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Oct. 12, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:11:00

2011 Black Belt Ninja Liberty Moves! A Freedomain Radio Seminar for Students for Liberty

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	This is a black belt ninja liberty moves and these are techniques that I have developed over the years which help to answer some of the fundamental objections that people have about when you present liberty topics.
	You know, those of us who've been in this Field for a while know that we get the objections.
	What about the sick? What about the poor?
	What about the old? What about the education of poor children?
	The roads! Always, always and forever.
	We are doomed to be deceived by roads.
	And... The approach that I took for a long time was to try and become the master knowledge acquirer of the multiverse and really try to research everything and I knew the history of Rhodes to the degree that people would avoid sitting next to me at dinner parties and entirely understandably in hindsight.
	And so all of this was the way that I approached trying to answer these questions.
	Say, oh, well, what about the poor?
	Well, you know, in the past, there were these friendly societies, and people are very generous.
	Americans give hundreds of billions of dollars to charities every year.
	And I knew the history of charity and all of the ways in which the poverty rate had declined in the post-war period.
	And you can sort of slowly see.
	It's like watching Krispy Kremes getting made.
	You could slowly see people's eyes begin to glaze over as I would go into this.
	And I sort of realized that I wasn't addressing people's basic concerns about liberty.
	And that was really tragic in a way.
	You say, "Well, what about the roads?" "Ah, well, you know, in the past the roads were private and there were tolls and they were efficient and the private railways were so much more efficient than the public railways and blah, blah, blah." And I learned all of this Tom DeLorenzo good stuff, which is great stuff to know.
	I think it's good to have in your back pocket.
	I just don't think it really changes people's minds about much.
	It gives them interesting information, but I don't think it really changes their minds about much.
	So, I'm going to give you a couple of approaches that you can try and see if they work.
	They work for me pretty successfully, and hopefully they'll be helpful to you as well.
	So, one of the things that you will probably be asked...
	Now, I'm a stateless society guy, so I'm going to talk about a society without a government, but this works, I think, just as well for if you want a very small government or a sort of constitutionally limited Republican-style government.
	So, forgive me if I just use statelessness, but I think these are adaptable very easily to other conditions.
	But you'll get objections like, well, show me...
	A free, a stateless society in the past that has worked, that has sustained itself, that has been successful and has worked.
	And you will be drawn into talking about things as esoteric as medieval Iceland and Dark Ages Ireland, and you'll have to learn all about the communications improvements in the neighborhood we call Somalia, and again, it won't change anyone's mind.
	But, you know, my response to that now is, it doesn't matter.
	I mean, and it's irrelevant, because the argument is true or false, whether or not there are historical examples.
	And so, in the past, you know, up until sort of the...
	15th or 16th or 17th centuries, all societies were slave-owning societies.
	And so anybody who said, let's not have slavery, would immediately be pounded with, you show me a society without slavery that has ever existed and sustained itself.
	And really the answer is, well, you can't.
	But that doesn't matter.
	Because if you're talking about something new, then you're talking about something new.
	And asking for historical examples, it's like...
	The first guy to come up with a portable MP3 music player would go to his board and his board would say, will you show me a portable music MP3 player that has ever succeeded in the past?
	And the answer would be, no, no, no.
	It's a new product.
	It's a new thing.
	So it's not really that relevant.
	So, you know, there was, of course, societies without universal suffrage.
	And so people went to it, well, let's have universal suffrage.
	You show me universal suffrage in the past.
	And the whole point is that it's new. And you have to, I think, urge people to look at the merits of the argument and not try and divert them to historical proofs and disproofs.
	I'm always trying to find ways to put together arguments without footnotes.
	Oh, the footnotes, the bane of our existence.
	They trip us up in terms of eloquence and flow every single time.
	So when people say, show me a society...
	Where statelessness or anarchism works, I say, well, you know, you show me a society prior to the 17th century where rights for women existed.
	And they'll say, well, there weren't any.
	Really? I say, well, okay, that's sort of the point, right?
	We're talking about something new.
	And the fact that it hasn't been around, I think, is a good thing rather than a bad thing, because it means that we're not going to make the same mistakes again.
	Hopefully, we'll make new mistakes.
	That's called progress in many circles.
	So that's the first thing I wanted to talk about.
	Now, the second thing I wanted to talk about is, you know, in logic, it's sort of called begging the question.
	It's when you're trying to establish something, but you have to assume that thing is already true in order to continue the argument, and that doesn't really work logically or practically.
	And the way it works in government arguments or arguments about freedom is, Is that you'll say, we need to privatize the roads.
	Or we need to have no government.
	Or we need to get rid of the Department of Transportation.
	Or we need to have the government stop funding the roads.
	And what do people say?
	They say, well, how will the roads be built?
	How will the roads be maintained?
	And so on. And what that is doing is...
	It's not conscious on people's minds.
	But what it's doing is it's saying to people...
	Or people are saying to you when they make that argument...
	The way it is right now...
	It's really great. It's really great.
	And so in whatever new society we have, or in whatever changed society we have, it needs to continue and repeat what is currently in our society now.
	So we have this crazy patchwork of roads and highways that just go on and on, which did not come from the free market.
	I mean, the highway system in America was built by Eisenhower in the 1950s.
	I won't bore you with more details, but...
	It was not generated by the free market.
	I mean, it's generated out of a Cold War anxiety about loss of communication, sort of like the internet.
	And so, because the existing system of roads and everything that has flowed from that, right, dependence on oil, sort of a flattening out and expansion of human communities into suburbs and so on...
	It did not come from the free market, and therefore, if we have the free market, quote, free market takeover roads, then it's not going to look like it is now.
	It's not going to look like it does now.
	And this applies to just about everything, right?
	You know, fence.
	I'm talking to a group who knows this even more viscerally than I do, or more recently.
	Government schools fence in kids in these prison-like environments for 15,000 hours, you know, for six hours a day with an hour or two of homework and this time off.
	In the summer, to forget everything you've learned.
	And so people think that that's what education is.
	That's what education has to be.
	And so when you say, well, let's privatize education, people immediately look at the existing system and they say, oh my goodness, we've got this existing system and it costs...
	$15,000 or $12,000 per student and, you know, it requires all these big schools with parking lots.
	It requires these yellow buses going all over the place.
	And so how is the free market going to photocopy what is and how could that conceivably be done?
	But that's begging the question.
	What that is is saying, well, the way that the government has run education for the past 150 years is the best possible way, and the free market's going to choose exactly the same thing, and it's just going to reproduce it the way it is now.
	But of course the reality is that no such thing will occur.
	And when the free market takes over education, you're going to have education of wildly differing kinds.
	You're going to have a wide variety of educational standards and approaches and opportunities and options where So many people are going to be trying to come up with the best way of doing things, and the best way is a multifaceted diamond in the educational field.
	Best for kids, best for parents, best for teachers, if we need them.
	And there's some doubt about that in the long run as well.
	And so, for instance, I mean, just to dip a little bit into history, in the 19th century in England, there were these Lancashire schools.
	And in these schools...
	You had very few teachers relative to the students.
	The teachers would teach the students and then the students would tutor each other going down the knowledge chain.
	And the way it worked is that you would actually compete in your tutoring skills to other kids or with other kids.
	So there'd be like 20 guys who would offer to tutor you in math and the best guy, the guy with the best references and so on, is the one who'd get your shelling or your penny or whatever it was.
	And so you had very, very few teachers relative to the students.
	The students taught each other. And, of course, there's no better way, in a sense, to make sure that you know something than to try and teach someone else that same thing.
	So the tutors who were the best were the ones who were the most knowledgeable.
	And they were also being good tutors.
	They would know who were good tutors in the ranks above them.
	And so it was amazing.
	I mean, you could get... Education for the modern equivalent of $40 or $50 a year.
	And it was just fantastic.
	And, of course, there's unschooling, there's homeschooling, there's the Sudbury School where everybody gets a vote that is equal from the principal to the four-year-olds at the bottom of the learning curve.
	And all of that works in delightful ways.
	So, saying, well, how would the free market, you know, how would...
	Poor people have $15,000 to send their kids to school for 10 months a year, but that's how the government works, and that's not how the free market is going to work.
	So that's another example. Same thing with charity, same thing with protection of the environment, right?
	You need all of these big, crazy government agencies to protect the environment.
	If we get rid of those, then people imagine, of course, that the environment is going to be unprotected.
	And that's... You know, when you've studied this stuff for a while, you realize what an annoying and repetitive argument this is.
	It's sort of like arguing, you know, people say, well, the government doesn't now, and if the government doesn't do it, it won't get done.
	It's sort of like saying if there was a marriage agency where the government, you know, assigned people to get married to each other.
	And then somebody said, you know, we should not have a government marriage agency.
	Then everyone said, well, then nobody will get married and we'll all die out and generations.
	There'll be no kids. No one will take care of the kids and blah, blah, blah.
	It's like, no, you end up with dating websites and singles bars.
	I don't know how the hell people meet each other anymore.
	But just because the government doesn't do it doesn't mean that it won't get done.
	What it usually means is that it actually will get done for the first time in history.
	So, yeah, so what does it mean to be charitable?
	I mean, would charities...
	Work the way the governments do now, which is with a great deal of distance between the bureaucrats administering the charity and the recipients receiving it.
	No, my argument, and it's worked historically, is that a charity, you need to really dig in and figure out what the issues are with the person or the family, what went so terribly wrong, and really get in there, rather than just send a check every month and sort of hope for the best, which is the way it sort of works now, or rather doesn't work. So, again, you know, people say, well, this is the Department of Health and Welfare, and, you know, this is the same with healthcare, right?
	This is their budget, my God!
	I mean, it costs so much, and how is that going to be reproduced in the free market?
	Well, of course, in the free market, things are going to be enormously different.
	You are not going to have to go to, I guarantee you, in a free market of medicine, you would not have to go...
	To school for eight years to take a blood test, find an infection, and prescribe an antibiotic.
	I imagine there would be a vending machine in which you would put your finger, it would prick a little blood, and it would test it, and boink, out would come your pills.
	And, you know, maybe you could send the vending machine to school for eight years to allow it to rent-seek as well.
	But it would be something along those lines.
	And I could go on and on, but what I'd like to do is...
	If there are people from the audience who have, you know, those head-beating, thorny, repetitive issues that come up when you're trying to talk about sort of free and peaceful and voluntary solutions to social problems, what are the kind of things that people have that are coming up all the time that maybe I can try and put through this grist of experience and see if we can come up with something what are the kind of things that people have that are In a free society,
	these would be telepathically beamed into the inside of my retinas, in a free society these would be telepathically beamed into the inside of my retinas and we wouldn't need to do this this way but of course we have to wait for that technology because it has to be licensed protect your eyeballs through the government all that kind of stuff
	But we're working on it.
	The first question I received was, how will criminals be dealt with in a free society without a state-run or state-based police system and court system and prison system?
	A great question. My standard answer is, let's not give them armies.
	You know, I think that's really...
	Because people think that it's dealt with now, right?
	This is another thing you have to watch, these sneaky little statists.
	And, you know, they're not being usually consciously malevolent, but they just assume.
	When people say, well, how would violent criminals be dealt with in a free society?
	It's the implicit assumption that they're being dealt with now, and they're not being dealt with now, of course.
	But violent crime is, you know, and I'm talking outside the realm where someone has a brain tumor which changes their personality or the nail gun goes through their head and changes their personality.
	But violent crime has its roots deep in traumatic, difficult, abusive early childhood experiences.
	This is where the science is pretty uncontroversial, that criminals are not born, they are made by other criminals, you know, caregivers, parents or whoever, who treat them really badly and then they grow up very aggressive.
	The pattern is very, very clear.
	And so, as in all things to do with a free society, the profit is in prevention, not in cure.
	And the way it works right now is that parents raise children pretty much in isolation.
	I mean, this is something really egregious.
	They raise them pretty much in isolation.
	And no one has any vested financial interest in making sure that the kids are being raised, you know, peacefully and benevolently and so on, right?
	And in a free society, parents, of course, would be held liable for the destructive actions of their children, and they would need, if they were going to get them into schools or other sorts of things, or medical care, they would need to have some level of insurance.
	And the insurance in a free society for children's misbehavior would be much cheaper if you took some parenting classes than if you maybe had the occasional review of your parenting skills.
	In the same way that if you want cheap insurance for your car, you should go and take some driving courses, and then you will get cheaper insurance.
	And so that gives people a financial incentive to find the best ways to help parents raise their children peacefully and negotiate with them instead of belting them or assaulting them or something like that, which means that people are going to be much, much, much less likely to become criminals.
	I mean, a rough estimate is, you know, nine-tenths of criminality.
	At the minimum, it's sort of caused by destructive or abusive histories in childhood.
	And so in a free society, the cost for that would accrue not to the taxpayers as a whole, but to the parents in particular.
	And those parents are not going to want to pay that.
	They're going to want to keep those costs low, which means that they're going to have to be good parents.
	And there's going to be people in there who are going to help them with that, because society as a whole will profit.
	If the abuse of children goes down, criminality goes down, society as a whole profits enormously.
	And unfortunately, tragically, in the worst possible way, there's no incentive in the current system for that kind of transaction.
	And because of that, you get things like this, what's it, Lochner fellow, or Lohner fellow, I guess, Gerald Lohner, I think his name was...
	Who shot the congresswoman and a bunch of other people.
	You know, he's costing an enormous amount of money now.
	This has all been borne by the taxpayers who had nothing to do with raising him.
	Well, it's not how it should be.
	And it's certainly not the case, I mean, if my dog attacks someone, I'm liable.
	And, you know, I think the same thing should be true with parents and kids.
	So yeah, and of course, locking people up and traumatizing them further is not the way to do it.
	So I think in a free society, there'll be lots of social interest and profit in intervening early to make sure that children aren't being harmed.
	Children who are being abused, you know, at the moment, you sort of have to have a broken arm and a shady-looking parent in order to have some intervention.
	but in the future.
	I mean, brain scans can very easily show traumatic experiences and how it's reshaped the brain of a child.
	I mean, that would simply be part of a child's regular scan.
	And if anything showed up that showed verbal or physical abuse, there would be intervention.
	And that would be the way it would go, I think.
	I mean, it could be many different ways.
	I think that's the most likely way.
	But yeah.
	Yeah, and of course, if somebody did, you know, just turn out to be some sort of psycho killer, then, you know, they would be ostracized from the community or from the community of civilized people as a whole until they submitted to some sort of treatment.
	And since everything would be privately owned, there'd be no place for them to go, except, I don't know, deep into the woods of Montana or something.
	So they would really just have to submit to treatment in order to be able to rejoin society.
	And I think that's how it would work.
	It's just a guess. But it certainly isn't working now.
	The second question that I received was, what is my perspective or opinion on the use of illicit drugs or illegal narcotics in society?
	And how would this be dealt with or how would this problem be dealt with in a stateless or free society?
	Liberty is an end in and of itself.
	Yeah, I know. I mean, the drug thing is tricky.
	It's tricky. I mean, I'm not a fan of drugs myself.
	I've never taken any, I mean, outside of the regular caffeine and, you know, morning picker-uppers.
	But it's tough.
	I don't know. You can ask the person, do you like Pink Floyd?
	Do you like The Doors?
	Do you ever hear this album called Sgt.
	Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band?
	I mean, it's fantastic albums.
	These are amazing musicians.
	And you could really go through the list of musicians who claim to have been inspired by drugs.
	Even Steve Jobs claimed that LSD, the couple of times he took it, was about the most important thing that he'd ever done in terms of unlocking his creative potential.
	If you like your iPad, then it's kind of tough to really be down on drugs.
	There are people who gain value out of using drugs, and they don't become addicts, and it, you know, opens their doors to perception, and I think that's fine.
	I mean, what do I care? I mean, do what they want.
	There are people who are addicts, and I think it's important to differentiate between the two.
	There are people, you know, should we throw Paul McCartney in jail?
	Should we throw Steve Tyler in jail?
	I mean, I don't think so.
	It's hard for me to like their music and think that they should be in jail.
	But there are people who are addicts, and if you care about addicts, you have to legalize drugs.
	If you care about addicts, you have to legalize drugs.
	That is simply a matter of basic human compassion.
	For so many reasons, I won't even bother listing them here in detail.
	But obviously, when it's illegal, they can't pop their heads up like gophers and just generally get help because there's so much negative problems and so on.
	Also, because it's illegal, the drugs are so much more expensive than they should be, and their quality is questionable.
	And so, my God, I mean, these people face a terrible time paying for these drugs, and they're preyed upon by the worst kinds of people.
	They can't easily get help.
	And, of course, if...
	If drug abuse is people's major concern, then let's forget about...
	I mean, obviously, things like marijuana, I mean, it just makes you snacky and sleepy.
	I mean, this is not something that is a big danger to society.
	But when people are talking about hard drugs, they're talking about a very small percentage of the population.
	If people are concerned about drug abuse, by God, I mean, let's look at the drugs that have been pumped into children for...
	Non-existent pseudo-ailments like ADHD and ODD and all of these acronyms that are just pulled out of some psychiatrist's armpit.
	I mean, that's where the real drug abuse occurs, is in this prescription nonsense.
	And the reason that it occurs is because we have a broken system that is failing the kids.
	And like every broken system, it is the weakest entity in that system who has to forever conform to its brokenness, and that is unfortunately the children.
	But the prescription system doesn't work.
	The jailing system doesn't work.
	Bombing crops in foreign countries doesn't work.
	If you want to see an extreme with the drug war, look at what's happening to all the mayors in Mexico, where they're being offered...
	You know, their choice of silver.
	Do you want coins or a bullet?
	So, it doesn't work.
	We need to let people who want to use drugs recreationally, fine, you know, like the music.
	Even if you don't like the music, you've got to admit it's pretty good music.
	And help the addicts, really help the addicts get the help they need, which means lower the price and take away the illegality of it so that they can find ways to get out of their addiction without facing jail.
	So, to me, it's just a basic matter The third question I received was, human beings are born into different families, different races, different classes with differing abilities.
	How would a free or stateless society deal with the problems of inequality that grow out of the wide disbursement of human potential among a wide variety of family structures?
	Yeah, no, that's a fantastic argument.
	And again, I would first of all start hacking at the root of the assumption that is within the question, which I'm not saying is the assumption of the listener, but which is to say that the current system is doing anything to solve that.
	I mean, it's quite the opposite. I mean, we have to sort of lift out of the everyday headlines and look at the big picture of what the intention of the socialistic welfare state was.
	Remember, back in the 1950s, the 1960s?
	Even, you know, back to the New Deal in the 1930s, the Great Society of LBJ in the 1960s, the whole point was to level the playing field, remember?
	The whole point was to give government public education to all kids to level the playing field.
	The whole point was to give subsidies to this group and to tax this group more and so on to level the playing field.
	And what's happened? Well...
	Almost without exception, you can look at just about any government program and say, you know what the results are going to be?
	The results are going to be the exact diametric opposite.
	Of its stated intention.
	And it's simple. I mean, it's simple and it's obvious and it's tragic, right?
	If I really like some woman, I'm like, oh, man, I really want that woman to go out with me.
	And I say, well, what I'm going to do, see, I'm going to sneak up behind her in a windowless van.
	I'm going to pull out my trusty chloroform and I'm going to knock her out.
	And when she comes to, she's going to be tied to a chair in my basement.
	And then I'm going to woo her.
	Well, I mean, of course that's not going to work.
	Violence always achieves the opposite of its intended goal.
	Say, ah, she's going to be mine, all mine.
	Of course she's going to do whatever she can to claw her way out of my house and call for help.
	So violence always achieves the opposite of what you want it to, and the same is true when it comes to egalitarianism within society.
	The gap between the rich and the poor has been widening steadily ever since the socialistic welfare state programs went in.
	Of course it has! Of course it has!
	Because you create a permanent underclass and you start hitting the rich hard enough to the point where they start waking up to politics, move right next door to the White House, and start Buying politicians, of course.
	I mean, you start controlling the rich, the rich will start controlling the government.
	That's inevitable. So you've got an underclass of people who are permanently dependent on welfare programs and on government payouts, and I include in this things like government teachers and post office workers and all the other people who are dependent on governments, and the people who are secondarily dependent on government programs, like people who are in government-protected unions that are sort of half in the private sector.
	And, of course, rich corporations with tax breaks and subsidies, farmers, people on unemployment.
	The list goes on and on, right?
	I understand. And so what's happened is that because we've decided...
	Well, we've decided to use very loosely.
	We've decided to use violence to try and solve these problems, right?
	Take money from people at gunpoint or print money through the evil of counterfeiting through the Fed.
	And that's how we're going to solve our problems.
	Well, our problems have just gotten worse.
	And they're going to be a lot worse once we're unable to borrow anymore.
	So clearly the existing system hasn't worked.
	But the reality is you simply cannot You cannot undo egalitarianism.
	Sorry, you simply cannot undo people's differences.
	So some people are born beautiful and some people are born ugly.
	And in order for there to be egalitarianism, we would have to have models chosen by blind people who couldn't touch them or something, right?
	To have egalitarianism in the modeling industry then would mean that we would have to just pick people randomly and that would never work.
	Say, well, but someone who's born really short, he can't be a basketball player.
	So, what?
	So what? So, you know, Danny DeVito can't join the NBA. It's sad, but that's that we can't make him taller.
	And, you know, I guess we could hack off the NBA limit.
	That's not obviously the right thing to do.
	Some people are born...
	I mean, gosh, think of, I don't know, Freddie Mercury, Celine Dion, Pavarotti.
	I mean, whoever you like as a singer, they're born with this incredible set of pipes.
	They just open their mouth up.
	I know they train and all that.
	Open their mouth up and the most incredibly beautiful sounds come out of it.
	I mean, Does that mean that you can't have auditions for a band?
	You've just got to take whoever wanders into the room and have them yell their bad karaoke way through your greatest hits?
	No! The great singers are the great singers and I can't do it.
	Maybe you can, but you can't get rid of those differing abilities.
	Some people are really smart. Some people have a greater capacity for risk.
	Some people are more conservative.
	The wide variety in human natures is fantastic and human possibility tends to follow human nature.
	There is, of course, the argument that where you're born is where you're going to end up.
	Statistically, that does not seem to be the case.
	Statistically, people move in and out of classes, upper-middle, lower classes, and everything in between in America with great regularity.
	In a free market, people move in and out of these classes all the time.
	People get rich. What do they call it?
	Rags to riches to rags in three generations.
	It happens pretty regularly.
	That having been said, there are kids who are born sick and people who have mental retardation or something.
	We absolutely need to, as a society, care about those people.
	I think the only people who really care about these people are the people advocating freedom.
	Because the people who want status programs The tragic thing that they're doing is they are creating, in every single society that this is tried, you create this temporary, unsustainable system that draws people into its web and then shafts them extremely violently.
	And so right now, of course, oh, we're going to solve the problem of the poor.
	We're going to give welfare to poor people.
	And what happens is, for a variety of reasons that we don't have to get into now, you end up with a lot of single moms.
	Single moms, again, unfortunately, heavily correlated to criminality, the offspring of single moms.
	It's sad, but it's true. I mean, Kids need dads.
	And what happens is you get these people who get stuck in these systems, which is bad enough, but then these systems become unsustainable, which means that you have a generation or two or three of people who've sort of born and bred themselves into this dependency, and then that dependency isn't going to last.
	And what is going to happen then?
	Then it is truly quitting a multi-generational dependency cold, Turkey.
	And that is a very dangerous thing to do in society.
	So unfortunately, you can't legislate it away.
	You can't get rid of it. There is going to be differences in humanity.
	And the best thing we can do is generously provide charity where circumstances can't be overcome.
	But provide as many opportunities through the fastest-growing free market that we can for everybody who wants to exercise their capacities to the maximum, which isn't to everyone's taste.
	But yeah, you can't will it away.
	And trying to legislate it away just makes things worse in the long run.
	The next question that I received was, what was my perspective or opinion on the recent Occupy Wall Street protests and demonstrations occurring in the U.S.? Oh, it's a love-hate relationship I have with these people.
	I mean, I... I like that they know that things are messed up.
	I like that. I think that they're energetic and passionate.
	In some ways, I grew up in a very apathetic generation.
	I was too late for the 60s and I think I'm a little bit too old for some of the Occupy Wall Street stuff.
	So I like the fact that they are mad.
	I like the fact that they're angry.
	I really like the fact that they're doing something about it, that they're raising their voices.
	Unfortunately, just about everything that I hear them say is not right.
	So, you know, to me, it's sort of like, you know, you live in a time of plague, and finally people get that it's a time of plague, and lots of people are sick, and then you get a bunch of people running down the street saying, ghosts are making us all sick!
	Let's do something about it!
	It's like, well, I'm glad that you're energized, I'm glad that you know people are sick, but we're not being made sick by ghosts.
	So everyone you're convinced that is ghosts is going to be one harder person for everyone else who can think straight to unconvinced.
	So, I'm glad that they're mad.
	I've made a whole bunch of videos hoping to...
	Point them in the right direction in whatever megalomaniacal way I can think that I can help.
	And I hope to be able to go and talk down there if they do it to Toronto.
	So yeah, I'm very happy that they know that the society is sick.
	I just think that most of the cures that they're talking about will only make society sicker.
	And in that sense, I think that they have been deceived by the powers that be and are actually fueling the very beast that they're trying to conquer.
	And I think that's tragic.
	The next question was, how confident am I that we are going to see a truly free society, and what are some of the steps that we can take to achieve this great end?
	I know without a shadow of a doubt that we will see a stateless society.
	I know that without a shadow of doubt.
	In humanity, the most consistent argument will always win.
	It doesn't win quickly, and it doesn't win easily, but it always wins.
	And the trend...
	You know, I'm a big history guy, and...
	You know, that's my sort of grad level education is in history.
	And my thesis was 2500 years of philosophy and history.
	And when you get to that height of a view, the landscape you see is very, very different.
	It's sort of like if you're living, you know, a nanometer high in an egg, you're like, man, this thing is really rocky.
	There's mountains, there's crevices, this is nuts, right?
	But then when you zoom out, it's like, wow, this thing is really smooth.
	And the view from history as a whole is two.
	First, the most consistent argument wins in the long run.
	And secondly, there is no way to resist the eventual expansion of what is called personhood, personhood to everyone.
	It extends to everyone, right?
	I mean, if you think about the ancient world, right?
	In the ancient world, you had one or two percentage of aristocrats, you had a small merchant class who depended upon them, and then you had slaves and serfs and women and children.
	And slaves and serfs and women and children had no rights, fundamentally.
	You killed them with impunity and, I mean, nothing, right?
	So you had a tiny, tiny percentage of people who had any kind of rights, and even those rights, as Socrates found out, were pretty shaky in the main.
	And, you know, you sort of fast forward to today, well...
	There's no slavery in the way that they used to be.
	There's no serfdom in the way that they used to be.
	Women have rights!
	Yay! Fantastic!
	And very few people argue otherwise.
	Racism was, of course, a foundational, driving, crazy motivating factor throughout most of human history.
	Racism now is, in all civilized circles, decried as the evil that it is.
	No slaves, no serfs, women have rights, and children, children, children, God bless the little tykes, are beginning to have rights as well.
	We're just starting that conversation about children having rights.
	So in various places in Europe, you're no longer allowed to hit children in terms of discipline.
	I think that's great. I think that's exactly what should be happening.
	And it's irresistible. It's going to happen in America as well.
	It's irresistible. The extension of personhood to children is the final thing that is necessary.
	What a great phrase. The final thing that is necessary.
	Let's put that on a placard.
	No, it's the final step of the humanizing of the other, of the outlier of humanity.
	It is the final step.
	So that aggression, like hitting kids, will be viewed as hitting your wife.
	Very soon. It's absolutely coming and it cannot be resisted.
	And so this extension of personhood to kids is the final step.
	Once that happens, the state is doomed.
	I mean, and it's happening now because children simply...
	It won't fit into a status society if they don't grow up with aggressive authority in the home.
	Their minds won't be shaped in a way that is at all useful.
	And yeah, there'll be people who will resist it, and there'll be people who fight against it, and the government will obviously decry it in many ways, but it's irresistible.
	And, you know, as I sort of mentioned, I guess, giving away the second part of the answer.
	It comes about when we extend the protection of the non-aggression principle to children.
	To some people it's sort of unimaginable, but it was unimaginable to extend it to women or slaves or minorities or whatever.
	But yeah, we extend the non-aggression principle to children, which is what we absolutely need to do as a community.
	It's consistent with our values.
	A child who disobeys you is not aggressing against you and therefore you can't use force against that child.
	Once we include children as full persons, and as in fact the only large group of people who deserve the most protection in society from aggression, and by aggression I don't just mean hitting, I mean screaming at, yelling at, raising voices and so on, and threatening and all this sort of stuff.
	Once we accept the extension of personhood to children and we refrain from aggressing against them, we will only be a generation or two away from a state of society.
	Because there will be no need for a state when there's virtually no crime.
	There'll be no need for a state when people don't grow up traumatized enough that they want to become cops and soldiers.
	I mean, I just read that I think it's almost 60% of soldiers admit to having seen significant parental abuse when they were kids.
	Well, of course, and I'm sure that the 40% there have seen other kinds of abuse.
	So you have very few, very little crime.
	You don't have people growing up with this hunger, lust for power over others because they don't have this big hole in their heart where their heart should be because they had a happy childhood where they were loved and protected.
	They don't want to become cops.
	Then they are able to deal and reason with each other and all of that.
	Our reasoning centers shut down if we've had early trauma, and they're very hard to reactivate.
	So people can reason. They won't want to become cops.
	They won't want power over others.
	There'll be almost no crime. There'll be no need for the state.
	The state will be looked at, you know, a smallpox curing center 10 years after the introduction of the smallpox vaccine.
	You'll be like, why is this thing here again?
	It'll just go. And then I was asked a follow-up question related to a question I had attempted to answer a little bit earlier in the conversation.
	Ah, I was hoping to get away with, oh, it sounds like I've answered them all perfectly.
	They won't need to ask any more again.
	That's the great thing when you have new questions.
	It's like, ah, good, I've answered it perfectly.
	This question was, how do you deal with people who reject reason and evidence and historical examples and philosophy as a whole in conversations about how to achieve genuine human freedom and peace?
	Well, I mean, if you get someone who won't sort of accept those kinds of arguments, I do have...
	And I did this in a speech at the...
	I think it was the 2009 New Hampshire Liberty Forum.
	It's on YouTube. But it's called the Against Me Argument.
	So somebody comes up and says...
	I like paying taxes.
	I'm happy being a tax serf.
	I'm a patriot. I want to see drug users thrown in jail.
	I like the wars in Iraq.
	I'm sorry. I don't know what accent I'm doing.
	But anyway, somebody comes up and they won't bow to reason or evidence or anything like that.
	It's like, fine. Okay, so let's say, just pick one issue.
	Say, you like paying your taxes.
	Great. Fine.
	I mean, that's fine.
	You like paying your taxes.
	I would never ever use force against you because you like paying your taxes, right?
	So I would never throw you in jail because you want to pay your taxes.
	Is that a reasonable position?
	And the guy would say, of course it's a reasonable position that I don't get thrown in jail for wanting to pay my taxes.
	I said, well... I disagree that paying taxes is virtuous.
	I disagree that it leads to a good end or a positive end or a productive end.
	And I'm not asking that you agree with me.
	You don't have to agree with me. That's fine.
	We can agree to disagree.
	But that's the key. Can we agree to disagree?
	Do you grant to me the same respect for my independent sovereign thought as I grant to yours?
	In other words, I would never have you thrown in jail for paying taxes.
	Will you accord me the same respect and allow me to walk free in your society and disagree with paying taxes and not pay my taxes?
	Now, if the guy says, no, you should be thrown in jail for not paying your taxes, it's like, well, then you want people to come with guns to my house and drag me off to jail because I don't agree with you.
	Is that your position?
	And if the person doubles down and says, yes, you should be thrown in jail...
	For disagreeing with me, then I say, unfortunately, you're a contemptible scum, and I cannot debate with you.
	I'm not going to pretend to debate with you if behind you are a bunch of guys with guns who are going to shoot me for disagreeing with you.
	I will not give that The pretense of a civilized interaction, just end the debate there.
	Because it's not a debate. Once somebody is using force against you, is advocating the use of force against you just for disagreeing with him or her, there's no more debate.
	Just shut it down. Now, if the person says, you know, I don't really like the idea of you being thrown in jail for disagreeing with me, we say, fantastic, beautiful, we are brothers.
	If you feel that paying money to some group is the best way, then what we're talking about, I would rather pay my money to the United Way, you would rather pay it to the government.
	I accept your right to pay to the government.
	You have to accept my right.
	And you do. So, fantastic.
	We have different strategies, and that's fine.
	But we respect each other to the point we're not.
	So if people, they have to understand that when they're saying the government has to doing stuff, what they're saying is, I want people thrown in jail for disagreeing with me.
	Somebody says, the government has to provide education to the poor.
	I say, I don't agree with that.
	I think that is wrong. I think it is unproductive.
	I think it's counterproductive.
	I think it's destructive to the minds of the poor.
	But hey, if you want to fund the government, you fund the government.
	I vehemently disagree with that as a productive solution.
	Will you accord me the respect to withdraw my consent from that which I find morally reprehensible?
	Now, if somebody won't let me withdraw my consent from that which I find morally evil, I'm not going to have a debate with that, but I'm going to pretend that there's any debate going, because they just pulled a gun.
	There's no negotiation when somebody pulls a gun, and the state is a gun.
	And so, just ask the person, are you openly suggesting that I be thrown in jail for disagreeing with you?
	That is a totalitarian impulse.
	That is statism.
	If you want to do it, great.
	I would never use force against you for following your conscience.
	You damn well better not suggest using force against me for following mine.
	The next question or comment was that the listener believed that the internet was kind of like a new Gutenberg press, a way of disseminating information formally obscured from the general population to the general population.
	and did I agree with that assessment and what was my assessment of the role of the internet in helping to promote genuine human freedom and rationality that's I mean that's great I mean I have to call that a brilliant observation because I I've made it myself so I have to you know Hopefully it's not too dumb.
	I think that's very astute.
	The internet is not going to do it in and of itself because the internet is used by a lot of crazy, bad, irrational people as well.
	I mean, obviously this conversation is only happening because of the internet.
	And even if I were there in person, I would only be there in person because people had heard about me through the internet.
	And I'd have heard about you through the internet.
	So yeah, the internet is the ultimate Gutenberg for a number of reasons.
	I'll just touch on them very briefly here.
	First of all, it gives people access to information that they wouldn't otherwise have.
	I mean, and incredible amounts of information.
	I mean, I can't remember the last time I got some piece of important or useful information from the mainstream news or something.
	I mean, I would never go to those places.
	I mean, maybe I'll go just to find out what the lay of the land is of the mainstream media, but you don't go there for anything intelligent.
	I'll just give you one tiny example.
	I mean, We're good to go.
	From the invasion, you can see them.
	It's a click away. I mean, it's unbelievable.
	The amount of, I mean, just podcasts.
	I mean, things like Mises.org or what's that one?
	EconTalk. They have fantastic resources.
	I mean, my show is to quote a much more minor example.
	The Khan Academy, all of these things.
	Amazing education that's out there.
	Alternate perspectives. Arguments you would never come across.
	In the mainstream media.
	I think that's absolutely fantastic.
	What that means to me...
	This is the second point.
	I'll just touch on this one and then stop because I could go on and on.
	But what it means to me is that somebody who...
	Is interested in sort of freedom or interested in politics, even from a status perspective, you can say to them, hey, what do you think of, I don't know, why do you think of Ron Paul's arguments?
	And if that person doesn't know Ron Paul's arguments, then I know that they're just not intellectually curious and they, I mean, they don't have to agree with them, but at least have to understand them.
	It means that they just, they don't step outside their little paddock.
	And this is one of the reasons I really love libertarians and anarchists and other people is that We're so constantly bombarded with arguments against our position that you simply have to be smarter than your average bear to sustain it.
	And so I think it's a great litmus test where people say, oh, you know, you're interested in politics or you're interested in economics.
	What do you think of Ayn Rand?
	And say, ah, I've never read her.
	It's like, really? Really the second most influential book in America after the Bible.
	One of the most influential intellectual books that has ever been written in history and you've never even cracked it.
	I just write that person off as a lightweight.
	I mean, I'm sorry.
	I mean, you're cliched.
	Unfortunately, you're a round peg in a round hole and therefore entirely too categorizable to be of any interest intellectually.
	So, yeah, I think it's fantastic.
	I think it is really cracking wide The monomania of propaganda that the state and its minions have had monopoly over for far too long.
	The next question was what do I think of the seasteading movement?
	Oh, I think it's fantastic. I actually did an interview with one of their ambassadors.
	And I think it's fantastic.
	I mean, the moment they get a floating platform out there, I'm out there with my rubber ducky and water wings, and I'm just going to see what it's all about.
	I think it's very interesting.
	I think it's a little soon in some ways.
	I mean, if it becomes really successful, I think they're going to face some opposition from the state.
	I'm very much for sort of growing solutions in a sense, multi-generationally from the bottom up.
	They sort of imposing them from the side in a sense, because politics is top down.
	You know, my approach is bottom up.
	This is sort of jabbing it in from the side.
	I mean, I think it's fantastic.
	I'd love to see how it works.
	I'd love to see how they negotiate, how they solve problems, how they deal with aggression or violence or criminality on these areas.
	I mean, I have lots of theories about how it might work, but I'd love to go out and see for myself.
	So I think it's, you know, something that everybody should check out and get behind if they can.
	It's a fascinating experiment.
	The next question was, unfortunately, a little bit too obscure and abstract for me to figure out.
	So I did ask for a clarification in this next question that I returned to the moderators.
	.
	Could you just ask that person for an example?
	I want to make sure that I answer something that isn't me pouring my own preferences into the question.
	Unfortunately, we weren't able to get a clarification of the question in time, so we moved on to the next question, which was a very good question about how a free society or a free market deals with things like occupational health and safety and other environmental issues.
	Right, right. Okay, so this is, you know, you've been breathing asbestos, or do you need to wear a helmet, and so on.
	Well, I mean, the way that these things have been dealt with traditionally is through law.
	I mean, and through common law.
	Let's remember that the law that we see today is this bloated, statist, spiderweb of steel-strangling-noose-monopoly-horror.
	Sorry, that was quite a mouthful.
	But the law that we see today with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of statues and books that you could put end-to-end in an airplane hangar and still not be done, that has nothing to do with the law as it originated in the quasi-free market of common law.
	So in common law, If I injure you, I owe you restitution.
	If I break your leg, during harvest time, I have to do my harvest, I have to do your harvest, I have to pay for the doctor to fix your leg, and I've got to give you some amount of sum for the inconvenience of what I did to you.
	I mean, that's just how it worked.
	It's called wereguild.
	If you kill someone, there's a restitution that you have to make.
	Now, of course, what happens, as is always the case when the government takes over things, is it turns to a big pile of Stegosaurus crap.
	Which is that if I do something to injure you, then you have to, instead of me paying you, you have to pay for me to be prosecuted, and then you have to pay for me to be tried, and then you have to pay for me to be incarcerated if I'm found guilty, and then you have to pay for me to be rehabilitated.
	I mean, it's crazy!
	The exact opposite of what the law should be.
	So, under a common law system, if I injure you, then I owe you restitution.
	And so, if you work for me, you come work for me, and I give you a ladder to climb up, and you step on the ladder and it breaks, then I owe you to fix it.
	I mean, that's natural. So, of course, what I'm going to do, like any sane human being, is I'm going to have insurance for accidents that occur for people working for me, of course.
	And like any sane human being, I'm going to want to have as cheap an accident insurance as I can.
	In which case, the insurance company is going to send some guy over in a pointy hat with a clipboard who's going to say, ha, your ladders are crap.
	Otherwise, you know, we can't insure you or your insurance is going to be 10 times as much.
	You need to fix this, you need to fix that.
	And in order to keep my insurance low, you know, I'm going to have to maintain the safety in my workplace.
	So, and anybody who acts in a dangerous manner, I'm going to have to talk to them and say, look, you know, you get injured here.
	I'm going to be in trouble, so I have to pay a lot of money, so you can't be doing that.
	And so, the way it works is, you know, accidents are very expensive.
	And they, unfortunately, it's become difficult or impossible to get any kind of justice in the current system.
	But in a free society, accidents are expensive.
	People want to minimize their costs.
	They get insurance, and the insurance is the one that...
	And this is true for health and safety.
	It's true for environmental protection.
	It's true for safety in food and drink and all this kind of stuff.
	I mean, you're just liable.
	And in order to minimize your liability, you get insurance, and the insurance people are the experts in making sure that you're doing things in the safest and best manner possible.
	And this is not even counting things like reputation.
	If you're Older...
	I don't know. You guys may remember.
	There was this Tylenol thing some time back where some nutjob put some poison in Tylenol.
	And they weren't liable because the poison...
	There was some crazy guy who put poison in there and sealed it.
	So the company wasn't liable.
	But it still terrified the bejesus out of them.
	So they had to worry about their reputation in the free market.
	And if you have...
	50 different aspirins and one of them might have poison in it, you're going to put that one to one side and you're going to just take one of the other 49 ones.
	So even if we don't count direct suing through common law, the reputation in the free market is the essence of efficiency and productivity and companies spend years and decades and billions of dollars building up their reputations and you know if you sell meat that It lays waste to half a village.
	Nobody's going to buy that meat again.
	Your stock price is going to tank.
	You're going to get sued personally.
	Personally, there are no corporations in a free market.
	There are no corporations in a free market because you cannot shield executives from their decisions and the way that you do now as a favor from the government in return for the corporate tax.
	There are no corporations in the free market.
	There are no legal shields for the decisions that people make because that's just a guaranteed way to make people make bad decisions.
	The next question was, what is the role of voting in helping to achieve human freedom?
	And is somebody doing something immoral by voting?
	Is it okay to go and vote in a ballot if that is your preference?
	Sure you can. I mean, you can do whatever you want.
	You're not directly using force if you check off a tick box.
	In a voting booth, I just accept that it's not how we're going to achieve freedom.
	I mean, again, I'm a big history guy, so I won't bore everyone with the details, but the liberty movement is much older than Ron Paul.
	It's much older than the Libertarian Party.
	People have been trying since the 17th century.
	control to minimize to restrain the growth of the size and power and predations of the state and the government has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and to my mind you know it took america 70 80 years to break out of the last vestiges of the constitution and just run rampant all over the land and then once it got fiat currency through the federal reserve it's just been printing us all into oblivion the u.s dollars lost like 97 of its value
	this huge national debt endless wars all over the world and so You can do it, but just recognize that it's been tried for hundreds of years.
	You could even count back to Socrates and company thousands of years.
	But even if we just look at the modern libertarian movement, which starts with the free market thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, it's been tried.
	It's been tried. And if all the geniuses in the world, if you count the founding fathers and assume their intentions were all honorable, fine.
	All the greatest geniuses in the world with the most amazing dedication to creating a small and controllable state, they all completely failed.
	And if it was impossible to restrain the government in the United States when it was approximately one one-hundredth its current size, there's just no way to do it now.
	If you can't lift five pounds, you can't lift 500 pounds.
	You just can't. And so you cannot restrain the state through voting now.
	It can't happen. And what you are doing, though, is you're saying that there's hope for it.
	And I think the sooner we give up the delusion that we can influence and control the state, It's like saying, let's reform slavery.
	No, no, no, no. You can't reform slavery.
	It's an evil institution. You have to get rid of it.
	It's like saying, let's use some professional wife beaters to minimize wife beating.
	No, no, no, no. You just have to not beat wives.
	I mean, that's the way it goes. So I think that participation is a kind of sanction.
	Not so much like you're saying everything the state does is good, but you're saying that the state will listen to reason and to morality and to the passion of the people.
	I mean, there's no evidence for that.
	There's every piece of evidence to the contrary.
	At this point, our official time was up, but there was still quite a backlog of questions to be asked and perhaps even answered by me.
	So the moderators asked if I was able to go a little bit over the time frame allotted for the webinar.
	Well, I mean, there are young people here.
	It's not going to keep them up past their bedtime, is it?
	then it'll be okay for them.
	You normally have to end my presentations with some sort of blow dart that has a sort of narcoleptic kind of drug in it.
	So I'll keep going until somebody hits me with that blow dart or an elephant gun with some sort of tranquilizer.
	Those things, both of those will take me down, but I'll struggle still and I'll just get slower and then eventually stop.
	The next question, was how did I view the left-right paradigm in analyzing social problems or socialills?
	And was it easier to deal with right-wing thinkers or left-wing thinkers?
	And were there any strategies that could be used to appeal to either party, either of these traditional sort of left-wing, right-wing paradigms?
	And if so, what would be my approach to these challenges?
	Well, I, you know, I'm a big fan of leftists.
	I'm a big fan of rightists.
	I mean, it's, I just, I went from listening, I went from reading a book by Noam Chomsky to reading a book by Ann Coulter, just because, you know, it's, to me, it's very interesting.
	I thought both of them had some pretty great arguments.
	So I think there's a lot that can be said for leftist critiques of society.
	And, you know, the leftist critique of corporatism is fantastic.
	I mean, it's a shame that they call it capitalism, but, you know, whatever, just correct that.
	The leftist critique of foreign policy, of imperialism, is...
	Brilliant. Bang on. Fantastic.
	The left is really good at seeing violence overseas.
	You know, it's really good at that.
	And it's really bad at seeing violence domestically.
	Whereas the right is very good at seeing violence domestically.
	And it's very bad at seeing violence overseas.
	And so the right tends to be more around, you know, strong army and America's interests overseas and bong, bong, bong, right?
	Whereas the left is, oh, you know, we don't want the army.
	We don't want the bases and this and that.
	But we want more... Coercion-driven social programs at home.
	So, yeah. So, on the left, you can say, okay, well, what's wrong with imperialism?
	Well, imperialism is imposing your will on others.
	Whatever, right? It's okay. Well, there's no such thing as countries.
	I mean, right? So, if it's wrong...
	I don't know.
	So, if it's... Okay. So, you get a leftist, right?
	So, okay. So... It's wrong for the government to intervene in peasant communes in Nicaragua.
	It was wrong to overthrow democratically elected officials in various South American countries.
	It was wrong for them to impose the war on drugs and the aggression against them.
	Wrong to fund these people. Wrong to do all of this stuff in South and Central America.
	Fantastic. Okay, great.
	So why is it wrong? You're imposing your vision and you're using aggression, blah, blah, blah.
	It's like, okay, so why is it any different between Washington and Texas as it is between Texas and Mexico?
	I mean, there's still one group of people imposing, if you forget the delusion called countries, everything the government does is imperialism.
	It doesn't matter if it's overseas because there's no such thing as overseas.
	There's only human beings with guns or without them.
	And so you can get the left by, you know, hooking into their domestic, their horror of foreign aggression and saying, well, everything is foreign, you know, because there's no such thing as domestic and foreign.
	and they're all just people.
	You know, if it's bad to impose aggression against peasant communes in Nicaragua, then it's bad to impose aggression through domestic policies in New Jersey.
	And it's the same thing.
	And you can use the other approach with the rightists, right?
	So they say, ah, you know, welfare is force and it's social engineering and this and that.
	It's like, okay, well, then we got to pull out of welfare and out of Iraq, right?
	It's the same thing.
	I mean, in fact, it's far better to be on welfare than it is to be in Iraq these days.
	So again, you get, I mean, the only thing that I've ever found to be a fundamental value is you try and find a principle that someone agrees with that they claim is universal.
	That they claim is universal.
	Because you can't have a moral rule unless it's universal.
	Otherwise, it's just an opinion and nobody can get behind that with any kind of flag.
	So you get someone to say, oh, this is your principle.
	Okay, well, let's extend it. Let's extend it.
	Let's extend it. Now, there's always something that someone bumps up to where they go...
	I don't want to extend it that far.
	And it's like, oh, you just talk them through that.
	Breathe into this paper bag, you know?
	Let me massage you. Let's try some of those drugs that Jews hate so much or whatever, right?
	But there's ways of getting over that.
	Everyone has that bump, right?
	So Ayn Rand had it with minarchism, right?
	They say, I shall never ask another man to live for my sake or live for the sake of another man.
	No initiation of force.
	It's like, okay, then you can't have a government.
	She, you know, coughed up her cigarette holder and went, I'm sure, on quite a rampage.
	Everyone has something, and I've had them too, and I'm sure I'll have them.
	Everyone has something. They say, ah, the non-aggression principle, you can't initiate the use of force.
	Well, that means no spanking your kids.
	Oh, no, I have to spank them.
	You know, everybody runs up against something.
	That is really hard for them to extend that principle to, and that's just something we have to work through through conversation, maybe through therapy, but it's something that we just have to work through.
	Get a principle that somebody hooks into, extend that principle, and then help them over the inevitable hump or humps that they hit as we all do.
	The next question was related to animal rights.
	Do I believe that animals have rights?
	Do I believe that human beings should extend rights to animals?
	And what are the barriers to doing so, if that's a valid approach?
	I don't believe in rights as a whole.
	I think that rights are just an imaginary construct.
	You might as well say, you know, the people have magic unicorns that guard their persons.
	Well, they don't. There's no such thing as rights.
	I think that there's universal morality, but I don't...
	Rights. I don't believe...
	I mean, animals to me are not the same as human beings.
	Animals cannot enter into a social contract.
	Animals very rarely can figure out the abstract consequences of their actions and...
	And so on. You can't reason a lion into not eating a gazelle.
	You can't make a killer whale a vegetarian.
	You just can't do these things.
	Now, that having been said, I myself am a vegetarian, and I think that the way that animals are treated in contemporary society is wretched beyond words.
	And there are two causes for that.
	I mean, the first cause is the state.
	You know, subsidization and shielding people from the full expense of meat and things like that is part of it.
	And so there's sort of that aspect of it.
	And the other is that, you know, again, people are just raised badly.
	They're, you know... One of the key indicators of sociopathy or...
	Antisocial behavior is cruelty to animals as a child.
	And if you don't go quite that far to become a criminal, you may just become somebody who works in the meatpacking industry.
	I don't know. But I think that we should have a lot more sensitivity to the way that animals are treated and try not to eat as many of them and try not to kill as many of them.
	I mean, it's bad and it's not great for your health.
	It's bad for the planet as a whole.
	It's not very sustainable and it's cruel to the animals.
	But I don't see any other way to do that other than getting rid of the state and raising children well so they have more sensitivity to animals.
	So no, you know, to me it's not, you know, a man who strangles another man is not on the same moral plane as somebody who eats a chicken, but I still really believe that we should treat animals a lot better and we should definitely not eat them to the degree that we do.
	I think that's unnecessary and I think it's destructive to the environment in the long run.
	The next question involved another common objection to a stateless society, which is this.
	How can we be sure that organizations like companies or defense agencies that gain economic power will not use that economic power to buy military hardware and turn themselves into another government and take over?
	Well, you know, it can't happen.
	But it's not easy to know why it can't happen, so I really sympathize with the difficulty of the question.
	So an example would be, let's say that I set up, you know, Steph's International House of Military Protection.
	And I go around and I say to everyone, you should give me money and I'll get all of this weapons and I'll protect us against space aliens and mole people.
	And, you know, if some government arises or there's some government over the sea that's angry or whatever, then I'll protect you all.
	And let's say I get a bunch of people to give me money to...
	Protect them and have a military and an air force and a navy and stuff like that.
	And people say, well, they'll just take us over.
	And the same thing is if I become some mega corporation, then I will just start buying up armies and hardware and weapons of mass destruction and then impose my will on others and so on.
	But, you know, it can't happen.
	It can't happen. It can't happen.
	The reason being that if I'm a defense agency trying to sell my services, everybody's going to be paranoid that I'm going to take them over.
	Of course they are, right? It's like, wait, wait a minute.
	You know, why would I want to give you money to buy all this weapons?
	Just come and become my government again.
	I don't want that. So, first thing I'm going to have to do is reassure everyone that I'm not going to become their government.
	How am I going to do that? Well...
	I'm going to have independent audits.
	I'm going to have $100 million in a bank account that is free for anyone who finds that I'm violating my terms of agreement.
	And, of course, I'm going to be facing competition from 100 other defense agencies who are all going to want to provide protection as cheaply as humanly possible.
	Remember, the government has no incentive to keep things cheap.
	It has every incentive to raise the costs.
	So if I'm in competition with a hundred other defense agencies, the defense agency that provides the best defense at the cheapest cost is going to be the one who wins.
	And so if I'm starting to amass some secret army of robot bats with lasers and shark teeth or something, I'm going to have to pay for that somehow, which means I'm going to have to raise my rates.
	As soon as I raise my rates, people are going to be like, hey, why am I paying double now?
	No, you're not providing me any more services.
	You're amassing a secret robot army of bats with shark teeth, aren't you?
	And they'll stop. They'll just cancel their contracts with me.
	Or I'm going to have to go into debt and then I'm going to have to get that past my board and say, oh, I've got these robots.
	Your business plan is robots with shark teeth?
	Come on, man, forget it. Let's just compete in the free market.
	So there's just no way.
	It's very expensive to dominate other people.
	It can only be done through the state.
	Let's say Walmart becomes a very big corporation because everybody really likes their goods or whatever, and then Walmart's like, aha!
	Instead of competing, we're going to reshape ourselves into a government, a military organization.
	Well, they're going to have to go and start buying armies and weapons and training people, and that's not going to go unnoticed in a free society.
	I mean, they're going to have to raise the prices on all of their goods in order to pay for these armies they're trying to develop or this violence they're trying to develop.
	In which case, everyone's going to go, well, I don't want to shop at Walmart anymore.
	Their prices are twice what they used to be, and Kmart across the street, which isn't developing an army, is still really cheap.
	In fact, they can get even cheaper now because they've got higher volume from everyone fleeing Walmart.
	And I know this is very, very brief, and you can check out The free book, Practical Anarchy at FreeDomainRadio.com forward slash free for more details on this.
	But you can't do it.
	Whatever you want to do to get resources to dominate others is going to put you at an extreme competitive disadvantage in the free market.
	And it's going to send clear signals that you're up to no good because you're going to be buying a bunch of stuff that you're going to have to charge people for somewhere, somehow.
	And you won't be able to tell anyone what it is.
	People will immediately know what it is.
	And they'll simply stop doing business with you and never ever do business with you again.
	And it would be a way to completely destroy a corporation because people would be so angry that you tried to bring a government back.
	You know, it'd be like... Anyway, I think you sort of understand the general argument.
	The next question was, how can a stateless or free society guarantee that human poverty will become a thing of the past that we won't have to worry about, and how will that be achieved, this goal of making poverty a thing of the past?
	Well, it will never be a thing of the past.
	I mean, there will be people who will choose poverty for a variety of reasons.
	I mean, think of some 22-year-old kid backpacking through Europe, washing cars, and I don't know what people do.
	That's a poverty lifestyle.
	Think of somebody who is a monk who chooses a vow of poverty, or somebody who's a minimalist, somebody who enjoys living in the woods.
	There's going to be people who choose poverty.
	It's not something that needs to be eliminated because it's a perfectly viable...
	But the statistics are pretty clear.
	There were two enormous periods of poverty reduction in the West.
	The first, of course, was the Industrial Revolution, where incomes doubled for the first time ever in history.
	You got the end of child labor, for the most part, because there was enough money.
	Well, first you got the end of child starvation, you got the end of child labor.
	To some degree, you had, at least in Western Europe, the end of war.
	This was the most incredible advance.
	Unfortunately, the World War I wiped out all of that progress.
	Almost to the last dollar, it wiped out all of the progress and the money that had been generated through the Industrial Revolution.
	And the second is in the post-war period, particularly in America, where poverty rates were dropping enormously, enormously, among all sectors, including blacks, other minorities, all sectors of society were dropping from the post-war period until, ah, yes, until the great society programs of the mid-60s, late-60s.
	There's no question about how we end poverty.
	That's been well understood for many, many years.
	You simply stop pointing guns at people and let them trade.
	That's all you need to do.
	An economy that is growing...
	There's some arguments, and I'm no expert in this, but Tyler Cowen has come up with some arguments that say you're never going to get as quick an economic growth as you did in the past because, you know, all the low-hanging fruit of economic improvements have gone by and so on.
	I personally don't believe that.
	I think human ingenuity is infinite.
	A healthy economy grows 8% a year, 7% a year, maybe in a bad year, 10% a year, 11% a year.
	We've seen those kinds of growths in China, in India.
	We've seen those kinds of growths in the Industrial Revolution and in other areas.
	And in that scenario, I mean, It takes, what, seven years to double your income?
	Eight years to double your income?
	The poverty, I mean, if everybody in America had their income doubled, there would be no poverty.
	There would be no poverty. Other than chosen poverty or poverty that resulted from just some really stupid decisions that people make, like some single mom has six kids or something.
	I mean, then they just rely on charity and so on.
	But there'd be no poverty.
	I mean, it would take six to ten years, seven to ten years to eliminate poverty.
	It's just that there's nothing in it for the government in that.
	There's nothing in it for the power seekers and the power hungers and the power mongers.
	And the people who like using violence because they lack reason.
	And they are, you know, monsters in human skin.
	So, it's, you know, it's always just been around the corner.
	It's just that there's so many spears, knives, and decapitated heads blocking the way that it's almost impossible to get through.
	But it's very close.
	And here we ran out of time on the webinar technology.
	I would really, really like to thank the organizers for the Students for Liberty, studentsforliberty.org for their time.

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