Thứ Năm, 31 tháng 8, 2017

Waching daily Aug 31 2017

Hello, I'm Hatsune Miku!~

Let's start the range test~ (◕‿◕✿)

If you're high ranged, you'll be able to hit the notes!

hiA~ hiB~ hiC~ (hi)D~ (hi)C~

This is super low for you, right?

I'll give you some more notes~ (•◡•)

If you're just an average person you won't be able to hit them though ಠ‿↼

But If you're high ranged,

Even if you catch a cold you'll be able to sing it~

hiD~ hiE~ hiF~ (hi)G~ (hi)F~

That's still your midrange, right?

I'll give you another set of notes~ (☞゚∀゚)☞

Is your falsetto up to the challenge? (ง'̀-'́)ง

If you're high ranged,

This'll be a piece of cake, right? 。◕‿◕。

hiG~ hihiA~ hihiA#~ (hihi)C~ (hihi)D~

You can give up if you want ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now I'll give you the last set of notes~ ♪~ ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ

The lyrics are too high to hear right? ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ

Show me the true power of your high pitched range! ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ

hihiC~ hihiD~ hihiD#~ (hihi)F~ (hihi)G~

The end!~ 。◕‿‿◕。

Nope, I lied!~ (ノ◕ヮ◕)ノ*:・゚✧

hihihiA~ hihihiB~ hihihiC~ (hihihi)D~ (hihihi)E~

Defoko: Km ಠ_ಠ

If you were able to make it this far,

You passed!~ (ノ◕ヮ◕)ノ*:・゚✧

RIP Teto

Defoko: Am I ded yet?

Tei: Nope, sadly :v

Defoko: Oh great ಠ╭╮ಠ

Defoko: Can I leave now?

For more infomation >> 【MMD】High Range Test (Miku, Len, Rin, Luka, Meiko, Kaito, IA, Gumi, Fukase, Piko, Teto) - Duration: 1:31.

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La resurrezione di Kel'Thuzad - Episodio 3 (IT) - Duration: 8:24.

For more infomation >> La resurrezione di Kel'Thuzad - Episodio 3 (IT) - Duration: 8:24.

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Road Trip #186 - I-49 South - Exit 73: Woodworth to Exit 46: St Landry, Louisiana - Duration: 10:59.

Welcome back to 504 Road Trips!

Today, we continue south on I-49 beginning at mile 73, near the town of Woodworth, in

Rapides Parish, Louisiana.

Along the right hand side of I-49 is a narrow strip of protected land and water called the

Acadiana Conservation Corridor Wildlife Management Area.

This 26 mile corridor spans 4 parishes, and is only accessible by boat.

We temporarily cross into a small corner of Evangeline Parish, for less than a mile.

We'll see Evangeline again in the next video.

Then we enter Avoyelles Parish.

Avoyelles Parish has a population of 41,117.

We conclude today's video at exit 46, St. Landry.

Thanks for watching.

Please subscribe, give us a thumbs up, share, comment below, follow us on social media,

and join us for our next 504 Road Trip!

For more infomation >> Road Trip #186 - I-49 South - Exit 73: Woodworth to Exit 46: St Landry, Louisiana - Duration: 10:59.

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«Воскрешение Кел'Тузада» №3 (субтитры) - Duration: 8:24.

For more infomation >> «Воскрешение Кел'Тузада» №3 (субтитры) - Duration: 8:24.

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Kanal Trailer ⚒ Franks Shed Woodwork ⚒ Youtube Heimwerker - Duration: 1:01.

Hey and welcome to Franks Shed!

My name is Frank and as a passionate do-it-yourselfer

I love to work in my homemade workshop

and build cool DIY woodworking projects

I'm not an expert in the things im doing

a lot times I'm doing things the first time on camera!

In my Videos I show you step-by-step

how you can make all sorts of projects

I want to inspire you to build things with your own hands!

No matter what your skills are

no matter where you start, everybody can be a do-it-yourselfer!

Now check out the DIY Projects in my channel

and make sure to subscribe so you don't miss anything!

Thanks for watching. See ya in my videos!

For more infomation >> Kanal Trailer ⚒ Franks Shed Woodwork ⚒ Youtube Heimwerker - Duration: 1:01.

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We played Foosball!!! - Duration: 7:03.

For more infomation >> We played Foosball!!! - Duration: 7:03.

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Bad Baby Spiderman Play Toys Tools for Kids Drive Car Color Song Nursery Rhymes | Compilation Video - Duration: 10:35.

Thanks For Watching!

For more infomation >> Bad Baby Spiderman Play Toys Tools for Kids Drive Car Color Song Nursery Rhymes | Compilation Video - Duration: 10:35.

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Free Thoughts, Ep. 197: Neoliberalism in the U.K. (with Sam Bowman) - Duration: 47:48.

Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts, I'm Trevor Burrus.

Matthew Feeney: And I'm Matthew Feeney.

Tom Cougherty: And I'm Tom Cougherty.

Trevor Burrus: Joining us today is Sam Bowman, the Executive Director of the Adam Smith Institute.

Welcome to Free Thoughts, Sam.

Sam Bowman: Thanks for having me.

Trevor Burrus: So Adam Smith Institute, first of all for our viewers who do not know ... our

viewers ... our listeners [crosstalk 00:00:22] you're looking at me, but no one else is,

our listeners. What is the Adam Smith Institute?

Sam Bowman: I hope that most listeners have a picture of you Trevus ...

Trevor Burrus: Well absolutely.

Sam Bowman: Trevor, while they [00:00:30] are listening. So the Adam Smith Institute

was set up in the 1970s and along with the IEA and the CPS was one of the big driving

forces behind the Thatcher radiation.

Trevor Burrus: [crosstalk 00:00:41] fill in some of these ...

Sam Bowman: The Institute of Economic Affairs and the Center for Policy Studies was one

of the three driving forces behind the privatization revolution of the 1980s. It subsequently went

through different brands, different iterations but it was always a free-market, classical

liberal organization. For the first few years that I worked at the Adam Smith Institute,

alongside [00:01:00] Tom, we were a Libertarian organization and then about a year ago, we

decided to, under me, rebrand and try to adopt and appropriate this word neoliberal, because

there are a few reasons for that. The word neoliberal doesn't have a great reputation,

but it's used as a sort of bogeyman on the left to attack the right, and we thought it

would be nice to take that back and change what it means. The word Libertarian doesn't

necessarily have a great brand in [00:01:30] the UK. One of the reasons being just that

it's associated with America, and it's seen as a sort of foreign import. And there's no

reason that should be, because Adam Smith and the old classical liberal thinkers were

not Libertarians, really.

Trevor Burrus: Nor American.

Sam Bowman: Nor were they American, yeah. But it's also kind of primarily for me, actually,

about recognizing a different strand in the kind of classical liberal inheritance that

I think does actually have quite a large constituency of supporters, but prior to us [00:02:00]

putting this out there and lots of other people grabbing it, didn't really have a name. And

that's for a kind of pragmatic, policy-focused, globally-minded classical liberalism that

is trying to fight for free trade and kind-of relatively open borders against this kind

of populist tide that we're seeing on the right. So that's really what we're trying

to do and we've had quite a lot of success, I have to say.

Trevor Burrus: So [00:02:30] the term neoliberal as you said it, it is ... I have only really

heard it described ... used mostly by people, who do not seem to understand what capitalists

... what capitalist thinking is. It's usually used by Marxist academics in my experience

saying we have to attack this neoliberal hegemony. Usually that means that they think that there

is no real difference between the left and the right in terms of how much they're for

markets. They're just little bit of details that don't matter that much. And the huge

problem is the support for [00:03:00] capitalism that is broadly enjoyed in the Western world

by, whether you're on the left or the right, in mainstream politics. So that's what they

think neoliberal is, that's the way it is. So why should we be using this epithet that

they've used to describe ourselves?

Sam Bowman: I think what's fundamental about neoliberalism is that it's about the world

as it is, right now. It doesn't really mean anything when the left uses it. They just

use it to attack anybody that likes markets to any extent. But there's a real strand of

kind of anti- [00:03:30] establishment and anti-status quo thinking in the Libertarian

world, which is understandable given that libertarianism is sort of a very radical,

very ,very kind of change the world, shake everything up, and have a lot of disorder

right now. Which is fine, but for a neoliberal, somebody needs to defend the world as it is

right now. The world is very globalized, the world is very free market, compared to lots

and lots of potential alternatives. And I think that really since at least 1989, since

the fall of the Berlin wall, we had won [00:04:00] the argument until maybe 2015, 2016. Somebody

needs to defend the way the world was between 1989 and 2016. And say, look for all of its

imperfections, this was the period, where more people were lifted out of poverty than

ever before in human history put together. More technological advances were spread to

more people than ever before.

The problem for me, or the reason that I thought that Libertarian wasn't sufficient, or wasn't

that useful, was that Libertarian preoccupations [00:04:30] were so different from where the

debate actually was. And where the debate actually is that we were sort of losing the

argument and the argument was taking place without us even being involved in it. We were

focusing on very interesting things to do with central banking and stuff like that,

while the political kind of center of gravity in the UK and in Europe and in the US was

to do with trade, was to do with what should this specific monetary policy be, what should

we should on labor market reforms. There's nothing ... you know [00:05:00] I see neoliberalism

and libertarianism as sort of compliments of each other. They're different ways of approaching

the world and different ways of approaching debate.

But, until the last, kind of 6 months, and you know I don't claim credit for this, I

don't think we can claim credit for this at all, but there has been a slight awakening

among many people, many of whom would have been to the center left, who now think, okay,

I see now, the debate is, should we have free trade with other countries? Should we have

more or less trade with other countries? And it doesn't matter what you think about tax

policy [00:05:30] or regulatory policy, if you think that free trade and migration are

good things, then you need to defend these things right now. We're seeing a huge reaction

against that, and for me, the neoliberal thing is about making that the center of the debate

that we're having. And the people who like markets need to put that at the front and

center of the stuff they talk about.

Matthew Feeney: I mean it sounds Sam like, as you define it, neoliberalism is a pretty

broad church. Is that one of the things that attracts you to that kind of branding, that

it's much more inclusive, [00:06:00] where libertarianism may seem to be something that

is determined to stand apart from everything else in politics and policy today.

Sam Bowman: Well yeah, exactly. The neoliberal ... if we're going to defend the period between

1989 and 2016, that includes people who I have huge, huge differences of opinion with,

right? Tony Blair, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, right? None of whom I would necessarily

classify as kind of, good, pure neoliberals. But all of whom had some kind of recognition

that trade was basically [00:06:30] good, that immigration was basically good. There's

been such a sharp divide, both on the right and on the left, with Bernie Sanders and Donald

Trump, and the kind of rise of populism in Europe, that makes me think that anybody that

is a liberal, and I use the word in the kind of European sense, of a Liberal in the left

or a Liberal on the right, somebody who thinks that individual freedom is a good thing.

Now we might disagree about how you get individuals to be rich enough to kind of act on that freedom,

that's where somebody might fall on the left or the right, but there has been, [00:07:00]

I think, such a ... basically, my friend Steve Davis at the Institute of Economic Affairs

talks a lot about this kind of political realignment, where you're seeing kind of leftist and collectivist

people on the right and the left coalesce around ... maybe not around the same political

parties, but certainty around the same positions. That we need to have much more autarchy, we

need to have much more protectionism and look after our own. People who are liberals are

completely split, they really, really haven't I think, woken up, to the threat faced by

this sort of nationalist, collectivist thinking.

[00:07:30] And the fact that neoliberalism as I talk about it is such a broad church,

where we have disagreements it should be over evidence and it should be over what particular

labor market policies work best for getting people into good jobs. That I think is something

that is ... has a lot of potential for bringing people together on the liberal side. So far,

I'm not sure how much of it is actually achieved. It's important, though, to kind of recognize,

we chose the word neoliberal, we use the word neoliberal, [00:08:00] because it is a swear

word on the left, right? We want to tell these people, look we're not giving in when we talk

about using evidence in policy making. We're trying to be less brittle in our approach.

There's something very, very brittle about many Libertarian approaches, particularly

in the UK. In the US, it's a much broader tent.

Matthew Feeney: Tell us what you mean by brittle, in this context.

Sam Bowman: I think when you approach policy debates as ... with a firm eye, [00:08:30]

with at least one firm eye on the way the world should be in a kind of perfect utopia,

you end up presenting arguments that can easily be broken down with one example. When you

have kind of utopias in mind, you make the arguments that I would say ... brittle, you

make them easily rejected by a single problem that you have with them. So getting rid of

the minimum wage, without a positive side to that, most people will reject that argument,

right? Getting rid of the minimum wage would be a good [00:09:00] thing. If you say, okay,

we need to strengthen the earning from tax credit, or in the UK, change the welfare system,

so it's much more cash based and much less paternalistic. Then, I think you have both,

we need to get rid of this bad thing the government is doing, and we need to make sure that there

is something that people who fall in between the cracks, can get. When you don't have that

second point, and you're only interested in making arguments that are incrementally bringing

the debate towards sort of perfect, natural Liberty. I think that [00:09:30] argument

doesn't appeal to people, and it sounds very strange to a lot of people.

Matthew Feeney: How much of the rebranding is, in part, successful because of the kind

of Liberals or Libertarians on your side of the Atlantic at the moment? So, when I was

working in London and Matt, Sam, and Tom working at the IEA, I ... very, very few conversations

with Libertarians about natural rights, and those as the foundations of libertarianism.

Then you come to the United States, and the landscape is much [00:10:00] more different.

Do you find that its actually easier to have consequential conversations in London or Britain

more broadly, because over here you have to start with more fundamental first principles?

Sam Bowman: Very much so. There are some natural rights Libertarians in the UK, but people

who I would have ... who would have called themselves Libertarians a few years ago, I

think had always been quite uncomfortable with the philosophical baggage that goes along

with that term, and had always been uncomfortable [00:10:30] with the idea that it doesn't matter

whether this actually makes peoples' lives better or not. All that matters is that this

coheres with our philosophical idea of natural rights. Many of those people, I think, particularly

on the younger end, who always had felt both like they want a home, they want an ideological

kind of thing to identify themselves with, but also that a lot of this seems quite strange.

And a lot of the natural rights philosophy that underpins libertarianism in some parts

of the world, in America especially, [00:11:00] seems quite weird and doesn't necessarily

seem true or valuable. And breaking those two things apart and emphasizing that this

is purely consequentialist. If this doesn't work, then it's bad and we should not believe

in it. That has been I think, quite a valuable step.

Matthew Feeney: So if we take a look at the last couple years, you mentioned 2015/2016.

I don't want to speak for everyone, but it's been a rather profoundly depressing couple

of years to have these ideas. Mostly because people who claim to adhere to these kind of

principles turned [00:11:30] out not to and elections like the US presidential election

or Brexit have raised concerns. With that context, how many liberals do you think are

out there? People that could actually be housed in this neoliberal home?

Sam Bowman: It depends on how broad we want to go. I think it's reasonable to say that

Tony Blair was something like a neoliberal. He was somebody who believed in ... when I

say neoliberalism, I basically mean somebody who is very, [00:12:00] very against government

involvement in ... basically thinks that regulation is almost always bad, but thinks that some

measure of redistribution done simply, can be fine. And that those two things don't need

to be tied up with each other. And that you can in fact compliment a reasonably generous

redistribution policy with quite a laissez faire approach to regulation. And thinks that

the evidence is much stronger when we talk about regulation than it is when we talk about

redistribution. And that wants to break those two things apart.

[00:12:30] The new Labor agenda, when though I think it didn't actually achieve very much,

was based on ... according to Peter Mandelson anyway, who was the Tony Blair's spin doctor,

the genius really behind the new Labor project in political terms. His view always was that

we want to let you make as much money as possible, and then we're going to tax all of that and

give that to other people. And that was the New Labor project, which I think is a reasonably,

I mean I disagree with him about the extent to which you should regulate the economy.

They want to regulate it much more than me. But that's more or less the kind of position

that I take. [00:13:00] The change that we've seen in France over the last couple months

I think is very very interesting and it suggests there's a much, much broader constituency

people who would be willing to vote for a pretty much neoliberal candidate in a pretty

much near neoliberal agenda in the form of Emmanuel Macron under the right circumstances.

Now he's been very lucky. I think he's a very talented politician, and I think really the

lesson there is get someone really good, and then you might be able get neoliberal reforms

through, rather than [00:13:30] there's a huge constituent of people waiting to vote

for neoliberalism. But, the kind of reforms that they need in Europe that are ... most

importantly labor market reforms, make it much, much easier to fire workers in order

to hire them. That is not going to come through anybody, except for Emmanuel Macron-style

candidates. Conservatives just won't be able to get that kind of reform through. The only

other people who can are countries that are austerity basket cases like Ireland was, [00:14:00]

Greece is, and some of the other Mediterranean countries are.

Tom Cougherty: Do you draw a connection between Brexit and Donald Trump? I mean this has been

done a lot with this general theme of all these different countries. But if you think

about it, it doesn't make a lot of sense that all of them would independently ... would

derive this or influence each other. We don't spend a lot of time watching British news

over here, I think maybe Britain spends more time watching American news over there, but

why would they be connected if they are, in fact, connected? At least the attitudes behind

[00:14:30] the votes?

Sam Bowman: Well a lot of the ... the answer is ... the short answer is yes, a lot of the

concerns and the worries that people had that led them to vote for Brexit seem to also have

been concerns and worries of people had that lead them to vote for Donald Trump. The interesting

... there are quite interesting papers that show that trade shock, so not how much trade

goes on with your area and the rest of the world, but how much that has increased in

the past few years. Also, it's not how many immigrants [00:15:00] are in the area that

you live in, it's how many more immigrants are in the area that you live in, compared

to a few years ago. That seems to be quite a good predictor of support for both Donald

Trump and for Brexit. Interestingly on things like housing and building, the English-speaking

world seems to be uniquely dysfunctional in not being able to build more houses. San Francisco,

Vancouver, London, Sydney, pretty much every English-speaking country in the world, or

every advanced one, seems to have a problem with housing that European countries don't

have. [00:15:30] That's interesting.

I think that ... for me, I was against Brexit. I thought it was a big mistake and I think

it is a big mistake. I don't think that people who opposed it were kind of ... or who favored

it were stupid or anything like that, but I think they might have hitched their wagon

to a pretty bad way of looking at the world and that's why I think a lot of free marketeers

who have very good intentions about Brexit and you think that this is a great opportunity

for us to deregulate [00:16:00] and to become a global Britain that isn't tethered to Europe

so much. I think they may have actually allied themselves with people who have no interest

in doing that at all. The reason that for me neoliberalism is so important right now

is that it's so ... it's explicitly globalist, it's explicitly in favor of internationalism

and cooperation between national governments and not having particular benefits for people

just because of where they come from and the EU to a greater or larger extent, was a globalist

project. You know freedom of movement. [00:16:30] Treating Romanians in the same way you treat

English people before the law, is a very, very good thing in my opinion.

Tom Cougherty: Do you think there's a general reason ... maybe you've already articulated

it there, but ... for why a lot of people in a lot of countries became illiberal almost

at the same time? Could it be ... I, personally, think that Islam could have a lot to do with

it, in terms of fearing the other, in terms of fearing the outside, because it's a threat

to Western Europe and it's a perceived threat to many Americans even though it's not really

a [00:17:00] threat to us here, but that right there is something that we need to start keeping

people out because there are some dangerous people and then that kind of goes ... but

do you have any [crosstalk 00:17:07]

Sam Bowman: Well, it's actually I don't specifically know about Islam, but it's interesting that

you mention that. Obviously, the European Union has virtually nothing to do, there are

no Muslim European Union countries. Perhaps, Turkey might ... Turkey probably won't join

now, but there was a suggestion that it might join during the campaign.

Tom Cougherty: But there are a lot of Turks in Germany and there's free movement [crosstalk

00:17:26]

Sam Bowman: Yeah, but there aren't that many Turks moving from Germany to the UK. But ... or

[00:17:30] there aren't that many people of Turkish ethnicity anyway. But, what you're

getting at, I think probably is part of the story. Because ... so the political scientist

Erik Kaufmann, who's at Birkbeck University, has shown that Eastern European or European

migrant percentage of population in a certain area, it doesn't predict support for UKIP

or the BMP, which is the kind of, neo-Nazi party in the UK, at all. It doesn't predict

that kind of thing at all. But non-white share of the population does predict it, for white

voters. So his suggestion [00:18:00] is that being anti-EU and voting for UKIP and things

like that, is a sort of expression of frustration at the changing face of Britain that people

feel like they have no control over, and use the EU as a sort of proxy for ... to get their

anger and get their annoyance at the way the country is changing out. I really don't want

to suggest that the vote for Brexit was primarily racist or xenophobic at all, because I think

it was really three different coalitions, conservatives who didn't like [00:18:30] European

institutions having supremacy over British ones, people who were anti-trade and anti-immigration,

and a smaller number of free market, classical liberals who thought that leaving the EU would

be a really great chance for bringing in free market reforms.

So far it looks as if it's the anti-trade, anti-immigrant people who are winning out.

The conservatives are getting something, but it looks as if the number 1 lesson that is

being learned by the political establishment, most of whom has to say are Remainers, and

voted [00:19:00] and campaigned for Remain, is that we don't want any more Polish immigrants

coming into the UK.

Matthew Feeney: Yeah, I'm going to have to challenge you just slightly on the idea that

the anti-trade coalition is definitely winning out when it comes to Brexit at the moment.

Now, I don't think there was an awful lot of anti-trade sentiment or rhetoric in the

campaign. I don't think there's been very much talk about that subsequent ... the referendum

decision. Now, I think we can probably say that the government may be mishandling the

negotiations, they may be pursuing a road, which may not [00:19:30] lead to the optimum

outcome in trade terms, but I think that their basing the kind of Brexit they want to pursue

explicitly around continued free trade with Europe. And as much free much with the rest

of the world in general. I haven't been in the UK living there for 5 years, but it doesn't

seem to me that there's a big, anti-trade backlash. Obviously I can't argue with you

on the immigration point, and it does look like, perhaps, people are foolishly putting

the desire to control immigration ahead of the desire to maintain [00:20:00] strong trade

links. But maybe you see things differently when it comes to trade.

Sam Bowman: I don't think it's true that trade wasn't an issue. When ... there was quite

a big story about a year-and-a-half ago about a Welsh steel mill that was ... basically

had to shut down and its being wound up despite the efforts of the staff, because of cheap

Chinese steel imports. And the argument was that the European Union is to lax. It's not

taxing this some kind of dump Chinese steel nearly enough and if we need to European Union

we can do that, [00:20:30] and I'm ... not only that, we can spend some of the money

that we're giving to the EU on fitting up these steel plants to make the more modern

and so on. So I do think that, and this was an argument that was made quite a lot during

the campaign, it wasn't one of the big cases that they were making but they were very,

very good at targeting certain voting demographics in a way that only they heard that argument.

But I think more broadly, it's ... we've seen from conservative MPs, in fact some of the

most since that some of the most ... people I would consider to be the most free-market

conservative [00:21:00] MPS talk about using tariffs in a retaliatory way and that not

being a big deal. If the EU raises it's tariffs on our imports, then that's fine, we can raise

our tariffs on their imports and that's going to hurt them. Obviously, it's actually the

importer who pays for tariff, it's not the exporter who pays for tariff. So if we raise

tariffs, that hurts us.

But more fundamentally, I think partially a difference of opinion about what trade actually

is, or what trade deals actually mean nowadays. And I understand why [00:21:30] people disagree

with this, but because the European Union ... because the single market ... this great,

huge free trader, the biggest free trade block in the world ... because that has been based

around non-tariff barriers or regulatory barriers to trade and about eliminating those, a shift

away from that that only looks at tariffs, which are really not that much of an issue

anymore, I think can only be understood as an anti-trade step and we've seen this from

almost every member ... almost every conservative [00:22:00] party MP.

The Labor Party is very, very happy about some elements of leaving the single market.

Particularly Jeremy Corbyn and the ... he's a Marxist, I'm not saying this in a ... as

a slur, he is a Marxist. He would say I'm a neoliberal, accurately, and I'm saying he's

a Marxist, accurately. But they, and the clique around Jeremy Corbyn ... it's widely agreed

that they wanted Brexit to happen, even though publicly they didn't say that. Because they

think that we'll be free of these rules that stop us from subsidizing [00:22:30] domestic

producers and from nationalizing things like the energy companies and the railways. So

I think to downplay the economic nationalism and the interventionism that drove a lot of

support for Brexit would be a mistake.

Tom Cougherty: So you've mentioned just now, but I wonder, what does it mean for neoliberalism

if the leader of the second largest party in the UK is a Marxist? And I think it is

worth for listeners to understand that we're not ... when an American calls Bernie Sanders

a socialist or a communist, this isn't [00:23:00] what we're talking about. We ...

Trevor Burrus: But Bernie Sanders has used the word democratic socialist to describe

himself, hasn't he?

Tom Cougherty: He has, but he looks pretty right wing compared to Jeremy Corbyn.

Trevor Burrus: That's true.

Tom Cougherty: But so what does that mean though, for a neo ... because you're right

to talk about these negotiations with the exit, but there could well be a labor government

in the future and does neoliberalism look healthy in that kind of environment?

Sam Bowman: No, not really. But even though Jeremy Corbyn himself is Marxist and the clique

around him are Marxists, the Labor Manifesto wasn't as bad as one might ... I mean it was

bad for [00:23:30] my point of view, but it was bad within normal ranges of bad.

Matthew Feeney: That's all we can hope for these days.

Sam Bowman: It was, yeah, it was things like we will get rid of tuition fees, we will slowly

stop the railways from being kept in the private sector. I'm not going to go into much detail,

but the way the rail privatization works in the UK means that every couple of years, you

get to re-decide if you're the government, which company gets to run the railways and

you can easily, in theory, say actually we're not going to put this out for private tender

again. I think what's [00:24:00] very much worth stressing is that the Corbyn coalition

is not that cordierite. Jeremy Corbyn is a very, very interesting person. Anybody who

is aware of his previous connections listening, I think we'll probably agree with me that

somebody who meets with the IRA in parliament a few weeks after the Brighton bombing is

probably not a great guy. Somebody who meets with Hamas and other terrorist groups, brings

them to Parliament for events and introduces them as his friends, he's probably not a great

guy.

Trevor Burrus: He sounds like Oliver Stone.

Tom Cougherty: [00:24:30] Oliver is just hanging out with all the wrong people.

Sam Bowman: I mean he really, he's taking money. He's worked for Iranian National TV,

he's really, really not a nice guy and he's really, really willing to hang out with pretty

awful murderous people. But, everybody within the conservative party thought that that was

going to kill him dead, I thought it was going to kill him dead. I'm not in the Conservative

party, but I was also one of these people, who thought it was going to knock him dead

when the campaign came. And interestingly what happened was that, in fact, what we thought

was his biggest weakness turned [00:25:00] out to be his greatest strength. Because people

are so cynical about politics and they're right to be cynical about politics, that the

impression of people was that anybody who's willing to do this must be so principled that

he is a really decent guy.

So you know maybe he was misguided about meeting with the IRA, I don't know, I don't really

believe what they're saying anyway. I don't think that that's actually true, but he must

be a really principled guy. And that allowed him to say one thing and then have a totally

different group assume that he was only lying because he had [00:25:30] to and that's politics.

So he has created, I think it's fair to say, probably the broadest coalition in modern

British political history of people who are highly educated, high earners in urban areas.

People who are old labor, people who would have worked in coal mining or would have worked

in industrial sectors of the economy that no longer exist, who have totally divergent

views about things like Brexit. But, on issues like freedom of movement, where the more educated,

more urban people would be very pro-freedom of movement, he could come out and say, oh

we want to end freedom of [00:26:00] movement pleasing the kind of old labor, industrial

type voters and have all of the urban, young graduates say well, he's such a principled

guy, he must only be saying this because he has to win an election. We know that really

he agrees with us.

I don't know whether he can sustain that, but I think it's really important to stress

that most people who voted for Jeremy Corbyn, I think, we're not voting for what he really

believes.

Matthew Feeney: That feeds into the question I was going to ask actually, which was how

much is it broad coalition based around the ideas and so in any political coalition, its

supporters don't all [00:26:30] support all of the ideas, but to what extent were the

particular policies he was promoting popular, or what extent was it actually ... this was

personality politics in an age of 24/7 media and social media and he was able to promote

a brand, a kind of idea of himself, which was a very authentic, principled person, who

had been true to himself over many years? And it wasn't just that in isolation, it was

that put up against Theresa May, who appeared to not know what she believed or what her

own policies were. And [00:27:00] indeed changed her mind on those things over the course of

a six week general election campaign. Was it really the Conservatives failings coupled

with his own sort of personal brand that built that coalition or actually should we be more

worried about the underlying state of the climate of ideas in Britain?

Sam Bowman: I think we should be ... I think the answer is yes. That's kind of ... there

are a lot of questions there. The answer is yes. Now the conservative party has failed

to make any case that free markets are actually good for ordinary people. [00:27:30] And they're

continuing to fail to make that case, because they now think ... they've misdiagnosed a

problem .... and the big problem is that not enough people own their own house. Now I happen

to agree that the system should make it much cheaper and much easier to buy a house. But,

their view is that ... oh well if you .... and government ministers have said, how can we

sell capitalism to people who don't own any capital. That's not the argument, right? Capitalism

is good, whether or not you own capital. That's not why ... I'm not a capitalist because I

think it's good for this small section of rich people.

And they themselves [00:28:00] think that this is the floor in the argument they've

made. They have failed for decades to make any kind of argument that leftist policies,

not only that they are better at administering leftist policies and that they're better at

drawing the line, but that leftist policies fundamentally don't work. So when they were

talking about Jeremy Corbyn wanting to bring us back to the 1970s and they themselves wanted

to put Union Representatives on company boards, wanted to have extreme government say over

pay ratios and pay [00:28:30] levels in companies. They were offering going back to the 1970s

as well, just a different kind of going back to the 1970s. They coupled that with an extreme

arrogance about winning, which led them to put quite bad policies but extremely unpopular

... not just quite bad from a policy point of view, but extremely unpopular policies

would have said that, for example, if you get old and you get sick and you need to be

looked after in your old age, for example you get dementia, we'll take your house to

pay for that.

Now that might not be a good policy. But that's not the sort of thing [00:29:00] you want

to campaign on. Maybe their flaw ... they were too honest. Teresa May's advisor after

he was sacked basically wrote a piece saying our flaw was that we were too honest. But

they also included things that are relatively trivial issues, but make them seem incredibly

out of touch, like bringing back fox hunting, which is not an issue that there's a huge

constituency of support for.

Trevor Burrus: This was actually discussed?

Sam Bowman: This was in the Manifesto, this was one of the ... this is a sleeper issue.

Trevor Burrus: That just is insanely cliché in some very bizarre sense.

Sam Bowman: Right, and I mean a lot of listeners will wonder why [00:29:30] fox-hunting is

illegal in the UK, right? So I don't really have a ... I don't strongly think we should

make fox-hunting illegal. But it makes you look very, very strange. This is an issue

that 80% or more of UK people are against legalizing. Even people in the countryside.

And it's a pure serving your base policy, that they only put into the Manifesto, because

they assumed that they were going to win a massive majority, and they could get away

with doing. And all of those things together, the long-term [inaudible 00:29:58] to make

an argument for free markets, the fact [00:30:00] that Teresa may herself ended up sounding

like a very strange person. She was asked on national TV, what's the naughtiest thing

you've ever done, and she thought about it for a while, and said, "Oh when I was young,

I used to run through fields of wheat." And this is just such strange response.

Trevor Burrus: She sounds like ... she sounds kind of like the conservative ... I mean I

don't know what conservative there means, but Hillary Clinton-esque. In the sense of

being very fake and going back and forth, and not really sure if she has any principles

and not being able to relate people.

Sam Bowman: I think [00:30:30] that's right, and all of these things together, the arrogance,

the policy arrogance, so thinking they could just put things in, the fact that they never

made this broad-based case, and the fact that they ran a personality focused campaign on

somebody who doesn't really have a personality. All of which made the Corbyn thing much bigger

than it might have been. The big problem is it doesn't look as if there's a good replacement

for her. And, yeah.

Matthew Feeney: And I think just to be slightly fair to Theresa May, I think the comparison

with Hilary Clinton is a good one in terms of the way [00:31:00] they maybe bond a little

bit during the campaign. But I think actually Theresa May, in her own way, is quite a principled

person, but her principles are all about service, and service to the party and service to the

country. And so a very well meaning and probably quite principled person in that respect, but

that's not enough actually, I think to be successful in politics, and trying to run

a government.

And I know we've talked about this before, you've written about it, how her fundamental

problem was actually the lack of an ideological [00:31:30] framework. And the lack of an ideological

framework, it left her all at sea when she was dealing with issues that popped up during

the campaign, with having to try and defend policies that seemed unpopular with the electorate.

Maybe you can elaborate a little on that?

Sam Bowman: Well, there is the problem that she sounded like she was on script for the

whole time. So anytime there was a question that would lead her off script, she didn't

have the normal framework that most of us have, most of us who are interested in politics

have, which allows us to think through [00:32:00] a problem, and think through a question, even

if we don't know all the facts of that. We can at least say, this is what my intuition

tells me as a Liberal, or Libertarian, or whatever. She didn't have that. She also didn't

have any allied bases of support within the Conservative party. She does have her own

base of support, she has made a name for herself as somebody who's very tough on immigration,

somebody who is quite skeptical of the modernization project that Cameron brought in, and somebody

who is actually quite skeptical of Thatcherism. So there is a constituency of support [00:32:30]

for that.

The problem was that because she never gave anything to other groups, she never had something,

let's say, on corporation tax, the people like me. People like me, who, if there was

something like that that would kind of keep us on board, would be much more inclined to

defend her, and stand up for her, on issues we didn't really care about, because we want

this corporation tax policy to be brought in. She never did that, she never cultivated

... I mean she ... as you say, she does have some qualities.

She doesn't like the political game, and she doesn't like horse-trading. You know, the

really revealing [00:33:00] movie made about her, short documentary movie made about her,

where Eric Pickles, former Cabinet Minister said, the thing about Theresa May is that

she just doesn't do negotiation. She'll either give you what you want, or she won't. He didn't

realize that he was talking in the context of a campaign where the Brexit negotiation

was the main issue. But he meant it as a compliment. She doesn't play games, she gives you what

she thinks is right, and what she doesn't. But that's not a great quality in a leader,

because it means she can't amass, this broad coalition that you need, and that Corbyn was

really able [00:33:30] to create.

Matthew Feeney: So all this discussion about interesting candidates and people losing elections,

I suppose we can't have a conversation here without Trump coming up. And there were debates

after the American election about whether Trump won or Hilary lost, and what exactly

is to account for the fact that Trump won. But a more basic question, I've only been

back to England once since the presidential election, and didn't stay too long, so I'd

like to ask Sam here, what's [00:34:00] been the take in the United Kingdom about our current

political situation? And what do you think, personally?

Sam Bowman: I should preface what I'm about to say by saying that English people, and

Europeans in general, make a sharp distinction between America and the American president.

Even when the American president is very unpopular, America is quite popular. But having said

that, the perception is that the US president is basically deranged. He is somebody who

perhaps isn't cognitively all [00:34:30] there, he is extremely dangerous and if there is

a benefit to Trump, it's that it's made European countries realize that they can't rely on

the American Security umbrella forever. Maybe this is all part of the Trump's master plan,

maybe he is playing 10-dimensional chess, but the ... in the UK, Trump is so unpopular

that being associated with him is poisonous domestically.

So one thing I haven't mentioned but, for good reason, the UK government's strategy

[00:35:00] with Trump has been to cozy up to him and to try and be as ... try and be

his best friend as the rest of the world turns away from him in order to hopefully get the

support for the momentum for a trade deal with US, which would actually be good for

UK economy. But that is actually been very, very damaging to the UK government because

the mere hint of sucking up to Donald Trump makes you look like you are ... like you have

no principles at all. And like you are completely craven.

My own personal view is that Trump is [00:35:30] not a great guy. I think he's very very worrying,

but I think that the American system seems to be restraining him quite well. And I am

quite reassured actually by the Congressional gridlock at everything he's trying to do,

even though I like quite a lot of the policies that the house republicans ... I like the

destination-based cash flow tax and that's great policy. I almost prefer for that not

to go through and to discredit Trump as somebody can get things done and it seems as if the

system is working [00:36:00] as designed for all of its flaws. But within the UK, and within

Europe in general, Trump is seen as a really, a madman.

Trevor Burrus: In a Western Europe of ... in the liberal social democracy that they have

in most of ... all of ... is there an exception for a broad welfare state, high regular ... there's

probably no exception in Western Europe. But, and you discussed that in the beginning when

you were talking about neoliberalism, which to me, maybe ... correct me if I'm [00:36:30]

wrong, but you said some of these fights you don't want to fight anymore. And I ... for

rhetorical purposes or just having effects of minimum wage, as you mentioned. It's like

do you want to fight not having a minimum wage anymore, that's a pretty core Libertarian

viewpoint, but I would guess that every single Western European country has a minimum wage

and it's probably a pretty generous one, and you're probably not going to get any headway

getting rid of that. So are you basically saying that you should just stop advocating

to get rid of the minimum wage, because of political [00:37:00] reality [inaudible 00:37:01]?

Sam Bowman: Well no, but I think that ... no I'm against minimum wage full stop. I think

it's bad policy. I've actually written quite a lot of work ... I've read nearly every minimum

wage paper that's been published. Certainly my colleague has ...

Trevor Burrus: In terms of what [crosstalk 00:37:14]?

Sam Bowman: In terms of rhetoric, the thing is to restrain the minimum wage, to not raise

it anymore, because that's where the debate is. If we say we want to abolish minimum wage

publicly ... I'm happy to say on the record, but if we make that a core thing that we're

arguing when we go on TV, then we're going to sound that like we're complete nuts, [00:37:30]

we're going to sound like we have no idea what the debate is right now. The debate is

how much do you raise the minimum wage by, and how quickly do you raise the minimum wage,

that's where we are in the UK, and where we are in most Western European countries. And

that's where people like us, if we're interested in actually affecting policy, should be.

Trevor Burrus: But does that just negotiate the terms of surrender? Because I see if Western

Europe is where we might be in America in 40 years, where we expect once you get a welfare

program in place, [00:38:00] it's never going to go away. We've already seen that more recently

with the Affordable Care Act, it's probably never going to go away, because it's a welfare

program. And if we keep building these up, we'll keep defending a line that keeps encroaching

against freedom and say, well this is the politically acceptable rhetoric we have to

fight on.

So for example, the NHS. This is a great example. I've heard ... I've never lived in the UK,

but that it is just the third rail of politics in the UK, to say it should be gone. The NHS

should absolutely be gone. And it should. [00:38:30] But if we're just going to accept

that it exists and say, okay now we're going to moderate up, we're not Libertarians anymore,

we're not advocating for cheaper, better, more innovative healthcare, but a socialized

system and now we're going to call it neoliberal. Is that just negotiating the terms of surrender

on something like the NHS? Just because everyone thinks you're radical even though you're right.

Sam Bowman: Well, if we were two Japanese soldiers on an island in the Pacific, and

we were discussing what we should do, we might decide we don't want to negotiate the terms

of surrender, but we'd still be irrelevant. That is for ... in [00:39:00] many Western

European countries the question. Do you want to be a Japanese soldier fighting until the

1960s and basically being ignored? Or do you want to take part in the debate that's actually

going on, and influence the debate that's actually happening as it's happening, and

bringing to bear the things? Because I think that free markets are good and I think there's

a lot of really good evidence that they're good and that most people who say that they

are interested in evidence in public policy are not, and are ignoring the evidence in

public policy.

And if it doesn't ... if we don't step up and say, [00:39:30] within the debate you're

having about the minimum wage, or the NHS, this is the stuff that you're ignoring and

this is the stuff that you're claiming to talk about, but actually the evidence is against

you. And my ... yes, maybe I would like to abolish minimum wage, given that the debate

is should we raise it by x amount or should we not raise it. That's the debate that I

want to have, and that's the debate that I want to win. The big ... there's such a tendency

to overestimate how much influence you have. We're gadflies. Certainly in England, certainly

in Western Europe. [00:40:00] Free marketeers are gadflies and the best hope we have is

being part of the elite debate that's taking place, and trying to be taken seriously enough,

that you can force them to at least acknowledge that this evidence exists and is against them.

I don't think that we have the option of ... I don't characterize it as surrender ... it's

realism. It's being a pragmatist. And not just ... not talking to ourselves. Because

that's the choice. It's do we talk to the debate that's going on right now or do we

talk to ourselves? And I'm not happy to be somebody who just talks [00:40:30] to ourselves.

Matthew Feeney: Sorry, I just a very quick question that maybe we should have addressed

earlier. So, yeah it's pragmatic. But I'm curiouser maybe to get you on the record,

is it your stance that the moral argument for radical libertarianism are incorrect or

not helpful? Or perhaps both?

Sam Bowman: What do you mean by moral arguments?

Matthew Feeney: So if the radical Libertarian view is a natural rights, non-aggression principle

based theory, and it doesn't have to be, but let's call it that. Is it that that [00:41:00]

kind of argument is incorrect or is it just not helpful?

Sam Bowman: It's incorrect. It's not true. The moral argument for any system is that

the system allows people to live their lives the way they want to. It's that it gives them

the choice and the control over their lives that they want.

Trevor Burrus: Well ... why do ... I just want to [inaudible 00:41:16], so they have

a choice because they have natural rights? To live however they want? You say that's

not true, right? You said what Matthew said is not correct. The natural rights view is

not correct.

Sam Bowman: That's right. The natural rights view ... the [00:41:30] utilitarian view is

correct.

Trevor Burrus: Okay, but then you said that the moral arguments [inaudible 00:41:34] the

choice over how they want to live their life, do they have that choice because they have

a natural right?

Sam Bowman: No. No.

Trevor Burrus: Okay. [crosstalk 00:41:39]

Sam Bowman: No. The moral ... utilitarianism is the correct moral theory, right. So the

moral, moral ...

Trevor Burrus: I ... I disagree with you.

Sam Bowman: Maybe not. Okay, well I agree with myself.

Trevor Burrus: It sounded like you just asserted natural rights implicitly by saying they have

a choice.

Sam Bowman: Not at all. Not at all. What I want is to maximize the preferences that are

satisfied, right? I'm a preference utilitarian. Most neoliberals, not all, most neoliberals

are some [00:42:00] blend of utilitarianism with various strange superstitions about natural

rights and things like that. But fundamentally, it's a consequentialist view. And the view

is, the more preferences that are satisfied, this is a kind of slightly obscure, philosophical

way of talking about it, but the more preferences that are satisfied the better. Of humans,

right? Perhaps of animals as well, but mostly of humans

Trevor Burrus: I mean my preference to murder you is probably a bad one to satisfy.

Sam Bowman: No, it's not. Any ... any ...

Trevor Burrus: I don't want to murder you Sam, but [00:42:30] I'm saying but ...

Sam Bowman: No my preference not to be murdered is the preference that I hold as well. So

that weights against your preference to murder me. But there's no way ... there's no moral

way of differentiating between good and bad preferences. How could there possibly be a

way of doing that?

Trevor Burrus: I ... but, this is going to go far [inaudible 00:42:45] just as I ...

Sam Bowman: No no no, I mean I'm ...

Trevor Burrus: No, you're right. No, I just ... I mean ...

Sam Bowman: There's ...

Trevor Burrus: You make a valid point, I'm just like ...

Sam Bowman: No I mean I call myself a ...

Trevor Burrus: If we wanted to double-length this episode ...

Sam Bowman: I call myself a bullet-biting consequentialist. I think it's both untrue

and unhelpful. So I [00:43:00] don't think you have to agree with me. I'm not claiming

to speak for all ... I don't even speak for my colleague on this one, but it's neither

true nor is it helpful. And it's in fact profoundly unhelpful, so it doesn't matter that much

if it's true. Even if you think it's true, the fact that it's very unhelpful should be

enough to make you think twice about how you approach it. Certainly unhelpful in the context

I'm working in and it might be different in the US.

The fact that it seems like it's based on a very ... and I say brittle, an [00:43:30]

easily rejected way of looking at the world, and the fact that it always ends up making

an extremely difficult case that seems to most people completely insane. The idea that

it's better for a person to go hungry, than it is for a rich person to have a pound or

a dollar taken away from them. That seems like a very strange reductio ad absurdum.

But that's the position if you are a strict natural rightist you need to adopt, right?

Trevor Burrus: No.

Sam Bowman: No?

Matthew Feeney: So I [crosstalk 00:43:57]

Trevor Burrus: I'm just going to say no to that, because again, we can go, this would

[00:44:00] be another episode.

Matthew Feeney: I feel like we could have ...

Trevor Burrus: I don't think we have to adopt taxation as theft to be a strict natural right

theorist.

Sam Bowman: Okay.

Trevor Burrus: Obviously, clearly this is not the case, because Thomas Jefferson, for

example, was a deep believer in natural rights, and he believed in justified taxation through

a consent-based contract theory of government. So you don't ... so ... just to push back

on your point, you don't have to say that taxing a rich person a dollar or two and saving

someone from starvation.

Sam Bowman: So the non-aggression principle you would agree is wrong?

Trevor Burrus: The non-aggression principle, strictly applied, I think is wrong. But I

think it is a [00:44:30] morally significant principle, that I think is morally significant

because people have rights.

Sam Bowman: And where does that come from?

Matthew Feeney: So I ...

Trevor Burrus: I'm going to let Matthew ask a question ...

Matthew Feeney: I ...

Trevor Burrus: I have an answer, we could go [crosstalk 00:44:43]

Matthew Feeney: No I ...

Trevor Burrus: In the bar afterwards we can totally hash this out, but we're coming close

on time here, so Matthew.

Matthew Feeney: Well I have two philosophy degrees and escaped academia deliberately,

so thank you for that trip down memory lane. So I have a question though in this pragmatic

[00:45:00] structure, how do we weigh up our policy preferences? So let's take for example

a hypothetical where a government said we plan to legalize marijuana, but we want to

give a monopoly to two distributors. This is the plan. Is this something where we should

just weigh out that on net it's probably better to legalize ... we don't like monopolies,

but it would be far better for people not to go to prison for smoking marijuana. What's

the strategy or the way that you address questions like that?

Sam Bowman: I think it has to be just based on the merits. [00:45:30] Are there any countries

that have done it this way? What does it look like there? Have they solved the problems

that we care about? I would be perfectly happy to go with a state monopoly if that was the

only possible alternative. I would obviously prefer a free market in marijuana, or in all

drugs really, but I would be perfectly happy to accept that if that was the only achievable

way of getting that step towards drug legalization that we could get it. It doesn't bother me

that much if we can only get 80% of what we want, because the alternative is usually [00:46:00]

getting 0% of what we want.

It's so important to me that and part of that ... I mean, with the neoliberal thing, I don't

want most Libertarians to say that they're neoliberals. I want a lot of people who aren't

Libertarians now to say that they're neoliberals. I'm not trying to cannibalize the Libertarian

base, I'm trying to extend this way of looking at the world to people who'd usually be put

off by natural rights or by the all encompassing way of looking at things that libertarianism

gives you. And the debate, at least in Europe, [00:46:30] I think suggests that there is

a very large constituency of people ... you asked me how many people earlier, I really

don't know, I really don't know. But there is a pretty big constituency of people, who

are very uncomfortable with the nativism of the right and the nativism of the left. The

preference for your own people that is pretty much all-pervasive now.

But they're also not comfortable with the traditional politics that goes with cosmopolitanism.

They really don't understand why it is that somebody who [00:47:00] is just as concerned

about people in sub-Saharan Africa as they are about people in London should by default

be a leftist or by default be somebody who is preoccupied with bringing back state control

of the railways, things like that. And that group of people are not served politically

or ideologically by anybody. Our role, for me, our objective is to give them a free market

alternative that isn't so brittle. And isn't so dogmatic that they're put off by it.

Trevor Burrus: Thanks for listening. [00:47:30] 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.

For more infomation >> Free Thoughts, Ep. 197: Neoliberalism in the U.K. (with Sam Bowman) - Duration: 47:48.

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La résurrection de Kel'Thuzad – 3e épisode - Duration: 8:24.

For more infomation >> La résurrection de Kel'Thuzad – 3e épisode - Duration: 8:24.

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Free Thoughts, Ep. 199: Close America's Overseas Bases (with John Glaser) - Duration: 50:34.

Aaron Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts.

I'm Aaron Powell.

Trevor Burrus: And I'm Trevor Burrus.

Aaron Powell: Joining us today is John Glaser.

He's the Associate Director of Foreign Policy Studies here at the Cato Institute.

Welcome to Free Thoughts, John.

John Glaser: Thanks.

Aaron Powell: What is America's "forward-deployed military posture?"

John Glaser: So that's a fancy Pentagon way of saying that we have a lot of overseas military

bases.

We have about 800 of them, of varying sizes, [00:00:30] in about 70 countries abroad.

It's a massive presence.

Some of these bases have people for years, and years, and years, permanently stationed

there with their families.

They build little cities inside these military bases to sustain life.

Others are really small, with only a few troops.

Just to get a sense of the size of it, it has roughly 250,000 [00:01:00] troops at all

times, all around the world.

In comparison, Russia, our geopolitical competitor, has only about nine overseas bases.

China has just one, in Djibouti.

It's a uniquely American preoccupation, this forward deployed presence.

Trevor Burrus: Has that number, 800, changed much in the last 20 years or so?

John Glaser: Yeah.

Trevor Burrus: Or maybe 50 years?

John Glaser: Sure.

[00:01:30] Since the Cold War, the number of troops deployed abroad has definitely gone

down.

The number of bases has gone down as well, but they went back up with regard to the Middle

East.

We took a lot of troops and bases out of Europe at the end of the Cold War, and reduced some

bases that we had in Asia.

Our presence and activity in the Middle East increased.

Since the end of the Cold War, we've [00:02:00] actually increased our presence there.

Aaron Powell: Where are these?

You said they're in 70 countries, and we have more in the Middle East than we used to; but

in general, where are these located?

Are they highly concentrated in specific parts of the world?

Or, are we pretty much covering everything?

John Glaser: They're highly concentrated, especially the major ones with lots of troops

in them, in Europe, the Middle East, and North-east Asia; so Japan and South Korea have very large

numbers of US troops.

Germany has a lot of US troops.

We have them scattered throughout the rest [00:02:30] of Europe as well.

Then, in the Middle East, we have roughly 50,000 troops.

We have major, 13 to 14,000 in Kuwait.

We have 7,000 roughly rotating in and out of Iraq right now.

We have, of course, the major presence still in Afghanistan.

We're still fighting a war there.

Major air bases in Qatar, and about 6 or 7,000 troops permanently stationed in the Navy's

Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, which is right in the [00:03:00] Persian Gulf.

Trevor Burrus: Now, you argue that we shouldn't have as many ... I mean, we could cut that

in half and we would still have substantially more.

We could have 400 bases and we still would have substantially more than any other country.

That would definitely be a significant change in US Foreign Policy if we were not so, as

we say, 'forward deployed' out there.

Is it asking too much, first of all, to not be able to put our force abroad at any sort

of ... five minutes from [00:03:30] being able to bomb Iran.

That's the way we think about American Foreign Policy.

Stepping back from that is really rethinking the entirety of American Foreign Policy.

John Glaser: Yeah.

I will reveal my own bias here.

I think yes, our foreign policy needs a fundamental re-think.

We shouldn't be playing the global policeman.

I think the purpose of American foreign policy ought to be what it used to be, which is essentially

protecting the physical security of the United States territory and it's citizens.

[00:04:00] Managing local disputes in remote regions of the world that don't have all that

much impact for our security or our economic interest, I don't think is in our interest.

I don't think that makes sense for us.

Part of the problem with having lots of bases in lots of different countries around the

world is that it tends to suck us into conflicts that we otherwise might not be engaged in.

For example, [00:04:30] after the Second World War in 1945, we established what was supposed

to be a temporary presence in South Korea.

We were supposed to work with the Russians to develop some kind of situation in which

the Korean Peninsula could operate on it's own, and have it's own government.

In 1947, 48, and 49, three successive years, the top military strategists in the Truman

Administration recommended full withdrawal.

[00:05:00] They did so because they said Korea is of little strategic importance to us.

The fact is that we had a presence there, and then when the North Koreans invaded in

1950, it obligated the United States to continue to be involved.

This is the case with our current commitments.

For example, we have bases in the Philippines that ... and Japan.

Japan and the Philippines both have maritime and territorial disputes with China.

If it's the case that they end up getting into some kind [00:05:30] of dispute, our

forces act as a trip wire.

They obligate the United States, make it politically costly for us not to get involved in optional

elective conflicts.

I think that's one of the major problems with it.

Aaron Powell: But doesn't this get to the ... The argument in part for these bases is

precisely that that's the sort of stuff we should be doing, that if we ... We don't want

the North Koreans taking over the Korean Peninsula.

We don't want China destroying Japan.

If we've got these bases there, [00:06:00] be they act as a deterrent in the first place,

and if they don't, they make us more capable and make those countries more capable of defending

themselves.

John Glaser: Indeed.

As we deter adversaries and reassure allies, this has the effect of, according to advocates

of forward deployment, pacifying the international systems.

Sometimes it's called the American pacifier.

We basically prevent spirals of conflict happening around the world, because this major hegemonic

power has troops everywhere.

[00:06:30] That's an argument; but I think you have to consider the other plausible,

causal explanations for the dramatic decline in international conflict and violence over

the past 70 years.

It is true that our forward presence was established after World War II.

It's also true that since then, there's a correlation between the establishment of those

bases and the decline of overall interstate violence.

But, there's other [00:07:00] factors as well.

For example, the fact that most great powers and some not-so-great powers have nuclear

weapons.

This creates a situation of mutually assured destruction, and it makes people really not

want to go to war because that means the destruction of your society.

Some people, that's called the 'Nuclear Peace Theory.'

Very honorable and respected theorists like Kenneth Waltz in the international relations

field have proffered that one.

Some people look at the Nuclear Peace Theory and say, "Well, sure, but that's probably

[00:07:30] redundant.

The conventional power that modern militaries have, as we saw in World War I and World War

II are so destructive.

They can destroy empires.

They can kill people almost as effectively as nuclear weapons, and so that acts as enough

of a deterrent: the modern capacity of industrialized militaries is too great."

Then, some people look at economic interdependence, which of course, has proliferated in the [00:08:00]

post-war era.

If you trade with someone and you have economic interdependence, you're much less likely to

go to war with them.

Some other people still look further.

John Mueller, for example; who you guys know, he's a political scientist out of Ohio State

University.

He has senior fellow here at Cato.

He's one of the foremost proponents that there have been dramatic normative shifts in the

way most civilized people see war in this era.

[00:08:30] It's something if you go back to the World War I era, you can hear people in

Germany and even our own leaders like Teddy Roosevelt at the time, talking about war as

something to aspire to.

It was a cleansing national experience that made people strong and glorious, and masculine.

That's different from today.

Even the war mongers among us tend to talk about war as something of a last resort.

Then of course, there's 'Democratic Peace Theory.'

There are more [00:09:00] democracies these days.

Democracies for some reason or another, tend not to go to war with each other.

You have all of these different trends, all of these different trend lines of ... that

have various support in the academic community.

They all point in the direction of less war and less violence.

Under those conditions, I think it's worth scrutinizing the American pacifier theory.

Aaron Powell: We turn to history, briefly.

We're talking a good [00:09:30] prompt for this conversation today is a paper you recently

published with Cato, which we'll put a link to in the show notes, about these overseas

bases.

You have a section on the how the motivations for having them have changed over time.

Can you tell us a bit about that [inaudible 00:09:47] ... long history of putting troops

in places that aren't your own territory?

John Glaser: Sure.

I don't know how much of the long history I can go into detail about, but the things

that I talk about in the-

Trevor Burrus: Actually, I'm going to interject with the first ... Before World War II, [00:10:00]

we did have the Philippines after the Spanish-American War.

When was the first sort of forward deployment?

We had Guam.

We had Philippines.

Starting in the early 20th century, we did have troops abroad, correct?

John Glaser: Yeah.

1898, after the Spanish-American War, we did adopt some pretty major overseas bases that

also ended up ... We sort of annexed territory.

We still own Guam, for example, and lots of other pieces of territory.

It's hard [00:10:30] to say when our first overseas military base.

Sometimes in the mid-1800s and actually early 1800s, we had some outposts in China to try

to facilitate trade between the United States and China.

I wouldn't really count that as a full military base in the sense that we're currently talking

about.

The 1898 style discussion, some people sometimes call that the 'saltwater fallacy,' because

we were still an expanding continent [00:11:00] here in the contiguous United States.

We had all sorts of military bases out West.

When it got past the salt water, people talk about that being more imperial inclinations.

With regard to the history, overseas military bases are not all that new.

You had Athens and Sparta building military bases throughout Greece.

You had Rome building military bases from Britannia all the way to [00:11:30] the other

end of the Mediterranean.

Empires of old used to build military bases to colonize distant lands with their own people.

They used to build them for mercantilist reasons, to gain economic advantage over their other

competitors.

It was only in the really the start of the Cold War, the end of World War [00:12:00]

II, that overseas bases started to develop this current justification.

Which is to, number one, deter adversaries.

Number two, reassure allies.

Number three, make it really easy for us to get places quickly if we decide we want to

go to war.

Aaron Powell: If we take the arguments, we accept the arguments of people who think that

there should be overseas bases, those arguments would seem to apply to other countries as

well.

[00:12:30] Then, why is that ... The United States has a bigger military than Russia,

and a bigger military than China; but the difference in the number of bases we have

versus the number of bases they have can't be explained just by the ratios there.

If these bases are valuable, why don't other countries have so many?

Why are they all sitting in the single digits?

John Glaser: The United States is unique in it's definition of it's national interests.

We have truly expansive definition of what our national interests are, what our [00:13:00]

global responsibilities are.

China doesn't have, within it's own national security strategy, what kind of military intervention

they would engage in if there's a humanitarian conflict in Latin America, or something.

No other country has such an expansive definition of it's national interests as the United States

does.

The other thing that's important in that context is that the United States is safer than most

other great [00:13:30] powers.

We have weak and pliant neighbors to our North and South.

We have vast oceans to our East and West, which act as a defensive barrier to most conventional

kinds of threats.

We spend ... roughly 38% of the global military spending is our own.

We could cut our military spending in half and still outspend China right now.

We have a nuclear deterrent, which prevents anyone from attacking our own territories.

This [00:14:00] situation puts us in a really secure place.

When you're really secure, unfortunately, and you're the unipolar power, the hegemony

in the world, you start to think about what you can do elsewhere as opposed to just protecting

your own borders.

Trevor Burrus: Don't you think that other ... You said we have our ... We conceptualize

our interests very broadly, but don't you think that other countries also do that to

us?

That they expect us to do the right thing, and that we're the benevolent hegemony, and

that that's actually the [00:14:30] entire point?

That it's not that big a deal that we're in Germany because we are generally a good country

that ... What's [inaudible 00:14:39], we will do the right thing after we've exhausted all

other options.

People know that about us, but I think that Germany probably wants us there.

Aaron Powell: They're not scared, at least, that we're going to up and decide to take

them over.

Trevor Burrus: Yeah.

No one's afraid of that.

No one's thinking that we're Rome and we're trying to take over the whole world.

Maybe in some of these places like Bahrain or a place where we [00:15:00] have ... We

might [engineer 00:15:02] conflict and put our people in danger, because there are people

there who want to get them.

That's a totally different analysis than say, Germany, which is probably creating good relations

between America and Germany, and allowing us to do what they're asking us to do; which

is to be the benevolent hegemony.

Which, I think we've done a pretty good job of that.

John Glaser: Yeah.

So first of all, it's totally true that Germany is not worried about the United States taking

over Germany.

That's not our M-O.

But if you're talking about the perception of [00:15:30] our military posture abroad,

you also have to take into account people that aren't benefiting off American largess,

that aren't having their defense subsidized by the United States and our presence there.

For example, one of the most dangerous points in the entirety of the Cold War, was of course,

the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Only a matter of months prior to that crisis, the Kennedy Administration put missiles, Jupiter

missiles, [00:16:00] in Turkey, which bordered the Soviet Union.

Of course, Moscow perceived this as deeply threatening.

The leadership at the time in Russia, in the Soviet Union discussed in papers that have

since been declassified that, 'We feel we're being surrounded by military bases from the

United States, and so we're going to give them a taste of their own medicine and put

one in Cuba.'

That precipitated literally the closest we've come to nuclear war, [00:16:30] so that was

obviously not a good thing.

That translates to today.

For example, the expansion of NATO, and the establishment of US military bases further

and further East towards Russia, and even up to the Russian border in some cases, is

the source of profound and lingering anxiety and resentment in Russia.

They don't like the perception that they're being sort of encircled.

You can also compare this in [00:17:00] Asia.

The United States has almost roughly 50,000 troops in Japan, right at the end of the Japanese

archipelago, which is sort of pointed like a dagger at the center of China.

We have about 30,000 troops in Korea, which of course, is very close to China.

We guarantee the security of the Philippines.

We have 60% of our naval presence in the Asia Pacific region.

[00:17:30] This is perceived in China as deeply threatening.

Every country and it's allies tends to view themselves as benevolent and wonderful, and

non-threatening.

The problem is when you get into other people's heads, they see it much differently.

Just to conclude this part, one of the foremost grievances cited for the 9/11 attacks was

the US military presence in Saudi Arabia.

It was something that Al Qaeda cited [00:18:00] in order to rally Muslim support against the

United States.

It was one of the foremost reasons and justifications that they used to attack us.

Our presence abroad can create all kinds of resentment.

That's not just in countries in the Middle East.

Just a year or so ago, there was a protest of 65,000 Okinawans in Japan in opposition

to the US military base presence there.

This can happen [00:18:30] all over the world, even among allies.

Trevor Burrus: I want to, on the 9/11 point, do you believe it is the case that, but for

American military bases, the ones cited in the Al Qaeda letter, in Saudi Arabia in particular,

I believe, but for those, 9/11 wouldn't have happened.

John Glaser: Well, there was a number of grievances that Al Qaeda-

Trevor Burrus: Well, we still would have been attacked.

I guess to clarify my question, too, if we just flew [inaudible 00:18:58] from Germany

[00:19:00] and attacked them, how much is the bases, and how much is it the military

actions?

If we were bombing places, but flying from Germany, or we were still treating the ... muslim

[inaudible 00:19:12].

That seems like a bigger thing than just the presence of a base that we're discussing right

now.

John Glaser: That's true.

In general, of course, lots of Muslims, particularly the extremist ones, oppose aggressive military

action in the Middle East.

The presence of US military forces [00:19:30] inside Saudi Arabia, which is the site of

the two holiest places in Islam, was the source of particular concern to very religious Muslims

because they felt that the Saudi government was inviting infidels and crusaders to the

holiest place in Islam.

That was the source of a particular and unique religious concern.

It's also the case that Robert Pape, one of the foremost [00:20:00] scholars on terrorism,

has said his studies that foreign occupation is the foremost determinative of terrorism,

a motivator for terrorism.

If you can go back in history, for example, when we had our massive military presence

in Lebanon in the 1980s.

In 1983, that's when Hezbollah committed an attack that killed something like 241 ... I

might get that number wrong ... US service personnel.

[00:20:30] In 2000, the USS Cole was attacked out of Yemen.

These foreign military bases are symbols of American power in the region.

All the other stuff, whether it's Israel/Palestine, the sanctions regime on Iraq, which ended

up killing lots of people, all kinds of other more tangible elements of US influence in

the region, the bases [00:21:00] themselves ... as I say, operate as a kind of symbol

of American power that can generate a lot of resentment.

Aaron Powell: Okay, but I can ... putting on my rah-rah war hat for a moment.

Trevor Burrus: It doesn't fit you very well.

Aaron Powell: No.

Trevor Burrus: It's been in the closet for a long time.

Aaron Powell: Yeah.

I guess, so what?

Russia, they're the bad guys; a powerful military run by a mad man.

China is the bad [00:21:30] guys.

The Islamic extremists are the bad guys.

Yeah, having super powerful good guys next to them makes them uncomfortable, and they

don't like it, and it makes them resent that we're more powerful than they are.

So what?

Why should that factor in?

Why should we just give in to the psychological pain of the bad guys and not protect our interests?

Trevor Burrus: Yeah, if we hadn't done Hitler with a bunch of military bases and it made

Hitler uncomfortable, you'd be like, "That's the point."

John Glaser: [00:22:00] It depends on what kind of results you want.

If you believe in the power of American deterrents, and that everywhere we put bases, it's going

to keep bad guys in check, then that's one reason to further the argument that you just

made.

The problem is that there are reactions to our overseas military presence.

It's what's called counter-balancing in the IR literature.

[00:22:30] For example, it's hard to find someone in Moscow or in the Kremlin that describes

the motivations for their military actions in Georgia and Ukraine in ways that doesn't

cite NATO expansion.

Lots of analysts point to Chinese aggressive and assertive actions in the South China Sea

as being motivated by a fear that the United States in the largest [00:23:00] naval presence

there.

Therefore, that's where they get all their oil, through the straights of Malacca coming

through the Persian Gulf, in the Strait of Malacca ... and we could possibly interdict

Chinese shipments.

When you make foreign powers nervous unnecessarily, you tend to get unintended consequences that

result from that.

Usually those aren't too pretty.

Now, the problem is that people see these things very differently.

People that advocate [00:23:30] for a foreign deployed presence, they don't like to admit

that Russia has taken aggressive actions in Eastern Europe as a result of the expansion

of our military presence.

Instead, they say, "Well, that's proof that we don't have enough of a military presence

there," which is an argument for always having military bases everywhere, forever.

I think that gets so far from what the purpose of American foreign policy should be that

it creates all kinds of problems.

There's costs problems, which I [00:24:00] think we can talk about a little bit.

More to the point, if you are like me, and I again, be clear about my biases here, I

think the United States government should be limited in it's powers and it's role in

domestic societies should be somewhat limited, especially compared with the role that it's

currently conceived as.

I think that translates as well to the foreign realm.

I think it ought to be the role of the American foreign policy, the purpose in American foreign

[00:24:30] policy, to protect the United States and managing global affairs, and trying to

prevent conflict in various regions, et cetera, getting ourselves drawn into conflicts, incentivizing

counter balancing, all these other negative unintended consequences, that doesn't meld

with my conception of what US foreign policy ought to be about.

Aaron Powell: The world is a relatively safe place, compared to [00:25:00] where it's been.

We don't have a lot of wars between nations.

Living in a dangerous world, even if we're ... across oceans from it, is still worse

than living in a safe world.

Wouldn't us focusing only on our own interests narrowly defined and pulling back, make the

world in general a more dangerous place?

Because then you wouldn't have [00:25:30] the US protecting countries or deterring countries,

even if there are these occasional push-backs and aggression that's provoked by it.

Which would then, just aside from being bad for the world, would ultimately be bad for

America.

John Glaser: Well, this gets back to the American pacifier thesis.

If you believe that the world is a safer place these days because America has scores of military

bases in scores of countries, then that's a really powerful argument.

[00:26:00] I think there are solid reasons to think that the world is a safer place these

days for reasons other than American pacifier.

Aaron Powell: But I guess the question is how does the cost benefit, kind of.

You could say you've got ... There's the American pacifier theory, and then there's the other

theories that you're more inclined to endorse; but given the state of the world right now

and how relatively good it is compared to where it could be and where it's been, it's

a profound risk to test those theories.

We can't test them on [00:26:30] the small scale and say, "Oh, it turns out to be ... maybe

the American pacifier theory is a little bit better than I thought," Or, "Maybe these other

ones aren't quite as right," and then roll it back.

Are the current costs that we are incurring at the moment, both in terms of just how expensive

it is and the danger that it puts American people, American troops in, high enough to

warrant that risk of testing John's theory about global stability?

John Glaser: Yes, because I don't think it's actually [00:27:00] that much of a risk.

It might help to narrow this down to a specific context, as opposed to thinking about the

entire world.

If you can remember it in the 2016 campaign, one of the main things Donald Trump kept saying

was that China, it's China's responsibility to pressure North Korea to behave better and

stop it's nuclear development, and missile development, et cetera.

One of the main reasons that China continues to [00:27:30] be a patron of North Korea is

that one of the main things that China fears is a unified Korean Peninsula under the American

military umbrella with US troops there.

If you go back in the study of international relations, especially ... This is very popular

in the great game era, and the European politics in the 1800s, buffer states are really important.

Buffer states make [00:28:00] states feel secure from their enemies.

If there's a piece of territory there, it's a measure of protection.

If China's mostly concerned about a unified Korean Peninsula with the American military

forces there, because it doesn't want US military forces on it's border, one thing that we could

do in terms of negotiating settlement to the North Korean issue, or leveraging China to

get more involved [00:28:30] in a constructive way on Pyongyang, we could offer a change

to the US and South Korean alliance, and perhaps pulling away from our military presence there.

That's a situation in which we could reach a more peaceful situation, some kind of peace

agreement, some kind of grand bargain between the United States, North Korea, South Korea,

and China; but it's being held back because China's main hangup is that US forces are

in [00:29:00] the region.

That's just one example.

There are others, though.

We don't need forward deployed military bases to keep us safe, and we don't need them to

make the world more peaceful.

Trevor Burrus: Kind of dovetailing on Aaron's question a little bit.

I was reading your paper, trying to be a neocon-ish person as I read it.

I could see the lines that they thought were laughable.

[00:29:30] One of your lines is, 'The rise in expansionist European power bent on a continental

domination is nowhere on the horizon.'

Isn't that what they would have said in say, 1930?

Isn't that one of these famous last words things that when we're talking about Europe

pulling out Germany, for example, as I said.

I know we can get later you think some bases are worse than others, and maybe Germany's

not top of your list; but if you're totally against the forward deployment, then we're

talking about getting out of [00:30:00] Germany, too.

I think history has shown that it's generally a bad idea to let European powers grow their

militaries and figure out and fight a war that is total destruction.

We shouldn't just be blindly saying, "This is not a concern.

We'll get out of there."

John Glaser: Yeah, I don't think today is comparable to the era in the lead-up to World

War I or in the era in the lead-up to World War II.

Europe is one of the most stable and peaceful [00:30:30] continents in the world.

It's a really safe and rich bit of territory.

Since World War II, European countries have developed all kinds of institutional elements

of cooperation, economic integration.

They have close political and diplomatic overlaps, in terms of how they perceive their interests.

It really is a demonstration of how things can become pacified [00:31:00] in a political

and cultural way after the devastation of the cataclysms of the first and second World

War.

I don't think there's really anyone that I'm aware of in the literature who points out

that Germany is a risk of a growing power that's going to gobble up it's neighbors and

start to gain a hegemonic influence on the European continent.

I think today, people would more likely to be pointing to Russia as a concern, as a power

[00:31:30] that wants to expand and gobble up other countries.

The problem with that is that their GDP is about 1.3 trillion, which is roughly like

Spain's.

The main thing that you need to build up military power is economic power.

Russia just doesn't have it.

They're a declining power in a lot of ways.

They have an aging population.

They have all kinds of internal problems that prevent them from being able to project power

in distant regions.

Their actions in Georgia, [00:32:00] Ukraine, and Syria lately, have actually bogged them

down in problematic conflicts that they don't quite see a way out of.

They have nuclear weapons, and that protects them, but they don't really have the power

right now to start gobbling up and become a European hegemony.

The main thing you have to look at, if you're concerned about a rising hegemony is the nature

of the regime, the balance of power, ... because the Western Europe [00:32:30] checks Russia's

power because they're more powerful and richer ... and the economic power and military power

of the states in question.

I think if you look at that, it's pretty clear that we don't need to have a permanent presence

there to prevent that kind of contingency.

It's like we had, in the past, basically we served as a balancer of last resort.

When other powers, European powers in particular, found that they couldn't manage a [00:33:00]

rogue nation on their own, then we would come in and balance.

That was a very wise and strategic and cost-efficient way to manage the balance of power.

Instead, now the dominant theory is we have to always be there to prevent this from ever

happening again.

If it happens, we'll have plenty of lead time.

I think we can easily deploy quickly, if we think we need to.

Trevor Burrus: If you were making the case [00:33:30] for, to a person who did not accept

... I think a pretty mainstream foreign policy view right now, even amongst ... well, some

conservatives.

They don't accept the fullness of your critique of American involvement abroad, but they think

we've done too.

They weren't a fan of Iraq, maybe they think we should get out of Afghanistan.

So when Trump said we've been doing too much abroad, that resonated with them.

But then to say, "Okay, therefore we should take every military base away," is like, 'Okay,

that's too strong.'

[00:34:00] We're going for a compromise position, and when you do this in your paper, you talk

about other technologies.

Maybe we do need to get there in three days, but we have aircraft carriers, we have planes

that can fly from Missouri to the Middle East and back.

If you were making the case for dramatically lessening how many bases we have and still

being able to accomplish the military objectives that a lot of people think that we should

have [00:34:30] the capabilities, even if we shouldn't use it as much, how would you

make that case for say, 400 bases rather than 800?

Which ones would you first say we got to get out of because they're not worth it?

What technologies can still let us be somewhat of a military hegemony, but without making

other people mad, without putting our troops in danger?

How would you rank the bases?

How would you adjust our military capability to still behave in the world?

John Glaser: We just talked about Europe.

I think Europe is one of the most stable, peaceful, and [00:35:00] rich places in the

world.

That makes it a very good candidate to pull US military bases out of.

We see eye-to-eye with most Europeans on how things ought to be on domestic liberal reforms,

and foreign policy, and stuff like that.

They're really rich, and powerful, and can defend themselves.

They can uphold the role that the United States now upholds in the region, if we were to leave.

That's a good test case.

[00:35:30] There are less stable areas.

I talked about the Korean Peninsula, for example, and of course, the Middle East.

I think reducing overall our military bases and maintaining a few, like the major ones

that we have in say, Japan, would allow us rapid contingency response to deal with any

operational contingency that might come our way.

The other important thing is what you were saying [00:36:00] is that our travel ... The

technology that we have these days, to travel really quickly, and bomb from great distances,

really allow us to engage in any type of mission that we think is necessary.

The only thing that really prevents rapid deployment of massive mobilization of military

forces, withdrawing from all bases would make that quite difficult.

The [00:36:30] argument there I would make is that it's not necessarily a bad thing to

rob the executive branch of the ability to quickly intervene in any conflict in which

they think they ought to intervene; and counter to constitutional ideas about checks and balances,

and giving the executive branch more options to deploy more quickly is kind of ... does

violence, so to speak, to constitutional principles.

Aaron Powell: [00:37:00] You've argued a few times that we are ... one of the effects that

our bases have is subsidizing the defense of other nations, because they don't have

to then pour their own money into defending themselves.

Do we know how much nations would react to us taking away those subsidies?

Can we just assume that if we pulled our bases out of Europe, the Europeans would build up

their militaries an equal amount, or the South Koreans [00:37:30] would?

John Glaser: It's hard to say.

I think you have to look at discrete examples.

Certainly it's the case, I think, that Eastern European countries, ones that are really close

to the Russian border, would start to boost military spending.

The Baltics already spend more as a percentage of their economy than a lot of Western European

countries do.

It's hard to say whether or not places like Germany, France, Britain, would boost military

spending if they didn't [00:38:00] have American protection.

One of the main reasons is because they don't face any threats.

In the United States, it's become a bit of a pathology to overspend on military assets.

We need more weapons, more equipment, more troops, more bases, et cetera, because we

have this expansive definition of our national interests.

If the Europeans don't spend a lot on their military, it might be because [00:38:30] we

subsidize their defense, or it might be because they don't really face any threats.

Who's going to invade Germany right now?

Who is the candidate that's going to bomb Berlin?

It's not really in the cards in the policy-relevant future.

They might inch up slightly, but it's not a guarantee that they would boost spending.

Aaron Powell: How does terrorism factor into this, because ... so ISIS has threatened to

invade Italy; but were there prophecies, right?

Berlin, [00:39:00] Germany has been attacked.

I don't know Berlin specifically has been attacked, but does that change the equation?

Do we need, because there's these ... there are threats in a way that there weren't from

just troops marching across a border?

John Glaser: Permanent peacetime overseas military bases are just about the worst tool

imaginable to prevent some guy driving into a crowd of people in East France.

The operations [00:39:30] and attacks that ISIS and other similar groups have taken in

Europe in recent years are mostly lone wolf attacks.

Sometimes there's some tenuous connection to some base in the Middle East that was directed

from the official group; but mostly, these are really low level violence attacks.

They kill a few people and it's very tragic, but there's literally no way to conceive of

our permanent overseas military presence as preventing that [00:40:00] or doing anything

to mitigate it, or responding to it.

These are just low level attacks.

Of course, the question of terrorism at a bird's eye view, it should be noted as has

been noted on this podcast in previous episodes, it's a small threat that we face from terrorism.

Every year since 9/11, I think the number of deaths in the United States from terrorism

is about 6.

Every year since 9/11, the average number of deaths from being struck by lightening

is roughly [00:40:30] 50.

This is a manageable threat.

It's not a war to be won, it's a problem to be managed.

Trevor Burrus: But if, on the flip side as opposed to trying to stop people driving trucks

through crowds, which I agree is probably impossible unless you want to live in a police

state; but if we want to hit terrorists in a strategic fashion, which whether it's through

drones, or bringing in special forces, and landing them, and seeing a threat.

Maybe we see that they have nuclear material or something like this, [00:41:00] it seems

that we would want to be flying out of bases in Italy, bases in Germany, bases in Qatar.

That would be better.

John Glaser: The Rand Corporation did a study on this.

What they concluded is that the time benefit of doing a bombing mission from say, Germany

into the Middle East, is so neg liable as to not very much be worth it.

It shouldn't be the justification that our bases in Europe need to be there so that we

can quickly [00:41:30] bomb the Middle East, because the time benefit is just so negligible.

For example, during the first Gulf War in 1991, we flew bombing missions from Louisiana,

in round trip missions, that were refueled in the air in under 30 hours.

We can so quickly bomb targets in the Middle East, really at a whim, that the foreign military

bases that [00:42:00] enable those logistically, enable those missions often times right now,

are just not necessary to complete the mission.

Trevor Burrus: I can picture someone with military experience listening to this and

thinking that this ... In your paper, you compare five days of response versus seven

days, if we were coming from mainland United States, or you said that Guam and Diego Garcia.

Guam is a territory, so we don't have destabilization concerns; so you're okay with Guam, and you're

okay with Diego Garcia ... which is a British territory.

[00:42:30] If you have a two day difference between flying from Louisiana to the Middle

East, and what's the big deal?

I could see in the military strategy being like, "Who does this guy think he is?

Two days is an eternity in military speed.

Two days is where ... Gettysburg day one to Gettysburg day three."

John Glaser: Yeah, so it's important to make the distinction here.

The couple of days difference is referring to a brigade combat team deploying to a foreign

region.

That [00:43:00] amounts to roughly 5,000 troops, lost of heavy equipment and vehicles, et cetera.

That takes a little bit longer, but not long enough to prevent us from being able to head

off some kind of major military conflict between militaries.

The bombing missions don't take a couple of extra days.

Bombing missions take an extra hour, roughly; maybe a couple hours.

We can easily field ... the time difference is negligible for bombing missions.

If [00:43:30] you want to get really technical, we have 11 or 12 aircraft carriers, which

can be all over the world and all over the oceans, and we can fly bombing missions from

them as well.

Trevor Burrus: Would you make a trade-off if you were trying to negotiate a bill, and

you were saying, "Okay, let's take 400 bases away.

We still have 400, and let's build three more aircraft carriers."

Would that be a trade-off you'd be willing to make, in the sense of saying that, "Okay,

I'll agree we need strike capability, but here are the 400 [00:44:00] bases that are

costing the most in terms of our safety, anger towards the United States."

John Glaser: Yeah.

Trevor Burrus: "I'll give you three aircraft carriers."

John Glaser: I'm a man of compromise.

I'm happy with that trade.

I don't think we need the extra aircraft carriers.

Trevor Burrus: "And a destroyer to be named later in draft- [crosstalk 00:44:13]."

John Glaser: Yeah, name the destroy after me.

I'll be really happy to make that trade.

I don't think ... We have more aircraft carriers than anyone else in the world.

A lot more.

We can put them in places all over the earth's [00:44:30] oceans to easily deploy.

We don't need the extra, but if that's the compromise I'm faced with, I'm kind of happy

to do that.

One thing about telling this military people, I got the idea for keeping bases in just Guam

and Diego Garcia from a friend of mine in the military.

I think the hawks that really insist that we must maintain a global military presence

at all [00:45:00] times are frequently not from the military.

For bureaucratic interests, military officials tend to insist that we don't shutdown bases.

Military people in general, people that serve in the military, I don't think are necessarily

by definition, insistent on the American pacifier thesis.

Aaron Powell: Are there any, or how many bases are there I guess that even if all of these

arguments for why we should have [00:45:30] the US military spread all over the place

are true, or just egregious examples of this base doesn't accomplish anything.

Trevor Burrus: We give you a big red pin and a list of all the bases and American assets,

and you say, "Okay John, cross 'em off."

John Glaser: What I'll say is that there's a lot of tiny bases in strategically insignificant

places that we could just easily do away with.

These would be the first to go.

There's a lot of bases that we have in a couple dozen, [00:46:00] or just over a dozen African

countries.

They're really small.

They don't have that many personnel there.

They're often hubs to train militaries in those countries.

We don't need those.

They don't make us safer.

They don't make Africa safer.

We have bases in Central and South America.

Those aren't needed.

If you talk about getting places quickly, certainly we can deploy from bases in the

United States to anywhere within our own hemisphere much quicker than [00:46:30] we can from distances

far, far, far and away.

In the Americas and in Africa, I think those would be the first to go.

Least significant.

Trevor Burrus: Going forward, a lot of people criticize libertarian foreign policy a lot.

We get it from both the left and the right.

We come in here, we say, "No more foreign ... forward deployment of the massive scale,

at least."

You made some very good points, but how do we start trying to convince people that this

is generally a good idea [00:47:00] and we can draw it down.

We don't have to go all the way to our principled level, but draw it down.

What sort of impediments do you see coming in that makes that difficult?

Other than the obvious disagreement with you.

John Glaser: I worry about how lengthy this answer will be.

The first point I'd make is that there's something strange about the way foreign policy is handled

in Washington DC.

The debate in foreign policy in Washington DC represents the merest sliver [00:47:30]

of the debate that occurs on foreign policy in the academic community more generally.

For example, the foremost proponents of our current strategy in academia are two guys

named Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth.

I had them here at the Cato Institute for a book forum in March.

According to them, they feel that they're in the minority in the academic community.

Let's just say at least 50% of academics in the international relations field [00:48:00]

are somewhat sympathetic to the Cato view of foreign policy.

Now, the Cato view on foreign policy is like an alien spaceship in Washington DC.

We are lone wolves.

Nobody cares to hear about this, both left and right.

There's a rough consensus on what US foreign policy ought to be, but it doesn't represent

most of the other really solid academically inclined viewpoints on what the role of the

United States should be.

In terms of persuading people, I think [00:48:30] that's a key point to make, that there's something

weird about how foreign policy is done.

That partly gets to this issue of what are the interests that are influencing people

to disregard other valid points of view.

There are all kinds.

I found this really interesting.

If you go back to 1970, there was a congressional investigation called 'Security Agreements

and [00:49:00] Commitments Abroad.'

It explained why the strategic use of US military bases abroad is never seriously scrutinized,

and I'm going to quote from it, if the listeners will forgive me.

Quote, "Once an American overseas base is established, it takes on a life of it's own.

Original missions may become outdated, but new missions are developed, not only with

the intent of keeping the facility going, but often actually to enlarge it.

Within the government departments most directly concerned, state department and defense department,

[00:49:30] we found little initiative to reduce or eliminate any of these overseas facilities;

which is only to be expected since they would be recommending a reduction in their own position."

The same logic holds today.

Entrenched interests both within government and outside it insist upon the current forward

deployed military strategy.

That creates basically no political incentive to propose changes to it.

But I think it's something we need to [00:50:00] consider.

I know that this is a radical proposal.

I did that partly to provoke people, but America's inherent safety, at the very least, should

incentivize people to scrutinize our overseas military base presence.

Aaron Powell: Thanks for listening.

This episode of Free Thoughts was produced by Tess Terrible and Evan Banks.

To learn more, visit us at www.libertarianism.org.

For more infomation >> Free Thoughts, Ep. 199: Close America's Overseas Bases (with John Glaser) - Duration: 50:34.

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How To Put On False Eyelashes For Beginners | In-Depth Tips & Tricks | #BeautyBite - Duration: 7:38.

what's up guys welcome to the cult curator where I help you navigate the

overwhelming world of beauty one tutorial at a time my name is Sonya and

in this week's Beauty bite I'm showing you how to apply false lashes like a pro

if you're new to false lashes the process can be extremely frustrating

which is why I'm going to break it down for you in this step-by-step tutorial

alright so you just need three things when you're applying your lashes the

first thing is the lashes your choice whatever lash that are comfortable with

or that you prefer to wear the second thing is a lot blue and the last thing

is a way to apply the lashes so either your fingers regular tweezers or a la

shop locator so if you're new playing false lashes and you struggle with

applying them the first thing that I recommend is choosing an eyelash that

has a very thin watch band so you can see I'm the one that I'm going to be

wearing for this tutorial it's a clear very thin watch band and the style that

I'm using is Andrea number 92 and just for comparison these are the House of

lashes iconic and you can see that this has a very thick lash band that's gonna

be a lot harder to work with the next thing is lash glue my favorite is the

Revlon precision clear lash adhesive this is really nice because it comes

with a little wand like this which makes it really easy to just apply directly

onto the lashes duo is another popular lash glue that a lot of people would

recommend I personally don't like it and I find that it's a lot more difficult to

work with you have to it doesn't have a little wand like the Revlon one so it's

just more frustrating to work with in my opinion so if you're beginner I would

definitely recommend the Revlon precision lash glue the last thing is

the way that you apply your lashes you can use your fingers but my fingers are

very short and stubby and I don't have long nails so it's difficult for me to

apply lashes that way the next thing is to use regular tweezers that you

used to pluck your eyebrows those when I use them I always end up hooking my

eyelid and it's just painful and frustrating for me to do what so I don't

use that my favorite way to apply lashes is using a la shop locator like this I

find this just easiest because it's made specifically for applying lashes you can

see that it looks like a pair of tweezers but the ends aren't pointy and

they are a lot longer so it just really does a good job of applying lashes in my

opinion it makes the whole thing a lot easier step 2 is to take the lashes off

of the container you want to be careful when you're pulling lashes off of the

plastic because it is glued on see the plastics and you can rip the lashes if

you pull too hard so it's important to be gentle alright - step 3 is to cut the

lashes so that they fit your eye typically when lashes come out of the

package they're going to be longer than your actual eyes so you want to measure

by placing the watch on your eye to see where you need to cut it another note is

to make sure that you don't cut off too much of the lash it's better to cut off

in small sections instead of doing a whole chunk and realizing that the lash

is now too short before you apply your lashes you want to make sure that you

curl your natural lashes and add some mascara this will help them blend into

the falsies a lot better and make it look a lot more natural I like to curl

them not everyone does this but I have very straight lashes so I feel like

curling them makes them blend it a lot it's better and you can use any mascara

that you want it really doesn't matter because it's not going to be really

showing up that much but I'm using the Milani lash trifecta alright so when I'm

applying logically onto the lashes I like to take the lashes on the

applicator like this and I'm just going to take the wand and run a thin coat

along the lash band you don't want too much product you just

want a little bit just enough to coat it and for the inner and outer corner I

actually like to apply it a little bit more like a little kind of bubble of

glue not too much but just like more than you did on the rest of the wash

because those areas tend to lift up throughout the day you can see that

there's a thin layer of lash glue and the ends have a little bit more lash

glue now you just want to wait a couple of seconds for the lash glue to dry up a

little bit that way it gets a little bit tacky and it doesn't slide around your I

love it so I know applying falsies I like to tilt my head back a little bit

and look down my eyes are still open and I didn't see myself in the mirror

perfectly but I like to do it just enough so that my eyelid is increasing

anymore now when I'm applying my lashes I like to hold it on the lash itself not

the band because that's where the glue is and when I'm taking it onto my eye I

like to bring it from above and then drop it down onto my lid like that it's

important to do that instead of coming straight on like this because then I

brush my lashes I end up with glue all over the place it gets stuck and it

doesn't sit on the lid as nicely so now I'm going to go in and apply the lashes

and at first you just want to kind of rest it

it's not applied onto my lid yet but it's just kind of sitting there so that

it makes it easier for me to move it around and I like to work with the outer

corner and attach it with a lock shop locator I like to push the falsies into

my lash like this so I'm just going along and pushing them together and as

this is drying you want to kind of push the lashes upwards like this so that

they sit up I don't know if you can see this on camera but now there's a little

bit of lash glue residue on my applicator so before I move into the

other eye I like to actually take a makeup wipe or some makeup remover and

clean it off that way the lash applicator doesn't stick to my other

lash now I'm just going to apply the other blush onto my lid you want the

lash on your skin and not on your actual lashes because when you pull it off that

will take your actual lashes off also and once you do that you're all finished

and that's how you apply lashes alright guys that does it for this tutorial I

hope you enjoyed it just remember that when you're applying lashes for the

first time or even the first few times that it's going to be frustrating and

it's going to be messy these are normal experiences that most people go through

so you're not alone and don't feel discouraged because with practice and

these tips you'll be able to start applying lashes like a pro so if these

tips were helpful if they were and you enjoyed this video don't forget to give

it a thumbs up and if you're new to my channel and you love makeup don't forget

to subscribe so that you don't miss out on any of my tips

tricks that you can easily add to your makeup routine that deserve for this

video but I post every Tuesday and Thursday so stay tuned for the next one

bye

For more infomation >> How To Put On False Eyelashes For Beginners | In-Depth Tips & Tricks | #BeautyBite - Duration: 7:38.

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The UK's ongoing commitment to Pakistan post-Brexit - Duration: 1:48.

DFiD and the UK consider working with Pakistan on prosperity and growth agendas

really important in this respect I think it was really striking that

recently my minister in London, our Secretary of State, she did announce that

also after Brexit trade relations with the developing world would still take

centre stage and we would make sure that our trading partners that have

particular priority deals with us, that they will still be honoured after

Brexit. I think that's really important. We want to encourage

and work with Pakistan to be outwardly oriented, to do the economic reforms

required, to invest prudently but also carefully, but effectively in

infrastructure for stimulating further investment in the country. This is a

country with enormous potential. It has a lot of youth, it's very entrepreneurial.

We want to work with Pakistan and we do that already

around skills development, we work around education and we do think that with this

youth, Pakistan should be able to take all these global trade opportunities

very strongly and we definitely as the UK want to work very closely with them

in the future

For more infomation >> The UK's ongoing commitment to Pakistan post-Brexit - Duration: 1:48.

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Hajj 2017 Changing The Cloth Of Kaaba Hajj 2017 Changing Of Kaba Ghilaf 2017

Hajj 2017 Changing The Cloth Of Kaaba Hajj 2017 Changing Of Kaba Ghilaf 2017

Hajj 2017 Changing The Cloth Of Kaaba Hajj 2017 Changing Of Kaba Ghilaf 2017

Hajj 2017 Changing The Cloth Of Kaaba Hajj 2017 Changing Of Kaba Ghilaf 2017

Hajj 2017 Changing The Cloth Of Kaaba Hajj 2017 Changing Of Kaba Ghilaf 2017

Hajj 2017 Changing The Cloth Of Kaaba Hajj 2017 Changing Of Kaba Ghilaf 2017

Hajj 2017 Changing The Cloth Of Kaaba Hajj 2017 Changing Of Kaba Ghilaf 2017

Hajj 2017 Changing The Cloth Of Kaaba Hajj 2017 Changing Of Kaba Ghilaf 2017

Hajj 2017 Changing The Cloth Of Kaaba Hajj 2017 Changing Of Kaba Ghilaf 2017

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