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Nov. 21, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:17:14

2264 An Introduction to Anarchy: Stefan Molyneux on Freedomizer Radio

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	Hi, Libby!
	Well, hello, Mary Lou, and this is Gadsden Rising, and I'm Libby Gadsden, and welcome to the show.
	We have a great guest on today, who's Stephan Molyneux, and we are with Mary Lou Van Houten, our co-host and producer.
	And Mary Lou, can you please introduce Stephan to the audience?
	Oh, yes.
	Let's see.
	I'm sorry.
	Stefan is the founder and host of Free Domain Radio, the most popular philosophy show on the internet with 400,000 show downloads a month and tens of thousands of listeners.
	It was a top 10 finalist in the education category in the 2007 to 2010 podcast awards and has been named one of the top 100 most inspiring and innovative blogs for educators.
	He has a master's degree in history from the University of Toronto and studied English literature at York University.
	He has been a keynote speaker and debater at a number of conferences.
	And I've been told that if you want to learn more about anarchy, you'd listen to Stefan.
	I've talked to a few anarchists, and I say, well, how did you become an anarchist?
	And they always say, listen to you, Stefan.
	So I thought you'd get a good one.
	So thanks for coming on the show.
	Listen, it's my pleasure.
	Do you mind if I start with a joke that Mary Lou has doubtless heard six million times?
	Not even a joke, just an impulse.
	Do you mind if I just start with it?
	Sure, go ahead.
	Hello, Mary Lou.
	Goodbye, heart.
	All right, it's off my chest.
	It's out of the way.
	We can move on with the show.
	It was crowding up my whole brain there.
	I'm like biting back and now it's all done.
	So I apologize.
	You've heard that a million times before.
	Let's just keep driving and pretend we didn't hit anything.
	Okay.
	Well, that's great.
	We should probably try to get that as one of our theme songs.
	You should!
	So, Stephan, welcome to the show.
	Thank you.
	Give us a little background on how you came to be one of the foremost anarchists, and just a little idea of the path you took, if you could.
	Sure.
	Foremost anarchist.
	That's kind of the taller than Mickey Rooney contest because we're not exactly infesting the planet.
	But I think I came through it fairly honestly after 20 years of struggling with some of the contradictions in objectivism and having a great, probably...
	Sexually charged relationship with that smoky Russian vixen, Ayn Rand.
	I finally just couldn't find a way that you could get taxation and a violent monopoly called the state without violating the non-aggression principle.
	In other words, thou shalt not initiate force against thy fellow carbon-based life forms, well, at least those with a neofrontal cortex.
	And so I kind of just gave up on the last few contradictions, and that leads you to A stateless society.
	It leads you to anarchism.
	And it's a weird and freaky and scary and dangerous word for a lot of people.
	And people say to me, Steph, you shouldn't use the word anarchism.
	And I said, yes, but hostess Twinkism is already copyrighted.
	And even though that's a more friendly name, unfortunately, it just is what it is.
	You can call it something else, but then people will say, well, how is this different from anarchism?
	You say, well, I just don't like the word.
	Basically, it's the idea that society can spontaneously and, in fact, must spontaneously self-organize in the absence of a state.
	Really, really briefly, we have all these social institutions, political institutions, that we have inherited from prehistory.
	You know, like slavery.
	And we said, okay, let's light a torch under slavery and burn it out of the human moral landscape.
	And we had, you know, the subjugation of women was how a lot of society was founded.
	We said, let's light a fire under that.
	And we got rid of things like hunting down and burning witches and warlocks.
	And we got rid of child sacrifice.
	And we got rid of all of these things.
	But there's this weird thing called the state.
	The government, which we just can't seem to bring the same clarity to, even though it's completely obvious that there's no such thing as the government.
	There's just a bunch of people who say, we have the right to initiate force against you, but the word violence is not very good, so we'll use the word law.
	The word violent oligarchy is not very nice, so we'll use the state.
	But it's a monopoly of people with the right to initiate force.
	It is a violation of a universal moral rule.
	Property rights, the non-aggression principle.
	It's primitive.
	It's ancient.
	It continually leads human beings to war, to disasters.
	It was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, the outright murders of hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century.
	And it's time we just took this great moral steamroller that we've been grinding down all of this historical nonsense with and turn it towards the state and see what's left standing if we bring real moral rigor to it.
	I suspect not much, if anything.
	Yeah, it's a fabulous concept that we could be actually free of the state.
	And there's a quote, and I don't know who said it, but they said the success of the state is proven in the fact that people believe anarchy is violent and the state is peaceful.
	And that's the success of the state.
	And I think all states are violent and are created to be so.
	Would you say so, Stephan?
	Yeah, everything that a violent group says is bad, it doesn't mean it's automatically good, but it means that you should take it with a great degree of skepticism.
	But unfortunately, what happened, of course, about 130 years ago was the government took over the education of the young, and that, of course, has become a huge problem.
	And, you know, it's funny.
	A couple of years ago, I was over at a friend's place.
	And they had just, they're having their second kid, but their first kid was like four or five years old, right?
	And he was sitting in front of the TV. He was watching some cartoon or whatever.
	The commercials came on.
	And his parents, you know, they were kind of lefty, kind of hippie, but nice people.
	And they sat down and they said, listen, son, you know that this is all just trying to get you to buy stuff.
	You get that this is just kind of propaganda.
	And he was going through this whole thing with his five-year-old, which I think is fine.
	It's a good thing to do.
	It's important to remind them that commercials aren't reality.
	And he just kept going on.
	They have a motive.
	They have an incentive.
	They're not going to reveal it to you, but they just want to fill you full of all of this nonsense, make you into a materialist, make you bug me to buy stuff which you don't need, and blah, blah, blah.
	And anyway, after the speech, I said, so where's he going to school next year?
	He said, oh, public school down the road.
	It's like, are you going to have the same conversation with him about that?
	Because that's a little bit more important than whether he likes a Transformer or not.
	I doubt that it was.
	But this is the way it is.
	People don't know how much they've been propagandized.
	That's how successful it's been.
	No, they don't.
	They have no idea.
	And they have no clue about how much they've been suppressed as individuals because of this.
	The corporate governmental structure has really suppressed human relationships in between people.
	Would you agree with that, Stephan?
	Oh, completely.
	I mean, we have a community partly through pleasure and partly through fear.
	You know, isn't all good stuff in life partly pleasure and partly fear?
	Everything that we want, we want to ask someone to marry us, it's because we expect the pleasure of marriage and we fear rejection.
	Everything that we want, everything we desire is a mixture of fear and desire.
	And human communities are that way too.
	I mean, we like having friends, we like having a good family, we like having a community.
	But the reason that we go out of our way to help other people is we want to create those bindings within a community so that if we come across hard times, you know, our foot gets run over by a giant penguin on a motorcycle, all the stuff which is difficult to insure for, then our community is going to step in.
	But what's happened, of course, particularly over the last 40 years, is people have traded in community for the state.
	Single moms have done this.
	Deadbeat dads have done this.
	Parents as a whole have done this by turning their kids over to the state as the sort of chain gang babysitting service for 12 years.
	And then, of course, sometimes even turning them over to the state as military denizens.
	And so we've gotten rid of all of that.
	And now what's happened is it's been so long.
	You know, it's like that scene in 1984 where Winston Smith goes into the bar to talk to the old guy who almost can't remember what life was like before the revolution.
	Well, we can't remember what it was like when we all got together to solve problems.
	And now what's happened is that state has taken over so much that it's considered to be like a central support, a keystone to the arch.
	And if we take the state away, everything collapses.
	But the state took over all of this stuff that was there before.
	If you take away the state, other things will rush in.
	It's like if you pull a rock out of the middle of a river, the water doesn't just keep running around.
	It has a hole, a mystery.
	Things rush in to fill in, and there's tons of historical precedents of how people were taken care of.
	In terms of charity and healthcare and pensions and all this, it all worked really well in the past, much better than it does now, but we're old and it's happened so long ago now that it's really hard to remember for some people what it was like before, and so we've got this idea that if the state doesn't do it, it's not going to get done, and that's the ultimate in subjugation.
	Absolutely, and one of the things is, I would even take it one step further, is that the state actually creates collapse amongst society.
	And one of the things I've heard is that in the, quote, wild, wild west, people think it was extremely violent until the sheriff came in.
	And of course, what is a sheriff?
	He's a representative of the government.
	And so as a result, people think that the state makes things better, whereas the state actually makes things worse and collapses families and communities because they then look to an anonymous entity that they can't really talk to And it becomes almost like a godlike entity because they can't see it, they can't touch it, they can't do much with it except give it money, and think that it may come to rescue them.
	And during the hurricane in New York, I saw a lot of people say, well, where is everybody?
	Well, where's the help?
	You know, we've got no help.
	They're looking not to each other but to the state.
	What do you think about that, Stephan?
	Well, I mean, in the hurricane, the Occupy Wall Street people were going around bringing food and first aid to people on boats while the government was still filling out forms to figure out whether they could maybe get a requisition for another form wherein they might get a requisition for another form to possibly get a boat delivered next week.
	And of course, the government has made all of these areas much more dangerous by providing subsidies to flood insurance.
	And so people are going to build in these crazy places because the government will largely pick up the tab for rebuilding their houses.
	And so the toll, the waste, the environmental destruction wrought about, all of this destruction and recreation of things is horrendous.
	And we just have this mentality now.
	It's like, we have a problem.
	Let's make a law.
	We have a problem, let's hold a political protest.
	We have a problem, let's write to a congressperson.
	We just have this idea that all we have in our toolkit is this big, giant, medieval ass hammer.
	And when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right?
	I gotta hit that.
	You know, it's like, you know, the idiots like me who think that if I am having trouble with a piece of electronics, if I drop it from a medium height, somehow it will get better because one time it did.
	And so, if that's all you have, is the idea that we appeal to the state, then that's all you're going to do.
	And of course, the state is more than happy to foster that idea and to create these imaginary enemies, you know?
	Oh, you see, if it wasn't for us, you'd be really scared of people who want to sell you stuff but can't force you to do anything.
	I mean, good lord, how dangerous is that?
	Look, I'd like to sell you a latte.
	Quickly, bring the children inside.
	There's somebody outside.
	He's got an ice cream truck and he's going to want to sell children our ice cream.
	I mean, just say no.
	You can just say no to everyone in the world except the state because they've got a gun to your jugular and they've got a nice little cell with a rather aggressive Vaseline-coated cellmate who's going to make your life a living hell.
	And so the only people you can't say no to are the government.
	And these are always the people we run to whenever we have a problem.
	Where do we think this is going to lead us?
	Well, it's even worse than that.
	People have become apathetic about their government because in actuality there is no representation in the United States.
	We have lost any real representation.
	The senators and the congressmen, they have to respond to sometimes over a million constituents.
	And they have hundreds of assistants who just write form letters.
	So there's become a great apathy in the United States over even talking to their government.
	But they still believe in it, which is really absurd, because they can't communicate with their representative.
	They can't communicate with their congressman.
	But they still say, well, what is the government doing?
	But heck, you haven't talked to your congressman ever.
	You don't even know who he is.
	Yeah, I mean, they should, you know, like in the NASCAR, they have all of these stickers.
	Everyone who buys a piece of the NASCAR advertising gets a sticker.
	Well, this is exactly how it should work.
	You should get tattoos on a congressperson for everyone who's donated more than a certain amount, and proportional to their donations, so we can see who we're really talking to.
	There's a great proof of...
	Of anarchy in the form of the state.
	It's kind of tricky.
	You kind of have to look at it sideways, but it's a really powerful proof because people say basically, well, look, we need the government to enforce contracts because they've never heard of eBay or PayPal or Visa or whatever, right, who will resolve any disputes you have for free.
	But let's say that they say, well, we need the government to enforce contracts.
	But the government is a perfect example of why you don't need the government to enforce contracts.
	Well, how does the government work?
	Well, you give a whole bunch of money to a congressman.
	And then that congressman is going to listen to you more than anyone else when it comes time for legislation.
	And this is well-tested.
	It's well-proven.
	Economists have been over this.
	You can get about 200 bucks back in profits for every dollar you spend on campaign donations, which is why so much money does get spent.
	There's no better return on investment for a business person than this kind of stuff.
	And so the interesting thing is that this all works.
	People donate to congressmen in return for preferential treatment.
	But the interesting thing is, it's all completely illegal.
	And yet it works perfectly.
	It works perfectly.
	Even though you can't write it down, you can't ever take a court to enforce it.
	And so when people say, well, we need the government to enforce contracts, it's like, you understand that corruption in a democracy works flawlessly to the detriment of almost everyone with no contract and no capacity whatsoever to enforce it.
	That's how powerful anarchism is.
	Anarchy runs the government and people say that anarchy doesn't work.
	Well, actually, I'd say it's corruption that runs the government.
	Anarchy, if we talk about it in its purest state, is something else.
	It's more of a collaboration between people that don't have a higher power that they have to respond to.
	Am I correct in saying that, Stephan?
	Yeah, I mean, it's a little facetish.
	What I mean is that contracts that can't be enforced by the government run the government.
	And of course, in a free market, in a truly free society, you would have tons of incentives to keep your contracts and tons of disincentives to break your contracts and so on.
	It would all be above board.
	It would all be visible.
	It would all be available.
	You'd have your contract rating, how good are you at keeping your contracts, like your credit rating or whatever.
	As you developed a better contract rating, the price of your contracts would go down.
	And if you, you know, screwed someone in a way that they didn't, you know, tip you on the nightstand for, then, you know, your contract rating would go down and then it would be more expensive to get insurance for whatever business you did.
	I mean, there's so many different ways that this stuff can be organized and I do occasionally get drawn into the black hole of explaining this stuff because the fundamental thing is it doesn't matter.
	I don't care.
	What jobs the ex-slaves have three generations from now?
	You can't prove it.
	You can't explain it.
	But you do know that slavery is wrong.
	We do know that the initiation of force is wrong for you and for me, for everyone, except people in funny little costumes or in funny little teapot buildings.
	And that exclusionary shit has just got to stop.
	Yeah.
	Well, it's not just that, but it's all being done for profit for a very small amount of megacorporations.
	That's why I say corruption, because it's not...
	I understand what you're saying when you're saying it's anarchy, because there is no rule, there's no law.
	It's just a bunch of high-end cowboys playing Indians, and they're trying to create conflict in order to sell war machine items.
	I mean, 52% of our budget in the United States now goes to the war machine, and it's actually higher than that.
	I'm being conservative.
	But 50% is so shocking to most people.
	I try not to tell them that the truth is it's more like 60% because we're maintaining 1,000 military bases all over the world.
	And just to give people an idea, in France it's about 7%.
	So we do have an incredible chaos going on in government, but I don't believe that anarchy and chaos are equivalent.
	What would you say about that, Stefan?
	Oh, no, there's no question.
	Anarchy produces order.
	Now, it's called the creative destruction of the free market.
	Someone comes up with a great idea for about 12 minutes, everyone thinks it's great, and then someone comes up with an even better idea and so on, right?
	But creative destruction is what we want.
	We don't want to be hanging around using these cell phones the size of a shoebox pointing at a satellite and not being under any trees.
	We want those things to go by the wayside and better things to come along.
	So there is...
	a kind of instability in growth, which we kind of want.
	You don't want the movie theater to be playing the same movie for 10 years.
	You want new movies, even if you like them or you don't or whatever, but you want some new stuff.
	So there is a continual process of creative destruction that occurs.
	It's a little destabilizing.
	And one of the things that people love, there's no better friend of the government than the military people and big business people, right?
	Because they love to use the government to raise barriers to entries, to rent-seek, to keep innovative, young, hard-working, entrepreneurial, sweaty types off their manicured, lawn-bowling avenues of perfect, illicit, fascistic profits.
	So there is kind of an instability in a free market.
	You know, things are there and then you change.
	It's an upgrade.
	Something works, then it doesn't.
	And so I always have better ideas.
	But if you want to have a look at chaos, oh my goodness.
	I mean, people who think that our system is stable is, I mean, they're like people who are saying, well, my heroin addiction is stable because I just got a hit and I feel fine.
	But of course, we know what's happening down the road.
	You know, I was doing a debate with a guy the other day who was saying, well, statism works well in Europe, and it's like, Baha, what are you talking about?
	I mean, they just slaughtered 40 million people 60 years ago and now they've sold off the young three generations down the future to foreign bankers to pay for the bribeocracy of the citizens in the here and now.
	Unfunded liabilities and the hundreds of trillions of dollars, completely unsustainable.
	Anybody who's not talking about what's coming next has zero concern for the poor, has zero concern for the victims of war, has zero concern for the sick, zero concern for the elderly, because this stuff will not last.
	It cannot last.
	And anybody who's not looking for alternatives is simply sitting on a plane whose both wings have torn off, wind's blowing through their hairs, half a stewardess is up their nose, and they're saying, well, I'm sure we'll land on something soft.
	It's mad.
	It is mad.
	And the true madness is how few people understand this.
	What do you think, Stephan?
	You live in Vancouver, that's right?
	No, I live just outside of Toronto.
	Oh, Toronto.
	Okay, I'm sorry.
	I saw Vancouver.
	I think people get it, but I think they get it really unconsciously.
	You know, like, depression is up.
	Obesity is up.
	People are stress-eating.
	They're popping these horrendous psychotropic meds.
	What is it?
	One in four American women on these antidepressants last year.
	I think we get it at a very kind of deep level, but it's very hard to articulate for most people.
	We just know that we're anxious.
	We know that we're not healthy.
	We know that we're obese.
	We know that we just feel unwell as a whole, and I think that's because people are just refusing to look at where we're going.
	I found your video particularly interesting, the one I just watched, because I have, in the last year, known more suicides Than ever in my life.
	I've known of more people committing suicide now.
	I think I know of approximately six in the last year.
	Not people I knew personally, but a friend's daughter, a friend's husband, and I do have a friend who says to me he wants to kill himself every day.
	Yeah, and so I'm just, suicide seems to be a lot in the air.
	I just, I can't explain why.
	But we'll get back to that because it was on your video and something you talked about a lot.
	So we're going to have to take a commercial break right now.
	This is Gadsden Rising with our special guest, Stephan Mournier, and Mary-Bee Van Houten, our co-host and producer.
	We'll be right back.
	You're listening to Freedomizer Radio at freedomizerradio.com.
	You can also listen and participate by calling 347-324-3704.
	Like Freedomizer Radio on Facebook and subscribe to Libby Gadsden on Facebook.
	We're back!
	Oh, thanks Mary Lou, and this is Gadsden Rising.
	I'm Libby Gadsden, and we have our special guest on today, Stephan Molyneux, and he is an anarchist, and Mary Lou Van Houten, our co-host and producer.
	So Stephan, we were chatting just now, but we were interrupted by the commercials.
	First of all, tell us about your documentary coming up.
	Well, I've modestly called it TRUTH! It's a deep diagnosis documentary, in other words.
	There's so much stuff that happens up on the surface that is the result of some very, very deep activity that's going on in the system as a whole.
	and it's very easy for us to get distracted by the shadows, right?
	Like, you know, there's that old story that Socrates talked about, how people live in this cave, and they're just looking at the shadows cast by the firelights of things on the wall, and they think those are the real things.
	They have to kind of climb out of the cave and look at the real world under the brilliant sun.
	And really, that's modestly or not, that's what I'm trying to do, a Matrix unplugging movie, where I'm really taking a philosophical examination of the ethical roots of the system.
	We have a system that is fundamentally predicated and based upon the violation of universal moral rules against the initiation of force and respect for property rights.
	And the effects of that are...
	Really far-reaching.
	And there's lots of sort of surface stuff, but it's right down there in the core of the basic way we've structured our society.
	We have rules for everyone called don't steal, don't murder, don't rape, don't assault.
	And then we create this group in the middle of, frankly, it's a shit pile for sociopaths where they all go and attempt to climb on the general population and feed on them like a bunch of vampires.
	We create this exclusion in the middle.
	Right at the center are called the state, the police, the military, the law courts, the prison system, the legal system, and all of these people, and the financial system, I mean, the fiat currency.
	I mean, imagine giving people the capacity, the right to type whatever they want into their own bank accounts.
	I mean, how long do you expect a system like that to last?
	It can't.
	But we get really distracted by all of the stuff that happens at the surface.
	And this film just starts coring in right down deep to the moral rules that we're violating.
	And as a result, we get all of these terrible things.
	But if we focus on the terrible things, they're not the root cause of the moral evils that we praise.
	You know, these Satans that we've stood at the altar and praise as if they're Jesus— If we don't understand that we are praising the wrong things and damning the wrong things, then we're like people lost in the woods who think north is south and east is west.
	We're never going to get where we need to go.
	In fact, we're only going to get more and more lost.
	And would you say that currency change is a solution to a lot of our problems?
	In other words, not change, but multiple currencies.
	Yeah, I mean, you can't have...
	An intergenerational predatory system without fiat currency.
	It's really hard to have sustained war without fiat currency.
	It's really hard to have this massive amount of bribery that goes on, where in America, half the population is dependent to a large degree on the government for its income.
	You can't have that without fiat currency.
	It's no accident that the 20th century was both the century of fiat currency and the century of total war and total dictatorship.
	If you look at the list of the wars the United States has been involved in, it's astonishing.
	You know, people just remember three wars or two wars.
	It's something like 50.
	Oh, and that's just the official ones, right?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Thank you.
	It doesn't include the war on drugs in South America.
	And the border wars they're having with Mexico where they're shipping guns over to Mexico and creating wars.
	So one of the things that we're experiencing here in southern France and in Europe in general is that the cities are creating their new currencies for just their region.
	We're having a resurgence and people are interested in, like you said, they subconsciously know something's wrong and it has to do with fiat currency.
	By the way, can you tell the audience, when you say fiat currency, what exactly that means?
	It's currency where you use a specific brand of European car...
	No, wait, hang on.
	It's currency where...
	That's my second bad joke.
	There'll be probably more to come.
	But it's currency where it's not based on anything real.
	It's not based on anything tangible, like gold or silver or diamonds, or even Bitcoin, which is based upon limited GPU or CPU resources to solve particular algorithms.
	And because it's unlimited, you can print as much of it.
	Basically, it's counterfeiting.
	You can print as much of it as you want.
	You don't, in fact, even have to bother printing it.
	You can just type it into whatever program you use to store your currency and bank accounts and so on.
	It's crazy because what happens is rather than raise taxes when you offer new goods and services to people, you simply print more money.
	You don't raise taxes and what happens is inflation spreads out.
	The inflation is actually the printing of currency.
	The raising in prices is the effect of that.
	When you print a lot of money, you raise the price of everything because it's more money chasing around the same number of goods.
	That is the most regressive tax there is.
	It hits the poor, those on fixed incomes, the elderly, the hardest.
	Everyone, because they don't understand this because this is the last thing they'd want to teach in a government school because it's really, really important.
	Peloponnesian War.
	And so what happens is they print all of this money, hand it out, and then everybody gets broke years down the road, and they get to blame the shopkeeper for raising the prices where the shopkeeper is just surfing the crazy waves of fiat currency.
	And the government then has to control interest rates.
	Once the government controls currency and interest rates, you have no free market left.
	You have no free market left.
	That's like saying, well, if 90 people are peeing in the pool, there's a little bit there that's great to swim in.
	Nope.
	It doesn't work that way at all.
	Thank you.
	I think people are searching for a reality to their currencies, not just here but in the United States.
	Is it the same way in Canada?
	Oh, there's a considerable interest among the younger people, because the older people, the boomers and so on, I mean, they had a pretty sweet deal, right?
	I mean, all the way back to Eisenhower building the highways, this was all built under deficit financing and all built under debt.
	Right.
	And so the boomers basically got a huge amount of services provided to them, you know, healthcare, charity, roads, education for the young and so on, largely financed through, you know, passing the buck, kicking the can down the road.
	And of course, the old age security and all the pensions that are due now and the healthcare that is due to the elderly and so on.
	So they got to save a whole bunch of money while basically shafting the next generation or two with these massive debts and so on.
	And their education was very cheap, even the graduate schools and so on were very cheap relative to now.
	And so they had a blast, really.
	And that's why the baby boomers are the richest generation the world has ever seen, because they offloaded a whole bunch of costs that they otherwise would have had to pay for through the government into debt while creating this, you know, hydra-headed fascistic monster that those young knights have to try and find some way to hack down to size.
	But now, of course, among the younger people, there's a great deal of interest because their futures are incredibly truncated.
	The amount of debt they graduate with is huge.
	The opportunities are vastly diminished.
	And this is one of the reasons why youth suicide is so high and why youth mental health problems are so high is that, you know, a lot of the people who are older are kind of getting off the Titanic in these little boats.
	Leaky though they may be, it's still better than being there.
	But the young in particular are like, Leonardo DiCaprio changed the boiler as the water's coming up, so they're very interested in looking at alternatives.
	You know, it's always desperation that breeds change.
	It's very sad.
	People refuse to live by reason.
	They refuse to learn by reason and evidence, and so they're like an addict who just has to hit bottom in order to change anything.
	It's depressing, but I'll still go with the reason and evidence.
	In some ways, people have hit bottom and they don't even realize it.
	I mean, I was watching the coverage about the hurricane in New York, and the police and firemen are taping off people's doors and saying they can't come back in their house.
	And, well, what are we going to do?
	Well, we don't know, but you just can't go back in your house.
	Even though your house looks fine and everything is okay inside, it's structurally damaged.
	And my point is that that's rock bottom.
	They just threw you out in the street.
	But still, they say, well, where's the government?
	Where's the help?
	They're still in this phase and this fuzz and this fog of, well, where's the government?
	They're looking at the government.
	They're shutting their houses down.
	Yeah, oh, they're there.
	They're just not where you want them to be.
	And then they're complaining about their right to vote.
	Well, we can't vote, so why didn't they postpone the vote for us?
	And they're still all completely standing around talking about what they consider real, which is a government that is helpful, at the same time as they're watching the government throw them out of their houses and not let them vote.
	So when you say rock bottom...
	I'm not sure there is a rock bottom.
	And sometimes I wonder, where is the bottom for these people?
	Well, for these people, it's probably fairly quick.
	But for society as a whole, I mean, I think the Day of Reckoning is tragically fairly close.
	Yeah.
	I mean, what is it, $70, $80, $90 trillion in unfunded liabilities in the U.S. economy on an economy that's $15 trillion gross every year.
	And that includes all the government nonsense and government-paid workers and all.
	So it's completely not sustainable, obviously.
	And you hear all of this terrible, sad, pitiful bleating.
	You know, people say, I'm going to retire.
	I paid into this system my whole life.
	I'm owed.
	It's like, no, no.
	You let your money be taken from you by a bunch of mafiosos.
	And so, of course, I mean, if you give your money to a drug addict, you can't say you've invested it.
	And if you give your money to power addicts, you can't say you've invested it.
	It's gone.
	And it was clear that it was gone years and years and years ago when they started pillaging the Social Security Fund and replacing it with the dusty IOUs of Treasury notes, for heaven's sakes, replacing an asset with a liability.
	It's all blown.
	It's all gone, and people just aren't waking up to this yet, because they seem to just have this amazing capacity to close their eyes and have basic mathematics bounce off their domes.
	It's amazing, but where you won't learn from reality, reality will school you pretty hard.
	You really reminded me of one of Ron Paul's quotes.
	He said exactly that when asked in an interview.
	About Social Security said it's all gone.
	It's all been stolen.
	It's gone.
	Right, Mary Lou?
	Am I correct?
	A bunch of IOUs, I think, right?
	Yeah.
	That's all that's there.
	What do you think of Ron Paul, by the way?
	Well, he's a pretty admirable fellow.
	I mean, he's certainly a better doctor than I'll ever be, and he's certainly a better congressman than I would ever want to be.
	I think that the political solution is generations too late.
	I think that we can't look for a political solution.
	I think that's mad.
	You don't try and infiltrate the mafia and turn it into the United Way, and you can't go into a monstrous organization like the state.
	I'm sorry?
	Well, no, okay, but whatever charity is not, you know, but you can't, you know, you don't take over Charles Manson and say, I'm sure he'll be a great babysitter if I just work on him a little while with some textbooks.
	I mean, the government is an agency of lies, deception, immorality, criminality, and so on.
	You just, you cannot go into the most successful criminal organizations of all time and turn them to virtue.
	That's just not what they're about.
	There's lots of other things that people can do, but the problem is that freedom fighters, all they can think of is politics.
	In fact, they've been co-opted by the state.
	Everyone says, well, we have a problem.
	The government is the solution.
	We have a problem of too much government.
	I guarantee you, The government is not going to be the solution to that, but this is where everyone tends to be drawn to.
	And Ron Paul, you know, whatever his motives may be, is the Pied Piper, I think, leading a lot of money and energy astray when we could do much more valuable things without getting involved in politics.
	I think at least he brought awareness to a groundswell of people now that will take his words of truth and bring it forward.
	And regardless of how he got there and how he lasted so long and the government has been criticized terribly, For being a patsy or being a fool, but you can say whatever you want, but his words have power and have truth in them, just like your movie says truth.
	Truth doesn't go away.
	Truth stays.
	It's the lies that fall away.
	So I think we can at least say that he brought awareness to a lot of people, and I think that's where his power lies.
	Do you feel that way about him, Stephan?
	I mean, I do and I don't.
	I mean, I'm certainly happy that more people are aware of Austrian economics, that more people are aware of the immorality of the state and so on.
	I think that's always a good thing.
	But, you know, my concern is now that people are just going to stop doing the stuff that they need to do to free the world and instead are going to cross their fingers to Rand Paul in 2012 or, you know, son of Rand Paul in 2024 or whatever, and we're just going to follow this political train right off a cliff.
	My concern is that he is awakening people, but I'm not sure that he's awakening people to things other than Well, and the Fed was a book that he wrote that was quite, I think, quite astonishing to many people and did make them more aware of what the system's all about because the Federal Reserve has always been a mysterious semi-governmental group of people that is not
	at all that.
	It's just a private cartel of bankers that are Siphoning money up from the poor.
	And this is something they're starting to understand.
	Whereas only in 2008, 2007, when Mary Lou and I were demonstrating in front of the Federal Reserve in Atlanta, we were just a handful of people.
	And now there's hundreds of people doing this.
	And so in that way, I think he's helped a lot in opening people's eyes about the Federal Reserve.
	And as we said, it's fiat currency that's at the base.
	of all of the problems that we're having and is really what's strangling true anarchy because true anarchy depends upon free exchange of goods and services without depending upon fiat currency.
	Would you say so, Stephan?
	Yeah.
	Fiat currency is the drug that lets them take out your spleen, your heart, your unborn children, the next generation, you name it, without you feeling much, much pain, right?
	I mean, and this is what is so difficult and so dangerous about it.
	Like, if I come to some political rally of 100 people and I say, I'm going to give you all $1,000, right?
	And they say, yay, let's vote this guy in.
	And I say, okay, you just have to give me $1,500 each.
	I had to keep $500 myself, and here's $1,000 back.
	Yeah.
	Well, then people would say, hey, wait a minute.
	They actually did that back in 2007 and 2006.
	I remember, don't you remember, they were handing out $400 checks to people, like, you know, oh, to help you get along.
	Yeah, and the only reason, the only way that they can do that is because they can print it or borrow it.
	Otherwise, the whole lie would just be ridiculous.
	They're spending now, I think, $65,000 per family on poverty programs.
	And how much of that actually gets to the poor?
	You know, 10%, 20%, maybe 30%?
	I doubt that much.
	I mean, it's all just a massive scam.
	Yeah, I doubt that much too.
	So, without fiat currency, the whole lie of this, quote, redistribution, what a nasty word, as if it were just how some randomly distributed beforehand rather than earned by people's sweat and risk and effort.
	So, the only way that they can promise you stuff that they don't have, I mean, the government has nothing.
	The government creates nothing.
	The government is a ghost, a void, a vacuum, a white vampire, you name it.
	That parasite!
	There's no...
	I mean, this is the reason why zombie movies are so popular these days, because people can look left and right in a voting line, and they know what's going on.
	And so, what happens is, if you don't have the fiat currency, you can't give people the illusion of money.
	If you actually have to take it from them in order to give it back, it's going to immediately be revealed as a lie.
	But all of this cloudy stuff that happens, oh, I got a check for $400.
	Did you know that by next year, your $400 is going to be worth, in terms of how much extra inflation is there, probably negative $400 because you've lost $800 worth of purchasing power because of inflation.
	Well, how many people can make that connection?
	And no one can really prove it directly, but it's there nonetheless.
	Yeah.
	I visited Africa and poor countries in the Caribbean back in the 80s and 90s.
	One of the ways that the despots in some of these countries appeased the people was they'd drive through crowds of people in their limousines and they'd throw coins out in the streets so that people could rush and grab them.
	And that's all I could think of when I got my $400 check.
	Here's me scrambling for the money that the government has thrown out its limousine window.
	It's really the same thing.
	Can't we get back to bread and circuses?
	Because at least the government has to bake bread rather than just print money, which is a lot easier.
	Yeah.
	They're giving you back a pittance of what you've given them.
	And, of course, most of what you've given them is in some private bank account or invested in some real estate.
	Or something like that.
	It doesn't come back to you.
	And the United States government has become, I think, the most foremost parasitical government on the planet.
	And I see people that I know just going down like flies all over the place.
	They're buying condominiums in Florida, but they can't pay the taxes and insurance because most other people in the building can't either, so they have to give it away.
	So we've got all kinds of people suffering from a parasitical government.
	It's so fat and so parasitical, I cannot believe that enough people are still supporting governmental policies such as private prisons.
	And I don't know, what do you think about the incarceration of Bradley Manning?
	Oh, I mean, he's a complete martyr to any kind of truth course.
	I mean, it's always tough when someone on the inside of a military organization does something right.
	I have mixed feelings.
	Someone in the mafia turned out to be a tattletaler.
	Well, I guess I'm happy, but I don't know.
	I mean, it's kind of ambiguous and kind of ambivalent about it.
	But as far as this predation goes, I want to mention too, you know, probably what the next thing that's going to happen, and we're talking about it in Washington...
	is, you know, they're out of money for Social Security, but equivalently, disastrously, they're out of money for all of the public sector pensions as well.
	And, of course, the demand for the Treasury still remains fairly high, but that's only because all of the other economies in the world are virtually in freefall.
	But I think they're probably going to pass some kind of law that's going to force people to buy Treasuries as part of their retirement.
	And, I mean, that's just going to be, I mean, that's just outright theft.
	I mean, that's just outright theft.
	And, of course, it's going to be spun as, you know, a positive move and patriotic, and the government is as good as gold and all that kind of stuff.
	But I think they're going to have to start pillaging the private or semi-private pension funds and so on, and they're going to do that by swapping out real assets for these IOUs called Treasuries and thus further burdening the younger generation.
	But, I mean, this is, it's such a mess right now that this is like watching a squid that's impaled.
	I mean, it's just the tentacles are riding out trying to grab everything it can because it's days of Do you think there's any hope at all?
	I want your opinion without telling you mine.
	Well, I mean, yes, because it happened before.
	I mean, people don't know this, of course, but in the 19-teens and 1920s and 1930s there were these friendly societies where you could get a year's worth of health care for two days' pay as a manual laborer.
	One of the reasons that this was blown away was because the doctors didn't like the fact that they had to compete for all of these groups who got together and wanted to bid them down and they didn't like the midwives and they didn't like the pharmacists and they didn't like all the other people who weren't licensed.
	So they, you know, they forced the go, they lobbied the government and gave lots of money to politicians.
	So the politicians would restrict entry to the profession, would outlaw a whole bunch And then, of course, after the Second World War, they got the right to write prescriptions and so on.
	And so it's really been snowballing since then.
	So, I mean, the path to cheap, affordable, effective healthcare is very simple.
	I mean, you repeal the FDA, you repeal the licensing of doctors, you...
	You repeal the monopoly on prescriptions from doctors, and immediately what will spring up is a whole bunch of people who will work really hard and really well to certify your medicines as safe, or at least if they're not safe, to advise you of the risk and so on.
	People don't want to take random pills and not know what effects they're going to be, so this service will be provided by But all, you know, the solution in general is just stop pointing guns at everyone.
	You know, stop pointing guns at people who have, you know, want to pursue a particular cure and people who want to take it.
	Stop pointing guns at people who want to provide health care, people who want to consume it.
	But there's so many entrenched interests now that it's going to be pretty hard to unwind that.
	Yeah, it is.
	I like what you say about taking away the licenses of medical practitioners because one of the worst propaganda that we receive as Americans is from the AMA. And they're the ones putting their stamp of approval on a lot of things that kill people.
	And in fact, illegal drugs is now the leading cause of death in America, from what I'm hearing.
	It's not illegal drugs, it's legal drugs, and a toxic mix of legal drugs that people are consuming that kill them.
	And we know of several celebrities already, so what about the normal people, quote-unquote regular people?
	We don't hear about them.
	Well, my God, I mean, all of these adult psychotropic brain chemistry-altering medications are being shoveled down the throats of children.
	Oh, yeah.
	Literally enforced because they have to go to public school and the public school won't accept them unless they get.
	And plus bribed for because then your kid is considered on disability and you get extra social security payments and so on.
	I mean, we're just force feeding this unbelievably toxic crap to our children by the fistful.
	And it's never been tested on children.
	There are no long term studies whatsoever.
	And then people somehow think that the government is there to protect you.
	I had this Dr.
	Mary Ruart on my show.
	She's worth checking out.
	You guys should have her on too.
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah.
	She's done calculations that millions of people have died because of healthy medications, perfectly legal in other countries, kept off the U.S. market for reasons of, quote, safety.
	You can't wave guns.
	You can't create monopolies of force and then expect anything but short-term gain for the minority and long-term pain, death, and destruction for the majority.
	But it's just a lesson.
	It's so hard for people to learn.
	It is.
	It's incredibly hard because it's been drummed into them so long.
	We're taught to look at the certificates on the wall, the doctor that's treating us.
	Of course, you don't want to go to some snake oil guy.
	I have to say that there is a difference here in France.
	We do have homeopathic practitioners who are available, and you do get reimbursed by the government for some of the treatment that they provide.
	They're much more available here than they are in the States.
	They're much more numerous.
	In the pharmaceutical stores, you can buy all kinds of remedies.
	Whereas I found that in the States, my choices were shrinking in terms of quote-unquote alternative medications.
	So I think that you're correct in saying that this is one of the worst people we're facing is this licensing of practitioners that all bow down to the FDA, the AMA, All down the line, so that we can all receive these, quote, legal drugs that will kill us.
	And that's, I think, would you say that's it in a nutshell, Stephan?
	I mean, I do.
	I think that healthcare is, you know, boy, I mean, it's a very complex issue, of course.
	I mean, depending on who you talk to, you know, 60%, 70%, 80% of healthcare problems are lifestyle-related.
	And one of the things, of course, that's happening, I mean, this is all just, again, tip of the iceberg stuff for all of the violence that's going on underneath.
	But, I mean, obesity in the U.S. I was just reading this article on obesity in Mexico.
	I mean, it's crazy.
	It's unbelievable.
	How overweight people are getting.
	All I have to do is take a look at that website called People of Walmart.
	Have you ever seen that?
	I've not.
	It may not be number one on my list of things to go to next.
	It will be.
	It's hilarious.
	It's so funny.
	But it's funny and it's bad.
	But I mean, one of the things that happens in the U.S., of course, is that you have this sugar cartel that works with the government to double the price of sugar for the average consumer.
	And then, of course, everybody facing all of these rising costs and price problems and so on ends up substituting this unholy high-fructose corn syrup for sugar because the monopolies have made sugar too expensive and that's causing lots of problems for people.
	I mean, it's a huge mess.
	It is.
	It is.
	But we're going to take a commercial break.
	We're a little overdue right now.
	So we'll get right back to that, Stephan.
	And this is Gadsden Rising with Libby Gadsden, our special guest Stephan Molyneux, anarchist, and Mary Lou Van Houten, our co-host and producer.
	We'll be right back.
	Hello, everyone.
	Bruce here again.
	I want to let you...
	Hey, Stephan.
	How are you there?
	I'm...
	How are you doing?
	Okay.
	This is your time to take any break you need to take, or we can chat about anything else you want to talk about.
	No, I'm good.
	How long is the show?
	Oh, cool, cool.
	Well, your show seems to be doing very well.
	You have a radio show, am I correct?
	It's a podcast.
	I mean, I go on the radio, but I don't have a radio show.
	It's a podcast.
	Oh, cool, cool, cool.
	Well, we need people like you.
	That's all I can say.
	Well, thank you.
	Thank you.
	I do my best.
	I sort of try and keep it entertaining and passionate and, you know, hopefully somewhat not entirely fact-free.
	So that's certainly the goal.
	That sounds like me and Marilyn.
	We try to have fun and just talk about whatever we feel like talking about.
	But because our hearts and our passion are in what we know is existing in the state, You know, just can't help from popping up, so we always gravitate back to the same thing.
	And how long is the show today?
	We've only got another about 20 minutes, as soon as this break's over.
	So you've got about a two-minute break right now in the chat room, and then we'll have the end of the commercials, and then we'll have another 20 minutes and we'll be over.
	Do you want to do a call for any questions from the chat room?
	You mean receive callers?
	Is that what you're talking about?
	We could either receive callers, or if anybody has a question, they could type it into the chat room.
	You could read it.
	Mary Lou does that.
	She's a producer, yeah.
	Because I live in southern France, and my computer won't let me access the producer keyboard.
	So Mary Lou and I have collaborated, so she's the person for that.
	And also, give her the information about that other guest that you suggested.
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, I will.
	What's the name of the guest again?
	It's R-U-W-A-R-T. Her first name is Mary.
	I've heard of her a couple of times and she's just fantastic on healthcare.
	I've heard of her.
	I'd love to have her on.
	We do talk about holistic medicine a lot.
	We talk about all the things around because people don't understand how deeply the tentacles of the government have reached into their lives.
	And we're going to start a roundtable, I think, of political women and just talk about whatever the heck we feel like talking about.
	That's a great idea.
	That's going to be once a week.
	Just because women are so involved with their children and schooling, and in some ways, they're more involved with the societal problems than men are.
	On a personal level, you know?
	I think that women are more involved in the actual solution because women are raising the kids and I think that's where the real solution comes in.
	So I think that the work...
	I mean, I'm a stay-at-home dad, so I'll count myself in the mom category, but I think that the work that we do with kids is the best way to free the world.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Because, you know, we've now been under at least a century of a state, you know, of a violent state that's indoctrinated us.
	So the only solution is to create a new generation of awareness in people.
	Because even... ...unmuted.
	We'll be back in a minute.
	If you'd like to comment or speak...
	We're back.
	Well, thanks Mary-Lou, and this is Gadsden Rising with Libby Gadsden and our special guest Stefan Molyneux and Mary-Lou Van Houten, our co-host and producer.
	And Stefan and I were just chatting about him being a stay-at-home dad.
	Oh, that's funny.
	Yeah, me and 20,000 other people in Canada, so 20,000 other guys in Canada, we are hard to spot.
	We stay close to the undergrowth, but we do stick out like a sore thumb in any Moms and Me groups.
	What do you mean?
	You don't want to meet other moms?
	No, I do.
	It's just that there's not a...
	Well, there's just some.
	There's another guy I know who's a fireman, so he's off a couple of days a week, of course.
	But yeah, it's a pretty female-centric world for the little ones, and so it's nice to throw a little bit of chest hair into the mix.
	Yeah.
	And Mary Lou actually lets Jeff know that we're thinking about starting a women's roundtable once a week.
	And that's how it came up that he's a stay-at-home dad because people who take care of the kids are essential to changing the next generation.
	So that's how that came about.
	And because we've had so many decades now of indoctrination that even our elders, you know, grandparents, They don't have much to give us in terms of insight.
	It's just gone on so long.
	Would you say so, Stephan?
	Yeah, I genuinely believe that if you want to look at society in the future and what it's going to look like and how it's going to function, you look at the childhoods in the present.
	I think that's something inescapable about all the lessons in the environments that we have as children.
	So often they just get replicated.
	Our brains are just like temporal photocopy machines that reproduce the past and the present so often.
	And since the 1960s in particular, when it became pretty much impossible to fire teachers, when the quality of education began to seriously decline after the public sector unions took over the teaching profession, I think basically schools have been turned into pretty much prisons as a whole.
	The buildings are built by the same people.
	You've got to raise your hand to go to the washroom.
	You don't have any control over your schedule or your day.
	You're shoved in there with a whole bunch of people you may like, you may not like.
	There's a tiny ratio.
	Of authority figures to inmates, and you've got metal detectors, you're afraid of weaponry, there's bullying, there's all of this Lord of the Fly stuff that goes on.
	And so if we're basically putting our children into a kind of prison without significant intervention, the future is going to turn into a prison as well, because you simply can't expose your kids to 12 years of institutionalized hierarchy and then expect that they're somehow going to be liberty-loving free marketers when they pop out the other side.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I went through the public school system.
	There's a large level of violence in this school system as well, and it's just getting worse from what I hear.
	And that's another analogy to prison systems that you can make, that the violence level of schools is horrendous.
	Yeah, and of course, if you cause too much trouble and if you don't like it enough, then you will be drugged in general.
	I mean, the largest source of referrals to psychotropic medications is from teachers who basically sit the parents down and insist that the child be drugged because he's bored in school.
	And, you know, we swung a little bit too far, I think, towards making school more friendly to girls.
	And now the boys are going completely insane in there because they basically just sit in a row.
	And, you know, when they're a little bit more used to throwing themselves against trees or...
	You know, all the things that boys do to learn about the world.
	And so we basically have come up, I think, with a school system where all children are suspect, but we view boys in particular as broken girls and generally who need to be fixed by medication, which turns a rather sinister element of school more into...
	One flew over the cuckoo's nest kinds of incarceration wards with extra doping.
	And I mean, in the future, they're just going to look back through the tunnel of time.
	And our system, our society will seem as incomprehensible to people in the future as...
	Slavery and feudalism does to us, as the Aztecs do to us.
	It's just astounding.
	You have to look at society from outside society.
	This is a big lesson of the Enlightenment writers, Voltaire and those, who wrote a lot about what if someone from the New World came to Versailles and looked at our system, what would they think?
	You have to climb outside the biosphere of culture and outside nationalism and outside of your entire history and culture and look at it from the outside relative to Universal moral principles.
	Otherwise, your society is going to be less than incomprehensible to you, because it actually is incomprehensible, but you think it makes some kind of sense.
	Once you poke your head out of that little amniotic sack of your local culture, and you look at your society, you have to put on a helmet, otherwise your head's going to explode from the madness of it all.
	I think it's called The Matrix.
	Yeah, that's one of the greatest metaphors ever, as I've said before.
	I mean, it's an incredible story about how we are farmed.
	Well, we are farmed.
	We are livestock.
	We are taxed livestock.
	Now, we're free-range taxed livestock because we get to choose our own professions because they figured out, like, if all you have is slaves, you get almost nothing out of them.
	If you have serfs, well, you get a little bit more out of them.
	But if you let your serfs choose their own professions...
	Then you get a lot more out of them.
	But, of course, the next step from free range is not freedom.
	It's a chicken McNugget box.
	So the idea that we're somehow the next step...
	We're more efficiently farmed than we've ever been before in history.
	And if you look at a map of the world, all you're seeing is a bunch of taxed livestock farms.
	And, man, we've got to find enough strength and dignity in the human spirit to shake off this stuff.
	And also...
	You know, this is the intrinsic problem we have.
	We need strength and spirit to shove it off.
	But anarchists don't organize well, neither do libertarians or anyone else who's slightly aligned.
	So I think that the best solution is for everyone to do what they want to do and not pay their taxes and pretend like government just doesn't exist.
	What would you say about that, Stephan?
	Well, I mean, I'm a big fan of living like the government doesn't exist.
	But if you don't pay your taxes, that's not really going to be sustainable, right?
	Because then the government is going to make its existence known to you in a very, very strong fashion.
	So I work to minimize my taxes, I have an accountant and all that kind of good stuff.
	And I work to minimize taxes, but I pay, and then I don't give them much more thought after that.
	I'm a big fan of staying within the law.
	I certainly am not going to tell anyone else what to do in terms of that.
	It's really an individual conscience thing, but my choice is to stay inside the law, minimize tax use, and keep my kids away from public school systems, and just work to have as peaceful an environment among friends and family as I can to reject people.
	Who want to initiate the use of force against me to refuse to associate with people who want the state brought down on me for following my conscience.
	And I think that kind of stuff is a lot more powerful in terms of building a genuinely sustainable, ever-growing, and empirically validated community of how well it works.
	People say, well, how does volunteerism work?
	I mean, it's my life.
	It's my life.
	I don't have people in my life just because I happen to be born in proximity to them.
	I have them if they care about me, if they're loving, if they're virtuous.
	And it can take a time, you know, it takes time for people to get their heads around these new ideas and so on.
	But I know it works because I've got the certainty of having lived it and continuing to live it.
	So my particular choice is I think I do more good to the future outside a prison cell.
	I'll pay them off, but that's about as much as I'll give them.
	Well, it's interesting because last night we had a lady on the show, actually she was on the show two nights in a row, who doesn't pay tax.
	We didn't go into that because she has so much to say.
	We'll go into it another day.
	She doesn't pay her taxes, and she doesn't put kids in school, and she doesn't even believe in homeschooling.
	She believes in unschooling, letting them basically learn for themselves.
	And my point also is that there are legal ways to not pay taxes.
	In the United States, you can defer taxes.
	In other words, it's illegal to not file.
	You can file and say, okay, I owe you $50,000 in taxes, and then you just defer it.
	And I actually have a friend who deferred for 20 years, and this got a pit bull accountant, and they settled for 5% of what he owed after 20 years of paying zero.
	So there are legal ways to avoid paying taxes, and we do know of a few.
	But I want to go on to another thing, is voluntarism.
	Can you tell the audience about voluntarism?
	We're hearing a lot about that these days.
	What's your definition of that, Stefan?
	Well, it's...
	The difference between lovemaking and rape.
	It's the difference between theft and charity.
	It's the difference between mugging and boxing.
	We simply want to point out that the difference that we're talking about, I think as a community, the difference that we're talking about is the difference between peace and violence.
	It's the difference between a handshake and a fist to the teeth.
	And voluntarism captures that in that we want human relations, as much as humanly possible, to be voluntary.
	Now, there are some human relations that can't be voluntary.
	You know, my daughter can't swing her satchel over her shoulder, you know, she's three, and go off into the night and seek out a better home, unfortunately, or hopefully...
	So she doesn't have any particular choice, but I, of course, try to parent like she could choose any dad in the world, and I try to parent every day like she'd choose me, even if she could choose everyone else, including Diego, who she's a big fan of.
	So I try to live my life as if it's voluntary, but it's just the idea that We really should have voluntary relationships with each other and not violent relationships with each other.
	And the state is merely a way of, through language, of obfuscating the basic reality that the state is a way of enforcing coercive win-lose relationships all the way across society, from rich to poor, from poor to the middle class, from adults to children, from the elderly.
	To the middle-agers.
	And we've got to stop thinking that violence is going to solve our problems.
	We've got to stop institutionalizing force and calling it order.
	We've got to stop institutionalizing violence and calling it law.
	We've got to stop institutionalizing debt and enslavement and calling it currency.
	We've just got to stop institutionalizing genocide and calling it war or defense.
	I mean, can you imagine if you hired some group to guard your house and it turned out that they were arming all the thieves in the neighborhood?
	That's exactly how the governments work.
	They sell arms to everybody they can get a hold of, and half the time that they're shooting, they're shooting against people who are shooting back with them, the arms that the government sold them in the first place.
	It's insane.
	And if we can't ever notice that it's insane and how mad it really is, stop forcing parents to pay for the miseducation of their children.
	If you don't tax people so much, then at least one parent can stay home and do what's supposed to be done, which is to actually parent your children, to spend time with them as much as possible.
	We just need to stop.
	Thinking that we can get anything done other than achieve consistent disaster by pointing guns at everyone and thinking that this is going to do something good.
	And so voluntarism really points out.
	And if people say, well, what is it?
	It's like, it's your love life.
	It's your job search.
	It's your decision about what you want to do with your life.
	It's the decision about what book you want to read next.
	It's the decision about what TV show you want to watch next.
	Nobody has a gun to your head.
	We treasure it.
	Anarchy.
	We treasure voluntarism.
	If the government passed a law tomorrow that said the government is now going to choose who you're going to marry, people would go insane.
	But that's how we feel about everything.
	Well, they do choose who you're going to marry.
	They decide if you're going to marry a gay guy.
	If you're gay, you can marry.
	If you're not gay, or if you're a transvestite.
	So, in a way, they do choose who you're going to marry.
	That's a good point.
	I mean, for the average white-hetero voter thing.
	Or if the government said, well, we're now going to assign you a profession, people would go insane.
	So how you would feel about that, we feel about everything that is state-bound already.
	The currency, the education of the kids, the healthcare, the psychotropic drugs, the bad food, the subsidies to farmers, the ethanol.
	How you feel about the next encroachment on state power is how we feel about the last 10,000.
	If you want to sort of get in our shoes, that's the best way to understand it.
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, we totally agree about that.
	The fact is, though, as myself, I'll just talk about myself, nobody else here, I'm recently divorced, and I say to myself, why on earth would I ever go before this state and marry again?
	You know, there's only one reason.
	He's 100 years old, and he's a millionaire.
	Ladies and gentlemen, that's your Match.com profile right there.
	We'll betray anarchist principles for sugar daddy.
	But really, I'm talking about marriage before the state.
	Why do you need a marriage license before the state?
	I'll get married in a Buddhist temple or on the beach with some friends, but why do I have to have that piece of paper?
	I keep wondering, why do I need that?
	I don't need that.
	I believe in marriage as a spiritual bond between people.
	I'm not going to go out there and get the 100-year-old with a million dollars, because I couldn't stand it for a day.
	But what I'm saying is that all it does is entangle your monetary and your legal involvement with the government.
	All right, but what about 99 years old and $1.1 million?
	Are we going to start bidding?
	I just want to find out where the threshold is here.
	Okay, well, is he going to die tomorrow?
	That's all I want to know about.
	It all depends what you're going to be up to tonight and how much hot wax candles are going to be involved and whether the ferret is going to be let out of the cage.
	That's all it's about.
	That's all that piece of paper is about, is how much do you owe?
	Is it community property?
	Are you going to share it or are you going to keep what you owe for yourself?
	Marriage before the state for me right now is inathema.
	And I can't even imagine it, honestly.
	It's just about money, and it's about property.
	You know, you get married before the government, and now they entangle your bank accounts, and they entangle your property ownership, and then when you get divorced, it's a holy mess, you know?
	And I'm just talking about me here, so...
	I certainly know a lot of men who look at the state honey trap of marriage with a significantly skeptical eye and say, well, okay, I could have a fulfilling relationship with a woman over the course of my life and have children, extended family, and so on.
	On the other hand, there's porn, video games, and I can avoid the threat of having a woman take me to court for 50% of my salary for the next 20 years and all this.
	So, the state has really, and tragically, I think, really messed up marriage incentives and causing a whole bunch of underpopulation growth amongst those who we really need to breed.
	So, yeah, it's a whole mess.
	Well, actually, in France, marriage is hugely unpopular.
	Very few people marry until they have three or four kids and they've been together for 20 years.
	And finally they say, okay, we'll get married.
	But in France, generally people are living under either no contract or they form a contract where they divide everything and they know what everybody's got so they have minimal problems with separation.
	And marriage has actually become very rare in France.
	People are tending to live in cohabitation and they can have a legal document that says that they are doing so, but they specify exactly what that means and they can have a ceremony and all that stuff.
	But the typical marriage in the USA, I think there's only one reason to get married and that's because you've got an interest in the property rights and the money rights of your partner because that's all it covers.
	It's a state license for marriage.
	It doesn't cover romance.
	It doesn't cover love.
	It doesn't mean anything, and the divorce rates show it.
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, it's tragic, the number of people who get married, and then they lived happily ever after.
	I mean, the majority of marriages, it's fascinating.
	I was just reading this study, the majority of marriages break up over housework.
	I mean, boy, if there's something you should discuss before you start living with someone, how about it's like, well, who's going to do what?
	It doesn't mean you can't renegotiate, but we have all of these nonsense fairy tales.
	You know, I'm reading some of these to my daughter, and it's like, I try not to read this, and they lived happily ever after, you know.
	And then they sat down and they worked a plan about how they were going to manage their money and how they were going to manage the household and whether they wanted children and how they were going to manage difficult in-laws and how they were going to retire and where they were going to live.
	And that's what I want the fairy tale characters to do because that's realistic.
	It's a merger.
	And the idea that, you know, love conquers all is, you know, the biochemical high of sexualized romantic love lasts about six months.
	And after that, you've got the nitty-gritty business of life, which is, you know, fun and worthwhile, deeper and more meaningful.
	But yeah, and the number of people who just get married and then say, well, what do you mean you don't do laundry and you don't want kids?
	It's like, what?
	You see, what I'm trying to get at is one of, I think, the powers that anarchy possesses Just put out the words, like, don't get married before the state.
	Don't let them know about your relationship.
	Keep your relationship private.
	Why declare your relationship to the state?
	No need to.
	There's just no need to.
	It's become a more and more absurd idea the more I think about it.
	Why am I standing before the state to tell them I'm in love with this person and I want to live with them for the rest of my life?
	That doesn't make sense.
	And I think in some ways it encourages divorce because people become greedy sometimes.
	They think, oh, okay, I'm going to get this inheritance.
	I don't want to share it with my wife.
	I think I should get divorced because I'd like to go out and buy a big boat and party.
	That's how some people think, I think.
	And so in some ways marrying before the state creates divorce.
	And I think that's a good platform for anarchy to be on, is to defy the state in terms of declaring a relationship before the state.
	And the more I think about this, the more I think it doesn't work for anybody, men or women.
	It only works for gold diggers who want to get money from the partner they're getting married to before the state.
	That's the only logical reason I can think of.
	Yeah, I would certainly agree that the state has shallowed out marriage a lot, because before the state, you actually had to marry someone who was going to stick around if you want to have kids and help you raise your kids and, you know, take care of you while you're breastfeeding, all that kind of stuff.
	And now, I mean, we've become this very shallow, surface, Kardashian-obsessed culture where, you know, for women, like, he's cute and funny, and for guys, it's like, she's pretty, and This is like the standards that people have and it's like pretty doesn't get you up in the morning at 3 o'clock to breastfeed your baby for the third time that night.
	I mean, that's not what pretty does.
	And it's not what cute and funny does is, you know, hold your hair while you're having morning sickness for the fourth time that day.
	I mean, there's a lot of substance and virtue and deep commitment that is necessary for a successful marriage.
	And people, before the government would step in and cover up all your mistakes in the same way that they do with the healthcare provision now.
	It's like, oh, you have diabetes?
	Here you go.
	Here's all this stuff.
	People actually had to make richer and deeper decisions and be more cautious with where they spread their seed or accepted seed or whatever.
	And now it's just become, oh, well, you know, it's a start of marriage.
	You know, if it doesn't work out or whatever.
	You don't face catastrophe in the same way, and so you're much less cautious about what you get involved in or who you get involved in.
	So yeah, I think the state does shallow out marriage in really terrible ways, and this is why the divorce...
	I think in New York, I think the majority of kids, women under 30, are born outside a committed relationship.
	I mean, that's...
	Well, it's not necessarily an uncommitted relationship.
	It can be committed, but it doesn't necessarily have to be declared to the state.
	No, that's true.
	That's a fair point, yeah.
	Yeah, and this is what I see in France.
	People are very committed, they're very together, they've been together, they raise huge families, they're happy, and marriage is simply an afterthought because perhaps they need it for some reason or other, but honestly, marriage is dropping hugely over here.
	I think one of the reasons is people are realizing that it is simply a declaration before the state, and they don't feel the need to do so unless there's some sort of monetary gain involved.
	I was married for 20 years, so I believed in it for a while, and now I'm very skeptical of any kind of formal kind of declaration before the state.
	I just want to be me, and whoever I'm involved with is my business.
	And maybe I want to live with more than one person.
	Maybe I want to live with a man and a woman.
	You know what I'm saying?
	It cuts down all these possibilities that you can have in your love life.
	And I'm not talking about sort of stuff.
	I'm talking about just love and togetherness in people.
	It really tends to narrow mind society.
	into thinking one man, one woman, a bunch of kids, and stay there together forever in whatever you're in.
	But we're at the end of the show, Stephen.
	You want to give us one last soundbite, and we're going to have to get you back on the show again some other time.
	Yeah, look, I really appreciate the invite, and it was a great conversation.
	Thank you so much.
	My website is freedomainradio.com.
	I guess we're closing in on 50 million downloads, and I'll be speaking in New York in April, and I'll Anyway, I've got tons of speeches coming up, and we've got experts on the show all the time who can, you know, give you the real speak rather than my surface northern lights shimmering fire.
	But thanks so much for the invite.
	If you want to give your website, it's Freedomizer, is that right, for people who are listening to this on my end?
	Yes, freedomizerradio.com.
	And Mary Lou will send you an archive, so you can broadcast it if you like.
	I certainly will.
	I would be very pleased to.
	And thanks again, ladies.
	It was a great show.
	I really appreciate it.
	Oh, thank you so much for coming on.
	And we did too.
	We really appreciate it as well.
	And we hope to talk to you again sometime in the near future.
	And this is Gats Rising with Stephan Mollier.
	Mon Mieux, sorry.
	And he's an anarchist.
	And please feel free to look at Freedom Maine Radio and we'll post your website on our site at Freedomizer Radio as well.
	This is Stephan.
	Thank you so much for being on the show.
	And Marie Levin Houten, our co-host and producer.
	And we'll be producing an archive tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day.
	So we'll talk again on Monday.
	And have a great weekend and Thanksgiving.
	Bye!

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