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Nov. 10, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
14:31
1507 Freedom as Defense Against Tyranny!

How a free society prevents the rise of a new tyranny.

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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
This is Freedom, Force and Protection, a brief response to one of the most common objections to a free society, a stateless society, defending against defense, how a free society protects itself from its armies.
So what is the myth?
Well, it goes a little something like this.
A society without a government contains a power vacuum that will be exploited by the first power-hunger group that comes along who wish to recreate a government.
And lo, we shall be as lambs before a slaughter of statist wolves.
Most likely people say as a private defense agency that after taking its customers' money will turn around and enslave them with the very weapons they have paid for in an orgy of irony.
It's not true. It seems true.
I understand that. But it's not true.
Hey, the world seems flat, but it's really not.
It's impossible in a truly free society for this to occur.
I'll make the arguments as to why.
But to truly understand what freedom is, a free society, it requires a fundamental change in our approaches to problems.
So, for example, if you take heroin to, quote, solve your problems, you can't solve the problem of your addiction by taking more heroin.
You have to think differently about how problems are solved in your life.
In the same way, you can't solve problems in a free society by thinking about how those problems are, quote, solved in a state of society.
You can't solve problems with the thinking that created the problems.
I'll make an argument as to why in this short presentation.
So the first rebuttal is, well, it's not true that an anarchic society has a power vacuum that will be exploited by the first violent group.
But even if it were true, the government might be recreated in a future free society.
Is that a good reason to not get rid of the government?
Well, of course not. If you're the captain of the Titanic and some guy comes up to you and says, dude, we are sailing straight towards an iceberg, you say, eh, there's no point turning around or turning away because, eh, there are other icebergs out there, we're bound to hit something and join Leonardo DiCaprio dancing on the bottom of the ocean.
Well, no, you would turn away from the iceberg, even if there was some other iceberg out there that you could potentially hit in the future.
If you had some sort of terminal cancer, you're going to reject treatment and die because you say, well, even if I'm cured, I might get cancer at some point again in the future, so, well, of course not.
So we aim for it even if it were true, although it's not.
The four basic facts of a free society is really worth deeply ingesting.
Number one, what concerns you concerns virtually everyone.
If you have a fear or a concern or an anxiety about something like, if you pay for national defense, won't those guys just take over, become a new government?
Everyone is going to have the same concern.
You're not alone. See, statism divides us into warring groups, special interest groups and people who prey on the body politic and extract taxes from the productive.
Statism divides us.
Freedom unites us.
In a stateless society, solutions are not imposed, but they are sold.
This is the difference between theft and trade, between lovemaking and rape.
If you have a concern about your defense agency taking over your life, then they have to sell you a solution to that.
You don't have to go with them.
You can go with anyone. You can rely on your own personal defense.
Solutions are not imposed in a free society, but sold.
In a stateless society, they're imposed, but that's very different.
In a statist society, corruption actually increases your competitiveness, which is why particular industries give enormous amounts of money to lobbyists to give to politicians or directly to politicians to get favors from the state, right?
So you've got defense contractors give lots of money to warmongers.
Pharmaceutical agencies give millions and millions of dollars to the state, to politicians for their campaigns, in order to get favors.
So, in a state of society, corruption increases competitiveness.
You can just Google Mafia Montreal if you'd like to know more about this.
But in a free society, corruption decreases competitiveness, and I'll explain why in a second.
Voluntarism. A free society.
Voluntary interactions create automatic safeguards against the exploitation of violent power, which is quite the opposite in a state of society.
I'll explain why. So let's look at number one.
We're not all that different, you and I. Almost everyone voices the same concerns about a free society.
What about the poor, the roads, national defense, the sick, and so on.
That's very important. Your concerns will be shared by virtually everyone in society.
Look, I've been arguing for a free society for a quarter century, and everyone has the same concerns.
I'm telling you, I'm telling you, I'm telling you.
I haven't talked to thousands and thousands of people about this.
Everyone has the same concerns.
In fact, I can tell you that I've spoken probably to 150,000 people about this by now through Freedom Aid Radio and other things.
Everyone has the same concerns.
They always come back the same. We are the same.
So that's really, really important.
You're not going to be alone in your concerns.
Number two, solutions are not imposed, but sold in a voluntary free market situation.
So let's say I want to start a defense dispute resolution organization.
We'll call it a DDRO. If I want to start a defense agency, I have to get everyone's voluntary participation as a customer.
That's really, really important.
That's not the same if you're a government.
You don't have to get anyone's voluntary participation.
But if I want to start such a business, I have to get everyone's voluntary participation as a customer.
This means that I have to address your fears that I'm going to use your money to buy weapons and create some heinous new government.
Everyone's going to have the same fears.
I have to overcome those fears in order to sell them my services.
And there'll be dozens or hundreds of defense DROs competing, at least until States are gone as a whole, in which case there'll be no profit in war and they will likely vanish.
But since there are dozens or hundreds of defense DROs competing for customers, whoever comes up with the best solution to customer anxieties wins.
You've got the geniuses of the business world all trying to figure out how to best deal with customer anxiety around the creation of a new state.
If you want to understand how problems are solved in a free society, stop thinking about your fears as a statist victim, as a statist piece of tax livestock.
Stop thinking about your fears as someone who has solutions, quote, solutions imposed at the point of a gun.
Think about how you are going to sell your defense DRO as an entrepreneur.
That's how you start to think about solving problems in a free society.
Here's some possible solutions.
I mean, I certainly can't recreate the genius of the market in any way, but here's just some possible solutions.
You can, I'm sure, come up with dozens of your own.
So if I want to start selling my services as a defense DRL, First thing I'm going to say is, look, I'm going to publicly disclose exactly which arms are being purchased and stored, right?
So I'm not going to build a secret army of robot helicopters, right?
I'm going to publicly disclose it and there'll be third-party verification, whatever is going to make my customers relatively secure, that they know what I've got.
Here's what I have, here's why I have it.
So I'm not going to buy more than I can productively justify as a defense agency.
I'm going to put $10 million in a third-party account to be paid to any customer or group or anyone who finds out that I've purchased more guns than I've stated.
Create an incentive. I'm going to offer to allow competing agencies to inspect the arms stockpile.
They're going to have every reason to want to find one robot helicopter that I've got stashed away somewhere in a UN building.
So they can come in and look.
Anyone can come in at any time and review what it is that I've got.
I proved that, look, I'm never going to manufacture arms, I'm only going to buy them.
I'm going to keep an arms length, so to speak, distance from the arms manufacturers.
So that way, people aren't going to imagine that I'm manufacturing something and store it in some secret location.
I'm going to keep a separation of power, so to speak, and that will win me some more customers.
I'm only going to deal with arms manufacturers that publicly disclose all sales.
And in fact, arms manufacturers themselves would not gain any success in the market if they did not publicly disclose all sales because people are very concerned about a robot army.
And look, I'm going to say in my policy, look, if you ever become uneasy, if you ever think that I'm doing something creepy or weird or building up some secret army, not only can you cancel immediately, but I give you a full refund, right?
So that's going to give my entire organization an incentive to openly calm customer fears about what it is that I'm doing.
Again, these are just some possible solutions you can come up with, I'm sure many of you are.
Number three, third principle of a stateless society, corruption decreases competitiveness.
So if I'm a Defense DRO and I decide to start stockpiling weapons, I'm building my robot army, what's going to happen?
How am I going to pay for it? I'm going to need to increase my prices to my customers to pay for the additional secret hidden weapons.
Well, we all know what happens then.
First of all, the moment I start charging more, without showing more weapons, everyone's going to assume that I'm just buying secret weapons, right?
So they're all going to stop.
They're going to invoke their cancellation clause.
They're going to go to another defense DRO agencies.
I'm going to go out of business.
Corruption decreases competitiveness.
Prices are a signal of how I'm spending my money.
If I increase my prices as a defense DRO, my customers are going to know that I'm stockpiling weapons, or most likely they're going to cancel immediately.
I'm going to go out of business. I'm not going to do that.
Let's have a look at some more principles here.
Maybe I ought to borrow the money instead.
Aha! I'm going to borrow a hundred million dollars to stockpile a secret army of robot helicopters.
That doesn't work, because if I borrow the money, I'm still going to have to increase my prices to pay for the interest, to pay for the principal on the money that I borrowed.
So my customers are immediately going to know, or very soon, that I have this stuff.
Plus, no one just gets to make that decision on their own to borrow money, right?
Because people aren't going to want one guy in charge of a DRO who can do whatever he wants.
They're going to make sure that within the organization there are checks and balances.
That's what's going to have to be sold To the consumer in order for that to become customers.
So I got a board of directors and financiers.
They're going to say, why do you want to borrow $100 million?
I have to come up with a good reason why.
Or they're just not going to approve it, right?
No bank's going to lend me money to buy the weapons.
Banks are going to say, look, we're very cautious about giving money to defense DROs because defense DROs can use it to buy weapons and they have soldiers and they're trained.
So, you know, the banks are going to have tons of clauses for defense DROs that say, look, We're not going to lend you money that's not approved by your board of directors.
And they're also going to say, any member of my board of directors can get the $10 million reward as well the moment that they find out that I'm buying more than I'm publicly disclosing in terms of weapons.
And if it's not enough, $100 million.
It doesn't matter. Whatever is going to make customers secure.
I just wanted to mention, I mean, I think the reason I'm able to think in this way is that I was an entrepreneur for many years and I had to present to boards, I had to present to potential investors to get the money, to get investment.
And the potential investors have a million questions.
Which they expect you to have thoroughly researched and understood.
First question. I go, I want to create a defense hero.
First question is, well, what's going to differentiate you from everyone else?
Second question is going to be, how are you going to calm customers' fears that you're going to take over and create a new government?
And so I have to come up with creative solutions and they're going to have 10 people or 100 people all coming in the same month with Defense DRO proposals.
They're going to pick the very best one that's going to calm the customers the most.
I've gone through this a number of times as an entrepreneur.
If you don't know that process, you don't know the checks and balances that occur before a business is started.
So I think that's useful.
Well, let's say there's some crazy-ass billionaire out there.
Some crazy billionaire wants to spend a billion dollars creating his own army.
Well, he doesn't have to go through checks and balances.
He doesn't have a board of directors, perhaps.
How would he be stopped? Banks are going to say, look, if you're not a registered defense agency or you haven't told us that, the moment we find out that you're buying arms, we're going to seize all your assets.
It's going to be in their clause. Plus, any bank executive who finds some guy buying arms is going to get some $10 million reward because the defense DRO could also say, anyone else who buys weapons, if you find them out, we'll pay you because they'd want to know if anyone's stockpiling weapons as well.
Arms manufacturers. Nobody would support arms manufacturers that did not publicly disclose sales for the very reason that they'd be concerned about a private stockpiling of weapons.
Arms manufacturers are going to say, hey, this crazy billionaire wants to buy weapons from us.
Right, so the bank's going to seize his assets.
No one's going to want to do any business with him.
Voluntarism creates checks and balances.
Defense DROs would publicize the danger.
Crazy billionaire wants to buy up all these weapons.
There's no way to hide an army in a free society.
Society just stops doing business with him, right?
The electricity company is going to say, no more electricity for you.
Road companies are going to say, you can't come on our roads.
Doctors won't treat him.
Nobody will sell food to him until he stops what he's doing.
So it's just not going to happen.
It's just not going to happen.
Now, again, this is a very brief presentation just to give you some ideas.
I go into this, perhaps in excruciating detail, but there's a free audiobook or PDF, Practical Anarchy, available at freedomradio.com forward slash free.
I've put the link off to the right.
If you'd like to know more, I mean, I'm not saying I have cornered the market on all these solutions, but this is a way of thinking.
I want you to get into the habit of thinking about how you're gonna sell to consumers rather than how fearful you are as a consumer of a defense DRO, right?
It's not the same as a state.
We have stuff imposed on us by the state all the time, violently.
But that's not how it works in a free society.
You have to start thinking as an entrepreneur and not as a statist victim in order to understand how things are really solved in a free society.
Thank you so much for listening and watching.
I hope that this has been enlightening.
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