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Nov. 1, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:42
487 Anarchy 101
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Good afternoon, people.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. Ten to six.
My God, I almost had a full workday.
Shocking. I'm supposed to be an executive.
Anyway, so welcome to all the new people.
I must tell you, it's very, very encouraging.
I was actually going to take a bit of a break from podcasting, because I'm really enjoying this Will Durant History of Philosophy series, and it's given me good fodder for things to talk about in the future.
But... I wanted to just sort of give a shout-out in a very white and non-ghetto way to all of the new brethren and sistren who have come to join us on the Freedom Main Radio boards and also to let you know a pretty big leap last month.
We went from about 65,000, 75,000 downloads To almost 100,000 downloads of audio podcasts and combined with Google video and YouTube video and still some of the old feeds that are pointing at my wife's website, mississaugatherapy.com.
And just wanted to say welcome.
It's very heartening and exciting that this is becoming the thing that it is becoming.
And I'm very, very appreciative of people who are taking the risk to download and listen to the mad chat that we have going on here.
And I'm also hugely appreciative that people are sort of sending the word out, getting the word out, getting a number of people coming to Freedom Aid Radio from search sites, but also from mail sites.
So I know that the emails are going around.
I also see that we're getting people coming over from other boards.
Hugely appreciate that.
I know, I know that your time is enormously valuable.
I also know that there is an enormous number of people who are competing for your attention.
Yes, you, right there. Your attention.
And the fact that you choose to spend some of your precious earthly existence with me in your ears, in your eyes, and soon when the Freedom Aid Radio sniff test comes along, up your nose.
I just can't tell you how thrilled I am and how exciting it is and how much I appreciate the time that people put into listening to this seemingly near endless stream of philosophical chats.
Now, we've had a number of posts on the boards today which are to do with...
Some of the basic questions.
And, you know, I certainly don't mean by that that they're not intelligent questions because they're very intelligent questions and they're very obvious questions to ask and the answers are not obvious at all.
At least, I'd like to think that they're not obvious because...
I mean, it sure took me a while to get these questions answered, and I hope that I'm not the slowest turtle in the race.
So here, in a rapid format, is the quick refresher, the skinny on anarcho-capitalism broadcasting from Libertopia, the capital of Ancapistan.
So, this is the sort of quick question.
Okay, so no government, right?
Okay, no government, we got that.
We go with that sort of basic idea.
Why? Well, sort of two basic reasons.
One, practical, which is less important, and one, moral, which is more important, right?
The moral one is that violence is bad, right?
If you're going to have a moral rule that says violence is bad...
Which is the only possible logical moral rule that could exist, right?
Because a moral rule has to be like a negative.
It can't be a positive, right?
It can't be thou shalt be violent.
Because there's lots of people who can't be violent, who aren't violent.
You've got babies who are then evil because they're not beating up other babies.
So you can't have a moral rule called be violent.
So you have to have a moral rule called don't be violent.
And so moral rules in the negative are positive, sorry, make morality possible.
And then, given that you have don't be violent, then you have the right of self-defense, right, in the same way that we say don't stick a knife in people, but a surgeon can do it because it's, you know, for the sort of health of the person.
So if you're defending your health, your life, you can use self-defense, although I'm not a big fan of it.
It's certainly a logical possibility and within the realm of ethics.
So we have sort of a moral commandment which says, don't be violent.
And then we have a whole bunch of people running around who are part of this abstract entity called the government who say, give us your money, give us your time, give us your children for us to educate.
And if you don't do these things, then we're going to send a letter, right?
And we're going to send a letter and then we're going to come by and then we're going to give you a court date.
And if you don't make the court date, we're going to pick you up.
And each time the sentences are going to pile on and what you have to pay is going to pile on and the interest payments and the penalties are going to pile on.
And then if you eventually don't pay your taxes at some point or another, we're going to send some guys over with guns to come and pick you up and lock you away in a room where you're going to get raped pretty regularly for quite a long period of time.
And if you resist, then we're going to shoot you.
And if you pull out a gun and defend yourself as you would against any other home invaders, then we're going to shoot you.
And that's wrong. I mean, it doesn't matter what you call yourself.
Men in black, government, the heat, the fuzz, whatever you want to, the man, whatever you call yourself doesn't matter.
It's evil to shoot people, and it's also immoral to be able to impose a unilateral contract on someone, right?
So some doofus in Washington or Baghdad or London or Ottawa up here in Canada says, hey, I'm going to raise your taxes.
I'm going to give you a 5% tax increase.
Well, that's a unilateral contract.
It's not even a contract because it is unilateral, but why is it that some guy just gets to say, okay, give me 5% more of your money or I'm going to send some guys over to shoot you?
And that's called a protection racket.
And people basically pay their taxes because they don't want to go to jail.
And we make up all these moral reasons as to why we do it.
But fundamentally, people pay taxes because they don't want to get shot and raped.
So that's called a shakedown.
It's not any different when the mafia does it, and it's not any different when the government does it.
They're just people who are pointing guns at you and telling you to hand over your money.
So there's a whole lot of ethical reasons that I don't really have to get into here.
I'm sure you understand those things basically.
It's how you live your life.
You don't point guns at people when you want them to do things.
If you want your wife to pick up some milk for you when she's out at the grocery store, you don't say, and honey, if you don't, I'm going to shoot you.
We're going to lock you in the basement and send Bert the rapist down to have his way.
That's not how you run your life.
Anarchy is not a big mystery.
Anarchy is just you. Anarchy is your life.
You don't use violence to achieve your ends, right?
And so this is not a big mystery that we're talking about here.
We're just taking the principles that you live by and saying, well, what if they're moral and what if they're true?
And sort of in the second category that we're talking about, what if they're practical?
What if they're just basically practical things to do, right?
I certainly believe that what is practical is moral, and what is moral is practical.
I mean, there's practicality that doesn't involve morality, like how do you build a deck and stuff like that, but morality sort of has to be practical.
Practical is effective, logical, rational, scientific, and empirical ways to deal with reality, and morality certainly has to be those things.
Morality, of course, is optional, but that doesn't mean that it's subjective.
The scientific method is optional.
You can try and build a bridge by praying to the gods for the right amount of stress and the right materials to use, and your bridge probably won't stay up.
But the scientific method is optional.
Good nutrition is optional.
Healthy practices are optional.
Taking insulin when you have diabetes is optional, but the effects and the methodology by which we know those things are good Or useful.
It's not subjective. Scientific method, nutrition, health, and so on.
medicine and so on.
So on the practical side, you know, violence just kind of doesn't work.
I mean, it works for a small number of people, right?
And those people tend to be sort of the, you know, what we'd call the people in charge, right?
The politicians and bureaucrats and union leaders and soldiers and police and so on.
It works for those people, right?
They get to take a whole lot of money, they get a whole lot of power, and they get to order you around from the time that you are a very young child until the time that you die, at which point they take a death tax usually from you.
But you spend your whole life being ordered around by these people, and if you disobey, you get threatened and shot and imprisoned and subjected to all sorts of brutal torture at the hands of your fellow prisoners and so on.
And that's just not good.
Fundamentally, that's just not a good way to organize society.
Society should not be You know, like a porcupine, bristling with guns, pointing at everyone.
And the moment that you disobey the people in charge, they just start waving the guns around and screaming at you to do what they say, or they're going to throw you in jail.
That's a fundamentally soul-destroying and incredibly disrespectful way to treat other human beings.
Just wave guns in their faces and say, do it or we shoot.
That's a hellish way to treat people.
That's a murderous way to treat people.
And it's absolutely not required.
It's absolutely not required.
So that's sort of another aspect.
Now, it's not practical to have a government because governments just get bigger and bigger and bigger, tax more and more and more, and then eventually they just go bankrupt, right?
They corrupt the currency by printing way too much money to pay off their debts.
They get involved in foreign wars.
They throw millions of their own citizens in jail into these rape rooms and so on.
And they just grow and grow and grow because power corrupts and immorality always swells.
It's like a cancer. Violence and immorality, they just swell until there's this horrible bursting, right, when society collapses in pretty fundamental ways that are, you know, pretty scary.
And they can be... Things which result in some more freedom for some people for a certain amount of time, like the fall of the Soviet Empire, and they can be things which result in horrible amounts of tens of millions of people getting killed, as you have when the Weimar Republic collapsed, largely due to the financial crisis that was provoked by governments, both within the Weimar Republic and abroad, with the dropping of the gold standard and so on.
We don't have to get into all that technical crap.
It's available if you want it, free domain radio.
But... You end up with Nazism, right, when these sorts of things happen.
And there's so many empires throughout history.
They grow and they grow and they grow and then they collapse.
And ordinary people just get smashed along.
They get swept along and smashed up against the pier of things that just aren't absolutely necessary in any way, shape, or form.
So, there's no need for a government.
People are perfectly capable of running their own lives.
And of course, if you think they're not, that's fine.
I mean, if you think that people are just really bad at running their own lives and that they're too dumb to know what's good for them or too corrupt or evil to do anything right, no problem.
Then you're still on our side, right?
You're still on the side of no state.
There's no way that you can conceivably not be logically and morally on the side of no state.
I mean, and I hate to say that as a big blanket statement, but...
Absolutely. You really do have to recognize that you're on our side.
Unless you're currently pointing a gun at someone right now, you're absolutely on our side.
Because if you say, well, all these people are too bad or people are too stupid to know what's good for them and they need to be ordered around by other people...
Well, you can't just sort of put this imaginary line down the middle of humanity and define the people in power as sort of being good people and the people that they're ruling being bad, stupid, corrupt, selfish, lazy people who need to be told what to do.
Because if people as a whole are sort of stupid, lazy, and corrupt, then the leaders are going to be that way too.
And having enormous amounts of military and financial and legal power over everyone else is not exactly going to improve their moral character.
So if people are bad in general, you can't have a government because the only way you're then going to have any kind of peace is when you have a sort of armed neutrality, right?
So if power is decentralized, if there's no central structure like the state, which has a monopoly on the police, the law courts, the military, and the jails, and so on, and can pass whatever the hell laws it wants and force people to do whatever the hell it wants, If you don't have that structure, then it's like everyone has a gun, but nobody has a bomb.
Nobody will then initiate force against you because they don't know who's got a gun.
They don't know what they're going to do. If people are just sort of bad and evil and nasty and selfish, the last thing that you'd want...
Is a particular social structure that gives people a monopoly of power over others.
Because the worst of the bad people will be drawn to master, become masters in that structure and become sort of political leaders and so on, and then force everyone else to do what they want.
So if people are bad, you can't have a state.
It's like a magnet for the corrupt, which then ends up just destroying everything.
If people are generally good, then you don't need a state, right?
Yeah, there'll be some bad people, but so what, right?
Because we recognize the existence of bad people, you can't have a state, because the state is the first place where these people are going to go, right?
There's all this Superman nonsense about Lex Luthor, you know, hijacks rockets and gets his own nukes and throws crystals into the ocean.
It's all nonsense, right? Lex Luthor would go, these evil geniuses go to the state, right?
That's where they go to make their money.
It's where they go to have power and control over others.
They don't do anything silly, these super-billions, right?
They just go to the government, right?
Because they get to run budgets of billions of dollars and order people around, tell them what to do.
And that's where bad people congregate is in the state, right?
So whether you think people are mostly good or people are mostly bad, you're absolutely on our side, right?
You're absolutely with us, 110%.
The only way that you can kind of Not to be with us 110%, is 98%, is you can say, okay, well, most people are bad, but there are a few people who are good, and they should be the ones in charge.
The philosopher kings of the sort of platonic model.
That's fine. It's a perfectly valid thesis to put forward, but then, of course, you have to recognize that democracy is a really bad idea.
In fact, democracy would be a complete evil.
If most people are evil, but only a few people are good, Then how on earth is it that you're going to get those few good people in power?
Because if you create a state when most people are bad and only a few people are good, You know, the good people are then going to be like a minnow in a shark attack situation.
They're not going to have much luck.
It's going to be like finding Nemo in a blender.
So that's not even remotely possible.
If there's only a few good people, there's no way in hell of ever figuring out how to get those people to be in charge.
And, of course, the bad people then won't want to obey them.
The bad people won't want to obey the good people because the good people will be saying to them, don't be bad.
And then, of course, who is it who is going to enforce the good people who are in the minority who are magically the leaders?
How are they going to enforce stuff?
They're going to need military. They're going to need police.
They're going to need courts. And so is it all the good people are political leaders and the enforcers, like the police and the military and so on?
Nonsense, right? I mean, if you've got people who want to go around waving guns at other people's faces because some political leader tells them to, that's not a good person, right?
So given that the majority of the police and the military are going to be bad people in that situation, for sure, right, they're just going to have a coup, get rid of the good people, take over as an evil dictator state, and so on, right?
So there's simply no possible logical way, and you can work this any which way you want it, there's simply no logical possible way that a state can ever work in the long run.
Absolutely impossible. And, you know, email me and throw any challenge you want at me.
I absolutely, completely and totally guarantee you that you will never be able to find a sustainable scenario wherein a minority of people have absolute power or near absolute power or the capacity for great power disparities over their fellow man.
Never, ever will it remain a stable situation.
And this is not...
Theoretical is just a fact.
Look in history. Look in history.
There's absolutely no state that has ever remained the same size.
States always grow. You can see this going on in the current world right now.
States always grow until they collapse and money is transferred in a horrible kind of way.
They corrupt the currency. They wage wars.
They come up with massive spending programs internally, which are basically just huge cash transfers from the middle class to the politically connected.
And they just pass all these laws, the war on drugs, they get a hold of the children, they put them through these horrible indoctrination camps known as public schools, and they just treat the citizens with about the same respect that a farmer treats citizens.
His livestock, right? Yeah, they might want to keep you vaguely healthy, they might want to keep you working, and the farmer doesn't take so much milk that the cow falls over and dies, right?
He gives it the chance to replenish itself, which is where the limits of taxation currently sitting.
But national debts, wars, throwing more and more people into jail, threatening more and more people, getting larger and larger in terms of power relative to gross domestic product, In the U.S., they pass like 100,000 new regulations every single year.
No laws ever get taken off the books.
More laws just get piled on and on.
People have no idea what's legal or illegal anymore.
You and I have no clue what's legal or not.
People could come to my house tomorrow and say, sir, you've broken a law.
I'd be like, hell if I know.
You tell me. You tell me.
So this is the sort of situation that you get because there's no logical way that you can give a minority of people massive amounts of power and not have that become an unstable, violent, and ever-growing and ever-corrupting situation.
Never has it ever happened in history that a government has remained small.
It is a constant lever.
Because of the power disparity, it just draws corrupt and power-hungry people to it.
And basically what happens is they tax more, which means that they can buy more enforcers and pay off more of their friends.
And then because there's more money in the government, more people are drawn to the government, which then means that more people have to be paid off by the government, which means that more people get drawn to the government.
The government, just think of it like you throw a ripple into a pond, right?
And that's the government. That's the foundation of a government, and its power just grows and grows and grows until it over-swamps the pond completely.
So that's the situation that we're working with.
In reality, there's not theory.
Just look at the sort of history of the world.
You can never find states that remain stable in size.
They're always growing. They're always growing.
They're always growing. And then they end up destroying their host societies.
Well, that's not necessary. We're good to go.
But, of course, there are certain things that are important in a free society or in any kind of society.
You want to have some sort of sanction against violence or some sort of punishment against the violent.
You want to have some sort of ability to insure yourself against risks.
You want to have some sort of ability for mutual defense against potential invaders, although within a generation or two of a free society, those won't be an issue anymore than you worry about your neighboring town coming and invading you.
And also, you want some way to have a sanction or a punishment against those who willfully enter into contracts and then break those contracts and so on.
And none of this is particularly complicated.
You also want some environmental protections.
You want clean air. You want clean water.
All these kinds of things. Right now, all of these things are absolutely impossible with a state.
And that's the thing you've got to sort of understand if you want to get your head around this.
I'm not saying you've got to agree with it, but at least you've got to understand that there's no evidence whatsoever that a state can ever provide these things.
And there's every evidence that it does not, that it provides the exact opposite of these things, right?
If you have a dispute with someone over a contract, unless it's like a, I don't know, a million dollar contract or more, there's no point going to the state.
There's no point going to the state whatsoever.
It's going to take you months, it's going to cost you a lot of money, you're going to have to have a lawyer, it's going to be a problem.
So, as far as contract enforcement goes, except for the very rich companies and those who have access to lawyers, which is of course how it's designed to keep us poor people away from any sort of power and influence, You're toast.
You've got no chance of getting what you want out of the state.
If you think that the state is interested in protecting your property, no problem.
You can just experiment with this.
Go down to your local cop shop and say, gentlemen, I'm getting a big screen TV delivered on Thursday.
I'd really like it if you'd come down.
I'm a taxpayer. Come on down and protect my big screen TV delivery just to make sure that nobody comes and steals it.
They'll just... They'll just come and laugh at you, right?
I'm getting a big shipment.
You guys are supposed to help protect my property.
I want you to come down and actually protect my property.
They'd say, damn it, man, we're not a security guard group, so no luck.
And, of course, if you've ever filed any complaint with the police about a stolen this or that, you realize that it's very nice that you choose to fatten their filing cabinets, but that's really, in general, the most effect that you're going to get.
So the government does not provide protection in this manner at all.
State schools are the most violent.
Except for prisons and wars, state schools are pretty violent.
They're one of the most violent institutions around.
States simply don't protect anyone's property.
And, of course, the fact that You know, just sort of popping into my mind, there's a bunch of people in the States that keep raising their property taxes, right?
And people on a fixed income, it's not like they can sell their houses to pay their property taxes.
That's, you know, sort of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
And so they can't afford the increase.
In property taxes, so they end up having to go to work for the government for free in a kind of slavery situation, or they can sell their house and move to a smaller house or a condo in the hopes that the increased property tax is there.
So no protection of your property there.
In fact, there's an increasing predation upon your property when you think about both income taxes in terms of your salary and property taxes in terms of your house and sales taxes in terms of your consumption and gasoline taxes in terms of your driving and phone taxes.
I mean, it just goes on and on and on.
This is not a group of people interested in protecting your property.
This is a group of people interested in taking your property with force.
Government doesn't protect your property.
Government doesn't protect your person.
You've got really bad government schools that lead people to be unprepared for any kind of productive economic life.
These sort of welfare ghetto hells where people have no future.
You have a family breakdown caused by the introduction of the welfare state.
You have increased amounts of poverty.
People were getting out of poverty up until the introduction of the welfare state in the 60s under LBJ, particularly in North America.
Poverty was dropping by about 1% a year, and then they put the welfare state in, and boom, stops, right?
It stops. Everything gets arrested.
People stop getting out of poverty.
Perfectly predictable, right? You're now taxing labor, and you're subsidizing sloth.
You're taxing productivity and subsidizing consumption.
Anything you tax will diminish, and everything you subsidize will increase.
So, of course, taxing jobs is going to get rid of people who want to have jobs, and subsidizing...
Not having a job is going to increase that.
Statistics fully bear that out.
Perfectly predictable and perfectly proven that the state got rid of people.
I mean, poverty would be totally done by now.
We would have no, other than sort of voluntary people, artists and people who want to sort of chase their dream and live in a garret or whatever.
Poverty would be almost completely eliminated by now.
We'd have a world. It would have been more than a decade ago that this would likely have occurred, but we could be living in a world without any real functional poverty.
What a paradise. What a paradise that would be.
And that wouldn't even need a stateless society.
Well, it needs no welfare state, right?
Now, of course, we're stuck with this big mess.
It's not going to be the easiest thing to turn around, but we've got to at least start with the facts.
Government doesn't get rid of poverty.
Government doesn't educate children.
Government doesn't protect your property.
Government doesn't protect your personhood.
Doesn't protect you from violence.
The government doesn't protect you from 9-11.
The government doesn't protect you from Katrina.
The government doesn't protect you from financial manipulations in the stock market.
The government doesn't make companies ever be honest, not cook their books.
The government cooks its books itself.
The government doesn't protect your savings because it's always printing more money.
Government doesn't protect your financial security because it keeps running the entire country into massive debts.
Government doesn't protect your security because it has brutal foreign policies that get governments overthrown, that create endless amounts of enemies around the world and terrorists who want to come and kill you.
Government doesn't protect your personhood because it'll suddenly make innocuous things like smoke and drugs illegal and throw you in jail and threaten you with this, that and the other if you don't comply.
The government doesn't protect your personhood because Now that you have all of these laws where you don't even have to have anyone complaining, like drugs and prostitution and gambling, nobody's complaining except the government, and so what they can do is they can just do a sting operation.
They can come search your car, and they can say, oh, look what I found, and they plant a joint, and then you're toast, you've got to turn other people over, you've got to make up...
Stuff to implicate other people.
The government doesn't protect you.
They can seize your property because of eminent domain.
They can just say, well, we want to redevelop this because I'm getting bribed by some big developer.
So sucks to be you. You're out of your house.
They can jack up taxes to the point where you can't survive anymore.
And this is the kind of predation.
And so all around us, we don't really see it.
But this is the kind of predation that we live in.
Constant uncertainty. Constant fear.
Constant insecurity about the future.
What's going to happen? Constant fear that kids are going to go to schools and get taught the most ridiculous nonsense or not get taught at all or be exposed to physical danger.
Constant fear. Constant threat.
And the future is only going to get worse, right?
So, there's a big problem being solved here.
And we're not even counting the other big stuff that governments get into.
Governments killed 260 million people last century, murdered outright, called democide.
And this is not even counting wars.
It's just, you know, dragging you out of your house, throwing you into a black maria, driving you off somewhere, shooting you, leaving you in a heap, or throwing you in jail, or collectivizing the farmlands.
You all starve to death. Whatever it is, governments just go around killing people.
I mean, they're a fundamental curse.
They don't protect the environment. Governments don't protect the environment.
Look what the hell's been going on. But if global warming is true, governments sure as hell aren't the solution.
They've been working on this for 20 years.
Not a goddamn thing's happened except things have gotten worse according to their own measurements.
Governments don't protect your natural resources.
Governments don't...
The most polluted lands on the planet are your government's lands.
I absolutely guarantee it.
Go and have a look at Russia and the most environmental laws on the books of any country in history.
It was a complete shit heap when the communists finally were let down.
Government doesn't protect property because nobody in government is responsible for any property.
Do you go out and get an oil change in your rental car?
Of course not. You're just temporarily borrowing it.
And that's the true of every resource that the government touches.
Nobody is interested in maintaining the long-term value of government property, so it always gets destroyed.
Private companies replant trees when they log them.
Companies that end up buying logging rights from the governments just strip the land bare and take off after bribing the government officials.
The governments can't protect you from these things because they're self-interested, hierarchical, hegemonic, violent gangs, thieves.
They're not interested. There's no incentive for them whatsoever to come and help you.
So, getting rid of that illusion is absolutely essential.
If you really want to take a journey towards some truth in the world, to some sort of honest evaluation of what really goes on, you just need to look at the facts.
There's logic behind it, there's empiricism, there's evidence, there's facts, there's statistics.
Government can't protect you. Government will never be able to do what it says it's going to do.
You point to me, any government program that has even remotely achieved its ends, any government program that has delivered on its promises, never going to happen, my friends, not now, not ever.
It's absolutely an illusion that we need to get rid of.
Like thinking that slavery was good or the women were lesser or the children were just toys or slaves.
I mean, this is just basic illusions that we have to get rid of as a species, right?
The illusion that government is ever going to provide anything other than Pillaging and the corruptive temptations of power and exaggerated debts and deficits and wars and terrorizing the population.
That's all they do. That's all they do.
And if you have any doubts, just try disobeying your government and see what happens.
You don't need to listen to me.
Go do an experiment, but just in your mind, because we need all the listeners we can get here, so don't actually go out and do it, because I don't want to prove the point by getting you stuck in jail.
But you understand. When you disobey the government, they're going to throw you in jail.
So violence ain't going to work. Government's never going to protect you for what you want, so what are the alternatives?
Well, given that we do want things like property protection and sanctions against people who use violence, and we want protection of our contracts and so on, well, this stuff can all be provided.
People provide these things.
There's no such thing as a government. It's just people who provide these things.
So I've sort of kicked around with an idea for a while called Dispute Resolution Organizations, DROs.
They're kind of like a cross between semi-private police forces and insurance agencies, and the way they basically work is this.
If you and I sit down and we decide you're going to deliver me 100 widgets and I'm going to pay you $1,000, then we both sign a contract saying that this is what we're going to do.
We put some parameters around it, like maybe you get a couple of days wiggle room and I can negotiate the price by 5%.
But if we blow past each one of our wiggle room areas and we break the contract, then we have agreed to a third party who's going to resolve the dispute for us with penalties that are set up ahead of time.
And then we go to that third party who says, you've got to pay this guy 500 bucks because you didn't take his widgets or whatever.
And then you either do it or you don't, right?
And if you don't do it, then the next person who wants to get involved in a contract with you is going to say, oh, you just stiffed the last guy you had on a contract with, so I don't really want to do business with you.
Or if I do, there's going to be a premium you're going to have to pay.
And of course, the DRO, since it's my representative, we could have different ones.
We could have a third party we both agreed on.
This dispute resolution organization is going to pay me the damages if they can't get them from you.
And then they're going to simply put you a big black mark in Euro saying, dude, this is not a good thing that you did.
You didn't ship the goods you intended to and therefore you're a risky guy to do business with.
That's going to harm your economic interests.
So you're not going to just disobey whatever it is that they say.
This is how eBay works. We're not talking anything theoretical.
This is just, you know, eBay is one of the largest employers in the world, if you think about it.
300,000, 350,000 people all working for eBay.
There's no government in eBay.
There's no court. It's international.
It's purely anarchic.
And it works absolutely beautifully.
So this can all work perfectly well.
This can work in terms of things like air pollution.
When you buy a house, of course, you want to have clean air so that your children aren't falling over, richen up their lungs.
And so you sign up with your neighborhood and say, okay, well, we're going to pay, you know, five bucks a month to a bunch of people who are going to guarantee to a DRO is going to guarantee we get clean air.
So the DRO is going to go out there and measure the air quality.
And if somebody wants to build a polluting plant right up the street from where you are, right now all they do is they'll bribe the government, but what they'll do in the DRO world is the DRO will simply not let that happen.
They'll buy these people out, they'll prevent it from happening, they'll pay them to relocate, they can do whatever they want, because if the air quality dips below a certain area, Then the DRO is going to have to pay us a whole bunch of money to move, right?
So it's going to be able to spend up to the amount of money it's going to have to pay to each of us in order to prevent our air quality from getting bad.
It's all easy-peasy, nice and simple.
Works beautifully in other areas.
And so there's no reason to worry about that.
International DROs, again, same thing.
No problem whatsoever. You're going to have cross-referential contracts between these DROs.
Again, nothing theoretical.
We're not making up Hobbit Town here.
We're talking about real-world stuff like the fact that cell phone companies all have this kind of stuff already.
ISPs have it, where they will simply charge a little bit extra to carry each other's signal.
And, you know, it's called coopetition.
It's a well-known thing in economics.
You are cooperating in a competitive manner.
So, again, we're not making anything up here.
There's no pie in the sky.
This is not utopia. This is how things actually work in the real world now.
It's just giving up the fantasy that massive aggregations of violent power and bombers and B-52 and atom bombs is ever going to make the world a better place.
Giving up on that nonsense.
And the question often comes up, well, okay, so this DRO is going to be spying on you all the time and so on.
And what about somebody goes and rapes someone and so on?
Yeah, well, that's fine. If somebody goes and rapes someone, then the DRO is going to have a hearing.
If the guy doesn't show up, then the DRO is just going to...
It's going to say to everyone, sorry, you can't go sell to this guy anymore.
It's going to say to the electricity provider, you can't have power to this guy's house.
It's going to say to the local grocery stores, don't deliver food to this guy and don't let him in your store.
Don't take his credit card. Don't take his what?
Just shut people right out of society.
They're going to have to leave town or they're going to have to show up and then they're going to go and be put to work by the DRO in order to pay off whatever debt is arranged, whatever sort of payment schedule will be arranged for the things that they've done that is bad.
And, yeah, I know, I know.
Oh, people feel this is so fascistic and so on.
Yeah, that's fine, okay?
Because DROs are going to not want to do this arbitrarily.
DROs are not going to want to screw around with people this way because if a DRO gets a bad reputation, its customers are all going to leave it.
You have power over this.
People are so afraid of groups abusing their power, and they're so afraid of this DRO model, I can't for the life of me imagine why they feel any safer with a monopolistic government with B-52s and nuclear subs and SCUDs and biological weapons.
I can't feel why. People feel any safer with an organization that knuckles them under and forces them to obey its every whim versus a group of insurance companies that they can come to and leave at any given time.
I don't know why people feel more afraid of DROs than they do of the government.
I think that they just don't like the idea that freedom is so close we can almost taste it.
We just have to change our minds a little.
The other question that also comes up, of course, is, well, why wouldn't there just be a DRO that gets all these guns and weapons and then ends up taking over and becomes another state and so on?
Well, you know, are you really afraid of this with Walmart?
Are you really afraid that Walmart's got sort of secret warehouses full of black helicopters and black ops and SWAT teams are ready to go and blow up the Kmart?
I mean, this is not how the real world works, people.
There's nothing to be afraid of here.
And if you are afraid of it, you know, you can be afraid of whatever you want, right?
You can be afraid of spiders, if you like, and you can be afraid of getting hit by lightning and UFOs abducting you and doing strange things with probes.
It's up to you. But if you are afraid of it, all you do is you, in your DRO, you say, you know what, I'm going to sign up with you.
I'm not going to sign up with you guys unless you do the following.
Unless you allow another DRO. To come by your warehouses and make sure that you're not stockpiling all these weapons, right?
So they have to submit to these.
I'm not a black ops evil DRO about to take over and become a substitute government.
They have to submit to these audits, right?
DROs are going to submit to financial audits.
There's no big problem with that.
And they're also going to submit to audits of don't become another state, right?
So if you're worried about these things, then that's fine.
You can then have a DRO. That is going to submit to all of these kinds of things to ensure that they're going to quell your fears that this group of insurance people are going to rip off their suit and ties and have these black, evil, anti-kryptonite superhero costumes underneath and end up becoming another government.
So that's really not going to be an issue.
Sure, DROs are going to get big because there's going to be efficiencies in scale, but the moment that people get nervous about a DRO getting too big, they'll just switch to another DRO. It's no big deal, right?
It's no big problem. Are you sort of afraid that Microsoft is going to take over your life and put you in some sort of coding gulag out there in the Peloponnesian islands and force you to crank out C code all day?
No, of course not. It's not what these businesses do, right?
For that, you need a government. So there's no possibility whatsoever that DROs are going to sort of turn into another government because there are going to be all these other DROs that are going to avoid that too.
Let's just say one big DRO, magical weird things happen and a DRO does start stockpiling weapons and start training an army, but the other DROs are going to very quickly deal with that, right?
They're going to get their own armies or whatever, or they're going to sort of pay the people not to go and join that DRO's army.
There are tons and tons of proactive and positive ways that even if one DRO did decide to become some big monster government, all the other DROs would just leap into action and deal with it in a proactive and positive way.
The first thing I'd do if I was a competitive DRO is I'd start putting stuff out there saying, hey, you know, these guys are training an army.
You might not want to be their customer anymore, right?
So actually, you wouldn't need to train your own army.
That would be a ridiculous waste of resources.
You'd just publicize it and then everyone would go, holy crap, this DRO wants to become another government.
I'm pulling my contract with them and suddenly they're out of money and they're toast.
So, you know, don't worry about it.
I mean, there's things to worry about in life.
You know, like a war, a terrorist attack provoked by your government's foreign policy, getting thrown in jail for some stupid innocuous thing like smoking a joint, having stuff planted on you by a cop, your taxes going up.
You know, there's stuff really to worry about, and then there's whether and the possibility some insurance company's going to try and turn its accountants into ninja statist, coup d'etat, you know, mercenaries.
I don't really think that's anything to worry about.
I understand the fear, but, you know, a moment's thought dismisses it pretty quickly.
All right, the last thing. Ooh, we're going quickly now.
I wanted to get all of this done in one, so I haven't really taken a breath in about 20 minutes.
Oh, God, I'm ready to get over here.
The last thing, just before I get home, we're going to talk about national defense.
Right, so let's just say there's a country, who knows what the hell they'll be called in a free society without governments, but let's just say you've got a country with national defense, you want to defend yourself.
New problem, what do you need to defend yourself?
You need one nuke. Maybe two, right?
It's really no big problem.
You've got nuclear power, you don't get attacked.
I mean, that's simple. Nobody ever attacks a country that has a nuclear weapon, right?
Why do you think North Korea did what it did, right?
Because it saw the smoking crater left by Saddam Hussein's distinct absence of weapons of mass destruction.
And so, pretty simple.
The DROs all get together.
You chip in about a nickel.
They all go and buy a couple of nukes.
And you're totally set from...
From external invasion, no problem whatsoever.
But of course, without a state, you can't get an army.
Armies are fundamentally enormously unproductive, incredibly destructive of human resources, potential and capital.
And so you simply can't have war without a state.
Unless you can force the taxpayers to pay for war, nobody's ever going to profit from it.
So... When you have a stateless world, there's no such thing as war.
This is another big thing that we want to kind of get.
We're not talking about a neutral thing here.
It's not like this would just be a little bit better.
We're talking about the end of war, the end of mass starvation, the end of poverty, the end of ignorance.
All these things are possible in the free market and absolutely impossible to be solved with the state.
In fact, the state provokes them and makes them worse.
So... When we're talking about national defense, totally simple, right?
If you feel like there's some risk, some danger, the DROs are all going to circle together and deal with whatever needs to be dealt with, however they would deal with it in a productive and positive way.
It wouldn't be about drafting a whole bunch of, or paying a whole bunch of 20-year-olds to go over and blow stuff up while a bunch of companies profit on it at the taxpayer's expense.
Using fiat money with future debts in the trillions of dollars.
No, it would be something more proactive.
They would simply hire a mercenary to go kill whoever was threatening to invade.
They would pay rewards for anybody who would do it.
Anything could be dealt with in this manner.
But fundamentally, the most important thing is that when you have no states in the world, you have no such thing as war.
And the best way to deal with this kind of stuff, you know, a couple of nukes and you're set.
National Defense is about the easiest thing in the world to deal with.
So I hope that this has been helpful.
I appreciate you sitting there through as I chewed through this stuff at an enormously rapid pace.
I'm going to go and stop now and rest my mouth.
Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you soon.
Look forward to your donations. Come by the website, freedomainradio.com.
Have a look at the board. Really appreciate it.
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