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Jan. 5, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:04:30
1824 Two Beers with Steve - the Freedomain Radio Interview
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Hello and welcome to Two Beers with Steve.
I'm your host Steve Patterson and today my special guest is Stefan Molyneux.
How are you doing Stefan? I'm just great, Steve.
How are you doing? And a very happy new year to you.
It's great to talk to you again. Thank you.
I think this is the first show that we've done in the year 20,011.
It certainly is. Anyway, you've been a guest on our show before, so some people already know who you are.
I listen to your podcast quite a bit, so I know quite a bit about you.
But for those that don't know you, just give us a quick synopsis of Stefan Molyneux.
Six foot, 190 pounds of rippling philosophical muscle.
Anything else that you'd like to know?
I basically – I sprint thought and sweat ideas and I am in the decathlon of brain grindy thinking.
That is my profession.
I'm a philosopher.
I run the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world, Free Domain Radio, which people can find at freedomainradio.com.
It's commercial free.
It is all free.
The books are all free that I've written.
I've written a book on comparing agnosticism to atheism called Against the Gods with a Question Mark, which is proving to be quite popular.
agnosticism to atheism called against the gods with a question mark which is proving to be quite popular it's a short overview of some of the arguments against agnosticism which i've just completed and that's available at freedomainradio.com forward slash free as is a book of mine on ethics and the philosophy of relationships and books on stateless societies and all other kinds of goodies so invite people one and all to come pillage my server for all that it's worth and i hope that people will check it out
It's a short overview of some of the arguments against agnosticism, which I've just completed.
well you certainly are the content king uh you can dominate uh people's days and weeks on the end with just your content alone well i think you know that the key thing for me is that if i produce enough unindexed material then it's functionally impossible to disprove me Because I can just say, look, in some podcast I proved you wrong, you'll just have to go off and find it.
And with 2,000 or so podcasts, it's impossible and I feel that that is a...
An intellectual triumph of the most weaselly and cowardly kind, but I'll take it is really what I'm saying.
Okay. The reason I'm talking with you today is because I've been listening to your podcast.
You've more or less sort of gone parabolic in my mind.
You're really… Are starting to, you know, catch fire with other news sources.
And what I mean by that is Alex Jones mainly.
He's got like a band of maybe 300,000 daily listeners.
So how has that affected, you know, the Free Domain Radio?
Well, I mean, let's not kid ourselves.
Alex is a pretty potent bump to anybody's listenership.
And I've been getting very positive responses to what I've been doing with Alex.
And I've really enjoyed our conversations.
I mean, I do have to drink about 12 espressos before I sit down with him and have a catheter just so that I can keep up because, you know, the man is not short of energy.
And so I just assume that he sleeps when he's not on the show.
He wakes up, you know, he gets a full on injection of caffeine to the frontal lobes, does the show and then is sealed back in a hyperbaric chamber.
That's my theory.
And I've really enjoyed our conversations.
He is a fairly generous host.
He is obviously well informed about some stuff.
I'm sure we have our disagreements, but that's true of just about anybody, even me, from one day to the next, I can disagree with myself.
So I've really appreciated being on the show, and I hope to do it again.
Well, that's the thing about Alex Jones is that I've had my disagreements with Alex Jones too, but I owe a great service to Alex Jones for bringing a lot of people to become part of my audience.
I mean, he turns a lot of people on.
He's got such a large audience and then sets them in motion.
So, I mean, all of us guys who criticize Alex Jones for just one little thing he says out of the 15 hours or 20 hours of content that he puts out a week, You know, my hat's off to the guy.
I really like Alex Jones for that reason.
And I've, I mean, just between you and I, and I guess whoever ends up listening, I've mellowed out my isolationism a little bit over the past few years for a variety of reasons, which we don't have to get into here.
And I'm a little bit more sort of hands across the water now than I used to be.
And so that's just something that I've sort of grown into.
And I think it's the right decision.
I found that the pure life of non-cooperation with those I have disagreements with just ended up not being particularly productive and so I've sort of altered my stance on that and I'm certainly willing to I think that disagreements that I may have with the host should hold back the benefits of philosophy from his listeners,
and that's really been the approach that I've been taking.
Well, your message gets across.
And one of the questions that he asked, and I'm going to ask the same question because I think it's a great setup for a show, is, you know, let's do a look at a setup of your worldview, the big picture, what's going on, and then we'll work our way down to maybe the, you know, the micro level to what it means to us.
So what is your overarching theory of maybe statism or the worldview in general?
Well, I think the fundamental thing that if people aren't talking about this, then they have no credibility with me.
If they're not talking about the fact that the existing system is dead and buried, then they're just talking out of their ass, and they have zero interest to me.
So there's, of course, a huge number of people in the mainstream media who are using all of these kinds of euphemisms and covering up all of the reality of the situation and of the system.
So, for instance, you hear, and I don't mean to pick on Tom I won't even pick on individual names.
It doesn't really matter. But you hear lots of talk about this stimulus package, right?
Like it's a stimulus package.
And really, who can argue with stimulus?
I mean, if you're that much against stimulus, you probably should be firebombing Starbucks or whatever, right?
But stimulus is not even a remotely accurate term for what is going on in the economic world.
First of all, it's money printing.
It's just a creation of counterfeit.
All fiat currency is counterfeit fundamentally, but this is counterfeit on steroids.
So it's not stimulus spending because the government has no money.
I mean, the government doesn't even have money relative to its own budget, right?
I mean, the government never has any money.
It just takes from the citizens.
But even relative to it taking from the citizens, it's way out of cash.
So when people are talking about the stimulus package, what they're talking about is two things, printing money and going into debt.
Now, everybody recognizes that it was Debt that caused the financial crisis, whether you think it's private debt in the form of mortgage payments or public debt in the form of government budgets.
It is debt that caused the financial crisis and really the underlying cause, of course, is just control of interest rates and fiat currency, which sends all kinds of wrong messages to the free market or the vestiges of the free market.
And so if people call things by their proper names, solutions are very easy.
And the ridiculousness and self-destruction of the existing system becomes very clear.
So if you say, we need to take on more debt to solve the economic crisis caused by debt, everybody recognizes that you're insane.
I mean, but you have to call it something else other than debt or printing money.
Or if you say we need to print money in order to deal with the problems of high prices in the housing market, everybody knows who's got any brains that printing money simply causes inflation.
So you have to invent another term.
And so I think anybody who's not talking about the reality that the system is dead, the government has less than no money, that printing money and creating more debt is not going to solve the problem just as we all understand.
I mean if I'm in debt up to my eyeballs, my solution isn't to go into more debt.
I mean I can say that I'm going to do it but everybody understands that that's a ridiculous thing to do.
It's amazing how powerful the words are to the narrative.
If things get explained that way, the narrative breaks down as to what they're doing.
But they're using words that are disguised to make their narrative clear.
Well, yeah, to make the narrative clearer and the reality more obscure.
I mean, I'm working on a sort of theory, which I'll just touch on briefly here.
I don't claim to have it all fleshed out, but I think there's a reason why psychologically powerful terms are used in economics, right?
So it's considered to be a depression, right?
I mean, it's a kind of the Great Recession.
People don't like using the D word, but everyone understands now that when you've got upwards of 16% to 20% of people out of work, it's a depression.
I mean, who's kidding who, right?
The only reason it's not completely collapsed is because of all of this money printing, which is going to make the problems worse down the road.
And so when you think about it, most people have an emotional understanding of economics that's sort of equivalent to a five-year-old's understanding of the family finances.
So when you're a kid, your dad just kind of has money.
I mean, you don't really understand it.
I'm trying to explain to my daughter, you know, we have to give people coins to buy things so that we can take them out of the store.
But, man, she doesn't really know what the heck's going on, right?
She's just like, well, half the time you use plastic.
So people, when you're a sort of four or five-year-old kid, your dad just kind of has money and he spends it.
And this is, of course, what people think of the government.
The government's like this dad who kind of has money and just spends it.
And nobody really gets where the money comes from.
I mean, they do if you sort of ask them, but emotionally, there's this block.
And a lot of times when people are psychologically depressed, like they feel down, they feel very sad, they feel empty, a lot of people solve that problem by spending money.
And this is true of households as well, right?
So if everybody's down, people are like...
Let's go out for dinner. You know, let's go to the mall and buy some stuff.
And a lot of people feel better.
And so I think when you talk about a depression, people, I think at some level in their minds, associate that with families being unhappy.
And of course, a lot of families in the US are unhappy for a damn good reason.
And so when you say we're going to solve the depression by spending money, by stimulating things with money, I think people get that not at a rational level, but an emotional level as a kind of parallel to what goes on in their families.
And I think that's one of the reasons why people don't call other people on this crap that they're spouting about stimulus and don't say, well, what the hell are you calling it a stimulus for?
Do you have the money to pay for it?
No.
Then you're going in debt or you're printing money.
There's no two ways about it.
So stop calling it stimulus and start calling it by its proper name.
But people have a barrier to doing that.
And the only reason I can think of is either people are completely retarded, which I don't believe, or there's some emotional level at which people kind of accept this narrative.
And I think that's got something to do with it, though I'm not saying that entirely proves the case.
um When it comes to, like, the government having to step in and spend money, are you familiar at all with, like, the exponential function of money?
I mean, I don't know how much you've delved into this sort of thing.
The stuff that, like, you know, money is a debt.
There was those films that came out, Promises Unleashed.
I think that was money is debt part two.
Yeah, I'm fairly aware of it.
Yeah, but go ahead. So, basically, what happens is that, you know, we've gotten to this sort of, like, phase where we've gone exponential, you know, where If people aren't spending it, then the government has to come in and spend it to sort of keep this jig up going on exponentially.
Eventually, someday, the curve goes flat and we have to double the amount that we're spending every day.
I don't know if you're familiar with that sort of theory at all.
It's the criticisms that people have around fractional reserve banking is what you're talking about, right?
And I actually have strong disagreements with that.
Okay. As a whole. Yeah, let me know.
Well, people will always try and find some way of avoiding the problem of violence in society.
And I think that's really tragic.
That is a real problem.
The problem is not fractional reserve banking.
The problem is the coercive monopoly, the violence that the government has with regards to the currency.
People will always try and pin it on some institution.
The problem is not the Federal Reserve.
The problem is not fractional reserve currency.
The problem is not even debt.
The problem is that the government has a violent control and monopoly over the financial lifeblood of the system.
The problem is that we have a bunch of sociopaths with the ability and legal right to counterfeit at will, to type whatever they want into their bank accounts.
There's nothing wrong at all.
With fractional reserve banking, fractional reserve banking is simply a form of gambling, and gambling is not wrong.
So if, like to say, completely free society, you can put your money into a bank that does not practice fractional reserve banking.
In other words, they don't lend out multiples of whatever is in their vault to entrepreneurs in the hopes of getting a return on investment.
They won't do that. And all that means is that you won't earn any interest on your money.
So it's just like a safety deposit box.
You put a piece of gold in a safety deposit box, you come back in 10 years, there's your piece of gold.
It hasn't multiplied, it hasn't split, it hasn't been invested in stocks.
But in a free society, you can take the choice to gamble.
In other words, you can say to the bank, listen, you can lend out double what my money is worth to entrepreneurs, and then I'm either going to come back and there's going to be a lot more money, or there's going to be a lot less money, or somewhere in between.
And so fractional reserve banking is just a way for people who want to get some sort of interest paid out to their deposits to permit the bank to lend out a multiple of what's in the vault.
And that's perfectly fine.
There's no force being used there.
There's no fraud, as long as you're aware and the bank is up front with what it's doing.
There's no force. There's no fraud.
And people always try to sidestep the reality of the violence at the heart of the system and look for some effect of that violence and say, that's the problem.
Like, the problem is fractional reserve banking.
It's not. I mean, the problem is that this is possible only, this level of fractional reserve banking is possible only with the violent monopoly of the state and for no other reason.
It's like you're trying to find the source of a pollution in your river.
You have to keep going, keep swimming upstream and upstream and upstream until you find whatever crap is being pumped in the river at its source.
I think people stop before they get to the actual source and they're still looking at the effects of whatever crap is being dumped into the river rather than the source itself.
People rage against fractional reserve banking like it's some sort of evil or People rage against fiat currency, i.e.
paper currency that's not based on anything.
I don't care about that.
In a free society, you might have fiat currency all over the place.
You just won't have a legally violent monopoly and that makes all the difference in the world.
And I'll agree with you on that.
And I'll probably agree with you on capitalism as well.
But what happens is the rules get changed while the game is being played.
And this might be because of the monopoly that you're talking about over how the game is played.
Tell me what you mean by the rules being changed.
I want to make sure I understand that. What I mean by that is let's take, for instance, in capitalism.
You have the ability to risk and reward.
No one ever talks about risk and failure.
They always talk about the risk and reward of capitalism.
And I guess if you're like a JP Morgan and you're holding on to an enormous amount of toxic assets, There is only risk and reward because you're not allowed – I mean you're allowed to take failure but why would you when you don't have to?
The games are changed. The rules of the game are changed because you have the power to change the rules to where you don't have to book those bad debts on the books at the moment.
And this goes for a lot of things.
I mean you can go to like the fraud closure gate with the home loans.
They change the rules as the game are being played to benefit themselves.
And that's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about if the rules were the same for everybody.
Just like in baseball. The rules in baseball are the same for everybody that plays the game.
They're the same for football.
But what if somebody has the ability to co-opt the umpires?
Then the entire game changes.
Okay, and that's kind of what I'm talking about is that I agree with capitalism and I agree with fractional reserve banking.
It's the ability to change the rules while the game is being played that I have a hard time with.
Well, and I would suggest that it might be wiser to amend your statement.
If you say that the rules are being changed while the game is in process, that's just another way of saying there are no rules.
Very true. I mean, because a rule is something that has to be somewhat universal, right?
There are rules to certain people that play the game, for the majority of us.
But then... Well, sure, yeah. But I mean, I think it's probably better just to say that there are no rules.
And I think that's one of the things that's very true.
People say, if you have a society which I believe and accept as the only valid application of the just theory of nonviolence, which is the non-initiation of force or the non-aggression principle, that...
If you have a system without a state, everybody says, well, then how will people's disputes be resolved?
And the reality, though, is that what people are assuming in that context is that we have a system in place at the moment where people's disputes are resolved, and nothing could be further from the truth.
We do not have a system where people's disputes can be resolved.
I only assume that people say we have a system where people's disputes can be resolved.
I only accept that they can say that if they've never actually tried to use the legal system that we currently have to resolve a dispute.
I mean, what is it? The 9-11 responders now have been trying to get payments for injuries sustained at ground zero for almost 10 years now, right?
I mean, that is not a system where people are getting any kind of justice.
If you are wronged in a contract, I've seen...
Cases go on for years and cost people over $100,000, $150,000 just to try and get some sort of settlement with no particularly clear delineation of the rules that they're supposed to follow and lawyers changing hands and having to restart all over again.
We actually don't, I mean, we're living in the worst kind of anarchy at the moment, which is a monopoly of chaos without the alternative for spontaneous order.
And that is really, really wretched.
I mean, we have the very worst kind of system wherein people's voluntary and free associations are not allowed to solve problems, but the problems are being actively resisted from being solved.
I mean, just take public education, right?
I mean, the public education, particularly the U.S., I mean, it's beyond wretched.
Somebody said some years back that if a foreign government had inflicted the U.S. system of education on America, it would be justly considered an act of war.
And I think that's very true. It is a war against kids.
But because there's so much control over the educational system through the government, because people are taxed to pay for this wretched, decrepit, disgusting, malevolent, indoctrinating, quote, education system...
Spontaneous and free and voluntary solutions are almost impossible to organize.
So you have an inflicted chaos without there being room for voluntary solutions and that really is the worst.
So when people say, "Well, how will problems be solved in the absence of the government?" It's like, "What makes you think they're being solved now?" In fact, the solution is prevented from coming into being through the power of the state.
Trevor Burrus: So let me get – and I listened to your podcast quite a bit.
I listened to a lot of your content, but I listened to a lot of other people as well.
So I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
It's a good thing. It's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
Weeks later, I crisscross everything that I've learned, and it comes together in a coherent thought.
But at the moment, it doesn't always feel that way.
And one of my things, one of the problems I have when I listen to a lot of your material is, and maybe you've made this very clear before, and I just totally missed it, and that is the they, right?
You know, who they are.
Or is this some sort of like organic organism that just, you know, it's sort of like a natural instinct that we have that we want to centralize power in the hands of a few?
Or am I, you know, take it from there.
Sure, sure. Do you mean is it sort of the conspiracy theory question?
Like is there a bunch of people in a room sort of plotting and planning all of this sort of stuff or is it more of a spontaneous evil so to speak?
Is that what you mean or is it something else?
I don't want to – it will be very easy to dismiss the conspiracy theory couple of guys.
But let's say this is sort of like a corporate thing.
You know, like the corporate bodies are sort of conspiring with each other, but for the betterment of themselves and not for everybody else.
OK, so versus what was the other the other option?
The other option was that it was instinct.
OK, this is instinct of these people.
So, yeah, on one side you have like it's sort of like inherent to corporations and the other one is it's instinctual to humans.
So, you know, where where do you think it is?
Well, let me ask you a question or two, and hopefully this will clarify at least my perspectives.
So let's say that you're sane.
Let's go out on a limb.
Let's say that you're sane, and you kill a guy, right?
So you're sane and you kill a guy.
What do you do with the body? I would hide it.
Yeah, of course, you would hide it.
And if you say this to anybody who's sane and who kills a guy, you know, they would hide the body.
I mean, but that doesn't mean that...
There's a big cabal of people sitting there saying, listen, whoever kills a guy, hide the body, you know?
I mean, it's just instinct.
And what that means is that human beings have an instinct for control and for power.
Because the greatest resource that human beings can own is other human beings.
Because we are the self-organizing livestock, right?
So if you own a cow, I mean, you have to build all these fences and the cow isn't very productive because you just get some meat and some milk or whatever.
But human beings are spontaneously self-organizing, and human beings are spontaneously self-policing.
And what I mean by that is that I now have done quite a number of speeches at libertarian gatherings and anarchist gatherings, and I've recently started asking the same question.
I sort of say to people in the audience, say, well, how many people in the audience here have been to jail for their beliefs?
And nobody puts their hands, maybe one or two.
And then I say, well, how many people have...
We've received significant social criticism from friends, family or peers because of your opposition to state power.
Every single person in the room puts his or her hands up.
Because we are spontaneously self-organizing, the fences that we have is horizontal social attack.
In other words, you and I are going to receive attacks and hostility and ostracism and rejection and contempt and scorn and all these things from our peers.
And this is one of the amazing things that happens in society is that once you start ruling people, And you start indoctrinating them.
They very quickly become frightened of freedom because if they never look at freedom, they don't have to see that they're kind of enslaved, right?
And so cattle don't do that, right?
Cattle don't gang up on the one person who finds a hole in the fence and drive them all back into the fence.
But human beings will do that.
So there's a huge, huge value.
Once you gain control and power over human beings, they self-police.
They self-police.
They self-enslave, and so it requires very little effort to maintain power over human beings.
That's just a sad fact.
A social organization has long roots in the history of tribalism and the need for horizontal cooperation to survive in the past.
It's biologically selected and so on.
You were breathing like you were about to say something.
Oh, I was going to say that.
So we allow ourselves to be centralized because it's part of our civil structure.
We allow ourselves to be...
Guided by others and we work together as a team and somebody takes a leadership role and then maybe that is our vulnerability.
We allow ourselves to be vulnerable to be policed by somebody else.
Sure, and we do that.
I mean, there are two ways that the rulers do that.
One is through the direct threat of force.
So if you don't pay your taxes, you get letters, and eventually people come and take your property, and if you resist them, then they might shoot you, right?
So you've got the threat of force, and that works very well.
We are designed to survive and reproduce, not to die in a useless suicide run against the powers that be.
So that's the—I mean, the first is direct force, which is actually not particularly powerful, because the more that that's used, like in North Korea, the less efficient— But by far the better way to get the livestock to self-police is to get a portion of the livestock dependent upon the generosity of the farmer.
So if you get people who are working for the government, you get people who are dependent upon the government for unjust benefits.
So you sort of think of...
It teaches salaries and two months off in the summer and professional development days and all these kinds of goodies.
This would not be exactly the same in the free market for sure.
I mean it's completely insane of course that we have a working day that goes from 9 to 5 and yet children are in school from 9 to 3.
I mean could you imagine in a free market that you would end a child's education if we even assume that children need to be in school to be educated for the moment.
Could you imagine that you would set up a school which would leave a two-hour gap between kids getting out of school and parents ending work?
Nobody would. But of course, this is what gets maintained by the power of the state.
So once you get enough people dependent on the ruling class, then whenever anybody starts talking about freedom, they get attacked by everyone who's dependent on the ruling class.
I mean, that's the genius of the dependent classes, right?
And that's the genius of getting people enslaved.
I don't believe that there's any cabal or secret documents that are passed around any more than I believe that your average killer, Hussein, wants to hide the body only because he's been to the body-hiding school of murder, right?
I mean, it's just an instinct that we have to get something for nothing.
It's an instinct that we have to maintain indoctrinated control over others.
And it's an instinct that has been finely developed and attuned, right?
Like we know for sure that when lions go to hunt a gazelle, they're all acting in concert, right?
They're all acting together, right?
Some flank, some go ahead, some dart out to change the gazelle's course or whatever.
And yet we don't think that they're sitting there calling out football plays to each other and that they've done it all up on a chalkboard beforehand.
They just have an instinct for this kind of predation and the same thing is true I think of human beings.
And so what is the alternative to sort of this sort of structure here?
Because if we're all self-policing in this sort of way and we feel as though we need a farmer or – give me your outlook of a better way to look at this.
Well, we know for sure that human beings don't want to live under a state.
I mean, that is a basic—I mean, that's an empirical, logical fact.
Like, for instance, you know some woman doesn't want to have sex with a guy if he has to have a knife to her throat.
I mean, that's—you don't even have to look twice, right?
I mean, okay, you could throw in some completely bizarre role-playing, but let's just say, right, if you see a knife to the woman's throat, you know she doesn't want to have sex.
If you see the guy with a gun to some other guy's ribs, you know he's not giving his wallet out of charity.
So wherever there's a gun involved, wherever there's the initiation of force involved, you know for absolute certain, without any shadow of a doubt, that that is exactly what people don't want.
So the government is a big, dark, ugly blob of an evil shadow which delineates exactly what people don't want to happen in society, exactly what people would resist if they could, exactly what people hate.
Human beings do not want enforced Welfare.
Human beings do not want socialized medicine because if they did, you wouldn't need to force them to do it.
And so the government is a huge delineation of exactly the opposite of what people want in society.
So that's the good news, that we know exactly what people don't want and that's exactly what the government is doing because they have to enforce it.
And so that is good news because it means that we know exactly what people don't want.
Now, what the mistake people make then is they say, well, the government is providing health care to the poor.
And therefore, if we get rid of government, then there will be no health care for the poor.
And that is – it's an easy trap to fall into and it's one of the most fundamental pieces of propaganda that exists, right?
So it's sort of like saying there's a big rock in the middle of the river.
And if we take that rock out, the water is going to run around that vacuum as if there was still a rock there.
But it's not true.
The moment you lift the rock out, the water goes thundering in and the whole course changes.
The moment you take violence out of the equation, then immense possibilities for creativity and voluntary problem-solving emerge that were completely blocked off.
by violence.
And, of course, the reality is, just as I said, anybody who was not talking about the end of the existing economic and political system as it stands is just talking out of their armpit.
Equally, anybody who says right now that the government is necessary to help the poor...
It's an intellectual joke and really a brain mutant of the highest order because what is going to happen to the poor when the government can't pay welfare?
And that is mathematically going to happen.
There is no way around it.
There is no way to avoid it.
The national debt is upwards of 80% to 90%.
Depending on how you calculate it, it's over 100%.
It has no chance of being paid off.
There's going to be massive defaults which is going to cause massive problems.
What is going to happen to people on old age pensions when the government can't pay for Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security?
So the idea that the government is somehow helping the poor, anybody who still proposes that is a mere propaganda machine who has no more intellectual value than a broken iPod.
So I got a question for you then.
This is probably an age-old question you get from quite a few people based along those same sort of lines is that without a government, you know, who puts out the fires?
Sure. Who polices the people?
And then more importantly, here's another one, and I didn't see it happen in the absence of government.
I like to go to bars, and I don't like people smoking next to me.
So now they've banned smoking in bars in Missouri, Illinois, New York, places that I've lived.
And I happen to agree with that one.
But there isn't an alternative choice where I can go to a no-smoking bar.
You let them know what you think on that.
Well, you obviously have the right to breathe air that is not smoky.
I mean, that's perfectly fine.
You don't have the right to shoot people for smoking in a place where they voluntarily have agreed that they're allowed to smoke, right?
So if you think that bars should be smoke-free, and I can certainly understand that.
I don't like the smell of smoke at all.
Then you should patronize bars where there is a smoke-free policy and that's the way that you should work.
I don't think that you can initiate the use of force against people engaged in a voluntary transaction such as I'm going to open my bar to smokers.
Smokers, they drink more, they tip more, they stay longer.
That's just a basic reality of bar ownership, and maybe we wish it were otherwise, and I can certainly understand that, but I think you can't legitimately use force.
Like, there's always something that we want, that we're tempted, right?
I mean, force works in very powerful ways, right?
So people don't smoke in bars where it's illegal, for the most part.
And so there's always something.
You know, the devil has fishnet stockings on, right?
I mean... There's always something that can be dangled in front of you that's like, well, it's such a little thing and, you know, it would really give me something that I want.
And it's always something like, shouldn't the government at least...
Make sure that children's toys aren't toxic, right?
Something like that. And you say, yeah, you know, the government should really make sure that children...
Yeah, you can't argue against that.
So let's have that government do that.
Well, shouldn't the government at least make sure that your water doesn't have cholera in it?
It's like, well, I don't really like cholera, so, you know, let's make sure the government does that and so on, right?
And all of that stuff is really seductive.
And of course, it's such a slippery slope.
And if the government were involved, sorry, if the government were even remotely interested in the health of children, then it would completely privatize education as soon as humanly possible and start looking at alternatives to this current system of locking children up in quasi prisons for 12 years, being droned at by boring people, then it would completely privatize education as soon as humanly possible and start looking at alternatives to this current That would be what –
and of course, if the government was interested in keeping toxicity out of children, they wouldn't be drugged for imaginary illnesses like ADHD and ODD and all of these other kinds of metaphorical – like new original sin, quote, ailments.
But this is not the case at all.
The government does not care about children.
The government cares about We're good to go.
About the health and intellectual acuity and growth of kids at all.
So, yeah, it's just really important.
Someone's going to dangle something in front of you like, you know, like those anglerfish.
They have that light and they dangle it in the deep water and it's like, ooh, what a pretty light.
Right? So you've got to be careful about that.
And the same stuff is there for me too, stuff that I really want.
And it's like one little push of that lever of force and I can get it.
And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. There's a principle we have to respect, right?
Yeah, actually, to recap, because this lesson makes it all the way very clear to me, this, you know, the free domain lesson of today is that, you know, because, you know, it's a disturbance to me that when I go into bars and somebody's smoking, but it's not the end of my life,
you know. But on the other hand, When you allow that sort of system into your life, there's the taxation and the fact that you're giving up a lot of your own liberties in the process by allowing you to allow somebody else to police somebody else to make sure that they I'm not even against the fact that an Eagles Lodge where everybody smokes there anyway can go and do that.
I just wanted government-sanctioned places where you just couldn't smoke so where people that don't smoke go.
And I saw this happen in a book I was reading, The Big Necessity, and I forget if I wrote somebody, it happened with sanitation in India, is that in the absence of government, the people come together to make these sort of decisions.
But when you involve government, it's everybody looks to the government as to the person that solves all the problems.
It's like... And it's very different.
So if we had lived in a society where we didn't have a government, then we might all come together and say, you know what, because there's nobody else around to make these decisions, we need to come together and do this voluntarily.
Whereas with a government system...
You – everybody looks immediately to the government.
In fact, I see this happen a lot with a lot of people who say, you know, you should run for office because that's how you'll get – Change the system.
Change the system. And I say, no, I don't – no.
And anybody that I've talked to has heard the same sort of argument.
You should run – you're so politically active, you should go and run for office because that's how you make a difference.
And we all say that's not how you make a difference.
That's a top-down – the differences that I want to make are bottom-up.
Well, I just say to people like that, it's like, well, you're so interested in, like I say, are you against crime?
And they say, yes. I say, well, then you should join the mafia and make it stop doing criminal things.
And they say, well, if I join the mafia, I'm not going to get it to stop doing criminal things.
It's like, well, yeah. So if I get voted in, I'm not going to stop the government from doing criminal things.
That's the whole point. Very true.
And sorry, just to hammer this smoking thing for just a second or two more, because I think it's a very interesting example.
There are two things in society that we don't like.
One of them is sort of minor annoyances, and the other is stuff which is, you know, kind of actually bad for us, right?
And the minor annoyances, look, we just have to suck it up and live with, right?
So... If I'm sitting, I remember, I don't know, a couple of years ago, I was sitting on a beach trying to relax and someone came down and they did have headphones on, but it was really loud.
And you know, sometimes when you can just hear a little bit of music, it starts to drive you slowly insane.
You know, when you can just hear that, you can't actually hear any lyrics or whatever.
It just starts to get annoying. Well, obviously, that's something that I can move or I can ask them to turn it down, but that's just something I have to deal with.
It's not damaging my health or anything like that.
Now, let's say that secondhand smoke is bad for your health and does cause health problems, then in a free society, people who smoke in enclosed areas with other people who don't want the smoke to be there might themselves be liable for the medical costs of people who've gotten sick as a result.
I'm just saying it's possible, right?
I mean, this is, I don't know, I'm no expert on this, but...
So there are things where there's an objective damage that is occurring to your health that has some causality that can be traced in some manner.
And I think stewardesses on planes won court cases if they developed lung cancer because people were allowed to smoke on planes because that was pretty enclosed and pretty certain.
And so those kinds of mechanisms would still occur in a free society that if people were doing stuff that was detrimental to your health, they would still be liable to I think we're good to go.
We'll be dealt with because there's a measurable economic cause and effect and cost in that that would have to be borne by someone and it will be the perpetrator of whatever behaviors are causing people this distress.
That's good because in that example you covered both the minor annoyances and then you also covered the fact that it's detrimental to other people because that was my next question was the cholera in the water.
We all have a concern over the water that we drink or even the toxins that people are pumping into the ground.
And we just assume because we've lived in this sort of narrative our whole life is that the solution to the problem is some sort of government response.
That's quite fascinating.
Let's switch gears just for a second here because you brought up Libertopia or some of the speeches that you've given because I've listened to a few of your podcasts that you've done where you've been the keynote speaker at different places and you've been doing this for quite a while.
So because of all the friction in the economy and what's going on with our government at the moment, Is there a larger following?
Are people more amped up than ever?
What's your feeling of being on the road?
Well, I think that there has actually been a huge deflation in the movement over the past few years.
Obviously, the libertarian movement invested a huge amount of energy, emotional, psychological, monetary, time.
It invested a huge amount in Ron Paul.
And that was – and people had significant delusions about that.
Like people were saying, well, this online Paul gave him X and therefore it just might happen that he becomes president and blah, blah, blah, right?
And, I mean, when the results came in, I mean, it was – I mean, it was staggeringly bad, right?
And there was this sort of dual narrative about it, right?
So when people were asking for money for Ron Paul, I don't think it was particularly virtuous, but they were asking for money for Ron Paul and they would say, well, it's because he could become president, right?
And he can set you free or something like that, which was not going to happen.
And then so when people said, well, this is not going to happen, then they say, well, no, it's really just for educating people and we know he's not going to win, but it's just for educating people and so on.
Though there was, in fact, no measurement of that, right?
If you're going to spend... I think that since the end of the fantasy about Ron Paul and with the knowledge that As someone of his caliber and experience and credibility, it's not going to be along for another generation.
And we sure as hell don't have another generation to spend on this system because it's not going to last that long.
I think there has been a kind of, you know, oh shit, let's hunker down and let's, you know, get some guns and some dried food and so on.
I think there has been a retreat.
These are just my opinions.
I don't have any proof of this, right?
So take it for, you know, what it's worth.
But I think there has been a retreat.
Into the bunker, so to speak, for the libertarian movement.
There has been a withdrawal from the public sphere.
I think also seeing the corruption that's occurring with the Tea Partiers who've gone in and now requested a billion dollars or more of additional spending.
I think people are kind of getting that politics isn't going to work.
And people don't know what else to do.
You know, it's like if it's not politics that's going to help free us or get this leviathan off our necks, what is it going to be?
So I think that there's been a lot of problems in the libertarian movement, a lot of withdrawal from engaging in this.
And I think that's been to the betterment of what it is that I'm doing because I've always proposed something quite different from that.
But I don't think that people are more fired up.
I think that there's a pretty heavy veil of hopelessness and resignation in the libertarian movement given what's happened over the past few years.
That's kind of a shock to me.
I would have thought that a lot of the events surrounding today would have galvanized a lot of people.
But once you've been let down, I mean it's hard to recoup.
Well, sorry, but galvanize them to do what?
That's the question, right?
That's very true.
I don't know.
I mean what do we do?
We thought we could.
They can't imagine that they're going to get someone elected who's going to make a big difference before the shit hits the fan economically.
So I'm not trying to sort of harangue you.
I'm just like curious if you've been sort of energized to do what?
I mean that's always the question, right?
Yeah. That's the question I ask myself all the time is like how can I use what small little time that I have remaining over my long workday and spending time with my kids to have some sort of impact?
And it's just there isn't sort of like this clear-cut choice.
And I can understand how people fell into maybe the Ron Paul candidacy as being the right thing to do, the way to spend your time, the way to spend your money.
And I don't know right now what to do.
And in my own sort of little world, in my own little podcast here, is I've tried to raise money to do like viral videos.
So I could make sort of like the perfect video that would just turn on so many people.
But I'm just sort of to the point where this will just – it's sort of like porn for the people that already listen to my show.
Right, right, right.
I'd like to see some of these viral porn – I know I hear what you're saying.
It's financial, economic. You're right.
What do you get behind?
And another thing is, if you get behind somebody and they become marginalized, then you've lost all faith in what you actually believed in, that sort of thing.
So there's a lot of questions at this point.
But maybe, just maybe, We're, uh, there, there's something rising up from, uh, and there's some, and people are starting to sort of like hold hands out and start to grab each other's hand and something might, might just come up, but, uh, future crystal ball.
Um, well, look, there's, there's, we have, we have zero opportunity to turn this thing around before it hits the wall.
I mean, there's, there's, you know, there's, there's no chance, uh, to, to do that.
And I think, I think people are beginning to, to really get that.
That the acceleration of the collapse of the existing system...
And we're not just talking America.
I mean, Europe is going through the same thing.
Canada is going through similar things.
I mean, the amount of debt, the predation, the exploitation, the special interest groups, the end of even the pretense of democracy, the fact that we have accumulated all of this massive debt and staggering multi-trillion dollar obligations when...
The big bills are still to come, right?
Because the big bills are the baby boomers retiring and where, you know, originally you had like, you know, I think it was like one person retired for every 10 people working.
It's going to go down to like one person retired for every two people working.
I mean, that's just completely unsustainable.
And so we are in this massive hole right before the big crater of retirement from the baby boomers is going to hit.
And it's not accidental, right?
The fact that There was no money in the Social Security Fund would have been evident to everyone if the government hadn't been able to blame the bankers.
So I'm not sure that's entirely accidental.
Again, I don't think it's plotted.
It's just natural exploitation.
And so there's no chance that things can be turned around politically before the government runs out of money.
Now, what the government is going to do is clear from history and it's clear just from the self-interest of the ruling classes.
Is the government is going to turn on the dependent classes.
And this is already starting to occur.
So there are a number of...
I made this prediction quite some time back and the evidence is starting to come in quite clearly that there are a number of governments in the US, state governments, who are looking at shredding the collective bargaining agreements that they have with their public sector unions because they simply don't have the money.
And California has this huge unfunded liability because starting in the 90s when they didn't have any money...
They stopped giving them raises.
And what they gave them instead was these staggeringly generous pension benefits because that was a way of getting compliance and reducing conflict in the moment without adding to the deficit at the time.
It's a standard cowardly – I mean, it's hard to call it cowardly.
It's inevitable. It's like saying that running away from a grizzly bear is cowardly.
Well, it's not. It's just what you do.
And so what's going to happen is the current crop of politicians, no matter what their ideologies are, Have inherited this dependent classes, right?
The people on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare.
And it's not just the poor, of course, the rich, the large corporations, the military industrial complex corporations like Boeing and Lockheed and all that.
The current crop of politicians has inherited all of these parasites in the quasi-private sector.
Politicians aren't stupid.
They know that the higher taxes, the higher the regulations, the less productive the productive classes are.
They also know that there can't be any possibility of recovery at the moment.
While we have so many dependents and so few productive and energetic people, they also know that the younger generation is not buying into the American dream, does not exhibit the same amount of entrepreneurial zeal that their parents did.
And so they know that they have to, and I use this word advisedly, I don't mean this physically, right?
But they know that they have to cull the dependents.
They know that they're going to have to find a way to stop paying out so much money and to loosen the shackles on the productive classes, not with the intention of setting anyone free, but merely with the intention of restoring their finances to some.
So my advice is just try and stay away from the dependent trough as much as you can because that is going to go bye-bye with the rapidity that will be quite surprising to people.
I'm totally in agreement with you there.
You've got this sort of like this separation between – or this wealth and income gap has just become so great between who the wealthiest people are and who the impoverished are.
I think something – I think the top 10 percent have 85 percent of the wealth, even the Pareto pencil.
Yeah, the bottom half have like 0.3 percent of the wealth.
And what nobody is talking about, Steve, is the fact that this is after – Almost a generation and a half of an attempt to equalize society, right?
Because the welfare state and public education and Medicare and Medicaid and taxes on the rich and taxes on corporations were all designed to equalize society.
That was the goal of the great society, to take away some of the highs, to bring up some of the lows, and to give people a middle-of-the-road income.
And, of course, As always is the case with violence as a solution, the exact opposite has occurred.
And of course, nobody's talking about that.
They're saying like, well, it's some mysterious function of capitalism, man, that we've got all of these highs and lows and the middle class has been gutted.
But the whole point of the welfare states, the whole point of government income redistribution was to turn everybody into the middle class.
I mean, that was the whole point, right?
To give free education to the young, to give income support to the young, to give training – sorry, to the poor – To give training program support to the poor was entirely designed to get everybody into the middle class.
That's the whole point of socialist redistribution.
And what's happened after a generation and a half of that is you have almost no middle class and growing rich and growing poor.
And nobody's talking about that.
That you've had trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars.
You've had people thrown in jail.
You've had massive amounts of violently executed effort designed to take away the highs and take down the highs and bring up the lows in the economy.
And you've ended up with an extremity of highs and lows.
Violence always produces the opposite.
But everyone's blanking out on that and pretending like that didn't occur, like there wasn't a big program to do that.
And now it's just mysteriously the opposite has happened.
And let's blame freedom, right?
I mean, it's crazy, but sort of inevitable.
You know, you weren't the first person to come up with a lot of these philosophies.
Where do you get a lot of your information from?
And what I'm thinking is, you know, Karl Marx, a lot of people say he was like a communist.
And correct me if I'm wrong in any of this because I've only read like a few internet blogs about this.
But he wasn't so much a communist as he was a critic of capitalism and that it would end in this type of state that we have now.
So where do you get your information from and who you're reading, that sort of thing?
Well, I'll pump a few sites that I like.
I think Mises.org is very good.
I think that the Independent Institute...
It's very good.
I still dip into lourockwell.com, which I think is some very good stuff.
A little more on the religious side to my taste, but, you know, it's good for your little bit of ANCAP blow for the nostrils.
And so I would get some of that sort of stuff.
I like going to conferences.
I'm fortunate enough to be invited to attend, so I get to see some other great speeches.
I, of course, get a lot of information sent to me by interested and alert listeners.
And this is where I get a lot of the interviews that I do from and so on.
So, of course, I think my site is very good.
I have now, I think, 150 true news episodes, which is, you know, the philosophy of the current news.
So I hope people will go and check those out.
They're on youtube.com forward slash free domain radio is the place that you can sign up for those.
And so I think that the information is great.
I just wanted to just correct to be annoying and pedantic as usual.
Well, first of all, Marx and Engels.
I mean, it's tragic and funny at the same time that two young men who'd never held a job in their life and who came from pretty privileged backgrounds but never worked a day in their life sit down and talk about exactly what the working class is all about.
I mean, that is comedy.
I mean, that would be a Monty Python sketch if it didn't have such a destructive outcome.
First of all, they said that the free market was going to self-destruct.
And that is not a prediction that applies to today.
And it is also very instructive that the majority of the platforms of the Communist Manifesto have been adopted by Western nations, right?
So we led this huge fight against fascism and socialism and national socialism and communism, the Cold War, right?
We can't let the Russians win.
Well, they didn't win, but the communists certainly did, because the majority of what goes on in the US is a form of Of state capitalism.
For instance, China, you know, this communist dictatorship, China owns far less, manages far less of the British economy, sorry, of the Chinese economy, than England does, the English government does of the British economy.
It's like less than half, right?
So, I mean, in a very fundamental way, England and America and Canada are much more communist than China.
This is not what Engels and Marx predicted.
They predicted that the unfettered free market would self-destruct, and that has not been the case at all.
What has happened is, as communism has been implemented piece by piece, they called it creeping socialism, and this is exactly what it is, although it is in fact communism.
Socialism is considered to be the cute teddy bear cousin of communism, but it's not.
It's just a smaller dose of a larger poison.
And so it is the It's a communization or socialization or basically violent enforced monopolies of state control of the economy that is causing the destruction of the economies because violence destroys things.
I mean, this is not hard to understand in war and it's not that hard to understand in economics either.
Violence and destruction does not breed wealth.
You know, I've always sort of thought...
I'm not recommending this to people, but I've always sort of thought it'd be kind of funny.
You get some economics professor who says that...
War is good for the economy because, you know, things have to be replaced.
You know, just go and key that guy's car, you know, and if he catches you and says, well, what the hell are you doing?
He says, you say, hey, I'm giving you a raise.
I'm creating, I'm stimulating the economy.
Yeah, listen, you know, if blowing things up is good for the economy, sure, a little scratch alongside your car is very good for the economy.
I'm just, you know, putting your theories into practice.
It's good for the paint shop. It's good for the painters.
It's good for the guys who made all the little components that make up the paint machine.
Think of all that stimulus.
Right. And then they have then, you know, if we keep keying your car every week, they'll end up with the money to send their kids to college and you'll get a raise because you're a college professor.
So, you know, good.
You know, I'm listening and I'm implementing.
Yeah. Very good.
Well, I think we've run out of time here, but I want to give you one last plug here.
What I want to do is talk about the donation model of your website because I think it's so important.
We talked about it a little bit earlier.
Where do you spend your capital?
Where do you spend your time and your money on what you think is important?
I've made it very clear to my audience that the way that we're going to keep Podcasts like yours, television video series like yours, like all the other guests that I have on this show, the only way to keep them moving forward is to allow them the time to concentrate their efforts on those sort of things.
So just talk about that for a little bit.
Well, sure. I mean, this isn't a hideout place for me.
I mean, I used to be a software entrepreneur.
I was an executive. I made some Pretty good coin in the entrepreneurial market.
I sold a company and then invested in a new company and all that.
Well, you might be unique, but a lot of the folks that we have on this show are not.
I'm some sort of business genius, which I'm certainly not.
But what I'm trying to say is that this isn't because I couldn't make it in the real world.
I became a podcaster.
I wanted to point that out.
I took a huge, huge pay cut to do this.
Again, that doesn't make me heroic because...
Or any better than anyone else because I genuinely love doing this.
So it's not a sacrifice on my part.
But it does mean that I am like Blanche DuBois dependent upon the kindness of strangers.
My sort of basic pitch is that for any organization or any ideology or philosophy or belief system to gain traction and spread in the world, people have to invest in it.
Everybody understands that.
I mean Mormons take 10% of your income.
Can you imagine if we said to our listeners, I'm going to have to take 10% of your income?
I mean people would go insane.
To join a synagogue, you have to pay them thousands of dollars a year.
To go to church, you have to pay them thousands or hundreds of dollars a year.
For anything to work in this world, resources need to be invested, right?
Ron Paul got like $20-30 million.
The 700 Club was so named because 700 people signed up in 1962 for $10 a month, which would be like $100 a month now, which is like $70,000 a month.
A year, right? Sorry, a month.
I mean, imagine what you could do with $70,000 a month in today's money.
I mean, that would be amazing.
And so it is to some degree, and I say this from my business experience, it is just to some degree a numbers game.
And obviously the government has control of the kids for 12 years, you know, six, seven, eight hours a day if you include homework.
We don't have that, right?
Churches have control of the kids through Sunday school and through various other forms of indoctrination.
We don't have that. Other kinds of movements get massive amounts of money from the government.
We don't have that. We can't, I think, in all good conscience, look for grants from the government.
So it really does come down to private donation.
My basic approach, Steve, was just this.
It's like, I don't want to be the richest guy in the graveyard.
I don't even want to be a rich guy in the graveyard.
If I've spent my last dime on my deathbed, I've considered that a life well spent.
Because my daughter isn't going to need any of my money because she's going to be a competent and efficient individual herself.
And so I sort of invite people to recognize that it does require resources.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
You know, I mean, it's a funny thing is that socialists believe there is such a free lunch, but will put millions of dollars into their organizations.
Yeah. And free market people understand that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but find it hard to dig deep and to support whatever it is that they believe is providing the best message, whether it's my show or some other show or some other website or some other institution.
And so yeah, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
You and I can put as much effort as we want into, but we still...
We need to eat. We need to buy equipment.
We need to travel to do lectures or presentations or whatever.
So yeah, I mean, it's just a numbers game.
And if we end up losing significantly in the long run...
For the sake of people saying, well, $10 a month of a subscription was too much for me, well, then clearly philosophy wasn't that important to people and craziness and irrationality and coercion was to others and that's just a numbers game.
So I really do invite people to support whatever show or whatever resource they find to be the most valuable.
It doesn't have to be money. You can send videos around.
You can send podcasts around.
You can engage people. You can start your own stuff.
It doesn't have to be giving people money but if you don't have the time, energy, expertise or desire for any of that stuff, yeah, we need the money.
There's just no two ways about it and it's a choice that everybody has to make for themselves but I really think that people looking back, if things do go to hell in a handbasket, won't look back and say… Well, at least I had that $10 a month or $20 a month in my pocket, which is now worthless.
So, yeah, that's just my annoying pitch to people, and I hope it makes some sense.
Yeah, we look at my father, who's probably of the Woodstock era.
Did you go to Woodstock?
And if you didn't go to Woodstock, then what were you doing?
And our kids can look back on us and say, well, what were you doing in 2011 when all this was going down?
Well, you know, it was... Do nothing.
Or you can be a part of something that's coming up.
Yeah, if you say, well, I knew all about it.
I knew exactly what the problem was.
I knew exactly what the solution was.
And I didn't do anything. That's a tough question to have posed to you, right?
Like, you don't want to be the guy who's the surgeon who drives past a pileup with people who really desperately need your services and say, well, I'm late for a lunch, so I'm just going to keep driving and hope that nobody knows that I'm a surgeon.
Yeah. You know, if you've done this amount of study and you've learned how to stitch people up, then when you come across somebody lying bleeding in the road, I think you damn well have to kneel down and stitch them up.
And I think that if people have spent a huge amount of time and energy and effort, or even a medium amount, learning about freedom and voluntarism and non-violent solutions to social problems, yes, the world desperately needs you, even though it sometimes kicks you in the face for trying to help it, the world desperately needs you.
And you really do have an obligation based upon your accumulated knowledge to help people as much as you can.
Well, I find there's no better way to end a podcast than that.
Leading and stitching people off.
I'm sure we've motivated everyone to put their heads slowly down on their desk.
Well, yes, and thanks, Steve. It was great to chat again, and I appreciate the conversation, and best of luck with your show.
Please make sure you give out your website address as well so that my listeners can drop past and see what you're doing.
Well, I got a volunteer from my audience coming forward and helping me out with my website, and we should have it up sometime this week.
It's going to be www.2beerswithsteve, all spelled out, www.2beerswithsteve.com, and then you can always contact me.
My new email address will be steve at 2beerswithsteve.com.
So this is all new to me, but yeah, I also have another one that you But you have to do it through a Google search because it's got.libs in it and stuff like that.
But you can also find me on iTunes.
And I'd like to say that it's always a pleasure to have you on, Stefan.
Always a pleasure. Thanks, man.
And I'll talk to you soon. Talk to you soon.
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