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Jan. 1, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:03
37 What is Libertarianism?
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So you've decided to download and listen to a little podcast entitled What is Libertarianism?
Of course, there could be a number of reasons for this.
Maybe you're just kind of curious.
Maybe a friend of you told you about it.
Or maybe there's someone in your family member or close circle of friends who's driving you completely insane with arguments about how we should go back to the gold standard.
And you kind of wanted to lift the lid and have a look inside the crazy world that is libertarianism.
Well, thank you.
Obviously, we as a movement are probably quite grateful that you've decided to download this and at least listen to one person's opinion about what libertarianism is.
And since we're quite an individualistic bunch, I'm sure I will get completely flamed for just about everything I say here, but I will try and stay true to what is generally common to the movement as a whole.
What is libertarianism?
Well, you know, you've probably heard of libertarianism in one form or another.
You know, you may have some images about who we are and what we are.
Maybe you think of us As crazy cult survivalists from Montana with beards longer than our hair.
No disrespect to Montana libertarians, who I'm sure are very nice, but we're really not that.
You know, maybe you think we're like crazy cult anarchists or, you know, crazy cult bitter loners.
The crazy cult thing is usually mentioned.
Or, you know, maybe we're like One step above or below the Dungeons and Dragons geeks, you know, people who can't seem to get a date or keep relationships because every date we go on we get into massive arguments about the role of the Federal Reserve and don't get any further than that.
Maybe you know a libertarian who seems to pick up a newspaper and get all red and foamy because everything in it is something they disagree with.
Or maybe you have an image of libertarians as people who've joined some crazy cult that forces them to argue with you every single time you get together with them.
Or maybe you have an impression that libertarians are people who believe that all problems, even acne, can be traced back to the government.
Well, actually the acne one is true.
You always wanted maybe a democracy full of people who knew about the Constitution, just not maybe as much as some libertarians know about the Constitution and are more than willing to share with you.
Or maybe you have this image of libertarians as people who inhabit or have come from some alternate universe where, you know, Lincoln was a bad president and the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery and the Great Depression was not the result of anything to do with business and robber barons were heroes.
You know, it's some sort of up-is-down, black-is-white alternate universe where everything that you believe is kind of turned upside down and presented to you in a complete negative Or a complete positive if you think it's a negative.
And, you know, I guess all of the above may be true to some degree, but I don't think are a particularly helpful way to look at an intellectual movement that has a good deal
of energy and focus and clarity behind it and you know as libertarians we would probably say something like that uh... libertarianism is a movement that is much has much more in common with the foundation of the united states the foundation of free markets and democracy and so on and all of this uh... kind of intellectual clarity about the role of government in the role of free markets and what it is to live in a good society and what it is to be a good person
has to some degree or another been kind of muddied over the past, say, 100, 150 years.
And we're trying to sort of drill back through time and bring some of the clarity from the past to the present.
I mean, we don't want to return back to the time of the founding fathers because, you know, we kind of like the fact that women have votes and blacks are not slaves.
And, you know, we really like the idea of equality for everyone.
But we generally are a historical movement that gets some clarity from the philosophers of the past.
and we're trying to bring some of that clarity to the presence.
So, although what we say may seem alien to you at times, it's really not.
I mean, it's a strong historical movement about limiting the role of government, So that's sort of a brief overview of some of the perspectives that people have on libertarianism and where it is we think that we're coming from.
So I guess the next question is, well, what do libertarians believe?
Well, I would say that fundamentally libertarians believe that morality is kind of larger than the government and it's larger than churches and it's deeper than sort of social institutions like schools or communities and so on.
That right and wrong is not up to sort of the habits of the moment or what is going on in society at the moment or what people are just raised to believe.
We kind of believe in the moral principles that you believe in, but we try to figure out ways to apply them maybe more consistently than you do.
So, I mean, I bet you if I were to sit down across from the table from you and say, do you believe that lying is wrong?
Well, you'd say, well, yeah.
And we'd say, do you believe that stealing is wrong?
And you'd say, yeah, stealing is wrong.
And we'd say, do you believe that You know, violence is a good way to solve social problems.
And you'd say, well, you know, not really.
Is it a very good way to solve social problems?
And, I mean, that's really where we're coming from.
You and I, if you're a non-libertarian, you and I will absolutely agree on 99% of the things that libertarians believe, but these are morals that you practice within your own life, right?
You know, if your kid steals a candy bar from a store, you're gonna sit your kid down and say, you know, stealing is wrong, you have to respect the property of others, you know, you're gonna Take that candy bar back to the store.
Maybe have your kid apologize.
You know, that kind of stuff.
All the stuff that, you know, parents have been doing since, well, candy bars were invented.
Or maybe even before then.
So you're going to do that, you know.
And if you catch your kid telling a lie, you're going to say, well, lying is bad and you shouldn't try and fool others and it's bad for them and it's bad for you.
It's going to hurt your relationships and so on.
And if your kid has a problem with another kid and doesn't like what that kid is doing, and they just kind of haul up and crack them one in the jaw, well, you're probably going to sit your kid down and say, well, you know, that's really not a very good way to solve problems.
You know, you want to sit down and talk with someone, you want to, you know, maybe get an adult, you want to sort of figure out a better way to solve problems than, you know, cracking people one in the jaw, because that's not a very good way to resolve differences between people.
So, I mean, all of the basic things, you know, respect the rights of property of others, don't lie, don't steal, don't cheat, you know, don't punch people, you know, don't grab people, don't push, don't, you know, all of the things that you already believe is what libertarians believe.
It's just that what we do is we try and extract from the moral beliefs that everyone has, the principles.
You know, it's kind of like a scientist, right?
Everybody says, if you sit them down and you say, does an apple fall down?
Then they say, well, yeah, every time I've sort of let an apple go in midair, it's fallen down.
And that's what everyone believes.
And then someone like Newton comes along and the apple falls on his head and, you know, he wakes up from some cosmic vision and, you know, fully formed is the idea of gravity or gravitational attraction.
So what we're doing is we're kind of taking the everyday morals that people have and we are sort of trying to extract the moral principles from those and then try and apply them more consistently.
Which is exactly what scientists do.
They observe individual things and then they try and extract theories from them.
And from those theories, they try and apply them to wider spheres of action, or matter, or energy, or whatever.
And that's really all we're doing.
We're saying, OK, this is what pretty much every human being in the world believes, right?
Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, whatever.
And we say, OK, well, what's the common elements within those moral beliefs?
And then we try and extract those common elements, like scientific principles, and we try to understand the world and apply them to the world in a larger sphere.
So we are much more in agreement with you than you probably think.
But where we kind of freak a lot of people out is that the conclusions...
of extracting these moral premises from these sort of everyday beliefs and then applying them more consistently, the conclusions of those are usually things that kind of blow people's minds, that kind of freak them out.
So, you know, I mean, if you know anything about science, Einstein said, OK, well, we've got these problems of measurement and we've got these problems of relative motion and matter and energy.
And, you know, one of the premises that he kind of said was, okay, what if we just take the speed of light as constant, right?
It's 186,000 miles a second.
Let's just say it never changes.
I mean, which is kind of a freaky thing to think, but, you know, he had that hair, and he did that thing.
So, you know, if you change that sort of central premise, you end up with a whole bunch of things that just mess with people's minds, right?
You know, like if you travel near the speed of light, your mass increases, and time slows down, and, you know, you've got two rocket ships going apart from each other at the speed of light, and they measure the distance that they're flying apart, the speed that they're flying apart at.
And lo and behold, even though they're both going away from each other at the speed of light, the acceleration between them is still only the speed of light.
It doesn't make any sense.
Yet, it's true.
It's been verified and so on.
Gravity wells will bend light and all these kinds of things.
And that's a lot more unfamiliar to us than the sort of Newtonian universe where apples fall and you can navigate a ship by looking at the stars.
However, the Newtonian universe just isn't as accurate for things like you want to get a space probe to Jupiter or something.
So as knowledge progresses, The principles that people apply wider and wider can often produce results that kind of freak people out.
And so we fully understand, from those of us within the libertarian movement, we fully understand that from the outside, I mean, we look like a bunch of crazy lunatics, and the conclusions that we draw from the moral premises that we've distilled from everyday beliefs
aren't really familiar to people and it doesn't comfort them and it makes them feel like there's some sort of alien life form inhabiting their brain that they've got to get rid of like some sort of plague and we understand that but you know the fact of the matter is that you know science and human knowledge has to progress that the world is not perfect and that there may be something of great value in taking people's everyday moral beliefs Extracting the essence and applying it to wider spheres of human knowledge.
And we think that there's something very important in that process.
Something that's really going to help society move to the next step or the next level.
Because, you know, we don't have a perfect world.
We haven't got all the problems solved.
So we really need to continue
to try and figure out the best way to live and the best way to organize society and we're not just going to sit there and say yeah okay we've got this huge government with this debt that's growing up we've got wars that people don't disagree with we've got ghettos and poverty and institutionalized racism and you know gun violence and you know street crime and over drug use and you know kids on Ritalin and you know we're sort of not going to sit on our laurels and say we're all happy with that what we want to do is say okay well where are we going to go next as a society and shouldn't it have something to do
with moral beliefs, right?
We're not just going to sort of make up something and say, you know, the next thing in society we want to go to Mars, you know.
What we want to do is try and create a set of moral beliefs that work for everyone individually and also work for society as a whole.
And so it's nothing too unusual in the moral beliefs that we believe.
I mean, we're not saying, you know, that You know, everybody should steal, or, you know, up is down, black is white, and dogs and cats should live together, or, you know, anything like that.
We're taking the beliefs that you have and applying them to a wider sphere.
So what does that look like in practice?
You know, so, you know, you might want to sit down because this is the part where your mind gets blown.
Well, we believe that, for instance, property is very important.
And there are very few people in the world who don't believe that property is important.
And I'm sure that if you, at the end of your workday, went down to the parking lot and your car was gone, You wouldn't sort of shrug and say, well, you know, property isn't very important or anything like that.
You know, property is important to people.
And we believe that it's very important, that the property rights are very important.
Well, what does that mean?
Well, it means you can't take somebody else's property without their permission.
And that's called stealing.
It's the candy bar from the store.
And it's exactly the same kind of rule that you apply in your own life.
That you try and teach your children that, you know, within your community you respect that.
You respect each other's property.
I mean, you don't go to someone's dinner party and say, you know, that's a really nice serving set.
Maybe I'll just put that in my coat on the way out.
You know, you respect other people's property and you expect them to respect yours.
And, you know, we believe the same thing, but because we believe that morality is a more important principle than something like a government or, you know, a sort of a social community or a church or whatever you want to call it, then we say, okay, taxation, right?
The institution and income tax in particular, but there's other forms of taxation that we have problems with.
Just say the income tax.
Well, The income tax basically is theft.
I mean, you may not agree with our conclusions about whether the income tax should be abolished and so on, but it certainly is pretty logical to say that taking someone's property without their permission, and especially using violence to do it, right?
I mean, if you don't pay your property tax bill or you don't pay your income tax, you're going to get more than a stern lecture, right?
You're going to get a bunch of letters in the mail and then if you don't answer those letters then you're going to get a court date and if you don't show up at that court date you know sooner or later the police are going to come by and if you resist they're going to pull out their guns and you know things get messy.
So you know without a doubt whether you agree with the income tax or not or you support it or not logically it's fairly hard to argue that it's not taking property from someone against their will using force.
Now, of course, a lot of people, and we're aware of all of these arguments, but, you know, just for your own comfort, we do know that people say, well, it's not taking money from people or taking property from people against their will, because people get to vote for the government.
And that's entirely true.
However, people don't get to vote for income tax.
And if people did vote for income tax, then, you know, you'd say to everybody who did vote, yes, I want income tax, and you'd take the property from them, just as if they had signed a contract and so on.
But we don't get to vote for whether there is income tax.
We get to vote for who spends it, which is a very different, you know, sort of moral situation.
And so, as libertarians, we're very focused on If it's bad for you, and it's bad for me, and it's bad for your kids, like stealing, then it's also bad for, you know, people who call themselves the government.
And so we do have a moral problem with something like the income tax.
Now, again, we're fully aware that the income tax is huge, and it's the foundation of lots of jobs, and part of it is used to build roads and run schools and all of that kind of stuff.
So we're fully aware of all of those issues.
We're aware that people think that because I vote for it, it's more voluntary.
But still, the moral principle that we all believe in, which is don't take people's property without their permission, especially if you're using violence to do it, we simply say, you know, just like Einstein said, the speed of light is constantly.
Let's see what follows from that.
Well, we say, well, let's just say that that moral rule applies to everyone.
You know, not just you and not just your kids, but the government, the politicians, the police, the army, everybody.
Because, you know, as libertarians, we're not particularly impressed with things like, you know, a social structure.
Like a human being doesn't become completely different just because it puts on a uniform or gets voted into office, right?
So we say, if the moral rule is common to everyone, then it has to be common to everyone.
And that creates conclusions that seem counterintuitive, right?
But, you know, counterintuitive conclusions is sort of the basis of the progress of human knowledge.
I mean, if things were obvious, then it would be really easy to progress human knowledge.
You know, everybody looks at the world and says, yeah, seems kind of flat to me, right?
But the counterintuitive truth is that the world is round, right?
I mean, it looks like the sun's going around the sky, but, you know, we're going around the sun.
It looks like the sun and the moon are the same size, but they're not.
So, you know, counterintuitive knowledge based on the discovery of principles and, you know, applying those principles to all things is, to most libertarians, what we consider The progress of human thought, and we're trying to do that in the realm of morality and social organization.
So, you know, if stealing is wrong for you, then it's wrong for politicians, it's wrong for, you know, I don't know, public school teachers, it's wrong for the military, that you can't use force to take other people's property is a rule that we consider applies to everyone.
So that's one sort of example of how a libertarian approaches the problem of social organization.
So we say, you know, stealing is wrong, murder is wrong, you know, lying is wrong, cheating is wrong, you know, you have to pay your bills, you know, you have to fulfill your contracts.
All of the things that you believe in and operate with in your personal life, we're just taking that and saying, well, what if that was just a principle that was equally true for everyone?
And that's our approach.
And the results, as I've mentioned, will be very surprising to a lot of people and will seem counterintuitive and things that you just want to reject.
But that's very common, you know, when you're trying to develop sort of a new science or a new approach to things, that lots of things are going to come up that do seem to be confusing.
You know, so for instance, I mean, I'll give you another one that people often have a lot of problems with.
So, a libertarian would say that, you know, if you earn the money, right, let's just say you're not a thief, you didn't steal it, because I'm sure you didn't, so you've earned yourself, you know, $50,000 this year or $75,000 this year.
Well, a libertarian says, well, that's your property.
You've earned it through the honest exchange of your value with other people.
Fantastic.
You know, you have an absolute right to that.
And, you know, your neighborhood thief doesn't have the right to come into your house and take that property from you.
Neither do they have the right to, you know, stick a switchblade in your ribs and demand that you hand over your watch.
And so, because you have the right to own that property, nobody can come along and say, you know, I represent the higher social good, I represent, you know, people who want to educate the nation or, you know, heal the sick and enrich the poor and, you know, help African governments or, you know, the old people or anything like that.
Nobody can come along with some sort of do goodery and take that money from you against your will.
And it's not just on principle.
The principle is very important.
You can't take property from people against their will.
But we also don't believe that the effects are any good either.
We don't believe that good deeds can come from bad actions.
So we don't think that, for instance, if money is taken from you for the cause of welfare or something like that, that welfare is going to actually help
people you know and i mean if you've had any experience looking at the world of welfare you may at least have some questions about how much good it does for people uh... so we think we say not only is it wrong in principle but it's also wrong in effect so for instance if someone comes along and says what everybody needs to be educated so we're gonna take twenty percent of your money from you to go and educate everyone well a libertarian would say two things in general number one he would say look nobody has the right to come and steal your property
You know, just because they call themselves, you know, the government or whatever, it's just some guy, right?
Some guy puts his pants on one leg at a time and he's got no right to come over to you and say to you, give me 20% of your money or I'm going to kidnap you and throw you in a jail cell.
And the reason that we know that is because you don't have the right to do that, do you?
Right?
You can't go to your neighbor and say, you know, my kid just got into Harvard, didn't get a scholarship.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to need 20% of your income, oh, Mr. Neighbor of mine, to put my kid through Harvard.
You don't have the right to do that.
And so why would anybody else?
You know, and it doesn't matter if they put a uniform on or call themselves the Grand Poobah or anything like that.
They still don't have the right to do it because, you know, morality is morality.
It's not just for you and it's not just for me.
It's for everybody.
So we would say that the person, first of all, the person doesn't have the right to do that.
And secondly, we would say that even if they do claim the right to do that and they do sort of frighten you or, you know, motivate you into giving you their money, that bad things are going to happen anyway, you know, because the money has been coerced for people.
So, you know, nobody's going to strive for excellence in education.
I mean, of course, a few people will because there are always people who strive for excellence in education.
But as a system as a whole, public school education, you know, isn't going to be nearly as good as it would be If you did it voluntarily with someone, like if you took the money for yourself and you went and shopped around for school that was privately run and you got the school that exactly matched your values, that worked for you, that way you like the teachers and you like their approach to education, well then those teachers kind of have to please you, right?
The way that Walmart does and the way that IBM does and the way that, you know, pretty much everyone except the federal and local governments have to.
Then if you were free to spend your money wherever you wanted, you would get great education for your children.
And if you couldn't afford it, you know, people are nice, they'll be charitable, they'll help you, you'll get scholarships, you'll get loans.
There's lots of ways to deal with, you know, not being able to afford something.
You know, there's ways to deal with that which don't involve, you know, running around with guns and taking money from people.
So, you know, not only do we say people don't have the right to take your money, but we also say if they do take your money, what they give you back in return You know, to use a technical libertarian term, is going to suck.
So if somebody does take your money and says, oh, don't worry, I'm going to return to you great education, well, they're not going to return to you great education.
Because if they could return to you great education, they wouldn't need to take your money by force to begin with.
So, you know, we don't just look at these idealistic moral things and then just say, well, there's this rule written in the sky called thou shalt not steal, and therefore we oppose all thefts everywhere at all times.
Because we try to be scientific in the way that we approach moral problems and the problems of how to organize society, We also look at what happens.
So let's say that we had a theory which said that money which is taken by force doesn't tend to produce good results and yet say public education was just a beautiful thing where everybody got really well educated and it was cheap and it was efficient and it was great.
Well, then we'd say, like a scientist would, like a scientist who says, I have this theory about, you know, how fast a bowling ball is going to drop from the Eiffel Tower.
Well, then they go out and they measure that, right, to find out if that theory was correct.
So libertarians, like we're sort of like third generation libertarians now, so the first generation libertarians came up with a whole bunch of theories about, you know, well, you know, communism is going to fail and fascism is going to fail and, you know, Nazism or National Socialism is really bad and, you know, democracy, which is, you know, sort of capitalistic or free market in nature is going to do really well.
And so then the second generation sort of picked up those theories and looked at the world, but it was kind of early to tell.
There wasn't a lot of information coming out of Soviet Russia and, you know, there was a big war so, you know, it was kind of hard to keep your focus.
But sort of the third generation of libertarians, we're the ones who are able to say, okay, well these theories came up a long time ago which predicted certain things.
Right?
So they predicted public school education was going to get really bad, They predicted that the drug wars were going to fail.
They predicted that the Soviet empire was going to fall.
That communism didn't work.
And they predicted that old age pensions were going to run into heavy deficits.
And they predicted that as government got more and more heavily involved in the health care system, that the prices were going to go up.
That dissatisfaction was going to go up.
That everybody was going to get miserable and antagonistic.
And they also predicted that the government debt would always, always, always continue to rise for a number of reasons.
So, we have these theories about how things should work based on commonly accepted moral propositions that are distilled into their principles and then applied to everything.
But we also work from the facts, right?
So we work empirically.
So, since all of these predictions were made by libertarians, which have in fact come true, we feel that the theory has a lot of validity to it, right?
Our moral theory of, like, you can't use violence, you know, except in self-defense, and, you know, lying is wrong, cheating is wrong, stealing is wrong, murder is wrong, rape is wrong, all of these things.
Because we have these moral theories which we apply to everyone, and we've been able to see the results of the predictions that were put in place you know like communism does not respect property rights at all except for a small group of sort of party elite so people who analyzed communism based on a theory of property rights said you know well you know there's no such thing as price in the communist economy therefore
You know, you can't allocate resources, therefore these terrible inefficiencies and wastes are going to occur, and the economic system will be unsustainable, right?
Because property rights are real, they exist, they should be respected, and therefore any system which is based on a complete rejection of property rights is going to pretty quickly prove unworkable, right?
So I mean, that's sort of an example of Theories of libertarianism that were around as early as the 1920s that were completely proven in reality So, you know again, we try to be scientific we've got these theories, but we look at what actually happens and We say well did it happen or not?
And you know, does that validate the theory?
You know one other sort of example, which I can give you is is you know libertarians said that when you put the welfare state and we're talking about you know the big fancy schmancy all the bells and whistles welfare state that lbj put in the nineteen sixties the great society programs so libertarian would say well you know this isn't going to work because
You're sort of subsidizing people having children, and you're subsidizing people living out of wedlock, and you're subsidizing people having only an intermittent time in the workforce between jobs.
You have a job, then you don't have a job, then you have another job later.
And because you're doing all of these things, you're actually going to make people more poor, because you're going to make, you know, being poor and pursuing probably pretty bad life choices, like having kids out of wedlock and And, you know, having only intermittent jobs and not finishing high school or whatever.
Because you're subsidizing all of these things, it's not going to work, right?
You're actually going to... People are going to stay more poor after these programs get in.
So that was the theory that was around at the time.
And then what happens is, you know, we kind of measure the results of this, right?
And it's pretty easy to see what happens.
So, you know, from like 1950 to the mid-60s, poor people, there were fewer and fewer poor people every year.
The number of people under the poverty line went down about one percentage point every year.
And then as soon as you put the great society programs in place then suddenly everybody who is poor stays poor like nobody else gets out of the poverty trap and now we find of course that it's just seven trillion dollars later right nothing has changed and you know we have more and more poor and the effects of all of these single-parent households and so on we can see in society right gangs and shootings and all this so you know we have these theories like
Stealing is wrong.
Therefore, the government shouldn't be able to steal from you to subsidize, you know, its sort of do-goodery programs.
And also, those do-goodery programs aren't going to produce any good anyway.
And so, you know, we did, and we would now, of course, completely oppose.
Something like, you know, the creation of a huge welfare state.
I mean, unless it was purely voluntary, right?
Unless LBJ gave you a phone call and said, you know, I'd really like some of your money because I got these great programs.
And, you know, if you said yes and sent him in a check, you know, like the United Way does, or the Salvation Army, or UNICEF.
But if it's imposed on you by force, if the government just passes a law which says, you now have to pay us all this money, and if you don't pay us, we're going to send cops to your house and throw you in jail, then we completely oppose it.
Because it's completely wrong to steal, and it doesn't matter who's doing it, or what they call themselves, or what title they give themselves, or how many other people voted for them.
Stealing is still wrong.
It's as wrong for the government or a politician as it is for you or your kid with the candy bar.
So we oppose it on moral grounds.
We also oppose it because, you know, guess what?
The money is not going to do any good anyway because you can't get a good outcome from a bad action.
So stealing the money is just going to create a big mess with lots of people who then get entitled to certain things and other people whose jobs now depend on these social systems getting larger and more coercive and more bullying and bureaucracy and national debt.
All of these bad things are going to occur.
You may get a year or two of good things but after that it's all downhill.
So that's, you know, a real brief overview of what we sort of mean by libertarianism.
It's just really, it's two things, you know.
One, you know, what's good for one person is good for everyone.
What's bad for one person is bad for everyone.
You can't sort of pick and choose moral rules and say, you know, one rule applies to, you know, this guy and another rule applies to this guy and another rule applies to this guy.
I mean, because that's just having a bunch of subjective opinions and doesn't add up to anything.
So we just say, you know, one rule for everyone, and also that, you know, if you say this is how something should work, then, you know, it's very important to track the results and see if your theory doesn't work.
And if your theory doesn't work, then it doesn't work for other things as well, right?
So if the welfare state doesn't work, then probably the war on drugs isn't going to work, because although we generally disapprove of people doing drugs from a sort of personal, save-your-brain standpoint, We don't believe that people who are doing drugs are criminals, right?
They're not out there assaulting other people.
They're not out there stealing.
And of course, if they are, then they get prosecuted for stealing, not for taking drugs.
You know, I guess our sort of point of view is that anybody who's ever enjoyed Sgt.
Pepper's Might not have the best case in the world to make against the pure evil of drug use because, you know, we don't throw Paul McCartney in jail.
So that's sort of our approach.
One rule for everybody that we distill moral rules out of the moral beliefs that everyone has and apply them more generally, just as scientists do, and we're very careful to always follow the information and to find out if the moral theories are correct.
And so the kind of society that we propose is a society where Nobody is allowed to steal.
It doesn't mean nobody will steal, because, you know, there are always bad apples in society.
But where you don't have, you know, a massive amount of government pillaging of your paycheck, but you are free to spend your money to help people, to put your kids through college, to, you know, buy your food and your rent and everything that you want to spend your money on in terms of helping yourself, your family and those around you, of course you're perfectly free to do, because nobody has the right to come and steal your money.
And so that's the kind of society that we're interested in talking about with people.
And it is a conversation.
Libertarians can sometimes be a little bit aggressive in the way that they pursue the truth, but it takes a certain kind of personality to sort of live out on the fringes and to try and push
the knowledge of human society forward so i hope that you'll forgive us when at times we get a little overexcited but we are very excited about the possibilities of taking everybody's moral beliefs and applying them to everybody else because we think that that's going to produce a world that is more peaceful that is more free that you don't have a society bowing under the weight of this ever-growing public debt which at some point is gonna do some real harm to the economy or real harm to the freedoms that your children hope to enjoy when they grow up
And we're willing to put a lot of time and energy into conversing with you to help us to find and define the next step in the evolution of human society and the kind of world I think that we all want to live in.
A world that's peaceful.
A world that is safe.
A world that is productive.
A world that is brother-to-brother with as few weapons and a little as violence as is humanly possible.
We think that's a great step forward and we hope that you will at least enjoy the conversation that might help get us there.
Well, I hope this has been helpful to you in helping to understand where libertarians have come from.
Lots of information available on the net, so please, please be happy and enjoy the possibilities of looking into libertarianism and let us know what you think.
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