2148 Anarchy Versus the State - Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio Debates Jake Diliberto
Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, engages in a ferocious debate with Jake Diliberto about the value and violence of US foreign policy, the long-term effects of the US involvement in World War I, the destruction of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ethical foundations of a truly free society. Jake Diliberto is a Political Scientist and Christian Theologian. He is a Ph D. candidate from UK University of Birmingham, and is a resident scholar on US National Security. He is the co-founder of Vets for Rethinking Afghanistan. Jake is a specialist in Religious Conflict and Religious Guerrilla Warfare. He served as a US Marine in Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001 Af-Pak, and Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. Jake is a co-founder of Veterans for Rethinking Afghanistan and a policy adviser and analyst with US based advocacy organization Rethinking Afghanistan.
It is with great pleasure that we accepted the Combat for Truth invitation, which I had originally suggested to Jake DiLiberto be settled with an arm wrestle, but unfortunately he Is it fair to say screamed like a little girl and said,
no, Canadian noodle arms are too much of a match for me, but we're going to have a conversation tonight about US foreign policy, a flower of virtue and goodness in the world, or Satan's anus squatting over the planet?
We're trying to try and sort that out once and for all.
We had a brief run-by on the late...
Well, I guess still present, but late on RTV, Adam vs.
The Man.
And so I'm going to start off with a little sort of introductory speech, which will go on for about 58 and a half minutes.
We're then going to take a 90-second commercial and then...
Oh, man, we're going to be out of time.
Anyway, we're going to try and do our best.
U.S. foreign policy is interesting.
I mean, the first thing that's interesting about the concept is that we can somehow divide domestic policy and foreign policy into two different things, which, of course, they're really not.
A foreign policy can provoke blowback.
Blowback provokes expansion in the size and power of the state.
We have increases in domestic policy, such as increases in tariffs and controls and taxes and health and safety regulations on domestic companies, which provoke Tariff walls against other countries who can then overcompete or compete against the US industrial machine fairly well.
So I just really wanted to point out there's not a clear division between foreign policy and domestic policy.
Now, I'm going to approach this.
I want to put Jake's argument ahead of him, but there's usually two ways you approach foreign policy.
One is a cold-eyed, pragmatic, by God, man, we have to live in the real world, and to live in the real world, we have to deal with real problems, and we can't just go sailing off in this idealistic...
Fairyland rainbow cruise of, wouldn't it be great if everyone were nice, kumbaya, why can't we all just get along?
And the other approach, of course, is to say, look, we have to organize how we live and the decisions that we make according to some kind of moral principles.
And if we don't, that's fine, then we're just cold-eyed pragmatists and we should forget about being the shining city on the hill, we should forget about having American exceptionalism, we should forget about pretending that we're trying to bring peace, virtue and democracy to the world, and just say, well, different colored people have resources that we want, so let's move them aside, nicely if we can, not so nicely if we can't, and get their resources.
So, the way that I would approach it, or the way that I've approached it in the past, is to say something like this.
Look, There are two foundational principles to any moral system.
The non-aggression principle, thou shalt not initiate force against others, and a respect for property rights.
They're sort of two sides of the same coin.
Because we own ourselves, we shouldn't have aggression against us.
Now, the state, the government, as an entity, is a direct violation of these two principles.
The government, by definition, is that monopoly of people who can initiate force against others in a given geographical area through taxes, through regulations, through laws, through imprisonment, and so on.
It is the foundation of the capacity for foreign policy is the right and power to initiate force against your own citizens through debt, through taxes, through regulations, through law.
And so to argue that benevolent effects can come out of The initiation of force against your own citizens, which is used to fund the military-industrial complex, is used to fund foreign aid, foreign policy, and so on, is to say that virtue can come from immorality.
I don't think that it can.
I think that you can get brief, surprising squirts of virtue, so to speak, from pounding somebody in the head, but it's really not a long-term and sustainable position.
So I'm going to give you just one or two examples of Ways in which I think that US foreign policy has produced some pretty unmitigated disasters.
And then I'm going to bend over and be schooled by a good friend Jake.
So, the first is Woodrow Wilson, as I'm sure we're all aware.
entered into his presidency before World War I with the promise to not spend American blood and treasure on European wars.
Of course by 1917 that had all gone by the wayside and the US sent over hundreds of thousands of troops into Western Europe on the side of the Allies against the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians and all the others.
And what happened?
Well, this was the foundational catastrophe of the 20th century, this foreign policy intervention.
There are a number of historians who've run this through the alternate reality processor, and I think with some reasonable credibility.
The extreme likelihood seems to be that if the US had not gotten involved in World War I, Then the Germans and the Allies would have reached a kind of exhausted detente.
They were all running out of young men.
They were all running out of money.
They were all running out of things to shell.
So they would have basically been exhausted, and they would have just gone back home to where they started from.
And I think that Europe would have learned a very powerful and important lesson about war, and it would have been unlikely to occur again.
Certainly not as quickly as it did again with the Second World War.
When the US came plowing in, what happened was The Allies began to look for the decisive smackdown victory.
Unconditional surrender, which had never really been part of military history in Europe before, became the word of the day.
And that happened because the US got involved.
Now, when the US got involved, Germany, of course, found itself fighting a two-front war, and so it sent Lenin through Finland to Russia with arms and with weapons to start the Russian Revolution in order to take Russia out of The Eastern Front.
The American involvement In the First World War, with considerable certainty, triggered the collapse of Russia from the initial Menshevik approach to some sort of democracy into the totalitarian, unbelievably blue regime of the Bolsheviks, which caused the deaths of 70 million people and had a strong impact on World War II and of course created the Cold War.
And so a real snowball began to go on that way, which was really catastrophic.
Because When America entered into the First World War, the Allies were able to impose the brutal Treaty of Versailles on Germany, where Germany would have still been paying, if it had stuck by that treaty, would still have been paying war reparations until the 1980s.
Truly astounding.
This wrecked the German economy, produced massive resentment, and was really one of the foundational causes for World War II. So that's a sort of an example.
And I'm not, of course, trying to say that anyone in America was like, you know, in order to make the world safer democracy, we're going to put up this cover of ethics and virtue, and then we are going to create a nightmarish century of genocide and wars and, you know, 40 million dead in the Second World War, and then a Cold War and all of this stuff.
But there is the law of unintended consequences.
There are dominoes that start rolling.
Nobody can predict.
What is going to happen when you begin using force or initiating force overseas?
And so that's one example.
Now, there are sort of credible estimates that also say that even since World War II, between 20 and 30 million deaths have been caused by U.S. foreign policy.
And it's really hard for me to think of a way in which that is justified because, of course, people in Washington sitting pushing chess pieces around an international board I don't really have the right to make the decisions about who should live and who should die in foreign lands.
That is really up for the people themselves.
If the people in Iraq want to overthrow Saddam Hussein, then they can take to the streets and do so.
If they don't, it's because they would rather live than die in a fight.
We don't really get to make that decision for them to the tune of over a million Iraqis who've suffered violent deaths since the invasion of 2003.
So, the fruits of immorality tend to be disaster and immorality.
And since foreign policy is predicated upon the initiation of force against one's own citizens to gather resources in order to go and have 800 military bases overseas and intervene in every country in the known universe, then the fruits of that violence is further.
And the last thing that I'll say...
Is that, you know, there's sort of an old, I think, reasonable way to judge the ethics of people.
And that is to say that a man who practices virtue some other place than his own home is not really that virtuous a guy.
So, you know, someone who...
is really against domestic abuse and travels all over the country and then returns home to beat his wife can't really be called someone who has a strong understanding of virtue because virtue should be practiced within your own home first.
And of course the argument has been to make the world safe for democracy, to bring peace and order to the world.
If that was the case, of course, then America should be dealing with its own problems first and then rushing around to save the rest of the planet.
Elsewhere later, and of course this is not what has been occurring.
As America has expanded its imperial role overseas in a typical late Roman Empire fashion, injustices and aggressions and debt and imprisonment and violence and poor education and diminished economic opportunities and general catastrophes all around are increasing with the level of its commitment overseas.
This is exactly what you would expect from the fruits of violence.
So it's really hard to say, well, America does really, really good stuff overseas when it's doing really, really bad and worsening stuff in its own house.
You know, if you want to go nation-built in Afghanistan and Iraq, maybe, maybe politicians could look out the window of the Capitol building and say, hmm, the number one murder capital in America is Washington DC. In other words, we are not able to deal with the problems of violence right outside.
This big, rotund building, which would give people some hesitation as to whether they're going to be able to pull the magic leaves of peace and virtue in a country thousands of miles away whose language and culture they barely understand.
So those would be my initial arguments against accepting the principle or the premise that U.S. foreign policy has been a benevolent force in the world.
And I will now turn it over to you.
Well, thanks, Stephan.
Can you hear me okay?
Yes.
Okay, very good.
Well, a couple of things.
First off, asking whether U.S. foreign policy has been a problem or is a question in itself, but asking if it has been virtuous, I would argue that no form of the human condition can be virtuous.
I mean, the world is broken, people are broken, nothing is perfect.
Trying to find perfection in anything on this planet is It's like trying to find gold inside, I don't know, water.
It's impossible.
So, has there been problems with U.S. foreign policy?
Certainly there has been.
The question should be, is U.S. foreign policy, as you said since, say, Woodrow Wilson, has the benefits of it been I mean,
we all know that the United States didn't go into World War II because of the atrocities committed by Hitler.
Had the US not gone in, the consequences could have been far worse than had we not gone in.
So trying to find a perfect solution to this is impossible.
So I think a better question would be, is the world better off with the United States Conducting its behavior since, say, Woodrow Wilson's era than without it.
And I would say, absolutely, the world is better off with the United States than without it.
And I think most people would agree with that.
Saying the United States is this total force of evil, I don't think it's just being honest.
Now, I want to make a point on two things which related to what you made starting about U.S. interventions.
U.S. interventions inside The world since Woodrow Wilson's era are due to a lot of factors that the United States was not in control of.
For instance, there were competing empires at the dawn of the 20th century.
There was the German Empire, there was the Austrian-Hungary Empire, the British Empire, and at all this time, these empires were competing against each other.
World War I was essentially Figuring out who was going to be the boss of this condition where Western Europe had competing empires.
It was more about that than it was about the US being a bad force of evil.
Now, did the Treaty of Versailles, was it problematic?
Absolutely.
The Treaty of Versailles was...
There were so many failures that we could go on and on and on about the Treaty of Versailles.
In that situation, what do you do?
In hindsight, it's always 20-20, but what's the world supposed to do?
Woodrow Wilson was trying to put together a strategic alliance to prevent further wars.
You can say, with the exception of World War II, which was indeed a terrible, terrible war, NATO has been relatively a good thing for Western Europe, keeping the peace Amongst these former competing empires.
NATO is one of the most There are collegial military alliances in the history of the world, I think, that has prevented another World War II-like.
Granted, we had the Cold War, and there were some problems with that, but NATO and those alliances prevented Western Europe from going to war against each other, and that was a good thing.
So I think that is a problem with U.S. moral policy?
Certainly.
We shouldn't be trying to find virtue in it, because statecraft is not a moral exercise.
There are more benefits to U.S. foreign policy, I think, than there would be negatives.
I'm interested to hear what you have responded.
Okay, I'll start from the end and go backwards.
You said that NATO prevented Western Europe from going to war against each other.
I don't believe that there was ever a time when, say, Germany and France, since the Second World War, were eyeing each other with weapons.
I don't believe that it had anything to do with the military alliance.
The fundamental reality seems to be, once you get nuclear weapons, you seem to become curiously immune from invasion.
Because, of course, once you have nuclear weapons, whoever is invading, you can turn the ruling class into puddles of glass.
And so I think that had a lot to do with that.
Now, I never said, of course, that the U.S. was total evil or that all foreign policy, you know, I said that there were positive things that came out of it.
So I'm not saying that the absence of an interventionist foreign policy produces nothing but virtue or that the presence of it produces nothing but evil.
I really just wanted to be clear on that.
Now, when you say that the atrocities of Hitler drew the U.S. into World War II... No, I say correction.
No, correction.
I said that they did not, yes.
There's no reason...
Well, of course, the Nazi Empire was going to fall, and the U.S. had very little to do with...
I mean, of course, everybody focuses.
You see Saving Private Ryan and Patton, and you see, aha, it's the D-Day landings that brought it all down.
That's not true.
The vast majority of the German losses happened on the Eastern Front throughout 1942, 1943, 1944 with the Russians.
And the Russians spent like 20 million soldiers or some god-awful amount like that, 10 million soldiers, defeating the Germans.
So it really had a lot more to do with that than it did to do with what the Allies were doing.
The war was going to end with or without the U.S. intervention.
Now, this is not to say the U.S. intervention was unimportant, but it was not the key deciding factor.
And, of course, you can always find a place in time where violence or the initiation of force can seem to do good.
Sure, but what I'm talking about is let's roll the clock back and say, well, why was there a Hitler to begin with?
And there's strong, credible arguments which says, well, it was Woodrow Wilson breaking the interventionist policy, which he, of course, committed to his voters, and then starting the ball rolling to give the unjust allied victory over the Axis powers in World War I, that that was what started the ball rolling that led to World War II. So I don't think it's a good argument to say Because a prior intervention required a later intervention, the later intervention was good.
And you sort of said, well, what are you supposed to do?
Well, this is the track, this is the trap, this is the trick, this is the real challenge, which is You have to avoid the temptation to break moral rules.
That's the real challenge.
If you want to be a virtuous society, you have to resist the temptation to break fundamental moral rules, to initiate force against your own citizens, to initiate force against others.
Yeah, if you initiate force against your own citizens through taxation and through the draft, you can probably get some good things coming out of it.
In some ways, for sure.
But you've still broken a fundamental moral rule, and what happens from that situation is you tend to see this snowballing, which has continued on from there, where the growth of injustice overseas is matched by the growth of injustice domestically.
And so because you have a I mean, there's this sort of rotation between internal and external affairs because you have a war on drugs, you have an incentive to go and intervene in Mexico, you have an incentive to go and intervene as the Russians tried to in the poppy fields of Afghanistan, you have this incentive to go into Nicaragua and Costa Rica and Honduras and all these other countries and, you know, firebomb their crops and so on.
And this then creates a swarm of people who want to come in domestically, which raises tensions about people coming over the border.
So it all just continues to snowball.
There's no human being who's wise enough to know even what the stock price of Apple is going to be about 20 minutes from now, let alone what dominoes am I setting in place when I begin to do these kinds of interventions that occur.
And when you sort of look at the U.S. and you realize just how blind it's flying, and this is not particular to the U.S. I mean, foreign policy is just another government program, so it's common to all of these institutionalized hierarchies.
I mean, the US didn't even have a clue that the Soviet Empire was about to fall in the 80s.
Didn't have a clue!
In fact, thought that it was stronger than ever and was urging for increased armaments and was urging for increases in nuclear weapons because the Soviet Empire was so strong and, you know, four days later it blew over in a stiff breeze.
And so if the US is not even able to see the end of its traditional enemy, if it's flying so blind in something as massive and important and heavily invested in billions of dollars, trillions of dollars spent trying to understand the Soviet system and fighting the Soviet system, if they had no clue that it was about to fall, then how on earth could we imagine that they could do any good when they're flying that blind?
You're just incorrect when you're saying the U.S. didn't know that the Soviet Union was about to fall.
I mean, I don't know what U.S. policymakers that you interact with or things that you read about what would take place in the 1980s, but I'll tell you that, I mean, I've spent a lot of time interviewing senior statesman Zygmunt Brzezinski, I've interviewed Henry Kissinger, I mean, the big globalists, you know, whatever.
The United States was very aware that the Soviet Union was at a tipping point, specifically looking at what it was doing in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
What we were unprepared for was what would be the fallout of if there wasn't a Soviet Union in the world as dominant as it had been during the Cold War.
We knew that it was going to, the United States knew that the Soviet Union would fall, we just weren't prepared for what would happen when it falls.
And so there's a real big difference here.
I'm actually, I don't understand stuff and I don't understand the anarchist position when it comes to the state and it comes to this monopoly of force.
The question is, what do you do when you don't have a government?
Because we've tried this experiment in human history before.
When there's not government, then you get anarchy, and anarchy does not bode well for the average citizen.
Anarchy is tribalism, it's ethnic wars, it's all sorts of political instability, and also just generally It doesn't go well.
I mean, when you don't have governments, oftentimes you have huge elements of famine.
Now, granted, even with governments, you can't have famine, but in capitalistic liberal democracies, society is better off than without any government.
So, I mean, I would be interested in what is...
What is the problem with, say, a minimal government?
I'd like to hear your remarks and then I'll give sort of my commentary in response.
Okay, sure.
Well, this is a common misconception.
Which can be easily remedied by checking with the dictionary.
But I mean, because everybody thinks they know what anarchy is, then they go with the common misconception.
Anarchy means without rulers.
It doesn't mean without the state.
The state is just one manifestation of rulers.
Tribal warlords are another manifestation of rulers.
You can have a priestly class that is another manifestation of rulers, such as in ancient Egypt.
So the concept of anarchy simply means a society where There is a fundamental recognition that all human beings are created equal and that all should have the same rights.
In other words, we should not grant a monopoly of the use of force, which is a violation of a general moral rule that the entire population is supposed to follow, to a particular small group of individuals.
Hand them all the guns in the world, give them all the power in the world, or even just a small amount of power, but still they have that monopoly of power.
And expect anything good to happen.
And it astonishes me that people who know the history of America can still talk about something called a small government.
You had the greatest aggregation of geniuses, political, economic, social, military geniuses, I would argue, in the 18th century, On the 13 colonies called the American Experiment, and they got together, they rubbed all of their giant white brains together,
and with the exclusion of kids and women and blacks and other minorities, they tried to create a society of general equality for middle class and up white people, and they tried to create a system, to engineer a system, so they claimed, that was going to be a small government and was going to stay a small government.
And that small government has, in a relatively short period of time, given the 10,000 year span of human history, has grown into the very largest government that could be conceived of, that would be unimaginably powerful to these people who were designing it.
This should give everybody some significant pause.
If you look at the small size of the English state in the 17th and 18th century prior to the empire, it also grew into a massive government and a massive empire that spanned the entire planet.
Small governments grow into large governments because small governments create economic opportunity because they don't tax that much, they don't interfere with trade that much, and this creates massive amounts of wealth.
And then the governments go, mmm, tasty, tasty wealth, how lovely, and so they start to tax and tax more.
And so the greater freedoms that you start with, the greater government that you end up with, and that's the problem.
The idea of minarchism is simply a slippery slope to the largest government that can be imagined because once you have all that wealth, taxes can go up and that wealth and the growing increase in that wealth can be used as collateral for debt and debt is the final damaging drug of a democratic republic because it allows people to get stuff seemingly for free.
It allows politicians to bribe everyone on the planet and the costs then pass forward into the generations and there's just no way to prevent that stuff.
So I think that's the basic argument in a nutshell.
Well, it's my basic argument.
I shouldn't say it's the, it's mine.
Fair enough.
Well, I mean, I just, I hear this oftentimes by anarchists that I meet, and, you know, somebody has a total right to choose to reject government of all costs.
Fair enough.
The problem is that we live in a world that benefits from government.
So you're, in many ways, you enjoy the freedom of free speech.
I enjoy the freedom of speech because the government allows us to.
The government allows us, not allows us, but protects us in some ways.
You made a comment that minarchism leads to sort of a big state.
Well, anarchism leads to a state anyways in general as well.
In anarchic societies, you get tribal lords, you get leadership because that's how society operates.
Human beings want to be organized.
Human beings want to be in community with other people, generally by our nature.
One of the things that we can do is have a democratic process, have a dialogue, so that the best form of community can happen through dialogue and through discussion.
That's the whole idea of democracy.
The opposite of anarchism doesn't necessarily mean totalitarianism.
The opposite of anarchism can be some form of statism, which is which that people can participate with government, can participate in the discussion and development of society.
And, you know, when you raise the point about the British Empire and the monumental state that was developed at that point, Certainly.
The world today is much larger than it has ever been.
I mean, our company is soon to be at 9 billion people soon within the next 10 years.
9 billion people!
The world never imagined that.
So the idea of letting 9 billion people just simply live in amongst themselves Doesn't necessarily bode well for the future of our world.
There are a lot of things to consider that need to be organized.
Looking after the environment, looking after our rivers, looking after our national parks, looking after each other.
And if you don't have a governmental organizing body that is checked by the people through democracy, in real democracy terms, it's more than likely that Some forms of organization, either companies or corporations, will end up exploiting our planet and destroying it.
I would like to hear your comments on the idea of how the world has changed.
Would you at least acknowledge that much?
I will.
Let me just, and I don't want to get drawn into this becomes a he said, she said thing, but I just wanted to mention, and I can post this, I'll ask you to post this on the debate, from a case study from the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Harvard University on Intelligence and Policy.
I just want to read you something that, because we did have a bit of a disagreement about this, and again, this isn't going to be conclusive, but I just wanted to put the rebuttal forward.
Critics contended, says this article, that the CIA overstated the strength of the Soviet economy, underestimated the power of Republican independence movements, and overestimated the military threat, thereby forcing the US into what some considered an unnecessary arms buildup.
Stansfield-Turner, head of the CIA from 1977 to 1981, wrote in late 1991 that, quote, we should not gloss over the enormity of the CIA's failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis.
I never heard a suggestion from the CIA or the intelligence arms of the Department of Defense or state that numerous Soviets recognized a growing systemic economic problem.
So again, I know you say you talk to Henry Kissinger, however credible that source is, but I just wanted to mention that's where I got my facts from.
Again, let's move on to what you said.
I just want to put that forward.
It's interesting to me, Jake, I see this continually all the time, and I think it's very revealing.
You were describing a system called a negotiation, a conversation, an organization, a planning, and so on.
In other words, you were describing a voluntary set of interactions, but that's not what a government is.
A government is a group of people with a monopoly right to initiate force against everyone else.
To try and turn that into a conversation and a way of organizing and planning and so on, no.
If it's organizing and planning and conversation, then it's voluntary, then it is a statelessness, then it is without rulers.
What you're talking about is what I mean when I talk about anarchy, which is to have a conversation about how things should be done in society.
But this is what happens, is that people say, well, you know, we can have a government where it's voluntary and the citizens restrain things and people get together to solve problems and so on, but that's not what a government is.
A government is the monopoly on the initiation of force.
You can try and say, well, people should find some way to resist this monopoly of force.
But the whole point is, it is a monopoly of force.
And it has all the guns relative to each individual.
It has a trained military.
It has a police force.
It has an entire court system.
It has prison guards.
It has you name it.
And it has tariff collectors and tax collectors.
It has massive amounts of people who are all trained and willing to use force against their fellow citizens.
That is a state, so you have to at least call it by what it actually is, rather than use these airy-fairy, voluntary terms to describe something that is, in its very nature, geographically coercive.
Well, running society, being a citizen, and interacting with other people is By definition, finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.
You can never totally get along with your neighbor.
You can never totally agree with somebody on anything.
The government is no different.
The government's sort of bigger scale.
What the government can do is provide leadership to get people directed towards something.
Sometimes for the negative, but sometimes for the good.
I'll give you an example.
In Sudan just a couple years ago there was a crisis that occurred and the Office of Transitional Initiatives just sent some money over to put a radio station in so that people could talk to each other and by allowing people to talk to each other prevented It stopped the genocide to some degree and it made things get better to a large degree just by simple people being able to talk to each other.
So again, trying to find utopia, as many anarchist people would sort of espouse, trying to find utopia is foolish.
Trying to criticize the government from being totally irrelevant or the monopoly of force isn't really a true description.
It's a false definition.
Is the government a monopoly of force?
Sure.
But not always for the bad.
Sometimes for the good.
And we have to get away from this utopian idea that somehow we can live in a society where there's no war, there's no violence.
That's always going to be here because that's the state of the human condition.
So what you're saying is that the state of the human condition is corrupt and prone to evil, and so what we should do is we should get a bunch of these same corrupt people and give them all of this power and just hope that it works out really, really well.
You don't think that's utopian?
Do you think the idea that giving flawed humanity who thirsts for power, who thirsts to get something for nothing, who thirsts to escape the consequences of their actions, That flawed humanity is fit to be able to take guns, point them at other people, and rule over them?
You think that's utopian?
I think the idea that you can find flawed humanity, a group of them, put them in power, and then have everything turn out really well, because evil people are never attracted to power, of course, that is utopian.
An anarchist is a cold-eyed realist relative to the idealism and derangement of statism.
Well, there is an alternative besides anarchism, and there is an alternative besides just trusting the people in Washington or, you know, Kabul or wherever else.
The alternative is a real The balance of power checks and balances against each other.
The problem with the American political system, as you sort of began to touch on, specifically related to foreign policy, is that there is no check and balances.
What we started as, what John Adams put in the Constitution within the three branches of government, all checking and balancing each other, that is That has slowly, increasingly become void, and today, instead of genuine democracy in the United States, we have the imperial presidency.
That's the problem with America.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that the checks and the balances isn't a good idea, in fact, the way that we should run society.
We all need checks and balances.
If you're married, you're checking your balances, your significant other.
If you're a child, your check and balance is your parent.
If you're in society, What prevents you from speeding and killing people is the police officers making sure that, hey, you speed.
Shame on you.
Here's a speeding ticket.
We've done the research and we know that if you go drive too fast, it's more than likely you're going to kill yourself or somebody else, so let's not do that.
Too much government is a problem, but the absence of government creates more problems.
Okay, so at least we've accepted that you're talking about the initiation of force.
I think that's fantastic.
And you also believe that a group with the violent monopoly on force over a geographical area can be checked by people who are pretty much disarmed relative to that group.
So you've got One guy in an alley with a gun, you've got another guy in an alley with nothing, maybe a nail file, and the guy with the gun is going to be checked by the guy with the nail file.
Individual citizens have no power against the state.
They have no power against the state.
They can be martyrs, they can be Tibetan monks and set themselves on fire, but they have no power relative to the state.
There is no such thing as a check and balance on a monopoly of force.
Now, the argument from the voluntarist or the voluntarist perspective is to say, We recognize that a balance of power is essential within society.
And the way that you create a balance of power is you do not create a monopoly of force.
A balance of power means that there are agencies which are competing with each other to provide services, to provide roads, to provide defense, and there are voluntary contracts that you sign with these agencies.
You know, what is it that creates a balance of power in terms of predation from cell phone providers?
It is the fact that you can not go with a cell phone provider.
You can sign a contract to make sure your price doesn't increase.
You cannot have a cell phone at all.
That's what creates a balance of power, is voluntary interactions with agencies.
Once you create one agency with all the guns in the world to run everything, you don't have a balance of power anymore.
You don't have a balance of power anymore.
It's interesting you brought up the idea of independent commerce as a means of check and balancing because you sign a contract, your prices don't go up, etc.
In the free capitalist economic system, competition amongst companies against service providers drives prices down under the, you know, basically I mean, just general capitalist economic theory.
And it generally works.
And so, in the free market, the check and the balance is corporations against each other.
And it's the consumers, because if I don't want to use it, I don't have to.
Same thing in the government, though.
If you don't want to pay taxes or you don't want to participate with it, you don't have to.
You can simply go off the reservation and not want anything to do it.
People do that in America all the time.
But cell phone companies don't have the power to make me move out of the country if I don't sign a contract with them?
Do you see that that's not the same as being free?
If I say, you know, Jake, you've got to agree with me on everything, or I'm going to move you to some foreign country where maybe you don't even speak the language, where, by the way, someone else is just going to tax you anyway, it's not the same to say to an animal in a zoo, hey, you can move to another cage on the other side of the zoo, and we'll call that the same as being free.
The idea that the government somehow owns the entire country and can order people who don't agree with its violent edicts off the entire country is a totalitarian, foundational totalitarian principle.
That the government owns everything and if you don't agree with the government, with those who have the guns, they can march you off into the ocean.
That is unjust in the extreme and a complete violation of personal liberty.
You know, Stephan, I mean, I'm by no means saying that America is, I mean, Anywhere is perfect.
I've been to 58 countries.
I've traveled around.
I've studied governments across.
I'm going to tell you something.
We are not animals in a zoo.
We are not in cages.
We have freedom to go.
We have freedom to move.
We have all sorts of unlimited freedoms.
I would pay anybody Any amount of money to take an army into West Virginia and try to take it over.
It just ain't never gonna happen.
It ain't never gonna work.
So I think that there's this very serious check and balance against the federal government from having too much power, especially in America.
I think your criticism It's very important, but simply saying, oh, life is better without government.
Okay, you don't want government?
Go to Somalia.
That's your current example.
That's what a society today looks like without any government.
There is no unified, voluntarist, happy society without a government.
It doesn't exist.
Somalia does not have a government.
It does not.
There is no working government in Somalia.
Yes, but as we said at the beginning, and again it's tricky for people to remember this, it means without rulers and there are local warlords and so on, right?
So again, the purpose of the anarchistic philosophy is to get people to recognize that rulers as a whole are unjust incursions into fundamental human liberties.
And again, bring up Somalia, fine, because everybody thinks that Somalia is some ironclad argument against voluntary society.
Somalia has by far the largest communications network in the neighborhood.
It has the lowest infant mortality.
It has one of the highest lifespans.
All of these have vastly increased since the end of the state there.
It has had a trajectory of improvement.
Since the government fell that has been astounding and completely not predicted, right?
You would expect that with the end of the government in Somalia, things would have gotten worse.
Absolutely not.
Almost every single indicator, I've got a whole series on YouTube about this, almost every single indicator of human well-being has improved in Somalia since the government fell.
So saying, oh, well, Somalia, that's the anarchy and therefore it doesn't work, simply means that people have not done any research into the empirical reality of life in Somalia.
I mean, I've heard many libertarians, anarchists use this, Somalia's example.
Human rights in general has gone down.
Women's access in society has gone down since the sort of the chaos that's been created since the 1990s.
There may be lower infant mortality rate, but there's also less births.
Sorry, are you saying that human rights have declined in Somalia since the last 40-year dictator left?
Absolutely.
The life of the average Somalian today is by far one of the worst Horrible, horrible places to be.
I mean, Somalians' life is not good whatsoever.
I mean, you're making an argument to say, ah, Somalia, great example, anarchy, let's go do it.
Come on.
You want to go sign up to live there?
No, no, no.
But the point is that you compare Somalia to the countries around it.
You don't compare Somalia to the West.
It's still an African country, which of course was raped and pillaged by most of the Western, quote, democracies throughout much of the 19th century.
But you would compare Somalia to how it was under a brutal dictatorship for 40 years that was heavily funded, of course, by Western governments in wonderfully benevolent foreign policy mandates.
And you would compare its growth since then.
It is not a perfect society.
What happened was, it is not that they've understood something about freedom.
Their government just collapsed.
You know, if a bunch of churches get hit by lightning, that doesn't make everyone a philosophically knowledgeable atheist, just because the churches have collapsed or something like that.
Just because the government collapsed does not mean that everybody understands philosophically what it means to not have rulers.
But the predictions that Somalia would be a catastrophe have not borne fruit, and there have been some very strong advances relative to how the other countries have done in Africa, in the neighboring countries in particular.
We've got a few minutes left.
Maybe we should talk about one other thing related to this debate about minarchism, anarchy, whatever.
For the most part, with the exception of failed states like Somalia, governments exist and they're going to continue to exist.
So my question To sort of the anarchist point of view, I mean, how do you, as somebody who's a statist, if you will, I have ideas about how to reform government, real ways that have really worked in the past and continue to improve it in the hope that knowing that it's never going to get better, or it's going to get better, but it's never going to be perfect, but we can improve things.
We can make small incremental changes to make life better.
What is, how does the anarchist assume In his position, his or her position in the world, when there seems to be government forever.
Oh, that's fine.
I mean, that's like saying to the abolitionist in the 18th century, well, we've always had slavery, so by golly, we're always going to have slavery!
Well, of course, that's not the case.
Just because an institution has existed forever, whether it's the brutalization of children, the subjugation of women, or the existence of slavery, or feudalism, or serfdom, or you name it, all of these institutions can pass away with resolute moral courage.
So the idea that it's always been with us, therefore it always has to be with us, It's like driving at high speed forwards only looking in the rear view mirror.
You're not going to do anything but crash.
The road to a free society, my argument has been, is very simple and very difficult.
The very simple thing is to recognize that the non-aggression principle applies to children first and foremost.
The studies that have come out of brain science over the last 10-15 years are truly astounding that if you raise a child without spanking, if you raise a child without aggression, if you raise a child without violence, the odds of them becoming drug addicts, the odds of them becoming destructively promiscuous, the odds of them having children out of wedlock, the odds of them becoming criminals, the odds of them becoming politicians, if I dare repeat myself, the odds of them becoming violent, aggressive, or destructive are almost Zero.
I mean, it's as close to zero as you can conceivably get in these sorts of predictions.
And so the way that you solve problems in society is, you know, we say, well, we all need a government because there's dangerous people in the world.
Of course, the dangerous people just go to the government and make everybody's life hell.
It's that we take the non-aggression principle, we apply it in our own families, we apply it in our own child raising, and we raise children who aren't going to be interested in political power, who aren't going to be threatening their fellow citizens, who are going to grow up speaking the language of peace and reason and negotiation.
As that begins to spread in society, the need for government, the credibility for I mean, the personal histories of politicians are just rife with child abuse.
It's nothing to do with the revolution and it's nothing to do with some abstract political argument.
It is simply to do with taking the values that I'm sure you and I agree with, non-aggression principle and so on, applying them to that where it counts the most, which is in the raising of our children.
Over time, that grows a society that outgrows a state and where the state will then look to people in that society the way we look at slavery.
Like, how on earth could that ever have existed?
Well, I mean, while I find your position intriguing, that's like trying to stop a train with a BB gun.
You cannot outgrow the state with teaching children how to be, you know, voluntary people who don't want to participate in politics.
So, the alternative is, option A with Stefan is wishful thinking.
Hopeless philosophy and idealism, and the alternative is participate with government, try to make government reform, and in the hope that you know it's never going to be perfect, however, we may be able to make proximate solutions to insoluble problems.
I don't expect the people that are in the Stefan camp to necessarily be converted To my point of view.
However, the idea is that we need to participate with society and government or else it's going to eat our lunch.
That's the alternative.
So, wishful thinking or make proximate solutions to insoluble problems.
Those are your choices.
I guess if something which is scientifically validated, actionable by just about everyone, and has been proven to raise people who don't want power over others and who are not prone to violence, if that's called wishful thinking, as opposed to more of the same, which is to try and engage in a political process with a government that has grown about twentyfold over the last hundred years and shows no sign even of slowing down, That is wishful thinking.
To think that you can somehow out-climb the growth of the state by talking to politicians as if politicians aren't just listening to people who give them money and people they can bribe.
To try and grapple down the leviathan as it gets stronger relative to our ineffectual That, to me, is complete wishful thinking.
To think that more of the same is going to change the trend of the growth of the state, whereas another approach, which is scientifically proven to produce people who won't be subjugated by the state and who won't have the desire to subjugate others through the state, who won't be threatening their fellow citizens and provoking the desire for a state, You know, this idea that we can manage and wrestle down the Leviathan, it didn't happen 40 years ago when the Libertarian Party started and the government was about 20% the size it is now.
You know, the Libertarian movement has not been able to even slow down the acceleration of the size and power of the state over the past 300 years since Adam Smith and the other writers were talking about the need for a small government.
300 years we've tried this political action.
2500 years since the days of Socrates, we've tried to make sure that the government obeys the wishes of the people.
Well, if you think that 2501 is going to be the magic year where it all turns around and you call me a wishful thinker, I am afraid I must respectfully disagree.
Well, I certainly appreciate the criticism of government.
I'm no fan of stupid government.
However, the alternative of no government is the absence of government.
If you want to live in a society where there is no government, you may want to look at how those societies have functioned.
It hasn't worked very well.
Government is like anything.
Government is like marriage.
There is no perfect marriage.
Government is like water.
There is no perfectly clean water.
There is nothing perfect in this world.
And simply thinking that we can raise our kids in the mountains of Nova Scotia and train them to be non-violent, somehow that's going to fix the problems.
No, we need people to live in community, work together, And try to reform society from inside out.
Sure, and if you feel that I should look at the history of statelessness and draw my conclusions from that, I would simply ask you to look at the history of the growth just of the US government, aimed to be sustainably designed as the very smallest government in history, yet has now grown to the very largest government the world has ever seen.
I think that that's probably worth examining the causes of that as well.
And I don't think it was a lack of motivation in the population to keep government small.
Americans have consistently complained about the size of government.
I think it's really important if you're going to ask me to look at historical examples, which I've done a lot of, you know, ancient Ireland, Iceland and Somalia and so on.
I think you need to look at the history of the success of political action in keeping governments small.
And governments collapse when they finally become so cancerous that they destroy the host society and kill the economy.
They don't get shrunk because of voting.
At least that seems to be the historical trend.
So, I mean, you are the listeners.
I mean, just approach all of this stuff skeptically.
We're just, you know, two talking heads making arguments, or at least I'm one of them.
And so there seems to be this premise, though, that political action, it's just axiomatically assumed to work.
And I try to approach it like a space alien, you know, like...
I'm trying to sort of approach it like, if I knew nothing about any of this, if I just had arrived from some other dimension, which I guess arguably some people think I have and continue to do so, but I like to approach it and say, I'm not going to assume any of this stuff is true.
So if somebody comes to me and says, no, no, no, see, political action, political action is the way that we control the size of the state, I would first say, okay, How's that been working out for us?
How's that been working out for us?
Don't worry, you can have a small government and keep it small, and they'd say, okay, well, what was the smallest government that was designed?
The American government.
How's it doing now?
Biggest government that history has ever seen with the power to destroy life on the planet many times over.
And a national debt that would choke Zeus in his throat.
And you'd say, well, that really doesn't conform to the theory.
That you can have a small government and keep it small.
What about some other examples?
Well, Japan had a fairly small government after the end of the Second World War.
How's it doing?
Well, it's got a debt to GDP of about 230%.
It's had a 20-year recession.
Why don't we, Steph, if it's all right with you, why don't we spend a few minutes here and respond to some of our viewers and their comments.
What do you think about that?
That's great.
That's great.
Okay.
Well, I guess maybe should we just start off right there with Travis?
Whoever agrees with me, let's talk to them.
How do we eliminate $16 trillion of debt?
Well, I don't think that that's possible.
I think that the debt has grown so large it's virtually impossible to pay off.
I think more than likely there's going to be a unification of monetary policy that's going to liquidate debt and create a new economic system.
I think that's probably That's option A. Option B would be to outgrow the debt, so where the size of our economy makes the debt insignificant.
I think that's very unlikely.
I look at the transitional government as the lack of government.
It's garbage.
It's ineffective.
It doesn't do anything.
So, I mean, we're talking nuances here.
Yeah, the Somali argument to an anarchist is like the Stalin argument to an atheist.
Well, Stalin was an atheist, and that's why he did all these bad things, and Somalia is anarchy, and that's the example, and it's bleh.
I'm not so sure about that.
How do you support the use of force to achieve your objectives in society?
That's an interesting question.
I mean, Stefan, you would say it doesn't...
I mean, you don't like the idea, is that correct?
Well, I would say that, Jake, if you want to sign a contract with an agency that gives it power over you and your children and their children and their children, even though they haven't signed a contract and can go into debt on your behalf and start wars on your behalf and so on, I would strongly urge you not to, but, you know, and I would certainly disagree that you could ever sign your children into obedience to some sort of social contract, but that would be your choice and you would be free to do it.
I would never initiate the use of force I reject the initiation of force
as a way of solving problems in society.
It's fine for immediate self-defense.
You know, shoot a guy in the kneecap, he's running at you with a chainsaw.
But as far as initiating force to solve social problems, I would never inflict that on others, and I damn well demand the same respect in return.
Right.
Well, I guess I look at it is that if you...
If a force benefits the masses and it doesn't intrude in your day-to-day living, I think that it's acceptable.
So for instance, we have police officers that are running around and they're giving them tickets and that sort of thing.
I think that's a very limited intrusion in our day-to-day lives that keeps more people safe than it not.
So I think there's a little trade-off But the little trade-off, the benefit, outweighs the risk that you have with it.
Man, but the idea that the US government, which currently has the highest proportion of citizens in jail than even China, and is approaching the levels of Soviet Russia under Stalin, the idea that the police are somehow really concerned with drunk drivers and speeding tickets is to not even understand where the majority of police budgeting and force and incarceration is being spent.
And there's ways to make sure that drunk drivers aren't on the streets without necessarily giving cops all of this power.
I mean, private roads would make sure that they would do it, insurance companies would It would take you to the cleaners if you ever got into an accident.
There's tons of different ways.
You could have cars where you have to breathe clean to stardom.
There's six million ways that you can prevent this stuff without having to create this Stone Age monopoly of power.
Well, true.
I mean, there are private means of controlling it, and I'm not against the private means, but however, from an American point of view, we trusted a sort of a public version of some of these things.
That's the social contract that we have sort of designed for ourselves.
We can reform it, we can change it, we can continue to improve it, make it better, as we have.
And we don't have cops running around the malls.
We have private security guards.
And that's not necessarily that bad of a thing.
Well, that's because the mall is a private property, unlike all the government-owned property where you need all these cops.
Anyway, sorry, go ahead.
Fair enough.
There's a question about CISPA and SOPA. I think that both of these are extraordinarily problematic.
I think that the government's sort of, you know, bizarrely creative relationship with Facebook and Google is extraordinarily problematic.
It violates sort of our day-to-day ability to communicate with each other.
At the same time, I voluntarily decide to use Facebook and Google, so I think that I'm subjecting myself to that.
I don't have to use those things, so I don't really have a right to complain about this.
Steph, could you describe the transition into statelessness from peaceful parenting?
Not quickly.
Not quickly.
The biological reality is that children who are aggressed against, and this includes spanking, it costs them IQ. It actually changes their brain.
Their fight-or-flight responses become much stronger.
Their neofrontal cortex, which is the seat of reasoning, and the deferral of gratification and the restraint of behavior that is the essence and foundation of maturity, Actually shrinks, and these changes tend to be permanent.
You can change them later on with a huge amount of work, but they tend to be, for the majority population who don't have the time and luxury and middle-class income to pursue therapy and self-knowledge, they tend to be pretty permanent.
And you really, really want to.
I'm going to make a strong recommendation here.
This guy's been on my show before.
He's Dr.
Gabor Mate, G-A-B-O-R-M-A-T-E. He's written a book called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, which is his work as an addiction doctor in Vancouver's Mean Streets.
He goes into the foundational designing and wiring of the brain that occurs from the moment of conception onwards.
What happens in the womb is incredibly powerful to how the human personality develops.
And that the addictive personality, whether it's addiction to sex or drugs or power or whatever it is that's going on, the addictive personality is attempting to self-medicate a hole in the brain that's left through neglectful or abusive parenting, whether that parenting occurs before or after.
The birth of the child.
And so, if we, in a sense, have children with good nutrition and calm, stress-free moms, and they're not subjected to spanking or hitting or violence or rape, because the prevalence of child rape in society is just astonishing, then we grow up with people who have Little rage.
They don't have rage.
They don't have impulsiveness.
They don't act out.
They're not violent.
They're not addictive.
They're not self-destructive.
They don't end up beating up their own kids.
They don't end up getting in single-parent households.
Their marriages are much stronger, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so all of this dysfunction, which creates a vacuum for state power, is no longer there.
And so if you have, say, 98% or 97% fewer criminals in the world, And 97% fewer people who want to run for office.
Is it really that possible to sustain the need for a state in anybody's mind?
I'm here to save you from the criminals.
It's like, I've never ever met one.
I've never been subjected to one.
I don't even know what they are.
And it would be like someone selling you insurance for your slaves.
If they ran away right now, you'd be like, I don't really have any, so I don't really need this service.
And that's, I think, how we outgrow in a nutshell.
Well, that's a very interesting and crazy point of view, but however, I'm enthused by your passion by it.
Well, you can call it crazy, but you do have to look at the facts.
This is not just my opinion.
This is actual science.
So you can call it crazy, but all you're doing is calling empirical validated science crazy, which is itself immature and ridiculous.
Currently, I've just had too much fluoride water and aspartame, so I guess I'll continue to stick with that world.
That's fine.
Do I support an involuntary system of government?
Well, this is a tough question because how can you be a statist and logically support involuntary system of government?
It's sort of a catch-22.
If you're a statist, you sort of want everybody to be a part of it and you want people to participate.
I'll try to make the point about this.
Involuntary systems of government, it's like this.
I think that society is better with a draft than without a draft, because it forces the nation to be in what it's doing abroad.
If you don't have a draft, the nation can sort of turn its blind eye and let everyone else go up towards one of the problems we have in America.
I'm in favor of government mandates in terms of Policies that look after the environment, that look after the way that we grow our food, the way that we do things.
But they need to be good policies.
And the problem is, all too often, the people that get to decide these policies are controlled by people with corporate interests that end up dominating people and not having a good society.
So it's a catch-22.
There needs to be reform society.
There needs to be an informed society.
And we need a society that is working together.
I guess I don't know how you can do that involuntarily.
I guess just philosophically, I guess you kind of have to be, you know, forced to do it, I suppose.
Do we have any more questions?
I just made all of Stefan's fans vomit with that statement, I think.
Yeah, I mean, the draft is worse than slavery in many ways, because the draft is forcing people to threaten to or actually murder other people, and you are forcing them at the point of the gun to do that.
It's kidnapping and enslavement and brutalization.
But this is where status thinking leads to.
I mean, this is where you can say, Jack, I mean, you understand, when you say that the political system is a system that, let's say we lived in the same country, that you and I have designed for ourselves?
I mean, that's completely not even close to the truth.
I mean, it's not even delusional.
I wish I could even call it delusional, because even the Constitution itself was a hidden secret document that was simply imposed upon the population with no consultation.
They wouldn't even let the press in to look at the deliberations.
And the idea that you and I have somehow designed the system which indoctrinated us from about the age of four or three or two onwards, that we have somehow designed the system, that we're somehow responsible for the system, I just, I can't see, and to justify pointing guns,
I mean, you would actually say to my daughter, you have to come with me, and I'm gonna fly you overseas, I'm gonna put a gun in your hand and point it at people who've never threatened you, and if you don't do it, I'm gonna arrest you, and if you resist arrest, I'm gonna put a gun to your neck, pull the trigger, and blow your jugular out, is astoundingly immoral.
I mean, to look at me and say that this is what should be done to my daughter in your wonderful world is unbelievable to hear.
Stefan, here's a check in the balance specifically related to military service.
When we had a draft, there were escapes for people that if they were Quakers, if they didn't want to do it, moral conscience, whatever.
There's escapes for people like that.
What they did was, people that didn't want to go to World War II, for instance, there was people that acted as nurses and In military hospitals or there were people that dealt with the mentally ill.
There's all sorts of work that's great work that could be done that But that releases somebody to go overseas and put a gun to someone's head.
If I go work in some hospital, that's some other guy who can go overseas and put a gun to somebody's head.
That still doesn't take me out of the equation.
It doesn't mean that what I'm doing is peaceful now.
They're gonna do it anyways, so it's better off that the nation's engaged.
I mean, my point here is that, I mean, they're gonna do it anyways, so it's better off that the nation is engaged.
Sorry, sorry, they're gonna do what anyways?
What's that?
Sorry, you said they're going to do it anyways.
I'm not sure what you mean.
They're going to do what anyways?
It's going to send our troops abroad anyways.
I mean, there's no way to stop that.
I mean, let's just be honest.
The only way to stop it is if they didn't have the money to do it.
But the way that the nation's forced to be engaged and criticize it is if it's forced to participate in it.
I mean, there's something to be said that the government's force The government's monopoly of power, bringing people into service, is a good thing for the country at large.
You can wave around this collective good all you want, but you're still talking about putting guns to the heads of people and making them do stuff that they virulently do not want to do.
I agree with you.
If they don't have the money to go to war, they won't go to war, which is why I oppose Taxation as a whole.
I mean, that's called the reduction of violence.
Because you have taxation, and you support taxation, saying, well, now we need the draft because we have taxation, is to escalate the violence.
Whereas I'm saying, let's defuse it.
Let's not add more guns to the equation and then think that we'd solve the problem.
Well, I'm certainly in favor of stripping the government of stupid funds for some of our foreign adventures.
So I guess, all in all, we may disagree about how society should be structured, how government should be structured, but we don't disagree that American foreign policy is extraordinarily problematic.
That is not where we disagree, Jake.
It's not where we disagree on how society should be organized.
That's like saying you and I disagree on whether we should have more airtime minutes or more cell data in our cell phone plans.
You and I in a free society can entirely disagree about how society should be organized and that would be perfectly fine.
We disagree on whether it is morally acceptable to initiate the use of force against the peaceful.
That is where we disagree.
It is a moral line.
It is not a question of yin versus yang or red versus blue.
It is an ethical question.
I will not cross that line and support the initiation of force against the peaceful.
You are willing to catapult yourself across that line, extremely well armed, and land in ninja cat poses and point guns at everyone, you think, Should do the right thing according to your plan.
That is a moral distinction.
I will not let you get off the hook by thinking this is some kind of a taste difference or a difference in how we approach things.
It is a moral difference.
You wish to initiate force against the peaceful to get what you want or to support the society you think is right.
I reject that.
And you may be fine with that, but I just want to be real clear to the audience that this is the difference.
It is not a difference of taste.
It is a difference of ethics.
Before we get into ethics, there has to be a foundational worldview.
Our worldview is different.
Our ethics is different.
Your worldview is that people can live in society voluntarily and be peaceful amongst each other with sort of the right thought process and this sort of thing.
I'm under the impression that no matter whether you have a government or you don't have a government, People are inherently flawed and they're going to, in some way, shape or form, use force against each other.
And there needs to be checks and balances in society to make sure that doesn't happen.
And so where I'm willing to use the government to step in is to create that check and balance.
The government will be run by the exact same flawed people who want to use violence to get their way.
And how that solves the goddamn problem has always been beyond me.
How you solve a problem called people are bad and want to use violence by creating a monopoly on force populated entirely by people that you say are bad and want to use violence to get their way is not solving the problem.
I've yet to meet minarchists who will accept this, but it is a basic fact that it's really hard for people to get their head around.
You can't create some fictional entity called the government populated by angels.
If humanity is really good or has the potential to be really good, great, we don't need it.
If humanity is really bad, you can't have it because they'll just use that.
It's the ring from Lord of the Rings.
There's no virtue who can overcome its power.
This is what violence does.
It corrupts human nature.
And I don't see it as the world is ever going to be perfect, but I say that government can create proximate solutions to insoluble problems.
These problems that we have in our world can never be totally fixed, but we can find proximate solutions.
And I think government has a better alternative than...
My worldview is that the absence of government creates more problems than government by itself.
And you are perfectly free to have that opinion.
You just are not perfectly free to initiate force against me for differing on that opinion.
If you want to have that opinion, fine.
I would not use force against you.
But that's what I need from people that I have debates with.
And if that's not granted, then really I'm not going to even pretend that there is a debate.
Because, I mean, you're pretending to have a debate, but basically you're just saying, Steph, well, if you disagree with me, I'm going to force you anyway.
So that's not a debate, right?
Well, I would say that you're in Canada, and me using force against you would create an international incident, so I will avoid that.
Okay.
All right.
Well, I think we've reached the end of the road of our conversation.
I really want to thank the people who've been listening in.
And it was a very challenging and stimulating interaction, to say the least.
And I hope that people found it illuminating.
Yeah, I agree.
And, you know, Stefan, I totally disagree with you, but I really respect you and your audience.
So I just want to thank you for your time and the guys at Liberty Chat for putting this together.
