James Smith and Robbie Bernstein celebrate the show's 500th episode while debunking claims that American wealth relies on slavery, citing the 1865 economy's near-zero value versus today's prosperity. They defend the non-aggression principle against Ben Burgess's critique, arguing it permits defensive force against aggressors like Bush, Obama, and Trump to protect property rights. The hosts reject the "deep state" collusion narrative as a coup attempt, criticize media bias, and announce an upcoming Paley Center appearance on November 25th, asserting that voluntary exchange, not state redistribution, drives genuine economic growth. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Competing Narratives Explained00:12:48
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
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Go grab the shirt.
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We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What is up?
Hope everybody's doing well.
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem, but not just any episode.
This is the final 500th episode of the show.
This is the last time it will be the 500th episode of the show.
You know, the 500th episode only comes around three times, and this is the last one.
We've had a great 500 week here on Part of the Problem.
And for Friday's episode, of course, we have the fire, the king of the caulks, Robbie Bernstein, here to join me back to the business.
This is the motherfucker you know.
To complete the celebrations.
That's right.
You got 99 more episodes on your contract.
But it's the trilogy of the 500th celebrations.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
All great things come in trilogies.
And then maybe we can do memorials of the 500th week.
It's possible.
Anything's possible.
I don't know.
I'm not going to guarantee it, but anything is possible.
So we'll see.
Maybe.
So there are some things that I had in mind for today's episode.
But first, the first thing I wanted to mention is something that's been in the news that was a development yesterday.
And it concerns the investigation into the origins of the Trump investigation.
The investigation of the investigation.
Can't they just move on?
You know, let's get rid of the whole impeachment stuff.
Let's just put it all behind us and let the country move forward and get the president that they want and deserve, Donald Trump.
Well, listen, I've always said I would rather the country move backward than forward.
And I don't want to put any of it behind us.
I want blood.
I like this.
I feel like it's unwinding before our very eyes.
Yeah, it sure is.
We had a government.
It was working, and then they just started eating each other with these investigations.
Yeah, well, who was it really working for, Rob?
That's the question.
So I'll say this.
The Trump-Russia collusion thing has been, as I've said many times before on the show, one of the biggest stories of my lifetime.
And really, I think everyone has to agree that no matter what side of it you're on, it's one of the biggest stories.
And I was talking about this, I think, like the last three years.
We've been talking about this on our podcast, off and on.
And, you know, I think about it when I do Ari's podcast, The State of the Union, every year, because that's where you do, I do like a three-hour podcast, and it's just the biggest story of the year.
And that has come up the last, I think, three podcasts because it's impossible not to put that as one of the biggest stories.
This is, on one hand, they're claiming that like, and it seems pretty, maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems pretty binary that one of these two things is the story.
There's like two competing narratives.
One is that Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is a Russian asset or, you know, at worst being used by the Russians and the Russians cheated to get him in at... or at best, at worst, actually involved in a conspiracy with a hostile foreign government.
Now, if that's the story, that's, you know, a huge fucking deal.
And the other narrative is that Donald Trump was essentially framed, that this was like a hit job.
None of this is true.
And we ended up that the American people rebuked the entire political order by electing Donald Trump.
And the first two years of his presidency were covered in this, you know, like tainted by this shadow of Russia collusion, which was all bullshit and was didn't happen by accident, you know?
And that's a huge story.
What I would consider the attempted deep state coup.
That's a big story as well.
So either way, it's a huge story.
And more or less, I got to say, as I have said before, I think we've been pretty much right about this thing the whole time.
Pretty much everything that's come out has backed up what we've been saying.
Well, I'll tell you this.
I might have been wrong about one of my major predictions or one of my major views on how this whole thing was playing out.
And I always thought, I might have been.
I'm not sure I was wrong, but it's starting to look more and more like I might have been wrong about a pretty major aspect.
And that has to do with Barr, the Attorney General.
I always thought, you know, it's like if you read the New York Times or watch CNN or something like that, you might get the impression that this Barr fellow is a Trump loyalist.
And to me, I was always like, yeah, this guy was a George H.W. Bush appointee.
This was a guy who supported Jeb Bush in the primary in 2016.
This guy is not a Trump loyalist.
He's as swampy as anybody could be.
And I always thought he was, in essence, or in effect, controlled opposition.
That his role was to be there so that the entire mainstream media could say, well, this guy is such a Trump loyalist and he's just doing the bidding of the president.
And then he could come out and say, I found no wrongdoing.
And they'd go, even this Trump loyalist admits there's no wrongdoing.
Because this is the way the whole fucking establishment system works.
You know what I mean?
They find one guy there.
This is where they go.
And even this Republican says Donald Trump should be impeached.
Like that's how they box you in to kind of control your mind.
This is why every Republican on CNN hates Donald Trump's guts.
The guy's like at 90 something percent approval rating amongst Republicans.
Yet all the Republicans on CNN go, even as a Republican, I think Donald Trump is terrible.
It's the same thing on MSNBC.
It's Nicole Wallace and these got Hugh Hewitt and all these like never Trump Republicans.
In reality, never Trump Republicans are like, I don't know.
They're as much a factor as fucking anarchist Americans are.
Like they're a tiny percentage of actual Republicans, but they're the ones that you see in the forefront on these major mainstream media channels and newspapers and stuff.
So that was always my thought.
Although I did say, I guess maybe like a month ago or something like that, as more information started coming out about what the Attorney General Bill Barr was doing on, I'm sorry, Bob Barr, right?
No, Bill Barr.
What he was doing on the in terms of traveling to other countries and stuff like this.
And you're like, oh, you know, I got to say, this kind of is starting to seem like he's actually investigating this.
Like, this is starting to seem like maybe he actually wants to get to the bottom of what happened here.
Maybe not.
I still could be right in my initial prediction where he's just going to come out and go, well, while there were a lot of mistakes made, there was no criminal wrongdoing.
You know, that's the type of thing that they usually like to go with.
So you can kind of still feel like there's this semblance of a justice, a judicial process or justice process.
You know, like you can kind of still feel like, well, we looked into it and they admitted there was wrongdoing, but no one's going to be held accountable for it.
However, yesterday, it was reported that this investigation has shifted into a criminal investigation.
Oh, yeah.
And now there's going to be subpoenas and all types of other things.
And this is, it's just starting to seem to me like maybe I was wrong about that.
And the Dems always like talking about how there's a criminal investigation.
So they must be really into it.
Well, it's funny watching them spin themselves in circles.
I mean, it's really...
Because now they're talking, it's funny.
Basically, they're saying everything that we were saying about the Miller investigation, that now that Trump controls the Justice Department, the Justice Department isn't actually serving justice.
And that sounds to me like you're criticizing the intelligence community, but they're saying that he's not no longer dishing out justice.
This is now being like a puppet arm of Donald Trump, and it's being misused to benefit Donald Trump, and it's not real justice.
And it's exactly, it's just so funny to see, it's almost like the cards you play.
Like we don't do that because we never have the appeal to authority card of, hey, this is government.
How dare you question their motives?
But the Democrats, that's what they were doing for two full years.
Well, it's amazing, actually.
We don't do it so much that it's so bizarre to me when you hear people do that with a degree of certainty.
Like I was on Kennedy last week and Juan Williams, who is actually a very nice guy, you know, off air and in the green room and stuff like that.
Very nice guy.
But he's like a Democrat, liberal Democrat.
And he was saying at one point where he said something, I forget exactly how we got into it, but he asked, he was asking the other, so it was like me, a Republican, and him, which is how Kennedy likes to do it usually.
There's like a libertarian, a Republican, and a Democrat.
And he was asking, he was grilling the Republican guy.
And he was like, so you don't believe Russia interfered in the election?
You don't believe Russia interfered in the election?
So you're going to disagree with the CIA, the FBI, the NSA.
And I just went, I went, all bastions of honesty.
And like Kennedy started laughing.
And it's just like this weird thing where it's like, do you really, are you in this world where that sounds convincing to you?
So you're just going to tell me that the CIA isn't being completely honest?
That's what you're telling me here.
And it's like, yeah, of course.
What type of retard wouldn't think that way?
I mean, that's, you know, like a given.
Anyway, this is their mindset.
This is the mentality.
So yeah, you're right.
You see that, but it's weird to see them then have to pivot to this other director.
What they were saying was out, they're making the exact argument that the Republicans were making about the last investigation of, hey, this is a misuse of government.
You're only investigating him for political motives.
They are now exactly saying exactly that.
And it's wild just to see the total flip without any like, oh, maybe we should be thinking about what this process is.
And it will, what it really, and what it goes to show you is the stuff that we were talking about a couple episodes ago, where we played that clip from, I think it was CNN, Brooke Baldwin, where she says the sacred office of the White House and how Donald Trump is betraying this sacred office.
And that's basically the establishment view that basically Donald Trump is so terrible that he's betrayed this sacred position of presidency.
And of course, no other president would do this.
So Donald Trump's Department of Justice is corrupt, but obviously it's just, it's beyond, you know, absurd to think that Obama would have done this.
But look, if there is a chance that there's actually a real investigation going on, and what gets, here's what gets interesting, right?
There is, obviously, this is like going into 2020, as we end the year of 2019 and we move toward 2020, which we are doing rapidly.
The Failure of This Presidency00:03:06
This is go time for the ruling elite.
This is like, we're getting down to crunch time.
They can't let Trump win again.
They can't have America rebuke the entire order and then reaffirm that.
This presidency has to be a failure for them.
And I think that's what a lot of this stuff has been about.
The Mueller investigation, the impeachment inquiry, all of this stuff, the mainstream media's crazy Trump derangement syndrome, the big tech censorship, all of this stuff.
It's all about the fact that we have to, this has to be a failure.
And now, as they get going, you know, they're really, they're out for blood.
They need to destroy Trump's presidency.
But that time might be when Donald Trump is at his most dangerous.
It's like, hey, if I'm going to go down, I'm going to use all the power I have, which is not insignificant power, to try to expose all of the people who are attempting to ruin me.
And don't think for a second that there aren't high stakes, like personally, for Donald Trump in this.
I'm not just talking about like a failed presidency.
I'm talking about the fact that like, like there were, okay.
John Brennan, Obama's head of the CIA, told us, we listened to him, right?
A week before Robert Mueller came out and didn't indict anyone else and wrapped up and submitted his report.
He told us there were going to be more indictments against the Trump family.
Like he's saying your kid's going to go to jail.
This is not an insignificant figure.
This is the head of the CIA saying your kid's going to spend years in prison.
This is high stakes, this game.
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Digging Deeper Into Impeachment00:06:45
We were talking about this a little bit before the show, but as a theoretical, let's say Hillary ran against Trump and won.
So we're really in the theoretical in 2016.
Oh, we're deep.
We're deep theoretical.
Counterfactual.
Okay.
If she came into power, do you think that she would go on a serious investigative campaign against Trump?
No.
You don't think she would try and no?
Because then she would theoretically have to run against him again in four years.
So I'm wondering.
Hold on.
If she's in 2016, no, no, no, if Hillary ran in 2020, Trump comes into office, do you think that she would try use whatever means she could politically to investigate Trump and get him locked up so that she wouldn't have to run against him again in 2024?
You think he would run again?
I don't think, I think Trump's going to be too old in 2024 to run against him.
But she might, well, that's a good point.
But she might, she, she might, I don't know.
Hillary's a very vindictive person, I believe.
So maybe she would.
But look, here's what's interesting, right?
There is no way that the origins of the Trump investigation don't implicate people in criminal activity.
There's no chance of this.
This isn't just like speculation.
I'm the first to let you know when I'm just speculating and when I'm guessing.
This is a fact.
The only thing to speculate over, the only question is whether they'll actually go after prosecuting people or not.
You know, it's like, it's like when James Clapper testified before Congress that, you know, the NSA was not involved in any spying on the American people.
It's like, okay, well, that's a lie.
He perjured himself.
Now, the question is whether or not they want to prosecute him, but there's no question that this was a crime.
It's just a matter of whether or not they want.
But the idea that the FISA court was misled, that all of these shady tactics were used, there are so many people who are implicated.
And it's not low-level people.
These are very high-level people all the way to the top of the Obama administration.
And when I say all the way to the top, I mean to Barack Hussein Obama.
Like, Barack, listen, there is no way that this entire effort to destroy Donald Trump's presidency was going on and Obama didn't know about it.
There's just no way.
You're telling me that you believe that the acting, you know, the top people in the Justice Department are all talking about the guy who's the Republican nominee targeting him and Obama's not aware of this investigation going on.
Like Obama's just in the clouds.
I mean, if you're telling me that, then, okay, then Obama's the most incompetent president ever who had completely lost control of his government.
And I don't buy that for a second.
I think Obama knew exactly what was going on, exactly what was going on.
Yeah, I think we're seeing a little bit of a, you meet force with force.
The Democrats are pushing pretty hard on the impeachment.
And I don't know, it's chicken and the egg.
Are they trying to push hard on the impeachment because they want him out before he really unwinds what they did?
Or is Barr actually pushing back on them and saying, hey, listen, if you really want to impeach this guy over some nonsense, we're going to dig a little deeper here and we're going to see who's playing foul.
See, I think.
So if you're suggesting that the Democrats are impeaching and this is Barr pushing back on the Democrats, I think you've got that backward.
I think it's more...
The impeachment was a pushback on what Barr is.
But I think Barr is escalating it now.
Well, you might be right, but I don't even know if that's true.
I think that it is.
I think it is the phenomenon that you're describing, but the order is important here.
And what Trump was doing, what those text messages, even those text messages that came out even revealed that he was doing, is that they're claiming that he was holding up the military aid to Ukraine.
But why was he holding it up?
It wasn't about Biden.
That's not what those text messages showed.
It was about Trump wanting to get to the origins of the Russia investigation, which Ukraine was like very involved in.
So I think what happened was that Donald Trump, it seemed after, and this is, you also have to keep the timeframe in mind.
It was right after he got off of the Mueller investigation and Mueller found nothing.
And then Donald Trump, and they saw that, and then he made this phone call to Ukraine.
And they were like, oh, shit.
Now that we, now that he hasn't been implicated in anything, he's going after the origins of the investigation and what exactly happened here.
And that's when they turned around and tried the impeachment thing.
I think they're trying to play chicken and go, well, we have you for this, if you have us for that.
So let's all drop all of it because they know people, if he's really playing for keeps, which, you know, it is Donald Trump.
So he might be.
And if he is, I think a lot of very powerful people are implicated.
How do we get the propaganda machine going for, hey, we got to understand who in the deep seat undermined our democracy?
That narrative isn't getting out there at all.
Hey, there are people within our government that thought that they were holier than the electing public and they so didn't want to give up power that they tried to unseat the elected official and they coordinated and colluded with foreign governments and with deep states and with foreign actors to unseat our elected official.
And this criminal investigation is very important.
Where's that whole machinery that we heard two years on the other side?
Well, there is, I'll tell you, this is like, it reminds me of what Jeff Dice was saying on our last, on the last episode I had him on, where he was like, the machinery is not equal on both sides.
He's like, one side is serious about things and the other side isn't.
So, you know, it's like, Jeff Dice made this point on the last podcast.
It was one of about a thousand just great points that he made.
But one way he was like, the left means it when they say things.
Like they mean it.
He's like, they play for keeps.
Like when the left goes, we're going to have gay marriage in this country.
They're like, we're going to have gay marriage in this country.
And the right says things like, we're going to cut the size of government.
We're going to repeal Obamacare.
We're going to, you know, outlaw abortion.
They don't mean any of this shit.
None of this shit is going to happen.
But when the left are like, we're going to let kids, you know, be transgender, it's like, no, no, no, we're doing that.
That's happening.
We're getting dicks for girlies.
We're getting dicks for chicks.
Weirdly enough, that is one of their priorities.
Dicks for chicks.
We live in a fucking cartoon, but yes, that is one of their major issues.
At least that sounds like a fun initiative.
Exactly.
I liked when I just saw the Google News headlines of the bar, when every single headline from your mainstream source, from what I remember when I was glancing at it today, was very interpretive.
Now, I know that we've spoken before about how these aren't real journalists, but it was all very, the reporting was Barr misusing the Justice Department.
Barr, you know what I mean?
Zuckerberg And Paid Advertising00:10:07
It was no, not even open for interpretation.
The fact that he's looking into this is clearly that he's working for Donald Trump and misusing what his department is for and that this is disgusting, which is so far from reporting, hey, there's a criminal investigation by the Justice Department.
Oh, yeah.
It's outrageous, the spin that they have to go through.
And it's so funny that they, like, as you like pointed out earlier, it's like all this stuff.
They're like, Donald Trump calls the, you know, Russia investigation a witch hunt.
Is this obstruction of justice?
Yeah.
Yet then Barr is in an investigation and they're like, this witch hunt.
I mean, they might as well say the words.
Like you're doing the exact same thing, except that investigation played out and they got no evidence of it.
But this investigation hasn't played out at all.
And we already have tons of evidence.
I mean, we have, this isn't just like, you know, a comedian on a podcast, you know, speculating about some conspiracy.
It's like we have Andrew McCabe, the acting FBI director, telling you that him and Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, sat down and talked about how they could remove the president, even considering invoking the 25th Amendment.
They were like, it's not like I'm just saying, oh, this was a deep state coup.
It's like, hi, I'm deep state agent.
Yeah, we sat down and talked about how we could have a coup.
Like, that's, that's their words.
They're like, yeah, this is what we settled with, the special prosecutor.
Like, that's, you know, we didn't really do the coup thing.
We just kind of tried to do this.
But it's like, okay.
So that, and, but, you know, anyway, so it's, it's really interesting to watch them spin this.
The other thing that happened this week that was kind of interesting, and I don't really even have like a ton to say on it, but it was this Facebook, you know, congressional hearing where Zuckerberg testified in front of Congress again.
And I got to say, I really do think these things are all related.
It's like, like I said, the establishment is in desperate.
Excuse me.
The establishment is in desperation mode right now.
They really are.
They cannot let Donald Trump get re-elected.
It's a narrative destroying result if he does.
Donald Trump getting elected the first time was, but re-elected is really, you know, they've tried their best to piece the narrative back together, which is basically the Russians elected him and the racists.
That's it.
It was Russians and racists.
That's who got him elected.
You know, it couldn't be anything else.
And I know for a fact that they see where their weakness is.
And their weakness is obvious.
And it's the internet.
And it's people being able to communicate without going through the gatekeepers.
It's the fact that people don't have to just, you know, it's the fact that somebody like, you know, Chris Cuomo gets called Fredo.
You just literally look at one of his tweets and then you see 37 replies all calling him Fredo.
And then it's not just the power that this is that great Bob Murphy video that I just recently shared that we were talking about on the other podcast.
It's not just the fact that someone can call, it's not just the fact that 37 people can call Chris Cuomo Fredo.
It's the fact that everybody else can see that.
It's like they can see that and go, oh yeah, we're not alone.
You're fucking, you're totally full of shit.
You're totally full of shit.
Like this is fucking, and everybody knows this.
It's like I'm not the only one who sees that they're full of shit.
And now people can go to not just this show, like a million shows like this show and get their own fucking, you know, like conversations going.
They can talk back and forth with people.
They can hear different ideas.
They can hear everybody calling these people out and going like, oh, wow, like, you know, there's not really, there's so many people I know who are on like podcasts and YouTube channels and things like this.
And I say this as somebody who goes on cable news shows or has gone on cable news shows many times in my life.
I've been on a lot of cable news shows.
I've done it more times than I could count.
These people on podcasts and YouTube channels, they would destroy these cable news guys.
Like these guys, it's not even just that like they're wrong.
It's that they're wrong and they're not even prepared to argue it.
They're built for 30 seconds of talking and then move on to the next guy.
And maybe after the 30 seconds, there's a 20 second follow-up and that's about what they've got.
They get destroyed in a long format, just absolutely obliterated.
And that's a danger for them.
So yes, all of a sudden Congress is grilling Mark Zuckerberg about what he's doing to crack down on quote fake news.
What do you do?
And there were these just disgusting clips that I saw of politicians.
One is Maxine.
And what's her name?
Maxine Waters.
Is that it?
Just grilling.
Yeah.
Just grilling Mark Zuckerberg about what he does.
You know, if politicians tell lies, does he censor that?
And Zuckerberg's like, well, we believe that, you know, in freedom of political discourse and politicians can say, we're not going to censor what they do.
And she's like, even if they lie, and it's like, man, isn't there an obvious problem with one politician just getting to rail about how you have to censor lies?
It's like, well, who decides who's lying?
Who's the, like, is this something out of the giver?
Are you the one who decides truth and then tells it to the rest of us?
Well, can you imagine if they took that responsibility upon themselves and then they have to go back in and go, hey, I was censored for lying.
Can you explain to me why I was censored for lying and that guy wasn't?
That's a tough standard to have to hold yourself to.
Oh, yeah.
And you got to, let's, let's also understand.
And they're all liars.
They're all a bunch of fucking liars.
And also, I mean, from what I understand, correct me if I'm wrong, because I don't really spend time on Facebook except to interact with the inner circle.
Don't always comment, but I read what they say.
I'll go check every once in a while.
I hope you guys writing shit are happy to know that.
Rob's reading you.
That's the only thing I go to Facebook for.
I check, I see what's going on with the inner circle people, and they can join us by becoming subscribing members.
Oh, yes, that's right.
Using our code, P-O-T-P?
P-O-T-P, baby.
P-O-T-P?
No, baby, just P-O-T-P.
Yeah.
And then post your name in the forum, and then you can post things, and I'll read it.
But anyways, there you go.
Facebook, they're basically like a television network.
People are on there because there's content that they want to consume.
And because there's content that people want to consume, you're able to buy advertising and you're able to hit people in certain demographics.
Politicians, they buy advertising.
That's it.
They're just putting up ads.
Facebook has nothing other than the fact that they're a platform.
They were first to the market.
A bunch of people have gone there and we all post things to each other because we're a bunch of suckers.
And as a result, we're all there and they're able to get free advertising without having to actually create content.
Like, in other words, they don't have to go create Seinfelds that will turn on NBC.
Right.
You and me, we're all posting dumb shit.
And so we're all interacting there.
And so they're able to sneak in their little ads and we see them because we're there.
That's it.
That's all that Facebook is doing is has a platform where people can pay for advertising.
Collecting and selling your data.
Well, all right, fine.
That's another side to it.
But I'm just saying, if I'm Zuckerberg, it's like, yeah, you guys are paying ads.
I like advertising dollars.
I don't give a fuck what you tell people.
It's not my responsibility.
Yeah, it's just outrageous.
And it really does.
Nothing could make me defend Mark Zuckerberg or these social media companies more who I'm, you know, I have my problems with.
But then watching Congress grilled up these people who don't understand anything about the business and just basically, I mean, it's almost so naked.
They're basically just going like, why aren't you doing my political bidding for me?
Like, as if that's somehow the role of Facebook to, you know, censor out arguments that you don't like.
And by the way, there are some ads that I guess you should pre-screen and go, hey, this isn't like, I'm not going to put razors up.
You know, if someone wants to sell razors to shove up other people's assholes, I'm going to go, hey, I don't know that I want to.
I'm not business.
I don't want that advertising on Facebook.
But when you start going into the rabbit hole of political campaigns, every single one of these are theatrical pieces and pieces of propaganda.
How are they supposed to sit there and judge it?
And then if they go, let's say they were going, hey, fine, we're going to be out of the game.
They'll never, you know what I mean?
Like people are, politicians are going to figure out how to advertise on that platform.
Well, it does seem like it's a challenge for them to really lock down and control this thing as much as they've been trying to.
But anyway, it'll be interesting to see where all of this goes.
But yeah, it was just disgusting.
I didn't watch the whole thing, but I just saw a few clips of it.
Anyway, We'll keep talking about all this stuff as more and more.
Well, the other aspect of that that just is interesting and worth a mention is that Powell and other people in government got very worked up about Facebook creating Libra.
And that's a big part of what they want to control: our chief good over here is currency.
And they did not want Facebook stepping in and creating a another and by the way, and also the way that they control it, which is always the way they do it, is you're going to create a platform by which terrorists can get funding and people can launder money, but that's that's nonsense.
It has nothing to do with that.
They just don't want another currency.
That's it.
Well, that's always, I mean, like, basically, that's that, that's their like attack on freedom.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, you could, you could make this argument about free speech.
You know, it's like you're going to create a platform where terrorists can talk to other terrorists or drug dealers can talk to other drug dealers.
It's like, well, yeah, I mean, that is technically true, but it's also so that law-abiding citizens can, you know what I mean, communicate with each other.
So there's, you know, the argument, it's all these arguments against cryptocurrency at Bitcoin or any of that stuff are all arguments that could be made against cash, you know, and by the way, they are going to start making those arguments against cash more and more because they want a system that they can control.
You like the credit card, you don't have to pay for it.
You just put it on it.
That's it.
Yeah.
You're good.
No, it's gone.
It doesn't affect you for the rest of your life.
Rob is fucked.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
Debunking Non-Aggression Principles00:15:38
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right.
So I want to try right around the half hour mark to transition into this other thing because I think this might take some time.
But so somebody did send me, and I thought this would be a fun use of our final 500th episode.
We're celebrating that we, one of my favorite things to do.
I really just have a lot of fun doing this, is responding to videos that are debunking libertarianism.
And there's one here that I really we should have done before, and we never did.
And this is, somebody sent this to me recently.
It might have been in the part of the problem inner circle.
I can't remember, but I saw on some social media, someone sent this to me and or posted it and tagged me or something.
And so, as you guys remember, friend of the show, Ben Burgess, who is a Democratic socialist, a college professor, professor of philosophy and logic.
He was at Rutgers University.
I believe he's moved.
But so we had him on the show twice.
One time he debated Gene Epstein, and one time me and him had like an informal debate.
And there was like a series of videos that were made.
And so first he made a video.
He does this series called The Debunk on the Michael Brooks show.
And the first thing he did, and this is how we came across him, was that he did a thing debunking taxation as theft.
We did a response to that.
And then he was like, why don't we come on the show and debate?
And so we had him in.
Then we did another episode where we talked about that.
Then Gene came in and did an episode kind of going over the thing.
And then they had the debate.
And at that point, it just seemed like we had done so many episodes with him that it, you know, it was overkill.
And that's why I said we needed to see other people for a little bit, take a break.
But there was a video in there that he made responding to us, and it was a debunk of the non-aggression principle.
And one of my major criticisms of like 99% of the debunking libertarian articles and videos and all of this stuff is that they never really addressed the non-aggression principle and private property rights.
And that's the core, at least from my perspective, of libertarianism.
And so Ben had made a video debunking the non-aggression principle and specifically responding to us.
And we've never taken this video on.
So it seems wrong to not do that.
And what better time now?
Some time has passed.
We have focused on other issues for quite a while.
And it's the 500th episode, Part C.
And it just seemed like the right time.
Someone had sent this to me.
I'd seen it.
I was like, all right, let's take this.
Let's take this apart.
Now, I actually have not watched this video in full, but I have watched, I think, the first like 10 minutes of it or something like that.
But I like that because it's fun to watch it live and react to it.
So we'll get a little part of it already.
Yes, that's right.
I will say before we play the video that I like Ben Burgess.
He was a good dude, and I appreciate that he came in and was like, you know, that earns a lot of respect from me.
And he also came out to one of the Soho forums after he did the podcast here with Gene Epstein.
And he's a good dude.
Obviously, we disagree on a whole lot.
But anyway, this was a video in response to me on the Michael Brooks show.
So let's start the video.
Now it is time.
All right, pause it all.
I think I say this every time.
Excellent theme music.
Solid beat.
Really like it.
I mean, it's not, you know, as well-produced as ours, but that is a good beat.
Whoever made that, dope beat maker.
It looks like the villain from Smallville, but with really bad hair.
Like someone shaved a goat.
Bro, I didn't even watch that show.
I didn't think I would get the reference, but then I just saw the guy in my head.
Yeah, he kind of does.
It's like they shaved a goat and just glued it on.
And that comes from me.
I don't even have good hair.
Don't even have good hair is a bit of an understatement, Rob.
But yes, you make a bald as beautiful.
Hairs for the week.
All right.
There you go.
All right.
Let's keep playing.
Music for this.
The debunk with Ben Burgess.
He teaches logic at Rutgers University.
He's the author of Give Them an Argument, Logic for the Left, which you can order today on Amazon and Lawrence.
Here's Darth Vader reading live here now.
Order this book for yourself.
Order it for your friends.
This is an essential tool in the arsenal of the left.
Ben, what are we debunking this week?
All right.
This week we are debunking the argument for libertarianism from the non-aggression principle.
Yes.
That was my ad hom.
Yeah, yeah, okay.
So, I mean, that was impressive that you committed a logical fallacy without even saying anything.
Hey, don't call on my show and act like a fucking libertarian.
I'll de-platform you in a second.
Fair enough.
Okay.
It's going to be a significant thing.
So what happened?
What is the impetus behind this segment?
Okay.
So two weeks ago when I did the first one of these on taxation as theft, it was a 10-minute segment.
The this libertarian comedian and podcaster Dave Smith, he did a show called Part of the Problem, and he did an episode that was largely devoted that was like largely devoted to responding to the debunk.
It was like probably like an hour and 15-minute response to the 10-minute debunk.
Okay.
And let's pause it right there.
Okay.
Yeah, it required that much time.
I'm sorry.
That's how much time.
I'm a long-winded fuck.
The name part of the problem isn't supposed to be edgy.
You fucking jerk off.
Okay?
It's just, I don't know.
It's just some stupid name that I thought of when I first started this podcast.
And yeah, I don't know.
That's how long it took me to go through all the horse shit in saying that taxation isn't theft.
So it takes me the time it takes me.
All right?
Sorry.
Of all the criticisms from Ben Burgess, the criticism that I take too long to make a point.
I mean, that one's really going to fucking earth me.
You son of a bitch.
All right.
Anyway.
I don't like that you're shaming this guy for jerking off.
It's natural.
You know what?
It is natural.
It's a natural process.
He's a different diss.
It's done in nature.
So it's certainly natural.
All right.
Let's get into it.
He plays in the clip I believe we're about to hear.
He plays a little bit of it where I refer to the non-aggression principle and expresses skepticism about the idea that there's like any possible response to this.
To the non-aggression principle.
All right, let's play this clip and then you will debunk the non-aggression principle.
Let's keep playing.
Just distribution is that as long as you're not violating certain customers, this feels like that Spaceballs moments where it's like us watching us, watching them, watching this.
I'm pretty sure this is a first in part of the problem history.
I don't think I've ever had me on the screen talking.
And by the way, I went to hit my vape exactly as I was vaping and had a moment of realizing how douchey it is to vape.
I hope just everybody who does watch the show live, I'm aware.
I'm aware of how douchey it is to vape.
I hate that I vape.
Okay.
I don't fucking, like, I don't, first off, I don't do any of the fruity flavors.
And I think part of that is just because I hate just everything about it.
I hate, listen, I only drink beer and whiskey.
I don't fucking, I won't put a lime in my beer.
I hate anything that isn't like manly, fucking, like, old school shit.
I would so much rather be smoking cigarettes.
But, you know, my wife got pregnant and made me quit.
So here I am vaping.
This is all I got.
You won't put a lime in a cocktail?
I don't really drink cocktails, bro.
I drink fucking, I drink whiskey and beer.
That's pretty much it.
That's my shit.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm overcompensating for some feminine quality or something.
I don't know.
But I hate, I get it.
I just had a moment.
I realize how douchey it is.
If Ben Burgess wanted to make a video about how douchey I am for vaping all the time, I would just agree with it.
I would just agree with his fucking point.
Anyway, all right.
This is very weird to watch me on the thing, but let's keep playing.
I think it's very short that I'm on it.
A lot of libertarians would talk about the non-aggression principle, which the can of worms worth its own debunk at some later date.
But if you're not violating the title of the title of the market, because a lot of libertarians talk about the non-aggression principle, which has its own can of worms, some other time we'll take on that one, right?
I'll be waiting for that some other time.
Oh, shit.
Well, ask and you shall receive, Dave.
All right.
Ben.
When I said I'll be waiting for that some other time, turns out I meant quite a while.
I was going to wait quite a while till episode 500, part C.
But yeah.
Okay.
So, you know what?
Tip of my hat to you guys.
I said I'll be waiting on that.
Now we've got it.
And now let's fucking see what you guys got.
Debunking the non-aggression principle.
For those people who are unaware, the non-aggression principle is pretty much what it sounds like.
It is the principle that you should not initiate violence on peaceful people or you should not initiate violence on peaceful people or take other people's property, take their stuff.
Don't hit people.
Don't take their stuff.
Don't hurt people.
That basic idea.
So let's see what they got.
Yeah, his debunk.
All right.
So here's the idea.
Libertarians will say that if you support any kind of redistributive taxation, much less the kinds of things that we would like, you know, workers' control of the means of production, that what you're advocating is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
And that this is just such an obvious moral principle.
It's just absurd to be opposed to it.
And what they kind of make it sound like is like it's almost an extension of pacifism or something that's like just short of pacifism, that you shouldn't initiate force against people.
And, you know, that sounds good.
Violence is bad.
Force is bad.
So, you know, it's so tough.
Okay.
So it's always, oh, he was almost, you know, they always have to frame it incorrectly, like at the outset.
So he was almost being honest at first and saying, hey, libertarians say that if you're advocating for these redistributive government policies, that that's a violation of the non-aggression principle.
So I was actually nodding my head as I listened to that.
Like, yes, that is fair.
And then he has to go down this road of saying, which I really find kind of disingenuous.
The idea of like, and they almost kind of make it sound like, whenever you hear people saying that, it's almost a guarantee that you're misleading people.
They almost kind of make it sound like, you know, pacifism.
Like they're almost kind of arguing for pacifism.
You know, because force is bad, violence is bad.
So that sounds kind of good if you're for pacifism.
Well, listen, I don't believe that force is bad.
I don't believe that violence is bad inherently.
And I've never said that the non-aggression principle is about pacifism.
I mean, I say all the time on this show that George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump should be tried for war crimes and convicted.
I mean, I think these people should spend their life in prison or be executed after being convicted.
That doesn't sound very like pacifism to me.
I don't think that sounds like I'm coming right up against the edge of pacifism.
No, I am all for defensive force.
And the idea that violence is bad, well, no, in some situations, violence can be like very, very good.
Very good.
Like if somebody was like, you know, running at my daughter with a knife and I killed that person, I wouldn't be like, oh, no, I've committed an act of violence and violence is bad.
I would think that was very good.
But why is that?
Why is that good?
Because it's defensive violence, defensive force.
There's no problem with that.
So the non-aggression principle is not appealing to the idea.
What people think of with pacifism is the idea that you should never use violence, even if you are attacked.
And that's not at all the same thing.
It's not just short of that.
It's saying that, no, what the non-aggression principle is saying is describing when it is appropriate to use force.
So it's not at all the same thing as saying force is bad.
So we've already started with completely improper framing.
And that, you know, like it always makes me a little bit skeptical over whether this is just a mistake or you're actually being disingenuous when you start off the conversation with false framing.
Okay?
All right, let's keep playing.
Sounds like, okay, if it would be justifiable to use force and violence, it would only be in self-defense.
So you shouldn't initiate it.
So this sounds great.
But then you start thinking a little bit about the details.
What exactly do you mean by that?
Because the way I just put it, which is the way they make it sound, that you shouldn't initiate force against people, if that were it, that, you know, that if that, in other words, that the principle were don't cause any kind of physical harm or threaten any kind of physical harm to another person who hasn't caused or threatened physical harm to you.
If that were really it, then this principle would not only not ground the kind of fundamentalist property rights that they want, it would actually rule out the very existence of any kind of property at all.
Because if you want to make an exclusive claim to a piece of property, what you're doing is you're saying, hey, nobody else is allowed to use this, which if it means anything at all is a threat of force.
Say you have a no trespassing sign in the lawn, that is a threat of some sort of force against a person who has done nothing but trespass on the property.
And of course, trespassing on the property doesn't mean that they've caused physical harm to you or they've caused physical harm.
Violence Against Property Defined00:15:21
So he's basically saying that you can't both have the non-aggression principle and private property at the same time.
Right.
So in other words, he's saying if you just were to have the non-aggression principle saying that you can't initiate violence.
So when I describe the non-aggression principle, I say the principle is that you shouldn't initiate violence against peaceful people.
But what he's saying is basically like, well, if you really believed that, then you couldn't have any property at all because really, what did a trespasser do?
I mean, he's a peaceful person, right?
He's just trespassing.
And you're saying now you can initiate force against him.
But let's really think that through for a second.
Is that person in fact being peaceful?
I mean, let's say somebody breaks into my house at night where my wife and daughter live and there's an intruder all of a sudden in my home.
Is it really reasonable for me to say, well, this person's acting in a completely peaceful manner?
I mean, just anybody, common sense, you tell me if a fucking person breaks into my home where my 10-month-old baby is asleep in the other room and I use whatever force is necessary to get that person out of my home.
Who was the aggressor in that situation?
Can anybody with a straight face tell me that I aggressed against that person?
What type of society could we possibly have if people didn't respect the non-aggression principle?
By the way, this is the point that I made to Ben Burgess when he was on the show.
I was maybe going to hold on to this till later, but I might as well say it now.
It's really worth noting to me that all of these people who go to debunk the non-aggression principle, and always in a fairly snarky manner, which, you know, fine.
I'm not above being a little snarky myself.
But isn't it something that they all live by it and then have this one exception, which is the state?
And the state is different and the state's allowed to do all of these things, but none of us are allowed to, but we all respect this all day long.
I mean, I actually said this to Ben Burgess when I had him on the show.
And I said, but isn't there something to this principle since you live by it every day of your life?
I mean, you live by the principle that you don't assault other people.
You don't hurt other people and you don't take other people's stuff.
You're not going to try to leave here with one of our microphones.
You don't break into other people's homes, break into their cars.
You don't pickpocket other people on the street, right?
But he steals their times with boring thoughts.
Well, you know, that is, but you know, it's really all of our time.
So that's not private property.
But fair point.
But it's like, and what he said to me was he goes, well, I vote for politicians who run on, you know, policies of redistribution.
And I was like, exactly.
For the state, you make this one exception for the state, and you know, but you can't think of one other aspect of your life besides the state where you don't follow this principle.
So, wouldn't you at least have to, I would think, if you were being honest and not mischaracterizing this as well, they basically make it sound like they're arguing for pacifism.
If you were being honest about this, wouldn't you at least have to go, you know, this is a principle that we all follow.
So, I get why they like this principle because any civilized human being follows this principle throughout all of their life.
It's it's the now.
If you were to say, well, we can have the non-aggression principle, and oh, yeah, that kind of sounds good, but then you throw property rights in.
Now, truthfully, from the libertarian perspective, it starts with self-ownership and property rights and then moves toward the non-aggression principle.
But even if you were going to start with the non-aggression principle and say we can have that, but we don't have property rights, well, one doesn't really work without the other.
Like, what you know, if you let's just say, right, like the old libertarian thought experiment, if Brian goes up and takes a watch out of somebody's hand, did he just initiate force?
Was he being the aggressor and did he commit a crime?
Well, actually, you need to know some information before you could say the answer to that.
Like, whose watch was that?
Was that Brian's watch, and the guy had just taken it from him and he was taking it back?
Because if he was taking it back, then that's actually not an initiation of force at all.
Could we really live in a society where we respected not being violent toward one another or not initiating violence against people, but you could just go break into whatever car, into whatever home?
Well, no, of course not.
You'd have to respect property rights.
Now, let's think about it like this: think about the basics of morality and avoiding conflict.
And that's why I like to take it to extremes like that.
And this is more or less where we start with, right?
Now, Ben, when he was on the show, gave me some shit about self-ownership.
And I basically said to him, I go, Well, how about call it something else?
Don't call it ownership since you don't like that term, but you know, self-autonomy, or shouldn't I be the one who makes it who has exclusive control over the decisions I make with my body?
Like, don't I own myself in that?
Shouldn't women be able to decide who they have sex with, and men decide who they have sex with, and men decide, you know, decide what you're going to eat tonight and what you're going to say.
And what, you know, the very basic core of freedom that you, that individuals act.
And if you're trying to have conflict, right?
Like, if I want to move my hand up and raise it in the air, and I want to do that, there's no conflict, right?
That's just me doing something.
I'm not affecting anybody else.
I'm just moving my hand.
But if I go to move my hand up and you decide to grab me and force my hand back down, now there's a conflict.
I'm trying to move it up.
You're trying to move it down.
Now, so if we're trying to avoid conflict, isn't the most reasonable position to say that I should control my hand, you should control your hand, and we don't try to initiate violence on the other one.
Okay.
So let's say you have some person.
It's a somebody is just, you know, on a desert island somebody where there's two people.
And one of the people there goes and collects some seashells and ties a string around it and makes a seashell necklace for herself.
And the other one comes, you know, she spends like an hour collecting the seashells and putting them on her neck.
And the other one comes and rips it off and takes it.
Who's initiated violence there?
Who's the one who's like who's threatening the other person?
Now, why is it that that person owns it?
And this is basically where the idea of homesteading comes from.
It's like, well, if we already acknowledge that she owns herself and you own yourself, she spent her time and her resources collecting these shells and putting them around her neck.
So she has a better claim to it than you do.
And that's basically the essence of property.
And then after that, if you had done something else with your time, let's say you had gone and collected berries and she was like, ooh, I'll trade you this necklace I made for some of those berries and you make a trade, then you voluntarily, with no conflict and no immoral activity, can trade these things.
And this is the idea of civilization, that you want to be consistent with morality and avoid conflict.
So yes, property rights are going to be baked into this.
All right, let's keep playing.
Harm to you.
Now, of course, what they'll say, like when they're trying to be more precise, is, well, no, no, no.
What we mean is that you shouldn't initiate force against other people or their property.
Now, that point that already gets a little confusing because, you know, I know what it is to threaten or, you know, harm, harm, or threaten harm against a person, but I don't really know what it is to use force or violence against property.
All right, pause.
Okay, so nobody is saying, use that.
Again, this is just not what a libertarian will actually say.
And he starts by saying, well, that's what they'll say.
And it's not what we're saying.
The idea isn't that you're using force against the property.
So like in my example, it's not.
Give me your car, car.
Yeah, it's not, it's not like, oh my God, we have to protect the car because the car might be hurt.
It's not that you're using force, in my example, against the seashell necklace.
It's that you're using force against that woman who made it.
She spent the time doing this.
You're robbing her of her time.
You're robbing her of what she has more of a just claim on.
So again, to use other examples, if somebody breaks into my house where my daughter sleeps, it's not that I go, oh my God, you just initiated violence against my home.
The idea is that you're a clear threat to me and my family.
It's the people involved.
Now, let's say, by the way, just a more real world example than the seashell thing.
Let's say there's somebody who works really, really hard at a job, like a working class person who's just getting by.
And they work really hard and they save up for a new car.
And this takes them like three years to put away enough money to get a new car because they need a new car to get back and forth from work.
The old one's breaking down or whatever.
So they get a new fucking car and then you go smash the window, get in, try to, you know what I mean?
Like try to rip the radio out or hot start the car.
Why are these references all from 1989?
Anyway, you fucking, but you know what I'm saying?
It's not the fact that you're initiating violence against the car.
It's the fact that you're ripping that person off.
You're literally stealing their life over the last three years and what they've sacrificed for.
So that's, it's not the violation against the property.
It's that you're violating another person.
And obviously we all can't exist without things.
And I guess further proof of that would be if you're homesteading, so you get to keep it because no one had the property.
So there's no violence against, you know, property.
It's violence when you take it from another person.
Yes.
And by the way, just if I'm nidpicking, and I think I did make this point to Ben when he was on the show too, but it's worth going over all this shit because it's the core foundation of everything we believe in.
But when he says having property is in itself a threat of violence, I just think that's bullshit.
I also think that if you want to get really technical about it, a no trespassing sign is not a threat of violence.
A no trespassing sign is not, trespassers will be shot is a threat of violence.
But no trespassing, I mean, I don't know.
Listen, as somebody who is a bit of a degenerate kid, like I've trespassed before on like basketball courts and things like that where there were no trespassing signs.
And yeah, I was in the wrong.
And if somebody caught me, I wouldn't be right for being there.
But it's not exactly a threat of violence.
And if you're going to say that, right?
Then like what follows from that are some pretty creepy worldviews.
So in other words, If you if a woman if you think rape is morally wrong, then you would say a woman walking around is implicitly a threat of violence because she could defend herself if you try to rape her.
Like, you know, now she hasn't actually threatened you, but if a woman were to walk around with a, if you try to rape me, I'll shoot you sign on her, that would be a threat of violence.
Now, technically, it is a threat of violence if she says I will shoot you if you do this, but don't you kind of see that it's like just existing and expecting not to be raped is not a violent act in itself.
It's like, well, then just don't do this obvious thing and everyone's going to be fine.
If I understand correctly, he's basically saying inventing the idea of private property also creates a framework for violence because then you have something that people can defend.
Sure.
Well, I mean, maybe.
So what, but what, like, but not inventing it doesn't prevent that at all.
Well, I was going to say, what's the alternative to not having private property?
Well, the government distributes everything.
Yeah, more or less.
But then you still come to a point where once it's distributed to you, so you have private ownership of it.
Well, you would think so.
Right.
And then I suppose, well, I guess what he would say is that once there's a just distribution of property or something like that, then it's theft if you take it, which seems like a very weird way to figure this whole thing out.
But then that comes down to saying that the government's a better distributor of resources than the free market.
Yeah, which is, you know, but they would always say, but they're not saying this government, they're saying their ideal government.
And that's where things get a little convoluted.
Anyway, let's keep playing.
Animate objects, you know, aren't the sort of things that we can commit acts of violence about.
Oren Niemney had a great article in Current Affairs a couple years ago called Defining Violence, where he does some really nice, he makes some nice moves making fun of this idea that you can have violence against property.
So what it really means is, well, you shouldn't initiate force against other people or violate or violate their property claims.
You shouldn't initiate force against other people or take away their property.
And of course, what's really doing all the work, what's actually in dispute in all these political arguments, is the second part, the part that has absolutely nothing to do with violence.
That's, in fact, the part that, well, has nothing to do with not initiating violence.
In fact, the part that allows you to initiate violence in defense of property.
So it's okay now, according to this principle, to initiate violence against somebody, to use violence against somebody who hasn't used or threatened violence against you in order to stop them from taking away your property.
And now this is already starting to sound a whole lot less like pacifism or something just short of pacifism, like it sounded like at first.
Now you're saying that if the government has given you this slip of paper, say that you're the owner of something, then you're allowed to use violence to stop other people from infringing on it.
So this is already there again.
So no, it has nothing to do with the government giving you a slip of paper about it.
I've never heard any libertarian make the argument that property rights are what the government decides property rights are.
That's why pretty much every libertarian I've ever talked to is opposed to eminent domain because if the government just decides, and this is why we're opposed to taxation, if the government just decides this isn't yours anymore, that doesn't mean it's morally not yours or that that's legitimate.
Like the government saying so doesn't make it legitimate.
And I'm sure you guys would actually agree with me when that's convenient for you.
But yeah, it's like, it's appropriate if someone comes and takes your shit to use the appropriate amount of force to get your shit back.
Now, if somebody, that doesn't mean that there's not excessive force.
Like if somebody, if some 15-year-old is shoplifting from a store and the store owner shoots him in the face, it's like, whoa, not cool, not okay.
That's not an appropriate response.
But yeah, if somebody goes in and shoplifts from a store and the store owner grabs him by the wrist and takes the merchandise away from him, are you actually in your right mind going to say that the shop owner initiated force against that guy?
Of course not.
He's defending what is his livelihood.
I know that they're like, well, it seems so ridiculous.
This really does seem so ridiculous that you would try to argue against it.
I got a question for you, Davey Smith.
Unfair Use Of Force00:09:14
Sure thing.
What do you call a country that says we're not getting involved in anyone else's entanglements?
The only way we're going to end up in a fight is if you come here and you invade us.
What do you call those people?
Civilized?
Wait, what are you going for here?
Non-interventionist?
I guess.
No, I thought maybe you'd describe them as pacifists.
No, I think pacifists is more really getting into like, we won't fight back if you come for us.
Oh, so we don't, I wouldn't believe in that at all.
That sounds just stupid.
That sounds like a good way to get overrun.
Yes, that's right.
I agree completely.
So why'd you call us pacifists?
Yeah, if libertarians are trying to sound like pacifists, why do we believe so much in gun rights?
Yeah.
Why are we so pro-gun if we're pacifists?
Of course, libertarians are.
Now, by the way, I should say, Bob Murphy, the great Bob Murphy, is a pacifist, and he has a whole argument about why he is.
But I've never really heard, besides him, I haven't heard a lot of libertarians even talk about this.
And I've certainly never heard the non-aggression principle put forth as if that's what we're basically saying.
Anyway, let's keep going.
So this is already pretty far from where we started, but now we run into the same problem that we were talking about two weeks ago in the taxation step debunk, which is that really they wouldn't say, what they would say is, no, no, no, Ben, you just strawman me.
I'm not saying that you can't, I'm not saying that it's because the government has, you know, has given you the slip of paper.
It's not about being the legal owner.
It's about being the rightful owner.
So in the Dave Smith thing, the part of the problem segment, he made a big deal about like objecting to my use of the phrase morally entitled, even though that's actually the language that I lifted straight from libertarian philosophers, Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard, who talk that way, but whatever.
The phrase he wants to use is rightful owner.
But if by rightful you mean morally rightful, then it's the same deal.
Once again, you're saying that it's okay to initiate violence only to defend property that it's morally right that you should have.
And of course, at that point...
No, I'm not saying that it's okay to initiate violence to defend what you have.
What I'm saying is that that's not initiating violence.
There's a big difference between that.
Like if somebody comes in to take your stuff, I mean, think about it this way, right?
Somebody, your wallet is sitting on a table close to a window and someone reaches in the window to your home to grab your wallet.
I'm not saying you can now initiate violence against that guy.
I'm saying that guy has initiated violence against you.
That money is what feeds my children.
I'm defending my family when I go to take that back.
My point is not that I can initiate violence against you.
It's let's have a reasonable, realistic conversation about who initiated that conflict, who initiated that confrontation.
And it's obviously the person reaching into your property to take your property, not you.
So if you want to debunk what I'm saying, fine, but address what I'm actually saying.
Let's keep playing.
It's a totally empty principle because, of course, everybody agrees that you should enforce whatever the distribution of property that it's right to have is, right?
That people can't just... you know, take things on a whim, that, you know, that if that's like, you know, I can't, you know, just walk up to you and take your phone or vice versa.
So whatever the right distribution of property is, we can enforce that.
But of course, this is just begging the question.
This is assuming the thing that needs to be proved because what's actually in dispute between libertarians and everybody else, you know, certainly between those of us who support redistribution of wealth and libertarians, is whether the existing distribution of wealth is just, in which case we should enforce that, or whether a redistribution would be just, in which case we enforce that.
And, you know, either way, it has absolutely nothing.
Let's call it violence.
Okay.
So, by the way, I think Ben Burgess, professor of logic, just made a false choice, which is that either the distribution is just or the redistribution is just.
And I actually don't think that's the case at all.
See, the way I look at it is not that the distribution, since he likes to use that term, is just.
I don't know that it is.
I just know that the redistribution would be injust.
Okay?
So let me say it this way.
Let me put it this way.
If you said, is it just that LeBron James is such a great basketball player and I'm not, I don't know that I'd agree with that.
I don't know that it's just that some people look like Brad Pitt and some people look like Harvey Weinstein.
I don't know that that's just, but I know that Harvey Weinstein forcibly raping a hot chick to equal the odds out is a violation of justice.
You get what I'm saying there?
It's not so much that I go, oh, well, the way things are, that's completely fair that some people are really good looking and other people are really ugly.
It's like, no, that actually seems kind of unfair to me.
But I know that it would be immoral to use violence to try to even that up.
So it doesn't, it's not necessarily, the onus isn't on the libertarians to say that the way things are is just.
No, there's nothing really just about it.
Certainly not fair.
I mean, it's not fair that some people are so much more talented than other people are.
Like, it's not fair that our podcast is so much better than the Michael Brooks show.
I don't know.
That's just, that's just God-given talent, baby cakes.
But you know what?
It would be wrong for Michael Brooks to come put a gun to my head and say, you got to fucking give me 30% of your awesome podcasting talent.
That would be unfair.
And I would be like, Michael, that still won't even it up.
But you get what I'm saying, right?
So it's not that the distribution is just.
It's that it would be injust to use violence against somebody who didn't use violence against anybody else.
That's the claim.
Let's keep playing.
Moves that they'll be often used in this non-aggression talk to make.
Like if you watch, you know, your co-host on that other show that you do, Sam Seder, has taught, you know, like when he's debating libertarians, sometimes you'll watch them like make a really big deal about this move.
They'll say, like, oh, so, you know, you're okay with like throwing people in a cage if they don't, uh, if they don't pay their taxes.
And of course, the right response is, yeah, okay, but you're okay with throwing people in a cage if they try to take property that, according to you, is not rightfully theirs, right?
So either way, we're enforcing some sort of property claims.
We're just disagreeing about which property claims to enforce.
And, you know, even if you're an anarcho-capitalist and you think it should be like a private militia and a private prison or whatever, it's the same shit.
It's just less accountable.
Right.
So all of a sudden you're getting a lot more grubby than like, hey, man, just like everybody should be at peace.
Yeah, totally.
The way they want to present it, really, the whole argument is just an elaborate rhetorical trick.
Right.
That the thing that's doing all the work is the claim that existing property claims are justified and should be respected.
Pause it.
Pause it.
Okay, this is just strawmanning to the nth degree.
I mean, I have never in my life heard a libertarian say that existing property claims are just.
I mean, like, holy shit.
I think the $4 trillion that the U.S. federal government is claiming in property is completely unjust, not to mention all the public land, not to mention half the private land that's propped up by government intervention.
Tons of existing property rights are completely unjust.
But this is really strange to me to say that you go, well, I mean, you might say you shouldn't throw people in cages who are not initiating violence against other people.
But I mean, in your situation, there would still be some people thrown in cages.
It's like, right.
So that's kind of like being like, so you're saying that like you shouldn't throw somebody in a cage for having sex, but in your scenario, you'll still use force against somebody who's raping someone.
It's like, right.
Yes, those aren't the same things at all.
In one case, there's a victim.
In another case, there's not.
So yes, if you go out and make a voluntary agreement with your employer to do X amount of work for Y amount of dollars, and someone else comes and sticks a gun to your ribs and says, give me a portion, they're the aggressor.
Native American Land Rights00:15:08
Sorry.
That's the reality of the situation.
And by the way, the whole logic of this kind of falls apart because if you think about it, right, if Ben Burgess is saying, because the point he was making before is that, well, you're not threatening violence against, like, I'm not threatening violence against you, just against your property.
But then he also says having property is a threat of violence, right?
So let's say I take your property.
It's now my property, right?
So now I'm threatening violence against you by having the property.
Say that all kind of like spins out of control.
So, okay, you are threatening violence against me, I guess.
Listen, the idea that force would be used in any society does not in any way combat the non-aggression principle.
Yeah, of course.
Of course, the question is whether we're using the force aggressively or not and what could reasonably be called aggression.
And I think taking someone else's shit is a form of aggression.
All right, let's keep playing.
By routing it through this totally redundant non-aggression principle that just says, hey, whatever the morally right property claims are should be enforced, they're making it sound like it's a matter of, hey, man, everybody should just be at peace.
And then the other thing that I would always add to this, you know, with my orientation and kind of, you know, occurs in the book that I'm working on with some sort of, actually, I think some overlap, is then always the problem of how does all of this start?
And that becomes actually a really significant problem for them.
So I remember even in one exchange that actually Sam did have with who is that really nutty guy?
Professor Murray Block?
Block?
Professor Block.
You're not narrowing it down right now.
I know.
I know.
I'm not narrowing it at all, but I think it was Professor Block.
I don't remember.
Walter Block.
And Block, you know, conceded, essentially it was just like, well, when it comes to essentially like, you know, committing genocide against Native Americans and taking their land in a pretty, you know, extravagant violation of the non-aggression principle, well, that's just like tough because like we're just going to just start history at another point.
There's just a completely arbitrary metric.
So, you know, these things like, and they can kind of say like, oh, well, you know, that's like the classical left-wing move.
You're bringing up like ancient history to like undermine current claims.
But actually, very much in a macro sense, these things still play out day to day.
And of course, like, those are where almost all redistribution claims come from.
And this is like the other kind of broader debunk that like when you're talking about, like as an example, like even like land reform in South Africa, nobody is proposing, you know, certainly nobody in the ANC, but not even like anybody in like the EFF is saying like, oh, like an Afrikaner family farm, you got to go.
Like, no, what they're proposing is massive land conglomerates and giant property holdings, most of which aren't even being used, be given back to families that literally had it directly stolen from them.
So like, that's the other part too, is like, where did this history start?
Like these things weren't just sort of like magically bestowed upon.
Okay, let's let's pause it right there.
No, nothing was magically bestowed.
I agree with that.
So look, I don't know.
I didn't watch this interview.
I don't know what Walter Block, what the great Walter Block said about the Native American experience, but I guarantee he did not just sum it up correctly.
I promise you that.
Look, no libertarian is saying that the conquest of the past was just okay or that violations of the non-aggression principle in the past were okay.
And in fact, personally, I believe there's no statute of limitations.
Like, I don't believe in a statute of limitations.
I think if you can prove something, then whatever.
If you were stolen from 300 years ago, fine.
Here's the problem we have with that, right?
Practically speaking, it is impossible to relitigate every crime of history.
First of all, the Native Americans who did have land stolen from them are all dead.
The people who stole the land from them, they're all dead.
If you can directly prove, like go generation by generation by generation and prove this land was stolen, and you want to go generation by generation and prove that this person was the descendant of the person by which it was stolen, I'm not against there being some type of justice for that.
Fine.
Here's the problem, though.
How far do you want to go back?
Because you know how those Native Americans got that land?
They stole it from other Native Americans.
You know how they got that land?
They stole it from other Native Americans.
The Native Americans, contrary to lefty, mystical fucking, you know, bullshit revision history, we're not these like peace-loving, you know, conglomerate that all got along together.
They're a bunch of warring factions.
Okay.
So what do you, how do you, how exactly do you want to do this?
You want to go through history?
Right.
So just to be practical, you have to at a reasonable point go like, well, yeah, okay, all of history is pretty much bloody conquest, slavery, oppression, rulers and ruled, but we don't want to live that way anymore.
We want to have a civilized moral society.
So you have to start somewhere.
And to me, the reasonable place is just go, okay, there's no statute of limitations.
If you can prove something in a court, then okay, go fucking prove it.
Go make your argument.
But it gets very, very muddy.
I mean, this is the practical dilemma with even like anything like reparations for slavery.
I come here as Native American to reclaim Buffalo.
Right.
Like, yeah, maybe.
Character good enough?
Well, it was a solid character.
But even the buffalo, they went fucking extinct from the fucking Native Americans.
And then we've brought it back because fucking white 20-year-old girls like that meat now.
So it's fucking like listen.
It's like what you say, that's what I've heard.
But if you say like, you know, reparations for slavery, it's like, okay, well, how about Barack Obama?
He's half white, half black.
Does he get them or pay them?
You know, these things are very like complex if you actually try to break it down.
And yes, it's just a practical realization that it's probably going to be impossible to go back throughout history and right every wrong.
And by the way, if you're going back through history and accepting that it was wrong, you're accepting that it was wrong that the Native Americans' land was stolen.
Kind of seems like you're implicitly accepting that a property rights violation is immoral.
By the way, guys, debunking the non-aggression principle, right?
I mean, what if they just took their land and didn't initiate violence against them?
You guys were, maybe they thought it was a more just distribution, okay?
So like, yeah, I agree.
It was, it is wrong anytime through history that somebody's initiated violence or taken property from somebody else.
But if you accept that that's wrong and you want to correct for that, okay.
But you also have to make sure that you're not stealing property from people in the present.
And that's where it gets very difficult.
And I've heard other libertarians talk and write about this too.
So it's not, this is just impractical and nobody's claiming that it's everything started from pure justice.
That's not the claim at all.
All right, let's keep going.
Oh, yeah, no, absolutely.
Like, I mean, I think that, so there are two issues that are important here.
So one is like, what's your underlying theory of distributive justice?
And I think that it's important to go to that because even though, of course, we do want to make a lot of these claims that you're talking about, both, you know, both claims about, you know, about stolen land being returned or, you know, about or about the process of capitalist exploitation, you know, stolen wages becoming profits.
We also want to say, I mean, if you read Critique of the Gotha program, Mark says that, you know, even in a socialist society, of course, people aren't literally getting the full product of their labor because we need, he calls them deductions, but basically taxes to pay for schools and hospitals and those who can't work and all that.
But at the same time, the point you're raising is really important.
And the response from them, at least if they want to be consistent, can't just be, oh, you're dredging up ancient history.
Because the whole difference between their view of what's a just distribution and everybody else's view of what's a just distribution is that everybody else says that, well, it matters what the outcome is, right?
Like it matters if the outcome is wildly unequal in some unfair way, that like this is morally important to whether or not these property claims are justified.
Whereas what the hardcore libertarian wants to say is, nope, any outcome is fine.
It doesn't matter how unequal it is.
Doesn't matter if some people live in the lap of luxury or get to have jobs on the view because of who their dad is.
And, you know, other people can, you know, like have trouble, you know, like knowing where the next meal is coming from because of who their parents are.
It's all okay as long as you can trace it back to a just process, right?
As long as it's right there.
I mean, this is strawmanning and misrepresenting the argument to maximum levels.
I don't know what to say.
I don't even know how to respond to that.
It's so Ben Burgess knows that this isn't what we're saying.
Nobody's saying it's okay or it doesn't matter.
The example, it's pretty funny, by the way, that he's trying to go to an example and the first thing he can think of is John McCain's daughter having a spot.
Oof, having a spot on the view.
Like that's the first thing he can go to is a fucking senator.
Like that's the example that pops into his head.
Kind of makes you think like, oh yeah, I guess government doesn't really solve this problem.
But no, nobody's saying it's okay.
Nobody's saying it's okay or it doesn't matter.
It matters a lot.
If some people are living in very like bad circumstances, that matters.
Like if I give my daughter a whole bunch of advantage, like if I work really hard, which is what I'm doing and what I will continue to do, I'm going to work really hard, build a good career for myself so I can give my daughter the absolute best that I can give to her.
Now, if some other father just takes off and doesn't care about his kid, do you think I would ever say that doesn't matter or that's just fine?
Of course it's not fine.
But if you tried to initiate violence against me to take what I'm giving to my daughter, what I'm working for to give to that other kid, that might be a problem.
No, of course society needs to come together and grapple with the problem of how we try to help out people who really need help.
But that none of this is an argument against the non-aggression principle.
This is just kind of like, oh, well, if we follow the non-aggression principle and let's say there were all these problems, like there were some people who had more than others, that's just fine.
No, it's not just fine.
That is a problem.
Well, on that, so okay, what I'm understanding is let's say you go, they concede, hey, the non-aggression principle would be a good way of, you know, protecting and distributing resources.
However, we've gotten to a place at the moment where it's kind of, hey, it's convenient for people that have stuff to go, hey, we believe in the non-aggression principle because there's been a lot of theft throughout all of human history that brought you to this place right now.
So in other words, fine.
Let's say we had an equal distribution of resources that was done, in their opinion, by a government body.
Then to say, hey, moving forward, we're going to have a non-aggression principle, they'll concede.
But because there's such a disadvantage for minority groups, they want to go, well, we need someone to come in and kind of equal the playing field first.
Now, what's interesting about that argument is that to me, you know, even if you want to say morally we think someone should distribute the goods, I think you'll end up in a worse place for poor people.
I honestly think that if you removed government for the equation and you allowed people to keep what they earned, the wealthy people would create really good opportunities for poor people.
A rising tide lifts all ships.
And when you introduce this government factor, it's going to be a thing that extracts wealth and ultimately dooms people to poverty.
It's not like so.
Well, I agree with you.
Listen, what you're making is the consequentialist argument, and I completely agree with that.
But I'm just saying, even on just the argument of the moral principle, it's not that you say, like, if you say rape is immoral, and then you go, oh, so you're saying it's fine that there are some guys out there who just can't find a mate and can't get laid and are just like kind of incels and like fucking are miserable guys because no woman is interested in them.
So you're just fine with that.
You think that it doesn't matter and there's no problem with it.
It's like, well, no, those aren't exactly the same thing.
In fact, they're not the same thing at all.
It's not the same thing to say that, like, oh, and it doesn't logically follow that if you think that matters, then rape is moral.
My point is that you go, oh, maybe there are other options here.
Maybe we can still stick to a moral principle and say, hey, let's talk to those guys.
Let's try to inspire them to fucking better themselves.
Fucking read more, go work out, do something impressive, and maybe find a way to attract women to you.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, I can still be like, no, this is a really big problem in society, but violence, initiating violence, is not the answer.
So you can still like, you know, like if there are people who have like really shitty parents and then somebody else has really good parents who are very, like, one's shitty and unsuccessful, and the others are great and successful, or maybe even shitty and successful versus great and unsuccessful.
And one kid grows up with way better opportunities than the other, we might say something like, hey, let's all kick in a few bucks and like try to start something for underprivileged kids.
It doesn't follow that just because some there's a problem, we therefore have to put guns to people's ribs and fucking extract money from them at the threat of violence.
This is just, it's not logically consistent.
You know what I'm saying?
Like you can care about that thing.
The idea that the fucking, you know, like rich people who have been very successful in capitalist societies don't care about poor people.
I don't actually think there's a lot of evidence for that.
Where do you think all the fucking charity comes from?
It's not from other poor people.
And now you could also argue that some of those rich people are just giving money to charity for tax write-offs, but that doesn't really explain all of it.
And you could say a lot of them are just doing it to like gain favor in the public eye.
Justifying Pre-Existing Inequity00:13:14
And to that, I would say like, yeah, but who can really separate that out from any of us?
How many of you ever do something like the right thing?
And at least part of it isn't so you're the guy doing the right thing.
You know what I mean?
Like that's whatever.
That's also a sign of a good culture that they're willing to praise people who are willing to give back to the community.
Sure.
So if that the consequence of a good culture is that the people who earn the most money want to give it back, sounds like you got a pretty winning proposition there.
I agree, sir.
All right, let's keep playing.
If we're violated along the way to getting there, you can have any outcome you want.
And if they don't make that move, then they just have no basis for thinking that this would be justified.
So it's really important to them that they make that move.
But then, of course, the economic history of the real world is never like that.
It's not that, you know, like you would get the impression sometimes, like reading people with Robert Nozick or Murray Rothbard that here's the economic history of the world, that Adam and Eve and their descendants spread out from the Garden of Eden, like making like free freeholding on owned property.
And then there were a bunch of free market exchanges and then we got here.
I mean, look, I don't know.
One of two things is happening here.
Either Ben Burgess is just completely full of shit, or which I actually think is more likely the latter, or he just hasn't read that much Murray Rothbard and is kind of making a judgment over him.
And I get it.
I'm sure I've been guilty of this myself, where you read a couple pieces by someone and in your mind, you're like, I get it.
I get what they're saying.
And then you just extrapolate in your own mind, like what their argument is.
But to say that if you read a lot of Murray Rothbard, you might get the impression that the history of economics has basically just been free market.
Let me say this.
I don't, I think you would struggle to find someone who's written more about the history of economics than Murray Rothbard.
I mean, the man has multi-volume series of books that he's written.
He's probably written at least 10 books on the history of economics, particularly the history of the banking sector, the creation of the Federal Reserve, the history of the Great Depression in America, what has government done to our money.
I mean, all of these stuff.
I know you've read a lot of this stuff, Rob.
The idea that Murray Rothbard wrote about the history of economics as if it's all been free market, laissez-faire, voluntary exchanges.
No, nobody, he was like the leading historian of statist, violent economic policies ever.
So that's just insane.
Of course, that was never the claim that he was making.
The claim might be: if we've been doing everything wrong in the past, let's stop and start doing things right.
Since you guys seem to concede that, you know, like fucking genocide and slavery and all these things were wrong, let's stop.
You concede that taking people's property is wrong, then let's stop.
Let's find a reasonable point to stop.
And no, we're not going to go back throughout history and right every wrong over the last, you know, fucking 200,000 years.
That's just not practical.
So come on.
At some point, you got to stop.
All right, let's keep playing.
Actual case, even in Europe, capitalism emerged from feudalism, a very non-consensual process of enclosures and all that.
And here in the new world, we had a process that was a million times more horrifying than that.
That makes what happened in Europe look cozy and consensual.
Like we're literally like the American economy was literally built up on the backs of slaves on land stolen from genocide victims.
Right.
And that's literally where these things come from.
Let's pause it.
All right.
You can throw the word literally in there one more time, but it doesn't make what you're saying literally true.
So by the way, I hate this left-wing talking point of the American economy was built on the backs of slaves.
I mean, look, slavery is horrible.
It's a horrible, immoral thing to do to, you know, force people into slavery.
Obviously, a violation of the non-aggression principle, to say the least.
But no, the American economy that we live in today was not built off of slavery.
That's just ridiculous.
I mean, there's so many ways to disprove this claim.
Like, one of the major things would be like, well, just look at it historically.
So when slavery ended in the year 1865, America had just been through the bloodiest war in American history, a four-year-long civil war.
Six, 700,000 people died.
The South was burned down.
The North had taken major losses.
If you were to say what economic progress had been made at that point or what the level of the economy was then when slavery was ended compared to today, it would be zero.
Literally wouldn't even register on the scale.
Zero.
0.00000001.
I mean, it'd be immeasurable to even take any, like, there was, by today's standard, no wealth.
None whatsoever.
It just didn't exist.
The wealthiest person you could find and the wealthiest person they could find was in abject poverty compared to today's standards.
Like, that's a fact.
That's just a fact.
Literally a fact.
Okay.
So the idea that slavery built the modern economy, well, then you'd have to ask yourself like a few follow-up questions and tell me how you square this circle.
Like, why, if slavery was so great at building economies, why did we get way richer after slavery?
Why didn't every society that had slavery get as rich as America did?
Like, why isn't Libya really, really rich right now?
Right?
I mean, they have slavery.
So shouldn't they be a lot better off?
I mean, they're building the economy on the backs of the slaves.
Why was the North substantially richer than the South?
Like, none of this makes any sense.
Okay.
So yeah, you can say that like feudalism was a horrible violation of the non-aggression principle.
Of course, slavery was a horrible violation.
Genocide is a horrible violation of the non-aggression principle.
Sure, all of those things.
But we didn't actually start creating wealth, wealth that could even register on the scale until we got rid of all of these things.
Like, you know, you talk about like how wealth was created, but before capitalism, there was no such thing as wealth.
Literally no such thing.
I mean, if you measure economic growth throughout all of human history, it's just a flat line at nothing until like the mid to late 1800s when it shoots up.
It's not a coincidence that right around the time we abolish slavery and have an industrial revolution, then all of a sudden wealth starts getting created.
So no.
And there's also a relation between wealth getting created and slavery ending.
You know, like all these things are related.
It's not like that they're like, oh, the slavery created all this wealth.
This is all bullshit.
But the idea that you would go, I mean, just think it through.
Like as a normal person who has a brain, think it through yourself.
And you go, look at like, I don't know, like look at somebody down by the freedom tower and they're taking a picture of it on their iPhone and sending it over Wi-Fi to their friend in Japan, right?
Like that's the state of wealth today, right?
Skyscraper building, a fucking phone with every, like, that contains the information of everything that's ever been recorded in human history that can take pictures and play music and do all this crazy shit and you can send it around the globe in a second.
And this is like modern wealth, right?
Like a little, a little picture of modern wealth.
And then you go, you know why we have all that modern wealth?
Because in 1840, some black dude was picking a cotton plant.
That's where we got that from.
Does that make sense?
Does that logically follow?
I mean, isn't there a part of you that go, nah, you know, I think there was a little bit more to it.
I think there was a little bit more to it than that.
And just because that guy being forced to pick cotton was a really fucking horrible thing to do, and like real human atrocities were committed against that group of people, that doesn't mean that that's the reason we have what we have today.
Those two things, I mean, it might sound nice, and it's kind of like this like, I don't know, this like pandering thing to say to people, oh, I'm so sorry this happened to you.
And like you're the reason we have everything we have today.
But it's just, it's not true.
It's actually really damaging to like continue in this fucking, this bullshit myth.
All right.
I think there was another point I wanted to make, but I lost it.
Let's keep playing.
That's where it's like, you know, again, of course, we should morally object to that, but that's also where it's like, hey, this isn't just about, you know, the morals of it.
This is also the literal material reality of where these things come from.
So then, and then I think that that kind of just reveals like what this really just comes down to is just establishing a rationale for just a pre-existing inequity and trying to turn it into some type of pseudo-hippie gobbly gook.
And therefore, and there you have the non-aggression principle.
Ben, thank you for the debunk.
All right.
So leave it there.
Yeah, there you go.
What an honest attempt to take on an opposing view.
Gobbly gook.
Gobbly gook.
And we just want to justify the previous existing inequity.
Yeah, I don't know what to say to that.
I mean, it's like, just take an honest listen to this podcast, honestly read Murray Rothbard, look into what he's actually said, or any good libertarian.
Nobody's trying to justify a previous inequity.
In fact, I hate a lot of the current inequities.
I hate the fact that these fucking bankers get rich off this Federal Reserve fucking state-run Ponzi scheme.
Like I say a million times, and I'll continue to say, look at where the richest counties in America are.
It's not a coincidence so many of them are around fucking Washington, D.C. and New York City.
It's because these are the politically connected and these are the fucking people connected to this crazy casino gambling fucking stock market New York City fucking crime syndicate.
Justify the inequities.
Why are we trying to justify?
I think it's fucking disgusting that the Clintons have made $100 million since they left office.
I think it's disgusting that Obama, the Obamas have probably made 10 times what they made their entire lives since they left the White House.
It's absolutely disgusting.
There's no part of us that's just trying to justify the inequities.
It's about how you got there.
It's about how you got there.
And yeah, you know what?
If people are making money from first just acquisitions of property and voluntary exchanges, well, then how are they making that money?
They're making it by improving the lives of other people.
So yeah, if they do make a ton of money, that means they're helping other people out.
You know, I just, whatever.
I will say I appreciate them actually attempting to debunk the non-aggression principle, but I just think this is a miserable fail.
A miserable fail.
And maybe, and I'll leave you with what I gave away before that I wanted to hold on to, but if the non-aggression principle is so laughable and so ridiculous, I would ask you, Ben Burgess and Michael Brooks, both of you guys, like I'm asking directly, not speaking to my audience, speaking to you two.
If it's such a ridiculous principle, why do both of you live by it every single day?
And I thank both of you for doing that.
I appreciate that you do.
This is why we live in a civilized society and we can have these conversations and go back and forth with videos.
But why, if it's such a ridiculous principle, don't you violate it sometimes?
Why do you feel any obligation to not just, you know, take people's stuff?
Hit people.
Take someone else's car.
Oh, you see some rich guy with a car?
Go take that car.
Why not?
Is it really a just distribution that he has that and you have your shitty car?
Take it.
Take some, you know, why not?
Would you feel wrong about that?
I mean, you certainly don't do it.
Maybe because that's how a fucking decent civilized person acts.
They follow the non-aggression principle.
All right, guys.
Thank you for celebrating all 503 episodes or N2, whatever the fuck we're at.
Why We Obey The Rules00:00:48
500 part C.
It's been a hell of a ride.
We're moving on.
The 500 episode week is over.
I can only extend this for so long.
We rebunked it, though.
That's right.
We sure did.
It's been rebunked.
Okay.
Run your mouth podcast at Robbie the Fire on Twitter.
I am at ComicDave Smith.
Once again, don't forget to go get our shirts at podcastmerch.com.
And yeah.
What's that Paleo or Paley Center thing you're doing?
Paley Center, November 25th.
I'll be at the Paley Center.
Go to paleycenter.org for information.
I need you guys to come out to this one.
All right.
I'm going to be on a panel with some other left-wing comedians.
So I'm going to need some of my people in the audience.