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May 19, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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2150 Arachno-Capitalism On Ice! Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio interviewed on Alaska Radio

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, is interviewed on Alaskan Radio about liberty, voting, financial regulation, philosophy, integrity, virtue, peace, South Park, and the hope for true human freedom in the future.

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	So this week we're honored to have Stephon Molyneux from Free Domain Radio on.
	And anybody who's been curious about the stuff we've been talking about on this show, who's been just on the internet looking for it, I have no doubt they've come across Stephon's YouTube videos and likely his website.
	And he's joining us all the way from Canada, I believe.
	Stephon, are you there?
	All right, Sid and Liam, how are you guys doing?
	Good.
	Stephon, let's see, the website again, what do you have?
	Oh, it's freedomainradio.com.
	All right, I'm going to get that up on my computer here at the same time so that we can cross-reference you to make sure that we know that you are who you say you are.
	Go ahead.
	It's him.
	There's nobody else who has quite the vaguely gay Tour of the Colony's accent that I do, so I'm pretty hard to often imitate it, never duplicate it.
	Right.
	I saw the Robert Murphy roast of you at Porkfest last year where he talked about your accent.
	I thought that was pretty funny.
	He's a funny guy.
	Yeah, he is.
	To start off, last week we were talking about theft being wrong.
	And we had a caller called in and he said, well, you know, theft is wrong, but how is the state going to function?
	Of course, you have this thing, you have a whole YouTube video on it, and you say it doesn't matter, right?
	And I was wondering if you could elaborate on that in regards to theft and murder and all these other things, if you could go through that argument with us.
	Sure.
	I have about eight minutes right there.
	Okay.
	Look, I mean, there are things that we all accept in our own personal lives, that the initiation of force is wrong.
	If you want to get a job, you don't go and kidnap the kids of the guys who's hiring you and say, I will release them from the windowless van and take the chloroform napkins off their face if you give me the job.
	If we want to get food, we don't consider it okay to go to a restaurant and bounce away.
	We don't like the pump and dump way of getting gas by running away from without paying.
	So we all accept in our own lives that taking other people's property without their permission is wrong.
	And we all accept that initiating force is wrong.
	And so there's this radical philosophical notion called consistency, called integrity, called having one standard.
	You know that old thing from Lord of the Rings, one ring shall rule them.
	And in philosophy, it's really one standard shall rule them.
	And so if It is wrong for us to initiate force and it is wrong for us to steal in our own personal lives.
	How do you create some magical reverse, upside down, black is white, zebras have no stripes bubble called the state where suddenly it's really good to do it?
	I mean, there's no way to justify it.
	You can't have a theory of physics that says, well...
	I can't fly, but if I put on this blue costume, you see, I can fly!
	You don't change your physical properties when you put on costumes, whether they're policemen or military costumes, and you don't change the moral properties of who you are and the moral laws that are...
	You need to be subjected to just because you call yourself the state.
	I don't get to be able to go backwards in time if I put a little hat on with the word hippogriff.
	It just doesn't work that way and it doesn't work that way in philosophy.
	But there's a lot that's embedded in what this guy said.
	Well, how's the state going to function?
	If we don't, let it steal.
	Well, first of all, of course, that's the end justifying the means, right?
	So if a good end occurs, then we can do all kinds of evil things to get there.
	Never works, never will work.
	It only works for particular individuals who have a bottomless hunger for power and aggression and politics and control.
	But it doesn't work morally.
	The ends do not justify the means.
	I mean, that's like saying, well, if I cheat on a test and get a good score, the good score justifies the cheating.
	It doesn't really do that, but people like to believe that it does.
	The second thing, of course, is that when people tell me how will the state function without the capacity to steal from us...
	The idea that the state is functioning?
	Functioning?
	Are you kidding me?
	To use the word the government and functional in the same sentence is such an illogical mind frack that it turns your brain into a lower intestine helium tube map of the London subway kaleidoscrap.
	It's like a benign cancer.
	Yeah, it doesn't work.
	Look, the massive debts, the conflicts.
	Look at Europe.
	Look at America.
	Look at Canada, where we have almost as high a per capita debt as Greece.
	That's not a company you want to keep.
	Look at the continual economic and currency disasters in South America.
	Look at the Middle East, where you've got the repression of women and theocracies, with Sharia law running around yelling at women who don't dress head to toe in body scarves.
	I mean, you show me where it's working.
	Show me where this massive functionality is supposed to be taking case.
	When America has the highest per capita prisoners for non-violent, non-crimes in the world where the number of prisoners per capita It's almost approaching that of Stalinist Russia.
	Where is the functionality in that?
	Where you have public sector pensions underfunded to the point where they're going to go bankrupt in five to ten years, and people are going to be left with neither their savings, which was taken from them by force, nor any kind of remuneration from the state.
	Same thing is true of Social Security.
	What's going to happen when we run out of money for welfare?
	What's going to happen when we run out of money for Medicare and Medicaid?
	What's going to happen when a trillion dollars of student loans can't get paid back?
	Because...
	High education doesn't get the same kind of traction in the economy as it used to.
	You show me something anywhere that's working, and I will begin to accept that as a possibility, but so far it really hasn't come across.
	Right, so even if you could justify theft so that the state would function, you would have the non-functioning that we're seeing today.
	Yeah, theft works for the thief.
	That's why they steal.
	I mean, it's easier to co-steal an iPad than to work to buy or trade one or make one yourself.
	So theft works for the thief and the state works for politicians.
	It just doesn't happen to work for the rest of us livestock.
	Yeah, that's another interesting theme that we've borrowed from you on this show is the theme of farms.
	And the farmer doesn't care if you tattoo, you know, the state sucks on the side of the cow.
	You're still a cow and you're still on his farm.
	It's just a matter of when you become a...
	Beef cow from a nut cow, right.
	Yeah, they'll give us a little freedom.
	Like if the farmer's cows are too close together, they're banging their heads and they're not producing milk and they're getting stressed and having heart attacks, yeah, he'll space them further apart.
	He'll give them some more freedom.
	But that's not because he wants to set them free.
	It's because he wants more milk.
	We're given certain economic and political liberties, not because the next step is freedom, but because it makes us more productive and makes us produce more milk for everybody else.
	Right.
	On that note, do you want to talk about your kind of view on the prospects for the potential for the elimination of the state?
	You have kind of a different viewpoint on that than a lot of other libertarian anarchist types.
	Yeah, I mean, it's inevitable.
	I mean, human society lurches and crashes its bellicose way towards consistency.
	I mean, if you look, say, 2,000 years ago, slavery was accepted.
	Rape was pretty much accepted.
	Unprovoked invasions of other countries and the subjugation of its citizenry was pretty much accepted.
	And, you know, massive class divisions between citizens and non-citizens, the aristocracy and the proletariat and all the plebeians was pretty much accepted.
	Subjugation of women and slaves and forget about even thinking about rights for children.
	They weren't even remotely accepted.
	You know, slowly, in an ugly, gruesome fashion, you know, it's like watching someone climb a chainsaw blade with their teeth.
	They do get a get-up, but it's kind of messy.
	We do slowly extend the concept of personhood to slaves, and now we don't have explicit slavery anymore.
	We extend the concept of personhood to women.
	And as soon as we extend the concept of personhood to the state...
	Then we say, okay, as Jefferson said, this truth is self-evident that all men are created equal.
	If we assume men means all people, then all we have to do is stop right there.
	If only the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence had stopped right there.
	All men are created equal.
	End of sentence.
	Then we don't have a state.
	We don't need it.
	The extension of common humanity, the extension of moral rights, the extension of personhood is inevitably spreading.
	You know, sometimes it's like a spilt red paint of blood slowly spreading across a map the way that it does spread.
	But it does slowly spread as long as people like us continue to make that effort to do so.
	Yeah, it's inevitable that we're going to wake up one day and we're going to go, whoa, this is immoral.
	It is non-functional.
	It continually destroys societies.
	And it only creates wealth in order to further pillage society, to use the increased wealth of political and economic freedom as collateral to borrow more and bribe more.
	And people will wake up to this and we will move past this ridiculous notion of statism in the same way we move past the ridiculous notion of slavery and the subjugation of women.
	And the amorality of rape and so on.
	And, you know, for a lot of people, you know, beating kids was a big deal in the past, right?
	And the rule of thumb used to be that you couldn't beat your wife with any stick larger than the width of your thumb.
	And now that's changed.
	And we don't accept wife beating anymore.
	People are beginning to wake up to not hitting children.
	And so, yeah, slowly, painfully, you know, and it's slow, slow, and painful because so many people have a bad conscience.
	They don't want to accept the truth and move on to a higher state of morality.
	But, you know, we'll get there.
	I don't think it's in our lifetime, but we will get there.
	Yeah, it's almost generational if you talk about it from that perspective.
	Which, of course, it has been historically anyway, especially with things like abolition of slavery.
	That took a very, very long time before that idea really gained traction.
	Yeah, did you guys watch South Park at all?
	Yeah.
	Well, so recently, I didn't watch it, but somebody told me there was a South Park episode where they mocked the idea of no government.
	What an incredibly fantastic and wonderful thing that it's even something they don't mock The concept of slavery anymore, because that's just a commonly accepted thing, right?
	What's that old statement?
	I think it was Gandhi.
	He said, first they laugh at you, then they attack you.
	First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, and then you win.
	So we're at the stage now of being attacked.
	It's no longer a loony crank idea.
	It's actually something where people will sit down and make the effort to mock it and to repudiate it.
	Not rationally, of course.
	It was all just silly nonsense.
	But But that's fantastic.
	A mainstream show is introducing the idea that there is an idea called No State.
	I mean, it's fantastic.
	Yeah, if they really thought it was an illegitimate idea, they wouldn't feel the need to go to the lengths to...
	Yeah, you're not going to do half a show on the Flat Earth Society, right?
	But you're going to do half a show if you feel that this is somehow in the air, and the first defense of all conservatives, and a lot of comics are very conservative, the first defense is simply mockery.
	You see that on The Daily Show all the time.
	He's called a socialist, and he just mocks people.
	He admits to being a socialist, and he just mocks people, Jon Stewart.
	That's not the same as a rational argument.
	It's entertaining away people's anxiety about contradictory ideas.
	But it's a huge, fantastic thing.
	Like, I've hosted the Peter Schiff show now twice.
	I'm going to host it on Monday and Tuesday.
	I'm an out-and-out...
	A-word!
	I'm an out-and-out...
	Voluntarist, anarchist...
	Some people have called me another A-word, but that's perhaps not something for a family-friendly show.
	But, I mean, it's amazing that this is even possible.
	I'm going to be speaking in Brazil on this topic.
	I'm going to be speaking on the West Coast.
	I'm going to be speaking in Las Vegas and Dallas and all these kinds of things.
	I mean, it really is quite amazing the degree to which, well, of course, the Internet is making all this possible, but the degree to which you can actually even have a conversation like this is really amazing.
	It's astounding progress in just a couple of years.
	Sure.
	Yeah, it's getting to the point where you run into people who self-identify as anarcho-capitalists or voluntarists.
	And it's kind of weird just from a few years ago to today.
	You know, you bump into somebody on the street and you're wearing like a Mises.org shirt or something.
	They're like, oh, Rothbard, yeah, I love Four New Liberty or whatever.
	Well, actually, sorry, just to be more precise, I self-identify as an arachnocapitalist, which I mean the spiders should be our main currency.
	And so I just wanted to mention that.
	Spiders are a great currency because so many people are scared of them that it's easy to hoard.
	And people won't steal the spiders, right?
	So the C-note obviously should be a black widow.
	Pickpockets ain't going to go into your pickpocket.
	Like, they're not going to pick your pocket if you've got a black widow spider in there, especially if it's got eggs and all that vermin, baby spiders all over it and so on.
	So I just really wanted to be...
	I'm precise about that.
	One of my favorite arguments that you've made that I found to be quite powerful, especially in personal relationships, is the against me argument.
	You know, bringing the abstract into the personal makes a lot of people very uncomfortable.
	Could you talk about that for a little bit?
	Sure.
	I mean, this is one of my first speeches was in 2009 at the New Hampshire Liberty Festival.
	I was the closing speaker, and this is where I introduced the argument.
	I've talked about it in podcasts before.
	Look, the more that violence is abstracted and invisible to people, the more they're going to be able to support it because they cannot see it for what it is.
	And there's a story that I heard when I was speaking in Phoenix a while back about the difference between an infantryman and a bomber pilot.
	Right.
	So in World War Two, there was this bomber pilot who used to get together with his pals every year or a couple of times a year.
	And they'd reminisce and they'd drink and play darts and all that.
	But the infantryman never did that.
	They never got together with their pals.
	They never talked about it.
	And the reason for that, you know, somebody asked this airman, this pilot, and said, well, what's the difference?
	He said, well, the difference is that it was a different war for us.
	Because for us, we would pull a lever and all we'd see on the ground are these little puffs of smoke.
	But these guys, they actually put bayonets through people's heads.
	You know, they actually blew people away at close range.
	They saw limbs.
	They saw blood.
	They got showered with intestines.
	I mean, they saw what war really is.
	We just saw little puffs of smoke.
	So for us, it's like not that traumatic.
	But for the infantrymen, they don't ever want to go back there mentally.
	And this is the difference, right?
	The state turns coercion into little puffs of smoke.
	You say, oh, well, I'm against drug use.
	Well, if you're against drug use, would you be willing to actually...
	Kidnap and imprison somebody for using drugs, like your neighbor or a co-worker or a brother or whatever.
	And if the answer is no, then you shouldn't support other people doing it, right?
	I mean, if you're not willing to do the dirty, ugly, wet work of violent enforcements of your edicts, if you're not willing to do that, then you should not be at all involved in that.
	And when I talk to people about taxation, and I just had a debate with Jake Diliberto, Where he was saying, oh, I'm in favor of the draft.
	It's like, okay, well, what that means is that you will take a gun to my daughter's head and you will make her obey your edicts.
	And if she doesn't agree and resists in a self-defense manner, you're willing to pull the trigger and shoot her.
	That's what it means to say, I wish to pass a law that everyone must obey.
	There's all these euphemisms, right?
	The social contract, the law, being a good citizen, obeying the state, peace, order, and good government, and so on.
	And the reason that you need these euphemisms, you don't need a euphemism for chocolate.
	I mean, it's just chocolate.
	You don't need a euphemism for a steak.
	You don't need a euphemism for a house.
	It's just a house.
	But you need a euphemism for that which is morally vile to you.
	And so we call it extraordinary rendition, not shipped out torture.
	And so we call all of these things like, well, I'm in favor of the draft because the draft gets the citizens involved in the wars.
	And being in favor of the draft sounds...
	I guess like a really abstract thing.
	But if you look at the mechanics, at the reality of what you're talking about, well, you're talking about certain groups of people, a particular group of people in society called the state, having the legal obligation to initiate the use of force against other people who refuse to pick up weapons and shoot having the legal obligation to initiate the use of force against other people who refuse So shoot this guy or I'll shoot you.
	This is not morality.
	This is not ethics.
	This is a scene from a Tarantino film where one guy has got a gun against the other guy's head saying, pull the trigger.
	I'm blowing your skull across the room.
	The violence of statism is something that is always abstracted.
	So I was having a conversation once with a listener about the Iraq War, and she was like, well, this is way back.
	I support the surge, she said.
	And that sounds fine.
	You support the surge.
	It sounds like you're in favor of tides.
	I don't know.
	But the reality is that I disagree with the whole war, and if you want to send money to these people, I will not forcibly stop you, because that's the initiation of force.
	But you surely will allow me to follow my conscience and not support the use of force against me for disagreeing.
	So people say, well, I'm for the welfare state.
	Great.
	Send them a damn check.
	If you want 80% of your charity money to go to middle-class, white, fat bureaucrats, fine.
	If you want people to be trapped in a permanent underclass and go to crappy schools and have little opportunity and live in terrible neighborhoods entirely run by government welfare and government schools and government housing and government streets, then fine.
	If you want to do that, I think it's horrible.
	I think it's wrong, but it's not the initiation force if you want to send money to those people.
	I find the whole system vile, disgusting, and hideous, and I came out of a very poor neighborhood and a very poor family, so I know a little bit of what I speak.
	Then you have to allow me the freedom to follow my own conscience, and you damn well cannot morally initiate the use of force against me for disagreeing with you about how the poor should be helped.
	Are you willing to reject the use of violence against me?
	If people are willing to do that, fantastic.
	We kiss on the cheeks, we are brothers, and we go off and do a Cossack dance together.
	If they're not willing to reject the use of force against me, then we part as enemies.
	I mean, because these people want guns waived in my direction for disagreeing with their unfounded opinions.
	And that is not something that I will countenance in my life.
	Yeah, that almost comes down to a self-respect thing.
	You know, if you respect yourself, how can you...
	Hang around with people who want you locked in a cage for having a difference of opinion with you.
	Yeah, I'm not going to take a bouquet of flowers from a guy who wants to rape me.
	I'm not going to pretend that somebody who's relying on the use of force is engaged in any kind of civilized debate.
	It's not.
	I mean, you're just threatening me with force.
	Then fine, I'm not going to pretend to debate you because it comes down to a gun.
	So I'm not going to give it the veneer of a civilized interaction.
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah, as you've pointed out, the state doesn't exist.
	There's just people with guns.
	And when you boil it down to that, all the cutesy little abstract language, all the euphemism, kind of melts away and you're left with a very different reality.
	One day if I get enough donations, I'm going to make a movie called The Statrix.
	I've got a question for you here.
	In my own mind, I'm trying to determine if there really is a difference at all between the mafia and the way they go and extort people for money and saying, hey, look, you pay us a protection fee or we're going to break your legs, and the state and the issue of taxation.
	Because lately, it's like I've had a shift in my mind.
	Somebody came in and scrambled the eggs up in there, and I don't see a difference.
	Well, I think there are some differences.
	The mafia does not rely on propaganda, right?
	The state relies on propaganda.
	So if, you know, this shifty Joe Pesci character comes into your store and says, you know, be a nice store you got here.
	Be real shame if something happened to it, man.
	You know, you got to give me some cash or who knows what a barrel of fiery gasoline might come through your front window.
	Who knows from where, man?
	Well, they're not appealing to propaganda.
	They're not saying be patriotic.
	They're not saying be loyal.
	They're not saying be a good citizen.
	They're just saying, pay us money or we'll trash your store.
	So they're more honest as far as that goes.
	I think that's a significant advantage.
	And also, the mafia won't take your children for 12 or 13 years, cage them up for 6 hours a day, and tell them how wonderfully moral the mafia is.
	And without the mafia, the society would just be a burning wasteland of anarchic hell.
	And so there's much less propaganda.
	In fact, there's almost no propaganda in the Mafia.
	And of course, the Mafia is really a shadow of the state.
	The Mafia relies on the government to ban certain activities, which raises the price for what the Mafia provides.
	So if the government bans gambling, what do you know?
	It then becomes very profitable for the Mafia to supply gambling or prostitution or drugs or cigarettes sometimes.
	Of course, the prohibition in the US is what brought the Mafia over to begin with.
	There was no Mafia beforehand.
	And of course there was no drug wars in the whole 19th century when any kid could go in and buy cocaine in the form of Coca-Cola for a couple of pennies at a drugstore.
	So the mafia relies upon the government, but the mafia is a much less successful government because the mafia can't legitimately control the minds of the children to train them about how wonderful and great and necessary and virtuous and good The Mafia is.
	The Mafia is simply the shadow of the government.
	And of course, you know, you say, well, why is it so hard to legalize drugs?
	Well, it's so hard to legalize drugs because the Mafia will kill any politician, I'm sure, who is actually going to go and legalize drugs.
	And everybody's pretty aware of this.
	I mean, if you cut into the profits of the Mafia to that degree, then, I mean, your life isn't worth anything, right?
	Accidents can happen to your children.
	Accidents can happen to your friends.
	Accidents can happen to you.
	It really doesn't matter what kind of protection you have.
	But, you know, they've invited this wolf into the house, and now there's not much chance to get out of it.
	I think another difference between the mafia and the state is, as long as you're paying the mafia, they'll leave you alone.
	Whereas the state, you can pay them as much as they steal from you, and they still won't leave you alone.
	Yeah, and the mafia doesn't take your money in order to bribe other people, right?
	I mean, they just take it for themselves.
	Or the government steals from the unborn and it steals from the productive in order to bribe all of those who become dependent on it.
	And that's a very different situation.
	Yeah.
	And you can move away from the mafia.
	Right.
	I mean, you can move away from the Mafia.
	I mean, if you go to some small town in the U.S., it's not worth it for the Mafia to set up there, so you can move away from the Mafia, but you can't move away from the state.
	All you can say is, oh, well, I guess I could leave this cage in the zoo, but the only other place I can go is to another cage in the zoo.
	So, really, what's the point?
	And now they're trying to extend the chains past the cage.
	Yeah, in the case of the U.S., they claim that the zoo is the entire world.
	That's right.
	If you leave, then they can hit you for tax evasion, even if you haven't paid those taxes yet and they're not being assessed against you yet.
	And they will then hit you with the taxes and bar you from reentry.
	Which, you know, the only thing that's positive about that is finally we have an answer that's real clear, even to the most blind, to the people who say, love her to leave it.
	I can't!
	I can't leave it, so I can't love it.
	That's right.
	Do you want to hold for the second half hour?
	We'll take some calls.
	That was wonderful.
	Thank you very much.
	We've got Stefan Molineux from the FreeDomainRadio.com on air with us.
	If you'd like to call in and be a part of the show, the number is 458-TALK. If you're outside of the Fairbank area, hack on a 907 first.
	458-TALK. That's 458-8255.
	You can also join us online at KFAR660.com.
	We'll be right back after the Fox News here on KFAR Local Talk Radio.
	Don't touch that dial.
	Fox News is here on KFAR. Fox News Radio, I'm Paul Stevens.
	First a life sentence, then a hospital trip for former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
	Egyptian state media says Mubarak's had a heart attack while on his way to serve a life sentence to his involvement in the killing of up to 900 protesters.
	But not.
	Everyone is happy with scuffles in and outside the courts.
	People are angry that Mubarak didn't get the death penalty.
	Fox Radio's Emily Wither in Jerusalem.
	Protesters gathering at this hour in Cairo's Tahir Square.
	Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in Singapore announcing 60% of U.S. naval assets will now stand in Pacific ports.
	Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman also at that conference.
	We don't want an open conflict with China, but we also cannot allow them to think that they can take advantage of us.
	Secretary Panetta also saying China and the U.S. must learn to work together on a better mode.
	Fox News.
	We report.
	you decide.
	Local Talk Radio, KFAR, with a clear perspective on what's going on in the world, whether it's overseas...
	...and you can see that.
	All right, welcome back to the Saturday morning wake-up call right here on KFAR. I am Steve Floyd, the person who basically pushes the buttons, and that's all.
	You know what, if I haven't pushed your button yet today, then let me know how I can do so.
	I'd be happy to do it.
	Joining us in the studio is one of our local irrational capitalists, actually an anarcho-capitalist, is Dave Diesel, and then from Bighorn Enterprise is This is Josh Bennett.
	Good morning, Josh.
	Good morning, Steve.
	And on the phone with us right now, we've got Stefan Molyneux from the freedomainradio.com.
	Good morning, sir.
	You're still with us.
	I sure am.
	I just also wanted to mention the arachnocapitalist uses the web to catch his prey.
	Oh, nice!
	Oh, come on!
	I spent the whole time thinking of a good joke about spiders.
	That's all I can come up with.
	What do you think of a phone call or two?
	Step on.
	Yeah, that'd be great.
	All right, 458-TALK is the number.
	Good morning, caller.
	You are on the air.
	Who's this?
	This is Randy.
	Randy, go ahead.
	I agree with a lot of the sentiment that's being talked.
	You know, government can become terribly tyrannical and destructive.
	But I do believe that we do need government.
	I do believe it's a tool, a necessary tool, just like fire is a tool, but has the potential for terrible, grievous damage, and water is a tool.
	But, you know, if a dam breaks, you know, it can kill thousands of people.
	It's a terrible thing.
	But basically, the purpose of government is for the protection of enemies, both foreign and domestic.
	And as I mentioned a couple weeks ago or so, the Swiss family Robinson, you know, they had that new island...
	I was in a country called New Switzerland, and I mentioned then that I was in favor of an anarchy system, you know, no government, because it was not necessary, just them and their treehouse, and if they had a few other families that came by, it still may not be necessary, and that would be the best thing.
	But the only trouble is, if they had many, many families, and then pirates, as you remember, pirates landed, and they were able to take care of those pirates that first time, but if you had a whole nation of pirates coming, eventually they've got to pool the resources and coordinate And form an army.
	And that's where the necessity of government comes in.
	And hopefully, you know, everyone would want to contribute to the army to fend off the pirates or the invading nation.
	But basically, you have to have coordination, and I think government then becomes necessary to do that.
	So that's how I feel about it.
	And Stephan, how would you answer that?
	Well, I mean, let's say that you wish to have protection against theft and aggression.
	Well, I don't see how setting up a monopoly of violence that has the right to take your property at will and force you to obey its edicts at will is really solving the problem of protection.
	From violence.
	Remember, the government initiates force against citizens.
	And so you can't solve the problem of being subjected to arbitrary force by creating a monopoly on arbitrary force that can subject you to its will whenever it wants.
	But let's say that you like that and I don't.
	Well, that's fine.
	Then what you can do in a free society is you can sign a contract with a couple of guys to say, hey, you guys, I'm going to disarm myself.
	You can have all the guns.
	I'm going to fund all the guns for you.
	Anytime you need my property, you can come over and take it.
	And if I resist you, you can shoot me and you can set up these rules.
	You can email me these rules every month.
	They're going to change continually.
	There's going to be hundreds of thousands of them within a couple of years.
	And if I disobey any of those rules, then you can come in a van and you can take me away and you can lock me for a pretty arbitrary amount of time in some cage.
	If you want to set up that contract, I don't think anybody would, but if you wanted to set up that contract with an agency and call it the government in a free society, you could.
	You couldn't bind me to it any more than I can bind you to my contracts, and you sure as heck couldn't bind my kids or your kids to the choices that you're making.
	So if you want to sign that contract in a free society, by all means go ahead, but you can't bind other people to it.
	Well, you are right.
	There is the element in even the most minimal amount of I see the element of wrongness in that, and I admit that, but I'm willing to accept that small element of wrongness to avoid a greater element of wrongness,
	because if the pirates take over our island and subject us all to a dictatorship, that also is a coercive situation, but it's a far greater coercive situation than the one that we were willing to tolerate, and so I'm willing to tolerate some Yes,
	but my friend, where do you think those evil and horrible people, which are also in your society, of course, as I'm sure we're aware, where do you think the most intelligent evil people are going to go in society if there's a government?
	Where do you think they're going to try and do their most harm?
	Well, you're right, just like Hitler Yeah, he tried to have a revolution, and it failed the Beer Hall Putsch.
	He was thrown in jail, and then he came out and said, no, no, no, the way that we get power is we take over the government.
	We don't have a revolution, we go in democratically.
	And this is the case with all demagogues throughout history.
	And if you look at history, of course, you can very clearly see that the United States was an experiment in the very smallest conceivable government at the time, and really the very smallest government that has ever been conceived of.
	And what happened?
	Well, we now, out of that process, have the very largest and most powerful government the world has ever seen.
	It never stays small.
	The illusion that you can create a monopoly of force and then somehow manage it with checkbox and ballots and speeches and blog articles from outside is a delusion.
	The moment you put that cancer in, it begins to grow.
	And there's just no way to ever prevent it from growing.
	This is the case with all societies throughout history.
	They start with maybe a little bit of freedom, like the Roman Empire, like the British Empire.
	In their birth, they were relatively free societies, and that relative freedom created a huge amount of wealth, or allowed for the creation through trade of a huge amount of wealth.
	The government then looked at all that wealth in society and went, bwahaha!
	Ah, now I can tax like crazy.
	Now I can use this as collateral.
	Now my tax rates can go up and up, and people will live with it because I'm not taking away the bread from their mouths.
	And so small governments inevitably lead to bigger governments.
	The smaller the cancer starts, the larger it ends up.
	There's just no way to keep it small.
	Stefan, briefly, before we let Randy go, I'd like you to respond to basically his moral position, that he is willing to accept a certain amount of...
	Oh, I think I lost you.
	How do you address that?
	That he's willing to accept a small amount of violence?
	Yeah.
	Well, let's take it to the sexual realm, shall we?
	Okay, go ahead.
	So, if you're really into having people clamp clothes pegs on your nipples, then go for it.
	It's not my particular cup of tea, but if you really like that, then go for it.
	But that doesn't give you the right to clamp Your clothes pegs on my nipples.
	So if you feel that there's some advantage to you in surrendering your right to live without the initiation of force against you, you can do that if you want.
	Sign whatever contracts you want.
	But you don't have the right to want other people.
	Of course, people can gather together for self-defense.
	Without a state.
	I mean, look at Iraq.
	I mean, this was a non-state ragtag army, as was, of course, the American revolutionaries.
	Again, we take the ethics out of it, just look at the military strategy.
	And they won against the biggest and most powerful military the world has ever seen.
	Look at Afghanistan.
	Yeah, the Mujahideen.
	They took down...
	Yeah, you take down a 25...
	Yeah, I mean, if you look at the Mujahideen in the 90s, you had people taking out $25 million MiG airplanes with a $40,000 missile.
	I mean, the economics of that doesn't take too long to add up.
	The war by attrition is always very powerful.
	You don't need a state to defend your land, even if you look at something as completely lopsided as the Iraqi insurgents versus the incredible might of the U.S. military.
	They still won.
	Alright, let's go on to the next call.
	458 Talk is the number.
	Good morning, caller.
	You're on the air.
	Who's this?
	Morning.
	Hey, who is this?
	This is Trevor.
	Trevor, good.
	What's on your mind?
	I wanted to comment a little bit about the last caller's Example of an ideal government being the Swiss Family Robinson.
	And I was remembering some political problems that I was given by my teacher back in high school.
	And it's the thread of logic that you eventually come to is that the ideal government is the benevolent dictatorship.
	And it always wound up being that You were happy with the government as long as the benevolent dictatorship was doing what made you happy.
	The second you were somebody that the benevolent dictatorship was using as the excuse to stay in power, all of a sudden the government was no longer okay because it was no longer something that agreed with you.
	It's the same thing as saying that you'll take a little bit of evil from your government to smother other governments from doing evil to other people.
	And it's It's pointing out the stick in someone's eye and missing the log in yours.
	That's another good analogy for it.
	Because if we can't clean up our own government, and let's face it, there's a lot of people that need to face some trials for treason right now.
	If we cannot clean up our own government and demand a moral government Or people that will regulate their own self-behavior.
	How in the heck are we the ones to even think that we should tell the rest of the world how to do it?
	Yeah, and it also, in addition to that, it creates a race to the bottom of morality.
	It's like, well, if they're going to be dirty to the nth degree, we need to be dirty to just a slightly lesser degree so we can...
	Beat them, you know, and then, oh, you know, they're even dirtier now.
	So now we're going to pass the NDAA and the Patriot Act.
	But we have to, because they're even worse.
	And that's just a total race to the bottom.
	It's like little kids, you know.
	He hit me.
	Well, you hit him.
	Well, he hit me first, you know.
	It just evolves.
	Somebody's got to take the moral high ground at some point.
	Well, and do you know what the murder capital of the United States is?
	D.C. Yeah.
	D.C. The murder capital of the U.S. is D.C. They think they can go to Iraq and fix a society.
	How about looking out the damn windows of the capital and fix the society where you have complete control over?
	Of course, they don't want to do that.
	Look, where are the worst performing schools is in Washington, D.C. The biggest disparity between rich and poor is in Washington, D.C. You know, fix what's right outside your window.
	Maybe then people will accept that you can fix things, you know, a stone's throw from your window and then a mile and then two and then, you know, maybe in a thousand years you'll end up in Iraq.
	I'm not sure they even have the intention of fixing things, though.
	I mean, if you look at it, historically speaking, isn't it usually they use the threat of outside violence to get people ginned up?
	The idea, well, let's give more of our tax money to go and join the fight.
	Let's send our children off to beat cannon fodder.
	I mean, isn't that the whole point of it?
	And whatever works to keep the public opinion high on the war is what's going to keep the war going.
	Well, and people say that we will go over to Iraq and we will blow up all of these innocent civilians because their ruler is really bad.
	And of course, Saddam Hussein was a complete psycho monster, an evil guy to the nth degree.
	But I still don't think we have the right to decide who's going to live and die fighting the state, fighting their state.
	I mean, these are from people who won't stop paying taxes because they don't want to get even a summons from the IRS. And yet they want to go and blow up other people for the sake of their freedom.
	No, if you want to take a stand in your own country, I don't recommend doing anything illegal, but if you want to, then at least you gain some credibility, but they won't even do that, so it's all nonsense.
	Hey Trevor, thanks for the call.
	Stefan, you just hit on something there that I think ties back to what you were saying to Randy about the idea of sticking clothespins on nipples.
	In a sense, the people that lived under Saddam Hussein, they, if they didn't like it, they could have changed it, right?
	Most people will choose to live under evil, then die fighting it.
	I mean, if you look at the Russian example, there was no revolution that came from within.
	Look at the Chinese example.
	There was Chinese communism.
	These killed tens of millions of people apiece, slaughtered and murdered.
	The people did not rise up from within.
	They choose to Live under the gun.
	They choose to be like mammals at the feet of dinosaurs.
	They stay underground.
	They stay low.
	They stay close to their families.
	They have their kids.
	They go to their job.
	And they talk under the covers with their wives.
	That's how they choose to live under evil.
	And that is the vast majority of people.
	And we don't have the right to decide that other people should die for the sake of freedom, which never quite seems to be granted anyway.
	And yet this is a myth that we set.
	We're going to go bomb the hell out of these civilians and kill, what is it, close to a million Iraqis and displace millions more to get rid of Saddam Hussein.
	But that was not their choice.
	What they wanted to do was to live under that evil where the vast majority of them were not going to be incarcerated and raped in the same way because the majority of them had nothing to do with politics.
	They just, you know, were good little livestock and did whatever they wanted.
	And I'm sure that's the decision that I would take if I were in that situation.
	I would not choose to have bombs come raining down upon me and liberate me from my life.
	Well, what if the Chinese decided to liberate us from President Obama?
	Would the Republicans get excited about that?
	Yay, we're being liberated!
	Well, all they have to do to do that is stop lending us money.
	You know, like, the U.S. has got this funny thing.
	The U.S. has this funny thing where they're trying to give guarantees to Taiwan against Chinese aggression.
	The only way they're going to do that is they go and borrow money from the Chinese to put weapons on the border against the Chinese.
	Listen, can you lend me some money so I can put some fuel in the tanks?
	I'm going to point at you with that.
	I mean, this is how ludicrous our system has become.
	In the middle of a sentence when you cut out on us from the FBI...
	I was just pointing out how America is guaranteeing Taiwanese borders against the Chinese, and the only way that America is going to be able to afford to do that is if they go and borrow the money from China to put the gasoline in the tanks to point at China.
	I mean, this is how ludicrous our system has become.
	It's like a mugger coming up and saying, listen, can you lend me a gun so I can rob you?
	I mean, this is just how crazy our system has become, and it's hard to see because we're so propagandized.
	It is nice to view it that way, though, because you see the victory of economics and economic law over politics and propaganda in the long run.
	Yes.
	As a result of that.
	All right, Stefan, I'm going to try to take another phone call.
	If for some reason I manage to hit the wrong button, please call back.
	All right.
	Aaron Bennett, is that you?
	Yep.
	All right, go ahead.
	What were you about to say?
	I was going to say that it's funny that the caller used Switzerland as their example since...
	Because under the Austrian occupation of Switzerland, you had the rise of William Pell, who used a top-down strategy of killing the highest officers and on down in a militia-type movement.
	And Switzerland never moved away from that again and never made a centralized military and used a non-aggression policy and decentralized their military and kept it that way.
	And if you look at a top view If you look at the old world and put it on fast forward, you'll see wars of aggression on a mass scale going on all over the old world except for one country, and that's Switzerland.
	They've stayed neutral through unbelievable times of decimation of World War I, World War II. You see all this aggression going on and nobody touches them.
	In Nazi Germany, anything that was Swiss was banned.
	Swiss Van Lee Robinson was banned as a play.
	You weren't allowed to put that play on during Hitler's rule.
	Any Swiss propaganda was banned because of their ideology so far removed from a statist ideology.
	Hitler didn't even want any of that concept to be allowed in Nazi Germany.
	So to use Switzerland as your example of Statism, I think, is a very bad example.
	You know, I was in Switzerland a couple years ago, and I was in London for about a week, and then I flew over to Switzerland.
	And if you go through London, there's whole areas of the city that are new construction from 1945 onward.
	And if you go into Switzerland, there's no 1945-plus, like, discrete neighborhoods.
	This is all new after 1944.
	And, of course, that's because the Swiss did not get bombed out because they didn't participate in the wars and they were not invaded.
	What's considered to be the freest nation in the world?
	Yeah, by many metrics, Switzerland is up there, certainly.
	Yeah, if you have a free society and there's wars around, everyone's going to ship their gold to your free society, just as they do to Switzerland, and no one's going to invade you.
	They have 300 years right in the middle of Europe, through the wars of the Reformation, through, as you say, the First World War, the Crimean War, the Second World War, everything that's been going on ever since.
	They've armed their citizens, right?
	You actually have to have a gun in Switzerland, and they don't get invaded.
	They are the safe harbor for everyone's illicit sort of war booty.
	And so, yeah, I think it's a great example of how you don't need That kind of involvement to have any kind of protection or defense.
	I wonder in terms of here in Alaska, is there a possibility of developing that kind of society here in Alaska or are we pretty much just doomed to be the colony forever?
	Well, the only focused attempt on anything besides the status quo is the AIP, of course, Alaska Independence Party, who believes in independence for Alaska so they can set up their own socialist state here, where everyone owns the resources.
	That's like socialism on a slightly smaller scale.
	So I don't know.
	I'm not holding my breath on that one, Steve.
	I don't think I need to add anything.
	I think you talked yourself in and out of something right there.
	I just watched that go by.
	Dave is trying to talk me out of it, but I still hold on to the idea, though, that somehow...
	I don't know.
	I don't like the idea of the Alaska Independence Party and the socialism that they project.
	But I don't know.
	I mean, how do you get freedom for people who are so accustomed to being in a corral?
	I think it's based on consent.
	And, you know, we're talking about voting with your mind.
	People talk about voting with their feet.
	If you don't decide something is wrong, then no one's ever going to act on it being wrong.
	And we're talking about, a lot of times on this show we talk about changing your actions, you know.
	If something's wrong, do something about it.
	But most people out there don't believe that death is wrong.
	You know, we get a bunch of callers, well, how's the state going to fund itself?
	It has to steal a little bit.
	So if we can't even get to the point where people believe certain things are wrong, Like theft and murder and conscription and all these things.
	How are we going to get to the point where they're acting on a belief that it's wrong?
	They have to believe it's wrong first.
	And we're a long ways from that.
	Well, and I think people reject the truth for social reasons, not for philosophical reasons, right?
	Somebody came up with a funny tagline for my show, Free Domain Radio, creating uncomfortable dinner silences since 2005.
	And it's true, right?
	So, look, if you accept that taxation is theft and your sister-in-law happens to be a schoolteacher, Well, how's Thanksgiving dinner going to go?
	I mean, I really think that people making their decisions based upon social ease and comfort and, you know, not confronting people who are on the other side of the moral divide.
	I mean, if you don't ever notice it or see it or bring it up, it kind of is like it's not there.
	there but it's just like it's not there.
	And so I think that people what they do is when they hear an idea that's going to challenge their social circles is going to challenge their personal relationships that goes through this little processor which says you know beep beep beep beep beep beep beep.
	Okay so it's minus 500 points for social discomfort.
	What will it achieve?
	Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
	Zero points of actual change in society.
	And they do this little calculus and say, well, why would I then want to accept these beliefs, which is going to be uncomfortable for my work environment?
	It's going to be uncomfortable for my social environment, my family and friends and my clergy parishioners and so on.
	And they're going to say, well, what's the upside and what's the downside?
	And if they're going to make the calculation based on some sort of pragmatic thing, it makes no sense.
	I mean, if you're a crazy, consistent moral idealist, then you do it damn well because it's the right thing.
	And, you know, though the heavens should fall, we must do the right thing.
	But if you make a pragmatic calculus decision on the pluses and minuses, I mean, you're just going to, you know, go to your happy place until the libertarian stops talking.
	Well, you tie into that the illustration that you give of the farmer and the livestock and how the farmer doesn't care if you've got a tattoo or a brand on the side of your hide that says the government sucks as long as you are still living within the society.
	All these people that I hear talking libertarian talk here in Fairbanks, the people that call into the show and agree that taxation is wrong, well, they still pay their taxes.
	They still advocate for government programs.
	Well, even more than that, they're still participating in the system.
	The first video I ever watched of Stefan's was probably three or four years ago, and it was the one where you were making an appeal to people.
	If they respect themselves, how can they vote?
	And I don't tell people what to do.
	If people want to vote, that's their decision or whatever.
	But that really struck me.
	If you respect yourself, if you believe that you own yourself, how can you vote for somebody else to tell you what to do?
	Yeah.
	Look, I also wanted to differentiate.
	I think paying your taxes is different morally from supporting government programs.
	Because paying your taxes is, they'll throw you in a cage if you don't.
	Unless you want to go live in the woods.
	And then you abandon the social discourse and leave the marketplace of ideas open to the worst elements.
	So I think there's a good strong case to be made for, you know, pay the bastards off and then go speak truth to power.
	And I think that's, you know, I I can respect a guy who stays in the mafia neighborhood and pays off the mafia as long as he's not saying, those mafia guys are great!
	So I think supporting government programs is something which you're not going to get punished for not doing, whereas the amount of force that's applied against people who don't pay their taxes I think takes the moral equation out.
	Like the moment the gun comes into the room, the morality goes out the window.
	And so I don't blame people for, you know, taking money from the government, since the government's already taken so much money from them.
	You know, when they're in a situation of force, I'm not going to judge them morally, but when it comes to voluntarily praising, you know, these blood-soaked overlords, well, I think that's a different matter entirely, once they've been made aware of the truth, right?
	I mean, morality's kind of like technology.
	We don't blame William Shakespeare for not using an iPad, because he just, you know, wasn't there.
	And so once people understand the ethical argument and they've had some time to adjust to it, then I think they gain a moral responsibility that they haven't had before.
	And so you can't prescribe a medicine if you've never even heard of it, if you're a doctor.
	But once you've heard of it and you've tested it and you know it, then you kind of have a responsibility to prescribe it if it's the right thing.
	So bringing moral arguments actually creates, I think, a moral choice for people that they really don't have before.
	They're so heavily propagandized.
	And I think that's another reason why people don't want to hear those moral arguments.
	Don't make me responsible for this choice.
	Don't give me a choice.
	I just want to stay in the matrix.
	Stay in the matrix, though, how do you get people out of the matrix if you're telling them to stay in the matrix and speak truth to power?
	The matrix is not the state.
	The matrix is the propaganda.
	I pay my taxes.
	I obey the law.
	But I recognize that it's an immoral situation, and I speak out against it.
	So the matrix is the propaganda.
	It's not the violence that we're surrounded by.
	Because once you see the violence that you're surrounded by, then you're out of the matrix.
	And then you can make whatever decisions you want.
	You want to go live in the woods?
	Go live in the woods.
	You want to pay your taxes?
	Pay your taxes.
	But as long as you see that there's a gun in the room that is really driving these decisions, then you're out of the matrix.
	At least that's the way I would use the metaphor.
	Right.
	You're basically using self-defense.
	You pay your taxes out of self-defense.
	That's what it is.
	Yeah, and because there are no options.
	If you go live in the woods, you're not free of the state.
	Because you're living in the woods because there's a state.
	I mean, who wants to live in the woods?
	Dan Haggerty and three guys on the run.
	So you don't escape the state by living.
	There is no escape from the state.
	There is no escape from the state.
	And so whatever you do to live there, if you go live in the woods, that's no different from paying your taxes.
	You're still making choices you wouldn't otherwise make because of the threat of force.
	So given that there's no escape, I choose to stay and speak as much truth as I can.
	Yeah, that's an interesting idea that presenting people with kind of the other option, the other ethical or moral option is, you know, the most important thing.
	Because, yeah, once they have been presented with that, they are uncomfortable and they have to think about it.
	And then they have to make the choice.
	I really want to have Stefan again for another hour at some point.
	I don't know if you can stay on now, but, man, I would love to have you on to talk more about this because it seems to me that a true, I mean, if you were truly an anarchist in the sense of wanting no government, To say to people, there is no escape from government, I think, almost ends up undercutting your position.
	Well, I mean, in the present.
	There's no hope for changing, why try?
	No, no, no.
	I didn't say ever, because remember, earlier I said that we will outgrow this institution.
	But in the present, government is ubiquitous.
	It is everywhere in the world.
	I guess maybe you could go to the Arctic and set up and be free from the bureaucratic penguins.
	I don't know.
	But you can't go anyplace in the civilized world and be free of the power of the state.
	That doesn't mean that that will always be the case, but right now, there is no escape.
	Yeah, because they're on a pretty good path right now to end themselves, financially at least.
	Oh yeah, no, absolutely.
	The crisis is coming, and that's why I think it's important to shoot up as many flares of truth so we can see the true lay of the land.
	Because people will blame freedom.
	The government will want to blame freedom, right?
	Like, what did they say about the 2008 financial crash?
	The problem was deregulation!
	There was no such thing as deregulation.
	The banks gave millions and millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to political candidates.
	The government has massive amounts of control over the financial industry.
	The SEC did nothing despite repeated warnings that this crash was coming from many competent Austrian economists and professors and so on.
	So it was not deregulation, but they just, they need to blame freedom so that they can have an excuse for more power.
	But I think that they're not going to be able to get more power, because what more power could they really want?
	That isn't going to cause economic collapse.
	The next phase is going to be that they're going to turn on the dependent cows who are draining the system.
	They're going to turn on the welfare recipients.
	They're going to turn on the Social Security recipients.
	And they're going to start talking about austerity and tighten your belts.
	We've all got to pull together through this crisis.
	And they're simply going to crash a lot of these programs, which is going to be catastrophic.
	For the system and for the people in it.
	So informative and you've scrambled my brain some more.
	I'm not sure if I appreciate that or not.

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