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July 6, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:12:39

819 Stefan Interviewed on the Radio - Radiate FM (Wed 4 July 2007, 3pm EST)

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	Well, we're back. Back on the air.
	And thank God for, well, not thank God, thank our top value perhaps for the fortune that allowed us to have our TILO system working again.
	And now on the air with us is Stefan.
	Welcome to the show, Stefan.
	Well, thank you so much. Sorry about the technical issues, but I'm glad that we could connect.
	Yes, you're on the air.
	Amazing. All right, great.
	Well, you heard our intro.
	Is there anything you'd like to contest?
	No, actually, I was kind of horrified when you said thousands of podcasts and articles and videos, but I just sort of totted it up in my head, and I am, in fact, Over a thousand and that's kind of chilling.
	But that's okay.
	You have like 800 podcasts and 400 some videos, am I correct?
	I think it's about 130 videos and about 80 or 90 articles and about 4 books.
	It's a lot. You know, it's a lot.
	It's like, you know, when you play a video game for too long, you look back at sort of six months of your life.
	That's sort of how I think sometimes about the last two years.
	But I'm certainly glad to have the material out there.
	So do you think people are going to talk about you like in Legend and be like, oh, he made millions and millions of podcasts and articles for all the world to hear.
	Are people going to sing about you?
	I don't know. I'll tell you what I think, though.
	I've been trying to think of a good tagline to put together for like T-shirts and mugs and stuff like that.
	The only thing that I can really think of that describes the show accurately is Free Domain Radio, where quality is quantity.
	That's really all of the best that I can come up with, and I think that's quite true.
	That's very good. I would buy that shirt for no more than $15, though.
	Not Canadian. U.S. U.S. Right.
	They're getting closer and closer now, so it's not such a big deal anymore.
	Are you trying to compete with us?
	Whose fiat money is better?
	Right, right. Your monopoly money is worth more houses than my monopoly money.
	Alright, so Stefan, tell us a little bit about Free Domain Radio.
	I looked at the Frequently Asked Questions article you have posted on Blogspot, and you say that, quote, Free Domain Radio is a philosophical conversation based on empirical logic and the Socratic method designed to help you bring the maximum freedom and happiness into your life, end quote.
	Maybe you could better elucidate FDR's meaning for our listeners and how empirical logic and the Socratic method can actually lead to greater happiness.
	Oh, sure. Let's start off with easy questions.
	Well, there's kind of two problems or two challenges or two schools of thought when it comes to intellectual rigor or human happiness, right?
	So on the one side you have abstract philosophy, which is sort of the metaphysics and epistemology and all that kind of stuff, which is the nature of the universe, the nature and study of truth, and to some degree ethics.
	That's all very abstract.
	And, of course, I studied a lot of that in school and enjoyed it.
	I mean, it's good intellectual exercise.
	But in terms of living your practical life, it's kind of like learning Elvish or Klingon.
	It's a good intellectual exercise, but it doesn't really translate a lot into the here and now.
	People have these ideas of philosophers of these thousand-yard staring, bumbling people who might be able to think about the nature of the universe but can't find their shoes.
	On the other hand, you have the psychological tradition.
	which is around actualization, authenticity, honesty, frankness and intimacy and all that kind of stuff and sort of lowering your own psychological defenses and trying to process your relationships more rationally and I've tried to sort of find a way to bridge these two worlds so that we have a theory that I think is quite good about abstract ethics and philosophy but at the same time,
	and this is what makes it sometimes a very exciting and occasionally volatile conversation is We say, okay, well, if these are our abstract ideals, truth, honesty, virtue, integrity, and all that kind of stuff, how is it that we're going to actually bring those out, bring those to bear in our own life?
	And so that's really the challenge that I've tried to bridge with the website, with the podcast, so that we've got a good definition of ethics that's not based on religion, that's not based on patriotism, that's not based on mysticism, that's not based on democracy or collective notions, but is based on reasoning from first principles, And once you get that greatest abstraction of ethics, how is it that you bring it to bear in the daily decisions that you have to make as a human being, right, to sort of maximize happiness?
	So that's really the purpose of the website, and that's why we talk about everything from, you know, the sort of free domain theory of ethics all the way through to dream analyses, right, because we're trying to bridge the philosophical and the psychological to produce a kind of actionable plan about how it is that you're going to be able to live your life and be as happy as possible.
	So, for those people who are listening going, what the hell is he talking about, virtue?
	Heck, heck. Yeah.
	Can you give, like, very briefly an example of, you know, how you can enact these ideas of, you know, and why is it good to derive these ideas of virtue and morality from first principles instead of, you know, religion, family, democracy, patriotism?
	Well, it's a very good question.
	And of course, it really is, I think, the most important question in life is the question of ethics and how it is we can be good people without becoming enslaved to sort of good, right?
	Where good becomes duty towards everyone else and so on.
	Clearly, of course, the core ethical commandment at Freedom Aid Radio is the donation of both money, children, and kidneys to Freedom Aid Radio.
	So that, of course, would be number one.
	Of course, from that core sort of premise...
	We derive a lot of other premises, which is Steph is the master of time, space, and dimension, all those kinds of things.
	All right, let me do that again and be a little more serious.
	Ethical theories, to me, are pretty much the same as scientific theories.
	So you don't have to use the scientific method to understand the world, right?
	You don't have to use experimentation.
	You don't have to use empiricism.
	You don't have to use logic.
	You don't have to do peer reviews.
	You don't have to have reproducible and reversible experiments or anything like that.
	In order to understand the universe, you can talk to a hand puppet, you can pray to a god, you can do a shimmy dance and hope that the answer comes to you, or you can use the scientific method, which is psychological, empirical, and rational.
	And in the same way, if you have a theory about how human beings should live, like what I call universally preferable behavior, which is not just, I think it's nice if you exercise, but universal behavior, Behavior that is considered good, like don't kill, don't steal, don't rape, and all that kind of stuff.
	And if you're going to have any kind of theory about how human beings should behave, then that theory needs to follow the scientific methodology, which is the first thing is it has to be rationally consistent.
	It has to be internally and rationally consistent.
	So if I'm a mathematician and I say that I've got this massive complicated proof of Fermat's Last Theorem or whatever, And right at the beginning, my basic assumption is 2 plus 2 is 5, then you know that the theory is not going to work, right?
	And you don't have to go out and test it, and you don't have to go through my 500-page proof or whatever.
	You just know. It's not because the premise is incorrect.
	And that's true of all science, right?
	If you have a theory about gravity, and you say that gravity depends on the weather, which obviously it doesn't, right?
	Then you're not going to have a successful theory of gravity.
	So in order to have any kind of successful theory...
	Of ethics, what you need to do is you need to have something that is logically coherent and consistent to all human beings at all times, in all places, right?
	So, for instance, if you have something which says, don't murder, right?
	Self-defense is a wrinkle and so on, but let's just go with don't murder, which, you know, pretty much I think people are mostly okay with.
	Well, if you're going to say don't murder is a good moral rule to have, then it needs to be universal.
	It can't just be, don't murder when you're in Kansas, but the moment you cross the state line to, I don't know, The Wizard of Oz or whatever borders Kansas, then you can't then say, okay, well now it changes.
	Now you must kill, right?
	So you can't, for instance, say, don't murder, but if you put on this green uniform, suddenly you have the right to murder.
	And this is how we know that there's ethical problems with something like the military, right?
	So you have to have consistent premises.
	You can't say don't steal.
	Unless you're part of the IRS, in which case you get to initiate force against citizens and take away their property.
	If you're going to have any kind of universal moral prescription, it has to be logical and universal.
	It can't just be made up.
	So in one country, you do one thing, and if you're a policeman, you do another thing, and if you're a soldier, you do another thing.
	If you're a prison guard, you do another thing.
	It has to be universal and consistent.
	You can't just make up different moral rules based on costumes, uniform, location, preference, gender, race.
	It has to be common.
	If you can't get over that first hurdle, Then you don't have a valid moral theory.
	I'm sorry, I didn't mean to... No, it's okay.
	I didn't mean to interrupt you. I guess what needs to be clarified here, though, is why when you say logical and universal, you're distinguishing yourself from perhaps Kant, who would say logical and universal.
	Because I think what you're trying to say is that things are conditionally universal, but only conditionally on the fact that people in the IRS are just like people who are not in the IRS, and that them putting on their little IRS hat doesn't give them the right to coerce.
	Would I be correct in saying that?
	Well, sure. I mean, if you put a saddle on a horse, it doesn't turn it into something else completely.
	It's just a horse with a saddle on it, right?
	And if you put a uniform on a man or you give him a business card which says IRS, you're not changing his fundamental nature as a human being.
	Now, there are people who can be accepted from universal moral rules, but there has to be an objective biological difference, right?
	So somebody who has an extreme form of mental illness, like certain forms of paranoid schizophrenia, Men who are in comas or children who are five years old, where there's an objective biological difference, then sure, just like a biologist can say, well, if a horse has stripes, it's probably a zebra.
	You can have sort of different moral rules if you have objective differences, the same way that biologists classify different animals.
	But when you're talking about ye olde, average, adult, intelligent, independent, free-will, free-thinking human being, You can't just make up moral rules that are completely...
	I mean, you can, you can do whatever you want, but they're just not going to be valid.
	Yeah, this reminds me of some general problem with different philosophies that some are focused on the individual, the rational philosophy.
	I mean, when I think of objectivism, I think of a lot of focus on the individual, and others are focused on the collective and surrendering one's will to the collective.
	And I think that's the main difference between rational philosophy and mythology or, you know, religion and patriotism.
	It's like the fundamental focus on the individual before any abstract collective ideas are put into place.
	Well, I think that's an excellent distinction.
	I mean, I think that you're quite right.
	When you put a whole bunch of horses together, you get a herd, right?
	But a herd is just a conceptual tag within our own minds that we use To describe a herd of horses, right?
	If you take away all the horses, you're not left with the dust of the herd.
	If you take away all the horses, there's no herd.
	Like, if you take away all the trees, there's no forest.
	And the question is, in philosophy, and I think you've identified it in terms of ethics, is the primary mechanism or the primary thing that you need to deal with in terms of ethics Is it a concept like a country or a society or a religion or even a family?
	Or is it an instance, like an individual?
	So if you have a concept called horses, is the concept derived from the actual nature of each horse, or can you just throw whatever you want in there?
	Or does it somehow the concept exist independently of what's in it?
	Is it a concept like a box?
	You take everything out of the box and you've still got a box?
	Or is it more like the idea of a forest?
	If you take away all the trees, there's nothing left.
	I think in a rational philosophy, and this, of course, is the scientific method, which is to say that rules are derived from instances, right?
	So if you've got a rule that says all rocks fall down, you can't just make up a rule which says, oh, except for that red rock and that other rock, and, you know, they're going to fall up, because the rule is all rocks fall down.
	Anytime there's a conflict between what happens in reality and your rule, it's your rule that has to give way, right?
	So I think you're right, and it all has to do with whether concepts A primary or whether individuals, the individual things are primary.
	So actually I guess this would lead into why individuals are primary and I guess this is where you might get into, you know, the primacy of existence but then followed closely by consciousness and how consciousness is a proof of existence and likewise how the consciousness is in control of his or her own actions and so forth.
	So how would you define the individual?
	Well, from a moral standpoint, the individual would be, for me, defined at a biological level, right?
	So the individual is, you know, a human being, you know, not small and chimp-like and covered with fur, and not large and abstract with a beard living in the sky, right?
	So just a human being, which a biologist, funny, you know, biologists have no problem classifying human beings, but ethicists seem to have an enormous amount of difficulty.
	I think it's one of the ways in which we can see just how far the ethical sciences lag behind the physical sciences.
	But yeah, the individual is some guy, some man, some woman, who has reasonable cognitive faculties, who exists in the world, and the dead don't really have any ethical status.
	So yeah, it's just some alive guy, some alive woman who's in the world.
	That is the thing which you are describing.
	That is the entity which you are describing when you are making moral rules, right?
	So if I have some Terrible disease that causes, you know, in the Dr.
	Strangelove way, it caused my arm to sort of lash out and hit people, and I can't control it, then we don't sort of say, well, your arm is evil and needs to go to jail, right?
	So it's the conscious individual that ethics, I think, really, really needs to deal with.
	And biologists have no problem defining human beings as that sort of aggregation of individuals, but ethicists seem to think that somehow we change our natures if we put on a uniform or join the government or something like that.
	So I guess this would lead us, I guess in a very broad sense, it leads us to your political philosophy, which is anarchism.
	And as I mentioned earlier, you are an anarchist, and this really seems to confuse people.
	Lock up your daughters. Yeah, lock up your daughters.
	At least in the sense that it's like...
	Commonly understood that anarchy means chaos, but you say in the FAQ, the term has been degraded through mythology to mean a world without rules, usually garbled in post-apocalyptic outerwear and riding in a well-armed motorbike.
	So I guess what you're trying to say by your definition is that anarchy does not mean no society but no government.
	So would you agree with the assertion and how would you convince others to look past the scary or extreme parts of anarchy or even the mythological parts like the Mad Max leather and the shotgun?
	Well, unless that's what you're into, right?
	In which case I'll definitely, you know, put anarchy in that clothing.
	But, I mean, the way that I try to get people to understand that anarchy is not no rules, right?
	Anarchy is that rules must be negotiated between individuals.
	When you have a government that can tax you whatever it wants, And sort of in debt the future generations, when it can print any kind of money that it wants, when it can declare war and go and bomb any country that it wants.
	That, to me, is anarchy, like in the traditional sense of the word, in the way that people usually understand it, like, you know, terror, confusion, chaos, madness, and so on.
	If you look at the Weimar Republic in the 1930s or the fall of Rome or the fall of the Soviet Union, Or even most of the Soviet Union.
	There was a system where there were, in fact, no rules.
	And you can see this now in the U.S., right?
	You have eminent domain into the seizure of any kind of property that may be even remotely connected with what might be loosely defined a drug crime.
	You have no rules, right?
	I mean, no human being at the moment can be sure, in the world, anywhere, that his property is his property.
	Because the government can choose to take it away in the form of taxes, tax increases, uh...
	seizures uh... whatever it is right and of course we say well but those are rules and and so on but of course uh...
	it it's been well proven that the police will plant drugs on people that they want to kind of get into trouble and so we currently live in a situation where we have a small group of people called the government who can do anything they want and we have to pay for it both in money and in blood in the form of of war and that to me is is real chaos so you don't know what's coming next you don't know How the debt is going to be paid off?
	What's the U.S. now? $40 trillion of unfunded liabilities?
	I mean, $200,000 for every working man and woman?
	I mean, then that to me is real chaos, where you just don't know what's coming next in your society.
	You have no control over your government.
	They can do whatever they want.
	That's chaos, and it's only shielded by the fact that the government has such overwhelming military force that we just obey, right?
	You're not going to sit there and say, well, if I buy two Saturday night specials, I can take on the U.S. military, right?
	So you say, well, they have such overwhelming force that I have to obey them, and that obedience is considered to be law and order, but it's not.
	On the face of it, it's order. It's order, but it's order like if you beat the hell out of your kids, they'll be well-behaved.
	I mean, they'll be suicidal, but they'll be well-behaved, right?
	If they're dead, they're the best behaved, right?
	Yeah, well, for a while, right?
	Then they hit their teenage years, which is sort of when the government runs out of money and things get a little haywire.
	But what I try to do is to help people to understand that you don't need a central authority with lots of guns in your life, like just you as an individual.
	You don't need a government with lots of guns pointed at you to make your life work, right?
	So I say to people, people say, well, you've got to have central authority and so on.
	It's like, well, how did you get your job, right?
	Well, you got your job, you applied, or you started a company or something, and you went peacefully, and you offered your services.
	How did you pick up your last girlfriend or your last boyfriend, or both, depending on your tastes?
	Well, you kind of, I don't know, put your best foot forward and tried to be attractive and tried to be charming, and there was no force involved.
	There was no violence involved.
	Why is it that you go over to your family's house for Sunday dinner?
	Is it because they're going to shoot your kneecaps off if you don't go?
	No, of course not. You go there because...
	We hope you want to.
	Yeah, we hope. But for the most part, we hope it's because you enjoy it.
	When my wife and I have a disagreement...
	Oh, wait, sorry, that is an example of a central authority.
	But no, you sit down and you negotiate it, right?
	So the amazing thing is, and this is how I try to get people to work empirically, everyone says, well, society can't work without centralized violence.
	And so I say, but your society, right, your friends, your family, your co-workers, your kids, your...
	Whatever, your teachers. That all works without centralized authority.
	So why is it that what works for everyone individually, in terms of their own personal lives, which is negotiation, non-use of force, and so on, why is it that it works so well individually, but somehow when we move to a bigger aggregation of human beings, the exact opposite rules will apply?
	It's like your biologist saying, well, a horse is, you know, a quadruped with, I don't know why, a shiny coat or something like that.
	And then it's like, well, yes, but if you get 500 horses together, suddenly they're covered with feathers and they can fly.
	Well, it doesn't matter, right?
	Whatever works for you individually, and I've never met anybody who said, oh, yeah, no, I got my job because I held the kids hostage, right?
	You know, I get my income by shooting people.
	I mean, that's not how it works. I don't see how we can say that it works really well at an individual level for there to be no centralized, coercive agency like a government.
	But then, boy, you get a bunch of people together when it's even more complex.
	And suddenly we need the exact opposite of what works on a personal level, and that's never made any sense to me, and I think that that's something that people can find a way to anarchism, recognizing that they themselves are already a state of society.
	When you said that real anarchy is in the Weimar Republic or the Soviet Union, that really made me think.
	People are so comfortable just psychologically accepting rules as long as they're abstract and unjustified.
	When someone tries to rationally explain to them, look, you don't need an authority figure telling you what to do.
	You make your own decisions every day when you pick what to eat, what to wear.
	All of a sudden, they get these psychological defense mechanisms telling them, well, no, we need law and order.
	And what's law and order?
	It's defined by people who are fallible, just like you.
	And why is it that when they make a law, it's more reasonable than when you make it for yourself?
	When you have the omnipresence of a state, I guess you'd imagine that it would be built into people's mode of thinking, their paradigm that a state needs to be there.
	I mean, I guess that's why the concept of anarchy is so violent to some people because...
	Because it threatens their religious beliefs too.
	I mean, if God isn't absolute and doesn't make all the rules, then the state isn't absolute.
	And vice versa, if the state isn't absolute, then God isn't absolute.
	So it just threatens a lot of values that people have just deeply seated in their psyche, I think.
	Well, I think that's quite right, and I think that this is sort of where some of the personal aspects of the tagline for the website at freedomainradio.com is the logic of personal and political liberty, right?
	So it's pretty clear to me that, you know, potentially ferocious and intellectual force that I may be, I am not going to overthrow the state.
	I certainly don't advocate doing it violently, and I'm not going to talk people out of all these illusions.
	By the time I take my big old nap at the end of my life.
	So the question is then, well, how is it that you're going to become free in your personal life?
	One of the core aspects of any rational ethical philosophy, I think, is the idea that there's no such thing as unchosen positive obligations.
	And what I mean by that is, I can't just say to you, hey, you know what?
	You owe me $1,000, right?
	And if you don't pay me, I'm going to shoot you.
	That's an unchosen positive obligation.
	I mean, if you borrow... A thousand dollars from me.
	That's one thing. Then you've chosen an obligation of repaying it, assuming you have a contract or something like that.
	But you can't just make up obligations for other people.
	And of course, that's the fundamental thing around government, right?
	That you're obligated to pay your taxes and you're obligated to obey the laws, even though you haven't voted for the existence of taxation, even though you haven't voted for the laws.
	And yes, you get to vote for the occasional sap, you know, hand puppet of the lobbyist that comes along every four years.
	But as anarchists are fond of saying, it's funny that no matter who you vote for, the government always seems to get in.
	Of course, that's the core issue with that.
	But I really think that it's important for people to understand when it comes to this kind of stuff that you can't just have these opposing rules, right?
	So I was arguing with this woman the other day.
	I should say debating in a positive and friendly manner, but I was debating with this woman the other day who said, well, yes, I think that That we need to use the government to take care of the poor and the old and so on, right?
	Because, you know, that's virtuous and that's moral and so on.
	And I said, well, you realize that it's using violence, right?
	Like if I want to take care of the poor in some different kind of way, right?
	Maybe I want to go and teach them or maybe I want to start a company and hire them or maybe whatever.
	Or maybe I just want to put my money in the bank so that somebody else has the capital to go and buy, to go and start a company and hire the poor.
	I said, but you're recognizing and you're advocating There's just one way to help the poor, and that's give a bunch of people guns and have them tell everyone else what to do, or get shot, right?
	And that's not a productive thing.
	She said, yeah, I understand that, but I still think it's a good way to do it.
	I said, but if that's a good way to make decisions in society, then by the sort of logical laws of ethics, you can't just say it's only good for poverty, right?
	And I said, well, how would you feel then about this?
	You have a ministry of marriage, right?
	Because, you know, marriage is good, and kids are good or whatever.
	And you have a ministry of marriage, and the way that you do it is all women go and sign up, and the government then chooses who it is that they're going to get married to.
	And if they don't like that too bad, right?
	They can always go and, you know, every couple of years they can vote for maybe a different husband if they don't like the one they've got, but they can't vote to not have that as a system.
	And so, you know, and if the woman doesn't marry the man that the government tells her to, then she gets thrown in jail, and if she resists, then she gets shot.
	Well, obviously that would be completely immoral.
	But of course, it's like what you were saying about the divisions that people have in their minds.
	Somehow, that's an acceptable way to deal with poverty.
	But it's not an acceptable way to deal with something like marriage.
	And of course, again, people get very hard-pressed explaining actually why there would be such different ways of dealing with problems.
	Well, it's 44 minutes past the hour and we're taking phone calls at 305-348-3575.
	Any questions or comments you have will be greatly appreciated.
	Okay, so as you were talking about your ethics, I guess the next big question is, why are these ethics binding?
	Why ought someone to follow these logical or rational rules?
	Well, I mean, that's an excellent question, of course.
	And nobody has to.
	As I said, you don't have to follow any I mean, just as I say, you don't have to eat well, you don't have to exercise, you don't have to use the scientific method, you don't need to go to the doctor when you're sick.
	But it's suddenly been my observation, and you can certainly let me know what you think.
	It's been my observation that no human being, it seems to me, is able to act without some kind of self-justification.
	I mean, you never get a war declared in history where the guy just says, You know what?
	I don't like these foreigners. I'm going to go and shoot them.
	That's never how it happens.
	There's always some huge story, and this is all the way back from Hitler with Czechoslovakia, and Hitler with Austria, and Hitler with Poland.
	It was always, well, you know, these darn Czechoslovaks are causing all these problems, and the Sudetenland Germans are crying out for help, and they're being oppressed, and we're going to save our brethren.
	You see, of course, the big nonsense about Iraq.
	They had long-range missiles, right, that went 112 miles rather than the 100 they were allowed, which certainly did not do anything to threaten the eastern seaboard of the United States.
	But you get all of these justifications.
	It doesn't seem to me that human beings are able to act without some kind of self-justification.
	Even the worst people in the world will say that there was a justification that's ethical for what they did.
	So, from what I've seen, if you can get human beings to believe that something is moral, Like, you know, the draft, right?
	I mean, the Second World War, Vietnam, or whatever, if people believe that the draft is moral, or people believe that soldiers are moral, or policemen are moral, or paying your taxes is moral, or supporting this, that, and the other is moral, if they believe that using violence to solve poverty and sickness and so on is moral, then they'll go along with it.
	Okay, Stephan, I hate to interrupt you, but we do have a phone call, so let's see what happens.
	Hello, you're on the air.
	No, I don't want to be on the air.
	Oh, okay, sorry. Oh, wow.
	It appears that that pickup of the phone call dropped Stefan.
	I'm very sorry, Stefan. You're gonna have to call us back.
	Apparently we can't run two phone calls at once.
	Well, so what's your take on what he just said then about the whole binding force of ethics?
	Well, I think what he was trying to say was that human beings just respond to morality naturally.
	And that's why it's important to define morality in a rational sense because we have no choice but to use morality.
	And I'm not sure.
	I mean, maybe he has a point, but it seems, well, we'll have him answer that.
	Sorry about that, Stefan. See, another problem with our telephone system.
	I guess you can only have one call, right?
	Yeah. Two lines, but one call.
	It makes no sense. Excellent.
	Now, you gave me a 75 number.
	Do you want me to call that instead? No, that's good.
	This is great. All right.
	Did we get the question?
	No, no question. No question.
	He didn't want to be on the air.
	It was just a question maybe for the station.
	But anyway, as we continue...
	Sorry, let me just...
	I'll be very rapid just sort of finishing up this idea.
	It's my belief and my observation that human beings are run by ethical theories.
	Whatever we believe is right, we will do.
	And so I'm not particularly worried about people who decide not to follow ethical theories.
	What I'm most concerned with It's getting the right ethical theory out there.
	And then I believe, as surely as when you spin the wheel of a supertanker, society will go that way.
	Ethics are the most fundamental and powerful ingredients in decision-making within individual and collective human life.
	So I think you just define the right ethics and keep working at the problem, and society just changes because everybody needs ethical justifications for what they do.
	Well, it appears that you're making sort of a psychological argument, but I guess, I mean, and obviously that's what it has to boil down to.
	It has to boil down to some sort of believable biological story.
	But I guess at the same time, don't you, I guess you'd have to support non-contradiction as one means, so that if you choose not to participate in ethics, or rather if you choose not to act ethically and think about your decisions, then you're not entitled to any sort of ethical treatment at the same time.
	Well, I think that's true, and I also think that by recognizing that human beings have the capacity to be evil, to act immorally, to accept completely bad and wrong and destructive ethical theories, because of that very fact, we can't have a government, right?
	If human beings were perfect, then maybe we could have a government, but then, of course, we wouldn't need a government any more than we'd need ethical theories.
	I mean, if people never got sick, we'd never need doctors, right?
	So the fact is that human beings do like power, Human beings do like to take things from other human beings.
	Human beings do like to offload the costs of what they want to other human beings.
	Because human beings have the capacity for evil, we can't have something as powerful as a government in human hands because it just corrupts everything that it touches.
	Yeah, it's funny. The government always condemns monopolies and tells us that they have to protect us from monopolies.
	The government is the monopoly.
	Yeah, that's always amazing how people make that argument.
	In order to cure this headache, I think a guillotine is in order.
	Well, I think this refers to something that you said in maybe one of your podcasts, which is that some humans are inclined for evil, and the problem is when we have government which is supposed to control evil, we're kind of hoping that we just get lucky and stick the right people in there to do the coercing for us and hope that they do it with good spirits.
	Right, and of course, what kind of human beings want to control the government?
	What kind of human beings want to control The 700 US military bases that are overseas.
	What kind of human beings want the keys to nuclear weapons?
	What kind of human beings want to be able to rip from people's wallets hundreds of billions of dollars a year at the point of a gun?
	It's not you. I don't think it's me.
	And so because you have a government, people say, well, we need a government because there's bad people in the world that we need protection from.
	But, I mean, and I accept that there are bad people in the world.
	But where do people think those bad people are going to end up?
	They're going to want to be in the government because that gives them total control and power over other human beings, which they would not have if there was no government.
	So I guess then the next doubt I would have, if I was listening, I would say, well then what's the practical solution?
	I mean, if we chose, let's say, to all adopt the rational philosophy and disarm ourselves, disarm the government that is, how would we prevent just being invaded by an immoral, tyrannical government and subdued to their will?
	Well, I mean, that's an excellent question, of course, as is the question which is sort of related, I think, about how are disputes going to get resolved in the absence of a centralized authority like the government?
	Well, first of all, the government doesn't resolve disputes.
	The government just orders people to obey it, right?
	So you don't really have, you know, it's like when your mom comes in and you and your brother are fighting.
	It's like you both go to your rooms.
	It doesn't matter to me who's right or who's wrong.
	I mean, that's how the government deals with stuff.
	So it doesn't really get... The government also is not very good at defending people.
	I mean, that's a pretty fundamental thing.
	I was born in Ireland and I grew up in England.
	My father's side of the family is British and was heavily involved in the Second World War.
	My mother's side is German and was also heavily involved in the Second World War.
	So I've done a fair amount of research, actually written a novel about all of this.
	And if you look at the appeasement and what happened in the 1930s, The government is really bad at protecting its citizens.
	I mean, the U.S. has this amazing, you know, it's got all the natural resources on the planet.
	It's got two oceans on either side.
	It's got peaceful neighbors to the north and south.
	And yet, every single time the U.S. is, you know, at war with someone or there's a cold war or there's terrorism, right, the U.S. is not doing a very good job of protecting its citizens.
	So the first thing that I would sort of suggest is that when you look at The hundreds of millions of people who were murdered in wars and also by governments, certainly over 300 million and probably closer to 400 million in the 20th century alone, that's not a very good track record for protecting people.
	The second thing that I would say is that with the advent of nuclear weapons, invasion has become a non-issue.
	Because of mutually assured destruction.
	No country that has nuclear weapons has ever suffered from an invasion.
	Why? Because if you have nuclear weapons, you can kill the leaders of whoever is invading you.
	And suddenly now that leaders are subject to the same kind of threats that soldiers in the front lines have always been, they seem to be pretty good at not declaring war anymore.
	So why has Europe not had a third world war?
	Because they've all got nuclear weapons, right?
	So you will get proxy wars that are fought in other countries like Korea and Vietnam and so on.
	But you don't get countries that have nuclear weapons getting invaded.
	That's how you knew that Iraq never had any weapons of mass destruction, because you just don't invade countries that have those things.
	And so a free society, a society without a government, yeah, there would be some, you know, there'd be like 20 nuclear warheads that would need to be maintained at the cost of like 50 cents a person per year, but that would eliminate the possibility of invasion from other countries.
	It just doesn't happen historically.
	Okay, well, before we move, I mean, I guess that really, do you consider that a full layout of your principles?
	Or maybe you want to tell us a little bit about your podcast on relationships and how you can apply reason and the philosophy to your personal relationships?
	I would love to. I just want to make sure I'm sensitive to your guys' timing and if there are any calls or women next week to take a break, what's their schedule?
	Well, you can go ahead and give us a brief summary of that in just a few minutes and then we're going to have to take a break.
	Okay, I'll do my best.
	It's a thousand podcasts, whatever, so I'll do my best.
	Well, the whole point of all of this, of course, is to end up in a situation where you can be free in your personal life, right?
	So one of the things that I talk about in my podcast related to this question of no unchosen positive obligations is that this doesn't just mean the government and the taxes and all the things that you can't control in your life.
	It actually means all the things that you can control.
	In your life. And those are things like guilt, obligation, duty, I mean, and not to the state because you don't have any control over the state, but in your personal life, right?
	So if you don't like your parents, you know, and again, this is controversial as all get up and maybe this will spark some calls, you don't actually have any obligation to see them.
	They have an obligation to care for you when you were a kid because they had you and that's a chosen positive obligation.
	But as an adult, you don't actually have any obligation to your parents.
	Or to your siblings or to your extended family, aunts and uncles.
	You're just born into that, right?
	The same way that you're born into a country.
	It doesn't mean that you have obligations to people.
	If you love them and if they love you, fantastic.
	That's great. But the way that we turn this whole question of virtue around is by rejecting unchosen positive obligations in our personal lives.
	That's how we make the world a better place, is refusing to reward people who don't treat us well With, you know, loyalty and guilt actions and so on.
	So, you know, if you don't like your parents, I mean, the way that I talk about it is, you know, certainly go and talk to your parents and say, well, I don't like when this or that happens, or I didn't like this or that when I was a kid, and talk to them.
	You know, be open, be honest, be vulnerable.
	And then, if it doesn't work out, you can walk away.
	I mean, there's a cult called the family, which is kind of at the core of a lot of the problems that are in society, wherein we just have to Quote, love and obey our family, which then translates into loving and obeying God and loving and obeying the state.
	But it really all starts at the core with the family.
	That's our parents are our first experience of authority.
	And of course, we will never be, even if we're in jail, we will never be in the kind of power disparity with anyone else that we were when we were kids with our parents, right?
	So that's why I spend a lot of the podcast focusing on familial relationships, focusing on good parenting habits and so on.
	And my wife, who practices psychology, runs an office out of her house, runs a clinic, she's the one who really helped me sort of focus in on this aspect of one's personal relationships being a mirror for the kind of society that we live in and how we have so much more control over our personal relationships.
	That's where we should really focus to bring the maximum amount of freedom to our life.
	And I think it's really easy for someone listening to this to say, yeah, I agree with him, but I got a good relationship with my parents.
	I mean, yeah, we only talk about the weather and sports, but, you know, we get along.
	They're fine. And I mean, I think that sort of complacency is what prevents a lot of people from really accepting these ideas.
	They think, yeah, sure, I mean, what he's saying makes sense.
	It's obvious. But, you know, I don't have that relationship with my parents.
	And I certainly do get a lot of that.
	And, of course, this is where some psychological sophistication is important, right?
	So if I say, you know, you need to have a rich and meaningful relationship with everyone in your life, where they get to speak, you get to speak about what's really important to you.
	And, yeah, you can spend some time talking about the weather and so on, but, you know, relationships expire in the desert of chit-chat and, you know, innocuous nothing, you know, parlor talk.
	You've got to have something where you really talk about your values, where you really talk about what life means to you, what's important to you, what fundamentally juices you as a human being.
	And so when people come and say to me, well, I get along okay with my parents and this and that and the other, well, there's a couple of ways that you can figure that out, right?
	I mean, I'm very much for empirical and scientific knowledge, but I'm also very much for instinctual knowledge, right?
	I mean, we have the gut brain and we have dreams and so on, which help us to figure out how to navigate through the complexities of Of a pretty relativistic cultural environment.
	So, you know, it's easy, right?
	So when the phone rings and it's my wife calling, my heart leaps and I'm thrilled, I'm overjoyed, I can't wait to talk to her.
	And so I just ask people, okay, it's like the phone rings and you look down at the call display and it's like, mom and dad, right?
	How do you feel, right? And the people's like, oh, you know, I'll let the machine get it.
	I don't have time right now, whatever, right?
	That doesn't mean that everything is, you know, horrible.
	But it means that this is not a relationship that is really causing you a lot of pleasure.
	There's that kind of gut feel that we get when the phone rings and it's like, oh, mom and dad, good or bad, right?
	And if it's not something that you look forward to, if it's an obligation, if it's a, you know, well, it's Mother's Day and I have to go.
	Actually, this is Father's Day weekend.
	Sorry? This is Father's Day weekend, so...
	Father's Day weekend, or of course, July the 4th.
	Another one where we're going through.
	I'm sorry, I just made that up. Yeah, that was a few weeks ago.
	That just goes to show how ignorant I am of family affairs.
	But I guess, how much does the oppression element tie into this?
	You know, like, I mean, sometimes it's just a relationship can be boring, but I mean, at what point does a relationship become outright destructive?
	Well, I think that the boring relationships Because I'm an out-and-out atheist and materialist, so I don't think we have a soul.
	I don't think we get anything later.
	We don't go anyplace after we die.
	We go to the same place that we were before we were born, which is like no place.
	Because of that, I'm not willing to live a life where I am consumed and waste time in boring and habitual and dull relationships.
	I'm not saying, let's all go skydiving every day, but...
	There has to be something that is gripping and enjoyable and I can be enthusiastic about it in my relationships.
	I don't consider boring relationships to be a value.
	I think that you need to...
	Not you, but if you're playing it safe and you're not talking about the things that really matter to you and you're just kind of going through the motions, then you need to get that relationship off the couch.
	You need to get it into a workout room and get it exercised, or you need to get rid of it.
	You just can't live...
	It sort of numbs you.
	You wouldn't go to a party and find someone who bored you and then start a long-term relationship with them, right?
	I mean, unless they were really hot or whatever, right?
	And then it wouldn't be that long-term.
	But I mean, you wouldn't, if you're just some guy, you go to some party and there's some guy droning on about how he loves nothing better than to read books about accountancy on the weekend, you wouldn't sit there and say, great, you know, let's have lunch every week or whatever, right?
	So given that that's not what you would do with your friendships, I don't think it's reasonable to say that you should do that with your familial or personal relationships.
	Ask your question of when a relationship becomes abusive rather than just boring.
	For me, that is a very, very specific place and a very, very specific point, which I think is important to, at least you're a ruminator, whether you agree or not.
	I think because human beings really want to be good, I think when somebody who has power or authority over you uses ethical arguments to make you do stuff which is not good, which is not universal, which is hypocritical or whatever, right? I mean, the classic example is a parent who hits their kid saying, don't hit your brother, right?
	It's that kind of nonsense, right?
	So when your parents use rules, use your desire to be a good human being, which I think is pretty much inbuilt to all but the basest of sociopaths, when your parents use your desire to be good to control and bully you, right, then I think that's pretty corrupt and that does you a lot of harm.
	And an innocuous example is, you know, maybe you've got some Bristly, warty, bad-smelling, unpleasant grandmother when you were a kid and your mom's like, you know, be a good boy.
	Go and kiss your grandmother. A good boy loves his grandmother.
	A good boy wants to go and kiss his grandmother or whatever.
	Well, that's taking your desire to be good and just making you like into somebody who has to obey orders.
	And that kind of desire to have you obey arbitrary authority or because it's your parents who would feel anxiety if you said, well, I don't want to kiss grandmother.
	She smells like mothballs and death, right?
	I mean, whatever it is.
	It's your parents' discomfort about that.
	They then translate that into moral rules that you have to follow.
	And that, I think, is pretty bad.
	I mean, that's where relationships run into real trouble.
	And it seems innocuous or insignificant.
	I'm sure people are listening to this saying, oh, what a baby.
	What does it matter?
	You're just kissing an old lady.
	And it usually is this kind of just these petty obligations that your parents force you into just using moral justifications.
	But the fundamental thing is that there's no reason why you should feel compelled to do them, even if they are insignificant.
	Yeah, and they're never insignificant, because it's always part of a pattern.
	Right, right. You know, I mean, it's never just, well, my parents were really interested in my thoughts and my welfare, but, boy, when it came to grandmother, it was always part of a pattern, right?
	You work from the innocuous stuff, and you have to be patient with it in yourself, because I agree with you, it seems ridiculous.
	I was just kissing grandmother with one second.
	Why does it matter? But it really does matter, because it matters how it is that you end up getting people to do what you want in your life, right?
	So, You can, you know, if your kid doesn't want to kiss his grandma, you sit down with him and say, well, how come, and what do you think, and this and that, and you talk to the grandma and say, you know, here's a breath mint, and maybe get that wart looked at, whatever, right?
	I mean, there's ways that you can negotiate that respect the feelings of everyone involved, or you can just sort of bully and dominate your kid and deal with it that way, and it's that latter part that lays the foundation for, I think, people's unconscious adherence in an irrational way to power structures like The state and the church and patriotism and so on.
	It's just, well, I just have to do what I'm told, otherwise people are going to get mad at me.
	Because that's always the unspoken thing, right?
	If you sort of have to go and kiss your grandmother, it's always because if you don't, your parents are going to get mad at you.
	And that sort of fear and obsequiousness, I think is pretty gross, but it's a very, very common way of getting kids to do stuff.
	Alright, great. Well, we're going to take a quick break at the top of the hour, so we'll be back in a little while, and hopefully we'll open up the discussion a little more to more contentious issues, other than Stefan just being the prophet of the radio.
	Right.
	All right, well, so we'll see you in a little bit.
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	Oh, sorry, Stefan, are you there?
	I sure am. Oh, my apologies.
	Well, we're back, and it's Toronto calling, I guess.
	So, uh... I guess we wanted to move on to a more open-ended part of the discussion.
	If you felt that you've laid out as much as you'd liked of your holistic world philosophy.
	Absolutely. You know, now that I've done it in 45 minutes, I can't imagine why I have so many podcasts.
	It's a baffling to me. But yes, absolutely.
	Let's go open-ended. All right.
	Well, so before we move forward with our discussion, I guess about more specific things like that troubling Izzot issue, let's talk about the elephant in the room, Michael Moore.
	Yeah. He recently released the movie Sicko, which he claims is an inside look at what healthcare is like for Americans compared to that of the Canadians, the Ukrainians, the French, and the Cubans.
	Well, since you're from Canada, why don't you give us your take on the movie Sicko?
	Well, I have seen it.
	I think Michael Moore is an excellent, excellent polemicist, and there's a lot to be learned from him on how to communicate passionately about ideas, I think.
	The cred for where credit is due.
	That having been said, it's kind of not anything to do with rationalism.
	It's kind of not anything to do with ethics or philosophy.
	So, for instance, if you go and interview people who've won the lottery and you say, do you think the lottery is a good thing?
	Well, of course they're going to say yes, right?
	So, if you go and interview people who have had significant medical issues, whose medical expenses are covered at the point of a gun through taxpayers, Then, of course, they're going to be pro the system, right?
	So, to me, it's not anything that's completely obvious.
	Now, it's entertainingly done, and he's a good performer, a good writer.
	But, yeah, you find people who've benefited hugely from a system, and they're going to like that system.
	You might as well go to the people who, you know, the sort of party leaders in the Soviet Union in the 1970s who had their Dachau is on the Black Sea and say, what do you think of communism?
	They say, it's great, you know, I love it.
	And the unfortunate thing is you talk to the people in the gulags, not so good, right?
	So the challenge that he puts forward that I think is a false dichotomy is A, the system in the U.S. is a free system, is a market-driven system, which it's not, and B, that the system in Canada is efficient and productive and so on.
	Of course, in A, more than 50 cents on the dollar of healthcare money is spent by the government.
	The government has control through the FDA of the release of new drugs, which is completely horrendous.
	I mean, there are some beta blockers which are supposed to help people with heart problems that have been available for 20 years in Europe that are still not available in the United States have killed 60 to 70,000 people, right?
	I mean, that's just one example.
	It costs such an enormous amount to get drugs through the FDA. You can't get a hold of experimental drugs even if you're dying and want to.
	And because it costs so much money to get drugs approved for human use, only, you know, basically pills which help male erectile dysfunction and cancer drugs, only the real big ones are dealt with, and people who have less common ailments don't get any particular help.
	The amount of lobbying that is done for the government to pass legislation that is preferential to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries is prodigious, right?
	This recent pill for old people, I can't remember what it's called, the pills for old people bill, has increased the cost for old people, and lobbyists spent hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to make sure that they got to write the bill, and then, of course, they're reaping tens of billions of dollars in profits, right? So you can't really blame the corporations, I think.
	It's just the system, and if they don't do it, their stockholders will throw the CEOs out on their butts.
	So, It's not a public system in the U.S. As Harry Brown used to say, what was the problem in the 50s and the 60s?
	How come you didn't have all these problems with the healthcare system?
	Well, it's because government wasn't so involved.
	So an operation which would cost a couple of hundred bucks in real dollars now costs a couple of thousand, right?
	And something that would cost 2,000 bucks in real dollars in 1960 now costs $20,000.
	So naturally, because government has been interfering with the healthcare industry, Regulating it, controlling it, subsidizing it, taxing it, funding it, lobbying it, then the government has driven up the cost, right?
	Government interference always drives up cost.
	And so naturally now people are saying, well, it's so expensive that we need more government, but of course it's so expensive because there is government in it to begin with, because violence doesn't work.
	In Canada, it's pretty bad.
	You know, it's pretty bad.
	We have tried six different ways from Sunday.
	Of course, they're all political tries, so it doesn't work.
	To reduce the wait times.
	People are waiting up to a year for cataract surgery.
	A year of being semi-blind.
	And you have no alternative. In Canada, recently, a guy who had kidney cancer, I think it was, was rejected.
	The government said, you can't have an operation because the cancer is too advanced.
	So he sold his house and he went to England and he spent his own money and he's fully healthy now.
	You really are at the whim of the bureaucrats.
	So people say, well...
	We don't like being at the whim of the insurance companies.
	At least they're competing to some degree for your time and money and attention, and you can change them.
	In Canada, we have just one insurance company that has all the guns, that prevents all competition, and, of course, that's not a better system or a better solution.
	You've got hundreds of thousands of people here who can't even get ahold of a doctor.
	You can't get a family doctor because they're too short.
	They're short of doctors up here.
	The system is completely unsustainable from a finance standpoint.
	As soon as you make anything free, the usage of it just goes up through the roof, right?
	I mean, it's a great system.
	The way that he puts it forward, right?
	Yeah, people who are going to benefit hugely from having other people pay their bills are going to be very happy, right?
	People who end up having to pay those bills and not having control are going to be unhappy.
	The last thing that I'll say is that There's this debate up here in Canada.
	It says, you know, we don't want a two-tier healthcare system because there's quite a bit of a movement to get some private stuff in.
	Of course, the politicians have their own healthcare system, which we don't get access to, right?
	Because you don't see the Prime Minister of Canada waiting in the emergency room, right?
	So it's in the same way that they get their own schools, like in the U.S., right?
	People in the Congress don't send their kids to public schools, right?
	So they have their own system, which, you know, would sort of belie that.
	So there already is a two-tier healthcare system.
	The other thing, too, of course, is that if you know someone in the field, like if you have a brother-in-law who's a doctor, then you move to the front of the line, and I've seen this happen a whole number of times up here.
	What happens is you don't get rid of the problem of access by making something free.
	All that happens is it becomes political and it becomes internal, and if you know someone and if you can get your way in that way, or if you have some sort of clout, Or if you're in the media, but to the average person who doesn't have that kind of class, who you never hear from, The system is terrible.
	I think it's kind of analogous to a man selling all his family's assets like his children's clothes and their food and buying a Rolls Royce and then looking at the Rolls Royce and worshipping it and being like, wow, this guy has it made.
	He's got this great Rolls Royce.
	And I think the problem is that in France, he's talking about how great it is and all the free nannying and all the health care.
	Yeah, he's focusing on the people who are getting it.
	When you actually look at France as a whole, they have 300% GDP unfunded liabilities.
	You know, they're in deep trouble.
	And I think the whole flaw of the movie is that it focuses on healthcare like it's a great thing, but it's the presence of that healthcare which is driving those countries into the ground.
	Right, yeah. I think the movie has two problems.
	Misrepresentation and wrong conclusions drawn from correctly represented things.
	Like, he misrepresents Canada and Cuba saying, you know, oh look, these people, there's no lines here.
	They're all coming here for free.
	And then he goes to Cuba and he's like, look, I brought Americans that were sick and look how good, look how well they're treated.
	They get medicine for five cents.
	And those are obviously blatant misrepresentations, at least of Cuba, because I don't even need to justify that.
	He makes it seem like they just landed on a raft, like on the island and walked on and got health care.
	But, you know, it's funny because when they were talking to the firefighters, there's a guy there wearing a military uniform, or at least what looked a lot like a military uniform, spouting all this symbolic...
	Horse. Generic. Generic talk about the 9-11 attacks and our brothers and the firefighters.
	And it's just like, this guy is clearly well-versed in propaganda.
	And you just wonder, how can Michael Moore try to pass off to us that he went to Cuba and got healthcare and the Cuban government had absolutely nothing to do with the presentation of it?
	This also happened in, you know, just to bring up some, I think, slightly relevant history.
	The same thing happened in the 1920s and in the 1930s, when people like George Bernard Shaw and other kinds of writers and artists went to the Soviet Union, and they were paraded around.
	Shirley MacLaine did this in China in the 1960s, paraded around, and everything looked fantastic.
	But of course, it's a nightmare socialist hell, right?
	I mean, that's why people don't want to be there.
	That's why they die to try and get out.
	If free teeth is what makes a Cuban being happy, why are so many Cubans dying on the high seas trying to get out of that prison?
	It is kind of lunatic, and it is kind of ridiculous.
	And the other thing, of course, that's important about Michael Moore's treatment of this kind of stuff is economics.
	The trick about economics is, as you're saying, it's easy to see the visible gains.
	So if the government gives some business $50 million, then they're going to go out and hire a whole bunch of people.
	And so all of those people who get hired because of the government's loan or grant are going to be like, yay, you know, we've got a job, and that's wonderful.
	What you don't see, of course, are all the jobs that are not created because the government took $50 million out of the tax, right, through the taxes, out of the taxpaying population.
	So all that happens is the government creates a whole bunch of jobs that are probably going to go bye-bye because there's no demand for them in the long run, and we know that because it's the government that's giving them the money.
	But we don't get to see all the people who never got a job, right?
	So the people who get a job, they're all happy.
	The people who don't get a job, they don't even know that they would have got a job because there's no alternate universe that they can compare their results to.
	And in the same way, that's what happens in places like France.
	Yeah, you can talk to a bunch of people there who got free medical care.
	Of course they're going to be happy.
	Free medical care, right?
	Who wouldn't be? It's a little tougher, though, when you talk to the 20 or 25 percent of unemployed youths who can't get jobs because of all of this taxation and so on.
	You never talk to those people because they don't even know how much they've been robbed.
	And they don't need medical care because they're young and healthy.
	Right. Well, that's, of course, the 50 million or whatever is uninsured.
	It's partly because the government has passed legislation because old people vote more than young people saying that you can't rationally charge people by age for their health care.
	So, of course, it's not particularly...
	It's economically efficient for younger people to get health care.
	No, no, I was done. Go ahead.
	It stunts competition in the sense that once the government has created all these regulations for like insurance and how medical insurance are supposed to work and how hospitals are supposed to treat people in a certain way, the result is that it creates these extremely high barriers to entry for any startup firm.
	So only these gigantic corporations that have lots and lots of money can overcome these regulations.
	So I think it's like...
	It's like a problem when people look at the corporations now in the United States as causing, you know, our high medical care costs, when really, in reality, it was, like you said, government intervention that made these costs so high, that eliminated competition, and that created these regulations that, you know, stop me, the consumer, from making my own educated choice.
	Like, I can't go to an unlicensed doctor, even though I may trust him, to perform even the simplest operation.
	Yeah, give you a prescription for the most benign medicine.
	You can't do that. I cannot get ibuprofen over 400 milligrams without a prescription.
	And for somebody without insurance, that's a disaster for them.
	Because then they have to go see a doctor to get that prescription.
	So they have to take, what, twice the Advil or something.
	Well, the other thing too that occurs up here, and I think it's a little bit better in the US, is that when you have something that's free, sort of quote free, You just have to restrict it by other methods, right?
	So, of course, when everything's free, you just get bigger waiting lines, right?
	Like if movies were free, then you wouldn't gain anything, right?
	Because instead of paying $10 or $15 to go and see a movie, you'd just line up for an hour to go and see a movie.
	You know, it's time or money. There's nothing free in the world, right?
	Right. All that happens here is that individuals have to pay less for health care, or rather pay it through our taxes, but we don't get it for free.
	All that happens is we end up waiting longer.
	And also, the other thing, too, is that, I mean, this always amazes me.
	You can't buy a car without the government telling you exactly what the mileage is.
	Like, you can't advertise a car.
	You have to say what the mileage is, right?
	And the government has all of these quality controls saying, you know, well, your windows have to be like this, and, you know, you have to list the ingredients of popsicles and so on.
	Up here in Canada, you'll be shocked to know.
	And maybe you won't be. I was certainly shocked when I first figured it out.
	You cannot find the success rate of a doctor.
	You can't. It's absolutely illegal, immoral, improbable, impossible to get that information.
	So if I, I don't know, I wake up one morning, it's like, oh man, I got prostate cancer or something, right?
	Obviously, I'm going to go and find the best guy who's got the best success rate for dealing with this particular illness.
	I can't get that information.
	It is absolutely not tracked, impossible to get a hold of.
	Now, If I know a doctor or I know somebody in the medical healthcare field, I can find out who the best is just kind of through word of mouth, anecdotally.
	But I can't, in the most important decision, how is it that I'm going to survive this illness?
	The government will force the people who make Twinkies to list what's in them.
	But you cannot find who is good and who is not good.
	You have no idea of the quality of the healthcare that you're going to get.
	And that's pretty terrifying.
	Well, if you were actually looking for the best doctor, you would be undermining really what the system is in principle, which is supposed to be equal service for everyone.
	Right. So you don't get to maximize your own chances of survival in the name of socialism.
	Right, right, right. And the horrifying thing, of course, is that...
	But this is inevitable, right?
	This is inevitable because if it was free and you knew who was the best, then that person would be completely swamped.
	Right. So it's just another way that you restrict it.
	So it's like, well, yeah, you get stuff for free, but it sucks, you know, to use a technical term.
	So there is no free lunch.
	There's no such thing as free lunch anywhere on the planet.
	And so if you want stuff for free, there will be some people who will benefit for sure, but the majority of people will not.
	Yeah, and that's one thing that...
	The majority of people will not benefit.
	The one thing that boggled my mind about the French part of the movie Sicko is that these people are so proud of all of their free services.
	Yep, free childcare. Oh, yep, free everything.
	It's not free. And they'll make you pureed carrots.
	It's not, yeah, pureed carrots.
	I can't understand how these adults in France with their eloquence and...
	But it's the old trick, right?
	If I give you stuff for free, will you give up your liberty?
	This is the oldest trick in the book.
	If I give you stuff for free, will you let me take your money?
	And this, of course, is the trick that a hold-up, a stick-up artist does, right?
	If I let you go, you'll give me your money.
	Give me your freedom, and I'll give you stuff.
	It's a negative incentive. Your freedom to walk away without a bullet in your chest.
	And the other thing, of course, that Michael Moore, as all these socialists, tends to do, is he obscures the fundamental fact that it's all provided at the point of a gun.
	I mean, that's the fundamental thing.
	He talks about, let's get together and kumbaya and everybody's happy and let's take care of the poor and so on and the sick and the needy, all of which I think are fine ideals.
	But what nobody ever talks about is that if you disagree with the system, if you want to take any alternative approach, Then you get shot.
	The closest thing I saw to an argument in the whole film was, well, I give it to them because I know they'd do it for me.
	And that's pretty much the nearest thing to a justification for why there ought to be socialized medicine.
	And that, of course, is the complete opposite of socialized medicine, right?
	Because I think human beings do come together.
	I think that human beings do help each other.
	I think reciprocal altruism is foundational to the family and to communities and so on.
	And when the government wasn't around, there used to be private societies that would take care of people who ran into these kinds of problems, whether they were church-based or they used to be called friendly societies that you'd sort of get them at work, you'd pay in a little bit, and then you'd be covered for these kinds of emergencies.
	Either human beings do care about each other or they don't.
	If they do care about each other, you don't need government to point guns at everyone to make them be good people.
	And if they don't care about each other, then let's not have a government and pretend that we do.
	Right. Let's not put people who control our lives and are still susceptible to the not caring about other human beings.
	Yeah. Right. And kind of fundamentally, I mean, I'm 40 years old, which is probably like, I don't know, 900 to you guys, but I'm 40 years old and I'm allowed to keep half my income and I have to obey every single conceivable A regulation and rule of which, you know, 99% of which I don't even know, right?
	Everything that I buy is regulated and controlled.
	I live in this nanny state, right?
	And I would love before I die, just for one day, I'd even take just one day, where I could be an adult and make my own choices.
	I mean, I think I'm a fairly smart fellow.
	I think I'm fairly well informed.
	I think I'm much better informed about my own life than a bunch of bureaucrats in some city I've never been to.
	I'd just love one day to be allowed to be an adult.
	And of course, I think that's a worthwhile thing.
	If I want to help the poor, I'll help the poor.
	I started a company in the 90s.
	We hired dozens and dozens of people who otherwise wouldn't have had jobs.
	So I've done my part.
	I'm happy to do it, right?
	I give to charity and I do the podcast.
	I hand them out for free, you know, education.
	I think it's a pretty good education that people can get for free.
	I'm doing my part, but I'm not allowed to make that choice, right?
	I've still got to hand over half my money and live as a, you know, sort of tax livestock to these people.
	And I think that I'm competent to run my own life and be my own person, be my own good person in the way that is logical and sound and rational to me.
	And by the way, I think I would end up doing a whole lot more good to people than giving my money to the government, which uses it for terrible things like welfare and bad education and foreign wars and so on.
	I'd just love to be an adult.
	Wouldn't you just love that? You actually sort of wake up in the morning and the money that you make is yours and you can help people and do with it what you will and you can make your own decisions and you don't have to obey all of these people that you've never met.
	I mean, it doesn't keep you kind of like a retarded child for the rest of your life, which I think is just terrible.
	I think the hoax that allows this to happen really is democracy in the sense that it's democracy as pure equality.
	Because when you give people the same exact vote, equal votes over all issues, you're essentially trying to say that they're equal in every regard.
	So that means that even a poor person for economic policies will have the same amount of weight as let's say you would have.
	Thus, the result is that, you know, it's the traditional, the classic 51-49 totalitarianism, that as long as somebody can hold something as meaningless as a majority, they can seize your wealth.
	They have a majority of your property.
	Right, and of course, the majority votes for them because they're getting money.
	I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, right?
	The reason that you can't touch Social Security in the U.S. is because the American Association of Retired People makes sure that it's the third rail, right?
	You touch it, you die. So, you know, you can't do that.
	The reason that you can't touch welfare in any significant way is because you're afraid of rioting.
	You have to pay these people off, right?
	Pay these people to not have any lives.
	Pay these people to bring their kids up in ghettos and terrible schools and to get stuck in the underclass, which is just horrible and unbelievably destructive.
	For the poor, I come from a fairly poor neighborhood myself, and I've seen all this stuff firsthand.
	It's brutal what this stuff does to the poor.
	It turns them into dull-eyed livestock, and it just keeps this cycle going.
	It's absolutely horrible what all of this stuff does to the poor.
	There's so much human creativity and potential that could be unleashed on these kinds of problems, but it's not allowed to be because it's all cordoned off by the government.
	They say, we deal with this. We're taking your money.
	We do it. We deal with it.
	And so nobody goes in and tries to come up with any creative and positive solutions because, you know, you're not left with any money to do it with.
	And of course, if you try, the government will just get mad at you and cause you lots of problems.
	What we were saying earlier reminds me of an argument that I've heard for welfare, which is that, well, the rich should be interested in welfare because it reduces crime.
	And it just reminds me, it really boils down to pay us at the point of a gun.
	Pay us or we will riot and hurt you.
	Well, that's the mafia, right?
	I mean, the mafia will say that.
	If you go into some mafia neighborhood and you open a store, then some guy will come by in a cheesy pinstripe suit that you can probably see your own reflection in and say, hey, you don't pay us the money.
	Something bad's going to happen to your store.
	I mean, we wouldn't think that's a moral thing.
	Is that what Canadian mafia sounds like?
	No, there's a little bit more A's, and they will at least leave you a donor or two.
	But yeah, definitely there's some similarities for sure.
	Yeah. But no, I mean, we wouldn't accept that.
	I mean, that's extortion, right?
	And so the 51-49% stuff, it's like who you vote for, right?
	Who you vote for is just the guy who's managed to sell his soul the most, right?
	So whoever's coming up in an election that's actually on the ballot, I mean, these are people that are already bought and paid for, because where did they get the $100 million or more that it takes to run a presidential campaign?
	Well, they got it from people Who expect, you know, a thousand percent return on investment for the money that they give to the campaign.
	And so whoever you are going to vote for has already been bought and paid for by special interests.
	It doesn't represent you in the least.
	Well, I guess this will tie into the next issue, which I wanted to ask you, which really boils down to your application of your principles in a society that is state-dominated.
	So let's say, suppose you were an American voter.
	Would you vote for Ron Paul?
	And I obviously know the answer to this, but I'd like you to answer it anyway.
	No, absolutely not.
	In no way, shape, or form would I vote for Ron Paul.
	And this is not because I think Ron Paul is a bad guy, or, you know, Ron Paul will never get in, or if he gets in, he'll turn into, I don't know, some goose-stepping Stalin-esque monster.
	I'm sure that Ron Paul is a perfectly nice fellow, and if we met over lunch, I'm sure we would enjoy each other's company.
	But no, you don't participate in a system that is founded on violence.
	You don't accept the premises that violence is how you control violence.
	It's like saying if you're an atheist that you should join the Catholic Church and vote for the Pope in order to get rid of the Church.
	But it doesn't work that way.
	The moment that you accept the premise that violence should be used in any way, shape, or form, you've lost the whole war.
	You don't get rid of the Ku Klux Klan by joining it, right?
	And by trying to get your way to the top and then trying to dismantle it.
	The moment you join it, you've said, yeah, this is good for me.
	And, of course, Ron Paul has some policies which are just out and out brutal and immoral in the extreme, right?
	He wants to deport 10 million illegal immigrants, right?
	Of course, the funny thing is none of the Americans would have gotten in in the 18th century if the same rules had been in place, right?
	This is the old pattern. We are in now.
	Let's raise the drawbridge and nobody else is coming in, right?
	But, yeah, what did he think would happen when he tries to deport these 10 million people?
	They'd fight back. They'd be bloodshed.
	They'd be murder. I mean, It's completely horrendous.
	And even just on a practical level, I mean, Ron Paul has done nothing to be able to lower the size of government in his own district, right?
	So if somebody failed completely at a smaller task, giving them a huger task doesn't seem to make much sense, right?
	Right. So, I mean, in the specific case of Ron Paul, you know, we find that he is actually a Christian conservative, he opposes abortion, he opposes immigration, and he's clearly ineffectual.
	I guess my question is, let's say there were, let's say Ron Paul were as great as some people pay him to be, that, you know, he is effective, he would be effective at reducing the size of government.
	I mean, and he weren't a Christian conservative.
	Let's say he were like truly as libertarian, small government libertarian as one could be.
	Do you think that would affect your decision?
	No, no, not at all, because small government doesn't help.
	That's just like saying a small tumor will grow back.
	I mean, let's say that we could magically get The government of the United States back to, what is it, one one-thousandth of the size that it is now, back to the constitutionally limited government of 1776.
	Let's say that some godlike politician could manage to pull that off, which is completely impossible.
	But let's just say, you know, for the sake of argument that this happened, well, how long did it take before the Whiskey Rebellion occurred?
	People were getting shot for not paying their taxes, taxes which were far higher than the taxes of King George that were being levied before the revolution.
	A couple of years.
	How long did it take before you had the, as it's called, I don't know, the War of Northern Aggression?
	People always get mad at me when I call it the Civil War, so whatever it's called, where you had 600,000 people getting killed for the sake of fiat currency and national debt and the control of the federal government.
	How long did it take before universal compulsory state education, right the worst plague of any society is to have the government train all the children right it's It's always going to be propaganda, no matter how you slice it.
	Well, it was less than 100 years, right?
	It was the 1860s, I think, that the universal public education...
	So even if we did this massive, huge struggle and got the U.S. government back down to one one-thousandth of its size, no income tax, no...
	a couple of tariffs and excise taxes, and that's it.
	No capital gains tax, no death tax, no sales tax, nothing.
	All of that stuff was gotten rid of, which is surely the wildest and most impossible dream.
	It just grows back. That's all it does, is it just grows back.
	And I think we should get the cancer out, not just try and repress it for a little bit.
	I think we should hand the future A freedom that is sustainable.
	So you don't think, let's say that somebody knew that his vote would make the difference, and he knew that, let's say he erected somebody like Ron Paul into office, and it would reduce coercion against him by just a little, he shouldn't do it?
	He should just let the system collapse?
	Oh yeah, no, absolutely he should.
	Yeah, for sure, because, I mean, this is just looking back at history, right?
	So small government People all the way back through the classical liberals of the mid-19th century.
	150 years, just to use the shortest possible time frame.
	For 150 years, small government activists, so people who want to reduce the size of the government, have been trying to work within the political system to get the government to be smaller, right?
	Hasn't really worked that well.
	I mean, just empirically, right?
	Forget the theories. Just look at the facts that for 150 years, and if you count the sort of resurrected Libertarian Party, 40 straight years, right?
	They have been working and working and working night and day tirelessly to reduce the size of the government.
	And the government has been growing asymptotically throughout that entire time.
	So something's wrong with that approach.
	I mean, just empirically, even if we throw all the theory out of the window, if I say, hey, I've got this great medicine that's going to make your tumor go away, or at least make it a lot smaller, and your tumor just grows bigger and bigger and faster and faster every day, At some point you're going to say, you know, maybe we should revisit whether this medicine actually works or not, right?
	So there'd be huge numbers of people trying to get the government back to its constitutional limits or get rid of the income tax.
	It doesn't work. Government keeps getting bigger and bigger.
	And now, of course, it's far too late.
	I mean, the government's just going to collapse, I mean, financially, right?
	And that's not going to be that far away, just mathematically.
	I mean, this is what happens to all empires, right?
	They just collapse financially. And so we've got to get the word out there as much as possible so that people don't mistake this collapse for the result of freedom, but they correctly identify it as the result of coercion and fiat money and all this kind of nonsense.
	So I guess, really, in conclusion of all of that, the individual, you think that the individual has a better shot at the government collapsing into anarchy and him being safe than him continuing to live under the state system?
	Or is it just a matter of principle that you just refuse to associate with the state at all?
	Well, I think that the principle and the practical go hand in hand.
	So I would say, yes, for sure, the government, I mean, the government mathematically is going to collapse.
	There's no question of that, right?
	It's not disputed, really.
	Right. So for sure, the government is going to shrink because it runs out of money, the same way that the Roman government did, the same way that the Russian government did in the 80s.
	The government is going to shrink, not through voting, but because it goes bankrupt.
	I mean, that's just inevitable. This is not particularly controversial.
	So given that that's the only way that it's going to happen, I don't think that it's worth compromising your ethics to go and try and control a system that's going to self-destruct because of its own To me, not only will it not help, not only will I think that this participation by people who want more government legitimizes the government, but it's not going to work.
	You could violate your principles for some effect.
	I don't think that ever really works, but you're not going to have any effect.
	It's just going to make things worse, and you're going to have compromised your ideals then for nothing in particular, other than a continuation of what's already been happening.
	So I guess, tangentially, we can also talk about applying your principles in the context of a state society.
	So what's your view on the use of public utilities such as this radio station?
	Great! Fabulous.
	No problem with it whatsoever. Great.
	I'd like a technical fleshing out of it, because I myself, long before I ever held the views I have, I became part of a public university, and about halfway through it, I started to realize, uh-oh, why am I in a public university?
	And, you know, I came to terms with the fact that perhaps maybe the presence of the public institutions did affect my opportunities in life, and that this is justification for me to at least finish my degree here.
	But, you know, to what degree should somebody, you know, use the public utilities, and to what degree should somebody not, you know, or abstain from using things like unemployment or welfare?
	Oh, I think that...
	I mean, I think you should abstain from unemployment and welfare, not because of any moral issues.
	It's just, I mean, unless you're going to starve or something, it's just not going to be good for you, right?
	It tends to blunt your sense of purpose and all that.
	I don't think there's any moral issues, though.
	We're in a state of nature when it comes to the government, right?
	I mean, we're like slaves, right?
	I mean, we don't have any moral obligations to the government any more than a slave has moral obligations to the slave owner, right?
	If you can get away, great.
	I mean, if you're going to eat the food that the slave owner provides, then eat the food that the slave owner provides.
	I mean, to me, that doesn't matter.
	I mean, the issue is to get rid of the violence that is so endemic to all societies, really, in the world.
	And, you know, given that it's the Fourth of July, we can say that the U.S. is one of the least violent societies domestically that the world has ever seen, and we all do happiness, and, you know, that we can have this conversation and not fear for our lives is wonderful, and I sort of want to put that out there.
	But sort of that having been said, no, you're going to get half your income, or, I don't know, 30 or 40 percent in the U.S., Take it away from you for the rest of your life.
	And so for me, it's like if you've got to pay the protection money and there's a buffet, go have some food, right?
	Because you're paying for it anyway, right?
	And you can't draw a line unless you're going to go and live in the foothills of Montana in some, you know, I don't know, some tent.
	How are you going to avoid it?
	You've got to drive on the roads.
	Everything you eat has been driven on the roads.
	The food that you get is either tariffed or subsidized through some farm program or other programs.
	You already went through 14 years of public education.
	You can't get to a university that's not publicly funded.
	To me, it's like that stuff just doesn't matter at all.
	I mean, you're sort of in a state of nature with the government.
	Grab whatever you can, because they're sure grabbing whatever they can, and let's have a situation where you can have a free choice about your ethics rather than just have to live in a reactionary state of violence.
	That having been said, there are some things that I would definitely not be pro, right?
	I think that joining the military That's not good, right?
	I mean, that's really not good.
	Well, it's really becoming part of the government in a different kind of way.
	Well, you're becoming a core part of the government.
	You're the contract guy, right?
	Then you're the hitman. You're the guy who's like, oh, who do you want me to shoot?
	Well, chain of command. Off I go to shoot them.
	And that's definitely immoral, right?
	And, of course, we could be free tomorrow if the policemen and the military just stopped enforcing all of these crazy rules that these people in government come up with.
	So, I mean, they are the visible fist of the power structure, right?
	So I would say don't become a cop, don't become a soldier, and maybe not an IRS agent, whatever.
	I mean, if there's alternatives, right?
	If there's no alternative, the only job you can get, then go and do it, right?
	But I just don't think that there's any particular ethics in a situation of such core coercion.
	So, what about when people apply this to voting?
	Wouldn't voting be just another way of using a government service that you can't really be morally reprehensible for using?
	Well, using in what way?
	I mean, you have to sort of go out and positively vote, right?
	I can't go anywhere in Canada without driving on a public road.
	So, I mean, unless I'm going to sort of live in my basement and eat my toes, right, I'm going to have to go out of the house.
	So that I have to use, right?
	But voting, that's something, you don't have to do it, right?
	I mean, you don't have to go and do it.
	To me, that would be similar to joining the military in some ways.
	I don't think it would be as bad, of course, right?
	Because you're not actually sort of out there using violence, but you're certainly approving of it as a way of solving problems.
	Okay, so it would be still a moral issue to vote.
	It's not exempt from morality because of the state of nature that we're in.
	Yeah, I mean, that's an excellent point.
	And let me pull back a little bit from that last statement.
	I was just sort of mulling it over, and I think that was too strong.
	No, you're not pulling a trigger if you go and vote.
	Now, for sure, you're saying that I want to control the people who pull the trigger, which is sort of saying that pulling the trigger is okay.
	But no, I don't consider it immoral.
	I just sort of consider it against your values and impractical.
	But no, I wouldn't consider it immoral in the same way that I would, you know, going over and shooting Iraqis for no reason.
	So it's more like inconsistent and ineffective.
	Yes, I would say counterproductive.
	Counterproductive, okay. It's kind of like my choosing to accept abuse from, let's say, my parents.
	Even though it's my right to do whatever I want with myself and maybe it's my right to be in that relationship, it's simply irrational for me to be doing it.
	Yeah, trying to reason with them to, hey, can you cut the beatings down maybe to once a month instead of just walking away, I guess.
	Well, I'd say that's a good analogy in a lot of ways, but I think it's a little incomplete insofar as if you accept physical abuse from your parents, then it's just you that they're hurting, right?
	But voting and legitimizing the use of state force does a lot of things to other people, right, domestically and overseas.
	So you're not containing it?
	I'm sorry, did you hit a number?
	No, no, sorry, it's just saying you're not containing it.
	Like, if you're a masochist, you want to get beaten up by your parents or your girlfriend or whatever, it's just you that's getting hurt.
	But when you go and vote and legitimize a system that, you know, has nuclear weapons and the military and, you know, all this kind of, you're doing a lot of stuff to legitimize something that hurts other people, right?
	So if it's just you and your parents, then you're the one getting hurt.
	It's sort of contained within you, but when you go and vote and legitimize a power structure that does a lot of violence around the world, other people suffer, I think, a lot more.
	Well, okay, I guess this ties over to what we were saying earlier about earlier services.
	I mean, on one hand, you can't treat the government like its own entity because it isn't.
	I mean, it gathers its money from other people.
	So when you partake of a certain government service, when you don't need to, like the road, aren't you kind of validating the force used against other people to build that service?
	Well, you have to remember that you also, in a way, or your parents contributed to that too.
	They were taxed too. Yeah, of course, of course.
	Yeah, naturally, it's fair.
	But I'm saying, like, let's say you know in this case that you did not contribute to this.
	Let's say you know that you happen to have not had a job for a while and you haven't paid taxes in a while.
	And you go and you take from a certain service that you know that another class had to pay for.
	Let's say the rich had to pay for a public school.
	Like a grant, like a student grant.
	Right. So couldn't you feel as though you were coercing those people or you were at least partaking in the coercion?
	You know, I certainly understand where you're coming from, and I think that's a good argument.
	The only thing that I would say about that is that, let's say that you're some guy who can't get a job, right?
	And you haven't had a job for a while.
	You just can't get a job. And I remember in the 90s when I graduated from school, in the middle of a recession, killers couldn't get a job, right?
	Gartner and stuff like this, right?
	You don't know what the world would look like if there was no government.
	But I can guarantee you this.
	that the economy would be a whole lot stronger.
	Many, many more people would have access to much, much greater economic opportunities, right?
	So, when you're not looking at the court and effective operating within a state-run coercive system, it becomes very complicated because you can't compare it to Where would I be in life without the government?
	Well, you'd be much, much further ahead.
	That ties into my public school argument, which is that the reason that part of education is so ridiculously expensive is because that they have to compete with subsidized public schools.
	And that, you know, the presence of an institution such as this here, Florida International University, Really, in a way, is what kind of drove out the possibilities of other private schools opening.
	And the same would go, actually, not only for universities, which do need to be large, but for primary schools.
	And, you know, I think the common argument goes, well, if there's no public schools, how are the kids going to get education?
	Well, how did kids get education before?
	Well, and are they being educated now?
	The government hasn't for 14 years, and half of them can't even fill out a job application when they graduate from high school.
	But they're not being educated at all at the moment, right?
	They're being intellectually and emotionally and economically crippled, right?
	So we could put the kids back to work in the field, and they'd be better off than being stuck in these terrible pens of government-run education.
	So, no, I agree with you, but it's so hard to conceive what life would be like without the government, but it certainly would be a lot better.
	So for me, if you can't get a job and you go on welfare and you haven't worked for a while, You know, for me, that's not the core issue.
	I mean, the core issue, I think, is just to keep pointing out the violence that is involved in a state-based society.
	And when you keep pointing out, and I sort of say it's the gun in the room that nobody talks about, right?
	It's the elephant in the room. This is the gun in the room that no one talks about.
	You just keep talking about that gun.
	I don't particularly feel the need to criticize people on welfare because that's just the environment, that's the system, that's the education, that's where they are, and that's the decisions they made as the result of a very bad system.
	I just think, keep pointing out That the government is an agency of violence, that you live without perpetual violence in your life very productively.
	I keep pointing out that coercion is wrong, that there's better ways to solve human problems than by pointing guns at people.
	And this idea that is so very, very unusual to people will become much more common coinage when people recognize how practical it is in their own life, how practical it will be in society as a whole.
	So for me, the questions of, you know, should I take this government service and that, I don't find it to be too important.
	What I want to do is focus my efforts on just keep reminding people who are outside this particular area of understanding just how brutal a system it is and how destructive a system it is and how fundamentally immoral a system it is.
	Well, I think, I guess, the best way to actually even solve the problem of, you know, which government service should I use is at least personal honesty, you know?
	Like, be as intellectually honest to yourself as you can to say, you know, would I really have deserved to have this food if there were no government, you know?
	Because let's say you knew that you had no skills to offer anybody.
	Let's say, you know, you were working with outdated technology.
	You might, you know, figure out for yourself that you don't really deserve to take from the government services because even if the government wasn't there, you wouldn't deserve it.
	You know, something along those lines.
	It could be, but of course, the question is why have you ended up with no skills, right?
	If the government had you for 14 years of coerced education, you know, this is how complicated it gets for me.
	It's like if you were in a free society, then people would be clamoring to try and find ways to make you useful to them, right?
	They give you apprenticeship programs.
	They give you free education in return for work, commitments after you were educated.
	People would be tripping all over themselves to try and maximize your human capital.
	And so you've ended up in a situation where the government's had you in their tender mercies for half your life or three-quarters of your life, and you've got no skills, and you're not a very good reader, and you can't write very well, and your verbal skills are low.
	So to me, it's all too, you can't unravel it in a way.
	So I'm not sure that those questions are that important.
	I think they're important for people who are criticizing anarchists who are saying, oh, so that's totally hypocritical.
	You don't believe in the government, but you're taking a student loan.
	To me, if people are that interested in integrity, then they should really be focusing on the fact that the government is an agency of violence rather than criticizing people trying to struggle to figure out a way to live ethically in a corrupt environment.
	And I think that that's the main value of your approach to philosophy and to issues, that you argue first from first principles.
	You don't take every instance, every dilemma that happens, you know, like CNN or when I'm watching Fox News, it's like, oh, well, this happened.
	What do you think? Well, I think this.
	And then, you know, they just say the cliched things that would conform to their party line or whatever it is that...
	Whatever opinion they represent.
	And then it never goes anywhere.
	The debate kind of ends on the host just shutting both people up because what are they arguing from?
	I don't know. What are they justifying?
	So that's what I love most about your approach is that you argue from first principles.
	You realize these are symptoms of a bigger problem, of a bigger disease that, you know, it's coerced.
	A coercive institution, which is a government, and using violence to solve problems instead of reasoning out and negotiating and having the freedom to make decisions.
	And that's what I find most interesting and most fulfilling about the website.
	Well, thanks. I appreciate that.
	And I think that, I mean, in the time that I was trying to figure this stuff out with our first principles, I definitely got lost more than I was found.
	It's like, you know, did Bush just pardon Scooter Libby?
	Did I read that the other day?
	And people are like, ooh, he should have been pardoned.
	Ooh, he shouldn't have been pardoned.
	Ooh, this is good, this is bad.
	And to me, the fundamental question is, well, this is anarchy, right?
	This is like, you did something illegal.
	Wait, no! You're pardoned, right?
	I mean, that's no rules.
	People say anarchy is a system with no rules.
	Here we have a clear example of no rules.
	Think of all the people that Bill Clinton pardoned in his last days of office.
	And it's just... This is a system where one man's whim rules other men's lives.
	That's anarchy. That is totalitarianism in principle.
	I think the irony is that people who criticize President Bush criticize him because he doesn't respect the rule of law.
	But it's impossible to have the rule of law when the very laws themselves contradict themselves.
	And when they're established by people in a monopolistic fashion.
	Well, not only that though, the laws that they establish, they contradict themselves.
	The laws allow for their own compromise.
	Right. So the establishment of, I guess, prosecution laws for politicians, they allow these ways out.
	Right. And I even saw this very issue being discussed the other day on CNN or Fox or something, and then someone brought up the fact that, well, you know, we don't get to ask our judges, oh, I think this sentence was unfair, you know?
	But if people really thought that that was a problem, like, Bush really has this gang that he can bully around or that he can control, then...
	They wouldn't be on TV talking about it.
	I don't know. It just seems like a contradiction to me.
	Everything people do, they find some way to evade going back to first principles.
	Well, sure. I mean, especially in the media, right?
	I mean, this is the wonderful thing about the Internet, right?
	This is the Socratic symposium that we get to talk about ideas in, where the powers that be sort of don't have control over the medium in particular.
	And, of course, it's very challenging.
	I mean, if you're a reporter or something and you start to talk about the fundamental violence that is at the heart of a state-based society, you're not going to be around for very long.
	Your FCC license is going to get pulled.
	But you're not going to have a very long career, right, because the government is the source of most of the information that ends up in the media, right, because it's a lot easier to read a government press release than it is to do detailed investigative reporting, right?
	And so the government is the hub and the center, right?
	If you go to the White House briefing room and you start to talk about the coercion, the nature of a state-based society, you're not going to be invited back.
	I mean, this is like all the way back to the first Roman emperor, this particular principle.
	So everything has to be watered and diluted, and you have to be distracted with these petty little arguments of, you know, how brained it is, Terry Schiavo.
	I mean, all this stuff is complete nonsense.
	Or should there be gay marriage, or should there not be gay marriage?
	The fundamental question isn't should there or shouldn't be.
	It's like, why does one group, however large or small, get to impose its will on others at the point of a gun?
	And if you deal with that issue, then the rest of it starts to look kind of unimportant.
	Right. I think how they end up justifying those types of things is they try to appeal to them as principles, but, you know, they just throw out, you know, the starting point of their argument really is this unsupported assertion, and people either like it or they don't.
	Yeah, there's no methodology for finding valid principles.
	So they just say, oh, well, family is important to society, and gay marriages upset families.
	Therefore, gay marriages are bad for society.
	So it's really the problem where they start at the first principle.
	And it really comes down to whether the people who hear it, the people who vote for them, choose to agree with it or not.
	Right, right. And of course, there's no definition of society or good or bad for.
	None of it makes any sense at all.
	And I don't think that, I mean, just at a practical level, I can't imagine that two happily married people You know, who've got a great family life and love their kids and, you know, whatever.
	They're going to say, what?
	They're allowing gay marriage?
	We're getting divorced. I mean, that's just not going to happen.
	What on earth does my marriage have to do with whether or not two guys or two women down the street shack up and call themselves a family?
	It just doesn't have anything to do with it whatsoever.
	My choice of 2% milk is directly influenced by your choice of buying a car.
	I mean, if you want to do something different, do something different, right?
	But, of course, the costs of enforcement are always offloaded, right, to other people.
	It's like the problem of war, the problem of other things, right?
	The cost of enforcing this stuff is always offloaded to the taxpayers, because if you went to the people who said, and you said, look, it's going to cost you $500 a year to enforce this gay marriage ban, write me a check.
	I think you'd find a lot of people dropping off the radar as far as their opposition to gay marriage went, the same way that if you went to the average pro-military American and said, only the pro-military people are going to be paying for the war and for the military as a whole, so I'll need a check from you for $25,000 a year.
	I think you'd find a lot of people who had ribbons on their cars kind of taking them off, right?
	Because what happens is you get to offload your preferences to the cost of other people, or the cost of your preferences to other people.
	Which makes having those preferences a whole lot easier.
	You don't have to pay for them yourself directly.
	Right. What you're exactly saying is what capitalism is.
	If you want something, no matter how bad you want it, if you can't pay for it, nobody's supposed to pay for it for you.
	Well, not supposed to, but you can't force them to.
	If I want a bike and I'm a kid, I can go around and ask people for the money, but I just can't shoot them if they don't want to give it to me.
	That's the only thing. Okay, well, actually, it's 5 o'clock, and we can run a little overtime if you would like to, Stefan.
	It's totally fine with me.
	Just let me know if it's good with you guys, if you have more questions.
	Oh, sure. We have plenty to talk about.
	Absolutely plenty to talk about.
	Well, first, maybe before we continue, you can give us a quick plug of Free Domain Radio and what it has to offer.
	Free Domain Radio. Absolutely.
	I certainly can. Thank you.
	I appreciate that. Free Domain Radio is a website devoted to this exploration of philosophy and ethics and truth and art and psychology and relationships from first principles.
	And there's a website with almost a thousand actively engaged philosophically minded people.
	There are podcasts. It's entirely free, entirely voluntary.
	You can donate if and when you choose.
	I do suggest 50 cents a podcast just because the philosopher does like to eat and has to pay for his voice over IP. I do request donations, and I do work at it full-time.
	It was originally a hobby, but then I found that I was much more interested in philosophy than I was in being an executive in the software world.
	So I have now moved to it full-time, which has made me all the more excitingly dependent upon my listeners.
	So please drop by FreeDomainRadio.com.
	You can listen to the podcast. I have free videos explaining everything under the sun, at least from my perspective.
	You can join in the conversation.
	And we also have an Ask a Therapist where you can send psychological relationship-type questions, familial-type questions, to my wife, who is a registered psychological associate up here in Canada, who will be more than happy to respond to you.
	We do that over a podcast. So lots of different services available for people who are interested in exploring ideas.
	And thank you. That's the end of the plug.
	Okay, great. Well, actually, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the forums, too.
	I mean, the forum does have a lot of members, almost 1,000, right?
	Right. Great, so there's a lot of discussion, and if I recall correctly, there's many, many sub-forums.
	Yes, yes there are.
	No, I definitely, I spend usually at least an hour going through and trying to answer questions as best I can, occasionally moderating the odd flare-up of Kemper, which does occur when people start approaching core values and family issues and so on.
	But no, it's a fantastic crew.
	We also do a Sunday call-in show, which is usually on Skype.
	It's Skype casted down at the moment Sunday.
	4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
	We do a call-in show where people can call in and ask questions.
	So, yeah, no, it's wonderful.
	I've never had any experience with forums.
	I never really posted on these systems before I started Free Domain Radio, but it is a wonderful, wonderful place to put your ideas out and get critiqued, and there's some really, really smart people with a lot of experience and knowledge who can help you out with stuff.
	Okay, well, that ends the plug.
	Yeah, okay, that's okay. Absolutely.
	No more plug, I promise. No, no, it's okay.
	You can plug as much as you like.
	So now, actually, I kind of want to move on to something maybe a little more philosophically rigorous, which is the is-ought problem and how that initially, you know, on the face of it, poses a problem for ethics and maybe how we can go about fixing it.
	Or how you go about fixing it.
	Or how you go about fixing it.
	Sure. Do you want to run through the definition of it?
	I'm sure I've had my chance to talk more than enough.
	Well, no, I mean, you can go ahead and explain it, because you have a lot of experience explaining it.
	See, here's where I have trouble, because I have to alternate between my host and commentator role.
	So actually, I'll just go ahead and ask you about it first.
	Okay, sure. Well, the is-ought problem is something which has really been growing since the general fall in most of the West of religious-based ethics.
	And the is-ought problem is, as you sort of said earlier, why be good?
	Why be good? And of course, goodness or virtue, and I wish there were better words because it makes you just sound like some sort of pious Puritan or something, but virtue does not exist in the real world, right?
	Numbers do not exist in the real world.
	The concept forest doesn't exist somewhere in among those trees, right?
	It all exists within our mind.
	So people say, well, how can something just exist within our own mind and not exist in the real world and not be subjective?
	Well, of course, the solution to that is to recognize that since ideas or concepts are derived from things in the world, they can exist only within our own mind and yet not be subjective, right?
	So the scientific method as a principle, right?
	The one that Francis Bacon in the 16th century, I think it was, developed.
	The scientific method as a principle of organizing and validating theories about the natural world, the scientific method does not exist in the real world, right?
	About the moon, and maybe the moon causes tides or whatever.
	Your theory about the moon does not exist in the real world, right?
	But it's a result of behaviors in the world.
	Exactly right. So it does exist within your own mind, but it's not subjective.
	So the scientific method exists within our own mind, but it's not subjective.
	Mathematics, numbers, exists within our own mind, but nobody's going to say that mathematics is purely subjective.
	I tried that approach in grade 9, and it didn't get very far, because the alternative was lots of studying, which was...
	Not my thing at the time.
	And I would say that the same argument holds true of ethics, right?
	So there's nothing in the world that says we should or should not do something, right?
	You don't have to get out of bed.
	You don't have to eat.
	You don't have to shower.
	And this is, of course, taking me right back to my bachelor days, but you don't have to do anything, right?
	You can just choose to expire in your bed silently.
	I mean, you've got pain and so on, but But you don't have to do anything, and there's nothing in the world that says you have to do something.
	But the way that I try and sort of solve that problem is to say you don't have to have a theory about how human beings should behave.
	You don't have to have a theory about anything, about truth or falsehood, right?
	You can just not open your mouth and talk philosophy ever in your whole life.
	But the moment that I say that theories about ethics should be universal and logical and consistent, and ideally there should be some Historical or present-day evidence for the truth or falsehood of ethical propositions, then you're either going to say, well, I think that there should be this, that, and the other, or whatever, or you're going to say, I don't think that there's such a thing as ethics.
	So the way that I've defined ethics is universally preferable behavior.
	So something which is preferable, not just for you, like you like ice cream and jazz, but something that's universal.
	Now, if somebody says to me, there's no such thing A universally preferable behavior.
	Well, they've just made a universally preferable statement.
	So they have just said to me the logical equivalent of, there is no such thing as truth.
	The moment you say, there is no such thing as truth, you have just made a truth statement.
	So it can't conceivably work logically.
	It's like trying to disprove logic by using logic.
	So you can't say, logically, there is no such thing as universally preferable behavior, because then you're saying, That it is universally preferable to believe that there's no such thing as universally preferable behavior, which is a complete contradiction.
	So you can't enter into any debate about ethics or truth or falsehood or philosophy without accepting universal norms of truth is better than falsehood and so on.
	And even if you sort of use English, right, it's structured English, then you're saying that there's universally preferable behavior called use English when you're talking to somebody who's speaking English, right?
	You don't get a lot of people who come back in Esperanto.
	So you can't logically say there's no such thing as universally preferable behavior any more than I can yell in your ear that there's no such thing as sound, right?
	The moment that I'm yelling in your ear, I'm deploying sound.
	I'm using sound to make my arguments.
	I can't say there's no such thing as sound.
	The moment that I say either there is or there isn't universally preferable behavior, I'm accepting that there is such a thing.
	So once you establish that, then the question is, what is universally preferable behavior?
	And then you have to work on definitions that make sense logically and have the empirical test and so on, right?
	So if I say, well, there is no such thing as property, right?
	Well, of course, the first property right that I have is to myself.
	If I say to you there's no such thing as property rights, then I'm saying there's no possibility of ownership from any human being for anything, including their own body.
	But, of course, I'm using my own body.
	I'm using my vocal cords to tell you that there's no such thing as ownership.
	So I'm exercising ownership over my own body to tell you that there's no such thing as ownership, which is a complete contradiction.
	Similarly, if I say that stealing is right, Then again, I'm performing a contradiction in my premise, right?
	Or I'm embedding a contradiction.
	If I say stealing is right, then let's say I grab your wallet.
	Well, I'm only going to grab your wallet if I can hold on to it.
	If I knew the moment that I grabbed your wallet that somebody was going to just grab it from me, I wouldn't bother.
	So if I steal your wallet, it's because I want to keep your wallet as my property, to pillage it and spend the money that's in it or whatever.
	So if I'm stealing from you, I'm both saying that property rights exist, in other words, I want to keep the wallet that I'm stealing, but property rights don't exist, which is that you don't get to keep your wallet.
	So any theory which says stealing is good is immediately self-contradictory.
	And you could go on and on, and Lord knows I have, about these various things, but you can come up with pretty good definitions Of universally preferable behavior, and people don't have to follow them the same way that they don't have to put gas in their car.
	It's just that if they don't, there are certain consequences, right?
	Well, nobody's going to make them, really.
	I mean, there's nothing in the sky that's going to strike out at them when they steal.
	Exactly, right. But if you want to talk about ethics, it's sort of like if you want to talk about mathematics, you can't start off with 2 plus 2 equals green.
	I mean, you can, but just nobody's going to take you seriously.
	So if you want to start talking about ethics...
	Then you have to have logically consistent definitions that are valid in all times at all places.
	Otherwise, no sensible ethicist is going to take you seriously.
	And you can't oppose the existence of ethics without saying that there's universally preferable behavior, which is the definition of ethics.
	So if you just sort of throw it, there is no is from the ought, but there are rational norms that any theory, whether it's scientific or mathematical or ethical or anything, has to follow.
	Has to follow in order to be taken with any kind of credibility.
	And that's where we really work with the ethical debate at Free Debate Radio.
	It's kind of new, I think, right?
	I mean, I don't want to make any sort of big claims here.
	It's new to me, right?
	And I've done a lot of reading in history and philosophy, but I think it's a fairly new approach, so don't look for the next issue of Scientific American, but it's something that I'm spending a fair amount of time trying to spread around, of course.
	So the issue is that you can't, it's logically impossible to make the statement that ethics are subjective.
	Right, because then you've said there's a preferential state in your mind which is to not believe that ethics are objective.
	So that's again, you've put forward an objective statement about preference.
	And since ethics are simply objective statements about preference for how human beings should behave, if you say it's wrong totally and universally and objectively to believe that ethics are objective, then you've just contradicted yourself and you're not going to get anywhere.
	Well, what about, I guess, the distinction between relativism and subjectivism?
	I think what relativism says is that you ought to behave in a way as though there were no universally preferable behaviors.
	But what about somebody who just simply, you know, like the Wittgenstein, like, pass over in silence, you know, the subjectivist who says that any statement you make about morality is meaningless.
	And he can't talk, right?
	Well, yeah, then he's saying that there is a universal statement of preferred behavior, which is that nobody should talk about preferred behavior as if it were universal, right?
	Again, that's just a complete contradiction.
	At the moment that he opens his mouth and says, you should or should not believe something, he's come up with a universal statement.
	And I have this debate with people quite a bit, because it's a tough concept to get.
	At least it was for me. Maybe everyone else finds it easier, but...
	The moment that somebody says to me, Steph, you should not believe what you believe, they're deploying ethics, right?
	They're deploying a preferred state of behavior, of thinking, right?
	And they're comparing it not to something subjective, right?
	Like if I say, I like ice cream, nobody's going to come up to me and say, you shouldn't like ice cream.
	Maybe my dentist or whatever, right?
	But nobody's going to come up and say, it is logically wrong for you to like ice cream, right?
	But at the moment that somebody opposes an ethical theory, They are saying, like in a universal way, rather than just, I don't like the font you used or something, right?
	Then they're substituting another theory that is universal.
	So you can't conceivably argue with somebody without accepting certain things, right?
	Like the validity of the senses, the fact that I exist and you exist because you don't debate with the mirror, or at least I don't, right?
	Then you have to accept that there's universally preferable behavior.
	There are some things that are just embedded in the very act of debating.
	That you just can't get away from.
	And, of course, a lot of philosophers have spent a lot of mental sweat trying to pretend that those things can be gotten away from, but the logical fact is that they just can't.
	Right. So the funny thing is that a subjectivist, when he's trying to convince you of his position, he's pretty much implied, and the whole discussion is, you ought to be reasonable, which is why I'm trying to convince you of my position, because it's reasonable.
	Right. If he's saying, you can't get an is from an ought, then he's saying, you ought not get an is from an ought.
	But an ought not is just another kind of ought, right?
	I mean, so, again, you...
	The moment you start debating, you cannot say anything your whole life about these things, but then nobody cares, because you're not part of the debate.
	The moment that you open your mouth, though, you have immediately bypassed the is-ought dichotomy, and you're saying that there is an ought, you ought not to believe it.
	As soon as you've come up with a should, as soon as you've come up with a statement that you consider logically binding on someone else, you've got universal oughts.
	You don't have to be a mathematician, but if you claim to be a mathematician or you start debating numbers, You have to accept that they don't exist in the real world, but they're also not subjective, subject to logical laws and so on.
	So the is-ought problem is itself a contradiction?
	Well, the moment you talk about it, yes.
	Again, if you don't say anything about it your whole life, but even then you're saying, I ought not to say anything about the is-ought problem.
	The moment that you start dialoguing with somebody, you're immediately saying, unless you're just saying, I like jazz and you like blues, and who cares?
	It's fine for conversation.
	It's not a philosophical debate.
	The moment that you try and say there's truth value that you should change your mind relative to, then you're saying there's objective truth, there's preferred behavior, truth is better than falsehood, you should believe what I'm saying because it's truer than what you're saying.
	You're automatically in the realm of preferred behavior and universally preferred behavior, which is ethics.
	So I think you made a statement earlier that kind of confused me.
	You said, when you're saying you can't derive an is from an ought, you're making a statement about universally preferred behavior.
	But let's say I said you can't make a car out of sticks.
	Is that a prescription for universally preferable behavior?
	I mean, couldn't it just be a fact?
	I mean, I don't dispute your conclusion.
	I just kind of, I'm a little confused about that statement.
	No, it's horribly confusing, and I try to do my best, but it is.
	There's lots of podcasts and articles on this.
	If you say to me, Steph, you can't make a car out of sticks, right?
	And I don't make any jokes about bends, right?
	The cars and sticks. Anyway, if you say that to me, then you're not saying you should not make cars out of sticks.
	You're just simply stating a fact.
	You can't make a car from sticks.
	That's not universally preferable behavior.
	That's just a statement of fact.
	Like, if I point and say, that's a tree over there, and it is, right, then that's not universally preferable behavior.
	If I say, human beings should tell the truth rather than lie, that's universally preferable behavior.
	So a simple statement of identification of facts and even of causality does not universalize unless you put a should in there.
	Well, David Hume would argue that you can't get a not from an is is a fact.
	So what makes that a prescription?
	Right. That's exactly what my confusion is.
	Yeah, but if I say to you, if you say to me, there is such a thing as universally preferable behavior, which is an ought, right?
	Human beings ought to do X, Y, and Z. If I say to you, that is incorrect, and you should not believe that, then I'm saying that universally, it is better...
	For you to believe things that are true than things that are false, and your thing is false and my thing is true, and so you should believe what I tell you, right?
	Because whatever, we reason through it.
	But I can't say that universal preference is invalid and then at the same time say you should reject your proposition that universal preferences are valid, and it's universally preferable that you should do that.
	Again, I've just backtracked and totally shot my own argument in the foot.
	So it certainly is true that you can't get an ought But the moment that you start dealing with any kind of ought, right?
	You ought to kill, you ought to tell the truth, you ought to believe true things and not false things, you ought to change your mind because your beliefs are irrational or whatever, right?
	There's no evidence. Then I'm sort of saying that there is such a thing as an ought.
	The moment I enter into the debate about oughts, I am accepting a whole bunch of oughts, right?
	Naturally. By trying to convince, let's say, by trying to convince us about how the is ought, I'm sorry, by trying to convince you that there is a problem with drawing an ought from an is, I'm saying implicitly you ought to be reasonable, just like the same problem with subjectivists.
	Exactly. I see your point of view, yeah.
	Excuse me. Okay, that was just too easy.
	Let's start again. Let's start again.
	Well, another thing that I find really interesting that does tie into the is-ought problem is the analytic synthetic dichotomy, which I've heard broken down in several ways.
	I'm not sure I was exactly satisfied by, I guess, Leonard Peikoff's approach to it.
	What's your take on that one?
	You know, this is a technical term that I sort of get and then don't get.
	So I can't claim to be an expert on analytic synthetic.
	I'd have to read up on it again.
	I read the Leonard Peacock book on objectivism, but this was about, I don't know, eight years ago or something.
	So if you know the definitions, I'd be happy to work with them, but I can't pop them off my head.
	I'll work with it here. I mean, pretty much, this started off as, I guess, as Hume's fork, which is that, you know, you either have statements that are deductively true, statements that are contingently true, or everything else in between is nonsense.
	And David Hume used this to undermine causality and all these things.
	So pretty much, in the analytic camp, you have things like, a bachelor is an unmarried man.
	It's something that's analytically true, it's deductively true, because contained in the definition of bachelor is unmarried man.
	Like a tautology, right?
	Like a tautology. Yeah, pretty much analytic statements are tautologies.
	Now, on the other hand, you have synthetic statements, which are ice melts at 100 degrees, which, by his argument, is contingent because it could be some other way.
	It's testable, right?
	It's testable or some other degree.
	But I guess...
	To have a meaningful discussion, you would have had to have been acquainted with this, but this is kind of like what's used to undermine the in-between principles, like events have a cause.
	Because you can't put them in either camp.
	Can you prove that events have a cause?
	No. And if you say simply that an event is that which has a cause, you're simply uttering a tautology that says nothing about the universe.
	And I think what Leonard Pykov accurately pointed out was that the problem with this dichotomy is that If you say something that you can prove to be true, you're not saying anything meaningful.
	And if you're trying to say something about the universe, you can't prove it.
	You're trying to say something meaningful, you can't prove it.
	So I guess the analytic synthetic dichotomy is a means by which Philosophy is made to be impractical and meant to say nothing or meant to prove that knowledge is futile in some way or another.
	I think this was also used by other philosophers like Kant and other mystical philosophers.
	This is also shown up in the particularly ferocious Ron Paul debate that I had recently where people say, you know, when I say that You know, for 150 years, people have been trying to make the state smaller by working within the state, and it hasn't worked.
	Then people come back and say, well, you can't prove that, because the state could be even bigger now if they hadn't done what they did.
	Right? And, of course, they're perfectly correct.
	I mean, I can't prove that, because there's no alternate universe that you can compare these things to.
	Right? But so, to some degree, when you look at somebody, and this comes down to things like happiness as well and in life as well, You can only compare, in a sense, the results relative to the original aims.
	Not to reopen that debate, but just to give an example of how you can work around that kind of stuff.
	If somebody says, I want to drive from New York to Detroit, and they end up driving into the Atlantic Ocean, you can say that they did not achieve their aim, and therefore there's something wrong with their methodology or their map is backwards or whatever.
	They thought they had a bond car that could go underwater.
	So you can compare at least these things to relatively stated goals, right?
	So everybody has the goal, sort of like, I want to be happy, right?
	As Aristotle says, it's the one thing that we want, which we don't want in order to get something else, right?
	We want money to buy things to be happy.
	We want love to be happy.
	But happiness is the one thing that we choose in and of and only for itself, right?
	So everybody wants to be happy, so unhappy people must be doing something not quite right.
	The same way that unhealthy people, assuming it's not purely genetic, Must be doing something not quite right.
	So there is a way, I think, of being able to at least compare the results of things to people's goals and desires and see where there's a mismatch.
	People like to avoid pain, and they're not masochists, and so if you're in pain, you must be doing something kind of wrong, right?
	So there is that way, I think, of at least comparing the results of things to people's stated intentions and looking for deviations from those, the fundamental one being happiness and efficacy.
	I think there's ways of working within that paradigm, at least I hope I haven't gone totally off topic.
	No, I think you're there. You're still there.
	I think that ties in very closely to the fact that, I guess, people expect that proof is something that's like, you know, it's bi-directional, that you have both the cause and the effect and you know the effect and all the possible effects and all the possible causes.
	But the problem is there's no way of making any...
	I mean, it kind of undercuts empiricism to say that because there's no way of making any inference without simply looking at results.
	Right. In some way or another.
	And I guess this ties into like a...
	I guess I kind of lost my train of thought here, but...
	Well, there's no way...
	Sorry to interrupt, but it certainly does tie into...
	The problem with this kind of stuff, if you say, well, we can't measure anything except by its effect, is that it means you're really going to have a tough time using philosophy as a predictor.
	Right? Then it's just going to be something that's going to be posterior, right?
	After the fact, looking backwards.
	And then if after the fact of looking backwards, If you look at something like history, you can't isolate all the variables.
	You can't say this caused that, caused the other, right?
	So you get into debates about, I don't know, like Pearl Harbor, right?
	And you say, well, the reason that Japan attacked America was because America placed this embargo, thus cutting off the supply of raw materials to Japan, which caused Japan to want to invade Manchuria and China, which caused more embargoes, which caused an eventual, because the embargo was enforced through the Navy, caused Japan to want to attack the U.S. at Pearl Harbor.
	Now, you can't Prove that, right?
	I mean, you can say these things seem to sort of logically follow, but you can't prove that.
	Or if you could prove it, it would only be in the past and maybe you wouldn't find it relevant to what's going on in Iraq and any future attacks.
	But I think that you can find these kinds of things.
	You can find trends without isolating all the variables.
	You just have to have enough cases, right?
	If you have somebody in a control group for a medical study, you can't control every variable.
	You can't control everything they eat.
	You can't control all their genetics.
	But you can still find patterns that are worthwhile from an empirical standpoint.
	I guess what I was going to say related to that on the issue of results is that let's say you're at the beginning of time and like suddenly you suddenly appear there.
	There's no way you can make any inferences without having seen a causal relationship occur before.
	So there's no way that I can infer, for example, that small government leads to big government without having seen something, some sort of fact related to the nature of government in the first place.
	Inferences go both ways, I guess.
	I guess that's what I'm saying. You can construct a logical, kind of like a logical, quote, a priori basis, kind of like what von Mises did of what you think an economy is going to do.
	But the only reason you were able to do that in the first place was because you observed results in the first place, which is like another school of economic thought, which is look at the results and reverse engineer them.
	Right, right. But I mean, that's the bi-directionality of the scientific method.
	So you get evidence in through the senses, and then you conceptualize about the rules or laws that might make sense of that sensual evidence, and then you create a theory that it's abstracted from sensual evidence, and then you go and validate that theory relative to more testing, which then may help refine...
	I mean, it's a bi-directional thing, right?
	And so Einstein comes up with the theory of relativity, and then he says, well, you know, you've got to fail out, and you've got to look at this This solar eclipse, and then if the light of the stars is bent at this angle as it comes around the sun, then this is going to be proof for it.
	So again, he observes things in the world, and then he comes up with theories which then are further validated.
	I mean, it's a bi-directional thing, right?
	And I think that is a tough thing because it's a very long-term process.
	It's a tough thing for people to absorb within their own minds because it's a very, very long-term process.
	It's the presence of that bidirectionality and the resulting imperfection of the knowledge that results from it is really what I think is at the core of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy because what the analytic-synthetic dichotomy is saying is that, well, you can't have perfect knowledge because you can't...
	It's always bidirectional.
	But then I guess philosophically the breakdown of the analytic synthetic dichotomy is that when you make a synthetic statement like ice melts at 100 degrees, the only reason that that may be false is because you've misspecified the definition of ice.
	If you were to fully specify the conditions that a block of ice were in and the conditions that...
	All its physical properties, the only logical result possible in the universe is that it melts at 100 degrees.
	And I think that's maybe what the analytic-synthetic dichotomy fails to recognize, that the only reason that something could ever be contingent is if it's misspecified or if it's not completely specified.
	I think that's right.
	And there's, to me, a sort of emotional level to this kind of debate as well, which I'm not going to claim is something that I can prove rationally, but it's like, you know...
	Bad guys are pretty certain, right?
	I mean, this is sort of the annoying thing about, I don't mean you, but I mean about philosophers in general, particularly ethical philosophers.
	You know, people like Hitler and Mao and Stalin, they were pretty certain about what they wanted to do, right?
	They were pretty certain about the sort of, quote, rightness or justice at their core.
	And it's sort of like we've got a cancer, right?
	And the cancer is aggressive, and the cancer doesn't stop, and the cancer is certainly certain that what it wants to do is keep cancering, you know, doing its cancer thing.
	And we've got a whole bunch of oncologists who are like, well, you know, I'm not sure about the philosophy of medicine, and I'm not sure about this or that or the other.
	And of course, the problem is that the bad guys in the world are very, very certain of what it is they want to do.
	George Bush seems very certain, as does, you know, other dictators around the world.
	You know, I don't know that Vladimir Putin sort of sits up at night wondering if he's doing the right thing.
	I think he just goes and does his thing, right?
	But unfortunately, philosophers tend to gnaw their fingernails and bite their cuticles about the truth and certainty and so on.
	And sure, there's stuff that's tough at the edge, but the non-aggression principle, I'm down with that.
	I've got no problems with that.
	I've got no hesitations about that.
	And I think that we need to be certain and more assertive, not necessarily aggressive, but much more assertive, about keeping pointing out the gun in the room backing people into corners if necessary right or you know try it in a positive way but if it doesn't work you know it's okay to get a little tough because there's lots of bad people in the world who want to do a lot of bad things and they're very certain and I just I've never really liked the idea that that only the bad guys get to be certain in the world and yeah there are some challenges at the edge of human knowledge and there are some areas where property rights may not be perfect you know like you're You're hanging on a flagpole outside somebody's apartment.
	Can you kick in the window and go in rather than drop to your death?
	Sure, the once in 10,000 lifetimes that that might happen to you, that's fine.
	But we can be absolutely certain about some really, really core stuff, about rape, murder, theft, and assault are all bad, that self-defense isn't really that ambiguous, because if you have a free society, you won't need it that much.
	I think that we can really power down about the 90 to 95 percent of stuff that we're really certain about and not get involved in that other stuff, like how many social services can I take before I violate my ideals and so on, right?
	I mean, they're interesting, but there's a lot more stuff to do, because morally I think we're kind of in the middle of a bit of a plague, you know, like there's a lot of bad ideas in the world.
	And I think that once we get to those questions, the world will be so much of a better place that we'll have done our job already.
	Well, I was going to ask you for closing thoughts, but that really sounded a lot like closing thoughts, but do you have anything else to say?
	No, listen, I think I've chewed everyone's ear off long enough.
	I really do appreciate the opportunity and, of course, it's a good day to celebrate the freedoms that we still have and to rededicate ourselves to preserving and expanding them.
	Well, do you like fireworks? Do you think that they're wasteful or that they're a fun, rational way of having a good time?
	I think they're great fun.
	I think they're great fun. Alright, what about beer and fireworks?
	Beer and fireworks. I think not necessarily in combination if you're the one actually setting off the fireworks, but overall, a good thing.
	All right. Well, thank you for calling in, and thank you for being a guest on our show for such a long time.
	In fact, I think this is a record-long show.
	We've never gone on...
	It's definitely a record in terms of quality of content.
	Well, I'm not going to let my co-hosts hear that one, and I'm glad that the CD... The reason we're stopping is because the CD ran out of space, so I'm glad that's not going on the record, and I hope they're not listening right now because they're going to be very mad at that comment.
	Well, thank you very much, and listen, just send me the MP3 link and I'll post it on the board and talk it up in the podcast.
	All right, thank you very much for your call, and have a happy 4th of July, even though you're Canadian.

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