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April 13, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:18
708 Free Riding into Slavery
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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is time for us to investigate the scintillatingly titled but occasionally less than gripping problem of the free rider.
Now, I've done podcasts on this in regards to the police and also with regards to national defense.
But there is a sort of general principle at work in the question of the free rider that's worth having I chat about, because when you talk about the free market with people and freedom in general, one of the things that always comes up, it's like the sticky burr on people's brains,
is that there are certain goods which you cannot exclude people from using, but they need to be there, and therefore they have to be charged, but you can't charge them on a per-use basis, and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
So, there's things that are thrown in, like lighthouses and roads and sidewalks and all this kind of stuff, which is that you can't...
This is the argument. I'm not saying I agree with it, but this is the way that the argument goes.
People say, well, you can't exclude people from these goods.
You can't exclude people from walking along a sidewalk.
And therefore... The sidewalk has to be there.
You can't exclude, so you have to have a government which taxes people.
And that is considered to be the way in which this problem of the free rider is solved.
And we've talked about this in terms of the problem of the commons before.
I won't sort of go into that again.
But I wanted to point out a couple of things that are just so brain dead with this position.
I mean, even more so than the usual statist arguments.
And this occurs among libertarians and minarchists, so on national defense, oh my god, you can't have national defense without a state, because of the problem of the free rider, and people won't pay, everyone gets the benefit, everyone gets a tertiary benefit, and nobody wants to pay for that benefit, and blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's just, oh my god, what a bunch of retarded nonsense.
I don't mean to sound harsh, but the essential, well, we'll get to that in a bit.
Let's sort of outline the opposition to the position that I'll put forward.
First, and then we can see if there's not a way to solve it without flatlining our frontal lobes.
So, there are some goods that you can exclude others.
So, for instance, I'm wearing a nice set of Joe Boxers at the moment, and because I'm wearing them, you're not.
Let me just give you a moment to compose yourself in the crushing, emotional disappointment of not being able to share a pair of Joe boxers with me, but the fact that I'm wearing them means that you can't wear them, and conversely, or at least you probably wouldn't want to.
Especially, I think I'm having Indian tonight, so nobody might be able to wear them again.
Just burn them or get a priest in or something.
But you can't wear them if I'm wearing them.
And I can't wear them if you're wearing them.
So those goods you can exclude, right?
So if there are goods that you can exclude other people or one person, only one person can use it.
And if that person is using it, other people can't.
And, of course, food is a pretty significant thing here.
So a piece of bread, if I eat it, again, unless you're very quick and not too squeamish, you can't eat it yourself, right?
So I consume it and you can't consume it.
It's a zero-sum game.
And therefore, since I can exclude you from using it and it's a sort of one-use thing, that definitely falls into the realm, if you're not a complete communist wacko, that falls into the realm of a private good.
I can exclude you from it if you steal my underwear.
Actually, I think I'd be kind of flattered.
But if I wasn't, if I was a porn star, again, then I would call the cops and say, dude, took my pantyhose.
And they would go and get it back from you, and you would end up on some video show.
So, this question of the, can you exclude others from it?
Is this a zero-sum game good?
Is sort of one aspect of looking at it.
And the more goods and services and capital and whatever, resources, the more resources that you place into this realm of the free rider problem, The more left-wing you are, the more socialistically-leaning you are.
And the less goods that you put in there, the more right-leaning traditionally you are.
And if you put no goods in the public sector, then it seems to me that you're kind of an anarcho-capitalist.
There's no public sector, right?
So the first thing that I sort of want to point out Is that this whole phrase, public sector, is just a big, steaming, bubbling load of codswallop.
It's Latin, you can look it up.
There's no such thing as a public sector versus a private sector.
People just make up these terms which are the complete opposite of any kind of thinking.
It doesn't make up stuff. It's the same way that people make up other dimensions with which they can put God in as a solitary, significant and eternal inhabitant.
People just make up shit and then call it thought, right?
So they say, well, see, there's the private sector and then there's the public sector.
And, of course, there aren't these two dimensions in the real world.
There's no symposium-like other realm of platonic cave extrusion wherein you can go and view the perfect forms of public good.
There's only people who...
Who do stuff voluntarily and people who do stuff through force.
Public, private.
Public, private. Public, private.
Try gun, no gun.
Gun, no gun.
Great lovemaking. Theft, trade.
People just love to make up these euphemisms, like, oh, it's in the public sector.
It's the public sector. It's just another sector.
It's like the private sector, but just some different letters.
Well no, of course the fundamental difference between the public sector and the private sector is the private sector is voluntary and in the public sector you get your ass thrown in jail where your ass goes through several rather exciting series of adventures if you don't obey the people in power.
And this of course is the little trick that the minarchists and libertarians who are still statists and regular old statists all the way through to the communists and fascists This is the little trick that they pull.
They say, well, see, there's this problem called the free rider, and we'll get to that in a little bit more detail in a few minutes.
There's a problem called the free rider, but don't you worry your pretty little head about it.
We've got a solution called the golden gun.
We've got a solution. We point guns at everyone, and we solve that problem.
Which is, of course, very similar to, as I said before, solving a headache with a fucking guillotine.
The problem, even if we accept that it exists, It's not solved by arming a bunch of thugs.
Arming a bunch of thugs.
It's sort of like saying, you know, I've got some weeds in my garden.
I'm going to call up Joe, low-strafe-bombing napalm-in-a-viplane guy.
And then, I'm not going to have any more weeds.
And that's true, but you won't have any more lawn or house.
And if your kids are outside, they won't have any skin.
So... That is not a way to solve the problem.
There's very few of us who would reach for napalm as a solution for weeding, and this is exactly what is proposed to solve the problem of the free rider, is that you arm a bunch of thugs, you disarm everyone else, and oh, magically, wonderfully, amazingly, everything just becomes hunky-dory.
So let's take one example of the lighthouse.
The lighthouse is something that is continually brought up In the Freerider problem, right?
So, you've got a lighthouse in a harbor that warns ships away from rocks.
And let's just pretend that this is pre-sonar or whatever, pre-echo-sounding location devices.
And you have five ships that come into that harbor on a pretty regular basis.
So, the Freerider argument will say something like this.
Well, look. You build this lighthouse.
It costs you money to build it and to run it.
And... What happens is you have to keep this lighthouse running because you don't know who's out there.
And if you turn this lighthouse off, then the people who've paid you for the lighthouse service will be upset, run aground or whatever.
But since you have to keep the lighthouse on because of these people, the people who don't pay Let's say three ships are paying.
Well, the two ships who don't pay get the perpetual benefit of the lighthouse.
And because they get the perpetual benefit of the lighthouse without paying, there's no solution for this whatsoever other than to have armed guards meet every ship as it docks and say, hand me over 50 bucks for the lighthouse or I'm going to shoot your guts out.
That's really, that's the only solution.
Guns, thugs, brutality, rape rooms, jails, the escalating and infinite power of the state, war, the crippling of social institutions that are benevolent and charitable, the substituting of the social safety noose that strangles and corrupts and destroys vast underclasses,
the military-industrial complex, all of the paraphernalia that goes along, the jailing of millions of people and ass-banging gulags, all of the hellish paraphernalia that goes along with the state, Is basically in vogue because there's 50 fucking bucks that are missing from one ship owner based on a lighthouse.
Do you see what I mean?
Like weeds versus napalm.
Weeds solved with napalm.
Hangnails solved with amputation.
This is the problem that is put forward.
50 bucks is missing for the lighthouse, so we have to enslave the entire population in an ever-escalating inflationary, controlled-of-money-supply War, civil war, hellish mess of despotism, power, tyranny, and escalating dictatorship!
Because, you know, these fucking lighthouses, I'm telling you, it's worth it!
It's worth it! Surrender all of your freedoms to the goddamn lighthouses.
Now, people just say this stuff, right?
They don't research it.
They don't look this stuff up.
And that's because they, you know, we've gone through the whole sequence, right?
They're brutalized by their families.
They need to justify power.
So whatever they're going to use to justify power, they will.
It's making up excuses for the escalation of power, justification of power because they don't have to deal with their own history.
So it's been sort of gospel.
Adam Smith mentioned this private lighthouse stuff, but it's been gospel pretty much since the 19th century through to the late 20th century.
The lighthouses, you know, you didn't...
Before there was the government, there was no such thing as bloody lighthouses.
Lighthouses, oh my God, did they ever not exist.
And... People were so fucking retarded that they just ran their ships up into the harbor and the ships ended like four miles inland.
They just drove them so fast into the rocks because people, you know, they just couldn't solve these problems.
Human beings can, you know, we can split the atom, put a man on the moon, but we can't figure out how to fund a lighthouse.
But of course it's pure nonsense.
Lighthouses were private, originally.
And they were not funded by the state because there was no state relative to the need for people to have lighthouses.
So, I mean, lighthouses were private.
And how did they work?
Well, people paid for them.
I mean, it's like these economists, these ass clowns who sell our freedoms down the river, sell us into slavery for the sake of 50 bucks on a dock.
It's like they've never been to a goddamn restaurant.
Maybe it's because I was a waiter for a couple of years when I was a teenager that I kind of understand this sort of principle that if you've ever been a waiter you understand the same principle.
If you were ever to go to one of these jerks and say, well, you know, the way that we're going to have restaurants work is people are just going to pay, you know, half or more than half of the waiter's and the busboy's salary.
It's like, oh, how's that going?
Is it going to be added to the meal? Is it going to be taxed?
No, they're just going to pay it voluntarily.
Oh, the economist is going to go, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
There's just no way that people would ever do that voluntarily.
How would it be in their interest?
Blah, blah, blah, blah. Especially if they've just gone to that restaurant once and they're never going to come back and they're out of town and blah, blah, blah.
They go to a different restaurant, never have to deal with the same waiter.
It's never going to work. People, all that kind of stuff, right?
Just nonsense. Of course, T.I.P.S. originally was to ensure, it was an acronym for to ensure prompt service, you sort of give it to the waiter at the beginning, but that's not sort of necessary, it's not how it works anymore.
But T.I.P.S. is fundamental, you know, sort of out in Punta Cana where you tip the maid like 10 bucks a week and tip these people and tip those people.
People tip, they just do.
I almost had like in the years that I was waitering, maybe one or two people didn't leave a tip and sometimes people would leave a crappy tip, but that was mostly because they had miscalculated their meal And had come with a 20 and, you know, 19 bucks worth of food, they'd missed the tax.
So they just didn't have enough money to tip me.
That's sort of what I believe. But most people left a decent, generous tip, 10, 15, 20 percent.
So people pay voluntarily for things that they don't have to pay for.
And look at these podcasts and we'll talk about the economics of Free Domain Radio another time.
I don't think traffic is slow enough.
We'll get into it now. People pay because they've got to face the harbormaster.
A harbormaster is going to be down there.
If you don't pay for the lighthouse, if you miss your yearly payment of $500 or whatever for the lighthouse, the harbormaster is going to come down and say, you know, it would be real nice if you chipped in for this lighthouse.
Human beings fundamentally have a great deal of difficulty doing something which they openly express as unfair.
Everybody who got into a fight was provoked by the other person.
All wars are started as a response to fears of aggression, or quote, fears of aggression.
Human beings always have to redefine what they do as just and fair, because people have a very difficult time looking someone in the eye and say, yes, I'm going to screw you.
I mean, not in the fun way. Yes, I'm going to cheat you, and I'm openly and acknowledgingly going to not give you the money that is just for me to give you.
People have a very tough time doing that.
If you've ever not had the money to tip at a restaurant, Don't you feel like leaving it out saying, listen, your service was great, I just calculated things really badly, I'm so sorry.
This is more prior to Visa and Interact cards, or at least prior to me having them.
So, people would tip, they just would throw the money in, and so on, right?
And there's ways that you can enforce this if this doesn't work, or whatever, you get some, I don't know, think of the Russian steamers or whatever, they're never going to come back, they don't want to pay.
Well, what you can do is you put up a public list.
I mean, public lists are very powerful.
You put up a public list, if you want, saying, you know, there are these ten ships that regularly uses Harbor, these guys have paid their fees, and these guys haven't.
And what happens is you can also say, look, I'm going to put spotters out there randomly.
I'm going to put spotters out there randomly.
And one day, one day, Or one night, I guess.
Your ship is going to be the only ship that's out there.
I'm going to use sonar or whatever.
Your ship's going to be the only ship that's out there.
And I'm going to turn the damn lighthouse off.
One day. You never know when that's going to happen.
One day, I'm going to turn the lighthouse off because you haven't paid.
And of course, what's going to happen is the sailors are going to see this list and say, what, are you crazy?
I'm not coming on your ship if you don't pay for the lighthouse because if they turn the lighthouse off, we're going to run aground.
I could get killed. Forget it.
I'm going to go work on some other ship.
And then you either have to raise wages and the Wages that you raise will be more than what you'll pay for the lighthouse.
There's lots of ways to do it, right?
There's lots of ways to do it that you can get these things done.
And, of course, lighthouses were private to begin with, especially along the eastern coast of the United States.
And then they were taken over by the government.
The government just takes things over and then people, oh, my God, I can't imagine how it would work any other way.
But people need lighthouses.
You can figure out ways to get it done.
People like to do fair and decent things.
They like to. The economics of a good conscience is, or the economics of fairness is an entirely, I do believe, understudied phenomenon in the field of economics.
What is the motive that people have to spend money outside of mere financial advantage?
Of course, people send me donations.
They don't have to pay for a thing.
I mean, I don't even know who's downloading.
I guess I could figure out the IP address, but so what?
So what? How would that help me?
So, there is an economics of good conscience, an economics of fair play, which people really do deploy or use in their lives.
And it's sort of like...
Like playing chess, right?
There's an economics, even a fair play of playing chess.
If you've got a chess person that you like to play with, and whenever he sort of reaches down to tie up his shoes, what you do is move the pieces around to put yours in more advantage, right?
Stick the, I don't know, the queen up your nose or something.
Then, if he figures that out, then he's not going to want to play with you anymore, right?
So you're going to lose a chess partner.
So why do you obey the rules in chess?
Because you want To do the fair and decent thing and also not be known as a cheater and also because you want to continue to have a chess partner.
There's lots of things, lots of decisions that people make just to be good people.
Churches run entirely on charity.
Charities, naturally, run entirely on charity.
So people do lots of stuff, spend lots of money for the sake of feeling like a good person and being...
And of course, if you listen to people closely, they're always talking about how good they are.
They're always talking about how what they do is superior.
They're always talking about How good they are.
And, you know, you hear all of these parents who are total bores who talk about, oh, we only allow our kids 20 minutes of TV a day.
We don't let them play violent video games.
It's always the boss, right? And our children seem to be slowly expiring from boredom.
But people do lots of stuff just to make themselves feel like good people.
So, where there are these sort of public good things, Well, people are going to do the rational thing.
They're going to do the logical thing.
And the logical thing is, if you're going to keep coming into a harbor, you're going to pay your dues.
You're going to pay your dues. I have no doubt about that.
I have no doubt about that whatsoever.
I lived on that very, quote, benevolence for years, for years and years.
And, ooh, can you prove it?
Well, yeah, of course you can prove it.
I wish somebody would do the economics of a good conscience, the economics of tipping and all this, just to prove statistically.
And people say, well, you can't rely on that.
You can't be sure of that.
Yeah, I got it.
But can you be sure of the government?
Hell yeah, you can be sure of the government in a bad way.
Trying to substitute the perfect for the good always results in hell.
The perfect is shit that you put on a good layer of cake in place of icing.
So, yeah, you can.
I've done the national defense thing before.
There's lots of ways to do it.
And there's enough motivated and positive people who will do the right thing, certainly to give me a chance to, I mean, despite a fairly catastrophic decline in income, to give Free Domain Radio a good go on a full-time basis.
But the free rider problem is something that, to sort of get to the second part of this, which I think is even more important than the first part, Anything that you come up with that's a free-rider problem can be solved.
You say, well, the government hasn't figured out a way to solve it.
Yeah, but of course the government is retarded.
The government is never going to do anything.
It's like saying my house plant hasn't figured out the unified field theory yet.
It's like, well, yeah, okay, it's a house plant, right?
What's it going to do? It doesn't mean that it's impossible.
It just means that your house plant isn't going to get it done.
But the issue with The free rider also shows up in other areas that have consistently been solved throughout history by sort of free market institutions of revolution.
So, for instance, people say, well, a sidewalk is a public good because you can't exclude people from coming in and this and that and the other.
Well, it's like these people have never been to a mall, you know?
It's like, don't you ever go to the mall, like, dude?
Ever go to the mall and just, like, hang?
What's that great tagline from?
Not such a great film called Mallrats.
They're not there to shop.
They're not there to work.
They're just...
there. And that is, of course, the mall phenomenon.
Malls are built privately.
And you have mall force, security cops, for the mall, who throw out the kids who are doing the bad things or whatever, right?
But a mall is privately built, and why?
It's more particular up here in Canada because, you know, the weather sucks.
But malls are privately built, and the sidewalk, if you think of the mall space, the space between the malls and those little stands with the depressed people hanging around them, cell phone covers and stuff like that, the places that you walk in the mall to get from store to store, the tiled things, that's a sidewalk.
It's exactly the same as a private sidewalk.
It's what you walk to get from your car to the store, right?
So you've got your private parking lots and you've got your private sidewalks, whether they're enclosed or not.
Up here in Canada, they're always enclosed.
And so why do the store owners provide you a sidewalk rather than, say, a deep hole, a gaping pit, a moat filled with alligators, fiery Jets, flame, magnesium pots, spikes, Bengal tigers.
Why is it that they provide you an even and pleasant place to walk to get to their stores?
Gosh, I wonder.
Gee, I wish I was a better economist, could figure this out.
I wonder if it might have something to do with the fact that they want you to go to the store and buy some stuff.
Now, that's too obvious. It's got to be something else.
So clearly, the store owners have an interest in providing a sidewalk.
To people so that those people can get to their stores.
If you've ever seen, you know, here in Toronto, of course, as in most places, the government is forever tearing up the sidewalks because it needs to inconvenience people and spend money.
And the store owners, what they do is they build planks over the gaping First World War trench filled with bodies and rats and so on.
That is dug from the road to their store.
They put planks. I don't think the city supplies these planks.
I do believe that the planks are put there by the store owners.
Why? Again, why don't they want people to fall into the pit?
Why? Damn, this is tough.
Oh, I wish I wasn't driving. I could really think somehow about this.
Of course, they put the planks there because they want people to have access to their freaking stores, right?
So... Again, not brain surgery.
This is not, you know, 50 pages of tightly tiny-fonted text of mathematical algorithms.
This is, huh, I wonder who could have an interest in bringing people to their doorway.
Perhaps it could be those who have stores who want people to come and buy things.
That's one thing. Now, another thing in terms of sidewalks and stuff like this, right?
So let's say that you buy a house.
And when you buy the house, there's just no way to get there.
Unless you have a helicopter, it's going to be a bit of a hitch, you know, a bit of a hitch for you to get to the house, right?
So it would seem to me likely, given that it's nice to be able to get to the house, and also you need a road to be able to move your stuff to your house from your previous house, that people who build houses and want to sell them would have some interest in building roads to those houses.
Now, my particular area, there's no sidewalk.
Why? Because it's a cul-de-sac.
There's no way. It's not a through street, right?
So nobody really walks there. And if you walk there, the traffic is so light, like one car every two days, that you can just walk along the road.
So yes, no sidewalk, because privately, no point.
No point having a sidewalk. It would be sort of a waste of time and cut into people's property for no good reason.
And it would be more to maintain, expensive, blah, blah, blah.
So where sidewalks are needed and sidewalks are valuable, sidewalks will be provided.
And if sidewalks add to the property value of your neighborhood, then I believe that the people who build the houses will build the sidewalks.
And if people prefer not to have sidewalks because nobody walks around or they don't want the expense or whatever, then people won't.
Walter Block, the great esteemed gentleman, has, of course, a great example with parks or public parks, right?
Public parks, the reason that you'd never have a public park, the public parks have to be public goods provided for by the state, is because you have this problem that every person benefits from, who has a house around the public park, every person, let's just say, benefits from having announced a nice view of the public parks.
It's like that famous phrase in real estate, a ravine lot.
Which out here in the flatlands and scrublands of Mississauga means a slight depression that depresses you when you look at it.
But people look out and their property value goes up because there's now a park there that wasn't before, but no one's going to pay for that, right?
That's sort of the idea, right? So the park's not going to be paid for and so on.
You can pay for how people come into the park, but so on and so on and so on.
Of course, there's no reason why that's the case at all.
People just make up these things, right?
Like they've never... Just go talk to a real estate agent, right?
Say, well, if you had a magic wand that was able to add 20% to the value of every home within a particular block, what would you do?
Say, no, I don't know.
I don't know. Which way, at this pen, do I put up my notes?
And they would say, well, I would buy up the houses and then I would build the land.
I'd buy up the houses, as many houses as I could around the park, and then I would build the park, and then I would sell the houses and make a profit.
And that profit would be more than enough to pay for the park if we assume also that the park will generate some profit through giving people entrance fees to come in, right?
But, of course, people don't think of that and say, well, what if the people that don't want to sell in that neighborhood don't want to sell their house?
No problem. Then go build the park somewhere where people do want to sell, at least to some degree, right?
And, of course, it's subjective as well.
As Dr.
Block points out, it's subjective, right?
So some people like looking at a park Other people don't want to look at a park, because there's all the young kids having sex in the bushes, shooting up, and smoking the doobies, and making noise, drinking.
All the stuff that parks, well, public parks are designed for, not so much the private parks, they'd then go into somebody's scurvy little basement, as I did.
So, parks, yeah, of course they can be provided and kept.
Beaches, yes, of course they can be provided and kept, and blah blah blah blah blah.
I mean, this is just all...
Such nonsense, right?
I mean, there's just no reason to believe any of this, right?
That you need a public sector for any of these sorts of things.
And here's what, sort of two final arguments that I'll make in this sort of area of the free rider problem, that creating the government does not solve the free rider problem.
It just turns everyone who's in the government into a free rider.
It doesn't solve the problem.
Because it's the same thing with the problem of the commons.
If you say there's such a thing as the problem of the commons, when you create a government, you create the greatest commons of all, where people can extract value without having to pay costs.
If you say that there's a problem with a free rider, that people will accrue benefits to themselves without directly paying for them, or they will accrue benefits disproportionately to what they pay.
So everyone pays 10 bucks, but one guy gets to pocket 10,000.
That's the free rider problem.
Even if the guy pays 10 bucks, he's in pocket 10,000, it's the free rider problem.
So either the free rider problem is not a big deal, in which case you don't need a government, or the free rider problem is a big deal, in which case creating a massive and well-armed free rider planet, which crushes everybody else and has the free rider ad infinitum, scarcely seems to be the problem.
Huh, I might have a bit of a sore throat.
I know, I'll snort botulism and rub buboes on myself and have sex with a leper.
Well, if you're really worried about infection, then don't do those things, right?
So if people feel that this free rider issue is a problem, free rider defined as people who receive disproportionate goods from shared resources, which everyone pays for collectively, but some people benefit from individually, Well, is there any better definition of the hellish problem that is government than the fact that it's a free rider nightmare on steroids with massive weaponry and exclusivity and the ability to print money and the ability to tax and borrow at will?
Is that not the worst goddamn free rider problem on the planet?
So it's very much the same thing that we had in terms of voting, right?
In terms of privatizing in general.
Either The problems that the government is supposed to, quote, solve are not that important, in which case they'll be solved by the free market.
Or they are deadly and important, in which case the government is a much greater manifestation of those problems than anything in the free market that it's supposed to solve.
Right? I mean, it's the basic paradox.
We need a government to protect our property.
We need a government to enforce our property rights, to protect our property.
Sigh. The logic then, of course, is that you barely need to point it out, but why not mention it anyway, right?
So, in order to protect my property, I need to create an uncontrollable monopoly of brute thugs disproportionately armed relative to my puny little Saturday night special.
I need to create a monopoly of thugs who can take my property at will.
And that's my solution to any risk to my property rights.
So, in order to protect my property, I have to give a group of monopolistic thugs the right to take my property at will.
Huh. Great fucking solution.
And it's just retarded, right?
It doesn't take more than a moment's thought to just see how retarded this all is, which is, of course, why the great mystery that Libertarian has never been able to solve, at least I'd like to think that, you know, here we've made some stabs at the solution in terms of family corruption and personal history and childhood and so on.
How could people believe something so retarded?
How could people believe something so completely contradictory and nonsensical?
Well, it's because of course their belief systems have been corrupted and destroyed by religions and parents and state education.
Fundamentally parents. So if people are really worried about the free rider issue, Creating a monopoly of unjust resource transfers called the government based on violence is completely the absolutely last solution that you would ever come up with, conceivably in this or any other universe, to deal with the free rider problem.
Hey, free rider is a significant enough problem that what we need to do is create a monopoly of free riders who are protected by all the guns on the planet.
See, free riders are so evil that we need to create them en masse.
Rape is so evil that we need to train children that rape is excellent and we need to not protect any women or men who are raped.
And we need to pay a million dollars to everyone who can prove that he's raped someone.
Because that's how evil rape is!
Murder is so evil That we need to create an elite squad of ninja death dealers and pay them a million dollars for every head in a bag they bring us.
Because that's how evil murder is.
Property is such an inviolable right.
Property rights are such absolute moral standards that we need to create a monopoly of violent thugs Who can take any property that they want and enslave anybody that they want.
Basically, this is all the statist arguments to boil down to.
It's such a big problem that we need to create a self-interested monopoly of force that will aggrandize this problem to infinity!
Do you see how just mind-fuckingly retarded it is?
What a clusterfuck of irrational stupidity it is!
To conceive of a state as a solution to anything, it's not...
...ness.
And here's the sort of last thing that I'll say in this.
I mean, it's too mind-twistingly ridiculous and idiotic to continue.
I mean, good God. Here's the other thing, right?
So people say, well...
People won't pay for the fucking lighthouses, so we must all be enslaved, right?
The free rider problem is so bad.
It's so bad. You see, people don't do the benevolent thing when they're not paid to do it.
People don't care about things where they could conceivably benefit at the expense of other people, where they can get other people to pay, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So we need a government.
Of course, people don't say a dictatorship, except for those still few loony Marxists and fascists and so on, right?
Muslims. They say, well, we should have a democracy.
Democracy is the solution to the issue of a free rider thing.
Democracy. So, if I get this argument straight, and it is almost beyond my powers to encompass this clusterfuck in my brain, if I get the argument straight, then it goes something like this.
People... People don't do anything that doesn't benefit them materially.
They're not going to tip a waiter, they're not going to pay for national defense, they're not going to pay for lighthouses, they're not going to pay for sidewalks or anything like that.
Because people don't act unless it's in their base self-interest to do so.
So we need to get people to vote disinterestedly And without paying them in a positive and correct and moral manner.
Sorry, that was a bit of a long-winded way of putting it.
I mean, let me try it again. Let me try it again.
I'll put on the concisenator.
Sorry, that was the circumcisenator.
That was a little painful. People say human beings only act in base self-interest, and that's why the free-rider problem is such a big issue.
So what we need to do is have people vote.
People are so self-obsessed with their own interests that the best solution is to have people vote, which they will do in a disinterested and positive manner.
People only act when they benefit economically directly, so we're not going to pay them to vote.
It's a complete and total contradiction.
If people can vote In a rational and positive manner, free of economic self-interest, then clearly they can apply resources, time and energy to do something that is not in their direct economic resource, direct economic interest.
In other words, they'll pay for the fucking lighthouses and the sidewalks and the schools and the charities and all this nonsense that people throw around.
If people can vote, then you're accepting that they will do things against their economic self-interest for the sake of doing the right thing.
And they will do it in good conscience, and they will do it with integrity, and they will do it for the right reasons.
And therefore, the whole reason for voting evaporates.
The whole reason for a state evaporates.
Because by appealing to the vote, you're saying that people will act in general self-interest to the detriment of their own economic interest to do the right thing.
And there's no need for a state anymore.
If people can vote, there's no need for them to vote.
But if you say, well, human beings are so selfish and they're so greedy and they never act outside of their economic self-interest, then of course that rule applies to both voters and everyone in the state.
and everyone in the state.
There's no magical flaming wall of other dimensionality that people pierce through and become separate, non-self-interested individuals who are perfectly altruistic and only act for the benefit of others and have no self-interest whatsoever.
On the other side, in this magic realm called the public sector.
Where two plus two is five and God exists and elves and dance on leprechauns heads.
The free rider problem either is a big problem, in which case it's going to affect the state much more, much more than any other single social entity because of the monopoly of the use of force.
If people really get off On grabbing economic benefits personally, aggrandized economic personal benefits at the expense of the majority, then what the hell do you think is going to happen to the politicians and the unions and the state workers and the tax collectors?
I mean, it's just going to be a complete shark attack.
It's going to be a feeding frenzy on the innards and the jugulars of the taxpayers, which is exactly, of course, what you see.
The state creates and exacerbates the free rider problem.
In the free market, there's no big issue.
Big problem with the free rider issue when it comes to sidewalks in a mall.
Either it's a big problem, in which case the last thing you can have is a state, or it's a little problem, in which case...
Oh, God, why would you ever want to invent something so hellish?
Thank you so much for listening.
I really, really appreciate it, as always.
I promise you that the quality of the audio will improve a little bit.
I just wanted to get this down while it was on top of my head.
Thank you so much for listening.
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