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July 20, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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1417 Stefan Molyneux Michael Badnarik Debate, Drexel University, Philadelphia, July 5, 2009

Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio and Michael Badnarik, 2004 Libertarian Presidential Candidate debate the question 'How Much Government is Necessary?'

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	This is a debate that I had with Michael Badnarik, the 2004 Libertarian presidential candidate, in Philadelphia on Sunday, July 5th, 2009.
	I'm afraid there has been a few audio problems.
	The first few minutes are fairly low quality, but it does improve after that.
	Thank you for your patience as we have wrestled with the technical difficulties to stitch this Franken file together, and thank you so much to Paul, the expert sound engineer whose gentle spectrographic caresses have resurrected this file to a fairly high level of quality, and thank you so much for your patience.
	And to the organizers of the event at Drexel University, and I hope that you enjoy the debate.
	This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio, and Michael Badnarik, a constitutional scholar, debating the proposition or the question, how much government is necessary?
	I want to welcome everybody today, and I want to especially thank you for being here.
	I have been trying to light the fires of liberty for many years, and the good news is that I see things turning around and moving in a different direction, and I want to thank you especially for being here.
	When it shows this much public interest in an abstract and highly intellectual debate like anarchy versus anarchy, it's like, wow.
	I mean, they're not like watching Jerry Springer actually here today.
	This is very good news, and again, I want to thank you for your participation.
	In any discussion or debate, obviously we need to define terms, and I'm sure that Stephanie and I will be enhancing those definitions as we go along.
	As a start, I would like to offer that anarchy basically is an absence of government, 0%, as opposed to perhaps a totalitarian dictatorship would be 100% government.
	And so, Somewhere in the middle, I would like to propose that the minarchy is at the low end, maybe 5-10%, I'm not quite sure exactly what that percentage would be, and that currently, today, we exist with 95% of it, I don't think we are a complete totalitarian dictatorship, but I think that my PRD is moving in that direction.
	Well, anarchy and minarchies are particularly close to each other, and most of you are familiar with what we currently have, which is, you know, a plethora of government, far more than we need.
	And so from the existing point of view, looking back down the scale towards zero and five percent, anarchy and minarchy are going to look and appear to be very, very close to each other, and Stephan and I will try to do our best to differentiate the two of them.
	As kind of a metaphor, as a chemist and as a high school chemist, one of the things I found interesting was distilling ethanol I don't know if anybody else had that interest, but when you distill ethanol, alcohol, the maximum that you can get is 95.6% alcohol.
	That's the maximum. And we have 4.4% water, because you just can't distill any more water out of the alcohol.
	You know, so 191 proof is basically the maximum you can get.
	We usually call it ever clear.
	And as far as I'm concerned, anarchy is that theoretical absolute that we're always trying for.
	And we can try to distill as much of the government out of it as possible, but we'll always have just a little bit of government.
	And this is an issue that the Founding Fathers certainly addressed.
	I consider myself a stepfather of the Constitution.
	James Madison was the father of the Constitution.
	He died in 1836.
	Since then, the Constitution's been pretty much abandoned and orphaned.
	And so I've adopted the Constitution and will protect it as if it were my very own.
	So the father of the Constitution, James Madison, wrote, it may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.
	But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
	If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
	If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
	In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this.
	You must first enable the government to control the government, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.
	The dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control of the government, but experiences by mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
	So, as much as I would like to have anarchy, I don't think that we can actually achieve it, because there are some things that are necessary for anarchy to exist.
	One would be widespread intelligence.
	And adherence to a high ethical standard, one that I try to achieve myself.
	In the 50s and 60s, we have stories of people leaving their doors unlocked, leaving the keys in the car because neighbors were dependent on each other and you just never expect anybody to walk into your home or go take your car.
	We have people putting bars on their windows and blocking everything, and even your laptop has to have cable on it these days.
	Another thing that energy requires is self-sufficiency and dependence on yourself.
	Currently, less than 10% of the families in the United States live on farms and can't produce their own food.
	The general population is completely oblivious as to where their utilities come from.
	I was in a gas station.
	They were ready to pay for the gas, and we had a blackout.
	Suddenly everything went dark, and a woman came rushing in and said, I can't help any gas.
	And I informed her that there had been a blackout.
	And she goes, but I have cash.
	And I said that had anything to do with it.
	Being completely and totally self-sufficient may be possible, but it means that your standard of living is lower.
	Because now you have to be responsible for everything.
	You have to do your shelter, your own protection, growing your own food, and your entire life becomes devoted to keeping yourself alive.
	And so even if we have people arrive on a deserted island and the first thing that they do is they start to cooperate.
	You go find firewood.
	I'll build a hut.
	You go look for fish.
	And you have this cooperation, mutual cooperation, that will improve everybody's standard of living.
	You go catch the fish and we can cook the fish over the fire that I built.
	The question, I suppose, really amounts to does mutual cooperation equal government?
	How formalized does that cooperation have to be before we give it the label of cooperation?
	And finally, in order to have anarchy, we have to have mutual trust in each other.
	And again, it may be just the human nature, but I don't believe that we do.
	We have trust in each other.
	Most of the laws that are created are created by our neighbors to control us and by us To control our neighbors.
	The general idea is that, well, of course, I can carry a gun because I'm adult and responsible, but I'm worried about my next-door neighbor.
	I want the government to have concealed carry permits to moderate my neighbor's behavior because I don't trust my neighbor.
	And the end result is that the government creates a law for me against my neighbor, creates a law for my neighbor against me, and we keep creating more and more laws against each other, and we all basically lose.
	So, we all struggle to stay alive.
	Knowing that eventually we're going to lose that struggle and we will all eventually perish.
	But that doesn't stop us from struggling to prolong our lives.
	Liberty is something we should always continually strive for, knowing that even if we were lucky enough to achieve it, we'd almost certainly start to lose it immediately.
	And anarchy I would equate to a utopia.
	Yes, I am definitely trying to move away from the massive government that we have to far, far less government in the direction of anarchy.
	But given human nature, I'm not quite sure that we can achieve it.
	Thank you. Here's the mic.
	Sorry? Oh, the piece?
	We'll pick it up. Okay. All right.
	How's that? We'll just make it karaoke night.
	Well, thank you very much for the chance to speak, and thank you for this very kind introduction.
	I will be speaking about a different kind of anarchy than Mr.
	Batnarik is speaking about, which seems to be similar to the Stone Age.
	I don't think that you need self-sufficiency to be an anarchist.
	I can't find anything in the bridge without my wife pointing it out.
	I think that we'll be talking about a little bit of a different kind of anarchy.
	I am what would be technically known as an anarcho-capitalist, in that I try to profit from anarchy.
	No, that's not it. It's that I believe in what I think everybody here would believe in, which is property rights are absolute, self-ownership and property rights are absolute, and the non-initiation of force is a moral absolute.
	And I'm sure that most libertarians, most minarchists would agree that property rights are double plus good and that the initiation of the use of force is very bad.
	The question or the difference or the divergence between an anarchist and a minarchist I think would be along these lines.
	That an anarchist looks at the principle of property rights and the non-initiation of the use of force and says those principles are inviolable.
	We are not willing to take those principles over our knee, bend them backwards until they break, in order to achieve some pragmatic objective.
	The minarchists in general will say, yes, it would be great to have a utopia where everybody was perfect, and they believe that anarchists do not recognize the reality of human corruption and human evil.
	And I would say the exact opposite.
	It's true. I believe that an anarchist understands the reality of evil, the potential for evil in the human psyche.
	And it is because an anarchist recognizes the reality of evil that we oppose the creation of a monopoly of legal violence within society.
	It's like certain people have a propensity for addiction to alcohol or to drugs or whatever.
	An anarchist who recognizes that metaphorically says, well, we're not going to put a distillery in their living room because they're drunkards or they're alcoholics.
	And human beings, many human beings, love to maximize their resources at the expense of others.
	It's a mere net gain calculation.
	What can I do in my life that's going to gain me the most resources in an amoral situation?
	Most people are biological creatures.
	That's what we do. We maximize resources.
	And the government is a Terrible, powerful, ugly and violent tool to maximize your resources at the expense of others.
	And since that's what human beings like to do, we can't have one.
	Power corrupts.
	Human beings like to get things for free.
	Human beings like to have power over other human beings.
	We are a tribal society.
	Darwinian evolution is why we're here today.
	Which is gaining power over others and gaining things with the least amount of effort.
	Because human beings have that tendency and the anarchist recognizes that, we cannot have a government because that will immediately be inhabited by immoral people who will use it to their advantage and at the expense of the majority.
	It is my view that menarchism is a very dangerous Philosophy, and not because I don't want less government, of course I do.
	I want less government to the point of nothing, in the same way that I don't if I'm sick.
	I don't want less sickness, I want no sickness.
	That's my goal. But I think that minarchism is a very dangerous philosophy, and I'll tell you why.
	Either the minarchist is going to succeed, or the minarchist is going to fail.
	If the minarchist fails, then the philosophy means nothing and the government continues to grow, which you could say is what's been happening for the past, say, 10,000 years.
	But if Minarchists succeed, and I believe that they did succeed in 1776, I don't think that you could come up with a better laboratory experiment for the success or failure of Minarchism than the creation of the American Republic.
	It was a beautiful theoretical laboratory proof of the possibility and practicality of Minarchism.
	And what has happened since then, we're all aware of, and that's why we're here, is we went from The very smallest government, which was about what?
	1%, 2% of what it is.
	We went from the very smallest government in 1776 to the very largest, most powerful, most terrible, most destructive government the world has ever seen.
	A government with the power to destroy the world many times over.
	First time in history that's happened.
	Never had a government that big and powerful before.
	Is there a relationship between a small government at the beginning and a big government at the end?
	I would say that there is. Because a small government that respects, to a large degree, property rights and opposes the initiation of force creates what?
	It creates a free market.
	Once you have a free market, you get staggering explosions in wealth.
	Right? Once you get in a society a staggering explosion of wealth, More money is available for taxation.
	More money is available for the military.
	More money is available for the endless hordes of social programs and social engineering that bureaucrats and politicians and states love to do.
	When you get the smallest possible government, you create a free market which builds wealth, which builds power, which then government swells to take over.
	It becomes a gold mine for those who want power over others.
	If a man makes $100 a year and you tax him at 50%, he will revolt, because he can't live on $50 a year.
	But if a man makes $100,000 a year and you tax him at 50%, he won't rebel.
	Which is why we're here and not in the streets, because we can survive on what's left over, because there's so much wealth in society.
	So when you start with a very small government, you create the conditions for a massive explosion in wealth that creates the greatest prize That politicians can get a hold of, which is the productive energies and wealth of a free, prospering, industrious, free market society.
	That's why I think minarchism is so dangerous.
	Another way to look at it, if you don't mind me stepping into metaphor lands, and hopefully I won't get too much of it on my shoe, is A guy comes to a doctor.
	Two doctors. There are two doctors in a row.
	Dr. Minarchist and Dr.
	Anarchist. And yes, that would be a great superhero villain, don't you think?
	And the guy comes in, he's got some honking tumor hanging off his side, right?
	And he says, Dr.
	Minarchist, can you help me with this tumor?
	Because it keeps growing, it keeps growing, and I have to get it cut, and then I have to go into chemotherapy, and my hair all falls out, and it's just terrible what happens.
	And the documentary kid says, well, I can cut it down.
	I can shave that thing down for you.
	80% maybe I can get it down.
	And the guy's like, but that's happened 20 times before I've got my tumor shrunk down 80%.
	It just grows back and I get sicker and I have to go to chemotherapy.
	So what can you do? He says, well, can't you just cut the tumor out completely?
	He's like, oh my God, no.
	That's utopia. That's crazy!
	If I cut out your tumor, you're going to get spontaneous tattoos on your forehead.
	Mohawks! You're going to be riding around motorcycles with Mel Gibson.
	It's going to be chaos and anarchy and dogs living with cats and all kinds of horrible things, right?
	Scare stories abound if I cut out your tumor completely.
	And he says, but if you cut it down, it's going to grow back, he says to Dr.
	Minarchus. Dr.
	Minarchus says, don't worry, I've got a plan.
	What's your plan? Well, I'm going to cut your tumor down by 80%, but when I'm in there, I'm going to take out a magic marker, magic being the operative word, I'm going to lean over, and I'm going to write on that tumor, don't grow.
	And I'm going to call it a constitution.
	Because we all know that tumors respect constitutions, right?
	And then it just grows back.
	Now he goes to Dr. Anarchist, and Dr.
	Anarchist says, Out it comes.
	It's a tumor. It's always going to regrow.
	It's happened hundreds of times in the past.
	It's going to happen again.
	So we're not going to compromise.
	We're going to cut it out. Because I know it's going to regrow.
	And that is the way that minarchism looks to an anarchist.
	It is a tumor. There are about 230 odd countries in the world today.
	Not one of them has a government that is not growing, or has not grown considerably since it was designed expressly to stay small.
	There have been hundreds and hundreds more throughout history, from the ancient Egyptians to the ancient Romans, the ancient Greeks.
	The Magda Carta, mmm, look at that.
	It was actually more rights to the nobles and you ended up with feudalism for another 500 years.
	Every single culture, every single country, Has designed a government to serve the people and to be small, to protect property, to oppose violence, and every single time, and we have five to six hundred examples of this, it never once has worked.
	Because it breaks principle.
	We say we oppose violations of property and personhood.
	And in order to achieve that, we are going to create an agency endowed with the special, unique, monopolistic ability to violate persons and property.
	You cannot protect persons and property by creating an agency with the monopolistic power to violate persons and property.
	We all understand that when a parent leans over to a child and says, don't hit your sister, that that's a contradiction.
	It's the same thing. You cannot create an agency with a monopoly of violence to oppose violence.
	It never works. It tracks the principle right up front.
	And I think the very, very important thing that I would suggest is that one of the most important virtues in the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge is humility.
	I fully accept that the Founding Fathers were stone geniuses whose intellect we can all hope to maybe someday emulate in some small manner.
	And they genuinely were the cream of the crop of the Enlightenment, some of the most brilliant men of the age, well-versed in history, in philosophy, in political science.
	And they did some amazing work to come up with the best conceivable balance and powers and ways to keep the government small.
	Separation of church and state, brilliant.
	And it's been tried many other times.
	The British Revolution of the 18th century was supposed to keep their government small, serving the people.
	What happened? It grew.
	Just as the American Empire did, into the British Empire, which ruled a third of the globe, subjugated hundreds of millions of people.
	You make the government small, it grows.
	The smaller the tumor starts, the larger.
	And more quickly, it grows.
	And humility is very important.
	I do not believe for one split second that I have any kind of capacity to create Scribbles on a piece of paper that is going to stop evil forever.
	It doesn't work. It can never work.
	How many of you would get a copy of a law written on a piece of paper, walking down an alley, some guy comes running at you with a knife, you're like, STOP! What are you going to do?
	It doesn't work. The Constitution laws, they do nothing.
	They're pieces of paper. They say, well, the Constitution restricts the government.
	No. The Constitution brings down a tree or two.
	Use it up to me. Right?
	Nobody goes into a shooting match saying, look, I'm invulnerable.
	It's just a piece of paper.
	It's not the solution to the problem of violence.
	And I do not imagine for a moment that I'm going to be smarter than the 500,000 geniuses who've tried to solve the problem of violence in society by creating a monopoly of violence.
	If you could give me a thousand years and a thousand helpers to try and come up with magic spells, magic words on a piece of paper that would stop violent people forever from doing wrong with institutionalized violence, I would never be able to do it.
	That's called humility. Can't be done.
	Recognizing what is impossible is the first step to wisdom.
	And the last thing that I would say...
	What's my time? One minute?
	The last thing that I would say, which I would say very quickly.
	The last thing that I would say is that the belief is, in constitutionality, in republicanism, limited government, is that if you get the right words on a piece of paper, that evil people will no longer do evil, right?
	They will come into government, they will go, oh, all right, no evil.
	Okay, no evil.
	But if we can come up with magic words on a piece of paper that will stop evil people from doing evil, we don't need a government.
	Because we go to the mafia and we say, look, here's a piece of paper that says don't do evil.
	They go, oh, okay, I'll stop doing evil.
	Or we go to a murderer and we say, okay, you did kill, but find this piece of paper which says don't do evil.
	And you go, okay. I go free if I sign that piece of paper?
	Okay, there you go. And we all understand that that will not stop the murderer and it will not stop The thief from doing evil.
	The pieces of paper will not stop evil people from doing evil things.
	If we can come up with such magic paper, such Harry Potter wonders, we get everyone in society to sign it and there'll be no more evil.
	We don't need a government. But we all understand that that's not how the world works.
	That evil people will sign anything you want in order to get away with it.
	And that's what will happen in any minotistic constitutionalist society.
	If we can do something wonderful with a piece of paper that will stop evil permanently in its tracks, we get everyone in society to sign it, lo and behold, there's no evil, we don't need a government.
	But if we doubt that that will work, then how is it going to work with politicians?
	If it's not going to work with the mafia, how is it going to work with an even more organized set of criminals called politicians?
	We understand we don't stop the mafia in its tracks by getting them to sign a piece of paper with rules on it.
	It is not going to work with the Mafia, it's not going to work with the murderer, it is not going to work with politicians.
	And recognizing that basic reality is where the creativity of coming up with a stateless society, with how a society works in the absence of government, is all about.
	I don't like Have you seen this cartoon?
	Someone's got this equation up here on the board, right?
	And then he comes up with an answer, and there's a cloud in the middle called, then a miracle occurs.
	Somehow it comes to the answer here.
	And there's some guy who comes up and says, you might want to flesh that bit out a little, because I'm not too clear on that.
	Well, to me, it's like, well, we want a nonviolent society or a society that opposes violence and supports property rights.
	And to me, the Constitution and monarchism is like, and a miracle occurs, and we get this free, wonderful society.
	That part doesn't work.
	And so we need to find another solution.
	And of course, my podcasts and my books, if you're interested, they're all free.
	You can look into that.
	There's lots of creative solutions about how we can have roads, national defense, police, law courts, all the things that we need because there are bad people in society.
	There's lots of ways to do it that don't involve this magical golden gun that's going to make everyone good and is never going to attract bad people to try and control it.
	And I think that's where we need to spend our creative energies rather than the fantasy that pieces of paper will stop bullets.
	Thank you. I don't understand.
	Which society would build the roads?
	Well, I figured it would be pretty much the same.
	Having a minarchist, you know, small government implies that there are a lot of things the government doesn't do.
	I think it would be pretty much the same if you don't allow the government to build the roads in a minarchist environment.
	It would turn out to be the same way in an anarchist.
	In both ways, it could be private.
	As I tried to express at the beginning, from our current point of view, from where we sit now with government, minarchy and anarchy are going to be like Almost identical.
	And it's going to be up to Stephan and I to really kind of distinguish how they are different.
	You all ready for a bad pun?
	I consider myself a bit of a Rhodes scholar.
	Take a moment to enjoy that joke, shall we?
	Well, I mean, it's funny, you know, the environmentalists who have a lot of good things to say are strangely addicted to avoiding this topic of the fact that the fact that the taxes pay for roads is one of the worst things for the environment, right?
	Because people don't have to pay for their driving in that sense, right?
	I mean, yeah, they pay some gas taxes, but you wouldn't be able to drive if the government hadn't built all the roads.
	Roads are pretty simple, right?
	I mean, they existed prior to the government.
	It wasn't like there were no roads before the government.
	There were private halls even in the 18th century in America, which all worked fine until the government took them over.
	If you want to go build a housing development, you're never going to sell the houses unless there's a road to it.
	And so roads are pretty easy to solve.
	And even if you don't accept the technology now, which can actually track where people drive and send them a bill.
	I mean, when I used to have a real job, I went on a highway that does Entirely private.
	And I paid a toll and it was beautiful.
	I mean, it was like an airport landing strip.
	It was fantastic. Whereas, of course, the public highway was just, you know, stop and go choked up, right?
	So, absolutely roads will be much, much better, much more efficient and those roads which are not supported by the traffic will fall into disuse and there'll be changes.
	People will drive less or walk at home more and we will end up with a much more efficient use of resources without all this crazy government subsidies and And the fact, of course, that they don't charge you for peak usage is crazy.
	So, you know, that way people all drive to work at 9 o'clock.
	It's, you know, nuts. So much, much more efficient use of resources.
	And I think we would agree that that should be a private function, minarchy or not.
	This next question is for Michael Badner.
	Also remember that rebuttals are allowed after a lot of time.
	Michael, is individual freedom compatible with government no matter how small it is?
	Is individual freedom compatible with?
	Compatible with government no matter how small the government is.
	Yes, it is compatible because we have individual rights.
	The basic premise of my book and my constitution class is the difference between rights and privileges.
	We, the people, have unalienable individual rights.
	We don't have to ask for permission.
	A privilege is something that someone allows you to do and they can revoke that privilege at any time.
	And most of us are not really clear on the concept that we have individual rights, we give the government privileges.
	Article 1, Section 1, Clause 1 says all legislative powers herein granted Well, when we are granting legislative powers, it implies that they are privileges, and we can take those privileges away from the government any time we are brave enough to do so.
	And my supporting evidence would be the Declaration of Independence, which says that when any form of government becomes destructive of your rights, the right of the people to alter or abolish it.
	I think we can all agree that it's time to alter Again, we have the option if we want to abolish it and to provide new guards for our future security.
	I disagree.
	I think it's important to remember that the disparity of power between citizens and governments now is very different than it was in the 18th century.
	In the 18th century we had muskets versus muskets.
	I mean, it was a relatively similarly armed opposing groups, right?
	What's that old Bill Cosby thing where they lose the coin toss, the British lose the coin toss, and it's like their handicap is that they all have to march in a row with big X's on them, and the revolutionary force can live in the woods dressed in tree branches and shoot from wherever they want.
	But back then it was relatively equal, right?
	I mean, because there were no nuclear weapons, there were no spy satellites, there were no, I don't know, brain-flying lasers from UFOs and stuff.
	The amount of hardware and technology that is available to a state to dominate its citizens now, not to mention computers, deduction of source of income tax and so on, it's all nuts how much you can be tracked and controlled because of the technology that was largely developed in the free market, is what I was saying.
	Small government means free market, free market means innovation, government takes over that innovation and uses it to control citizenry.
	You are creating the weapons that are used to keep you down.
	And so, in the future, not everyone's going to have a nuclear weapon, obviously, but the government will, because usually Minarchists say government for national defense.
	How are you supposed to conceivably, no matter how many six-shooters you have, how are you supposed to stand up to F-16s and M1 tanks and nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers and spy satellites?
	It's simply impossible. That's why you can't have a government now because the disparity between the average citizen's strength of might and the state is simply far too great.
	that the citizen can never control the government and the government will always be that well armed and that's why we have to get rid of it as an institution completely.
	Okay.
	The effort of government law, how do we have to do this?
	Hand to hand combat.
	And that's, I think, where this is going to go in about three minutes.
	Conflict resolution, of course, is essential.
	I mean, the reality is people are going to disagree, people are going to cheat, people are going to steal, people are going to do bad things with good promises.
	And that's the reality, which is, of course, why we can't have a government because those people will all swarm to the government while they have a monopoly of force.
	There's lots and lots of different ways of coming into it around something that's really, really powerful in society is ostracism, right?
	It's a really, really powerful thing.
	I think Michael's completely right that interdependence is the key to, well, division of labor.
	We're all so dependent on each other.
	I mean, if I had to grow my own food, I'd end up eating my feet.
	It would just be crazy, right?
	And I'm not that flexible, so I'd be really hungry.
	But we are so interconnected that if we are not allowed to participate in economic life, it is a complete catastrophe for us.
	And so I have this, it's a bunch of articles and podcasts, and there's a book called Practical Anarchy, which you may think is an oxymoron, but I don't, which is available for free on the website, which I have these dispute resolution organizations.
	I don't know how it's all going to work because I can't find the future down to the large detail.
	No one can, but it's a way it could work.
	If Michael and I enter into an agreement to do stuff together, right, he sells me an iPod, I'm going to give him a hundred bucks.
	Then we have insurance, right?
	And so 2% of that goes to the insurance.
	And then if he doesn't ship me the iPod, I get the hundred bucks from the insurance company.
	And if I don't pay him and he ships me the iPod, he gets the hundred bucks.
	If we trust each other, we don't have to have that.
	Then we have no recourse and so on.
	Anytime you sign a contract, we both nominate an objective third party who's going to mediate the dispute, and we agree to abide by that ruling.
	And if we don't abide by that ruling, we are no longer allowed to participate in contracts.
	These dispute resolution organizations simply won't allow us to continue in contracts until we deal with the problem.
	And then we face the problem of ostracism in a society where to be ostracized is to go to the Stone Age caricature of anarchy that Mr.
	Bednarik portrayed a little earlier.
	The interdependence of human beings means that we have an enormous amount of power and influence over each other without using violence, just by saying, I'm not going to do business with you if you break your contract.
	That is a disaster for people.
	And of course, right now, conflicts aren't resolved at all.
	Anyone here ever tried to use the court system to resolve a conflict?
	Anyone? How did that go?
	Was it a productive and quality use of your time?
	Was it efficient? Was it positive?
	Was it useful? So right now, we have the worst of both worlds.
	We don't actually have an effective conflict resolution, but competition is banned.
	And if we can survive this, we can sure as heck survive it where competition flourishes in the productive resolution of disputes to the benefit of the just authority.
	Oh, I'm done. When I sit there.
	I agree that if we have a contract dispute, we can go to arbitration.
	There's a saying that in Texas, He needed killing is a valid defense.
	Fortunately, that's not necessarily true.
	But that's what it all boils down to.
	I don't know why. I wish that it were not true.
	But in human nature, you get enough people together, you're always going to find somebody who is crazy or somebody who is evil.
	And that's what it really all boils down to.
	We're not worried about the 98% of the people just kind of go around mind their own business.
	You know, we're worried about the lunatics that are going out to hurt others.
	And it is a necessary fact of life that at times you need to use violence to quell the violence.
	You know, fight fire with fire.
	And the question ultimately revolves around where is that going to happen?
	Now, if we want to do anarchy and have everybody resolve these violent things themselves, I mean, I'd be happy.
	Let me wear my shoulder holster, and I promise only to shoot the guilty people.
	And, you know, even my friends are going to go, oh, wow, you know, we don't want to let that anarchy do that.
	That'd be a little bit extreme.
	And so the purpose of having a government, a minarchy, is to have a dispassionate Use of force.
	I am obviously emotionally involved in the thing, in whatever the issue is, and it's like, they're guilty, kill them.
	And the idea is that we go, whoa, bad narc, we're going to calm this down, we're going to take it slow, we're going to have a jury of our peers evaluate this.
	If we finally decide, many years later, that the person did commit murder, then we can do a lethal injection or lecture chair or something like that.
	This is where there is no good answer.
	I would really like to never have to kill anybody.
	Why can't we all just get along?
	I don't know. People are strange that way.
	And so I am content to have a very small government say, okay, we're going to use force to protect your property because most people won't.
	You know, John Wayne in The Shootist said that, you know, most people will flinch or hesitate before they pull the trigger.
	He says, I won't. I went to front sight training, and you have all these guys out there dressed in camouflage with all the extra ammunition hanging around.
	They're looking like little Junior Rambos.
	And I said, well, okay, you know, you look really impressive, but you're shooting at a paper target.
	I mean, do you really?
	Do you really have the courage to pull the trigger and take another human life?
	And suddenly it got all real quiet because they realized that in most cases they don't.
	And certainly a vast majority of people won't do that.
	And they need to be protected and they want an organization to do that.
	There is no piece of paper Which is going to be perfect.
	We were discussing this last night.
	How can we write the Constitution so that it's perfect?
	How can we write a piece of paper so that this won't happen in another 223 years?
	And the answer is, it's not possible.
	You know, the cost of liberty is eternal vigilance.
	It's up to us.
	And again, there's no good answer.
	Either I have to kill them or we have to have a government do it.
	And we're going to keep bouncing back and forth between who's going to have that power.
	And ultimately, I know the government will not protect me efficiently, which is why I am a very strong Second Amendment supporter.
	This question is for both.
	Hypothesize, what might the world look like if the U.S. Constitution had never been ratified?
	Would the number of deaths throughout the world be larger or smaller without the U.S. government?
	We'll start with Stephon first.
	Okay, good. Nice theoretical question.
	Well, if the U.S. Constitution had never been ratified, there would—I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there would be little to no federal government.
	What that would mean is that the competition among the states to keep their productive citizens Would be very high, right?
	Because originally there were 13 sovereign nations, right?
	Like not the EEC, but France and Germany and England, right?
	So what would have happened if the Constitution was not ratified is that there would be no federal government.
	There would be individual countries, And those countries would compete to have people stay and not move and not leave because it's really hard to control the movement of people in the 18th century.
	There weren't even any passports until the First World War because people would stow away.
	They'd come here. There was no, you know, electronic this, that, and the other.
	You could just go wherever you wanted for the most part.
	So there would be that aspect and that competition to keep people would mean that taxes would be slower to rise because the less centralized things are and the easier it is to move between things, the more competition there is, right?
	Because it's like a bunch of farmers where the cows can go wherever they want.
	You have to provide them some good grazing in order to, I don't know, slaughter them later in a tax metaphorical sense, right?
	But there would be greater competition.
	Oh, now I'm hungry. I'll eat later.
	There would be greater competition for the tax livestock, which I think would help things.
	There could have been a civil war that would have gone on, but it wouldn't nearly have been as bad, and I doubt it would have actually happened, because I think, as we all know, not having gone with the schoolhouse rock version of history, we know that the war was against the South in order to extract further tax concessions and had nothing to do with slavery.
	That would not have occurred.
	Slavery would have died out as it did because they just would have eventually figured out that slaves, not only completely immoral, but economically unproductive, So slavery would have died out just as it did in the rest of the world, simply by governments no longer catching slaves.
	That's all you have to do to get rid of slavery.
	You don't need a stupid civil war, as they did in Brazil.
	The government just said, okay, we're not going to catch your slaves anymore, and suddenly it became too expensive to run after your own slaves all the time, and so slavery just ends when the government starts enforcing it.
	So it would have died out relatively quickly because you wouldn't have been able to compete.
	With the slave-free societies, who have much more agricultural productivity, you for sure wouldn't have had the First World War, because the American involvement in the First World War, which there's a very strong argument that the American involvement in the First World War led directly to the Second World War.
	When Americans sent over huge numbers of troops, it tipped the balance of power against Germany so much that Germany had to agree to the Treaty of Versailles, otherwise they were just fighting to a standstill and they would have gone home and there would have been no Treaty of Versailles.
	Because Germany agreed to the Treaty of Versailles, they had to pay off all their debts which meant they printed money.
	Germany would originally have been paying up until the 1980s for the First World War if the treaty had been honored.
	Because they had to print so much money, they ended up with hyperinflation which destroyed the middle class, radicalized the Germans who then turned to Hitler for salvation.
	There was hatred of the Jews because the Jews were perceived as the international bankers driving the hyperinflation and so that hatred escalated and so if you didn't get a first world war without the federal government it's very unlikely you would have had a second world war so I would say that the Constitution has, in a very obviously abstract and theoretical way, the blood of millions seeped into its parchment, and without that, the history of the world, I think, would have been a much more peaceful and benevolent place.
	That's not even to count the things like, do we really think that Delaware would have invaded Iraq on its own?
	Of course not. Of course not.
	You have to have the federal government, and the reason you have the federal government is because it has the tax livestock which gives it the fiat currency power to fund wars through preying on future generations, right?
	So you would not have had the wars in Iraq.
	You wouldn't have had Korea. You wouldn't have had Vietnam.
	You wouldn't have had all the proxy wars that have been fought around the world.
	You wouldn't have extraordinary renditions.
	You wouldn't have the torture camps of Guantanamo Bay.
	You wouldn't have Abu Ghraib.
	There would be an enormous amount of peace, because the more you give people the power, right?
	What is the slogan of government?
	Free evil. That's what it is.
	You get to do evil, and other people get to pay, in cash and in blood.
	And the more abstracted you are from those you rule, the more evil you can commit.
	And that's why, if you're going to have a tyranny, you want it right by your side, not overhead in the sky, dominating everything.
	So I think it has a...
	It has had a seriously negative effect on world peace.
	Sorry, that's a real sprint through history, and I'm not going to say you're going to agree with everything, but that's certainly a perspective that I would take.
	I love a really good debate, so I'm going to agree with Stephan.
	You've got to agree with the truth.
	And again, anarchy and minority are going to be very, very close.
	We're going to have to search hard to find some of the differences.
	I teach a class on the Constitution, but the Constitution is far from perfect.
	Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1 allows slavery to exist until 1808.
	There are definitely problems with it.
	The colonies were trying to repay the Revolutionary War debt.
	The 13 colonies were printing money like it was going out of style, and with printing money you get hyperinflation and the economy stops.
	And so people in the colonies went, well, we really love freedom, but the economy sucks.
	We want you to go to Philadelphia and modify the Articles of Confederation.
	That's not what they did.
	They went, they threw the Articles in the trash, and they came up with a more perfect union, more perfect than the Articles Confederation, presumably.
	And it established a more centralized government.
	Alexander Hamilton was a monarchist.
	He didn't like King George III, but he thought that King George Washington would be a really great idea.
	Fortunately, Washington rejected the idea.
	Alexander Hamilton's followers were nationalists.
	They wanted one strong centralized government.
	He knew they wouldn't go for that, and so he labeled his team of supporters Federalists, which is a lie.
	Thomas Jefferson's followers were Federalists.
	They wanted a loosely distributed or loosely organized government, but that label Federalists had already been taken, and Hamilton said, well, if we're Federalists and you're the opposite of us, you must be anti-Federalists, which makes it sound like, you know, so basically what Hamilton did was switch the labels, you know, good guys and bad guys, and you switch the labels in order to get the Constitution ratified.
	Not a surprise that our politicians lie to us.
	The surprise really is that, you know, 200 some odd years later, when we talk about the strong centralized government in Washington, D.C., we don't call it a national government, which is what it is.
	We go, oh, that's a federal government.
	And, you know, so Hamilton was such a good liar, we're still falling for the lie.
	Two centuries later.
	If we had stayed with the Articles Confederation, the Articles required unanimous support, unanimous vote of all the existing states.
	Try to imagine 50 states united together and getting a unanimous vote from 50 states.
	How big do you think the federal government would be?
	It would be a trivia question.
	Okay, four tickets to the local concert, you've got to identify the city where the national government is.
	Oh gosh, I used to know that.
	We would be better off.
	We want to make the government small.
	And again, it is up to us.
	It is up to us to make sure that it stays small.
	That's what eternal vigilance, you know, is all about.
	You know, you don't go out and cut the lawn and go, wow, you know, I've really got a well manicured lawn, you know, and this is the last time this summer I'm going to have to cut the grass.
	You know, you get a good rain and your neighbors are going to be complaining because the grass is a foot tall.
	Government is the same way.
	Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, suggested that we need a little revolution about every 20 years, you know, to kind of trim back the government that has grown up.
	The problem is, it's like earthquakes in California.
	In California, we like earthquakes.
	About every 6 to 12 months.
	Because when you have earthquakes, often, You know, everything vibrates.
	You go, wow, did you feel that?
	That was pretty cool. And nothing bad happens.
	It's, you know, after five or ten years when you haven't had an earthquake and all that pressure has built up, you know, now you get 6.2 on the Richter scale and, you know, knock down buildings and roads.
	So I think that we're at that place politically.
	We haven't had, you know, enough revolution in a while.
	And if we do, in fact, have one, we're going to be knocking down some buildings.
	Thank you.
	If what had been, if they, oh, socialism?
	Short answer?
	No.
	Any questions?
	Most Americans imagine this huge political dichotomy between the Republicans and the You know, you're either red or blue, and that is a false dichotomy.
	You know, the Democrats want to control your life, the Republicans want to control your life.
	I mean, what the heck is the difference?
	The real dichotomy is between individualism and collectivism.
	In any decision about your life, either you can make that decision, Or the government can make the decision for you.
	Anybody with half a brain pretty much agrees that I'm smart enough to make my own decisions without the government helping me.
	Socialism and communism are inherently evil.
	As Stephan pointed out, private property is very important.
	It's the number one answer in my constitution class.
	You know, every question about the Constitution ultimately derives, you know, the answer is property.
	Communism has ten planks, and the first plank is to abolish private property.
	You have no private property, you have no rights, and, you know, socialism is just communism's little sister.
	Socialism is the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles.
	Communism is presumably the perfect Implementation of those principles and I am opposed to collectivism.
	I defend everybody's individual rights.
	If it's not roads, it's defense.
	And I agree with what you're saying.
	And it really is frustrating when you're a communicator about freedom and liberty and anti-war and anti-violence and anti-torture and anti- Great rooms of modern status prisons and so on, and people say, well yes, there is the blood of millions and there is the enslavement of millions and there is the starvation of millions through statism, but you know we can't be free because people need to drive places.
	It's such a strange perspective.
	That because we have problems with how we're going to defend the geographical area, we must all be slaves and sheep and tax livestock and herded around and indoctrinated in schools and dangled a few coins in our old age because these problems are so insoluble.
	But they're really not.
	I take national defense. This is something that comes up.
	Oh, if there's no government, there's no such thing as national defense.
	Two quick answers, and there's more in podcasts and in books if you're interested.
	First and foremost, national defense.
	The weird thing about when you use violence to solve problems, you freeze those solutions in time.
	Think of public education.
	We all, most of us went to public schools, right?
	In 1860, 1870s, they were nationalized, right?
	They went from the free market to the state.
	In 1860, you had a classroom with a teacher who had a piece of chalk and a blackboard.
	150 years later, with the internet, with virtual reality, with homeschooling, with pen tablets, with every kind of communications transformation that you could conceive of, and a few that you could never conceive of, what do we have? 150 years later, we have a blackboard, a piece of Chalk and a teacher, right?
	It freezes solutions in time.
	When you wrap them in violence, they freeze in time.
	The problem with statism, fundamentally, is that it is a solution that is as old as humankind.
	It is fundamentally tribalism on a national scale.
	So it's at least 10,000 years old.
	You look back at 5,000 years or 7,000 years of the ancient Egyptians.
	They had governments. They had law courts.
	They had national defense. They had taxation.
	They had inflation. They had fiat currency.
	All of these. Staggeringly destructive shite that statism represents.
	We don't use medical technology from the ancient Egyptians.
	We don't use papyrus from the ancient Egyptians, but still we're supposed to use this concept called the government, which is so old.
	National defense has been superseded by technological advances.
	No country that owns even a single nuclear device has ever been invaded.
	Ever. Yeah, they fought proxy wars, right?
	England and Argentina. In the Falklands we've got Russia and America in Vietnam and in Korea and so on.
	But no country that has a single nuclear weapon has ever been invaded.
	Why? Is Europe at peace for the first time in 10,000 years?
	Because they've got weapons of mass destruction and the leaders, these brave political military leaders, suddenly seem to find a lot of restraint when they're in the crosshairs.
	When they can't just send young people to be slaughtered, but they themselves could get hit with a nuke, suddenly they seem to find a lot of restraints and the capacity for peace.
	So what do you need to defend a geographical area?
	A couple of nukes. What is that going to cost you?
	A hundred million dollars a year?
	It's a buck or two per person per year to guarantee that you're not going to be invaded anymore or you're going to start causing trouble overseas, which gets people flying planes into your buildings.
	So you don't want any more than that.
	You want a minimum possible defense.
	It's completely easy in a free society.
	Second point, which I'll keep brief, is that...
	Let's use our moderators here, just very briefly.
	All right, the guy in the suit is the statist society.
	We'll keep that theme running.
	And the guy without the suit, who should really be unshaven, is the anarchy society, right?
	So I'm an evil third-party dude who's got a military and wants to invade, right?
	Why is it that I would want to invade another country?
	Is it to sightsee? Of course not.
	It's because I want to take over the tax structure of that society.
	Right? Because that society has tax livestock which produce consistent money, which I can then spend.
	Right? So if I go and invade this guy, then I can take over his tax structure, which is of course what every conqueror does.
	Right? They go in, they take over the government, they continue to extract the taxes from the population.
	So I can go and invade this guy, this guy's country, I'll say.
	That's a little sinister otherwise.
	I go and invade this guy's country and I can take over the tax structure of his state.
	But this crazy anarchy dude, his country, there's no tax structure.
	There's no tax collection.
	It's the difference between trying to take over a really well-organized farm that's very productive and wandering into a swamp.
	No disrespect. He actually smells great.
	I'm going back for just one more.
	But that's the real difference.
	If you have an anarchic society, there's nothing to invade, because there's nothing to take over.
	There's no tax structure. There's no Fort Knox that you go and create.
	There's no national army.
	Why did Hitler go into Western Czechoslovakia?
	Because of the Skoda-Amenon works, which were created by the state, so he could take those over.
	To get the 100,000 soldiers, to get the 20,000 tanks, to get the artillery unit, that's why he went there.
	If it was a stately society, those things, those fruits, those benefits would not be there to take.
	So, you don't have to worry about being invaded if you're an anarchistic society because there's nothing to take.
	Not taking over a farm and getting the milk and the eggs and they're just wandering into a forest where there's nothing to take.
	No sane person is ever going to invade.
	An anarchic society.
	Plus, of course, you don't know who's got what weapons, right?
	Which is a little different in a state of society.
	It's fun to invade a state of society, particularly in Europe, because the population is disarmed, right?
	Even the greatest military in the world is having a tough time standing up to Iraqis who are arming themselves, right?
	Because there's no disarmament of Iraqis because they're just bringing arms in from outside.
	You're simply not going to worry about national defense.
	It's going to be a couple of bucks a year and even that's going to fade away.
	No one's going to want to invade you because there's nothing to take and they don't know who's armed.
	You're just not going to have to worry about it, but we still think in the same old way as when that kind of status solution seems to be essential for everyone, but it's really not the case.
	technology and events and weapons of mass destruction have overtaken that need.
	Next question.
	This is for both speakers.
	Ayn Rand once wrote in Capitalism the Unknown Ideal, that anarchy as a political concept is a naive, floating abstraction.
	If the society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare.
	Stefan and Michael, please argue for or against Ayn Rand's stance on the stateless society.
	First of all, I wanted to just mention I'm a massive fan of Ayn Rand.
	I think she is a stone genius describing the ages.
	And without her, I probably would still be some muttering Canadian socialist.
	Canadian anarchist, that's a weird thing.
	It's like the two words you'd never expect to hear together, you know, like, Finnish entrepreneur or military intelligence or something like that, right?
	It's just weird. You're an anarchist.
	You must be from Bolivia. No, Mississauga.
	Anyway. So I have huge, huge respect for Ayn Rand.
	The two things that I disagree with her approach on ethics, though of course I agree with almost all of her conclusions.
	Not that that means anything. It just means that I do agree.
	So I have a huge disrespect for the Rand, one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived.
	I think her stance on anarchy is irrational.
	I know she's going to come and haunt my dreams tonight in some smoky way.
	But she says that some gang is going to take over society.
	But what are they going to take over?
	What are they going to take over?
	There's no tax structure in place.
	There's not this constant money spigot coming out of the government control of the citizenry.
	You know, if there is this incredible desire for domination over other human beings, how does the existence of government solve that problem?
	It's a huge plum prize for every evil person to grab ahold of to control other human beings.
	Because it's already in existence.
	It's already self-funding.
	The military, the weapons, the control, the police, the prisons, the prison guards, the truncheons, the court system, everything!
	The indoctrination system through the children for the most part, although I know she wouldn't agree with that.
	It's already in place.
	You just have to step in and take the money.
	But in a free society, a truly free society with no state, the apparatus for control and profit simply do not exist.
	You can't just go around creating them.
	I have a whole section in this book about, say, some defense agency, right?
	You pay for some defense agency.
	How wouldn't they just become another government?
	And it's completely logically impossible, economically impossible.
	I won't go through the whole argument because I've got my guy here who's keeping me on time.
	But have a look at it.
	I mean, there's really, really strong arguments as to how.
	Of course, there is a danger of human domination.
	That's why we can't have a pre-existing structure that is expressly designed for human domination called the state.
	If that's not there, people will be bullies in their private lives, but they're not going to take over the whole society of hundreds of millions of people and take half their income at the point of a gun because that gun simply won't be there and you can't just snap your fingers and create it in a free society. but they're not going to take over the whole society I also want to say that I am a huge fan of Ayn Rand.
	I think that logical thought is the only way to come to any reasonable conclusion.
	In an earlier metaphor, Stephan was talking about government as kind of this cancer, and he suggested that you don't go into the doctor and ask him to cut out 80% of the tumor.
	Obviously, he'd want to remove all of it.
	What that metaphor overlooks is that the tumor had to, you know, arise spontaneously the first time.
	We presume that it had to come from somewhere.
	I believe that is true about government.
	Again, if we could eliminate all government.
	Again, we haven't actually defined what government is.
	I don't know if we've established that mutual cooperation with nothing written down It's anarchy, and it's only when you write stuff down.
	But as soon as we start to have contracts, we write contracts on paper because we presume the paper's not going to change.
	If Stephan and I agree to something verbally, and we shake hands and we're really good friends, and we come back here from now, and I go, you said...
	He goes, no, no, that's not what I said.
	If we don't have anything written down, we can end up arm wrestling or getting into fisticuffs to try to debate what was done.
	If we have it written down, we can go, here it is on paper, that's what we agreed to.
	And even that is not a perfect cure, because those contracts can also be misinterpreted or reinterpreted later.
	But, again, one of the factors that make anarchy I mean, so wonderful but impossible is human nature.
	Most of us, I'm going to just roughly estimate, you know, 98% of us just want to be left alone.
	You know, I really, really like you, but I have no desire to interfere in your life whatsoever.
	I mean, I'm busy trying to run my life, and I'm not doing that real well, so I don't have enough time to try to control yours.
	For whatever reason, there are people in society who just think that they know how to run your life better than you do.
	You know, all you've got to do is, and they're more than happy to spend their part of the day, you know, doing things to control you.
	And they can formalize it, you know, and put it in paper, and you've got government.
	And if you don't nip it in the bud there, it's going to grow bigger and bigger, and eventually you will have a huge problem.
	It's an organized system of plunder that somebody else can come in and take over, at least you hope they can take over.
	If it's impervious, then we're in trouble, because we do have a very huge, powerful government right now that is euphemistically known as the United States, and if we, the people, don't stand up, it's already out of control, and it's easy for it to get more Out of control.
	In my Constitution classes, I ask my students, hypothetically, if Chinese people have a right to life.
	And the answer is obvious to me, but they have to think about it a while and go, well, yeah, they do have a right to life, but they don't have a Constitution, they don't have a Bill of Rights, and they also don't have a government that respects their right to life.
	It's not a piece of paper that gives you your rights.
	And what would happen?
	They've got 1.5 billion Chinese people.
	That's 1,500 million compared to our 300 million here.
	What would happen if overnight 1.5 billion Chinese people just stood up and said, hey, enough is enough of this communist dictatorship.
	We're not going to do that anymore. It would end.
	You know, we are in an ideological war.
	It is a war of ideas.
	And the socialists and the communists are currently winning.
	You know, they have most of us convinced that they're in charge and, you know, we need to follow orders.
	Why does communism work in China?
	Sadly, because one and a half billion Chinese people think that's the way it's supposed to be.
	They accept it.
	They allow it to happen.
	The same argument can be used here in the United States.
	300 million people allow this to happen.
	All we have to do is stand up tomorrow and go, freedom!
	Enough is enough.
	And we will be able to take back this government and have a lot more liberty and a lot more freedom.
	Three questions.
	This is basically what I had been alluding to one or two questions ago.
	It's all about the unfortunate human condition that some people are evil.
	Violence is going to happen.
	And in many cases the only way to stop that violence is with additional violence force.
	If you can throw a tarp over somebody and subdue them without violence, all the better.
	But somebody Sadly, somebody is going to have to use force and or violence to stop the bad stuff from happening.
	And again, if you want to have anarchy, just let me know.
	I'll strap on my.45 and you guys don't have to worry about my property.
	I'm willing to take care of myself.
	And anybody tries to take my property, I guarantee that I will not hesitate when I pull the trigger.
	Most of the people in the world, specifically most of the people in the United States, are not willing to do that.
	They are not willing to engage in violence.
	They are not willing to even use violence for self-defense, which is a concept that just boggles my mind.
	But that defense needs to happen.
	Most people want to subcontract that out.
	They want someone else to take care of them.
	We want it done responsibly.
	Again, that's this theoretical minarchy which always uses force to protect your rights and never uses force to violate your rights.
	I don't know how we get there.
	It's like flipping a coin and having it land edge on, but that is the goal.
	I think that Stephan and I will agree that what we have now is way too much government.
	Let's start cutting back on government, minimizing it, making it smaller and smaller and smaller.
	And when we get to the 5% minarchy mark, we can reanalyze it and think, well, maybe we can go that last 5% and get anarchy.
	I'm willing to learn.
	But we're never going to get to anarchy if we don't get to minarchy first.
	It is our responsibility.
	it is your responsibility to take control of your government.
	So, 2% evil.
	We're just trying to figure out who in this room is.
	I mean, yeah, there are evil people in the world, as I said at the beginning, there's no question of that.
	I have never heard a satisfactory answer, because there isn't one, about how if there are two percent of evil people, and the evil people want two things, they want money for free, and they want domination and power over others, that is the exact definition of what a government does.
	So if there are only two percent of evil people in society, let's say, that's true, where are they going to want to be?
	Are they going to want to be in the government?
	The government It's a rocket-propelled boost to evil.
	It's like giving evil that nitro thing in the car movies, you know?
	It just allows evil to go that much faster.
	You can't keep evil people out of government.
	You can't do it. Everybody thinks that there's evil people in the world, so we need these shining virtuous government people to protect us from the evil people.
	But I don't want power over others.
	I'm not that avaricious for money.
	I guess I do this crazy thing for a living.
	But I recognize that there are lots of people out there who are hungry for power over others, who are hungry for free money.
	You have a government. Government is a monopoly of individuals with the legal right to initiate force.
	Frankly, at will, because constitutions stop nothing.
	In fact, constitutions are dangerous because you think that they will save you from evil people.
	If you believe the lies of evil people, you are at their mercy.
	Chamberlain goes to Munich in 1938 and says, From Hitler look, he said he's not going to invade any more countries.
	They believed him.
	And what happened? If you think that pieces of paper will control evil, you are setting yourself up to be dominated by the very evil people who are the only people who want to have that kind of power over you, and the government is a ready-made place for them to go where they have that dominant capacity.
	Of course, if there are no evil people in society, we don't need a government.
	If everyone's evil, no government is possible.
	If a majority of people are evil, then you can't have a democracy that says they'll just vote in evil people, right?
	If a minority of people are evil, which I believe is the case, then you can't have a government because that's exactly where it will draw them like a black hole draws matter.
	That's exactly where they will go.
	So this problem, which is, I do remember the question vaguely, the problem of who will watch the watchers has never been solved.
	And to me, saying, how will, um, Arbitration and how will conflict resolution and so on be performed in a free society is like saying who will determine the value of a good?
	Well, the competition, optimization, and efficiency of the free market determines the price or the value of a good.
	No central planning can do it.
	How do we find the best and most creative ways to solve problems without institutionalized violence which leads to war, inflation, predation, and destruction?
	I don't have all the answers.
	Nobody does. But I know the answer is not institutionalized violence.
	I know that the creative intelligence of human beings, which has been forcibly restricted from solving these problems throughout history, we didn't have a state created from us.
	We inherit a state from the origins of the species like we inherit superstition.
	We don't any longer say, I need rain, I'm going to do a rain dance, because we understand that I don't have rhythm.
	We inherited a state from the primeval ignorance of the species, the same way that we used to think that the moon was made of cheese and the sun was made of ping pong balls or something, right?
	But we now understand that slowly and painful that we have gotten towards a more scientific and rational understanding of the world.
	We have to shed the superstition of statism, the fantasy that we can give a small group of people the power, the monopolistic power of initiating violence and make the world a better place.
	It's a superstition that we inherited.
	Like slavery, we inherited slavery from the origins of the species.
	And we outgrew it.
	And we don't sit there and sit there and say, oh my god, slavery's about to come back!
	Right? Because we all understand that it's immoral and it's not coming back.
	The same with statism.
	We inherited it from the origins of the species.
	It is a primitive, dumb, stupid, violent and ugly way to solve human problems because it doesn't solve human problems.
	It just makes them worse.
	It rewards evil people at the expense of the virtuous.
	And I can't spend my life running around saying, is the government getting any bigger?
	What stand am I going to take today to make it smaller?
	I don't want a life of eternal vigilance against the growing power of evil.
	I want to remove the apparatus which feeds it, which is the monopoly of statism.
	The very fact is that people don't want to spend their whole life caged with a rabid tiger saying, what's it doing today?
	How am I going to make it smaller? How am I going to control it?
	No! Get the tiger out of the cage and live free!
	We don't have to circle around this thing called the stage and try and control it and make sure it doesn't get any bigger because we can't!
	It's never happened before.
	It will never happen in the future.
	We just get rid of the whole thing as a concept because it is an erroneous concept.
	Calling people to government does not change their moral nature.
	Putting a guy in a uniform does not mean that it's moral for him to kill.
	Putting a guy in a funny hat doesn't mean that he can fly.
	Calling someone to government does not give them the moral right.
	To initiate the use of force, it is a logical and moral error to talk about a government at all.
	And so, who will solve it?
	free individuals voluntarily, not those with the power of coercion.
	Next question, Michael.
	Should an individual be able to secede from the government without repercussions?
	Oh! Yeah, I certainly hope so.
	Secession is a topic that comes up frequently with, oh, I don't know, 27 states doing 10th Amendment proclamations these days, and we were discussing the War of Northern Aggression last night, and there is a widespread misconception in the United States that only Texas has the right to succeed.
	I don't know Maybe because we're just really stubbornly independent in Texas, but anybody, any state has the right to secede.
	And again, in our conversation recently, somebody tried to suggest that the Civil War proves that states, you know, cannot secede.
	And it's like, so you don't know or either believe in or respect the Declaration of Independence.
	Oh, yeah, that's my favorite document.
	Well, the Declaration of Independence was a secession We seceded from England.
	And basically the only difference is that presumably we won the American Revolution and the southern states lost the battle for southern independence.
	You can have an idea, again, this is an ideological war, and sometimes you have to stand tall and defend your ideas.
	You may or may not We may or may not win those ideas.
	But yes, I do believe that philosophically an individual should, I mean, my parents are both alive.
	I love my parents.
	But at my age, I don't ask Mom and Dad for advice.
	I talk to them frequently.
	They don't try to tell me what to do.
	In fact, Mom bemoans the fact that, oh, Michael, you're just going to do whatever you want to do.
	Like, yeah, that's pretty much true.
	Stubbornly independent. So if I'm not going to allow my parents to make decisions about my life, I mean, why on earth would I allow a government to make decisions about my life?
	That's absolutely ludicrous.
	So, you know, what we need is a lot more people standing up and being independent and, by whatever method you want to, declaring a secession from the federal government.
	And, you know, we just need to have enough of us to make it stick.
	You know, if I go up against the federal government by myself, I may be very valiant and I may be very courageous, but pretty much I'm going to end up looking like a pepperoni pizza.
	We need to have a majority of people holding these same ideas and defending them.
	If Stefan and I are walking through the jungle, I'm guessing that Stefan and I both agree that cannibalism is bad.
	But if Stefan and I encounter cannibals in the jungle, I don't think it would be a really good procedure for us to stand in a soapbox and go, you know guys, cannibalism is really, really bad because we're going to be the first ones in the pot.
	So, you need to have enough people, you have to have a good idea to start with, and you have to have enough people supporting your idea to be able to defend it and make it work.
	And the Constitution, I think, is a really good idea, better than most, not perfect.
	But right now, in the United States, we don't have enough people defending it.
	And the government is way out of control.
	I haven't eaten enough today.
	Because when you start talking about cannibalism, I had a total Bugs Bunny moment.
	You know, all I did was I looked over and I saw a drumstick in a suit.
	You know, with the aromatic stuff going up there.
	You know, you see the fade in and fade out.
	Anyway. But enough about me.
	Well, should an individual be able to proceed from the government, I think it's very important for us to be precise and accurate in our language.
	I'm on a libertarian-less forum with Kinsella and Locke and a couple of other people, quite a number of other people, and we got into a very fierce debate under their whole video on this, because they couldn't quite understand the concept.
	Because they're trained in economics and they're trained in political science, they're not trained in philosophy, right?
	And so, a bit of an educational milestone, because they were saying the government this, the government that, the government the other.
	Should the government be able to do this?
	Should the government be able to do the other?
	And it's like, well, that's like asking, should unicorns be allowed to play soccer?
	And really, that is a very real way of looking at it because there is no such thing as a government.
	It is a concept that does not exist, right?
	We all, like, we say, okay, there's a crowd here, right?
	You all bought your invisible friends, which is great, but there's a crowd here, right?
	And if you all leave, there's no crowd.
	You can't take a photograph of a family with nobody in the picture, because it's just a conceptual fact.
	It doesn't exist in reality.
	No such thing as the government.
	What there is, is stuff written on paper, some very well-oiled and quick-to-be-pulled guns, there are aircraft carriers, there are buildings, there are flags, those things all exist.
	There is no such thing as the government.
	There are people with guns, there are prisons, There are people who fear for their lives if they cross that government or do not pay its extractions.
	But there's no such thing as the government.
	It doesn't exist. So, to me, saying should I be able to secede from the government is like should I be able to walk out of Middle Earth?
	It's a meaningless question.
	Do I have the right to live free of others initiating violence against me?
	Absolutely. Of course.
	Do I have the right to secede for the government?
	It's a meaningless question because it presumes that the government is a conceptual tag with any meaning whatsoever when it's not.
	It's just a bunch of people with guns.
	That's all they are. No such thing as a country.
	There's earth, there's trees, there's air.
	But there's no such thing as a country.
	No such thing as a government.
	I can't secede from it because it doesn't exist.
	I do reject the right of other people to initiate violence against me.
	That includes the people who call themselves the government, but I can't see from that which does not exist.
	As long as we continue to believe that it does exist, we think that we're obeying something other than people with guns, but that's really all it's about.
	It's just people with guns. There's no such thing.
	and I can't succeed from that, which does not exist.
	Okay, so for the final question, the United States of America is a compulsion experiment.
	What was the hypothesis and what is your conclusion?
	That's a good question.
	I like the way that's phrased.
	The experiment is self-government.
	For countless centuries, governments across the world were all controlled by a king, an emperor, some monarch.
	I don't know how we got there, but everything was derived from the concept of the divine right of kings.
	Without going into a lot of detail, God comes down with his magic wand, smacks some guy in the head, and says, you're the king, you own everything.
	You have all the rights and you can distribute privileges to your subjects.
	They owe you their life.
	Unless you can pick both feet up off the ground at the same time, you're standing on my land and basically I own you.
	And so we came to the North American continent and decided, you know, that's really not a really good way.
	And the Declaration of Independence establishes the idea that we are going to, you know, be blessed with rights, you know, ordained by our Creator.
	And so instead of, you know, God hitting the king in the head and we get privileges secondhand, now we We are sovereign.
	We are kings and queens.
	And my book is entitled, Good to be King, to express that idea.
	We have 300 million kings and queens in the United States.
	And we have rights.
	We can own property.
	We don't have to get our privileges from someone else.
	And this idea was so unusual, so unorthodox, so revolutionary, that You know, most of the countries around the world go, oh, my God, this isn't going to last.
	You know, 20 years tops.
	I mean, it's going to all fall apart.
	And so, okay, we've got 223 years.
	It hasn't been, you know, the best of times, but it certainly hasn't been the worst of times either.
	And by distributing the power, instead of having one person have that power, you know, life has been pretty good.
	The standard of living in the United States has...
	Exponentially increased.
	But we lost sight of the concept.
	The concept is individual rights and personal responsibility.
	Everybody wants their rights.
	You watch the news and every other day you have somebody banging on the podium demanding their rights.
	Well, if everybody wants their rights, how come we're struggling?
	How come we don't have wall-to-wall liberty?
	Well, that's because nobody wants the responsibility.
	You own your body.
	You're responsible for feeding yourself, sheltering yourself, and, oh, by the way, you are responsible for providing for your own retirement.
	But our parents and grandparents were lied to.
	The government says we're bigger and smarter than you.
	You give us your Social Security money.
	And when you're ready to retire, you're going to have more money than you know what to do with.
	How many times have you heard the conversation, yep, Mom and I are going on vacation again.
	We just can't spend that Social Security money fast enough.
	Nobody on Social Security feels secure, and that's because we have given the responsibility of our retirement to the government, which is a really, really sad thing.
	So I think the experiment started out real well.
	But because we didn't understand that the cost of liberty is eternal vigilance, we didn't realize that the Founding Fathers didn't set it up to run in perpetual motion, that it's our job, our responsibility, to provide for ourselves and to protect each other's rights and to keep the government small.
	And because we've allowed the tiger out of the cage, now we are in trouble.
	We're trying to figure out how to get it back in the cage.
	So at this point, the experiment may be ready to go extinct, which I think is very sad.
	I think that's the difference.
	You want to put the tiger back in the cage.
	I want some tiger skin pants.
	I think that everybody recognizes- sorry about that image, everyone.
	Would you like to take a moment to put your lunch back?
	I think that every person who studies and thinks about these topics recognizes that America was on paper a noble step forward and a great experiment in attempting to create a government by and for the people to protect the rights Of citizens, we create this government to secure our liberties.
	And I think that I certainly believe that it was a great and noble experiment.
	I can't imagine That the circumstances will be better.
	Maybe when we go and live on other worlds, you kind of need virgin territory to create a new society because unfortunately there are so many people indebted in and dependent upon status, largesse and handouts from teachers to postal workers to retirees to welfare recipients to military industrial complexes to executives to banks to now car companies, you name it. That you simply can't pry that power out of people using politics.
	So maybe we can go to a new country or a new planet.
	We can start something new. A new landmass arises.
	We can colonize it and start something new.
	But I think there was a really unique set of circumstances that gave rise to the possibility.
	It was a conjunction of new landmass, tyrannical governments in Europe and other places around the world that caused the best and the brightest to flee, as they always do.
	And you had the peak of the Enlightenment philosophy.
	You had the printing press, which allowed for the easy dissemination of amazing writings like Thomas Paine and other writers, John Locke and all of these great philosophers.
	So you had an incredible alignment of the planets to create the greatest possibility for statism.
	And let's remember that the American Revolution was still a statist revolution.
	It was not, let's get rid of government.
	For a small little bit that occurred, I think, in Pennsylvania, which Murray Rothbard writes about.
	But it was a statist experiment.
	I doubt ever there will be a better set of circumstances to test the theory of statism.
	But let's look at where it started and where it ended, because there is a bit of a myth.
	You know, I did a lot of studying in history, and one of the things that you learn when you study history, especially at the graduate school level, is that the winners...
	The winners write the history.
	The victors write the history.
	Obviously, if Hitler had won, there would be a whole different set of history about the Second World War.
	And we do see the American Revolution and the American Statist experiment through the lens of, you know, I hate to say it, but rich white landowners.
	They wrote the Constitution.
	They wrote the Declaration of Independence.
	They furthered the laws.
	There weren't a lot of black women who were on the federal court system in 1820.
	And we forget, by just looking at this small group of incredibly privileged, and brilliant, and I think mostly honorable men, that there's a lot that's missing from our conception of how America started.
	I'll give you a small statistic.
	In the 16th century, the population, the native population of the Americas, North and South America, was estimated at about 24 million souls.
	By the late 18th century, it was about 2 million.
	That is a greater than 90% reduction.
	Can we call it genocide?
	I think at some levels we can.
	Because there were bounties put out by the federal government and the local governments that if you killed Indians, you got paid.
	It was a professional mafia hit jobs Of the native population.
	Was some of it somewhat accidental, smallpox, blankets?
	Well, yeah, you could argue that it is.
	But it did start on the whole...
	America rests on the graves of those who were here.
	And that aspect of things, it also started with slavery.
	I'll do 30 more seconds if that's right.
	It started with slavery and it started with certain aspects of the genocide.
	That's where it started. No rights for women, no rights for children.
	Slavery, genocide, where did it end?
	The largest, most powerful, most brutal government, particularly overseas, that the world has ever seen.
	The most powerful and brutal empire.
	And I think we can do better.
	I don't think we have to stay within that paradigm that we start with genocide and end with empire.
	But there's another way.
	Say there's no good answer to the question of government.
	We need to start asking different questions, which is not what kind of government we have, but why do we need it at all.
	Now that we have the technology, the communication, the wisdom, the knowledge that we have now, we need to start asking smarter questions, not how do we tame the tiger, but why do we need the tiger?
	Thank you.
	I really do want to get to audience questions, but there's an old saying that if the powers that be can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't care about the answers because you're just completely in the wrong ballpark.
	I do believe that there's two reasons why we do things, fundamentally.
	There's pragmatism and there's idealism.
	So pragmatism is like I need to Mow my lawn, right, as you were saying.
	I can either get a nice lawnmower or I can get some toenail cutters, right?
	And if I use toenail cutters to cut my lawn, I'm not immoral, I'm not evil, I'm just, you know, not very productive, right?
	So if we're going to do things for pragmatic reasons, then we're going to do things for pragmatic reasons, then questions of morality and right and wrong and virtue and evil and good and bad, they don't come into it at all because we're just about getting things done.
	But I believe that we want to do things particularly in the questions of institutionalized violence and organization of conflict resolution within society.
	Those are all fundamental moral questions.
	How do we live in a virtuous, free, noble, peaceful society?
	How do we eliminate war?
	How do we eliminate imprisonment?
	How do we eliminate torture? These are all essential moral questions.
	When you're going to go from the realm of pragmatism into the realm of morality, you can't erase Your principles.
	Because the whole reason you're there is because of the principles.
	Mr. Bednarik and I and Minarchist and I will agree, self-owning, property rights, the non-initiation of force are the moral principles that are the most sacred, the most important, the most vital.
	I would argue the most pragmatic principles to hold to.
	We can't have a moral goal called the improvement of mankind and the reduction of violence and torture, war and murder.
	And then say, in our very first step towards that, we're going to break those moral principles and create an institution that has the right to do everything that we consider immoral.
	If we want to build a bridge towards virtue, we have to go in that direction.
	We don't say, it's so important, it's so moral to go north, the first thing I'm going to do is head south.
	You can't break the principle in your very first step.
	Maybe towards the end when things are really hellish, but not at the very beginning.
	And if you want a peaceful society, as we all do, and you want a society that respects a person's property, then you stick to those principles and you don't break them the very first time you set forward your solution and say, yes, property rights are important, so let's create an institution with the perfect power to destroy them.
	Yes, self-ownership is so important, so let's create an organization with the power to own people through taxation.
	Through laws. Yes, the non-initiation of force is the most important principle, so let's immediately create an institution which its very definition is to break that principle.
	Let's not sell out the first step.
	Okay, maybe the hundredth step when we're offered a lot of money, but not the first step.
	And that's the consistency that voluntarism or anarchism or a dedication to non-violence and to self-ownership gives you.
	You stick with your principles.
	If you're going to abandon your principles, why even bother being in the moral arena to begin with?
	And so let's not look to a violent institution to solve the problems of violence.
	Let's not look to a monopoly of the initiation of aggression to solve problems of human conflict.
	Let's not give up on our principles The very first time we utter our solution, but let's stick consistently with those principles, because not only are they true, and not only are they moral, but damn it, they work!
	And this debate, which is completely non-violent, And this audience, who is perfectly delightful, is a perfect example of that.
	Everywhere you look, you see spontaneous social organization without violence.
	You see it in the marriage market.
	You see it in the job market.
	You see it in the educational market.
	You see human beings coming together to solve problems in a voluntary and peaceful manner.
	Anarchy is what we live!
	Statism is the exception.
	People say, well, what's proof of anarchy?
	They say, oh, can you prove to me that anarchy works?
	Look in the mirror. When was the last time you used violence to get a job?
	I've never used violence to get a job.
	Postal workers accepted. When was the last time you used violence to get a date?
	I've never used violence to get a date.
	So, you negotiate.
	You work peacefully. Does that mean everyone's like that?
	No, of course not. But that's why we can't have a government.
	People think it's an argument for the government.
	It's the exact argument against the government.
	We work voluntaristically peacefully in every aspect of our lives.
	If you want to look at anarchism, look at 99.999% of everything that you do is voluntary and peaceful and cooperative.
	Yeah, you'll get disagreements.
	Yeah, you may raise your voice. Yeah, you may get mad at people.
	But you don't pull out guns and shoot people.
	That's the vast majority of people.
	And I'm not going to give up my freedom because there are a few evil people in the world.
	I'm not going to allow the fear-mongering of people who say you need a government but to protect you from the evil people.
	I don't want to give up my freedom, my daughter's freedom, my wife's freedom.
	I don't want to give up that freedom because there are bad people in the world.
	Isn't that surrendering something essential and important?
	Because there are bad people in the world, I need to get into a cage called statism.
	Doesn't that mean they win?
	That's a shame. I don't want that.
	I don't think you want that either.
	We have to come up with more creative solutions than, I hear something in the bushes, let me get into a cage for the rest of my life.
	I'm not that scared of bad people.
	I'm really not, to the point where I'm going to huddle in a cage.
	You know, like a frightened chihuahua.
	Because there might be a beast out there in the bushes.
	Because every time I go out, I don't see a beast.
	And I see that the people who are telling me there's a beast are the ones who are the actual predators.
	Right? Say, well, you've got to get into the cage because there are predators out there, but the only guns I see are the governments.
	They're not protecting me from someone else.
	They are the people who are threatening me.
	I will take my chances that what's in the bushes is a squirrel, rather than hide in a cage.
	Because I'm afraid of bad people.
	I don't want to surrender my liberty to the mere potentiality of evil.
	And I don't think you should either.
	Capitalism Usually gets a bad rap.
	We look at the economy.
	We've had a trillion-dollar bailout.
	Now we've got a multi-trillion-dollar stimulus package being planned.
	We've got like a triple-trillion-dollar budget planned for next year as if anything with 12 zeros left of the decimal point can accurately be called a budget.
	And they go, see?
	Capitalism doesn't work.
	Well, we don't have capitalism in the United States.
	Not really. We have an economy that is almost universally controlled by the government.
	We just used that Interstate Commerce Clause and the General Welfare Clause, and we have a population that doesn't understand the Constitution, and they can pretty much get anything by it.
	We've got a president who's handsome and articulate and promises change, and people are standing ovations, applause, applause, and you wonder why we're having problems.
	When I give my presentations, I will ask for a show of hands, how many people are good patriotic Americans?
	Not surprisingly, it's unanimous.
	Everybody's a good patriotic American.
	I'm like, okay, show of hands, how many people know how many articles Are in the Constitution.
	Rarely. Rarely does anybody have any clue.
	And my question is, like, what constitutes a good patriotic American?
	You know how to dress yourself in the morning?
	That's the criteria.
	You know, you got your shirt buttoned correctly, so that makes you a good patriotic American.
	I think the standard needs to be a lot higher than that.
	You know, we have a lot of criticism about the Constitution.
	You know, the Constitution doesn't work.
	Well, no, not if you don't use it.
	Most people have no idea what the Constitution says, so they wouldn't recognize unconstitutional government when it falls on them, not if.
	Most of what my government does is unconstitutional.
	I find that unconscionable.
	And totally unacceptable.
	And with the last breath I ever take, I am going to do my best to restore a constitutional republic to protect your individual rights, to protect your private property, and to limit the abuse that government has monopolized on it.
	It may not be the perfect answer, but we have government because a wide, vast majority of people I really don't want anarchy.
	I've already discussed one topic, is the abhorrence of violence.
	It's like, I don't want to hurt anybody.
	In fact, a lot of people I know, they don't even like verbal confrontation.
	I mean, I enjoy You know, talking with Stephan and, you know, getting into all this.
	I mean, my favorite thing is these philosophical debates.
	I love it. You know, arguing back and forth, you know, examining the ideas.
	A lot of people that I know don't even like to do that.
	It's like, oh, oh, you know, like you're raising your voice, just like, you know, can't handle confrontation.
	I want everybody to just hug and love each other.
	Well, you can want it, but it's not likely going to happen, not universally.
	You know, most of you will not accept anarchy because it's going to require you, in some circumstances, to perform violence.
	And most of you are not willing to pull the trigger to kill somebody that's trying to kill you.
	The other thing is that we do, as Stefan said earlier, we like property.
	And we like the easiest way to accumulate it.
	And instead of working for it, if I can take yours, Well, that's just a whole lot better.
	I let you go out and work in the field and grow all the corn and I just show up at the end and, you know, walk away with the wagon.
	Most people do not understand the difference between rights and privileges.
	And it boils down to, you can do anything you want with your property.
	You can do nothing at all, justifiably, with my property.
	It's my property. I was speaking to a college audience and one young lady raised her hand.
	I was a presidential candidate.
	She wanted to know what I was going to do about Medicare and Medicaid.
	And I said, they're theft.
	They're gone. And she was like horrified.
	You know, it's like apparently I didn't understand the situation.
	She had to let me know that her mother was elderly and ill and had all of these medications that she needed to buy.
	And I said, well, do you love your mother?
	Well, yes, of course. Would you help your mother buy her medications?
	And she doesn't say yes or no.
	She immediately tries to divert the question.
	She goes, but what about that SOB up on the hill?
	You know, the guy with the big motor home in the driveway with more money than he knows what to do with.
	And the first thing I did was question her, how do you know that he has more money than he knows what to do with?
	Apparently he knows exactly what to do with his money.
	That's why he's got the motor home in the driveway.
	But ultimately I said, okay, your mother needs these prescription drugs, which we all acknowledge are expensive.
	Are you going to take a gun and go up there and take that person's money?
	No, not going to do that.
	Why not? Well, because that would be theft.
	And I said, oh, I get it.
	You want me to go up there and take that person's money and give it to you for your mother's prescription so you don't have to risk lead poisoning.
	You want the booty, but you don't want to take the risk.
	You want other people's property and you want the government to do it for you.
	I am opposed to theft of any kind.
	I'm opposed to individual theft, and I'm opposed to government-sponsored theft.
	We have individual rights.
	It's all based on private property.
	And I think that liberty does have a chance, because the idea, the basic idea, is private property.
	And even a two-year-old understands the importance of private property.
	What's a two-year-old's favorite word?
	Mine! Mine!
	I want it to be mine so I can be in control.
	Well, a two-year-old doesn't understand the concept of yours, and we've got to convince them that, no, you're not allowed to play with Tommy's toys unless you get permission.
	Our government is currently acting like a two-year-old.
	They want to take your property and go, mine!
	We call it eminent domain.
	You know, in Texas we had the Trans-Texas Corridor.
	The Texas government was planning to steal 584,000 acres of private land to build some monstrosity highway.
	Now, I'm not a Luddite.
	I don't want to keep really low on technology.
	I travel in a really fast car.
	I like highways. I want them to be smooth and straight.
	But I don't want to have the government steal property and then allow a Spanish company To monopolize the profit from that.
	No, no, that's not going to happen.
	Not in Texas. So, anarchy is, again, I believe anarchy is a wonderful ideal.
	Kind of like, you know, 100% alcohol.
	Fortunately, the laws of physics don't allow you to have 100% alcohol, and I think that human nature prevents us from getting to anarchy.
	One, you don't want it because it puts too much responsibility on your plate.
	And two, because there's always somebody, sadly, who thinks they know how to run your life better than you do.
	And so I don't think that we can avoid government.
	You know, you can't make an omelet without breaking a couple of eggs.
	I don't think that you can have a civil society without somebody kind of putting down some formal rules.
	And we just have to make sure that those rules Do not subjugate one part of the population for another.
	Again, there are no easy answers, but that's our challenge.
	That is our challenge, to be intelligent enough, to be moral enough, to find and identify what the ideal, what the perfection would be, and move in that direction as often as we can.
	And maybe, maybe we'll get to it.
	Maybe we will achieve anarchy someday.
	At the moment, I don't think anybody knows which direction anarchy is.
	You've never memorized the Bill of Rights.
	You don't know how many articles are in the Constitution.
	And so I'm doing my part to educate the population, teach them the difference between right and privileges, and hopefully, and I believe it is true, I believe that people are waking up, and I believe that people are more and more prepared To take responsibility for their own life because, well, frankly, the government is screwed up so bad, you know, nobody likes the style of government we currently have.
	And so I want to thank Stephan, I want to thank Drexel University, and I want to thank the audience again for being so patient and being so intelligent to be here and listen to us discuss this high level intellectual concept.
	Thank you very much. First of all,
	I just wanted to remind everyone we are accepting donations in the back of the room, so please take what this event was worth to you and please give that back if you could.
	We're paying for this out of pocket, so we'd really appreciate that.
	This is a question for Steph.
	I think one of the roadblocks in trying to explain the concept of anarchy and how it can sort of triumph over the limited government approach is dispute resolution and how you would get compensation if someone broke a contract.
	And to use an extreme example, someone murders your son or something.
	In your example, you'd say this person would be ostracized from the society.
	They would have a hard time having economic transactions and just having a lifestyle.
	And I would contrast that approach with Hans Hoppe's approach.
	I'm sure you've read through the impossibilities.
	I haven't read a huge amount of Hoppe.
	I've just read his stuff on national defense, so feel free to defend.
	Well, he basically says you have an insurance company And the insurance company can sort of seek compensation if it's justified.
	And I think just taking the approach of this individual to be ostracized in this society is kind of difficult for people to grasp.
	Because if someone has a huge bankroll or whatever, and they're able to be ostracized and they're OK with that, then what's to stop that person from just breaking your contract or committing acts of violence?
	And I'm wondering why you don't take that approach when discussing how you would It's an excellent question.
	The status solution to the problem of violence, if this kind of rape, of murder, of assault, the status solution is very, very tempting, of course, because it seems like it's a real solution, right?
	But, of course, if theft is so bad, then...
	Property rights are absolute, then we can't have taxation because it's a violation of the principle up front.
	So I sort of reject that as a solution.
	It means that we then have to go to more creative places to solve that problem.
	I'm in no way, shape, or form even remotely intelligent enough to attempt to reproduce the creative intelligence of millions of people to solve this problem.
	So the solution is going to be infinitely better than anything I come up with as people compete to try and solve this.
	The first question, if you're thinking about an anarchic solution or a stateless solution to a problem like that is, What would satisfy me?
	So let's say that, I'm going to really ask that question, what is it that would, like if you were looking at someone to protect you from murder or protect those around you from murder, what would you want them to do if, say, your girlfriend or your wife was killed, murdered by some dude, we'll call him Bob, because Bob is our usual guy.
	If Bob kills your guy, what would you want as your ideal Solution to that.
	Solution is the wrong word.
	Restitution, or how would it best be handled for you as a potential consumer of someone who would provide services in this area?
	Right. Well, my approach would be to try to prevent that from ever happening.
	Agreed. Absolutely. And the approach that I think needs to be taken is that the person knows that there's going to be extreme retribution or compensation in that event.
	So just by taking that approach off the bat, you kind of avoid that situation.
	But the situation could still occur.
	And I don't personally know, just like you said, how many millions or billions of people are going to have better solutions to this.
	But I would definitely...
	Sorry, I'll keep this short.
	Let's say I'm a GRO and I'm trying to sell you my protection services.
	So I'm doing a show and tell dog and pony show.
	What is it that would be the most appealing to you as the solution to violence committed against you or someone like you?
	Would you want that person killed?
	Would you want money from that person?
	Would you want them to be incarcerated or imprisoned for 30 years and pay you half the money they made at forced labor?
	What is it that would be, nobody says this is great, but what would be the most beneficial thing that I could offer you to get your business as a dispute resolution company?
	I would want You know, I would want everything back that was taken from me if it was impossible.
	Yeah, if that's impossible, because we'll talk about murder, right?
	I mean, what is it that would be...
	Like, this is how it would work in a free society, is that we would, as a dispute resolution organization, I would be going around saying, how can I make this right for you?
	What is the best possible solution?
	So, I know it's hard to talk about.
	Let's just talk about, you know, maybe she gets knocked on the head or something.
	Like, let's not go with, like...
	I don't know, that's fine. Okay, so you want to go with the murder thing?
	Yeah, because you've got to explore the extreme possibilities.
	Yeah, let's go with the extremes, absolutely.
	So, your wife gets murdered, what would be the best, well, it's a weird way to put it, but what would be the best possible outcome of that for you as a potential consumer of protection services?
	I would want some kind of monetary retribution.
	Right. It would be different for everybody.
	Maybe I'd want the person committing the actual murder.
	It is different for everybody, and that's why we need competition, right?
	It is different for everybody.
	Yeah, and me personally, I might want that person to conduct many hours of community service or something.
	Something non-violent, something that wouldn't, you know, I just don't want them to go in a jail cell and rot, because that's no good for anybody.
	Right, and then when they come out, they're crazy, right?
	I mean, jail is a terrible solution, right?
	Even for evil people, jail is a terrible solution, right?
	Like, jail is a terrible solution for drug addicts, and it's a terrible solution for people to do evil, because they just come out and do more evil, right?
	The repetition rate for criminals in a state of prison system is 80-90%.
	It's ridiculous, right? So you want a better solution than that, right?
	And you certainly want to, the best thing you could do for your wife's memory if she was killed was to, right, get money to replace the income that would be lost and the support that would be lost and, you know, so your kids could get a good education and you could pay off your house.
	You'd want that kind of money, right, because it's a significant loss of income to look at it at a coldly calculating economic level.
	Forget the emotional stuff, because that can't be fixed.
	You'd want money back and you would also want to be damn sure that this wasn't going to happen again.
	Right. Now, a state of society is never going to provide you either of those things.
	You're never going to get money from the criminal, and 80-90% is going to be a recommission of offense.
	So my original question was, how come you opt to say this person would be ostracized from society and not be able to conduct commerce?
	Right. Well, no, sorry.
	It's not just that you can't...
	We're going to go to a complete abstract here, and I'll try and keep this short, right?
	But then there's more about this impractical anarchy.
	But very briefly, you can't rent an apartment, you can't buy food, you can't travel on anyone's property because everything's privately owned.
	You can't go to a restaurant, you can't even use someone's drinking fountain, you can't participate at all economically in the society.
	That is what I guarantee you all of the protection agencies are going to work with.
	So this guy is either going to have to go out and live in the wilderness and gnaw on tree bark and rabbit legs and stuff, which he's not going to do, right?
	Or he's going to have to submit, in order to regain his status as being able to participate in society, he's going to have to submit to some punishment.
	In order to regain his status as an economic actor in society.
	So he's either going to go out and live in the woods and be nowhere near anyone, in which case you don't get any money, but at least he's not out killing people, or he's going to have to submit to some sort of punishment and hopefully cure for whatever ails him, And so the punishment is going to be you have to work at some job, you get half of his salary, 40% of his salary goes to imprison him and 10% goes to the profit, to the DRO or whatever.
	He's going to go through anger management, he's going to go through psychological counseling, he's going to go through whatever it is to try and get the evil out of his heart so he doesn't do it again.
	He's never going to be released until people can figure out as best they can, given the inexactness of the science.
	So it's not just, you know, you can't get a job.
	I mean, you actually can't function in society if people don't want to do business with you.
	We have computers on the internet, so if you walk into a store and try even to use cash, they're going to be like, murderer, murderer, murderer.
	And if they give you a meal and you're a murderer, they also, the restaurant will get pulled from the system.
	Right? So it's the best, I mean, is this the perfect solution?
	I don't know, but it certainly is a viable and potential one, and it's a lot better than what the state is going to do for you right now.
	Thank you. Can I respond to that?
	My name is Don Corleone, and I'm so glad that there is no government, and I'd like to offer another solution to your problem.
	Right? That was where I was going to go.
	I will personally make sure the family is wiped out.
	All you have to do is kiss my ring and promise me a favor in the future.
	That was right where my question was going to go.
	If a DRO, if I'm shopping around for DROs, this man just killed my wife.
	I want his family dead.
	I want his house. I want his bank accounts.
	I want him dead.
	I want him buried upside down on a pike.
	Now, if you, the DRO, won't do that, I'm going to look for a DRO that will How does this jive with the non-initiation of force in an anachronistic society?
	You actually say you want his family dead?
	No, really? I mean, that's what you would want?
	Do you think that would be just?
	You're talking to somebody who just had his wife killed.
	Sure. I don't think a DRO is going to be, I'm going to take out the gene pool.
	I'm going to drop a bomb on the city where the guy...
	No, they're not going to do that.
	They're going to say, yes, that's an extreme response and that's a shame, but we're not going to do that.
	So he's going to go after somebody who might...
	Do something close to that, you know, or whatever.
	Right. Okay, but look, let's put things...
	Yes, you can come up with some crazy guy who wants to wipe out the whole family.
	How does a free society handle that?
	Well, first of all, by not making him a goddamn president.
	Right? Right.
	Those guys do exist.
	Maybe you're one of them, right?
	Who want to just nuke the gene pool, right?
	Okay, but let's not at least give them nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, and V-52s, right?
	So, there is going to be punishment for the people who do evil, but let's keep the problem in perspective, right?
	The murder rate in the Wild West, when government was very small and remote, was absolutely tiny.
	You could go five, ten years in a town without a single murder.
	Some towns went as long as twenty or thirty years without a single murder.
	Okay, so yes, is there a challenge dealing with the problems of murder in a free society?
	Absolutely. Will murderers be fewer and far between?
	Absolutely. Because they won't be cops who go nuts.
	They won't be veterans returning battle-scarred and the PTSD. And there won't be that kind of violence in the home from those kinds of situations which lead to further violence down the road.
	There won't be prison guards who become dehumanized through beating up and controlling prisoners.
	There won't be prisoners who are in jail Getting beaten up and raped and shivved who are then released back out into the streets because it will be a different society where we don't use the initiation of force to try and solve these complex embedded psychological difficult problems.
	So we're talking about in an average town, you know, a murder or two every five years.
	Right? And will society find some way to provide restitution for that?
	Absolutely. Will everybody want to wipe out the whole gene pool?
	No, of course not, right? They will be angry in the moment and the DROs will provide counseling and grief management and try and get them through that difficult time.
	But the alternative to this as a solution is the state gets an army.
	The state gets prisons.
	The state gets to use whatever force it wants it will against anybody, anytime, anyhow, anywhere.
	So it's important to put these problems in perspective.
	Do we want maybe one out of ten people having an excessive response to a murder every five years, which means we face this problem in one town every 50 years?
	Or do we want the CIA and the FBI and the US military with 700 bases overseas poking Sticks into wasp's nest perpetually, causing the murders of hundreds of thousands of people, right?
	So again, will anarchy solve everything?
	Of course not. There's human problems which will be intractable.
	Some people will go on a rampage and shoot the whole, absolutely.
	But, given that that potential exists, the last thing we want is a centralized military and police force and prison system.
	I'd like to make a little side note here.
	Essentially, with the DRO, which you mentioned, it wouldn't be as lucrative for them to go around and kill the whole bloody family.
	If you do that, well, then you'd get repercussions from maybe the family's DRO and whatnot.
	But, on a side note, what I actually want to talk about, y'all, the two of you are very concerned with rights.
	One from an objectivist moral standpoint, the other one from the Constitution.
	Where do y'all think these rights come from?
	Oh, I don't believe in rights.
	Good man. No, I don't believe in rights.
	All right. To me, this is, you know what rights are?
	This is rights. Please don't hurt me.
	That's all it is. It's a request for those in power not to hurt you.
	That's all a right is. I do believe in objective, universal, absolute morality, and I have a whole crushingly boring book available for free, called universally preferable behavior, which if you ever have trouble sleeping, put it on a low murmur, a little Barry White in the background.
	The trouble then is waking up, not getting to sleep.
	But no, I don't believe in rights.
	I don't believe that they are imbued within us.
	They don't believe that there are weak atomic forces that cling rights within Earth.
	Human beings have properties.
	We don't have rights. We have properties like we are ambulatory, for the most part.
	We breathe oxygen. We're carbon-based.
	We are the rational animals sometimes.
	So we have properties, and those properties biologically are universal, which is how we're classified as homo sapiens.
	We don't get ourselves confused with sea anemones.
	We have properties which are universal, and I think those should be respected as biological and physical facts, but we do not have rights.
	No government can take away the fact that I have mass.
	No government can take away the fact that I have scalp.
	No government can take away the fact that I breathe oxygen and I'm carbon-based.
	Right? So those are just facts and properties about human beings.
	But since governments can take away rights, the rights are just purely illusory.
	And of course begging people to leave you alone never works.
	Because they're like, oh, you want freedom?
	Great! Then I'll start taking it away so that you'll give me stuff, because that's what you really want.
	It's like saying to a torturer, you know, it really hurts when you do this.
	Well, what does the torturer want to do?
	Bam, bam, bam.
	So I don't believe in rights.
	I think that you have a different approach, and certainly the objectivists do, but I don't believe that they exist any more than fairies do.
	A difference. We've discovered a difference.
	When Stephan was down on his knees begging, he wasn't begging for rights, he was begging for privileges.
	Rights are not, please don't hurt me.
	Rights are, you will not hurt me.
	Thomas Jefferson said, you only have the rights that you are willing to fight for.
	I have freedom of speech, not because they wrote and ratified the First Amendment back in 1791.
	I have freedom of speech because I've never met anybody big enough to shut me up.
	So, we spoke at the Independence Mall yesterday, and, I mean, of all the places in the United States, Independence Hall, Fourth of July, I mean, it was This was the best Fourth of July, the best Independence Day I've ever had, you know, to be looking at Independence Hall.
	And then I discovered, thank you, that I discovered that as I'm speaking, on this little podium, there's this little concrete square, which was a free speech zone?
	We're celebrating Independence, and the government is going to allow me my opinion on this concrete pad?
	Are you kidding? Anywhere I happen to be standing is a free speech zone.
	The government doesn't tell me what I can or cannot say.
	The government doesn't tell me where I can or cannot say it.
	So rights do exist.
	You cannot take somebody's rights away.
	You can take their life, but you can't take their right to life.
	You know, if rights don't exist, then I'm not sure exactly what the philosophical discussion is about.
	What is it that we're trying to protect?
	You know, life, liberty, and private property.
	That's the whole point of having written the Constitution at all.
	Imagine a hypothetical conversation between Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry.
	The sun is shining, the birds are flying, the butterflies, the crops are growing, the children are laughing and giggling.
	I mean, it is pretty much heaven on earth.
	Can you imagine a conversation that said, you know, what we need is a government.
	A government that's going to oppress us, raise our taxes.
	I mean, everything's like too perfect if we, you know, just get bored.
	If we at least had a government trying to oppress us, then we'd have a reason to wake up in the morning.
	It would keep us, you know, like...
	I can't even imagine that as a concept.
	More to my reality is that, you know, life is nearly perfect, almost heaven on earth.
	And they said, you know what we need?
	We need a system to protect it just the way it is so that we can maintain this type of perfection, this type of heaven on earth, to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.
	It's a goal.
	It's a laudable goal.
	We may never achieve it.
	We certainly have gotten further from it today than we used to be.
	But we really do. We need to continue working on it.
	It's a constant process.
	Philosophy, you're constantly, every day, learning more philosophy, honing it, making it better, eliminating any contradictions that you have.
	I think the same thing is true with government.
	It's never going to be perfect, it may be okay today, but we have to keep monitoring it and constantly making it better and not letting it grow without supervision.
	Thank you.
	Mr. Chairman, thank you.
	And Stefan and Michael, a great presentation today.
	Stephan, I want to direct a couple of comments towards you and then ask you a quick question, if I could.
	First, one of your statements, I'll use a scare tactic to say that we do not have the ability to fight our governments, our large arsenal of bombs, weapons, and super duper throw down weapons to stop us.
	But at the same time, you said, Well, we can't even stop the insurgents overseas, and I find it pretty fascinating that a bunch of people that live, if you will, in clay houses can't stop the most tyrannical governments in the world.
	So, certainly, we as a people have the ability to go ahead and change our destiny no matter how big our military force in this government is.
	Secondly, the second comment I want to bring up was, An anarchy society that does not have a tax base is not one that is going to be desirable from a tyrant's point of view.
	And I will argue that point by saying that if I were a tyrant looking to take over a disorganized society that did not have a tax base, that would be a no-brainer because I would march right in there, take over their rights, promptly tax them, whether they have a current tax base or not, and then promptly throw them into servitude.
	So whether they have a tax base or not does not make them undesirable for a tyrant.
	Now, I will ask you one more thing on the DRO, and that is, any time you give someone more responsibility or more power than the people have, they themselves will become tyrannical, just like government does.
	So the question I have for you is, as you've given these people to be judge, jury, and hagman at the same time, how do you keep their powers to a minimum So they don't overstep your boundaries.
	And that's the bottom line. Pretty much instituted government at that point.
	Yeah, I'm not saying I've convinced you.
	I'm not saying I've closed the case.
	I'm just saying there's a possibility that it may not be as bad as you think, as far as I can get.
	I want to be respectful to other people's questions.
	Thank you very much.
	Back to government.
	Ah, thank you. The wonderful topic of the day.
	Thank you. One thing I haven't seen come up yet, and thank you everybody who's here, because it's great for people to have an open mind, no matter what philosophy, we won't know what we know until we hear it.
	So it's good to hear all different sides, whether we agree with it or not, to find out whether or not we do agree with it, because hearsay, you don't know what you're getting.
	I heard I needed a garlic or something to come here.
	You're a vampire. You're going to bite.
	You don't really bite. No, I don't even chew.
	Alright, one thing I haven't heard come up yet is something to do with the world.
	The world isn't going to follow our anarchist form of non-government.
	What would happen if, I don't know, South Korea decides they're going to nuke Hawaii?
	And we don't, if I'm understanding it right, we have no government.
	We have nobody in power.
	We have nobody to make decisions for our landmass.
	How does that work?
	Because we're not going to lay down and roll over and take it.
	That's a great question. I guess the first question I would have is why does South Korea want to nuke Hawaii now?
	Or why are they threatening to do so?
	Why are they threatening to nuke Hawaii and not Switzerland?
	No, it's not because, actually, I think, why are they threatening to nuke Hawaii rather than China, or some other country that's local to the Far East, where they could actually get their rockets?
	Because they can, maybe?
	No, the reason that they're threatening, the reason that Al-Qaeda, the reason that these other countries threaten the United States is, and I'm certainly not defending the retaliatory use of force in these situations, which is going to be almost certainly against defensive civilians, But the reason is that the American government is using and deploying massive amounts of force overseas.
	Right? That they are, they have black ops, they have, you know, these 700 plus military bases overseas.
	They have funded governments, the U.S. government.
	It's the largest arms seller in the world.
	It's like having a police protection agency that is actively taking your money to armed criminals that they claim to be defending you against.
	And so because the United States is taking your tax money to the government and going and doing all these terrible things overseas, funding dictatorships, arming dictatorships, funding oppressors, overthrowing governments, invading, conquering, undermining societies around the world, there is a hatred of America.
	And they can't strike at the American government.
	They strike at the American people, which I don't agree with, of course.
	But the reason that we don't need a government to protect us from North Korea, North Korea is only threatening us because of our government, and I used the word R to be Canadian, but you know what I mean, right?
	The solution to statism is not more statism.
	The problems caused by statism should not be why we rely on statism, right?
	We should really try and stop the problems at the core.
	You know, and say, oh, Al-Qaeda hates us because we were free.
	Well, Americans were a hell of a lot more free a hundred years ago, and Al-Qaeda and the Muslims didn't touch us at all.
	I'll give more if it happens.
	But it's not going to happen if you don't have a government.
	No one's ever going to aggress against us, ever.
	What if it happens?
	What do you mean, what if it happens?
	Could it happen? No, it's not going to happen because no country has ever...
	We have a force field around us now because we're anarchists.
	No, because, as I said earlier, you have the two-part solution.
	One is that no one's going to want to just nuke you for the hell of it because you have nukes and can nuke them back, right?
	Who's in charge of the nukes, though, on our part, to nuke them back?
	Well, you would have defense agencies who would compete among people to provide the cheapest and most effective deterrents to invasion, but you would not have, as you currently have, Massive forced fiat currency funding of aggression overseas.
	Because if nobody would want it, I mean, people are for the Iraq war, it's like, well, you take the bill, right?
	Don't send me the bill if I'm against it.
	So people would not be funding aggression overseas, they would be funding the cheapest and most effective form of deterrence to avoid an invasion, and that could take many, many different forms.
	But I don't believe that some admin would just suddenly up and want to come and nuke people.
	That just doesn't happen in history.
	There are very specific circumstances to lead to that kind of anger and aggression towards the U.S. government.
	This question is for both Stefan and Michael.
	You both expressed approval of privatization of roads and other currently public or what I consider to be the commons, common territories.
	What would the effects be on the individual?
	Individual rights, or as Stephan asserts, privileges.
	Let's look at a road, for example.
	If a road were privatized, could there not be constrictions on the individual to say that you must have a license, you must have two headlights present on your car, you must have a good moral account in your local town?
	I mean, all of these different Precautions, so to speak, or liens could be put on the individual.
	How do we address that in the fact that—I mean, take it one step further—when entire towns are privatized, in order to live there, you would have to relinquish your right to free speech or your right to religion.
	These are real contradictions to a free society in which you have to deal with privatization.
	I would like to hear both the speaker's responses.
	Does everybody realize that Saddam Hussein started out as president of a homeowner's association and kind of worked his way up to Tyron?
	I don't deny that society needs rules.
	I mean, we are a social people.
	We all have, you know, different opinions, different values, different ethics.
	And, you know, we need to figure out a methodology of coexisting in the same relatively, you know, small space without killing each other.
	You know, that's purposeful.
	And in the study of any philosophy, that would be the political level.
	You have your personal ethics, and you exist in a society with other people whose ethics are different from yours, and again, we need to coexist.
	So there need to be certain accepted rules.
	There's no right reason that the government has to establish those rules.
	Speed limit. Most people don't follow the speed limit.
	I think the general rule is 10 miles an hour over.
	You can probably do that for a long time without getting a speeding ticket.
	But there's another traffic rule that says you don't drive on the left side of the yellow line.
	And I don't know many people that violate that rule.
	Not because there's a squad car around every corner, because if you drive on the left side of the yellow line, you're probably going to end your life here real soon.
	Again, there's not always going to be an easy answer.
	The answer is always property, but when you get to water and air.
	We've agreed that I own this piece of land, and it has a stream going through my land.
	What water do I own?
	This is my water.
	Oops, it's moving. It's moving.
	I own Stefan's water.
	It is moving. You know, it's a difficult process, but just because it's difficult doesn't mean that you don't need to come up with the answer.
	As far as private roads, most roads were private.
	You know, I have some store or facility I want customers to get there.
	I build the road to make it easier for you to, you know, get to my store.
	The government under the Constitution is allowed to build post offices and post roads.
	The reason for the roads was to get the mail from one spot to another.
	Everything else was kind of like make a trail.
	There are all sorts of historical examples of private investments working.
	The Erie Canal was supposed to connect New York City with the rest of the country west of the Appalachians.
	And so they privatized it, completely private investments.
	They dug this canal, I don't know how much is it, 100 miles or something like that.
	And it was making a profit for the investors before it even opened.
	So, you know, we need to have some organization.
	We need to have some rules.
	It doesn't have to be government.
	And people say, well, yeah, that's true, but we have to have government in control of the police.
	No, you don't.
	Well, yeah, how would you do it?
	How about Beverly Hills?
	You pay to have your own security guards.
	You know, I'm sure that the Beverly Hills police, you know, drive around in their cars, but if you've got enough money...
	You know, you pay to have your own security guard, my own personal police officer sitting there at the front gate, you know, to check people coming out of my property.
	So, you know, if you're poor, you can't afford a security guard at the front gate, so you go out and buy a Saturday night special.
	What's a Saturday night special?
	Well, it was any gun that you could afford.
	You know, people who live in the ghetto are the ones most likely to need self-defense, and so the government basically says, okay, you can have any gun you want, except one that you can afford.
	A Saturday night special is just some arbitrary label, you know, on inexpensive pistols that make it socially unacceptable for, you know, poor people to defend themselves.
	So, you know, there are a lot of different solutions.
	And again, you know, it's your life.
	You have the responsibility of feeding yourself and protecting yourself.
	And we need to come up with other solutions other than big government.
	I have a sort of unique experience to bring to bear in these kinds of political questions.
	And I've had a pretty varied career being an entrepreneur.
	And when you're an entrepreneur and you want to create a business, and almost all businesses need investment, you go to investors and you have to prepare so much stuff and you have to do your market research and you have to talk to potential customers and figure out exactly what they want.
	You have to research the competition and you have to create all these really boring charts about where you land on the XY of various competition features.
	Yes, we're more expensive but people really want these features and here's the demographic we're going to appeal to.
	How you get investors.
	And investors will see, right, let's say that you're going to create roads, right?
	Investors will be specialized in investing in road companies.
	And let's say that we need to build a road from this podium to this podium.
	The investment community will literally have a dozen companies come through saying, give us A hundred million dollars to build this road.
	And the investors will ask, oh, it's horrible.
	This really is. It's like swinging light bulbs in truncheons when they ask you every single conceivable question under the sun to figure out if you've really done your homework and your research to please your customers better than everyone else who's presenting to them that day, that week, that month, that year. It's a really grueling process.
	This is exactly how it will work in a free society.
	Every rule that you apply to a road has overhead that someone has to pay for.
	So if you say you've got to have both your headlights on, then you have to verify that.
	You have to have people checking it out.
	You have to have punishments.
	You have to block people from coming onto your road or give them some DRO. There's got to be overhead to it.
	And so when you go to the investors and you say, I want two lights on every car, they're going to say, how much is that going to cost?
	Right? And you're going to say, well, it's going to cost me an extra $200,000 a year.
	Well, why would people pay that?
	They're going to say. Well, because it cuts accidents by 20%.
	And we've done the market research, we've talked to 500 or 1000 potential clients, and they've all said, I will pay $5 more a month happily to get a 20% reduction in my possibilities of accidents.
	Right? That's how things work in a free society.
	It's hard for us to remember that.
	Unless you've been in that situation, you wouldn't really know much about it.
	I'm sorry, that sounds annoyingly condescending, and I really do apologize.
	But it was a shock to me when I first went through that whole process a couple of times.
	So every time you want to impose a rule on whatever it is you're building in a free society, everything from collective defense to roads to healthcare, you have to prove to incredibly annoying, hard-bitten, skeptical investors why your solution is something that customers will want more than every other thing that they could conceivably invest in that year.
	So you have to do such a staggering amount of homework.
	You have to build your case. You have to have done all the research.
	And so when the road finally comes into existence, the rules are never arbitrary.
	They're designed to be as effective as humanly possible based on the greatest value it will provide to consumers that you have verified by actually asking them.
	Right, so that's a long answer, but it's really, really important.
	Things don't just pop into existence in a free society.
	They go through an incredibly grueling process of ensuring that the maximum value at the cheapest price is created for every single consumer.
	It will be the case with defense DROs.
	It will be the case with healthcare, insurance.
	Profits protection. Everyone has to go through this annoying, horrible, you know, it's like it makes a frat initiation look like a tea party.
	What you have to go through to try and get people to invest in you in a free market.
	So, I guarantee you, through that process, which you never get from the government, you get quite the opposite.
	Through that process, you will end up with the roads and the hospitals and the schools And everything will be incredibly tuned and retuned and retuned to meet exactly what gives people the most value at the cheapest price.
	And that is the inevitable process of trying to get funding and trying to find customers in a truly free and competitive market.
	And it's so hard for us to understand when we look at government monopolies what is possible in terms of tuning yourself to your market.
	But there will be the exact right amount of rules.
	And if people stop wanting two lights, Then you'll go to One Light and you'll drop their rates by five bucks a month because that's what they've expressed preference for.
	Does that make any sense at all?
	Well, sorry, legal and moral code, I mean, sorry, legal and moral code, I mean, we were talking about roads, right?
	So the legal and moral code is a whole other issue, and maybe we can talk about that afterwards, because I want to make sure we get to other questions, if that's all right.
	But I was really just talking about two lights on a highway kind of thing.
	Another question? I don't have the mic.
	Oh, mic. Oh, yes, you had a question for a while.
	Thank you. My question is actually for you, Mr.
	Badnerick. Earlier you mentioned that...
	The reason that we need a government to protect people in issues of, like, disputes is because nobody wanted to initiate, force themselves.
	People cringe at the idea of initiating violence.
	And I wonder if you would disagree that part of that is actually a symptom of the collectivist society we have.
	Like, there's been social experiments to show that when someone collapses on a subway, if there's a bunch of people, nobody helps.
	If there's one person, you feel like it's more dependent on you, you're more likely to help.
	So, do you think that's possible, that the reason people Don't want to take on the, like you said, you'd be willing to, you know, arm yourself and defend your property, but most people wouldn't.
	Do you think that's more of a symptom of the fact that we have been ideologically or socially conditioned to believe that that's not our responsibility, that's the government or the police force?
	I do think that the collectivist tendency in the world is because people don't want the responsibility themselves.
	And I think it stems fundamentally from our origins in family.
	When you're five years old, you don't make your own decisions.
	Mom and Dad make those decisions for you.
	They feed you, they shelter you, and life is really good because you're protected and you have no responsibilities.
	You know, the epitome of that is when you get to college.
	You know, gosh, life is really good.
	You get to make your own decisions.
	You get to decide when you go to bed at night.
	You get to decide what you watch on TV. How much alcohol you drink.
	Oh, wow, this is really great.
	But, you know, car insurance is due and you go, Dad, I need to check for car insurance.
	I need to check for my tuition.
	So, you know, college is utopia because you have all the benefits and none of the responsibilities, you know.
	I think that having done that, we, you know, mom and dad finally go, thanks, you're out of college, our responsibility is done, you know, get your own part in it.
	You know? And, you know, we go, wow, life used to be a whole lot better when I had somebody taking care of me.
	And I think we have a tendency to want government to do that.
	I don't know if it is true, but I've always believed that Winston Churchill, I've always heard the quote attributed to him.
	If it's not him, I apologize.
	But the quote is that if you are 20 years old and you are not a socialist, you have no heart.
	And if you are 40 years old and you are still a socialist, you have no brain.
	The back on that is that, you know, socialism has such great marketing.
	It's like everybody's going to have everything.
	You're going to have food.
	You're going to have shelter. You're going to have education.
	You're going to have health care.
	Life is going to be wonderful.
	You know, it's just kind of like, you know, that the marketing is great.
	Who wouldn't want that?
	It's like, yeah, I mean, that sounds like heaven on earth.
	I want that. But then you realize that Oh wait a minute, you've got a job and all of a sudden the government has taken taxes out of your paycheck that you worked so hard for and you can't buy the stuff that you wanted because taxes are so high because you're paying for other people's health care, other people's education, other people's stuff.
	And you go, oh wow!
	You reach maturity and you go, wow, this pretty much sucks.
	It's a redistribution of wealth.
	You know, socialism is really wonderful.
	The problem is that you eventually run out of other people's money.
	So, Mr. Batter.
	Badarak? Yes.
	I appreciate you trying to inject liberty into a political process that seems to be against liberty.
	You mentioned eternal vigilance several times to protect that liberty.
	The only option I see is to spend my life trying to convince 150 million plus one to my way of thinking.
	That level of eternal vigilance isn't free.
	It sounds like being enslaved to freedom.
	So you did say I am free.
	If I'm free to do what I want with my property, I should be able to look through a brochure and decide what government serves my needs the best and who gets access to my property.
	I know that it is panarchy, but I do not want to spend my life creating or chasing after different government packages.
	Millions of people with good ideas routinely succeed selling their products and services in the free market.
	You spoke of minarchism as a possible path to anarchy.
	I ask whether your ideal government would allow and work with competing institutions for what you define government functions to be.
	Well, I mean, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
	I don't like it any more than you do.
	I mean, we're supposed to be able to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
	And, you know, I mean, I'm happy to do it, but that's not my pursuit of happiness.
	I'm a skydiving instructor.
	You know, I want to jump out of perfectly good airplanes, you know, drink beer and chase attractive women.
	That's the way I pursue happiness.
	You know, and I can't do that.
	You know, because my government is taking, when I lived in California, my federal state and FICA taxes totaled 48%.
	And I don't know where you guys went to school, but when I was growing up, that was half.
	And there is absolutely no way I am going to give half of my productive output to the government.
	No way. You're going to have to come and take it.
	Because, you know, previous generations have allowed the government to get this far out of control.
	I mean, it's not my fault.
	I didn't allow, you know, the New Deal.
	I didn't, you know, encourage Vietnam.
	You know, it's like, I just looked around and it's like, This is the hand I've been dealt.
	This is the government that is here.
	And I can sit and, you know, complain about it a lot, but that's not going to solve the problem.
	So I'm destined to travel across the country teaching people the difference between rights and privileges and, you know, hopefully with my eight-hour class, motivate people.
	And you suggested that I have to, you know, convince 150 million plus one people to my way of thinking.
	Yes! That's what I mean when we say that this is an ideological war.
	This is a war of ideas, and I am promoting the idea of individual rights and private property.
	And the sooner 300 million people in the United States adopt that idea, the sooner I can pack my suitcase and go back to the airport and jump out of perfectly good airplanes.
	And right now, I am vastly, vastly outnumbered.
	Most of the people in the United States are socialists.
	They don't know it, but they like the government handout.
	Well, assuming you could get that 150 million won, and in your ideal menarchist society, would you allow free competition against government services?
	Yes, absolutely.
	And we've already got demonstration of that.
	The post office.
	Most of you aren't even old enough to know the post offices that I went to.
	It was kind of like the witch's house in Hansel and Gretel.
	I mean, they were dark and dirty and kind of like a scary place to go.
	Mom would say, you know, Michael, I'd like you to go buy some stamps.
	It's like, no, please!
	Now post offices are pretty clean.
	They're fairly modern.
	They've got the new blue logos.
	It didn't always used to be like that.
	The post office had to literally clean up its act when Federal Express started being, you know, if you absolutely positively have to get it there overnight, use Federal Express.
	And people did. It was expensive, but it worked.
	True story. Went into a post office, and there must have been 40 people waiting ahead of me.
	And you've got to take that little number like you're at the meat counter.
	You know, and I sit down, and I'm They actually have park benches in the post office because they know you're going to be there.
	I mean, you may as well take a book.
	And, well, you know, when I get frustrated, I also get a little bit devilish and devious.
	And so I was sitting on a bench next to some guy, and we were just sitting there, and I kind of looked at my little slip, and I said, mine says Tuesday.
	What does yours say? And he looked at his slip.
	He thought he was going to have to come back tomorrow.
	You know, and the sad thing is the post office is the most efficient federal agency we have.
	Well, would the post office be a function of your ideal minarchist government?
	The post office is one of the things specifically listed in the Constitution.
	That doesn't mean we can't get rid of it.
	You know, you want to come up with a privatized solution?
	Hey, I'm all in favor of it.
	I mean, newspapers are going away.
	I mean, most of your newspapers are having trouble just, you know, staying funded because, like, who wants to, you know, pay for all that chopped up tree?
	Most of us, many, many more of us are now getting our information, you know, from the internet.
	You know, we've got, I thought I saw an iBook here.
	You know, everything is electronic.
	We're going away from paper.
	You know, and the people who are newspaper editors, you know, may feel a little bit threatened by that, but I'm sure that the people who operated the delivery stable for years and years, you know, for generations felt a little bit threatened when, you know, Henry Ford came up with this, you know, like, motorized little buggy.
	You know, progress happens.
	Deal with it. Yeah, no, I have the mic up here.
	This question is for both.
	I've really enjoyed the back and forth of this, how much government is necessary, but I don't think we've ever really defined what government is.
	Government is that which is unnecessary.
	Sorry, just kidding. Well, in response...
	In response to Karen's question about Korea or any country nuking us, you said that the defense agency would be responsible for any retaliation.
	If that's not government, what is it?
	The government technically, and I think that we would agree on this, that the government is the conceptual label for a group of individuals, for whatever time period, who have The legal right to initiate the use of force within a given geographical area.
	Okay. Can I stop you there and just ask?
	You certainly can. It's your question.
	Okay. If I, as an individual, have the right to use force in defense of myself, when does it become a government?
	Okay, because I can use force to defend myself.
	If I group with one other person, we're walking down the street and we see five people, With their weapons drawn, coming towards us.
	Obviously, we both together have the right to use force in order to protect ourselves.
	Absolutely. I think I see where you're going with this.
	So, when does it become government?
	How many people are necessary to join together?
	There are two functional characteristics of government, right?
	The first is that it, fundamentally, that it initiates the use of force.
	And it does that for two reasons.
	To prevent competition and to take money.
	I mean, there's other things like regulations and so on, but the fundamental thing is That you can't set up a competing police agency in the current system.
	You can't set up a competing post office if they let you, though I think that you still can't charge less than the post office, which is heavily subsidized.
	You don't have the right to initiate the use of force as an individual or as any number of groups.
	You have the right of self-defense, which is universal for all people.
	Well, you're just answering the question under our basic current system.
	Okay, you're not answering it in a more general sense.
	Okay, sorry, what am I not answering?
	I must have missed it. I apologize.
	How many people acting together does it require to become defined as government?
	None. So anybody who claims the right to initiate force is wrong and a criminal if they act upon that premise.
	No matter how many people get together, they can call themselves a government, it is just the mafia by another name.
	Because that which is moral or immoral for the individual does not change depending on how many people get together, which I'm sure we all agree on, so it never becomes...
	Valid. Now, the mafia that wins will call itself the government, will indoctrinate the children to worship it, will bribe all the people in the world with all the productive people's money to gain allegiance, will start wars, will do all of these terrible things, and they'll call themselves the government.
	But that just means best mafia.
	Mafia that won.
	I would agree with that, okay?
	But still, we haven't defined what government is as far as...
	No, we don't. Huh?
	We have. He said it's not the legal right to initiate force.
	Okay, well, I have the right to initiate force if I feel that someone...
	If somebody has a gun pointed to my head...
	What's that? Yes, I mean, they use the initiate force to prevent competition and to take money, right?
	That's the definition of it.
	And they obviously claim the legal and moral right of all pomp and circumstance because you can't...
	I mean, they have to put the gun in velvet, right?
	Because you see the gun and you're like, oh, I'm a slave, right?
	And so they have to put all this nonsense and drape the flag and parades and blah blah blah, right?
	Because nobody wants to see this, right?
	Because that makes you feel humiliated and you might want to change.
	So, yeah, there's no group of people who inevitably gain that moral right, but there is a group that claims and acts upon that moral right to initiate force, usually within a geographical area.
	Well, and I said at the very beginning, in my opening thing, we need to define, you know, establish definitions, and those definitions may change as we go along.
	You know, my question was, does mutual cooperation, you know, constitute government?
	In your hypothetical, as I understood it, you're walking along all by yourself with a gun for self-defense.
	And I think your question was, how many of you standing shoulder to shoulder in a row constitute government?
	Well, if you're all there independently with your own gun for self-defense, I mean, I don't think that it does constitute government.
	My premise earlier is that it's a hypothetical.
	You know, and I would certainly be happy to carry a gun to defend myself, but most people won't.
	And so you get a lot of people who say, you know, I don't want to carry a gun.
	I'm afraid of guns. I don't know how to use guns.
	I want someone else to do my protection for me.
	And so we're going to hire the security guard to stand out at the front gate to presumably shoot the bad guys.
	The question is, how big of a security force do you have to have?
	And I agree with Stephan, the initiation of force is never legitimate.
	George Washington said that government is not reason.
	Government is not eloquence.
	It is force.
	And like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
	We create this government to protect us, but we've got to kind of watch it so that it doesn't outgrow the original purposes.
	The government that is supposed to protect you can grow big enough to threaten you and become You know, a greater threat than, you know, the problems that you were worried about originally.
	So, I mean, I'm curious as to what your definition of government is.
	If Stephan and I, you know, get a voluntary cooperation, I'll help him protect his property, he helps me protect my property, do we actually have to write something on paper for it to be a government?
	You know, if we create a one-page, you know, contract, And we go, okay, this looks pretty good, and if I see anybody taking your stuff, I'll shoot them.
	And we both sign the contract.
	Does that constitute government?
	I mean, I don't know what, and we would have, I don't know how many people we have in the audience, but I'm sure we can come up with, you know, probably a dozen or more different definitions of what constitutes government.
	Okay, well, I guess my question is, what would this design agency be called, not government?
	Well, it would be called a company, right?
	It would be a company.
	It would be a company with a tank.
	It does not have the right to initiate force, to extract money from a disarmed population, and it doesn't have the ability to initiate force to prevent competition.
	But the government by definition...
	Yeah, of course it doesn't actually have, if you use the word right colloquially, it doesn't have that right, but it exercises that right, let's say.
	Whereas the DRO agency would not, because free market, volunteerism, and you would obviously, the DRO would say, look, if I ever have one bullet more than I'm supposed to, I'll pay every one of my subscribers $10,000, and there'll be an independent audit, and all the safeguards and checks and balances, which never work with government, really do work in the free market.
	I'm sorry, let's continue this if you want after, but let's make sure we get the other questions in, because...
	No, not you, Jim. Anyone else?
	No, just kidding. Just kidding. Go on.
	He has tough questions.
	Anyone else? First, thank you both for coming.
	I've really enjoyed this discussion today.
	My question is for Michael, and I know we're sort of struggling with the definition of government, and I think a lot of what we're quote-unquote disagreeing about here, it may be a matter of semantics.
	What I wanted to ask you, Michael, is if you're saying we need to have a government, a minimal government, what are those minimum government functions that are essential to have a government for that could not be provided better under a free market system?
	And I'm not talking about a collective defense because that's not a government.
	I think when we say You know, government, we are talking about initiation of force.
	So, in that context, what would these essential government services be?
	Well, the purpose of the Constitution and the government we're supposed to have is to protect our life, liberty, and property.
	That's the goal. How we go about it is basically a procedure, and, you know, if this procedure is not working, you know, when any form of government becomes destructive of your rights, we can establish a new one.
	And again, I like the individual responsibility.
	I don't want to have to pay for your education and I don't need you to do my defense.
	I'm perfectly happy doing it all by myself.
	But most people aren't.
	And so the things that are basically necessary are to provide services for the people who don't want to provide them themselves.
	I mean, I have a right To communicate with you, but Philadelphia is a little bit long distance from Dallas, and I don't want to have to get in the car and travel 27 hours every time I want to hand you an envelope.
	So there is a system available where I can scribble an address on the envelope, drop it into a box, and somebody else will pick it up and do the traveling for me.
	I like that.
	It saves me a lot of time having to come back and forth.
	I mean, I love Philadelphia and I come back frequently, but it would just be inefficient in my life.
	And so it's partially division of labor.
	All of us have a higher standard of living if you don't have to do everything for yourself.
	You know, you get really, really good at one thing, and then you pay for other people's services who are really better at those things than you are.
	There are certain things that we don't want to do, and I give self-defense as one of them, and there are probably others.
	If we had people who were smart enough and responsible enough to want to do everything for themselves and just do everything on a voluntary, interactive basis, it'd be like, wow, this is wonderful.
	But people are not that smart, people are not that ethical, and people are not that responsible.
	So that's the direction I want to move.
	So at this point in time, The founding fathers did their best to say, well, okay, most of the government is going to be at the local level so that you can go down to the city hall and smack your representative upside the head.
	The state government is going to handle most of the things.
	Murder is a state issue.
	It's not a federal issue.
	And the federal government is supposed to be really, really small to handle the things that are just not practical for each state.
	To get into. It's economy of scale.
	We're going to have one army that will defend all 50 states.
	We can have a really good army and that way we don't have to have competition.
	Most of you are probably not old enough to remember AT&T was the only company and it gave really great service.
	And then the government tried to help us and broke them down into smaller baby bell companies and It's like it took a long while before we...
	But we still have people going, well, Verizon, AT&T, and all these different companies.
	It is the free market.
	Some people have better service than others.
	It depends on what area you live in.
	But it may not have all the advantages that one phone system that worked might have had.
	So, I mean, I really don't care.
	Society will figure out those things.
	And, you know, as soon as everybody grows up and is responsible enough to do their own thing, yeah, then we can probably get rid of government.
	I don't have anything to add.
	Do you guys see any tired arms?
	You might have a better view than I do.
	Oh, yeah, that's the gentleman and the lady in red.
	No, the guy here. Red?
	Yeah. Just a follow-up to that response from Michael.
	You mentioned that we wouldn't be very productive as people if we all had to do everything that we needed ourselves.
	And you mentioned the division of labor.
	My question is, how come we can't just let other people fulfill our need for self-defense in an open market It sounded like, to answer his question, you wanted to give the government a monopoly on self-defense.
	I don't believe that's what I said.
	That's what it sounded like.
	I certainly didn't intend that.
	Again, I'm happy to do defense on the open market, and I gave an example of Beverly Hills is where people do that.
	It's an open market. You've got the police.
	You've got the public Hollywood police department out there with their black and white cars.
	And, well, you know, for rich people, that's not good enough.
	And so they hire private security.
	If you're really rich, you can hire a bodyguard that will follow you around and, you know, presumably beat up anybody that tries to hurt you.
	You know, I don't need a bodyguard.
	Don't want a bodyguard. You know, I would I would really like one of my issues is the Second Amendment, and I would like to be able to carry a gun.
	I mean, for the most part, nobody messes with me anyway just because of the attitude that I carry.
	But, you know, my attitude would sure like to be backed up by, you know, a.45 underneath my shoulder.
	I'd be happy to do that.
	And, you know, people are really, really polite.
	There's a saying that an armed society is a polite society.
	And if you've never gone to a gun show, I mean, you know, everybody at the gun show, I mean, you're walking down the tables and you're looking at the different things and you bump into somebody and it's immediately, oh, excuse me, sorry, you know, just trying to walk around.
	Everybody's like, you know, I don't want you to think that I was, like, trying to violate your space or anything.
	You know, And in my personal experience, the people that I really like, the people that I'd like to have around closest to me, not always, but usually, turn out to be gun owners.
	It's like they are the people who are calm and confident.
	They have nothing to prove.
	And on the other end of that spectrum, I have a personal friend Really good friend.
	I love this guy. And we coexist as friends because we've got a mutual agreement not to talk about politics.
	You know, that's the one issue that we don't talk about because, I mean, my arm doesn't reach far enough to the left.
	So, my car was in the shop.
	He picked me up for work about four days in a row.
	And during those four days, it's like, you know, I think twice, three times he came, you know, picked me up and he's just, oh, just seething in the morning.
	You know, it's like, you know, good morning.
	He goes, man, I almost called you last night.
	Really? What for? He goes, I was so pissed I wanted to come and borrow your gun and blow some son of a bitch away.
	I go, oh, no wonder you're afraid of everybody having a gun because you think everybody thinks the way you do.
	If you think that you want to go out and blow people away and you assume everybody else, yeah, it would be pretty much a bloodshed alley.
	Most gun owners are not like that.
	I am not a violent guy.
	I'd much rather give you a hug.
	Just don't try to hurt me.
	I want to put a real good guarantee on that by carrying my shoulder holster.
	I have a question for Mr.
	Bednarik. We've talked about the Constitution and I guess the original intent was to have an indirect tax to fund the government's operations.
	Could you talk a little bit about how the government would fund its operations?
	What, you know, what you foresee is going in the future of how this would work?
	And would you be able to, as a citizen, opt out of funding a government?
	This is, like, one of the most common questions I heard when I was running for President of the United States.
	You know, it's like, My statement as a libertarian was that we're not going to lower taxes, we're going to eliminate the IRS. And when people recover from the shock and catch their breath, they go, well, how are we going to pay for all this government if we get rid of the IRS? And it's a trick question.
	It presumes an answer.
	If I ask you, do you still beat your wife?
	The question presumes that either you did beat her and you've stopped, or you are continuing to beat her, but either way, at one point in the past, you did beat her.
	Well, if you ask me that question, I'm sorry I can't answer the question because I've never been married.
	So when you ask the question, how are we going to pay for this government, it presumes that this government is legitimate and should be paid for.
	The real question is, What is it that we should be paying for in the first place?
	We signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the IRS and income taxes didn't happen until 1913, so by my arithmetic that was well over a hundred years where we had no income tax, no IRS, and the United States government had more money than it knew what to do with.
	How did that happen?
	Well, at least for the beginning part of our country, government was limited by Article I, Section 8, and Congress wasn't doing anything outside of that list.
	And so because the federal government was really small, there really wasn't a whole lot to pay for, and so the Founding Fathers paid for that very limited government using excises.
	And it wasn't like, well, we like your country, so you're only going to get a 5% excise, but this country over here doesn't play ball with us, so we're going to raise it to like a 50% import tax.
	It was just kind of, I don't know what the percentage was, but just hypothetically, 5% for any country or foreign company that wanted to sell here.
	You're not collecting a lot of money, but you also don't have a whole lot of federal government to pay for it.
	Okay, so what you're saying is that there would be some kind of sales tax if products were being imported.
	But again, the question is, what if I don't want to pay the sales tax?
	Well, the Constitution identifies two types of taxes, direct taxes and indirect taxes.
	Direct tax is basically one that you cannot avoid.
	It's sometimes called a capitation tax.
	This is the tax and you can either mail it in or we'll come and get it.
	The other type of tax is an indirect tax, which is very much like a tax on gasoline.
	And your choice is, I don't want to pay the tax on gasoline.
	Okay, ride a bicycle. Okay, so the capitation tax, how are you going to collect it?
	The capitation tax?
	Again, the way the Constitution is supposed to work.
	Congress sits down and decides, we've got Project X. You know, whatever it is, and again, hypothetically, we've got good, honest politicians representing us, you know, and we really need something, something that the people would actually want.
	And Project X is going to cost a million dollars.
	Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 says that representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned to the several states.
	How do we know how many representatives in the House each state gets?
	Oh my God, we're going to have to count everybody in the country?
	So California has 10% of the people, so they get 10% of the representation in Congress.
	And we got 435 members.
	10% of that would be 43 and a half, and unfortunately they don't let me cut a representative in half, so California gets 44.
	What would prevent California from just buggering up the census numbers, and let's say they manage to double the number of people who actually live in California?
	What would prevent them from doing that?
	Well, the Founding Fathers understood checks and balances and it says representatives and direct taxes.
	So when Congress, you know, approves Project X for a million dollars, Washington, D.C. would then send a bill for $100,000, or 10% of that, to Sacramento.
	And Sacramento decides how they're going to pay it.
	If they've got a hundred grand in the Treasury, they write a check, mail it to Washington, D.C., and the people of California, you know, like, don't know, don't care.
	You know, Sacramento could also send out a postcard, you know, to the, I think, 30 million people in California and say, you know, write us a check for 25 cents, you know, mail it in with a 45-cent stamp, you know?
	I hear what you're saying.
	I think the question I'm asking is, once you decide what the tax is going to be, don't you need an enforcement arm to collect the tax?
	Whether you call it the IRS or you call it whatever, Don't you need an enforcement arm?
	Well, yeah. To force compliance.
	Presumably. Again, this is a completely hypothetical situation.
	We have representatives that are only collecting taxes for things that we want.
	So there's not going to be a real big problem with the enforcement.
	Most people are going to be voluntary sending it in.
	And yes, that would be a legitimate tax.
	Article 168 Clause 1 says that Congress has the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises For three reasons.
	It doesn't give, you know, like, for every April 15th for any damn thing they want.
	So, again, I mean, I have no problem with, people say, well, I don't mind paying taxes, I just want to pay the lowest amount of tax that I can.
	I want to, like, you know, make it real cheap.
	And I say, well, I don't mind paying taxes either to a constitutionally justified government.
	But that's not what we've got.
	As soon as you get the government to start following the Constitution, I'll be, you know, a lot less upset about having to fill out a 1040 form.
	You know, again, whatever the project was whatever the project was for, I mean, it'd be probably pretty rare Whatever the federal government is doing, they would be funding it using these excise taxes.
	It's kind of a catch-22 question.
	It's like, God can do everything.
	Really? Can God make a rock so big that even he can't pick it up?
	It's like, I don't know.
	I'm happy to sit down and discuss these things, but whenever you get into a position like this, people are always creating questions that are hypothetical.
	I don't know what would happen to be there, but if it's a legitimate thing, the tax is going to be really low, and I think that most people would voluntarily pay it, and if you're one of those holdouts that doesn't want to, and it's like, eh, don't arrest him. I'll pay it.
	We've got a free A free market, a capitalist society, I'm making so much money, I got you covered.
	Don't sweat it. Next.
	Yeah, we have about 20 minutes left in our official schedule, so we'll do that.
	We're scheduled to end at 5.30, but if our debaters would like to stick around, if you have the availability, I don't want to...
	I view this as an extremely pleasurable Brilliant questions, great audience, so I'm happy to stay as long as people want to stay, so let's get the next question.
	Great fun. Sure. You guys, you want to point out the questions from now on?
	Yeah, you've had one. You commies aren't cool, dude.
	There has to be at least one guy at every Libertarian meeting whose beard is longer than his hair.
	That is a fact of life, and it's good to see that you've filled that niche.
	Thank you. My question is actually for Michael.
	I support you a lot.
	I got your book right here. Basically, every question, I have a couple questions, but basically everything that's been directed towards you, you've been no government, no government.
	Shouldn't you be anarchist then?
	I mean, everything you've been saying has been no government.
	And also, what exactly do you propose Would be government, and how exactly would you pay for it?
	Like, Pat Buchanan says, oh, this country, tariff, not our own country, but aren't they individuals?
	Shouldn't they not be forced to pay things also?
	Everyone's an individual, so just not our country.
	And also, our founding fathers, what gave them the right to write a document over me?
	Did I give them permission for that?
	Which document? The Declaration?
	The Constitution. I didn't give permission to anyone to write a document over me.
	Founding Fathers are not.
	Well, nobody gave the Founding Fathers permission to write the Declaration of Independence.
	They just did it. And I've already said that the Constitution, they didn't have the authority to write the Constitution.
	They were sent to Philadelphia to modify the Articles Confederation.
	They closed the doors, and they basically ship-canned the Articles Confederation, which I think would have been better in many cases.
	I mean, not as good in others.
	And they came out and said, you know, I mean, everybody knows that it's easier to get forgiveness than permission.
	You know, and I don't know exactly how it went, but it was probably, you know, Benjamin Franklin spilled his beer on the, you know, Articles Confederation, the ink smeared, we couldn't read it, and, you know, so we just kind of wrote down and, you know, sat down and wrote this Constitution, and, you know, we know it's not what you asked us to do, but all you have to do is ratify the Constitution and all will be forgiven.
	Well, it wasn't by the numbers, but eventually all 13 states did ratify the Constitution.
	One of the things that my students in my class are usually stunned to discover is that if you want to burn the Constitution, if you want to shred the Bill of Rights, I don't care.
	They go, but the Constitution says.
	I say, well, I don't care. Don't tell me what the Constitution says.
	Most of the time, they're telling me what some state statute says.
	You know, Michael, you're telling me you've got a right to keep and bear arms.
	But they've got these laws, they've got these 23,000 gun laws that say, I don't care.
	I don't care what it says.
	After Heller v.
	Washington, D.C., a first Supreme Court decision about the Second Amendment in I don't know how many years.
	I got like a dozen phone calls that morning.
	Michael, I want to be the first one to tell you about Heller.
	The Supreme Court voted 5-4 in favor of Heller.
	So? Well, we thought you would be excited.
	Why would I be excited?
	Well, because the Supreme Court identified the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, as an individual right.
	So, I didn't know that before.
	Do I need a Supreme Court vote of five to four to let me know that I have a right to life?
	Exactly. But why do you need government to tell you anything then?
	Why not let that be up to you?
	And every example that's come up to you, you have non-government solution to it.
	So why not just be non-government?
	Let me say this again.
	I would be happy with anarchy.
	You want to get all the government away and make it go away?
	I'm fine. I'm happy to mutually, but that's not going to happen.
	Because most of you out there don't have the courage to pull the trigger and defend yourself.
	You won't kill somebody else who's trying to kill you.
	You want somebody to do the job for you.
	You don't want to take the time to learn all that science, to learn all that math, so that you can exercise your responsibility to teach your children, so you're going to go and...
	I mean, I'm not the one that's been sending my kids to government-controlled schools for over 50 years, parents.
	Parents have the responsibility to teach their children all the skills and values that child needs to be a functioning adult.
	Parents will send their Johnny and Susie off to college, let the government and let the teachers do the reading, writing, arithmetic.
	Nowadays, I mean, in 1953, Americans were number one in math and science.
	We are now 29th In math and science, so even if the Department of Education was constitutional, and it's not, we should stop doing that because we're going in the wrong direction.
	And so parents, the children are graduating from high school, they're functionally illiterate, they can't read the diploma that you just handed them, and mommy and daddy have the audacity to complain that, well, my child just hasn't learned the values I wanted them to learn.
	Why the hell not?
	Because you gave that responsibility away to the government.
	So don't blame me.
	I'm a skydiving instructor.
	Who do you think packs my parachute?
	I do. But it's also a thing of principle.
	Just because the war in the Middle East isn't going to go away, do I have to support it just because it's not going away?
	No. If it's government, I'm not going to support it, regardless, and I'm going to speak on that.
	Just not because, oh, it's not going away, so I'm going to support why this should work.
	No. If the war in the Middle East isn't going away, I'm not going to find a way to support it.
	I'm still going to be against it, just like government.
	You can say it's not going to go away, but you can still speak out against it.
	I am trying to eliminate as much government as possible.
	I don't know... Who else is running around talking about these things?
	I don't know. We have people here disagreeing on whether or not anybody has any rights.
	I'm pretty clear that I do and will physically defend those rights.
	When I teach my class, I ask, why do we have any government at all?
	Why not anarchy?
	Let's just get rid of all...
	And they all go into seizure.
	It's like, oh my god, we can't do that.
	Like, why not?
	Well, you know, and then they come up with all these reasons why they don't want it.
	Well, okay, if we have to have government, why did the Founding Fathers pick a constitutional republic?
	Why not socialism?
	Why not communism?
	And basically, again, the purpose of the government that they designed was to protect your life, your liberty, and property.
	Well, it's not doing that anymore.
	Well, it's not the Constitution's fault.
	You know, again, Capitalism gets a bad name because we've got a really lousy economy.
	Well, we've got the really lousy economy because we're not using capitalism.
	You know, the Constitution is getting a bad rap.
	It's like, oh my God, look how terrible.
	We got all this, you know, this evil, corrupt government.
	Well, it's not the Constitution's fault.
	Not the Constitution's job to protect you.
	It's your job to protect the Constitution.
	You know, you only have the rights that you are willing to defend.
	And, you know, Most people are not willing to take the responsibility.
	You know, we were talking about moral decisions before.
	Well, you can only make a moral decision if you're intelligent enough to know what is moral.
	And, you know, excuse me, but those of you that are watching Dancing with Stars and Jerry Springer and, you know, American Idol and Lost and all these other quote-unquote reality television programs, it's like, excuse me, you know, like, go to a museum.
	Pick up a book!
	You know, I just cannot...
	I can't feel a whole lot of sympathy for people that, you know...
	I mean, I have people order copies of my book and copies of my DVD, and I look at this stuff in the order blank, and everything is in lowercase.
	You know, it's like, you never learned grammar?
	You never learned how to spell?
	You know, no wonder you can't read the Constitution.
	So we need to...
	We need to remove the government.
	There is no education system.
	It's an indoctrination system in this country.
	And we've got a whole lot of government to get rid of before we can talk about whether we can get rid of all of it.
	This question is for Michael.
	This is obviously a debate on how much government is necessary.
	So I'm going to assume, even though I haven't read your book, that you're going to bring your most powerful points to bear today.
	Now, what I've heard is that, contrary to Stephens, that we need government because people are not comfortable defending themselves.
	I will postulate that everyone here is more than willing to defend their family violently with extreme force if they have to, right?
	No one here does not defend their family, right?
	Also, I am quite happy with the fact that everyone here would be uncomfortable using a gun.
	That makes anyone here who raises their hand and is happy killing somebody or is comfortable, I don't want them by me.
	So I think that's amazing that most people are not comfortable doing that.
	Now, with regards to, and the other point was that the mass majority of people are not intelligent enough, are not educated enough to have an anarchistic society based on the free market.
	But you are traveling the country trying to educate these stupid people.
	The thing is, though, is that are you trying to raise an army, or are you trying to educate people to be happy?
	Do you want people to stand up against the government and die, or do you want them to be happy in the here and now?
	I would love to have people happy.
	Most people aren't.
	Most people don't even know what they need or want in order to be happy.
	Having this free and open society is an ideal.
	I don't know how to answer the question without alienating certain groups.
	I mean, if you go into the ghettos, there are people in the ghettos that they don't have very much.
	They've lived four generations with this welfare state.
	They have come to the belief, the sincere belief, that we owe them a living.
	The government is obligated to give them food and education and all that stuff.
	Well, I mean, you can want my property all you want, but you're not going to get it, not if I can stop you.
	And, you know, I'm happy that people think that they would be willing to defend themselves.
	If somebody comes up and starts choking you, I don't think that anybody could just stand there and let it happen.
	People will claim that they are, like, nonviolent, but, you know, self-preservation is going to kick in, and when you start gasping for air, you're going to start at least squirming.
	You're going to make it difficult for somebody to hold onto you.
	You know, maybe start scratching their eyes and just doing something to make the other person go away.
	It may be very, very bold and make everybody feel good to say that, oh, sure, I would use deadly force to protect myself.
	Well, I was out at front sight gun training.
	I mean, these are the people who are, you know, like just all Rambo.
	You know, these are the people who I think are most likely to physically defend themselves.
	And I'm telling you, they won't.
	You know, when it's only a paper target, you know, they can be real macho and, you know, I scored all these headshots.
	But, you know, it's really difficult to think that, you know, you'd have to take somebody's life.
	And I think that it would disturb you for a long time.
	Most people don't like the reality, the fact that in our society, That may be necessary.
	I think the NRA reports that there are two and a half million times a year that somebody uses a gun to defend themselves or their children.
	Fortunately, 90% of the time, they do that without pulling the trigger.
	You know, just merely displaying the gun makes the bad guy go away.
	Well, and I'm not going to get into a great big long Second Amendment discussion, but You know, if you think that you would defend yourself, oh, okay, I'm happy to let you think so, but it's not as easy as you might think.
	Okay, my question...
	I don't know, sorry, I don't know where you all are living, but you might want to move.
	This is like, you know, choking and people with guns.
	Most aggression I ever face is politicians tell the media to type bad things about me.
	That's all I face, but...
	Sorry, you had a question in the back?
	Yeah, it seems like...
	We just woke up in this socialistic nightmare and we have 20 years before the only way out is going to be a collapse.
	And I was just curious what your comments are on that idea.
	I know that actually mentioned it a lot.
	At the very end of his book on the Book of Socialism.
	And I was just wondering, I heard some of Steph's podcasts where he makes the comment where, you know, your change will magically dissolve and everything will go forward.
	It's going to be dramatic, but blah, blah, blah.
	Sorry, I'm just, what did I say?
	You changed the... Your change will dissolve.
	You make this argument that philosophically, if you present these ideas to people, they will understand them and then we'll no longer be tax slaves.
	And it just doesn't seem like it's going to happen that way.
	It seems like in the socialist nightmare that we're a part of, the only way out of this thing is to let the system collapse and then move forward from there.
	And I guess what I'm asking is, is there anything you can do to prepare yourself?
	Rand made an argument that the best defense is to surround yourself with like minds.
	She also makes arguments that that's even more powerful than surrounding yourself with guns.
	And I guess I'm just sort of opening up and asking, you know, suppose this scenario happens.
	The only way out of this collectivist socialist nightmare is a form of collapse.
	Let the system collapse.
	Is there anything that you are doing for yourself personally beyond what you're currently doing trying to make people aware to go through this stage of what's probably going to be very dramatic?
	Yeah, I mean, the collapse is inevitable.
	I mean, anything which mathematically cannot continue will not continue.
	I mean, that's just a basic fact, right?
	There's no fuel in the plane.
	We don't know when it's going to hit the ground, but it's not going to stay up.
	So, this is a very, very crucial and critical time, which is why, I mean, for my, you know, like, I can't get that interested in another software release relative to, I think, trying to do some real good in the world in these Kinds of topics.
	The collapse is going to happen and it's too late.
	We hit the iceberg like two generations ago.
	The ship is going down. But I think that what we really want to do is to get people to understand why the collapse occurred.
	Right? We want to get people to understand that the reason that the collapse is occurring is because of violence.
	Because of institutionalized, organized, status, predatory, violent, ugly, and evil coercion.
	Because people are constantly told That voluntarism is causing all our problems.
	It's the greed of the bankers, right?
	It's stupid. The bankers were as greedy 50 years ago as they are now.
	Why now? It's like blaming a plane crash on gravity.
	So I think it's really, really important to keep hammering on people, and I know this sounds like an ugly way of doing it, but keep repeating to people as positively and emphatically as possible that the problems in the world stem from violence, right?
	Stem from the initiation of force and fraud and so on.
	And that way, when things go wrong, and Ayn Rand is getting a remarkable, not that remarkable, resurgence in her popularity because Atlas Shrug predicted all of this stuff with pretty eerie, not eerie, stunning accuracy, like 50 plus years ago.
	So I think you want to be right.
	You know, that's really, really important, obviously.
	And you want to make the reasonable predictions.
	You want to remind people that the world is going downhill rapidly because of increases in violence.
	And violence occurs in many, many ways.
	Fiat currency, income tax, debt.
	We all know it, right?
	Keep telling people, there's a gun in the room, there's a gun in the room, there's a gun in the room.
	Society is run on blood.
	Society is run on violence.
	Statism is force. There is a gun in the room.
	Because if people can't see the gun in the room, then the people are just falling over.
	They don't know why. Oh my god, it's a microbe.
	Oh, they fainted, right? There's a gun in the room that's being pointed at the human race, at the human face.
	And if we keep pointing that out, and we keep...
	Because people already accept that violence doesn't solve problems, because they don't go for a job interview and take the guy hostage to get the job.
	They already understand, in their own lives, that violence will not solve their problems.
	If we get them to understand that society runs on this kind of violence, and they understand they can make that connection, well, it doesn't work in my life, it's not going to work in society as a whole.
	We get them to make that connection, then when things go bad, they'll stop looking for the bankers, and they'll stop looking for the capitalists, and they'll stop looking for the multinationals, and they'll start to look at where the violence really is, which is the initiation of force represented by the state.
	That's the first place they'll look.
	It's not the only problem in the world, of course, but when you look at societal collapse or societal problems, People have got to start seeing and drawing the conclusions between the violence that never works in their own lives and the violence that cannot work socially.
	But until they see that violence and have it repeatedly, patiently, and positively pointed out to them, there will be a great mystery, and then bad people will say, freedom has failed.
	But freedom never fails.
	Violence fails. And we keep reminding people of that.
	Then when the crash occurs, they'll know why, and we can start to build something better out of what comes after.
	I agree that the economy is going to fail, the structure is going to collapse, and it will always be replaced by something.
	Well, I said a number of times that we are in an ideological war, and what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to win what we replace, you know, after the collapse.
	You know, I want people moving in the right direction.
	I want them moving in the direction of protecting private property.
	And they can't do that if they think that the government is the answer.
	The government is not the answer.
	It's the problem. And so I'm doing my best to change the way that people think and to get them to acknowledge the individual rights of everybody and to take the personal responsibility that's going to require to make it happen.
	Alright, my question is for Michael.
	As a former presidential candidate, obviously you wanted the job, so let's just assume that you won.
	No, let's not assume that I won.
	Well, if you did win, what services would you want the government to provide, ideally in your utopian society?
	Would it be none? Would it be just the fence?
	Would it be roads? What's the baseline?
	Article 1, Section 8.
	When people were talking to me, it was like, well, assuming you get elected, what's the first thing that you would do?
	Well, eliminate the Federal Reserve, eliminate the IRS, send executive orders to the IRS telling them to come to work, make a pot of coffee, start dusting off your resume because you guys are going to be out of there, send a letter, executive order to the alcohol Alcohol, tobacco, and firearms, which really should be a convenient store and not a government agency.
	And let them know that if they take a gun away from anybody that is not at that moment committing murder or robbing a bank, that I will personally see to it that they are prosecuted for violating somebody's individual rights.
	And I did an actual book signing at a bookstore.
	It was kind of impressive, and I answered all these questions.
	And one lady says, well, okay, so what are you going to do?
	After the second two weeks.
	I said, well, play golf, I guess.
	And he's like, well, what do you mean?
	I said, well, my job is to keep the government really small, and after, you know, we get this list of things, there's really not going to be a whole lot for me to do, and, I don't know, probably go out and play golf, you know, do photo ops.
	You know, as President of the United States, I don't have the authority to go around and send troops to anywhere I want.
	So, And again, to address that first statement, no, I didn't want the job.
	The only question that I resented as a candidate was, well, you're not going to win, so who are you going to vote for?
	I was like, would you ask George Bush who he was going to vote for?
	You know, I'm not doing this because I want to be president.
	I'm doing this because I don't want the Democrats and Republicans to be president.
	I don't like their idea of that job.
	You know, I cannot vote for the Democrats and Republicans and respect myself in the morning.
	So if you don't like the way the other guy is doing the job, you've just got to do it yourself.
	I've got time for about one more question.
	I think I have... I actually have to head back to Texas, and my ride is going to be leaving here very soon.
	Okay. Does anyone have a question specifically for Mr.
	Mr. Ben, okay, great.
	Male Speaker: So, with this guy, then you've got to go?
	Yeah.
	Male Speaker: I'll see if I can feel it.
	Male Speaker: You've made it very clear that you're a minarchist and you don't believe energy works realistically.
	So I guess my question is that while it goes throughout history, it seems that people have progressed and we've gotten less totalitarian governments.
	We've had kings and emperors and dictators and it seems as we've considered life getting better, we've moved from absolute monarchies to constitutional to democracies and republics.
	We don't have a constitutional democracy.
	You can't find the word democracy in the Declaration of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.
	We are a republic, and there is a significant difference.
	All right, but it appears that as we move to a, like, people have more say in their government, life's gotten better.
	So what I'm saying is, maybe it's less government that's made life better, made it possible to advance.
	So why not just shed government entirely?
	and just argue for that rather than just trying to keep it minimal when it seems to be the problem.
	Anarchy is just not possible because most people don't want it.
	My original metaphor was alcohol.
	You can only distill alcohol so far and you always get a little bit of water in it.
	I think the standard of living goes down if you don't have any government at all.
	I think that it's a necessary evil.
	In the convention in Atlanta, I said that fire is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
	We need fire to survive.
	You need it to warm the house.
	You need it to cook your food.
	But any time the fire gets outside the fireplace, you know, it's a bad fire because it could burn the house down.
	And I suggested that the founding fathers understood that, you know, a little bit of government is necessary just to kind of, you know, keep everything, you know, organized rather than Doing the Mafia thing and let the Mafia decide how to resolve the murder of your loved one.
	The Founding Fathers understood that a little bit of government was necessary, but it's got to be a place for it.
	And they wrote the Constitution.
	Any government that is within the Constitution is a good government.
	Any government that's outside the Constitution is a bad government and needs to be stomped out.
	So, again, I'm trying to Whittle the government down to the size of the Constitution, specifically Article I, Section 8.
	Once we get government actually controlled, the Constitution, the piece of paper, is not going to do it.
	I love Stephan's metaphor, like, hold up that piece of paper.
	It's only a piece of paper.
	You know, it's only a collection of ideas, and those ideas are only going to triumph if most of the people here share those ideas.
	But, unfortunately, most people think that they can just vote for the candidate.
	That's going to give them the most free benefits.
	You know, we operate as a republic, or as a democracy instead of a republic.
	People don't have the ideas.
	The girl whose mother needed prescription drugs.
	She was happy to have me become president and steal money from somebody else and give that money for her mom's drugs.
	People live in contradictions all the time.
	I'm trying to You know, protect my own life, liberty, and property, and in the process of doing that, you know, I'm accidentally fighting for your life, liberty, and property, too.
	You know, it's kind of a fringe benefit.
	I can't help it. Okay, can we get a round of applause, please, from Michael Badner.
	I really want to thank everybody.
	I want to echo Stefan's comments.
	I love this kind of stuff.
	I just eat it up.
	I can sit here. I tell my students that I can answer questions about the Constitution longer than they can ask, and they almost beat me to it last Saturday.
	We stayed up until about 1.30 in the morning talking about the Constitution.
	My website is constitutionpreservation.org.
	My email address is there if you'd like to send me a question about the Constitution.
	That's kind of like one of my favorite things to do.
	Out of my 200 email a day, those are the ones I answer first.
	So, again, thank you for your interest in actually being willing, whether you agree with me or with Stephan, just being here to listen to the debate.
	Thank you for giving me hope for the future that anybody even cares.
	Thank you so much.
	We've got one or two more.
	If anybody, you can stay or leave, but we have one or two more questions that I will attempt, and then we'll start talking all about Michael.
	Go ahead. You can leave.
	Sorry, and I'm sorry.
	I'll try and imitate him if I can.
	Okay. Speaking of all of us being in this room caring today, actually caring about what happens with our lives, what are things that we can do to combat apathy And so many people that we encounter every day.
	Well, what people most want, and it's an old argument that goes way back to Greek philosophy, what people really want is happiness.
	It's the one thing that we try to get for its own sake, right?
	Like we got on a bus to go somewhere, we'll buy a car to drive something, but happiness we don't Do for something else.
	We do it for itself. The most motivating thing in the world is joy.
	It's happiness. It's enthusiasm.
	And that is infectious. Now, not everybody wants to be happy.
	Some people look at a happy person and they get all kind of, you know, like bad Ayn Rand characters, you know, like they just hate it or whatever, right?
	But for those people who really do like being happy and feel inspired at joy, I believe that the equation is something like this, right?
	Reason equals virtue equals happiness, right?
	You have to think and you have to have non-contradictory ideas.
	You have to have rational ideas.
	You have to put those into practice as best you can when nobody's perfect, but you have to do that.
	And what comes out the other end is happiness.
	And the best way to get people, I think, interested in philosophy is to live your values as rationally, as consistently, as joyfully as possible, and then people will see, damn, she's happy!
	Right? And if you're happy, people want to know, like if you live in a world of really overweight people and you're relatively slender, some people will go, I hate those thin people, right?
	But some people will go, I like some of that.
	And I say, well, how did you get...
	Like, if you want to sell people a diet, right?
	And so, if you want to get people interested in reason and evidence and philosophy and thinking, you have to lift the values to the point where you've become really happy yourself.
	And then people will be interested in how you get there.
	And I think that's how...
	Because, you know, people in the Fed, and we'll get rid of the Fed, and we'll, you know, get currency, and this stuff's very interesting.
	It's fascinating, right? But it's not what people get up in the morning Really wanting to do is to study the Fed or read a book by Thomas Woods or Ron Paul or whatever.
	Great though they are and interesting though they are, what they want is to be happy, to be connected, to be in love, to be enthusiastic, to be joyful about their lives.
	The more you live your rational values, the happier you will become.
	And then for those people who want to be happy, who still have that spark of enthusiasm to want to go out and get that joy in life, they'll want to know how you did it.
	And you'll say, Steph told me, no.
	He'll say, I've been thinking, I've been really thinking and reading and I live my values and these are the values that I live and I consistently apply them and that results in happiness.
	And that's, I think, the best thing we can do is to be happy and enthusiastic, to show people empirically what the results of rational and happy values are, and then those who want to become happy will really want to do that.
	I know that's the real hippy-dippy answer in a way, but does that make any sense at all?
	Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, actually.
	And we can control that.
	Your own ad, advertisement.
	Yeah. You know, I can't control whether there's a pet or not, but I can control whether I live my own values consistently.
	And if I'm not happy, I sort of look back and say, okay, well, what did I do?
	What part of my wife's commandments did I disobey?
	That I've ended up not happy.
	Why am I cold? I didn't take a jacket when she told me to.
	So you want to be happy and enthused.
	Not fake, you know, like some of those dad Christian pictures of the family.
	But genuinely happy and people will really become interested.
	And then if you talk about things like the Fed or the economy, Austrian stuff, this, that, and the other, people will say, well, she's happy and that's good.
	So other things she say have credibility.
	But a lot of libertarians are like, They're like Gollum, you know, evil, evil.
	And so people are like, well, they might be right, but I don't want to be that, right?
	So I think you want to try and be a person that people have, you have something of real value to offer called happiness, and they will then be interested in how you got there.
	And that's, I think, the best way to, I certainly am doing a lot better since I really began to live my values, which took entirely too long than before, where I was right.
	But only in a really abstract way.
	You want to really personify, I think, rational happiness, and then people won't want to get there, because you can control that.
	You can't control the fat, right?
	Oh, that makes me so happy.
	Now I'm more right. You haven't had your question yet.
	It was the other guy, right? Hi, Steph.
	I had a question for you, I think.
	I had a question.
	I think when someone asked you about the American experiment, you said that it was a great stride to set up this republic or democracy or whatever.
	I know someone also mentioned Han Toppy.
	He also has another book called Democracy, The God That Failed.
	I don't know if you read it or not.
	He points out that most people regard democracy as a procession off the ladder of civilization, like a good thing.
	Whereas he would argue that monarchy had many redeeming qualities over democracy, such as, like in democracy, every war is total war.
	People say, you know, we're invading Iraq, or, you know, we're not.
	People that call themselves a state are invading Iraq.
	In monarchy, there was never the case.
	Actually, people would go up to the castle walls and watch the soldiers battling and have popcorn and things like that.
	I was just wondering what you thought about this.
	The idea that a monarchy is they own the country, right?
	So democracy, nobody owns anything, and everybody can prey on everyone else.
	But in a monarchy, the aristocratic families, they actually own the peasants, they own the land, and so they have an investment in continuing that value, which in democracy you just don't have.
	And the other point, which in case you didn't hear, is that in a democracy, The war is total war, right?
	In the aristocracy, it was like, what, a couple of hundred inbred idiots whacking each other with swords while everybody sat around and watched.
	And wars were, you'd never have more than a couple of thousand people.
	But it was the democracies that started the 10 million plus genocide of the First World War, the 40 million plus of the Second World War.
	So, I mean, I think those are great arguments.
	The problem that I have with that, and I'm not claiming to be any expert on his argument, but the problem I have with that is that it certainly is true That war has become more total, but I would argue it's more a function of technology than democracy versus aristocracy.
	I mean, if you had bombs and planes and machine guns and this and that and the other in the 15th century, they would have just borrowed and done that and killed more people that way.
	I think the other problem that that argument has is that when the aristocracy did not, almost inevitably, did not raise the wealth of the average serf.
	I mean, you look from, you know, The fall of Rome, sort of 400-500 A.D. till, you know, 1400 A.D., right?
	You've got, that's all aristocracy, no democracies in Europe at all there, and living standards are, you know, a complete catastrophe that whole time period.
	When you do start to get some liberalization of the economy, which went to some degree hand in hand with democracy, what happened was you started to see a rise in living standards because Serfs are affixed to the land like a tree, right?
	Whereas workers can move around and there's some competition for them.
	So living standards under a democracy generally tend to go up and living standards under a monarchy tend to be flat if not declining.
	Is it the additional wealth of democracy that makes it possible to wage more total war?
	Is it the technology that comes out of the free market that comes from a democracy?
	I think that's arguable, but I don't think...
	Obviously, he's not saying that monarchy is the solution.
	He's saying that there is a kind of private ownership, but I don't think it translates to any benefits for those in the middle or the bottom, which in democracy it tends to, if that makes any sense.
	I think that might just be a function of...
	There happened not to be any free markets under anarchy.
	I'm not advocating anarchy, but monarchy, sorry.
	But if there were free markets under monarchy, I think Hoppe would argue that people would be better off because kings also have less incentive to tax because they don't want to have rebellion because it's very easy to just kill a king.
	Right. I mean, if someone wanted to kill Obama, they wouldn't accomplish anything because then Biden would just move right up.
	I also wanted to add that even if they did have air jets and things like that and weapons of mass destruction, the kings had more of an incentive not to involve the populace because the populace did, according to Hoppe, they viewed the king as more something they had to tolerate and not some You know, the king had his own business.
	He took care of his own affairs and things like that.
	And they just kind of paid to do whatever.
	I mean, so I'm not sure what you have to say about that.
	One of the beautiful things about being an anarchist is you can't answer questions like how should things be funded, right?
	I mean, with all due respect to Michael, that was not a clear answer, right?
	Well, it is forced, but you don't actually have to pay them because I'll cover the guy who can't, right?
	So you don't end up with that kind of muddy stuff.
	The other thing you don't have to do as an anarchist is you don't have to say, which of these lesser of two evils would you prefer, right?
	Democracy or monarchy, which is better?
	It's like, well, they both suck. They may suck in different ways to different degrees, but as an anarchist, you just have to say, I don't want to be shot in either kneecap.
	Thank you very much. And if you make me choose, I guess I'll choose one or the other based on whatever criteria I prefer.
	You know, do I want to live the life of a drudge, you know, like the Monty Python guy?
	You know, he must be a king. He hasn't got shit all over him, right?
	Do you want to live the life of that drudgy slave but have less of a chance of being killed in a war?
	Or do you want to maybe have a chance for a better life with an increased income with a greater chance of being killed in a world war?
	Those are like, I'd love to have a society where neither of those choices exist, and that really is the state of society, in my opinion.
	So, I think they're interesting questions, but, you know, to me that's like, you know, which shit piles do you want to wallow in?
	I'd say, let's go forward where we don't have those, and then not worry about which one was better or worse under which circumstances.
	But I think they're very interesting theoretical arguments, for sure.
	Yeah, hello, Jack, okay.
	Hi. My question has to do with, for lack of a better term, international relations and how an anarchist territory can't be the world initially.
	It has to be part of some land mass and that there's going to be disagreeing peoples at some kind of a porous border that disagree and they're going to, like, let's just say it was the territory of America that There would be some point where people said, oh, I'd rather be part of the nation of Canada or I'd rather be part of the nation of Mexico for whatever reason.
	Sorry, which country is anarchist in this?
	America. America is anarchist.
	I know you're kidding. No, that's fine.
	I'll come there. I'll come here if that's the case.
	Thanks. So my question is also in relation to that, how the United Nations or other countries sometimes will say they don't Legitimately recognize a nation, like if they have a new government, and they say, oh, we don't recognize that nation, we aren't trading with them.
	What I was wondering is, obviously there isn't a government, so if people were trying to trade internationally, they would be trading with private companies or individuals, and that there wouldn't be any governments trading with, or would governments outside this territory trade with individuals?
	Well, remember, governments don't trade with anyone, just to be precise, right?
	Yeah. It's companies that trade with other companies.
	Or, yeah, so with that dynamic and stuff, like, how would an anarchist country deal with, like, if governments passed laws that said private companies can't do business with an anarchist nation, or, like, all these kinds of questions I'm new to this stuff, so I haven't explored it. That's a great question.
	There's an old economics argument, maybe you've heard it, maybe you haven't, which is to say, America and Japan, right?
	It's the question of do we, you know, trade wars, tariff wars, right?
	You're Japan, and I'm America, and you say you can't import wheat.
	I can't export wheat to Japan.
	And then say, oh yeah, you can't export rice to America, right?
	And we get into this escalating war.
	It's completely ridiculous, right?
	And I'll give you an example.
	Let's say I, as America, come up with a cure for cancer, and you, as Japan, come up with a cure for AIDS, right?
	And you say, America, you can't sell your cure for cancer in Japan.
	And then, would it be rational for me to say, it's better for my population, who already have access to this cure for cancer, if I block you from selling your cure for AIDS to my population?
	It would not be advantageous, right?
	So the fact that one country is imposing trade barriers on another country in no way, shape or form, implies that that country should then retaliate.
	And it just means that, unfortunately, the people who want to sell wheat to you are kind of hooked.
	They've got to sell it somewhere else or switch crops or something.
	And so if a foreign government says, you can't export your stuff, no government is going to say reasonably that you can't, they're going to say to their own citizens, you can't sell to the anarchic country.
	How would they know in a way, right?
	I mean, there's no border that we would take care of in an anarchic country.
	And so you would lose out, to some degree, not being able to trade into a state of society, but you would still be way better off letting the state of society trade with you and just trade internally for the things that you weren't allowed to export.
	It would still be vastly beneficial to the anarchic society.
	We're not reliant on the foreign governments to allow us to trade outside.
	I mean, we still get the advantage of them trading with us, if that makes any sense.
	Last question, maybe?
	Or are we completely run dry?
	Oh, did the camera person have a question?
	Why is your forehead so shiny?
	I just have a general question, I guess.
	In your definition, what is an anarchist?
	A bad person, right?
	Evil. I get a reptile head, right?
	Well, an anarchist, obviously there's many, many different definitions of it.
	That's why I sort of said it's an anarcho-capitalist variety.
	Certainly, I think the basic requirement of an anarchist is to not recognize the legitimacy of the state.
	And I think that most anarchists would not recognize the political or moral legitimacy of the state.
	Anarchists certainly do respect authority.
	As Bakunin said, and somebody has this on my forum, he said, what does it mean to say I reject all authority when it comes to dealing with a shoemaker?
	I respect his authority with regard to the shoe.
	So it's not a rejection of authority, it is a rejection of the moral authority of organizational violence.
	Now, there's a lot of complicated nonsense about anarchy, like people say, well, we shouldn't have property and, you know, we're an anarcho-socialist and so on.
	I don't like any of that stuff, fundamentally, because it seems to me That if you want to be an anarcho-socialist, an anarcho-capitalist society is your best friend.
	Because you don't have to exercise property rights.
	It's optional, right?
	If someone steals my car, I don't even have to report it.
	I can just say, hey, it went to the collective good and whoever needs it can use it and fantastic.
	In a free society, if you want to set up some hippy-dippy, flesh-pit, bond-smoking, whatever, house of infinite carnal knowledge, you can do all of that.
	You can all get together and have group hugs and spread whatever bacteria you want back and forth, but you can have that collective ownership.
	You can not exercise property rights.
	You can collectively work the land.
	You can, you know, raise naked children.
	Do whatever you want, right? And there's no way that a free society, I mean, maybe get involved with the protection of children, maybe, but is not going to say you have to exercise your property rights.
	An anarcho-socialist society, to me, could only exist if it specifically opposes the exercise of property rights.
	Now, what agency is going to oppose the exercise of property rights?
	It would have to be an agency that has some sort of compulsion.
	Right? I.e., I want to keep this.
	No, you can't because you're not allowed to keep anything.
	Right? And so you simply have a big contradiction there, right?
	Because you have to have, you're supposed to have no authority, but in order to enforce nobody exercising property rights, you have to have some authority.
	So I think that whole system just doesn't work at all.
	I think one of the reasons why anarcho-socialists don't like anarcho-capitalism is that they know, in a free society, very few people are going to end up in their hippy-dippy, you know, commune-farm nonsense, right?
	Because, you know, people are going to go like, man, I've got to get something done with my life.
	I've got to go do something and be in society and maybe gather together some capital and air conditioning is nice and I like my food irradiated, perhaps, I like fluoride, I like to be able to visit a dentist, like all those kinds of things, right?
	Like the second generation Amish, you know, it thins out a little bit.
	And I think they know that if they're in a free society and they have to, in a sense, compete with a private property society, that they're just not going to be able to sustain themselves.
	And that's why I think they want to create this, you know, the whole country is a hippie commune or whatever.
	And I'm being a little disrespectful to the views, but that's, I think, the major difference is you have to reject the institutional authority of violence.
	And after that, I would say you have to logically sustain property rights, but not everyone agrees.
	All right. We're going to do two more.
	Two more, okay. Two more questions coming all the way over.
	Oh, we said two. You can't see behind you, can you?
	No, no, sorry.
	We're going to take this, ladies. Just teasing you.
	Go, no, don't. Okay. No, don't.
	Sorry, go ahead. No, no, not you.
	Look, it's chaos.
	It's anarchy right now.
	Just curious, in an anarchist society, how would you think to deal with child abuse?
	I mean, a child obviously can't go to an independent agency and say, you know, my rights are being taken away through by my parents.
	Right. No, that's, I mean, I think that really is, and we always wait until the end for the essential questions, right?
	Because you cannot have a peaceful and free society where a significant proportion Of children are mistreated, and unfortunately, a significant proportion of children are mistreated even in the current society, and we have one of the more enlightened societies with regards to the protection of children, so you simply can't have a free society if a lot of people are coming out hyper-aggressive, damaged, unable to concentrate, and so on from difficult households.
	I think that parents are going to want to have Legal protections for their children's actions.
	I think that's going to be pretty basic, right?
	If your child goes and, I don't know, throws a rock through someone's window, you're going to want to have some kind of protection.
	You're also going to need to have medical insurance or some kind of medical protection for your child.
	If you send your child to school, which most people will in a free society, because schools, I mean homeschooling is a desperate measure based on how bad the schools are, right?
	But in a free society, schools will be incredibly well tuned towards the maximum capacity of teaching children.
	So if you want to go to school, you're going to need to have some sort of DRO protection for your child, immunizations, whatever it is that's going to be.
	So children won't make the contracts themselves, but children cannot escape, parents can't escape the necessity of having their children in some kind of social net of contracts and obligations.
	Now DROs are going to want to minimize as much as possible how expensive it's going to be to insure children.
	Like everyone, right? Like if you're a non-smoker, you get better rates from the insurance company.
	And so, GROs are going to say, look, if you want to save as much as humanly possible on your child's insurance, which you're going to need to have your children function in society, We've done all the research, we've compared all of the possible parenting methods, you know, you pay us 200 bucks for a parenting class or 2,000 bucks for a parenting class and you will save,
	you know, $300 a month on your child's insurance because we know that people who parent this, this, this and this way, we've got the evidence and it's empirical and it's scientific and it's proven that this is the best way to parent children so that they're peaceful, they're non-violent, they're not, you know, poking other kids with sticks and so on.
	And they're less stressful, they're less likely to get sick, and so on.
	And so you have an agency which is not the state.
	The state has certainly no interest in protecting the rights of children other than, of course, some dedicated individuals like the superheroes of the child service agencies.
	But with DROs who want to make it as cheap as humanly possible to ensure the health and safety of children, they're going to do the research to figure out what kind of parenting best keeps children peaceful and Their best allows them to accelerate their education, gives them the best social skills, produces the fewest bullies, and so on.
	And so they will offer huge incentives for parents to get involved in the styles of parenting that are the most effective.
	And they may be different for different cultures and different for different types of children and so on.
	But there will be very, very strong efforts to minimize the cost, the destructive cost that children have in society.
	Because, of course, children who go wrong, I mean, not only are very expensive when they're young, I mean, the social cost is huge.
	Now, at the moment, it's worn by taxpayers who can't do anything about it.
	But you can also say, as a DRO, you know, when your kid turns 18, if you follow this particular plan, we will also insure them at half price, right?
	And so it's a huge net savings.
	Is it going to be perfect?
	Of course not. There's going to be people living in the woods who beat their kids, and that's terrible.
	But, you know, we're trying to put a system in place where things can be as productive and positive as possible.
	And I think that's a real rough sketch.
	There's more about that in the book, but does that sort of make any sense about how I think it could be more proactively handled?
	Yeah, but are you saying then that you would force people to get insurance for their children?
	No, no, no, no. It's not forcing.
	Okay. It's not forced, right?
	So, for instance, I mean, I know that there's debate about immunizations, but we got Isabella immunized.
	And we want to send her to a private school because public schools suck and I'm not...
	We're going to try and reinvent educating children, at least.
	I mean, some people do, and I just don't think it's right for me.
	And they have said, you know, we want her immunization records when she comes to attend the school.
	They're not forcing me to get her immunized.
	But if I want to send her there, then I have to get her immunized.
	And they have every right to request that, right?
	So nobody's forcing parents.
	To do anything, right?
	But what they are saying is that if you want us to extend protection to your child for damage, for health care, for whatever, then you need to, then you can pay full price and you don't have to take any parenting courses, right?
	But if you want to save half price or 75%, then take these parenting courses and it will be a good investment for you.
	It's like, you know, you go for your driver's license.
	If you've taken particular courses, you can get reductions on your insurance.
	And if you haven't, you pay full price.
	So it's not forcing anyone. Balances of incentives, if that makes sense.
	There was a gentleman at the back, and then maybe we'll do.
	That's a great question, though, by the way.
	Very important. I have one big question.
	I don't quite understand, how would you be able to maintain anarchy?
	I kind of really think that you'd always have your, you know, getting back to the Michael Corleone idea that there will be groups that will pop up and they will try to control other groups of people violently.
	And these groups can spread.
	They can get funding from other countries.
	They could take on, you know, they can get, they can be self-sufficient, have their own corporations, and just expand and be A government.
	That minimalistic government that Michael was talking about.
	Sorry, were you here? Because this question came up once before.
	Was it that my answer sucked for you or you weren't here?
	I mean, either one is fine. I'm just wondering which one it was.
	I may have missed it, but I may have not understood your answer.
	There was a question about what constitutes a government, and maybe I didn't quite get a clear answer to that.
	But I totally can see how a group of people can come in and start a gang.
	Just like the government, the gang itself, they would start their own gang and try to control people.
	You know, right now we have gangs because of drugs are illegal.
	But if drugs weren't illegal, there would be no gangs.
	But there would still also be the trafficking of people in one way or the other.
	Making them work as serfs, if you will.
	How do you prevent this from happening?
	You're talking about these organizations, these insurance companies, if you will, kind of making you work in society in a particular way that's constructive to everybody.
	But I also think that at some point, if I do something bad and I get turned away from all these insurance companies, There's always going to be another insurance company to say, oh, you know, I don't care what you did in the past.
	You know, come on in.
	You know, you can order food here.
	Sure. Now, let me just take that last scenario.
	I did answer the first one earlier.
	You can look at the book, and again, you may not agree with everything I'm saying.
	I'm sure you won't, right? Because you're a thinking person, and I'm certainly not going to say I've got everything right.
	But let me just deal with that last point, and then if you're not satisfied with what's in practical anarchy, just give me a shout or, you know, come by the Sunday show and we'll talk more.
	So the issue, and it's a great, great point that you raised, the issue is some guy gets kicked out of a DRO because he's a total jerk or something, right?
	He's a nasty guy who doesn't keep his contract.
	And so there's going to be some other lower tier, you know, trailer park DRO who's going to come squidging and say, you've done that at what you've done, right?
	I mean, I'll insure you, no problem.
	And there will be that aspect of things for sure, but remember, DROs are only valuable to the degree with which other DROs will work with them.
	Right? So, I can print my own currency, nobody cares, right?
	Because no store will accept it.
	Right? I could come up with a credit card that one model railroad store in Nunavut accepts, and nobody's gonna...
	because it's only useful in one store, you might as well use cash, right?
	So it's the interoperability or the cooperation of the DROs that makes them valuable.
	And so if I have some low-rent DRO that sidles up to criminals and says, I'll represent you, no other DRO is going to want to do business with me.
	Why? Because there's no point having the punishment called ostracism if you then cooperate with the DROs who pick up the ostracized people.
	Then it's not punishment at all.
	And I would not be able to sell that to my customers saying, don't worry, I'll ostracize people who don't fulfill their contracts and then not do it.
	People would just stop using me as a DRO and I would go out of business.
	So I have to have some standards of behavior and interoperability and all DROs would have the same incentive.
	And so if you have some DRO that will pick up criminals or whatever and try and insure them, the problem is no other DROs will deal with them and so they're kind of useless.
	And they would just have to be enormously expensive because no other DROs, so they'd have to duplicate everything that all the other DROs were doing.
	So I don't see how that could practically work.
	Just because you have to have that interoperability for DROs to work.
	I have to be able to take my DRO money from Philadelphia and go to Scranton or to Columbus or whatever and use it there too.
	If those DROs don't recognize that DRO, It's not really worth anything to me, right?
	So there has to be this interoperability for them to be of value at all, and those criminals who are ostracized, the DROs who pick them up will themselves be ostracized, and therefore won't have any value to the people that they're representing.
	Does that make any sense?
	It is a good answer! One!
	Yay! I hit my personal death today!
	One good answer! Beautiful!
	I should stop now. Oh wait, you had one more.
	You want to hear? I'll just keep the mic. Thank you.
	First, I'd like to say your patience for our questions, or sometimes not questions is awesome.
	So as an anarchist trying to live my principles, sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the fact I'm living in a world that's so embedded with statism in our economic and social realms.
	I'm just a college grad and trying to move out of the house and having trouble getting a job.
	The only job I could get was for a company that has lots of government contracts.
	And I'm trying to switch to an environment that's better suited for me, et cetera, et cetera.
	Sometimes I feel a little guilty about this company that I work for.
	What advice do you offer for how you draw the line or for what you find acceptable or what you resist?
	Thank you. Let's get the easy question at the end.
	That's great. Young anarchist.
	Oh, you're so stupid. Wait till you can get a podcast and then come out as an anarchist.
	No, I'm kidding. No, that's a great question.
	So the question when I graduated from school...
	Look, I took government contracts when I was an entrepreneur and I was already a staunch objectivist and anarchist and this and that.
	You did not create the world that you live in, right?
	Obviously, if you'd had the choice, you would not have had the statist predations infesting and infecting the society that you live in.
	You have to make your way in the world as it is, right?
	We can't live in the future, we can't crawl into the books of an anarchic blueprint and live there, one that would be to try, right?
	So you have inherited a world from people who unfortunately just have not done the work necessary to clarify And work to eliminate the violence that is inherent in the society that we live in.
	That's not your fault, obviously, right?
	It's not your fault that you have inherited the society where you can't be a purist, right?
	I mean, people come to me and they say, oh, you're against the government, you have a podcast.
	No, TCPIP was the Department of Defense in the 60s.
	Yeah, okay, so what?
	I'm supposed to just, like, not breathe air because, you know, the government defines the standards for air conditioning or something?
	I'm not going to be that kind of purist because that is to take on the sins of the whole world and say I'm completely responsible for them and I can't breathe and I can't live and I can't eat food because government farmers get government subsidies and I can't drive on the road because the government has produced the roads and the buses.
	You couldn't do anything, anything in life.
	And that, to me, that can't be right.
	I'm not sure exactly all the reasonings why, but just standing there not consuming oxygen until you die It can't be the only way to live morally in society.
	And what kind of world would that leave to people if we don't have enough to eat and we don't have a way of getting access to the internet, of buying books, of learning, of reaching out to other people, of washing, right?
	You know, I'm an anarchist.
	I haven't bathed in four months because the government supplies the water.
	It's like, ugh, you could be right, but I don't want to find out, right?
	No, you've got to shave.
	You've got to, you know, whatever, right?
	I mean, you've got to live in the society that you find yourself in.
	Like, you know, if we're born doctors and it's a time of plague, we just do what we can.
	I mean, yeah, we take risks and so on.
	I would say very much this is what I found with my professional life.
	I made lots of mistakes this way and hopefully a few of my scars will give you some useful tips.
	I would not bring political voluntary anarchism Into my conversations about government contracts at work.
	I mean, it's just, you can do it, right?
	But, you know, it's going to be really, really tough.
	And I think that that's not productive.
	Like, I think you need to eat, you need to educate yourself, you need to live a happy life within the confines of the society that you live in.
	I think that you need to dedicate yourself not to the sort of fruitless opposition of abstract things that you can't control, but really on focusing on living as many of your values as possible within your own sphere of influence, right?
	Within your own personal relationships.
	Professional relationships, you're not paid to be an anarchist at work, right?
	You're paid to be...
	Alright, so you do helpdesk at work.
	Fantastic. So they're paying you for helpdesk.
	Anarchy not translate you to helpdesk, right?
	So it's not like... Now that I've solved your software problem, let me tell you about the society you live in.
	There's a gun in the room! Right?
	So, they're paying...
	That was my first podcast, I never published it.
	But they're paying you for your help desk, right?
	So you provide the help desk service, and they're not paying you for anarchism.
	If you can find a job proselytizing about anarchism, fantastic.
	Go to town, right? It's a hard road, but it's well worth it if you can work towards that.
	But be professional in your job and do that which you're paid for.
	I mean, if my doctor is against the healthcare system, I still want them to write me a prescription.
	I don't want them to lecture me about the healthcare system and send me out with my infection intact.
	I want them to do their job, and their job is not to talk to me about anarchism, and neither is your job at work.
	Yeah, some of your paycheck is going to come from government, but there's no way to escape that unless you want to go live on nuts and berries in the woods, in which case we abandon the world to the bad people.
	If all the good people say, well, I have to be so pure that I can't function in society, we just leave The future of the children in the world to the worst people in the world who don't give a crap about integrity and virtue, right?
	So we fight the tough, ambiguous fight.
	There's a certain amount of what you can live with that no one can tell you, right?
	I mean, there may be some government contract that comes up where you're just like, oh man, I can't do it.
	And no one can tell you whether or when that occurs.
	And I don't think there's any objective line.
	I really don't. Okay, maybe frontline culture in Iraq.
	I don't know, right? You just have to be sensitive to how you're processing stuff, right?
	There's only a certain amount of stuff we can watch before we just go, you know, we can't do it anymore, right?
	But I would certainly not create some abstract rule that says I can't do any job where there's government money ever involved, because then you can't have any job at all.
	If you're a waiter, some guy might be an IRS agent.
	You don't know. You then become paranoid, right?
	So I would say it's more of a gut sense and a gut feel, but I think that the thing is, as I was saying to the lady before, who didn't leave but naps, is that right?
	No, I'm just kidding. Sorry, it just looks like you're...
	But as I was saying before, don't let the evils of the world and the institutionalized violence of society bring down your spirit.
	Because it is in the indomitable will and joy of our spirit that we are going to lead human beings to a higher place.
	You know, if we're going to be those kinds of lighthouse leaders helping people in from the far seas of statism, we have to have that kind of joyful, happy integrity.
	Don't let the evils that have accumulated throughout history, that you're not at all responsible for, crack and break down your joyful spirit in your pursuit of a better world and an elevated species, right?
	That stuff doesn't matter.
	It doesn't matter that bad people made shitty decisions in the past.
	That doesn't cling to us.
	That doesn't cling to our souls.
	We stand as tall and as firm and as proud as we can without taking responsibility for the sins of the past.
	Statism is Catholicism.
	You just have to reject it.
	There's no original sin that way.
	We struggle to do the very best that we can for the sake of joy, not for the sake of changing the world, because you can't change the world without joy.
	You aim at changing the world, you get frustrated and miserable and don't change anything except your own level of happiness for the worst.
	So I would stand tall with the joy and integrity of the truth and the virtue that you have.
	Don't let the slings and crap of statism that you didn't invent and not responsible for stick to you.
	Be sensitive to what you can take emotionally and be aware of where it just becomes too unpleasant and work to figure that out within yourself and change what you need to be.
	But the whole purpose of evil is to make good people feel guilty for breathing.
	And I just don't think we have to feel that way at all.
	We have an incredible gift to bring to the world.
	The gift of truth and of reason and of evidence and of virtue and of happiness and of peace.
	Right? And we have the key that unlocks a really golden and beautiful future.
	And if we feel stained by the sins of the past to the point where we become ashamed of being the most reasonable and, I believe, the most virtuous people around, we're just surrendering to the darkness a light that we just don't have to.
	So I hope that gives you some sense of at least how I approach it, and that was a great, great question.
	All right. Thank you very much, Stefan, for coming out here to Philadelphia.
	Greatly appreciated.
	Thank you.
	Just another reminder, thank you everyone for coming.
	And also, just please, please, please, if you can donate, I really ask that you would.

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