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Jan. 14, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:58
959 Taking a Contract Out on Taxes
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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope that you're doing well.
It's the 14th of January 2007.
I'm sitting on a rooftop patio at the...
What's the name of the hotel?
The Delano? Delano.
We're getting massaged just a little bit later.
And I wanted to go over some issues.
There was such a wonderful encapsulation of so many convincing errors in a series of posts recently.
That I wanted to go over them and hope maybe this can be sort of clearing house for the errors that occur.
You know, perhaps well-meaning, we don't know.
This is a gentleman named, we'll just call him Monkey, since that's what he calls himself.
And actually, let's call him Koto.
And he has had some questions, been very polite, very civilized.
And unfortunately, though, I would have preferred just a chat about it because these kinds of errors are very, very difficult to resolve.
From the standpoint of a chat on a board, but he's declined to have a verbal chat, so I will just provide some responses here to the issues that he's come up with.
So... Around the questions of...
He says, I do not see taxation as theft.
And here's why. He says, you can live in Canadian society and never pay taxes.
The moment you get a job which moves you into a tax bracket, essentially, you know you will have to pay taxes.
By accepting the job, you are also accepting the cost, too, which you must pay to hold that job.
This is exactly the same as having to pay your landlord the cost to which you accepted or agreed upon before you moved into that apartment.
If you do not pay this cost, you cannot keep that apartment or keep that job.
Even if after the fact you are unwilling to pay your landlord or the government the money because you do not accept the level of service or any other complaints.
To not pay your landlord after living there or the government after the fact is theft itself, which is why not paying your taxes and not paying your landlord is fought against with the same force.
These are even analogous to essentially going to a restaurant ordering something from the menu which has a price next to it.
By ordering it, you pre-agree to pay that cost for the food.
If you finish eating that meal and you run off and don't pay the pill, it is theft.
Which is why when people who say taxation is theft try not paying your taxes, what is truly happening is taxation is a cost of living essentially.
If you choose not to pay your taxes, that is the action which is theft.
All I can say though is that you are certainly convincing me Sorry, let me just...
And this is a wonderful argument, and this is something that you hear quite consistently throughout debates with status, that you have voluntarily agreed to pay taxes by consuming government services, by living in a country, and so on.
And there is an implicit contract, which is that when you go to take a job that you are, quote, agreeing...
To pay 40% of your income, or I guess in Canada, certainly the tax bracket that I was at when I gave it all up, closer to 50% of your income to the government in the form of taxes.
And when he says you can live in Canadian society and never pay taxes, what he means by that is you can...
Live on, I think it's like $9,000 a year or something, you don't pay taxes, or you can go and live in the woods and so on.
In other words, you can be so catastrophically economically underproductive that you will end up not paying taxes.
And this is a very interesting argument.
We've all run into it before, but I think that the way that it should be unraveled is through a What's happening here is that a third party is being introduced to a two-party transaction, which is considered to have the same voluntary wait as the two parties involved.
And what I mean by that is, if I come and apply for a job with you, then...
You may not have in your contract that I'm not allowed to steal from you.
You know, I'm not allowed to embezzle.
I'm not allowed to steal client lists and so on.
There may be stuff like non-solicitation, non-competes and so on in our employment contract.
But basically, when you and I enter into a contractual arrangement together, then both of us are doing that voluntarily.
And yes, it certainly is true that we both accept certain legal or moral premises in that contract.
And that is a voluntary and competitive situation.
So, for instance, this gentleman says that if I enter into a contract, go to a restaurant or take a job or whatever, that that is a voluntary contract, which it certainly is.
But it is a competitive and voluntary contract.
In other words, I can take any number of jobs.
I can start my own business.
I can decide to become a sugar daddy and sponge off some rich aunt or some rich woman or something like that.
So there's many, many options, and people are competing for my services, at least at some level, if anybody ends up hiring me.
And therefore, that is a voluntary and competitive situation that is entered into entirely voluntarily by both parties.
Now, to then inject a third party into that interaction called the state or the government, which basically just comes down to a bunch of people with guns, to then inject that third party Which is taking money by force to inject that third party and to say that third party who is going to tax everyone who has any kind of decent job and who is going to take that money by force to say that that third party who is taxing everyone through force taking their money through force is exactly identical to the two parties who are in a voluntary and competitive and optional interaction with each other is to conflate Voluntarism with coercion,
which is, of course, what always happens with statism.
Statists can't look at the initiation of the use of force involved in taxation and say, yes, it's force, yes, it's violence, and it's good.
So they have to redefine it in some other manner.
So another way of sort of analogizing this so that we take it out of the complicated realm of taxation and so on is to say that If you get married anywhere in the world, that I get to rape your wife.
Right? So once a month I get to rape your wife.
Then, can I reasonably say to you, well, since you have voluntarily decided to get married, you have also voluntarily involved yourself in a contract wherein I get to rape your wife.
In other words, by choosing voluntarily to marry your wife, you're also choosing voluntarily To allow me to rape your wife, in which case it's not rape.
And if you withhold your wife from coming to my house and letting me have at her, that you are denying a contract and therefore I am entirely justified in using force against you.
That is exactly the same logic as is being applied to taxes.
That you can inject yourself as an involuntary and universal third party And claim then that you can voluntarily and unilaterally and from a one-sided standpoint impose force or use force to extract value from other people as a third-party parasite to a voluntary two-party interaction.
And then anybody who withholds that value from you is attacking you or is withholding the payment of a just debt and therefore you can aggress against them.
So this is the same logic that if anyone gets married anywhere in the world that I am just saying, well...
I get to rape that person's wife, and if he disagrees, then he is withholding his wife's just payment of sex to me, and therefore I can compel her to have sex with me.
But the marriage is between the husband and the wife.
The marriage can't just be fastened onto by a third party who can impose his will.
Through force. I mean, it can be, but it's not morally justified.
And the contract that I have is between my employer and myself.
It has nothing to do with some third party who can just go to ride in with guns a-blazing and impose his will upon me from that standpoint.
So this attachment of a third party to a voluntary and competitive and optional interaction, which then magically transforms it into force and just initiation of the use of force, is not valid.
And of course, universally preferable behavior doesn't recognize any weird and abstract entities like the state.
What it basically means is that any rule that you allow to be valid for one person, you must allow to be valid for everyone.
I mean, if you define a horse with stripes as a zebra, then all horses with stripes that are, you know, stripes are biological and not painted on, are zebras.
You can't just sort of say, well, a horse with stripes This horse with stripes is a zebra, but that horse, which has exactly the same physical characteristics, is a rock or a cloud.
That wouldn't be science.
That would just be weird kind of made-up mysticism.
And same thing here. You can't say, well, one person can unilaterally inject himself into a two-party transaction as the third party and claim whatever he wants in terms of extraction of value from the two-party interaction.
But then, of course, everyone...
Everyone should be able to do that as well.
Everyone should be able to do that.
If it is perfectly logically and morally feasible and valuable and permissible to attach yourself like a lamprey, like a leech, to any voluntary competitive two-party interaction and thus initiate force because your imposition of your extraction of value is exactly the same as their voluntarism, then that should be true of everyone.
In which case, When I interact, I take a job with someone, if a third party can inject themselves into that interaction and extract whatever they want through the use of force, then clearly my wife should be able to intervene or inject herself into the sort of, as this person defines it, the quote, voluntary interaction between myself and the state and simply demand the taxes back.
Because if some guy in Ottawa or some guy in Washington or wherever can attach himself to my contract and take 50% of the money from it through the threat of force, and that's perfectly voluntary, then everybody has that power.
Everybody has that right. You can't just make up a right for this magical entity called the government.
If I wrap these rocks in the concept, the state, suddenly they are immune to gravity.
But it doesn't work like that in the physical world.
It doesn't work like that with ethics.
So, if it is perfectly valid and just to inject yourself as a third party into a two-party, voluntary, competitive interaction and take whatever you want, then the interaction which is defined as voluntary by this Coco fellow...
Which is the state taking money from me, my wife can then inject herself as a third party to that, quote, voluntary interaction, and take the money back, and then give it to me.
And then my boss can do it to my wife, and I can do it to my boss, and I can do it to my wife, and basically it all cancels each other out.
out.
If everybody has this ability, then it all cancels each other out and you still don't end up with a viable entity called the state at the end of it.
Now the next question that Coco responds to is whether or not taxes are theft.
They're And of course, I put forward the protection racket example, which of course is If I know that by building or by opening a restaurant in a particular Italian neighborhood or Vietnamese neighborhood or whatever neighborhood, that I'm going to have to pay, quote, protection money to the mafia, that's exactly the same as the government, right?
Except that the government is everywhere and you can't go anywhere without paying taxes to someone.
So he said, is a protection racket theft?
He said, whether or not it is theft is a question.
Do they actually provide protection from common criminals?
If yes, they are providing a service at a cost.
Thusly, not theft.
If no, then it is theft.
This is beyond the point.
Protection rackets are wrong because they extort the protection, which is unlike government.
So here is his argument.
He says, you have person X. He wants to open up a nightclub.
Before he does anything, he knows that he will have to pay taxes.
There are also deductions, so it is possible that he works it out such that he does not pay taxes.
On top of this, let's say he cannot afford to purchase the nightclub himself.
He has to rent. So he looks out, finds a good nightclub, starts renting.
He gets a business license before he ever hires any other people.
He has two costs at least.
One is rent, and the other is taxes.
He accepts these as a cost, or why else would he continue on?
Let's jump ahead to the grand opening.
Everything is running well. His books are balanced.
He is in many contracts, be these literal pen and paper contracts or simply implied contracts.
If this man does not wish to honor one or more of these contracts, he will be accused of theft or similar crimes.
Which contract they break should not depend in any way.
You can simply look at the free market value or similar of such a crime and give the appropriate punishment.
Albeit I tend to have been swayed quite heavily by Stefan in that police should no longer be using violence as the punishment.
However, such non-violent punishments I think are not necessarily stateless, only capable.
Sorry, I don't know what that means. So he says, a man in a nice suit requests that a shopkeeper pay excessive sums for insurance while his goon makes comments about how flammable the place is and the risks of crime.
When he opened the store in the neighborhood, he implicitly agreed to pay the cost needed to keep up the store.
You would need to show that the extortion occurs before the, let's say, nightclub is ever created, and they somehow threaten the existence of this non-existent nightclub.
The fact here is that the cost of the nightclub being taxed is universal knowledge.
You know for a fact that if in the USA or Canada, you will have to pay taxes.
The mafia extortion, on the other hand, is not universal knowledge.
Many of these people open businesses thinking they do not have to pay any money to a mafia.
These mafia people often come into the story well after the fact and threaten the businesses if they do not pay.
To make sure your example is valid, Sorry, to make your example valid would be the potential business owner is aware, without the man in the nice suit coming and stopping by, that he will have to pay rent taxes and a percentage to the mafia.
He then accepts those terms and ventures into creating his business.
There is absolutely nothing wrong here.
No man in a nice suit is coming with a thug to create extortion.
He previously agrees to pay them for protection.
If he did not agree to paying that protection money, he simply...
It has to not create the nightclub.
Issue solved. Now, that example of where all business owners or potential business owners are aware of the fact that they must pay protection money, chances are the police would know also.
So chances are that such a mafia would be shut down, given that police are capable of finding actual evidence of extortion and not just business owners giving money to them for protection.
By what principle is it a valid argument there but not a valid argument here?
Well, again, this is a very interesting argument, and this gentleman is to be admired for his tenacity, if not his universal application of logic.
So his argument here is that you know in advance that you're going to have to pay taxes, and therefore the paying of the taxes is not extortion, but simply a contract which you are entering into by creating your business.
Again, I'm not exactly sure how it is justified that only the people who call themselves the government have this power.
Is it not the case that I can...
Like if a new development is being built, and I stick leaflets in the, I guess, in the real estate agent's office or whatever, or the developer's office who's selling the homes, I stick a leaflet in saying that if you move in here, I'm going to open a school in the neighborhood, and if you move into these houses, I'm going to take $10,000 a year from you.
To pay for the school, whether you have children, whether you send to the school, your kids to the school or not, whether you homeschool them, it doesn't matter.
You are still going to have to pay this $10,000 to support my school if you move into this neighborhood.
And if I'm allowed to do that, then the first person I'm going to do this to is to this gentleman.
And then I'm going to be able to say, well, if you continue to use your bathroom, then I am going to ask you for $500 a month.
To continue to use your bathroom.
And what I will do is I will give you access to my premium podcasts so that you get a service, a quote service in response to the $500 a month.
And if you don't want to continue using your bathroom, and I'll put a webcam in there to make sure that you do, that's no problem because then you can always go to the restaurant or the coffee shop down the street every time you need to go to the washroom, whether it's 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, or you can pee into a cup and then take that cup down there or whatever.
Because this would be exactly the same, and I provide a service to you, which is you can have access to my podcasts, and I then put a condition upon you, which is I tell you in advance, if you continue to go to your bathroom, then you owe me $500 a month in return for my podcasts,
and whether you download them or not, or whether you like them or not, And I'm providing you alternatives, which is if you don't want to continue using your washroom, you can just go to the washroom across town.
But you just can't use your bathroom if you use somebody else's bathroom.
Well, that is a perfectly valid situation.
Now, he's going to say, well, but I didn't know that when I moved into the house.
But so what? Governments raise taxes all the time.
Governments raise taxes all the time.
So the fact that I'm extending my power to your bathroom, which wasn't the case when you moved in, doesn't matter at all because governments raise taxes all the time.
Taxes were like when I was a teenager, when I first started working, taxes were about half what they are now.
And if you count inflation, my money value has gone down by like 60 or 70 percent.
That's something I never contractually agreed to when I started working.
And when I start working in a long-term job, The taxes that go up there, this gentleman is going to say, are perfectly valid.
If no tax increases are ever valid, and tax increases will always be imposed upon people who are already working who did not agree to that level of taxation when they first started working, if no tax increases are ever valid, then no state is ever valid because all states rely on taxes being imposed which weren't imposed before.
I don't exactly see how that analogy doesn't follow the particular model that he has.
So, if I can't just go and tell people who are moving into a new neighborhood that they owe me $10,000 to pay for the school that I'm setting up nearby, which they're welcome to send their kids to or not, or whether they have kids or not, doesn't matter.
Whether they're retired and they're never going to have children, doesn't matter.
They still owe me the $10,000 a month.
If I'm not allowed to do that, then it's hard for me to understand exactly why or how that is not valid.
Now, so foreknowledge of that issue I don't think particularly makes it right.
Foreknowledge of an issue does not particularly make it right.
So, let's take another analogy of the situation.
When we look at something like slavery, when a baby is born, He is not a slave, obviously.
I mean, he may be owned or whatever, but he doesn't act as a slave.
You don't give the baby a hoe to mow down the back 40 or something.
The baby is not a slave when he's born.
And then what happens is, around the age of 7 or 8, when he becomes economically viable in terms of being able to do work around the plantation or whatever, then he is told, look, you are now a slave.
And if you continue to live with your family...
Then you will owe 90% of your labor to the plantation owner.
And what that means is that basically the plantation owner has to give some money in living quarters back to the slaves, otherwise they starve to death and he loses his investment.
So the slave is effectively taxed as something like 80 or 90%, at least back in the sort of 17th century.
So, instead of the current Canadian sort of 60% taxation, you as a slave will be taxed at 80%, and you will not be allowed to change jobs or whatever.
Sorry, but you can always run away, right?
You can always flee, you can always leave, or you can always apply to leave, but the only place that you can go is to another plantation.
So you have to leave all of your friends and family behind, and the only place that you can go is to another plantation.
Or you can go and live in the woods and hope that nobody catches you, but you will always be hounded for registering with a plantation owner.
So the child is then in a state of non-slavery.
Or non-practical slavery, or effectively being taxed at 0%.
And then he is told, look, if you stay here, you will be taxed at 80%.
In other words, you will be a slave.
And you can choose to go to another plantation, where you will be taxed at 80%, or maybe some places will be 70%, some places will be 90%.
But you get to choose...
Who owns you? You get to choose the form of labor or the location of the labor wherein you get to be a slave.
So here we have a situation where a child is moving from a state of non-slavery to a situation of informed slavery.
In other words, he's saying, if you stay here, you will be taxed at 80% and you will be a slave.
But you can always try and go somewhere else, right?
You can always try and move somewhere else.
If another plantation owner will have you, this process will take a couple of years.
It will be highly expensive and may not work.
And this is the case which occurs.
If you want to go and get a green card in the U.S., it will take a couple of years, it will be very expensive, and it may not work.
You may move down there and then you are on some sort of paper which is more temporary and then it gets pulled or yanks and you have to move back.
So it's highly risky to go to another plantation.
So this idea that you don't have to pay taxes because you can leave the country is directly analogous to this, a child then entering into a situation of slavery.
He knows ahead of time, like, if you decide to stay here, then you are automatically going to be taxed at 80% and be a slave.
Well, he's got foreknowledge of what happens, which is the foreknowledge of the nightclub owner building who then results in this having to pay taxes.
the people who buy the house in the new development have quote foreknowledge of the $10,000 per year that I'm going to extract from them through force and if they don't pay me because they have quote voluntarily decided to pay me by moving in there although the contract is actually between themselves and the person who makes the building, the contractor by voluntarily moving there they have agreed to quote pay me and so on
although of course anyway they're moved someone's going to have they don't have an option to avoid this contract right they can move to some other place so they can but everywhere they go they're going to have to pay $10,000 or more And what happens if the following year I then up it to $12,000 unilaterally with no competitive bids?
Do I get to then just jack it to $10,000, $20,000, $30,000?
At what point does this become ridiculous where you just say this is simply extortion?
This has nothing to do with a valid or moral contract.
So, I don't particularly see how a foreknowledge of taxation thus justifies taxation any more than a foreknowledge that your wife is going to get raped after you marry her.
Or, of course, she's going to get raped if you don't marry her, too.
But after you marry her, your wife is going to get raped.
I don't know how then the marriage then sanctifies that rape.
It doesn't. It doesn't make it moral, right?
It doesn't make it moral at all.
It's the use of force that we're talking about here, not...
Sort of any, quote, contract.
And this is, of course, the magical mystery of this contract, right?
I mean, you don't sign a contract.
You don't voluntarily agree to anything.
You don't voluntarily agree to anything.
Nobody voluntarily agrees to pay taxes and say, oh, well, you get to stay.
If you stay in the country, you're, quote, voluntarily agreeing to pay taxes.
Well, that's like me saying that if you stay in the apartment, then you're voluntarily agreeing to pay me the $500, right?
For the, quote, privilege of listening to my premium podcasts or whatever, right?
So that doesn't seem to make much sense to me at all.
But let's move on to the next point.
He writes here later, he says, I'm dispelling the claim that taxes aren't voluntary.
The sheer fact that you can leave makes them voluntary.
This, to me, is directly analogous and equivalent to a child...
Who is being beaten and who is six years old.
Such a child can conceivably leave and make his way in the world.
But that does not mean that if he stays, he is voluntarily accepting and sanctifying morally his beatings.
It's just that it's very difficult for him to leave, and he's born into the situation, which is analogous to taxes, that we're born into a particular country and have to submit to the violence.
And yes, we can certainly go elsewhere and so on, but so can a child of six or seven run away and attempt to make his living on the streets through begging or whatever.
And so I don't really see, again, how that particularly makes sense.
So he says, The government, however, isn't going to say, get out. Unless you aren't a citizen anyhow.
There are many other options, however, such as take a job where you pay no taxes, or use deductions and similar avoidance methods to not pay taxes, or democratically change it so taxes become voluntary.
Then deal with the consequences of that choice.
I do believe that the USA and their Articles of Confederation basically proves that point.
Well, this is very interesting.
So he's saying that if you can voluntarily convince everyone else That it's wrong to have to pay taxes, then you can change the situation so that you don't pay taxes, and that becomes voluntary, and the ethics really haven't changed.
But again, I don't really understand how convincing a whole bunch of other people that something is wrong suddenly changes it from required to no longer required.
So, let's continue to go on with this gentleman's arguments.
Now, since the argument is put forward that those in the government can take money from you by force as a result of you being born into a country and earning a living, what that fundamentally means is that those in the government own everything.
Because if he uses the example and says, well, your landlord can charge you money for renting you an apartment, that's because the landlord actually owns everything.
The apartment building, right?
The landlord owns the apartment and therefore when you move in, you are entering into a contract which is you're taking the use of somebody else's property and you're paying them rent for that.
So the only way that this can be justified In an analogous kind of way is if you say that those people who claim to represent the government actually own everything and are charging rent for everything in Canada.
Now, of course, this is all a co-ownership position, right?
Because the government doesn't claim that it owns everything in a communistic manner and doesn't allow any other ownership.
But it's more of a fascistic model insofar as your landlord is allowed to own the building, but the government is an implicit co-owner of the building insofar as it can then charge property taxes.
In other words, you rent from the apartment owner, but the apartment owner is essentially renting from, quote, the government.
And what that means is that the government is the implicit co-owner of absolutely everything in the country.
Every scrap of land that exists.
Because if you go and build a cabin in the woods, the government can come and start charging you property taxes and so on.
So if the premise is then put forward that the government is the co-owner of everything, then...
What is being said is that since the government is an amorphous beast that sort of changes, right?
You get new political leaders every couple of years.
What it means is that people can magically come into universal ownership of everything in Canada or America or England or Bahamas or whatever.
They can magically come into ownership of these things simply through the act of being elected.
And it's hard to understand what property rights mean if something that you create or fashion or trade for is something that you own.
Whereas, something that, like when you become a politician or everybody bestows upon you the subroquay president or whatever, or leader, that you then get full ownership rights over everything, because the ability to evict people from their property if they don't pay you is full ownership rights.
Like, you are only renting your apartment from your landlord.
He gets to kick you out if you don't pay it.
His are the full ownership rights, but of course the government owns and can evict the landlord for non-payment of property taxes.
Therefore, the government has the full ownership over everything.
So it's hard to understand how property rights can be established.
Universal, absolute, total property rights can be established simply through a ballot or whatever, right?
Because if a group can bestow universal property rights upon others, then the government, those in the government clearly who claim those property rights over everyone, are clearly in the minority, right?
So then, all you have to do is, when the guy comes to collect your property taxes, if you don't pay them, you simply have to get a couple of friends over and say, we vote that we now own this, and I am in full proposition of everything in Canada, and now you owe me property taxes because I now own everything and everybody has to pay me rent.
It's just made up fairy tales around ownership, right?
It's got nothing to do with any kind of moral argument, it's just that they have the guns, right?
So, I don't know how property can be established in any way, shape, or form if it can just be made up by a majority, sort of, quote, putting a leader in charge of the entire property.
Why that is not available to everyone is not exactly clear to me.
So why, when the guy comes to collect my taxes, my wife and I don't say, sorry, we've just had a vote, and Steph is now the property owner of everything in Canada and can now collect taxes from everyone.
Why is it that only certain people have that right and not other people?
So... And our friend Coco says exactly as much as this, right?
And he says, the government spread itself by force and took possession of the land.
The government at that point owned the land.
It then sold the land to the people.
This is not allodial.
I don't know what that means. So in reality, it is like selling you a car, but they still own it.
You just can drive it around and sell it and everything.
The original owner didn't sell all rights to you.
As for the because they say so part of it, you bought your computer from a computer store.
Who says you own that computer?
Is it because you say so?
No, you own it because you in essence bought the entire rights of that computer.
The land you have not bought the entire rights of.
You may call it leasing the land from the government.
Governments often continue to own land to this very day.
And the interesting question here, of course, is that The government spread itself by force and took possession of the land, killed off the natives and so on.
And so this is ownership through force, right?
And so here, this is simply the claim to ownership based on violence, not based on legitimate possession, creation, trade, voluntarism, or anything like that.
And he says, you bought your computer from a computer store.
Who says you own that computer? But that's not the important question.
The important question is, why does the guy in the computer store own the computer?
Not whether he transfers the right to you or whatever.
Why does the government own the land?
Why do those who get voted in suddenly gain magical possession over everything in Canada, and then when they leave office, immediately they lose magical possession for everything in Canada, and some new guy who gets voted in suddenly gains his magical ownership rights?
That's the real question, right?
So the real question is why our governments consider legitimate ownerships of everything right now.
He says, Force is not a legitimate way of gaining any form of property, somebody argued.
And Coco responded, said, It's very unfortunate that wars have been waged and land has been taken from, say, the Native Americans or whoever.
Your proposal, on the other hand, doesn't seem to address this.
Furthermore, you are clearly speaking about the whole taxation is your property and it is taken by force.
Well, given you haven't refuted my previous points that basically place taxation on par with paying your bill at a restaurant, if you refuse to pay either of those, it is theft.
The response to theft in society can be dealt with in many ways.
Arresting a person can be done in a non-violent way.
That's not true. The violence starts to occur when you resist arrest.
Well, that's just silly. That's like saying rape is exactly the same as lovemaking.
It only becomes rape if the woman resists.
That's just sick. The police or whoever defend themselves may need to use violence to stop these people from hurting each other, which from what I've listened to, self-defense is not something you guys oppose.
Furthermore, I see issues in your monopolistic system that stops people from taking part in society.
So I don't see that as a practical way of eliminating police and arresting people.
Again, this is the kind of twisty, nonsensical fog that people get into when they're attempting to justify ownership and violence in this kind of way.
So wars have been waged and land has been taken from, say, Native Americans or whoever.
And so I don't quite understand how you can say that violence was used to take the property initially, but now it is perfectly just and exactly the same as paying a restaurant bill.
So, for instance, if somebody comes in and takes over a restaurant by force, do they then own that restaurant and can legitimately charge people for Those meals, whether or not they show up or not?
Because that, of course, is the issue as well, right?
When you go and consume a meal in a restaurant, you're consuming something in particular, and therefore you are paying a bill for something that you have consumed in particular.
This idea of collective nonsense, this is all collective nonsense.
Basically, the metaphor and analogy would be...
You open up a restaurant, and somebody steals that restaurant from you, shoots you, or kills you or poison to you, takes over that restaurant, and then sends bills out every week for $100 to everyone in the neighborhood, whether they come there and eat or not.
And that would not be considered legitimate in a statist society, therefore it can't be legitimate as the root of statism itself.
And then he says, one could argue that before Columbus landed, Native Americans had full legitimate ownership of the entirety of North America.
As nobody else had a claim to it.
Even if it were just one Native American who would own 99% of the land, it doesn't matter.
What I'm saying is that in a way, Europeans are guilty of this and we took all of the land by force.
So anyone who isn't Native American must leave North America and the Native Americans can figure out how to divide up the land.
So this is very interesting.
What he's saying is that those who have taken ownership illegitimately must leave the country.
Those who have claimed ownership through force must leave the country.
But that, of course, is the government in the present.
So on the one hand, he's saying, well, if you don't pay your legitimate debt to the government, you must leave the country.
But on the other hand, he's saying those who claim illegitimate universal ownership must themselves leave the country.
So either the citizens have to leave the country or the government has to leave the country, or those who claim to be the government have to leave the country.
This is the sort of nonsense that you get into when people start trying to defend the indefensible, right?
Because if illegitimate universal ownership is unjust and therefore those who claim it have to leave the country, then clearly it's the government who has to leave the country, not the citizens in a state of society.
So, this again, it's all just nonsense.
I can understand it's kind of compelling and it's kind of cute and it's kind of interesting, but you get into some really twisty kind of nonsense when you start trying to defend this stuff on any kind of rational basis.
And of course, most of this isn't true either.
I mean, the vast majority of the land that was transferred to the U.S. government was transferred by the owners of the Native American slaves, right?
By his very definition, those who are political or tribal leaders own everything and everyone, and therefore can charge whatever rents they want, and can buy and sell these people as they see fit, can make up rules and send them to prisons, or make this illegal, that illegal, and so on.
And so by his very argument, it was the tribal leaders of the Native Americans who owned everything and therefore can transfer that right of ownership to whoever they want.
So it's hard to say exactly why it's illegal to then take the land that was traded for trinkets and goodies and other things and alcohol and the bang sticks by the Native American leaders who by definition owned everything and therefore could transfer that ownership in the same way that the ownership is transferred of everything from one gang of thugs to another gang of thugs during an election.
So I'm not really going to spend any more time on this stuff just because it is sort of silly and tiring and tiresome.
But this is what happens when you start to come up with weird collective concepts and when you conflate voluntarism with coercion and optional and competitive contracts with universal and imposed contracts.
And when you come up with all these magical things like It's the magic vagina portal to individual morality or to individual amorality or immorality, which is that if you just happen to be born into a particular place, then you are suddenly under a massive obligation to pay off whoever is calling themselves the government, which is the same as, you know, I mean...
The government which this gentleman says illegitimately stole the land from the Native Americans.
But of course, if something is wrong in the beginning, then it's wrong all the way down, right?
If it's wrong to buy slaves in Africa and force them in slave ships over the Atlantic to America, then surely the fact that that was illegal and immoral and evil It does not justify it in the second or third generation.
It's like, well, yes, you were illegally taken from Africa and brought over in slave ships, but now, given that you're born in Canada, or born in America, you are now voluntarily choosing slavery unless you want to try and fill out the paperwork to go to some other plantation and be a slave there.
That, of course, makes no sense whatsoever.
And what I did was I asked this gentleman who was using terms of right and wrong and so on, but then he said he was a moral relativist, so then...
I asked him what his definition of morality was and how he worked it out from first principles, and he said he had no idea how to answer that question.
That's when I bailed out of the debate, right?
Because it's just a fog of propaganda which is designed to get you to kiss your chains.
And it's all just the most, frankly, it's the most repulsive nonsense wherein the most magical entities are created and rights are created.
That are completely opposite, are applied to two different people in an interaction.
And this, of course, is supposed to make us feel happy and grateful and voluntary.
That because our ancestors were captured and put in these slave pens of taxation, that now it's suddenly voluntary because we were born into them and the rules can be changed at any time.
This is highly offensive to anybody with any shred of dignity and desire for freedom.
But this, of course, is the kind of debates that you run into quite a lot with...
These mad moral monsters who just make up these mythical entities of the state and universal collective ownership and parasitically attaching yourself as a coercive third party to a two-party voluntary and competitive and optional contract and so on.
It is a real kind of magical parasitism but it's all too common so I thought this would be useful and helpful stuff to talk about.
So thank you so much for listening. I look forward to talking to you soon.
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