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March 7, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:35
672 Minarchism, Libertarianism and Logic

The state is not inefficient for everyone...

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Good morning everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is 8.09am on March the 7th, 2007.
And this is going out to all our minicus brothers in spirit, if not necessarily in flesh.
And I'm going to point out some things that I see as problematic within the small state position, the constitutionally bound.
If only we could get back to 1776, but without all the slavery and no rights for women or children, then things would be so much better and we would have a stable and positive social situation.
So, the one thing I think that's interesting about the conflict or the differences of opinions between market anarchists, or those who believe in a stateless society, or advocate a stateless society, and minarchists, I could be wrong.
This is just based on my experience in debating with such folks.
But it feels like the burden of proof is sitting squarely on the shoulders of the market anarchists, the Mars, the anarchists.
In other words, the minarchist position of a small state, constitutionally bound, separation of powers, checks and balances, and so on, that a small state is just automatically considered to be the default positive and proven position, that if we can get back to a small state, then things will be hunky-dory, and it will certainly be an improvement upon a big state, and that is the goal that we all should have.
That position as a default position, it's like arguing about God in, I don't know, a Southern Baptist small town.
The default position is that God exists and he certainly is a Baptist.
And anybody who wishes to dislodge that position is going to have a fairly uphill battle because that is the accepted position.
I think, you know, personally, I think that human thought takes the greatest leap forward when we abandon default positions and start to work from first principles.
They put things to the test, right?
It's the old Galileo with the bowling ball and the orange thing dropping off the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Everyone thinks the bowling ball is going to fall faster.
In fact, people are so sure of that that they wouldn't even bother to experiment on that any more than they would try and postulate that the world is banana-shaped.
Of course, when you do test it, it turns out not to be true.
So I think that the real advances in thought occur when default positions are not accepted as default positions.
And this idea that a small state, a minimal state, is a positive, good, and benevolent thing, and that should be our goal, Is, I think, really taken as a default position.
And the problem with that is that then the burden of proof then shifts to everyone that you're talking to.
And I think that's kind of intellectually lazy.
I mean, I don't think it's going to stimulate you as much as if we don't take these things as default positions, but rather start working from first principles.
So let me sort of give you an example of what I mean, because I think if we can share the burden of proof for our respective systems, then I think we're going to get a whole lot better off.
I'm certainly willing to accept the possibility that market anarchy may not be the right thing.
Stateless society may not be the right thing.
I'm just willing to keep combing over this until the day that I expire, probably podcasting.
So, it's not that I view this as a fixed and perfect position and minarchism is just plain wrong.
I'm not trying to convince you of that.
What I am saying, though, is that I have some doubts and questions about the minarchist position.
And those doubts and questions I've not been able to resolve.
Now, we are in a bit of an incompatible position.
A small state is not just a little bit larger than no state, right?
It's quite a difference, right?
So if you want a state that is 10% the size of the existing state, then you say, as Harry Brown did, right?
You say, well, let's get to the 90% and then we'll figure out the 10% at the end.
We'll rent the Rose Bowl and we'll have a big debate about where we should go after that.
But I think that it's quite a bit of difference there.
I really do. I think it's quite a bit of difference.
And I think that the principles that you have at the beginning really condition what happens at the end, as we all know from the difference between the much more successful American revolution versus the highly genocidal Russian revolution.
The principles that you have at the beginning really do determine where you go.
Your navigation at the beginning of a long sea voyage, one or two degrees difference, means that you end up on different continents sometimes.
So I think that knowing where it is that you want to go at the beginning of a journey is very important.
And if the state is wrong, I'm not saying that I've convinced you of anything yet, if the state is sort of morally wrong...
Then having a small estate is not really the same as having a good thing or having a good society.
And again, I'm using an extreme example here and I apologize for that.
But if you say, oh, I'm a guy who goes out and rapes a woman every night of the week.
Every night of the week I go out and rape someone.
And the goal then is to say, well, if you could just sort of scale that back to weekly, that would be an excellent ideal.
That would be the best possible ideal that you could achieve.
Well, I doubt anybody would really say that.
I mean, obviously, it's a kind of improvement.
But if you also knew that even if you could battle for years of therapy and personal confrontation and shadowing the guy and so on, that you could get him down to once a week, but that the moment you took your eyes off him, he would go back to seven nights a week and increasing from there, then you would probably feel that it would not be a very positive thing to do.
So the difference between a 10% state relative to the existing state, if the state is wrong, is not the difference between good and evil, right?
The difference there is between really bad evil and less of that evil, which I don't think is a goal that is very enlightening or ennobling, reducing the amount of evil.
It's a good thing to do. If I could snap my fingers and make the state smaller tomorrow, I would.
But as far as a goal goes, A, I don't think it's going to work for a variety of reasons we'll get into.
But B, even if it did work, you're asking for the state to defy every single...
The state has manifested in its history over the past couple of thousands of years, which is to grow and grow and grow until it eats up society.
There's a collapse, there's a retrenchment, and then it grows and grows and grows again.
It shifts sort of justifications and moralizations, but always continues to grow.
So even if you could get the state small again, there's very strong arguments as to how it would simply grow again, just grow again.
And so it seems like an enormous amount of effort.
If the state is wrong, like if it's wrong to have a state, It seems like an enormous amount of effort to claw the state back down to a smaller size, which, as you know, economically and politically is next to impossible and doesn't really ever occur until the state collapses, as it did in Soviet Russia in the late 20th century.
And then, of course, all it does is start growing again as, well, same country, same state, same pattern.
So, I'd like to sort of make the case, or at least make the possibility of the case, that the burden of proof lies a little bit more on the monarchists than the market anarchists, and I would like to try and take some chips at this edifice of statism that scales all the way from monarchists to maxarchists,
to people who just want, I don't know, some sort of fascist or socialist dictatorship, and try and convince you that It's better to have a more consistent goal rather than to not have a more consistent goal.
I sort of believe that an inconsistent goal actually works against your ends, but we will get to that a little bit later on.
Now, the first thing that you sort of hear in my experience in debating with minarchists, the first thing that you hear is that...
A big state, it's like a bell curve, right?
A big state is really bad.
A state that is too small is really bad.
And there's a comfortable margin or region somewhere in the middle wherein having a state that is just the right size, right?
It's the, this bowl of porridge is too hot.
This bowl of porridge is too cold.
This bowl of porridge is just right.
It's the Goldilocks argument for the proportionality of the state relative to GDP or relative to its taxes or whatever.
And most often what I hear from minarchists is an argument from efficiency.
Or you could say the argument from stability or whatever it is.
But the argument basically goes like this.
Well, a big state is really inefficient because the taxes are too high, because it controls too much of people's lives.
People aren't free enough.
They're frightened of the state.
And the state continues to grow, and the state manipulates the money supply, and the state borrows often from overseas lenders, and so it's a hidden tax upon future generations, and the state this and the state that.
So that's inefficient, and usually the argument is around morality, although there is some appeal to human liberty, often with reference to the principles of the Founding Fathers.
And I understand the argument, and I think, of course, it's a compelling argument, but it's a compelling argument for me just because of pre-existing arguments for statism, right?
It's hard to stare old Jefferson in the eye and say, dude, you got it so wrong, it's ridiculous, right?
You were so close, and yet so far.
And it takes a certain amount of, dare I say, hubris or mad pride to look at the Enlightenment philosophers and say, you missed the boat.
A little bit on deism, a little bit on statism, and let's give it a shot at correcting you.
But, you know, maybe it's possible.
Maybe it's possible. Just maybe.
So, the argument from efficiency then scales, right?
So then a big state is inefficient, but then a small state is inefficient.
Because if you get a state that's too small, and let's say you have taxes raised of $1 and one guy can buy a gumdrop and he calls himself the state or something like that.
And that's bad because there's going to be all of this violence that is going to be running riot in the streets and there's no way to punish criminals.
And there's a little bit of Old Testament, we need the state to thunder and crush the criminal element and so on.
And that is bad.
If the state gets too small, then chaos and mess and economic inefficiencies, of course, and liberty is then constricted again, right?
So liberty is constricted when the state is too big.
Liberty flowers when the state gets smaller, but then liberty dies on the vine when the state gets too small because you get all of these gangs running the streets and, I don't know, mini-states popping up all over the place and competing corporate interests and so on.
It's all this Mad Max stuff, right?
So that's sort of the argument as far as I understand it.
I'm sure there's a lot more sophisticated stuff, and I've certainly experienced it, but I'm just going to try and bear it down to the minimum so that we can get through this in a reasonable amount of time.
Thank you.
Now, the interesting thing about the argument from efficiency with regards to the state, and I'm just talking about the large state here, Is that economic efficiency is a very slippery and tricky concept to work with, in my opinion. Because it is so subjective.
It's so subjective.
And, I mean, economists will tell you this as well.
Every decision you make has an opportunity cost.
And... Every rule that you put into place has winners and losers, right?
So we all know that the farm subsidies have winners in terms of people who run the farm subsidies and certain farmers who have political pull that they win.
It's just that the general population loses, the smaller farmers lose, and the price of food generally goes up and so on.
So there are winners and losers in almost every economic transaction.
That is a coercive redistribution.
There's win-win when it's two people exchanging goods freely, but when there's coercive redistribution of any kind, whether it's taxation or welfare or military spending or whatever, where there's coercive redistribution of income, there are winners and there are losers.
And the thing I think that is sort of problematic with this minarchist approach is saying it's inefficient.
It's inefficient. Is that the basic question is not answered, which is to who?
Inefficient to who? You've got a state that's running at 50% taxation up here in Canada, it's 50 to 60%.
Well, certainly it's inefficient for me, but then the question is, why is it there?
Why does it exist?
Why does it exist? If it's inefficient, why does it exist?
People don't generally build roads to nowhere.
They don't build planes made out of balsa wood that are life-size.
They don't generally do things that are inefficient.
So, if the state exists, and you say that it's inefficient, then that's not the whole story.
It doesn't explain why it's there.
And it doesn't answer the question of inefficient to whom.
Well, From a mere economic standpoint, a stick-up, right, a hold-up and stick a gun in your ribs and tell you to give me your wallet, you say, well, that's economically inefficient.
But then why is it happening?
Well, because it's only economically inefficient for one of us, right?
It's only economically efficient for one of us.
It's highly economically efficient for me if you happen to be carrying $1,000 in cash and I get a hold of that with relatively little risk for five minutes' work.
And, of course, I mean, I'm aware it's economically efficient as a whole, and it raises the costs of self-protection.
People then want to carry guns if crime gets too high and blah, blah, blah.
I understand a bit I want to carry cash, and I understand all of that.
But I'm just talking about crime exists.
I mean, pure material crime, property crime exists, taking out the psychological element of people's, I don't know, horrible histories or whatever.
It exists because it's economically efficient for some people.
It's economically efficient for some people.
And the state exists because it's highly, highly economically efficient for some people.
So the principle of economic efficiency, to me, can't logically apply to the state.
Because the state is an example, a prime example, of extreme economic efficiency.
Extreme economic efficiency.
But the state only exists because it is extremely economically efficient for some people.
So I don't really get how you can say that the state is economically inefficient.
The state is not economically inefficient.
That's like saying a plane only goes up.
A plane goes up and down and sideways and so on, but...
The state is enormously economically efficient.
It is the most economically efficient mechanism for the transfer of wealth in the history of the world.
I mean, it fades the relevance of a stick-up artist into almost atomic insignificance.
A stick-up artist can pull down, I don't know, a couple hundred bucks a day, if he's lucky, and for how long?
Till he runs up against some jiu-jitsu god who...
Does monkey get fruit on his chest?
So that's not very efficient.
But the state legally disarms its citizens or if it doesn't have the capacity to legally disarm them completely as in the US, it simply develops overwhelming force and goes and attacks foreign countries and so on.
But we're talking trillions of dollars of transfer.
Trillions of dollars of wealth that is transferred From the majority of citizens to the minority of politically connected people.
By politically connected, I do include, what, a third of people who work for the federal government or whatever.
They're certainly connected to politics, even if they're not having dinner with the president.
Look at the profit levels of corporations that do business with the state.
Up here in Canada, 2007, March, Scotiabank has reported a profit of a billion dollars.
A billion dollar profit for a bank.
Would that occur in a free market?
Well, of course not. Of course not.
It would never in a million years occur in a free market.
It just is impossible.
It's inconceivable. Look at the profit margins of those who do business with the state and you will understand that it's incredibly economically efficient to have a state.
And we're just talking about money here.
We're not even talking about power, which is a great aphrodisiac for a lot of people in the world.
To have power over others to sign a document and have the whole world march in line behind you, that's a pretty heady joy.
It's like a drug, right?
It gives people a high. There's just no way to get political power in the private sector.
You can't. Anyone who's been self-employed or anyone who's been the boss of any decent-sized organization knows that you are never in charge.
I mean, you're never in charge when you're in a free market situation.
You try and guide, you try to influence, you try to lead, but people got to follow and you can't make them do that.
Not in the same way that you can make people pay taxes or obey a regulation.
So, the power that is available to people in the public sector is simply not available through any other means.
And they love it. Obviously, they love it.
How much money could George Bush make as a businessman?
Well, he might be a decent used car salesman.
Might pull home $100,000 a year.
Leader of the free world, based on his intellectual abilities?
I sort of doubt it, actually.
I really do. So...
The state is highly efficient.
Highly, highly, highly efficient.
In the same way that having cows is highly efficient for a farmer.
It's not the way they produce veal.
They lock the cows up, overfeed the milk, I think it is, and immobilize them so that they get really fat, so that the veal tastes better, I guess.
Well, that's not so efficient for the cow that would rather be out roaming the woods and dodging coyotes, but it's pretty efficient for the farmer.
So the cow, of course, would say, well, this is not efficient at all.
I mean, this is a cow beating its head against its stall because it can't even move.
The cow would say this is not efficient at all.
This is terrible. This is the worst thing ever.
But the farmer would not agree.
If the cow says this is totally inefficient and irrational and wrong, it doesn't explain why he's stuck in a stall and being fed all this horrible milk forever.
So I don't think that the argument from efficiency works very well.
Because it's collectivist, fundamentally.
The argument from efficiency says that the state is inefficient and people prefer efficiency and that's how we're going to win.
We're going to convince people that it's more efficient to have a smaller state because people prefer efficiency.
Efficiency is better. But if efficiency is better, then you have just affirmed that the state is never going to shrink because the state is efficiency for those who are using it to pillage the general population.
If people prefer efficiency, and if you expect the people to rise up on the grounds of efficiency, then I think you've just argued yourself out of minarchism.
Certainly, people prefer efficiency, and I would agree with that.
But if people prefer efficiency, surely people prefer that which gets them the greatest resources for the least labor.
It gets them the greatest resources for the least labor.
Otherwise, it's tough to explain lotteries, right?
But if people prefer that which gives them the greatest resources for the least labor, then the citizen will never win against the state.
Because in order to fight the state, the citizen has to risk jail, the citizen has to defy, or the citizen, at the very least, has to live a life of frustration and exclusion by arguing about the evils of the state and how a smaller state would be better in the face of mostly scorn and condescension from all of those around him.
And what's the benefit?
Well, it certainly has not accrued as yet.
Libertarianism and minochism haven't done anything to get rid of the state or even to slow down the size of its increase.
So, if people do prefer things which are efficient, and if they do prefer that which gives them the greatest benefit for the least amount of effort, then the motivation for those who are benefiting from the state versus those who wish to shrink the state is so lopsided, even by the minarchist's own argument.
The state will never fall.
Will never fall. There's this old argument, which I'm sure you've heard, which is that For me to oppose an agricultural subsidy is going to take me months of work.
I'm going to be fighting against people whose entire livelihood depend on an agricultural subsidy, or so they think.
And if I do get this agricultural subsidy repealed, then it maybe saves me 20 bucks a year, 30 bucks a year, maybe 40.
Maybe 100, doesn't matter.
Maybe 200, maybe 1,000, doesn't matter.
But, of course, the farmers who are no longer benefiting from the subsidy, well, they lose $100,000 a year.
So their motive to retain the subsidy is far greater.
And their funding, right? Their ability to spend money on the state.
And, of course, we all know that's how legislation is really affected, is through funding.
Their motivation and their funding availability...
To keep the agricultural subsidies, right?
They can bribe the politicians.
They can fund the politicians. They can take out ads.
They can rally popular support.
Everyone is going to be thundering and marching.
How many people are going to march for $50 a year?
How many people are going to march for $100,000 a year?
Well, just look at it, right?
The argument from efficiency that says the state should be shrunk because it is inefficient is exactly why the state will never shrink.
The state will never shrink.
Based on the minicus own argument, and maybe there's something I'm missing here, and feel free to clarify it.
Maybe you feel that there's some...
Incredible Keanu Reeves in the Matrix kind of situation where people can magically all come together and oppose all subsidies at once and walk away with something so much greater and so much better.
Or you maybe believe in the great libertarian offer which is will you give up your favorite government program for $10,000 of income tax a year of return to you.
But it doesn't matter.
If you would say, I'll give up my favorite program, everyone has a different favorite program that they'd want to give up.
And all of those people are never going to give up that program.
The people who work there, the people who've benefited from it, the politicians who advocated it, the people who receive benefits from it, I mean, they're never going to give it up because it's economically efficient for them.
Because, as you know, the fundamental nature of the state is that it charges...
The taxpayers to enforce the collection of taxes.
You can't get more economically efficient than that.
It would be like, as a farmer, not only did you have cows, but the cows paid you $5,000 a month per head out of their own pockets?
I guess they wouldn't be wearing leather, but...
You couldn't get, I mean, not only do you get all the benefits of having power over the cows and so on, and maybe you get to sell them for meat or something, but they're also paying you.
And through that, you get to take their money that the cows are paying you to build barbed wire enclosures and electric fences.
You can't get any more economically efficient than that.
Unless you run into one of these goose that lays a golden egg or something, you just can't.
So, if you believe that economic efficiency is a reason why the state should shrink, I'm afraid, I think, that the weapon goes off in your hands because economic efficiency is specifically and precisely why the state is never going to shrink.
And that's something that I would give at least one pinky to get into the head of Minarchus and get into the head of Libertarians.
Now, the other thing that I'd like to talk about in terms of cost-benefit analysis is, and I'm doing this not because I dislike minarchists or anything, but because I really want you guys to, if you're wrong, right, and I could be wrong, let's just have the debate, but if you're wrong, I really don't want you to be wasting your time.
I mean, we're all on this world for a short amount of time, and if we do care about freedom, then we really should be Applying our resources to...
That which is going to gain the most traction.
That which is going to achieve the most.
We should be applying our resources.
If you work in a lab trying to figure out how to cure cancer for 40 years, and then at the end of that somebody says, oh, you were working on pig blood.
That's totally different. That's not applicable at all to human beings.
You'd probably feel just a little bitter.
And like, well, what the hell was the point of all of that?
And particularly if you're a volunteer, right?
I mean, how many of us are getting paid to be libertarians or minichists or anarchists or whatever?
If you were a volunteer and they said, oh, you've been working on the wrong substance for 40 years for, you know, eight hours a day, and so the whole thing's been a complete waste, well, that's a pretty negative thing to occur, right?
That's a pretty negative thing to occur.
I think that there's an even grimmer possibility, which is why this is somewhat urgent for me, which is that...
You could be going the opposite way.
You could actually, through saying that the state is good but needs to be tweaked, you are actually providing justifications for the state.
So libertarians or maniacists who believe in a small state are absolutely justifying the state.
They're saying the state is morally good, it's just out of proportion.
It's just out of proportion.
Like, if we could turn this cancer into a benign cancer, then that would be okay.
And that may be even worse than wasting your time, right?
In the service of that which you despise, in the service of violence and hegemonic power and so on, that which you despise.
And that's really not a fun way to spend your life, right?
So that's like if you're the volunteer working with the blood to try and find a cure for cancer, and it turns out that you think you've come up with a cure and people get injected, but it actually makes cancer worse.
You'd want to know that, right?
You'd want to know that. I'm not saying I've proven it.
I'm just saying that if that were the case, if it were the case that fighting for a smaller state is actually swelling the existing state because you are accepting the premises of violence and centralized coercion, you're saying it's okay.
Slavery is okay.
We just need more benevolent slave owners.
You don't fight slavery, at least the abolitionists didn't fight slavery throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, didn't fight slavery by saying, well, we need to tweak slavery.
We need slavery to be more benevolent.
We need to give the slaves Sundays off.
Or the slaves should only be slaves for one day a week.
But that's not how you fight slavery, because basically, obviously, you're accepting the premise that slavery is good.
Because you're saying people should be slaves on Sundays.
So you're not opposing slavery on principle.
You're tweaking it. And I know that libertarians would say, well, it's a considerable tweak to make the government one-tenth or one-one-hundredth the size that it is now.
I agree. I agree.
But you're still accepting that violence is good.
Violence is a positive force within society, or can be.
We need to get the guns into the hands of the right people.
There need to be fewer guns and they need to be in the hands of the right people.
But we still think that it's good to point guns at citizens.
That we still believe that there's a monopolistic, centralized, coercive power or group of individuals who must, who should, who have the right and should exercise that right to point guns at citizens.
We should get rid of the income tax, sayeth these people, and we should replace it with an excise tax.
A tariff or something. So, we want fewer guns and we want them pointed at fewer people.
But we absolutely believe that guns should be pointed at people.
And that's the most moral thing.
You're not saying, regretfully, guns must be pointed at people.
You're saying it's a positive good that guns must be pointed at people through the state, right?
Through this small group of people who will never be corrupted by that power and who will never want to, apparently, want more guns, right?
There will never be an escalation as there was after The American Revolution.
How long did it take?
60 years? 70 years?
80 years for the Civil War to break out?
And for 600,000 men to be killed in battle and society to be disrupted and destroyed?
I mean, look how nuts. People went about 3,000 dead on 9-11.
600,000 dead in the 1860s, given the population of the U.S. It would be millions of dead now.
How long did that take? And what was it for?
For tariffs, for taxes.
So this is the problem that the sanction of violence, the sanction of coercion, the sanction of brutality, the sanction of the right for certain individuals to initiate the use of force against other individuals because they put on a uniform or a costume or call themselves a government or this or that, I would suggest that you can't fight a cancer while saying that cancer can be good.
I think that you not only diffuse the goal that you're trying to achieve, which I think is the same goal, right?
Less violence, if not no violence, and...
I mean, if we could have a society with no state, I'm sure, and it could work, I'm sure everyone would prefer it.
Certainly it's intellectually more consistent, logically and morally more consistent, than saying, well, people should have the right to wave guns in other people's faces, but we'd like those guns to be different, and we'd like those people to be different, right?
That's sort of the voting situation, and that's really where Dominicus are and where libertarians are.
Violence is good, we should have less of it.
And that's sort of the fundamental contradiction that I don't understand about minarchism and libertarianism.
I mean, if violence is bad, why do you want it?
If violence is good, why do you oppose it?
And if violence is bad, why do you sanction it?
I mean, that's the seesaw logic that I've just never been able to get my head around.
If violence is bad, and here we've already dealt with the argument from efficiency, it's efficient for others, if violence is morally wrong, and we all know that the state is a massive agent of violence, if violence is morally wrong, then why do you want to keep it?
In the realm or the form of a small state.
And I know that some Christian libertarians out there, oh, well, man has fallen, blah, blah, blah, man has fallen, and therefore can't rule himself, and so on.
Yeah, sure, okay, fine, but if man has fallen, then how can a man have power over other men, right?
I mean, the worse you think people are, the less justification you have for a state.
Then armed neutrality is the best you can hope for, where the tots have Uzis, right?
I mean, that's the best you can hope for, logically.
But if violence is wrong and you wish to oppose it, then why would you wish to rescue it in the realm or in the form of a small state?
I don't quite understand that.
Violence is wrong, so we need a smaller government.
But then violence, somehow, when the government gets below a certain magical size, 10% of its current size or 5% or whatever, suddenly, and lo, it seems almost magically, violence becomes good.
Centralized, coercive, monopolistic power in the form of a state is bad when the government is big.
Government shrinks. 90, 80, 70, 50, 20, 10, 9.
Violence is still bad. 8.
Violence is still evil. 7.
6. 5.5.
Violence is still evil. 5.
Ping! Violence should becometh good.
You know, I just can't see it.
I just can't see it. I can't see the logic of it.
If you do have a cancer and the radiation treatment is working, do you want to shrink it or do you want to get rid of it?
Do you want to, oh, the cancer's down to 5%.
Well, what happens if you stop the radiation treatment?
Oh, it's going to regrow. Oh, well, let's stop then.
Well, no. Isn't your goal to get rid of the cancer?
Cancer doesn't become 5% of its original size and suddenly become benevolent or positive for you.
Oh, I better not go below 5% of my cancer, of its original size, because then I'll be very unhealthy.
Well, no, cancer's bad, right?
That's why you're fighting it.
That's why you're opposing it, because cancer is bad for you.
And it doesn't get down to some smaller nugget and suddenly become good for you.
Especially since every single person who stops the treatment, whatever treatment you're taking, has their cancer regrow.
See, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
And again, I could be missing something very important, but this is sort of where my thinking is, and feel free to tell me otherwise.
Because if you say, well, yeah, I prefer a stateless society, but it's just impossible.
It's just impossible. Well, that's fine.
I mean... Then, of course, you have the problem.
Why is it impossible? Well, it's inefficient and it could never work and so on, right?
But that's a different argument, right?
That's a different argument.
Saying a stateless society is better, but it would never work means that you're not a minarchist, right?
You're just a confused anarchist, if I can put it that way.
I'm sorry, that's not a very nice way of putting it, but I think you know what I mean, right?
Then you are an anarchist in terms of your ideals, right?
You want a stateless society.
But you just don't know how it can be achieved.
And good Lord, I mean, that's no problem.
I mean, that's the issue that all the anarchists grapple with.
But that doesn't matter.
Fundamentally, it doesn't matter how a stateless society works.
You don't say, well, I'd really want to get rid of slavery, but I don't know...
Which job every slave would get if they were suddenly freed, right?
Because taking responsibility and ownership for other people is the whole problem with slavery to begin with.
So if you say, well, I can't oppose slavery, even though I want to, all the way, because I don't know how all the slaves would get jobs and where they would work and what would happen.
But, of course, if you oppose slavery all the way, that's not your issue anymore, because you don't have ownership over other human beings, and whatever they do is their business.
If they get jobs, if they don't get jobs, they become cap-man, they can become whatever.
It doesn't matter. They can continue working as slaves if they want.
But once you understand that opposing slavery is opposing ownership and responsibility for other human beings, then you get that there's no such thing as, I can't oppose slavery all the way because I don't know how it would work, how society would work in a post-slavery environment.
Well, it's not your job to be responsible for how people run their lives after they're no longer slaves.
That's the whole point of opposing slavery, is not taking ownership and responsibility for other people.
And it's the same thing with a stateless society.
Yeah, we've put some work here in Freedom Aid Radio on how it might work, but so what?
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
How would society work is a statist question to begin with.
How would society work is how could I set things up so that society would work, but there's no state, so you can't set anything up.
Now, you don't lie awake worrying how eggs get to market from the farmers in Wisconsin.
You would if you were a central planner, but in a free market situation, the question means nothing.
They either will or they won't.
It's up to people to do it or don't do it.
But it's not your business because it's a free market.
Now, if you have ownership over some sort of milk board or egg board or some sort of farmer's collective state-run mess, then sure, yeah, it becomes a big question because you've got to get these eggs to market, but it's not your business in a free society to figure these things out.
How will criminals be dealt with?
How will this work? Well, we can spend some time thinking about it, and I think that's an interesting question to ask, like playing chess.
You know, what's the best strategy? How would things work?
But it doesn't matter. And not having an answer to these questions doesn't matter at all.
You know, where will this slave get a job if we get rid of slavery?
It's not my business. I know that slavery is wrong, but it's not my business.
How society works in the absence of slavery because the whole question of it being my business, what people do, is the foundation of slavery to begin with.
That I'm responsible and I own other people's decisions and I must solve their problems.
So how anarchism works is irrelevant.
There is no such thing as how will things work.
There's no such logical question.
That question only applies to a status society.
It only applies to central planning in one form or another.
It only applies to a command and control hierarchy.
Like if you are a part of a church that says oral sex is bad, someone says we should get rid of that rule.
They say, well, what positions, what sexual positions will people have if we get rid of that rule?
How will they have sex? Well, it doesn't matter because there's no rule.
It's not your business.
It's only your business if there's a rule.
And if you oppose these kinds of coercive rules, it's not your business how it works otherwise.
It's nobody's business how an anarchist society works.
It's nobody's business.
It's a fun question, but unfortunately it's used as a barrier to moving the discussion forward.
And that's irrelevant.
That's a status premise. How will it work?
Unless you do worry about how eggs get to market, in which case you probably don't have time to listen to this, because there's a heck of a lot going on in the free market that you've got to worry about.
There will be people whose job it is who will be paid to worry about it, and they will be the ones who get it done, because it's their economic interest.
Their efficiency principle will be to get it done.
How will the state and society deal with national defense and currency and prisoners and murder and rape and so on?
Well... There will be people who will be paid to do it and they will do a fabulous job of doing it because that's what the free market does.
And trying to reinvent the entire strata of society and every economic transaction that might occur in the future and saying, well, as soon as we've answered how every conceivable thing works in a stateless society, then we can start to advocate it is an irrelevant question.
So, that's sort of the last thing that I'd sort of like to say in this regard, and thank you so much for your patience in listening to this.
I know that it's a long podcast, but I try to keep them energetic and entertaining.
Not, you know, ha-ha entertaining, but hmm, entertaining, let's say.
The last sort of thing that I'd like to talk about is this sort of question of principles, right?
This question of principles. Now, People don't generally oppose the current state or the current size of the state or whatever.
They don't say, I oppose the current size of the state because the state called me four eyes when I was a kid, it picked on me, it stole my lunch money and pushed me into the mud.
People don't personalize it, right?
I mean, I guess some people have their political awakening personally, right?
Like, so there's some people in New York where they keep raising property taxes, these little old ladies who've lived in the same house for 50 years, right?
And they get angry because or they get frustrated with the government because the government keeps raising their property taxes.
They can't pay their property taxes.
So they end up indentured working for the government, right?
They do work around for government offices and that's their way of paying off their property taxes or they'd have to sell their beloved house and Move into some apartment or whatever, which they don't want to do, right?
So then they go, well, geez, you know, I've lived my whole life and now I'm suddenly noticing that the government is force and the government is violence and the government does not care about my wishes.
Or you get people who are struck with eminent domain or asset forfeiture or whatever.
And they achieve their political awakening that way.
But the political awakening, the awakening to the reality and the permeation of force throughout society, is something that people abstract, right?
They go to principle on it.
They go to principle. They don't say, I don't want to move, and that's my political stance, because it's not a political stance.
It's just a preference. I like fish.
But they say, it's wrong, it's objectively wrong for me to be forced to move because my property taxes are being raised so high, and it's wrong for me to be an indentured servant to the government because they just arbitrarily keep raising my property taxes, even because the value of my property is going up, even though none of the value of that property is realized because it's all potential, not kinetic money. So they basically come to it through principles, right?
Through principles. And I would say that you are a minarchist because of principles, right?
Because you have principles about freedom and liberty and so on.
And I know that for you, those principles sort of run into problems when you consider the state becoming too small, right?
Because you're all about human liberty and economic efficiency and government by and for the people and this and that and the other, right?
All of the goodies that...
All of the goody fairy tales that...
Exist in the world that I think keep the state alive, in my opinion.
We can talk more about it. But you have these opinions or these perspectives, and you feel that human liberty and human possibility, potentiality and economic efficiency and so on are completely threatened by a state that is too small.
But to me, that just seems a little bit reactionary, right?
I mean, if you're going to do something big, then I think you need to work from first principles.
I mean, that I think, if you're going to do something as huge as take on the monolithic leviathan that is the state in the modern world, if you're going to take it on, then I would say that's a big enough cud to chew on, a big enough bite to chew off, that I would say that you'd really want to make sure that you're going to be as effective as possible.
Because it really can't escape anybody's notice that libertarianism, you know, has not had a whole whack load of success, right?
It hasn't really worked.
I mean, yeah, you got a couple of people elected and so on, but so what, right?
I mean, the purpose of libertarianism is not to get people elected.
But to shrink the state.
And that has not occurred.
The state is growing faster than ever before.
So I think it's fairly safe to say that the goals of libertarianism have not been achieved.
And people say, well, we need more time and this and that.
Well, yeah, but unfortunately we don't have more time.
I mean, this is where the urgency comes in.
This is why I'd sort of make the statement that the time is not with us.
The time is not on our side with which to continue this minarchistic approach.
In 1970 or 1965 or whenever, if you started that early, then obviously good for you.
Thanks. It gave me a whole bunch of useful stuff to read.
Now, time is not on our side.
I mean, the way that the state is growing and so on, we can't say, oh yeah, well, you know, at the current rate, of course, at the current rate, this will never turn around.
At the current rate of libertarian activism and minarchist activism and minarchist arguments, it will never turn around.
We're going exactly in the wrong direction.
And what minarchists have done is given the idea that the state is good, it just needs to be different.
And I think that's really not a productive or positive thing to have achieved.
Because then people get confused.
The violence is bad, but then at a certain percentage of state power, violence becomes good again.
That's just kind of confusing and messy for people.
And the worst thing in the world, I think, is to think that you're doing something when you're not, right?
So if you have some, I don't know, let's go back to cancer.
If you have cancer and you go to some faith healer who says the way to cure cancer is through yoga or something like that, If you have cancer, then you go to some guy who's not curing it.
You kind of need to know that he's not going to cure it, right?
And of course, if it just makes it worse, that's important to know as well.
The illusion of progress is the great paralytic of movements, right?
If you think you're getting somewhere, or if you think that what you're doing is achieving something...
Then you are going to continue to do what you're doing, right?
So you really do want to know if that which you're doing is actually achieving something or not.
You really do want to know that so that you can stop wasting your time because it's a bitter thing to spend your life's energies trying to get something done and not only not achieving that thing but achieving the exact opposite, feeding that which you despise.
So the idea or the illusion, which to me is sort of wrapped up together, There are sort of two illusions.
One is that the state can achieve something positive, that violence can achieve something positive.
And the other is that advocating violence in any form can achieve something positive.
These are the two aspects that I think are sort of twin delusions, right?
People believe that the government can achieve something positive.
People really do believe that.
They believe that the government can achieve something positive.
If only the right people can get the guns, then that can all be achieved and that can all be a good thing.
And I think that that's just not true at all.
I think that we have to give up on that illusion that violence can achieve anything positive.
And I'm not talking about brute self-defense in the face of a stick-up.
I'm talking about institutionalized, organized, centralized, coercive monopolies of violence as a state.
If we give up the idea that violence can achieve anything positive, then we can truly give up on the idea of the state and we can stop wasting our time in the realm of politics.
We can stop wasting our time trying to get things done by trying to grab the gun and use it for what we consider to be the good, right?
This is like the ring, the ring of power.
Nobody can use it for good and nobody can use...
Thank you so much for my donations as of yesterday.
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