1336 True News 34 - Gun Control
Gun control without the state.
April 20, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Good afternoon, everybody. | |
| I hope you're doing well. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| This is a talk on gun control without a government. | |
| This was a question that came up in New Hampshire when I gave the keynote address at the Liberty Forum last month. | |
| And I gave a response that could really only charitably be described as somewhat sketchy. | |
| So here it is in a little more detail. | |
| Of course before we start there is no possibility that gun control can ever be rationally or morally achieved with the state because of course when we say gun control we're saying guns are bad and the way to keep guns out of the hands of people who will do bad things is to give a monopoly of gun ownership and use to a small group of people who can So you can't solve the problem of gun control with the state because guns can only be prevented from being owned by certain people by giving a monopoly of the initiation of the use of force through guns to another group. | |
| So you can't solve the problem that way. | |
| But here's a few ideas about how it could work without a government. | |
| None of this, of course, is absolute, but these are avenues of exploration. | |
| The first thing to understand when it comes to gun ownership without the state is if you want to live in a neighborhood where there are no guns, then what really you are doing is you are saying to everyone in your neighborhood, I wish to exercise property right controls Over your property, right? | |
| So if I say I don't want anyone within a 10 block radius of me to have a gun, what I'm saying is I wish to exercise property rights over their property. | |
| Now, in a free society or a just society or a rational society, this of course is perfectly possible and there are three basic ways to go about it. | |
| If I want to exercise property rights over your property, there are three ways that I can achieve it. | |
| The first is that I can pay you for that privilege. | |
| Like if I want you to wear A kilt and a tutu every day, I can pay you a certain amount of money and then you'll do it. | |
| Or if I want you to work in my cubicle or pump gas at my gas station, I will pay you money and then I will be able to exercise property rights over your time or your property or whatever it is, right? | |
| So that's one simple exchange of value. | |
| In other words, If I don't want people to have a gun I will simply pay them a fixed amount every year which will give me the right to inspect their home or whatever. | |
| I pay a thousand dollars a year to everyone in my neighborhood so that they don't have guns and or just bid it up or whatever and that's how one way I would do it. | |
| The second way that I would do it is I would go around to my neighbors and hopefully find everyone has the same sort of opinion and idea and we all agree Because we are of the same mind to enter into contracts with each other where a third party comes and checks on guns because we all don't want guns in the neighborhood. | |
| And so we all get together in a new neighborhood or get everyone in the same neighborhood and we all agree that we're not going to have guns and we enter into an agreement about that and so it's another way of doing it. | |
| I don't think either of those are particularly great. | |
| I'll sort of get into why in a second. | |
| But the third way is... | |
| Let's just say we start some new neighborhood and we have an organization. | |
| There are 100 families or 100 groups move in, 100 people move in, and we don't buy the houses. | |
| The houses belong to some organization. | |
| We'll call it a DRL or dispute resolution organization, which is my sort of way of Talking about organizations that can replace state functions. | |
| So there's some DRO that actually owns our house and leases it to us in perpetuity on the basis or under the contractual obligation of not having guns inside. | |
| So I'll talk about the weaknesses of the first one. | |
| Paying people to not have guns doesn't really work very well because You can't find everybody who wants to give up their guns within a 10 block radius. | |
| And even if you do, you face the problem of the escalating price war, right? | |
| So maybe the guy can get the first guy for $1,000, but the last guy is going to be a lot more expensive than $1,000 because he knows he's the last holdout and so on. | |
| So I don't think that really works. | |
| And plus people just wouldn't financially be able to pull it off usually. | |
| So I think just paying people to not have guns doesn't really work. | |
| I also don't think that finding people who mutually all want to and enter into reciprocal contracts and so on, that's not really very practical. | |
| I mean, you could maybe do it, there's some social pressure involved and so on, but it really can't be a universal and so on. | |
| So I don't think that particularly works very well practically. | |
| These, of course, are fine morally, but I don't think they work very practically. | |
| We could do all of this. | |
| Let's say I start up some new community and I make it a condition of everyone buying the house that, yes, you own the house, but you can't have guns in it. | |
| But see, that's a kind of contradiction, right? | |
| Because if I own my house, but I can't have a gun in it, then I don't really own my house because I'm restricted in the use of property. | |
| Now, I'm not burning down someone else's house. | |
| I'm not initiating force or fraud. | |
| So it's not a violation of a moral rule to have a gun in your house. | |
| So it can't really be said that I own my house if I can't have a gun in it. | |
| And therefore, someone else must own it. | |
| And so the best way to set that up legally is to have an organization that owns the houses and leases them out to you in perpetuity on the condition that you don't have a gun in there. | |
| So the problem with setting up these reciprocal contracts where I own my house, my neighbor owns this house, but I could only buy the house if I agree not to have guns in it, is the question of perpetuity. | |
| Because I can enter into a contract and say, well, I'll buy this house, but I won't have a gun in it, but I'm not sure that I can really inflict that reasonably or maybe even morally on someone else, right? | |
| So let's say I want to give my daughter my house and say, well, you can have this house But you can't have any guns in it. | |
| It's like, well, who's stopping me? | |
| Well, it's just a condition of sale. | |
| It's like, but who's the third party, right? | |
| There's you, there's me, there's my daughter I'm giving the house to. | |
| Who's the third party who doesn't allow guns in it? | |
| Well, you know, how do you enforce that? | |
| And how do you sort of morally justify that or rationally justify it? | |
| I don't think that works very well. | |
| So I think the only way to do it is for a particular organization to actually own the houses, but it's a lease in perpetuity, a 99-year lease that's rock solid, can't be undone as long as you don't have guns in the house, right? That is the way that I would imagine that it would work in a state of society. | |
| The interesting thing about this, and there's lots of interesting things about this way of approaching to solve problems, and of course, some people will say, well, that's exactly a government. | |
| The government owns everything, and we lease in perpetuity if we obey the laws, blah, blah, blah. | |
| It doesn't work at all, and if people are really confused, it's not the same situation at all. | |
| If people are confused about that, I can do another video, but, you know, I'm sure you're smart enough to think through as to why that doesn't, it's not an accurate analogy. | |
| But the good thing about this sort of gun ownership thing is that the great thing about a stateless society, one of the many wonderful things about a stateless society, is that there is lots of competing models of social organization, lots of choice about where it is you want to live and how it is you want to live. | |
| And the great thing, what keeps these rules to a minimum, is that you can't externalize the costs, right? | |
| Because If you own your house free and clear, right, you can do whatever you want in it as long as you don't aggress or whatever, right, and force fraud and family members or children, whatever, that you can do whatever you want with your house, then you have a free and clear ownership. | |
| The more rules, right, that you layer on top of this ownership, the more you need an external agency to actually own the house and you lease it on condition of obeying these rules. | |
| But the great thing about that is that it actually will negatively affect The value of your home, if you have all of these rules, right? | |
| So the houses that are owned free and clear are going to be worth, I don't know, $100,000. | |
| Let's make something up, right? And the houses that have 500 rules and you can't actually own them, you can only lease them by obeying these rules, are going to be worth a lot less than $100,000. | |
| So, because you have all these extra rules, you don't actually get to own the house, and you could be kicked out if you make a mistake. | |
| Who knows, right? I mean, you would obviously not have it like a mistake base, but it's restricted, right? | |
| In the same way that if I'm selling a bicycle, right, and I say, well, you can buy my bicycle, but you can only ride it north-south, not east and west. | |
| Well, it wouldn't make much sense, but I sure as heck wouldn't get as much for the bicycle on those conditions as if I just said, here's the bike, you can obviously do what you want with it. | |
| So you can't externalize the cost, which means there will be a limit on the number of rules that are piled onto your homes because of these neighborhood associations or whatever. | |
| Because it would negatively affect the price of your home. | |
| So that is really good. | |
| You can't say, well, I don't like guns. | |
| I'm going to pass a law. I have all the taxpayers pay for it. | |
| It's going to be universal across the land. | |
| You're going to be competing in terms of home ownership and values with all these other social models of organization. | |
| Therefore, minimum rules, maximum safety and security, minimum costs, maximum value of the house will all be pursued in a rational context. | |
| So that I think is really, really important to understand. | |
| You simply can't pile all these rules on because nobody will want to move there or buy the house. | |
| It will really negatively affect the value of your house. | |
| The second thing, of course, is that there are all of these competing agencies. | |
| I don't really believe in a state of society that there will be any neighborhoods where guns will be specifically prohibited. | |
| And the reason for that, of course, is that guns prevent crime, right? | |
| And so if criminals don't know whether there's a gun in the house, they're going to not go. | |
| If there's some neighborhood out there where they know there are no guns in the house, Then they're going to want to go and steal from those houses, right? | |
| Because it's clear that there are no guns there. | |
| And so the people who want no guns in the environment will either have to pay for extra security to keep these criminals at bay. | |
| I'm not saying there'll be a plethora of them, but this is the logic of it. | |
| This is what would happen. Or they would have to accept higher rates of home insurance in order to have the privilege, so to speak, of not having guns in the house, right? | |
| So that is really important as well because they may find it's an extra $500 a year or $1,000 a year for the security, for additional fences, for patrols, for additional insurance costs because they're that much more likely to be robbed. | |
| And therefore, they may find that it's not really worth it for them. | |
| So I really don't think that there would be sort of neighborhoods where there would be no guns at all, but certainly people would experiment with it and try and find some way of doing it. | |
| I imagine what would happen Is that there would be an increase in defensive security, right? | |
| So like, if somebody steals your iPod, it's voice activated, so they can't use it, or your TV is thumbprint activated, or whatever it is, right? | |
| So to make it less valuable for people to steal stuff is great. | |
| That kind of stuff will be a disincentive for people to come and rob you. | |
| Of course, money that is voice activated or thumbprint activated or retina activated will be a way of dealing with the problems of theft, right? | |
| Like I just got a Visa card, I have to enter a punch card. | |
| Just little things like that where you minimize the possibilities of theft. | |
| And, you know, fundamentally, unless you're a total psychopath, you don't want to blow someone's head off who's come into your house. | |
| Could be a drunk in the wrong house, right? | |
| Who knows, right? But what you do want is a way of disabling. | |
| So technologies would be developed where you'd get to shoot someone with some sort of, you know, tranquilizing sliver or something that would go through even thick clothing and disable that person and so on, right? | |
| So that would be the way and which kids could survive if it accidentally happened to them or whatever, right? | |
| So These ways of enforcing social norms are all available, but the pressure will be constant and downward. | |
| To minimize the number of rules, to make them as efficient and as cheap and as positive and as safe and as helpful as possible, because that adds to people's, the largest investment that most people have in their life is their house, right? | |
| And so those kinds of minimal, positive, proactive, helpful, healthy, secure rules will be in place and whatever enhances the value of your home, which is really your quality of life, the security of your neighborhood, the safety of your children, All of that will be purposefully driven by these DROs, these dispute resolution organizations. | |
| And so when it comes to where do you want to live? | |
| Are you moving out of your parents' home? | |
| Where do you want to live? Are you going to have all of these amazing resources available to you electronically or at the library? | |
| Well, you can go and you can say, okay, well, here are the rules. | |
| You know, they're small enough and simple enough to be easily followed. | |
| You know, this neighborhood has, you know, this many break-ins per year, has not had a murder in this number of years, never has a rape. | |
| So you'll be able to compare all of these sorts of things, make a wise and informed choice based upon your preferred level of security versus cost, your preferred level of rules versus value of your home, and all these kinds of things. | |
| The competition to come up with the best, most creative, most innovative, most productive, most secure, most safe kind of environment for the elderly, for middle-aged, for youth, for children, We'll be part of the constant innovation and reinvention of a stateless society. | |
| And I, for one, though I will never live to see it, would love to be carbon frozen, or I guess Walt Disney-fied, and wake up to see all of the amazing innovations that will occur without the brutality of the state running everything. | |
| So these are just some ideas about how it could work. | |
| I absolutely look forward to your feedback. |
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