Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burris. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Richard E. Wagner. He's the Hobart L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He's the author of many books, the newest of which is James N. Buchanan and Liberal Political Economy. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Richard. Well, thank you for having me here, guys. I'm glad to be here. The end of the book, you have an appendix discussing James Buchanan and you in the personal relationship you had for about 50 years, correct. And you have a great little anecdote in there where you walked into Buchanan's class as a grad student at the University of Virginia and he asked you, and you describe it almost like cold calling, and Aaron and I both went to law school so we can sympathize, cold calling. He asked you, I said, Mr. Wagner, what's wrong with the American tax system? Now, I have two questions following that. One is what did you say? And two is why would he ask that? What does it say about James Buchanan's thought that that's something he would just ask a grad student in his class? Okay. On your first question, I had spent a fair amount the preceding summer reading works by Buchanan, works on public finance, works by his dissertation supervisor who subsequently I found Buchanan didn't think much of him. I think that was at Chicago, correct? Yeah, Chicago. And later I found out that Buchanan didn't like what he encountered as public finance in Chicago and wanted to create a whole different approach to public finance. Anyway, the standard public finance stuff was still standard today, pretty much a broad and tax basis, clothes, loopholes, things like this. And Buchanan asked the question. I had read these works and shot up my hand and answered what I thought was quite a good answer. And when I finished kind of had a smile to myself at how well I had done and Buchanan said, Mr. Wagner, you have no business answering a question like that because we're Democrats here, we're not autocrats. I didn't know what he meant by that time. Later I found out that what he meant was that standard public finance theory viewed governing officials as some kind of parents or lords of the manner whose job was to tend to people that whereas Buchanan regarded himself as a genuine Democrat in the sense that what he was trying to do with his work starting from day one was to ask, well, how could you, if you took seriously the idea that democracy should be a system in which people govern themselves as against being a system where some people govern others? How would you put that idealization into effect? And that was the core of his whole life's work, which I came later to realize, but at first that first day I was just stunned. What kind of person was James Buchanan? Well, on a personal level he was, you might say, in large groups. He was a fairly reserved person. Even in seminars he wouldn't say very much, but what he said was almost invariably very incisive and to the point and everyone paid attention to it. He was, I think, he had two kinds of loves in his life. One was his scholarship and the other he liked to engage in what you might call gentlemanly farming. In his time in Blacksburg he had a fair amount of property. He liked to, besides growing vegetables, picking blackberries and stuff, he liked to make wine. His blackberry wine was quite good. He also made zucchini wine and that really tasted kind of green. What was the core of, so he's the founder of Public Choice, or a founder of Public Choice, the Virginia School. What is the core of that? What makes Public Choice economics distinct from regular economics as we might think about it? This distinction comes down to the question of how do we conceive of government? We have an economic theory of markets where the core of the theory of markets explains how it is that a system of people, each of whom relates to each other within the basic principles of private property and freedom of contract, how that kind of interaction generates coherent patterns of economic activity that are beneficial to all. Then Buchanan asks the question, well, how can you inject governmental activities into that system of order? The usual presumption is that government is a kind of a planning agency that observes what is wrong about markets and acts to correct them. That's a theory that goes back to the very early 19th, excuse me, 19th century. It's going under the heading of one big branch of that's called the theory of public goods. An example being a lighthouse where the claim is that people wouldn't provide lighthouses through market processes, so government has to do that. Another big branch of that is the theory of externalities that says that market transactions can cause troubles for other people that the transactors don't take into account. That was a standard kind of theory. What Buchanan said about doing, and not just Buchanan, but some other people working with him like Ronald Kos and so forth, was to explain that that's not right, that you can get lighthouses provided through market-like transactions, you can get externality problems settled as well through market transactions. The economic literature subsequently came to display a wide variety of illustrations. Ronald Kos, for instance, explained how lighthouses were provided in the 17th and 18th century in England through a form of market transaction. Someone like Steve Chung, probably 40 years ago, illustrated how the claims of the impossibility of getting enough pollination services with bees was handled through market contracts between beekeepers in the one hand and various kinds of pasture owners on the other hand to relocate where bees are at any season. What came out of this was also, I think, a recognition that government itself is not some kind of planning entity because the sheer complexity of modern life means that no agency, no person can manage the affairs of an entire nation. Government has a decentralized market-like structure that operates under peculiar kinds of institutional arrangements. I think the ideas behind public choice was to say, well, let's just apply economic ideas to political activity and see where it goes. That was the starting point from Buchanan's work. It started off that he just wanted to develop the theory of public finance in a different way, where if you say, well, if public finance is not a subject that a public finance theorist doesn't tell a politician what would be a good act of state, but rather if the public finance theorist is simply trying to understand and explain what it is that governments do, how they do it, and why they do it. Public finance becomes a scientific activity and not a kind of a prescriptive activity. That was the basis of Buchanan's work, what his starting point was. But you have a great little analogy that I'm going to use in future lectures when I talk about public choice, but we talk about in Buchanan's public finance discussion where if you are trying to figure out the reasons why a monarch is funding, taking certain taxes or funding in certain ways, you do a basic individual choice. Why does that monarch make those choices?  That's just individual choice. If it's an oligarchy, you have to figure out how a bunch of people make decisions together. If it's a democracy or something resembling it, you have to have a whole different theory about how choices emerge from the people and the rules that they play by, which is what Buchanan was very much focused on. But it's amazing to me that that took so long to that obvious idea that there's something different about it. When you just say the government decided, it's not the same as saying Henry the Eighth decided, but a lot of times we talk like it is, as opposed to figuring out all the forces that go into the quote unquote government deciding. Why did it take so long for someone like Buchanan to come along and say, oh, you missing huge parts of what's interesting about this? I don't know. One of Buchanan's prime intellectual heroes was a Swedish economist, Newt Wixel. In 1896, he published the piece of work that Buchanan centered on in his constitutional work about the importance of unanimity at one stage. Wixel has a famous quotation in his book there to the effect that up to his time, 1896, the theory of public finance is based upon the presumption that the world is ruled by autocrats. Can I just jump in and you define public finance? We've used the term a lot, but what exactly is public finance? Public finance is the study of the economic activities of the government. That's pure and simple budgeting as well as regulating. Both how it collects money and how it spends it. Yes. I mean, and the way in which it had traditionally been studied was that this was the domain of statecraft, of rulers. The task of public finance was, among other things, to advise a ruler on what would be a good tax system or what would be the right amount to spend on this activity or that activity. The sort of tax that Buchanan took goes back to Wixel and some Italians was to say, well, governments do things for the same reason ordinary people do things. That is to say, there are politicians who have desires that they want to pursue. They face various kinds of constraints in pursuing their desires and you ought to be able to generate an explanation or an explanatory theory of public finance and that's what became public choice. There were some precedents there in a group of Italians starting in the very late 19th into the early 20th century who thought or tried to do much the same thing, but it was Buchanan really carried that forward and it became public choice. I'm sure that we talked about this before, a little bit before we started recording, but maybe some of our listeners have particularly tuned into this episode because they've heard of a book called Democracy in Chains by a woman named Nancy McLean from Duke University. You were writing this book for a while. It came out a month before Nancy McLean's book, Democracy in Chains. I'm sure you weren't planning on heading it off before it came out, but it is interesting that Nancy McLean wrote a trade book that is largely about James Buchanan and the subtitle of the book, if any listeners are not familiar with it, just to give you an idea of the flavor, the deep history of the radical right stealth plan for America. This is her task. It's nominated for a National Book Award now and there's been a lot of discussion and we'll put some links up. Do you regret giving away the stealth plan? Yeah, I know exactly. You published it beforehand. They could have just gone to your book. You don't want to ask about it because the book has contained so many errors that you almost don't want to raise it to the point that it's part of the discussion, but you said you had read the book. You felt obligated to. You knew Buchanan for 50 years. You've written much about his work. You've written books with James Buchanan. So I guess I could ask you generally what he gets wrong about it, but that would be too big of a question. Let me just ask a specific question. She claims that James Buchanan was very angered or galvanized by Brown v. Board of Education in his appreciation for decentralized education and maybe some racism, but she never comes out right and says that he's totally racist but strongly implies it and that that was a huge thing that he was going forward to try and break down democracy and to produce local control, which included the possibility of segregation. Did you ever hear James Buchanan mention Brown v. Board or like any of those goals and what he was pursuing? On a number of occasions, he and I talked that he was very much an egalitarian in his basic sentiments. He had no objection to Brown decision that he believed in decentralization in parental choice, student choice, but he did so within an orientation that in a liberal orientation of people being able to develop their talents and abilities, he had, he was certainly an opponent of segregated schools that existed at the time and I don't know where Nancy McLean got these kinds of ideas. I think as far as I can tell from reading her that she's a, she's very strongly has, you might say enlisted in a kind of a Antonio Gromsky kind of progressivist march through the institution so to speak where she, I think she sees her fundamental challenges participating in this kind of effort to undermine the traditional American institutional arrangements of limited governments, individual responsibility for one's doings, free markets, decentralized governments and so forth. I mean, she's just a very standard kind of lefty in this regard who I think with the idea of a long march through the institutions that may not be the creation of Antonio Gromsky who was an Italian communist might have been Lenin, but still the idea was that in order to set the conditions for the new collectivist way of living in modern western societies, you had to destroy a lot of kind of institutional remnants. You couldn't just have one big idea that people would embrace, but rather you had to go through and tear down a lot of the kinds of structures of living and thinking and believing to set the conditions for a new system to arise. And I think she recognized that one of the obstacles to that march has been the development of public choice theorizing that puts political figures, political institutions on the same level as everything else in society. It demystifies politics and politicians, where I think her program is very much requires some certain mystification of the political or some elevation of the political. And I think in her eyes Buchanan is really a symbol of that. I mean, she knows nothing about Buchanan's economics as a way of thinking. She says so in her book.  And to make that symbolic point, she tells numbers of kinds of stories that aren't true in terms of Buchanan's own work, for instance. She refers to the southern agrarian David Davidson, who is a known kind of racist and so forth, because Davidson used the term Leviathan. Buchanan never cited Davidson in his work. He never talked about him with me ever. And Leviathan, of course, goes back to Thomas Hobbes. And Hobbes was a major political thinker that Buchanan... A little bit higher than David Davidson, yeah, I would say, yeah. And so is this kind of thing. Or again, another example was that her very first chapter was titled, I think, Something Like The Marks of the Master Class or something like that. And it was John C. Calhoun. And again, Buchanan never cited Calhoun. But what McLean took about Calhoun was his slave-owning characters and qualities and thought that everything about Calhoun was pro-slavery. I have no idea what Calhoun's position was on these things. But it's also notable that Calhoun was a very major political thinker. In fact, Calhoun's ideas about federalism are to some extent found within the Swiss Constitution, which is a widely recognized quite successful democracy, that as much kind of decentralization has various kinds of built in procedures by which sets of cantons can reverse national legislation. And so, which isn't exactly like Calhoun, but it's in that kind of family of how do you operate a federal system of government where one of the tendencies to be fought against is the federal government to act as a kind of a cartilizing agent that thereby the states and the federal government act as an entity through such things as federal grant programs and things like this. And the Swiss, as I have certain features of their constitutional arrangements, are very much in the spirit of Calhoun's thinking. But did you hear Buchanan ever mention Calhoun? No. But McLean, I think her actual term is intellectual load star. Buchanan's intellectual load star is John C. Calhoun, which seems to me intellectual malpractice at the very least. Oh, it's terrible intellectual malpractice, but I guess you might say that from her point of view, as an enlistee in this long march through the institutions to advance the cause of progressivism, she happened to hit upon Buchanan as symbolizing a lot of the style of thinking that supports a lot of the resistance to this progressivist march. And so I think that probably, I don't know her, but I imagine that was, why does a scholar select a certain topic for a book? Going to her title, Democracy in Chains, maybe trying to put herself in her position as much as we can. Why might someone who reads Buchanan think that he does want to constrain democracy or put it in chains? I mean, is there something in Buchanan that would actually lead someone to think that? Well, she says right up front that she doesn't understand what Buchanan is thinking, doesn't care to, made no effort to. So how she could say that? I don't know. Sure, there is a sense that of democratic government as being constrained, but that's nothing mysterious. It goes back to the simple question. How can you even talk about democracy as a system of self-governance? You have, we can imagine monarchy where we say there's a monarch, he wiggles his nose and something happens. That's the theory of monarchy. It's a theory of choice. But now we go to democracy. And the idea of democracy is that people are self-governing people. So suppose you have a small group, say 500 people, let alone 300 plus million people. Suppose you have a small group of 500 people. How can they self-govern themselves? Well, 500 people by itself is just a mob, which means those people are going to have to construct some kind of institutional or organizational arrangements. They're going to have to do things like how, what are the kinds of offices? Are there going to be committees? Are there going to be chairman? Who's going to, what procedures by which you even give a speech? 500 people can't speak at once, which means in turn that there's going to have to be some kind of office of a chairman who can recognize speakers, limit speech. These are all chains, if you want to use that term, because rules govern all interactions, rules, conventions, standards, however you want to label it. And so to talk about democracy and chains, I think does not at all reflect a serious scholarly effort, but rather reflects a certain kind of ideological effort to create an image that might resonate with readers. That's all I can think of. I think there's also a tendency, and this seems to be on display here, that the kind of progressivism, the radical progressivism that someone like Nancy McClain advocates, requires restricting democracy a fair amount in of itself, because the reason that we don't have a radically progressive country right now is because most Americans don't agree with the full platform of radical progressivism. So if you gave Americans what they wanted, we wouldn't end up with that. And that seems to be her book, and you saw this with the blow up over the influence of the Koch brothers. There was a recent long article in The Intercept by Lee Fang about how Atlas, the small international think tank down the street from us, is basically controlling all of Latin America, and that's why we don't have socialism throughout Latin America. Although it's about 40% or so. That is pretty well. Well, if Atlas were bigger. But it's this, and I think libertarians do this too, that we have this tendency to say like, the reason that our ideas are not more popular or have not been affected at a larger scale is because there's some nefarious influence behind the scenes, whether it's dark money or it's these people at the University of Virginia and George Mason really controlling things, or it's government schools indoctrinating the children, that the reason that it's, if only we cleared away the nefarious actors, the secretive cabals, our ideas would dominate and everyone would accept them, when in fact the much more likely explanation is simply like, you haven't convinced people, your ideas, they disagree with you. Maybe rightly, maybe wrongly, maybe if they have more information, they'd be more likely to agree with you. Maybe if they have more information, they'd be even less likely to agree with you. But that's where it is. And pointing at people like James Buchanan or the Cokes or the teachers unions or whoever else is just a way to deflect, I think, like maybe your own rhetorical failings or the lack of rigor in your own ideas, or simply just the fact that it's hard to convince masses of people of any particular set of ideas. No, I think that's an excellent point and I would sort of add to that, I guess my own observation in a sense that I think it's important to accept the notion that societies are to some extent inherently venues of simmering social, societal civil warfare. I mean, you hope that the warfare intensity is simmering and not boiling, but I think there's something in human nature and our interests in striving for improvement that is going to bring us in conflict with one another in various ways. And what the dimensions of that conflict are, the axes of that conflict are themselves emergent products of human imagination and invention. But who, for instance, ever walked out somewhere and found, say, 10 people with a round ball and saying, well, let's all stand here there and see how many times in 15 minutes, say, we can pass the ball up and down and see how many goals we can make.  They're going to say, well, let's divide up into teams and contest each other. And I think that contestation is part of human nature and faction is part of human nature. This was one of the fundamental features of going back to the Federalist Papers, was recognition that faction in humanity was never something that was going to be abolished. All you can hope to do is live productively inside of it. And what economic theory fundamentally tries to explain is how it is that a social system where relationships among people are governed by those legal principles of private property and freedom of contract will tend to generate progressive, wealthy, peaceful societies. Whereas to the extent those relationships are governed by the ideas of common property, common ownership, where with common ownership it means that if I make a bad decision, things don't do well, I don't pay for it. Everyone contributes and pays for it. And so who pays for it? Taxpayers pay for it. And then to boot, if taxpayers become an increasingly shrinking part of the total electorate, you get increasingly into a world that where for many people, government is almost free. And basic economic theory would say that that's a recipe that's going to increase the intensity of the simmering. That's always going to be present in societies anyway, because I think that kind of striving for superiority for glory to use Hobbes' term is part of our natures. When we talk about James Buchanan and you mentioned previously that he would have considered himself a real Democrat, someone who deeply believed in democracy. But it was democracy warts and all, it seems to some extent that it was trying to take people and figure out what is the best way to construct the government that they want. What was he mainly trying to book like The Calculus of Consent, which is maybe the eurotext of Virginia Political Economy School with Gordon Tulloch. What is that book, for example? What is Buchanan discussing in that book? The Calculus of Consent had a couple, I think, of objectives. One simple one was to say that the American Constitution had a very coherent economic logic behind it. So you get, going back to 1885, Woodrow Wilson published Congressional Government. And in that book, Wilson excoriated the kind of American system of checks and balances and so forth, and wanted to have a streamlined kind of centralized state run by the right people. Which is always an interesting thing if you think about it, is how it is that all presidents promised up hold the Constitution to take the oath of office, and yet most of them are dedicated to subverting one form or another. You probably have to go back to Calvin Coolidge to find someone really dedicated to upholding the Constitution, but still. This was the main focus of the Calculus of Consent. We're saying that there is a sensible logic to checks and balances contrary to the whole progressivist notion that chaotic results come out of democracy. Going back to another part of the question you asked about Buchanan's very deeply felt democratic sympathies was that, again, he was deeply concerned with the normative position that people together, the activities people undertake together should be of value to all of those people. That's what he mean by self-governance. Another way of putting that idea is that people shouldn't really have the experience of being bossed in life, pushed around in life. That, sure, you might agree to work for someone under the conditions that they lay out for you and so you show up on time and so forth, but you're not really being bossed there. You've agreed to it and this kind of quality of not being bossed of self-governance, that's what led him to think, well, how then that's fine is an ideal, but how might you go about putting some institutional structure to that? Like, for instance, one of Buchanan's lifelong interest was in federalism as a form of government. The idea there is that you talk about self-governing republics, but what are the boundaries of the republic because you're talking about some boundaries that's going to cover a set of people and are those boundaries just imposed or do people create them in various ways? And so the organization of governments, the idea that you could have some activities undertaken by a national government, some by towns, is very much a part of his thinking which leads and turn into questions as to whether that kind of arrangement is going to be a highly competitive system of governance or it's going to turn out to be a cartelized system. There's a fellow at the GMU Law School, Mike Agrivi, who just, I guess not just a couple years ago now, put out a book, an important book on cartel federalism and going through the tendencies for our federal system to morph from an open competitive system into a cartel system, but this, again, was very much part of Buchanan's extreme democracy. His work on public debt is the same thing, reflects the same kind of concerns, which is a matter of how well can a democratic system handle the situations where political figures today are making decisions or judgments that will not manifest for, say, 20 years. See, within the market framework of property and contract, even at my age, I can reasonably go out and invest and say an oak grove. Even though when those trees are ready to be harvest, I might be dead and it can go to my estate, my heirs, and so thereby I will have a good reason to manage it well. But if I were in the position to be a politician, it means I have a leasehold to this force for the term of my office and when the term expires, I'm gone. So how do I manage the forest in that setting? And in the case of public debt, if you have the recognition that politicians much prefer to tell constituents what good things they can do for them rather than what cost they have to bear to receive those good things, I think you're set up for a kind of a systematic tendency towards budget deficits, which is a kind of a democratic irresponsibility. But it doesn't mean in Buchanan's estimation and his judgment that therefore you should not do things today to care of the future, but rather perhaps suggest things like if a government is going to borrow today for long-run projects, it should perhaps assign liabilities today to who's going to pay those projects in the future, just like you assign liabilities for mortgage debt, the car debt and so forth, that those debts stay with you.  And so it's not denying democracy, but saying how do you marry or bring responsible action into a democratic setting? I think that a good occurred to me that the famous quote, which I'm not sure where it came from originally, but democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting over what's for dinner. And so maybe you could say that some Buchanan thought is to say that he was trying to keep democracy from being that, trying to... If you did have two wolves and a sheep, what are the rules and institutions that would actually have the sheep be okay with being in the voting block with the wolves? So in this situation, the sheep could be the minority or it could be the people in the future who have to pay the debts that they're going to put down and just trying to keep it from that while keeping the legitimacy of democracy. That wolf and sheep illustration is a wonderful one. It reminds me that early 20th century fellow, Fredo Pareto, at that time there was a big discussion. It has contemporary relevance, I still discuss it, about what a good government should do to maximize social welfare. This is the standard public finance question. And Pareto responded to this controversy that had been going on and said, what do you mean by maximizing social happiness? When social happiness for the wolf requires eating the sheep while for the lamb it requires the avoidance of being eaten. And that, you know, what Pareto was doing was getting away from this idea that government was some kind of shepherd managing the flock and was questioned become how the different parts can cohere and manage themselves, which is, again, what liberal institutions of private property are really fundamental about. And so, in this case too, you know, it's a matter of, I've often thought, whether you think about the problem of public policy as a problem of herding sheep, that's the standard kind of vision, is that we have this office we call policy maker and they herd sheep and sheep just go along. Whereas if you put the problem of how do you herd cats, well, you don't. And that's raised, and that I think is the real democratic setting. If you, if it were a matter of herding sheep, we wouldn't have had a backlash against prohibition in the 1920s. We wouldn't have had the, against wars on drugs today and so forth, because people would all be sheep and do it. But it makes a huge difference if the social problem was one of dealing fruitfully with cats or with wolves and lambs and how the whole, you might say, social ecology works there. And I think the basic lessons of economics and of public choice is that social ecology works better the more so human interactions are governed by principles of private property and liberty of contract. Does this theory of democracy depend on, or I guess, demand taking a dimmer view of voters of the electorate than we tend to get from politicians and their rhetoric, that we tend to get, you know, the people are wise and then going back to the, you know, the undue influence stuff, that if only the people really got what they wanted, we would choose well, that people can see the public good, when in fact, you know, some of the stuff you described, like the, you know, the running deficits, like one of the reasons that we run deficits is the same reason that people run credit card debt, you know, that we like to spend now and we don't really want to think about how we're going to pay for it in the future, because that's not as fun as spending.  Like, do we, does this theory of democracy require, to some extent, being less democratic or being more willing in the cause of making the government work to overrule or ignore the will of the people? Oh, this is a very important question that digs right into some of the core of democratic ideas and democratic theory. It goes back, as far as that goes, it goes back to the debates between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists going back prior to the Constitutional Convention, where the Anti-Federalists gave more emphasis upon the smaller governments and upon the importance of what you might call civic virtue. Now, civic virtue within the Anti-Federalists, especially, was, I think, it's an important quality. It's something that has cultivated naturally within markets. But, for instance, within the system of private property and freedom of contract, if you buy a car on time and find your loan payments are too high and you're not willing to make them, you'll have to sell the car and walk or whatever else you might do. You can't borrow because there's a discipline because the rules of the market mean you're going to be liable for the value consequences of your actions. Now, the democratic form gets away from that by saying, well, if a government spends too much on something so it's not worthwhile, well, there's no person who's responsible. If a private business undertakes a bad project, that owner is liable for the consequences. And government, no. It's taxpayers who are liable for the consequences. Now, with respect then to civic virtue, see, there's a problem in the basic idea of equilibrium theory and economics is that any promise you make to someone about some benefit they're going to receive is going to imply a complimentary promise made about the costs they're going to have to bear. That's just a simple fact of economic theory that we have a demand side and a supply side. Now, if you look at political programs and speeches, almost all of them refer to what people are going to receive. Rarely do they refer to what they're going to have to do to make that possible. And if they do refer it all to cost, it's going to be some amorphous kind of notion of other people pay the cost. You don't pay the cost. But yet you get to even take a simple thing, a small entitlement like Herbert Hoover's old chicken in every pot kind of claim. That claim, of course, emphasizes chickens. You receive chickens. What even you don't think about there is, well, do you want to go out and work on the chicken farm to make chickens possible? But you can't have a chicken in every pot unless there are people who are working to provide those chickens. And I think civic virtue is kind of the ability to live in recognition of promises made to receive benefits simultaneously entails obligations to make those possible. I think one of the dangers in contemporary democratic politics is the severing of this duality between promise and obligation. Whereas in basic again and basic private action principles, a promise simultaneously is an obligation. And when they get into politics in a world where everyone pays the same tax, you could say that a promise is close to an obligation, everyone's in it together. But you get to a world increasingly where some people pay taxes, many people don't, or also you have various kinds of rates of tax that all these things work to weaken the duality between promise and obligation. And yet maintaining that duality is an important part that I would submit of responsible action. Did Buchanan, if we're talking about sort of how we conceive of voters within public choice theory and acknowledging that voters may not have high incentive to be very politically informed and some of the things that you kind of mentioned there, I'm sure Buchanan agreed that that was part of the limitation of voting. But did that mean he judged voters as excessively for not being informed? Was he against voting or against voters and against voter ignorance as something that made him mad? And was that the kind of, because I think that someone like Nancy McLean is very into democracy purportedly and voter education, get out the vote campaigns, you know, there's the most important civic act you can do, what would James Buchanan generally think about voting? I never asked him that particular question directly, but I certainly had a number of conversations with him. And I certainly know that he wouldn't think much about these get out the vote campaigns that these would be missing the point, which has to do with what you might call the environment within which rational responsible action is undertaken. The main thing there is that there are some kind of environments within which people act that promote responsible, clear-headed kinds of action. Again, markets are a lovely example of that.  In turn, that means you're going to be reasonably thoughtful and sincere in trying to make a judgment as to whether that's good or bad, because you are responsible for the value consequences of your actions. Now, when you get to collective action, governmental action, nobody individually is responsible for the actions they take. Now, what does that suggest in a world where perhaps there are some actions that need to be undertaken collectively? But many don't. You certainly don't have any need to have collectively supported health insurance, for instance. But this would suggest that the wider the range over which collective action takes place, the less the informational substance that goes into decisions are going to be made, the more fully those kinds of actions are going to be determined by people who have very high investments in the outcome of different kinds of policies, which is far removed from any kind of notion, I think, of reasonable self-governance. And all the things I get out that vote do and stuff like that is validate the kind of current system and its direction of movement. But I think just a simple comparison of the properties of a system of social organization where in the one hand, what you choose to do, you're the owner of versus the system, what you choose to do, you don't own. A simple illustration that I think all students recognize would be if a hundred people go into a restaurant and they each have to pay for their own meals, you're going to find various decisions made, but each person is going to make his or her choices based upon what he or she likes compared to what they're going to pay. Then you say, well, there's no tab for each of you. At the end of the night, I have your credit card numbers and I'll divide by the number of people in attendance. And what you're going to find is the total bill is going to be substantially higher that many people will choose to order something because they don't have to pay for it, that they might have otherwise done something cheaper. And so that's the fundamental democratic setting. And in the restaurant case, moreover, I use the example of a hundred people, each of whom pays 1% of the total bill, where in modern tax systems, our tax system as a way of charging, within the federal income tax, roughly half the taxpayers are free of tax. Now, they pay social security tax, but that kind of system nonetheless is one that breeds irresponsible conduct because people don't, for the most part, bear the value consequences of their actions. Now, I want to go to this question you write a couple of times. For example, I'm talking about Buchanan and John Maynard Keynes. So, you write Keynes's social philosophy could reasonably be described as guided or controlled liberalism in contrast to Buchanan's genuine liberalism. Now, in this question of being a genuine liberal, I'm going to go back to the McLean book and read a quote from Buchanan from an essay he wrote called Why I, too, am not a conservative. The classical liberal is necessarily vulnerable to the charge that he lacks compassion and behavior toward fellow human beings, a quality that may describe the conservative position along with others that involve paternalism on any grounds. George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism can be articulated and defended as a meaningful normative stance. The comparable term, compassionate classical liberalism, would approach oxymoronic classification. There is no halfway house here. Other persons are to be treated as natural equals deserving of equal respect and individually responsible for their actions, or they are to be treated as subordinate members of the species akin to that accorded animals who are dependent. That's Buchanan. Here's how Nancy McLean writes that quote, and then I want you to comment on what this says about both Buchanan and McLean. Coke, this is Charles Coke, or possibly Fred Coke, but Coke learned as a young adult from his mentor Baldi Harper that the great social problem of our age is that of designing the preventative medicine that will stop the eroding of liberty in the body politic. Harper warned that once the disease advanced, a bitter curative medicine is required to gain already lost liberty. James Buchanan revealed just how bitter the medicine would be. People who failed to foresee and save money for their future needs, Buchanan wrote in 2005, are to be treated as subordinate members of the species akin to dot, dot, dot animals who are dependent. So that is how McLean described what Buchanan said about people as subordinate members of the species. Now aside from the critically intellectual malpractice of how bad of them is quote, quote, why would Buchanan come along and say there is no middle ground in classical liberalism? There is no coherence to the idea of compassion at classical liberalism or liberalism, and why does that make him a genuine liberal? I don't know why Buchanan would say that. Actually, I never liked particularly much that particular essay of his. I guess I don't draw that rigid distinction between liberalism and its proper meaning and conservatism if you say that what you want to do is conserve useful workable institutions. Hayek and Edmund Burke had a lot of points in congruence with one another, actually. And I think in that respect, I often refer to Benjamin Franklin, where at the end of the Constitutional Convention, a woman was reported to have asked Franklin what kind of government did you people create? And he responded, a republic, if you can keep it. Now in that kind of response lies a recognition that the kind of system of liberty that was created doesn't automatically maintain itself. It has to be fought for and against forces of erosion just like, you know, in natural sciences there's the concept of entropy of order becoming disorderly. And at the same time, I think in societies, there's certain kinds of forces of entropy at play that a system governed by, you know, market arrangements, liberal arrangements is not something that's going to maintain itself. It's been going through a lot of erosion over the past century or so, although I think the basic support for that system still resides and still exists. What, you know, I think the quote you read from Nancy McLean is just backwards in the sense that what it illustrates is, in fact, the understandable erosion of the kinds of prudent actions that people would take to care for themselves within a market arrangement. Yes, they have been eroding and much of that erosion has taken place through the expansion of governmental activity as far as caring for people and so forth. There are whole history is full of various kinds of philanthropic organizations, mutual aid societies. There was a historian some maybe 20 years ago, David Bito, who wrote a wonderful book on mutual aid societies prior to the welfare state and how those forces were undone through the coming of the welfare state and how within realms of private charities that, you know, the basic idea, I think, of liberalism is a kind of a humane, tolerant kind of spirit, a charitable kind of spirit, are all part of, I think, the liberal orientation and attitude and that the liberal attitude, I think, is rightfully one that treats people as individuals not as instruments to be manipulated. I think they become instruments to be manipulated within the progressivist scheme of thoughts that sees people as children and wants to keep them there in tutelage or in bondage rather than seeing them as as people who have the capabilities of being fully functioned individuals. And so what she's describing is, yes, it's the expected result of the undermining of traditional liberal institutions that have taken place to this extent is going to, to the extent people come to think that I'm not going to have to pay for what I order in the restaurant but it's going to be a general charge against the government, I'm going to eat better. And but that's the problem. And then the problem is there is a problem of how do you get back or how do you restore a system of liberal governments? It's not an easy question. I don't think there is any recipe there. It's something that those of us who believe in the importance of liberty and responsible action have the the obligations and the talents to make our cases in the various best ways we can. But I would just simply remind everyone, at least it's my my social theory is that recognition should be that and goes back to Hobbes at least, is that societies are battlegrounds and that humanity is going to have divisions and that the political problem is always one of of contending for how we're going to conduct our lives. And I think that's just human nature. The German flittle theorist from the early 20th century, Carl Schmidt once posed the problem. Well, are humans dangerous creatures or not? And how you answer that question says a great deal about how you approach the problem of political economy. Buchanan approached it as they're dangerous creatures who Robert Frost had had this beautiful poem. I forget the mending wall, I think was the title. And the line when the closing line there was good fences make good neighbors. And Frost wasn't trying then to separate people, but rather saying if you knew where your boundary was, I knew where mine was, we could be fine neighbors. Whereas if that was up for grabs, then have no option but to fight. And so that's the real message of liberalism, of Buchanan's liberal political economy. And is the very much the underappreciated notion in play today is that liberal political economy liberalism is not contrary to Nancy McLean, a matter of a few rich people trying to run the world as they would see fit as public masters. But as a way of bringing everyone into a world in which they can choose the adventures and activities that they want to have with other people within the framework of market institutions of property and control. Thanks for listening. This episode of Free Thoughts was produced by Tess Terrible and Evan Banks. To learn more, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.


We don't need to eat animals, so do we. That was the most interesting conversation ever. I've never heard anyone's reach so far. I thought you would know that if you know a lot about farmers. That's the way that we accept humans to die.  We are Leicester Square again, London, Burger King behind us. We've got the Enrich Caged Facility here that we exposed for the Uncovered series. I'm going to talk to people because Enrich cages for eggs are more common than what you think. Looking at about 36% of eggs are coming from these facilities here. That's quite a high number considering there's 66 million people in the UK or maybe more by now. That's quite a lot of our hens being exploited in these facilities. This was one of the most frightening places I've ever been in. You saw how shocked I was in the video. I was just in complete disarray in there. The hens are just going mad in there.  It's just multi-level story, animal exploitation, prison it was. Let's see what the public think of it. Do you know what this facility is? That's me in there by the way. Can you see? Yeah, I don't know. This is for eggs, in England for eggs. Okay, I don't really have any though. Yeah, which is why I don't eat eggs actually. I don't eat them. Or other animal products because so much cruelty involved. Violence as well. Kind of factory. Factory farm? Yeah, factory, yeah, bad. It's a factory farm. Factory farm for animals, yeah. Can't be bad. Do you think they can be good? No really. I'm more in that organic way. Organic? Natural. Natural?   They do? Yeah. Animals do horrible things to each other. But in the right environment, in natural environment. We don't need to eat animals, do we? No, yes we do. We choose to, we choose to. We need one particular... Nutrient, B12? No, I don't know the name exactly now. But one particular protein is coming only for the blood. And can't be... Iron, you mean iron? It's a kind of, it's no iron. It's something... B12. Combination, no. It's no people, it's no iron. I don't remember now. No, no, no, no, no, the medical condition. It's a nutrient. As a people, we need that... Well, it's a protein, but I don't... What about me, what do you think about me? Do you think I get that nutrient that you're talking about? Can't be fixed. We can't have from something else.  I've been vegan for eight years. Maybe you believe that. No, but I haven't eaten animals for eight years. Maybe you believe that, but you never know. I never know? Yeah. I'm living proof.  And you can't see an animal on your plate on these days. That's not mean you don't eat the animal proteins. From where?  Do you remember the horse meat scandal? Well, you think they're making, putting meat in my vegan food? Yes, can be. Without me knowing, that's why I'm not dead? Yes, can be. Otherwise I should be dead? Can be. No. Okay. No.  It's like freina di wasi. Like bones, flowers, which actually is provided even though... Flowered bone? Like bone meal? Yeah. So, they're putting bones in my food? No, that can be put actually as... Virtualizer? Yes. So, you think the plants actually have the nutrient from the bodies of the animals? Can be. We never know. We never know. So, that's why I don't have to eat animals is because the animals are actually in the plants? Is that the... Can be. Can be. Okay. I'd prefer to go with like more science-based approach and like most plant-based diets can be healthy for all stages of life? Even in the science, the science can be pushed on the limit, but you can't go over.  I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. Okay. I can't say now.  I'm not in that position, yeah, to have and to be to know like hundred... What I know is what is double processed, yeah, like food, that's dangerous for your body. Oh, of course. I understand that. Yeah. It's actually nothing. We'll make some changes on molecular, you know, level for generation. Not for now. You will don't feel, but if you have the child... My child's gonna be sick? Yeah, that's it. Yeah.  You never know, especially... I mean, you never know what eating animals does to people, too. We actually do know. We do know, because heart disease is the number one killer of people.  Cholesterol is only found in animal foods only. There's no cholesterol in plants, so we know that. So I'd go with what we do know versus what we don't know and some imagination or fear. That's why everyone's free to choose. Yeah. You're free to be cruel to the animals. You are free to do that. But that's why I ask for people's heart conscience. Because you legally can do this to the animals if you want. You can pay for this. But I ask people to use their heart, not just what's legal and what you can do. Yeah, that's true. I respect that. Bless you. That was the most interesting conversation ever. He literally said, The reason I'm not dead from being vegan is because they're hiding animal products in the vegan food. That's why I'm not dead. You know? I've never heard anyone's reach so far to go, Well, the reason that you're still alive is they're grinding up bits of animal when putting it in your vegan food. And that's why you're getting that magical nutrient that's only found in animals. That was crazy. I took this footage. Hello. I don't know the tips at all, mate. Yeah, I filmed in here. That's me in the footage. That was the other night in England. You do realise that all farms are like that, right? You do realise that all farms are like that, right? Well, 36% of the eggs in the UK come from enriched cages. This is an enriched cage barn. If it's not all farms, show me the good one. The chickens in my garden. Ah, okay. Well, that's not a farm. That's your garden. You should see my garden, mate. It's close to being a farm. Is it really? It's like 46 tubs of fruit and vegetables in every... Oh, good work. ...every inch of space. Good on you.  Why not?  I eat, yeah.   So it's not a debate I'm going to have right now. I don't eat my chickens. I don't eat those chickens. Do you like those chickens? Yeah, of course. I buy them as pets because I like them as animals. The eggs are just a byproduct of having them. But, yeah, they do a few things for me. They keep the grass down, keep the bugs off the edge. Animals only are good in terms of, like, what they can do to serve people? Is that what you think? They shouldn't just exist. There's a lot of animals that only exist because of people. If we stopped eating them, they wouldn't be here. They would be extinct faster than us killing them. A lot of animals, yeah, of course. I grew up in the countryside, so I'm a bit better informed than the average person about the way that the farms work, the byproducts and everything. And I think a lot of vegans... What was that? A flyer? The amount of times I speak to the vegan protesters and I see them with leather handbags, leather belts, leather shoes. No, man. No, but you might be mistaken because some vegan leather looks like leather, but it's not leather. Oh, yeah, that's right. I think there's a lot of people who... Oh, you couldn't be... But let's just say, well, they'd be a hypocrite, but what they're preaching is still correct. But they need to live by what they're preaching. Of course, yeah, I mean, I do. Yeah, of course. But, like, I could say... Like, someone could say... Do something horrible and then speak out against it. But what they're saying is still right. My personal food issues... Yeah. There are certain things that I won't eat. Like what? I don't buy any eggs that come from battery farms. Like, the battery... These are called enriched cage facilities. I don't buy any enriched cages. I know. Battery cages, I don't think... You call it an enriched cage just to s*** a little bit of sandpaper. Well, they give this little, like, scratching thing s***. Yeah, and I don't buy eggs... So where do you buy them from? I get them from my garden. Okay, yeah. But what about bacon? If I was going to buy them, I'd go to the farm shop or the farm's market. Okay, and where do the... So you get all your meat and flesh? I eat from the bushes, but my thing with meat, I won't eat veal, I... Why?  Why is that? Because I've seen the process involved in either raising or killing those animals. And I don't like it. Well, I've seen the process involved for raising and killing just conventional animals, and it's no better. I know, from experience, the majority of farmers raising something like beef cattle. They've got a lot of time left. Well, let's talk about... I think those animals live very well. Well, let's talk about the... When they're killed, the majority of them, the responsible farmers, those animals are killed as quickly and painlessly.  The slaughterhouse workers do... But they are killed as quickly and painlessly as possible. You don't know that? I've done that job. No, but you don't know that for sure? I did that job. What, bolt gunning cows? Okay. But you know how pigs are slaughtered? I never did pigs. Well, I'm... Pigs are... Pigs are stunned and in blood. Yeah, so how do they stun them? They're stunned and in blood, and which is it? No, they don't. Oh, they do, like, for a small percentage, but most of them are killed in... They're stunned in gas chambers in the UK. I thought you would know that if you know a lot about farming. That's the way that we accept humans to die.  Definitely. Gas chambers are used in a lot of places. People who've done something evil. Okay. Yeah, but the animals have done nothing wrong. But does that person deserve to suffer with this? I don't agree with that. I'm just saying, like, they've done something wrong. There's an indictment against them. The pigs have done nothing wrong. How many animals die growing vegan or vegetarian? I can answer you that, but... You know that it's more than...  I think that what you're trying to do is avoid the fact that pigs are suffering in gas chambers, and instead... We're on a microphone right now. Why are that? To see a friend over there filming. Yeah, because... I'm happy to have a debate with you, but I don't like the being... But why not? Because I don't want to be on YouTube. Yeah, but... I'll happily debate anything with you. I can blow your face, but this is a public space, so if you're going to talk to me in a public area... Listen, best of luck. No, I appreciate it, mate. All right, that was an interesting conversation with that fellow there. He wanted to focus on cows and his backyard hens, but he didn't want to talk about the pigs. As soon as we started talking about gas chambers, he wanted to talk about crop depths. Because I feel like... Once you get them to a point with the... Like, the gas chamber point where pigs suffer and die in, his first thing is to do is to appeal to hypocrisy and go for the crop depths. He wants to have some type of accusation against you instead of addressing the moral point. But obviously most of the crops, like, what do you think pigs are eating? They're eating crops. What do you think cows are eating? They're eating crops. And there's more crop deaths incurred because of meat and dairy and eggs than because of human consumption. So... But anyways, it's supposed to be about enriched caged eggs and just spiralled off into a conversation about humane slaughter with that security guard. So... Anyways, we'll keep going. This is an egg facility. What? This is an egg facility in the UK. Eggs? Eggs, yeah. Yeah, this is me in there. It's not you, is that you? Yeah, that's me. Let's see. Oh, it's not like that's against battery farming, basically. Well, this particular topic is today, but I'm against the exploitation and cruelty to all animals. So you're vegan. Yeah. You're vegan, yeah. Yeah, yeah. What do you think of that? It's fine, it's absolutely fine. I can't argue with that. Yeah, because the reason I went vegan is because I felt like I didn't want to put those animals in this suffering, yeah. So I felt it was consistent with my values. So my actions are consistent with my values, what I believe. Are you against the cruelty to animals? Oh, of course, yeah. We're the recent people who have cruelty to animals. Well, most people pay for it, don't they? So that's why I just ask people if they're against it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what about in your actions? Are you against cruelty to animals in your actions? You mean eating them, wearing them? I was vegetarian at one time, but now. I don't eat much meat. I tend to eat fish.  I do eat fish, yeah. I'm not a vegan scanner. Can you be cruel to a fish? Do you think? I know. I work with it. Some day I work with cheese vegan. I know what it stands for, you know. So you fish can experience cruelty, yeah? I'm sure, yes. So if you're eating them, you're kind of part of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.   A lot of people they know, but they don't want to do anything about it. You do end up with quite a narrow range. For example, you can't eat honey either, can you? Or any kind of milk? It's just animal products.  Oh, eggs, you can't eat eggs either, can you? No, but I use tofu instead of... You see, it's quite a narrow range. No, no, it's actually... There's more plant foods in the world than there are animals to eat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's about, what is that, 10 animal products you don't have to eat? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But instead of eggs, we just use tofu, vegan eggs. I'm aware of it, yeah. You are? Well, I'm aware of it. Yeah, I know what it stands for, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Anyway, alright, no worries, buddy. The biggest enemy is not those who kind of come with fierce opposition. It's the apathy. It's the, I know about it, I mean, do I care enough to change? Probably not. You know, that's really the enemy of the animals is apathy. People who come up and oppose vehemently, passionately, they're the people who actually care enough to stop and they're having some type of emotional reaction. But other people, they just get this like blasé kind of nonchalant attitude. This apathy, that is the reason why things like this can happen. It's apathy. The people sanction it. It's nice to say I was kicking them to make him tender before I ate them. It's always the boyfriend though, more of a harder not to crack. You watch all my videos and you're not a vegan.


these pay things no one holds cash anymore and no one has time to figure out the buttons the apps man whoever came up with this idea is making an absolute bag it's just convenience man like bang an hour maybe a little bit more have some lunch start there's my number plate and we are off parking has started and now I can go off and it's going to send me a notification to say hey your parking is almost up or whatever and every quick transaction whoever made this if they're smart enough which I'm sure they are 1% or 2% for every transaction they'll get and this would be used hundreds and thousands of times every day across the country and the world find your gap and then go hard with it and you create passive income from something that everybody uses every day like the convenience that's why I'm making that app


Explosions could be heard in Gaza city on October 8 as Israeli jets flew above the sprawl of buildings in retaliation for the bloodiest Hamas attack in decades on Saturday, plumes of smoke rose as the sound of jets, drones and explosions continued throughout the morning. Israel had battered Gaza overnight pounding housing blocks, tunnels, Amoskin homes of Hamas officials in Gaza, killing more than 300 people, including 20 children.Ina sign the conflict could spread beyond Gaza, Israeli artillery responded to mortar fire from Lebanon and drone strikes hit a post of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia along Israel's northern border.


Hello. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining this talk. We have just finished our MrBeam Kickstarter campaign last week. Right now we are here to share our experiences on crowdfunding, Kickstarter, or a hardware project. And, well, here we go. Well, first of all, has anybody thought about crowdfunding something? Nice. So, we are Tea and Philip. I'm Philip. That is Tea. We are software developers with a computer science background. And we're working as app developers and web developers for a few years. And somehow got bored. Tea's startup didn't go anywhere. I was working as freelancer and, well, we needed something new. And, yeah, and something new to learn and stuff like that. And we have never done hardware. We have no idea about crowdfunding, finances, marketing, sales, anything like that. So, we thought, let's do a hardware project and go on Kickstarter. Yeah. A little bit about our project. It was MrBeam. MrBeam said, do it yourself, laser cutter and engraver kit. It was born because we wanted to dig a little bit deeper into 3D printing. And we needed some kind of goals, some kind of projects to not to just humble around to get a little bit more focused on the topic. So, we decided we built one of these. Do it yourself, laser cutter. First with a laser diode from a DVD burner. And later we upgraded it to a one watt class four laser. And while we decided to open the hardware and the software, we didn't release very much yet. We already released a little bit of software, but there's still some cleanup to do in the hardware stuff. We managed to send out the hardware rewards for all the backers just in the week and now we're working on the backlog. Well, everything was done with open source software and that was an open source hardware and that was one of the reasons why we wanted to open source our project as well because we started October last year and right now we just finished the whole Kickstarter thing and we wouldn't have been that fast without all these things you see here. The open scott for engineering, the 3D parts, the key cut for making electronic circuits, inkscape, gerbil, octoprint, Arduino, you all know these projects and we want to say a big thanks for everybody who contributed in that. We already said we chose Kickstarter, but in the beginning we didn't know where to go on which platform to put it and we looked at different ones but we didn't really know if anybody wanted to have a home-built DIY laser cutter so we went the safe way and chose just the biggest one because Kickstarter is the market leader or was at the time and so to be safe we chose Kickstarter which made everything a little bit harder because in Germany there's no Kickstarter representation so we had to use Tia's brother who has a green card and lives in the US and set up all the things you need like a bank account and Amazon payments account and all those accounts basically and the company in the end and that made it possible for us to have a Kickstarter project well, started from Germany and one big preparation was a working prototype because at that time Kickstarter only accepted hardware projects if you could present a working prototype I think it changed in the meantime but we worked like two months or something on the prototype and then got all the bureaucratic stuff set up and went on planning the whole thing and how we set up the campaign so a big part was planning or estimating the costs we would have for example the hardware like the source materials that we bought stepper motors, plastic parts, cables, everything and also the money it takes to put all the things together and that's then the COGS, the cost of goods sold as I've learned and also we had to do more prototyping we had to take into account the money we had to use to live off and we almost forgot some other things like lawyers and tax advisors and then you also have the fees you pay to Kickstarter and Amazon payments and then there's taxes, everything but we managed to I think we did a pretty good job calculating the stuff it's not like we got rich or something but we didn't get poor either or not poorer than before as we mentioned we didn't have any financial background and it was one of the most difficult parts how to approach that and luckily we added big buffers money and time wise like 20-30% in both and we ended up using the money buffer right away spent it all and also we took a little bit more time used up the buffer in the time and also spent one and a half months more than we planned but it's not too bad for a Kickstarter project I've heard and then if you have all the costs together and you know what it's going to cost you to produce all the things and send it out, you need to think of shipping and then you have to produce a number that you put on Kickstarter and also think of a total funding sum that you want to read you don't want to even if you can't produce one kit for a reasonable price you don't want to produce just one like you need maybe at least 60 to get it going because it's not worth the work otherwise and yeah luckily we managed to get four times the money we asked for so yeah we were good on that Yeah, second task was to present the project on Kickstarter therefore you need a video that was quite difficult either we read a lot about successful Kickstarter campaigns and advices and whatever and the most interesting or the most important part was that you have to tell a story you don't have to be professional but it must be some kind of story behind it and first of all we made a video it was almost ready it was edited until the end and we showed it to some friends it was the first feedback was so well yeah that's nice but I don't care about if the electronic circuit is working with 12 to 24 volts and well we had to admit okay that's perfectly true We spent two months on the prototype developing the technical details and then we wanted to present all the things we thought of and how we built it and everything but in the end the people didn't care about what works more like what it and we're interested in what it does or what it can do and in that moment you are so proud of what you have done especially if you didn't have any knowledge about electronics before and so you wanted to mention it and well we learned it just drop it it's not important at all tell the story and show the use cases show use cases is quite important that the people are getting some idea quite early in the video what to do with the thing you are trying to promote here we revised the video and made a second iteration and that was quite better also in Quickstar I don't know about the other crowdfunding platforms you can preview before you actually publish the project to the world you can preview the campaign and send it with a special link to your friends or colleagues or whatever so we didn't know about that in the beginning but that's very helpful because it's the step to the last it's really helpful to show it to somebody else well then we started the campaign at 2 o'clock in the night because we thought well the US just has finished work then and that might be a good start we ended up without some sleep for several days we got tons of emails and needed a lot of coffee to answer them all and even if you make some FAQs people are just continuing asking questions that was a really really exhausting time first we thought well at that time during the campaign it was running 32 days we could develop the software further and maybe research about third party suppliers but we really needed almost 24 hours for supporting all the questions for answering all the questions finally after the campaign you have to wait 3 to 4 weeks for the money because the first Amazon payments is collecting that from the credit cards from the backers sometimes the credit cards fail Amazon payments is trying that another time and well it took some time until we really got the money and could order the stuff we needed another point is we got a lot of emails offering help they were somehow really useful someone saying hey I'm a very friendly beta tester if you need just give me a line another one is if the curious one was some kind of we are curry feinstein style lounge and we want to promote your product next to other big brands like Gucci and Dolce and Gabbana in the golden globe awards and you're like what I don't know if this fits here and so we ignored them and when we finally had the money we had to transfer it to Germany and finally we could start shopping for all the good stuff we bought maybe half of the stuff we ordered parts in China through Alibaba and Aliexpress very helpful there it's a little bit I was a little bit afraid we had the motors there because I was wiring like 7,000 euros to a bank account in Hong Kong and all I had was an email saying yeah we'll ship the motors after we receive the money so but we were lucky we got all of our parts nothing really was bad or didn't arrive the motors actually they sent us some wrong tracking number and they thought it's already delivered we checked the tracking number it was delivered somewhere in Singapore I was really getting afraid but they sent us different tracking numbers it's kind of a strange feeling if you feel the responsibility of delivering some stuff to your backers who are so kind and give you such a money yeah then another very, very new task to us was to make an electronic shield for the Arduino it's basically a combination of stepper drivers and the laser diode driver in our case we made four prototypes because if you make one mistake in this part it's not upgradable with a bug fix release or something it has to work from the first production run something that was really new to us being software developers you're not used to that the worst case happened we had the third prototype ready tested and it was super working well but then the manufacturer of one very important IC said hey sorry we discontinued this chip and we said oh well, well now then we had to find an alternative and had to do a fourth prototype which luckily was quite good from at the first iteration we were a little bit experienced at that point so it went a little faster we have quite a few plastic parts that we need for the gigantry for the whole device basically we thought about injection molding but somehow the numbers weren't high enough so it's too expensive or doesn't make sense for a small number and we ended up 3D printing all the parts it was 7000 parts in the end like 90 kilograms of plastic and spent our four printers for four months printing spent maybe I don't know 600 hours maintaining and well taking plastic parts off and cleaning the extruders and everything so it's not the best idea to to produce that many parts 3D print that many things or yeah it's well it costs us some time well we luckily we set some upper limit on our Kickstarter rewards and we almost reached the limit and in the end I would say it was almost a little bit too high because all these manual tasks we had to do which are not enough for mass production but way too much for two persons alone since cable trees if you are crimping cables cutting cables and whatever soldering stuff it just takes a lot of time we had to deburr steel rods we spent a lot of time finding a correct steel or a good steel supplier who is delivering already the correct length of the piece of the steel well in the end we ended up hiring two students which was an additional manufacturer in the end but without them we wouldn't have made it yeah also the manual parts were really where the problems lied so on the picture you see the frame parts you need four of them for each kit we had 260 kits and that was after me after cutting all of those and before drilling holes into them so that was a good few weekends spent and also we spent a lot of time the effort for starting something like that the first time effort is really big you have to find all the suppliers go through Alibaba and check the ratings sometimes they promise things that they can't deliver and the drilling was really bad in the end we had some fun as well first of all we were invited to the Fabcon 3D in Airport that was a small 3D printing fair some weeks later we were invited at the Fab10 conference of all the Fablabs in Barcelona this was a really nice experience there we met some people from the government of Georgia they invited us to an innovation camp in Georgia it was some kind of nice holiday between the whole Kickstarter campaign we were invited to TM Wissen at Servus TV it's the TV station of one of the biggest media companies the Red Bull media don't laugh we went to the Maker Faire Rome which was a really huge fair it was impressive and finally we were in the Make magazine formerly known as CT Hex there we have the journalist sitting in the first row who wrote the article we made a little road trip through the US because we wanted to deliver some of the parts in person our Kickstarter campaign was based in the US so we thought it would be cheaper to not spend the money on the shipping to the US but just deliver it ourselves it didn't work and in the US we made some very inspiring person this guy that's actually Lord British maybe one or another one knows him he founded some nice software company Origin in the 90s after all it was a huge experience I'm really glad that we have done it you probably as well it was kind of exhausting as well some takeaways the cost calculation at once is super important we did our best but it was not enough compared to other Kickstarter projects we have made it somehow quite good we are only two months delayed we are around about 00 right now so I would recommend if someone was doing some kind of crowdfunding think about scaling before even if you are not sure if your idea will be a success just be prepared for that about the cost calculation we heard from Kickstarter projects or crowdfunded projects they ran out of money just before they wanted to ship their rewards we don't have anything anymore then the 3D printing it scales to some point but at some point you need at least one person full time to maintain the printers even though our printers had some auto leveling bed and were quite time saving in the calibration then we underestimated the duration of the manual tasks like cutting cables and additionally the duration of finding the right suppliers that was a really big time time consumer well then another advice would be just to think what we want to do with the project afterwards is it just a project like we thought in the beginning or do you have plans to make some kind of company out of it or to make the project open source or to get it growing somehow it would have been good if we had done something like that before and well we are rich in experience right now but we are not rich in terms of money but we made it and it was kind of fun thank you both very much for this very interesting first hand speech or talk now as usual we have some questions please line up if you have questions over here we have two microphones over here, two microphones over there we start with IRC questions sorry no questions from IRC, network is down we start with number one please ok cool project congratulations just wondering how much effort you put into actually marketing your campaign once it was online and how you went about that we didn't put any effort in marketing our campaign we put it online we reached our goal in 48 hours we saw the visitors coming from Kickstarter recently launched projects so we were very lucky at that point and then we thought ok we may do some marketing if the campaign is slowing down during the time or during the period but in the end we almost reached our upper limit of devices to produce we didn't do any marketing but we planned when to start the campaign I'm not sure if that helped but I do think so so we launched it in the US when people came home from work also on a Friday but no marketing after that we published some things on our social networks that was it how many devices did you ship? 240 thank you my question is how many emails did you have to reply to or people you had correspondence with via email versus those that actually then participated or contributed maybe we have like 350-360 backers I would say 5-6 times that 5-6 times thank you number 4 please yeah in the first place many thanks for this awesome story one question in the last slide you advised to think before about what you want to do if this is only a project or you want to take steps further and then you mentioned that you in the first place thought only of it as a project but you said in the first place so what is the next step for you guys well the next step is to grow the company we have a company right now we try to get venture capital after the Kickstarter campaign we request per day for a device we couldn't deliver that so we thought let's just try out what is going on okay but you now thought of where this is going to end, where you want to end for me it was like let's do the Kickstarter and then I would plan on going back to my normal work that was the problem thank you I was wondering why you chose Kickstarter over some other crowdfunding servers and why only Kickstarter and not some like 3 crowdfunding services okay well we have chosen Kickstarter because it's just a market leader it is huge I thought my brother lives in the US otherwise he would have probably been using Indiegogo but we just read the 2013 numbers from Kickstarter they had some slides they were very impressive and so we thought Kickstarter would be well to make some crowdfunding parallel on platforms I think it's a huge effort but it's already too much on Kickstarter the first week so I'm not sure if it's a good idea if you don't have a big team behind you thanks thank you number two please could you say a few more words about the legal side of things so you did that as a private person not as a company what about regulations and liabilities you might run into someone who has his eye out with it and wants to sue you with it or the FCC tells you that this is not regulated or whatever so could you just say a few more words about people interested in producing hardware what they have to pay attention to or perhaps they don't have to so we do have a company because of the liability issues we did do that and well we did the project as a DIY kit like Bausatz in German which shifts the liability to the person or some part of the liability to the person assembling the kit and also it takes away the requirement to comply to all the regulations like CE or electronic waste and everything so you founded a company before you ran the Kickstarter so which legal form did you choose to do that an LLC, a limited liability company you can do that via an online service within an hour okay thank you now do you feel like you've got a sort of community of users a kind of audience through which you might try and launch similar products in the future or do you see it kind of as being the end of this project and then you'd start a different kind of venture yeah right now trying to build a community around our MrBeam project we have some quite very active members community that was the reason why we wanted to do it as open source so people can decide if we want to continue it or not and people can just work on their own and extend it we really want people to work with it and improve it or develop attachments the work did you learn anything from your backers kind of during the campaign did you hear about any feature requests or tweets like what color you should paint it or stretch goals yes a lot you have to just block it and others are quite nice ideas somehow to manage it you also learn a lot about use cases people who want to use what they want to use it for and yeah sorry to interrupt so there's enough time outside to meet this guy so please give an round of applause for this very good speech


Why hello there. I'm Sandy Allnock. Welcome to my YouTube channel where today I'll be making artist trading cards and I thought I would show you the process for what I'm doing for my ATCs for a swap and Explain what an ATC is and then invite you if you'd like to join us in a big old ATC swap All right, let's get started It is an ATC.  They're only traded or given away you can take part in a swap and That would be when you share a bunch of cards with a bunch of people or one card with one person or A round robin kind of swap all different ones or run different ways and you can Google to find different ATC swaps The history of the ATC it's said to have originated in 1997 in Switzerland When someone with the last name of sternum, and I cannot pronounce the first name my apologies of Zurich Hosted the first swap and ever since then these little art pieces have been traded around the world The details of an ATC each one should be exactly three and a half inches tall and two and a half inches wide and I'm guessing you could do Horizontal orientations they don't have to be vertical, but the ones I see are vertical, but it's the same size as a baseball card Most of them are rectangular, but some artists will experiment with arched tops Folding flaps pockets all sorts of things. They should have a little bit of weight to them So they need to be at least card stock not lightweight paper But not so much that it couldn't slip into a clear plastic sleeve made for a trading card Some artists will include those interactive parts that fold or swing think about flaps and doors limbs on paper doll cards Tails on animal cards ears that pop up lots of different options But it needs to fold down to fit in the three and a half by two and a half inches ATCs can include texts like quotes or journaling Stamping painting pencil mixed media basically anything goes But the important thing is to make your ATC a reflection of you and your own style If you do cute then cute is perfect if you do grunge grunge is great But just remember these aren't throwaway art They aren't just something to do with that leftover scrap of something You want to put your heart into what you share because this is sharing your art. It's not just sharing your scraps ATCs are often traded inside of card sleeves to keep the art inside safe And those are the baseball card sleeves little individual ones Sleeves are not always required in a swap, but you need to check the requirements to see what's expected of you And if you start collecting a bunch of ATCs You can get one of those three ring binder sheets where you can put in a whole bunch of ATCs Just get the baseball card size And I'll link to both of these kinds of sleeves that I found online if you're interested in getting some of those I Keep a treasure box myself and I put these ATCs in there I have a bunch of them from years gone by and every once in a while I look through them for inspiration So there are three types of ATCs One is a one-off. It's a one-of-a-kind unique card You know never gonna make another one of it. You've made just a single one Secondly would be a series a few ATCs that are on one theme And they're usually numbered one of three one of four one of five, etc And then there's also an addition two or more cards that were created to look Identical and those would also be numbered one of three one of four one of five On the back of an ATC you want to include your information You can type it up and glue it on you can attach it that way You can get a stamp to do so you can hand write the information And I'll include a link to a stamp that I found in the supply list as well And you can find them in lots of different places and different stamp companies You want to include your name as the artist you want to include the date you made it The title if it has one your email or website and I would say do not include your phone number or your mailing address Just because you never know where this thing is going to end up if there's going to be a picture of it somehow taken For somebody's blog and you don't want your private information out there You also want to include any notes like whether it's part of a series or edition and If you are part of a swap make sure that you pay attention to the rules because some swaps will ask that you do a write-up on how you made the thing and what supplies you used etc And so if that's the expectation be sure you meet that Now why am I talking about ATCs? This is not a channel focused on ATCs Well at art venture we wanted to do another swap. So we decided on swapping ATCs this time The theme for it just very simply fall trees leaves pumpkin spice nesting Gratitude fall colors, which is what I'm focusing on Anything upbeat in the message and since we're going to be actually doing the swap in November. We're skipping the Halloween imagery The process for taking part in it. You're welcome to come join us Is that you'll need to sign up ahead of time to be part of the swap? the sign-ups are going to close on October 31st 2023 and There's going to be a couple different things We're going to do in sorting out the names if you want to participate in mailing Internationally you need to be ready right away when you get the name to drop it in the mail because sometimes it can take a week to two weeks to get to somebody and There's questions on the survey that will get you on to that international list if you'd like to do it Otherwise, we're going to swap each group with someone on their own continent And that's going to keep mailing costs down and the time factor and you'll receive a private message On art venture from one of our moderators on or about November 1st or 2nd Once we get all that sorted with the address of the person that you'll send to But you can start planning your card right now if you want and it's actually in my eyes better not to know who you're Sending it to so you don't become intimidated by them or go look up their art and try to make something for them You're making something that represents you For the due date ATC's should be mailed to arrive the week of November 12 to 18 And I'd prefer everybody try for earlier in the week because on the weekend of the 18th We'll have to decide whether it's going to be Friday night or Saturday We're gonna have a zoom call to share all the ATC's if you can't come to that zoom call Don't worry. You can still participate. You can watch the replay later And you can also post pictures of the ones that you received in the comments on the zoom post So that everybody can see what was received by each one of us So if you are interested in participating in the swap, then please do go to our adventure If you haven't heard me talk about that yet, I'm not sure where you've been but art venture is my community on mighty Networks and there are several thousand of us there as artists sharing our work There's no ads no algorithms just us and we share all kinds of things there homework from classes other pieces that we do all sorts of stuff and we can ask questions you can Talk to other artists about ideas that you have and we just give each other encouragement sharing our work So go there and look for the orange box in the featured section that has the information about the swap on it and Then you'll click through that Read any of the instructions that are in there. I mostly covered what was in that post here in this video but then at the end of that post is a link to Survey monkey and that survey is where you'll add your information, which is going to stay private You're only going to get an address for one person that you're swapping with and only one person is going to get your Address, but I will have access to all of it Which is why I am making many ATCs as you've been watching So I am going to be sending out nine ATCs and I'll be sending it to whoever I randomly get a sign to as Well as eight other people will get one randomly by surprise so I'm just gonna randomly draw names since I have the addresses to ship them out to and One of the other things if you are interested in this technique, but you don't make ATCs You're like what could I use this for what could I do with it? I have also done this kind of a thing in art journal pages And this would make a wonderful background for that You can even leave blank spaces where you want to have any of your journaling go in there If you have stamped pictures or something do this as a background Just throw some colors on there and blob some ink on and you're good to go And speaking of art journaling There's a class that I will be teaching in in November and it is called gratitude junk journaling It's over on teachable with my friend here And she gets a whole bunch of people a whole bunch of different artists teaching in the class And it's all month long and you get prompts and we talk about gratitude things were grateful for and Just different techniques and everybody's gonna talk about their own thing All the different teachers and there's a Facebook group that you can be in community with everybody else who's doing the class So the class starts November 1st Which means that early bird pricing is gonna end before that and I will put a link Down below and information about whatever the early bird deal is going on right now because the pricing changes throughout the month The earlier you purchase the better at the discount So if you're interested in art journaling then come join me and everybody else for that one Now let's talk a little bit about my ATC's. They told you I was gonna make nine out of this and What I did was use the few colors that I have left in my pH Martens collection of paints a bunch of them I've dried up because they've been sitting on the shelf just looking pretty Because they are like a rainbow of pretty bottles and I have just not been using them because they're hard to get to I have all kinds of stuff piled in front of them and they just kind of peek out as little rainbow soldiers and I need to go through them because I realized when I went to grab some colors for this project that a lot of them are Just all dried bummer But maybe I'll do some painting with whatever colors remain in the near future So I can use them before they all totally go belly up but I put the color on the watercolor paper, this is cold press watercolor paper and Smushed it just closed it up now if you're doing art journaling You could do the same thing with a two-page spread Just put the paint on one side and then close it And let all that color mush over to the other side Keep that in mind if you're looking for any crazy background ideas Because this ink blot thing it's kind of fun so what I've Then did once it was dry was to use a pipette to put the ink on because that gave me thick and thin lines I wanted to have some thicker heavier black But I knew it would take forever to achieve that with A fountain pen because I'd have to just keep drawing thicker lines And I wanted the line work to go a little bit faster so the pipette worked really well to kind of squish out a bunch of You know different thicknesses of ink and get the main lines in there And then I could fill in with the fountain pen for all the rest with my eco twizby medium nib And then once I finished all that all I had to do was chop them up And turn them into the right size for atcs And I did go back through on a bunch of them Because you know once you trim those down You end up seeing where there might be a vacant space that needs a little more detail added to it, etc And this whole thing left me with Two strips that I can use for bookmarks and then two other small chunks that I can use for cards as well So I'm just about done here All I have to do is add my information onto the backs of these and I will be ready to go Come early November If you would like to participate in the swap remember the link is down in the doobily-doo below this video And also remember you might randomly get one of these and you can actually see it in person And this is the lovely selection of ladies who are teaching in gratitude junk journal class You can see my little happy face there. So I hope you'll join us That's going to be a wonderful month of just being thankful I will see you guys soon get out there and create something every day and I'll see you next time


It is my distinct honor to emcee and in total trauma working with Ethan on it, but nevertheless an honor because I get to introduce a real and true leader in Washington. We often hear that people don't do anything, that it's stagnated, but it takes a man, not only a man perhaps, from a state where the mighty ducks are represented, who could do the kind of incredible work that Earl Blumenauer has done. Representing Oregon's third district since 1996, he has been a leading voice in the fight for marijuana legalization. He called for the firing of DEA administrator Chuck Rosenberg. He's championed, that's right, applaud for that. He's championed legislation to expunge federal marijuana offenses and he's championed legislation to legalize in his own home state where it is legal. Representative Blumenauer has made ending marijuana prohibition one of the causes of his political career and he is here with us today. We are so blessed to have him in this fight. Join me in giving him a drug policy reformist. Welcome to Earl Blumenauer. Wow. Wow. Do we have an amen? Thank you so very much. I welcome you here as part of what is truly a global effort to try and reframe and reform failed and destructive drug policies that have captured the imagination of politicians for far too long. It is true. This has been an area that I've been involved with literally since I was a child legislator before any of you were born in 1973 voted to legalize adult use of marijuana in the Oregon legislature and that was the same time that Oregon became the first state that decriminalized marijuana and from that moment forward it has been absolutely clear to me that we're wasting lives, we're wasting resources on a failed policy of prohibition that distracts from things that we can do together. You are here at a fascinating time in our nation's capital. Now ignore the goofiness today on Capitol Hill on the floor where there are some of my Republican colleagues that would have us turn our back on the very victims from the slaughter that is occurring in Paris or in the Middle East. Hopefully we're better than that. But below the surface there is an area that you are watching bipartisan support growing. We have had 13 amendments approved in Congress or in committee in the last two years moving forward marijuana reform. We've enacted into law the FAR Roarbacher Amendment to get the federal government off the backs of state legal medical marijuana. We've enacted into law unraveling the prohibition against hemp. Think what Thomas Jefferson and George Washington must think today where what they grew on their farms 350 years ago is illegal? Give me a break. We have a working group of Republicans and Democrats alike that have introduced over 16 pieces of legislation and you just saw my friend and colleague Corey Brooker. It's as Barney Frank reminded me this summer we were having dinner. It's finally being introduced in the Senate. We think that's progress in the Senate. You are here at a time to help advance this cause. We hope that you will take time to visit with other friends and colleagues to point out that this effort of drug reform is tied directly to the major issues that confront us here in terms of racial disparity in criminal justice, in terms of wasting federal dollars, in terms of a health problem, an epidemic of opioid deaths and we can't allow the VA to deal with medical marijuana for our veterans. This is Goofy. We ask you to help us focus attention on Capitol Hill and at home. The time is now to reform these marijuana laws. I look forward to working with you as we unroll our program in Oregon, as we move to other states and as we will make more progress at the federal level. With your help, in five years we will have completely turned this back to the states to deal with as they see fit, like alcohol, and we'll be able to move forward with other major reforms in justice and drug reform. Nothing is more critical for us to show real progress for real lives moving on, capturing this moment in history. We need your help. We look forward to working with you. Things lie ahead.