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Oct. 14, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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1770 Freedom is Humility - Stefan Molyneux speaking at Drexel University

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, speaks at the 2010 Students for Liberty conference at Drexel University, Philadelphia, Oct 9 2010.

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	applause Okay, now the good stuff.
	It is my pleasure to introduce you to our opening keynote speaker.
	Stéphane Malou, a Canadian blogger, essayist, author, and host of the Three Domains radio series, or podcast, living in Mississibwa, Southern Ontario.
	Oh, I pronounced that right. Stéphane is a volunteerist who has written numerous articles and smaller essays, which have been published on Libertarian websites, such as Strike the Root, And he has recorded over 1,500 podcasts and written numerous books, which are all self-published, except for his first, which was published by Paul Chimera.
	Maligny's works cover politics, philosophy, economics, relationships, atheism, and personal freedom.
	In 2006, Stefan Maligny quit his job in the field of computer software and now works full-time on Free Domain Radio, a philosophical community website which is funded completely through donations.
	Stefan Maligny was the closing speaker for the 2009 New Hampshire Liberty Forum.
	And this position was formally taken by Ron Paul in 2008 and John Stossel in 2007.
	Malmue was also the opening speaker for the three-stage project's Corkfest, which I was there for.
	It was a great introduction to your life.
	So please put your hands together for Stefan Laws.
	Hi everybody, good morning, and thank you so much for coming out.
	I just flew in from Canada yesterday and it's been a while since I've traveled alone.
	I normally travel with my wife who takes care of the logistics and so on and I was really trying to think about how to do this speech really well because, I mean, you're such an intelligent, educated, well-read audience that I wanted to do something.
	Dumb. So, I said, I'm going to have a speech in my head.
	And I, you know, checked in using those electronic kiosks.
	I put in all of my information. And then I was so lost in my speech preparation that I wandered off without taking my ticket.
	And so then I thought, oh, I've got to go back and get my ticket, right?
	So then I went and I had a coffee and I sat down and I was working more on the speech.
	And then I got up and I left my luggage behind.
	I found my wife outside and was like, honey, you can't let me travel anymore.
	It's like, rain man takes a holiday.
	I'm an excellent speaker, I'm an excellent buddy.
	So, I wanted to talk about the challenges that all you fresh-faced, young, eager, brilliant people are going to face in your life, because I'm not quite so fresh-faced, though still very eager, and I wanted to throw a few hopefully not useless points of wisdom down this year of the years,
	because you're going to spend a lot of time in your life talking about freedom, and you're going to spend that time talking about freedom And what I'm going to say is going to equally imply whether you're not so much with the state as a big thing or not so much with the state at all, but you're going to spend a lot of time fighting with people.
	Now, tell me if you've ever had this scenario.
	You say, I don't think that the government should run the welfare program.
	We shouldn't have the welfare state.
	And then people say, well, who's going to take care of the poor?
	And you say, ah, let me look it up.
	You know, I've got lots of answers.
	I've got these possibilities. There'll be charity.
	There's going to be more economic opportunities without the government, lower taxation, more job growth, so blah, blah, blah.
	And then people will start to puncture whatever you move forward.
	They'll say, well, what about this? What about this?
	You spend your whole time. And eventually somebody's going to come up with some scenario that you just can't answer.
	And then you hear, ah, you see, so freedom doesn't work.
	Right? Don't do that.
	That is a huge, frustrating bang your head against the water until you lose your hair and you can see how that looks.
	Don't do that. It's really not a good idea to do.
	So, I'm going to give you some other ways of approaching that challenging conversation.
	It's really, really hard for people to think outside the state.
	I think we all understand that the state is that social agency And so, getting people to think outside of that paradigm is really, really tough, but it's really essential to do that.
	So, to give you an example, let's say that the government ran marriages.
	Right? So if you want to get married, like I said, everybody has to get married.
	So you put your application in, they match you up with someone, and then you get married.
	And that's how things work.
	Now, if you were to say, I don't think the government should run marriages, what would you do back?
	Well, then how will people get married?
	I mean, it couldn't happen.
	How could it possibly happen?
	What about Stevie Pete?
	I mean, no one's going to want a marriage, don't pick him, or whoever, right?
	Because, you know, the idea of taking a shower just would be incomprehensible, right?
	So, when you have this system called the state solving problems, asking people to step outside that paradigm and say, what if the state doesn't do these things?
	People immediately, they need an answer.
	It's like you create this intellectual vacuum that people need an answer as to how things will work in the absence of a government.
	And it is a fool's quest, and it is a pointless exercise, and it is futile.
	And I'm concerned that it's going to frustrate you to the point where you'll stop talking about freedom.
	It's really, really important. I'll give you another example.
	So, slavery, right? Say, American slavery in the 19th century.
	So, if you would say, we should abolish slavery, right?
	So, people would say, well, I have 500 slaves on my plantation.
	How will they get jobs?
	How will each of them get a job?
	And then the moment you come to some guy who probably couldn't get a job, people would say, well, you see, you can't get the slavery.
	Right? It's really, really important Once we take the state out of the equation, once we take the initiation of force out of the equation, that solutions will arise that nobody can possibly predict or conceive of or imagine.
	So, if I was talking about this stuff from, I don't know, not 1980, I said, talking about this stuff and say, I mean, not that long, but I was talking about this stuff from 1980, and I said, well, we should get rid of the post office.
	We've got to be in control of the post office. Because the government delivers mail, and if you stop the government delivering mail, there will be no such thing as mail, right?
	And if I were to say, no, no, no, because you see, what's going to happen is there's going to be this series of tubes, right, that deliver mail electronically through wires and through the air and through radio, and people would have free video conference calling around the world, instantaneous IMs, people would say, oh, come on.
	I mean, that's just science fiction, right?
	Because we can't imagine What incredible geisters of human creativity and opportunity are unleashed by the absence of coercion.
	Nobody, nobody, nobody can predict the future.
	So I'm going to submit to you that when people say to you, how is freedom going to work, they're attempting to lure you, you know, slowly and deeply and darkly, they're attempting to lure you back into the status paradigm.
	If you say, I know how freedom can work, that's kind of a central planning approach.
	Because that's what central planners think.
	That's what government people think.
	That the future can be predicted.
	That the future can be planned for.
	That the future can be managed.
	That the future can be controlled.
	But it can't be in a state of freedom.
	So I really want to invite you where you get Because it is a status premise to say that it can be predicted.
	People in general, I mean, I think libertarians are pretty good, much better than most people in this area, but people in general have a great deal of trouble with those three magic words, I don't know.
	Right? It's really, really tough for people to say, I don't know.
	So you say, well, how will the poor be taken care of in a free society?
	I don't know. And it doesn't matter.
	And then people say, what do you mean it doesn't matter?
	It doesn't matter that the poor...
	I mean, you have to take care of the poor, so how's it going to happen?
	And I'm not going to support freedom until I know exactly how it's going to happen.
	But I think we need to have the integrity to say, I don't know, and it doesn't matter.
	Because the only thing that matters is the morality and virtue of the ethics of the situation.
	I'm going to give you another scenario, hopefully.
	That was great then. Okay, so we get back to the government-friendly marriage, right?
	So there's this rule that says, okay, first thing we do, we round up all the fertile women, and then we transport them to marriage camps.
	And then they get doled out on some algorithm to people who want wives, right?
	And you say, all right, tomorrow, you can't get that but round up women for a thousand men.
	And people say, well, no, no, you see, we have to have marriages, and that's how we achieve that end.
	And what I focus on these days, which I found to be very effective, is say, okay, let's go back to that first step.
	You understand? You want to put these women around them up and farm them off to people for marriages.
	Let's go back to that first step, where you kidnapped them.
	Because I don't really care what happens after that.
	Because what matters is you're kidnapping them.
	And this is what is true. Through money and taxation, you are kidnapping Money.
	You are holding guns to people's heads, whether metaphorically or not.
	And you're taking their money.
	And then people say, well, what should we do with this money that's taken through force to achieve some good end?
	It's like that. But you've already destroyed morality by taking the money to begin with.
	So then saying, after we steal the money, what good can we do with it is to inject morality after the fact.
	But if you've already destroyed morality in the very beginning, if you're already kidnapping the women, it doesn't matter how efficient the marriage camps are after that.
	If you steal people's money to begin with, through the initiation of force, does it really matter what happens after that?
	Of course not. You have to focus on that first step.
	Because one of the foundational arguments with the state, and we were just talking about Sam Harris this morning, he's going to this utilitarian argument as well, It's that the reason we justify the state is, I call it the argument from effect, right?
	Which is that, well, the ball will be taken care of if we have taxation and the welfare state.
	I mean, there's so much that's wrong with that statement, you could really waste a lot of time pulling it apart.
	I mean, of course, the first thing that's wrong with that How are the poor doing under government control of education?
	How are the poor doing under government control of public housing?
	Well, we've got a permanent underclass, and we as in Canada too.
	We've got a permanent underclass of people who have virtually no opportunities to know her, who are surrounded by the plagues of wretched education, the plagues of gang warfare from the drug war, the plagues of deflation, the plagues of unemployment, all of which can be traced directly back to the government program.
	So the first thing, people say, well, poor being taken care of now, how will that be reproduced under a free society?
	Well, it won't be. And they're not being taken care of right now.
	So you've got to attack that.
	Don't be falling into the trap of trying to explain how freedom can work.
	Because I think the first thing that a libertarian needs is humility.
	I think the first thing that anything he needs is humility, which is to have the strength and courage to say, I don't know and it doesn't matter.
	How many of those 500 slaves, when you free them, will get a job?
	I don't know and it doesn't matter.
	Because slavery is immoral.
	That's the only thing that matters is that slavery is immoral.
	Taxation is immoral.
	Government control of currency is theft through counterfeit.
	It is immoral. It is immoral.
	That's the only thing that we need to focus on.
	Because if people don't accept that argument, all we're doing is arguing the effects of immorality.
	After we steal this money, what are we going to do?
	No, no, no, let's get back to that first step, right?
	Everybody wants to brush over that first step.
	You know, you ever see those movies where there's some invisible guy and, you know, she sees that special effects, at least before CGI, right?
	They had these strings that would pick up these things, you see these white footprints or whatever.
	And then someone comes in and, pfft, talent power goes in the room and you see the outline of the guy.
	Well, that's what I call pointing out the gun in the room.
	Everybody wants to pretend that there's no gun in the room, that the government just has this money and what are we going to do with it now that the government has it?
	The government just has this power.
	What are we going to do with it? How are we going to use the Fed to manage the economy properly?
	Nobody wants to look at the fact that there's force at the very beginning of it.
	And I will submit to you that if you can't get someone to see the gun in the room, right, if they attempt to erase it through the social context, it's not force, you see, The suggestion box for slaves.
	So it's really important to just focus back on the morality of the situation.
	Because nobody talks about the government without talking about morality.
	We want to help the poor. We want to help the poor.
	But my question has also been, what on earth is wrong with being poor?
	I mean, I used to have...
	A good job as a software executive.
	I was not real on. And then I quit all that to the other people on the internet.
	And you. And I quit all that and I'm much happier because of it.
	So I took a 75% take-back to talk about philosophy to talk about, truth to talk about, ethics to talk about, government freedom and all that.
	So according to the government, I am now somebody in need of help.
	Well, I don't have a breath, though.
	But it's got nothing to do with that, right?
	There's nothing wrong with being born.
	Being born is a choice, right?
	So, I mean, some guy decides to become a mom.
	I guess he's down under the poverty line, but he's close to the God or whatever, right?
	So, that's his particular preference.
	So, it may not even be a problem that needs to be solved.
	Anybody ever have a discussion about the roads?
	Anyone? Interesting story.
	In 1919, a young army captain was assigned to the very first army convoy across America by car.
	Any guesses as to how many days it goes from Washington to San Francisco in 1919 by car?
	62 days, averaging 5 miles an hour.
	Or about the same speed I drove on high when I first had my daughter in the back.
	Careful! Now that young officer was Dwight Eisenhower.
	And he was also the Allied Commander of the Second World War.
	He noticed that while German railway systems were very easy to destroy, the roads were virtually indestructible.
	It's really hard to bomb them.
	If you bomb them, they just fill them in.
	Whereas if you put a bomb anywhere near a railway line and then to twist the rail even a little bit, it's useless.
	And it's hard to fix.
	So he had seen how bad the roads were as a young man.
	He had tried to fight an enemy and saw how good the roads were.
	And then, of course, in the Cold War in the 1940s, 1950s, He was concerned that there was going to be a nuclear war.
	And so he wanted roads to connect places so that they could send troops around.
	He didn't want railway lines because they were easy to destroy.
	And so this is how the American state highway system was won.
	So the reason we have these roads It's because of the government.
	So what is it going to look like without the government?
	Who knows? Jetpacks!
	No, seriously! I mean, seriously, isn't that the whole reason we get out of here?
	No, but I mean, it could be.
	Or maybe everybody just works at home.
	Or maybe teleportation has been developed.
	Come on, is there any less weird email being done?
	No, not really. So, in terms of roads, we've got this whole map of roads that is entirely based upon the initiation of force.
	So, what is it going to look like if there's no gunpoint to the people to build these roads?
	It's not going to look anything like it.
	So, saying, well, we have this state system called, called roads, or welfare, or currency, or law, or national defense, or whatever, and say, well, how is that going to be reproduced in a state of freedom?
	It's not going to be reproduced in a state of freedom.
	And no one can predict what it's going to look like.
	And putting on that prognosticatory hat and saying, I'm going to come up, I'm going to get rid of most of this, so I'm guilty of it, right?
	But saying this is how it's going to work, It's a fool's quest, because you might as well say we're going to go on holiday in my Dungeons and Dragons campaign, because it's all just a made-up world.
	We don't know what the future's going to look like.
	We don't know what human ingenuity is going to be unleashed in a state of freedom.
	We have no idea. And I think that humility is saying, I don't know.
	If I knew everything was going to happen in the future, I guess I'd be a pretty good dictator, but I don't.
	Nobody does.
	It's a fool's quest to imagine that we could know anything like that.
	I think the other thing to get statists to understand is that this very premise is always and inevitably going to lead to corruption.
	So people say, we want to use this thing to achieve this good end, to help the poor to do whatever.
	But the reality is that benefits always improve specific individuals.
	There's no such thing as the poor.
	I mean, they're human beings. And bureaucrats and politicians and lobbyists and it's the latter three that tend to benefit from the poverty programs.
	What is it? I think the statistic is something like 95% of the money that goes to poverty programs never reaches the poor.
	It's that much overhead for politics and bureaucrats and lobbies.
	You couldn't run a charity like that in the free market and expect anybody to give you a penny.
	But the benefits in the government always attribute specific I have a bottomless incentive to lobby for the increase of those, right?
	So if I could get some, let's say, with some nasty corrupts and all these days, and I got a law passed that said, everyone in America has to send me a dollar a year.
	Ooh, 300 million dollars a year for me, right?
	So I have a huge, massive bottomless incentive to keep that law running, to lobby.
	If I spend a hundred million dollars lobbying Congress to get my dollar a year from every American, I'm still up 200 million dollars a year.
	Hundreds of millions of dollars of incentive to keep that program going and to expand it if I can, $1.50, right?
	Cost of living goes out and stuff a lot.
	But you all would have $1 worth of incentive to oppose me, right?
	Which is not much of an incentive.
	And that's the problem, right? That every specific group massively benefits from government transfers of wealth.
	And those individuals massively benefit.
	And you create entire lobbies.
	So you create an interstate highway system, you create massive public works programs, you create massive government unions, you create car companies that sell a lot more cars, and they're now heavily invested in those government programs that are going to get involved in politics and lobby, and you're going to get all these people in the original highway system wasn't even going to go into cities.
	And it was only lobbying on other cities that got those hybrid systems into the cities.
	So you fundamentally distort the entire society, the entire incentive structure of society, when you start using violence to achieve your ends.
	And when you remove that violence, it's impossible to guess what Is going to occur in the absence of that violence.
	So, I really, really want to encourage you to avoid that conversation.
	Because you can't win. Some ingenious evil troll is going to come up with some example that you can't answer.
	And then it's like, oh, I guess the treatment doesn't work.
	It's always such a problem. So, I thought we could try taking this approach.
	If you want to sort of stick your hand up and talk, if you've had some particularly nasty, ugly or repetitive, frustrating kind of conversation about state programs, try this approach to see if it does any good or whether I've created some sort of greenhouse where only my own theories work.
	Anybody got...
	This is the part where you all get to talk about the state.
	Libertarians, I thought people would be dying for the money.
	If you can get used to speaking in public, that's a good thing for trade women.
	Anybody? National Defense.
	Anybody? Oh! How will we educate our children?
	How will we educate our children?
	That is...that's a great question.
	Of course, the parents being never educated with them, right?
	Rather than just boring and indoctrinating.
	Yeah, I mean, does anybody know why we have two months of school off in the summer?
	Farming, right? Because when schools were invented, 70-80% of the U.S. population was involved in farming.
	Anybody know what the percentage is now?
	It's 5%, or if you count as the major farmers, it's 2 or 3%, right?
	And even that's relatively high because of government subsidies, right?
	So we've gone 70% down to 2 or 3%, and you still have time off for farming.
	It's crazy, right?
	Because once you put violence into a system, it ceases to change.
	It gets frozen in time.
	I mean, think of the incredible technology advancements in every sphere of human communication since 1870.
	Right now, in 1870, you had a teacher and a blackboard and, you know, 20, 30, 40 kids in rows.
	A hundred and forty years later, after humanity has gone to the moon and everything has changed, everything is upside down, what do we have as our educational paradigm?
	None of that has changed because, as people pointed this out to me on YouTube, it used to be a blackboard.
	But now, it's a whiteboard.
	That's what we call progress.
	Yeah, baby, it's a negative box.
	And that's as far as they've gotten.
	And I, you know, now that they have Wi-Fi in schools, people are getting much better education from putting out their iPod and looking something up rather than listening to some tenured teacher breathe dust into their dying brain.
	I'm just going to gauge that because this is a, I mean, I know this is a very tech-savvy group, so, and I know you can see people with glasses, right?
	So what I'm looking for is to make sure there aren't those two little big ones and people looking down at the right desk, the right pocket.
	So it's just kind of boring what's on Facebook.
	So far so good.
	Excellent.
	Yeah, so how are we getting educated children?
	I mean, it's insane to think that violence can be used to educate children.
	I mean, there's a fundamental policy that's put forward.
	And I remember thinking about this even as a kid, which is, you know, if you're a kid and you grab some other kid's lunch money or toy or whatever, what do you hear?
	Don't grab, don't steal, don't take, it's not yours.
	Right? I remember as a kid when I first learned about how governments What is good for me and good for you?
	I don't understand. So, yeah, I mean, that's a good point.
	And I would say I don't know how children would be educated.
	I would question even the very paradigm that children need to be educated, right?
	Anybody heard of this unschooling movement?
	Yeah, so, I mean, I've got somebody who's slated to do an interview on the show about this.
	It blows my mind. I go so far in radical thought and then stuff just blows my mind.
	Some schooling thing blows my mind that you just basically talked to David Friedman about this, right?
	He's got two kids who had no schooling.
	They just taught themselves and he would get people in to help out when necessary or whatever.
	So, I would even question whether the entire paradigm of educating children is even valid.
	I don't know. Maybe it's a good way to do it.
	I don't think so. Because it's enforced through violence.
	The one thing you know is that if something is enforced through violence, it's not what people want.
	So people say that the government reflects the will of the people.
	Absolutely not. Absolutely not.
	The iPad reflects the will of the people.
	But we know that the government does not reflect the will of the people because it has to use force.
	Right? To achieve things.
	It's like saying, kidnapping reflects the little person in the back of the van.
	No! Because if he wanted to be there, he'd be there.
	If you have to kidnap him, it does not reflect anything.
	I think I understand that. So yeah, with education, how will children be educated in a free society?
	Who says that they have to be educated?
	We don't know! There's no way to know, because even the private schools in the world are almost exclusively shackled With government regulations and...
	Wait, do we have the government teachers here?
	Yeah, the government teachers, right?
	And, you know, you hear people sort of sometimes interview later at night and go, wow, I remember this one teacher in grade four who was really inspiring.
	You know, if people think that's a good news story, I think that's a terrible news story.
	One teacher? One out of how many teachers did you have?
	Like a hundred? Oh man.
	So yeah, that's one example.
	So I don't get sucked into how children get educated.
	It's like, who's to say that they even need to get educated?
	I mean, we had court astronomers in the Middle Ages who were in a lab.
	We had incredible engineers in the Industrial Revolution who never went to school.
	I was on a radio show recently about And I pointed out that if any of the standards for education and professionalism had been applied, none of the founding fathers would have made it into America, which is actually kind of funny.
	Ben Franklin had grade 6.
	Try getting into America with a grade 6 education.
	No, no. We can't have you.
	So, that's one example.
	Anybody have any others?
	If you remove the central government system, what would prevent things like the military or churches or some other existing lobbying group from taking over and admitting war, coercion, and force as a replacement for the vacuum that's created?
	The Terminator evil corporation slash social entity, right?
	Like if you don't have a government, this is right, if you don't have a government, then you will have this sort of Mad Max, Mohawk, leather, motorcycle, machine gun, chaos, rambans, dogs living with cats, all of that kind of stuff running wild on the streets, and then there will be some other new entity that's going to evolve to take over this war and all this sort of stuff, right? Well, is that it doesn't happen.
	I mean, there's no historical example of any social entity taking control Yeah, there's no example of a social entity taking control of a society without the state.
	So, I mean, you could think of the East India Company in the 18th century, they were dominant in trade in the 19th century in India, but they were granted a monopoly by the state.
	So, think of a tariff, right?
	So, if you're some sweater manufacturer and you want to put a $10 tariff on goods coming into the country, you can't do that without the government.
	I mean, are you going to hire guys to go through other people's property and inspect their ships, and then you're going to put them in jail, and all this kind of stuff?
	Of course not, because that's going to make the price of your sweaters ten times what it used to.
	Only by offloading the costs of the general population can you achieve these kinds of localized periods.
	It's completely impossible.
	To do it without the state.
	A church, like, so people say to me, well, if there was a government, then you'd get some private defense agency would suddenly develop all of these great weapons and you'd get a new government.
	But that's all nonsense. And that just tells me that people don't We either don't understand the free market or have never worked inside it.
	So, I was a Chief Technical Officer at some software company that co-founded it.
	And if we had said, you know, I've had it with this selling.
	I just, I don't like it.
	I don't like the competition. I don't like the sales pitches.
	We're just going to go in with guns.
	Like, that's it. Opened it?
	No, I don't think so. Well, what would happen?
	So what's that going to do?
	It means that our software is going to languish.
	It means that our costs are going to go up.
	So we're going to be providing work services to our customers and we're going to be increasing our costs.
	Plus, I'm going to have to give guys the programmers, it's not a good idea in any context or situation.
	I think it's gone from UAUC, right?
	Sorry, inside joke. Anyway, so you would have to lower the quality of your products and you would have to increase your cost, which would immediately signal to people that you're, you know, they just wouldn't stay with you, right?
	They'd just go to some other place, which could give you, right?
	To actually raise your own army, to actually fund your own army, it's a hugely expensive proposition.
	It could not be unnoticed in society.
	You just couldn't. You couldn't do it.
	And you'd have to place all these orders for a huge amount of weapons, and that would be noticed in society, and people would just say, I don't think so, right?
	I mean, if I were running some defense agency in a free society, the first thing I could do is say, I'm going to give $100 million to anybody who finds that I'm amassing weapons over and above what I'm contractually obligated to provide.
	And the money is an astronaut with a third party, and if you go and you find my secret cash with black helicopters and laser sharks or whatever, then you get a hundred million dollars.
	That's easy, right? You just make it so that people have a huge incentive to find you out.
	So this idea that you can, this is again, the idea that you can reproduce the government in a free society, it's not possible.
	You can only have this kind of tyranny when you have the costs offloaded to the general population through a monopoly of force.
	When you don't have that monopoly of force, you simply cannot aggregate that kind of power.
	I gave the idea that there's a monopoly in the free market.
	You know, 90% of Fortune 500 companies that were around 100 years ago are not around anymore.
	90%. I mean, that's how turning the market is, even with, you know, this nasty IP laws and other kinds of government relations that people have, tariffs and all that kind of stuff.
	That's how horrible, that's how much capitalism overturns itself even in the current system in a free market would be even more of an overturning.
	Without the government, how are we going to make sure that our Who is safe?
	Yeah. How are we going to make sure that our drugs are safe?
	Anybody know how many people are on psychotropic medications?
	You know, in the worldwide population, it's astounding.
	It's a hundred million people taking things like Prozac and all this kind of stuff.
	Which has no better than random clinical trials.
	So, and that stuff is really bad for you.
	As far as, I mean, I'm no doctor, right?
	But this is just what I've read, right?
	I mean, all these school shootings, why weren't they happening in the 60s?
	Because kids weren't being medicated in the 60s, right?
	This stuff produces homocidal fantasies, and blind rages, and it causes people to disconnect from reality.
	It's dangerous stuff. Completely legal, and completely out there.
	I mean, the FDA, there's a, Dr.
	Mary Rouart does some great presentations on this.
	I had her on the show a little while back, and she pointed out that the FDA was put in place After thalidomide in the 1960s, you may have heard of this, I think it was an anti-nauture agent for pregnant women, that resulted in the deaths, I think, with one or two hundred children as deformities and so on.
	And she's calculated the millions of deaths that have resulted from delayed or denied drugs that are legal and safe in other countries that have been denied in the United States by the FDA. It runs into millions.
	This is what happens when you use the state to solve problems.
	It's that, oh, well, the government had approved this previous drug, thalidomide, which resulted in a few hundred deaths, completely tragic and awful, so let's put a government agency in power, get advanced and expanded powers, and we end up with only three to five million deaths, because that's called our solution, right?
	So, first of all, I have a question whether the drugs are even that safe right now, and secondly, I would say that it is the concern We're good to choose unsafe drugs, obviously.
	And yet consumers also have the choice to choose unsafe drugs.
	If I'm dying from some ghastly disease and there's some experimental procedure out there and I'm going to be dead in two weeks, you know, bend me over and shoot me up with whatever you got.
	I'll roll the dice, you know, but you can't do that now, right?
	Unless you can lump yourself into some clinical trial.
	Everybody's decision about the level of risk of what they want to put into their bodies is completely up to them.
	I'm not going to deny somebody dangerous medicine if that's what they want, because no human being can tell what the effect is going to be.
	No human being can make the decision.
	We can justifiably and legitimately say do not initiate force and respect property rights because those are universal values and if you want to be bored by more of my thoughts on this, I've got a free book on ethics on my website.
	But nobody can make that decision about one level of danger you're willing to accept from drugs from people.
	Nobody can make that decision for you.
	It is not beneficial at the moment.
	The system is not helping people at the moment.
	In fact, it's harming many, many thousands times more than it was originally designed to help.
	And it's everybody's decision about how much safe.
	If you want a completely safe drug, drink water.
	I mean, no, if you want a completely safe drug, then you can just go for something like aspirin that's been tested for years and years and years or whatever.
	If you want something more risky, you have that choice.
	As long as full consent is there, that's everybody's individual choice.
	What about civil security?
	Not so much national security, but say, you know, in cases of tort or death or something like that, I don't need an enforcement agency that's able to go out and enforce objectives of law.
	Okay, so you mean like somebody steals your car?
	Yeah, like somebody steals my car.
	I mean, yeah, using force and force is not Right, right, right.
	A friend of mine had his Porsche got stolen and it had a GPS tracking device in it.
	He went to the cops and he said, my Porsche's been stolen.
	Sorry, Porsche. My car's been stolen.
	It has a GPS tracking device.
	And they said, we'll look into it.
	And I went back to mouthy, the donuts, whatever they do.
	And he called back a couple days later.
	So we had nothing yet, right?
	So he went to Porsche and he got them to look into it.
	They actually located where the car was.
	He called back, car's right here.
	Can you go and get it?
	Yeah, we'll get on that. - I'm trying to sit up with the crib. - And nothing, nothing.
	They would not go.
	Because, you know, it's dangerous.
	Cops want to pull people over for speeding, right?
	Because this is not dangerous. I guess maybe some places in the south, but they don't want to go into a den where people may be well.
	So, again, the question is what happens right now is just about nothing.
	How many stolen cars are recovered?
	Buy the police and return to their owners.
	Anybody have that statistic?
	I bet you it's single digits.
	I guarantee you it's single digits.
	So, right now, there is no solution.
	I mean, people say to me, well, what if we didn't have our legal system?
	I can only assume that they've never actually tried to use the legal system because we didn't have it.
	I had an issue once where a broker was selling a lot of stocks for my account and he was churning the account.
	Oh, right. Okay. And I got documents from the company that said, we did illegal things.
	You know, we did wrong, we shouldn't have done it.
	So they confessed and I still couldn't get a clear judgment.
	Right, so it doesn't work right now.
	What I would do is, I would say, just have an insurance that says, hey, your car got stolen, we'll just give you a new car.
	And what that means is that the insurance company has an incentive to work with the car companies to make sure that cars don't get stolen.
	You know, retina scans, voice prints, I mean, whatever, right?
	But there's ways to prevent that.
	We all want prevention of crime rather than a cure of crime.
	I think we all understand that, right?
	So, you know, what about the voice-activated television?
	Right? So, if you steal it, you can't turn it on.
	I mean, just things that are off the top of my head, right?
	I mean, it's not like the cops invented those annoying things that go off when you go out of stores, you know, the beep, beep, beep things.
	They didn't come up. They didn't come from the police.
	They came from the free market. All those kinds of solutions around the prevention of theft would be there.
	If somebody did break a contract with you, and I don't want to get into all of the details, there are lots of recourses that are free society, short of marching up with them with weapons.
	You get ostracism, right?
	You don't get your water, you don't get your electricity until this issue is resolved.
	There's lots of ways to do it that don't involve the initiation of force.
	That hasn't been said. I've certainly no passive.
	The self-defense is perfectly valid morally, but there's lots of options.
	The last thing that people want to do in a free society is not pulling out guns because nobody wants that stuff around.
	If it's at all possible to avoid, there's so much that you can do prior to that around prevention and finding ways to have people do something better without, you know, marching around the SWAT teams.
	You know that old statement that When you have a hammer, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
	And that's the problem with the state, right?
	When was the last time you heard somebody suggest some way of solving a social problem that did not involve political action?
	That did not involve passing the law?
	That did not involve throwing more people in prison?
	One in 28 children in the United States has parents in the incarceration system.
	And that's staggering.
	America has a higher population.
	A prisoner's per capita than China, that evil dictatorship, than Russia, because we won the Cold War.
	So there's lots of ways around theft that, again, and I don't know, I want to fall into that trap of here's how it will be solved, but people don't want to have stuff stolen from them.
	In a free society, job opportunities will be so plentiful and people will have so much money that only people who are mentally ill will steal.
	I mean, there'll be so little economic incentive to do so, and there'll be so much anti-theft stuff in place, and people who are mentally ill, we don't, they shouldn't be put in prison, they should get treated, right?
	So, that's sort of my rough answer, if that makes sense.
	Are you just telling me I'm down, or do you have a question?
	Question. Okay. How would you conduct foreign policy with foreign states without a domestic power?
	Well, I wouldn't. No, I mean, but foreign policy.
	I mean, can you give me an example?
	So a state threatens to invade, how do you say to them, oh no, please do not invade, go on.
	Oh yeah, so, okay, two minutes.
	Okay, so let's say there are two farms.
	So there are two farms, right?
	One is called the State Farm, not the insurance company, but the State Farm.
	And the State Farm has all this livestock and it has all these crops and all this gold in the basement and so on, right?
	And this other farm is just a hounding wilderness of bugs and bears and crap like that, right?
	So if you want to go and take over a piece of land, you don't want to go to the howling wilderness of bears and bugs and leashes and stuff like that.
	You want to go to the farm which already has domesticated livestock.
	You don't want to go and wrestle the bears down and try and find some moose and cows that you can domesticate.
	That's a hell of a lot of work. You want to, if you're lazy, you want to steal stuff, you go to the place where everything's already domesticated.
	So the last place that the foreign government is going to want to invent is the state of the Indian Bay, is the state of the society.
	Because people invade other countries to take control of the tax system.
	If there's no tax system, what are you taking over?
	There's no central government that you will take over, that you will now have people giving you their tax money instead of somebody else.
	I mean, to say the society, a couple of nukes, nobody's going to invade you, because no nukes in a country has ever been invaded.
	It just doesn't happen. It's the ultimate deterrent.
	So you don't need to worry about that.
	Plus, nobody's going to want to invade you anyway, because one thing is you're just going to invade someplace with no government.
	There's no taxes to take over, so they can't make any money out of it.
	There's no benefit to it. So I don't think that's...
	You don't need to worry about that too much.
	Again, that's just my rough answer.
	I'm pretty sure that there's an example of an anarchic society.
	Iceland, I'm pretty sure it was anarchic, and at one point it was taken over by another country.
	It was, and I'm not an expert on it, but I do know that the society lasted Over a thousand years as a state of society.
	I don't think America's going to make 350, so it's still doing a lot better than most societies.
	But that's absolutely right, for sure.
	But that is also an example of a pre-technological society, right?
	A society will see other people coming, like you've got spy satellites, so you'll see other people coming.
	There'll be lots of intent for all of that.
	At that time as well, there was individual weapons and individual people, so, you know, 100 guys could take over 50 guys, just based on the accepted view of the movie 300.
	But so you could do that because it's just, but now with weapons, mass destruction and all of that, numerical superiority means nothing because of nukes.
	So I think that paradigm of just taking over because there are more of us, which I think would be a negative for the state of society, I don't think that really applies anymore.
	It's not a perfect answer, and there's more about it in my book, Practical Amity, if you want to check it out, but that's sort of my wrong answer if it makes sense.
	One minute. That's the news.
	Oh, in a free society that has the news?
	Well, if I were in a free society, let's say that we're in a free society and we're surrounded by nasty, statist places or whatever, right?
	And the reason that the nasty, statist places dislike us is all the next people are having a free society because they could just walk over the border, right?
	Because that's just moving, right? So they get mad at us.
	Well, maybe I would be interested in having some nukes, right?
	And I can't imagine that nukes would be more than $300 million a year to run, to operate, to maintain, or whatever, right?
	So basically, you have to convince people that it's worth a dollar a year in America.
	It's worth a dollar a year to have nukes determined.
	Now, who would have that?
	Whoever would have that would be the company that can most Convince people that it's safe to go with that, right?
	So if you have any arguments about or discussions about the state of society, here's my strong suggestion to you.
	Say to the person, you are the guy trying to sell me nudes.
	How are you going to do it? Right?
	Don't be the guy trying to sell them nudes because they'll just come up with objections after nudes.
	Just put them on the other side of the table, right?
	So say, you're trying to sell me your surfaces as the magical nuclear Opposition company or whatever, right?
	The deterrent company, right?
	So how would you do it? So how would you do it?
	You're trying to sell me your services as a nuclear deterrent company.
	How would you do it? Because I'm scared you're going to turn those dudes on me and become another government.
	How are you going to do it? I don't trust myself without power.
	Okay, suppose you did.
	What could we do?
	I would hire only sane people.
	So rigorous mental health screenings, absolutely.
	Eliminate Congress. Hyper-secure location.
	Hyper-secure location.
	Subject to third party verification.
	How many people would you need to intern the keys to make it?
	It would be like 20 people. That would be whatever, right?
	You would guarantee that there would only be three nukes because that's all you need for your deterrent and they would only have a range of such and such and they would be...
	You would have all this contract with people that would be And you'd pay people $10 million if they ever found that you'd broken any of this kind.
	Like, you would just try and sell as hard as possible to make people secure with what it is that you were doing.
	And if someone else came up with a better idea, they would get the business.
	And if someone, three years from now, finds a better deterrent, sharks with lecturers from cannons, I don't know.
	Then they would get the business instead.
	So you'd be facing a constant competition to reassure people that you would not turn the weapons against them, and that's how you would sell it.
	I mean, people say, well, what if, what if, but there's no better way to do it.
	Because right now, we have this crazy system where to protect your property, the government takes half your property.
	I mean, if you proposed, if there was no government and you proposed it, people would think you were insane.
	No, seriously, they would.
	So what we want to do is, We're really concerned about security.
	So we're going to have this group of people who are going to invent arbitrary rules and throw you in jail and win and take off your property because we're really concerned about liberty and property rights.
	People would say, what?
	What? That makes no sense.
	But because it's aged like evil wine, people think that it makes sense, you know?
	You have to look at things from the perspective of, I call it the argument for morale, which is the initiation of force and destruction of property rights is immoral.
	Everything else has to flow from there.
	Because if you don't have that, you've got no basis for suggesting anything about society.
	Because you have to start with the virtue and the ethics and just stay with that.
	So, anyway, that's it for me.
	Look at that rousing ending.
	Thank you so much for your time.
	Great work. .
	Okay, so with that...
	Wow, sorry to shut off that.
	Applause so harsh. But with that, we're going to take a small break.
	It's going to be 15 minutes.
	So 15 minutes from now, we're going to go into those breakout sessions.
	And before you get up, we mentioned that there's been a change in the schedule about breakout sessions.
	So let me go over it really quick.
	The anti-war session is going to be right here.

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