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Oct. 23, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:00:06
1490 Stef on the Oracle Radio Network October 23, 2009

Stefan answers questions on liberty on the radio show 'Outside the Box'.

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Back on the program. This is Outside the Box, this live edition, Friday afternoon, October the 23rd, even.
I am the one and only H to the Izzo, baby.
Hank Xavier, if you know me, with me today is my good friend and guide, often a guide through the confusion and malaise that is political ideology these days.
There's just so much spin and twisting and doublespeak and Orwellian kind of weirdy, weirdy, weird, weirdness going on, Stefan.
You know, you really are a light in the dark because you approach these things in the light of reason and with humor and with really just a friendly sort of rationality that I find to be quite appealing.
It reaches a broad number of people.
I appreciate that, HX. And I really do feel left out because I feel everybody in the radio show has a cool two-letter acronym except me.
So I'm going to be Bald Sophist or BS for short.
So you can just have people refer.
I'm going to try and get that. My former name, my rap name was Big Chatty Forehead.
But that seems to have fallen into disuse.
So I feel like I'm much more hip now.
So I'd appreciate that.
Alright, MCBS right here on Outside the Box today.
Going to spit some anarchism today.
And Steph, what we're going to do today is we're going to get a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
We're going to try to toss some of the more common arguments against anarchism that I hear at you and get your response.
And then we'll do a little bit of news commentary later on.
But I really feel like this audience needs to hear what anarchism is rather than what it's perceived to be according to the mainstream media.
So anarchism is chaos, guns in the streets, warlords, only the strongest survive, the worst elements of Darwinism rise to the top, the strong slay the weak.
Why is that wrong?
Well, anarchism is simply the consistent application of a principle, which just about everyone agrees with, right?
The whole trick with thinking, and this is true of science and it's true of philosophy and it's true of medicine, is to simply be as consistent as possible in your principles.
So we have this principle, which we all learn about from our parents, we all learn about in kindergarten, we all learn about from cops, right?
Which is, don't initiate force against other people.
That is a principle.
And, you know, when Einstein sort of took a principle called the speed of life is constant and just made that a universal constant, then we got some amazing and terrifying things out of it, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and all these wonderful things that modern science can do.
And in the same way, anarchism is simply the application of the principle that you should not initiate force against others.
And if we make that a universal principle, we come up with some very surprising things.
And it seems weird to people, right, in the same way that the first guy who said that the world was round was sort of laughed and mocked.
Oh, come on, it doesn't even look round.
If the world was round, we'd all be rolling off it, you know, like sweat off a golf ball or something.
But when we simply take these principles and apply them consistently, we end up with a stateless society because taxation is the initiation of force.
A state is a small group of people who have the legal right to initiate force against others in a geographical area.
Now, we can say that's okay.
But then we can't say that the initiation of force is wrong, right?
Then we just throw all of our principles out the window.
Now, when we have a society where we have thrown all of our principles out the window, that to me seems like a war of all against all, even if it's a, quote, civilized war like we see in democracy where the government is hurting all this money back and forth between various interest groups.
Taking over this organization and overfunding that organization and cutting the funding of their enemies and rewarding their friends and bailing out the banks.
That, to me, that is anarchy.
That is chaos. They're now deciding the pay scale of corporate CEOs in America now.
That to me is anarchy.
That is chaos. Where we're heading to financially, that is anarchy.
That is chaos in the traditional sense.
A state of society is simply us saying, hey, you know what?
We have a principle called don't use force to solve complex social problems.
We're going to apply that consistently, which means we don't hit our kids.
We get rid of the government and all that kind of stuff.
And there's lots of ways in which problems can be solved without initiating force.
And the people who defend the initiation of force is fine.
I just want them to be honest and say, yes, putting guns to people's head is a great way to achieve social goals.
But you know that people aren't behind an idea when they can't state the reality of that idea openly, when they have to use euphemisms like a social contract or whatever, right?
Or you get to vote, like that means anything, right?
So I just want honesty from the people who claim that violence is a great way to solve social problems.
I also want them to say why only some people get to use violence and not everyone, right?
So some guy likes public schooling.
I think it's vile and destructive to children.
So I can't go round to my neighbourhood with a gun and collect money for my school, so why does the government get to do it?
And no matter how many times you ask this question, how many people you ask, you will never get a straight answer as to why there are these two worlds.
People over here who can use all the violence that they want in the world to achieve their goals and everybody else who can't.
That to me is corrupt and it leads to what people...
I mean, the fall of the Roman Empire came around directly because of expanding welfare state and militarism, as we see in the United States.
And there you got anarchy.
You devolved into warring tribes.
You had the feudal system, which was terribly anarchic and destructive.
And so we're trying to avert what people call anarchy.
We're not trying to bring it about.
Yeah, I think it's an unfortunate reality, Steph, that we live in a society where we can no longer trust the nature of words.
We can no longer trust the nature of their meaning because they've… They can be so distorted and so manipulated in the mainstream media because the mainstream media is so pervasive and it's absolutely everywhere.
It completely constructs the entire macro-social perspective of the entire society as a whole.
So they can take a word like anarchy, which really means individual responsibility and voluntary action.
I'm sorry. I have a free book called Everyday Anarchy which points out that most of the social institutions that we inhabit and treasure and value are completely anarchic, right?
I mean, the marriage market, the dating market, the job market is completely anarchic.
There's no government agency that tells you who to marry.
I mean, there are a few that tell you who you can't marry if you happen to be gay, which is terrible, but...
But most of the things that we so value and treasure, we rely upon voluntarism, right?
And if the government organized everybody's marriage, said, you have to get married to this person, you have to stay married to that person, and so on, and then someone came along and said, you know, I think people should be free to choose who they want to marry, and then everybody would say, oh, but if that happens, then there'll be rapes and burnings and pillages and witch hunts, you know, and that would just be a scare story.
The idea that if people get to choose and do things voluntarily, that incredible disasters will result.
It's just a pathetic scare story from people who have no damn good arguments at all.
Well, I happen to be probably one of the few gay men that you'll run across that is actually against gay marriage.
I'm against all state marriage, period.
I think that the reason that divorce rates are so high is that people can't reconsider later on without dire consequences because the state is standing there with a gun to their head and is going to mediate all these court issues and split up families and split up property and do all this stuff when Really all we need to do is just figure out a way to go, okay, let's talk about this in a rational way between us and come up with an agreement that we need.
So I'm a gay man that's against gay marriage.
I'm against state-sponsored marriage, period.
I'm with you there, brother. Equality and absence of the state.
We'll be right back on Outside the Box.
I'm the HX filling in for Alex.
We'll be right back. We are back on the program this afternoon.
Friday afternoon, October the 23rd.
I am the HX filling in for Alex Ansory.
We'll be back next Thursday, I believe.
So I'm going to be filling in today, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
I'm going to try to bring you a few more guests next week as well.
I am the ATEX, and with me today is one of the best speakers on volunteerism and the need for the stateless society today, Stefan Molyneux.
Stefan, welcome back to the show. Thanks.
Did you choose the music for the show, or is that something you inherited?
This is actually – this is Alex Ansari's bumper music.
I was going to say, because a gay man playing Roxy music, I was just wondering whether I should start voguing and how clichéd we were going to get.
But, you know, I just wanted to point that out.
Next up, Boy George.
Anyway, sorry. Right, right, right.
Let's all put on our karma chameleons, ladies and gentlemen.
So, Steph, here's another argument that I hear all the time, and especially coming out of the genre of various patriot ideologies, various constitutionalist ideologies.
I hear this a lot from paleo-conservatives, and I wonder if you could respond to it as well.
Anarchism is socialism.
Socialism is bad. Anarchism is socialism.
Well, I mean, you can say up is down, black is white if you want, but that's not going to get you out of the garage, right?
Don't we see a huge block of people who self-identify as anarchists?
Who say this precise thing that anarchism is socialism?
Absolutely. There's a group called anarcho-socialists.
They seem to me to be entirely incomprehensible.
And that's why, see, to me, it's really tough to say I'm an anarchist because it comes with so much baggage and it comes with so much, well, this kind and not that kind.
I mean, I prefer to call myself a philosopher or whatever simply because I'm sort of reasoning from first principles.
One of the things that comes out of that, reasoning from first principles like no aggression or no initiation of force, is a stateless society.
Does that mean I'm an anarchist?
Well, if you say that, that's like...
Dawkins saying, I'm an evolutionist.
No, he's a biologist and evolution is one of the things that he accepts as a scientific biologist.
So I don't like to say, well, I'm an anarchist because that is to plant your flag in a conclusion.
What I like to do is to reason from first principles, make the arguments and the conclusion is that a stateless society is the only moral and, by the way, practical way to organize solutions to social problems.
So, yeah, there's lots of people out there who will say, I'm an anarchist socialist.
And, of course, my question to them, and they always have this idea, you know, we're all going to live in one big flesh pile, hippie commune, exchanging various diseases and bacteria and so on.
And that's fine. I mean, if people want to buy up a bunch of land and all live in, you know, mud huts and, you know, grapple with their pigs on a daily basis, that to me is entirely fine.
Grapple with their pigs. Yeah, they can do that.
And that's entirely compatible with a free society, right?
I mean, as long as they're not initiating force against others, that's totally fine.
But the problem is that they mistake very often Proudhon's statement, property is theft.
What he meant was state property, state-enforced property that most wealth arises from crime, which I think historically we can look at and see is actually quite true in many ways.
And they say, well, there shouldn't be any property.
And then the question always comes, well...
an enormous number of resources to weaponry and control and so on so socialism automatically implies a state because you're saying society has to be this way right has there's no property we have to share everything equally everyone's income has to be the same and then the question is if you want the outcome to be uh egalitarian or socialistic or whatever then you need a big gang with a big bunch of guns hurting all the resources around to make sure that everything is equal the That is not anarchism.
The moment that you have a centralized group of thugs with weapons, that's statism, and that is socialism, that is fascism, that is nazism, communism, whatever you want to call it.
The whole idea behind a voluntary society is that there is no big group of people with guns who get to order everyone around and call it virtuous.
And let you pick up a few crumbs from the tables of your masters.
The idea is that nobody gets to initiate the use of force morally, which means there is no government.
There is property rights.
You can't have a society without property rights.
You also can't make an argument against property rights without exercising the right of self-ownership, i.e.
I am making this argument from which all other property rights derive.
So there's no logical and consistent way to argue for an anarchic socialism or anarcho-communism or whatever, even anarcho-libertarianism.
I've heard that phrase, which to me is completely bizarre.
A little bit of force, yet no force, right?
That doesn't make any sense. Right.
So I would just say, no, no, I'm against the initiation of force to solve social problems.
I use the word anarchism because it's easier than if I use some flibber-de-jibber word, right?
I'm a flibber-de-jibberist, right?
And then people say, well, what is that?
Oh, that's a government-free society.
Well, isn't that anarchism? No, it's flibber-de-jibber, right?
So I just use the word and then make sure that I tell people this is not a position that I have.
It is a conclusion that I have come to from Reasoning from First Principles.
Very, very interesting.
I think we do tend to sort of wrap ourselves up in our own labels sometimes, and I think you're right.
Sometimes that's detrimental because that could then be spun around and used against you.
So I like the idea of arguing from first principles, saying we own ourselves And so property rights sort of follow.
Another argument that I hear all the time, especially from Marxists, is the idea that profit is somehow evil.
And of course this speaks to capitalism more specifically, but this is a capitalist society, and a lot of the people who listen to this broadcast consider themselves to be So, profit is evil?
Yeah, I mean, to use a rough metaphor, and I apologize for this, but I think it's important.
If you define all lovemaking as rape, then all lovemaking is evil.
And if you define all profit as theft, then of course profit is evil.
But it's just an incorrect definition.
What happens is people confuse the predations of state mercantilist, quote, capitalism, right?
The sort of semi-fascistic system that Michael Moore...
I think pretty effectively skewers in his recent movie.
If you say that everybody who makes money is doing so – it's a profit and they're doing it illegitimately, right?
They're using the government or some sort of laws or they're ripping off their workers, stealing from people.
Then, of course, if you define all profit as theft, then profit is immoral.
But that's not the technical definition of profit, right?
The technical definition of profit is not, well, I invested in a ninja costume, which cost me 10 bucks, and then I broke into someone's house and stole jewels worth $1,000, right?
So I'm up $990, right?
So I have a profit. No, that's just theft, right?
The technical, at least, definition of profit is the value add that both parties receive from a free market interaction.
So if I have $5 and you have a pen and you want $5 more than you want a pen and I want a pen more than I want $5, then we'll have that exchange and we'll both be better off.
We've both profited because we both have something.
From the exchange that we didn't have before that we want more than what we had before.
So it's an absolute improvement.
And so when there is a voluntary interaction, the profit accrues to both parties.
And people just don't understand that because they've just heard all profit is banks that pillage people and so on, through the help of the government and so on, that that's profit.
It's not. That's just theft.
And the voluntary interaction to mutual advantage is where profit occurs.
I mean, the guy who works in a factory...
Is profiting relative to any other job or not working in a factory in a free market society.
Why? Because he's making more money because of the capital investment in the machinery that the evil factory owner has put in.
He is making more money than he would have if he started his own factory.
At least that's what he believes at the time.
Or if he just, you know, I don't know, tried to make cars in his backyard with an erecto set or something, right?
Great response. We're actually coming up against a break.
No problem. We'll pick it up, man.
Thanks. Yeah, we want to talk about surplus labor, and we want to get you to deconstruct that as well.
That marks us when we get back.
Back in the program, you have tuned in to Outside the Box.
I am the HX filling in for Alex Ansory.
Great bumper music that Alex Ansory has on this program.
I just got musical whiplash.
What was that, John Wayne with a cold?
I don't know. It made me want to go posse up and go hunt me down some, you know, some criminals or something.
Get deputized by the local sheriff and go hunt them down.
And you know, even though you're talking about cowboys, I'm not going to make a single Brokeback Mountain joke.
Just... That's too easy.
That's what I'm saying. You'd get no points for that one.
There's low-hanging fruit and then there's just the stuff you step on.
Low-hanging fruit.
You better stop it. AlexAnswery.com is the website today.
You'll be able to go there and find a chat room, I think.
I think it's somewhere on the site here.
It's a great site, by the way.
AlexAnswery.com A-L-E-X A-N-S-A-R-Y dot com.
All one word. And I think he's got a chat link there somewhere.
Not precisely sure, but I will get familiar with his site so I can tell you all better about it Monday, so I don't let him down in that capacity.
He'll be back Wednesday, but today we've got Stefan Molyneux on the line, freedomainradio.com, freedomainradio.com, an excellent source for excellent ideas, most excellent ideas.
I highly encourage this listening audience to go and check out Stephen's work, he has an epic body of work going on over there, and just always good stuff to dig into, and it just really breaks down the false perceptions that are built up by the mainstream media.
It's like, you know, I just envision, like your work, Steph, I envision this giant sort of electrical light board, right?
It's just like a thousand, hundred thousand switches all over this big thing.
And like as you consume your material, you know, it's like you're just walking down this row of switches, flipping them on one at a time.
Well, that's a very nice way of putting it.
I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, so you've got some – you're going to be putting out something new this afternoon, you say?
I just finished a really – I'm very, very proud of this video.
It is on – it's called Money Is You and it details what is actually occurring today.
When the government is running up foreign debt, what is actually being sold, I'll be putting that out later today.
So I'm sure people can check that out if they subscribe to Freedom Aid Radio on YouTube.
Right on. And I think on the Mike Chambers show, I think I caught this right.
One of the guests there at the end was talking about Social Security checks are going to start having stamps as being paid by China at some point soon.
I just caught that in passing.
I'll have to go back and check that out, look that up.
But wouldn't that be something?
Well, whether they have the stamps or not, it's still somewhat true, right?
You're right, right. Oh, did you catch what Anita Dunn said a few days ago?
No, I don't think so. Oh, Stephan, you totally missed it.
Anita Dunn is the White House communications director under Obama, and she came out recently, or it was sometime in the recent past.
I don't know if it was like further in the past and the video just now came out or if it's recent the video came out.
But it was the speech of her behind this freaking podium with her bob haircut having self praising Chairman Mao as one of her favorite political philosophers.
Well, wasn't he the guy who said that political power flows out of the barrel of a gun?
So maybe we're getting more honesty from the ruling classes and that's not always a bad thing.
I mean, at least then it can be legitimately opposed, too.
I don't have any problem, like you, facing down the reality of the argument.
It's when they twist and when they become Orwellian that they're the most dangerous because you can't nail the arguments down at that point.
Yeah, because you can manipulate language, but you can't manipulate reality, which is why sophists will always try to redefine language.
You can't say to a gun, turn into a flower and have it turn into a flower, but you can redefine a gun as a social contract.
Something you're obligated and democratic participation and suddenly the gun is not a gun because the language has covered it.
But that's why people love to manipulate language and try to avoid reality as much as possible because reality is kind of intransigent that way.
Yeah, I just couldn't believe it.
We actually have a caller on the line.
We're going to go to Michael Pine from California here in just a few moments.
But I just couldn't believe it. It was like Anita Dunn standing up there praising Mao and talking about when she's unsure in her political life, this is one of the people that she turns to.
She spoke about Chairman Mao and Mother Teresa in the same breath.
Well, Mao was a communist and Teresa supported fascists, so maybe they're not that far apart.
Sorry, let's get to your caller.
That's true. But for me, she might as well have just been standing up there talking about, you know, when I'm in doubt and I don't know what to do in my life and I just need some direction, you know who I turn to?
I just crack open Mein Kampf and start reading.
And I just get inspired by the words of Adolf Hitler.
They just lead me to the light.
Well, sorry, just before we get to the caller, the other 1984 reference is that the war switches all the time, Eurasia and East Asia, right?
So... We were at war with communism, right?
And China was the enemy.
And now China is the friend because we need their money.
And there's no reference to this.
We have always been at war with Eurasia, you know, and this kind of stuff.
It is just amazing to see how this slides over and what a genius Orwell was that way.
Right. Michael Pine, you're live on Outside the Box today with our special guest, Stefan Molyneux.
I'm the HX. Go ahead with your question.
Yes, are you talking to me?
Yes, Mike. Mike from California.
Yep. Yeah, this is more from Oregon, actually.
Oh, hi, Mo. Something's wrong with our little broadcast here.
Yeah, that's fine.
That's fine. Thank you so much.
First of all, if you go to alexhansury.com and just below, I mean, on the top, I just scroll down, it will say, meet up with Alex every Wednesday, and just go a little bit down.
It says, visit the chat room during the show.
You can click on that.
Oh, yeah, yeah, okay, where the chat room is.
There it is. I see that.
Scroll down a little bit.
It's in the second column, the first column on the left side at the very bottom.
Visit chatroom during the show at alexansery.com.
Thanks a lot, Mo. Yeah, yeah, no problem.
I have a comment also, too.
I mean, 1984, I mean, this guy was ahead of himself.
He was like flash-forward.
Much ahead of himself, when he wrote that book.
And then they made a movie out of it, too.
But the bottom line is this, that, you know, once we see that 200,000 American citizens in Detroit don't have electric, and right now it's cold weather, matter of fact, or some people, they don't have water.
She's shut off in the United States.
So what suppose we have to do?
I know anarchism is not the way to go, but I mean, we cannot go to be violent either.
So my best way to think is Gandhi's way.
I mean, let them If we go united together as a whole country, because they divide us and conquer, but we should tell them hell with you guys.
We are going to be united and we are going to go to the streets like Gandhi did.
Let them kill. Let them kill the row first, second row, third row.
But how many more TPL people can they kill?
Yeah, sorry, I just wanted to mention, I don't think it was Gandhi's intention that civilians would be mown down.
I mean, I know that happened at Amritsar and other places, and it happened in particular around the India-Pakistani border.
I agree with you that violence is in no way, shape or form the solution to the problems of statism.
Statism is an irrational and destructive philosophy and the only way to combat the effects of irrationality and destructive ideas is with rational...
And peaceful ideas.
It is an educational process.
In my view, it is a multi-generational process.
There has been no enormous change in the structure of human society that I've ever heard of that took less than at least three generations.
And we may get a little faster because of the internet, but the internet is a tool available to good people and bad people.
So I think that it is around education.
It is around patience.
I do not believe that anybody alive now will live to see a stateless society any more than the people in the 15th and 16th centuries who first began talking about the evils of slavery lived to the 19th century when slavery was abolished.
But there is no way to get there without starting here, and I think that the greater honor goes to those who take the first steps.
Excellent response. Mo, you can stick around and respond again if you'd like after the break.
We're up against it right now.
Outside the box, alexansery.com.
I'm the HX filling in.
Stick around.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
hey, hey, we are back on the show.
This is outside the box, and I don't – Stephan, I don't know.
Where did Alex Ansari find the HX theme song there?
I don't – You know, I think that he's got an iPod setting, which is not the Genius playlist.
It's just schizoid.
I think that's, you know, push that button as if I have multiple personalities that have no knowledge of each other.
What music would each one like?
That's my theory. Anyway, let's not just again.
Yeah, that's the soundtrack that I hear in my head when I walk down the street, by the way.
You know, as I cruise past the hasty-tasty in my Reeboks kicks, that's the music going on in my head when I flip the collar, snap the fingers, you know.
We still got Mo on the line today on Outside the Box.
Once again, I am the HX filling in for Alex Ansari.
He'll be back next Thursday.
I'm going to be with you until then.
We still got Mo on the line.
Mo, you want to wrap it up with a comment?
Yeah, sure. I mean, the bottom line is what Gandhi did.
Generally, it's for every other country, like Iran, within two weeks' time, the Iranians are going into the streets, chained together their hands, and they're going to the streets silent.
They're not saying any words.
So what the hell they can do?
Let the terrorist government of Iran shoot the people.
Okay, the first They will go down, second go down, third go down, fourth go down.
They can kill 1 million, 2 million, 3 million, 100 million Iranians.
I mean, not 100, I mean, 20 million.
Again, 50 million Iranians will live in peace.
You see what I'm saying? I mean, revolution or evolution.
If revolution means you have to be about peace, where Gandhi went, Gandhi's way.
Otherwise, they will use, mashallah, anywhere in the world.
If people react violently, then they give them the tools, say, well, these people are violent.
And violence brings violence, and then bring, mashallah, to any country, generally speaking.
So, Iranian now decided to change their tactics.
So, within two weeks, there's going to be mass demonstration across Iran about Gandhi's.
I mean, they don't care.
If they shoot them, okay.
The first line, first hundred people die, second, die.
I mean, this will be all put on YouTube, put on YouTube, and then they cannot do it.
At one point, they run away.
The soldiers will run away.
Because they say, wow, what the hell we have done?
Yeah, no, sorry to interrupt.
I agree with you that when people see the violence that is in the statist kind of system, That they recoil.
I just don't think you need waves of people dying in order to show the violence that is inherent within statism.
All you need is a moral and philosophical examination of the premises of statism and you see that it guarantees people the right, if not the obligation, to initiate force against people who are almost inevitably disarmed.
And so I don't think that we need waves of people dying to see the violence in the system.
I think we need to just continue to make the arguments as clear and consistently as possible about the violence that is inherent in an organization like the state.
And I think once we can see it in our mind very clearly, the gun in the room, as I keep talking about, to keep pointing out the gun in the room that is involved in any state of society, then people can see the violence conceptually and we don't need to see it physically because we understand that it's there and we will have the same revulsion.
Against the use of violence, we won't need to see people being gunned down in order to turn away from such a monstrous system.
And can I just also say that I have to disagree some.
I've often said that there's really no revolution without consequence, and I have to look back.
I have to look into the nature of humanity as we stand, the reality of us.
And the reality of us is that we naturally self-preservate.
We tend to choose courses in life that lead to our own preservation.
I don't think that I don't think that there's anything wrong with saying that we are under direct attack and we have the right as a human being on planet Earth to self-preservate and to defend ourselves.
So I often have found that Gandhi's way is not my way.
Although I do respect Gandhi and everything he did, his path was his way.
That fit his circumstances and don't necessarily fit these.
Because I believe that this system, this machine, will declare martial law and hand down all of these oppressions regardless of what we do.
This has been the history and fact that we've observed so far.
We haven't had a violent uprising or an exceptionally Violent response to these oppressions so far, and yet these oppressions persist and continue and grow even.
And they're worse today than they've ever been before.
So I think that we absolutely have a right and even a duty at a certain point to draw the line and say here and no further beyond this point is dire consequences.
That's the nature of self-preservation.
Sorry, just to back you up a thing there, not to go against necessarily what Mo's saying, but...
Biologically, we are constructed to survive, not to be free.
And if the only way that we can survive is to bow down to tyranny, then that's what almost every human being will do.
And there are a few exceptions. But biologically, it wouldn't make much sense to go up against the tribal leaders, get killed and not reproduce.
Those genes would have been weeded out of sort of rebellion at all costs.
Those genes would have been weeded out pretty early on in human evolution.
And so the reality is that most people will choose to live under a tyranny rather than die fighting it.
And we see this all.
I mean, look at 70 years of Russia when they slaughtered tens of millions of people in China and North Korea and Cambodia and blah, blah, blah, right?
People choose to live under tyranny and find whatever happiness they can in their lives rather than die fighting it.
And so given that that's a reality, and certainly everyone on this show and most of the people I'm listening who aren't listening from prison have taken that choice, right?
We're not saying, well, taxation is immoral, so I'm going to not pay my taxes and go out in a blaze of gunfire glory with the IRS, right?
That's just not what we're doing. So I think it's kind of tough to say to other people you should have a courage in a more difficult situation than I have in my relatively easier situation.
Well, I'll just tell you, I don't pay taxes, and I don't maintain an income that is traceable by those people.
In fact, I try to undermine and reject the machine at every possible level that I can in my own personal life.
And what I mean by that is that even the individuals, like we'll take the Browns situation up in New Hampshire, they stopped paying taxes, got overwhelmed by force, and now poor Elaine has been sentenced to 35 years, and she's like 67 years old or something like that.
So we'll take that example.
Had that been me, I would have refused to pay the taxes.
I would have undermined the system that way.
And then when the system came to leverage consequences, I would have undermined those as well.
You would have seen me run away to fight another day.
You would have seen me undermine everything that the state was trying to do to leverage these consequences and thus perpetuate its power.
And that's where I think the struggle is.
I don't think that we have to necessarily say, okay, I'm going to resist this thing and stand here and die in the face of it.
I think that's an error to view resistance that way.
Resistance is multispectral just like the oppression is multispectral.
So if we in our resistance can start to think that I have the opportunity and the means right now in my own personal life, in my own reality, To begin to undermine this system on various levels of consequences and then determine to undermine those consequences as well, I think that eventually what we're going to see is a watershed moment where there's so many people resisting in that function that the gears just cannot continue to turn.
Yeah, and the system fundamentally, at least my argument, the system is not top-down.
The system is not guns pointing at everyone because that's not what we see.
The system that I see that supports the state is horizontal.
And what that means is that if you go to your friend's house or a family gathering or whatever, I don't know.
And so I think that the way that, because if we understand that the state is really an effect of the degree to which we attack each other for talking about freedom, that that's what they cash in on is the fact that we will generally get hostile at a horizontal level with people who talk about real freedom.
The way to really undo the structure to me is to simply take a stand in your relationships, in your life.
Around freedom and around principles.
Nobody has to, but that is certainly my suggestion.
It's the road that I've taken, and I can tell you that it's been very successful for me and for a number of other people, but it certainly is a great challenge.
Well, certainly the most reasonable position tends to prevail.
We're up against a break right now.
I can't hear the bumper music, but this is Outside the Box.
I'm hosting HX till Wednesday.
We'll be right back. Won't you come see about me?
I'll be alone.
Dancing, you know it, baby.
Tell me your troubles and doubts.
Give me everything inside and out.
Love's strange, surreal in the dark.
Think of the same thing without.
Taking a dip into the diverse mind of Alex Ansery on the program today as we pay attention to his bumpers for the first time and notice how widely diverse they are.
Boy, that guy's got a really widely diverse taste in music.
I was just listening to that 80s song and all the ties in my closet just got really narrow and leathery.
It's pretty cool. Oh, that's funny.
You're not going to see that in any Disney films.
That's for sure. AlexAnsweryChat.ChatTango.com.
AlexAnsweryChat.ChatTango.com is the chat room.
You can also find that at AlexAnswery.com.
It's in the first column on the left-hand side.
If you scroll down to the bottom right above where it says Multimedia in the next section is a link that says Visit Chat Room During Show.
And you can click that link and that will get you right there into the chat room.
If you've got any questions, comments, or concerns in the chat and you don't want to call in at 866-841-1065, You can post them in there, and we will post them to the good Sir Stefan Molyneux, although I shouldn't say that because we're kind of conspiratorial around here, and people will start thinking like you've been knighted by queens and things.
So I shouldn't say that.
But we're back on the program.
This is a short segment, so we're just going to get right back into it.
Surplus labor, Stefan, is a Marxist idea.
Yeah.
And we're going to read a quote from him about that.
And we'll see how much time we have.
And maybe you can respond in the next segment, because this is the really short one.
So he says, it is only after men have raised themselves above the rank of animals, when therefore their labor has been to some extent socialized, that a state of things arises in which the surplus labor of the one becomes a condition in existence for the other.
At the dawn of civilization, the productiveness acquired by labor is small, but so, too, are the ones which develop with and by the means of satisfying them.
Further, at that early period, the portion of society that lives on the labor of others is infinitely small compared with the mass of direct producers.
Along with the progress in the productiveness of labor, that small portion of society increases both absolutely and relatively.
Besides, capital with its accompanying relations springs up from an economic soil that is the product of a long process of development.
The productiveness of labor that serves as its foundation and starting point is a gift, not of nature, but of a history embracing thousands of centuries.
How do you respond to that? I never liked him as a writer particularly.
I mean I just find him kind of long-winded.
Anyway, who am I to say? But yeah, the idea – the basic idea is that you pay a worker $10 an hour and you sell the products of his labor for $15 an hour.
And because of that, you are stealing $5 from the worker and that's an injustice.
And that's nonsense. I mean, that is complete nonsense.
So, for example, one of my first jobs I got was putting together New York Times.
I got it when I was 11. I put together New York Times on a Sunday in a bookstore.
I loved it because I got free books, right?
But I put the Times together.
I was paid like two bucks an hour or something like that.
And if I'd sit in a field and just move my hands in the same way, then I would obviously be producing nothing of value whatsoever, and I'd probably be trespassing, right?
So the fact that I was able to make some money by making these movements is only because somebody had kind of built a store and a newspaper around my hands' movements, and it's that value.
Which is why I was able to earn $2 an hour rather than zero sitting in a field.
And so people forget the factory that is around the worker that has been built for the worker to be more productive.
That's why he's getting the $10 rather than $5.
Hold the thought on the factory.
We're up against a break. Outside the box right now, we'll be right back with one or two more segments with Stephan.
Don't go anywhere. I'm coming down, coming down like a monkey.
But it's alright.
Like I'm moving back that you can't see.
But it's alright.
Try to shake.
Phil Collins there on Outside the Box on the HX filling in.
And I could have swore Phil Collins in that bumper there just said, gotta have, gotta have a monkey, but it's all right?
You know, you just had to cue up a bald singer there, didn't you?
You just had to, you couldn't resist?
There was just no way out of that box, right?
Hey, this is outside the box.
Outside the box, right. I mean, you never know what you're going to get here, Stephan.
So we're talking about surplus labor.
We're talking about why this is false and that labor can't just go out into a field and wave its hands around and expect to be defined as labor.
There has to be another side of that.
So that's where we are. Yeah, so there's a whole – a huge degree of investment.
That is created, and we're just talking about a free society here, and I mean, statism is a different situation to some degree, but you have a factory that is around the worker, right?
So the worker who's, you know, pushing and pulling and pushing and pulling something has to be attached to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, usually, of invested wealth, right?
Somebody has deferred savings or has created some sort of profit, basically has deferred spending in order to invest in a factory.
So a capitalist has taken $10 million or $100 million and built a factory.
And because of that, the worker is able to earn not just $1 a day, which is what you see in some of the third world countries and sometimes worse because they have no capital investment.
The worker is able to earn $10 an hour rather than $1 a day.
And so the worker is hugely better off than if the capitalist had not built the factory.
So he is profiting from the capitalist in the same way that you can profit from renting because you don't have to put down all the down payment and tie up all your money.
You can profit from renting.
So he's renting the equipment from the capitalist and the capitalist is renting the labor from the worker.
And the combination of the two produces far greater wealth for both than if one or the other.
And if the machinery is there but no workers, then there's no money.
And if the workers are there with no machinery, then there's no money really.
So the fact that it is a free and mutual exchange is really, really important to understand.
The fact that Marx banged his maid and produced a kid which he then abandoned is also not unimportant when it comes to evaluating Marx as a thinker.
If he's really all about let's not exploit the workers, how about not banging your maid and then dumping her in the gutter with a baby?
You know, I don't mean to sound overly prudish, but I do like to think that thinkers have some adherence to the virtues that they inflict upon other people.
So I just wanted to toss that in as a bit of salacious gossip that may have some relevance.
Good stuff.
Good stuff. I'm no fan of Marx.
I say let's get Jerry Springer on him.
He's been so responsible for so many misperceptions and so much garbage that's been picked up.
Anita Dunn praising Mal.
This stuff is related here.
This brings up another topic that I wanted to talk about in the final segment.
We're going to get you to respond to one of these criticisms of the ineffable Ayn Rand if you'd like to do that before you go.
But we've got – it's just – sometimes, Stephan, I just – I go, man, MacArthur – or who was his name?
The guy crazy about McCarthy?
McCarthy, yeah. Yeah.
Was he right? Yeah, I mean, in many ways, Ann Coulter has an interesting book.
I'm not a huge fan of everything she says, but she has a good book on McCarthy.
Yeah, he was right.
I'm a huge fan of the bones at her neck.
I don't like anything else about it, but the bones at her neck are hard.
Yeah, McCarthy was right insofar as if you could imagine during the Second World War that the State Department and the Foreign Department and so on were all infested with Nazis, which to some degree there were some, but then that would be a huge problem.
And the fact that there was a sort of anti-Russian Cold War going on And there were large amounts of communists infesting the U.S. government, and they had some real effect on the Yalta Conference, right, and how Europe was divided after the Second World War.
I think that, I mean, he was crazy drunk, not a philosopher and all that, but...
I think that – and of course the problem was that they don't attack the philosophy.
They attack the people. Have you been in the Communist Party?
Let's get this guy. Let's have a witch hunt on this guy.
And attacking the people is just a ridiculous way to avoid the real problem, which is you actually have to attack the ideologies.
It's so strange to think that America fought and bled and died, spent trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives fighting communism only to end up with a president who nationalizes entire industries, which is the very basis of communism.
I mean, it's so tragic to see that when you fight people, not ideas, you always end up losing, no matter how much you win against the people, you will always end up losing against the ideas in the long run.
You're speaking to one of the major blunders that comes out of the Republican Party, who tends to be less interested in the ideas behind the politics and more interested in who they find to be most electable.
You know, again, focusing on the individual rather than the ideas creates the opportunity to inject other ideas that you may not be so keen on.
So that's a great point, Steph.
Absolutely. Yeah, leave the people out of it.
I mean, it's not that the people are entirely irrelevant, but… You just keep talking about the principles.
Keep talking about the ideas.
Keep talking about philosophy.
Keep talking about reason and evidence and just stick with it all the way from A to Z. As Churchill said, when you've got the position that's reasoned and is valid, never give up.
Never back down. And I think that's really important.
The only thing that we should ever surrender to is better evidence and better arguments.
Never. Absolutely. Intimidation, never manipulation, never threats, never bullying, only to better evidence and better arguments.
And the degree to which people forget that and start focusing on people is really tragic.
It is absolutely, you may win a fight or two, but you will lose the war every time.
Well, it's most certainly the Jerry Springer mindset.
I mean, you know, you don't know me.
You don't know me. That's not my baby daddy.
I'm my baby daddy.
And you go through these things and you go through these epic conflicts of social conflicts on those kind of broadcasts.
And it kind of trains you to think in eight-minute mode about things that really should take a good deal of introspection and analysis and so on and so forth.
So I'm not really surprised.
I'm not really surprised that the pervasiveness of mainstream media and all the reality TV is predicated on the idea of people attacking other people, watching these petty, dramatic conflicts, and the ratings go through the roof.
We see the same thing on this side of the fence.
When on this side of the fence, individuals start going after other individuals, And start name-calling and dropping names saying this person or that person is scum and they're COINTELPRO and they're a communist and they're talking all this and all that instead of focusing on the ideas.
Ratings go up. That's an unfortunate reality but there it is and I think it's kind of pathetic to be honest with you.
Well, it's tragic really because of course in public schools we're never taught to think.
We're never taught to reason from first principles because the moment that we reason from first principles we would recognize that public schools are an immoral institution, right?
So the teacher says to children Don't steal, right?
Don't hit, don't push, don't steal, right?
And then when the children get a little older and they realize that their parents are being forced at gunpoint to pay taxes to support the teacher's salary, it's a little tough for the teacher to say it is a principle that you should not use force to get what you want.
It's like, well, teach isn't your entire job, your days off, your two months off in the summer, your pensions, your job security, isn't that all predicated on a gun?
We will be back after the break.
Jake, hold that thought.
We're coming right back.
Welcome back to the Danger Zone.
You have found yourself outside the box.
I'm the HX filling in for Alex Ansari until next Wednesday.
We'll be here the rest of this broadcast on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
Alex Ansari will be back on Thursday, I do believe.
I think that's the plan.
So we look forward to his return.
And right now in this final segment with Stephen Molyneux and Steph, thanks so much for being with us again.
It's just fantastic, man.
You just rain blows, thunderous blows of rationality down on me.
And I just I love it.
I eat it up every time we have a chance to talk.
But we're going to get right back into this.
So we give you as much time.
And we're going to address a Marxist fallacy here as written by this guy, rustbeltradical.wordpress.com.
And the article is entitled The Myths of Ayn Rand.
And he writes in this fallacy number five, this is the one that I'd like you to respond to.
entitled The Capitalist Free Market Equals Freedom.
And he says, according to Rand, freedom means only one thing, freedom from the threat of physical violence, and it is the role of the state to ensure that freedom.
Everything else is a matter of contract agreements freely drawn up between individuals on the basis of legal equality.
And he writes, this is an entirely restrictive view of freedom.
Of course, real freedom is the freedom to develop your own individuality and creativity on the basis of freedom from hunger, from poverty, from disease, from exploitation, from intimidation, and from the permanent exhaustion imposed by capitalist work regimes, parentheses, it is no accident that the center parentheses, it is no accident that the center of modern capitalist work regime methods, the United States, is the sleep deprivation capital of the world.
He adds, by the way, people do not confront one another in the marketplace on the basis of freedom and equality, but on the basis of deep structural inequalities of class, race, and gender.
So I think that pretty much wraps that up.
What do you say? Well, I think those are some excellent, excellent critiques.
I think that if we look at America today, we can absolutely see class, race, and gender having a strong effect upon people's economic freedoms to interact.
So, I mean, some poor black kid, right?
I mean, his schooling is going to be atrocious.
He's going to be tempted by, if he comes from a ghetto or poor neighborhood, he's going to be tempted by Gangs and drugs and that kind of lifestyle, the gangster lifestyle.
And he's going to have a great deal of difficulty getting employment if he wants some sort of blue-collar job because the manufacturing sector has been decimated.
He faces much higher chances of, far higher chances of imprisonment, you know, which goes on your permanent record, renders you largely unemployable, blah, blah, blah.
So he's saying that these are problems in society.
And of course there are absolutely enormous problems within society.
He also has a far higher likelihood of being born to a single parent family, which has huge negative effects upon children's potential.
But if we, of course, if we look at these things rationally, we look at who's in charge of all of this.
Well, who fundamentally is in charge or has the most influence over the structure of black families?
Well, it is the state, right?
Through welfare, through subsidized housing and outright managing the ghettos and so on.
Who is it who educates this poor young black child?
It is the state. Who is it who has created this insane drug war that is corrupting every level of society and has particularly negative effects on those from poor neighborhoods?
That is entirely the state's doing.
And we can go on and on, right?
So when he's looking at the effects of somebody who comes...
The state's doing even insofar as much as bringing the drugs actually into these neighborhoods.
I've heard that too. So...
If we look at how these things play out, then we have a – we look at the state as the fundamental problem.
Black families did not – the welfare state did more to disintegrate the black family even statistically as far as I understand it than slavery did.
And it is – It is absolutely tragic what has happened to black families.
They were getting out of poverty, they were rising to the middle class, and then bam!
You know, one of the most racist things that came into being was some of the great society programs that, you know, by targeting the poor, and the blacks were poorer than whites at this point, created a more permanent underclass, and we can see the effects of this in this sort of ghetto culture and this worship of violence, and still the degree of child abuse that can go on in the black community, which is higher than some other communities.
So if we look at issues of...
I'm just picking one, right?
You can pick any one of the sort of gender, race, or class.
It is really, really tragic what has gone on.
To blame freedom for this is so ass-backwards.
You know, it's like watching a pretzel try to navigate a map of the London subway system.
It's just so twisted.
It's bizarre. But this is what people do, right?
They say, well, there are these problems, and the problem is freedom, so we need more government.
And that is a really, really tough thesis to sustain when the government has had so much power And authority and influence and control over the black community.
I mean, it is the government that is throwing all these blacks in jail, right, who are mostly nonviolent.
Maybe they use some drugs or maybe they are involved in the drug war, in the drug trafficking or whatever.
These are not crimes in any free society.
And so it is the state that has had the most power over the black communities.
And so if people feel that, for instance, black communities are having a problem, and I think that they're having pretty significant problems, the last thing that you'd want is more state power because if you do a thorough empirical and intelligent analysis of the problems, you can see that it is state power that has had the greatest effect on creating these problems, and more power is you can see that it is state power that has had the greatest effect on creating Well, absolutely.
I mean, when did we trade opportunity for welfare?
I mean, when did we trade choice for the safety, the social safety net?
When did we trade freedom for being captured into a state that will care for us cradle to grave?
I don't want to be cared by the state from cradle to grave.
The state is not good at it.
No, and what's going to happen to these, and not just blacks, but what's going to happen to all the welfare recipients when the government runs out of money?
I mean, you want to see great tragedies that arise out of these short-term violent solutions.
You're going to see what happens when people start running out of money to pay off the underclass.
You will see.
And then hopefully people will understand that it is the people who are interested in a free society who genuinely care about the poor and the people who just want to shovel money around at the point of a gun have no care or concern for the poor because if they did, they would be questioning the role of the state rather than demanding an increase in its power.
Yeah, absolutely, Steph.
Just awesome, awesome responses.
We'll let you respond real quick to something from a chatter before you go.
In fact, we'll let that one go.
What do you got coming up in the future here, Steph?
Well, what kind of dreams are going on in that epically admirable?
Well, thanks. I appreciate you.
Very, very kind. Well, I'm continuing to do my True News series, which you can get on where I do a philosophical analysis of current events.
I still have in the works.
I have so many notes. I have a draft of a book called How to Achieve Freedom because I get lots of questions like, well, what's your solution?
Stop being such a critic and let's talk about how we can actually achieve it.
And so I'm working on that.
But that's a long and Vaguely scholarly work that's taking a lot of research to get done.
So that's going to be out at some point.
You know, it's also tough, you know, with being a relatively new parent.
My daughter is 10 months old, so it's a little tough to find the time for that really, the detailed work of writing a book.
But continuing to put out the podcast, I have a Sunday show every 4 p.m.
at Eastern Standard Time.
Just go to fdrurl.com forward slash call in to join.
And, you know, have a Skype ready or a telephone and...
I'm more than happy to take calls.
Anybody who has any questions, I'm more than happy to hear them.
Awesome, awesome. Well, thank you once again so much for joining us on the broadcast.
I hope that we can do it again in the not so distant future.
Just real quick, are you planning on homeschooling?
Undecided at the moment. We have checked out a local school that is private that does appear to be quite good.
I'm not a big fan of reinventing education.
I think the teachers are very well trained and specialized, but She is such an amazingly active kid.
I can't imagine how she's going to stay in a class for six hours a day.
So we may end up doing that, but I haven't really made any decisions yet.
Well, thanks so much for the call.
Thank you. I appreciate it. We will see you again soon.
Thanks, man. Have a great show. Thank you very much.
Stefan Molyneux from freedomainradio.com headed out there.
We'll see you again another time.
We'll be right back for the last half hour.
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