Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, interviewed by Ben Lowrey. Topics include: why we should not do what other people tell us to, why gods and governments fail at morality, what the world will look like like 50 years from now, how the minority controls the majority, the corruption of corporations and the hope of youth.
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Well, Stefan, it's great to speak to you. | |
| How are you today? I'm just great. | |
| How are you doing, man? Yeah, great. | |
| I'm a big fan of your show, and I watch your videos, and I love listening to you. | |
| I really enjoy what you're doing, so thank you. | |
| Well, I appreciate that, and thanks for the invitation to be on the show. | |
| Yeah, my pleasure. Well, why don't we just start off? | |
| Would you tell us a little bit about freedomainradio.com, and how do you describe yourself? | |
| What is it you do, in your own words? | |
| Well, describing myself, sexy, bald MF, is usually the phrase that comes to my mind. | |
| It doesn't necessarily leap to everyone else's mind, but to my mind, I am a backup dancer in a Prince video, but that, again, is not anybody who's seen my videos may not agree. | |
| The website, yeah, freedomainradio.com, it's a philosophy show, fundamentally, which means that we try to, or I try to, reason and argue from first principles. | |
| I have pretty good training in that area. | |
| I have a master's degree in History from University of Toronto. | |
| And my thesis was sort of history of philosophy with a particular argument that I put forward. | |
| But at the same time, I have a pretty artsy-fartsy background. | |
| Like I went to the National Theatre School. | |
| I studied playwriting and acting. | |
| I've been an actor. I've made a film. | |
| And so I really – and I write a lot. | |
| I've written novels and stuff. | |
| So I really try to sort of You know, give some rocket juice of good metaphors to some of the dry subject matter of philosophy. | |
| So that's sort of what I – and, you know, humor, if at all possible, can help be the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. | |
| So, yeah, I mean, it's been around for about five years. | |
| I've been doing it full-time for a little over three years. | |
| I speak at a whole bunch of conferences, and yeah, it's been quite a ride, and thanks to the generosity of the listeners, it's all been possible. | |
| I eat on a regular basis, which is good, and just because there's no ads, I don't charge for the podcast, I don't charge for the books, so it's almost all listener donations, so yeah, I mean, if people listen and like the show, I'm always happy to have a few seagulls fly over the horizon with some shekels stapled to their beaks. | |
| Right. Right. | |
| Wow. Okay. Incredible. | |
| So from listening to you talk, you've got an incredible depth of knowledge and understanding of economics and, you know, political philosophy and all that stuff. | |
| And that's what I was hoping to talk to you about today. | |
| And just to give you a little bit of perspective on where I'm coming from, I kind of became interested in these topics from the growing free man on the land and sovereignty movement, which I'm sure you're well aware of. | |
| Right, but because I'll post this on my site, if you could mention a little bit about that for my listeners who aren't familiar with it, that'd be great. | |
| Sure. Well, you know, I don't know how long this has been going on, but there's a growing number of us. | |
| We've started to question, why should we have to do, as we're told, by this government? | |
| You know, why are we... Right, right. | |
| So, you know, a lot of us really don't know, you know, we don't really understand what we're trying to achieve. | |
| We just know we don't want to do as we're told. | |
| So would you give us a little bit of perspective on, you know, the way you view, I mean, just get the ball rolling for us. | |
| What is this social contract, etc.? | |
| Well, I mean, I think you've summed it up beautifully when you said, why should I do what I'm told? | |
| You can't sustain that philosophically. | |
| So let's say that you and I set up a rule, right? | |
| You and I, right here in this, we set up a moral rule called, you have to do what I tell you to, right? | |
| And I say, we're going north together. | |
| And you say, we're going south together. | |
| And we both have to obey each other immediately and It doesn't work. | |
| It doesn't work. It logically fails. | |
| You cannot have a universal moral rule called, you have to do what the other person says, because then everybody's going to be yelling contradictory stuff at everyone else, and it doesn't work logically. | |
| And see, this is the philosophical thing. | |
| Now, people say, well, but logic, who cares? | |
| It's really important. If you try to build a bridge without logic, it's going to fall down. | |
| If you try to navigate the seas without using any logic or science or evidence, you're going to go round and round and get eaten by a dragon. | |
| My oceanography is not perfect. | |
| So this idea, yeah, why should you do something because you're told to do it? | |
| There's no logical or moral reason why that would ever be a virtue. | |
| Now, if it doesn't fall into the category of virtue, Then it falls into the category of something else. | |
| Something that is certainly not virtue. | |
| And what that means is that we do stuff that we're told to because we're afraid of the consequences. | |
| And tragically, awfully, messily, and horribly, that has been the sad, pathetic-ass substitute for ethics that has been at the center of human society since the dawn of time. | |
| Do shit, because if you don't, I'm going to beat you up, or I'm going to kill you. | |
| Or my god is going to beat you up and kill you forever in the afterlife. | |
| And this idea of massive negative consequences as the only practical, pragmatic driving force for getting human beings to do the right thing, it's hysterical and it's overblown and all that kind of stuff. | |
| So it's... Just a terrible way. | |
| So we've had gods on the one hand, and we've had governments on the other hand, both of whom threaten you with extremely negative, destructive consequences, jail or hell, if you don't do what they want. | |
| But that is, frankly, insane. | |
| And we all know that that's completely immoral. | |
| Because if I were to be interested in some... | |
| Bird. You're from England, right? | |
| I'm getting the right lingo down. | |
| If I was interested in some bird, like Tweety Bird. | |
| And I said, listen, you really should go out with me. | |
| And she's like, you know, I don't think so. | |
| You're not really my type. | |
| And I said, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. | |
| You don't really seem to understand. | |
| If you don't go out with me, I'm going to chloroform you with this here rag I've got. | |
| I throw you in the back of my windows on this van. | |
| I'm going to lock you in my basement. And John Fowle is going to write a novel about this. | |
| So we'd all understand that that would just be pretty stone evil. | |
| Go for some job and say, listen, I really want this job as a fry cook at McDonald's, but I really expect to be making about $500,000 a year. | |
| And the guy says, are you crazy? | |
| I don't mean no. | |
| That's not how the economics works. | |
| You're not bringing that much value. | |
| And you say, listen, I'm afraid you don't understand. | |
| If you don't do what I want... | |
| Then I'm going to give you a slow roast on your fry cooker for all of eternity and call it a kind of hell. | |
| We would all understand that that would be psychotic behavior, that you can't elicit virtue out of people by threatening them with punishment. | |
| And what that tells us about those in charge is that they view us as dangerous, insane children who need to be bullied and frightened and aggressed against and all of this, threatened. | |
| It's really crazy. | |
| But morality and how we organize society is technology, for want of a better word, that we've inherited from the freaking Stone Age. | |
| The idea that we have rulers who threaten us with negative consequences if we don't obey their edicts, whether those rulers are priests or politicians, It's straight out of the Stone Age. | |
| And you name me one other piece of technology we still use from the Stone Age. | |
| I do not open my beer with the jawbone of an ass. | |
| And it's just really, really common. | |
| I'm not using my feces to paint graffiti on my study wall. | |
| That, of course, is for my garage. | |
| Garage! Sorry, garage. | |
| I'm going to translate for your British users. | |
| So when you say, why should I do what I'm told? | |
| Well, you do what you're told for the most part because you're threatened with negative consequences and that is a dangerous situation. | |
| But that's sort of like if you see a dog in the road that's going, it has rare foam and its legs are twitching and it's walking in a really stiff gait and it's like got rabies infection spray painted on the side of it, then you're going to turn around and go the other way. | |
| But you don't consider that a moral interaction, right? | |
| You don't say, well, I'm turning around because that's virtuous and that's good, and to continue on in the path of the rabid dog, that would be immoral and evil and bad. | |
| No, you turn around because it's a fucking rabid dog, and you don't want to get bitten. | |
| And that's the way that we interact with those who have, you know, this violent power over us, whether it's direct physical power in the form of the state or sort of emotional abusive power in the form of religion, We will obey. | |
| But if we are wise, if we understand this, we say, okay, well, if I'm going to obey, I'm going to obey because there's a rabid dog in the road, not because there's some moral thing that these people are going to try and... | |
| Because if it's moral, you should be convincing people, not waving guns and hell at them. | |
| Anyway, that's my brief introduction. | |
| Not too brief, but you know me. | |
| Right, right. Yeah, sure. | |
| So could you give us a little bit of an insight between the difference from voluntary open market as opposed to, you know, the threat of a gun type of thing? | |
| Sure. You went to government schools, right? | |
| Yeah. Right, okay. | |
| And what would have happened to your parents if they'd said, you know, the quality of these schools is really bad. | |
| There's lots of bullies, and there's drug use, and knives, and weapons, and all this kind of stuff. | |
| So listen, Mr. | |
| Government official, Mr. School Board, I appreciate the offer, but I'm not going to pay the property taxes for this school. | |
| In fact, I'm going to need to homeschool, I'm going to private school, but I'm not interested in this deal. | |
| What would have happened? They'd have probably ultimately been put in jail. | |
| Right. And put in jail by people who come to the house with guns. | |
| And if you resist, they will shoot you. | |
| They will shoot you. I mean, it's a murder-based society. | |
| Statism is a murder-based society. | |
| Everything is under the threat of murder. | |
| Even a parking ticket, right? | |
| I mean, if you're speeding and you don't slow down, they'll shoot out your tires or they'll try and corner you. | |
| But then if you come out waving a gun like you would with any carjacking, they'll gun you down. | |
| It's a murder-based society. | |
| And it's shocking to me That information is shocking to anyone. | |
| We've got to be clear about the society that we live in. | |
| Even if you think that's okay, at least name it for what it is. | |
| Give it the proper name. | |
| That's the beginning of wisdom. It's a motor-based society. | |
| If you don't want to do things that you disagree with, I can go to Walmart or I can go to Tesco, is that Safeway? | |
| Are they still around in England? It's been a while. | |
| They're trying to give you some good local... | |
| Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so you can go to one supermarket, you can go to another supermarket. | |
| If you go to one supermarket, you can choose one can of beans over another can of beans or no can of beans at all, and nobody's going to throw you in jail or gun you down or threaten you or take you to court or all that kind of nonsense. | |
| That's voluntary, right? | |
| And yet, whenever you touch... | |
| The state, then what happens is it's like, do it or else. | |
| That's the sum total of the argument that the government puts forward in practical terms. | |
| I mean, of course, they're morally like, well, you're a good citizen. | |
| You must obey your state. Be nationalistic. | |
| Be pride. Here's an Irish jig for you. | |
| You've got to be happy. Salute the flag. | |
| I mean, that gives you all this. But fundamentally, it comes down to do it or else. | |
| And that is really a sad, sad, pathetic non-argument to submit to. | |
| So some people say that, you know, that human society couldn't function without a centralized government. | |
| Do you agree or disagree with that? | |
| Well, I mean, people can make that argument and my response would be fine. | |
| Okay, so let's be consistent. | |
| Let's be consistent. | |
| If giving a small group of people a monopoly of violence in a geographical area is the way that we get shit done... | |
| By the way, you don't mind if I cast a little deer? | |
| Not at all. If this is the way we get shit done, then let's expand it. | |
| Let's turn over the marriage market to the government, and the government will now assign you to a husband and to a wife. | |
| And if you say no to the boyfriend or the girlfriend that the government assigns you or the husband or wife that the government assigns you, then you get to go to jail, and some boyfriend will pick you out, and he probably will be an even worse choice for you. | |
| Let's be consistent. | |
| Let's have the government pick your profession. | |
| Let's have the government pick your career. | |
| Let's have the government pick where you live. | |
| All of this. | |
| So let's be consistent. | |
| If having the government order people around is the best way to get things done, let's have the government, let's just have a complete dictatorship. | |
| Because that's obviously a good way to do things. | |
| And people say, well, no, that's no good. | |
| It's like, well, okay. | |
| Well, why is it not good to have people married by the state, ordered to who to get married by the state, but it's okay to have children be herded into schools against their will, against the parents' will? | |
| We know it's against the parents' will because they're forced to do it, right? | |
| You know, by definition, that whatever somebody is forced to do is against their will. | |
| I mean, if I'm having great sex with a woman, and we're having a mutually enjoyable time, The fish oil is flowing and the goat is purring contentedly, then everything's all hunky-dory, right? | |
| But if I have a knife to her throat, we automatically know she doesn't want to do it. | |
| By definition, if I'm using force, that's rape and she doesn't want to do it. | |
| So the moment that the government makes people do something in society, you know that that's exactly what they don't want to do, because otherwise they wouldn't need any force. | |
| The government doesn't need to pass a law that says children should want chocolate. | |
| And if they don't want chocolate, by God, we're going to throw them in jail. | |
| Because children naturally want chocolate. | |
| They don't need to pass a law that says teenagers should want to have sex with each other. | |
| Because that's just, you know, of the two things on their mind, that's one of them. | |
| And the second is how soon is till the next time. | |
| So whatever the government is forcing people to do is exactly what people don't want to do. | |
| It's the exact mirror image of people's desires. | |
| So we know that human beings as a whole desperately do not want Government-run schools because they have to be forced to attend them and they have to be forced to pay for them. | |
| We know for an absolute fact that people do not want socialized healthcare. | |
| We know for an absolute fact that people do not want the government to control currency because if people really wanted the government to control the currency and all of the horrible repercussions that has happened, You wouldn't need a law given government monopoly control or the central bank monopoly control over the currency. | |
| So the government is like the negative image. | |
| In photography, you've got the negative image. | |
| The government is the negative image of what people want in society. | |
| And so, yeah, it's a brutally bad system. | |
| And, you know, let's just be honest. | |
| If giving people a monopoly of force is the way to get things done, let's expand it. | |
| And if it's not, let's contract it. | |
| But let's not have these two worlds, you know, where some of it's really great to be done by violence and some of it's really great to be done by volunteerism. | |
| That system cannot halt. | |
| Right. You know, it kind of reminds me of the Hank Reardon speech, his speech about money where he's in court. | |
| Yeah, well, Dagnar Ranishgold has a big speech, which he gives to Hank Reardon. | |
| I can't remember, maybe Hank Reardon has one in court as well. | |
| But yeah, that money is sort of a voluntary value that's earned and traded through virtuous productivity in the free market, stuff like that, right? | |
| I think there's a scene where he's in court. | |
| It's been a while since I've read it. | |
| Oh, by the way, have you seen the movie yet? | |
| No, I wanted to. | |
| I interviewed one of the producers, but I couldn't get it in Canada. | |
| I've ordered it, and it's going to come, and I'm really looking forward to seeing it. | |
| I mean, that's a movie that just can't go wrong, in my opinion. | |
| I mean, it just can't, because, you know, obviously it's going to be a different take, but just seeing that stuff come to life is fantastic. | |
| You know, it can't really go wrong. | |
| Yeah, I look forward to it. | |
| I haven't seen it either. I think it's out on DVD soon, so I'm looking forward to that. | |
| Recently, on one of your videos, I don't remember which speech it was, but you said... | |
| Of the endless one. | |
| I'm over 2000. You said something very interesting about the state is policed horizontally. | |
| We police each other, or something to that effect. | |
| I don't remember how you put it, but would you kind of go into that a little bit? | |
| Yeah. A little bit. | |
| You're kidding, right? A little bit. | |
| Sure. I did a speech more on this at Libertopia last year, and it's on my YouTube channel, which is youtube.com forward slash free domain radio. | |
| But the question is, you know, and it's always been the question of any peace-loving, morality-extending activist, which is how the hell does such a small group of people end up ruling such a large group of people? | |
| You know, it's like building a pyramid with the point down on the bottom. | |
| I mean, how the hell does it stand up? | |
| You know, how is it that a half a percent or one percent of people can rule everybody else? | |
| I mean, you could say now, well, they've got, you know, weapons of mass destruction and, you know, electronics. | |
| But this all came into being long before that, right? | |
| And the answer, I think, is, you know, think of slavery, right? | |
| Slaves outnumbered, right? | |
| There was a, I think it was a Roman senator who proposed a bill saying, we got to get all the slaves to wear yellow armbands or something like that, so that we can identify who they are, you know, because we don't accidentally want to be nice to somebody who's a slave or whatever. | |
| And he got shouted down by everybody else in the Senate. | |
| And they said, that's a stupid-ass idea. | |
| I'm paraphrasing. I don't know what stupid ass is in Latin, but it's probably something horribly difficult to conjugate. | |
| But that is a stupid-ass idea, because if we put yellow armbands on all the slaves, they will realize how much they outnumber us. | |
| And that's the... | |
| So how do you get... A small group of people who have no particular advantage in the Roman days. | |
| Everybody could get a sword, right? | |
| It wasn't like anybody had weapons of mass destruction or anything. | |
| So how could you rule? | |
| Well, what you do is you make the slaves attack each other for questioning the system. | |
| And so what happens is the slaves enforce the system on each other. | |
| I mean, there's ways that you do that, like through collective punishment. | |
| So if one slave says something caustic or negative or, you know, says, why am I a slave and you're a master? | |
| That's unjust. What you do is you get a thousand slaves and you whip them all, right? | |
| And that way, the next time any slave says, we're slaves and we should be free, everyone's like, shut up! | |
| Don't say that, whatever you do, because then we're all going to get whipped. | |
| So collective punishment is this kind of thing. | |
| You also inculcate in the slaves, in children, and this is a lot of what religion is about, Which is that God, God himself, or the gods themselves, have put you here under us as part of the divine chain of being, the divine line of command, right? | |
| The chain of command from God to the Pope or the priests, down through the parents, down through the kids and then the slaves and all the serfs, right? | |
| So there's this, you have to go in, like the caste system in India, you've got a slot into your place, like a... | |
| Like a piece of jigsaw in the right puzzle. | |
| And if you question that, if you oppose that, then you are against God. | |
| You are going to burn in hell. | |
| You are a sinner. | |
| You're a terrible guy. | |
| And Patui, we're all going to spit on you. | |
| So you internalize that staying in your station Is morally good. | |
| Questioning and opposing your station is morally bad. | |
| And if you train all the slaves that way, then any slave who says, I don't want to be, this is terrible, they're using force, why are we slaves? | |
| You are going against God! | |
| You're going to burn in hell! And if I listen to you, I'm going to burn in hell. | |
| So they all shut each other up. | |
| They all attack each other. And this is how the system is maintained. | |
| This is the purpose of religiosity. | |
| It's the purpose of, not the only purpose, but it's the main purpose of government schooling for sure. | |
| And you've experienced this, I'm sure, if you've brought the basic argument that taxation is forced to people, what do they do? | |
| Shut up! Yeah, no, you're disloyal, you're not a patriot, you don't like it, leave it! | |
| Right, this is standard slave-on-slave aggression. | |
| This is, we police each other. | |
| In fact, that's one thing I noticed, actually. | |
| Of course, all the tax money goes into the same pot that pays for the hospitals and the schools and the roads. | |
| And so if anybody questions the tax or the income tax or the military expenditure, then people say, oh, what? | |
| You don't want to pay for schools? | |
| You know, you don't want to save people's lives with hospitals? | |
| What, are you a murderer? You know, kind of. | |
| Well, this is the thing too, and I've got a book, it's on YouTube and on my website called The Handbook of Human Ownership, that makes this point, and I think you're bang on, which is that if you're a farmer and you want the cows to attack each other for even thinking of leaving the fenced area, what you do is you get a bunch of the cows to be dependent on you. | |
| Right? And then when the cows, you get like a quarter of the cows dependent on you, and any other cow who says, I don't want to be part of this farm, they're like, oh, so you want these poor dependent cows to starve? | |
| What kind of heartless cow are you? | |
| My God, this is terrible. | |
| And it's like, I didn't make these people, these cows dependent on the farmer. | |
| It's not my fault that people have taken this path or, you know, made these choices where they've ended up dependent. | |
| I mean, That's not reasonable. | |
| I mean, we never said about slavery, well, we can't end it. | |
| My God! I mean, there's lots of slaves who are dependent upon slavery. | |
| They're too old, or they're too sick, or there's lots of farmers who are dependent on slavery, or what's going to happen to the poor slave owners or the slave shippers who ship the slaves back? | |
| No, we just said, look, this shit is immoral. | |
| We've got to stop. It's wrong to have... | |
| Human ownership. You can't own human beings as property. | |
| Whatever falls out of that. | |
| I mean, I don't care. I fundamentally don't care what happens to the teachers after we privatize education. | |
| Because that's not the point. | |
| And people say, oh, that's terrible. You don't care. | |
| It's like, no, I don't care. And you don't care either. | |
| Because there was no rational argument that said, well, you see, if we get rid of slavery, you see... | |
| Who's going to pick the cotton? | |
| There'll be no cotton picking, no fruit picking, no agriculture will happen, and we're all going to starve to death and die! | |
| No, because when you got rid of slavery, you got mechanized farming, you got better wages, agricultural productivity increased, increased. | |
| So the idea is that, as you say, if the government does it and you say the government shouldn't do it, you're sort of saying it shouldn't get done. | |
| But that's insane. | |
| I mean, if the government did organize everybody's marriage and you said that's immoral, that's institutionalized rape, you've got to force people to get married and have kids together and throw them in jail if they separate. | |
| People would say, oh, so you think that the human race should end, that nobody should get married and nobody should have children and blah, blah, blah. | |
| But that's just standard slave-on-slave aggression that gets us all pounding each other down so that we never ever get tall enough to, you know, look in through the windows of the farmhouse. | |
| Right, right. | |
| Got it. I'm interested to ask you, what's your vision for the future? | |
| What is possible? Like, how would you like to see it in the near future? | |
| How near? Well, let's say... | |
| Let's say within the next 50 years, what do you think could be achieved? | |
| Well, I know what can be achieved. | |
| I mean, whether it is or isn't, I don't believe that political action is going to do it for us. | |
| I think that political action has been tried for about, even if we get rid of the ancient Rome and ancient Greece examples, three or four hundred years, people have been trying to use politics to restrain and control the state. | |
| It never works. The state just gets bigger and bigger, faster and faster. | |
| I mean, if we couldn't control the state in 1800, when it was about 120th the size it is now, we sure as hell aren't going to control and contain it now. | |
| If they couldn't do it, right? | |
| If you can't lift five pounds, you can't lift 500 pounds. | |
| I mean, that's just the basic law of reality. | |
| So I don't think political action is going to do it. | |
| I think what's going to do it, and this is not just an opinion, there's some pretty good science behind it, what is going to do it is... | |
| Raising children without aggression, right? | |
| Raising children without violence, without spanking, without hitting, without threats, without yelling, without abuse, without all this kind of stuff, right? | |
| And it's this pretty terrible situation at the moment. | |
| I mean, why do we have a violent society? | |
| Why do we have a society where people accept coercion as a rational way of getting people to do stuff? | |
| Because that's how it works in the home. | |
| Over 90% of parents still hit their children to get them to do what they want. | |
| So, of course, those kids grow up and say, well, yeah, someone threatens me with violence to get me to do the right thing. | |
| That makes perfect sense because that's how I grew up for the first 15, 18, 20 years of my life, right? | |
| I mean, that's the language you speak. | |
| It's like... Speaking English, right? | |
| You grow up and you don't even think of it as speaking English in a way. | |
| That's just language, right? And so if you raise children with aggression, and this is parents, majority of parents, this is priests with their threats of hell and sin and bonfires forever and Jesus weeping because you masturbate and shit like that. | |
| I mean, it's ridiculous, right? | |
| And it's public school teachers who punish. | |
| It's your peers who threaten with humiliation and so on. | |
| We're just so steeped in this way of doing things that says, do what I say or I'm going to do really nasty stuff to you in one way or another. | |
| I spank you or threaten you with hellfire or humiliate you in school or whatever. | |
| And so when the kids come out into adulthood and they're like – the teacher gets replaced with the policeman or the priest gets replaced with the politician. | |
| Do this or you're bad and do this or you go to jail or do this or whatever, right? | |
| It's like – it's perfectly natural to them because that's how they're raised. | |
| But if you raise children without that hierarchical aggression, without punishment, without threats – I mean, they'll grow up and it'll be like, the state will start, you know, aggressing against them or threatening them. | |
| They'll be like, what the hell are you doing? | |
| I don't even speak this language. | |
| I don't know what you're saying, but it's not right. | |
| And I mean, look, I mean, I've been doing this. | |
| I've been a stay-at-home dad for almost three years now. | |
| And my daughter never hit her. | |
| I've never threatened her, never raised my voice at her, never called her a name. | |
| There's no need for it whatsoever. | |
| She is the happiest, smartest and very obedient because we have mutual respect rather than threats of punishment. | |
| That's the best thing that people can do. | |
| Raise their own kids or intervene in situations where you see children being harmed or threatened or aggressed against. | |
| That's the best thing. We can't save most people. | |
| I mean, their brains have been too futzed up by propaganda, but you can do within the sphere you can control, your own life, your own family, your own kids, your own parenting, the other kids that you know around you. | |
| You can do a lot, and I think that's the very best thing that we can do to bring about a free society. | |
| Right. Wow. I want to ask you about the Venus Project, because I really enjoyed your commentary on a lot of that. | |
| I really enjoyed it a lot. You're going to try and get me in trouble with the Zeitgeisters again. | |
| Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. | |
| No, I like them in a lot of ways. | |
| I mean, it's like the Wall Street guys, the Occupy Wall Street guys, you know? | |
| I appreciate that you're gunning the motor. | |
| I just wish it was in the right direction, but go on. | |
| Right. So, you know, a lot of people in this movement, we've got, you know, a lot of people have got a fantasy of kind of going back to a simple life and growing food on the land and kind of living in a community and sustainable living and, you know, that type of thing. | |
| And also, you know, obviously you're well aware of the Venus Project type of vision. | |
| What's your comment on all that type of vibe? | |
| Well, I think it's great. I mean, hey, I don't claim to have any answers about how society is going to work. | |
| I've got some sort of theories. | |
| I've put them out in some of my free books. | |
| But the basic reality is if people want to live in some hippy-dippy... | |
| Everybody's merged together in a big vat of jello at the end of the night kind of lifestyle. | |
| As long as they're not using force on each other, as long as it's peaceful and voluntary and you can come and go as you see fit, people can and should, I think, experiment with what they like. | |
| If people want to go back to the land and live off food that they locally grow, I think that's fantastic. | |
| I mean, great! More power to them. | |
| I don't think that anybody at all has the right to impose that vision on other people as the way to go. | |
| The great thing about a free society is you're going to have a vast multiplicity I think it's nonsense, | |
| and I think it'll last about 12 minutes, but Go for it. | |
| I'd love to see it because there's nothing more fun than being disproven about your fundamentals. | |
| It really is very exciting when that happens. | |
| History and economics and evidence is all against the capacity to run any kind of advanced economy without prices. | |
| Because prices, of course, reflect supply and demand in an automatic and brain-free kind of way. | |
| But if they want to do it, I think it's fantastic. | |
| As long as they commit to doing it peacefully... | |
| I can't imagine, you know, that's like saying, well, what do you think if your neighbor paints his living room a really ugly color? | |
| It's like, it's his house. | |
| You know, as long as he doesn't force me to paint it, he can, you know, put a Velcro wall up there and jump up if he wants to amuse himself. | |
| But as long as he's doing it peacefully, that's fine. | |
| Right. Okay, yeah. | |
| Cool. I wanted to ask you, I've heard you a couple of times explain, you know, the difference from open market, you know, what corporations do as opposed to governments in force at the point of a gun. | |
| And I know, I've heard you talk about how people get confused, you know, saying corporations are evil. | |
| Would you just elaborate on that idea for us? | |
| Sure, sure. Look, people mistake corporations for the free market, and corporations are not instruments or entities that have been created by the free market. | |
| Corporations are state-created, state-maintained, and state-protected legal fictions. | |
| And the reason that they're there is so that the ruling class of politicians can gain the allegiance of the ruling class of high-end politicians. | |
| Fascist, mercantilist, pseudo-capitalists, right? | |
| I mean, so there's lots of ways the government does this, right? | |
| So they'll give you a patent on your goods, which means you're then dependent upon the government to protect your patent laws. | |
| Of course, so much of what goes on in the field of entrepreneurship these days is just patent trawling. | |
| You just buy up a bunch of patents and sit on them and then you sue people who come even close to it. | |
| I mean, it's a terrible, wretched, awful Goddamn system. | |
| And so you get patents on the one hand. | |
| But the very existence of a corporation is a beautiful thing for the amoral financial classes, right? | |
| Because you work for a corporation and your corporation makes money. | |
| Woohoo! You scoop it out. | |
| The claw. You go and get the money and you scoop it out, right? | |
| And then you put it in your bank account and it's out of the corporation. | |
| So if your corporation makes money, you take the money out. | |
| And it's a one-way street. Next year, your corporation loses money. | |
| Do you have to give any of it back? | |
| Hell no. It's perfect. | |
| It means it's a one-way money spigot. | |
| The money comes out when the corporation makes money and if the corporation loses money or goes bankrupt, you're perfectly shielded. | |
| None of your shareholders, none of your creditors can come after a penny of the money you pulled out of the corporation. | |
| No free market institution would ever create Such a one-sided instrument or legal fiction. | |
| It makes no sense. And so what happens is the government extends these legal and financial protections to the business ruling entrepreneurial class or just the business ruling class. | |
| And in return, the ruling classes on the business side, they say, okay, in return, we'll let you tax this legal fiction. | |
| But all that means is that they raise their prices for their customers and then they depress their wages for their employees. | |
| It's not like the ruling classes pay that much in terms of corporate taxes. | |
| And when I say ruling classes, I mean, I know that in America in particular, right, people come and go. | |
| But I'm just talking about the people who have lots of direct political influence. | |
| And so corporations have been given this charter by the state, which gives them this completely one-sided economic situation where they get to make money in good times and never have to pay anything back in bad times, which gives them incentives to focus on the short term and, of course, So much money gets forced into the stock market that damn well shouldn't be there. | |
| People shouldn't be in the stock market unless they know something very particular about stocks and the industry that they're investing in. | |
| But so many people just are forced to go into the stock market because of tax incentives or RSPs, as they're called, or 401ks in the US, these retirement saving plans, where you get your money stolen from you unless you hand it over to a stockbroker. | |
| Well, of course, stockbrokers love that shit. | |
| I mean, woohoo! You're either going to hand it to the taxman or hand it to me. | |
| Of course, people hand it to the Stockbrokers, which creates this supercharged stock market where there's way too much money chasing around way too few profit opportunities, completely changes the environment of the businessman or woman to the point where they're just chasing the stock price all the time rather than building long-term value. | |
| Excuse me. So corporations are, you know, like this festering scab on the keeping wound of state power, but saying that corporations are evil is just to miss the point. | |
| You know, they are maximizing profits in an environment that is entirely dictated by the state. | |
| Starbucks has no cops of its own, right? | |
| I mean, they don't throw you in jail. | |
| What they'll do is they'll go to the government and ask for preferential legislation. | |
| Of course they will, because if they don't, then the next door, the second cup is going to do the same thing and screw them. | |
| To me, getting mad at corporations is like getting mad at poor people for cashing in a winning lottery ticket. | |
| You stand in front of the convenience store, somebody comes and has won 100,000 quid on the lottery and he's going to go into the store and you say, listen, man, you've got to not do this because all they do is print that money, you're stealing from the poor, you're stealing from the unborn, they're going to use it as collateral for the debt and it's really bad. | |
| They're going to be like, screw you, I'm going in. | |
| So, I mean, people can get mad at corporations and understand that because they're sort of closer. | |
| And, you know, you're employed by corporations and fewer people have direct interactions with the government, certainly if you're lucky. | |
| But corporations are an effect of power. | |
| They're like the shadow cast by a big, evil, nasty statue. | |
| I mean, you can, you know, you can take your hammer to the shadow, but you're just pounding the grass. | |
| You're not hitting the source of the darkness, which is the monopoly of violence held by the state. | |
| So, are you saying that a corporation is not real, true free market, then? | |
| Corporate activity? Well, sure. | |
| I mean, they're entirely created and sustained within the legal framework created by the state, right? | |
| I mean, the tax framework, the legal... | |
| The law is not a free market institution. | |
| The law is entirely run by the government. | |
| It used to be a free market institution way back in the day, common law and so on, right? | |
| But the law, I mean, there's nothing to do with the free market. | |
| The law is the opinions of those in power backed up by the guns of those willing to use violence against their fellow slaves. | |
| I mean, the law is a tyrannical statist institution. | |
| It has nothing to do with the free market. | |
| The free market would be peaceful voluntary contracts negotiated with no reference to state power and violence. | |
| Oh, I see. Yeah. | |
| Yeah, that makes sense. | |
| Yeah. Yeah. Oh, right. | |
| Yeah, you got me thinking there. | |
| Well, okay, so let's look at, say, well, corporations, they're evading taxes. | |
| First of all, corporations don't exist, right? | |
| They don't exist. They're legal fiction, right? | |
| It's like saying that my novel is writing a novel. | |
| No, it's not. | |
| It's not a human being, right? Can't write a novel. | |
| So, corporations don't pay taxes. | |
| People pay taxes. You raise taxes on corporations. | |
| All it means is that corporations will either move their stuff, their operations offshore, They'll pay their employees less. | |
| They'll grow their business slower. | |
| They'll invest less in capital equipment. | |
| They may pay slightly lower bonuses to their executives, but that's less likely because the executives are in charge. | |
| So, yeah, so that doesn't make it so to say, well, corporations are evading. | |
| Taxes, well, that's got nothing to do with the free market. | |
| Corporations are legal fictions created by the state. | |
| The tax environment is legal violence created by the state. | |
| And so you have a fictional legal, sorry, a fictional statist entity attempting to escape the violence of a statist legal system. | |
| What on earth would that have to do with voluntarism in the free market? | |
| Well, nothing. Right. | |
| So tell us a little bit more about volunteerism in the free market then. | |
| I don't think many of us really quite understand what that means. | |
| Sure you do. It's what you and I are doing right now. | |
| I mean, I didn't threaten you to get on the show. | |
| You didn't threaten me to come on the show. | |
| It's a voluntary interaction. | |
| You can pull the plug on me. | |
| I can pull the plug on you. | |
| We're having a chitchat. | |
| Everybody understands completely what volunteerism is because we all know the difference between charity and theft. | |
| I mean, if a guy comes up to me in the alley and says, give me 20 bucks and he smiles and whatever, I'm like, hey, maybe I'll give him 20 bucks or 20 quid. | |
| Comes up and sticks a knife in my ribs, that's a whole different situation, right? | |
| And so we all completely understand what volunteerism and the free market is. | |
| It's where you choose to live. | |
| It's the occupation you choose to go into. | |
| It's the friends you choose to have. | |
| It's the boyfriend or girlfriend you choose to shag up with or whatever. | |
| These are voluntary, peaceful interactions. | |
| And we all love those things. | |
| And if the government were to encroach upon those things, we'd be shocked and horrified, just as the philosophical among us are shocked and horrified at how much the government has already taken over in these areas. | |
| Right, okay. So if I just go back to something I kind of asked you earlier, which was how do you envisage it? | |
| Do you see that we could have a society without the government and everything's free and open and it would work? | |
| Is that possible to you? | |
| Oh, it's not only possible, it's the only thing that's possible. | |
| I mean, statism always eats itself. | |
| I mean, statism, societies always collapse. | |
| And the societies that are the most free always end up collapsing the hardest because they're so free that they have free trade. | |
| And this is true of England and ancient Greece and ancient Rome and Portugal and Spain and the Netherlands and now the American Empire and the British Empire. | |
| I mean, you have this – England was the first country to institute significant free trade around the world. | |
| I mean, it was mostly free, more free than it was before, and it broke down the power of the medieval unions and guilds and all of that. | |
| So there was the free flow of capital and labor, at least relative to how it had been before. | |
| What does that mean? Huge increase in industrial revolution. | |
| Incomes double in 50 years. | |
| I mean, people are living rather than dying. | |
| Children escaped child labor for the first time in human history. | |
| Fantastic stuff. So what's all that mean? | |
| The government says, oh my god, we hit a gusher, ladies and gentlemen. | |
| We've got so much money coming out of this free market. | |
| We can have an income tax. | |
| We can get a central bank. | |
| We can start wars. | |
| We can borrow. So the more economic freedom you get, the bigger the state you end up with. | |
| And this is the tragedy, right? | |
| So free markets with a government in the center almost inevitably lead to empires because there's so much money that comes out of the free market that the government just uses it to bribe, borrow, bully, and... | |
| And create wars and all that sort of stuff. | |
| So yeah, I mean, freedom is a great danger when you have a government. | |
| But when there's no government, I mean, fantastic. | |
| Because, I mean, people say, why do we need a government? | |
| Why do we need a government? Because people are assholes. | |
| I mean, that's the only argument. | |
| When you get right down to it, why do we need a government? | |
| Because we live in a planet neck deep in assholes, right? | |
| And that's a great name for a punk band. | |
| But we'll get back to that later. So, okay, why do we need socialized healthcare? | |
| Because people are assholes. | |
| They don't care about the sick. | |
| Why do we need the welfare state? | |
| Ah, because people are assholes. They don't care about the poor. | |
| Why do we need government-run education? | |
| Ah, there's so many assholes out there. | |
| I don't care whether poor kids get an education or not. | |
| So, you know, if you subscribe to the, you know, I don't know, homo arsoleus, you know, that being an asshole is the essence of being a human being, then you're going to believe that you need a state. | |
| But logically, it doesn't make any sense. | |
| Because if there's so many assholes in the world, and you have a government, where are the assholes going to go? | |
| They're going to go to the government and they're going to run everything. | |
| Or if there's so many assholes in the world, how on earth can you have a democracy? | |
| Because if the majority of people are assholes and the majority wins, then all you're going to get is asshole policy after asshole policy. | |
| I'm going to say this word over and over until it even sounds weird to us. | |
| So that doesn't work. | |
| But if people... | |
| Oh, and of course, you have to have a state because there are assholes out there who steal and rape and kill and assault people and so on. | |
| But ending these kinds of human behaviors is very easy. | |
| It's very easy. I mean, I'm not saying it's easy to implement, but how to do it is we know. | |
| We know very well, which is that, as I said before, when you raise children without aggression, they're not violent. | |
| They don't want to beat up other people to get stuff. | |
| They don't want to. They negotiate. | |
| Because that's the language they grow up speaking. | |
| You grow up yelling at kids and beating them up and screaming at them, then, of course, they're going to grow up very aggressive. | |
| And scientifically, this is well-established. | |
| So if you have peaceful parenting, if you have reasonable, rational, non-aggressive, non-invasive parenting, You're going to have 90 to 95% reduction in crime. | |
| I mean, this is not just pulling these out of my butt. | |
| I mean, this is fairly well established. | |
| You're going to have half the cancer rates. | |
| You're going to have almost no people addicted to drugs, almost no alcoholics, almost no smokers, almost no people who have STDs. | |
| You're going to have almost no teen pregnancy. | |
| None of these things are going to happen. | |
| Because that's, you know, people do these things because they've been traumatized as children. | |
| This is all, you know, FDRURL.com forward slash BIB is all the statistics and the interviews about this whole series called The Mom and the Brain. | |
| And so, yeah, of course it's going to work, but the first thing we have to do is extend the non-aggression principle to our children. | |
| To our children. I mean, of course we do, right? | |
| I mean, I'm not just allowed. | |
| If somebody is not listening to me or disobeying me at work, I don't get to go and pull down their pants and smack them on the bottom, right? | |
| I mean, that's not how it works. | |
| I mean, that's not how it works among civilized adults. | |
| And of course, it shouldn't be how it works with kids as well. | |
| So, yeah, I mean, not only could it work, it is the only thing. | |
| That will work in any kind of sustainable way. | |
| So we stop having this situation where we get these bouts of freedom, this manic depressive shit that we always go through as a society. | |
| We get these bouts of freedom. | |
| It's like, woohoo, we're free! | |
| Yay! Productivity, money, wealth, goods, woo! | |
| And it's like the government's like, ooh, my blood. | |
| I smell, I want, I taste, I grow. | |
| And all that small governments become is food for cancer. | |
| Food for cancer. It feeds the bigger government to grow. | |
| And I'm just sick of this cycle and let's break through it. | |
| Nice. Wow. | |
| Yeah, that makes perfect sense. | |
| My gosh. Yeah, it does. | |
| It really does. So, right. | |
| Good. Well, we've solved the entire problem of the known universe. | |
| Should we stop here? End on a high note? | |
| Yeah, I guess so. | |
| Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. | |
| Okay, well, you've given me plenty to think about. | |
| So, tell us about the books you've written. | |
| Can we download them or can we buy them? | |
| Sure, yeah, at freedomainradio.com forward slash free. | |
| I won't go through the whole list. | |
| There's quite a few there. There are books on relationships, books on anarchy or stateless society or voluntarism, whatever you want to call it. | |
| And I've got books on ethics, how we can have a system of ethics without gods and governments and threats and bullying and all that kind of crap. | |
| The Handbook of Human Ownership, which is a comedy novel. | |
| It's supposed to be an instruction manual for a new politician on how to control the cows and the livestock. | |
| And I've got a book on atheism called Against the Gods. | |
| And yeah, the PDFs and the audiobooks are all free. | |
| I just can't give away the print copies for free because it's too expensive, but they're pretty cheap. | |
| But they're all available and, you know, they've been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and I'm very happy that people do that and I hope that they enjoy them. | |
| Wow, incredible. Okay, so I'm going to encourage everybody to go to freedomainradio.com and I'm going to do the same thing and go and download them and have a read. | |
| So, Stefan, it's so nice of you to give us your time today, take the time to talk to us. | |
| So, thank you. It was my pleasure. | |
| Thank you so much for the invitation. I really enjoyed it. | |
| All right, okay. Well, nice talking to you and take care and I'll speak to you soon. |