Interesting interview Tom. With that said,I have been in the Liberty Movement for over 50 years and have tried to keep a positive attitude for change in America. However I believe that you and your guest are missing the elephant in the room. The Progressives have had over 100 years to implement their 10 Planks (albeit in modified form) to the Communist Manifesto. With those 10 Planks comes a voting majority which I will call the Political Dependency Class. This Class consists mainly of government employees,retired government employees,special interests and a multitude of net tax consumers that I call the “Entitlement” Class To try and change the attitudes of this voting majority and make liberty an option is almost an impossibility. You could no sooner get these parasites to get off of the government gravy train then you could teach a maggot to become a vegetarian. So what is the average libertarian to do? The only answer I can come up with is to set up your personal world and make it.as much as possible,into a Galt’s Gulch and wait for the inevitable collapse of Leviathan. It took centuries for Rome to fall. Maybe if we can wait long enough so will leviathan.

Michael Huemer has a very good TED Talk on The Progress of Liberalism.

I thoroughly enjoyed it and can highly recommend it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrZ2DJzbYYo

23 Charts That Show Why This Is The Best Moment In History To Be Born

http://www.businessinsider.com/whats-the-best-time-in-history-to-be-born-2014-9?IR=T

One of the best things to point people to who want to see results is the http://FreeStateProject.org

I’m not going to say it’s _the_ answer for anyone, only that it is one way to take action and make a difference in one’s own life today. Now.

The simple title of the guest’s book “Beyond
Democracy: Why Democracy Does Not Lead to Solidarity, Prosperity and
Liberty But to Social Conflict, Runaway Spending and a Tyrannical
Government,” indicates a completely incorrect and inaccurately-mapped-to-reality style of thinking. (This meme is the regrettably communicable brain disorder of “Konkinist political relinquishment” which is almost identical to Mencken’s uninformed disavowals of democracy.) I’ll probably listen to the podcast, because I greatly respect Tom Woods, and he’s arrived at a lot of correct conclusions, but his guest is “all wet.”

Democratic limits on government power, properly-defined, are thousands of times stronger than “republican” limits on government power. A republican limit on government power is simply a law, which “informs the government when it can expect to encounter resistance” (Spooner). A democratic limit on government power is any limit that contextually activates networks of human brains (which still outcompete the best supercomputers on Earth in terms of goal-directed response). This includes the grand and petit juries; free association and speech (assembly); and widespread private gun ownership practice and carry.

The laws “protecting” the prior democratic limits on power have done nothing to protect freedom once they were transgressed. The networks, on the other hand, have begun organizing in overt and covert cybernetic networks. Sure, these networks are continuously outcompeted by sociopathic networks of office-enabled bureaucrats; the bureaucrats after all, are highly-incentivized, whereas the libertarian networks are comprised of apathetic and dilettantes who don’t take freedom seriously. (You’d have to put Justin Amash and Rand Paul in a separate category here, as well as a few highly-technologically-inclined counter-economics practitioners.)

In short, libertarians don’t follow the maxim “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” In this failure, they have become the greatest enemies individual freedom has ever known: those who take the ideas of liberty seriously, but do not pursue them.

Of course, Thoreau said it first, and said it best:
” I know this well,
that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I
could name—if ten honest men only—ay, if one HONEST man,
in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were
actually to withdraw from this co-partnership, and be locked
up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of
slavery in America. For it matters not how small the
beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done
forever. But we love better to talk about it: that we say
is our mission. Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in
its service, but not one man.”

Libertarians throw rocks at the libertarians who _act_ in defense of freedom. “Don’t sully our precious perfection by laboring to bring it into material reality!” I know this well, because I’ve performed a lot of action in defense of liberty. (Like many of the people in the Free State Project who failed to reject the idiotic choice of New Hampshire.) …Always alone, always outspent, and nearly always for candidates that were 100% delusional, who viewed me as “the hired help,” and ignored the advice that would have placed them in office.

I have no doubt at all that libertarians will get serious about their own liberty, when it is far, far, too late. When you’re kneeling in front of an open grave and the modern progeny of the revenuer has a gun at the back of your head, it’s far too late to resist.

Q: What does a serious libertarian do? A: They stand in the way of the punishment of the innocent.

When the Northern abolitionist movement took the prior stance, they suddenly became a goliath against slavery.
1) The Free Soil Party opposed slavery, and made serious efforts to bring new states into the Union as free states, and to run candidates against all pro-slavery candidates, when they could cause such candidates victory.
2) States Nullified bad laws, because people wouldn’t support pro-slavery candidates, and they would support anyone who could defeat them. Crowds of people crammed courthouses, demanding the innocent not be returned to bondage (As Mr. Woods so accurately points out in his book, “Nullification,” about State nullification, which should be the PRIMARY goal of every single State Libertarian Party).
3) Abolitionist jurors shut up about their views, and got seated on juries, in spite of the judges’ and prosecutors’ attempts to stack the jury against fugitive slaves. (These jury-stacking attempts continue to this day, but unserious and simple-minded libertarians “grandstand” or “confess” during voir dire, getting themselves kicked off of juries. This is the single greatest failing, with no near competitors, of individual libertarians.)

The USA is the world’s highest per-capita incarcerator (enslaver). Our government schools are scarcely better than propaganda indoctrination camps, plucking the fangs from our young, rendering the Crotalus horridus featured on the American flag harmless to the unprincipled German jack boots who then tread on us with impunity. When libertarians stand against tyranny using all means at their disposal, including well-armed civil disobedience, we will have liberty. …Not before.

Democratic unity is the strongest political force on Earth. Democracy =/= suffrage alone. Don’t make that silly, neophyte intellectual error.

See also:
http://www.democracydefined.org