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May 17, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
51:53
241 The State, Violence And Crime
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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
So it's the 17th.
I know it's not going to be a through-sung podcast, although don't doubt that the idea has occurred to me.
But it is the 17th of May 2006.
It's 6 o'clock, working a little bit late, nothing too major.
I'm doing some coding, which I haven't done for about a year and a half.
I'm building a little product to sell to our clients to validate their data.
And I'm using Visual Studio 2005, learning the intricacies of Visual Basic.net.
Most enjoyable. Oh, it's very enjoyable.
I'm glad I don't have to learn a whole new language, like C-sharp, but I am very always happy to look at new stuff that you can do in a programming environment.
This thing's really cool, that you can bind form objects to business model objects is really, really neat, not to say the least.
And, of course, if you are coding in this area, might I recommend a tool called IdeaBlade, which is a very interesting Calm development tool, which is worth having a look at if you're doing database-style programming in a rich client environment.
So that's my plug for them.
They've got some very cool tools, which we'll probably be using when we start the next-gen upgrade in August.
So, I'm going to take a page from the boards and respond to a user's request that I do a podcast entirely about myself.
No, I'm kidding. That I do a podcast entirely around this idea that a government is required for civilization.
That man in a state of nature, according to Hobbes' famous phrase, is sort of nasty, brutish, and short.
So, without a centralized state, everybody's mean, vicious, ugly, and so on.
Now, I've taken a lot of different approaches to this, so I'm going to take a slightly different approach now.
The other approaches that I've taken, of course, is that violence is only profitable if you can offload the costs and risks of violence to other people.
And the basic function of the state is to offload the costs and risks of violence to those you're stealing from.
So, If you're a manufacturer who wants other manufacturers' goods banned from your marketplace, you have to pay the state to do it, or you can only get it to be done profitably if you pay the state to do it, or rather bribe the politicians to strip the money from the taxpayers in order to diminish the taxpayers' choice in goods and services, which is a long way of saying that violence and crime does not pay unless you have a state, in which case crime pays enormously.
There's a famous story that Noam Chomsky has used for a recent book, It's called Pirates and Emperors, I think the name of the book is, but basically it is that there's this pirate who is, I think it was Alexander the Great, he is a pirate, a single pirate ship that was rolling around the Mediterranean, hijacking ships and robbing from them and so on.
Oh, there it is again, and so on.
I will work to wrestle it back.
And Chomsky uses the metaphor because the pirate is finally caught, dragged before Alexander the Great, and Alexander says, what the hell do you think you're doing being a pirate?
And he's like, well...
I just wish I was as successful a pirate as you so that I could have a whole navy rather than a single ship.
So I thought that was very interesting.
Thieves and emperors are the same thing.
Criminals and rulers are the same thing.
So the idea that somehow you're going to reduce violence by...
Offloading the costs of violence to the taxpayers is rather lunatic to me.
So I haven't really had much luck understanding this argument.
What I will say, though, which is when people who aren't so bright look at the problem of violence, they confuse compliance with peace.
They confuse it.
They confuse acquiescence or submission to force as an absence of force.
This, of course, is because of their own parenting, the parenting that they went through, and possibly, of course, the parenting that they're brutally inflicting on their own children.
But, of course, compliance with violence is not pacifism, is not peace.
To take a page from the podcast this morning, a woman who submits to your rape is not making love to you.
Just because you have the knife to her throat and she submits without fighting back, it is not the same as lovemaking.
So people who look at the fact that compliance occurs in the face of overwhelming force, idiots then will look at that and say, well, look, it looks a lot more peaceful.
Look, nobody's fighting back.
Look, it's peace. And so, I think that that is...
The first thing that you need to establish is that principle with people, which is to say that, is it peace if overwhelming force is applied and acquiescence occurs?
In other words, it was slavery, slavery is rape, rape, right?
If the application of force, which results in acquiescence or compliance, eradicates the fact that force is applied, then there's no such thing as slavery.
There never was. Because...
The slaves were there because if they left, they'd be hunted down and had their kneecaps broken and so on, and their families would be eradicated.
And then they'd be dragged back with severe punishments, they'd be whipped.
So the fact that slaves sort of sat there drinking their grog and singing songs and didn't fight back and didn't overwhelm their masters and didn't run away, does that mean that there's no force occurring?
Well, of course not. So, that is sort of the first thing to establish with people who think that in the absence of a state, everything will be brutal.
Now, the other question that I always have with these kinds of people is, well, who are we talking about here?
Who are we talking about?
It always seems to be, frankly, rich white kids...
From the suburbs. Pampered rich white kids in university always feel that there's this seething mass of violent people out there who, without the staunch armed might of the state, will overwhelm the whitey-whitey population and just smother us to death and bring us down and there will be slaughter and the women will be raped and there will be burnings of houses and so on.
I'd just love to see these people.
I really would. I really would love to see these people that they talk about because I really have never seen them in my life.
I grew up in a very bad neighborhood.
And yes, there were a couple of bullies.
And you know what? The state was completely useless with them.
I think I was only really ever bullied in one, I think one significant way.
I'm thinking, yeah, maybe two.
Well, the first was that a friend of mine and I, when I was 12 or 13, we used to go down into the local ravines, and we'd sort of go for hikes, and occasionally we'd build a fire and cook some food.
You know, it was all very primitive and very enjoyable.
We both had households that we wished to partake of as little as humanly possible, and so we had no money.
And so going to the woods and having a little camp out was kind of funsy, so that's what we did.
Well, one day we were hiking down there and some older kids...
We passed by these two older kids who were like 16 or 17 and, you know, the age disparity is pretty significant at that phase in life.
They were like twice our size.
And they told us to stop.
They made us build them a fire.
And they kind of made us hang around and terrorized us to a small degree.
I mean, nothing major. They called my friend names.
And he was a bit of a chunky kid and a bit of a short kid.
And I was not a big kid by any stretch.
I didn't really sort of fill out until I was 15 or 16 and began lifting weights.
But... At one point, and the only violence that occurred to me was, at one point, I said to them, these two huge guys, these men, really, basically, were picking on this 12- or 13-year-old kid.
They were picking more on him because he was overweight than myself.
And I turned and said, why don't you pick on someone your own size?
Because I was really disgusted at this point by what was occurring.
And so he turned around and he punched me in the stomach.
It didn't really hurt that badly, but of course I made a big show of, oh, you know, because I didn't want him to feel like, oh, that didn't hurt, did you?
Let me punch you more. And after an hour or so, they let us go and we kept moving and all that.
And, of course, as they left, they said, if you go to the cops, we'll beat you up.
If you talk to the cops about this, we'll beat you up.
And so I didn't talk to the cops.
And I think the only other time that Indra, on the Monday morning, one of the guys walked past me in the hallway, or no, was sitting in the cafeteria, and he sat down a couple of tables over and he said, Hey, how was your weekend?
That kind of stuff, you know?
I mean, it was a little scary, but nothing particularly traumatic or horrendous.
And one other time...
I was playing Defender, the arcade game.
I was sort of the same age.
And a guy unplugged my machine because I was doing well and he wanted to play.
So he unplugged it and plugged it back in.
So I called him an effing asshole.
I don't think I even pushed him.
I think I just railed against him verbally because that's the kind of pugilistic fellow that I am.
And he had this pretty vicious-looking older brother who heard about this and sort of would pass me in the hallway, and he once punched me in the sort of shoulder and said, You're dead, man!
You're dead! You yelled at my brother or something like that.
And, of course, all I wanted was a brother who would even be one-tenth of 100% as loyal to me, but nothing ever came of it.
And the funny thing was is that about four or five years later, I ran across him at the mall, and we chatted fairly amiably, and he didn't seem to be any...
He didn't seem to remember me or this incident at all, but that was scary.
For about a week or so, I thought I was going to get beaten up.
But, of course, it never happened, and I've never been involved in any kind of fistfight.
And this was a pretty rough section of town.
Well, of course, you don't get involved in the kinds of situations which end up with violence.
You just don't do it. I mean, you know.
If you've got any kind of antennae out there at all and any kind of desire to avoid violence, it's really not that hard to do.
And, of course, now I move away.
I live in a great neighborhood and have no issues with violence in any way, shape, or form.
So, this whole seething tide of humanity that is going to, if without a state, is going to take us all over and so on, it doesn't make any sense.
The only time that I've ever seen bullying or violence occur is when there is an immense power disparity.
And that's fairly important to understand.
The power disparity breeds the violence.
People who use violence do not want you to fight back.
They do not want you to have access to weapons.
They do not want you to have the capacity to turn back anything on them.
It's always, always, always the power disparity that creates violence.
If you look at violence against children, the most common form of violence in society by far, and generally by women, is violence against children.
This is the real brutal clan within society as mothers, and of course fathers to some degree, but in my experience it's primarily mothers.
Mothers are the primary caregivers, and whenever there's a single family, it's the mothers who have custody, pretty much.
So when it comes to the greatest We're good to go.
And it's going to take time, and it's going to take a lot of us doing it, but what is going to happen over time is that people are going to finally figure out, parents are going to finally figure out, hey, if I mistreat my kids, I can't rely on them being around when I get older.
That is the single sole message we want to get across to parents.
If I mistreat my children, they will not be around when I get older.
It is a fundamental argument around ethics that very few people are innately ethical and most people will take their ethics from their surroundings based on a cost-benefit analysis of their life.
And at the moment, parents get to treat children however the hell they want and then parents can always rely on those children to stick around with them when they get older and to come over and to wipe their butts and do all the nice things that we're supposed to do towards people who've loved us wonderfully and they don't have to love us wonderfully.
Not at all. And so the greatest good that we can do is to say to our parents, either you behave better or I'm out of here, and then follow through.
This is the most fundamental way that we can affect the moral nature of mankind is based on our relationships with our families.
As I said before a number of times, we cannot change the state.
But we can change those around us who are corrupt, to refuse to sanction them.
To live free and to live in solitary freedom, if that is what is required.
I know that bridge, which I had to cross.
I mean, I did all of this breaking with the family long before I got married.
And we have to get corrupt people out of our lives.
We have to quit supporting those who are corrupt.
That's the greatest thing that we can do in order to try and make the world a better place.
It is absolutely within our power and the most powerful thing.
As soon as word gets around in the parenting clan that if you treat your children badly, they'll...
Happily walk off when they get older, then there's a slow change that we will begin to bear on other parent-child relationships.
It will happen if we talk about it openly and write about it openly, our experiences, then we will begin to send a sort of shot across the bowels of this brutal tyranny we call parenting these days, and I think that will be the best thing that we can do for goodness.
So, in a parent-child relationship, you have an enormous power disparity which results in, yes, brutality towards the children.
Absolutely inevitable. When it comes to societies where you have strong patriarchies, so when you look at the Muslim societies where The man can sort of say this word three times and divorce his wife and retain all the property, retain custody of the children, and the wife is going to be an outcast, and she might get stoned to death.
Well, then you have a situation where, yes, lo and behold, the fathers are brutally dominant on the wives, and the wives, in turn, are brutally dominant upon the children.
So there you have a system with extraordinary disparities of power.
And of course, both of these are completely state-supported.
Both of these situations are completely state-supported.
And you have to, if you're going to start talking about violence in the state, and I don't mean you people, I mean all these other idiots out there who just mouth these stupid platitudes written by People like Hobbes, for Christ's sake.
I mean, you might want to take advice from a lot of people before you start taking advice from Hobbes, who is a blatant, state-sucking, parasitical, power-praising, vicious leech brain.
This is like reading Mein Kampf and saying, ah, here's some good, you know, genteel Jew relationship advice.
Anyway, so the power of parents in the modern world is entirely enforced by the state.
So, as Christina once pointed out to me, I think it was last week we were talking about this, and she said, well, when you have domestic abuse occurring from a husband-wife situation, The cops have to press charges, regardless of whether the spouse who's being abused, and usually the wife, whether she wants to or not, the cops have to press charges.
There's a zero tolerance policy.
Now, in her entire time of dealing with psychology and dealing with hospital patients who are brought in because of violence and dysfunction, in her whole study of child psychology in graduate school, She's never once heard of charges being laid against a parent because a child has been wounded or attacked by a parent.
Never has happened. Maybe it happens where you are.
It has never happened in Canada.
And I think Canada is pretty sensitive to this kind of stuff.
What does happen is it might get reported to Children's Aid who sit on the file and then get into a lot of sort of flummoxy kind of crap if the kid dies and make a lot of apologies.
And as I mentioned recently, That guy's gone.
The new guy's here and things will change.
And then the next kid dies.
Ah, that guy's gone. The new guy's here and things will change.
So the power of parents is absolutely reinforced by the state because the state in no way intervenes to protect children.
In no way, shape, or form does the state even remotely intervene to protect children.
As someone posted on the boards recently, this girl was thrown in jail because she was molested and the government wanted to protect her, throw her in jail.
Where God knows she's never going to get molested.
So, the children are completely helpless in the modern state society.
It's one of the reasons why I recently wrote an article, I guess about two months ago, on how the stateless society protects children, which is a hell of a lot better than they're protected right now.
I mean, I know from my own circumstances, and just so you understand why I'm particularly angry about this particular topic...
I mean, my mom was dragged off to an insane asylum.
I came to visit her.
They knew all about me and nobody did a damn thing.
Nobody did a damn thing.
See, the government does not want to deal with children at all because it's expensive to deal with children.
And so the government doesn't want to deal with children.
The government would rather take property from drug dealers than it would actually try and protect children who are going to be expensive to deal with.
And of course, the government doesn't want to deal with that.
So there's no protection of children in society whatsoever in the modern world.
And of course, I knew this as a child, as every damn child knows in the modern world.
You want to talk about a state of nature.
Let's talk about frickin' childhood.
Oh my god, what a ridiculous state of nature.
There's no authority that you can appeal to in school.
In the church, in the police, in the government, in any way, shape or form, there's no goddamn authority that you can appeal to as a child.
You're in a complete state of nature.
You have no protection.
You have no rules.
You have no possibility of protection against those who have greater power than you or retribution.
And we're talking about teachers and we're talking about priests and parents, but we're also talking about siblings.
There's no way that parents...
I've never heard of parents protecting one sibling against another in any way, shape, or form, because it's the parent's brutality that is provoking into sibling brutality.
So there's no protection for children whatsoever in the modern world.
This is a very important thing to understand.
Children... Are complete and total slaves in the modern world.
And you were a slave.
You were worse than a slave.
A slave can be raised in freedom and then sold into slavery when they're an adult.
A slave has a particular property value to the slave owner and therefore is not going to get harmed in that kind of way.
In the way that a child can get harmed.
But children operate in a complete and total state of nature under the current system.
And this is the source of all the world's evil, is the fact that children gain no protection in the current world.
And if you did, I mean, if you're out there, oh, please tell me, let me know, let me see this, because I've never seen it.
Anyone I've talked to, all the people that I've talked to in my life, all the people that Christine has talked to, not one of them experienced even the slightest shred of Of protection from anybody when they were younger.
If you did experience it, please let me know, because I don't want to have an unjust opinion here.
But based on logic and empiricism, children are in a complete state of nature.
So let's sort of understand that to begin with.
The idea that, oh, you see, without a state, there'll be a state of nature.
Well, this is...
Childhood under the state.
The parental protections are enormous, and the protections for children are absolutely non-existent.
Because, of course, what you do? Oh, I'm abused.
Well, if you say, oh, I'm getting abused, then...
The cops are going to come by and lecture your parents, then you're going to get abused even worse.
Or the cops are going to come by and drag you off and put you in God knows what state foster home or state program where you just bounce around from person to person and may, in fact, end up with much worse abuse and probably will.
I certainly was better the devil you know than the devil you don't, right?
To suffer the evils we know rather than to fly unto those we know not of, as Hamlet puts it.
This is what we want to stick with as children, and everyone's perfectly aware of that.
The whole point of society is to screw children over, to place them in a situation of complete subjugation, to parents and teachers and priests and elder siblings, and to do nothing, to do nothing to protect them.
So, I have little patience with the idea that if we don't have a state, we'll have a state of nature, because we have a state, and we have the most fundamental state of nature at the moment, which is the complete and utter lack of protection of children in society.
It's a pretty obvious thing, right?
I mean, when you think about it, just think about your own childhood.
Who did you repeal to who could help you?
Nobody. Nobody.
You were totally on your own.
You were totally vulnerable, totally exposed, totally exploitable, totally brutalizable.
Nobody protected you. Who are you going to call?
Come on. I mean, this is people who worry about a state of nature.
What do you think is in society at the moment?
What do you think is at the root of society?
What do you think is at the root of everyone who's violent?
It's the fact that there's no protection for children in society.
In the patriarchal societies, of course, the state completely reinforces the power of the man.
And this is obvious if you just look at Sharia law in the Muslim world.
This is just something that we barely even need to go into because it's so obvious.
So, wherever you have power disparities, you have the capacity for violence.
It's not inevitable. I mean, there could be, I hope to be a great parent, I hope to be a father who loves and cherishes and nurtures his children, and I will feel enormously protective of them because of the power disparity.
Christina, who is not the largest wife in the world, who weighs like 110 pounds and is like 5'2", Is physically vulnerable in a way that I can only imagine, and that physical vulnerability makes me feel especially tender and protective towards her, and so I would hope that the same thing would occur with my children,
that their vulnerability and size differential Will incur in me a desire to shield and protect them rather than a desire to brutalize and exploit them, which is what almost all parents seem to experience because of their own parenting and their own lack of growing up and maturizing and dealing with their own past and pain and so on.
So, state power creates power disparities.
And power disparities are the root cause of violence.
The state creates power disparities also, of course, by creating the police force and the military and the prison system.
So, for instance, where we see a fairly violent situation, say in Iraq at the moment, and Iran perhaps soon, we see an enormous power disparity.
Between the US Marines and the local insurgents, which is why they have to do these IEDs and sniper attacks and drive and run and hit and run kind of stuff.
It's because there's such an enormous power disparity.
Well, the power disparity is not bringing peace.
The power disparity is bringing war.
If you want an example to the contrary side, of course, and I've used this example before, so please let me know if there's a better one.
I'd be more than happy to use another one.
It's just the one that pops into my mind.
Where there is equality of power...
There is peace. Where two countries have nuclear weapons, there is never a war.
There is never a war.
The only time that there's ever a war is if they fight it by proxy on someone else's territory where that someone else does not have nuclear weapons.
So where there is no power disparity, where there is...
Sorry, where there is enormous power disparity, there is always violence.
Where there is no power disparity or little power disparity, there is always peace.
Now, if we accept this as a principle, then it seems fairly obvious that government is all about the creation, propagation, and escalation of enormous power disparities!
Yes, that's the answer.
If power disparities cause violence, and the government is that agency which best creates and expands upon power disparities, then the government is that agency which best furthers the rise and spread of violence!
Assuming, of course, that we count...
Sorry, I'm not mad at you. I just find that these things are so obvious.
And everybody argues against them because they just live in their own heads and feed off propaganda.
Hobbes? Who the hell is Hobbes?
Look at your own goddamn life, oh opponents of ours.
Nasty, brutish, and short.
Look at your own childhoods.
How well were you protected there?
How well did the state support all of the power that your parents had over you?
Completely and totally. So, where there's power disparity, there is violence.
The government is that agency which most creates and extrapolates power disparities, and therefore the government is the agency which most promotes violence in society.
This, of course, is assuming that we have an understanding that compliance in the face of power disparity does not...
mean a lack of violence.
So the rape victim who submits because the shiv is at her neck or his neck is still experiencing violence.
Pretty sure that's different from lovemaking, so this should not be that hard for people to figure out.
Now, the question might arise, of course, which is this.
If you say, oh Steph, oh Steph, that childhood is a state of nature, That the state does not protect children, and because it is a state of nature, then The fact that the state doesn't protect children would be an argument for the extension of state protection towards children rather than an argument to get rid of the state.
Because if we say, wherever there's power disparity in the form of parent-child, and brutalization occurs, the state doesn't protect the children, then there you have children existing in a state of nature who are brutalized, and what we should do is put the state in or some agency in to protect the children.
I absolutely and totally agree that children should be protected.
I absolutely and totally disagree that the state will ever do it.
The state has only had about 10,000 years to figure out how to protect children.
Doesn't seem to be doing a very good job.
I personally think it's relatively okay for us to take another route.
If human beings have been banging their freaking heads against a bloody, bloody wall for 10,000 years, it might be, I think, a reasonable thing to say, I don't think it's important that we change the angle that we're beating our head against the wall.
I think it might be important to stop beating our head against the wall and try something different.
Because the state is not going to be able to protect children, the state has no interest in protecting children.
The state has no economic interest in protecting children.
In fact, the state has a strong economic interest in ensuring that children are abused.
Abused children cause problems.
Problems in terms of violence and disruption and so on.
And that brings up the need for police and military and all the state power in the world, right?
The state loves to provoke problems in society to justify its own power and existence.
So the state enormously benefits from there being violent criminals and destroyed children and brutalized and abused children in society.
The state enormously profits from it in a way that DROs just wouldn't.
And I've dispute resolution organizations.
This is all on my blog and on lewrockwell.com forward slash molyneux forward slash archives, I think it is, or you can just do a search.
If you want to know more about these organizations that replace a state, then these organizations have a distinct requirement and desire for and profit based on children growing up to be economically productive and peaceful members of society.
Well, governments just don't.
For two reasons. One, governments want the kind of disruption so they can justify their own power and brutality.
Number two, the government needs cops and soldiers, and you don't get cops and soldiers unless you have brutalized children.
How is it going to get the enforcers?
How is it going to get the people who are willing to beat and club and brutalize people whenever the law books change?
Oh, new law! Let's go beat up these people!
Oh, new law! Let's go beat up these people!
And you've got to have these evil, violent robots at the state's behest if you're going to be able to brutalize your population and profit from their enslavement.
So the state absolutely requires the two sets of brutalized children, those who grow up to be police officers and military men and prison guards and so on, and politicians, And those who cause the trouble that require, in the state's view, its own existence and expansion of its power and so on.
The state has no interest in making childhood better for anybody.
And, of course, the remainder of everyone who've gone through brutalized childhoods, those of us who survive without becoming cops or criminals, end up with very difficult and broken self-esteem and a natural subservience to authority and all this and that.
So, of course, that makes the state makes us that much easier to rule.
All we do is run around justifying state power and licking the boots that kicked us.
And that makes people very easy to control.
So let's just put it this way.
The state has no interest whatsoever in making childhood better for people.
And we know this not just because of the nature of state schools and state laws, but we also know this from about 10,000 years of recorded history, about 6,000 years of recorded history as far as states go, that they really have never gotten quite round to figuring out this whole thing that children should be protected and figuring out how to do it.
Never really got in the hang of it.
Never going to happen in a democracy either, of course, because children neither vote nor can donate any significant amount to political campaigns, so their interests and needs are never going to be taken care of.
Absolutely simple quid pro quo.
Anybody who can find an argument to the contrary...
Please let me know what you think, and I'll tell you that you're wrong, because this is just so evident throughout history.
Children are never protected.
The idea that somehow the state can be reformed to protect children against all logic, benefit, and political or democratic reality is just nonsense.
You can try, of course, and maybe you'll come across something I haven't thought of, but I seriously doubt it.
I would just say accept this one for what it's worth, because you're going to have a pretty tough time changing my mind, at least.
So, let's continue with the state and violence.
Let's look at the greatest power disparity that is obvious to people.
The childhood one always seems to escape people in ways that I can't quite understand, but hey.
If we look at the most obvious one outside of childhood, then we, of course, take a look down into the ghastly red shark mullet of war.
Now, war, of course, is the result of the greatest disparity of power that adults face, which is the disparity of power between a citizen and his government.
So if you think back to the Second World War, well, nobody had nukes, and they were all pretty evenly matched, and if it wasn't for the capitalist economy of America, it would have been a standstill, as was the case with World War I. Well, why did they go to war, and so on?
Well, of course, the real reason that they went to war, the real reason that, say, Germany went to war, was because of its power over its own citizens.
The war is always, always, always primarily against the domestic civilian population.
It is never against the opponents.
It is only peripherally against the opponents.
Soldiers can exist in the absence of invading and occupying other countries.
A military can exist.
And so a military is not Primarily focused on war, because militaries exist in the absence of war.
But militaries can never exist, never, never, never, in the way that we understand them now.
Militaries can never exist in the absence of forcible funding from taxpayers.
There was no standing army before there was an income tax.
It's impossible. You can't have an army if you don't have income tax in particular.
And so armies simply cannot exist.
Unless the domestic population can be brutalized, terrorized, and forced at the threat of being thrown into the rape gulags to fund the army and the air force and the navy.
There's just no way. It's absolutely impossible.
World War II was possible, of course, because of domestic taxation policies.
And all governments participated in that.
You can say, well, what if you're next to Germany and Germany's got this taxation policy and so they're raising and they're going to invade you and this, that and the other.
Well, that's not really for us to worry about at the moment because we have weapons of mass destruction.
It's not really an issue. But, of course, what would happen if you had an open policy country?
I mean, this is something sort of important to understand.
If you had a no-taxation, DRO-based, open policy, no immigration laws, just come on over and set yourself up however you like, want, please, or choose, then everybody's going to desert the other country, especially the young men.
They're going to desert the other country and come to where you are.
If you want to know, one of the main reasons why Germany ended up being able to recruit so many people was because none of the other countries would let the German young German men emigrate to them.
Otherwise, they all would have left the same way everybody did to America in the 19th century.
One of the reasons that there were no wars in Western Europe for the 19th century was because all the young men were going to America, so they couldn't really get their military up and running.
I mean, it's just obvious, right?
You've got the choice, right?
You're some guy in Germany, some poor schmo peasant farmer dude kid, and someone says, you can join the Wehrmacht and go and invade Poland in the winter.
Well, I guess they invaded it in September, but you'll get to stay there in the winter, and maybe we'll have some boots for you when it's minus 40.
Or you can go and get a great job in a free society just by getting over the border.
And there'll be tons of people who will help you do it.
And there's no extradition policies, and there's no way that you don't even need citizenship.
You just get a job and get going.
Well, what are you going to do?
Of course you're not going to join the army.
What a lunatic thing to do.
I mean, the armies are only possible when you have immigration policies that prevent people from emigrating.
The Jews only got killed because there were policies that prevent people from emigrating and nobody would take them in in the Second World War.
So it's always state power.
It always comes back to state power.
I mean, it's the only reason these things ever occur.
So war is primarily designed and only possible because of the brutalization of the domestic population.
Said brutalization, of course, is only possible.
Only possible because of two things.
One, propaganda.
Two, overwhelming force.
It's really that simple.
And propaganda, the state propaganda in public schools, is only possible because of the overwhelming force that is used to extract the money from the population to pay for the public schools.
Right? So, I mean, it all comes back to state power.
War is what occurs when you have states that are able to brutalize their own population.
Wars don't occur in the absence of a state.
Violence only occurs because of the presence of the state.
And we've talked about this before, so I'll just touch on it briefly here.
People are afraid of the mafia?
Well, why was there no mafia in America before the 1930s?
Well, because there was no prohibition.
Why was there no organized crime in America whatsoever, other than the state and the mercantilist groups?
Why was there no organized crime in America whatsoever in the 19th century?
Why? Because everything was legal.
Cocaine was legal, heroin, opiates, opium.
I don't even know if marijuana was around, but it was legal too.
You could buy it in a drugstore.
It was originally in Coca-Cola.
So there was no organized crime.
No organized crime. No organized crime.
So is it the organized warlords that you're afraid of?
Well, I mean, they don't exist without the state.
The state and the criminals are one and the same.
This is an important thing to understand.
Forget about the thin blue line.
The state and the criminals are one and the same.
They are symbiotic.
They are two sides of the same coin.
You cannot have criminals, except for the odd insane guy, which will be dealt with by D.R.O. Society and is not exactly a threat that we need to worry about, relative to taxation and war and social collapse and the destruction of currency.
You won't have criminals in a free society.
You just won't.
Because there'll be no profit in it.
And therefore, anybody who's sane is going to find some other way of earning a living that isn't going to involve bopping people over the head or trying to stick them up or anything like that.
Because drugs, if you want to have drugs, they'll be so free, so cheap, that you can buy all the drugs that you want by working part-time.
And you can also have a place to live to boot.
And food. So if you want to be a hop-head and, you know, just blow away your life and take in peyote through the butt, I don't care.
It doesn't matter. You'll be perfectly free to do it and you won't have to turn to a life of crime anyway.
Prostitution is legal and gambling is legal and, I mean, all of these things.
This is a free society. I mean, yeah, you can set up your own area where, you know, you buy all this land and then you set up your own DRO and here you can't gamble or drink.
That's fine. But the criminals aren't going to go there anyway.
So the state is both run by criminals, enforced by criminals, or the cops and the police are just criminals, and it generates criminals.
Crime is an effect of the state.
Crime is the shadow of the state.
Crime is directly proportional to the power of the state.
And that's all there is to it.
To say that there would be more crime and violence in the absence of a state is to say that your health will decline in the absence of a tumor.
The tumor is the cause, ill health in general is the result.
The state is the cause and crime is the result.
Crime is the result.
And crime is the result, of course, because the state has made crime profitable, because the state does not enforce its own regulations except those which specifically profit it, therefore encouraging criminals, because criminals make so much money from the illegal activities or the activities the state has made illegal that they simply bribe the cops.
Because so much money is stripped from you, and you're subject to so many brutal regulations if you operate a business legitimately, that working under the table, working in the black market or the grey market becomes that much more profitable.
I mean, good God, the state breeds criminals the way that shit breeds a stench.
I mean, the state is crime, not just in its manifestation, but in its effects on society.
The state is the soil, regulations are the manure, and criminals are the weeds.
They're inevitable.
They're the inevitable result of state power.
And also because the state does nothing to protect children, and so children are brutalized both by their parents and by teachers without any protection whatsoever.
These days, of course, the state is only interested in drugging children or expelling them.
Because it doesn't want to deal with the seeds, the fruits of its own brutalizations.
And, of course, last but not least, the state trains the criminals.
I don't just mean in terms of prison.
What I'm talking about is public schools.
Public schools are so destructive to the human soul.
You could not conceivably come up with a more destructive environment for rationality, joy, compromise, negotiating skills, win-win relationships, ethics, integrity, honor, self-respect, self-discipline, any of these things. You would not come up with a conceivable situation that would more effectively erode those things in children.
If they were any more brutal, kids would react with open hostility, and if they were any less brutal, kids would actually survive them.
But right now, they're poised in this perfect passive-aggressive pit, where children's minds get destroyed and they don't even know it.
So, if you want to look at the primal breeding ground...
For criminals, that is not too obvious.
Families are fairly obvious. State regulations are fairly obvious.
But public schools are completely obvious.
I mean, there's a reason why so few kids in poor neighborhoods end up finishing school.
It's because school is just another torture.
Their home life is torture. Their social life is torture.
And school is another torture.
School's not a haven where they go to learn and be happy and learn how to get their way out of poverty and use their minds and learn and grow.
No, school is a place where they go and get yelled at for being who they are.
Where they get heavily criticized for being depressed gang members when they've grown up in brutal state-sanctioned and state-supported welfare families with no parents around, drug dealers on every corner, gambling, prostitution, organized crime, gangs, all of these things created and fostered by the state.
And then in the state schools, people go, well, you're just a loser for being a gang member.
Well, of course they're not going to be interested in sticking around.
Blaming the victim is always ridiculous.
Blaming children for growing up in these kinds of environments?
It's like blaming someone in a rich neighborhood, some woman who gets raped in her bed at home with a security system on.
You can't blame the victims.
You can't blame children. You can't blame teenagers for who they've become.
You can save them, but you sure as hell can't save them by blaming them.
It's like once when my mom called the cops on me, I got this long lecture about how there's such a thing as a generation gap and I need to listen to my mom.
No question, of course, from the cops as to why things might have escalated with my mom, as to why I might be defending myself in a way that would cause my mom to get hurt.
No question about that at all.
I just got these big lectures from this stupid freaking oaf about, oh, there's a Generation Gap son, and you've got to really listen to your mother.
She's looking out for your best interests.
I know it can be hard sometimes, but you've got to pay attention.
You've got to do the right thing by her, blah, blah, blah.
I could have housed the guy over the balcony.
This is all you get from the state.
It's blind lectures about compliance with anybody who's got any kind of authority.
And, of course, parents can sue the state.
Children can't. So this is all complete nonsense, right?
I mean, you simply can't have violence without the state.
You can't have violence in any organized or predictable or cohesive or universal or dangerous or significant way without the state.
It's absolutely impossible.
It's absolutely and totally impossible.
And I'll tell you the last way that I will show this to be the case for you.
If you look at people who do not have direct access to the state, in other words, the middle class, You could not come across a more peaceful section of society than the middle class.
Now, the upper classes, they're all involved in the mercantilist activities, lobbying the state and getting their way and, you know, harnessing the power of the state to brutalize everyone else.
And the poor are entirely ground under the heel of the state and addicted to all the state programs and brutalized by the state and subject to all the violence of the gangs that state policies generate.
So they're lost to us.
And the rich are lost to us because they're too busy co-opting the state for their own benefit.
But the middle class has no access to state power.
None whatsoever. You can't get a lawsuit going.
You can maybe get small claims, but you can't get a lawsuit going that's going to save you in any way, shape, or form.
The rich people will just outspend you and you'll end up going broke for no reason.
So the middle class has no access to state power.
They live in a state of nature.
Completely and totally live in a state of nature.
And they are by far the most peaceful members of society.
And that's another example.
Anyone you're talking to, pretty much they're in the middle class.
I mean, you might be talking to the odd guy from the lower classes like myself who kind of fought his way up.
You might be talking to the odd rich kid who's got some sympathy and brains.
But for the most part, you're talking to nice sort of middle-aged, sorry, middle-class kids when you're talking about this kind of stuff.
So when you ask them, okay, well, you tell me all of the massive benefits that violence accrues to all the violent people that you know.
And they're going to be like, well, I don't know any violent people.
It's like, well, how can that be?
Because you don't have any access to state power.
You can't use the cops.
You can't use the law courts.
They're not for you. They don't help you.
Go to adventuresinlegaland.com.
Some great stuff that Mark Stevens has written up.
And the police have no incentive to help you.
When we were first going out, Christina lent me her vacuum cleaner because I had a carpet when I only had a dust buster because I was a finely organized bachelor.
And I left it downstairs while I went to get something for my car and it got stolen.
So, of course, I called the cops and they said, oh, so I guess it just got legs and walked away, huh?
And they took down the serial number and said they'd call me if they ever came across it.
Yeah, right. Because nothing's going to happen about that.
So of course I had to take the matters into my own hands and I had to put up signs and I had to canvas people and ask them if they'd seen it.
And fortunately somebody saw the sign and put the vacuum cleaner out front of my door and knocked and ran away.
So I got the vacuum cleaner back, but of course the cops could have done all that too.
But they have no economic interest in doing that whatsoever.
The cops could have gone and searched everyone's apartment looking for that in the building.
But there's no incentive for them to do that.
So it just...
I mean, the cops aren't there to help you if you're in the middle class.
And this is the most peaceful group of all.
If access to state power made you peaceful, then surely the upper classes should be the most peaceful.
They should never use state power for their own advantage, but they're the most violent.
They're the Halliburtons.
They're the ones who run military contracts, and they're the ones who run foreign aid.
They're the ones who run the government.
They're the ones who utilize state power in the most brutal kinds of ways.
And the poor are also the most violent, right?
The criminals, the drug gangs, and all of that.
And they're the ones who have the most access to state power in that sense, in terms of recipients.
The middle class has no access to state power and is the most peaceful class of all.
So, it really isn't that hard to figure this stuff out.
It's pretty freaking obvious.
All you have to do is look at your own life.
And realize that...
Wherever you have state power, you have violence.
Wherever state power exists, it raises the disparity of power between the attacker and the attackee.
It destroys consequences for those in power.
It offloads the costs of enforcements to the taxpayers, to those you're getting robbed from.
And so of course it's going to increase power.
And the only way that you can pretend that that's not the case is if you pretend that your own life is full of violence that doesn't exist.
And everyone you know is full of violence that doesn't exist.
And that compliance to brutality is exactly the same as peaceful cooperation.
And of course it takes intellectuals and those educated in college.
To be able to make those ridiculous leaps of logic and to argue them as if they're just totally obvious and to be absolutely stunned if anybody contradicts them.
But don't listen to these people.
Explain to them the better way of understanding the world so that they really get that the root cause of violence is the state and in the absence of state we will have virtually a violence-free society.
So please, speaking of voluntary cooperation, come past the freedomainradio.com and donate some money for me.
We are on now podcast 241.
So if you've listened to me from the beginning, the suggested donation, not that I mind if you want to give more, the suggested donation is 50 cents a podcast, based on the idea that, say, four or five of these podcasts is the equivalent to a movie, and ten of them is equivalent to an audiobook.
And so five bucks for an audiobook or 250 for the equivalent of a movie is a pretty good deal.
This stuff is better for you than any movie will ever be, because it helps you organize your thoughts and your life and makes you a better, happier, more peaceful person, although it may seem a little stressful at times.
The end result of it is much, much better than anything else, I would submit, that you're likely to get in most of the media that's out there.
So please, show your appreciation for the work that we're doing here, the work that I'm putting out, and the responses to the conversations that I'm putting out, and give me some money, because I think that would be a fair exchange of values.
And also come by freedomainradio.com forward slash board.
I saw on the display today, we have 108 members, and I saw 173 guests online.
Now, of course, not all 108 members were online.
There was only about a dozen or so.
But 173 people browsing through the boards, I think that's pretty cool.
I've actually... I'm not sure. That seems very high to me, so I've asked people if there are any reasons why this number should be discreditable.
Or discredited? Why we shouldn't believe it.
So I'll update you if that is the case.
But I just thought that was kind of neat.
We really are getting quite a bit of activity going on now, finally, as we're growing to some pretty significant links and some pretty significant memberships and some pretty significant people visiting the boards.
And every dollar that you provide towards me in this way will absolutely help me continue to get the word out, with the end result goal being, of course, that I would like to be able to do this full-time.
Which I think will be great for you because you'll get some research.
But also, you will get the opportunity to give me the opportunity to go out and talk about this stuff in a wider media context, which I would really enjoy doing and I think would be very helpful because I think I have a good ability, as best as I can, to be able to explain this stuff to both you and other people.
So thanks again so much. I look forward to your donation.
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