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April 27, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:52:45

2133 Power, Violence and the Reality of Progress - Stefan Molyneux Debates Dave Nalle!

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	Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	This is a debate that I had with Dave Nell, which was organized by Ian of www.libertychat.com.
	I hope that you will enjoy it.
	I did answer a few questions while we were getting some technical issues worked out, and then we will start with the debate.
	Would be good for Steph to address why he does not advocate the action of voting, no, which influenced followers to do nothing while a property tax increase was passed by one vote in Freetown of Grafton.
	Watch ten potential votes not cast by his followers.
	Now to citizens paying more tax because of philosophy.
	What's your answer to that? Hey, let's be fair now, my friend.
	It is not because of philosophy that people are paying more tax.
	It's because the government has a gun to their neck.
	That's why people are paying more tax.
	Let's not blame philosophy for the actions of predatory people in blue, who are very well-armed.
	I don't understand why people think that if taxes don't go up, that debt doesn't increase.
	The government is going to spend more, the government is going to spend more, the government is going to spend more.
	If they don't get it from you through tax increases, then they're going to get it from the poor through debt and through inflation, which hits the poor the hardest.
	So, the idea that, oh, the tax increase didn't go through, and therefore there's going to be less spending, no, all you're doing is...
	You're passing the buck down the road.
	Not getting tax increases only means something when the government can't go into debt, but the government will just go into debt.
	It doesn't matter whether your taxes go up.
	Your taxes are going to go up either way.
	They can hold taxes firm as they did, you know, through the Bush situation when he declared two wars and gave massive bailouts of money and gave massive prescription drug benefits to the elderly.
	And what happened? Well, all that happened was the government went catastrophically into the debt.
	Anybody paying for the tarp? Anyone paying for the bank bailouts?
	Anyone paying for all of that?
	No. Government just goes into debt.
	So, look, there's been no tax increases.
	There's just been debt increases.
	So, thinking that you can fight a tax increase by voting down a tax increase is nonsense.
	You just get the tax increase later with interest.
	In fact, you could argue that a tax increase in the here and now is much less destructive than a tax increase down the road through debt.
	Or they sell bonds or whatever it is they'll come up with.
	If the government doesn't get more taxes, it doesn't stop spending.
	It doesn't stop increasing its spending.
	I mean, of course not, right?
	You just want to make sure you don't succumb to the illusion of an answer, which isn't really an answer.
	Voting is not going to set anybody free.
	And let's not forget, voting is not free, right?
	What's the opportunity cost of getting involved, of understanding all the issues of every candidate saying yes, no, or whatever?
	Going down to vote, I mean, it takes probably at least a hundred hours to go down.
	And let's say that you managed to stop a $200 a year tax increase for a hundred hours.
	Well, you just paid yourself two bucks an hour and you might as well go assemble Apple iPads in China Police and military are they necessary?
	What are alternatives to police and military?
	Well, I mean, it depends what you mean by police and military.
	This is always a tough question because governments own the terms police and military.
	That's a big problem. So when you say, do we need police and military?
	It's like saying, do we need education?
	And what people mean by education is boxing 30 kids with a distracted and bored teacher in a room that is basically modeled after a prison cell.
	And drugging probably one-tenth to one-quarter of them and making sure that the times of schools directly do not coincide with the parents' working day.
	So parents work nine to five and schools are like eight to three.
	Couldn't imagine anything more inconvenient.
	Imagine trying to sell that in the free market.
	And so... When people say, how are we going to have education in the free market, do they mean kids learning stuff or do they mean the current box called education that is being put forward by the school or by the government at the moment?
	So police and military, we absolutely do not need them in the form that they're in and I guarantee you that things will be infinitely more effective in the future when you have free police and free military.
	So police, what do we want?
	We want the protection of persons and property.
	Well, Creating a monopoly of violence with the right, the legal right, nay, in fact, the inevitable obligation to violate our persons and property at will, is not the way to protect your persons and property.
	What you want for it is prevention rather than cure.
	And the problem with everything the state does is it gets paid for cure, well, the illusion of a cure, rather than actual prevention.
	So in the California health budget, I think about 4% of the budget goes towards prevention and 96% It goes to cure.
	Because prevention is people not getting paid, right?
	If the doctor prevents you from getting sick, he doesn't get paid for curing you.
	And if the police prevent you from getting stolen from, they don't get paid for pretending they're going to go and find stuff.
	And so in a free society, you will pay people until a bad thing happens to you, which gives them the financial incentive to make sure bad things don't happen to you and to work to prevent theft rather than to pretend to cure it through the police.
	So, this is the typical insurance scheme, right?
	So, I have home insurance, which means that if stuff gets stolen, the insurance company is going to replace it.
	This has a direct incentive for the insurance company to make sure my stuff doesn't get stolen and to prevent, find ways of doing it.
	So, that would be sort of one example.
	As far as the military goes, a truly defensive military is a very interesting...
	Almost all military is, certainly since the Second World War, has been designed to destroy civilians.
	If you think of nuclear weapons, if you think of biochemical weapons, even if you think of these supposedly laser-accurate drones, which seem to go off course more often than a government budget estimate.
	They're all designed to basically fairly indiscriminately kill civilians.
	If you think of the number of Iraqi soldiers who were killed versus the million-plus civilians who've died ever since the invasion or have been murdered, and the couple of million more who've had to flee Iraq because it's been turned into a smoking rubble without electricity, running water, or basic sanitation, you understand that it is an offensive war.
	Modern warfare is an offensive Arsenal designed to destroy civilians.
	And that is not defensive. That is purely offensive.
	A purely defensive military would look very different and would be far cheaper.
	So, for instance, if you look at one of the reasons that the Russian Empire came down was that the Mujahideen, who were being funded by the CIA and trained and earned by the CIA, they could bring down a $25 million Russian jet with about a $20,000 Stinger missile.
	And the economics of that equation worked out pretty consistently and drove the USSR into bankruptcy after, of course, its 10-year war in Afghanistan.
	What does that sound familiar? I don't know.
	It'll come to me soon.
	So a purely defensive military with a non-invasive, non-WMD system would be obviously a system of defenses against nuclear warheads, it would be a system of defenses against bombers, and it would be a targeted offense against a particular military and political leaders who were threatening.
	And that's going to just be far cheaper.
	But the basic reality is nobody's going to want to invade a state in a society anyway, because governments invade other governments' territories in order to take over the tax structure.
	Right? In order to take over the existing tax structure.
	That's why one government will invade another government.
	And if there is no existing tax structure, Then it's the difference between taking over a productive dairy farm with lots of money and assets and all that, and workers, versus saying, I'm going to go and take over this iceberg, or this piece of tundra in the middle of nowhere.
	There is no existing profitability structure that can be taken over by one government institution because there is no tax structure, there is no tax collection structure, there is no centralized state set of assets.
	A defensive military with a very, very low threat of invasion would be very much cheaper.
	And there would be constant innovation about the best way to defend.
	Right now, I mean, what innovation is there in the military?
	Well, there's the ugly stuff they get from the private sector, and that's about it.
	So... No, I mean, again, please, Simon, I'm no military expert.
	I just know that I would want a choice about the brightest geniuses coming up with how best to protect me for the least amount of money.
	I don't believe that I would be much threat in a stateless society because there'd be nothing for the government, nothing for the governments to come in and take over.
	You know, why did Hitler invade Czechoslovakia?
	Because they had the SCOTA armaments works and all the tanks and weapons in the known universe.
	And that's why you wouldn't have all of that stuff in a free society.
	They would be much more targeted and defensive methods of repelling invasion.
	So that would be my guess.
	Hi everybody, it's Devan Wallin from Freedmade Radio.
	I really want to thank Ian from Liberty Chat for getting this debate going and thanks of course today for joining up.
	Hopefully we can polish this apple of truth until it shines like the very sun itself.
	So first of all I want to say I'm coming obviously from the voluntarist or the anarchist side.
	I think Dave is leaning a little bit more towards minarchism.
	And I wanted to really start by saying that I like minarchists a lot.
	I myself I was a minarchist for about two decades, and I have switched camps, and that may mean that I made a move in the right direction or the wrong direction, and maybe we'll find out.
	But... The challenge that I sort of couldn't overcome, which maybe Dave can help me out with, is that we're going to found these ethics that we believe in.
	I think as libertarians and anarchists, we found our ethics on two things.
	One is property rights.
	The other is the non-aggression principle, which is thou shalt not initiate the use of force against thy fellow man, woman, child, or kitty cat.
	And the state, as I've studied and understood it for almost three decades, is that monopoly on the initiation of force in a particular geographical area.
	And it can either be through taxation, or it can be through tariffs, or it can be through other kinds of revenue increases, or it can be through not allowing competition to services that it provides.
	So if you have the government providing the objectivist or minorist ideal, which is the police, the law courts perhaps, The military, maybe the prisons, depending on how you argue it, then they have to have a monopoly on these services.
	If they don't have a monopoly on these services, then it's not a state.
	If they have a monopoly on these services, that is a violation of the non-aggression principle because it means that they have to initiate force against people who are providing alternatives to these services, which is, of course, if I come up with another way of protecting people's property other than the government-issued standard Cat and Blue police stamp, then... I'm not initiating force against anyone and the government doesn't have the moral right under the non-aggression principle to initiate force against me for providing a competing service.
	Any more than one gas station can launch a scud into a gas station across the street because it doesn't like the competition.
	So that is sort of the really essential argument that I just couldn't overcome.
	I couldn't square that circle anymore.
	If you're going to have a principle, then have a principle.
	And if you're going to have a principle called non-aggression and the respect for property rights, then, you know, almost ipso facto that eliminates the moral justification for the state.
	To me, you can't really argue against that, though.
	Maybe I'm wrong about that. So what happens with the minarchist camp is often there's this argument that, well, yes, the government does violate the non-aggression principle, but in the absence of the government, you end up with much more violence and much worse aggression.
	All the anarchist police will become warring gangs with motorcycles with laser-mounted shark heads and Mohawks, fire, bunker busters or whatever.
	And so if we don't have a centralized state, the result will be much worse.
	Kind of a scare story.
	There's not a lot of historical evidence for this.
	There's tons of historical evidence that smaller governments tend to grow into enormously large governments.
	Of course, the example of America, which is about the smallest government that could ever have been conceived of, growing into the largest, most powerful government with the capacity to destroy human life many times over with the most debt, the most weapons, the most people in prison of the percentage of the population almost in history.
	And so there's not really a very sort of good argument, I think, that the government is somehow going to make things safer for everyone.
	But most fundamentally, I think, the anarchist position, I obviously can't speak for all anarchists, but for me at least, the anarchist position is fundamentally one of humility, which is to say, I can't guarantee...
	That no spontaneous self-organization to protect persons and property for national defense, for roads, for education, whatever is currently being provided by the state.
	I can't guarantee, beyond any shadow of a doubt, everywhere, anywhere, until the end of time, That it can't be done voluntarily.
	Because to me, the minarchist position only makes sense if you can absolutely completely and totally prove that the spontaneous self-organization in a pure market sense with everybody voluntarily contracting, that that's completely impossible to provide collective services.
	I mean, I think we've seen tons of examples of how it does provide collective services.
	And so for me, I don't know how the roads are going to be done 300 years from now.
	I don't know how a society is going to be protected against rogue asteroids and reincarnated dinosaurs and other governments with weapons.
	I don't know. I mean, I don't know.
	But it doesn't really matter. Because I can't prove that it's impossible to spontaneously self-organize.
	And fundamentally, what we need to do when we're looking at society and how it should be run is we need to go back to principle.
	Because principles don't tell you much about the future.
	And you really can't tell much about where the future is going to go.
	So an example I've used before is, you know, why did we get rid of slavery?
	Because slavery was immoral.
	And we got rid of slavery because slavery violated the non-aggression principle.
	It violated self-ownership and so on.
	What came out of that was incomprehensible to everyone who was an abolitionist in sort of the 17th and 18th and early parts of the 19th century.
	I mean, it's just, it was incomprehensible.
	I mean, 80% of people were involved in farming when they were slaves.
	Now it's down to 3%.
	And we've got giant machines that, you know, thresh all the corn and they run on the ground up dinosaur and tree juice from 300 million years ago that's been sucked out of the ground by giant tubes and shipped across the seas in ships that could never have been conceived of by people in the 19th century.
	So what happens out of doing the right thing?
	It's to me unpredictable.
	You can't possibly guess at it.
	And it doesn't really matter.
	You get rid of slavery because it's immoral.
	What happens? Who knows?
	It doesn't really matter. And the government, as a violation of the non-aggression principle, is not a good idea.
	And finally, I sort of say that the minarchist idea that we get a very small government, to me, is the most dangerous idea of all.
	Because if you look at history, you can look at...
	The Roman Empire was preceded by significant increases in free trade and stability of currency and a relatively small government, at least relative to the other governments that were around.
	If you look at the British Empire, that was preceded by a very small government relative to what came before and relative to England was one of the first countries to really institute free trade in the 18th century.
	And if you look at America, America started as the very smallest government and has grown into the very largest government.
	To me, this is not an accident.
	When you have a small government, of course, what happens is free trade increases.
	You get that capitalist, everybody wins negotiation and trade and transaction.
	That generates enormous wealth, enormous improvements in efficiency and all of that.
	That enormous wealth is fuel for the government.
	The government sees all of that wealth and like a farmer whose chickens are suddenly producing ten times as many eggs, they go on a spending spree.
	They just go on a massive orgy of spending and they use their tax revenues and future tax revenues as collateral for massive debt.
	They can suddenly afford to go to war.
	They can have a welfare state.
	They can have all of these great things because of the productivity increases of the free market.
	So a very small government It's like pushing down an enormous spring that's then going to go boing!
	And so the argument that we can somehow have a small government and keep a small government, to me, is quite the opposite of what history shows us.
	So those are just a few of the points that I wanted to start with, but I'm happy to be schooled by Mr.
	D and get told where I can correct my thinking.
	Okay. Well, to give some of my own background, Like Stephan, I have changed my views over time.
	I started out as an anarchist many years ago, or at least a radical libertarian, and from there I eventually began to realize that that philosophy didn't address the problems that we face in the real world.
	Although still, I admire the idea of voluntarism and all the principles that Stephan talks about.
	The problem is that we still have to live in the real world, And to live in the real world, although you can take those principles and apply them in your personal life in a lot of ways, you can try to live your own life isolated as much as you can from society and from the requirements it places on you, it is impossible to entirely escape to your own Walden Pond.
	Even when Thoreau went to Walden, he survived there because his ants brought him baskets of food.
	It's almost impossible to get entirely away from society, especially as we become more modern.
	And more interconnected, you really can't get away from it.
	Then the problem becomes, yes, we do have a government that is out of control.
	So the question is, can you find a way to fix that government, or do you have to throw it away and start over again?
	And if you start over again, is there any guarantee that your ideal anarchist paradise that you create will stay what you started as?
	Because clearly, no government in history, as Stephan has said, Stephen said that no government in history has ever stayed small.
	They always grow larger. My argument would be that no society, no group of human beings in history has ever been able to survive without developing a government which became more sophisticated and eventually became too large and out of control.
	My argument would be that you go back much lower to fundamental principles of human character and human interaction That there is a violation of the non-aggression principle in almost everything that human beings do.
	If a man or woman wants to improve the lifestyle which they live, that inherently implies some sort of interaction with other people, and when interactions with other people take place, when you reach out beyond your immediate self to involve other people in commerce,
	an exchange of ideas and materials, In exchange of property or claiming property, in growing crops, in any of these human activities, you immediately initiate a situation where one person controls something and another person controls something else, and there is the potential for conflict and coercion in that dynamic.
	Just exchanging goods for services or goods for goods implies a certain amount of coercion if you want to get the best deal for yourself as opposed to giving an advantage to the other person.
	Human nature is not compatible With a complete isolation from other people.
	And if you want to have any of the trappings of any kind of civilization, if you don't have any of the benefits and improvements in lifestyle that come with organized human conduct, then inevitably you're going to run into a situation where people interact and there are going to be problems in that interaction.
	The possibilities of fraud, of force being used, of violence, or of theft.
	And when that happens, people have to look for a solution.
	And if you take the Solution into your own hands, then there's no organized system or check on what will be done by one person to another.
	So the solution that people have come up with for that is to form civilizations and governments where there are principles on which those people will be governed.
	There are laws and courts, as Stephan said, which will deal with the problems of human interaction.
	My argument, of course, would be That you have the best government when you have the least government, that a government which is kept to its minimal necessary functions will last longer and will be functional longer than any other form of government.
	If you start out at a more complex level, as some civilizations have, then you deteriorate more rapidly.
	And the ideal, of course, is to have sort of a pure, natural environment for people to live in, but in reality you have to accept a certain amount of compromise.
	Life is constantly a matter of compromises, and the question is, what compromises do you want to make?
	Most people would rather compromise a little bit by giving up some of their individual liberty in order to get some of the protections and benefits that come with having a developed society.
	Other people aren't willing to do that, and one of the problems is it's very difficult for both lifestyles to coexist without coming into conflict.
	If you're both living in the same geographical area, and one person wants to live without rules, even if he lives a perfect and harmonious lifestyle with other people anyway, and other people want to live with rules, it's very difficult to have those rules have exemptions for certain people.
	And that's where you get into the problem of the social contract, Which is the sticking point for a lot of anarchists when it comes to dealing with society or civilization as a whole because they don't accept the idea that you can be put into an agreement that you never really agreed to just because of where you live or what country you're part of.
	And I sympathize with that philosophy.
	And that's the most basic and original argument between anarchists and minarchists or republicans or however you want to look at it.
	It's an argument that Burke and Godwin had 200 years ago, and the argument really hasn't changed months since then.
	Locke put this down to the existence of property.
	Some anarchists don't accept the right to own property, but people seem inherently to occupy space.
	And if you occupy space, then property is implied in it.
	People seem to acquire goods and products and things that they make, or things that they find, So, property is almost unavoidable in human society.
	Once you accept the idea of property, then you have the idea of ownership, and once you have the idea of ownership, this is my land, this is your land, this is my thing, this is your thing, then you have an increased probability of people wanting to take things away from each other or wanting what other people have, and you have to have some sort of The system is agreed on to manage all of that.
	You come into an existing system, if you're born into it, or if you move into it, then you really only have two choices.
	To either comply with the rules of the system as they exist, to try to change them, or to leave and go somewhere else.
	That's kind of an inevitability of life.
	And the problem, the ultimate problem that I had, the reason I could not stay an anarchist, was that I didn't see any way In which we could tear down society and start over again and satisfy the needs or desires of most of the population.
	All it seems really possible to do is start over again and redesign the system or roll things back to the way they were when the system was designed and originally worked much better than it does now.
	And that's what I work for now through groups like the Republican Liberty Caucus is to Roll back government to the way it was 200 years ago, so that it can allow us the maximum freedom while still providing that umbrella of safety and security, which people inevitably seem to crave.
	Not everyone, Stephan and a few others that I know may be above that, but unfortunately the vast mass of people who we have to live with inevitably seem to crave a certain amount of that security, protection, and services that civilization provides.
	All right. Excellent, excellent points.
	Let me just pick up on a few of them.
	The first is, Dave, you seem to say that...
	Can you guys hear me alright?
	So, one of the arguments that was made was...
	That commerce is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	In other words, negotiating for a good price.
	If I haggle well and get a good price from someone, that is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	I have never, ever heard a definition that a good Hegel is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	The non-aggression principle is very, very clear.
	If I'm defrauding, that's different.
	But if I'm simply negotiating for a good price and the other person says, well, I want $5 for this pen, but I will sell it to you for $4.
	If that's voluntary, that is not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	Another common mistake that is conflated, this happened with the debate I had with Michael Bettnerich a couple years ago, is that the technical definition, well not even the technical, the dictionary definition of anarchy always seems to be missing one letter for people.
	It's pretty easy to remember.
	Anarchy means without rulers.
	It does not mean without rules.
	This is a very, very important distinction.
	So people sort of think that if you don't have a government, you don't have civilization.
	If you don't have a government, you can't have trade.
	If you don't have government, you can't have the division of labor.
	You can't have capital investments.
	You can't have banks. You can't have whatever.
	You know, you can't have contracts.
	This is to mistake, to make a fundamental error, which is to say that because something is now provided by the government, if the government does not provide it, it will not be provided.
	And that is like saying, well, if the government assigns everyone a husband or a wife, if the government stops doing that, then no one will ever get married, no one will ever have children, no one will ever fall in love, no one will ever have sex, and the human race will die out.
	The government is like this big giant rock in the middle of a pool.
	If you pull the government out, The water rushes in to take its place.
	In fact, the water can't go there.
	Productive solutions can't go there because the government's in the way.
	So, anarchy does not mean that we all live in caves.
	Anarchy does not mean that people don't have any rules or ways of entering into contracts or anything like that.
	Anarchy does not mean without rules.
	Anarchy means without rulers.
	So, I just really wanted to be clear about that for the audience.
	Fraud and force are huge problems in human society.
	Another, Dave wasn't saying this specifically, but it's something that comes up.
	I think it was sort of there in the background.
	But, you know, Dave, of course, correct me if I'm wrong.
	Anarchy, I think, is the only philosophy that fully recognizes the fact that power corrupts and that human beings have an innate desire as biological animals to get as many resources as possible with as little expenditure of effort as possible.
	That's why people play the lottery.
	So we want to get a lot of resources.
	We don't want to expend a lot of effort.
	That's just the basic... I mean, all animals, all living creatures, I think, have that impulse.
	But this is what I don't understand, and I'm happy to have this clarified to me, as I've never been able to figure this out.
	If fraud and force are a problem in human society, I don't see how creating a monopoly on force solves that problem.
	Because there's no way whatsoever that you can create this magical sphere or biodome.
	You can call it a constitution.
	You can call it magical arms-bearing fairies for all I care.
	There's no way to keep this magical barrier that takes...
	That keeps all of the people who want to get things through fought and violence away from the government.
	They will go, the moment you create a government, you create a massive gravity well for all the bad people in the world to circle in, to take control, to be sophists, to lie to people, to promise, to bribe, to corrupt, to print money, to gain control of resources, to gain control of industries, to favor their friends and punish their enemies, as Harry Brown used to say.
	And so to me, if fraud and fraud is not a huge problem in human society, then we don't need a government.
	But as you dial up the importance of force and fraud in society, you actually dial down the possibility that a government can ever work.
	Because creating a monopoly on force and fraud is only going to draw people.
	So if a tiny minority of people are into force and fraud, they're not going to be a big issue.
	They'll be dealt with my voluntary association and publishing of Contract breaking in a free society.
	But if there are only a tiny minority of them and you create this agency which has a monopoly on force, you give those tiny minority great power because they're going to swarm that institution and they're going to use it to rule over good people.
	And so there's just no way that creating a monopoly on force and fraud is going to be able to solve the problem of force and fraud.
	It's like this whole thing. It's something I thought of a couple of years ago.
	I'm sure I'm not the only person to think about it.
	If we're starting with a blank page, you say, okay, well, we have a society, there's no government, there's no other...
	And people would get together and say, hmm, okay, I want to really protect my property.
	I want to make sure that my property and my person is protected.
	And then someone comes along and says, hey, I've got a great idea.
	Let's create a tiny monopoly of people with the legal right and the overwhelming force to violate your persons and property at will.
	Is that the way you want to protect your persons and property?
	You say, no, no, no, no, no. That's like, I want to be raped to stay a virgin.
	That doesn't, you know, it doesn't even make any kind of sense.
	The ways in which, and again, this is all guessing about the future, which is only somewhat useful.
	But in terms of contracts, pretty easy.
	You buy contract insurance.
	So if Dave and I get into an agreement, he sends me 500 bucks, I send him an iPad.
	He sends me the 500 bucks.
	I don't send him the iPad. Then we have insurance ahead of time that he gets the iPad from the insurance company.
	The insurance company tries to get the money back from me.
	If the insurance company can't get the money back from me, then they publish that I have violated my contract and it becomes much more expensive for me to get a contract next time and people can see publicly that I've violated my contract.
	This is how eBay works, right?
	350,000 people, one of the largest employees in the world.
	No governments, no courts.
	Fundamentally, it all revolves on a rating system.
	Although some people have told me that that's changed a little bit lately, but that did work for many years on that.
	And so there's tons of ways that you can get this kind of stuff sorted out through voluntary association.
	If you have house insurance, or you have insurance for your business, or you have insurance for your car, that makes sure that if it gets stolen, somebody's going to pay you restitution to the insurance company.
	You can choose not to have that insurance and that's, of course, you save the money and you take that chance.
	And the insurance company then has a very strong incentive to make sure that your car isn't going to be stolen.
	It might put in an unbreakable GPS in there that it can track it whenever it's reported stolen.
	Again, six million things that they could do.
	They could make sure that gas stations don't provide gas to stolen cars.
	I mean, six million ways that they could figure out how to solve this.
	These kinds of innovations will not be present in a government society, because a government society does not make money through prevention, but rather through, in a sense, well, in a very real sense, the provocation of the problem and the illusion of a solution, right?
	So, in the 19th century, you could buy cocaine in bottles with sugar carbonated water called Coca-Cola, and there were no drug gangs who were dealing Coca-Cola.
	Kids could go into a drug store and buy cocaine-laced drinks.
	And then the government, of course, comes along, provokes all these problems, and invites, through prohibition, all of the mafia in the world over to set up shop in America.
	The mafia then get involved in politics.
	They provoke. They make sure that these things stay banned because that's their area of expertise, drugs, gambling, prostitution, and so on.
	And originally, of course, alcohol running.
	And this, you know, just escalates from there.
	And there's just no way to stop that process.
	The moment that you create a monopoly of force within society, all the bad people in the world come start using it for their own benefit.
	I do not view...
	The law is an opinion with a gun because the government is simply imposing its will on everyone and there's no way for any individual to avoid that.
	If the people who are providing the rules in society are customer-driven, governments never are.
	If they suffer consequences through providing bad service, Through people cancelling their contracts, which government can never do.
	What people are basically saying is that a good that is forced upon people that they do not choose and cannot avoid is going to be infinitely higher quality than a good called money, called contract, called personal or property protection or defense or whatever that is voluntarily provided to people.
	But force is never going to produce a higher quality good.
	I just wanted to point that out, that anarchy just means without violent rulers.
	That's all it means. It doesn't mean people have no authority.
	It doesn't mean there are no rules. In fact, I would say that there are only rules when a social consensus of entrepreneurs and customers get together and figure out the best and most productive ways to have these rules enforced to everybody's satisfaction with a minimum of cost and long-term reward for Good behavior.
	Because, of course, if you keep your word, if you don't steal, if you continue to keep your contracts and you perform your contracts as specified, it becomes cheap to almost free to insure your contracts.
	That's a kind of reward for virtue that never exists under the state fundamentally.
	So that would sort of be my argument.
	Remember, anarchy doesn't mean living in caves, it doesn't mean no rules.
	All it means is we refuse to violate the non-aggression principle by creating a monopoly on violence and then expect that that's going to lead to some sort of social stability and virtue.
	Okay, to address some of these points, government, when you talk about government, You talk in the context of modern government as it exists in America today or in other countries in the 21st century.
	That should not be used as a model for what government should be.
	To use the most degenerate modern examples of government gone wrong, where government doesn't work as the sort of assessment of what all government would be or should or can be, is a little bit unfair.
	Government, at its most basic level, is a consensus of the governed.
	It's in your realm of contracts, essentially.
	The way governments start is by people getting together and agreeing as they would in a business transaction that they will essentially Create an entity or hire on people to do things for them which resemble the functions of what we think of as government.
	If they decide that they want their community to be secure, they get together and they sign a contract that creates a military or a militia or other services they might need.
	At that point, they're not assigning rulers, which is why, as you describe anarchy, and many people do use that term, It isn't incompatible with having a basic functional government, as long as you're not electing rulers.
	You can have a system of government which doesn't have rulers.
	That's the idea of a popular Republican kind of government, where you don't put the power into the hands of individuals, you put the power into the hands of the rule of law, into the hands of a governing document, or a set of rules that everyone follows in government.
	And if those rules are designed well enough, although Humans being imperfect, it's very difficult to design them so well that they'll last forever.
	But if those rules are designed well enough and government continues to follow them and they have the proper checks and balances in them, the theory is that then no single individual or no group of individuals will gain so much power from this government that they'll become tyrannical.
	It doesn't work that way very well in practice, but you point out that all governments eventually evolve into something which is a tyrannical state, but by the same measure there's no history of an anarchistic society, a society without any kind of government, staying that way or surviving as such.
	There have never been successful anarchist experiments which have lasted more than a few years without becoming, in many cases, even more tyrannical Then things started out as a contractual, consensual government like the United States did.
	So there is no obvious solution.
	Anarchism doesn't have any better history than statism does.
	When you get right down to it, everything, all human endeavor, unless reviewed and renewed every so often, seems to eventually degenerate into some sort of a system where people take advantage of other people by using whatever methods are available to them.
	So the question then is, which system is more likely to put effective checks on those people for a longer period of time?
	And what we see from examples in history is that when you have a balanced Republican form of government where there are protections built into the system for the rights of individuals, where minorities are protected, where you have enough checks and balances in the system to assure that there'll be a certain amount of stability as far as the Controlling the power that's acquired by any individuals,
	then you see a system which lasts much longer as an equitable system than just individual voluntary associations and things based solely on contract, which don't seem to last long at all, because as soon as you start signing those contracts, as soon as you start looking for more ambitious things that you could do through the consensus of groups within the public, they gain power by making those agreements.
	If everyone in the society agrees to sign on to a contract saying that because we happen to control the land that has a certain resource, they immediately can become oppressive and abusive, but it's still all operating with voluntary contracts.
	It's just that everyone doesn't start off on equal footing.
	Not everyone has the same skills, the same intelligence, the same resources, or the same access to the things which give you advantages in society, and therefore no society Founded on any principle can ever be equitable except to the degree that human beings are willing to organize to make sure that a certain amount of equity exists in that society and that there is some sort of level access to opportunity and that no one can really seize control and become abusive.
	Every idealistic society that you see through history rapidly degenerated into tyranny and that just seems to be an inevitable Aspect of human nature that we really can't get away from.
	I would like to see a true anarchistic society.
	I'd like to see us stay at that stable level where people will respect each other for as long as humanly possible, but inevitably it will break down.
	Looking at the real world, I don't see any evidence that an anarchistic society has ever held up for any extended period of time, and that is a pragmatic argument.
	Maybe it's disappointing to a lot of people, but I'm afraid that it's just the way it is historically.
	And in the situation we're in now, tearing everything down and going back to a state where we essentially started over again and had everything set to zero would be so impractical and unrealistic that it would never happen.
	People would not allow it to happen, unfortunately.
	People would become addicted to their government, and you have to find a way to wean them off of it and offer them some alternative, which would be the morphine of government To get them off the heroin of statism, I suppose.
	I guess I have a sort of disadvantage here because I'm arguing a pragmatic argument against an idealistic argument here.
	But unfortunately, no matter how much we like the ideals, we're stuck with the reality.
	And I don't see the mechanism by which we get away from it.
	This is why anarchism has always been popular with a small group of individuals, but isn't Something that really can be exported beyond that group effectively and sold to the public on a mass scale.
	Something much more limited can be, like libertarianism or minarchist philosophy, which would improve everyone's conditions of living considerably as far as their liberty was concerned.
	But the actual anarchism, even if sold as being a nice thing, as it was with our early pilgrims who came to America who were told they'd have freedom from government and freedom from religion, From religious controls and opportunities they didn't have back in England, freedom from a stratified society, and it was a true offer.
	The offer of that freedom was genuine when they came here to America, but the first thing they did was to start to organize governments, and you see in Puritan New England that government became as religiously oppressive very quickly, within a couple of generations, as the government back in England had been.
	And people like Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, who were very much anarchists, were forced to move out of that society into the wilderness, and in the wilderness they formed their own new societies, or they conflicted with other societies, and eventually those settlements that they had founded developed governments of their own.
	And now Rhode Island, which Roger Williams founded, one of the great libertarians of the 17th century, Rhode Island has one of the most corrupt political governments in the country.
	And it still follows the forms of what Roger Williams laid out, but the reality has become very, very different.
	I don't see, if Roger Williams couldn't do it, I admire him greatly, I don't see how we could do it with much less opportunity, much less land to expand out into, much less opportunity to sort of leave the existing civilization and go somewhere else to start over again.
	So that being the case, I think our best option is to find a way to minimize the harm the government does.
	To create as many opportunities for people to be separated from government and to function individually as they possibly can, to privatize government, to take those, as you said, to take those functions away from government that can be done without a government being involved, and to provide a minimum framework in the government for those things that people feel they absolutely cannot do without from a government, and under a structure where no individual has a greater advantage than any other to control What that government does.
	And I don't believe that our Constitution provides that perfect structure, unfortunately.
	I think that it might be possible to write something along those same lines that would do it better.
	But it depends, absolutely, not so much on the governing documents or the rules you agree on.
	It depends on the people being willing to constantly be vigilant and follow up on the rights that they possess And to follow up on the powers they've given government and make sure that government, the moment it starts to step out of line, is brought back into check.
	It has to be a symbiotic relationship.
	Government has to be continually rebuilt and renewed on a matter of daily basis if it's to function.
	You cannot have a government which is a static thing, which exists unto itself.
	Government has to be something which includes the people all of the time continually interfacing with the government if it is to be something that is not oppressive.
	I ran out of words.
	Well, I guess I have a few questions or issues with those arguments.
	I may have read a whole different set of history books, including Lisanda Spooner, but I'm not sure that I would agree at all with the argument that somehow the majority of people in the United States approved of The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and so on. My understanding of the history is that there were a fair number of Blacks and Chinese who weren't particularly available to give their assent.
	Half the population who were women were excluded.
	I don't believe that it was put to many young people and many people who were poor, many people who couldn't read.
	And so I don't really think that a case can be made that the Constitution was ratified by the majority or even everyone who would have to be in order to make a valid contract.
	In fact, the deliberations in the Constitution were entirely kept secret.
	It was a closed-door session.
	People weren't allowed in. The newspapers weren't allowed in.
	And it was simply presented as a fait accompli.
	At the point of a musket, I guess, when all was said and done.
	That seems to be in contradistinction to Dave's point that somehow people got together and couldn't solve their problems and therefore decided to come up with a government.
	Yeah, you said that people got together and decided to put together this constitutional republic.
	The other thing that I would argue is that it's true that there have been societies without a government, but to go back to the definition that I put forward, anarchy is not a society without a government.
	Anarchy is a society without rulers, and that is a very, very different thing, because there, of course, everybody who's in the government is a ruler, I mean, in terms of the legislative bodies and the enforcers through the police.
	But not every ruler is part of a government.
	So you could have some primitive Stone Age tribe where, you know, the leader cracks people on the head with a rock if he disobeys him or the shaman.
	That is an example of rulers, which we wouldn't really classify as a government.
	I think it would just be tribal leaders.
	In the cases where there have been no governments in the past, think in Ireland or Iceland or whatever, in sort of 5th century or 6th century and then 11th or 12th century, Oh, they did last a couple of five, six hundred years sometimes, which is pretty good compared to state of societies.
	But these were not societies without rulers, because you had priests who everyone believed were the sole ticket to salvation, and you had, you know, the local warlords and so on.
	And so these are not societies without rulers.
	A society without a ruler is a society that has accepted reason and evidence as the way of...
	Resolving conflicts. And this doesn't mean everyone, but for the most part, right?
	And so this is the distinction between, say, you know, religion, where there's no objective methodology for resolving conflicts, versus science, where there is the scientific method, which is the pretty objective way of resolving conflicts.
	And so before the scientific method was generally accepted and understood by the majority of people working in the physical disciplines, when there was like alchemy and prayer and Lord knows what, There was no real objective methodology for resolving disputes.
	Now, my argument is that when people begin to really understand rational philosophy, which has been a long, slow, and grueling process that is really, I think, still in its early days, when people accept reason and evidence as the means of resolving moral disputes and legal disputes and so on, Then society's got a huge step forward and we've moved in a sense from superstition to philosophy.
	And that's really how people will begin to resolve their disputes.
	You can't really look at primitive societies where there's no government and say this is a very rational, post-Socratic, you know, reason and evidence, science-based and trade-based kind of society.
	And so it's very much the pinnacle of advancement.
	So trying to sort of say, well, in the past there were these societies that were kind of primitive that didn't have a government and that's exactly the same.
	As rational, empirical, philosophical anarchy, I think, is a mistake.
	And of course, in the past, there have always been rulers.
	That doesn't mean that in the future there always has to be rulers.
	I'm sure we all understand that.
	In the past, up until the 17th century or so, in the past, there were always slaves.
	Almost all societies had slaves or slavery in some form.
	That didn't mean that that always had to be the case.
	Now, what's interesting is that the societies that have given up slavery, that have understood the moral argument against slavery, where slavery has become morally repugnant to just about every reasonable human being, 99.999% of the population would abhor and be virulently against slavery in the classical sense.
	Fiat currency is a slightly different matter.
	It doesn't tend to devolve back.
	Nobody is saying in the EU, the way that we should solve the currency problems is to get cheap labor by going to Africa and kidnapping a whole bunch of people and using them as slaves.
	Now, this would have been a reasonable argument, unfortunately, in the sort of 14th century.
	But in the 21st century, people have got that this is just not the right thing to do.
	They don't say, well, let's solve the problem of the economy by getting children who are six to go and clean chimneys again.
	And let's, you know, whatever, set up sweatshops for kids who are seven or eight.
	This is just not advanced because people have kind of grown beyond that.
	They haven't said, let's solve the problem of unemployment by banning women from having jobs.
	I mean, this would be an argument that may have had some traction a couple of hundred years ago, but doesn't anymore.
	When people make a step forward morally, it doesn't create a vacuum that then suddenly pulls some other evil forward.
	I mean, when people do make steps forward morally, where equality of women and the horrors around Slavery and, you know, a respect for not putting children up chimneys.
	When people step forward that way, they don't tend to just step backwards.
	And so I think it's hard to make the case that if people really understand the non-aggression principle and they're raised peacefully without spanking and rationally and all this kind of good stuff, they're not just going to go out and become like psycho killers who want to take over society and rule everyone in some Nero, ancient Roman emperor kind of fashion.
	So I don't think that looking back at history, I can't think of examples of society that were rational, They had an understanding of free market economics and were philosophical and understood the Socratic method and science and evidence and all that kind of stuff that also didn't have rulers.
	That to me is something that is not evidence of in history.
	The mere absence of a government is not the presence of anarchy.
	It is merely the absence of one kind of ruler.
	So I can't really look at history and say that's a valid approach.
	And I certainly can't think of a society where everyone got together and agreed That they were going to create this, you know, big-ass government.
	And that's obviously, I mean, because universal suffrage is very new in the world, and even if we accept that children shouldn't have a say in what kind of society they're going to grow into, and that by the time they're 18, that, you know, they just got to live with whatever they've got, pretty much, after having been indoctrinated by the state, although I know, of course, Dave would be against government education, I'm sure.
	But universal suffrage is very new.
	And so whatever societies were set up in the past was set up by a tiny minority relative to the numbers of people who could vote.
	Because there were slaves, because there were poor people, because there were women.
	Almost all throughout human history could not vote.
	And so even if voting did somehow legitimize the will of the majority over the will of the minority, and even if we accepted that that would somehow be valid all the way through time into the future, which would be an absolutely unprecedented kind of contract, There's no contract that you can sign in the free market that can bind strangers four generations from now.
	To create one for the state is to create a massive exemption in terms of fraud and force.
	But even if we were to accept all of those arguments, it's impossible to maintain that any of the existing governments in society came about through some sort of consensus because the vast majority of people had no say in it whatsoever.
	There are a number of points brought up there.
	And the first one I'll address is I never said that our government, as it was created, was created in an ideal situation.
	I didn't mean to put myself as a defender of the Constitution as it was written or the conditions it was written under.
	Obviously it was not a document which was representative of every person in the society at the time.
	It was a document representative of a very special interest group that happened to have some ideas about protecting the rights of minorities and Trying to create a stable government in mind.
	But at the time, the worldview was that certain groups didn't have the same right to be involved in the body politic that others did.
	And it has evolved over time that as others were added to that body politic, then they were provided the same protections as those who were in the original group, which is the way that that kind of a dynamic should operate.
	You also, you know, you talk about the rulers again.
	I had never meant to imply that I supported the idea of rulers in any form, and maybe the way that you're using anarchism, which I understand is a technically correct way to use it, although not the way that it is used popularly, really eliminates our conflict to a certain extent, because under your definition of anarchism, what I'm talking about as far as a consensual government really is within the scope of the kind of anarchism you're talking about, I guess.
	Because I'm not talking about a government of rulers who rule by arbitrary force.
	I'm talking about a government that is created by and maintained by a consensus of the people, where the people have a voice in the government, the ability, hopefully, to dissolve the government, and where those who run the government or operate the government are representatives of the people rather than rulers who are established over the people involuntarily.
	It's an idealistic system, just as most other philosophies of government are idealistic, but it's in the gray area between idealism and what's actually practical to have that kind of consensual government.
	I think we did have A relatively consensual government if you take into consideration the exception that we didn't acknowledge the rights of all people to vote.
	And it wasn't just elimination on the basis of gender or elimination from the voting populace on the basis of race.
	We had poll taxes.
	We had economic restrictions on who could vote in the early Republic as well.
	But none of those things necessarily change the basic sound concept of a government that is created by contract, by agreement between individuals, which at least in theory should be fair and representative if it's done right, which I think was done relatively well with the Constitution.
	And, you know, as far as the rights of minorities in that situation, one of the things that happened when the Constitution was written and when the nation was formed was that certain minorities that didn't agree with it, the ones who had opposed it during the war, found it expedient to leave the country.
	A great many loyalists went and settled in Canada, returned to England, Because they didn't feel they could live under the government that was established by the people who had been their enemies during the war.
	So one of the key things, of course, to making a consensual government work, an absolutely fundamental principle, is that you must have the ability to leave that country, to leave that government, and choose to live somewhere else.
	Freedom of movement is one of the most basic fundamental rights that individuals should have.
	I think Stetman would probably agree with that, because that, you know, It allows them to go and try to find the place where they can have a more free society, a more anarchist society, than what they may have been born into or be living in at the time.
	But, you know, there is no ideal solution to any of this stuff.
	I have to come back again to sort of the pragmatic questions, which is, how does Stephan think we would go from the society we have now, which we both obviously agree is far from perfect.
	The government we have now is entirely unacceptable in the things that it's doing.
	It has reached a level of abuse of our rights and of intrusion into our lives, which is intolerable.
	But the question then is, how do we get from here to a society which would be acceptable to the majority of the people and would have a minimal amount of government, or no government at all, or a government that's purely consensual and fits that anarchist model,
	Without going through a period of unimaginable bloodshed turmoil and general unhappiness, dissatisfaction, people running naked in the streets, and what most people think of as anarchy in that transition.
	When there have been attempts to overthrow, to get rid of oppressive governments, you often end up with things like the Russian and French revolutions.
	And the irony there is, things get better for about 15 minutes, and then they get even worse than they were before in most of these cases.
	So, given the lack of historic examples of an overthrow of an existing regime leading to a real solution, and don't use the American The situation is an example because in America we had the advantage of being geographically separated from our oppressors.
	When have we ever been able to go backwards on that large scale to something more fundamental and pure?
	When are we able to turn the dial back from 11 where it is now to 1 or 0?
	It just doesn't seem to happen.
	You talked about people becoming more rational.
	I agree that we have in some ways become more rational, but most of these victories over various oppressive institutions like slavery were not achieved by the rationalists.
	They were ultimately achieved by pragmatic reasons for economic reasons.
	Slavery became economically infeasible.
	That's one of the reasons why it was able to be defeated.
	I firmly believe that if slavery had remained profitable, it would have lasted for another hundred years.
	And we still have economic slavery in one form or another.
	Those dynamics don't really go away, and from what I see in society, people may have become more civilized, but they haven't become more rational.
	There's an amazing amount of irrationality in the principles under which people operate in modern society as well.
	The irrationality of fundamentalist religion, which has had a big upsurge in recent years, the irrationality of the socialist and communist agendas, the philosophies of the European Union, the people running that part of the world, the philosophies of some of the Of the Chinese.
	It's not rational philosophy in most cases.
	It's an irrational emotional philosophy, nationalism being one of the most dominant forms of it.
	I don't see us really getting that much more rational, except that maybe those of us who are rational understand it better and have more tools at our command.
	Right. Well, those are excellent points.
	The argument, and I hate to take on my ultimate mentor, Socrates, in any way or form, because it's intellectual hubris of the highest degree, but I take great issue with Socrates' argument that the government owns everyone and everything, and the only way to protest it is to leave.
	For many reasons. Obviously, in the Mafia could make that argument about a neighborhood.
	If you don't want to pay your protection money, you're free to move to another neighborhood, and we would not recognize that as just.
	I don't accept that there's an...
	Obviously, an institution can't own anything, and a constitution can't protect you from anything, because all they are is pieces of paper.
	George... No, George W. Bush didn't get a whole lot right, but he did say the Constitution is just a goddamn piece of paper.
	He's right. It's just a goddamn piece of paper.
	And the only thing is that there is only a government of men.
	We say, oh, we want a government of laws and not of men.
	Well, men are not robots, and they don't get programmed by laws, and they have their own free choices, they have their own free will, and they like using power to their own advantage, which is why you can't create a monopoly of power and expect to do anything other than be a gravity well to all the worst elements in society.
	So I don't accept that the right to leave a country, which is really a right to keep your friends and family hostage in a sense, because you have to move away from them, maybe to a country where you don't know anyone or don't speak the language or uncomfortable with the climate or whatever.
	I mean, I don't believe that the government gives you any freedom by allowing you...
	To leave. And of course, generally, it is the case that all you can do is go from one cage to another cage, right?
	So even if you're allowed to leave the US and go work someplace else, you then just start paying taxes.
	It's not the same to be able to go from one cage to another as the same to be able to go into the wilderness.
	And I don't accept that any human being, even temporarily, has the right of property over an entire geographical area.
	No matter how many people approve of it, it is still immoral.
	The numbers of people who approve of an action do not denote its morality.
	In fact, As I think, as you point out, it often denotes its irrationality and immorality.
	So there's no institution that can own anything because ownership is a function of human action.
	And therefore, only human beings can own anything.
	And there's no human being who can own everything simply by being vested with some powers and imaginary powers in the majority.
	I don't get to... The majority doesn't get to grant me the right to fly and it doesn't get to grant anybody else the right to own everything and exercise that kind of property right.
	Especially, of course, since it does conflict with other people's property rights and there's no investment of labor and blah, blah, blah.
	So I wanted to point that out.
	But to move to something I think is very positive.
	And I think that we're on the same page as far as we want the institutions of law, the institutions of rules within society to be continually improved and subject to the will of the people.
	I completely agree with that.
	I think that is, you know, voluntarism is quality, in my opinion, until people had the choice to get married and the choice to divorce.
	All marriages pretty much sucked in the same way that all services provided by the government pretty much sucked because it's not voluntarism.
	Voluntarism is quality and we do want quality in our social institutions.
	We do want quality in how conflicts get resolved and hopefully how they get prevented.
	We do want real quality in how our persons and property get protected.
	We do want real quality in our children's education.
	And force, a monopoly, is the opposite of quality.
	Voluntarism is quality, at least the way that I would argue it.
	And so I think that We're sort of talking about the same thing.
	I think you call it the government and I would call it, I call it DROs or other people call them other things, just, you know, voluntary ways of getting your needs met as far as protection and contract and so on goes.
	But I think that the best way, you know, they call it the dollar democracy, right?
	That the best way to get quality out of institutions that solve social problems is to have a constant flow to and fro of customers.
	They try and make the case for you.
	They show you the evidence about how they are best helping the poor or how they are best curing cancer or how they are best building roads.
	And they make the case and they provide advertisements and testimonials and whatever data.
	And they attempt to woo customers that way.
	And if some company gets big and bloated and unresponsive and starts spending all of its money on massive junkets to the moon for executives, then people will leave that and stop being customers and then new management will come in or whatever company goes out of business.
	So I think that this constant sort of the creative destruction of the free market is what we want.
	It's far more important to have that in something like police and defense than it is to have it in freaking iPhones and computer desks and windows and, you know, just looking at things around my room.
	You know, where we have the greatest danger, we have the greatest need for voluntarism.
	Where we have the greatest possibility of corruption, we need the greatest choice among consumers because it is only voluntarism That opposes corruption, that opposes the expansion of power.
	All corruptions have an economic cost because all corruptions are by definition economically inefficient.
	If some defense agency that wants to go and, you know, build all of these, you know, super shark weapon robots firing badger nipples out of their eyeballs or whatever, that's going to cost a lot of money and that's going to raise the prices for their customers.
	So there's inefficiency.
	Trying to go from becoming some private defense agency to becoming the all-powerful defense agency It sends clear market signals.
	It's very expensive. People will leave you in droves.
	Shareholders will revolt.
	Everyone will reveal what you're doing, all the people you're buying from and trying to order these laser nipple fires or whatever.
	And so we accept that the quality of our cell phones is very much dependent upon the volunteerism in the free market.
	It's the difference between a Mercedes-Benz and a Lada in the car market.
	And so it seems to me, since we accept that quality is really important, since we accept that corruption and inefficiency are economically bad, the best way to ensure that goods are provided as corruption-free as possible, as force-free as possible, as prevention-positive as possible, rather than reaction or curing, is to ensure that we have voluntarism, that we have the right to come and go, to place our dollars wherever we want, not Federal Reserve notes, but whatever replaces them in the free market.
	To make sure that wherever we have the greatest danger, that's where we need the greatest amount of voluntarism.
	Because where there is that danger, we need people to be able to leave at the moment's sign of trouble.
	If some defense agency is getting too big and throwing its weight around and becoming nasty, boom!
	People gotta leave. And all the other defense agencies will be very happy to point out all the flaws in this defense agency and put out scary ads, you know, with all the truths and so on.
	And so, where there is the greatest danger of corruption, the concentration power, and a non-responsiveness to very, very important market forces, that's where we need to really hit the gas and really push home the idea of voluntarism, because that's where the greatest danger arises.
	Now, very briefly, to sort of point out, so I think we're in agreement that we need these things to be efficient, we need them to be quality, we need them to hopefully conform with the non-aggression principle, which I think only the truly voluntary society does.
	As to how to get there, I am in complete agreement.
	A bloody revolution is about the worst conceivable way to come up with a free society.
	And I agree. America was in a unique position that I can't imagine will ever be equal, even if we find some floating paradise on Mars that we can all go live in.
	It's never going to be equal.
	So I think that was a frozen moment in time that has long passed and is unable to be reproduced.
	the vast majority of revolutions in human history produce far worse conditions after the fact and usually actually interestingly only arise after an improvement in conditions if you look at the not so much the french revolution but certainly the russian revolution things were getting quite a bit better you had some freedom from the serfs you started to get some democracy you got free trade coming up bang then there was this reaction formation back so i agree we can't win through revolution i don't believe that we can win through politics i think politics has been tried for About 2500 years,
	we've tried to use politics to control the state.
	Certainly over the past 150-200 years since the classical liberals were writing, we've tried that really hard.
	We have tried, since the founding of the Libertarian Party in the early 1970s, we've tried that really hard.
	So thousands or hundreds or decades of years, it doesn't really matter.
	It doesn't work. It doesn't work.
	And there's lots of reasons why.
	I've got a book called How Not to Achieve Freedom, if anyone's interested.
	It's free on my website at freedomandradio.com.
	But, how do we get there?
	Well, I think there's really interesting science.
	There's really interesting psychological facts and medical facts about how we go to a free society.
	And I think, without wanting to make the whole complex case, and people can check out more of my material on this, I've got interviews with tons of psychologists about all of this, but...
	Fundamentally, if we raise children without aggression, that means spanking, that may even mean timeouts, which I've used maybe twice and have completely abandoned in my parenting.
	No yelling, no name-calling, no spanking, no threats, no threats of ostracism or abandonment, and not dumping them in daycare for more than 20 hours a week, as that's equivalent to they experience the same psychological effects as maternal or parental abandonment. as that's equivalent to they experience the same psychological effects Spanking, according to the latest research, to children is indistinguishable from physical assaults because, of course, the science and power differential is so great.
	If we raise children without aggression, then the science seems very, very clear that they grow up more intelligent, more intelligent, more intelligent, more intelligent.
	They have greater mental health and stability.
	They have more positive relationships with their peers.
	They're much, much less violent, much less prone to violence.
	In fact, it's almost non-existent among children who are raised very peacefully.
	And they're much less dysfunctional.
	They don't get into drugs.
	They don't get into gangs. They don't get into teen pregnancy.
	They don't get into alcoholism.
	They don't even smoke. Their health outcomes are much better.
	Their job stability, financial stability, all of these things are way better.
	And they become of course better parents to their own children and so on and so In a sense, the government, it feeds social dysfunction and it feeds off social dysfunction, right?
	And so when you have a whole bunch of, you know, single parents and gangs and bad schools and all of that, you create all of this social dysfunction, which creates further demand for government services and government protection.
	If we sort of look at it the other way and turn it the other way, so if we as a community say, we're going to apply the non-aggression principle to our own households, particularly to our own parenting, You raise children highly functional who are not going to require government services.
	You raise children who are not aggressive and not subject to a lot of fear from aggression either.
	You raise children who are going to be very intelligent, right?
	Because spanking alone drops IQ by three to five points.
	And with all of this in place, they're going to be much less desire for government services, much less need for government services.
	We outgrow the state and there'll be much less belief Like an innate belief in why there would even need to be a government.
	Because if you think about it, the way that parents treat their children is very similar to how governments treat their children.
	My house, my rules. Well, this is kind of my country, my rules.
	So if you don't like it, you can leave, says the bad dad.
	And this is what the government says as well.
	And the way that Parents teach their children fundamentally is through power, not reason.
	And again, this isn't universal, but it's depressingly common.
	I think it's 80 to 90% of parents are still spanking their children.
	And so if children are forced to do stuff based upon the power and authority of the parent rather than reasoned with and negotiated with, then of course they're going to grow up saying, well, we need a top-down hierarchy in society.
	We need someone who's going to tell us what to do.
	We can't all negotiate with each other.
	It's like expecting a child to grow up speaking Mandarin if they've never been exposed to the language.
	Of course they're going to grow up speaking the language called the state, called power, called rulers, called authority, called subjugation, called power.
	And so we just need to make it a multi-generational project to raise children outside of hierarchy, to raise children outside of aggression, outside of violence.
	The science is incredibly clear.
	Incredibly clear and consistent about the positive effects it has on children.
	The positive effects it's going to have on society.
	It's the greatest revolution that can be conceived of.
	I tend to agree with you about raising children without violence, without threats, without coercion.
	I think that's the way to do child raising, and without the government being involved as well as possible.
	The problem, again, though, is that how do you take a society of bad parents and turn them into good parents?
	We've seen a trend in recent years towards parents being More rational with their children, with raising their children better.
	But it generally takes place in a certain segment of society, the educated portion of society, the wealthier portion of society, and all you're really seeing happen then is that one class of people raise more functional children, more rational children, and that goes on from generation to generation, while the other segment of society continues on in the way that they've been doing it for generation after generation after generation.
	And isn't terribly receptive to being reasoned with to change the way that they do things.
	So you end up with the Eloi and the Morlocks, two divided sections of society, which can't really function together as well as they once did because their values have become more and more different as time has gone by.
	Libertarians, for the most part, fall into the same general category as the sort of liberal elite, as people call them, of being people who are intellectual, irrational for the most part, and who raise their children in a more accepting and rational way.
	But that group, some on the right politically, some on the left politically, is very far separated from the vast mass of people in the country who don't subscribe to those rationalist ideals and don't seem to want to buy them from us very much either, based on voting and And things like that, popularity of candidates.
	We have a sort of liberty-oriented candidate running for office, for example.
	He has to, in some ways, disguise some of his beliefs, some of his more rational positions, in order to get people to buy into him in a mass market.
	Anyway, to go back to something else that you were saying, if I can remember it, the problem with going over multiple points is I can't always remember the ones that came earlier.
	But we have this question of what is government, essentially, that's been brought up a couple of times here.
	And I think that maybe we agree that government is maybe the wrong term to use for it, but government is the term that we've sort of come to accept for what we do to keep society at a certain level of order.
	But we did talk about how government You were saying that turning government back is difficult and has never really happened.
	That's what I'm trying to get to. But I think there is one example, actually, where it has worked.
	And this is one that people don't think about very much, but at the same time we had the American Revolution here, and it may have been a side effect of the American Revolution, you saw in England a turning back of their government at the same time as part of that classical liberal revolution, where England, looking at the example of America,
	looking at the conditions that existed within their own country in the early phase of the Industrial Revolution, It went through a period of change in national policy, in how they handled things domestically, in how human condition crises were handled, all the problems that they had that most of the countries in Europe had during that early 19th century period.
	England dealt with relatively bloodlessly through political reform, through opening up institutions, through widening the voting franchise, through eliminating slavery, and it did all these things actually faster than America did them and faster than Europe did them.
	So what you saw happening when you come to the 1840s for the most part is that in England you didn't have the uprisings and the rebellions and the revolutions that you had all over Europe in 1848.
	England instead had to have the Chartist Revolt, which was relatively minor.
	They had some labor union uprisings and things like that that were on a small scale.
	But you didn't have vast social upheaval because England had found a way under their consensual form of government that was the basis for what we tried to develop here in America, they had found a way for people to be involved in the process Of taking government down to a more popular level and reforming government internally that seemed to work in that situation.
	And actually, to give them credit, even today the English seem to be better than we are, better than most countries are, at rolling back the clock on government.
	They've still got way too much government.
	They're still probably worse off than we are in a lot of ways.
	But you do see the English, through their parliamentary system of government, with a lot of turnover in representation, where the basis of representation is very small and very local, you do seem to see more possibilities for them to reverse the excesses of government than you see in most nations.
	It's something that should be studied and looked at, and you figure out what the key nugget To what they've done right is, and try to maximize that in the future for whatever, you know, government you're trying to live in.
	I think there's something there, something right in their system of government that isn't so right over here.
	You know, in the period starting with Margaret Thatcher and going forward from there, they had managed to roll back a lot of the excesses that came out of the 1970s there, a lot of the socialism that was Implemented starting, you know, with Clement Attlee after World War II, they just became more and more and more and more socialist, and at some point they drew a line and said, stop, and they started to roll it back, lowering taxes, opening up opportunities, dealing with immigration in a way which was in many ways better than we've dealt with it here.
	You know, there's something right that's been done in England.
	It's not perfect by any means, but, you know, if you look around the world, there are other places where things have been done right as well.
	If you look at the Netherlands and Belgium, The Netherlands and Belgium, as opposed to the Belgians and the Netherlands.
	They've also done some things right.
	They've found ways to roll back some aspects of government, to take institutions of government and privatize them, like in the case of the Netherlands, they privatized medicine and education to a large extent by using a voucher system.
	There are solutions out there which do reduce government's overbearing role in our lives.
	And those are the things that I think we should pursue.
	It's all a matter of half measure.
	You're never going to instantaneously get a perfect solution.
	And I hate the idea that we might try to do something like a constitutional convention, which some people are pushing for now, to try to fix everything all at once.
	But I think that just as we have incrementally gotten worse and worse, I think we can incrementally fix a lot of this stuff by presenting it to people as small individual solutions to individual problems.
	But instead of offering them more government solutions, offer them more voluntary solutions.
	Instead, I mean, this was, you know, one of my great idols growing up was Milton Friedman.
	And this is Milton Friedman's answer to the problem of government, is that you go and you pick individual institutions and you privatize them, you take them away from government one by one by one, until eventually you return control over their lives to the people.
	And I think he was right about that.
	Trying to do it on a wholesale level is too risky, but I think you can do bit by bit.
	You can return things back the way they should be.
	Well, I mean, I think that's great.
	But to me, that's like a business plan called Make Money, which is sort of implicit and doesn't give you any particularly productive details.
	And so the problem, of course, and I'm sure everybody's aware of this, but it's worth, I think, reminding us of that, is that The incentive problem is too big to overcome.
	So everybody who benefits from a government program is hugely invested in keeping it going, whereas everyone who pays for it has only a tiny incentive to oppose it.
	And this is why you get these ridiculous things like sugar subsidies going on for so long, because the sugar producers get a million bucks ahead for the sugar subsidies and protections and tariffs, whereas the average consumer pays only, you know, 10, 20 bucks a year.
	And so this incentive, the imbalance of incentives is just Too huge to overcome.
	There's just no way. No way to do it.
	And so, you know, the idea that we're going to sort of privatize little bits of government here and there and then whittle it down that way, I think is, you know, everybody who's pro-privatization is going to get an insignificant benefit, whereas everyone who's going to be privatized has massive and imminent losses.
	And so, I just, I mean, there's just no way.
	It'd be great if we could, but I think the reality is, and I think the empirical evidence is, that it's not something that is really, really going to achieve.
	I do agree, though, that the extension of voluntarism to formally non-voluntary institutions is really important.
	And this is why. I mean, this is one of the more controversial things that I do talk about, but I think philosophically it's completely consistent with libertarian thought, which is, you know, as I said, if you can't divorce if your relationships between husband and wife are involuntary, Then you can't really have quality marriages because, you know, in a sense, you can't fire your husband or your wife and anyone you can't fire is not going to provide you a quality service.
	And in the same way, I sort of look vertically between adults and their parents and say, well, why is this subject to these different kind of rules?
	So, Pete, you said, well, how do we improve parenting as a whole?
	Well, I think we have to make the family, we have to encourage the family to be voluntary.
	Rather than just assume, well, these are my parents and therefore I have to, you know, hang out with them for the rest of my life to actually look at the quality of your relationship to try and improve it if possible.
	But yeah, if your parents smacked you around and were drunk and, you know, drove cars into your bedroom through your bedroom window and stuff, then...
	Yeah, I mean, I think you should examine whether you want to spend time with them as an adult.
	That, to me, is bringing voluntarism to an environment.
	And if parents, in a sense, can be fired, then they're going to have an incentive to provide better quality service to their children.
	This is certainly the approach that I take in parenting and an approach that I've tried to...
	Sort of put out there. We all understand that public sector workers who can't be fired aren't going to do a very good job.
	And if we have this cultural belief that, you know, my parents, no matter how badly they treat me, I have to spend time with them.
	I have to, you know, have a relationship with them.
	This is something we've completely rejected.
	I mean, if you're abused as a wife, everybody says you should leave that relationship.
	And so, if there's no penalty, in a sense, for parents being abusive from a voluntary relationship standpoint with their adult children, then that abuse is much more likely to continue.
	The best way to counter corruption and abuse is through voluntarism, whether it's in the government, whether it's in business, whether it's in the family, whether it's in marriage.
	And the extension of this principle, I think, is really, really important so that we bring the innate improvement in service provision, if I can use that cold term for being a parent or being a husband or being a friend, is the promotion of volunteerism.
	And I think if we can bring the concept of volunteerism to the family, we're going to end up with a much greater quality.
	It is something that people can really review and achieve in their own lives.
	Of course, the goal is to improve relationships, but if, of course, this is the goal with marriage as well, marriage counseling, but if the relationship can't be improved, then the idea of voluntarism between adult parents and adult children is something that is not really discussed.
	In fact, it seems to be quite a taboo topic.
	And so naturally, as a philosopher, I'm drawn to that, which is the most taboo, because I think that's where the greatest fruition and potential lies in the future for freedom.
	And so that's, you know, I think, yeah, it'd be great if we can privatize the institutions of government.
	I'd just be happy with bringing more concepts of voluntarism and the resulting increase in quality simply deeper within the family structure, since I do believe that the state is fundamentally an effect of family relations, and this seems to be borne out by a large number of scientific studies that show that people's political influence Thank you.
	Thank you. The science, the facts, the evidence, the experts keep drawing me back to this sort of one institution, which I think we're going to have a lot more luck with in terms of voluntarism than we do in trying to sort of bring down sugar tariffs or privatize the post office, if that makes any sense. A question for me, what about after an economic collapse?
	Would not people be more persuasive in the privatization plan?
	I think it could be done there.
	Well, I mean, obviously it'd be great if we could avoid an economic collapse.
	I think that an economic adjustment that's going to be quite interesting is inevitable.
	I mean, it's just so late in the game.
	But I think that it can go either way, right?
	So in times of crisis, it can go either way, and that's the real challenge.
	That's why I think we've got to keep shooting these flares up to illuminate that it is not freedom that has failed, it is force that has failed.
	It is not voluntarism or the free market or trade or money in terms of the private sense.
	It is government intervention, government control, government, quote, management, and the inflation that's resulted in free currency that has failed.
	And that's because the government's going to want to blame the free market, right?
	I mean, the government creates all the problems and then brings freedom for the problems.
	We have to keep reminding people that, you know, we predicted this, that we've been right all along, and that people better start listening to us.
	The worst things get because, you know...
	Sure, as sunrise, the government's going to try and blame all the voluntary interactions in the world for all the effects of its own violence and corruption.
	And so I think there is going to be an economic dislocation.
	And I think it's really important that we get as much information out there as passionately, as powerfully, as positively as possible to remind people about the real causes of these issues.
	I'm sorry, Dave, you can grab the next one.
	one.
	I think, I don't know if Ian's going to put them up or what.
	Ian has posted a question for me.
	Let me take it quickly.
	Right. Ian is putting them up now.
	The first question was, how do you justify government morally?
	And I'm going to take that and also deal with the second question here, which kind of relates to it.
	I don't try to justify government morally.
	Government is by its nature inherently immoral.
	What I do try to justify, however, is when government reduces the negative impact for people, Then it's less immoral than the alternative.
	So a good government which governs minimally and provides only those services which people need is better than a big government which oppresses people.
	And I don't see there being a third option that actually works in the real world.
	So my starting assumption is that you will have some sort of government.
	And then the question is, what can you do to make that government do the least harm possible?
	That's a moral judgment.
	But government isn't the moral choice.
	Government is the alternative to the immorality, or limited government, good government, is the alternative to the immorality of bad government.
	And those seem to me to be the two choices that you have.
	So what I'd rather have is the more moral, less immoral, less destructive government, as opposed to the alternative which is the worst of government's excesses.
	And the other question that was asked, that sort of goes along with this, was how do you achieve minarchism if you can't achieve anarchism?
	And you can achieve minarchism because you can do it incrementally.
	Maybe if you achieve enough minarchism, the next step beyond that, once you achieve your minarchist paradise, is to take the next step in reducing government and end up with the anarchist paradise.
	I just don't have a lot of faith in being able to get that far in the process.
	I don't have a lot of faith in being able to get to minarchism.
	I think that I'd be very happy if we could cut down our institution of government to the point where we get to reasonable government of some sort.
	You know, that would be an improvement.
	If we had the government that we had when I was a child, even, we'd be a lot better off.
	If we had the government we have in some of our least heavily governed states on a nationwide basis, we would be much better off than we are now.
	One thing that I didn't mention when Stephen brought it up before is that here in Texas we have an awful lot of functions of government which are performed privately and which work very, very well.
	And I think that you could do that on a nationwide scale, on a state-by-state basis, on a much larger level than it's being done now.
	And also with the issue of revolution, what happens after the collapse of society, you already see a lot of people branching out into the underground economy.
	into alternative business models.
	With the credit drying up, you see people raising money by alternative methods of raising money.
	You see a lot more entrepreneurship developing.
	If enough of that goes on, we could stave off the economic disaster by essentially creating a second economy within the existing economy, which would be resistant to the forces which are making the major economy crash.
	I just answered three questions, I think, and I'll hand it off.
	Oh, wait, I have to be angry for a minute with Jocelyn.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	Yes, less immorality is immorality.
	But at the same time, more immorality is more immorality.
	Would you rather have your entire leg chopped off or one toe?
	I'll take the toe over the leg.
	That's the kind of choices you have to make in the real world.
	I'm done. Yeah, I mean, the counterargument to that is that we've tried that for quite a long time.
	And, you know, I'm a relentless empiricist, and that doesn't mean that, you know, I'm right.
	It just means that the way that I look at the evidence is that we've really, really tried for a long, long, long time, again, all the way back to Socrates, to try and use various mechanisms to control the science and power of the state.
	Since it is a monopoly of force and since it draws bad people to use its power and to increase its power and since power over others is an addiction, it's like expecting a heroin junkie to suddenly...
	Not. The heroin junk game could vaguely happen, I guess, theoretically, but it's not very common.
	And so I think that we need to start looking at alternatives.
	And I think that you can't use the argument from efficiency to overturn the state because the state is so damn efficient for bad people and for lazy people and for incompetent people.
	And so... The argument from efficiency like, oh, we'll be better off collectively.
	Well, there is no such thing as the collective, of course.
	We all understand that. And the government is so incredibly efficient for bad people to impose their will, for inefficient people to get money, for corrupt people to get power.
	And so anytime you say, well, we'll just play down the moral side of things and we'll just use this argument that it's going to be economically efficient or society will be better off in some abstract way or you'll have more money in your pocket or whatever or taxes will go down...
	The moment you give up the moral argument or you compromise the moral argument, you argue from efficiency, you've lost.
	Because the argument from efficiency is going to benefit the people.
	Benefiting the sugar produces a lot more than everybody else.
	And so that's why I think that if we let go of the non-aggression principle or say, well, let's just go for less violence, we end up with more and more and more.
	Because once we've compromised the principle, I mean, what are we fighting for?
	A couple extra bucks in people's pocket?
	Well, people don't care that much about extra bucks in their pocket.
	If they did, we already would have had a revolution.
	So... What they care about, I think, is morality.
	I believe that moral arguments, moral foundations, really do run the world.
	And I think that the argument against slavery was pounded in morally.
	The argument against women's inequality was pounded in morally.
	It wasn't compromise. They didn't say, let's get one less beating for the slave every week.
	They said slavery is an abomination and must be eradicated.
	And yeah, you could say there was economic efficiency arguments in there as well.
	Yeah, I understand that. But there was still a very powerful moral campaign that made that translatable and actionable by the average person who wouldn't understand the economic arguments to save their life.
	I mean, how many people were versed in Austrian economics in the 18th century?
	Not very many! And so that's why I won't give up the fundamental moral argument, because I've seen libertarians, and I've been one of those libertarians, trying to make that argument from efficiency for decades, and seeing it just get worse and worse and worse.
	And I think it's because if you argue for less whipping, you really only serve those people who still want to keep whipping the slaves, and in fact, you only increase their power.
	Whereas if you just damn the whole thing as immoral from top to bottom, slavery, evil, statism, immoral, top to bottom, uncompromisedly.
	you may lose, but it's the best chance I think we have for winning because I think the alternatives have been proven extremely, not only ineffective, but counterproductive because the state just keeps getting bigger.
	And I'm sorry, as far as the government crashing, sorry to interrupt if you dismissed that, but remember, I mean, between a quarter and a third of the economy sorry to interrupt if you dismissed that, but remember, I mean, between a quarter and a third of the economy of So you may be surprised how much continues to work if there's something goes wrong with things.
	Of course, if currency is a problem, then...
	I mean, most of the food supply is going to go toast, but a lot of things will still work because they work outside the government.
	It's just another proof. If volunteerism can operate a third of the world's economy, even in direct opposition and having the state make it illegal, imagine how it could work, how well it could work if it was in the open.
	I'm done, so please go ahead and take another question.
	Right, to respond to Stefan for a second on the last thing that he said, which is very interesting.
	One of the statistics that I've been following is the size of the underground economy.
	The underground economy is now over $4 trillion a year.
	It's up to almost a third of our GDP. And as the economy gets worse, more people go into the underground economy, more people go off the books, more labor is taking place and being paid for with alternative forms of payment.
	And that's a sign of the economic situation that we're in.
	People don't trust the structure that we've established to run our economy, and they're looking for something else.
	Whether it's large enough to take over if the economy collapsed is probably debatable.
	But anyway, going back to the moral argument, my issue with that is that I don't see the people as a whole necessarily waking up to that morality or accepting the idea of morality.
	We've tried and tried and tried, as you said, to sell these ideas.
	The Libertarian Party are trying to sell some of these ideas For 40 years and people are not buying them.
	So something else has to be done.
	You have to sell something else.
	As your cover for it, essentially, and sneak the good ideas in on the back of issues that stir up the public.
	That's the way the political system works, if you want to make change.
	It's very disappointing. It's very frustrating.
	But I don't agree with Stephan that we should give up, necessarily, on trying everything that we can to change the system as it exists, because you're changing it one way or another.
	You're either going to change it by overthrowing it and changing it radically, or you're going to change it incrementally, And if you don't try to change it, there's really nothing you can do except what a lot of my friends down here in Austin have done, which is to become voluntarist agorists who have sort of dropped out of society and are living on their farms and eating their chickens and just trying not to interact with government at all.
	The problem with that is that that only works so long as government doesn't want to interact with you.
	No matter how many people choose to sort of drop out of society and Live an alternative lifestyle.
	Eventually, they're still subject to the whims of government, and therefore, they'd be much better off if they were interfacing with trying to change the government and not putting off the inevitable by trying to live outside of the system.
	And it tends to turn the public discourse over to the bad people, basically.
	If you can drop out of the public discourse, then the worst voice take over.
	Somebody has written, Dave, as an individual, would you allow me to secede from the authority of the state and take responsibility for my actions or force me to participate in the state system?
	And this, of course, is an essential question.
	The brief voluntarist or anarchist side of the coin is if you want to buy a big tract of land and set up your own government, then you can do that.
	You can entice people to come and live there.
	And if this is a model that people want to work with, then that's perfectly fine.
	If you want to set up a...
	Hippie-dippie socialist commune, you can do all of that.
	So the voluntary society can accommodate people who want to live under a particular kind of contract.
	I mean, obviously, we would hope that they'd be able to leave if they wanted, but you could buy that tract of land, you could set up a social contract, you could have a government, you could have police, you could have taxation, or whatever, if you wanted.
	And that would be an experiment that a free society would Yeah, it's your land, it's your voluntary contract or whatever.
	It wouldn't be exactly the same as the government because I assume there'd be revocation clauses.
	But so anarchism can handle the government, but I don't think a government can handle anarchism because it needs that geographical monopoly.
	So I guess the question is, would in the military system, would somebody be allowed to to buy attractive land and say, you know, I don't want to use these services.
	I'm going to do my own thing.
	Would that be possible? If I may, I want to answer two questions that have come up here.
	The first one is Guest964 asked me if as an individual I would allow him to escape or secede from the authority of the state and take responsibility for my actions or force him to participate in the state system.
	Well, asking what I do as an individual is almost meaningless in a state system because as an individual I'd love for you to be able to do anything you wanted as long as it hurt no one else.
	But the problem is that once you have a state established, It's the state that's going to make those decisions, not your individual, not your neighbor, not your friend.
	The state is ultimately going to decide whether you can comply or can't comply, or whether you can have that little individual paradise or group, you know, if you can have your own little state within a state, or your own little community within a community, you know, you're stuck with a situation where sometimes you have to interact with other people.
	And we've seen many situations where these idealistic communities, like for example here in Texas, the Future Day, Latter-day Saints, sorry, the The fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints set up this community where they were entirely self-contained, where they were practicing polygamy, some questionable things were going on there, and they couldn't stay away from the scrutiny of the state.
	Inevitably, the state wanted to get involved and make sure that they conformed to a certain extent.
	But somebody else brought up something really very, very interesting.
	Somebody else mentioned infiltrating the mafia and turning it into a charity.
	What many people don't realize is that the mafia and other criminal institutions, including some of our current contemporary street gangs, are very heavily involved in charity work.
	They have church charities in the mafia.
	They have charities that they fund.
	They donate money to various causes.
	In times when we've had sort of less of a structured society, Criminal institutions often are involved in providing services to the communities that they came out of.
	In a lot of cases, some of the things we think of now as criminal gangs got their start because certain services were not being provided in the communities that they originated in, and they organized in order to provide some of those services.
	Even if those services happened to be access to drugs or access to certain other things, that's where they came from.
	They're a great example of a sort of naturally occurring economic system.
	Yes, but although the Mafia does do some charity, the United Way doesn't spend a lot of money on hitmen.
	So it's not quite as big an overlap as I think the question suggests.
	I don't know, maybe the United Way does use hitmen.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	This question of the Mafia versus the United Way, of course, brings us to the idea of unions.
	Unions were intended to be institutions that protected the rights of workers, but unions have become very much like criminal gangs, and they do use hitmen.
	So the dividing line between criminal enterprise and people just organizing for their own good is unfortunately very thin.
	Well, I don't think the underground economy is the real free market because it is underground.
	And that which is just like saying that the underground railroad for slaves in the 19th century was some sort of travel agency because it has to operate without the clear functionality of open contracts and it has to really bury itself.
	And so I wouldn't say that it really is a free market to be evading and dodging the state.
	You know, a guy dodging sniper bullets is not out for a stroll.
	Oh god, Seven just disappeared again.
	The answer, since Seven's having these video problems, go back to Guess964's question to clarify.
	Yes, I think that groups should be allowed to secede if they do things like buy the property they secede on and provide their services for themselves.
	I really have a hard time arguing against the right of secession, at least on an economic basis.
	But on the other hand, when it comes to states, which are institutions of government which have signed on to a contract like the Constitution, I do not feel comfortable with an entire state seceding from the Union, as many paleo-conservatives think.
	It was a great idea.
	That's a different issue than a small group of individuals wanting to live their own sort of separate existence on territory that previously belonged to another country.
	If they own that territory free and clear, if they own that land free and clear and the assets they're using free and clear, I think they should be allowed to exist independently under their own control.
	I don't believe that minarchy will eventually lead to anarchy.
	My argument is that minarchy leads to the very biggest governments that can be conceived of.
	And so I think aiming at minarchism is one of these, you know, there's a lot in thought that is really counterproductive.
	You know, I think about this sometimes, you know, you go to the dentist and they take those scratchy things and they just scrape the lipid crap out of your gums.
	And it's like, wow, that really hurt and I'm spitting blood.
	This really can't be good for me, but it actually is.
	And so there's a lot of things that are kind of counterproductive, counterintuitive.
	That's kind of why we need philosophy.
	It's like we need nutrition because chocolate tastes better than broccoli.
	And so we need philosophy because there's a lot that's counterintuitive.
	And so what's counterintuitive is you think we aim for the small government.
	And what happens historically is you end up at the very biggest government.
	It's the case I made at the beginning of the debate.
	And so if we get minarchism, the next stop is not anarchism.
	The next stop is Leviathan.
	And that's why you've got to aim straight for anarchism.
	That's the only way that you'll get there.
	You aim for minarchism, you've got a bigger and bigger and bigger government.
	So that would be my argument.
	To respond to what Stefan just answered.
	I agree with Stephen that the tendency of government is to get bigger.
	And that's the inherent nature of government is that it builds upon itself.
	But then I think that it is realistic to continually hammer it down.
	You know, if you have a...
	Sorry, I've just been talking so, Dave, if you want to go ahead with the final comments.
	And you keep it at a reasonable level.
	I guess my approach to all this is that we're doing damage control.
	That's fine. Do I have final comments?
	I don't know, like you asked Rachel's final question, which is how would you fund government?
	I mean, ideally, in an ideal world, most of government would exist on a fee-for-service basis, where everyone would pay some sort of subscription fee for the services the government provides, and that would probably fit within Stevan's definition of anarchism.
	But at the same time, there are some things which government would do which some people would not want to pay for, and then unfortunately you get into the realm of a certain amount of coercion to get those things covered.
	Well, I appreciate the conversation.
	I think we're very much along the same lines.
	Feed-for-service, yeah, absolutely.
	But the difference, and it is not a small difference, but a massive chasm, the difference is that I have no problem with feed-for-service for whatever you want.
	I do have a problem with a legal monopoly.
	On that service. That is the issue that can't be sustained for me morally.
	Because the moment you say that the government is offering a FIFA service, it's only a government if it can legally prevent other people from competing with it.
	And then you have the whole problem.
	You've got this island of force and a sea of voluntarism.
	It's going to expand. You're introducing cancer into the healthy cells.
	It's going to grow. It's going to overwhelm the body politic.
	And it's a big, big mess.
	I think that we've basically been looking in the wrong place.
	You know, there's an old story. It's like a Huff joke or whatever.
	Where a guy comes out of a bar and he sees this guy looking on the ground by a big lamp, by a big lamppost.
	And he says, oh man, what's going on?
	The guy says, oh, you know, I lost my car keys and I'm looking for them.
	And the guy says, oh yeah, well, I'll help you.
	And he gets down, he's looking around, looking around, 10 minutes, can't find the car keys.
	He's like, did you drop them here?
	And the guy says, no, no, no, I dropped them like half a block away.
	And he said, well, why are you looking here?
	He said, well, because this is where the light is.
	There's no light over there. And I think this is kind of where libertarianism kind of got caught into.
	It's like we've got this historical thing.
	Politics, politics, politics.
	And only politics, generally.
	Politics or... Agorism.
	Politics or agorism, these are the choices that we have.
	This may come out of my business experience or presenting.
	To be really productive, you've got to scrub your mind.
	Unlearn all that you have learned.
	Scrub your mind and say, look, if we were starting completely from scratch, if we had no historical precedence, if we had no existing way of solving these problems, how would we approach them?
	You know, Dave has made the point.
	It's a great point. Reason and evidence hasn't worked.
	And the science for that is very clear.
	Reason and evidence hasn't worked because people still have really crappy childhoods.
	And when you have a crappy childhood, whether it's because of your parents or because of church or because of, well, certainly because of government schools or maybe a combination of all of them, you grow up without the ability to think, right?
	Most people pretend to think when they're really just rearranging their prejudices.
	And science is very clear on that.
	That people have the impulse and afterwards they create the explanation for it.
	So the reason that reason and evidence hasn't worked with people is that people are fundamentally, through bad childhoods, they grow up without the ability to process reason and evidence.
	They grow up as unfortunate sophists.
	Ex post facto justifiers for whatever prejudices were inflicted upon them as children.
	They're not encouraged to think, they're not encouraged to analyze.
	Their parents, their priests, their teachers are very often resistant to critical thinking and they get tense, they get anxious and the whole table goes silent and there's lots of negative pressure against it.
	So we can't win with reason and evidence until people are capable of processing reason and evidence.
	And that, I think, is a very fundamental thing.
	So we have to, in a sense, grow people who are capable of responding to reason and evidence.
	And that's going to come about through peaceful and philosophical parenting.
	I know it's not where the light is, but it is actually where the keys have been dropped.
	And that's where we've got to start looking.
	And that's where we've got to start working.
	Because we say we're all about reason and evidence.
	And that's exactly...
	Where the reason and evidence points.
	That it is going to be a revolution in parenting.
	It is going to be a revolution in peace within the home.
	It is going to be a revolution of volunteerism within the family before we ever see a shred of expanding volunteerism and sustainable volunteerism within society as a whole.
	Stephen actually gave me something to think about there at the end.
	And one of the things that I noticed in sort of preparing for this Is that Stefan and I actually have very similar backgrounds in some ways.
	And I think that may be something that we should be looking at.
	We both come from backgrounds where we've grown up in a diverse environment, moved around a lot, went to different schools, been in different countries.
	I think that that unsettled background where you aren't regimented into one lifestyle for your entire childhood It makes an enormous difference in making one open-minded enough to be rational and objective about things.
	And I think one of the problems we have in society today is that economic forces in particular limit so many people in our society to not having the opportunity to travel, to see other aspects of the world, to be exposed to other cultures or to other individuals or other viewpoints.
	The Internet and our mass communications address that to some extent, but there's nothing quite like the sort of hands-on experience that you get Growing up with a diverse background and lots of opportunities offered to you to meet different people and see different things being done and to have your horizons expanded,
	maybe the Internet eventually will break down those barriers and we will see out of the Internet This sort of revolution in education that Stephan wants to see.
	And I think he's right that if we could change the way that people learn, if we could change the way that people access the world around them when they're children and the conditions under which they're raised, we might see a sort of a change of the base level that people are starting from when it comes to dealing with institutions and government and how they live.
	But unfortunately, I'm not that patient.
	I'll raise my kids well and I'll encourage others around me to do it.
	I certainly would join Stephan in advocating for better methods of raising your children and giving them opportunities.
	But at the same time, I'm concerned about all those people out there right now who didn't have those opportunities, who weren't raised right, but who could still have better conditions they lived under and who could still have their suffering minimized and their liberty maximized if we were to aggressively go after government as it exists now.
	Without destroying the entire institution, but solving some of the problems as aggressively as we possibly can.
	And that's where Stephan and I differ.
	I think the main difference is that I'm kind of looking at the, you know, I guess I was raised and always looked at the world as, what can you do to fix this problem?
	I see a problem, I want to fix it.
	Stephan wants to fix the problem too, but he wants to think about it.
	I just want to go after it as fast as I can.
	And figure a way to tear it down and rebuild it and make it better.
	And I think we need both approaches.
	We should all be working in whatever area we feel most comfortable to change the system as it exists now.
	Because one thing we can all agree on is that right now things aren't the way that we want them to be.
	And everybody who's working against the way things are now to make things better rather than worse, However they're doing it, through their writing, through their blogging, through their videos, through spreading ideas, or through direct government involvement, through political campaigns, all of that stuff will eventually combine, I hope, to tear down things as they are and make them as we would like them to be.
	All right. Well, thank you.
	I know Ian can't join in, but I really do want to thank Ian from libertychat.com for setting this up.
	It was really enjoyable.
	And thanks a lot, of course, for Dave for coming by.
	And Dave, if you want to put in the chat window your website, I know this is going to go out to my listeners and to lots of other people.
	My website, of course, is freetomaderadio.com and it's 40 million downloads and big philosophy show.
	You should come and check it out. Lots of free books and everything's free, no commercials and, you know, it's pay what you want if you like.
	So you might want to check that out.
	And Dave's is RLC.org.
	That's the Republican Liberty Caucus.
	And if you want to check that out, RLC.org.
	That is the place to go to get more of Dave's thoughts and arguments.
	And sorry to be speaking for the host and certainly don't want to speak for Dave, but I really do thank everyone who came by.
	We had a pretty significant number of people listening in, and I'm sure this is going to go out fairly far and wide.
	A very, very enjoyable conversation and I really do appreciate the time.
	And I hope that we can have more of these kinds of debates.
	I think this is a very important.
	Yeah, think about debating in a narco-communist.
	Hey, point him my way.
	I would be, or her, you know, point her my way.
	I would be very happy to debate.
	I love the art of debating, the art of conversation, I think is very important.
	I think we need to have more debates within the community about best practices and best approaches.
	I know we all have the same goal, but I think it's important that we challenge the existing way of doing things because I think that the hour is getting late.
	I should debate Noam Chomsky.
	Is that the guy who ate Noam Chomsky?
	Noam Noam Noam. And I will talk to everyone soon, I guess.
	And remember to go past LibertyChat.com.
	And that's the way you should see more of these chats.
	Tom Woods, myself, other people have done that.
	And check it out. LFNYC.com.
	You can check out the next New York Liberty Fest.
	I'm afraid I won't be able to...
	Do it because I'm going to be in Libertopia.org for my MC duties there, but I'm sure we'll do it again soon.
	So thanks everybody so much.

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