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Aug. 4, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:33
1429 New Hampshire Freedom Roundtable

A roundtable discussion from the Free State Project in New Hampshire, March 2009.

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Welcome to OTN. I've rounded up a few folks from the 2009 Liberty Forum.
I've got Ian Freeman from Free Talk Live, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio, and Mark Stevens from markstevens.net, correct?
That's it. And so what I thought we'd do today is just take some time out to sit down.
Ian and I have done quite a few things with the Free State Project and the activism and things that are going on here in New Hampshire.
I know you guys are fairly new to some of this Free State Project.
This is your first time attending the conference, correct?
What are your initial thoughts, having seen all of this going on?
People packing, which is pretty cool.
Yeah. It's nice to know you.
It's like when I first moved to Phoenix in Arizona, where you've got people walking around with guns, big guns, and not everyone's freaking out.
You know, I mean, you go into a restaurant or something, there's four, five, eight people packing, and it's normal, which it is.
And it's not to say that it doesn't happen when people freak out.
We have, what is it, every month it seems like somebody's getting a phone call and the police are coming out and it turns into a...
Really? It's usually someone from Massachusetts, though.
But it's not to say, you know, the police are coming in questioning these people, detaining them for hours.
One guy went in and filed a police complaint.
So it comes with a little bit of struggle in order to make it like you see out there.
No, and I think that...
I mean, I feel perfectly content and happy with...
Even though it's surprising I'm from Canada, right?
So you don't see people packing who aren't in uniform.
But I feel perfectly comfortable and happy, shaking hands.
And, you know, I don't think that they're, you know, Yosemite Sam's.
You know, that's sort of the stereotype.
But I'm really, really...
I'm impressed with the intellectual caliber of the people here.
Really great discussions, really great questions, really intensely focused people who obviously have poured a lot of time and energy into a movement that they really believe in.
Because my history with conventions is business conventions where you're kind of there to press the flesh and make a sale and so on.
And so I'm really, really impressed with the focus and...
Intensity is a word that has two kinds of, you know, too intense is bad, right?
But I really do like the intensity that people have and the focus that people have and the sense of purpose that people have.
And I think that's why the Free State Project, whether you agree with the political possibility or not, and I have questions about that which doesn't mean anything because nobody knows the future, but I can certainly see why it would be really nice to be around like-minded people where you have your disagreements, but... The core aspects of the non-aggression principle, property rights, you know, small to no government, that stuff is really core to what people talk about here.
And the well-educated people who, you know, you had some surprising things to say, I'm sure, for some people today.
But, you know, people were open and receptive and had questions and comments.
And I really like that.
You know, it's sort of like... No one shouted you down.
Yeah, it's like, Gons didn't come out.
You know what it's like? The way I feel about it, it's like going to a scientist's convention, right?
So some people in science, they have disagreements about certain aspects of science, certain aspects of physics or whatever.
But they all have a common methodology for resolving their disputes, which everybody respects.
And I think here what's really nice is that nobody's saying, well, we disagree, so I'm going to go and get the government to do something about it.
Whereas we all say, well, reason and evidence and negotiation is the way to resolve these disputes.
And that's really nice to be in that environment.
Have you noticed that the Free State Project is almost organized in the same way that a voluntary society may be?
I mean, sure, there is this board of directors and Free State Project, people that run the Free State Project, but the intent is really to get people to move here.
Once they're here, it's up to them, and there really is no overriding structure, nobody telling somebody what to do.
Essentially, the way most of the things happen in the Free State Project is somebody will announce, here's what I want to go out and do.
I'm going to protest cannabis in public.
I'm going to go do this or that protest.
And then the people that support that idea go and get behind and get involved.
And I think the local politicians are really having a hard time understanding.
They're frustrated. We call this local show called Talk Back in Keene every week.
We make a point of bringing up pro-liberty ideas and talking to what are essentially two city councilors sitting here on the radio.
And one of them has been harping on this for a while, like the idea of, well, who's your leader?
You guys, this is your problem.
This is what he tells us. You need to get organized, guys.
Your problem is being very critical of the organizations.
Well, there isn't enough of an organization.
You need a leader. Well, that's why this is so great, because there are no leaders.
I think they believe, at least in Keen, They believe that I'm a leader because, well, I'm more visible than the average free stater.
And we're getting to a point where that's going to change because we have so many people that have moved in now, just within the last six months, that as they start to self-organize and they start to do their activism, They're going to show up on the radar of these politicians too, and they're not going to know what to think.
But wait, Ian's not telling them to do these things?
Who are these people? They're going to come out of the woodwork, and they're already, I think, somewhat overwhelmed with what's happening.
And it's barely even begun.
Yeah, there's nobody to attack if there's no one front and center, right?
It's like trying to fight fog.
You can't do it. And that's probably what's frustrating, is they're used to someone who has, like, a pyramid structure.
You lop off the top and it scatters, but that's not how it works.
They want us to be like them. Yeah, for sure.
Well, it's easier, like you're saying, it's easier to go after the head of the organization.
Because it's typically, you take off the head and the tail goes away.
You don't have to worry about that.
But the spokesman who's getting people motivated, once you remove the motivation, that's why, so like Martin Luther King, you take him out.
John Lennon was the same thing.
So I think it's safe to say everybody at this table has given up on the idea of the state solving problems or the need for the state.
I'm wondering from you two, what was it that finally kind of won you over?
For me it was a year and a half process of listening to the Market for Liberty and Free Talk Live before I was finally able to let go of the concept of we need the state to keep everybody safe.
What was it for you guys?
Well, what did it for me was actually, what I talked about this morning, was finding out governments, in their own words, unambiguous, very clear, they're not here to protect you anyway.
So there's really no argument with that.
Either you accept it or you don't.
So you either go blindly and accept and think, oh, I can vote and it's going to change things, or you can take a step back and realize there has to be other ways to do this.
And that's when I start getting into voluntarism and actually, like Gandhi, But to the people who say, well, we have this system that's established and we need to use the system to change the system, what's the solution to that?
I looked at it just because you're a prisoner and you vote for a new warden doesn't make you any more free.
And Lisanna Spooner said basically the same thing.
Just because a man is allowed, allowed is the operative word, to choose a new master every few years doesn't mean he's any more free.
We would all understand, I think, the argument that would say, you can't fight slavery through the draft.
Because that's fighting fire with fire, right?
And we would oppose that, if we'd have been around the last century, or two centuries ago, we would oppose that civil war thing, right?
That you can't fight slavery through involuntary slavery, especially, you'd rather be a slave than someone in the army, right?
And so you can't use the weapons of the enemy to overturn that.
Because it's not a self-defense situation.
It's not possible because we're so out-manned and out-gunned, so to speak.
So that was sort of my approach.
I'm more recent, I think.
I was an objectivist minarchist for many, many years.
Because objectivism takes you that far, you know, real small government.
And then it really draws that line.
After that is evil. If you go after that, if it goes below half a percent, it's evil, anarchy, right?
And so for me, it was really, really hard.
You don't have to let go of all those beliefs in the state that have been ingrained into them.
And you know what the toughest thing for me was?
When you believe in the government, to whatever tiny degree, you get to step around a whole lot of problems when it comes to explaining how society works.
Because you've still got courts, police, military, the defense of the realm or whatever.
You still have that all sorted out, right?
And then you go with the objectivist problem like voluntary taxation but no competition.
Like it just gets all quagmirey, right?
But what it does is it allows you to bring people a long way without having to address things like, well, how do you deal with motorists?
And how do you deal with roads?
And how do you deal with national defense, right?
And so the amount of creativity that it takes, or creative and intellectual energy research, thinking, you know, reading, debating, that it takes for that last 2% is huge.
It was much more effort for me to go that last 2% than it was to go the first 98%.
When I was reading The Market for Liberty for the first time, that was kind of my transition period.
And when I was reading the parts of that book about how justice could work in a free market system, it was very difficult for me to really...
That's your Scanners moment, right?
Yeah. Wow.
I knew I had to go back through and read it over again because it just wasn't...
One time wasn't enough for me to really process it.
And even after the second time of reading just that chapter, the couple chapters over again, it still took me quite a while to really...
Bust through that barrier.
Yeah, it's like saying we should treat slaves better and there should be fewer of them.
It's not as big a leap as, you know what, the whole thing.
It's just bad. And it's evil to have them, right?
So that was killer for me.
And it happened actually for me just in a debate I was having with someone where I was taking a standard objectivist position and they brought up pollution and things like that.
I came up with a solution that's in podcasts and I won't go into it here.
And then it was like, Literally, I took three steps back.
I had a holy roller moment.
I was waiting for the thunderbolt of libertarianism to come straight through the roof.
I had to sit down.
It was one of those moments where it all just started to unfold from there.
What I had to do was to let go of holding on to that which had enough answers for me to get by, but not enough for me to really grow as a thinker.
Almost answers are really terrible because they stop you.
Right? At that edge where it's just saying, you know, I'm going to jump and hope, right?
And that worked out much better, but it was a really, really tough transition for me.
How does voluntary society work?
And it boils down to, and I think it has to be left at this, you don't kill people to provide services.
How they are actually provided on a voluntary basis, how each individual one, you have to think about that.
And it's that thought process of how that would actually function.
It gives people so much of a difficulty to get to that.
Because they don't want to actually think.
You tell me, Ian, or Siobhan, you tell me in your podcast exactly how you deal with child rapists.
And if you can't explain that, I'm not going to accept it.
And this is the trap.
You probably get this a lot.
I get this a lot. This is the trap.
And it's actually a very subtle status trap.
Because if one person, let's say you or me or anyone, one person was smart enough to figure out how a whole free society would work, that would actually be an argument for a dictator.
Because you'd be smart enough to reproduce every decision that everyone could possibly make, and I know how all resolutions should be.
But you can't. There is no conceivable way.
What you do know is that free people find solutions.
There's no economics person who can say, here's where all the goods and materials should be produced, and we should have this many baby carriages and this many railway cars and so on.
It's impossible, but you know that in a free society, the allocation of resources will be very efficient.
In the same way, I don't know how Child rapists are going to be dealt with in a free society, but I do know that a state of society will produce far fewer of them for a variety of philosophical and psychological reasons and that people will not want there to be child rapists in society and that people have this capacity called economic exclusion, which is incredibly powerful and is how things used to work in the past.
But how, you know, what exact contracts are going to be signed and how it's all going to work, it's impossible.
And if I could do that, that would be an argument for the government, because then someone would be smart enough to organize everything, which would be crazy, right?
I mean, then some genius Stalin can just phone everyone in the morning and say, here's what you're doing with your death, send you a list, right?
And it's not possible. But we do know that violence, as you say, is the worst conceivable way to solve any problem except direct violence.
The future, the society without a state, has no precedent.
That we can find that, yeah, you can talk about Iceland or Ireland, but, you know, people don't care and people don't care.
Somalia. Yeah, and you can talk about Somalia, but these are not, these are examples of society collapsing into anarchy.
That's not the same as through violence, right?
Well, and in Somalia, they've got the situation where the UN... It's trying to force new governments on top of it.
Yeah, popping weapons in. They're selling weapons in there.
The U.S. is funding rebels and violence.
And so, I mean, that's like saying, well, you know, a building collapsed, and therefore, I blew up a building, therefore I'm an engineer, right?
I mean, that just, so you, when you're looking to the 90, 95% reduction in the state, you're going back in time to a precedent that is pretty well recognized and accepted.
Like people say, well, the Republic, the Founding Fathers, the minimal state, and so on.
So people say, well, we want to go back, right?
And that's what people say, we want to go back to that.
And so people have a place that they can start from that is recognizable.
Say, let's go back to, you know, the good old days, right?
But when you talk about a state of society, you're like, it's like the end of 2001.
People see this giant baby head approaching the planet, you know, like some new future that nobody can really get.
And that, I think, is the really tough part.
Liberty, free market, voluntarist, consensualist ideas.
We have to bring enough people on board to where it becomes a popular movement.
I mean, right now, we're just a bunch of crazies in a hotel in Nashua.
I mean, the amount of people is growing, and that's good.
And that's really, I think, all that it's going to take.
Once we get enough people together, Then it'll become something where there's a voluntarist in every place of business, and there's a voluntarist in everywhere that people are experiencing their lives, and there's voluntarist television and radio and newsprint.
I mean, I say those things, and we have them actually in Keene.
I mean, we've got my show originating from there.
Free Minds TV and Free Minds Radio comes out of Keene.
The New Hampshire Free Press is there.
So we already have TV, radio, and newsprint.
So it's just a matter of backing those ideas up with the people that are on the ground who can say, yeah, I agree with that.
The reality is most people are followers, right?
They're not the thinkers that we would want them to be.
So we have to find the thinkers, get them to come on board with us, and then everybody else is just going to climb on board because it will seem like a foregone conclusion eventually.
Oh yeah, why didn't we think of that?
So we're getting there, but it's going to take...
That's why the Free State Project is such a great idea to converge all of these activists in one place.
You called them intense earlier.
You really have to be an intense activist to uproot your life and move somewhere that you don't know anybody.
Well, you don't know them at first, but as you've seen, everybody here gets along really well.
Right off the bat.
So even though you don't know anybody necessarily, when you get here, there are a whole bunch of people that are willing to be your friend and willing to get to know you.
And that's just...
This level of camaraderie and synergy is something that the Liberty Movement has, I don't believe, ever experienced.
And it's... It's coming, right?
We can see the voluntary society.
We don't know exactly how it's going to work, but we know the fundamentals and we can see it happening in the future.
So it's just a matter of, and I guess that's what we're talking about here, is how we get from here to there.
I think it's people. Yeah, this is about ideas.
I've said for a long time, it's not about George Bush or the Bush dynasty or whatever.
It's about the ideas that are in people's heads that allow them to do what they're doing.
We don't need to talk about the Masons because if you didn't have this mindset that people seem, or at least act on, if that wasn't there, that government is nothing, you know, is somehow more than just a gang of killsteers and liars.
If that wasn't there, no amount of Masons could do what's being done or illuminati.
They're free riding on the illusions.
Yeah, right.
They rely on those illusions, and as long as those illusions.
So that's why the education is so important.
And I just wanted to bring up real quick.
I'm very surprised.
There was someone at the talk today that I gave that started crying.
Wow. And it was right at the point, and I had mentioned that a lot of times people have been thrown into a kind of depression that I've worked with, and notwithstanding that the IRS isn't bothering me anymore, which should lift a huge burden, do you think?
But it was the part where someone had said to me, you tore my reality out and it didn't replace it with anything.
And I'm really sorry. There's really nothing.
I mean, the things are still, you know, Ian's still, Ian, this is still the table.
The difference is you know that who you are is not based on political public relations.
It has nothing to do with some slogan from a politician.
Not that you're being a citizen or an American doesn't define who you are.
But initially that can be very...
If you filled her up with something, that would be against what you want to do, which is to have people think for themselves.
You don't want to rip out mythology and replace it with ideology, which is sometimes the objectivist thing.
Not to slam objectivism, which I'm a huge fan of, but you want to teach people to think.
People come up to me and say, because I just had a kid, are you going to teach her about Santa Claus?
And of course, the point is to not teach children conclusions, in my opinion, teach people conclusions, but teach them how to think, right?
And not fall into the... Ask questions.
Yeah, ask questions. Say, okay, well, so you've heard this story called Santa Claus.
Let's think about it. You know, what do you think?
How would we know? So that she can reason it out for herself.
That way she can never come back to me and say...
You told me. So she can think for herself.
And that's really what we want people to do.
And when you take away the easy, empty, non-answers that people get in the guise of wisdom and knowledge, then yeah, they feel this, I'm a vacuum, I got nothing, right?
But out of that grows a real personality, like a real human being who can think and feel and express.
You're no longer an automaton. You're no longer following the script that they've laid out for you, whether it was organized religion or the government that said, okay, well, here's what you need to believe and here's what you need to do.
You need to go to college, you need to get yourself a career, you need to retire.
And, you know, this is kind of the path that everybody believes that they're on until they come across this information and then...
You rip that out of them, that's what probably that lady was experiencing, or I'm not sure, the lady guy, the lady was experiencing was, you know, her paradigm was being destroyed inside herself, and that's not an easy thing to come to grips with.
But I like that you say that you can plant something there and really have it flower out, and I think that's absolutely the case.
Yeah, see, if there was a Santa Claus, you know, we wouldn't need a government, because the poor would be taken care of, the children would be taken care of.
Okay, we need more dentists, because, you know, he's all about the speech, I think.
Well, I do want to, just real quick, get back about the camaraderie that you talk about, and that's what's so important when you have a situation where somebody's, you know, their view within the world Or in themselves, okay, it's torn up like that, that they do have people like, hey, there's people like Steph and Sam, and there's a whole tight-knit group.
And I'm pretty impressed, too.
Everyone seems to really get along, and we don't always agree, but you don't have the same thing like you get even at Libertarian Party functions, which I've gone to and had people very upset with me.
But here, at least she knows, and other people, you know, they can get together, that we all have the same common beliefs, that non-aggression, you know, and it's that core belief, so there's that support system there.
That was something I struggled with, moving to New Hampshire and joining the existing activists.
There are some of them that are going off in directions that I don't necessarily agree with, supporting the people who brought weapons to the Ed Browns during the standoff.
That's something that kind of crosses the line to me because that's a little bit violent in nature.
But there are certainly just, everything under the sun is going on out here and you can pick and choose the ones and just simply avoid the things that you don't believe in.
And at the same time, I've developed my own strategy.
I really believe in talking to some of the politicians, some of the, Ian mentioned something about that earlier.
I think that's critical to target those people and start talking to them about these ideas because they have a much larger audience, you know, in the local area.
I also believe in doing what I can to raise the production value and the quality of the existing liberty media so it looks more professional.
And I think when the mainstream sees some of these ideas, they look for the tiniest little thing to kick it out.
Right, right, right. This is crap because I disagree with that so now I can turn it off and go back about my life.
Right. What do you guys think are the most effective ways to advance The message of liberty or just the journey, the transition that people make from believing in a state to believing in freedom and liberty?
Who wants to take that one?
The media. I mean, it's just, it's the most powerful way to communicate with somebody unless you have a real close relationship with someone.
I mean, they say that radio is a very personal medium, and they're right.
You've got, and you guys are all radio hosts, you guys have your own podcast, so you've probably gotten a response from your listeners where they say, I feel like I know you.
Oh yeah, yeah, I get together a lot this weekend.
You don't know them. You've never talked to them before.
But they know you because you've been expressing your thoughts and your beliefs through this audio medium that literally is going right into their brain, you know, like two sides of their head going into them.
The television is good too because you can really generate some emotional response from the imagery on television.
And so just touching people with this message is just so powerful.
We all know it because when you hear the Liberty message, it shocks initially if you're stuck in the government paradigm, but it's shocking to the point where the What the hell am I listening to?
What are these crazy people saying?
They stay tuned in, and this was your experience.
You came across Free Talk Live.
The people who believe in the state and the political process to bring about change, look at that and say, you're ruining it for all of us.
You're poisoning the well.
You know, you shouldn't be doing this.
If you want to change the marijuana laws, for instance, go to the statehouse, sponsor a bill, get your friends out to come and scream outside the building.
You know, we've seen... Right.
And that's what happened this week.
And we were both out at this protest or rally or whatever it is they called it for this HCR 6, some resolution, to draw a line in the sand and tell those feds they've gone too far.
If they take one more step, we're going to be out of this union.
So, Dennis Goddard from the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance.
I love Dennis. He's a self-professed anarchist, but he's heavily involved in the political system.
Dennis asked us to come out and support him.
So, since I like Dennis, he came out.
I didn't expect very much out of it.
It's a political thing. Politics doesn't really do much to change anything, as we well know.
But the whole event was just so distasteful to me.
Well, it's politics, number one.
But politics brings out the nastiness in people, of course.
And so what you pretty much had was – and I don't know who put it this way, but I thought it was brilliant – the idea that these are just nothing more than a bunch of shouting monkeys.
I mean that was kind of the idea.
It was originally proclaimed during the recent presidential campaign where you have one side and one side.
Run! Paul! Run!
And the other side's yelling, Obama!
Or McCain! Or whatever.
And they're just chanting and chanting and chanting.
We're talking about thinking.
There's no thinking going on there.
And that's what was going on at this political rally.
And I was just thinking, you know, there were 300 people probably that came in and out from this rally.
That's a lot of people.
And we understand that politics is attractive to the activist community because, well, it's easy.
They don't have to take any risks.
It's safe. They don't have to take any risks.
So we know that the government indoctrination system teaches people that you want to avoid risk.
You want to get yourself a nice, comfy job and then settle into your retirement.
You don't want to take any risks.
They also teach you not to think.
They tell you what to believe.
If those 300 people were to engage in an act of civil disobedience instead of just begging, which is really all it is, shouting, we want you to do this and do that.
Of course, they'll do what they want.
They don't care what you think.
But if those people were to engage in non-cooperation, civil disobedience, the state would be done because they don't have enough room in the jails.
They don't have enough money.
They just suspended jury trials for an entire month here in New Hampshire because they're out of money.
Really? And hardly anyone ever asks for a jury trial.
So if you had 25 people, let alone 300, if you just had 25 people go out, take bong rips out in front of the police department, it's just some sort of civil disobedience.
First of all, they'd barely even have enough cops to arrest all of you.
They'd have to call cops in from the surrounding areas, presuming they could arrest you all, and you all demanded jury trials.
They can't raise taxes quick enough to pay for these things.
So the level of control that they have over the whole situation is just paper thin.
It's paper thin. And if we just had more activists that were willing to take some risk, I think there would be tremendous advances.
But instead we have 300 people shouting outside the state house.
I mean, is that how you guys see it as paper thin?
Something that's really ready to collapse?
I don't see it as paper thin. I mean, I agree with you that they would just get money from the feds, right?
Because the feds would say, well, we don't want this to be a precedent because the feds run the drug war, which is a huge multi-billion dollar industry.
So that would be my thing. I mean, if I were the fed, I'd be like, okay, well, ship them a million bucks to cover their costs.
We'll print it, right? It's no- But the bureaucracy gets in the way.
No, I agree. It wouldn't be simple, but again, paper thin.
I agree with you. Certain areas, they're running low on money.
The states are really low on money.
What, are they sending out IOUs in California now?
I mean, so definitely the system is creaking, but I think, as you say, the system rests on error, and the system rests on what I I call slave-on-slave violence, which is that most people, I don't get any hostility from the state.
They don't lift a finger against me and I talk about some pretty radical stuff.
But the only people who ever attack me are my fellow citizens.
So basically, if you've ever seen the film The Life of Brian, the revolutionaries get into an argument when they're out doing some heist and they start attacking each other and the Roman soldiers just show up and they know, like, hey, you know, check your time, you know, just let them tire themselves out and then they just pick them up when they're all on the floor.
And that's, I think, a lot what goes on.
I view the state as a horizontal Attack mechanism, because the people who get hostile towards us are not the government, for the most part.
You a little more, because you're poking them in the eye more.
But certainly not for me, because I don't take political or legal stuff.
It's that whole French thing you've got going on.
Yeah, yeah. I'm Mr.
Freedom France. That's really my nickname.
So I think that the state is a horizontal attack, that we get anxious and we attack each other for these new ideas.
And then because we're attacking each other, we're cheaper to own.
If you get the slaves to beat up on each other, you don't need foremen.
So it becomes much more economically productive.
So I think that the role that we have to do, in my opinion, is, I mean, I think the stuff that you guys are doing is fantastic, but it's because there's many paths to liberty, that's the idea, right?
We don't want to think there's one path, because that's a status paradigm, right?
A status paradigm is one solution, everybody else go to jail.
But one of the problems we're seeing, at least, and whether it's paper thin or not, that's up for discussion, but...
There's no doubt, I think we can probably all agree, that the most powerful ways to change things and to do activism don't involve the political scene.
Oh, I agree completely. And the situation we're dealing with is that most of the activists Probably the supermajority, 90%, 85% in this movement, this movement of intense people, are intensely involved in the political system.
So shifting those activists over, and they are coming slowly.
I know the president of the Free State Project is a self-proclaimed voluntarist, and he was more involved in the political movement, and he's just become more and more disillusioned with it over I don't want to speak for him, but my understanding of what he said is that, you know, he's become more disillusioned with it and he's become far more friendly to the ideas of, well, the alternatives, which could be non-cooperation, civil disobedience, media, other market, creating market alternatives to government, anything that doesn't involve the political system.
But there's that risk factor.
So somehow getting people to become comfortable with taking a little bit of risk in order to get the reward of freedom is one of the critical things that we're doing here.
There was a brilliant episode of the Twilight Zone with the invasion.
They used Martians and so they cast some doubt among the people and they start killing each other.
And they have this discussion. Does this work everywhere?
Do you ever have to kill them?
No, they do it on their own.
But yeah, I have been inconsistent because I do engage in the political system.
I don't do it with voting, but I do it where people are going into court or they're dealing with bureaucratic attacks.
And to me, I see it as a lot more effective because when somebody goes in, somebody might be a real skeptic.
Why would a prosecutor just withdraw the charges because I asked, is there evidence of a complaining party?
Well, there's a lot behind that question.
You can't answer it without getting into a real pile of crap.
I mean, you just know. And to see it, like I was saying to someone outside the room today, to actually watch a prosecutor in front of all those people withdraw from Very serious charges that they have against someone, like drug charges.
You have to see that to believe it.
Most people won't believe it until they actually do it.
So going in with a family member, let's say they take a script or we've done some consultation or whatnot, to go in and actually engage these people in the lion's den, so to speak, like you've done, people see that and they take a lot away from that.
And they go and they tell their friends and family.
So yes, it is engaging in the political process, but you're damage control.
You're trying to limit the damage.
It's that or you roll over.
When I say engaging in the political process, I mean specifically the standard things, the standard issue things that you're told you should do.
Like voting and running campaigns and holding signs or petitioning to your representatives and these sort of standard things.
What you're doing is you're taking a look at their system and you're using it, you're kind of plugging yourself into it and you're doing things that are unusual.
You're doing things that you can do, but most people don't know.
It's like, I think it was part of your book where it says, when you get your traffic ticket, it says on the back, well, you could do this, this, or this, but they're, maybe it's not your book, but anyway, but you can do other things.
You can do other things than what they're telling you that you can do.
Right. But you aim to reduce violence, not control violence, which is the political solution, right?
That we're trying to control and manage this violent system.
You're just trying to get people out from under it.
That's true. When they initiate, you're a self-defense advocate for people to get out of that line of fire rather than going into the belly of the beast and trying to make it move his little tyrannosaurus arms to do what you want.
Yeah, and some of the benefits that there, and I know this is very tiny in the overall scheme of things, but when you hit on it about lowering the violence, there have been 10, 12, or 15 cops that I've had personal contact with that have left the job.
Mm-hmm. They have left the job.
Now, yeah, there's Tom, Dick, and Harry to fill that, but that's somebody where he's not just going to, he's not in a vacuum, he's got a family.
There's a reason why he left the job.
He's probably going to be telling them.
His wife is probably a lot happier.
So they're all ripple effects.
And, you know, so that's why, you know, When I see a guy get orders from Ireland or New Zealand or whatnot, it's encouraging that the word is getting out and people are getting it and they're taking on their own a big risk like Sam in New Zealand going into court.
That's a big step.
That takes a lot more guts.
Like what you did, to go into court and actually stare them down.
But more people are doing it.
What's really going to be important is that when people keep doing these things and if more people do them, that we have the ability to document it.
So taking that kind of activism, which I think is awesome, and combining it with the media that I was talking about before.
Because if somebody walks into a courtroom and does what you're talking about and really takes an outside-the-box perspective and gives a judge a real something unusual, It doesn't do anything if he's the only person in the, you know, the handful of people that are in there.
But if you've got a camera in there, you upload that to YouTube, then you can show people, this is for real.
You know, what Mark says is true.
Of course, we've been trying to do that in Keen, and now they're cracking down on cameras in the court.
But that's going to result in, and this is all about tying all this activism together.
So they crack down on cameras in the court?
Well, these activists aren't stopped by that.
There are going to be five cameras in the court next time.
Yeah, it's really changing their behavior.
What was the court last week?
We had a guy who didn't take his hat off fast enough going into the courtroom, so they arrested him.
Somebody else asked, hey, what's going on?
And he got thrown against the wall and arms pinned behind his back.
He's crying in pain.
They go back and when the judge came in they didn't call all rise because the Free Staters don't stand for the judges here typically.
So they're specifically not doing that.
In the order in the Keene Court where they're cracking down on the media it specifically says you may not film anyone in the audience and I think again They don't want people seeing it because they also said you cannot start recording until the judge takes it secret.
So they don't want people to see, they don't want the sheep out there to see anyone challenging the authority of the state.
And I think that's such a key component to the change that's going to come about.
Yeah. Well, I wanted to mention, I agree, because one of the things that's so effective about the court stuff is because you're not challenging, you're not initially challenging someone's belief and having someone cry and ripping everything out.
You're going based on what you've already been told.
This is the greatest system of justice in the world.
Why? Okay. And now, so I take the reasons why.
The presumption of innocence. And then I break that down, and then we just use that against them, asking questions.
You step into their paradigm while still holding on to your content.
Right. I'm starting here in legal land, in fiction, but I'm leading you here to objective reality.
You know, something that's based on tangible proof.
And for some, like this morning, it's a very painful ride.
For judges, typically, you know, as I'll say, a lot of judges respond very emotionally because you are upsetting their view of reality.
Their map of the world is just being shredded.
But that's the point why I do that.
But you take it from somewhere where they're familiar and you bring them there.
And it's very effective.
And when people watch that, because people have done this in court by asking two or three questions, the judge flips out screaming and yelling and maybe a nosebleed or two, and then the case is thrown out, or the ticket rather, and the people will follow you out.
And they want to know what strange magic just happened.
Absolutely. All you did was ask for evidence.
Why did he start screaming? Why would he throw the case out?
And so you have this opportunity because they saw it firsthand.
They saw the guy with the robe who's supposed to be the honorable professional one.
You asked two or three innocent questions and all of a sudden this calm, rational, otherwise professional man is screaming.
So he is doing a lot more to destroy their map of the world than I am at that point.
He's doing the work for me.
The system as it stands can't be repaired.
And I think we know that because of the stimulus package.
Because this massive, completely fictional, you know, trillion-dollar-plus monopoly money cloudburst...
Essentially a way for them to take all...
Oh, yeah, they know. They know that the, you know, it's like, you all stay.
We're just going to go check on the lifeblocks.
You know, they all stay there, play your canaster, you know, wine.
Right, so if there had been no stimulus package, then I would have given it another, you know, five, ten years.
But with the stimulus package, and again, I've heard this from a friend of mine who's Russian, who said that this is what happened in the late 80s, when they recognized that they would not be able to last within their careers because of the deteriorating economic situation.
And there's a room somewhere with real government statistics that some people have access to, right?
Like the fact that if they calculated the unemployment rate now, the way they did in, say, 1975, it would be almost 17% as opposed to 6 or 7, right?
And that's just one, right? So they have real knowledge about the outstanding liabilities to foreign governments, the interest rate payments, the amount of money they've got relative to whatever assets they have.
So they know, and I think that they know, For sure, that is not going to outlast the careers of senior bureaucrats right now, so there's a massive plunder.
It's like the door to the treasure room is coming down, so just, you know, stuff your pockets and leave your hat behind, you know?
Smash and grab. Right, so I think that the stimulus package, which interestingly did not come from the citizens, The stimulus package is very much a top-down imposed against the will of the majority, which to me is also very instructive because I did a video series recently called Statism is Dead.
It comes out of working on this stuff for 25 years, knowing how consistently people would argue back in 1980 for status solutions for everything.
Everything, right? Because the worm had not turned yet, right?
The disasters... At the beginning, statism is great because, you know, like in the same way if you just start watering stuff on credit cards, you look wealthy, right?
It's like at the beginning, it all looks great.
It's like heroin. Yay! But now you simply don't see...
Any kind of mass call for a government solution.
And that to me is very interesting because it seems to me that the masses don't believe that the government can solve problems anymore, but there is a vacuum.
Which is, and then what?
If we can't imagine how the economy can work without slavery, We can say slavery is wrong, but we don't know what else we can do, right?
So I think it's up to us to say, yeah, it's evil, and here's the fruits of virtue, which is a happy, voluntary, peaceful, stable, monetary, no war, all that kind of good stuff.
Yeah, what I've noticed is that the government's doing the same old thing they always have.
They came out and they sold this stimulus package by saying, look, we need it to save America.
If the automakers go down, It's economic collapse, doom and gloom.
You guys, I'm sorry, you don't want us to do this, but it's for your best interest.
I think what's changed though is that the internet, people's understanding, something has changed out there to where they don't believe it.
They're saying, no, no, this isn't right.
I've heard A, B, and C to tell me that, no, this doesn't make sense.
At the same time, they don't necessarily have the answer, as you say, to a voluntary society, and that's my question.
As this existing system begins to collapse and crumble, are people going to clamor for just a slightly different system?
The right system of checks and balances?
Or do you think they'll be ready to evolve into a voluntary society?
And what's that going to take?
As this existing system begins to collapse and crumble, are people going to clamor for just a slightly different system, the right system of checks and balances, or do you think they'll be ready to evolve into a voluntary society, and what's that going to take?
Without having somebody that they can see or hear or know somehow in their lives reaching out to them saying, you know, come with me if you want to live, then yeah, they're going to be stuck in their paradigm.
That's the world they live in.
Oh, let's try the Republicans again.
Maybe they'll get it right this time.
But they will do that without conviction.
True, because they don't know what else to do.
This is the great thing about Obama, and there's not many great things about Obama, but the great thing is that he is, you know, the most charismatic, you know, he's a great speaker, he's very charismatic, he's very certain, he seems very confident, and so this to me is the last huzzah, right, of statism, because people really put...
Their energy. And we went from what people will, I'm sure, consider the worst president to who people believe is the best president.
Now, if he can't save the system, and clearly he can't, he's just some guy, right?
I mean, you can't do it, right?
And so the system will go down.
The interesting thing is that out of the 20th century, people recognized problems with particular forms of statism.
They've always been skeptical of democracy, at least the intellectual classes, ever since...
Socrates, right? So democracy is a problem.
So they tried fascism, they tried communism, they tried socialism, they tried...
But the flavors of statism, there's nothing left in the buffet, right?
There's no flavor of statism that I can think of.
Well, right, now they're trying fascism. Unless it's like the unicorns run the country, right?
Now it's a mix of fascism and socialism.
That doesn't work either. Yeah, but it's not an idealistic mix.
People aren't saying, well, let's go and do this because it's a great ideal that's going to save the world, right?
They're like... Let's try this tool to loosen it.
So because there's nothing left in the buffet of statism that hasn't been tried, republic, democracy, fascism, communism, socialism, corporatism, mercantilism, empire, everything's been tried.
So people are looking at this empty buffet and saying, man, I'm hungry.
And I think it's up to us to say, you know, turn around slowly, carefully, right?
But there's a whole world where you can grow your own props.
You don't have to do this thing which you have to pick and choose from other people.
And I think that huge, silent, amazing collapse of the dominant paradigm of social organizations since the Egyptians, 5,000 years, people don't believe in it the way it is.
And nobody's coming along and saying, I have a new flavor.
That people can believe in. Because there is no new flavor.
And I think that's an incredible opportunity combined with the internet.
I think what the government is doing, though, to counter that is they're coming along saying, look, we'll give you the job.
We'll give you the food. Come join our...
But that's bribery.
That's not idealism. It is bribery, but what it does is it creates this huge army of people who become dependent on the state and just blindly reinforce those ideas.
And you're absolutely right.
And the purpose of the stimulus package also is to buy the intellectuals to create the fawning classes and to create the dependent classes who are so invested in statism that they, in a sense, their intellectual activity is the scar tissue of their corruption, right?
I think we're good to go.
Right, yeah, it's like a big rent-a-frame program.
They're renting all of their constituents, essentially.
Which is a huge, huge, huge benefit.
And the money or the benefits or whatever, it's going to run out at some point, and then those guys are going to be left out in the cold.
A huge benefit how? To the voluntary society?
Yeah, because it means that, I mean...
You know, when you're down to renting hookers, you're not a player anymore.
So, you know, when you can't pick up a girl on your own, you've got a lavish cat, right?
Or you're Hugh Hefner or something, right?
You're just some decrepit old lizard player.
But what it means is that, because people are, I believe hugely, people are incredibly hungry for idealistic purpose of their life.
They're hungry for virtue, for ethics, for the shining city on the hill.
They want to build that for themselves, for their children.
They want to feel that they're part of society's progress and moving towards...
They want to find their purpose in life. Yeah, I mean, that's religion, that's statism to some degree in the past.
I mean, that's what people do.
That's nationalism, patriotism.
And now, there's this big, rotting corpse where people's ideals used to be, right?
And yes, the corpse is oozing money, to mix my metaphor terribly, right?
There's gold coming out of it, right?
But... There's this absence of noble purpose.
The people don't believe in government anymore, in my opinion.
And to me, Obama's the methadone to get them off that, right?
That's my belief. But it means that if we can advance a credible, passionate, exciting, thrilling, motivating moral narrative for people to say, yeah, we can have a great society, we can have a beautiful world, we can have a peaceful world, we can make this place a paradise.
But you have to let go of your illusions, right?
Because the fundamental enemy to all progress is illusion, because it gives you the belief that you've got an answer when you don't, right?
And the fact that there's no competing ideology out there that I know of, I mean, you read the papers, you read the blogs, there's no competing ideology out there that I've seen that has any kind of motive power to people, because it's all some tired old rehash of stuff they've seen before, except for ours.
And this has not been tried before, and that's why going back to the old republic isn't going to work.
It's like, well, we've been there, and look where we ended up, right?
So even if we rewind the clock, we're just going to come back here again, right?
Whereas if we say, no, we break from that, and we can do something new, you know?
So that's the end of my speech, but that to me is why we have such an amazing opportunity right now.
It's like you said in Zen and Yaw, the motorcycle maintenance, but to tear down the motorcycle factory or a government, but leave intact a rationale that created it, And the rationale will create another motorcycle factor.
Yeah, I'll get cancer treatment and I'll keep smoking.
Well, what happens, right?
Remove the cause.
And the effect is not a problem.
They want to just keep putting band-aids.
But I think it's important what you're saying, because if you watch and you listen to what they're saying, They're very keenly aware on these shows because they keep saying consumer confidence or voter confidence.
The confidence in the system, they understand it all goes based on confidence.
And I think it has hit in the crapper.
When you've got people, it's one thing to someone 25 years old to lose their job.
It's bad, but they're going to move on.
But another thing when you have someone 60 years old Where he's being wiped out.
When you have worked for 35 years or so and you're looking at having your entire savings wiped out because it's nominated in dollars, these people, at least in my little scope of influence and the people in Mesa, Arizona, they're pretty angry.
And they're seeing that this is not something that happened by the market.
This is something that was done deliberately by the government.
And so that confidence It keeps going down.
And I think that opens a possibility for people to start considering these ideas and looking outside of their current paradigm.
Yeah, that's why I agree with Ian when you say it's paper thin.
I think what the illusion is in the tragedy, like I mentioned, is because there's so many people who don't know what you're thinking.
So it's that whole ash conformity experiment again.
They're not willing to act on it, like you mentioned before, if they would just do something instead of holding some civil disobedience.
I agree, and it's just getting people out of that shell.
I think the confidence is way down.
They see what the problem is, but they don't know.
I don't know. You think Joe over there really?
It's that problem with what does my neighbor think?
In some religious writings, there's the God of what other people think.
And it governs your whole damn life.
To touch on that, libertarians, I don't like that term really anymore, but voluntarists and liberty-minded people have always been feeling so alone.
I mean, where they are, most of them are really alone.
And so when you're talking about, well, what does my neighbor think?
If you're the only guy in the neighborhood that's talking about liberty, if you're the only guy who believes in freedom, and everybody else is a status mindset, whenever you bring something up, they shoot you down, and they shoot you down, They do everything to take a crap on your ideas.
It's really going to just bum you out.
And so the concentration factor is really, I think, the key to all of this.
Concentrating as many activists in the same place as possible allows them to feel better about themselves because they have other people to validate their viewpoint around them.
and they're not being constantly attacked by their neighbors.
And from the neighbor's perspective, it changes the situation because, again, you're no longer the lonely nut down the street.
You've got people that are your friends, and you've got this network.
We had 25 people show up at the court this week when Dave Ridley was arrested for recording in the courtroom lobby.
There were 25 people there with four or five video cameras.
Just for a pretrial hearing.
Right, so the people that are in the system looking out at this are seeing something they've never experienced before.
It's not just the one guy anymore.
It's become a group, a relatively small group, but a year from now, and we're here at the 2010 Liberty Forum, that group's going to be even larger, and then You know, 2012, it's going to be mind-blowing what's going to happen.
It's just like you say, we can't predict what the market is going to do, how it's going to solve all these problems.
Neither can we really predict what all of these activists are going to do when they finally get together with one another and figure out that there are more of us than there are of them.
At a certain point, that line is going to be crossed, and then all bets are off.
You can never, like if somebody has a gambling addiction, you can't get them to quit when they're on a winning streak.
You just can't. They're down in Vegas and they're making 10 grand an hour playing blackjack and you say, you know, I really think you should stop this.
He's going to be like, but you get...
But when their gambler hits bottom, which is generally the case with addiction, and government is a massive addiction to violence, power, and greed, right?
So there does have to be pain, right?
People who don't, you know, adjust their health to prevent heart attacks will usually do so after they get, you know, the big one, right?
If they survive it, right? So if you don't go to the dentist for preventative, then you'll go when you've got a toothache, right?
So people will change based on pain, and where you don't change based on reason, you end up having to change on pain.
And that's why, much though I dislike the difficulties that people are facing, it seems to me, if you're not going to listen to reason, then you'll listen to reason after you see the disasters of not listening to reason.
And that's what I think is going to be the spur between people looking to new solutions, because they know, and it really hits them hard, and the pocketbook, as you say, is a pretty hard place to hit people, particularly if they don't have a lot of options later in life.
They will really start to look for alternatives, but only when they see the suffering.
And it's been a long time coming, and the longer it comes, the harder it is, right?
And it was that line from the movie which really sums up what you're saying, what we're saying about the numbers, from A Bug's Life, which we mentioned how many times.
Those puny little ants outnumber us at least 100 to 1, and if they ever figure it out, there goes our way of life.
So they're done.
So it's just a matter of keeping people from knowing that stuff, and that's why they keep you so damn busy.
That's why it's calculated all right.
Everything that's happening now is being done for a reason.
There's an object behind hyperinflation.
They have to keep you so busy working for this, dad, you gotta pay for the flat screen, you gotta get the SUV. You gotta keep paying for all this stuff and it keeps you too busy.
It's like, well, I'd like to go out and join you guys and help with the activism, but I got this.
So they keep you busy on purpose.
It used to be that dad could work without just a high school education.
Now you need two parents and they're still barely making it.
I think the government is starting to come around to the idea that the answer getting smart and organized and so forth when the when a judge sits down and looks out at 25 people standing there coming to support one guy they know they're not going to be able to treat it the same way so in a sense I think as we see more and more of that it will come to the point where they're just overwhelmed and what are they going to do if all they know is to respond with violence Or propaganda.
Propaganda's just not working that much anymore.
They're hitting the gas and they're not getting much burn, right?
I mean, you can see that. The talking heads are making rounds about the stimulus package and there was a massive silence, at least from what I could see in terms of the general response to the population.
Everyone's just like, you know, we've been panicked too many times to believe it anymore.
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