All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 26, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:25:24
1465 Debate With An Objectivist

Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio debates an Objectivist on the Peter Mac Show.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The antidote to tyranny is knowledge and And acting with courage to defend our most basic rights, life, liberty, and property.
Dedicated to the cause of freedom for everyone.
Here's Peter Mack.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
Thanks for tuning in here to Liberty News Radio and the Peter Mack Show.
I'm Peter Mack, the host tonight, and this is going to be a really good show.
I have two gentlemen on here to debate basically the question, what is the proper size of government in a free society?
We have Mr.
Ted Potts on. He represents the objectivist side.
Ted has owned and managed car dealerships for 25 years here in the Kansas City area.
He trades futures. He supports the Ayn Rand Institute, and he has studied philosophy, including objectivism, for some 20 years.
Now, if you're not familiar with objectivism, I'll give you a couple websites to go to.
One is the aynrand.org website.
Objectivism is the philosophy of Ayn Rand, essentially.
Ayn Rand is A-Y-N, R-A-N-D dot org.
And then their local organization, if you will, is the Kansas City Objectivist Group here, and that website is KCObjectivist dot org.
KCObjectivist dot org.
On the other side, we have Stefan Molyneux.
He's been on the show before.
He is the host of Freedom Main Radio, and he produces podcasts basically on a daily basis, and those are available, of course, at freedomainradio.com.
You can also put his name into YouTube and see videos of him espousing his philosophy.
And so I want to thank both you gentlemen for taking time to come on the show tonight.
Saturday night is perhaps not the best night to do a debate.
It's easy to find other things to do, more entertaining things, so I really appreciate both of you coming on the show tonight.
I don't really have any particular format in mind.
I'll strive to make sure each one of you gets to have equal time and say everything you need to say and just kind of have to steer us in and out of commercials.
So, with that said, Ted, maybe if you could go ahead and just acknowledge that you're here and if you just want to go ahead and start with your position, that would be good.
Hi, Peter. First, thanks for having me on the show.
Like you mentioned, I'm an objectivist, but I do believe that there is a proper form of government, and that the purpose of government is to protect individual rights.
I think that from the Civil War until about 1913, that the United States had fairly close to perfect government.
It wasn't perfect, but it was far better than what we have now or what we had before then.
I truly believe that we do need a government of some kind in order to protect individual rights.
Otherwise, we would just have more engaged with different police departments, different court systems, different defense systems, and individuals would not have their rights to protect the problem.
Okay. Do you want to, Ted, by chance, expound a little bit, obviously you laid out some of it there, but expound a little more on the objectivist position on rights, because that may not be clear for everybody listening tonight.
Different people may have different ideas of what you mean by individual rights, so maybe it would help a little bit to just expound on that, if you would.
Sure. Well, objectivists follow That's what Ayn Rand wrote, believing that she laid it out logically more clearly than anyone else.
And she believes that, and I believe, that humans are different than other animals and that the distinction that makes us able to survive and thrive is our ability to reason.
The morality that fits with our ability to reason, that allows us to act on our reason, is a rational self-interest, that we should act according to what's good for ourselves and our family,
and that any kind of altruistic action, true self-sacrifice, where we Do things that are against our interests and against the interests of our families for the benefit of other people.
Those actions are not good.
And the purpose of government is to allow people to act in their self interest.
And an idea that she had is that humans should be able to There's really nothing that should prevent them from acting in their self-interest.
And anything that does prevent them from doing that is, by definition, not good.
Right. Okay.
Stefan, do you want to respond to that?
Or, Ted, does that sufficiently sum up at least your opening, if you will?
Yeah, I think Stefan and I are going to agree in a lot of areas, and I'll wait to hear from him.
Sure. We're both, I'm assuming, trying to figure out the best way to detect individuals.
Right. So go ahead, Stefan, if you will, then.
Sure, thank you and I certainly do appreciate the fine gentleman taking the time out of his evening and I also wanted to express what is for me a very deep appreciation for objectivism.
I definitely started as an objectivist and either I have gotten further away from the truth through the philosophy that I have pursued since then Or I have taken the principles and applied them more consistently.
Hopefully we will find out one way or the other, but that having been said, objectivism is, I mean to me, Rand is a stone genius work of incredible philosophical power and depth.
I think a few missing components, which I'm sure would be the case with any great thinker.
We can't get everything right.
So I just wanted to start off by saying that I think we will agree on far more.
Then we disagree.
The problem that I have with statism and objectivism, while it aims for a minimal state designed to be a third party protector of the right of self-defense, of the right to protect, protecting property rights, protecting the right of liberty and trade and free speech and congregation and so on.
The problem I have with the objectivist position is that it is founded On the non-initiation of force, and I have a huge respect for two objectivist positions, property rights and the non-initiation of force.
And the problem I have is that I cannot for the life of me conceive of a state, a government, which is a monopoly on the initiation of force, which takes two fundamental forms in the state, which is the power of taxation, number one, and number two is the power to prevent competition in the realm of police or national defense or courts or prisons or whatever.
And so if the non-initiation of force is foundational to objectivism, I simply, and it could be a limitation of my intelligence or imagination, but I cannot for the life of me understand how a state can exist within a society, Without violating the non-aggression principle, the non-initiation of force, and without violating other people's property rights, either through taxation or through the interference of their rights to trade and compete with the services that the government provides.
And I stick with principle, of course, and I'm sure that objectivists are of the same mind.
And if a state can be conceived of that does not violate Either property or the non-initiation of force, I'm completely on board.
I haven't been able to figure it out, but I'm absolutely wide open to ideas.
Well, I think that first, objectivists don't believe that the philosophy is based on the non-initiation of force, while we're certainly against the initiation of physical force.
The philosophy begins with Man is a rational animal, and because he's a rational animal, he needs to be free to act on his own judgment, and work for his own benefit, and keep our people at work with the courts, I'm sure we agree.
But the beginning is not the lack of initiation of court.
And secondly, objectives don't believe in taxation.
And to the extent we've put up with it for the crime being and focus on other issues, it's not that we agree with it.
It's just that that's not the first thing that has to change.
Taxation, for example, for national defense, police, court, Okay, Ted, sorry to interrupt you there.
We're running into our first break.
That's what the music tells us.
So hold on to that thought, Ted, and we'll let you elaborate on that as soon as we get back, as long as needed.
So stay with us, folks.
You're listening to The Peter Mack Show.
If you want to listen to this on the phone, you can do so by calling 801-769-2970.
Of course, that's not a free call.
Thank you. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we're back here on the Peter Mack Show, and we're glad you're tuning in here to Liberty News Radio.
We have Stefan Molyneux and Ted Potts on the line with me, and they're discussing the proper role of the proper size of government.
And Ted, you were talking about objectivism not beginning with, if I understood you, the principle of non-initiation of force, but rather the rational nature of man.
If you want to just maybe reiterate that a little bit and then carry forward.
Yeah, the other point I wanted to bring up was that objectivists don't believe that government should initiate a physical force that should retaliate against a physical force in an attempt to protect its citizens' individual rights.
Those are the two things that Stephon mentioned that I just wanted to clear up.
We do believe that there should be a government, a proper government, and its power should be delineated And limited by a Constitution.
And the idea that the Founding Fathers had was wonderful.
It just wasn't quite...
The Constitution itself just wasn't quite tight enough.
And it would be fairly easy to fix a couple of mistakes that we believe that they made.
And in spite of those mistakes, they still achieve the greatest country in the history of Sorry about that.
You can hear me? Yes, we can.
Okay. Sorry about that.
So if I understand this correctly, Ted, and I just want to make sure that I do, this is a contradiction that I can't unravel in my mind, but I'm way open to hearing it, how it can be unraveled.
So if the government does not initiate the use of force, and of course there really is no such thing as the government in reality, there's just a bunch of people, right?
And those people will have rights.
So the people who are in the government, I'm not going to have any different rights or abilities from anyone else in the society, right?
So if I see you getting, I don't know, jumped by a mugger, then I can stop the mugger because I can, you know, self-defense is a right which can also be in the third person.
So is it fair to say then that the people in the government will not have any different rights or properties or abilities than anybody else in society?
Well, they wouldn't have different rights than the political system.
They're just not different possibilities.
The citizens would have delegated their rights to the cons of the political court to the government.
Not saying that citizens shouldn't get an emergency situation retaliation, but the primary method of retaliation is in the context of government.
Uh, they left a place to the, uh, and we were asked to report, uh, five years to, uh, and the student system, uh, uh, uh, pulled the, uh, the criminal, uh,
and in the event of, uh, uh, tax-finding of the country, the defense system, if you start, you have to protect the citizens, the citizens, the citizens, the individual aid, or, or, or, or, So even though the employees of the government did not have special rights,
certainly not the way rights are properly defined, they would have responsibilities and job descriptions for that matter that are different than the efforts that still would not have the right to initiate physical force.
They would only have the right to respond if it was a force or retaliated.
As all of us would, the difference would be that most people don't want to respond, and they don't want to put themselves at risk, and they shouldn't put themselves at risk.
It's not in their self-interest to try to defend against the criminal if there's a less risky way of doing so.
And that's where government comes.
Yes, but I mean, it could be anything.
It doesn't have to be something that we would call a government.
I mean, I certainly agree with you that the use of retaliatory violence is a pretty specialized job.
You know, it's like being a dentist.
You should have a lot of training.
You should know what you're doing.
You should know how to use weapons and hopefully use nonviolent ways of solving violent problems.
And you're right. I mean, grandmothers in strollers to babies in the arm don't want to do that.
And if I understand what you're saying correctly, then the agency that society chooses can't initiate force, and therefore taxation would not be a valid concept.
It would be some sort of voluntary donation or some sort of contract.
And it also would not have the right to initiate force To prevent competition, right?
So if you want to go to a particular group to protect your property, and I want to go to a different group to protect my property, clearly neither of us is initiating force against each other.
And so the state would not have the right to prevent voluntary contracts or arrangements for the protection of property and persons outside its own offerings.
And so I just can't I don't quite see how that would be called a government rather than just a group of people who are offering a particular set of services to protect people's property and persons.
Well, in a proper society, there certainly could be private security firms just as there are today in the United States of America.
But my question, I would flip it around a little bit.
I would say If we have experienced a proper government or something very close to a proper government in this country in a 50-year period from the Civil War in 1913, and during that period of time, the United States became the greatest and most successful country in history, whether you look at it economically or even if you look at it morally.
And when you consider People from all over the world immigrated to the United States without any kind of social program, healthcare, social security, public schools, whatever.
They came solely for the opportunity to trade, to trade their goods and services for others' goods and services.
That world, at that point of time, certainly in hindsight, is pretty darn close to perfect.
My question to you would be, what's wrong with the proper government?
If the government's duties are properly delineated, and if there's multiple levels to make sure that each area of the government abides by the Constitution, and the Constitution is maybe a little bit more explicit in that its purpose is to protect individual rights and solely to protect individual rights.
Why mess with that, since the purpose of the government is the protection of those rights?
Why have competing governments that may or may not be criminals, that may or may not have a proper constitution, that may or may not act in the best interest of its citizens and protecting the rights?
What's wrong with I think that's an excellent question.
Peter, what's our time frame for commercials?
I just don't want to get on a rant.
I just want to make sure I manage my time.
When do we do next for a commercial?
Right. About a minute and ten seconds.
The basic problem, I can pick this up after the break, the basic problem that I see is that power corrupts and anytime you give any group of people the right to initiate force or the right to control citizens, you give them a great deal of power.
And that power will grow, inevitably and forever.
There's no government that has ever stayed small, and all governments grow into these absolutely monstrous entities as we see today, bestriding the world like colossus, starting empires, torturing and invading and so on.
And so the problem is, the smaller the government is to begin with, the more free the citizens are, therefore the more wealth is created, the greater the free market productivity is, and therefore the larger government can grow.
And the larger the government grows, the worse things get in society.
We're into the music, so hold that thought and stay with us folks.
folks.
We're going to be back here in just a few minutes, and Steph will respond to Ted's question.
Thanks for tuning in here to Liberty News Radio, and I have Stefan Molyneux and Ted Potts on the line, and Ted put a question to Stefan.
Essentially, what's wrong with a government dedicated to the protection of individual rights with explicit the discussion of that in the Constitution and so forth, I'm sort of paraphrasing Ted, so if I didn't do a good enough job, Ted, jump in there.
But, Steph, you were responding to that question as I understood it.
If you start with a very large government, like some communist nightmare dictatorship like Russia in 1917, if you start with a very large government, then you end up without much economic growth.
In fact, you probably will have significant economic decline.
But if you start with a very small government, you get an explosion of creativity and wealth creation within society that the government has some right to take some aspect of that wealth.
And so as the size of the free market grows because of the small size, of the government.
More and more people who want to do bad things with political power tend to get drawn into the government.
This is my explanation as to why you see this amazing, just mind-blowing progress where the United States was explicitly designed as the very smallest government in history and it has now grown to be the very largest and most powerful government with the greatest capacity for violence in human history.
Now I don't think anybody who wants to keep Empires and wars and the United States foreign policy has been responsible for upwards of 30 million deaths since its inception, not even to count the millions of Native Americans who were killed to make room for the American settlers.
I think if you want to have a peaceful world and you want a voluntaristic world and a world of free market and property rights and the protection of life and liberty and property, I think that saying, well, if we just go back and we tweak the beginning of the United States, we just write a few more paragraphs into the Constitution or change some commas around, that everything's going to turn out magically different.
I just don't think it's realistic.
I think if you rewind the tape back to a small government situation, You're going to get that same wealth generation that's going to put more money into the government coffers and more people are going to be drawn to the government to control that money and that power and the free market that thrives in the small size of the government ends up feeding the beast of government,
the leviathan of government until you end up with exactly what we see around us now that the United States is the largest and most powerful government that history has ever seen with the greatest capacity to deal death 20 times over to the planet as a whole And I just don't think that that's a matter of grammar in the Constitution.
I think that's fundamental to the nature of state power.
Well, Siphan, I feel like I'm arguing against the straw man in that your points are dealing with the United States government the way it is, including the flaws that ran its Constitution, including the The General Welfare Clause, the Interstate Commerce Clause, and the fact that originally it lasted slavery.
There were laws in the Constitution, but in spite of those laws, the United States became the freest country in history and has survived for well over 200 years.
And my contention is that That humans can learn from their mistakes and that the mistakes that were made in the Constitution can be removed and that it can be more explicit and state unequivocally that the purpose of the government is to protect individual rights and those rights are life,
liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness and that government cannot do anything Other than to protect those rights.
And to the extent that he does, it's up to the various branches of government to prevent the other branches of government from usurping their power.
And again, my question is, because the United States government, in spite of the law, was far more successful than other Because you'll agree that there were flaws, I'm sure, and that they should have been removed and could be removed in the future.
Why not start with something that we know works and protects individual rights?
At least to some extent, rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, start with small governments, which I believe could be It's taken over by brute force by larger government.
Instead of starting with a large government that has the ability to protect its citizens against invasion by foreign invaders, including foreign countries like, fill in the blanks, you know, Putin or China, if they ever start heading back towards communism.
I mean, there's a lot of risks in the world out there, in addition to the Islamic fundamentalists.
And I think Americans need protection from those risks, and I believe the proper government will do a far better job than start-up security firms that want to grow into a larger government.
Well, my response to that would be, and it's a very short question, and I'm certainly happy to hear the answer again.
I'm not claiming that I have any kind of monopoly on the final answers here, but to create a government, you need to give that government enough force, enough capacity for force to dominate a pretty large geographical area.
So they have to have tanks and bombs and aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons and biological weapons or whatever.
And you could say, well, these things will only be used in self-defense and so on.
But so you have to create this gang or this group of people with truly awesome biblical power of life and death and coercion over citizens.
I mean, because we're talking about now, right?
Now these weapons have been invented and so you would have to give your government these weapons.
And so, given that these weapons have been invented and the government needs them in order for national defense, when you give this gang or this group of people all of this amazing power of violence and coercion, how is it that they're not going to expand?
I mean, the Constitution is not a magic spell, right?
It's just a piece of paper.
It is just a piece of paper.
And you can write whatever you want, but what's to stop them from just...
Passing an amendment or doing whatever they want.
I don't see how any individual citizen or group of citizens or majority of citizens can conceivably stop the expansion of state power.
And that, of course, if you remember from the Whiskey Rebellion, is how America started.
People didn't want to pay the whiskey tax and George Washington wrote them down with the troops, right?
So I just don't understand when you create this monopoly How it is that citizens are supposed to constrain it from growing?
Because the Constitution isn't going to do anything, right?
It's just a piece of paper that sits in a library somewhere.
How is it that this growth in power, which is always the case throughout history, can be prevented by citizens who've given such a great deal of power to the government?
Well, Stephan, if you look at the last, I don't know, 1,500 years, We didn't have a perfect Constitution, and there were flaws, and the government has certainly overstepped its bounds from time to time.
But tell me if I'm wrong, I'm thinking back in time, and I'm trying to remember when the United States government initiated force against a free country.
The times I can think of I'm trying to think,
if you were right, and just the fact that a country is large and powerful is enough to make it corrupt, In spite of the flaws that the United States Constitution has, the United States, from my point of view, I can't recall it ever initiating a physical force against another country unless that country was a victim.
So, is there any evidence to back up just here, I guess, is my point of view?
Well, I mean, I'm no expert on the history of U.S. imperialism, but just off the top of my head, I can think of Cuba, and I can think of the Philippines, and I can think of Hawaii.
Originally, of course, was not a U.S. state in the founding.
I can think of its entry into World War I. I can think of, even if we pass over World War II, I can also think of all of its activities in South Africa.
In South America.
Now, you can say, well, but these other countries are dictatorships, but I don't see how, because the bombs are dropped against citizens in those countries, right?
I mean, it's a million Iraqis who've died, right?
And I don't think that we have the right to decide life or death for other people, right?
I just don't think that a government has that right.
But really, I'm talking about the expansion of the state power against domestic citizens.
We don't have to worry about overseas imperialism.
No, forget about the overseas imperialism.
Let's just talk about how is it that when you give a government this amazing amount of violent power to have an army and a navy and an air force and all that, how is it that that government is not going to expand its power?
Okay, well, we're up against the break again, unfortunately, but Stefan, if you need to elaborate, I'll let you or obviously...
No, no, that's it. You can go ahead.
I'm back, folks, so stay with us.
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, we're back here on gentlemen, we're back here on the Peter Mack Show on this September 19th.
Stefan Molyneux and Ted Potts are debating the question of what is the proper size and role of government in a free society.
I think, Stéphane, you were last speaking, and if you want to pick it up from where you were responding to Ted?
Yeah, sorry. I just remembered the U.S. overthrew the democratically elected Government of Iran in 1953.
But let's forget about foreign policy because that's a whole other kind of quagmire.
My question still remains, even if you design a perfect piece of paper with perfect words on it, how is that supposed to prevent the expansion of power from a nuclear armed government?
I've never quite understood how the Constitution is going to stop governments from just amending it or ignoring it or doing whatever they want.
Well, I'm sure you'll agree it's taken 200 years before the United States has been able to get between an individual and say his doctor or an individual and his lawyer.
There still is quite a separation of the government from most people's everyday lives, although I'll be the first one to admit there's far less separation than there used to be.
I truly believe that if the United States Constitution didn't have a couple of laws, that we would be far better off today, and maybe, for example, the idea of the Income Tax would still be a fantasy in state's minds as opposed to a reality that we have to deal with this year.
There are ways, I believe, and a fairly limited number of changes need to be made to the Constitution to make it explicit that its purpose is to protect its rights.
The Declaration of Independence, when it said the purpose of government is to protect its rights, that was far more explicit than anything written in the Constitution.
And it's quite possible that there were some quasi-statists at the time We're trying to compromise with more free market individuals and that the document wasn't written well.
But in spite of its flaws, again, we had a tremendous run.
Even if the United States were to end in our lifetime within the next 20, 30 years, It still would have been a 250-year run, which is a long time for a republic.
And you're concerned that a government that is properly delineated would somehow explode into a monster, so to speak, I'm putting words in it now.
I think it's unfounded, simply because the United States, which had Several loopholes jump through, and it's trying as hard as it can right now to get through as many of those loopholes as possible, after 250 years, as far as I know, has never attacked anything but dictatorship.
And those attacks, of course, could easily be rationalized for the protection of its citizens, because when a dictatorship is running a country, and it has the ability to initiate civil support, By definition, it's a threat to free people around the world, and as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing immoral at all by eliminating a crazy man with a machine gun waving a ram, which is effectively what a dictator is.
Okay, so, but the only way that, even if we accept, I don't, but even if we accept that the United States only acts benevolently overseas and does not cause the death of innocent civilians...
I can make a statement about that here before the end of this section, okay?
So just tell the callers to hang on, I mean, not to hang on, but we'll call back.
I mean, I'll make an announcement about it.
Can you guys hear me? Hello?
I'm sorry, go ahead.
It helped Saddam Hussein get into power and again overthrew democratically elected regimes in Nicaragua, in Chile, and in Iran.
But even if we say that the United States did nothing but good overseas, which I don't believe, The problem is, of course, that it can only do that good overseas by initiating force against its own citizens in the form of taxation, right?
So it doesn't really matter to me what happens after the money is taken from the citizens by force.
You know, if I steal a thousand dollars from you and then say, well, I gave it to charity, that doesn't make me a good guy, right?
So the problem I have is not so much the guns that face outwards, it's the guns that face inwards towards the citizenry.
And that has been, of course, a great challenge in American history.
And that's what I see continually expanding with government power.
Stefan, are you asking if it wasn't the calculation, how in the world did government command?
No, what I'm saying is that I think if you focus on the overseas adventures of the United States, you know, we could debate that, I think, fairly significantly.
But all of those that oversees, whether it's imperialism or benevolence, we could debate.
But all of that activity is only possible because of the initiation of force against its own citizens in the form of taxation, right?
And whether that taxation is, in the original republic, excise taxes and duties and so on, or whether it's income tax or whether it's fiat currency inflation, It is a problem from the non-initiation of force standpoint that you're able to tax citizens to fund your foreign adventures to begin with.
And that's really where I would focus my criticisms, not on what happened to the money after it was taken from the people by force, but the fact that it was taken from the people by force to begin with.
And that has been the fact, ever since the government began, that is the foundation of its, and all governments, By definition are founded upon taxation and the aggression against competition.
And that is the power that always seems to grow and can't be restrained by grammar and syntax and pieces of paper.
I think that's a very real and practical problem that I've never heard a good solution from a statist with regards.
How does the government...
Who you give all of this power to, how does it stay restrained when it can raise taxes at will, when it has such an unbalanced monopoly on the use of violence?
It just doesn't make any sense to me that you could imagine that citizens will somehow be able to restrain this monopoly of force.
So you'd be more apt to accept the idea of the United States of America if it raised its Look, if the social agency that protects life, liberty and property Does not have a violent monopoly and does not aggress against its own citizens, then it conforms with the non-aggression principle and I'm perfectly in favor of it.
I would no more want a violent monopoly in the heart of social organization around things like laws and punishment and crime and so on than I would want a violent monopoly around healthcare.
To me, violent monopolies are just bad.
They violate the non-aggression principle and they're extremely destructive to just about all living creatures over time.
And so, yeah, if the government doesn't use force and if the government doesn't prevent competition, absolutely, you know, then it's a business like any other, and I'm all in favor of it because I'm a diet-of-the-wills free-market dude.
Well, first off, I don't think anybody on the objectivism side of things is arguing that the government should be able to pass.
So, We don't disagree in that area.
And secondly, no one thinks that the government should be aggressive, and no one thinks the government should be, as you would say, violent, except in the retaliation against criminals or foreign invaders, and to, of course, a lesser extent to those that commit fraud.
The points you're bringing up seem to be against a position that is not my position.
For example, when it comes to raising revenue, there's been several suggestions of how a free government could raise revenue from a free people, including the idea that transactions with the We would charge the fee voluntarily only if the people entering into the transaction wanted the fee taxed on.
And if they agreed to the fee, which would be relatively small because it would apply to all transactions that those people entered into, that those people would then have the right to petition the government in the event of a dispute and use the court system.
If they went into a transaction at any time, whether it was in a relationship with a bank checking account, or whether it was a contract that was a little more sophisticated, and they chose not to pay the one-tenth of one percent,
or twenty-five hundredths of one percent, or whatever the numbers might have to be, then they would not have the ability to petition the court Okay.
Sorry to interrupt here, Ted.
We're obviously up against the break here at the top of the hour.
I hope you both gentlemen can stay on.
We've got, you know, a few commercials here, and we'll get right back into the debate.
So folks out there, stay with us.
I will take some calls later on, but I want both Stefan and Ted to have as long as they want to make their points, and when they get tired, And we'll take calls.
So I'll sort of gauge callers by that.
So stay with us, and we'll be back in a few minutes.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Here's Peter Mack.
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we're back here for the second hour of the debate here between Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedom Aid Radio, and Ted Potts, a local objectivist here.
And if by chance you're just tuning in, you don't know what that is, then I suggest you go to aynrand.org and read about what objectivism is.
That's the philosophy, if you will, founded by Ayn Rand.
And if you're local here in Kansas City and you want to learn more or contact some local objectivists, you can do so by going to kcobjectivists.org.
Both Ted and Stefan have agreed to stay on for roughly another half hour.
Then one or more of them has to go.
I've been holding off calls because obviously I want them to talk uninterrupted by those.
Unfortunately they have the commercials to do the interrupting here.
And then after that we'll take calls and people on either side of this issue are welcome to call in and maybe we can even get two or more on the air at the same time if we get two of you on opposite sides.
So that's sort of the game plan as I see it.
We'll continue with Stefan and Ted, and I'm not quite sure.
I think, Stefan, you were responding, but if we need to recapitulate some things that were said before the hour, then either or both of you jump in and do so.
I think I remember, Ted, and tell me if I misunderstood what you were saying, but if I understood it rightly, you were saying that people can choose not to, sort of, quote, ensure their contracts by paying taxation to the government or paying a fee to the government, but then if their contracts don't work out, they don't have access to the court system.
Is that a fair characterization of what you were saying?
That's just one example of a method of I don't know if it's voluntary funding of the government, but just to make it a little bit clearer, you would have a choice of having all of your contracts packed, if you will, but you would choose whether you wanted the protection of the court system and the police, or whether you wanted to forego that protection.
The advantage of that kind of a system would be, if the price got too high, then you could hire your own security company, maybe cheaper, and protect against a government that got a little bit of friction.
But for the most part, because the government would have the ability to be a little more efficient on larger sales, and because they provide court production, It's believed by me and most political philosophers that have looked to the issue that the government would survive and people would choose to be protected.
Let's face it. Think of all the corporations.
Think of all the wealthy people out there that would want their life, their liberty, and their property protected from criminals.
I think we would all pay for that service.
The only question would be, what's the proper price?
And if the government duties were limited to those three areas, the price, I'm sure you'll agree, would be a very small fraction of what we pay today.
Somewhere on the order of 7 or 8 percent of our income or 1 percent of our property values or something that would be a small price to pay to be able to live our own lives and grow our businesses and enjoy our families and our friends without the experimental interference.
If, in fact, government were to go larger, it would only be because It was breaching at your possibilities according to the Constitution.
And the belief is, just as it worked semi-well in the United States for the last 200 years, the proper Constitution would work even better, and the different branches of the government would actually check on each other to make sure that each branch is doing nothing but protecting individual rights.
Just imagine if the United States Constitution is clear and it says that the purpose of Congress, the purpose of the presidency, the objective of France, the purpose of the court were to protect individual rights.
And those individual rights were the right to life, the right to property, the right to liberty, and the right to pursuit of happiness.
And any actions on the part of the government that do anything more than protect those rights And it's up to the various branches of the government to make sure that the other branches act in accordance with the Constitution.
I think if it was that clear, and that delineated, that instead of the United States lasting, say, 250 years, pull a number out of that, that it would be more like 2,500 years.
And hopefully, just as I hope, that the United States fixes the mess that we're in now, that after 2,500 years, if there are, in fact, laws in the Constitution, that they will be fixed, and the United States could last for 25,000 years.
Just pull another number out of them.
So, I really do believe that We came very close in 1789 and 1776, and it was possible to take drastic surgery.
And like I said earlier, throwing the baby out with the bathwater and starting all over again with the idea of very small competing governments, none of which would have the ability to defend against the large, powerful...
The survival section teaches you common...
Sorry, I just...
We get a little interruption there, but sorry, go ahead.
No, that's all I had to say.
Alright, so thanks.
I appreciate that. That does sort of explain.
So if you and I exist in this geographical area, and we find that the government is inefficient, and I must say it is quite delightful to hear an objectivist talk about government efficiencies.
I think my head just exploded, but in a good way.
But if you and I wanted to engage in a business contract, And we did not want to use the government for whatever reason, because there was somebody else who could provide it better and cheaper and perhaps in a non-violent manner, right?
Because, I mean, eBay is an example of how hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people can negotiate contracts internationally and with almost no recourse to any kind of state.
And it is the largest, one of the largest single employers in the world in aggregate.
So if we wanted to use some sort of honor system or contract rating system or where the results of any welching would be publicized and would be bad for us as individuals, if we wanted to go to some alternative way of maintaining our contract, then we could do that, right?
We wouldn't have to use this particular group called the government or whatever.
We could go to some other group, like insurance companies.
You don't have to go to just one insurance company.
You can go to a variety of insurance companies to get, or a variety of cell phone companies or whatever.
So the government would not be able to prevent competition, nor would it be able to force you to consume its services.
Is that what you mean? Yes, but I want to make clear one point that I might have omitted or you might have missed.
I would imagine that in order to be fair, since the government is providing more than just the court system, it's also providing the police department and the defense department, that if an individual were to choose and were to say, I don't want that protection for the contract, they would also be fulfilling the police protection.
To some extent, I can't imagine how their defense would continue in the event of a national emergency.
But that latter point is probably moose because the government has got to protect all of its citizens, and when you do that on a national basis in the event of a foreign invasion, you're going to protect the people that paid and the people that didn't pay.
However, in the case of police and in the case of It's the court system.
People would be able to opt in or opt out.
Now, in answer to your question as to whether or not a third party could take over the responsibility for the police or take over the responsibility for the court system, I guess my response, thinking about it very quickly here, would be yes, in a limited way, though.
In other words, Some entities have to regulate and make sure that the third parties aren't initiating physical force against peaceful and honest citizens.
If you have multiple security agents that are out there trying to protect their customers against other security agency customers, There still has to be some overarching entity that society is among those entities.
Sure. And the music is telling us, we're going into break.
Sorry to cut you short, Ted, but I'll give you time to elaborate if you need to.
And we'll be back here in just a couple minutes, folks.
Stay with us.
Stefan Molyneux and Ted Potts are debating the proper size of government and free society.
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we're back here for the second segment of the second hour.
And this may be the last one because not both parties can stay on.
If they do want to, certainly they can, but that's my understanding at this point.
So I'm not sure, Ted, if you had sufficient time to finish before I interrupted you with the announcement about the commercial.
I think I was pretty much coming up.
Okay. Okay, Stefan, you want to?
Sure, yeah. I mean, so just to reiterate, I think the point that Ted was making was that there would need to be some overarching agency to make sure that groups were not initiating the use of force.
And I agree that we want to have virtues like the non-initiation of force, and we want to try and figure out ways in which they can be most productively created and enhanced.
And the one thing that's very true about using violence, whether it's even in self-defense, but using violence of any kind, it's incredibly expensive.
Any organization or any company that can get something done without using violence is going to be able to offer its services much more cheaply to its customers.
And so in a society without a government, a stateless society, you've got every entrepreneur on the planet, every brain-spanning genius on the planet trying to figure out how to resolve disputes without using violence.
And there are lots of things that people have come up with, lots of ways that people have come up with to both prove theoretically and practically how disputes can be resolved without using force, right?
That you can use economic exclusion, right?
So if people keep not fulfilling their contracts, the insurance for their contracts goes up to the point where they're not economically viable.
If somebody commits a crime, it's very easy to Enter them into a database where people simply don't want to do business with them and they then have to submit to punishment in order to regain their economic status within society.
Because participation in a civil and economic society is such an enormous benefit to people that to take it away sentences people to a lonely death in the wilderness, right?
So society has a huge amount of power simply by refusing to do business with people.
And there will be companies that would make sure all of that worked very efficiently and very well.
I think the difference between objectivists and myself, and not to place anybody else in my category, is that I'm not willing to say that violence is what is needed to resolve disputes within society, that we need a centrally armed agency of force to solve problems within society.
I think that what keeps Companies as lean and mean and non-violent as possible is the competition for prices in the free market.
It's why your insurance company doesn't have an army, because the moment an insurance company tries to put together an army, it has to raise its rates, which means it's go out of business, right?
It's very expensive to use force, and I think that the free market in dispute resolution will continually drive non-violent solutions to violent problems, whether it's a crime or fraud or whatever it is.
Counterfeiting or whatever, that there's lots of creative ways to solve problems in society without creating a monster monopoly of force called the state.
And I'm really, you know, I just invite Ted, you know, to explore the options of ways that society can be organized without using an institution that fundamentally was invented, you could say, you know, 6,000 years ago in ancient Egypt, right?
We don't use...
We don't use hieroglyphics and dried mud for our paper and I don't think that we should use social institutions or necessarily accept that those social institutions like the state that were invented thousands and thousands of years ago are really that appropriate to the 21st century with all the technology and capacities that we have.
There's lots and lots of ways to resolve disputes and to contain criminals and to get things done in terms of national defense and roads and all these other kind of good things.
Without creating this huge, dangerous monopoly of force within society, which to me, I'm just not willing to say that that's necessary because I just have an enormous belief, and I think reasonably so, in the creativity of entrepreneurs and the amazing capacities of the free market to find and design non-violent, peaceful, economically efficient ways of resolving disputes and minimizing crime.
Well, Stephon, the only thing I can say is I don't know how, and I don't think any entrepreneur can handle the methods that would protect against gang warfare or something along the lines of the Mafia attacking and defrauding and shaking down honest business owners without an empathy That doesn't have a monopoly on violence,
as you say, but has a monopoly on the retaliation against violence.
And I think that's a really important difference.
I'm not arguing for the initiation of physical force.
I'm only arguing for an entity whose job it is to protect Oliver from the initiation of physical force.
And otherwise, I'm afraid, and I'm I can't imagine any other solution other than a competing gang.
And whoever has the biggest guns and the biggest knives and the biggest nuclear weapons is the gang that ends up winning simply by initiating physical force.
I'm quite certain, as a matter of fact, without a proper government delineated by a proper constitution, that we would end up with the biggest gang taking over the world until the next biggest gang comes along and takes that we would end up with the biggest gang taking over the world until the next biggest gang comes along and takes over the Well, we already do have that bigger gang, right?
The United States government is the biggest gang.
We already have that, right? I'm sorry, I just want to interrupt and say, I'm sure you're aware of the history of organized crime in the United States.
There was almost no organized crime in the United States until the government banned the sale of liquor.
And from there, banning prostitution, banning gambling, and particularly banning certain kinds of illicit drugs or hallucinogenic drugs or whatever.
That it is not that the government wasn't invented to protect people from organized crime.
Organized crime is created by government regulations and by government control over voluntary transactions in the free market.
So I think to say, well, we need the government to protect us from organized crime is not accurate at all.
Part of the reason for the creation of those entities is just as you're saying.
However, That's within the context of a government.
If you don't have a government, then those entities are going to spring up, not in response to liquor laws, but in response to the fact that there isn't any government out there protecting citizens against initiation of physical force.
So, is it your understanding then that in the Wild West, right, in the frontiers of America, there was a lot of organized crime, like the Mafia hung out in the frontiers where there was very little government interaction?
Is that your understanding of how it worked?
Well, a better example would be Russia, for today.
I mean, you've got a relatively low tax rate, and a country that has switched from socialism to capitalism, But the investment in the world and the growth of the economy is not anywhere near what it was in the 1800s in the United States because there isn't the protection of individual rights.
There is lawlessness going on, and there are gangs, if you will, and there are groups of people that feel like they are as strong as the government or can compete against the government,
and that kind of chaos Sorry, is it your contention that Russia is an example, like post-communist Russia, under Putin and Medvedev, is an example of a government that is too small?
Now, I'm saying of an improper government in that example, but yes, a government that is too small in protecting individual rights.
It's not a proper government.
I'm sure you'll agree with that.
But it is a relatively large government.
But I don't think the important factor is the size of a government.
It's the purpose of a government.
It's the function of a government that determines whether it's proper and whether it's just.
The size itself, to me, is meaningless.
Same thing with corporations.
Sorry here, Ted.
We're up against the break here at the bottom of the hour.
You're welcome to stay on.
If you can't, that's certainly understandable.
Just let the board off know, and we'll take it up from there.
But in any case, folks, we'll be back here in a few minutes and we'll continue.
Stefan?
Yes.
Yes.
How much longer are you planning on staying on?
I could do another half hour.
Alright, sounds good.
Thank you so much.
Alright, we are on right now, so go right ahead and you'll be on with Peter.
Alright. I appreciate very much him taking an hour and a half out of his Saturday to do so, and my understanding is Stefan's still...
Okay, so Stefan's still here, so what I thought we would do now is open it up to calls.
If you want to call in, if you have a question or you want to, you know, jump into the debate yourself with Stefan, obviously on the, you know, more or less on the side that Ted was on, you're welcome to do so.
The toll-free call-in number is this, 866-986-6397.
Again, that's 866-986-6397.
And I noticed we had some callers earlier, and I had to sort of put them off because I didn't want to have Stefan and Kit interrupted by calls when they were still willing to debate.
So, Stefan, you're going to stay on for about another half hour, is that right?
You bet. Okay, ladies and gentlemen.
Well, we're back here. At least I'm back.
I hope Stefan's back. We think we got the audio connection worked out.
And Stefan, are you there?
I certainly am. Can you hear me?
I can hear you. Hallelujah.
There you go. Very good.
We're going to have some callers come on here shortly as soon as she gets them up.
But go ahead and give your synopsis or whatever you want to talk about.
Sure. I mean, look, again, I just wanted to reiterate my extreme respect for the objectivist position in very, very many ways.
You know, metaphysics, epistemology, and I just have some disagreements with ethics and politics, but the foundations are the same, so much, much in common, much props to the objectees.
Where I think the problem lies, and this is going to sound kind of hippy-dippy, but I really do believe this is where the problem lies, It is a failure of trust in possibility, right?
So we've always had a government.
There's always been a government.
And it's hard to imagine how society can work without a government.
But I fail to see how fundamentally that's different from something like slavery.
I mean, until slavery was abolished in most Western countries, at least in the sort of 18th and 19th centuries.
There'd be no societies without slaves.
You say, well, let's get rid of slavery.
People say, well, you can't. We've always had slavery and blah, blah, blah.
Again, I'm not saying objective is opposed to slavery, just so you understand.
But it is this thing where we say, well, I can't imagine how it could work without it.
And when we hit that barrier to the failure of imagination, of possibility, of accepting possibilities that are going to be way bigger and better than anything we can think of, We kind of get scared emotionally.
We get scared, we say, well, that's just too weird for me.
I can't imagine a society without a government.
And when we get scared, we kind of invent all of these scare scenarios.
You know, like there'll be crazy, shaven-headed motorcycle gangs in leather jackets blowing up things.
You know, like we just kind of, you know, I debated with Jan Hellfeldt the other day.
He actually came in with pirates stealing battleships and firing on cities.
And like, you just come up with these crazy scenarios.
But that's not...
I don't think we should say because we're nervous about thinking about what society would look like without a government.
It just can't happen.
And I think that's happened so many times in history where people say, well, it couldn't ever work.
And, you know, you can't give women equal rights.
You can't raise children without hitting them.
It's never been done before.
And if you don't... You know, if you don't hit children, they'll just run all over you and so on.
And it's actually quite the opposite that occurs.
When we stop thinking about using a monopoly of violence to solve our problems, the world gets better, whether it's to do with the protection of women or children or any of these things.
And that's my invitation to people, is to think about that kind of stuff.
Right. And let me just add to that.
And then we've got two callers, and I want to get to them quickly so they can address anything you've said or I've said or Ted said.
I would add to that they overlook the horrendous things that government has done, not just foreign policy, but to its own people.
And the second thing I would add here, and I was sort of elaborating on this when we were not able to communicate, Steph, was that to me it goes back to the root, the contradiction.
Well, you know, it's wrong to initiate force, but at some point if you have this government that's only going to survive by the collection of fees and people don't want to use it, Then it's going to go under and people are going to use these other services that you were alluding to that are providing the service better for the fees and so forth.
The only way it can survive is to use force against those other services that people are voluntarily using more than the entity that is originally called government.
And that is a violation of their principle of a non-initiation of force, it seems to me.
Well, it is. I think that's more than seems.
It is, right? And I've also made the case that people say, like, when we look at people more in the political center, which is the left or the right, it doesn't really matter, they say, well, I can't really figure out how the poor can be helped without a government.
And we say, well, don't worry, there's going to be tons of things, a charity and people, and there'll be fewer poor people because there's more economic growth and a free society, blah, blah, blah.
But people get stuck and they say, well, I just can't picture it and therefore I'm not going to support it.
But with the objectivists, they say, well, I don't know how the courts are going to work without a government, or I don't know how national defense is.
But that's fundamentally no different from saying, I don't know how the poor are going to be helped without a government.
But if we make the cases that 99 out of 100 things can be done better without the government, What's wrong with that last one?
We all have this point where we stop and we go, well, I just can't figure it out.
And then we say, so I'm not going to support it.
But just because I can't figure it out, or you can't figure it out, or Ted can't figure it out, doesn't mean that we shouldn't act on principle and just oppose the initiation of the use of force in all forms.
And just trust that not using violence is going to be a better thing.
Absolutely. I'll make one quick point, and then we'll take BR from New Jersey, because we've got people waiting here.
And I want to get to them. But the other thing was, he said, well, if we just, you know, there are just a few minor, again, paraphrasing, and I hope I don't paraphrase incorrectly what he said, but there are just a few minor flaws in the Constitution.
If we correct those, Then things will be, you know, hunky-dory and we'll have close to a perfect system.
But it still leaves the court system interpreting that, as I was saying.
Okay, we have this system now that is confined to the protection of, you know, individual rights and so forth.
They can't meddle in business fairs and stuff like that.
The government's still going to come along and say, oh, well, we're not meddling in business fairs.
We're just telling you you can't do business unless you have this license.
We're not meddling in business fairs.
We're just saying if you want to cut hair, you have to have a license.
We're not meddling in business fairs.
We're just saying, if you want to do this, you have to do X, Y, and Z, or we're going to put you out of bed.
I mean, you can't get out.
Okay, so, B.R. from New Jersey, please step up if you're in the wings waiting.
Hello? Go ahead.
Hi. I'm on the air now?
You are. Okay.
Yeah, this is B.R. Merrick, and I occasionally write Articles for Strike the Root, so that's how I got to know about Stefan Molyneux's writings and his internet broadcast.
So I was just going to call to support his argument.
Numerous things have already been covered, and of course we've already covered the history of the United States government and its violence and force used against its own people and so forth.
But one of the things that Ted brought up Is that he really, really wants a government that concerns itself only with retaliatory force and not the initiation of force.
But what he doesn't seem to understand with that argument is that a government that is installed, whether or not you want it there, has already initiated force.
By putting itself there, whether or not you want it, whether or not you agree, they say we're here and we're here to Only use retaliatory force whether you like it or not.
That right there is the initiation of force.
So you can't have an institution that begins with the initiation of force that can only concern itself with retaliatory force.
So it's a contradictory statement to want something forced on everyone that only uses retaliatory force.
It's already initiated force.
I think that's beautifully and succinctly put.
I envy your ability to get your point across in less than three hours, and I will call you afterwards to find out how you do that, because it's a mystery to me, so I appreciate that.
All right. Well, anything else, BR? No, that was mainly it, because you've covered most everything else, so thank you for a great debate.
It was very interesting. Thank you for coming on.
Okay, let's take Mike from Michigan.
Mike, you're up on the air.
Okay. Well, thank you for that call, Mike.
Do you have anything to say to that, Steph?
Unfortunately, and I do apologize, I couldn't follow what he was saying.
The connection was fairly bad.
I'm sure you heard it better, but no, I didn't have anything to add.
Sorry. Okay.
Well, we're up here at the top of the hour, Steph.
If you can stay on, that'd be great.
If you can't, let Nicole know and I'll carry forward.
I can do another 15 minutes and then I'm going to be lazy dad and go to bed.
I understand. Thank you very much.
So, okay, 15 more minutes of step, folks.
Stay with us. And if you want to call in, plenty of time to do so.
We'll be back in a couple minutes.
We'll be back in a couple minutes.
We'll be back in a couple minutes.
The antidote to tyranny is knowledge.
And acting with courage to defend our most basic rights, life, liberty, and property.
Dedicated to the cause of freedom for everyone.
Here's Peter Mack.
And we're back here, folks, for the third hour of the Peter Mack Show on this Saturday, September 19th.
And Steph has graciously agreed to be on for a few more minutes, so we'll take advantage of that.
Steph, we'll go ahead and take our next caller.
We have Al from South Dakota.
So, Al, when you're there, go ahead and chime in.
Hi, Peter. Stephon, how are you guys?
Just great, thank you. How are you?
I'm good, sir.
Peter, this is Al from the Freeman Radio Show, freemanradio.com.
Yeah, you are. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks for being on the show earlier this week, and I just wanted to call because I had a couple of comments.
First of all, I agree with your previous caller, Mike, in that when we believe in fictions, especially corporate fictions, which government is nothing more than a corporate fiction, they tend to be able to be really slimy, like a snake, like the water just beads off and runs off their back and nobody takes responsibility.
And, you know, if you look, there was a commercial on...
Some time ago, and in fact, if a wife is killed, if a wife ends up being killed, usually, no matter how hard the husband tries to say, no, it wasn't me, it wasn't me, it usually ends up it was him.
And my point is, is that in the 20th century, the individual had more to worry about from their own government than they did from foreign governments.
What do you guys think about that?
I mean, I think you're absolutely right.
There's a researcher, I can't remember his name, who's done quite a bit of blood-curdling research into what he calls democide, which is murder by government.
And his calculations is that in the 20th century alone, outside of wars, Upwards of 250 million people were murdered by their own governments in a variety of ways.
And he includes things like the collectivization of the farms under Stalin, which resulted in 10 million people dying from famine.
The same thing happened under Mao in the 50s.
And a quarter of a billion people, even outside of wars.
And if you start throwing in wars, you start to get some truly...
Well, the numbers are all horrendous, of course.
But there's no question that the...
Everybody looks to, oh, defense from other countries, but it is the attacks from your own government that most people have to worry about, not attacks from foreign governments.
I think that you're quite right, and I think it's well worth looking up the term democide on the web to find these unbelievably blood-curdling statistics about what goes on when governments attack their own citizens, which is really what they generally do.
And the other question I would have liked to have asked Ted was, When it comes down to, you know, you mentioned we need protection from the thugs and the mafia.
Well, I would have just liked to have asked him one question, is what's the difference between the government we have today and the mafia, other than one is quote-unquote legal?
Well, that's an excellent point as well.
I mean, the invention, we all know this from 1984, right, that the invention of fictional external enemies in order to create cohesion within the group is fundamental to any system of exploitation and brutality.
And so I quite agree with you that, you know, the Fed is legal counterfeiting and most governments are, you know, there's an old Yes Minister, if you ever watch that British show, which is actually quite a funny show, particularly if you're on the more liberty side of things.
Where he says, well, we need the government to fight organized crime.
And then somebody says, wait, so we need disorganized crime to fight organized crime?
How is that going to work? And I thought that was a really wonderful way of putting it.
Right. And now, the scope that we're talking about here tonight, Peter, I want to comment on a wonderful topic, excellent guest, some good knowledge going around.
But the scope of this is so large because, you know, basically if you go back to the definition of government, it is control.
That is the definition of government is control.
And it comes down to the war that's been fought since time immemorial, since two guys were planting crops in the fields and some Some caveman come by with a crown on his head and said, me king appointed by God must obey.
And the two guys looked at each other and laughed and went about their work.
The guy had to find a different village to go to because they just rejected him.
They weren't going to have a king.
But Frederick Bassey in the law, he...
Yeah. That book is so powerful, and I would encourage your listeners to grab a copy.
It's not a really long and thick pamphlet.
You can find it on the web, even.
But it talks about the age-old war between a group of people who always think they know what's best for the individual and the individual and his own right, his right to be left alone.
Yeah, I did a whole show years ago on that book.
I mean, I just did a solo show because you're right.
It's short and I think very eloquent and to the point.
I think he makes a statement in there, or at least he's quoted as making the statement that government is that fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.
You know, because here when we have these massive people, this massive debate in this country, as you know, going on now, Steph and Al, about health care and people talking...
You know, various points they're making about it and so forth, but nobody's making the point, at least in mainstream, that I'm seeing that basically somebody's saying, I want somebody else to pay for my health care, or I want some doctor to provide it for me, you know, without me having to pay for it.
And yet that's what it comes down to.
I mean, we use this, we put in the words government and this agency and da-da-da and all this thing as if, and that just masks the reality of That, you know, all you're doing is you have this entity of people that are going to take money from some people to pay for somebody else's health care.
And in so doing, they're going to regulate it and tell doctors what they can do and how they can practice medicine and who can practice medicine and who can, as Steph talked about at length on other shows, not just here, you know, who can make drugs.
And, you know, this one entity will determine whether a drug is safe or not.
But none of that is ever discussed in the mainstream.
And that's what's frustrating for me, I suspect, for Steph, too.
I don't know. Well, not frustrating.
I mean, it would be inconceivable that it would be discussed.
I mean, that's not what the mainstream media is for, right?
The mainstream media is to dance Michael Jackson's body in front of people so they don't think about the real issues that are going on, or to talk about vague, nonsensical political concepts.
What you should be hearing about in the mainstream media, but you never will, is the fact that they say, well, you know, 40 or 50 million Americans have no healthcare.
It's like, but the government has been controlling the healthcare industry for over a hundred years.
By, you know, through the AMA and through regulations and through Medicare and Medicaid and subsidies and taking over the hospitals and so on.
It's like, so if this is what the result of a century of government intervention has resulted in, which is this, what many people consider this big dissatisfying thing of 30, 40, 50 million people without healthcare...
But this is the result of government intervention.
So how is more government intervention going to solve the problem?
It's like the auto industry, right?
I mean, you've had government involvement, particularly through unionization, in the car industry, for decades, right?
The increasing regulations and subsidies and manipulations and propping up unions and so on.
And so now the government is going to take it.
But this is all the result of coercion and people never hear that.
So what they think is, well, We need more guns, right?
Because it's always ascribed, the disasters of the government, always are ascribed to the free market, and the solution is more guns.
And until people wake up to that, it's just going to keep happening.
You're right, Steph. I mean, when I said mainstream media, yeah, obviously the talking heads are not going to do that, but we have thousands or a million people, depending on whose numbers you look at, converge on Washington and Why didn't any one of those 70,000 people bring up this issue?
Why, when they had these town halls where our representatives got hounded by people, which I think is great.
I wish they'd get hounded more.
Why didn't any of those people stand up and say, you know, I don't want the government involved at all.
It's already involved. It's already making a mess.
But that's never put forth, or at least not very succinctly or clearly.
It's always, well, I don't want this plan.
I don't want that plan.
Well, yeah, we need health reform, but I just don't want Obama's health reform.
Right, but this is a right-wing issue in a way that the Iraq War wasn't, right?
Those people should all have been around for the Iraq War, and if they'd stopped the Iraq War, then the economy would not have collapsed in the way that it did last year.
But this is just a particular right-wing issue, whereas the war was more of a left-wing issue, and it'll just keep bouncing back and forth.
But remember, 40% of people in the United States, 40% of voting adults, do not pay Much, if any, federal income tax, just based on their income.
So immediately when you start talking about a federal program, any federal program, I know that's not specific to healthcare, but any federal program, 40% of people are going to be for it immediately.
Why? Because they're getting something for nothing, right?
So they're just, you know, of course they don't want to talk about it because people have a guilty conscience about everything that they've kind of taken.
And so they're not going to want to start bringing that up now because then people are going to start pointing fingers all the way back through time, right?
Absolutely. Well, Steph, thanks very much.
I know it's an hour later where you are and you have family to attend to.
I really appreciate you coming on.
I hope you'll do it again soon.
We'll be in touch through email.
Al, if you want to stay on, if you're still there, you can do so through the break.
We can continue. In any case, folks, I will be back in three or four minutes.
▲
Export Selection