Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, is interviewed on the Liberty Minded show about his personal history of liberty, and the future of the freedom movement as a whole.
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| Alright, we're very excited tonight to have as our guest a man whom Jeffrey Tucker of the Mises Institute said would be looked at as having one of the greatest impacts on the philosophies of liberty and anti-statism in history. | |
| He's a man who needs no introduction, but we'll give him one anyway. | |
| He is Stefan Molyneux, author of ten books of which I know, probably more, including Everyday Anarchism, The Handbook of Human Ownership, and On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion. | |
| He is the host of the incredibly popular Free Domain Radio podcast on freedomainradio.com and a towering force for the cause of liberty. | |
| Thanks so much for being here, Stefan. | |
| Wow, it's my pleasure. | |
| I'm just trying to think how I'm going to match that very kind description. | |
| I feel I need to levitate, my head needs to go all the way around, and I need to have freed significant portions of the globe by the end of the podcast. | |
| So I'm ready. I've got my game on. | |
| I'm ready to roll. We've set the bar pretty high for you. | |
| Excellent. That was our expectation. | |
| So we'll try to make that happen tonight. | |
| All right, I'm in. We have a kind of a tradition, kind of like inside the actor's studio of beginning with the same question. | |
| And it's a question you've probably been asked a million times. | |
| And like most of the questions we ask, because you've done so many podcasts and written so much, you've said probably... | |
| Everything, you've answered probably everything we'll ask tonight, but we'll try to keep it fresh. | |
| Either way, just like inside the Actors Studio, we begin with the same question. | |
| How did you get here? | |
| How did you get to this political philosophy? | |
| In succinct terms, in the least boring way for you, explain how you came to the philosophy of anti-statism, free market anarchism, voluntarism, libertarianism, that which goes by many names, but of course, you know, a rose is, you know, by any other name. | |
| How did you get to this? | |
| How did I get here? | |
| Well, son! It all started one night when my mama was so drunk she couldn't even lift the car out of the ditch. | |
| I'm going to do the whole interview in that voice. | |
| Oh my god. | |
| To be the voice of Mater in Cars 3. | |
| Well, you know, I think it's pretty standard for anybody who's in this. | |
| It's objectivism as the start and love and galt's gulch and, you know, the end of Atlas Shrugged and kind of realizing there's no government there. | |
| I don't care what... That smoky Russian vixen says elsewhere in her writings, her ideal society has no government. | |
| And it was really just, you know, I mealy-mouthed around the problem of things like voluntary taxation and, you know... | |
| Which is like voluntary rape. | |
| It's just sort of a contradiction in terms. | |
| I just gave up the ghost of minarchism after many years of debating and just becoming exhausted by my own incompetence at being able to square the circle called, let's have a non-aggression principle, let's have respect for property rights, let's create a monopoly of violence to violate the non-aggression principle at will, and eradicate property rights whenever it sees fit. | |
| You just can't square that circle. | |
| And after a while, You just got to give up that ghost and say, okay, well, consistency is everything. | |
| Consistency is everything. I mean, if you're going to be into philosophy, you've got to go for consistency. | |
| Otherwise, you're just dealing in staggeringly neon-lit opinions. | |
| So it really was just continuing to comb over that same beach until I finally found that Roman coin called freedom. | |
| Boy, that's a bad metaphor, as if there was much freedom around. | |
| But I think that's sort of where it went. | |
| And then I started podcasting during my commute to work. | |
| I used to work as a software executive and eventually people said, donate. | |
| We'd like to donate. And so I said, okay, maybe I'll get some gas money. | |
| And then donations came in and I went, whoa, that's nice. | |
| So then I started, well, then I sort of did a little bit of sideline, which was web podcasting, which is you put a You sort of get a dancer's pole in your room and you grease yourself up usually with fish or sometimes cod liver oil. | |
| You slap on a pair of sheepskin assless chaps or sometimes it's just leotards and you shake your money maker until people pay you to stop and then eventually I just went back to philosophy and continued and there I stand. | |
| Alright, so origins in... | |
| You just need a moment to scrub those visual images. | |
| That's what the pause is for. | |
| It's like there's no amount of mental Clorox that will take that image out of my head. | |
| Maybe we do need a moment. | |
| Okay, so origins in the philosophy of objectivism. | |
| But obviously you moved away from that a little bit because I think that in order to embrace the kind of market anarchism that you are a proponent of, of which you are a proponent, it doesn't quite square with traditional objectivism. it doesn't quite square with traditional objectivism. | |
| What are your thoughts? | |
| No, look. | |
| Massive props to Ayn Rand and the objectivists. | |
| I'm still a 95% fellow traveler, but... | |
| And in the realm of metaphysics or the nature of reality and epistemology, the nature of knowledge, I mean, you have to beat those bushes pretty hard to find something that's wrong. | |
| But in the realm of ethics, I was never particularly satisfied, you know, that which is proper for man, the rational animal, and so on. | |
| I had problems with that because if you look at somebody like... | |
| I mean, pick anyone. Bill Clinton. | |
| Bill Clinton is a massive multi-millionaire philanthropist now because of his engagement in politics. | |
| He has been very successful in material basic mammalian reproductive power. | |
| And so that which is good for man as a rational animal, well, the expansion of power in the sort of Nietzschean sense, the drive for power and the drive to acquire resources, which is a sort of basic biological drive, is very rational in many ways to pursue. | |
| And so I've always been bothered by the fact, and this is true of all ethical theories I've encountered, and please don't count me as any kind of mega-brain expert on them all, but the problem with ethics is... | |
| The people who most need it can't be convinced of it. | |
| So the people who are like real sociopaths or complete monsters or narcissists or whatever, you can't corner them with ethics. | |
| They'll just make up whatever they want. | |
| And the people who are really interested in ethics and who are susceptible to ethical arguments Well, they're kind of already good to begin with. | |
| So that's kind of an annoying situation. | |
| It's like you've got this perfect diet to make people lean and fit, but the only people who are interested in using it are people who are already lean and fit. | |
| Well, no. You've got to get the diet into the hands of the people who are 300 pounds and their foot's dropping off from diabetes. | |
| So I really spent a huge amount of mental sweat trying to find an ethical crowbar which you can use to pry Open even the most resistant mind, even the mind that is most contemptuous of or uses morality as a kind of way of gaining power. | |
| Again, it's not my idea. | |
| It comes out of Nietzsche and other people that most people use ethics because they want to gain power over their fellow human beings. | |
| So if I can convince you that something is wrong, then you'll avoid doing it. | |
| And if I can convince you that something else is right, you'll pursue doing it. | |
| And all I have to do is align that What is good for you, what I tell you is good for you, turns out to be good for me, and whatever is bad for you turns out to be bad for me. | |
| And so, you know, what do you think? | |
| Well, worship of the king is good and rebellion is bad. | |
| And, well, that's really good for the powers that be. | |
| So, I had a problem with the sort of what is best for man, the rational animal, because... | |
| There are lots of bad people who love to get power and how do you talk Bill Clinton out of wanting power or having power? | |
| How do you talk to Barack Obama and say, you know, it may seem like you got a sweet deal here being the most powerful man in the universe, but, you know, it's really not good for you. | |
| It's not good for your soul. He's just, you know, what's he going to say? | |
| He's just going to say, well, no, this is what I've wanted. | |
| This is what I pursued. I've worked very hard to get it and I'm really enjoying it. | |
| That's why they all... Go for a second term if they can. | |
| It's good to be king. | |
| And I don't know an ethical theory outside of the one that I'm working with called universally preferable behavior that solves that problem. | |
| That was number one. Number two is politics. | |
| She's got the non-aggression principle down and square and then she just drives the truck of statism right over that little mouse of freedom. | |
| And so she says, well, you've got to have a government. | |
| And the end of Atlas Shrugged, they try and fix the government. | |
| It's like, don't! Do you want to just rewind the clock? | |
| Do you want to just rewind this tape and have the same damn thing play out over again? | |
| Because that's what's going to happen. And so I think that she was tempted, right? | |
| She was tempted by trying to achieve something soon. | |
| You know, the history of libertarianism, the history of the freedom struggle almost always is the myth of the tortoise and the hare. | |
| You know, that old myth or the old fairy tale. | |
| Yeah. Oh, yeah. | |
| Well, it's a will-o'-the-wisp. | |
| It leads you into the swamp and leaves you in the swamp. | |
| So just in the realm of ethics and politics, I have deviations from objectivism. | |
| So really in more the application rather than the theory. | |
| But those are the things that I have attempted to repair in an edifice that I hugely admire. | |
| I'll slide a quick question in and then I'll leave some questions for my colleagues here. | |
| But you mentioned something that I think is quite interesting. | |
| And that is... | |
| You mentioned many things. | |
| Oh yeah, which part, Kyle? Okay, the whole thing is going to require a lot of editing. | |
| But in there, for about 8 seconds of that 10 minute speech, I was actually quite interested. | |
| I'm sorry. No, no, no, no. | |
| No, it was all incredibly interesting. | |
| We have a ton of respect. | |
| I know I have a ton of respect for what you do. | |
| I just thought it was kind of funny to phrase it. | |
| In the last interview or two ago, I was called a premier tool for liberty. | |
| I wasn't sure which way I was going to take that, but I thought that the pole dancing might be my best in my next question. | |
| Anyway, sorry, go on. Oh, tool belt for liberty. | |
| Maybe that's what they meant. That's good. | |
| I'm not even going to touch that one. | |
| Okay, but here's the thing. | |
| The paradox, right, of libertarianism and politics. | |
| Right now, libertarianism and more so market anarchism are basically strictly academic, strictly philosophical. | |
| I feel like That kind of declaws us a little bit. | |
| I feel like that kind of gets rid of our teeth, neuters us, if you will. | |
| But what you put forth is this idea that even getting involved in the political spectrum at all, even voting, becoming complicit with this system is worse. | |
| I just wonder sometimes. | |
| I mean, this is really the paradox that bothers me the most. | |
| What really is worse, to kind of atrophy away in this kind of academic and philosophical realm, or to be corrupted and kind of homogenized by the political realm? | |
| Yeah, but I mean, you're saying it's academics and or philosophy or nothing. | |
| Sorry, academics, philosophy, or politics, or nothing, right? | |
| Well, I just... | |
| I see libertarianism kind of inhabiting both of those spheres, but... | |
| I see it more so in the academic sense, and it's not having too much success. | |
| I mean, we can talk about Ron Paul, but for the most part, it doesn't have much success in the political sphere. | |
| And so the real argument is like, where should we dedicate our energy? | |
| Sorry, when you say it doesn't have much success. | |
| Libertarianism has struggled for about 300 years to control the size and power of the state. | |
| And since classical liberalism 150 years ago, it's really had its foot, its pedal to the metal. | |
| And since the founding of the Libertarian Party in 71, it's had, you know, 40 years. | |
| You know, it's had Ron Paul around for decades. | |
| And it's pumped hundreds of millions of dollars, untold hours, mountains of books. | |
| We've decimated forests arguing for liberty. | |
| Right. The government now is, what, 20 times the size as when we started? | |
| I mean, I don't think you can say that not having much success. | |
| The whole point was to either keep the government tiny or to reduce its size. | |
| We've got a 20 to 30-fold increase in the size of the state. | |
| That's not even counting national debt. | |
| I don't think that that could be described as not having a lot of success. | |
| Do you know what I mean? Like if I've got a thing where I say, listen, I know you've got a tumor the size of an orange. | |
| I've got something that's going to reduce it to the size of a pinprick. | |
| And then, you know, after my treatment, it is about the size of a wrecking ball. | |
| I don't think we could say, well, that treatment could have, you know, it's had some success, but it just... | |
| You know, if you don't mind putting your tumor in a wheelbarrow, you can still get around, and, you know, we'll call that successful. | |
| No, it's been a catastrophic, catastrophic clusterfrag of infinity in terms of its goals versus what it's achieved. | |
| Do you see what I'm saying? | |
| And I'm not trying to be personal about it. | |
| No, that's fine. No, I do see what you're saying. | |
| I guess really the thrust of my question then is where do you think we should put our energies in? | |
| Well, we... See, there's a devil in the world, lads. | |
| There's a devil who steps with smoky footprints all over the souls of man. | |
| And that devil has one, you know, he's got a big fishing line. | |
| And on the end of that fishing line is this lure. | |
| And this lure says, take your philosophy and throw it out into the void so that it can never land on anything you can ever directly and personally affect. | |
| And that's where I want you to spend all of your energies. | |
| Pissing off a cliff into the wind so that your pee disappears into the night, your vital fluids, your essence, your energy vanishes into nothing. | |
| And then annoying people like me come along and say, that is not right. | |
| If you're going to have values called the non-aggression principle and a respect for property rights, you do not focus on that which you cannot control. | |
| That is to say that all your values and all of your energies and all your philosophy is going to be ground into an impotent, useless dust. | |
| Spread to the four winds and you're going to beat your head into a bloody pulp and fall to the ground and call that, wow, I've dedicated my life to true freedom and liberty. | |
| No. What we do is we apply these principles to our own lives. | |
| To our own lives. So, in particular, I focus on parenting. | |
| On parenting. Right? | |
| Hands up! Fantastic. | |
| How many of you were spanked or hit or paddled as children? | |
| A little bit. Of course. | |
| Right. Was that a violation of the non-aggression principle? | |
| That's a really good question. | |
| I don't think my mom would say that, bud. | |
| Well, did you initiate force... | |
| No. Was it self-defense on them? | |
| I mean, were you coming at them with a chainsaw? | |
| No, no, no. It was an axe, but not a chainsaw. | |
| No. But it was. It was not self-defense on the part of the parents, right? | |
| Yes, you're correct. So that's the initiation of force. | |
| And I'm not trying to say your parents are like Satan or anything, but the reality is that that is a violation of the non-aggression principle. | |
| That is a violation of self-ownership. | |
| It has empirically terrible results, right? | |
| I mean, with the exception of you three guys, it reduces IQ by three to five points. | |
| It increases social aggression. | |
| It increases peer problems. | |
| It increases tendencies towards criminality. | |
| And that's just spanking, let alone hitting and, you know, where you're yelled at, where you called names. | |
| The amount of aggression within the family is something that the non-aggression principle and the respect for self-ownership and property rights has a huge amount to say about. | |
| Now, do we have more effect if, you know, I don't know if you guys are parents, but if you become parents, do you have more effect over whether you hit your children or not? | |
| Or do you have more effect over the policy of the Federal Reserve? | |
| I think that would be the former. | |
| I hope so. I mean, if not, wow. | |
| I mean, if we had the opportunity to thank Ben Bernanke when he engages in quantitative easing, I think we could have an effect on it. | |
| Right. I mean, imagine combining the two, the nastinesses and disciplining your children with fiat currency paper cuts. | |
| I mean, that's just a vortex of each other. | |
| Right? But so there's an example, right? | |
| How about we just raise our children with respect to the non-aggression principle and self-ownership? | |
| You know, I've been a stay-at-home dad for three years. | |
| Never hit my daughter, never raised my voice at her, never called her names, never threatened her, nothing like that. | |
| Because that's something I can do. | |
| I cannot change the government's policy about military bases in the Middle East. | |
| I cannot change the amount of national debt that is being piled on our shoulders. | |
| I cannot change the military-industrial-prison-school complex. | |
| But what I can do is not use violence within my own home to raise my children, not use violence in my own relationships. | |
| And, of course, I can choose, if I want, and I have chosen this on many occasions, To say to people who are statists and who, even after lengthy conversations and long periods of time and arguments, still advocate the use of force against me, I say, okay, look, I'm not breaking bread with you anymore. | |
| You can't be my friend if you want me thrown in jail for disagreeing with you. | |
| If you want a gun pointed at my head for my opinions, I cannot consider you a friend. | |
| That is a radical step, I understand, but that is called being consistent with your values. | |
| And these are things that we can do in our personal lives, and it is my absolute belief, and it's not just faith, that there's a lot of science to show this, that if we raise children peacefully, they will... | |
| Not want power over others. | |
| They will not be drug addicts. | |
| They will not be criminals. They will not be promiscuous. | |
| They will not end up on welfare. | |
| They will not end up poor. | |
| They will be healthy, confident, able to think clearly. | |
| They will listen to and accept the validity and authority of reason and evidence rather than powerful human authorities. | |
| So the way that we build a stateless society is on the peaceful, free treatment of children. | |
| I mean, that is, you know, I said the tortoise and the hare. | |
| Well, the tortoise is plod, plod, plod, generation after generation, better and better and better. | |
| We could have a paradise on this world if parents simply restrained from aggression and violence for five years, the first five years of their children's lives. | |
| That's all that we need. Of course, that's a big step for a lot of people, a lot of cultures. | |
| But that's what we know will work. | |
| You know, this chasing after the evil institution called the state and attempting to, you know, turn those bat wings into unicorn rainbows, I mean, it's just not going to work. | |
| Fantastic. I wish we could broadcast everything you just said to Israel. | |
| You wish you could broadcast it what? | |
| Everything you just said to Israel. | |
| Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I've got some Israeli listeners. | |
| They don't like to admit it often. | |
| I do. I kind of want to segue into something you said earlier. | |
| I'm excited where the liberty movement is now, especially with Ron Paul reinvigorating Austrian ideas. | |
| We haven't seen anything like this since 1974, when Hayek won the Nobel Prize, and Austrian ideas were on the forefront again. | |
| But there's a lot of libertarians who are very zealous about their devotion to the Constitution. | |
| And I'm afraid that we're going to kind of fall back into The same cycle where this Constitution has failed to restrain the powers of government and it's going to fail again. | |
| It's hard to convince people. | |
| Certainly all of us have gone down that rabbit hole of being introduced to monarchism and Ron Paul and then rejecting and being unable to justify the powers of the state and its own responsibilities. | |
| You see that markets work a lot better, and eventually you have to admit to yourself that you're an anarchist. | |
| But I'm really afraid, and I criticize other libertarians for thinking that the Constitution is an effective tool for restraining the government, because it's not. | |
| As you've mentioned earlier, government has grown exponentially over the past few decades. | |
| Yeah, look, I mean, the only thing worse than the Constitution not restraining the government is the Constitution restraining the government. | |
| Because when the Constitution restrains the government, and you could argue, you know, if you're willing to toss black slaves, women and children and poorer white men out of the equation and say that for the first 60, 70, 80 years of the Republic, the government was restrained by the Constitution. | |
| Well, what happened? | |
| Well, there was a huge, massive explosion of wealth. | |
| Wherever the government is restrained, you get the resulting incredible productivity growth of free trade. | |
| I mean, just look at what's happening with India and China now, where the free trade principles have come into effect. | |
| Socialism, which was the horrible legacy of the British Raj to India after the Second World War, and China, which was gifted communism through a variety of radicals in the mid-20th century. | |
| They've cast that aside. | |
| They've minimized state presence in the economy relative to how it used to be. | |
| They've abandoned largely central planning, and they've turned people free to produce and trade and create wealth. | |
| So you've had a shrinking of the state, and what does that do? | |
| Well, that creates a huge amount of growth, a huge amount of cash, a huge amount of capital in the system. | |
| The government takes some of that capital and becomes much richer thereby, but what it does is it goes to bankers and says, hey, look, I've got really productive tax livestock. | |
| I'm going to borrow based upon their future productivity. | |
| So when you have economic growth in society, it is food for the cancer of the state because it creates the growth in the economy that the state uses as collateral to borrow and further indebt the people. | |
| And this is a universal phenomenon. | |
| You can see it happening all over the world, particularly, of course, in North America. | |
| And in Europe, you know, why are all democracies in debt? | |
| Well, I mean, for two reasons. One is that you can't have a democracy without debt, because democracy is all about moving money around, and if you don't have debt, it's a zero-sum game, right? | |
| So some people get rich, some people get poorer, and you can't create the illusion that you're somehow benefiting a group at the expense of no one, which is necessary for the spread or growth of the illusion of virtue of democratic virtues. | |
| And the other is because this is what happens. | |
| You know, if you give a gambler a huge amount of money, he doesn't stop gambling. | |
| He gambles more. He goes more into debt. | |
| He uses that money as collateral to borrow even more. | |
| I mean, the whole thing is a Ponzi scheme. | |
| I'm even more scared of a government that is restrained by the Constitution. | |
| I mean, look at the American experiment. | |
| It should be the most illustrative and tragic experiment in statism in the history of the world. | |
| You started with the very smallest conceivable government that could be designed by the menarchists of the day, all of them stone geniuses who put all the checks and balances that they could think and so on. | |
| And that very experiment in the very, very smallest government, according to the theory I'm putting forward, should have grown into the very largest conceivable government that the world has ever seen. | |
| The largest, most powerful government with the largest and most powerful weapons and the largest majority of people in jail of any of the Western democracies. | |
| That's exactly what happened. | |
| Small governments lead to monstrous tyrannies. | |
| If you look at England was the first country to experiment with free trade in the 16th and 17th centuries. | |
| 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, lo and behold, we have the British Empire because that's what the government does. | |
| Wherever you see economic freedom, you end up with massive corruption. | |
| Look at Japan after the Second World War had free market principles inflicted on it by the victors. | |
| And now they're, what, in their third decade of recession and depression because they're so unbelievably in their GDP, debt-to-GDP ratio is almost three to one. | |
| It's insane. Wherever you give the government money, you enslave the future, you expand the government, you corrupt the citizenry, you even further corrupt the leadership. | |
| And this is just a cycle that is so repetitive that it takes a willful ignorance of history to miss it. | |
| Wow, that's incredibly hard to argue with. | |
| It was. So, yeah. | |
| I don't want the constitutionalists to lose, but I don't want them to win even more. | |
| Because imagine how big the government's going to get if it has 10 times the income, you know, 50 years from now. | |
| That's another paradox of liberty. | |
| I mean, here we are, you know, Ron Paul, probably the most friendly to our ideology candidate to come along in, well, I don't know, ever. | |
| Oh, Bob Barr was pretty great. | |
| No, Bob Barr was not great. | |
| Sometimes we set the bar high, and sometimes we set the bar very low. | |
| And here we are, and we've supported him, but there's almost this deification of the document of the Constitution, just as you've illustrated. | |
| Even the smallest amount of government poisons the whole thing, and it's going to explode. | |
| But what they're selling... | |
| I'm sorry to interrupt, but you know what they're selling? | |
| No, go ahead. They're selling... I mean, politics, academics, right? | |
| All of these people who say that freedom is won through abstract arguments. | |
| Freedom is won through voting. | |
| Freedom is one through political action or giving people von Mises' books or Rothschild's books that you just need to throw these seeds of knowledge out and lo and behold, you're going to end up free or you just need to go pound some lawn signs, hand out some literature and donate money to Ron Paul and you'll be free. | |
| What people – I mean, look, I really, really respect the knowledge of the academics. | |
| I incredibly respect the commitment and passion of the politicos. | |
| But I know what they're avoiding. | |
| I know what they're avoiding. There's this huge black hole called, what the hell does this philosophy do to our personal relationships that everyone's avoiding? | |
| Everybody's hoping that Ron Paul is going to bungee right in and solve the problem of statism for them so that they don't have to deal with their personal relationships. | |
| Everyone's hoping that some academic is going to write some book that's great enough and fabulous enough and powerful enough and arguable enough and well researched and evidenced enough That it's just, you know, people are going to repeal stuff left, right, and center. | |
| But that's mistaking what the state is. | |
| The state is not a vertical thing that imposes itself upon us. | |
| You know, tell me, you guys go to, I was going to say dinner parties. | |
| How old are you guys? We're mid-20s. | |
| Oh, we go to dinner parties. | |
| You bet your ass. | |
| Oh, you go to dinner parties. | |
| But it's like potluck stuff, right? | |
| Come on! And by potluck, emphasis on the potluck. | |
| Anyway. I went to a murder mystery. | |
| I'm completely stereotyping. | |
| But if you go to family events or you go to whatever bunch of people who aren't necessarily enlightened in the way that we are, you start bringing up this stuff and how does it go? | |
| You can definitely alienate people. | |
| You can definitely alienate people. | |
| Their eyes glaze over and they think you're crazy. | |
| It's like what you said about the politically ideological brain. | |
| It rewards itself. | |
| They feel a reward whenever they dismiss ideas that are contrary to the political ideas that they have decided are correct. | |
| So people get a sick enjoyment from disagreeing with you. | |
| Yeah, it's a relief from anxiety. | |
| And those glazed eyes, that slow step backwards, that tension, that let's change the topic, that unease, that hostility, that is the state. | |
| That is the state. | |
| It is our willingness to attack each other that is the foundation of state power. | |
| The state is not the laws that are imposed upon us. | |
| The state is everybody who screws with you in one way or another when you point out that the law is just an opinion with a gun and that we are tax cattle and that our leaders do not care for us because they spend our blood for useless wars and to bribe their friends. | |
| But when you point out these basics, taxation is forced. | |
| Just something as simple as that. | |
| A three... Sentence, unarguable statement. | |
| Taxation is forced. The state is our fellow citizens' willingness to attack, criticize, vilify, condemn, avoid, ignore, slander us when we simply base them. | |
| The government doesn't do that. | |
| I mean, I've never spent the night in jail for my beliefs, but I have lost I don't know how many friendships and relationships based upon These basic realities. | |
| The state is not doing that. | |
| The state doesn't censor us at family dinners. | |
| It's our families that do that. | |
| The state doesn't censor us at dinners or parties when we talk about the basic realities, which at this point we have to talk about. | |
| I mean, it's so late in the game that it's not like, you know, I don't know, 1950, you could be a little bit more relaxed about things. | |
| But now, I mean, given the economic problems that are snowballing, we kind of got it. | |
| You know, we kind of got to. | |
| I mean, this is sort of like being a really good doctor when somebody's choking on a fishbone in the restaurant right now, like in the seat right next to you in a restaurant. | |
| You got to interrupt your dinner and go do something. | |
| So we have to do something. | |
| But the state, the repression, the silencing that happens is entirely horizontal. | |
| I mean, it doesn't need to be done top down because we do it to each other. | |
| And that's what politics can't solve. | |
| And that's what academics and Mises and Rothbard and all of these great thinkers and Rand, they can't solve that problem, that we're all so eager and willing to attack each other for whispering the truth in dark corners or shouting it from the rooftops. | |
| That is the state. And people don't want to confront that in their personal relationships. | |
| They don't want to confront the reality of your brother sitting across the table basically saying, essentially saying, I want armed guys to come to your house, put guns to your neck, and drag you off to prison indefinitely because you don't agree with me about how the poor should be helped, or you don't agree with me about how education should be provided, or you don't agree with me about the goddamn roads. | |
| People want you thrown in jail for disagreeing with them. | |
| They want you arrested. | |
| That's screwed up, man. | |
| That's messed up in the extreme. | |
| And until we confront that, we're not going to solve the problem of the state. | |
| Because that is the state. It's everyone cheering the leader that makes the leader. | |
| It's the church of the state, yeah. It's, yeah, it's proponents have... | |
| I'm never going to get into... | |
| I shouldn't do these late interviews where I get these topics. | |
| I have to go down and bring down a raw gazelle with my teeth now. | |
| Eat it hard or something. | |
| Anyway, so go on. Go ahead, Sean. | |
| I totally see that in my life, too. | |
| Some of my personal friendships have been affected by my own opinions. | |
| It seems like these proponents have organized into a church of the state. | |
| Forget criticizing the state. | |
| Its own defenders. | |
| That's hard enough to deal with. | |
| They vilify you for it. | |
| So, Stefan, Would that not mean that this is an issue of human society, that even with the removal of the state, that human beings would form these societies because this is a problem of society and not necessarily the state? | |
| No, I don't think so. | |
| And let me say, what the hell do you care what I think? | |
| Let me sort of give you a tiny bit of evidence that involves teenage sexuality, so... | |
| So pay attention. This will be followed by a short demonstration and a video. | |
| Any volunteers? Look, I don't know if you guys remember, of course you do, because you're closer to it than I do. | |
| Hitting puberty. Do you remember when you didn't think about sex much? | |
| And then, you know, your smelly bits start growing, you've got hair coming out of everywhere, and suddenly that's all you can think about, right? | |
| You didn't need propaganda for that, right? | |
| You didn't need a whole bunch. | |
| You didn't need like eight years of government indoctrination to accept that the naughty bits really should come in contact as soon as humanly possible, right? | |
| It's just biology. | |
| It's just biology. You know, if I'm hungry, I don't need a government propaganda to get some food, right? | |
| So that which is natural for us does not require propaganda. | |
| But think of the amount of time and energy and... | |
| Ugh! Resources that are poured into propagandizing children. | |
| I mean, what is the state? | |
| I think Brett Van Out of School sucks. | |
| It's like 15,000 hours that they got you trapped just drilling this most inane, dusty-headed, nonsensical, chicken-breath crap into your head, where they've got you so dazed, bored, and confused, and frightened that You'll say anything just to get to recess. | |
| And I mean, God, I mean, the punishment in school is staying in school. | |
| It's called detention. I mean, can you imagine that? | |
| I mean, my daughter, you ate half a candy bar. | |
| Do you know what the punishment for that is? | |
| Another half of a candy bar. | |
| I mean, that makes no sense. | |
| The punishment should be you have to leave school early. | |
| That should be the punishment. | |
| When I was a kid, your punishment was staying in school and doing math problems. | |
| So basically, I'm being punished anyway, because I'm in school too. | |
| School is a punishment. | |
| School is a prison. School is a prison. | |
| And so if society was natural, if it was natural for people to organize themselves into violent hierarchies and to believe all this kind of nonsense, Then we wouldn't need all this propaganda. | |
| It just wouldn't happen. | |
| You know, it's like, is it natural to believe that, I don't know, Jesus walked on water, you know, came back from the dead and, you know, was born of a woman who was a virgin? | |
| No, because if that were natural to believe, you wouldn't need to teach it to kids. | |
| Because they pick it up as they went along. | |
| But if you think of the amount of indoctrination that has to go into things that are unsustainable rationally, You understand that kids are very rational. | |
| Kids are incredibly rational. My daughter understands that she's three. | |
| That means three times around the sun and the solar system. | |
| We've done it with fruit and all that. | |
| She doesn't mind things that look kind of weird. | |
| Hey, the moon and the sun, they're not exactly the same size. | |
| In fact, they're not even close to the same size. | |
| They just look the same size because one's closer and one's further. | |
| She understands. We've got no problem with any of that. | |
| Shifts in perspective and stuff. | |
| You know, a guy who lives in the sky who is invisible, has lived forever, and yet rules everything, and gives you free will but interferes, knows exactly what's going to happen, punishes you anyway. | |
| Like, that stuff is just the Mobius strip in the head, right? | |
| It's a pretzel. So, that which is natural to us does not require endless enforced repetitions. | |
| That which is unnatural to us must be propagandized. | |
| And that's not a complete proof, but that's sort of an evidence that when you look at society, you're looking at the result of intensive propaganda, not what is natural to the human soul. | |
| Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. | |
| Stefan, we talk a lot about... | |
| Sorry, nobody's mentioned anything about the promise demonstration. | |
| Should we just... I was trying to subtly move away from it. | |
| Well, none of us are teenagers, so we'd have to go out and find some teenagers. | |
| I've got some in the back. | |
| You've got some in the back. I shouldn't have told you that. | |
| I'm sorry. You know, our laws in Oklahoma are really strict about this, Stefan. | |
| We might need to just sweep this one under the rug. | |
| We talked a lot about French maid outfits, so we It's mine, so maybe not. | |
| Okay, go on. Let's go on with another one. | |
| We've talked a lot about the U.S. or the United States. | |
| One thing that we were just kind of wondering is how common is this idea of liberty in Canada? | |
| Are there a lot of people receptive to it? | |
| Well, you know, we fall closer to the left. | |
| We don't have quite the same left-right paradigm, although our righties are much more palatable to me than your righties, right? | |
| Because you've got righties like Centorum, who seems to spend a lot more time thinking about gay sex than even gay men do. | |
| I've made that comment before on the show. | |
| Yeah, I mean, isn't that crazy? | |
| I mean, you know, you just know he's going through, like, you know, J.Crew bikini briefs catalogs just going, oh, this is just so sinful. | |
| I mean, look at the sunshine, like, twin care. | |
| I mean, you just know he's just so sinful. | |
| Well, he's a religious fascist. | |
| That's all really you can say about him. | |
| Yeah. So, I mean, we don't have righties that way. | |
| And we don't have righties who have this bizarre disjointed Republican thing where it's like, within the great biodome of reality called the United States, we should have freedom and peace and non-aggression. | |
| But once we step off these shores, we need to rain unholy godfire on every turban head the world over. | |
| We don't have that weird disconnect where reality reverses itself the moment you step off the shores of the waving plains. | |
| We have righties here who are kind of fiscal conservatives. | |
| They don't get the religious aspect. | |
| But we're more lefty, which means that The violence that is invisible to us is the violence of social programs and healthcare and education in the same way that for the Democrats, that's helping people. | |
| Whereas the people on the right in America look at that and say, well, that's social engineering and that's really bad and there's violence and blah, blah, blah. | |
| But the ones on the left, they accurately identify... | |
| The horrors of neoconservative foreign policy and objectivist foreign policy, which has had, I think, a more important effect on American foreign policy than most people realize. | |
| When a third of Americans claim to have read Atlas Shrugged, you know, it's going to have an effect on foreign policy. | |
| Ayn Rand was very aggressive that way. | |
| So, yeah, I mean, here you can get people to understand that, you know, war is bad and so on, and there's much more tolerance for drugs up here. | |
| In fact, if it wasn't for pressure from the U.S., I'm absolutely positive. | |
| That marijuana would have been legalized here already. | |
| So, yeah, it's a kind of weirder, gentler kind of culture in that it does not like the gun-worshipping, bomb-worshipping, military-worshipping aspect of the U.S., right? | |
| And there's some fundamentalism, but not in-your-face kind of fundamentalism. | |
| But getting people in Canada to recognize that, you know, the socialism that we got from our mega-Marxist tool job called Pierre Elliott Trudeau... | |
| It was just catastrophic for the nation. | |
| I mean, our guy in the 70s, our prime minister in the 70s, was such a goddamn socialist that Castro sat down with him and said, I'm thinking of liberalizing the economy and bringing in free market reforms. | |
| What do you think? And he said, no, we're trying to get to where you are. | |
| We love communism and Marxism and that kind of socialist, and that's what I'm trying to get to where you are. | |
| And it's like, what a great side to be on in history, Pierre. | |
| What a fantastic, fantastic place there. | |
| So, yeah, it's a little different up here, but, I mean, the challenges are essentially the same, that people look at universal healthcare as a great thing, as if access to waiting lists is the same as access to healthcare. | |
| It's just a delusion that we have that's really hard to penetrate. | |
| I think a lot of the differences come from the fact that in America we're poisoned by this mechanism of this gargantuan military-industrial complex that I don't believe really affects Canada as much. | |
| Honestly, when you really distill things down to their essential elements here, the military-industrial complex has its fingers in every pie and pretty much controls everything from economic policy forward. | |
| Well, and I mean, you put in the prison industrial complex and you have a pretty unholy set of bedfellas. | |
| Right, absolutely. I'm sorry, you're all shocked that that was a short comment, right? | |
| Sorry. Every now and then I change direction completely. | |
| Alright, let's get comfortable. | |
| He's starting to talk. What? He stopped? | |
| What? Please warn us. | |
| Um, let's see... | |
| Okay, well, I've got a question then. | |
| I think that in order to be a proponent of a stateless society, that is to say an anarchist, of course, one must simultaneously hold the belief that mankind is inherently good, or at least, right, reject the Hobbesian ideal that we must live under a kind of mother state that'll rein us in from, you know, destructive behavior towards each other, etc. | |
| But while maintaining an understanding that historically human beings have a propensity to dominate each other, given the opportunity, is this kind of an inconsistency, do you see, in the anti-statist philosophy? | |
| Or is it inherently optimistic, or does it just give enough room for the reality of history? | |
| Yeah, I mean, this is the argument that people need to be good for us to not have a state, or people need to mostly be good for us to not have a state. | |
| And I have sort of two answers to that. | |
| One is that, you know, people will be good if they're raised without violence as children. | |
| I mean, and again, I hate to harp on that, but it's just, you know, I got to go where the facts are. | |
| I've got to go where the science is. | |
| If we raise children peacefully, Absent brain tumors and blows to the head, they're going to be peaceful. | |
| The brain develops in a fundamentally different way when you're raised without aggression, trauma and violence. | |
| The vast majority of people will be good and peaceful and courageous and not into exercising brutal power over each other. | |
| All of that comes from a brutalized childhood. | |
| Again, that's my opinion. | |
| I'll bore your listeners with this if they want to go through it. | |
| It's really, really important stuff. | |
| FDRURL.com forward slash BIB. It's called the bomb in the brain, the effects of childhood abuse on the brain, on the hippocampus, the neofrontal cortex and all that. | |
| You get a massive increase in the fight or flight. | |
| You get a reduction in the neofrontal cortex. | |
| In other words, you're really impulsive and you don't think about the consequences of your decisions, which is really the foundation for politics and criminality. | |
| But I repeat myself. Sorry, you raise people peacefully, they'll be peaceful. | |
| But even if that doesn't occur, let's say that doesn't occur, or let's say that that's completely wrong. | |
| I got my head up my ass about that, and I'm completely wrong. | |
| I would argue that only a stateless society recognizes the reality of human evil. | |
| Because you can only believe that the government is going to protect you from human evil if you imagine somehow that evil people... | |
| Have never heard of the government and have never said, wow, a monopoly of violent power. | |
| I wonder if that could help me in my nefarious ends. | |
| I wonder if I could get a hold and use this violent power to propagandize children into believing that everything I do is good and that they need me to destroy the family and create new generations of criminals, to scare the general population with, to start wars, to run up debt. | |
| Because, you know, what do evil people want? | |
| They want two things. They want something for nothing and they want a lack of accountability for their actions. | |
| That is the definition of what the government does. | |
| It gives people stuff for nothing Through a forced transfer of wealth or through inflation or through debt, they give people something for nothing and they are excluded from accountability for their actions. | |
| How many cops go to jail? | |
| How many politicians go to jail? | |
| I mean, a third of the Congress has significant criminal problems. | |
| They never go to jail. And so it is a recognition of the reality of human evil that means you can't have a state. | |
| I mean, you can't have a monopoly of power and expect that that's not going to draw evil people to run it like Flies to shit. | |
| I mean, you recognize that flies like shit, so you don't create a big pile of shit in the middle of society for the flies to go. | |
| Oh my god. That's pretty great. | |
| Did you want to ask your Rachel Maddow question? | |
| Oh, I mean, sure, sure. | |
| Yeah, I don't... | |
| You don't agree with me, you just don't want any more scatological metaphors, right? | |
| No, no, no. | |
| Hey, man, I'm trying to eat over here. | |
| No, dude, go ahead, go ahead, just unload all the scatological metaphors you want. | |
| I think even using the word unload was scatological. | |
| I think that was deliberate. | |
| Okay. Well, alright, let's move on a little bit to the anti-war left, or the illusion of the anti-war left. | |
| This is something that's a big pet issue for me. | |
| Rachel Maddow, in a recent interview about her anti-war text, Drift, this is her new book, stated she doesn't believe that there are people in government who are trying to keep the American people in a disaffected state from the wars. | |
| And I'm paraphrasing here, but... | |
| Sorry, just want to make sure I understand that sounds important. | |
| She doesn't believe that the U.S. government is trying to keep people in a disaffected state about the wars. | |
| I'm not sure what that means. Okay, the thrust of her theory is that Our wars don't hurt anymore. | |
| They don't affect people on a basic level, whether it be the raising of a tax, the rationing of goods, etc. | |
| And we don't see the dead come home. | |
| We don't see the body count, etc. | |
| And she doesn't believe that that's deliberate. | |
| She doesn't believe that's deliberate, okay. | |
| No, and that's what she said on this interview. | |
| She said she doesn't believe the state is attempting to hide the real financial and human cost of these wars from the people. | |
| Is this naivete of the subversiveness of the state the reason why the anti-war left has failed, why it has no teeth? | |
| And why is it, do you think, that they remain blind to the tyranny of the state, even though they claim to be an anti-war movement? | |
| Wow, that's a good question. | |
| Just before we dive into that, I mean, you heard about this Guy who allegedly got drunk, ran off the base, shot up a bunch of Afghani civilians and children, went back to the base, I think drank some more, ran out, killed I think a total of 17, as he's charged with, right? | |
| Yes, sir. And there was this article in the paper the other day about, you know, this seems to have really affected people's view of the war. | |
| You know, the fact that some civilians have been killed. | |
| And it's like, are you freaking kidding me? | |
| Yeah. What is it, 11 years into this damn war, and 17 Afghanis get killed, and suddenly people are like, hey, I think some Afghanis are getting killed. | |
| I mean, I don't even know what to say about that. | |
| I mean, that's just completely bizarre. | |
| That's like a 40-year-old guy cooking, dropping an egg, and going, hey, they fall down. | |
| LAUGHTER They break! | |
| I don't know what to make of it. | |
| I mean, man, oh, alive! | |
| That's just such willful ignorance that, I mean, I don't even know. | |
| Anybody who said yes in that should never be allowed to vote, because, I mean, if you can't tie your shoelaces, if you don't know where your front door is, and you don't know that civilians are getting killed in a war, then I don't even know how you can... | |
| Anyway. So, yeah, the matter thing. | |
| Well, I mean, in some ways I kind of agree with her, but probably not for the reasons that she would state. | |
| There is no law that says to any American publication that I know of, you cannot print the pictures of Afghani dead or Iraqi dead. | |
| You can only print the pictures of American dead. | |
| Right? There's no law that an editor would go to jail for printing the pictures of Afghani dead. | |
| No, absolutely not. But nobody does it. | |
| Nobody does it. It's a wonderful proof for anarchy, right? | |
| Because you don't need laws when there's social consensus. | |
| Because it's much more powerful than a law to have social consensus. | |
| Okay, so you tell me. What would happen if Time Magazine or the Washington Post or the New York Times or whatever ran a whole issue listing off the Afghani dead who had died in the previous month or the Iraqi dead or both who had died? | |
| What would happen to that paper? | |
| Fox News would lose their minds. | |
| They would just completely, and not just Fox News, but they would be trashed. | |
| Yeah, but they don't care about that, because that's controversy that's good for business. | |
| What would happen that would hit them where it hurts? | |
| People would not renew their subscriptions? | |
| Yes. Yes, but some people might start subscriptions based upon that. | |
| It would be even worse than that. | |
| Okay. Tell me. | |
| Well, um... | |
| What's happening to Rush Limbaugh at the moment for his comments? | |
| He's talking about his advertisers. | |
| Yeah, advertisers would pull, right? | |
| Yeah. Yeah. Advertisers pull, and you're toast. | |
| I mean, these, particularly newspapers these days, don't have a lot of cash on hand in general. | |
| Usually they're in debt. No. | |
| Then, you know, there's just a smoking crater where the paper was, right? | |
| But then this is beautiful. | |
| I mean, what a horrible thing to live in, but what an amazing proof of the fact that a state is not necessary to enforce things. | |
| Definitely. So if she understood, right? | |
| So what is she going to say? | |
| There is a conspiracy. | |
| Well, no, she can't, because she's got no proof of that, right? | |
| So people would say, well, where's your proof of the conspiracy? | |
| And she'd say, well, I don't have any, but I can call it conspiracy anyway, right? | |
| Then she has no credibility. | |
| And rightly so, because, I mean, if you claim conspiracy without proof, that's not very responsible, right? | |
| Right. Well, that's great to hear. | |
| That's great to hear in the liberty movement, because I think sometimes we have a propensity to accept conspiracy theories at face value. | |
| But yeah, no, your point is well taken. | |
| But what she should be saying, of course, but she's right in that the war is relatively painless. | |
| And the reason it's painless is, of course, it's diluted by debt, right? | |
| I mean, if the government cranked up your taxes by double to go and invade Iraq, there'd probably be a whole lot fewer people waving flags and, you know, calling for the slaughter of innocents. | |
| Absolutely. So it's diluted through debt and it's diluted through fiat currency, through the overprinting. | |
| And so, you know, how many people can piece together the thousand steps it takes from them cheering the invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq to the fact that they got their house foreclosed on seven years later? | |
| I mean, how many people can follow that causal chain? | |
| Probably not one in 10,000. | |
| Or, you know, why did I lose my job? | |
| Well, because I cheered for this war. | |
| I mean, people, not only do they not want to take that responsibility, and not only is nobody explaining that, but it's really hard to figure out anyway. | |
| So, you know, overprinting of money and a relative lack of competition because all of the European economies are going down the tubes, as is China. | |
| So, in a way, it is a kind of pain-free war in that it's really – the pain that's coming in is very visceral, but it's very oblique. | |
| And it's one of the reasons why I have much less sympathy for people who are complaining about losing their houses and losing their jobs. | |
| It's like, well, did you cheer for the wars? | |
| Well, you know, you reap what you sow. | |
| And if you didn't spare a thought to the Afghanis and a million Iraqis getting blown up and millions more getting dispossessed and they got no electricity, they got no medicine, they got no running water, they've got cholera, they've got medieval... | |
| Illnesses that haven't been seen in the neighborhood for centuries, if you didn't spare a thought for them but just went around cheering whatever warmonger currently grabbed the microphone, then the fact that all that's happened to you is you've lost their house while all that's happened to them is they've lost half their family, you're actually getting off kind of scot-free. | |
| And your misery will continue to increase until you empathize with the victims of your masters. | |
| That is almost an iron rule in society. | |
| Until we have empathy for the victims of our masters, we continue to get closer and closer to that level until we just, in all humility, learn to give two shits about the people our cheers send the bombs into. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Well, unless Sean or Alan have anything else to say or to ask, or if you, Stefan, have anything you just feel like talking about, I've got one last question and we'll wrap it up. | |
| Oh yeah, listen, just before we do, I've had a chance to, you've mentioned my website at freedomainradio.com. | |
| Please, please make sure that my listeners who might be listening to this on my stream get your information and anything that you guys are up to shortly. | |
| Oh, absolutely. And also, that reminds me, I was going to plug that video, The Bomb and the Brain, on freedomainradio.com. | |
| Everybody, everyone listening to this podcast who doesn't already go to freedomainradio.com has got to watch this video. | |
| It is an unbelievable illustration of the way that we think ideologically, politically, the way we think about violence, the way we react to things. | |
| You've just got to see it. | |
| Everyone has got to watch it. | |
| As far as we're concerned, we are libertyminded.org or facebook.com slash libertyminded. | |
| We are a small, now, libertarian think tank based in Oklahoma and we produce essays, videos, etc. | |
| based on the topics of liberty Basically, we try to look through all sorts of topics, political and otherwise, through the lens of liberty. | |
| That's our MO. Are you guys going to the Porcupine Freedom Festival at all or Libertopia or any other place where we may actually be in the same neighborhood? | |
| Okay, well, we would love to do something like that. | |
| And also, if you're ever down in our neck of the woods, please give us a call. | |
| We'll buy you a beer. But that's kind of far from us. | |
| I don't know if we'll be able to make it up this year. | |
| Do you have a donate page on your website? | |
| No, not as of yet. | |
| We will. Well, put a donate page up and any of my listeners who are listening to this who were thinking of donating to me, donate to these guys so they can drive or fly out to one of these events because they're just fantastic. | |
| I'll be, you know, speaking at Perkfest, I'll be hosting master ceremonies at Libertopia. | |
| Uh, so send some money to these guys so they can get out to one of these Liberty festivals to pump their show, to meet people, to get energized through the community. | |
| Cause I think it's really important. | |
| It can be kind of an isolating thing to, you know, be the lone candle of truth and the high wind of cultural bullshit. | |
| So, uh, you know, donate to these guys and get them on the road. | |
| Yeah, that's how we feel out here in the middle of the plains of the United States. | |
| But, Stefan, we're very humbled. | |
| Thank you so much for your plug. | |
| It's been such a pleasure to have you on. | |
| If you wouldn't mind just one more question, then we'll wrap it up. | |
| With this, what I think we will see as Ron Paul's last run for the presidency, it seems to have kind of invigorated in the youth of America, at least, and probably elsewhere, Reinvigorated an interest in the philosophy of liberty, and hopefully once again these youth can go down that rabbit hole and eventually come to the conclusion of anarchism. | |
| Where do you see... | |
| What will this... | |
| What will it rot? | |
| Where do you see this... | |
| Increased interest in libertarianism or anarchism in the youth going in the near future and where would you like to see it go? | |
| Oh good, so you dropped me a nice easy question to close off with this. | |
| It's going to come back to haunt me. | |
| We're going to go to Mars and beyond. | |
| Well, look, I'm never going to complain about people who come to philosophy in oblique ways. | |
| If it comes through politics, if it comes through objectivism, if it comes through, you know, wherever. | |
| I think, you know, it's great to get you started. | |
| The only thing that I would say to people is... | |
| Don't assume and don't stop. | |
| Don't assume that where you think freedom can come from is where it can actually come from. | |
| Be critical, be skeptical, and for heaven's sakes above, please people, look at history. | |
| You know, those who do not remember the past are always condemned to repeat it. | |
| We have In 2012, significant, statistical, historical, real reasons to be skeptical of the value of political action. | |
| Read Brian Kaplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter. | |
| Read my How Not to Achieve Freedom book. | |
| Just be skeptical. | |
| People have been trying to solve the problem of the state through politics, through voting, through laws, through repealing laws for literally thousands of years and more specifically 300 to 150 years to 40 years from Adam Smith to classical liberalism to modern political libertarianism. | |
| And where we've ended up with is the largest, most indebted, most heavily armed, most powerful, most Aggressive state that the world has ever seen. | |
| That is not a good track record. | |
| That does not indicate that we are going in the right direction. | |
| Academia and politics are interesting ways to begin the journey. | |
| Do not assume that that is where the journey will end. | |
| Be skeptical of it. Be skeptical of it. | |
| There are things that you can do in your own life that will have a much more powerful and foundational, verifiable turtle getting over the finish line, not Here, running around the tree till it falls over. | |
| Way of getting to the future. | |
| Be peaceful with your children. | |
| Do not aggress in your relationships. | |
| Confront those who support the aggression against you with the reality of the gun that they're introducing into your relationship. | |
| Make the violence of the state real to people. | |
| However much they squirm and avoid it, it's something we need to show them. | |
| The gun in the room. That is there when people say there ought to be a law. | |
| That is there when people say you must pay your taxes. | |
| That is there when people say you must obey the law no matter how unjust. | |
| That is there when people say you must fund government education. | |
| That is there when people say, by God, we've got to help the poor through the state. | |
| When people say, how can we have a world free from war because I can't figure out how the free market might build the goddamn road? | |
| Confront people with the violence that they accept and advocate within the system. | |
| Live peacefully within your own family and particularly with your own children. | |
| That is the sure, scientific, statistical, valid path to a free and peaceful future. | |
| Do not get distracted by the easy, quick heroin hits of writing books, reading books, and going to political rallies. | |
| It may make you feel good, but it is knocking bricks down of the road that we need to build. | |
| It's not putting them one in front of the other. | |
| It's back-breaking, it's slow, it's laborious, and I guarantee you it will get us there. | |
| Fantastic. Well, we are incredibly humbled to have shared this evening and this conversation with you. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| It's been such a pleasure to speak with you. | |
| We hope to have you on sometime in the future. | |
| Thank you so much, Stefan Mellonu, for being on Liberty Minded this evening. | |
| It's my absolute pleasure. | |
| That's LibertyMinded.org. | |
| Yes. LibertyMinded.org. | |
| LibertyMinded.org. Guys, it was my absolute and total pleasure. | |
| It was a great deal of fun. | |
| Just give me a ping anytime. I'm back. | |
| All right. Thank you. Have a great evening, sir. |