Jeffrey Tucker On The Preservation Moral Dignity

The Declining Culture At Universities

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “Let me tell you what happened to me.  When I turned 18, if you can believe it, I could drink.  The law was not changed yet.  People who were born two weeks after I turned 18 were not allowed to drink for another three years.  That was a law that was passed 30 years ago.  I never really experienced this weird culture that’s now known by everybody.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  You know the subject that I asked Cynthia to lure you in with.

Jeffrey Tucker:  I hope it’s on this whole youth drinking issue.  Look, this is a hugely important topic and nobody wants to talk about it.  I think it’s about to become extremely important.  I don’t know if that’s what you had in mind, because we also suffered through the Republican debate last night.  There’s plenty to talk about there, too.

Mike:  You being of the libertarian stripe and having swam in those circles and edited their work for decades, you must have been as horrified and mortified as I was and many of our listeners were watching the bloodlust on that stage.  I even said we could just turn the video portion of it off and I could put an audio feed on during this show and let it run, that debate or any of the five, and I could fade it up at any point in time and almost could rest assured that one of those candidates would be talking about killing someone.

Tucker:  It was out of control.  Of course, Rand Paul wasn’t there to provide anything like a counterweight.  Yeah, they were out of control competing with each other on bloodlust and calling for government power to do this and that, celebrating the police, more surveillance.  Jeb calling for internet companies to forbid encryption technology, like he knows anything about this subject.  He was talking about using government power to prevent companies like Apple from permitting you and me to use encryption.  It was totally out of control.  Then, of course, there’s Trump.  Even Cruz and Rubio were alarming.  Mike, what about this?  You’re right, the bloodlust, the wars, the big government, the surveillance, arrest Edward Snowden, you name it.  But they also want to reduce taxes.  Then they just turn around and attack government.  How do they do this?  This is like a schizophrenia or something that’s taken hold of the Republican Party.  Don’t you think it’s much worse than it used to be?  There’s always been intellectual contradictions, but on this level, this is totally out of control.

Mike:  I was doing live commentary on this last night.  Next time we have one, we’ll invite you to come on if you’d like to provide some as well.  When they were talking about the tariffs, during the tariff discussion, my colleague here who hosts a morning show on the Veritas Radio Network Crusade Channel, Mark Kreslins, we were pointing out that I buy Trump’s argument and I like the fact that he is talking about tariffs.  When he’s talking about China devaluing their currency, first of all, I’m screaming at the TV going: We’re the world undisputed heavy-weight champion when it comes to devaluing currencies.

Tucker:  Thank you, thank you.

Mike:  Secondly, Jeffrey, and you’re an economist by trade, none of them talked about if you raise the tariffs – Rubio came the closest to saying the consumer is going to pay it.  My thing about it is, if China lowers the cost of its currency or monkeys with its currency, the first thing that happens is the price of everything at Walmart goes up.  Maybe you could talk just a little bit about what the effects of a tariff are.

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Tucker:  The tariff is paid by you and me.  I was grateful to Rubio for pointing that incredibly obvious fact out.  A tariff is in fact a tax.  Now, in the 19^th century, it was pretty much the only tax.  Can you imagine a time when we didn’t argue about tax reform?  There weren’t any taxes.  When you made money, you kept the money you made.

Mike:  What a novel idea.

Tucker:  Yeah, it’s also an idea that was once called freedom, which we can’t even imagine anymore.  The government raised all of its measly amount of revenue that it needed for whatever through the tariffs.  I guess all told that’s probably a better way to go about it.  It’s not great because it injures relationships with other people.  People do pay the tax when they go to the stores.  It injures your trading relationship.  The tariff in the 19^th century did contribute, because it did get out of control, to the sectional conflicts that ultimately led to the Civil War.  In response to that, actually, tariffs fell and fell after the Civil War until some idiot had the idea of: Why don’t we start raising money by taxing people’s income directly?  That was a catastrophic decision really.  All tariffs are going to be paid by you and me.

I’ve got to tell you, Mike, when you think about what progress has been made in politics over the last 20, 30 years, one of them is that we’ve managed to reduce tariffs to a kind of manageable level of between zero and five percent with most nations of the world.  Wouldn’t you know it these guys would – I think Trump was trying to explain himself out of his comments the other day that he wanted to slap a 45 percent, I think he said, tariff on goods coming from Mexico.  When the moderator tied to the New York Times and he blew up and said “They’re lying.”  Then he tried to re-explain his position.  Were you persuaded by his re-explanation?  It sounded to me like the Times mostly got it right.

Mike:  No, I was not persuaded by it.  Then again, I’m one of these wacky people that actually tries to divide and find out what the intent of the men that ratified the Constitution was when they ratified it.  What did they understand natural-born citizen to mean?  If I read Emmerich Vattel and I read Blackstone, I know exactly what it means.  Cruz and Rubio aren’t eligible.  Folks, Jeffrey Tucker is on the Dude Maker Hotline with us.  Jeffrey is the proprietor of JeffreyTucker.me.  I’ve got to ask you, where’s that beautiful scenario at that you’re on top of the mountain taking a photograph for the website?

Tucker:  That is Wyoming.

Mike:  Wow!  I want to go there.

Tucker:  Listen, Mike, you go there and you take a pony ride and you will really experience [??].  That’s from the top of a mountain that I got there through a ski lift.  That was in the summer, maybe early fall, something like that.  I tell you what, it is just, the scenery is just breathtaking.  That’s the right place to go if you get a chance.

Mike:  I’m showing this to our YouTube audience.  Tell me about the subject that you want to talk about.  I’m not very familiar with it.  I have seen some stuff about the underage drinking or the youth drinking.  What’s that issue?

Tucker:  Mike, I’m not sure entirely how old you are.  I think you’re in your early 20s sometimes.

Mike:  [laughing] You’re only off by 30 but that’s okay.

Tucker:  Let me tell you what happened to me.  When I turned 18, if you can believe it, I could drink.  The law was not changed yet.  People who were born two weeks after I turned 18 were not allowed to drink for another three years.  That was a law that was passed 30 years ago.  I never really experienced this weird culture that’s now known by everybody.  If you talk to anybody coming out of college in the last ten years and ask them about the drinking culture and you will be shocked.  The level of irresponsibility, the amount of binge drinking – I have some data in this article for the Foundation for Economic Education.  It’s absolutely shocking.  Just rattling off the top of my head, there’s something like two-thirds of people surveyed who admit to having been binge drinking in the last month.  I never recall anything like that when I was in college.  It’s out of control.  Pre-gaming [?], there’s a lot of uncertainty whether they can get liquor.  Most drinking takes place at these weird, private places, whether it’s dorm rooms or frat houses or neighboring houses which they rent out for parties.

I was thinking about this.  We have also the problem of sexual assault on campus.  It’s all related to alcohol consumption.  As I was thinking about this, I thought, look what happened.  We’ve recreated the culture of prohibition and focused it on the center of 18- to 21-year-olds, the most irresponsible age group on the planet, and fostered a culture of outrageous deviancy, abuse, sneaking around, lawlessness.  Everybody this age has a fake ID or a real ID that’s different from their actual ID.  There’s a huge market for fake ID in every college town.  It’s a culture of itself with its own rules, its own language, its own expectations.  I tell you, I think it’s morally corrupting a whole generation, several generations.

Mike:  That’s an interesting thought.

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Tucker:  It’s really grim.  You’re hearing a lot more about the problem of sexual assault on campus, right?  There’s some debate: Is it true?  Is it not true?  Is it a big problem, a small problem?  The problem is that most every case of this, people admit to alcoholism involved.  This is the core problem.  It’s the problem of prohibition.  Nor is the adult community in a position to sort of manage this world because it exists in secret.  It exists outside of any kind of adult supervision.  If you’re in college, you can’t just saddle up to the bar and order a beer.  You’ve got to go hang out in some dark, sneaky corner somewhere.  The kind of crap these people drink, you just can’t believe it.  You go to a typical party today on any college campus and you’re going to find a trash barrel in the middle of the room just filled with random liquors.  They call it jungle juice.  You dip your cup in and just get as blasted as possible.  These people don’t know how to drink.  They haven’t been trained to drink.  They’re children that are using very dangerous substances, and they’re used to it.  The culture of blacking out and pre-gaming – I describe some of this in the article.  It was beyond belief.  I don’t know how these people live through it.

Anyway, my point is just simply that we need to cut this crap out.  Lower the drinking age to 18 and start treating these people and expecting adult behavior from them and changing the culture on campus.  I think this government rule has been a true calamity.  Anybody concerned about the morals of the youth need to get behind this crusade.  We’re starting to see some movement in this direction.  The Free State New Hampshire –

Mike:  Did you say crusade, behind this crusade?  That’s our slogan, “What’s your crusade?”  I just found out what Jeffrey Tucker, our guest, what’s your crusade.

Tucker:  It really is.  We’ve got to lower the drinking age.  We’ve got to stop this culture of prohibition among youth.  It’s very serious.  These are formative years, Mike.

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Mike:  I’m in.

Tucker:  These are the years when people have to learn how to be adults.  What are we doing?  They’re leaving their homes for their first time and they’re free from mom and dad.  What they greet is this wild, just pervasive culture of intense, secretive alcohol abuse.  It’s really nuts.  I love this idea of this movement and we’re seeing it in California and New Hampshire to lower the age.

Mike:  I have an idea.  Let’s have a symposium right here on the Veritas Radio Network Crusade Channel.  You tell me who you want me to call to get on the symposium.  We’ll do it on YouTube.  We’ll broadcast the whole thing and record it, and then we’ll make our case in multimedia.  How about that?

Tucker:  I love this idea, Mike.  It is gigantically important and hardly anybody talks about it.  You know why?  Once people turn 21, they’re like: Great, I’m in.  I’m safe.  I’m fine.  They forget about everybody.  These 18- to 21-year-olds, they’re powerless to do anything about the law.  They need adult voices out there to advocate for their human rights and for the preservation of their moral dignity.  We can make a difference in this area.  I think it’s really important.  College presidents are behind it.  Something has to be done.

End Mike Church Show Transcript