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Jan. 5, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:23:53
953 The Anarchist Roundtable #1: Ron Paul

So close - and yet so far?

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Hello. Oh, hi, Brad.
Hi, Stephen. Hi, how's it going?
Oh, it's going okay.
How are you, sir? How are you? I'm great, thank you.
I've got Wendy on the line. Hi, Brad.
It's nice to meet you. Hi, Wendy.
Nice to meet you, too. Okay, so I just thought it might be worthwhile, particularly now that we're taking the pause between primaries, the deep breath between the deep disasters of Ron Paul, to talk about...
Some of the stuff that's floating around because I've tried my best to articulate this sort of...
It's hard to sort of...
I don't even know how to put it because it's not like anti-Ron Paul.
That, of course, is a kind of misnomer.
It's like saying that if you are against coercion that you don't like George Bush, right?
That's not really the issue, but...
So I've had a tough time...
Explaining the position to people, because politics becomes so volatile and personal for people so very, very quickly that it always comes down to personal stuff.
It almost always does, especially with Ron Paul, because he's such a cult figure right now.
Yes, he is. He is.
And it's amazing to me.
I've never been attacked by statists or theists, and I've had my share of broadsides, but I've never been attacked by anybody relative to being attacked by Ron Paul supporters.
And I can understand that, because there's kind of like a desperate hope.
Like, if this doesn't work, by God, we're doomed, right?
So it's like the last lifeboat off the Titanic.
Things don't get too pretty when you're looking for a seat cushion, right?
Well, I'd go even further than you do when you say this is not against Ron Paul, because, you know, to some extent, I like Ron Paul better than any other candidate out there for president.
But that's like saying, I like having my leg broken better than having my back broken.
You know, I don't like either.
And I don't think anyone should make me say it's wrong or object to my thing.
I don't want my leg broken at all.
Right, right, right.
Now, sorry, Brad, you were going to say?
Oh, I just think that's an excellent point to make.
Also, I think we need to keep in mind that part of the things that we would like to point out or that I believe we ought to point out to other libertarians are that a lot of the ways we've looked at things Have been, over the years, I mean, as a movement, have been what have brought us to this point.
At least, I believe that could be the case anyway.
Mainly, we've...okay, let me back up just a moment.
As I see it, libertarianism, properly understood, is simply the non-aggression principle.
When you attempt to apply this to politics, One way to do it, and the way that most libertarians do so is they apply it in the sense of policy.
That is, libertarianism as a moral principle becomes classical liberalism in practice, regardless of whether or not someone accepts the logic of a stateless society, the idea of its desirability, or whether they instead hold on to some sort of minarchist ideal.
The anarcho-capitalist is Like the monarchist, the classical liberal in practice within the state of context.
Now, I believe instead what we should be doing is trying not to attack the edifice of state policy because ultimately it's all an abstraction.
Instead, what we ought to be trying to get people to do is Understand that state power itself is simply illegitimate.
There's no whittling down to be accomplished.
There's actually something more in the lines of culty programming.
Before I go on, because I like very much what Brad said, and I have some comments, but I'm having a very difficult time hearing Brad because his voice is coming through very wavery.
Is his voice sounding good to you?
In terms of recording value.
It's not a huge issue. What happens is if I lose somebody's recordings, I just record what I consider to be their opinions in an outrageous Spanish accent.
Oh, great. Great.
I'd love you to do me.
I would love you to do me.
Is it high-pitched? Do you wear high heels while you do it?
I'm not sure that I want to get into the whole outfit thing because it probably would leave you with a mentally scarred image.
I do thank you for that.
No, I think One of the problems with Ron Paul, which Brad just touched upon, is that he's making people believe in the political process again.
He's making people true believers.
And this is something that applies whether you're an anarchist or you're an LP person.
You're making a savior out of a politician.
And electoral politics, even if you're not an anarchist, is merely one way To accomplish social change.
And what's happened is I've seen a diversion of all energy, all money, wealth.
Antiwar.com, for example, at one point was struggling to get their contributions for the year.
And it's a wonderful organization.
It's a wonderful site. I think it's been in the forerunner of the peace movement, of awareness of antiwar.
And it was struggling to get a few tens of thousands Meanwhile, the Ron Paulists were, you know, in one day were getting six million.
And, you know, it's people's money.
It's people's time. If they want to divert in one way as opposed to another, that's their business.
But I really do lament the death of all but political, of electoral activism within libertarianism right now.
And again, it comes from seeing a politician as a savior.
Which is, whether you're an anarchist or a libertarian, you have to be a little appalled by that.
Well, it's the name as well, right?
It's called the Ron Paul Revolution.
But it's not about Ron Paul.
At least it shouldn't be. It should be about the principles, right?
Well, the Ron Paul Revolution is not about libertarian principles, as far as I'm concerned.
He takes some very good ideas, and he hitches them to some very bad ideas.
And he incorporates them into an even worse institution, thus making the institution and the bad ideas respectable while diluting libertarianism.
And it's going to be much, much harder.
I mean, people are starting to think that libertarianism has something to do with using eminent domain to take land in order to build a border fence so that you stop the freedom of motion of people.
I know it's about the principles, but I don't like the principles either.
Right. I mean, this is not even to include, as you say, his stance on immigration defense building, the vocal, at least, commitment to attempt to deport as many millions of illegal immigrants as he can, the collective guilt that is being foisted upon foreign nations where you can't get a visa to be a student to come to the U.S. if you come from what's called a terrorist nation, which by any definition would include the United States in international affairs.
So, unfortunately, you have to just end up appealing to so many people's prejudices that principles simply become the lever by which you attempt to get power.
And if you can find a set of principles that people go for and will donate money for, then you use those principles in your pursuit of power in the same way that Reagan...
And everybody has to get their cherry broken to some degree by this illusion, right?
I had it with Reagan, right?
And you just go, wow, you know, this guy has finally got it.
And he's saying all the right things and...
And you just have to sort of recognize that this is a bunch of words that people put forward, and staying with the principles is really, really tough.
And I think it's really, it's impossible.
I mean, if he's really into the rule of law, surely he should have a platform put forward, which would be to prosecute George Bush for war crimes and a violation of the Geneva Convention through his invasion of Iraq and subsequent approval of torture.
I mean, there's nothing like enemy combatants in the Geneva Convention.
So this is a war crime.
And of course, according to a 96 U.S. law, that is any violations of the Geneva Convention must be met with the death penalty.
So you can't say I'm into the rule of law and that's why I want to get rid of immigrants or illegal immigrants and then say nothing about something that's far more egregious in terms of harm to the U.S. economy, U.S. prestige, deaths of U.S. lives.
The war is far worse than even the worst scenario, sort of, quote, illegal immigrants that you could imagine.
But he's not talking about applying the rule of law in that context.
So you just end up having to distort yourself into a kind of funhouse mirror reflection of valid principles in order to try and appeal to people's prejudices without provoking their thoughts.
Brett?
I've been stunned by your brilliance.
What often happens is people are like, oh, is he done?
Is he done? There's silence. Wait, I should talk.
The wall was paused there for a moment, and frankly, it's like...
But I was pausing because I wanted Brad to have a chance to comment.
Well, I was simply going to say that if you look at what's going on with the things that Ron Paul supporters are saying, It doesn't take a whole lot of observation to note that what you most often see is not an embrace of libertarianism or even a drifting in a libertarian direction so much as people are desperate to hang on to their illusions.
Specifically, look how many times you will find people talking about how Ron Paul will save the Republic.
Well, I don't want to save the Republic myself.
I don't know about you all, but in my opinion, the Republic is a criminal enterprise, even when it is working correctly.
Okay? Statism is going through one of its crises right now.
I don't know how it's going to turn out.
What I can tell you is that toward the end of its lifespan, the Roman Empire had Sort of an oscillating tendency to go back and forth between good and bad emperors.
And frankly, I don't want Ron Paul to stabilize the U.S. Empire.
Now, people will say he's going to end the empire because he's going to bring U.S. troops supposedly back from overseas.
And I'm certainly not going to object to that if he were to gain power.
But the thing is that ultimately what's going on in any sort of situation like this is if Rob Paul gets in there, it's only going to be because he's been allowed to take power, because it's what the ruling class believes.
It's what they need to give up.
In order to keep the overall scam going, in order to keep the overall system...
Right, sorry. It's sort of like if the cows are dying because their pens are too small, you may, in order to keep the milk and meat flowing, let their pens become a little larger, but that's not with the intent of setting them free.
Bingo. I also fear that Ron Paul is legitimizing government and legitimizing a lot of the process That we should be all opposing and questioning and which has fallen into disrepute until in fact there was this rallying point, this uncritical cultism surrounding Ron Paul.
To some degree, I'm very uncomfortable with the rule of law without knowing what the content of law is.
And I also don't believe an awful lot of what Ron Paul says.
Ron Paul is a politician and everyone seems, everyone who is He's become a pallbearer of the movement, seems to forget that all the criticisms one should apply to a politician even apply to him.
The rule of law, he says, would be the Constitution, but the Constitution he wants to change in ways that...he wants to change the laws so that he can rule through laws that he wants there and does not respect the ones that are Are there that don't get him where he wants to go on issues like immigration and abortion?
One of the things that is appalling about Paul...
Hey, but that's the last Paul joke you're allowed to make that way.
I'm keeping track here.
Sorry, go on. Oh, okay.
Okay. As things progress...
In the caucuses and such, and as things get closer to the line, he is becoming more radical on the issues that I consider to be his most objectionable points.
For example, on immigration, his latest very frightening ad that was put out by his own people in immigration saying that he would make it a constitutional amendment so that just being born in America Does not make you an American citizen.
He would take away that right.
Now, I'm not arguing for citizenship, I'm an anarchist, but there is the legal fiction of citizenship, which does give you certain privileges, like the ability to leave and enter the country, and it's not the government's prerogative to ever say no to you on that point, if you're an American citizen.
He would make it, again, as Brad was saying, Or perhaps you, Stephan, the idea of you're guilty, you're a terrorist de facto in the eyes of the immigration people if you're a student and you come from a country that's been declared, one of how many dozens of countries that's been declared a terrorist nation.
And his abortion position has become much, much stronger.
I think that Paul and his founding reasonable, like I'm for the rule of law, I'm a constitutionalist, When you actually push him, he comes out and becomes much more totalitarian and slides toward that position with great ease when he thinks that's what people want to hear.
Well, I mean, he's a fundamentalist Christian, right?
Yes, I think he's a social conservative.
I mean, he's a fundamentalist Christian.
He's very big on this idea of the state should be a state matter, abortion should be a state matter, and then turns around and does things like vote for a federal Law that would declare human life begins at conception.
I mean, he has all these internal inconsistencies, and then he always has this wiggle room when you try to pin him down on something.
Why is he being supported by so many Nazi groups?
Why is he in white supremacists?
Well, you know, I cannot be held responsible for who supports me.
That's very true, but you can comment on it.
And, you know, there's always this wiggle room in this very strange There's two questions.
I think what's happening here, by the way, is that Brad and I are addressing two different questions.
Brad is addressing the question of, is Ron Paul or any electoral, any person running for president or office, someone that should be supported by a libertarian, or is it always a bad idea?
I agree it is always a bad idea.
I've been addressing, is Ron Paul a libertarian?
And those are two different questions, and I'm glad that Brad is taking that side because I'm not articulating it, and he is, and it's important.
Well, thanks, Wendy. I'm trying to.
What I would say is actually, believe it or not, although I'm actually articulating more of an anti-electual position than what you're doing right now, my personal view of Ron Paul is overall slightly more favorable.
I mean, Personally, if I was not against voting, if I was not against the electoral political approach, but was still a libertarian, I think he would be my probable choice for who to support.
That is not an endorsement, though, because the point is that at this point in my ideological development, I've realized that it's going to take a revolution, and I don't mean simply a revolt in some sort of In an adventurous sense,
I mean we're going to have to develop an intellectual edifice that will influence the intellectual environment in this country to where the idea of an actual stateless society becomes the default choice.
The way Marxists have slowly influenced the political environment in this country such that An ever-increasing social welfare state and political control of X, Y, and Z has been their default choice.
I believe that ultimately we're going to have to try to pull things in the opposite direction by taking a hardcore radical stand, not necessarily a violent stand, but certainly one that is very in-your-face and very radical.
That approach does not fit in with electoral politics.
It's not all about being a smiling guy with perfect white teeth in a freshly pressed suit.
We're going to have to be...
More assertive?
Very determined, very in your face, very radical people.
In order to influence where the center of gravity is in the long run.
If you look at some of the different theories of political change, one of the things you'll notice is I would like to Google the concept of the Overton Window.
That's O-V-E-R-T-O-N, the Overton Window.
And what it is is some of the people who are sort of Beltway-type, think tank, wonkery public policy types have noticed That there's a sort of window of acceptable debate, and the job of the think tank professional is to sort of gradually move where that window of debate is,
what options it's standing over, by shifting the center of gravity, so to speak, of the The overall political discourse in this country.
So, for instance, a candidate won't necessarily take a position that a think tank might be able to.
And in turn, a radical group organization may take positions that a think tank couldn't because of things like, you know, think tanks have to be able to raise money.
candidates have to be able to raise a lot more money than our think tank would, depending on the situation.
Basically, there's a whole lot that's wrong with the way people view reality in some ways.
And by that I mean political reality.
People want to hold onto their illusions so tightly that in order to really affect change in the sense of A broad change of attitude of a revolution in popular consciousness,
it's going to take a vanguard of determined intellectuals that are actually influencing the popular debate or the political Well, I think that's right, and I think that, I mean, a lot of what philosophical anarchism or anarcho-capitalism is designed to do is simply to de-euphemize what is called political discourse, right?
Because if you say something like, I wish to uphold the rule of law by deporting illegal Aliens or whatever, right?
Then it sounds, A, like the plot of a Will Smith movie, and B, it sounds like something that is vaguely to do with law and order and virtue and justice and due process and all that kind of stuff.
But if you say, I'm going to shoot millions of people who want to live in a particular area, that's a whole lot less palatable, and it's all around controlling the euphemisms, right?
And at least a lot of what I'm up to It's just to get rid of it.
Don't talk about the rule of law.
Talk about an opinion with a gun, right?
Because you just have to euphemize it.
Right, right. In other words, we should not be advocating the kidnapping of the geographic land.
Correct. Of course.
So, I think that process is really being clouded, right, by the Ron Paul revolution, or whatever you want to call it.
And there is also this fantasy, you know, there is this dream of the old republic, you know, that has all of the mythological trappings plus flags of a Star Wars movie.
Where there's this belief that there was this old republic with noble founding fathers and, you know, stalwart men and, I don't know, like, daughters of the American Revolution.
And boy, if we could only get back to that paradise, you know, this Eve, this, sorry, this Garden of Eden, then everything would be great again.
But one of the things that I try to point out, and I still haven't got a satisfactory answer to, is that people say, well, we want small government.
And I say, well, do you believe that the American experiment in the 18th century was designed to create the smallest government in the history of the world?
And they say, well, yes, that was the whole point of the Constitution was to limit the power of the government and we want to create the smallest government in the history of the world.
And then I said, okay, well, do you realize, though, that this experiment has, in fact, produced the largest and most powerful government in the history of the world?
And then, of course, there's this, you know, tumbleweeds blowing down the conversational alleys because if you say, my specific goal is to produce a vaccine against cancer, and then when you apply it to a population, cancer rates go up enormously until you have more cancer than at any time previously in history, then continuing to apply the same medication would seem to be counter-rational, to say the least.
And so this is the wonderful thing about, as you said, Brad, earlier, statism is in a kind of crisis.
Well, you don't really hear about massive new government programs other than, you know, the war on terror and so on, because people just don't believe it that much anymore.
Like, nobody says, well, we have this social problem, let's create a massive new government agency.
The state does it to some degree, but you don't hear it that much in intellectual circles anymore.
And there is a crisis of statism, I think, as you...
Rightly point out, because everybody's recognizing that the facts are just so incontrovertible that, you know, this experiment that was designed to virtually get rid of slavery has created the biggest and most powerful slave owners in the history of the species, and so we probably should try something different rather than going back to that same prescription.
I think one of the problems is that Ron Paul and the Paulists believe, clearly they believe that government can be tamed.
Government can be contained.
It is not a wild, ravening beast.
That it is really a servant.
And it's sort of the night watchman, Ayn Rand, night watchman view of the state, that it can be contained.
And what they're trying to contain it by is the Constitution.
They have a sort of a fetish worship going on with the Constitution.
And this legitimizing of the state at the core That it's some kind of garden that you need to get the weeds out and let the flowers bloom, as opposed to seeing it as what it is.
It's a patch of weeds and there is no flower there to be weeded and cultivated.
At bare minimum, even if you have a limited government, which would be far preferable than what is right now, of course, What you have is a dangerous beast that you must always have on a chain, and you must always pull to account and keep it a very tight leash.
This faith that's given to Ron Paul does a number of things.
It legitimizes government, even among hardline anarchists that I've known for decades.
Yes, they've read all the theory, they know all the arguments against politics, and then they'll look you in the eye and say, but it's Ron Paul.
He can reverse time. He's immune to gravity.
Pretty much. And so what's happening right now is the whole of libertarianism, whether you're an anarchist or you're a limited government person, is heading away from radicalism.
In fact, even the LP is looking radical these days.
They're starting to debate whether or not they should nominate for their presidential candidate the category none of the above.
That's actually one of the proposals put out there.
They're even looking radical compared to Ron Paul.
Oh, the LP, sorry. The LP. The LP is actually starting to...
That's one of the respectable things that's been floated and debated within the national branch.
We've got to get back to the idea of social change comes from changing the hearts and minds of people.
The souls of people, and it's a revolutionary process without the violence, because violence really does not ever accomplish.
You can't get to a peaceful society through a violent means.
When you use violent means, you're not trying for social reform, you're going for self-defense, and those are totally different goals.
But if the goal is social change, Ron Paul is taking people down the wrong road The wrong path and away from anything that really could be effective.
But I would say, I mean, I think those are excellent points.
I would also say that generally, at least what I've observed in terms of social change, is that it's when the Oedipus seems to be at its greatest, at its most powerful, that it's right at the very end.
That's sort of the history of, look at the Roman Empire and the The British Empire and you can even look at the Soviet Empire that, you know, throughout the 80s, I just remember all of these films about nuclear war and the Red Menace and so on.
And it just seemed to be this immense, huge edifice.
And then, of course, it collapsed from the inside.
The beauty of this Ron Paul phenomenon is that it is going to put a stake through the heart of political libertarianism for at least a generation because he's going to flame out and obviously there are going to be people who've been drawn into the idea of freedom that we can hopefully scoop up into something a little more consistent.
But on the plus side, no one's going to come forward who's going to be a more, quote, credible candidate for the libertarian position for at least a generation because, I mean, the guy's got millions of dollars.
He's been in Congress for like 400 years.
He's Christian, so he appeals to that side of things.
He was in the military. He appeals to that side of things.
He's a doctor, so he's got all of these...
All of this credibility and there's no candidate that's going to come along that's going to spark people up.
And that's one of the reasons why I think people are so desperate and fastening on to this because they know it's either Ron Paul or it's not going to happen politically.
There's just going to be nobody who's going to...
Let's say that some guy comes along in four years and says, I want to run as a libertarian.
They say, well, look, we had Ron Paul.
He had full media. He had millions of dollars.
He had all the credibility on the planet.
He was on all the talk shows.
And he got like 5%, 6%, 10%.
So there's no way you're going to do better than him.
So people will not be tempted, at least for a generation, to throw their weight behind political causes.
So in a way, this is like, once you give it the biggest shot you have, and it doesn't work, then you have to start looking for alternatives.
And I think that's the plus side that will be the fallout, if that makes sense.
And I would think that the point is that We who espouse alternatives need to be there, ready, and able to show them an alternative.
And that's why I'm about to go ahead and plug one of my websites, www.agorism.info.
Sorry, do you want to spell that again?
And then, Wendy, you can go ahead. Yeah, plug play.
This is essential stuff. Basically, agorism is the very end of libertarian ideology that I spouse.
And the best way I found to summarize it is simply that agorism is revolutionary market anarchism.
And when I say revolutionary, I'm not talking about the Ron Paul revolution.
Right. That's more like a devolution.
And Wendy, you had a website you wanted to mention?
Yes, I wanted to also mention my website is Wendy McElroy, Wendy spelled the normal way, McElroy, M-C-E-L-R-O-Y dot com is also.
And also, I'm loving talking to you guys because, you know...
It gives me perspective on myself about Ron Paul because I think that Brad personally likes Ron Paul and trusts him more than I do.
This is not a slam at you, Brad.
I think you said the same thing.
I have severe doubts about his credibility, frankly.
And in terms of Stephan, Stephan, I am far less optimistic that something good will come from this phenomenon, this Paul phenomenon.
I think that one of two things is likely.
There's going to be an entirely separate kind of backlash that coalesces around Ron Paul or around his principles and sort of continues the revolution.
Or the Paul phenomenon is going to just further confuse the issue of what libertarianism is.
So that, as I said before, it's going to be associated with eminent domain and border fences and I mean,
that's an astounding position to me that people say that, as Walter Block pointed out in this article, which I don't know if either of you bookmarked it, but I think it would be worth going through a couple of the main arguments if you have the time.
The idea that whether or not we should forcibly evict people from the places that they live or prevent the movement across this fantasy line called the border, it's just amazing to me that this could even be a debate in libertarian circles.
But of course, the xenophobia that has arisen from the average white American's fear that he may actually end up feeling like an immigrant, quote, in his own country, In other words, that he may actually experience what it's like to be a minority, which he's inflicted upon various other minorities over the last couple of centuries.
The idea that this is any kind of reasonable debate just shows you how far the corruption of politics goes.
How far the corruption of what being a libertarian has become due to Ron Paul, but also due...
For a very long time, LewRockwell.com has been putting...
They're basically the engineer of this argument.
And, you know, I think the world of Lou, but I've always disagreed with him on this issue, and now I am seeing how extremely destructive that position is, or can become, and that it cannot be packaged with all the other libertarian positions, and somehow given a sheen, a patina of respectability, and I've been wrong.
Well, I mean, one of the examples is that one of the reasons that Americans are flooding north is that because of the subsidies towards American farmers, American produce is being dumped in Mexico below cost, which means that they can't compete.
The same thing's happening all over the third world, right?
Which is that... We're good to go.
Government intervention in the agricultural economy has rendered them unable to survive on their farmland.
So it's just another example of how statism always leads to more statism.
You subsidize the farmers, which means that the Mexicans can't survive on their farms, which means they come north to try and find industrial labor, which is not possible in Mexico because of the statism in the economy there, which prevents the foundation of You know, large capital concerns like manufacturing.
But of course, the solution then is more statism.
It's never like, well, you know, the reason that we have to, the way to get rid of immigration is to get rid of the farm subsidies.
He never says that. The way to get rid of immigration is to put a fence up and deport people and so on.
And this is just terrible.
Just terrible. He's actually come out and said that it's very low on his priority to get rid of organizations like the Department of Agriculture.
And other, you know, facilitating organizations.
But the immigration thing is the only way to justify in any way, you know, Ron Paul's position under libertarianism is to concede that the government owns every piece of land in the United States and has overriding ownership.
Because clearly, people want, farmers want to have workers come across.
They are inviting them onto their lands.
And the only way to say that this is libertarian is to somehow say it is part of libertarianism, that the government on a national level owns every inch of land, or at least has a veto.
On the individuals who own them and their right to control them.
Yeah, somebody's hiring these people. It's a free contract that is occurring.
And whether it's you... I mean, no libertarian can, I think, reasonably say that it's against some sort of moral law to work under the table.
So, it really is astounding the amount...
But this is where the prejudice boils up, right?
It's just that this is the kind of divisions that politics always sows.
And it really is a pretty disgraceful spectacle.
The implicit racism and xenophobia that's in these kinds of positions and the lack of reciprocity in any logical or moral manner that you could have in this area is just astonishing.
So I thought it might be worth, unless anybody had something to add on that topic, going through a couple of the arguments that Walter Block, who's a guy I always enjoy listening to, though I think that he might have been sucked into the RPR mothership a little bit, but that's sort of my perspective.
But he had some interesting arguments that he put forward about why getting involved in the political process was a productive thing, even for people who would be more on the anarchic side of the fence.
And if I remember rightly, the first one was this idea that...
We all consume government services, therefore being virulently anti-state is always a hypocritical position, which I can't imagine is believable to anybody who's not been raised with the concept of original sin, i.e.
existence equals immorality.
But I've just never quite understood that one, so I was just wondering if you guys wanted to talk a little bit about that position where...
We say, well, you shouldn't vote because, or, you know, you can't legitimize an evil institution, and they say, well, but, you know, you consume government services already, so you can't say you have nothing to do with the state, so what's the difference between that and voting?
Well, the thing about that is that, and frankly, I was amazed to see that coming from Bloch, because he ought to know better, because libertarian class analysis actually Explains why that argument is simply bunk.
And that is this.
The state forcibly maintains a monopoly on the provision of those services.
Okay? When Lech Walesa jumped over a fence to lead a strike of ship workers in the old Warsaw Pacto Yeah, I think he was in Poland. Communist state.
You know, he was striking and those dock workers were striking against an enterprise and that enterprise was in turn a state-owned enterprise.
You know, would you say that they were Doing a bad thing by, you know, breaking their contract with their employer?
Well, no, because their employer was an employer owned by a bloodthirsty state.
It was a monopoly.
And it was not simply some monopoly that arose innocently by any means.
It was no such thing.
It was a monopoly imposed through criminal measures.
I use sidewalks that are publicly provided because those sidewalks are land that has been, in essence, stolen to be made into sidewalks.
The cement is poured using stolen money.
All this is by no means my fault.
I've had nothing to do with that.
Brad, I am so glad you're here because you and I are taking, without disagreeing with you at all, In fact, I like very much what you said.
We take totally different attacks on the same thing, because my attack wouldn't be with class analysis so much, but would be with individual responsibility.
First of all, you know, yeah, of course I use the public roads.
And I do not, by the way, grant Walter Block's assumption that the state owns them, and I'm using state property.
It is unowned property.
It is a product of theft and is not owned.
So I'm using unowned property.
But I take, on an individual basis, sort of a Thoreauian view, Henry David Thoreau, because he made a very good distinction, a very clear distinction, that really the only obligation you have in life is not to hurt other people.
That how you deal with the state is your business.
Whether you pay taxes, whether you Whatever.
The only thing you are obliged not to do in dealing with the state or in any other dealings in your life is to harm innocent people, their person or their property.
When I walk down on own property, even if I were to accept Walter Block's massive grant to the state of all roads and things like that, even if I were to grant that, I'm not harming someone in any way.
If I am electing someone to a position of unjust power over a third party's life, I am harming them.
And I have no right to inflict that harm, whether I do it through state means or do it on a more privatized level.
That's my obligation not to do.
Well, I think that's an...
I wouldn't go necessarily as far as saying, like, obviously the act of writing on a piece of paper and putting it in a box is not directly harmful, but of course it does lead to the legitimization of the state as a whole.
It also leads to putting someone in a position of power.
You may say that...
I think you've trivialized...
I think one of the things that's been trivialized in libertarianism by people who don't advocate voting is that, well, it's just a scrap of paper and it doesn't matter and in the long scheme it doesn't contribute one way or the other.
I'm talking on your personal obligation.
Would you sign a contract?
Would you sign a pledge saying, I back Hitler?
I back genocide. I back something else that I consider to be fundamentally unjust.
Would you put your name on that for a publication, public view?
When you vote, you are putting your personal moral sanction to the process, not only a process, but to a certain person being put in a position of unjust power over another.
As an individual, I think it is an abrogation, a total breach of my main Moral duty in regard to every other human being on this planet, which is not to harm them, not to take that personal stance.
Well, I'm convinced. That was beautifully argued.
Yep, I'm perfectly convinced.
I mean, to me, there's still a moral difference between the guy pulling the trigger and the guy writing on the piece of paper, but I certainly, certainly appreciate and actually agree with...
Okay, good. Just changed my mind there.
I'm not going to argue with any of that.
And the other metaphor that I would use is that if you're in a prison and you eat the food that is provided by the guards, that doesn't mean that you are then obligated to try and become a guard or that there's no difference between eating food when your alternative is to starve to death.
Because, of course, that would be the remedy since all the food that we consume or produce is funded, at least partially funded through state subsidies and is driven to us on state roads.
Clearly, we can't eat food without participating in the system, so to speak.
But if you're in prison and you have to eat the food, that's just a necessity.
You've got to live, right? We don't have to live, but, you know, we generally prefer to.
But just because you are forced to eat prison food doesn't mean that then that's indistinguishable from attempting to become a guard and trying to dominate other people.
I think you have to keep repeating that.
Not only should you eat the food, but you should also make sure to use the energy you gain from eating that food to dig a tunnel to get out.
And if you happen to get a chance to kill a guard, or have to in order to effect your escape, you've certainly done nothing wrong.
No, that's self-defense for sure.
So, I don't know if you guys have, I couldn't find it, I didn't bookmark it, whether you guys have the article out, but was there any other points in that that you felt that would be worth a strenuous and exciting rebuttal?
Um, can I pick on a point of annoyance rather than a strenuous rebuttal?
Hey, it's anarchy, baby, whatever you want!
Okay, let's not go into chaos, though, okay?
Let's not skew that. Um, One of the things that, by the way, I've known Walter for, to touch on something Brad said, I've known Walter for decades, and since I was a wee little libertarian bouncing around.
And he used to know very well that there was the entire rebuttal against the use of sidewalks, just as he used to know that anarchists weren't objecting to slave goody or slave baddie and all the things that he brought out just as he used to know that anarchists weren't objecting to slave goody He used to know those arguments.
He was one of the people that gave them to me in the first place.
So I don't know what's going on, but there's a...
I think we do know, right?
Which is the temptation, the hope, the desperate, you know, if I can get these goodies, I'm willing, you know, if I can eat this nutrition, I'm willing to take this poison too.
But of course, all that happens is you get the poison without the nutrition.
But that's the great temptation.
One of the things that annoyed me very much about How Ron Paul is being packaged by a lot of the libertarians who are like Walter.
They bring up, even Spooner agreed with this or agreed with that and Murray Rothbard would be so pleased.
They drop a lot of names and it seems to be a substitute for argument.
It seems to be almost an intimidation tactic or kind of buttressing themselves with You know, by association.
And it's not only one of the many, many ways that these people just skirt any kind of real hard argument, but it also is part of the cult phenomenon.
I mean, Walter seemed to think it was a knockdown argument that at one point Spooner was involved with politics.
And it's a knockdown argument only to buy into the idea of there being cults or icons in libertarianism.
That you don't question that, oh, Spooner said it, therefore it's something that I have to agree with.
I don't agree with him on intellectual property.
I don't agree with him on a number of things.
But it seems to be this whole mentality that's moving away from the ideas, away from the principles, and it's all becoming personality.
And I find that if the girlish blush goes off my cheek, I lose my temper, it's usually on that point.
Right. Right.
Right. That's one thing that we should bear in mind.
Libertarians seldom spring forth like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, fully formed.
I've certainly made a lot of mistakes in my own ideological development.
I spent well over a decade backing the Libertarian Party and doing the best I could to be an activist for that, encouraging people to register to vote.
I even won an election and served in office as a city councilman for a small city for a single term and ran for higher office even.
I'm by no means myself any sort of an exemplar or role model.
We all make mistakes.
Spooner, you know, sure, endorsed politics at one point.
People change their minds as they go through life.
People think about things from new angles.
People discover new ways of looking at things.
People's opinions change over time, and a lot of times it's because their analysis has improved or they've discovered new information that they haven't before.
In my own case, I came around to the anti-political approach as a result of The pro-war libertarians that I encountered within the Libertarian Party around the advent of the Iraq War.
And prior to that, I had been very enthusiastically a supporter of the LP. I worked tremendously hard for it, in my opinion.
But I came to the realization that all these pro-war libertarians, I was simply shocked that there had been such a failure of internal political education within what I thought at the time was the best hope for the movement.
And it really forced me to go through a process of rethinking some of my basic assumptions about the nature of political change and how we were going to We're going to have to find full libertarian principles.
Winning elections is not what's going to do the trick.
We're going to have to subtly but determinedly influence the ongoing meta-political conversation that's going on in this country.
Well, and it is a, sorry to interrupt you, but it's a desperately sad thing, the way that there's this selective processing of history within the libertarian movement.
So, for instance, people say, well, Spooner advocated political involvement, and it's like, yes, and the state got bigger.
I mean, the right point is supposed to be to make the state get smaller.
Why is it that you're not allowed to talk about the last 300 years, at least if we take since Adam Smith, why is it we're not allowed to talk about the fact that political libertarianism or classical liberalism has been the default position to try to control the size and power of the state for the past 300 years And the state has grown and grown and grown and grown.
And so if you want different results, you have to do something different.
You can't just do what you've always been doing that has been doing the opposite of working, whatever that word is.
It's not like they didn't manage to make the state smaller.
It's not like they even managed to slow the acceleration of the growth of the state.
The state has grown asymptotically all the while the political libertarianism has been attempting to control it through political means.
And you're not allowed to talk about the fact that we have Hundreds of years of evidence, or even if you just want to go back to the founding of modern political libertarianism sort of 30, 40 years ago, this approach has been tried and the state has continued to grow asymptotically in size, exponentially in size.
So the idea that we continue to do this, something's going to change, it's just the wildest kind of magical thinking.
Sorry, go ahead. No, I was going to say, it's not despite the fact that libertarians, the people who are supposed to be opposed to political process, And celebrate the private realm instead.
It's not despite the fact that they have sought electoral laws.
It's partly because of it.
Well, I would agree with that. It's part of the problem.
Yeah. And one of the things about history, it's strange the selectivity that history has come, because all of these people know.
Walter Bloch and Lou Rockwell, all these people know the history of things like Henry George and how Henry George bid for office.
Split them in the late 1800s.
Split the whole movement and destroyed radicalism and did something very similar to what Ron Paul is doing right now in the movement.
How disastrous that was!
It ended up, it fizzled as Ron Paul will fizzle into nothing and the only real winner in this situation, I believe, will be Ron Paul, who will have ridden a crest of money and publicity to a position on a national stage.
That he would never have otherwise.
And the movement will be de-radicalized.
The opposition, the people that should be opposing government instead will be turning into constitutional fetishists.
Yeah, because paper can stop bullets.
Many scientists don't realize this.
Yeah, you know, and I just love the fact that a government-passed piece of paper, you know, is my protection against the government.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but what is it that Ron Paul recently did if he proposed an amendment to say that we should respect the Constitution?
That's not a joke, is it?
Because you told me I couldn't make Ron Paul jokes, so if you're making a Ron Paul joke...
Actually, I meant the appalling joke, the pallbearers, just because I was jealous, I couldn't think of it.
Would that be the amendment for redundancy in amendments?
Because the government has not respected a piece of paper, we should have another piece of paper that we expect the government to respect.
But of course, if you reject evolution, then you can do just about anything intellectually.
Well, that's another...
A lot of reasons...
I don't give this guy a free pass.
In the same way that most libertarians seem to, on issues like being as evangelically Christian as he seems to be.
His federal amendment, his federal act by which he voted to make human rights, human beings exist at the point of conception, is amazing that the government is getting involved in a scientific medical Definition and making by law what should be made by science and medicine.
But he plays fast and loose.
This guy, it's not merely that he plays the feds off against the state and so he never has to answer, you know, I'm going to leave this issue like abortion up to the state.
Though he's kind of backed away from that.
He's becoming far stronger pro-life And he used to be.
He's not kind of absent his own opinion from the states.
He never gets down to explaining to me why it's better to have a state control me than a federal government, and why my rights should basically be decided state by state, rather than there being natural rights as in the Bill of Rights.
Wendy, Wendy, Wendy, but what you don't understand is the simple reasoning that your local mafia gang has your best interests at heart, while the remote mafia gang does not.
And if you could only put that little thinking hat on, it would all become clear to you.
Well, you know, I like my mafia to be about 3,000 miles away from me.
At the bottom of the ocean. And I have, just as someone who has experienced both federal and local government, my local government interferes in my life far more than the federal government.
Right, right. So we can have this debate.
It actually is a debate.
Is the Fed better than the state or whatever?
But they're both thugs. So he's advocating thuggery on a state level as opposed to a federal level.
Why do I think that's a libertarian position?
Well, it's that wonderful quote, if they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't even care about the answers.
Well, that's all of what I see in the Ron Paul thing.
There's obfuscation.
There's an idea, well, Spooner said this, Or it's a state thing.
Or the final bottom line thing, well, he's better than the rest.
It depends who you are.
Is he better than the rest if you're an illegal immigrant?
Is he better than the rest if you're gay?
Because I really do think he's homophobic.
Yeah, well, let's go with the territory, right?
Is he better than the rest, ultimately, if you are an atheist who wants to live in a secular society, a secular society under law, not necessarily the culture?
Because I don't claim to have any right to expect any kind of culture, but I do have a right to expect respect under the law.
No, I mean, I think those are all excellent points, and it will be interesting...
Sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead.
Well, it will be very interesting to see, because there is this idea, I've sort of put forward this metaphor before, I'll just touch on it briefly here, that there's a road, which Brad mentioned earlier, which we all go down, which is, you know, we read Rand or Rothbard or whatever, and we go like, yeah, non-aggression principle, right? And there's this blinding sunburst of clarity.
It's like, yeah, taxation is coercion, wait a minute, you know, it all sort of makes sense when we get that to begin with.
And then, most of us, and certainly myself, go through a long period where we have this blinding clarity with this weird little knot of fog in the middle like that.
This fog around the state and taxation.
So, for me, I was all about, well, you know, there's this voluntary taxation, you know, all this kind of nonsense, right?
Because it's just very hard to make that leap to a voluntary society, which is what we all live as individuals.
At least, I haven't got a paycheck by taking a gun to anyone for a while.
So we have this weird little knot in the middle of how do we deal with certain forms of social organization like police and all that.
And then once you figure that kind of stuff out, and I had to unfortunately invent the wheel myself, not realizing how much stuff there was out there already, but we go through that process where we then clarify things and we say, oh, okay, well, the non-aggression principle works in my life.
I've got ways that it can work in the abstract in general.
And then you just clear away that last little bit of fog and then you have real clarity and real sort of certainty.
But the problem is that then what happens is, you know, this is my wife practices psychology, so she's introduced me to all these wonderful concepts, but the reality is then, and this is what bothers me about the Ron Paul argument, particularly in the Walter Block article, is that Ron Paul can say, I am against the initiation of the use of force, so I need taxation to fund the military.
Right, he can literally go from that statement to the next statement and nobody says, wait a minute, you know, how does that work?
If you've got a principle called the non-initiation of the use of force, how is it then that you're able to advocate taxation and federalism or local statism or whatever?
That is a wild contradiction and if you can manage that contradiction within you, then you're in the Orwellian planet of doublethink and like you just can't, nobody can expect anything consistent to come out of your mouth.
Let me just finish my point and then I'll turn it back to you if you don't mind.
The people who can support a guy who says, initiation of use of force is wrong, we need a military and taxation and this and that and the other.
What happens is then when we consume government services but oppose voting, we're called hypocritical and inconsistent with our principles.
I mean, that's the amazing thing about it.
Like, how somebody could say to an anarchist, you are inconsistent with your principles because you're forced to walk on the sidewalk, Whereas I support somebody who's against the use of force and then wants taxation in the military.
I mean, that takes a huge amount of, like, self-blinding willpower to be able to make that statement without dissolving into laughter, but way too many people seem to be able to do it.
Sorry, Brett, go ahead. Oh, forgive me.
I was just about to interject.
You're reminding me of an old Highland quote.
I believe it was Robert E. Highland that said, hypocrisy makes the world go round.
Yeah. And it's quite true in this case.
But it's more than hypocrisy, though I agree with that.
It's a militant hypocrisy.
The idea that there is a litmus test, that you are not a libertarian unless you take this position, this hypocritical position, and critical thinking disqualifies you from being libertarian, basically, as long as the critical thinking is aimed at this one politician.
Every other politician is fair game.
That this one politician who is savior, who as Sunni Maravillosa said, is the one man fit to lead us all for whom we should pull the great lever.
As I said, I'm far more of a Ron Paul skeptic, I think, on a personal level than either of you are.
For example, one of the things that I wonder why he's gotten a free pass on He's considered to be the anti-war candidate.
Actually, I'm not suspicious of all politicians on this.
Kucinich, I believe, is anti-war.
And I really respect him for that stand.
But, you know, Ron Paul wasn't anti-war in Kosovo.
And he supported the war in Iraq as long as there was an official declaration from Congress.
In fact, he introduced a measure to get an official declaration.
And I brought that up to so many people who support Ron Paul.
And their answer is always, well, he was trying to emphasize that there was no official, and he had purposes other than getting the official declaration, and he really wasn't doing it to validate the war, but he had an official, he wanted it officially declared a war by Congress.
Like if I do this little dance, then when I stab the guy, it turns from evil to virtue, right?
Well, what was his, did he have his fingers crossed when he...
Basically, they're saying he's a liar.
He was standing up and lying in Congress, saying he wanted a declaration of war, that he was lying to his fellow...
So their defense of him is that he was just faking it, he was just fooling, or it was dramatics, he was a liar.
Why should I believe anything else he says, especially since he has demonstrated recently in becoming rabidly Anti-immigration and his last YouTube ad just looked like Big Brother totalitarianism with the wording and the scare tactics against terrorism and immigrants are going to rule our lives.
He's pandering.
So why should I not think this man who fakes it and lies and does mock feints in Congress on the issue of war He's sincere about anything else he says.
Why is he not just tapping into what he perceives as a pent-up hunger for peace rhetoric?
Well, I mean, I think that's right.
And I think that the great temptation, which has always been what sucks libertarians into the political process, like they've never seen the godfather, you know, like keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.
Co-opting or hiring your worst enemy is a very standard tactic in any hegemonic power structure.
I mean, to absorb your opponents is to eliminate any real opposition and then to work within the system, you know.
I've never noticed anybody who's a libertarian and an atheist saying that the way we should get rid of religion is to become the Pope and then dissolve the Catholic Church.
Nobody ever says that, right?
But somehow in politics this can work.
But it's this temptation which is that until we accept that this is a multi-generational project, until we accept that getting rid of the state will take as long as separating the church and state, which was hundreds of years after the idea was first floated, Until we accept that, we're forever going to be saying, well, I want to see freedom in my lifetime.
I want to see freedom now.
I want to get my taxes reduced now.
And until people recognize that, as Brad said earlier, the intellectual edifice that supports the ethics of statism is not going to be undone by voting.
It's not going to be undone by anything other than a concerted attack upon the foundations, upon the roots of the lies which support these institutionalized evils.
And that is a multi-generational project.
we have to aim at that and every time we try and take a shortcut we end up just escalating that which dominates us I've talked a lot so I'm leaving go this is Brad prompting silence Yeah.
Over to you, Brad, in our bureau in cyberspace.
Well, what I would say is that I'm not of a like mind with you on the proposition that it's a multi-generational endeavor.
It can be because, obviously, any project where you set out to accomplish anything can take an unlimited amount of time, particularly depending on how much you get wrong along the way to doing it.
I believe, however, that if the modern libertarian movement, starting from the late 60s to today, had taken a stridently anti-political and explicitly revolutionary and explicitly anarchistic approach,
had taken that all along, and all the effort that has gone into this fake constitutionalism had instead In other words, if libertarians had the courage of their convictions and been as forthright and honest in their activism as they ought to have been, then it's very hard to say exactly where we'd be right now.
Maybe we would have encountered ruthless repression and been squashed like bugs, or maybe we'd be in a free society by now.
Sorry, Brad, let me just ask you a question, if you don't mind, because the reason I call it a multi-generational project is that, for the most part, it seems to me that people don't want to become anarchists or whatever you want, market anarchists, because of the rejection that they're going to get from their peers and family, because of the social ostracism attacks and exclusion that they experience. because of the social ostracism attacks and exclusion that they That certainly has been my experience.
But when you decided to go from political libertarianism, or I guess a species of minarchism, or at least working within the system, to outright stateless anarchism, how many of the people that you knew followed you in a friendly manner through that transition and were still there when you were done?
Well, I'm in the Midwest, so being a libertarian kind of made me at least slightly an outcast anyway, for several years prior to that.
But...
But you had lots of friends in the political libertarian arena, right?
I mean, at least people that you knew or were in correspondence with.
Right, but far fewer now.
It's been a process of isolation and marginalization.
Because a lot of people, obviously, they want to hang on to their illusions.
And someone that has something different to say that doesn't really quite mesh with that does tend to be tuned out.
Well, I'm sorry to interrupt you, and this may be a useless point of clarification, but what the heck, that's what I'm here for.
I would say it's not that they want to hang on to their illusions, it's that they want to hang on to their relationships.
It's my particular belief that the reason that people are pro-immigration is not because they have any particular understanding of the issue.
The reason that they're anti-immigration is because if they are at...
To me, it comes down as simple as this.
It could be more complex, but this is the approach that I take, or at least that I've experienced.
If you say, well, immigration is nonsense, borders are an illusion, the state is a fantasy, and blah blah blah blah, then, you know, people react like you're attacking them with a stick or something.
Like, they get really mad at you, right?
Because people are heavily embedded, as you say, in their illusions, but what people don't want to see is, if I speak the truth to those around me, how many of them will be curious and be interested, and how many of them will just attack me?
And I think it's in order to hold on to their friends, their families, and sometimes even their marriages or love relationships, That people are afraid to speak the truth because they don't want to put those relationships to the test and say, well, if you're really interested in me and in the truth and virtue and this and that, then we should be at least able to have this conversation, whether you agree with me or not, at every level or every detail doesn't matter.
But people don't want to bring this stuff up because they know that they're going to get attacked by the people around them in their life.
And I think they're trying to save their relationships, not particularly their illusions, if that makes any sense.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you.
I see that as a difference in emphasis in trying to describe the situation.
What you're saying absolutely makes perfect sense.
Like I said, I'm not disagreeing with you on that point.
There are many reasons, one of which is peer pressure, that people don't speak up, and I think it's a very, very undiscussed reason.
Gertrude Kelly, who was the My contributor to Tucker's Liberty, whom I like particularly, wrote a brilliant article on how peer pressure is as effective a silencer as actually law because of the fear that people have of losing relationships or just disapproval, social disapproval. You know, that's why things like shunning work so well.
You know, there's a fiction in America that it's a secular society, that there is no religion floating around.
Politics has become religion, basically.
One of the pieces of secular religion in the United States is that the US is the freest country in the world.
It's just accepted as dogma.
Global warming has become that way.
So that when you start questioning these things, you get the kind of response from people that you expect to get from a religious person when you come up and you basically say, what you believe in, your faith and what you consider to be your virtue and such, is trash to me.
You know, I don't believe in global warming.
You get all of a sudden you're an evil person.
And there's a viciousness of response that's totally out of proportion to you're just stating a belief about a scientific fact.
Or a theory.
You see this all over the place.
I'm being theoretical right now, but in my family, you cannot discuss certain things.
You simply sit down at a table.
Or rather, or rather, I'm saying it wrong.
Politics comes up all the time.
But when people sit down and say, oh, you know, we've got to do something about immigration, or we've got to do something about taxes, they spout the mainstream lines.
They never see that they're talking politics.
They're just talking the facts.
That's just the way it is.
Grass is green. Immigration is a problem.
So there's an unawareness on their part that they're even being political.
And when you come back and take a descending point of view or something that even politely calls into question the war, for example.
I have family members who are serving over in the war.
And you cannot, if I say something like, what a travesty I think the war is, and just in this tone of voice, and just that all of a sudden I want my family to die.
I want those people over there to die.
Or I want, I think they're oppressors.
Or I think things that I'm not being, that I have not said are immediately heaped upon you.
Because there is no discussion right now.
On these points, they become very divisive.
They become very religious in terms of the responses you get from people.
And yeah, I shut up.
And I'm the only person sometimes in the room.
My husband and myself are the only people in the room, around a family table, that are not discussing politics and they don't even recognize that they are.
Sorry, I just wanted to, and I think that's entirely true.
I mean, I can certainly tell you from my own personal experience that of extended family and personal friendships that survived the transition, and I'm not a very aggressive debater.
I don't raise my voice.
I'm very positive and very friendly.
But when I did finally get down to...
And this is, I think...
Hello?
Hello? Have we left, Stefan?
I hear you. We hear you now.
Oh, am I back? Can you hear me at all?
Oh, sorry. Just somebody from the CIA just wanted to say how much they were enjoying the discussion.
You were making a point that you just started at the beginning, but I lost it.
If they find it so enjoyable, ask them where you can send the invoice to the building for you.
You want to give them your address.
I'm like, they don't have it already.
They also said I might want to get that pimple looked at.
I'm not sure what that means. Anyway, but no, I mean, at a personal level, my transition to consistent, philosophically consistent principles, right, to that, and when I started talking with my family about the truth,
as I was exploring it at this time when I was moving from, I guess, sort of objectivist minochism to anarchism, There was an enormous amount of hostility and I know that it didn't come from me because I'm not a very aggressive or hostile person at all and tend to debate with great positivity but I just did really notice that there was a lot of hostility that came back and when I finally moved to what I think is the logical result Of arguing about the non-aggression principle,
which is when people say, I think taxation is good.
What most libertarians or anarchists do is they start talking about taxation is theft and the abstract and this and that and the other.
But what I did was somebody said, well, the welfare state is necessary.
I stopped arguing about whether it was good or bad or the effects or this or that.
I just said, well, am I allowed to disagree with you without being shot?
I mean, that's sort of what it really comes down to, right?
When people talk about state programs or taxations, it's like, hey, great, you know, you think that money should be taken and given to the poor.
I think it's a terrible idea and I think the results are disastrous, but that's not the issue because we can argue that effect from here to kingdom come with statistics and you can never get anywhere.
But when I sort of look people in the eye and I say, okay, so you're for the Iraq war, Am I allowed to disagree with you without getting shot?
Because if they will look me in the eye and say, yes, you can be against the Iraq war and you should not be shot, then it's like, great, then I should not be taxed to pay for the Iraq war.
Or whatever, whatever government program.
Are you willing to look me in the eye and say, yes, I support the use of force, not in the abstract, in the status level, but against you personally, individually.
Do you want me thrown in jail or shot if I disagree with you?
And if somebody says to me, yes, then obviously nobody with any self-respect could continue to hang around for a long time with people who advocate the use of violence against them.
And it's at that place that you really get propelled into this interstellar distance, right?
Where you go like, wow, you know, lots of people around me who are more than happy to see me...
To see violence used against me, that I think is the shocking place that people get involved in Ron Paul and all this sort of nonsense to avoid that it's in your personal relationships where you need to lay it on the line as far as ethics go.
That's a very good tactic.
I'm going to use that. But one of the things that occurred to me too that annoys me so much, my annoyance factor, again, introducing Murray, introducing Spooner, things like that, That's one of the things you find within the Ron Paul supporters and libertarianism, is the attempt to use peer pressure to silence you.
This is not your opinion on a politician.
This is a litmus test of your worth as a human being within this movement.
And have you read everything that Lisanna Spooner ever wrote?
Because I have, and he says, and it's like, well, I don't care what Lisanna Spooner wrote.
I can think for myself. How many places have you seen them say, Over and over again, it is your duty as an American to support Ron Paul.
As if America even exists, we might as well say it's my duty as a Narnian to support a unicorn.
I mean, none of this stuff means anything.
But there is just almost a thug-like peer pressure being exerted, and the discussion has stopped being about the worth of Ron Paul, or the worth of electoral politics.
And another obfuscation, another shifting of ground, is people are putting it is the worth of you.
You prove your worth by standing up or sitting down, you know, and all of a sudden, your opinion of a politician is a character analysis of you, rather than the person who's trying to seek power and the apparatus that is the enemy of us all.
Criticizing that basically shows that you're a worthless human being.
Right, and the people who are...
I mean, this is the rank irony, and you can spend a long time on this, which I won't, but the rank irony is that When libertarians say we should abrogate our fundamental principles for the sake of short-term effect on our practical liberty, that we should get rid of all of this stuff, we should just follow this guy even though we're supposed to be against the non-aggression principle because he's going to throw away our principles for the sake of short-term benefit.
Obviously, you don't end up with the benefit or the principles and that's the trap, but it's hard to see then how people who advocate throwing away principles for the sake of short-term benefits could be against illegal immigration because that's exactly what the illegal immigrants are doing by their own definition.
I wanted to weigh in on one point that you two discussed earlier on too.
I have a slightly different approach to whether it's multi-generational or the long-term, short-term.
At the risk of being misunderstood, I don't think that we will ever win, just as we will never lose.
I think there's a continuing battle between freedom and power, just as there's a continuing battle between good and evil.
And I see them as good and evil in terms of being pro-life and anti-life, freedom and power.
And it's not something that we are going to, as human beings, ever get to utopia.
and get to a pure anarchist state and we shouldn't probably make that our goal.
We should always hold it up as an ideal just as you hold perfect health up as an ideal.
Perhaps you'll never get to perfect health but it doesn't mean you don't take vitamins and exercise and hold it up as where you want to go.
Every generation, every corner in the face of the earth will always be fighting the battle between freedom and power just as we'll always be fighting the battle between good and evil.
And there's no short-term fix.
It's a long-term struggle that is part of the human condition, I think.
Sorry, I'm just pulling my head back off the desk.
I'm so inspired. No, I'm kidding.
I mean, I think that's quite right.
I think that we do want to find some sort of massive, like, I'll take this one big pill and be healthy for the rest of my life.
But of course, it is a process, not an immediate moment that we can make these transitions in.
I also have to say, I have to go in about five or ten minutes.
So if there's something concluding that you want from me, or whatever, perhaps we should think about that.
I just thought we could trail off into an embarrassed and empty silence.
Was that okay? Oh, I'm good at that.
Oh, you've come to the right person.
Well, I'm from England, so we absolutely can't allow that.
It's in our past. There are to be no social silences.
If there is a social silence, talk about how there's a social silence, but never let a breath be taken without a word.
But, no, I'm certainly, I've had more than my fair share of speaking, so I will absolutely leave the rest of it to you guys if there's anything else you wanted to mention or discuss, or if you're out of topics, we can, of course, pick this up another time if you like.
Well, I encourage Brad to keep plugging the anarchist line that he does so well, so my absence shouldn't stop you two from talking.
But no, I think I've said pretty much everything other than, you know, like I said, I think that I probably am more critical of Ron Paul the man than either of you may be.
I just see him as another politician, a career politician.
Good God! I mean, he's been in Congress 20 years, and he's trying for another office.
Well, he's a massive career politician, and I don't exempt him from the same kind of criticism and skepticism I give to any politician.
I don't basically take the position that he's the good politician.
Well, he could have been doing something useful like delivering babies, right?
Yes. Well, okay, that's great.
Brad, did you want to mention anything else?
Also, for both of you, you might want to mention your websites again.
Go ahead, Wendy. Wendy McElroy, McElroy spelled M-C-E-L-R-O-Y dot com.
I also have another website called ifeminist.net, I-F-E-M-I-N-I-S-T-S dot net.
That's great, that's great. And sorry, Brad, go ahead.
Well, just real briefly, obviously I do disagree with Wendy about whether or not we'll win.
I'm actually quite convinced that in the long run we will win.
I too much take the plum rough body in line of being a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist.
Things are going to be bad over the short run.
Over the long run, I believe the state is, in fact, obsolete.
And if not our generation...
Then in the coming generations, it will devolve upon someone to give it the coup de grace.
And the sooner the better.
And one of the things that I've been working hard to do is plug what I believe is the best way to go about reaching that goal and to explore that line of thinking more I would urge you once again to go to the website that I'm promoting, www.agorism.info.
That's A-G-O-R-I-S-M dot I-N-F-O, agorism.info.
And that word, by the way, agorism, comes from the Greek word agora, meaning open marketplace.
Okay? Beautiful.
Okay, well, listen, I really do appreciate you guys taking the time to have a chat.
Would you like to listen to this before I post it, or are you fairly comfortable with what's been talked about?
I'm comfortable, and I have confidence in your editing.
Take any edits you need to take.
I have complete confidence in your ability to make me sound like even more of a complete idiot than I've done so far.
That's right. I will put it through the rabid Scottish accent program that I have, which will make us all sound like completely insane.
That's just my particular, you know, pleasure.
Well, thanks again so much.
I think we should do it again. I certainly enjoyed it, but we can sort of set this up another time, and maybe we can grab in Mr.
Roderick. But I think it was certainly useful, and I will send you guys the link when it's all put together.
I would be certainly up for doing it again.
I apologize for it being any difficulties.
I'm getting this coordinated, but it's definitely worthwhile.
I'd love to do it again. Fantastic.
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