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Aug. 23, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:46:24

1440 Sunday Call In Show Aug 23 2009

Building roofs in air, determinism, UPB and protecting the environment sans state!

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	Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and all the in-betweeners.
	I hope you're doing very well. This is Stefan Molyneux of Freedom Aid Radio, live to you on Blog Talk Radio.
	This beautiful, beautiful day, I'm going to check because I'm always getting the date wrong, August the 23rd, 2009, at 1600, because we're always on military time here at Anarchist Central.
	So, thank you so much for joining.
	I'm going to let our good friend...
	James, interrupt me if we get callers, but James, would you like to hollerbot out the call-in number for those people who have not had it tattooed on their eyelids as yet?
	Oh, absolutely. And I hope that everybody can hear me.
	Somebody please give me a response through the chat for everybody that's in the chat there.
	But the number is to call in to the show, 347-633-9636.
	That number is 347-633-9636.
	9636 and I will be periodically putting it on the screen in the video room at peacefreedomprosperity.com and you just click on movement TV and it will come up on the screen along with various other announcements so that number again for you guys that want to call and talk to Stefan or debate him or You know, just want to tell him bits about your life?
	Go ahead. That number is 347-633-9636.
	Now, James, I believe that we also have the power to add people through Skype.
	Is that something we can do?
	Yes, sir. All right.
	So if you'd like to ping or in the chat room, Throw a Skype ID to James, then he will add you in through that.
	Ventralo, G-Talk or whatever, all those other things, not available as of yet and perhaps never, but Skype and phone.
	There is another way. There is another way as well.
	But there's another way for our international callers that don't want to or can't see the logic in spending the money.
	To call Stefan, but wants to talk to him.
	That is, if you go and sign up for a BlogTalk account at blogtalkradio.com, you can actually use the click-to-talk feature on the BlogTalk website.
	And you just click that if you have a sound card, microphone, and obviously you have speakers.
	Otherwise, you would not be listening to the show right now.
	And just for those who are curious and have asked me about this, next week it won't be push to talk.
	It will be push to yodel because it's going to be an all-Scandinavian show, just for those who will be coming in next week.
	Actually, I lie completely.
	Next week, I do believe that we are having Jan Heldfeld.
	Is that right, James?
	We're going to have a debate with Jan Heldfeld.
	Is that correct? He has thrown down the gauntlet, sir.
	Sir, he has thrown down the gauntlet.
	He has thrown down the gauntlet.
	It was a highly rubberized gauntlet that took up and clipped me on the nose, causing many, many tears, which I'm sure will be my response to the actual debate.
	But next week at 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time or shortly thereafter, we will be having a video debate on whose name is harder to spell, John Heldfeldt or Stefan Molyneux.
	So we're going to be taking votes on that because we're all about the democracy here.
	Absolutely.
	Now, it's going to be...
	He is a minarchist, which means he is a very small ist, and he's going to be debating the proposition that we need a state, a government, in order to have a civilized society, and I will be debating that we should not have any kind of civilized society.
	Well, something like that.
	I will be debating the stateless society position, that a state is not only not necessary for a civilized society, but cannot possibly sustain a civilized society in the long run, And so that should be very exciting.
	It will not just be two chatterbox heads.
	We will have a formal structure of debating.
	And then we will turn it over to the real brains of the outfits, the listeners, who will give us their two cents worth.
	And if that's in Canada, please, 2.1.
	All right. So as we wait for the listeners to finish dialing, it can take a while for sure.
	Some... There's some talk floating around the blogosphere, and I don't know if anybody out there has got more information on this.
	I've just seen a little bit of it here and there.
	Now, I think it was in May of 2009, a good friend, Barack Obama, he suppressed the publication of torture photos, of photos of U.S. soldiers torturing people.
	Others, right? It's hard to say insurgents because when you're in that kind of state of nature, that kind of Lord of the Flies situation, nobody knows who's an insurgent or not, right?
	I mean, it's like there was a CIA assassination program that was going on in Vietnam and Cambodia where tens of thousands of people were killed by the CIA on tip-offs that they were bad guys.
	But all, of course, it turned out to be was guys who owed money to a guy, said, oh, he's a bad guy, go shoot him.
	Or some guy who wanted some other guy's wife said, oh, he's a bad guy, shoot him.
	So it just turns out to be, you know, it's really hard to establish proof.
	It's really hard to establish guilt.
	It's really hard to establish credible evidence and arguments.
	And you have to have the right to face your accuser.
	You have to have the right of cross-examination.
	You have to have the right of competent representation through a lawyer.
	And none of this stuff, of course, occurs in a war zone.
	It's all just hearsay and gun-to-the-head confessions and all that gulag stuff.
	And this is not to pick on the U.S. military, which, as far as militaries go, is probably not the worst that has ever been in history.
	In fact, I'm sure that it's not the worst that has been in history.
	And it's probably, as far as civilized militaries go, not that that's a complete oxymoron, it's one of the more civilized militaries around there.
	It's just that you simply can't expect Young men to be thrown into danger to watch their friends get blown up through IEDs and killed and and you can't pour all of the hysteria and adrenaline into immature minds and bodies I mean they take soldiers when they're 18 human brain doesn't even reach physical maturity until one's mid-20s and they take these people put them into highly stressful highly ritualized highly dangerous highly attached highly violent situations and people go nuts there is No way to avoid it.
	That what war is, it is, you know, truly, they say, unleash the dogs of war.
	It is let slip the dogs of war.
	It is taking rabid animals off a leash to start war.
	And so torture is always, always, always central to war.
	If you look even at the Allied bombing campaigns of the Second World War, which there seems to be very credible evidence, and you can look this up on the web, Very credible evidence that the Allies, particularly, of course, the United Kingdom and the United States, bombed civilians and initiated the bombing of civilians in Germany, particularly, of course.
	And this had nothing to do with the war effort.
	If they had actually focused on bombing military installations and arms production factories and so on, particularly the Skoda Works in Czechoslovakia, They would have shortened the war by the estimates range from months to years, but instead they had the Jupiter complex raining fire down on the civilians from the heavens above.
	And my grandmother was killed on a bombing raid in Dresden in, I think, 1944.
	On my mother's side, on my father's side, an uncle was flying the plane.
	And why was my grandmother killed?
	Was it because she was a big fan of Hitler and was essential to the war?
	Of course not! It is just, it is civilians who always pay in war.
	It is civilians who always pay in war, because if the combat is unmatched, then the insurgents or the rebels will always merge into the civilians and act as much as possible as civilians, right?
	So that they can blend camouflage, use human shields.
	So civilians will always pay, torture will always escalate, violence will always occur, and the people who return home will Having gone through these kinds of situations are, to a very large degree, not fit for reintegration into civil society, or at least what's left of civil society, because they've simply been through so much.
	And I have an enormous, enormous amount of sympathy for the soldiers who, through economic desperation, through propaganda, through, as some have communicated to me, through bullying on the part of parents, To go into the military, those people who have gone in thinking they're going to do good or just going in for an education and once they're in, you know, it's like the military is a roach motel, right?
	You can check in, but it's really, really hard to check out.
	So the suppression of evidence in terms of saying we're going to suppress these photos of torture is a suppression of the reality of war.
	And I believe that there's a movement afoot within the government to suppress all future, to write proactive or preventative legislation to prevent all future dissemination of any photos that are of torture by the US military, which is basically saying, yes, we're going to keep doing it. And the suppression of evidence of these kinds of crimes is what the government wants.
	And it always strikes me as amazing that people would accept that without...
	Just being completely shocked that the government would write permanent legislation to suppress the evidence of its own crimes.
	It's not shocking to somebody who's studied the nature of the state for a long time like I have, or perhaps like you have, but it certainly should be shocking to you if this is relatively new, that the government is basically writing legislation or considering legislation.
	And I believe the first round has passed unanimously that will suppress all evidence of future atrocities by the US government, which is really carte blanche, is to say that it will continue.
	Just as Barack Obama, the Yes We Can Mr.
	Change Head, is continuing the processes and the criminal acts of extraordinary rendition of kidnapping people and shipping them off to other countries to be tortured.
	It's simply the suppression of all future evidence of war crimes, which is a complete indication that it's going to continue, and it's also carte blanche to the people doing it.
	We say you will be allowed to torture and we will put in jail anybody who takes a photo and publishes it of you actually torturing someone.
	You see there's torture but then there's the real crime you see which is saying that it exists and this is the kind of Orwellian world that we live in at the moment where the real crime has become the identification of the real crime and it's complete madness but this is the world that we live in and I hope As I said before,
	Obama got elected, that when people recognize the degree to which there is no change, right, you're just changing the hood ornament on the car that runs you down, that they won't be tempted to vote for somebody else next round, but will look for more viable alternatives.
	James, you're huffing and puffing.
	Do we have a caller? Yes, we do.
	You can hear me breathing?
	I can. It's quite sexy.
	Please, don't stop. Oh, okay.
	Yeah, we have a caller from area code 760.
	Go ahead, caller. Hi, my name is Daniel and I'm calling from California.
	I just have a question about your universally preferable behavior, particularly a claim that you made in the ethics redux video which went up on YouTube roughly a week ago.
	Specifically, I want to talk about your handling of Hume's famous is-odd problem.
	Maybe you're anticipating my objection.
	I just want to make sure I understand your position first, because I may have completely misunderstood, and I don't want to strawman you or something like that, so correct me if I'm wrong, and I'm sure you will.
	Can I just say one thing before you start?
	Okay. I love my UPB. Sorry, I'm still working on that song, but I'd just like you to continue.
	Please, go ahead. All right, all right.
	That was very nice. Well, you might want to check your ears checked, but thank you.
	Okay, I just want to make sure I understand.
	So what you're saying is that the is-ought problem is not exactly a problem because sort of in asserting that one cannot derive an ought from an is, one is, in fact, Ending up with an ought.
	I think what you say here in the video is that oughts do not exist in reality.
	Therefore, we ought not to say that they do.
	Right. It's the is from the ought not.
	Yeah. I'm just...
	If I understand Hume's is ought problem correctly, it's a statement about what is logically possible.
	And it seems like it's pretty well analogous to the statement that One cannot draw a square circle.
	It's just simply impossible.
	I'm just wondering how one would conclude from a statement that one cannot draw a square circle, that one ought not draw a square circle.
	I mean, it seems like it doesn't make sense to apply an ought or ought not to something that is impossible.
	Do you see what I'm saying?
	Yeah, no, I think I understand.
	Look, I'm no expert on human.
	It's been a long time since I've read that particular section.
	And please, people, we've got a whole bunch of people in the chat room, please correct me, I'll keep glancing at it.
	My understanding of the Humean attack on ethics is to say that there is nothing in nature that says morality is necessary or required or anything like that.
	There's nothing... In a sense, we have to fall if we jump off a cliff.
	But there's no such have to in the realm of telling the truth or being on time or not strangling kittens or not, you know, stabbing old women or something.
	There's no such thing in nature.
	There's nothing inevitable in the nature of reality or in the laws of physics or the laws of biology.
	There's nothing which says we must be good in the same way That we say rocks will inevitably fall down if you throw them off a cliff, and water must inevitably, you know, go flow downhill and so on.
	So the Humean is to say you can't get an ought, we should, Respect property rights.
	We should not violently aggress against each other or anything.
	You can't get any of that from any physical property of man, beast, machine, nature, reality, space, time, or anything like that.
	And I fully agree with that.
	I don't think that there's anything in nature that creates a should The fact is, if I strangle you and you can't breathe, you will die.
	That is a fact. But there's nothing in that fact that innately says, I ought not to do that.
	And that, of course, is the great challenge of morality, which has been solved in two forms.
	Again, historically, one is by saying God will punish you.
	God puts the ought in the is.
	Or... There is no ought from an is, but the state will throw you in jail if you don't obey the law.
	All that is punishment, which is not quite the same as being good, in my opinion, and arises out of some pretty primitive ways of putting things in there.
	Somebody just put a quote up.
	I'll just read that. This is a quote from Hume.
	He says, in every system of morality which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning and establishes the being of a god, or makes observations concerning human affairs, when all of a sudden I'm surprised to find that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, oh baby, it is, sorry, is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought or an ought not.
	This change is imperceptible, but is, however, of the last consequence.
	For as this ought or ought not expresses some new relation or affirmation, tis necessary that it should be observed and explained and at the same time that a reason should be given for what seems altogether inconceivable how this new relation can be a deduction from others which are entirely different from it.
	So he's saying there's an is and an is not.
	And that moralists will always say, well, this is and is not, and therefore we ought to do X, Y, and Z. And he's saying that that's a huge leap which is never sustained by evidence or reason.
	And I fully agree with that, for sure.
	But he is, of course, saying that there is an ought in an is here as well, which I don't think he's catching, right?
	And again, far be it from me to stomp on the scalp of Hume, right?
	I mean, this is just my thoughts on the matter.
	But he's saying that If the ought is not supported by the evidence, we ought not to say that it is.
	That is getting an ought from an is, right?
	That's not how I read it.
	I see Hume's claim as simply a matter of what is and what is not logically possible.
	And maybe if one wanted to be logical, then one ought not, you know, We're going to try to make that logical leap.
	But that is sort of in reference to a third accepted kind of solution to Hume's result problem, which is that you can sort of derive enough from it is if you are referencing some goal or other.
	Like, if I had goal x, then there is some way I should act to achieve that goal.
	Yes, but that's not universalizable, right?
	Like, you can't universalize.
	I mean, the one thing that everybody wants about ethics is that they be universal and not cultural, because the moment they're cultural, then their preference is like eating ice cream rather than what I would call universally preferable behavior, like respecting persons and property.
	So if it's conditional upon a goal, then it can't be universalized, right?
	Then it becomes like MapQuest.
	If you want to drive to Philadelphia, then you ought to take these roads.
	But, of course, that's not ethics.
	That's like a project plan, because...
	Ethics is everybody should want to drive to Philadelphia.
	Everybody must drive to Philadelphia.
	Everybody must respect persons and property.
	But when it comes to a particular goal and then you get the ought, you no longer have ethics.
	You simply have cause and effect, if that makes sense.
	No, I completely understand and agree.
	I'm just saying, what I read Hema saying is, you know, this is impossible.
	Deriving an ought from an is is impossible.
	And if you want to be logical, then you shouldn't do it.
	So he's not making a universalizable claim.
	He's just referencing those who have the goal of being logical.
	They're saying if they want to achieve that goal, then they should not make such a derivation.
	Well, I completely agree with you that nobody has to use philosophy or science or mathematics if they don't want to be logical, right?
	Then they don't have to do these things.
	But it has been my experience and observation, and I believe this to be a universal, though it's not the kind of thing that can be proven syllogistically, and you can certainly tell me what you think.
	I have never, ever, ever met anyone who says, this is true, Or this is valid or this is a fact or something is real or something is, you know, exists.
	And when you say why, they say there's no reason.
	There's no evidence and there's no reason.
	Because those two statements are contradictory, right?
	So if I say leprechauns exist, then I'm making a truth claim statement about external reality.
	Leprechauns don't exist as dancing sugar cereal fairies in my head.
	Leprechauns exist outside my head, in the objective, in the real world.
	Then I'm saying leprechauns exist as a statement of fact about the world.
	And if I then say, I have no reason and evidence to prove that they exist, and there's every piece of reason and evidence to believe that they do not exist, then I have contradicted myself.
	Now if I say, I believe leprechauns exist, but there's no proof and evidence, then that's sort of in the gray area, because belief about the external existence of something should reference something that's out there in the world, right? Now if I say...
	Well, and so, but if I say, and which is a true statement, I would say, I believe that people believe in leprechauns.
	I'm not saying that leprechauns exist in the real world.
	I'm not saying that people's beliefs exist in some platonic way in the real world.
	What I am saying is I believe that a belief in leprechauns exists in other people's heads.
	And I'm not making a statement about empirical, out-of-consciousness reality, objective reality.
	I'm talking about subjective beliefs.
	Like if I say, I believe that some people like vanilla ice cream and some people don't.
	I'm not saying that that belief exists, you know, like a tree or a solar system or something.
	I'm saying that it is a belief in someone's heads.
	So I've never met anyone who says something about reality who then immediately says there's no evidence or reason for me to believe this at all.
	They always have something that they will fall back on as some kind of evidence or proof.
	And so it's true that it's if you want to say something logical then you have to use logic or if you want to say something factual you have to use reason and evidence.
	It's just that everybody's beliefs are always claimed to be factual.
	I've never met anyone Who says, my beliefs are factual and there's no evidence for them and every evidence against them.
	I've never met anyone like that.
	Even the people who believe in the most outlandish things will say that there's reason and evidence, right?
	And so to me, it's sort of a non-conversation to say, well, if you want to sort of be logical.
	Because everybody does claim to have reason and evidence to support his or her beliefs, if that makes sense.
	I've never met anyone who doesn't.
	Yeah, yeah. It's just that we can...
	To explain the presence of logic behavior in pretty much every person.
	I'm sure there's a crazy person out there somewhere whose mind just doesn't work properly, who would make claims about reality without paying difference to logic or evidence.
	But for the most part, I think you're right that people in general do act as if their beliefs are founded in evidence.
	Right, and I don't know if you spend much time around crazy people, but just by the by, I mean, the people who I've met who are crazy have the most amazingly elaborate systems of justification for their beliefs.
	Like, you think of the sort of standard scene, and this is obviously not evidence, it's just a way of looking at it, you know, and there's some crazy guy in a movie, and you know, the cops go into his house, And he's got all of these diagrams on the walls and he's got pictures and cutouts and photos and it's all obsessed and he lives in his own world which supports his crazy beliefs or whatever, right? Like Mel Gibson in conspiracy theory or something.
	So even people who are crazy work very very hard to find some way to support their craziness.
	Because of course if they didn't work that hard they would kind of quickly see that they were crazy, right?
	So they have to surround themselves with believability things.
	Like the same way people who believe the same crazy stuff Always hang out with each other, right?
	Like people who believe in past life's theosophical regression therapy always hang out with those people.
	They don't hang around with Richard Dawkins, right?
	Not that he would probably let them, but...
	But so people do...
	Even people with crazy beliefs surround themselves with similar beliefs, which gives a kind of pseudo-empiricism.
	Okay, yeah. I think...
	In any case, it's at least conceivable that there could be a person who does not...
	Structure the beliefs around what they think are reasons.
	I mean, it seems conceivable that could be a person like that even if currently none exists.
	And I'm just thinking that just because just about everyone, and we can even go so far to say everyone, happens to have the goal of being logical, and that doesn't really advance the argument against, or I mean,
	I'd rather for your No, I think I understand what you're saying.
	Look, I think I understand what you're saying, and I think we're in agreement.
	Let me paraphrase it and then tell me if I'm way off base.
	So the fact that, let's just say, the fact that everyone wants to be logical does not mean that everyone ought to be logical, right?
	Exactly. No, and I completely agree with that.
	I completely agree with that.
	Just because everyone claims to be logical doesn't mean that everyone ought to claim to be logical.
	I completely understand that.
	But what I focus on in my philosophy quite a lot is in these self-detonating statements.
	So clearly, if I cover your eyes and yell into your ears that sound doesn't exist, then I'm clearly contradicting myself right up front, right?
	Okay. Okay, let's see what I got.
	Right, I mean, this wouldn't make any sense, right?
	I can't yell at you that sound doesn't exist, because I'm using sound to communicate that sound doesn't exist.
	Like, if I write you a letter and mail it to you and say, the mail never gets delivered to the right person, that would also be a contradiction, right?
	Because if I was trying to send a message to you, I couldn't claim that the medium never reaches you.
	Okay. I can't use a logical argument to disprove logic.
	That's another kind of self-contradictory statement.
	Yeah, I see that.
	Sorry, so let me finish.
	So what I mean is that it's certainly true that nobody has to be logical.
	Of course not. There's no ought that's innate in logic.
	But the moment that somebody uses logic, then they're subject to the laws of logic, right?
	The moment that somebody... Like, if I say to you, all sentences are incomprehensible, then that's a contradiction, right?
	Because if all sentences are incomprehensible, then you won't understand my argument, right?
	So if I say...
	Yeah, because my argument disproves itself.
	Because if you understand my argument that all sentences are incomprehensible, then you have comprehended my sentence and that's it, right?
	I'm disproven by the very act of what it is that I'm doing, right?
	Right. Or if I were to say, this sentence is false, for another example, that would be...
	Yeah, you know, if I say, you don't exist, or I don't exist, then clearly, if I say, if I'm talking to you in this medium and say, the internet doesn't exist, then clearly, if I phone you and say, phones haven't been invented, right?
	There's so many things. I mean, we could play this game all day, and Lord knows I have, right?
	But believe it or not, it's edited, my books.
	But... But you understand, in the very act of doing something, we have set up an enormous number of premises that if they're not true, we wouldn't be doing what we're doing, right?
	So if I make a logical argument to you, then I am saying, you know, sound is valid, your senses are valid, reality exists, I exist, you exist, logic is valid, evidence is required because I'm providing evidence in the form of an argument.
	So all of these things combine to have an enormous number of things that simply must be true in order for the person even to bother making the argument.
	And it's around looking at those things that are underlying the argument.
	What has to be accepted in order for the argument to be even remotely valid.
	And it's looking at those things that the form of the argument applies to the argument itself.
	That's sort of what I'm saying. We always, if somebody yells at me that sound doesn't exist, my first impulse in a way is to say, no wait a sec, sound does exist.
	Look, here's an oscillograph or whatever, you know, something that translates sound waves into, you know, ripples on a, you know, whatever it is that I'd come up with to prove that sound does exist.
	But I don't need to do any of that, because the very act of somebody speaking sounds Indicates that he believes that sounds do exist.
	And if he's saying sounds don't exist, then he's obviously not right.
	So we always want to run off and sort of accept the premises.
	But I say forget all of that.
	Look at the premises of the argument.
	So anybody who's going to argue with you is going to have reason and evidence.
	Anybody. Now if they don't have any reason and evidence, they won't be arguing with you.
	They'll just be shouting incomprehensible sounds at a passing sparrow.
	They'll never be debating with you.
	Because the moment someone debates with you, they're putting forward, as Monty Python says, a logical series of propositions, statements intended to establish a proposition.
	And so, the moment that somebody starts arguing with you, they're using logic, they're using evidence, they accept that sound is valid, that your senses is valid, that you both exist, that objective reality exists, because that's the medium that they're using.
	They're not using psychic puffs of smoke through Aztec I guess my main wonder is that,
	well, earlier you said that If we just sort of look at our goals and act with reference to them, then we're not doing ethics.
	I'm wondering what need there is to be doing ethics specifically.
	It seems like the objective of ethics, the underlying purpose of the study is to figure out how we ought to act.
	And it seems like if we can do that entirely by referencing our goals and referencing evidence pertaining to how best to achieve those goals, And even if we're not doing ethics, we can still know how we ought to act with respect to those goals.
	You see what I'm saying? What's the concern over doing ethics proper as opposed to just referencing goals and acting in accordance?
	Right. Well, I mean, I go a little away from Ayn Rand, who doesn't agree with me on this, or rather, which is ridiculous to say since she never heard of me, I don't agree with her on this.
	She says that sort of ethics and integrity are sort of required even if you live alone on a desert island.
	To my way of thinking, the main reason that we absolutely do need ethics is that our actions have direct impacts on other people, right?
	So I have a daughter who's just turned eight months.
	And if I decide to go out drinking and my wife's away or whatever, then my daughter is going to be left at home alone, which is obviously not good, dangerous or whatever.
	She could get upset or scream or get sick or whatever, right?
	And so to me, if you live alone in the woods, it's like the sound of a tree falling in a forest.
	If a guy does a bad thing in a forest, he's completely alone or on the dark side of the moon or whatever, right?
	I mean, who cares? To me, it's completely, like, it doesn't matter.
	It's like other space aliens currently doing a jig on the dark side of the moon, and they'll zoom away on the moon's shadow, we'll never see them.
	It's like, I got more important things to deal with.
	But the degree to which our goals and our actions impact other people is the degree to which we absolutely do need ethics.
	And since in any modern civilized society, we're so interwoven, everything is so interwoven, right?
	I mean, I was thinking about this the other day, that the number of people who process the little jars of food that I get, that my, you know, somebody grows it, somebody It ships it.
	They package it. They safety test it.
	They seal it. The glass has to be clean and not bacteria.
	The number of people I kind of have to trust in order to take a spoon of custard and put it in my baby's mouth is enormous.
	And I really do need all of those people to be acting with integrity.
	And not just for fear of lawsuits, but to actually proactively act with integrity in order for me to trust.
	And this is just one tiny example.
	We're so interwoven.
	In a civilized society, we're so embedded in cheek by jowl economically and socially that we really do need to be good.
	We really do need to reflect on ethics.
	If I have a goal of raping someone and they have a goal of not being raped, clearly there's going to be a massive conflict and a contradiction in our mutual goals.
	So I think we do need to have a consistent and objective and universal system of preferred behavior.
	And I'm very much for the thou shalt not, right?
	I have been questioned quite a bit about, you know, because UPB is all about don't steal, don't kill, don't rape, don't assault, don't murder, and so on.
	And so people have said, well, what about real virtue, like courage and honor and integrity and so on?
	And I think that stuff's all great.
	I really do. And I absolutely will do a book on that at some point about the positive virtues.
	But we're so far even from identifying the negative virtues in society, like the degree of violence we use through the state to achieve what we want, that to me it's like, we can talk about nutrition later on, but everybody's dropping dead of the plague, so let's deal with that first, and then later we can talk about how to optimize the health that we have regained.
	So I think that you can't just say relative to your goals, because our goals have direct impacts on the life, health, and happiness of others.
	Yeah, okay. I mean, I definitely agree with you that, you know, each of our actions have widespread ramifications for, you know, the well-being of others.
	But it seems like, well, you know, I personally have a goal to live in a society where myself and my friends, my family are safe.
	They don't have to worry about, you know, being raped or what have you.
	So it seems like that is an objective goal.
	So there is some one best way to achieve that goal.
	And moreover, it seems like That goal happens to be one that is held by most other people.
	And it's not that it is, it's just that it happens to be probably for evolutionary reasons or something like that.
	So it seems like working from that goal that I want to live in a happy society or whatever shorthand is easiest, I can always know how I should act without ever making a statement of oughts that don't directly Point back to that objective goal.
	And I can always reference objective evidence to know how to work toward that objective goal.
	You see what I'm saying? Yeah, I do.
	I do see what you're saying. And I do have another caller.
	So let me just, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to end with a short speech here.
	And then hopefully, you know, you feel free to give me a ping on Skype or on the message board.
	We can talk further about this.
	Because, I mean, I think the thoughts that you're raising are completely fantastic and downright brilliant.
	So I'll just try and match them a little bit.
	So I'm sure that you and I, well I should be just talking about you, I'm completely sure that you do not need a system of ethics in order not to go around killing people.
	I'm absolutely sure that you don't need a system of ethics in order to not, you know, steal food from the Meals on Wheels van or whatever, right?
	So you want to live a peaceful, good, happy life.
	And so do I. So you and I, in a sense, don't need ethics, right?
	In the same way that if you and I, all we ever want to eat is fruits and vegetables and grains and so on, right?
	Then we're not going to need the science of nutrition because our natural desires are going to be to eat healthy stuff to whatever, right?
	I mean, we may if we get some insulin deficiencies from genetics or whatever, right?
	But if all you ever wanted to eat was good food, you would never need the science of nutrition.
	We need the science of nutrition for people who don't want to eat good food.
	And You and I don't need a system of ethics.
	Like, I don't sort of wake up in the morning and say, let me check my to-do list.
	You know, okay, well, I want to go and strangle three hamsters, and then I want to go and drown five birds, and then I want to go and chop down my neighbor's favorite tree and then set fire to his cat.
	And then I'm like, oh, wait, damn, UPB tells me I can't do those things.
	Oh, I hate that, right?
	I mean, that's not my sort of day's plan, and I'm sure that's not your day's plan either, right?
	And so the reason that we develop ethics as a logical and objective system is not to prop up the virtuous desires of the naturally good or the naturally healthy.
	It is to smash the terrible theories of the corrupt and the evil, right?
	It is a neutron bomb that lands on bad theories and leaves good people standing, right?
	It is a counterfeit detection machine, which we don't need if people are using honest money.
	But there's people who use dishonest money, both consciously and unconsciously, and it's for that we need the counterfeit detection machine.
	And UPB is a very powerful, corrupt, nasty, evil, vicious, ethic detection machine.
	And that's what we need it for.
	It is to expose and smash the bad theories and the bad people who hold them and to drive them back from civilized society, either to reform or to cast them out into the intellectual wilderness that we all wish people like Marx And Bismarck had gone to.
	So, it's not for you and I that UPB is important.
	It is to assault, to attack, and I'm very martial this way, perhaps to a fault, but it is to assault, to attack, because it leads to life and death ethics.
	Bad theories of ethics end up running societies such as we can see now, socialism and Marxism and all this kind of stuff, and fascism, then people get really hurt.
	They get killed, right? Bad system of ethics leads to the death of a million people in Iraq.
	40 million people in the Second World War.
	So, I am very martial when it comes to attacking corrupt and immoral theories.
	And that's what we need a system of ethics for.
	Not for you and I. We're naturally going to eat fruits and vegetables.
	We don't need somebody to say, you need to eat fruits and vegetables because that's what we need to eat.
	But we need it to turn back the tide of really ugly, vicious, and nasty theories.
	So, sorry about that.
	I appreciate that. And please feel free to contact me.
	We'll have more conversations about this.
	I can talk about ethics all day.
	It is the most important topic.
	We do have another caller, so thank you so much for listening, and I'm sorry for the caller that you had to wait.
	Cue him up, baby! We do have another caller, and just to give the number out while I'm here, it's 347-633-9636.
	The number again is 347-633-9636.
	Or you can use the Click2Talk at BlogTalk Radio for you international listeners or viewers.
	We do have a caller from an area code 727.
	727, area code.
	You're on the air. Excellent.
	Hi, Stefan. My name is Chris.
	Hi, Chris. How are you?
	I have two thoughts.
	I listened to the show last week, and I heard a couple things.
	The first part is going to be about when somebody was saying, is it intellectually honest to say that you can be an atheist?
	So I have a thought on that one.
	And then the second one, it's a segue into kind of an adjunct to minicarism and kind of my view on that interrelationship between community organization slash religion and the state.
	All right, now listen. Sorry, I hate to interrupt you up front.
	Pick your favorite one, because if we get another caller, I can't do two.
	The reason being that I'm trying to...
	We left a whole bunch of people not able to get on the show after having them hang around for an hour and a half.
	So pick your favorite one. Yeah, pick your favorite one.
	I understand. So, sorry, go ahead.
	All right, well, then I'll go with the second one.
	I think that this one has a larger ramification.
	So, the second one is this adjunct to minicarism and the role of community, organization, and this thing.
	And in a very generic way, I mean, for a long time in my life, I was involved in religion, and I saw that, you know, they have two elements.
	They have the mythological, theological element, and then they have this social element, which was extremely edifying to the people that were involved.
	But, you know, you get wrapped up in all the other stuff and you kind of, you know, it has sometimes the mythology and the theology get in the way of really productive things.
	So I tried to take what I learned there.
	I've been really, really looking at all these different forms of government and where they've been tried and why they failed.
	And then I came across your stuff and I think you hit it on the head.
	It's this centralizing of violence, this centralizing of conflict.
	And I started to see that It's in humans.
	It seems to be just a part of us.
	It's the reason why we want to reach out and change the world around us.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	I just wanted to be sure to understand.
	When you say the centralization of violence, you're talking about a very specific thing of the state.
	When you say it's in all of us, I'm not sure what you mean.
	Do you mean wanting to centralize violence or supporting it?
	Sorry, violence is in all of us?
	Conflict and violence. I say conflict slash violence because of the way that you use it at times.
	You say, you know, the guy with the gun, the violence.
	But, you know, sometimes it doesn't come down to shooting somebody.
	Sometimes it just comes to putting me in jail or something.
	So I'm using them in a similar context.
	I'm saying, that's in us.
	That need to reach out and change the world around us.
	Is that in you? It's in everyone.
	You wouldn't have your radio show if you weren't encouraged to try and change the world around you.
	Well, yeah, but I'm not trying to do it violently, and neither are you, right?
	But the fact that we're debating right now, you know, you could assign a word to it.
	You could say that it's conflict.
	Well, but you and I are not engaged in a violent interaction, right?
	This is what I was saying earlier, right?
	I look not at the content, but at the form of your argument, and if you say violence is in everyone, Or violence is a common way.
	But you and I are debating.
	This is not... I mean, conflict in a verbal form is nothing compared to, obviously, if we have a gun to each other's head, right?
	I mean, that's a noble coward, not Tarantino, right?
	Indeed. Well, let's just say that we'll squash violence for now.
	We'll just say conflict is in everyone.
	Let's just say, you know, at its most extreme conclusion, it turns into violence.
	But conflict seems to be in everybody.
	It's the reason we participate in the world around us.
	So the reason that we participate is in order to fight with others, is that right?
	No, it's to change the world around us, make it more to our liking.
	You have families, you have kids, you buy homes, you get cars, because you're effectively reaching out and moving the pieces on the board.
	You don't like the way they're positioned right now, so you have conflict with the way the pieces on the board are positioned.
	And can you give me an example of conflict that would be involved in, say, buying a house?
	And I'm not saying you're wrong, I just want to make sure that I understand where you're coming from, because you're making a lot of things that I can't follow, and that doesn't mean that they're wrong, it just means I can't follow them.
	Okay, well, let's say you've got a certain salary, and you've been living in a rundown area of town, and you really don't like it, but You also know that you've got this big dream to go do something.
	Let's say you want to build some big fancy computer system.
	So you've got this idea that you could make the sacrifice.
	You could go buy this house.
	It's in a real hot area and there's a lot of people that want to buy it.
	And eventually you get it in your mind.
	You have to have it. You go talk to these real estate agents and they're like, we've got two people looking at this house.
	And so you start coming up with all these schemes to try and beat the other person to it.
	And you take out more money or you sweeten the terms or whatever.
	But the idea that you're up against an obstacle, it's something that you actively want to change in your own life.
	And you actively want to change it in two or three levels removed in everybody else's life.
	The people that live around there, the people that want to buy it, the real estate agent, you are reaching out and modifying their lives at the same time.
	And it doesn't mean it's not helping, it's just a really general, abstract way to try and frame the concept of reaching out and modifying the world around you.
	If there's a better term, I would love to use that, because it seems to be confusing, the way that I'm using it.
	And let me just say why I'm confused, is that you're using the same word conflict to refer to someone being killed or thrown in jail, or somebody buying a house.
	That's why earlier I said we should squash that.
	We should squash violence.
	Take that off the table. Because I agree.
	It's not that broad-reaching.
	So you're saying that if you and I want to buy a house and I offer 5% more and I get the house and you don't, that's a kind of conflict?
	That's it. Well, that's just it.
	That's the end of it. Conflict doesn't mean there's any retribution, there's no reciprocity, there's none of that.
	It's moving the pieces on the board.
	Let's just take both terms off the table and say that idea right there, change the pieces on the board, we all have that in us.
	And sometimes people are moving pieces in very bad ways, sometimes they're not.
	But that's innately human.
	Sorry, let me just interrupt.
	Let me just make sure I understand it, right?
	Because what you're saying is that human beings have a desire to affect their environment, and that's innate?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Well, I think that would be hard to argue against, but I'm not sure what...
	Okay. Okay, go ahead. All right.
	But that's a great starting point, because if we can say that, and if we can say, all right, we know that people want to reach out and modify the world around us, and we know that, you know, whenever you centralize that, whenever you get one person that has more effect on the environment around them, You know, they could be using, I'm going to air quote it, but conflict, you know, in a good way, really good things happen.
	When they use it in a bad way, really bad things happen.
	And what's the difference between a good and a bad way?
	Well, let's say somebody says, you know, we need to develop our space program and go to the moon.
	You know, furthering science and technology seem to be really good things.
	We need to go squash those dirty, you know, Muslims over there.
	That's a really bad way. In the first way, do you mean like a private space agency, or do you mean something that's funded through coercive taxation?
	I'm not really interested in that.
	I think as long as it happens, we can all acknowledge our microwaves are a good thing.
	You're saying you're interested in human conflict, but you're not interested in whether violence is used or not?
	That seems to me kind of...
	I'm not interested in the tangent.
	What I am interested in is, what we're talking about is, This idea of when you centralize conflict, I mean, you broach it, it's just I'm putting it in different words.
	When you centralize conflict, when you get a bad guy in power, it turns into really bad conflict.
	Sorry, sorry, again, just so I understand what you're saying.
	Because, I mean, if you want two bits of advice, and I certainly can't tell anyone what to think or how to think, but I think you need to slow down a little bit in your own thinking.
	Because you say, if we have a good guy in power, all is well.
	And if we have a bad guy in power, all is not well.
	But to me, what you're talking about is, if we have people who won't use violence to achieve their ends, that's good.
	And if we have people who use violence to achieve their ends, that's bad.
	And I would agree with you there.
	I'm just not sure what the insight is, if you don't mind me saying so.
	All right. Well, let me wrap it up then.
	The insight is if it's innate for all of us to want and desire and pursue conflict on some level, or change the environment around us, and if you centralize that, bad things can come of it, what happens when,
	one, you localize it so that those conflicts, when they do arise, have smaller effects, but two, The central authority, the moral authority, or whoever you want to call it, that you're going to give all this power to, what happens when you give them a direct competitor that has equal and exclusive access to conflict?
	And that's the thought. That's where this idea of, you know, what was the...
	What happened whenever they said, you know, separation of church and state?
	And I have a very strong opinion on why theology and mythology are incorrect.
	But what happened when they gave total moral authority to the government, and now the church, which had been the advocate of the people for generations, for hundreds of years, when they became irrelevant?
	Now the government had exclusive control over the people.
	And whenever a bad person got in power and said, we're going to go squash those dirty Muslims over there, everybody went along because there was no real strong advocate for the people.
	So give two, maybe more parties controlling interest in the people so that they can conflict between each other.
	Yeah, I mean, I'm going to have to stop.
	I'll re-listen to this part, because I'm really having trouble following what you're saying.
	My suggestion would be to start not with moving big geopolitical things around on the chessboard, but start with more simple ethics, like what is good, what is evil, what is right, and what is wrong.
	Because if you go from there...
	Then you're kind of like trying to say, well, how do the planets move without figuring out how, you know, marbles move, right?
	I'd start with more simple, more basic stuff and then try and work into this big, you know, well, what if this happens and what if that happens?
	Because my sort of thing is that the non-aggression principle and so on means that you simply can't have centralized initiation of violence because initiation of violence is immoral.
	And rather than say, well, if we accept these and we have these big deal of political things, how should they move around so that things could be better?
	I would, if I were you, My suggestion would be to start with stuff that's much more simple because I keep asking you these simple questions and I'm not sure where you're coming from.
	So if you don't mind, I will listen to this again and if I have more thoughts about it, I'll post them on the board.
	But that's sort of my first response would be to start much more simply, much more basically with, you know, two guys in a room rather than big geopolitical stuff.
	That's generally the place where I find the most productive thought comes from.
	But, you know, which is not to say anything you're saying is wrong.
	I'm just saying that I can't really follow it in terms of basic ethics.
	Do you find that there's a discrepancy between theory and reality?
	Do I? Well, of course there are.
	I mean, of course. All right.
	Do you find that the two guys in the room is reality?
	Sorry, not all theories in reality, but certainly a lot of them, for sure.
	I mean, there's a discrepancy between communism and reality.
	I don't think there's a discrepancy between, say, a peaceful free market interaction and reality.
	But yeah, for sure, some theories can be way off base.
	So do you think that two guys in a room is reality?
	Well, it's a good first test, right?
	I mean, it absolutely is a good first test because two guys in a room is an accurate representation of reality.
	My suggestion is just where I would start and build the foundations and then build the roof.
	I just feel that you're up in the air throwing bricks and they're not landing anywhere just yet.
	So again, those are just my thoughts and maybe I'm completely wrong, but that's sort of my impulse.
	James, do we have another caller? I appreciate it.
	Yes, sir, we do.
	Okay. We have a caller from area code 215.
	Hello. Hello.
	Hi. Stefan.
	Hello. Hello.
	Nice to hear you. Nice to hear you, too.
	How are you doing? Good.
	I'm doing very well.
	My question is regarding, and I hope...
	You are not completely disinterested in this topic, because I gather that it's become a little boring for you to talk about this so many times to so many people, but after watching a couple, or actually all of your videos on free will versus determinism, there's a part in it which I was wondering if you could further clarify for me.
	I may choose to, I may be determined to, but let's go ahead.
	That's fine. I was wondering about the part where you talk about the self-contradicting statement where for a determinist to argue with someone who believes in free will is kind of self-contradicting in the fact that they're not going to choose.
	By arguing with somebody, you're inherently believing that they can choose That's something to do with it for sure.
	The other thing to do with it is that if a determinist is going to say that a human being is not special or different with regards to reality, doesn't have a special property called rational consciousness that we don't understand as yet, of course, But it's just like the weather or just like a dust cloud or any other complex system or the ecosystem of a rainforest or whatever.
	If a determinist is going to say that a human being is not different from any other aspect of reality, but that that difference is only an illusion, then what I would be really respectful of with determinists, and I don't know if you are or are not one, but I would be really fascinated to see a determinist attempting to talk a weather system out of raining, right?
	Or to talk a dust cloud out of rotating, or to talk about, you know, to sit down with the Amazon forest and say, you know, A, you're just too wet.
	B, I mean, what's with all these bugs?
	For heaven's sakes, this is crazy.
	Right? And see, these flowers are way too big.
	You really need to change that.
	That's just, I don't know what the hell's going on with that, right?
	And just go down with the whole thing, right?
	And just get the rainforest to change its mind about what it's doing, because that is a complex system, like the weather that's impossible to predict and so on.
	But I have never seen a determinist sit down with any other complex system and debate with it, other than a human being.
	So if a determinist says, That a human being is exactly the same as every other complex system, but would consider it insane to debate with any other complex system, then that, to me, is not a very consistent belief, to say the least. Right.
	And I completely understand what you're saying.
	I just feel that, to answer your question, yes, I consider myself a hard determinist, but I just feel that even though two people might argue, and Like I said, I don't know if this will make any sense to you or not, but I feel that if two people are arguing,
	regardless of the outcome, for example, if I try to convince you to be a determinist, that doesn't necessarily mean that I think that either of us has a choice in engaging in the argument or deciding what we want to do.
	We're merely pieces of matter that...
	We're merely pieces of matter that kind of bounce off of each other.
	To use your example, we're rocks that are bouncing off of each other.
	I don't believe that I can control which way you move.
	Sorry, let me just interrupt for a sec, if you don't mind.
	So if you and I were, like, if you were to take this audio snippet, right, and you were to cut your half into one cassette tape or CD, and you were to cut my half into another cassette tape and CD, and you were to get two boomboxes, and you were to put your half in one, and you were to put my half in another, and you would have them facing each other and playing back the recording of our conversations, that, of course, would be completely predetermined, right?
	Yeah, I would say so, yes.
	Would you call that a debate?
	Well, I would call it...
	I don't know if I would call it a debate.
	Sorry, you think that it might be a debate?
	I'm going to push you on this, because I apologize, it sounds harsh.
	Is it a debate or is it a debate if two CD players are playing back our conversation to each other?
	Well, here's the difference I find, and I'm sorry if I'm trying to avoid it.
	Come on, this is not a multiple choice, and do me the honor of just giving me a yes-no.
	Is it a debate if two boomboxes facing each other are playing back our recording?
	No. Okay, good, because now you're not crazy, right?
	Because obviously it's not a debate, right?
	Well, I don't know if I'm not crazy, but I agree with that.
	Definitely agree with that. Right, and so...
	But why is this called a debate when it's exactly as predetermined as two boomboxes facing each other?
	See, this is what bugs me about determinists.
	You all use the language of free will all the time.
	And yet when I say exactly the same situation is occurring with two boomboxes, you say, well, that's not a debate.
	But this is. But it's not.
	According to your proposition, there's no more choice in you and I conversing here than in two boomboxes facing each other.
	So this is not a debate, and neither is two boomboxes.
	I guess in that respect, I have to agree.
	I mean, there is no difference because when we debate, we are only, in my opinion, reacting from the previous experiences that we have.
	And I'm only talking in consequence to what you just said and you're doing the same as what I just said.
	But I just feel that even though it is predetermined, things do change.
	I mean, I potentially, I'm not saying I ever will, but if I could potentially change your mind No, no, no.
	You're using free will again.
	The mind does not change in a deterministic universe, right?
	If we got two boom boxes playing, Their minds do not change.
	It is the inexorable execution of physical laws that is occurring.
	There's no change of the mind.
	Like, one of the boomboxes doesn't say, well, that's an excellent point, Mr.
	Sanyo. Well, yes, Mr.
	Sony, that was a great point.
	I think I've changed my mind.
	No, we would not say that about two boomboxes, right?
	So, listen, I'm going to cut it here because, you know, I'm happy to talk to you again.
	Really, I am, right?
	But you can't use any terms that would not be valid to two boomboxes.
	Because then you're sneaking in free will into a determinist debate.
	So you can come and call back in, but I'm going to keep stopping you every time you use words that would not be applicable to two boomboxes, and we'll see if you can continue with the argument.
	So let me just, before you cut it short, I just would like to hear your insight on one thing.
	And that is, do you believe that someone can change...
	So you're saying that someone cannot change their mind in a predetermined situation.
	If determinism were true, one cannot change their mind.
	Is that what you're saying?
	No more than a boombox can change its mind.
	Because there's no mind. There's only the illusion of a mind.
	When I say change mind, I'm just saying preferences.
	So if one day I like the color red, and then somebody or something convinces me otherwise, I like the color blue.
	Okay, I'm going to cut you here because you just used the word convince, which is a free will term.
	So I'm going to just, you're going to have to think about this some more.
	Come back to me when you don't use a word.
	I mean, you can't use any words that wouldn't apply to two boomboxes, and clearly two boomboxes can't convince each other.
	So I'm going to cut you here.
	And feel free to call back in if you're not going to use any terms that are derived from free will.
	Because then you're just yelling at me that the sound doesn't exist, right?
	But no, I appreciate it. I mean, it's always a fascinating topic, but I have yet to hear a determinist who doesn't talk about free will or use free will terms.
	James, we have another caller?
	I appreciate your answer.
	Thank you. Thank you. We do indeed, sir.
	And the number for everybody to call to talk to, Stefan, is 347-633- 9636.
	That number again is 347-633-9636.
	Or if you are an international caller that wishes to call, you can use the Click2Talk feature on BlogTalk Radio.
	And sorry, just one more thing too.
	If you're calling from the Mir space station, I will give you James information.
	You can reverse the charges and just ping me privately.
	Yeah, because I will then, you know, bill Stefan for that.
	Oh, damn, never mind. It's all up.
	All right, so I had a, somebody emailed me a question that I can't remember floated around from somewhere to do with my last video on ethics.
	And it sort of went along the lines of the following.
	I couldn't find it just now, so I'll paraphrase and I apologize if I got it wrong.
	Somebody proposed and said, well, universally preferable behavior or my sort of theory of secular ethics If I put forward the proposition that says, people, if they want to murder, and they feel that they can get away with it, then they should murder.
	Somebody wrote and said that that could be universalized.
	And I think it's an interesting objection.
	I don't think it's valid, but it certainly is an interesting objection.
	It is to say, because UPB says that murder is immoral in a way, but the more technical way of saying it is that any theory which advocates murder as universally preferable behavior is automatically self-contradictory and fails the test of logic, let alone evidence, of course.
	And so, when somebody puts conditions on something and says, well, you can universalize the statement If somebody wants to kill and believes they can get away with it, then they should kill.
	But that fails the test of the very first word, which is universally, right?
	Because things have to be universal.
	Like somebody was saying, and I respond to this in the book, they say, could it not pass the test of UPB to say it's immoral to eat fish on Fridays?
	Well, no, because if you say Fridays, it's not universal anymore, because universal is without reference to time or place.
	Like, we can't say rocks...
	You can't have a scientific theory which says rocks fall down on Thursdays, and then they fall up on Wednesdays, right?
	We understand that that's not universal.
	That's just an arbitrary distinction.
	Like, in the same way, you can't say, logically, as a biologist, that...
	All cold-blooded animals are reptiles, except for this blue salamander, who's a mammal, right?
	It's like, well, the blue is not the definition of a reptile.
	It's cold-blooded and eggs for young and doesn't suckle its young and so on, right?
	And so the universal aspect of things are very important.
	It means you can't put arbitrary and artificial distinctions in your ethical propositions.
	So that's sort of the first thing that I would say.
	Like, what is the difference between someone who wants to kill and someone who doesn't want to kill?
	Does that really have anything to do with their nature as a human being and the rules that would apply to them?
	No, that's like saying this Scientific theory is true unless you don't want to believe in it and then it's false.
	Well, obviously that wouldn't make any sense.
	The person's beliefs or preferences don't have anything to do with the validity of the theory.
	So that would be, it's not universalizable in the way that people think that it is.
	And it's really, really important when you hear objections to UPB to look for these artificial distinctions.
	Right? Because UPB is very much against, excuse me, artificial distinctions.
	UPB says that the initiation of force is wrong And it doesn't matter if you put on a green costume with camouflage and netting and a hat and cool hand Luke sunglasses.
	It doesn't matter if you put on a costume, you're still not allowed to kill.
	Because a costume is not relevant to universality.
	Like you don't, you know, as biologists wouldn't say to a guy who's standing there in a black t-shirt, there's a human being.
	And then if I put on an army costume, he says, I don't know what the hell that thing is.
	What is that thing?
	He would say, well, that's a guy in a green costume, right?
	It doesn't change my nature as a human being.
	And so arbitrary distinctions in the realm of UPB need to be thrown out because it's universally, right?
	You don't get to say murder is right in Greece and wrong in Turkey, right?
	Because that's not universalized, right?
	Any more than a scientific theory would be like that.
	So that'd be the first thing that I would say.
	The second thing that I would say, and that's kind of obtuse and abstract, but the second thing that I would say that's really important when you look at objections like this is, you know, go back to the basics.
	Go back to the basics. Go back to that, which is the simplest.
	Which is, two guys in a room, right?
	So, if you say, well, I can universalize this statement which says, if I want to kill and I think I can get away with it, I should kill.
	Right? Just go back to two guys in a room.
	Can... Your ethical theory, can your theory of universally preferred behavior, even if we accept that it's universal, which in this case it's obviously not, if we accept that it's universal, can it be enacted by two guys in the same room?
	Well, this one of course can't be.
	Because let's say Bob suddenly is struck by the overwhelming desire to kill Doug, and Bob believes he can get away with killing Doug.
	Well, then he goes over and he starts strangling Doug.
	Now, Doug is filled with the overwhelming desire to defend himself by killing Bob, right?
	And so Doug wants to kill Bob.
	Doug wants to kill Bob.
	And he knows that he can get away with it because it's self-defense, right?
	So here we have two guys who are both trying to enact this universal principle of, I really want to kill this guy and I believe that I can get away with it, but they can't.
	Actually, both achieve this at the same time.
	They can both respect each other's property rights at the same time.
	They can both respect each other's person at the same time, but they can't both want to kill each other at the same time, even if they believe that they can get away with it.
	So, just for those who get hung up on these artificial distinctions, you know, look for the universal, look for arbitrary separations in time, or desire, or location, or circumstance, look for, because it's got to be universal, otherwise it's not ethics.
	And if you can't find them, but you still feel that something's wrong, you know, trust your instincts.
	It doesn't mean that something's wrong, but certainly trust your instincts if it feels wrong, and it certainly does feel wrong to say that if you want to kill, you believe you can get away with it, you should, and it feels wrong.
	Go back to two guys in one room and say, can they both achieve the moral ideal, the universally preferred behavior at the same time?
	And of course they can't. They can't both rape each other.
	They can't both, no matter how flexible they are, they can't both steal from each other at the same time.
	They can't both kill each other at the same time.
	And this is how you know that respect for persons and property are UPP compliant.
	So that would be some feedback.
	To provide to those who are, and look, there's nothing wrong with, you know, trying to find exceptions to this, but I think you need to, if you're going to find exceptions to UBB, you can't just pick, you know, behavior and say, well, I've disproven this behavior and therefore I've disproven the universal and the preferable aspect of it.
	It needs to be all three.
	There's a reason why there are three Words in the title of the book and in the central theory, not just one.
	And the last thing I'd say about that, we don't have any callers, right, James?
	I'm not talking over anybody hanging on.
	Is that right? Oh, I even put James to sleep.
	That's not good. No, no, no.
	Just for me a second here.
	Yes, we do have a caller.
	I'm glad you mentioned that. I was off in the land of...
	He went to his happy place, which is the mute button.
	Anyway, sorry. No, I was listening.
	I always listen. That's why you drew my attention here.
	The board is acting very slow.
	Here we go. Caller from a 908 area code.
	You are on the air.
	Hello. Hi, how are you?
	I'm great. How are you doing? I'm doing pretty good.
	I have a question regarding anarchy.
	Yes. And this is my question.
	How do you think an anarchist society will deal with things that affect the society as a whole, but are not in control of just one private organization or corporation?
	So something, for instance, like global warming or exploitation of people living in remote areas.
	Right, right. Or it's a national defense and pollution as a whole, right?
	Stuff that's very, very collective or generalized in nature, is that right?
	Correct. Right, right.
	Okay. Well, let me ask you, just so we have a benchmark, how do you believe or how do you perceive that a statist society deals with, say, global warming?
	Sorry to interrupt, I really do apologize.
	I just asked you for the response. And the reason that I'm asking this is, I don't believe that global warming is man-made because Jupiter is heating up as well and I don't believe there are a lot of SUVs out there beyond the asteroid belt.
	I think it's solar activity.
	I think in particular it's sunspots or whatever.
	So that's my, you know, I'm no expert but that's, you know, what I believe.
	And I've gone through so many environmental scares since I was a kid.
	I just, the burden of proof is very high for me these days.
	But let's say the global warming is real, and it's been floating around for, what, about 20 years it's been?
	Global climate change, I think they call it now.
	So it's been floating around for about 20 years.
	And what have you seen statist societies do about what they consider to be a huge imminent disaster?
	I think they've done much.
	But I don't think the statist solution is the best solution.
	I'm not trying to catch you.
	What have they done?
	I've seen a lot of talk.
	I haven't actually seen anything that's been done.
	There's this Cash for Clunkers program, but that's all nonsense.
	That's got nothing to do with global warming.
	That's just about propping up the car industry.
	That's actually really bad for the environment because it's pushing a lot of cars into landfills and causing a lot of energy and resources to be expended in the creation of new cars, which aren't economically necessary in the way that they would be without the subsidies.
	Because it's important to understand what you're comparing things to.
	Let's say that an anarchist society would do nothing about global warming, but then if you're comparing an anarchist society...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Can I give you what I'm comparing this against?
	Because I sort of got into anarchy from listening to Chomsky, which is kind of a non-central control of power, He's opposed to that, but he's on the other side of anarchy, which is he's like leftist and socialist.
	You are more like an anarcho-capitalist.
	So that's what I'm trying to compare.
	I could see that a society that is organized might be able to reach a consensus, but an anarcho-capitalist society, how would you go about doing that?
	Okay, and the reason that I was asking that question is that often, and if you debate this with someone, often the implicit assumption is that the status society handles this well, and therefore an anarchist society has to handle it well just to be equal, right? And so if people say, well, how would an anarchist society handle Global warming.
	I don't believe it's true, but let's say the answer was it would never be able to handle global warming.
	Then people would say, oh, well, then it's worse than statism.
	And it's like, no, no, no, it's not.
	Because statism has wars and huge debts and crushing economic business cycles and inflation and fiat currency and it retards the intelligence of the young and it turns the old into useless hangers-on and it bribes and it It has all of this immorality at its core, and that all gets taken away with an anarchist society, right?
	So if global warming is not handled in a free society, and it's not handled in a status society, then it's irrelevant as to which is better, because it's like, those are equal, but there's so much else that is better in an anarchist society.
	So I just wanted to point that out up front, because people say, well, how would justice be handled in a free society?
	Like there's any justice in a state of society, I mean, which is crazy, right?
	I mean, you can start a war that kills a million people, you get a pension, right?
	You steal a piece of pizza as your third time doing some crime, you go to jail for 20 years.
	There's no justice in a state of society.
	There is only bullying, bribery, and corruption.
	People say, well, how would charity be handled in a stateless society?
	As if a statist society through the welfare state is doing anything to help the poor.
	So I just wanted to point that out.
	But the short answer of if global warming were real and if it were man-made and if it had significantly negative consequences, well, what would happen is that if sea levels were going to rise as a result of man-made global warming, then all of the people...
	Who had property within a mile or so of a pretty flat beach would face the destruction of their property over time.
	And they would be insured, obviously, against that kind of thing.
	They would be insured against flooding, because there's not much point getting insurance when you live by the sea and not including flooding, right?
	So there would be, you know, hundreds of billions or billions, probably billions and billions of dollars that insurance companies would lose if global warming were real and were going to have this kind of negative effect, right?
	And so those companies would have billions of dollars minus one dollar to spend to solve the problem.
	And how would they do that? Well, they would probably fund research into cleaner burning fuels.
	They would probably fund research into alternative energy sources.
	Whatever it took, they would have billions of dollars because they'd know for sure, or to a large degree of certainty, that they were going to lose billions and billions of dollars if the sea level rose.
	So they would have all this money which they would spend to reduce The potential impact of that, because they would have a huge, massive, monstrous investment.
	It would be unimaginable, because beachfront property is so expensive, right?
	So it would be unimaginable how much money they would lose, and they would have all of that money to spend to reduce the emissions that they had proven were going to cause this massive property damage, right?
	And they're self-interested, because it's their own money, it's their own profit.
	They're self-interested in the way that governments just aren't.
	I'm sorry? I was just saying that I guess that's a really good point what you're saying, and I guess I would say that if they're successful at actually getting the money, it would mean that people actually care about global warming.
	If they don't get that much money...
	Sorry, sorry. I think you... Sorry to interrupt.
	I think you misunderstood what I said.
	What do you mean if they're successful in getting the money?
	Getting the money to...
	You were saying about that they would go and try to raise money For funding research, you know...
	Oh, no, no, no. Sorry, they wouldn't go to raise money.
	They wouldn't go to... I mean, maybe they would, but that wouldn't be the first place that they would probably look.
	I mean, every DRO that helped people to protect their property would have an entire research department that was dedicated to finding ways to reduce property damage, right?
	I mean, we're talking about a completely free society here, right?
	Every DRO that would insure people's persons and property would have an entire research department designed specifically to minimize those.
	They would have built into their business plans the kind of spending that they would need in order to minimize property damage.
	Now, if something huge like global warming came along or a killer asteroid or something, right?
	Then they would either have the money or they would borrow the money.
	I don't think they'd have to go out and raise the money because they would be a huge company if they're insuring billions and billions of dollars.
	So they would have the money or they would be able to raise the money because they would be able to show some return on investment.
	And clearly not having property destroyed across thousands of miles of coastline would be a pretty positive thing.
	It would be a pretty positive thing to achieve relative to having all that property destroyed.
	And so there would be a net positive for them to be able to do that.
	So the money would be pretty easily available because the alternative would be this massive destruction of property which nobody would want, right?
	The entire energies, and it wouldn't just be those DROs.
	It would be all the other DROs that deal with them.
	It would be the DROs that represented the roads.
	Because if the roads all get flooded and washed away, then the road DROs are out of luck, right?
	It would be the sewage DROs or whoever was running all of the infrastructure.
	There would be hundreds of billions of dollars available to spend from all of these DROs that protected all of the property and had all of these massive investments in factories and roads and sewage systems and whatever.
	National defense and canals and waterways and bridges and beaches.
	Condos, everything you could imagine.
	They would all band together and say, our entire investment is going to go underwater if we don't act now.
	And we have hundreds of billions of dollars of exposure here, so whatever we spend that's less than that is a net profit to us.
	And they would be able to spend that.
	This is just a real brief overview, but they would have Huge incentive.
	The incentive of hundreds of billions of dollars, right?
	When New Orleans went underwater, nobody in the government paid a goddamn penny.
	It wasn't their money that was on the line.
	It wasn't their jobs. It wasn't their profits that were on the line.
	And that's the difference, because in a free society, it's actually your money that's at risk if you fail to protect your customers.
	If the government fails to protect your It's, quote, customers, which is really just its tax livestock.
	Nobody pays. In fact, people, it's FUMU, right?
	Fudge up, move up. That's the general principle in the government, right?
	You're promoted past your level of competence, right?
	And so, that would be my sort of quick answer, that there would be a huge investment.
	What about my second scenario?
	What about, because, and this is very common in Latin America.
	Like, for instance, you have huge corporations that We're good to go and invest money in extracting goods from, let's say, the Amazon forest.
	In the Amazon forest, you have a lot of tribes there.
	They've been living there for such a long time.
	Now, how do you think those people will be able to protect themselves against exploitation?
	Well, how's it working for them now?
	How's it working for them under a status society?
	Oh, it's not working at all.
	Right, so in order to be better than statism, anarchism doesn't have to protect these people at all.
	I'm not saying it won't. But anarchism doesn't have to protect these people at all in order to be infinitely better than statism.
	But I just want to point that out.
	Because people then say, well, if anarchism can't protect these people, let's stay with statism, right?
	Like, don't cure my cancer if you can't guarantee me.
	I would have said that, but yeah, that's a fair point, yes.
	Yeah, okay, okay. So, let's say that there's no economic incentive, right?
	I mean, maybe there is, but let's just say there's no economic incentive in a free society to protect the pygmies or the remote people or whatever, right?
	Let's just say, I mean, to make the argument as tough as possible, right?
	Do you think, what percentage of the population in your country do you think cares about These indigenous people, these tribes?
	Well, I would say...
	I don't know.
	50% because they just happen to be there.
	Right. Okay, so a lot of people care about these people, right?
	Yeah, but a lot of them don't have any resources for anything.
	Yeah, no, I understand that.
	Here's the thing, right?
	In a statist society...
	This is really important. In a state of society, in order to get anything done in a democracy, let's say, you have to have more than 50% of the people who care about it, right?
	Right. Care about it enough to make it an issue, to vote for it, to make sure the politicians do it or whatever, right?
	To get anything done in a state of society, You have to have at least 50% of people...
	It wouldn't really happen if...
	You can see it right now, it doesn't really happen.
	Right, but I'm just saying, right?
	So, you can't do anything with less than 50% in the state of society.
	Correct. If a state of society is going to deal with this, it means that at least 50% of people really care about this issue.
	Now, if 50% of people really care about this issue to the point where they'll spend time and energy and money educating themselves and writing up pamphlets and creating websites and getting on talk shows and getting people motivated and getting the politicians and forcing them to do stuff and bullying them and getting the media involved, then you have 50% of people or at least a large percentage of people who are really invested in getting this To getting these people protected, these tribes protected.
	And so, in a free society, that's even more likely to be a solution for two reasons.
	One is that if somebody wants to go in and start tearing up the land where these people live, they won't have an army that's paid for by the taxpayers to back them up.
	They would have to pay for their own army, which I bet you, given these people's affinities with poison blow darts and stuff or whatever, right?
	Given that the logging company or whatever would have to supply its own army to oppress these people, it would very quickly become not profitable at all.
	Right? Because the army would be like...
	That's a very good point. You know what?
	That's a very good point because something like that just happened maybe a couple of months ago where the actual government tried to go in and get the people out or just tried to basically protect the corporations' land.
	And it ended up in a really, really bad fight between the...
	People who live there and the government, like the police basically, whatever.
	And, you know, it's a very good point of what you're saying.
	You know, if the corporation actually had to pay for it, you know, I would see that they wouldn't be willing to spend that much money and it wouldn't, you know, become profitable.
	That's a very good point, yeah. Right.
	I mean, the same thing happens up here with the atrocious treatment of the aboriginals or the Native Canadians up here and the Native Americans in the U.S. This is abominable what happens to these cultures.
	So, they would not have the government army to do everything that they needed to do, and so they would push these people back, but these people would still be around in the forest.
	They would know the Amazon jungle a lot better than the people coming in to work there.
	They would be able to sabotage, they would be able to use blow darts, they would be able to flatten their tires, they'd be able to put sugar in their gas tanks at night.
	Like, it would just be completely unsustainable from an economic standpoint if you didn't have the government waving its guns around.
	And so, If in a state of society you need 50% of people plus a subsidized military to get anything done, sorry, to protect people you need at least 50% of people, then it means in a free society at least 50% of people are going to care, right?
	If it's going to be compared to a state of society.
	So they're going to buy up land if they want.
	They're going to turn it into a park.
	Because people do a lot of stuff that's not economically productive just for the sake of, you know, they like doing it, right?
	So they will buy up the land or at the very least...
	Because these companies would not have the statist army as free hitmen, violence is so unbelievably expensive.
	This is what people don't understand.
	I don't mean you, but people just don't get this.
	Violence is incredibly expensive economically.
	And the only way that violence can be sustained is if you have Free hitmen paid for by other people.
	Like we talked about this in terms of slavery I think a week or two ago.
	Slavery, if you have to go out and catch your own slaves and you have other people offering to give them wages somewhere else and to ship them out under the dead of night because they're cheaper than whatever, right?
	You can't conceivably sustain slavery unless you have government hitmen going out and dragging your slaves back.
	Unless the outsourcing of the costs of enforcement are achieved.
	Externalized as they say in economic circles.
	Slave owning is completely non-viable in the absence of the state picking up the tab for enforcing it.
	Dealing with these tribes is completely unsustainable.
	Violence of any kind, the initiation of force is unbelievably expensive and that's why if we can get rid of the state, we get rid of that bucket of blood that people externalize their costs into and the amount of violence in society would diminish in ways that we couldn't even imagine but would be like night and day compared to what we have now.
	Okay, excellent.
	Alright, was that useful stuff?
	I hope that that was helpful.
	Yeah, I mean, those are really good points.
	I'm kind of getting into anarchy.
	I just started reading about it maybe a few months ago, but I kind of started from the leftist point of view.
	I didn't know that anarcho-capitalists existed until maybe a couple of months ago.
	I haven't reached any conclusions yet, but I can definitely see that centralized power is not the solution for any kind of problem.
	It just creates more and more problems.
	In Latin America, I've seen that here, and it just doesn't work.
	So that's where I'm coming from.
	I mean, I have, not that I'm sure he cares, but I have an enormous amount of respect for Chomsky, And I've read a number of his books in his analysis of US foreign policy.
	I mean, I think that it's just...
	I mean, he is UPB all the way, baby.
	He is like universalized ethics, right?
	So he's just... One that pops into my head is that he wrote and said, if America...
	If the American government is justified in bombing or napalming Colombian drug fields, right?
	Poppy fields or whatever that are used in production of drugs, Because those drugs cause harm to American citizens, then surely every country around the world that receives imports of American cigarettes is perfectly justified in bombing the tobacco fields in the South because those crops are harming those country citizens, right? And I think that's really, really important.
	To understand that when you reverse those kinds of things and you understand just how crazy the ethics are, if you take the premises of statism and are put into this other context, and he is a complete genius,
	in my opinion, at, I mean, many things, but of course, at taking these moral principles and reversing them and saying, well, if it wouldn't be just for other countries to bomb American crops that are dangerous to them, Then why, oh why, is it moral for the American government to do it?
	And all of that kind of stuff is, you know, it really does help dislodge people's cultural prejudices when it comes to understanding the, quote, ethics that their own governments claim.
	I think he's brilliant with that stuff.
	I mean, you know, what can I say?
	He's pretty harsh on anarcho-capitalism, but I think he just has to understand.
	The notion of the non-initiational violence as a principle.
	Now, what's interesting is that you both reach different conclusions, which is you are for private property and he's against private property, which is very interesting.
	You both begin from the same principle but reach different conclusions.
	I haven't worked out the logic, so I don't know who's wrong, who's right.
	That's what I'm going through right now.
	It's very interesting. It just gives you hope that there's something out there that can help build a better society than we have right now.
	I've put it out before and I'll put it out again.
	I would love, love, love to get a competent Anarcho-socialist or anarcho-communist on this show to educate me about these other forms of anarchism.
	I can't conceive of how they could work but that could just be a complete failure of imagination on my part and I would be completely happy and you know put this out there to anyone listening or or anyone you know anarcho-syndicalist, anarcho-socialist,
	anarcho-communist and Anarcho commune, whatever it is, people throwing themselves together in one hippie flesh pile, whatever it is that you're down with as far as anarchism goes, I am very, very curious, honestly, openly, genuinely curious about the methodologies and the ethics and the properties of these systems.
	I've read some and I just can't make head or tail of it.
	It seems always to me to descend into...
	Arguments for metaphors, you know, peace, love and brotherhood and all that and I can't actually I look for a lot more rubber on the road when it comes to theories and practice.
	So if you are...
	The one thing that I've heard over and over again is that, you know, the principle is that, you know, initiation of forces is wrong, right?
	So if you have a corporation who can...
	I mean, I'm not saying that I will give the left I'm not the best defender of them because I just started looking into that.
	I don't know all the ins and outs, but what I've heard a lot is that corporations usually have the upper hand when it comes to negotiations.
	They tend to use coercive force against employees.
	To be precise, it's not the corporations who do it.
	The corporations never do it.
	It's not the corporations who do it, as we talked about with the Amazon rainforest and these tribes.
	What they do is they call their friends in the government to do it.
	And I think that's what's missing from this analysis.
	Not your analysis, but the analysis of the lessons.
	It's like, I don't know any corporation in America that has its own army.
	The government wouldn't allow it.
	They don't have their own police force.
	They have a couple of portly security guards, but that's not anyone's threat to anyone.
	What I always read about with labor conflicts is that the National Guard is called out, the army is called out, the police is called out, people get arrested.
	It's not the corporations that are paying for it.
	It's the state. And tragically, it's actually the workers who probably have legitimate complaints who are being taxed to pay for their own oppression.
	And I think to focus on the corporations when it's actually the government that is the muscle is...
	I don't think it's just not realistic.
	It's just not what is actually happening.
	It's always, always the government that comes in with the guns.
	And I think that's what they maybe miss.
	Or they say, well...
	If the corporations had to pay for it themselves, it would still happen.
	That's the basic problem with some of the lefty libertarian or the left anarchy stuff.
	They say, well, maybe it's because they've just, I don't know, seen too many nonsense propaganda films that come out of Hollywood with evil corporations doing X, Y, and Z, you know, as in Leandry or something, right?
	But no, if corporations had to pay for violence themselves...
	It would never happen, and we know that it would never happen, because they never do pay for it themselves.
	They always call the state in.
	They always call the state in.
	Maybe when they say exploitation, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are, you know, only for late, you know, but it means that they just entertain their, you know, their employees, just because the employee doesn't, didn't have enough resources to begin with, you know, he was a child to educate himself,
	you know, so he doesn't have any His negotiation strength is not as much as a large corporation with lawyers and people who know all the ins and outs of doing business.
	So from that perspective, it's not necessarily that they have slaves, but they can easily manipulate wage.
	Now, sorry, do you mean an individual corporation?
	Because an individual corporation can always choose to underpay people, right?
	I mean, I've been an evil capitalist, and I've run a team of many programmers, and if I, you know, I could easily say to them next year, I'm going to cut your wage in half, right?
	And what would they do? Well, you know, I mean, that's going half as extreme, you know, but if you don't give them a raise, Right, so let's say I don't give them a raise, what are they going to do?
	Well, if they don't know how the market is, they just know how to program and that's all they do, they might just accept it.
	Or they might just not even notice it.
	They might just not raise their salary for years.
	Sorry, let me just...
	I'm going to just talk from experience.
	Have you been a manager and determined people's salaries?
	I have been involved, yes.
	Okay, so have you ever tried to tell people you're not getting a raise this year?
	No. No, not really.
	Well, what do you think would happen if you did say to them you're not getting a raise this year?
	I've been part of the process.
	I have not been the decider.
	You know, but I've seen people, you know, to try to put the wage down as much as possible, you know, and just give, like basically they gave me a budget and they told me, you know what, this is This is your budget, go find somebody, you know, that is willing to work for that.
	Right, sorry, but let me sort of explain again, I can't...
	Sorry, let me just explain something about that though, again, and we're talking about a free society, and I know that you don't live exactly in a free market, but...
	Correct. If I'm going to hire a programmer, Who doesn't know anything about his worth, who doesn't know what the market rate is, who isn't motivated to try and figure out what he's worth, who doesn't ever talk to other people in the field and say, well, you know, hey, you're a friend of mine, how much are you making?
	Or who doesn't go online and say, what is the average programmer's salary in this neighborhood for my years of experience, right?
	Then what you've hired is a dumb programmer.
	What you've hired is a programmer who just doesn't think about it.
	And so you're not going to get very good programming.
	You know, a place that I worked at once, the programmers were really good, and I replaced the boss who'd been pretty tyrannical.
	And they pretty much, they very quickly figured out that I don't exactly rule by fear, right?
	But that I was very proactive and their productivity went through the roof.
	They were just able to cut down their delivery times by over half.
	I mean, they just did amazing things.
	But at the same time as that liberation of creativity occurred, came them also shaking themselves out of their daze and saying, holy crap, I'm underpaid by like 15% relative to the market.
	And they all began talking amongst them.
	I mean, employees all talk to each other.
	I mean, everything is horizontal in most organizations.
	And so they came with really heavy wage demands, right?
	And I had to take it to the executive board and I had to say, well, here's the proof, right?
	I went and ordered the studies and said, here's what the average salary is.
	This is an objective third party.
	We have been underpaying.
	And I said, well, we don't want to pay 15% more.
	And it's like, but you have doubled the productivity, right?
	And I could replace these guys with people who would accept less, but then we're going back to even less because they all knew the code and they became very important.
	So we're actually going to end up like, you just have to make the case.
	Now, some people in business aren't very good at making the case for more money.
	Like they say, we want the best and brightest, but we want to pay average.
	In other words, we want them bright but clueless, right?
	I mean, that's just a contradiction.
	If you're going to get people who are energetic and bright and ambitious, then they're going to know their own worth and they're going to negotiate.
	I have been given those kinds of requirements.
	Yeah, yeah. Hire the best person and pay them in the bottom 10%.
	It's like, you just gave me an impossible.
	You said, go north and south at the same time, right?
	Now, some bosses are pretty stupid as well, right?
	Not everybody who's at the executive level understands economics, right?
	A lot of them are kind of dumb.
	And they will say, well, we want to hold down wages because that adds to our immediate profit.
	And it's just up to other people in the organization to make the case that it doesn't work that way or it doesn't work that way for very long.
	And that's just something that if companies don't figure that out, then the companies that do figure that out will simply kick them in the ass pretty quickly.
	And economics will take care of that in the long run.
	Because if you're consistently underpaying people, it's because you're undercharging for your products.
	Now, if you're overcharging for your products, but you're underpaying your people, then you're providing very expensive products...
	With a dumb workforce.
	And that's not going to last in the long run.
	Because somebody who pays more will be able to produce cheaper products for less money because they'll raise wages by 15% and drop the product's price by 40% because they'll get it done in half the time or whatever, right?
	So, economics will take care of that in the long run, except in the case where you have government monopolies, you have trade restrictions, you have import restrictions, you have taxes on competition.
	What is it in Peru? It takes 1800 pages and two years to open a little factory?
	I mean, That's crazy, and of course that's going to harm the workers, having that higher barrier to entry to come in and compete.
	Oh, anything which diminishes competition for workers is really bad for the working class, for the workers.
	So you want to have wide open competition so that everybody's opening factories and trying to bid up as much as possible and hire the best people, and there's a real competition for workers' wages.
	That's the only way that I know of to sustainably secure High wages for people is to have as much competition as possible, to have no restrictions on imports, to have no restrictions on starting a business, to have no restrictions on every reasonable thing in business, because that's going to draw a lot of people into the hiring business, which is going to immediately raise the demand for workers and make sure they get paid more.
	When you have a lot of restrictions on, say, starting a business, Then what happens is people don't start businesses and those people who already have businesses can underpay their workers because there's not a lot of new businesses starting who are going to compete up or bid up the wages.
	So loosening the restrictions on people is the very best thing that you can do to raise the wages of workers.
	And unfortunately, people confuse this and say, well, if things were really free, then the workers would be screwed.
	And it's the complete opposite is true.
	The only way to make sure the workers aren't screwed is to have as much competition for the workers as possible.
	And that's what you see in the IT field.
	Right, yes. I can see that.
	By the way, and this is going off topic, but I just started reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrug.
	And I must say, it's a very intense novel.
	It is. Have you read anything else of hers?
	I'm sorry? Have you read anything else?
	Is that your first book of hers?
	This is my first book.
	I heard about her...
	I don't know if it was on your blogs or in your videos, somewhere around your videos I heard about Rand, or maybe in one of your debates, I'm not sure.
	And I just started looking into it, and that's kind of how I got into...
	Well, I know she doesn't really represent anarchism.
	I think she's more... She's a pro-police and things like that, but she has a lot of these free market...
	Yeah, she's an anarchist in theory, but a minarchist in practice.
	No, seriously, because the non-initiation of the use of force is a central aspect of her philosophy, but she then breaks it at various points in her philosophy.
	I don't want to give anything away in the book, because it's a riveting read, and you should absolutely read it, in my opinion.
	I prefer The Fountainhead, but that Shrugged is a great read.
	But she absolutely, her principles lead directly to anarchism, but she, for various reasons, didn't make it to anarchism, which, you know, hey, imperfection is the nature of the beast when it comes to being anybody in this world, right?
	Yep, definitely. Well, Steph, thank you for your time.
	And I'll keep reading, and if I find any good arguments for Anarcho-socialism?
	I'll give you a call. I really appreciate that.
	And if you know anyone, if you come across anyone who you think is really good, please do send them an invite to drop by either this show or we can do a debate in another format.
	I burn with curiosity to find out more about the anarchism of a flavor that I don't understand at all.
	But I'm certainly willing to explore.
	I'd love to debate Chomsky, but I don't think I'm exactly on his list of to-dos, right?
	At least not yet. I've got a ways to go.
	Of course, I've only been doing this for a little over two years, full-time, so it's still very early days when it comes to what it is that I'm doing here.
	Maybe at some point, if I can race the Grim Reaper to him, we could have a conversation.
	I certainly would be thrilled to speak with him and have an enormous amount.
	But I'm not holding my breath as of next week, so we'll see.
	On the other hand, if I become an anarcho-capitalist, I'll definitely let you know.
	If that happens, definitely you would have had a huge influence on it.
	because even you are the one who basically taught me about it and kind of pointed out a couple of books, you know, like Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead, I guess, now.
	And I'll let you know how it goes.
	And I must say it was a real, real pleasure to chat with you as it is for all of my listeners.
	And I just wanted to say this is Absolutely a high point of my week to have these conversations with you.
	I look forward to it all week, my Sunday's rag, until I can come on the air and speak to you about it.
	So thank you so much for giving me the trust and the openness to converse about this sort of stuff.
	Drop by freedomainradio.com for anything that you want in the realm of philosophy.
	Thank you so much for keeping this show going with your donations and support.
	And I will talk to you with the main munificent Jan Heldfeld next week.
	for a debate on anarchism versus minarchism and thank you so much.

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