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Sept. 3, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:04
2207 Freedom for Beginners - An Interview with Stefan Molyneux

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Alright, this is Stéphane Molyneux, a philosopher in Canada.
A lot of times you talk about oppression and violence and the like, and how people put each other down with force.
As a philosopher, is there a root of that?
And if there is, then what is it, and how do we stop that?
Well, there's nature versus nurture, the two arguments about the roots of violence.
Some say we are predatory apes and we are going to thunder down from a hierarchy and get all the betas in line and take and pillage and all that kind of stuff.
And it certainly is true that as mammals, we want to get maximum resources for minimum amounts of effort.
And the best way is to domesticate other human beings in the forms of slaves or serfs or taxpayers or whatever.
But I don't subscribe to that very much.
I think that human nature is a very hard argument to make.
The latest science seems to be very clear that aggression is the result of specific experiences both prenatally, right, in the womb, and for the first couple of years in particular.
The degree to which children are treated with peace, with voluntarism, with respect, with dignity, and the degree to which they're not aggressed against verbally, physically, sexually, emotionally, seems to lay down a very strong pattern of how they're going to grow up to be.
If you're treated violently as a very young child, there's a much greater likelihood that you are going to have a whole lot of dysfunctional behaviors as an adult, ranging from more smoking to more promiscuity to drug abuse to alcoholism to sexual abuse or the criminality and so on.
It's even a double the risk of cancer for people who've gone through a lot of early negative experiences.
I think that we are much more nurture than nature.
And the fact that the brain seems to adapt very well to situations of plenty or violence, in other words, if we grow up in a situation of plenty, we tend to be cooperative and peaceful and want to trade and work to get what we want.
If we grow up in a situation of violence and aggression, I think our brain kind of knows, it's sort of short circuits and says, okay, well, peace and cooperation isn't how things are getting done here, so we better charge up the fight-or-flight mechanism and make impulsive decisions, have short-term relationships.
That's the best way to reproduce.
So I think that it's really how children are raised determines how society is going to be in the long run and the best cure for the ills of society.
The one that may not solve everything but it certainly is the most important place to start is the peaceful cooperative treatment of children.
Alright, you talked about turning people into livestock or slaves or taxpayers.
Do you think that, you know, turning someone into a taxpayer, which is viewed as a civil responsibility, do you think there's a correlation between that and that slavery?
Oh yes, there's no question of that.
I mean, there's been three fundamental ownerships of human beings.
Direct slave ownership, which was not particularly I mean, you could get whatever brute sweat labor you could out of whipping their backs, but it wasn't very creative or productive.
And then there was a kind of enclosure, but you had some of your own produce, right?
So you were a serf, and so you were bought and sold with the land, and you were kind of a fixture of the land, but you kept most of what you earned.
You paid a certain proportion to the local aristocracy, but you kept a good deal of what You earned.
Now, in the new paradigm, which has really only been around for about 200, 300 years, it's sort of free-range serfdom.
So you can choose your own profession, choose where you go to get educated and so on, and you sort of have the right to trade to a large degree with other people in a fairly voluntary way.
But the products of your labor are used in two fundamental ways.
The first is that they're used as direct payment to the powers that be, right?
So they'll tax you at, you know, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%.
And just take your money.
And there's force in that, right?
It's not a social contract.
It's not a voluntary thing.
You're born where you are and you have to, in order to stay out of jail, hand over this money.
Well, in any non-governmental situation, that's called a shakedown.
And the other way that your money is used is it's used as collateral.
Your future productivity, your future tax revenues are used as collateral to borrow, and the borrowing of that money is what allows politicians to bribe special interest groups in return for political favors in the here and now, and selling off the next generation to God knows who.
It is certainly a step closer towards freedom, but we still have that last little step to go, which is where true self-ownership is actually part of the human paradigm, and we are allowed to decide for ourselves where our lives, liberty and property are dedicated.
Alright, so you're talking about, you're saying that freedom only exists without government because governments own us.
So do you think there's any philosophical way to justify government, to justify its existence, or that sort of thing?
Well, yes, there's tons of philosophical ways to justify To justify government, just as there's plenty of scientific ways to justify creationism, they just happen to be wrong.
It's just not good philosophy, although it is, of course, the very prevalent philosophy.
The ruling class has picked the philosophers, and lo and behold, they have picked, paid, and broadcasted the philosophers who tend to be the most favorable towards state power, all the way from Ayn Rand to Socrates.
But there's no way to justify it from a moral standpoint.
I mean, from a moral standpoint, the initiation of force is always wrong.
The initiation of force is always wrong.
Did I say it clearly enough?
The initiation of force is always wrong.
And government, by its very nature, is the initiation of force.
It is a small group of individuals in a given geographical area who have the legal right and obligation to initiate force, virtually at will, against everyone else.
And it is absolutely criminal, it is absolutely wrong, and it's absolutely hard for people to see that because, This is what we've always lived with.
It's almost like when society had 10,000 years of slavery before that was ended, formal slavery, people said, well, slaves, I guess, but no more than you and I think of pigeons a lot.
It just takes the next step of human evolution to universalize these morals to the point where we don't grant anyone the right to initiate force.
Well then, if there's no moral way to justify it and if the philosophical justifications of government are wrong, what about is there any correct or is it incorrect to justify it with practical means?
In other words, if you make murder illegal, then there will be less violence.
Well, you certainly could make that case, but statistics are going to make that kind of tricky.
So, for instance, after a five to ten thousand year program called Thou Shalt Not Kill from religion, from communism, from fascism, from democracy, from you name it, from even secular thinkers, we had in the 20th century almost a quarter Of a billion people murdered by their own governments.
I mean, not even including wars.
That's just rounding them up, starving them off, shooting them, drowning them, burning them, starving them.
And so I don't think really a quarter billion souls heaped beneath the ground is a really great argument for this is working just beautifully.
If you throw in wars as well, I mean, good heavens.
I mean, it just goes on and on.
It's probably double that number.
So it certainly is true that you will gain some immediate compliance when you pass laws, but it's only if you exclude democide, in other words, the murder of citizens by their own governments, it's only if you exclude democide and just look at private murderers that you could even remotely make that case.
But once you include democide, the case really can't be made.
So if you include governments in the laws that they're trying to force on everyone else, then the case is not clear or not good at all.
Now, for people in power, they love the government.
I mean, just think of having your own private bank, your own central bank.
You can type whatever you want into your own bank account.
I mean, that's heady stuff.
You can start wars, stop wars, throw people in jail, harass your enemies, benefit your friends.
I mean, it's beautiful.
I mean, it's evil, but it's beautiful.
So, from a pragmatic standpoint, for those who yearn to achieve the unearned, I mean, there's no better mechanism than the state.
Well, a lot of those deaths that result of either government incompetence or government violence have been a result of a very over-controlling government, not very often from a democracy or, you know, a genuine democracy.
Do you think that democracy can make it more fair or democracy can decide better than, say, a free market what should happen?
There's no...
Yeah.
I mean, I think...
I mean, that's a fair point.
There's no question that democracies...
I mean, in a way, you could say, well, democracies were sort of charged with keeping their citizens safe and blundered from world war to world war and cost the lives of many of their citizens in ways in which there are many arguments.
I've done a series called The Death of the West.
On YouTube, which, you know, that these wars were preventable and avoidable and so on.
But you're absolutely right, of course.
I mean, you and I are not fearing a Holocaust or a genocide against us.
And that is very true.
And that is definitely to the advantage of society as a whole.
So as government gets smaller, things get better.
And I just don't see why we would want to stop.
We're experimenting with how much further that could go.
Yes, when governments get smaller, when governments stop interfering with free trade, when governments stop interfering with the free flow of goods and capital and people and labor, then yes, things get better.
So let's just, you know, if I cut down on my cigarettes, I can climb more stairs.
So why don't I just think of quitting entirely?
Well, could you make the argument that government improves the free market, that it can improve, say, creativity and entrepreneurship by putting on copyright laws and patents and protecting intellectual property and personal property to enhance the free market in a way?
Well, if you're going to, first of all, I don't agree with government solutions like patents and copyrights.
I think that they stifle innovation.
I think there's very good historical information that shows how much they stifle innovation.
If you think of all the great classical periods in Western history, these all occurred in countries where there was no copyright and patents, so people could freely experiment with each other's work.
You see the patent wars going on, the amount of energy that's being put into patent trolls and everyone just holding on to these patents so that they can milk companies and companies having huge amounts of money invested in pieces of paper that they use to swing at each other like paper joust swords.
So I think that there's a lot of wasted energy.
But of course, if you're going to include the government in the question of creativity, then you have to include the government in public schools.
How well do public schools under the government promote entrepreneurship and creativity and risk-taking and the creative imaginative genius of the species?
I think that, as you probably well know, Government schools were created with the express intention, goal, and purpose of churning out brain-dead serfs and slaves and factory workers and soldiers from the old Prussian system.
And so that mind-crushing, dust-settling slowly on your dying frontal lobe, sitting in rows like a bunch of canned-brained sardine heads, that is exactly what you get from government schools.
So I think that if there was a little bit more creativity in education, I think we would have a lot more creativity in the marketplace as a whole.
Well, if you're talking about education, isn't it nice that we have government schools teaching our poor children who their parents wouldn't be able to put them to the school?
And also on the flip side, if they were taught at private schools, wouldn't they be taught that any government takeover or any unionization would be bad?
Well, I mean, that's a big topic.
You're going with the assumption that children need to be educated at all.
There's great unschooling movements, homeschooling movements.
Children used to learn with their parents about the world.
And parents would stay home a lot of times in the year, particularly in farming communities.
So this idea of taking your kids...
You know, and sealing them in a prison-like structure for 12 years with strangers, and that's how they're going to learn the truth, value, and virtue of the world is a statist notion.
There's no need to believe that that's even true.
It's just what we're used to.
The idea that poor people won't get educated, I mean, do you care about poor kids getting educated?
Sure, yeah.
Okay, good.
So you would help them out, right?
Yeah.
I would help them out, too.
In fact, I do.
I put out all of my educational materials and my books as well.
Everything is free.
So I care about them.
You care about them.
Everyone I talk to cares about them.
So we have no need to fear that they won't be helped and taken care of.
And there were school systems in the 19th century that came out of the private sphere that cost less than $100 a year for a very high-quality education.
And, of course, the other thing is the poor people are paying.
They are paying for these schools anyway, but ridiculously high costs.
$15,000, $20,000 a year for crappy education, crappy brain debt, skull rotting, vegetation growing in the base of your brain, terrible education with a 50% dropout rate in many schools with just wretched attendance records with 20% of students performing even close to grade level.
I mean, they're just wretched, but they're unbelievably expensive, and the poor pay for that.
In inflation, when the government prints money to pay off all these ridiculous programs and special interest groups, it pays for it in lower job opportunities.
It pays for it eventually when the money runs out in a truly catastrophic financial situation, the likes of which we have not seen in the West probably ever before, at least since the fall of Rome.
Well, you talked about the poor.
Are the poor greatly benefited by government?
After all, government hands them a lot of money and then protects them from a great amount of crime that they have.
They need the most protection from that.
Wouldn't you say that's a valid point, that government assists the poor?
Well, how do you think the poor are doing after 40 years of very intensive work from the government?
How are the poor doing?
How are the average wages?
What are the employment opportunities for the people with lower education?
What's the income disparity like, particularly in the US? How are the poor doing after 40 years of intense government intervention?
Well, you know, the poor people generally get richer and then they're replaced by people coming into the labor market.
I couldn't say that, you know, the people coming in are so much better than they were 50 years ago, per se, but...
Statistically, the problem of poverty was being dealt with before the Great Society programs of LBJ. So, you can see this in the post-war period.
Poverty declining, 1% every year.
We were a generation away from eliminating all, but I want to be a monk, voluntary poverty.
And at the moment the government programs came in, poverty stopped declining, began to edge up, and now...
It's estimated that half of Americans are either at the poverty line or one paycheck away from it.
Half of Americans.
And that doesn't even count the huge hanging chasm crater of national debt and unfunded liabilities that run up to 75 to 80 trillion dollars that is just waiting to swallow up the poor.
So no, the welfare programs work on the poor like heroin works on a drug addict.
It's momentary relief and the problem just gets worse.
Well, Lyndon Johnson is great society programs.
It's a very nice name.
It's a very nice intention.
Do you think that we should ever judge any government program by its intention?
Or do you think we should instead try to predict the results?
And then what if we're wrong?
Well, neither.
You don't judge anything by its intention and its results.
I mean, if I go and steal a car, Does it matter what my intention is?
No.
Not in a court of law.
Does it matter what the result is?
No.
It matters that I stole the car.
And what matters is the immorality of what I'm doing.
It's the forcible or thievery transfer of property against the owner's will.
So it doesn't matter what justifications it put forward for a government program.
It fundamentally doesn't matter what the results are.
The only thing that matters is that violence is used to fund it.
Violence is used to take money from people, either now or even more against their will, future of the unborn, in the form of deficits and debts.
So violence is used to either create money out of nothing, which is private counterfeiting and public good monetary policy according to the documents.
But no, the money is either counterfeited or the money is...
It's stolen or the money is borrowed with somebody else's unwilling future collateral being put up.
And so the only thing that matters is the morality of the funding.
It doesn't matter what the intentions or the results are.
Now, when you start something off immorally, it tends to go really badly in the long run.
I mean, a life of crime is great.
You don't have to get up early.
You don't have to go to school.
You don't have to have a paper route.
But just, of course, in the long run, it seals you in a life of shame, degradation, and an underworld hell of the black and gray markets.
So it doesn't matter what the intentions or what the results are.
The only thing that matters is the morality of the origin.
All right.
Well, talking about crime, wouldn't crime be sort of a lack of government?
Wouldn't you see that as sort of what people think of anarchy when there's no control over this?
Yeah, I know this is the idea that the human society is this bubbling cauldron of evil and iniquity, that this lid of government is struggling to keep down and so on.
But what do you mean by crime?
What about theft?
Well, if the government is stealing more than half of your income, How can it be said to be protecting your property?
That's just fundamental.
If the government can pretty much arrest you and detain you at will, what does that mean about your liberty?
If the government can sell off your children before they're even born, what does that mean about a social contract?
I mean, it's only if you exclude what the government does from moral consideration that the questions even become reasonable.
Once you include the government, You know, it no longer becomes feasible to say, would crime go up if there were no government?
Crime would immediately go down because there would be no taxation.
There would be, you know, voluntary, charitable, just as there used to be, just as there was in the past before government, with its big lumbering evil ways, shouldered its way in and pushed all of these organizations out.
There were tons of friendly societies and churches and communities and all that that used to take care of everyone.
And doctors who would give away their services for free or in return for a chicken and five eggs.
I mean, all of this stuff used to happen in the natural benevolence of the human social instinct before government came in.
If you take government out, you know, think of a rock in the middle of a big rock in the middle of a stream.
If you take the rock out, the water rushes in to fill the gap, fill the void.
And it's the same thing with government.
Take the government out.
It's not like people will then no longer care about the poor.
I mean, Either democracy reflects the will of the people, in which case it's doing what the people want, it's helping the poor, the old, the sick, and educate the poor, the young, and all that, or it's not.
Now, if it is doing that, then the people will just keep doing that if there's no government.
If it's not, then it's not legitimate anyway.
Well, so, government is big and evil, is what I'm getting from this, in that it's unfair and it's forceful, but I've heard a lot, though, that capitalism is bad, and that it's all driven by profits and greed.
What do you have to say to that?
Well, let's say that there's lots of people out there who are driven by profit and greed.
Well, do they not go to the government as well?
And does the government not have just a few more tanks and ICBMs than Walmart does?
The government has the capacity to turn your money into monopoly crap that's barely fit to wipe the ass of a dodo just by printing more money.
I mean, there's no private company that has that power.
Governments have the capacity to pass laws and set up the prison industrial complex to the point where hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions of people, in the U.S. are unjustly incarcerated for non-violent crimes.
No private company has the capacity to do that.
So, I mean, even if we say that greed and predation and all of that is human nature, okay, well, then the last thing we can have is a government, because that's exactly where the greediest and most predacious people are going to go.
But I don't think that is the case.
I think the government corrupts society as a whole.
I don't think that, I mean, having a centralized vortex of infinite coercion Power corrupts, as Lord Acton famously put it.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And there's no power like force.
The power that a company has in the free market is to attempt to entice you by putting bikini models next to its car.
Ooh!
Maybe I'll say yes, maybe I'll say no, but I'm not terribly frightened.
But the power that the government has is the power to...
I mean, to pass a law to arrest you, even for things you had no idea about.
And if you resist, as you would anybody coming into your house with weapons, they'll shoot you down, and they'll drag you off, and they'll throw you in jail, and you'll have a trial, which probably doesn't mean that much.
I mean, in America, only 4 or 5% of cases end up in trial because people get threatened with such heavy sentences.
They just cave and, you know...
Try and survive as best they can.
So, no, I will take my chances of freedom.
I mean, all of these institutions, which seem so monolithic and eternal, and we've got to have them or everything's going to go to hell in a handbasket at Mach 12.
Same thing was said about the end of slavery.
Same thing was said about equality for women.
Same thing is said, oh my God, if we don't spank our children, they'll just grow up to be spoiled brats and won't have a single respect for blah, blah, blah.
I mean, all these scare stories, oh, and if we get rid of government, it'll just be Mel Gibson in flaming headsets shooting at you from, you know, burning motorcycles and crap like that.
These are just scare stories, and they were told about every advance in the human condition.
But the reality is, people say, well, what are we going to do?
How are roads going to be built?
How's this going to, how are the poor going to be educated without government?
Who cares?
It doesn't matter.
It's like saying...
Well, who's going to pick the cotton if we have no slaves?
Who cares?
Who cares?
It doesn't matter.
The question is, is slavery moral or not?
And if it's not moral, let's scrub it off the human landscape.
And whatever replaces it is going to be way better.
And I'd rather have combine harvesters than slavery.
And you never know what's going to come over the horizon or over the hill of a drop in violence, of a deinstitutionalization of violence, like slavery, like the oppression of women and so on.
So, you know, we just, we keep moving forward as a species, and scare stories only tell you that you're going in the right direction.
All right, well then, how do we move in the right direction?
How do we go from here?
Because, well, obviously, besides being better parents, should we vote for people who want to reduce government?
Or should we, you know, protest?
Should we start a revolution?
What should we do?
Well, I don't think a revolution is good.
I don't think you can end violence with violence.
I think that voting is worse than a waste of time.
You cannot make an evil institution good by shaking ballots at it.
Otherwise, you know, if rhetoric and persuasion and commercials can turn an evil institution into a good institution, then there's no need to experiment with the federal government.
I mean, we've got much smaller local criminal gangs around that we can test our theory out on.
We can go join some local drug gang and try and get it to become a charity drive for picking up used clothing for a diabetes association.
We can join the mafia.
And attempt to get it to reduce its violence and increase its charitable donations.
We can work from the inside that way.
We all understand that that would never work.
So the idea it's going to work with the most successful criminal gang is laughable.
It is a delusion that people have, which is the salvation fantasy.
Someone's going to come over that hill.
Someone's going to come in and all I'll have to do is vote for them.
I won't have to do anything challenging, personal.
I won't have to confront people in my life.
I won't have to confront some parent who's hitting his kid.
I won't have to give up trying to yell it and scream it and hit my kids.
Someone's going to come along and just set me free, and that delusion is just sinking us further and further into the quagmire.
It's personal action.
The personal action is you reject violence in your life, and you reject people who support violence, who advocate violence against you for disagreeing with them.
You simply reject violence as a principle.
That's how it spreads in society.
There's so much that we could do at a personal level in our own lives, in educating others, in confronting others, in being challenging, in other people's faces sometimes, as philosophers and thinkers should be.
Well, that's going to be more than we can ever complete in a lifetime.
That's actually going to move the goalposts closer.
This chasing after this fantasy of a political solution has been tried for about 2,500 years.
I'm not convinced that 2,501 is going to turn it all around.
So, yeah, you know, you're talking about, you know, we can't do this all in one.
Irwin Schiff obviously tried to not pay the income tax, and then he was forced to.
He was thrown in jail.
Peter Schiff talks about that one a lot.
So what should we do?
Should we just be good parents?
Well, no, I gave a bunch of things there.
I'll enumerate them again.
Of course, of course, we should not use...
I mean, spanking children is a violation of the non-aggression principle, so we should stop doing that.
80% to 90% of parents...
Sorry, go ahead.
So, you know, we should teach people, but you said that voting is, you know, a waste of time.
Shouldn't we vote for, you know, as long as we accept that we can't get rid of government right now, shouldn't we vote for someone who at least says it'll reduce the size of government?
Well, how has that worked?
When has that ever worked?
I mean, I'm an empiricist.
Tell me where that has worked.
It didn't work under Barry Goldwater.
It didn't work under Ronald Reagan.
It didn't work under either the two Bushes.
It's certainly not working under Barack Obama, although that's not exactly...
Oh no, he promised to reduce the deficit considerably, which of course he has only magnified it massively.
It's just a sucker's game.
I mean, you have no control over politicians.
None whatsoever.
They will take your vote and then they will do whatever they want.
There's no contract.
There's no consequences, negative consequences for them not fulfilling their promises.
And so, no.
I mean, obviously people can go and do what they want.
Writing a piece of paper and putting it in a box is not directly a violent act.
It certainly puts the wheels of violence in motion.
But it's all nonsense.
And it's a way of distracting you.
It's an old question, an old comment from, I think Thomas Pinchot said it, if they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't care about the answers.
And if the question is, which politician is going to set us free, well, they don't care about the answers, because it's the wrong question.
The real question is, how can I implement the non-aggression principle and the respect for property rights in my own life?
Well, living the non-aggression principle is like being anti-racist.
Obviously, you don't have racism in your own life if you're anti-racist.
Obviously, if friends of yours are big fans of the KKK, You sit down and you have a damn talk with them, and you point out the irrationality, the immorality of what it is that they're up to.
You give them some time to adjust, and if they still keep chanting and chooting and chortling after the KKK, then you cut them out of your life.
Or you drop the principle.
Then you say, okay, well, I'm not that big on anti-racism.
I'm going to be friends with guys who are big fans of the KKK, so no problem, right?
If you're against anti-Semitism and you have some friends who are Nazis, then you have to talk to them about that.
That's the personal confrontation aspect.
And you have to make your decisions based upon your values.
And the problem with statism is that if I disagree with someone about how the poor should be taken care of, hey, if they want to go send their money to Barack Obama or Obama, I'll never use force to stop them.
I think it's wrong.
I think it's immoral.
I don't want to do it.
I think there are much better ways, and not only much better ways, but less destructive ways to do it.
But if he wants to go and do that, he can do that.
The problem is I'm not allowed to follow my conscience in a state of society, and I object to that.
I object to having guns pointed at me just for disagreeing with people about how to solve complex problems like poverty.
And so these are the things that we can do.
It's a multi-generational process, but living with integrity to your values in your own life, that's what counts.
That's what changes the world.
Not chasing after politicians and their pamphlets.
That's just a waste of time and pushes the necessary tasks further back.
So, are they all liars?
Are all politicians liars?
Or have none of them?
Because a lot of people followed Ron Paul.
He seemed like he would really reduce the size of government.
Are they always going to do this?
Because...
You know, could we learn from our mistakes, learn from what we lost in George Bush Sr.
and Ronald Reagan, and then someday succeed?
Do you think that might be a little bit practical?
But learn what?
I mean, look, I'm not going to call politicians liars.
I mean, I have much better moral terms for them, but I don't...
Because lying, I don't know.
I don't know the inner state of mind of various politicians.
I don't know if they have good intentions and find that the system grinds them down.
I mean, I don't know.
I don't know.
But the reality is that since...
The late 18th century, really when classical liberalism got its birth out of Locke and Smith, people have been trying to control the size of the government.
And America was the great experiment in that.
The very smallest government that could ever have been conceived of in the history of man has now turned into the very largest government with the most powerful destructive machinery the world has ever known.
That needs to be instructive to us.
We need to learn that lesson.
That they spent 300 years trying to control this behemoth and trying to make the smallest states serve the people.
And now we have the very largest, most powerful government with the capacity to destroy life in this world many times over.
And we need to stop what we're doing.
We need to stop what we're doing and look at history.
For God's sake, it's essential.
That experiment didn't work.
Are we smarter than the founding fathers?
Hell, I'm not.
Maybe you are.
I'm not smarter than the founding fathers.
I'm not smarter than all of the pragmatists or the utilitarians, or I'm not smarter than the entire genius of Western political science put together.
They've all tried to create governments that serve the needs of the people, that stay smallish, that protect life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, and all of that.
And I would do scant honor to their work if I just kept doing the same thing despite hundreds if not thousands of years of evidence to the contrary.
It doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
And until we find somebody who's smart enough to be able to turn evil institutions into good institutions, to solve the problems of public choice theory, concentrated benefits from state power, diffused costs and so on, the rational ignorance of the voter who gains almost nothing from studying these issues, these problems are insurmountable.
They cannot be solved.
And so the whole mess simply has to be re-examined from the ground up.
Just one last question.
If somebody did create this completely non-statist No, I mean you wouldn't say a non-slave society.
A completely free society.
Somebody created that somewhere else and we still stayed here where we are.
Should we move to that place, that completely free society where everyone can flourish or should we stay here and try to model that and mold what we have at whatever present time into that?
Should we go to where there's more freedom or should we try to make our environment more free?
Well, I don't think there's a philosophical argument that can convince anyone of that.
I certainly would not blame people who abandoned ship and went to the Phobos moons of Mars interstellar freedom colony.
I don't know.
I also would have great respect for those people who stayed behind.
I think that until there's a greater general moral understanding of the necessity for the non-aggression principle and a respect for property rights, it's all nonsense.
I mean, if you look at Ron Paul, And this I predicted years ago, and I'm certainly no smart guy for predicting it because it's perfectly obvious.
He began to really have an impact and make a gain in the polls.
And what happened?
Well, they just turned all the slander cannons on him, right?
They called him a racist and all of these kinds of things and just kept trumpeting that over and over again.
And that's where we are.
We're at the phase of debating by monkey poo throwing.
I mean, it's sad.
But the moment when Ayn Rand make a very powerful case for, you know, small government, real minarchy, for atheism and so on, what happened?
She's a cult leader.
She's crazy.
She's a hypocrite.
She's nuts.
She's, I mean, just nobody actually makes an argument.
They just use slander.
And until we're actually at the place as a society, as a species, where we can actually start to make some arguments, it's going to be very simple.
Let's say that Hawaii suddenly becomes a free society.
Well, a lot of smart people are going to want to go to Hawaii.
What's going to happen to the tax farmers in America if a lot of their great people are going to Hawaii?
Well, they won't like that.
They will simply stop them from going to Hawaii.
They will put restrictions on the capital that they can say.
They can say, if you go, you can never come back even to visit your aging parents.
Or they will simply plant problems in Hawaii and then say that as a result of these problems in Hawaii, and they've done this many times before, we have to go in and we have to stabilize the situation, which is the mess that we have created.
Just look at the history of Iraq, if not Iran.
And so, I mean, until there's a general understanding, people are going to be so susceptible to the manipulations of propaganda that it would just be a mob mentality and reason and freedom cannot win against the mindless Borg of historical empty-headed momentum.
Well, it looks like the odds are kind of stacked against us.
No, no, no, no, no.
I don't want people...
If you think politics is the answer, then yes, of course.
History proves that repeatedly.
But if you want, if you're interested in actually living these values rather than trumpeting them across time and space, if you're actually interested in stopping talking about them and living your values, then there's a lifetime's work of a very powerful...
energies that you can put into your own life, in avoiding violence, in reducing violence, in eliminating aggression, in talking to people about it in a personal way, reminding people that there's a gun in the room, that they're pointing at you if you are interested in freedom and they're interested in statism.
It is not a different flavor of ice cream conversation.
There's an infinite amount, and I'm telling you, my friend, that stuff Not aggressing against your children, not aggressing in your personal relationships, lighting people up with the fires of true freedom, and then in the long run, I argue, either drop the values or drop the friends who continue to advocate the use of violence against you.
Well, there you have...
The capacity to build the magical free society called Hawaii, right?
It's Utopia, Y-O-U-topia.
You can have the free society.
You know, pay the bastards off, that's fine, you know, but you can have that free society.
It's a beautiful place to be.
I don't have aggression in my life.
I don't aggress against my wife.
I don't aggress against my daughter.
I've never spanked, never hit, never yelled.
It's a beautiful place to be.
I mean, I don't need to build a free society if I'm in a free society.
And that is something we can all achieve.
Well, it's been great talking to you.
I guess we can end that on a positive note of things are getting better.
Thank you so much.
And that'll be the end of that.
Looking for a great ending, actually.
Yeah, I can't think of this part.
Thank you, thank you very much.
No problem.
You're very welcome.
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