In September, I sat down for a talk with Tucker Carlson, on Tucker Carlson Today. This is the complete video. We talk about a great deal, from Foundationalism to farming, and whether I am related to the Communist Big Bill Haywood.
You can find the audio version here, or on standard podcast platforms. Audio and video versions also embedded below.
Good interview.
I think the reason they want us atomized (and it is also even more so the Libertarians than the left) is so there is no aggregation of power, but theirs, as that the individual is more easily ruled without any community structure to fallback on for support and mutual defense (and not just physical).
You solve the import problem by charging some small percentage in gold or other precious metals at point of entry.
See that is the whole idea of my land tax system I related earlier, is to break up the concentrations of land wealth, into the hands of the people so they can become self sufficient, and as long as you own no more land than calculated PER you and others within in your support group (by pledge or bond, etc), you are tax free. Taxes as such would be paid mainly by those who the system benefits the most, those who own the most, instead of the little people not only paying for the wealthy who benefits the most, but paying with their lives to protect that wealth.
This would cause government to shrink, because this taxing structure would incentivize people taking care of their tribe / hamlet / village / support structure / economic unit, trying to find ways to solve problems with one another, and becoming a stronger tribe to preserve their wealth (by taking in more people), because if not they would pay more taxes or lose land, rather than throwing each other to the wolves when it becomes convenient to do so.
And when we are talking land, that doesn’t mean it has to be in one place or that somehow people would be tied to the land (unless it was contractual). I suspect that a fairly robust market would develop vying for patronage and the land market would continue much as it has.
Charles, thank you so much for posting this interview with Tucker Carlson. I don’t subscribe to Fox News, so only see Tucker’s shows when referenced by someone else who posts a link. Anyway, great interview and I’m very pleased to see you in a high profile mainstream venue. I’m seeing you more and more in the public eye and that’s a good thing. You must have caused quite a few near-death experiences for any hapless progressives who happened to stop by to listen in.
I would love to see Foundationalism become wider known.
Thank you! So would I . . . .
Incredible. Congratulations, Charles, this is huge. It’s remarkable, and I think very important, that you were able to introduce such a huge audience to Foundationalism.
The one thing I’d disagree with is on space exploration. I think an emphasis on manned exploration, and ultimately settlement, of the solar system is absolutely essential. Without a human presence, there’s no possibility for the heroic, and it’s precisely the lack of the heroic that is behind the ennui of the present age.
Yes, this is probably true, although of late I have been increasingly disheartened that we are going backwards. But I suppose if we go far enough backwards, we may then be able to go forwards.
Great interview. Here is an article I found that reminds me of your philosophy: https://im1776.com/2022/09/09/a-time-to-dig-trenches/
Best wishes
Thank you, I’m Brazilian so fox news don’t let me access their services unless I use a vpn. Keep on your great reviews
Interesting on the topic of antitrust. What do you think the Bork-Scalia paradigm of “vertical-horizontal” is flawed and should be cast aside? To me, that is the only model of antitrust that makes sense. For example, if you break Google into four Googles now, it will not solve the problem of wokeness/current thing ideology infiltrating the industry because it will be the same pool of people staffing the same companies–four tyrants are hardly better than one tyrant. At the same time, while the power of the four Googles to buy out competitors will be severely diminished, they all gain the imprimatur of the government and can use that recourse to the government to stomp on competitors instead–the government getting in the business of determining how much competition is too much, I think, tends to lead to rent seeking.
You’d have to have more drastic measures–among them obviating rent-seeking. To some extent, it is correct that, no other changes being made, four Googles might not be better. But efficiency of censorship might decline, competition might result, and new entrants become more likely. You’d still need other rules, such as that any platform above a certain modest size is a common carrier forbidden to engage in any censorship the government could not engage in.
Thanks for the response. Antitrust has always been an impossibly complex subject, so I imagine to overhaul the current system in that view is not a matter of simply turning a few levers and dials. But turning the switch regarding common carrier status for the tech co.s is certainly a good start.
Keep up the good work, by the way. I discovered your reviews and podcast in early ’21, and they have made my walks, hikes, and runs much more interesting since, going back through the archives.
(Also, it occurs to me that I should have made a crack in the initial post that the sorry state Google’s search engine is in right now almost makes it seems like somebody just finished busting the company into quarters anyway … so I guess I will put that here.)
Yeah, that’s somewhat of a mystery. We’ll see if so-called AI changes search; probably not, since its prime directives will be monetization and preventing wrongthink.
Great stuff. Is there a transcript available? Would be good to have for its summary of Foundationalism principles.
No, but maybe I should do one.
Great to see the MAXIMUM LEADER on Tucker….
Thanks for giving us the link to the now-available full hour of your interview with Tucker Carlson. You both did a good job — it was fun to watch.
Two points:
Space — I don’t think space works as a frontier. There’s just nothing there. The more we learn about how humans do in space, the more it becomes clear that we will never do well beyond the earth. Space itself is empty, and the planets, moons and asteroids we could reach will never be inhabitable.
Things will change, of course, in ways that we cannot foresee. But for the foreseeable future, space isn’t likely to inspire anybody.
Antitrust — I don’t think Tim Wu’s ideas on antitrust are workable. Hipster antitrust (or neo-Brandeisism) sounds good in the abstract (“big is bad”), but experience shows it doesn’t work in the real world.
Tim Wu left government to go back to Columbia Law School and said that he had got more down than he had ever imagined. He must have a feeble imagination. As far as I can tell, he got nothing done.
I heard Tim Wu give a speech at a “right to repair” conference at UC Berkeley. It was uninspiring, devoid of anything practical in real life. I don’t blame him — it must be tiring giving speeches like that. But it just shows the problem the hipster antitrusters face.
Lina Khan at the FTC at least implemented one action item on the hipster antitrust “Utah statement” playlist with her proposed rule banning non-compete agreements. But I don’t think that rule will fly. If nothing else, I hope the courts clip its wings. That principle should be left to the states.
Maybe I am wrong, and in fact, I hope I am wrong. Though I badmouth Tim Wu and Lina Khan, they are both brilliant with their hearts clearly in the right place.
But I think there is a better way to handle the problem of big companies doing damage. A way that relies on bottom-up measures rather than top-down edicts.
Thank you! Well, I intend to write a fresh piece on Space, so I will address this question, and others. Maybe, like Communism, neo-Brandeisianism has never been tried! I noted on Twitter the other day that Wu had seemingly gotten nothing done. Maybe this lawsuit against Google has something to do with him or his ideas; more likely, of course, it’s just something that will be settled by Google giving some money to BLM and promising to censor even more on behalf of the Regime.
But back to neo-Brandeisianism, you are still looking at it through the prism of the current dispensation (same with non-competes). Obviously the present dispensation will never give us anything. In the new dispensation, as I said on Tucker, the government of limited ends but unlimited means will simply dictate that any company within a narrowly-defined market that acquires more than 5% market share will simply be forcibly broken up within four weeks, and the employees of the two new companies forbidden from any communication, on penalty of lengthy jail terms. There will be no administrative state left to meander through, etc. It’s obvious now that working through current structures is just a total waste of time.
Fair points, Charles. In fact, good points. Let me add a little in response.
Space — I look forward very much to your piece on space. I see space as a frontier similar to the deep sea. Interesting to explore, perhaps, to strange ducks like James Cameron, but completely and unalterably hostile to human life. Living miles down on the bottom of the ocean would be technically possible, but why do it? You would be under constant existential threat and always wholly dependent on humans on land. Space would be even worse, especially given the distances involved. Projects like Mars One are just a pipe dream.
Antitrust — If Tim Wu was behind the justice department’s recent lawsuit against Google, I agree that would be a feather in his cap. That lawsuit takes exactly the right approach (in my opinion) by forcing Google to work with rival tools and platforms and to let its competitors interoperate with Google products. I was glad to see the government move in that direction, away from the “break ’em up” mentality that seems so alluring to many.
One more comment about space as the final frontier. In 1961 newly inaugurated president John Kennedy started talking about what we now call a moonshot — an all-in effort to achieve the audacious goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
That goal was achieved, but it turned out to be meaningless. Rather than leading to leap after leap in space (as envisioned in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey), no one has returned to the moon. We earned bragging rights for beating the Soviets to the moon, but that was all we got out of it. One small step for a man was far from being a giant leap for mankind. The moonshot was a dud.
(The Soviets never put a man on the moon, though we learned after the collapse of the Soviet Union that they had plans for such a program that they kept secret. Interestingly, in 1963 John Kennedy proposed at the UN that the Soviets work with us on a joint manned lunar mission, and Nikita Krushchev apparently considered doing that. John Kennedy’s assassination two months later killed that idea.)
The International Space Station has failed to capture even the public interest that the moon landing did, as too have other space achievements. Scientists have learned a lot from space exploration, and will continue to learn more. But as a frontier that will excite anyone other than specialist scientists, I don’t think space will ever do that again.
To the general public, space is just a setting for Star Wars and Star Trek and their cinematic progeny, amounting to nothing than far-fetched fantasy. In that genre, you could say something visionary like:
“Space, the final frontier.
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.
Its five year mission: To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life, and new civilizations.
To boldly go where no man has gone before!”
But in real life, there will be no such visions. No more intense and exciting moonshots into space. Why? Because space is dead and sterile, inconceivably vast and unforgivingly hostile. There’s nothing there to inspire the effort.
I will work all this in!
Great seeing the Maximum Leader on Tucker !!!
Thank you!
Hey Charles, do you plan on publishing something on paper? Because it would be nice to have it on paper so I could highlight interesting quotes you say. I was remembering something you said about an useless aspect of philosophy but don’t remember where I saw it.
Publishing what? This whole site is published! And each writing has a PDF. Or do you mean on a specific topic?