All Episodes
Previous Next
June 19, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:00:30
2164 Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio interviewed on Proof Negative Radio

Stefan Molyneux discusses current events and general philosophy.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
All right, guys, welcome back. welcome back.
Of course, we're right in the middle of hour number two here.
I have my trusty sidekick, Valerie Sergeant Martin, with us right now.
And not only do I have the lovely Valerie with me right now, I do have the one and only Stefan Molyneux, which you'll know from Free Domain Radio, and he does interviews all over the place, including right here on Freedomizer Radio.
Stefan, thank you so much for joining us.
It's my pleasure.
Thank you so much for the invitation.
Alright, and Valerie, of course, she's the one that helped put this all together, so thank you, Valerie.
My pleasure, and I'm happy to have you on the show again, Stephan.
Thank you.
All right, well, Valerie, I'll let you get the first question in here, since I took the first one with Madison.
Well, I wanted to thank Stephan for joining me a few weeks ago.
We talked with Stephan and Tom Woods, because both of you were about to go speak at the Libertarian Party of Texas' convention.
How'd that go?
Oh, it was great.
I mean, what a fantastic group of people.
We had, I mean, some real luminaries, of course.
Tom Woods, we had wonderful presentations on everything from healthcare to we had law enforcement against prohibition.
We had a Muslim come in and talk about the challenges of targeting within their communities.
And it was just, it was fantastic.
I mean, it's a great meeting of minds.
I can't recommend enough that people get out and meet.
You know, when I was, when I used to be an IT executive, I was running an R&D team in the software business.
And after, you know, so much time in front of the screen, sometimes we'd be like coding all night or for 18 hours straight or whatever.
And I remember one of the R&D programmers turned to me and said, you know, It's time to go out into the big blue room and meet the flesh people, because we hadn't been outside in quite some time.
And sometimes it can feel that way a little bit.
You know, when you're reading books, when you're going to websites, when you're even chatting on the phone, there's nothing that quite beats going into the big blue room and meeting the flesh people of liberty.
That's my pitch for these things.
Let me ask you, I know you're a big libertarian, but you didn't make it to the Libertarian National Convention this year, did you?
No, I didn't.
I try to go places where I'm invited to speak and I didn't get an invitation.
So what I did was I gently rocked in a fetal position, sucking my thumb and sobbing the whole weekend.
But I feel that I'm over it now with sufficient medication and Swedish massage.
One of the things that we talked about when you were on the show was the fact that I was going, well, first of all, for those who don't know, you're not a huge fan of voting or the political process, and I am a Republican,
and I've been chosen as an alternate to go to the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August, and I asked you and Tom If my participation in that process was legitimizing an evil system, and I thought you might like to share with folks the answer you gave me that day.
Wow.
Quoting myself, that's a challenge.
I believe it was enormously convincing and I was right.
Do you want more details than that or will that suffice?
What I guess, Stefan, I'm trying to get at is that you and Tom both were very supportive of going and participating in the political process, just not, I guess, being assimilated into the Borg, I guess, is what you're trying to say.
It's good for us to To try to teach people about the principles of freedom and liberty wherever we can reach them.
And you encouraged me to go ahead and participate even though it wasn't exactly the ideal situation.
Well, the perspective that I come from, I mean, I'm always drawn, and I'm not saying I'm the only one in this conversation that's this way inclined, but I'm always drawn to those really grating and annoying first principles.
Now, the initiation of force and violations of property rights are the two major evils that we are fighting as liberty folk.
The government is defined as the agency which can initiate force and violate property rights at will.
And thus, it is the most successful criminal around.
You know, the mafia is just that's organized crime.
The government is a much more successful version of disorganized crime.
And I don't think that you and I would say, OK, the way to beat the mafia is to infiltrate it.
We're going to polish up our suits, we're going to put enormous amounts of duck butter in our hair, and we are going to adopt Jersey slouches and bad Mafioso accents.
We're going to go in and we're going to work our way to the top of the Mafia, and then we're going to turn it into the United Way.
I mean, we would recognize that's not really how we're going to...
The libertarians fight the Mafia, of course, by making things legal.
That's the best way to fight the Mafia.
This is sort of my perspective.
If you view the government as the most successful crime lords in the known universe, then attempting to reform it from within makes about as much sense as trying to reform the mafia from within.
That having been said, and I say this with all due humility...
I wrote a political manifesto, started a political party.
I know and I get how tempting it can be to feel that that is the route.
I have since abandoned and am now opposed to not political action in terms of educating people and talking about ideas and getting people engaged in the process of talking about philosophy, which is really what I think we're about, but the illusion that that is the main, the only, the sole, or even the major way that we're going to achieve freedom.
I think that You know, the problem is whenever you have a hammer, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
And we always complain about, you know, if there's a social problem, what first people think is, oh, let's pass a law, let's get Congress involved.
And I'm concerned that we might be as a community doing that with politics and saying, oh, we want to achieve freedom.
Well, we have to go to politics.
And that's the only place.
And I think that It cuts off a lot of other avenues.
So for education, I think it's great.
I don't think it's going to get us free.
But as somebody who spent 20 years in the minarchist, objectivist political camp, I can completely understand that it's a process.
The last thing I'll say is I have other approaches I can't guarantee for sure since nobody can tell the future.
I can't guarantee that only mine will work.
I can't guarantee that yours won't work.
So, you know, fellow travelers, but I think we need to be cautious about the degree to which we just assume that political action will free us.
All right, now let me jump in here.
I have a question I've been wanting to ask here.
This is in regards to the whole Syria conflict, and I would like to know, one, how is it that it's acceptable now to just, we write our own approvals, basically, from the United Nations to go to war.
We don't have to ask Congress for that.
And if we have Russia and China saying that if you go into Syria, we're going to We're going to fight you there.
I've never seen a type of country that would say, all right, well, we'll get more troops out there and we'll do it faster then.
Well, of course, America...
I mean, how many times has America...
America's been at war, I think, over 100, 150 times.
How many times has it actually declared war through Congress?
What is it?
First World War?
Second World War?
Maybe one or two others.
I think the last one was Korea, if I'm not mistaken.
No, Korea was a police action, wasn't it?
I don't know that they formally declared war.
I think they downgraded it to a police action and bypassed the Constitution that way.
Sorry?
I was trying to remember.
I'm sorry.
No, maybe there's one or two others, but maybe the War of 1812, I don't know.
But the going to war has been a factor of the imperial presidency.
I mean, this is true even back to Jefferson's day.
He got involved in Middle East conflicts over the Barbary pirates and so on, bypassing Congress and so on.
So this is, you know, everybody sets up rules and then immediately bypasses them.
That's the nature of the state.
So the fact that no war is being declared is not too surprising.
China is actually in a pretty good position to reject U.S. imperialism.
If they just decide to stop lending the U.S. government money, then I think that the entire military-industrial complex has come to a grinding halt.
The U.S. recently began to...
To try to guarantee the borders.
I think it was Taiwan or something.
Guarantee the borders and make sure that Taiwan was going to be invaded by China and so on.
And given the financial situation in the United States, what's the first thing they had to do was go to China and say, listen, do you mind lending us some money so we can fuel up some tanks and point them at you?
I mean, it just...
Such a lunatic situation.
They're going to write Monty Python comedies about the kind of world that we live in at the moment that is only shielded from its true absurdity through propaganda in our mind's eye.
Valerie, go ahead.
Okay.
I want to talk a little bit about all of those podcasts and videos you do at Free Domain Radio, Stefan.
It's amazing the amount of of work you do for the cause of liberty and freedom and the video that I got introduced to you with was the video about the story of your enslavement and it talks about how easily humans are subjugated and I thought you might want to elaborate a little on it.
Wow, you know, at 2300 shows, I'm not asked often to elaborate.
Can you speak a little bit more?
That would be great.
Yeah, I mean, it's one of these ones that I did, and I knew it was going to be pretty good when I was putting it together, and it has, I think it's 1.1 million views, which for a Liberty video is quite a bit these days.
And the basic thesis is, I think, something quite simple and powerful, which is that we alone of all the animals not only are afraid of the future consequences of threats, right?
So you can't go and, you know, Kidnap some dog's bride, some dog's mate, and then get him to do extra hunting for you in return for setting her free because it's too conceptual.
You can whack him on the butt with a newspaper if he poops on your cat or something, but you can't threaten an animal with long-term conceptual consequences like a loss of freedom.
And in return, get that animal to do stuff for you.
You know, we'll train and domesticate animals, but human beings are unique in that we can be threatened with a future loss of liberty Which we, of course, understand and don't want to experience.
And in return, we will surrender some part of our productivity.
I mean, this is the classic mafia shakedown, right?
Some guy has spent his life preparing for, saving up for, investing in and creating a restaurant.
And then some, you know, sleazebags in shiny suits come by and say, you know, it'd be a real shame if something happened to your restaurant.
But for 500 bucks a month, we'll make sure that no one burns it down by accident.
Obviously a shakedown, but I'll just pay the money and these people will leave me alone.
You can't do that to a cow.
You know, you can't go to a cow in a barn and say, you know, moo cow.
I don't know how you'd say it.
Moo, moo, moo, moo, moo, moo, moo, moo, moo, moo.
But you can't go to a cow and say, you know, heifer.
for.
It'd be a real shame if something happened to this barn you were living in.
And so I really need you to produce an extra couple of quarts of milk a day and just, you know, leave them by the door.
Otherwise, some really bad accident could occur to the place that you're living in.
I mean, what's the cow going to do?
He's going to, you know, look at you sideways, chew some cud and crap on the grass.
So human beings can be threatened with these conceptual punishments and in return will pay off, you know, to retain our freedom.
This sets up a fundamental economic paradigm that is the root of political hierarchical power, which is you pay me a certain amount of money and I will not throw you in jail.
And this, of course, is taxation.
The essence of taxation is the initiation of theft.
It's protection money.
And yes, yes, I know.
People say, well, they make roads for you and they give you free healthcare and so on.
Well, so what?
Who gives a crap?
I mean, farmers will create stalls and they will make sure their cows don't get sick and they'll give the cows free healthcare too.
But that's not because they want to set them free.
That's just because they want to keep the livestock free.
And so if you look at the world...
You look at the map of the world, you see all these countries.
The jigsaw puzzle of human conception, pure imagination, doesn't exist anywhere, anyhow.
You go from Mexico to the United States, it's one step over a piece of dirt.
It doesn't change color.
There's not an extra moon in the sky.
Gravity doesn't reverse itself.
It's just one step on a piece of dirt.
But we've got this fantasy that we have all these countries, and the way to look at them is they are tax-free.
Farms.
They are tax farms, wherein people are kept enclosed, and we found from the guy from Facebook who tried to take off to Singapore exactly how tight that enclosure is, and we are farmed, and we are given a certain amount of freedom.
This is one of the arguments in the video.
We are given more freedom than we used to have in the past.
In the past, you were a slave, or you were a serf, you were tied to the land, you were bought and sold with the property, and that's not a very profitable way of farming human beings.
The best way to farm human beings is to let them choose their own occupations, to let them choose their own education, And then with the increased productivity, give them some significant amounts of free trade.
With that increase in productivity, you can then tax and use their productivity as collateral to borrow, which is why all Western governments are in debt.
And that is the nature of the society that we're living in.
We have freedoms only insofar as us having freedoms is more profitable to our political masters, not because they want to set us free.
So you may find that if you are a cow farmer, that's a really bad cattle farmer, And I guess if
you look at it, Stefan, I'm a big fan of Kobe beef.
Of Kobe Beef?
Yeah, it's made from the basketball player, if I remember rightly, Kobe Bryant, and I believe he does get quite a lot of massages.
The problem is you want to get the Kobe beef from Kobe Bryant before he's played the game.
Otherwise, that smelly sock thing is just repulsive.
All right, Val, I think I'm going to take over.
Sorry, on the note of cannibalism, did we stop the free flow of conversation?
Did I go that one step too far?
It's always important to know.
I think Proof's point is, you know, even though you might have a great luxurious life, you're still not free.
You're still not truly free.
And like you were talking about, the Facebook founder, and I can't remember his name, who, after the IPO, wanted to take all of his...
No, no, this is one of the other guys.
He wanted to leave the country with his earnings from the sale of the stock, and he found out very quickly that he was not allowed to do that.
I really think this is interesting, Stefan, because one of the things you're saying about the story of your enslavement is because we have this fear of something that happens to us in the future, we can be threatened into doing whatever the leaders want us to do.
That brings me to a different question then.
Did the U.S. founding fathers really intend for Citizens of the United States to have inherent freedom.
Well, I think that they did.
I think that there was two aspects to the founding fathers and the truly, I think, revolutionary and admirable philosophy of the founding of the United States, government by and for the people, no inbuilt aristocracy, no hereditary rights, the separation of church and state, I mean, no income tax.
I mean, there were some wonderfully great ideas that came out of Renaissance and particularly Enlightenment philosophy.
But you could make a cynic's argument, and you wouldn't have to be much of a cynic, but you could make a cynic's argument to say, well, of course, it's a new government.
They have to sell you all of this stuff so that you'll accept their rule.
You have to say, well, this is a totally different government.
This is a much more peaceful government.
This is a government by and for the people.
This is a government that's only here to protect your rights, so let us rule you.
And that's sort of one argument, you know, when you have to sell some reason why you want to turf out the British for taking two points on your tea.
The other argument that you could make is that the Founding Fathers, given the rawness of the continent, given the incredibly bad lines of communication that were here, and given the fact that they simply couldn't rule the country, they didn't have the money, they didn't have the manpower, so it's sort of like, well, It's sort of like your horse breaks out of your barn and runs away, and you know you're never going to catch her.
She's just running off, going to go rejoin her herd on the plains, and you say, I've decided to set you free!
It's like, well, it's already a fait accompli.
So I think that they wanted to sell the government to the people, and they also recognized that they simply couldn't immediately institute a European-style aristocracy or social democracy or whatever you want to call it.
And so they said, well, given that we can't rule these people, let's pretend that we're here to set them free.
Given that we can't impose an income tax on anyone because we don't have the troops, the manpower, the money, or the historical legitimacy, given that we can't impose income tax, let's say income tax is bad and we're not going to impose it.
And the reason that I think the cynical argument works a little bit is, you know, there were a couple of classes of human beings in American society that didn't do so well.
Women, of course, children, slaves, and the native population.
You know, they didn't really do so well.
So I'm with Jefferson.
You know, sit down, write the Declaration of Independence.
Beautiful.
I hold it as self-evident that all men are created equal.
And then stop right there.
That's all you need to write.
Everything after that becomes a justification.
And of course, the moment that they got power, because power corrupts everyone, You've got George Washington writing down the Pennsylvania farmers to impose a whiskey tax and killing them if they didn't submit.
So I think there was a lot of great ideas, a lot of great philosophy, but the great danger of a small government is a small government does protect and create freedom, and it does protect and create significant protections in property rights and freedom of trade.
That creates great wealth.
With great wealth, you get the capacity to tax A whole lot more.
It's like giving a middle-class guy a winning lottery ticket.
Well, what's the first thing he does is he spends like crazy.
And if you get a small government, the government gets handed the winning lottery ticket of capitalist free market productivity, which it then uses to ratchet up taxes to borrow and to grow, which is why it's the only way you can really understand that the very smallest designed government in history, the American government in the late 18th century, has now become the largest, most powerful, best-armed Most dangerous government the world has ever seen.
You know, freedom is food for the cancer of the state.
Alright, Valerie and Stefan, we're up against a break here.
What do we want to get into when we get back?
I'm happy to go back to cannibalism, but it's your show.
Whatever you feel is going to work best for you is fine with me.
All right.
Well, Valerie and Stefan, I'll let you guys figure it out here when we come back.
Yeah, I'm happy to do some current events if you guys want to talk about...
I think some public sector union stuff is pretty important at the moment.
Okay.
All right.
Sounds awesome.
We're here with Stefan Molyneux, and we're here with Valerie Martin and, of course, Group Negative.
And we'll be right back.
All right, guys, welcome back. welcome back.
Of course, Pruf is here.
Valerie Sgt.
Martin is here.
And you said we're waiting for Stefan to come back?
No, no.
I just told him that we'd be gone for a couple of minutes.
He should be there now.
Oh, okay.
I'm here like your conscience.
Well, I was going to say, Stefan, your audio is always exceptionally clear.
And all of your podcasts and videos, they're very, very good audio-wise and video-wise.
Well, I just wanted to mention, Valerie, that one of the reasons for that, if you just move your legs a little, I'm actually hiding under the table of your booth.
It's one of the ways that I try to improve my audio and help people with their untied shoelaces.
It's really a double service that I'm trying to advise.
You've got a great sense of humor.
Oh, thank you.
I really think that just comes from not having any kind of filter, which normal sensible people have.
You and proof share something in common then.
What's that?
No filter?
You have no filter.
Yeah.
Anyway, so you mentioned public sector union issues.
What exactly did you mean when you said you wanted to talk about public sector union issues?
Well, I mean, it's gripping topics.
I mean, who doesn't want to sit down at a dinner party with somebody who wants to talk about public sector union?
It's just like, I'll take a double helping because I don't want to go back to the buffet with this convo going on.
But no, I was just reading this article.
There's this guy, Alan, who writes on my message board.
Guys, comes up with the most fantastic stuff.
Let me do a couple of statistics, because I think, you know, the run-up to this election, I think it's really important to understand just the massive amounts of conflict of interest that voters have, which should make everybody skeptical of what the mainstream media is talking about.
So, you know, $757 billion hole in the retirement funds, covering 22.5 million public sector workers.
It's truly insane.
And that's just in terms of the retirement.
There's also a $627 billion shortfall in healthcare services for retirees.
For every dollar that states will eventually have to pay out in healthcare, they've set aside only five cents.
One thin, sad, lonely little nickel for every dollar that they have to spend.
And this is really quite astounding.
I mean...
What kind of tax increases are they going to be considered?
Because if they try and cut these benefits, these are contracts.
They will be taken to court.
They will be sued.
And the courts are going to likely uphold these weird contracts, you know, write some intergenerational contract between people.
And it's going to be just a complete mess.
I mean, this to me is the real class warfare.
It's not rich and it's poor.
It's not poor.
It's those profiting from the gun of the state and those paying for the gun of the state.
It's those the guns are pointed at and those on the other hand who are rifling through their pockets.
And it really is going to be quite astounding what is going to happen.
We saw this with Governor Walker in Wisconsin, just how much is at stake for so many people who've put up with crap jobs, go nowhere careers, really bad coworkers, annoying retarded bosses And now they feel like, I'm due!
I spent 30 years with my nose halfway up some middle manager's butt, and now it's going to take a lot of money to wash that smell away.
And this is, there's no money.
There's no money.
There's no money.
And these people are, not only are they robbing the pensions, the government, like the state government's robbing the pensions to pay down their operating costs, but the pensions are also losing money hand over fist in the stock market and other kind of investments.
So you can see this really affecting American politics, right?
So Obama recently was talking about how the private sector is doing fine, but it's the public sector that we've really got to start shoring up, even though there are more people working for the public sector now than there were in 2008.
But that's kind of like a silent mating call.
It's like a dog whistle that only public sector union members can hear.
And so basically he's saying, give me money to the public sector unions.
Give me money.
And I will go and get you many more plum public sector jobs, which translates into more forced union dues for political campaigning.
It's a really mutated system.
I mean, you have people forced into unions, and you have unions with way too much power because they have a monopoly.
You can't have a monopoly and a union together.
I mean, that's just a recipe for massive corruption.
And you have these forced union dues, which are the mainstay of the Democratic Party.
I mean, at least the Republican Party gets most of its donations, as far as I understand it, from relatively small individuals, like small-time donations from individuals.
But how much money is coming from Hollywood and the public sector unions to the Democratic Party?
And what kind of weird conflict of interest is it?
How can you possibly be objective about public sector unions when you do one?
It's like asking someone on welfare to be objective about the welfare state.
It makes no sense at all.
But there's no restrictions or even questions about conflicts of interest in voting, so where do you guys think this kind of mess is going to head to?
Well, I'm going to answer that question with a question here, Stefan, and I know that's what we're supposed to do when it comes to politics and radio, but I'm going to do it anyway.
My thought here is, for example, when Hitler took over in Germany, the first thing he did was get rid of all the journalists.
So I'm trying to understand here why everyone in the lamestream media is bending over backwards to kiss Barry's you-know-what.
And after his tuchus is kissed enough, what's going to be the first thing to go in 2012 if he gets re-elected?
It's going to be the journalist.
So why is it that people have no problem supporting this when 100% of the time in the past, This is exactly what goes on.
They don't want any negative reporting.
Yeah.
Well, you know, journalism is very interesting because journalists have a great facility with language.
I'm someone who has a fairly good facility with language as well.
And I know the temptation of when you're really good with words, you can talk yourself into all of these wonderful, kaleidoscopic, Alice in Wonderland, picture yourself on a boat on a river.
You can paint yourself into all these word pictures.
What you're trying to do to tell everybody what the meaning of is is.
Yeah, so you end up painting yourself all of these word pictures, and everyone's like, whoa, that is beautiful.
Wouldn't it be great if we had a society of equality where everyone got free healthcare and the kids were all educated?
Like, you can talk yourself into these fictions.
Like, to be a writer, you have to be able to picture all of these worlds like they're real.
And so people who are really good with language are very susceptible, I think, to things like socialism, and they're very resistant to the kind of hard reality of the free market, the sort of truth and basic facts.
And so I think the people who are drawn into the media are much more susceptible to rhetoric, to sophistry, to word pictures, to imaginary landscapes called socialism and communism.
But I think what's happening to the mainstream media is they're being so repeatedly exposed as base, vile, maggoty, leachy liars.
By what's going on in the blogosphere, what's going on on the new Gutenberg press of the internet.
Every time the mainstream media puts out something, it's almost always proven to be just false, ridiculous, contorted, self-serving.
And they're facing the consequences in that people are turning away from the mainstream media towards...
The more direct media, like the kind that we're doing here, where I think that we have to work a little bit harder to get an audience and we have to tell the truth.
We have to tell the truth.
And it seems weird when you look at the amount of debt the New York Times is in, the hundreds of journalists being laid off every quarter, the collapse of the print media and so on.
You'd think at some point someone would have a goddamn business plan called, let's start telling the truth.
But they don't seem to be that interested in that, and thus they will go the way of the dodo.
All right, Valerie, if you have a topic, if not, I'm going to go full steam ahead here.
Go ahead.
All right, I'm going to switch to another topic here, because this one I found odd yesterday when I read this, and it's labeled Bizarre Bargain.
Taliban says that if the U.S. drone strikes do not stop, they will cease using polio vaccines.
I've never heard of this type of negotiating.
Ah.
Okay, so they're basically going to turn their own population into a kind of biological warfare if the drone attacks don't stop?
I guess, or they're going to side with the health freedom people and decide that polio vaccine is bad.
I guess Gardasil is still going to be okay, but they're going to start with just not taking polio vaccines.
Well, I mean, it is...
It is truly astounding.
I mean, these drone strikes, they're just wretched.
I mean, and the way that they're reported as well, you know, the US has killed a top Taliban operative.
I mean, that's nonsense.
They have no idea who they've struck.
In Vietnam, there was a program of assassination.
You'd point out the Viet Cong, and they'd just go assassinate them, and they'd kill tens of thousands of people this way.
And under review, it turned out that this was all bogus.
This was just guys settling old grudges.
It's like the movie Memento.
You've got a confused hitman who will go shoot anyone you point at, and this is how the old Hatfield and the McCoy conflicts of Vietnam got settled, was through this assassination program.
The imagination or the fantasy that the United States government, which did not predict the fall of the Soviet Empire, did do nothing to stop 9-11 and other terrorist attacks, and have just been uniformly incompetent, that they have some idea who is actually a top Taliban operative and a that they have some idea who is actually a top Taliban operative and a top al-Qaeda operative and knows exactly where they are, and they They barely have anybody who can speak Arabic.
They barely have anybody in the ground and they have a lot of blue-eyed guys with blonde hair who can't really pass for locals in these places.
So basically someone just says, Oh, that guy, he's a top Taliban guy.
Why?
Because he's a competitor on my chicken ranch.
And they just go nuke that guy, and then they say, aha, you know, we have done X, Y, and Z. And it's all just such a lot of kabuki nonsense that it really is hard to take seriously.
And of course, the Taliban are a bunch of medieval sociopaths and just, I mean, horrible.
But you can't fundamentally beat these people with bombs.
All you can do is beat them with better ideas.
The progress of the human species is not crawling out of a crater with half your legs gone.
The progress of the human species is to reason, and particularly with the young, to bring reason and evidence and the passion of good philosophy to the world.
That's how we progressed.
Nobody bombed us into the Scientific Revolution.
Nobody bombed us into the Enlightenment.
Nobody bombed us into the Renaissance.
Nobody bombed us into the Industrial Revolution.
These things all occurred because intelligent, articulate people dug in their heels and spoke the very damn truth to the skies, despite what fell.
And made the case convincingly in the social marketplace for peace, for the free trade, for property rights, for the non-initiation of force, for the rights of women, for the end of slavery, for the rights of children.
You make the case passionately and repeatedly in the public sphere.
That is how we advance as a species, not raining hellfire down from 10,000 feet on people who you haven't had no trial, no evidence, and you're just pushing a button and blowing them to smithereens.
That is not how human society progresses.
That is taking us back, and it's an insult to the Stone Age to say that's taking us back to the Stone Age, because in the Stone Age you actually had to stand in front of somebody With a boulder and attempt to smack him on the head, this pushing a button, this video game death with all this propaganda is just horrendous.
I mean, where could it conceivably stop?
This escalation has no end.
I was just going to say, I like that Stefan says that we have to reason, introduce reason logic, particularly to the young.
Is that because people that are older, like the old dogs, can't learn new tricks kind of thing?
I mean, I think there's some truth in that.
And I say this almost looking at my screen to see the avalanche of people saying, well, I'm 50 and I love your show.
And so it's not a uniform statement.
People who have the habit of thinking continue the habit of thinking.
So that's not a big problem.
But...
The best way to get people to think is to introduce reason and evidence and critical thinking, Socratic reasoning and all that kind of stuff when they're young.
But it's really hard to do when they're young because then you've got to put them in public school or try and find some alternative.
And if you put kids who can really think and criticize and question authority and who aren't riding the dull, bloody wave of historical momentum and aren't embedded in the nonsense called culture, It's really tough for those kids in school.
My daughter is three, and they're sort of just wandering over this kind of stuff myself.
So it's hard to teach the young reason.
In an irrational society, it makes their journey to adulthood sort of like watching those salmon swim upstream when there's, in fact, a tsunami, a firestorm, and a hail of lava coming down.
So it makes it more challenging.
But I really think it is the only way to do it.
I mean, I don't know what you guys are like in terms of your ability to convince people.
I bet maybe one.
One in a thousand.
Maybe one in 500.
On a really good day, maybe one in 250.
But in terms of actually lighting the divine spark of genuine human thought in people, even with all my passion and eloquence, it's really, really hard.
It's like you're trying to light a fire with wet sticks underwater.
So maybe you guys have a better track record, but I think we've really got to focus on having the young, Not stop thinking, because I think, you know, certainly kids are born to think, they're born to reason, they're born to negotiate, they're born to understand property rights.
You know, they say it's easy as taking candy from a baby.
My God, have you ever tried taking candy from a baby?
They get property rights totally.
So I think, yeah, focusing on the young is really important.
Well, I mean, honestly, I think if you want to try and share with a family member that doesn't believe any of what we talk about, It's much easier to have a homeless person tell them rather than you tell them.
For some reason, they just think that we're all crazy.
Right, right.
Yeah, no, whereas they'll listen more patiently to a homeless person because they already know that they're crazy and they'll humor them or whatever.
So yeah.
So maybe what we should do is just find some, you know, shaggy-headed guy with like one pant leg and have him lead the movement and maybe that's how we'll go forward.
Follow the guy who's wandering aimlessly down the street and tripping over the subway grade.
He is the future!
There are a lot of shaggy-headed guys in our movement already.
But anyway, and that's okay.
I was going to let you know that one of our hosts on the Freedomizer Radio Network has called you the Aristotle of our times.
What do you think about that?
Well, I mean, it's a wonderful compliment, assuming that he doesn't think that I'm just really into young boys, because that may not be exactly the vibe that I'm trying to give off.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, it's a huge compliment.
I'm not going to pretend any modesty here.
I think that if you're going to try to be a good philosopher, then you obviously, you know, I go with Arnold Schwarzenegger on this, as I do on so many things, except the amount of weights that I lift.
And the way that I treat my housekeepers, not that I have any.
But Arnold Schwarzenegger said, you know, when he was governor, he said he was being interviewed and he said, somebody asked him, you know, well, would you want to be president?
He's like, well, of course I'd want to be president.
I'm the kind of guy that if I'm going to get involved in a field, I want to go to the top.
I want to be the best.
I want to be the...
The greatest.
I want to be the Muhammad Ali of philosophy.
So, yeah, I'm aiming to take my place among the greats, and I think that's what you've got to do if you're going to get involved in a field as deep and powerful as philosophy.
Go for the gold.
I mean, I don't think there are many people who, you know, are athletes who say, you know, I'd really like to peter out sort of in the mid-range world.
Not quite a bronze and not quite the nationals.
I work really, really hard and I take on all of this stuff.
I'm going to train and eat food that I don't want to eat and not eat food that I do want to eat.
Get up at 5 o'clock in the morning and run up and down hills with logs tied to my back so that I can get...
You know, a few amateur sponsorships and peter out somewhere in the middle, you know, maybe at a state championship.
No, everybody who gets into athletics who really goes for the gold wants to go for the gold.
They want to be the best.
So I'm certainly, I'm not, you know, I can't conceivably judge where I stand in any of this kind of stuff.
But, you know, if I fail, it won't be for lack of ambition.
So I really do appreciate the compliment.
It is incredibly kind.
And with any luck, I won't have to do what Aristotle did, which is to flee his government, saying that he will not allow the Athens to sin against philosophy twice after what they did to Socrates.
So I appreciate the compliment, and it really, really is very kind.
Someone else in the chat room wanted me to ask you if you think living a truthful life is more important than living a happy life.
Mm-hmm.
There's an argument, Nietzsche first sort of formulated this, but I think it's very true.
I mean, it's an old argument in philosophy, or an old perspective, which says...
Well, we want to be happy, obviously.
Happiness is the thing.
Because it's the one thing we don't get in order to go somewhere else, right?
We get in the car to drive somewhere.
We wake up in the morning so that we can have some breakfast or whatever.
But happiness is the one thing that we do not do for the sake of something else.
Once it's there, you know, that's it.
It's complete.
And the argument from Socrates onwards is, you know, reason equals virtue equals happiness.
So if we are rational, then we can be good.
And if we are good, we will be happy.
And that's compelling and simplistic, because I think that's true if we live in a rational world.
But we do not live in a rational world.
I mean, we live in an anti-rational world.
I mean, we all know this.
We bring basic reason and evidence to politics, to religion, to economics, to ethics.
And, you know, it's like stuffing your pockets full of landmines and running into a giant magnet.
It can be pretty catastrophic.
And so when you bring basic reason and evidence and you bring the basic kindergarten ethics of, you know, don't push, don't steal, don't hit, don't, you know, do these bad things and you apply it in a global context, in a universal context and erase the moral legitimacy of the state, people kind of freak out, you know?
They act like, you know, Morpheus, the scene with Neo in The Matrix where he's, you know, he's got those cool shades on and he just hands him this pill and Neo's like, Hmm, yeah, I think I can take that pill.
Okay.
But the way that people react to us is if we're trying to basically hold them down with four security guards, lube them up and give them that pill up a chute where the sun don't shine.
And so it's really hard in an anti-rational world to say, well, if I'm rational, then I'm going to be virtuous.
And if I'm virtuous, I'm going to be happy.
I think we want to try and build a world Where reason equals virtue equals happiness.
But right now, to be rational, it's kind of to have a lot of lasers pointed at your forehead.
And Lord knows a lot can fit on my forehead.
So I think it is a challenge.
But I think we just have to do the right thing no matter what.
I mean, all of us who've benefited from people doing the right thing in the past, no matter what the cost...
You know, all of the great things we've got out of that.
End of slavery, equal rights for women, property rights.
I mean, all of these great things that we've inherited from the past, where people just stood up and damn well did the right thing, no matter what storm shook them to the core, I think it's just a big-ass version of pay it forward.
You know, then we've just got to do that to build the kind of world that we'd love to live in someday.
Right, but Stefan, we're about to live in a society where smoking marijuana will happen to be legal But drinking a soda will not be legal.
Well, I mean, the soda thing is just truly, it's truly astounding.
And it just shows you how pitiful and desperate the solutions are.
You know, it's, I mean, it's ludicrous.
And obesity, of course, is a huge problem.
I mean, obesity is a big problem, and you can trace, I think that fundamentally you can trace obesity to the destruction of the nuclear family that occurred from the beginnings of the welfare state in the 1960s.
Massive rises in single parenthood.
Single parenthood has been significantly and statistically associated, correlated with rises in obesity.
And so the idea that we've got this fundamental crack and breakup and shattering of the nuclear family, you know, with one parent staying home and one person going to work and kids having a stable, large community, extended family kind of upbringing, I mean, that's all been completely shattered.
And now you've got the majority of women under 30 giving birth.
They're not even in a marriage.
And so you've got the end of marriage.
You've got the end of massive rises in divorce, incredible chaos among kids.
So yeah, I mean, this is all associated with lots of TV time, fear of neighborhoods, bad eating, lots of eating out, processed food, crap food, junk food, salt and fat and calories.
And so the idea that these fundamental social issues that have been created by massive, massive social engineering on the part of the government can be solved by making people who want to drink a lot and burp a lot buy two drinks instead of one, it's just unbelievable.
It's like dropping a band-aid right after you drop the atomic bomb and saying, well, you know, it kind of balances out.
Hey, Stefan, I was...
Asked to ask you, and I meant to ask you earlier, how was your trip to Brazil?
That was part of the reason why it took a few weeks between your last appearance on the show with me to your appearance today.
You were in Brazil.
How did that go?
Well, it went well enough that they, you know, they had to get a couple of security guards at the hotel to prevent me from eating my own passport and never coming back.
It was fantastic.
I loved Brazil, which is to say that I loved the Brazilians.
First of all, Dear God, it was great to be in a country where my butt doesn't stand out anymore.
That was something just incredible.
Because here, you know, people would just often, if I'm in a bookstore, people would just step on it to climb up to a higher shelf.
But there, you know, it's pretty much on par with other people's butts.
That's fantastic.
The fact that I got paid an enormous amount of money to never attempt a Brazilian dance with my British ass hips, that was fantastic.
What an amazing profit center I'd never even conceived of.
The Brazilian food was fantastic.
The friendliness of the people was just amazing.
My wife and I took her daughter to a zoo, and the kids there were fantastic.
They came over, they played with her.
We didn't speak each other's language, but it was just a huge amount of fun.
People were incredibly generous, sharing their homes, sharing their thoughts, their ideas, their feelings, their passions.
The Brazilian movement is incredible when it comes to their passion for libertarian ideas.
I mean, they have a huge mountain to climb.
I mean, they have a lot of superstition in the country.
They have a lot of history of statism.
All the intellectuals are socialists.
I debated a professor who, a professor, I think he's in political science, one of the leading intellectuals, and he was just, you know, bang on Marxist socialist.
And we had a pretty ferocious but very enjoyable debate for a couple of hours one night with some great audience participation.
I stood up in front of senior politicians in Brazil and told them that taxation is theft.
It was very exciting all around.
And so, you know, I really would recommend for people to look up Brazilian libertarianism.
It's a very energetic, positive, focused, and fast-growing community led by some incredibly energetic, intelligent, and professional people.
So I just am massively enthusiastic.
Well, let me ask you then.
Is thriving right now, while most countries are in shame.
Well, of course, there's a massive oil revenue, right?
Brazil is one of the biggest producers of oil in the world.
And they haven't...
I mean, they don't have an empire.
Remember, a lot of what America is facing is the hangover from empire.
And this is exactly what England faced after the Second World War.
And this is exactly what Rome faced in the last 500 years of its existence.
Don't worry.
The internet allows you to do fast forward on history these days.
But...
So this is, you know, they don't have an empire.
And so if you have a welfare state and a warfare state, you know, your acceleration into the pit is really rapid.
So yeah, lots of oil revenues, a pretty well-educated population, and of course a uniformity of culture, which has helped quite a bit.
I mean, you know, mostly Catholic, mostly, you know, with the same sort of viewpoints, and still very strong families.
I don't think the waves of family breakups have hit very hard in Brazil.
So, there's a lot that's holding the economic catastrophes of the Western Bay there.
I mean, probably it's not going to last, but that, I think, has a lot to do with it.
All right.
Valerie, go ahead.
You said strong families is one of the central tenets of a society that can develop critical thinkers, you know, have the young turn into critical thinkers.
Something I've meant to ask you about, and it's sort of controversial, but there are some people who believe that you advocate divorcing your parents if they are bad parents.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to.
I get that it's a challenging idea.
But sort of let me explain the ideas behind it and see if you can make any sense of it.
When I grew up in the 70s, divorce was everywhere.
I mean, divorce went up like 300% in the 70s.
My parents were divorced.
I think most of...
No, not quite all.
Most of my friend's parents were divorced and so on.
And what was put into my mind, and I think it was actually a pretty good idea, which was basically, you should not put up with destructive and abusive relationships.
This was in the newspapers.
This was in the mainstream media.
This was in made-for-TV movies.
This was even in kids' books that I read, you know, about daddy was beating mommy, so mommy had to go someplace safe kind of thing.
And so, if your relationships are abusive, as I was always told, you have the option to not be in them.
Yet, parents are kind of excluded from that as a whole.
So, I mean, if you had a friend who said, you know, my husband beats me up all the time, you'd probably say, Well, you know, it might be a good idea for you not to be in that relationship if it's violent or destructive and so on.
And so, yeah, I've definitely, when people have said, you know, if they call into my show, I do this sort of Sunday call-in show, and they've said, well, my parents are, you know, they beat me up or they, you know, I was raped or something like that.
It's like, well...
You don't have to stay in relationships that are abusive.
Now, I think, my personal opinion, which I've repeated many times on the show, is go see a therapist.
Really try to work things out with your parents.
But if they're unrelenting and therapy can't solve the situation and they continue to be abusive, yeah, you have the right, and certainly not the obligation, but you certainly have the right and the practical freedom to not be in abusive relationships.
And This is only controversial, I think, among some of the parents whose children have decided not to be in relationships with them, usually, to my knowledge at least, under the care and feedback of a professional therapist.
But yeah, I strongly stand by that.
I think that if relationships are abusive, whether it's a husband-wife relationship or a friend relationship or a sibling relationship or a parent-adult-child relationship, Reminding people of voluntarism is, I think, very important.
We can't do anything about the state.
We can't wave our hands or snap our fingers and get rid of the Fed or calm the stormy seas of foreign policy and the welfare state or any of those kinds of things.
But we can take a stand against violence and aggression within our own lives, and I don't really see a logical reason why that wouldn't occur for every relationship that we have, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, it makes sense to me, and I'm not sure why so many people find it controversial either.
I'm a child of divorced parents, and neither of my parents were abusive, but I did have a stepparent that was abusive of my mother, and, you know, it was very traumatic, and it was a hard thing to go through life in that sort of environment.
So as an adult, you know, knowing that you could disassociate from that would be I think it would bring a lot of relief to people and it would make them feel much better.
Sometimes people don't want you to have that option, though.
They want people to stay with their families no matter what because they think that, you know, that your family should be more important than your own personal well-being sometimes.
But I'm glad to hear you describe it in that way.
One of the things that makes me think of, though, is should we avoid people in general who make our lives unhappy?
Well, I hope not.
I mean, I make some people's lives unhappy.
I think you guys do, too, because we put uncomfortable truths in front of people.
So I would hope that people would not avoid me because I make them uncomfortable or unhappy.
So, I mean, If you go to a doctor, that doctor may make you quite unhappy for a while.
You know, if he gives you some medicine that's unpleasant or some course of treatment that's difficult.
If you go to a personal trainer, they will, I can tell you this from birth, they will make you very uncomfortable and you'll barely be able to crawl out of bed the next day if they work you hard.
If you go to a nutritionist, they're going to say, hey, you know that food you really like?
Well, you can't have it anymore.
You know that food that you don't like so much?
Have more of that.
So I think that discomfort is...
I think it's healthy to expose yourself to that.
I mean, I think we've all faced ideas that, you know, are a bitter, jagged pill to swallow that we have been happier from as a result.
So I don't think people who make us unhappy necessarily is the standard or is the criteria.
I think that we should have the highest standards for the least voluntary relationships, right?
So just to touch on the last topic, right?
We know, I think we all accept and understand that if a woman is in a, you know, she marries some guy and then he turns out to be an abusive drunk or whatever, then...
She should be aware that she can leave him.
Whether she should leave him or not, I mean, I probably think yes, but that's not a decision you can make for anyone else, but she should be reminded of the options.
Of course, the parent-child relationship is not voluntary, as you pointed out.
It wasn't like you chose your stepfather.
I mean, your mom did.
And we don't choose our parents.
We can choose our spouses.
We don't choose our parents.
So I think parents have to have the very highest standards.
I mean, I'm very aware of this in raising my daughter.
I'm the stay-at-home dad.
And she doesn't have a choice.
You know, she didn't choose me as her dad.
And she didn't even choose to be born.
So it's up to me to make that something she would choose, right?
So I try to parent every day as if...
If my daughter had the choice of me and any other dad in the world, that she would choose me.
That's sort of how I have to.
Because she doesn't have that choice, but I have to act as if she did.
I think that's the best way to promote quality in an involuntary relationship.
So I've never hit her, of course.
I've never yelled at her.
I've never insulted her.
I've never called her names.
I'm positive and enthusiastic and available and all that kind of stuff.
And so I just want to sort of point that out in terms of the voluntary versus the involuntary relationships.
Because parenting is an involuntary relationship, it has to have the very highest standards, way higher than marital standards, which is a voluntary relationship among adults.
And so, as far as people making us uncomfortable, no.
I think if people are abusive towards us, in other words, if they call us names, they put us down, they threaten us, they hit us, or they support the use of violence against us, well, I think that's a pretty tough...
I mean, I think it's worth getting in there, trying to reform the relationship, trying to help the person, because...
If you're a doctor, you don't just step over someone on the sidewalk who's bleeding out, but fundamentally we have to give them the respect.
Other people who are nasty or abusive or destructive or harmful or toxic, give them the respect of their free will, which is that they're choosing this path if they've had another option presented to them, which is what we try to do, what I enthusiastically try to do with people.
But eventually, you know, they have to be responsible for their choices and life is short.
I myself do not let aggressive or abusive people into my life.
If they're in my life, you know, as they were in the past, I will talk about it with them.
I will try and work with them.
I will try and work with them with a therapist if that's what's necessary.
But if they simply refuse to change, then yeah, I mean...
I certainly don't have the right to really subject myself to that.
It's not really a healthy thing to do.
But even more importantly, I don't have the right to subject my daughter to that kind of behavior and its effect on me.
Absolutely.
Well, Valerie, I know we've pretty much had an hour here and we've gone commercial-free.
Stefan, I know it's getting late, so I'm going to let you go ahead and Well, I mean, my show is freedomainradio.com.
I hope that people will check it out.
I've got youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio for videos.
The books are all free.
The podcasts are all free because I have the economic intelligence of cheestring.
And so I hope that people will just consume and share as much as they want.
If they like the show, they're certainly welcome to donate.
That's how I actually I bake my bread and put straw over my head.
So if people want to check out the show, I hope they will.
We have, I think, 40 million plus downloads.
Oh, and Porkfest!
Come out to Porkfest later this week.
I'm going to be leading a rousing and passionate sing-along with the audience, and I will be doing a couple of speeches, and I'll just be around with my family for general social chit-chats.
I hope that people will drop by.
I'll be the master of ceremonies at Libertopia in the fall, Libertopia.org.
I'm going to be doing a presentation on ethics in Vancouver in June.
I'll put the links up here, at least on my version of this podcast.
And just for my listeners, since I'll put this on my show as well, for my listeners, if you can put your info out, then hopefully we can send some traffic your way as well.
Absolutely.
And can you tell us about Porkfest?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, Porkfest is just mind-blowing.
It's fantastic.
It's like a thousand people all passionately devoted to voluntarism.
You've got everything from agorists to law professors to, you know, chattering idiots like me.
There's going to be just a huge crowd there.
The Free Talk Live guys are going to be there.
Adam Kokesh is going to be there.
Jeff Berwick is going to be there.
Just a fantastic lineup of truly great thinkers.
And if, you know, people want to go to...
I think it's porkfest.com to check it out.
It's a campsite.
It's real cheap.
It's in the beautiful mountains of New Hampshire, and it's just really worth coming out to.
Again, you want to go out into the big blue room and meet the flesh people in the Liberty Movement.
It really is.
It's inspiring for me.
This is my third year going, and I talk and do events there every year, and I just love to meet the listeners and hang out with them.
So I hope that people can come by.
I hope you guys can come by, too.
Now, where is it located again?
It's at Rogers Campground.
I think it's Lancashire, New Hampshire.
But it's Rogers Campground.
You can do that.
But if you go to porkfest.com, you can get the map to it there.
But it's in New Hampshire, and it's part of the Free State Project, I think.
Okay.
Hey, and I was just going to say one...
Hey, can I plug myself real quick here?
Please.
I actually was nominated for the Zoe Taylor Award, which is going to be given out by the folks that did the Silver Circle movie on Thursday, and I wanted to tell them thank you again for considering me as a nominee, and I really appreciate it.
That was with a long list of Other women activists who I admire and respect greatly, and I want to tell them thanks again for including me.
Well, congratulations.
That's fantastic.
Yeah.
Thank you, Stefan.
It was really an honor, and I was very appreciative of that.
But you said we should plug our site for your listeners, and I think proof you need to do that.
Oh, you were doing a good job, but that's all right.
Obviously, we're live at freedomiserradio.com where we have shows 15 hours a day and we have shows 7 days a week.
I happen to be the anchor guy at night.
Alright, and what's the best website for people to listen?
Yeah, what's the best website?
Oh, freedomiserradio.com.
There's a chat room and a listen button right there.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks so much, guys.
I really appreciate it.
It was a real pleasure.
And I hope we get to meet face-to-face one day.
All right.
Absolutely.
Thank you, Stefan.
And please come back again.
Everybody, we have a huge response when you're on the show.
It's really great.
I appreciate that.
Thanks so much, guys.
Have a great night.
▲
Export Selection