Some free-market perspectives on health care to the poor, and the role of guns in social violence. Stefan Molyneux is the host of Freedomain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com
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| Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing very well. Letter. | |
| My name is... I'm a student from the UK, and I'm working my way into libertarian, anarchic way of thinking. | |
| Not quite. It's not a way of thinking. | |
| The scientific method isn't a way of doing science. | |
| It is science. This is thinking. | |
| It's not a way of thinking. I mean, people say, well, this is Steph's philosophy. | |
| No. If it's my philosophy, it's not philosophy. | |
| It's called an opinion. It's either good philosophy or it's bad philosophy. | |
| He says, I'm a reader of Chicago Austrian economics. | |
| I'm almost totally convinced by your arguments and the evidence supporting them. | |
| I have one or two things I'd like to respond to so I can put my conscience to rest. | |
| A very good idea. Here in the UK, our National Health Service, that's the government-run healthcare system, is so fiercely defended by the main parties that there is a huge protest when our LibCon government is privatizing small sections of it. | |
| So my question is, how should I argue for a private healthcare system here in the UK? Well, it's not a private healthcare system. | |
| It's a non-violent healthcare system. | |
| And it's all in the terms. 90% of philosophy is defining the terms. | |
| And so, people are not arguing for public versus private. | |
| They're arguing for voluntary versus coercive. | |
| Clearly, you would not have a particularly difficult time arguing people about the merits of lovemaking versus rape, about the benefits of charity versus theft. | |
| And explaining the moral difference between an emergency tracheotomy and just stabbing someone in the throat. | |
| And these are because people understand that there is violence in one situation and there is nonviolence in another situation. | |
| We would not have much of a difficulty arguing against the idea that the government should assign us marriage partners and forbid divorce for the rest of our lives, because that would be clearly institutionalized rape. | |
| So, it doesn't matter what service is provided, it only matters whether a gun is involved in the provision of it. | |
| And if people skate over or vault over or ignore, as everybody does, they ignore the gun in the room, the fact that the state uses coercion to achieve its ends, then they can hear you, can argue for anything. | |
| How should I spend this found money? | |
| It's a fun conversation. | |
| If I find a million dollars that can't be traced and tracked and I'm never going to get in trouble for using, how would I spend it? | |
| You know, that's quite different. | |
| So that's one thing I would say. | |
| The other thing I'd say is that it's important to recognize that human nature changes fundamentally in the presence of the state. | |
| If a Brinks truck overturns in a poor neighborhood and thousands of hundred-dollar bills go fluttering through the neighborhood and people grab them and, you know, stick them in their socks and up their noses and stuff to hang tight to them and don't return them all, would we say that human beings are innately thieves and don't respect property rights? | |
| No, it's just lots of untraceable, at least pretty untraceable dollar bills, hundred-dollar bills floating through the air, so some of them will be returned, but a lot of them are going to be grabbed. | |
| Finding a wallet down the street does not make you a thief. | |
| Stealing it from somebody's pocket does. | |
| And so in the presence of the state, people's perception of what is moral and virtuous changes. | |
| It corrupts humanity. | |
| And so that's another sort of thing that I would mention. | |
| Another thing you could say if you want is, okay, well, what's going to happen when the system runs out of money? | |
| What is going to happen? I mean, if you want to talk consequentialism, The government money provides a huge and wonderful high for people for a generation or two. | |
| But, you know, it's like some guy who quits his job and goes on credit card debts and says working is for suckers. | |
| It's like, okay, well, what happens when you run out of money and you can't pay off your debts? | |
| What happens when you declare bankruptcy, lose your house, your car? | |
| What happens then? I mean, it all looks fine if you're going to go into debt. | |
| What happens when you can't pay off the debt? | |
| What's going to happen to the poor when there's no welfare checks available, when there's no pension checks available? | |
| What is going to happen to the poor when there's no money to pay the doctors to treat them for, quote, free? | |
| Yeah, going into debt is a great way to avoid reality for a short period of time. | |
| And the richer the country, the longer it can sustain it, but fundamentally, it is a problem. | |
| So, yeah. | |
| If you're going to vault over the moral issue of using force to provide services, then I don't know why you would have a moral argument after that. | |
| You know, it's... | |
| I said recently there was some controversy about some Marines supposedly urinating on the corpses of people that they had killed in Afghanistan or Iraq, probably Afghanistan. | |
| I mean, it's a strange place to draw a moral line. | |
| We can go overseas and we can kill people, but we can't piss on them. | |
| Hey, no to any marines out there. | |
| I would rather you piss on me than blow my head off. | |
| After you've murdered people, the desecration of corpses seems like a pretty arbitrary line to draw in the sand with regards to ethics. | |
| So, after you've initiated the use of force and fraud and counterfeiting to steal from people, both current and future people, right? | |
| A national debt is tax enslavement of the unborn. | |
| So, once you've okayed that, what would be the point of bringing moral arguments in? | |
| It would be completely ridiculous. | |
| It would be like writing a book on how to treat your kidnapped rape victims nicely. | |
| Well, once you are going, going okay that it's okay to kidnap and rape them, why on earth would you want etiquette after that? | |
| So it doesn't really matter what happens to the money after it's stolen. | |
| You simply have accepted, if you're for this sort of stuff, you've accepted the use of force as a way of solving problems. | |
| So then saying, well, what's going to happen to the poor if we stop using violence to provide them with services? | |
| But if you're really concerned about ethics and virtue and goodness and right behavior, then let's back up a square or two to the point where taxpayers, both current and future, have guns pointed at them for the provision of these services. | |
| And if someone says, well, I'm okay with it, I'm okay with using violence, you know, they drape it up and tart it up in some sort of social contract and so on, well, that's fine. | |
| But then they have the logical problem of saying, well, why can only some people use violence? | |
| Why can only the people who call themselves a state use violence to provide these services and other people can't? | |
| That's like saying, you know, all these penguins are penguins except for those five, and they're the opposite of penguins. | |
| Are they penguins? Yes, but I'm going to define them as the opposite of penguins. | |
| Try, you know, saying that to your biology teacher and see how far you get. | |
| You can't have a classification and a universalization. | |
| Classification is humanity, universalization is virtuous behavior. | |
| You can't have a classification and a universalization and then just create arbitrary opposites. | |
| I mean, you can. You're just wrong. | |
| So you can't say human beings should not initiate the use of force, except for those guys over there with the funny blue or green suits on or, you know, at this particular address. | |
| They can not only can do it, but they must, they should. | |
| It would be moral for them to do it. | |
| Then you're creating a category called humanity, nonviolence, but this category of humanity, violence. | |
| I mean, this is just fundamentally incorrect. | |
| It's immoral. It's corrupt. | |
| And fundamentally, it is... | |
| It's just philosophically incorrect, and this is why things go from bad to worse. | |
| If you're making fundamental errors in physics and engineering when you're trying to build a bridge, the bridge is going to fall down. | |
| And if you're making fundamental errors in your categorization of humans and virtue... | |
| You're going to have all of the disasters that we see going on around the world. | |
| You know, massive national debts, unfunded liabilities, bad education for children, the Eurozone coming crashing down, fiscal crises. | |
| You know, because what is the fundamental problem with, say, central banking? | |
| It's quite simple. Counterfeiting is immoral for all human beings, except for... | |
| That little group of wrinkly, crypt-keeper, besuited, bespectacled baldies over there, those guys must do it. | |
| Everyone else can't do it. Well, this is a fundamental philosophical error. | |
| All of these penguins are penguins, except for those five who are the opposite of penguins. | |
| I mean, that just makes no sense. | |
| And things that make no sense turn to error and catastrophe and, in ethics, evil over time. | |
| So, that would be the other thing. | |
| Now, the other thing he talks about is... | |
| How should I argue for a private healthcare system? | |
| Sorry. He says, I believe in the right to bear arms as it gives people the ability to fight off oppressive governments and intruders, etc. | |
| However, when people say more guns equals more deaths, it gets me thinking, call that weak-mindedness or whatever, and I question whether people in a free society can be trusted with weapons. | |
| Could you give me some comments? | |
| On that or give me a video link. | |
| Wow, there's tons of stuff about it. | |
| But again, you just want to work with first principles if you really want to make sure that you're not arguing from a fact. | |
| Arguing from a fact or consequentialism or utilitarianism or pragmatism is always a disaster. | |
| It's always saying that an idea, the value or truth of an idea can be judged by its effects is not valid. | |
| That's not what philosophy is. Philosophy is first principles. | |
| Right? It's like saying that Einsteinian physics is wrong because it led to atomic weapons. | |
| No. Einsteinian physics is right or wrong regardless of the consequences of that. | |
| And so you don't have the right to bear arms because of, you know, X, Y, and Z consequence, the fighting off oppressive governments, which doesn't really work anyway. | |
| But no, you don't have the right to bear arms because of that. | |
| You have the right to bear arms because it's philosophically contradictory to oppose it. | |
| Right? Because, okay, let's say that people do not have the right to bear arms. | |
| Okay, so who's going to stop them from bearing arms? | |
| Well, people with arms. | |
| Okay, so some people must have the right to bear arms in order to stop other people from not having, who don't have the right to bear arms. | |
| Well, you've got then all of these penguins except for these five who are the opposite of penguins. | |
| Nobody has the right to bear arms except for these guys in a blue costume who must have bare arms to stop everyone else from bearing arms. | |
| People either have the right or don't have the right to bear arms. | |
| And not having the right to bear arms creates insurmountable logical contradictions. | |
| And therefore it's false. | |
| You know, logical contradictions equals falsehood. | |
| Logical contradictions equals falsehood. | |
| That's all you need to think about. | |
| And so anybody who says that, okay, so people in a free society, can they be trusted with weapons? | |
| If you say yes, then you have a free society. | |
| And if you say no, they can't be trusted with weapons, then obviously you can't have a government. | |
| Because you have to trust people with weapons who call themselves the government. | |
| And if people can't be trusted with weapons, then you can't have a government. | |
| I mean, this is the old fundamental thing. | |
| And people will always try and create this double thing, this artificial divide in your mind. | |
| It's very dangerous. Very dangerous. | |
| Most dangerous thing there is. And they will say, we need a government to protect us from evil people. | |
| But if there are evil people in the world, and I have no doubt that there are, Where's the first place they're going to go? | |
| It's to the government. I mean, if you create an agency but the monopoly of force, it's going to attract evil people like flies to shit. | |
| And you do not solve the problem of evil by giving it a monopoly. | |
| I mean, you may solve the problem of certain conflicts. | |
| But, I mean, it's the Randall Patrick McMurphy thing. | |
| That you can solve the problem of rebellion with a frontal lobotomy. | |
| You can solve the problem of a migraine with a guillotine. | |
| You can't solve the problem of evil by creating an agency with a monopoly on evil, which attracts all the evil people. | |
| It's like, we have a problem with organized crime, so let's create one big organized crime monopoly and give it domination with nuclear weapons over the whole area. | |
| You've not solved the problem. | |
| You've just fed the cancer to the point where life becomes unsustainable. | |
| I guess a guy who's died doesn't have any problem with cancer, but it's not like you've had a cure. | |
| So, that's really, really important. | |
| People will always say, well, because of these bad people, because of these bad consequences, we must have a government. | |
| But that's creating a category of people which is supposed to have the exact opposite categories or characterizations of those that you've just described. | |
| Sorry, that's a bad way of putting it. So if I say, well, there's lots of evil people in the world who will take your stuff, so we need a government to protect us from them. | |
| Well, how does the government pay for this protection? | |
| By taking your stuff. You haven't solved the problem. | |
| You understand? The use of government... | |
| As an imaginary solution for social problems is worse, really, but it's on the same intellectual level as the use of God to solve problems in physics and biology. | |
| You say, well, God did it, didn't it? | |
| There's no answer. It actually prevents answers because it's the pretend answer. | |
| When you have a pretend answer, when you think you have an answer, you stop looking for answers. | |
| And government is a way of pretending you have an answer when, in fact, you're just making the problems worse. | |
| It's the old thing. It's morphine for a toothache. | |
| Hey, my tooth feels better, but the rot continues deeper. | |
| So I hope that helps. Thank you so much. | |
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