All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 19, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:03
2195 Ethical Anarchy Panel: Stefan Molyneux, Bill Buppert, Dr. Dan D'Amico and Ernest Hancock
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
...panel which means my job is done in about another two minutes.
Jeff Berg was going to be on the panel, but no longer is.
Ernie Hancock is on the panel, and he's the founder of Freedom Phoenix.
Dan D'Amico is a professor of economics at Loyola University, New Orleans, and he's already been introduced in other sessions, so I'll leave it at that right here.
So is Stephan Molyneux.
He has already done a couple talks and roasts last night as well, so hey everybody, I think you know him.
At this point, I'll turn it over to Bert and look forward to your panel basically.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and Stu Koi, who may be present.
We've already introduced our panel.
What we're going to talk about today is the ethics of anarchy.
We're going to have a very interesting conversation here about that, and I'd like to say that my definitional standard for anarchy is a state-less society, and we all know that in the lexicon, anarchy is weighted with a lot of negative baggage out there as a result of the media, Hollywood, and the history that is taught in the government re-education camps.
I would urge you to reconsider that.
I would urge you to reconsider the fact that anarchy is the envisionment of a stateless society, but a stateless society in which self-ownership and self-government are key.
So, with that, we're going to discuss the ethics of anarchy and ethical anarchy in itself.
And one reason why we would toy with the term Ethical anarchy is all of you are familiar with seeing the news footage on television of the black-clad, property-destroying hipsters who are destroying private property, throwing rocks through windows or McDonald's, whoever they choose to victimize.
And these are the anarchists who are saying, yeah, we want the government to leave us alone, but we'd like them to pay our student loans and we'd like to live off of them if we can.
So they do consider their neighbors their property, and we would like to make a distinction about that.
So what I'd like to do is, each of the esteemed panelists here, senior philosopher being Stefano, of course, are going to give a brief preamble to what their vision is of ethical anarchy, and then we'll have some repartee, and I'm hoping that we'll close out our panel early among ourselves, So we can open it up to questions and answers and involve the audience more.
So with that, I'm going to hand it off to Stefan.
Hi.
Good morning.
Good afternoon.
Sorry, just one quick request.
I feel like we're kind of yelling over a lot of conversations.
So if you're in the back and you want to have a chat, no problem.
If you could just take it a little bit to one side or the other and keep it down, that would be fabulous.
Quiet in the back!
Quiet in the back!
Oi!
Shut your cam calls!
See if you can figure out who was in the army and who wasn't.
The haircut is not a clue.
There's a mistake that is made around anarchy, which is there's one letter that people get wrong.
Just one letter.
One letter is the difference between a free society and the apocalyptic economic hellscape that we're currently writing the four boss men into.
And that one letter is, oh, so people hear anarchy, and what do they hear?
without rules.
Like you're just going to sit down and play chess.
One of you has a pigeon, one of you has a bazooka, you can call in airstrikes.
Like there's no rules to chess, it's just mad.
And that's not what Anarchy is.
Does anyone know the technical, annoying definition?
Without rulers, right?
So, you know, you're not going to play chess.
So it's not without rules.
Just one little r.
Insert r here to achieve human freedom.
It means without rulers.
And that is a very different thing.
Because people think that rules mean rulers.
And this is not true.
Rulers mean no rules.
No rules of any sense, of any consequence, and certainly no rules of any ethical content, with any ethical content.
You know, when two guys just sit down and play chess, they don't need a referee.
They don't need an umpire because they both accept and work with these.
If you have a referee and an umpire who can be brined, who has his own self-interest, who's got money on who wins and loses, you end up with a chess game who has no rules.
And society with a state at its center?
It's a society without rules.
It is a society with rulers, which means there are no rules.
Because there's self-interest, there's lobbying, there's bribery, there's debt, there's buying off the politicians who then buy off the voters with the money of their unborn children.
It's a huge mess with that.
You take away that, one, and people think it means no rules, and therefore we need a government.
But when you have a government, you have no rules.
Anyone know the horrible number of new laws that are introduced every year in the United States?
Anyone got a guess?
40,000.
It's something like that.
So 40,000 on top of the incredible amount of rules that nobody knows what the rules are.
You know, I've always had this thought of ever getting, you know, in a courtroom or something and said, you did something wrong.
It's like, okay, come on, current out these law books.
Just stack them up.
Just stack them up and say, are you kidding me?
Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Nobody knows the law.
There is no law.
There is a selective amount of retribution you can get from people who are upset with you who can pick out whatever rule they want.
Common law!
Common law is something that evolves through social consensus and through that which is effective and efficient for human society.
That is a law without rulers as well.
So, for me, to say ethical anarchy is like saying dishonest politician.
I mean, you're just repeating yourself.
That exists anarchy because anarchy means without rulers, which means the possibility of developing rules that are enforced and reinforced through a community.
Some of the basics, you know, how do you deal with contract law without a government?
Well, first of all, the only people who ever think the government solved problems are those people who've never tried to ask the government to solve a problem.
So you go to someone who says, well, how are you going to enforce contract law without a government?
Have you ever tried to enforce contract law with a government?
No.
Well, then you wouldn't be asked to be that twisted.
I mean, how do we achieve justice without the government?
You can't achieve justice with the government.
But there's ways of enforcing contract law, there's ways of dealing with violence and crime and so on that have nothing to do with creating the arbitrary rule.
You can protect property without creating a central institution with the capacity to violate property at will.
I mean, what an insane solution!
You know, we're always asked to justify anarchy.
Imagine, you know, being some space alien who would do nothing, saying, justify statism.
Well, we need to create the state to protect property.
How does the state function?
By violating property.
I don't care how propagandized you mean, you gotta wipe that board clean and start again.
So, when you get rid of the states, you get rid of the violations of property rights, which is taxation and so on, and you get rid of the violations of the non-aggression principle, which is enforcing taxes, it's enforcing drug laws, it's enforcing the funding of foreign dictatorships through foreign aid and so on.
And so when you get rid of these central agencies and you have a society that is spontaneously generating and dealing with these rules, which is what we all do all day, all the time.
I just gave a speech in Brazil where I told a bunch of politicians that taxation is theft.
And they said, well, how can society run without violence?
I said, well, how many of you have directly used violence this morning?
I said, directly, because they were politicians.
But how many of you have directly used violence this morning?
None.
I said, okay, last week, last month, last year, zero.
Zero.
So everybody avoids the use of violence in their personal life, but we say, well, that's what we're talking about.
They're like, well, no, no, that can't work.
Which is completely bizarre, because it's exactly the same principle.
So when you get rid of the state, you have a system which does not violate property rights, which does not violate the non-aggression principle.
Now, violations of property rights and the non-aggression principle are still going to happen, of course, but they're dealt with through Defense agencies, privatized defense agencies, that dealt with it through contract, that dealt with it through insurance.
So if you and I are going to engage in a business deal for $100,000, we just buy insurance in case the other guy screws up.
And then if we do, the insurance pays us the difference.
And the more we are honest with our contracts, the lower that insurance becomes, so it becomes It's much more effective and efficient to be moral and keep your word.
I think we all understand that stuff.
So to me, ethics, non-aggression principle, respect for property rights, they're really the same thing because your body is your property and someone stabs you, they're violating the property called you.
So, non-aggression principle, all we do is universalize that, and once we universalize that, there is no room for the state.
The state cannot be morally justified.
It is an evil institution.
So to me, ethical anarchy is just the same way and saying the same thing.
It's like good virtue.
Ethics is the same as anarchy, and that would really be my case.
Yeah, normally when people are justifying a position normally when people are justifying a position of activism or supporting to live within a world governed by statelessness as opposed to conventional political institutions,
they tend to legitimize their stance from one of two perspectives.
Either they support anarchism for, say, moral or deontological reasons, That anarchism promotes rights or is the best social organization to protect individual rights.
In consequentialist terms, people support anarchist positions for the sake of efficiency or improved social welfare conditions, some better social outcome, greater wealth or prosperity.
I self-identify as anarchist for sort of neither of those two reasons and instead for analytical reasons.
I think that the way in which our public policy discussions take place in society today is that we presume that problems are moral injustices and that does a lot of the heavy lifting for promoting an activist strategy of intervention.
If instead we took The insights that have been garnered from an analytical perspective of recognizing in social environments that have rules that function very differently than our own, what we see is that patterns of behavior, social norms, In these different social environments, emerge in very, very different ways.
And that includes moral conceptions.
The way in which people understand the scope of their rights or the details of their property ownership.
And I think that that observation in the analytical category of anarchism should be the starting ground before you can build any moral understanding of the ethics of anarchism.
So in large part, I think that deontological methods applied to the anarchist social science project has done more harm than good.
When we think that we can explain the content and details of a free society by means of self-reflection and applied logic only, we end up ignoring a lot of the more testable and recognizable we end up ignoring a lot of the more testable and recognizable empirical patterns of how society
I'm a bumper sticker guy.
If you can't put it on a bumper sticker, it's too long.
And, you know, freedom is the answer, what's the question?
So I always default to more freedom always makes us better off.
And to say that ethics and anarchism are the same thing, I agree with everything that Stephan said.
It goes much deeper than that.
For me, I want to be left alone.
I want to live free.
I want to find the universal best practice of whatever.
But there is no universal best practice for everybody.
There's universal best practice for me.
And the universal best practice for me, the only way I get to do that is advocate and everybody gets to have their own universal best practice.
Okay?
Everybody gets to be free.
You do whatever you want.
Go into a little enclave that you have and how many wives you want to have and children and this and raise dogs and marry chickens and whatever.
I don't care.
But the thing is, is that on my, you know, where I want to be left alone, you know, can we agree to be left alone?
So, the practical application of that is this.
I'll give you an example.
As we advocate for being left alone, this law is oppressive, we don't like that, this shouldn't be, Ernie, you're just an anarchist.
I get on the radio all the time, talking about, yeah, well, you're just an anarchist.
I have, you know, big names, blah, blah, progressives, de la, whatever, you know, well, you're just an anarchist.
It's like they're, you know, insulting me or something, okay?
And I go, compare to what?
What we got now, death, dying, destruction, war, that's my choice, that or none, I'll vote none.
I mean, if these are my options, you know, none's a big, giant, flaming, easy choice.
But when you're dealing with the mindset, when you're dealing with people that would do you harm, when you're dealing with people that would collectivize their efforts and make you pay for it, for them enslaving you, how do you create a different environment?
Because that's really what my goal is.
I don't want to, you know, someday live free, kind of maybe, you know, keep the flame alive.
I want to live free now!
You know, so I make every effort to do that.
And in my battles dealing with man, there's always some guy with a shiny magic gun.
You know, the gun in the room is a perfect example of my stuff.
There's always the gun.
And when you're dealing with them, everybody playing in politics, they think that there's some kind of rules.
And the rules go like this.
I do this, I vote here, I say this, I go to court, I whatever.
And when you're playing with the government, you're playing with your activism and so on, it's really easy, you know, to beat these guys.
But they don't play by the rules.
Sooner or later, it's like, I always say, it's like playing chess with a three-year-old.
But sooner or later, the three-year-old stands up, knocks all the pieces off of the table, and puts 345 slugs in your chest.
Oh.
You know, I mean, you know.
Yeah, hopefully it's a...
Maybe we're in a very tough neighborhood.
That's what he is from the hood.
Oh, no, think about it.
Any of you that are on the streets, on the line, it's getting to that.
Don't you think?
I mean, there's no negotiating with these guys.
They're just surviving the traffic stop.
You know, my good friend Mark Victor, partner of the Freedom Summit, he's a criminal defense attorney.
Thank you.
He's a criminal defense attorney, and he has an article that says how to survive a police stop.
A traffic stop.
Because the goal isn't to argue constitutionality with the officer.
The goal is to come out alive.
The goal is to survive.
So how do you build an ethical society, an anarchist society?
Can we say the same thing?
You know, the highest best purpose of this and that is to leave me alone as a state of mind that we're advocating for the next generation.
We're not going to change you.
I've learned this.
You are not going to change the guys in the shiny badges and the guns.
This system has drawn them out of all the good out here and the muck has settled over there.
You're not going to change them.
It's us.
Let's not have it the seed of whatever comes after this.
Because that's one thing a lot of us will agree on.
There's going to be an after.
You know, in the end, freedom always wins.
It just gets really, really, really, really, really messy first.
Okay?
And I'm for the after that.
What do we rebuild?
Where's humanity going?
Alright?
So, if we have the seed at the core of rebuilding this, we have like a, you know, a plan.
Somebody's plan.
You know, I don't want Stephan's plan.
I want my plan.
If I get to have my plan, then I'm Persephone's plan.
There's no central plan for freedom.
Let's keep thinking about that.
I'd like to suggest that Marxist economics, Keynesian economics, and the Chicago School are all sophisticated academic rationalizations and the Chicago School are all sophisticated academic rationalizations for intervention by the state in economics.
Sophisticated as in sophist, as in lying, as in laden with misconceptions about human beings' work and how incentives work.
I wrote an article recently where it's entitled Political Science is an Academic Death Cult.
And my challenge to any of you out there, I'm a political science BA myself.
Any political science grads out there?
Those of you who have that degree, take away the ability for political scientists to postulate outside of ethics and outside of morality, not the use of force or violence, but the use of peace, and they have nothing to say.
In every political journal, in every political magazine, in most political wags that you will find on the net in the right and left spectrum as we know it, what you'll find is very sophisticated academic rationalizations for the use of violence in the courts.
That's what political science is about.
Take the gun out of the room, as Stefan would say.
Take their violence away, and political scientists have nothing to talk about.
What's essential to know about Ethical anarchy, or anarchy as we've stipulated on this panel, is that what everyone in this room is doing who advocates for that, we are taking the 18th century Wilberforce abolitionist project into the 21st century.
What we're saying is that in the 18th century, to look left and right, east and west, to your neighbors and your friends in the community, very few folks did not accept slavery as an institution as far as chattel slavery was concerned.
As far as the ownership of other human beings, You'd always get a north-south.
Well, that's the way it's always been.
Well, outside of a few pockets of the Middle East and Africa today, chattel slavery, for the most part, is gone.
But regulatory, tax slavery, and every other manifestation of the gun in the hands of the national state is alive and well.
So I would submit to you that.
We are an abolitionist project.
We are not an anarchy project, necessarily.
What we're trying to do is take Wilbur Force's charter to the next level and free everybody to do as they wish and be the captains of their faith, the masters of their destinies, as it were.
So with that, unless a panelist has something else to say, I would like to open it up to questions from the audience because that way we could have some more interaction.
Any objections?
Now, just while people are coming up, I just wanted to mention this consequentialist thing that we always get drawn into, who built the roads, who will take care of the poor, the healthcare, and all of that.
I just had this debate, I was mentioning this morning, this morning at the barbecue, I had this debate with this premier Marxist intellectual in Brazil last week, I think it was, and he's like, well, who's going to take care of the poor?
And I said, I don't care.
I don't care.
And he was like, you little bits of Marxist brain juice.
I am one of these slow motion scanners or something.
Because this is supposed to be the big trap, but we're supposed to care.
Does this mean I don't care about the poor?
Of course not.
But it's like if you go to somebody who wants to end slavery in 18th century, you say to that person, who's going to pick the cunt?
The correct answer is, I don't care.
Because slavery is wrong.
And what happens after slavery, I'm curious to find out.
People are very good at solving problems.
Human beings have been able to solve all conceivable problems except cell phone reception at Rogers Campground.
Every year makes the same thing.
You've got a race to carrier pigeons, you've got smoke signals, and you've got people on the roof with flags sending messages to other hotels.
What the hell is wrong with this vortex space-time continuum that you cannot get a satellite?
That's why.
Because you can't get a satellite over Roger's campground.
That's why we're here.
No drones.
It took me three years, but I'm there.
You know, we all get the question, but who will build the roads?
There's a one-word answer.
People will.
People.
Period.
Will.
I think so.
Thank you, Mr.
Grammarian.
We are going to conscript a lot of zeitgeist robots, I believe, that they are going to build the roads.
I feel that's the way it's going to go.
giant floating robot cities building roads.
I'll start us off with questions or a statement.
I think that actually consequentialist arguments are important to address because most people don't have the same burning passion that you all do and some of us in the room do about abolishing the statement.
It just doesn't resonate with them.
And they're scared of a world they don't know.
And it's not very compelling sometimes to say people will do it or I don't care.
But we also don't need to get off into like weird anarchist theory land and try to come up with all the ways private business will do it.
It's the same reason we don't need to, like, to say privatize industry in the Soviet Union.
That doesn't mean you describe exactly how the shoes are going to be produced.
You describe the market mechanisms that will do it.
But with anarchism, I'd say most people are just unaware of a large history of this already operating.
How are we going to build the roads?
Let's look to the colonial turnpikes that were privately provided, and were bigger as a percent of the economy at the time, and the Eisenhower Interstate System was.
Just example, for example, who takes care of the poor?
Mutual AIDS exercise, let's look at the history of that.
I think a lot of us who know a lot about economics tend to forget that there's a long history here, and if you look at those examples, we see pockets of AMLPs everywhere.
Then it's a matter of how do you extrapolate that for a wider society today.
Sorry, but very brief.
I kind of agree with that.
Just because...
You know, there's a couple of things that all economists agree on.
Minimum wage destroys jobs.
Tariffs suppress trade.
There's a couple of things that like 90% of economists agree on.
And these arguments have been made for the last 400 years.
And we have very high minimum wages.
We have incredibly high tariffs.
And we have unbelievable interferences in trade.
And everyone knows.
If you have free trade, you get division of labor.
You get price mechanism working well for efficiency.
You get all of these great things.
Consequentialist arguments don't work.
In economics, 400 years they've been trying to get the free market to work and we have less free market now than when they first started.
This would be one example of many.
Consequentialist arguments don't work.
Consequentialist arguments are people's way of saying, I want to avoid the ethical dimension to your question, so I'm going to pretend it's about moving stuff and people around.
So, it is wrong.
I don't want to end the state.
I can't care less about the state.
I want human beings to recognize that violence is immoral in all of its forms, not just in the state, but in the family, in parenting, everywhere.
Violence is immoral and it leads to short-term gains for a select number of people and long-term catastrophes for everyone.
I think that the consequentialist argument is people saying, I don't want to face that simple, bare, bold moral truth that there's a gun in the road which we should damn well put down if we want to call ourselves a civilized society.
I'm not mad at you.
I'm just mad at the idea.
And so people want to avoid that.
The argument is so simple.
Taxation is forced.
Done.
But people want to create all these complications about, well, okay, but if somebody has a contract with some DRO agency, and that DRO agency has another cross-contract with some other DRO agency, and nobody wants to pay for the roads, and maybe there's a defense agent, forget all of that stuff.
The violence is immoral.
I don't care who picks the slave.
I don't care who picks the carton after we end slavery.
We have to just keep wondering that slavery is immoral.
That's how these things are won.
Nobody said, "Well, who's going to cook when women have the right to have jobs?" That's not how they won.
They said, "No, we want to be free and equal." That's moral.
That's right.
And you've just got to keep thundering that.
I think that's the root of what we have to go to.
I agree that we should emphasize ethical arguments, but I think you're wholly mistaken to say that we have to throw away consequentialism too.
I think if we're honest, most people we interact in this world care about justice and consequences.
And different people have different trade-offs of how much one works the other, but absent the consequences, you're just banging your fist saying taxation is theft and the rest of the world looks at us and goes, "Yeah, you guys are nuts." I'd like to make a bridge on this because I deal with this a lot.
We do radio a lot, and it goes like this.
What would happen if we even have a rejoiner on my show, declare your independence?
Rose?
It's the Ernest Hancock shuttle.
We're going there aren't any roads.
Okay?
Well, I got my Jetson-mobile coming, man.
If government wasn't there, I'd already have it.
I'd already be doing it.
In fact, in Norway, the north area, they have a Skycar now.
It's a gyro-independent.
It goes 100 miles an hour in the air, on ground, takes off in almost nothing, lands, converts in about 60 seconds, and gets 300-mile range.
I want one!
Solution!
Well, some regulation or law or something that's going to prevent me here, you know, but I'm one, alright, alright, alright, alright.
So you talk about the consequences of freedom, and you'll say, they go, well, what about the, well, this would happen.
I'd be in my heavy-than-air dirigible blimp that I'm taking a port vest, it's my RV at 3,000 feet, and I'm making a land, I'm out here, we do, we party, go up, take a trip, come back, whatever, next year.
You know, I mean, you're not, you know, sea steady.
Spaceship one, we were all part of that.
Spaceship one, government zero.
Why was I so enthusiastic about that?
And we're the ones that did that sign, by the way.
And why was I so enthusiastic?
Because I knew it would have been private satellite communication.
Richard Branson goes and buys all these bankrupt communication satellites saying, oh yeah, the poor children in third world countries need to have internet access.
Yeah, bullshit.
Okay?
It's wrong.
They could have Internet 47.
I don't care.
Humanity marches on.
The thing is, is that I can see what was happening in the mid-90s.
L. Smith, he's a well-known libertarian science fiction writer, you know, certainly the party guys know who he is.
And he made a comment.
He goes, you know, if you go to the supermarket, they have the novel section and so on, books and all their good romance and, you know, Arnie boys and whatever.
There was an entire section of science fiction.
We had Omni Magazine, Adam and Eve, you know, you had all kinds of different science stuff and science fiction and everything.
The entire category went away within five years.
All of a sudden it started to dwindle and poof!
You go to Blockbuster Video and they still have video stores.
You go in there, science fiction is not even there anymore.
It's an action or horror or something.
It just got stripped away.
And I could see what was happening.
I was cabinet chair of the libertarian party, playing politics and all that, and I go to the schools.
They always ask us through the lecture seats.
You come talk to the junior high.
I could see what was happening.
The reason they have social studies, at least at that time, in seventh and eighth grade, junior high, there's this middle school mentality.
You have elementary school.
You have it.
Junior high and then high school.
Let me tell you what junior high is.
That's where you, you know, right when you're starting to go through puberty, right when you're starting to question authority, right when you're starting to resist, right when you're starting to go, nah, right now, and right when you've got your smartphone, you just go in there and go, put your liar, liar, liar, pants on fire.
Okay?
So, at that time is when they start instilling the social studies thing.
They're going to tell you how you're going to protest.
They're going to tell you how you're going to react when you feel injustice.
You're going to go to the man.
I am a building.
I'm just a building.
We're going to do it just this way.
It's programming.
And I'm going, they eliminated the imagination or the ability or curiosity for young people to even ask, can there be something different?
They programmed the question out of us.
We're not giving them the imagination.
No, I don't want to tell them exactly how the road's going to be building and give them some economic study about it.
No, it's wrong.
It's bad.
I don't know.
Are you going to put a gun to my head and take my money and do whatever it is that you want?
Bad.
But how good is bad?
But I go, I don't know, you might this or that or go crazy, man.
I mean, science fiction, we're floating around on, you know, I love that LRN commercial.
Yeah, I see you're floating around there.
You got a permit?
It's that mentality.
You think that you're going to be able to do some argument, or you're going to reason with the government, or you're going to get the police to pound you on the head, or they're not going to enforce something you've enforced.
They're not going to say, oh, let's go vote, okay?
And I'm going, you know, if you don't change the culture, even if you win, if you don't have the culture and support of the people in office advocating for you, if you haven't changed the culture, you're just wasting your time.
I'd like to preface my question.
I'm a lifelong atheist.
I gave them a hell of a time when they sent me to Hebrew school when I was a kid.
But I have noticed we do have an ethical philosophy that we're putting forward.
And throughout history, it seems that religions were the main source, stewards of ethical memes outside of the state.
But now, as we're increasingly secular, we don't go to any kind of gathering to talk about ethics once a week.
You know, the best we do, as some of us who are very motivated, will come to a couple of conferences a year to think about these questions.
Are you, as a panel, satisfied with the secular institutions to propagate ethics?
And what would you like to see in the future?
You?
I think...
That you're right to notice that there are sort of spillover benefits to formal religious institutions, where people develop networks and build mutual aid and other forms of services through church groups.
So your question sort of invokes this mechanism between the ethical content of that experience and the social outcomes.
But I don't necessarily think that that explains as much of the predominant content of, say, good outcomes in society or socially beneficial behavior.
So, like, this issue about consequences versus deontology, I found it interesting that the example at hand was slavery, that there's an identification with the abolitionist movement, But I think to explain the decline of systematic slavery around the globe through history,
you need to understand a lot more the rise of more efficient alternatives to that social institution that made it impossible to preserve and perpetuate over time.
And you'd also have to explain why slavery has systematically declined in areas that lacked a significant prohibition movement.
And I also find it sort of convenient that the same theological certainty of, well, we have truth on our side, there are the consequences.
It's the same thing that rests at the interventionist strategies of military occupation, foreign aid, as well as domestic regulations with regard to urban development and social welfare programs.
In the academy, when we try to introduce data and sort of findings and results about unintended consequences of government intervention, the political opposition to those forms of research is predominantly the notion that, yes, but helping, And doing something moralistically is right even beyond what this obvious harm seems to suffer.
So like, it's a deontological crutch that tries to play a contemplative game.
That's sort of my take.
So, is spreading ideas then important, or is it just simply kind of a Marxist thing where as our economic situation changes, the moral landscape will change?
For me, I think social change is not predicated on popularity.
It's not a direct democracy.
It's instead a function of having People understand the structure of how society works.
It's not necessarily people being committed to a particular idea, but people applying a consistent way of understanding the world, if that makes sense.
The argument around slavery, you know, was it economically inefficient and then the morality changed?
To me, it's begging the question.
The reason that slavery became economically inefficient was because people fought for free markets.
Why was there no alternative to slavery for 10,000 years and then there was and became inefficient?
Because people had formerly made a moral argument for it.
For peace and free markets.
So I am not satisfied with the way ethics are going.
I don't think religion has solved the problem of ethics because religion just gives enough contradictory material for people to cherry pick whatever they want to justify their own position.
So if you're a peaceful person, you can find that in the Bible.
If you're a violent person, you can find that in the Bible.
And so religion has to solve the problem.
The state certainly has to solve the problem.
I think it's up to philosophy, and the problems of ethics are very simple.
I mean, proving it all is tough, but you don't have to be a physicist to catch a ball.
You know the equations to be able to catch a ball.
Violence is wrong.
You've just got to keep repeating that to people and remind people that when they're advocating state coercion, they're advocating violence against you directly, as an individual.
You are advocating the use of violence against me for disagreeing with you.
Make it personal.
That's where ethics really live, and I think that's where we've got to go as a community.
Sorry, go ahead.
Absolutely.
I guess I'll start with an admission.
I'm a little bit new to the ideas of anarchy.
I started as a libertarian about two or three years ago, but just got introduced to volunteerism and anarchy and that whole idea.
But I'm good with the consequences and the ethics.
I love that.
That stuff makes perfect sense to me.
One of the big questions I have is how do we get there?
You know, what's the cause going to be?
How do we go from a state-run society to a self-government?
I'd like to address that very quickly.
I think one thing that's going to happen is, and we've discussed this over the past week and the weekend, and everybody's aware of this, this economic conflagration and collapse that is coming to America and the planet is not a matter of if, but when.
When this economic collapse comes, because this is the first time In global history that we've recorded in the western world in which this reserve currency is such that if the dollar collapses it takes the rest of the world with it and from those ashes will emerge whatever kind of systems whether they are spontaneous order or Marxist analogs will come out of that.
But right now, Greece and California are on the same boat, economically.
The only reason that California is afloat is because it has Uncle Sam as a sugar daddy.
Uncle Sam cannot eternally be a sugar daddy.
So what I'm saying here in short form is that once this economic collapse comes, The bread and circuses will cease.
The violence will begin from the government.
And there may just be pockets of resistance, hopefully peaceful resistance, around the globe, whether it's in the United States or in different parts of Earth, where people are going to say, we're going to start from scratch, but we're going to start in a way in which we don't think that our neighbor is our property, and we will embrace free markets and free minds.
You know, when I first got exposed to libertarianism in the early 90s and so on, they always were going on about big L, small L libertarianism.
I had no idea what they were talking about.
Big L Libertarian, Libertarian Party, official, political, kind of, you know.
Then you have, small Libertarian is just the philosophy that the LP abandoned long time ago, so we don't have to worry about that.
But the question, though, is how do you become from a Libertarian to an Anarchist?
Well, you know, that's a joke.
It's like the difference between a Libertarian and an Anarchist is about two or three election cycles.
So as experience goes, and you start to get, you just go, now I get it, this just doesn't work.
I mean, it's just, you know.
So I am of the opinion that it's all just breeding them out.
It's by example.
It's being the shining light.
And, you know, documenting when they won't let you do it.
You know, it's an evolution.
I don't know why.
When we started the love-olution thing, everybody was always like, you know, how'd you know?
And I'm like, how'd you not know?
I mean, and the next thing's going to come, and the next thing, and the next thing.
We're going this way.
Now, you know, as we trend in this last century towards more and more economists' understanding of we should be left alone, I mean, you know, there's pockets.
You know, guys in the Warsaw Ghetto weren't feeling like they were on the trending side, you know what I mean?
You know, they're kind of, you know, we're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But if you're in Arab Spring, you still got problems.
We have in Freedoms Phoenix, we have Hariya Phoenix, which is Arabic for Freedoms Phoenix.
We have an Arabic Facebook and an Arabic Twitter.
When the Arabic Spring started, we're sending books and DVDs in their format.
And we're sending the printed material and translations of the Declaration of Independence into Cairo and Alexandria.
The philosophy of liberty, second only to the United States, is now watched in Saudi Arabia.
This is a worldwide love-elution.
And you get so mired into the little short, you know, gendarme with a shiny badge and the gun and the balding, you know, sweating fork kind of...
And you're missing that there's a love-elution going on all over the planet.
It's a renaissance.
I mean, no less than that.
And it's a generational thing.
Let's embrace that.
The culture will force this just by attrition if nothing else.
I mean, how else are you going to do it?
Are you going to fix them?
Are you going to make them do it?
Are you going to go toe-to-toe?
M16 to F16?
I mean, how are you going to do this?
Are there any Arabic or Farsi speakers who can translate Stefan's stuff for YouTube?
YouTube.
Google.
Yeah.
Hi.
I just wanted to address the issue of, like, sort of ethical arguments versus consequentialist I actually think it's a false dichotomy.
I think that the only thing that actually achieves desirable results is sound principles, and the only thing that really makes a principle sound is the fact that it's consistent with our nature and human happiness and flourishing.
So, the analogy that I like to make is, it's kind of like if I wanted to get to Rogers Campground, and I asked first a directionist, and he said, well, just follow these beautiful directions no matter where they lead.
And unsatisfied, I ask a destinationist, and he says, well, that's easy.
Do whatever gets you to Rogers Campground.
Obviously, they're both useless.
So, what...
So I think that it's not really ethical arguments versus consequentialist arguments, it's seeing past that false dichotomy and understanding what actually makes a principle sound, and then you understand that that's really the only thing that leads to desired algorithms.
I especially like to hear what Stefan thinks about that.
Well, but we're not all the same, right?
I mean, people who are given political power really love political power.
Freedom is very bad for them.
I mean, public sector union leaders, how happy are they about privatization?
I mean, why does the government...
It is directly, physically addictive.
There are studies that show this.
It is more addictive than cocaine to get political power.
These people are addicts.
This is why it escalates.
This is why it never stops.
This is why it goes, like all addictions, to collapse.
And so you take away crack from the crack addict.
He is not happy.
Oh yeah, it's good for him in the long run, blah, blah, blah.
But he's not happy.
And so I think it's really important to understand that there are people profiting psychologically, financially, emotionally, on every level, profiting from the current system.
Barack Obama is dying to get in for another four years.
I mean, you couldn't pay me enough money to stay there for a day, and he's dying to get in there.
And I'm like a jaguar in a bag in a river I'm trying to get out so bad.
He wants to go back in because of money, power, prestige, attention, and all that kind of stuff.
So if we win, there's going to be massive sections of society that lose big, hard, catastrophically.
And they're going to fight tooth and nail to get to keep their benefits.
So, the consequentialist doesn't work.
It's great for us, bad for them.
Well, I think we would probably agree that there's no chance of convincing Barack Obama or the people who are that invested on either ethical or consequentialist grounds.
Like, no argument is going to convince them.
In either case, whether you're talking about an ethical argument or a consequentialist argument, you're talking about people who you can actually convince and people who, you know, that it's worth it to actually argue within the first place, right?
Yeah, no, I agree.
But nobody can argue that violence is virtuous.
That's why propaganda buries it so deep in the flag and in songs and in public school indoctrination.
Nobody can stand in front of you and say, the best solution to complex social problems is a Tarantino standoff with all the guns in the room pointed at all the people in the room.
That's terrible.
Everybody gets that.
So, once you keep pointing out that we live in a murder-based society, that the threats of murder and jail and rape is the best that we've come up with in 10,000 years under a status paradigm to deal with the problem of ethics and disabayment of social rules, There's nobody who's going to stand and defend violence.
And that's why we just have to keep pointing it out.
The moment people see what the system is, they will recall it.
But right now they don't see it.
So it's just a matter of uncovering.
And then, once that argument is there, people will say, Oh, you were profiting from evil, and now evil is going away?
I don't have any sympathy for you.
I'm sorry.
I just don't.
You profited from evil, and evil is going away.
I mean, if they legalize drugs, the Mafia is going to be really upset, and I really couldn't give a shit.
I mean, I definitely would agree.
I think the attempt to make pure consequentialist arguments is ultimately contradictory, because they're ignoring, really, the most fundamental bad consequences and what actually causes them.
I have a question about Politics as a means to achieve volunteerism or anarchy or spreading liberty.
So, I was looking around the room and I think in this room I saw fewer Ron Paul t-shirts than in the Yeah, Yeah, so a decent number of people.
So, wait.
.
Yeah, you just kind of pass on a sheet for your email or something.
So, one thing I'd like to hear from the panelists is, do you think that political action is, I don't want to say just an effective means, because clearly, if there are people walking around on Paul charts, and I've heard from all kinds of people saying, "I got into Ron Paul and I've heard about this," and so there's clearly the Ron Paul campaign and all that kind of stuff, Is funneling people into liberty.
But I'd like to hear from the panelists, do you think that it's an efficient method, as in the best thing that we can spend our time on to spread liberty, to achieve anarchy or volunteerism as soon as humanly possible, which I'm sure we'll all agree would be the best thing to achieve it as soon as possible.
And if you think that it is a very efficient way of doing it, I'd like to address that very quickly, and I'd like to say that I'm better off mowing my lawn with my teeth than voting as far as getting applications results for me.
The worst and most insidious part of this, and Stefan has made a living off of this, and rightly so, he insists this is about philosophy.
This is not about politics because, this may sound presumptuous, I would say all panelists here are above politics because we know what politics, when it is wedded to the government, leads to.
It leads to a spoil system.
It leads to a system of initiated violence.
It leads to caging.
It leads to maiming.
It leads to killing each and every time it is employed.
Even the Czechoslovak Republic, which had a peaceful divorce in 1993, And cops are the only thing that stand between us and freedom and liberty.
Because Obama, Stalin, Lenin, and all the rest of the bad actors, to include George Bush, you name your bad actor, the only thing that gives them power is police.
That's it.
"Absent police, they can't do shit." Yeah!
Shit!
I saw...
I want to give you some demographics so you can't understand and answer specifically your point.
You know, when we started, you know, in Phoenix we started the Ron Paul Revolution.
I'm the one that came up with the logo and did all that kind of thing.
But let me tell you what you've never heard me say.
You've never heard me say, vote Ron Paul.
Google Ron Paul.
Ron Paul Revolution.
Ron Paul, go around, how are you making signs about doing Ron Paul?
Meet up, Ron Paul, Ron Paul.
But I never said, vote Ron Paul.
Because I don't have a cake voting.
I haven't voted since 2002.
2004, I run for U.S. Senate against John McCain.
You don't even vote.
Yeah, I want to talk about it too.
I run for Secretary of State for the second time, in 1994, in 2006.
Still voting?
With a question mark.
And the B in voting was the B for Vanetta.
Still voting?
You guys got weird?
We done yet?
We good?
Okay.
So, voting, no.
But, let's look at Egypt.
When the Arab Spring thing started, I look at the demographics.
I interview people from Bahrain and the streets when they're doing Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, on my radio show.
Three hours every day, I interview all the guys.
We're in Egypt.
Okay?
They're in the square.
I hear the stuff in the background.
I see the guys throwing Bob Tuff cocktails on the demonstrators.
I mean, they're trying to instigate something.
So we see the Banksy thing.
That's where that came from with the flower, you know, throwing guy.
Alright?
So the thing was, I'm going, what are the demographics there?
80 million people.
About a third of them lived in just a Cairo or Nile River Valley there.
You know, 17, 20 million people.
You had half of the people lived on less than $4 a day.
You had 33% of the people were 14 years of age and younger.
How the hell do you get away from that demographic?
You have an average age of 24.
The average median age in America is 37 or something.
I'm going, they're not going to win this.
You know, the bad guys, they're just going to be bred out.
The Generation X got a smartphone.
You're screwed.
So what do you do?
They get to the streets.
They're not leaving.
They're no hell no.
We don't go.
Then all of a sudden, okay, I think you swear we're going to have an election.
We'll do it.
They're doing it right now.
You know, the bar is going to die.
They go back and forth.
The State Department says, this is a new leader that we approve of.
And you get Pharaoh number 302.
Okay?
Another Pharaoh.
Another ruler.
Another occupied government.
Another.
What if you injected in them, which is what we were trying to do, and I think we were pretty successful, is that you glue yourself to your own Pharaoh?
What if we infected an average age of 24?
What if we infected 33% of the population under 14 who've grown up with the idea that they rule themselves?
Just that infection.
What will happen?
I don't know, but I want to find out.
If you see this pattern in other areas that you support, see other people support, this idea of support Ron Paul, but don't vote for him, to me that's a little bit like, go to McDonald's, I love McDonald's, go to McDonald's, buy their food, but don't eat the food, you know?
And so, I'm wondering if you see that?
My goal, real simple, was this.
As a libertarian activist, we never had, even the party, they're catching on the platform.
Put that in, take that out.
We want to make sure we get invited in Washington to some Christmas party or something.
You know, we want our mother-in-law to like us.
Alright?
If you want, you know, let's not be too crazy.
I'm going, in 2006, with the Libertarian Party's strip their platform in Portland, Oregon.
I was there.
And I warned them.
I said, you do this?
You just leave it open for any and everybody.
The immortal libertarian six months later, Ron Paul.
So he's kind of sort of thinking about maybe doing a blue ribbon panel to run.
Okay?
Boom!
I'm all in.
Ron Paul's evolution science going all over everybody.
Everything that's going rock and roll and whatnot.
Because I knew it's the philosophy.
Exactly what these guys are talking about.
The power of the idea.
You know, not the force.
You know, I never said, you know, anything other than having him up at that podium.
My goal was to make sure, I knew they'd want to get him off.
Oh, hell yeah.
There was no way in hell he was going to get up there and say what he did.
And you go, oh yeah, bring him back.
Okay?
They wanted to get him off as fast as possible.
And I have one goal.
If you listen to my shows back then, I have one goal.
Keep him up on that podium as long as possible.
Because the glow of 360 on the horizon somewhere, and he was like, hey, it's over there, man.
Let's go that way.
That's why I did it.
No other reason.
I'm bored at the moment for just two seconds.
I think that politics can be a fine way to wake people up to an alternative way of living, but if we want to apply the non-aggression principle as a society, as a group, there's so many things that we can do before we have to worry about politics and the Fed.
For me, parenting, parenting, parenting, the non-aggression principle begins at home.
Don't spank, don't yell, don't intimidate, don't threaten.
That's how we grow.
An entire generation that would look at the state like some giant stone-headed chicken god with six arms on a Hindu wall saying, well, why would I worship that?
That's kind of weird.
I've never seen anything like that before.
And that's how we outgrow the state.
We can't outfight it.
We can't outvote it.
My God, you can't join the mafia and turn it into a charity.
It makes ridiculous.
but you can raise children so that they don't speak the language of subjugation.
I want to address something very quickly about a consequentialist argument.
We use that and remember that efficiency can inform effectiveness, but effectiveness doesn't necessarily inform efficiency.
I'll let you brock that as you wish.
But if we suspend our belief in anarchy and all of a sudden we magically click our ruby slippers and all become neocon collectivists in this room, we would all say in the name of safety, That the national speed limit should be 5 miles per hour and because of the head injuries that occur in automobiles, we'd all be forced to wear helmets.
Now, is there anything efficacious about that?
From a safety perspective, there certainly is.
And of course, what you'd have is you'd have enforcement of that law through force and violence.
That force and violence would potentially lead to those who wish not to wear a helmet and those who wish not to drive below 5 miles per hour to have the flashing red lights in their mirror.
And when they don't respond to the flashing red lights, that could eventually lead to their death as a result of seeking some kind of efficacy For our own safety, for the children and as such, in this status world.
What a fucked up way to think.
Good Lord!
It's like being paralyzed What I'm going to do now is that we have about four minutes remaining, and I'm going to lay the mic down, and any of the panelists would like to say some final comments, I'm going to...
Of course, we have one question here.
One more question, and then if we have any time remaining, the panelists can have final remarks.
Thank you.
Well, it seems to be like a debate over does slavery still exist or doesn't exist, but it does absolutely exist.
Everybody here has already been freaking sold into the life.
Everybody here is owned.
The warning is, is there anything but channel to this government?
It's just a corporation.
You tell them to go shit in a hat.
I just walked out of the family court and told them that, basically.
And I made myself the director of my own legal person.
And they had nowhere to go.
I took them out of the position of being able to go after my estate and put them in the trustee position where they belong.
And they had nowhere to go.
And I took the gun away because I came on a free schedule.
They wanted to arrest me.
It was going to cost so much money.
And the sheriff that brought to arrest me didn't want to get in law with that.
It wasn't worth the $35 an hour.
Okay, I know where this goes.
I've heard this argument.
And it's a good point to end on because this is a good point.
There is no process that's going to stop them from all the yes and meds we rule you.
Okay?
You can process all you want.
It is, who put them up there to begin with?
How did they get up there?
How did they get this idea that they...
Because there is a culture that allowed it.
That we weren't educated.
That we didn't know.
That we didn't start off with the first principle that I owe myself.
I'm with this.
We're not going to go into the details of it, I guarantee.
Because it's three minutes.
It's three minutes.
We'll start off with your own thing.
I already know how this goes.
You've got a fucking lot in some beautiful day.
What else you got to do?
Okay, when we get done, you come up here.
If we don't understand that it comes from the basis, the fundamental of a culture thing, we're going to keep perpetuating this.
I just want to make sure that if we all know that we're not owned, like you're saying, you know, that...
I mean, you are.
I'm not, man.
I don't care what piece of paper they got.
Do you really think it's not a revolution between the ears, really?
Do you really think it doesn't start there?
You know, I mean, where else does it start?
You know, I mean, if you're not free and you're on the head, why are you going to go ask them for freedom?
Oh, please, I got the right paperwork?
Okay, I got to tell you this.
I get this all the time.
Obama comes out, he doesn't have the right paperwork, the birth certificate thing.
You know, it comes out, we get the layers like a year ago.
Sheriff Arpaio in Arizona comes out and he has, oh, look at this, a year later, it's a big deal.
I'm like, where the hell were you guys a year ago?
They come up and they go, Ernie, you're a shitty publisher because I can't believe you don't have the top of the page every day that Obama's birth certificate is a fake, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I go, listen to yourself, Mr.
Conservative, what are you doing?
You're arguing for the position to be ruled as long as they got the right paperwork.
It's not the right paperwork.
He's not my Alright, my last thought.
It just came while you were describing science fiction.
I just had this vision.
We take you on a very brief mental journey.
Imagine going into a bookstore.
Your children or your children's children, they go into a bookstore and they say, listen, I'd really like a copy of the Constitution.
Constitution?
I haven't requested that for a while.
Let's look down and look down through the computer.
Oh yeah, it's just over in the blue section.
What's the blue section?
historical fiction.
That concludes this panel.
I'd like to thank everybody for honoring us with your attention.
▲
Export Selection