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March 24, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:39
159 Arguments for Freedom (Part 2)
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Good afternoon, it's Steph.
It's two o'clock on Friday afternoon, the 24th of March, 2006, and I hope you're doing beautifully!
I would like to continue with this idea of finding rapprochement with those who we are discussing our ideas with, and I'd like to go a little bit further along the lines of things that we need to establish, that we have in common, that will help us to help people see the truth.
I don't like to call it conversion because that smacks of irrationality.
I think enlightenment is a nice way of putting it, which can be helpful, but basically it's just around helping people understand that 2 plus 2 is 4.
Now, I guess we got to premise number seven, which is the idea that incrementalism is not working.
This is another important thing to get people to understand.
As somebody famously said, and Harry Brown appropriately quoted, Incrementalism in theory is perpetuity in practice.
And what that means is that... Well, you know what?
You guys are smart enough.
You know exactly what it means.
I'm never ever going to underestimate the intelligence of libertarians, because you all are brilliant!
Brilliant, I tell you.
So, to get people to understand why we have solutions that seem to be kind of radical, It's important to understand that the problems that we're facing are not problems that can be solved by sort of more of the same.
They're not problems that can be solved by tweaking.
And they're certainly not problems that can be solved by bureaucrats within the system.
Now, another thing that can get people to help understand why we have the approach that we have, I guess this would be principle number eight.
It's not a principle of libertarianism, but more of economics.
Well, people respond to incentives.
If you want to figure out, in general, what people are going to do, then you have to have a look at how they map incentives for themselves.
What is their relationship to incentives?
That's fairly important, because if we don't say that human beings respond to incentives, then we are left with the problem of randomized motivation, which means that no social organization can ever work because it's kind of random.
I mean, if you don't think that certain illnesses respond to antibiotics, but instead respond to completely a random set of events, That, you know, the full moon is in the sky, a vulture is overhead, and you're looking at your elbow, and magically you're cured, but doing it the next time won't cure it either, then there's no such thing as health, right?
So if human behavior and motivation is entirely random, then there's no such thing as philosophy.
Certainly no such thing as economics.
And, of course, then there's no way of explaining why certain societies do well, i.e.
free market, private property, and so on, and certain societies do really badly, i.e.
everything else.
So, I think that we can safely say that people do respond to incentives.
Now, I think we can also say that, this is I guess principle number nine, that the incentives that people are responding to within the government are not those which solve the problems, that are the governments.
So, for instance, the base incentive of government agencies is to exacerbate the problems that they're trying to solve.
So the more welfare is required, the more poverty there is, the more welfare is required, the more that the welfare agencies grow.
This is quite the opposite, of course, from the free market, for reasons which I'm sure you're fairly well aware of, if not perfectly well aware of.
So the incentives within the system are going to determine people's future behavior.
And when incentives are so stacked, you can't just sort of nag people and say, well, you shouldn't do it.
Because people respond to incentives.
So there will be some people Who will always end up doing the right thing no matter what.
There are other people who will always end up doing the wrong thing no matter what.
And the vast majority of people will do kind of what they are allowed to do.
And that's sort of important.
They will do what they can get away with.
Lots of people will never have an affair even if they know they can't get caught.
Lots of people will have affairs even if they do get caught and a lot of people will just kind of do whatever.
Do what they can get away with based on the circumstances.
Same thing with sort of getting away with taxes.
If you can be sure that you're not going to get caught for not paying your taxes, a lot of people won't pay their taxes.
The same thing is true if you're a waiter and you get tips and so on.
What do you declare?
Well, you declare the minimum that you can get away with without getting audited.
So, once we've sort of got that point across, that incrementalism isn't really going to work very well for them at all, for solving these kinds of problems, and that the incentives that are in the public sector are slanted in such a way that there's not going to be any reform coming from within, Then, people can argue all of that for sure, and they can say, no, incrementalism is working, right?
In which case they need to sort of explain why government programs keep getting worse and worse, despite the fact that they keep trying to improve them, right?
I mean, it's not like everybody who's in the public sector is an evil, parasitical, vampiric troll who just loves to get up in the morning and teach children as badly as possible and keep people dependent on welfare and so on.
It's just that once you get a big pile of money that's been Achieved through illicit means, no good can come out of it just by the very nature of reality.
You can't sort of get blood money and turn it to good use.
So, it's not that everybody who is a bureaucrat, or who works in the government, or who is a politician, is evil by nature.
That's not really the issue.
The issue is that, in general, the system as a whole doesn't have any real incentives to serve the customers, right?
The real customers are not the taxpayers, because the taxpayers' money is coerced.
And so the real customers are their own sort of political ambitions, and, you know, all the stuff that we know, which we can talk about if we want another time about bureaucracy.
But basically, there's not a strong incentive.
In fact, there's a strong non-incentive or negative incentive, or I guess you could use the official British word and say disincentive.
English word.
So...
Incrementalism doesn't seem to work, and of course if people can come up with good examples of how incrementalism does work in the absence of a free market, incrementalism in terms of improvements, but it seems to be the exact opposite, right?
The more money you spend on a government program, the worse it does, and there's no government program, at least that I know of, that has ever systematically improved itself.
So people can say that these systems are open to improvements within their own structures, but all they have to do is they have to come up with the challenge of Two things, right?
Well, three things, I guess.
The first is come up with examples.
The second is explain how or why those examples are not a part of the free market.
That's sort of important as well.
And the last one is to explain sort of why only those examples are the ones that are So if government programs do have the ability to reformulate themselves or improve themselves, even if they can find one and prove that it is not dependent on the free market for that improvement, they still have to explain why only that one is the one that is improving itself.
That's sort of important as well.
So there's lots of barriers and I don't really think that anyone's gonna be able to get over them.
There's lots of barriers that sort of explain why it doesn't really work to have bureaucracies in the state sector, who are the recipients of coerced money, reform themselves.
So, if we sort of put all of these things together, I don't think I quite got to ten, but I don't have a pen to write these down, so I'll just sort of go through memory.
So, if we go through all of these sorts of things together, right?
Are peaceful solutions are better than violent ones?
Well, we're looking through DROs and through voluntarism and through voluntary taxation and through, you know, whatever it is you want to call it, and we can get into all of these sorts of debates another time, but in general, anarchists, minarchists, and so on, are looking for peaceful solutions rather than violent solutions.
We're looking for adaptive solutions because, of course, we're looking for free market things that are going to continually change according to new circumstances.
The one thing that happens in the free market is you get this kind of permanent improvement process, this permanent optimization of the use of resources to maximize customer satisfaction, to maximize profit, to maximize all of those good things.
And so, in the free market situation, you get something that's very adaptive.
So, for instance, if there's some magic formula tomorrow that can be invented, that if you recite it, it eliminates poverty, then it seems to me unlikely that the public sector is going to be expending strenuously, night and day, all of its resources to come up with such a thing.
But an insurance company that insured people against poverty would be highly incentivized to come up with such a thing, and will work night and day.
And this is the basis of the entrepreneurial lifestyle.
When you're an entrepreneur, and I can talk about this from direct experience, you end up working night and day for years.
Not with the hopes of, obviously, you're your own boss and all that.
And as far as being my own boss, I'm kind of a tyrant.
But you're aiming for the big payout and the satisfaction in terms of emotional financial sense of doing a good job and selling your business or growing it to a significant amount of creating your own culture and not being under anybody else's thumb.
So from a career standpoint, all of that stuff is great, but it's a lot of work and you only do it because of the incentives.
I can absolutely guarantee you that because I've been in many different job situations in my life, both large companies and small companies.
And wherever I have not had an incentive, then I just don't do the work.
So that is, I mean, I don't do as much work.
I'm not going to get up at, you know, six in the morning and go for a long day of meetings and then code all night if I'm just, you know, if I'm being paid a salary and, you know, I get the money when I just sort of meet my objectives.
And when I don't have a strong career path for improvement or reward bonuses or whatever, I mean, it's just natural, right?
I mean, people respond to incentives and that's nothing you can do about it.
That's a basic fact of human life.
So the free market is going to give an adaptive solution rather than a fixed solution.
As you pass a law, you get a bureaucracy going, and then that bureaucracy lasts until the end of time, or more accurately, the collapse of state finances.
And that is sort of not the solution that we're looking for.
We're looking for something a little bit more adaptive.
We're looking for something just a little bit more flexible and something that's going to continually adjust itself.
To new situations, new circumstances, new environments, new possibilities, and so on.
Constant optimization is what we want.
Now, we've already gone over the people are generally benevolent kind of argument.
In my experience, and I'm sure that there's about 10 billion reasons to disagree with me on this, and there's lots of people out there who will, but in my experience, eh, you know, people are pretty nice.
And if they're not nice, it's probably because I'm not being very nice.
I mean, that's sort of the general thing that occurs.
There are always people who are going to end up not being nice no matter what, and there are always people who are going to be nice no matter what, but the majority of people will generally tend towards niceness unless they're extremely provoked in one manner or another.
And so if you eliminate the benevolence of humanity argument, then it becomes harder to argue for for anarchism or, you know, objectivism, libertarianism.
It doesn't become impossible, but it becomes a much more sophisticated argument.
So if you're not dealing with somebody who's really bright, and hopefully not too well-educated, because if they're too well-educated, their brain's been turned into a kind of flashy porridge.
But if you get someone who's reasonably bright and open to new ideas, you can make the arguments for anarchism based on the universal evil of human beings.
You know, basically that If people are universally evil, the only thing that is going to keep peace at all is to have a balance of power situation.
And so you want to make sure there's no state because if people are evil they're going to be much worse if they have a significant difference in the balance of power and the state is automatically going to create that.
So you've got to have the only hope you have for peace in society is for everybody to be armed and at each other's throats to the point where it becomes not productive to pull out a gun.
And of course the last thing you want is a dictatorship where people can harm whoever they want without any repercussions.
And that is, you know, I mean, it's more tricky and it's more tricky because it requires a bit more conceptualization and also because, you know, it's just not true.
It's just not true.
The number of people that I've known who willingly use violence in their lives is like one, maybe two, maybe three in my whole life.
And those people do it usually within the context of a relationship that is intimate in nature, so it can't exactly be called coerced.
I don't know anybody who just randomly gets up, walks out the street and starts punching people or mugging people.
There are such people, but of course those people are generally responding to prior violence in their lives and so on.
So, the vast majority of people are nice.
I mean, you know, stop your car at any time and ask people for directions, as I mentioned earlier.
You'll see, people are very nice.
In fact, they seem very regretful if they can't help you.
You go to your neighbors and ask for a cup of sugar.
I mean, people aren't going to blow you away when you stand at the doorstep and say, can I get me some sugar?
So, people are generally benevolent, and that solves the problem, conceptually, of the welfare state, right?
Because people will help each other and so on.
And even if people say, well, they won't help each other enough, and this and that, then you say, okay, well, sure.
There's always going to be risk.
You know, you can't eliminate risk from new situations.
The real question is, is the risk greater than continuing on the current path, right?
I mean, there's a risk for chemotherapy, but is it better than dying of cancer?
Well, probably, right?
It's the same thing with risky medications.
If you're going to die anyway, it seems to me that taking something that has a promise of helping you, even if it's risky, is worth it.
So that's sort of the major point that I'm trying to make around that.
Now, the poor, generally, they want to improve their lot.
If they're helped, if they have the options, they will generally want to improve their lot.
If they don't, then the welfare state is completely immoral because you're just funding people with bad habits.
The poor want to improve their lot, and the best way to do that is to give them jobs, as I mentioned before.
Now this ties into the adaptive solution as well.
One of the things that I've made the argument for, and I guess I can do this because I started a company that hired like 30 people, is that if I want to help the poor, then I would like to be able to do that by starting a company.
Rather than paying taxes, right?
So I pay whatever, 60 grand a year, 70 grand a year in taxes, and I would much rather be able to take that money and plow it into starting a new business.
And I think that that's a lot better in terms of helping the poor than just sort of being taxed and having the money handed to them, regardless of the efforts that they're making to get out of poverty.
And I really demand that right.
Of course, I really demand that right to help the poor as I see fit.
Not as some bureaucrat sees fit.
Not as some political lobby sees fit.
Not as some politico sees fit.
I demand the right to help the poor as I see fit.
Now, of course, I would also argue that the time and energy that I'm investing in these podcasts is going to do a heck of a lot to help the poor over the long run.
So I also demand the right to help the poor in non-monetary ways.
You may decide to help the poor by handing out food at a soup kitchen, or donating turkeys at Thanksgiving, or starting your own company, or trying to find a cure for heroin addiction, or whatever, right?
By teaching parenting seminars at cut-rate prices in lower-class neighborhoods.
I think upper-class neighborhoods too.
It's not like they're all great parents either.
There's lots of ways that you can help the poor that aren't around getting money taken from you at the point of a gun.
And I think that we should have a flexible and open enough solution that people can help the poor in the best way that they can, right?
So there's some people who the best thing that they can do is give money, right?
So if you're some guy without any social skills who's inherited a lot of money, I'm guessing that the best you can do is to give the poor money.
But if you are somebody like me, who's got an entrepreneurial streak and likes to hire and develop people, then you get kids out of school, or even kids who aren't out of school, kids with talent or kids with drive, who otherwise, if you don't create a job for them, there will be no job.
Right?
I mean, it's not like... If nobody creates jobs, there are no jobs, right?
So every job that I don't create is one job less.
It's available for people, right?
So that's an absolute fact, right?
There's no other... You don't get sort of made some other way.
And so, if you're like me, and you like to hire people and work with them and so on, that's how to get them out of poverty.
Whereas most of the people that I hired, at least early on in the business, were kind of out of school, and kind of broke, and student loans, and definitely heading for poverty without a job, right?
Or back home to their parents, which, you know, kind of like poverty too.
And so I demand the right to be able to help the poor in that manner.
And then, of course, you'll get this mealy mouth canteen objection.
It's like, well, yeah, you're helping the poor, but you're profiting from them, too.
It's like, yes, exactly.
That's why it's really helping the poor.
You know, to give people, like, what would that make any sense for me, right?
To increase their pay to the point where I wasn't motivated to improve the business?
How would that help them at all?
It wouldn't.
It would be a ludicrous idea.
And of course, because people respond to incentives, those people whose personal incentives, whether it's financial or emotional, who those incentives align with helping the poor the most, I mean, that's exactly what you want.
You want people to have strong incentives, emotional, financial, whatever, to help the poor, because that's how you know the poor are going to be helped.
Because as we said a little later, the people respond to incentives.
So it's a non-violent situation.
It's a flexible situation and this idea that the only way to help the poor is to hold a gun to someone's head, take the money and hand it out like candy is not really an optimal solution.
So hiring is better than welfare and monitoring is important for charity.
Any charity that is going to ask for your money is going to have to prove to you, I think, that if they're not starting a business and have that natural incentive built in, They're going to have to prove to you that they're actually doing a good job, right?
So they're going to have to give you some statistics about the people who are off welfare, who were on it before, and, you know, there's lots of ways of measuring this kind of stuff.
But basically, that kind of situation is very important.
It's very important to understand that in the absence of monitoring, in the absence of specific controls based on personal incentives, That it's very hard to optimize solutions, right?
I mean, very hard to optimize systems or processes or policies or whatever it is you're doing to solve a problem if you don't have any personal stake in the issue, right?
I mean, if you're not going to lose your job unless you make it more efficient or you're not going to get a big bonus if you make it more efficient, then, you know, it's sort of hard to expect people to do it.
And so, given also that incrementalism isn't going to work, then the current system cannot reform itself.
The current system cannot reform itself.
I mean, we'd all love to wake up one morning and figure out how to snap our fingers and turn every bureaucrat in the world into a free marketeer.
That would be wonderful.
You know, because then everybody in the world would be free and we wouldn't need to have lots of arguments like this.
I mean, that would be wonderful.
But it's never going to happen.
It's like trying to snap your fingers and everybody in the world's no longer going to get sick.
I mean, never going to happen.
So, at least until capitalism runs fully the healthcare system.
But it's not going to happen.
So given all of these sorts of things together, right?
You sort of package all of these things together.
Because the existing system cannot reform itself, we need to look for alternatives to the existing system.
That to me is quid pro quo.
It's built up in the definition.
If the current system is heading for disaster, and I think we can all pretty much understand that it is, and anybody who knows anything about the national debt, and the rise of bureaucracy, and the expansion of legislation, and the problems with tort law, and I mean you could go on the problems of foreign policy, and so on.
Everybody recognizes that the existing system cannot continue.
It certainly can't continue for the next hundred years, and it would be very likely if it continued for another 50 years, and I'd still find it pretty unlikely it continues for another 25.
For me, 5 to 10 to 15 is probably going to be much closer to it for reasons that I've gone into elsewhere.
And so what does this all mean?
Well, if the existing system can't continue, And, of course, the self-destruction of the existing system is going to be pretty bad, right?
It's a little bit nicer to put your landing gear down before you hit the tarmac, right?
So it's a little bit nicer for people to understand what the issues are before the existing system self-destructs, because then they may choose an even worse system to replace it.
It's like, oh, the government's gone bankrupt.
You see, freedom failed, so let's have a dictatorship.
I mean, that would be the worst way to get out of the current situation, right?
So you want people to have an understanding Which is what we're trying to do in this conversation, to have an understanding of why it's going to fail, what the problems are, and what the solution is going to be, which is going to be getting rid of the government.
I know it's radical, but hey, you know, they got rid of the church and state being together.
They got rid of slavery.
They got rid of the aristocracy in North America.
They got rid of a lot of stuff that seemed unthinkable.
I'm sure one more won't kill us as a species.
Now once you put all of this together, and I know I've been trying to put it together for the last couple of sentences, but I'm gonna get there, I really am!
Stop distracting me!
I'm talking to myself, not you.
But if we put all this stuff together, that current system ain't gonna last.
Current system can't reform itself.
We absolutely want to try and come up with a better system before the existing one implodes, even if we can't change the implosion, at least it will mean that something better is going to come out of the post-implosion social scenario.
And given that peaceful solutions are better than violent solutions, and given that adaptive solutions are better than fixed ones, and people are generally benevolent, and the poor and the sick want to improve their lot, and hiring is better than welfare, and monitoring is important for charity, and we really want to give people the flexibility to help the poor in any way that they see fit.
And there are ways, of course, in the free market that helping yourself is helping the poor, as in being an entrepreneur.
You put all of this together, I mean, You know, everybody has the same goals, and we all want these things.
Everybody has the same goals, it's just a matter of how to go about it.
And, of course, people, if they understand this, they're going to understand that the existing system can't reform itself.
We've got to look outside the existing system to find solutions for these things.
So, putting all that together, and hopefully you can be a little bit more concise than I've been, because it's not likely that someone's going to sit there for 45 minutes listening to you go on and on, unless it's a podcast, of course, which I still can't quite understand.
But anyway, glad to have you along.
And so it seems to me that if you get all of this stuff established with someone, and you care and concern, and you want to help racism, and you want to help poverty, and you want everyone to be happy, and you want the children to be loved, and you want the sun to rise with a big smile on its face, and you want children to dance and sing, and everyone to be good at karaoke, so you want all of these things, which is what everybody wants.
I certainly would like to be better at karaoke.
But what that means in the end result is that, you know, this anarchism thing, it's worth a look.
It's really worth a look.
And that's, you know, kind of important.
It's not comfortable to look at it.
I understand that.
I mean, so this is how you communicate to other people.
It's not comfortable to explain it to people.
It's not comfortable to look at it.
It feels kind of freaky.
I understand that.
Imagine that you're the first guy to figure out the world is round.
You're probably going to be falling over dizzy for the next couple of days.
It's understandable that it's kind of freaky to come up with a non-intuitive but perfectly rational solution to an existing situation that's going to get worse and worse, that can never reform itself, and the end of which is going to be pretty disastrous.
So I can understand that that makes sense.
You know, I sometimes think when I'm at the dentist that, you know how they take that sort of sharp hook and they scrape all around your gums just to check the gum depth and all that?
Ooh, it's lovely, isn't it?
I always want to put on an audiobook, but I feel rude like I can talk anyway.
Ah, to be British.
But they take that hook, and they scrape it around your gums, and it's kind of uncomfortable.
And they're like, ah, I have to measure your gum depth, and I'm going to do that by jumping up and down on this sharp thing I've got poked into your gums.
So I've got to think that the first person to come up with that was kind of like a sadist, and he may have been slightly disappointed that it actually helped people.
I don't know.
But there's lots of things that are non-intuitive.
As simple as, I like chocolate cake, and not so much with the eggplant, but eggplant is good for you, and chocolate cake, except in small doses, isn't so much.
So, there's lots of things in life that are non-intuitive, that are counter-intuitive, that, you know, don't make sense until you really think about them.
And that's, you know, as to be perfectly expected, right?
It doesn't look like everything's composed of little atoms, but, you know, really they kind of are.
So, there's lots of things that are non-intuitive.
It doesn't make sense that raising the minimum wage makes people poorer, but, you know, it does.
So, there's lots of things that are non-intuitive.
I understand that it's uncomfortable to look at new things.
But once you've established that you're all on the same page, that you and the person you're arguing with are all perfectly on the same page, you all want the best for people, you all want for people to be happy, you all want... It's just a matter of methodology.
And it's also just a matter of, and this is where things get to be a little bit more tricky, it's a matter of getting people to understand that repeating the same sort of incantations is not going to solve the problem.
Right?
So the incantation that's very common in the government is, you know, more funding.
More funding!
If only we had more funding, everything would be hunky-dory.
That's what we really want is more funding.
And if we have more funding, Oh boy, it's just, you know, we are $5 away from paradise.
Yes, we've blown trillions upon trillions of your dollars already, and things have gotten worse, but $5 more, it's just going to be wonderful.
Again, Harry Brown, who I'm thinking about with a certain amount of nostalgia, of course, at the moment.
But he had some great things, you know, to talk about.
He's sort of saying, you know, to some shifty brother-in-law.
It's almost a brother-in-law, right?
Because it can't be blood relatives, although it sometimes is.
So some shifty brother-in-law says, yeah, you know, I got a business idea.
Oh, it's going to be fantastic.
I'm going to sell hula hoops over the web.
And it's going to be a fortune.
And all I need from you, you can just lend me $5,000, baby.
It'd be beautiful.
So you lend the guy $5,000, and he blows it on Wine Woman and Song, and he comes back and he says, you know, I've got to build a website for this thing now.
Just give me another $5,000, it would be beautiful.
You know, you keep going around, I'm sure you get the idea, right?
And Harry Brown didn't do quite as whiskey-voiced a guy as I did, but hey, you know, he wasn't quite as exhibitionistic of his early acting training.
So the guy keeps coming back for more and more money.
At what point do you sort of say, you know, I don't think you're another $5,000 away from being a successful entrepreneur.
I think you're just kind of like a chiseling lying bum.
Or however you want to put it, at some point you're kind of beholden to, based on just having some kind of learning curve and intelligence as a human being, it's kind of beholden upon you to close your checkbook and to tell him that you'll think about it.
Which is the British approach.
So the same thing is true with helping people to understand that the same formulas aren't going to produce any different results.
So, you know, if they feel that prayer is really good for dealing with leukemia, but everybody who tries it dies, it's fairly important, I think, to say, if you're interested in health and getting people to be better off, it's fairly important to say, I don't think prayer is really going to help you here.
Like, I gotta tell you, I know you feel strongly like it's a solution, but it's never worked in the past.
In fact, prayer just makes people worse, right?
I mean, the problem with that metaphor, which has just dawned on me, is that Government programs make everything worse, right?
Prayer doesn't have any effect on leukemia.
It doesn't make it better, it doesn't make it worse.
But government programs actively make everybody worse.
So it's kind of like you're saying, people are saying, you know, you know what really helps with emphysema is smoking.
Smoking and lots of it.
You know, stogies, chewing tobacco and, you know, camels.
That's the way to really help emphysema, actually making it worse, right?
So repeating the same old formulas which haven't worked, say, for the past, oh gosh, what would it be?
10,000 years or so?
Repeating those formulas one more time, in the face of overwhelming evidence and perfect consistency in terms of the disastrous of government programs and the disastrous of violence in general, You know, repeating those formulas again, I'm sorry I've got to tell you, it's not good enough.
It's not good enough anymore as a political argument to say, we need more funding, we need another law, we need a new bureaucracy, we need to do this, we need to do that.
Oh, has meddlesome and violent foreign relations caused problems with us around the world?
Let's go and invade a country.
You really have to do a little bit better than that now, because the facts are in.
As we know from the 20th century, socialism doesn't work, the lack of a price system doesn't work, lack of property rights doesn't work, and it doesn't work in a way that gets hundreds of millions of people killed.
So it's not exactly neutral.
We know that doesn't work.
We know from the current world that, you know, religion makes societies worse.
The more power that religion gets, the more power, political power in particular, that religion gets, the worse things get in society.
So, you know, those facts are in.
We know the national debt.
We know all about the messes in public schools.
We know the fact that the public schools have been, had increasing funding for the last 40 years.
We know that public sector unions, blah, blah, blah.
We know this eminent domain and, you know, seizure of drugs.
We know the drug war doesn't work.
Everybody knows these things.
And so it really isn't enough to continue to mouth off the same load of crap that got us into this mess to begin with.
And that's, you know, you don't have to put it that harshly with people, but, you know, it's important for me at least to say, um, no, that...
It's not going to be any different.
It's not even rhetorical.
It's not even, well, how would increasing funding help the schools get better?
It's like, no.
I'm sorry, that's really been tried for 40 years.
That's not a solution.
And the more it's tried, the worse it gets.
So more funding isn't even neutral.
It isn't even negative just in terms of taxpayers.
More funding for education, for instance.
It's negative in terms of the children.
And you really don't want to be harming the minds of children.
So I've got to tell you that your solution of more funding Doesn't cut it.
Not going to work.
I'm sorry.
Please try again.
But you're coming up snake eyes as far as any kind of valuable contributions to the debate.
So you've got to sort of beat back the fantasies, however nicely you can do it.
Or, you know, if it's not nice, that's your choice.
But I would recommend that you try and be as nice and humorous about it as possible.
No, it's not going to work.
Sorry, that answer, you can even say, like the kid who doesn't understand, you can say, well, I don't know what will work exactly, but I'll tell you what won't work.
I don't know how to cure a migraine, but I'm pretty sure it involves not beating your head against the wall anymore.
And so, that's something that's sort of important, because if people think that the same old solutions are going to work again, then they're not going to look for new solutions.
That's an absolute given.
And this is why, as nicely as possible, but pretty firmly, when Christians say, all the good stuff that Jesus talks about is innate to his nature, but all the evil stuff he talks about is taken out of context, it's like, sorry, it's not.
I don't mean to be shocking.
you.
But when he says, when Jesus says, kill all the unbelievers, got to tell you, I find that a little offensive, you know, as a card carrying unbeliever, as a blasphemer slash heretic, you can check my business card.
I got to tell you that I do find that a little offensive.
And And, you know, if a Nazi says to a Jew, OK, yeah, well, we do talk about killing all the Jews, but, you know, you don't want to take that out of context.
Out of context of what?
Out of context of what?
Out of tickling us before you kill us?
Come on!
I mean...
So if we let people get away with this kind of stuff, they're not going to figure it out, right?
If we happen to have gotten this special light shone on our forehead, and on my forehead, as you can imagine, that's fairly bright.
If we're the ones who happen to understand this, and other people of course don't, and have no incentive to see it, because it's kind of uncomfortable when, as a Christian, you get associated with near-universal genocide, well, they're not going to see it.
What incentive would they have to conceivably see it?
So we have to sort of point it out, and the way that we point it out is sort of gently, insistently, and kindly saying, yes, I understand that there are some nice Christians, and I do understand that Jesus said some things that I would probably agree with.
But I've got to tell you, I still can't get away from the whole genocide thing.
Genocide of non-Christians thing.
I really can't get over the whole, I think that we should have slaves.
And I've gone through this kind of stuff before.
But that's the stuff I can't get past.
And I really don't feel comfortable mixing and matching.
Like, I may be an animal lover and a vegetarian, and so was Hitler, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to sort of say that I'm a Nazi, right?
I'm actually just going to say that I'm a vegetarian and an animal lover.
I'm not going to say I'm a Nazi because I have those two things in common with Hitler.
So there's some stuff that Christ said that may be relatively sane, but I'm not going to subscribe to the whole thing, right?
I'm not going to eat an entire cake of arsenic just because there's two peanuts inside and call myself healthy.
So, after you've established that the existing system can't continue and we need a solution that's based on pacifism, right?
Because the solution can't include ingredients from the poison, right?
Your cure... I mean, this isn't like snake venom time, right?
The cure can't involve the poison.
So, if you have a system that's basically based on violence and coercion and is sliding into ever greater violence and coercion, all these sort of problems, this, that and the other, the solution isn't...
That's going to involve coercion, right?
Because that's sort of the root of the problem to begin with.
And so that's, I think, fairly important to get across as well.
If something can't be reformed within and is driving us all off a cliff, economically and politically, then the solution to all of that problem, which is based on violence, is not violence, right?
The solution to slavery, as Lincoln had, is not to raise a slave army and go and fight it, right?
It doesn't really work, right?
The solution to government-sponsored discrimination, a la the Jim Crow laws and so on in the late 19th, early 20th century, the solution to state-sponsored bigotry is not, to me, state-sponsored bigotry.
So this is one of the reasons why affirmative action is stone evil, as slavery and discrimination was stone evil, right?
Kind of surprising to me.
We can talk about this another time.
It's always kind of surprising to me that minorities that are enormously harmed and destroyed by the state look to the state for a solution.
I mean, that's just kind of funny, you know?
This guy beats the crap out of me every day, so maybe he can be my surgeon.
Yeah, because that sadism is going to get less when you're unconscious and he's got a knife.
Right.
That makes sense.
That's another thing to get across to people, that the solution is not going to involve exactly the same traits and moral rules that have got us into all these problems to begin with.
So this is sort of my template as it stands for getting these ideas across to people.
I think it's so important to try and get the alignment.
The alignment that everybody wants the world to be a better, happier, peaceful, more productive place.
Everybody wants the poor to have all the opportunities they want.
Everybody wants peaceful solutions that are adaptive and flexible and positive and long-lasting and appeal to people's innate desire to improve their situations and be happy.
So, to me, that's all wonderful, and we are all on the same page as far as that goes.
All moralists want the same thing.
I mean, all true moralists, right?
You've got false moralists who are just apologists for state power, like this John Rawls fellow, and I think to some degree Noam Chomsky, and just about every other intellectual that I've ever read who's not specifically in the, at least the libertarian camp, to some degree the objectivist, and to a larger degree the minimalist, or anarchist, or anarcho-capitalist for sure.
These people are all apologists for state violence to one form or another.
That's kind of corrupt.
The issue is that they are hooking into other people's desire to have these problems solved, which all decent people want solved.
The majority of people are decent.
And they're selling them a bloody bill of goods in order to get them to believe that this is going to work out for the best, right?
That this is going to solve all the problems that everyone wants solved around race and poverty and illness and abuse and Lack of education.
All the problems that we'd all love to see solved.
People sell this false bill of goods, like violence is going to achieve those things, right?
So people say, okay, well hide the violence, pretend it's not violence, and so on.
But this is going to solve the issues, right?
And it's like the war, the perpetual war to end war, right?
And the next war is always going to make the world peaceful, but, you know, there's always a war after that.
Make the world safe for democracy, get rid of the Nazis, get rid of the communists.
Now, Al-Qaeda, I mean, yeah, absolutely, sure.
Sure, we don't like the basic idea of people coming and killing our citizens, so in order to solve that problem, we're going to go and kill other people's citizens.
Sure, absolutely.
I mean, what more logical a solution could you conceivably have?
So, I think you can get people to understand that the old answers, you know, more funding, more laws, and another government department, or even if they say less funding, right?
I mean, less funding is another.
This is the problem of the Republicans.
And I don't mean the Republicans in power, who are just fascists.
I mean the Republicans, like, who are old school, right?
Who are like, a little bit of government, you know, law, courts, police system, maybe.
Maybe some privatization there.
Police, a little bit of military, blah blah blah.
I mean, the old-style Republicans who were sort of statist variants on the classical liberals, those people are like, less government is the solution.
And the problem is that, given that we have already established that the government cannot reform itself, less government is not going to work.
And even, of course, if we could get back to very much less government, like even to the constitutionally limited prescription for the size or the degree of power the federal government is supposed to have, which would be tiny government relative to now, like 0.5% of the government that we have now,
Well, don't you know, it's all going to start all over again, and within 80 years, two to three generations, it'll all be right back to where it is now, so you kind of want to just, you know, let's not put this thing into remission, let's put it out of its misery, right?
The state.
So, even if people are those kinds of like, it would be great if we had a constitutionally limited government, and it would be great if we could get back to what the founding fathers intended, and so on, Well, even if that were possible, which it isn't, right?
You can't sort of say less violence because you've still already conceded that violence works, right?
You just want to tweak it, which you can't do, right?
That's like Mickey Mouse and the brooms in the Sorcerer's Apprentice, right?
You're just like, hey, I'll just use a little violence and immediately it spirals completely out of control and consumes you and eventually the whole society in a flaming wrath.
So these people aren't going to help, right?
You don't say less slavery.
You don't say less slavery.
Slavery is either right or it's wrong.
Slavery is right or it's wrong.
You don't say less slavery.
If something is ethical, you don't say less of it.
And even if you do say less of it, like sometimes you should lie to save people's feelings or whatever, you don't say that's moral.
It's definitely a compromise.
But for sure, you don't want to get into the situation where you are agreeing with someone that less violence, right?
That's not progress, right?
If you get into an argument with someone when they say, we want less government, then, you know, my humble opinion is that you're doing a complete disservice to the freedom movement, the real freedom movement, which is like completely anti-violence, by saying, yeah, okay, violence is good, but we have too much of it.
That's not the way it works, right?
That's not the way that reality or philosophy or truth or logic or morality works.
I mean, this is not how things are.
So if you allow any kind of justification for the initiation of the use of force, then you've lost the argument.
Don't bother.
Don't ask.
Don't try.
Don't combat.
Because you're gonna end up just basically Undermining the whole moral clarity and reality of the issue, which is that violence is always wrong.
The initiation of violence is always evil, and so therefore the state can't exist.
And don't compromise with that, because then, as I've mentioned before, why bother?
Why bother getting into fights with people if you're just talking about the length of the knife that you should be stabbing people with?
I mean, that's really not an honorable pursuit, in my opinion.
Like some guy saying, we should shoot him in the head, and you're saying, no, we should just shoot his toe off.
You know, that to me is not swinging things around to the good side of the fence.
That's not to me making a stand for goodness and freedom and moral improvements in the species.
That's just, yeah, okay, we shouldn't aim at the heart, we should aim at some extremity that they can live with if they get blown away.
If it gets blown away, they can still live.
That's not, to me, that's not, you know, the ship's still gonna sink, it's just gonna sink a little slower.
We don't actually want a ship that doesn't sink.
Don't get involved in that kind of stuff at all.
I know it's very tempting.
Oh, I know, I know, I feel it too.
It's like, okay, well, I'll make this little concession and at least I'll be closer to the anarchist position or at least I'll be closer to a moral position.
No, they won't be.
They absolutely won't be any closer to a moral position if you compromise on the initiation of force issue.
No way, shape, or form.
All you've done is justified violence.
Now you're just talking about degrees.
Yes, we should kill some Jews, but you know, six million is just excessive.
I mean, that is not a moral argument.
And you're not going to win that anyway, right?
As soon as you say, yes, we should kill some Jews, then, you know, the whole apparatus is going to get away with you, and you'll be lucky if it's only six million.
And then you'll have to look yourself in the mirror and say, yeah, I kind of helped build that machine.
I kind of helped put that human sausage maker in place, and I kind of got it some... I gave it a lube job, and I filled it up with fuel, and then I said, well, don't run this thing too hard, and then, lo and behold, I got led away, put in a dungeon, and they ran it as hard as they could, and killed everybody.
So, I'm sorry to put it this boldly, but... I don't have much choice.
But the fact of the matter is, you simply can't compromise on this issue.
I mean, you can, but, you know, what's the point, you know?
Look at yourself in the mirror and tell me that you'd be proud of that, right?
Shoot less, kill less, use less violence, stab less deeply.
If you feel that that's how you want to spend your time in the world, as far as contributing to the goodness of the world, then you and I, my friend, have a slightly different definition of what constitutes moral behavior and moral arguments.
And if I'm wrong, by all means let me know, because I would love to have those kind of compromising arguments, except that my Socratic demon won't let me.
Except that I just can't see my way clear to saying to people, yes, I think that we should punch, but it only should be to loosen the tooth, not to break the jaw.
I just can't see how that's a moral argument.
Please help me out of my prison if I'm in error and let me know.
So this is the general stuff that I wanted to talk about when it comes to arguments.
You know, you've got to lay this stuff, like you're building a house, right?
You get your plans, you got your foundations, you got your brick by brick, you got everything that you need to do.
You sort of conceptualize it all ahead of time, all that kind of good stuff.
And that's pretty important to do.
When you take on a moral argument, it's a It's a pretty significant thing.
It's a pretty powerful thing to do.
I don't want to over-stress you or anything.
But you're kind of only really going to get one shot.
You're kind of only really going to get one shot.
And as I sort of mentioned on the board, somebody was saying that he sent a letter to his brother and sister-in-law because they were very keen on having something like, oh, you should bring the flag back into public schools or whatever.
And so he started, you know, down this road of talking to them about the government's force and so on.
And I said, you know, I really applaud your courage, but I kind of want to warn you about something.
I've mentioned this before.
I'll mention it again.
That, you know, you really should be aware of the road you're going down.
You've got to know where you're going, so you have a choice, right?
You're going to go down this road, right?
You're going to stop, whatever.
I'll just use taxation as an example, but you're going to use, this is what's going to happen.
So you're going to say that taxation, you think it's immoral and you want out.
And they're going to say, no way, you can leave the country but you can't stop paying taxation.
And you're going to say, well you do realize that you're kind of advocating that I get shot.
Now I have no problem if you want to pay taxes, if you feel it's the right thing to do.
I don't.
I think it's the wrong thing to do.
I don't want to fund foreign wars.
I don't want to fund a corrupt welfare scheme.
I don't want to fund corrupt foreign policy.
I don't want to fund foreign aid that goes into the pockets of dictators.
Now, if they say, well, you have to pay it, you can work to change the system, or you leave the country, whatever, right?
You say, okay, well, you are telling me that I have to get shot if I don't agree with you.
Now, I'm not telling you that you have to get shot if you want to give money to these people.
By all means, do so.
So recognize only one of us is holding a gun here.
You're saying to me that I'm going to get shot if I don't agree with you.
And you know, that's sort of important to me, you know, as a free thinking and person who likes to have people around him say, who don't advocate his murder, that's kind of important.
And then you're going to sort of be staring across the table at someone who's sort of saying, yes, I would support that you get murdered.
You know, you should be killed, right?
That's, that's sort of what you're, I mean, this is the reality.
I mean, I'll make these things up.
This is just the way things are in the world, in fact, in reality.
Now, if you go down that road, then you end up with that situation where somebody's sitting across from the table at you, looking at you directly in the eye and say, yes, you should be shot.
Well, I gotta tell ya, you may be able to excuse this in your own mind, in some level, in some mad way, but in your heart of hearts, your relationship is over.
I mean, this man's become a stone enemy.
There's nothing I can do about it.
There's nothing you can do about it.
There's something he can do about it, but he obviously hasn't.
So this person has become a stone enemy.
I mean, how do you feel about somebody who says, I want to shoot you.
I want you to be shot.
If you don't agree with me, I think that you should be gunned down.
You know, or, you know, imprisoned for the rest of your life.
I mean, I don't know about you, but I don't really want people like that in my life.
I don't want people who've gotten murder towards me in their eyes in my life.
I mean, how could you conceivably want that?
How could you conceivably call yourself a moral human being and associate with those who want you killed?
Right?
So, you know, given that you've only got one chance with these people, I think it's pretty important to know what you're doing when you start to get into this.
So get a whiteboard, say to the person, I'm going to bore the pants off you for two hours straight, but it's really important to me, and I think it could really do a lot.
To enhance our relationship.
Don't say, sort of, save.
It may sound like a threat.
But, you know, you say to someone, don't do it over dinner with everyone talking.
And don't do it when you've got some place to go.
And don't do it when they're watching TV.
And don't do it when they've got to go pick up their kids.
Take them to lunch and say, I need you for a couple of hours.
And bring your salt and pepper shakers to explain stuff and build, you know, maybe list down the points you want to make.
Make a real chance.
Make a real effort in trying to get people to understand your opinion.
It's very important.
Because if you blow it, I mean, yeah, okay, you've harmed the freedom movement, blah blah blah, but you're not a slave to the freedom movement.
You don't even have to do this at all.
But if you're not going to do it, then don't do it, right?
I'm not saying you have to.
You're not a slave to freedom.
That would be a contradiction.
You don't have to do any of this.
But if you're going to do it, if you're going to start doing it, you're going to end up with the I-want-you-shot stuff.
I mean, or you're going to give up and hate yourself, right?
Either way, the relationship's toast, right?
So you want to save your relationship with the people who you want to save your relationship with, and you want to do that as intelligently as possible.
And the way to do that, of course, is to sit down and say, I need time from you.
I need you to explain where I'm coming from, so you don't think I'm a nut, so you don't think I'm a loony, so it makes sense to you, so that you understand the argument, so that you understand that we are entirely in agreement with 99% of this stuff, and, you know, all of that kind of stuff.
And then, you know, say, are you willing to have that conversation?
And if they're not, you know, then whatever.
You can do whatever you like.
It's going to be tough.
Maybe you have to avoid them for a while.
Who knows?
You're going to be uncomfortable.
You know, make sure you prepare for that conversation.
Not because you want to convert people.
I mean, that's all nice if you can do it.
If you want to illuminate and show them the truth, fantastic.
But don't end up in a situation where you've got nobody left in your life.
It's not necessarily the way to go.
So that would be sort of my suggestion.
There's lots of ways to make the argument fun and enjoyable and positive and productive and save your relationships, win people over to the truth, be a happy guy and do an incredible service to humanity at the same time.
But it's not like, it's like you're going into the ring with Mike Tyson there.
You got to prepare, you got to work up to it a little bit.
So I hope that these suggestions are helpful in that way.
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