HS 152 – The Agorism Revolution With Austin Petersen

Austin Petersen is the Director of Production at FreedomWorks and was an associate producer for Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show, “Freedom Watch” on Fox Business. Petersen built Napolitano’s social networks and manages them currently boasting over 350,000 fans and millions of clicks a month. Austin is also the CEO of Stonegait Pictures, a photo/video production company.

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Petersen grew up on a farm in Peculiar, Missouri. Graduating from Missouri State University with a degree in Fine Arts, Petersen moved to New York City to pursue a career in media. After three years of working in the entertainment business, Petersen became engaged in politics during the 2008 Presidential election cycle and moved to Washington, DC to accept a job at the Libertarian National Committee.

In 2009, Petersen accepted a position with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation as the New Media Program Manager and Video Producer until his return to New York City in 2010 for “Freedom Watch.”

Austin’s most recent project, Alongside Night-The Movie, makes history by introducing the world to the philosophy of Agorism for the first time on the big screen. Agorism is a revolutionary philosophy and counter-economic approach to “starving the beast” of big government through the last, true free market, the black market.

Check out this episode

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Start of Interview with Austin Petersen

Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Austin Petersen to the show. He is Director of Production at FreedomWorks as well as the Executive Producer and CEO of Stonegait Pictures, LLC, a for profit consulting firm that provides high end video and photography, as well as consulting services for a wide range of clients. And, Austin, welcome. How are you?

Austin Petersen: I’m great. Thank you very much for having me, Jason.

Jason Hartman: Good, good. I always like to give our guests a sense of geography. Where are you located today?

Austin Petersen: I’m located in Washington, D. C.

Jason Hartman: Fantastic. Well, that’s the mecca of bailouts and the new business capital of the world in a way.

Austin Petersen: Heart of the beast.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, it is. So, tell us a little bit about what it is you do and let’s dive into some subjects ranging from maybe internet sales tax, Bitcoin and the military takeover of Boston recently in the wake of the tragic bombings.

Austin Petersen: Absolutely, yeah. Starting off with probably the most interesting topic for our audiences, the one of the militarization of Boston, and I think the reason that we as libertarians or people who care about freedom need to discuss this is because, libertarians, we often get criticized for not having any sense of security, national security, local security. We talk about the 2nd amendment but we don’t talk about when things like that occur, how do we defend ourselves in such a way so that we don’t feel like we need the state.

Because I think right now the mentality of the American people is such that we expect the police to behave like that because we do not have any sense of get out the posse and ride to find this guy.

And I’m not saying that’s good or bad, but the value question there is that the police, the state, they are going to have a response that is bigger and bigger the more and more people are expecting their security to be contracted out to the state.

Jason Hartman: Let me just mention something, Austin, that’s interesting about the massive, in my opinion, police overreaction to Boston. And just a couple of months ago, you might remember Christopher Dorner, the rogue cop in LA, where the police basically torched someone’s house. I mean, where is the victim of that talking? But what’s interesting about these two cases is in both cases the civilians found the bad guy, not the police.

Austin Petersen: Right, absolutely. But here’s my question to you, and I want to pose this out there as a challenge. People say, well, now they want drones in Boston next year, that they want to have domestic drones. And I’m just curious, is the drone really a problem if the private citizen uses it? And if it’s not a problem for a private citizen to use it, like let’s say my brother, for example, was right in Watertown where that occurred, and let’s say he had an observation drone and wanted to use that drone to go after a suspect or to police around his private property, should there be any restrictions on that? And, if so, what sort of restrictions would apply to private citizens protecting their own property versus the restrictions that libertarians may want to place on the government?

I’m sort of conflicted because drones have existed for quite a long time and private civilians have been using them for years, decades. An RC helicopter is a drone and mounting a camera on it is something that’s kind of been a fad in recent years. But I’m just curious if libertarians are against the use of drones in a situation where instead of rolling tanks down the street or rolling the cops who might arguably be more dangerous, would it be more fiscally conservative and more respective of individual rights if the police were allowed to use drones? And I’m not saying I endorse that, but what I want to ask libertarians or people who believe in this is if private citizens can use them for observation or for defending their own property, could the police use them for defending their own property? And I ask this question to a group of…

Jason Hartman: Wait, did you mean to say that the other way around…Did you mean to say if police can use them, private citizens should be able to use them? Because you said it the opposite way I think.

Austin Petersen: Right. I think the reality is the police are going to take that right to use that.

Jason Hartman: Oh, of course they are.

Austin Petersen: And what I think the argument should be on a libertarian side of things is that anything that the police owned, the private citizen should be able to own as well.

Jason Hartman: Well, you know what’s interesting about that, Austin? Thankfully, a few gun manufacturers feel the same way. I’m sure you caught that in the news about 3-4-5 weeks ago. I think it was a couple of gun manufacturers said we’re not gonna sell any gun to law enforcement that a civilian can’t buy.

Austin Petersen: Right. Well, that’s the thing. When you talk about things like drones, I think what happens sometimes is that libertarians sort of have a knee jerk reaction to this kind of technology because of how it’s being used unconstitutionally by the executive right now. And so I think what has happened that’s muddied the debate in the last few weeks, libertarians are saying, well, we’ve got a ban on drones. We can’t have drones on the homeland. Well, there already are drones on the homeland and I think that the debate should be “What are the constitutional protections that we as citizens are going to lay out for ourselves, respecting our 4th amendment rights and our ability to have the right to be in our homes without unnecessary searches?”

So, if they’re searching for a fleeing suspect, it’s going to be very hard to tell the American people, no, the police should not be able to use drones. Well, basically what you’re saying there is that we have to spend even more money and put police officers in a helicopter and pursue a fleeing suspect through a possible dangerous urban area. So, I want to challenge people to think about these questions because the value questions I think are different from the legal questions. The value questions are do we want drones being used domestically? The answer: no. Are they going to be used domestically? Yes. But can we do something together to use our constitutional due process to make sure that no drones can be used unless authorized by a warrant or in case of exigent circumstances such as this Boston bombing?

And so I think that we as libertarians, we can all agree on the value questions. Do we want a society full of drones? No. Are we going to get a society full of drones? Yes.

Jason Hartman: Yes. We’re not gonna get what we want is what you’re saying.

Austin Petersen: Well, we’re not gonna get that. But what we should be asking for, what we could get are constitutional protections of individual rights, meaning that if the police are using these types of technology, this technology should be open to use. Now, I really, really, really want to stress an important point here because one of the things that libertarians think about is if drones are weaponized and they’re used domestically, well then people are gonna be killed. Yeah, probably. And that is why the difference between a weaponized and a surveillance drone is all the difference because a surveillance drone is something where you had a hostage situation, for example.

You’ve got somebody on the 10th floor, you want to know where the hostages are. Should the police be able to use a surveillance drone after a warn has been issued to go and like put it up on the 10th floor so that you could stealthily find out where your hostages are to secure their safe release? Absolutely. However, the difference between a surveillance drone and a weaponized drone is that it is impossible for a drone to be placed in imminent danger, meaning that if a robber comes out of a store and is shooting and he’s shooting at police, you have a right to shoot him. It doesn’t matter what you shoot him with, but you have a right to fire back and to do that because a life is in imminent danger.

The difference between that and a person and a drone is a drone is not alive. You cannot put the life of a drone into imminent danger. So, if a robber comes out of a store and there is a drone there with a gun, you cannot just kill him because that would be an execution and that will be a violation of due process.

Jason Hartman: Oh, now this is interesting. I’m not sure people, including myself, fully grasp what you’re saying there. Are you saying the military or the civilian police force cannot put say a police officer into imminent danger? They seem like they’re in imminent danger frequently.

Austin Petersen: No, a person can be in imminent danger. The question here is how is it legal and ethical to use drones? And using them for surveillance, 1, has been issued, seems to me to be ethical and as long as it doesn’t violate our 4th Amendment rights and we’ve got those kinds of constitutional protections, fine. However, the reason why domestic drones should not be allowed to be armed is this: If domestic drones are armed and they’re sent in to chase someone down and execute them, that is a violation of due process. If a police officer is chasing a suspect and his life is in imminent danger because the suspect starts shooting at them, the officer has a right to fire back. Now, if a suspect is fleeing and they’re being chased by a weaponized drone and they shoot at the drone, it doesn’t matter. The drone is just a piece of plastic. You can’t just execute someone with a drone unless someone else’s life is in imminent danger.

And these are legal questions that libertarians really have to understand because the difference between a surveillance drone and a weaponized drone is night and day. And a weaponized drone is something that is used for assassinations. It should absolutely not be used on the homeland because a weaponized drone used on the homeland would be a violation of due process.

Jason Hartman: But you know, I mean Obama’s already shown that he’s quite willing to violate people’s due process and hunt essentially American citizens for execution. So, we both well know we are going to see weaponized drones, more and more military style weapons used on the homeland, which is unconstitutional in my opinion, clearly, against American citizens which even makes it more unconstitutional. And when you talk about the surveillance drones, I mean we should have some way to electronically defeat their surveillance and protect our constitutional rights.

Austin Petersen: Yeah, you should because the thing is if a drone is flying over your home and they don’t have any warrant to be flying over your home then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to sort of defend against that. The problem is do you own the private property of the air above your head?

Jason Hartman: Not usually, we don’t usually own the airspace. But even if it’s not a home that you own, what if you’re a tenant? The problem is you get into this whole issue that the lawyers use called expectation of privacy. So, when you’re outdoors, even if you’re in your own backyard and you’re sunbathing with no clothing, nudist sunbathing, do you have a right to privacy in your backyard? It’s outdoors. I mean, Barbara Streisand sued a photographer years ago for taking pictures of her home from the air. And I don’t know what the outcome of that case was but she basically claimed it was a violation of her right to privacy.

Then it gets into, for example, I live in a high rise and I’ve actually seen this – it’s pretty amazing – I mean, it’s kind of a cool thing that happens occasionally here – but a helicopter will fly not above me or not even at my own eye level but below me. That’s how high my building is. And if a drone flies by, they could look in my windows now. I am so high up in the air that I almost never close my blinds because I have an expectation of privacy being this high and I pay a lot for that. So, there are all sorts of issues there that are very important, but the drone thing is really, really scary. And I think every American should be extremely fearful of the way they’re being used and the way they’re going to be used which will be much more invasive than it is now.

Austin Petersen: Right. I hate to use the word “fearful” because I don’t like to be like the politicians and tell people they should be afraid or anything like that.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, but they should be.

Austin Petersen: They shouldn’t be scared. We should be brave. Because if we’re going to take our country back and we’re gonna demand protections of our rights that have been engrained in the constitution, then I think we have to be brave and bold and we have to be able to fight back with the question with boldness because if they’ve got us afraid, then we start behaving on their terms. We need to take the battle to them.

Jason Hartman: Fair enough. So, talk about that a little bit. I think everybody kind of gets the whole drone problem, at least after listening to us for a few minutes here. But any action steps that you can recommend that people can do to really get this under control? Because this technology is scary. And, folks, just one more thought on this, and feel free to comment on this, too, but these drones aren’t what you think. I mean, these drones are getting as small as insects to where now they have drones currently, and they’ll get smaller and better I’m sure, the size of a dragonfly. And a dragonfly isn’t that big. It’s maybe, what, 5 inches long? It’s big for an insect but it’s not big for a drone. They can fly by your window and certainly take pictures and video, but potentially leave things there that can bug your conversation and pick up audio. There’s all kinds of really scary elements to this or elements we should be brave about, however you want to put it.

Austin Petersen: Absolutely. So, here’s the thing that I want to know, and a lot of libertarians talk about things like intellectual property, how there shouldn’t be any intellectual property, but let me just pose another tough question. If a private owner of one of these drones owns a mosquito sized drone and they happen to fly that drone near your property and let’s say you own a computing business to them, and they’re listening to everything you’re saying, they’re recording your movements, they’re recording your business so that they can learn how to basically steal your secret recipe…

Jason Hartman: A little corporate espionage there.

Austin Petersen: A little corporate espionage there. So, it’s not just the government using these things that we necessarily have to look at. It’s how private citizens use them as well. And I guess the question really is do we have a right to privacy? And if we do have a right to privacy, where is that in the constitution and how do we sort of flush out those kinds of privacy rights?

Jason Hartman: And of course we were both saying we do have a right to privacy and we better make sure Facebook and Google know that, too.

Austin Petersen: Yeah, absolutely, but the question there, at least with their corporation, you voluntarily are given your information to the corporation now.

Jason Hartman: Fair enough, and I agree with you, but in practicality, these corporations become so big and so pervasive that I would almost bet that someone like yourself is not on Facebook, but certainly I’m sure you use Google products and right now you’re using Skype which is owned by Microsoft, and I would submit to you that nowadays it’s almost becoming that you need to use Facebook because it would be like years ago not having a telephone. You really can’t fully exist and engage in society without it.

Austin Petersen: Right, yeah.

Jason Hartman: So then it becomes governmental. It becomes an infrastructure issue. And even if it’s a privately owned entity, it becomes like infrastructure.

Austin Petersen: In a sense. I mean, I would be careful about comparing it too much to government because, again, government is coercive. You choose to be on Facebook and I hate to be the corporate defender here, but again I envision a free society where people can form corporations and voluntary leave and go at will, but when it comes to a right to privacy, if you don’t want your privacy violated, don’t be on Facebook. So, I don’t know. I feel like there is a right to privacy, but a right to privacy sort of is null and void when you are voluntarily committing your information to a corporation.

Now, let’s look at this another way. Do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your own home if you are observable in the street? So, if you are let’s say coming out of the shower and you’re nude and someone is standing on the street taking pictures from the street…

Jason Hartman: Yes, you do. There should be no peeping tom. That’s illegal to be a peeping tom.

Austin Petersen: Right, but the question is, what are they really violating? You know what I mean? Because the thing is they haven’t come onto your property, you’re in view, what sort of rights do you have? I mean, all they’re doing is taking a video, for example. They haven’t done anything other than take your picture. I mean, do you own your photo? Do you own your likeness, your image? So, these are the kind of questions that I think libertarians have got to formulate some good answers for because the public, if we don’t come up with better solutions, people are just gonna assume the state, the state every time as a default. So, I think we’ve got to find some sort of intermediary steps for privacy rights for Americans that they can digest so that we don’t have to say that we’re giving up, it’s all or nothing, either way, black or white, republican or democrat. Does that make sense?

Jason Hartman: Yeah, certainly companies have been able to trademark their images of even buildings they own. I read an article years ago, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, about how the owners of the Empire State Building were suing people for selling t-shirts with the image of the Empire State Building on it and what they did to protect it is they went and trademarked the image of the Empire State Building and said, look, we’re the owners of this building, we own its image, and I think to have sovereignty in one’s person, we should be able to own our image. Now, the problem is they’re going to say, similar to the way they view like liable and slander laws, they’re going to say if you’re a celebrity you don’t have the right to it, because then Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien could never tell a joke about a celebrity that’s somewhat defamatory. They’d get sued all the time. But I don’t know – this is the reason we have courts and advocate lawyers, right?

Austin Petersen: Well, some libertarians are even against those. So, we’ve got to figure out what’s the best way for us to protect our rights and how do we define those rights? I think, at the moment, our rights are slipping away in situations like Boston and if anything it’s because libertarians like ourselves are not offering those solutions. We’re sort of just ranting against the state and criticizing the police state but we’re not questioning the legal question. And how come libertarians aren’t set up at Boston, walking door to door at every single door that those thugs knocked on and saying “Here’s a copy of the Constitution. These are your rights, these are your civil liberties, this is what you say when a police officer talks to you, this is how you defend your rights, you know what I mean? Like, why isn’t that happening right now?

Jason Hartman: Yep, very good points. I mean, I saw images and I’m sure a lot of our listeners did of people having guns pointed at them in Boston, being forced out of their homes so the police could invade their home to inspect it.

Austin Petersen: Happened to my brother.

Jason Hartman: Did it really? Wow.

Austin Petersen: Yeah, it did.

Jason Hartman: And then the question comes – in Massachusetts, marijuana is illegal – so what if someone had a marijuana joint sitting out on the countertop when the cops invaded their house without a search warrant, do they then become prosecuted for something else that the cops find that they wouldn’t have otherwise found?

Austin Petersen: Right. That’s why I’m saying to all of our friends who are libertarians in Watertown, Massachusetts in Boston. You need to be going around to those neighborhoods right now and telling everybody who got their house searched these are your rights, you need to know these rights. You don’t even know if you’re going to get your Miranda rights any more in the future if you happen to be born in a different country or have some strange religious beliefs that the majority of people want to persecute. So I think it’s absolutely crucial that Americans are educated on their civil rights, their civil liberties and a constitution. That is the only way we are going to be able to hold off the rising tide of statism in short term until we can begin to take the high ground and start actually being the abolitionists that we want to be with a lot of these bloated government bureaucracies.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, boy, it’s something else. Okay, anything else you want to say about Boston, Watertown? Because I want to just have you touch on a little bit of the Bitcoin phenomenon that’s been pretty largely reported lately and also the internet sales tax issue that, by the way, was just sort of shoved under the rug while Boston was going on, huh?

Austin Petersen: Right, absolutely.

Jason Hartman: Convenient that the media didn’t pay attention to that.

Austin Petersen: Right. And the real issue with the new internet sales tax law, they call it the marketplace fairness law, is that the republicans are the ones for the most part that are kind of coming out and saying, yeah, we need to do this. And sort of what’s happening is that they’re trying to pass the sales tax on the internet. And citizens are going to have to start paying sales taxes to different states which, as it stands, I believe is unconstitutional. And I think that if libertarians don’t get active in this fight right now, we’re gonna find ourselves paying higher taxes for our cell phones online and whenever we purchase things online.

I certainly don’t think it’s fair for someone to have to pay a tax if they don’t have a brick and mortar store in the state. Why are you having me pay a sales tax for a business if it doesn’t have a brick and mortar there? And so what we really need to look at is the fact that we’ve got all these republicans coming out and saying it, like South Dakota governor, Dennis Daugaard. He’s a republican. He’s like “This is a matter of equity and fairness”. Just because the bill is called the Marketplace Fairness Act doesn’t mean it has anything to do with it. They can call it the Don’t Kick Puppies Act.

Jason Hartman: Okay, but I know that. A lot of these bills are total misnomers of course. But I want to almost take the devil’s advocate here on this because I sell online, people buy my products online. I don’t have to worry about complex sales tax issues or anything like that. And if I own a brick and mortar store, I would say it’s just there. All these brick and mortar stores, and a lot of these honestly are mainstream America which I’m not a big fan of the corporatocracy. I mean, I like business better than government, but when it becomes really, really big, big business in Wall Street, they typically become a bunch of abusive crooks. So, I don’t know. I kind of want to see little Main Street businesses able to compete.

Austin Petersen: Yeah, I do. But, just remember, it’s bills like this that make it so that they can’t compete because what happens is that the corporations write the regulations and then the government passes them because the big corporations can afford to pay the regulations and the taxes. It’s the little guys who get screwed because they’re the ones who are going in the marketplace, they don’t have any kinds of subsidies, and they sure as heck can’t afford to pay the higher taxes even though the larger red industries can. That’s why they demand regulation.

Jason Hartman: Of course they do. No, I totally get that because what it does is it creates a barrier to entry and it keeps competition out, no question. And that is what Wall Street and the FCC are all about and the FDA to a large extent, too. So, read Milton Friedman on that stuff, folks, because he’s got some really interesting things to say about licensure in the FDA. I don’t know what he says about Wall Street, but the FDA, he gives some pretty good examples. So, I’ll definitely agree with you on that.

And here’s another thing about it, just going to your side of things, if you do tax online sales, do you realize how complex this gets for every online seller? It’s not a matter of my clients, my buyers will have to pay more so much as it is managing and paying the tax to every little state and municipality. The kind of software and consulting that will be required to maintain compliance for a small internet seller will be unbelievably complex and expensive.

Austin Petersen: Yeah, absolutely.

Jason Hartman: And Amazon.com can do it. It’ll be no problem for them.

Austin Petersen: Right. Because Amazon.com, they support it. But look at eBay. The reason eBay is against it is because they’re composed of mostly smaller sellers. So they’ve got the most to lose. And, again, you talked about fearing the corporatocracy. The big corporations like Amazon, they don’t have as much to worry about. They can implement the software probably with no issues. But then again, when the government says something’s gonna be easy, you know it never is. And so what I think is going to happen is this is going to drive transactions more over to Bitcoin which is really exciting. They call it a cryptocurrency, a digital currency. And it’s sort of had some ups and downs in the marketplace is it sort of struggled to find its place among the world currencies. It’s very exciting, though, right now because it turns out that now physical Bitcoins are going to be offered. Each physical Bitcoin will have a holographic stamp underneath it that you peel off and you can trade them and you can trade the coins and then the way to know not to get a Bitcoin if it has the seal broken, that way you know it’s already been transacted with.

But that to me is an exciting thing because congressman Ron Paul was just complaining last week about Bitcoin. He was saying, oh, well, I like gold better because at least I can carry it around in my pocket. And then turns around, boom, 24 hours later we see that they’re making physical Bitcoins so that people can feel like they got something even if it still has a digital counterpart. So, yeah, to me this is exciting. These are the things that I think libertarians, even though it seems kind of kooky in a way – there are some kooky ides that seemed kooky before they became mainstream – and when the government comes in and says we’re gonna start proposing an internet sales tax, I can pretty much guarantee you that if they do something like that you’re gonna see a rise in value of Bitcoin as people start to look for alternatives to avoid our oppressive taxation system.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, I just caution listeners to be careful of the Bitcoin thing. I mean, you can find many videos on YouTube that explain how it’s a Ponzi scheme. And I don’t know. I’ve studied it and it’s a cool idea. And the other thing is they’ll probably just find a way to make a law against it. Of course, they cracked down a lot on those gift cards and those MasterCards and American Express Cards that you can buy at CVS and Rite Aids and Walgreens or Best Buy because they claim, which may be true, that drug dealers and terrorists were using them and any alternative currency that competes with the Federal Reserve or central banks of other countries, believe me, and this is true with gold and silver, too, there is going to always be a huge very well-funded and very powerful campaign against it, maybe they’ll use the legal tender laws. I don’t know. I’m concerned that they’ll find a way to just outlaw Bitcoin.

Austin Petersen: They really can’t. And the reason is because it’s similar when people say Obama’s going to have an internet kill switch. You can’t do that. And then thing is, the way that internet works, two computers is an internet. Servers exist all over the world with multiple redundancies. And bitcoins, as they work, they aren’t stationed in one area. It’s not like with the liberty bell or where this guy was raided by the feds because he had a store of gold and silver that backed his paper currency that he created.

No, Bitcoins don’t exist like that. They exist as part of an algorithm that exists out on the internet, in the ether, and there’s just no way for any for one person to just hack it and take it down because there’s too many servers all over the world that is carrying this currency. So the exciting thing, really, about Bitcoin is the fact that it is pure anarchy and there’s really nothing that the government can do about it. They can try and shut down certain stores, but those will pop up again. And I think really the question is how willing are people to invest in something that the government will eventually try and regulate?

But, in my opinion, I really think that this is probably going to be the battle lines drawn between the Federal Reserve and the people because when enough people are doing enough transactions – for example, like Cyprus – we saw what happened with Cyprus when the value of Bitcoin soared because everybody in Cyprus was pouring their money into this currency where nobody could steal it, where the banksters couldn’t steal it.

And so I honestly see something like this happening again for things like the internet sales tax. Every time the government acts, the market reacts. And that can be a good thing because what happens is sometimes the black market ends up providing goods and services more efficiently than a regulated market would be. So, I don’t really fear economic crackdowns too much on things like Bitcoin just because I understand how the decentralized nature of that currency works and I love seeing it frustrate the hell out of all these…

Jason Hartman: I do too. I love the fact that it’s bugging them.

Austin Petersen: I do too. I used to work at Fox for two years. I was the producer of Judge Napolitano and I was shocked when I got there because although the technical skill of many of those people is matched by some of the brilliance of some of the people, when it came to just your every day average news anchors, the talent of reading on camera didn’t extend to the brain cells. And what was happening, what I was seeing, is that these are financial experts, blah, blah, blah, but they only know finances that they are taught according to their business schools and they have no concept of economics at large, macroeconomics or microeconomics really. They just know the market.

Jason Hartman: Just like a professor in a school, they’re in a room. They don’t have real world experience usually.

Austin Petersen: Yeah, very rare that you’ll find an anchor who could say “Oh yeah, Bitcoin, a digital cryptocurrency and this is how currencies work, this is how economics work, this is why what’s happening.” No, instead, whenever major financial news occurs that has a libertarian nature they’re confused as hell and then the network executives tell them the fed doesn’t like it. It doesn’t have anything to do with it. So just bash it or just make it look kooky. I had Ron Paul on to bash it apparently I guess.

But no, I’m surprised, but the world is going to see because when people are given the opportunity to do business with one another in a manner that allows them to avoid taxes totally anonymously, you’re going to see more things like Cyprus in the future, and you just watch. Things like Bitcoin are going to proliferate.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, well, very interesting. Well, hey, Austin, give out your website and tell people where they can learn more about you and your work.

Austin Petersen: Sure, absolutely. My website is www.TheLibertarianRepublic.com or you can just go to LibertarianRepublic.com. It’s where I do my op-eds and reporting and I publish a lot of news there that’s relevant to the liberty community. And I also have a Facebook page that I’d like people to go to: Facebook.com/ProducerPetersen. My name is Austin Petersen and it’s spelled all Es, no Os. Those are the two places where I do a lot of my blogging and a lot of my projects come out there. So if you’re looking for Austin Petersen on the net, that’s where you should go.

Jason Hartman: Alright, Austin Petersen, thank you so much for joining us today.

Austin Petersen: Thank you very much, Jason.

Narrator: Thank you for joining us today for the Holistic Survival Show, protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Be sure to listen to our Creating Wealth Show, which focuses on exploiting the financial and wealth creation opportunities in today’s economy. Learn more at www.JasonHartman.com or search “Jason Hartman” on iTunes. This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, offering very general guidelines and information. Opinions of guests are their own, and none of the content should be considered individual advice. If you require personalized advice, please consult an appropriate professional. Information deemed reliable, but not guaranteed.

Transcribed by Ralph

The Holistic Survival Team
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