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March 29, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:48
165 Intellectual Property Rights Part 2: Justice

How the media created its own problems with regards to property rights

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph.
I hope you're doing well.
It is 8.35 a.m.
on the 29th of March 2006.
So, I hope you're doing well.
This is part two of Intellectual Property Rights, and we're going to talk about the media, but we're not going to talk about the media in general.
That's something that is slated for soon.
It will be coming, but not this morning, other than to talk about some general principles or ideas around retribution.
This idea of retribution is very interesting.
The one biblical saying that I do sort of believe in is, those that live by the sword shall die by the sword.
And unfortunately, though, it's just one generation removed.
I mean, if those who lived by the sword died by the sword, then there would be no swords, right?
Because it would be like, if you smoke and you die in three minutes, then there'd be no smoking.
Right?
Well, there'd be very little smoking.
There'd be about as much smoking as the Russian roulette in the world.
But unfortunately, the effects of violence usually take a couple of generations to destroy the perpetrators.
And so the first generation or two make out like bandits when it comes to violence and then it tends to accumulate later on.
So let's have a look at at least one way of looking at how the media and intellectual property rights have used violence and how it is that violence is going to destroy them.
This is why you don't use violence.
You can't ever tell How it's going to get you.
You can't ever tell what the retribution or where the retribution is going to be.
This is why it's so important to really keep an eye on violence.
Don't get me wrong, in an anarchist society, in a DRO-based society, it's not like there will never be any tendencies towards growing another state.
Human nature is carcinogenic, as far as violence goes, to a small degree.
And there are some people to whom it is a very large degree.
So yes, there will be the invention of outside threats, and there will be the demand for this, that, and the other, and there will be a discomfort.
People have a discomfort of living with imperfection.
This comes out of our religious histories as a species and our religious indoctrinations as individuals.
When people have a problem with imperfection, they always want to use force or violence to snuff any kind of deviation, even if it's entirely natural and statistical.
And that also comes out of our parenting.
When you step one foot wrong, young man, that kind of stuff.
So to take a tiny example of this, if you look at thalidomide in the 1960s, there was about 130 children died because of thalidomide.
And so you had the creation of the FDA that's been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people since.
It's just that the hundreds of thousands of people who died are not vocal and also don't fit into the current framework of people's thinking about the state, or at least older people's.
Younger people's are much, much more able and willing to look at these kinds of issues.
But that's an example of the solution, right?
So hundreds of thousands of people die in order to put an agency in place that is supposed to save 140, 130 children who died.
So this is the kind of solution that you end up with when you put the state in place.
Now, the retribution aspect of it is very sad.
It's very sad, but it's very inevitable.
So, in terms of intellectual property rights, I do find it quite funny To hear the media talk about property rights.
Now.
Of all times.
Now.
Of all times.
And this is the hypocrisy that makes us secretly loathe the media.
Again, I don't want to get distracted because I have a lot of stuff to talk about in terms of the media.
But I will tell you what I think about the media and the history of the media and its relationship to the state.
And we'll top it off with just talking about why their appeal to property rights now have a little trouble getting really roused about it.
I get roused about a lot of moral topics, but the idea of media conglomerates talking about property rights, much though I love property rights, I do find it a little hard to get riled up in their defense, and I'll sort of tell you why.
So, as the airwaves start off, and in the 1920s the FCC imposes regulations on the airwaves and begins to sell them out to the highest bidder, or to the ones with the most political pull, or the ones who bribed the most, more likely.
And so the media end up with a monopoly that is granted from the government, which they have to renew year over year.
This is funny.
This is one of the root problems of something like licensing.
Licensing is a pure evil, whichever way you slice it.
But in the realm of the media, it's particularly bad.
Because basically what happens is the government sets up the FCC and says, OK, you can have a radio station, and you can have a radio station, but you'd better do it right.
You'd better not use any swear words.
You'd better not criticize us.
You'd better not do this.
You'd better not do that.
And in return, we'll give you a monopoly, and you'll pay us a license, and we'll fine you when we think you step out of line.
But, you know, it's a monopoly.
So the media didn't have any real problems with the government continuing to own that monopoly.
I mean, maybe they did, but they sure as heck didn't talk about it.
I don't remember an enormous flurry of media activity in the twenties and thirties talking about how the government had no rights to licensed property.
I mean, this basically is fascistic in nature.
It's fascistic for The government to allow private enterprises to nominally own resources, but to have those resources really, in fact, owned by the government.
I mean, if you have to apply for and pay for a license every year, then you're renting the media.
The government owns it, you just rent it.
And that's the fascistic model, right?
The communist model is the state owns everything, the fascistic model is The state allows the private industry's concerns to own resources nominally, but the state actually controls them.
And this is of course exactly the case with the media.
Now, I don't really remember the media talking and thumping and beating their chests a lot about property rights in this instance.
I think that they were more than happy to get this monopoly from the state Which allowed them to what?
Yes, absolutely.
Monopoly allows you to raise prices and monopolies only exist when the cost of enforcing that monopoly can be offloaded to the taxpayers.
So the taxpayers pay twice, right?
This is the insult.
I guess they pay three times.
The first thing they pay for is in terms of lower quality, because when you have a monopoly you have lower quality, which is why a lot of media sort of sucks.
So that's sort of number one.
Number two is they pay because the prices are higher and in this case it means that they pay with their time because of more commercials.
And in the third case they pay the police and the military and the bureaucrats through their taxes to enforce this regime which is forcing low-quality, high-priced, too-many-commercials media upon them.
And the price that everybody pays is that the media ends up being enslaved by the state.
I mean, this is completely predictable.
As soon as you have the licensing, as soon as you have the state control, then you end up with the media being controlled by the state.
And this is perfect.
I mean, the media really is nothing more.
Or less than a mouthpiece of propaganda for the state these days.
And it's not entirely the media's fault.
Just very briefly, there's two other major factors.
One is that people are raised in government schools and so basically they're already hammered with so much propaganda their brains can only take a few drops of truth mixed in with a vast acidic vat of propaganda.
And even then the truth is pretty optional.
And the other thing too is that people are very interested in the movements of the state because so much money is now tied up in the movements of the state.
And so if you don't have inside connections or an inside view on the state, then you're not going to be able to print the news relative to other outlets and so you're going to be harmed by that.
And so to get inside view into the state, you can't exactly call for anarchism, right?
You can't criticize the state as a whole.
If you need it, in some way or another, as a source of your information, which your readers demand, because the state is controlling so much, that if they're behind on info, they lose money.
So there's lots of reasons, but basically, you don't get a lot of criticism of the state from the media.
Now, you do get stuff like, oh, taxes should go up only 1% rather than 3%.
It'd be nice if we had a little reduction here.
Isn't it?
This flat tax thing is interesting, but it's unworkable.
You get this sort of Vague nibbling around the edges of state power, or mild attempts to slow the growth of state power.
But all that does, of course, is legitimate state power.
If you pour your entire career's energies into exhorting slave owners to treat their slaves better, then you are tacitly and implicitly accepting and morally condoning The institution of slavery.
So criticism is not criticism, right?
The more sophisticated dictatorships slash democracies of the modern West have figured out that mild criticism is approval.
Fundamental approval.
And what it does is it co-ops and integrates and, for our Star Trek fellow friends out there, it borgs the media.
By allowing criticism, so it sort of sucks in people who have problems with the government, gives them a little bit of criticism room, and then, you know, won't.
But I mean, if you really were to get big on talking about an overthrow of the government, you'd go to jail of sedition.
I mean, the same thing happened in World War I and throughout America.
It's happened here in Canada as well, that if you openly talk about overthrowing the state, Then you end up going to jail, because that's not really allowed.
That's hate speech, right?
It's hate speech, which, you know, is just wonderful.
Hating violence is, to me, love.
But hey, that's just me.
I won't exactly try and prove that here.
Now, the media has not done an enormous amount to control or slow down the rise of the government.
So if you look at the biggest problem that media has these days is the Internet.
Now, let me give you a direct causal chain, if you like.
And I'm not going to say this is provable, but it seems pretty credible to me.
You've got the FCC creating the media monopolies in the 1920s, 1930s.
The media generally throws itself behind the war effort in the Second World War, and then after the Second World War, throws itself to a large degree behind the Cold War.
And then you get this sort of annoying warning from Eisenhower about the military-industrial complex on his exit in the fifties.
It's annoying because he didn't do a damn thing about it while he was in power, but wanted to go down as some sort of elder statesman on his way out.
So that's great.
Thanks, dude.
Maybe you could have, instead of warning people who can't do anything about it, maybe you could have actually done something about it while you were in power.
No, no.
That wouldn't be allowed.
I guess he didn't want to go the way of JFK, right?
So, in the military-industrial complex, the media is completely warned about it.
They carry all the warnings about it.
Everybody saw it.
And, well, who did they end up focusing on?
They end up focusing on Senator Joseph McCarthy.
So there's this guy.
He's a drunk and he's a weirdo, but he's right.
There were hundreds of spies in the State Department, and Eastern Europe was partly lost because of spies at the end of the Second World War, and there were large amounts of communists in the media, and there were large amounts of communists.
The sad thing is, of course, that nobody ever says, wow, we're getting a lot of communists coming out of our school system.
Maybe we should privatize it.
It's never gonna happen.
What we need is more crackdowns and congressional inquiries.
Oh, that's funny.
But they don't talk about the military-industrial complex.
They don't throw their considerable weight and might against the military-industrial complex.
And so what happens?
Well, and you can't predict these things, right?
That's why you have to act on principle.
That's why the argument from effect doesn't work.
Who in the media would have conceivably said, we'd better oppose the military-industrial complex, otherwise in 20 or 30 years, Actually, 40 years, we're going to have a problem because a medium of communication is going to be developed by the military, that is going to be taken over by the private sector, and there's going to be compression algorithms that are going to crush down the size of our music files.
In fact, they wouldn't even know what a music file was back then.
And movie files, and it's going to cause massive amounts of piracy because people resent us in their hearts for failing to protect their freedoms.
I don't really think that would be part of anybody's business plan.
Or if it was, it would be like the loon in the mailroom who Sniff glue in the corner.
So you can't predict these things.
But this is what happens when you unleash the dogs of war.
When you let violence loose upon the land, it always comes back to bite you.
And pretty hard.
And so you can see, people who made a lot of money from the twenties and thirties onwards, because of their state-granted monopoly, and failed to oppose the war, and failed to oppose the military-industrial complex, and failed at this, failed to oppose increases in taxation, and always called for more government power, and blah blah blah.
And they weren't just catering to the masses.
The masses are a little bit more easily swayed.
And by swayed, I mean that they're not as fixed in their opinions as intellectuals.
I've had lots of conversations with people who are not educated at university, and I gotta tell you, they're a lot more open to new ideas than people who've been absolutely stuffed to the gills with propaganda.
And of course, Once you become an intellectual, your major hope of income is from the state in one form or another.
Through education, think tanks, through consulting to the government, through being in the government.
There's just so many opportunities for intellectuals in the government that this is where they know their bread is buttered on.
And so they're not going to criticize the state.
And they're firmly and fixedly not going to criticize the state.
Because they want the money of the state, and as intellectuals, they can't take the hypocrisy of their own hideous, more sort of moral hideousness.
And by that, I don't mean everybody who works in this state.
I mean, there's lots of people who've written to me who've said, I work for the government, or I'm a teacher, and so on.
I don't mind that at all.
I mean, not that my opinion should matter to you as far as this goes.
It's your own conscience you have to deal with.
But logically, it's better you in there educating children than some crazy socialist or fascistic-style teacher, so...
So, it's absolutely better you go in and rescue people.
Right?
I mean, you go and rescue people.
If the government pushes people who can't swim off a pier, you don't not dive in to save them because you say, well, the government did it and so on and so, right?
So go in and help people.
And if you work for the government, that's fine.
But just recognize that what it is that you're doing is being paid through blood money.
As I recognize myself, the deals I close with state agencies get me blood money.
Non-participation is not an option.
The government runs 40 or 50 percent of the economy.
And you can't separate where the money's coming from.
So that kind of consistency is what Emerson called the hobgoblin of little minds.
And I don't mean that you have a little mind, because you're listening here.
But what it means is that looking for that level of consistency is immaterial and it's going to waste your time.
What you do want is to take the resources that you have and you can bring to bear on the solution, learn as much as you can and speak out as passionately as you can where appropriate about freedom and that magically turns the money from blood money back into good money, in my humble opinion.
The fact that I'm using my company Notebook, which is paid for by, to some degree, state financing and state contracts, to broadcast freedom?
Eh, I think that's kind of nice.
I think the LP should have taken the federal money.
I think that they could make a very powerful case for that.
And I think it could actually be a restitution argument, a property rights argument, but that's just me.
That's one of the reasons I'm not in politics, is that that's the level of freedom that they have to deal with, and I want to go Just a little bit further, with you, my brothers and sisters, as stout and staunch companions.
Then, because the media did not oppose the military-industrial complex, and the increases in taxation and so on, and it took them a hell of a long time to start opposing the Vietnam War, Then you end up with the Internet.
I mean, it's a direct line of causality.
Not that the media could have absolutely guaranteed that there would be no military-industrial complex and so on, but this is what happens.
This is the domino effect of past failures of integrity.
Once you have World War One, which the media slavishly promoted, I mean, this was one of the first great exercises in modern propaganda in the West, was the amount of energy and moral filth and lies that the intellectuals of the West, particularly in America, poured into the cause of World War One was just savage.
And it's exactly what you'd expect from people who've come out of the first generation to come out of public schools, that they are going to be sort of hateful moral monstrosities out there dripping poison into the ears of the good people and serving the sort of sword-armed tentacles of the state with great fervor.
So it seems to me that you start off with that, and for World War I, you get the increase in state power, you get the FCC, you get World War II, direct causality from World War I, as I've talked before.
From WWII, from the failures of the West, particularly FDR and Churchill, and particularly FDR, who had the bomb to push Stalin back, you get the Cold War.
From the Cold War, you get the military-industrial complex, because of the fear of nuclear war, which occurs because of WWI and WWII.
You end up with a need for the Internet, which was originally developed so that you'd have a decentralized methodology of communication that could survive a nuclear strike.
So you had no single hub, right?
So everyone could talk to everyone.
There's no economic drive for that in the free market, but it works for the military, which is expecting a nuclear bomb.
So there's a number of causal mistakes and lack of integrity, moral corruptions, evil, and so on, that ends up with the creation of the Internet.
Now, even the creation of the Internet could have been survivable.
If the media had turned against the state and against the war, then it could have been that the Internet would have languished as a non-commercialized medium, as a non-spread-out medium.
But once, you know, you get the introduction of modems and the World Wide Web and TCP IP gets developed and so on, then, you know, you're kind of toast, right?
Because then you've got an everyone talks to everyone, which everyone is now connected to, and it's just going to be a matter of time until the economic landscape changes to the point where the media companies end up with all of these problems.
So, to me, it just seems kind of funny.
Now, it's a little bit sad because the people who are, I guess, middle managers and below in media companies haven't been around long enough to do anything in regards to dealing with the growth of state power and this, that and the other.
But there is a big problem now, and it's hard for me to really understand the media's principled role.
Like, I can understand their self-interest role.
Like, I can understand, let's use the state to bash the people who are sharing our files.
And that's harming our profits.
And we like the state.
We're in approval of the state.
And so let's just use the power of the state to smash people who are abusing our intellectual property.
Hey, I got no problem with that.
That's an honest statement of brute and pragmatic utilitarianism.
Hey, it's cheaper to get the state to go and beat up on grannies out in Pasadena And it's more expensive for us to hire our own goons, so let's offload the money to the taxpayer and get the state to brutalize these people.
I got no problem with that.
You know, that's open, that's honest, I don't think it's moral, but you've got to respect the integrity to evil that that would represent.
But of course that's not what they do, right?
They use the argument for morality.
They talk about, oh, they're these people and they're in cars and they're blowing up and you're stealing their stuff and it's theft and it's piracy and it's bad and it's evil and respect property rights.
Dudes, where the hell were you when my taxes went to 50 or 60 percent?
Oh my God, please, please do not start talking to me about property rights now.
Oh my God, I'm gonna share and steal everything.
If you continue to talk about property rights, my respect for property rights is gonna be seriously diminished in regards to you.
Because I didn't really notice the media doing a whole lot to protect my property rights.
I just think that's too funny.
They had the ear of the government.
They had the ear of millions of people and the eyes of millions of people.
I really don't remember them doing a whole lot to protect my property rights in the past.
And now they're wielding property rights as a moral absolute?
Oh my God, you can't be serious!
I mean, it's just the funniest thing in the world.
Now we are very interested in property rights because it's harming us.
But we are rich and we don't really pay taxes.
So as your wages have been languishing for the past, declining for the past 25 years, As jobs are being shipped offshore because of the growth of government power, if your taxes have gone through the roof, as your mothers have had to leave their babies at home and go to work as, you know, well, we're fine.
We're in bed.
Our reporters with the troops, and we'll be all over government, praising it and licking its boots.
Oh yeah, we're fine with all of that, because it doesn't really harm our interests.
It's just you that's getting screwed.
You, the poor voiceless peon at the bottom or the middle of the social heap.
You, who has no voice and who cannot influence government and who has no access to media because if you come up with any of these ideas we will grant you no access to media.
Well, they were kind of keen to hold this down while the state buggered us and now they want to talk about moral principles and property rights?
Oh my God, it's too funny for words!
I mean, this is the kind of retribution that happens.
Human beings are essentially moral and good people.
And those who do right by us, we do right by.
But everybody knows that the media has become a base and cancerous state whore who is perfectly content to get the considerable meat thrown off the table as the state feasts on our innards and to hold us down while the state buggers are senseless.
And now...
They want our moral cooperation in protecting their property?
Oh my god!
Oh my god!
Can you imagine?
Okay, we're really sorry.
Well, they won't even say that.
They just blank out.
They don't even talk about it.
All right, we've sold you out to the state, we've done absolutely nothing to protect your property and your rights and your human rights, and we've just completely sold you out to these fascistic overlords.
But now, if you could really be nice and morally respect our property, that's great!
And they don't even talk about it like that, though, would you?
It's, you better, you better respect our property rights, you better do right by us morally.
It's like, dudes, what have you done to earn it?
What have you done to earn my moral allegiance?
You pump out all of this state-fetishistic crap, and personally for myself, just speaking personally, I've been writing both books and articles and manifestos and everything that you can think of.
This sort of fount of knowledge that is in these podcasts, for whatever it's worth, does not spring out of nowhere.
I've been doing this for over twenty years.
I didn't come up with all of these opinions because I happen to have a microphone.
These are all perfectly well thought out and formed opinions over twenty years, and I've had zero access to media.
I have a review of one of my novels that would make you weep.
It's so beautiful.
You can have a look at it on my website, which you can look at.
It's on my personal fiction website.
You can get to it from freedomainradio.com.
I've got short stories there I think are absolutely beautiful.
I've got a novel which talks, you know, it's a three-volume novel that talks about a British family and a German family from World War I to World War II.
Revolutions, which is a very early work, which I wrote when I was about 24, got published independently with no media coverage, and although I strained and tried, I couldn't get a thing.
So, you know, for me, it's like, well, what allegiance do I have with you guys?
I mean, what allegiance do I conceivably have with you guys?
I mean, it just wouldn't make any sense for me to have a strong respect for their moral absolutes now.
Now, I would absolutely respect the property rights of the media companies, and all they would have to do is do one thing.
Just do one thing.
One little thing, and all would be forgiven.
All would be forgiven.
All they'd have to do is look up and say, Hey, you know what?
Now that we're down here on the floor with you getting buggered by the state, I think that we might have made a mistake in talking about how wonderful the state is.
I think that we might not have done as much as we could to protect your property rights.
Now, it's not the media's job to protect our property rights.
I fully understand that.
I'm not giving them any kind of altruistic absolute that they have to do.
It's just that we all kind of sink or swim together, and they never quite figured out that by protecting our property rights, they would actually be protecting their property rights in the long run, but they didn't really want to take that moral stand.
So if they turn to us, as we're both down here on the floor, with the state hovering over us if they turn to us and said oh my brothers and sisters what a mistake we have made we are so so sorry that we did nothing to protect your property rights that we didn't do enough to oppose the military industrial complex and the destruction of your property rights that has occurred at the result of taxation over the past hundred years and we didn't you know we didn't oppose the FCC and we didn't oppose the licensing of the airwaves and blah blah blah blah blah
Then I would say, hey, let's get up, let's both battle the state and all is forgiven.
Absolutely.
But of course the media doesn't do that.
The media...
The media nags and bullies us, morally, using the argument for morality.
That's what the media does.
That's what their basic modus operandi is.
It's basically to call us bad people for not protecting property rights.
Well, it's a sword that cuts both ways, my friend.
As in Lord of the Flies, a spear is a stick sharpened at both ends.
That's a wonderful metaphor when you think about it.
You plunge it into someone, it goes straight through you as well.
And so, if people are bad and should be prosecuted for failing to respect property rights, well, I gotta tell ya, I don't really see that much that the media has to stand on.
In fact, I could see some of them ending up in court as well.
So, I think that from that standpoint, this kind of large-scale retribution is what occurs in history quite regularly.
It's a little hard to see, because we get so much propaganda to the opposite.
But once you do see it, to me it's blindingly clear.
I mean, that could just be me.
So, for instance, you know, as I talked about in Why We Forgive Socialism, the Jewish culture did not morally attack communism, because they knew, and they associated themselves with Judaistic philosophies.
And so the massive genocide of the Christians that occurred in Russia under the first rule of Lenin, communism, went unremarked and unreported upon.
And so what happens is that Hitler then says, oh, okay, so there's this genocide going on over there, which is Jewish to Christian, at least that was his perception.
And I don't see a whole lot of violent opposition to it, so I guess I'm going to have to go it alone and try and protect Germany.
I mean, not that he wasn't a crazy evil loon, but this was sort of his thinking.
And so you end up with the genocide of the Jews.
Now, of course, the Jews who got killed weren't the Jews who were glossing over the evils of communism and praising it to the skies.
But this is what's so unfortunate and what's so unfair about it.
I mean, there's nothing you can do about it, because evil is a rot that takes time to manifest.
But this kind of stuff goes on all the time.
It goes on all the time.
And so, wherever you sell your soul to the state, in one form or another, either you or your descendants are going to pay the price.
Because it always comes back to bite you.
It always comes back to bite you, and in fact, often it comes back to swallow you whole, and destroy you completely.
So, that particular issue, I think, is pretty significant.
And this is why people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, to the media.
And this is something that I've sort of often felt, that the way that we look at the Weimar Republic, if you've ever looked at it, where in sort of the twenties in Germany, you had these, you know, topless cabarets and transvestite impersonators and, you know, all of this really, I guess you could say, decadent art.
And it seemed to me, sort of, Looking back, and I did a fair amount of research for this, for my trilogy on Europe, it does seem kind of odd when you look back on it, because from the hindsight of history, you can see the storm gathering, right?
You can see the forces of Nazism and Communism gathering, and one of them was bound to win.
And so, to me, of course, it does look a lot like Fiddling While Rome Burns, and it looks a lot like, don't you people see what is coming, and you're spending all your time and energy putting on these stupid decadent shows that don't mean anything, and you're publishing all of these silly stories about nothing, and nobody's sort of getting up and saying, um, incoming!
Run!
Fight!
Do something!
And the same thing, of course, is going to be true when people look back upon our era.
And they will look at movies, something like, you know, The Dukes of Hazzard, or, you know, the immense amount of, I don't know, a hundred million dollars being put into the third remake of King Kong, or, you know, they'll look back on something like, I don't know, remaking Miami Vice, right?
A hundred million dollars and the labor of thousands of people for years, and they'll look back on all this stuff and it's like, Hello?
You're at war.
The government's taking a few remaining rights.
What are you people doing?
Well, of course, what they're doing is they're distracting people.
I mean, the reason that people are drawn to these projects is because they know in their heart of hearts that the situation is absolutely terrible and they want to ignore it.
They want other people to ignore it.
They want to pretend that it doesn't exist.
They want to work very hard to pretend that it doesn't exist.
And everything, everything that is going on in society right now, I guarantee you this, I can't prove it, and so please don't accept my guarantee, but this is what I really believe.
Everything, everything that is going on in society right now is entirely related to the power of the state.
It is either directly praising the power of the state, it is either confirming of the power of the state by a mild kind of criticism, or it is outwardly distracting people from the power of the state.
With the minor exception of V for Vendetta, which I saw on the weekend and I'll talk about another time.
Just about everything that is going on in society has to do with the power of the state.
Why are our debts so high?
Well, because the taxation has taken everybody's money and so the only way that people can maintain their lifestyles is by going into debt.
And also because it would seem very funny and silly to be fiscally completely responsible When the government is obviously grabbing everything from the treasure chest anyway, so it would be kind of silly to be completely responsible while it's like there's a tomb that's being raided by everyone, everyone's grabbing the ingots, and you're like, well no, I'm going to establish property rights before I take anything.
It's like, grab!
Run!
It's a state of nature!
You don't appeal to morality in that situation!
I mean, I do, right?
But I'm appealing to abstract morality.
I mean, I'm taking money from the state through my paycheck and through the stuff that's going on in the contracts that I'm dealing with, so that's fine.
But I'm not doing it and saying that it's morally right and it's absolutely justified and blah blah blah.
I'm just saying this is the state of nature.
I prefer to have access to people through having an income and I think that's better serving freedom than going to live in the woods.
I mean, the last thing that I'll say, and it's sort of a little bit related to what I was talking about earlier, I was chatting with a friend of mine through IM yesterday, and I was saying that, you know, we hit our first 2,000 show download in one day.
And I was very excited and very thrilled, and I think that's great, because we've only been running a little over four months, a little under four months, I think.
And so I thought that was great, and I was very happy, and so I was chatting with him on IM, and I was saying, it's so funny that after 20 years of writing, that it turns out that it's nothing to do with writing.
You know, I thought that was kind of funny.
And he said, and I thought it was smart, he's a very smart fellow, and he said, well, don't think of it that way, because I don't think that's accurate.
And I'm like, don't you tell me what to think!
I love it when people tell me what to think.
It's so much easier.
But he said, no, don't think of it that way.
That's not accurate at all.
What you do want to recognize is that this is what happens when you get to talk to people directly without having to go through people in the media, right?
They're in book publishing or radio or this sort of media that way.
When you get to talk directly to the people without having to go through all of this sort of media conglomerates and so on, this is the effect that you can have.
And I think that's quite true.
And it's something that hadn't occurred to me, because of course, you know, I'm a very responsible guy, I'm very... my locus of control is in my spine, and so I'm always thinking, well, what can I do?
How can I improve things?
It's got to be something to do with me.
But the fact that I've never even had a short story published in any kind of paid sense, and, you know, I'm hoping that the sales of my novel are going to pick up as a result of this.
Revolutions, it's available on my website, I think it's a damn fine read.
So, for me, being able to talk to you directly, without having to go past anybody else, is sort of how the media will come down, right?
The existing media will come down, and to me, that is sort of the final injustice that the media is going to face.
It's absolutely justice in the objective sense that they're going to perceive it as injustice, which is that the Internet, which is how you're hearing me, and things like XML and RSS and so on, The media which allows you to get some kind of truth that isn't a slave to state power is what is also going to bring down existing and traditional media.
And so the internet is not only cutting into their profits in the short run with mp3s and videos and so on, but it's also going to cut into their profits in the long run because the middlemen that I've been talking about earlier I don't exist generally in the media now, right?
I mean, I consume far more media from the internet than I ever do.
I can't think of the last time I've ever watched a news show.
I think the only media that I consume with any regularity... I watch a couple of Dr. Phil's a week, with Christina, and a House episode once in a while, stuff like that.
But I don't go to movies, and I get most of my media from the Internet.
And that is very interesting to me, because it cuts out the middleman.
So the middleman as a whole is going to be cut out, and this is the result that they face by not opposing the sort of growth of the power of the state, is that you end up with the Internet, which destroys their capacity to make money as the middleman.
It takes the monopoly away of distribution, which is obviously good for me, and if you've come to podcast 8 million here, Good for you.
And of course, I would like to welcome all the new listeners, but I'm not sure it's gonna make much sense because it's gonna take them a while to get here.
But if you do get here in a month or two, welcome and thanks for downloading everything.
I'll talk to you soon.
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