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July 10, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:12
322 Getting National Defense Without Attacking Citizens
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Everybody, hope you're doing well. It's time for the joys of significant background noise.
And it is 11.23 on the 10th of July, 2006.
And I'm afraid, sad to say, that I have to do a low-tech recording for a variety of reasons today.
But I would like to sort of go ahead and continue chatting about this question of social conformity.
And I'll give you sort of the prompt...
For this, or why this occurred, and then hopefully that'll put it in, you know, some kind of context for you that will make sense.
So, the question around social conformity is something like this.
Okay, so you live in San Francisco, and there's some local DRO that is going to, or has a desire to, or people want it to, provide some sort of defense for the geographical region in which you live, right?
It sort of makes sense, right?
I mean, you're going to have to have some level of defense for your property in the weird and bizarre possibility that in a stateless society or a stateless planet that you are going to get invaded by other countries.
It could also be, of course, the case that the reason that this is something that might occur is you are a stateless society, but your neighbor is some crazy non-stateless society dude, and bad things are occurring all around.
So, that is another possibility that can occur that you need to sort of have protection against.
So, of course, the question of the free rider always arises in the question of defense.
And so, I'm going to put out some ideas which I think will be useful around this question of how do you get defense paid for when everyone else...
If you think everyone else is going to pay for the defense of your...
General neighborhood, why on earth would you end up putting your own dollars into that?
Because you just can benefit from the free rider situation and end up with the protection without having to pay a penny.
Now, as I've mentioned a couple of jillion times before, human beings are economic animals, but economics is only peripherally related to income, right?
As we sort of mentioned before, human beings are driven far more by ethics and by social approval and so on than by mere income.
This is something that you can sort of see just based on the fact that people exist in the world, right?
Because children are not economically advantageous to you and they make you tired and they are difficult at times and so the very fact that people have children which is a fundamental fact of human nature or human social reality indicates to us that human beings somehow are able to make decisions About what is valuable to them over and above what is simply going to be productive for them from an economic standpoint.
I wonder if you can even hear me over this.
It's always the case when you're in a rush that you end up driving through the car wash, right?
So people do have significant issues within their own lives that they do not...
or significant values which are not related to economics as a whole in terms of mere income, but economics is...
The study of limited resources of which human life is the most fundamental.
Everybody has a fixed number of minutes, not fixed in advance, I don't think, but a fixed number of minutes in the world.
So human life in its most fundamental sense is the limited resource and how we're going to spend time to maximize our pleasure and to minimize our discomfort in the long run and the short run is the study of economics.
And so I would say that people are not simply going to refuse to fund A defense of their neighborhood because it's going to save them a certain amount of money.
Now, there are two conditions under which the free rider problem does become more significant.
The first one of those is, of course, the higher the price that you have to pay to not be a free rider, the more people's temptation to be a free rider is going to be, right?
So, if national defense costs $50,000 a year, then the temptation to have other people pay for it is sort of high, right?
Because that's a heck of a lot of money to pay for national defense.
And this all does tend to be somewhat circular, right?
Because as the price of defense goes up, the incentive to become a free rider also goes up.
And so it becomes a vicious circle, right?
The higher price that you're paying for defense, the more people want to be free riders.
And therefore, the more that people want to be free riders, the higher the defense is going to Cost for each individual who's not a free rider.
So, I understand all of that escalation.
That makes perfect sense to me. But I just don't think that it's particularly important in an anarchist society.
And I'll sort of tell you why.
Now, that's sort of the first reason that people are going to want to be a free rider.
Now, the second reason is because they're not going to be known as a free rider.
I mean, that would sort of be my approach to solving that problem.
The more anonymously People can get by as a free rider the more incentive they have to be a free rider, right?
So it's the old question, like, if there's nobody watching and you knew you could get away with a crime, would you actually commit it?
Well, the number of people who would would sort of go up, right?
Those who are doing a sort of cost-benefit ratio just at that level are going to be people who decide that the crime is sort of beneficial to them and so on.
People with sort of internal ethics aren't going to Be that way, but a lot of people just sort of do a cost-benefit calculation at the moment, and so the higher the price of getting off the free rider bandwagon, and the more anonymously you can be a free rider, the more the free rider problem is going to be an issue.
So what that says to me is that DROs dealing with the issue of defense are going to be very interested in doing two things.
One, Reducing the cost of defense, because that's going to solve the free rider problem.
If defense is a penny a year, and it's effortless to pay, there are very few people who are going to object.
I mean, that's sort of being the basic. If it can be deducted, one penny can be deducted from your paycheck once a year, and you'll never notice it, most people will say, yeah, okay, well, it's worth it to me, I guess, right?
So the lower the price, the more you're going to deal with the free rider problem, and the The less anonymously you can deal with this issue, the less anonymous you remain in this issue, the more you are going to want to get out of the free rider bandwagon and do the right thing, I guess you could say, right? And how do I know this?
Well, I was a waiter. And one of the things that...
I mean, if it didn't exist, it would be an endless argument against it.
If tipping didn't exist, right?
Just sort of very briefly. If tipping didn't exist...
Then it would be a rather endless argument against tipping, right?
So if you said, well, what we're going to do, see, is we're not going to pay our employees.
We're going to have our customers pay our employees, right?
That's how it's going to work. We're going to pay our employees ridiculously little as waiters, but we're going to ask our customers to give them money voluntarily at the end of the meal.
People say, oh, that's never going to work.
Customers will just walk out where that's not enforced.
It's crazy. But...
When you deal with, as I mentioned in the podcast this morning, when you do the semi-inconvenient thing of dealing with reality rather than abstractions as your primary source, then people who say, well, donations and so on will never work, have to explain things like tipping, which occurs and fuels the service industry to a fairly large degree.
And the reason, of course, that people tip is because it's expected and they feel good And they don't want the disapproval that might radiate from the person who is being tipped.
And the people who are being tipped are pretty good.
They're pretty good at making you feel bad for not tipping them, right?
That's their sort of economic value add to some degree is that issue.
So, to go into the question of defense, DROs...
In my humble opinion, it would take a sort of three-fold approach to it, like if I was setting up a defense DRO. The first thing I would do is make it as cheap as humanly possible, and you do that by buying two nukes, right, or three nukes, and saying, anybody who tries to attack us, we're going to nuke you, and that's pretty much going to do it.
And what is the cost across a couple of hundred thousand people for maintaining two nukes?
I don't know, what, five bucks a year?
Ten bucks a year? Something like that, right?
It's not going to be much, sort of my basic point.
So... From that standpoint, that's one thing that I would do, is try and make it as cheap as possible, right?
I'm not going to have all of these aircraft carriers, and I'm not going to have all these troops stationed overseas, and I'm not going to have all these ridiculously bloated defense contracts, and I'm not going to do all of these silly things around propping up foreign governments and so on.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to try and keep it purely defensive, right?
I mean, to actually have a Department of Defense, which is aimed at being defensive, is very cheap, right?
It's the Department of Domestic defense is cheap.
Foreign offense is expensive, right, which is in the military.
And, of course, corruption around military contracts is very expensive.
But the DROs wouldn't take that approach, of course.
They would find cheaper ways to provide it.
Now, of course, once it's cheaper, then the objection to paying your dues and getting off the free-rounder bandwagon goes down precipitously.
And one of the reasons that it goes down precipitously is that if...
What is being asked for is reasonable, is reasonable, then people generally don't mind paying it, right?
So, for instance, if you are in a restaurant, you know that the price of your food is cheaper because the wages of the serving staff, of the waiters, the maitre deacon, the busboy, and so on.
Because all of these people are paid less, we know that there is a concomitant decrease in In the price of our food, right?
So it's not a ripoff.
And we know that because of competition, right?
Price competition in restaurants is not insignificant.
And so our meals are being subsidized by low wages.
And so we're not paying more for tipping, right?
Sort of fundamentally, we get that.
We're not paying more for tipping.
We're just not being a free rider, right?
So if we don't tip, then yes, other people are going to end up paying more.
And that is going to be an issue.
We also have a bit of a personal relationship with the waiter in the way that we don't have with the tax collector and so on.
So it's a little bit...
And we appreciate the effort if the waiter is pleasant and nice and all that kind of stuff.
So we're sort of relatively happy with all that kind of stuff.
So with the restaurants, we're relatively comfortable with tipping.
And when I was a waiter, which I was for many years as a teenager, I think maybe once or twice I got no tip.
Like maybe once or twice out of literally thousands of tables that I served.
Maybe once or twice, I got no tip, right?
So I just know tipping works.
I mean, you can argue all you want about the free rider syndrome, but again, you do need to sort of explain, if you feel that it's an impossible problem to solve, that you do need to explain something as basic as tipping, which works despite your theory, right?
That's one of the things you need to understand.
Now, of course, restaurants are cyclical businesses, right?
A lot of people who go to restaurants go back, right?
So if you don't tip your waiter, then you go back, you're afraid that you're going to get bad service or your waiter's going to be surly, Or is just going to be sort of superior and give you that snarky look but not say anything that's going to get him in trouble or whatever, however you want to put it.
Because people go back to restaurants, there is kind of that issue around repeat business and not wanting to face the guy that you've ripped off and all that kind of stuff, right?
Certainly the temptation, I think, is higher when you're on holiday to not tip when you're never going back, right?
It's one possibility. So people generally will provide resources when it's fair, right?
When it's fair. And so if people feel...
That defense is not a viable proposition in terms of fairness, right?
So, if the value of my property is increased because of national defense, then I'm going to be more likely to pay for it voluntarily than if the value of my property is decreased because of national defense.
So, if national defense is 50% of my income, then I could probably get it cheaper elsewhere.
I could hire my own security guards.
I could join together with a bunch of people and just protect their property that way.
I could go out and buy a nuke or whatever, right?
If it's that high, then people are going to feel that it's unjust or unfair.
And this is why when people say, I'm not paying my taxes, we don't phone the IRS and turn them in.
If somebody says, I raped someone, the silence would go around the table and people would feel like, well, that's bad or whatever, and report you and you're evil.
But when people say, you know, I smoked a joint or I paid my contractor under the table to do my work so I don't have to pay taxes or whatever, all of that kind of stuff, Then we are not horrified and shocked as people.
If somebody says, I always leave the restaurant without tipping the waiter, then, you know, we kind of think that that's probably a little bit on the sleazy side.
Like, I'm not sure that I'd feel real great about somebody like that.
Because, you know, it's kind of like an implicit contract.
If you don't want to tip, then don't go to restaurants, right?
That would sort of be my approach to the issue.
But that's sort of...
People don't mind when it's fair, right?
If the price is being reduced in some other manner, then people don't mind paying voluntarily.
So that would be the second thing.
Now, as far as DROs went, if I were setting up a DRO, I would first look at whether national defense was even required, right?
I mean, let's just be honest.
You don't need a whole lot of guards along the U.S.-Canadian border, say.
So the question, of course, is other nations, right, in the long run.
But the shorter question is, is national defense...
Even required. And my argument would be generally no.
In general, free countries don't attack free countries.
It's sort of a silly thing. It's so much more beneficial to trade.
Once anarchism starts to spread, war will become a distant, horrifying memory, much like the Spanish Inquisition and so on.
At least in those countries that are free.
But let's say you do need national defense.
You can keep it as cheap as possible.
And what I would do is make the case.
Make the case to people.
So, say that I am going to charge you less to protect your property if you give up $50 a year for national defense.
If you don't want to give up $50 a year for national defense, then here's how much it's going to cost for me to protect your property.
$200 or something like that.
But if you don't kick in, then it's going to cost $300 because I still need national defense.
I just can't get it from you, so I'll just get it from you from some other way.
That's one approach that DROs will take.
And it is something that has to be rational, right?
As a DRO, you want to charge as little as possible for national defense, and you want to make the case.
Like, it's got to be cheaper for you as a DRO to have national defense than to not have national defense.
And you have to make that case to people, right?
Yeah, I'm charging you 50 bucks a year for national defense, but boy, oh boy, would it ever be a whole lot more if we didn't have it, right?
Like, then I wouldn't protect you at all, because I couldn't defend you against foreign evaders.
And it wouldn't be 50 bucks. It'd probably be something like 10 bucks, right, or 5 bucks, or something like that.
So that would be my sort of statement.
Now, the other thing which you could do as a group of zeros who are all interested in protecting the property as a whole that you're responsible for is you all get together and you say, what's the cheapest conceivable way that we can insure national defense?
And that tick comes out to $10 a head.
Well, we're just going to make that a condition of insurance.
If you want to insure anything with us, you've got to pay $10 a year in national defense.
That's pretty clear, and that happens quite a bit in business.
If you want... This, you have to pay for that.
If you want the couch, you have to pay for delivery.
It's a real cost that if you don't pay for, we're not going to sell you the couch.
People say, well, I want it bundled.
It's like, yeah, but some people have trucks.
Why should you be subsidized by their prices when they could more cheaply pick it up themselves?
All of that kind of stuff. From that standpoint, DROs could very easily bundle the price of national defense into The price of simply being protected by DROs, if that makes sense.
But let's say that that didn't occur, right?
That didn't work for whatever reason.
Well, another thing that I might do as a DRO, and these are all just possibilities.
I mean, heavens knows I can't recreate all the possible decisions of brilliant people or maybe even one brilliant person in an economy.
But let's just say that I was not allowed to do that or that consumers didn't want that, right?
Then what I would do is I would also say that if you want me to To deal with your transactions.
Like if somebody uses a credit card and rips you off or somebody shoplifts, you want me to apply restitution for that in some manner as your DRO, which would be a pretty popular thing for people in retail particularly, right?
So protected against theft and shrinkage and bad checks, a bad credit card, counterfeit currency, whatever, right?
Whatever it is that you want to protect yourself against.
Then if you want all of that, then what I'm going to do is I'm also going to say that you have to submit to me one-tenth of one percent of your sales for national defense.
This, of course, could easily be bulked into the price of the goods, or if consumers didn't want that, right?
Let's say that there was some very unpopular DRO war.
I'm going to make some stuff up, right? Eurasia or East Asia is a forever war or something with Oceania.
And there's some unpopular war, then what will happen is people will no longer want to pay for the military, right?
So let's say it goes from one-tenth of one percent, or, I don't know, 50 bucks a year or five bucks a year or whatever, to like 200 bucks a year or one percent.
Then people are going to say, well, no, I don't want to pay that.
I don't agree with the war. I think that's way too much.
I don't agree with all this offensive stuff that's going on.
I mean, this won't happen without a state, but let's just pretend it did, right?
Take the worst case scenarios as we generally do.
Well, then what's going to happen is some stores are going to break out of that mode, right?
And they're going to say, we don't charge you defense.
It's optional, right?
And then you're at the cash register and you're buying your computer or something for a thousand bucks.
And somebody says, can I put...
Ten bucks on that extra for national defense.
And then you can say yes or you can say no.
And if you say no, then you're sort of like someone who's not tipping, right?
So if you get bad service, then you can choose not to tip, right?
Rather than complain, you don't have to do anything.
That's the beauty of tipping, right?
You don't have to sort of complain and know that nothing's ever going to be dealt with because the guy gets paid anyway, or at least they might get fired.
But it's not as direct.
The beauty of tipping is you don't have to lift a finger.
You just have to endure some withering social scorn, right?
Which is survivable, right?
In a way that taxation and gunfire is not so much.
So... That would be another approach that you could take, which would be, I think, a valid approach to dealing with the issue of defense is swelling and it's no longer going to be built in.
So the cash register says, can I put 1% of your purchase for national defense, yes or no?
And if you say no, then you pay $1,000.
And if you say yes, then you pay $1,010.
And if you say no, then you have to endure the scorn of the hot chicken...
Fatigues behind you that you might want to pick up later or the guy who's got the big support our troops t-shirt, you know, you have to endure their scorn and, you know, the withering contempt of everyone behind you who's twitchy and has been addicted to pornography since the day they were born.
So if you're willing to do that, right, if you're willing to sort of accept that social pressure, then you can act according to your conscience and there will be other places like the hippy-dippy granola stores where they simply won't charge it as a matter of principle.
We don't charge for national defense.
We don't do it. And maybe they set up their own DRO. I mean, there are lots of ways that this can be solved, which don't involve force.
But don't underestimate the power of social conformity, of social ostracism, and people's fear of disapproval.
I mean, it's what keeps families alive beyond all rational sense and pleasure.
And so, I would say don't underestimate that particular aspect of human nature and of reality that people have a tough time enduring, you know, withering social scorn, right?
So another thing that you could do, let's say that wasn't allowed, right?
We can take all these particular possibilities and options in the world without any particular challenges, because it's a free market, so the water will find its way from the higher ground to the sea in some way, right?
The great thing about the free market is if there's some stone in the way, it just goes around it, and if there's some rise, then it just spreads around that, and it will find, right, if there's a desire for a solution, To occur, the free market will find a way.
It's just like watching water go from a mountain to the sea, right?
It's just waterfalls and eddies and pools and currents and this and that.
So without a doubt, a solution is going to be fine.
So it doesn't matter how many obstacles we place in the way of a river other than a huge dam, right, which I guess is communism or fascism, totalitarianism.
Whatever you put in the way of the free market, the free market will solve, you know, with barely a blink, right?
So the other way, other thing that you could do is if You pay your 50 bucks a year or 20 bucks a year or whatever, then you get a sticker.
You get a sticker.
And that sticker has some neat cool hologram and you can put it on your house and you can put it on your car.
And that says, yay, I have paid for the defense of the realm.
And if that's the case, those people who don't have those things are going to be pretty conspicuous, right?
Maybe you get a tattoo on the back of the neck.
I don't know, right? But if you don't have that sticker, then you're going to be kind of conspicuous as a freeloader, right?
I mean, as somebody who is a free rider.
And you may feel fine about that, right?
You may not care, but the vast majority of people really, really do care about this kind of stuff, like in a very serious kind of way.
They really, really do care about social approval.
And so if you show up at your parents' place or you try and pick a girl up or a guy up in your car and you don't have this sticker, automatically you're outed as a freeloader.
DROs may also have in their contract that if you decide that paying for national defense is optional, but if you don't pay, they're going to put your name on a website.
And that might be the case, right?
It may also be the case that when you go for a job, people may say in a sort of patriotic, I like the DRO anarchist model kind of way, They might say, we only hire people who have this sticker.
We only hire people who pay their national defense bill.
Because if they don't pay it, then that says something to me about your chisely kind of nature.
Assuming that it's cheap and reasonable and valuable and so on, then you're kind of like a deadbeat freeloader, so I don't want to hire you because I'm getting a pretty strong sense about your approach to paying for things and your ability to work in a team environment, your ability to...
Unless the DRO thing, and again, this won't happen, but let's just say it did get kind of crazy, foreign wars and so on.
People didn't want to pay a grand a month for their Iraq bill or something.
Then they wouldn't pay for it, and then people would say, we don't hire people who pay for the national defense because we consider them to be brutal warmongers or whatever, right?
So the social tide is pretty important.
If it's cheap and reasonable, but you don't pay it, then I, for one, would have problems hiring someone into my company who didn't pay.
They obviously would be kind of Like cheap beyond words, right?
And not very team-based, let's say, right?
And that's no problem, right?
Nobody has to force me to give anybody a job.
But if it was cheap and reasonable and somebody didn't pay it, then they obviously were cheap and chisely or had bizarre ideas about war or defense or whatever, right?
Unless I happen to be of exactly the same opinion, in which case we could start our own company and don't hire people who do have the sticker or whatever, right?
So there's lots and lots and lots of ways that you can deal with the problem of the free rider...
Right? Without taking a gun out and shooting people, right?
There's lots of ways that you can solve these issues without gunning people down or throwing them into rape rooms and so on, right?
Because, of course, the major issue with the free rider, right?
And this is sort of the issue with most of anarchistic thought, right?
If the free rider is a terribly huge and devastating and horrible problem, then you absolutely can't have a government, right?
Government is the ultimate free rider, right?
We'll get paid regardless of how good a job it does.
And government can just take money.
And government can subsidize companies at the expense of the taxpayer.
And government can subsidize the military at the expense of the taxpayer.
And government has guns.
And so government is the ultimate free rider, right?
So if you believe that the free rider issue is huge and unsolvable or whatever, right, then for sure you don't want to wrap it in a defensive layer of guns and weaponry and nukes and scuds and all of these kinds of nuclear subs and aircraft carriers that the government has, right?
So, if the free rider is a significant issue for you, for sure it's going to be a whole lot worse if it's defended through violence, right?
I mean, that I think would be a fairly safe assumption.
If it's a bad issue voluntarily, it's not going to get a whole lot better by being coerced, right?
So, if you believe that the free rider issue is a big deal, then you really can't argue for the government.
Now, if you believe that the free rider issue is not a big deal and can be solved in the ways that I'm talking about here, then you also have to argue against the government, right?
It's sort of one of the... What are the fundamental things to get?
And this is applicable in just about every realm, or at least every realm that I've thought of with regards to the government.
Ooh, there's this big problem, blah, blah, blah, blah.
DROs will turn to...
Infighting in wars is like, okay, well then you sure as heck don't want a monopoly.
You want armed neutrality, right?
You want neutrality, peace through everybody having weapons, right?
If you believe that human beings are innately violent and want to dominate others, then for sure a monopoly of force with a legally disarmed population is going to be a whole lot worse than having a whole bunch of people who don't know the other person's arms and who have lots of, you know, like if human beings are naturally drawn to this warlord, dog-eat-dog, cannibalism, kill-the-children kind of world...
Then a state is the worst conceivable thing in that realm.
A monopoly of force, and they know that the other person is disarmed, and so the abuses are going to be never-ending, right?
So you have to argue against the government if you think that human beings are violent.
And if you think that human beings are not violent, then obviously you have to argue against the government, because that just turns human beings who are by nature non-violent, which is my particular opinion, into human beings who profit from the obfuscation of violence and the offloading of the costs of violence to other people in the surest way.
The surest way to increase something is subsidize it, right?
The surest way to decrease something is to tax it, right?
The government always subsidizes vice and taxes virtue, which is why the government always corrupts society more and more and more over time.
This is a fairly, I think, important thing that people just should really appreciate and be sensitive to the issues of social pressure, of conformity, of people's general and genuine inability or disability in the face of withering social scorn and that kind of stuff.
Because you can solve an enormous number of problems dynamically without the overhead and the violence of the state and the, frankly, the basic immorality of the state You can solve a lot of these issues without having to appeal to the guns and the violence and the ever-escalation of vice that occurs when you get to offload the cost of violence to taxpayers and hide the reality of violence from the morally sensitive and so on.
So my particular sort of area of philosophy in this area is to simply just continue to focus on this issue.
Continue, continue, continue.
To focus on this issue of solving problems in a non-violent manner, and I think we've got a pretty strong way of being able to say that we can deal with the problem of the free rider using peaceful free market optimizations in a very compelling way, and in a way that's very different from the problem that we cannot solve in terms of the free rider, which is the state, which is the ultimate free rider, and so legally protected from the consequences of its free riding and anonymous in the way that bureaucrats are.
Without consequences. So on.
So I think that's the way that I would approach it.
I wouldn't underestimate this power of social conformity.
And of course, if any anarcho-capitalists were ever to suggest tipping, we would be told to howl down as completely impractical people.
But to anyone who says that this kind of stuff is impractical, ask them how it is that tipping can conceivably work, and I think you'll get some interesting answers.
Ooh, look at that. 30 minutes on the dot.
I hope you're doing well. Thank you so much for listening, as always.
You know the spiel at the end, so I'm not going to repeat it here.
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