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Oct. 13, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:21:24

1769 Stefan Molyneux on the 'Declare Your Independence' Radio Show

A wide ranging interview with Ernie Hancock about politics, the future, and the state of the state before the 2012 US elections.

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	Libertopia this weekend, and I'll see him Friday, and we'll broadcast him there.
	Maybe we'll get him on a little bit live.
	But, you know, he's also going to be one of the featured speakers at the Freedom Summit, freedomsummit.com.
	And we're going into a special time now.
	We're going into a time that really we haven't seen this type of a revolution between the ears since the old American Revolution, the first one.
	At that time, it was like discovering the law of gravity.
	You know, John Locke back in the mid and early 1700s, he was like, you know, I get to be my own boss?
	Can I do that?
	You know, is that even possible?
	Well, who was controlling our minds back then?
	It was the church. It was the monarchies.
	It was, you know, we rule you.
	I pulled the sword from Excalibur from the stone kind of thing, you know, and because this guy with a funny hat put my funny crown on, and now I rule you.
	Well, the whole concept of individual sovereignty started coming up, and that was a revolution, and the idea that, you know, we're going to have a government that supports that.
	Well, then we find out after a couple centuries of of experience, that it always devolves into the same thing.
	It's always somebody ruling you, even if it's the masses.
	So, have we got to the point now to where we can start to evolve as a species?
	As, you know, as we join the intergalactic family of, you know, assuming there's other people out there or not, doesn't matter.
	You know, as we start to travel Off this planet, are we going to take the concept of we rule somebody with us?
	I think this is a discussion that's going to happen in this next presidential election cycle.
	We had the revolution in 08 that just brought a lot of people into this political process.
	And I remember that was the big discussion.
	Are we going to delude people into thinking that you can vote yourself free?
	Are we going to do that?
	My argument that those that were part of this, that helped fund it, that helped participate in it, that had the experience from decades of work as libertarian activists before, as I go, you know, I think they're going to come to the same conclusion that we did.
	As we went through this process, they're going to learn that's not how you're going to get your freedom.
	But how are we?
	That's why we have Stefan Molyneux from Toronto on.
	Stefan, I got you there?
	Well, you know, there's a new catchphrase that's just started in the last few weeks.
	My good friend Barry Hess is the Libertarian candidate for governor here, and he's more anarchist than most.
	But his whole thing is, if you want to help people, you stop hurting them.
	You know, he goes, let's go help people.
	He goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, before you come up with a new program, before you come up with how you're going to redistribute the wealth, before you come up with a 45 to my forehead to take my tax money and the noble cause is de la name of, he goes, before you do that, before you go helping, the best way to start helping people is to stop hurting them.
	Stop hurting them.
	How does government hurt us, Stephan?
	Well, government hurts us by forcing us to obey its dictates and its whims.
	Government hurts us by devaluing our rational capacities for negotiation and peaceful interaction, by treating us as bad children, as wayward sheep, as dumb animals that need to be forced and cattle prodded and herded around in order to achieve any kind of virtue.
	And then, after treating us like these terrible, retarded, idiot children, it says, well, you're intelligent enough to vote for all of these highly complex economic and foreign policy proposals.
	You're intelligent enough to vote on who is going to run the economy of a multi-hundred million population advanced economy.
	You're smart enough to know exactly who's got the best plan for Afghanistan and Iraq.
	This is what's always astounding to me, is that if we're smart enough to vote For people who can do these incredibly complex things, then surely we're smart enough to just manage them for ourselves.
	And I think that's a way in which the government really ropes us in, is it pretends that we're really intelligent when it comes to voting, but then as soon as somebody or anybody gets into power, we're treated as people who can't tie our shoes or get out of the door forwards.
	You know, so I think the government insults our intelligence.
	I think the government devalues us as human beings.
	I think the government treats us as tax livestock while flattering our egos by pandering to our vanities in imagining that we can do all of these amazing things in deciding for who gets to run the world.
	You know, the one thing that I thought was interesting...
	I never thought of before until I'd gone to, I think it was the 1996 Libertarian National Convention in Washington, D.C., and I saw the argument over the plank in our platform that had to do with children.
	When do they... Emancipate themselves.
	You know, what is age of consent?
	And the consternation, the drama was all around people that have been abused at a young age by, you know, parents and grandparents and the state.
	You know, they'd have somebody they knew where they wanted to go live.
	I want to go with what you call it or You know, my coach or teacher or neighbor or something, anybody but these people and their extended family, because they're all abusers, and who knows more than me?
	I'm the one getting abused, and then the government would say, no, you have to go here.
	So their whole thing was, look, I want to have The ability to speak up for myself, to represent myself, even at a younger age than 18.
	Where did this number come from?
	Then you got the, you know, what kind of movie you can watch and when you can vote and drink and go to war and all this other stuff.
	And at the very least, we get the, you know, I guess by 21 you can buy a handgun and all this other stuff.
	And I'm going, okay, so we're 21.
	We're 21. I don't need a parent.
	I'm free. No, now I got big brother or big sister on me.
	You know, I'm just at what point do we got government deciding when the age of consent is, but then all of a sudden it comes with all these conditions even when you're an adult.
	You never get to be free, autonomous, sovereign, left alone.
	There are those that just want to be left alone, and there are those that just Won't leave them alone.
	And until we understand to find what that is, that we can govern ourselves, that even becomes part of the debate, we will forever be ruled.
	And it's coming up for another vote of who's going to rule you again.
	We're going to talk about it more.
	My favorite anarchist, Stephen Molyneux from Toronto.
	There are those that just want to be left alone, and those that just won't leave them alone.
	Which one are you?
	The Ernest Hancock Show.
	What the hell are we fighting for?
	Yeah! What are we fighting for here in Declare?
	My favorite anarchist from Toronto, Mr. Stefan Malino.
	You know, Stefan, I want to make sure people understand where you're coming from and what your history is.
	You host of Free Domain Radio.
	Now, how best do they get access to Free Domain Radio?
	Do they just go on YouTube and look for it, or are they just Free Domain Radio in a Google search, and boom, you blow up all over the place?
	How best for them to get ahold of you?
	Yeah, if you could not talk about an anarchist blowing up all over the place, that probably would be good.
	On Google search.
	It's FreeDomainRadio.com and there's videos and podcasts, there are feeds, you can add it to iTunes.
	I've got a number of free books on ethics, on how a stateless society functions so much better than a government-run society.
	And I just wanted to also say, I just came back from Drexel University.
	At the Students for Liberty conference, I was the opening keynote speaker and had a fantastic time.
	I tell you, Ernie, this next generation kicks some serious behind intellectually and morally.
	They are so smart.
	You know, genetically, we're getting smarter every generation, which is why freedom becomes more and more likely, because freedom requires a certain amount of intelligence to process the basic facts of it.
	And this next generation, I'm telling you, they had the best questions, they're the smartest, they get right to the core of the issues so quickly.
	And it was a great time.
	So I just wanted to, of course, thank the organizers and thank the listeners for that shot in the arm that always happens whenever I talk to people in their 20s.
	You know, they're just so smart.
	Why would they want, you know, you?
	Stephen Mullen knows who from Toronto.
	I mean, you know, it's like, you know, Stephen, we're going to have this guy come to the university.
	We're going to have you go to the Libertopia.
	We want you to come to the Freedom Summit.
	We're having you on Declare Your Independence.
	Who the heck are you, man? Why are you so popular?
	Welcome to my show!
	I mean, I guess I'm getting fairly popular.
	Probably a quarter million people have listened to the show by now.
	I've had over 20 million downloads.
	And so I guess there's some value in what it is that I'm saying.
	So this is probably why I'm being invited.
	I've got like, I'm presenting at the Libertarian, the Ontario Libertarian annual meeting.
	I'm presenting at that in November.
	And then of course I'm coming down to your fabulous summit and I'll be at Libertopia.
	We're leaving tomorrow.
	So I'm really, really looking forward to it.
	It is just a thrill to be in this environment and talking to so many intelligent and committed people.
	It really is such a recharge.
	You know, this kind of lifestyle can be a little bit isolating, you know, I mean, it's not like my neighbors are very keen to chat about the possibility of life without institutionalized violence.
	They just give you all those kinds of funny looks if the topic even drifts their way.
	So I just, you know, encourage people to go to these conferences, to meet up with people.
	It's not quite the same over the Internet.
	You know, face-to-face, it is really a beautiful crew that we're all involved with, and I really, really highly recommend people to come to your summit, to Libertopia.
	It is such a rush to meet so many smart people who get it.
	So I just wanted to throw that little pitch out for you and the other summits that are going to.
	Well, your career, where you came from?
	You're a software entrepreneur, executive.
	I guess you made your mark there, and then all of a sudden, you're just kind of...
	Man, this is, you know, you're more stimulated, I guess, by the thought process behind, you know, I don't want to be ruled.
	And you started expressing that in creative ways and doing YouTubes and so on.
	I remember the first time, I think it was...
	Wow, December 08?
	I think it was the first time we had put something up of yours on Freedom's Phoenix.
	And then I couldn't find it.
	I couldn't remember what it was called.
	I couldn't... And then all of a sudden I saw it again.
	I'm like, aha! And then I saw you at the Porcupine Festival in, I guess it was June or whenever it was.
	It was this last spring-summer up in New Hampshire.
	And I'm like, oh yeah, we're going to lock this guy down for the Freedom Summit.
	And the reason that I could see what was coming was Even before the Levolution, that's why I was so certain what was going to happen with the Levolution, because I had been an activist out here.
	I had been going to universities.
	I have been speaking to people.
	I knew that was even the little bit of direction to go look at Austrian economics, to look at libertarian philosophy, to look at the possibility of not being ruled.
	Just to funnel them over in that direction, they would heal themselves, because then they would have immediate access To information just like what you were providing, share it with their peers, hit Facebook, hit the internet, hit their blog, go on Facebook, and just explode all over the place.
	And that's what you're experiencing, but it's been in the makes for quite a while.
	When was the first time that you started to get an idea that there was actually an audience for what you had to say?
	Well, Ernie, for me, I didn't speak for about 20 years because I really didn't have much to add.
	I mean, I lived, as a lot of people do, under the shadow of the great Russian smoky goddess of reason, Ayn Rand.
	And I just was like, well, she's nailed it, and she wrote the best books on it, and she has all the best ideas.
	So I didn't sort of, you know, it's why I don't go and audition for Queen to be their lead singer, because you're just not going to sing better than Freddie Mercury.
	So... So I just feel I didn't really feel that I had that much to add.
	But after about 20 years of just continuing to research and study, I began to see what I conceived to be some problems with objectivism, mostly in ethics and politics.
	I mean, she was very much a minarchist, and I was not too comfortable with her theory of ethics.
	And then this idea just hit me when I was having a debate with somebody actually at work, with an employee at work.
	And the idea hit me about how something might work without a government.
	And then it was just a whole series of monster dominoes, you know, when you just have those massively, like, lightning bolt-to-the-forehead moments of clarity.
	And then I said to myself, dang, Steph, you've got something to say.
	You've got something finally to add after 20 years.
	And that's when I started to write, and that's when I first got my start on LewRockwell.com.
	And started to get published on antiwar.com and started to do podcasting.
	And I didn't really think of it as anything other than a hobby, because that's really what philosophy has been, is this massively passionate hobby of mine for about a quarter century.
	But as time went along, people started to say, hey, you know...
	I'd really like to donate to the show.
	And I started taking donations, and then they started to increase.
	And then I said, well, you know, I talked about it with my wife and said, maybe we should take a run at it.
	And of course, since I'd already been an entrepreneur for quite some time, I knew some of the basics of the business world, and I was fairly comfortable with risk.
	Although I really did feel this was a one-way street.
	You know, if you come out as, you know, internet anarchist dude...
	It's a little tough to slither back into the software realm because everybody Googles everybody these days.
	So I really felt it was a one-way ticket.
	So emotionally, it was really hard to make that transition.
	But once I did, I've never looked back and I don't think I've ever been happier.
	Well, I'm glad you're doing it.
	You made me happier. You know, this is what you find out, and the reason that we even started the Freedom Summit, it was three weeks after 9-11.
	It was in 2001, our first featured speaker, I think, was Bumper Hornberger from Future Freedom Foundation.
	We had Clint Bollock from the Institute for Justice.
	We had Don Brudeau.
	He's going to be another speaker this year.
	It's been a decade since he's been around.
	Butler Schaefer. I mean, So we were hobnobbing with the boys back in the day, and we were just adding each other to hobnob with, because there wasn't a lot of people that really, certainly not in popular culture, that had any idea of what was really happening to us and what was a possible solution.
	Think about it. The people that you're speaking to right now, these universities and so on, when we first started advocating this openly, you know, they were what?
	You know, preteen, 10, 12 years old?
	So this is a totally new environment, a totally new generation.
	And I want to ask you this one question.
	From your experience, do we just kind of have to wait for the older generation to simply just go away, to die off, to be gone?
	I mean, you know, what are we waiting on?
	Well, look, I think that's a great question.
	I think when you look at the scope of history, huge social changes take at least 100 to 150 years.
	And I think that we're well underway, but I think we still have a generation or two to go.
	Well, we got the internet.
	Maybe speed that up because it's always about communication, transportation, and, you know, the ability to just share.
	Well, that cycle is like, I don't know, overnight.
	So maybe it might go a little bit faster.
	We'll talk about it more and what the future holds for people like us.
	Here on Declare Your Independence with my special guest, Stephan Molyneux.
	And now, live from the studios of Freedom's Phoenix, Ernest Hancock.
	I want to break free.
	I want to break free.
	I want to break free from your life.
	I'm so satisfied I don't need you.
	I've got to break free.
	God knows!
	Yep, there's my audition for Freddie Mercury!
	Hey, you know what, Stephan?
	Do you know who's going to play Freddie Mercury in a movie that's coming out about Queen?
	It's Borat, isn't it?
	I'm not proud that I know that, but I do.
	Yeah, I was like, okay, we'll see.
	I guess you've got to go all out, you know, and comedians will do it, so we'll see what happens.
	But you know, the one thing I did want to get into is that there is, if we're out there advocating for none of the above, I vote none in the government, I don't want to be rural.
	I'm good, thank you, leave me alone.
	Are you offering a solution?
	Is there an alternative? Do we have to have an alternative?
	Do we care? Well, an alternative to violence is...
	Life. An alternative to violence is choice.
	The alternative to violence is morality.
	The alternative to violence is peace.
	It's like saying, well, if we shut down war, what's the alternative?
	Well, the alternative is everything except war.
	The great thing about freedom is it's everything but, you know, everything but pointing guns at people's heads.
	Whereas with the government, it's quite the opposite.
	There's laws forcing you to do everything.
	You can only go down one alley, one street.
	The freedom is an open field, and there's just one place you can't go to, which is the initiation of force.
	So if you just take away the government, you're opening up massive vistas of human potential, and there's just one thing that you can't do, which in fact very few people want to do, which is to initiate force against others.
	My neighbors don't want to do it.
	The people I go to at the mall don't want to do it.
	My listeners don't want to do it.
	People I buy and sell from in person or over the web don't want to do it.
	Human beings don't like initiating force directly.
	There's just a few real nutjobs out there who like to do it, and most people don't.
	It takes a government, you know, it takes a government for people to be comfortable with theft and redistribution.
	Because it takes a law that is civilized, sort of quote civilized, that is written down in nice ink and hung on the wall.
	People don't like to see the violence that is actually occurring.
	You know, you see celebrities, they get pulled over for drugs.
	They don't spend a lot of time in jail because people don't like to see the way that the system actually works.
	So I like the idea of everything but force because that encapsulates everything that's possible for human beings except pressing guns into each other's necks.
	Which, you know, if you're not the lead in a Tarantino film, ain't that entertaining.
	Well, this is one thing that I get into this conversation all the time, and I guarantee you do too, but what about?
	I mean, you know, fill in the blank, oh, what about?
	And let's say the most defenseless, disabled...
	The individual there being taken advantage of, the solution would be what?
	It doesn't matter.
	It doesn't matter.
	The people who say, but what about the poor?
	But what about the old?
	But what about the sick?
	But what about the infirm?
	But what about the incompetent?
	What about the people with unibrow?
	What about the people with mullets?
	What about the people with peg legs?
	It doesn't matter because after you steal the money, you can't make good.
	Right? So it's like me saying, okay, well what we should do is we should have the government run marriages.
	So what we should do is we should kidnap all fertile women and we should lock them up in a big detention center and then they should be handed out to people by the government.
	I mean, after you kidnap them, it doesn't matter how efficient the rest of the system is.
	After you kidnap these women, which is completely immoral, you can't make it good after that.
	You can't do good with stolen money.
	You can't make it good from violence.
	So to me, if you say, let's imagine the government did run marriages, and crazy people like you and I were saying, well, let's not have the government run marriages, people would then say, well, how would so-and-so get married, and how would this guy get married?
	You know, he smells, and he doesn't have a nice car, and she's unattractive, and so on.
	But it doesn't matter.
	It doesn't matter what happens in a state of freedom.
	The only thing that matters...
	The only thing that matters is that violence is being used to attempt to solve social problems which is wrong, immoral, counterproductive, destructive, in every way conceivable.
	So I don't care what happens in a state of freedom.
	I don't care what happens after we privatize the post office.
	I don't care what happens after we stop giving foreign aid to dictators.
	I don't care what happens after the war on drugs is shut down.
	I don't care. I know that what happens will be better.
	But I don't care what happens.
	All that I care about is that we stop using violence to solve social problems.
	You know, I don't care who gets a job, which ex-slave gets a job and which ex-slave doesn't get a job.
	What I care about is that slavery is wrong.
	And to get drawn into arguments about how every conceivable problem will be solved after we stop pointing guns at each other is a fool's quest.
	Nobody can know. It's impossible to guess.
	People who ask me, well, you know, how will national defense be provided in a free society?
	It's like, I don't know. Because if I did know, I'd be a good dictator.
	And nobody can know.
	Nobody could predict email and video conferencing 20 or 30 years ago.
	I mean, nobody can predict that kind of stuff.
	Nobody can predict that you could fax physical things from one place to another using these plastic molding faxes.
	I mean, it's so much that's going on that's incomprehensible.
	That anybody who tries to predict what's going to happen is inevitably going to be wrong.
	So people who say to me, you know, how will national defense work in a free society?
	It's like, I don't know. And it doesn't matter.
	What does matter is we don't use guns to provide it.
	And, I mean, nobody even knows what the price of gold is going to be tomorrow.
	Imagining how people are going to solve problems in 50 or 100 years, it's a fool's quest.
	So I just focus on the ethics at the beginning.
	I don't care about the consequences later on.
	I'm with you, brother, but this is one thing that I want to make sure that we drill down on, because I'll advocate a lot for seven, eight years.
	Maybe I wouldn't call the show Declare Your Independence now.
	I'd be more like Declare Your Independence without reference to a document.
	But the document did say, I mean, I really liked the Declaration of Independence as a young man when I read it.
	It made it pretty clear to me that if you're going to have any kind of a government, it defined how to know when a government is bad.
	If it's not defending individual rights, then it's bad.
	And that's where the question comes in.
	Can you have, even the possibility, Of some kind of a government that is non-coercive, or are those...that oxymoron...I mean, those cannot...you can't have a government unless it is coercive, or do you call it something else?
	So I'm going, let's say we eliminated all force, you know, non-initiation of force.
	We got the libertarian ideal, and we're going, nope, you know, there is no coercion here.
	Inside these borders, well, then you got to have borders.
	You know, and who's going to enforce the borders?
	And how you define what a border is?
	And who gets to enforce it?
	Enforce for and against what?
	I mean, you know, it just keeps going from there.
	Is there the possibility of having a government and defining it as non-coercive?
	No, there's not, because the Ayn Rand idea is something like, you know, you have a government that just does the military, and it does the law courts, and maybe the prisons, or something like that.
	But this is the idea of the entirely minimal state.
	But that has to initiate the use of force.
	So let's say, for instance, I don't like the government law court system.
	Are they going to force somebody else to not compete with it?
	Are they going to use force and throw someone in jail for doing something as peaceful as coming up with an alternate dispute resolution system of whatever kind?
	If the government is providing the military, let's say that I don't want a military.
	Let's say all I want is five nuclear weapons in the country, which is going to cost me like a buck a year, because no nuclear country has ever been invaded in history.
	So once you have five nukes, you're totally safe, at least as far as history goes and theory goes, until the end of time.
	So let's say I don't want an army.
	I just want some sleepy guy sitting at a desk with five nukes and 500 chains of command that need to set them off.
	So is the government going to throw people in jail who want to seek alternatives to government solutions?
	Well, at the moment, of course, it will.
	I mean, if you want to find some way of having your child educated and not pay your property taxes because you hate government schools, as every sane human being does, well, they'll throw you in jail.
	If you want to run a post office, as Lisanda Spooner found out in the 19th century, you want to run a post office alternate to the government and not follow their regulations, they'll throw you in jail.
	So the moment you grant a monopoly, To an institution and you allow it to initiate force to prevent competition, why then, my friends, you have a government.
	And then you have the beginning of the end and this long, slow, dismal slide into increase and corruption and lobbying and tariffs and taxes and national debts and taking over the currency and national banks and foreign conquests and foreign aid and it all just swells like a tumor.
	So you have to never, ever give an institution the moral right to initiate force to prevent competition, but that's the very definition of a government.
	So no, governments by nature, by their very definition, must initiate force to maintain a monopoly, and that is the beginning of the end.
	And when you do some of your presentations that I've seen, the one concept that it really, probably between the eyes on a lot of people, is this idea that when you look at a global map and you see the different colors and the borders and the boundaries, you're really looking at what?
	Well, you're looking at farms.
	You're looking at farms.
	You're looking at farms. I mean, you see all the worry that is going on in Europe at the moment and in Canada and to some degree in America about the reproduction rate of the livestock, right?
	That it's fallen down to 1.3, 1.5, 1.7, but not enough to maintain the herd.
	So they have to import cows from other cultures, which causes problems at home with voting and so on, right?
	I mean, this is livestock.
	This is a herd mentality.
	We are in farms.
	We are the livestock, and it's what ranchers always want to do with their livestock.
	They want to number them.
	They want to track them. They want to know how their health is.
	They want to know where they are.
	They want to know how much they can get from them as a resource.
	Whoa! Is there an end?
	We'll talk about it when we come back with Stephan Molyneux.
	There are those that just want to be left alone, and those that just won't leave them alone.
	Which one are you?
	The Ernest Hancock Show.
	Welcome back to Declare Your Independence with me, Ernest Hancock, and another independent declaring kind of guy.
	Stephen Malinu from Toronto.
	You know, let's go ahead and talk about that a little bit.
	I mean, you know, are you declaring anything?
	Are you, you know, putting a big A on your chest?
	I mean, what is it that you're declaring or designating yourself as or that you want?
	What is it? That's a good question.
	I don't like to use the term anarchist.
	I mean, obviously it has all these negative connotations, but I don't want to use some other word.
	Yeah, we can use that.
	But then people say, well, how's that different from anarchists?
	And you get into that. But look, I'm not an anarchist.
	I am not a libertarian.
	I'm none of these things. What I think of myself as and what I try to practice most rigorously...
	It's the ancient art of philosophy.
	And the ancient art of philosophy is that which says your theories should not contradict themselves.
	I mean, it's really nothing more complicated or easier or harder than that, which is that your theories should not contradict themselves.
	And it's really the extrapolation of the rules of the kindergarten, right?
	Don't push, don't steal, don't hit, don't bite, don't do any of those things.
	And let's just make that the rule.
	Let's just make that the rule called let's not steal, let's not hit, let's not use violence to get what we want.
	I think if it's appropriate for a two year old, it probably is also appropriate for a 20 year old or a 40 year old or a 60 year old or an 80 year old.
	I think that not using force to get what you want is a good rule.
	And I really listened to my kindergarten teachers and I held that fast to my heart and I have stuck with it ever since.
	So I just call myself a philosopher.
	Now, the rational result of philosophy is a stateless society because human beings don't magically change properties when they get into office.
	Have the ability to fly.
	They can't walk through walls.
	They can't levitate.
	They can't turn upside down, spin around, and drill all the way through to China.
	They don't change their properties when they put a costume on, whether it's a green costume from the army or a blue costume for the police.
	A human being is a human being is a human being, and none of us have the right to initiate force.
	That's just a universal constant which erases many things that we hold dear, the state just being one of them.
	Well, my question is when you, you know, declare yourself, you define yourself, you can do it very simply.
	You can do it very simply by just, you know, philosophy.
	It doesn't contradict itself.
	And that's a very good point where you have a lot on the right or the Republicans or, you know, we pinky swear this time we're going to be good, you know, put us back in charge.
	You know, and they will say things that contradict the very thing that they're asking to put them in power to do.
	You know what I mean? It's like, we're all for peace and freedom and liberty and all this other stuff, but we still...
	It's a matter of degree, you know, of what the Democrats...
	It's always by comparison.
	We're not going to be as evil or as bad as them, but they never are offering you anything consistent or good, you know?
	And we're supposed to go, yay!
	You're not... Your horns aren't as, you know...
	It's large. Your pointy tail isn't as long.
	I mean, it's just, you know, it's craziness.
	So now I'm looking at going into 2012, where we have Dr.
	Paul, that I suspect, unless, you know, health reasons of he or his wife, Carol, you know, kind of enter into this, I would suspect that, you know, he's inclined to run again.
	If he does that...
	The people that were supportive of that, I'm sure they got a bad taste for a lot of reasons of this political process before, and he may have new people coming in with different focus and all that kind of stuff.
	Is he contradicting himself?
	You know, is there him participating in this process?
	Is he doing more damage than good?
	Or, you know, is he the best that we're going to get with the system, but he's just kind of given a, I don't know, support of the system of government at all?
	I mean, you know, what do you think of him running again?
	Look, it's a complicated question.
	There's no possibility that somebody is going to enter into the government and turn it to good.
	It's not going to happen. Because the government is an evil, criminal agency.
	Now, I don't mean everyone in the government is evil and criminal, because people have been propagandized and so on.
	I'm just talking morally and philosophically.
	It is an immoral and corrupt, nasty, blood-soaked octopus choking the life out of humanity, slowly, unfortunately.
	And so you can't turn an evil institution into a good institution.
	I mean, if we could do that, we should go and infiltrate the local mafia and try and turn it into a nice charity, right?
	We should go and infiltrate some Hells Angels gang and turn it into the nicest daycare in the world.
	But you can't enter an evil institution.
	And turn it towards goodness.
	And I would imagine that most people who support Ron Paul don't imagine that that's going to happen.
	But there is an educational aspect to the Ron Paul campaign, that people hear ideas that, you know, put at least a crack or a dent into the matrix of delusions that we're all force-fed as children and all the way through our deathbeds through the mainstream media.
	So I think there are some cracks in the matrix that Ron Paul is heroically banging his head against and I think having some effect.
	But the solution to statism is not going to come by being borged into the evil empire and trying to change it from within, right?
	They blew up the Death Star.
	They didn't try and get inside Darth Vader's suit and turn it around from there.
	Well, you know, Star Wars fans, there's some good in there.
	At the last minute, after he laid waste to everybody, then he's a good guy.
	But, you know, I understand the point, and I just want to make sure that, you know, in the next hour, when we get down to the nitty-gritty of some of the solutions that we might see, or some of the changes that we might see in the people,
	And where that goes, before we get to that, you know, I wanted to kind of make sure that we had a base philosophical understanding that you really don't think that by having any kind of a government, a collective, a monopoly on force to do something is ever going to produce the good that they promise.
	And I'm wondering if that is your definition of government, this bringing together of people that you delegate authority to to act, With a monopoly of force, is there any other definition of it?
	I mean, can you have some other kind of – I mean, is it family, tribal, patriarchal, matriarchal, somebody at top?
	Because you're always going to have some kind of a society that's based on, I don't know, tradition, heritage, something.
	And what do you think would be advantageous or what would result?
	Well, I mean, this is a big question, so I'll try and keep my answers shockingly succinct.
	But society, this is the way that I think of it, and I think there's some really good proof.
	I've got a series on YouTube called The Bomb and the Brain about this.
	But to me, it's called The Bomb and the Brain.
	FDRURL.com forward slash BIB. People can look at this and the science behind what it is that I'm just going to say, which is that Society is a reflection of what goes on in people's family lives, right?
	So if you raise a child without the initiation of force, without bullying, without using your authority, without using your size, without raising your voice, if you raise a child in an egalitarian, peaceful, curious, and positive way, you know, with obviously the fact that you're older and wiser and the child, you know, wants to eat sand and glue and you have to sort of take care of that.
	But if you raise a child peacefully, Without hierarchy, without authority, without bullying, without any kind of abuse, then when the child pops out into the world and the child sees the government, They'll just go, what? What is that doing here?
	That has nothing to do with how I've been raised.
	I'm being treated in a way that is fundamentally violating the sanctity of my life that never happened in my family.
	Like the way you and I were raised, like slavery is just immoral and the subjugation of women is just immoral.
	And so when we pop out into society, if we see people...
	You know, keeping people locked up in their basement like slaves and beating up on women, then we say, well, that's just shocking and that's just wrong.
	And we need to oppose that.
	It's just instinctive because that's how we're raised.
	So we need to raise children in a way that is peaceful and voluntary and without using size or power or authority or intimidation or withdrawal or any of those emotionally manipulative tricks that all too many parents use.
	And that way, they will just look upon the government as a weird, freaky thing that makes no sense.
	Like, if you're raised in some culture where there's a giant stone chicken, and that's your god, and it's in the middle of the square in your village, then you're going to grow up with all these emotional attachments, and these giant stone chickens are going to pray to them, and you're going to think it leads your life and visits you in your dreams and so on.
	But if you come from some other culture where you've never heard of this giant stone chicken, what you do is you stand in the middle of that square.
	You look at this giant stone chicken and you say...
	That's a giant stone chicken.
	It's not a god or anything.
	It doesn't have any emotional resonance to me.
	It's just this weird giant stone chicken.
	And we need to raise children in such a peaceful and egalitarian way that when they first come across the idea of the state, it doesn't kind of fit because that's how they've been treated by their teachers and their parents and the priests and all of that.
	It makes sense. We have to have them look upon the government like it's a huge, weird, freaky, giant stone chicken that they have no emotional attachment to.
	That's when the mysticism of the state falls, finally.
	You know, the one thing that it brought to mind, I don't know if you and I have talked about it before, I've shared it with the audience.
	It was probably a couple of months ago, my granddaughter, on her first birthday, she had a little brother born, so I've got two little grandkids now.
	And at about 11 months...
	She had the remote or something she's playing with or something.
	And I go up and she's entertained by it and finally I need it.
	So I go up and she just kind of communicated that, man, that was hers.
	And all of a sudden it dawned on me.
	I'm going... Oh, I get it.
	Our first social concept that we have at a very young age is the concept of mind.
	I don't know about how we work on that yours thing later, but, you know, they had the concept of mind, and I could see what all...
	What all of the government wants to accomplish is to beat out of us this concept that you have anything that's yours.
	No, it belongs to everybody, or we regulate what's yours, or how you get to use what's yours at the youngest age.
	Embrace the future and work towards a stateless society that's peaceful.
	Well, we've got to embrace the concept that it's our responsibility to train the next generation to be peaceful and to protect the concept of mind.
	Can we do that? Should we do that?
	Well, we're going to ask Stephan Molyneux from Toronto when we come back.
	It's time for Declare Your Independence with Ernest Hancock.
	Believe me when I say we have a difficult time ahead of us.
	But if we are to be prepared for it, we must first shed our fear of it.
	I stand here without fear because I remember.
	I remember that I am here not because of the path that lies before me, but because of the path that lies behind me.
	I remember that for 100 years we have fought these machines.
	And after a century of war, I remember that which matters most.
	We are still here!
	Let us make them remember.
	We are not afraid!
	No fear!
	No fear, no fear, no fear here on Declare Your Independence of Me, Ernest Hancock from Phoenix, Arizona, from the beautiful studios of Freedoms with an S, freedomsphoenix.com, and, oh, I've got to say, Freedom Summit, freedomsummit.com, where you'll go and you'll see one of the featured speakers is Stefan Molyneux from Toronto.
	He is going to be popular.
	I just know it. I know it.
	I know it. We have a lot of great speakers, but I know that there is a special...
	We're going to make it a little better if we only did.
	If we turn the dial a little bit more, you know, it's like talking to Bernanke.
	I'm going to turn the dial again.
	There's a dial around here somewhere to turn.
	And the concept that there isn't a dial.
	It's the dial. That's the problem.
	Quit having some kind of a regulatory ability or this monopoly on force or doctrine or how you're supposed to be socially or economically engineered with whatever law, which is always backed by somebody with a shiny badge, uniform, and a gun.
	That's what always happens.
	And just the concept that not only should we be free, but we're better off when we are.
	Just... Left alone.
	And I want to get back to this one concept I ended last hour with Stephan, is this concept of mine, is that fundamental?
	Is that something that my granddaughter or some 10, 11-month-old is part of our DNA, our hardwiring, that we have something like, you know, I'd rather have this than not?
	I mean, where does that come from?
	Well, I mean, I would say that it comes from the basic fact that infancy is about mastering the very basis of ownership, which is self-ownership.
	My daughter will spend an hour going up and down a challenging set of stairs until she gets it right.
	She's 22 months. And she's learning how to kick balls, and she's learning how to throw balls, and she's learning how to do somersaults.
	And she's, you know, we put her in a gymnastics class.
	She loves to walk on beams, so every time she sees anything that looks even remotely like a beam, a curbside, a stripe on the road, she will walk on it to try and get it right.
	So she's trying, struggling to master that basic and essential aspect of ownership, which is self-ownership.
	And so for me, once you have self-ownership down, which is what infancy is about trying to establish, I mean, when she first saw her hands, she was like, what the heck are these things?
	It's like these big pink spiders floating above her head.
	She had no idea that they were attached to her or that she could even really control them because in many ways she couldn't.
	And so learning to master herself, learning to use her own strong little body to do what it is that she wants to do, is the basis of ownership.
	And then, of course, she would rather spend time, I mean, you know, like all kids, she's saying, it'd be a no-dired, it'd be a no-dired, no-dired.
	No bed. No nanny nanny.
	She doesn't want to go to bed because she would rather be downstairs spending time with us or playing a game or something like that.
	So she has preferences.
	She would rather have a toy that she's playing with.
	She's still getting into sort of sharing.
	She's pretty young for her share, I think, as just a singer that gay people like.
	But... It is something that is so fundamental to our development that it makes perfect sense to me that self-ownership and the immediacy of having property in the moment is so essential for kids.
	And it takes a lot of propaganda.
	It takes a lot of propaganda to undo what is so essentially natural to us, which is to own ourselves, to be responsible for the effects of our actions, right?
	I mean, if my daughter builds a sandcastle, that's her sandcastle.
	I can't say that's not your sandcastle, but then say when she pushes over a lamp, she's responsible for the lamp being broken, because these are both effects of her body.
	So we love to give children, quote, ownership when it comes to, you did something wrong.
	But we have a tougher time giving them the exclusive use of property.
	With my daughter, when she has something and she's playing with it, and some other kid wants it, it's like, sorry, you have to wait until my daughter is finished.
	That might be 10 minutes, that might be an hour.
	If we're out walking around and some kid wants to come and play in our backyard because we have a swing set of the gods...
	It's like I say to my daughter, do you want to stay out here or do you want to go back?
	Because I'm not going to pick her up and take her to the swing because somebody else wants to go.
	So it's allowing her self-ownership and choice for what it is she wants to do and giving her the responsibility for the effects of her actions, both positive and negative.
	That's entirely natural to her.
	It takes a lot of propaganda to scrub that out of people's brains.
	Well, I tell you what gives me hope and optimism is that it took decades, generations, and trillions of dollars of propaganda and government-licensed Media in the form of television and radio and the government schools and all of this combined over so much time.
	I mean, MTV's rock the boat and all, vote or die, vote or die.
	I mean, everything that they have to do to get us to think the way that they would want us to, that it took that much to even, kind of because I realized over the past decade or so That they, as you start to question the validity, I mean, regardless of whether you think voting is good or bad or has an impact or not, at the very least, you know, when I first started getting in the early 90s, I'm going, this is not accurate.
	I mean, with the computers coming and how they were doing it and how they, all the machinations, you know, which a lot of people saw during 2008 with Dr.
	Paul, what they'll go through to limit your choices and all this other kind of stuff.
	The very fact that you have this ability to express yourself, and it really comes down to, I don't need your permission to do so.
	It's something that is taught at a young age, and that they would use all of these forces to try and get you to be socially and economically engineered into what serves people.
	The state as opposed to the promise that they made is that the existence of the state was to protect the right of the individual to do what they want.
	It was a lie.
	It's always been a lie.
	But what it so gives me pleasure is that that's the lie that they have to keep saying, and they're going to do the same.
	The Republicans are doing it now.
	They're coming back, you know, it was six weeks before the midterm elections in 94, after 92, the big Ross Perot thing was going on.
	Six weeks before 94, they came out with their contract with America, or contract on America, depending on your perspective.
	Then they come out with the promise with America six weeks before the midterm elections, after this Ron Paul revolution thing.
	You know, so I can see it.
	It's like a repeat. It's like a cycle.
	It's a revolution. It just revolves.
	It keeps coming around.
	And they do the same thing with the same expectation.
	And I'm going, this time it's a little bit different.
	It's different because there are people like Stefan Molyneux that's out there challenging the whole concept that you use the system at all.
	And what we teach ourselves and our children, my children were brought up as adults.
	I expected them to behave as adults.
	Their friends were adults.
	We pulled them out of the public schools at a very young age, my four kids.
	We had all four of them.
	By the time the oldest one was in third grade, we said, we're done.
	We're done. We're out of this thing.
	And they grew up as adults from the time that they can remember.
	And what happens when you're thinking as an adult and you have a government that wants to treat you as a child?
	How do you rebel? We'll talk about it when we come back.
	We'll be right back.
	It's time for Declare Your Independence with Ernest Hancock.
	Nothing's thinking on the south side of town.
	You're putting up what you ain't gonna find it around.
	It's a rainbow story.
	Rainbow song.
	And there's a mountain.
	It's a rainbow story.
	Same old story!
	Same old story!
	Yep, same thing, same, same, same, same, same, same, same.
	I keep hearing it over and over and over and over.
	And as you get to be older, I'm like 49 now.
	I'm born in 61, so I'm like, I don't know, what am I? You know, senior citizen, next generation or something.
	But the thing is, is that I'm old enough to see that this keeps coming round and round and round and round.
	It's the same thing, and they've been able to get away with it because we have short memories that were bombarded with gazillions of dollars of blah, blah, blah, but there has been a change.
	The change has been access to information that is peer-reviewed by young people instantaneously amongst each other, and you always have the bad guys.
	There's somebody out there that is sitting there going, Yeah, we want to inject the infection of the man into this forum, into this blog, into this site.
	And we get it at FreedomsPhoenix all the time.
	I'm sure there's some Pentagon, Obamunists, somebody who sit there camped out and getting their paycheck to sit there just to try and put a question in, a little bit of doubt, or don't you think we should be talking about?
	But it gets peer-reviewed.
	And all of a sudden, that's why we set up FreedomsPhoenix the way we did.
	Fine, let the neocons and the socialists come in and say whatever.
	But, you know, we had something this morning.
	A guy was going on about, you know, things, and all of a sudden libertarians jumped all over him.
	Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
	For the first time that this person normally on their own sites that, you know, their sycophon sites that are out, Lord knows where, they are never being challenged.
	On Freedom's Phoenix, you get challenged.
	You're going, um...
	I think you're really, you know, you're not hitting the nail on the head, and they give their opinion.
	So I want to ask Stefan Molyneux from Toronto, you know, this whole concept of the slow pace, the evolution of humanity, you know, evolving past the need for government, don't you think that that's kind of, that process is speeding up a lot with the instantaneous access of information and sharing it?
	Oh, absolutely.
	There's no question in my mind, no doubt whatsoever, that what is possible now is so vastly different from what was possible in the past.
	In the past, if you wanted to reach young people, you either had to be a novelistic and artistic and philosophical genius like Ayn Rand, of which there are very, very few, or you had to go into academia.
	As Walter Block did, as Murray Rothbard did, and as Mises did to some degree, you had to go into academia.
	Those were really your own options.
	And once you went into academia, then you have the problem of credibility, right?
	So academics say that people should make sacrifices to...
	Live in the free market, that people should give up benefits in order to get into the free market.
	But of course, academia is a state-protected union where you have to work very little and get six-figure paychecks.
	So it's a little tough to hear academics talk about the free market, since they seem to be doing as much as possible to stay away from it.
	Now, I'm talking about now.
	Like in the past, 60s, 70s, 80s, you had to go into academia, and I think that was a just and worthwhile thing to do.
	But now you don't have to.
	I mean, I was considering going into academia after I got my master's.
	I'm so glad now that I didn't.
	Because if you're an academic, you might teach 2,000, maybe 3,000, maybe 4,000 people in your entire career.
	I've got 20 million or more downloads and video views since I started this thing.
	I mean, it's vastly greater than anything I ever could have achieved as an academic to do it this way.
	And, you know, I don't have a boss.
	I set my own agenda.
	I set my own topics, I guess, in conjunction with my listeners, since I'm a market-driven kind of guy.
	But this has really opened up a possibility for human communication that has never existed before.
	And I'm simply, I'm not trying to sort of pat myself on the back, but the show that I run, Free Domain Radio, is the largest philosophical conversation in history.
	And is that because I'm some sort of monster special genius?
	I don't think so. I think it's just because, I mean, I have some good skills and talents, I've got a fairly good head on my shoulders, but there's this incredible thirst for knowledge, this thirst for clarity, this thirst for For comprehensibility.
	You can find all the information in the world at your fingertips.
	What is really missing is wisdom and virtue and comprehension.
	That's what philosophy provides.
	A shape to the static.
	That's what philosophy provides.
	So this would never have been possible in the past.
	And so I think it's just hysterically positive.
	Added to this is experience.
	I mean, that was the one thing that, you know, in fact, as you look back, you know, H.L. Mencken, a lot of his writings, and even, you know, before you go to Albert Nock and Mises and Hayek, I mean, they predicted everything.
	They knew what was coming, you know, but it certainly wasn't taught in our government school system, and it certainly wasn't embraced by even academia or politics or anything else, but it was by people that just sought The truth.
	We just want the truth.
	And if you're really looking for the truth that has evidence that, like you say, a philosophy that does not contradict itself.
	I'm going to steal that.
	I hope you don't mind. A philosophy that does not contradict itself.
	I like that. And, you know, you look at this and you go, you know, this is not anything new.
	I mean, I'm sure it's been refined, but Lysander Spooner, you know, 150 years ago, I mean, he was saying the same kinds of things.
	Locke, Jefferson, I mean, they understood the fundamental supremacy of the individual, the individual, and there's always been an attack on that.
	Why?
	I mean, I got my, you know, I'm sure I can speculate, but why do you think it is that there's such an attack on this philosophy that they've been able in the past to keep it suppressed to where it's not even discussed in the public schools, but why do you think it is that there's such an attack on It's not discussed in the lamestream media, the media that's so last century.
	It's not discussed even on the campaign trail, save Dr. Paul, you know, gives a little bit of attention.
	What we are not discussing is the supremacy of the individual.
	Why?
	Oh, I'm going to sing you the answer to that.
	Yeah.
	Money, money, money, money!
	That's all it is. It's money.
	It's money, money, money.
	If you can get people to believe that there's this weird social contract that nobody has ever defined and doesn't exist and is only one way, if you can get people to believe that there's these scary people in their neighborhood that they need the government to protect them from, Drug addicts and prostitutes and criminals.
	If you can get people to believe all of that stuff, then you can pick their pockets at will.
	But if you teach people that the sovereignty of their reason and their individuality is sacred, then they won't reach for their shoelaces for every random politician that comes by with a single rose, of which you only ever feel the thorns.
	So it's all about money.
	I mean, if you look at government workers earning about 50% to 75% more than private sector workers, well, why do they like that?
	Well, because they get to make a lot more money.
	I just had an interview yesterday with someone from the Milton Friedman Foundation, the CEO of the Milton Friedman Foundation, talking about the California pension crisis, where the estimates that the pension is short-funded, underfunded, by $300 billion to $500 billion. by $300 billion to $500 billion.
	Another half a billion dollars in pension deficits for U.S. cities.
	God knows what the federal deficit is, but it's ridiculous.
	But that's all money that's transferred from productive people to parasites.
	So saying, why do we oppose individualism?
	Why do we oppose philosophy?
	Why do we oppose the universalization of ethics?
	Because there's deep money in selling people fairy tales.
	There's deep cash, coin, gold, and bullion in getting people addicted to social fantasies like the collective, like the country, like the state, like nationalism, like patriotism.
	You know, lick the boot of the farmers and maybe we'll give you some change from the dollars we robbed from you.
	That is a story as old as mankind, but it doesn't have to be told forever.
	When we come back in the next segment, I want to make sure that we address, you know, there is a next phase of this thing.
	You know, it's going to come down.
	I mean, we've been predicting this for, I don't know, decades as libertarians, but it's been, for the past year, I'll tell you what it was.
	It was September of 2009 when the Kansas Supreme Court Started coming out saying, you know, all this mortgage stuff, fraudulent stuff, man, you know, this MERS thing, this mortgage electronic recording service or whatever the heck it is, they don't have the standing to foreclose.
	We have violation of property rights going on.
	The rule of law is gone.
	We're a banana republic.
	All this stuff we knew is coming.
	Then what? Then what?
	This whole thing, this whole facade, this whole fantasy of government is going.
	Rhodes, it's the Ernest Hancock show.
	Where we're going, there aren't any Rhodes.
	I want to break free!
	Break free! Yeah!
	We want to break free here on Declare!
	You're independent from me, Ernest Hancock, and my special guest, Stephan Molyneux from Toronto.
	He is, you know, helping us understand, you know, what's possible.
	And let's go ahead. On Freedom's Phoenix today, we have up there one of the top stories.
	It was just put out by Time magazine.
	I thought this was interesting. Top 10 failed futuristic predictions.
	Okay? Stephan, go with me here, man.
	You know, these are the top 10 failed futuristic predictions.
	Universal jumpsuits. I guess we're not going to have those anytime soon.
	Jetpacks, meals in pill form, flying cars, time travel, teleportation, underwater cities, cyborg abilities, a post-apocalyptic landscape.
	I mean, all these, I'm going to wait until next month.
	But one of them that they had was a worldwide government.
	We haven't had a worldwide government yet.
	And I'm going, do we really have a worldwide government already?
	I mean, what are we looking at here?
	Oh, you know, futuristic fantasy science fiction things which have never come to pass.
	How about a successful government program, for heaven's sakes?
	That's what they should have down there.
	Forget about jumpsuits and flying cars.
	How about just one government program that has achieved its objectives on budget?
	People always think it's about the Jetsons.
	It's not about that. Well, let's go ahead and talk about, you know, one thing before we get done with the show is that we have another presidential election cycle coming up.
	You know, this midterm, I mean, I haven't really been paying attention.
	I mean, here we have a lot of people involved in a lot of congressional races.
	You know, we have David Nolan, the founder of the Libertarian Party, lives in Tucson here.
	He's running against John McCain.
	His last election in 2004, I ran against John McCain as a Libertarian candidate then.
	We got David Nolan running now.
	He's doing well. I mean, he'll even debate them and come out 54%, 53% in a four-way race.
	You know, or three-way, I don't even care.
	You know, he's up there, you know, winning.
	You know, on the pole on television, yay!
	But then, of course, they never promote it anywhere.
	You know, you never see it.
	You don't know. And so I'm looking at this, and I'm going, you know...
	You know, what is the future?
	I mean, we have a lot of people participating in the process, but after this election cycle, we're going to have a lot of people, and we'll see what happens with this Tea Party thing and all this other stuff, but we go into this next 2012 election cycle for president, What do you think is going to happen?
	Are the people going to be engaged?
	Have you seen them being engaged in the 2010 election cycle?
	And why would they be engaged or not engaged in the 2012 election cycle here in America?
	What do you think? Well, I mean, predictions are tough, right?
	So this may come back to haunt me, but I'll tell you what I think.
	I think that people have given up on government.
	I think, and I made this prediction, oh, it's close to two years ago now that I did my statism is dead series.
	Statism as a philosophy is dead and buried.
	I mean, it's completely gone.
	It's only momentum and political predation that is keeping statism running.
	Everybody, everywhere you look, the state is doing anything.
	It is a complete catastrophe.
	Finances are a catastrophe.
	Schools are a catastrophe.
	Foreign policy is a catastrophe.
	The slaughters of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis is a complete disaster.
	Policing is a disaster.
	The prisons are a disaster.
	The war on drugs is a disaster.
	And no matter how much people are addicted to mythology, reality does have a way of swinging the wet fish of empiricism upside your head.
	Whether it's slow or fast, it does hit people sooner or later.
	You can't ignore the facts forever.
	Unless you're completely psychotic, in which case you have to run for office.
	People are getting it. They're getting it.
	They don't look... I mean, every time they pick up that newspaper, it's some other disaster.
	It's some other catastrophe.
	It's something else that's underfunded.
	It's some new mess that was created.
	They read about Bernie Madoff and how people tried to warn the SEC for years that his pyramid scheme was completely impossible financially.
	Nobody did a thing.
	The Gulf oil disaster, where you had the Gulf oil executives writing the safety reports and then the government people just signing it, where they had literally hookers and blow parties with the regulators.
	And so that wasn't solved.
	And then the government didn't do much to fix it up.
	Everywhere you look, it's nothing but disaster, disaster, disaster.
	The entire mainstream media is incredibly statist in its philosophy and incredibly anti-statist in its reporting because it continually reports how disastrous and catastrophic and unsustainable everything is.
	I think that people had their last hope in Barack Obama because he was so diametrically opposite, culturally, intellectually, historically, racially.
	He was the exact opposite, in a sense, from George Bush.
	And so I think there was this belief that with somebody so different coming into power, There would be a big change.
	And there hasn't been a big change.
	It is a continuation of business as usual, except he's pushing the pedal to the metal on the gas of quantitative easing and funny money and bailouts and so on.
	Because he wasn't really different.
	He never was.
	No, I agree. But people thought he was.
	And I think now that people see that the system is the same no matter who's in power, like no matter who you vote for, the government always gets in power, they're recognizing that it doesn't matter who you vote for.
	They're recognizing that the power is the lobbyist.
	How are they going to treat Dr.
	Paul? You know, this time, I mean, last time we saw up close and personal what they did, and that was the biggest education I thought for America...
	That was the biggest benefit of this entire thing.
	The big discussion between a lot of people was, Ernie, what you're going to be doing, because I predicted what was going to happen.
	I understood the sentiment out here, and I knew his rhetoric.
	Dr. Paul had spoken at previous Freedom Summits before.
	He had run as a Libertarian in 1988.
	I knew his rhetoric.
	I knew what would happen if that got out, and I knew that's why the big bad guys in the media and everything are so...
	So draconian in their repressiveness of the message that we have to share, they go, heck no, because they know the power of it.
	So when this goes, they'll try and make fun of them, they'll do whatever they can, and it's just going to backfire, and it did.
	But now we're in a situation to where...
	I think even Dr.
	Paul doesn't appreciate, or maybe he does.
	Maybe he's a closet anarchist.
	There's a lot of evidence that would lead me to believe that.
	I mean, he obviously knows that government doesn't work.
	So I'm looking at it from a perspective that Maybe he understands that his role in this is to just demonstrate that even the most delusional, the people that are most supportive of this constitutional republic,
	that think that you can fix it from the inside, that you have the perfect manifestation of a human being that can embody that in the campaign of Ron Paul, and that even then, Even especially then that it is impossible because it is fundamentally wrong at the beginning to have an entity that is going to rule.
	And no matter how nice they're going to rule, well, they intend to rule.
	There's no getting around that. So I'm going...
	What do you think is going to happen?
	I mean, you gave, you know, the response that, you know, I think statism is dead.
	Can you give me kind of a chronology of this look at it from 07 when this first started?
	It was about now that this was starting to, you know, get up.
	And then this January is when he kind of made that.
	I think I might sort of create a blue ribbon panel to discuss Having a Blue Ribbon Committee to maybe I might run.
	And when that happened in mid-January of 2007, then it exploded.
	We started immediately doing the Ron Paul Revolution signs, and that kind of took on way before the campaign took hold.
	And what we saw happen was a last-ditch, one-more-time effort.
	We're going to do it. Based on the rhetoric and the background and the history of Dr.
	Paul's advocacy over a period of several decades.
	So we're going to go ahead and we're going to give it one more shot.
	Are they going to do it again?
	And then who's they? Are you going to have the Republican Party come and embrace this campaign for liberty, going to wrap arms and legs around the Republican Party or vice versa or mutual love fest, and they're going to try and recreate the love illusion in support of the state?
	Or do you see that's already gone?
	I mean, I need to get your kind of view of what you think and prediction.
	Get on. Declare your independence.
	We get a step in my new prediction on what's going to happen in 2012.
	Go on. Give it to me, man.
	Well, I think that people are going to be remarkably disengaged, right?
	So the Democrats are the party of unions, and government unions largely, and the Republicans are the party of big business.
	I mean, to put it in some pretty stark terms, that seems to me the way that it shakes out.
	So the only people who are going to get enthusiastic about the next election cycle are the people who stand to benefit from the collapse of the system, because the system is not going to last that much longer, and mathematically that which cannot continue, shockingly, will not continue.
	And so there'll be a lot of sound and fury from public sector unions who are facing cutbacks in their gold-plated pension and lifelong healthcare systems.
	And there'll be lots of screaming and crying out from big business who wants to hang on to all of its unjust benefits.
	And so there'll be this huge cacophony of people who are feasting on the decaying corpse of the body politic.
	But I don't really think that anybody else is really going to care.
	I fundamentally don't think that people are going to get very excited about these elections, and I think there's going to be a lot of indifference, right?
	So unfortunately, of course, there's a huge constituency of people feeding off the government, and those people are going to start to panic as the government begins to reach the end of its days.
	But I don't think anybody else is really going to care that much about this kind of election.
	You know, I'm in agreement with Stefan on this.
	How do we place ourselves to be of the most service to humanity?
	What do we advocate?
	Where do we go?
	What do we do?
	What's our actions?
	What's our example?
	We're going to talk about that when we come back on Declare Your Independence in just a little bit.
	And now, live from the studios of Freedom's Phoenix, Ernest Hancock.
	You don't know how I love you.
	Oh, is that true?
	Are they lucky back in the USSR? Well, now the Soviet Union, but not even the Soviet Union.
	Just plain Russia. You know, China.
	Are we to be made fun of now in junior high, just like we were to make fun of these collectivist societies before?
	And back then when we were thinking that we were somehow different.
	Well, maybe we weren't.
	You know, collectivism is collectivism.
	We're going to collectively take all your goodies and collectively spend it.
	You know, it's really a matter of degree.
	It's, as Stephan Molyneux from Toronto says, we're just a farm.
	It's just a farm and we're livestock.
	And we're, you know, it's a different kind of livestock management You know,
	one thing I wanted to bring up Is that all of this mortgage-backed security things and the fraud and the foreclosing and all, we've been covering this lot for a year.
	And what happened was that somebody brought up, you know, these judges that are here, even in Arizona until recently, when it became obvious what they were doing, they were just ruling in favor of, we don't care what the law is, we don't care what the rules are, we don't care, we don't care, we find in favor of the banks.
	And what happened was, you know, they were like, what's the motivation to get paid off?
	Is there a bribe? They started looking at the pension funds of the judges, just like all the other municipal pension funds, and that if they don't get a handle on this thing, the judges' pensions go bye-bye.
	Ha! So I'm going, okay, well there's your financial incentive right there.
	And if you see the entire system going down, not only financially, but with any kind of credibility from rank-and-file people, you know, how do we position ourselves To take advantage of this distrust, of this repudiation of government.
	Where should we be?
	Should we be running for office?
	Should we make ourselves available?
	Should we be talking?
	I mean, how are you planning to position yourself, Stephan?
	Well, I have a couple of points that I have found to be powerful and effective.
	This is where I'm going to stick my flag, so to speak, from a guy who doesn't believe in them, but that's my metaphor.
	The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to ask the people around me, do you support the use of violence against me?
	So I hate public schools.
	I think that they are brain-feasting, soul-destroying internment camps for the young.
	So I don't want to fund them.
	I don't want to fund the war in Afghanistan.
	I don't want to fund money going to foreign dictatorships through foreign aid.
	I don't want to fund the war on drugs.
	I don't want to fund welfare programs because it's created a permanent underclass of money-addled people.
	So I don't want to support any of these things.
	And I say to people in my life, I said this to my family, I said this to my friends, I said, do you...
	Do you support the right for me to disagree with you without being thrown in jail?
	Without being thrown in jail?
	Do you reject the use of violence against me?
	against me.
	That's what I ask people in my life.
	And I was willing to give them some time to mull it over.
	I didn't sort of have them up against the wall, shaking them by the neck.
	I was just asking them, but it was a persistent question for me.
	Do you support the use of violence against me, or do you reject the use of violence against me?
	And anybody who had the nerve to look me in the eye and say, yes, you should be thrown in jail for disagreeing with me.
	Well, I'm just not going to break bread with that kind of person.
	I'm just not going to have that kind of person in my life.
	So make the violence real to people.
	Make the violence of the state real to people.
	Do you accept that I can disagree with you without being thrown in jail?
	That I can choose not to pay my taxes and not get thrown in jail?
	That I can choose not to support these destructive systems?
	That I can follow the dictates of my own rational conscience and not be aggressed against with your support?
	So if people are willing to support the use of violence against me, they have no place in my life.
	They have no place in my life.
	That's called taking a stand in the real world for me.
	I think that's really important.
	The thing is that I've been...
	I'll tell you what my technique has been.
	It's been the most successful certainly when doing radio and so on.
	I don't ever make the attempt to try and convince someone to agree with me.
	They start getting defensive and they dig their foxhole deeper and they put sandbags around and all that kind of stuff.
	You know, what I try and do is I just try and make sure that they are understanding of why I'm so convinced.
	I go, no, these are the things that have convinced me.
	This is why I'm so convinced.
	And then you'd be like, you know, the method that you say, what's your evidence?
	I mean, if you've got some other evidence, you know, something I don't know, well, please share with me.
	I mean, you know, because I'll alter my perspective.
	You know, if I have new evidence that counters whatever it is that I've come to Learn over these decades of adult life.
	I'm going, you know, this is why I'm so convinced.
	What convinced you?
	And usually what's convinced them has been propaganda.
	It's been this herd mentality.
	It's been, you know, the bullet points on some 3x5 card that's been, you know, wrote over Fox News.
	I mean, it's just phenomenal to me.
	They don't really think for themselves, and they have no concept Of what the fundamental underlying principles are of whatever it is that they're talking about.
	They'll go, you know, but we've got to protect the country.
	We've got to save the country.
	USA! USA! In fact, that's whenever you challenge them on anything, at any gathering, they just start chanting USA! And I'm going, do they even understand what they're doing?
	What they're pledging allegiance to?
	Where the Pledge of Allegiance came from?
	I mean, it's just all of this indoctrination, but I'll tell you what my hope is.
	My optimism comes from the fact that the people that are embracing this that have been so conditioned are an average age of over 60, 70 years old.
	Do we just have to wait another 10, 20, 30 years and sit back and all of a sudden it'll just change by attrition?
	Or is there something we can say or do or you have a hope for that we can change the older generation that's been a victim of all this propagandizing, all this marketing, all of this focus group, all of this mandatory youth indoctrination camps of decades?
	Is there something we can do to embrace or help them, or do we just write them off?
	You know, it's tougher for the older people.
	I did a video recently where I said, hey, you know, you're all pensions and Social Security is all crazy underfunded.
	And if the elderly are willing to admit that they had no control over the political system and that's why it is the way it is, then I'm willing to fund them.
	I'm willing to fund them because they're admitting that they're wrong and they're giving us the chance to look for something better.
	But if the elderly say, oh, yes, we had full control over the political system, and therefore we're now going to use it to rob the young blind, well, I don't have any sympathy for that perspective.
	Now, unfortunately, the vast majority of people who listened to the podcast or who watched it either didn't respond or I had quite a number of elderly people write me to say, hey, okay, yeah, I didn't have any control over the political system, now give me your money, like it was a joke or something like that.
	So unfortunately, the elderly are now in the position where if they say, yes, we were completely wrong, we invested in a system that blew all of our money, we were aware of it, and we've been teaching the young for our entire life that you are in control of the political system and you are responsible for your actions, right?
	right? So when I was six or seven and I didn't do my homework, I got in trouble because I was responsible for the effects of my actions.
	Now, if the old who've been telling us our whole lives that we are all in control of the political system...
	Have now invested in a political system that has blown all of their money and there's nothing left but a couple of dusty IOUs in the treasury vault, then they're kind of responsible for that and therefore nobody should be forced to pay for their retirement.
	But they can't really admit that because they're in a pretty vulnerable position where they need their retirement money, they need their free health care because the government has taken their money and they've had that much less to retire on and now whatever retirement savings they had that were invested have been nuked in this recent financial meltdown.
	So all I ask from the old people is to say, hey, this system didn't work.
	I'm perfectly happy to say that you're not responsible for it as long as you're willing to say that there was no way to control this system, in which case let's ditch it and find something better.
	But I think there is going to be quite a generation of warfare.
	If the old don't turn around and say, yes, we messed up and we were responsible and we're sorry, then I think everybody will have sympathy and we can move on to something better.
	But I think they're going to try and pretend that it's somehow not their fault and that we should continue to pillage the young to pay for the mistakes of the old.
	And I think that's going to cause a lot of problems.
	Well, the problem's coming up.
	I mean, because the only way to sustain this is, I mean, they leave on our floating bills that go, well, you know, it's kind of like, you know, $30,000 a family over 50 years, and they're actually doing the math.
	They're going to, you know, we're going to do that.
	Are you serious? Like, I trust you not to be stealing even more anyway?
	You know, later I'm just going, no, no, it's done.
	And it's become an obvious to a lot of people, but I see in this next election cycle something that's going to be pervasive.
	It's going to be this argument that you and I are having right now, this discussion, I won't say an argument, but this discussion that we're having right now is going to turn into an argument between those that are online and on Facebook and spreading your videos and but this discussion that we're having right now is going to turn into an argument between those that are online and on Facebook and spreading your videos and your podcasts I believe what Ernie's been talking about.
	I believe whatever it is that is in direct opposition to using the system.
	And they're going to say the system can't work if you abandon it, if you don't vote, if you don't come out and do whatever.
	And it's always like, you know, my friend Barry Hess says, he goes, they always want to save the ship.
	They're so worried about the ship estate, they totally ignore the people on the ship.
	And Stephan and I and a lot of people are trying to save the people.
	Let the ship go! Heck, man, you know, I'll key it as it goes down just for grins and giggles.
	So I want to make sure that we understand that this battle, this discussion, this argument is going to happen very soon, and it's going to have an end result.
	I hope that the end result will be people will start to understand that humanity We'll be able to evolve past the need for any government.
	And I know Stefan Molyneux from Toronto.
	Free Domain Radio.
	Free Domain Radio.
	Google it. You'll find him. Stefan, thanks for coming on, man.
	It's always a great time.
	I look forward to seeing you Friday at Libertopia.
	Thanks, man. I look forward to it, too.
	I appreciate it. You bet, buddy.

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