A wild conversation about current affairs; the Venus Project, turning your children over to the men who start wars, protecting property in a free society - and taking the cancer of the state to that nice Dr. Anarchist!
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| This is Blacklisted News Radio, bringing you the intelligent news information and analysis you need to bringing you the intelligent news information and analysis you need to arm yourself with. | |
| Now, here's your host, Doug Owen. | |
| Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. | |
| This is Blacklisted News Radio. | |
| It is Wednesday, February 9, 2011, and tonight our guest is a rigorous philosopher, prolific author, and host of Free Domain Radio. | |
| He studied literature, history, economics, and philosophy at York University, holds an undergraduate degree in history from McGill University, and earned a graduate degree from the University of Toronto University. | |
| He's written many, many books that you can find at his website, free of charge, at freedomainradio.com. | |
| Everyday Anarchy, Practical Anarchy, How Not to Achieve Freedom, and of course, How to Achieve Freedom. | |
| He is none other, and welcome to the show, Stefan Molyneux. | |
| Thank you, Doug. It's great to be here. | |
| I appreciate the invite. Absolutely. | |
| Well, I wanted to get you onto the program because, actually, I'm pretty familiar with the Free State Project, a lot of the things that are going on in New Hampshire. | |
| I'm a big fan of talk radio, so I listen to Free Talk Live, a lot of those guys. | |
| And, of course, the event that you recently spoke at, Libertopia, drew my attention to your work, and I have been... | |
| Going through a lot of your interviews, specifically the ones with Peter Joseph talking about the Venus Project, considering the global economic calamity that we are headed towards, many people are looking for solutions to these economic woes. | |
| And I think that when we look back historically, all the way back to tally sticks, one of the things that has plagued mankind is an honest economy. | |
| I mean, throughout the ages, wars have been conducted because of money and the banking systems have You know, just failed over and over again. | |
| We've seen it right here in the United States with our central banks, the War of 1812, on and on and on. | |
| And so, of course, the Venus Project is very alluring to a lot of the people that are in the Ron Paul movement, the conspiracy movement, all of these nonconformists, people that do see that there's a huge problem, but there's a lot of traps. | |
| So anyway... I wanted to get into some of the topics and some of the solutions that you see in anarchy and just get your take on really where we're at today considering the Middle East, this global awakening, or maybe just more of the same in your opinion or in your research and kind of see where we can go with this idea of anarchy. | |
| Well, I really appreciate that opportunity and, you know, anarchy is one of these really difficult words because when you use the word anarchy, what happens in people's minds is it gets sent out psychologically to some distant place where usually guys, you know, idiot, young, rich, white kids in balaclavas are throwing trash cans through windows and so on. | |
| But... I sort of invite people to look at anarchy not as chaos, because I think anybody who looks at the current system would say that statism is chaos, totalitarianism is chaos, and unfortunately our increasingly fascistic democracy is chaos. | |
| But anarchy, if you want to see the way anarchy works from just about everybody who's not an outright criminal, or in politics, but, I repeat myself... | |
| Just look in the mirror because anarchy really is how you live. | |
| It is a way of dealing with people without subjecting yourself to a centralized authority. | |
| So when people go out in the dating scene and they want to, you know, go find somebody to date or mate with, they go to a bar, they go to an online dating service, they go play racquetball, they stand outside, you know, with a cardboard sign saying, we'll neck for food. | |
| There's lots of things that people can do, but they don't go to the government and apply for a dating permit and get assigned a dating partner. | |
| When you go to get your education, you can choose from any number of schools, any number of schools. | |
| The government doesn't tell you, here's how you have to do it. | |
| When you look to get a job, you just send your resume out and the government doesn't assign you a job. | |
| So this voluntary free transaction is stuff that we all magically treasure in our own personal lives. | |
| But somehow when we come to this idea of society as a whole, up becomes down, black becomes white, anti-gravity kicks in, and we suddenly think that everything has to be completely opposite. | |
| So where you and I and most people in the world would vigorously fight a central governmental control of anything to do with our personal lives, where we live, who we work, who we marry. | |
| We have to take a quick break. | |
| More in moments with Stefan Molyneux on Blacklisted News Radio. | |
| Stay tuned. And welcome back. | |
| This is Blacklisted News Radio. | |
| I'm your host, Doug Owen, and tonight joining us on the program is Stephan Molyneux. | |
| He is a philosopher. | |
| He's a prolific book writer, and you can find everything that you need to know about him, his podcast, and all the information that he brings to the table at freedomainradio.com. | |
| Stephan, before the break rudely interrupted you, you were getting into the idea that, for the most part, people... | |
| In everyday life, we make many decisions for ourselves. | |
| We treasure a lack of central authority in our personal lives. | |
| When it comes to who you date, where you work, what career you choose, what education you pursue, what your hobbies are, we would incredibly resist the imposition of a forcible central authority in our lives. | |
| And yet, somehow when it comes to social organization as a whole, we throw that out the window and we go back to the Stone Age and say, we need to give a small group of guys all the guns in the world to make it work. | |
| And we'd never imagine doing that in any other sphere of our lives. | |
| So all really the anarchists are saying, at least I would assume the philosophical anarchists are saying, Is that the most successful areas in a reliance tend to be that which does not conform to a central, oligarchical, hierarchical, brutal, violent, throw them in jail if they disobey kind of authority. | |
| Let's just try expanding that a little. | |
| Just pushing further and further that principle that works so well in our personal lives. | |
| Let's not pretend that there's some weird difference between society as a whole and what works for us individually. | |
| And just try expanding the non-aggression principle. | |
| The non-initiation of force further and further out and just see if there's any place where it rationally should stop. | |
| And I think I'd argue that there is no place where it rationally should stop and I certainly haven't been able to find one in my own life. | |
| So I just, you know, instead of thinking about anarchy like some removed, abstract, vaguely 19th century, unshaven, bad-smelling concept, just think of it as like how you live and what you like to do and how you like not to be ordered around. | |
| So this is basically your idea for a solution to some of the dogmas and the problems that we have obtaining freedom is the fact that most of us can't define where our decisions as far as personal decisions in our own lives should start and end and where the government's authority over us begins. | |
| Because many people out there that would argue against anarchy would, of course – and, of course, there's so many negative connotations that are associated with anarchy itself, just the word. | |
| People think violent kids in the streets setting buildings on fire. | |
| I mean, and that's conditioning. | |
| I mean, that's why it's bred into us. | |
| But when we look at a lot of the things in civilized society or allegedly civilized society, many people would attribute these roadways and the school systems and all of these things that they don't personally want to take care of to another authority. | |
| And so even in tribes, you kind of see a government, a type of government, maybe more... | |
| Conducive to what we would like to see form. | |
| So, you know, let's look at the current system that we have today, especially monetarily, because that's where I think the root of most of the problems really drives from. | |
| And of course, it's in such a relationship with government. | |
| I mean, when we talk about, you know, government and the economy, it's almost one of the same. | |
| What are some of these dogmas and mental blocks you think people have towards anarchy and really obtaining freedom? | |
| Yeah, look, I mean, you bring up two excellent points. | |
| One is dogmas, the other is money. | |
| There are two things that once the government sinks its bloody vampiric fangs into, you're either going to ride straight off the Thelma and Louise cliff into fascism or you're going to ride some helium balloon up to a free society. | |
| Those two things are education and currency. | |
| Once the state gets control of children, and given the very short amount of maternity leave that most people are able to afford these days, the government sinks its teeth into children when they're still infants and then grabs them and subjects them to 15,000 hours of indoctrination and boredom and often medication in the public school system. | |
| And that's sort of one catastrophe. | |
| And then, when people get to be adults, what happens is they enter into this monetary system, and the monetary system itself is controlled by the government. | |
| The monetary system should be entirely private. | |
| People should be able to use whatever they want for money. | |
| Money should be run by private companies so that they can provide exactly what people want from currency, which is portability and non-theftability, non-counterfeitability, not selling off grandkids into debt to foreigners. | |
| And so, if you can focus, I think people should focus in freedom on getting the government out of educating the children or at least trying to counter-effect the effects of that kind of indoctrination. | |
| And secondly, educating people to the absolute totalitarian catastrophe that a currency system has devolved into, where you have a bunch of Kleptomaniac lunatics in Washington and Cairo and Ottawa and London, all over the world. A bunch of kleptocrats who can type whatever they want into their own bank accounts and sell us all like livestock down to the 12th generation to whoever the hell they want. | |
| It is a complete catastrophe. | |
| You have to keep government out of currency. | |
| You have to keep government out of education because if you get rid of those two things, there's no government left at all. | |
| Well, you know, and some of the other problems that come up with this idea in the minds of a lot of people. | |
| What about the environment? | |
| Greedy, evil people like Doug Owen and Stephen Molyneux want to go out there and exploit the coal and the resources and the fish. | |
| We want to kill the world for profits. | |
| You know, that's what they see. | |
| And those are some of those mental blocks that I frequently come upon when I'm talking to people out there about a more free society. | |
| And I'm not even... I'm totally on board with anarchy because, quite frankly, some of the people that I see day to day kind of scare me. | |
| I don't think they could accept these ideas because of the indoctrination, unfortunately. | |
| But this is the astounding thing, Doug, which is that the very same people Sure. | |
| Sure. So I always ask them, look, if it's in such a terrible state, why don't you re-examine who you've put in charge of it? | |
| I mean, if you give someone the money to keep your car protected and then you come back and it's on fire and the wheels are all gone, it's up on blocks, Then maybe you should look at who's in charge of it. | |
| So the first thing I would say is either the environment isn't a problem, in which case we don't actually need the government to deal with it, or the environment is a problem. | |
| If the environment is a problem, let's re-examine who's been in charge of it. | |
| There's no magic that happens to people's brains or souls when they pass through that weird portal into the antimatter world of government power. | |
| Nothing changes. If people care about the environment, and I do, and you do, and anybody with kids does, we all care about the environment. | |
| If we care about the environment in a free society, then we will make sure that we take out insurance to make sure our air is clean and that companies get punished either through sanctions or through social ostracism or economic ostracism for muddying up the environment. | |
| But... There's nothing weird that happens. | |
| People think when you give people government power, you vote them into power, they become these noble heroes who just spend all day spit-shining their halos and turning their dross into gold. | |
| They're just people like you and I. And the worst thing that you can do with people in power is to imagine that they're going to do all this virtuous stuff that can't be achieved by society as a whole. | |
| That's nonsense. And the second thing you need to do, and this is counterintuitive to a lot of people... | |
| Is you need to privatize as much as humanly possible. | |
| I'm going to give you a very brief example. | |
| It won't take me more than 30 seconds. | |
| We don't have it. We have to take a quick break. | |
| Oh, it's a good thing you forced me there. | |
| I'll come back with the fabulous card story in a second. | |
| Then we'll get into the Venus Project, some of these other solutions, and much more. | |
| This is Blacklisted News Radio. | |
| Our guest, Stephen Molyneux. | |
| Stick around. This is Blacklisted News Radio. | |
| Stefan, in the final segment here, we've got about 40 minutes to go. | |
| You want to take some phone calls? I would absolutely love to chat with your listeners, sir. | |
| It's a great pleasure. Alright, awesome. | |
| 1-866-841-1065. | |
| And of course, you can find everything at blacklistedradio.com. | |
| That is the website dedicated to the show. | |
| You can find the podcast, the archives, the interactive chat room, and much more there. | |
| Of course, our great sponsors that help fund this project. | |
| We're talking with Stefan Molyneux today, and we are talking about anarchy. | |
| We're talking about some of the, I guess, societal problems that really condition these dogmas, these doctrines, into our minds and why it's so hard to... | |
| For lack of a better term, come back to common sense. | |
| You had three points you wanted to bring up before the break. | |
| Oh, I just wanted to mention, so like 400 years ago, Jacques Cartier, not the man who invented the watch, but some other dude, he came to Canada and he said you could almost walk from the boat to the shore off Newfoundland. | |
| There were so many fish, right? | |
| It was just one of the most amazing natural harvesting grounds for fish the world has ever seen. | |
| Cod, so thick you can barely see water. | |
| And this worked for about 400 years until the government got heavily involved in managing quotas. | |
| So what happened was the government wanted to buy boats from the fishermen and so the government offered to raise their quotas. | |
| And a few years ago, the stock of cod, which had lasted perfectly well under mostly private management for 400 years, 400 years, has been completely gone. | |
| And there's not even enough left for it to replenish over time. | |
| It's gone, gone, gone. | |
| And it didn't take more than a decade and a half of government involvement. | |
| Look at the rainforest. The rainforest is being stripped because the government is selling off the timber rights with no need to replant. | |
| The government doesn't sell lands around the world to timber companies. | |
| It sells just the right to harvest timber. | |
| Well, how ridiculous is that? | |
| Because if you have a private market In land for timber companies, then the timber companies who are able to make the greatest use of the resource will be able to bid the most for that. | |
| And what that means is the companies that replant and renew and sustain the use of the timber lands will be the ones who bid the most for it. | |
| So you're guaranteed in a free market to have the wisest and most renewable use of resources. | |
| It's when the government comes in and starts buying votes with its short-sighted, nonsensical Well, it's nonsensical in terms of sustainability, though it's very smart politically. | |
| Just giving the greatest advantage to the most people who can offer it votes. | |
| And that's what they do. | |
| And anybody who thinks it's going to be any different in a democracy simply hasn't studied the nature and history of democracy in any way, shape, or form. | |
| Yeah, well, I think one of the big problems that we have is that we've become complacent. | |
| We've really been conditioned to believe that the political leaders of the free world and the third world and really all over the world really have no culpability to the people. | |
| There's no recourse for the evils, the atrocities that they commit. | |
| They are above the law and that it's pretty typical to have liars, cheats, murderers, thieves, you know, running your country. | |
| You know, people... Yeah, I mean, sorry to interrupt, but this is what is so astounding to me, Doug, and you run this over and over, and it's such a cognitive dissonance. | |
| You know, the people who say, well, the government should run the welfare, and the government should protect the environment, and the government should, you know, slowly neck with the dolphins, and the government should caress the extinguishing catfish or whatever. | |
| The reality is, it's like, you get that this is the same institution that starts wars, right? | |
| You get that this is the same institution that has run up trillions of dollars in debt that it can't possibly pay off And shafted the next generation. | |
| This is the same institution that sanctions the use of torture. | |
| This is the same institution, particularly in America, that has millions of non-violent offenders, quote offenders, for imaginary crimes like drug use, in jail, incarcerated. | |
| Screwed for life. It's the same dudes you're going to. | |
| There's not like evil dudes on one side of the government and good dudes on the other. | |
| And you just have to get the good dudes to beat up on the evil dudes and take it over. | |
| It's the same institution. | |
| And it's the same institution that counterfeits. | |
| And destroys the poor. | |
| It's the same institution that runs the public school. | |
| It's the same institution that has built a welfare system that has trapped two generations of people in a permanent, undereducated, brain-dead underclass that they have almost no hope of getting out of. | |
| These are the people you want to save the planet? | |
| I mean, it's crazy! | |
| Stephan, everybody gets a trophy. | |
| Nobody's a loser in this society now. | |
| It's kinder and gentler. And I think that that really does transcend to politics, quite frankly. | |
| People are like, well, you know, he's trying his best. | |
| He might have messed up and illegally invaded two countries and killed a million Iraqis. | |
| But, you know, it's just George. | |
| He's just an idiot. It's just basic propaganda that really keeps us abused. | |
| You wouldn't even let these people babysit your children. | |
| Right. You know, would you let a guy who strangled a homeless guy come and babysit your kids? | |
| Well, why are you handing over your children for 12 years to George Bush or Barack Obama, these people who are sanctioning torture, who are extending wiretapping and intrusion into people's lives, who are running up catastrophic deaths? | |
| I mean, they're thieves, they're killers, they're psychopaths, and yet it's like, here, here are my kids for 12 years because you guys are just great. | |
| Yeah, well, it makes no sense whatsoever, and it's really hard to justify. | |
| I mean, there's no way that somebody like myself, or maybe even yourself, can really reason with that. | |
| I try all the time, and I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall sometimes, but I think a lot of people are getting it. | |
| When we look at the statistical polls, we see that people are really fed up with the system, and they realize that, hey, the A team and the B team are both corrupt. | |
| And so there's new teams, like the Tea Party team here in the United States, that are coming about. | |
| And there's a lot of other people that are looking at these issues and trying to figure out solutions. | |
| And so there's a lot of things that are being purported as the possible solution, one of which is the Venus Project. | |
| So let's talk about the Venus Project and maybe the pros and cons of such a system. | |
| Well, I mean, the pros are the criticisms that Jacques Fresco and Peter Joseph and the people involved in this system. | |
| The criticisms that they level in the existing system are, to me, most often very accurate. | |
| When they're talking about the financial system, when they're talking about the concept of government fiat money as debt, you know, in my opinion, I think they're bang on and more power to them. | |
| I wish I could string, you know, I think that stuff is fantastic. | |
| The solutions that are proposed are ludicrous. | |
| The solutions that are proposed are economically insane. | |
| They are a mad throwback to a primitive era. | |
| And four decades after this movement has started, which claims that a supercomputer can run all the world's resources to the benefit of everyone... | |
| I'd love to see an algorithm. | |
| You know, you've had four decades to make speeches and make movies and have websites and sell t-shirts and hats and bumper stickers, all the while complaining about conspicuous consumption, of course. | |
| So, if you've got the supercomputer algorithm that can, you know, magically meet the unspoken needs of six billion people around the world, let's see an algorithm. | |
| To me, it's like a business plan that says, we're going to make a lot of money. | |
| So give us everything. It's like, you know, I'd like to see a few more details than that. | |
| So I have problems with the solution. | |
| They say that it's not going to be coercive, but at the same time, they say in order for it to work, everybody has to participate. | |
| There seems to be a bit of uncertainty around those particular issues. | |
| And I'm very concerned that the people who are following the Venus Project, and I just had a two hour debate with them on their radio. | |
| I'm very concerned about the wasted effort and wasted energies that are going in. | |
| In other words, people who might be very helpful in actually building a free society are being dragged sort of slowly backwards in this pit of robot led Marxism that has failed many times in the past will certainly fail again in the future. | |
| And I just think we should come up with something new other than, you know, collective ownership and no private property and no profit. | |
| I mean, and, you know, the workers unite with shiny new bodies of titanium. | |
| And also, I mean, giving the robots power over everything. | |
| I mean, haven't we all seen this science fiction movie before? | |
| I mean, don't we all know where that's going to lead at some point? | |
| If it's intelligent enough to figure out what we want even before we want it, it's sentient. | |
| It might look upon us as very useful livestock for its, I don't know, degrees its innards with. | |
| And if it's not that smart, then it's just going to be a catastrophe anyway. | |
| So that's my two cents on the movement. | |
| Yeah, well, it does seem like a crazy concept. | |
| And of course, who are the programmers of the machine? | |
| What happens when the machine breaks? | |
| What if there is a celestial event or the sun puts off enough gamma rays to blow out electronics or you have an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse? | |
| You don't want all of humanity, all, you know, however many. | |
| If I can go three days without my notebook crashing, then maybe I can start to think about a supercomputer running. | |
| All right, guys, quick break. | |
| This is Blacklisted News Radio. | |
| I'm your host, Doug Owen, and while the birds have been freed from their cages, we do have the internet. | |
| We have, well, discussion, conversation, and we're talking with Stephen Molyneux here on the program tonight. | |
| We're talking about the Venus Project, and well, you know, on its face, somebody like myself who just has a little bit of common sense and can see... | |
| This system really erecting and really looking at what it would be. | |
| According to the Venus Project, it scares the hell out of me. | |
| I mean, it's everything that you could think of in some sci-fi evil movie from the 60s coming to fruition. | |
| You know, a supercomputer allocating resources and property or, you know, where you live. | |
| Trying to figure that all out and just knowing what's best for you, this benevolent, omnipresent, omnipotent thing that would control the world. | |
| And on its face, it sounds like decent. | |
| But the big problem, and I have the same problem I think you do, is that these types of movements, no matter how absurd they may sound on their face, they keep people in a rest of development. | |
| And you have a lot of people that spend time trying to figure out if they want to get on board with said projects. | |
| So before you know it, it really just becomes this huge waste of time. | |
| And at the end of the day, it's centralized government. | |
| I mean, haven't we learned anything in the 20th century about centralized government? | |
| Has anybody died? | |
| Enough people died, yeah. | |
| Well, look, I'll tell you the issue I have with, and this is not specific to the Venus Project, but this is socialists in general. | |
| Socialists and Marxists, the issue that I have is, look, there's a lot of impressionable young people out there who've not been taught anything about economics or critical thinking or philosophy and so on. | |
| And I think the first thing that responsible thinkers in the world should do is not give people solutions. | |
| The important thing, if you're a thinker and you want the world to improve, is to teach people how to think. | |
| not give them neatly wrapped up in a bow of solutions because that bypasses them actually having to think critically and learning how to think and coming up with their own solutions. | |
| So my concern is that you've got a whole bunch of socialists, and the Venus Project is in there, who go to impressionable young people who don't know how to think critically, who have never studied economics, who've never studied philosophy, and they say to them, you know, if you go and get a job, you're being exploited. | |
| You know, the profit system is ripping you off. | |
| The accumulation of any kind of wealth is parasitical, and if you buy a car, you might as well be driving it over the toes of Romanian orphans or whatever. | |
| And they basically fill people who are young and impressionable and potentially just about to start out on their careers with a fear and hatred of even the vestiges of the free market system that we have. | |
| I think that is pretty destructive. | |
| I think it's very destructive. | |
| I think that a lot of people who could have successful careers, who could achieve some sort of wealth and independence and And get all of the goodies that come from that in terms of your ability to make a positive difference in the world, to be benevolent, to be philanthropic and so on. | |
| A lot of people who are stuck in crappy jobs aren't being encouraged to work within the remains of the free market system, to build up resources, to build up professionalism, to build up contacts, to build up skills in communication, in writing, which you can all do in the business world. | |
| Instead, what they're being told is that the entire system is out to screw them. | |
| That there's no hope, that participation in the system is to participate in corruption, and I think that's kind of preying on the futures of young people. | |
| Rather than just teaching them how to think, rather than teaching them how to reason, rather than teaching them how to question, it just gives them a whole bunch of resentful and hopeless answers, which I think cripples a lot of their potential, and I think there's a lot to answer from people who put these kinds of centrally planned solutions out there and Raise and stoke people's resentments about the remaining freedoms that we have. | |
| I think they have some stuff to answer for because I think it cripples a lot of people who otherwise might, with some encouragement, launch themselves into some significant success at every level. | |
| Sure, you know, and I talk about the conspiracy movement a lot here because, you know, I'm I'm definitely a conspiracy theorist to the T. I'm the ultimate skeptic. | |
| I don't believe the lies that the government tells me. | |
| And by proxy, you're a conspiracy theorist, even if it's something you read in the London Guardian. | |
| It really doesn't matter. | |
| But one of my big contentions is that people feel really, I guess, paralyzed by some of the information, looking at some of the things that government is doing. | |
| And that, in turn, puts them into an arrested development state. | |
| So looking back to the 1980s, people that were worried about the United Nations dropping troops in this country, rather than trying to accumulate wealth, do things in their community, going out voting with their dollars, trying to be part of the solution. | |
| They just ran to the hills and have been waiting there ever since with their wind-up radios. | |
| I think the Venus Project does something of the similar like there as far as keeping people on Arrested Development. | |
| There's a lot of these different systems. | |
| In your assessment, how do we achieve freedom? | |
| How do we go forward? | |
| How do we put together a system that most people can get on board with? | |
| Well, it's all about what you can do in your personal life. | |
| To hell with society as a whole. | |
| It doesn't even exist. There's nothing but aggregations of individuals. | |
| If you try to save the world, you end up just wasting your time spinning your wheels in a canyon that nobody can see. | |
| What we need to do, Doug, is we need to passionately communicate about freedom and about peace and about voluntarism in our personal relationships. | |
| It's the evangelical relationship. | |
| Of your arm's length. | |
| That's really what we shouldn't be shouting at masses. | |
| We should be speaking softly and persistently to the individuals in our lives. | |
| I say that as the positive. | |
| What I also say is that if we truly believe in the non-aggression principle... | |
| And there are people in our lives who, even after patience and reason and explanation and curiosity and persistence, who still, after many months, continue to advocate the use of force against you and against me because that's what people are doing when they're talking about the state. | |
| What they're talking about when they talk about the state is they're talking about, if you disagree with me... | |
| About how I think society should be run, I sanction and encourage the use of goons in blue costumes to come kick down your door and drag you off and kidnap you and imprison you. | |
| That's what people who talk about the state are doing. | |
| I don't have people like that in my life. | |
| If they won't give up, They're addiction to violence against me. | |
| Not some impersonal thing like a law somewhere on a book because it's always a gun pointed at someone somewhere. | |
| That's all the state is. | |
| It's someone pulling out a gun, not in self-defense, sticking it in somebody else's face and saying, do it or else. | |
| And so what I say is, look, if we're going to really be true to these ideals of peace and voluntarism, we have to have those tough conversations with the people who remain addicted to the use of violence in our lives and say, look, If you want people to throw me in jail, if you want guns to be pulled and pointed at me just for disagreeing with you about how society should be run, I don't think we can be friends anymore. | |
| I'm very sad about that. | |
| It breaks my heart, but I cannot sanction I have too much pride and too much faith in my ideals to accept that. | |
| That is a very powerful thing to do. | |
| That gets people right up against what they're really talking about when they're talking about governments and laws and incarcerations and taxation and debt. | |
| They're talking about violence. | |
| Unless we make it real for people, they'll never have a chance to get out from under it. | |
| Well, we also have stakeholders, people that are invested in the system, and they stand to benefit from the state. | |
| I mean, unfortunately, here in the United States, you look at the statistics, we have probably 60 to 70 percent of the population that is somehow subsidized by government. | |
| Now, sure, you and I... Yeah, that's why voting's never going to work, and voting's never going to work because there are too many people being bribed. | |
| I mean, you can't beat them. | |
| It didn't work in Rome. It didn't work in the Ottoman Empire. | |
| It didn't work under Bismarck's Germany, you know, once you get enough cattle dependent on the farmer, you can never get rid of the farm, at least through any political measure. | |
| Sure, and the farmer becomes really the father. | |
| It becomes your custodian, your guardian, and that's really what the state is. | |
| Well, sorry, let me just throw another angle in there for you. | |
| In my experience, it is not the farmer who attacks me for talking about freedom. | |
| It's all my fellow livestock who attack me. | |
| Because once you get enough people dependent on the farmer, once you get enough cows who need the farmer to survive, the moment somebody says, maybe we should not have a farmer, they all panic and attack whoever says that, right? | |
| So once you get enough people dependent on the government, anyone who starts talking about real freedom gets set upon like, you know, a minnow in a shark tank. | |
| It's not pretty, but that's the way And then the cattle are basically giving the farmer guns. | |
| Here, shoot these other cattle. | |
| They're starting problems over here. | |
| Yeah, they're threatening my livelihood from your table. | |
| If I've adapted to exist off the crumbs of your table and people say, let's all be free, that threatens my whole existence. | |
| Now, the reality is, of course, if the farmer were gone, we'd have about a week of confusion and then everything would be great. | |
| But people don't want to take that chance. | |
| The state is not the politicians. | |
| The politicians are only in effect. | |
| The politicians of the state and the military and the police and the prison system We're good to go. | |
| Yeah, I couldn't put it better myself. | |
| Alright, we're going to get into voting with your dollar. | |
| The corporations and the utopia that Stephen Molyneux could see in a free society. | |
| On the other side of this quick commercial break, stick around. | |
| This is Blacklisted News Radio. | |
| You like the bumper music there, Stefan? | |
| That's pretty good. That's pretty good. | |
| A little descendants there. Good stuff. | |
| Good stuff. You know, I don't know what it is, but punk rockers can get away with saying it all. | |
| For some reason, it's easily dismissed. | |
| I don't know. Muse, there's a lot of bands out there that have a lot of political and anti-New World Order and free market perspectives and even, dare say, anarchy in their music. | |
| Plenty of it. We play Andy Flagg and They are hardcore. | |
| Anarchist, so they proclaim anyway. | |
| We're talking with Stefan Molyneux here on the program. | |
| 1-866-841-1065 is a toll-free number to join us on air. | |
| If we get some calls, Stefan will hang out with us. | |
| He definitely wants to hear from you guys out there. | |
| Post questions. I mean, anarchy. | |
| We're talking about, you know, some of the things that are pretty taboo, and I know that we could probably get into some really controversial topics here, like the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and how you view those, and that would definitely get Why don't we go there? | |
| Let's pull the curtain back for the listeners there, Stefan. | |
| We're looking at anarchy versus statism versus what we have today, which is kind of an incestuous relationship between the stakeholders, the energy syndicate, the bankster gangsters, the federal government, which gives these systems legitimacy. | |
| And I think that that's really the root of the The issue is that through our status views, we believe that the IRS is legitimate and can take our taxes. | |
| Why? Because the state gives them that authority. | |
| And so it's that relationship that most people have with their country, their patriotism, which really enslaves them. | |
| And I know that's kind of a... | |
| A colorful way to describe it, but I truly believe that. | |
| Let's talk about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, some of the issues that we have here in the United States because people want that back or this perceived notion of what it was in the good old days. | |
| We want the good old days back. | |
| Everybody wants to kind of regress back to this day where people wore wigs and it was a very patriotic time and What's your thoughts on that? | |
| Is the U.S. model, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the laws of the land, is that the right model or is that just another flawed system? | |
| Oh, come on. I mean, I think it's important to look at the empirical facts of US history, not what was written about it by the victors. | |
| And the US history, it began with the genocide and slavery, and it has ended with a collapsing economy and imperialism. | |
| This is not what anybody would consider a successful system. | |
| The only degree to which the US system has been successful is the degree to which it has Cause the government to retreat and let people actually be free. | |
| So I'll give you a very brief, not such a brief metaphor. | |
| Okay, so let's say you're sick, you've got a tumor, right? | |
| And you go to two doctors, and one of them is called Dr. | |
| Minarchist, or Dr. Small Government, or Dr. | |
| Constitutionalist. And one of them is called, and this is a great name for a villain, although he's actually the hero of the story, one of them is called Dr. | |
| Anarchist. So you go to Dr. | |
| Minarchist, and Dr. Minarchist says, okay, look, we're going to have to cut out huge sections of your body. | |
| We're going to have to put you through horrible radiation treatments, and then with any lack, your tumor should go down. | |
| And you'd be like, oh, okay, can't you just cut it out? | |
| No, no, no, no, no. We can't cut out your tumor. | |
| That would just be terrible. That would be anarchy. | |
| We can't cut out your tumor called the state. | |
| We've just got to shrink it. | |
| And it's like, well, what happens after you shrink it? | |
| Well, after you shrink it, it regrows. | |
| And it regrows, and it regrows, and eventually it's going to threaten your life again. | |
| And then we'll bring you in here again, and we'll do this horrible, we'll call it a revolution. | |
| Although it's really just spitting around rather than changing anything, and we're going to give you more chemotherapy, and we're going to give you more drugs, and we're going to cut you open again, and we're going to shrink your tumor down. | |
| And then it's going to grow again, and it's going to grow again. | |
| And then you go over the street, you go to Dr. | |
| Anarchist, and Dr. Anarchist says, oh, you've got a tumor? | |
| Let's take the mother out. | |
| Let's just take it out. And why should we take out your tumor? | |
| Because it's always going to regrow. | |
| So we just take it out. You go back to Dr. | |
| Minerikus, you say, listen, the anarchist guy says he could just take the tumor out. | |
| It's not going to grow back. Dr. | |
| Minerikus says, no, no, no, it's okay. | |
| Well, let's try this. Okay, what we do is we're going to cut you open, put you in chemotherapy. | |
| You're going to get really sick. We're going to cut you open. | |
| But then when we've got you open and we've cut away a whole bunch of the tumor and we've left a certain amount, what we're going to do is we're going to get a little felted marker. | |
| See, and we're going to We're going to write on your tumor, and we're going to write, don't grow back. | |
| And we're going to do it in sort of florid kind of calligraphy so it looks really official. | |
| And we call that a constitution. | |
| And you say, well, how many times has that worked in the past? | |
| Oh, it's never worked. It's never worked. | |
| But we like the lettering. And that's the reality. | |
| The state always grows back. | |
| The logic of state expansion. | |
| The state is free evil for anybody who wants it, because it's evil when you get to externalize the cost of the general population, and they're helpless to resist. | |
| So instead of going back to Dr. | |
| Medochist and getting this tumor reduced with these horrible revolutions every single time, like what we see happening in Egypt at the moment, how about you just take out the tumor? | |
| Take out the tumor! | |
| Because you know it's always going to grow back. | |
| There's no possibility that it ever won't grow back. | |
| And the worst thing is, the smaller the tumor starts out, the bigger it ends up. | |
| Because the smaller the tumor starts out, the more free market productivity you have, the more economic growth you have, the more wealth is generated. | |
| And therefore, the more the government can tax and grow and expand. | |
| So it's no accident that the freest, economically, one of the freest countries in history, which is America in the late 18th and 19th centuries, it's no accident that one of the most economically free countries in the world has now produced the largest, most gargantuan government the world has ever seen. | |
| Because freedom Well, I don't disagree with you. | |
| I think there are fundamental problems in thinking that we are going to have aristocrats that just write laws and For the most part, the government has always been above the law. | |
| It's selective enforcement. | |
| And we see it all the time. | |
| It's saying, okay, well, it's smaller government. | |
| I think people like that idea because they view government as the provider of roads, the provider of the military that keeps us safe because God knows we have messed with enough people around the world. | |
| We have resources here in the United States. | |
| So if we just decided one day, let's just get rid of the government. | |
| Let's get rid of NASA. Let's get rid of... | |
| No, no, no. | |
| I don't think that's true. Look, I have no problem with there being NASA. I have no problem with there being a military. | |
| Let's just not pull out guns and force people to pay for it. | |
| That's all I'm saying. I mean, look, if people think that dweebs playing the big rockets is the coolest thing ever, fantastic! | |
| Write them a check! If you think that, I don't know, I mean, if you think that one company should run all the roads, great, pick a company and write them a big fat check. | |
| If you love the way that the welfare system works at the moment, then let's privatize all of that sort of stuff. | |
| And if you like it, write them a check. | |
| But don't force me to support things that I consider predatory and monstrous and immoral and destructive. | |
| I care about the poor. | |
| I mean, I came from a brutally poor background and I really care about the people who got left behind. | |
| I really care about the people who attracted the state welfare system. | |
| So don't force me to support that which I think is destroying the poor. | |
| I really care about the tender and eager minds of children. | |
| Don't force me to pay for a system That puts them into a fine spaghetti paste through a horrible strainer called indoctrination. | |
| I care about the environment, so don't force me to subsidize a government that destroys every piece of environment. | |
| Do you ever want to find the greatest pollution in the world? | |
| Look at government lands. Look at what the army leaves behind. | |
| Look at government production facilities. | |
| Look at the Soviet Union. | |
| I just don't want to be forced to support things that I consider immoral. | |
| I grant that right to everybody else. | |
| I demand that right for myself. | |
| Sure, and I think, fundamentally, to a certain degree, I mean, we have lots of people that think, hey, I shouldn't have to pay school taxes because, guess what, I don't have children. | |
| And I can get on board with that. | |
| I think that most people would argue – well, I – No, you should not have to pay school taxes because the initiation of force is immoral. | |
| So people should not come after you with guns to force you to pay whether you have kids or not. | |
| It doesn't matter whether you have kids or not. | |
| It's just the initiation of force. | |
| Well, I think the argument most skeptics would have, Stefan, is the fact that rather than the individuals, right? | |
| And this is really the root of it, I believe. | |
| It's about the collective. | |
| It's about the state. | |
| It's about the community. | |
| The new thing now is communitarianism. | |
| You know, it's about the state being bigger than the individual. | |
| So, you know, most people would say, well, you know, we need roads. | |
| Okay, and we have a quick break, and I'll let you answer on the other side. | |
| You know, we need roads. | |
| Not everybody would volunteer to pay for those roads, and they would want to use them as well because we have an entitlement society. | |
| So how do you fix dilemmas like that when we talk about anarchy? | |
| We'll get Stephan's comments and yours. | |
| Rolling into Hour 2, 1-866-841-1065. | |
| Locked and loaded for hour two. | |
| It is Wednesday, the ninth day of February 2011. | |
| Stefan Molyneux is our guest. | |
| We're talking about anarchy. I cannot believe that there aren't more people on the call board tonight. | |
| Calling me out for being a total unpatriotic person for bringing somebody like you, a social deviant, Stefan Molyneux, onto the program here to talk about some taboo topics. | |
| We got Rob in Canada. We got Rob in New York, Borden, Canada. | |
| You can be part of it as well. | |
| 1-866-841-1065. | |
| Toll free number 1-866-841-1065. | |
| Let's go to the phone lines here. | |
| Rob in New York, you're live. | |
| Hey, how you doing, Doug? | |
| Good, sir. What's on your mind? | |
| Nothing. I was just hoping I could have a quick dialogue with your pal Stefan. | |
| Stefan, it's a pleasure to make your acquaintance. | |
| Very nice to meet you too. What can I do for you? | |
| Well, I was just listening to a lot of the stuff that you had to say. | |
| I do have to admit that you're incredibly correct about the term anarchy having a negative incantation to it as opposed to the philosophy that you're presenting. | |
| Unfortunately, I'm painfully unfamiliar with your work, but there were a couple of things that you were mentioning that I can agree with. | |
| What I wanted to ask is, you know, in order to get your message or your philosophy out there to a wider audience, why not change the negative incantation? | |
| Why not change the word from anarchy to something that would be more kindred and thus making people more receptive To be able to accept the ideas, kind of bringing down the mind's firewall. | |
| Because, I mean, it could have any type of an incantation as, like, how people would think of, like, ooh, Satanism and Anton LaVey. | |
| Now, if you've ever had any experience with Anton LaVey, I, you know, I haven't had any person, but a couple of his things here and there, and he just basically talks about, you know, just being a nonconformist, very similar to anarchy. | |
| The problem is that there was just such a strong negative incantation with the word that a lot of people, myself included, initially rejected almost automatically the work that he presented based on that. | |
| So I was wondering about your thoughts on that, if you had any. | |
| No, listen, I mean, it's a discussion that's come up many times over the years, and I think you raise a brilliant point. | |
| And I'll tell you what my thought is. | |
| I certainly try not to describe myself as an anarchist, because that is to categorize myself. | |
| I think that's not a reasonable thing to do. | |
| Like, a good physicist doesn't say, I'm an Einsteinian or a Newtonian. | |
| He just says, I'm a physicist and I accept that Einsteinianism is valid and Newtonianism is valid in limited circumstances. | |
| So, I mean, I categorize myself as a philosopher because I reason from first principles using as much evidence and rationality as I can get my hands on. | |
| And I accept that anarchism or the non-initiation of force at a social level, all anarchism is to say that what's wrong for you and I is wrong for everyone. | |
| That's all anarchism says. | |
| If it's wrong for you to steal, and it's wrong for me to steal, which I certainly accept and believe that it is, Then it's wrong for people to steal. | |
| And if you relabel something like theft and call it taxation, that doesn't make it any more valid. | |
| If you relabel something called murder and you call it war, that doesn't make it any more valid. | |
| So that's all that anarchism is. | |
| Now I recognize that it's got all these negative connotations. | |
| The reason that I continue to use the word is that other words have been proposed like voluntarism and stuff like that. | |
| The first thing that happens is people will say, well, how is that different from anarchism? | |
| And then you kind of have to say, well, it's not. | |
| I'm just being manipulated. I just want to be upfront and say, look, I recognize the word has negative connotations, but there's just no better way to describe it, and I'm not going to pretend it is something else. | |
| I like that, Stefan. | |
| Non-coercive government action, anarchy, voluntarism. | |
| There's a lot of terms. It's the idea of the government not aggressing or forcing you to do something that you don't want to. | |
| You being the individual, not having to be extracted for every dime to pay for things that you don't want. | |
| It's a crazy concept, and many people think it's unpatriotic. | |
| And it's not that I don't love this country. | |
| I do. | |
| But I do not believe that the United States of America is a boundary that was written up by a bunch of rich guys and a bunch of laws that they don't pay attention to anyway. | |
| I believe it's the people of this region, of this continent, of this area. | |
| And, yeah, I know some of the problems that people see when you start going down, I guess, the path towards anarchy. | |
| And that is the exploitation of evil corporations that have become just monolithic and mega-powered. | |
| They're bigger than governments themselves. | |
| And how we really cut them loose and let them die as they should. | |
| Because we do have government regulations. | |
| Yeah, no, that's right. No, I mean, I'll give you a very brief example of that. | |
| The pharmaceutical lobby in the United States spent, I don't know, a couple of tens of millions of dollars influencing legislation recently that got them many billions of dollars in government contracts. | |
| Now, whether you like it or not, the logic of the free market, when united with predatory state fascistic corporatism, Is that any CEO who did not invest a few tens of million dollars to reap many billions of dollars of return would simply be fired. | |
| I mean, because this is where the money is. | |
| The government is a giant money hose, and businesses like to make money. | |
| Now, if you get rid of the government as the giant money hose, then business will stop being money hose in a slightly different sense, right? | |
| Think about it. I mean, common sense says, okay, well, if the government isn't telling you every day that you need a vaccine, okay, that you need whatever it is that Pfizer is providing... | |
| We're driving 10 million U.S. kids every day on these ridiculous psychotropic meds. | |
| There's no medical validity whatsoever. | |
| Corporations like Pfizer, I mean, yeah, people do want to get a Woody, and they'd probably do good in that market, but they wouldn't be pumping your kids full of psychotropic drugs. | |
| It's the power of the state that forces and mandates your children to be on them. | |
| Otherwise, you're going to get your door kicked in by the CPS and maybe have your children taken from you. | |
| If the government is the giant source of money, corporations are going to go and do business with the government. | |
| I mean, I was in business as an entrepreneur for 15 years. | |
| We did some contracts with the government because we needed to stay in business. | |
| And if we didn't, our competitors did. | |
| And then they made more money and they were able to do more R&D and they were able to get other benefits. | |
| So in order to be a responsible businessman in this crazy messed up system that we have, you have to do business with the government. | |
| There's just no doubt about it. And if you're a big enough company, then you have to influence the government through bribery, through lobbying, through campaign donations, and so on. | |
| And it's not ideological because most companies give just about equal amounts to both of the parties in the U.S. because they know that these guys hold the power of life and death through regulation and licensing and laws over the success or failures of businesses. | |
| So let's not confuse the mafia with the people who were the mafia's tailors. | |
| And say, aha, the real problem is the tailors who are suiting up the mafia. | |
| No, no, no. The problem is the mafia. | |
| But you get rid of the mafia, and then these guys will just change to doing business to guys who aren't armed, you know? | |
| Well, sure. I mean, Halliburton and all these companies would go out of business if there wasn't people that needed to die and the government couldn't extract money from you or just print their own money out of thin air or just, you know, run insane deficits. | |
| Imagine if each and every person actually got direct taxation from the government for the war on terror. | |
| People would not be that scared of terrorists. | |
| They'd start realizing, hey, I'm less likely to die in a terrorist accident than I am driving around on Highway 35 tonight. | |
| Maybe I should be worried more about that. | |
| So anyway, let's go to Rob. | |
| Sorry, let me just, one more thing, very, very quickly. | |
| People remember, there's a giant statue of evil called the government, and it casts a big, long shadow. | |
| And the shadow is all the effects of all of that violence. | |
| And let's not confuse the shadow and say, well, if we get rid of the statue, the shadow will still be there. | |
| No, no, no, no. If you get rid of the cause of violence, which is all of this government predation, most of the effects of violence will vanish as well. | |
| And let's not confuse the two. But sorry, go ahead. | |
| No, sure. I just want to go back to Rob. | |
| Oh, actually, I think I turned the call for it off. | |
| I muted myself. Guys, call back in 1-866-841-1065 and we'll bring you up on the phone here. | |
| I just accidentally hung up on myself. | |
| Shall I just pretend to be a caller? | |
| Steph, you're so sexy! | |
| Sorry, let me try that again. | |
| Me, me, me, me! Steph, bald is beautiful! | |
| Sorry, I'm still trying to work on that voice, but something like that. | |
| Yeah, well, you know, that might be, you know, very indicative of the people that call into the program for you. | |
| I don't know. Let's go to Bord in Canada. | |
| Bord, you're live. What's going on, Doug? | |
| How you doing? Doing well, sir. | |
| Good, how you doing, man? Yeah, very good show tonight. | |
| I'm glad that you brought this guest on. | |
| I've heard him talk before. | |
| He's got some very interesting points, a lot of stuff I can agree with. | |
| Nice to have you on there, Mr. | |
| Molyneux. Thank you so much. | |
| I've got a question for you. | |
| We've been chatting around in the chatroom, and a lot of people can agree with a lot of points that you're saying, but one point that keeps coming up is, it may be something I missed. | |
| I didn't catch the first half hour of the show. | |
| But a subject that kept getting brought up was the privatization of control. | |
| People agree with your ideas of changing the system and whatnot, but they keep bringing up they don't agree with having a private company or some sort of private control. | |
| Could you expand more on that? | |
| Am I totally off topic here? | |
| No, no, listen, this is probably the number one concern, and I think it's a perfectly sensible, healthy, and rational concern. | |
| It's a great, great point to bring up. | |
| I'm just going to keep describing how good a point it is to bring up, and then hopefully we'll move on to another caller. | |
| No, I'm kidding. I'll do my best to answer it, and again, I'll try and keep it brief. | |
| Look, most people who live in this world, in this decaying orbit of economic destruction that we're currently locked in, most of us are employees. | |
| We're not, you know, maxi entrepreneur capitalist gods with monocles and gold dogs yipping after our heels. | |
| We're employees. And so what happens is, when you're an employee, particularly when you're an employee, In an uncertain economic situation, which has been the U.S. for the last generation and a half, I would say, since the 70s when real wages began to decline, you feel precarious and you feel subjected to the whims and power of your boss. | |
| And so we feel... | |
| Awkward and we feel uncertain and we feel like we can't say no to our bosses because there's 10 other guys who'll take our job and we feel like we're hanging by a thread and it's nerve-wracking and it's scary. | |
| And so what happens is when you hear some lunatic like me come along and say, let's privatize everything, people translate what it's like being a corporate serf In a fascistic state, mercantilist economy, being a corporate serf and say, well, what? Does this lunatic want more of that? | |
| I mean, I'm already scared enough of my boss. | |
| Does he want everyone to be my boss now? | |
| And I think that's completely understandable. | |
| But it's not the way that things will work in a free market. | |
| Well, I think that a lot of people really, quite honestly, maybe bored and some of the people in the chat room, I haven't had a chance to really monitor it during the show, look at the idea of a private police force and say, okay, well, let's say the state of Texas or the area of Texas, whatever it may be. | |
| We contract with Blackwater to provide security because we want our property secure so that way we can freely travel, we can go out and And commerce and vacation and all the things that you would want in a free society. | |
| Well, let's just say that once this corporation, we give them the contract, they become so big that they start going out and beating up the people and taking their money. | |
| We've got a new government now. | |
| We've got a new government that has no culpability or accountability to us whatsoever. | |
| Quick break, guys. We'll get back to you. | |
| You can bring up more comments. | |
| Rob in New York's back and of course Michael. | |
| 1-866-841-1065. | |
| is a toll-free number to get you up and on air. | |
| Final segment with our guest, Stephen Molyneux. | |
| His website, freedomainradio.com. | |
| You can find out everything. | |
| He's got all of his books there for free. | |
| You can also buy print versions. | |
| I think the host of them was $74.95, something like that, for all of them. | |
| Yeah, you can get a package, but people should just read the PDF. | |
| There's very few people who want the hard copies anymore, but if you want them, they're certainly available. | |
| Can I take a swing at this private defense agency question? | |
| Yeah. One of the things I think that most people have contention with when we talk about things like anarchy is the idea of having a police force. | |
| Most of us agree that we need some control. | |
| There has to be some rule of law, that there are evil, bad people out there that do need to be put away. | |
| How do you do that in a volunteeristic system where only people that want to participate pay money? | |
| For things like highways, governmental systems, maybe not, you know, centralized, but a privatized system. | |
| How do those things, you know, how do we have an equitable solution for all? | |
| Well, look, I mean, roads, I mean, yeah, I mean, it's like we can't be free. | |
| We have to live with war and torture because of tarmac, you know. | |
| But roads in the U.S. were private long before the government came along, and they worked a heck of a lot better. | |
| And if you compare the government railroads with the Private railroads, and Tom DeLorenzo has written about this quite a bit. | |
| There's lots more efficiencies than private railroads. | |
| So let's not worry about transportation. | |
| That's not why we can't be free. | |
| I think the question about the police is very good. | |
| So let me put on... | |
| Maybe I should do it in the voice of the guy who just did the commercials. | |
| It'd be a lot scarier. | |
| It would be. But let me pretend, you know, that I am... | |
| Trying to sell my services to you as a police agency, let's say. | |
| And by the way, there's going to be like 50 or 100 companies all trying to provide the safest and cheapest and most efficient and best protection of your property. | |
| And most of that is going to be around prevention. | |
| Rather than cure, right? | |
| So people would rather stuff not get stolen rather than stuff get returned to them possibly. | |
| So what I would do is I'd sort of sit down with you and say, listen, I want to offer you my police protection. | |
| And you'd say, well, how do I know you're not going to take all my money and go and buy $12 million Black helicopters with sharks with laser beams for pilots and then take over my whole family and send me to the salt mines in Kessel. | |
| And I'd say, well, look, I get that question a lot, and here's what we're going to do for you. | |
| First of all, we are going to set aside $10 million in escrow, which means that we can't touch it. | |
| And anybody who finds that we are buying one bullet more than we say or one gun more than we say gets $10 million. | |
| So there's a huge incentive for anybody who finds that we're messing about and trying to build an army together. | |
| And that's the first thing. | |
| And if you don't want to do that, then we're going to set another $10 million aside and we're going to pay a company who's completely independent of us and whose CEO gets the $10 million and they come and audit us every single month and they make sure that we're not accumulating too many weapons and so on, right? | |
| So these are just off the top of my head, but... | |
| The reason I brought up being a corporate serf before is that having been an entrepreneur myself, I was chief technical officer at a software company for a large number of years, when we're going out and try and sell people, we as the entrepreneurs, we have to overcome the skepticism And indifference and inertia of our potential customers. | |
| So we have to go out and make ourselves so attractive and we have to deal with every customer's concerns and we have to reassure them that we're going to do what they want and they're going to be happy with their service. | |
| And by the way, they get a money back guarantee if after the first year they're not happy with how we're protecting their property. | |
| And they can cancel at any time. | |
| And we'll pay them if we make a mistake. | |
| And, you know, whatever we have to do As an entrepreneur to get you to sign up to our protection business, with 50 other guys competing out there to do a better job than us, the first thing we're going to address and the first thing we're going to deal with to the satisfaction of our customers is the question of accumulating weapons and becoming another state. | |
| There's lots and lots of ways to overcome that. | |
| And I would invite people to remember that the companies of the future are not going to be like the state-sucking military-industrial-corporate monsters of the present. | |
| You as an employee will have much more power and authority. | |
| There'll be much more demand for labor because the economy will be free. | |
| And so you won't feel like a trembling indentured servant hanging like a thread over an abyss of economic destruction. | |
| It's not going to be like that in the future. | |
| You'll have much more confidence and everybody who wants to sell you any kind of like national defense or local defense or police or security or health, they're all going to have to work Like crazy to get your business and overcome your objections and if they don't overcome them, there'll be a guy next who's coming in five minutes who will do his best to overcome them and at some point that's going to be satisfying to people. | |
| Sure. Okay, I think that's a great retort. | |
| Let's go to Michael in one of the FEMA regions. | |
| What's up, Michael? Hey guys, how are you doing? | |
| Love your show, Doug. You want to say hi to everybody in the chatroom. | |
| Mr. Mullen, I appreciate your point, and I really appreciate you being honest about the anarchist label and explaining it the way you did. | |
| It gives it a better face, I agree with you on that. | |
| But I wanted to talk to you about your privatization of services. | |
| I don't think that's going to work in the United States, and as a matter of fact, I think it's actually quite the opposite of what could work in the United States, because we'd end up more like Germany post the Weimar Depression, and right at the beginning of Hitler's time, I feel. I think we would have something like, say, maybe the TSA, which It's completely incompetent and aggravates everybody and makes people really mad. | |
| And maybe public sentiment rises up enough, so in comes Blackwater to become professionals and do it. | |
| Wouldn't that be sort of like the SS and the SA in Nazi Germany? | |
| I don't think the private armies really would take off, not under our system. | |
| We're just a little too corporately controlled. | |
| Great points, Michael. | |
| Stephan? Well, I think that you would have a tough time maintaining the argument that Germany in the 1930s suffered from a deficiency of government. | |
| You had massive expansions in power under Hitler. | |
| You had the dissolution of the Reichstag. | |
| You had the extension of emergency powers, the right of arbitrary detention. | |
| You had the setup of concentration camps. | |
| You had the beginning of the harassing of the Jews and the Gypsies and the homosexuals and the intellectuals. | |
| You had A theft of gold from the banks, which I'm not always against if it's by the people as a whole, but this is an example of more and more government. | |
| That wasn't an example of privatization. | |
| In fact, Hitler nationalized vast sections of the industry in order to prepare it for the war footing that he wanted to pursue. | |
| I don't think that's a fair example about what would happen when things get privatized. | |
| I think that's an example of what happens, as always happens, which is that the state continuously grows, which is why we simply can't have it around. | |
| 435 Area Code. | |
| Didn't have a chance to screen the call. | |
| You are live, sir, or ma'am. | |
| Hey, Stefan. I was just wondering, in the midst of all the community that we kind of live in as anarchists and freedom lovers and conspiracy theorists, where do you come down on the conspiracy theorist side? | |
| Zeitgeist has it right when they talk about the fiat currency and things like that, but what about the 9-11 type of stuff? | |
| You know what I mean? Like, the evidence that they present, not just them, but others. | |
| Right. Look, I don't get too much involved in that sort of stuff, and not because I don't think there's value in it, or not because I don't think it's valid. | |
| I mean, it's not fundamentally a philosophical question, but my concern is that I think, like, when I was growing up, it was the JFK assassination, that was the big thing, and my history teacher board and guys who presented it, and we got all hot and bothered. | |
| And what did all of that add up to? | |
| What did the billions of hours that activists spent trying to figure out the JFK murder, what did that solve? | |
| We've had 10 years now of people working themselves into a face-exploding frenzy about 9-11. | |
| What has it gotten us? I would say let's forget about each individual instance of state crimes, of which there are just so many. | |
| It doesn't matter. Let's look at the basic principle of should we allow the initiation of force To be at the center of how we run society. | |
| Do we ever think that human beings will ever be able to exercise that kind of monopoly of financial and military and police power without becoming corrupted by it? | |
| What they do with that power is always going to be immoral in the long run. | |
| So let's throw away each individual instance of it and look at the big picture and the principles behind it. | |
| Stephen Molyneux, thank you so much for joining us tonight. | |
| I definitely want to have you back on the program, but we're out of time. | |
| Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for the listeners. | |
| It was a great show. Thank you. |