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Aug. 20, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
15:04
2197 Brazilian Wax 2! Stefan Molyneux Answers Questions from Politicians
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Time Text
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Now we're going to open the session of questions and answers.
I would like to invite Hélio Beltrão, president of the Institute of Mises Brazil, who will coordinate the questions and answers.
Well, we have a little more than 10 minutes of questions.
If you have any questions, please send them to the moças that are on the front, and we will continue with the questions.
I have already some questions here, but before I would like to start with my own question, Stefan.
And you...
Is it hard?
I'm sorry?
Is it a hard question?
Because otherwise I'll take one from the...
It's a very hard question.
We wouldn't have you fly from Canada all over here.
But anyway, you mentioned how the state violates these three rules that we can teach to a simple child.
Do not lie, and that's usually fraud.
When you counterfeit money, the government is doing fraud.
Well, and of course, politicians are not bound by campaign promises.
There's no legal mechanism by which you can enforce a campaign promise, so, I mean, it's not exactly the same as lying, but I wouldn't put it too distant.
True.
Also, do not steal.
And when somebody takes your property, For example, in the form of taxes, against your will, that's a form of stealing, no doubt.
And do not hit others, do not enslave others.
And in Brazil, we have conscription for the army.
So when somebody does that in the civil society, you go to jail for that.
But if the government does it, then it's okay.
So we have these double standards and people seem to go with that.
So I have two questions related to that.
First of all, how can we get there?
Since we understand when you explain it, but people don't seem to act that way to eliminate those distortions.
And what's going on then?
Why do people do not act on that direction?
That's one question.
Can I do that first?
Because otherwise I'll forget.
Look, but how many people use violence today?
Oh, you guys are here voluntarily?
That's great.
I didn't know that.
No, but see, you didn't.
Nobody used violence today, right?
If you wanted a coffee, you didn't go and, you know, hit someone with a Nerf bat and take the coffee.
Okay, you did.
But everyone else didn't.
Right?
So, in our lives, we actually, the non-aggression principle respect for property rights is at the center of our lives.
But then, we step over into the public sphere.
And suddenly, up is down, black is white, zebras have no stripes, and the lion can lay down with the lamb.
And so we have these opposite rules.
You know, in our lives, the use of violence to achieve our ends is horrifying, and we don't do it.
But then suddenly we think, for society as a whole, everything's different.
We need this compulsion.
We need this hierarchy.
We need this brutality.
But philosophy does not allow for that, because the government is composed of people.
There is no such thing as the government.
It's a concept.
It's an idea.
It's like there are trees.
There's no such thing as a forest.
That's an idea in our head.
And so we cannot have opposing moral rules for citizens and for leaders.
I mean, that's like being a biologist and saying, well, all of these lizards are lizards except for this blue one.
It's a mammal.
Well, what's the difference?
Well, it's blue.
Well, no, that's not an essential difference.
And so you put on a blue costume, it doesn't give you different moral properties, you can't fly, you can't travel backwards through time, and you cannot initiate morally the use of force.
So it's just trying to break down this barrier between the private sphere, where violence is rightly received as horrifying, and the public sphere where coercion is wrongly perceived as necessary.
And we just have to keep working on breaking down that dichotomy.
Yeah, and the second part of my question is related to how do we deal with the grave problems of society if we achieve that scenario that you mentioned?
So, for example, how do the poor are going to be able to feed themselves?
How do we solve the problem of the poor if you say we're not going to have taxes?
Well, look, first of all, thinking that We need to find a way to solve the problem of poverty without taxes is somehow indicating that the problem of poverty is being solved with taxes.
And I guarantee you it's not.
When you look, when the government is smallest, the poor escape poverty.
I mean, look what happens in China and India.
You have 40,000 to 50,000 people per month moving from poverty to the middle class.
The same thing is happening in Brazil, right?
I can't remember.
I read the statistics recently.
Huge number of people moving into the middle class because the government is smaller and property rights are more respected.
How many people here do not care about the poor?
You see a poor guy on the street, you're like, step over him and just keep on moving.
We all care.
We assume that in a democracy, the majority is going to vote for policies that help the poor, which means the majority want to help the poor.
Of course we do.
We're soulless human beings, only out for personal gain.
We want to help other people.
But we do not help the poor through compulsion.
We do not help the poor through violence.
Helping the poor through the state is like taking cocaine for a toothache.
Okay, you feel a little better for a while, but you just make the problem worse.
So how are the poor going to do in Europe when the government runs out of money, when it cannot send out the welfare checks?
They are going to do very badly, and we want something that is sustainable.
We want sustainability in the environment.
We really want sustainability in charity.
Excellent.
There's a question by Jorge Vasquez.
He says, In a country where a large fraction of the population is a net receiver of government's money, how do you convince a majority that no government is not the best way to organize society?
Yeah, that's tricky.
Next question.
My approach, I look at...
Incredible moral advancements that have occurred in the past, and there are two that come to mind.
One was the end of formal slavery, and the other was the recognition of the equal rights of women under the law.
Two incredible advances in human society that before they occurred, people couldn't conceive of it, you know?
So people would say, well, I mean, the slavery analogy when you argue for a free society, people say, yeah, you show me a society without slavery.
That's what we're trying to do.
Of course, there's not one yet, right?
And then other people say, because a slave picked all the food, right?
Slaves picked all the food.
They say, oh, well, if you don't want slavery, you just want us to all starve to death.
And so none of these things make sense.
You have to go to the moral argument.
Slavery was ended not because of economic efficiency, not because of some abstract reason that had to do with economics or social organization.
Slavery was ended because people thundered over and over and over again that it was an abomination, that it was an evil, that it was a stain upon The soul of humanity.
And it is the same thing with the recognition of the rights of women.
It was immoral to exclude women from the social discourse and from the rule of law and the protections of law.
You've just got to keep thundering that it's immoral.
And morality wins.
Rational, consistent morality, if it is repeated annoyingly often enough, it always wins.
We just have to trust that process because there's tons of historical examples of that occurring.
Okay.
There's a question by Cristiano, mentioning your view on religion.
He's asking, isn't religion a voluntary form of organization?
Well, that's tricky.
Certainly, religion is rarely coerced upon people, but the challenge with religion is that it is presented as objectively true to children.
And philosophically, we don't have to get into a debate about, you know, God's existence or non-existence, but philosophically, it is not objectively true.
It is not something that is subject to the scientific method.
It is not something that survives rational analysis.
And certainly, there are 10,000 gods That people believe in around the world.
Very few people go to send their kids to Sunday school to learn about 10,000 gods, right?
They send them to Sunday school to learn about one god, or some trinity, or whatever you want to call it, and that's the only, the way, the true, and they don't learn about the other things.
So I think it's a selective withholding information that is not particularly fair to children.
So it's not exactly the same as coerced, but it's not quite the same as voluntary if it is repeated as things that aren't true, as if they are.
Okay, I think we have two questions that are related.
One of which says, how would you respond to people that say that without the government we would revert back to the state of nature in which life would be short and brutal?
And the other one is, how can we end statism since we know that the philosophical answer of libertarianism and liberty is correct and necessary?
Yeah, the argument, of course, is that without the government, I suddenly get a big mohawk, tattoos, I have machetes, and I just run screaming through the streets, chopping at everything under the sun.
This is the Hobbesian argument, right?
Nature, red, and tooth and claw, that if you get rid of the state, chaos and, you know, the stereotypical use of the word anarchy.
Well, that's like saying that if we make marriage voluntary, everyone will be raped.
No, we make human relationships voluntary.
You do not end up with coercion and brutality and violence.
But that is an ogre that is invented by the rulers to keep us afraid of freedom.
I mean, there's just no historical evidence for it.
It's like saying, well, I can't approve this business plan because I'm going to be attacked by the ghost of Bluebeard.
It's just an imaginary, without historical evidence, when government shrinks, civility improves.
As government has gotten bigger, the rate of death from government, democide has gotten enormously larger, wars get larger and more powerful, and where government tends to be least, human civility tends to be at its highest.
So I think it's just a scare story without any empirical evidence.
There's a question I just remember reading some of your discussions online.
There are some people who argue that when we establish government, it's exactly like a condominium in which people have, you know, certain things they want to do in the public sphere, so you need certain rules for that, so you need somebody to take care of the condominium, certain aspects of the condominium.
So how is it different?
Aren't they right to argue that we need government in that sense like in the condominium to take care of the common stuff?
Yeah, well the difference of course is that the government doesn't own everything and therefore we have to petition for the scraps of freedom that are allowed to us because the government owns everything.
So a condo of course is built and it's owned by someone and then you have to sign a contract to not I don't know, have a punk band in your living room or something like that and you have to obey the particular rules.
But this is the argument that somebody has built the country, some group of individuals or an individual has built the company, the country, sorry, owns the country, and then we have to obey his rules to live there.
But I don't see any signatures on Brazil that somebody, you know, oh, that was a lot of digging, man.
I had to go just dig that whole country out.
I had to fence it off with all these oceans and then I had to carve all these rivers and build these mountains.
Man, I'm beat.
That was a tough, you know, three days of work.
But there's nobody who's done that.
The natural resource is here.
It's available to everyone.
We own ourselves.
We own that which we invest our labor into.
So the idea that there's some group that owns everything and then we have to obey them in order to be continued to allow to exist, that's serfdom.
That's farming.
That's not human society.
Okay.
Another question, what's your view on abortion?
Well, it's awful.
I mean, it's terrible.
It is wretched.
It is a catastrophic decision for any woman or couple to have to make.
And I think that we should work as hard as possible and as strenuously as possible to reduce the social circumstances that give rise to abortion.
When it comes to ethical questions, I always ask myself, could I pull the trigger?
This is what you have to think of when you think of state power, when you think of coercive power.
Could I pull the trigger?
Look, if some guy was running at me with a chainsaw, first I'd scream like a little girl, second, probably wet myself, but third, if I had a gun, I would probably pull the trigger because I don't look good with chainsaws in me.
And so I would do that.
If I saw some guy beating up on some woman and the only way I could stop him was with knocking him on the head with a bat, then I would probably do that because I would pull the trigger in those situations.
If a woman is going to go and get an abortion, I don't feel like I can pull the trigger.
What I can do is I can study the causes Of abortions, which are relatively easy to understand, right?
Broken families, poverty, and work to alleviate those social conditions and really get to the root of the problem, which is really what philosophy...
Philosophy is like nutrition.
It's not like an ambulance.
So philosophy is about building long-term solutions that usually bear fruit, I'm sorry to say, a generation or two at best, from the present.
And so if you're having a heart attack, you don't call your nutritionist and say, what am I going to do?
You say, call 911.
It's too late for nutritional advice.
And so it's really about digging out root causes.
And there's many, many ways in which the prevalence of abortion can be minimized to the point of virtual non-existence.
But I certainly don't believe that pointing guns at people is the way to solve those problems in the long run.
Excellent.
We have 60 seconds for your final consideration.
All right, here's my dance routine.
Well, look, I really want to say thank you.
I didn't see a lot of reflections of iPods in people's glasses, so that's good.
That means that you were not checking your email too much.
That's great.
That's what you look for as a speaker.
I really want to thank you for inviting me.
I really want to thank you.
I will be around for the rest of the day if anybody wants to...
You know, ask any more questions or share any stories.
I would love to chat more about philosophy.
Thank you so much.
It was a real pleasure and very, very smart questions.
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