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Dec. 14, 2005 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:27
12 The Imbalance of Power
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So I'm going to continue some ideas from my last podcast.
I'm tucked away in the background of the, in the back corner of the food court here at the Washington Convention Center on the 14th of December 2005 at 2 11 p.m.
So I'm on at 3.
I got a little bit of time beforehand.
I wanted to go over some ideas that I mentioned in my last podcast, before I was interrupted by the housekeeper, and just talk a little bit about the problem of incentives within a violent system.
The problem with violence is that violence always creates a win-lose environment.
We all know that if someone's going to steal your Rolex, it's not like they've made a new Rolex, they've gained a Rolex, and you have lost your Rolex.
The same thing is true for, you know, the government in particular.
I mean, if I get a particular federal grant, you are not getting that money.
Now, of course, the government can always print more to pay both of us, but all of that means is that the future generations, or whoever's going to inherit all that public debt, or whoever's going to pay for the inflation, loses their money.
The only thing that contributes to the growth of goods and services within the economy is trade and being able to do more with the same amount of time, right?
So the question of profit is complicated, but suffice it to say here that if I can produce one widget an hour by hand, And then I spend ten hours creating a machine which allows me to produce two widgets an hour in perpetuity.
You know, after ten or so hours, everything after that is pure gravy and I now have more with the same amount of time and energy.
that I did before.
I mean, it's a very simplistic way of looking at it, but the only thing that creates a win-win situation is investments which improve productivity over time or over energy.
So again, not to get too technical on the economics of it, the important thing to remember is that if it's not an investment which is voluntary to supply a product or service that the market desires, which is also voluntary, Then it is a zero-sum game or a net-sum game.
So I steal from Peter to pay Paul.
There is a net loss because not only have I taken $100, say, from Peter to pay Paul, But the labor that I could have contributed to the economy if I were not doing something as slimy as stealing money has also been lost to the economy.
So, not only does Peter lose $100 and Paul gains $100, but the time that I might have spent in a productive endeavor, which I've now spent stealing, is also lost to the economy, so it's a net loss.
Overall.
So that's an important point to remember when looking at violence.
And, you know, I mean, I'm sort of focusing a little on violence rather than the state here because it's a little easier to understand with somebody who grabs your sneakers than with somebody who is, say, printing money and creating national debts.
But violence is always a negative sum game, which is why, of course, societies which rely on violence, and this, of course, is most of the world except for the West, And most of the West, except for the last 250 years or 200 years or so, those societies which rely on violence are those societies which remain poor.
I mean, there really is no, at least to me, because I'm not a think tank that is paid to overcomplicate things, there's no great mystery to the problem of poverty within the world.
Poverty is simply created by violence.
Poverty is exacerbated by violence.
And unfortunately, the violence in Western civilizations, through taxation is funding the violence in other civilizations or non-civilizations if it's a violent state say in Africa or in the Middle East.
The violence here funds the violence there and thus poverty generally tends to increase.
So, of course, then the question is, why is violence ever an option?
Or why is it ever preferred, right?
Well, violence is analogous to drug use, in my opinion, and this is one reason why it's, to me, kind of ironic that the government tries to control drug use when it's addicted to violence, money, power.
There are two paths to happiness, I guess you could say.
One is to live a moral life and be a good person and be courageous and be virtuous and all of that good stuff.
And that's time-consuming and difficult, much like getting into shape is time-consuming and difficult.
The rewards are great.
The level of difficulty is not minimal.
So, the other route to happiness is you can just take a nice juicy hit of heroin.
Now, I myself never tried any drugs of any kind.
I was a smoker for a little while and I like a glass of wine from time to time, but I've never even tried marijuana or anything like that.
I just...
I feel that I have kind of a good racehorse between my ears and I don't want to steroid it up in any way.
So, you can, of course, choose to just forget about being a virtuous person and just take drugs.
And I can certainly understand that perspective.
I really can.
I mean, if I had, if my doctor phoned me tomorrow and said, Steph, my boy, you've only got A week to live.
Well, you know, I'd be kind of tempted.
I gotta tell you, you know, they say that, you know, crack or heroin is like a thousand times better than your best orgasm, so...
You know, part of my life plan is to wait until I'm very old and then start trying all this stuff when it doesn't matter to my health anymore.
So that having been said, I can certainly understand why people would be interested in... Just wait, there's a bit of a rumbling here as they take a cut.
So, I can certainly understand why people would be interested in taking drugs if they're in a particular situation where they only have a short amount of time to live.
Or, you know, they're in an enormous amount of pain.
I mean, I hope that there's going to be lots of morphine around when I get old and sick and, you know, I'm on my deathbed.
So, you know, drugs are a perfectly valid approach to particular kinds of problems.
It's just that, you know, if you're like 20, 30, 40 or 50 years old, you don't particularly want to get into the situation where you get addicted to something which is going to ruin your life for the next, you know, 40 or 50 years.
So, I would say that these sort of two approaches to happiness, one is short-term chemical and one is long-term virtue.
Pretty much, unless you're in a very unusual situation or about to die, you want to go with the long-term virtue rather than the short-term chemical.
So, with that not-too-subtle metaphor in place, we can actually have a look at what violence does.
You know, if you want to make money, you can either take the long and difficult route, excuse me, which is to, you know, go to school and learn stuff and, you know, figure out the market, figure out what people want, invest your own money, put your house up for mortgage, work 60 hours a week and so on and, you know, then maybe you can make a lot of money.
Or you can become a thief.
You know, there's a certain amount of technical skills involved in becoming a thief, but it's not really comparable to what it takes to run a business or even perform at a high level job.
So, in the short run, for a specific or particular individual, there are enormous benefits.
Right?
And so that is something that is important to remember when it comes to violence.
This is also true for the government.
If you are a farmer, And, you know, you need or you feel that you need sort of federal subsidies because the price of crops goes up and down and foreign governments subsidize their farmers and there's weather and all this kind of stuff.
Then, you know, it's certainly to your benefit to actually lobby the government to get the money and suck it away in your bank account.
Is it ever to your detriment in the long run, Gail?
Yes, of course, to some degree it is.
Assuming that you have some degree of affection towards your children, it's probably not that great to dump a mammoth load of debt into their hands.
Also, assuming that you have some affection for your children, it's probably not too great to bequeath to them a political system of basically legalized civil war.
You know, with ever-shrinking liberties and so on.
But in the short run, you know, it's money in the bank, baby.
It's cash.
It's good stuff.
So, I think that is a very important part of understanding, you know, why government power tends to grow.
That for certain specific individuals in the short run, it's enormously beneficial.
And, you know, to some degree, human beings do only think in the short run.
I mean, that's an arguable position, and there's, you know, people who will argue otherwise, and that's fine.
I mean, the whole proposition that I'm talking about doesn't rest on that.
But certainly, people, when you offer them money, and they don't have to work for it, and they can just go and cash it, and they don't have to stick a gun in anybody's face, they will take it.
I mean, they absolutely will.
So, I think it's helpful to understand that particular perspective on violence to understand the government.
I think another thing to understand why violence in the form of the government is so bad is the following.
Most people are peaceful.
And I say this even though they talk about their love of Iraq, the war in Iraq, or they talk about their love of government subsidies, or they talk about the need to, you know, give checks to people on welfare or whatever.
That's all well and good and that's all theoretical, but most people, most people, by far the majority of people, are not at all comfortable using violence to achieve their ends.
I mean, this is assuming that they haven't grown up in some sort of Nicaraguan or Haitian scary death camp society where they're given a gun when they're ten and their mother is killed in front of them and all this kind of stuff, which obviously messes up the psyche quite a bit.
On average, people are generally very peaceful.
And this is one of the main reasons why the government or the growth of government power is so dangerous, is that it allows people to be violent or to gain the effects of violence without themselves having to perform that violence.
I mean, a classic example which I think I got from Harry Brown is If you are somebody who feels that their rent should only go up 3% a year and your landlord raises it 6%, you can either go down to your landlord's apartment, knock on his door, put a gun in his face and say, you better damn well not raise my rent more than 3% or I'm going to shoot you.
And most people, of course, are not particularly comfortable with that.
For a number of reasons, some of which are moral and some of which are practical.
The moral one is that very few people feel very good about performing that level of violence.
The practical one, of course, is that your landlord might have a gun too, so you're not going to really enjoy the risk of going down to threaten him with a gun.
And, of course, you can't perpetually enforce it because, you know, If you're going to declare a state of nature against your landlord, he can just kick you out.
He can turn the heat off in your apartment.
He can just raise the rent later.
He can walk away from the apartment building.
I mean, there's lots of ways in which violence is impractical.
But the fact of the matter is, the point of this part of my conversation is to say that people don't really feel comfortable using violence, and that's one of the ways in which violence, in the absence of an institution like the state, does not generally play a very great role in society.
So, when you put a law in place, what's actually happening is you are Taking violence off your radar.
Taking the violence that is required to achieve your goals off your radar.
You're outsourcing the gun, so to speak.
So, if you lobby City Hall and get them to say, well, no landlord can raise the rents more than 3% a year, sort of, you know, the rent control paradigm, then what's happened is you have gained all of the benefits of keeping your rent low.
You have Absolved yourself of the moral horror of putting a gun into somebody's face, and you have also eliminated the risk of retribution or retaliation from the landlord.
Now, of course, you've only done that in the short run because in the long run, as we've seen in places like New York during the 70s and 80s when rent control just went completely nuts, when the costs of running a building are largely largely greater than the cost of the revenue that can be gained from renting it out, people just abandon their buildings, right?
I mean, it's kind of ironic to me that the government says you can't raise your rents and then also raises your property taxes.
I mean, it's inevitable because violence always grows and corrupts and destroys society.
But it's kind of funny that, you know, of course they're going to end up with these bombed out sections of town.
I think some social, one social commentator whose name escapes me said that there's, you know, short of mass bombing, there's no better way to destroy a city than through rent control.
And you raise the rents, sorry, you keep the rents low, you raise property taxes, and of course, you know, you're going to end up with very little rental space.
Now, of course, the people who then have rental space already are doing great through that situation.
They're doing very well, because they can hang on to really cheap, frail places, and then they can then get money under the table, or what used to be called key money in New York.
They would basically get bribes to transfer the apartment building, or the apartment itself, so that Rents could not be raised, right?
Rents would be raised if the ownership changed, so they'd pretend the person was still living there, but, you know, they would then change the owners if the person died, and you'd pay $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 for this privilege.
So, you know, the people who actually have property before the portcullis of government regulation comes down actually end up doing very well.
That's also the case, as you know, or probably know, with zoning, right?
I mean, if you have a house that is overlooking a ravine in a sparsely populated area, that house is going to be worth a lot as the city grows, right?
So you buy a house 20 kilometers or 20 miles out of town, It's a sparsely populated area.
You don't pay that much for your house, right, because the commute is too long, there aren't enough businesses around you, so the overall value of your house is not that great.
However, as the city grows, right, the value of your house is going to go up briefly, and then it's going to begin to go down again as more and more people build in your neighborhood, right?
So you might have had a nice ravine view of woods going off into the distance when you bought the house.
But then as the city grows, what happens is you end up with overlooking a construction yard, overlooking somebody else's backyard, overlooking a house.
The ravine might be clear-cut or whatever.
So the value of your house is going to go down again as more and more people move into the neighborhood.
Now, most people, of course, aren't comfortable going and setting fire to a construction, the construction of a house that's blocking their view of the ravine or is on the other side of the ravine.
They're not comfortable with You know, shooting construction workers.
But if they can go to the government and get zoning laws passed, then they maintain the value of their house.
In fact, they increase it significantly.
Because now it's in a highly populated area and still has lots of elbow room and a great view.
So they gain all of the benefits of using violence without any of the risks of retaliation and without any of the moral disgust or horror of having to perform it themselves.
So that's sort of another example of how when violence becomes institutionalized, so to speak, then the gains of violence will always be there and will tend to increase, but the negative aspects of violence, i.e.
the retaliation and the moral horror of pointing a gun at someone directly, they're all eliminated.
Right?
So, given that you have created a situation where violence is rewarded and the costs of violence are eliminated, of course you're going to see a situation where violence is going to continue to grow and grow and grow until the consequences of violence are now so great that the entire structure of society is going to collapse.
This sort of reminds me, when I was a kid, I read a great explanation for pain.
Because, you know, you'd hit your thumb with a hammer, or you'd, you know, fall out of a tree you were climbing, and it would hurt like the dickens, and you'd go, my man, this sucks, I know I've fallen out of a tree, why do I feel all this painful?
And I can't remember where I read it, I mean, I was very, very young, but it really has stuck with me over the years as a pretty good metaphor for a lot of things other than, you know, physical pain.
And the way it went was this.
The guy was writing and said, well, look, if you're climbing a tree and you climb past a wasp's nest and you don't see it, right, and you can't feel any physical pain, then what's going to happen?
Well, you're going to keep climbing the tree and you're going to hang out in the tree and you're going to practice your bird calls or whatever, look for robin's nests.
But the problem is that the wasps that you have disturbed are stinging you.
In your butt or in your back or in your legs or whatever.
Let's just say you can't see them or whatever.
Now, you're going to keep climbing, despite the fact that you're being stung, and you will have no biofeedback to say, look, something's wrong.
I'm being stung here.
I better get out of this damn tree.
And what's going to happen is that you're going to keep climbing and keep climbing.
The wasps are going to keep stinging you until their venom overwhelms your neurological system and you fall out of the tree in a coma or, you know, you fall unconscious and you're going to die.
Or you're going to be incredibly badly injured, right?
Coming down out of a tree when you're 50 or 75 feet up, when you're completely unconscious, is probably not a very good strategy for survival.
And I think that that is an excellent, excellent metaphor for the problem of violence as well.
People don't generally like being violent because the retaliation, and to me the fear of retaliation is a pretty small aspect of people's disdain or distaste for violence.
People just can't look in the mirror, most people can't look in the mirror and say, yeah, I had a good day today where they went around and stuck guns in people's faces and, you know, blew other people away and, you know, kidnapped and robbed and maimed and whatever, right?
The reason that institutionalized violence is so dangerous is that not only does it accrue the benefits of violence to people who experience neither the moral horror nor the risk, but it also causes violence to spread and spread and spread to such a degree that society itself, to pull back to my metaphor, falls out of the tree and is destroyed.
So I think that is a A very important aspect of violence or the state to remember when you're having a look at the paper or talking about things with people and why the argument from morality is so important.
The argument from effect or the argument from efficiency doesn't work, does not work in the absence of the argument from morality because the state system is very efficient to certain people.
If you want to keep the value of your house, then you want to make sure that you can apply to City Hall and get zoning put in place so that nobody can build near you.
That's very efficient to you.
Economically, you profit from that because the costs of violence are all outsourced to the police and the law courts and you simply maintain the value of your property without having to lift a finger other than to, you know, do some political organization, sign some petitions or whatever.
So that particular issue doesn't work with people.
When you say it's economically inefficient to have a government, it's nonsense.
For certain people, from a purely material standpoint, it's enormously efficient to have a government in the short to medium run.
In the long run, of course, society collapses, they're miserable, their kids have wretched lives, and so on.
But, you know, that's really not how people make decisions, right?
I mean, if I come to you and say, I'm going to give you $50,000, but there's a risk that in 30 years, you know, there may be some inflation, you know, I mean, just to take an example, you're going to take the check.
I mean, there are maybe six people in the world who are moral enough, and I'm not sure if I'm one of them, to reject that on the basis of, look, I don't want people a generation from now to have an extra percentage of inflation just so I can have my $50,000.
That's really not how things work.
And of course, you can take that money and invest it and recoup a lot more than out of that whole situation than people will ever lose out of, even that your kids will ever lose out of that one percentage point increase.
I mean, I'm just making up numbers, but I think you get The point and that's why in the absence of the argument for morality People simply are unconvinced of the virtue of getting rid of the government or you know to take a less anarchistic and more libertarian approach of minimizing the power that it is able to to wield and Because if we say, well, capitalism is more efficient, then that's true, of course, for society as a whole and in the long run.
But for very specific people, it is absolutely much more economically efficient to manipulate the political process than it is to rely on the free market.
And last but not least, the people who will have to decide whether or not to change the system to, say, lower the prevalence of government power, are the very people who are profiting the most from government power.
And so that's why that's never gonna happen.
You can't go to a politician and say you need to limit government power when a politician's entire salary and pension schemes are derived from the institutionalization of violence that the state represents.
Similarly, lawyers, you know, gain an enormous amount of benefit from the current rather messy system of litigation and tort law.
And, of course, they're not going to be the ones who are going to up and say, yeah, I would sure love to cut my income by about two-thirds to allow people who are simply eloquent and logical to argue court cases rather than have a monopoly on it.
And that seems like an excellent position.
I will definitely work night and day.
To invalidate the value of my education and to ensure that I can no longer get very expensive settlements from the cases that I'm trying.
It's absolutely impossible.
I mean, there's no way that you can ever rely on that ever happening.
It would be fantasy land to imagine it ever could.
However, the one hold that we do have on people is that they don't feel comfortable using violence.
Very few people feel comfortable using violence.
Sociopaths are extraordinarily rare.
And so, the one thing that we can always have a hold on people is to say that it's wrong to steal, it's wrong to take money, it's wrong to use violence.
And people still agree with that in current society.
Even the people who are older, who are benefiting from the system, still appeal to virtue, right?
All the government does is appeal to virtue, not efficiency.
You will occasionally see arguments like, well, it's cheaper to have socialized healthcare than the American system or whatever, but those are all tertiary.
Because the danger with those arguments is that then you can compare the current healthcare system to the one from 40 years ago in America or Canada and see that the modern ones are so much more expensive.
So most people still feel very uncomfortable with the idea of approving of violence and that's where of course we can have the greatest effect in conversing with people.
Get them to understand that it's wrong to use violence to solve social problems, that it's wrong to have certain people have the right to use violence And then we can also point out that by giving certain people all of the benefits of using violence and none of the drawbacks, we are actually creating a system wherein violence can do nothing but increase and increase and increase until it destroys society as a whole.
I have found that to be somewhat effective in getting people to understand why this issue is so important.
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