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Aug. 28, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:57:33

1986 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show, 28 August 2011

A rebuttal to 'Why I am not a Libertarian,' anarchism and authority, Bitcoins and the state, lie detectors, sense-data and philosophy, and the economics of debt.

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio, August the 28th, 2011, at 2 p.m.-ish.
	And it's the Sunday call-in show.
	I'm just going to record the intro for a video.
	So a few people, more than a few people, have sent me a recent article put out by a fine writer called Why I Am Not a Libertarian.
	And so I thought we'd just...
	I haven't read it yet. I kind of like this doing it live and see how that goes.
	So he writes, of all the political movements out there, libertarians have the coolest rhetoric.
	No matter what the issue is, they get to talk about freedom versus tyranny and quote all that rousing stuff the founder said about King George.
	It's also the perfect belief system for a young male and maybe by now young females too.
	You don't need knowledge or experience of any specific situations.
	You just need to understand the one big idea that solves everything other than a small and approximately humbled An appropriately humbled military and judicial establishment government is bad.
	Protect life, protect property, enforce contracts, and leave everything else to the market.
	I should know, he writes, 35 years ago I was a 19-year-old libertarian and I learned all the arguments.
	Now I'm a progressive, a liberal, whatever.
	These days even I have to shake my head at how often I'm tempted to quote Marx.
	I think he means Karl, not Richard.
	What happened? Well, I suppose I could stroke my white beard and pontificate vaguely about the benefits of 35 years of experience, but I'm thinking that a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires me to be a little bit more specific.
	When you escape a sweeping worldview like libertarianism, you usually don't find an equally sweeping critique right away.
	A broad reframing may come later, but the transformation starts with a few things that stick in your craw and refuse to let themselves be swallowed.
	Sweet mother of God, I mean, this guy's not a bad writer, but lordy, lordy, lordy, can we make an argument at some point?
	Okay, so he says, for example, when I was leaving fundamentalist Christianity, one of the first things that bothered me was the genealogy of Jesus.
	The Bible contains two irreconcilable ones in Matthew and Luke.
	And they can't both be the gospel truth.
	Now, decades later, that issue is nowhere near the top of my why I am not a fundamentalist list.
	I can understand that. So let me start with some specific simple things before I launch into more abstract philosophy.
	Plague! I recommend that anyone thinking about becoming a libertarian read The Great Influenza by John Barry.
	It doesn't say a word about political philosophy, but it does compare how various American cities handled the Spanish flu of 1918, which globally killed more people than World War I. Okay,
	so... You know when you're going to start out with generalized insults, like, well, I was young, and it's a perfect philosophy for a young person who doesn't understand anything about anything and wants to, you know, when you escape.
	Libertarianism is not a worldview. The non-aggression principle is not a worldview.
	Like, you know, stand over here, it looks a little different.
	Stand over here, it looks a little different.
	It's not a worldview. It's a principle.
	And so, no arguments yet.
	And then, plague.
	Plague? Plague of all, especially the Spanish plague.
	Of the post-World War I period, huge numbers of people, I think 20 million people around the world died.
	The plague was an entirely status phenomenon to begin with.
	The plague occurred when masses of soldiers were decommissioned at the end of World War I and returned home.
	So the war was not exactly a libertarian or anarchist or free market endeavor.
	The First World War was an entirely status phenomenon.
	And so I'm not really sure how the failure of a plague generated by the state and the failure of certain government agencies to deal with that is somehow a vindication of the government.
	Again, this just blows my mind.
	And of course, if you live in a free society, people are probably going to have lots of health insurance.
	and the health insurance is going to contain various fine print mechanisms for dealing with plague or dealing with some sort of outbreak because insurance companies don't want everyone to get sick if they're health insured.
	So it's not a problem that the free market can't deal with.
	It's just this has been entirely created.
	The whole Spanish influence is entirely created by the government.
	Let's see here.
	Global warming.
	There's a reason why small government candidates deny global warming.
	Denial is the only answer they have.
	Global warming is a collective problem and there is no individualistic solution to it.
	Even market-based approaches like cap and trade require a massive government intervention to create the market that attacks the problem.
	Again, I'm not sure how global warming is a free market created or caused problem.
	So, The government has been controlling pollution for about 150 years.
	So if there's a big problem with pollution, such as people who believe in global warming, if there's a big problem with pollution, first place to look to is the government or the agency that's responsible for controlling said pollution, for managing and dealing with said pollution.
	That would be the government.
	And so to say that it's a problem that needs government when the government's been in charge of a problem it's obviously failed to solve, like global warming, It's one aspect of things that doesn't work.
	I mean, the very existence of corporations is a disaster for the environment because corporations allow profits to be accrued from customers, taken out of the corporation, and given to individuals.
	The corporation then becomes a legal shield for any...
	Retribution or tort or suing that occurs on the basis of the ruination of other people's property through pollution.
	And so you've got this massive legal shield that protects individuals who've profited from the despoiling of the countryside.
	They can't be touched personally.
	So that's the way you get rid of corporations.
	The second thing you do is say, what is the greatest polluter on the planet?
	Well, it's the government.
	And so having the government deal it is really like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.
	And how about the fact that the government stole from the unborn in order to bribe everybody with roads, particularly in the post-war period?
	The government's been taking over and expanding roads forever.
	Now, of course, those roads are all falling apart.
	I was just reading about all this stuff in Montreal.
	People are terrified to drive across bridges because they built all this crap for Expo 67, which is now falling apart.
	So the government built all these roads, which stimulated the production of cars and everybody was far-flung.
	And, of course, that has a lot to do with With global warming for people who believe in it, so again, this is just tip of the iceberg stuff, but they put government in charge of fisheries as this happened in the East Coast, and a 400-year sustained resource collapses within a decade or two.
	So again, I don't know how global warming suddenly becomes a free market issue.
	So let's see. Property.
	Again, I won't do the whole thing because I'm not entirely sure of the quality of these are.
	These are just assertions. Well, there are plagues, so we need a big government.
	Well, there's global warming, so we need a big government.
	Well, it's not a lot of research that's going into this.
	So, I had to live, he says, outside the libertarian worldview for many years before I began to grasp the deeper problem with it.
	Property. Every property system in history, and all the ones I've been able to imagine, are unjust.
	So a government that establishes a property system, defends it, and then stops it.
	And then stops. It's an agent of injustice.
	So a government that establishes a property system, defends it, and then stops is an agent of injustice.
	Oh yeah, so this is the problem of, well, how would we devolve publicly owned properties to privately owned people, or to private people without massive injustice?
	Yeah, that's a big problem.
	That's a problem of, that's a technical problem, it's not a moral problem.
	That's a technical problem. Libertarians, no, sorry, let me rephrase that, because it is to some degree a moral problem, that people who've been stolen from should have some restitution.
	Libertarians tend to take property as a given, as if it were natural or existed prior to any government.
	But defining what can be owned, what owning it means, and keeping track of who owns what, that's a government intervention in the economy that dwarfs all other government interventions.
	You see, ownership is a social thing, not an individual thing.
	I can claim I own something, but what makes my ownership real is that the rest of you don't own it.
	My ownership isn't something I do, it's something we do.
	Okay, yeah, I agree.
	If I say I own a car, other people have to agree that I own that car and not try and use it, or at least if they do, they're subject to some sort of sanction.
	Aside, he writes, this is why it's completely false to say the government programs primarily benefit the poor.
	Property is a creation of government.
	So the primary beneficiaries of government are the people who own things, the rich.
	So the primary beneficiaries of government are the people who own things, the rich.
	Okay, so if government protects property and you have more property, you disproportionately benefit from government protecting your property rights since you have more property.
	All right. Again, I think that's an observation.
	It's not really a judgment. Property and labor.
	It's worthwhile to go back and read the justification of property that were given in the early days of capitalism.
	The most famous and influential of such justification was in John Lark's 1960-90 classic, The Second Treatise of Civil Government, Locke admits that both reason and Christian revelations say God gave the will to all people in common.
	Alright, so he didn't actually make that last argument.
	Let's see if there's anything else that's...
	Okay.
	Yeah, so his argument here is that...
	Everybody should have the access to the means of production, right?
	So, in Lachshund to gather a state of nature, only laziness could keep an able-bodied person poor because the means of production, nature, was just sitting there waiting for human labor to turn it into property.
	Today's economic environment is very different, but our intuitions haven't kept up.
	Our anxiety today isn't that there won't be enough goods in the world, and it isn't fear that our own laziness will prevent us from working to produce those goods.
	Our fear is that the onus of the means of production won't grant us access, so we never have the opportunity to apply our labor.
	Okay, so his argument is that everybody should have access to the means of production.
	The means of production, of course, are capital goods, capital machinery, factories, and so on.
	So if you work in a factory, you don't have a factory, you don't have access to the means of production.
	I mean, to me, that's very much taking a snapshot of the world and saying there's an injustice in it.
	Well, where did the means of production come from?
	Well, for a lot of people in the Industrial Revolution, the means of production came from their own hard work, from their own savings, from their own entrepreneurial risk-taking and so on.
	And that's how they got the means of production.
	And so if other people want to compete with them, that's great.
	But lots of people don't want to be entrepreneurs.
	And why should they have to be entrepreneurs?
	A lot of people go to work 9 to 5.
	They work to live. They don't live to work.
	And I don't think that there's anything wrong with that.
	I don't think there's anything bad about that.
	And of course, you can easily have access to the means of production.
	There's two ways that you can gain access to the means of production.
	The first is that you scrimp and you save and you take risks and you go into debt and you buy stuff and you have a product idea and you work 80 hours a week for years to build enough resources to get a hold of the means of production.
	Whether that's a t-shirt printing press or a factory, you know, it's up to you.
	That's what you can do. So the other way, of course, that you get access to the means of production is you rent it from the capitalist and you Accept more stable but reduced wages because you're taking fewer risks.
	Anybody who wants access to the means of production is automatically taking a significant risk because business failures are huge and numerous and almost endless.
	Whereas if you say, well, I don't want to buy a printing press, I just want to make t-shirts, then you can take your wages and you get access to the means of production by accepting wages and giving a certain portion of those wages is overhead to the person who's actually bought the means of production.
	Everybody has access to the means of production if they want because the means of production for the most part are pretty useless without people wanting access to them.
	I guess robots to some degree, but people have to, you know, if you have a factory some people at least have to be in there who have access to the means of production so that your factory can actually make stuff.
	So again, I mean, there's nothing here about the non-aggression principle.
	There's nothing here that is philosophical, but I certainly do accept that That a problem that is, I think, misidentified, and it's consistently misidentified in these sort of Marxist analyses of the free market, is that, okay, so the means of production, let's say that it is exclusive and it is a form of economic power and it is a form of domination and so on.
	Well, okay, great. Let's accept that as an argument and say that those aspects or those hierarchies which contain within them Domination and unjust power are bad.
	I don't see how we solve owning a factory by creating a very powerful government.
	Because is not a very powerful government much worse than somebody owning a factory?
	In terms of its ability to impose Power and control on those below it.
	I don't think that we solve the problem of injustice and an imbalance of merely economic power by creating a monolithic leviathan state with the ability to start up its own laws, initiate force at will, probably print its own money, I'm sure he would be keen on that as a liberal, and to imprison at a whim.
	I don't really think that that solves the problem of someone owns a factory and somebody doesn't.
	Because that's considered to be an unjust hierarchical and exploitive situation.
	Creating a monolithic government does not solve that problem at all.
	Because, as he rightly points out, the state benefits the rich.
	So, of course, the best way To have a churn, to have a turnover in the classes is to have as small a government as possible because big corporations will always overtake the government and use it for its own ends.
	Whereas if there's no government, then corporations are going to rise and fall based upon the whims and preferences of the customers and of the employees, which to me is a much more stable situation.
	So again, I'll put a link to this in the video and on the Sunday show notes, but not a very A good article, not very well thought out, but, you know, as always, interesting to read.
	So let's get on to the callers, and thank you for your patience.
	We have Irregular Me up first.
	Excellent. Oh my gosh.
	Hello. Hello.
	Germany again. Alec here. Hi.
	Hi. Wow, there are not so many callers there.
	Actually, I wanted to just do a quickie.
	Wait, I just had a dream about this, but go on.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	Actually, I wanted to only ask you, and I'm very sure you mentioned it somewhere previously, and actually you mentioned it partly in your speech right now, was about...
	What do you say to these very hardcore anarchists who don't only want to have abstinence of a state, but also don't want to have any rulers at all?
	What actually anarchy says without ruler?
	I mean, yeah, of course they would have still the liberty, like if there are entrepreneurs around, and they would have maybe top-to-bottom hierarchies.
	Of course, they could still say no to that.
	I mean, they've got their free choice here.
	But there are these extreme people out there who really say they don't want to have any rulers in any means.
	And do they say this in a way that is comprehensible to somebody else?
	No, because if they do, then they're certainly willing to submit to grammar, right?
	Yeah, that's true. They're certainly willing to submit to syntax and, you know, correct word usage.
	So I think for somebody to say, I will submit to no one and to nothing is, well, you already lost the grammar, so maybe you want to rethink that position.
	That would be my... Look, I mean, there's two kinds of, you could say, authority.
	Authority! There's two kinds of authority, right?
	So the first kind of authority...
	is the authority of the expert and the authority of the expert is gained through the slow and patient acquisition of knowledge and the wise application of that knowledge and the beneficial exercise of that knowledge which gains trust in the wise old man Solomon who's good at resolving disputes and so on.
	That's this one kind of authority.
	And it's earned, right?
	I mean, my dentist has authority over my teeth.
	He has more authority than I do over my teeth.
	Because, you know, it's often struck me, like, what kind of bizarre sadist would come up with the idea that scratching your gums was really good for your teeth?
	I mean, like, what a freaky thing to do, right?
	And so, there's that kind of thing.
	I mean, the mechanic who fixes my car, I assume that he knows what he's doing.
	He seems to. And so, he has...
	I submit to his authority. He may say that I need something and I'm going to either trust him or find some new mechanic.
	So those two types of authority, right?
	The first is the one that's earned and is imperfect, right?
	But earned. And the other is the kind that is aggressively or violently imposed, right?
	The state makes all these rules and the state prints money and all that sort of stuff.
	And I think that the confusion among some anarchists is to confuse earned authority from imposed authority.
	And if you don't want to have any kind of authority, then I guess that's fine if you want, although anybody who communicates it, again, is facing a sort of UPB violation in an aesthetic kind of way.
	But yeah, there's nothing wrong with authority as long as it's chosen and can be revoked outside of contract anytime.
	I mean, if my dentist is not good...
	Then I can switch to another dentist if I don't, you know, like my teeth are falling out or whatever.
	So as long as it's voluntary, a submission to authority is fine.
	But I mean, and to me, a lack of capacity to submit to legitimate authority is a sign of immaturity.
	The people from who I've heard stuff like that, I can totally colorize this with that argument or statement that you just made here.
	Yeah, I mean, the first thing I'd say is, so...
	How was your childhood? No, seriously, it's a perfectly sensible question to ask.
	Because we all have significant experience with authority that starts from our childhood.
	That is our very first exposure to authority.
	And hopefully we are exposed to the benevolent authority that makes Recent arguments and so on and respects differences and negotiates and all that kind of good peaceful parenting stuff.
	But if somebody has, to me, an irrational attitude towards authority or is unable to distinguish between voluntary and violent authority, then the first place I would ask is, okay, well, what was your initial experience of authority?
	What were your early experiences of authority?
	Now, either that person...
	Like, there's a couple of possibilities.
	Either that person had a really great experience with authority when they were young, which is interesting because then something else must have intervened at some point to give them more of a negative view.
	And that could be some experience or it could be some argument that would be very fruitful to hear about.
	That is almost never the case.
	I mean, I'd say never, but never say never at this kind of stuff, right?
	But the second is that they had a negative series of experiences with authority when they were children, but they have worked through that, right?
	They've sort of come to an awareness of it.
	They've come to a moral evaluation of it.
	They've probably hopefully been to therapy or at least done a significant amount of self-work and self-knowledge to understand their relationship to authority, in which case they understand the relationship between their early experience of authority and their existing beliefs about authority, which is a good thing to know.
	Again, this is extremely rare because usually when You work through your initial impressions of authority, you don't miss the obvious things like there's a difference between voluntary and violent authority.
	But the third, and by far the most likely option, is that they had significantly negative experiences with authority when they were children.
	Which remain unprocessed in their minds and have coagulated into an irrational set of abstractions that are keeping their emotional pain at bay.
	You know, that's just a theory.
	It's a possibility.
	It's something that I've certainly seen borne out.
	A whole number of times throughout the course of my life in talking about ideas with people.
	And of course, if somebody's surprised at that question, like someone says, well, there's no authority that's legitimate.
	It's like, oh, can you tell me a little bit about your early experiences with authority?
	If they're like, what the hell does that have to do with anything?
	Well, if they don't know that it might have something to do with it, then their self-knowledge is very low.
	And I, you know, I just generally don't get involved in discussions with people whose level of self-knowledge is very low because you're not talking about what's really going on.
	You're just making up a bunch of abstractions to avoid things.
	Cool. Cool, cool.
	Thanks. Well, do let me know.
	I mean, if... If this theory turns out to be wildly incorrect, I'd certainly like to know about it.
	I totally agree.
	I think the one with the grammar was great.
	I'll definitely write that one down.
	The people I'm talking about are mostly these kind of people who are the main train station sitting there in black clothes and saying nonsense stuff from them all day long.
	That might be a cry for help, like, please ask me about my history because I can't handle it alone.
	Yeah, I totally agree.
	Totally agree. Other subject.
	You haven't talked since a while.
	I mean, it's a very young industry.
	Bitcoins. I would like to talk a little bit about bitcoins.
	What do you think about the recent developments that they're like forks popping up?
	There's like solid coin that came up right now and other things which failed a little bit.
	But I don't know.
	You would like to talk a little bit about that?
	I am not particularly aware of what's new.
	I mean, last time I heard, you know, they had some security breach and all this sort of stuff, but I haven't really heard about anything that's hyped off.
	I mean, if you have something to talk about, I certainly would be happy to hear, but I don't think I would have much to add.
	Yeah, I mean, I just follow, there was this, what was it called, a conference, I think, in New York, Bitcoin conference.
	And then there is since, I think, 21st of August, there is this, came out this solid coin, and they claim that they improved the code and made transactions faster and solved some other issues, which was mining related and all that kind of stuff.
	And since ever then, the exchange price of the Bitcoins fell down again.
	I'm just observing it.
	I really love it, this Bitcoin whole thing.
	Totally digging into it.
	That's also my way of how I'm transacting donations towards you.
	You changed your donation, your Bitcoin donation address.
	I think you changed it.
	No. Because you didn't?
	No, I really didn't.
	That's weird. Because there's this block explorer, right?
	Where you can see all the transaction which goes to one address.
	And when I was checking on your address, Oh dear.
	It was very empty.
	It was very empty. And then when I... Well, let's not get into the...
	Sorry, let's not get into the boring technical details about my Bitcoin address.
	Let's try and keep the show peppy.
	And somebody has just mentioned in the Bitcoin wasn't breached, just one of the wallet services.
	I think that's important.
	Look, I mean, the reality of Bitcoin is that it's a fascinating experiment to see collective problem solving in the realm of...
	Of currency.
	I mean, I think it's fascinating.
	And anybody who's interested in the free market, I think should be reasonably interested in what's going on in Bitcoin.
	Now, Bitcoin is not, repeat not, what currency would look like in a free market.
	Because Bitcoin is operating under a status monopoly and has to take all of the normal and natural and inevitable precautions of that, of operating within that monopoly.
	So, you know, to take an extreme analogy, it's like the Underground Railroad, which helped to ferret slaves out from the South in the 19th century up to Canada or to other places.
	Yes, it certainly is true that in a free world, blacks would drive from the South to Canada, and they may even move from the South to Canada because they have a fetish for frostbite.
	But when they are traveling through the Underground Railroad under the threat of slavery, It is not analogous to how things are actually going to work in terms of travel or whatever in a free market.
	And so the fact that Bitcoins is operating under a series of status restrictions is extremely significant.
	And so I think it's a fascinating experiment in terms of like an underground railroad trying to get people's value into something that is...
	More collective, less centrally controlled, and so on.
	I think that's really great. And I think it's really fascinating to watch.
	But it's important not to mistake it for how things would operate in a truly free market.
	Meanwhile, I think we fixed the thing with the donation address.
	You've got different ones on YouTube on your website.
	So that's where the confusion came in.
	Oh, I should probably fix that then.
	Yeah. For the other topic we just talked before, I did have another question.
	Could you give me some examples of earned authority in an anarchist society?
	Well, sure. I mean, a DRO would be an earned authority.
	And I mean, to hand over...
	My reputation in exchange for contract protection is a very sensitive thing to do.
	I mean, this is one of the most common questions I get asked about the DRO model is, you know, let's say some DRO just convicts you unjustly of something and says you stole some guy's car when you didn't and your reputation is ruined and this and that and the other.
	It's like, well, that is a significant problem.
	There is a high degree of vulnerability that is associated in Getting involved with people economically in this kind of way.
	It's a very, very vulnerable thing to get into, and I can completely understand that.
	But, I mean, the usual answer is the twofold answer.
	One is, how is that problem solved by the state?
	Right? I mean, the state convicts people unjustly all the time.
	I mean, there was some nutjob doctor recently I was reading about, who for many years claimed that he could do bite mark analysis and match it with people's dental records and get things completely right.
	It turns out to have been... Completely nonsense.
	And just made up crap.
	But, you know, many, many people were convicted on this man's biased testimony.
	Eyewitness accounts are notoriously, notoriously unreliable, of course.
	And that's a significant problem.
	I mean, the whole legal system is nonsense as a whole that we currently have.
	Because, I mean, with the exception of some DNA evidence, which I think is more valuable, But the legal system would do far better if you just got rid of lawyers and put in lie detectors.
	Lie detectors, when properly administered, seem to have a 90-plus success rate, way higher than something like identification of a suspect in a lineup and whatever.
	He was 30 feet away at night running the other way, but I know who he is.
	And you could then deal with most trials in a sort of very quick and efficient manner.
	Would that be perfect? Well, no, of course not.
	You'd try and find as much backup, as much, you know, try and find ways of collecting as much evidence as possible.
	But the idea that this sort of cross-examination of amateurs by experts is the way to get at the truth, as opposed to just something as simple as a lie detector test, is...
	And of course, a lie detector test can pick up stuff which a cross-examiner could never pick up.
	Because there's just, you know, the person just denies and there's no evidence, right?
	But of course, you're not going to see a change in the legal system that, to the detriment of lawyers, when the legal system is staffed, controlled, and manned and administered mostly by lawyers.
	Of course, they're not going to do that.
	So, yeah, there is a vulnerability in saying, look, in return for protection of property and protection of contracts, I'm willing to hand over my reputation to you.
	I think that's...
	I think that is a vulnerable thing.
	Of course, DROs would have to have significant penalties against anybody within their organization who fabricated any kind of evidence or anything like that.
	Like this Dominique Strauss-Kahn has been released from prison.
	Or released, I guess he was out on bail, right?
	So he's been released. The case against him fell apart.
	Now, who in the government in America is going to face any sanctions for Jailing a man, destroying his reputation, at least to a significant degree.
	And then having to withdraw the case.
	I mean, what negative sanctions do they face?
	If you proposed that for DRO system, everybody would think you were insane.
	And you couldn't design something more corrupt.
	But then they say, well, the government solves this problem.
	I mean, it's just natural.
	So, yeah, there could be injustice in a DRO system.
	There's no question of that. An identical twin of yours may...
	Do a crime that you don't have an alibi for.
	To reduce the possibility of something unjust occurring.
	Could something unjust occur? Absolutely, of course, no question.
	But since it's an argument from effect, we can subject it to the test of degree.
	Certainly in a free system, there will be no such thing as the illegality of drugs.
	Even people who are staunchly anti-drug would find it probably kind of tough and annoying to come up with the Hundreds of billions of dollars required to prosecute a war on drugs out of their own meager earnings, and so it's not going to happen unless you can socialize the costs of your particular prejudice.
	It just doesn't work. And so, yeah, I mean, you know, people say, well, I can find imperfections in a free society, therefore we should stick with our society.
	But that's just an irrational, it's a completely irrational argument.
	It's a completely irrational argument.
	It's like saying that I could get some other kind of cancer if I quit smoking, so I'm not going to quit smoking.
	You might, absolutely, but you still need to quit smoking, obviously, right?
	So, I mean, in terms of risk to health, maybe there's other pleasures that make up for it.
	I mean, that's just a minor example, but the idea that there may be imperfection In a free system, which then justifies the continuance of a compulsory system, is just an obvious defense, and it's an emotional defense, because it has so little reason in it.
	I mean, it's like saying, you know, some slaves might not get jobs, so we've got to keep slavery.
	Well, I mean, that's just an argument that's made up to avoid having to deal with The moral argument at the basis of it, which is that slavery is immoral.
	Yeah, there may be imperfections. There will be imperfections in a free society.
	But there will be far fewer of them.
	They'll be much easier to remedy.
	And they'll be driven by demands and requirements of the customers rather than imposed from the top down through violence.
	And fundamentally, there will still be a vastly less...
	The society will be vastly less subject to the initiation of force.
	And that really is the moral goal we're after.
	Yeah, today I don't have too much actually to say, so I think I'll just pass on to any questions in the chat.
	Thank you. I appreciate your questions.
	Oh, sorry, go ahead. There was one thing earlier I saw.
	Who was writing that?
	Let me scroll up.
	Because of the lie detector, someone posted something interesting here.
	American Psychological Association, the truth about lie detectors.
	I mean, what does it say?
	Little evidence that polygraph tests can actually detect lies.
	Interesting article. Probably too long to read it out loud now entirely.
	But it seems that there is...
	Let me post it again.
	Oh, but this is the one from 1994?
	No, seriously. I mean, that's like saying that computers from 1994 weren't very good at voice recognition.
	I have no doubt that computers from 1994...
	It's 2004, actually.
	Oh, the one that I see here is a new psychophysiological detection of deception examination for security screening.
	Briefing report, October 1994.
	Is that the one? Oh, there's another one here.
	I posted the last one there.
	It was from, what is it, Bertie Balzac?
	Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.
	Okay. Okay.
	All right. Well, I'll put that in the notes to the show, and people can check it out.
	I've heard, you know, what do I know, right?
	But, I mean, I've heard that when properly administered under controlled conditions by an expert with clearly defined yes-no questions, that it can be pretty good.
	But... Yeah, I mean, even I've got like this survival app thing, or like, I don't know, there it gives recommendations that you can manipulate your blood pressure by, I don't know, squeezing a toe in your shoes and stuff like that.
	Yeah, you can do all of that, but you just ask the person to take off their shoes and tell them not to do that.
	I mean, all of that stuff is, I mean, look, all of the countermeasures are well known by the lie detector administers, and so they will make sure that That this isn't going to be the case.
	Again, I'm no expert.
	I'm just repeating.
	This is what I've heard.
	I still think that they're better than eyewitnesses, which is notoriously unreliable.
	But anyway, so...
	Yeah, it's a good point. No, it's interesting.
	Yeah, definitely. There's so much out of order.
	So any suggestions all go into a better direction, actually.
	Well, anyway, so, yeah, I don't have too much stuff, actually, to ask this time.
	I just wanted to, yeah.
	Yeah. All right. I asked my questions for today.
	Thanks. All right, so somebody's written, in a Sunday show a few weeks ago, you mentioned that when playing with Izzy, a large part of the play was fantasy play.
	In this comment, you mentioned that Izzy said, Steph, can you be this character?
	Does Izzy call you by your first name?
	How do you feel about children referring to their parents by the first names rather than calling them mom or dad?
	Izzy does not call me by my...
	I don't think Izzy even knows my first name.
	So, I mean, I can't remember what I said or if I said that incorrectly.
	I, you know, she can call me whatever she wants.
	I mean, she likes calling me Dada and I like it.
	But if, you know, we have friends whose kids call me Mr.
	Steph... Which I think is fine, too.
	They're welcome to call me Steph if they want.
	I don't mind. You know, the label is immaterial to the person, fundamentally.
	So I don't mind if Izzy, you know, wakes up one day and wants to start calling me Steph.
	I'll be curious as to why, but I'm certainly not going to say, no, you can't call me by my name.
	You have to call me by my biological label in terms of paternity.
	I just, I would think it would take a little bit of getting used to it.
	I mean, I've seen, I mean, I was around some pretty hippy-dippy kids when I was a kid, and occasionally you'd come across a kid who would call their parent by their first name or whatever.
	I'm not sure that I would encourage it because it just seems a little, I don't know, it just seems a little bit odd.
	But I certainly wouldn't have a problem with it fundamentally.
	If that's what she wants to do, that's what she wants to do.
	And I can't make it, there's no moral argument about it, so I can't exercise my authority over that.
	I could make an aesthetic preference, but that would be to ask her for a favor rather than to impose anything like that.
	Also, do you naturally speak with a mixed accent?
	Or do you naturally still retain your London accent?
	Do you feel that it was hard to fit into Canadian society with a British accent as an 11 or 12 year old?
	Do you think that by the age of 11 or 12 it is too late for someone's accent to naturally change?
	That certainly has been the case with me.
	And yeah, I did find it pretty hard to switch into Canadian society.
	The accent certainly didn't help.
	But I didn't know how to skate.
	I didn't know hockey. I didn't know baseball.
	I didn't know football, you know, like the American or North American style football.
	And nobody cared about the stuff that I was good at, like soccer and tennis or whatever.
	And so, yeah, I did find it tough to adjust.
	I think, of course, with a better family structure or family life, it would have been easier to adjust.
	But there were certainly some pretty significant adjustments.
	Now... It's easier to have a British accent than other kinds of accents.
	I mean, you may be viewed as a fruitiness incarnate, but it's still considered to be a, quote, classier accent than other kinds of accents, so it certainly could have been worse.
	But no, I've not made any effort to retain my accent, but it certainly obviously is still there to some detectable degree.
	Yeah, I was driving with Christina the other day, and we were just talking about wines and so on, and she said, oh, I don't think I've ever had a fruity wine.
	I don't think I've ever heard of a fruity wine.
	And I said, oh, isn't that your title for the biography of our marriage?
	Anyway, it's neither here nor there.
	Oh, something pretty cool happened the other day with Izzy, who was just over two and a half.
	We were driving past a hotel, and the hotel is called the Delta.
	And she knows the hotel because I used to have a gym membership back in the day, before I cut it to further feed the bitch goddess philosophy.
	And she's learning words, and so she knew that was...
	I said, what's that word? Delta, right?
	And then we stopped at the light, and...
	I sort of asked her what the word was again, just out of curiosity.
	I looked up and I noticed that you couldn't see the D because the sort of corner of the building was cutting it off.
	And I said, what's that word?
	And she said, Elta. In other words, she took the D off and pronounced it correctly.
	I thought that was just fantastic.
	I thought that was just fantastic.
	And her words...
	I mean, she's still working on letters.
	She can get her letters. My car is almost 14 years old now.
	And so I took it in to get a check-up and, you know, it's horrifying to go in.
	It's like, okay, should I just leave you with a kidney or the car to fix it?
	Because that's how it's going to be.
	And there was a big sort of semi-circular couch in the waiting room or the antechamber of physical horror as you wait for them to tell you.
	You know, they're printing it out.
	What's wrong with it? It's like, how many pages do you need in that printer to tell me everything you need to fix in my car?
	And there was a semicircular couch, and Izzy looked at that and said, that's for kitty cat!
	And I sort of stood up and I looked, and yes, it was a C. And so she's seeing letters everywhere.
	Like these little, she sees X's in the struts, like exit!
	Close enough. So her fascination with letters and language is just barreling along a pace, and it's a beautiful, beautiful thing to watch.
	Hello? Hello.
	Steph? Hello.
	Can you hear me? I can.
	I wanted to ask you two things.
	One was the following.
	A lot of the existentialist and subjectivist and basically what I consider nonsense philosophy deals a lot with the subjective experience.
	And ultimately, I am coming to conclude the argument basically that humans are basically objects plus consciousness and volition.
	And so I wanted to To hear what would be your take on said argument and basically just ask you what you think therapy or psychology would look like or will look like in a stateless or free society where there are no entry barriers and there's more of a free market.
	Okay, let's start with the first because you said...
	What do I make of the argument?
	But all I heard was a statement.
	If you can just tell me what the argument is.
	You said there was an existential approach, that human being was object plus will, and I just want to make sure I understand.
	And if you could just break the mic a little.
	I'm getting a lot of breathing from your mic.
	You need to move it further away from me around.
	How about here? Somewhere in between would be good now.
	It sounds like you're on the far side of the moon.
	Here? That's great.
	Okay, so yeah, if you'd give me the argument...
	Well, there's a lot of...
	What I've read is basically a distinction or division between the subject, object...
	from the existentialists that ultimately seems like a trap into concluding that therefore you cannot make objective external standards for things such as ethics and the organization of society because everything is subjective and we should focus on the subjective experience of the existentially like the being and the object and phenomena and all of this and for me It's basically we are just another type,
	another category of objects that have volition and have free will but fundamentally there is a human nature that until we evolve into a different species is describable and sort of like what you do with UPV is basically describing how or prescribing and describing how can humans behave Those objects with volitions,
	with capacity for making conscious choices, how can they behave in order to avoid conflict?
	And so, for me, the distinction between subject and object seems a bit like a trap into just focusing on the subjective, because we're just...
	I mean, it's not...
	Sorry, there's way too many thoughts here for me to process what you're saying, because you're making a lot of sort of statements, and I respect you for that.
	I just want to make sure that I can Deal with the one that sort of came up first.
	So let me sort of see if I can understand what it is you mean, and then I give a response, right?
	So one of the arguments around subjectivism goes like this.
	Our brain is encased in a skull and is floating in water.
	Our brain does not have hands that it can directly touch the world with.
	It does not have eyes that it can see the world with.
	It does not have a tongue through which it can taste the world.
	Everything comes to the brain through the sensory apparatus itself.
	You know, inches away from the body.
	And so the brain is merely receiving electrical impulses that are containing sense data.
	And therefore, since the brain does not have any direct connection Right.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, and if you look at it from a sort of purely biological standpoint, the brain is sort of floating in the brain in cerebrospinal fluid, and it is true that our neurons sort of process and integrate the externalities, but that doesn't mean that it's all projection.
	Right, yeah, well look, I mean, I don't care about the content of someone's argument initially.
	I don't care about the content of someone's argument.
	I care about the form of the argument and everything that is implicit within the form of the argument.
	That's what I care about first because you can answer, I think, about 90% of the problems of philosophy simply by looking at the assumptions embedded in the form of the argument.
	So if somebody says to me, everything is subjective, then they are relying on the objectivity Of the world to communicate to me that the world is subjective.
	And that just fails. That just fails.
	Yeah, it's exactly what you mentioned at the beginning about using language, because you're already using an external standard.
	Yeah, it's like somebody coming up to me and saying, you don't exist.
	Well, who the hell are you talking to then?
	Right? I mean, it's crazy.
	And so much of philosophy gets lost in this swamp of, let's forget the form of the argument and start arguing about the content.
	No, no, no, no. Fuck the content.
	Fuck the content. It's the form.
	That answers most of the questions that people have about philosophy.
	And people don't like that because philosophy historically has been a tool to exploit people.
	It is a tool to create moral rules with magical exceptions for the rulers, right?
	As I wrote, I was sort of working on a video about this, that property rights were invented by thieves to discourage competition, to get other people to respect property rights so that the thieves would have greater access to other people's pockets.
	And virtue is invented to reduce the competition for violent power over others.
	And so virtue is invented as a form of a barrier to entry for evil.
	It's a tariff to keep the foreign goods called true virtue out of the cesspool country of political and military and police power.
	And so people love to not be able to solve problems in philosophy because philosophy is not designed, historically philosophy was never designed To solve problems, but to bewilder and baffle people into confused compliance with sociopaths.
	That's sort of my argument about how it all works.
	And there's tons of arguments about this.
	I've done that whole series on the trial and death of Socrates.
	Right, and Nietzsche said that.
	Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, and it's not like a staggeringly new idea of mine.
	And so people don't want to look at the form of of the argument and what is implicit in the form of the argument because it answers so many questions that philosophy is really not designed to answer.
	Philosophy is designed to baffle and bewilder people into obeying people who have no conscience.
	The conscience is almost invented as a tool of domination.
	And so, yeah, I mean, that's why people never want to look at the...
	So people say you can't get an ought from an is.
	Well, you just did. It's so simple, right? So, you know, don't take a bus to my house and tell me the buses don't exist.
	I mean, it's ridiculous. Right, Steph.
	I don't mean to interrupt, but what I feel uncomfortable is that I don't feel like I'm completely reasoning it all the way, but I'm doing like a big leap into another conclusion to reject that argument, which is to say...
	Humans are just another category of objects that can be described in their nature and can be prescribed for functionality, and that functionality is UPB. So that's where I feel that I make a quantum leap that I can't explain.
	And so I'd like to hear at least what you have to say about such a statement.
	Well, I mean, you said something earlier about how UPB is designed to resolve conflicts or to reduce conflicts.
	That's not... I mean, that's not...
	That's not what it's for.
	That's like saying the theory of relativity was invented to how people design nuclear weapons.
	No, it may be a consequence, but that's not what it's for.
	UPV, the way I understand it, analyzes the functional applicability of ethical theories.
	And those ethical theories exist with the purpose of avoiding and solving conflict in society, I think.
	No, no. The ethical theories...
	It's like saying that the purpose of capitalism is to reduce conflicts over resources.
	No, the purpose of capitalism is to respect the universal reality of property rights.
	But the purpose of capitalism is to be true, to be valid, to be consistent, to be empirically verifiable.
	It's like the purpose of a scientific theory is not whatever is developed through that scientific theory.
	But the purpose of the scientific theory is to accurately describe and predict the behavior of matter and energy.
	And, you know, the purpose of UPB is to check abstract theories first for logical consistency and then for empirical verification.
	That's all it's for. Because a theory which is logically inconsistent cannot be true.
	And a theory which is logically consistent but is denied by empirical reality cannot be valid, cannot be accurate, let's say.
	And so, yeah, the purpose of UPB is to simply say, Theories need to be logically consistent and empirically verifiable.
	And logically consistent is necessary but not sufficient for truth.
	Empirical verification is necessary but not sufficient for truth, because you may have something which predicts the behavior of certain matter under certain situations like Newtonian physics, which is not accurate under other situations like Einsteinian physics.
	And so, that's all it's designed to do.
	And people get all confused about UPB, and I can sort of understand it, but You'll notice, I mean, one of the things that I find very interesting about people's discussions of UPB is that where UPB has clearly demonstrated that, say, murder cannot be universally preferable behavior, and the two guys in the room argument is very clear about that, the people who oppose UPB have never accepted that.
	Like, they'll sort of bring that up and I'll give them an answer, they'll just move on to something else.
	They've never said, oh yeah, that's right, that does make sense.
	So yeah, murder, rape, and assault, and property rights, those are all validated by UPB, and there's no logical way around it, because you can't have two guys with universal preferences that oppose each other in the same room at the same time.
	That can't happen.
	And so, I mean, that's exactly the same as having a theory in physics that says, under exactly the same circumstances, one rock will fall up and one rock will fall down.
	It's just not going to happen, right?
	And so, and let's say that the only thing that UPB does is it verifies that rape is bad, murder is bad, assault is bad, and theft is bad.
	Let's say that's all it does.
	And everything else around it is wrong, you know, or is stupidly argued or confusing or whatever.
	But it really does a great job of those things.
	Just those things. You know, the four biggies of human history.
	And I think it does a pretty good job on aesthetically preferable actions as well.
	Let's say that that's all it does, is it gives you rape and murder and theft and assault.
	Well, I think that's pretty good.
	I think that's a pretty good achievement.
	I think it does a lot more than that, but let's say that's all it does.
	And people always avoid those things, right?
	They always go into some other thing.
	They try and bring in, you know, animal rights for elderly animals who accidentally contributed to Social Security but who have dementia and, you know, blah, blah, blah, right?
	They always go to the fuzzies rather than dealing with the clears.
	Well, of course, there's so much in the world that violates the four morals validated by UPB that we could spend literally five generations just dealing with those before we get to the social security dependent retarded squirrel.
	And so, you know, when people want to go, it's because they don't want to deal with the obvious ones around theft and rape and murder and assault and so on.
	They just don't want to deal with those because that's, you know, that's enough for us to do.
	We've got enough to chew on just with those, which are clearly and obviously and basically validated by UPB. But people always just want to keep going until they find some place where UPB becomes confusing or gets fuzzy or whatever.
	And that to me, again, that speaks volumes as to people's motivations around it.
	Right. The other question was about your thoughts of what therapy and psychology the field of will look like in a free society.
	I think that's a great question.
	I don't think I'm prepared to do it justice because it is such a big question.
	So let me hold off on that.
	I did actually, you know, by the by, I'm sorry, I've got some solo casts in the pipe that I'm just having some trouble finding time to process.
	But I did get a question from a fine lady some weeks ago about what would identity look like, what would our identity look like in a free society without nations or without gods or without culture as we know it now.
	And I did do a podcast on that, which I think is related.
	So I have got that one done.
	I'll never forget.
	I was in a restaurant once listening to you and I remember the phrase never left me, which is your identity or your individuality is your individual experience of reality or reality.
	Or your true self is your individual experience of reality.
	And that phrase never left my mind.
	I remember even where I heard it.
	So thank you for answering my question.
	You're very welcome. Those are great questions.
	Thank you so much, as always, for bringing them up.
	All right. Next!
	Hello? Hello.
	Hey, Stefan.
	How are you doing today? I'm good.
	How are you doing? I'm doing well.
	I've got three major questions for you and then just a quick announcement on meetups and then we can shuffle off to the next guy.
	Three major questions.
	There may be no next guy, but okay.
	Well, maybe not major, but we'll see.
	My first thing I wanted to mention was that I actually was I've finished reading Against the Gods this morning from start to finish, and I have to admit, that is the best refutation of agnosticism I have ever read.
	And especially when you mention about how they deny the existence of existence itself and how contradictory it was.
	That was really the best way to put it.
	And it was also nice how you addressed the fact that Agnostics or people that are more of that bent do so because they were essentially secular-minded people that grew up with religious parents.
	Ergo, they didn't want to really cause a fuss.
	They didn't want to cause problems.
	So that's why they were kind of that bent.
	And it really was a nice, nice way of explaining it.
	But kind of the real question to that is, what about deism?
	Because I know deism, the basic assumption behind that is that they say that, oh, we can use the scientific method and rationally prove the existence of at least one deity.
	So what about those deists?
	Are they just as bad?
	Well, I think that the way that I sort of approach these questions of religiosity and nations and cultures and so on...
	And I think about this, of course, a lot since I became a parent, is I think, I'm looking for Isabella to say, I think that based upon my experience of reality, there's an invisible sky ghost somewhere out there in the ether, who's, you know, created the universe or whatever, whatever, right?
	And I can't imagine she's ever going to do that.
	I mean, she'll have questions about where do we come from and so on, although she's starting to understand that already.
	Sorry if you could hold on for a sec. I'm just in the middle of another question, but hang tight.
	We'll put you up soon.
	And so my question would be, my question is always to look at motivations before I look at reasoning.
	And I mean, that may be Good, it may be bad, but it's certainly a methodology that I find to be the most valuable.
	Because after 25 years of talking philosophy with people, I have significant skepticism as to people's motives in discussing philosophy.
	And that is just a hard one.
	Sometimes bitter experience.
	And so when someone is driven to maintain the existence of a deity, my question is, first of all, why is this important to you?
	Why? Why is this important to you?
	And it's a fair question.
	It's a fair question to ask.
	And so I would assume that most people who are driven to...
	Come up with some argument for the existence of a deity have some personal stake in the matter.
	And I would also imagine that most people's personal stakes in the matter come from their relationships.
	In other words, if they accept that there are no gods, then how is that going to affect their personal relationships?
	Again, I'm not saying that doesn't make anyone's argument true or false in and of itself, but motivation counts.
	Motivation counts. And so if somebody is driven to create convoluted arguments about deism or things that exist before the existence of the universe and so on, then my question is always, well, why?
	Why does this matter? Why is this important to you?
	And what I've found over the years is if you dig and you really, if the person's honest, you don't have to dig very deep, is you find out that they've got an aged religious mother whose faith is perceived to be very important to her.
	Or, you know, they're married to a woman who is religious.
	And they can go as far as deism, but to go any further would be to break the silver bond of intimacy with their partner.
	That there's some reason as to why somebody is so invested in something.
	And look, that counts for me as well.
	The last thing I'd want to do is to create some rule that I'm exempt from.
	But my first question is, why?
	Why is it important? Why is this question even important?
	I mean, for a deist, obviously, if they're creating some higher power somewhere out there that is not part of any traditional religion, that you can't pray to, that isn't going to change anything, that doesn't explain anything other than a pseudo-explanation of how the universe was created 20 billion years ago, and who gives a shit about that in terms of their day-to-day living?
	Nobody. So the question is, why invest this amount of energy in something that, quite frankly, Isn't going to change anything in your life.
	Well, because it is going to change something in your life.
	And that is going to be your relationships with people who are religious.
	Right? So, I mean, if I come up with some, you know, I write some book about how there is some invisible pyramid on the far side of the moon, and I spend a year's amount of effort writing this book to make this argument...
	It's a reasonable question to ask, why is this important to you?
	Because it doesn't matter whether there's an invisible pyramid on the dark side of the moon.
	It's not going to affect anything. It's not going to change anything.
	I mean, if somebody believes that Jesus saves and you pray to Jesus for salvation from sin, and if you don't, you're going to go to hell, well, something changes.
	So I can certainly understand the motivation of Religious people, for their arguments.
	But a deist or an agnostic, by their very definition, is arguing about something that is not going to change anything in their lives, in terms of whether there's a God out there or not.
	But, becoming a strong atheist, by God, it does change things in your life.
	And I would assume that's...
	And again, that's my assumption as to why people are doing it.
	And again, that doesn't mean that their arguments are invalid.
	But to me, it's very important.
	Because if somebody comes to me with those arguments and I say, well, why is it important?
	It's like, well, I'm only interested in the truth.
	It has no effect on my personal relationships, whether I accept or don't accept the existence of God.
	Well, then I just know that it's not true.
	Because it does. It does change your relationships.
	I've got this video out on YouTube called Hatred of Atheists, which shows that atheism is worse than the new gay.
	I mean, atheists are significantly despised throughout North America and certain parts of Europe.
	I mean, they're one of the most hated and feared minorities in the world.
	And so, yeah, for people to say, well, it has no effect on my relationships if I become a strong atheist or I accept that there are no gods, that person is simply not telling the truth because it does have an effect.
	And so they either know that it's having an effect which is going to have some effect on their beliefs or they don't, in which case they just lack self-knowledge to the point where they're not going to be able to debate anything rationally.
	Sorry, but thank you so much for your kind words about that book.
	I was very pleased with that book.
	The part I liked the most was the part describing how the unconscious Well, yeah, of course.
	And there are those of us that do understand stuff like that.
	I mean, you just have to say, hey, 2 plus 2 equals 4, not 5.
	But then the problem is, do you really, since a lot of the folks that are just in the mainline public do believe that 2 plus 2 is 5 or even that it's possible in an alternate universe it would equal 5, is it really beneficial to really kind of go against, to really kind of so overtly oppose them on that? to really kind of so overtly oppose them on that?
	And in some instances, yes.
	But, you know, in other instances, it's not as much.
	And so that's kind of like where the big choice is.
	And that's why a lot of folks are kind of quiet.
	Sure.
	And look, I'm certainly not saying that everybody should, you know, ride into the blazing machine guns of public hostility.
	At every opportunity, there's no question of that.
	Absolutely. We can say, look, I am an atheist, but in this particular situation, even if religion comes up, I'm not going to talk about it.
	But that's just honesty.
	Discretion is the better part of valor.
	That, to me, is simply being honest about the situation.
	Yeah, it's pretty scary to be an atheist.
	It's easier for me than it is for a lot of people.
	But, you know, they get these messages from people, as I've mentioned before, who live in the South in some place they can't move from.
	And it's really difficult and very hard to be an atheist in society.
	Certain environments. But then what you say is, you know, this is really tough.
	I'm not going to bring it up. And that to me is honest.
	But then saying, well, I'm going to switch to deist or agnostic when it really is just social disapproval that you're scared of is not honest.
	That's twisting philosophy to serve an emotional end that is not valid, I think.
	And, you know, that's fair and whatnot.
	It's kind of a difficult situation.
	Just trying to kind of improve upon that is pushing a rock up the hill at the very least.
	My next question actually had to deal with something I was reading on a Minarchist blog, actually.
	And it was very interesting. It was called Factions, the Chains of Oppressions.
	And I reposted a portion of it that just dealt with anarchists specifically on the board.
	And it goes by the same title.
	But if you don't mind, I would like to read just a portion of it and just like a paragraph or so and just get your take on it.
	Because it was actually a very interesting, minarchist kind of argument.
	And just for the folks to just know the context, I won't go into that here about what the principal faction is.
	But if folks are more interested, just follow the links in that forum posting.
	But this is from Factions, the Chains, the Oppressions.
	One of these factions are the anarchists in certain of their various forms.
	The founders, meaning the founding fathers, enacted very few laws that acted directly on the people.
	For the most part, the laws enacted in the first few decades of the United States were laws to define, enhance, or protect the government.
	The exceptions were the moral laws, although that probably should be in quotes, also known as blue laws, which generally existed within the confines of a town's ordinance or perhaps even county ordinances, in an effort to establish a moral foundation that was comfortable to the majority of those residing there.
	Otherwise, a degree of anarchy, at least by one definition, was a part of life of the So there's the old adage that liberty is existence so long as your fist stops before it reaches my nose.
	Our individual constraint on our own actions so that we do no harm to others is perhaps the best definition of that which should be.
	I think he's kind of suggesting the non-aggression principle there a little bit.
	The modern anarchist, even those who might espouse absence of government altogether, Are not inconsistent with much of what the founders believed.
	A minimum of government is perhaps best and is without a doubt consistent with the Constitution and most state constitutions as at least as originally ratified.
	Now here's the kicker, Stefan.
	So long as anarchists adhere to the principal faction, that's basically the minarchists for the most part, the constitutionalists.
	So long as anarchists adhere to the principal faction and subordinate their beliefs, stateless society or whatever it all is, subordinate their beliefs to that principal faction, they are adherents to and a product of the United States.
	They are what America stands for.
	And I was just thinking, wow, isn't that just a little bit of a contradiction?
	Or maybe I'm wrong.
	What's your initial take on that?
	I may have just missed that last bit.
	If they adhere to the non-aggression principle?
	No, so long as anarchists adhere to the principal faction, and it was elsewhere in a different, this was actually like a four-part series, and the principal faction was essentially defined as like the typical minarchist constitutionalist position, we the people and all this stuff.
	That was kind of defined elsewhere.
	But generally that's what it is.
	That's the principal faction. Because this entire series of articles is about factions and basically different kinds of political dissonance is what it's really about.
	So, so long as anarchists adhere to the principle faction and subordinate their beliefs, the stateless society or whatever it all is, to that principle faction...
	Like minarchism, for example, they are adherence to and a product of the United States.
	They are what America stands for.
	So what about that notion that if you are an anarchist and you want to bring about the stateless society and whatever else, that you should subordinate that belief to something like minarchism or the republic or something like that?
	Is that not a contradiction?
	Is my reasoning wrong?
	What's your take on it?
	Well, I mean, to subordinate to a dominant political faction is the entire antithesis of anarchism.
	Right? I mean, that's...
	I don't know. I mean, that's like saying that the center for disease control should subordinate itself to anybody who wants to spread disease.
	It's like, no, no. Disease control, right?
	And so an anarchist should not...
	I mean, you can't rationally argue that an anarchist should ideally subordinate himself to a dominant political paradigm because...
	That's like saying that Martin Luther King Jr.
	should have really joined the KKK. It's like, I don't think you really understand what he was talking about then, right?
	I mean, that's just a misunderstanding of anarchism that is, again, you either have to think that people are emotionally defensive or intellectually retarded.
	And I go with emotionally defensive because I wish to rescue my...
	My belief in the value and virtue of humankind.
	And so, yeah, I don't, I mean, I can't understand.
	It just seems entirely contradictory to me.
	And I think it is. Well, just for folks that want to kind of understand the context of that, what the principal faction is and all that, I did provide links at the bottom of the forum posting, and the name of the forum posting is Factions, the Chains of Oppressions, parenthesis, anarchism.
	There was also another one I did from another portion of it, which was about atheism, but that one is a little harsh, and I think that one I should probably save for another time.
	But this one about anarchism I just thought was kind of simple.
	The third type of question I wanted to ask you today, and this is something that's kind of cropped up a lot, is There are returning veterans, there are former lawyers, just basically former agents of the state, legislators,
	cops, judges, bureaucrats, all those kind of people, that decide to not work for the state anymore for whatever reason and decide to try and turn their skills, that skill set they learn while they have that job, to try and benefit people in a grassroots way.
	So here's the question. Is it possible for For lack of a better term, civilians.
	Is it best for just people to learn skills or skill sets from former agents of the state with the purpose of learning how to protect yourself?
	And the second part to that, is it compliant with the non-aggression principle?
	So let's say that there's some ex-marine who's giving you survival lessons.
	Right? And like how to eat roots and berries and whatever.
	And you want to learn how to eat roots and berries because you're obviously reincarnated from a badger life form.
	And so is it wrong to take their instruction even though that instruction was gathered by the state?
	Is that right? Yes, I think that's the kernel of my question, yes.
	Basically, you're trying to take something they learned, which was in a bad context, and you're trying to kind of turn that around and turn it into something good, if that's at all possible.
	I know this might be kind of a minarchist thing, I don't know, but I just wanted to ask.
	No, look, I mean, does that mean, like, let's say that the government developed some vaccine for some illness, and you take that vaccine.
	Well, yeah, you take the vaccine.
	I'm not going to deny myself value in life because there are other people out there doing bad things.
	Look, I can control my initiation of force.
	I can say I am not going to aggress against my child.
	That's under my control.
	I'm not going to beat up my friends.
	I'm not going to dump cold water on my wife to wake her up.
	I'm going to live in a decent and civilized and peaceful way within my own life.
	I can say that and I can control that.
	And that's my moral responsibility.
	And frankly, that's where my moral responsibility ends.
	So if I'm going to sit there and say, well, I'm now responsible for the moral evils of other people.
	And all of the inevitable and highly complex effects that is going to result from other people's violation of the non-aggression principle, then that seems to me to take a somewhat Christ-like approach to the sins of the world.
	You know, like they all come rolling onto me and I have to make all my decisions based on that.
	And I have to find some clear channel of activity which has never been tainted by the non-aggression principle, which I think is...
	You know, the roads were all built on debt and sweat.
	And does that mean I can't take groceries that are driven along those roads?
	No. I mean, deal with your own moral choices.
	And don't worry about the moral choices that are made by other people because it doesn't accrue to you.
	Interesting. Okay, so that would mean that logically we can take the skills that other people learned in a despotic setting and try and turn to something good as long as we are morally consistent, as other individuals are.
	Okay, that makes sense. Well, otherwise we have to never read books because most of us were taught to read in government schools, right?
	Very true. I'm not giving up books because there's public schools, right?
	Touche, touche. All right.
	And then I just want to do a quick shout out.
	Basically, if folks go to the forum and look up Texas Skype group, just follow the first posting.
	If you are an FDR listener and you're in Texas, please visit...
	The forum posting called Texas Skype group and follow the instructions on that first post.
	Also, there's another one I put up that's for Austin, Texas specifically.
	It's called Austin, Texas Meetup.
	I'll put the links to both those forum postings in the chat, but if you're an FDR listener in Austin and you actually want to meet up in person, just follow that thread.
	We're still trying to decide. I put up an initial tentative location, but we can adjust it as need.
	We're going to try and do something next week if at all possible.
	And Stefan, thank you very much for having me on.
	I look forward to being on in the future.
	Please do. Thank you.
	It's always a great pleasure.
	Somebody has asked, it seems to me that a definition of central planning may be planning how to use other people's property, whereas a non-central plan system would be one where the owners of the property decide what is to be done with it.
	It is, of course, a matter of degree.
	All economies would be mixed.
	Economies by this definition.
	I'm not sure what that means.
	In Jeff Tucker's brilliant book, It's a Jetson's World, He said that a major factor in the Soviet system falling apart was the spare parts not being available due to the lack of the free market.
	Do you think this is the major issue with central planning or an issue?
	Yeah, again, if you want to type some more clarification, I don't think all economies are mixed economies by that definition, because central planning is the theft of property.
	And so...
	I mean, in a free market system, there would still be theft.
	I mean, there would be still occasional thieves in a free system in a stateless society, but it's not institutional.
	And we don't say that it's a mixed economy because there's a small amount of petty theft or whatever.
	We say it's a mixed economy because there's some elements of the free market and some elements of coercive government theft and control.
	So I wouldn't agree with that.
	All economies would be mixed economies.
	But, no, the major issue with central planning is, I mean, there's two ways of looking at it, right?
	So a moralist would look at it and say, well, it's organized theft and the initiation of the use of force.
	Two ways of saying the same thing, I suppose.
	And so we would look at the moral argument against the initiation of the use of force in statism.
	And I think that would be a great argument.
	A great place to start. That, I think, is my preferred...
	Obviously, people who know this show know that's my preferred way of approaching it.
	Now, other people will look at it and say, well, it's horrendously inefficient.
	And so there's the calculation problem, which is that in the absence of price, in the absence of all of the information that price gives you, you know that you have no way of planning anything because you don't know what price is.
	And I've gone into this before in my debate with the Zeitgeistre That's on YouTube and other things.
	I won't sort of do it in here.
	But fundamentally, it's the problem.
	It's a calculation problem. Can't figure out how things work, how they're supposed to go, what you're supposed to do.
	And that's just for existing goods, let alone potential goods that could be created through some other mechanism.
	I mean, you can sort of...
	I do this just from time to time in my head, right?
	I mean, it's sort of a very interesting thing for me to do, right?
	So, I was at the mall the other day, and I saw there was a little photo booth.
	And when I look...
	I've looked at it, I don't know, half a dozen times before.
	But I just noticed that the photo booth actually has a little sort of mock flashlight on top and a little button.
	And the whole thing has been sort of made to look like a camera.
	And, I mean...
	That's sort of a bizarre thing.
	So think in a mixed economy, if someone's got these photo booths, or a centrally planned economy, someone's got these photo booths, and they say, you know, I'd really like to get stuff made to make these photo booths look like cameras.
	Then you'd have to go and apply to someone.
	And how would someone know if that was the best use of those resources?
	Right? Of whatever plastic and metal and this and that, to go to turn these photo booths into looking like big cameras, How would they know?
	How would they know? You go into any candy store and look at those vertical, clear plastic tubes of 500 different kinds of candy.
	Well, how would anybody know what kind of candy should be produced and how much and where it should be shipped in the absence of price, in the absence of demand?
	I was having a debate with someone once, but they were trying to tell me that recycling was economically and energy efficient, that it was better to recycle.
	And I said, no, it's not.
	I said, yes it is. I said, no it's not.
	How do you know? I know because nobody's coming to pick it up and giving me a dollar for my garbage.
	I know that. That's just a simple knowledge base.
	It's not profitable, which means that nobody can figure out a way to use less energy recycling than recycling costs.
	Because if they could, people would be coming by without the government mandating anything.
	People would be coming by to pay me for my garbage.
	So the fact that they're not, I know.
	So, I mean, the spare parts is an effect of violence, but it is the moral reality of it.
	Because, I mean, the Soviet Union was very profitable to certain people, right?
	I mean, all the Soviet leaders had their Dachaus on the Black Sea and had a pretty great life.
	So, yeah, you can't really argue...
	Somebody has said, there is technology which turns trash into energy, which is profitable.
	Well, fantastic. Then they should be coming by to give me money for my garbage, which I would be very happy to do.
	But, yeah, look, there could be certain places, right?
	So I'm sort of, I mean, I grew up in apartment buildings, right?
	So the garbage is all centralized, right?
	So there's a central chute. You just go down the hall, you open up the garbage thing, you hold your nose, you dump all your garbage down, it goes into one central area.
	And I think maybe that could be more profitable because you're not driving around house to house to pick the stuff up.
	But, I mean, anyway.
	All right, so we have another caller.
	Let's get back to the live folk.
	That's you. Hello. That's you, Mr.
	G. Make sure you unmute yourself.
	This call? Me? Yes, go for it, my friend.
	Okay. I've posted this question a couple of times on the board and I've got no real satisfaction.
	I'm trying to wrap my arms around the idea of debt and I've heard you refer to debt in your podcast like selling the children of the future down the river and etc.
	Strapping debt onto the backs of future generations and everything.
	But in reality, you can't really reach into the future and grab resources and pull them into the present.
	So everything that we have here today has already been made and produced.
	So anything that's going to be made and produced in the future is going to come from future labor and resources.
	And we have these numbers, the number like in the trillions, which are far beyond what any future labor and resources could ever produce in reality.
	It's like a virtual... Abstraction, right?
	So there's sort of, I guess, maybe a commitment of people that say, I'm going to use my laboring resources to give to person X for whatever reason.
	And say, for example, in Greece and these nations that are failing, they need to keep getting bailed out.
	And so the IMF goes in and loans, air quotes here, loans them money, right?
	But they're not really bringing machinery and laborers on ships over to their country because the people are incapacitated in some way.
	I'm trying to figure out what it is that they're actually loaning.
	Are they giving them permission to use their own labor and resources to do the things that they're doing now anyway?
	And I think the last post that I posted on was like, if you can imagine a guy that owns a forest and He's creating lumber out of his forest and he borrows money from the bank so he can go chop down his own trees and smelt some metal to create his own axe and fashion his own wheels and he borrows some more money from the bank so he can wheel the lumber into town.
	Maybe you could help me understand what's going on with this whole debt lending thing.
	No, that's a great question.
	And let's differentiate, as we always have to do, between voluntary and violent.
	So take a common example.
	Let's pretend we're in a free society.
	And I want a car.
	And I want a car because I got a job offer that I have to drive to get to.
	And let's, you know, for a moment just leave the environmental concerns out of it and just say that all other things being equal.
	So if I get a car, then I can make $100,000 driving to work.
	The only other job that I've got is $50,000 which I can take the bus to.
	So I want the car because It's economically advantageous for me to have a car.
	But the car costs $25,000, which I don't have.
	And I'm not going to have the $25,000 to buy the car until after I've been working at this job for some time, but I can't get to the job unless I have a car, right?
	Now this is a typical problem that occurs.
	When you have a sort of drip of resources that is only available if you have a lot of resources right now.
	The same thing is true if you want to buy a house, right?
	And so what I want, of course, is for people to lend me the $25,000 to buy the car so that I can drive to the $100,000 a year job.
	And so when people lend me that money, what they're doing is they're taking money that other people have saved.
	I mean, occasionally people will do their own lending.
	But a bank, you know, other people have saved their money, and therefore the bank has a bunch of money in the vault, more or less.
	Again, that's a fraction of reserve and all that.
	Let's just throw that out the window for the moment.
	Just deal with the sort of simplest aspect.
	So a bunch of people have deferred consumption, and the result of that is that I don't have to defer consumption.
	I can get my consumption right now, but only because other people have deferred their consumption.
	I mean, if everybody's spending everything they've got, then it's a subsistence economy.
	There's no capital built up.
	There's no money in the bank. There are no banks.
	There are no cars. There's no capital, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So people will lend me that money, which is what other people have saved up in the past.
	Now, the reason they'll lend me that money is so that I will pay them back more than $25,000.
	I'll pay them $30,000 back or whatever it is.
	It turns out to be based on the interest rate or whatever.
	But it's still economically advantageous to me, and it is economically advantageous to the bank, and it's economically advantageous to the people who've put their money in the bank.
	Because they get a certain amount of the profits from the interest that I'm paying.
	The bank takes some. The depositors take some.
	Obviously, the car company is happy.
	And I'm happy. It's win-win for everyone.
	Well, that's like a time preference for premium paid on deferred capital.
	We want stuff now rather than later, and we're willing to pay to have stuff now rather than later, for sure.
	And that's what interest is, is paying to have it now rather than later.
	Because I could, conceivably, right?
	I could take the $50,000 job, and I could save for two years to buy a car and then try and get the $100,000 job.
	But I'd rather have the car now and get the $100,000, because I don't know whether that job's going to be available in two years or what the economy's going to be like.
	There's risk and blah, blah, blah, right?
	And so, you know, bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but it comes with a premium called interest, right?
	Now, that's sort of the general free market thing.
	Now, fractional reserve banking is another thing wherein people in the bank will lend out multiples of what they've got.
	So let's say the bank has a million dollars that it can lend, but it lends out 10 million dollars.
	It does that based on the assumption, and they would do that in a free market system based upon the historical assumption, that The loan values that they put out never decline more than 5%.
	So there's 5% default on loans or whatever.
	They lose 5% on their loans.
	Now, since they only lose 5% on their loans, lending out 10 times means that they make more money than if they just lent out whatever's there.
	Because if they lend out whatever they lend out in a million dollars, they're still going to lose that 5%.
	But they don't gain the multiples as if they lend out $10 million.
	Now, if they lend out $10 million...
	And they lose 10%, then they've just wiped out their whole capital reserve, right?
	And that's risky. And in a free market system, people will choose the level of payout that they want.
	And higher risk means higher payout or higher potential payout, right?
	So greater risk means greater payout or greater loss.
	And the danger of course comes when banks lend out significant multiples Of what they've got in the vault.
	This was the basic story of the financial crisis that banks of 2007-2008 ad infinitum, that banks were often lending out 30 times what they had in their vaults.
	And of course that gives you great profits.
	Those profits get suctioned out of the corporation and they get put into people's pockets and those people can never have that money retrieved should they lose money in the future because that's the nature of the beast.
	But when you're lending out 30 times what you have in the bank, you lose 3% and you're done.
	You're wiped out.
	And that's just, of course, what happened.
	But that's all highly artificial, right?
	I mean, there's so much that's going wrong with that.
	So much intervention in the economy at the financial level, at the Level of investment in banks and stocks.
	It's mostly socialized, particularly risk is socialized and profits are privatized.
	It's the worst kind of fascistic nightmare that you could imagine setting up.
	But as to your question about the IMF comes in with all this money, of course the IMF doesn't have any money.
	Anybody who's not in the free market doesn't have any money.
	It's a basic thing.
	They don't have any money. Government doesn't have any money.
	Government workers don't have any money.
	UN doesn't have any money.
	These international aid agencies, they don't have any money.
	How do we know that? Because they're not producing anything.
	They're not selling anything. They have no profits.
	So the IMF can get its money one of two ways.
	Either, I guess three ways.
	Either the member countries can tax their citizens to give money to the IMF, which is a simple theft transfer.
	Which is not how it works.
	But that's one way they could do it.
	But they're not going to do that. Because it's going to piss off the voting population who's going to see their taxes go up without seeing any particular benefits.
	So it doesn't work that way.
	But what the IMF can do is it can receive money from its member countries who print the money.
	Just make it up. Make up some magic money, give it to the IMF. And then when the inflation hits a year or two later, nobody knows.
	What the cause is. Nobody can trace it back.
	It's like, oh, inflation. It must be because my grocer is greedy.
	That's why the price of everything is going up.
	Or they can just borrow the money from somebody else, give it to the IMF, and so on.
	So this is how all of these bailouts work.
	It's moving magic inflationary money around.
	None of it's real. None of it.
	I mean, you'll notice that the IMF doesn't get paid in gold.
	The countries aren't going to do that.
	So is Greece, say for example, when they get this bailout from IMF, are they going to use this money to buy resources from other countries that have to be shipped in in some way because they don't have the resources in their own country?
	Is it like a line of credit that they're going to use?
	No, that's not what they're going to do.
	And look, I'm no expert on this, so double check everything that I'm saying.
	This is my understanding of it, but I'm certainly no expert on this.
	The reason that Greece is getting the money is to pay off the bondholders.
	Because if the bondholders of Greek debt don't get paid off, or if they're worried they're not going to get paid off, then the interest that they're going to charge on lending to the Greek government is going to go up and up and up.
	To the point where Greece is going to default.
	It's going to default on paying its bondholders.
	It's going to default on paying its old age pensioners.
	It's going to default on paying its workers.
	It's just going to run out of money.
	When you say run out of money, you mean that the people that are working to support the pensioners are going to become too few a number to put a roof over their own heads and give up whatever their resources are required to support the pensioners as well?
	Well, right. And of course, there's been a big run on Greek banks over the past couple of months as a lot of Greeks who are fearful that the government is going to crack down on tax evasion.
	You know, I love that phrase, tax evasion.
	Bad, evasive maneuvers.
	You know, like the slaves in the underground railway were slave evaders.
	Murder evasion. No, they were trying to get free.
	Anyway, so, but a lot of Greeks have taken their money and put them in sort of offshore accounts or overseas or wherever, right?
	Just to try and keep it away from the clause of the government.
	But, I mean, the government is as subject to the laws of economic reality as every other entity in the world.
	And at some point, you simply run out of money, right?
	And normally the situation that happens then is you devalue your own currency.
	So you default through printing money or just finding some other way to devalue your currency and that stimulates imports and exports of particular configurations and all this and that.
	But they can't do that because they're part of the EU and they can't devalue their own currency anymore because they have the euro, which is everyone's currency.
	And so what's happening is the money is not...
	It's going to partly, of course, go to pay off some of the government's debts to the people or whatever, but a lot of it is going to go into the bond market.
	Because if it wasn't going to go into the bond market, it wouldn't do them any good.
	Let's say you give Greece, I don't know, $100 billion, and they use it entirely internally.
	Well, that doesn't really help the bondholders too much, and so they're going to continue to...
	Ask for higher and higher premiums on lending to the Greek government, which is going to cause them to default anyway.
	So again, this is my understanding of it.
	And please, you know, take this with all the grain of salt of the world, since it's not my particular area of expertise.
	But it's a way of, you know, so Germany has to pay all of this money to Greece.
	And one of the reasons that Germany has this money to pay to Greece is that after the Second World War, they had an amazing guy whose name escapes me, who was a total free market guy.
	And, you know, broke down all the barriers to trade and, you know, reduced government hugely and set up all this free market stuff.
	And, of course, they had a lot of peaceful parenting that came in after the Second World War, which makes people more economically productive and more prone to freedom and so on.
	And so Germany has remained a pretty significant economic powerhouse within Europe.
	And this is because they are living slightly more virtuously than the Greek government and using less violence to run society.
	And so the Germans are going to get stolen from in order to subsidize the immoral habits of the Greek government and the irrational greed, I guess it's rational in certain ways, of the Greek people.
	And so it's just a way of taking resources from the healthy and giving it to the anemic, which only makes the anemic generally more greedy.
	Well, it still doesn't really close the disconnect that I have between, say, you know, There's prosperity in the sense of goods, actual goods, and say Germany producing cars that are physically on the lot, and these numbers that reside in a computer somewhere that can be transferred to Greek banks.
	It's like, I don't know, giving a homeless person a sandwich as opposed to a dollar or something, or this money is only redeemable at the...
	For some alcoholic's rehabilitation food program or something.
	If you were to give Greece money that was only redeemable in, say, the country where it came from, would that be where it would be used?
	I'll have to continue to look at it.
	To me, it's almost like a P.T. Barnum type trick.
	If you can convince people, hey, pay me to come cut my yard.
	If I can get all my neighbors to give me $10 to come and take a swipe of my yard with a neighbor, the lawnmower, and pretend it's fun and sell that somehow, to me that just seems like what the banking and money system is.
	You're convincing people to give up their own resources and labor I mean, the fundamental role of government is to subtract value.
	So, I mean, the fundamental role of government is to do that which people don't want.
	I mean, that to me, that's praxeological.
	That's fundamentally axiomatic.
	Right? So, I mean, if a man is being stolen from, then by definition, he does not want to voluntarily give that person the thing.
	Right? So, I mean, if a guy sticks a knife in my ribs and says, give me a wallet, and I give him my wallet, it's axiomatically true that I do not want to voluntarily give him my wallet.
	Because there's violence, right?
	If a woman is being raped, she is not.
	Submitting voluntarily and with happiness to the sexual violation.
	To me, again, that's praxeological.
	That's just the definition of the thing itself.
	And so the government does exactly what people don't want the government to do.
	Because if the people wanted the government to do it, the government wouldn't need to do it.
	So how do we know that people do not want...
	Government workers. Because the government has to pay them.
	The government has to rob from the people and pay the government workers.
	How do we know that people don't want tariffs on sweaters coming into America from France or whatever?
	Because the government has to enforce it.
	If people wanted tariffs, then there would need to be no government.
	If everybody in the United States was willing to pay an extra 50% on French sweaters voluntarily for some reason...
	Of morality or something, then you wouldn't need any tariffs.
	In fact, the imposition of tariffs would be a ridiculous overhead, right?
	And so, the government by definition is always and forever doing exactly that which people do not want.
	It is the opposite of free market desires.
	How do we know that people don't want unions for workers in the way that they're currently configured?
	Because They have to be enforced by the government.
	So if people wanted cars that were made by guys who earned union wages with all the union benefits and early retirement and so on, if people actually wanted those things, then they would simply pay for those things voluntarily.
	Right? They'd be this thing, right?
	So you say, okay, you can get this car for $10,000 or you can get it for $22,000 if you're willing to tip the workers with all this additional goodies.
	And if people genuinely wanted to do that and that was the majority position, then People would tick that and say, great, I'm happy to spend another $12,500 for the union.
	Beautiful. Wonderful.
	Couldn't be happier. Well, but the fact is that people don't want to do that, and we know that people don't want to do that because they're not asked.
	And the union knows that people don't want to do that because the union doesn't ask people, but it tells them through the guns of the state that they better damn well pay that $12,500 or they're going to go the hell to jail.
	So whenever you see like a bailout for Greece is exactly the opposite of what the German population wants.
	Understand? Because if the German population was really keen to subsidize 50 plus retirement ages for people living on the Mediterranean, they would send them a check themselves.
	There'd be like a, you know, like a Haitian relief fund.
	There'd be a Greek bureaucrat relief fund.
	You know, these poor people are facing the prospect of having to work until they're 52, for God's sakes.
	Send these poor people some money.
	They need sunscreen, dammit!
	It's hot down there on the beach.
	These poor people. They're running low on mojitos and margaritas.
	Ship them, stat! We're going to get helicopters to drop cases of fruity drink mix to these poor, sunburnt people.
	And you try selling that to people locked in the throes of a German winter, and if you can, then you're an amazing salesperson.
	And so, you know that the IMF is exactly what people don't want to do.
	You know that foreign aid is exactly what people don't want to do.
	You know that the national debt is exactly what people revile and hate and would rather have nothing to do with anything of.
	You know that the war on drugs is exactly what people would revile and hate and don't want.
	Because it's enforced by the state.
	So, I mean, if that helps at all, you know that fiat currency is exactly what people don't want.
	Because it is a monopoly enforced by the state.
	Very aggressively and violently enforced by the state.
	You know that public school is exactly what people don't want.
	And Waiting for Superman is on Netflix at the moment.
	I'd recommend watching that. It's hard to watch these poor, desperate families trying to get their kids into any kind of decent education.
	And it's just heartbreaking to see that Oriental woman, who seems to be a very sunny and positive human being, trying to find some way to reform the school system in her district.
	It's just heartbreaking to watch.
	Inevitable, predictable, but heartbreaking.
	So yeah, I mean, people say, well, we need public schools.
	It's like, well, then... Great, but we know that human beings do not want public schools at the moment.
	We know that. We know that human beings don't want to give teachers two plus months off in the summer.
	We know that for a fact.
	We also know that most human beings would rather be at home with their children than out at some job.
	And we know that empirically as well because in certain countries in Europe, they have generously granted like up to 18, I think up to 15 or 18 months leave For women to stay home with their kids, usually women, and they do.
	They drop out of the workforce almost immediately.
	So you know that human beings want to stay with their kids and not put them up in daycares, because that's what happens the moment they get the resources to do so.
	Anyway, I know I'm laboring the point, but every time you see a government program, you axiomatically, you automatically, you praxeologically know that this is the exact opposite of what people want.
	And this is why it's so funny when they say the government reflects the will of the people.
	The government reflects the exact opposite of the will of the people.
	Well, one quick thing.
	Am I still on? Hello?
	Can you hear me? Hello. Well, yeah, I'm from Germany.
	I just wanted to throw that one in because I can actually give a live opinion.
	And yeah, people are really, really, really, really, really unhappy with...
	What's going on there?
	But there are conditions.
	They don't just give away that money.
	There are conditions. There are certain contracts made that they have to get these and these kinds of What I have to also say, which really pisses me off, is that Greece is now building at the border of Turkey a huge Well, what is it?
	It's like a pit, a ditch.
	Instead of building a wall, how they're doing it in the Gaza Strip, they're building a ditch which stops heavy tanks and machineries from entering.
	But actually, the reason they said for what it is, is to stop immigration from Africa dipping over to Europe.
	So you can see that there is government, not just in the hands of the IMF. There are conditions made.
	I just wanted to put that one in.
	Yeah, and maybe those conditions will be met.
	And maybe they won't. I mean, but nonetheless, it's still not what the people want.
	Because then there'd be a free flow of help to these poor beleaguered Greek civil servants and so on.
	But, yeah, I mean, this is another example.
	I mean, for all of the talk that Americans have about their problems with illegal immigration...
	Banning immigrants is exactly what people don't want.
	In reality. Because if people really didn't want immigrants, in other words, if they didn't want cheaper food, and if they didn't want vastly underpriced products in a wide variety of other areas, if they didn't want these things, then people would simply boycott anybody who used immigrant labor.
	And they'd pay unionized wages to You know, to make sure that their orange cost $5 or whatever.
	But the reality is that people are very keen on immigrant labor, which is why the government has to ban it.
	Because otherwise, that's what people would want in a voluntary society.
	I mean, it's easy to ban stuff if there's no trade-off, right?
	I mean, if you're really keen on the war on drugs, you hate drugs or whatever, you know, maybe drug addiction killed your twin brother or something, and you really hate the war on drugs, Well, I guess you're willing to pay the taxes required to ban drugs or to pretend to ban drugs or to corrupt the police force by pretending to ban drugs or whatever.
	Because you're sharing that cost with all of the other people in your country.
	So, you know, you're willing to give it up, your $1,000 a year or whatever, because everyone else has to give up $1,000 a year.
	So there are certain individuals who want it, but they only want it because the government is enforcing That decision on everyone else, right?
	Because they get to socialize the cost of their particular bigotry.
	But the same thing is true, right?
	So, I mean, the same thing is true of illegal immigrants, right?
	I mean, if people really didn't want illegal immigrants, they would simply have nothing to do with anyone who worked or employed or whatever, right?
	But there's the trade-off, right?
	So you get rid of illegal immigrants.
	Let's say you could ban them all entirely and get the 10 million in the U.S. out or whatever.
	Well... I mean, the economy would collapse, right?
	Illegal immigration is the shadow that is cast by the artificially high standards of living that are temporarily created and inflicted on the general population by middle class unions.
	You raise the price of labor to the point where the economy simply can't survive unless you get a semi-slave underclass of illegals in.
	I mean, the system couldn't survive.
	And whether those semi-starving class of illegals or Underpaid workers, so to speak, are in your country in the form of Mexicans or are in China in the form of an oppressed majority of pretty helpless workers doesn't really matter.
	The moment that you artificially raise prices in one area, you create a vacuum for exploitation in another area because otherwise the whole system just won't work, right?
	I mean, if you raised the price of labor through unions to the point where everything costs double, the same thing is true for the union workers, and they don't really gain anything.
	So somebody has to sacrifice in order for these artificially unjust gains to be sustainable.
	Sorry, go ahead. Steph, I just wanted to add to answer the question of the listener that I think that ultimately what the next generation ends up paying in is then when you see the destruction of capital that the government has over-regulated the economy and then destroyed it through scrambling to get to whatever productive means of production that they can get a hold.
	You can see that in the next country from where I live in Nicaragua.
	We had a company, a private company from Sweden, put some air turbines, and then after they did all the investment, then they nationalized them.
	And for example, take Hugo Chavez.
	He just nationalized all of the gold reserves of Venezuela.
	So ultimately what that does is it creates a disincentive for the creation of capital, and that creates unemployment, and that increases the cost for the next generation.
	If you're economically productive you have to pay taxes.
	What you're paying is a greater percentage than the generation before you.
	Yeah, no, I think that's true.
	And I mean, to the caller's first point about you can't sell off the future, you can.
	You really can sell off the future.
	It doesn't mean you'll be able to collect.
	I think I understand now, because now you're talking about the destruction of capital.
	So, for example, you've been able to create a certain amount of capital that's going to have momentum and carry a standard of living into the future by...
	The use of force or planned economy, whatever you want to call it, you're steadily eroding that capital where eventually the next generation is going to have to start from scratch because they'll have no capital.
	It's been destroyed by the previous generations, right?
	So it's going to be harder on them to start the machine rolling.
	Sorry, let me just be more precise about that because, I mean, this may be annoyingly precise, but it's not so much that you're destroying your capital because, I A lot of them are still there.
	I mean, some of them obviously have been dismantled, but it's more that you're taking out more and more loans against your capital, right?
	So it's not that I've crashed my car.
	It's just that I've taken out a $25,000 loan against a car that's worth $25,000.
	And if I don't pay that back, then I take my car away.
	I think that's closer. It's more like you've taken out a loan against your capital rather than you're destroying it.
	But I guess you can always walk away from the loan.
	In any event, one more thing I wanted to ask you about...
	You could say that about the housing market in the US and look at all those houses being destroyed right now, being held by nobody.
	No, those houses are being sold off to vulture funds.
	I mean, this is a beautiful deal that's going on for some of the nastier elements of society that the houses that the government bought up.
	They're sort of taken ownership of.
	They're all being sold at pennies on the dollar to a bunch of government cronies.
	I mean, this is the standard. This is why the IMF wants to go in.
	And you can read about more of this in Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which is a pretty good analysis, or Confessions of an Economic Hitman by, I think his name is John Perkins, where the IMF goes in and it demands austerity measures.
	And so what happens is the most helpless and most dependent of the citizens get screwed.
	And then it demands a sell-off.
	Of... Of government goods.
	And those government goods then go to particular corporations who are well-placed and politically connected and they get them for relatively cheap.
	And the money doesn't go to the people.
	The money goes to the bondholders, right?
	So the financiers who obviously helped Greece lie about its financial situation to get into the EU to begin with.
	I mean, just it was complete fraud.
	You try that anywhere in the private sector, you'll go to jail for life.
	But of course, this is the government, so...
	Everyone gets a big, fat pension and book deals.
	But the IMF comes in and the government, quote, gets a whole bunch of money from the IMF, which is just stolen money from other livestock.
	And then it screws the people who are the least powerful.
	And then it takes all of this money, gives these assets over to a bunch of people who are buying stolen assets with stolen money.
	And then it sends the money off to other tax farm owners who have bought the future productivity of the dwindling and depressed livestock in the form of bonds and other forms of government investments.
	So it's a truly predatory and vile situation that leaves everyone worse off except for the rich and connected.
	Well, and given your preference for being rank-and-file today with access to dentistry and surgery as opposed to a king before Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, Do you see any potential for the powers that be to mitigate the continual clampdown on freedom and productivity that's going to crash the system?
	It's going to take away their access to dentistry and surgery or whatever goodies of the future that we're going to have by not opening up the market.
	Do you see any potential for any rollback?
	Well, there may be some, for sure.
	I mean, look, the ruling class has been around with, you know, some pretty insignificant interruptions for thousands and thousands of years.
	And they know how to use power, and they know how to maintain power.
	They know how to continue with power.
	There's no question that there are times, you know, people say, ah, Steph, you say the government never shrinks, but ah, is the government shrunk, so such and such?
	Yeah, government increases.
	And it's not a straight line.
	It's a jagged line. No question.
	Government shrinks at times. But it only shrinks so that it can grow more, right?
	It only shrinks. I mean, it's like, you know, some guy has a really bad acid trip, and then he decides to cut back on his LSD. Well, he's not cutting back on his LSD because he wants to stop doing LSD. He's cutting back on his LSD because he wants to keep doing LSD, and if he dies, he can't do that. Right?
	So it's really, really important to distinguish that.
	So, yeah, I mean, the government is going to contract.
	There's no question. Mathematically, it cannot continue.
	And this happened in Canada.
	They shrunk the government, I think, 20% or 30% in the 90s.
	And they did that because they were paying 40 cents on the dollar in interest payments, and it was completely unsustainable.
	And they did that through screwing the usual suspects.
	And... Then they continued that march, right?
	So they lowered it because they wanted to get better borrowing terms.
	Not because they had any commitment to a smaller government, but because it was a practical necessity to do that.
	And that's going to occur.
	That's going to occur. There's going to be military metaphors trotted out, sacrifice metaphors trotted out, and the war on debt, and the war on dependency, and so on.
	The people are going to be, you know, rounded up and given hysterical speeches and powerful speeches and peaceful speeches about the need for shared sacrifice and to create a better world.
	And suddenly the children are going to be invoked, you know, because we're selling off our children and we need to have a better care for the future.
	We want to give our children a world that they're, you know, going to be proud of and happy of and look back on us with respect and not pee in our graves for selling them to bond-holding foreigners.
	Anyway, I mean, all of this stuff is going to occur and there is going to be a shrinking in the size of the state.
	No question.
	I mean, the politicians aren't going to be unemployed because they're so keen on a war in Afghanistan.
	They're not going to run the system into the ground.
	This isn't the Roman Empire days where there's virtually no communication and very little understanding of all of the economic drivers.
	I mean, the economic drivers of what's occurring, like the Austrian school analysis of inflation and the business cycle, I mean, it's just been so bang on.
	Even if you go back to Ayn Rand's analysis, they've just been so bang on that everybody knows what the cause is.
	And the government knows that it has bought too many votes and created too many dependents, so it's just going to shrink the size of the dependents, but not because it wants to restore any kind of freedom, but simply because it wants to maintain its own power.
	So, yeah, I think that is going to occur.
	Okay, thanks. You're very welcome.
	And unless we have anybody who's got a yearning, burn, and dying to ask it, last-minute, ditch-on question, I think we may be done.
	Somebody asked what I think about Islamic banking, where you pay for a fee for a loan rather than interest.
	The fee would not vary like interest does.
	It is fixed. Well, I mean, if people want to do that, I think that's fine.
	Steph? Yes.
	I wanted to invite everybody to check out my recent YouTube channel.
	It's called First Principles, SpefBot.
	I'm just trying to synthesize some stuff, and it's all inspired by your work.
	Well, thanks. Can you spell that out?
	Make sure people can get a hold of it?
	Sure, it's S-P-E-F-B-O-T. That's the name of the channel.
	Fantastic. Really do appreciate that.
	Well, just a last-ditch reminder to people in the chatroom and people listening to this, you can go to PatriotPulse.com and vote for me, if such is your fancy.
	And remember that in the dark days of summer, the philosopher's PayPal inbox can become a tad lean.
	So if you have any leftover shekels or you've suddenly come into...
	A billion dollars worth of illicit government funds through the lottery system?
	You might want to throw a few points my way.
	I would really appreciate that. You can go to freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
	To do that, it can be as little as a count of 10 bucks a month, 30 cents a day.
	It really does help out in terms of travel costs and in terms of technology costs and server costs and bandwidth costs and all that kind of stuff.
	We have hit some just sort of amazing numbers when it comes...
	To bandwidth. And first of all, we've got a new server, of course.
	We've uncorked the server in terms of bandwidth that it's just going to max out without any throttling whatsoever.
	And thank you to those who've written to tell me that their sanity has been saved by having slightly faster access to the podcast and so on.
	And I really do appreciate that.
	And I'm just going to get you some stats.
	I think we hit... Was it 700 gigabytes one day?
	Fairly recently.
	I thought that was just amazing.
	And that is, I think that's quite impressive.
	We're getting about 400,000 video views every month just through YouTube.
	There's a couple other channels that I have, but I think the majority of them do come through YouTube.
	And I think it's about an equivalent, so maybe a little bit more in terms of podcasts.
	Oh yeah, so just recently we did 208 gigabytes of downloads in one day.
	I think that's great, that's amazing, and thank you everyone who's helping so much to share of all of these.
	Steph, can we donate for you to get a new bicycle instead of car repairs?
	Wait a little bit until Izzy's old enough to ride with.
	So anyway, things are growing.
	I've got a whole bunch of speaking engagements this fall.
	And yeah, I'm sorry, of course, for those who are looking for me on Adam vs.
	The Man, there may be a gaping hole in my presence there, because there is a gaping hole in RT's presence of Adam vs.
	The Man, which is a shame, but we shall soldier on.

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