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March 19, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:37
146 Response to a military email

A marine calls me out...

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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
It's Steph.
How are you doing?
It is just before four o'clock on Sunday, the 19th of March, 2006.
And it's time to take on a Marine, because you just have no idea how tough I can be on the Internet.
So I got an email from a gentleman through the form mail at freedomainradio.com, and I'm going to read it to you.
And then I'm going to tell you my thoughts, and hopefully this gentleman will write me back, or will post on the boards, and we can continue the conversation.
Because it is, of course, an important conversation, like most of the letters that I get, and most of the email comments that I get.
Very intelligent, very well written.
I mean this is amazing to me because of course the majority of people can come out of the state school system not so much with the writing or the communicating but the people who come through libertarianism and objectivism and even certain strains of conservatism and certain strains of even the Democratic Party Excellent language skills, very important issues.
I certainly take the time, I certainly thank everybody who takes the time to write in because it improves the quality of this conversation.
It helps me correct error, which is important for me, essential for me.
So thank you so much for everyone.
And I just want to compliment everyone who's written to me for the people who post on the boards too.
It's a brilliant crew.
And so thank you so much.
So this is a letter that I got a couple of days ago, and I'm sorry that I haven't had a chance to deal with it until now.
But here it goes.
Steph, I found myself disturbed by your broad-brush condemnation of the people who have chosen military service based upon one example.
My father was an army officer.
I served in the Marine Corps.
My brother later served in the Army.
I have a nephew and cousin serving in the Armed Forces at this time.
I find your comments on the brutal and bloodthirsty nature of the people who serve as an insult.
We were not, we are not, murderers.
We placed ourselves in harm's way out of a sense of duty and love.
You may think hindsight is the most mellow shite, but as you base your slanders on one example, I am willing to put my entire family as a counter case.
We are neither thugs nor degenerates.
We love our families, we take care of our children because we understand how precious and fragile they are, and we love our country.
If by your definition that makes us throwbacks, I proudly accept your approbation.
I strongly believe every person must stand for what they believe.
Youth and immaturity may express itself with jingoistic bravado, but at the root of our choice to serve is the desire to serve, to do good, and to be remembered.
The rights we find so precious, including the right to disrespect the motives of our leaders, especially when they do deserve it, and our ancestors who are really strangers, and our relatives who may deserve it, have been protected by these young people who have made sacrifices to join the service.
You should be thankful that young men, both the tough and the not-so-tough, and now young women have chosen to serve.
I am angered by your slap in the face of those who serve.
Furthermore, I am frustrated by the fact that I agree with your libertarian approach on social services.
I will continue to be constructively enraged by your uniform phobia and narrow-mindedness.
Well, first of all, thank you for a very interesting and courageous letter.
I certainly applaud the intention, and I certainly respect the honor and the sense of self-respect that is coming out of this letter.
And I certainly, certainly, certainly understand that if I'm incorrect in my understanding of the military, that I'm doing an enormous disservice to those who are taking up arms against external enemies, protecting our rights, and so on.
And so if I am doing that, and if I've ended up doing that, I absolutely, thoroughly, and grovellingly apologize, because that would be absolute disrespect to virtue, and virtue is the thing that motivates me the most.
So I will tell you what I think of these sentiments, and then you can tell me what you think of what I think, and we can continue the discussion.
Now, I don't believe that I have condemned military people, or people in the military service, based upon one example.
And, of course, he has some members of his family who are in the military, as have I. My problem with the military is not based upon, I know a guy who was a soldier who was really mean, or bad, or evil, or anything like that.
It's the institution as a whole.
The reason that I find this letter very interesting, worth discussing, is that I know that for the friends who have written to me from the United States, these sentiments are quite common.
And so I think that it's important to examine them very closely.
The real thing that you see in this letter is the word SERVED.
SERVED is something that you really strongly see when you start to examine this military mindset.
So you see SERVICE, you see HELPING as when I read this letter from the woman from Moncton who was justifying the death of her son in Afghanistan.
You see service and you see love, love of country and love of children and what you also see is this strong belief that the military, the people in the military, the soldiers are the ones who have created, sustained and protected Our liberties is a very, very strong piece of information or perspective that you constantly get.
So I'm going to spend a few minutes on this letter because I think it's so important to at least understand where it is that I'm coming from.
And then you could, of course, make your own decision.
Now, service is a very interesting question.
Public service, public sector, a lot of people who work in the state sector are considered to be servicing or service oriented industry.
Now, I don't mean to denigrate this word service, but when I think of the word service, I think of the service sector.
I think of the private market sector.
Things like restaurants, the people who service my cars, the cabs.
What kind of service am I getting?
The stewardess is on planes, and so on.
What kind of service do I get?
And what that means is that when I voluntarily interact with people, how well are they serving my interests?
Because, of course, the interests that I'm serving for them It's the transfer of my money into their bank account and so that service is automatically part of the transaction.
The question I have is how well am I served in return?
So for instance when I had to return a piece of equipment once, electronic equipment, it was two days past the warranty expiration date and they took it back and I consider that to be great service.
So service, I sort of have a bit of a problem with the idea of it in terms of the military for a couple of reasons.
One, The military, in relation to me, and in relation to you, if you're not in the military, it is not a voluntary relationship.
It is not a voluntary, participative relationship.
So there's no question of using the word service in this area.
So, for instance, if somebody delivered a car to my door that I did not want and sent me a bill And the car didn't even work and if I didn't pay the bill I got thrown in jail.
I would have a tough time saying to that person that you are serving me.
That you are serving my interests.
Serving is a voluntary relationship.
Service is a voluntary relationship.
Service is not something that is imposed from outside through the threat of force against individuals.
Now the military I have to pay the bills of the military, whether or not I agree with what they're doing, and if I do not pay these bills, policemen are going to come, and if I resist, they're going to gun me down.
So I have a little bit of trouble understanding how a sort of, quote, contract that is imposed upon me against my will, and if I choose to withdraw or break that contract because I disagree with the actions of those who I'm contracted with, so to speak, I get shot down.
I don't really consider that service.
I would not consider that service if somebody came alongside me when I was walking along the street, kidnapped me, threw me in the back of a van, took me to McDonald's and forced me to pay for a meal whether I wanted it or not.
It would be hard for me to look at that as service.
It would not be service.
So the idea that the military are serving me or serving you or serving anybody else is a little hard for me to understand.
It's not the way that I would use the word service if it's enforced upon me and if I'm going to get shot down for refusing to participate or refusing to fund people who I have no approval of.
Please don't use the word service, or if you do, please explain it in a way that makes a little bit more sense to me.
I mean, if you are volunteering at a hospital for free, and it's a voluntary arrangement, you could be said to be providing service, or serving people, or whatever.
But you cannot call it service if it is a coerced relationship.
If people are forced to pay your bills, if people are forced to pay for your equipment, if people are forced to pay for your travel and your pensions, you really can't call it service.
Because it is an absolutely violent infliction of harm, the threat of infliction of harm, on the domestic population.
Which pays for the army, so forgive me if I really don't see it as something beneficial to me that is voluntary and based on service if I'm forced to participate in it at the point of a gun.
If I'm forced to pay for the soldiers' meals and equipment and travel and pay and pensions at the point of a gun, it's not voluntary, it's not service.
I agree that there's service involved, but it sure as hell is not to the taxpayers.
Now the next question or comment that this gentleman has is that he says, I find your comments in the brutal and bloodthirsty nature of the people who serve as an insult.
We were not, we are not, murderers.
Now that to me is a very interesting question because maybe, and I fully, I mean I've never served in the military, the closest I came was Boy Scouts, Maybe I'm completely mistaken, and I absolutely can be open to correction on this matter.
But one of the things that I do think that I understand about the military is that the whole point of it is to kill people.
I mean, maybe I'm completely out to lunch on this, but the military training, the guns, the bombs, the planes, the submarines, the Navy vessels, the Scuds, the bunker-busting bombs, the nuclear weapons, the weapons of mass destruction, I just gotta think that that's something to do with causing people physical harm.
And of course, yeah, I understand they go into New Orleans and they do this and they do that and that's fine.
That's sort of like a hobby for the army is to do these kinds of things.
But the central purpose of the army is to kill people.
The central purpose of the army is to physically harm people.
And I may be sort of mistaken on that and maybe there's some other reason that the army exists.
A central reason.
I don't mean a periphery reason.
The central reason that the army exists is to train people to kill people that politicians tell them to.
And I sort of feel fairly safe in saying that, based on my knowledge and understanding of the military, based on my studies of the military throughout history, based on my family's stories about the military.
And so I think it's fairly safe to say that the entire purpose of the military is to do people harm.
And there may be periphery things that they do, like they came through Toronto one winter to help us shovel the snow, and that's fine, but that's not their primary purpose.
That's what they are used for on occasion.
Yes, I know that they say, well, we go out and we build this and we build that and we build the bridges and we're rebuilding Iraq and we're building Afghanistan and so on and that's fine.
In that case you can say, well, the primary purpose of the military in that situation is not to kill people but to build bridges or whatever.
The problem is, for me at least, that the way that the military gets this money, let's just say that the military is only involved in building bridges and throwing candies to orphans or whatever, right?
The only way that the military gets this money is because all the taxpayers, every single taxpayer knows that if you say no, you get thrown in jail.
So that to me seems to be kind of the point, right?
So the military's sort of, the major purpose is to harm people, and through that capacity and willingness to harm people, you get taxation, right?
I mean, we all know that we could generally take the cops if we all ganged together and wanted to, but we really can't take out the military because it's got all the weapons of mass destruction and so on.
So the military is definitely the backup for the domestic police force, which we are fully aware of.
And so it's hard for me to understand when I know that the military is going to shoot me if I don't fund them, and that their entire training seems to be around doing people physical harm, either primarily domestically, of course, to get the funding for the military, but secondarily overseas in a variety of theaters.
So given all the training, given all the weapons, given the entire philosophy, the purpose, the top-down hierarchy, the lack of ability to say no, It seems to me kind of like that the military is there to harm people.
And of course, all harm, all threats, are threats of murder.
Let's get that straight.
There is no threat in human relationships except the threat of murder.
So if you're torturing someone, the reason they don't get up and walk out is you'll kill them if they try and get away.
The reason people stay in jails is they're probably going to get shot if they try and get away, or at least if they do, nobody's going to get mad at the shooter.
So all threats come down to the threat of murder.
And, of course, let's just say that the penalty for not paying your taxes was getting a rap on the knuckles with a ruler, and we would all not pay our taxes.
But let's say we didn't want to show up to get a rap on the knuckles.
Well, what would happen?
At some point, somebody has to threaten you with a punishment, and if you don't submit to that punishment, they have to threaten you with death.
So the penalty for speeding is a ticket.
And if you don't pay your ticket and you don't do this and you drive without a license because they won't renew it because you didn't pay your tickets and you don't go to traffic court and so on, at some point they're going to come and they're going to try and take you in.
And if you resist, they're going to kill you.
All threats come down to the threat of murder.
And by that, of course, I mean the legal relationships, not necessarily husband, wife and so on.
Now, since the military is the agency in society that is most specifically devoted itself to the cause of doing harm to people, and since the only possible harm that you can really threaten people with in the end is death, it's very hard for me not to understand that people who are in the military are not willing to be murderers, are not willing to be people who kill other people who are not directly threatening them.
So obviously over in Iraq that's pretty clear and there's lots of other examples, but I as a taxpayer am not threatening this gentleman's interest by just sitting here and not paying my taxes, but he is willing to back up the police if they fail to come and get my taxes from me and shoot me down.
If I don't agree with it.
So it's the willingness to be murderous, since it is only not murder if it's in self-defense.
And I can't really think of a time when America's been physically invaded since the War of 1812, and yet it has been in like 30 wars.
So it's kind of hard for me to understand how the American military, and I'm not picking on any military in particular, they're all the same in my book, How the American military can be perceived to be acting in self-defense, and of course even taking on self-defense on behalf of somebody else is morally an ambiguous situation at best.
But for sure, America has not been invaded.
America has been involved in 30-40 wars overseas.
You could say it was to stem communism, but that's nonsense because America is becoming more socialistic by the minute.
So it's really hard for me to understand what people say when they always have fighting communism and the domino theory and so on.
I think that would be all fine if America, say, was more free at the end of the Cold War than it was at the beginning, which it's not.
So we can get into that another time.
But the fact of the matter is that all the training and the weapons and the whole philosophy of the army is around doing people physical harm.
And that's the entire... This is not Doctors Without Borders.
This is not some privately run charity sending over food rations to Indonesia after the tsunami.
These are a group of people dedicating themselves to the art of killing.
And whoever tells them that this is the enemy, they go and kill that person.
So that to me is pretty important.
And I know that there are lots of people in the military who aren't on frontline combat and who don't take up arms against the enemy.
But, you know, if it is a crime, right, to go out and kill people who aren't attacking you, and I do believe that it is a moral evil of perhaps the greatest kind, except perhaps those committed against children, then if you are supplying the military, and you are not coerced to do so, taxpayers are off the hook because they're coerced, but if you're in the sort of logistics end of the military or the supply side or supply chain aspect of the military, then you are really an accessory to a crime if it is in fact a crime and of course I would argue that it is.
Now I'm not going to get into the psychological capacities of people who accept the profession of violence as a living.
I'm not going to discuss the capacity of that kind of personality to love their family or his or her children because that's a topic for another time.
However, the question of the military man's love of his country is an interesting one.
If I say that I love my wife, but I'm going to kill her if she leaves me, I think that it might be fair to question the nature of what I claim to be love.
So military men claim to love their country.
Well, that's fine.
So if I'm a military man and I claim to love America, and I'm an American soldier, then obviously America is... I don't love the trees, I don't love the air, I don't love the goats.
I love the people!
So I love the people who make up this country because there's no such thing as the government or the constitution or the ideals.
I mean, these are all things just in the minds of people.
So it must be the people that I love.
So I'm an American soldier and I say I love my country.
Well, it's hard for me to understand what that means when the fact of the matter is that if those people don't pay for me, then I'll shoot them.
It's hard for me to understand what is meant by love in that context.
I love everybody in this country, and if they don't pay my bills, I'm going to shoot them.
In other words, I love my wife, but if she tries to leave me or voluntarily disassociate herself from her relationship with me, I'm going to shoot her.
I'm not sure that I would call that love.
I mean, I think that love is a complex topic, which we can talk about another time, but I'm fairly sure that's not what is meant by love.
It may mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but support me or I'll kill you, I don't really see fitting into anybody's categorization of love.
So this kind of patriotism, I just have a hard time understanding.
Now, it could be, of course, that soldiers say, I mean, I'm the American soldier or soldier from any country, and I say, well, what I love is the ideals of the country that I'm living in.
And that's a perfectly interesting thing to talk about.
But I doubt very much that the ideal that you love is support me or I'll kill you.
I very much doubt that the ideal that you're serving is obey me or die, give me money or I'll shoot you down.
Because that would be a very hard kind of philosophy to get behind very enthusiastically.
Now you may, if you're a soldier in the West, you may say to yourself, well what I value, what I want to protect and serve and blah blah blah is the ideals of freedom.
But surely the ideals of freedom have something to do with property rights and free association and all this kind of stuff, and equal rights for all.
So it's hard for me to understand how, if free association is served by forcing people to give money to the military, that certainly is not free association at all.
It's hard for me to understand how freedom is served by forcing people to pay for the military at the point of a gun, and really doesn't seem to make them very free at all.
Now, of course, if you believe that, as a soldier, the important thing for you to do is to protect property rights, I gotta tell you, logically, there's some problems with that.
Because if you say that you want to protect property rights, and the only way that you are going to do that is if you force people to give you their property, I got to think that there's a couple of tricky things down there you've got to work out before you can put that forward as a logical moral theory.
So that's sort of another area that I have some problems with.
Now what about something like equal rights for all, which of course I fully subscribe to and I think is a wonderful moral theory.
But I gotta tell you where I have some problems with the sort of classical or current military approach to the idea of protecting equal rights for all is that I don't have the right to go and start an army.
I don't have the right to go up and down my street and say I'm going to do whatever I want to do for your common defense and you better pay me or I'm gonna shoot you.
So given that I don't have that right, I don't really understand why anybody else has that right.
I have the right to hire my own security guards.
I have the right to do whatever I want voluntarily.
I have the right to set up a sort of self-defense stand like a lemonade stand in front of my house and say, oh I can protect you better than anybody else and here's how and here's why and you should sign up and voluntary and DRO and all this kind of stuff.
But I don't actually have the right to go and force people to accept my, sort of, quote, services of self-defense.
I don't have the right to force them.
To support those services at the point of a gun.
So it's hard for me to understand how the military model of taxation, forcibly funding the military, is any kind of defense of equal rights.
Because it seems to me that it starts with the premise of exactly unequal or oppositional rights.
Which is that some people have the right to force other people to accept their self-defense, whether they think it's good or bad or indifferent or right or wrong.
And if they don't accept that, they shoot them.
And that right only occurs for a very small number of people in the political sphere and for the military people themselves.
And it is the exact opposite right for everyone else.
So George Bush can sort of fund a military, and if you don't agree with him, he'll pay someone to shoot you down.
But someone else in America can't come up with the same service and compete and, you know, come up with a better solution or whatever.
So it is a Stalinist monopoly of the very old, very worst and very fascistic and most totalitarian kind to say that only a small group of people have the right to use violence to achieve their goals and everybody else must not, cannot have that right.
So, for instance, private citizens can't own tanks, but the military has to.
So again, not only are you forcing people to serve you in the military, and forcing them to pay your bills at the point of a gun, but you're also legally disarming them relative to yourself.
Now, the specific rights that this gentleman writes about is the right to disrespect the motives of our leaders, and I think it's interesting that he phrases it that way.
Because disrespecting motives is completely irrelevant and is not actually right at all.
I can disrespect the motives of anybody I want in my own mind.
The real question is, can we actually change the behavior of our leaders?
So, for instance, in a free society, in a truly free society, there may well be a military.
I don't think it would, but let's just say it looks exactly the same as it was today, and people generally didn't agree with the Iraq war, well they just wouldn't fund it.
But then you would actually have an effect on your leaders.
So let's say everybody says we needed the Marines, we need the military, they do a great job and it's fantastic, there's no better way.
We've cost about in the private sector and the best minds in the world have gone into the problem of national self-defense and the only way that we can come up with, the optimum way that we can come up with it is to have the existing military that we see today.
Well I think that's great!
And what I want is the right not to disrespect the motives of the leaders.
Who cares about that?
What I do want is the right to actually change their behavior.
And the only way that I can do that is if, say, for instance, George Bush launches a war against Iraq that is posing no threat to the US whatsoever.
And, you know, Saddam Hussein, of course, put in by the United States in the 80s and sustained and nurtured by the United States in the 80s in the war in Iran.
And millions of other reasons why that war is completely unjust and immoral, then I just don't have to pay for it, right?
I just say, you know what, I'm not going to sign the check this month that goes to the military because I really disagree with what they're doing.
That's a right that I want.
I really don't care about the right to disrespect the motives of the leaders.
I mean, who cares about that?
That's not going to actually change anything.
So this idea that these rights are protected, are protected, by the military is also quite a fascinating one, and worth spending a minute or two on.
Here's an example of why, and I don't mean to sound vainglorious in any way, shape, or form, because it's not just me, but it's people like me, and people who are listening to this, and perhaps this gentleman, if I can make a strong enough case.
I don't believe that it's the military that has protected rights throughout history in any way, shape, or form.
And I'll tell you why I think that is the case.
The military as an institution has existed for five to ten thousand years.
I mean, you can certainly go all the way back to ancient Egypt to see military organizations, military styles of social organization.
Now, the military has been around for, say, five thousand years, ten thousand years.
Human rights, as a sort of valid concept, have been around for maybe two hundred years.
So if the military is really good at defending human rights, creating, protecting and defending human rights, then it would seem to me rather odd that 0.0002% of human history has had any kind of human rights, whereas 100% of human history has had the military.
So I've got to tell you, I don't really think that it's a prima facie cause of human rights or defense of human rights for there to be a military.
There's nothing specific about the military that does anything to protect human rights.
I will humbly suggest, with all due humility, that it is philosophers who work to define the logical constructs of human rights.
It is philosophers who learn to communicate passionately, powerfully, and effectively the root causes of violence, the root causes of government coercion of the economy and of the citizenry, the root causes of brutality, who do enormously, infinitely, hugely more to protect human rights and infinitely, hugely more to protect human rights and to create a peaceful society than people who are willing to be paid to kill people.
Property rights, limited democracy, the republic, separation of church and state, None of these were achieved by generals.
None of these were brought into being by the military.
In fact, it could easily be said that all of these advances in human society were brought about specifically through a limitation of the military, of the military's power to enforce the edicts of the church.
And it was never, to my knowledge, and please correct me if I'm wrong, it was never the military that came up with these things.
It was never the military that said, you know what, I don't think that having the church and the state united is really good because we've had a hundred years of religious wars throughout Europe that's decimated a third of the population, blah blah blah.
I don't think that it's the military that is going to bring about a withdrawal in Iraq.
I don't think it is the military that is going to end the welfare state.
I don't think it is the military that is going to free us from the poisonous talons of the public school system.
Now, the military could do all of this tomorrow.
And that's one of the things that frustrates me about the army.
If the military decided that the war in Iraq was invalid.
It would stop tomorrow.
If the military felt that public sector unions were not productive because they were based on coercion, blah blah blah, it would change tomorrow.
The military can dictate anything that it wants to the civilian population.
It can dictate anything that it wants to George Bush.
What, you think George Bush is going to take on even one Marine?
Are you crazy?
The military could set us all free tomorrow.
The military could disband the public schools, could eliminate the welfare state, could end the war on drugs, could clean out Washington, could give us a libertarian, minimalist, whatever you want to call it, anarchist society in about two and a half days.
That's how close we are.
It's right absolutely around the corner.
And never once in human history has it ever happened.
Never once in human history has the military come up with ideas around human freedom and philosophy and morality and limited government and actually put those into effect.
Now you get coups all over the place and you get philosophers coming up with better ideas that permeate throughout society which the military ends up usually being limited and controlled so that other people can be free.
But the military itself, defending these freedoms?
I'm not sure that people in the military even understand any of the freedoms that we have.
If they did, they wouldn't talk to me about protecting property rights and civil rights and making the world equal for everyone, when they've got guns pointed at us poor, helpless, disarmed taxpayers, who if we don't pay them, they'll shoot us down!
So this is one of the reasons why I have a tough time understanding military people when they say they're protecting my freedoms.
Because I gotta tell ya, It's kind of their guns that are pointing at me, and that's what I consider the greatest limitation to my freedom!
So, again, totally open that I'm missing something absolutely obvious and fundamental.
But when I see myself ringed by guns and bombs, if I don't pay my taxes, and if I don't obey the civilian leaders, and if I don't do this, and up to, yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir, when I see a ring of guns pointed at me, and if I put one foot wrong, they're gonna open up, gotta tell ya, I don't really look at the people behind those guns and say, thank you for all this wonderful freedom!
So, one last comment about this gentleman's statements.
He says, I am angered by your slap in the face of those who serve.
Now, I understand that if I'm entirely incorrect about this and I've missed something very essential about the nature of human freedom and non-violence, then it is a slap in the face, absolutely.
And I've mentioned this before in the podcast, since 12 million or so it was, called Am I Too Mean?
Now let's just have a look at what's sort of on either side of this seesaw when it comes to am I slapping the military in the face or whatever.
On the one side, you have me, a computer, and a web server.
I go to the gym, but I don't take a lot of martial arts, let's say.
So that's sort of what you've got on one side of the equation.
A guy with a podcast and some ideas, right?
And this is sort of what I'm putting out there.
And I've worked hard to try and make them logical and I'm engaging in debate and I think we're having some success getting closer to a moral ideal that I think is actually going to work and also be logically defensible and I think we're Getting closer to this nirvana of an actually perfect moral theory.
It doesn't mean a perfect world, but it does mean a perfect moral theory.
I think that's a good thing.
But what am I putting into the mix aggressively?
Some ideas, a voice, a podcast, a computer, and so on.
So that's sort of on one side of the seesaw.
Now, on the other side of the seesaw, you have a couple hundred thousand strong military funded by tens of billions of dollars with nuclear weapons, with scud missiles, bunker busters, aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines.
I mean, that's the level of force.
And no consequences, because they're the military, they can do whatever they want, right?
We've certainly been aware of that.
I haven't noticed the military refusing, or the police refusing, to enforce the Patriot Act, for instance.
So they can do whatever they want without consequences.
They're not going to go to jail if I don't pay my taxes, or I disagree, or I do whatever, right?
They're going to be able to shoot me and probably get medals.
Well, maybe not medals for shooting me, because, you know, I'm not that well armed.
They're certainly not going to get any negative consequences.
So on the one side you've got one guy standing up and you know you can think of me if you like or people like me as like the guy who's standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square and the famous photo I think from 89.
So you've got people with a couple of ideas who are working really hard to get these ideas out into society about what a free society would actually look like.
And that sort of on the one side of the equation is, you know, a couple of words, podcast, computer, and so on.
On the other side, you have tens and hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of well-armed, well-trained troops, weapons of mass destruction that can destroy the entire planet.
And who is considered to be the aggressive one?
Just think of that.
Think of that for a moment.
And I put this out, obviously, to the fine gentleman who wrote into me, but also just in general.
It's very important to look at the level of aggression that we're talking about here.
And for this gentleman to get angry at me for sort of slapping the military in the face.
Let's say that I could slap the military in the face.
Well, the military can vaporize my entire city.
With no consequences.
I mean, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Need I say more?
Who went to jail for that?
Nobody.
Perfect war crime.
So, it's kind of hard for me to understand how people can get angry at me Even if I'm completely wrong, how can people get angry at me and call me overly aggressive, slapping people in the face, that I'm disrespected, that I'm this and that, when I'm a guy with a podcast versus the biggest military might the world has ever seen?
People with the ability to genocide the whole planet.
People with the ability to hook people up to fake electrodes.
And people with the ability to hurl dogs at prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
People with the ability to hold other people without phone calls to lawyers, without phone calls to families, without charges, indefinitely, based on Patriot Act and Patriot Act 2.
So it's kind of hard for me to understand how people look at me and say, you know, of these two sort of people on the seesaw, right, one guy versus the entire armed might of the military around the world, you know who the really aggressive guy is?
Is the guy who's saying that maybe there's a problem with this?
That's the guy who we should get mad at.
That's the guy who's being inappropriately aggressive.
I mean, don't you think that's kind of funny?
To me, anyway.
Right?
So, I mean, it's like feeling sorry for the guy in the tank with the guy in front standing in front of him hoping that he won't run down other people.
So what's the upshot of all of this?
For me, at least, the upshot of all of this is that I have no problem whatsoever with there being a military if that is what people want.
And the only way that we're ever going to know if people actually want it or if it's actually effective is for the military to be privatized, is for self-defense To pass into the hands of the private sector so we can figure out how much is actually required to be spent on the military in order to provide for self-defense.
Because I gotta tell you, I don't see a whole lot of self-defense going on from the US military.
In fact, I see quite the opposite.
And this is true of the British military, and it's true of the Iranian military, and so on.
Every military in the world claims that it's acting for the self-defense of the people, yet it seems to me that pretty much for the most part, most of the military ends up attacking other countries, right?
Afghanistan and Iraq are the two recent examples of America.
Well, why did America have to go into these countries?
Well, because America was attacked.
And why was America attacked?
Well, there's lots of theories, but let's just say the general one in libertarian circles or in socialist circles is That the U.S.
has these 800 bases stationed around the world, that the U.S.
props up all of these dictatorial regimes around the world, that the U.S.
gives all this foreign aid to all these dictatorial regimes around the world, thus further propping them up.
So it's both financial and military.
And that's why the Twin Towers were attacked and why the Pentagon was attacked.
Because it's military and financial aid which props up these dictatorships around the world.
So it seems hard for me to understand exactly how the military is acting to defend the American people, or any people for that matter.
So first of all, the military aid that is given around the world is taken from the American taxpayer's pocket at the point of a gun, the money to fund that military aid.
Secondly, the financial aid is also taken from the American taxpayer's pocket, At the point of a gun, and that gun is fundamentally the military's because the police could never outshoot the domestic population.
And we only obey the police because we know the next guy is to come around to have substantially more firepower.
Not to mention the fact that simply paying for any of the military at all involves pointing a gun at the domestic population.
It's kind of hard for me to understand how this could be claimed to be self-defense.
It seems to me that what happens is that the government gets more taxation, funds more military, goes overseas, starts stirring up all of this trouble, poking all its sticks into these hornets' nests, And then you get attacks upon domestic population, which is used to further go and attack countries overseas, which then further rouses opposition from overseas countries and further invites terrorist and guerrilla attacks upon the domestic population.
It's a vicious cycle, right, which ends in the collapse of the entire society, right, or the state base, the state aspect of the society, as I talked about recently in the podcast on the fall of the Roman Empire.
And, of course, the fall of the British Empire was the same kind of situation.
Anyway, I could go on.
So it's hard for me to really understand what it is that people in the military mean when they say that they're there for the self-defense of the general population.
Not only are they taking the salary from the general population, not only are they using the salary that's taken from the general population to fund financial and military prop-ups of dictatorships overseas, and I know it's not necessarily the military that's doing this primarily, but You know, they're certainly not doing anything to oppose the civilian leadership that is doing this.
But also, as a result of this, the domestic population not only has the initial predation on them from the army to feed itself, and to arm the overseas dictators, but the people who are groaning under the heel, the bloody heel, of those overseas dictatorships end up pretty pissed off at America, or whoever, and end up retaliating as well.
So I don't really see that that serves people's self-interest at all.
So the last thing I'll say is that, you know, not to sound like I'm calling this gentleman out or calling out people who are big fans of the military, but obviously, and I do respect this, I mean, I do respect that if you believe that the military is required to protect people's freedoms, then I think that's a very interesting thesis and I could be completely wrong and you could be completely right.
And the only way we're going to find out is if you are willing to submit this to the test at the free market, right?
So if I say everybody wants my particular brand of speakers and I force everyone to buy them at the point of a gun and I say, well, the reason that I'm doing this is that everybody wants them, then of course the next logical thing would be to say, if everybody does want the military in its existing configuration, Then having the overhead of all of this taxation collection and processing and management and punishment apparatus is an enormous overhead.
So if I say to everyone, you have to buy these speakers, and three quarters of the price of the speakers is me hiring all the people to go and force you to buy these speakers, it could be said that this is not a very efficient situation.
So what you want to do is if everybody really does want my speakers, I'll just put them out on the free market without all this overhead of forcing everyone to buy them, and lo and behold, it'll be so much cheaper and people will want my speakers even more because they'll be even cheaper!
So instead of having all this tax collection, and the state, and the bureaucracies, and the IRS, and the tax jails, and the tax lawyers, and I mean forget, throw all that stuff out, because it's service, and people want it, they want their freedoms protected.
So all I'm saying to people in the military is that, let's assume that I'm completely speaking out of my armpit, and have no idea what I'm talking about, and everybody does exactly want the military that we have right now, and it provides enormous services, it's a great benefit, and it protects people as well as humanly possible.
Great!
Wouldn't that be fantastic?
That way we can get rid of the government and the military can stay exactly the way it is.
Because people will recognize it and fund it and blah blah blah blah blah.
And you'll say, well, people don't want to fund it, blah blah blah.
Fine.
Then it's not a service.
If people don't want to fund it voluntarily, Don't insult us by calling it a service.
It's not a service.
You're just taking money from us at the point of a gun.
Do that.
Do it openly.
Do it in an open and fascistic and steel-booted manner.
Do not insult us by pointing guns at us, taking our money, and then saying it's a service that we want.
That is insulting.
I actually find that more insulting than people taking my money.
Take my money, do it openly, but for God's sake don't tell me it's my choice and it's for my own good.
I got enough of that from my parents and I really don't think that I need it from the military as an adult.
And it wasn't any more true from the military as it was from my parents.
So I hope that makes sense.
This is sort of my perspective.
I'm certainly open to debate these issues.
This is my two cents worth.
And I'm trying to be responsible in what it is that I'm saying.
But if you have discussions or you have objections, please point out where I'm logically wrong.
Don't bother writing to me saying that I'm slapping your dead heroic grandfather in the face or whatever he's going to spin over in his grave.
That doesn't really matter to me at all, right?
We're talking about a logical moral framework.
We're not talking about who gets offended and who doesn't.
So, please write to me or email me if you have any ideas about how we can best talk about the situation from a logical, moral, productive standpoint.
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