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June 6, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
55:55
785 Slavery and Statism
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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is 2 o'clock.
I'm going to head down for a workout, but I thought I would read something from the board before I went down, and we're going to have a chittle-chattle about it while I am sweating and groaning on my ridiculously light girly weights.
Actually, they're not too light, but they're certainly not monstrous.
Steph and others who oppose all political action, righteth a listenereth.
As you know, slavery was abolished through political processes, coupled with processes outside of political processes, like popular protest movements that possibly had representatives in the political system in most of the world.
Legislation was passed that outlawed slavery, possibly with some transition period and possible compensation for slave owners.
If you had lived in the time when these political processes were going on, and if you had known everything about politics, morality, and economics that you know now, would you then have objected to the political processes that resulted in the abolition of slavery?
Because they are political processes, and according to you, therefore immoral and impractical and only adding to the power of the government.
If so, is it because you think that if there had not been such political pressures, there would have been more pressure from outside of politics, and that this may have grown and grown, leading to the collapse of not just slavery, but the state itself as well?
If this is not a realistic scenario, would you have been willing to await the collapse of the state before the slaves could be freed by non-political processes?
Your answer could be, well, the slaves were freed, but just look at how much more enslaved everybody else became in the next 150 years after it was ended through political means.
But if this is your answer, then you cannot use the example of the abolition of slavery the way you did in one of your articles about how the government should be abolished completely and not reformed.
I don't quite see how that follows, but we can go back to that.
Another answer could be, it would only be wrong for libertarians to condone or use political processes to abolish slavery because they would be engaged in what you think is a performative contradiction, but it would be okay for non-libertarians to use these processes as they are not saying that the initiation of force is always wrong.
And I don't, I mean, morality is morality, it's not whether you're a libertarian or not.
Whether you're a libertarian or not doesn't change whether gravity affects you, and it doesn't change what ethics are either.
To be sure, I'm not comparing the abolition of slavery to the abolition of the state itself, because, as you pointed out in our conversation, it wasn't slave owners who abolished slavery.
The reason that I ask this is because I have a difficult time figuring out whether you would oppose all political processes for before-mentioned reasons and would be willing to accept the consequences of that, or that there are possible ways out, for example, when there is a large ideological battle outside of politics, too, that helps the political processes.
In any case, I feel that I'm missing something, or that you are missing something, of course.
And, um...
Somebody else wrote, I can't remember if it's the same gentleman, wrote and asked...
He said, um...
If a ruler came up to you and said, I am going to tax everyone in the whole land $500 if you say yes, And I will not tax everyone in the land $500 if you say the word no,
right? So if I say yes, the ruler then goes and taxes everyone $500, and if I say no, the ruler refrains from...
Taxing everyone $500.
What would I say?
And I certainly understand the thought experiment behind that.
And I'll tell you what I would say.
And I'm not sure I'm going to argue that it's the perfectly right answer, but I'll certainly tell you that it's the answer I would give.
The first thing is that I would give no answer.
I would give no answer.
I would give no answer.
Obviously. Right?
Because it's not...
It's not ethical to involve yourself in those kinds of brutal, violent, destructive decisions, right?
To involve yourself in the potential mass murder of everyone who might not pay the $500 is immoral.
You don't even get involved.
Like if a hitman says, do you want me to shoot this guy?
Actually, that's a bad example.
Forget the hitman. But if the ruler comes up and says...
You say yes or no, and I'll tax or won't tax.
You don't answer. You don't answer.
You don't take that on yourself. You don't participate in that decision as if it is a relevant moral decision.
Because, of course, the ruler wants to believe that you are making him do it.
The ruler wants to believe that it is you who are making him do it.
Do you understand? Because the ruler can say, hey...
Steph said yes, so I have to tax him.
And if people say, well, why are you taxing me?
Why are you taxing me?
Then the ruler says, well, Steph said.
I asked Steph, he said yes, so I'm taxing you.
Don't blame me. I'm just a messenger.
I mean, that's a bit of a hyperbole, but I think you get the general idea.
So no, you don't participate.
You don't participate at all.
You don't participate at all.
Because it's an implicit sanction, without a doubt.
Now, if somebody then said, no, no, no, Steph, the thought experiment is that you must answer yes or no.
You must answer yes or no to the question of whether the ruler is going to, based on my answer, tax everyone $500 or not.
I would say yes. In that thought experiment, if I were forced to answer, I would answer in the affirmative.
Yes, you should, you must, you will tax everyone.
And why would I answer yes?
If you're curious, why would I answer yes?
Well, I would answer yes because no one should have that power.
No one should have that power to begin with.
Latent power is dangerous.
Latent power is very, very dangerous.
If your husband says, I have the perfect right to beat you to a pulp if I feel like it, and it's perfectly moral for me to do so, the fact that he doesn't on any particular day does not mean that you're not in danger, and he's not a brute, and it's not an immoral relationship.
Is that line from The Godfather?
Someone asks, Don Carleone, have you ever beaten your wife?
He's like, she never gave me cause.
That's great. What a beautiful thing.
So... No, I would say yes.
And why would I say yes? Because you want to bring latent power out.
Right? You want to lure it out.
You want people to see the gun in the room.
I would say yes. And then there'd be a tax revolt and that power would be taken away.
If no one had ever been taxed before and suddenly someone came along and said, give me 500 bucks, they'd say, screw you, buddy.
Well, you get off. And then the power would be taken away.
So, yeah, I would say yes.
So that people would be aware of the power that they were suffering under.
I mean, it's all a thought experiment, right?
This never happened in real life, but...
So just to deal with that question first, you don't participate.
You don't take on that moral responsibility or that moral burden of saying yes or no to somebody's exercise of violence and brutality.
No, you don't take that on.
Yes, you should. No, you shouldn't.
I vote for this. What is always said.
What is always put forward as the prime benefit.
of democracy. Why is it considered just to brutalize people in democracy?
Because they vote. And if you don't vote, you can't complain.
But if you do vote, then you're sanctioning.
These are the no-win situations.
These are the no-win situations.
So no, I don't think that you do say yes or no to somebody who asks Should I impose this violent and unjust power that I reserve the right for myself to impose on these people?
You don't answer. The answer is you should not have that power.
Give up that power. If the person won't give up the power but just wants a yes or no from you, no, you don't participate.
And if you're forced to participate, then say yes.
Now, people are going to say, well, what if he says kill 10 million people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, I mean, you can take this stuff to ridiculous extremes, but basically the thought principle that I was put on, yeah.
If it's $500, yes, I would say go tax these people and good luck, because it will be the end of your dictatorship.
Or if it's not, the people don't deserve that freedom anyway.
If they just dumbly go up and pay the $500.
But then, of course, I mean, if that were the situation...
If that were the situation, then he would never come to ask me.
I mean, there's some parameters we have to accept in these kinds of thought experiments.
Well, I knew I'd been to this hotel before.
How interesting. Oh, interesting.
So, I was actually up here to present a software package solution and take comments from a large group of teachers, actually, interestingly enough.
Anyway, the second argument that's been put forward is around the question of slavery, and slavery, of course, is a much more interesting and sophisticated thought experiment to look at, and I really do understand and sympathize with, and do not claim that it's an open and shut case, because it involves guessing about the Effects of the future based on the decisions that are made in the present, and that's never a certain science.
And of course, for me, where a science is not certain, we must retreat, in a sense, to essentials, right?
To principles, right?
So where certainty is not present, we have to retreat to principles, I think.
So what I'd like to sort of...
To put it out as a framework is an idea of looking at this question of political action versus nonpolitical action in a way that hopefully will make some sort of sense to us.
So the first thing that I'd like to sort of say is that The question of incrementalism is one that I really, really do understand.
And of course, I tried to found a political party when I was in my, gosh, early to mid-twenties, I think it was.
So I have gone down this route, which doesn't mean that...
So what? It doesn't mean that I haven't...
Just because, you know, it didn't work in a way that conceptually or practically for me doesn't mean that it's wrong.
I have been wrestling with this for 90s, nearly 20 years.
I do understand, though, when somebody says, well, there was political action to get rid of slavery, and would you have denied, in a sense, those slaves their freedom in order to race after this pie-in-the-sky thing called the state, getting rid of the state?
And I do understand that.
I sympathize with that, and I certainly would not necessarily want to be one of those slaves who got freed later rather than sooner if we'd taken another tack.
But there are some practical considerations, of course, and some philosophical considerations to take into account, in my opinion.
Now, the first thing that I would say is that I'm not entirely sure, when we look at something like slavery, that without focusing on individuals, I would say that there's much more slavery now, even in America, than there was in the 19th century.
Slaves were, if I remember rightly, this is a guess, 8-9% of the population.
And let's just say that they were 100% slaves, right?
So, 8-9% of the population were 100% slaves.
This is chillingly utilitarian, and I apologize for that, but I'm just trying to run through the thinking that I've worked on to try and come up with these conclusions.
So, taxation was a couple of percentage points.
And the slaves will count as 100% slaves.
There was no draft before the Civil War, no standing army, and so on.
And children, of course, were educated privately, and there was no public schools to speak of.
So we can sort of put the grand total of slavery in the population as a whole at about 15%.
I mean, accurate to at least three decimal places, but at around 15%.
Very few immigration controls.
Currency was not being run by the government.
There wasn't all this nonsense.
Fiat currency and so on.
So here we have a situation where we have about 15% enslavement in the population.
And of course, it's unequally distributed, I mean, with the slaves, the actual slaves, bearing by far the brunt of it, and that is a terrible thing, of course.
Now, of course, if we look at the burden across the entire country, well, the children are mostly slaves, right?
Ordered into public schools or schools that have to follow the public school curriculum.
So they're mostly slaves, and the parents are enslaved to pay for that.
You have the welfare slaves or the people who have made terrible life decisions, not only terrible in terms of reality and long-term consequences for happiness, not in terms of short-term efficacy financially, but people who have made these kinds of decisions to have kids and broken but people who have made these kinds of decisions to have kids and broken families and join We have an enormous amount of slavery there.
We have a slavery of the worst kind in the form of prisons, where I think it's like 1 or 2% of the U.S. population is in prison, not even counting those in the military.
And I would rather be a slave working in the fields than a man in prison myself, right?
I mean, that's just my...
maybe everybody has their own taste, but that would be my particular preference.
So, those are just a couple of the examples.
We have the people whose savings are eroded by inflation.
We have the people whose jobs and savings are stripped by mercantilist corporations that use the power of the state to manipulate and destroy currency and jobs and lives for their own profit.
We have old-age pensioners who are enslaving the younger people to pay for their retirement despite being the wealthiest generation in the history of the planet.
And you could go on and on.
I think you get the general idea.
But since the...
I mean, a man can be enslaved by his debt as well, right?
I mean, if you don't work and you borrow and borrow and borrow, and then what happens is that you end up being thrown in debtor's prison, or you end up having to work off For years upon year upon year, if not decades, the debt that you have accumulated, then your freedom is diminishing while you're borrowing, right?
I think that's all fairly clear for the even least economically astute among us, which I may be counted among.
But clearly, where there is an enormous amount of debt, there is a reduction.
In liberty that is accumulating, right?
So given that the total liabilities of the American government run into 50 to 60 to 70 trillion dollars, it's obviously not payable off.
I mean, it's just not. It's just not payable off.
You couldn't even begin to pay that off.
There is an enormous increase there.
We've got taxation cooking for the average salaried employee.
At 30 to 40 odd percent.
And then we have accumulated liabilities by the government much higher than that.
And so from that standpoint, there is an accumulation of liabilities which would approximate a certain kind of slavery in the realm of 50 percent or more.
I mean, and this is a very conservative estimate.
A very conservative estimate.
This is not even including counting things like deflation and so on, right?
So we have, and of course we have internal revenue service and so on, wildly out of control when it comes to the laws that they can place on people and the burdens that they can place on people, homeland security and so on.
So... The question is, if we sort of look at the state of just one country that was inured in slavery or immersed in slavery in the 19th century, there has been a net increase, a net multiple of, say, three times.
I mean, let's just take the very minimum, the very minimum, right?
15% in the past and 45% now in terms of slavery of the population overall.
Mixed, right? And I'm not even going to suggest that it's equalized.
Obviously, there are no exact slaves, but there's soft slavery.
Welfare, bad education, the welfare state, and so on, is a kind of soft slavery.
And this is represented...
The people who get caught in these kinds of systems have life expectancies 20 years or more, less than the average.
And, of course, the average is that much higher if you count all of that.
So... There is a kind of slavery that is involved in that kind of soft slavery, where you just diminish people's expectations, you make them dependent, and you tend to cut them off, as Charles Murray has pointed out, during the time when they're making some pretty fundamental life decisions, you tend to cut them off from the more productive decisions that they could be making, or at least diminish their capacity to make those in a rational manner.
Now, if we take another approach and look at this this way, which is if we look at something like conscription.
To end slavery with conscription is madness, right?
We know for sure that the vast majority of slaves preferred slavery to death.
The vast majority of slaves preferred slavery to death.
Why? Because they didn't kill themselves.
So, just looking empirically, we know that the slaves preferred to live rather than to die.
Now, conscription, of course, takes that choice away from you.
The slaves had more liberties than the average conscripted soldier had.
And I don't know, I mean, the only figure that really sticks in my mind in the war between the states was 600,000, I think, people killed, so God knows how many people were...
Well, conscripted, but it must have been an enormous amount.
I've got to imagine over a million.
So, were there more conscripts in the armies in the war between the states than there were slaves?
I don't know. Of course, there were some slaves in the army as well, but...
That is worse than slavery or conscription, particularly in those days, right, where a nick on the battlefield could get infected and you would die.
So, the...
The question with regards to slavery, that the cure was worse than the disease, without a doubt.
So, I don't even know what the population of slaves was in the Andebellum South at this point.
Was it higher than 600,000?
I would guess yes, but...
Definitely the conscription aspect was worse than slavery, right?
So it's all well and good to say, well, political action, just in the United States, and the United States was the only country that required a civil war to end slavery for reasons that we could talk about another time.
But this is the example that we're most familiar with, so let's stay with that for the moment.
So... Slavery...
It was ended, quote, ended through a greater slavery.
And the net result, 150 odd years after slavery, is that net slavery within society, even within one of the freest countries in the world, America, net slavery has increased in society.
And it does not become evenly distributed, right?
Because there are the people who are the underclass who are slaves.
Not all minorities, of course, but...
And then there are the people who are the political class and the political elites, the economic elite, who are very closely tied together, who pay very little taxes.
So, has the question of slavery been solved through political means?
Well, I would say no.
I would say no.
Now, if we also look at the conscription, I mean, the government power that grew out of the Civil War was prodigious, right?
Fiat money, very shortly after the foundation of the...
after the Civil War, public school education came into play.
So, the growth in government power, as it always does through war, right?
The growth in government power that occurred through the efforts to free the slaves was enormous.
It was enormous. And that government power founded the basis in a lot of Western countries, but in the U.S. as well, founded the basis for things like the national banks and all the skullduggery that goes on with the economic finances.
And because of the national banks and the international system of commerce that was set up in the late 19th century, the wars of the 20th century, which were primarily economic phenomenons, you can't have that kind of war effort without significant Economic finances and control over finances.
So the other thing to remember as well is that the power that came out of this 19th century stuff was the foundation for the wars of the 20th century, which killed hundreds of millions of people, and the democide of the 20th century, which killed hundreds of millions of more.
So I'm just not entirely sure when I look at the world in the 19th century and the world in the 20th century that These enormous steps were taken towards liberty.
I'm quite sure that the steps were taken in the opposite direction.
So, when you look at slavery, it's sort of the political intention.
Were the blacks sort of, quote, freed?
Well, yeah, I guess they were freed for a while, for sure.
And were hundreds and hundreds of thousands of innocent American, non-slave-owning Americans, Dragged into a form of utterly despotic slavery in the form of conscription?
Well, yeah! So, it's a displacement, right?
The problem with the government is it always substitutes bad for worse.
and getting rid of slavery through the genocide of war is not a step in the right direction, it's a step in the wrong direction.
And the other thing that could be said, I think, is that And this, again, is sort of controversial.
It's just an opinion. Let me know what you think.
When we look at the capacity for a slave to make his way to freedom was not great, but it was not impossible.
So the average adult slave could ride the Underground Railway, could make his way to a northern state, could make his way to Canada, that there were ways of escaping slavery in this sense, right?
However, if you look at a child in public school, this is not the case.
Children have virtually no capacity to escape the state-mandated education within the countries that they live in.
So, your average slave, on a plantation, just to take a cliched view of it, has greater capacity for liberty than a child in public school.
Now, if you look at the way the public school was set up, you say, well, the slaves got beaten and so on.
Well, yeah, so did the children in the public schools as they were set up at the time.
Right? So... That is another way of looking at it, right?
That these kinds of...
Now, did the getting rid of slavery lead directly to the public school system?
No. But people made the mistake of thinking that the government, right, the state as a whole, got rid of slavery.
So you say legislation was passed to outlaw slavery.
Well, that's not the case. I mean, that's not the case.
You never need to pass legislation...
To get rid of something like slavery.
But that's just not possible.
And the reason for that is that something like slavery only exists because of legislation.
I hope that makes some sort of sense.
I'm going to just try a bit of a walk here, because this is too involved a topic for weights.
So, I will just go for a gentle, gentle walk.
150 pounds? No, not quite.
210 pounds? 214 pounds?
A little closer. Alright, so one sec.
Age... 40!
Oh! Grab my coffee.
One sec. Now, the other aspect to recall in this area, I think, is if you look at some place like Brazil.
Brazil never passed laws to outlaw slavery.
the way that slavery ended up being outlawed in Brazil was they simply stopped enforcing it.
Again, this is quite an important aspect of understanding this stuff, right?
So, Brazil never ever passed a lot outlawed slavery, according to the research that I've done.
However, Brazil did simply stop enforcing the laws that kept slavery alive, right?
So they simply stopped bringing slaves back, so to speak.
So, if we understand that, then we should, I think, be able to understand that...
It's not a law that you...
You don't need to pass a law to get rid of slavery.
You just need to stop enforcing the laws which support slavery.
Sort of understand?
Does that sort of make sense in a way?
So, it's not that the government took an active role in getting rid of slavery, right?
All that the governments in the West needed to do was to stop taking an active role in maintaining slavery.
I mean, if you have a mafia group that's killing a person a day in some neighborhood, then if they stop killing a person a day, because they're just not sending their hitmen out anymore, do we then say, look, they're preventing crime?
Well, they're actively stopping crime.
No, they're just stopping committing crimes.
They're just stopping committing more crimes.
Right? That's sort of an important distinction.
What people did get a sense of with...
I mean, this is one of the things that the political activism did.
Again, this is not empirical. I can't prove all of this.
Just thoughts, right? One of the things that the political activism involved in the abolitionistic movement did was it gave people this thought because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the state.
It gave people this idea that you could...
You could mobilize and you could lobby government to make good things happen.
You could lobby and motivate and get...
One thing that the abolitionist movement did was it brought a lot of Christian socialists into government.
It brought a lot of Christian socialists into getting...
Once you spend 5 or 10 or 15 years of your life lobbying government to get it to do something, once it does that thing, you don't just stop.
You don't just stop. You say, wow, if I got the government to pass laws against slavery, what else could I get the government to do?
Again, this is just a hypothesis.
It's a possibility, though, for sure, and I think that there's lots of reasonable ways to have this make sense, I think.
But once you set up an industry, that industry doesn't tend to go away.
If you think of corporations and their lobby, corporations will set up a lobby group to make inroads into government in order to avoid some tax or some damn thing.
And that lobby group, then, when that particular whatever-whatever is achieved, they don't tend to go away.
They just sort of vanish. What they do is they say, well, now we've got all these relationships with people in the government.
We are going to continue to use them.
You don't just dismantle that political apparatus that you've put together.
You continue to use it to try and get more benefits, right?
So you may have originally set it up to, you know, governments threatening to slap a tax on your industry, so you buy some politicians, you buy some lobbyists, you set up your offices, and you fight that.
Now, when that's gone...
You don't just give all that up again, right?
You don't then just say, oh, well, you know, we spent five years fighting this thing, and we've got all these great relationships with politicians, and, you know, we've bought all these people who have all these great connections.
Now we've achieved, you know, we've gotten out of this tax.
You keep it running, right?
I mean, this is the deadly infection that political action creates.
So you keep that office running.
And now instead of reacting to government power, you've successfully reacted to and blocked some sort of tax or tariff or some damn thing.
You've excluded yourself from some negative regulation.
And then you say, oh, okay, well, that's great.
So now, let's start influencing things positively, right?
Because you know it's going to happen again.
These people are on the payroll, right?
They have been enormously effective in making or saving you millions and millions or hundreds of millions of dollars.
And you know that what the government did once, it could do again, easily.
You also know that your competitors have set up these same kinds of lobbying outfits, right?
And that if you let your lobbying outfit go, right, so your business XYZ, you set up some lobbying outfit, if you then let that lobbying outfit dissolve after you've achieved your particular specific aim, then company ABC, which is your competitor who you were fighting on this issue, maybe they initiated the tariff that was going to be imposed on you or something, they're going to keep their political...
System running, and of course it takes a while to build up this kind of infrastructure, lobbying and so on.
Well, they're not going to let their political office dissolve, so if you let yours dissolve, you're also at the mercy of your competitors now, who have, you know, relationships.
Plus, the politicians have become used to the influence and the money and the power, or donations, or Whatever that they've gotten from you.
And so if you suddenly withdraw, then somebody else is going to sort of swoop in and pick up these needy politicians whose incomes have risen to match your donations or bribes or whatever you want to call them, influence.
And so what happens then?
Well, someone else is going to swoop in and politicians are going to be angry at you now, right?
See, they've become dependent on you and your lobbying, your efforts.
So now that the politicians have become dependent on you, if you just shut it all down, they're going to be angry at you and someone else is going to swoop in.
So how are you going to fare in the next round of legislation?
So I'll bet you, though I can't prove it.
I'm perfectly clear about this.
I'll bet you a lot of the abolitionists were humanists, but a lot of the abolitionists were Christians, right?
So, the Christians took the abolitionistic fight to the government, and then what is pretty well established is that the public schools were put in place as a measure of helping enforce religious conformity, because there were too many foreign types coming into the society.
So why was it that shortly after this, shortly after the Civil War, the public schools came in?
Well, I would bet you, dollars to donuts, that this all happened because the Christians had gotten themselves heavily involved with government at a lobbying level for the sake of slavery.
And now they had all these relationships, they weren't going to give them up, because when we talk about company ABC and XYZ, in this particular instance, we're also talking about Pentecostals, Methodists, Anabaptists, Calvinists, Catholics, Protestants, religious denominations, and they're not going to give up their hold over politicians, which they got into because of the cause of abolitionism.
So... When people looked at the government as a powerful tool for achieving social change, like abolitionism, it never stops there.
It never stops there.
And, of course, that's the problem.
Like peanuts.
You can't just eat one.
So that's the kind of long-term risk that I think you're going to get involved in when you look to the government for particular solutions.
Everything is a process.
Everything has repercussions.
Government control leads to more government control.
And the relationships that are set up to combat the first instance or the issue of government power that you...
That you disagree with.
Those relationships and that power structure that is set up to deal with that continues.
Continues, continues, continues.
And those relationships take on a life of their own.
And you don't know who's coming in next and what they're going to want to do with those relationships.
So, ending slavery is a cause every...
Sane, decent, and reasonable human being on the planet would be entirely behind.
And using the government to do it created an infrastructure of lobbying, the idea that the government was going to be able to proactively deal with social issues And then you had everybody wanting in, right? You had people with public schools wanting in.
You had people who wanted universal suffrage coming in.
And you had, of course, the banking system that was set up to pay and the fiat money system that was set up to pay for the Civil War then continued, enabling things like the funding of the public schools and the world wars of the 20th century.
You never know where this stuff is going to end.
You always know it's going to end badly.
But I'm just saying that the cause and effect of these kinds of things in history is something that we can't just take for granted and say, well, the government got rid of slavery and that's a good thing.
You can't look at these things in isolation.
Everything is an ecosystem.
Everything is a process. Everything swells and grows.
The moment you pick up the gun...
The gun multiplies.
The moment you point the gun, the cricket chirp of guns being cocked in the darkness echoes all around you.
So, So, I would say that the political solution to slavery gave some short-term belief to a small subsection of the population in terms of slavery, which then, of course,
devolved into the Ku Klux Klan, the Jim devolved into the Ku Klux Klan, the Jim Crow laws, the two-fifths voting, and it really wasn't until the post- Basically, I mean, if we just talk about the blacks, the black renaissance really only occurred between the end of World War II and the 1960s.
Twenty years! And then it all went to hell again, right?
So, the political solution, I mean, as I mentioned, the black life expectancy went down after slavery.
A lot of them did worse.
So, and why?
Well, because slavery was ended when the economy was decimated, right?
It's like, you're free, now you have no job.
You know, I don't know that they're going to be too happy about that, and that's why a lot of them died younger, right?
A lot of the slaves died younger after the end of slavery.
Now, I mean, of course I take the long view.
I mean, that's partly my training, and that's partly my mental habit.
But I can't look at anything in isolation and just say, well, this political action ended slavery, as if that political action that ended slavery ended there.
But it didn't. After the Civil War, after the abolitionistic movement...
You had the Fabian socialists, you had all of the people who believed that you could now use government to heal and solve all sorts of evils within society, all sorts of ills and problems within society.
And this all as a whole just got worse and worse and worse over time, to the point now where we're far worse off as a society as a whole, with all due sympathy to the slaves, which were a miserable existence, no question.
So, my approach would have been somewhat different from the abolitionists, and it would have required more patience, but then what in life that is good does not?
I would have said, not let's use the violent power of the government to attempt to abolish slavery, but let's abolish the institution that makes slavery possible.
And war, and famine.
Let's get rid of that!
Now, of course, the response, and I fully understand it, maybe it's correct, of course, the response would be to say, well, if you attempt to get rid of the government as the enabler of slavery, it's going to take forever.
Whereas, if we have this war, or we have this political movement, It's only going to take 20 years, not 50 years, or 100 years.
But so what?
So what? Human beings have been around for, what, 200,000 years in their current form?
So what if it takes longer to get rid of the entity of the state than it does to use the state to kill hundreds of thousands of people and hope to get rid of slavery, which isn't going to work anyway?
The great temptation is always, always, always to save the world by picking up a gun.
*Sigh* And it is a lesson, of course, that as a species we seem to need to learn over and over and over again.
But what would have happened if the abolitionists had not sought the abolition of slavery but of the government?
Well, the government was tiny back then.
Tiny! It was constantly running out of money.
It had a tax base in the single digits in terms of percentage of GDP. The GDP was tiny relative to now.
I mean, pain was one of the major riders.
Christianity was far less forceful than it is now.
Children were educated.
At home, de Tocqueville talked about the awareness and literacy of the American people, their fascination with laws and politics, their suspicion of government, their hatred of taxes.
they went for war over a 2% tax on a particular commodity.
So yeah, that would have been the time.
*laughs* That would have been the time to fix the Constitution.
To say, look, if we choose a government, it's not a government.
All men are created equal.
Let's finish the Constitution. Let's finish the dream.
Let's finish the republic.
Let's close the circle.
And this aberrant monstrosity of government, which enables slavery, we can get rid of.
And they could have thundered about that instead.
And a lot of people had never had any real direct contact with the government in America at this time.
Especially those people not living in cities, particularly at the federal level.
Right, so they could have thundered about that.
And yes, it would have taken two generations.
*sad music* Two generations. Well, of course, it would have been tough, because it's almost impossible to get rid of the government without getting rid of the concept of God.
I think it is impossible.
So that wasn't the time.
I understand that.
I mean, that's okay.
And the evidence wasn't there.
But... I don't know that it's really fair to say, well, it would have taken them a long time to get rid of the government back then.
It's fair to say it. You can certainly believe whatever you want.
But then you're just saying that market anarchy is hopeless.
Because if they couldn't get rid of the government back then, when the government was like one one-hundredth the size that it is now...
When it had no particular feat of arms that could not be matched by any well-organized group of individuals, unlike now with nuclear weapons and a million other horrible things, then there's no chance, right? Then there's no chance to get rid of the government.
If they couldn't get rid of the government back then, when it was 1% of its current size, no weapons of mass destruction, No multi-generations of public school indoctrination of the young.
I mean, we have to at least admit, far easier for them to have gotten rid of the government back then than it is to try and do it now.
They had a much, much easier job.
We also can, I think, accept and understand, and this I will fight very strongly for, because this is true, That if they had gotten rid of the government then slavery would not have occurred.
Slavery would have ended and wouldn't have been replaced with conscription and the indoctrination of children by the state and the welfare state and the generational slavery of old age pensions the slavery of Debt.
Endless, constant debt.
Well, we'd be a whole lot better off.
If you can get rid of the government, you get rid of so many other evils.
But if you get an enormous number of intelligent, resourceful, and well-educated people to embed themselves with the idea of using the government to achieve good, You create an entire class of, let's say, charitably, even conceivably well-intentioned, busybodies and political junkies, who will then attempt to use the state for every great thing in the world, and create nothing but the greatest hell on earth. who will then attempt to use the state for every
Here's another possibility.
If in the early part of the 19th century, people had tried to get rid of the government and had succeeded by the late 19th century, I betcha, betcha, betcha, betcha, that the likelihood of the wars of the 20th century would have been greatly lowered.
Greatly lowered. If you had an example of a society working beautifully without a government, how successful could communism really have been?
Communism arose simultaneous to activist democracy, to political activist democracy.
All of these things in the mid to late 19th century arose at the same time.
If, you know, let's say it took 60, 70 years Early 19th century to late 19th century, if, by the late 19th century, you had a wonderful example of a society that was working perfectly and beautifully without a government, highly successfully, well, you'd never have had Keynesianism, right?
Obviously. You'd never have had the Great Depression.
obviously, you would have not had a problem of people provoking war against a successful society because there was no real way to invade America in the 19th century.
So, if they had chosen to end the state, instead of to use the state to end slavery, and then use the state to attempt to solve a whole bunch of and then use the state to attempt to solve a whole bunch of other social issues, which entrenched them in a the whole history of the 20th century could have been quite the opposite.
Instead of it being the endless spread of fascism and communism, which effects are still being felt, and still spreading throughout the Western world, It could have been the spread of statelessness, true human liberty and equality, if, if, if they had taken a different approach.
Now, of course, the argument that I'm really making is not about the 19th century abolitionism.
It is about us.
And statism. What if?
What if? I mean, it's not getting any easier as time goes along.
This may be the last chance.
This may be the last chance.
Maybe. The technology that has made this conversation possible is also making totalitarianism an enormous amount more effective.
The telescreens of 1984 are simple now, right?
Big Brother can always be watching you.
This was science fiction in 1948.
It's not science fiction now.
The technology that makes this conversation possible is the same technology that can make this conversation go away permanently.
So, yeah, I think that we have a once-in-a-lifetime-of-the-species opportunity to have a conversation about getting rid of the state and actually make the ideas...
give spread to the ideas.
And I think we have to do that.
Because we don't want somebody else podcasting a couple hundred years from now and saying, oh my god, relative to now...
The government would have been so easy to get rid of in the 21st century, compared to now, the 24th century or something.
Why, oh why didn't they do it?
Why did they support politicians to get rid of the government?
Why did they hope to get rid of Catholicism by voting in the right Pope?
Why, oh why, oh why didn't they see the truth and act with integrity?
Well, I see that as a definite possibility and a definite option.
We, of course, can try and take that political route, and it will lead us exactly to the same defeats and swelling of the state, reloading and oiling of the endless guns pointed at the forehead of humanity.
It will take us straight back to that, which is where it always leads.
The state is Mephistopheles, You can't wield its power for good.
You can't wield its power.
It's the ring. You cannot wield the power of violence for good.
Whatever you get will cost you far more than you receive.
And by far the worst thing is it will cost the generations to come far more than it will cost us.
The little compromises and easy, pragmatic leaps that we try and take now to satisfy our lust for action and effect will sell the future down the river.
And I think that we do hold the fate of those generations in our hands, and I think it comes down to recognizing that you can't control the state, you can't use the state for good, you can't heal with the ring, the one ring, You just can't do it.
It's impossible, but sure as sunrise, all the bad people in the world, and by that I don't mean anyone in this conversation, all the bad people in the world want you to believe that you can use the state for good, because then you'll do that rather than try and get rid of it.
Thank you so much for listening.
I hope that you're having a wonderful day.
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