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Feb. 28, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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1862 Freedomain Radio on the Vinny Eastwood Show!

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses the Middle East, ancient Ireland, shrinking the state, and the U.S. Constitution.

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	Welcome back ladies and gentlemen to our number two of the Vinnie Eastwood Show with Will on AmericanFreedomRadio.com and incidentally theVinnieEastwoodShow.com proudly brought to you in collaboration with GuerrillaMedia.co.nz New Zealand's unconventional news.
	And we do like to try and, you know, fill up the schedule with amazing guests, some of which you may have never heard from, but I would wager all of which you'd want to hear from.
	Again, on that note, we have a very special guest.
	His name is Stefan Molyneux, is it, bro?
	And Molyneux, that's pretty good, yeah.
	Well, I knew. Okay, and he's coming out from Canada.
	He's the host of Free Domain Radio.
	And just in this short segment here, I'd love to get him to introduce himself to you.
	Stefan, welcome to the program.
	Thanks, Vinny. It's very nice to be.
	I feel like we're drilling through the center of the earth from one colony to another and launching sound packets at each other.
	So I think that's pretty cool.
	I run Free Domain Radio.
	It's the largest and most popular philosophy show We've had about 26, 27 million downloads by now.
	I've been doing it full-time for a couple of years and part-time before that.
	I used to be a software executive.
	Before that, I was an I'm a graduate student studying history, and before that, I did some acting at the National Theatre School of Canada, and before that, we fade into the mists of inconsequential high school experiences, so I won't bore everyone with those.
	And I am a rationalist, I guess you could say.
	I work from first principles, and I'm fascinated by economics, particularly Austrian economics.
	I like to apply philosophical principles to society, to politics, to relationships, to marriages, to parent-child interactions.
	I'm just fascinated the degree to which universality, you know, the wonderful universalization that philosophy is capable of, the degree to which it can be extended, expanded, and injected into just about every form of Of human interaction, both external and also internal with yourself.
	So that's my particular bent, and I absolutely love it.
	Yeah, well, and this is the thing we just had Casper Leach on from Time for Hemp, and it seems to me that it's intelligent, professional people, for some reason, get motivated to stop working in that particular environment and start working on a personal project for the benefit of the rest of the population.
	And there's usually some description of motivating factor behind that.
	For myself, it was being arrested for dealing cannabis, and that really kind of woke me up.
	What happened to you? What happened to me?
	It's just like, what injury did you sustain that turned you into a philosopher?
	Well, that may be actually a pretty good question.
	Well, I mean, I think I came through a pretty traditional route.
	I got turned on to objectivism when I was in my mid-teens and studied that and branched out from there, became a big fan of Aristotle and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and other of the sort of great philosophers and Like most people, you immerse yourself in a study for about 20 years off and on, and then you begin to want to bring some of yourself to it.
	You can play other people's piano music for so long, and after a while you want to start singing or creating tunes yourself, and that was my particular goal, so that's what I've been up to.
	Alright, awesome!
	Stefan Molyneux, host of Free Domain Radio.
	Ladies and gentlemen here on American Freedom Radio on thevinnieeastwoodshow.com.
	We'll be right back.
	We'll be right back.
	And welcome back to the Vinnie Eastwood show.
	Oh, wait, hold on.
	I'm singing.
	And welcome back to the Vinnie Eastwood show on American freedom, radio.com.
	And it's the Vinnie Eastwood show.com.
	It's the Godfather episode with the man himself, Stefan Molyneux, coming as live from Canada.
	Stefan, welcome back.
	Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
	I feel I should kiss a ring or something, but I guess we'll just have to keep moving on.
	You only get one favor!
	Speaking of favors, would you do me a favor and talk about the Middle East situation?
	Because I'm very interested to hear what you have to say and just to preface it.
	In fact, it doesn't even need prefacing.
	If you are listening to this show, you already know that there is copious quantities of crap happening in the Middle East right now.
	Stefan, go for it, my friend.
	Well... I think the first thing to recognize about the Middle East is that these activists have internet access, and given that they have internet access, they're looking at something that we in the West aren't really looking at nearly as much as we should, which is the greatest, most massive, most stupendous elevation Of the poor into the middle class that has ever before been seen in history.
	Over the past 20-25 years in India and in China, over 300 million people have escaped poverty because the Chinese economy has been growing at like 9.5% per year.
	I mean, it's staggering because they've actually allowed entrepreneurs to be free and they have a smaller share.
	The government has a smaller share of the Chinese economy than the British government does, which is supposed to be all kinds of capitalist, right?
	And so Egypt in particular, you have 40% of the population living on less than $2 a day.
	This is after 6,000 years of statism.
	This is the best they've been able to achieve.
	And so I think a factor of three things.
	One is this continual poverty.
	In the Middle East, which is just grueling and absolutely brutal.
	The second is, of course, the middle class people are able to see the amount of opportunity that is available in other formerly third world countries, like China and like India, and want the same thing.
	And they recognize, they understand that it's economic freedom, as it always is, which has vaulted all of these people out of this hand-to-mouth, poverty-eat-your-toenails existence.
	And I think third, of course, you've had a massive increase in the price of foodstuffs over the past couple of months, 20-30% depending on how you count it and sometimes even more.
	And when you're living on $2 a day and your price of your food goes up 30%, you're just 30% hungrier.
	And I think that's fascinating.
	I think what's also, as has been mentioned a little bit, but not very much in the mainstream media, is the intelligence community around the world.
	I mean, good lord.
	I mean, they were caught off guard by the Iranian revolution in 78.
	India's 98 nuclear tests.
	They failed to foresee the 9-11 attacks in the US. Didn't even see the end of the Cold War.
	They... They were examining the most examined country in the world, which was Iraq in the 90s, and they thought there were weapons of mass destruction that they weren't.
	They missed the fall of the Berlin Wall.
	They missed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
	They missed the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.
	They had no idea the 1973 Yom Kippur War was going on.
	They miscalculated all of the Bay of Pigs stuff.
	I mean, you could go on and on, and Lord knows I've been known to, but...
	I think it's really important for people to recognize that this is like really sad and pitiful state radar.
	These people are paid hundreds of billions of dollars a year to suss out all of the potential trouble spots around the world.
	They missed the uprisings in Tunisia, in Libya, in Egypt.
	They have no idea what's going on.
	They lack human intelligence.
	They seem to lack basic intelligence.
	They seem to lack internet access.
	I mean, the chat rooms in the Arab world were alive.
	We've read revolutionary talk.
	There were Twitter feeds going up all over the place, Facebook pages exploding with organization, and these people are like, I don't know, I'll check some guy's blog maybe and see if anything's going on.
	I don't know what they do all day, but I just thought not only is there a lot of very interesting factors going on to generate, I think, some potential for positive changes in the Middle East, but it is also just another massive internal security and intelligence failure on the part of all of the U.S. alphabet soup of agencies that are supposedly designed to protect everyone.
	Well, you know, the revolutionary aspect of what's going on in the Middle East is not an unexpected element.
	I mean, the US government has known for some time that the dictators that they sponsor are really ticking off the people of the Middle East, and eventually they would be overthrown.
	And so they've seen this kind of well in advance, apparently.
	And now it seems to be just sort of positioning themselves so that there's a crisis in the Middle East to force up food prices so that the instability will then affect the rest of the world and use that as a justification for people to beg for martial law.
	And that's my opinion, at least.
	So you think that there may be sort of martial law and a further crackdown in the Middle East?
	Well, if there's a...
	I'm talking more along the lines of the Western world.
	I mean, martial law really basically, in my opinion, can't be implemented in the Middle East because there's just too many people that are on the streets.
	You can't martial an entire population if the entire population is motivated against you.
	It just can't happen.
	Unless, of course, you have more guns than the entire population does and are prepared to use them on unarmed populations, as is happening in Libya, where, incidentally, U.S. troops have now landed in order to train the rebels.
	So, you know, we're going to be looking at yet another U.S. war.
	Yes, yes. Well, you really can't get enough of those on your Cheerios every morning, can you?
	No, no, absolutely not, you know.
	I mean, I've got my bowl of U.S. wars as well like that, you know, and a few teaspoons of that on my cornflakes every morning just keeps me damn skippy!
	Tastes like cordite!
	Yeah, yeah. But look, I mean, you're from New Zealand, right?
	It's like depleted uranium that I can sprinkle from, you know?
	Look, you're from New Zealand, right?
	So, I mean, New Zealand in the 90s went through a significant contraction in the size and scope of state power, right?
	I mean... Ditched a whole bunch of subsidies, got rid of, I think, almost all the agricultural subsidies.
	There were, I think, drops in the corporate tax rates and shrinking in state expenditures.
	So there are certain times, I mean, the state as a whole generally expands, but it's sort of a jagged line.
	And so there are times when the state is going to contract.
	My particular view is that in the Western world, there is going to be a contraction in the state over the next sort of five to ten years.
	I think the ruling class is not ready to give up because there's no particular place for them to go.
	It's one thing for the ruling classes or the banking classes or the elite classes to flee from I think we're going to see some restoration of economic freedoms, probably not as many social freedoms, but some economic freedoms because they understand that the tax livestock have become unproductive because the walls of regulation and taxation and control have closed in a little too tightly.
	You know, if you pack your cows too close together, they just get sick and die.
	And so the economy in the West, and this to me is as much Europe as it is North America, a little bit more so in America than Canada, But there's been too much regulation, too much control, too much expansion of state power, too many dependent parasites on state power.
	This is going to have to be a reform.
	I don't think it's going to fall into fascism because the ruling classes know that that way lies their own impoverishment in the long run, that they need to loosen the shackles on their productive classes in order to restore some of the economic growth that has died off over the past 20 or 30 years.
	Where I focus a lot of my time, and in fact, no, I don't focus too much on it, come to think of it, but the extermination aspect of New World Order and those sorts of things are always in the back of my mind.
	Whenever any kind of war, conflict, or any type of event that gets hyped up in international media I automatically, and this is probably just my assumption of my young ignorance working here, but my assumption always is, okay, who's benefiting from this, and how is it going to be used to further take our freedoms off us, expand state power, and eventually exterminate us orderly?
	Well, I mean, it's always a possibility, but as you may know, I view the relationship between the rulers and the citizens as the relationship between a farmer and the livestock.
	And we are sort of in the unique position as livestock that we only tend to be productive when we perceive that we are free and respected.
	And that, of course, is a counter to being livestock, but nonetheless, it's sort of the double thing that we require.
	Farmers don't want to kill off all their livestock.
	They want to find ways to make them more productive.
	Unfortunately, one of the things that's happened over the past I think we're good to go.
	I also mean the military-industrial complex, the corporations who suckle at the state teats and so on, and the bankers, of course.
	And so governments take from the productive class and give to other people in return for votes because it's a lot easier to get money from the government than it is to go out and rob someone yourself.
	It's a lot safer, I guess, for people who aren't so much into the knife-in-people's-ribs scenario.
	Yeah, it reminds me of the plaque that Ron Paul has on his desk, no stealing, this government doesn't like competition.
	No counterfeiting, because that's our job, right?
	So I think that what's happened is the dependent classes, you know, there's been a whole series of governments that have needed to create more and more dependencies because that's how they buy their votes.
	And this is true of public sector unions and, as I said, the financial classes, the bankers, Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the military itself, the prison complex.
	I mean, you could go on and on.
	But there's just way, way, way too many anchors hanging off this boat.
	And there's way too many parasites in this body.
	And so there's going to need to be a shift away from this, quote, redistribution of money, which is just theft and bribery.
	There's going to need to be a shift away from it.
	I don't think that the rulers are so dumb as to think that if they just impose martial law and fascism that they're going to do anything other than completely crater the economy because they'll have to prevent people from leaving and when people are prevented from leaving and martial law is declared, they tend to become economically very unproductive.
	You end up with a kind of late Mussolini slash Brezhnev style economy or a Chairman Mao economy where People aren't producing anything because they're just too depressed.
	And so you have to keep the illusion of freedom alive, but at the same time you have to draw back or cut back on the amount of money that's going to the dependent classes.
	It's a tricky, tricky business, but I bet your heads are working very hard in the corridors of power to figure out how to achieve this end.
	Or how to stop people from finding any solutions.
	Go Will. You touched on something there.
	A lot of this policy, especially of welfare-based initiatives, is just vote-grabbing.
	It's just pragmatic.
	You haven't got enough money?
	You can't afford the food?
	We're going to give you some food stamps.
	We're going to give you $60 a week.
	And there's all the promises.
	We're going to make free education.
	Who cares if we're brainwashing you?
	Where have people's principles gone?
	Why don't they think beyond the first dimension instead of just thinking, money from government equals good.
	I vote for them. Where's the actual, oh, nothing's free in this world.
	The government can't create anything out of nothing.
	The bankers can. They're not actually thinking about the downstream effects.
	If something seems too good to be true, it always is.
	Oh yeah, it's easy to win a game if you cheat.
	Well, but the brilliant thing about creating this dependent class is that they become the social police of everyone else, right?
	So if you live next door to some, I mean, not to pick on anyone in particular, there's these Wisconsin teachers at the moment whose salaries are significantly higher with benefits than the average Wisconsin's So you live next door to someone who's a teacher who's benefiting from all of this state control and coercion.
	They get a couple of months off in the summer.
	They finish work at 2.30.
	And so what happens is if you say, look, I want to be free.
	I want to be free of the violence of taxation.
	I want to be free of the destructiveness of state power.
	What happens is they get mad at you.
	So the government doesn't have to send anyone around to your house and threaten you with anything.
	All they have to do is create a dependent class That's big enough that the moment any of the productive classes starts talking about freedom, all the dependent classes start shouting them down.
	It's a beautiful mechanism that keeps the slaves self-policing, right?
	The state is fundamentally a horizontal mechanism of slave-on-slave aggression.
	It's very rare that it needs to be top-down.
	We all just turn on each other when anybody threatens the withdrawal of state benefits.
	Exactly. Exactly.
	You see it if you go out on the street and you demonstrate for 9-11 truth or anything that's outside the box, who comes running to the defense of the establishment?
	Well, they don't need Henry Kissinger down there on the street because they've got every brainwashed little SOB out there who thinks they're part of the establishment, who thinks it works for them, who thinks that the Diet Coke is wholesome and good for them, and they come running to the defense of the system they don't understand.
	Except for the trickle fed, what they get fed over the media, portholes.
	It's really sad, isn't it?
	Your own flesh and blood.
	I've got a standard family who will defend a system they know nothing about to the point where they won't talk to me They can't even give me the time of day being flesh and blood related.
	Right. No, I'm sorry to hear that.
	That's how powerful propaganda is, and it's not a sob story, but it happens to anyone who steps outside the mark, because that's how powerful the propaganda is worth more now than DNA. And the sad thing, too, is that I think there's a lot of shame in being part of the dependent class.
	And along with a lot of shame comes a lot of fear.
	Which is that you've kind of specialized as a sort of economic organism.
	You've kind of specialized into fitting into this particular slot of dependency.
	And if society changes, I think it makes people feel very insecure that they're going to have to go out and compete in the free market with people who are, you know, maybe more ambitious or maybe harder working and so on.
	So people, I think, feel a sense of shame and dependency.
	I think we all know what's going on deep down.
	But I think there's also a sense of great fear.
	And I think of somebody, you know, we all do sympathy, right?
	So some teacher who's 60, who's worked for, you know, 30 years or whatever as a teacher and, you know, she needs her retirement and she needs her health benefits and so on.
	And people come along and say, well, you know, this is all kind of coercive and it's all kind of immoral and so on.
	I mean, that's a pretty terrifying thing.
	She can't rewind and start all over and she can't even fast forward and start all over.
	So I really have a lot of sympathy for the people who have...
	Fallen into the sort of jaws of these kind of propaganda, have their brain chewed up and sort of spat out, and are in the situation where they really do have a pretty grim battle on their hands.
	It's very, very hard to face that and to realize that you've been dependent, to realize that the system that's been supporting you and is going to support you has some pretty significant ethical problems that is very root, notably the violation of the non-aggression principle.
	So, you know, it's hard, hard, hard for people to admit that kind of stuff.
	And swinging back into the Middle East situation, we have, well, how many countries now are on the verge of overthrowing or already have overthrown their government?
	You know, we're talking about a thing that's region-wide.
	We've got Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya.
	I mean, where is it going to stop?
	I mean, that's just counting off the top of my head.
	That's seven. Right.
	Well, I think these things do tend to snowball, and there is this incredible, I mean, the very reason that we're talking ourselves, there's this incredible spiderweb of communication that is going on, that people in,
	you know, I mean, this guy sets himself on fire in Tunisia, and everybody in the Arab world knows about it within six hours, and can, you know, maybe even see the video, if there was video, or hear the reports, or see the news stories, and I mean, That is completely mind-blowing that you can see this revolution spreading digitally and visually.
	It's truly astounding.
	Absolutely. The grand thing about being in the information age is that you give the average person the ability to amplify their emotions, their thoughts, and their experiences.
	You're listening to The Vinnie Eastwood Show with Will, a very special guest.
	This is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio, and we'll be right back.
	After the break.
	Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. - It's fun.
	The evil scumbags and elites and whatnot that think that this planet is their frickin' ordained right to rule, there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide because, well, they're surrounded on all sides by their enemies of free humanity.
	Our very special guest joining us for this hour is Stefan Molyneux, the host of Free Domain Radio.
	Stefan, welcome back.
	Thanks, Vinny. Great to be here.
	Yeah. Hey, well, what was the thing that we wanted to get into now with him, Will?
	Just sort of like solutions and philosophically how we can actually turn this system around because what's happened is that we've got a society now that's been socially engineered into basically just not giving an F about the things that rule their lives.
	What if I'm just absolutely mad?
	Well, I mean, it's, you could say that it's a rational calculation, right?
	So why, you know, I don't spend my spare time looking at, you know, mangled bodies in surgery manuals, because, you know, there's not much time I'm not going to be a surgeon.
	So I think a lot of people who don't feel like or believe that they have the ability to make a change are not going to look into what the problems are.
	Because then it's just like researching stuff you can't do anything about.
	It's going to depress you.
	It's going to alienate you.
	It's going to make conversations with other people all kinds of awkward because they're going to bring up, you know, how, well, we should raise corporate taxes to do this and we should lower spending over here.
	And, of course, if you disagree with the whole system, those conversations can be a little bit awkward.
	So if you say to people what you should learn about this stuff, you should learn philosophy and you should learn freedom and you should learn economics.
	And part of them will say so that I can feel excluded, so that I can feel awkward, so that I can have really, really, really explosive conversations with people in order to achieve what?
	And I think that's the great gap that the freedom movement has yet to close, which is to give people a compelling reason for learning about stuff which can be brain-tortuous and make you feel a whole...
	A cavalcade of despair and hopelessness and all other kinds of things.
	That's why I like activists who basically adopt very specific fields of research so that they can understand one element.
	And my goal is really to just sort of interview all the people who are specialists in all the elements so that I can be given at least a general overview so that I can personally, for myself, just figure out what the hell is going on here and what to do about it.
	My goal is to defeat these guys, and so we don't have to do this show anymore, to be honest.
	We need to get out, right?
	Well, I mean, it's more than the show that we need to.
	The show isn't our predicament.
	The total enslavement is.
	And that's what I think is missing.
	I think we need a reference plane, a backbone, a skeleton to our resistance from which we're working from.
	Otherwise, we're just getting paddled off at every argument, at every level.
	We're getting pushed to the side with pragmatic debates.
	We needed to invade Iraq because we've got this Islamic hatred towards the West, and they're jealous of our way of life, they're jealous of our slavery.
	They won. Yeah, we kill millions of them by denying them food and medical care and then we're shocked that they might be at all upset with us.
	But unless we have a real reference plane that everyone can agree on, then we cannot defeat all their little pompous arguments that we know ahead of time they're going to say.
	We know they're going to call us conspiracy theorists.
	We know they're going to say this isn't the time for debate and all the rest of it.
	You're an extremist! Yeah.
	Because that's a helpful word, right?
	And then the View's talking about Charlie Sheen, and you can't mention anything about the geopolitical nature of what's going on, what America's doing right now, because that's outside the frames of the debate as we've pictured it.
	I was wondering, is the debate actually important anymore?
	I think the frame of the debate seems to be more important than the topic of the debate itself.
	I think that debate should be able to have free flow and be able to go into any direction that is in any way relevant.
	Because some people, they try to separate things.
	And this is the great part about compartmentalized society where everybody specialized in one small area and can't do F all else.
	They just block themselves off from learning things because they just don't see the relevance or they don't want to see it more operatively.
	Well, I've always felt that, well, I shouldn't say I've always felt, I've really come to the conclusion over the last few years, gentlemen, that the fact that you can't have these conversations with people is exactly why we don't need a government.
	Because these social rules are spontaneously created.
	There's no central directive, right?
	Like, your socialist Aunt Ellie doesn't get a little directive which says, okay, if this topic comes up, you need to block with this.
	And if this topic comes up, you need to say this.
	And don't even talk about this topic.
	Yeah. Well, because these rules, these ostracisms, these tensions, these social problems, these attacks, they all arise spontaneously.
	In other words, the most fundamental social rules of interaction arising spontaneously are enforced without any central coordination or planning.
	And that is a fantastic argument as to how social rules can be enforced without a government.
	Just try to talk to people outside the box of propaganda and you get short circuits, you get aggression, you get pretend confusion, you get all of these things which we've all experienced a million times.
	But that's exactly why we don't need a government because all of these social rules will be enforced without central planning, without central coercion, without all of these mechanisms which are so destructive.
	Like jails and wars and imprisonments and so on.
	I think it's a really, although it can be really frustrating to work within this really foggy maze of social convention, the fact that it's so powerful is exactly the argument that should help propel us forward, which is to say, hey, you know how you don't want to talk about this or, you know, I can predict exactly what you're going to say.
	When I bring up taxation is forced, you're going to tell me it's a social contract.
	If I say it's a social contract, then it should be voluntary.
	You say, no, it has to be enforced because if it wasn't enforced, no one would obey it.
	So then it can't be a social contract because nobody wants to obey it and therefore it's forced.
	I know we're going to go round and round like this.
	It's completely predictable.
	But that's exactly why we don't need a government because people will spontaneously organize themselves To protect the status quo, to protect their self-interest, all we have to do is teach them that their self-interest is different than what their masters tell us and society will self-organize and enforce itself without the need for centrally coercive monopolies of power.
	Yeah, yeah, decentralising government I think is one of the things that I really, really want to advocate here is because of the fact that every single centrally planned economy has eventually either deprived all its people of its wealth or assets or destroyed all of their rights, you know? It doesn't work any other way if you look at history.
	And my assumption is that at the moment, our politicians, for some reason, they are so brainwashed and they are so propagandized, I would hasten a guess that even very few of our current politicians know anything about politics, geopolitics, or the New World Order, or anything.
	Any of these aspects that would actually influence their political decisions, they don't know.
	And it's because of the fact that we don't debate all of these things.
	It's because of the fact that they operate within set guidelines and paradigms, and it's because of the fact that they can't talk about truth.
	No, they can't.
	And if you imagine the most staggeringly narcissistic vanity that it must take for a politician to say, I am competent and To talk about how education should work in a country of 300 million people or 15 million or five Million people.
	I mean, just imagine, imagine how insane you would have to be at the very, very deepest level.
	So insane that you look perfectly normal.
	How insane you'd have to be to say, I know how to create jobs in a complex, technological, modern economy that is embedded in globalization.
	In other words, I know how to create jobs.
	I saw this guy in The Daily Show the other day.
	Who was one of Barack Obama's top economic advisors.
	And he was like, you know, we've created a million jobs over the...
	No, you haven't. You haven't done it.
	I mean, you've borrowed.
	You've sold off the kids to whoever.
	But you haven't created a single job.
	Because if you were creating a single job, you'd be too busy actually working for a living rather than writing all these policy statements.
	But that's the thing that's amazing.
	You know, philosophy really is, I think, fundamentally designed to teach you humility.
	I don't know. I don't know how the poor should be saved.
	I don't know how everyone should be educated.
	I don't know how national defense should be provided.
	I don't know how roads should be built.
	I do believe that if we stop pointing guns at everyone all the time, amazing and wonderful solutions will come out of the complex ecosystem of human creativity.
	But I don't know.
	This is anarchism or voluntarism or statelessness or whatever you want to call it.
	It's simply an admission of rational ignorance.
	I don't know how you should live.
	I don't know what your wife should do with her life.
	I don't know exactly how your children should be educated.
	Even one family, I can't tell how to live.
	But the idea that you can pass a law to tell 300 million people how their health care should be provided, I mean, that is so mad that you know these people have never gone through this sort of humility of rational self-limitation or rational self-examination.
	Exactly. Instead of saying, I don't know, and being honest and open about it, they say instead of another three words, I don't care.
	What do you mean? I mean, what happens is these people don't want to think of – they don't want to go and read 25 books and study social policy or just anything, or even just think for themselves.
	They sit in a dark room at night and go, oh, what makes sense here?
	How do I want to live my life?
	How does my neighbor want to live my life?
	What sort of intent do most people have?
	What are the threats to our liberty?
	Instead of thinking these things, people just go, well, I'm going to trust Barack Obama.
	He looks like a nice man. He's smart.
	He came out of Harvard Law.
	He got his first job with Zbigniew Brzezinski or whatever.
	I mean, he's a good guy. And so they offer up their trust and that way these people get all this power.
	And then the same zombies say to me every day and they say to you, Stefan, they say, You can't do anything about it.
	It's too big. You're just a drop in the water.
	Quit while you're ahead.
	Stop hating the government. Don't blame them for your problems.
	Well, sorry, let me interrupt you for just a sec.
	I would be a little bit more precise.
	They don't give up their power to Barack Obama.
	It's no reason to pick on him rather than anyone else, but his name came up.
	Because if they wanted to give up their power to Barack Obama, he wouldn't even need to run for office, right?
	He would just need to create a website where he would tell people, What to do every day, and they just go and subscribe, and he'd say, okay, well, I need to give my money here, and I need to go obey these rules, and so I'll just go and do that.
	What happens is the power is taken from them, and then they justify it by saying, well, he seems like a nice, smart guy, so I guess it's okay.
	Yeah, I'm sorry. I mean, I mis- I labeled it.
	I pinned it on Barack.
	What I should say is it's not the figurehead.
	It's the establishment that they haul themselves out to for cheap rights, compared to the national debt anyway.
	And what it does is it alleviates people of their own responsibilities for themselves.
	So it's not that most people are bad.
	It's just that as these catch nets have been developed and You know, we have all this entertainment industry and then we're working more and more slavishly because our dollar's been devalued.
	People don't have the time or energy or motivation or inclination to really want to govern themselves.
	And so these guys are given the opportunity to step in because government has no power on paper.
	Government is a fictional entity.
	The only way they get power is by people conceding their own.
	And that's the sad thing.
	It's realizing personal power.
	If you think about the might of the biggest armies in the world, The US military today.
	You think of their power and you think of all of what they have and you just look at the architecture of government, all that power is stolen power.
	That's all the initiative and all the drive and the intellect that's stolen from people and disproportionately placed in few hands to be a baton to all of the central bankers who go unseen.
	I certainly think it's very true that you don't ever see the guys behind the curtain.
	I mean, Barack Obama doesn't wield the power.
	It's the people who print the money and the people who control the currency, in my view, who have the real power.
	It's the less obvious ones, you know, and they're so detached from reality that, you know, it wouldn't surprise me, but of course it would shock me if, say, a congressman or whatever kidnapped 100,000 children and then forced them into prostitution and said, look at all the jobs that I've created.
	As a solution, that's what you would do.
	You would say, we're not going to serve central banks anymore and we're going to nationalize our banks and cancel the debt.
	Is that the first step you would take?
	Well, the first step that I would take is simply allow for a free market in currency.
	I mean, this is how it used to work in the United States and in other countries because, of course, it used to be gold and silver back in the day and fiat currency was simply created as a representation of gold and silver.
	It was never supposed to have any value in and of itself.
	It was certainly never supposed to have any value I think?
	Well, there were some changes in the value because, for instance, when Spain discovered the New World, they imported all of this gold, which messed up their economy and gave them 400 years of economic decline because of massive inflation.
	And so there are problems with gold and silver as a form of currency.
	I think that electronic currency would be much better.
	But currency as a whole needs to be very closely and rationally tied to the overall growth of the economy.
	And anybody who runs a private currency system that could provide stability and predictability in that currency without deflation, without wild boom and bust swings would very quickly rise to prominence in the economy.
	So the very first thing that I would do, of course, cancel all the debt.
	The debt is completely and totally imaginary.
	But privatize money. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Vinnie Eastwood Show with Will on AmericanFreedomRadio.com.
	And incidentally, TheVinnieEastwoodShow.com, proudly brought to you in collaboration with GuerrillaMedia.co.nz.
	Our very special guest, Stefan Molyneux, host of Free Domain Radio, joins us here for the final segment of the fastest two hours of Welcome to my show.
	When he was elected, he made a point of going around and teaching the people of Venezuela about their rights and their constitution and yada yada yada, making sure that they all knew it.
	And then after the CIA ousted him in a coup, two million people took to the streets, overthrew the coup leaders and then brought Chavez back.
	Now, that seems as a shining example of what happens when you educate people about what their rights are and how important it is to defend them.
	And this has been eroded by a number of different mechanisms in the United States, both chemically, politically and monetarily, to basically take away people's knowledge of their rights and thus take away the rights themselves.
	What's your take on that, Stephan?
	Well, I... I'm annoyingly philosophical in these areas, so I don't like to look at what may work, what could have worked, what has worked here, what has worked there, because what I like to do is say, okay, well, look.
	We need to have some way that society needs to be organized.
	I think that organization is a pretty good thing.
	You need stuff to work in society, and I think that's a good thing to aim for.
	And so we're either going to try and patch stuff together based on what we kind of like or what might have worked here or could have worked there, or what we're going to do is we're going to clear the table.
	We're going to say, okay, what's good is And what's evil?
	What's morally right and what's morally wrong?
	And I think that we all agree that theft is wrong, that assault is wrong, that murder is wrong, that rape is wrong.
	Okay, straight away here we get into a moral system of morality.
	The zeitgeist crowd would argue there is no inherent morality, it's all conditioning.
	Right. So what do we do with those people?
	I mean, there's a lot of people talking about the Zeitgeist people.
	Well, see, but here's the thing. I mean, I've got a whole book on ethics, which is available for free on my website, where I sort of try and make this case.
	I won't make the whole case here.
	But if we accept that the non-aggression principle – and I've talked to the Zeitgeist people.
	I had a debate with them recently, and they agree that the non-initiation of force is a moral principle, that they would not initiate force to get their system going, in which case we're all brothers experimenting in the social paradise – Called everyone.
	That's great. But if we accept that the non-initiation of force is a universal value, then simply by definition you simply can't have a government because a government is a group with a monopoly power to initiate force in a geographical area.
	So, if you're going to say that the non-initiation of force is a moral good, then you can't have a government.
	However tempting and however comfortable, and I understand how comfortable it is, and it's really weird to think of as like thinking, hey, let's have a farm with no gravity.
	It seems weird to think of a society without government, but that's okay.
	Okay, okay.
	I'll Just an argument.
	Right now we have total dependence.
	Right now we have total dependence, a total nanny state.
	You go your method here.
	I'm just posturing an argument here.
	Total independence. I'm saying people can't go from A to Z. I'm saying people go from A to maybe X. And we have a limited government where they have sole responsibilities, but their responsibilities have to And are held to the public good by a measure of moral good.
	And so it's not forced. It's not forced for their own benefit.
	It's an act of good and righteous government in the benefit of the people.
	Well, but look, if you want to talk about practical consequences, here's what I would argue.
	That there's nothing more dangerous to the world than a small government.
	Because a small government It has a very efficient economy.
	If you look at England, why did it become a world power?
	Why did it ever have an empire?
	It had an empire because it was the first country to institute free trade and the protection of property rights by and large in general for most of the classes.
	Because of that, it became the world trade center of the world.
	Spain had a similar experiment in free trade which gave them...
	So when you have a small government, the small government has a very productive economy.
	The very productive economy creates a huge influx of taxes or potential taxation which allows the government to grow and grow and grow.
	So if you look at the American government, and we were talking in the break, you said it worked pretty well for 80 years.
	Well, anarchism worked in Ireland for almost a thousand years, but nonetheless...
	The government that starts off the smallest always ends up the largest because the smallest governments have the most productive economies which creates huge wealth.
	When we say Ireland's model worked, to what ends?
	I mean, not being mean here, I mean, I have ancestry in Ireland, but I mean, seriously, to what ends?
	Like, I mean, once again, that comes down to cultural values.
	There's a lot of grey areas in right and wrong, and then it comes down to The physical, on-the-ground application and the constituents of now, right now we have, for better or worse, largely cosmopolitan, multicultural nations where...
	There are a lot of cultural boundaries clashing or distancing themselves from one another.
	It then favors your model of not having a centralized government because that would have to have one-size-fits-all policy across all these cultural realms.
	But still, you're going to have tribal factions competing and some rising to prominence over others.
	I mean, we're always going to have these boundaries forming society.
	We're always going to have a hierarchical system forming, aren't we?
	Well, I would argue that where you see the most tribal conflict is where you see people attempting to gain control of the state, right?
	So we think of the civil wars in Africa.
	These are wars because people want to get a hold of the government, and one of the reasons they want to get a hold of the government is to get foreign aid and other kinds of benefits.
	You kind of broke up there a bit, Stefan.
	You'll have to repeat that. Sure, sorry.
	In Africa, you see all of these tribes that are competing and warring with each other.
	What are they warring over? They're warring over to get control of the government.
	That's what they're willing to invest blood and money into.
	They want power because there's already a government.
	Why did the Nazis invade France in May of 1940?
	They invaded France. You can get rid of an official government, but you're always going to have people who want power, and whether you call it a government or a gang, these groups are always going to resist.
	My argument is if you have a good government, a good group of people, then they can act in the public good and protect the public from wannabe gangsters forming and ruling over people.
	My thought is that you just need to inform the public so that they know how to defend themselves because there's nothing more dangerous than somebody with independent thinking that won't do what you tell them to do.
	I'd like to thank you, Stefan, for coming on the show with us today.
	It's been a real pleasure, mate.
	Thank you so much. It was a great conversation.
	I really appreciate the invitation. We've got to have you back, Stefan.
	Thanks. Take care, man. Have a great night.
	For real. You can check him out on Free Domain Radio.
	Just Google that and you will find it.
	You're listening to The Vinnie Eastwood Show.
	Thank you very much for doing that.

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