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Oct. 16, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:00:09

2015 Freedom, Peace, Property Rights and the Nonaggression Principle

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, is interviewed about the roles of violence and property violations in the current disastrous performing Western societies.

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	So, Stefan, in your work, you talk about the non-aggression principle.
	Now, what is that?
	And who came up with it?
	How long has it been around?
	What's your understanding of this?
	Well, the non-aggression principle that I first heard about was my kindergarten teacher.
	And I think this is most people's first introduction to the non-aggression principle is it's wrong to just go up to some other kid, pound them in the head, and take their toy.
	You can't push them.
	You can't hit them. Now, if some kid comes running at you with a toy, you can push him away.
	You can sort of maintain your own physical space.
	That's sort of the self-defense principle, which I think we all understand.
	But the non-aggression principle is...
	It's tragically simple.
	I mean, it's so simple that we can all understand it.
	My daughter is not even three yet, and she's perfectly aware of the difference between initiating and responding to aggression.
	And so the non-aggression principle is simply that, I mean, one way of putting it is it is immoral to initiate the use of force against another human being.
	And another way of putting it is to say that any moral theory which states that the initiation of force against other human beings is morally desirable, or as I would phrase it, universally preferable behavior, cannot be logically sustained.
	You can't have a logical enactment of the principle called initiating force is good.
	The only way that a moral theory can work logically, and I would argue also practically, It's if you say that you cannot initiate the use of force against others and this is independent of countries, it is independent of age, it is independent of clothing, whether you're in a cop's uniform or a soldier's uniform or you're dressed up as Ronald McDonald.
	I mean, it is just wrong to initiate the use of force against others.
	We accept this, we inflict, you could say, this ethic on children and I think wisely and rightly so.
	And we accept and inflict it upon citizens that we can't go around pounding each other with two by fours because of our political differences.
	But tragically and awfully and destructively, there are massive exemptions or exceptions to this basic rule in society at the moment.
	And we can talk about those more, but I just wanted to sort of see if that sort of makes sense as an explanation to begin with.
	So are you saying that this is something that's...
	Sort of, I guess, obvious or self-evident the way that Enlightenment philosophers used to say that natural rights are self-evident?
	I think it's a little more than self-evident.
	You simply could not have a society where everyone was supposed to be initiating the use of force against each other at all times.
	I mean, that would be crazy and ridiculous.
	You couldn't even really have that work with two guys in a room for more than three minutes.
	And so the initiation of force as a moral principle can't be valid.
	It's impractical, it's illogical, it can't work.
	And I generally feel that if it is a moral rule we impose on a two-year-old, then it's probably a pretty good moral rule.
	It has to be universal. Because if we're saying to a two-year-old, don't hit your brother, don't hit your sister.
	Use your words, not your fists.
	Then we're either saying that to the two-year-old because it's the right thing to do, or we're saying it because we're big and powerful and we can impose our will on a two-year-old.
	Now, I like to think that most parents want to teach their children what is right, not just to Subjugation to parental authority.
	And so if we say that it is a moral rule that is applicable to a two-year-old, it's kind of hard to figure out why it wouldn't be applicable to a 20-year-old, a 40-year-old, a 60-year-old, and so on.
	So yeah, I believe that it's a universal thing.
	It's a universal rule that is valid.
	I mean, I've got a free book for anybody who's interested called Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, which is available at freedomainradio.com.
	Wherein people can sort of look into the logical, philosophical arguments behind the non-aggression principle.
	But I don't think we really need to do that unless you're just really a philosophy geek like me.
	But we do it because it's what we teach to two-year-olds.
	And we don't teach to a two-year-old that the correct word for a bunch of water vapor in the sky is a cloud.
	And then we change it to unicorn when they become 20.
	You know, the word for cloud is the same when you're 2 as it is when you're 20 and 50 and 80.
	And it's the same thing is true for what is reasonable, virtuous, decent, and moral behavior in society.
	That not initiating the use of force is valid when you're 2 and 20 and 40 and 80.
	So now you said that there were some exceptions to this, not in theory or not in principle, but in practice, you know, it comes out in people's behavior that they seem to think that there are certain exceptions to this.
	And, you know, well, I'll just go ahead and let you say, what are some of the ways in which society routinely transgresses this?
	Well, there's a number of different layers.
	We'll just start with the global and we'll go to the more personal.
	So in the global sense, of course, we have invasions.
	We have the initiation of war.
	And I'm not talking about last-ditch self-defense wars, which are extremely rare in society and in history, but preemptive initiative wars, the international crime called aggression, which is the unprovoked invasion of another country, Of course, Iraq would be one.
	Afghanistan would be another.
	Just to pick on America, there are lots of other countries that are involved in these conflicts and involved in other conflicts.
	And, of course, Iraq had no direct, immediate threat against the United States.
	And so the invasion was the initiation of the use of force against Afghanistan.
	A country that obviously was ruled by a nasty, brutal, evil dictator, but that does not give us the right to kill his citizens.
	And we say, well, he's a dictator because he kills his citizens.
	So us, or say us very loosely here, but going in and wiping out a couple of hundred thousand of Iraqi civilians and driving millions more into exile is not the way to solve the problem of Saddam Hussein killing his citizens.
	So we have the initiation of force in terms of war.
	Another example would be the war on drugs.
	So a person who wants to smoke some marijuana, you know I'm over 40 because I use marijuana and not slang, just to be clear.
	But somebody who wants to go and smoke some marijuana is going to go and have a peaceable transaction, probably a very peaceable transaction with a guy with a rainbow hat and some dreadlocks perhaps.
	And he's going to go and get his drug and he's going to give that guy some money.
	He's going to go home and he's going to smoke his drug on his couch and he's going to watch Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz together.
	And this is, of course, nobody's initiating force here.
	He's not stealing, he's not punching, he's not kicking, he's not assaulting, he's not strangling any homeless guys.
	He's just going out and exchanging some money for some vegetables or some vegetation.
	There's no initiation of force here, so if a third party decides that that's wrong, that that's bad, then they can go and start initiating force, which is what the cops do or the Drug Enforcement Agency does.
	They go and initiate force in a fundamentally peaceful transaction.
	Now, you may disagree with people taking drugs, you may like it, you may not like it, but there's no Way to argue that it is somehow the initiation of force.
	Now, if somebody drives stone, well sure, but then that's like driving drunk, right?
	We don't ban alcohol because people drive drunk.
	We punish the behavior, not the preconditions.
	And so, that's an example where the government can initiate the use of force against people who are trading peacefully.
	This occurs all over the place in what used to be called the free market.
	It's barely a free market anymore.
	Where people who are engaged in voluntary trade have force or aggression initiated against them all the time.
	This occurs in the realm of governments protecting unions with preferential legislation.
	And this occurs when you have the biggest reverse bank robbery in history, which was the recent bailout, $700 billion, that we know of.
	And you know, there's a lot of even more, probably a lot more money under the table.
	But you have this reverse bank robbery where instead of citizens going to the bank with the gun, the banks go to the guns of the government against the unborn citizens of the future through debt and deficit financing and through the overprinting of money through the Federal Reserve.
	Because, you know, this money isn't taken from anyone directly other than it's diluted through inflation, particularly against those who are yet to even be here.
	Where, you know, they say, well, the financial system is going to collapse, holding the government hostage, so to speak, and then the government gives them all this money.
	That is the initiation of force because it is diluting the currency.
	It is reducing the value of everyone's dollars through the theft called counterfeiting or government control of currency.
	So that's another example of – that's more fraud, but it is kind of a force because anybody who wants to set up a competing currency who says, look, I don't like the way that you have these fiat dollars not backed by gold or not backed by anything.
	Monopoly money printed on the whim of a politician So I want to bypass this and create my own currency while those people go to jail.
	They go to jail. For what?
	For creating their own coins?
	I mean, that's insane. Creating coins is not an act of aggression.
	It's not beating somebody up or punching somebody or raping somebody or killing somebody.
	It's just creating some coins and using them in circulation because you don't like what's currently out there that the government has.
	You get thrown in jail.
	The guy who did the Liberty Dollars is in jail now because he simply created some coins and put them into circulation.
	It's astoundingly immoral that this occurs.
	I mean you could go on and on but sort of that's at the sort of international level in terms of war and trade tariffs and barriers.
	Subsidies of course are another form of theft and transfers.
	Farmers get lots of subsidies which are paid for by everybody against their will.
	We know it's against their will because there's not a donation box where the farmers take donations.
	The money is forcibly taken from taxpayers or diluted from The bank accounts of mostly the poor through inflation and then it's given to the farmers.
	People don't agree to this.
	They don't want it. They're forced to participate in this.
	You could sort of go on and on, I've been known to, but I'll just sort of end up with another area is spanking or corporate punishment of children.
	And this is another area where people violate the non-aggression principle all the time.
	I mean, obviously, if your child is not listening to you when you ask her to clean her room, she's not initiating the use of force against you so you can't spank her.
	I mean, just morally, you can't spank her.
	Obviously if a kid hits another kid, hitting that kid saying don't hit is the kind of logical pretzel that would put Spinoza in a blender.
	And so you just can't work with that sort of stuff.
	So really at the personal level all the way to the international level, there are countless violations of the non-aggression principle that are accepted as valid and not only valid but valuable.
	And what's happened is anytime we see a problem now, What we do is we say, well, we've got this massive machinery which can violate the non-aggression principle at will called the state and it's, you know, in the prison system and the police and the courts and all that kind of stuff.
	So we have this massive apparatus that can violate the non-aggression principle at will because, you know, that old saying that if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
	And so every time we have a problem, we say, well, the way to deal with that problem is to further violate the non-aggression principle.
	Now, if that theory was...
	Valid, then things should be getting better and better.
	But that theory is not valid.
	And so every time we expand the state, every time we pass new unjust laws, every time there are new irrational and destructive regulations which violate the non-aggression principle, Things get worse.
	And so if we want to know why things are getting worse in the world, it's because we're constantly breaking the oldest and most universal and most valid law of humankind, which is thou shalt not initiate force against others.
	And every time we expand the violation of that law, things get worse.
	Now, they get better in the short run for certain periods.
	I mean, violations of the non-aggression principle is like cocaine for a toothache.
	You feel better in the short run, but you're heading for a very bad place in the long run.
	Or at least whoever benefits from that particular violation feels better.
	But we could come up with all sorts of examples of how they violate the principle to benefit some people, as you were just enumerating with subsidies and things like that.
	And then everyone else has the entire market changed, the game that they're playing in, the rules get changed.
	So they're obviously aggrieved, but yet someone else is benefited, so therefore the The end justifies the means in some people's minds, which is really where this all comes from, right?
	It's the idea that there's some greater good to be gained by initiating force through government.
	So, therefore, whatever you have to do in order to achieve that is okay, right?
	Well, I mean, the way that people justify this kind of behavior is they, first of all, they vault over the morality of the situation completely and totally.
	Completely and totally vault over the morality of the situation.
	And so they say, well, let's forget for a moment that the government is initiating the use of force against people in order to solve my problem.
	Let's just pretend that's not even there.
	So that's the first thing they do.
	And the second thing they do...
	They only look at the benefits to a specific group rather than the losses to the general group.
	In order to even discuss the possibility of a violation of the non-aggression principle, you have to first pretend that you're not violating the non-aggression.
	It's a social contract and people can vote and there's choice and candidates.
	You have to pretend that something is voluntary when it's in fact involuntary.
	And so once you go past that, then you're into the land of amoral, arid pragmatism, where you say, well, you see, we've got some poor people in our increasingly rich society, and so let's take money by force from those who have some more and give it to those who have less.
	Now, the buy force thing is what everybody wants to vault over and pretend isn't there.
	You know, it's the redistribution of wealth.
	Well, you know, I can go and knock over a convenience store and call it the redistribution of wealth, but that's not going to stand up in court, right?
	And so, they say, so yeah, first of all, they have to ignore the morality of the situation, the evil of initiating force.
	And then what they have to do is they have to look at the poor people who are receiving the money from the richer people And say, well look, we're giving money to poor people, that's good.
	So you vault over the morality and then you only focus on the specific gains to particular individuals rather than looking at what you're setting in motion as a whole, which is a predatory society of civil war, where everybody is attempting to gain control of the guns of the government and push it there, to get it to lever money, power and influence and laws their way.
	And what are you doing to poor people when you give them lots of money?
	Well, you tend to end up with single-parent families, which is very destructive for kids in general.
	You tend to end up with people locked and mired in poverty.
	You tend to undermine the incentive for work and getting out of these sorts of environments.
	And if you look at, I mean, the very worst sections in Western society Are all almost completely government controlled.
	If you look at the ghettos in America or the ghettos in England, these are places where the government controls the housing, the government controls the roads, the government controls the public transportation, the government controls the education of the children.
	15,000 hours, 12 years of education.
	The government controls almost all the economic transactions that are going on through regulations, taxes and other kinds of controls.
	So, if violations of the non-aggression principle were great, then those areas where the government has the most control should be paradises, should be the Jacque Fresco, you know, whirligigs of happiness.
	But they are, in fact, the worst areas of society because violations of the non-aggression principle create these horrible infections within society that either spread or have to be contained.
	Well, of course, anyone who goes through a government education institution will be told over and over again that, well, it used to be worse.
	Society was so much worse 100 years ago or 500 years ago when the government didn't have as much power or as much ability to exercise its power.
	And, you know, I kind of...
	See, that is a side issue.
	Again, I almost don't want to argue with someone about that because they're going to believe whatever they want to believe.
	And, well, anyway, there's some mutual friends we have that have this viewpoint themselves.
	No, and of course, I mean, this is something that people say.
	Look at the Industrial Revolution.
	You had... Child labor.
	You had 16-hour factory days and so on.
	And of course that's true.
	And you and I dropped into that situation would be completely wretched.
	But the reality of the Industrial Revolution is that workers' wages doubled for the first time in history in about 50 or 60 years.
	The population grew.
	And by the end of the century, child labor was largely eliminated for the first time in history.
	I don't know if people have this weird idea about the Middle Ages, like it was some sort of bucolic princess bride fantasy planet where the kids just played around in the haystack all day.
	No, I mean, the... I mean, if you really want to see awful conditions for children, you go way past the Industrial Revolution and you look at what was happening to children in the Middle Ages.
	You had plagues, you had, I mean, 10% of the European population would regularly die of starvation in the winters.
	I mean, it was wretched. There's a reason why everybody swarmed to the cities and was really happy to get 16-hour workdays because it meant that they get to live rather than die of starvation or die of plague or die from war.
	It was a situation where during the Middle Ages they were basically tenants on someone else's land and then giving a large portion of whatever they could produce and sell.
	They would be giving a large portion of that to the landlord, right?
	I mean, would you say that that was the social – They were halfway between slaves and workers, so to speak.
	They were serfs, right? So they were tied to the land, could be bought and sold with the land.
	They had to provide up to a third of their income, meager income, right?
	It's one thing to pay a third of your taxes when you make $50,000 a year.
	When you make $5 a year, it's quite a bit different.
	And yeah, of course, they were not free.
	They were not free to experiment.
	They were not free to trade.
	The medieval guilds were incredibly restrictive on free trade to the point where If you sneezed when somebody was walking past your stall, you could be arrested.
	Because then, you know, if you sneezed, like let's say you're a blacksmith or something, you sneezed when somebody was walking past your stall, then the person would say, God bless you.
	And then you'd say, well, thank you very much.
	And by the way, I have these great horseshoes, right?
	So that was considered unfair competition to sneeze when a customer was walking.
	That's how incredibly restrictive it is.
	That society was. I mean, it's completely mental.
	It's completely insane. And people don't, I mean, they imagine that somehow things were great beforehand because they read, I don't know, it's almost at the level that they read fairy tales when they were kids and they think that everything was great.
	And then there's really these black satanic mills came along and swallowed up all these happy bucolic children into these, you know, horrible sooty moors of industrial death.
	It wasn't the case at all.
	I mean, there was no revolution.
	There was, I mean, there was obviously rebellions against some of the unsafe and unsanitary working conditions, which was entirely right.
	But it was a massive step forward.
	And if you were to ask most people in the 19th century, would you rather live in the 16th century?
	I mean, if they had any sense in any historical perspective, they would never want that at all.
	So it's not so much...
	Of course, I mean, the Industrial Revolution was worse than situations are now.
	But to claim that the government is the cause of that is ridiculous.
	Because we had big, powerful governments all throughout human history.
	The government was invented 6,000 years ago in ancient Egypt or 7,000 years ago, wherever you want to sort of do the drawing line.
	Big, massive, powerful governments.
	Rome had all of the features that we have in the modern West today.
	Redistribution of wealth, free food for the poor, the reality TV called eating the Christians with lions, feeding the Christians with lions, whatever, right?
	It had all of these characteristics.
	It had the empire. It had hyperinflated currency.
	It had a central bank. All of these things.
	So, if having a large powerful government was the way that we ensure social progress, why on earth was it the case that social progress of any sustainable kind, economic progress of any sustainable kind, which is really new?
	I mean, it's 200 years old for heaven's sakes.
	Why is it that out of six or seven thousand years, it was only when the governments were finally restrained?
	And controlled and minimized that we got this kind of economic growth.
	I mean, if big governments solve problems, we should have had the Industrial Revolution in 5000 BC and we should all be teleporting through the stars on magic pink unicorns of statism at the moment.
	But that's not the reality.
	The reality is when the government got smaller, when the government got controlled, in other words, when the initiation of the use of force was minimized.
	When the moral rule was no longer arbitrarily and almost universally violated by the state, that is when you got the human renaissance, which led to the current productivity and the technology which enables this conversation all came out of the free market.
	Now, let's get back to modern times.
	Everyone's... Are you there?
	Yes, sorry. I was just hoping I wanted to not have that in your ear.
	That's quite all right. Okay, so...
	Let's talk about people's modern concept of how government works and the idea of taxation, which you talk about a lot in your work and really is, of course, central to any understanding of government because they couldn't do anything without it.
	That's their bread and butter.
	That's how they finance everything.
	As you so eloquently point out in so much of your work, Taxes aren't necessarily just what everyone thinks about.
	You give money to the government and they redistribute it to the people that need it.
	Of course, there's this entire huge apparatus of people working for the government that are receiving benefit for doing that.
	In other words, they're paid their salary and their benefits.
	And their healthcare and everything, that's their profit for working for the government.
	Would you want to donate to a charity where 80% of the money went to administrative overhead?
	Of course not. I mean, that would be crazy.
	Nobody would want to do that. I mean, just think, if you die with a million dollars in your bank account and you really want to help the poor, who are you going to give the money to?
	Are you going to give it to a private charity like the United Way or are you going to give your money to the government in the hopes of helping the poor?
	I mean, nobody would give it to the government.
	Of course not. The government isn't there to help the poor.
	Sorry to interrupt you, but the problem of poverty was being solved before welfare state programs came in.
	I mean, the poverty rate in the United States halved in the post-war period up until the early 1960s.
	And poverty was being solved.
	It was being solved. I mean, involuntary poverty.
	I mean, the people who choose to be poor or monks take a vow of poverty or whatever, they can choose to be poor.
	Or novelists who want to, you know, work three days a week as a waiter and work on the great American novel.
	They can choose to be poor. That's not poverty in the way we would understand it.
	That's just a choice. But involuntary poverty was absolutely being statistically soft in the post-war period.
	And all of that progress came to a grinding halt with the welfare state.
	A cynical part of me, which I'm not sure is true, a cynical part of me says, well, the government...
	Put the welfare state in so that the problem of poverty wouldn't be solved.
	Because if the problem of poverty was solved, when you solve the problems of poverty, you do a lot to solve the problems of crime, of course.
	And when you do a lot to solve the problems of poverty and crime, there's far less need for the government.
	People are like, why do we have all of these government agencies when there's so few problems in society?
	So it's almost like the government has a vested interest to maintain and Continue the problems in society as a reason for its own existence.
	Poverty was being solved and now, not only has it not been solved, but it's been made worse because we've got a semi-permanent underclass of poor people who are receiving criminally wretched educations at the hands of the state.
	Absolutely wretched.
	40% of job applicants in the UK have to go through some sort of remedial reading and writing program.
	I mean, shocking.
	I mean, if a private school did this, I mean, people would be up in arms and parading in front of it, but it's the government, so everybody just looks the other way.
	Well, yeah. Sorry, and the last thing I'll say is that when you get these kinds of situations where not only have you created this permanent underclass of poor people, but, and most tragically, this permanent underclass of poor people are dependent upon a system which mathematically cannot continue.
	Right? I mean, mathematically, this system cannot continue.
	I mean, people say sometimes that those who are small or no-state advocates are callous towards the poor.
	I would argue the complete opposite.
	I think people who are advocating government programs to help the poor are incredibly callous towards the poor and are only advocating government programs not out of any rational economic or philosophical or moral approach.
	But just because they like this magic wand to be waved, they like to feel that they're doing the right thing, this is pomposity and self-congratulatory nature to people who just think just waving guns around is going to solve problems.
	I don't think they actually want to solve problems.
	I think they just want to feel good about pretending to solve problems.
	But really solving problems like poverty is a lot more than just pointing guns at people and taking their money and redistributing it.
	It's a lot more complex than that.
	And so what is going to happen to the poor people When the government runs out of money, when the government runs out of people it can borrow from, when the government runs out of money that it can print with any credibility.
	What is going to happen to the poor people if the government prints money to try and pay off its debt and we get hit with significant inflation?
	Well, significant inflation hits people on fixed incomes terribly.
	And there's a story that comes out of the hyperinflation in Germany in the 1920s where a guy had been saving his whole life and cashed in his retirement savings at the age of 65, which a few years earlier would have kept him in comfort for the rest of his days, and he was able to buy a cup of coffee because the prices had gone up so much.
	So who really cares about the poor?
	Who really cares about people who are old and dependent upon Social Security?
	Who really cares about these people?
	It is not the people who are advocating a continuance of the current system.
	That's just deranged.
	That just shows a fundamental math and economic illiteracy, not to mention moral illiteracy, that I think when people advocate that without any justification, that they just have excused themselves from any rational corner of the conversation.
	Well, you know how the Obama administration has thrown out this thing.
	They started, you know, during the campaign, of this definition of richness.
	That you're rich when it's $200,000 a year.
	Or then they changed it to $250,000 a year.
	And I'm not even sure if that's household or individual or before or after taxes or what.
	And when I was at the Occupy Portland event a few weeks ago, there was someone holding a sign and it said...
	If you make less than $350,000, then you're on our side.
	You're part of the 99%, right?
	And as you know, when hyperinflation happens, that won't mean anything anymore.
	And even if it doesn't become officially hyperinflation anytime soon, it's still high inflation.
	We're already having high inflation.
	And, you know, so, yeah, what happens when $350,000 won't buy you a cup of coffee?
	I mean, it reminds me of in Spinal Tap, you know, they have the scene with the guitar that goes to 11.
	No, no, this one gets up to 11.
	We need that little push over the cliff, yeah.
	That's how people think about money.
	And it's weird because you think just over the course of the last four or five years here in America, you really see the decline in the value of the dollar.
	There's no way anyone can ignore it.
	And yet when it comes to actually...
	Quantifying, you know, what is the difference between a rich and a poor person?
	Or what's the average income?
	And things like that.
	You know, it's weird.
	They go back to what seems to me to be almost Depression-era mathematics.
	Because, you know, back when my grandpa was a kid, it was a big deal to be a millionaire.
	And they still act like it's a big deal to be a millionaire when houses cost half a million dollars.
	Well, I mean, the one thing I will say in sympathy to the people who have resentment towards the rich is that, I mean, I share it to some degree as well.
	And not because I have any problem with money.
	I have no problem with money.
	I have no problem with people.
	Earning money and making money, I think it's wonderful.
	But there are a lot of people in the West and there are lots of people in America who have their money in a very, very unjust way, right?
	I mean, the people who are doing all of this financial skullduggery and trading, the people who are first in line to get the freshly minted Federal Reserve dollars, they get to spend them at full value while you and I get to spend them at a third value.
	So there are lots of people who get government contracts and have the politicians wrapped around their finger through campaign donations.
	There are people who get unjust patent extensions to their various products and pills and so on.
	There are people who are doctors who get a lot of their income through monopoly privileges granted to them by the state.
	Stockbrokers who are the only people legally allowed to trade these kinds of instruments, whereas you and I can't.
	I mean, what's up with that? I mean, I can go and buy any kind of fruit that I want, but I can't go and buy and sell them.
	Anyway. There are a lot of people who get a lot of their money through very sinister, bad, nefarious, murky mortar style means, right?
	Lots of farmers and the big industrial farm companies get massive subsidies from the state and then they go turn around and dump their produce in the third world causing the destruction of local agriculture, eventual starvation.
	I mean, it's monstrous and brutal the way that this stuff works and so there are a lot of people out there who have a lot of money.
	Who got it? Not through voluntary trade in the free market, not by providing goods and services that people voluntarily want, but through political manipulation, through state privilege, through monopoly, through mercantilism, through the quasi-fascism of the growing interventionist economic state.
	And so, yeah, and I sympathize.
	That is a nasty way to pull some coin together.
	Well, but the worst part about it is that whatever those people do, if it's at a large enough scale, then it affects everyone.
	And I think that that's why people keep going back to the idea of free market doesn't work, is because we all have to play in the same casino with these people.
	You wouldn't care about what the rules are of...
	GoldenPalace.com unless you're a member or unless someone is forcing you to play at GoldenPalace.com.
	But GoldenPalace.com is the Federal Reserve.
	We all have to use their money.
	Most people have to be involved in pension schemes that are in the stock market.
	So yeah, people are angry that these stock...
	Well, but see, but this is where they didn't blow up their economies.
	I mean, they're doing great. Right.
	I mean, they made out like bandits.
	I mean, they got to leverage their risks at 30 to 1.
	30 to 1 risks are insane.
	It means if you lose 3%, you're wiped out.
	So, they got to leverage, and the reason people leverage, of course, is when anything's going up, you make many multiples compared to less leverage.
	And so, yeah, I mean, they made out like bandits.
	They made a fortune. They got to pull those fortunes out of the corporations into their private bank accounts, and then when the corporations blew up, they got more money given to them by the government, which they also got to take out in big bonuses.
	So, you know, there is no such thing as the economy as a whole.
	I mean, just the same thing, there's no such thing as the human race as a whole.
	I mean, fundamentally, there are individual actors attempting to maximize gains in an economic environment.
	And, you know, for these people to say no to that is like you and I being handed a lottery ticket for $10 million that is just won and saying, well, no, I'm not going to cash this because, you know, it's...
	You know, it's not right. I mean, how many people in the world would not cash a winning $10 million lottery ticket?
	I mean, it's almost nobody. So if you set up a system where they have these legal fictions called corporations, which would never exist in a free market, never in a million years would they exist in a free market.
	In the free market, there would be no such thing as corporations.
	Corporations are legal fictions, monsters really, created and sustained by state power, by state laws.
	Legal corporations are ways of shielding business owners from losses.
	So when the corporation makes money, they can pull all the money they want out of the corporation.
	But when the corporation loses money, they don't have to pay it back.
	Then the creditors get screwed or the shareholders or the employees or whoever, but not the business owners.
	So it is a one-way fantasy camp of pulling money out of a profitable company without being responsible for paying it back when losses occur.
	This fundamentally distorts the way that people make economic decisions.
	And so there would be no way that this would be sustainable in a free market.
	In a free market, if I went to a bunch of investors and say, I have a company with a legal fiction wrapped around it and the way it works is anytime the company makes money, I make out like a bandit.
	But anytime the company loses money, you all are going to have to pay and I won't.
	I mean, the investors would say, thank you.
	They'd pull the little lever and my trap door would open and I'd go down to the pit of economic alligators.
	But if I went there and said, look, I mean, I'm in there with you.
	I'm not going to be shielded from losses and I'm going to hope to make a reasonable profit.
	But if there are losses, then I'm going to lose out as well.
	Of course, everybody would want to be on the same boat as far as that goes.
	So there's just no way that what we call a corporation now I think we're good to go.
	I think we're good to go.
	The business environment has changed.
	The legal environment has changed.
	The state rules, the government rules have changed.
	Now these people can make all the losses in the world that they want.
	The government's going to bail them out and they're never personally liable for any of these losses.
	So, I mean, of course they're going to make those decisions.
	And it's my understanding, and this understanding comes from the fact that I've been on the board of directors of a corporation in the past and seen how you had to incorporate it with the state, and then if you get behind on filing your paperwork, they'll just dissolve it without asking.
	So it kind of seemed to me like the corporation almost belonged to the state.
	Would you say that's correct?
	Yeah. Well, certainly the legal protections that are afforded to business owners and executives are created and maintained by the state.
	Of course, look, people don't understand, of course.
	I mean, they do if they think about it for a moment, but you're never taught to think about things for a moment in government schools.
	But if you think about it for a moment, you know, Mitt Romney got into a lot of trouble by saying corporations are people.
	I mean, this just goes against the programming that people have.
	Now, there's a lot that I disagree with Mitt Romney, but in a way, he's right.
	Because people say, well, let's tax the corporations.
	Like the corporations are some weird race of space aliens with all, you know, made of gold that, you know, that crap money into a bucket for us.
	I mean, if you raise taxes on corporations, what happens?
	Well, you simply lower pay raises on people.
	I mean, there's a fixed amount of money in a corporation.
	And so if you raise the taxes, you're going to lower R&D, you're going to lower spending in sales and marketing, you are going to lower hirees, you're going to, I mean, that's just reality.
	There is no third party invisible friend called corporations who can take the beating for you.
	There are only human beings.
	These legal fictions called governments, called corporations, called countries, whatever you name it, all of these legal fictions that are created, they don't exist.
	There are people and there's stuff and there's weapons.
	And that's really all it goes.
	People, there's stuff and there's weapons.
	And weapons, of course, is a subsection of stuff.
	And so, there's people moving stuff around and trading it if they want, and there are other people who say, look, if you trade this way, if you take this route, if you sell in this place, if you do this, if you don't give me this money, I'm going to put a gun to your neck and take you off and kidnap you and lock you in a tiny cell.
	And that's the way it works.
	And so, all I'm saying, I think all that reasonable ethicists are saying, is we've got to really focus on the use of violence within society Which is our default go-to position for getting stuff done.
	Got a problem? Pass a law.
	Got a problem? Lobby a politician.
	Got a problem? Call up your congressman.
	Got a problem? Hold wave signs and ask for a law to be passed.
	I mean, we have at some point to understand that, I mean, in America there are about 100,000 new laws and regulations passed every day.
	We have to understand at some point That 100,001 is not going to turn things around.
	In fact, things are going bad because we are unleashing the dogs of hell, the dogs of war, the dogs of the state, the dogs of violence.
	We are unleashing violations of the non-aggression principle every time we ask the government to solve our problems.
	Violence makes things worse in the long run.
	We all understand that in our personal lives.
	But we have a tough time extrapolating that same basic morality to our society as a whole and that's why society as a whole lives in this weird alternate universe where for you and I to redistribute income because we're poor is called Theft and we go to jail.
	Whereas for the government to redistribute income to others and keep 80% of it for itself is called wise social fiscal policy and it's called caring for the poor.
	I mean it's madness but it's a kind of madness that we've been trained not to see.
	So there's a couple things that I want to talk about, about that specifically in relation to taxes, that I think will really help illustrate for people who still don't get it or still want to make excuses for it.
	Basically, when it comes to taxes and wealth redistribution, people say, well, you know, poor people need it.
	And then, you know, they're not even arguing ethics sometimes.
	They're saying, you know, I want to get those bad rich guys and, you know, this will never affect me or normal people because we don't make enough money to have to, you know, have the same gun to our heads, you know.
	But basically, the way I see it is that if you have...
	A tax code and different ways of treating people in the tax code depending on what their income is and how many kids they have and all the sort of crap that government takes into consideration for that.
	Well then, everybody has to submit their information to the state to prove that they're either worthy of not getting taxed or...
	And in the United States, basically, the way it is is that If you don't make enough money to get taxed, then you still have to fill out the paperwork, right?
	And then you get all of these exemptions and it ends up being a credit and they send it back to you as though it's a tax refund.
	But since you never actually paid, it's not a refund.
	It's welfare. But you didn't ask for it.
	And if you...
	There's no way around it.
	You have to fill out the form, and then they send you the welfare, and you're doing it under penalty of perjury.
	And so, you know, there's just no way of getting out of it.
	Even if you're poor, you still have to deal with the state, you still have to deal with the tax system, and you still really do have a gun to your head saying, you have to fill out this form, and you better tell us everything about every little penny that you got and what you spent it on.
	You know, I guess maybe a lot of people, they just, like, get their W-2.
	They have a regular job, you know, nine to five, and it's not really difficult for them to file taxes, and then they get this sweet check at the end of it.
	Yeah, well, of course, I mean, the majority of taxes, at least at the federal level, are paid by a very small proportion of the population.
	So, I mean, a lot of people think that they're getting a free ride.
	I mean, we're all in the same boat.
	I mean, if we're all in a big boat, there's no point...
	Drilling a big hole on the rich side of the ship and thinking not everyone's going to go down.
	I mean, we're all in the same boat.
	But the reality is that taxes violate the non-aggression principle.
	I mean, this is a fundamental reality.
	I mean, people can argue for or against the effects of it, but the morality is very simple and very clear.
	Taxes violate the non-aggression principle because taxes are the initiation of the use of force.
	If I'm home peacefully gardening and exchanging with my neighbor if I want and trading and buying, using money, whatever it is, I mean, I'm not initiating force against anyone.
	And so for the state to come and say, you must give us X amount of dollars so we're going to throw you in jail is a clear, vivid and simple violation of the non-aggression principle.
	Now, people can say, well, but we want good things to happen from the violation of that non-aggression principle.
	Well, that's fine. You can make that argument, but then you can't claim that you have a different argument for politicians than you do for the people.
	We are all supposed to be under the same law, whether it's legal or moral.
	Otherwise, it's not a universal law.
	It's not a moral law. It's just a bunch of opinions with guns.
	And so if people say, well, I want good things to happen out of the violation of the non-aggression principle, first of all, you're saying good things can happen out of the violation of a basic moral law, which means that morality makes no sense at all.
	If good things can happen, we need to redefine what morality is.
	And the other thing is that...
	If people say that good things can happen out of the violation of the non-aggression principle, poor people get money through violating the non-aggression principle, then let's let all the poor people violate the non-aggression principle.
	What that means is that if you make under $15,000 a year as a family, then you can go steal a bunch of stuff and you won't be prosecuted.
	Because violating the non-aggression principle if you're poor is a good thing.
	So we don't need the government.
	We can just let people go and steal and shoplift and take whatever they want and they won't be prosecuted.
	But, of course, we say, well, if that would have happened, society would descend into chaos.
	But what do people think is happening now?
	The violation of the non-aggression principle will always put society into chaos in the long run.
	And so, you know, we see this happening all over the place now.
	Just giving a small minority of people with a lot of weaponry the capacity to violate the NAP at will, it doesn't solve the problem and, in fact, makes it worse.
	Sorry, you were going to say that.
	No, I was just going to say, I think we can all forgive a person who gets caught stealing bread when they're hungry.
	We wouldn't say, oh, throw the book at that person or cut their hand off like they would in some countries.
	But at the same time, we're not saying stealing bread is good.
	And that's the principle here.
	Well, I think all moral people recognize that by far the better part of criminality is prevention rather than cure.
	I mean, the question is always in my mind is that why is this person in such a situation in such a position in their life where they feel they have to steal?
	Do they not know that there are churches and community centers and nice atheists who will give them bread for free if they're starving?
	Do they not know that?
	Do they have no friends who will help them out?
	Do they have no family? Why do they have no friends and family?
	I mean, somebody who is in a position where he's stealing bread I think?
	That's a very, very rare situation.
	We can't design society around these very, very rare situations.
	We have to design society, I think.
	Well, first of all, we have to not design society at all and not have a central place where all of these rules get propagated because that kind of power corrupts every human being on the planet who comes in contact with it.
	But, yeah, if I ran a store and somebody came in and was starving to death, I'd give them bread.
	Of course they would. I mean, it's like saying if somebody's drowning and you have to Yeah, I think...
	The real problem here is just that people are mixing all sorts of things together.
	You're talking about a moral principle, and then they're trying to argue about statistics and history and all of these effects and all of these...
	But the data is in on the statistics.
	Sorry to interrupt, but that's the most annoying thing.
	The data is in on the statistics.
	How are the poor doing? How are the poor doing?
	How's the middle class doing? Remember, this grand experiment, I mean, if you don't count...
	The 1930s under FDR, if you don't count the sort of New Deal stuff, which was the beginning of some sort of unemployment insurance and Social Security, but if you simply count 1960s onwards with LBJ's Great Society onwards, this experiment is 30, 40 years old. It's really short.
	I mean, even in the history of the Republic, it's pretty short.
	In the history of the world, it's teeny tiny, teeny tiny.
	And how's the experiment going?
	Remember, the purpose was to eliminate poverty.
	How's that? Is that getting better or worse?
	Well, it's getting worse. Remember, the purpose was to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor to make a more egalitarian society.
	How's that working out?
	Well, the gap between the rich and the poor is widening, not narrowing.
	And it was supposed to eliminate illiteracy and it was supposed to eliminate ignorance through additional investment in government schools and through giving unfireability to government teachers who get their commitment and all.
	How's that working out? How is the educational standards of the US and the West doing as a whole?
	Well, they tend to be getting worse.
	They tend to be getting worse, even relative to other government schools, let alone what might happen in a truly free market in education.
	And none of this, none of this takes into account The debt.
	None of this takes into account the enormous, massive debt.
	You could almost say, well, if things had gotten better but we're still in debt, then it's, you know, one step forward and one step back.
	But things have gotten much worse relative to the claims that were made for these government programs.
	Things have gotten much, much worse and we're in a situation of massive, catastrophic, punitive, unpayable indebtedness.
	And so it really is tragic all around.
	And moralists predicted this.
	Have predicted this from the beginning of time.
	You know, we have all of the stories in the world.
	They're from fairy tales through Atlas Shrugged to whatever you are.
	Fairy tales and all of the stories in the world will tell us that if we use violence to get what we want, we will get a short-term gain and we will get a long-term pain.
	And that is exactly what is rolled out.
	There's no surprise to any moralist Who's worth his salt or her salt, that this is what has occurred.
	And the only tragedy is that we're replaying Rome, but in fast forward with the weapons of mass destruction, and it is tragic that humanity still has to learn this lesson, that you violate the moral rules at your inevitable peril.
	But, you know, it's a lesson we're just going to have to keep learning until we figure it out.
	Sorry, I've been waiting for a while to do that.
	No problem. Don't wait for me to pause.
	So, well, this gets into what I'd really like to finish up with here, at least, is that you're talking about debt, and we talked about taxes.
	And of course, those two are, you know, joined at the hip.
	But here's the thing that I think a lot of people overlook is that it's not like there's a one-to-one relationship between taxes gathered and money spent.
	It's entirely different.
	It's – the taxes that we're paying now, as far as I can tell, we're still paying for the Korean War.
	We're paying for someone's hip replacement 20 years ago.
	And then the money that's being spent now, we're spending a future generation's money, tax money, or we're borrowing against them.
	What you talk about in your work is tax slavery.
	You actually describe citizens of countries as being tax slaves and these are tax farms.
	And you talk about how basically you're an asset being sold on the international bond market so that your government can borrow money and then And the excuse is that they spend it on social programs, but they only spend a portion of it, really, on that. So, I mean, isn't that...
	It's beyond just taxes.
	It's this whole system of debt slavery.
	Yes. And, I mean, it's a big topic, and we'll just touch on it briefly.
	But, I mean, yeah, the reality is that central banks give currency to government in the form of debt.
	And... The government has to pay interest on all of the money that it borrows and all the money that it puts into circulation.
	And so, yeah, I mean, the income tax in the United States is being used to pay interest on debt.
	And it's being used to pay interest on debt that has been used to create currency.
	And so, yeah, I mean, the system is fundamentally unsustainable and it can't work.
	And it's exactly what you would expect when you give A group of private individuals a violent monopoly over the creation of currency.
	And then you get voters who can vote away the future's money for the sake of their own enrichment in the present.
	I mean, there's that old saying about government.
	Democracy in particular is a fantasy by which everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else.
	And it's crazy.
	People say, ah, tax the rich.
	Well, that just means that the rich will have less money to spend, which means that fewer jobs are created and so on.
	And people say, well, but if you cut taxes, it doesn't cause growth in the economy.
	And that certainly is true if you cut taxes without cutting spending.
	If you cut taxes without cutting spending, all you're doing is adding to debt.
	And it doesn't take a moral genius to recognize that we do not have the right to enslave future generations through our spending.
	It's fundamentally immoral.
	If I die tomorrow, my daughter doesn't inherit I don't have any debt, but if I did have debt, my daughter wouldn't inherit it, obviously, right?
	It would be immoral. And yet we do this in an intergenerational way in the West, in the current system.
	It's completely immoral. If it's immoral in a one-to-one relationship, it doesn't become more moral When you put a million to one or 200 or 300 million to one relationships.
	So yeah, we have this terrible system where everything is created through debt, where a dollar that is created can create many multiples of itself through legally enforced and legally protected fractional reserve banking.
	And this is all just completely wretched.
	It's absolutely immoral.
	It is utterly unsustainable.
	And the worst thing is, of course, that what we've done is basically put people in these zoos called the welfare programs and social housing, government housing.
	And what's going to happen is there's going to be not enough food to feed them.
	And then we have to turn them loose, so to speak.
	But they don't, I mean, all they're used to is these cages.
	They don't have the skills to compete in the free market.
	They're going to have to learn in a real hurry.
	And there's going to be a lot of problems with that transition, a lot of social unrest, a lot of violence, and somehow, somehow, people are going to end up blaming the non-aggression principle.
	This is the amazing thing, is that all of these problems are caused by violations of two basic moral rules, property rights and the non-aggression principle, which are both two sides of the same coin.
	And when you violate property rights and the non-aggression principle, and taxation and debt, government debt are examples of both.
	When you violate property rights and the non-aggression principle, Things get worse and worse and worse.
	And then what people do is they say, you know what the problem is?
	We haven't violated property rights and the non-aggression principle enough.
	I'm really, really drunk.
	I'm going to drink my way further to get sober.
	And this is the great tragedy is people say, well, it's a lack of regulation.
	That, of course, there's a lack of government intervention.
	It's a lack of laws. It's a lack of power.
	It's a lack of control. It's a lack of money printing.
	It's a lack of stimulus spending.
	It's a lack of government programs.
	It's a lack of Keynesianism.
	We need more counterfeiting, more violence, more laws, more controls, more power.
	More violations of the NAP. More violations of property rights.
	Because the last couple of hundred thousand have gotten us to this place, but I'm sure the next couple of hundred thousand will turn us right around.
	It's madness. This is what addicts do.
	They don't think clearly. They're addled by propaganda.
	We're addled. Most of us are addled by propaganda.
	We don't understand the nature of the system we're in.
	And we can't get up to the 10,000-foot view of the basic moral principles, which is what we need.
	To have a functioning, growing, healthy, caring, compassionate, moral society.
	And we just, we keep remaining addicted to using violence as a way of solving our problems, to violating persons and property as a way of solving our problems.
	And when our problems get worse, at some point we're going to realize that.
	At some point we're going to realize that we simply have to return to the basic moral standards of mankind, and that's how society will get better.
	That's how it worked in the past.
	It ain't working now, but it can work again in the future.
	So it's not about creating a grand plan.
	It's about just doing the best you can with the circumstances that you have.
	My grand plan is be good.
	I mean, it's to be good, be good.
	You know, let's pretend that the world can be as moral as behavior we expect from three-year-olds in a kindergarten classroom.
	Let's just assume that.
	Let's just assume that we can organize the way that we approach social problems in the same way that we organize a toy box in a kindergarten room, which is let's not use violence to get our way.
	Let's negotiate, let's reason, let's be kind, compassionate, curious, empathetic, but let's stand firm before all the people who want to grab all of the invisible guns in the world, which are only rendered invisible by propaganda.
	All the people who want to grab all the guns in the world and point them everywhere like some bizarre welfare Tarantino movie and say, no, no, no, no.
	We've got to put these guns down.
	We've got to outgrow Using a club to get what we want.
	We've got to outgrow pointing guns at people, screaming at them, threatening them with jail, throwing them in the back of police cars, locking them up for years.
	We've got to find ways to help people who are addicted to drugs other than throwing them in jail.
	We've got to find ways to help poor people other than using guns to steal from others and running up massive debts which are going to crush them.
	In the long run. We have to find ways of dealing with education without pointing guns at parents and forcing them to pay taxes to pay for a substandard education and people who can't get fired and people who still get two months off in the summer, though almost nobody's involved in farming anymore, we have got to find a way to simply say, if we're going to solve problems in society, we must, we must, we must put down these guns and start talking.
	There is no other way we will ever solve these problems.
	Okay. One final question regarding Occupy Wall Street.
	I gather from everything you've said in this conversation and previous ones that you don't think that what they're doing now is particularly effective.
	And of course, the motivations are not good according to the non-aggression principle.
	But there's one thing I heard them talking about in their chat rooms and stuff that I thought, well, hey, that would at least work or that would get some sort of effect.
	And they were talking about closing your bank account.
	And, you know, also, I would assume that talking about closing your bank account is going to start a run on the banks that's going to have an even greater effect.
	So what do you think about that?
	I mean, I'm sure that, you know, a run on the banks would, you know, harm some of your dollar denominated assets and things like that.
	But as a way of sort of, you know, poking a needle in the balloon and popping this This economy that's built out of thin air, apparently.
	What do you think? Well, I think it's pretty harsh on the poor to close your bank account.
	Let's say that you destroy the current financial system.
	Well, what's going to happen to the single mom of three kids who needs a welfare check?
	What's she going to get? I think that's pretty harsh.
	There are lots of people who are dependent on the system.
	You don't just yank someone off Two decades worth of heroin, cold turkey.
	I mean, they'll just die. I mean, you just, you can't.
	There has to be transition. The transition is going to come from understanding.
	You know, there's a great scene.
	It's a very famous scene in an old movie now, I guess, really old, called On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger.
	You know, they did this scene in the back of the car.
	I'm not giving anything. It's not a spoiler.
	It's a great film to watch. But his brother pulls a gun on him.
	And he doesn't get angry.
	He doesn't, ah, what are you doing?
	And throw him out of the car. He doesn't pull the gun out.
	He's just like, no, Charlie, no, no, no.
	And he just very gently, very lovingly puts the gun down.
	And I understand the frustration.
	You said their motivations may not be good.
	I don't know about their motivations.
	I mean, that's obviously a personal matter.
	What I've seen being proposed, I mean, there's some good stuff in it.
	There's some stuff that is not good at all.
	But the reality is that I'm glad that they're protesting in a way.
	I'm glad that people get that there's frustration.
	People really instinctively understand that the system is not working.
	I think it's too late to say this.
	This all should have been done many years ago.
	But the reality is that until people can see the violence of the system, right?
	I mean, it's an old Monty Python quote, come see the violence inherent in the system, but it's real.
	It's real. Until people can see that statism is violence, that taxation is violence, that the Federal Reserve is coercion, And then they won't understand why things aren't working.
	And they'll just be flailing around like a fish in the bottom of a boat, not able to find its way back to the water.
	Because they won't know which rules are being violated.
	They won't know what steps to take to begin to right this tipping vessel.
	And it's real simple.
	Property rights, non-aggression principle.
	It's real simple to right this boat.
	And so I think a certain amount of time studying, right?
	Everybody wants to help somebody who's got something stuck in their throat.
	But we want the guy who's really studied surgery to do the tracheotomy, not just some guy who's grabbing a knife and going to town because he's just going to end up with a head rolling across the floor.
	So I think a little more study and a little less surgery is probably what's needed at the moment.
	Okay. Well, thank you so much, Stefan.
	And everyone should check out your website, freedomainradio.com, and also all of your e-books.
	Oh, yes. I hope that people will.
	And thank you so much. It was very enjoyable.
	All right. Well, I'll talk to you later.

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