April 9, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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1636 Net Neutrality - The Freedomain Radio Interview: Two Beers with Steve
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So welcome to Two Bears with Steve.
I'm your host, Steve Patterson, and today my guest is Stefan Melleneux.
And Stefan is the host of his very own podcast, his radio show.
It's called Free Domain Radio.
And he also has a successful YouTube channel, a channel that has quite a body of work.
In fact, last night I was checking And I noticed you have 462 videos on there, which is quite an enormous amount of content.
You know, I call you the king of content.
Are those all videos that you uploaded yourself?
Yeah. Now, of course, 460 of them are of my cat playing piano, but two of them are about politics, philosophy, and ethics.
So it's not much of a mix, but those two have been quite popular.
And I imagine you also do some videos as well, or some audiobooks or some books.
Yeah, I mean, on my website, which is freedomainradio.com, there are over 1,600 free podcasts on a variety of topics.
There are, I think, six or seven free books on philosophy and ethics and a philosophical approach to relationships and stateless society, how society might work without a government, and all kinds of juicy tidbits.
All of it's free.
You know, it's a donation model, so I'm often eating my toenails come late in the month, but it's a very exciting business model.
Yeah, we were just talking about that before we came on the air, is that, you know, the business model of the Internet is, you know, give it away for free.
If people think it's worth something, they'll donate to it to keep it going.
Yeah, and I've often thought, I mean, imagine how great, how much better movies would be if you paid what you thought it was worth on the way out rather than having to pay up front.
I think that there's something about the donation model that drives quality, I think, in a way that has never really been experienced before.
And I think that's very, very exciting.
And I think this is why people turn to the internet.
Because on the internet...
The level of quality that is required by anybody who wants to make a living at providing content over the internet, the level of quality that is required is so high that I think you just get a lot better stuff than you do in the mainstream media.
Even if you take away all of the sort of general cultural nonsense of the mainstream media, I think there's just higher quality on the internet because A, the people who are doing it are doing it out of passion, since it's not really a career.
And certainly I started doing it for free and didn't take donations for quite some time until people wanted to donate.
And I'm like, hey, I guess you could, right?
And so I think that there's a lot of really high-quality stuff on the internet.
If it's popular and it's given away for free, I think you can assume that it's the highest quadrant of quality that you can find, whether you agree with it or not.
I think that the quality is there, and I think that's what's drawing people more to this medium.
Yeah, we're just about to tick over the one-year mark for the Two Beers with Steve show.
And, you know, it's years gone by.
I never asked for anything. And people are starting to ask me, you know, like, you know, where can I donate to because there's no donate button on your website, which I just recently put up for some folks that want to donate.
So, yeah, they've been tragging and trailing along all year long.
And listening to the show and they want to support it.
You know, I do the same thing. If I get something for free and I feel like it's probably worthy of payment, I'll pay for it.
In fact, a band out there, it wasn't Coldplay, it was Radiohead, did the same sort of business model where they gave it away for free and they said, whatever you want to pay for it, we'll take that in kind.
And there were some people who were big hardcore Radiohead fans who donated $100.
Some donated nothing. But the business model works.
Yeah, and if I remember rightly, what happened out of that business model was that they made about as much money as they would through a conventional album, but they had much wider distribution.
And to me, that's fantastic.
I mean, for me, the purpose of my show is to bring philosophy to as many people who may not otherwise be interested or have the money to attend a course or whatever.
So to bring philosophy to as many people as possible.
And so if I sort of can make a reasonable living and have a roof over my head and food in my belly and get it out to many, many more people than if I were some sort of teacher or professor in an institution, that to me is way better.
I mean, if you can get, I don't know, it's not exactly the same paycheck as the professor, but if you can get a reasonable income and I've had, you know, 14 million podcasts downloads We've had two and a half million views of videos on the channel.
That is way better.
I mean, I would take less money to have that amount of distribution than have any access to a sort of institutionalized situation where I'm teaching maybe 30 or 40 people a year.
That's crazy compared to the millions that you can reach with a high quality show over the internet.
Yeah, and you know, we're actually going to talk about net neutrality today.
I thought there'd be three questions that we should tackle today.
And so I'll first start off with talking about the question I want to talk about first, and then we'll talk about net neutrality.
That'll be kind of like the thing that everybody sticks around for.
Right, just get through all the boring stuff.
It's the money shot of this show.
You know, like, there was an old show that Bill O'Reilly was on.
They had the girl dancing around in the bikini, and they showed it the very first commercial break, and they kept it around to the very end.
Well, we don't do that sort of content on this show, but we do net neutrality.
We bounce around net neutrality.
Are you saying we don't? So I ordered these tearaway pants for nothing?
Okay. Fair enough.
That's probably best for everyone involved.
Okay, so stick around, folks.
Coming up next, net neutrality.
So this is what I like to start talking about, is we can sit here, and this is more of a financial market question.
We can sit here, we can parse through the intricacies on how the market works and how corporations have gained monopolistic control and how both political parties are two heads of this very same beast.
But what I really want to know is...
Downdeep, is there something fundamentally wrong with our current system?
And if I could expand further upon that question, is that are the problems in our financial system, our corporate system, and political system merely isolated events of fraud, or are they symptoms of a larger problem?
Does that question make sense to you?
Oh, it really does. And I think that is an excellent question.
I think a lot of people get really focused.
And it happens to me, too.
I have to resist this impulse.
You know, the details of the everyday is my crack cocaine addiction.
You know, it's like, I'll read the New York Times, and I'll sort of say, Oh, Oh, there's this thing that's happening and I want to do a show about that and talk about the surface things, which is also true when we get to net neutrality.
I think it's really, really important and I have to sort of will myself to do this, to dive below the sort of churning waves of the everyday into the deeper currents that are really causing the issues at hand.
Most people want to fix stuff at the surface, but when you go really down to the depths is where you get to really fundamental solutions, right?
So, I mean, to take a silly example, right?
So, slavery, people are like, oh, we should treat our slaves better, or this slave was treated badly, or we should maybe teach the slaves to read, and so on.
That's all dealing with the effects, but the fundamental issue is, of course, that slavery is immoral, and it must be abolished as an institution, and then you have a real solution.
And I think with finances, there are...
A number of things that are fundamental, but I think the most fundamental issue, and you can read Tom Wood's meltdown for more on this, the most fundamental issue with the economic systems throughout the world is government monopoly over currency.
That is so fundamental.
If you want to, like, if all the fish in a lake are dying, you don't...
Look at each fish and say, well, I wonder what he died of, and I wonder what he died of.
What you would do is you would look at something that is common to the lake as a whole.
And when you have instability in financial systems throughout the world, then what you need to do, the first thing you would look at is the currency.
Because currency is the lifeblood of the entire economic systems throughout the world in every context.
So if economics as a whole is going haywire, and I think it's fair to say that it has been, particularly for the last 20 years, Then the first place you need to look at is currency.
And governments have a monopoly on printing money.
And what that basically means is that governments can type whatever they want into their own bank accounts.
And of course, if you and I could type whatever we wanted into our own bank accounts, we would type a huge amount of money.
We'd go and spend a huge amount of money.
We'd type a huge amount more.
We'd use it to bribe people.
We'd use it to buy lots of things, which would make the businesses around us really...
You would gain tremendous power.
Yeah, it's massive power.
There's no greater power because it is a form of theft.
Counterfeiting is a form of theft.
Now, currency, there are some people like Agurus and so on who think that currency itself is wrong.
I think currency is perfectly fine.
And it's something that is relatively recent.
The fundamental government control over currency in the United States is less than 100 years old.
It was, I think, in 1915 that the Fed was founded.
And since then, the American dollar has lost, I think, about 97% or 98% of its value.
And that's so fundamentally catastrophic that people can't see it.
They just get used to it. And they just don't see how destructive it is to give the government control.
Over the currency because what they can do is they can print money rather than raising taxes and that takes about 18 months to two years to percolate throughout the economy.
It tends to harm the poorest.
Worst of all, it's the most regressive tax there is because it creates inflation and inflation hurts the poor much more than it hurts the rich because it devalues their fixed income.
And so giving government control over the currency has created this massively unstable Anti-democratic, I mean even if you're a fan of democracy, which I'm not, you at least would have to understand that having the government print money rather than raise taxes is fundamentally anti-democratic because what it does is,
and to go into debt, what it does is it pays for current programs at the expense of people in the future, at the expense of people who haven't even been born, and that surely is taxation without representation since you can't exactly get a thumbs up from a fetus.
So I think that if you really want to look at what's going on in the economic system as a whole, people say, well, these bond markets and these interest rates and this and that, but the power that the government has to create and control currency, to create and control interest rates, to go into massive debt, it is the very foundation of the instability of our system.
And the system will never be stable until that problem is addressed.
And what about – let's talk about an alternative to that because the government has control over it, and you are looking towards where it's more of a – I think you're probably pointing towards a free market solution.
And what would that look like?
Yeah, I mean, a free market solution, I think, is a good way of putting it.
I would slightly amend the term to a non-violent solution, right?
Because philosophically, I think, and just basic kindergarten morals, right?
Don't push, don't steal, don't shove, don't hit.
We all understand that violence is not a good way to solve social problems in our own life.
So I didn't get a job.
I don't get to take the manager hostage until he gives me the job.
If the girl doesn't want to go out with me, I don't get to kidnap her and put her in the trunk of my car.
We all understand that violence is a bad way to solve problems in the private sphere.
We just have to understand that it's a universal principle.
I have to extend that to the public sphere.
So a nonviolent solution, because what happens at the moment is that if you set up a competing currency, you're called a counterfeiter, or you are violating 600 different laws.
And you will be thrown in jail.
And if you resist being thrown in jail, they'll shoot you, right?
I mean, so what we're looking for is, you could say a free market solution, and certainly it would be a free market solution, but I think it would be more fairly characterized as a non-violent solution.
The non-violent solution could be trade in kind.
The non-violent solution could be private and competing currency companies where, of course, a currency company would really want to give you stability in currency.
I mean, I worked in business for about 15 years.
I was an entrepreneur. I founded a company, and I was an executive at two other companies.
And boy, oh boy, I mean, if you've spent any time in...
I was in the software field, which is sort of the wild west of the business world.
The degree of instability in the business world based on fluctuations on currency, on booms and busts, I mean, it really is crazy.
I mean, it's like being locked in a barrel, rolled down a hill and trying to have a rational conversation with a schizophrenic on crack.
It's really a crazy environment to try and work in.
So any private currency would really want to give you stability.
It would want to give you interchangeability.
You might have some kind of chip where you'd load it up at different currencies that it would find the most optimal currency to use for a particular A transaction, you might get cash back on each of your currencies as an incentive to use it.
But most importantly, you would know that a dollar now would be worth a dollar in 10 years.
And that would change everybody's fundamental habits so enormously.
I mean, one of the reasons that people don't save is that they're concerned about money losing value because of inflation, because of debt.
If money had constant value, people's incentive to spend it would be much less because it would be easier to defer gratification.
So I would say, yeah, a non-violent solution so that you could compete with currencies.
You could not use a currency if you didn't want to.
You could do anything.
But you couldn't initiate force to control how people used money.
And that, I think, is really the essence of a virtuous system.
Yeah, I knew that we'd probably get into a philosophical situation.
market solution to pop up.
That would require some research on the part of all the participants to make sure that what I'm holding actually holds value.
So what we've done is the system that we have now, in essence, is we've outsourced our research to the government.
We got this. Don't worry about it.
We got this. We're on it.
We're taking care of you. So you would have to, as a citizen, take time to research exactly what you're holding if it has any value whatsoever.
Well, sorry, let me give you a counterexample.
I mean, just as, you know, my entrepreneurial head would say something like this.
People don't want to do research to find out whether a currency has stability and value.
They just don't want to. I mean, you wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to.
So what I would want to do is, if there was that need, Then what I would do is I would say, okay, I want a rating agency for the currencies that's going to be objective and give a sense of their value.
Or I want to sign a contract with a currency provider that says, if their currency loses more than 3% of its value over a five-year period, they will pay me double the difference in gold or something that's going to guarantee it so that I don't have to worry about it.
Yeah, some sort of insurance contract.
I mean, I think you're right about the government.
What it does is it takes over something like this big, sword-engorged Borg, and then people stop worrying about it, right?
So in the US, there's this deposit insurance, right?
Because after the run on banks in the 1930s, which was a result of Fed manipulation of the currency, as was the Great Boom and the Great Depression, People became frightened of bank failures, and so the government says, don't worry, we've got it.
And they come in and they provide this deposit insurance.
And so what happens is people just stop worrying.
But the government hasn't taken away the risk.
All they've done is enforced a bad solution.
But what happens is people stop worrying about the risk.
And so this is one of the reasons why you get this financial instability.
Because if consumers aren't worried about risk, Then they're not going to monitor these institutions.
And the monitoring, therefore, has to go to the government.
But the government is really bad at monitoring things because the government will respond to whoever has the most power and influence.
That's not you. That's not me.
That's the companies they're trying to monitor.
And so they've just been to their wishes.
I mean, there was this guy who sent the SEC numerous letters detailing how it only takes about 10 or 15 minutes to do the math on Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme and to realize that those returns are completely impossible and it's a Ponzi scheme.
But of course no one did anything because that's not their particular interest.
So when the government imposes a solution, people stop worrying about the risk.
But the risk isn't dealt with.
It just accumulates until things get even worse.
It's like taking heroin for a toothache.
It's like, yeah, you'll feel better, but it's not like your tooth gets healed.
Yeah. And the impression that people have of the SEC, of the Federal Reserve, is it's very institutional.
There's these engineers running over spreadsheets all day long, but in fact, it's more of a political machine than it is a mathematical machine.
Oh yeah, I mean, certain studies have been done that the Fed will pump money into the system before an election.
So the economy sort of does better so that people can get that political windfall.
It is an entirely political institution.
And we'll talk about this with net neutrality.
The moment you turn something over to the government, it's no longer a matter of voluntary choice.
It becomes a matter of special interest, privilege, manipulating the guns and prisons of government.
It is not a solution.
It only removes the anxiety.
It doesn't solve the problem.
Yeah, but now that we're talking about political, we've moved along to the political system, I kind of want to get a sense of your political views.
And we'll expand that out further, talk about philosophically on how you view our current political system and what an ideal form of government would be.
But for the time being, let's talk about you, Stephan, because from what I can gather, you're an anti-statist, correct?
Yeah, I mean, I think that's...
Again, I'm going to just be annoying and tweak the terminology, and I apologize if that's imposing something.
I think that would be like saying Richard Dawkins is, you know, an anti-creationist.
I'm, you know, I guess you could say that I'm anti-statist, but fundamentally I'm against violence.
And I'm against violence in all its forms, whether it's violence against women, children, adults, individuals, collectives, wars, and of course politics.
Any political system is defined as a group of individuals who have and claim and have the moral right to initiate force In a geographical area.
That is fundamentally what a government is.
It's a group of individuals with a bunch of guns who have the right, the legal right, to initiate force.
And in fact, the legal responsibility to initiate force in a given geographical area.
Let me jump in. Sorry, go ahead, please.
Because I want to define the word status because I feel like there's this movie, The Big Lebowski, and they always talk about these nihilists.
And I never understood that until after the movie, I looked it up.
You know, they believe in nothing. So let's define what a statist is.
You know, they believe in a statist.
Yeah, they believe that it is morally legitimate for certain individuals to initiate force against others.
Not only morally legitimate, but morally necessary.
In other words, they would consider the absence of such a group of individuals in society with this right to initiate force to be bad, calamitous, catastrophic, to result in, you know, the stereotypical Mel Gibson form of mohawked I think that's...
Not only illogical, but an immoral position fundamentally.
And I don't say that everybody who believes this is immoral, because I think that you have to have heard the argument before I think the moral choice really arises.
I mean, we all grow up in a state of society.
We're taught by government schools that government is good.
Shockingly, right? In the same way that Mazda commercials seem to tout the virtues of Mazda cars, government schools tout the virtue of the state.
And I think until you've heard the oppositional argument to the moral legitimacy of this gang of thugs, I would call them.
I think that it's not immoral to believe it, it's just what it is, right?
But I think that once you've heard the moral argument to the contrary, then I think there is a moral responsibility that falls on you to either find a way to justify certain people using violence or to accept the counter-argument.
Yeah, this is part of your videos that I appreciate the most is because I'm more of a, less a philosophic and more of a mathematical type person.
So this is where I enjoy it the most of your videos is, and after I saw your first video, I was like, you know, I need to learn a little bit more about this, talk more philosophically about stuff like this.
So I picked up George Orwell's 1984 to get a better perspective on this because this matters, you know, speaking philosophically does matter.
Do you think so? Well, it's really the only thing that matters.
I think human beings are driven most fundamentally by the need to be good, by the need to be moral.
And that doesn't mean that they're always doing good, of course.
Otherwise, you wouldn't need philosophy any more than you would need nutrition if people only wanted to eat that which was good for them.
But human beings are very fundamentally driven by the need to be virtuous.
Unfortunately, we have social institutions that aren't virtuous.
And so philosophy has been tortured It's something that resembles a pretzel combined with a map of your lower intestines, combined with a map of the London underground subway system or something.
Philosophy has been really twisted to attempt to justify this fundamental contradiction in society.
That violence is really bad for private citizens, but violence is really good for people who put on a blue costume and come and collect taxes, or people who put on a green costume and go and blow up Iraqis.
To create a justification for this has tortured philosophy beyond recognition.
To go back to something that is more simple I think is really important.
I'll give you one brief example if you don't mind the analogy.
In ancient times and really up until Kepler and Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, The Earth was considered the center of the solar system, and everything went around the Earth, right?
And this works somewhat okay, except for the fact that there's Mars, right?
And the problem is, at one point, and I can't really give you the visuals here, but at one point, Mars does what's called a retrograde motion.
In other words, it goes forward, forward, forward, and then, as the Earth accelerates around the Sun, Mars appears to go backwards, and then it starts to go forward again when Mars begins to catch up.
And this is called the Ptolemaic system after, I think, a Greek philosopher or astronomer.
And so what happened was people considered spheres to be the perfect shape and because God made everything and spheres and it all became about spheres and so they had to invent more and more complex mathematical calculations to explain these things like the retrograde motion of Mars and other things that didn't fit with the Earth-centered model of the universe.
And astronomy and the mathematics around it got more and more complicated and more and more bizarre as measurements got more and more refined and they found more and more problems with the model.
And then, of course, what happened was the revolution, the sort of scientific revolution after Bacon in the 16th and 17th centuries.
People said, well, you know what?
If we put the Sun in the center of the solar system, we can throw out all of these monstrously horrendous, you know, 1,500 pages of calculations to figure out where Mars should be at any given time.
It all just falls down to three equations or whatever.
And I think the same thing has happened with philosophy.
Philosophy, in an attempt to justify this violent institution at the heart of society called the state, has created all sorts of weird things like postmodernism and existentialism and consequentialism and utilitarianism and all these kinds of things.
Which don't really have any principles and they just try and measure effects.
You know, like, hey, if we put taxes and we take money and we give it to the poor, hey, we've solved the problem of poverty.
It's all about the effect.
It's not about the principles. Whereas if you just say, well, the initiation of violence is wrong, and you put that as the sun at the center of your solar system, Everything just falls into place.
The disasters of the current system fall into the place.
The reason why the welfare state doesn't work falls into the place.
The reason why war has not ended falls into the place.
Everything just fits in a beautiful way.
Philosophy becomes infinitely more simple when you just enshrine that principle of the non-initiation of force at the center and don't let it stop as you go forward.
Whereas if you have to justify the state, which is one of many things that people try to justify, including the existence of gods and ghosts and gremlins and hobgoblins and all that, If you just take that principle, put it at the center, and work from there, everything becomes gloriously simple and beautiful, I think, almost mathematically. But if you've got to justify this violence, everything just gets messed up and complicated.
And if I was to take what you're saying here and make sense to me, I'm going to go ahead and take what I'm hearing you say and work it so that I understand.
We've added layers and layers of complexity to our system.
Look at how all the programs that we have, all these charitable organizations and even these grants that we have and the way the tax code is set up.
So we added all these layers of complexities.
But what you're saying is these are all done to justify what the state has, the manipulations the state has done.
Let me just go a little bit more differently, right?
So physics was getting kind of really complicated around the late 19th century and early 20th century because there were measurements that were coming in that were just really whacked out because, of course, measurements were improving.
Now, of course, one of the great things that Einstein did was he came along and he said, hey, what if the speed of light is just constant?
I know it's weird. I know it doesn't make any sense.
I know it violates all of our sensibilities.
But let's say the speed of light is constant.
No matter what. Even if you've got two spaceships traveling apart at the speed of light, the still measure is constant.
And of course that just violated everybody's sensibilities.
It made no sense based on all their prior understandings.
But let's say the speed of light is constant.
Once the speed of light was held to be constant, you get E equals MC squared.
Then everything falls into place.
All the measurements. Makes sense.
But if you don't have that constant to understand the complexity of your measurements, then you just end up inventing more and more complexity.
What you're talking about, I think, which is a very, very important category, is the effect of this confusion around morality.
So, people say, well, the poor is a problem.
And of course, the poor is a problem.
Not all the poor are a problem.
I'm a lot poorer now as a podcaster than I was as a software executive, but it's not a problem.
That's a choice, right? People are poorer when they have children, but they're not poor in the same sense as somebody who's really fallen on hard times.
So the poor are a problem and a voluntary solution to poverty would be, hey, go start a company in a ghetto.
Go hire people. Go give to charity.
Go educate people. Go help them out in some way.
That would be a voluntary solution and, of course, was a very common solution in the past.
A violent solution is let's pass a law to go and grab all this money from citizens and then give it to a bunch of bureaucrats and I think it's 10 or 15 percent of it trickles down to the poor.
So it becomes a bureaucrat job creation program and very little of it gets to the poor and that which does get to the poor tends to trap them in poverty.
Now what happens is violent solutions don't work and so you have to have more To fix the problems caused by the violent solutions, right?
So public schools don't work, and so you have to take more money and try and find a way to solve problems, right?
Public schools were supposed to solve all these problems, but they didn't, and so you get no child left behind.
And now there's another, Obama's coming in with another means test to try and solve these problems.
Violent solutions don't work.
And so you have to continually pile more and more on to fix the problems of the previous, and it just makes it worse.
I mean, this latest healthcare bill is an example.
Healthcare was supposed to have been solved, you know, 40 or 50 years ago with Medicare and Medicaid, but it didn't solve the problem, and so you have had continually ever-increasing amounts of government control over the healthcare industry because violence creates a temporary solution to a problem, but it doesn't... Like, if you go steal someone's fish, Then you can eat that fish.
But tomorrow you're hungry again because you haven't learned how to fish.
And the guy doesn't want to fish anymore because you keep stealing his fish.
So nobody ends up with anything.
So then you've got to go find some other guy to steal from and then you get food for another day.
He doesn't want to steal. So violence creates this snowball effect where more and more problems get created.
You need more and more violence to solve it.
It's like that old Mickey Mouse cartoon.
He gets these spells and the dancing...
I think that's what you're talking about but the moral justifications that underlie it all get even more twisted and complex.
Yeah, you have to forgive me.
These are just more of a philosophical, deeper approach.
This is something that we don't normally do on our show.
But I just got done reading a book, and these are conversations that I enjoy, though.
I just got done reading a book, Rose George's The Big Necessity.
It has to do with how we deal with our waste.
And over in India, they have a top-down approach or the bottom-up approach.
So the top-down approach is where money just is showered down from the government to fix the problem.
What happens is you really get a bunch of people waiting for the money to show up to fix the problem rather than people coming up with their own solutions.
So the grassroots solution is most likely the best solution and also the cheapest and the most innovative solutions.
Yeah, and you're right. It engages people in solving problems.
And the other thing, of course, which is very confusing for people because it's not mentioned, but it's so obvious when you think about it, is the government has no money.
The government creates nothing.
The government is not a business.
It does not have a profit. It creates nothing.
All it does is use force to transfer wealth from productive people, more productive people, to less productive people.
And that is really, really fundamental.
So whenever you hear the government is injecting a trillion dollars into the economy, well, they're not, actually, because they don't have a trillion dollars.
They don't have any money whatsoever.
What they're doing is they're borrowing money and using it to bribe people in return for votes.
That's the fundamental equation, and anybody who doesn't believe that is too naive to know which way to pee, right?
And so the government doesn't have any money.
So when they say, well, the government is going to do this, the government is going to do that, all it can do is counterfeit money, steal from future generations, or steal from the more productive citizens around at the moment.
It doesn't have any money to give away.
It doesn't have any money to transfer.
And so everything that you get from the government is something you just pay for even more later.
They are a loan shark.
We don't imagine... That a loan shark is somehow magically creating money.
He's going to give you some money, but then you're going to have to pay it back with ruinous rates of interest in the future.
And that's, of course, the same thing that happens with the government.
And this is what's really confusing to people.
They say, well, when there's a recession, we should stimulate the economy with more money than from the government.
But the government doesn't have any money.
All it's doing is it's stealing from the recovery to come, which means that the depression is going to last longer.
But, of course, the reason the system continues is that people who get that stimulus money are very happy and they will spend a lot of time, energy, and money to lobby the government to create these stimulus packages.
Individuals benefit, the collective loses, and that mismatching of incentives is one reason why the government continues to grow and disasters continue to accumulate.
Yeah. I mean, we're talking about these top-down solutions.
I'm going to move to that bouncing net neutrality in the bikini here.
But that's the top-down approach.
And then I favor more of a bottom-up approach.
And what happens is this bottom-up approach gets hijacked by corporations, I think, in a lot of ways.
Because there's a public and there's private.
And they They've hijacked the private solution, but in a lot of cases, they're monopolistic corporations.
Let's move into net neutrality because I think that has to do with what we're about to talk about.
If you've been paying attention, and you really have to look for it, net neutrality is in the news right now, but it's not getting front page coverage.
It did get on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but unless you weren't already in the know on what net neutrality meant, you would have blown right by the article.
And just a few days ago, the courts ruled in favor of Comcast and its ability to set up essentially toll roads on the information superhighway.
Well, sorry, let me just, can I give two seconds of background?
Yeah, please do, please do.
What happened originally, as far as I understand it, was that BitTorrent is, of course, a massive file-sharing system.
And again, not to sound overly cynical, but the vast majority of what goes on in BitTorrent is the transfer of illegal materials.
Understand, illegal to me is not a dirty word, and I'm no fan of intellectual property laws in the current system, but that's not the opinion of people at Comcast, right?
The opinion of people at Comcast is a huge amount of network traffic is being driven by illegal sharing of files over BitTorrent, which is harming those of our customers who are doing non-illegal activities and browsing websites or watching videos on YouTube or whatever.
And so we want to throttle the amount of network bandwidth, not kill, but throttle the amount of network bandwidth that we give to this illegal activity that is harming our, you know, honest and legally law-abiding customers.
And I think that's where it started.
And this, of course, raised a huge amount of hue and cry and fuss about limitations of freedom of speech and this fear that they're going to shut down Google or route you to their own sites or they're going to deny voice over IP so you'll take their phone solution and so on.
And I don't think any of that is, I think that's more scare stories, but the original intent was to reduce the unfair burden on the network of illegal file transfers.
Is that, I mean, that's my understanding of it.
I think you're better versed on it than I am, but is that how it started?
It came out of the BitTorrent.
Ordeal. They were soaking up bandwidth.
It makes sense on the surface.
Let's say the information superhighway again.
I'm not very well versed on this, believe it or not.
I probably should be and I will be over the next couple of weeks because this is something that's going to matter down the road, I believe.
Let's say that you've got all these kids.
Basically, the internet is dominated by Sorry, are you saying there's pornography on the internet?
Sorry, Glenn. I've never been there.
And myself.
But there are people out there.
And in fact, when the internet...
That's what really launched the internet.
This is a sidebar conversation.
But what really launched the internet was the ability to get free porn.
Oh, it's like VCRs.
And I mean, almost all new media is driven by masturbation.
You can like it or you can not like it, but it is just a fact of human nature.
And you could say almost really just a fact of male human nature, but...
We've got seeds and they go bad.
So that's what drives media.
And what I'm doing here and what you're doing is we're just riding that pornographic wave.
That's right. We are sitting there waving our hats, riding the pornographic wave.
And hopefully when they're all done with their business, this is getting a little bit too far out there, but they'll tune in to what we're saying.
Right after the cheesy 70s musics and the guys with the bad mustaches and the robes comes the philosophy and the economics, you know, trailing after it like a geek after a busload of cheerleaders.
Anyway, sorry, go on. Oh, boy.
Oh, boy. Well, two beers with Stevie's taken in.
That's right. What a turn there.
Oh, only two. Oh, sorry.
I mistook the instruction.
Anyway, so on the surface, I was trying to point out that it makes sense, you know, hey, man, you are taking way too much of the pizza at the table.
You know, there's only so much pizza to go around, you're taking more than your fair share.
So, but what I see happening is, and one thing I'm more concerned about is, I don't, you know, They're setting up these monopolistic controls of the hardware that runs the internet.
They're setting up toll roads on the information superhighway so that they can direct traffic one way or another.
If they want you to tune into Google, they'll slow down the services to all the other search engines.
And there's sort of payoffs and bribes.
To think that they wouldn't do that...
Sorry, I'm just... I mean, there's lots of complicated, fascistic mess around the size of the corporation's access to the internet, the fact that the internet was a publicly developed good, but these guys are profiting from it without paying back the people who originally paid for it.
I understand all of that, but let's pretend for a moment that it's a free market environment.
I'm not sure... What the issue is.
So if some guy says, I like Google, and I like YouTube, and I'm never going to go to any other search engine, and I'm never going to go to any other video site, and in return for that allegiance, I only have to pay half as much to access the Internet.
That seems to me like that's voluntary.
Again, as long as there's no initiation of force, and whereas if the majority of people say, I don't want any priority to any kind of Internet traffic, I don't know.
I don't know.
And so I want to be part of a network that either minimizes that traffic or doesn't allow it.
And so I get faster internet access because it's not all being hogged up by this illegal downloading.
And so I want to go to a company that's, now again, that's a voluntary thing and people are willing, you know, they're happy to do it or not to do it.
But I think the problem is that, you know, if they go to a political solution, somebody's going to be putting a gun to somebody's head eventually because that's what all laws do.
But I have no problem with, you know, if they want to highlight certain sites or speed up certain sites or slow down certain sites, to me that's, you know, perfectly fine.
Let's say I only want English language sites and I don't want other language sites, you know, maybe they can put a priority on those.
As long as it's voluntary and it's, you know, openly spelled out and contractual, I don't see why people wouldn't want to trade faster access.
They get faster access to the sites they visit the most, and they pay less to do it because the companies are sponsoring it through the ISP. I don't have any particular problem with that.
I don't view that as a limitation of freedom of speech, but that's how I would approach it from a free market standpoint, but maybe there's things I don't understand about it.
Well, I mean, this is all just news coming out right now, and we're having a discussion based on it.
And like I said, I'm not 100% on top of it.
But one thing I do not care for, and I know you're the one being interviewed here, so I just want to have you let— No, no, you go.
It's your show. No, I want to get your opinion on these things because you had a career in the technology world.
So I want to understand, like, what do you think about giving monopolistic control to people?
Because once they control the hardware, they control the roads pretty much.
Well, I'm not sure. Sorry, as far as I understand it, just about anybody can plug into the internet.
So I don't know about monopolistic control.
There's no way in the free market.
I'm sorry, go ahead. The cables, the wires, the switching units.
Well, but sorry, those would be manufactured by Nortel or some other hardware provider.
And Nortel will sell to whoever wants to buy, particularly now.
They will sell to whoever, Cisco, I think, is a more viable company.
They will sell whatever hardware to connect to the Internet that people will buy.
So I don't think they're controlling the access.
And I think most people can plug in somewhere to the Internet if they're really desperate to.
So I do agree with you that the amount of investment for a really fast connection, you know, T3s or more, to an internet provider or to the internet as a whole is a very expensive proposition.
And to supply residential customers with internet access through cable or satellite or something is, again, a very expensive thing to do.
And, of course, the cable company owns the cable.
I mean, I get internet through the cable.
And they own that.
And I could have the alternative of going to satellite, I guess, if I wanted.
But there is a monopoly based upon the existing infrastructure and who owns it.
And there is a monopoly, to some degree, a quote monopoly because it's so expensive to set up this sort of stuff.
But I don't think that there's any legal monopoly in that if you and I wanted to start an ISP, that it would be illegal for us to do so.
I don't think that is the case.
But again, you and I live in different countries, so maybe it's different where you are.
And what's your take on the BitTorrent?
From a free market perspective, the behavior that went on from Comcast, kind of limiting BitTorrent's ability to access whatever pipelines or infrastructure.
You know, they own the hardware, and they are responsible to the customers.
I can guarantee you this, that...
The Comcast executives, I guarantee you, did not sit in a room stroking their Persian cats and twiddling their pencil-thin mustaches and saying, boo-ah-ah, we really want to start a shitstorm with people and we really want to piss off everybody and we really want to start wrangling with the government just because we really want to destroy freedom of speech.
I mean, I guarantee you that's not how...
As the software executives, or I think executives in just about every country or organization work.
What happened was they said, somebody put up a chart which said something like, you know, 80% of our traffic is illegal downloads.
And we're paying for this stuff, which is illegal.
And maybe 20% of our customers are using 80% of our bandwidth for illegal stuff.
They put that chart up on the wall, and no responsible executive would look at that and say, eh, we don't need to do anything.
I mean, every executive would say, if 80% of our capacity, which we've paid for, is being used by a small percentage of our customers for illegal activities, we should throttle that.
And the reason we should throttle that is because if we don't throttle it, then what we have to do is we have to expand our network.
We have to upgrade our hardware.
We have to do all of this funky stuff, which is going to raise rates for our end users.
And so basically we're saying, you people who aren't using BitTorrent to download illegal stuff, you have to pay an extra 20 bucks a month because we have to upgrade our hardware to pay for all of these guys doing the illegal stuff.
I mean, from a business standpoint, the price had to go up either way.
And so either the price went up in terms of time for the people on BitTorrent, right, so they're paying more in terms of time because it throttled, or the price goes up for everyone in terms of money.
And I think it's more fair to throttle BitTorrent than it is to ask the people who aren't using BitTorrent to pay.
Now, the problem the ISPs are going to get into, I think, and one of the reasons why I think net neutrality is probably going to win out in the long run.
It's either going to win out because customers say, I just don't want you messing around with what I get to access.
I just don't want you to do it.
And so they'll sign up and they'll pay a little bit more so that there's no...
And that's a market solution.
And of course, Comcast is going to say, hey, if that's what you want...
You know, we're a free market company.
That's what we're going to do. So that's one way it's going to win.
The other way it's going to win is out of the legal system.
Because the moment that the ISP becomes responsible, in a sense, for what is going from the internet to a customer, then they open themselves up, I believe, to all sorts of legal liabilities.
Because right now, they're just a pipe, right?
They're just a sewage pipe, right?
We don't care what's in there.
We're just pushing the liquid through, right?
But the moment they say, well, we're going to focus on this website and this customer, then what's going to happen when some customer's kids gets a hold of, sees kiddie porn or whatever, then the ISP, which is now dipping its fingers into the data that's flowing through its pipe, can't get that fingerprint off the data anymore.
And I think that they're probably going to back down unless they can get immunity through Congress for this sort of stuff.
But they're probably going to back down because of the consequences of the legal liability.
Let's say some, you know, crazy terrorist guy is downloading some bomb-making instructions on the internet.
And if somebody can sue the ISP because the ISP is now aware of the data that's going down and is managing it, I think that that is going to be enough of a legal scare.
Unless they can get immunity, that's going to be enough of a legal scare to cause them to back down.
Yeah, well, from that perspective, I completely agree with you.
But, you know, the thing is, I always agree with a lot of things like this.
But what we never foresee is the unintended consequences.
Because once you put hand, you know, and here I go back to my monopolistic controls, is once you put the power in hands of people, and I was in the military for a while, and I sat next to General Sidwell one time at a lunch, and he says, once you have power, He closes his fist and he says, you never let it go. Because once you lose it, you never get it back.
And I just see, like, if they get the situation where they are the ones directing the pipes until these solutions are found, it'll be a battle to get those freedoms back.
So do you see any unintended consequences?
Well, yeah. I mean, the unintended consequences is that people are going to...
People who are interested in net neutrality, who want no fingerprints on the data, they are going to think that going to the government is going to solve the problem.
And I can guarantee you that going to the government is not going to solve the problem.
The moment you get the government interested in a particular topic, you know what's going to happen.
I mean, who's going to have more influence over them?
Comcast, who pays about a trillion dollars in taxes and has, I don't know, tens of thousands of employees and thus is very essential to the government in terms of income.
They're going to have way more influence than any, you know, bearded hippies sitting in the basement yelling about free speech.
The moment you're turning it over to the government, you are creating a collusion between the government and the telecoms in this particular area that just didn't occur before.
And your rates are going to go up because they're going to have to spend a lot of money on lobbying and they're going to have to spend a lot of money complying with regulations.
So your rates are going to go up.
It's just a mess.
And I mean, what the hell does the government know about the internet?
I mean, the government doesn't even know which...
I mean, it doesn't really know much about anything.
It's always sort of struck me as kind of ironic that you can't be a doctor without, you know, 10 years of medical school, but you can be a congressman passing laws about healthcare with no quality.
You don't have to have any qualifications or certifications to pass the laws that control people who have qualifications and certifications and experience.
So the government isn't going to know what to do with it.
All it's going to do is respond to whichever pressure group yells the loudest or has the most power.
It's not going to be a rational, moral, or intelligent solution.
It's going to be a political solution, which means force used for the sake of special interests, which isn't going to be the people who start it.
Yeah, well, we're running out of time here, Stephen, and I really appreciate you stopping by.
I mean, that is a segue to another topic completely with me because, you know, a lot of these politicians, they run on the platform of taking their kids to soccer every day, being a really good father and giving emotional speeches and not much else.
So I really appreciate you stopping by.
I'd love to have you come by another time if you have more opportunities to come by.
So thank you for being a guest on Two Beers with Steve.
Oh, you know, before I let you go, though, I want to give you a chance to promote some of the products.
You know, your wares, you sell T-shirts, hats, that sort of thing.
Oh, yeah.
Actually, that's down for the time being.
We're sort of thinking about whether to put it back up.
But, yeah, so there's nothing really sold on the site.
I mean, people can go and download podcasts.
They can have done a bunch of interviews recently with some pretty smart and well-educated people, which I think people really enjoy.
Lots of free books.
So I would just say, you know, consume, consume, consume.
If you find it valuable, I certainly do appreciate a few bucks through the website at freedomainradio.com.
But, you know, the important thing is to consume philosophy, to put it to work in your life.
It just is, I believe, the only road to true freedom and happiness is through philosophy.
And I hope that people will take advantage of everything the site has to offer and just consume, consume, consume.
That's my main goal. Yeah, and if I could piggyback on that and say that, you know, I've spent a lot of time on your site, and you're not just one trick pony.
I mean, it's such a wide variety of topics.
Last night, I watched about a 30-minute interview that you had with Dr.
Lustig, I believe, about, you know, the politics of obesity.
Awesome. And then, you know, there's Peter Schiff as the next video.
Yeah, yeah. I love talking to smart people.
To me, it's like a free education, and I hope that I can pass it along to the listeners.
But yeah, consume, consume, consume.
And if you find it valuable, a few bucks to cover costs is always appreciated.
But the important thing is that people just find a way to awaken that fire of philosophy within their own minds, because that has to be, I think, the road to a peaceful future.
Yeah. Well, thank you very much for being a guest on Two Beers with Steve.