Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, answers listener emails including: Do Boys Learn Differently from Girls? How to Best Make the Case for Freedom? What about Right to Work Legislation? Is It Initiating Force to Get Your Children to Do Chores?
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio. | |
| This is a listener email, so it's been a while since I've done this. | |
| But let's do it now. | |
| So somebody wrote, Hi Steph, I've recently have gotten into your videos and can't stop watching. | |
| You lay out your ideas brilliantly and concisely. | |
| There is a point of confusion that I have with regard to authority, though I understand the initiation of force is universally wrong, but when you reprimand your daughter for doing things socially abnormal but ultimately harmless, eating with her hands at a restaurant or telling an obese person that they're fat, how is that not initiating force? | |
| Well, if all I'm doing is telling my daughter that she's doing something quote wrong or that's rude or that's mean or that's nasty, well, that would kind of be negative. | |
| Not exactly the initiation of force, but not a very pleasant way to get an idea across to someone. | |
| So, I will not reprimand her for calling someone fat. | |
| I will say that there may be nicer words for it, and people may be sensitive about it, but I'm not going to ever reprimand her for telling the truth. | |
| Eating with her hands at a restaurant, I don't think that one has ever come up. | |
| Like, the key thing to raising your children is you want to get them to try to imitate you. | |
| That should be your major goal. | |
| So, mommy and daddy eat with cutlery and therefore she's going to want to eat with cutlery because that's what big people do and she wants to be like mommy and daddy. | |
| You can solve 80 to 90% of leadership issues in a family by simply being a person that your child respects, likes, loves and wants to emulate. | |
| So, I did for a little while say, please say please and thank you, but then I just realized to let that go after my conversation with Dana Martin. | |
| Let that go and simply say please and thank you, and then she'll imitate that, and she has. | |
| She has imitated that. | |
| If you want her to do chores, then you need to do chores, and then she will want to do chores with you. | |
| She wants to help. | |
| She's very interested in helping. | |
| What if she refuses to do what you ask? | |
| Well, she can refuse to do what I ask. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| The way that I work with that is freedom for Isabella is freedom for me. | |
| So I had a bunch of work to do the other day, and Isabella made a deal with me that she would go outside if we did X, Y, and Z, because I really wanted to go. | |
| It's a beautiful sunny day. | |
| And she ended up breaking her deal and not going outside. | |
| And I got upset. | |
| And I explained to her that, you know, we need to have deals and so on. | |
| But she still didn't want to go outside. | |
| And so I said, okay, well, then I'm going to take an hour and do some work that I need to do. | |
| And she read for a while and this and that and the other. | |
| And it wasn't punitive. | |
| It was that freedom for her is freedom for me. | |
| And I think that's the important thing. | |
| If you don't get that freedom for your children is freedom for you, then it's a lot harder to deal with those kinds of situations, I think. | |
| Also asks, is it possible to be friends with somebody who has authority over you? | |
| I'm good friends with a co-worker who just got promoted and she's now my authority. | |
| She can't fire me, but she's considered my superior still. | |
| Yeah, you can. | |
| I mean, I was friends with my employees and went on vacation, went skiing, you know, with a friend of mine who was an employee. | |
| So, yeah, you can do it. | |
| I mean, you just have to be very clear about the difference between work and friendship and so on. | |
| Someone has asked my opinion about the Michigan Right to Work Bill. | |
| and the challenge, of course, is the right-to-work bill is the union does not have the right to deduct automatically union dues from your paycheck, and so you can choose to opt out of paying union dues. | |
| The union argues that that means that there's a free rider problem, which is that people will get the benefits of union negotiations without having to pay for them and so on, and this, of course, is the fundamental problem when you have a state. | |
| To try and solve a free rider problem with the government is completely insane. | |
| Because the government is most susceptible to the free rider problem. | |
| Free rider is when you gain the benefits without having to pay the costs, right? | |
| So if there's some private defense agency that's keeping you safe from aliens and ball weevils, then if you don't chip into it, you still get that protection and so on. | |
| But, you know, this is sort of related to the problem of the commons. | |
| But the government, of course, is... | |
| Ridiculously that way, right? | |
| I mean, because governments always run deficits, people are getting something for nothing. | |
| People are basically selling off the next generation to bribe themselves with other people's money in the here and now. | |
| So you don't solve the free rider problem by getting the government involved. | |
| Now, there's so many ways to solve the free rider problem. | |
| It's not even worth getting into them. | |
| Of course, social ostracism, social pressure, is the best way to deal with these kinds of issues, and it's very powerful. | |
| People who are socially ostracized experience the same physiological reactions as if they're undergoing torture. | |
| So it is a very powerful thing to do, and that's, of course, how it should be dealt with. | |
| I mean, if you're not part of the union, then that union would have the right to publish those who have provided union dues, and everyone who didn't would then not be part of the union, and would they have other people want to hang out with them? | |
| During the coffee break. | |
| So you want to rely on social pressure more than you do on physical violence, of course, right? | |
| I mean, I think that sort of goes without saying. | |
| But the whole union situation is so surrounded by and enmeshed and draped over with the violence of the state that it's really impossible to call it a private organization anymore, which is actually quite similar to corporatism or corporations in that there's just so many rent-seeking laws that have been put into place that allow people to use state power to gain some sort of advantage that… It's all kind of nonsense. | |
| The great danger, of course, is that when you chase unions out of the private sector, so to speak, then they simply start taking root in the public sector, where there should never be unions, right? | |
| I mean, unions are supposed to be there as a counterweight to the profit drive to drive down the wages of the workers, blah, blah, blah. | |
| And in the public sector, there's no profit motive, so there shouldn't be no need for unions. | |
| But they go there, and then what happens is there's no cap on union demands, fundamentally, right? | |
| So there are caps on union demands in the private sector because math is math, right? | |
| And you run out of money, and you can't pay people, and you pull a hostess and go John Galton there. | |
| As Monty Python would say, loathsome spotty behinds. | |
| And in the public sector, of course, it's not the case. | |
| You can continue to borrow, print money, lend, tax, and so on, and this can go on for a long time. | |
| So, if you put unions into the public sector, it's truly food for a cancer that is unlimited by any short-term or rational mathematics. | |
| So, yeah, I mean, I guess it's fine. | |
| Right-to-work bill is fine. | |
| Does it really matter? | |
| Is it going to change anything? | |
| Well, no, of course not, because the unions will simply shift their energies to the public sector, which is actually worse for the next generation. | |
| Here's another one. | |
| Steph, let me begin by saying that I'm a huge fan. | |
| I'm listening already. | |
| Your work has been among the most influential in forming the very foundations of my beliefs, philosophical and political. | |
| Well, thank you. | |
| Here's my problem. | |
| If corporations and governments are merely people coming together and associating to form these entities of real-world power and authority, I believe they are, insofar as corporations and governments are not the buildings or stock tickers or presidential seats, etc., then in rejecting them, are we not rejecting the aspects of human nature that drive people towards these associations? | |
| Where is the disconnect? | |
| Right, so this is the idea that society is an effect of human nature, and if you change society, then it will simply, it's like pushing something out of a stable orbit. | |
| It will simply, generally, regain that stable orbit over time. | |
| And so, if you try to change society away from what human nature is, then you will simply end up with back where you started, right? | |
| So, you know, oh, if we get rid of the government, then these gangs will come along and some gang will emerge as a new government because we have a hierarchy built into our DNA and anytime you try and break something up or change something foundational in society, it will change back to reflect what human nature really is and so on. | |
| Now, governments are not people coming together and associating to form these entities. | |
| Governments are reflections of particular ideas, and those ideas are insane, are completely irrational, and completely ridiculous. | |
| But they make sense to people because it reflects their early childhood experiences. | |
| So clearly if I come up to you, knock on your door, and say, Hi, I'm from ABC Protection Agency, and I'm going to try and protect your property, and the way that I'm going to do that is you need to sign over the power to me to rifle through your bank account at will and take whatever basically I please. | |
| Oh, and also I'll need to borrow against your children's collateral if and when they ever become productive citizens of society. | |
| Oh, and I need to be able to give you rebates in counterfeit money. | |
| This would all be nonsense. | |
| You'd say, well, you're insane and you're a criminal, so you've got to get off my property, man. | |
| But the way that it works with the state is the state is even worse than all of that. | |
| But it only seems believable because people believe that without a hierarchical, violent monopoly... | |
| Then everyone's going to run wild. | |
| Everyone's going to, oh, there are these terrible corporations. | |
| These corporations are going to run wild without the government putting its foot down and putting a stop to all the... | |
| But this is all just parental stuff. | |
| This is parental and priest and teacher stuff. | |
| I mean, when I was a kid, the kids went wild, and then the teachers came in, and they had to... | |
| You see all this all the time in, you know, the kind of good wife-style court shows. | |
| The lawyers are all yammering at each other, and the... | |
| The judge says, enough! | |
| And everyone sort of bows down behind him. | |
| So the idea is without a centralized authority, we're all chickens running around with their heads cut off, and there's no negotiation, there's no peace, it's a war of all against all, and this simply comes out of how we're taught as children, and how rules are inflicted on us as children. | |
| They're not explained to us, we're not respected, we're not treated as equals as much as possible, and so because we have these top-down do-it Do what I say, not as I do. | |
| And, of course, there's still a lot of spanking and yelling and abuse and so on. | |
| So the idea is, of course, that without a bullying central authority, there's no possibility of order. | |
| This is bred into us from before we're even born. | |
| And then we look at the government, which is just an extension of this irrationality, and it seems to make sense to us. | |
| There is no human nature. | |
| There is only the deep impressions of pre- and postnatal early childhood. | |
| That's all there is. | |
| There is no human nature. | |
| There is only the deep impressions carved into our souls by pre-birth and post-birth, particularly the first few years of early childhood. | |
| That's all there is. | |
| The state is an effect of the family. | |
| And if you change the way that children are raised, you change human nature, you change society. | |
| It's the only way to get it done. | |
| Do I think that boys learn differently from girls? | |
| Well, it's hard to say. | |
| I mean, gender is such a social construct that it really does seem hard to say whether boys learn differently than girls. | |
| There does seem to be some evidence that when you begin to change schools, public schools, to focus more on, quote, girls' issues, then boys suffer. | |
| And boys are doing a lot less well than girls in schools these days. | |
| So boys tend to be a little bit more active, tend to be a little bit more hands-on, and tend to be a little bit less, quote, nice. | |
| But I don't know whether... | |
| I strongly doubt that there's anything genetic in that. | |
| There's a woman who I've had on the show. | |
| Delusions of Gender, Dr. | |
| Cordelia Fine. | |
| Check that out. | |
| I mean, brain studies just really can't find any difference between boys and girls. | |
| I would also really recommend, actually, as a general author, Christina Hoff Summers, who's a professor of philosophy, she's written a book called Who Stole Feminism? | |
| It's really good. | |
| I'm currently going through One Nation Under Therapy, but the one that's most relevant to this conversation, which I'd recommend, is called The War Against Boys. | |
| And if you want something a little bit more anecdotal, you can go with The Demise of Guys, which is another book that is interesting. | |
| That's by Philip Zombardo. | |
| So I don't know if boys learn differently from girls, but all of the stuff that's happened where we focus on sort of girl learning all came out of bad data, false statistics, general lies, and so on. | |
| So... | |
| We can't tell much about anything when there is a statist society. | |
| Particularly in any realm where that state has a lot of power, you can't tell anything about anything. | |
| So if the government forced men and women to get married, and forced women to submit to sex with men they loathed, or forced men to submit to sex with women they loathed, then we would say, well, do you think women and men genuinely like each other? | |
| Well, it's really hard to tell. | |
| It's really hard to tell because there's just so much violence and coercion and compulsion and abuse floating around the issue that, I mean, we really won't be able to tell until the dust of violence settles and we can get a clearer view of how people act in a voluntary environment. | |
| All right, so do one more. | |
| Haystead, first I suppose I should say thank you for helping to enlighten us all. | |
| You're welcome. | |
| I saw your video on sociopaths and thought I would try the against me argument. | |
| And try I did, albeit without the same eloquence you have in your videos. | |
| Eh, it's just practice. | |
| I approached a friend and started talking about it and was afraid to find that she did support violence against my person. | |
| In the end, she claimed that paying taxes was a requirement of the society we live in and that she and I must have differing views of living peacefully and violence. | |
| Well, it's interesting, I'm going to assume that you're echoing some of her language. | |
| So she kind of wriggled out, because she said, it's a requirement of the society we live in. | |
| And that's a way of saying, rather than, I screwed up, mistakes were made. | |
| You know, it's just very third person, very abstract, and so on. | |
| So the question to come back is, so you believe that paying for this particular, paying this particular group of people is really important? | |
| I don't. | |
| I consider it immoral. | |
| I consider it destructive. | |
| Will you allow me to act on my conscience? | |
| And if she says no, you have to go to jail if you disagree with me. | |
| Not if you disobey the law, not if you don't pay your taxes, right? | |
| Because these are all based upon opinions. | |
| These are all based upon opinions that these things are moral things to do. | |
| They're legitimate. | |
| They're required. | |
| Whatever you want to call it. | |
| So, don't let people weasel out by assigning some third-party generic entity that you have to obey. | |
| Like, don't obey the priest, obey God. | |
| Well, it's not me you're obeying, it's the law. | |
| But the law only has validity because you believe it has validity. | |
| So, once again, we come back to your beliefs. | |
| Am I allowed to act in my conscience and to find ways to help the poor other than giving money to a bunch of psychopaths with guns? | |
| Can I find a way to help the poor other than creating massive national debts and so on? | |
| Will you allow me to follow my conscience without wanting me thrown in jail and shot if I resist? | |
| Will you withdraw your consent for violence against me for peaceful activities? | |
| And, oh, paying taxes is a requirement for living in a civilized society. | |
| It's like, so then, yes, you do want me thrown in jail. | |
| Don't give me this bullshit about taxes and the government and society and peace and the poor. | |
| It comes down to you saying, yes, I want you thrown in jail for peaceful activities. | |
| It's a one-on-one transaction because the justification for the laws comes from the opinions of the people. | |
| The law is only held aloft by the empty helium balloons of people's vapid opinions. | |
| Puncture those opinions and don't let them hide behind some general social theory. | |
| That's bullshit. | |
| Or some human nature argument. | |
| Or some argument from consequences. | |
| So, his friend said, questions were also brought up about maintaining roads, minimum wage regulations, and healthcare. | |
| I tried to explain that more efficient private sector would take the place of public companies, to which she asked about the poor people who could not afford any sort of healthcare. | |
| I tried to say that charities would step in and help, and then she says, and if not, right? | |
| So, this is called the guard of the gaps, right? | |
| It's just another sort of argument which people make about the state. | |
| And what they do is they would try to corner you into some area where help is not coming to someone. | |
| Help is not coming to someone. | |
| And then, into this void is this magic entity called the state that solves the problem. | |
| And the reason I call it the god of the gaps is that it's the same argument that is used in a superstitious or religious context, which is... | |
| Well, can you tell me exactly how the Big Bang operated and where everything came from? | |
| And if you say no, then people say, oh, well, then that's where God did things, right? | |
| And the reason it's called the God of the gaps is that there's always some gap in human knowledge. | |
| There's always questions that aren't answered. | |
| Maybe there are even questions that can't be answered. | |
| Do you know what lies outside the universe? | |
| No. | |
| Well, that's where God could be, right? | |
| So there's always some gap in human knowledge, and it used to be, do you know where lightning comes from? | |
| Ah, you see, that's the hammer of Thor. | |
| Do you know where the tides come from? | |
| Ah, you see, that's Neptune slow-humping some sperm whale down in the depths, right? | |
| So there's always some... | |
| Wherever you don't know something, there's always considered to be some room for God in there. | |
| And, of course, you can set up some scenario where some poor person is sick and has no access to healthcare. | |
| And then people say, ah, well, you see, that's why we need government. | |
| As if the government solves that problem. | |
| Right? | |
| So people say, what's outside the universe? | |
| Well, I don't know. | |
| Well, that's where God could be. | |
| Well, that doesn't mean anything. | |
| And certainly the trend has been that when we close the gaps and get knowledge, the God or the state argument simply keeps wriggling its way into whatever gap there is about things now. | |
| So, you say, what about poor people who could not afford any sort of healthcare? | |
| Again, make it personal. | |
| Don't deal with abstractions. | |
| The state is all about and only exists in the justifications within people's heads. | |
| The state is a state of mind. | |
| The state does not exist in Washington. | |
| The state does not exist in London or Amsterdam or Brussels or Cairo or Timbuktu. | |
| The state exists a little bit to the right of your left here and a little bit to the left of your right here. | |
| That is the only place That the state exists. | |
| Everything else is an effect of the beliefs. | |
| So somebody says to me, well, what about the poor who've got no health care? | |
| I say, well, do you care about them? | |
| Yeah, I do. | |
| Then you'll help them. | |
| Done. | |
| Then you'll help them. | |
| Now, if you're not going to help them, then don't give me this bullshit that you care about them. | |
| And if you are going to help them, then don't give me this bullshit that we need to say to help people. | |
| I say, ah, well, what if not enough people want to help them? | |
| Well, I say, first of all, every time I've talked about this for the last 3,000 years, people have brought this up as an issue. | |
| So, of course, people care about it. | |
| Right? | |
| Trust me. | |
| And if you start bringing these questions up with people, you will understand or you will very quickly experience that everybody has the same concern and therefore the poor will be helped. | |
| And they say, well, what if that doesn't happen? | |
| I say, well, do you believe that democracy reflects to some degree the will of the majority? | |
| Yes. | |
| Well, the majority wants Medicare and Medicaid, and they want socialized medicine, they want all of these things, and they want welfare, and they want free schools, and they want blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | |
| And so the politicians provide them. | |
| So if democracy reflects the will of the majority, then there will be more than enough people to help the poor. | |
| We simply know this because the state has enacted laws which represent the will of the majority. | |
| And the will of the majority is, let's take care of the poor, the sick, the old, the weak, the tired, the indigent, the constipated, whatever, right? | |
| So, no worries. | |
| We already have ample empirical evidence. | |
| You care. | |
| I care. | |
| The majority cares. | |
| That's why we have these things already. | |
| So, done and dusted. | |
| Say, ah, well, what if somebody falls through the cracks? | |
| They covered it? | |
| Well, you can set up a scenario wherein someone won't get help, but if they can't get help in a free society, they sure as hell can't get help in a state society either. | |
| And, of course, there's tons of examples. | |
| In the past, you know, doctors used to give pro bono work. | |
| They used to take payment in kind, you know, appendectomy for nine chickens or whatever. | |
| And they used to be, I mean, it used to cost you about two days' wages to get health care for a year back in the day before the government started trying to help out everyone. | |
| And that's before technology made things better and cheaper and faster. | |
| So... | |
| All of that is nonsense. | |
| But don't get drawn into the God of the gaps. | |
| Lord knows. | |
| It's happened to me occasionally. | |
| But... | |
| It's really important not to get drawn into that, because it's just a way of diffusing it. | |
| What if this? | |
| Ah, you see, you can't solve that problem, therefore we need a government. | |
| The other thing you can say is, well, what's going to happen to the poor when the government runs out of money? | |
| Governments, what is it now? | |
| 15, 16 trillion dollars in debt? | |
| Unfunded liabilities, 80 trillion dollars plus? | |
| So what happens when the government can't pay for the system that it's set up? | |
| Because this is this fantasy that the government is some sort of answer. | |
| And in the short run, it is. | |
| In the same way that heroin is an answer for depression in the short run. | |
| And binge eating is an answer for depression in the short run. | |
| But in the long run, what happens, right? | |
| So, what happens in your society? | |
| Like, what happens in the state of society when the government runs out of money? | |
| Well, they'll raise taxes. | |
| Well, they can't really raise taxes. | |
| Taxes are already very high. | |
| And people flee raising taxes. | |
| Gerard Depardieu did it. | |
| Bono, Mr. | |
| Let's Pay Off Third World Debt, Bono, fled Ireland to escape taxes. | |
| People just will move money offshore or they'll stop working. | |
| People leave. | |
| A quarter of British millionaires left England when the taxes went up on them. | |
| So, you know, that was good, right? | |
| You can't just raise taxes. | |
| And raising taxes won't solve the problem. | |
| The problem is when you have $80 trillion of unfunded liabilities on a $15 trillion economy, you cannot conceivably raise enough taxes to pay for what you need. | |
| It's completely impossible. | |
| So what's going to happen to everyone when the government runs out of money? | |
| And that's an important question, because they can't answer that, right? | |
| I don't know. | |
| Well, so stop talking about the one guy who gets hit by lightning in an asteroid and has frozen French frogs rain on him at the same time in a free society, and let's start talking about not the theoretical problems of a free society, but the inevitable catastrophes of a state of society. | |
| Have them try and answer the questions. | |
| So... | |
| So, he's also said, I know it's lazy of me, but do you have videos on how a post-government world might run? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| You can check out my free book. | |
| Practical Anarchy. | |
| And that's available for free at freedomainradio.com forward slash, what is it? | |
| Yes, free! | |
| Forward slash free. | |
| And if you like it, I certainly would appreciate some money. | |
| It took a long time to write. | |
| It certainly took many, many years of reading and research. | |
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| Have yourselves a lovely day. |