June 6, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Good afternoon everybody, hope you're doing well. | |
| It's Steph, my voice is back! | |
| I hope you're having a great time. | |
| I guess I'm going to be back on air now. | |
| It's Tuesday, June the 13th at 5.19pm and I've just had last week and now Monday and Tuesday off, which has been wonderful, very relaxing, very enjoyable. | |
| So I wanted to say at the very beginning of this podcast, I'm going a little bit out of sequence, I did record some stuff. | |
| On the last week. | |
| But what I have to do is switch to a new feed. | |
| So I'm going to tell you about that now. | |
| Now the new feed is... | |
| It's very subtle. | |
| The existing one is free domain underbar radio underbar podcast dot xml. | |
| The new one is going to be free domain underbar radio underbar podcast underbar one. | |
| And the reason for this is that I use FeedBurner, and it has a size limit of 256k, and I've received a number of very helpful suggestions from people on the boards, people even geekier than myself, which is, you know, not easy to achieve. | |
| And they have given me some great suggestions on cycling podcasts in and out But I'm already spending enough time as it is on the podcast, so I'm not going to do that. | |
| What I am going to do is post this podcast as the last one in your existing podcast. | |
| But to get podcasts after number 271, if you could please add free domain underbar radio underbar podcast underbar1.xml as your new post, that will be where... | |
| The second round or continuing round of Free Domain Radio podcasts will be. | |
| So, a little bit of news, or a little bit of housekeeping news. | |
| I have bought an ad in the International Society for Individual Liberty mail-outs, which go out to about 40,000 people a day. | |
| And I've also bought something for their web page, which will be a link through to freedomainradio.com. | |
| We have now, I guess we've hit quite a good number of listeners, on the boards themselves we are up to 135 And I regularly see 10, 20, 30, or 40 guests online, which is great. | |
| So if you want to come by freedomaderadio.com forward slash board, B-O-A-R-D, we have 6,632 threads, almost 10,000 posts, 9,915. | |
| And in the past 24 hours, we've had 168 new posts, two new users. | |
| And so we are getting quite a bit of activity there. | |
| Which is very nice. I'm very pleased with that. | |
| It's a very, very interesting set of commentary. | |
| Everything from whether professional boxing is illegal to should we all go live on an island somewhere. | |
| I think it's great and I really appreciate everybody's time and energy posting in there. | |
| As far as the hit counts for those who are interested, and you can always find these by triple clicking on the pawprint on the first free domain radio page. | |
| Since February the 19th, I don't really count February, so sort of March, April, May, and a little bit of June, three and a bit months, we've had almost 18,000 hits from almost 6,000 different people, and I think that's very good. | |
| I'm very pleased with that. | |
| We've had a steady increase, so we had 3,783 hits in March. | |
| We had 4,663 hits in May. | |
| We had 5,583 Sorry, 5,551 hits in May and in June so far we've had 2,431 hits. | |
| Again, I think that's good that things are cooking well on the blog at freedomain.blogspot.com. | |
| I guess since I started it, I guess this would be about a year and a half ago, we've had 13,000 hits which is not too bad. | |
| And we're getting quite a lot of hits from a variety of sources, which is great. | |
| So we're starting to get some real energy cooking, which I think is wonderful. | |
| Now, what I'm going to do with this podcast, we're a little bit out of sequence, but I have written an article, which I'm quite excited by. | |
| It was quite a crab to work on, but I'm quite pleased with the results and fairly confident about the math. | |
| I have a history degree, and there's a reason that I did not go into economics. | |
| It's because math is not my strong suit, but I've had better mathematicians than myself look at this, and I think we've got some good feedback. | |
| So this is the article. | |
| I'm going to submit it to a variety of sites over the next little while, and hopefully it'll pop up, but I think it's a good one for helping people to understand at least one concept around market anarchism. | |
| So this article, which you can find at freedomain.blogspot.com, as well as on the Freedomain Radio site under Articles, is called market anarchism. | |
| Are you guys crazy or just nuts? | |
| After twenty years as a small government libertarian, I've spent the last eighteen months or so strenuously and unsuccessfully resisting the implacable logic of market anarchy. | |
| I started out thinking it was a rather odd theory, but I have come to appreciate some of its finer points, and thought it might be interesting to share some of them with you. | |
| If these approaches are correct, then they may help you. | |
| If they are incorrect, perhaps you could rescue me from the error of my ways. | |
| Now, market anarchism is a broad term referring to the theory that voluntary free market relationships can and should replace all existing coercive state relationships. | |
| It is derived from taking the principle of the non-initiation of force to its ultimate conclusion, and accepting that if using violence is wrong for one person, then it is wrong for every person. | |
| If stealing is wrong for me as a private citizen, then it is also wrong for everyone, including those in the government. | |
| Much like the theory of relativity, the consistent application of this simple principle can produce rather startling conclusions. | |
| If the initiation of force is wrong, then governments as a whole are immoral institutions. | |
| Since the only moral agent is the individual, then no individual can claim opposing moral rules based on membership in a certain club, such as the government. | |
| Logically, a man can't be subject to one moral rule while sitting at home, thou shalt not kill, and then be subject to a completely opposite moral rule when he puts on a uniform. | |
| The same is true for property rights. | |
| If all men have property rights, then no man can morally take the property of another man. | |
| Of course, most people feel very uncomfortable with the idea that society can exist without a government. | |
| It might be worth understanding the market anarchist responses to typical objections, just for the sake of clarification. | |
| For instance, market anarchists are always asked how a stateless society could deal with violent criminals. | |
| We have some excellent answers, of course, but the most relevant is this. | |
| The vast majority of evils in this world are not committed by private criminals, but by governments. | |
| Or, to put it another way, the greatest danger to human life is not private vice, but public, quote, virtue. | |
| In the 20th century alone, credible estimates for the numbers of citizens directly murdered by government stands at 262 million people. | |
| Picture this. If the average height of each victim was five foot, laid out end-to-end, the corpses would circle the globe ten times. | |
| This number is six times the number killed in all wars in the 20th century. | |
| This number does not include periphery deaths, such as the 60 million killed by malaria as a direct result of worldwide governmental bans on DDT. Now, many government policies also promote violent crimes, such as welfare and the war on drugs, but even if we ignore those, what are the odds of being murdered by a private criminal versus a government official? | |
| Well, the population of the world was 1.7 billion in 1900 and 5.9 billion in 1998. | |
| For the sake of brevity, let's take the sum population of the 20th century as the difference between them, 4.2 billion. | |
| 262 million killed by governments out of 4.2 billion means a 6.2% murder rate. | |
| If we add in additional factors such as wars, medicinal bans, persistent infant mortality, economic stagnation or decline due to state regulations and so on, we would end up with a figure probably double that. | |
| Of course, the majority of these crimes occur in totalitarian regimes, so for Soviet Russia and Mao's China, the murder rates would involve further multiples. | |
| We could add other factors as well. | |
| What about the endless kidnapping and imprisonment involved in police states and the war on drugs? | |
| What about the rapes that constantly occur in state prisons? | |
| What about the abuse that occurs in state-run orphanages or homes for the elderly? | |
| What about the mental and physical abuse that occurs in state schools? | |
| What about the family violence that occurs in regimes that do not recognize the rights of women or children? | |
| What about the constant infanticide in China? | |
| What about the endless, endless theft of taxation? | |
| In relatively small state societies, the murder rate tends to be about 200 per century per 100,000 people. | |
| Out of a 20th century population of 4.2 billion, this results in 8.4 million murders. | |
| This compares with 262 million state murders, excluding being killed in a war, denied medicine, or an economic future. | |
| In other words, even using the most conservative estimates, a citizen is over 30 times more likely to be murdered by a government agent than a private criminal, or private murders total just over 3% of government murders. | |
| Glancing at pre-20th century state murders is even worse. | |
| From the 11th to the 19th centuries, we can easily count over 110 million state murders, with a far lower world population, of course. | |
| So, do you see what I mean about prioritizing risks? | |
| Now, state crimes are qualitatively different from private crimes. | |
| There are many steps that a citizen can take to reduce the impact of private crime on his or her life. | |
| From security systems to doormen to moving to a better neighborhood, you can directly control the amount of danger you are exposed to. | |
| For instance, about two-thirds of murder victims knew they're murderers. | |
| So just hang with the right crowd and your risk drops significantly. | |
| Seventy-five per cent of recent murders in New York were directly related to the drug trade, so stay away from dealing and you're that much safer. | |
| Contrast that to governments. | |
| What can you do to protect yourself against taxation? | |
| Nothing. Everywhere you go, you were taxed. | |
| Want to take up arms against the Gestapo? | |
| Good luck. Want to escape regulations? | |
| Pray for a libertarian afterlife. | |
| Naturally, the opposing argument is that criminal violence is like an inverted bell curve. | |
| Lots of state power equals lots of violence, and also, no state power equals lots of violence. | |
| However, statistics just don't bear that out. | |
| In general, the smaller the government, the lower the crime rate. | |
| And so who can definitively say that no government will naturally produce more crime? | |
| It would be like saying, well, my health improves from my cancer shrinks, but it will surely worsen if it disappears completely. | |
| If we are truly concerned with human suffering, we must rank threats rationally. | |
| We must deal with the most life-threatening problems first, and only then proceed to lesser dangers. | |
| What would we think of an ER doctor who treated a hangnail before dealing with a spurting artery? | |
| When people are dozens of times more likely to be murdered by a government official than a private criminal, is it rational to use our fear of criminals to shy away from even exploring the possibility of a stateless society? | |
| Of course not. Refusing to consider market anarchism for fear of criminals is like refusing to treat a man dying of cancer because he might someday be hit by a bus. | |
| Sure, you might say, I understand that dictatorships kill lots of people, but we're all against totalitarianism. | |
| Just because too much state is bad doesn't automatically mean that any state is equally bad. | |
| Look, I fully understand and sympathize with the intellectual appeal of a small state, and would find it very compelling, except for historical and current realities which show that governments never, ever stay small. | |
| Like cancer, they continually expand. | |
| The smallest state that ever came into being, the American Republic, lasted less than a century before dissolving into internal wars, state-run banking, foreign entanglements, ever-escalating taxation, and crushing national debts. | |
| So I've got a graph in the article which shows U.S. federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product. | |
| So it's pretty low, around 1929. | |
| We're cooking at around 10%, and then, of course, it bulges up to 35% during World War II, and then goes back down to 20%, and then it's sort of rising up around 33%, and now it's dipped a little below 30%, and now it's back up over 30%, which is sort of why I say that we didn't really win World War II. This is an interesting graph to sort of have a look at. | |
| This just goes up to 2003 Q2, So it probably doesn't have, well, it wouldn't have all of the Iraq war stuff in there for sure, but it's a pretty gruesome graph to look at. | |
| Now, of course, the vast majority of spending increases are on social programs, or more simply voter bribing, and there's a graph in there as well which shows how There is social programs, which in 1947 were about 1%, are now up around over 14% of GDP. So that something is, sorry, a percent of net national income. | |
| Fairly important to understand there. | |
| Low, it's lower. | |
| The defense spending is lower, surprisingly. | |
| It peaked in 1952 with Korean, but the Korean War has sort of gone down since. | |
| It's well worth having a look at. | |
| Also to have a look at some of the other trends in there as well. | |
| Now, naturally, this expansion in state power and coercive relationships increasingly displaces private or voluntary relationships, just as a cancer displaces healthy cells. | |
| Now, this is interesting. | |
| It's a graph which we have here, which is government, federal plus state plus local, is growing four times faster than the economy, which is depressing the private sector's share of the economy. | |
| So, a percentage share of national income in a sort of pre-New Deal This would be the 1920s. | |
| It was 10% the government, and it was almost 90% was the free market, the private sector. | |
| In 1947, the government is 20% and it's 80% for the private sector. | |
| Now, it's a 45% government and 55% private sector, of course. | |
| This can't last. The overall shortfall in US spending $47 trillion as of 2004, up $11 trillion in a single year, will inevitably result in either totalitarianism or bankruptcy, or both. | |
| Now, there are many reasons for the inevitable increases in state power and corruption, but the main point here is that even if we were able to magically reduce state power to purely constitutional levels, it would take less than a generation or two for the self-destructive growth to begin again. | |
| Because the government, as an agency of monopolistic violence, can never be controlled. | |
| Because the power disparity between the military and the citizenry is just too great. | |
| Like slavery, the state can neither be reformed nor managed, since its very premise, the initiation of the use of force, is immoral, irrational, impractical, and in the long run, utterly self-destructive. | |
| In my view, the libertarian movement is foundering not because we advocate too much freedom, but rather because we do not advocate enough freedom. | |
| Our moral vision is constantly compromised and undermined by the violence we advocate for the sake of our small state position. | |
| But either violence is right or it is wrong. | |
| If it is right, how can we quibble about the degree of violence used by the state? | |
| If it is wrong, how can we approve of even a small state? | |
| I look forward to your feedback. | |
| I look forward to your donations, which you can provide to me by clicking on www.freedomainradio.com. | |
| And also, don't forget to update your feeds for the next round of podcasts. | |
| Thank you so much for listening. |
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