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May 21, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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1914 Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio on the Max Keiser TV Show!

'Economics and Philosophy' - A tour through historical and contemporary economic issues through the lens of rational philosophy - Max Keiser interviews Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio on television

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	Alright, welcome to On The Edge.
	I'm Max Keiser. Time now to go to Canada and speak with Stéphane Molyneux, who is a Canadian philosopher, a blogger, an essayist, an author, host of Free Domain Radio podcasts.
	He lives in Canada in a place called Mississauga.
	Am I saying that correctly, Stéphane?
	Mississauga. Mississauga, Canada.
	Where is Mississauga? It's just outside Toronto.
	Alright, fine. Now he's written a bunch of articles, he's widely listened to, and it's interesting, we don't speak to many philosophers on the show, and you don't hear anybody ever interviewing philosophers anywhere.
	It seems like philosophy itself is no longer held in the regard it used to be.
	Why is that, Stefan? That's my first question.
	Why is philosophy itself in such decline?
	Philosophy for many, many generations has not really been in the marketplace.
	If you look back at the birth of philosophy 2,500 years ago, Socrates went down in the marketplace.
	He went down to speak to the people, to ask them about their concerns, and to give responses that hopefully were helpful to their lives.
	Now, I have not taken the academic route.
	I mean, I have a master's from an Ivy League college, but I've not taken the academic route.
	I have gone To the people.
	I am an entrepreneur. I ran a business, sold a business in the software field.
	So I'm really market-driven.
	And I've tried to have philosophy wrap around the actual life concerns of people.
	And I think that's made it more relevant.
	I think academic philosophy, existential philosophy, modern postmodernism has really abstracted itself away from people's actual concerns in their lives that rational principles can truly help them with.
	Right, it seems as though this idea of philosophy or organizing one's principles in a cogent, codified, referenceable series of bullet points has given way to this idea of Let's call it economics,
	the modern economics, where everything is based on cost-benefit analysis and making the most amount of money in the shortest period of time seems to have replaced philosophy as such, and it's been enabled by computers and the industrial revolution, you know, going back to that trade, etc.
	Is that a fair characterization, or am I completely off base there?
	No, I think you and I share that view.
	I watched your recent morally laudable Pitbull attack upon Goldman Sachs in the Q&A period, and what you kept hitting on was honesty, was integrity, was virtue.
	And these are states or commitments to excellence in the moral field.
	They need to be internalized by people.
	The world will always dangle these temptations for the quick buck, for the easy buck, for the easy way of doing things.
	Philosophy It says that the easy way is like a cupcake to a diabetic.
	It may taste good in the moment, but it's going to cost you down the road.
	And I think you and I share that focus on the non-aggression principle, on a respect for property, on integrity, on long-term plain and good dealing with people that has rewards down the road, though it can be costly in the moment.
	Alright, now politically you would align yourself, correct me if I'm wrong here, but you would put yourself in the camp of libertarianism.
	Is that true?
	And if it is true, just, you know, the short description of what is libertarianism as you see it.
	Sure. Libertarianism is basically two principles.
	An acceptance of property rights.
	The first property right being self-ownership, that I am responsible for what I do, that I am responsible for my actions.
	I'm also responsible for the effects of my actions.
	So if I build a house, then that's my house.
	If I punch a guy, that's my crime.
	And so I'm responsible for myself.
	I have self-ownership. I own the effects of my actions.
	That's basic property rights.
	The second, of course, is the non-aggression principle, which is you do not initiate force against others.
	You can use force in an extremity of self-defense, hopefully in a less than lethal way, but you do not go around initiating force, either yourself or asking others to do it on behalf of you, i.e., I want the government to pass some law to protect me from overseas competition by initiating the use of force against people importing goods by slapping a tariff or a tax or some sort of protectionist racket on.
	You don't do it yourself and you sure as heck do not ask other people to initiate force for your benefit.
	All right, I'll get to the fourth part of the equation in a second.
	I want to just focus in here on the idea of property, private property, and what the pushback many times that comes along when people are talking about libertarianism.
	Libertarianism, of course, seems From what we hear, all is pushing for smaller and smaller government.
	And they view government as an invasive force.
	So that's correct, right?
	I mean, one of the goals is to keep government as small, quote unquote, as possible.
	Yeah, I would say that if you view libertarianism as simply anti-state, then I'm not saying you, but you missed the point.
	The point is that violence, the initiation of force, is recognized as both immoral and impractical in the long run.
	And we can see this with the economic disasters befalling the world, all over the world, intractable, deep...
	Economic problems, deficits and debts and fiat currency and overprinting and inflation and so on.
	All of these things result from the initiation of force.
	That governments gain a violent monopoly over currency, which they can then print at will, causing endless economic disasters.
	So it's not anti-statism, it's anti-violence.
	Because we recognize and accept that violence is not how we achieve moral goals in our personal lives.
	Neither can we achieve those moral goals through the use of violence, through the state, through laws.
	At a social level. So it's really an anti-violence stance rather than an anti-government stance.
	All right, now your essays appear frequently on sites like LewRockwell.com.
	He's a libertarian.
	He's part of the Austrian School of Economics.
	And many of the threads that you see on LewRockwell.com will talk about Shrinking government.
	They attack government quite often.
	And in the case of, let's say, large oil companies that might be attempting to be regulated by the government, this is attacked, you know, that the free market should be left alone, and that we shouldn't worry about any of the externalities that these big energy companies or oil companies are producing.
	So it sounds like, from what you're saying here, that, you know, that kind of libertarianism thought, which is, you know, really hateful of all regulation, you're divorcing yourself somewhat from a lot of that, let's call it, mainstream libertarianism that I read on LewRockwell.com.
	Is that true? Well, there's a tradition in libertarian thought that largely comes out of Ayn Rand, which is that business is good and government is bad.
	Now, that wasn't exactly Ayn Rand's perspective, but there's a lot of pro-business thought.
	But I think if you look at the legal and economic realities of the modern system, corporatism or corporations are absolutely in no way, shape, or form the product of the free market.
	Corporations are blood-sucking, legally void moral monsters created by the state.
	And the reason that the state creates corporations is so that it shields the upper echelons of the business class from legal responsibility for their own actions.
	And so what the government does is it gives all of these legal privileges to businesses.
	So you can take profits out of the corporation in good times, but you can't be held personally liable for losses to the corporations in bad times.
	Those get externalized to the shareholders.
	They get externalized, as we've seen so recently and so catastrophically, to the taxpayers in the forms of bailouts.
	Corporations are quasi-fascistic, blood-sucking money monsters created by the state would have nothing to do with a truly free market environment.
	Alright, now let's move on to another term here to get our terms in order, and then we'll dig into this a little bit more deeply.
	You also talk a lot about volunteerism.
	So tell me, when you talk about volunteerism or volunteerism, what are you talking about here as it relates to your overall philosophy?
	Well, voluntarism or voluntarism is the idea that it is conceivable, it is conceivable and it has occurred at times in history that you can have a functioning and sustainable society without the initiation of force in any institutional way whatsoever, which means without a government.
	And this is the way that everyone lives their personal lives.
	I mean, if I want to go on a date, I don't chloroform, kidnap the girl and throw her in a windowless van and drive off into the sunset.
	I go out and present myself as a potential date partner.
	I don't use force to get people to listen to my show.
	You didn't use force to get me on this show.
	And so the way that we live our personal lives is, for the most part, we don't use force.
	And it's the idea that if this works at a personal level, we should at least explore the possibility that we can create a society and we can have a society that does not have institutionalized violence at the core of its, quote, problem-solving mechanisms, which means no state, which means looking at voluntary ways that people can resolve conflicts around a contract, around the initiation of force, around crimes, whether they're personal or property crimes.
	Lots of ways to explore.
	And in libertarianism, this really comes out of the tradition set forward by people like Murray Rothbard and Hans Hoppe, people who have explored the extent to which we can extend the non-aggression principle even to the historical monster called the state.
	Okay, now to some, what you're talking about here sounds utopian, and yet at the same time, we've had practical success stories in this exact way with the success of open source software.
	For example, the Linux project, And which now runs much of the internet and this whole ethos that has developed in the software industry.
	And you come out of the software tradition.
	Is this part of, are you inspired in part or are you influenced in part by the open source free software movement?
	Yeah, I certainly have looked at that and studied it quite extensively.
	It's a very, very successful example of spontaneous organization.
	So there's this idea, Max, that if we don't have people ordering us around, we're just gonna, you know, sit around on the couch and pick our noses and then go out and start hitting each other with baseball bats, which is all nonsense.
	What we find in history over and over again, and in the marketplace, It's that when institutionalized hierarchical force is withdrawn from a situation, people spontaneously organize.
	And one example of that is the open source software movement.
	Another very interesting example is language itself.
	There is no language government.
	Language evolves spontaneously and naturally.
	Some words are proposed, some words make it, some words don't.
	But there's no central committee.
	It is not a socialist, but rather a free market entity that we use to communicate about everything.
	And that's another example of spontaneous organization.
	Just a bit of a digression here, but have you done much looking into the whole field of linguistics?
	I believe Noam Chomsky has a theory of universal grammar or something like that which talks about kind of this idea of erupting spontaneously.
	Well, yeah, I would say my daughter is almost two and a half years old, and I'm a stay-at-home dad, so I find it absolutely fascinating.
	It makes me sound a little clinical, like she's my language guinea pig, but seeing the development that occurs for her in language, there's no way that there's not some pre-programmed capacity for language in her mind, and this spontaneously emerges.
	Through interaction with others, it really is quite fascinating.
	And yeah, Noam Chomsky's had some stones thrown at his theory lately.
	But yeah, there's this idea that the human mind is wired for spontaneous acquisition of language, which is further backed up by the idea that there's a sort of language window from about 18 months to about three years old.
	And if people, for whatever reason, did not get that language window, would not expose to language during that window, they actually never learn language properly afterwards.
	Of course, you're up in Canada, so are you also observing in your daughter kind of a spontaneous gravitation toward wanting to play ice hockey?
	No, she's quite fascinated by skating, and she does mimic it sometimes with socks on her hardwood floor, but no, she's not gotten that bug as yet.
	But I don't have that bug either because I didn't grow up in Canada, so it's not flowing down from the environment.
	And we don't watch, I don't really watch sports, so there's not really much exposure to it there.
	Okay, well, so I think I understand the philosophy.
	It's a volunteerism, a spontaneous order that's bubbling up from the DNA that, if respected, creates sustainable, viable societies.
	So without any force, physical force needed.
	So let's go to the current events here.
	We see happening the IMF. In Ireland, they are committing acts, you could say, of financial force.
	We see the IMF committing acts of financial force in Ireland, in Greece, around Europe, by forcibly injecting debt, you know, foisting debt onto these economies, corrupting governments.
	They're committing acts of financial brute force, financial violence.
	So how does one deal with that?
	You know, if it were to befall Canada, for example, and Canada was following your philosophy, what would Canada do with the barbarians from the IMF coming in with their financial violence?
	Yeah, I mean, you've used the term financial terrorism, which I would completely agree with.
	It is absolutely stone-cold immoral what is going on in Ireland at the moment.
	As you know, I mean, a few years ago, I think it was in 2008, Irish banks faced a pretty catastrophic set of losses from their hyperinvestment in unsustainable property prices.
	And so the Irish government guaranteed all of these private losses by private banks.
	With government backed finances.
	And what that means is that they signed a unilateral contract on behalf of current and future Irish citizens to repay the losses incurred by these private banks making their own private decisions.
	Absolutely completely immoral.
	I can't go and sign a contract which makes my neighbor pay for a car that I want and then he goes to jail if he doesn't pay.
	The fact that governments are allowed to do it is completely immoral.
	And just another example of how catastrophically dangerous it is to give a small monopoly of people all the guns in the world and expect them to positively solve social problems with it is absolutely immoral.
	Ireland has to default. There's no question about that.
	There's no doubt about that.
	The only people who aren't saying that are people invested in the current system who are hoping to rip off Current and future Irish taxpayers.
	It's completely immoral. And an example of a completely non-democratic process.
	This did not go to the people as a plebiscite or as a referendum.
	They were informed of that decision, that they'd been sold and their children sold down the river for the sake of these banksters.
	No. Ireland should tell the IMF to get lost.
	It should tell the people who bought all these bonds, some of whom are Irishmen and Irish women, I understand that.
	Sorry. You invested in a criminal organization.
	You deserve to lose your money.
	And this will teach you to not do it again.
	Right. And they're saying, of course, the same thing happening in Greece.
	And the IMF got the Greek government to sign this memorandum, which makes the IMF's claims over assets in Greece superior, first in line, ahead of anything guaranteed in their own constitution.
	So they just overrode and run a roughshod over the constitution of the country.
	And a couple of years ago, apparently, John Paulson and Lloyd Blankfein were having a meeting in Athens to discuss how to carve up Uh, Greece, once the collapse is coming, that they themselves are engineering.
	So do the people, I understand that its brute force is not necessary, but you mentioned that in selective cases it is, um, The necessary.
	So do the people of Ireland or the people of Greece, are they at the point now where they need to apply some violence?
	I mean, there's no other way to describe it.
	It's similar to what happened, you know, in France during the 18th century.
	Are we at that point? I think that violence is absolutely last resort.
	I think in the absence of understanding the true root causes of what is occurring in the society, violence will not solve the problem.
	So we see this in the, quote, Arab Spring at the moment, where you see a lot of revolutionary activity in the Arab countries in the Middle East.
	But they don't have a strong understanding of property rights, of the non-aggression principle, of all of the Enlightenment values that drove the American Revolution.
	So they're just going to replace one bad boss with another.
	So what I would strongly urge people to do is to examine the actual nature of the system that we have rather than simply throw yourself in the barricades and try and fight something you don't comprehend.
	Democracy is simply a system of intergenerational bribery.
	Democracy can only work if governments bribe their citizens, and they can only bribe their citizens by going into debt.
	If I go to you as a politician and say, hey Max, I want to give you a thousand dollar check, but I have to tax you fifteen hundred dollars First, $1,000 for you and $500 for my overhead, you'll simply say, well, you're not giving me anything.
	But if I offer you $3,000 because I borrowed $1,500, well, then that's fantastic.
	You can believe that you're getting something for nothing.
	Citizens around the world, but particularly in North America and Europe, we need to stop asking to get something for nothing.
	Historically, people have gotten $3 to $4 in benefits for every dollar they've paid in taxes, and the result, of course, is the debt.
	Debt and fiat currency manipulation is inherent in the nature of a statist society, particularly a democracy.
	So we need to study things philosophically to understand how we got into this mess, and that way we can work to create and achieve a solution that is not going to be simply rotating like that old Who song, you know, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
	We need to find a way to stop this cycle, and that can only come through understanding first principles and the economic drivers to the current disasters.
	Okay, let me just digress for a second.
	Of course, you're up in Canada, and they recently had an election in Canada, and you've got a new conservative government in place.
	Can you just talk for a minute about how you see the politics in Canada, what happened with this new election, and what you see is going to be the case for the next couple of years?
	Well, it's not exactly a new government.
	It's a continuation of the existing one.
	As a volunteerist, I don't spend a huge amount of time focusing on politics in the same way that you probably don't spend a huge amount of time following college bocce ball or something.
	But I will say this, that Canada is at enormous risk, I think, for a significant economic dip.
	First of all, the housing prices.
	As we talked about the last time I was on your show...
	Housing prices are multiple levels of prior valuations in the same way that Americans, it's actually worse than America was before the crash.
	The banking system is much more stable, but of course what Canada faces is the giant sucking sound of destroyed economics south of the border, 90% of economic activity.
	In Canada, it's with the US. It's trade with the US. And as the US economy goes down, Canada's is very likely to follow.
	So we do face significant risks.
	And I don't see any government activity trying to hedge those risks or trying to solve those risks ahead of time.
	So I think there's going to be a lot of problems in Canada over the next little while.
	All right, now I've got a two-part question.
	The first part is we see the youth uprising in Spain.
	We see demonstrations in Greece and all over Europe.
	We also see the Arab Spring.
	We see the regime changes in Tunisia and Egypt and across North Africa and the Middle East.
	Are these events connected?
	That's my first question.
	And my second question is, if they are connected, how would one Combine them in some way to affect some economies of scale so that instead of having 10 or 15 of these revolts, you'd have one kind of global insurrection.
	Stefan? I think that's a fascinating question.
	Let me see if I can come up with something useful on the fly.
	Solve the entire world problems and you have 30 seconds.
	I would say that the first thing that people need to understand is that the initiation of force won't solve problems.
	Now, We do have the initiation of significant forceful and tyrannical deaths, so a kind of international economic fraud that is going on through the selling of future generations to bribe current citizens within countries.
	People need to understand that first and foremost.
	I think they really need to understand that setting up someone new in power is simply going to reset the system to have it start all over again.
	The Arab Spring is really being driven by food prices and commodity prices.
	So, for instance, 40% of the Egyptian population lives on less than $2 a day.
	This is another argument for a stateless society, is that Egypt was one of the first countries to come up with a government over 6,000 years ago, and 6,000 years later, 40% of the population is still eating their own toenails for breakfast.
	If that's not a damnation of an entire system, I don't know what is.
	So there's, you know, two ways that societies or people for that matter change.
	The first is they have an intellectual or moral or philosophical enlightenment where they rise above the everyday moments of their disasters and look at the big picture.
	The other is that they simply hit a wall And then they kind of recoil and go in some other direction.
	I think that society as a whole has hit a wall.
	Government finances in the West have hit a wall.
	The amount of poverty and destruction in the Middle Eastern dictatorships, which are largely funded by the West, particularly America, they've hit a wall.
	And it's my hope that people will say, what's the nature of this wall?
	How big is it? How can we understand it?
	How did we get here? From a multi-generational standpoint, rather than just throwing Molotov cocktails at people in costumes with riot shields and hoping that that's going to achieve something, it is a moral, philosophical and intellectual revolution, a renewed commitment to the non-aggression principle, a rejection of the initiation of force as a way of solving problems.
	That's what we need. That will encompass all kinds of abuses throughout society, from the personal, to the familial, to the relational, to the statist.
	And that's the commitment that we need.
	Absent that, we're just going to go round and round with these same problems over and over again.
	I want to follow up on that a little bit because what I've observed is you've got now millions of people around the world in these cities, Madrid being the latest example, tens of thousands of people on the street.
	And when you add them all up, there are millions of people now, and they're protesting essentially against the same thing.
	The austerity measures that were forced upon them, By their corrupt politicians getting in bed with the bankers.
	So they have a monolithic enemy, and yet they have their defense or their Their pushback is not unified.
	It's not monolithic. You know, when I just talked to people in Madrid recently, I asked many people there, do you feel common cause with the other protests happening around the world?
	And they're very reluctant to say that they are.
	They want to feel like they're special, that their cause is the most important cause.
	And so that level of the ego, even in A situation where you're having your income stolen from you, your net worth stolen from you, your country's assets stolen from you, the ego is still prevalent and keeping people from reaching out to their fellow human beings to create this wall of dissent.
	And this ego is being fed, of course, through all of the machinations, not only through the political end, but through the mass media and through the light entertainment end, through the Twitch end of the games and everything else.
	So how do we break through it?
	How do you break through it as a philosopher?
	Do you give them one book to read?
	If they only had to read one book, what would it be?
	Aristotle? What would they read to get their brains oriented in the right way here?
	Well, I mean, I have a bunch of free books on my website.
	I would humbly suggest those.
	I have a book on ethics, which makes the case.
	I have a book on stateless societies, practical anarchy and everyday anarchy, which make the case for voluntarism.
	So they're all free at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
	People can check those out. There's lots of resources on mises.org.
	But I would say fundamentally this, to the citizens of the world, let me get on my grandiose soapbox here.
	What I would say to people is to recognize that the government that you have has no loyalty or obligation to you.
	The government is bribing you.
	The government is trying to give you something for nothing and selling off your children for the sake of giving you filthy lucre in the present.
	That is a dishonorable and horrible situation to be in.
	In order to give you stuff, the governments that you have have to borrow stuff.
	In other words, they have a stronger relationship with the banks who lend them money to bribe you with than they have with you.
	And when push comes to shove, governments will side with the banks who keep them afloat rather than the citizens who they bribe.
	This has been the case throughout history.
	If you look at the Roman Empire with its bread and circuses, mass drugging through entertainment of the people, it's the same thing that is going on today.
	The government owns you.
	The government does not care about your long-term happiness.
	The government does not care about your long-term well-being any more than a farmer cares for the long-term happiness, health and liberty of his cows.
	You are farmed.
	You are a tax slave.
	You are a resource used to get money out of banks to bribe you with and the majority of the bribes also stay with the ruling class both political and financial.
	Governments are not there to help you.
	Governments are there to control you and to use you as collateral.
	So the idea that if you get somebody else in the seat of power that you will become a free human being is a mad delusion that has never happened in the entire six to ten thousand year history of the state.
	The government is not your friend.
	The government is your owner.
	And we need to free ourselves from ownership.
	And the only way to do that is to understand that we cannot give individuals the right to initiate force through law.
	There is no other solution than that.
	One last question.
	We have about 30 seconds left.
	What about fighting austerity with austerity?
	It worked for Gandhi.
	He was subjected to the imperial ambitions of the British Empire.
	We wanted to impose austerity measures on India, and his idea was to impose austerity measures on Britain by depriving them of cotton.
	No. By depriving them of...
	The taxes from salt.
	He went march to the sea.
	Okay, we're going to fix this up in the edit.
	By depriving them from the taxes on the salt.
	And he had the famous march to the sea, of course.
	So he's fighting, using austerity to fight austerity.
	Is there anything, one thing, that all of these people unified could Be austere about in their own day-to-day life to fight austerity with austerity in this Gandhi-like way that you can see, Stefan.
	Yeah, absolutely. I would say just refuse to participate in a corrupt system.
	Don't pretend that your vote is going to buy you freedom and whatever you can do to keep assets away from the government is very, very important in terms of tax minimization, in terms of finding ways to avoid getting involved in the system.
	Absolutely. Every dollar you give to the government is going to be used as collateral to borrow or print 10 more dollars, which you're going to be on your children are going to be indebted to.
	So absolutely try and avoid working within the system as much as possible.
	But India is a terrible example in some ways, because although they managed to throw off the British imperialists, what did they get?
	They got Nehru and his socialist government afterwards.
	So they just exchanged one boss for another boss.
	You just switched the colors of the bosses.
	You didn't gain any more freedom, because they did not understand, and there's no way they could have back then.
	That the initiation of force is always wrong.
	So focus and study the philosophical principles at the root of ethics.
	And from there, the sunrise of reason and evidence will free society as a whole.
	But individual strategies can only work if it's part of a larger pattern of understanding and progress.
	And a true moral revolution will change the world.
	Simply fighting against the system without really understanding its cause will only tend to replicate it.
	All right. That's all the time we have for on this episode of On the Edge.
	Stefan Molyneux, thanks so much for being on the show.
	Thank you, Max. It was a real pleasure.
	All right. That's going to do it for this edition of On the Edge.
	My guest this week was Stefan Molyneux of freedomainradio.com.
	Check it out. If you want to send me an email, please do so at ontheedgeoppresstv.com.

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