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March 9, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:23:53

2106 The Future of Your Freedom

The map of a world without violence, and the path to get there. Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, interviewed by James Corbett of The Corbett Report - http://www.corbettreport.com

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	Welcome, friends. This is James Corbett of CorbettReport.com.
	It is the 7th of March 2012 for me here in the sunny climes of Western Japan and the 6th of March 2012 back in the freezing, frigid, dark climes of Eastern Canada where I'm joined on the line by none other than Stefan Molyneux of Free Domain Radio, FreeDomainRadio.com.
	Stefan, thank you so much for joining us today.
	It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
	Well, I don't know the best way to introduce you to my audience.
	I have received so many emails, especially in the last few weeks, asking me to have you on the program that I guess you don't really need any introduction at all to most of my audience.
	But for those out there who may not have heard of Stefan Molyneux yet, why don't you just give us the rundown on who you are and where you're coming from?
	Well, as I said, my name is Stefan Molyneux.
	I am an ex-software entrepreneur and sort of co-founded the company, grew it, sold it.
	I was the chief technical officer, worked in sales and marketing as well as programming and management.
	And I had a long commute, wouldn't you know.
	And in my long commute, I got sick of audiobooks and sick of the radio.
	And so I started recording thoughts.
	I have been studying philosophy both...
	In a formal and informal setting for about, I guess by this time, almost 30 years.
	Shocking but true. And so I started recording my thoughts in the car and I thought, what the heck?
	I've heard of podcasting.
	Let's throw them up and see what sticks.
	And it's been my full-time gig for the last couple of years.
	I speak at conferences, I host conferences, and I've published a bunch of books, and everything I do is free.
	It's a sort of donation-based, I don't know, business model may not be quite the right word, but it's an advertisement-free, you know, how Socrates would beg for lunch in return for philosophy.
	I think that's really my I prefer to say listener supported, but I get the idea.
	Yeah.
	So, yeah.
	So I live on the, you know, like Blanche Dubois, I depend on the kindness of strangers.
	And I've been working in the field of ethics and politics and the philosophy of ideal human relationships and all of that.
	And working on how we parent in philosophical or libertarian terms.
	And I've done a series of interviews with some fairly famous libertarian parents, David Friedman, Stefan Kinsella and so on.
	And so I'm really, really fascinated about how two basic principles work in the world.
	The non-aggression principle, thou shalt not initiate force against thy neighbor, though thou may respond to it in kind, should you be the victim of such an assault.
	So the non-initiation, a force, a non-aggression principle, and, which I think is pretty much two sides of the same coin, property rights.
	You own yourself, you own the effects of your actions, whether they're a crime or a field of wheat or a baby, let's say.
	And so, yes, self-ownership, property rights, and the non-aggression principle seem to me kind of like the three legs of the tripod that society should stand on.
	Whereas that's not really how it works at all at the moment, and therefore society doesn't work very well at the moment because we've kind of drifted away.
	If you've ever really been close to those three principles, we've kind of drifted away, and it's my job to be the Socratic annoying gadfly and remind people as much as possible of these principles.
	And since I started the show, I think I've had about 40 million people.
	I think it's the biggest philosophical conversation the planet has ever heard, mostly because of the brilliance of the listeners and the ease of the technology.
	I throw a few brain cells into the mix as well.
	And so, yeah, it's been a very successful show, and it's a very pleasurable show.
	I do a live call-in show at 2 p.m.
	Eastern every Sunday.
	People can go to freedomainradio.com to find out more.
	I do interviews. I do...
	Conversations with listeners, I do solo shows, I've done an introduction to philosophy on YouTube, all that kind of stuff.
	Sorry, was that too long? Too long an intro?
	Not at all, not at all. Well, you've done, obviously, a lot of work to introduce to people, and certainly I've come across some of your work repeatedly over the years.
	I mean, it's just, it's everywhere online, so you're definitely getting out there in a big way.
	But you mentioned...
	You're saying I'm actually very similar to a virus.
	That's... You are going viral.
	Yeah, I'll take that. Well, in this day and age, that's a good thing.
	So, well, let's go back to the core principles that you were talking about there, because the non-aggression principle and the idea of self-ownership property rights are, I think, fundamental to a lot of the message that I have and many others out there in the alternative news or information Media right now have.
	But there's a strange other virus that I think has infected the minds of men for many centuries, if not millennia, if not since the beginning of human society, and that is the virus of statism.
	And the idea that, yes, these core principles of non-aggression and property rights are so precious that we must therefore immediately give them up to a group of people who we designate to be special human beings who can then violate those principles in order to maintain them.
	Which is a bizarre system, but that's basically what statism boils down to, the way I see it.
	And I myself have been infected by this, and I'm trying to get rid of the infection, but as anyone who's ever had an infection knows, it takes time, and it can be a lengthy recovery process.
	So I'm a recovering statist in a lot of ways, and I guess...
	Well, exactly right.
	And I guess we're just in different stages of that recovery.
	But as someone who's recently coming around to the fact that statism is an evil and must be eliminated, I'm still grappling and wrestling with those last demons of, oh, but anarchism will lead to hell on earth and all of these strange events that we've never seen before will suddenly take place because there's no...
	Maybe we can talk about those.
	If it's any consolation, I spent an embarrassingly lengthy two decades struggling with minarchism and statism versus non-statism.
	I came from sort of the objectivist camp where anarchism is dismissed with a A really kind of regal imperiousness without any particular arguments.
	And yet, of course, if you look at, sort of peel back the layers of Rand's writings, you can see that Galt Gulch in Atlas Shrugged Has no government.
	It's a purely voluntary society with no government.
	And yet when they all return to the world, the first thing they do is try and fix the Constitution and make a better government.
	So there was a split even within her own thinking about that.
	And so I absolutely sympathize.
	My goal, of course, is to help people do it in less than 20 years.
	Because that's what it was for me.
	It's just so embarrassing looking back.
	But, you know, I'd never really been exposed to it.
	I didn't know anything about Murray Rothbard or Hans Hoppe or Steph Kinsella or any of the other people who are out there doing great work.
	I really sympathize with the challenge and how much of a deprogramming it is and how much time it takes.
	If you've got challenges and issues, I may swing and a miss, but I'll swing energetically either way.
	Well, I think I'm starting to shake myself out of it.
	So perhaps we can get through some of the core arguments rather quickly off the top and get into some of the more interesting discussions in more depth.
	So off the top, let's come up with the types of arguments that everyone always comes up with.
	And I'll just put them out in the most general form and you can just knock them down as quickly as possible.
	So, of course, the one that everyone immediately thinks of is, well, we must, we have to have some sort of authority, some sort of body put together to protect us from evil people.
	And there's all sorts of different ways that that works.
	And we can imagine all the different scenarios, but broadly speaking, some type of police force or something in order to protect people from each other and protect property.
	Sure. This, of course, is the problem of infinite regression, which is, you know, there's that old argument about the cosmology that said, you know, that the world sits on top of a duck, sits on top of a fish, which sits on top of a turtle.
	And then some kid asks, well, what's underneath the turtle?
	And somebody says, no, no, no, it's turtles all the way down.
	It's turtles all the way down.
	And the problem of infinite regression is, okay, well, we are afraid of aggression against us.
	We are afraid of people using force against us.
	The logical solution to that can't possibly be that we arm a small group of people with all the weapons in the world who can then aggress against us anyway.
	That's like saying, well, I'm a little worried about cancer, so I'm going to introduce a massive cancer into my system to protect me from the maybe cancer that might happen years down the road.
	We would never think of that as a viable solution.
	There are challenges around aggression.
	There are challenges around contracts.
	There are challenges around maintaining cordial and productive human relationships.
	And we can sort of talk about various solutions.
	But the logical solution, in other words, a solution that we would invent from a blank slate, Not one we just inherited from some prior age in history.
	It can't possibly be that we say, well, we're afraid of people using violence against us.
	So what we'll do is we'll get a small group of people, give them all the guns in the world and disarm ourselves and then assume that we're safe.
	Like you say, well, we need the government to protect us from people who are going to take our property.
	So we're going to give the government to take half or more of our property at will and change whatever laws they want at will.
	So we lose half our property against our will through the threat of force, and that is supposed to be how we protect our property.
	I mean, that obviously, this is like a guillotine to solve a headache problem.
	It doesn't work logically.
	So there has to be other solutions that we can at least be open to because that one is just not logical.
	Does that sort of make any sense? It certainly does.
	And I guess we can extend that out as well to the international scale because, of course, minarchists love to argue, well, we still need a national defense, which would run roughly along the same lines as that argument.
	Yeah, look, I mean, I think a national defense is a really good idea.
	But I think any rational person, right?
	So when you say, well, maybe we should have a free society, people can contract for their own defense.
	People immediately say, what do they immediately say?
	They say, well, but whoever you contract for your national defense is just going to take you over and become another government.
	And it's like, well, so you're saying the existing system is really bad.
	If the worst possible thing that happened to a truly free society is it turns into the society that we have now, that's a pretty strong condemnation of the society that we have now, right?
	Because they're saying, well, my anarchism would turn into that and that's really bad.
	It's like, well, then at least we're saying that what we have now is really bad.
	But of course, you and I and everyone who would contract with somebody to provide some sort of geographical defense, The first thing we would ask them is, how can we be sure that you're not going to turn those guns on us and take us over and strip us of all our property and our freedoms?
	That would be the very first question that anybody with any brains would ask.
	Now, as an entrepreneur, You know, I've sort of grown up in a different environment from a lot of people who maybe just work for others or who have academic positions and so on.
	They're not used to selling their services to skeptical people who don't want to have anything to do with them.
	You know, when I was on the sales side of IT, you'd have to call between 100 and 1000 people to make one sale.
	So, you know, the vast numbers of people had no interest in what you're talking about.
	You'd have to overcome all of their objections.
	And their lack of interest.
	And so if I want to come to you and say, listen, JC, I got me a great defense agency.
	I can protect you for a buck a day.
	No problem. First thing you're going to say to me is, well, okay, I give you all this money.
	You buy all these weapons. Why don't you just take tanks and roll them down my street?
	What's going to stop you from taking me over?
	I have to answer that objection.
	If I can't answer that objection, I don't get your business.
	The next guy who phones you who says I can do it for a buck a day, he's going to get your business if he can answer that question.
	There's tons of ways to answer the question.
	I can say, well, listen, I've parked $50 million in an escrow account managed by a third party I have nothing to do with.
	Here's all the legal paperwork. If anyone ever finds me amassing weapons that can be used against citizens or amassing more weapons than I publicly disclose, I will give them $50 million or that third party will give them $50 million.
	I mean, that's just one of, you know, six billion different ways that you could reassure the public.
	Of course, if somebody contracts to you To protect you, he's going to want to do it as cheaply as possible.
	And if he then decides to build a secret army of robot laser guided mice and hamsters or something, then he's going to have to pay for all of that, which means he's going to have to raise the rates on his customers without providing them any initial any any increased defense.
	So immediately they're going to know, hey, wait a minute, my rates have just doubled, but you're not actually providing me any more defense.
	You're building a robot army of mice, aren't you?
	And so it would be very obvious.
	So it would be very expensive to try and amass all of this weaponry to try and take over.
	Whoever is not going to do that is going to be able to provide much better services in terms of defense.
	And there will be lots of third party people checking it out.
	And anytime anybody goes one foot off the beaten path of what they promised to their customers, they would be out of business the next day.
	So.
	It is the very concern that we have that an aggregation of power corrupts and an aggregation of weaponry can be used to take people over is the very thing that 6 million entrepreneurs the world over are going to put their heads to the grindstone creating huge entrepreneurial sparks of business brilliance in order to reassure customers that that's not going to happen.
	We damn well don't have that from the system that we have now and so I think that is a much, much better opportunity.
	All right. Well, it certainly makes sense to me.
	So let's move on to the other side of the objection.
	And people who are not Canadian in the audience might not know, but recently an MP in Canada got into trouble for basically supporting an online censorship bill that the government is trying to ram through that he was basically saying, if you're not with this bill, you're with the child pornographers, blah, blah, blah.
	This is also one, I think, where they wanted to give the police access to your internet records from your ISP without even a warrant or without any information.
	Exactly right. Yes, the Any police person would be able to look at all of your ISP activity and everything without a warrant.
	All of this, I mean, just terrible censorship.
	But of course, if you're not with that, then you're with a child pornographer.
	So let me use that type of argument against you.
	Because if you're not for government, then you clearly hate sick people who can't afford health care, right, Stefan?
	Right. And that's the same argument that it would be like saying if we were in the 17th century and I was an abolitionist and you were pro-slavery.
	Let's give you the pleasant straw man argument.
	If you were pro-slavery and I was anti-slavery, you would say, so you basically want everyone to starve to death because we're not the slaves.
	How will the cotton get picked?
	How will the crops get picked? You want everyone to be naked in the cold and starving to death in a ditch.
	Right. The mistake of this, of course, is to say, because the government provides X, whatever X is, roads or welfare or old age pension, because the government provides X, if the government does not provide X, X will not be provided.
	That is so irrational.
	I mean, I understand that it seems rational because we're all propagandized into believing that nonsense, but it's completely irrational.
	So it's like, if religious leaders or cultural leaders or parents arranged everyone's marriage, And you and I said, well, that's not right.
	I mean, young people should not be forced into marriage.
	It's a kind of institutionalized rape.
	That's not right. And people said, oh, so you want the human race to die out?
	Because if people aren't forced to get married by their elders, nobody will ever get married and nobody will ever have children.
	So that's what you want. Because if we don't provide the service through force, it will never be provided.
	But that's not true, of course.
	We all understand that that's not true.
	When you get rid of slaves, you end up with a better society, you know?
	If you'd have said in the, I don't know, the early 18th century in the South, we were having some debate about slavery, and I said, oh, listen, James, don't sweat it, man.
	Don't sweat it, because you know what's going to happen?
	We're going to get rid of slaves, and currently about 90% of people are involved in farming.
	Don't worry. In 100 to 200 years, it's only going to be 3% of people involved in farming, and you won't even need slaves.
	You won't even need workers for the most part, because these giant These machines are going to sweep through the fields of cotton, and they're going to automatically pick the cotton, and only one person will need to drive them.
	They'll do a whole field in half a day, and they will run on the crushed-out juice of ancient trees buried a mile underground.
	I mean, you look at me like, I don't even know what you've been smoking, but whatever it is, A, can I have some, and B, it is not making any sense in your argument.
	But that, of course, is exactly what happened.
	Proportion of farmers went down, machinery went up, and the efficiency is far higher than it was 100, 200 years ago.
	And so we don't know what's going to happen in the future, but we do know that people do want to help other people.
	We know that because people have voted for welfare state programs, right?
	If the government reflects the will of the people and the majority of the people want welfare state programs, then they will provide those things in the absence of government.
	We know that for two reasons. One, because they vote for them, which means the majority of people actually want them.
	And two, because the government replaced existing systems of welfare that already were there.
	The government doesn't create things.
	The government takes over things.
	The government didn't invent education.
	The government took over private education.
	The government did not invent roads.
	The government took over roads. The government didn't invent railroads.
	The government took them over. The government didn't invent welfare.
	It took it over. So these things all existed, and I would argue, in a far more beneficial manner before the government took them over.
	So there's no reason whatsoever to believe in every reason to accept That if the government does not provide these things, then they will be provided in a far better and far more sustainable way by free people, charitable people voluntarily interacting for the betterment of all.
	Because, man, you know the story.
	I mean, we've got the system now where we've created a near-permanent underclass of undereducated, overbreeding, single-parent households, tragic, catastrophic ghettos.
	A near-permanent underclass of what on earth is going to happen to these people when the government runs out of money, as mathematically it's going to and probably in the not-too-distant future.
	So the argument I would say is that the people who say that the welfare takes care of the poor simply don't know anything about the numbers or choosing to ignore them.
	Half of people in the U.S. don't even graduate high school.
	It's barely better here in Canada.
	And so people are getting really terrible education.
	They're getting trapped in the welfare state.
	There's nothing left in the Social Security Fund but IOUs that strangle and rob the economic future of the children.
	And so it's just a terrible system all around.
	Statism is like a drug.
	It's like heroin. Yes, it makes you feel better in the short run, but it makes all of your problems worse in the long run.
	And this is what we all understand.
	A life of violence, a life of aggression, a life of counterfeiting, a life of cheating, a life of fraud, a life of debt, will make things better in the short run.
	Guy who runs up his visa rather than going to work has a great month or two, but when the hangover hits, it hits pretty hard.
	So we're really looking for sustainable, peaceful solutions to social problems, not violent, entrapping, short-term solutions that lead to greater disasters.
	Well, very well put.
	And I think, certainly, I would imagine that most of the people who are listening to you, obviously, and a lot of the people who listen to me already are well aware of the problems created by government rather than the supposed solutions offered by more government.
	And perhaps it's particularly fitting that we're recording this on Super Tuesday evening in the United States where certain people in 10 of the states of the Union are supposedly deciding who might be the political puppet for 2012.
	Yay! So can you feel the excitement, Stefan?
	It's just so overwhelming that people get to participate in their own enslavement in this fun, carnival-like atmosphere.
	I feel the excitement like I'm wading through a deep Dank, oily, black pond.
	And it's like, hey, do I have leeches?
	Oh man, did leeches get in my waiting boots?
	That's the political excitement.
	That's what I feel. But you get to choose which leech sucks off you.
	So that's, I mean, it's so fun.
	Yeah, absolutely. If you get to choose between one of two or three potential husbands that the government is assigning you, that's exactly the same as choosing your own husband.
	If you get to choose which slave master is going to beat you, that's like being free.
	If you get to choose which hood ornament is on the car that runs you over, that's the same as walking free.
	But now, you see, we hit on an issue that will be controversial, I think, to a lot of the listeners, because a lot of the people out there still believe that if they pick the right leech, they can win a little bit more freedom or something along those lines.
	So what if people pick Ron Paul 2012?
	From what I understand, from what people say online, that's going to solve all the world's problems.
	Well, I mean, I've had my issues with the Ron Paul candidacy, which I'm sure has not had much impact on the Ron Paul candidacy.
	I think it would be a complete disaster for Ron Paul.
	It's way too late.
	It's far too late. I mean, if you get promoted to be captain of the Titanic three minutes before it ships, three minutes before it sinks, who will you remember to that?
	You remember it's the guy who sank the Titanic.
	The system is far too gone to be rescued politically.
	And so if Ron Paul gets in, the results are going to be catastrophic.
	The results are going to be he's going to attempt to cut.
	There's going to be riots.
	He's going to have to call out the National Guard.
	There will be blood in the streets.
	Look what happened to Arnold Schwarzenegger when Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to shave a few bits, a few points of pension payouts many years into the future.
	I mean, he was done. He was done.
	Scott Walker asks his public sector workers who make far more than private sector workers and have job security nobody has even dreamed of in the private sector for like 20 years.
	He asks them to pay not 6% but 12% of the cost of their healthcare.
	Well, I mean, you've got Democratic senators and congressmen fleeing the state.
	You have riots. You have people dying.
	I mean, and this is tiny.
	This is like 0.001% of what Ron Paul wants to do.
	And what is he going to recall?
	All of these traumatized soldiers?
	Where is he going to put them? It's going to cause massive problems at home.
	If he tries to rein in government spending for public sector unions, there's going to be massive strikes.
	He's going to have to break them up somehow.
	I mean, what's going to be remembered is, wow, you know, when that libertarian guy got in, You know, the shit hit the fan, you know, hard, hard, hard.
	And that's all that people are going to remember is the amount of problems and aggression and violence and social turmoil and rebellion and all of that.
	They'll blame libertarianism for it.
	Because people still aren't aware enough of the basic kindergarten ethics that society should be running under, which is don't hit, don't steal, and keep your word.
	And people have yet to extend and expand the basic morality that we all live with every day.
	They simply have yet to expand that to the state as a whole.
	The state remains in this other world.
	Weird, anti-matter world where violence equals virtue and compulsion equals order and debt equals wealth.
	I mean, it's a complete upside-down Lewis and Carol, Alice in Wonderland world.
	People have yet to extend the ethics of basic rational morality to the state.
	And so, yeah, Ron Paul gets in.
	And it's not going to work anyway.
	The government is essentially a criminal organization.
	I'm not saying everyone in there is some good fella.
	I'm just saying that morally that's the way it is because it initiates the use of force.
	That is its reason for being.
	That's its sole power really.
	And you don't join an evil organization to get it to be good.
	I mean, if we think that's possible, just go join the mafia and turn it into a charity.
	Just go join some local drug gang and turn it into a children's charity.
	It's not how it works.
	You don't join criminal organizations and turn them to virtue.
	It's a fantasy. You have to work much more fundamentally than that.
	Well, that's the point.
	And as I can almost hear my email servers melting down with all the angry emails that are flooding in from Ron Paul supporters, let's turn to that idea of the type of society that we actually want to create as an alternative.
	Well, sorry, let me just talk to those supporters for a sec, because, I mean, trust me, I wait for those.
	I really like Ron Paul supporters, and I like Ron Paul a lot.
	I mean, obviously, I'm not religious, and I have certain issues with people who reject evolution who are Doctors, that seems to me a little bit off the kilter.
	But I like Ron Paul a lot.
	He's a very smart guy. He's a very capable guy.
	I mean, he's a doctor and a very skilled politician.
	He's better at one of those things than I'll probably be at anything in my whole life.
	So I think that he's a really impressive guy.
	He's a good writer. He's a good communicator.
	And props where props is due, he's doing fantastically in the polls.
	I mean, who would have anticipated he'd be, you know, when they're down to four, he's holding strong.
	So I have nothing against the educational aspect.
	It gets people to read about the Federal Reserve, gets people to question the matrix that they're stuck in.
	So there's a lot of great stuff.
	And I've always said, look, I make the arguments against political action.
	I've made them for years. And people can accept or reject those arguments.
	Maybe Ron Paul will get in and everything will get better and I'll eat my own feet and crow and humble pie for the next couple of years, which I would be very happy to do if I'm wrong.
	But, you know, I've auto-suggest to Ron Paul, anyone committed to whatever they're doing in the course of liberty and human freedom, just give it your all.
	That's all I care about.
	I say don't. I say let's focus on parenting and personal relationships.
	That's how the freedom of the future is going to come.
	So I give that my all.
	But if people don't accept my arguments, and I certainly don't claim that there are two and two make four.
	They are predictions based on, I think, reasonable educated guesses.
	But I just want them to go full tilt boogie, you know, like work your 12, 14 hours a day to get Ron Paul in if you think that's the way to go.
	So, you know, I don't want to put myself in opposition to the Ron Paul supporters.
	I don't think it's going to work and I've made strong cases as to why.
	I think they're strong. I've had public debates as to why.
	I've put out the statistics and the data and the historical arguments as to why.
	But nobody can predict the future.
	Maybe they're all going to be right and I'm going to be completely wrong.
	I would be perfectly happy to accept that.
	I mean, whatever moves the course of liberty forward is fantastic.
	So I don't want it to be like, oh, he thinks we're all bad.
	I don't. I admire the commitment.
	I admire the money that's tens of millions of dollars pouring into this.
	It's just that historically and rationally and morally it's not going to work.
	So, you know, give it your all, and then when it doesn't work, you can join us on the ship that's actually sailing towards the sunrise.
	Hopefully. At any rate, well, absolutely.
	I think that is the point. And that, to me, I mean, there certainly is nothing that's affected as much of an education in the mass public consciousness over the last five years as the Ron Paul campaigns have.
	So, absolutely, I'm certainly not positioning myself in opposition to that education.
	And I think it is doing valuable work in that regard.
	But turning to that ship that's sailing towards the sunrise of the future that we want, let's start to think about the type of society that we could have without government.
	And I know it's hard for people to put themselves in those shoes.
	So I want to start on, I think, the basic issue that everyone starts with when they start thinking about these issues, which is Dispute resolution.
	There's going to be disputes in society.
	People are going to murder, steal, rape, whatever, pillage.
	It's going to happen. What do we do when that happens if there is no such thing as a government to come in and resolve our disputes for us?
	Right. Well, I mean, there's two answers, and I'll try to keep them brief.
	I've got some free books on this practical anarchy and everyday anarchy on my website at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
	People can listen to them or read them as they see fit.
	But very briefly, let's say that you and I enter into a contract.
	Well, we're both aware that we may break the contract.
	I mean, maybe we've been doing business for 30 years and we trust each other completely and so on.
	But let's just say it's the first time we're doing it and we don't know a huge amount about each other or we can't maybe find enough about each other online or whatever.
	And so you and I are going to enter into contract and we're aware that one of us or both of us may break the contract.
	So what would be the smart thing to do?
	I ask you. Oh, you're right.
	This is not rhetorical.
	Sorry, I should have turned my rhetorical off.
	But yeah, so what would we do?
	What would we do in that situation?
	Why don't we buy some type of insurance whereby if one of us breaks the contract, then the other will be owed the money that would be forfeited?
	Yeah, our contract is 400 bucks for an iPad or whatever, right?
	And so, yeah, you'll buy insurance.
	And so there'll be some third party who will pay you if I don't ship you the iPad or pay me if your check bounces.
	And how much that contract is going to be is going to go down the more that we are reliable, the more that we keep our word.
	It's going to be cheaper to, quote, insure us.
	The other thing is that if it's too big for that, you know, if it's a multi-billion dollar or multi-million dollar contract, then we both agree to go to some third party arbitrator and abide by those rules.
	So we just say, listen, I've dealt with these guys.
	They're really great. We both agree.
	Some third party is going to adjudicate our dispute as efficiently and cleanly as possible, and we agree to abide by them.
	Now, let's say one of us doesn't abide by that.
	Well, that's okay. That simply means that the insurance will then kick in as much as possible, and nobody will ever do business with you again.
	And those are the kind of challenges that we face.
	Sometimes people are going to get hosed.
	Yeah, okay. But people get hosed much more in a state of society.
	I don't know if you've ever tried to use the court system, but anybody who has will tell you it's completely pointless and ridiculous.
	I mean, we kind of live in a weird state of anti-anarchy at the moment that most people have no access to dispute resolution.
	I mean, you've got a small claims court where you can do a couple of hundred bucks or a thousand or two thousand bucks.
	And of course, you know, people who do multi-million dollar contracts, they have legions of lawyers and all that kind of stuff.
	But the vast majority of people in the middle have no access to dispute resolution at all.
	Because taking people to court is years and hundreds of thousands of dollars and who knows what's going to happen.
	The laws could change en route.
	I mean, it's crazy. And so we kind of live in a situation where people don't have access to dispute resolution at the moment.
	And they're prevented from having access to dispute resolution because the state holds a monopoly on these things.
	That's the part that I think people don't understand.
	We're already living in a weird state of anarchy at the moment, except that we're not allowed to have solutions with each other that are effective.
	I mean, look at something like eBay.
	Last time I checked was a couple of years ago.
	eBay was the full-time income for like over 300,000 people.
	It's international. You don't even know where the other person is.
	You have no contracts with them.
	It simply relies on ratings.
	Because you can't really pursue legal matters within eBay.
	It simply relies on ratings.
	What an incredibly powerful thing.
	That is a stateless anarchic.
	Solution to the problem of dispute resolution and you can get cheaper prices from somebody who's got a lower rating but you're taking that risk and you may lose something.
	Somebody who's got a perfect rating after five years, you're pretty much guaranteed they're able to charge a little bit more because they've maintained those ratings because you're reducing your risk and so on.
	So there's tons of examples of how this stuff can all work but my concern is I actually want people to have access to dispute resolution which they do not have at the moment and I think that's really tragic.
	It certainly is, but an interesting aspect of that is the fact that you point to the fact that multi-million dollar corporations and multinationals have access to these legions of lawyers in our current dispute resolution system offered by the courts, which obviously places a complete skewing of the scales of justice towards their side.
	And one wonders, I mean, the knee-jerk reaction, I think, of someone still in statist mentality to this type of dispute resolution of an anarchical society would be to say, well, the fundamental wealth disparity will still be there.
	There will still be people who have much, much more wealth than you and I, the average person.
	So wouldn't these dispute resolution...
	Would organizations and insurance also reflect that in some way that these people would still be able to exert their power in ways that they wouldn't otherwise be able to without that wealth?
	Well, sure. So it's the argument that I call them dispute resolution organizations or DROs.
	So a DRO that works for some big insurance company is going to get a lot more business from that insurance company than they are from any particular individual.
	And so they're going to be skewed towards that insurance company.
	Is that the argument? That would be one of the ramifications.
	Okay. Let's say that that's a problem.
	I think it's not, and I'll tell you why.
	But let's just say for a moment that that is a big problem in a free society, and there's no way around it.
	In other words, big companies are going to use their economic power to skew disputes in their favor against the little guys.
	Let's just say we can't ever solve that problem in a free society.
	How the hell is that solved in a state of society?
	Because in a state of society, they go to the government.
	And they write the laws.
	I mean, lobbyists come from the industries.
	They write the laws.
	And they run the system.
	But they have all of the might of the state and of fiat currency printing and national debts.
	How is it solved, the undue power that large organizations have?
	How on earth is that solved when they have access to control of the political machinery of a monopoly of force and counterfeiting?
	That makes it far worse.
	If that's a big problem in a free society, it's an infinitely bigger problem.
	In a status society, I mean, for every dollar that some corporations spend on lobbying, they get more than $200 in political benefits.
	They get the monopoly called patents.
	They get the monopoly called international property.
	They get to exclude other competitors from coming into the industry through licensing, through tariffs, through trade barriers and so on.
	Let's say you're some sweater manufacturer and you don't want cheap sweaters coming in from China.
	Right now, you just go and lobby the government.
	And it's disproportionately weighted to having those tariffs go up because anybody who's going to lose their job is going to be yelling blue murder to the government saying, save me, save me!
	And everyone who would have a job because of the wealth created by cheaper sweaters doesn't even know that and so they can't even complain because it's all ethereal and in the future.
	And so they go and they get the government to ban imports of sweaters from China.
	That's a big problem, right?
	And that happens in a state of society.
	How on earth would a sweater company in a free society with no government, how would a sweater company conceivably be able to stop all the imports from all over the country?
	Would they hire some private army to go to every port and make sure that no one got in?
	Well, how would they pay for that? They'd have to directly charge their customers, which means nobody would want to do business with them anymore.
	Plus, the negative publicity would be horrible.
	So if a company tried to do what they can legally and acceptably do through the government, if they tried to do that in a free society, it would never work.
	So if we're concerned about disproportionate power of economic concentration, the last thing we want to do is combine that with the monopoly of force and counterfeiting called the state.
	So that's sort of the first...
	The idea that the state solves the problems and they only exist in a free society is crazy because if they exist in a free society, they're going to be way worse once you throw a monopoly of weaponry and fiat currency counterfeiting.
	So that's for now.
	The second issue is, okay, so I am looking to buy an insurance company.
	I'm looking to buy some insurance, right?
	Whether it's insurance for my contracts or for my healthcare or accidents or whatever.
	Your concern and my first concern is, wait a second, these guys who are going to adjudicate this dispute, they totally get a lot more business from you.
	The insurance company.
	So I don't want to go with that system.
	So again, non-rhetorical question time, how could that be solved?
	If you're somebody who's claiming to want to sell insurance to someone, how are you going to reassure your potential customer that mediation or arbitration is not going to be automatically decided or tilted in your favor?
	I guess would this be another case of the track record proving the fact?
	Yeah, but you'd have to get enough customers to have a track record.
	So how are you going to overcome the first objections?
	I don't know. That's a good question.
	Well, what I would say is, look, I've got 50 companies who arbitrate for me, and I never give them any more than 2% of my business.
	So, and these people all have, you know, thousands and thousands of customers and they only have 2% of my business.
	So I've spread out the people who represent me with my customers so that, and I will show you all the books and all the press, I'll give you a really boring PowerPoint that will have you nodding off and signing a contract before the day is out.
	So that I can guarantee you that it's not weighted in my favor because these people get it.
	We've worked it out. So they get as much money from their customers as they do from me.
	It's equal. It's balanced.
	And they've also got, you know, a bunch of other companies that they work with.
	So I don't have one company where I pay 100% or 90% and customers only pay 10 because we recognize that would be a conflict of interest.
	So we've set it up and it's independently audited and you can go and check it out.
	And so there's 50 million dollars in the bank for anyone who finds that this is being cheated.
	They get that money free and clear.
	So that we've got it – this is just off the top of my head.
	I don't know how it would really solve, but this is just off the top of my head.
	I would want it weighted so that there would be a balance of economic incentives so that neither the company nor – because I wouldn't want it weighted on the side of the customers either because then the customers would keep defrauding or overcharging or complaining too much and then my premiums would go up.
	I'd want it to be nicely balanced, like right – you know, 50 pounds on either side of the seesaw in terms of economic incentive.
	So that that could be taken off the table and people could really focus on the justice of the dispute.
	That's just one solution off the top of my head.
	What do you think? It certainly does make sense in that regard.
	So my mind wanders to things like other types of public services that we take for granted right now.
	For example, the supply of water or something like that.
	Those types of services that would not be easily provided by a number of competing services, it tends to become a centralized type of thing, and it's keeping the commons of humanity.
	So those types of things often become centralized and certainly have become a state monopoly.
	Sorry, let me make sure I understand. So this is one company has to build, let's say you've got a farm out in the boonies, one company has to build the water pipes to get your water to you, and so they have a natural monopoly?
	Is that what you mean? Well, that's one aspect of it.
	But I think even in an urban setting or whatever, it's unlikely you're going to have five or six or ten different competing water companies.
	There's probably going to be one central water supply that's going to be maintained by something.
	And it might be the type of thing where people voluntarily say, yes, absolutely, I'll pay, you know, 10 cents a month or whatever it is to this company so that they can provide clean water and everyone uses it, blah, blah, blah.
	But that type of centralization always brings with it the possibility of influence from outside so that a, you know, Rockefeller, Rothschild, Warburg, fill in the blank there, fill in the blank there, who has access to unlimited resources for all intents and purposes, can come in and influence that process to put in their fluorosilicic acid, which is called sodium fluoride, which is actually a byproduct of the uranium ore mining process, blah, blah, blah, poison into the water supply to poison and dumb down the people, et cetera,
	I mean, this doesn't really fundamentally change the structure of the way that a lot of these problems function in a state of society, does it?
	Okay, so obviously, and I'm sure you understand this, but more for your listeners, if you're concerned about people having a monopoly, the state is the ultimate monopoly, right?
	And so if we're concerned about undue influence in society, then an agency that can use force to take people's property at will, that can print money at will, that can start wars at will, that can imprison people virtually at will and keep them there as long as it wants, does not solve the problem of monopoly.
	Right. But let me be clear that the thrust of my argument here is not to say that it would be better under a statist thing, but just that it doesn't actually fundamentally change.
	I mean, if it doesn't really change under an anarchist government or Way of running our society, then all we're arguing is just a matter of semantics.
	I mean, I think people are looking for...
	Let me just make sure. And so you're saying that somebody might own the water supply for a town, and then they might want to put fluoride in that water supply.
	Is that right? Right, exactly.
	And of course, there would be all the PR rollout of how, you know, this is so good for your teeth.
	It's like drinking sunscreen. It'll be great for you or whatever.
	You know, I mean, this is one example of how this is done.
	But they don't have a monopoly. I mean, they don't have a monopoly for a number of reasons.
	So the fixed assets, right?
	The dam, let's say they build a big dam and all these pipes or whatever it is, rainwater collection systems, irrigation systems.
	So somebody has bought that and somebody has paid for that and somebody owns that.
	But that doesn't mean that it's the same entity has to own it next year, right?
	So if people don't want the fluoride, obviously if people don't want the fluoride, then the fluoride won't go in.
	I think that's fairly clear.
	Because people will, or if the fluoride does go in, then they'll just They'll collect their own rainwater.
	They'll get bottled water shipped in just for drinking and cooking and so on, which is a minority of what most people use for water.
	And they won't particularly care if there's fluoride in the water they crap into and flush away.
	I don't think they'll really care. Or maybe they don't mind showering in fluoride rather than drinking it or whatever.
	So when it comes to ingesting, there's lots of different options that people can use for, you know, they can build their own local rainwater and filtering systems.
	They may be on wells themselves and so on.
	So there's lots of options for that.
	But if adding fluoride is more expensive than not adding fluoride, so if then someone can come along and say, I can buy this company and I don't have to add fluoride anymore and I'll recoup the cost that I'm going to be laying out to buy the company in getting better rates for my customers, getting rid of all of this competition, selling more water, competition like rainwaters and so on.
	And so if people are doing something that's economically unproductive, they're jacking up rates or whatever, people will find alternatives, they'll find substitutes, or other people will come along, put an offer in for the company and buy it from them and make the money back through a better service to the customer.
	So that's one way of doing it.
	The other thing, of course, is they really don't have a monopoly because you can move.
	So if someone comes in and triples the price of your water suddenly, well, first of all, you're not going to go live in a place where you have a month-to-month contract with the water.
	Because what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to move in and you're going to say, listen, I need to low for at least five years how much my water is going to be.
	And I want to guarantee that it's never going to go up more than 5% in any given year.
	And there'll be lots. So companies will have to provide those reassurances in order to get people to move to the town, to whatever, right?
	And so those kinds of things will be in there already.
	People are going to want those reassurances because nobody wants these sudden tripling of rates or fees.
	But let's say somebody does break that and you can't find a way and suddenly you can't afford to lift that.
	Well, they don't have a monopoly because you can move anywhere in a free society.
	There's no residency.
	You don't have to get a green card.
	You just move anywhere that you want.
	And so they really don't have a monopoly because of the mobility of people.
	One of the problems, of course, is that, you know, it's hard to move from place to place, licenses and registrations and tariffs.
	You know, we've got these dog tethers, these electronic tethers on us all over the place called passports and work permits and all that kind of stuff.
	But in a free society, you can move anywhere and you can Go anywhere, do anything, and so they don't really have that much of a monopoly on you in the final result, which is very different from the way it works with the state.
	Okay, well, let's talk about one of the underlying issues of that, which is the issue of the commons, because obviously the idea of private property and property ownership is, I think, something that the vast majority of people do take for granted.
	There are others who want to communize everything and everything, all of that.
	But leaving that aside for the moment, I mean, the idea of private property, of course, becomes problematic when we talk about things like water and air and things that obviously cannot be maintained within a certain boundary.
	And this is one of the classical things that have preoccupied philosophers and statists and...
	Many people for many centuries is what do we do in those issues of boundary disputes and how do we, you know, maintaining water supplies when someone pollutes it and someone further downstream gets the brunt end of that.
	I mean, those types of disputes.
	But you buy insurance for those things.
	You would buy insurance for those things.
	So let's say that I build a house someplace, my favorite patch of ground in the whole world.
	I would buy a bunch of insurance that would say, listen, I'm going to pay you guys 50 bucks a year.
	And if the air around my house ever gets polluted to these levels, then you guys gotta pay me a million dollars to relocate.
	So I'm gonna pay you 50 or 100 bucks a year, and if I ever get pollution that is unacceptable to me, which was mutually agreed on and validated by a third party, you guys gotta pay me a million dollars.
	That puts a million dollars for each person who's in that neighborhood, a million dollars of incentive to some organization to make damn sure that that air never gets polluted.
	Which means that they're going to buy up land around it.
	They're going to not allow people or if somebody starts polluting upstream, they're going to go and pay them to put scrubbers in because it's a lot cheaper than paying everyone to relocate.
	The same thing could be true of water and so on.
	You simply buy insurance and that way you don't have to worry about it.
	You give them 50, 100 bucks a year or whatever for your pollution insurance and then everybody is out there working to make sure that those levels never get triggered because that's going to trigger a huge financial loss for them.
	I understand the concept, but do you understand how that answer does not seem parsimonious to people who are looking at this and saying, well, then I have to pay some organization for the right to exist on this planet without being polluted?
	Well, you don't have to.
	You can take the risk of not having that, for sure.
	But I mean, I don't see how people get to buy completely pure air in perpetuity in the future.
	I mean, that's just not rational because things need to be built.
	If you're building a house somewhere, somebody's got to go and cut down those trees.
	Somebody's got to go and pour that concrete.
	Somebody's got to ship water and oil to you.
	They've got to build a road to you so you can drive.
	All of this is going to cause pollutants.
	So pollution is a natural fact of life.
	It needs to be minimized as much as possible, but we can't expect to live free.
	I mean, you go live on a desert island, you won't have to worry about it probably ever.
	But if you want to live in society, you have to recognize the fact that Your existence within society is going to cause pollutants, and therefore we need to find intelligent ways to manage it.
	But I don't see how anyone gets to Live in a way that causes pollution, but then never expect to have to deal with pollution, and that doesn't make any sense to me, if you follow.
	I do, I do.
	So, okay, we could talk about these issues for hundreds of hours, but...
	Wait, wait, wait, last thing, last thing.
	I have one last thing as well.
	Government doesn't solve the problem.
	I mean, the government is by far the biggest polluter in the whole planet.
	The whole planet. I mean, the military is unbelievably pollutant.
	I can tell you, I've worked in the environmental industry for many years.
	The military is incredibly... Polluting.
	And the governments are unbelievably polluting.
	The government-owned lands are just crap.
	They're just terrible. You know, army bases get pulled up.
	They just leave all this crap everywhere.
	It's just ridiculously bad.
	And if we're worried about the problem of the commons, right, which is, in other words, things that are unowned tend to get exploited.
	The government is unowned.
	People understand that. The government is not owned.
	The government is subject to the problem of the commons.
	Right? Which is that people want to just take stuff.
	I mean, that's what national debt is.
	It's the problem of the commons.
	That people are just taking out more than they're putting in because there's no personal liability because it's unowned and there's no...
	There's no negative result for exploitation.
	The currency itself is subject in the government system to the problem of the commons.
	The debt is subject to the problem of the commons.
	What about the education of children subject to the problem of the commons?
	What negative results occur to individuals for negative outcomes?
	Well, if the pizza store Spits on my pizza.
	I'm never going back. They have a negative result for bad service.
	And when you don't have ownership, when you don't have negative personal repercussions for bad service, that is the problem of the commons.
	You don't solve the problem of the commons by creating an institution that is infinitely subject to the problem of the commons.
	Again, it's the beheading for a migraine.
	I guess you solved the problem in your own mind, but the solution seems a lot worse than the problem.
	Sorry, you had one more.
	I'm happy to keep talking. I think that goes to one of the fundamental underlying issues that I think we should say for a different conversation in another day, because that goes to a much deeper, I think, layer of all of this, which is the monetary system itself and how that would function.
	But let's leave that for another day.
	One last thing on today's topic.
	In a recent episode of my podcast, Three Debates That Will Blow Your Mind, one of the eponymous debates in that podcast was one that you had with Michael Badnarek back in 2009 under the title How Much Government Is Necessary.
	And in that long debate, it was four hours of video footage there that, again, I hope people will go and check out in its entirety.
	It's quite a fascinating discussion in a lot of ways.
	One of the things that I found interesting was that among the audience, some of the people brought up the question of protection, the sort of, you know, police forces type of thing.
	Well, they would still exist. They just wouldn't be controlled by the state.
	You would pay for them and you would pay for protection, security, whatever, that type of thing.
	There would be dispute resolution organizations in case, you know, it doesn't get out of control, blah, blah, blah.
	But one thing that I thought was interesting and I thought was unresolved in that discussion was the subject of, once again, the extremely wealthy being able to afford a different layer of protection than the average person, which makes sense on a certain level.
	Obviously, if you have millions or billions of dollars or whatever, you're going to need more protection than the average person.
	You're going to have more property to protect.
	It's going to be more valuable to people, etc., etc.
	So you're going to need a different level of protection.
	You're going to go to a different service.
	But to my mind, that creates the problem of the disparity whereby there's going to be a de facto government of armed SWAT team goon thugs that will be able to overpower what you or I would ever be able to afford in terms of protection that would Inevitably recoalesce into government.
	I mean, I don't know how we really get rid of the idea that there's going to be people who have that vast amount of resources to put to the question of how best to enslave other people that wouldn't be able to function in a state.
	I mean, the technology is here for them to be able to buy the type of technology that would be able to enslave vast amounts of the population, whether or not there's a government involved.
	I'm sorry. I was trying to break it down to sort of what would it look like.
	So do you mean there would be sort of gated communities with armed guards to keep the riffraff out?
	No, I don't. I mean, there will be billionaires and trillionaires and the people who create money itself and have enjoyed that privilege for centuries and thus have accrued amounts of wealth that are unthinkable to the average person.
	Sorry, the people who've created currency?
	What do you mean? The banksters and others who create, who have in our past created money out of thin air in order to lend it to governments, in order to, etc, etc.
	The people who own the Federal Reserve.
	Sorry, I'm not saying it wrong.
	I just want to make sure... Banks in the past did not create money out of thin air.
	That only occurs when the government grants a monopoly and takes over the currency.
	Right, right. This wouldn't exist in the new system.
	But I'm saying that the disparity in wealth that has accrued because there are people behind the scenes, the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, the Rockefellers, et cetera, once again, fill in the blank, have access to amounts of resources that you or I could never even dream of.
	To the point where they would be able to buy the equivalent of today's, you know, SWAT teams and martial law forces.
	Oh, you mean like they'd be able to buy an army?
	Exactly. Exactly the point.
	They would be able to buy the resources that the government currently uses with its supposed authority to use on the average population.
	I think that's pretty easy to counter myself.
	Maybe I'm an idiot, but this is sort of what I would do is, I mean, there may be some need for banks in the future.
	I don't know. I doubt it.
	Banks are, you know, they originally, they were for fear of theft, right?
	Because you would carry your gold on a stagecoach and some guy might jump out of behind a rock and take it from you.
	So there was... There was fear of theft.
	We have so much technology now that can deal with theft.
	You know, thumbprints, retina scans, voice activated cache.
	There's so many things that we could do so that we'd never really have to worry about theft, right?
	There's this phone now that will unlock only if your face is in front of it and moving.
	You can't even do it with a photograph.
	That's amazing! That technology is flawed and designed to be flawed.
	I mean, biometrics is a failed technology.
	Okay, so in some perfect world we can make it.
	It's better than a bank.
	It's better than fiat currency.
	That's sort of my argument. You can have voice-activated television, so somebody takes your television and they can't activate it.
	It's just ways of doing it.
	It's not perfect, but there's ways of doing it, and of course lots of resources would be poured into making that technology better.
	I don't know that you really would need banks.
	Of course, the other reason that people put money in banks is because of inflation, because the value of their money is eroding by a couple of percentage points each year, and so they put money in banks.
	It's the same reason why people have all their money herded into the stock market, which damn well shouldn't be there.
	So, would you need banks in the future?
	Let's say that you would.
	Let's say that you would need banks to put your money in or whatever.
	Well, the rich people would need banks even more, right?
	Because they have even more money.
	So what I would do is I would never, ever, ever, ever put my money in a bank without the following clause in everyone's contract.
	If we ever find that you're buying weaponry, we keep all your money.
	If we ever find that you're buying mutant ninja penguin attack drones with your money, we get to keep it all.
	Closed out, converted to gold, taken home, done.
	And we have the right to, because look, things are going to be pretty visible in this kind of society.
	I mean, let's just say the whole world is free, just for the moment.
	Well, there's going to be people manufacturing weapons to sell to defense agencies.
	Well, those people are going to be under pretty tight controls.
	Because remember, for every Rockefeller, there's another Rockefeller who doesn't want that Rockefeller to become a government.
	So they're all going to monitor each other because they don't want anyone to take over.
	And if somebody's out there, the weapons companies would have to publicly print everyone who bought because nobody would invest in those companies otherwise.
	And they would be boycotted if anyone found out that they were selling weapons under the table because everybody gets how dangerous that is.
	So they would have to publish, publicly publish every single transaction.
	They'd have to open themselves up to inspections at any time.
	But my point is that there would effectively be two different economies because these companies wouldn't have to worry about business from you and me.
	They would have these trillionaires to fund them.
	I mean, they wouldn't care if we boycotted them.
	What, you mean they wouldn't need to buy groceries or get power?
	Of course they... I mean, they have to live in the society too.
	The owners of these companies have to live in the society too.
	Everybody's embedded, particularly the more wealthy you are, the more you're embedded in the existing economic system.
	Economic ostracism is an unbelievably powerful method of social control.
	Even personal ostracism in a community produces feelings which is scientifically identical to physical pain, right?
	So it's a kind of torture to be socially ostracized.
	So that's a very powerful thing, even without economic ostracism.
	If there's economic ostracism, you simply can't exist in the society.
	If people aren't going to sell you food, if they're not going to deliver you power, if they're not going to deliver you water, if they're not going to allow you to drive on their roads, if they're not going to give you gas, if there's economic ostracism, you simply can't live in that society.
	This is an incredibly powerful method of – I hate to say social control because then it sounds like – it's like – but if people grossly violate the norms of the society, whether at a criminal level or at this kind of I'm selling nuclear weapons to crazy fundamentalists who whether at a criminal level or at this kind of I'm selling nuclear weapons to crazy fundamentalists who live You would be ostracized economically and socially to the point where you simply could no longer exist within that society.
	You'd have to leave the entire area because if people don't want to do business with you, and of course with the communications technology we have now, it's very easy to find people like that.
	It is a privilege to participate in the economic system.
	It is not a right by any means that people can deal with you voluntarily or not.
	And so if people did start selling weapons to some descendant of the Rockefellers or the Carnegies, that would be very evident very quickly.
	All of the investors would be ostracized.
	All of the senior management would be ostracized.
	Maybe even some of the employees who may have known about it would be ostracized.
	Nobody would want to take that risk.
	Everybody would have contracts with the banks that said, if you sell weapons under the table and we find out about it, and we will, because we reserve the right to come and inspect your records, your facilities, and put cameras in wherever we want because we're so concerned about this.
	We get to keep all of your money and nobody's ever going to enforce a contract with you again.
	You will never, you know, we're going to tell everyone not to sell you food, not to, you know, send power to you.
	This is how horrifying it is.
	Nobody's going to do that. I mean, it's just not going to happen.
	That's not the way that people's minds work.
	People don't work to build up a huge fortune and then put it at risk to sell a couple of weapons to people who, if they took over, I mean, would be pretty bad.
	It would be pretty bad for everyone.
	People enjoy the productivity of voluntary trade a lot more than the dominance of a hierarchical structure, unless they happen to inherit one and then they're sort of using that from what they've inherited from history.
	But there's so many ways that that would be evident and so many countermeasures that could be put in place and so much economic and social ostracism that could be put in place that it would be fundamentally impossible to achieve, I think.
	All right. Well, Stefan Molyneux, freedomainradio.com.
	I mean, we could talk about this for hundreds of hours.
	Well, tell me what you think about that approach.
	I'm not saying anything what I'm saying is a clincher.
	I understand that because I don't know how a future society works and nobody could.
	That would be an argument for central planning rather than freedom.
	But these are just things that I would want from any institution I was dealing with where I was concerned about weaponry, where I was concerned about some monopoly.
	On power, I would want all of these reassurances.
	I think other people would as well.
	And there'd be so many people trying to find ways to reassure people and make sure these checks and balances were in place, which is very different from something like a constitution.
	But just from this last argument, I hope we get to talk again.
	We certainly will.
	We certainly will continue this conversation at great length, I hope.
	But on that last point, I would say I certainly hope that that is true and correct.
	Fear that the disparity in wealth is great enough for these people to control self-contained economies, whereby I honestly believe that they would be able to segregate themselves from the rest of society at this point with just talking about the vast amount of resources they have at their disposal.
	And do you think that they would be able to keep those resources if they offended society as a whole, A? And do you think that the problem is solved by the existence of a state?
	Well, I don't think it's one or two or three or seven people sitting in a room.
	I think that these people would be able to control an area, a territory, that they would be able to dominate the economy in that way that they could impose their will in that state.
	And from that point, use that as an amassing point for their resources to...
	But just give me a minute or two more because I'm...
	I certainly don't want to hold on to a point that's not valid.
	But when you say sort of control an area, I'm just trying to figure out what that looks like in practical terms.
	Well, in practical terms, I mean, we're getting to the point, as everyone knows now, that they're deploying their drones and whatever.
	We're getting to the point where you actually wouldn't physically even need people to do this anymore.
	Technologically speaking, all you'd need is the people to design the equipment that The attack robots or whatever.
	I mean, it sounds like science fiction fantasy, but we're getting there step by step.
	And I really do think it's a matter of time until the technological control of society, not only at a physical level, but down to the level of our genome and everything, is becoming possible and within the grasp of these tyrannical elites who we know have been...
	Sorry, but this has all been done through the state, right?
	Where the the social costs the cost of this weaponry is all offloaded mostly to future generations through debt and through the backs of the poor through inflation But that's not a the all of what you're talking about is occurring within a state a status society and it is a challenge to say how it would continue occurring in a free society But that's like saying that slavery occurs in a state of society, but slavery would continue to occur in a free society.
	It does continue to occur.
	Slavery continues in any type of state of society, obviously.
	No, no, I said a free society.
	Because slavery really only was able to be supported because the cost of capturing the slaves and enforcing the contracts was socialized, right?
	Like in a free society, you try and own a slave, your slave runs away, nobody's going to go catch him.
	Right? Because nobody wants to pay for that, right?
	But in a government society, you can pay, you can force people to pay through taxation and tariffs and debt.
	You can force people to pay for the catching and returning of slaves.
	If you're an individual slave owner in a free society, your slave's going to run away and nobody's going to return him.
	So what, are you going to hire your own army to comb the entire...
	It's going to be far more expensive to do that than simply say, okay, well, slavery's not...
	Slavery is something that, so to say, well, in a state of society there's slavery, but in a free society there would also be slavery, I think is to miss the economic point of the argument.
	I mean, outside of the morality of it all, without socializing the costs, when each individual has to bear the costs, as I talked about with that sort of sweater company, if you have to pay the cost of enforcing a tariff to ban all Chinese sweaters from America or Japan or wherever, You can't do that.
	You can only do that if you can offload the cost of that enforcement to the general population through the mechanism of the state.
	If the individual has to pay for his own geographical enforcement without the benefit of the state and debt and the existing infrastructure of brutality, that is a very, very different situation.
	And I just want to caution, you may be right, and I'd like to talk about this more, But be careful, I would say, James, of saying, well, it's like the state, but there's no state.
	It's a very fundamentally different And it's hard to find things that translate from one to the other.
	So people say, well, how would currency work in a free society?
	Well, we already know that because there was currency in a free society long before there was a state.
	And in the 19th century, well, from the late 18th to the early part of the 20th century, prices were almost completely stable within the US. In fact, they declined slightly.
	It's only since the government came in power that we've had like a 98% devaluation of the dollar and massive debt.
	So we already know what it looked like in a relatively free society.
	Slavery, bad. No rights for women, bad.
	Little respect for children, bad.
	But economically, it was a relatively free society for most of the economic participants.
	And we know prices went down straight for 150 years.
	And so to say, well, what if we get fiat currency and we move it back to a free market system, we're just going to get more inflation.
	Is to misunderstand it because in a free society, currencies have to compete and they'll compete in terms of stability, of course, because people want to be able to project into the future some sort of currency value that is the same as the present so they don't have to factor in wild variations in inflation and currency value.
	I don't think we want to say, well, we've got the Federal Reserve, let's say, a centralized currency.
	We move that to a free market situation and you're still going to get inflation and this and that because it's a fundamentally different animal.
	It's the difference between rape and lovemaking.
	Lovemaking is not just a slight variation on rape.
	It's the complete opposite, voluntary versus violent.
	And the voluntarism versus the violence thing, it's really hard to translate anything that happens under a situation of violence.
	When you transform it to a situation of voluntarism, you almost have to throw everything out and start again from scratch and say, okay.
	And it's hard to do because we grow up in this whole matrix of everything is run by violence.
	Every problem is solved by law.
	All organization comes from hierarchy and brutality and kidnapping and imprisonment and wars and debt and monopoly and And lobbying, it's horrible.
	And so when we take that violence out of the equation, we're almost left with nothing but a blank page.
	And I've not had much success.
	You may convince me completely, but I've not had much success at all trying to find ways in which I can move the existing architecture of violence into a situation of volunteerism and have it look even remotely the same.
	And that's my particular caution.
	It's such a blank slate when you take the gun out of the room and replace it with a handshake that you're dealing with almost a completely different species, if that makes any sense.
	Do you have any pressing engagements or do you have time to keep going?
	Hey, I did four hours.
	I had a coffee because it's one o'clock in the morning here.
	I had a coffee and I'm happy to keep chatting.
	This is such an important topic.
	It really is and I don't want to leave it there because there is so much more to say.
	I don't think I... Okay, let's just keep going.
	I don't think I fundamentally disagree with a lot of what you're saying there.
	I do. Certainly on the economic points that you're talking about, I do agree with that.
	But I always have my red flags go up when people start talking about how under some new system the human species is going to change and all these people who have been evil and plotting for control are suddenly Not going to even be thinking in those terms and things like that.
	So I don't think you addressed my underlying point, which was like your example earlier when you were talking, but we're back in the early 17th century or 18th century, and you're telling me...
	Oh, in 200 years, you know, we're gonna have these machines that'll be able to do an entire field of cotton and pick the cotton and sort it and everything by itself, and we only need one person to do it, and it's gonna run on, you know, wood from under the ground, blah blah blah.
	I mean, that's...
	That's, to me, the type of situation we're looking at when we try to expand into technologies of control, controlling other people.
	Because I think there would still be the fundamental mindset of certain people in order to try to continue that quest of trying to consolidate power for themselves.
	I don't think that's going to go away in any society.
	Why do you think, sorry to interrupt, but certainly not everyone is like that, right?
	I don't think you're like that. I don't think I'm like that.
	So some people are and some people aren't.
	What do you think the difference is?
	That's a good question.
	And that's above my pay grade, whether it's...
	Some people are...
	I mean... You have a pay grade?
	Oh, what's that like? Is that nice?
	You're not just hat in hand.
	Please, sir, do you have any more?
	Sorry, go on. That's pretty much it.
	Listener supported, as we say.
	I like that. It makes me sound like a boob.
	The listeners are my bra.
	Actually, I'm over 40, so I got the man boobs.
	But anyway, go on. Well, there you go.
	Okay, you threw me off with the man-boob image.
	I'm gonna have to clear that before I continue.
	Sorry, we were asking about why do some people become, you know, power-hungry sociopaths or whatever, right?
	And why do some people... Okay, well, let's get into that.
	There's the psychopath explanation, if you want to pathologize it, or there's the...
	Freemasonry, mystery religion, you know, brotherhood of evil, there's the...
	Yeah, exactly, that explanation.
	I mean, I don't know which one you subscribe to particularly, but I think there is absolutely a...
	I subscribe to the childhood argument, because that's where the science is.
	Please continue. The childhood argument that evil or dysfunction or predation, exploitation, addiction of any kind, That these arise out of heavily traumatized childhoods.
	That's where the science seems to be very clear and the statistics seem to be very clear.
	There's a study called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study which dealt with about 18,000 Kaiser Permanente people.
	And these are not even poor people.
	These are people rich enough to afford upper-middle-class health insurance.
	And I've got a presentation, I hope your listeners will check it out, called The Bomb and the Brain, which is FDRURL.com forward slash BIB. It's very clear.
	The more adverse childhood experiences that you have, such as having a parent who's a drug addict or being beaten or being raped or being verbally abused or having a parent in prison or having a parent with a mental illness or whatever, the more adverse childhood experiences you have, It's a straight line, and sometimes it's even asymptotic.
	The more subject you are to things like alcoholism, sexual addiction, drug addiction, disturbed finances, disturbed career paths, lack of education, unwanted pregnancies, early pregnancies, broken marriages, the amount of adult dysfunction that occurs is very,
	very clearly related to the amount of adverse childhood experiences that people experience, of course, when their children And so the reason that I'm pretty confident, and again, I could be completely talking about it out of my armpit, but the reason, James, that I'm pretty confident about the future is that we're not going to have a society that is free until a lot more children are raised peacefully, until a lot more children are raised without the trauma of even things like spanking.
	Almost 90% of parents still spank their children and the science is very clear that spanking children is experienced by children and has the same symptoms as physical abuse.
	It's an abuse of power.
	It's an abuse of size. It's an abuse of strength.
	It's an infliction of pain. It's not a rational argument.
	It is simply fear-mongering among children.
	Until we can raise children more peacefully and raising children violently or aggressively or abusively or even just abandoning them to daycare and other things, which, you know, if a child is put in daycare for more than 20 hours a week, he experiences exactly the same symptoms as a child who's completely abandoned by the parent because children have such a shortened sense of time.
	And so this is a big topic for me, so I'll just, you know, touch it really briefly.
	Until we can raise children more peacefully, we ain't going to get a free society.
	Once we have children raised peacefully, we will get a peaceful society.
	And once we get that peaceful society, it will be a different species that we're dealing with, because when you raise a child aggressively or violently or neglectfully, You get a different brain.
	You get a predatory brain.
	The studies are very clear on this.
	You get an enlarged amygdala, which is your fight and flight mechanism.
	You get a shrunken neofrontal cortex, which is reasoning and the deferral of gratification.
	You get a different species when you raise a child brutally.
	You get a peaceful and cooperative and reasonable and not quick to anger and not subject to addiction and violence and the desire for power over others.
	You raise predators through violence, and you raise a peaceful species through peaceful parenting, which is why I focus so much on parenting, because it's not something I wanted to do.
	It's one of the most controversial things I do, but that's where the science is as clear as can be.
	You can never get 100% clarity in these kinds of issues, but it is as clear as science can possibly be, as psychology can possibly be.
	That the route to a peaceful future is peaceful parenting.
	And until we stop hitting our kids and screaming at them and calling them names and, I mean, the statistics for child rape are just horrendous.
	I mean, it's sometimes two or three out of every five girls and one to two out of every boys have experienced these premature sexual horribleness.
	Until we stop hitting and raping and screaming at and abandoning our kids to have other people, non-parents raise them, until we can try and find some way to get them out as much as possible from this horrible system of public education or miseducation, we ain't going to get any kind of risk.
	Politics is a symptom of the early childhood experiences.
	The state is an effect of the family.
	You change society by changing how children are raised.
	Once we get there and enough people are raised peacefully, you're just not going to have all these people who are like, how can I possibly amass enough power to dominate, control, bully and break and enslave other people?
	That comes from an incredibly disturbed history.
	And so there's just going to be far fewer of those people.
	They're going to stick out like sore thumbs.
	There's going to be lots of agencies who are going to work to intervene to make sure that children like that are safe and protected much earlier than now, where nobody profits from the protection of children at the moment.
	Criminals and dangerous people all over the place.
	And of course a lot of them end up going into the military and the police.
	The government needs and feeds off criminality and dysfunction in society.
	And so we're stuck in this vicious cycle.
	And so to me the only way to break it is to have peaceful, loving parenting.
	I can say this as a parent who stayed home for three years with a very high energy child that it just works beautifully.
	I mean my daughter has never been aggressive to another kid.
	And she has never been aggressive with us.
	She is very affectionate.
	She's very intelligent. We negotiate with her all the time.
	It works Better even than I imagined when I was merely theorizing about this stuff.
	And this is the most revolutionary and radical act that people can do, is to work as hard as they can to keep children safe, to keep children protected, to make sure that children are surrounded by reason, by curiosity, by negotiation, and that no adult uses the size and strength, the might make right argument of I'm bigger than you, to dominate and control children.
	Because all that does is teach children that dominance and control and power is where it's at.
	And that's how you end up with these adults who need that.
	So that's my hopefully not too confusing speech about how the society of the future can be very different.
	The science really does support it.
	Well, you have no argument for me that we need to raise children in a loving environment and absolutely eliminate those forms of abuse.
	And you have no argument for me that the state is one that functions best when it has a dumbed-down, fear-filled, incapable of reasoning population that can be scared and herded into Into doing what the state wants it to do, but you will forgive my incredulity at the idea that there would be no David Rockefeller.
	David Rockefeller wouldn't be David Rockefeller and wouldn't be concerned about controlling humanity if he had just been raised more lovingly by John D., or John II. I just don't buy that.
	Well, you should look at his childhood.
	Look at the childhood of presidents.
	The childhood of presidents is one long, grisly, ugly, horrible series of case studies in child abuse.
	It's not accidental that these people come from these horrific backgrounds.
	I know it sounds weird.
	It sounds like we're all looking for one switch.
	One switch is going to make the world a better place.
	For the Marxists, it was the economic argument.
	If we change the relations of workers and capitalists and we change who owns the means of production, we're going to get paradise.
	Of course, that turned to hell on wheels.
	Of course, right? The British were, if we go and dominate the world and introduce Western values to the world as a whole, then we'll Bear the white man's burden and make the world a better place.
	Well, that didn't work out very well.
	America's been trying to spread democracy for, what, 120 years or since the takeover of Hawaii or even before with Puerto Rico.
	And that has not been working out.
	So I really, really get and understand the skepticism about we throw this switch and the world becomes a better place because that is often, it seems almost inevitably used by people who are simplistic and not taking into account multivariable possibilities.
	I totally get that skepticism and I hope I'm characterizing your skepticism or reservation about this accurately because I really understand.
	I'm not saying... The only thing that we ever need to do is to raise children well because that merely makes them potentially able to be rational.
	It doesn't mean that without correct moral arguments, without good philosophy behind it, without a proper education, love alone doesn't change the world because love simply removes barriers to growth.
	It doesn't actually make people grow.
	So I think reason plus love, I think, works together, which is why I try and work on better parenting plus having, I hope, really good philosophical arguments for virtue and the non-aggression principle and property rights and so on.
	I think that if we can raise children well, at least they'll have the possibility of reasoning.
	Right now, the science is pretty clear as well that most people don't reason.
	What they do is they have prejudices which are inflicted by culture, by religion, by nationalism, by all these things.
	They have prejudices, and then they do confirmation bias, they seek out that which confirms, and they also have ex post facto reasoning, right?
	So people have an emotional response, and then they reason, they make up reasons as to why they had that emotional response, usually to do with morality.
	And until people can reason, philosophy isn't going to get very far.
	So I hope that peaceful parenting will create minds that are Open to reason, more open to reason than defensive broken minds are.
	And then if we have great arguments and we have more peacefully raised children, I think that's going to move us up the ladder.
	It's not like throwing a switch.
	There is no instant revolution.
	It's a multi-generational process.
	But I think we've got to at least start heading in the right direction, which is away from an addiction to politics and the idea that we can change the things through law, that we can infiltrate violence and turn it to virtue.
	I think we need to Turn away from that illusion, right?
	There's nothing longer than the shortcut that leads nowhere.
	And I think that's been my argument.
	Let's do the slow and steady multi-generational peaceful parenting stuff because that has been shown to work.
	The science is very clear behind that.
	Politics People have been trying to make the world a freer place through politics for, I don't know, at least two or three hundred years if you count Ricardo and Adam Smith and from there on the classical liberals and so on.
	It just keeps getting worse and worse, whereas the peaceful parenting thing, we know it's going to get things to be better and better.
	And it's something you can actually control rather than politics you can't do a damn thing about, fundamentally.
	So are you denying that there is psychopathy or are you saying that psychopaths are only created through bad parenting?
	Well, it's not just bad parenting.
	Maybe it's a sick society, it's religiosity, and so on.
	But yes, I am absolutely saying that to me, and I just had a conversation with a researcher about psychopathy, I think just this is last week.
	We know that there are certain people who have genetic triggers for aggression.
	But that's not enough.
	The genetic triggers alone are not enough to make somebody aggressive.
	It's the genetic triggers in combination With aggression within the household, with violence inflicted upon them as children.
	That seems to have a very high rate of producing extremely aggressive children.
	We know scientifically, or at least as scientifically as these things can be known, that spanking increases aggression significantly.
	That spanking reduces IQ points.
	That spanking increases defiance.
	That spanking makes children more aggressive both to their peers and to those in authority.
	So that's something we can do.
	I've not yet come across A psychopath that I've read about, and I've read about quite a few by now, who had even close to a normal childhood.
	And normal, I mean, even just in the current context.
	Not normal in sort of the future context of a much better childhood that we should get for people.
	So, to me, I sort of analogized it like, there are some people who are more susceptible to sunburns and some people who are less susceptible to sunburns.
	But you always need a son.
	I mean, even somebody who's really susceptible to sunburns isn't going to get a sunburn in a cave underground.
	And so there are people who are more susceptible to becoming aggressive if they're faced with aggression, but the aggression in the household still needs to be there to trigger those epigenetics and turn on those genes, even though they're there potentially.
	I think that...
	I mean, what do I know?
	Theoretically, it's possible that somebody could just be born evil, but then they're not really evil, right?
	Because they're just born that way, and it's just their brain damage or something.
	Who knows, right? But the vast majority, if not Everyone that I've ever read about who has turned out to be that aggressive has come from an extremely violent and dysfunctional home and Or they've been on these psychotropic meds which you know as you know or may know increase Homicidal fantasies and suicidal fantasies and aggression and violence in in truly astounding and horrifying ways so It's the biggest variable we can conceivably control does that mean that That if everyone in the world is raised perfectly that we'll never have a single aggressive individual.
	I don't know. But let's say that we only cut it by 98%.
	I still think that's pretty good because the people who are raised peacefully will notice the aggressive person very clearly as being way out of the bounds of normal human behavior and They will deal with him appropriately.
	Being raised in a healthy way doesn't make you blind to evil.
	It doesn't make you like a sheep.
	It makes you very, very clear when somebody who is really nasty is around.
	Because it's such, you know, in the same way that if you're in a party and everyone's speaking English, then somebody's speaking that African clicking language, you kind of notice it because they're speaking a language that's very different.
	And so I think that we raise people well and enough people are raised healthy and peacefully.
	What do you get? Well, you get a society where evil people stand out like, you know, sunspots on the sun to an astronomer.
	They're so clear to everyone that they're never going to be able to gain power because people aren't going to be frightened of them.
	Well, that is an important point.
	I may not agree with some of your ideas, but I certainly agree with that.
	I think that absolutely we need to create a society or return to a society, create a society probably more likely in which the evil people will not be able to function as much as they are in our current status society.
	And there's no doubt... Yeah, evil people go to the state.
	You know, they're like, the state is like shit to flies for evil people.
	Evil people swarm the state.
	And the old argument, what do you do with a psycho killer in a free society?
	Don't give him an army would be a good start.
	Don't give him a police force and law and the power of law.
	That's a good start. It may not be perfect, but it's a lot better than the power they have now.
	That is exactly right.
	Well, absolutely. Well, so many, so many, so many things to talk about.
	And as I say, I certainly hope that we can have you on in the future to continue talking about these issues.
	I have so many, so many things to think about, but I think that's good for now.
	So Stefan Molyneux, freedomainradio.com.
	Thank you so much for joining us today.
	Listen, just before you go, for my listeners as well, please give out your information so that they can pursue your most excellent material as well.
	James Corbett, CorbettReport.com.
	That's C-O-R-B-E-T-T-Report.com.
	I have podcasts, interviews, videos, articles, etc.
	all available there. Well, thank you so much.
	That was a really enjoyable conversation.
	I really want to compliment you on a truly exciting series of questions.
	I have to go and put my brain in a hammock now and give it a sort of Swedish rubdown because it's tired.
	So great, great job.
	I really appreciate it. And it was very enjoyable.

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