Nick Gillespie
speaker
229 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Nick Gillespie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You know, it could be a solar panel, you know, I don't think build your own wind farms have taken off yet, but I'm sure they're coming. You know, like you probably, you want to make it as simple as possible to say like, okay, we've come up with like, here are the basic rules.
And then what free markets are really good at is figuring out innovative ways to do stuff for lower costs with better outcomes. And that's not always perfect and it's not always, you know, sometimes it needs a kick in the pants or sometimes you just need a top-down regulation or restriction on something.
But I think things generally work better, you know, when you let markets operate more freely to kind of figure out what people want to, because a lot of times we don't know what we want. and then how to get there more quickly.
Yeah, DDT is a really interesting example. I mean, the kind of planetary ban, almost complete planetary ban on DDT comes from Rachel Carson in Silent Spring.
And she was making a series of cases. And the modern environmentalist movement in a lot of way comes out of that book and the movement that she helped inspire. And it turns out that DDT is really good at killing mosquitoes. The best. Yeah. And its banning was not necessarily a good thing because everything has costs and benefits.
And it turns out in certain places, people are using lower levels of DDT in order to really powerfully eradicate mosquitoes. And so like- People, we are constantly held captive by these old things like, you know, DDT was killing people, you know, as if like everything good didn't come out of an era where boys were riding spider bikes, jumping ramps into vats of DDT.
But, you know, it turns out that it gets much more complicated and we, you know... It's worth going back and thinking about this stuff. And you mentioned polio. I'm sure we'll talk about Robert Kennedy at a certain point. You know, Robert Kennedy, who's old enough to really remember polio, is like, you know, the polio vaccines have, you know, killed more people than they saved.
And it's like, you know, I want to see the stream of iron lungs, you know, going up in front of Health and Human Services.
At certain levels, right? Because this, yeah. And then this is, you know, one of the things I gave a talk last fall, you know, which was about what I call the agony of abundance. Like the biggest problem I think we have today, you know, in a kind of macro sense is we forget how to learn from the past. And- Boy, howdy. There was a poll last year and it's- Preach.
Yeah, and it's like almost 60% of people last year said that life was better in America in 1974. Because you were a kid. Yeah, let's go look at 1974 and like the Pinto was the best-selling car in 1974.
Well, I was partial to the Pacer because I just remember them having an ad where a guy delivered a six-foot sub in the back of the Pacer. Yes, sure. But then it was all glass, so by the time it got there, it would have flies and maggots on it.
The Pinto not only was explosive, literally and figuratively, well, not figuratively, just explosively, but it was a bad car. And we have done so much better to make better cars, but yet people are constantly being born back into the past thinking that it was a simple decision. Yeah.
Okay. What's an example of that?
I totally hear where you're coming from. And libertarianism historically, it's like a post-World War II phenomenon, really a post-1968 phenomenon, really, as an organized movement. Really?
Well, it was partly the people who founded the Modern Libertarian Party, people who were working at places like Reason. They felt left out of politics, you know, Republicans and Democrats. Like, you know, when you're, especially if you're a young man in a draft year and your choice is Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey or George Wallace, you're like, okay, where's the exit, right? You know? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. A huge, huge factor. And people like Ayn Rand, I never personally went through an Ayn Rand phase, but she was massive. You didn't smoke that much pot? See, I went through it. Oh, wow. The objectivists I knew, they didn't even get drunk. Oh, wow. Much of smoking weed. So it's like, okay, I'm out.
because for me, you know, the 1950s, I mean, post-war America is the first time when America became, you know, kind of a wealthy country and also like it was, you know, that's when individual liberty flourished. Like suddenly you had, even among minorities who had it really shitty in the 50s, like if you were black, you know, I mean, Brown versus Board of Education only took place in 54.
Schools didn't get fully desegregated until Nixon in the early 70s. I mean, you know, it's bad. But at every level, people were doing so much better and there was so much more stuff to buy, so many more choices to make on every level. It makes sense that libertarianism started to become more interesting and attractive.
I was more into Jack Kerouac and the Beats who were exploring individual liberty.
Yeah, you know, so these are all like kind of, you know, parts of a broad movement.
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