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June 13, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:01:07
2161 Debate - Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio Versus Professor Vladimir Safatle in Brazil! 'The Function of the State in Society'

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, debates Professor Vladimir Safatle in Sao Paulo Brazil.

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Hello, hello.
I didn't follow any of that.
He could just be saying he's the bald foreigner who will be proven wrong.
So, thank you so much.
I do apologize for doing this in English in a Portuguese-speaking country.
I apologize.
It is not being a good guest, but I've spent more time learning philosophy than learning Portuguese, so I appreciate your hospitality, and again, I'm sorry, next time.
I will not have learned Portuguese, but I will do it in mime.
This will be better.
Did you want to reintroduce our colleague and friend here?
We're ready.
So are we ready to start?
Shall I start?
Okay.
Well, the question that we are going to talk about tonight, which is I think a very essential question, the most essential question, is we're going to be talking about the function of the state in society.
And I think that it is always, always essential to start with definitions.
To know what we are talking about so that we are using the same words to mean the same things, otherwise we end up in terrible realms of confusion.
So I'm going to start.
I assume that, unlike Bill Clinton, you know what the means and of, and there's another the.
But the other three words, social, function, and state, need...
To be clarified, for me at least, and if we have disagreements about the definitions, we should resolve those before we continue, otherwise confusion doesn't get solved.
But to me, 90% of achieving the truth is all in the definitions, so we'll start with that.
So the social function of the state, the word social, so important to understand what we're talking about.
And for me, social means things which are voluntary, things which are not coerced, things which are not the response of violence.
So when you say, and if this makes no sense in what you say, just tell me and I'll try and rephrase it.
But when I say, I'm having a social engagement, this does not mean I'm going to rob a bank.
Does that make sense?
If I'm having social tea, this doesn't mean that I'm rounding people up with police dogs and bringing them to my house.
So social to me means a voluntary, like I assume everyone here is...
Here by choice, and obviously there's some bribery.
My daughter got candy.
She's here for candy, but most of you, I hope, are here.
Not because of bribery and threats, but by choice.
And so, I would like to define the social as that which is voluntary.
So, for instance, We don't think that it is a social life if we are in prison.
You know, we have interactions with other people, mostly running and hiding and all but if we can.
But this is not social.
Social is that which is chosen.
When I'm talking about the social function of the state, I mean that which is chosen.
Function is something around improving or facilitating to enhance.
So when we say that there is a reproductive function to sex, to having sex, and so it is something which It facilitates and extends or expands.
It's something to do with it either works or it's improving or something like that.
So when we talk about the social function of the state, it has to be something that improves or makes better or at least facilitates something being possible.
Am I going too fast, too slow?
Is this okay?
Yeah, it's alright?
Okay.
If people start to, then I'll slow down.
If I go too slow, I start to feel like I'm getting sleepy.
That's your job, to feel sleepy.
Now, the state.
Ah, the state.
That is a challenging thing to define.
The word means so many things, I'm sure, in Portuguese as well, but I'm going to make a very rigid, rigorous, philosophical definition.
Now, the state The state is not a thing.
We always use this language, like the state is a person, or the state is a thing.
Like I was just reading about in Canada, the state funds, gives money to, builds, the state makes the roads, the state educates the children.
In America, they call it Uncle Sam.
Do you have a similar phrase here?
No?
My criminal cousin?
No?
So Uncle Sam they call him in the States.
The partner.
The not so silent partner.
The not-so-silent partner, right.
I think that's my wife's phrase as well.
But the state is not a thing.
I had a debate some time back with some people in America, and I made this argument that the state does not exist.
It is not a thing, it is not a person, it is not a rock, it is not a tree, and I got sent a lot of emails that there were pictures of the White House, and pictures of the Pentagon, and pictures of the Federal Reserve, and pictures of men, like an army marching, and they say, this is the state.
And I said, but that's not the state.
This is a white building.
This is a, I guess, a sort of hexagon building.
This is another building with big columns.
It's got the word Federal Reserve.
And this is some men in a green costume.
But this is not the state.
These are just things.
And buildings, and people, and guns are always with the guns, right?
But the state is not a thing.
The state is...
So what is it?
Well, the state, I will argue, or at least make the case, it is a claim that some people make.
That their use of force It's legitimate.
It's good.
It's necessary.
It's moral.
It's essential for society.
You know, we say, oh, we're without a state.
Terrible, horrible things, and nobody can trade.
Nobody can raise their children and motorcycle games.
Well, it seems you already have them here, just driving all the way down between the cars.
That's crazy.
We actually saw on the way down, one of them got a little lump.
But so, the state is a state of mind.
It is our acceptance of the principle that a small group of people People can use guns to get what they want, to make law.
Law is an opinion with lots of guns.
You write it down and suddenly it's like a magic spell.
It becomes virtuous.
So the state is our acceptance that it is good for some people to use force.
And philosophically, this is a crazy notion.
It's crazy.
But people say, well, the state is legitimized, it's valid, it's true and good.
Because the majority accepts it.
50% plus 1 makes something from bad to good.
We accept this nowhere else in society.
So if three guys are walking down an alley and two of them decide to take one guy's wallet and they vote, It doesn't make it right, even if it's a two-thirds majority saying, I will get your wallet.
This doesn't make any sense at all.
So that is not something that is valid, but it is what is the state, is what is defined as the state.
And I'm going to skip, but maybe we'll come back into this.
There are lots of reasons why the majority argument doesn't work, but it is this acceptance that we have a minority of people who can use all the force in the world.
So, when we put all of this together, we've got the social function of the state.
Social is defined as that which is voluntary.
That which is romantic versus that which is rape.
It may end in the same physical act, but one is voluntary and one is evil, is immoral, is involuntary.
And so, if social is that which is voluntary, And function is that which improves or facilitates the voluntary.
Then saying the social function of the state is exactly like saying the romantic function of rape.
It is an opposite.
That which we allow to be coerced is the opposite logically, morally, commonsensically.
That which we allow to be coercive and violent and predatory It's the opposite of that which is voluntary.
So that not only is there no social function for the state, but whatever functions for the state is the opposite of society.
It's the opposite of what is chosen.
If you are coerced, that is the opposite of what is chosen.
And the last thing that I'll say before allowing you to take down all of these arguments that have been put up is that, you know, we hear Strangely enough from all the government teachers, we hear that the government reflects the will of the people.
Anyone?
Can we hear this?
Social contract, will of the people.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
This is not something we have to think about very hard.
It's just surprising.
It's a surprising thought because we hear so much of the opposite.
That which is coerced is obviously the opposite of what somebody wants.
So, if I'm walking down the street and a man comes up to me and says, give me 10 reals.
See?
He's played with it.
Give me 10 reals.
And I say, yeah, okay, here.
I've won the lottery.
I've had a good day.
My horse came in.
Here you go.
Well, that is a choice.
He has asked me for money and he has given me.
So, we know, praxeologically, we know it just logically, empirically, that I wanted to give him the money.
We don't know if I would have given him the money if he hadn't asked, but that doesn't matter.
The reality is he asked me for the ten reals and I gave him the money.
Ah, but if there is a gun to my ribs, We know that I do not want to give him the money.
Or, at the very least, we know that he does not think that I want to give him the money.
If you could get ten reals just by asking without putting a gun to someone's ribs, you would do that.
Because you're not exposing yourself to retaliation, to my ninja moves, or to a possible criminal sentence or anything like that.
And so when a gun is in someone's ribs, we know for sure that what happens is not what they want.
Because otherwise there would be no need for the gun.
The state initiates force against citizens all the time.
All the time.
In its essence, it is the only agency that has that right.
If you live...
What is the mafia called in...
I mean, not the government, but the other one.
What is the mafia called in...
PCC. PCC? Okay.
So, if you are running a restaurant in the PCC neighborhood and some shady guy comes and says, listen, We're going to need to send you a bill for protection because we don't want something bad to happen to your store and you give them the money You give it to them because they're threatening you, but you don't consider this to be moral, necessary, legitimate.
It's just something you suffer through.
But we know you don't want to give the money voluntarily because there is the threat, of course, and the government uses threats all the time and interferes with the free flow of ideas, of goods, of capital, of choice, of relationships, business relationships, even personal relationships.
And this is wrong.
So society is that which is voluntary, the state is that which is forced, and force is the opposite of civil society.
That's my introductory statement, and I'm happy to hear all the corrections of the world.
Well, first I'd like to apologize to...
I'm really sick.
My speaking would be, let's say, in slow motion.
I will try to go into the end, but I'm not as sure.
Second, I would like to thank this invitation.
I think this is a very interesting situation and moment.
I don't think that I will change your point of views concerning things very complex, like state and videos and so on.
But I'm sure that if you listen to me, maybe you can have a more Rich and complex idea about what is a leftist tough concerning states.
And I would like to listen to a liberal point of view exactly because I believe that I don't need the stereotypes of what is a liberal tough or something like this.
Well, this is the reason that I'm very grateful to be here.
Concerning all these discussions, I would like to put two major points.
First, I understand this criticism that you made concerning the relationship between state and coercion.
State as a kind of coercive structure.
And I can agree with this.
I think that some But I have problems to say that, well, what is the state?
The state is a coercive structure that blocks, let's say, the autonomy and the authenticity of civil society.
Because we can make this Every institution that I have in mind, for example, I can say yes, but the family too is a coercive structure.
The religion, even the individuals, there is something absolutely coercive and disciplinary in the constitution of individuality.
Then I don't think that the good point of view is I would like to say that we have in modern thought a very strong essay to think what is a fair state.
Or if it's possible to say, well, a state could be fair.
And I believe in it.
And I think that I would like to talk a little bit about this tradition that try to show how this state is a social structure important in, let's say, in the institutionalization of freedom.
I don't agree With the idea that we are free just where the state does not operate.
Because, for example, I can give an example of what I'm thinking.
It's not possible to talk about freedom.
In a social situation where we find strong inequality.
I think, for example, inequality is not just a question of social justice.
There is no freedom in poverty.
Well, we can be kind of stoic and say, well, I'm free in my mind even if I'm a slave.
I think this is not a very good point of view because I think this linkage between freedom and integrity is There is a strong problem in this view.
But if you accept that inequality is not just a question of social justice, but is a question of how the society must run To be a reality.
Then the question is, which kind of institution can develop a very strong policy of equality in society?
We can see in the history, in the West history, the state was very important in it.
The state was very important in this, let's say, universalization of rights.
We know, for example, there is a process, a historical process, when some vulnerable part of the society could have Like today, some rights concerning economies, concerning social service and things like this.
And I think these states are very important in this point of view.
Well, the point that I would like to put is, well, the two points.
The first is maybe it's the question to make a difference between What is a kind of fair state?
And second point is I think that we cannot make a strong distinction between freedom in one side and equality in the other side.
If you cannot make this distinction, the state is a very important actor in this game.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate that.
That is not a shocking statement from somebody on the left, and I really understand it.
I'll take a couple of swings of it and see if I can make any sense of it.
I think that we want to be clear in our distinctions of coercion versus non-coercion.
Coercion is the presence of weapons, of threats, of consequences, Getting your butt dragged out to jail, being under house arrest with people who will shoot you.
All laws come down to the threat of murder.
People stay in jail because if they try to escape, They are killed.
I mean, if some guy comes into my house in Canada, I have the right, I'm sure it is here too, some guy kicks in my door, you have the right of self-defense.
In other words, if the only way that you can prevent the aggression is to use force, then you use force.
And to me, this is morally legitimate, it's unfortunate, you don't want to have it, but you have that right.
But if they're dressed in blue costume, you can't do that, because they will kill you.
If you don't pay your taxes, Then you will get a letter.
Probably quite a nice letter at the beginning.
And then the letters will get shorter and less nice.
And then you will have a court date.
And if you do not show up to the court date, then men will come to your house.
And if you attempt to act in self-defense, they will shoot you.
I mean, this is the reality that we don't often like to look at in the way that The cows don't like to go too close to the electric fence.
If they stay away, it's like, hey, I'm just roaming around.
I like it here.
You know, it's my comfortable spot.
But the reality is that this is the kind of coercion that I'm talking about.
If we start to mix in things like a couple of other examples, individuality is coercion.
No, individuality is not pointing guns at people.
The family is coercion.
No.
There is coercion in the family, there are people who hit each other in the family and so on, parents who spank children in the family, but the family is not defined as the initiation of force and control, and it's not a murder-based institution in the way that the state is.
So I think you can say there's manipulation in the family.
Now, interestingly enough, and I just want to touch on this very briefly, because I had a great question that I didn't answer, I think, as well as I could have in the I was talking to you the other day about religion.
And religion is interesting because religion is a strongly Catholic country here, so of course you have hell.
Is this still something that is accepted for most people?
I think the Pope is sort of admirable about it and I think in England they said "Pan, too much work." But, too hot.
I mean, like in Chile.
But hell, of course, is a threat of eternal damnation and torture for children.
So it's really hard to say that the transmission of religion is entirely voluntary, a threat of violence.
And hell is the ultimate threat of violence because you don't even get the escape of death.
You're already dead.
So it's hard to argue that that is voluntary.
That could be another discussion.
I'm happy to talk about religion.
Well, sometimes.
It can be a little stressful sometimes, but it is an important topic.
But in the state, we're simply looking at, is there a gun in the room or not?
Is there a gun in the room or not?
If you date someone and you ask him or her to marry you and they choose with their own volition, they may regret their choice later, but maybe the husband will I mean, there could be any number of things that will happen, but it's still a free choice.
You can un-choose it, but that is a choice.
There's no gun, right, in the room.
So I just really wanted, I'm really just talking about gun, no gun, gun, no gun, and gun willing to be used.
I think that's an important distinction.
I think it's a fascinating and complex point that my friend has brought up here to the degree to which is poverty.
Freedom.
I think it's pretty hard to say yes, but it is freedom.
And there's no doubt that there is a massive amount of poverty in the world.
I mean, certainly in Canada, there's more of it, I think, here in Brazil.
There are countries like Japan and China that have made huge strides in reducing the amount of poverty in society.
But I think we can all generally accept...
I read these studies recently that said, you know, 97% of poor people...
The legal definition of poverty in the US have color TVs, internet, microwaves.
60% of them own their own home.
70% of them have a car.
20% of them have two cars.
It's what we call poverty now compared to 400 years ago.
I would rather be the poorest person in a Western country than the king of France in the 17th century.
There's much better life, much better opportunities.
I think that the more we can give people opportunity and the more we can widen their capacity for choice, the better off they're going to be.
What I've seen historically, the argument I'll make is that when you see great inequality, you see the state.
I'm sorry that most of my knowledge is about...
I started reading about Brazil quite a bit before I came down, but everything was so interesting that I just kept following link after link and wow, I've got nothing useful done other than reading a lot about Brazil that I couldn't use in Japan.
It is fascinating stuff.
So I'm sorry if I give you some examples from non-Brazilian environments, but I mean, the free market is a huge engine that lifts people out of poverty.
56,000 people a month in India and China are moving into the middle class.
I know the middle class is growing quite a bit here.
The free market, the lack of coercion.
The free market is simply, there's no gap.
Doesn't mean you don't have regrets.
We've all bought stuff that we didn't like, but it may be too late to return it, but it's still a choice.
Choice doesn't mean perfection.
Choice just means, no, not one of these in the room where you have tariffs and taxes and controls and even minimum wages.
I mean, this is the introduction of coercion.
In the post-war period in the United States, poverty was declining 1% a year until the welfare state came in.
As we all know, since the introduction of the welfare state, poverty has, the gaps between rich and poor, has widened.
Enormously widened.
Does anyone know how much in America personal wealth has declined in the past four years?
I just read this yesterday.
It is a shocking number.
Anyone know?
40%.
40%!
Is this because we have an excess of free markets in the States?
No.
Government has continued to grow and continue to grow.
As governments grow, inequality grows.
Think of the Soviet Union, where they had the upper, the Politburo and the rich, they had all their dachels on the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and Ivan Denisovich's were laboring for less than we could imagine, laboring for fruit with bugs in it.
I mean, it was horrible.
So I agree that poverty is a huge problem.
My friend here said he was talking about rights, that the government is really good at extending rights.
No, no, no.
Government is really good at restricting rights.
And then when we take away the government restriction of rights, when we forbid them to use force in certain areas, suddenly they claim that they've expanded rights.
I mean, who enforces slavery?
Well, the government enforced slavery.
You couldn't have slavery if you had to go and catch your slaves yourself.
Well, they just ran off.
Then what are you going to do?
No, you have slavery because the government will go and catch them for you and bring them back.
It is the government that enforces slavery.
Who didn't enforce the rights of contracts for women?
Well, the government didn't do that.
And you can sort of go on and on.
I mean, in Canada, the government says it's perfectly fine to hit your children if they're between 2 years and 12 years of age.
You see, 12 years in one day.
What's wrong?
Next day, it's red.
I mean, it's crazy, right?
I mean, so it is the government that is failing to protect this.
This is not something that the government solves.
This is a problem the government creates, and the degree to which we restrict and control and minimize the power of the state is the degree to which we get equality in society.
I agree that poverty is a big problem, that the biggest governments should have the least poverty and the greatest equality, but we see over and over again, as government power grows, inequality grows, the middle class gets hollowed out.
You get this polarization.
The rich use the power of the state.
To line their own pockets, they use the legal protections of one of the greatest evils called corporatism, called corporations.
Corporations are huge legal shields that the rich hide behind to escape the consequences of their actions.
Remember that BP oil spill?
How many BP executives lost their homes because they weren't taking care of their rigs?
How many bankers went to jail for destroying trillions of dollars of the world's wealth?
Zero.
How many protesters went to jail in the United States for singing Ben Morrison in a public park?
2,500.
The power of the state enriches the rich, impoverishes the poor.
We were just driving around and we were talking about this yesterday when we went walking around Savalo.
I know that the average Brazilian wage is six, seven thousand dollars, maybe a little more US dollars per year.
And so naturally we thought, well, you know, if the labor cost is so low here, we should go and buy a lot of stuff.
We should be rich, evil, gringo capitalists, come in and buy a bunch of stuff, which would bid up wages, which would increase everybody's income over the long run.
We went to the mall.
I looked at a nice pair of slingback arms.
But we looked at shoes and they were more expensive than Canada.
We looked at the electronics.
It's like, well, not too bad.
The tax is what?
100% on an iPad.
And so we can't.
And is that because The government is doing something to help the poor now.
The government is not helping the poor because the government is not letting us purchase enough, thus driving up the wages of the poor.
The only way to raise the wages of the poor is not pass laws and point guns at people who won't hire them for more.
Raise the demand for the poor, which means lowering barriers to trade.
Lowering barriers to trade always drives up.
This is a sustainable way to increase the wealth of society.
Passing laws, pointing guns at you and giving the money to you, I mean, just completely distorts everything.
Completely distorts everything.
So, my argument is, when you take the gun out of the room, human society, human interactions, human relationships, human economics always improve.
Not necessarily for everyone all the time, of course not, right?
But, in general, that is a very, very clear train.
As government powers go down, the human condition improves as government power increases, the human condition I mean, to do all of this stuff, to do all of the social engineering and welfare state and this and that, the government has to do two things which are unbelievably bad for people.
Number one, it has to take control of the money supply, right?
Because to give people things, if you don't control the money supply, if you have a gold standard or whatever it is that maintains the value of currency, because I know in South America the value of currency can be quite an exciting thing as it is now for the rest of the world.
If you want to give people things for free, you've got to take control of the money supply, because it doesn't work otherwise.
So if I say, well, I want to give everyone 100 dollars, 100 reales, what do I have to do?
I've got to tax them about 200 reales, because I've got to pay my people.
I have all this money around.
I've got to pay the tax collectors.
I've got to pay the people who make sure nobody's cheating.
I've got to make sure nobody's dead in trying to collect.
I've got to have the bureaucrats who are going to process the checks.
So I have to tax you.
And how many politicians would say this?
Aha!
I'm going to pay you 100 reals and tax you 200 reals.
Vote for me.
I mean, this would not be anybody.
So in order to give people 100 reals, you have to take control of the money supply so you can print the money.
And the people say, hey, look, I have 100 realts, how fantastic!
But it only buys 20 or 30 or 40 realts worth of stuff.
Because it's all so much.
And then of course, when they control the money supply, they have to control the interest rates.
Because if you print all this money, the interest rates go up.
And all the money that you borrowed to bribe all these people, interest rate goes up, and then the taxes have to go way up.
And then everybody realizes what a game.
The Europeans are figuring this out.
Fiat currencies last about 30 or 40 years, and the U.S. went fiat in 1971, and it was in the 70s and 80s, and it's about 30, 40 years.
When you study history, it's all around the same thing over and over again.
Everybody's just surprised who haven't read about the past.
So the increased government power and inflation is the worst thing for the poor, because the rich can do defensive things with their money, but when the poor are poor and the price of bread is going up, this is unbelievably catastrophic.
So this idea that you can appoint some group, the last thing I'll say is if we are interested in equality, there is no greater inequality between those who control the money supply, who control the interest rates, who can sell off The unborn productivity of future generations for the sake of bribing people in the here and now.
This is inevitable with the state.
This is not the state gone wrong.
This is the state.
You bribe people to get their votes and you pay them off by selling off fetuses to Chinese banks.
It is unholden.
There is no exception to this, particularly in democracies.
And it's repetitive from the Roman Empire down to the present.
You give people shallow entertainments, reality TV, you give them this stuff, and you bribe them with printed money and borrowed money.
And the power to do that is the greatest inequality.
I cannot type whatever I want into my bank account.
I've tried.
The read-only field.
Total offer.
But the government can do that.
There's no greater power than the power to control money, the power to control interest rates, and the power to sell off the productivity of the unborn.
and there is no equality that can come out of that moral and legal and philosophical inequality within society.
Okay, well, I would like to point just to questions for...
First up, about coercion.
I believe, too, that we need to begin by definitions.
I understand coercion as something that you don't make by free choice.
It means you must accept.
It's not a question of choice.
If you accept this idea, for me it's very complicated to say that, well, family is not a case of coercion.
Or even religion is not a case of coercion.
Or I would like to say the process of constitution of individual duality has a strong measure of coercion.
It means what I need to loss to be individual, for example.
what I need to accept to be individual.
If you put this kind of questions, I think that I prefer to say that there is a several kinds of questions.
I can understand that the coercion that exists in the state is not the same coercion that exists in the family.
But I don't like to accept that there is no question of coercion in the family.
Maybe we need to be a little less, let's say, binary and say, well, in some situations The family can be a space where I can learn things for freedom.
In some situations, the state can be a very strong and important actor in some fights, some social fights.
I ask if the question is not to avoid this kind of institutions or if the This is the first question.
The second is, I can understand all this point of view concerning the action of the state as a guarantee of equality.
I can understand all this position that you We put in the debate.
But I'd like to make a question.
You came from Canada.
I believe that you studied in the public school.
It was a mix, but a lot of it was in public schools.
Yes.
And what do you think about the public schools?
Terrible.
Absolutely terrible.
Why?
Because I was never taught how to think.
I was stuffed full of a bunch of propagandistic conclusions.
The government is here to help.
Without the government there's Chaos and murder, and the government saved us all from the Great Depression, and the government saved us all from the Nazis, and with that, you know.
It was all just a bunch of conclusions, and I also found that this is all the way through.
I got a master's degree from the University of Toronto.
I studied at York University and McGill University, so I had a good tour.
I was in private school in England, public school here in Canada, and whenever you question the Outright propaganda of the state, it becomes very hard.
I was just talking about this, I'm sorry, a very free answer, but I was just talking about this with someone at dinner the other night, that it was in graduate school, this woman was in graduate school, she's like, ah, I don't know if I want to continue, because if you were in Canada and you say, the Great Depression was caused by the free market and it was,
the effects were immediately rated by the The New Deal under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and then capitalism was saved by World War II. If you say that, which is the complete opposite of the truth, empirically and statistically and morally, but if you say that, then you don't have to footnote anything.
Because it's just like saying the world is round.
You don't have to say footnote Galileo said, you know, here's the math.
You just say it, because it's accepted.
And the propaganda that is out there that is, I'm sure it's the same here, government schools are the same everywhere, But if you say something like the Great Depression was caused by the Federal Reserve jacking up the amount of money in circulation by two thirds and then contracting it by a third and then massive amounts of government intervention, violent intervention in the economy kept things going and the Second World War did not save capitalism.
Capitalism was only saved by the fact that they dismantled all of the New Deal programs, almost all of them up at the Second World War and let the free market function.
Then you have to provide so many footnotes, and then people will say, well, this is not a reliable footnote.
And I have 2,000 historians who are saying one thing, and you have five who are saying another, and so you don't get an A. And so, in this way, you just have this reproduction of this propaganda.
I can't think of a single thing of significant or enduring value that I got out of public school.
I don't know if you guys feel any different.
I mean, almost everything that I've got that is of real value in my life, I have Learned outside of formal education.
Formal education for me was just trying to navigate my way through to get a piece of paper and trying to bite my tongue as much as possible to the point where it was half the size of my head when I was done.
Do you think that propaganda exists just in public schools?
Well, no, but propaganda exists from Coca-Cola.
We went to the zoo the other day and here is the snake by Coca-Cola.
I don't think the snake was built by Coca-Cola.
I don't think it was made of Coca-Cola.
Is that what you're saying?
Just one point, in Brazil, in private schools, you have to abide by the government.
Yeah, they're all the same regulations.
But the difference is with an advertisement, I know that it's an advertisement.
When I was younger, I worked in a daycare, and we took all the children to a Coca-Cola factory to see how the Coca-Cola was made.
And they played a commercial.
I can't even remember the song, and you can count yourself happy.
Otherwise, I would do karaoke for sure.
And all the children were singing along.
But if you were to say to them, if you were to say to the children, I'd ask them afterwards, I'd say, well, is this true?
Is this like a truth?
Is this like good?
Is this like right?
And they'd say, no, it's tasty.
And I would also say, do the commercials tell the truth about Coke?
Like, do they say it's bad for your teeth?
Do they say whatever, right?
They'd say, well, no, of course.
They're trying to sell us Coke.
Of course not.
I mean, they're aware.
I mean, everybody knows a commercial is a commercial.
But people don't know that public school is a commercial.
That's the problem.
That's why I call it propaganda rather than advertising.
Yeah, but this is very funny because, for example, I always studied in private school.
I studied here in the private school that learned me that the French Revolution was a show of murder.
Just this.
Just a show of murder.
And I always said, look, I think that's not exactly the case.
You said to me, look, this is a private school, this is my school, if you don't believe, you need to go ahead.
But there is no other place to go.
Then, I can understand what are you saying.
We, in this process, when we're in a public school, we need to accept some perspectives, some versions of the history that maybe is not really true.
But in the public system, nobody can say to you, look, if you are not agreed, go ahead.
You can discuss.
But if you are just in the private system, for example, it's the same thing.
If you are working for a private company, people will say, well, this is our value.
Okay, I mean, I obviously can't speak to your education.
I grew up and I went to a private boarding school in England.
And I can tell you for sure that the private boarding school in England was heavily influenced by the existence of the state and in particular the aristocracy.
Private schools are there for the children.
Let me be completely broad brush strokes.
Private schools are there for the education of the elite in order to have them run the society that exists.
Not to create a new society, not to challenge the tenets of that society, but to step into the leadership roles of the society that exists.
And so, you can't be an anarchist in private schools.
I'm an anarchist.
They want you to go and run society, and so they're grooming you for leadership in a society that you're going to benefit from because of the state, because of the power of the state.
I mean, that would be my guess.
I would also say, as you said, that they have to follow the curriculum.
But it's very difficult to have a school and get parents to pay for a school That teaches the children the immorality that is at the root of the society that they live in.
It's like, give me $10,000 a year so that I can make your children very uncomfortable in the society that they live in.
Somebody suggested a tagline for my show.
I run this philosophy show, Free Domain Radio.
So Free Domain Radio creating uncomfortable dinner silences since 2006.
Because isn't this what philosophy does?
I mean, this is what moral principles they do.
And so I think it would be tough to sell a private school in a society saying, well, yeah, we're going to teach you that law is an opinion with a gun.
We're going to teach you that taxation is theft.
We're going to teach you that national debts are a form of intergenerational enslavement.
And go and enjoy your society.
I don't know a lot of parents would pay for that, but that's because of the society that exists.
In fact, I think parents would pay not to have that.
I don't think you can really say private if they're trying to get people to adapt to a status, irrational, aggressive, violent Hegemonic society.
Then you're just trying to adapt to this stuff and it's not to me the same as a truly free education.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, but I put this question because I would like to put another question.
In your point of view, how services like education and health need to work if you are totally against the state?
Well, if I knew how they could work, I could be a great state.
I'll give you a very short analogy, then a bad answer.
I look forward to it.
The short answer is it doesn't matter.
In America, in the South, the slaves pick the cotton, right?
The slaves pick the food.
And if I say, we should not have slavery, people say, well, who will pick the cotton?
Well, who will pick the food?
I don't care.
All I care is that slavery is immoral.
I don't care who picks the slaves.
I don't care who build the roads.
I don't care how healthcare is provided.
I just want people to stop using guns to run society.
Because it just runs it into the ground.
Violence is like a drug.
It's not like a drug.
It is a drug.
People become, I don't know, there's fantastic studies how recently political power, power over other people through coercion, whether it's criminal or the state, Whether it's amateur criminals or professional criminals, it releases dopamine in the system, endorphins.
It is more addictive than cocaine.
They've done studies with monkeys, and they have found that as monkeys move up in the social violent hierarchy of monkeys, it's a very aggressive hierarchy, they get more dopamine, more endorphins, and then when they go down they become depressed, and they're nervous, and so on.
Political power is incredibly addictive.
This is why we have people who are drug addicts fighting the war on drugs.
It's ridiculous, right?
So that's the very brief answer.
I don't care.
I do care that people...
I want people to stop shooting each other.
I don't care if they hug or walk away from each other afterwards.
Just put down the guns and then we can talk.
But there's tons of examples of education.
There's a fantastic...
I've got a video series on YouTube called The Death of the West.
There was an example of education that was in...
It was called the Lancaster School in the 19th century.
We could get a full year of very high quality education.
A lot of these people went on to higher education.
Can anyone give me a guess how much it cost?
Give me a guess.
40,000.
40,000?
For a year?
80,000.
80,000?
Anyone else?
This isn't constant dollars.
This isn't modern dollars.
No.
Sorry, this is about 80 US dollars.
The way that it occurred is that the older students would attempt to sell their tutoring services to the younger students, who in turn would attempt to sell their tutoring services to the younger students.
Everybody was both a learner and a teacher.
You know that the best way to know if you know something is to try to teach it to someone else.
You ever try to teach the business cycle theory to someone else?
They've got 10,000 questions and you immediately know when you don't know stuff.
And so this was a very, very effective and powerful form of education that was there.
In the 19th century in America, literacy rate?
97%.
97%.
This is a time when people consumed Herman Melvin, Moby Dick.
They consumed Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man.
Democracy in America by de Tocqueville was a bestseller.
This was a highly literate, highly educated population.
Do you know there is no government school that has come even close to that?
Literacy rates in the United States right now?
Do you have any idea how absolutely appalling it is?
Of course, I'm not saying you're in favor of any of this, but the literacy rates, even by government standards, and the government is like the opposite of standards, but even just by government standards, only about 30 to 40% of grades 6, 7, and 8 students are literal.
I mean, it's catastrophic what is going on in government education and to me this is the result of coercion.
Coercion produces crap.
The only thing that is equality is voluntary.
Everything that is not voluntary is junk and immoral, obviously, and disastrous in the long run.
Yeah, but it's a little bit strange because you are not saying, well, without government education you'll be there.
You just say, I don't care.
Could you imagine the image, for example, you were saying, well, let's stop with the state, let's stop with the social state, social service and things like this, and a poor family asks you, well, what will you do now?
You say, I don't care.
It's a little bit...
I think it's easy to say in this way.
But I would hope that people would not want me to care, because they shouldn't be reliant upon me for whether they...
Do what they do?
I mean, there shouldn't be anybody in society we go to and say, how will my life be run?
Save me from X, Y, or Z. I mean, to the poor people, I would say you're poor because of the state.
Where we do not have the state, you know, in the United States, the least regulated profession is the computer industry, the software industry.
How's that doing in terms of reducing prices, increasing quality?
One of the most regulated fields in the United States is the healthcare industry.
How's that doing?
Catastrophic.
Constantly increasing costs.
There is, I saw a presentation, I just came from Dallas and gave a talk there, a presentation by Dr.
Mary Ruart.
I really recommend looking her stuff up.
She's estimated that up to 5 million Americans have died as a result of the FDA's control over drug approvals.
The drugs that are perfectly legal in other countries that save hundreds of thousands of lives are banned.
And so people say, well, how will my medicines be safe?
That's assuming that they're safe now.
Poor people say, well, how will my children be educated?
They're not being educated now.
In fact, it's worse than not being educated because they think they're being educated when they're not.
And when you think you have a solution, that's worse than not having a solution.
You know, you ever get that feeling you're driving?
You're driving along.
Maybe you don't have your GPS. Or maybe you can't drive with one knee like my friend who drives down here tonight.
But you get that feeling and you're like, I think I might be lost.
You know, that's a good feeling.
Because if you're completely confident and you are lost, that's really bad.
And so it's the illusion of an answer that the state gives.
How are we going to deal with poverty?
Point a bunch of guns at these people, take some money, print some money, and then we'll give some money to these people.
Look, our problem is solved.
It's the illusion of a solution.
How are we going to educate people?
Well, we're going to force all of these children to go into these schools, and we're going to force all of these people to pay for it, and we're not going to allow competition.
And if we do allow competition, it's by our rules and following our curriculum.
And then we think we have solved the problem of education.
That's like solving the problem with loneliness by forcing people to get married.
You haven't solved the problem.
You've just alleviated a symptom while making the problem worse.
And so, when people say, well, how will problems be solved without the state?
There's this illusion that violence is solving the problems now.
It's not.
It's covering up a few symptoms.
You know, as I say, it's like cocaine for a toothache.
I feel better.
But my tooth is only getting worse.
And when it wears off, right, when we run out of money, when we can't pay our debts, when, you know, Greece, you know, Greeks at the moment are taking a billion dollars out of the bank every day because they're terrified of what is going to happen.
Americans relied on the government to solve social problems.
They have a $15 trillion debt, close to $100 trillion of unfunded liabilities.
They just lost 40% of their wealth in four years.
Was the government not big enough?
It's the biggest government the world has ever seen.
The United States government is the largest, most wealthy, most powerful government the world has ever seen.
How's it going?
Sorry.
No, this is very funny, because for me it's funny to listen to this kind of perspective.
Because, for example...
Funny ha-ha.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
It's not exactly what I expect.
Because, for example, you say...
You thought I was right-wing?
Sorry?
You thought I was, like, right-wing?
You say, for example, well, I would like to say to a poor family, well, we are poor because of the state, because of the government.
And you use the major examples that came from the United States government.
Well, I would like to say, as a vulgar Marxist, something like, well, the problem is that this government is not exactly a public government.
It's a government totally...
You mean resilient?
Yeah, the American government.
It's a government totally linked with Major interests of major companies.
It means it's not a public government, it's a private one.
It's a system that the big companies use, for example, to defend banks, as you said.
To defend some companies and things like this.
But, for example, we can think in a more fair state.
For example, well, where are the people that have the lowest difference between rich and poor?
There are countries that that have strong states like Sweden, like Denmark, like Finland, like Norway, like Iceland.
But I think that we can say, well...
Why do we have these examples?
Because we have a kind of state that is not just a skill, a skill of some nature complex.
This phrase in economics is called regulatory capture.
For those who know this, you're a bank and the government has the power to regulate you and so you give a lot of money to politicians and you make sure that you get the right to legislation.
The Obamacare, certainly the pharmaceutical aspects of it were written by the pharmaceutical industry.
They pay massive amounts of money and they give Tens or hundreds of millions of dollars through various means to candidates.
And of course, the regulators, if you are, let's say you're doing an MBA in finance and you're like the top 1% of your class, do you say, I can't wait to get a job at the SEC because they pay like $70,000 a year.
No, you go and you create these crazy financial instruments that manipulate fiat currency, make you rich and destroy the world.
This is true.
Physically, the dumber people go into regulations.
I mean, dumber relative to it.
The really smart people go into the industries, and so they can't keep up.
It's just an intelligence differentiation.
Regulatory capture is a huge problem now with the Scandinavian examples.
I mean, it's a long conversation and we don't have to bore everyone, but my fundamental question is, are they in debt?
And of course they're in debt.
And so it's sort of like, you know, you get up and you go to work every day.
But every country in the world is in debt now.
I know, but because every country in the world is in debt.
But it's like you get up and you go to work every day.
You know, there are times when you don't want to go to work.
You've got a headache or, you know, whatever, and you didn't sleep well.
And then your neighbor is just sitting there, you know, with this big cigar, a mojito, at 8 o'clock in the morning.
Can you believe it, right?
And you're like, man, I'm a sucker.
This guy's got it, mate.
But all he's doing is living off his credit card.
And it's going to crash.
And so we can always find some government, right?
They seem to be doing much better.
I mean, their inequality is going on and so on.
Yeah, of course, because they're going into debt.
But you'll find that their birth rates are usually very low, which is a huge problem, especially in the aging population.
We all know that baby boomers are going to retire.
Is it the same thing here?
Did you get a post-war boom?
Not so much, right?
Because you didn't have a war.
That's a good post-war boom, but only in Nazis.
They don't breathe very much.
They were all pretty old, right?
So yeah, if someone goes into debt, it looks like they've squared the circle.
They've solved the problem.
But the Norwegian countries are massively in debt.
They have extremely low rates.
And so there's just no conceivable way.
They won't last another 20 years.
It's absolutely unsustainable.
Going into debt and printing lots of money and I mean, yeah, it looks like you've solved all these problems.
I mean, why are the baby boomers in North America so rich?
Because the government paid for all the stuff they should have paid for, like roads, like healthcare, like all this stuff was very cheap and very free.
They didn't have to pay for their aged parents because of Social Security.
And so they got to save all this money for stuff they should have otherwise bought.
And so they got all this money now.
And they expect to get all this retirement money, but there's nothing in the bank, so all they're doing is feeding off the young, who are the poorest generation that has come along in a while.
I mean, it's brutal.
So yeah, I mean, it's no question you can find some state of society that seems to be doing okay, but the big question is, what's their per capita debt?
What's their population bulge?
I mean, this is just demographics and finances.
If it's unsustainable, what's going to change?
I mean, none of the state of societies.
Canada has a higher per capita debt than Greece.
This is not a good company to be in.
Now, we have some natural resources and Greece has fewer, but I mean, it's all completely unsustainable.
And it wasn't sold to us as unsustainable.
It wasn't like, hey, let's have a spending and bribing orgy and we'll make lots of money and then we'll stiff the next generation with the bill.
It was sold as this was going to be sustainable, this was going to reduce costs, this wasn't going to be a problem.
And so the people who founded the system were either fools or liars.
Not that you can't be both.
But, yeah, you can find some country that's working out, but if it's got a small birth rate, an aging population, and dead, it's just a matter of time.
Yeah, but what can guarantee you that a society without state will be better than a society that we know?
What can, let's say you end slavery, how can you, let's say we're the first people to talk about ending slavery, we'll go back 400 years.
We're the first crazy Quakers to talk about ending slavery, and people will say, well, how can you guarantee me?
That a non-slave-owning society would be better.
Show me an example of a non-slave-owning society in the past.
We said, well, we can, because we're talking about it for the first time.
But I think that comparison is not a very good one.
This means you compare the slavery system with, let's say, a democratic system.
Well, at least the slaves could run away.
I mean, what are you young people going to do when the debt comes, right?
I mean, there's no place you can go.
The slaves have an underground...
I understand, I'm not saying that everyone here is exactly the same as an American slave.
I'm just saying that the analogy is not completely outlandish.
I mean, what is the per capita debt in Brazil at the moment?
Anybody know?
Per capita?
Yeah, like per capita debt, national debt.
Two trillion divided by two hundred...
Oh, please don't make me do this.
Let me take my shoes off and count myself.
Two trillion dollars?
Two trillion reais divided by two hundred million.
And this is just current debt, unfunded liabilities, promises to people made for healthcare, for old age pensions, for...
No, that's the funded one.
This is funded, okay.
But it's going to be pretty significant.
And we have no right to sell off the unborn.
We just don't.
I mean, national debts are unbelievably immoral.
And it is a form of enslavement.
To be born into a system where you are loaded with tens or hundreds of thousands of rails of debt, It's a form of economic enslavement.
It is an exploitation of the unborn, which is even worse than the exploitation of the workers.
The workers at least, they can maybe vote, or they can go to another country, or they can start a business, or they can start a union, which would be great.
I mean, they can do all of these things, but the unborn have absolutely no sense.
To be born into debt is unbelievably unholy.
And this is the case for all governments around the world.
They're just selling off the unborn for the sake of bribing voters in the present.
And if it's that universal, we've got to ask if there's something wrong with the system as a whole.
If every single government is doing exactly the same immorality, at some point we have to say, It's something wrong with the system as a whole.
Not just, well, this government versus this government, but...
And so, I think that it's perfectly valid.
I mean, sorry, one last brief example.
I've used this before, but...
If we were talking 400 years ago about the end of slavery, and I would say to you, I know exactly what's going to happen.
I know.
I'm going to tell you.
We're going to free the slaves.
Now, right now, 90% of people are farmers, are involved in agriculture.
There's just a few people who aren't.
But by the time this is done, 100 years, 200 years from now, only 3% of people are going to be involved in farming.
And there will be these giant machines That go rolling through the crops with these huge robot arms that pick all the crops for you.
Oh, and they run on the crushed trees of 300 million years ago.
And one guy can do a whole field in an afternoon that used to take hundreds of guys half the summer.
And then they'll replant automatically.
And then these giant rolling wagons with no horses will fly across these crushed rock roads.
And you would say to me, that's completely insane.
I mean, that's not even science fiction.
That's like a drug trip that you're talking about.
That makes no sense.
But that is actually what happened.
The future beyond the veil of force, the future on the other side of peace, the future when we put the gun down, is unimaginable.
So to try and predict it, say, well, who will build the roads?
Who will deal with the healthcare?
It's like saying, who will pick the crops 200 years after the end of slavery?
It can't be fathomed.
But it will be fantastic.
But, look, I would like to think in the kind of society where the state is not exactly necessary.
We're talking about the windering away.
Yeah.
You know, there is In the fight against the state.
But the question is, we have a problem now.
The problem is, for a society like this exists, we must put everybody in the kind of same level.
It means, for example, if you have today, we have strong structures of inequality, then if you just put this This will grow up.
We saw it in other situations.
We saw, for example, in the neoliberal politics where the states were, well, we put ahead of the state.
Inequality grew up.
Okay, sorry, but what examples of that?
Well, England was an example.
Inequality England grew up in the 80s and 90s.
I remember the numbers.
In 1970, The 1% more rich in England had something like 2.3 of the income of the country.
Today, they have 5.3.
And in 230, they must have something like 40%.
Our historical experience is not a very good one.
This is the question.
I could accept your idea that we must give the responsibility to individuals.
But what we say until today, what you see until today, is not really, really good.
No, it's not.
Okay, yeah, that's a great point.
So, if I want to make sure I understand the argument, so when we've seen situations where there is some restriction in the size and power of the state, or maybe even a diminishment, that you get increased inequality.
You can look at what happened in Reagan's America, where they cut taxes and so on, or Thatcher's England and so on, where there is a shrinkage in the state caused by a rising inequality.
Two arguments.
It doesn't matter if you cut taxes, it matters if you cut spending.
The problem with Thatcher and Reagan is that they cut taxes without cutting spending, which means that they just run into debt.
And when you run into debt, you have to go borrow money.
The government doesn't come to us.
Right?
When it needs 10 trillion dollars, right?
It doesn't come to you and I and say, listen, with the change jar, listen, can you chip in a little because we need 100 billion reales to cover the budget?
No, they go to the monster capitalist.
Can I say a nasty word now?
They go to the monster capitalist people who aren't very nice with holes.
And they go to those people and then those people give them money to cover up and then they end up paying a lot of money back to those people.
Do you know the income tax in America?
Does everybody know where the money goes from the income tax?
All the income tax in America goes where?
Does it go to social services?
Does it go to roads?
Does it go to hospitals?
Police?
It just goes to pay interest on the debt.
It doesn't even go to pay the debt.
It only goes to pay interest on the debt.
So if you cut government taxes without cutting government spending, then you have to borrow money from these bankers, and then the rich end up getting very rich.
Because now they own 20-30% of Americans, 20-30% slavery, to financiers who have lent the government money because the government wanted to cut taxes without cutting spending.
And when you cut taxes, of course, you proportionally benefit the rich because the rich pay more in taxes, and so this is not a good way to solve the problem of the state.
That's the first thing.
The second argument I would make is, I always find it fascinating to look at these patterns.
Look at the Roman Empire at the very beginning.
Very small government, relative to the end.
To the end, it was just another fascist dictatorship.
But at the beginning of the Roman Empire, what did they get so wealthy from?
From free trade and a small government.
Look at the beginning of the American government.
Okay, sorry about women, sorry about slaves, but looking at, and not small, there's big important issues, but if you look at the size of the government and the degree of control it had over trade, it was tiny.
No income tax.
No sales tax.
You could go and do whatever you wanted.
You could go be a doctor, go be a plumber, go be a lawyer.
You didn't have to have all these licenses and no tariffs, a few tariffs, but there was nothing.
And it grew unbelievably.
It grew unbelievably in terms of its economy without rising prices.
Do you know that the average price of commodities at the end of the 19th century in America was lower than at the beginning?
I mean, we just used the prices going up, up, up, up, right?
It was cheaper at the end than at the beginning.
I'm sorry, the British Empire.
England, how did it become a world power?
Because England was the first country to institute free trade with other countries in the 18th century, 17th century.
Believe it or not, I've read these books.
It's amazing.
These incredible arguments that they made for free trade, saying it was going to be incredibly beneficial.
So they freed up the corn laws, reduced the agricultural subsidies and controls.
None of this stuff is made.
But what happens?
The Roman Empire has free trade and it has great transportation and a small government.
So you get a lot of wealth.
And what does the government do when it sees a lot of wealth in society?
It starts to raise your taxes.
Right?
Freedom breeds tyranny.
As long as you have a government, when you have a small government, you will get a large government.
It is food for cancer.
Freedom is food for the cancer of the state.
The British Empire, free trade.
Lots of wealth.
Massive growth in taxation.
America went from the very smallest government that had ever been conceived of in the history of our species to the very largest government that has ever existed.
It could even have been imagined in the history of our species.
And so my concern is that, yeah, if you shrink government, what you're doing is you're creating a huge amount of potential energy and potential wealth.
The government starts to tax.
When the citizens become more wealthy, the government uses that wealth as collateral to borrow and enslave and in debt the next generation.
As long as you have a government, whatever you do to compress that government, if you're not compressing it to nothing, It just blows up and takes over every...
Sorry, that's a freak out.
I can understand your argument.
When I say that it's funny, it's because I remember, for example, some leftists, like Pierre Clast, that had written a book called Society Against the States.
Society Against the States.
And the arguments are not really different from your arguments, too.
But what we see, for example, when you say, well, the question is not just cut taxes, the question is just cut spendings.
But when you see the governments that are cutting spendings, what they cut?
They cut spending on education, It's very complicated to even try to imagine how we can cut-span it without destroying all these services that are totally important for people.
Well, you stop paying interest on the debt.
You screw the banksters.
Save the people, screw the banksters.
I mean, you stop...
I agree, I agree.
But governments can't do that.
I mean, there's a reason why they don't do that.
They don't do that because if they make...
I'm trying to keep my language.
It's a fancy joke.
But if we...
It's hard to speak clean.
But the governments can't do that because if they do not get the debt servicing, if their debts are called in, what do they want to do?
Yeah, this is very funny.
For example, I saw, I don't know if you are...
What do you think about, for example, this Republican candidate, Ron Paul?
Oh, Rommel?
Hugely dangerous, in my opinion.
Cool!
He's a cool guy.
A doctor, politician, Austrian economics guy.
No, because he was the only that said something like what you say.
Yes, well, I have some issues.
He believes in states' rights, you know, because this government, really bad.
This government, really good.
I mean, this just doesn't do it.
This cancer is bad, but this local cancer is healthy.
But, you know, I mean, I think for Ron Paul, first of all, I mean, it's very religious, and I think that's a problem.
I mean, if you're looking for rational, consistent thought.
But I think the great danger of Ron Paul, imagine, you know, the way I sort of view it is you're second in command on the Titanic.
And let's say I'm the captain and you're second in command.
I feel something, right?
And I go down and I look at the bottom of the ship.
You know, water coming in, Leonardo DiCaprio running around.
And then I come back up and I say, listen, I would like to give you a promotion.
I'm going to put you in charge and you're going to be the captain.
And you're like...
And then, all the history books say, you went down with the Titanic.
You were the captain in charge when the Titanic went down.
If you are into freedom, you stay away from this Hindenburg at the moment, because if Ron Paul got elected, I mean, the system can't sustain itself, no matter what anybody does now.
I mean, we're just trying to find ways to get to the next thing after this thing stops.
But all people would remember is, you remember that libertarian who got in?
Ron Paul?
Well, when he got in, you know, all the spending got cut, and people were out rioting in the streets, and oh, remember what libertarianism?
I mean, they're still blaming the Great Depression on the free market.
I mean, this would kill freedom and philosophy for a thousand years if this guy got in power, because it would take that long to get over.
I mean, he's a well-meaning guy, nice guy, smart guy, but...
Stay away from that Titanic right now.
You can only have credibility if you're not in charge when the thing goes down.
That's why I'm not president.
It would be on the boat.
Yeah.
If you feel that bunk, start edging towards the lifeboats and save as many people as you can.
Do we have any questions from the brains of the outfit out there?
Concerning Ron Paul, but then you say he doesn't have a formula to fix the things.
Libertarian ideas only goes well when you are in the cruise mode, when you hit a rock, it doesn't work?
Well, let's say that Ron Paul got in.
He would have to be prepared to use force.
He would have to, because he would be cutting a huge amount of social spending.
I think that's irresponsible.
I think people are dependent on the system.
I don't think you can just change society in that fashion.
But he would have to be prepared to use force.
So he would try and privatize schools or maybe...
I mean, I know that's not directly, but he would try and privatize stuff or cut spending.
People would go out in the streets.
They would riot.
He would have to bring out the police.
He'd have to bring out rubber bullets.
He'd have to bring out the National Guard.
You'd see blood on the streets.
This is what happens.
In Quebec, they're talking about raising tuition, about $150 a year, in a province in Canada, just trying to get it back to how much they used to pay in 1960.
There have been riots and deaths.
In Wisconsin, they're talking about Asking people to pay a few percentage points of their retirement benefits and you have riots and death and recall elections.
People are not philosophically ready for a free society.
They can't even conceive of it as a free society, a non-violent society.
So yeah, if Ron Paul were to get in, he would have to use force.
Now let's say he was willing to use force and let's say by all miracles he achieved his goals and we collapse the state back down to 10% of its current size.
You would see a huge explosion of wealth in society, lifting the poor, as statistically happened after the Second World War when the free market was relatively free.
Poverty was declining 1% every year.
Every year.
And then the welfare state went in and it stopped declining and now it's increasing again.
But all that would happen is if he got what he wanted, we'd collapse the state back down, there'd be a huge growth in revenue, in income, and people would be making $100,000, $200,000 a year.
What would the government do?
Money, money, money, tax, tax, tax.
Collateral.
And so the government would simply grow.
Even bigger than it had before.
And I don't think this can go on forever.
And eventually the government's going to get so big and technology will get so advanced that we simply won't be able to fight it anymore.
So I don't think this process can go on forever.
Does that...
I think that may have answered your question.
Is that...
Anybody close?
I don't want to say...
When I say I've answered your question, I don't mean that, ah, that's the final...
I'm just saying that's my answer.
I think that Ron Paul's program, he wouldn't cut the social security or things like that for people that are dependent on the system.
He would cut more in the military and war on drugs, things like that.
At least from what I remember.
He would do a transition process.
Yes, I understand.
I'm not saying that he'd hold people on the streets, but it's really tough to cut spending in a social welfare system because let's say he fires a whole bunch of people from the military.
Well, they just go on unemployment insurance.
He hasn't actually saved any money.
Yeah, but when you unregulate the economy, then you have more jobs and you put out the regulations.
So I think there is There could be a transition.
I agree with you that if we maybe crank the size of the state, then they would use that wealthy and maybe to buy a new technology, people would get into the government and control them more.
Yeah, I mean, where he would have the most luck and I think where he would have the best chance would be to get rid of regulations, to get rid of barriers to entry.
You know, if we want to help the poor, we want to make sure the poor can very easily become skilled people.
If it takes you seven years of staring at some other guy fixing toilets to become a plumber, that's a huge barrier for the poor.
We want to make sure, hey, you want to be a plumber?
Go be a plumber.
I don't care.
If you blow up people's toilets, they'll be upset with you and you won't be a very good plumber anymore, but go be a plumber.
Just reduce the barriers to entry.
Places in the States, you have to have a license to be a flower arranger.
Because, you know, you put that rose next to the tooth, right?
So I think in that instance, yeah, if he's about breaking down regulations, but the problem, of course, is that whenever you try to break down restrictions and regulations, everyone who's benefiting from it goes insane, right?
I mean...
The sugar tariffs, I mean just tiny examples, sugar tariffs make people millions of dollars every year by restricting imports of sugar and so people, it raises the price of sugar in the U.S. to the point where they end up putting this god-awful stuff, fructose, glutose everywhere because it's not regulated and so people get fat and it's all these terrible things that happen but the reason that these things go on decade after decade after decade is that,
as you know, if you try to cut sugar subsidies Then every consumer has like 20 bucks worth of incentive, because that's how much it costs each consumer a year, 20 or 30 bucks.
They have almost no incentive to support you, but the sugar producers who are making millions of dollars We'll go hire lawyers and make ads and run negative ads.
Politicians just don't touch it.
I'm sorry?
They buy politicians.
Yeah, they buy it.
Whenever you have this regulatory control, the people who benefit from it will just go destroy your political career if you try and take away their unjust money.
I don't know what would happen in that situation, but I think it's a lot easier to talk about cutting regulations than achieving But that's a great point for Clarence.
Thank you.
Question for Vladimir.
You seem to think, I understood, that you think that you need to achieve certain society's goals or qualities or something like that.
And for that, you would consider the state the vehicle to achieve that.
But if you agree to the principle that the state is Or very clearly so.
Would you still be willing to defend that aggression to solve society's problems through aggression?
The question is, I don't believe that the state is just aggressive against people.
I think that there is a kind of ambivalence in some political states.
For example, I can accept that some state politics are very aggressive because they are made by Special interests.
Exactly.
Something like this.
But, for example, I can identify some kind of politics, state politics, that are benefit for people.
For example, we have a province called some justice.
If you don't have some kind of power that could break some trustees, even the idea of a free market is finished.
But the question is, who can do this?
For example, we have our Brazilian economy.
We have a very good example here.
You refer to antitrust?
For example, antitrust laws.
We have our economy.
It's a totally trusty economy.
Every sector is made by change.
Two or three companies.
For example, airlines and things like this.
You could say, well, but these companies, they are in the state.
For example, they are in the state, they are in the regulatory councils of the state.
We're right, sure.
But the question is, well, I would like to fight for a regulatory system that is really regulatory.
Not just an expression of some more strong interest in society.
In this case, we have examples.
For example, in some situations the state was able to do this.
Why?
Because we had a kind of strong social power.
Activism.
For example, when the trade unions were strong and things like this, they could put the state, let's say, in some light.
Or put some politics in some light.
And I believe in it.
I believe in it.
But I can understand this idea that what is better for us.
Better for us is a situation where, well, the individuals, where the civil society could decide themselves.
I totally agree with it.
But I think the first step to do this is changing this political structure.
For example, I believe that our liberal democracy are not able to do this.
I believe that we need to go to a kind of, let's say, publicitarian democracy.
Democracy where this continuous use of the public opinion It just really works.
I don't believe, for example, in the kind of democracy like we have today, where a parliament and things like this, I think that we need to go to a kind of directly popular expression.
And we have the technology for this today.
But I don't think that you solved the problem of monopoly and creating a state.
I don't think you solve the problem of monopoly by creating a state, because a state is a monopoly.
You can't solve the problem of a concentration of power by creating the ultimate concentration of power.
You say, well, this company's going to get too much economic power, so to control that concentration of power, I'm going to create a state with the monopoly of taxing and policing and law and military and jails and courts.
And, I mean, this doesn't solve the problem.
It's like saying, I have a headache, so a guillotine will...
Well, I guess you won't have the headache.
Only because you won't have the head.
It is a challenge.
Accumulations of power in society tend to be not good.
I'm completely with you on that.
In a free market, again, This is a future fantasy, but in a free market you can only become economically powerful or significant by pleasing your customers.
Because you can't use the government to force people to buy your product.
Microsoft has these monopoly patents.
Monopoly patents is just another form of government.
It's just wretched.
These things.
And Apple has them too.
All you have now is companies fighting each other over patents.
There's a term for it, a patent trial.
Somebody just buys up patents and sits on them so they can sue people.
I mean, this is crippling for the industry as a whole.
And so the best way to avoid a concentration of power is, first of all, not build a state.
Because that has a concentration of power that is then used by everybody else to enhance their own economic power, to have a completely free market, Because let's say that you are in the 19th century, you have a monopoly on horses and carriages.
Let's just say it's a free market, you build the best stuff, but then people don't like you or whatever.
But then the car comes along and the horse and carriage is done.
Or let's say you have a monopoly on the telephone.
Well, somebody comes along and invents the internet.
Or you have a monopoly and there's always something new that comes along and breaks up a monopoly.
To my knowledge, and I've studied this extensively though not exhaustively, There's never been an example of a free market monopoly.
To my knowledge, without using state power, without using state coercion, this is also true that there's no example in history of customers complaining about a monopoly.
Because a monopoly is only a monopoly because it's pleasing the customers.
The only people who bring complaints about a monopoly, who drive the regulatory process, the Sherman Antitrust Act and all the regulations that are supposed to break up monopolies, anyone guess who complains about a monopoly?
It's the other companies who can't compete.
It's never the customers.
The customers never phone up the government, they never write to the government and say, I don't like this company.
Well, I did this.
But you can't drive policy, right?
I mean, there are some people who, right, and were the companies you're talking about, did they have state control, power protection?
For the company, airline companies and things like this.
Did they not have state control or control?
They did.
They are totally...
They're quasi-fascistic...
Yeah, but I mean, historically it's not a letter-writing campaign from the public in the free market that creates these antitrust.
It's the other companies.
You know, Adam Smith said, he's right, you know, businessmen never get together for more than five minutes without hatching a conspiracy against the public.
And it's very true, but it's very hard to get that conspiracy into effect unless you can control the government, which is what companies first want to do.
I mean, if you create the government to protect you from the rich, the rich aren't stupid, what's the first thing they do?
Ah, let's get control of the government, and that way we can completely eliminate alternate solutions.
So, I mean, it's tempting.
I mean, I get it.
It's really tempting to say, you know that old saying, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?
We've got a problem in society.
We've got this big government, so let's have the governments of it.
We've got a problem with, you know, I mean, nobody ever talks about how, you know, I think it was Rockefeller who had Standard Oil, right?
Nobody ever talks about how Rockefeller saved the whales.
Anybody know that?
It's interesting.
We never hear about this in Canada, but before, he made the price of kerosene come down like 90%.
It was an incredibly efficient capitalism, in a good way.
And before, did anyone know what they used before kerosene?
Whale oil.
Whale oil.
I mean, the whales were almost done.
Capitalism saves the whales.
I mean, it's a funny thing.
You don't hear about this.
And then, of course, government takes over giving licenses to hunt whales, and the whales are almost gone.
And in Brazil, the antitrust proceeds.
The government runs questionnaires to the suppliers, the company clients, and the competitors.
So that's how it works.
Yeah, and the competitors always want the government to break up.
Because they can't compete, and so they want to break up the monopoly.
Or you see, do you remember, Microsoft got into all this trouble with antitrust regulations.
This was because they were bundling Internet Explorer for free with the operating system.
But this is because a lot of people who were very rich and powerful lost a lot of money on nets getting stocked and they got really angry.
So they used this to punish.
IBM went through the same thing.
15 years of antitrust laws being slammed against them.
They lost all their innovation.
So anyway, I mean, it's very tempting to think that we can solve the problem of a concentration of power by creating the most powerful concentration of power and then having it set the rules, you know, like you have a referee or sign an umpire or something, but this is, it doesn't work because the rich take it over, it's all politically motivated and, you know, why do they cut spending for the poor guy on welfare?
Because He's not giving them a million dollars for their campaign.
The poor, in a status welfare system, the poor do very badly because their power is all diversified and diffused, but the power of the rich and the corporations is very concentrated in that system.
But maybe we have another problem, too.
Maybe free markets.
Is it a Costco idea?
Because, for example, I never saw a free market.
Well, there's no such thing as an impossible idea.
You've never seen a free market?
Well, I think we have one here tonight.
A free market simply means no coercion.
And nobody's here by coercion, as far as I understand it.
I don't see any chains from the videographers.
Yeah, but this is not a market.
This is a market.
It's as high as money.
No, I must say, I'm not here to sell.
I mean, time is money, right?
I mean, you guys could have been doing anything else with your night.
Maybe you're thinking that would have been a better idea.
I don't know, but this is a voluntary association.
Now, we're not actually exchanging money here, we're exchanging time and ideas.
It's a very bizarre way to use the idea, you know?
It means every non-cursive situation is a free market.
Well, no, what I'm saying is there's no fundamental distinction between this.
If we were exchanging money or ideas or time, it is still an exchange of something.
It's very strange for me.
I know, I know.
But what I'm saying is that...
So let's say that I sold everyone a book here.
How is that...
There's still no coercion.
There's no fundamental difference between exchange of ideas and money and bodily fluids, whatever.
I mean, it's still just, there's still no gun in the room, there's still no force in the room, nobody's passing laws, nobody's sending people to jail, nobody's threatening.
So, I would say that this is a free market of ideas.
The fact that we don't exchange money doesn't matter.
But not every situation without question is a potential free market situation.
For example, let's say I married with my wife in an absolutely non-cursive situation.
But this is not a potential free market.
Did she not choose you from a bunch of other people?
Did you not choose her from a bunch of other people?
Like you were nuns or...
No, no, but this is not...
But there's a market in dating.
Is that not fair?
We advertise with makeup and...
It's very funny, because I remember this Kantian idea, for example, concerning marriage, where Kant, for example, said, well, the marriage is a contract.
It's a contract when I have the right to use the sexual organs of the other.
I think your wedding vows weren't very romantic.
I remember, for example, the Rebellion criticism.
when Regal said, "Look, we cannot think that a marriage is a contract, because if this is the case, I can call the police and say, "Well, my wife, the court should make sense with me.
I have rights." But why can't it stop that a marriage is a contract?
Well, first of all, sorry, you can dissolve a union, you can dissolve a marriage for no sex.
Yeah.
That's very expensive.
It's costly to do because the government runs it.
It has very negative repercussions to everyone.
My only question is maybe we cannot use the idea that every potential intersubjective relations is a kind of free market one.
No, and I'm not saying this is exactly the same as a stock exchange.
I agree with you.
I was using an analogy.
You say, I've never seen a free market.
We started originally with society but social, and I was saying that which is not coerced is social.
Here we have a voluntary association.
Right now, it doesn't happen to be a voluntary association with money, although money is involved.
I mean, if I had, you know, some people subsidized me coming down here and all that, and I'm giving up other opportunities, as are you, to go and work as a fry cook at McDonald's and they know how much they make or whatever, right?
So there is money that's involved.
Even if we just look at the deferment of income we have by being here and talking with each other, there is an economic aspect to almost everything, which doesn't mean that everything is just cold and calculated and money-based, but what I'm talking about is that this is a voluntary My
question is, I never saw this voluntary association in market situations.
For me, it's a kind of abstraction.
It's a really abstraction.
Sorry, do you mean you've never seen it in its...
Sorry?
I would say, when you say something in its pure form, it sounds like it's unattainable, so I don't exactly know how to say it.
But what you mean is you've never seen people exchange value economically in a free situation?
Never.
I would agree with you.
In the same way that when agriculture was run by slavery, you would never have eaten a piece of fruit that wasn't affected by slavery, for sure.
But that doesn't mean we can't have that.
It just means it's not here now.
I agree with you.
I mean, I can't think, because, you know, I mean, it's crazy.
I just read the statistic.
Depending on how you measure it, between one-third and half of the world's economy is outside the state.
Is it a black market?
Is it a grey market?
Is money under the table?
And so on, right?
I mean, this is crazy.
How horrible to live without any recourse to the rule of law.
I mean, this is wretched for workers, for everyone.
It still functions, but that's not a free market because it has to be on the run from the government all the time.
So you can't have open contracts, you can't have any of that.
You can't have enforcement.
This is very funny because it's something like Some communist friends, and they said something to me.
I think comrades.
Yeah, comrades.
And my communist comrades, they said, look, we never had the experience of a real communist state, but we can reach it.
And this is funny, because, for example, you said something like, we never had the experience of a free market situation, but we can reach this.
I understand that, but there's a bit of a difference.
There's a lot of difference.
First of all, they got close in terms of the government control over the means of production and the government was supposed to reflect the will of the workers.
They got real close.
As they got closer, things got way worse.
In the socialist economies for reasons that are dull and technical but mostly to do with Von Mises' explanation of the price problem.
Without prices you can't efficiently allocate resources to the calculation problem.
Thank you.
So as we got closer to communism, things got worse and worse and worse.
Whereas as we got closer to a free market, things got better and better and better.
I mean, in terms of, I mean, you look at history, right?
I mean, you look at the GDP or per capita income of history.
Now, the Industrial Revolution was not a free market.
I mean, you had the most efficient murderers were the aristocracy and they owned the land because they were the best killers, the best hired thugs of the state.
And so you had this concentration of capital in the hands of, frankly, the most evil people in society because land was capital back in the day.
They threw all the people off the land to concentrate on the enclosure movement.
This is not a free market situation.
In the Industrial Revolution itself, you had a skewing of government policy towards the rich and the wealthy and the capitalists because they paid more in taxes than they needed more workers.
You also had the speed of land system of welfare state in the south of England that It was just terrible and devastated the workers to the point where their incomes actually declined while the workers in the north where there was not a welfare state their incomes tended to go up and up and everyone looks at the south and says well that was the free market but the south of England was a welfare state north of England was not and their wages doubled well the south was just terrible and this is why the north is still different even now than it was in the past but as we get the free market and you can see this both
in time and also slicing through society In time, you can see, was there more of a free market?
Was there an income growth?
Look at what's happening in pre-free market relative China.
Up until the 90s, they were communist.
Catastrophic.
Just devastating.
They've got these ghost cities, they've got this crazy fascistic central planning that's still running a bunch of the economy, but look at India, look at China, these countries as they began to respect private property and embrace the free market as less and less violence was used in economic interactions.
My communist congress, you said two things.
The first thing, well, the communist idea was lost when Lenin stopped with the idea of Soviets.
Then everything that came after, they said it's not communist.
The second question is, when you said, well, when we reach, we are near from free market, the things go better.
What I can think, for example, Reagan, Thatcher, and so on.
Yes, but they did not cut regulations, they did not cut spending, they only cut taxes.
Give me an example.
Feudalism to industrialization.
Feudalism, there was no free market.
I mean, you were a serf tied to your land.
You couldn't compete, you couldn't capitalize, you couldn't industrialize, you couldn't automate.
Catastrophic.
And then you start to see the respect for private property begin to emerge and some equality and so on.
But the thing is, yeah, Lenin, yeah, he got rid of the Soviets.
Then he had to introduce the new economic plan because they were all starving to death.
But you cannot have a system where one bald guy changes his mind and it all falls apart.
You know, that's not a good system.
I'd rely on the integrity of one guy, and if that guy changes his mind, the whole system is toast.
I don't want that.
That cannot work.
It cannot ever be reliant on the whims of one guy, or ten guys, or a hundred guys, or a thousand guys.
It has to be the individual choices of everyone.
That is the only way.
I'm not defending here...
No, this is what I would say to the...
And the third point, when you use, for example, examples like India and China, you could say, look, but this is not a question of, well, China became a free market society and then things go better.
We can say a very different thing, for example, it's a hybrid society.
It's a state capitalism.
Yeah, the capitalist part is going better.
The state part is not.
But the capitalist part is going better.
Look, I mean, if you have some A giant tumor and somebody gives you a medicine and the medicine starts going into your body.
Well, you're not better right away.
I mean, you're just starting to get better.
And so, yeah, I mean, the state is the tumor and the free market is the cure.
And so if you start to, oh, well, that's still tumor.
Well, yeah, that's still tumor, but it's, you know, it's better.
And so, yeah, that would be my argument.
We can say the opposite.
Exactly the opposite.
Go ahead.
Say it backwards then.
The free market is a disease and the state structure is...
China was not a capitalist country and then the state arrived and then No, because if you look at GDP and wealth, wealth is not the only measure, I understand that, but it's an important one.
It's necessary but not sufficient for freedom and happiness.
And to your point about poverty, I completely agree, but the statistics are very clear.
When they liberalize the economy, which simply means Stop using guns as much.
It's not the end of guns, because they're not a free society, of course, right?
Neither are we, neither are you, neither are anyone, right?
Neither is Somalia.
But less guns means more increase in war.
Look, I don't want to make here the defense of China and Soviet Union.
It's not my position.
But using your argument, for example, in the 50s, the country that grew up in the most strong way was Soviet Union.
The country that grew up?
That grew economic?
Yeah, yeah.
It was Soviet.
If you trust Soviet statistics.
But you have the numbers.
Yeah, okay.
But you know, it's very complicated.
If you say, no, the numbers are just a force.
Just some truth.
No, okay.
I mean, we can...
I don't know if it's going to be at all interesting.
We'll just touch on it very briefly.
But, okay, so Russia in the 50s.
Industrial espionage was unbelievable.
I mean, the amount of intellectual capital that they stole.
And of course the West was still subsidizing quite heavily.
I remember grain shipments going from Canada over to the USSR quite a bit.
So they were stealing a huge amount of stuff.
They were being given a huge amount of stuff.
And of course they were slaughtering, as you know, millions of their own population.
So, you know, stealing, charity, murder, I just can't see that being the basis of a society that we can say, well, look, they were growing.
Well, you know, my belly grows when I have gas.
That doesn't mean that I'm...
you know it's just one part of the history sorry let me just shift over here but even if they were growing even if they were growing the growth is not I'm not a consequentialist.
I'm not like, well, if we get the growth, then it's good, right?
When you free slaves, the economy goes down because everything's got to reallocate, right?
And the farmers aren't happy because now they've got to pay for what they got for Roman poor before.
So when you free the slaves, the economy gets worse.
And when you encourage women to be equal in relationships and not put up with abuse, you get a lot of abuse.
I understand this, because I'm a little bit afraid of this kind of argument, because, for example, we have this example in Chile.
Well, I was born in Chile.
And I always listen to this idea, but you know, when Pinochet came, the economy grew up.
But what does this mean?
The economy can grow up, but this is not the case.
The case is, well, we have no freedom.
I can use this for Castro too.
When Castro came, the education grew up, the health grew up.
And the question of freedom.
Yes, and to me it simply comes down to the ethics of the situation.
I believe that a virtuous life will make you happy, but not everyone who is happy is happy as a result of virtue, right?
Some guy just wins a lottery, he's like dancing in the streets for a day or two.
But that doesn't mean that he's lived a virtuous life.
I believe that virtue leads, no, it's the old Socratic equation, reason equals virtue equals happiness.
But that doesn't mean that everything that is rational is virtuous.
It doesn't mean that everything that is virtuous is going to make you happy.
Virtue can be very hard at times.
It can make you unpopular.
It can make you frightened.
It can make people aggress against you and so on.
But in general, I think it's a good equation.
Reason equals virtue equals happiness.
In the same way, I think that Freedom, peaceful cooperation and so on, leads to wealth, leads to a good use of resources, leads to environmental responsibility for a variety of reasons, leads to good things.
But you can also get growth in the government or in a state society by borrowing and spending.
They count that as growth.
In America, the GDP goes up if someone gets sick.
I mean, that's insane.
How can that be economically great because they have to spend money to get better?
I mean, this is insane.
And in Chile, they counted government roads to nowhere.
And this is why China is building all these cities.
You've seen these pictures.
You look at them on the Internet.
It's creepy.
They have these cities built for like a million people.
Only 10 more minutes, that's for this comment?
Or...
Oh, okay, then I'll shut up and then she finishes.
But they count all this crazy stuff as producing growth.
This is not.
You hire 500 government workers to dig a hole and fill it up again, but this adds to your GDP. But this is insane.
They build more prisons in the United States, and this is counted as getting wealthier.
I'm sure this is true in the Pinochet as well, in Chile.
The way that they measure these things, and they don't count debt.
I'm getting wealthier because my Visa card is running out.
Well no, I'm actually in Quora because they're going to pay the principal plus the debt.
So to me it's how you measure these things.
There has to be an index of economic progress that doesn't count.
Prisons and cancer and roads to nowhere and it includes things like death.
I think with those rational measurements we'd see things a little more clear.
But I completely understand.
I think it was Naomi Klein who wrote The Shock Doctrine and what she was talking about in Chile under Pinochet.
Unholy.
Absolutely horrendous.
And certainly not a reduction of violence in society.
That's really my goal.
I think, yeah, good things come out of not pointing guns at people.
I mean, you maybe have no Tarantino films, but...
But good things come out of it.
But you don't say that it's the good things that matter.
I think it's just the after-effect of not using violence to achieve things.
Anyway, I'll let you...
I've talked a lot, so I'll let you...
I think we have a question here.
Really?
When will it end?
Many times the result When you read about results of research, talking about the happiness of the people, quality of life, self and professional satisfaction, socialist and communist countries are very, very poor scholars.
What do you think about it?
As I see the highest control of the state and the The positive rules, lowest or lowest, are the score of these items.
Okay, well, first thing, I don't believe very much in these measures of happiness.
I think there's, in the point, methodological point of view, it's a very complicated one.
Second, I agree with you.
I don't like the idea to live in a country like Romania or Polonia or something like this.
I know every ex-humanist country and I can agree with you.
It's not a very good place to stay.
But the question is...
I think that, for example, I believe in the kind of development of an idea.
When republicanism appeared, it was a failure, a total failure.
If you were in the 13th century and saying, well, I'm a republican, people will say to you, you are totally mad, the idea was totally a failure, what are you talking about?
Today, I think everybody here is a Republican.
I understand what this first communist experience in the history was.
It was a total failure.
It was a catastrophe.
But I'm not sure that the idea of a more eco-society or a really strong eco-society is a bad one.
Where is it to work?
Where it works.
For example, I'm not totally against the welfare state.
I think that it was a very strong and very important moment in the history of European societies.
I don't think that these societies were the destiny of the society was the failure, economic failure.
I think that we can go more strong in this kind of perspective.
I think that When we try to use the state for politics of equality, the people are more happy, if you want to say it like this.
And I'm very suspicious about Every situation that we used the idea of a strong free market.
Because what I say in the past is not good.
What I see in the past is not good.
For example, I don't think that the experience of neoliberalism in Anglo-Saxon countries was...
A good example.
I can understand that it's something like, well, but it was not really a very strong libertarian essay, well, they just cut taxes, they don't cut spendings, and so on, and things like this.
I can understand.
Then, let's say I'm...
I'm a calm, I'm sceptical about this.
I'm sceptical in a really philosophical way.
I'm waiting to see.
If you can show me, well, look, this is a very good example.
We can organize a society without a state in a society that will not destroy it by strong inequality.
okay I vote to you well I you have another question I'm going to ask you a question.
I agree with you when you said that a system with a minimum state evolves to a system with a pure state.
And I agree with you about the aggressive nature of the state.
But states appear in the world after human beings, after human civilization.
So how could you guarantee that a stateless society wouldn't evolve again to a I can't, obviously.
But I do think that when we make progress, it sticks.
That's a terrible answer.
I know.
But think of, I mean, you don't see politicians now saying, let's bring back slavery.
You know, we don't see politicians saying, let's ban women from the workforce and put them back in front of the stove.
Right?
I mean, we don't see that.
Because when we make progress, Generally, it sticks.
It's not perfect and there's still, you know, but you don't see a big Nazi party in the world anymore.
I mean, there's still a few nutjobs out there who are, you know, nasty and broken and so on, but when we make progress, it doesn't tend to go back.
And there, of course, will be a huge number of...
Organizations in a free society that would be strongly resistant to the idea of a state coming back, right?
So there will be people who may provide some kind of collective defense.
They don't want a government coming back.
There will be people who adjudicate disputes, who provide insurance for breaking of contracts, who deal with criminal issues and so on.
They don't want a state coming back.
And so you have a lot of organizations within society that would be strongly resistant to the idea of a state coming back.
You would have all of the people who see the benefit of a state.
You also would have a population used to freedom.
Used to not having an oligarchical hierarchy breathing down their neck with guns and lasers pointed at them all the time.
And they would not be very easy to rule.
Do you know what I mean?
Imagine trying to take Barack Obama and H. Rapp Brown and these guys and putting them back in the cornfield with a ball and chain on their legs.
It wouldn't work very well.
I've got lots of free books on my website at freedomainradio.com if you want.
I think there's one called Practical Anarchy which is the argument as to why you couldn't invade A country that had no government.
I mean, just look at the difference in power between the United States military and the Iraqi insurgents, and who won.
Because you have a government agency trying to compete with a, quote, private agency.
It's just incredible.
Afghanistan has been trying to be ruled 20 times over the past 10 centuries, and they always lose.
Because they're fighting for their homes, and other people are fighting for government pay.
And so there's lots of arguments as to why.
And plus, you know, generally countries are taken over to take over a tax structure.
In the free society, there's no tax structure to take over.
It's a lot harder to domesticate wild animals than it is to transfer an animal from one zoo to another.
So, there's lots of arguments as to why.
But, you know, I still think, let's say I have cancer and the doctor says, well, I can cure you without cancer.
And I say, well, what if it comes back?
I don't know.
Do you still want me to cure you now?
Of course you do, right?
I'll take my chances with it coming back as if I get cured now.
I think it will stick.
Stefan, let's go to a final question, then the final conclusions.
Final conclusions?
That sounds like quite a high order.
It's all everything.
Permanently.
Stefan, you said that robot is not the way, so politics might not be the way to get rid of the state.
So what would be this way?
What should we do?
I mean, it's a multi-generational process.
I think we have to understand that.
I think that In America and in England, I don't know about Canada, to me, still 80 to 90% of parents are hitting their children.
We cannot have a free society if we grow up being hit by our caregivers.
Because then we're used to violence solving problems, solving conflicts.
And then when we grow up, we say, well, we need a central authority who's going to throw people in jail to solve problems.
I think it comes that early.
The state makes no sense logically.
It makes no sense morally.
The only way it can make sense is if we've had some experience with something like it before.
And so I think that aggressive and controlling and perhaps even violent parenting teaches us a kind of language of subjugation and a bizarre, irrational respect for power as the only solution to problems.
Then when we see the state as adults, we learn about the state.
I speak this language already.
I think so.
My goal has been, we can't end the state.
You can't sort of say, no.
It's not like the guy in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square.
You can't do it.
So the non-aggression principle, which is, that shall not initiate force, we enact that in our own homes.
We obviously don't do it with our spouses.
We don't do it with our children.
We reject the use of violence in our personal lives, to me.
And then we raise a generation of children who They don't, you know, they reason with, they're negotiated with, and then when they see the state, they're like, well, this is weird.
I mean, what?
This is not how I've ever been treated before.
What?
No, no, no, this is not right.
Whereas if we, you know, hit and yell and bully and punish and go and so on, then, of course, then when we come up to an agency, it makes sense.
But we want the state to not make sense to people for it to be, you know, if you ever look at You know, you see those Hindu gods, they're blue, they've got an elephant head, 12 arms, and you think, well, that's kind of weird.
I mean, to them, it's just Jesus on a cross.
To them, it's perfectly sensible, because that's what they've grown up with.
So basically what I'm saying is we want the state to look like a blue thing with elephant heads and 12 arms.
It doesn't look far into our experience.
I think the only way to really achieve that, I mean, if we make the philosophical case, we make the...
A moral case.
And then the case for practical consequences.
But I think much more fundamentally, we have to simply reject the use of violence in our own lives.
The use of aggression, the initiation of force, everywhere we can.
In our business relationships, through threats.
In our personal relationships, there's rejection of violence.
That, to me, is how you grow social change in areas you can control.
And I think politics is a big distraction from that.
I mean, I've had lots of arguments.
Every time I go to a libertarian convention, this topic comes up.
Does banking violate the non-aggression principle?
Why does it come up?
They bring it up.
And a lot of these people who are very pro-Ron Paul are vociferously and aggressively defending the initiation of force against children.
How has Ron Paul saved you from the consequences of that aggression in the home?
He can't.
So anyway, that's very brief, and I've got more on the website, but that's actually my summary, because I don't think I've got anything more important to say than that.
OK. Explain my major point of disagreement.
I like the idea that we are fighting for it.
But I think that the model of a free market is not a good model for a society without coercion.
Why?
Because free market is the idea that we can see each other as individuals that are fighting for his own interest or are expressing his own interest.
And I'm very suspicious concerning the idea of individual.
I think that the major moments of the philosophy of 20th century and the 20th century Toph put this question in the debate.
The question is, let's say, we can suffer When we are not individual.
We are not recognized as individual.
But we can suffer too when we are just individual.
When we lost the possibility to make a relationship With something that is in me, but that don't have the form of individual, don't have the structure of individuality.
In each subject, there is something that is not totally individualized, that's something that is not totally a person, but I think this is a very important thing.
And I believe that we must try To fight for a kind of social bound that could recognize this, let's say, this non-individual And I think that the model of the free market is not a good one because we are not able to think.
When we saw as a part of a free market, we saw each other as just individuals that fight for its own interests.
I know that it can sound a little bit metaphorical, things like this.
Well, I must develop this idea.
Unfortunately, we don't have time.
But I would like just to put this question at the end.
I had the first word, so it's only fair to have the last one.
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