Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - The Voluntaryist Handbook w/ Keith Knight
Aired: 2022-08-23
Duration: 01:31:54


=== Terrorist Bombs and State Power (10:18) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up.
[00:00:02]  You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:08]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:10]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:12]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:16]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:22]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:26]  You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:30]  Here's your host, James Smith.
[00:00:34]  What's up?
[00:00:34]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:35]  Welcome back to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:00:38]  I am very happy to welcome back to the show one of my favorite people out there, one of the best guys we've got.
[00:00:45]  He is Keith Knight.
[00:00:47]  He is the host of the Don't Tread on Anyone podcast, and he just released the voluntarist handbook, which is a phenomenal book.
[00:00:56]  I highly recommend everybody go follow Keith Knight, watch his show, purchase the book.
[00:01:01]  What's up, brother?
[00:01:02]  How are you?
[00:01:03]  Not much at all.
[00:01:05]  Well, besides the fact, I'm still mourning today's loss with reliable sources.
[00:01:10]  Other than that, I'm doing real well.
[00:01:11]  Thank you for having me on.
[00:01:13]  You know, people say this like, yeah, people say this in like a glib kind of tongue-in-cheek way, but it is a genuine loss for my podcast.
[00:01:20]  And I don't like that people, yeah, people are kind of like, oh, good riddance and all like that.
[00:01:26]  And I'm like, okay, I have to work 20% harder now than I did before, where I'd be like, what are we going to talk about on the show today?
[00:01:32]  And then someone would send me a Brian Stelter clip and you go, well, that's 50 minutes right there.
[00:01:37]  And, you know, it's just not, it's not that easy.
[00:01:39]  I know people say there's a lot of other people who are terrible.
[00:01:42]  It's not that easy to find that perfect mix of like condescending arrogance while getting it completely wrong, while also just handing you the argument.
[00:01:55]  It's not, it's a perfect storm that comes around once in a lifetime.
[00:01:59]  So I really do.
[00:02:01]  I miss him already.
[00:02:03]  The term is smuggerant, I believe.
[00:02:05]  It's a smug, ignorant piece of trash who is just so, oh, gosh, I can't believe.
[00:02:11]  Don't you know that this is anti-democratic?
[00:02:13]  When they sort of give you that, when everything starts with a sigh, I can't believe I have to continue to explain this.
[00:02:20]  That is the sort of feeling.
[00:02:22]  But it's guys like Brian Stelter who gave me the confidence to do, I don't know anything.
[00:02:26]  If everyone was as smart as Scott Horton and Hans Hoppe, I'd be like, God, I can't do anything.
[00:02:30]  But then I see, oh, people are willing to listen to Brian Stelter.
[00:02:33]  All right, I guess I can start a podcast then.
[00:02:36]  Well, that's the same way.
[00:02:38]  I mean, I feel like even like bad guys, because you give, you know, Scott Horton and Hans Herman Hoppe, okay, those are two really strong examples.
[00:02:44]  But even like guys like, you know, if you, when you look at like what the TV was in the 70s or whatever, if it's like, if it's, you know, Gore Vidal having a conversation with, you know, even like Buckley, two bad guys, you know what I mean?
[00:02:59]  But at least you'd listen to that and be like, well, that's kind of daunting.
[00:03:01]  And these guys are really, they really kind of have their shit together.
[00:03:04]  But today you're like, look, I'm an idiot, but I'm smarter than all these people.
[00:03:08]  So it's very easy.
[00:03:09]  Let me go.
[00:03:10]  I'll go do this.
[00:03:11]  No problem.
[00:03:12]  What a white pill that is.
[00:03:13]  I mean, it's not like we watch the president of America, huge, powerful country, and the president, oh, this guy's got to be really smart.
[00:03:20]  And his press secretary, it's got to be really hard to get anything past, whoever the secretary is.
[00:03:25]  So if we want to respond, we're going to have to get a ton of minds together and really go through the arguments and have books ready.
[00:03:30]  You could do a live stream commenting without any preparation.
[00:03:34]  I mean, it's so ridiculous.
[00:03:36]  And that is, I think, one of the greatest reasons we can be so optimistic, because it's that much easier to create insecurity in the minds of the people we're trying to communicate to.
[00:03:46]  It's going to be hard to, you know, get them to say, I guess I've been wrong for 30 years and the last thousand Facebook posts have been totally illegitimate.
[00:03:54]  That's that's a tall order.
[00:03:55]  However, just to make them so insecure to where they sort of like lean into us, stop hating and sort of accept the privatization of everything.
[00:04:05]  I think that's really where Roby should go with this.
[00:04:09]  Yeah, so this was a major theme on this show on part of the problem for years when I first started, where I used to say, look, I'm not sure that I can convince you of libertarianism or convince you of anarcho-capitalism, voluntarism, whatever you want to call it.
[00:04:28]  But I guarantee if you listen to this show, I can convince you that the establishment is full of shit.
[00:04:35]  Like, I guarantee I can convince you that the Democrats and the Republicans and the corporate press all suck.
[00:04:42]  Like that, I will, I guarantee you, if you give me just like three episodes, you'll be like, yes, I'm sold on that.
[00:04:49]  So that's where, that's what I'll start with that.
[00:04:51]  Like maybe, maybe you don't believe that the guys I read have all of the answers, but I'm telling you, you can't tell me this guy isn't full of shit, that this doesn't make absolutely no sense.
[00:05:01]  And I wrote that for quite a while.
[00:05:03]  Maybe I'm still writing that.
[00:05:04]  I don't know.
[00:05:05]  Anyway, it's, but yeah, that's that we at least can do that.
[00:05:08]  Well, there's, there's so much to ride there.
[00:05:10]  I mean, I will, I had a woman say to me the other day, oh, gosh, you're an anarchist.
[00:05:15]  What are you one of those like bomb makers?
[00:05:17]  Oh, I don't know about you.
[00:05:18]  I said, okay, so you're against people making bombs.
[00:05:22]  You familiar with governments not only making bombs, but using them and using them on civilians, not just like evil pedophiles or rapists or anything.
[00:05:31]  They actually kill civilians, not just the American government, but it's happening in Armenia.
[00:05:36]  It's happening in Yemen, Pakistan.
[00:05:39]  There have been wars in Latin America.
[00:05:41]  Did you know that there was like a world war that happened two times and it was governments murdering tons of civilians?
[00:05:47]  I mean, I know it's terrifying that an anarchist might have a bomb that might explode and hurt a person, but the very thing that you're kind of against applies sometimes to anarchists, but applies a thousand fucking times over to the people who you pledge your allegiance to.
[00:06:03]  Yeah, right.
[00:06:04]  And like, yeah, we absolutely should start stop those anarchists who would be detonating bombs.
[00:06:09]  But again, it's like if your worst case scenario about an anarchist is what states do all the time, every day, then yeah, it's anyway.
[00:06:18]  So, okay, so you just put out this book, the voluntaryist handbook obviously was inspired by Michael Malice, who put out the anarchist handbook.
[00:06:27]  And you made a kind of like a more specific version of this, which is specifically about more our brand of anarchism, which is kind of, you know, the true voluntaryist libertarian version of anarchists.
[00:06:46]  But within that spectrum, you have voices from the left and the right within that area.
[00:06:51]  So what for what, for people who don't know, what is the book?
[00:06:56]  What made you want to write the book?
[00:06:58]  The book is a collection of 48 essays and two or 47 essays and three sections of different quotes on certain topics that is my attempt to give anyone who's generally interested in politics the ultimate understanding of what libertarianism really is.
[00:07:18]  So the main reason that I wrote it is so I could, you know, tell people there are a thousand books I want you to read, tons of articles, tons of speeches, but if I only had one book, what would I give them?
[00:07:30]  And I would think, you know, Hazlitt's book is good, but it doesn't explicitly advocate voluntarism.
[00:07:34]  Hans Hoppe is good, but there's some things about monarchism that might turn people off in there at the beginning.
[00:07:40]  So I said, you know what?
[00:07:41]  Can I stop complaining and just be the change I want to see in the world?
[00:07:44]  So I wanted, so it was really Malice's book that motivated me to do this.
[00:07:49]  The reason I think it was important to make this on top of Malice's excellent contribution is because the concept of a society without a state that would be communist, it actually would not be anarchist in the sense that it doesn't respect people's right to make voluntary contracts in the form of exchange.
[00:08:12]  Usually it applies to labor, but this would be sort of anything that resulted in inequality and a quote. exploitation of someone's labor.
[00:08:21]  So if you believe that Dave Smith and Brian don't have the right to make a voluntary exchange, what I'm essentially doing is claiming to be a ruler over you as well as Brian.
[00:08:34]  So if anarchism is a society where there's no rulers, now that's very different from me saying, Brian, don't take that job from that idiot, Dave.
[00:08:41]  I got a much better offer.
[00:08:43]  Come work for me.
[00:08:44]  You can do all this other stuff.
[00:08:46]  Dude, you could probably beat me real quick.
[00:08:48]  Okay.
[00:08:48]  I don't like this example anymore.
[00:08:50]  Yes.
[00:08:50]  Okay.
[00:08:51]  So Dave's working for Luis J. Gomez, and I offer Dave a much more attractive salary.
[00:08:57]  Now we're talking.
[00:08:58]  There's all these things you can do.
[00:08:59]  There's so many methods of persuasion that you can use to get someone to achieve your ends.
[00:09:05]  What the anarcho-communists would do is not recognize the legitimacy of that voluntary exchange.
[00:09:11]  Consider internships where people get their foot in the door and they get tons of on-the-job experience.
[00:09:17]  They see what it's like to deal with customers, deal with co-workers.
[00:09:21]  That is so valuable.
[00:09:22]  And that is literally labor for a little less than minimum wage, sometimes $0 an hour.
[00:09:27]  But they have a right to do that.
[00:09:29]  Anytime you're reading books or trying to research for something, you're not necessarily getting paid.
[00:09:34]  Something like college is four years of unpaid labor.
[00:09:38]  So the communists must really be against, you know, going to universities, except for the fact that they control the university.
[00:09:43]  So they love them.
[00:09:45]  And they, of course, want to forgive student loan debt as if it's theirs to forgive.
[00:09:51]  It's just so boringly predictable.
[00:09:53]  The point is, is that I think the only legitimate form of anarchism is anarcho-capitalism because it allows people to engage in contracts.
[00:10:02]  It recognizes that right, whereas the communist would have some different set of ruler, not recognizing the legitimacy of contracts between consenting adults.
[00:10:12]  So this is the ultimate case for decriminalizing capitalist acts between consenting adults.

=== Fire Departments as Cooperation (12:25) ===

[00:10:18]  Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
[00:10:21]  The book is beautiful.
[00:10:23]  There's just so many beautiful essays in there.
[00:10:27]  I felt like as I was reading through it, it was like bringing me back to my roots.
[00:10:32]  Like a lot of people who know this show, for the small amount of people who listen to it now, who actually listen to it the whole way through, we've picked up some steam over the years.
[00:10:43]  But for the people who used to listen, this show really started and it was so much about just pure libertarian philosophy.
[00:10:51]  And I've, as the show has grown over the years, I've gotten much more into like current events and the day-to-day news of the country or what's happening in the country.
[00:11:01]  But really, the reason I started this show and the reason I got so interested in all this stuff is I was just so compelled by how beautiful the philosophy of libertarianism is.
[00:11:11]  And I love just from your opening in the book, where you kind of lay out that it's like, look, there's this inherent contradiction in the way everybody else views the world.
[00:11:21]  And when you say everybody else, 99% of people, you know, intellectuals, civilians, everyone, like the way they view the world.
[00:11:28]  And it's basically, right, as you mentioned that, look, there's, okay, we, we have to have a government because if we didn't have a government, then there could be monopoly or people taking advantage of people or all of this stuff.
[00:11:46]  But at the same time, we accept that what we mean by government is a monopoly on all of the most important services.
[00:11:53]  And that this is just like this blatant contradiction and a couple others that you go through.
[00:11:58]  And I don't know why I just always found it so beautiful to tear apart those contradictions and find the like logical implications of actually believing in something and taking it to its natural conclusion.
[00:12:12]  I still see this.
[00:12:13]  You know, I saw the other day on social media, someone was arguing, or maybe it was on a podcast actually, where I saw someone was arguing about like, they're like, okay, libertarians, well, what do you mean you're against government and against socialism?
[00:12:28]  Like, what about the fire department?
[00:12:30]  If we didn't have the fire department, are you telling me you have to pay?
[00:12:33]  If someone didn't pay, then their house just burns down.
[00:12:37]  And it's so fascinating to see all of these kind of these thoughts come out of people.
[00:12:43]  And you're like, well, okay, look, let's just say you believed in, okay, the fire department example.
[00:12:53]  Well, it's not exactly clear why that needs to be a completely socialized monopoly for everyone.
[00:13:01]  Let's just start with something, say something like food, okay, is far more important than someone putting out your house when it's on fire.
[00:13:11]  Not saying it's not important when it comes up, but you need food like every fucking day.
[00:13:15]  You only need your fire put out like very rarely, you know?
[00:13:18]  And you could argue, well, there's food stamps in case anybody doesn't have food, then we have this government program.
[00:13:24]  But now you're kind of already reduced to like, okay, it wouldn't be the fire department anymore.
[00:13:29]  It would be like some type of stipend for someone who can't afford the fire department.
[00:13:34]  And then, but if you go like, no one's going like, oh, I can't believe you'd want everyone to pay for food.
[00:13:39]  You'd really want someone to have to spend money.
[00:13:42]  But like, of course, because we all just take that for granted because we do it all of the time.
[00:13:45]  But you could see where if the government had a complete monopoly on food and someone was arguing, oh, you shouldn't have that.
[00:13:52]  You'd go, oh my God.
[00:13:54]  Like, are you really telling me that we wouldn't do that?
[00:13:58]  This is insane.
[00:13:59]  Like people would just pay for their own food.
[00:14:01]  Like there's all these different areas where you'd see that like, oh, okay, no, this doesn't actually make any sense what you're arguing for.
[00:14:08]  And if it did make sense, then why should it just be the fire department?
[00:14:12]  We should have government monopolies on all vital services.
[00:14:16]  And then, I mean, what's vital?
[00:14:17]  Clothes are vital.
[00:14:19]  Shoes are vital.
[00:14:20]  You know, like all of these things.
[00:14:22]  And then just to take on the next argument of like the, well, what about like food stamps or a safety net of some sort?
[00:14:28]  And you're like, well, I mean, it's pretty important to have fucking a lot of different services that we don't have a safety net on.
[00:14:36]  And it seems the more the government's out of the way, we don't even think about it.
[00:14:39]  We just take it for granted that everybody has ample access to all of these things.
[00:14:44]  I don't know.
[00:14:46]  Anywhere you want to jump in on that?
[00:14:48]  So as far as, well, if something's privatized, then the provider can refuse service.
[00:14:56]  They have a lot of goddamn nerve bringing this up after 376 cops sat on their asses while children were getting murdered.
[00:15:04]  Not to mention, Anthony Blanken has met Sergei Lavrov, I think, one time since February of this year.
[00:15:12]  And from what I know, they didn't really discuss a ceasefire.
[00:15:16]  So as far as not providing a service, so when government doesn't protect us, let's take two big examples, Pearl Harbor and 9-11, because your audience is mostly American.
[00:15:28]  Did government like certainly become or all of a sudden become illegitimate?
[00:15:33]  I mean, they didn't hold up their end of the social contract.
[00:15:35]  We have to pay.
[00:15:36]  And in exchange, they keep us safe.
[00:15:38]  So if they don't hold up their end, they get more power.
[00:15:40]  If we don't hold up our end, well, we get put in a cage and shot if we resist.
[00:15:45]  George Bush's approval rating, I think, was 91% after he didn't keep 3,000 Americans safe.
[00:15:52]  And the government had intentionally provoked a response through Iraqi sanctions, support for Israel through things like the Khanna massacre, having bases in Saudi Arabia used to bomb Iraq.
[00:16:05]  A lot of civilians died in such a thing.
[00:16:08]  So it's not a legitimate thing to say, well, what if government doesn't provide a service?
[00:16:14]  Or what if an organization doesn't provide a service?
[00:16:17]  Therefore, the state needs to step in.
[00:16:18]  The state so often is the great non-service provider.
[00:16:23]  So it's not like, well, there's money and greed in this place, but when the state comes in, well, then it's all kind, virtuous, charitable giving.
[00:16:30]  Imagine that instead of the fire department requiring payment and in exchange, they don't put out a fire.
[00:16:38]  Well, let's compare that to the IRS.
[00:16:40]  If you don't pay the IRS for all the services that government claims to provide, do they just call you and say, hey, Dave Smith, it's IRS.
[00:16:50]  We noticed you didn't pay.
[00:16:51]  Is it because you're unhappy with the service?
[00:16:53]  We're so sorry if we haven't provided a good enough service.
[00:16:56]  If you want to opt out and go with someone else, we totally respect that.
[00:16:59]  No, they not only won't provide the service, they won't provide it after they've confiscated your house, put you in a cage, and left your children to be raised by total strangers in foster care because you didn't chip in.
[00:17:12]  So in both cases, you can have people not chipping in.
[00:17:16]  In the status case, you get put in a cage and don't get the service.
[00:17:20]  And in the private market case, you might not get the service, but you might have a fire extinguisher.
[00:17:25]  Fire departments would work like AAA works today, where most people can join for very cheap.
[00:17:30]  And if you don't join and you're in an emergency, they'll help you out.
[00:17:33]  They'll send you a bill.
[00:17:35]  You can read Tom Woods' book, Have the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.
[00:17:40]  Charities are very well known in the West because people who believe in God, they see every human being as an extension of themselves made in the image of God.
[00:17:51]  There's tons of examples.
[00:17:53]  You mentioned a number of things here.
[00:17:56]  As far as the beauty of libertarianism, this is also something that I really liked because you can say, I have a philosophy about human beings.
[00:18:04]  They're rather selfish or rather self-interested.
[00:18:08]  And you can still recognize that and say the beauty of the free market is that it harmonizes the interests of individuals cooperating in such a way.
[00:18:19]  So it's not that.
[00:18:21]  Steve Jobs said, God, I really like Keith Knight and his family.
[00:18:24]  I'm going to create Macs for them.
[00:18:26]  He did this in his own self-interest.
[00:18:28]  And I didn't buy this Mac because, well, I really like Tim Cook, the current CEO.
[00:18:33]  Therefore, I'm going to chip in and help him out.
[00:18:36]  It's he wants my money and I want his service.
[00:18:39]  So when it comes to the state, well, they can just demand any amount for any reason.
[00:18:43]  It'll probably go to the Bandawite Azov Battalion anyways.
[00:18:46]  And if I don't chip in, they'll cage me.
[00:18:49]  Well, that is a rather primitive disutility of arranging a society.
[00:18:54]  Whereas Sheldon Richmond makes the point that social cooperation is so vital.
[00:18:58]  It's one of the earlier chapters in this book that people are constantly cooperating.
[00:19:04]  So this microphone was made by a different company than who made the USB insert that I'm using, which is different from the Cox communication that I'm using for internet access, which is a different company than Apple, which is different than Zoom, the platform we're using now.
[00:19:20]  However, all of these people have cooperated to give us a service for very relatively cheap.
[00:19:26]  So that's an example of how people can cooperate and get something cheap like the fire department.
[00:19:31]  And then finally, what are the most expensive things in society?
[00:19:36]  Well, the things that are most heavily subsidized, housing, healthcare, and college schooling, which I refuse to call education.
[00:19:42]  The reason this is because there's a classic saying called he who pays the piper calls the tune.
[00:19:49]  And this means that when producers have to answer to customers and customers pay the producers, they have to answer to customers.
[00:19:57]  You don't produce a good product or service.
[00:19:59]  You end up like Sears, Blockbuster, MySpace, AP Grocers, any of the companies that Marxists don't believe exist, that the capitalist just rakes in money without anything on the other end.
[00:20:11]  You constantly get this feedback mechanism of, hey, I not only approve of your product or service, I'm willing to bear the cost of allocating my scarce money supply towards your product or service.
[00:20:25]  So the most subsidized things are the highest cost because the producers focus on pleasing politicians as opposed to pleasing producers, whereas things like cars, printers, microphones, computers, routers, these have all drastically decreasing costs while increasing in quality.
[00:20:42]  So if you care about the poor, if you care about morality, the only system that you could advocate is voluntarism because it's the ultimate check and balance against the evil powers in the world.
[00:20:53]  Voluntarism allows people to disassociate with bad actors, whereas the state says you have to fund them no matter what.
[00:21:00]  And maybe you can vote in four, six, or 10 years and you get a one in five million vote.
[00:21:05]  And there's so many mules going around, maybe your vote's not even counted.
[00:21:09]  Dinesh D'Souza makes that case.
[00:21:10]  I don't know if it's true or not.
[00:21:12]  I'm not convinced.
[00:21:14]  Maybe.
[00:21:15]  But maybe it's not even counted.
[00:21:17]  Well, I'll tell you, Tucker Carlson just had a piece the other night.
[00:21:20]  I don't know if you saw that.
[00:21:21]  You know, it seemed to say there was some real shady shit going on in the Georgia elections.
[00:21:25]  So, hey, I certainly don't, my default position is that I don't trust anything the government says.
[00:21:30]  I just haven't yet been convinced of what the scale was in that particular event.
[00:21:34]  But okay, so there's a few things that you talked about there that I think are right at the heart of what's so beautiful about this whole worldview and this correct worldview that actually applies to real life.
[00:21:46]  And it's so number one, oftentimes I think that, and this is partly because of like the Chicago school and Milton Friedmanites and those types where what they'd always focus on with free markets was the aspect of competition, which is, you know, an important thing in life.
[00:22:07]  We compete and that in many ways makes us stronger.
[00:22:11]  And the fact that, you know, if there is no competition, that's not helpful.
[00:22:16]  And when there is competition, it makes you step your game up, as anyone who's ever competed in anything knows.
[00:22:21]  But the aspect that you're talking about about cooperation is so much, in my opinion, so much more prevalent in market activities.
[00:22:30]  Just no matter what you think of, you know, if you just think about like going to the grocery store, what that actually entails, you know, it's like the amount of cooperation.
[00:22:40]  Okay, just from the very beginning, it's my wife being willing to go for me.

=== The Liz Cheney Scam (05:50) ===

[00:22:44]  Okay.
[00:22:44]  So she's already cooperating with me and agreeing to go do all of our grocery shopping.
[00:22:48]  She's getting in a car that was built by not one person, but like hundreds of different companies when you include all of the different pieces that are involved and who services it and all that.
[00:23:00]  She's going to a store where there's some landlord who rented out this store to a Whole Foods and they're in agreement about that.
[00:23:08]  They have an agreement with a butcher who has an agreement with a, you know, like a trucking company that moves it to them.
[00:23:15]  They're everybody and we're all, and then she's agreeing to purchase things at every specific price.
[00:23:20]  There's so much, like so many different things coming together that everyone peacefully in this harmonious way is agreeing on what they agree to and what they don't agree to.
[00:23:32]  And then the other thing, as you touched on earlier, is that what the market has that the government doesn't have is a cleansing mechanism.
[00:23:40]  And that, you know, it's not just that you signal to Steve Jobs or Cook or whoever, you know, is at Apple now that you approve of them when you buy their computer, but when companies go out of business or just have losses in general, they get the signal that people aren't happy with what you're doing.
[00:23:58]  You're not adding value to their life and they don't particularly feel like peacefully cooperating with you.
[00:24:03]  Whereas, as we could really see, and you used two great examples in 9-11 and Pearl Harbor, but of course, there is the example of just the response to COVID, which I don't know just about anybody.
[00:24:15]  Over the last two and a half years, this government has turned upside down every norm and done, just completely devastated this society.
[00:24:26]  And at this point, what is the result of that?
[00:24:29]  Well, the CDC just quietly goes, Yeah, we're going to agree with you guys.
[00:24:33]  We're going to say, Hey, I guess we're not going to do all that stuff anymore.
[00:24:36]  We're just going to do it your way.
[00:24:37]  And all of them still have their salaries and their pensions and their everything.
[00:24:43]  You know, it's like, so Liz Cheney is a good example the other day, just got absolutely wrecked in her primary.
[00:24:50]  And I've seen some of these people saying, you know, well, she took a courageous stand against Donald Trump.
[00:24:57]  And it's like, well, okay.
[00:25:00]  I mean, yeah, I mean, look, if she hadn't have stood up against Donald Trump so much, would she have had a better chance of not losing her primary?
[00:25:08]  I will concede maybe that would have helped.
[00:25:12]  Courage.
[00:25:14]  She has a net worth of like $40 million.
[00:25:18]  She could go be a CNN contributor, work at a think tank funded by weapons companies.
[00:25:25]  She can go be maybe she'll be on the view as the token conservative.
[00:25:29]  Maybe she'll run for president and just raise tens of millions of dollars, even though she won't get 1% of the vote.
[00:25:35]  Like, is that really courage?
[00:25:37]  Like, if you told me I could say something right now that would guarantee I lose my podcast audience, but I make $100 million over the next 10 years, and I said it, would you go, wow, Dave, that's courageous?
[00:25:52]  You know what I mean?
[00:25:53]  Like, no, that's not really that correct.
[00:25:55]  So, when you see these government officials and government elites, they always fail upward.
[00:26:01]  There is no punishment for failure.
[00:26:04]  And this is right at the heart of the problem of everything that's going on in our society right now: is that no matter how wrong they get it, there is no cleansing mechanism.
[00:26:14]  Whereas in the market, there are even rich people go broke.
[00:26:18]  Even huge companies go broke.
[00:26:20]  Kodak was like the business in film.
[00:26:24]  They went broke because they made this decision that they weren't going to switch over to digital.
[00:26:29]  And they were wrong.
[00:26:30]  And so they fucking begin.
[00:26:32]  They went from being the thing to being who cares?
[00:26:34]  Oh, you're the biggest company in film.
[00:26:37]  Okay.
[00:26:38]  Well, no one uses film anymore.
[00:26:40]  Everyone's digital now.
[00:26:41]  So who cares?
[00:26:42]  And that's the major problem here: there's no like cleansing mechanism that ever, no matter how bad the fuck up is, you continue to be rewarded.
[00:26:52]  Yeah, freedom of disassociation is the ultimate check and balance.
[00:26:57]  So yeah, if you care about checking checks and balances, it's good to maybe have, you know, a Senate, House, a presidency, a Supreme Court.
[00:27:06]  But it's more important that we're able to say, screw you to those organizations if they don't do a bad job or if they do a good job, we need to be able to associate with them and contract with them.
[00:27:18]  So yes, that's vitally important as far as Liz Cheney goes.
[00:27:23]  I mean, how is it called courage when you take the position of every professor, everyone in the media, everyone in Hollywood, the vast majority of Democrats who control the cathedral's narrative, tons of podcasters, blue check Twitter, Facebook, when Zuckerberg comes out and only says election misinformation applies to Russian disinformation, not Hillary Clinton said.
[00:27:51]  17 intelligence agencies confirmed Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
[00:27:56]  That was redacted on June 29th of 2017 by the New York Times.
[00:28:02]  So did Facebook come out and apologize?
[00:28:05]  No.
[00:28:05]  Joe Biden on the presidential debate stage said that 50 Intel officials, not just one, two, three, 50 Intel officials confirmed this laptop of my son is a Russian plant.
[00:28:19]  So no problem.
[00:28:20]  I mean, he's just provoking a war with a nuclear power.
[00:28:23]  You know, it's not like an anarchist built a bomb or anything.
[00:28:26]  All of these things are much more misinformative than anything that could occur otherwise.

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[00:28:34]  So yeah, the need to disassociate with bad actors is so vitally important.
[00:28:39]  Yet it's the one thing that the state doesn't allow us to do because it necessarily relies on forced association.
[00:28:47]  Yeah, 100%.
[00:28:49]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Truebill.
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=== Unions vs Private Property Rights (15:37) ===

[00:30:34]  Well, let's take on some if we can here, because obviously the book lays out from many different angles by many different brilliant thinkers, like arguments and reasoning for arriving at this conclusion that we ought to live in a voluntarius society or as close to it as we can possibly get.
[00:30:55]  So let's try to take on some of the criticisms of voluntarism as best we can.
[00:31:02]  Let's try our best to steel man them and then respond to them.
[00:31:07]  So the first one that I thought of was the one that you mentioned at the top, which is a good one to start with because you kind of talked about this is what inspired you to write the book after Michael Malice's book, where you're like, well, look, there are these Anarchists, left-wing anarchists, some identify as anarcho-communists, anarcho-syndicalists, different forms of left-wing anarchists who argue that me and you are not really anarchists.
[00:31:37]  And if I could make their argument as strong as I can for them, I will attempt to.
[00:31:43]  And there is a little kernel maybe of truth in how the what where these words originate from, right?
[00:31:50]  So anarchy means without rulers.
[00:31:55]  And hierarchy is also in the form archy with rulers at the top, right?
[00:32:03]  So where there are, there is an order of rulers.
[00:32:07]  So they'll say, look, if you're not against hierarchy, then you're really not against rulers.
[00:32:15]  And therefore, you people who believe that someone could be the business owner and someone could be the business worker and someone could be, you're really not an anarchist, even though you're against the state, you know, in some sense, you're not really an anarchist because you don't believe in ultimately kind of like achieving these egalitarian ends.
[00:32:38]  So I don't know, is there a better way to steel man the argument, or what would you say?
[00:32:42]  They'll say, you're not really, if you believe in landlord and tenant, then that's that's still some, you know, you're not truly an anarchist.
[00:32:52]  Or if you believe in employer and employee, this person still has this ability to say, well, you do this or you lose your job.
[00:32:59]  And if you lose your job, you're going to be destitute and blah, blah, blah.
[00:33:03]  But first off, is there a better way to steel man that argument?
[00:33:06]  Or if not, what would your response to it be?
[00:33:10]  That's a pretty good way to steel man because we've heard it so often.
[00:33:16]  Maybe I would say the anarcho-capitalist does not allow the individual to reach their full creative potential because a number of institutional barriers that exist as a result of previous aggression currently exist in society today.
[00:33:33]  Therefore, things like employers, which exist because of a power differential, do not allow individuals to live life unruled.
[00:33:41]  Therefore, anarcho-capitalists are not anarchists.
[00:33:44]  That's all bullshit.
[00:33:46]  So on page three, I have a list of terms just because a wise man once told me that so many disagreements come down to different definitions of the same term.
[00:33:58]  So if you think capitalism is just people being greedy for money, I would be totally against capitalism.
[00:34:05]  But how on earth is it greedy to want money voluntarily?
[00:34:08]  But the socialist who wants to take money by force and threatening to cage you, well, that's not greedy at all.
[00:34:12]  That's just caring about people.
[00:34:14]  So when I define anarchy on page three in the terms section, I say from the Greek prefix an, meaning without or in the absence of, and the Greek noun archon, master, ruler, anarchy does not mean without rules.
[00:34:29]  It literally means without rulers, without masters.
[00:34:33]  So the difference between someone heavily influencing you and someone being a ruler is simply your consent.
[00:34:39]  This differentiates trade from theft, slavery from work, and kidnapping from hanging out with someone at their house for an extended period of time.
[00:34:49]  So if a man works and the woman stays at home, she would be exploiting his labor because she's not working.
[00:34:57]  She's just taking a portion of his income and spending it.
[00:35:00]  And obviously college, like I mentioned previously.
[00:35:04]  Anytime someone gives charity, well, that person didn't work and they're not obeying the labor theory of value.
[00:35:10]  So charity has to be outlawed.
[00:35:11]  Obviously, Social Security needs to be abolished.
[00:35:15]  And any sort of voluntary retirement program, well, that needs to go.
[00:35:19]  But as far as are we not really anarchists, I think I have addressed that as much as I can in my opening statement.
[00:35:29]  Simply, we believe individuals have the right to contract.
[00:35:32]  The anarcho-communist does not.
[00:35:34]  So even though they were first, absolutely historically accurate, they were first.
[00:35:39]  Imagine if the earliest mathematicians believed three plus three equaled 55.
[00:35:46]  They would have been first, but they would not have been mathematically correct.
[00:35:49]  So yes, the earliest anarchists did believe that you didn't have the right to make voluntary exchanges.
[00:35:55]  Look, the bottom line is you don't know what's best for 7 billion strangers.
[00:36:00]  I mean, look at all of the inequality that exists.
[00:36:02]  I don't know, everywhere.
[00:36:03]  In the NBA, I'm not nearly as good as the NBA as anyone in the NBA.
[00:36:09]  And not only that, within the NBA, less than 1% of NBA players sell 99% of the jerseys.
[00:36:16]  It's like five or six guys sell 99%.
[00:36:20]  That's inequality.
[00:36:21]  This is referred to as the iron law of oligarchy.
[00:36:24]  The original example that's given by James Burnham in the Machiavellians is: all right, so you're sick of the bourgeoisie, these owners, horrible people.
[00:36:35]  So you are going to start a union where you allow the proletariat to rise up and be an equal force against this bourgeoisie.
[00:36:43]  Nothing anti-libertarian about that.
[00:36:45]  You can certainly do that.
[00:36:46]  You have the right to strike.
[00:36:48]  The alternative is forced labor, which is slavery, which violates the non-aggression principle.
[00:36:53]  So people in a union will voluntarily come together.
[00:36:57]  However, not everyone's going to come to the union meeting.
[00:37:01]  Not everyone's going to talk at the union meeting.
[00:37:03]  Not everyone is going to be as persuasive as other people at the union meeting.
[00:37:07]  So you end up with Jimmy Hoffa and his five friends controlling the union.
[00:37:11]  This is called the iron law of oligarchy.
[00:37:13]  So the most democratic people on the planet, Bernie Sanders and AOC, they have more institutional power than 99.9% of their supporters ever will.
[00:37:23]  Because anytime you organize, anytime people organize, there's going to be some people who are better than others.
[00:37:29]  And it just makes economic sense for you to delegate the cost of spreading the message to that person.
[00:37:34]  Iron law of oligarchy refutes anarcho-communism on both moral and practical grounds.
[00:37:40]  I think it was Thomas Soule who said something along the lines of even if we had absolute perfect equality tomorrow, we wouldn't have it the day after tomorrow.
[00:37:51]  You know, like it's like, even if you were somehow able to get this, you know, I will say that I think here's where there is, and I know this is semantics or linguistic, you know, accuracy, but I think I'll concede this.
[00:38:04]  I think that when we use the term anarchy, we are using it in the literal sense, the way you were, that no rulers or without rulers.
[00:38:14]  But the term hierarchy also has that same root word, you know, rulers in it.
[00:38:20]  And that's not actually how everyone who uses the word means it.
[00:38:23]  So when people talk about hierarchy, it's actually there should be some other word that describes.
[00:38:29]  So in other words, if there's a hierarchy where LeBron James is, you know, way higher than some benchwarmer, he's not the ruler of that benchwarmer.
[00:38:38]  I mean, the bench warmer could leave anytime he wants to.
[00:38:40]  It's not like he doesn't, like by our definition, we wouldn't actually consider them a ruler or not a ruler.
[00:38:46]  Hierarchy is just that there are obviously always going to be differences between people and some people will achieve different levels of success.
[00:38:56]  And the thing that a lot of these leftist types who claim, well, you're not the real anarchist, they'll make these, you know, they'll make arguments like some of them, I think their rebuttal to your point would be, well, no, no, no, we have no problem with, you know, people making voluntary transactions to a certain point.
[00:39:19]  You know, like in the same way, they'll go, Well, we have no problem with personal property, but we have a problem with private property.
[00:39:27]  And they'll kind of say, Well, you could have a house to live in your house, but you can't have five houses and rent out four of the houses.
[00:39:38]  But this, of course, becomes they get themselves into a very big predicament here where you go, oh, okay.
[00:39:47]  So you're so obsessed on this hierarchy part that you're foregoing the anarchy part.
[00:39:55]  So, okay, you what does that mean?
[00:39:57]  I mean, look, I could have a garden in the back of my yard.
[00:40:00]  How much food can I grow?
[00:40:01]  Enough for my family?
[00:40:03]  How about enough for my family and a little bit to put away for the winter?
[00:40:07]  Is that too much?
[00:40:08]  How about enough to put away for the year?
[00:40:10]  How about enough to put away for five years?
[00:40:13]  I mean, when is your point of when I have too much that I don't need that?
[00:40:18]  By the way, what does need mean?
[00:40:21]  I mean, need, which is a word the commies like to use a lot, right?
[00:40:25]  To each according to their need.
[00:40:27]  Um, so what do we need?
[00:40:29]  I mean, all of us have way more than we need, at least in the year 2022.
[00:40:36]  If you're not in a third world country, you have way more than you need.
[00:40:40]  So, what do you need?
[00:40:42]  At what point does it change?
[00:40:43]  This is a completely arbitrary line.
[00:40:45]  And then, the more important question is: who stops me?
[00:40:49]  Who gets to stop me when I've grown?
[00:40:52]  See, this is where there's this big contradiction on the left with egalitarianism as you go, well, everyone has to be equal, you know, or as equal as possible.
[00:41:02]  And so, then if I have, you know, if I'm growing way more food, you know, maybe I'm growing enough food to feed an entire town.
[00:41:10]  I don't need all that food, but I was growing it in my yard.
[00:41:13]  I'm growing all this food.
[00:41:14]  I don't need that.
[00:41:14]  Well, who stops me?
[00:41:16]  Who comes and takes it from me?
[00:41:17]  Well, by definition, that person who uses force to take it from me is my ruler.
[00:41:24]  And also, by definition, there's a hierarchy here where that guy has the decision-making ability over me.
[00:41:33]  So, actually, I would argue that the only true anarchists, even though I'll concede the term hierarchy is a little bit misused in terms of the literal definition using the word ruler.
[00:41:45]  If you're going to use that term ruler with anarchy, the only way you can be an anarchist is to be a voluntarist capitalist, laissez-faire, complete laissez-faire capitalist.
[00:41:55]  But that if you don't support private property, then not only are you not an anarchist, but you also have to believe in hierarchy and you can't believe in egalitarianism because somebody would have to be in a higher position than me in order to make that determination.
[00:42:14]  And this idea that just, well, the people make that determination is complete fucking bullshit.
[00:42:19]  There's no the people, there are just individuals.
[00:42:22]  And then who's going to fucking enact that on me?
[00:42:24]  And again, even if it is the people, if it's all of the people versus me, well, that's not very egalitarian, is it?
[00:42:32]  It's a whole group of people with more power enforcing their will on me.
[00:42:36]  So, the question is, what rights do you have?
[00:42:38]  And do you have the right to delegate those rights?
[00:42:41]  So, if my grandma has the right to defend herself, she's in her 80s.
[00:42:46]  It's going to be a little difficult.
[00:42:47]  So, what she's going to want to do is delegate that.
[00:42:50]  And she's kind of exhausted from, you know, doing anything.
[00:42:54]  So, she's not going to want to grow her own food.
[00:42:56]  So, she's going to delegate that.
[00:42:58]  My grandma is not the only person out of the 7 billion people on the planet who want to delegate these things.
[00:43:03]  So, what you end up having is people engaged in a division of labor.
[00:43:08]  And therefore, some people specialize, have more private property in certain areas, and those areas become more productive as a causal result of being private.
[00:43:18]  So it's not that, well, now I'm being restricted and I can't go on that property because it's now private.
[00:43:24]  You have more options than you otherwise would as a cause result of private property.
[00:43:28]  So when I went to Florida recently for the Yale 2022 revolution, because there was private property, I didn't have to say, God, I wonder if there's food there.
[00:43:40]  Do I have to bring my own food?
[00:43:41]  I just knew all these things that would be privately available to me.
[00:43:46]  would exist because there's a profit incentive, because the resort was privatized.
[00:43:51]  You would think that no one would be having any exchanges with anyone because everyone has their own private property and everyone's restricting access.
[00:44:00]  So everything's in shortage mode.
[00:44:02]  No, because there's private property, there's much more of an abundance than there otherwise would be.
[00:44:07]  So that's the utilitarian case.
[00:44:09]  And then on the moral case, look, the guy giving me a place to live, my renter landlord, he gives me a house.
[00:44:17]  All you leftists give me is Antifa burning down houses.
[00:44:20]  So if you care about the poor, make sure that there's a class which only benefits if they provide a good or service to those who choose to contract with them.
[00:44:31]  I mean, all of the books that I've bought, I've spent tons of labor reading them, and the author has reaped the benefits from my labor when I purchase them.
[00:44:43]  So what?
[00:44:43]  That's a voluntary exchange I chose to make.
[00:44:47]  Anytime you allocate your scarce time on this planet towards something or other, it can be a sense of exploitation.
[00:44:55]  You and I working to explain this to the dumbest people on the planet means you and I have to send them an invoice or we need to put them in jail for exploiting our surplus labor under no justification.
[00:45:07]  Could you both support no people ruling anyone else and having the right to forcibly stop people from engaging in voluntary transactions?
[00:45:15]  You don't know what's best for 7 billion strangers.
[00:45:17]  Allow them to do whatever they want voluntarily.
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=== Protecting Assets from Violence (11:55) ===

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[00:46:39]  So have you heard this argument, which I got to say, I'm going to have a lot of trouble steel manning, but I've heard this argument made by people who call themselves libertarian socialists.
[00:46:51]  And they basically say that without like they'll argue that rent is theft.
[00:46:58]  And they'll argue that without a government, landlords would not be able to defend their property.
[00:47:12]  So, the argument is basically that the government, through its police force, they on the face of it, I guess there's some plausible argument, right?
[00:47:24]  That police protect private property.
[00:47:28]  Now, this is, you know, let's say before San Francisco and Los Angeles and the riots of 2020, man, you know, there was some off time where government police used to protect private property.
[00:47:42]  And so, okay, their private property defense is subsidized by the government.
[00:47:49]  And so, therefore, if they didn't have that, you know, they're relying on the government to intervene to defend their private property.
[00:47:58]  Or, you know, these a similar argument to that will be that like private property is inherently kind of like an act of violence because they, you know, you, you are, are arguing to defend it with force.
[00:48:11]  I've seen these arguments made.
[00:48:13]  I'm baffled by how stupid they are.
[00:48:15]  Like, number the, the thing that just jumps right out to me is just that, like, if you think of the average landlord who has like five or six properties, my guess is he's making, I mean, at least like at the very least, low six figures a year.
[00:48:32]  He's probably paying 50% of this money in taxes.
[00:48:35]  If he did not have to pay 50% of this money in taxes, I think he could probably afford to hire some private security.
[00:48:44]  And the idea of like proper private property being violence or something like that, a threat of violence.
[00:48:53]  Well, if you believe that, it seems to me that you'd have to say like, like a woman saying, I don't want to be raped is a threat of violence, or that it's like, you know what I mean?
[00:49:04]  Like you're the aggressor for not wanting to be raped.
[00:49:07]  I mean, it's just, I really don't even know how to steal man this argument, but it is an argument that is out there.
[00:49:12]  I don't know.
[00:49:13]  You got anything you'd like to say about that?
[00:49:16]  So without the existence of a state to protect private property, the protection of private property would not exist.
[00:49:24]  Therefore, anarcho-communism is inevitable in the absence of a state.
[00:49:28]  That's probably the closest I can get.
[00:49:30]  The assumption is that which is not subsidized in a state of society would not exist in a voluntary society, which the subsidy makes something much more expensive than it otherwise would be because the producer does not have an incentive to meet consumer demand.
[00:49:47]  They get all their money from politicians.
[00:49:49]  So, I mean, can we agree with this libertarian socialist that the military is pretty expensive for the service of creating enemies that then want to kill us and justify further military expenditures?
[00:50:05]  That seems like a pretty high cost.
[00:50:07]  So the idea that, well, your private property won't be protected unless 40% is stolen with a threat of violence every year is literally like saying bad husbands would exist without OJ Simpson.
[00:50:21]  They're taking the worst example and saying without this worst example, this thing could not come to fruition.
[00:50:28]  The answer is people would either have guns to defend themselves, they would have knives to defend themselves, they would have alarm systems, they would have voluntarily funded security organizations.
[00:50:40]  So the idea that a business couldn't contract with someone at a small cost and say, hey, if my business or my private property gets raided, you guys have to pay me an insurance fee in exchange.
[00:50:54]  So now you have an incentive to protect my private property.
[00:50:58]  The assumption that it wouldn't exist in the absence of a coercively funded monopoly is just someone who does not, who has not really taken business seriously.
[00:51:10]  It's like something.
[00:51:11]  Well, if businesses are private, they'll never exist because they'll have to pay employees and then the employees will take up all the money.
[00:51:17]  No, what they'll do is find an equilibrium.
[00:51:21]  So they won't pay $1,000 an hour.
[00:51:23]  They also can't pay $0 an hour, which is why not 100% of workers earn minimum wage because of competition and capital investment in productivity.
[00:51:33]  So they would allocate a certain percentage that's now not being taken by force every year.
[00:51:39]  They would allocate that to a private protection agency who would have more of an incentive to protect their private property than anyone else.
[00:51:48]  Now, as far as, well, then these organizations would just go to war.
[00:51:53]  Okay.
[00:51:53]  As I mentioned before, governments have gone to war maybe once or twice throughout history.
[00:51:58]  I'm not sure.
[00:51:59]  I'd have to double check.
[00:52:00]  So the existence of battle does not go away because a monopoly on violence exists.
[00:52:07]  It not only exists, it makes it more likely.
[00:52:11]  The reason is because war is extraordinarily expensive.
[00:52:14]  This is a theory generally called the state is the health of war.
[00:52:18]  So we know war is the health of the state, meaning governments can get away with things in wartime in an emergency that they otherwise wouldn't be able to get public approval on in the absence of this terrible evil external threat.
[00:52:31]  But the state is the health of war because it often has the ability, Zelensky's doing this, to conscript people and fight against their will.
[00:52:38]  So they don't even need to convince people to join their military.
[00:52:42]  They also coercively fund the operation.
[00:52:44]  So if people say, you know what, I think it's better if Donest and Luhansk were independent republics, considering they voted for that in 2015 at the tune of like 90%.
[00:52:54]  Same with Crimea previously.
[00:52:56]  So, you know, I don't like Putin.
[00:52:58]  I don't like Poroshenko, I think, was the president at the time.
[00:53:02]  But, you know, if the people voted, then that could be Russian territory.
[00:53:07]  Ukrainian government doesn't allow that.
[00:53:09]  They coercively fund the operation and now can murder civilians for seven years and then the and then Zelensky can play the victim afterwards.
[00:53:18]  So the very fact that the government gets to externalize the cost of war makes war much more likely to happen than it otherwise would.
[00:53:25]  Some people hear that and hear me saying that war only exists because of governments, not what I'm saying.
[00:53:31]  It's more likely to exist because the government doesn't have to bear the cost of recruiting people often and doesn't have to actually pay the price.
[00:53:39]  They could tax it or they could just print the money.
[00:53:41]  And third, they don't actually have a criminal justice system which recognizes violence as illegitimate when they do it.
[00:53:49]  The collateral murder video comes out and the guy who leaks it and the guy who shared it, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, they're the ones who go to jail.
[00:53:58]  I mean, certainly.
[00:53:59]  So having a legal double standard, coercing people to join the operation in the form of conscription and, you know, male privilege, remember that's a totally real thing.
[00:54:09]  And then taxing and printing everything else.
[00:54:13]  So in every case, the socialist has no justification.
[00:54:16]  Private property is justified because it relies on people engaging in voluntary contracts.
[00:54:21]  On a utilitarian basis, it makes things more abundant than they otherwise would be.
[00:54:25]  And states, collectivist organizations are more likely to go to war than ones based on voluntary cooperation.
[00:54:32]  Yeah.
[00:54:32]  Okay.
[00:54:33]  I think that's, to me, that's a pretty devastating case.
[00:54:36]  All right.
[00:54:36]  Let's move to the more that was kind of the left wing criticisms.
[00:54:42]  Let's move over to more the right.
[00:54:43]  Let's start.
[00:54:44]  Let's start boomer con and then go to more interesting, thoughtful right-wing people.
[00:54:50]  So the boomer con criticism of libertarians might be something like, all right, well, you want a completely anarchist society.
[00:55:02]  Well, look at chaz.
[00:55:04]  You know, that's that's what you get when you have anarchy.
[00:55:08]  You're going to have, you know, just this kind of like lawlessness and craziness and violence.
[00:55:14]  If we didn't have the police force and the military, someone could, you know, there'd be high crime in these neighborhoods.
[00:55:22]  Putting people away in jail, you know, is what actually brings down the crime rate.
[00:55:28]  We see, you know, as we're letting people out of jail, crime rates are going up.
[00:55:33]  As we're prosecuting drug crimes less, crime rates are going up.
[00:55:37]  Without the military, I don't know.
[00:55:39]  We'd all be speaking German or some dumb shit.
[00:55:42]  I don't know.
[00:55:42]  I'm trying my best to steal man these arguments.
[00:55:45]  Any of that?
[00:55:46]  What would you respond?
[00:55:48]  German's a fine language.
[00:55:50]  I wouldn't mind speaking it.
[00:55:53]  It's a harsh.
[00:55:54]  That's very xenophobic.
[00:55:55]  I reject the question.
[00:55:57]  There's kind of like, it's like a very sharp, you know, it could cut you with that language.
[00:56:04]  But anyway, any response.
[00:56:06]  So one of my favorite articles in here is from a gentleman named Joe Sobrin.
[00:56:10]  He was the senior editor at National Review for 18 years.
[00:56:15]  He was William Buckley's right-hand man.
[00:56:18]  And he came out and said, look, I've been a conservative my entire life.
[00:56:21]  However, I talked to Murray Rothbard and it was interesting, but then I talked to Hans Hoppe and I just became an anarchist.
[00:56:28]  The reason that he gives, let me just quote one brief section, page 136.
[00:56:34]  Gradually, I came to see that the conservative challenge to liberalism's just prudence of loose construction was far too narrow.
[00:56:42]  Nearly everything to it all, I thought, was the 10th Amendment, which forbids the federal government to exercise any powers not specifically assigned to it in the Constitution.
[00:56:53]  But the 10th Amendment had been comatose since the New Deal when Roosevelt's court virtually excised it.
[00:57:00]  So in other words, the conservative, the second they give this group, the state, a monopoly on an interpretation of a great document, what would be a great contract that you could write up for a number of people organizing together, maybe an HOA or something.
[00:57:16]  The second it becomes monopolized, that means only one group gets to interpret it.
[00:57:22]  And you can come away with interpretations that are blatantly ridiculous.
[00:57:27]  So when the conservative says, well, we need things like objective law, we have to have some way of knowing what's legal and what isn't.
[00:57:35]  The Supreme Court right now, nine lawyers who went to Ivy League schools don't agree on whether there's a right to own a AR-15, nor do they agree on whether there's a right to an abortion.
[00:57:45]  So the idea that 330 million people will objectively understand a law when nine Supreme Court justices who went to like Harvard or Yale or somewhere else, that is not going to happen.
[00:57:57]  A much more likely scenario is people are going to engage in voluntary contracts that allow them to increase their utility because they have an incentive.

=== Illegal Drugs and Mafia Control (05:06) ===

[00:58:07]  And the other party has the right to dissociate from them if they're not meeting their end of the bargain.
[00:58:15]  So when it comes to things like increased degeneracy, no laws and such, this is occurring at a point where the American government does exist.
[00:58:25]  So what they're essentially saying is, without a state, we might have all the things that are currently happening under a state.
[00:58:33]  All of these bad things can always happen.
[00:58:35]  The question is, under which system would you rather this problem exist and which system best incentivizes the absence of this system?
[00:58:45]  So when it comes to something like people using drugs or the mafia existing, just as people were more likely to drink moonshine during prohibition because you needed something small, you could hide, therefore it was much more potent, much less reliable.
[00:59:01]  Well, then they're more likely to use things like crystal meth and heroin today, and they're much more likely to overdose.
[00:59:08]  When it comes to making these things illegal, that's where mafias come in.
[00:59:12]  That's where MS-13 actually gets more power than they otherwise would have.
[00:59:17]  I don't like the fact that Scottsdale is like flooded with all of these pot shops, but it is a hell of a lot better than people getting separated from their kids, families being torn apart, you then having something terrible on your record for the rest of your lifetime.
[00:59:34]  So when it comes to something like that, the existence of a state doesn't stop it from happening.
[00:59:39]  The police are the people not protecting you from the existence.
[00:59:43]  And then the final thing of riots.
[00:59:47]  Well, did the police face any terrible consequences?
[00:59:50]  I mean, this guy who I think his name was Michael Bird or something, he murders Ashley Babbitt on camera.
[00:59:58]  Everyone sees it, and there's not even a trial.
[01:00:01]  I mean, Kelly Thomas is murdered on security camera by two officers.
[01:00:06]  They get off.
[01:00:07]  Tony Tempa is suffocated to death.
[01:00:09]  Eric Garner is suffocated to death.
[01:00:12]  So these cops not only will punish innocent people who are mostly peaceful, they will allow riots to exist because they know the response will be people begging for more police.
[01:00:24]  So all of the terrible things you say can happen under a voluntary society have happened under a status society.
[01:00:31]  The question is, should they face competition or should they not?
[01:00:35]  According to the conservative, well, all we have to do is lobby them and maybe elect someone who's really going to lay down the law.
[01:00:44]  The laws, the tax code alone is 72,000 pages that no one's ever read.
[01:00:49]  Anytime an IRS agent is looking at the same person's income, they come up with two different verdicts on what the person actually owes.
[01:00:56]  This is research done by John Hasnis in a chapter titled The Obviousness of Anarchy.
[01:01:00]  He cites that in my book.
[01:01:03]  So one, you don't get objective law where everyone knows drugs are illegal, crime and rioting is illegal, therefore we won't have it if a state exists.
[01:01:14]  It's more likely to happen because you don't have the competition incentive.
[01:01:18]  Not to mention that the reason people believe all this trash and nonsense is because of government schools and universities, which push the debunked racism conspiracy theory that leads to all of these riots, which could be certainly considered blowback to some extent.
[01:01:34]  So, I mean, none of that justifies a coercively funded monopoly.
[01:01:39]  Yeah, they list a ton of bad things, but those things exist in any society.
[01:01:42]  It's like saying, well, ignorance exists, therefore we need a state.
[01:01:46]  It's just as bad as saying ignorance exists.
[01:01:48]  Therefore, the Koch brothers need to coercively fund and monopolize schooling systems.
[01:01:53]  That won't necessarily solve the problem.
[01:01:55]  In fact, it'll make it worse.
[01:01:57]  Same thing with the state.
[01:01:58]  Yeah, no, absolutely.
[01:02:00]  And I mean, and on the bright side, there have been a lot of people on that side waking up over the last few years.
[01:02:09]  But man, I mean, if you could just see, you know, from the, if you look at the riots of 2020, from the fact that the whole thing was the cops' fault for sparking the event.
[01:02:20]  Now, okay, I know the, you know, like George Floyd thing was absolutely inexcusable.
[01:02:26]  The fucking no need to throw this dude who was having a panic attack on the ground and lay your knee on his neck until he fucking died.
[01:02:32]  Like it was just inexcusable.
[01:02:34]  He wasn't even like a violent threat.
[01:02:36]  It was just like fucking that cop was having some fun.
[01:02:40]  And then, okay, yes, there were all of the race hustlers and all of these people who pushed it and all of that, but the cops fucking started it with this problem.
[01:02:49]  And then once the riots fucking spread, you see the cops like they'll go up to like some little old man and push him down on his fucking head.
[01:02:57]  They'll go throw some girl on the ground.
[01:02:59]  But when there's a big group of people actually fucking looting and destroying and fucking people up and all this, oh, then they back off because it's not, you know, it's like, if you can't look at that and just see, ma'am, this is not the best system for protecting against this, then I can't help you.

=== Monarchy Pressure and Strategy (16:02) ===

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[01:04:46]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[01:04:48]  All right, let's move.
[01:04:50]  Let's move to the more, I think in some ways, interesting critique of libertarianism.
[01:04:57]  The kind of the more hardcore right-wing neo-reactionary criticism of libertarianism, which some of it seems to be led by like or very influenced by Curtis Yarvin.
[01:05:13]  I know you did a long podcast responding back to him, which I thought was excellent.
[01:05:19]  But so his, he would use this analogy.
[01:05:21]  I don't want to butcher the analogy, but it was something like, well, look, if you had like a pole standing straight up, you might only need a little bit of pressure to keep it, you know, straight up.
[01:05:35]  But once it's all the way in this direction, you need a whole lot of force to bring it back into equilibrium.
[01:05:42]  And so I think the argument basically goes that like, look, in order, if there's been all this force that's been used to get society to where it is, then we need a whole lot of force to bring it back to something more like sanity, you know, something more like what the correct order would look like.
[01:06:03]  And then, so that's the first point.
[01:06:05]  And then I think the second point would be something to do with libertarian strategy.
[01:06:13]  Like the idea that you're just going to wake a lot of people up is not actually what moves societies.
[01:06:21]  What moves societies is what very powerful people who are always destined to be very powerful people actually think and how they actually move things.
[01:06:29]  And so we kind of maybe let's take them one by one and we could we could spend the rest of our time on that.
[01:06:35]  So number uh number one, the idea that say, because this I think is, while I disagree with it, I think is a much more intelligent criticism.
[01:06:44]  The idea of say, after, for example, after Something like what we've had with the COVID regime.
[01:06:52]  You have people like DeSantis and Abbott in Texas saying, hey, we're going to ban private businesses from discriminating against the unvaccinated.
[01:07:03]  And so you could say, well, that's not exactly a libertarian solution, but you go, look, after all of this government force has been injected into taking whatever, after all this government force has been injected into propagandizing people to hate the unvaccinated and all of this government force has been used to push the vaccine and guarantee liability,
[01:07:29]  is covered for the vaccine and all of this, that now we're going to need some force in the other direction to counter that.
[01:07:37]  Do you have a response to that?
[01:07:39]  Yeah, when it comes to the need for large-scale societal change, this absolutely can exist when there's a state for reactionaries or anyone who's just not a member of the current cathedral for them to occupy.
[01:07:54]  And sometimes that can be vitally important because it allows you to do things like engage in minimal necessary force responses.
[01:08:02]  So, I mean, the response could be anyone who advocated the vaccine goes to prison, millions of people.
[01:08:08]  Well, that would be very, that'd be a very high cost.
[01:08:10]  So maybe the minimal necessary step is we can stop the vaccine mandates of employers.
[01:08:18]  And I totally get that because that's classically what the state is.
[01:08:23]  People benefiting at the expense of others and those other people benefiting at the expense of you.
[01:08:28]  It's like you could only punch someone in the face when their hands are down.
[01:08:32]  So we'd be better off without this thing.
[01:08:34]  But sometimes I've been getting hit this entire time.
[01:08:38]  I can finally punch back.
[01:08:39]  I'm going to take my chance when I get it.
[01:08:41]  So I totally get that.
[01:08:42]  The idea that, well, if the poll is society and we generally have this equilibrium, but this is society going fine, libertarianism can work here.
[01:08:52]  But if society is completely on its ends, Somalia, places like Baltimore, sad that that's an analogy, but it happens to be.
[01:09:02]  Then you need someone to really step in.
[01:09:04]  Well, the fallacy that's occurring is he's equating initiating violence power with institutional power.
[01:09:12]  So we could say that there is a problem where we can't really move things from one place to another.
[01:09:19]  It's like we have a lot of stuff here, but it's needed over there.
[01:09:23]  So therefore, you might think we need a monarch to step in and control things.
[01:09:27]  Well, what's happened historically is a guy named Cornelius Vanderbilt competed with a guy named Edward Collins, and Collins got up to a million dollars a year from the government.
[01:09:39]  He was subsidized, and Cornelius Vanderbilt was able to out-compete him in steamships.
[01:09:46]  This is not some trivial little thing.
[01:09:48]  Well, I think matches could be privatized.
[01:09:50]  This is, can human beings travel across water and not just the kings of society?
[01:09:55]  Can the everyday person eventually be able to not just see the two miles that they live, the two mile radius from where they happen to be born?
[01:10:06]  Can they go from Manhattan to England?
[01:10:09]  And can they eventually go to Argentina if they want?
[01:10:12]  This is something huge.
[01:10:13]  When it comes to the Wright brothers, the government plan to build a plane was called, I think it was called the Langley Project.
[01:10:20]  I think the guy's name was Samuel Langley.
[01:10:22]  So they said, well, government's going to build a plane.
[01:10:24]  We're going to step in.
[01:10:25]  We can't have some unstable pole.
[01:10:28]  We have to have a stable plane that needs to be built.
[01:10:31]  Of course, the Langley project failed.
[01:10:33]  And two bicycle shop owners, the Wright brothers, with the help of their sister, actually made a plane.
[01:10:39]  And that is what later led to the Boeing 737s that many people fly on today.
[01:10:46]  So there's two examples of large-scale fast change happening and coordination as a causal result of privatization and not the need for a monarchy.
[01:10:57]  Other examples would be the drastically lowering in the price of oil from John D. Rockefeller.
[01:11:04]  Whether you love him or hate him, that is an example of people fastly organizing something and quickly getting it out to the masses.
[01:11:11]  Andrew Carnegie, when it came to steal books, when it comes to the example of Jeff Bezos, I remember where I'd have to work probably five or six hours of landscaping in order to afford a book.
[01:11:22]  And now they're much more affordable because of people like Jeff Bezos.
[01:11:27]  So being a libertarian is not being against power and organization and people being very ambitious.
[01:11:33]  All that stuff is allowed.
[01:11:35]  Or Steve Jobs might even be a better example with computers and iPhones.
[01:11:39]  So all of those examples, I just gave tons of examples of people organizing and society coming together and really aiming towards an end that's extraordinarily beneficial.
[01:11:48]  That has to meet the standard of what Yarvin is claiming.
[01:11:54]  Well, we need to get people together.
[01:11:56]  Those are a number of examples of people coming together.
[01:12:01]  Another thing he does is he says, FedEx is an example of a monarchy.
[01:12:05]  UPS is a monarchy.
[01:12:08]  Your car is made by a monarchy.
[01:12:09]  What restaurant do you like?
[01:12:10]  It's a monarchy.
[01:12:11]  The reason it's a monarchy is it has a CEO.
[01:12:13]  The CEO gives power to a number of underlings who hire employees, who have customers, and then there's this feedback loop.
[01:12:21]  The fact that he doesn't differentiate, or he does so in very few places, he doesn't differentiate between the monarch we can choose to associate with and the one we can say he's not providing enough values through him.
[01:12:34]  That is just unbelievable.
[01:12:36]  For someone who's read Hoppe, especially the last few chapters of democracy, The God That Failed, are you telling me that if like Sears was able to issue taxes, you'd be like, well, it's the same as they were before.
[01:12:48]  No, it's not even close.
[01:12:50]  Well, this is it.
[01:12:51]  And it drives me crazy because it's like they're familiar with Hoppe.
[01:12:55]  They've all read Hoppe.
[01:12:56]  They all admire Hoppe, and yet they still insist on butchering him.
[01:13:01]  So it's like, okay, Hoppe's argument, agree with it or don't agree with it.
[01:13:07]  Hoppe's argument is that a private property society and anarcho-capitalist society is the best that we could hope for, but preferable to democracy is monarchy because it better simulates private property, where the monarch privately owns government.
[01:13:27]  Now, agree with that or disagree with that, however you feel.
[01:13:30]  That's their argument.
[01:13:31]  But what they say is that Hoppe argues that real libertarianism is monarchy and that therefore what we want is monarchy.
[01:13:41]  And so see, look, the New York Times is a monarchy and FedEx is a monarchy and all of this.
[01:13:46]  It's like, no, Hoppe's point is exactly the opposite, that actually a monarchy is private ownership of the government.
[01:13:54]  But what you're talking about is private ownership of a company.
[01:13:58]  That's just private ownership.
[01:14:00]  Now, okay, yeah, you can say it's a monarch in the sense that I'm the monarch of my house.
[01:14:05]  Okay, but like, that's not what anyone means by monarchy.
[01:14:08]  What they mean by it is someone who owns the government.
[01:14:11]  And so obviously, Hoppe's position is preferable to that is an anarcho-capitalist private property society.
[01:14:17]  And my thing with this argument right here, I got a pen too.
[01:14:20]  It's a kind of gay yellow pen, but I got one here too, right?
[01:14:23]  So I think that Curtis Yarvin's argument is that like, okay, look, society up here takes very little pressure to hold this up.
[01:14:33]  I could just rest my hand right here and holds very little pressure.
[01:14:36]  But if it's all the way over here, it takes all this pressure to get it back up here, right?
[01:14:41]  But my counter to that would be that when society is right here, what's actually going on?
[01:14:47]  And my argument would be that currently what's going on is there's all this pressure right here.
[01:14:52]  And what we really need to do is take this pressure off.
[01:14:55]  And the natural point is right back up here.
[01:14:57]  Now, it may, when you take this pressure off, swing around a little fucking bit and meet ultimately in this equilibrium here.
[01:15:05]  But that's what's going on is that there's all this pressure.
[01:15:08]  Look, all of this shit, all the crazy, like fucking whatever you'd call leftism, wokeism, all of this, it's a government program.
[01:15:17]  It's all a wokeism is a government program.
[01:15:20]  It is all, it exists in the public school sector.
[01:15:25]  It came out of the universities.
[01:15:27]  It's pushed by the CIA and the FBI and all of these different organizations, the entire political class, the entire Hollywood class, the entire, it's everything that's propped up by the regime, by the cathedral.
[01:15:41]  All you'd have, you see this constantly.
[01:15:43]  All you'd have to do is remove that pressure and it would be gone.
[01:15:49]  There's no way this stuff could survive within the market.
[01:15:53]  And if I'm wrong about that, I'm wrong about that.
[01:15:55]  But there seems to be no, I mean, it seems like every indication is that if you just relieved that pressure, there's no way any of this stuff would exist.
[01:16:04]  If you're telling me that any of this left, like, how would gender studies exist without the college, you know, like system?
[01:16:18]  The whole thing is just teaching kids and then them maybe having a career teaching other kids.
[01:16:23]  It's a big Ponzi scheme propped up by government tax dollars.
[01:16:27]  Like just get rid of that and watch the problem solve itself.
[01:16:32]  And then there's a big incentive for those voters to exist because they actually have a state to which they can use their vote to impose their will on you.
[01:16:41]  Where if there wasn't that bat signal, they would be less likely to be attracted to it and they'd have to use their power of persuasion.
[01:16:49]  But specifically, so the last chapter of the book is 50 pages and it's just a collection of random quotes that I think are important.
[01:16:56]  So one of the quotes is from Democracy, The God That Failed, page 72.
[01:17:01]  And Hoppe makes this so clear.
[01:17:03]  He says, it was to a large extent the inflated price of justice and the perversions of ancient law by the kings, which motivated the historical opposition to monarchy.
[01:17:14]  However, confusion as to the causes of this phenomenon prevailed.
[01:17:19]  There were those who recognized correctly the problem lay with monopoly, not with elites or nobility.
[01:17:26]  But they were far outnumbered by those who erroneously blamed it on the elitist character of the rulers instead, and who accordingly strove to maintain the monopoly of law and law enforcement and merely replace the king and the visible royal pomp by the people and the presumed modesty and decency of the common man, hence the historic success of democracy.
[01:17:49]  So you could have the same person in two different situations, the voluntary monarch who people can disassociate with, who has a real incentive to make as much money as he can to get as high of a social status as he possibly can.
[01:18:04]  And he can't get a dime out of your pocket unless you voluntarily give it to him.
[01:18:08]  The monopolist does not face such an incentive.
[01:18:11]  So when Yarvin and the like say that they want government to be run like a company, I think any governing service can be run in such a way.
[01:18:23]  Does that get to the heart?
[01:18:25]  You also mentioned strategy.
[01:18:28]  As far as what the libertarian strategy can be, well, first, embracing the division of labor and recognizing that some people are good at convincing some and not others.
[01:18:39]  That is, that's one of the things that should be at the top.
[01:18:43]  But second, when it comes to people's ability to influence politics, they have no incentive at all to get informed.
[01:18:51]  It's extremely costly to understand agriculture subsidies, let alone agricultural subsidies and the minimum wage and sugar quotas and foreign policy with Yemen and Pakistan and everything else.
[01:19:05]  So because that is likely to happen, we have people who have an incentive to accept things once they are privatized and once the state has diminished in power.

=== Filling the Political Vacuum (12:37) ===

[01:19:16]  One of the big white pill articles in here is called One Moral Standard for All by Sheldon Richmond.
[01:19:22]  And he says, look, it can be intimidating to be a freedom advocate because you say, oh, God, we disagree with people on healthcare and the environment.
[01:19:30]  And oh, God, there's a thousand things we got to convince them of.
[01:19:32]  All we have to do is get them to stop believing in this cult of statism, which is that morality applies differently to different people.
[01:19:41]  The complimentary essay is How Private Governance Made the Modern World Possible by Edward Stringham.
[01:19:47]  So he uses the example of eBay, not a small company, PayPal, not a small example, Amazon, not a small example.
[01:19:55]  How these are mostly reputation-based organizations that even if someone says, hey, I'm at Amazon, I'm using my small business to work through Amazon, and I'm going to screw you out of your money.
[01:20:07]  It still doesn't pay to use the government court system.
[01:20:10]  You still use private arbiters or you still comment or you leave reviews or you screenshot it and post Facebook and MySpace.
[01:20:18]  That threat of a bad reputation and decreasing your private voluntary income is a check and balance that the marketplace has.
[01:20:26]  So it's not just convincing people, delegitimizing the authority.
[01:20:31]  There's also the economic incentive that exists for people to not associate with the state, even if they love it because association with it can be extraordinarily costly.
[01:20:41]  So those are two of the reasons I think libertarianism is not just some pie in the sky magical thing that we just pretend is going to exist one day.
[01:20:52]  So much of it exists now.
[01:20:54]  So long as you don't have what Thaddeus Russell calls the shame is the health of the state, that because people feel that they have an obligation to this thing, they tend to obey it.
[01:21:04]  Once you expose them as the absolute criminals they are, well, then people like Stephen Crowder are going to get on in front of his millions of viewers and say the FBI should be abolished.
[01:21:12]  No one has an obligation to fund them or obey them.
[01:21:16]  Well, that certainly is a step in the right direction.
[01:21:19]  So I think Yarvin is not correct on both strategy or the illegitimacy of a possible libertarian strategy, as well as his pencil analogy.
[01:21:29]  Did I answer that?
[01:21:31]  I think you answered a lot of it.
[01:21:33]  I guess the final thing, and we could close on this, is the in terms of in the realm of strategy, I think what some of the neo-reactionary types would argue is that, you know, it's just even convincing more people is pointless.
[01:21:52]  What I'm doing, my work is pointless.
[01:21:55]  It doesn't matter how many, you know, even if Stephen Crowder says this, and even if more people don't believe in the legitimacy of government, it doesn't really matter because at the end of the day, there's going to be this ultimate sovereign.
[01:22:09]  There's going to be this power center and they're going to do as they wish.
[01:22:14]  And whatever the change doesn't come, it's the opposite of kind of like the old, you know, the new left view that the change comes from the bottom up, the change actually comes from the top down.
[01:22:28]  And so what you really would care about doing is convincing elites, powerful people, rather than convincing regular people who might listen to this podcast or something like that.
[01:22:40]  My response to that typically would be that, you know, I mean, those powerful elites seem to spend a ton of time trying to propagandize the people.
[01:22:48]  So it seems that they believe it's pretty important to have everyone believe in this.
[01:22:53]  And so I think it's probably pretty important to unplug people from that, you know, that.
[01:22:58]  propaganda and to counter it.
[01:23:01]  But I don't know.
[01:23:01]  Do you have anything to that?
[01:23:03]  Or do you think, is that their argument exactly?
[01:23:05]  Or what do you think?
[01:23:07]  Yeah, that's a common expression.
[01:23:10]  If there was no hope, their propaganda would be unnecessary.
[01:23:14]  So the fact that they're feeding us this trash is evidence that they recognize that public opinion and acceptance is important.
[01:23:22]  I will, I'm sorry to use the Evalde thing again, but literally one person with a gun got 376 officers to stand down.
[01:23:31]  A number of churchgoers in Texas got the FBI to stand down for 51 days.
[01:23:38]  And yes, they were murdered afterwards, but so fucking what?
[01:23:40]  People who follow the law all the time get murdered as well.
[01:23:43]  I'd much rather be these people than any of the other ones.
[01:23:47]  So, okay, that's a portion of it.
[01:23:51]  Also, the power vacuum argument doesn't recognize the importance of public opinion when it comes to a power vacuum.
[01:23:59]  So if everyone believes in the concept of statism, some people have a right to rule, others, and this right exists as a causal result of people voting.
[01:24:09]  It's only voting through this institution.
[01:24:11]  If any other institution voted, that would be initiating violence against peaceful people.
[01:24:17]  This is so important because just as Assad would have a hard time coming to America and then just becoming president, even though he is the president or prime minister of Syria or whoever replaced Netanyahu or Ehud Barak, all these people would have difficulty, even though they literally are kings, presidents, prime ministers, whatever you want to call them, simply because in America, they don't recognize that legitimacy.
[01:24:41]  Kim Jong-un, very powerful person in one area and not another area, because in this area, he does not have widespread recognition of being legitimate.
[01:24:52]  So the power vacuum will always exist.
[01:24:55]  The question is, what checks are going to exist?
[01:25:00]  Is there going to be a democratic vote?
[01:25:01]  Is there going to be a constitution that the monarch is pressured into following or that he has a financial incentive to follow?
[01:25:10]  When it comes to anarcho-capitalism, the simple non-recognition of a double standard is the check and balance that drastically limits, doesn't make it impossible.
[01:25:20]  Yes, you can murder people.
[01:25:22]  Yes, you can form mobs, but then again, most mobs get their power from black markets, which allow them to thrive in areas they otherwise wouldn't be able to.
[01:25:32]  So when it comes to power vacuums existing, yes, they can always exist, but they primarily exist as a causal result of people believing in statism, something they'll happily change once the people who are cool or even the elites.
[01:25:47]  I agree.
[01:25:48]  I'd rather Elon Musk, I'd take Elon Musk and Joe Rogan and Mark Zuckerberg becoming voluntarists over like, you know, I don't know, 10,000 of my neighbors or something, because then it would make it cool.
[01:25:59]  Then it would make it popular.
[01:26:00]  Then it would make it okay.
[01:26:02]  Just as in most advertisings for something like Corona Extra, you have a ton of people smiling and hugging each other and they're in great shape.
[01:26:09]  Well, they're telling you that this product is associated with happiness and well-being and popularity because people are constantly seeking acceptance and their biggest fear is rejection.
[01:26:20]  If we show them that voluntarism is cool and then make it more popular than something like monarchism, which necessarily relies on this double standard that can't be applied consistently, I mean, whenever they give me an argument, I say, Did your monarch allow you to make this argument?
[01:26:36]  Don't you want to make sure that I'm the monarch of you?
[01:26:39]  This way, I use my low time preference to violently dominate you and increase your well-being in the future, or do you just live in Monarchistan in your head and you just go around engaging with people voluntarily and engaging in actual libertarian ethics before you make any large purchases?
[01:26:54]  Do you check with a monarch to make sure it's okay?
[01:26:56]  No, you don't.
[01:26:57]  Obviously, not because so much of our life is lived in libertarianism because that's actually what we value.
[01:27:04]  It's only because of this propagandistic bullshit that is constantly fed to us through government-funded entities.
[01:27:12]  So, yes, power vacuums would exist.
[01:27:14]  The reason they have so much power is because of the existence of a state.
[01:27:17]  If you had to individually collect $4 trillion from strangers every year, it would be something like totally impossible.
[01:27:24]  But because people believe the IRS has the legitimacy to do so, what's the IRS?
[01:27:29]  1% of America?
[01:27:31]  I bet it's not even close to 1% of 1%, and they're still able to collect more than any mafia could ever dream of because people recognize the legitimacy.
[01:27:39]  Once a very small percentage of people stop recognizing that legitimacy, the cost of the state to enforce its edicts becomes way too high.
[01:27:47]  And we have to, I don't want to say we have to, but it's also important to get people to just hate this organization.
[01:27:54]  So, showing them the Kelly Thomas video, it's not like, well, I'm really cheap, so I don't like that I have to pay taxes.
[01:28:01]  It's I hate this organization that kidnaps people for victimless crimes.
[01:28:05]  I have a chapter in here titled Homelessness Regulation and Exploitation.
[01:28:09]  Two cases: one in Los Angeles, a guy named Elva Summers, and a guy in Washington named Jay Austin.
[01:28:14]  They built houses for the homeless for between $1,000 and $50,000, and the homes were confiscated by the state.
[01:28:22]  Forced homelessness exists because it wasn't up to code, whatever the hell code is.
[01:28:27]  I don't believe any of them have even Los Angeles are up to code.
[01:28:35]  Yeah, yeah, really.
[01:28:36]  And government murdering civilians.
[01:28:38]  That's totally that's totally up to code.
[01:28:41]  So, look, once we get people to really hate this thing, it's only going to take a small percentage.
[01:28:46]  It's not like 90%.
[01:28:48]  What percentage has to resist and stop recognizing its legitimacy?
[01:28:52]  Something very small.
[01:28:53]  Therefore, libertarianism's a reasonable thing that can really be achieved.
[01:28:58]  It takes people recognizing something they already accept and extending it to the political class.
[01:29:05]  So, yes, it is realistic.
[01:29:07]  I agree.
[01:29:08]  And I think that there's something, I think that's great what you said.
[01:29:12]  And something in there really stuck with me.
[01:29:14]  The example about like Assad coming over here or whoever, pick whatever world leader you want to pick.
[01:29:22]  You know, pick like, imagine if, you know, Assad or Netanyahu or Putin or like any other world leader you could think of came over here.
[01:29:33]  And I would just go even one step further with that analogy and say, and imagine all that the powerful billionaires and elite class people were behind them.
[01:29:43]  Could they convince Americans this is your new ruler?
[01:29:46]  My guess is no, because they it's just like, no, we don't accept that.
[01:29:51]  That's not what we've been trained to believe.
[01:29:53]  That's not who rules this government.
[01:29:54]  And so, and I think there's a very powerful point there that it's like, no, in some ways, this represents the Hayekian-Rothbardian split, which in a very weird way, I think the neo-reactionaries are more on the side of the Hayekian.
[01:30:08]  The idea that we need to convince the intellectuals, we need to convince the important people.
[01:30:15]  And then that will be ultimately what leads to like the, and the truth is that that's never going to happen.
[01:30:22]  They're all incentivized.
[01:30:23]  There's a reason why the billionaire class all supports the state because they benefit from it.
[01:30:30]  And we have a much better shot at just convincing the masses.
[01:30:34]  And I think if you reach enough, it's critical mass, but I think as you pointed out, critical mass is way lower than most people think it is.
[01:30:41]  I don't think it's 60%.
[01:30:42]  I think it's like 10%.
[01:30:44]  of society.
[01:30:44]  You convince 10% of society, and then you're going to be like, you're going to be blown away by what changes.
[01:30:50]  All right, listen, we got to wrap up there.
[01:30:53]  Dude, I've really fucking enjoyed this.
[01:30:55]  It's been way too long since last time.
[01:30:57]  I promise it will not be as long till next time I have you on.
[01:31:00]  Guys, go follow Keith Knight.
[01:31:02]  He's one of the best guys we got.
[01:31:04]  Go purchase the voluntary, I almost said the anarchist, the voluntaryist handbook.
[01:31:09]  It's phenomenal.
[01:31:10]  And go check out his show, Don't Tread on Anyone.
[01:31:13]  Anything else that you want to plug?
[01:31:15]  LibertarianInstitute.org.
[01:31:17]  Of course.
[01:31:18]  Me, Scott Horton, Kyle Anzalone, Sheldon Richman, a ton of authors there.
[01:31:23]  Our general goal is to create an educational archive that you can go to.
[01:31:28]  You can use a search engine, type in healthcare, economics, minimum wage, Iran, Pakistan.
[01:31:34]  We have so many free materials that we're using because we want to make everything free, no paywalls or anything because we want to just change public opinion.
[01:31:45]  LibertarianInstitute.org.
[01:31:47]  Dave Smith, thank you for having me.
[01:31:49]  Dude, my pleasure.
[01:31:50]  Thank you so much.
[01:31:50]  And thanks, everybody, for listening.
[01:31:52]  Catch you next time.
[01:31:53]  Peace.