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Aug. 31, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
14:06
1446 Post Debate Review - Anarchism Versis Minarchism

Some thoughts I had on my debate with Jan Helfeld.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
I hope you're doing very well. This is a little sort of post-game roundup to the debate that I had with Jan Helfeld this last Sunday, August the 30th, on minarchism versus anarchism.
We didn't get to our closing statements for a variety of reasons, and so I just wanted to throw a few of my last thoughts out to sort of close up things.
The first thing that I sort of wanted to mention was, to me, it was disappointing to get scare stories.
You know, well, under anarchism, you know, pirates would hijack battleships and shoot mermaids at children's heads or something like that.
It just, to me, started to become kind of ludicrous.
Actually, it started off that way.
But these kind of scare stories are not arguments.
I think it's really, really important to understand that.
Like, if you're a libertarian or an objectivist and you've ever said, why, we should get rid of the welfare state...
What you hear back is, oh, poor people would die in the streets and all that, right?
It's scare stories. And you say, oh, well, Social Security we shouldn't have.
Well, so you want old people to not get medical care and to die in the street.
Those are just scare stories, right?
I mean, there's not a reasoned argument with reference to evidence from first principles, logistically worked out, and so on.
It's not a reasoned argument.
It's just a scare story. And if you are a libertarian or objectivist, You have experienced an enormous number of these scare stories when you try to talk to people about, you know, the free market or private schools or whatever.
And so, since this is where Jan is coming from, it seems...
It seems odd to me that somebody who's been on the receiving end of so many scare stories would immediately turn around and fire off scare stories at somebody else.
Because we all know how annoying it is to be on the receiving end of those things.
And... So we shouldn't...
I don't think we should inflict scare stories on others.
My personal opinion.
And... I think that the scare stories arise from a limitation of imagination, which is to say, thinking which does not go down the guardrails or the guide rails of first principles all the way through with reason and evidence, because that pushes us past the comfort zone many, many times. When we follow reason through logical conclusions, it makes us uncomfortable.
I certainly know that the idea of a stateless society It made me extraordinarily uncomfortable for many years.
It was incomprehensible, and it was only after I just continued to work on first principles that it just became inescapable that this was the only moral and logical way for society to be organized.
Still open to counter-arguments.
This is my reasoning.
And when you don't have those first principles just guiding you, you know, like a monorail, when you don't have those first principles, when you hit something that just freaks you out, like no government, and you just get these images of, you know, Mohawks and piercings and, I don't know, shooting cats out of cannons and stuff, Then you'll stop, right?
But first principles just keep you going past all of that emotional stuff and then you just you just keep working on it, right?
I mean, that's what first principles before if we could feel our way to the truth alone We wouldn't need philosophy at all.
We just need I don't know ecstasy or something So I would say that When a libertarian or objectivist says, well, I'm willing to go, you know, minimal state, but, you know, police, law courts, military, prisons, or whatever, maybe prisons are optional, but that I can't do.
To an advocate of the state of the society, that is exactly the same as when you, as a libertarian or objectivist, say to someone, let's get rid of the welfare state, and say, oh, you can't, because all these terrible things would happen.
It's exactly the same reaction, and fundamentally, it's exactly the same reason.
We understand that your average Republican or Democrat can't really conceive of how the poor can be much better taken care of in a free society, or how children could be that much more magnificently educated.
Not that they're all magnificently educated now, but could be that much more magnificently educated in a free society.
So, your average citizen can't imagine how these things could occur, and therefore just says, well, disaster scenarios, it would be bad, and so on.
But the same thing to me is true of libertarians and rejectivists, right?
So where we have the welfare state for your average citizen or old age security or whatever, pensions, public education, those people say that's all sacrosanct, right?
You can't touch that because if you do, really bad things will happen.
Well, but you take that structure.
If we get rid of it, terrible things will happen, and you move it over to, you know, police, military, law courts, and so on, you get exactly the same reaction from libertarians, objectivists, quite commonly, that you do from the average citizen with regards to other things.
It's really, really important to understand that.
Just because you can't figure out how peaceful interactions can solve problems doesn't mean that peaceful interactions can't solve problems, right?
I think that's really, really important, and that's why I resisted towards the end of the debate The focus on specifics.
Specifics in terms of understanding what virtue looks like in terms of social organization.
Specifics are the devil's anal OCD. And what I mean by that is...
If you're sort of thinking of dismantling central planning in Russia in 1989 or whatever, you're dismantling Soviet planning.
Well, what they're used to saying is, well, we're going to have, you know, 10,000 loaves of bread in each store this time next year because it's centrally planned, right?
So they know.
And if you say, well, let's get rid of central planning, what you're saying is voluntary interactions will provide the bread in an appropriate manner.
And it's moral, right?
Because you're not initiating force to control supply distribution prices and so on.
And so if you're sort of gung-ho on privatizing Soviet bread distribution and someone comes along and says, well, how many loaves of bread will there be in the stores in five years?
You can't answer that question.
And then when someone says, well, you can't answer that question and therefore we shouldn't privatize bread distribution, that obviously would make no sense, right?
It's illogical. Because the real answer is, nobody knows.
Nobody knows except for one particular principle, and that principle is, in five years you can be sure, if it's a free market, that the amount of bread in stores will be highly appropriate, well and finely tuned to the needs of the population, their ability to pay, their preference for bread versus other things, and so on. Like, if they all go Atkins on your ass, then you come up with, I don't know, PETA or whatever that doesn't have carbs.
Right? So, that's the answer.
That's why I kept saying, we don't know what weapons the defense DROs will have in the future.
We do know that those weapons will be appropriate to the risks in the world and appropriate to what their customers are willing to pay for and appropriate to the assurance The appearances of security towards their customers, i.e., we're not going to use these to create a new state that those customers will inevitably and naturally desire and appropriate to the amount of investment that's available, like, it will be appropriate to so many factors that would be dictator-dominated by free interactions that you can't say in the future.
I put out some theories or whatever, but you simply can't say.
What you can say is that it's a moral to initiate the use of force, and that, consistently applied, means a state of society.
And then when you try to work out the details, you're really arguing in what crops are raised in northern Gondor.
The future is a fictional place, which doesn't mean principles don't apply, but it means that it's like resisting getting rid of slavery, because by saying, well, I have 200 slaves, how will each of them get a job, and where will they work, and what will they earn in two years' time?
It's like, I don't know. I don't know, but slavery is wrong.
So I don't know what the future society is going to look like with the consistent application of the non-aggression principle.
But I do know that the initiation of violence is hugely immoral.
So I just sort of wanted to point those things out.
And just to sort of say, I mean, I did find the debate quite exciting, a little frustrating, I'm sure that Jan did as well.
But I think that it's really, really important to just keep going back to first principles because What it kind of comes down to, I think, for a lot of libertarians and objectivists, when faced with the concept of a state and a society, or the idea, is there is this, I think, this failure of imagination and curiosity.
Like, wow, I wonder how it could work, right?
Like, you keep inviting people. Pretend you're a salesman from the defense DRO trying to sell, and you're coming to all these objections.
How would you overcome them? Because that's a much better place to start when it comes to solving problems.
As opposed to just roadblock, roadblock, fear story, roadblock, fear-mongering roadblock, which...
I don't know, maybe emotionally satisfying at some level, but doesn't really serve to get you curious and into the other person's shoes to really understand where they're coming from.
I think there was an argument from effect, which I've always sort of resisted when it comes to social organization.
Arguments from effect are totally fine when you're planning to drive somewhere.
I want to go north, so...
Let's go north, right? That's not a moral decision.
But when we're talking about uses of violence, coercion, enslavement in terms of imprisoning and armies and police and weaponry and nuclear bombs and aircraft carriers, this is all around bloodshed, the initiation of violence, war, genocide, torture.
These are the mechanisms that are at work when we start talking about the initiation of force.
And so those are not arguments that...
Those are not situations that lend themselves to an argument from effect.
Because the argument from effect is, well, if we do this, then this.
First of all, it's very difficult to predict in the future, if not impossible, what exactly is going to happen.
And secondly...
The argument from effect is sort of like, if I could get away with this crime and I wanted to do it, I would do it.
Because that would be an argument from effect.
But if you're talking about a crime, then you're talking about morality, something which is inflicted on someone else, usually violently.
So we have questions of ethics.
This is not something that you say, I'm not a utilitarian.
Just look after the fact and say, well, you know, this worked out really well, so it's a good thing, right?
Because I think the argument, Jan's argument for sure, and other arguers have said that the state is necessary because it produces the best society.
A small government, protection of property rights, this and that, it produces the best society.
But there is no such thing as society.
There are individuals. The current system, right?
If you go to, I don't know, Bill Clinton or George Bush and you say, how do you like the U.S. government?
They'd say, it's absolutely perfect.
Why? Because they got all the power they could drink and all the gold they could eat, right?
I mean, they got millions and millions of dollars.
The name of the history books they had, I mean, obviously they didn't quit, even though obviously it's a stressful job, I imagine.
So they liked, they campaigned hard to get this job, they liked the job, so they would say that system works really, really well.
If you are looking at somebody who's drawing out, as most retirees are, four or five times more than what he or she paid into, Social Security.
It's a pretty good system, right?
If you're talking to the mafia, they really like the war on drugs because it keeps the product illegal, which allows them to trade it at great profit.
And you could sort of go on and on. Each individual has a preference for a particular form of social organization, right?
Pimps like the fact that prostitution is illegal because it has to stay under the table and they get to beat up their poor prostitutes.
Lots of different people have lots of different views.
Now, Jan says, well, I like a small government which protects this and does that and has still the law courts and the prisons, I think, and the military.
I like that. But that's very different from saying it produces the best society for everyone.
So his particular preference can't translate into a universal preference.
Because as soon as we say to somebody, the government you prefer is the government that should be imposed on everyone else, It's not an argument to say this government produces the best society.
Because everybody has their own view of what the best society is for their particular preferences.
And since most human beings remain currently in a state of amoral resource acquisition and maximization, they're just going to use it as a, you know, a club to gain what they can and get rid of what they like.
Bad farmers love farm subsidies.
That's a perfect state solution to them.
How is Jan or anyone else going to say to these people, that's a bad system?
Like, no, it's a great system to me.
How are you going to talk to George Bush Shrub, shrubby head, and say, it's a bad system.
He's going to be like, it was a great system for me, because otherwise I'd be like a used car salesman drinking or something, and a million Iraqis would still be alive.
So I think it's really, really important that you don't go with the hedonist or the utilitarian or the sort of, quote, pragmatic argument and say, well, I like this form of government because it produces the best society.
Well, you know, what is your best society isn't necessarily the bad guy's best society.
And if you're going to surrender principle and say it's about what I think is best, then you've really surrendered the essential thing, the essential thing, which is the opposition to violence, which is a hallmark of every civilized thinker in the long run.
I hope this has been helpful.
Thank you so much. I'd like to thank again James for hosting.
And again, sorry about the technical issues.
I can't remember if I mentioned this at the beginning now, but I'm really, really sorry that we had so many technical problems.
We did rehearse. We did get together.
But unfortunately, the tech gremlins just went completely haywire.
And Jan's microphone was picking up his headset.
Sorry, he had his speakers on. We just Couldn't fix it.
So I do apologize for the technical issues.
We will do our absolute best to avoid such a debacle.
And I'm sorry that it was a struggle to understand some of the things that were being said.
I did work, and another listener who helped me, worked very hard to try and improve the quality of the audio.
And believe it or not, we actually made some progress.
But I am very, very sorry.
For the technical issues, thank you for your patience as we work these things out.
This was the first time we tried a live Max Headroom x2 style debate.
So thank you so much for those who tuned in.
I promise the next one will look and sound a whole lot better.
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