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Sept. 9, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:04:10

2216 Freedom Is the Answer - Here Are the Questions

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	So anyway, Stefan, as we've said, welcome to No Fit State.
	Before we delve into discussing the history and the role of the state and anarcho-capitalism, how it compares, I wonder if you could just give us a brief summary of your own philosophy and how you arrived at it.
	My philosophy is really founded on the non-aggression principle.
	That's sort of one side of the coin.
	The other side of the coin is respect for property rights, which is, you know, you could really argue it's just the same thing and, you know, looked at it from a different angle.
	So, the non-aggression principle, thou shalt not initiate force against thy fellow man, and the respect for property rights.
	And I came to it through Ayn Rand, through objectivism, and sort of recognized that if you're going to do the non-aggression principle...
	I like to go all the way.
	Really, that's my philosophy.
	I'm not a tease.
	I'm not a second base guy.
	I'm not a third base kind of guy.
	I'm an all the way kind of guy.
	So eventually after trembling on the edge of that brink of the non-aggression principle, probably about six or seven years ago, I fell happily into the pit of accepting that a truly voluntary society is the only way that society can move forward, can avoid these endless collapses and wars and I fell happily into the pit of accepting that a truly voluntary society is the only way that society This grim, boring cycle of freedom followed by economic freedom breeds a whole lot of wealth.
	Government uses that wealth as collateral to borrow.
	It indebts.
	It enslaves.
	It prints.
	It inflates.
	And just, you know, if you see that cycle clearly enough, it gets really, really boring.
	And I hope that humanity will at some point get so bored of this cycle that they'll start looking for alternatives.
	Yeah, definitely.
	I think there's a lot of people looking for alternatives now, but just from our own experience, they tend to fall back into the principle of trying to take the government that we have, or the government that France has, or the government that Russia has, and saying, well, I know in all of these cases it's always been bad, but we can somehow clean it up so it will work.
	As you might say yourself, Stephen, give me the gun and I can do a better job of it, sort of thing.
	Well, I mean, this is a classic behaviour of victims of abuse, right?
	That they believe that they can reform their abuser.
	This time it's going to be different.
	They can't strike away from that abusive relationship.
	Yeah, there's a lot of people, it seems, waiting for a hero figure to come along.
	And I saw that first in the States four years ago when Obama was coming into office.
	And people genuinely seem to think that all of their problems are going to be solved overnight.
	Yeah, and I mean, what a wonderful thing that would be if some thundering man-god could ride over the horizon, crack his fiery whip of violence and make the whole world stand to attention with peace, order, prosperity and freedom.
	Wouldn't that be great?
	You know, it would be great if I didn't need to take craps in the morning.
	It would be great if my hair all grew back.
	It would be great if I could live forever.
	And it would be great if my pet unicorn would actually come back when I called.
	But unfortunately, these things just aren't true.
	And we have to let the things of childhood go behind, of which faith in the organizational use of violence seems to be one of the hardest to let go of for people.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, I don't know about yourself, but we've found that whilst most people are comfortable with the idea of reducing the size of the power of state, as I think you've written yourself, they become distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of getting rid of it altogether or completely.
	And it's really those last few stepping stones that seem to be the biggest hurdles, isn't it?
	Yeah, I think there's a tipping point.
	This wasn't such a scary idea in the past.
	I mean, there were lots of anarchists, very public anarchists in the past, from Tolskoy to Tolkien to Bakunin to lots of anarchists.
	Prud'homme in many ways.
	So lots of very public voluntarists or anarchists or people who, you know, are just consistent in their ethics.
	It's philosophical.
	And, of course, Lysander Spooner in the U.S. You can sort of go on and on.
	But it was sort of a more acceptable viewpoint in the past.
	I think really what's happened is, I think there's a tipping point.
	So once you take away people's liberty...
	To a particular degree.
	I don't know what percentage it is.
	You know, 20% maybe it's okay.
	30, 40.
	Once you get sort of 30, 40, 50%, once you take away people's liberty to that degree, then liberty becomes a really painful concept to think about.
	Because you've been robbed of so much that if you then really consider what it would be like to be free, it's really quite agonizing.
	You know, it's like...
	Going down to the dungeon of Louis XVII and putting up PowerPoint slideshows of Waikiki beaches to people who are chained to the wall.
	I mean, it's just kind of cruel.
	And I think in particular, once the government gets control of the children, right?
	And this has been the case for almost 150 years now, that governments throughout the West are the ones who train the children.
	And so when people have problems in society, they always seem to take the government out of the picture when it comes to having trained children.
	The people, right?
	So Obama rails against the greed of Wall Street.
	It's like, well, you know the government trained all those people, right?
	It either trained them directly through public schools or indirectly by certifying the teachers and setting the curriculum in private school.
	The government does not find its citizens satisfactory, then it needs to look in the mirror.
	It's sort of like I have a flight school and I train all these people to fly and they keep flying into mountains and I say, man, those people are idiots.
	I can't believe what terrible flyers they are.
	That's, you know, I need to get more money from people because, you know, just sort of like how many terrible flyers there are.
	It's like, dude, didn't you train those guys?
	So I think that, and so when the government takes your childhood...
	Which is kind of what the government does.
	Thousands and thousands of hours have locked in these little ice cube trays of mass distraction.
	It's really painful.
	I mean, to have been shepherded around, to move around like a cow from bell to bell, regardless of your particular interest at the moment, to never be asked anything about what you want to study, to be simply shunted through for the convenience and summers off of your elders.
	That's really painful.
	I mean, there's a really deep, I think, emotional pain when people think of how it could have been, and I think that's one of the reasons why they shy away from it.
	Yeah, I guess it's sort of like they feel that they've invested so much as well into this that...
	You know, I liken it to taking a shit onto somebody's best rug.
	That's the sort of reaction you get when you say, well, do we actually need a state at all?
	You know, it's this shock horror.
	Like, one person said to us today, with no government, well, then it would be anarchy.
	And we said, well, yeah.
	Bingo.
	With no rape, there would just be lovemaking.
	Yes, that's exactly right.
	You are on the money.
	Yeah.
	So I guess what we're trying to get across to, a lot of our listeners may be new to this whole concept of having no government whatsoever.
	I mean, a lot of the focus tends to go towards reducing government and sort of cleaning up corruption.
	And that's all good stuff.
	But there is that inherent argument that something that has...
	Arguably was created out of corruption and definitely has become so thoroughly corrupt.
	It almost becomes like an unworkable situation to be able to tidy all that up.
	So your sort of angle at it is that we just get rid of it altogether.
	To go with a...
	Well, yeah, I mean, of course.
	I mean, if you just look at the 20th century, just some basic facts.
	I mean, facts are important.
	Some people have calculated, you can Google the word democide, or your listeners can, have calculated that 250 million people were murdered by their own governments in the 20th century.
	That's not really good.
	I mean, the Holocaust was unbelievably evil enough, and it's minuscule in comparison to democide.
	And now, if you compare that to private murders, we, you know, in the 20th century, private murders, depending on how you calculate it, it's about 8 million.
	So, on the one side, you have an entity which is considered necessary for the protection of people, killing almost a quarter billion people, murdering them.
	This doesn't even count wars.
	This is just...
	Death camps, starvation, forced marches, that kind of stuff.
	On the other hand, you face the risk of 8 million private murders throughout the century.
	And the private murders, these include things like, you know, the effects of the drug war, people raised in government schools who don't know how to think and who have really bad aggressive problems.
	It includes people who've come home from wars who are traumatized.
	It includes a lot of government mix-up in that 8 million.
	It wouldn't be nearly that high in a private society or free society.
	But these are just basic facts that you're not supposed to know.
	I'm sorry?
	I was just going to say a lot of those numbers don't get recognized.
	Casualties of war, we generally only hear about deaths, don't we?
	But there's a huge knock-on effect.
	Yeah, and I mean, America, right, America was this big fight against communism.
	Because communism, you see, had all of these gulags, and it was really bad.
	But the percentage of Americans in prisons for nonviolent crimes is really very close to what Solzhenitsyn and others were experiencing in the Gulag Apikalago under Stalin.
	And so how have you won the war when you're incarcerating a similar number?
	And of course, governments say, well, you need us.
	You see, you need us to save you from other governments.
	The other governments are really, really dangerous.
	And so you need us because these other governments could, you know.
	They're even worse.
	Right.
	But the reality, of course, is that governments are the biggest arms dealers in the world.
	If America feels that foreign...
	Or the British government, of course, it's England, the UK, Russia.
	I mean, these are the big arms dealers.
	And if other governments are so dangerous, then perhaps we should stop arming them to the T's.
	It's sort of like if you...
	If you want an alarm system installed in your house and they say, well, you know, there's lots of these thieves around.
	It turns out that the thieves are actually hired by the alarm company to threaten you, to get you to buy their services.
	We would recognize that as incredibly corrupt.
	And so governments are not protecting us from other governments.
	They are, in fact, robbing from us and selling off our kids in order to well-arm all of these other governments.
	It's shocking.
	I mean, it's truly criminal.
	Yeah, it's quite the perfected sort of racket or mafia really, isn't it?
	The protection racket that goes on.
	So just stepping aside from that for a moment, I mean we hear a lot about moves towards minichism or smaller or minimal government.
	I just wanted early on for you to sort of explain to us and the listeners how small government inevitably becomes large government, if not the most centralized government we've ever seen, the case in point being the United States.
	Yeah, I mean, that's a good point.
	And there is the fantasy, and what a great fantasy it would be, right?
	So there's this objectivist or libertarian argument that, you know, we're going to crush the state down to, you know, the couple of major functions that the state should have, the police, the law courts, the military, maybe the prisons, and then that's it.
	So the government is an umpire, it's not a player.
	And what we...
	What I understand is, you know, if that's the goal, the first place you look is history.
	I mean, that's the first place you want to look.
	You don't want to look into the fantasies of the future or the language manipulation you can create in your head about how things should be.
	You want to look at history and say, okay, has this been tried before?
	And what were the results?
	Well, just a couple off the top of my head.
	Ancient Rome started off as a pretty small government.
	That's one of the reasons why it had such growth.
	And the small government turned into a very large corrupt republic which became very imperialistic and then finally crushed itself because it ran into so much debt that it couldn't pay off its mercenaries.
	Its mercenaries came and sacked Rome, reducing it from a population of about a million to a population of about 17,000 as everyone was sent out into the countryside in a true Cambodian-style death march into starvation.
	So this was a big problem.
	Big governments grow out of small governments.
	Small governments allow wealth to grow.
	Wealth becomes collateral.
	Wealth becomes higher taxes, which funds the ambitions of politicians.
	And you could look at England, of course, was the first to implement really the modern concept of free trade in the 18th centuries.
	And England then became very wealthy.
	And what happened?
	It became very top-heavy.
	It became increasingly controlled.
	And, of course, it became imperialistic because sociopaths at the top Love to lob grenades over to other countries.
	It lets them discharge their sadism.
	It helps them provoke foreign enemies, which allow them to cow the domestic population with, you know, created threats.
	You poke a hornet's nest and say, oh my god, we need protection from hornets.
	Isn't that a shock?
	America, of course, is the biggest example and the one that most people would be most familiar with.
	America, of course, philosophically designed as the very smallest government.
	I mean, it was an atom on the face of the sun.
	It was the smallest government.
	I mean, okay, well, let's discount the incredible murders of the domestic population, the Native Americans, the Indians.
	Let's discount no rights for women.
	Let's discount no rights for children.
	Let's discount slavery.
	Just looking at it through the lens of, you know, white, middle class and uppers.
	It was the very smallest government that could be conceived of, philosophically designed by the geniuses of the age.
	And look what happened!
	It grew from the very smallest government that the world had ever seen to right now, the very largest government with the most power, the most destructive power that could be imagined that the world has ever seen.
	The power to destroy life on this planet dozens of times over.
	If that doesn't give people pause about the prospects for minochism, then I suggest they rewind and listen again.
	I guess it would be more of a reprieve for a short period of time.
	I think that's a lot of the calls, people calling back to want to get back to the founding fathers, back to the early days of the Constitution.
	At the end of the day, if it got to this state once, it's going to happen again and again and again.
	Really, we need to start looking at a completely different matter.
	The cancer always regrows.
	It's sort of like you want the surgeon to open up, cut away maybe 80% of the cancer, which you know is going to regrow, and then say, don't worry, I wrote the word constitution on your cancer, so there's no way it's going to regrow.
	And then, of course, it always does.
	At some point, it's like, you know that last 20%, which we know is going to regrow and threaten our health again?
	Just take that sucker out.
	I'll try life without the cancer at all.
	I really think that there's some great possibilities there.
	Yeah, I think it's the very nature of government, isn't it?
	Because it doesn't produce anything of worth by itself.
	It's only really this parasite that's sort of stealing from everyone else.
	It's constantly having to justify its very existence.
	Well, there's no upward cap on its growth.
	I mean, for so many reasons.
	I mean, if you provide bad service in the free market, people stop buying from you.
	If you overcharge in the free market, people stop buying from you.
	There is involuntarism.
	There is a natural check and balance on the growth of power.
	If a large group of people think a corporation is getting too big or some organization is getting too big, there would be no corporations in a free society.
	They're state-created monsters, too.
	But if some organization's getting too big, people are like, okay, hey, you know, I'm going to just stop dealing with these guys, and then they collapse.
	They can't go out and buy an army.
	I mean, that's going to be completely obvious to everyone.
	And so government has no limit on its upward growth.
	And the way, of course, the government works, which we all know, is the government will give you stuff for free.
	And the way that it does that, of course, is it prints and it borrows.
	It prints money and it borrows money.
	And not one person in a thousand can usually trace back inflation two years after the fact to the printing money that occurred to pay for some particular social program.
	And more importantly, it goes into debt.
	So if you look at a lot of the wealth that the baby boomers have created or gathered, a lot of it is because the government paid for a whole bunch of stuff that they otherwise would have had to pay for, from roads to healthcare to old age pensions and so on.
	And the education of their children.
	Government paid for all of that by going into debt.
	So they got a huge amount of free stuff.
	The debt now rolls into the next generation.
	And this is inevitable.
	In public choice theory, you can read about this online.
	There's no mathematical possible way that the size of government can be restrained or controlled.
	The benefits of taking a penny from a million people and giving it to some guy are far too great.
	And so the guy who's getting, you know, whatever it is, a penny from a million people He's gonna have a huge incentive to keep that going.
	You and I have one penny's worth of incentive to stop it.
	And so it ends up with death by a thousand mosquito bites and the slow suicide of a once noble culture.
	It's one of the inherent things going into economics and just how the fact that the huge majority of the population, when you try and describe debt-based currency and how private banks basically create our currency out of nothing when you try and describe debt-based currency and how private banks basically create our currency out of nothing and that we're indebted to
	One of the reasons why I think they don't believe it or they don't want to listen to it is because the con is so big and they think that there's some sort of system in government that wouldn't sell us out.
	There's this belief that the government is our mum and our dad and they wouldn't do anything to hurt us.
	Well, in reality, of course, it's this complete collusion between those who benefit versus the rest of us that are just put up with however much tyranny that They can throw at us.
	It's strange because there seems to be this faith in the altruism and benevolence of government without ever having to be proved or categorized.
	Well, I mean, this is the basic problem.
	I mean, obviously, if all men are good, then we don't need a government.
	If all men are bad, we can't have a government because the bad men will use the government to dominate everyone else.
	If the majority of men are good and the minority of men are bad, the bad people will take over the government and use it to dominate the good.
	If the majority of people are bad and a minority is good, same thing happens.
	There's no logical way under which the distribution of good and evil in society can justify the existence of a government.
	I mean, look, we're mammals.
	We want...
	Like all living organisms, we want maximum returns with minimum effort.
	And the government, of course, provides that, and it swells and justifies.
	And the other thing that's true is that people have no respect for wisdom or deep study in the realm of Of government or political science or even economics.
	I mean, as Murray Rothbard said, it's no crime to be ignorant of economics.
	It's a complicated discipline.
	But it kind of is a crime to think that you know something when you don't.
	And stuff which just seems obvious to people, which they're told repeatedly, which is just not true, that people think that they know something about it.
	And they really don't.
	And unfortunately, I mean, in other disciplines, that's kind of understood.
	I don't sort of wake up one day, do a couple of stretches and say, that's it, I'm ready for the Olympic hurdles, right?
	I mean, I recognize that it takes years of training and dedication to become an expert in this.
	And the average idiot on the street thinks that he knows something because he's seen a couple of ads and he was indoctrinated by his public school into how wonderful government is.
	He thinks he knows something about it.
	False knowledge is the true enemy of knowledge.
	I mean, if you know that you don't know something, you can go and find it out or at least admit that you don't know it.
	But if you think you know something that ain't so, that's the really dangerous problem.
	And most people have an understanding of political science from their government schools in the same way that people who look at McDonald's ads on TV have an understanding of nutrition.
	I mean, they're all just commercials.
	They have no substance to them.
	I think it's also worth noting how invested so much of the population is now on the state, whether it be the welfare state or something as simple as food stamps.
	Or the fact that you've paid your taxes...
	For 20 years and you're counting that up in your head that I've paid, you know, 5,000 a year for my taxes, which means I'm invested for this.
	And, you know, so it's got to be worth something.
	And I've gone through it, so therefore everybody else should, regardless of the morals of the matter.
	Yes, and...
	As I've asked this of a wide variety, I speak at a lot of conferences, and I've asked this of a wide variety of people in the audience.
	I say, well, how many of you have gone to jail for your beliefs?
	And maybe one or two people will put their hand up.
	And I say, well, how many of you have received social ostracism and criticism and significant social problems because of your beliefs?
	Every single person.
	Puts their hands up every single time.
	And that really is the government.
	The government is horizontal, right?
	The government gets us to attack each other for speaking the truth, and then they profit from that.
	They don't monitor us.
	We monitor each other.
	It's slave-on-slave violence that produces the state and only makes the state possible.
	The state is an effect of our willingness and sometimes lust to attack each other for speaking the truth.
	You also see this with a lot of the issues that you see people bickering about.
	It's almost like gay marriage is a good one.
	We're handed some sort of thing for the peons to fight over and the government is this all-knowing arbiter and it's like a never-ending circle.
	Basic liberties and freedoms Should be there regardless of, you know, your race, your gender, whatever, your sexual preference.
	Yeah, I mean, you could just say to people, would you be willing to accept gay marriage if it meant never having to pay taxes again for the rest of your life?
	I mean, how many people would it?
	Oh, you know, I've had a sudden change of heart.
	It's like, instead of the government even coming in as an arbiter and saying, right, well, basically, if everyone treats everyone the same, then it's all cool anyways.
	They come in with this, well, this group needs more rights, or this group will have to take away everyone's...
	And it's this fake arbitration of the government.
	Again, coming in as the parent figure, To sort of calm everyone down and tell, you know, say which side of the argument they're going to put their force behind, to force people to fall in line with.
	And you get this with so many things in life, once you're aware of the whole sort of con job, is you just see how many of the arguments everyone's fighting over are actually one very simple to solve, but they're also, they're just there perpetuated to keep the government I think the other thing is the issues become aligned with one party or the other and so the whole time you're in this false paradigm or this false dialectic I should say where it's right versus left and pick a team and your
	issue will be ascribed to one of those two teams really.
	Yeah, no, it sort of reminds me of, you know, being teased as a kid when some kid would say, yes means no, and no means yes.
	Do you want me to hit you?
	And you're like, no, no, no, wait, wait, what was it again?
	Ah!
	You get hit anyway, right?
	I mean, it's just, it's a trick, but now you're to blame, right?
	But, no, the gay marriage thing, obviously, I mean, it's obvious it comes out of religiosity.
	It comes out of the Christian problem in the Old Testament and to some degree in the New Testament with homosexuality.
	I mean, homosexuals are supposed to be put to death according to the all-loving God of the Old Testament.
	And that has had a huge effect on society.
	If you look at it, even remotely objectively, of course, people want to use the government to protect the family.
	I mean, this is sort of the idea.
	The family has been...
	I mean, it's people, they can't even understand it unless they've studied this in history.
	The family, the traditional family, has been absolutely, completely and totally shredded and decimated by state social policies of the past couple of decades.
	I mean, the rise of single motherhood, the deadbeat dads, the...
	It's truly horrifying understanding the degree to which The communist goal of having the state become really the replacement for the traditional family unit has been achieved.
	I mean, this is the goal of all unbelievably radical and destructive ideologies is to replace the family unit with some other collective concept based usually almost exclusively on coercion.
	And this, of course, it shifts people's loyalties in very powerful and fundamental ways.
	If the state has been your pseudo-daddy, that gives you a whole host of psychological issues when it comes to rebelling.
	If your mom has been dependent upon the state, then wishing that the state were not there is, in a sense, wishing for atomization.
	It has hugely profound effects.
	On people's psychology.
	It has very profound effects on economics, of course.
	It has very profound effects on crime and dysfunction.
	The kids with single parents just tend to do a huge amount worse, which means more social services, more government, more problems, more crime.
	So the idea that the government is going to do something to protect traditional marriage when it has just dropped a bunker buster into the nuclear family over the past few decades is an astonishing thing.
	I really have this feeling, guys.
	I don't know what you think.
	I have this feeling.
	People are going to look at us a couple of generations from now and they're going to wonder how we managed to get out of our houses without just continually bumping our heads in our doors, being too retarded to open them.
	Or how we were able to walk down the street since we would obviously have tied our shoelaces to our penises or something.
	I mean, how the hell are we supposed to be taken seriously as a species when we come up with these absolutely absurd things?
	Like we say, I need the government to protect my property and I'm going to give them the right to take half of it by force.
	I want the government to protect the family, though it's shredded for the past few generations.
	I want the government to protect me from criminals.
	The government is largely responsible for producing them.
	I want the government to protect me from foreign governments, which your government is arming.
	How often do they think we can get through the day?
	Cannabis makes people, you know, lazy and makes them go psychotic.
	So what we're going to do is take them and lock them into jail for 10 years.
	And, you know, that's really, you know, intelligent.
	Put them on psychotropic drugs.
	Put them on psychotropic drugs since a kid.
	Yeah, I mean, it's...
	They're all oxymorons, these things, really, aren't they?
	Well, and of course, I mean, politics is physically addictive.
	This is fairly well documented, that the achievement of political power, as distinct from economic influence or whatever, the achievement of political power releases drugs in your system that make you feel good and happy and joyful that are stronger than cocaine.
	And they've seen this, you know, they do this experiment with monkeys.
	Monkeys that go up in the social hierarchy, in the brute force hierarchy, Get all kinds of happy joy joy juice in their brains and when they go back down they feel crashed and depressed and they have to try and achieve it again.
	So you have a bunch of people who are addicted to substances more powerful than cocaine called political power attempting to try and tell us not to be addicts.
	I mean again it's an unbelievably comic and pathetic and dismal farce.
	Yeah, I mean, these things have been proven time and time again, and one of the best examples really was the Stanford University experiment.
	For those who aren't familiar with it, a bunch of students were taken, half played the role of prisoners, half played the role of prison wardens, and very quickly we saw the effect that power and authority has on people, even people who think they're immune to it.
	Well, but just to clarify, that it's certainly an experiment.
	They wanted it to go on for a couple of weeks.
	They had to stop it after a day or two because of injuries and so on.
	Sadism and brutality.
	But this is, you know, some people think, oh, well, this is human nature and blah, blah, blah.
	But no, this is all people who were raised by the government.
	All people who were put into government schools and spent, you know, 12 or 13 of their formative years being instructed six hours a day with an hour or two of homework by the state.
	And they have no capacity whatsoever to avoid the addiction to power.
	And they assume that the moment they have power, they can use it to harm and abuse others.
	Well, this is what you learn from public school, but it's got nothing to do with human nature.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Well, I think we've established that we're sort of singing from the same hymn sheet here relatively.
	So just sort of change things up a little bit and maybe ask you a few questions or pose to you the points that we continuously have put to us.
	Yes, please.
	If we kick off maybe with law and policing and the justice system and so forth.
	James is just putting the dogs out of the way because they're making a noise.
	Oh, James!
	Sorry, man.
	It's...
	I didn't mean, you know, I got a husky and they like howling.
	What you mean, it's releasing the blood-soaked, fire-breathing anarchist hounds into a peaceful party.
	That's why I got them.
	And I got dash hounds to go for the ankles.
	That's right.
	Yeah, so let's skip forward ahead to...
	We've got our chance for a true anarchist system.
	So we have a couple of things that people come up to.
	They always come back to...
	One of the things they come up to when you say that we don't need a government is how are we protected?
	How do we stop criminals from just...
	You know, raping everyone, stabbing everyone to death, setting fire to everything.
	There seems to be this perception that without this police force, which they don't seem to understand is a relatively new concept, that there would just be murder on the streets.
	Okay, so you play the status and I'll see what blurring, blur-eyed ninja moves I can pull.
	So this is you making the case, and I would say, so is it your perception or belief that when people will not face the consequences of their actions that they will act in a more evil way?
	Yeah, that seems to be what everybody thinks, doesn't it?
	Well, do you believe that politicians and other government officials do face consequences for their destructive actions?
	Right, so if you believe that in the absence of some sort of negative response like jail or whatever, people are going to do bad things, then you can't have a government, because the government pretty much provides immunity from bad things for people.
	You know, if you run a stoplight, you will get pulled over.
	If you start a war, you will get a pension And you will get a book deal, right?
	So if believing that people will act worse in the absence of negative consequences, if that is true, then you can't have a state.
	If it's not true, then the state isn't helping anyway.
	What about, say for instance, England became a nation of anarchy.
	And we had all the good stuff, small local systems, everybody helping each other out, and it's all running fine.
	What's to say that China, who is run by an IONX regime, doesn't come in and then just basically overtake us?
	Is there some sort of system that we could have where we could have a military?
	Would that be private?
	Would that be run by corporations?
	Yeah, of course.
	Look, there's a couple of things to say about that.
	First and foremost, governments take over other governments For the reason that a really nasty farmer is going to take over another farm.
	Because the cows are already domesticated and producing all this good stuff which you can sell.
	So governments don't take over countries.
	When they invade, governments take over tax systems.
	So when the Nazis invaded France in May of 1940, what they invaded was to take over the tax collection system that was already in place.
	And so they just started collecting taxes and grabbing all this stuff.
	If there's no tax collection system in place...
	There's really not much point or not much capacity to go in and take it over.
	You know, it's just like you'll go take over someone's farm if you want to make a quick buck and you're a bad guy, but you're not just going to go into the woods and start, you know, because there's no system.
	Nothing's domesticated.
	So that's really tough to make the case.
	Why would they come?
	I guess they would try and maybe come in and enslave you or whatever.
	What about natural resources?
	Well, but natural resources tend to be much more efficiently gathered through trade than they are gathered through conquest, right?
	I mean, so for instance, right, there are lots of natural resources in India, lots of natural resources all over the British Empire.
	And so when England was completely broke at the end of World War II, why didn't they just rebuild their treasury by continuing the empire?
	Well, the reason is because it's really expensive to run an empire.
	An empire is profitable for a few people, but it's very expensive for everyone else, right?
	And so, at the moment that Britain ran out of money, it dumped its empire, which gives you the true understanding of its economic value to people.
	So, if China wants to get natural resources from England, the best thing that they can do is to trade.
	Now, of course, you can get some crazy things or whatever.
	But you would have a private army.
	Of course you would.
	And of course, people could have weapons, right?
	I mean, the reason that I think it was the—I can't remember.
	It wasn't Hirohito.
	It was some Japanese admiral in World War II. He said, you can't invade America.
	Every blade of grass has a gun.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And you can't.
	Because, right?
	So if people have the capacity—I mean, nobody knows.
	There's no registry.
	But if people have the capacity for weaponry— How on earth are you going to invade?
	Think of the technology that would be there.
	I mean, the technology in the military is incredibly wasteful and doesn't work 98% of the time.
	It's ridiculous.
	But imagine if you had the genius of some, you know, Steve Jobs-style entrepreneur coming up with sophisticated weaponry designed to target perhaps just the leaders of the foreign countries.
	I'm sorry?
	The iBazooka.
	The iBazooka, something like that, right?
	And so that kind of stuff would be developed if there was a need for it.
	People don't want to be invaded and taken over by Chinese overlords, and so they would fund that, of course, as they would, right?
	I mean, they would want to keep their way of life intact.
	And, of course, to take an example that is difficult but instructive, I mean, look at something like Afghanistan.
	I mean, even look at Iraq.
	I mean, look at the amount of power and might and control and wealth the US military has.
	And they've basically been defeated by what?
	By a bunch of insurgents, people who have almost no resources.
	And defense, of course, is much cheaper than attacking, right?
	So one of the reasons the Soviet Empire went bust in the 80s was because they were sending $20 million MiG missiles—sorry, $20 million MiG airplanes— Into Afghanistan, where the Mujahideen trained by the CIA were launching a $20,000 rocket to blow it up.
	I mean, it doesn't take long for that math to accumulate and bust you up.
	So defense is much cheaper than invasion.
	There would be much better technology, people would be much more proactive, and there'd be much less reason to take over a system with no existing tax structure.
	So that would be my argument.
	And, you know, there's lots of others and plenty of examples.
	I mean, Afghanistan has been invaded by, what, 20 different countries over the past thousand years and they still remain sovereign.
	So again, I'm not saying, and therefore we'll end up like Afghanistan.
	This is not exactly a very sophisticated society.
	But there's lots of reasons to believe that it's not going to be as big a problem.
	As people think.
	And let's say it is, right?
	So, I mean, this is what people say.
	Well, let's say we have a free society and the government comes back.
	Well, first of all, there's tons of reasons as to, I mean, people wouldn't, you know, that's like saying, well, what if next election, everyone in England votes for slavery to come back?
	Like, it's not going to happen.
	I mean, once you make that step forward, you don't tend to go back.
	There's not going to be a law passed next month which bars women from ever holding a job.
	Once you pass that threshold, you don't tend to go back.
	Once people start getting a taste set, they can protect themselves and they can contribute in a positive way to their We're domesticating.
	It's one of the reasons why they disarm the public, England especially.
	People are petrified to defend themselves against violence or criminality because the state's going to come and get them.
	They've gotten domesticated so much that it's bred into us now that you're not allowed to defend yourself and the state's the only one responsible, which of course is ridiculous when you look at the face of it because you look at all the corruption and the deaths in police hand.
	But yeah, it's just one of those things that As Michael says, the oxymoron of everything.
	They'll shoot down one argument, even though the system that we've got in place right now is abysmal.
	I've got a book, it's free on my website, it's called Practical Anarchy, which goes into all of this stuff in more detail.
	I won't regurgitate and cough up the hairball of all the arguments here.
	But I will say, the fundamental argument with the statist...
	And isn't it cool that there even is that word now?
	Yeah, I love that word.
	I mean, the fact that there's a word to identify...
	Yeah, I mean, that's fascinating that there's a word to differentiate that belief, right?
	As opposed to, you know, you don't say that, hey, look, there's somebody who believes in gravity.
	Anyway, but the fundamental argument is not about consequences.
	I mean, frankly, who gives a rat's ass in a teacup What happens after we're free?
	How things get done?
	It doesn't matter whatsoever.
	And it's impossible to predict fundamentally.
	So, let's say that you and I were having an argument in the antebellum South, early 18th century, at the end of slavery.
	I think we should free all the slaves.
	This is immoral.
	Own people, chattel cattle.
	I mean, beat them and chain them and enslave them.
	It's evil.
	And people said, what?
	But the slaves pick all the food.
	Are you saying we're all going to starve to death?
	That's what you want?
	Everyone is just going to starve to death?
	And you said, no, you know, I think I know what's going to happen.
	Okay, so just work with me.
	You know, put on your imagination cap for a sec.
	I think what's going to happen is...
	Okay, follow me, a word picture.
	But maybe 150 years from now.
	So right now, like 80% of people are involved in farming.
	But let's say 150 years from now.
	Maybe less.
	Only 3% of people are involved in farming.
	And you know all that stuff that's in the ground, that black stuff called oil that is just a huge hassle and a mess and we just try and find some way to get rid of it?
	That is going to become some of the most prized stuff on earth.
	And what's happened is they're going to suck it out of the ground and they're going to put it into giant mechanical robot wheelhouses that have these giant mechanical robot arms that go and pick all of the crops and And get all the cotton and all the wheat and they get all the crops and it's going to require just one guy up there driving.
	It's going to do the work of a hundred slaves.
	It's going to take one day today to do what used to take a month.
	And it's going to run on the crushed juice of old prehistoric dinosaur bones and trees.
	And that's how it's all going to work.
	And so we can free the slaves because it's going to lead to this wonderfully great robot-armed oil-valuable future.
	I mean, people would look at you and say, well, that's insane.
	I mean, what a ridiculous thing.
	I mean, that is actually what happens.
	You can't predict it.
	You don't know what's going to happen.
	I don't care how the cotton gets picked after we free the slaves.
	The fact is that slavery is immoral.
	I don't care how the roads get built.
	I don't care how the children get educated.
	I know it's going to happen because people want solutions, and solutions are always provided in a free market.
	But I don't care fundamentally.
	Because to say I need to be able to guess how cotton is going to be picked in a hundred years in order to justify my opposition to slavery is a rhetorical trap which you simply can't escape from.
	It's a Venus flytrap.
	It closes over your brain.
	You can't get anywhere.
	The problem is the initiation of force is immoral.
	The problem is taxation is theft.
	The problem is that Incarceration for non-violent crimes is kidnapping and imprisonment.
	And it's wrong.
	It's immoral.
	Selling off the unborn, the productivity of the unborn for the sake of bribing constituents in the here and now is wrong.
	It's immoral.
	We have to take that moral stand.
	I don't care what happens a hundred years from now once we have stopped using violence to solve social problems.
	I don't care how people get married once we stop raping everybody.
	We have to stop using force and imagining that it's good.
	Yeah, I think the slavery analogy works really well.
	The only thing with that is it's one aspect of society.
	And when you're trying to recommend or suggest an anarcho-capitalist society without a government, you're looking at breaking everything down rather than just one aspect.
	And I think the other thing there with what you were just talking about is Those points go across or come across very well when you're preaching to the converted.
	But in terms of when you're trying to introduce new ideas to people, they want to know what the consequences will be.
	And they're not prepared to just accept the moral argument.
	But you can push back on that, right?
	So what you're saying is that unless someone could guess how...
	Cotton was going to be picked 100 years in the future, you wouldn't have supported the end of slavery?
	Like, would you have said, we have to keep going on with slavery until people can predict what's going to happen in a free society 100 years after slavery?
	You understand that that would never have occurred.
	You would never have had that satisfied, and therefore, you would have had to perpetually approve of and defend the institution of slavery.
	If the standards that you're handing to me to prove the freedoms that I'm talking about was the same as required for slavery, you would have been an ardent pro-slaver.
	Mm-hmm.
	And if people say, well, yes, I would have been an art and prose slaver, it's like, okay, I guess we're done.
	And if they say, okay, well, that is a problem.
	I mean, I get that the standards that I'm applying to you now in arguing for a free society are exactly the same standards that would have continued slavery.
	There's something wrong with my standards, then great, you can start to have a more productive conversation.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I take your point.
	I mean, there's obviously lots of other arguments that come up or other questions that were asked or that people are asked if you start sort of bringing up the state or questioning the state.
	One of the main ones would be People often say, won't people want to get rich and powerful and inevitably break voluntary contracts at the most opportune moments?
	I know you speak about...
	Okay, so, of course, yeah, the argument for that is so, okay, because what people do is they divide the world into opposite things.
	They divide the universe into two opposite worlds.
	Extreme.
	So, in the world of the free market, people want to do all of this greedy stuff, and they want to break contracts, and they want to just, you know, pillage and, you know, do all this terrible stuff to get a hold of all these resources.
	And those are the devils.
	Now on the other world are these angels, you see.
	These angels who don't have any of those drives, who don't want to get things unjustly, who don't want to accumulate power, who don't want to break contracts.
	And those angels will control the devils.
	But of course, if it is human nature to want to get stuff for nothing and to break contracts and so on, then you have to ask, how many times do politicians break the contracts that they make?
	How many times do politicians break the promises that they make that get them elected?
	Well, all the time.
	In fact, any time a politician keeps a promise, it's purely accidental.
	Oh yeah, I guess I did keep that.
	I guess I never thought of it.
	So would you argue there's no semblance of accountability as it stands?
	Well, I mean, there's two ways, I guess three ways to answer that.
	The first is, well, yes, there's no accountability because you can't sue the government.
	And if you can sue the government, the government, if you win, will God help you, right?
	But if you win, they don't pay you from the income of the person who made the decision.
	They pay you out of general tax revenues.
	So, no, there's no accountability.
	Pretty swell deal.
	Yeah, in the same way that there's no...
	And of course, most government employees who work in contact with the public are specifically shielded.
	They are immune from any kind of lawsuit explicitly, and you can't even imagine it.
	So no, there's no consequences.
	If a politician makes a decision that is bad economically and costs a bunch of people their jobs, he has no liability for it whatsoever.
	If a politician starts a war and it turns out that the war, as it almost is the case, was started on false...
	Pre-taxed, then the government, the individual has no liability.
	Now, you could say, well, if somebody's really unpopular, they'll get voted out and so on.
	But, of course, by the time you're voted out, if you're at any reasonably high political office, you've made more than enough money to retire on for the rest of your life.
	You have contacts.
	You can go into consulting.
	You can go into the revolving door of public-private sector partnerships.
	And so it's really hard to say that that's a massive catastrophe.
	I mean, just look at Tony Blair.
	I mean, the guy started a war where, according to reasonable critiques, he knew ahead of time that there was no weapons of mass destruction, started the war unjustly against a country that had zero threat to UK interests.
	And he's on the lecture circuit.
	He's teaching.
	He's got book deals worth millions of dollars.
	He's written his memoirs.
	He's got a Gold-plated pension with gold-plated healthcare benefits for the rest of his life.
	He's made more money than he could be spent in three reasonable generations.
	So it's hard to see where the negative consequences are for directly being involved in a war that has cost the lives of about a million people in Iraq and driven millions more into refugee status.
	So it's really hard to say where the accountability is in government.
	I mean, talking about psychopaths, Basically, government is run like a mafia.
	I mean, we joke about this all the time.
	The entire thing, you know.
	You've not paid your taxes.
	Oh, look.
	Your house may be set fire to you.
	You haven't paid your protection racket.
	Sort of like that.
	I mean, that is pretty much...
	The sort of people that sort of gravitate towards government and even local levels we see that all the time with corruption locally and there is no accountability and of course the move to a one world sort of government is just basically to remove as much direct accountability as possible.
	Don't come to us mate, go to London, you can't go to London because it's in Brussels now, you know.
	Well, but I think the important thing to recognize, there's two, I think, fundamental differences between the Mafia and the state.
	The first is that the Mafia doesn't indoctrinate everyone's children, and therefore they don't, right?
	And as a consequence of that, the people in the Mafia People don't believe that they're do-gooders who are helping society.
	They're like, you know, this is my team.
	This is all I care about.
	You screw you.
	So if you don't give us the money, we'll break your kneecaps.
	But they don't sit there and say, and therefore give me the Nobel Prize.
	They give me the Presidential Medal of Honor because I'm just such a great guy who's doing so much wonder.
	And people look at the mafia and say, well, that's some pretty scary, dangerous stuff there, man.
	I don't want to get involved in that.
	But they look at the state and they say, here are my children.
	Do with them what you will.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	But how would you stop an equivalent sort of mafias that we've known for a long time throughout history?
	What's to stop them coming about in an ideal society, a stateless society?
	How do you prevent them forming and developing?
	Because they really are the epitome of this sort of cynical, self-interested psychopath, aren't they, who subvert And manipulate power.
	Well, I mean, what does organized crime get its money from?
	It gets its money from prostitution, which is mostly illegal.
	It gets its money from gambling, which is mostly illegal.
	It gets its money from drugs, which are mostly illegal.
	If free market entrepreneurs, without the overhead of violence, violence is very expensive.
	Without the overhead of violence, free market entrepreneurs providing these services, which are Tragic in many ways, though still voluntary technically, they will not be able to out-compete the Mafia.
	I mean, why doesn't the Mafia go into producing iPhones?
	Because they can't compete, right?
	But won't criminals always find an angle, you know, always find an edge or a way in?
	Well, give me an example.
	That's a description, not an argument.
	No, I take your point.
	God, you've put me on the spot there now, haven't you?
	To the gulags!
	Any sort of institutions or industries that form...
	You can just point out to people that the mafia directly came.
	You can see them swarming off the ships.
	They came to Ellis Island with prohibition.
	I mean, they came straight over.
	As soon as something becomes illegal...
	Then you get organized crime.
	This is like how the British Empire made all of its money dealing opium to China.
	They make sure that it's illegal there so that they can rack up the prices.
	There's a lot of evidence pointing towards prohibition for drugs in the States being pretty much the same sort of interest.
	They want it illegal so that they can profit off of it a lot more.
	So your answer then, Stefan, is really to have no sort of laws, essentially, or nothing be illegal?
	Have I misunderstood that?
	Well, laws is a statist argument, right?
	So if you don't have a state, you can't have what is commonly described as laws.
	There are obviously safeguards, and there obviously is, you know, if we enter into contracts, we want to make sure those contracts are going to be followed.
	If you go work for someone, you want to make sure they're going to pay you.
	And the workplace environment is going to be as safe as it can reasonably be.
	So you're going to want all these safeguards in society.
	It's just that the government doesn't really provide them very well.
	So let's say that we have a mafia forming and they demand services and don't pay them continuously because they've got the biggest guns, the biggest force, the most weaponry, the most feared.
	So they can go around just demanding what they want in terms of products and services and not paying for it, because they're not going to be concerned about dealing with dispute resolution organisations or a bad credit rating, are they?
	That sort of mentality, those are not concerns that they entertain.
	Well, wait a sec.
	I mean, who is going to be selling all these guns to the mafia?
	I certainly wouldn't want to have anything to do with any company that would sell guns to criminals.
	So any company which could show that they weren't selling guns to criminals would get people's business because nobody, even the gun manufacturers themselves, don't want guns in the hands of criminals.
	But how would they stop the guns being taken?
	So you've got a factory producing guns, okay?
	Yeah.
	It's maybe not heavily fortified or whatever.
	What's to stop a mafia going in and taking all the weaponry?
	Well then you would...
	Build it in some remote location that was heavily fortified.
	I mean, that's sort of one possibility.
	Who knows what weapons would be available in the future that would defeat guns?
	Who knows?
	I mean, you could have glasses where if you squint a certain way, it sends out a ray that knocks someone out.
	I mean, who knows?
	I mean, this kind of stuff is incomprehensible to us at the moment.
	Sorry?
	Is that the Google Goggles?
	I don't know.
	And I guess you would also get back to the point that the people would be empowered.
	I mean, Stephan, I would imagine that you're...
	We were talking earlier about the free man movement and how...
	I mean, the free man movement in England is quite, quite big.
	And I would imagine there that we would still be wanting to follow natural laws of, you know, not hurting others and, you know...
	Theft is wrong.
	Murder is wrong.
	Sorry.
	We sort of have, okay, there's this mafia.
	But the question is, how does it form, right?
	So I want my house protected.
	I want my car protected.
	I want all of these sorts of things.
	So I'm going to hire an agency to protect them.
	And what that means is that if somebody steals my car, they give me a new car.
	So that puts a financial incentive in that company's business.
	Budget to protect my car as best it can, right?
	So how does that work?
	I don't know.
	Maybe I have to, maybe it's a thumbprint starter, and therefore nobody else can steal it, you know, unless they have my thumb.
	Okay, I don't want to have my thumb.
	Maybe it's a breath.
	Maybe it's, I don't know, some way that you can start it.
	So right now, of course, the police have no financial incentive to prevent crime.
	If you look at the advances in protection from crime that have occurred over the past, you know, whatever, 50 years, they've all come from the private sector.
	I mean, the little tags on clothing, you walk out, it goes, beep, beep, beep, please return to the cashier.
	It didn't come from the police.
	Home alarm systems, they don't come from the police.
	Car alarms didn't come from the police.
	How to track your iPhone, that didn't come from the police.
	The notebook chains, they didn't come from the police.
	You can sort of go on and on.
	It's the free market that is trying to prevent this kind of crime.
	So you say to someone, listen, if my car gets stolen, you owe me a new car.
	They immediately have $20,000.
	Pounds or 10,000 pounds worth of incentive to make sure your car doesn't get stolen, which means they've got to monitor car thefts, they've got to try and figure out how car theft rings come into being, they've got to figure out ways to disrupt them in a very proactive, competitive way, which the police have no financial incentive, fundamentally, to do.
	The police have no legal responsibility to protect you, they can't be sued for a failure to protect, and so, you know, what they say to serve and protect, well, it's not you, it's other people higher up the food chain.
	But what I want is a system where 20 guys, 20 companies, 20 organizations are competing for my protection dollar and showing me all of their statistics, showing me all of their methodologies, being on top of the very latest technology and the very latest ways of protecting my property.
	That's what I want.
	I don't want some, a bunch of chunky guys eating donuts in a system that we've inherited from the stone age, lurching around saying, oh, fill out a report, we'll look into it.
	And you know, that's not going to work for sure.
	And so if I'm concerned about organized crime, then I want to buy protection money from protection money.
	So I want to buy insurance against, so if some guy comes by and starts shaking me down for protection, the insurance company is going to pay it.
	So they immediately have an incentive to make sure that the organized crime doesn't form, to make sure that if it does form, it's broken up.
	They have, you know, huge incentive to do that because they're going to lose a huge amount of money if an organized criminal gang gets started.
	So if you have these contracts, these things in place where people have a direct financial incentive, basic of economics, right?
	There's two.
	One, people respond to incentives.
	Two, people's desires are limitless and resources are finite.
	And so that is the very best thing to do, is to have a company or an organization, a group of them, all competing for your dollar, all trying to prove to you that they have the best way to keep you safe with statistics, with third-party validations.
	And also, in case you're ever scared that these guys are going to become some new government, having a $10 million reward in escrow for anyone who finds them accumulating more weapons than they report or hiring secret armies of bat-shaped robots or something like that.
	So that's how we actually intelligently protect things is that we have people constantly innovating and competing in the free market to provide us with the best, most efficient, cheapest, and most effective prevention.
	Prevention is better than cure when it comes to just about everything.
	And so that's how you get yourself protected in a free society, not, you know, well, I'll just have a bunch of guys take my money and a bunch of other guys who don't want to get much into danger sitting around filling out forms, and therefore I'll be protected.
	I mean, that's wishful thinking.
	And I guess we've already got, we've got mafias, we've got quite a lot of organized crime, and they're obviously operating quite happily in our current system, so it's not like we have the best track record.
	How would these...
	Let's do one more if that's okay.
	Yeah.
	So how would these security agencies, do you think, how would they honor their contracts?
	Would it just be simple free market in that if a company has a track record of backing in on its contracts that people just stop shopping their services with them?
	Yeah, look, I mean, the policing of contractual obligations is done by the competition, right?
	So if you start welching on 5% of your deals, your competition is going to find that out pretty quickly, right?
	Because people are going to complain.
	They're going to blog.
	There's going to be some other agency where they can report noncompliance.
	And so immediately you're going to get 10,000 ads a day on your Google goggles, your retina or whatever the hell they're displayed on my forehead.
	And they're going to say, you know, the XYZ defense contractor is now welching.
	It's 500% increase on deals it's welched on and so on.
	Come to us.
	We'll honor their contracts at half price for the first year.
	They're constantly trying to siphon off customers from each other.
	And so, I mean, you don't, I mean, the competition is what acts as the break to bad business practices.
	I know we'll let you go soon, but I would just like to...
	Any ideas of moving forward?
	How can we, you know, for our listeners, how can we dislodge the existing power structures and institutions and sort of get things moving towards this sort of goal?
	I mean, obviously, we can't go down with just voting in different groups.
	And I think most of us would agree that less or no government is the way forward.
	So how would you say that you would lead by example for people to follow?
	Because I think a lot of people philosophically will understand less philosophically until they actually see it in practice.
	They see these sorts of ideas in practice and then want to follow it because it's beneficial to them.
	That's how humans tend to go.
	Is the first thing to do to stop voting?
	No, I don't think telling people what to do is a great idea.
	That's too much like the state.
	Or encouraging it, at least.
	No, I mean, stop voting is not anything that enlightens anyone because they either really understand the arguments, in which case you don't have to tell them, or they're doing it just because you said so, which is not exactly freedom.
	So I don't think that giving people orders or telling them what to do is really much of a solution.
	I think that, you know, if you're a heavy smoker and you want more people to quit smoking, what should you do first?
	Quit smoking.
	Exactly.
	You quit smoking yourself.
	If you're 400 pounds and everyone around you is 400 pounds and you want everyone to lose weight, you can nag them to lose weight while continuing to insert half a pizza into your cake hole every day.
	But what you want to do is lose weight.
	And then people might say, hey, I like that thing that you do where you walk up the stairs without falling over and clutching your...
	Heart in the Sanford and Son remake.
	So maybe I'll have some of that, right?
	And, you know, if you quit smoking, you say, hey, I really like the fact that you can go run and play with your kids without cuffing up half a black tar lung.
	So maybe I want some of that.
	So if you believe that a peaceful, nonviolent society is the way to go, then you start with yourself.
	You look in the mirror and you say, okay.
	How am I using aggression in my life?
	How am I using abuse in my life?
	Am I yelling at people?
	Am I calling them names?
	Do I hit my children?
	Do I put my children in a little cage called a timeout?
	Do I know other people who are doing these things to their children?
	These are things that we can actually change.
	These are things that we can actually affect.
	To have a non-aggressive, a non-violent stance towards society, to have a non-violent stance within your own relationships and in particular with your own children, with the children around you that you have any kind of influence over the parents, family, friends, neighbors, whatever.
	Introduce them to the ideas of peaceful parenting.
	We are talking a multi-generational change.
	It's generations away.
	Let's not do that tortoise and the hare thing.
	You know, the hare runs around and just falls asleep and the tortoise actually wins the race.
	We have a multi-generational change.
	This is why we have to let go of politics and accept and work with the reduction and elimination of violence, whether it's, you know, verbal abuse, spanking, yelling at people, all kinds of things.
	To reduce the incidence of aggression within our own lives is the key.
	That is going to win for us now, because, you know, we don't want to enslave our lives away and pounding our head against the wall for change that's only going to occur in a hundred years.
	That makes us miserable, and I don't think it actually brings that hundred years any closer.
	Probably pushes it further back.
	But we can live the values that we espouse.
	You know, if you've got a bunch of slaves and you think, you know, let's end slavery, first thing you can do is turn the key on the leg irons of your own slaves and set them free.
	And those slaves are the people in your life, whether it's your kids, your peers, your employees, whoever.
	You simply reject the use of aggression and violence in your own life, and that builds peaceful societies.
	Inevitably, I can tell you it works.
	And so forget the big grand gestures.
	We're going to paint the sky with images of anarchy, freedom, peace, and gentle lovemaking.
	This is all a fantasy that people use to avoid dealing with the difficult issues of their own use of aggression in their own lives.
	Once we let go of the fantasy of changing the world and we dig our feet into the petals of actually changing our own lives, well, we actually do both.
	And we include, you know, in that sort of outlook, trying to limit any sort of involvement with government, start doing things yourself, schooling your own children, all that sort of jazz as well.
	Oh, yeah.
	So it'd just be a gradual case of if you're not using the services of the government and you're not involving yourself in that entire system, it's sort of like...
	It makes it redundant.
	Yeah, it starts to make it more and more redundant because its only purpose in being it validates itself.
	And then, you know, by moving it from the equation...
	You know, where possible.
	I mean, you can homeschool your kids in many places in the world, or you can unschool or, you know, at least put them in private school where you've got some more say and control.
	That's one possibility.
	I don't know about not participating in the state at all.
	I mean, I think that's kind of impossible.
	You know, if you live in a socialized healthcare system and you get sick, you've got to go see a doctor.
	I mean, what are you going to do, right?
	They've got a monopoly, so...
	You know, I won't eat any food that has been driven on a road.
	Well, you know, welcome to your steady lunch of nettles and pebbles.
	So, you know, where possible, I think, you know, it's a good idea to do.
	I wouldn't make it any kind of principle because, you know, I mean, go living in the woods isn't changing the world either.
	And you're not free of the state if you're living in the woods because you're only living in the woods because of the state.
	I think that's, you know, a balance.
	Yeah, I don't really fancy living in the woods.
	I don't know.
	No, don't knock it till you tried it.
	Alright, so...
	Yeah, so I think that was great.
	Really appreciate having you on, Stefan.
	Yeah, thank you so much for your time.
	Oh, my pleasure.
	I appreciate the questions.
	And, well, keep up the good work and we'll send this show over to you when it's edited.
	Do you just want to put a plug out there, Stefan, for your site and the work that you...
	I know you're working on a documentary at present, which I myself am definitely looking forward to seeing.
	Yeah, well, it's freedomainradio.com.
	40 million downloads or so.
	Biggest philosophy show in the world.
	I hope people will come check it out.
	It's all free.
	The podcasts are free, the books are free, and all that kind of good stuff.
	There's a community with 10,000 people on the message board and so on.
	Freedomainradio.com, yeah, a documentary is plugging away, and I'm really looking forward to getting it out.
	I think that the freedom movement does need its zeitgeist, and so I hope that we will get some measure of success from that.
	And if people like the shows, they are certainly welcome to donate.
	That's kind of how I get my daily bread.
	And so thanks for the opportunity.
	And for my listeners who are looking to listen to this, if you would like to put your vital statistics out there, be sure to speak over the steady drip of endless English rain.
	Well, mate, thanks for being on.
	No, sorry.
	What's your website?
	What's your guys' website?
	Oh, libertytactics.com.
	Sorry.
	Libertytactics.com.
	All right.
	Thanks, guys.
	It was a real pleasure.
	Yeah, thanks a lot, guys.
	Thank you, Stefan.

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