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April 26, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:38
2131 Ending History, Freeing the Future - Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio Speaks at Mises Canada
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Music If you want to hear me, I don't want to yell, but I also want to be audible.
I assume the people in the back end realize that we want to be free and just quiet down.
That's probably how it's going to work. Does anybody, do you guys know who I am?
Does that mean anything?
A few people? Yeah? Okay. I'm Steph Molyneux.
I run a philosophy show called Free Domain Radio.
We just passed 40 million downloads.
And since I asked for 50 cents A show from donators, and we all know that everybody, conversion rate on the web is 100%.
I'd just like to tell you, I'm hugely wealthy from the show.
And so, everybody's food and drink is on Redmond.
I just really wanted to let everyone know that.
Actually, I just had a debate yesterday with a libertarian.
I come a little bit more from the, can I use the A word here?
Yes. From the asshole side of things.
No, I come a little bit more from the anarchy side of things, because I just love chaos, destroying Starbucks, wearing balaclavas, throwing garbage cans around.
You know, I think, well, we're all on the same page.
As far as we're going to rampage right afterwards, trash the place, that kind of stuff.
Anyway, so in preparing for that, I sort of thought a little bit about some of the challenges that we face.
Who here has been trying to convert people the longest?
I've got three decades. I don't mean to point at the people we've got.
He's got hair, so he's still ahead of me.
But what do you got? Three decades?
Four? Oh, four.
Four? Four decades?
Four! Going once, going twice.
We got any more than four. Anyone willing to admit that?
Before there were libertarians.
Before there were libertarians.
Okay, okay. When returning to a small government seemed vaguely possible in Canada, right?
Yeah. Objectivists, okay, yeah.
So three or four decades, how many people just want to get a sort of sense, and I don't want this to be a talk like you all just sort of doze off, or it's like, I wish this guy, can we talk to each other without this guy getting offended?
So I just want to ask some questions and, you know, maybe get some feedback.
How many people have an enlightenment or conversion rate of one in five?
One in five going, okay.
One in ten.
One in ten? Okay, I'm going to sit down and tell us how it's done.
It takes a long time. It takes a long time?
Okay. I don't talk to a lot of people.
The fact is I do assessment and I don't invest in life.
Oh, so you do a triage thing, right?
It's like, so if this person has an NDP badge, it's like, I'll keep moving, thank you very much, right?
Okay, so one in ten, but you're very selective about that, right?
1 in 20? I only have 20 friends.
I only have 20 friends.
Which means you used to have 400.
And you started talking to them about freedom.
1 in 20? You roll a d20?
Am I getting any Dungeons and Dragons people here?
Anyone? No? Alright.
1 in 20? 1 in 40?
Anyone got 1 in 40? 2 and a half percent?
I'm like the selective one between 1 in 20 and 1 in 40.
Right. So you're like the guy at the bar who waits till they're drunk.
Okay. Got it. Is anyone here who's actually tied to someone or shackled to someone?
Was this supposed to start out as a sex game and ended up as a libertarian evening?
There you go. All right.
Wouldn't be the first time, probably won't be the last.
Okay. So, yeah, so I've sort of been thinking about the challenges of it, and I've used statism, I mean, for those who, you know, maybe knew statism, the idea, of course, that the government, this sort of organized group of people, I'm using the word organized rightlessly there, organized group of people who have a monopoly on the initiation of force in a geographical area, are somehow going to wave their magic guns and turn the world into a fruity kind of paradise.
That sort of statism, why is it so tough?
Well, I think statism is fundamentally theological.
It's fundamentally a religion, and not a good kind of religion where you go and do charity work and help lepers and all that, but the not-so-good aspects of religion.
Because I think the three hardest words in the English language are, I don't know.
It's really, really hard.
I think religion comes out of that a lot.
Where do we come from? I don't know.
Let's say that, you know, Zeus threw some thunderbolts, had sex with a goat, and there we were.
I'm not really up on Greek mythology, but I think it's something like that.
There's a lot of sex with animals.
Am I remembering that correctly? Anyone?
Anyone claim to know that? So you say, I don't know.
It's really, really tough.
And one of the things that happens, you know, we've all had these conversations, we'll start to talk to people and we'll say, well, I don't think we should have a welfare state because of X, Y, and Z, because it traps the poor and this permanent underclass.
You know, the welfare state is like that tree sap that goes over those mosquitoes, like in the prehistoric times, and just...
It kind of traps people there, right?
Because you've got the dependency problem, you've got bad schools.
I just read this great article, actually, about one of the reasons that people bought such expensive houses in the United States.
How is that explained? Oh, people are greedy, people are stupid, bankers are stupid, and so on, right?
It may be true, but of course in the US, and I think it's somewhat true here in Canada, I think it's even more true in the US, people wanted to buy really expensive houses because they really needed access to decent schools, right?
And so they, in a sense, overbought because they wanted their children not to go to these cell-based hellholes of violence, degradation, drug abuse, and random knifings called the modern American and to some degree Canadian educational system.
And there's a woman in charge of larceny.
12 years? No, she got 12 years in jail.
She got 12 years in jail?
That's the equivalent of a kid's time in public school.
So she couldn't get the kid back into the good school, I guess.
So wait, did she fake an address?
12 years in prison for getting your kid into a good school.
Because we're all about education in the public sector.
Actually also, since we're on random tangents, thank you everyone for keeping me from going straight.
Redmond did actually say you can have as much time as you want.
The eggs come out at night.
Yeah, well eventually what happens is usually there's a blow dart.
You know, some sort of tranquilizer.
It usually takes a lot more than one.
I'll just start to slow down.
Somebody catch me if I pitch forward.
Or maybe if I've been speaking enough, you won't.
No, catch him, he might get back up.
But yeah, I was just reading about how, you know, we hear a lot about the sort of Catholic priest scandal with the sexual abuse of children.
But you're actually 800 times more likely to have inappropriate sexual contact with a public school teacher than you are with any clergy that you could name, statistically.
Of course, you don't hear about that because, you know, public school teachers are saints and angels who don't care about PD days or PE days and summers off and unable to be fired.
They only care about the children, of course, and we see that every day.
But this question of sort of, I don't know.
Whenever we say, well, I don't think we should have a welfare state because it's really bad for the poor, we say, well, who's going to take care of the poor?
Who's going to take care of educating the kids?
Who's going to take care of the old, the sick, the whoever, right?
That's what people say. And so then you have to become like the all-knowing, oracle, brain-dimensional X, where you can answer every conceivable question about how society's going to look in a hundred years.
In a hundred years. I mean, if I knew what society was going to look like tomorrow, I'd make a killing on the stock market.
But the idea that you can know what society is going to look like in a hundred years is incomprehensible.
But this is a standard that is demanded of us before people will accept that.
Now, I guess I got a question because I was thinking about this.
Do you guys think that libertarianism is political or philosophical?
Is it a moral position or is it a political position?
Moral. Moral. Moral. Moral?
Yeah, I think it's a moral philosophy that has political implications, obviously, right?
If we're going to accept, I would say, the two things, right?
I mean, and they're sort of related, two sides of the same coin.
Number one is the non-initiation of force, non-aggression principle.
And the other, of course, is a respect for property rights.
So kind of two sides of the same thing.
And that's, I think, a moral position that has political ramifications and so on.
But this demand that we have to predict the future using morality, I think it's impossible.
I think it's impossible to expect morality to predict the future is to expect the impossible.
Because what morality can do is it can tell you what's good and bad, what's right and wrong, what's good and evil in the present, but it can't tell you the effects of virtue.
I mean, you could say, well, if you're virtuous, like the Aristotelian argument, if you pursue excellence in virtue, you'll be happy.
But sort of go back to the argument against slavery.
You could say slavery was wrong because, of course, it was a violation of self-ownership and it was a violation of property rights.
And you can make that case.
But the standard would be, to be an abolitionist in sort of the 18th century, the standard would be that we're facing now when we have conversations about what freedom would look like in the human realm and in the future.
The abolitionists would have to say, how will agriculture look 150 years from now if we get rid of slavery?
Because back then, about 90% of people were involved in farming.
And, of course, farming was all manual labor because slavery, you know, nobody wanted labor-saving devices when you had slaves.
That's why there was no Industrial Revolution in the ancient world, because they had slaves.
And nobody wants to devalue their slaves by introducing labor-saving devices.
That would be like expecting Apple to work to make iPads obsolete.
Oh, no, wait. They do that, I think, about every eight to ten minutes, right?
Let's scrap that example.
We'll go back to something else. But you could never predict in 1850 what agriculture was going to look like in the 21st century.
Like these giant combine harvesters that run on the juice sucked for miles underground by incredible pipes that crushed dinosaur juice and crushed trees and that's how it's all going to run and you won't almost need any labor to pick cotton or to pick trees even.
That could be completely incomprehensible.
And if you had made that prediction, and somehow you'd had a window look through in time, if you'd made that prediction in 1850, and you'd been accurate, what would people have said?
You're insane! So if you're right about the effects of freedom, right?
You get rid of slavery, and suddenly labor-saving devices, and now what is it?
I think it's two or three percent are involved in farming.
And of that, about ninety percent are just involved in lobbying.
I think there's like three guys who feed everyone, and there's like all these bureaucrats that feed off them.
But if you had been right, and I'm saying this because I think this is a good argument to get people out of the prediction business, because we get drawn into the prediction business, right?
We like this Johnny Carson character.
Oh no, you're all too young to know that.
Sorry. Johnny Carson, anyone?
You know, remember he used to do, what's the name of that character?
Carnac. Carnac. Yeah, he used to read the answer and all that, right?
Younger people may have seen Arsenio Hall imitate him.
That would be my guess. Younger people won't even know who Arsenio Hall is.
Oh my god, I'm so dated.
Must get new cultural references.
But that means watching MTV and that means having no attention span.
Conan O'Brien? Remember he's the guy with the sword?
Who lobbies for the marketing board or the wheat marketing board?
That's right. Do you know he used to come to budget meetings with one of his Conan swords?
He did. He'd come to come and say, we're going to cut no matter what.
Still didn't work. You can be Conan with a sword, you still can't cut government, right?
Makes us feel a little better, right?
Can't quite be that big.
But to get us out of the prediction business, right, you can say to people, well, okay, so what if we had been in 1850 or 1840 or whatever, and you'd said, What is the world going to look like 150 years after slavery?
Because, I mean, I think to be realistic, to have the society that I think is ideal, you know, we're talking multi-generational process.
I mean, I think that's, you know, all fundamental social change takes 100 to 150 years.
Abolition of slavery, 100 to 150 years, equal rights for women.
We're starting to figure out that maybe we should have equal rights for children in terms of protection from aggression and so on.
We're kind of early on, I think, and so I think it's going to be multi-generational.
People are kind of asking us, what is society going to look like 150 years from now?
How are problems going to be solved in the year 2152?
2162! Look at that.
Just did that in my head. Took me a while because I went to government schools, but I can't take off my shoes because somebody's eating.
People are asking us to say how problems are going to be solved in the year 2162.
And you can say to people, well, if you'd been in 1850, you'd be saying, well, how's cotton going to be picked in the year 2012?
And obviously we would have no answers for it, and even if we'd been correct, nobody would believe you if you said these giant combine machines are only 3% of people and they'll actually, they'll build entire lakes of wine and set fire to them and they'll dump butter into the ocean because, you know, they want to keep the prices up.
Oh wait, they'll still be government, so they're confusing.
But people would not believe that there would just be this tiny percentage of people involved.
In farming. Farming was everybody's job back then.
Like 90% of the people. So it'd be like saying now, in 150 years, we don't have to worry about poverty because only 3 or 4% of the population will actually have jobs.
And people would say, oh, come on, that's ridiculous.
But that's what happened with farming.
We basically got to do stuff other than farming.
Which, I've been inside a barn.
I'm actually quite happy about that because it smells like a frat house.
I mean, it's horrible in there. So, The prediction business answering what happens after freedom is achieved, I think is like taking a slow sprint off a cliff edge.
Because you either come up with something that is believable, in which case it's far less than what is possible, or you come up with something that sounds so incredibly utopian that no one is going to believe you.
I mean, so, I mean, basic arguments about the welfare state is, The welfare, like the problem of poverty was being statistically and very effectively solved in the post-Second World War period, in America at least, and other places in the West as well.
You can see that chart. Poverty rate was declining 1% every year, starting about sort of 1948, 1949, straight onwards, until, until, anyone, anyone?
Until the welfare state came in, right?
Because the government was like, oh!
Crap! There are fewer poor people around.
If there are fewer poor people around, there's less reason for government.
So let's help them.
Let's go and help these poor people.
And next thing you know, fewer people start to get out of poverty, and now you seriously have a permanent underclass, which is very, very hard for people to get out of.
So if that process had been allowed to continue, there would be almost no problems with poverty.
Or, you know, the black family is a huge problem in the United States right now.
I think it's close to 70% of black kids are being born out of wedlock.
Not a good situation for black kids.
Do you know that there are fewer kids in the black community being born out of wedlock and more stable marriages even than whites as recently as 1960?
I think it's... Well, at the turn of the century, it was even higher.
It was a very stable family environment.
I think it's Thomas Sowell who said that the welfare state has done what even slavery couldn't do, which is to destroy the foundations of the black family.
And so, again, these problems were being solved, and then the government steps in.
And it's kind of predictable in a way, because when everyone's poor, nobody really thinks there's this huge problem called poverty, any more than people in the Middle Ages said, hey, we're all really short.
Because everybody was short, so it didn't really matter, right?
But when you get...
Sorry, you're looking really perplexed.
Is it your food?
Is it me? So when everybody's poor, you don't get a lot of tracts about poverty in the Middle Ages, because everybody was poor.
But what happens is when more and more people become wealthy, the poor kind of show up, if that makes any sense.
Sorry?
And what do you mean?
There were rich people in California.
There were a lot of people that have moved and immigrated there.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, so what you've got, yeah, like...
They just had 15 million people immigrate and 10, or sorry, I think it was like some 100,000 taxpayers.
How many people immigrate?
15 million people immigrate to California and only 100,000 of them are paying taxes.
And how many of those are employed in the public sector where the word paying taxes could be a little bit dubious, right?
Wow. By the way, just to give you an idea of the mainstream view of these things, the 2010 Nobel Prize was awarded to economists for their studies I think the next Nobel Prize is going to be awarded to a guy who proves that having your shoelaces untied can lead you to trip more.
And other things that we learned when we were about four years old seems to be what?
My son knows this.
I incentivize him not to work.
You incentivize him not to work?
But he's unionized, so it's a little different.
I think these things have actually become an insult to your intelligence now.
Like, do not ever accept one of these prizes.
As you say, if Obama gets the Peace Prize...
Yes. Downhill.
So, this issue of predictability, I think, is really important.
I've always argued that we really just need to return to the moral argument.
Because the predictability argument is a fundamental game.
You know, it's like writing a sci-fi novel or something.
Like, how would society work and all that?
Some young ladies shoot bows and arrows and stuff like that.
That's all kind of fun stuff to work with in our minds.
But it's the moral argument, I think, that really needs to be returned to.
But the moral argument precludes predictability.
So the moral argument against slavery is, well, it's just immoral.
It's evil. It's treating human beings as chattel.
And we've got politicians for that.
We don't need other people as well.
And so, but once you make that moral argument, you detach yourself from the predictability.
Because people will always try to draw you back into who's going to pick the cotton when there aren't any slaves.
Or, you know, the argument that sort of goes...
Like, people have this weird idea, because the government has provided a service for so long, if the government doesn't provide that service, Then it's impossible to provide that service.
And to me, it's like a Roadrunner universe.
It's like a Warner Brothers universe.
It's like you've got this stream, and it's got this huge honking rock in the middle.
You attach this big crane, you hook this rock, and you yank it out.
And the statist sort of believes that the water is still going to run around.
You know, this weird, you step into it and walk around like Moses, looking at these big walls of water and so on, right?
Because, of course, you take that...
Rock out and the water rushes in to fill it.
And if you take that out, of course, first of all, the government replaced a bunch of agencies that were providing things like old age care and health care, these friendly societies.
You can Google them. I saw a great presentation in Libertobia last year about this.
And these friendly societies where people got together and they all took care of each other, right?
I mean, government doesn't rush in to fill a need.
It provokes anxiety in the population and then it It passes laws and it displaces the existing solutions and replaces them with horrible things.
The minimum wage was originally put in explicitly to push certain people out of the labor market.
Well, minorities, right?
People who have jobs don't like people who will accept less wages.
Unions definitely pushed minimum wages from a racist and from an economic advantage standpoint.
This is licensing too, right?
Because Lord knows you wouldn't want a plumber who hadn't passed a 19-hour exam to fix your toilet.
So once they pass that exam, it's like the cab companies, right?
Once they've spent $150,000 for these ridiculous licenses, then of course they want to keep all the newcomers out and it's very expensive to replace them.
But this issue of predictability, I really sort of strongly urge you to reconsider when you get drawn down.
You know, it's like all the people we debate with have this come-hither stare around predictability.
You know, well, if you don't want the slaves to pick the crops, then you just want everyone to starve to death, right?
I mean, because if there's no slavery, of course they'll just find some other way and a better way in the long run to pick crops.
Just one point. What I've found with people who are attempting to predict Over the last hundred years, it's really been the environmental crew.
When you look at the Malthusians, it started with Malthus predicting that people were going to starve, you know, because they're going to run out of food.
And now it's the same thing. You've got guys like Paul Ehrlich, John B. Holdren, who are consistently predicting there's a population.
And when you read what they say, they are the most deeply immoral people around.
Paul Ehrlich would actually come out in public and say, don't feed India.
Let them starve. We can't save them.
Just let them starve. This is crazy.
And it's deeply immoral.
And these are the people who create these predictions in order to scare you so you won't act on their behalf.
Well, and where do they get their funding from for the most part?
I mean, there's a huge scientific community that all they do is they go, blah!
Blah! We're doomed!
We're gonna starve! We're gonna die!
There's gonna be no oil! You're gonna eat your children and so on, right?
And I mean, that's because the government needs to keep the population in a state of fear and anxiety.
I mean, that's just natural, right?
So that you're just afraid and you feel like you need protection.
I mean, that's natural. They lost religion, so now they can do something else.
Yeah, yeah. I don't want to take up your whole evening.
I'm happy to answer any Q&As if people have any, but I sort of fundamentally just resist and I have to say this to myself every day because it's so tempting.
Because we do have great answers about how the poor will be taken care of and how the old will be given whatever they need to survive and flourish and how education is going to work.
We have great answers, most of which occurred and were demonstrated before.
You know, I did some research.
I've done a series called The Death of the West.
It's an upper.
But there were these schools, truly astounding schools, the Lancaster schools, where the older students would sell their tutoring services to the younger students, and it was sort of this whole pyramid.
And you could have one teacher for every couple of thousand children.
A teacher would teach the few oldest, the few oldest would teach the youngest, and of course, if you've ever been a teacher, you know that the best way to really show that you know something is to try and teach other people about it.
Whereas, you know, when you passively, you know, you absorb and then regurgitate, we call this learning now, but the real learning is when you're teaching, I think, when you can explain something to someone else successfully.
So, teaching the younger kids was part of the education of the older kids, and you could get, and this is in 1990 dollars, you could get a full year's education for 40 dollars per child.
$40 per child!
And the kids coming out of this educational system were whip-smart.
Of course, you look at the, you had a 94% literacy rate in Massachusetts before public education went in.
And if you look at the books that were coming out that were popular, of Thomas Paine and Herman Melville and Mark Twain.
I mean, the language skills are just way up there when the education was private.
We've got all these great answers, and it's really tempting to go in.
But of course, when you talk about the past, people don't get the principles, they just get the empiricism, right?
So when you talk about In the 19th century, you talk about the Industrial Revolution.
People think, well, that's when they, you know, took children who formerly in the Middle Ages had been gambling through the fields and picking daisies and, you know, they attached butterflies to them and sent them up for little rides and so on.
And then they grabbed these and, in some Dickensian methodology, they stuffed them into chimneys where they all choked to death by the time they were twelve.
They don't remember, of course, that the fact that the children in the factories was a lot better than them being under the ground, which is the way they would have been prior to that.
But so you talk about the schools in the 19th century, people just think, you know, paddlings and, you know, they have all these awful images and they think that you want to go back to that because very few people are trained or have even much interest in extracting principles.
So the best examples we have are in the past, but when we do that, right, like I've heard anarchists say, well, you know, Iceland in the 11th century was a really great example of anarchy.
It lasted like 450 years.
And all people think is what?
Anarchy is going to be really cold, right?
That's what you're saying? I need an igloo?
I don't understand that. But no, what they do is they think of Iceland in the 11th century or Ireland in the 6th century or 5th century.
And all they do is they think, like to them, they're saying, let's go back to a Monty Python movie.
I mean, that's all they can think about.
Like, it's just some horrible, you know, and why is he a king?
Because he hasn't got shit all over him.
That's all that people can think of.
Sorry? It's the idea that Murray Rothbard called it The Wake theory of history.
The idea is that where we are today is the height of progress.
In some ways it's that here today is necessarily better than it was.
There's no concept that in fact things could actually be worse.
Oh yeah. I mean the 19th century, if you ever mention to people that the price of everything throughout the entire 19th century in America went down, But they can't even comprehend it.
They just can't understand it.
Or if you make the argument that Rockefeller saved the whales, because he invented the kerosene, which they didn't have to kill all the whales for the blubber and so on.
It doesn't fit into people's thesis.
So the best examples that we have are in the past, but people are so concrete in their thinking that when we bring up the past, people think that we want to go back We're stuck to that somehow, and that's not the case, right?
So the empiricism of the past I have not found serves us very well in the future, because there were so many bad things in the past, right?
You talk about good education in the middle of the 19th century, well, no rights for women, no rights for children, there's still slavery in lots of places of the world, you know, the life expectancy was like, well, at least half of us would be dead by now, and I think the other half would be eating them.
It's hard to use the empiricism of the past, but the ethics that we use to make our case cannot predict the future.
The abolitionist who says no slavery cannot conceivably predict what agriculture will look like 100 years after the end of slavery.
We can't conceivably say what society will look like after the end of the status paradigm of attempting to solve these problems and just making them worse.
When we have the end of mob majority rule, we don't know what society is going to look like.
When we finally do achieve the true dream of humankind, which is all men are created equal, all women are created equal.
You know, I've always been bothered by that just by the by before I end up.
You know, the Declaration of Independence, we hold this truth to be self-evidence that all men are created equal.
So we need a government. It's like, no, no, no!
No, no! Stop right there!
All men are created equal! Stop!
Stop writing! Step back from the table, you know?
You had me at all men are created equal.
Let's just throw some women and minorities, you know?
But if all men are created equal, then none should have violent power over the others, which means no state and so on.
We'll get there eventually, because consistency is the inevitable progress of the species.
But I think You know, strongly urge, just keep returning to the moral case.
I will not use historical examples if I can avoid them.
They're absolutely valid and incredibly compelling to people who can really think, but we're dealing with a big bunch of state miseducated muggles, right?
So, we have to be a little bit patient and recognize the limitations.
Don't scare the natives with your magic called thinking.
You know, they get angry, they boil pots, they, you know...
Even if you predict an eclipse, that was the famous way they saved people.
These guys said that they got captured.
I don't know if this is true. Does anyone know if this is true or not in urban legend?
These guys got captured by some Polynesian crew of savages and they were going to get boiled up.
And they said, they were like, oh, one of them was an astronomer.
He's like, I think there's going to be an eclipse this afternoon.
So they all said, if you eat us, the sky gods will eat the sun and all that.
And the eclipse started. That's how they were saved.
True? False? Nonsense?
I have a question.
Oh, wait, wait. Almost done. Almost done.
Is your question, are you almost done?
Because then I have an answer for you.
No. Never.
But yeah, so...
Was it John Cook?
It would be kind of ironic if John Cook was eaten by his cannibalism, right?
John Cook. Cook. That's a good idea.
But no, I mean, so historical examples don't work with the concrete kind of thinking that surrounds us.
Predicting the future is unbelievable if we're right.
And again, I mean, it's going to be even more amazing what the world is going to look like and how human problems are going to be solved in a hundred years.
Much more amazing than what happened to agriculture between 1850 and 1950.
It's going to be stunningly...
Because agriculture is just one sector.
This is all of society which is going to be free.
So when we do finally achieve that dream of true equality among human beings, which means...
The true dream of the anarchist, which is not no government.
Anarchy doesn't mean no government.
Anarchy means no rulers.
And anarchy, I was saying this in the debate last night, everyone says, thinks anarchy means no rules.
No, no, put an R in there.
Rulers. It's a little different, right?
We have lots of rules when you have anarchy.
But avoid the historical examples, my suggestion.
Stay with the argument from morality, which most everybody accepts that you shouldn't use violence, get what you want, and if somebody's really enthusiastic about that, back away slowly, call 911, and try not to engage with them, and try and stay away from predicting the future.
Just keep pounding that moral argument.
I think that's the only way that genuine change and lasting change is really going to happen in society.
That's it for my little speech.
Thanks for your attention.
And if anybody has any cues, I might have some A's. - Yes.
Hey, we talked last time.
We did talk last time, right?
You've put on some hair since we last met.
I noticed these things.
Do you think you'll be getting on to Yeah, for those who don't know, actually this was, I guess I can tell a few tales out of school.
So I was contacted by the producer for the Peter Schiff show, and I think Peter had completely forgotten that he was on my show like two years ago or whatever, right?
But he's like, I want you to come on and talk about the North American Union and health care, Canadian health care.
So of course I said fine, and I spent the night and the next morning reading up on these things.
I'd done some topics on them before, but I wanted to get up on the latest.
And I jump in and he's like, you're an anarchist, aren't you?
I didn't know it was going to be a debate about that.
Otherwise, I'd have studied his positions and changed all of my arguments.
Every time I debate with someone, I never want to use an argument I've used before.
If you're going to have a sword fight with someone, you don't use the moves you've all used before because they know what you're going to do.
I always changed my arguments. I thought we had a pretty good debate.
I ended up subbing for him that Thursday.
They got a lot of positive feedback and they said they'd like to do it again.
I hope so. Yeah, I hope so.
I was hoping to go in New York to maybe, if I was going to go to New York, I was invited to speak at the Liberty Fest there, but it coincides with Libertopia, which I had a previous commitment to.
But it will be, sorry, I will be out in Vancouver in, is it?
June, honey? July 28th.
Yeah, July 28th. I'm going to be meeting my good friend Walter Block out there in Vancouver, so that should be a lot of fun.
And Doug Casey speaking there as well, and Rick Rule, and a lot of really smart people, and me.
Was it because of the debate you had that he asked you to come and slip in?
Because you don't get comments usually, and then you should have.
Yeah, you know, kudos to him.
They just contacted me and said, can you do it?
And I was able to, so I did.
Did you guys listen to that? Anyone?
I had a second on that as well.
You had a debate with Andrew Schiff and his brother called that.
Yeah, yeah, his brother called. I like to not think of it as destroyed.
Conquered! Sorry? Andrew had a good point.
It was basically out of chaos you're going to get people wanting to form a government which then removes the entity.
You had a good point about that.
I don't quite remember what it was.
He had a point saying that once there's entity they're going to form a government.
Yeah, so this is the argument that if you have no government you create a power vacuum that cannot You know?
Sucks the government back into being or something like that.
I mean, there's a couple of points just briefly to make against that.
I mean, the first is that the implicit admission of defeat is that the worst possible conclusion to an anarchic society is statism.
That's not a very noble position to start from, you know?
Well, if the worst thing that could conceivably happen to your society is it could turn into the kind of society that I'm advocating.
What? So that's like saying, well, if you cut out the cancer, it might grow back.
Well, at least you're calling it a cancer.
You know, we're a step forward, right?
So that's sort of one of the arguments.
The second is, there's not a slavery vacuum in the modern world, right?
I mean, once people accept the moral argument, it doesn't tend to go backwards.
Unless, I don't know, dinosaurs come back to life and asteroids hit the earth and we go back to whatever, right?
But once people accept a modern...
I made this case last night in a debate.
In Europe, they're not saying, well, you know, the way that we're going to solve our fiscal crisis is we're going to put six-year-olds back to work in the mines.
Doesn't happen. Because people kind of get it.
Child labor is not good if you can avoid it, right?
They're not saying, well, the way we're going to solve unemployment in Spain, which is, I think, 30% or 40%, depending on how you count it.
50% under 25. Yeah, 50% under 25.
The way we're going to solve unemployment is to ban women from having jobs.
No, imagine trying to make that case in Europe.
There's not a big vacuum of wanting to ban women from the workplace or wanting to put children back in the mines.
So once we make a moral advancement, it doesn't...
Or they don't say, well, let's solve the labor problems by importing slaves.
I mean, we've passed that as species.
We don't tend to go back to that.
I mean, there are going to be a few creeps out there who are going to say stupid stuff.
But for the most part, once you make the case effectively and people accept the moral argument, So once there's no government, it's going to be the equivalent of saying, let's solve problems by banning women from the workforce.
Let's bring slavery back.
Let's bring the government back.
It won't be acceptable to people, especially once they've seen the benefits.
And also, once you have a free society, you don't have that state of perpetual anxiety.
You have a state of ever-improving human conditions.
So with what scaremongering are they going to bring this demon back to life?
You know, it's like talking to an atheist and saying, I can save you from hell.
No, but unless you mean continuing to talk with you, I don't really understand what you, right?
So, it just, once you lose the belief in something, you can't be scared back into taking it back.
And of course, there's other six million other things, right?
I mean, so there's going to be, let's say there are these defense agencies that protect you geographically, which is going to become sort of pointless after a while, because without governments, you're not going to have invasion.
And let's say that there's a government that wants to invade two areas.
One of them has a government, the other one doesn't.
He's going to go for the one that has the government.
Because the reason that countries invade other countries is to take over the tax system.
Well, see, the moment that you say that, what do people think?
So you want to live under the Taliban?
No, this is the danger.
I mean, you're right. But the reality is that if you make those cases, and I'm tempted by them too, and logically it's true, but empirically people just kind of freak out.
But no, I mean, it's like saying if you want to take over a farm, if you want to take over some land, you want to take over a functional farm where the cows are already domesticated, not even a metaphor, and producing revenue for the farmer and so on in the form of taxes.
Sorry, milk. And that's why you want to take over something where it's already farmed, already domesticated, and where there's a production system in place that you can profit from.
You don't want to just go wander into the woods where there are bears and snakes and tigers and stuff.
I'm not a biologist. Maybe they don't even coexist.
I don't know. But it's wild.
In a society without a government, what are you going to do?
You're going to go in and take over what?
What are you going to take? There's no tax system in place.
You've got to go and set up a tax system when you don't know who's got what weapons, because it's a free society.
It's just not going to happen, right?
And of course, internally, if there are a bunch of people providing security services, everybody's immediate concern is going to be, wait a minute, if I sell you enough money to protect me from other governments, what's going to stop you from enslaving me?
That's going to be everybody's first concern.
Well, that's what I'm saying. So the way that I try and solve that when I'm talking to people, and maybe we'll try this here.
Can I have a seat here? Sorry?
Yeah, yeah.
So let's say that I'm the guy buying defense services and you're the guy selling them.
And I'm going to say, wait a second, I don't want to give you any money.
You're going to buy tanks and laser-guided badgers with sharks on their backs and you're going to use those to take me over.
So, I don't want to buy your services.
How are you going to convince me that this isn't going to happen?
Because if you can't convince me and he can, I'm going to go with him, right?
I was thinking more of a state where people rise up and want to give him the government what's there and what happens after that?
Oh, yeah, but anarchy is going to happen when people accept the moral argument as It's not gonna happen because there's a revolution.
I mean, in my opinion. A revolution is usually in a state of desperation and when people have really bad ideas, that's usually when revolutions happen.
It's all about force.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm so angry at the boss, I need a new boss.
Yeah.
Right now, complaining that they might actually have more papers.
Yeah, I mean, they're in a sort of artificial situation because the pieces of paper have become so necessary.
Anyway, so, yeah, another time.
But the reality is some entrepreneur, there's going to be like a thousand entrepreneurs, all of whom have great ideas about how to ease people's fears about...
The defense agency becoming a new government.
And whoever answers those, you know, off the top of my head, right?
Six million ways you could do it.
I'm going to put ten million dollars in the bank and I have independent auditors swarm over me.
If I ever buy one more bullet than I publicly announce I have, whoever finds that bullet gets ten million dollars, free and clear.
Or I'm never going to allow any particular agency to hold more than 1% of my stock.
So everything is diluted.
And my warehouses are going to be open, and anybody can come and wander through and audit anything that they want.
I mean, there's so many ways that you could reassure people that you're not going to suddenly turn over.
And if some agency started doing things secretively or whatever, That would be a clear sign to everyone that they were up to no good and people would stop contracting with them and they would be toast, right?
You tried proposing this to your board of directors, they would never go for it.
And the last thing, of course, is there'll be a bunch of other defense agencies who will all be keeping an eye on each other because if one starts to act badly, the other ones are going to start doing running ads 24-7 saying, you know, Bob's defense agency is stowing these killer badgers or something.
Again, I'm not really much of a military man.
And they're going to start putting this and say, you know, plus, we'll give you half price for a year if you come with us, and these guys are doing bad stuff.
So they'll all be policing each other.
That's what happens in a free society.
The only way to deal with the concentration of power is through voluntarism.
You can't do it by appointing a monopoly, a force.
And I think that's all we have time for.
Freedomainradio.com, thank you so much.
I'll be around for the evening for a while until my daughter gets sleepy.
Thank you so much for your time. Cool, yeah.
Speaking of Canadian healthcare, I just got a...
Oh, that's his phone. That's his phone.
Yeah, speaking of Canadian healthcare, I just got a little flyer in the mail all about the great new veterinary hospital around the corner from my house.
And it was amazing.
Like, I swear, these dogs and cats are getting better healthcare than humans.
No, I'm serious. I'm absolutely serious.
They absolutely are getting...
If you want a hip replacement operation, it's better for your dog to be...
Oh, for sure. No, no, no.
You will get it faster.
You will get it cheaper. You will have the most modern medicine.
And you know why? Because there's a free market in healthcare.
Imagine that. They call you the next morning and they ask how your cat's doing.
My mom flipped out.
She said, my doctor has never called me after an operation to ask me how I'm doing.
Of course not. No. He doesn't want more business from you.
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