "start": 1898.02, "text": "I, I see it as the world, it, it's a big world out there. There's two hundred countries or so. You can choose where you go, and you have to just, you know, and, and even for me, like I, I'm bullish on Dubai, as, as you were saying, like it's like this idea of what's on the up, right? I, I think Du-Dubai is on the up in terms of people coming here, business going on here, favorable regulatory environment for the most part, so Yeah, I think ultimately everyone has to just choose what, what jurisdiction that is, and maybe if you're an American listening, well, that's which state am I going to be in, as an example, right? And, and I'm, I'm bullish on that idea because that's really what rewards the jurisdictions that do well. And so you can sort of see it like a, you know, take it, take yourself out of the bad jurisdictions and go for the good ones. And so that's, I think that's the high level idea. But, yeah, perhaps Maybe some of it is circumstance as well. So as you were saying, Singapore, it's not just that they had, you know, relatively low taxes and so on, it could also be maybe the proximity to China, right? Because they were maybe able-- Because they were able to do a lot of trade there, and maybe some of the Middle Eastern countries, right, like the UAE, have, a lot of their business from oil and gas. okay, so maybe some of that is a-- Maybe some of that is luck of the draw, you know? But at the same time, One, they had a lot of natural resources and they didn't, they weren't able to, well, at least in the recent years, has not been a great place. So I think there are always pros and cons, and you just ultimately have to look at where things are going and look at the culture, look at the overall picture, and decide, well, look, you know what? Given my choices, I could either, like, so for me, that was either sit in Sydney, Australia, stay in a high tax nation where the culture is just going down, like all these They believe in the state, they believe in lockdownism, and they believed in all these things. So if you tried to argue these things with them, they would say, \"No, no, look how many lives were saved.\" despite the analyses that were being done showing, and okay, maybe we might not fully agree with this, but there were analyses, and actually there was a recent one put out by Gigi Foster. Now, to be clear, she's not even a libertarian, but she's an economist, and she put out an analysis showing even on a qualis-- quality-adjusted life And this is obvious, right? Like to anybody who's really studied economics, it's obvious. But unfortunately, what the people believe matters, because if a lot of the people around you, maybe they got invested into that lockdown belief early, now it's hard for them to change, right? Because they were kind of already committed. It's like a sunk cost fallacy. So for me, it's like, either stay in Australia, pay this really high tax, and, you know, sort of live amongst people who basically hate your freedom, or go to another country where it's low tax and they- They don't really care that much about your freedom. You kind of do your thing and they do theirs, and, you know, maybe that's about as much as we can reasonably hope for given the situation and given the world we're in." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "34:45", "start": 2085.43, "text": "Well, there's definitely a psychological sunk cost to the COVID narrative that's gonna make it very hard for a lot of people to ever, give up the idea that lockdowns and vaccines were good and necessary. And, and I understand, you know, I, I admire your choice in saying, \"I'm not gonna sit here and just argue with crazy forever. I'm gonna take my life in my own hands and go, go out into the world and, and, you know, go where I feel like I can find greater freedom.\" But here's the fly in the ointment," }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "35:15", "start": 2115.19, "text": "You are, at least at the outset, a guest, and, you know, you're not gonna throw your gum out your Lambo as you're rolling down the street. You're not gonna, you know, you're not gonna go graffiti, some mosque, and you're probably not gonna pen, den-- you know, letter, letters to the editor denouncing the local government in the newspaper, right? I mean, that's not-- you would feel almost naturally that as a new person, a guest, that that's not your role. But, but the, the, The political ideology of the twentieth century, and it's not dead, and it manifests as political globalism, not the good kind of globalism where you can get a Diet Coke everywhere. I mean, I'm talking about political globalism, the idea that, that the whole world sort of needs to have a Western style social democracy. And this mindset of universalism never sleeps, right? It is relentless, it's like rust. A-and so when, you know, when Stephan Livera goes to Dubai, he wants to be a good neighbor and do business and, you know, be- successful and, enjoy the freedoms that Dubai offers. But when some people go to Dubai, they look around and say, \"Well, this is a place I have to fix.\"" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:25", "start": 2184.85, "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "36:26", "start": 2185.57, "text": "Right. And so this, this is how all the trouble in the world comes to us, because America, especially, but the West more generally, has decided it's our job, to police the world and their political arrangements. And so I think there, there will always be arbitrage. There will always be young people like you who are gonna go out there Or, and, you know, go someplace else in the world, or maybe eventually go to Mars or whatever it might be. But I just wonder in a digital world, whether this arbitrage between jurisdictions is going to be challenged in the twenty-first century." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:03", "start": 2223.0, "text": "Well, you're right in that it is being challenged in certain ways, but here's the question, will they be successful? So a few examples, of course. So things like some of these supranational international organizations They hate this sort of thing, right? The OECD and other organizations, they're trying to do things like, \"No, you should have minimum tax thresholds.\" But at the same time, let's not forget, in the same way that Murray Rothbard wrote the arguments about, why cartels break down, well, it's a similar kind of thing because each country, they might be in a situation where they can't afford that because maybe the way that they are competitive is by having low tax. And so we see that dynamic as well, that there are challenger nations who want to, try Being different, right? El Salvador trying to go and be the Bitcoin country that you can freely go as a tourist and spend your Bitcoin or that you can set up a business there and things like this. So I, I, I see it like it's a big world out there and that the Western propagandists don't want you to understand that. They want you to think that, oh, only, only the US, Australia, UK, Canada, New Zealand, these are the only countries that you would ever go to. So just stay, stay put, little plebs, right? They sort of tell Let's know, just stay put and just take what you're given. We're gonna tell you the truth, we're gonna tell you what you're allowed to say on social media, and yet there's a pushback, right? So we're seeing, right, for all his flaws, Elon Musk and for all the subsidies and, you know, he is at least trying to push back on Twitter, so for that, for, you know, for what it's worth, right? We're seeing people like Jack Dorsey come out and be fully Bitcoiner, right, and fully try to promote this alternative I think it's just an ebb and flow, right? So there will of course be ways that people are trying to control, but then there'll also be competition, and there will be other places that you can go and other places where maybe they just don't get riled, as riled up about politics, right? There's not like protests on the street here. People just either they, they assess the country and say, \"Look, is it going to be a good fit for me, work, tax, business, other, other, you know, family, friends, et cetera? I don't know, am I going there? And so, I, that's, I think the high level way that I'm seeing it. But of course, I think that overall battle for hearts and minds, it still matters, right? Like it still does matter that we try to promote sound ways of economic thinking, sound ways of thinking from a political philosophy point of view, like what are we owed, right? I, you know, I owe you to, you know, not aggress against you, and you owe to not your, what you owe me is to not aggress against me, and that we" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:42", "start": 2381.65, "text": "But, I agree that some of that is going to be a cultural battle, and, you know, to the point about what people get, outraged about socially and culturally, yeah, some of that is, just what do people get outraged about?" }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "39:53", "start": 2393.2, "text": "Well, maybe we need an index of the least political countries in the world. That's a good idea. Because wherever politics doesn't dominate, that's where I want to live. So I'll leave you, Stephan, with this though. Economics is social cooperation. Economics is human beings dealing with each other, hopefully absent- Forced or fraud. And that's it. And so, you know, the idea that there are personal liberties or social liberties or political liberties, which are somehow different from economic liberties and these ought to be tracked differently and plotted on two different axes, I think is false. I think everything flows from economics, from our desire to improve our material well-being and for our desire to, interact with other human beings in win-win manner. So I think that's what it comes down to, Stephan. how can people keep in touch with you and, see what you're doing these days?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:46", "start": 2446.09, "text": "Yeah, of course. So people can search me online, Stephan Livera, stephanlivera dot com, and if they wanna find, a place to buy and learn about Bitcoin, swan dot com is the place. And, Jeff, thanks again for, hosting me. It's always a pleasure to chat with you." }, { "speaker": "stephan_livera", "time": "40:59", "start": 2459.22, "text": "All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening, have a great weekend. We'll be back next Friday." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:03", "start": 2463.49, "text": "Just a few reminders about upcoming conferences. So there is Bitblockboom dot com, that's August 25th through to the 28th of August. That's going to be in Austin, Texas, and that one is known for having a really hardcore Bitcoin, scene, and so looking forward to that one, and code Livera will get you a discount there. Also coming up is Liberty in Our Lifetime, so that's LifetimeLiberty dot com, that's October 21st to the 23rd. It's gonna be in Prague, in the Czech Republic, and you Levera two zero. So that one's a really good one if you're interested in free private cities and some of the associated scholars and speakers are going there. I'm really looking forward to that one also. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you guys in the citadels." } ] }