Jeff Deist on college education

Many students leave university with disastrously stupid worldviews - hostile to property, markets, free speech, family, and even civilization itself.  The whole cottage industry of "indentity  studies" is useless and destructive, by design.  These phony courses leave kids dispirited, depressed about the future, and ready to throw away centuries of received wisdom for a progressive blank slate.  Unwitting students graduate meaner, dumber, and older - with de facto degrees in narcissism ("I feel") and nihilism ("I hate").  Talk about opportunity cost!  Paraphrasing Mises, universities are gardens of socialism rather than exciting places for knowledge, ideas, and development.

~ Jeff Deist, Mises Institute fund raising letter, April 20, 2022

Daniel McAdams on competition between the U.S. and China

Jeff Deist: Even among libertarian audiences there are people who say China is a real threat to the United States.  China is biding its time and hoping we suffer an economic fall here.  Those people at the Mises Institute who talk about secession would simply open the door for a weakened America to let the Chinese lion in.

Daniel McAdams: What would they do?  Take California?  I had lunch with my good friend Colonel Douglas McGregor and he said, our military is still fighting the idea of territorial warfare.  The rest of the world has given up on this idea.  You don't go and fight and take over.  Right now, we've taken over 30 percent of Syria.  What are we doing there?  Nobody knows.  We're the only country in the world that goes around looking to put in bases and get territory overseas.  What does it give us?  It seems to me the last thing that the Chinese would ever want would be to "own" most of the U.S.  You know, first of all, it's a basket case.  They've got their own basket case because of the economic problems they have.  Why would they want to inherit something worse?  It would be a disaster.  The real Chinese threat is that the Chinese do capitalism better than we do.  We go overseas and we overthrow governments, we take over media, we push people around, we push gay rights.  The Chinese go overseas and make business deals in foreign countries and they get the stuff they want.  They get the rare earths.  They build factories.  And that's the real reason that the Chinese will certaintly outpace us in the future.

~ Daniel McAdams, "All the Trouble in the World," The Austrian, November-December 2021

Daniel McAdams on the evil empire in DC

Jeff Deist: There is a tremendous amount of hubris in the West today.  The whole world has to share our principles and our form of governance, essentially social democracy.  And this should be maintained through international governance in the form of the United Nations or the World Bank or whatever.  From my perspective this is just the twenty-first-century version of imperialism and colonialism.  It is ideological colonialism.

Daniel McAdams: Yes, and worse because we can kill a lot more people a lot quicker.  The people that jump on the bandwagon, "We've got to do this, we've got to overthrow X," you are living in a country whose foreign policy and military leadership are responsible for the deaths of millions.  You have a president who just droned a family and then lied about it, started wars, who's now holding nearly a hundred people in a gulag in DC because they happened to set foot in the Capitol building on January 6.  This is one of the most repressive regimes in the world, and if you doubt that, step out of line.

~ Daniel McAdams, "All the Trouble in the World," The Austrian, November-December 2021

Daniel McAdams on Ron Paul's foreign policy

Jeff Deist: Ron Paul was motivated by two things in deciding to run for Congress: foreign policy and monetary policy.  He was able to dovetail those two things.  He understood that interventionism abroad is a cousin of interventionism at home in the economy.

Daniel McAdams: This is something that the neocons and most conservatives never understand.  Those same people believe that six thousand miles away, all of a sudden the government becomes omniscient and omnipotent, there's a huge disconnect and the reason is very simple.  They never have to live with the consequences of the policies that they promote overseas.

~ Daniel McAdams, "All the Trouble in the World," The Austrian, November-December 2021

Jeff Deist on Alex Berenson: "virus gonna virus"

Some of you may know the name Alex Berenson, the former New York Times journalist who comes from a left-liberal background.  He has been absolutely fearless and tireless on Twitter over the past eighteen months, documenting the overreach and folly of covid policy – and the mixed reality behind official assurances on everything from social distancing to masks to vaccine efficacy.  He became a one-man army against the prevailing covid narratives.  Mr. Berenson is famous for creating a viral (no pun intended) phrase which swept across Twitter last year: virus gonna virus.  Which means: whether one is in Sweden or Australia, whether in New York or Florida, whether you have mask mandates or lockdowns or close schools or require vaccine passports – or do NONE of these things – virus gonna virus.

~ Jeff Deist, “The Terrible Economic Ignorance Behind Covid Tradeoffs: My Speech to the Ron Paul Institute,” Mises.org, September 7, 2021

Jeff Deist on price discovery

The purpose of capital markets is price discovery.  They help investors and businesses allocate capital to its best and highest uses, however imperfectly and haphazardly.  Short traders, long traders, so-called insider traders, futures traders, derivative contracts, speculators, gamblers, colluders, and even naked short sellers all serve this imperfect process.

~ Jeff Deist, "The GameStop Saga Unravels Stakeholder Theory," Mises.org, February 3, 2021

Jeff Deist on the future of free, decentralized communications

The underlying ideology, the impulse towards freedom which includes free communications and speech, is not so easily quashed.  And for that reason, I'm actually quite optimistic about a highly decentralized future where we don't have these huge gatekeepers like Google search, or Amazon Web Services, or Facebook and Twitter and Instagram as the only big 800 lb. gorillas in social media.  So I'm actually quite optimistic.

~ Jeff Deist, "Dealing With Big Tech Censorship - With Jeff Deist," 22:30 mark, Ron Paul Liberty Report, January 14, 2021

Jeff Deist on the dropping of seasonal flu cases

You know that basically now there's no flu cases?  Pharmacies across the country in the United States are reporting basically no prescribing of tamaflu?  Tamaflu is the cheap generic go-to for most doctors come November-December through the winter for flu.  And the idea that there's no flu in America, flu has been eradicated - no, flu has not been eradicated.  What's happening is that... COVID is sort of a layering diagnosis which is going on in all kinds of things.  So you're seeing people with flu plus COVID or obesity plus COVID or whatever kind of co-morbidity is all being dragged into a big bucket of COVID diagnosis that we can juice these numbers and create perception.

~ Jeff Deist, "Ep. 1802 Jeff Deist on the 2020 Fiasco, and Whether There’s a Case for Hope," The Tom Woods Show, December 24, 2020

Amity Shlaes on the revolutionary attitude of youth in America

Jeff Deist: There is a sense of a slow, gradual march, and then occasionally there are great leaps forward.  It feels like we're in the latter phase at the moment.

Amity Shlaes: The current period reminds us of the Cultural Revolution in China - heavy pressure from youth, and dangerous youth sanctimony.  Young people telling older people the way things must be.  It's disconcerting to observe such a dynamic in the United States.

~ Amity Shlaes, "2020: The 1960s Redux?," The Austrian, July-August 2020

Jeff Deist on the catalyst and underlying cause of the 2020 Crash

The Great Crash of 2020 was not caused by a virus.  It was precipitated by the virus, and made worse by the crazed decisions of governments around the world to shut down business and travel.  But it was caused by economic fragility.  The supposed greatest economy in US history actually was a walking sick man, made comfortable with painkillers, and looking far better than he felt - yet ultimately fragile and infirm.  The coronavirus pandemic simply exposed the underlying sickness of the US economy.  If anything, the crash was overdue.

Too much debt, too much malinvestment, and too little honest pricing of assets and interest rates made America uniquely vulnerable to economic contagion.  Most of this vulnerability can be laid at the feet of central bankers at the Federal Reserve, and we will pay a terrible price for it in the coming years.  This is an uncomfortable truth, one that central bankers desperately hope to obscure while the media and public remain fixated on the virus.

~ Jeff Deist, "How to Think about the Fed Now," The Austrian, May-June 2020

Jeff Deist on the allure of MMT

MMT is the perfect economic proposal for those who sincerely and deeply believe wealth simply exists in America, and will continue to exist, regardless of incentives. All we need to do is figure out how to more fairly divvy it up—and so why not through government spending?

The promise of something for nothing will never lose its luster. MMT should be viewed as a form of political propaganda rather than any kind of real economics or public policy. And like all propaganda, it must be fought with appeals to reality. MMT, where deficits don’t matter, is an unreal place.

~ Jeff Deist, "Not Modern, Not Monetary, Not a Theory," LewRockwell.com, June 26, 2020

Jeff Deist on MMT and government spending

It’s easy for those of a free market bent to dismiss MMT out of hand, but the impulse to create something from nothing resides deep in the human psyche, and politics is where this impulse finds expression. We should not underestimate the allure of MMT in the midst of our current upheavals, because it appears to make possible every left progressive program: unlimited public works and federal jobs, useless and uneconomic green energy schemes, reparations for black Americans, Medicare for All, free college, free housing, and a host of others.

~ Jeff Deist, "Not Modern, Not Monetary, Not a Theory," LewRockwell.com, June 26, 2020

Jeff Deist on presentism, progressivism and the "New Economics"

Presentism is at the core of the progressive worldview, which insists the past is alway retrograde, the present is always better but still deeply imperfect, and the future has an ultimately happy deterministic arc. It is one manifestation of the hubris which comes from imagining we live in a unique time, and a uniquely enlightened time.

Presentism is the hallmark of the imagined economics smart set: the Paul Krugmans, Christine Lagardes, Thomas Pikettys, Noah Smiths, and Benyamin Appelbaums of today. The economics they advocate—mostly in blogs, social media, financial news shows, or pop books, and never in treatises—is sui generis, unique to them. It’s their own economics, created out of whole cloth by them individually, supposedly scientific and brand new to suit today’s world. It’s a New Economics for 2020. And of course they all insist they’re merely following and interpreting the data, going where it takes them. After all, they’re scientists!

But exactly what theory or education or discipline do they apply to that data? Is it really economics?

Of course we know there is no New Economics, any more than there is new physics or new calculus. There are advances and discoveries in economic science, and there are new technologies which of course have an enormous effect on economies. But economics is, and always will be, about human action in the context of choice, scarcity, opportunity cost, and subjective measures of value.

~ Jeff Deist, "Mises and the 'New Economics'," talk at the Austrian Scholars Conference hosted by Grove City College, February 22, 2020

Jeff Deist on libertarians and humility

Being a libertarian means we don't know.  It means we don't know what's best for 320 million people in the U.S., much less 7 billion across the world.  So that, to me, involves humility.

~ Jeff Deist, "Jeff Deist on the Trouble with Libertarian Technocrats," The Tom Woods Show, January 10, 2020

Jeff Deist on the nasty 2018 midterm elections

By any objective measure, the ideological and policy disagreements between the national Democrat and Republican parties are not significant. Both accept the central tenets of domestic and foreign interventionism, both accept the federal government as the chief organizing principle for American society, and both view politics simply as a fight for control of state apparatus.

Similarly, differences between policies actually enacted by Mr. Trump and the existing Congress and those likely to have been enacted by Mrs. Clinton and the same Congress are fairly small. While Mr. Trump alarms the Left with his tone and tenor, his actual views on taxes, spending, debt, trade, guns, immigration (the "Muslim ban" was neither) and war (unfortunately his good campaign rhetoric is largely abandoned) plainly comport with the general thrust of Clinton's neo-liberalism. 

Today's ugly midterm elections are about style rather than substance, party rather than principle, and power rather than ideas. Americans do not much argue about whether we are governed by DC, and only slightly over how we are governed by DC. But we argue viciously about who governs us from DC. 

~ Jeff Deist, president, Ludwig von Mises Institute, November 6, 2018

Jeff Deist on socialism... in theory and practice

Socialism is absurd in theory, but murderous in practice.

~ Jeff Deist, "From the publisher," The Austrian, September-October, 2017

Jeff Deist on why loss of faith in government is a positive sign

I'm convinced that this loss of faith in government is quantifiably different today.  This is not just our grandparents' sort of complaining about "let's throw all the bums out."  This is different; something's different in America today.  And really that's what our movement is all about, right?  It's helping people make the leap from where they already are, which is government isn't working, to where they need to be, which is government can't work.  At least certainly not a government of 320 million diverse people top-down style from Washington, DC.  It's an absurdity.

~ Jeff Deist, "Alt-Right vs. Socialist Left: What It Means for Liberty" @ 27:13, Mises Circle Houston, January 30, 2016

Jeff Deist on libertarian society

Now there's a lot of ways we might define a libertarian society (or more libertarian society), but one way we might define it is to say a libertarian society is a society where the great matters of the day - cultural, economic, social - are not decided by politics.  And I would suggest that we are heading in actually that direction.

 ~ Jeff Deist, "Alt-Right vs. Socialist Left: What It Means for Liberty" @ 26:37, Mises Circle Houston, January 30, 2016