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Aug. 16, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
24:06
1723 Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio Interviewed on the Max Keiser TV Show

23 minutes of tasty televised anarchy!

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Hi, you're On The Edge with me, Max Keiser.
Let's go to Ontario, Canada and talk with Stéphane Molyneux of Free Domain Radio.
Stéphane, welcome to On The Edge.
Thank you, Max. It's great to be here.
All right, Stefan, you believe in an economy based on volunteerism.
And I want to get into what volunteerism is, but first let me just insert a little side note here.
When I see volunteerism, I think such things as Wikileaks.org, which of course is A bunch of volunteers volunteering information to a central repository.
It has had an enormous impact in redefining the debate in Washington and around the world in terms of America's foreign policy.
Or Wikipedia, which are a bunch of volunteers adding submissions to a central repository that is basically maintained and upgraded by volunteers.
And so there's something in the economy That allows now for voluntary input in a way that we couldn't see before the digital age came upon us.
So is this kind of what—tell us a little bit about volunteerism.
Am I near base in terms of my thoughts about it?
Is this a variation on the theme?
Tell us about what volunteerism is.
You're describing one effect of voluntarism and the way that I would describe it, which I think is pretty common coinage, is to say that if we are going to organize society, which we need to do in some way, we need to organize it according to principles, according to philosophical moral principles, not just randomly, not just based on the inertia of history, but according to some real basic principles.
Now, one of the most basic principles in any rational moral philosophy is the non-aggression principle, which means you don't have the right to initiate force Against other people.
You can respond to force in terms of self-defense, but you don't have the right to initiate force.
When you move that principle to the center of society, you end up with a very different looking society than we have now.
In the same way that when you move to the equality of human beings to the center of our thinking, we got rid of things like slavery and the subjugation of women.
We got more rights for children and so on.
So when you look at society and you say, let's organize it according to a moral principle called the non-initiation of force, then you eliminate government as a morally justified institution because the government rests upon the initiation of force in terms of taxation and hyper-regulation and various controls over individuals.
The government is a group of individuals which has the moral right to initiate force in a given geographical area.
Voluntarism or the non-initiation of force undermines that whole way of thinking.
Okay, so move this idea of aggression away from the center of government, and you create something, a society and a philosophy that's markedly different.
Now, in the case of the United States, Yes, it's true.
They now have a government that's completely centered on aggression and war profiteering.
But that's because the folks who go into countries like Afghanistan or Iraq, they don't actually participate in the way that the Constitution designs, that they have to consult with the Congress, for example, before going to war.
There's checks and balances in place to prevent the aggression, war of aggression, from occurring.
So in the U.S., they have obliterated that whole checks and balances, and the U.S. is just getting right back into the game of committing aggressive acts to impose their empire.
But isn't it possible, though, in the case of the U.S. Constitution, if it were adhered to, as it was originally iterated, wasn't this an attempt to get away from a government who's centered purely on aggression?
I absolutely agree with you and I absolutely disagree with you.
So let me tell you where I agree with you first.
It's true that as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence even was written, that this was an attempt that comes out of enlightenment rationalism.
This was an attempt to Put reins on the government, to bind down the government in the chains of legalese, of language.
So there was that attempt.
But if you look at the practicalities of how America was founded, of course, there was genocide against the Native American population.
There was wars of aggression to expand its territory.
This is my annoying, I got a graduate degree in history, and I really feel I need to use it from time to time.
So Jefferson actually bypassed Congress to declare war against Middle Eastern pirates.
Very early on, you had Washington riding at the head of an army down in Pennsylvania to collect a whiskey tax that was even higher than the tax that the British had put on originally, that was the trigger for the revolution.
So while on paper, it's really important not to look at what's written, but what is done.
In the same way that we judge a man by his actions, not by his words, the Constitution was imposed without consultation from the people.
There was supposed to be all this big consultation and it didn't happen.
It was a secret meeting that imposed the Constitution.
Right afterwards you had a president bypassing Congress to declare a war in the Middle East.
You had tax collection going far and above what had occurred under the British.
So I think it's really important to recognize that the American experiment not just stumbled but almost consumed itself in contradictions right out of the gate.
It was never able to achieve this restraint upon power.
The only reason That the American government was small in its inception was that the rebels were very weak, and they didn't have the kind of power that they have now.
Government will always have the maximum power that it possibly can in any given situation.
During the revolution and shortly thereafter, the population was scattered, the army was heavily in debt, and they just didn't have that much power.
So they said, hey, let's make not having power a principle.
But the moment they could get more power, they took it.
And that, I think, is the fundamental problem of statism.
Okay, so in the case of the U.S., there was an attempt to outlaw aggression, effectively, a gratuitous aggression, but that has failed.
And what you're saying is that laws or any institution is incapable of dealing with this issue.
There has to be a philosophical core.
Of non-aggression.
And that philosophical core has to take precedence over any attempt to make illegal aggressive acts.
Now, how does one, let's say, spread the philosophy in a society?
How does one make the philosophy of non-aggression the core principle of a society?
Well, my solution to spreading it has been to try and be an entertaining philosophical idiot.
That has been my particular approach.
And you're doing a fantastic job at that!
It really is my goal and I feel that I achieve it in spades.
So I will make jokes, I will make ridiculous videos, I will try to be as entertaining as possible while continually hammering home the point that a society that is not based on moral principles is going to fail.
Any system that you can think of That has, at its core, a fundamental error.
Like, you know, when in the past they believed the Earth was the center of the solar system and the Sun orbited the Earth.
The calculations to figure out where the planets and the Sun were were ridiculously complicated because they made a mistake at the very core of things.
When people thought the world was flat, they could not navigate the oceans because you couldn't take into account the curvature of the Earth.
In the same way, we look at society at the moment, and this is true of societies all over the world, things are getting worse and worse, laws are multiplying, debts are multiplying, unemployment is skyrocketing, everything is underfunded, pension schemes, unemployment, anything, schools, everything is underfunded and the debt is massive.
The reason that all of this escalating complication, confusion and mess is occurring is because there's a fundamental flaw at the center of our thinking about society which is that we believe we need a little gang of people with a lot of weapons to make things right and that just doesn't work it just makes everything worse and worse in the long run and that's what we're dealing with now okay so the idea that a government like the US which is enormously aggressive and some would argue committing societal genocide because they've expanded their empire to Like the Roman Empire did,
to the point where they can no longer sustain it, and now you're seeing that empire collapse, as every empire in history has.
And that, at the core of the U.S. experiment, were, some would argue, there were moral principles.
There was the Constitution, there was the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence.
They tried to outlaw the kind of thing that you're talking about, gratuitous aggression, wanton aggression.
But that didn't work.
It has failed, obviously.
The U.S. experiment has been a failure now, we can say, with some certainty.
But where does one find these moral principles?
I understand you have some moral principles.
Are they codified in any text or belief system currently, in your opinion?
Obviously, people living in the United States would say they draw tremendous moral guidance from the Bible.
Is the Bible, does this offer principles that you can build a country around?
I think that the Bible offers some rules that I would agree with, and I'm sure you would agree with.
Don't steal, don't murder, and so on.
Coveting thy neighbors, something, something, maybe not so much.
But the Bible offers some conclusions that I think are very helpful, but the Bible doesn't offer...
It's a religious text, so it doesn't offer rigorous philosophical reasoning from first principles.
So this is not a plug because the book is free, but on my website at freedomainradio.com, I've written a book called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, which attempts to prove, and I think successfully, it's been out for a couple of years now, and stands unchallenged.
It proves two fundamental axioms that we need to have a civilized society.
The first is, That the non-aggression principle is the only morally consistent approach to organizing society and human relations.
And the second is that property rights are inherent and implicit within human interaction.
So you get property rights together with the non-aggression principle.
And what we find is we end up with a society that looks very much like how you and I run our lives.
I mean, if I want something from the store, I don't drive my car through the plate glass window, come out with an Uzi and grab it, at least not recently.
And so, you and I, we will do things peacefully and voluntarily.
When I wanted to get married, I didn't bonk someone over the head, put them in the trunk of my car, and keep them chloroformed in my basement.
Again, not recently.
And so, when we organize our lives as you and I do, voluntarily and peacefully, where if we want something, we will negotiate for it, we will earn it, we will trade for it.
Everything works out great.
If you and I turn to a crime spree, then things aren't going to go very well for us.
The same thing is true in society.
The way that we need to organize society is exactly the same as the way that we organize our personal lives.
Adam Smith said it about economics.
He said that the affairs of a great nation are fundamentally no different than the affairs of a household.
Debt is not wealth.
In your and I's household, debt is not wealth.
And coercion doesn't work.
And the same thing is true in society.
So this is nothing new.
This is simply expanding the way that people already live Okay, now let's talk about the apparent mutual exclusivity of property rights, private property rights, versus this idea of non-aggression.
The reason I say they appear to be mutually exclusive Is that the idea of private property rights seems to be at the core of most aggression.
Take the United States, for example.
They believe they have a right to the oil and resources in Iraq.
Therefore, they're going to invade Iraq.
And some, according to the Lancet report in the UK, they have killed a million innocent civilians.
I mean, this was all in the name of property rights that they believe that they're entitled to.
Now, that's at the basis of their aggression.
How do you balance private property rights with non-aggression?
And isn't it true, Stefan, that there is an alternative model to private property rights?
And have you fully discounted that in your philosophical model?
Okay, there's a lot to chew on there.
Let me try and take off some swallowable bites and start at the beginning.
I would argue, Max, that the invasion, occupation and frankly genocide, genocidal activities in Iraq, this is not the result of the exercising of property rights.
This is the result of the violation of property rights.
So, for instance, if Cheney and Rumsfeld and all these other thugs had been presented with a bill for the war to their own personal bank accounts, There's no way that they ever would have declared that war.
The only reason that the United States is in Iraq is because they get to initiate force, the government gets to initiate force against the American taxpayers, largely unborn given the national debt.
It gets to initiate force against American taxpayers in order to fund the war.
So it's not so much the effect of the war, which is tragic and gruesome beyond words, but the cause of war is the initiation against the civilians in order to pay for it.
There's no way that war could ever be profitable unless you could offload the costs onto innocent civilians and even those Americans who are for the war I guess there's three of them left by now, most of them in government.
But those Americans who are for the war would find themselves very quickly against the war were they to be sent a bill personally to their bank account for the costs of the war.
You'd find people fleeing that money pit like crazy.
So the initiation of force against citizens to pay for the war is what results in the aggression against Iraq.
And that's where I would say the violation of property rights is occurring, is among the citizens from the population.
So that's the first issue that I would talk about.
As far as alternatives to property rights go, Philosophically it just doesn't work.
The very brief argument is that it is impossible to argue against property rights.
Property rights are designed, they evolve from self-ownership.
So you and I own ourselves and we are responsible for our own actions.
We are also responsible for the effects of our actions.
If I go and strangle some cat, then I am responsible for the death of that cat.
I'm responsible for the effects of my actions.
Property is just the result of particular actions.
Like you and I are waffling around on the internet at the moment and hopefully we're going to get some coin from it at some point.
So those are the effects of our actions.
We own the results of our actions.
No one can argue against that.
Because if you argue against it, you are using your own body to make the argument.
So you are exercising self-ownership to argue against self-ownership.
That just doesn't work logically.
So, sorry to be mildly technical, but that's the approach that I think a rational philosophy takes about property rights.
Okay, I'm going to talk about that for a second, the property rights, as you've just iterated, but I want to go back a second to the Iraq war situation.
The folks in the U.S., the neocons, the war profiteers, the Dick Cheneys, the Donald Rumsfelds, the George W. Bushes of the world, felt that Well, they had a misplaced idea about who owned what in Iraq.
They felt they owned the resources, and therefore it was their right to simply take them back what was rightfully theirs in their mind.
Obviously, the Iraqis believe that their resources belong to the Iraqis.
What you're describing here is that This is not a function of market economics.
This is a function of market failure economics.
In other words, the price mechanism, in terms of costing, the true cost of the actions of those neocons to go into a foreign country and steal assets, if the costs were adequately represented to the people that they represent, the Americans, That would never happen.
So it's a failure to communicate actual pricing, the price mechanism, the price discovery mechanism, to use an economics term, is completely, has run as a failure in terms of adjudicating and creating policy, both domestic and foreign policy.
Because in the U.S., of course, the total price discovery failure is at the heart of the real estate collapse As well.
So on this subject of costing out economics in a true manner that would give people a true cost-benefit analysis for their actions, these self-realized individuals that you're speaking of, do you include Ecological resources in that equation.
For example, in Canada, it's now the home of the, you know, Alberta tar sands.
Some would consider it an enormous ecological disaster.
But those prices are not adequately reflected in the economy as reflected in terms of the liabilities of all Canadians.
Can you speak about this a little bit?
Yeah, absolutely. I think that the protection of the environment is obviously fundamental to the healthy working of any civilized society.
With the understanding that we need to use stuff and eat stuff and drink stuff and have energy, we also need to recognize that the long-term sustainability of environmental efforts is absolutely essential.
It's interesting that not many people know the history and why would you, but in the 19th century in England when the satanic mills, the factories, first started pumping out their vile smog all over the countryside, what happened was in London they put these factories up and there were these apple farmers all in and around London, which is impossible to imagine these days, but it was the case in the 19th century.
And all of this smog began rolling down and coating their apples in just Ick and goo and making them unsalable.
So the farmers went to the courts and said, these dudes are damaging my property, so I want restitution.
I need a restraint on what they're doing.
You need to get these smokestacks moved or cleaned or something like that.
And the British courts at the time Basically said, the social good of society as a whole requires that these factories be allowed to do what they're doing.
Your petition, your plea is rejected.
And the reason, of course, that the governments did that was because they were getting much more tax money from the industrialists than they were from the small apple farmers.
So I think it's really important to understand that when you put the government in charge of environmental policy, that government will inevitably bow to those who can give it the most goodies in terms of votes or in terms of donations and that is a fundamental problem.
It's a conflict of interest. There are so many ways of solving environmental problems using the free market and fundamentally what it has to do is with ownership.
So in the card industry out in Newfoundland in Canada they fished card for 400 years until the government took over the quota system and then within a generation it was entirely Strip clean because the government didn't want to impose restrictions on the fishermen because that would cost them votes because the fishermen wanted all this money and they just assumed the government was going to take care of it.
The government does not solve problems.
The government uses force, sells off the unborn to foreign creditors and throws people in jail for carrying around bits of innocuous vegetation.
That's what the government does. The government miseducates the children, runs up debt and eventually takes the old age people off pensions because they've run out of money.
It doesn't solve problems.
It's a fantasy to think that they do.
We need to start looking at voluntary and peaceful ways of solving problems like environmentalism by having things be more owned, not less owned.
People say, well, we need the government because of the problem of the commons, right?
Like if everyone lets their sheep graze in a common area, it's a huge problem because everybody has an incentive to let their sheep graze more.
But using the government as a solution to the problem of the commons is beyond insane because the government is the social agency that is most subject to the problem of the commons.
You've got taxation, you've got money flowing in and out, and you have people who have temporary custodianship over the government through democracy.
So their incentive is to pillage as much money to pass as many laws to provide as many favors to their friends and punish their enemies with as much punitive legislation as they can before moving on somewhere else.
The government does not solve the problem of the commons, which is fundamental to environmentalism.
The government is incredibly subject to the problem of the commons, which is what we see with national debts.
Okay, you mentioned the tragedy of the commons, and this will bring me back to the second part of the previous question, when we were really discussing about property rights, individual private property rights.
Now, it seems as though there's a bit of a conflict in what you're saying, and let me describe what I mean here.
If you take an example of a group of programmers who are interacting on the internet every day, Who are forced to deal with Microsoft products, deciding that, you know what, these products are really horrible, We're going to break off.
We're going to use the Unix code.
We're going to create our own software.
It's going to call Linux.
And it's going to be voluntary contribution to this code.
Nobody is compensated.
Nobody owns it.
There's no private property at all involved.
The net result is a superior product that defeated the private property ownership interest of Microsoft in many ways.
The internet runs on open source, as it's called.
Open source Open ownership.
It's not privately owned.
Now, in the digital world, which is relatively new, it didn't exist during the period of the satanic mills, during the period of manufacturing and the industrial revolution, when gravity and friction It had to be overcome.
In the digital world, we don't have those constraints, and it's ushering in new models of common wealth, common ownership.
Isn't there somewhat of a conflict there?
Because you seem to allude to the benefits of being on the internet, let's say, but the very foundation of the internet is born out of individuals who are working in the public interest, not in private property interest.
Sorry, but you have one minute.
Okay, I'll keep this brief.
That is an excellent point, and I've got to tell you, Max, you are a real pleasure to listen to.
That's a fine mind you have sitting above your shoulders.
That's not an answer!
No, but it's...
You're thinking, you say I caught you off guard, and now you're using flattery to compose a response!
How you doing? No, listen, the thing about property rights is that you don't have to exercise them.
You don't, right? So I can choose to take my beloved computer and put it out on my front lawn and let people walk off with it if I want.
I can choose, as I do, to hand out all of my books, podcasts, and other materials completely for free and just say to people, donate if you like.
I'm like a waiter with a lot of polysyllables.
That's perfectly fine.
There's nothing that violates the non-initiation of force.
There's nothing that violates the non-aggression principle if people choose to work in a collaborative, voluntary, non-property manner.
As long as they do so peacefully, that's perfectly fine.
If you choose to exercise property rights, that's great.
If you want to live in some hippie commune and share soap and Lord knows what, then you can do that as long as you're not initiating force.
And I think that there's a lot that can come out of This kind of voluntary non-property cooperation that I think is incredibly valuable.
As you said, Wikipedia and Linux and all other kinds of great stuff comes out of that.
But nobody's initiating force.
So property rights are not enforceable in that you have to exercise them at all times.
They're optional. And some great stuff can come out of relinquishing property rights.
As long as you're not initiating force, you are okay with the non-aggression principle.
Right, and Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University, of course, created something called the Creative Commons, which gives creators the option of either applying private property rights or not.
All right, Stephan Molyneux, thanks so much for being On The Edge.
Thank you, Max. It was great fun.
All right, and that's going to do it for this edition of On The Edge.
I want to thank my guest, Stephan Molyneux.
And if you want to send me an email, please do so at ontheedge at presstv.com.
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