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Nov. 26, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:57:14

529 Call In Show Nov 26 2006 (Sorry, last 20 minutes are cut off...)

Prostitution and private property

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	Hello, everybody. It's Estefan and Christina on Sunday, November 26, 2006.
	A few scant minutes after 4 o'clock on Thanksgiving Sunday.
	I got it messed up last week.
	I thought last week was Thanksgiving because in Canada it's different, though in Canada it wasn't Thanksgiving last week either, so I'm not sure that I have a really good excuse in any way, shape, or form.
	But thank you so much for joining us.
	If you are taking time away from your family, well, I can't blame you, but I'm glad that you're with us.
	So we'll start with a brief chat today, which will have some relevance to those who've been floating around on the boards this week and have seen.
	on the boards, we had a gentleman who I'll call Sid join us this week, week and I did a podcast on a story that he posted about his belief that his sister was kind of like a communist or a socialist because he'd stolen her Easter candy and now she had this obsession with making it all equal and he had a theory, which I thought was quite good
	actually, about how people can have their, the people's political beliefs can be heavily conditioned by their early childhood experiences, which of course I would not hesitate to agree with for a moment.
	So, but he didn't like the podcast.
	He told me that I'd got them all wrong, because in the podcast I said that my major concern was with his cruelty towards his sister when he was a child.
	And he told me that I'd gotten it all wrong, and I think three or four times I asked him if he would tell me what I'd gotten wrong.
	I offered him a chance to rebut.
	I offered to read any corrections that he had for me on air, but he didn't want to, he just wanted to keep telling me that I was wrong, rather than give me any sort of instruction in how I was wrong.
	So, And after a certain amount of back and forth and some veiled insults and some sort of, as one poster put it, a slap and a kiss kind of thing where he said, you know, basically, Steph, you're working out your own childhood issues with your brother, but you're the greatest guy, most amazing podcaster and a real hero.
	So that all gets very confusing.
	So... So I sort of gave up on the conversation at that point because when somebody keeps telling you that you're wrong, which is not an uncommon thing when you put forward philosophical, moral, or theological ideas, and particularly when you talk about people's families with all the caveats that I certainly gave up on the conversation and suggested to other people that he may not be a good person to engage with because there was a lot of passive aggression,
	a lot of splitting, a lot of problematic interactions, and of course there's no way to get anywhere if somebody disagrees with you but doesn't tell you.
	What the nature of that disagreement is.
	It's sort of... It's just designed to appeal to your insecurities, rather than somebody just says...
	Like, I get these emails fairly consistently where people say, Oh, Steph, you're so wrong about everything.
	And I just...
	You know, the size of your wrongness and the degree of your wrongness is so vast that I don't even know where to begin cataloging it.
	Just trust me, Steph, you're totally wrong about everything.
	And, of course, I respectfully ask them, if I can, for correction, because if somebody has found out that I'm wrong about something fundamental, like God or, you know, the state or ethics or family or psychology or love or economics, the things that we talk about, if somebody Has found an error in my thinking.
	I will kiss the hem of their garment if they tell me where I've gone wrong and how to, you know, maybe they don't even have to tell me how to correct it, but I absolutely request and almost require of someone that if they tell me that I'm, you know, fundamentally wrong about things as important as ethics and so on, family relations, That they tell me where I'm wrong.
	Because just telling someone that they're wrong without actually helping them out by correcting their error is just kind of like aggressive.
	It's passive-aggressive. Is that the right term, sweetie?
	Passive? Passive-aggressive, right.
	And it's really just designed to appeal to your insecurities.
	So you say, oh, well, I guess I'm wrong.
	I don't know why, but this person seems to think so, so I guess I am wrong.
	I am wrong and so on.
	So anyway, so I went down the road of not responding to this gentleman after sort of pointing out that he was just telling me that I was wrong without sort of telling me how and so on.
	And things escalated.
	This guy posted a whole bunch of stuff and things escalated fairly quickly to the point where he said that, you know, he said basically, what should I do?
	Because my neighbor He has these parties where he has hookers and blow.
	And I believe that the blow that he was talking about was not of the oral variety, but of the powder keg variety.
	And he said, what should I do?
	And I said, well, there's not much you can do because the government doesn't enforce private property in the realm of sort of sound standards very easily, and there's public roads and so on.
	I would suggest moving, and I wouldn't suggest confronting a neighbor who has endless loud music parties with hookers and cocaine, because that would be an indication that this person who has this tendency to do this kind of partying is a pretty disturbed individual.
	And then, of course, a certain number of people jumped all over me for that statement, because, of course, if I say that somebody who has Drugs and hookers parties is a disturbed individual, then obviously I'm square and mean and judgmental and so on.
	And so, you know, this guy, Sid, not only did he sort of post this stuff and then put a whole load of smokescreen out about his response to me, but then post other stuff, which then causes more inflammatory stuff.
	And then... Joy of joys, he decides to post to me, because there's a section out there for if you want me to do a podcast, I always really appreciate suggestions from listeners.
	And if they fit into the general stuff that I'm developing over the next month or two, then I'm more than happy to hear it.
	So he put a podcast in there, a suggestion in, basically, which was, you know, Steph, I would like to suggest that you do a podcast on taking the gun in the room away from your own head and, you know, quitting your obsession to save the world and And, you know, learn some meditation and so on.
	And that he would pay me to do that podcast, right?
	So this is highly insulting, of course, right?
	And so I said, look, I really don't appreciate your passive aggression.
	And then he says, no, no, no, it was a genuine desire to help you when, of course, I hadn't asked for his help.
	This is a gentleman who'd been homeless for a while, so I try not to take an enormous number of life lessons from people who have this kind of background unless they've gone through a fair amount of therapy and so on, which this gentleman hasn't, so...
	Or at least he's never mentioned it.
	So basically, I had to say, look, if you continue to disrupt all this stuff, if you continue to sort of insult me and then do passive-aggressive nonsense, then I'm going to have to ban you, which, of course, then produced a flurry of responses that I'm a mean guy for, you know, I think this is the board's been running for, I don't know, April, I think it was.
	Was it April? Yeah. Yeah.
	I think it was April of this year.
	So it's been running for about nine months.
	No, eight months. It's been running for about eight months, and in this entire span of time, with hundreds upon hundreds of listeners and many, many more times that of guests who've come in, I've banned precisely one person, right?
	I mean, that's sort of been it.
	And so I'm banning another person, and this is causing some people to now decry that I'm a sort of petty dictator and so on.
	And I certainly understand all of that.
	I mean, I understand that it looks kind of mean to ban a guy.
	And there is this general pattern that you may see in your life with people where what they'll do is they'll come up and they'll put forward sort of veiled insults to you, right?
	If somebody wants to come and correct me, you know, fantastic.
	That was me kissing the garment again.
	I think that's wonderful.
	I'm perfectly happy to do that.
	I have learned an enormous amount from people who've come on the boards and corrected me.
	But you really have to watch out for people who aren't interested in helping you, but rather interested in sort of insulting you and tearing you down because of their own histories and issues and history.
	And so one of the things that you have to watch out for is this sort of pattern, right?
	The no-win situation. So the no-win situation is when somebody basically kind of insults you in a way, right?
	Says, you know, when people post to me or write to me and they say, oh, Steph, you're just passing judgments, snap judgments, you're swallowing your own Kool-Aid, you're drinking your own propaganda pill, you've become a cult leader and this and that, right?
	When people post that kind of stuff, Then that's highly insulting, right?
	It's highly, highly insulting.
	And I don't take the Christian approach that you try and rise above those who insult you.
	I think that you should extend a hand if somebody has insulted you and get them to understand because maybe they've completely inadvertently insulted you, right?
	So it's not usually worth flying off the handle right away.
	But if somebody does put something forward, it's highly insulting.
	It's usually not an accident, but they may be sort of unconscious of their own motivation, so I think it's usually worthwhile saying, well, here, what you did is highly insulting, and here's why.
	And then if they then deny it or they switch the topic or they insult you in a different way, then to me it's a state of nature.
	All bets are off. I don't feel any need to continue to act and interact with someone in a civil manner if they're insulting.
	Because what happens is that somebody will insult you in some manner and then when you point out that what they've done is insulting, They'll sort of deny it or do this or that.
	And then, when you refuse to interact with them after that, they will then condemn you or criticize you for being dictatorial, for not respecting their free speech, for being culty, for not respecting differences, for not being able to handle differences of opinion, right? And so, this is a pretty common pattern.
	We've gone through this a number of times on this show, and certainly it happens...
	Not just on this show, and it happens, I think, a lot more aggressively outside of this show, but this is something that if you get involved in talking to people about philosophy and economics, and particularly psychology and family issues, that you will end up with this problem where people will kind of slam you.
	And then when you point it out, they will then blame you or say, you know, well, I didn't slam you.
	You must be paranoid, right?
	That's the typical, right?
	Bang! Someone slams you.
	And then you say, hey, that's kind of insulting.
	And they say, well, I didn't mean to insult you.
	You must be paranoid, right?
	Yeah. And then where are you going to go from there, right?
	And so what happens is then you say, okay, well, I don't want to interact with you anymore, right?
	Which is perfectly valid. And then people say, well, I guess you just can't handle differences of opinion and I guess you're just petty and dictatorial and so on, right?
	And of course, then when people who are on the boards point out this sort of problem to the people like Sid who are posting this stuff, Then, of course, and this has happened a number of times before as well, people, so I say, I don't want to interact with you anymore, and then somebody flies off the handle, like this guy said, and says, well, you know, you're just a petty dictator, and this and that and the other.
	And then other people will sort of say, well, you know, Steph's bored, and, you know, if you go around insulting people, they don't actually have to interact with you.
	And, you know, he's just saying that the consequences of continuing to insult will be a ban.
	And then, of course, the person who has initiated the conflict then says to all of the people who are posting back to him, well, you guys are just Steph's acolytes and you're just rushing to his defense and I'm independent thinking and you guys are just slaves to free domain radio and this and that, right? Further insults all over the place, right?
	Further insults, continual.
	To everyone, right?
	And of course, that makes some people feel like, hey, wait a minute, am I actually a slave to Steph?
	Am I a slave to free domain radio?
	Maybe this guy really is independent, and maybe Steph can't tolerate dissent.
	You go around this road.
	So, but sort of what I want to point out, and I'm certainly happy to take questions or comments, if you're on the Skype chat, there is a request mic button somewhere along the top here.
	You can click that, and our lovely technical assistant will be more than happy to open up the mic to you if you have something to say, or you can type it into the chat window if you don't have a microphone.
	I'd be certainly happy to repeat it.
	But I sort of wanted to point out that This is a, obviously we have a sort of microcosm in a way of a private property environment within the boards, right?
	So somebody has sort of come into my property and has done things which I disagree with, right?
	Which would be offensive and insulting to me.
	I've tried to reason with him and I haven't had any luck, right?
	Because I can't control the behavior of other people and I can't control how they're going to react to things that I find problematic.
	And to me, this is exactly the same as your house, right?
	Somebody pointed out quite rightly in the post, they say, well, if somebody comes over to your house for a dinner party and says that all capitalists are fascists, and this wasn't posted on the board, I'm just sort of coming up with a separate kind of thing.
	And... If you then say, well, that's offensive to me.
	I'm a capitalist and you're calling me a fascist and so on.
	And if they continue, then do you have the right to ask them to leave your property?
	Well, of course you do. It's your property, right?
	So if people have a problem with this, you know, a correction of mine and so on on the boards, then I would say that it may be worth sort of re-examining this notion of private property within your own mind and having a look at it from that standpoint.
	So... All right.
	If that's all I had to say about that, I hope that that's helpful.
	Ah, okay. Well, we have a question, which is, is this not a little bit gossipy?
	From a listener, and of course, there's some people here who are listening who don't have any knowledge of the boards and so on.
	The reason that I think this is important to talk about is that when you do go out into the world and you talk about philosophy and you talk about ethics and freedom and economics and so on, that you do run into a fair number of hostile people.
	And I've certainly received emails and seen posts that are regular enough where people say, well, I tried talking and then it got kind of weird, it got aggressive, it got problematic, and so on.
	And freedom, of course, freedom of association is very important.
	You always have the right not to interact with people, but there are lots of kinds of people who will say to you that you're a coward for not wanting to interact with them, if they're sort of hostile or insulting and so on.
	So that's sort of the major issue that I wanted to talk about.
	It's not that people really care about the ins and outs of free domain radio and the boards.
	It's just that This may be a common enough phenomenon that other people might find it valuable to hear what people have had to say.
	Greg, are you on?
	I don't mean to be too critical about this, but it just occurred to me that by giving this much A purely internal matter?
	Not so much an internal matter, but an unproductive thread of discussion.
	Isn't it kind of feeding into that, in a way?
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Kind of becoming entrapped by it.
	It becomes kind of a tit for tat.
	You're being a dictator.
	No, I'm not. Yes, I am.
	No, I'm not. Yes, you are.
	No, I'm not. You know, that kind of a thing.
	Right. I guess that's all I'm saying.
	Okay, so you feel that the conversations on the board went into, you're a dictator, no you're not kind of thing?
	Or just this conversation?
	It started to feel that way on the board, sure.
	For sure, absolutely. Absolutely, and that's one of the reasons why I pointed out that interacting with this particular person might not be the most productive thing to do, right?
	Right. But I think knowing when to disengage from a conversation I do think is quite important, and that's sort of one of the things that it's not always easy to do, right?
	Because when somebody says something to you that hurts, It comes from one of two, there's two possibilities, right?
	Either they're trying to hurt you because they're, you know, a bad person or something, or they're telling you something that you don't want to hear and that hurts, right?
	So just being hurt by something that someone says is not a good criteria for ending a conversation.
	And I, when these kinds of things flare up in sort of my inbox or on the board or just in general conversations with people, I do find it very helpful, and I had to really wrestle with this one because you want to make sure that you're not dismissing a conversation because there's value in it, but it's painful for whatever reason, right, for you to hear it.
	And so that's why I was sort of trying to put forward some criteria because, you know, when people go and talk to their families about the values that really mean something to them or talk to their lovers or friends, We quite often get some reactions ranging from incomprehensibility to hostility and sort of everywhere in between.
	And I think it can be helpful to sort of slice and dice the interaction so that you know when it's productive to engage with somebody in a debate and when it has dissolved or devolved.
	And I don't think this occurs on both sides.
	It can, right? It can be like two television sets yelling at each other for sure.
	But I think that if you have standards around, you know, you don't get to insult people, right?
	You don't get to insult people, you don't get to call them stupid, you don't get to call them, and you don't get to try and manipulate them by saying that they're wrong and then not telling them why and so on.
	So I think those are pretty good lessons, though, to look at so that when you're in a conversation with someone and it's painful that you can differentiate between your own defensiveness and somebody else's attack, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, I suppose it.
	Makes some sense.
	I guess it's just sorting out where Where the departure line is in that gray area, right?
	Do you feel that it would have been better to sort of rise above...
	And I don't mean this in a pejorative sense, I mean, because you could well be right.
	Do you feel that it would have been better to sort of rise above the conversation that occurred on the board and also not talk about it now because that's sort of the more mature approach?
	I mean, you could be right.
	I'm just sort of trying to understand where it is that you're coming from.
	Well, I guess for my...
	From my point of view, I would have tried to extract an abstract principle from what was going on, and then if one could be, then try and deal with it that way, rather than getting down into the details of the specific contents of the thread.
	To me, that just confuses things.
	If nothing can be extracted from it in an abstract sense, then If there is no value in it, then there really is no point in spending time on it.
	Okay, well, I'm sorry if I didn't communicate the principle that I got, at least, out of the interaction, or if the instances that I talked about didn't seem to have any relation to that abstract principle.
	I think that it's worth, you know, in the sort of scientific approach, you start with the instances and then you move on to the abstractions, right?
	Like, otherwise, the abstractions are sort of without context if you don't have the source data.
	So I certainly try to talk about that in terms of the source data and then talk about the principle that if you're sort of being insulted and there doesn't seem to be any productive way to move the discussion forward, that you're certainly under no obligation.
	And also that because the board is private property, there is no need for any additional conflict, which is sort of one of the things that we talk about in Anarchy, right?
	That when a private property is the dominant and, in fact, sole form of ownership of things in the world, Then there's no need for us to have this kind of conflict with people because when you end up in a situation with conflict with someone and they're on your property or you're on their property, you can just leave or you can just be asked to leave the property or be ordered to leave the property or whatever.
	And so it actually is quite interesting in how little conflict there is in these kinds of situations.
	There really isn't an enormous amount of conflict relative to things like the state or the law courts and so on.
	That's an interesting take on it.
	Something I hadn't thought of.
	Just the fact that they're willing to argue at all is sort of a testament to the power of private property as a means of ameliorating...
	Actually, that's what I was saying in another post I put out there, too, about a week ago.
	Conflict doesn't necessarily equal violence.
	No, no, of course not.
	And our favorite resident communist lady was talking about how I pulled out the gun in the room by threatening a ban and so on, which, again, it's a conflation of the legitimate exercise of private property and denying somebody entrance to that private property versus going out and taking their property at the point of a gun and how confusing that gets for people and how I think it's important that when I sort of exercise control over my private property,
	That people understand that this is not the state, right?
	This is not the gun in the room.
	This is a perfectly legitimate and lawful, in the DRO sense, no DRO would ever say, yeah, well, you have to let this guy leave his rants on your hard drive.
	Although I think it would be all DROs would say that you have to leave my rants on your hard drive.
	But that's a separate matter. But...
	That people really, when I say, okay, well, if you continue to disrupt and sort of cause problems here, I'm going to ban you.
	I'm not going to have to ban you because I can choose to let the guy post from here to eternity, but that if I legitimately sort of exercise my property rights, that, you know, firmness in the sort of pursuit of your values, right, is not dictatorial, is not state-based, right, and there still seems to be quite a bit Of conflation of that, right?
	Like somehow the free domain radio board has to be like a public space.
	And if I don't allow people to post whatever they want, then I'm sort of the equivalent of some tin pot dictatorship that won't let gay pride go down the main street or something like that, right?
	That if I refuse to allow people entrance into my property, that that's exactly the same as the government being dictatorial.
	That's a bit of an exaggeration of the sort of ideas that people had, but there's certainly some posts around that.
	It's a complete confusion of the whole idea of freedom in the first place.
	This kind of goes into the argument I was having with the philosophy group that I'm with, is that I was explaining how ostracism isn't violence and they just didn't get it.
	That to ostracize somebody from your property is a violent act.
	That it's a violent act and therefore it's no better than say a state chasing people off of its territory.
	Right, right. I mean, it's funny because if you were to say to a woman, right, there's a woman, and there were other people, I'll just sort of pick on this lady, a woman who says, you know, Steph, you're now pointing a gun at this guy and threatening him and this and that because I don't want to interact with him on my property.
	Of course, if a woman says, I don't want to go out with this guy who wants to go out with me, we would, of course, perfectly respect her right to the custodianship of her own property, and not letting other people, sort of, quote, onto her property of her own body.
	And nobody would say that to not want to go out with someone is the same as aggressing against them, however disappointed they may be that you don't want to go out with them.
	But people just, they get very confused about this issue of sort of a firm use and a firm...
	Deployment of property rights or a firm exercise of property rights and refusing to let somebody on your property, they then say, well, this is exclusionary and it's dictatorial and it's culty and he can't handle other opinions and this and that.
	And I think that this is certainly in the history of Freedom in Radio, I've received countless accusations of this sort of kind.
	Because, you know, this Sid fellow also posted and said that he hoped that I would respect or that it would be a principle worth respecting that you can respect the speech Of people who are different from you, right?
	And you get a lot of this kind of stuff.
	When you put forward absolute statements, especially around ethics and psychology, then people will say, well, I hope that you respect my difference of opinion.
	And, of course, that's a complicated question and breaks down to sort of two very simple answers.
	One is that, of course, I respect people's differences of opinion insofar as I couldn't be bothered to go out and stop them from expressing their differences of opinion, right?
	I'm not going to go and, you know, if there's some communist website out there, I'm not going to go and, you know, do something to their website and, you know, give them some denial of service attack or flood them with X, Y, and Z because, you know, I don't care.
	I mean, they can say whatever the hell they want, right?
	I think that's great. However, you know, if somebody is coming to my house and eating off my table, then if they sort of say that I'm an evil fascist cult dictator or something like that, then yes, I'm going to order them off my property, and then of course they're going to say, aha, you see?
	He is an evil cult dictator, because he can't handle dissenting opinion and so on, right?
	But dissenting opinion is one thing, but personal insults are another thing, and that's something that I just won't tolerate, of course.
	Right. I mean, it's...
	Gosh, I lost my train of thought.
	Never mind. Well, and people have a complicated set of mishmash about the idea of opinion, right?
	Because opinion is something that people should never have any conflict about, right?
	You like some pretty freaky and obscure jazz, right?
	Not stuff that I like.
	I'm sure that I like music that you wouldn't like.
	We would never come to any particular insulting blows over that, right?
	It's like... I don't like the color that you've painted your bedroom.
	People don't, well, that's it.
	I'm taking you down, punk.
	I mean, people don't get fussed about opinion.
	They may sort of get mildly irritated or whatever.
	The people who say, well, you know, I don't know, the homosexual lifestyle is, you know, they're just looking for attention.
	Fundamentally, people don't get that fussed in the absence of a state, which they can use to club people of different opinions.
	But opinions are never a source of conflict, right?
	Opinions are never a source of conflict in any sort of rational philosophy.
	Yet on the other hand, where you have absolute statements, They should also never be the source of personal conflict because you have reason, evidence, and science to decide, right?
	You don't sort of see Keynesian economists on one side of the trenches and Austrians on the other side lobbing howitzes at each other, and you don't see scientists with, you know, the superstring theory versus those who have some other theory, you know, shooting each other in the halls of academia and And they may not all love each other, but the way that they resolve disputes is according to the scientific method.
	So either what's causing conflict between people is a subjective opinion, in which case, since a subjective opinion has no binding nature on anyone else, the fact that I like the band Queen doesn't mean anything to anyone else.
	And certainly nothing that I could ever enforce, however much I'd like to.
	So either it's a sort of subjective opinion, in which case there's no reason whatsoever for conflict, or it's an objective opinion, in which case you use rationality, logic, science, empiricism, evidence, and so on, and there's still no reason for personal insults or for any kind of personal attack.
	So... I've just never really understood.
	I mean, I can understand it based on certain people's histories and decisions and moral natures, but there really is no need for a conflict between people.
	In a free society, you just don't deal with the people.
	If you don't like them, don't deal with them.
	But there's no need to sort of rub each other's faces in the world and act in that sort of way where the conflict is engendered and so on.
	That's because we have a state and all this and that.
	And you're not really rubbing each other's faces in the world.
	You're trying to rub each other's faces in each other's view of the world, which fundamentally is...
	I mean, it's that...
	That kind of violent conflict arises out of more of a test of will than it does out of any kind of desire for a rational understanding of the truth.
	No, that's quite right, and it certainly is great evidence of somebody's personal history when their tolerance of differences of mere opinions is a sort of kill-or-be-killed situation where only one of us comes out the room alive liking jazz or something like that.
	That's not a very mature personality, and that, of course, comes from I don't know.
	Andrew, do you have a mic?
	Oh, I think he's doing something with Blow.
	Hang on. Sorry, we'll come back.
	Let me, you know, this is the first, I think this is the first Hookers and Blow Sunday that we've had on Freedom Aid Radio.
	Let me clean up the lines.
	Did you ever see that? I can't remember some Woody Allen film.
	Let me just, while I, I'll just mention this while I try and find you there.
	Some Woody Allen film where he's staring at a bowl of cocaine and then sneezes.
	It goes absolutely all over the room.
	It's actually quite funny. So, let me just see if I can't get Mr.
	A on the line as Skype thrashes its way through yet another do I mute, do I unmute, who can tell, click twice and have it reverse itself kind of situation.
	So Andrew is taking issue, just for those who haven't been following the WWF on the boards this week, Andrew is taking issue with the fact that I said that people who repetitively or repeatedly have hookers and cocaine parties with loud music, unless that music is Queen, They, that this is the sign of a disturbed personality.
	And the great thing about it, of course, is having Christina here as a psychologist, that she can take this one and say that she never was at these parties, and even if you have photos, they're probably doctored.
	So, sorry, while I... Right, that's why we don't have the video on.
	I'm not doing the video this week.
	Yeah, sorry. Andrew, I'm just waiting for Skype to give me back control of the mic.
	I don't know why. It just seems to take forever, but let me just...
	Oh, yes.
	And Christina said that paying for sex shows that you have no self-respect, although she often tells me that begging for it is perfectly acceptable.
	I'm not sure what that means, but we shall see.
	Okay. I don't know why Skype is not letting me...
	Every week we have these technical excitements.
	All right, so let's go with unmute everyone.
	I'll wait for that to kick in, because then we'll have the blast of sound, and we'll know exactly when.
	And each podcast will have to come with a cold shower now.
	Well, don't you remember, I think at some point back, somebody was talking about wanting to get their girlfriend into Freedom Aid Radio, and I suggested that they light some candles, strew some rose petals on the bed.
	And then just put a little big chatty forehead on the background.
	I genuinely do think that there are a large number of people who just get onto Skype casts and go, hello, for about three hours.
	All right. So let me just find Mr.
	A. Where is he down here?
	All right. Actually, Andrew is the webmaster of...
	Actually, it's not Hookers and Blow. It's BlowandHookers.com.
	So I'm sure there'll be a little pitch in there for that as well.
	Go ahead. Well, I mean, I don't see the argument at all that someone who pays for sex has no self-respect.
	I mean, it's the traitor principle.
	You know? You're exchanging your values to someone else.
	You're not harming them. You're not treating them as an object.
	You're treating them as a being with rights.
	And you're exchanging value with them.
	Well, of course, from an economic standpoint, I would have no objection for that at all, of course.
	I mean, nobody's saying that it should be illegal or that it's evil or anything like that.
	But sexuality is not like a bathmat or a bicycle that you buy and sell from somebody else.
	There are implicit value statements involved in sexuality, right?
	Sexuality is the sort of foundation.
	I mean, I'm just talking from a purely biological standpoint here for the moment, but...
	You know, sexuality is sort of the root of the family structure.
	It involves, historically, or at least in the way that we've evolved as a species, it involves some pretty significant long-term commitments to having kids and so on.
	And it's not like the invention of birth control and so on.
	And the recreational sexual possibilities, which that has unleashed, so to speak, has changed our sort of fundamental nature.
	And there's quite a bit of difference between selling someone a sort of value-neutral good, like a bath mat or a bicycle, I mean, sexuality is sort of the binding of a monogamous couple.
	And again, you know, casual sex is a little bit different.
	It's a little bit more recreational and so on.
	But paying for somebody to have sex with you is sort of like paying for someone to be your friend, right?
	Like, I mean, if you really were a good friend, you wouldn't need to pay somebody to be your friend.
	And paying somebody to be your friend would not be considered, I think, an act of high self-esteem.
	And I think that paying for somebody to have sex with you It's also, I don't think, the highest act of self-esteem, but I'm certainly willing to hear opposite arguments.
	I just don't see where you can draw the line.
	I already said in the chat, you know, if you pay for pornography, is that showing no self-respect?
	If you pay for a peep show, or if you pay for a massage with a happy ending, where does the line get drawn?
	You really can't. Well, but just because the line is not perfectly able to be drawn doesn't mean that the extremes don't have opposite characteristics, right?
	So, for instance, just because there's such a thing as pure, I don't know, Brita water, and then there's seawater, and who knows exactly when it starts to taste bad or when it's no longer good for you, there's no clear line.
	That doesn't mean that there's no difference between Evian and seawater when it comes to drinking, right?
	So, when you're in a sort of committed love relationship and you...
	You know, sexuality is the key differentiating component of that relationship.
	That's sort of at the one side of things.
	And at the other side of things, you know, there's paying someone to have sex with you.
	Yeah, there's stuff in the middle that may sort of be gray, but that doesn't really mean that there's no difference at all between the two extremes.
	But let me ask you this, because obviously we have a difference of opinion about that.
	Do you think that the self-esteem of somebody who pays for someone to be their friend is the same as somebody who goes and wins friends just sort of by their own merits?
	Well, I don't think it would be a friend in the same way if you're paying for them.
	Right, but do you think that if I said there's two people and you know nothing about them except one person goes out and gets friends on their own steam and another person pays to have people talk to them and pays to have people simulate friendship, would you be able to come to any conclusions at all about these two people if that was the only thing?
	And I'm not saying final or absolute conclusions, but even conclusions relative to each other.
	One person is paying for friendship, the other person is not paying for friendship, but instead has lifelong friends that don't demand money for showing up.
	Would you say that there would be any difference in self-esteem between these two people?
	I don't know. You would have no opinion about that?
	Difference in self-esteem?
	What is self-esteem? Well, self-confidence, self-respect, a feeling that you are sort of worth something, right?
	Self-esteem essentially implies that you're not going to treat yourself badly, that you're going to be good to yourself, that you will act with integrity, that you will treat others with integrity, you will respect your being, you will respect your thoughts and opinions, you think that they have value, and good moral character.
	Liking oneself. Liking oneself.
	Or we could sort of put it another way if you like.
	Would you say that somebody who had to bribe someone to get a job would be more competent than somebody who got a job on his own merits?
	Probably not. Okay, so if you have to, like, since you can get a job in your own merits, right, if you then have to pay somebody or bribe somebody to hire you, then it's clear whether or not you do or don't have the equivalent skills,
	it would be fairly clear that somebody who chose to bribe someone to hire them rather than to just get a job themselves, that they at least would not think That that person, that man, would not think that he had enough skills that he could get hired without bribing.
	And we'd know that just because he bribed someone to give him a job, right?
	So there would be an evidence of, whether just or not, there would be evidence of a low self-esteem situation if somebody bribed somebody else to give them a job.
	So in a situation where there's the possibility of mutually voluntary interaction, such as I go for a job and I give up my time and then they give me money such as I go for a job and I give up my time and then they give me money and I provide services, where
	When one person then says, I'm going to throw 200 bucks in to make you do it, then they're clearly compensating for something, right?
	Because if you can just go and have sex with people, which, you know, I read as possible, then...
	Then if you throw 200 bucks in as well, you're clearly making up for some deficiency, right?
	Are you arguing that prostitution is not mutually voluntary?
	No, what I'm saying is that if you want to go and have sex with someone, in the same way that if you want to have a job, it happens billions of times a day, according to the channels that I watch, that people just go out and have voluntary, non-monetary sex with each other.
	And so if then person, like man A, it could be woman A, but we'll just say man A. If man A, if Bob decides, or let's call him John, let's be really technical here.
	If John decides to go out and in this whole world where you can have voluntary sex and people will have voluntary sex with you, just the same way that you can get a job and so on, then you don't have to have a job for the rest of your life, right?
	You might just have a job for a weekend, right?
	You could have all the flings that you want.
	But if somebody says in this realm or this world where all of these voluntary exchanges are occurring without money, I want to participate in this, but I need to bring 200 bucks to the table, then for sure there's a deficiency that they feel that 200 bucks is making up for them.
	Well, there might be a deficiency, but it doesn't mean it's not voluntary.
	But I'm not saying it's not voluntary.
	I'm saying it's low self-esteem.
	It's lower self-esteem if you feel that you need to bring $200 to a job interview to get hired.
	That's lower self-esteem than somebody who says, I don't need $200.
	They'll be lucky to get me. All right.
	So, look, don't get me wrong.
	I'm not saying that there's anything evil about it, right?
	I mean, yeah, if you want to, I mean, not you, if John wants to go and pay for sex and somebody wants to sell sex to John, that's fine, right?
	Maybe John is 300 pounds and nobody wants to have sex with him.
	I don't know. Just making whatever.
	Maybe he's got three weeks to live and he can't afford dinners and dances and dates or whatever, right?
	So I'm not saying there's anything immoral about it.
	I'm not saying it's coercive, and I never have said that about it.
	I would simply say that all other things being equal, somebody who feels that they need to bring 200 bucks to the table to have a woman have sex with him, or a man, or a sheep, or whatever, that's an indication of a lower self-esteem than somebody who goes out and just goes and has sex with someone.
	Now, I'm not saying that casual sex, you know, in a sort of multiple, repetitive kind of way is also an indication of a terribly high self-esteem, but we don't sort of have to get into that right now.
	I just want to make sure that you understand, at least, that I don't believe that there's anything coercive about it.
	And from an economic standpoint, it is an exchange of value, but it's an unnecessary exchange of value because there's people who will have sex with you without money.
	Does that principle apply to the production of all goods in society?
	Well, sure. I mean, bribery obviously indicates a lower self-esteem, right?
	In every situation, right?
	I mean, let's say there's a plumber and I need my sink fixed and I'm good friends with him and he might do it.
	Is it bribery if I pay him?
	Is it bribery if you pay him?
	The difference is that I don't think plumbers have orgasms when they're fixing your sink, or if they do, that would be pretty cool.
	But when you're talking about sex, you're talking about mutual pleasure.
	So if you have to pay someone for a mutually beneficial interaction, then obviously you feel you're not bringing that much to the table, so to speak.
	If your plumber has orgasms when he's fixing your pipe, then he's probably begging for your pipes to burst, so to speak.
	So the reason that you pay for a plumber to come and do this stuff is because plumbing sort of sucks, right?
	It's not a hobby that people sort of have where they just roll around saying, hey, can I fix your pipes?
	It's boring to learn.
	You deal with a lot of smelly stuff.
	There's crap all over the place.
	So you pay a plumber because plumbing is unpleasant.
	But making love with someone is supposed to be sort of mutually pleasurable.
	At least, again, I've read that.
	I think that's the issue of contention there, because you said making love, and I wouldn't consider going to a prostitute the same as making love with someone that you love.
	Well sure, but even casual sex is supposed to be mutually enjoyable, right?
	And I'm sure it is. And I'm sure that prostitution is mutually enjoyable because the prostitute is getting her money and you're getting whatever you want.
	Right. No, mutually beneficial is different from mutually enjoyable.
	I mean, I don't want to sound overly like I'm splitting hairs.
	The whole point is that each party goes into it because they feel that what they're getting in the exchange is greater than what they had before.
	So of course it's going to be mutually enjoyable.
	That's the point of interacting with anyone.
	Well, no. No, certainly I would completely disagree with that.
	If you're paid to go and clean out the shit from someone's toilet, I think you'll find that beneficial.
	I don't think you're going to find that enjoyable.
	Obviously, you prefer to do it than not to do it.
	I'm sorry? It's more enjoyable than the alternative.
	Well, sure, but so is getting shot in the foot rather than shot in the heart, but that still doesn't mean you're going to enjoy it.
	Let's not kid ourselves.
	Most women who end up as prostitutes don't have exciting careers as a doctor as their other option.
	Most women who end up as prostitutes didn't sell their Barbies as kids thinking, gee, I can't wait to turn this into a full-time occupation.
	Most people... Who end up as prostitutes come from highly abusive and often sexually abusive histories.
	There is a drug addiction.
	There is enormous problems with mental health problems in the sex industry.
	Now, part of that is to some degree, of course, engendered by the illegality of it and so on.
	But even in places where it's legal, it's not exactly the occupation of choice.
	It's not like, gee, if your daughter says to you, I'm going to go and become a prostitute, I don't think a whole lot of people say, I couldn't be more proud, right?
	So... I think that you have to look at the sort of chain of causality that ends up with somebody sort of selling their body for money and if you sort of say to most women, is this what you wanted to do?
	Is this what you're most proud of and are you happy with this?
	I think it pays the bills and I'm not that educated and I got this drug habit or I got three kids or whatever.
	This is just what I got to do, right?
	And so I don't think that it's, I mean, it's obviously beneficial for both parties, but that's not quite the same as saying that it's enjoyable in the way that two people having sex, whether it's lovemaking or, you know, a bang on the sand in Daytona Beach, right, that there's two people who are sort of mutually pursuing and enjoying that.
	That's quite different from it just being an economic transaction that benefits both people.
	Okay, but that doesn't speak to the person's sort of self-respect or anything.
	I mean, anything I do is totally enjoyable like that, but it doesn't mean I don't have self-respect if I do something that's not totally enjoyable.
	I'm not sure.
	Could you tell me where I... I'm not sure I understand that I was making that point, but maybe I made it inadvertently.
	Go ahead. Well, I thought you were saying that, you know, you have this sort of, you know, passionate love-making, and that's enjoyable, and that's mutually beneficial, but...
	And that would show self-respect.
	But if you just pay a prostitute, that doesn't show self-respect because it's not sort of the passionate lovemaking, you know, mutual enjoyment kind of thing.
	Well, if you have a situation where two people can bring to the table their mutual enjoyment of sexuality, and that's a very common situation, in the same way that if I'm a vendor competing with you to sell 500 widgets to a company, and you send in your RFP, and I send my RFP in with $10,000 in cash, immediately anybody outside the situation is going to say that my goods are of worse quality.
	Because if my goods weren't of worse quality, then I wouldn't Have to bribe, right?
	I mean, I'm bribing to cover up for something that's a negative, right?
	I mean, I'm not saying that this proves my point.
	I'm just saying, do you accept that as a fair statement about putting in a business proposal with $10,000 in cash as a bribe attached that you would see in a competitive situation?
	That would not be a good that you would consider to be of the highest value.
	Well, yeah. I mean, if it's meant as a bribe, you know, you could just include it in the cost, you know, $10,000 less.
	Right. So where there is...
	But, you know, $10,000 less wouldn't go directly to the purchasing officer, right?
	It would just be, you know, $10,000 more the corporation as a whole would have, right?
	So if you're bribing someone, then...
	Clearly, there's a deficiency that's being made up for, right?
	And this is, of course, the case with the plumber as well.
	The plumber doesn't want to come and fix your pipes, right?
	The plumber wants to, you know, sit home and watch the ballgame.
	And that's why, you know, when you call a plumber on a Sunday morning at four o'clock in the morning, he's going to charge you like quadruple overtime and basically fix your pipes and take your house, right?
	Because we pay people to do stuff that they don't want to do.
	Because if they wanted to do it, we wouldn't have to pay them, right?
	Right? Well, that argument falls apart because he could just fix his own place because he wants to.
	I mean, you're arguing that something that can be done sort of for free but is done for a bribe therefore shows that when it's done where there's a bribe shows there's no self-respect.
	No, no, hang on. I'm sorry.
	I can't follow that conflation.
	I can't get that many variables processed at the same time.
	But do you sort of understand that we do pay people to do stuff because they don't want to do it?
	Well, sure. Right, okay.
	So, a prostitute doesn't want to have sex with the John.
	Voluntary. No, it's voluntary.
	No, she doesn't want it, because otherwise you wouldn't have to pay her, right?
	Well, I mean, she does want to have sex with the John.
	No, no, no, no. She wants the money.
	She doesn't want to have sex with the John, because if she wanted to have sex with the John, she wouldn't charge, right?
	Right. Well, sex with the john is part of the values exchange.
	I mean... Oh, come on.
	You've got to give me this one.
	I've worked pretty hard for this one.
	I think it's only fair to give me this one.
	If you said that we pay people to do stuff because they don't want to do it voluntarily of their own accord, then you can't say now that the prostitute wants to have sex with the john.
	She doesn't. She wants the money.
	In the same way that the plumber doesn't want to fix your pipes, he wants the money, and fixing the pipes is the way to get to the money.
	And the reason that he has to be paid to fix the pipes is because he doesn't want to do it voluntarily.
	No, the money is the incentive that is paid because she doesn't want to have the sex.
	And the money doesn't make her want to have the sex.
	The money makes her put up with having the sex.
	If I say to you, Andrew, I'm going to give you 500 bucks to clean out my toilet, I don't think that after I've eaten Indian food, let's make it as horrifying as possible, and maybe the wall, and parts of the shower.
	But anyway, if I say to you, Andrew, I've got this horrible job, I'm going to pay you 500 bucks to do it, It doesn't turn into, like, when I give you the 500 bucks, you're like, well, I'm really glad to have the 500 bucks, and then you're going to put yourself in some industrial gear to go in, and you won't go in alone, and you'll go in with, you know, like a flamethrower and something or other, right?
	But me giving you the 500 bucks doesn't magically make you want to clean my bathroom, like, now, yay, I got the 500, like, you just, like, you take the 500 bucks and then you put up with cleaning my bathroom, right?
	Yeah, well, I suppose we have to get into the definition of want to, but, I mean, yeah, if you give me 500 bucks to clean your bathroom, I would want to do that.
	I would want to clean your bathroom.
	No, you'd want the 500 bucks.
	I mean, this is a very important point, because this is sort of the fundamentals, at least for me.
	I mean, I could be wrong, but this is the fundamentals of economics.
	That the reason we have to pay people to do stuff is because they don't want to do it voluntarily, right?
	Because the reason that the governments have to force us to pay taxes is because we don't want to pay the taxes, right?
	I mean, the reason that force is used in society on the negative side and that bribery, and again, not in a bad way, but the bribery of just basic economics, is because people don't want to do it voluntarily.
	They'll do it because they want the money, right?
	Because in order to give someone, you have to be filling up something in order to make it an incentive for people, right?
	If you're going to pay someone to do something, it can't be, because economics wouldn't work otherwise, right?
	If the plumber really wanted to come over and fix your pipes, then you would never pay a plumber, right?
	People would just say, well, why would I pay you?
	You want to do it anyway. I mean, I'm not sure exactly how to go from here.
	I mean, in my mind, it's still part of it.
	If you say, do you want to clean my bathroom?
	I'd say, no, or hell no.
	And then you'd say, well, I'll give you $500.
	Do you want to clean my bathroom? I'd say, yeah.
	Right, but your emotions haven't changed.
	You didn't go from not wanting to clean up my bowel movement, sorry for the horrible nature of the metaphor, but your emotions don't change.
	You don't suddenly go from having an aversion to cleaning up my bathroom to suddenly really wanting.
	The money doesn't change your brain, right?
	It doesn't fundamentally alter your human nature to the point where what you find repulsive, you now find enjoyable.
	You'll do it because you want the money.
	Take a bunch of really poor people and line them up and have them bid on it.
	Of course they're going to want it. I mean...
	Okay, so if they want...
	Here's the thing. If the only difference between them not wanting to do it and wanting to do it is the $500, then obviously they don't want to do it because in the absence of $500 I couldn't get anyone to do it, right?
	Right? The place that... I'm sorry to be so...
	But this is sort of pretty important, right?
	For me. And I hope this is interesting to other people.
	How are we doing on listeners here?
	Sorry, go ahead.
	They don't want to do it. But with the 500 bucks, they do want to do it.
	No, they want the 500 bucks.
	It doesn't change someone's nature when you give them money, right?
	If you had to clean my toilet and I gave you 500 bucks, you'd still be in there totally grossed out by what you were doing, right?
	Right? Yeah.
	So, you still don't want to clean my toilet.
	You'll do the cleaning of the toilet to get my 500 bucks, but it's not like you think it's like, oh my god, what a horrible job to clean Steph's toilet, and then when I give you the 500 bucks, you're like, wow, magical!
	Now I want to do it, right?
	It's still a disgusting thing to have to do, it's just that you'll do it to get the money.
	And again, this doesn't violate any principles of economics.
	This seems to me very basic around, and by basic, I certainly don't mean obvious.
	Well, I mean, just looking at the situation, if somebody voluntarily is cleaning your bathroom, and if you're looking at them as a sort of third party, and somebody asks you, do they want to clean that bathroom?
	I would say, well, yeah, if they didn't want to clean it, they wouldn't be doing it.
	You know, it's like that old economics joke, where two economists are walking by a car or a Ferrari dealership, and the one says, man, I want that Ferrari, and the other one says, evidently not.
	Right, right. Because he's not willing to make the sacrifices in order to get the Ferrari, right?
	Exactly. So when he goes to buy it, he wants it.
	Yes, that's right, that's right.
	He wants the Ferrari, but he's not willing to take the necessary...
	He wants other things more than he wants the Ferrari, which is clear from his whatever, whatever, right?
	Yeah, I totally understand that.
	And I don't see, though, that...
	To me, I couldn't really understand the purpose of prices or wages or money.
	If people, like...
	If I give... Okay, let me ask you this then.
	If I give you the 500 bucks, and then you want to clean my bathrooms, and then I take away the 500 bucks again before you start, and I say, no, I want you to do it for free, you're then going to not want to clean my bathrooms again, right?
	And you're not going to clean my bathrooms.
	Yeah, well, there's no incentive anymore.
	Got it, got it. Okay. So the only reason that you want to clean my bathrooms is for the $500.
	That's the sole cause of you wanting to clean my bathrooms.
	I mean, unless you're some horrendous masochist or something, right?
	In which case, maybe I could charge you to clean.
	Anyway, we'll talk about that one later.
	So clearly, you have an enormous lack of desire And we know how much your lack of desire is.
	It's $500 of lack of desire, right?
	That I have to sort of fill up with, like you have a hole called, I don't want to clean Steph's bathrooms, which is $500 deep.
	And assuming that if I offer you $499, you won't do it.
	And then we go to $500, then you will do it.
	I know that I can measure your lack of desire to clean my bathrooms by $500, right?
	Now, the whole time that you're cleaning my bathrooms, the moment I take away the money, you're going to stop immediately and then you're going to get mad at me or you're going to sue me or whatever, right?
	So clearly, the lack of desire remains continual throughout your cleaning of my bathrooms.
	And you're not going to look back upon it with pleasure.
	You're going to look at the $500 with pleasure and you're going to say, I don't know, man, I wish I'd gotten more education so I didn't have to clean that mess up for $500 or whatever.
	But you're not going to look back upon the time of cleaning the bathrooms with pleasure.
	So you're not going to look forward to it.
	You're not going to enjoy it while you're doing it.
	And you're not going to look back upon this episode in your Life with pleasure, right?
	Well, I don't see why not.
	Oh, come on. You're cleaning like crap.
	You're not going to look back on that with pleasure.
	I'm making 500 bucks.
	Sorry? I'm not going to look back on a specific event and be like, oh yeah, it was great to scrub the toilet, but I'm going to look back and be like, yeah, it was...
	I'm glad I got the 500 bucks.
	I would have done it for 400 and I bid this bald asshole up to 500.
	Or whatever, right? You may think that I would have done it for $100 or whatever, right?
	Or, you know, hey, that wasn't that bad.
	It took me five minutes, I made $500.
	But you're still not going to look back on the actual act of cleaning up my toilet with pleasure, right?
	Because otherwise you wouldn't have needed to be paid if it was something that got you off or whatever, and you got a thrill out of it.
	So then what we're coming to is that the prostitute does not want to have sex with the johns.
	She wants the $500.
	Well, yeah, no, that's a good question.
	Sorry, somebody just posted this as well.
	I said that, do you think that there's any amount of money that would make you enjoy cleaning a toilet?
	The actual act itself.
	If a million bucks, I bet that wouldn't actually change your emotion.
	You'd still be more thrilled to do it, in a sense, because a million bucks.
	But you still wouldn't enjoy the actual act of cleaning the toilet kind of thing, right?
	So, the reason, then, that we've gone through this horrible, and this is one of the metaphors that I'm more than happy to leave behind until we come up with a possibly even more ghastly one...
	But clearly, the prostitute doesn't want to have sex with the John, because otherwise she'd do it for free.
	Clearly, there's lots of people who have voluntary sex for free.
	So if somebody is going to bribe a woman to have sex with him, when there's every possibility that he could have a woman have sex with him without paying for her, then he is obviously making up for some deficiency, because the woman doesn't want to have sex with him, and he knows that because he's paying her.
	And somebody who's going to say, I want you to...
	Sorry? And I didn't know you were presupposing that he can't get voluntary sex.
	Well, I'm not saying he can't.
	but we know that he's choosing to pay for it.
	Right?
	Because we know, like, in the same way that if I go and bribe someone to hire me, it's clear that lots of people get hired without being bribed, and it's clear that lots of people have sex without paying for it, right?
	So if I have to bribe someone to get hired, obviously I have a lower esteem of my own worthiness as a job hunter if I feel that I have to bribe someone the same way that if I put a bribe in with my bid for a company, or to sell something to a company, that I genuinely believe that my products are of lower quality and can't evenly compete in the free market, right? Because I have to bolster them up with a bribe, right?
	Right.
	So they're not as good as at least I believe that they're not as good as everyone else's products, because I have to balsa them up with a bribe when other people are not bribing.
	I think he's dialing.
	Okay.
	Hello, Candy? What are you wearing?
	Would you like to take it from here, sweetie?
	And look, I mean, this is, we don't have to sort of sort this all out.
	We can mull it over. We can come back on this, right?
	But just, you know, this is the thing that I was kind of hoping that people would get, and a lot of people do, right?
	So, you know, I'm not talking about you, but, you know, after, you know, people, when I put out certain statements, like where I say, you know, somebody who's got hooker and blow parties is, you know, some dysfunction, some mental problems, and that paying someone for sex is not a mark of high self-esteem, and so on, you know, I sort of face this dilemma when I post these kinds of things, right?
	Because, as you can see, this is a long debate, right?
	And I'm not going to claim that I've conquered or you've conquered.
	We're still sort of trying to figure this out, and we don't have to sort of finish it up right now.
	But when I put these things on the board, right, and I sort of say, well, I think that whatever, I can either do the thing where I put in like a 50-page post where we go over these kinds of debates and go back and forth or whatever, right?
	But I try not to say stuff.
	I mean, I'm not saying that I never do it.
	I try not to say stuff that I haven't thought through.
	Like, I try not to say stuff that's just off the top of my head and a random opinion.
	Now, people who are new to the boards, they kind of see this and maybe they haven't noticed the 525 podcasts or whatever and think that I'm putting out opinions that are unreconstitutional or unthought out.
	And again, this doesn't mean that I'm right.
	This is just sort of the way that I have worked it out in my mind.
	But this is for the new people who are joining us that Again, it doesn't mean that anything that I'm saying is correct.
	It just means that I sort of put some thought into the background of these kinds of things.
	So I would like to sort of open it back up, unless you wanted to add something else.
	I'd like to sort of open it up. I'm sorry, go ahead.
	I just don't feel like, okay, let's say some guy can go and get girls and enter into this voluntary sex and it's all nice.
	And then he chooses to go get a prostitute just because.
	I mean, that doesn't say anything about him necessarily, other than that he likes to get a prostitute every now and then or whatever.
	Right. I mean, so your position at the end of this conversation is the same as it was at the beginning, right?
	And that's not bad. I just sort of want to understand that, like, because we've been talking for, like, 30 minutes or 35 minutes, and I haven't been able to convince you, and that doesn't mean that I, you know, that's bad, but I don't think that there's much, I'm not going to be able to say anything more other than what I've already said, so let's put this one on hold, because if after the length of discussion that we've had, your position is still the same, then obviously I'm not able to put it in, or convince you of anything, or put it in such a way that is going to change your mind, which is fine.
	That doesn't mean that there's anything bad with that, but I think that if we're still in the same place as when we started, then we'll need to take, we can come back to this or maybe hash it out on the boards.
	So I'd like to – I do have a – actually, believe it or not, now that we're just a little over an hour into it, I do actually have a topic, which we can either put in or not.
	But I would like to offer – if anyone has any sort of comments or questions about anything that's gone on this week or any questions for people who have joined more recently – Stefan Molyneux, Freedom Aid Radio, just for people who are coming in randomly saying hello, hello. But if you have any sort of questions or comments, if you can click on the raised hand.
	Oh, we do have a gentleman coming in.
	Oh, I think he does.
	Let me just see. Oh, this person has left.
	You know, it's got all the quality of things that you get for free.
	But I remember when we tried...
	There was another chat program we tried when we first started.
	I can't even remember what it was. TeamSpeak.
	TeamSpeak, which was even more exciting and people couldn't log in and so on.
	So I actually wouldn't mind paying for something.
	It's just that it's not...
	I haven't been able to find anything that people will sort of download and use and so on.
	So this, I guess, will work relatively well.
	So if you do have a sort of question or issue about anything...
	I would certainly be happy to entertain them, comments and so on.
	Oh, there he is again. So let's see.
	Mr. L. Yeah, hi.
	Well, I was reading the board as well earlier this week.
	I think it was the poster...
	Excuse me.
	I think it was the poster TX Island gal or someone who said that...
	Or who accused you of...
	Of being dictatorial or something.
	Well, basically I just don't see what the problem is.
	To me it's just a simple exercising of private property rights, because obviously as libertarians we would say that if you go on someone else's property then you have to respect the rules of that property owner.
	Yeah, if that property owner says that you can't do X or Y or Z on their property, then you have to respect it.
	The way I see it, that's all that was being done on the board.
	Well, I can't help but agree with you.
	And the thing, of course, that to me is partly interesting around this as well is that this woman is a communist, right?
	So she has, I'm sure that as a communist, she studied her history of communism.
	So she has some examples of what might be called some pretty savage dictatorial tendencies in the 20th century, namely, you know, the communist regimes and so on.
	And then to say that, you know, myself is dictatorial, I think it's quite a large leap in the terminology based on the fact that she obviously has some pretty good examples of dictatorship within her own field of study and her own preferences.
	So, I mean, the only thing that I can assume is that this comment was made, you know, without, as a lot of people do, right?
	And I've been guilty of this as well, so it's not throwing from any sort of high area here, but...
	People will just say stuff emotionally on the spur of the moment without really thinking it through.
	I take the word dictatorship or tyranny or cult.
	I take these words very seriously.
	And other people may not. They may feel that they're sort of rhetorical devices.
	But I take these words very seriously.
	I take words like honor and courage and virtue, you know, not that I always achieve them, but I take the words very seriously.
	Somebody accuses me of being dictatorial or culty or intolerant or hostile or immature or projection or whatever.
	I take that stuff very seriously, and that doesn't mean that that person is wrong.
	But when somebody says it's dictatorial and you're using the gun in the room, which I have defined, As the ultimate evil, right?
	I mean, if I've, and I think worked pretty hard to help people to understand that the initiation of the use of force and the violence of the gun in the room is the ultimate evil, if somebody then accuses me of deploying the tactic which I have decried as the greatest evil...
	I'm going to take that personally, like I am, and I'm going to give them sort of one warning shot to say that's pretty offensive, right?
	But if they continue on, then obviously they're not that interested in having a rational debate, right?
	I mean, unless I actually have pulled out a gun and haven't noticed it, in which case I'd really want to know, but that wasn't the case at all with this, of course.
	Sorry, just before you continue, the reason why I think this is important is not because anybody cares, either now or in the future, about a small friction on the boards, but we can't convince people that we're serious about ethics if we let insults to our honor.
	Go unresponded to.
	And this doesn't mean pistols at dawn.
	This just means, you know, if somebody accuses me of using violence, which I have defined as the greatest evil in the world, in history that results in the murder of hundreds of millions of people every century, then they're basically calling me...
	The worst and most vile kind of immoral rapist, murderer, or whatever.
	I take this stuff very seriously.
	I take ethics very seriously.
	It doesn't mean that I can't have fun and make jokes, but I think that in our conversations with people, it is absolutely essential that we not let insults to our honor go unanswered, right?
	And that doesn't mean yelling at people or anything like that, but it just means pointing out that what you're saying is highly offensive.
	And you can't just go around calling me evil as a rhetorical, not you, right?
	People can't go around calling me evil as a rhetorical device, right?
	That they need to think about what the hell they're saying before they go around accusing people of being evil.
	So that's just something that I think that libertarians as a whole don't do, right?
	We tend to a little bit laugh off the differences that we have with people, but I think that if we want people to take ethics seriously, then we need to take ethical terms and ethical uses in debates, I think, quite seriously as well.
	But so sorry, I just wanted to get that point in, but please go ahead.
	Okay, well, basically I just agree with what you said earlier regarding that, well, I think on the board we should be able to accept any opinion on any issue really.
	It's just that the manner in which it is said, whether someone is calm and rational in the way they state their opinions, and I think we should be able to debate them properly.
	As I say, as long as someone is, as you say, insulting, then I think that's where we should draw the line.
	Well, I agree with you to a large degree insofar as certainly we should try to be as respectful as possible.
	I don't mind if somebody gets angry at me, and I certainly don't mind if somebody gets very passionate.
	I mean, I certainly have had my share of angry or whatever podcasts.
	It's not the level of passion that I have any problem with.
	It's a sort of direct and focused insult and assault on my virtue that I would have a problem with.
	People sort of say that I'm culty or irrational or hostile or, you know, and don't address the arguments even after I ask them repeatedly to sort of tell me where it is that I'm in error.
	I would certainly agree with you that any sort of personal attacks are not a good idea unless they're backed up with a lot of evidence, right?
	I mean, I've certainly said things in podcasts, either when I analyze people's dreams or certainly the one that I did on the Easter Bunny Fellow.
	That, you know, I said there's some mild statistic tendencies here.
	There's, you know, this is sort of my opinion, and I said I'm perfectly open to being corrected, and here's the evidence in what you've said that I see occurring.
	So I've certainly said things that would be, could be offensive to some people and so on, but I try and work a lot of evidence in, and I'm perfectly open to being corrected, and I offer to read rebuttals on air and so on.
	So, to me, it's It's just, the rationality is the key, right?
	I mean, if somebody has evidence or somebody has, but, you know, just casting aspersions and so on is absolutely, to me, doesn't work.
	And the moment somebody calls me immoral without, you know, damn good evidence, then, you know, we're definitely going to have a problem.
	Yeah, I generally agree with that.
	And also, in reference to your conversation with Andrew, why do you say that the prostitute may not necessarily want to have sex with the John?
	Well, because she has to get paid.
	Right? So if she has to get paid, she obviously needs an incentive to overcome a reluctance, right?
	So if you're sitting in a bubble bath and then somebody calls you and you're a plumber and then says, come and work on my pipes because they burst and there's shit flowing all over my bathrooms, then you as a plumber want to stay in your bath and you don't want to get up and go and deal with the pipes, right?
	So somebody just saying, I'd like you to come and deal with my pipes isn't going to get you out of the bathtub.
	But if somebody says, I want you to come and fix my pipes, and you say, I don't want to come and fix your pipes.
	I'm sitting here in my bubble bath, I'm playing with my rubber ducky, and I'm listening to my, you know, Zamfir pan flute, and I'm having a great and relaxing good time.
	Okay, well, it looks like I can hear people.
	I guess we're back on. Let me just unmute you, Mr.
	Lepifrax, and we'll see if we can continue the chat.
	Please go ahead. I can hear you breathing.
	Yes, go ahead. Hello?
	You mean a married person pays his wife for sex?
	Oh, absolutely, yes.
	No question. No question.
	The question is, Christina, whether or not a married man who either pays for sex or has affairs, whether that's an indication of a low self-esteem.
	Oh, yes, absolutely.
	Yeah, I mean, do you want to take that one?
	Why don't you take that one? Oh, apparently we need some organization for this show.
	I mean, not that there ever have been any indication of that in the past, but yeah, one second.
	Now, just before Christina starts, while she's getting organized, this is not the same as evil.
	This is not the same as bad people.
	This is not the same as a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	This is more to do with the aesthetics of life.
	So, for instance, if I say to someone, someone stops their car and says, how do I get to Carnegie Hall, and I send them to Chicago, Obviously, there's a kind of fraud.
	I guess I'm lying to them. I'm causing them inconvenience.
	But I doubt very much that they would be able to sue me in this particular kind of any sort of rational or just legal system.
	So we're not talking about evil and we're not talking about the ultimate pit of inequity of human nature.
	That's like the state and gulags and wars.
	And we're not talking about prisons. We're not talking about anything like that.
	We're talking a little bit more around the aesthetics of ethics, around nice-to-haves rather than have-to-haves, right?
	Like the have-to-haves are don't aggress against people, don't defraud them where big sums of money are involved or whatever, don't rape, don't kill and all.
	But there are certain aesthetics which are sort of positives which can't be enforced by any central agency, and that's sort of what we're talking about now.
	So the question around how could it be explained or understood If the proposition is put forward that somebody, a man who has affairs or goes to prostitutes while he's married, is of a lower self-esteem.
	Oh, sorry. Am I not heard?
	I have no idea. Okay.
	I hope everyone can hear me now.
	We are having a microphone problem.
	I would say that someone who is married and goes outside of the relationship to a prostitute for a sexual relationship, that there would be something fundamentally wrong with that person's self-respect, respect for the marital relationship, respect for his wife, and ultimately respect for the child.
	If there are children in the relationship.
	My feeling about this, and a very strong feeling, that would be considered deviant behavior.
	It is not within the norms of most cultures.
	I mean, in most cultures, we have monogamous relationships.
	We have some kind of a contractual relationship between a man and a woman, or here, even in Ontario, between two partners of the same sex.
	Where they agree to be monogamous.
	If the relationship is an open relationship, I would say that even in those relationships, there are significant problems with the person's sexual identity.
	It has a lot to do with how one feels about oneself.
	Where is a person's self-respect or regard?
	Sex is a very intimate, very personal, very trusting kind of a act.
	And when one violates the trust in a relationship by going outside of the relationship, it says something about the person's own self-worth, about how they feel about themselves, about their ability to hold up to or live up to a commitment, about their own ability to...
	Their own vision of themselves, their view of themselves, their own self-perception, that they cannot have a loving, respectful, mutually enjoyable relationship with the person that they've chosen.
	Well, and for sure, somebody who goes and has an affair without giving his wife the opportunity to make her own choices is totally detonating the relationship.
	Like, it's an act of self-destruction.
	If you're in a bad relationship with a woman, and I've had my share, maybe even a little more than my share, but if you're in a bad relationship with a woman, then you break up with her, right?
	That's the thing to do.
	if you can't work it out or whatever, and even if you're married and you have kids and you can't work it out, you break up with her, right?
	But you sort of sit down with her and you say, hey, this isn't working out.
	We've tried counseling.
	We've tried this.
	And you've got closure and completion and whatever, right?
	You go and deal with that in a sort of mature way.
	If you go and have an affair, then not only are you robbing the woman of the chance to make her own decision about, but you're also getting involved in something that you have to hide, right?
	So what is very dangerous to one's psychological integrity is to be involved in a situation where you have to hide your behavior from others, right?
	Now, I'm not talking about watching porn and masturbating, which you don't really do at the office.
	I mean, that's not something that harms other people.
	But... When you are involved in something where you really have to keep it hidden from other people, that's pretty dangerous stuff to get involved because you then can only surround yourself with people who either trust you wrongly or aren't very perceptive.
	You also end up having to fake an enormous amount of things to cover up.
	You live in constant fear of being discovered.
	It really is a very self-destructive situation to get involved in.
	Somebody with high self-esteem It's going to look at that possibility of, should I act in such a manner that is going to violate my own capacity to process reality in a healthy and effective manner?
	It's going to say that nothing is worth that.
	Nothing is worth that.
	I'm not going to act in a manner that I have to hide.
	And I'm not going to act in a manner that is going to violate the trust of somebody who's close to me.
	Because if that person is not somebody I want to spend time with, then let me do the honorable and decent thing and release them and release myself from a relationship that's not working.
	But let me not go and end up in a self-destructive spiral of faking reality.
	And of course then, boy, you want to see a bad breakup?
	And I've seen a couple of these.
	If you really want to see a bad breakup where the husband gets totally hosed, Just watch any marriage that dissolves based on the husband having an affair.
	It is brutal.
	The wife will just take you to the cleaners.
	You will end up being broke for the next 10 or 20 years.
	You will end up with, especially if there are kids involved, with endless and bottomless hostility towards you from the woman who feels violated in a very sort of unique way.
	And I'm sort of trying to put myself in the woman's shoes here now.
	But... She feels very violated because you've gone and had sex with this other woman and then you've come back and you've made love to her and so on.
	I'm sure it's the same for men, too.
	I think it's a little bit more for women, though, because she's on the receiving end biologically at the sexual act.
	And so anyone with self-esteem is going to say, I don't want that in my future.
	I don't want to detonate this whole marriage, get taken to court, end up with endless battles and fights.
	Because, you know, especially if you're going to be co-parents for the next 10 or 20 years...
	You don't want to detonate your life in that manner.
	You don't want to put something out there that you have to hide in shame for the rest of your life.
	So there is a kind of self-destructive aspect to going out and having an affair, which doesn't mean that you stay chained in a marriage that doesn't work.
	It just means that you end it in a way that is more honorable and gets you, you know, you look yourself in the...
	Yeah, look yourself in the mirror and sort of like yourself.
	And again, the last thing I'll say is that when I was much younger, I was unfaithful to a girlfriend, and it was a complete and total mess.
	I was in a very low self-esteem situation.
	It was in my teens and so on.
	And it's not something that I was proud of or ever proud of.
	And so having sort of gone through that, you know, the key thing is that, you know, if you do it, you've just got to own up that it's a bad thing, take your lumps and so on.
	But that's sort of why the sort of affair thing is very bad.
	Okay. Yeah, just an unrelated question.
	When's your next Luvok Haraac going to be?
	Well, you know, it's kind of odd. I wrote a follow-up to the one that I wrote that got such a good deal of praise.
	I sent it to him, never heard anything back.
	A few days later, I sent it to him again, saying, gee, I wonder if I got stuck in your spam bin, and I still haven't heard back, so I've got one.
	If you want to sort of read another article, you can find it at...
	It's free-domain.blogspot.com, but I have not received anything back from Lou.
	Maybe he's on vacation or whatever, so I'll try and send it to somebody else over there, but I haven't.
	And it's a shame. I kind of wanted to get it in while the people would remember still the previous article, but so far...
	I mean, I'm not going to complain. I've had almost 30 articles published there, but unfortunately, I haven't got around to anything.
	He hasn't gotten back to me over the most recent one.
	And normally, if he doesn't like it, he'll just say no, so I don't think he has any problems doing that, but...
	Okay, then. But, yeah, if you need to get your fix for whatever reason, you can go to my blog.
	I put it there. Okay, then.
	Thanks. I'll check it out.
	Thank you very much.
	Now, I'm certainly, if you would like to ask a question, I take the easy ones.
	Christina takes the difficult ones.
	So, if you would like to ask any questions, this is Stefan Molyneux, host of Free Domain Radio at www.com.
	FreedomAidRadio.com. I've got to tell you, too, you can click on the Ask for Microphone, and I'd be happy to relinquish control.
	Oh, Sephathus wants to talk?
	I don't know. He's got tough questions.
	Let me just see if...
	Yeah, just before I pass it over, I just wanted people to know that I think we've already passed 100,000 downloads for this month, so we're going on track for 120,000, 130,000, I think, which is fantastic.
	Sephathus, go right ahead.
	Hello? Hello? You have the mic.
	Hello? Hello?
	I'm here. Hello?
	Am I on? Roll, roll, roll, roll, roll.
	Gently down the screen.
	You might want to...
	Oh, you did. You've got your mic in here.
	You've got your mic in here. Just turn off the speakers while you're talking, but go ahead.
	Yes. I was...
	Well...
	I was talking to...
	Wait a minute. You had an hour and a half to prepare and this is how you're starting?
	That's it, you're fired. Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, about the sex for money, I just don't understand how anyone could think that it's not self-esteem related when there's just a ton of movies that illustrate just how related to self-esteem the sex is.
	It is. I mean, like, the movie Can't Buy Me Love, for instance.
	That was...
	Oh, I thought you meant lesbian spank Inferno.
	And I just kind of wanted to make that point.
	It wasn't necessarily a question, I guess.
	Well, I agree. It's a very good point.
	I've actually, through my work, working in crisis units and mental health units, psychiatry units, I have met a number of different prostitutes from all different levels of prostitution, from the high-class call girl to the street prostitute,
	to the one who works for I've met male prostitutes, female prostitutes, and I can tell you, you know, the lifestyle that they have, I mean, these people just don't one day wake up and say, I'm going to sell my body for sex.
	This decision to become a prostitute or to sell their bodies for sex comes from a long history, a long string of Thank you.
	Thank you. I just wanted to point out as well that I very much enjoyed the way that Christina put the emphasis on a professionally informed opinion.
	I just wanted to point out how enjoyable that was for me and how it helped put the rest of my podcast in context.
	Okay, we've had somebody else join, which I will...
	He has been very patient, waiting for me to end speaking, and very optimistic.
	So, Mr.
	Mad, you, my friend, are on.
	Stefan, hello. Christine, hello.
	I'm good, how are you doing? Not bad.
	Oh, sorry, I thought you said, how are you?
	How are you? I'm okay, I'm okay.
	I'm interested to listen to your podcast.
	I'm in London. I work for a talk station in London which is broadcast throughout the UK and I was just looking through the listings and I've been listing on and off to what's been said and it's pretty interesting what I hear so far.
	I'm more perplexed By the fact that you're using the fact that someone's low esteem for them or a reason to go to a prostitute in the marriage or context.
	Why do you use this as an analogy?
	To go to a prostitute, wouldn't it be the fact that there's a breakdown in the marriage?
	I would think personally myself as far as prostitution is concerned, as long as it's controlled, it's a clean environment, that it may be a good thing where if there is, say in London, I'll give you, for instance, in London, there are controlled areas of prostitution.
	And they found the rates of rape, murder, basically, and attacks, dropped dramatically for the fact that there are men out there that, A, have a very high sex drive, and, B, I wouldn't say low self-esteem.
	I would think it was more put down to the fact that in a marriage that certain couples' sex strides don't match.
	Don't match at all.
	Where there is an outlet for either either to go to, i.e.
	a prostitute. Okay, I just want to make sure that I've got to...
	I didn't want to interrupt you, Matt.
	Oh, sure, sure. So if I understand it correctly, say hello to London for me.
	I lived there until I was 11.
	It's a great thing. Oh, whereabouts? I lived just in Hermitage Road, not too far from Crystal Palace.
	Oh, that's just down the road from where I live.
	Oh, how nice. Look, I mean, I really appreciate that, and that's quite right.
	And this is an important thing to differentiate for me as well, that for the people who are sort of new to listening to this and who don't know my particular approach to sort of politics and economics, I am absolutely, totally and completely for absolutely, totally and completely legalized prostitution.
	I think that keeping prostitution as an illegal act It causes untold suffering, misery, exploitation of people in the sex trade industry who have usually not ended up in the sex trade industry because they haven't been exploited in the past.
	So I think that the harassment of prostitutes, the vilification of prostitutes, the health risks that go on, the criminal element, the problem of course is that when you have Prostitution being illegal or solicitation, you end up with the mafia involvement, the criminal involvement, the pimps, the gangs, the drugs.
	It's just a complete mess all around.
	Of course, women and men, of course, end up in prostitution also because, and these things are all kind of related, they end up in prostitution partly because making drugs illegal has caused the price to become so high that it becomes almost impossible to make drugs illegal To have a regular job and to pay for drugs, so then people sort of spiral into this whole awful situation.
	I mean, we know for sure that you can have a drug habit and have a productive job because, of course, the number of doctors, who are the people who have the easiest and the most access to drugs in the world, a number of doctors have been found to be abusing drugs, hard drugs that they have access to, the morphines and cocaines and so on, heroines, And still have performed their duties reasonably well.
	So we know that you can have a job if you have access to quality drugs, you can have a job, and so on.
	So to me, there's a lot of interrelated factors that are going along here, that you make drugs illegal, which raises their price, which causes people to not be able to have a job, and England has been quite forward this way.
	They have methadone clinics to get people off heroin, and I think in England as well, at least as of a couple of years ago, if you were a heroin addict, you could actually get heroin So that you didn't have to end up with, you know, these dirty needles and hepatitis and AIDS and selling your body and all this wretchedness, right? I mean, the people who have substance abuses are people who have medical issues, right?
	This is a medical and psychological issue that needs to be dealt with.
	They're not evil. They're not, you know, scum.
	They're, you know, people who've got terrible, terrible issues.
	So I totally agree with you.
	And, you know, my psychological approach to looking at the problem of self-esteem that may be associated with visiting prostitutes I just wanted to sort of clarify that, hopefully not too much at length, that I have great sympathy for this, right?
	And it needs to be legalized so that these people have access to courts and that they have access to dispute resolution services that aren't the point of a gun, that lowers the price and all that.
	So sorry, you had a... Well, yeah, I mean, I totally agree.
	I mean, at the end of the day, the top police commissioner in the UK, they've worked out between them.
	God bless them. That the way that, especially with the drug problem, i.e.
	drugs leads to prostitution, leads to crime, and so on and so on and so on.
	The way around it, they will supply heroin to drug users under a very strict controlled environment.
	And to bring down the crime rate, because they worked out the fact that the actual crime rate within the UK It was costing so much because drug addicts were breaking into houses and so on and so on and so on and so on.
	And so the cost was spiraling out of control.
	So one of the top police commissioners has suggested for the UK is to get drug addicts.
	That's drug addicts in the sense of not anybody off the street at the moment.
	To go to, like, Amsterdam.
	I've been to Amsterdam.
	There's controlled areas where people can go and have their jobs.
	It's not the best thing.
	It's not the best thing.
	But, A, it does control the situation.
	B, it will control the crime rate.
	Because you won't have the situation of people breaking into people's houses just to get a quick fix for the next day.
	Because, I mean, I've dealt With, you know, people that are on heroin.
	And the first two things they're thinking of in the morning is, I feel really bad and where am I going to get my next fix?
	And that's the two main things on the mind.
	And it's a horrifying spiral of destruction.
	Yes, absolutely. I totally agree with you on the amount of suffering that is engendered.
	It's not also, as I'm sure you're aware, it's the abuses that creep into the police system because of the war on drugs.
	I mean, if you look at the corruption that has occurred within the United States police force based on this massive and insane war on drugs, you know, where the cops are planting drugs on people to get them to confess and the drugs, the police are then doing asset forfeitures and seizures and so on.
	I mean, when you start to have a crime where there's no complainant other than the state, right?
	I mean, if you pop me one in the nose, I'm going to bring charges against you.
	If you come and steal my car, I'm going to bring charges against you.
	But if you go and smoke pot in your own house or you go visit a prostitute, what business is it of mine, right?
	So the problem is when you put crimes onto the books where the state is the sole complainer, then the state starts to create problems, right?
	I mean, it's not because the people in the government are innately evil or anything.
	It's just that when you get this kind of power that is put out there, It inevitably is going to get abused, right?
	So you now have, what, a million Americans in jail, and in horrible jail.
	I mean, Amnesty International has visited these jails and said that these are inhuman third-world conditions, regular rape and beatings.
	I mean, it's just absolutely inhuman.
	And you've got a million people in there who are in there for nonviolent crimes that no sane human being would ever say violated anyone else's rights.
	So there's an enormous amount of corruption and brutalization of the enforcers that goes on with this kind of stuff as well.
	So I agree with you that it should be legal, and I agree with you that...
	I wouldn't go so far as to say it should be control, but that's perhaps another discussion.
	But I would still very much...
	Sorry, no, what I was going to say, what I meant was control, in a controlled environment, i.e.
	that someone goes to, say, like a chemist, you know, like someone that will supply the drugs to them,...under a very strict basis, i.e.
	one needle, one shot of heroin, cocaine, and monitor it.
	This is where a lot of the governments are let down, or they let themselves down, and us as taxpayers down.
	They don't follow through with the monitoring.
	It's okay and it looks good on the TV, you know, man standing there with a hypodermic needle and parsnip to some drug addict and going, yay, we are for the drug people, let's sort them out.
	But like six to eight months down the line, when that man is like shooting up again and shooting someone to get his next fix...
	Right. No, look, I agree with you, and I don't want to shock you, or maybe you're not shockable in this area, but I myself am something – I'm called a – I sort of – the philosophy that I bring on what this show is about is something called market anarchism, so it's about freedom, property rights,
	and no government, so the problem that – and I don't want to get into that debate, because that's a whole other thing, but I wouldn't necessarily say that I would trust the government to really help these people, because I think that would be more of sort of a private and charitable thing to do, but – What I will say, though, is that these drugs have been around since the dawn of recorded history.
	I mean, these hallucinogenic drugs have been around.
	However, the enormous social problems that are associated with them have largely really only risen since the sort of early to mid-1960s.
	So, for instance, there's a bit of, like, British trivial history for you.
	In 1960, you could go into a chemist's in London, and you could buy three hits of heroin for 25 pence.
	And it was made by pharmaceutical companies.
	It was clean. It was good.
	It was pure. And there were a couple of hundred addicts in London, right?
	By the end of the 1960s, instead of it costing 25 pence to get three hits of heroin, it cost five pounds to get one hit of heroin, and there were 20, 30, 40,000 addicts in London, right?
	Because, of course, the moment that the price of drugs goes up, criminal elements get involved and then will start trying to get people addicted so that they can continue to pillage them for money.
	So the problems with drugs are created by the laws against drugs, which doesn't mean to me that people who are on drugs don't have problems.
	Of course they do.
	But the problems are made far worse by the fact that once you get involved in drugs, you kind of have to disappear from society, from civilized society and so on.
	And it's like human beings just have to keep learning the lessons of prohibition over and over and over again.
	When you ban something, you're just making a symbolic gesture that actually just makes it worse.
	Well, yeah. I mean, you know, at the end of the day, I mean, you know, heroin, as you probably know yourself, is used in the medical industry anyway.
	But, I mean, it is a perplexing problem.
	It's a self-perpetuating problem because the point is, as you said, if the price is very low, then the criminal element are really not going to want to know.
	They're only going to come in when it's like 100 times more expensive to get the same amount.
	And as you say, it's a self-perpetuating thing.
	It comes to violence. It comes to prostitution.
	There's areas in London now.
	Which absolutely breaks my heart because at one point they were beautiful, beautiful areas.
	Now you dare, you dare need to step into them because you would get shot, you would get mugged, or you would get attacked.
	Right, and you get whole generations of children growing up in these kinds of ways.
	And what does that do to their trust in society and their trust in the virtue of the society that they're in and so on?
	You end up with these vastly different classes like a lot of the ghettos in America and certainly there were certainly some areas when I was a kid in London that you just didn't go.
	And, you know, you can't blame it all on the drug war, but boy, it's a pretty big, the war on drugs, the war on prostitution, and to some degree the war on gambling and so on.
	Everything that you make illegal, you don't solve the problem of sort of human vice by pointing guns at people and saying, we'll shoot you for being bad, which is really what all laws come down to.
	You have to have a lot more compassion and help for people.
	Like, if somebody's trapped in a bear trap, you don't just sort of shoot their leg off and say, look, I saved you, right?
	I mean, you've got to take a more proactive and positive approach Well, yeah, I mean, you know, as I say, at the end of the day, you know, it's like with London.
	You're going to central London now, down where, I mean, Big Ben.
	Now, I live very close to where Big Ben is, Parliament, you know, Buckingham Palace, stuff like that, you know.
	And you go down there and you see trams and people will step over them, you know.
	Some of them do try it on.
	There's been cases where you just look at their hands and arms and you can see where they've been shooting up and stuff like that.
	And it is.
	There's no compassion.
	Not even the Salvation Army gets involved now because people have been shot, people have been stabbed.
	And society itself today is slowly but surely starting to envelop on itself.
	It's starting to break down.
	And as I say, I can only speak for London.
	You know, because it is.
	It's criminal what is going on.
	And as I say, you know, the amount of people They're involved in, um, practitioners in the sense of, uh, uh, you know, like criminal activities within government themselves.
	I mean, we've had three occasions over here, you know, like, and you were saying about prostitution.
	We've had three members of parliament which have had to leave because they've gone to male prostitutes and they've denied it and they've been caught.
	Now that is the highest law of the land.
	Now, if they are involved within something like that, then what the heck is the rest of us?
	You know, what chance have we got?
	Right. Well, there's another thing I'd like to point out as well.
	I mean, if you want to quit smoking, right?
	If you want to quit heroin, what are you going to do?
	You're going to go cold turkey.
	You've got no job. You've got no decent place to live.
	You've got no support network because the charities won't touch you because of the fear of violence and the illegality.
	But if you want to quit smoking, you can go into any doctor, you can go into any drugstore, chemist, and you can get smoking patches, you can get nicotine gum, you can get hypnosis, you can get all of these legal ways of diminishing your intake with quality-controlled substances so that you can get off, you know, with the right counseling and with the right support network, you can get off these drugs and lead a productive life.
	So you can get off an alcohol, of course.
	You can wean yourself off alcohol.
	There are alcohol substitutes.
	There are drugs that you can take that make yourself allergic to alcohol that are safe.
	There's Alcoholics Anonymous, and there's lots of support networks because it's not illegal to drink and it's not illegal to smoke cigarettes, although it's not that far off where it might be.
	You have a way of getting a soft landing from these drugs, right, so that you can get out.
	But you can't control the quality of drugs when you are, like Lenny Bruce, right?
	I mean, he didn't die from heroin.
	He died from, you know, bad heroin, right?
	I mean, this is where a lot of, so there's just no easy way to get off.
	These drugs, because they're so illegal, whereas something like nicotine and other kinds of addictions, you can find medically safe and supervised ways of getting off these drugs totally impossible.
	These people are absolutely cast down a well of iniquity.
	We sort of, as a society, shrug and say, well, they're bad, they did it to themselves, not knowing about their history, not knowing what happened, where they grew up, and so on.
	And they then become the bad people, and we become the virtuous people, and there just seems to be a chilling lack of compassion for this problem in society.
	Wouldn't you think that, I mean, we're talking across a big wide stretch of water between us.
	Wouldn't you say that is society itself, it's called what I would call the MTV society, the want it now and what the heck happens tomorrow, we don't really care society, because it isn't.
	You know, it is that sort of lack of compassion that nobody gives a damn anymore.
	I mean, look at Christmas. A Christian pagan celebration of the birth of Jesus, which has been completely and utterly ripped apart, and you can buy anything you want on TV now.
	You know, it's that, everything's for Christmas.
	Everything goes mad now.
	You know, everything, all the prices go up.
	And why? Because of Christmas.
	There's no compassion in the world.
	No one gives a damn, really, if you look at it in that way.
	Well, I think quite a lot has changed.
	I don't get the sense that you're a high school student, so you've certainly seen a stretch of time, as have I, between sort of the beginning and the end, right?
	Just because of your vocabulary and your obvious wisdom and all.
	I wouldn't go that far.
	But, you know, we've seen quite a bit of changes, and society, of course, I mean, to my sort of way of thinking, and this is debatable, of course, but I would certainly say that because we generally have this big bucket of concern, we call the government, right?
	Well, the government has a social program, and the government takes all my taxes, and the government, I'm sure, is doing the right thing, and there's unemployment insurance and old age pensions, and there's welfare, and there's this and that.
	So we as a society, we just sort of assume that the government's going to just take care of it.
	And so our own personal motivations for charity, both with the diminished income that come out of high taxation, and just the general sense that somebody over there on the other side of this foggy wall of government or of big sort of institutions, someone else is taking care of it.
	And my money's been taken, and it's being put to good use.
	And of course, when you look into the reality of these government programs, it's not the case at all.
	I mean, these people aren't being taken care of.
	You know, there's a lot of words and there's a lot of promises and then there's, you know, not because people in government are evil, it's just the nature of the institution, right?
	That we have, I think, abandoned a fair amount of our own conscience when it comes to dealing with social issues and we just assume that someone else is going to handle it.
	And when you start to look into whether it is actually being handled, are the poor being helped?
	Are the uneducated being educated?
	Are the sick being treated with dignity and respect in a timely fashion?
	Are the programs working?
	It doesn't take a long time to figure out that once you get past the press releases and look into the actual facts, that there's not a lot of effectiveness in these things.
	And I would say, in the way that I approach things, that a much more positive and voluntaristic approach and a return of the conscience and the compassion for people in society to The members of the community rather than it being sort of over there on the other side where the government runs would be a much better thing for everyone.
	Well, this is it. I mean, you take, for instance, like the UK. Now, our National Health Service is completely in breakdown crisis now.
	There is no money.
	There's no money to pay.
	Yeah, it's the same here in Canada. As you know yourself, it is breaking down.
	There's God knows how many viruses running around hospitals now.
	There's people dying in hospital of viruses.
	MMC, I think they call it over here.
	I don't know what they call it over here.
	It's a viral disease.
	Yeah, because they've bombed everyone's systems with antibiotics for 30 years and now everything's...
	That's it. And the thing is as well, if you work through that, a lot of them companies which supplied all them drugs are to do with government.
	It's the same over here at the moment now with the Olympics in 2012.
	Now, they've just turned round and they've got the Olympics.
	Yay! Great! Great for London.
	Now they've turned round, right?
	And they've just worked out, ooh, it's going to cost 400% more than what the original estimate was.
	And that's just now.
	Wait till the final bell comes.
	You know, in Montreal, they had the Olympics in 1967.
	No, no, the Montreal Expo.
	Sorry, the Expo in 1967.
	They're still paying the bills.
	And I mean, and the crazy thing is, is where they're building this, they're going to flatten half of it afterwards and build prime state.
	You know, and who's paying?
	We are. It's crazy what is going on.
	Absolutely crazy. Right, and I think that we need to be fairly creative with the solutions, right?
	Because trying to vote someone else in, which has been tried basically for the last hundred years, doesn't really seem to do as well as we'd hoped.
	So we certainly... I mean, you might want to listen to some of the podcasts.
	We can talk about a variety of different and interesting solutions, which might be of fun to you.
	And I don't mean to interrupt you, but I do just want to sort of mention to people...
	That if you do have any sort of questions or issues, then just click on the sort of raise or beg for microphone kind of situation.
	Yeah, we'll wait for people to come back.
	This is all too exciting.
	But if you click on raise microphone, then I just don't want to, although it's fascinating to chat with you, I just wanted to make sure that anybody else had questions or issues.
	I certainly appreciate you joining in, and give me a shout if you ever want a cross-Atlantic anarchist perspective on social problems.
	It usually is quite an interesting perspective to get, and will definitely generate some exciting controversy.
	No doubt. All very politely.
	All very politely. Over a nice cup of tea and some crumbies.
	Absolutely. Scones, by the way.
	Scones, yes. Marvellous.
	Scones. Scones.
	That's a joke for people over 35.
	Yes, most definitely. Okay.
	So-called toolkit. Thanks so much.
	I really appreciate it. That was very nice to have you.
	Be sure to come back. Thank you.
	I might actually get a chance to squeeze in my topic.
	What do you think? It's only just past six.
	Maybe I'll keep it for next week.
	Maybe what I'll do is, if nobody else has any other questions, which I'm certainly willing to entertain, if you click on the raised microphone, I can mention my topic, and then we can talk about it more next week.
	It's coming on for the dinner hour.
	So if you have any sort of questions or issues, do anyone, I don't think anyone's got anything raised, right?
	Clearly, they just want to hear nothing but my topic.
	And I can't help but commend them for that extraordinary level of wisdom.
	No one? I just want to make sure I don't get anyone.
	Enough with that. Okay. All right.
	So the topic that I had, which I thought was interesting, wait, a couple of people are flashing me here.
	I'm trying to ask to click to speak, but it doesn't seem to be working.
	Okay, so we have somebody who is actually the son of Ayn Rand, interestingly enough, who would like to say something.
	Let me just see if I can find him.
	And then we may have to, in fact, wait for my astonishingly excellent topic for next week.
	Let me just...
	His name is...
	Oh, can I even say it?
	It starts with a J. Let me just see if I can find him on the list here.
	I don't think I can see him anywhere.
	Okay. Sorry. All right.
	So we're going to start with my topic. And now my topic is, and there's been some interesting debates back and forth, both in my email inbox.
	Oh, is he there? Is he there?
	Okay, we've had him...
	I'm just going to drag him over to the old chat window.
	And I was looking for his name rather than his handle.
	So let me just...
	All right, I think you're on.
	Can you just try saying something now?
	Am I in now? You certainly are.
	How are you doing? I had a question going back to the Prostitution issue.
	I didn't hear all of your discussion tonight, so I may have missed a bit of your...
	Well, that's it.
	We can't entertain questions unless people have been in for the last two and a half.
	I'm just kidding. I understood your argument that basically if you were willing to accept money for sex, then you wouldn't...
	You don't really want to have sex with that person.
	Did I... Summarize that correctly?
	The hookers and cocaine domain from earlier?
	Yes, just to summarize for those who are joining later, because we've had some people just join.
	The reason that we know that somebody doesn't want to have sex with you is if they only have sex with you because you pay them, that's a fairly strong indication.
	Okay, well I guess what I was, and maybe this is along similar lines of earlier caller who was kind of challenging the logic of that argument.
	It would seem that you could only know that You don't necessarily know that they wouldn't otherwise have sex for no money.
	You only know that they at least know that the market will bear some money.
	So you could almost, you could maybe, and maybe as a parallel argument I was wondering, I was thinking about people like maybe for yourself who like to hear different people's challenging questions, engage in arguments.
	You enjoy that process.
	You love it. But if you can get Paid for it, then even better.
	So just the fact that you're being paid for it doesn't necessarily mean you don't like it.
	No, that's an excellent point.
	I'm certainly not going to disagree with that.
	But the original, and again, you may have zoned out during this long ago part of the chat, but the original sort of question was, is it indicative of someone, John, or whatever his name is, that this John has, can we guess that he has lower self-esteem because he's willing to pay for sex than somebody who doesn't?
	It certainly is the case, or could be the case, That if you go up to some, I don't know, some woman in a bar and say, you know, let's make the beast with two backs, and she says, that'll be 200 bucks.
	It may be that if you haggle her down...
	You can get her to have sex with you for nothing.
	However, if you do accept that you're going to pay her $200 or maybe you only even haggle her down to $100, you certainly are not willing to put it to the test that she's going to have sex with you for free.
	And again, that would indicate a slightly lower self-esteem.
	Does that sort of make sense? So at this point, you're arguing the self-esteem of the John as opposed to the willingness of the prostitute to have sex for free.
	For sure. I mean, it certainly is the case.
	I mean, the argument was really, because I posted on the board my opinion that somebody, the original criteria was somebody who has loud music, prostitute and cocaine parties on a regular basis Is somebody who's disturbed in some manner sort of psychologically and then the question got to around then I was sort of pointed out that I thought that somebody who went to prostitutes indicated lower self-esteem than somebody who didn't.
	And then you're absolutely right.
	It may take an extraordinarily high degree of self-esteem in a weird kind of way To go and haggle the prostitute down to zero.
	I mean, from a purely economic standpoint, I would be quite in admiration of somebody who was able to do that.
	I mean, if Brad Pitt decided to go trolling for prostitutes, I bet you he could probably get them to pay him 200 bucks, right?
	Just for the photo on the wall, you know, and maybe the cache of, you know, if I'm good enough for Brad Pitt, maybe I can get 300 bucks.
	It would be like a loss leader for the prostitute, right?
	To get additional revenue from advertising or whatever.
	So I can certainly understand that, but in general, a prostitute who's in the business of charging for sex, who decides not to charge for sex, is no longer a prostitute, right?
	So a prostitute, almost by definition, is somebody who is charging for sex.

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