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April 9, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:16:08
1033 Late Night Conference - Microsoft, Unions and Debating...

A variety of topics in a late-night chat...

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Time Text
Yes, I'm in. Okay, hi.
Nice to meet you.
Sorry, I'm just getting coupled tunnel something fierce with all the typing I'm doing lately, so I thought this might be a little bit more, well, a little easier for me.
And remember, it's all about my convenience.
So you had some comments or questions about Microsoft?
soft.
I was just saying that before the Department of Justice case and I'm not sure if this was included in the Department of Justice case but it used to be where if you were a Microsoft OEM especially if you were a Windows OEM Microsoft would not allow you to enter preferred markets unless you were a non-compete signer,
which means you couldn't sell a computer that had any other operating system on there or a customized version of such and such piece of software.
It is contractual, so I'm not saying that's wrong or anything, but it's definitely not a very free market way to do business, in my opinion.
Okay, and you may well be right, but tell me what you mean by a free market then?
Oh, I just mean, you know, not using the heavy hand of government to secure your places in markets, I suppose.
Okay, and how is it that Microsoft, through putting this contract in with people, was using the heavy hand of government?
Well, they were relying on things like copyright law and a rash of other statutes.
I don't know if they were federal mostly or state, but definitely a few.
So, sorry, your issue is with copyright, not with this contract, is that right?
No, not specifically.
It was just one example I could think of with regards to Microsoft and them not being as competitive as they could be.
Okay, and I'm sorry, but I'm just having trouble understanding the language that you're using, because surely being able to enter into a voluntary contract that is enforceable is not a bad thing, right?
I mean, when I buy a house, it's voluntary for me to buy a house, and I expect the bank not to sell the house simultaneously to somebody else, right?
Right. So, I'm just trying to follow, and I'm not saying you're wrong, because I don't know enough of the details of this particular case, and we can certainly talk more about that, but I just want to, because you're saying, well, they entered into a contract wherein they would offer benefits to certain people in return for exclusivity, is that right?
I think that's basically the idea.
I don't know the details, but I'm pretty sure that was the reason why.
Not the reason why, but that was the reason for the agreement.
If you were a Microsoft OEM, you would have to agree to only sell their products or else you would have your benefits revoked, I guess.
Right. Okay.
And I'm not sure how that is not freedom?
I don't think that it's maybe the best way to...
To make your product popular in the marketplace, it seems like the merit of the product would be a little better to do it, maybe, rather than threatening a lot of lawsuits against people.
So, it's your opinion that they should have done it a different way?
Is that right? Yeah, my opinion.
Okay. Sorry, sorry.
I'm just trying to understand what this means.
So, you would prefer that Microsoft did it a different way?
I don't know if I would prefer it.
It's just my opinion that maybe they could do it better.
It's not my preference.
I really don't care that much what Microsoft does.
But... Just from a competitive standpoint, it seems like standing on the merits of your product is a little better than just requiring that your vendors only sell you, I guess.
Well, but they are in fact...
I mean, just my experience or my understanding of it, they are certainly standing on the merits of their product, right?
I mean, if I go to Dell, if I write an operating system this weekend...
And I go to Dell and I say, you can sell my operating system on your computers as long as you don't sell Microsoft or any other operating system.
What are they going to do? You are probably going to have a difficult time.
Well, they're going to laugh in my face, right?
Right. And so it is because of the strength of the Microsoft product...
That they are able to offer that benefit to people, right?
So, for instance, earlier, this would be, I guess, in the late 80s or early 90s, they had an agreement which caused a lot of people to be upset, which said that if you were a computer manufacturer like Compaq or whatever back then, if you... Sorry, whoever's just joined, if you could turn off your...
If you could mute yourself...
They had this deal where it said, okay, if you sell 10,000 computers, you can only get Microsoft DOS on your computers if you buy 10,000 copies.
Like, we're not going to sell you one unless we sell you them all, right?
Yeah. And that bothered a lot of people, right?
Upset and so on, right?
Yeah. I'm sure it did, yeah.
But, of course, I don't think that there was anything wrong with that.
And, of course, the reason that they did it, whether we agree with the statist solution to property rights in terms of intellectual property or not, and I certainly don't.
But the reason they were able to do it was because otherwise everybody would have just stolen the property, right?
right they would have just taken it free I mean because that's what was happening to DRDOS digital research's version and so
If Microsoft had said, okay, well, if you only sold 5,000 copies of DOS, even though you sold 10,000 computers, you only have to pay us for 5,000 because the computer field has always been so cutthroat in terms of the price, then all that would have happened is people would have reported that they'd sold far fewer copies than they actually had.
And they would have just copied this long before copy protection.
There was no Internet to activate the software.
And so they just would have ripped it off, right?
Maybe.
me.
Oh, no, no, not maybe.
Sorry. This part I know for sure, right?
Because that's what's happening.
I mean, that's what's happening.
I mean, Microsoft didn't just put this contentious business practice into place because they just woke up one day and said, that's it.
We want to, you know, make you corner people with this kind of stuff.
But they were just getting ripped.
Like, they would send people in to buy computers.
They would send people in to buy computers, and those people would not be charged for DOS. But DOS would be on the computer.
I mean, they did a lot of research.
They don't just wake up one day and say, ooh, let's do this contentious thing, right?
They were pretty desperate because stuff was just being handed out like candy.
Oh, you're talking about piracy, right?
Oh, yeah. If I understand. Oh, okay.
There was a lot of DOS piracy with the pre-installed versions.
Is that what you're saying? Yeah.
Okay. That doesn't surprise me.
I mean, if you go to countries, the country's intellectual property laws, you find that, you know, just take a trip down a busy street in Hong Kong and you can do just about anything you want without respect to intellectual property.
So that doesn't surprise me.
Right. I mean, and so that was the issue that they had, right?
Again, we could sort of argue about whether or not the status solution to intellectual property is correct, and I'm sure that we would say that it's not.
But certainly, if you have a contract with someone that says, every time you install my operating system, you owe me $50, if that's a voluntary contract that other people sign, then you have the right to have that contract upheld, I would say. Harvey, do you have headphones on?
Is it echoing?
Someone's echoing. I don't know who it is.
We've got like 10 people in the call.
I'm hearing you pretty good.
I'm not good. I'm not hearing too many echoes.
I'm hearing a little bit of bounce.
They're moving the microphone or anything.
Any echo? Okay, well, just if you're not talking, if you could mute, not you, Harvey, but other people, if you're not talking, that you could mute.
And, you know, again, this is something that I was, I listened to this podcast, actually a very good podcast called EconTalk, which is at econtalk.org.
I was talking about Macy's the other day and these economists and they were sort of saying, well, why is it that Macy has a shoe department?
What they should do is they should raffle off the floor space of their shoe department to some other vendor who comes in and sets their shoes so that they can constantly get the best people, get the best price, get competition and so on.
And economists go kind of crazy trying to figure out why they don't do that.
What could be the possible advantages and so on.
And this guy was saying, well, we don't need to.
What we know is that Macy's is a big successful store that's been around for a long time.
So if they're doing this, they have a damn good reason.
I remember reading an entire chapter in a book on economics.
Where they were sort of saying, well, why is it that popcorn is so expensive in movie theaters?
Because it costs pennies to produce and they charge like $2.50.
And the general consensus was that some people like to eat popcorn and some people don't.
And if you lower the price of popcorn, you have to raise the price of tickets.
Because movie houses make more profit off their concessions than they do off the movies.
So if you say, okay, well, popcorn costs me a nickel to produce, so I'll sell it for 50 cents, then you'll draw a lot of people in, but you'll have to raise the price of movie tickets, which will make them more expensive for people who don't like popcorn.
So they just try and find some happy balance and so on.
So the way that you'd approach this is you'd say, well, it doesn't really matter.
We just know it's optimal because there are lots of people fighting for movie-going dollars, and I'm sure that they've done the best that they can if they're in a free market situation.
We can be sure that they've done the best that they can to optimize it, and they have good reasons.
And I, for one, could never understand why they don't just sit down with a movie, like somebody who runs a movie house and say, why do you do this?
And they'll just tell them. I mean, I don't know why they just have to sit there and theorize in a vacuum.
It seems kind of almost like theologians.
But in the same way, if a highly successful company like Microsoft makes a business decision...
I mean, it may be the wrong decision, and certainly they have made bad decisions.
Windows ME, perhaps Vista, and the failure to sort of get up to speed on the internet relatively soon.
But... But I think that we can assume that they've done a lot of work to try and figure out what the most optimal solution is, if that makes sense.
Again, that doesn't mean that it's a perfect solution, but it means that they're dealing with a lot more knowledge than you and I will.
I generally would give them the benefit of the doubt, which doesn't mean anything other than that would just be my opinion.
But I would have a tough time arguing business decisions with one of the most successful businessmen in history.
Yeah. To me, that's sort of like saying, well, I think Einstein should have taken a different approach to relativity.
I mean, that takes some serious stones.
Some people have it, and maybe they're right, but I sure don't.
But it is a very different situation from a government environment, right?
Yes. And that's the part that I think, and this is just what was going on in the chat window, right?
That people don't like to – I'm not saying you, but people often don't really like to talk about that difference.
Everybody knows in their gut what the difference is between a private company and a corporation, right?
A private company, you don't have to lift a finger and you haven't given them any money.
But with governments, all you have to do is be born and you're on the hook in terms of having to provide them with half or a third of your income for the rest of your life or be thrown in jail.
And that's a huge difference and that's something that – that's something that people seem to spend a lot of time avoiding.
I'm not saying you, right? But people do.
I'm not sure exactly why.
Maybe it's just an ugly truth to look at.
I'm not sure. Yeah, I don't really know.
I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't say that, you know, Microsoft having maybe not the best contract is, you know, somehow immoral or anything like that.
I wouldn't make that. I wouldn't make that.
I wouldn't make that. I wouldn't make that.
I wouldn't make that. It just seems like, like, like, like, like, of free enterprise and competition that those, those, those, those, the team I'm sorry, I'm going to just have to interrupt you for a second.
We're getting a kind of broken record situation.
Do you have anything else using the internet or anything at the moment?
You're getting a kind of blurb, blurb, blurb sort of cycle on your language?
No, I don't have anything going that's sucking up, sucking up, sucking up.
If anybody else has a question or something, I can mute my mic.
Okay, yeah, sorry. I'm not sure why you're looping like that.
That's a new thing for Skype.
So, I know that we've got a T1 on the server, so I don't think it's that.
But, okay, if we don't have to spend a lot of...
I don't think it's the speaker thing, because normally that's not quite as precise as that.
You get an echo while they're talking.
And you think he said he was on headphones, but...
Okay, I think that was all that he wanted to mention.
If anybody else had any sort of questions or comments about that, I mean, I just, I find it, it's a really volatile topic.
I mean, we just had this fellow Charles who was in the chat window, and I am sorry for, you know, if I botched in and scattered the conversation as it was.
Who was saying, well, yes, the government, I have problems with government, but what about corrupt corporations?
And I think that there's a problem insofar as it's really hard for people to differentiate between the free market, the government, and predatory companies that use the government differently.
I mean, there's almost no bigger enemy of the free market than a large businessman or a big business person.
Because since there is a government with an almost infinitely deep public purse, we have the situation where… Companies can appeal to the government for protection.
And you can see this with things like sugar subsidies and farm subsidies and I guess the farmer subsidies and so on, that they're just constantly clamoring for government.
And then people say, well, in the absence of that government, those companies will still continue to do what they do.
So you've got these companies that prey on the taxpayers through the mechanism of the government.
And then people imagine like if you take away The supports for this bridge, this bridge will still stand, and the anarchist perspective, or I should say at least my perspective, is the complete opposite.
That if you take away the government, what you're doing is you're taking away a financial way of offloading the costs of enforcing protection from the companies to the government.
So it's sort of like slave owning, right?
So if you're a slave owner, the only way that that can be financially feasible or viable is if the government goes and catches your slaves for you and brings them back.
Because if the government stops, and this is how it happened in Brazil when slavery ended, the government just stopped catching slaves and bringing them back.
And if that happens, like if the government simply stops enforcing, say, an import ban on sugar, then what happens?
Well, the people who are currently benefiting from the artificially high prices in the US market because of an import ban or a high tariff on sugar...
What are they going to do? Are they going to all band together and pool their resources and start inspecting every container coming into the United States to see if there's any sugar in there?
And are they going to hire their own military?
Are they going to create their own court system?
Are they going to create their own prisons?
Of course not.
The only way that something like a sugar tariff is ever conceivably remotely sustainable is if you get the poor bastards who have to pay more for sugar because of that tariff to also pay for the enforcement of that tariff.
If you take the government out of the equation, It is no longer profitable to prey upon the people because you have to – each company would have to replicate or group of companies would have to replicate all of these essential government functions that are required for the pillaging of the population.
Like the Coast Guard, the customs officials, the import-export inspection crews, the prisons, the law courts, the military to enforce it all.
I mean it would be crazy.
There's no conceivable way that in the absence of a central collective agency of violence, that companies could conceivably afford to individually replicate the functions of government, especially since there wouldn't be a monopoly on government.
So what would happen is Sugar Company, if it even was deranged enough to try and come up with all these government replacements, would face some other parallel system that opposed it.
I mean it would never happen.
It could never conceivably happen.
It is only because there is this massive government power that exists that people want to hook into to use for their own benefit, to bribe the politicians, to steal from the people, to pay the enforcers.
If that is gone, the predatory corporations, which is what I think this Charles fellow was talking about, the predatory corporations will immediately and permanently vanish.
You can't have it as a fiscally productive approach to come up with your own replacement government as a private corporation as a means of stopping, say, all sugar that you don't want to come into the U.S. from coming into the U.S., So I just sort of wanted to – there's a big misunderstanding about that, that there are all these companies that prey on the taxpayers through political shenanigans and corruption and bribery and campaign donations and this and that and the other.
And if you take the government away, that all goes with it.
That all ceases with it.
If you can get somebody else to pay for the enforcement of your corruption, of your greed, then of course all that's going to do is exacerbate greed.
Once you have to pay for it yourself, it is such a staggeringly bad deal that there's just no way that it can be sustainable.
I actually have written an article or two on this where I've gone through some of the math, just that it is completely unsustainable for any sugar company or any group of sugar companies to attempt to To inspect every container coming into the US to make sure that there's no sugar imports coming in.
It just would never happen. They would be forced to go into the free market that way.
So anyway, I just want to sort of mention that to start off.
But I'm certainly happy to, if any other sort of questions are around, I'm happy to hear them or you guys can talk to each other.
It's up to you. You have to unmute yourself if you are about to talk.
Hey, how does this sound?
Is it less staticky than it was before?
I put headphones on this time and I plug directly into the sound card rather than using the built-in speakers with the external microphone.
That is pretty damn sexy.
You're turning me on. I have a- I have a- I have a- I'm going to have to interrupt you again.
We're just getting this ridiculous loop.
I don't know what is going on.
This is Harvey, right? If you could just type your question into the chat window.
I mean, you'll hear it if you ever hear this back as a recording, but it really is not possible.
I don't know what's going on if you've got something else or if you've got a really slow connection to the internet, but it is really...
Yeah, if you could just type there, that would be excellent.
That would be excellent. That would be excellent.
that would be no I'm just kidding that was me gotcha yeah I don't know what your version You might want to upgrade.
I'm not sure. Oh, latest version.
Yeah, that's strange. I don't know what it is.
But it's happening. Everyone's getting the same problem with the looping in your audio.
Anybody else while he's typing the question in?
If anybody else had a question or comment about that or any other topics.
Well, I'm just curious to get your perspective on how...
You're aware of how Gates got his start, right?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, he got an exclusive deal with IBM. And he bought his operating system off some guy for $75,000 or something like that, if I remember rightly. Right, and I'm not sure...
I mean, I'm not sure how legitimate these sources are or whatever, but the claim is that before that deal was inked, he was telling IBM he already had it.
The argument is that he was sort of lying to IBM just to get the deal.
Yeah, but I mean, I don't really care about that stuff too much.
I mean, A, we'll never know for sure, I'm sure.
And B, that doesn't matter, right?
I mean, this is done in business quite a bit, right, where you oversell what you've got in order to get investors so you can build what you say you're going to.
I'm not saying that it's necessarily the highest standard of ethics, but the real issue is if I say I have a prototype half-finished and if you give me $100,000, I'll deliver the full working version in six months.
The only important thing there is, do I deliver the working version in six months?
Now, if I don't deliver the working version in six months, then ownership of the company is lost from me or whatever, right?
Right. And also, there's some responsibility there on IBM's part, too, for not actually checking up and...
Well, Bill Gates was like 12 at this time, right?
I mean, please, you know?
My dad's going to drive me to the meeting is not usually something that is a very big confidence builder, right?
Well, I guess he dropped out of college in order to do this, but...
And now that I think about it, the way that he secured his position after...
After that... You're right.
It really doesn't matter how to start it.
I mean, fundamentally.
Yeah, I mean...
And I think you made another point in the chat window, which was that...
Some companies that currently are gigolopolis would certainly not be so in a free market, and I think that's entirely true.
If you look at some of the companies like Archer Daniels Midland, like Boeing, and all of these other kind of companies, McDonald's, Douglas, and so on, these companies are massive bloated monstrosities because they're getting...
PepsiCo and Disney and...
Well, no. I'm just thinking more of the ones involved in the military-industrial complex.
They're getting those regular cannonballs of state cash directly to the stomach, right?
And those ripples go out quite a bit.
Pharmaceutical companies and so on who basically bribe politicians for subsidized drugs and extended patent protections, those companies would not be nearly as big.
Unions, of course, would be much smaller and leaner.
There would be an entirely different – I shouldn't say entirely – a largely different economic landscape.
There's a great quote from a show that I'll pump again called The Wire in the second season where a union man says rather in bitter – in a rather embittered manner to someone after he – He donates a lot of money to a political campaign and basically gets screwed out of it because someone else donated more.
And he's like, you know, we used to build stuff in this country.
We used to build stuff in this country.
And now all we have is our hand in the next guy's pocket.
And... That, of course, is just an example of those that live by the sword shall die by the sword.
Unions banded together and sucked about $50 trillion out of the US economy, thus driving an enormous number of companies overseas.
So they used politics to artificially inflate their own income by making sure that the enforcement of anti-scab practices was all outsourced to the government.
So they got to keep all the profits of having a quasi-monopoly and they got to outsource and screw the taxpayers with the cost of enforcement of that monopoly, which is almost always the case.
And then, of course, unions get really pissed off because politicians don't care about them that much anymore.
And why do politicians not care that much about unions anymore?
Because they don't represent that many people anymore.
Because the high cost of union labor has driven a lot of jobs overseas, right?
So... That's to me kind of funny where the union guy is embittered because politics isn't working for him anymore.
But of course if you live by the sword, you die by the sword.
If you rip off people through the political realm, then of course you will end up being left destitute.
Unfortunately, of course, it is – it was a generation or two prior that made the real killing in the union activities, right?
The mob bosses and so on.
And now everybody is just left with the shit heap that's left over.
But that is a common sentiment, right?
That, oh, the good old days when politics used to work for us and now they don't.
And of course now, I mean politicians don't give a rat's ass about the average voter.
I mean, frankly, all the politicians care about is moneylenders in China and Japan, right?
I mean, it's got nothing to do with the average.
Unions don't matter at all in the average.
They can survive with unions being pissed off at them, at least for the remainder of their term.
But if the money masters in, say, China or Japan or Luxembourg actually has a lot, strangely enough, or England decide to turn off the tap, I mean, the government collapses in about a week.
So, of course, they've got their ears tuned to those people a lot more than anyone else.
But anyway, I just sort of wanted to point that out.
The economic landscape would be very different, and a lot of the companies that are very large at the moment would not be.
Do you think that, given the problematic nature of large corporations, do you think that it's just propaganda that gets people hyper-focused on corporate wrongdoing rather than government wrongdoing, or do you think there's more to it than that?
Well, I think that they're taught a lot to dislike corporations.
Of course, people have a lot more dealings with corporations than they do with governments, right?
You work for a corporation.
A corporation delivers food to your grocery store.
Corporations are around in a way.
But fundamentally...
The reason that people pick on corporations is because corporations will listen to people, right?
And governments don't, right?
So, I mean, we've talked in this conversation about how in many, many interactions, the most rational person is the one who gets picked on, right?
Right? Oh, that's a good point.
Right. So the person who is the most responsive and the most rational will be the one who gets picked on.
We just had this Christian fellow come by.
Tyler, his name was on the board.
I don't know if it's his real name or whatever.
But he came by and was talking about how great his parents, who were Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints people, and he was talking about how great his parents were and what wonderful people they were and so on.
And I said, well, you know, sorry to be blunt, but that's hard for me to understand because they subscribe to a belief system that says put atheists to death and lots of other people too.
And, you know, a belief system that advocates rape and genocide, murder, slavery and all this kind of stuff.
So I said, if you're saying that people can believe all of that stuff and still be happy and good people, then that's a little hard for a philosopher to process because we go with reason equals virtue equals happiness.
And if the beliefs are irrational and the actions that they advocate are evil, clearly it's not.
You don't have to be that complicated to go with rape or genocide as evil.
Then it's hard to understand how they can be happy and wonderful people.
And this guy got really angry at me, right?
And why did he, rather than talk to his parents about the limitations of the, to say the least, of the ethics in the Bible.
Now why did he get mad at me rather than go and talk to his parents?
Because obviously it was creating a lot of anxiety in him.
Well, because you're a lot less dangerous than they are.
I'm not at all dangerous, right?
He knows that I'm not going to mess him up, right?
I'm not going to attack him.
I'm not going to stalk him.
I'm not going to, I don't know, report his IP as a spam monster.
I'm not going to call the, you know, I'm not going to, I mean, I'm a reasonable guy on the internet, right?
I might get a little irritable or whatever, but he's got nothing to fear from me, right?
Absolutely. Right.
And it's the same thing with corporations versus the government.
And it's the same reason why whenever you steer people towards the fact that the government uses violence to get what it wants, they always want to turn off down the corporation cul-de-sac, right?
Yeah, that's true.
Because they know that corporations don't have armies.
They know that corporations can't audit their tax returns.
They know that corporations can't plant drugs in their car.
They know that corporations don't run armies that start wars.
I mean, that's not to say that there aren't corporations who get paid for that like Blackwater, but that money still comes from the government.
It wouldn't exist without it. So people want to talk about corporations.
I'm sorry? Yeah.
I say every made-for-TV movie is about some little guy making good against a corporation.
Oh yeah, and it's about evil and corrupt corporations and so on.
And the reason is that people can do something about corporations, right?
I mean, you had, what, 10 million people picketing against the Iraq War?
If you had 10 million people picketing against Coca-Cola, the company would take a massive blow, right?
Yeah, that's true. But the governments are like, fuck you, you hippies, we're going to blow up Iraqis anyway, right?
So people want to veer away from talking about the evils of the government in the same way, and this is to personalize it perhaps a little too much, right?
But in the same way that when I started talking about the evils that were in my family, everybody just got mad at me, not at the people who had done those evil actions, right?
Yeah. Sure, that makes a ton of sense.
But in the case of corporations, too, you also have people, individuals, who want to actually use the same gun that the corporation's using.
They just want to turn it in the opposite direction, right?
Yeah, for sure. They're competing for the violence of the state, control over the violence of the state.
So it makes a lot...
Go ahead. Sorry, I was just going to say, it doesn't make any sense then to rail against what it is you're trying to gain control over.
I mean, really. Yeah, this is a psychological map that is purely subjective, and it's just my way of working with it.
It doesn't mean anything, but the way that I think about it is that...
The government is like the crazy-ass abusive parent, and corporations are like the younger siblings.
Now, the younger siblings, they do sometimes weasel and curry favor with the parent and so on, but everybody gets mad at the younger sibling because he's helpless and dependent and whatever, right?
But nobody has the balls to talk to the parents, right, who everyone is terrified of.
And to me, that's the same kind of thing, right?
You start talking about the basic differentiation between a private company and a government, which is that a private company cannot impose unchosen positive obligations upon you, cannot throw you in jail, does not have the power of taxation, does not have the power of war, does not have the power of passing its own rules, does not have the power of the gun.
That's pretty significant.
That's pretty significant.
I mean, that's like having no clue of the difference between lovemaking and rape.
Now, it's true that people who have sex often have sex for bad reasons or do bad things, but it's still a voluntary interaction.
And if you don't know the difference between sex, consensual sex and rape, then I'm not sure what you're doing in the realm of ethics.
But you're not doing anything particularly intelligent.
And in the same way, people don't want to talk about the violence of the state because they then have to kind of say, well, that's the big issue.
And then they have to face their own helplessness and their own fears.
And it's bound up with a lot of family stuff.
And sorry for the people who are joining this relatively new.
This is a pretty dense sprint through some of the core concepts that we work with here.
But it's really, really uncomfortable for people, right?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. And they'll do a lot to avoid that.
And they'll go back to talking about corporations because then there's a fantasy that someone can control the problem, right?
So the fantasy that there's some agency out there that's going to do right, that's going to curb the bad guys, that's going to do all these wonderful things, that's going to be the sheriff in the town, that's going to be the high noon Gary Cooper situation or whatever.
If you talk about...
Sorry, go ahead. That's just a rationalization of their own desire to use force.
Well, it may be.
It may be their own fear of force as well.
But when you talk about corporations, you have a kind of brain-dead solution.
And that's not to say that everybody who has this solution is brain-dead.
I mean, you've got some brilliant people who have this solution.
But it's like, how is power going to be dealt with in a complex industrial or post-industrial society?
Yeah. The government's going to do it.
Well, to me, that makes about as much sense as saying, where did life come from?
Well, God created it, right?
It's a complete and total non-answer.
Because if you just say, well, how are we going to deal with the problem of power?
Well, we're going to create this massive centralized agency with acre after acre of prison cells and tens of thousands of men under arms and nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers and bombs and scuds, right?
And we're going to give this agency the power to wage war and pass laws and do whatever the hell it wants, and that's how we're going to solve the problem of power.
It's mental, right?
I mean, that's what you would expect from a crazy man, right?
Yeah, a Stalin.
Yeah, how are we going to deal with the problem of power, with the fact that power corrupts with fear of the power of the corporation?
We're going to create a huge, massive, centralized, brutal dictatorship with the power to tax, with guns, with weapons, with bombs, with anything that it can get its hands on, with the power to print money, whatever money it wants.
That's how we're going to deal with the problem of power and corruption.
We're afraid of power.
Yeah, like I'm afraid of power, so I'm going to create the biggest, most monstrous power the world has ever seen, and that's how I'm going to deal with the problem of power.
Well, it's an anti-answer.
It's the opposite of an answer, because it's a pseudo-answer, right, as we talk about, or as I talk about in the UPB book.
It is a complete non-pseudo answer.
It's like saying, where did the world come from?
God made it.
What's right?
Well, whatever some crazy sun-baked people in the 5,000 years ago wrote down when they had no knowledge of modern science or tools of knowledge, whatever they said, it's a complete and total non-answer.
But it is an answer that satisfies people in a small kind of way.
Or what it does is it allows them to push away the question.
Say, well, where did life come from?
God made it. Okay, I don't have to think about that shit anymore, right?
Because it's hard to think about that stuff, right?
In the case of a government.
Yeah, but in the same way they say, well, how are we going to deal with corporate power?
Well, the government's going to do it.
And that's just kind of an answer that lets people put that question away.
Okay, well, what if I got an answer?
We'll pass a law. The government's going to regulate it.
The government's going to do it. And that's what I'll call an answer.
The fact that it's a complete and total anti-answer...
then go to the government and you say, well, who's going to manage the government?
People's brains kind of futz out, right?
In the same way that when you go to Christians, you say, well, where did life come from?
Well, if life exists, God must have created it.
Oh, so everything that is alive or lives or has conscious existence must be created.
Well, you get turtles all the way down, the infinite aggression problem, right?
Well, God exists, therefore who created God?
They futz out, right?
Oh, sure, sure, sure.
And it's the same thing when you say, okay, So if the government exists to control power, who controls the government, which is the greatest power?
People are just like...
It does not compute.
Right. Well, and the significant difference, though, between the state and the church, though, is that...
Or at least what I was thinking was that it's kind of a...
It's an attempt at externalizing that undefinable fear of power, right?
And kind of giving it definition and a place that you can go to actually see it and know that it's...
Or not know, but...
The buildings and the pomp and the circumstance and everything is kind of a manifestation that you can...
Yes, that's true.
A decentralized free market DRO situation, there's not a central totem pole that all the savages can dance around, right?
Right, exactly.
That's exactly what I'm saying. I mean, we'd live in a world with no countries, right?
We'd live in a world with no flags, with no national anthems, right?
With no armies, with no us, no them, no colors on the map, no borders to pass through, no passports.
You just get up and go wherever you want.
Sorry? No gold-domed buildings that you visit once a year, right?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there'd be no C-SPAN to watch.
There'd be no politics to watch.
There'd be no laws to follow, no people to root after, no ticker tape parades for people involved in mass murder.
There'd be none of that stuff.
And I think people would just be seriously disoriented.
Oh, for sure. Absolutely.
Absolutely. But I think that the fundamental issue, as I talk about in this untruth thing, right?
I mean, the fundamental issue is that people aren't afraid of power.
The fundamental thing is that they're just afraid of knowledge, right?
They're afraid of knowledge of their own limitations.
They're afraid of, like, if everybody around you says, this is the answer, and it takes you about five seconds thought to realize that it's completely not an answer, people are just afraid of being attacked for that, right?
Sure, it's social metaphysics, right?
Yeah, yeah, no, it's just God is fear of other people, while statism is just fear of other people, right?
I mean, how many people want to go down to the south and say, I don't support the troops.
I think they're murderers. In fact, I know they are.
That would be pretty dangerous.
That would be pretty dangerous, right?
And so people are just like, fuck, I'll stick a yellow ribbon on my car.
What do I care, right? Or avoid it and hope nobody asks you about it.
Right, right. And this is why I've read this thing.
I've got to tell you, I thought it was staggeringly brilliant.
I'm sort of plowing my way through this book called The White Man's Burden.
Why the West's effort to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good.
And there was one thing in here I thought it was just fantastic.
Let me just see if I can dig it up.
It's everything that we talk about here to the nth degree.
What happened was, when the Soviet Union fell...
There was this kind of, quote, shock therapy that was put in, where people just went and said, okay, we're going to turn everything over to the free market, and you all now have pure capitalism.
Of course it wasn't. It wasn't pure capitalism or anything close to it.
But what happened was, I'll just read this little section here.
Do-do-do-do-do.
This guy, he writes, he says, Economists more familiar with the pre-reform Soviet Union were much more prescient.
University of Maryland economist Peter Murrell, a long-time student of centrally planned economies, wrote a series of articles in 1991 to 1993 arguing against shock therapy as utopian social engineering.
He wrote to me recently that to try to convince other economists of his views was itself a utopian project, and he turned his attention to other subjects after 1993.
History vindicated Murrell's scathing description of shock therapy.
There is complete disdain for all that exists.
History, society, and the economics of present institutions are all minor issues in choosing a reform program.
Establishment of a market economy is seen as mostly involving destruction.
Shock therapists assume that technocratic solutions are fairly easy to implement.
One must reject all existing arrangements.
I love that sentence where he says, he wrote to me recently that to try to convince other economists of his views was itself a utopian project, and he turned his attention to other subjects.
I mean, I'm going to write to that guy and just tell him that that's just brilliant.
It's a lot about what we're doing, right?
Well, sure, because...
Just the whole idea of talking a statist out of people who invested their entire lives into that sort of thing.
You're not going to change them.
You're just not going to change them.
And that's of course why we give up on politics, right?
Well, certainly. Certainly.
I mean, to throw yourself at it in opposition is the same thing as throwing yourself into it in support.
It's just the opposite side of the same coin.
True. Alright.
Now, did anyone have any other questions or issues or comments?
I know we had some newbies in here and we did take a bit of a sprint through the wonderful world of some of the thoughts that we work on here.
Did anyone have any other questions or comments?
Or you can type them into the...
We had a fine lady in here who may have wanted to talk about her boyfriend.
We don't know. Okay, we have somebody who wanted to roleplay?
Absolutely. I always take the role of the slutty nurse, just in case you were wondering.
Oh, no microphone.
Sorry, the hand puppets.
I can't read them, but it certainly does look saucy.
So, yeah, we can give it a shot for sure.
Hello.
Can you hear me?
That's a little quiet.
Try again. Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi.
Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you.
I had to turn it up a little bit.
Don't start yelling, but yes, not too bad.
Okay. I'll try this.
Everyone is asleep right now.
So, I don't want to wake him up.
Steph, I just want to roleplay.
I just was debating a couple of hours ago with a friend of mine at college.
She studies...
I'm sorry to interrupt you for just a second.
I'm sorry to be annoying, but because I've had to turn you up so much, you can't move your microphone because that makes very loud sounds.
So just get your mouth in as close as you can, but try not to move the microphone if you don't mind.
And please, sorry, go on. You're debating with a friend of yours?
Oh yeah, okay, I'll try.
Hold on. Okay, I think I got it.
Yeah, I was doing a wedding with her, and she studies sociology, and the thing is that on my college, there will be, starting tomorrow, there will be a strike.
All the students are going to shut the university.
They're not going to let people in.
They're going to stop classes.
They're kind of the guys who put masks on and start to fight against the police or something like that.
And they're doing it because there will be Some changes in the university.
And most of the people doesn't agree.
And the thing is that she was saying that that's the right thing to do.
Because the majority wants to close the university and stop classes and start to fight.
And that was moral.
Almost every student had the obligation to, you know, to go on the strike and to start to fight against the government or something like that.
And I was saying that that wasn't moral at all.
That I didn't, they were not representing me, even though they claim to be doing that.
That the majority doesn't mean that I That I agree with them and they, you know, the whole democratic thing that she said that kind of was saying that the majority always create the moral rights to do stuff.
And I was trying to debate UPV with her, and it was kind of hard, I don't know, because she kind of avoided the topic, began to say that now, you know, a society makes the rules and kind of the rest of the people who doesn't participate in the political democracy has to kind of,
you know, Adjust?
Right. You could say?
Sure, sure. And yeah, that was like the roleplay that I wanted to do.
And do you want to take her role?
Yeah, yeah. I would like to do that.
Okay, well, I'll try and make this relatively quick, but I don't want to rush it.
But what I would do, the approach that I suggest, is you have to point out the gun in the room.
And that's what I was doing in the chat window earlier with Charles, right?
I wasn't pointing it out. I was just asking him what happens.
If you don't pay for a government school, well, obviously they come to your house with guns if you don't reply to the summons, right?
So if you want to try and get people arguing about whether society should make rules, arguing about what participation is valid, whether the majority should do this, to me, that's all a bunch of crap, not your crap, but her crap, that is like a big fog bank.
It's a big cloud around the gun in the room.
So, what I would do is say, so, if you want to support the people who are on strike, do you think that I have the right to shoot you?
And what would she say?
Hey, what do you mean?
What do you mean, like, to shoot you?
Excuse me. I don't get it.
We're not talking about that.
We're talking about democracy or participating in the thing that we'll get a benefit from.
Well, but we're asking a very basic question about the use of power, which is what we're talking about.
If you want to support the people who are on strike, can we say that I don't have the right to shoot you for your opinions?
That you're free to support the people on strike, right?
Yeah. Okay.
Now, I agree with that.
I think that you are perfectly free to make your own decisions about your support for the people on strike.
Do I have the right to disagree with you without being shot?
Yeah, yeah, you can, but it's morally wrong.
You're not participating in the people that we all want.
Well, no, no, we're not talking about society, right?
We're talking about you and I and what we believe and whether we're free to believe it.
I am perfectly happy for you to be free to disagree with me without facing any violence, right?
Yeah. You shouldn't be thrown in jail for disagreeing with me, right?
Yeah, sure.
And I shouldn't be thrown in jail for disagreeing with you, is that right?
Yeah, yeah, sure.
Okay, well then we're in perfect agreement.
That we should not have a law about this, because a law is always about someone getting shot or someone getting thrown in jail, right?
And if support or non-support for this strike is optional, then nobody should get shot for either supporting the strike or not supporting the strike, so there shouldn't be a law about it at all.
Yeah. Yeah, of course.
But nobody will shoot you.
You cannot participate or disagree.
The thing is that if you don't Participate in the conversations that we had earlier trying to get the social benefit that we try to agree and fight for our rights.
If you don't want to do that, nobody's going to cheat you or anything.
We're just going to close the university and For, you know, the only people that, the only way that we can, like, win this stuff against the government is just by, you know, going on strike and closing all the classrooms and stuff, classes.
Well, but what if a professor and I want to teach and learn?
And we voluntarily, we don't agree with the strike.
Now clearly, you said I should not be shot for disagreeing about the strike, right?
Yeah. So clearly, it doesn't mean much if I can't act upon my beliefs, right?
Yeah. Like, if I said, you have the right to strike, but you're not actually allowed to strike, you're allowed to believe that you should strike, but you're not actually allowed to strike, and if you do actually strike, then we're going to shoot you.
That would not be reasonable, right?
Yeah, of course not.
In the same way that if I disagree with the strike, I should be free to act on my beliefs, right?
Right. And to go to the university and get an education if somebody else disagrees with the strike and wants to teach me, right?
Are you willing to say that I should be shot for doing that and the professors should be shot for doing that?
I can't imagine that you would be.
No, no, of course not.
I like you. Yeah, I like you too.
So, we are in perfect agreement that we should be free to have our opinions, to act upon our opinions, and we're not talking about our opinions being we want to go and rob a bank or strangle a nun.
I mean, we're talking about going to a university, teaching, or not going to a university and not being taught or whatever.
So, we're perfectly free.
To make those decisions and to act on our own conscience as we best see fit without facing any violence, right?
Well, yeah, I guess you're right.
But the thing is that, you know, that's not going to happen.
Everyone agrees with this strike and they're going to close up everything.
So you're kind of...
So individualistic that you don't care about the people here.
We had a big issue with this reform that the government is making in our college.
And you just look like you don't care.
You just care about your classes and your things.
This is for the benefit of we all.
But don't you like to be better in college?
Well, you can certainly believe.
I don't believe that the government is valid at all.
I don't believe that disobeying one bandito's or mafia dons commandment is the point.
I think you oppose the mafia as an institution of violence and evil.
So I don't care if...
About one little strike right here on this campus tomorrow.
I am after a bigger beast.
I am not interested in one fingernail of one claw of the dragon.
I want to go for the heart of the dragon.
And you... You can get as upset as you want and do whatever you want about this little injustice in this little corner, but I'm going to spend my life fighting the biggest devil of all, which is violence as a whole, violence as an institution.
So I reject the state As an institution of evil, I reject violence as solutions to human problems.
I'm aiming my laser at the forehead of this devil, and I think you're more interested in trimming its fingernails, with all due respect.
I'm just not interested in something this inconsequential.
I don't want to spend my life fighting a little injustice in a little place for a little issue.
I want to spend my life targeting the biggest and most hellish devils that bestride the world.
So it's not that I don't care.
I just care about something which to me is much more important than this little thing.
But I mean, now you're missing the point because you've come again to this...
You have a very individualistic view of yourself.
And there's a lot of people who depend on this university for living.
They don't have much resources and the state supports almost every one of them for studying here.
So these changes are going to Are you going to bring some bad consequences to these people?
These people won't be able to study anymore in a few years.
So you're not paying attention to the big picture.
This is not a small thing.
Okay. Look, you can accuse me of a lot of things for sure.
But you cannot accuse me of not looking at the big picture.
See, some people, and I don't have any problem with it in particular, right?
Some people say, we want slaves to be treated a little better.
And they run around trying to convince slave owners to treat their slaves a little better.
Now, there are other people who spend their lives trying to end slavery.
And I'm that person.
I'm one of those people anyway.
So, when you say, we should try and spend our lives trying to make sure that slaves get beaten a little bit less, I mean, if that's what you want to do with your life, that's totally fine, and maybe you'll be able to do some good.
I don't think you will, but maybe you will.
I don't know, because I don't care.
My issue is, slavery is an evil, and it's not an evil we're going to get rid of in my generation, maybe not even in my children's generations, but we will get rid of it.
So you can accuse me a lot of things.
Do not accuse me of not caring about the poor.
I care about them in a way that is much more permanent.
I care about slaves in a much more permanent way by trying to get rid of slavery rather than bandage up a few of their broken bones.
Yeah.
I don't know what else you should say.
But, yeah.
The other thing that I would say is that if she has some other approach about how collective decision-making is really good, ask her if she will allow her family to choose her husband.
Will she allow her church or her congregation, will she allow some group to choose her husband?
Even if she gets a vote, right?
So maybe she's got 50 people in her family and 50 people get to choose her husband and she gets one vote.
Would she find that acceptable?
Of course not. Of course.
I took another example, but maybe it wasn't that good.
Because I was trying to debate, like, going on the topic of the strike, we weren't so far as to discuss about morality.
And I think that's the core issue.
You know, she probably thinks that, I know, she thinks that, There is morality in the world, but that morality just comes from relative societies.
I mean, as long as society changes, morality changes for her.
And that's a cultural issue, not like a universal thing.
So I was trying to debate with her on UPV. I was trying to get on that way, but it took a different approach.
to point the gun in the room and that was the other option that I had but I didn't thought about it probably at the moment I'll try that.
But, you know, I was saying, like, the majority doesn't have the power to make morality, because if that would be the case,
then, you know, like the thing that you said with Her husband, but on a probably much smaller or less shocking example.
If you put it in that way, then she feels like it's personal and that's better.
It has more impact on her thoughts.
Yeah, I mean, she's saying basically this is a good rule for making decisions, collective and voting, but I don't want it for the biggest decision of my life, which is who I'm going to marry.
It's like, well, if you don't want it, how can it be a good thing?
Is it just for everyone else?
How is it that you get to be exempt from this rule?
Would you allow other people to vote on whether or not you got to have children or whether or not you got to raise them or how you raised them?
Of course not. People want to make those decisions for themselves.
So why is it certainly good for collective things in other less important matters?
Doesn't make any sense. But I've got to ask, is this woman phenomenally attractive to you?
No. I've met her, I don't know, this year, early on.
She's kind of intelligent.
I mean, she is intelligent.
We've hung out a couple of times, but she has great personality.
Maybe we've never tried these kind of topics before, but she sees that Maybe she thought that debating with me was easier, you know?
I show her that that was not the case.
Well, she had to go and we ended the debate kind of early.
Sorry, did you enjoy the debate?
Well, yeah.
I was...
I felt like I had...
Good points and maybe she sometimes felt like she hadn't thought it that way but of course I think it's kind of hard when you like to admit that like so honestly at the beginning but she took some time to read what I was saying and And,
you know, make a pause and rethink about some stuff.
But she kept on the same things.
She said at one point that, you know, because directives, I don't know what the name, like the head of the university, I don't know, will be the principal or something like that, of the college was making some will be the principal or something like that, of the college We formed the whole university, of course, with the support of the state.
I'm sorry, I'm just going to have to interrupt you because I think you're rambling, if you don't mind me saying so, because I'm having trouble following what it is that you're saying, and I'm not sure if there's a question anywhere in here.
And I don't mind that in particular, right?
I just sort of wanted to point that out.
Because if you enjoy debating with the woman, then that's great.
Then you should debate with her or not as you see fit.
But I would definitely suggest that you guys need to decide on like what are the rules of debating, right?
Because it sounds like she's just tossing a bunch of Credible opinions around, right?
Like, I've heard this, and this seems right, and reality is...
Sorry, ethics are subjective and cultural, and of course, most people believe that, and, you know, collective decision-making in the form of voting is essential, and we have to help the lot of the poor, and we do that by putting them in a better position vis-a-vis the state.
Like, all of that stuff is pretty common fodder for modern pseudo-intellectuals.
So I would maybe send her something that you think is a good intro to philosophy.
Maybe my videos, maybe something else.
But is it reason and evidence?
Because you guys are starting to philosophize way down the road.
I don't get into politics until the eighth hour of my introduction to philosophy.
You guys are starting right at the end.
You don't have any framework for working these questions out.
Bye.
Okay.
Yeah. I mean, you're like Orville and Wilbur Wright saying, okay, first thing we need is a jet engine.
It's like, no, no, no, no. First thing you need is to get off the ground at Kitty Hawk for 100 feet, right?
Yeah. So I would forget about politics and say, okay, well, how do we know if something is true or not?
Because if you don't have agreement on that, then...
You're not going to be able to get anywhere, right?
Yeah, yeah. What is true and what is false?
How do we know something is true?
How do we know something is false?
I mean, if you can answer that, then you can start to build the framework.
And that's hard stuff, right? I mean, there's lots of stuff out there that can help you with that.
But, I mean, to just jump straight into politics and attempt to work your way back, I just, boy, that is a...
That's just not going to work, right?
You can't build a bridge by starting in the middle, right?
You've got to start at one end or both ends and work your way towards the middle, right?
You guys are starting to throw bricks in the middle of a canyon saying we're building a bridge, but you're not because you don't have them anchored to anything, right?
Yeah, sure.
You have a good point there.
I kind of thought that and I was trying to You know, try to define things like morality or something like that.
It's totally true.
We have to begin with, how do we know something that we're saying is truth or not?
To begin with the question, is the truth at all?
That would be the first step.
And I think you got the point.
That was probably the Yeah, and she's going to say that there's no such thing as the truth, and so on.
And if she goes down that road, I mean, I don't mean to pump my own books or anything like that, but...
I don't know that you need to reinvent the wheel.
Just hand her a copy of UPB or whatever and say, you know, read through this.
Translate it before. Yes, translate it first.
Yeah, okay. Well, let me know when that's done.
I'll get on it. Yeah, no, listen.
You focus on your studies.
We'll save Santa Monica later.
No, no. Don't worry, Steph. Don't worry, Steph.
The strike is going to last a long time.
Probably... Two or three months.
It's going to be long. Then there's nothing better that you could spend your time doing.
And look, if we sell a bunch of copies, I'll send you a bunch of money, right?
I mean, anybody who translates my books gets half the profits for quite some time.
So, you know, go for it if you can.
And if you want to, I certainly would be thrilled to have a Spanish-language version.
Okay, well, listen, it's getting kind of late, so I'm sorry to cut this short, but I'm going to have to try and get to bed.
Thank you. Excellent questions.
I mean, it is a tough thing that you're doing.
I hope that you do get what you want out of this relationship with the girl.
I hope she's worth it.
Because it doesn't sound like she's coming from a very open-minded place, but maybe that's not the case.
But yeah, just keep going back to the gun in the room and keep saying the UPB argument is if this is a good idea, then it should be a good idea for everyone all the time.
You can't just sort of pick and choose these rules.
And so if she says, well, we should do it this way, then it should be this way for everything, right?
Yeah, yeah, sure.
Thank you very much, Steph.
You're very, very welcome, and thank you everybody for dropping by the impromptu late-night chat.
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