UK Column Radio
Governments Make Everything Worse - With Wanjiru Njoya
Wanjiru Njoya tells Charles Malet how she sees a truly free market, devoid of any government intervention, as being the route by which all societies are improved. Read the write-up at: https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/governments-make-everything-worse-with-wanjiru-njoya-0
- Broadcast on:
- 03 Oct 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
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Thanks so much for inviting me. Very happy to speak with you today. Good. Now, as I say, you have a particular post in an academic capacity, but I think what I'd like to do is lead the audience sort of up to that point. So can you just give us a background into your life, but particularly what it is that set you off in motion as an academic and how you're upbringing has sort of informed the choices that you've gone on to make? I suppose I come from a fairly academic family, so there's lots of academics in my family where I think all of us PhDs. So I think just to grown up in a very academic context and it's been academic in the old sense, which is about being interested in reading and finding out about different fields and seeing how they all link together across the arts, the humanities, the sciences. So that's how I got into academic life and my academic background is in law. So I have a bunch of law degrees and I'm interested. So law in an academic sense is less about litigation. I'm going to court and it's more about how we think about law, how it influences our life, how it reflects our culture and our society. So you said earlier that I described myself as a property rights absolatist. That's what it is. A lot of my writing is about what do we mean by property rights? Why are they important? How are they linked to who we are as human beings? The idea of self-ownership. So it's very academic in that sense. It's not about, I suppose, what most people would think about laws, how, you know, fighting cases or something like that. So I've talked for many years in British universities and as time has gone by, so most of my academic teaching and writing has been in property law, corporate law, these kinds of fields that are probably nothing to do with what most people hear me talk about these days, which is about equality and freedom of contract, freedom of association. So how I got into that field of writing about law was because I felt that some of our fundamental principles are being forgotten. So, you know, it's very easy to talk about markets, which I talk about a lot nowadays, markets, buying and selling free trade, these kinds of ideas. It's very easy to talk about that and to forget the fundamental underlying principles like freedom of contract and freedom of association and I felt that these were being forgotten. If all you're talking about is people trading and the terms of trade, and it's very easy for governments to say, well, we could think of better terms of trade, so let's impose them. You've completely, at that point, unmured yourself from the fundamental principles of liberty. So that's what my recent books have been about. Economic freedom and social justice talks a lot about freedom of contract, redressing historical injustice talks about the ideas I was describing earlier, self-ownership and private property. So I suppose that's been the trajectory of my academic career, and now I talk a lot about free markets at the Mises Institute where about Austrian economics, which promotes free markets, and my input in that context is to explain why free markets are important, why capitalism is important. I think the article you saw was how capitalism defeats racism, so it's basically about saying, why is capitalism of value to us as human beings? It's not just about trading in markets, so you can make a lot of money, which is what many people think of. It's not just about profit making, but it's also about the human spirit, I suppose you could say, what we want to be and how we want to achieve our goals and things that we value, and that's important for everyone regardless of their race. So that's been a stronger theme in my writing in more recent years. Excellent introduction. Now, before we get into exactly what you were talking about, the relationship between capitalism and racism, a few other things I'd like to go through, but particularly in relation to the Mises Institute and the sort of the genesis of it, but particularly given the circumstances around academia in the wider context at the moment and how challenging it is to express the sorts of views you have, reasonable as they may sound to the audience, the UK column audience certainly, but just, can you just give us a bit, you know, where does the institute sit and how is it regarded by sort of comparable bodies or indeed treated, you know, by say even the media or the government and that sort of thing. So the Mises Institute is essentially a school of economics. It does, if you go on to the Mises Institute website mises.org, it says, it says Austrian economics, freedom and peace. So, and many economists associated with the Austrian school of economics are writing about libertarian ideas of liberty and foreign policy that's related to how we can achieve peace. So there's a lot of ideas that, I mean anybody can go on the Mises website and see, but the primary goal of the institute is Austrian economics. It's a school of economics and teachers economics to students. So, primarily in terms of the perception of it, it's as a school of economics that's outside what you might call the mainstream economics, which is very interventionist. So Austrian economics is a school of economics that says that the government should stay out of regulating markets and that exchange between human beings is based on voluntary exchange. You know, I have something to sell and you have, I don't know what I'm selling and that's all it's about and government should not be intervening. So, suppose in that sense you were asking how it's regarded, I suppose in that sense you could say it's regarded as a stronger in its defense of the free market than the mainstream. So, if you think of the mainstream, let's say the Chicago School of Economics they would be also saying that the government should stay out of market exchange, but they would be conceding, I think conceding is a good word, they would be conceding that sometimes government interventions may be useful. So, somebody like Hayek would be, I think, a good example of that, even though he's regarded as an Austrian, he would be regarded as closer to the Chicago way of thinking in that sense where you say sometimes you may need government interventions, for example, for education you know, unemployment sport or things like that. How the Austrian school would be regarded would be saying no, you don't need government interventions because government interventions make things worse. So, that's the way to be regarded and as we live in a very strongly pro-interventionist society today, that's regarded by many people as complete anathema. Like, well, what do you mean we don't need the government to intervene if governments don't intervene, who's going to protect us? And that again has been a very strong theme in my work where I'm saying this idea that you need the government to protect you is driven by fear of markets which is an unwarranted fear. And if you're going to say, well, you know, in markets things could go wrong and I could end up in a very bad place and that's why I need some protection. You could say the same about governments. Governments intervene, they try to make things better, they make things a whole lot worse and so that's what we're trying to show. I think is that interventionism tends to be judged and this is a point that's been made by many economists, not just Austrians. So, if you think of somebody like Walter Williams, who wasn't an Austrian, he also often made a point that we shouldn't judge government interventions by their intentions. All the government wants to help everybody but by their effects and their outcomes and that's what I think the Austrian school emphasizes. So, that's how it would be regarded I would say in that sphere of the economic world. It's completely fascinating and it will resonate absolutely with our audience. I mean, we have an international audience but certainly the British contingent among that will recognise absolutely your point that government intervention simply makes things worse and that's becoming more readily observable by each passing day. That being the case, how do you and those that share your views and the sort of practical approach to Austrian economics, how do you exert influence? So, it's always been very important as part of the Mises Institute to say that we're not a think tank. That's why I said earlier that we're a school of economics and I would say teaching economics, especially to students is the primary activity but not just to students but to anybody it's a lifelong learning process. So, we're not a think tank, we're not there to write, I don't know, policy papers that influence, I don't know, the movers and shakers of the world. Truth and reality is very important to what we're doing and what we write about even though it may be that that's going to be rejected by whoever's making decisions about, I often refer to them in my informal writing as our lords and masters. Okay, maybe they don't care about truth or reality but we are insisting that truth matters, reality matters, so I've had a few recent articles on that. I'm critical of this idea that, oh, there's no such thing as truth, you have your truth, I have my truth and, you know, there's no such thing as reality, reality is a social construct, you make your reality, I make mine. So, we are talking about truth and reality without regard to whether the government is listening or whether it's influencing them or not. They probably don't care what we're saying but we want to reach people out there who are looking around and thinking something doesn't seem right. So, just to give an example of what I'm describing in my last book which I co-authored with my Mises colleague David Gordon, it's called Redressing Historical Injustice, and in the forward to that book, the preface to that book, I should say, David Gordon writes that we know that our view may not be popular, we know that our view may not be influential, we're saying we shouldn't be paying reparations to people for historical injustices that happened before any of us were born, and we know that may not be a popular view because what's popular is for people to say oh, I want my reparations, I want my money from the government, so we know it's not a popular view but we still think it's important to express truth and we also believe that many people out there want to know what's true. So, that's who we're trying to reach. Yes, I think really, when I was talking about influence, you're quite right to clarify there, of course, that you're not in any way a think tank and you're not seeking to have that sort of engagement, but I think really I meant through the sort of alumni body, you know, those that have been educated by you and your colleagues, where do they go off to and what sorts of things are they getting involved in, but you can sort of track that you know, that path through. Well, that's a good question, I'm not sure that I'd be best qualified to talk about that because I haven't tracked it myself, but just based on what I can see, and from the students that I've met and people that I've met at Mises conferences, there are people in all walks of life doing all kinds of, you know, they're lawyers, they're doctors, they're economists, they're academics, they are businessmen, homemakers, you know, young students, young teenagers, as older students at university, so it's a whole spectrum of people. We're in all walks of life, and that is actually the goal because we think of economics as life, as what we do as our daily interactions, we don't think of it as some, you know, some specialist activity that a few, you know, a chosen few are going to be participating in, so that, you know, we have Austrians everywhere. I read somewhere, I forget who it was who said this, who said that if you're thinking, if you're thinking rationally, and if common sense is important to you, and if you're interested in how society's ordered, and you're interested in what works, and you're interested in productivity and prosperity, then you're probably an Austrian, these are the principles of Austrian economics, so I wouldn't say there's a specific field of influence that Austrians are in, I would say that they're everywhere, and in more recent years, I think we've seen a lot of influence in people interested in the idea of peace, and of not being constantly, people constantly at each other's throats fighting and trying to amass you know, armies behind them to sort out their differences and to say no, that's not how we're, that's not how civilized societies sort out their differences, so the influence of Austrians economics is spreading, I think, in all these different fields. That's terrifically heartening, especially as I say in the current academic climate, or at least the way that it seems to be going in Western world. Tell me though, because I wonder how this translates, I think people listening and watching will absolutely follow exactly what you're saying and completely understand the sense in it, how though on a practical and personal level, do you either individually or sort of in the way that you would suggest to other people, how do you practice that, how do you sort of disassociate yourself from government influence at the individual level? Right, thanks, that's a good question, so my input into this, as I say, my background is in academic law, and I think I was mentioning earlier how much people have forgotten what I consider to be our fundamental principles of Western civilization, if I can put it that way. So just to give you an example, this is something that I've noticed, as I say, I've been teaching in law schools for about 30 years now. In many different countries, I spent some years in Oxford, I spent some years in Cambridge, LSE, I spent some years in Canada as well, so I think I've experienced quite a wide range of students, and what I've started to notice over the years is that they're forgetting what we used to think of as common sense principles. They don't hear it at school anymore, all they hear at school these days is, you know, anti-racism, diversity, that's all they hear, and nobody talks to them about things we used to think of as common sense, like the importance of the individual, and of free will, and of choice, these kinds of ideas. I remember when I was at school, we were constantly being told that it was up to us to make the right choices and that the future is in our hands. Almost daily in assembly, we got this message. Now the only message they get daily in assembly is people are oppressed, if you're black, you're so oppressed, if you're white, you're oppressing everyone, that's all that we hear. So what happens at the end when you see them at university, they have no concept of, I'll just give you an example so the discussion doesn't get very theoretical. To give you an example, teaching equality law, looking at the Equality Act, which is a statute, and normally when you're reading statutes in law school, the words of the statute matter, that's the whole point of statutes. It's not like reading cases where you're trying to understand the facts, you're trying to understand the context, the history, the, when you're reading statutes, the words matter, so you get students to read the words, and it states very clearly in the Equality Act that this is a duty on public bodies. It's a duty on employers. That's very clearly stated. And so you ask a follow-up question to students about, you know, 20, 21 years old. Do you have a duty to observe the Equality Act when you're choosing your friends? Can you discriminate against people when you're choosing your friends? They say, oh no, no, no, you can't, that's illegal. The Equality Act says it's illegal. Nowhere in the Equality Act does it say it is illegal to choose friends, you know. It doesn't say that, so where are they getting that from? It's somewhere, I would say, almost in the air around them, that they're thinking only it must be illegal. Even though the words don't say that, they start thinking maybe I'm reading it wrong, because from what I've been told my whole life, this is illegal, you're not supposed to do this, it doesn't even matter. Sometimes I push them, just to be the devil's advocate I say. So when you're going on holiday with your friends, should you make sure that all your friends represent different races? Then they start thinking, yeah, you know, this is what equality law says we should do, which it isn't. So that's just to give you an example of what I think is important in terms of my own influences, to say to people, look at the laws that you're making, look at how they're being enforced, think about the lies, I think lies is a good word. To use, think about the lies that you hear around you and be prepared to stand up and say, no, that's not true. And then here you come up to the other problem where people say, well, what do you mean? That's not true. That's true for the person who's talking. So again, we're back to that issue where they've forgotten what truth is. So I make very simple points. I say read what the government is telling you, push back if you think it's not true, push back if you think it's wrong, remember what's right and what's wrong, remember your own liberties and don't be beguiled by people saying it's the progressive way where you have to follow. You know, all kinds of rubbish that they tell people, here's what you have to follow because it's progressive and normally you'd expect any common sense observer to say, well, no, that's rubbish, but they don't. They just think, oh, well, maybe if this is what all my professors are telling me, maybe this is what's what's right. And I really, I strongly argue against that. Even to the point where I think as you've probably heard, these days in the academic context, if you stand for common sense people, you get students complaining. They say, oh, I'm offended. I don't feel safe. So it's very hazardous to even speak about very basic truths such as I'm describing, which are not even controversial. It absolutely is. And as you say, it begs us to believe that any of that could be regarded as controversial, but let's make a better effort to get into something that is more controversial. So we'll deal with racism and specifically the definitions of it, because as you say, common sense is one thing people should read stuff, but even when they do, so what I've done is I've got the dictionary definition from Merriam-Webster and then how they added to it in 2020, which you, I'm sure, could probably get rid verbatim off the top of your head, but for the audience, the original definition was that racism is a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. Now, in 2020, in the wake of the, well, the sort of enormous surge of, I suppose, support for the Black Lives Matter movement, they added, as a secondary definition, the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another, and then just to help everybody understand what they meant. They said specifically white supremacy, sorry, white supremacy, so which, if either of those definitions of racism would you go along to, with, rather, and how would you sort of critique that? I would critique all of it. The second definition you read is just critical race theory. That's what critical race theory teaches, and that's why people have been so against it, because it teaches, well, the whole thing that you read out. One race is good, one race is bad, the bad race is oppressing the good race, white people are always guilty. In fact, I think they call bad things by a new name, which is whiteness. So, you know, anything, anything they see, or look at this, going on in society, they say, "Oh, well, that's called whiteness." That's why they say abolish whiteness, destroy whiteness. There was this, Dr. Shola, who wrote, eradicate whiteness from the face of the planet. They can say this because they're saying whiteness just means oppression. So, they can say anything. They can say, "What was the other thing?" They said, "Slash the throat of whiteness." They can say, "Kill whiteness," because to them whiteness is just, they say it's not people, it's just systems of oppression. So, it's fine to talk like that. It's a metaphor. It's terrible, terrible language, and many people, and this goes back to what I was saying about common sense, many people, they just find that appalling, that you can speak in this way, and that's why in some states in the United States, like Alabama, critical race theories banned, you can't teach it in public schools because it's this abhorrent ideology. So, I'm obviously against it, and I think that most people are. The only people who support it are a tiny minority of committed ideologues, who have some kind of twisted Marxist way of understanding the world, and that's why they have all these new ways of understanding racism. So, I think most people are against that, but I'm also against the previous, what you could call the normal idea of racism that we used to have in, I guess you could say, the 1960s. So, that's what people call the old idea of racism, where you say it's about discriminating against people. So, to take the classic case of the employment law, where you get two applicants, black and white, and then you say, "Oh, I don't like black people, so I'm going to hire the white person." So, that's the old style of racism, and people say, "Well, that kind of racism was wrong." Well, I no longer accept that that kind of racism was wrong because, well, two things, first because of I support freedom of contract, as I was saying earlier, and we can talk about freedom of contract later if you want to, but there's a second problem with it, which is that the minute you start to yield, maybe the best phrase is given inch and they take a mile, the minute you start saying, "Oh, yes, racism is terrible, and people are suffering." Even though you have in mind that old correct idea of what is racism, so you're saying it's terrible, people are suffering from it, we need to, what's the word that you stamp out, racism, the minute you concede that, you've just opened your gates to the insane people. You really have, because there is no way to distinguish between them, and this is another important point that I frequently make, so people say, "Well, there's good anti-racism, and then there's insane anti-racism." So, they say, "We can keep good anti-racism, we just won't do the insane anti-racism." And I always ask them, how are you going to do that? How are you going to promote anti-racism and enforce anti-racism and ensure that the only people doing that are the good people? How on earth would you do that? It's impossible. So, I'll give you a practical example again from the university's context. So, people come up with, let's say so far it looks like a sane idea, and say, "Let's diversify the curriculum." So, so far it sounds pretty sane. It doesn't sound crazy anyway. It sounds like somebody just saying, "Oh, well, let's read widely." So, you think, "Yeah, cool. Let's read widely." They say, "So, we don't want a predominance of Eurocentric views." In the curriculum we want worldviews, other views. So, you think, well, you know, that still sounds reasonable because it sounds like all you're saying is, expose the students to different literatures. I think everybody would say, "Yeah, great. Expose the students to different literatures." They then say, "We need to make space in the library for different literatures." So, again, it's all sounding very sensible. People go along with a whole lot of it. This thing called decolonize the curriculum. Next thing you know in the newspapers, they've abolished saying Angla Saxon. They've axed Jane Austen from the curriculum because she's complicit in slavery. They're telling academics that if you want a promotion, you have to show what anti-racism you're teaching in your classes. Mathematics is racist. We need ethnic mathematics. Computer sciences racist. Physics is racist because Isaac Newton, I forget what he did, he was complicit in slavery. So, before you know it, that's where you are. And what I say to people is, if you're saying you want to do the good anti-racism and you don't want to do the insane anti-racism, where are you going to draw the line and how? So, they say, well, you know, you can put the right people in there who are not the activists because it's the activists who do all this insane stuff. So, if you just put the sensible people to do the anti-racism, then we're going to do good anti-racism. So, here's my question. What sensible physicist, let's say you're a nuclear physicist. You've been reading physics your whole academic career. What sensible nuclear physicist is going to devote his career henceforth to telling you who is white, who was a racist, who invested in, I don't know, what, slave ships. He wants to do nuclear physics, right? So, you always end up with the activists doing these jobs. People who have no education except for a degree in grievance studies. Those are the only people who want to do this anti-racism, decolonized. So, I think one decolonized book we had recently was called "The Psychosis of Whiteness." So, the person who wrote that psychosis of whiteness is a professor of black studies. These are the people in a department of black studies. These are the people who want to do this work, and it will always be that way. You are never going to persuade a brain surgeon in the medical school who you think he's the sensible person. You are never going to persuade him to stop doing brain surgery because you want a sensible person to reorganize the library and take out all the non-canonizer books. So, the problem is inherent in this idea that we need to stamp out racism, and that's why I say to people forget stamping out racism. First of all, we live in the least racist age of all time. Tony Sewell did a whole study of that and wrote a report. He was commissioned to write a report on this in the UK some years ago, where he says the UK is not a racist society. You aren't going to not get a job because you're racist. So, forget about stamping out racism, and let's focus on the things we should be focusing on like, how to get students a good education, how to support them in an increasingly challenging world. You know, all these challenges, how to fix our healthcare systems, all these challenges we should be focusing on, so much so called racism. Well said. Now, what I want to go back to is your reference to twisted Marxism, which I think can be used as the sort of touch paper for an awful lot of things that we might regard as having gone very, very wrong indeed. And to cite an example, I just refer to a comment you made on Twitter, or X, as we are now supposed to call it, recently about a horrific work of public art that's about to be put up in London, or possibly has, by the mayor, Sadik Khan. And you began your message with blacks are so gullible, and then you went on to effectively sort of paraphrase what Khan was saying, which was that you're so important, and we can show how much your lives matter by celebrating your criminals, a reference to George Floyd having previously been sort of represented in sculpture. Now, for those that can't see this broadcast, Wenjuru is black and I am white. My question, therefore, is how much pushback do you get when you make remarks like that? And what do you think would happen if I'd sent that message? I don't think I get pushed back. What I get is people trying to silence me. You know, with very crude methods. You know, I don't tend to get anybody pushing back on my arguments. I don't tend to get people saying, "No, you're wrong. Black people are not gullible. Black people are not celebrating criminals." In fact, the criminal I had in mind that was, yes, George Floyd, his murals are everywhere, and the school children being told to kneel down and worship him. But it wasn't just George Floyd, it was also that criminal that the mayor of London erected in Trafalgar Square on the fourth plinth. He murdered British settlers in Malawi. It was a gruesome attack. He beheaded one settler whose descendants, you know, this is, to them, its recent history. You know, to them, this isn't ancient history. This was their grandfather. I think because his daughter was only four years old, about four years old at the time, and she was there. So this, to the family, it's not ancient history. And they see the man who murdered their grandfather, the great-grandfather, on a plinth in Trafalgar Square, and they're upset. Of course, they're upset and distressed. So that's what I'm against. Nobody ever pushes back and tells me, no, we think it's okay to, you know, we think it's okay to celebrate murder as we think it's good to celebrate John. Nobody ever pushes back on the arguments. Instead, they just try to silence me typically. First of all, they'll say, oh, you're not, you're not really black. You're a white man onto it up pretending. You're a white man onto it up pretending you're a black woman. It was a picture I did used to you. So you got those nutters. But then you also get the ones who know me saying, oh, you're just saying what someone paid you to say. Well, all these are ways of trying to tell me to stop saying this because they're saying, oh, stop whatever your paymasters have told you to say. They never address the arguments, which shows that they have no arguments to make in sport of what they're doing. What would happen to you if you were to say this, well, goes back to what we were saying about racism. They'll say, you're a racist. That's why you're saying that. And that's why I think this links very well to the point I was making earlier, which is I was trying to say there's no good form of stamping out racism because it'll be used in exactly a case like that where they'll say, oh, you're only saying that because you're a racist and we're trying to stamp out racism. Therefore, we're going to stamp you out. Absolutely. No, I mean, I think you put that so well and it will absolutely, well, it highlights the absurdity of the situation, but it articulates it very well. Now, let's get into property rights, freedom of contract. And just I mean, one of the big areas of this, as you say, is sort of reparations and claiming land from, you know, time gone by. I mean, how is that manifesting now? And really, what's your view of these claims that we see in various parts of the world where people appear to be sort of being put up to making claims for land that they say belong to their ancestors? Right. So I want to talk about freedom of contract specifically later because that's linked also to what we were talking about racism. But on this question of reparations and people asking for land, one reason why my colleague, David Gordon, and I wrote this book, Redressing Historical Injustice, was because we wanted to address all the arguments that are presented to support reparations, because what tends to happen in the public debate, people will raise one argument. And if you counter that argument, they don't engage with your counter argument. They just move to a different argument. When you counter that one, they move to a different argument. And then they soon they'll be right back to square one. But the point is that the debate tends to go round in circles. And so you can never pin them down. So they'll start by saying that's the argument that you mentioned earlier. You stole my land. I actually wrote an article with this exact title that's just published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies where the title is, "You stole our land." So that's what they start by saying because left of land is something that everybody would say is wrong. So if you stole somebody's land, you should give it back. So they start by saying, "You stole our land." And you then ask them to prove it and they can't. And this is one point that I have often made, is that if people could prove that the land was stolen, they wouldn't be in the news saying you stole our land. They'd be in court. That's where you go when you have evidence of your being that was stolen or you go to the police and you say my car was stolen. And here's my, you know, proof that it's my car. So the mere fact they're saying this is the proof that they have no evidence. And when you ask them for evidence, they then shift to another argument saying, "Well, you shouldn't ask me for evidence because it's a historical crime. I don't have evidence. It's a legacy of oppression." The legacy, the evidence of the legacy is you can see how oppressed I am. But what's the evidence of that? Oh, it's the discrimination. I'm so discriminated against that this shows. So this is the way that the argument starts slipping from one point to another. And so we thought if we put all the arguments together in a book, we can show how all the arguments are wrong. None of the arguments stand up. And the only way they're able to create the perception that they have a good argument is because in the public debate typically they will be making one simple point. They will be saying something like one thing they like to do is to show grievances. So they'll say, look, look, look at what happened in this event when my people were attacked by the brutal police. What's that got to do with you want this land? Nothing at all. But it's a kind of emotional way of making people feel like, oh no, these poor people whose ancestors suffered so much, we better give them what they're asking for. There's nothing to it. And moreover, and I think this is one point I want to make, none of the arguments that we have advanced in our book are new that we've come up with. These are arguments that have been made over the years. In fact, going back into the, I don't know, into the depths of time, you can see from the enlightenment, people were saying we can't just, civilized people can't be constantly fighting blood feuds. You know, they're fighting England stole from Scotland. But if you go back Scotland stole from England. But if you go back, it was the romance. Oh, but if you go back, it was the Vikings. And, you know, this went on for centuries until people realized this is ridiculous. There has to be an end to this feuding about history. We should just focus on property rights, freedom of contract, freedom of association. That's the only way a civilized society can continue. So that's really the point that we're making in our book. And just to go on, on that theme, particularly on the freedom, the idea of freedom of contract, but also if you can, I mean if it doesn't work, then we can do it as a follow-up question. But coming back to the idea of capitalism as a mechanism by which racism is effectively sort of neutralized, are you able to tie that into sort of an answer? But if we can deal with those sorts of things, yeah. So, and I think this is a theme that came up earlier when we talked about racism and people saying I've suffered racism, I've suffered, you know, whatever, I go into the library, there are no books of my culture. You know, all these kinds of arguments. And I have persistently said, none of that matters. This is to do with, and this is something perhaps we can talk about later. This is a kind of socialist way of thinking that if I have problems, I need to get the government to come fix that for me. Because if you take a very simple example like, you know, I'm struggling to find work, I'm applying for jobs and people aren't hiring me and I suspect that that's because of my race. They don't like black people. The government needs to come and fix that. No, the government doesn't need to come and fix that. Actually, oddly enough, many people struggle to find work. White people struggle to find work. White men struggle to find work. I mean, ask anybody, have you ever struggled to find work? And you would see it's a very common, there are deprived communities in England that are majority white. They're struggling to find work. So that's the first thing. Freedom of contract is a way of saying we think about exchange with other human beings without regard to race. We think about how's the market? How's the labor market? Who's hiring? We think about these things without regard to race. People who say, oh, well, the libraries are not very decolonized because when I went to my university library, there wasn't a book about my race. And I always say to people, what's the matter with you? Go in a book shop and buy the book about your race. That's how freedom of contract fixes that. And then they say, well, I haven't got any money. I want a free book in the library. If you go on Amazon and you type in a book about your race that you really, really want to read, someone selling it to you for pennies. And this is what I mean when I say freedom of contract in the market liberates. That's how you buy books about whatever you want to read. So my parents are a good example of this. So my parents were in the States in the 1960s when I cannot show you the libraries were not decolonized, although I don't know the curriculum wasn't decolonized. And they bought a whole load of books by African writers because they could. You know, you went into a bookstore and there was the African section and that was brilliant because you could buy books from all these African writers and you could read them. That's how freedom of contract and free markets liberates people. You can find anything you want. And what we should do is encourage people to find market solutions to their problems and not say, you know, you vote for somebody that's going to give you free stuff that's going to promote your race and your values. So that's why I think it always comes down to freedom of contract because without freedom of contract, then yes, you're stuck. If you don't have contracts, if you don't have exchange, if you don't have markets, then yes, you could say you're stuck and your only option at that point is to try and get the government to help you because you have no other options. That's why I think freedom of contract is so important. And I always assure people there's always somebody out there who wants to hire you. It's not necessary that everybody must want to hire you and set up the red carpet when they see you coming. You just need one job because you're one individual. There's always somebody there who wants to pay you because you can do the job they need to be done. That's, you know, your dollar and my dollar had the same color. So that's how markets liberate. It's a very strong message. I think especially for younger people and parents and educators, there is a growing sense certainly in the United Kingdom. And I think a lot of, as I say, the Western world will want to put a better descriptor that education certainly in the first few stages of life is becoming more or less indoctrination and that people are going to face increasingly sort of limited opportunities for reaching the points of view that you're discussing now. I mean, if it's possible to sort of give advice or describe ways in which people could take action against this as they have children in the education system or from outside of it, where would you point people? Wow, that is such a big, unimportant question about what people can do because this ideology for our children is poisonous. It's okay for us. We're a little bit robust because, you know, we're not at school. But if you think about young children who are hearing this every day being told, you know, it's hopeless. You are so doomed. There's nothing that you can do to fix your situation. One example that I like to give that was covered in the Daily Mail. I think it was in the Daily Mail. I saw it. It was it was a nine-year-old boy at school. He was he was in the year. No, he wasn't nine because he was in year six or seven. Anyway, young boy at school, black boy in a Scottish school with very few black children and the head of the school decided to do anti-racism in the school assembly and thought, oh, there's a black child in my school. I'll get him to come in front of the entire school assembly and tell us how oppressed he is. And this poor boy had no warning. So he was at assembly. He was only. I remember him being very young, no more than he was maybe 10 or 11. At his school assembly called out in front of the entire school for being black and told, oh, you poor oppressed thing. Tell the school how oppressed you are. You have no idea. This is terrible. What can we do? It's so difficult because I do accept that some of these heads are well-meaning. They probably think, oh, I don't want to be a racist. I want to help anti-racism. So it's very difficult to come up with a solution that will work for everything. So some people say, oh, no, those teachers are not well-meaning. They're activists. You should fire them. You can't just fire all the teachers. You literally can't go into school and say, oh, all of you are a load of Marxist activists. You're all fired because they get this at teacher training. That's the other thing. It's coming from the teacher training. So you get a whole graduating cohort of teachers who are peddling these Marxist theories and you just can't fire them all. You'd have to close the schools. So it's difficult to find a solution. What I try to do is to encourage parents. There's a lot you can do at home to talk to your children, to inoculate them against this. I know it isn't easy because when we went to school, parents told us, listen to your teacher and do what your teacher tells you. And actually, if you defied the teacher, you'd been trouble at home as well for having done that. So it's very hard, I think, for those of us with children in school to tell them if your teacher tells you you're oppressed, that is not true. Or if your teacher tells you you're an oppressor, that is not true. So in Canadian schools, to give an example, as I know you have an international audience, they have schools where they get every single morning to tell the children to declare that they live on stolen land. They're basically squatters. Your parents stole this land and now look here, we all are squatting on other people's land aren't we terrible. They tell this to little children. There was an Australian mother with a young child in kindergarten, so three or four years old, very, very young, who came home and said, are we bad people? Because that's what they were learning in kindergarten. So I try to encourage parents to talk to their children and to try and counter the narrative that children are getting from school. And I know it's difficult if the teachers are telling your children, or your parents are racists. It puts the children in a very, very difficult position. So this is why some states, I think I said this earlier, like Alabama, they banned this. They just said, you are not allowed to teach children this at school. It's simply prohibited. And then they start saying, well, what about our free speech? We should be able to teach anything you want. And Alabama said, no. That's simply banned. And so I don't know if that's a good solution because it, it, it, and I just wrote an article about this actually. It seems to fly in the face of what we promote, which is free speech and freedom of inquiry. You can't say let's promote freedom of inquiry and then say, you are not allowed to tell the pupils this and you are not allowed to tell them that. It's not a good way to resolve it. So because there's so many different, there's so many spinning plates, what I try to say, and this is what I said in my book, Economic Freedom and Social Justice, it's like playing whack-a-mole. You can't try and put out all the different fires. And what I think is the best way to resolve all these issues is to stop with the whole racism is terrible and we need schemes to promote racism because that's where the rot begins. You can't go into every classroom and see what each teacher is saying. You can't look at everybody's syllabus to see what's on there, but what you can do is to stop promoting anti-racism. It's the fact that it's being institutionally supported. That's the problem because we've always had Marxist teachers, right? I had a Marxist professor at school. They've always been there. That's fine. No one. They didn't cause any harm because people listen and they're convinced or they're not. That's not a problem. The problem we have is when the entire curriculum is promoting this and people are getting fired if they don't do it or being told you won't get promoted. If you don't do it, that's where the problem comes. Absolutely. As you said, it's a very tricky area to even consider offering advice upon, of course. Now, related to this is the concept, the definition of equity, and you've compared it or likened it with apartheid, saying that it's the same thing in different clothes, which I think is very well put. Would you just explain what it is you mean by that? So apartheid was a system of separate development. So the theory behind apartheid was people have different races, have different cultures, races have different priorities, different hobbies, different habits. So they should develop separately because that allows them to decide their own priorities, whatever they want to do. That's what apartheid was in South Africa. So the Africanas would, you know, do whatever it is Africanas like doing and the different African tribes. The Zulu's would do whatever Zulu's want to do and, you know, the Swazis or whoever, they've got their own republic. And every African people would just do whatever it is they want to do. So that was the idea of separate development. You wouldn't have schemes where you're trying to get everybody to be in the same development program. So they had a system of education in Africana schools, and they had a system of what they called Bantu education in the Bantu schools. And it ran separately like this. And everybody said that's abhorrent. People went on marches all across the West saying this is wrong. They didn't separate the races. And they put economic sanctions and collapse the country. Now what is equity saying? Equity is saying, well, some races are oppressed. Now the races are the oppressors. They have different needs because if you don't help the oppressed races, there's no point having equality because they're not in a position to benefit from it due to their legacies of oppression. So we need separate systems so that the oppressed people can have their own safe space. And the oppressors can, I don't know, they can go into room one or one or wherever we send the oppressors. So again, we're separating the races. They have things like blackout theater, which is a theater show only for black people. They have events in schools called. I think they're now calling it affinity groups. The names change, but I think now they're calling it affinity where they say it's only for black people. By the way, they never hold them only for white people. They say it's only for black people because they're the oppressed people. Banks and large corporations saying we have a graduate career track for these race of people to help them. The Bank of England recently had one. It was all over the newspapers where they said we'll get school children to come to the Bank of England and learn about what we do. But it's only for the black children because they're so oppressed. That's exactly the same thing as separate development. You're saying we need different parts of development for people according to their race. It's exactly the same thing just with a different name. I often say if the Africana nationalists had called their scheme equity, it's still being power to this day. It's because they called it a power tie. People said, oh, that's wrong. You can't do that. But we're doing exactly the same thing. We call it equity and everybody says, oh, that's very good. Yes, we should definitely do that. And the other thing they complain about apartheid is they say, well, it was dishonest because even though it was called separate development, they say that actually the separate development was used to favor white people. They called it separate, but they say, well, what they really did was to favor their own. Well, isn't that what equity is? Equity says we want special schemes for black people. But then they're given favors. They're given jobs, opportunities, promotions, pay rises. That's exactly the same complaint we had against apartheid. So it's hypocritical. And I think it's unsustainable for a society to be founded on hypocrisy. I think it matters. So socialists say, and I know that they've said this because they talk about this a lot in the context of the environment. You know, when all these celebrities fly in their jets and then they say, oh, you must all stay at home. And so the idea of hypocrisy has arisen in the environmental context. And what they say is that it doesn't matter if they're hypocrites because they say it's true that the planet is dying. And it's true that if you stay at home, that will help. So never mind whether I'm flying in my private jet because what I'm saying is true. So that's the way they reason. So they reason the same way in relation to equity. They say, well, it's true that equity is just like apartheid, but we are now doing it from good motives. So it doesn't matter if we're being hypocritical. And I'm saying, yes, it does matter. Your society that's founded on hypocrisy is volatile because first of all, people don't like hypocrisy. They become resentful. They become angry. They will be out on the streets rioting. And you can't fix that by just throwing them all in jail. People don't like to be taken for fools. That's why it matters if we're running a hypocritical system. And that's why it's wrong. I'm against it. You can probably tell the way I got fired up. I think it's very wrong. I have got that impression. I think your tits will too. But you're absolutely right. Hypocrisy is the defining theme of this era really. But not to want to sort of put a donor on it with that in mind. And the fact that exactly like what you're saying with apartheid and equity and that history is not necessarily a repeating, but certainly rhyming. How do you see this going? I know that's a terribly general question, but I mean, do you see that there will be an increasing sense of revulsion at all of this and that people will start to take greater control of the public sphere and sort of beat governments back? I think, and I think a lot of people have said this, that as long as the sensible middle or what likes to think of itself as the sensible middle, as long as they're doing nothing, because they don't suffer from all this that much. I know because many of them are my friends. They say, "Oh, it's appalling. This shouldn't be..." But they're not really that bothered, frankly. It's not affecting their life that much. Sure, they may think that's terrible if the children are being told that they're oppressors. But it's not affecting them that much. They'll just tell their children, "Oh, pay no attention." And they'll move on. And they don't realize there's actually a group of people out there who don't have the luxury of saying it doesn't matter that much. There are people. Let's give the example of these training schemes, career tracks, telling people, I think Apple was the one in the news the other day. Goldman Sachs was also in the news for doing this. So let's take those kinds of schemes where you tell people, "This is a track for getting a job, and it's only for black people." There are actually people who have no other options. They're in school. That was their hope that they hoped I could have an opportunity. That's closed off to them because of their race. They aren't in the sensible middle where they can say, "Oh, well, it doesn't matter that that's unfortunate. I'll go find something else." They actually feel that their one hope has been cut off. Of course, they get resentful. That's what people are now calling the far right. Saying, "Well, they don't like diversity. That's because they're the far right." No. They're not the far right. They're people saying, "Where do I go now?" Another point that they've been trying to make is a lot of diversity people have, I don't know, other countries they can go to. Look, if you're a global citizen that lives anywhere, then if the country you're living in collapses, you just hop along to another country. There are a lot of people who are saying, "I don't have that option. This is my country, and this is my only option. If I'm locked out of all opportunities, well, that's the end of that." They start to feel desperate. They start to feel like they're back against the wall. If they feel they have nothing to lose because their back is against the wall, it becomes very dangerous. I always say, "You can't just tell people not to be, what do they call it?" Radicalized. You can't just tell people, "Well, don't be radicalized." Because they will be radicalized. You're oppressing them, oddly enough. So this is why I think it's very dangerous. And who can we appeal to? I think, and what I try to do, if I can, is to appeal to what you might call the sensible middle who are saying, "Well, it's terrible, but it's not that bad." It is that bad. And I think that we should end what we call, we'll just do good equality. Oh, one thing that they like to say is, "We will not do equity, but we will do equality." And I like to say, "No." Because when you say you're doing equality, that's what we end up with, and that's why it's wrong for us to do it. So these are the people I try and reach. The people who think, "Oh, everything's going a little bit wrong, but it's not very wrong. It is very wrong." Absolutely is. And I think that's a poignant note upon which to begin to draw to a close. And Jiruru, people will have been fascinated in everything that you've gone through to this point. And I know that we would have had ours more of various topics to talk through. But please tell us, where can we go to look further into your work? And indeed, I know you're obviously on X. Where can people find more about what you're doing? Right. Thanks so much for the great questions. These issues, I think, are so important. And if you go on the Mises website, that's M-I-S-E-S dot org slash Joya, my surname, N-J-O-Y-A. I've written about all the things that we've talked about because I tried to situate it in, as I said earlier, the wider literature. And so if you go on there, I mean, it's not just me also, my other Mises colleagues writing about these themes. That's the best place to go to read more about this and maybe think more about what can be done. And you are on Twitter as well. But I can't remember what your Twitter name is. My Twitter handle is @JiruruJaya, which is just my name. So you can find me on there. Absolutely. And as I said at the beginning, we'll make sure that all that goes into the notes accompanying this interview. So when, thank you very much indeed. Now, just a quick one to the audience who will have had an awful lot to think about. But I'd just like to say, please do consider supporting UK column financially, if you're not already doing so, but are in a position to, it's five pounds a month, and it will help us to continue to bring interviews of this quality to you. But it's been a real pleasure to listen to Wang Jirri. Thank you so much for joining us. And I hope you'll keep in touch. Thank you so much for having me on your show. And thanks so much for the great questions and discussion. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We're going to the audience. 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