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Jan. 23, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:11:10

2305 Will America Descend into a Civil War?

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio - and recent winner of the 2012 Liberty Inspiration Awards - is interviewed by Michael Shanklin of http://voluntaryvirtues.com.

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	Hey everyone, welcome to Triple V. It's Mike Shanklin.
	Today I'm joined with a special guest.
	You know who it is.
	It's Stefan Molyneux.
	You guys can tell from the title on top of the video anyway.
	Stefan, how are you doing today?
	I'm very well.
	How are you doing, Mike?
	I'm doing pretty good.
	I can't complain.
	Just got a bunch of questions here for you and a few of my own and a few from other people out there from all walks of life.
	So we have stuff coming from anarcho-syndicalists to huge statists to voluntarists.
	So it's going to be all over the place tonight.
	But I think it's going to be very enlightening.
	I think a lot of people are going to get a lot from this.
	For those of you who don't know Stefan, Stefan Molyneux has been one of the largest contributors at least to My mindset and help me at least, if you want to call it awakened to the real world, the reality around us, and philosophy, rationality, reason, a touch of economics, and a little bit of education on militarism here and there.
	It all comes together for a pretty good mindset, a positive mindset actually, towards the non-aggression principle.
	He's written numerous books.
	You guys can check out his works over at freedomadradio.com.
	Going into this, Stefan, some of these questions I want you to know are from, people wrote long paragraphs and so I tried to summarize it so if I didn't get your question exactly perfect, if I didn't have the correct intent, I apologize, but I think we might have something working here.
	Stefan, if you could real quick, I know every time you go on to a show you have to talk about what voluntarism and non-aggression is because some people might just be coming to this video for the first time.
	If you could really quick, maybe a minute or two, summarize What we are even here for while we're even talking on this video, and that we can move on from there.
	Sure.
	Well, voluntarism is the idea, the radical idea, that we should not use violence to achieve our ends.
	It's not a huge amount more complicated than that.
	Like the free market, once you stop using violence, amazing, complicated, wonderful things happen.
	Multi-year contracts, cell phones, alarm systems, quantum physics, computers.
	Amazing things happen when you stop using violence.
	And people mistake the complexity of what happens when you stop using violence For the complexity of the system itself.
	But once you lay down your weapons and you start negotiating with your fellow human beings, wonderful complexity emerges.
	But the system itself is very simple.
	The system is, thou shalt not initiate force against thy fellow man.
	That's really all it comes down to.
	Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not rape, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not assault.
	So respect for property rights, the non-aggression principle, that's it really.
	Everything that flows out of that is incredibly complex, but It really is very simple to explain as a concept, as an idea.
	And it's something that just about everybody accepts anyway.
	Everybody accepts that violence is not really a very good way to achieve your goals within society.
	So that is good.
	I mean, from that standpoint, we're doing really great things.
	When you started to oppose slavery, you know, everybody thought slavery was necessary and good and virtuous, but in this situation, everybody in their personal lives say, yes, it's not a good idea to go and knock over a bank when you want to raise.
	Yes, it's not really a very good idea to Slip a date rape drink into some woman's martini rather than ask her out.
	Yes, it's not a good idea to go kill someone you disagree with.
	And so we already accept all of that.
	And all we're saying is, okay, well, if that's true, then let's just believe that that's true for everyone.
	And that takes a lot of sacred cows out of the equation, you know, like the state.
	So it's really a very simple thing, which we all accept and we're all taught in kindergarten.
	The radical thing about voluntarism is not the ideals, but the actual The seriousness with which universality is taken.
	Like, if this stuff is true, then it's just plain downright true.
	And let's make it universal and let's start pretending that we can create some magical group of people immune to the most basic moral laws.
	Right, I completely agree with you.
	In one of your recent videos, I think it's something more people need to see.
	I wish people would share this a little bit more.
	I put it on my Facebook page the other day, and I don't think maybe 10 people liked it.
	It takes a little while to get through it.
	It's 58 minutes.
	But it was talking about violence in America, and you were kind of linking the welfare state I want you to kind of explain if you could break that video down into a one or two minute thing where you were kind of referring to the government taking over the role of the father.
	Sure.
	I mean, there's been a movement really over the past 40 or 50 years, and in particular 30 to 40 years, where the economic foundations of the family have fundamentally changed.
	So the economic foundations of the family is the man goes out to work and the woman stays home and raises the children.
	And because of that, there's a whole neighborhood of people who do that, right?
	And therefore, you have over-the-fence neighbors, people who can watch your kids, and you have something close to what we're supposed to have historically as an evolution of our species, which is about four adults for every one child in terms of how the ratio of education works in society.
	That's really changed.
	So, of course, there was a big strong urging from a largely state-sponsored, state-funded and academic-based feminist movement to say to women, go out and work.
	Oh, that's great for the government because the government's goal in expanding its tax base is to convert non-taxable labor to taxable labor.
	Raising children is not taxable labor.
	And if you can get women to go out and work, then women stop raising children and they start making money, which can be taxed.
	And then they have to put their kids in some daycare, which the government runs, and can tax.
	Plus, the government gets to indoctrinate the children even sooner than otherwise possible.
	So for the livestock tax owners, it was a fantastic deal.
	And of course, you know, I mean, women should have every opportunity and blah, blah, blah.
	I mean, there's no problem with equality and so on.
	It's just that it became, being a housewife was, you know, being a mother was denigrated and being a career woman was elevated.
	And so because of that, you had, and sort of in simultaneous with that, you have a huge amount of resources that need to be poured into the family.
	Dissatisfaction with marriage was enormous.
	When you have a highly contested divorce sequence, so you have to prove fault, you have to prove abuse or affairs or whatever, then people stay married because it's too hard to get unmarried.
	When no-fault divorce came in along with the welfare state, families basically exploded.
	I think this law came in recently in Chile where you could get a no-fault divorce.
	The divorce rate is currently 80%.
	And so what happens if a family split up?
	Well, you still need resources.
	Somebody's still got to raise the children.
	Somebody still has to take care of breastfeeding moms and somebody still has to, you know, bring in the bacon, so to speak.
	And if women and men are working and if a lot of families have split up and there's a huge rise in single motherhood, then the state, of course, is more than happy to buy votes by wallpapering up the craters left by family disintegration.
	And the abandonment, fundamentally, of children to be raised by strangers, which is the result of both parents going into the market.
	This has hugely dysfunctional effects on children.
	And so violence in America and violence around the world really needs to be understood as a problem that arises when traditional family structures are detonated.
	And they're detonated fundamentally by the state.
	When you replace the economic drivers of the family from, you know, the need for productivity and togetherness on the husband and wife to, let's go petition the government for free daycare, free healthcare for my kids, free babysitting in the form of public sector education or free kindergarten, then the state is happy to provide these things in terms of, hey, you know, I'll give you these things in exchange for votes.
	But, of course, what happens is the children grow up in increasingly atomized, solitary and dysfunctional environments.
	So, I mean, one brief example.
	Is that instead of there being four adults for every one child, which is kind of what's necessary in terms of our evolution, you end up with one teacher to 20 or 30 children.
	And so what happens is it's not the adults who are educating the children anymore because there's just too few adults around.
	What happens is you get a peer or horizontal, quote, education.
	Which is why peer pressure becomes so strong and why gangs form, particularly in houses where there are no fathers.
	The boys are all educating each other in the rough and tumble, Lord of the Flies nonsense that goes on.
	They're not being civilized.
	They're not being calmed down.
	They're not being turned into productive citizens.
	So the violence that America faces is largely a function of fatherless children.
	It is not a function primarily of poverty, because if 80% of American gun violence is based upon gangs, well, gangs arose with single parenthood, gangs arose with the war on drugs, and gangs arose with the welfare state.
	And so it's been catastrophic, particularly for the poor, but gangs weren't around in like the 1950s or the 1940s, at least nowhere near.
	And people were poorer than they were in the 70s and 80s and so on.
	So it's not poverty that produces it.
	It's family dysfunction driven by short-term vote buying and greed-based government programs.
	Yeah, so basically, we now have, we used to be just had government and then the mafia that was the gangs.
	Now you have government, mafia, and these inner city gangs on top of it.
	Now, good stuff.
	And I think we can look at the education system with its revisionist history as, you know, what we sometimes refer to it as.
	It's not as if a public education sector can actually reach the rational conclusion on the non-aggression principle, correct?
	Could you just rephrase that question?
	I wasn't sure.
	I want to make sure I got it.
	It's basically that the public education system will never be able to fully expose the non-aggression principle.
	It won't be able to teach to its rational conclusions because it is built up inside of a system Oh, God, no.
	You can't.
	You can't have teachers saying to children, Johnny, you can't use violence to get what you want.
	Now, I have to go on strike because I want a raise.
	And your parents are going to have to pay for my salary, whether they like it or not, whether you're here or not.
	And if they don't pay for my salary and my benefits, then lovely cats in blue are going to kick in your door, hopefully not shoot your beloved pet, and drag your parents' asses off to jail.
	And I will be cheering and applauding this from the sidelines.
	So, violence is really, really wrong to get what you want, but it is essential.
	I mean, the hypocrisy of the public school sector is why ethics fundamentally cannot be discussed in the public school sector because the very foundation of it is evil, which is the initiation of force against peaceful people for the purposes of dragging their children away from them virtually by force, indoctrinating them, and paying.
	You always want to get the not-so-bright intellectual class on the side of the state.
	Because if you're not so bright, you're pretty comfortable teaching propaganda because you're too dumb to even recognize how dangerous and how deadly it really is, or even to notice that it is propaganda.
	So you capture the really dumb pseudo-intellectual class in the form of teachers and statistically this is true.
	It is the bottom 10 or 20 percent of all college students who go into the teaching profession just the way you want it, right?
	And the smarter people you ensnare with With academia, right?
	So you get the smarter people all by giving them access to politicians in the realm of the media.
	So you want to make sure that you capture as many intellectuals as possible on the sticky, flypaper, brain-rotting goo of status propaganda.
	And unfortunately for the state, fortunately for the future, the internet has changed all of that.
	Yeah, definitely.
	Hey, I got a question from somebody else I want to read real quick.
	A guy named Isaac Freeworld.
	That's his Facebook username.
	Obviously, I don't think it's a real name, but he can call himself whatever he wants.
	It says, ask Stefan what he thinks about anarcho-cynicalism and cooperative business models.
	So, good luck.
	Well, I mean, that's fine.
	There's no moral content to anarcho-syndicalism or business.
	So, if you want to have a cooperative business model, and when I was a business entrepreneur and a business owner, I ran a business that was incredibly cooperative where all decisions were collective and I certainly didn't hide my salary and so on.
	So I tried to do it that way.
	I think it's fine.
	There's going to be a constant experimentation on the best way to run businesses and those ways are going to change depending on the business, depending on the technology, depending on the market and so on and depending on the availability and skill of the labor.
	So I think it's fantastic.
	If people in a free society want to set up a hippie commune where they all pick lice out of each other's hair and, you know, have group sex with penguins, okay, except for maybe the penguins, fine, you know, as long as you're not initiating the use of force, you know, if it's consensual penguin sex, I think that's really what I'm trying to get at here.
	But if it's not the initiation of the use of force, fantastic, you know, go to town, experiment, you know, go nuts.
	You know, marry robots.
	I don't care.
	But once you cross the line into initiating the use of force, that's fine.
	You certainly can't say everyone has to do it this way or you get thrown in jail.
	Like, everyone has to have a commune.
	Nobody can respect property rights.
	You want to all get together and not respect each other's property rights, so to speak.
	Own everything in some kibbutzim kind of Common, fine, fantastic, go for it.
	I don't care, fundamentally, because I don't know what's right or wrong, you know, in terms of the best way to organize everything in society.
	Nobody does.
	That's why central planning doesn't work.
	So, yeah, if people want to experiment, that's fine.
	If they say this is how society has to be, well, then suddenly we switch to opposite sides of the tennis match of good and evil, because then they want to initiate the use of force to achieve their ends, and that's not acceptable.
	Okay, now think about it this way.
	Don't people have to...
	I'm in total agreement with you here, but my question, a little...
	Anarcho-communist, anarcho-syndicalist over here is saying, Shanklin, you've got to buy the property before you can have the ownership of it so that you can give it up, because you can only give up what you have, right?
	So wouldn't they have to at least be able to answer the needs and wants of the society around them so that they can earn Whatever, to barter for the land, wouldn't that still exist?
	And what would you say to anarcho-communists about, you know, tragedy of the commons obviously is one thing, but they don't even see it that way.
	To them, it's just, well, property is theft.
	I mean, obviously, you've had this discussion before, but I hear a lot in the circles, and there's a big, yeah, I don't even know if anarcho-capitalists, if you won't even label them that, voluntarists, can coexist with people who don't believe In public property, I mean, some of these people even say they will outright attack us once the government's gone.
	I've heard that before, so what do you have to say about that?
	Well, that's a lovely way to open a debate.
	I mean, not from you, but from these people.
	Okay, so Mike, what percentage of the U.S. do you think is populated by people?
	Like actually having a person standing in that one foot by one foot section?
	No, no.
	I mean like it's really owned and used.
	I don't mean like government owned.
	I mean like real owned.
	Like farmed or has a house built on it, has a fence around it, has a city on it.
	What percentage of the U.S. do you think is populated by people who are exercising personal property?
	I have no idea.
	I'd probably guess 25%.
	I don't know.
	Last time I checked, which is a while back, three and a bit.
	Three?
	Three.
	Three percent, four percent.
	In fact, you could take the entire world's population, give them a little bit of land and fit them all in Texas.
	It's really hard to understand because most of us live in cities where squished up people, basically as that comedian says about riding on the subway, hey, since our groins have been pressed together for half an hour, do you want to start a family?
	But we don't understand really just how empty this planet really is.
	I mean, I live in Canada and dear Lord, You know, you take people, spread them out evenly across Canada, you know, we can't find each other with howitzers.
	So, I don't think there's going to be any problem if, you know, one of the most sort of energy and population and resource-rich places in the world, like America, is still only managing to populate its country 3%.
	I think there's going to be room.
	For people to set up their own communes without having to buy the land, right?
	Because we think of all the land is owned because there's this magic government flag that owns, like, people, moons, Mars, I don't know what the hell it is, this magic spear that they stick in the ground with their piece of cloth, and woohoo!
	We own everyone!
	I wish I had one of those.
	So, they're going to have room to do their funky communal experiments.
	That's fine.
	But look, forget land.
	Land doesn't matter.
	It's unimportant.
	The reality is where you start talking about property is people.
	Do we own our eyeballs in In other words, if I lose an eye or both eyes, do I get to take one of yours by force?
	Of course not!
	We all understand that's immoral.
	If I drink my liver into a smoky grave, do I get to take half your liver, attempt to regrow it and put it in my side with a spoon?
	Of course not!
	If I lose my thumb, do I get yours?
	No, of course not.
	So, at a personal level, you know, the stuff that we grow and build and tend to take care of, which is our personal bodies, we own and other people don't get to take that stuff from us, don't get to snip off things that they want from us.
	You know, you've got a reasonable head of hair there, let's trade, right?
	I mean, that's not how it works.
	So, it's the same thing with land.
	I mean, it doesn't matter what land.
	What matters is what you grow and what you produce.
	And there's no fundamental difference between a crop that you've planted and grown and your body that you water and feed and rest.
	There's no difference between your pet and your pancreas.
	There's no difference between your wheat and your skin.
	So, if you work to create something, whether it's physically in your body and attached to you, or something that otherwise wouldn't have been into existence if you didn't make it, no difference whatsoever.
	People want to create these artificial distinctions because we have this weird thing in our head, like, if you steal my eyeball, that's really bad, but if I build a house and you steal that, that's somehow not as bad.
	And, of course, in a way, I'd rather have a house stolen than an eyeball, but fundamentally there's no moral difference between the two, so, you know, Keep your hands off my eyeballs, you stinky hippies, and go find some place in the woods to go do your thing.
	That's really my message to the anarcho-syndicalists.
	And, by the way, by stinky hippies, I mean I want to be there Saturday night, because if you want to go to a good party, stinky hippieville is the place to go.
	I completely agree.
	Alrighty.
	This question comes from Jamie Trautman.
	They ask, if there was a stateless free market society on Earth existing among societies such as Communist China, could the free market remain stable if the consumers buy goods from a business that exploits China's cheap labor force?
	In other words, obviously since it's going to be insane over in Communist China since the economy is so bad, It's basically like forced-wave slavery, I guess, is what they're saying.
	Wouldn't that allow for a company to become a giant corporation like Walmart?
	Wouldn't that lead to such a company acquiring smaller companies and conquering a huge portion of the market?
	Wouldn't that allow for a monopoly to exist?
	So I want to kind of go over maybe monopolies, too, and talk about how maybe a free society could work next to a status society, if that's possible.
	I know, obviously, a person like me, I'm trying to bring freedom to the world, just like you.
	Yeah, I mean, I think it's a bit of an artificial question, like a lot of these things, because if a country has become stateless, it's because children have been raised peacefully, there's a general understanding of the virtue of ethics, there's been a...
	Reduction in the number of people's exposure to the toxicity of government propaganda through public schools.
	There are so many things that have to happen before, you know, to sort of wake up and have a stateless society.
	There are so many things that have to happen before, so many dominoes that have to come down, that you're not just going to have, boom, tomorrow, you know, next to Tibet is now a stateless society in China.
	But the big problem with being next to a stateless society is going to be immigration, right?
	Because let's say that you are, I don't know, I think Tibet's next to China.
	So Tibet becomes a stateless society and China isn't.
	And China is, you know, it's semi-repressive, post-communist, fascist nonsense that it is right now where you're only allowed to have one kid.
	Well, maybe you want more than one kid.
	Most people do, which is why there's a law to only have one.
	Well, the first thing you're going to do is go to Tibet because there's going to be no immigration controls available.
	In a stateless society, because immigration is recognized for what it is in a stateless society.
	It's called moving!
	That's all it is.
	It's just moving from one place to another, and there's no controls.
	Oh my god, you can't come to this street, right?
	So just move wherever you want.
	So there would of course be an East-West Berlin kind of problem where everyone who's in the state of society, who's got any gumption at all, is going to want to get like hell out of that state of society, stream off the border into the stateless society, And, of course, that's going to provoke a lot of problems.
	Like if, in a sense, you buy a farm next to some guy's farm and then you break down all the fences, all of his livestock are going to come stampeding over to you, especially if they know there's no slaughterhouse there and they won't get milked.
	The problem is going to be with immigration in this sort of artificial scenario, but of course we're talking about things so far in the future and after such an unimaginable change in human consciousness that, you know, it's really hard to, you know, it's like being in the 15th century trying to figure out what the internet might look like.
	It's just not something you can really productively do.
	But as far as the monopoly argument go, I mean, of course it's an old chestnut and it's sort of trotted out pretty regularly.
	First and foremost, if people are concerned about a monopoly, Then they have to be anti-statists, right?
	I mean, the state is a monopoly.
	It's like...
	I mean, it's like a guy being riddled with cancer, right?
	He's riddled with cancer and somebody comes along with a magic drug and says, hey, this makes your cancer gone tomorrow.
	And he's like, well, okay.
	But...
	But what if it comes back, you know, in 40 or 50 years?
	Be like, dude, you're going to die of cancer in three days.
	You know, are you really worried about cancer coming back in 40 or 50 years?
	Of course not, right?
	So, I mean, maybe you're worried about it, but not to the point where you're going to refuse treatment, right, or not take the pill.
	So if you're worried about a monopoly, then be an anti-statist.
	If we can get rid of the state, of course it's not going to come back.
	Slavery ain't going to come back tomorrow.
	Nobody's going to start subjugating women in the West tomorrow.
	It's just, I mean, absent Sharia law, right?
	So, none of this stuff is just coming back.
	Nobody's going to get political power in America by saying, let's bring back slavery and serfdom, and let's ban women from having any occupation.
	When we make progress, it doesn't tend to slide backwards unless there's some huge catastrophe.
	And the other thing too, companies, you can't just go and buy up companies to dominate a market.
	It doesn't work that way.
	Because what happens is, let's say there's five companies in the market.
	So, the first one buys the second one for $100 million.
	Well, the problem is, That the next three are not going to cost you $300 million because every time you get one more company, the price goes up because you have that much more of an incentive to buy that company because if you end up with a monopoly, you can charge monopoly rent prices and all that and your rent seeking has all done you a fabulous service.
	So everybody who's selling these companies is going to be like, whoa, man.
	First of all, he just knocked out a competitor.
	That's fantastic.
	If he's going to come for us, we're going to raise our price like crazy.
	And then, you know, so what happens is you end up taking on such a, if you really do want to buy everyone, you take on such a huge amount of debt.
	And such a huge amount of liabilities.
	And you have the problems of trying to integrate all these five companies.
	If you've ever worked in IT, you know, disparate IT systems, disparate cultures, disparate histories, lots of people are going to say, well, screw this.
	I didn't want to work for Megacorp, Walmart, Potato Head.
	I don't want this company, so I'm out of here.
	I'm going to start something entrepreneurial.
	All the contacts, all the customers leave.
	It's not like playing Monopoly, buying houses when you're in the free market trying to take over companies.
	It is a huge, big problem.
	And so it's not going to happen and nobody as far as I understand it in the past 350 damn years has ever been able to show a perpetual or even remotely long-lasting monopoly that has not come about because of some sort of government grant or favor or license or some sort of special treatment or tax break or subsidy or outright dominance of the field granted to it by some sort of government fiat.
	So if you're worried about a monopoly, you're worried about two things.
	A, the government, and B, companies that the government is giving monopoly power to.
	In the free market, it has never proven sustainable to try and create a monopoly, so it's like saying, well, in a free market society, what about the dead rising from the grave and strangling everyone?
	It's like, I'll take my chances.
	Well, not only that, but let's say somebody tried to collude and form a cartel, they would also have, let's say 30 people came together and they all signed this agreement in this closed room and they're going to jack up rates, they have an incentive to undercut each other and always do so.
	So there's no way that any of these crooks that are going to be crooks are going to be doing this in the back room anyway, they're going to crook each other out back into the market and people, as long as there's open competition, people can enter this market any time they want.
	The other thing too is to remember, and this is, you know, complaints against a quote monopoly, like the Rockefellers or the Carnegies, or people who were doing Really well, the complaints never come from the customers.
	The complaints come from the competitors.
	So it's not the customers who are upset at somebody who's doing really well in business.
	It's the competitors that lodge these complaints because they can't compete with these business geniuses.
	And so they're like, well, okay, we've got to break this company up.
	But it's not the customers who are complaining.
	It's always the competitors.
	And that tells you Exactly where the trouble is coming from.
	And to your point, there's ample evidence that this is a completely repetitive process.
	That the people who want to create, like if you want to raise prices, the way you do it, if you're smart and evil and there's a government, is you get the government to impose barrier to entry costs, right?
	So licensing or whatever nonsense it is, you know, ridiculously high educational requirements like that daily show about some woman who had to spend 300 hours learning how to braid someone's damn hair.
	So you go to the government and you raise the barrier to entry and then you get licenses and you get the government to force everyone to do this.
	And the reason you have to go to the government to get monopoly prices is because monopolies don't work without the government.
	As you say, if everybody colludes to raise prices, the first guy to break ranks is going to make a killing and possibly take over the entire market.
	So the higher you raise the prices artificially, the more everyone breaks ranks.
	This has been shown over and over and over again, which is why These monopolistic rent-seeking bastards always want to end up cuddling up to the politicians, you know, giving them sweet foot rubs with baby oil so that the government will pass laws to raise the prices because they know they can't sustain it in a free market.
	Yeah, and then they get rewarded with political contributions on the side, too.
	Good stuff.
	I have another question here from Matt Meyer.
	He asks, constitutional government, the opposite of what we currently have, obviously, or straight to voluntarism, what will it take to achieve either?
	Go to town on him.
	Say that again?
	Yeah, he's basically asking, constitutional government, the opposite of what we currently have, or straight to voluntarism, what will it take to achieve either?
	That's what he asked.
	Well, you can't achieve a constitutional government because there's no such thing as a constitution.
	There's a piece of paper.
	Which, you know, I guess you can draw on.
	You can probably draw money on it if you want to be a modern constitutional government.
	But there's no...
	I mean, constitution is just a piece of paper.
	It's like saying, let's be ruled by origami.
	It doesn't mean anything.
	It's just people.
	There's just people and there's guns.
	And that's all that society in a status scenario amounts to.
	Pieces of paper don't stop governments from growing.
	Magic spells don't stop governments from growing.
	You know, killing chickens in ritualistic manners with arseless chaps.
	They don't...
	I mean, for the chickens, of course, because otherwise it would be kind of kinky.
	This doesn't stop government from growing.
	Government grows inevitably because once force is used in a universal sense in the equation of the economic affairs of mankind, once you introduce the element of force, it is always going to grow because it is so vastly profitable.
	This is basic public choice theory, right?
	It's so vastly profitable to use violence to get what you want from a productive population that it is inevitably and always and forever going to grow.
	From the moment you introduce the idea of force, in general, in society, it's just going to grow.
	And history shows this With unbelievable, like, drumbeat, we will rock you, brain-deadening regularity.
	You get a little bit of freedom, like in the Roman Empire or the pre-British Empire, or the American Empire, you get a little bit of freedom, and woo, we get a huge amount of money that comes out through free trade.
	And everyone, you know, parties till dawn and makes lots of money and trades and the division of labor goes on and resource optimization and efficiency, capital infrastructure gets put in place.
	I mean, It's all beautiful and everything grows.
	And then the government says, whoa, that's great food for the cancer we call ourselves.
	And they then start to take that over and tax it and then they overwhelm it and they collapse it.
	I mean, it's the same thing that happens over and over again.
	So there's no point.
	There's no point going back.
	To a constitutional government.
	As I said before, that's like opening someone up who's about to die of cancer, you know, cutting three-quarters of the cancer out, and then saying, don't worry, it's not going to grow back because I wrote the word constitution on the cancer.
	So, you know, clearly that's changed the nature of the cancer.
	Well, it hasn't.
	You're just going to set the cycle back and start again.
	So, forget that.
	Let's get off this goddamn treadmill of big government, small government, big government, small government.
	Small government, big government collapse.
	Small government, big government collapse.
	Forget it.
	I mean, it's just we owe the future a little bit more than the same repetitive bullshit of the past.
	So, what we want to do is promote a form of humanity that is not domesticatable.
	And the way that we do that is...
	We don't teach children the language of statism in the home.
	The state, and I'm certainly not the first and probably not the last to talk about this, the state is fundamentally in effect to the family.
	If you treat children in an egalitarian fashion, in a consultative fashion, in a negotiating fashion, and you don't use aggression, you don't use abandonment, you don't use threats, you don't use punishment, then children grow up not speaking the language of statism.
	And then they're about as threatening as a Japanese kabuku clown yelling at you from across a river.
	It's just not scary because they don't speak that language.
	They haven't been broken, subjugated, and frightened to the point where someone comes along and wants to break, subjugate, and frighten them.
	They're like, oh, I know what this is.
	I'll do it.
	So, it all starts in the home.
	It all starts very early.
	We raise an undomesticable group of human beings and the state will simply not have any power over time.
	Because, of course, if you raise children peacefully, you get almost no crime.
	I mean, so much of crime.
	90 to 95 percent of addiction and other forms of crimes have been traced directly back to child abuse.
	So you raise children peacefully, then we won't really have to worry about criminals.
	Yes, okay, some guy's going to get a brain tumor once in a while or struck by lightning and he's going to get all Stephen King on everyone, but it's so rare that we don't really worry about it.
	Don't buy a lot of insurance for getting hit by a meteor.
	So we raise children peacefully and we almost have eliminated the problem of crime, and without the problem of crime, And without the problem of poverty, and without the problem of dysfunction, without the problems of drug abuse and so on, what do we need a state for?
	We need to protect you from all these people who are just, what, sipping mint juleps in the sunset.
	So we raise children peacefully, and that's the only way that we're going to outgrow the state.
	And anything else to me is just a distraction.
	No, good stuff.
	I have another question from Adam Rigaud.
	I think I'm pronouncing that correctly.
	He says, do you think there's going to be a civil war in the future of the United States, at least some type of secession?
	What are you going to do about the future, and when do you think the economy is really going to start taking a hammer from inflation?
	Obviously, we're on an unsustainable path going into the future with the debts and everything else that we're building up around us.
	Do you think it's going to turn into a war or not?
	Do you see us...
	Obviously, it feels like we're already living in a World War III scenario.
	It's just kind of more of a big bully picking on a bunch of smaller little regions.
	But what about here domestically?
	Do you see any kind of...
	There's people raising arms about, you know, if you take my guns, we're going to get together and fight you guys and the rest of this stuff.
	And it looks like they're going to try and push some kind of national gun legislation down our throats within the next three years.
	What do you see coming down the road for America and the economy?
	Well, unfortunately it's You know, and I, of course, go out on a limb here.
	I think I said about five years ago that it was going to be five to fifteen years.
	Five to fifteen years in the future were going to be the make or break time.
	There is a depressing amount of predictability about these kinds of things.
	If you move in libertarian circles and among gun rights activists, it's easy to forget just how placid and compliant most people are in the face of authority.
	You know, study after study has shown this.
	I mean, if you look at Milgram's experiments and Zimbardo's experiments in the 1960s and beyond, You know, if people in a white coat and a lab, we're holding a sort of a clipboard and if they're in a white coat, if they tell someone to deliver fatal electric shocks to somebody with heart problems, the vast majority of people will just do it.
	They'll just do it.
	This is how shattered and broken the spirit is of our once noble race.
	It's tragic.
	Most people will simply obey.
	Fascism is not something that comes in the future.
	Fascism is something that is already all around us.
	How many cops will refuse to obey an unconstitutional law?
	Very few.
	In other words, we already have fascists who will do anything the government says in the form of law officers, in the form of immigration officers, in the form of IRS officers, FBI, CIA, Army, you name it.
	They may not feel comfortable.
	I mean, how many people refused to disarm peaceful citizens in the New Orleans-Katrina debacle?
	No, they just all went door-to-door.
	The fascism is here.
	The orders haven't been given, but there's no doubt whatsoever that the fascism is here already.
	This may sound like hyperbole.
	It's absolutely not.
	This is entirely grounded upon decades of scientific research.
	They have replicated this study.
	You can look at Milgram's experiment.
	They've replicated this study around the world.
	And it is almost universally consistent that almost everyone will kill someone that someone they perceive to be an authority tells them to do it.
	War tells us that, hey, go shoot that guy, he's a bad guy.
	Off they go, right?
	So the ingredients for fascism have not been solved.
	You know, we had this whole goddamn 20th century bloodshed of hundreds of millions of people fighting communism, fighting fascism.
	And the shit is still all around us.
	It's in remission because there's not a credible threat to drive people into the arms of the inevitable demagog who arises during times of crisis.
	But the fascism is all around us.
	The orders haven't been given.
	At least not many of them relative to how bad it can be.
	But there's not going to be any resistance to the expansion of government power.
	I mean, government 20 or 30 years ago was like 20% of its current size.
	It's grown five times with almost no protest.
	In fact, with the enthusiastic participation of both of the major parties in the US. And so, if there's a crisis or whatever, and we see this with the Patriot Act and with these horrible wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, it's a little crisis.
	9-11, relative to world history, 3,000 people, relative to the 300 million people, a democide or more in the 20th century, that gave people, I mean, they freaked out enough that they gave up huge amounts of rights in the Patriot Act.
	They cheered on the beginning of a decade-long war that's killed over a million people.
	There's no doubt that when the orders are given, the cops will obey it and the people will comply.
	There's no reason to believe anything different because the studies are universal around the world.
	That people are so shattered and broken up, squished, crushed and stripped of their soul and ethics and virtue and potential and happiness and love and intimacy and capacity as human beings.
	It is so crushed when they're children that they become Programmable, programmed, fascist drones by the time they're probably in their early to mid-teens.
	It's probably the end of the road.
	We don't understand.
	You know, this image from The Wall, right?
	The movie The Wall.
	I don't know if you've ever seen it.
	The kids all fall into the hamburger, right?
	They fall into the meat grinder.
	This is what is called status education.
	This is what is called religious education.
	People are so broken that when the orders are given, they will comply and they will obey and they will enforce.
	And yeah, there'll be a few people who will resist, of course, but it won't matter.
	You know, if you move in the libertarian circles, it's easy to forget that 150,000 new statists are coming out of government schools every single month on average.
	You know, sure as hell aren't getting 150,000 new libertarians every month.
	So, sorry to sound kind of dire, but I try to stay as empirically true to the facts as possible.
	And the facts are that the fascism, all the ingredients for fascism are already perfectly around us.
	And a crisis and a demagogues is the only match and flint that it takes to set the whole thing up.
	Yeah, it feels like we're, you know, when wrestling came out years and years ago, a lot more people at the time at least believed that wrestling was real.
	And you asked somebody today, and I think it's only down to about 8% believe it's still real, you know, wrestling, the fake wrestling, obviously.
	But it feels like that way for statism.
	Like, the next thing we have to do is kind of do what most of the fans of wrestling had to do, which was kind of like...
	Realized that it was just a dream, it was a fantasy world, and that, you know, they're really not hitting each other with their buddy-buddy in the back room.
	That's what it kind of feels like, you know, when you're looking at politics, because obviously, sure, you have the bickering between the two parties, but really, government continues to grow, just like you're saying.
	I want to continue on here.
	We've got a lot to go over in a little time.
	Valerie Rumor asks, she says, ask Stefan if there is any one thing that he thinks we can do to bring people towards more anarchism, volunteerism, agorist thinking.
	Ask him what, in his opinion, is the biggest obstacle to the movement at this time.
	Those are great questions.
	This is off the top of my head, so I won't defend this when I'm sober, or I may not.
	But we need to become a community that people envy.
	We need to become a community that people envy.
	And I don't think we are a community that people envy yet.
	I don't think that we're very effective at dealing with bullies within our own community.
	I don't think that we hold ourselves to the highest standards of human interaction in our own community.
	I think that we can be self-indulgent, petty, vindictive, vicious.
	I think that our public personas are sometimes entirely out of sorts with our professed goals of non-violence, or at least of the non-aggression principle.
	I think there's ridiculous infighting.
	I think there's a lack of willingness to address essential questions like, does the non-aggression principle apply to spanking?
	I mean, I've written articles about it, I've talked about it for years, and I've yet to find many people in the libertarian movement who are even willing to think about engaging on this as a practical topic.
	But Jesus H. Christ on a stick.
	Spanking is something we can control.
	Federal Reserve, we can't do shit all about.
	We can't control foreign policy, we can't control government policy, but we can control whether we initiate the use of force against our own children.
	If we were to examine Our own behavior rather than focus solely on the people over the hill whose actions we can't even approach, let alone change, I think we could do something truly incredible.
	If we were to have the highest standards of behavior on the internet, that would be pretty cool.
	People would say, wow, there's a movement where people actually behave respectfully and intelligently towards each other and they don't indulge in flame wars and they ask questions and they're curious and they're intelligent.
	I think that's really cool.
	I kind of maybe want me some of that.
	Or if we have, as a community, a commitment to nonviolence within the family, my goodness, we would have some pretty smart children.
	My goodness, we would have some pretty amazing children.
	We'd have children that people would go like, wow, there's a peaceful family.
	There's a family where people really enjoy each other's company.
	I want some of that.
	I don't know crap all about fiat currency and inflation, but I can see a productive, peaceful and happy community and I can accept and understand that and I can apply that.
	In my own life.
	There's a community that's really into self-knowledge.
	This is the oldest commandment of Socrates.
	Know thyself.
	Know thyself.
	Here's a community that is really committed to peaceful communication, to negotiation rather than aggression.
	Here's a community that supports each other, that encourages each other, that is willing to confront and clash intellectually in pursuit of the truth, but not in insulting, vicious, or denigrative ways.
	That would be such a departure for most people from particularly societies on the internet or societies that they may have known or whatever, that people would just like it.
	It would be like, whoa, I think I see a slice of the future.
	I like it.
	Because every time we come up to people or we present ourselves as a community, what people perceive is, what they receive is, these people want to run my life.
	And I know that's not what libertarianism or anarchism is about, but this is what they perceive.
	It's that these people are coming and want to run my life, right?
	So when you see a bunch of Nazis walking down the street, you know that they want to run your life.
	You're like, well, I don't want these people running my life.
	Pretty scary.
	Pretty volatile.
	I want these people running my life.
	I don't want these people in charge.
	I don't want these people to organize society.
	I don't want to live in society that these people like.
	Because if they're Nazis or communists, I don't want to live in the society that they like.
	But the question is, do people want to live in the society that libertarians like?
	Well, the first thing is that we have to show what that society looks like, which is not blog posts or abstract crap, it's how do we treat each other?
	How do we treat each other?
	And how do we deal with bullies?
	Because we say, well, we don't need the state.
	Well, if we can't even manage our own community and deal with bullies in some way, either through reform or ostracism, then who the hell are we to talk about what works in society?
	First thing we want to do is show all of these principles at work within our own communities, within our own families, within our own interactions.
	What if libertarians had by far the lowest divorce rate?
	Because they really got along.
	They knew how to negotiate.
	They didn't use aggression.
	What if they had the smartest, best behaved, most accomplished kids?
	Because they didn't use any aggression against them.
	They homeschooled them.
	Whatever it took to raise this crop of healthy human beings for the first goddamn time in human history.
	What if there was an intelligence and a...
	A negotiation and a non-violent confrontation where necessary about differences of agreement within the community, wouldn't that be amazing?
	We've got to show people.
	We can't argue with them based on reason.
	People don't even know how to reason.
	We might as well be shouting at an ant in Mandarin when we bring arguments from Austrian economics to the average person.
	But they can appreciate what they can see tangibly.
	And so people who act abusively or aggressively in public are part of the libertarian movement.
	They're just feeding the state and starving the future.
	Well, I think a lot of it also has to do with, which I agree with everything you said, just to add to what you're going towards, a lot of people don't see how the violence inside of the home, domestic violence, can actually stump the brain.
	It brings up a memory of an abused dog.
	Whenever you go to touch an abused dog, They always have that jerk reaction.
	And when you have, like, my dogs, they'll come up to you, they love everybody.
	They'll lick you in the face, they don't care, you know?
	It's just love everywhere.
	And it kind of reminds me of the difference that most people don't see from a statist household and why people become statisms when they're raised in an aggressive environment versus a more freer, more peaceful environment.
	I guess, you know, It's really hard to get people to understand that when they're raised inside an environment that's aggressive.
	Do you agree on that?
	Yeah, for sure.
	I mean, 90% of parents are still hitting their children.
	90% of parents are still hitting their children.
	What if the remaining 10% were all libertarians?
	I mean, wouldn't that be an incredible pitch to say, listen, we're into the non-aggression principle.
	And here's, you know, yeah, the Fed, blah, blah, blah.
	But here's where you can really implement it in your own life.
	And here's, we're going to show you how, we're going to help you how, we're going to communicate how, we're going to coach you on how, we're going to encourage you on how.
	And boy, you know, wouldn't, I mean, I get letters literally every single day.
	I get a letter or two or three from people saying, you know, I've stopped yelling at my kids, I've stopped threatening my kids, I've stopped punishing my kids, I've stopped hitting my kids, and it's amazingly great.
	It was a tough transition, but oh my god, this is paradise compared to what it was before.
	You know, those people are doing a hell of a lot more Right.
	And we won't have the conversations.
	Tough that they are.
	I get it.
	It's tough that they are.
	We do need to have the integrity to our principles to say, does the non-aggression principle apply first and most importantly to the actions that I can control?
	And does it really matter about the things I can't control?
	Because if you see people who are thunderingly positive about a particular principle and then only apply it to areas they have no power over and refuse to even discuss it on areas they have power over, people don't understand that 90% of communication is non-verbal.
	That shatters credibility to everyone.
	This is why we can't grow.
	Well, I got a question for you.
	Actually, I think Valerie had this second question annotation in there.
	She was asking for parents who are now, you know, they've already had kids who are 10 years old or so, so they might have missed that opportunity to fully implement your non-aggression parenting.
	What is something they can do at this point to kind of maybe help fix the problem if there is an issue there?
	Is there any way to correct it at this point other than just trying to do what we're doing from the start and they just try to implement it when the kid's 10 years old or so?
	Well, I mean, just to be clear, it's not my non-aggressive parenting.
	Even Dr.
	Benjamin Spock in the, I think, early 1950s, he published some 60 years ago, was opposed to spanking the American Medical Association, Association of Pediatrics, all against spanking.
	So it's not just me.
	This is like I'm barely significant in this.
	I'm like a, you know, a firefly in sunlight, right?
	If you have made mistakes, I mean, gosh, I mean, I think we all kind of know what to do about mistakes, which is to apologize like crazy and make amends as much as humanly possible, and to accept the responsibility of knowing that according – if you held true to the non-aggression principle and spanked, In the past, then you don't really have the excuse of ignorance.
	Obviously, when you're spanking, you are initiating the use of force against a child.
	Violence is only acceptable in self-defense, and spanking is not an act of self-defense.
	I think it's tragic that you were in a community that didn't remind you about this basic Implementable principle of your highest values.
	I think it's really tragic that it wasn't addressed in Ayn Rand's writing.
	I think it's really tragic that Nathaniel Brandon doesn't seem to have done much to address it.
	I think it's tragic that Murray Rothbard and all these people haven't had the topic of parenting come up.
	I mean, it's really tragic.
	But it's also very, very encouraging.
	Because if parenting had been tried and we were still in the same damn position, I'd be out of answers.
	I mean, we tried everything.
	We tried political action.
	We tried infiltrating academia.
	We tried writing books.
	We tried publishing blogs.
	We tried starting TV stations.
	And we tried parenting.
	Well, we're out.
	There's nothing.
	Until space aliens come along and remove governments with beneficial lasers that turn politicians into traitors, then we're done.
	But this is the one thing that has been consistently avoided.
	It's the one thing that scientifically is...
	Certain to work.
	Not a doubt.
	It's certain to work.
	So it's the one thing that's been consistently avoided that is certain to work.
	So, yay!
	You know, that's fantastic.
	We have something we can do.
	So you apologize for not thinking it through.
	You also can get a little upset at your community for never bringing it up.
	You can also, if you have been somebody who squelched discussions or avoided discussions about this stuff in the past, You can also get mad at yourself, you know, without necessarily beating yourself up, but it's okay to get frustrated about something that was obvious that you didn't do.
	You apologize like crazy.
	Maybe you go to family therapy with someone to see if you can work out some of the damage that's been done by violence and aggression within the home.
	There's things that you can do, but you know, admitting there's a problem, admitting you made a mistake, admitting you didn't live up to the values that you were portraying, Or that you only lived up to them in areas you couldn't affect or couldn't change.
	And dealing with the fallout, repairing the relationships wherever possible, I think that's the best that can be done.
	And to parents who do that, oh, I mean, that's fantastic.
	You know, any change never catches anyone at the beginning, right?
	Almost never, right?
	It's always in transition.
	Some people are older, some people are younger.
	Like, so, you know, if we privatize everything tomorrow, there's some people like, three days from retirement, you know, in the public sector, they're screwed, right?
	I mean, that sucks.
	Sorry, but, you know, you had a shitty career waiting for the pot of gold, which, you know, freedom has now taken away.
	Sorry, but...
	But the reality is that we have to slice this sausage at some point, right?
	And, you know, sorry if you're further down the road, but you did have the principles and unfortunately you didn't have a community that really wanted to talk about this stuff, which I can understand.
	Childhood stuff, parenting stuff, family stuff, it's volatile as hell.
	You know, fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
	That would be me.
	But it's still, it's the only thing we haven't really tried and it's the only thing that scientifically is certain to work.
	So, dear God, let's screw our courage to the stick in place and get her done.
	Good stuff.
	Okay, I have some very important questions here.
	I personally wanted to ask you this, but a guy named Colin Grant asked, what do you think about anarchists who run for office and use the Do Not Vote For Me platform?
	I know certain anarchists like Nick Coons who ran for office but was simply using the pulpit to spread ideals.
	Would you ever run for office on an education-only platform?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I mean, nobody votes anyway, right?
	I mean, I don't know the exact numbers, but I think like 50 or 60 percent of people don't vote.
	So like 10 or 20 percent of people vote for the winner.
	And of those 10 or 20 percent of people, half of them or more are simply voting for government benefits that have been promised to them by whoever, right?
	So when you talk about people who don't have a conflict of interest who are actually voting, You know, it's 5%, 6%, 7%, 8%.
	And if you take out of those people, people who don't have a freaking clue about anything, you don't know their ass from a hole in the ground, you know, couldn't name you an Austrian economist, and don't know anything about fiat currency or anything like that.
	I mean, nobody votes, fundamentally.
	I mean, almost nobody votes.
	So, the idea that we should, you know, and I'm great for, like, let's not vote.
	I mean, that's great.
	I think if you're going to use a political platform to talk about Peaceful parenting?
	Great!
	I just haven't seen any of that yet.
	But I think that trying to spread the ideas of Being against politics by entering into politics is like trying to use a slave army to defeat slavery.
	It's just such a contradiction at the base of it that there's so many better ways to do it.
	Don't waste your time, don't waste your money.
	Everybody wants politics to solve it because if politics solve it, we don't have to have, as I've mentioned before and will mention again, the tough conversation about politics.
	Aggression, violence, spanking, hitting, assault, abuse, verbal, on the internet, wherever.
	We don't have to have those tough conversations and confront people within our own community.
	If someone can bungee in from politics and save us all, woohoo!
	Don't have to do the heavy lifting of implementing this in my own life.
	So it's very tempting.
	It is.
	But that way, madness and defeat lie.
	Good stuff.
	And this next question comes from Eric Bickford.
	He says, as an atheist, should I spend my time debunking religions?
	Or because religions are voluntary associations, besides children of course, usually, is my time more wisely spent debunking statism?
	Yeah, of course, children...
	Religions are not, as I mentioned, right?
	Religions are not voluntary organizations because they're indoctrinated on helpless children who don't have the independence or rational cognitive abilities or perspective or history or sometimes even reading ability to differentiate truth from falsehood.
	So it is indoctrination.
	I actually once was really interested in...
	A Christian woman.
	I was dating her, kind of, kind of.
	Anyway, we really...
	But we had a great degree of intellectual compatibility in many ways.
	And so we started talking about how to raise kids, you know, before we didn't really start dating, because, you know, I wasn't an idiot even back then.
	Maybe I am now, but I wasn't back then.
	And I said to her...
	She said to me, she said, oh, you know, my dad's an atheist.
	He just sleeps in on Sundays, you know, so you can do that while I take the kids to church.
	And I said, no, no, no, no.
	If we have children together, they can't be taught religion when they're young.
	If they want to become religious when they get older, well, that's their choice, right?
	I mean, of course, right?
	But you can't teach them that religion is true when they're too young to differentiate or understand what it is that you're talking about, the options, perspectives.
	Like, you don't sort of lay out all the 10,000 gods that people believe in and then throw a dot at this one and say, good, that's Jesus, that's us.
	So that's why...
	We're Christians.
	So anyway, I didn't quite put it that floridly.
	And I just remember very clearly she said, no.
	No, no, no.
	The children have to come to church with me when they're very, very young.
	She was like, you know, like a laser.
	And it's like...
	Okay.
	I'm sorry we won't be dating anymore, but thank you for illuminating the process for me.
	So, and we never did, of course, I never did date again.
	I mean, she didn't become my enemy or anything like that, but she sure would have if we'd gotten married.
	So, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
	I mean, fighting religion, I think that has some value, of course, right?
	I think that it's important to put, you know, truth, reason, and evidence first and foremost.
	But the reality is that religion is not the fundamental We're good to go.
	And so it's like, you know, you can follow the tooth fairy for all I care.
	Just don't hit and yell at your kids.
	I would have much more in common with, you know, some anarcho-syndicalists who raised his children peacefully than from some anarchist who spanked his kids.
	Because I'm all about the ethics you implement.
	I'm not about the ethics you talk about.
	I'm not about the ethics you blog about or the ethics you fantasize about or the ethics you debate about or the ethics you read about.
	I'm about the ethics you live.
	And somebody who is living the ethics of non-violence and non-aggression within their own lives is much closer to me in terms of compatibility than somebody who's not doing that.
	So, I think fighting religion is fine.
	I think it's a good thing to do.
	But again, it just all falls secondary to parenting.
	Now, of course, religion has its component within parenting and that's a complex topic and so on.
	I really wanted to point that out.
	I mean, I definitely will take my swings at religion, or as the religious people call it, you just bash Jesus, you know, like some sort of celestial piñata.
	But the reality is that I'm really, you know, whatever promotes peace and parenting, I'm for.
	Of course, there's problems in the Bible with parenting, right?
	Spare the rod, spoil the child.
	The Bible is very keen on having children who question their parents stoned to death.
	So there's lots of problems.
	If you follow the biblical commandments on parenting, you're like a stone evil guy who will rot in jail for the rest of his life.
	A couple of problems with that, but of course there are very few Christians, if any, who do that.
	I have the next comment or question, I should say, comes from Philippe Olszewski.
	I'm sorry, Philippe, if I got your last name wrong, there's some hard pronunciations out there in the world.
	Especially as we have different nationalities coming together through the internet.
	But he asks, what are Stefan's thoughts on antinatalism?
	Antinatalism, which is, he says you're a pretty pro-kids guy and he'd like to hear your reasoning on why it's a good thing to give somebody life.
	Yeah, I mean, I guess I've heard these kinds of questions.
	I find them a little hard to process.
	So, antinatalism is the idea that it's immoral to bring a person into the world, right?
	I mean, clearly there's a contradiction in that you're only alive to make the argument because someone brought you into the world.
	So, if life is the problem, then, you know, there's lots of remedies involving high buildings and so on that you can take.
	Not that I recommend them, but there are things that you can take if life is the problem.
	But if you're arguing that people shouldn't be brought into existence, there's, of course, a self-detonating argument.
	It's like yelling into someone's ear that there's no such thing as sound because you're kind of alive.
	Now, the argument often is around the consumption of natural resources and so on.
	If you have a kid, it's going to consume so much more energy and all this kind of stuff.
	But I don't know that that's necessarily true.
	I mean, what if your kid invents a USB drive?
	You know, which has saved more paper than all of the environmental organizations in the world ever put together.
	What if your kid comes up with a great way to negotiate relationships so that far fewer people get divorced?
	Well, divorce, of course, is a huge consumer of natural resources.
	Two houses, two cars, lots of driving.
	And so if you can cut down divorce, you cut down natural resource use.
	Maybe he's going to come up with free energy.
	Maybe he's going to be somebody who finds some magical way to promote voluntarism and restrict the statism to the point where everything becomes much more efficient and we can work from home.
	I don't know.
	Like, you don't know that your kid is going to be a consumer of resources or a genius or even just a smart guy who's going to find some magical way to minimize the use of resources through some sort of entrepreneur.
	What if he invents a teleporter?
	You know, we don't need cars or airplanes anymore.
	Who knows, right?
	So, you can't really make the argument that everyone who comes into the world consumes resources because some people come in the world and make resources incredibly more efficient than they used to be.
	So, I mean, do you download, do you drive to the CD store, you know, like you're in some Barenaked Lady store?
	Or do you drive to the all-night record store on a Tuesday night and pick up your albums?
	Or do you just click on a button and download them from the internet, legally and of course paid for?
	So, no, of course, right?
	Do you have to drive to go to college or can you take the courses online?
	I mean, lots of amazing things that have been done to minimize resource use and consumption.
	So, I think gamble on life.
	I think that there is, of course, a time where you have so many children, you can't give them the requisite individual attention.
	I don't exactly know what that number is, but it's somewhere less than 20 and somewhere more than zero.
	So, I think you can certainly make an argument that too many kids is detrimental to each child's experience, but the idea that you should be against having kids on principle fails on almost every level that I can think of philosophically.
	Yeah, good stuff.
	You know, I think what he was really trying to hammer on was, I guess some people call life safe slavery, and I know one time you had a rebuttal where you said that basically if you thought your life was slavery and it was that bad of a condition, I guess you could commit suicide, you know, put your money where your mouth is.
	If you really think that parents are enslaving people by giving them birth, you know, that's kind of the mentality.
	Some people say, you know, you have no choice what to be born, right?
	Yeah, well, of course, everyone who's alive chooses to continue the conditions of their birth, right?
	I mean, so it obviously can't be that bad.
	And I'm not sort of saying to be true to your principles, go jump off a bridge.
	I'm just saying that this is logical problems.
	But the other thing I think which happens in the libertarian movement is we are so rapidly approaching a crisis in society that I do not want to have a child at this point.
	And I have, I mean, more than the natalist sort of fundamentalist argument, I certainly have some sympathy with that.
	But I choose to live like there's no state.
	That's the freest I can be.
	And I really genuinely believe that if you live freely and loudly, the loudly part is important, if you live freely and loudly, you're doing the best service To virtue, to philosophy, to freedom, to the future that you can possibly do.
	If there was no state, I'd be a dad.
	I want to be a dad because I love my wife with every atom and fiber of my being, and I really didn't want to be a dad until I meet her.
	Children come out of love for your partner.
	They don't come out of, I want a kid.
	It's because I love this person so much that I want us to share something together, and I also want to see how great she's going to be as a parent.
	And my wife as a parent is stupendous.
	I struggle to catch up sometimes.
	And so if you love your wife, and if there was no state you'd have a kid, then the best way to live in a stateless way is to have a kid.
	I mean, the best way to live in a stateless way is to act as if there's no state.
	Yeah, pay them off, you know, fine, take money, you know, but if the mafia is going to come and shake you down for 500 bucks a month, give them the 500 bucks a month if you want.
	If you can't move, if you're stuck there, give them the 500 bucks a month, but then don't waste two days or two weeks or two years bitching about the mafia.
	Then they've taken a lot more than $500.
	Give them your money.
	Pay them off.
	Pay the bastards off.
	Fine.
	Take the money.
	Now I'm free.
	I paid you off.
	Now I'm free.
	So make the same decisions that you would make without the government because that's the best way to show people what the future looks like and that's the best way to live free of the government.
	Yeah, good stuff.
	Next question coming up here is Franklin Nicolme Voluntarist asks, what's the next step for Freedom Main Radio?
	What does the community need to do To go from a one-person organization to a huge network?
	Maybe is there going to be a free-domain radio university someday or something to that end?
	What do you see for the future of free-domain radio?
	Where's the next step?
	Do you think it's just going to remain?
	I mean, obviously, you have help in the back, you know, people that take care of some technical issues and stuff like that, but it's mainly Stefan Molyneux.
	Everything you see is Molyneux's work.
	What's the next step for free-domain radio?
	Well, we're attempting to clone Pee Wee Herman and Max Headroom to take over the show because we genuinely feel that that would be largely indistinguishable from my august presence.
	But no, I mean, absolutely.
	The show, of course, has grown beyond anything I imagined.
	I was, you know, just hoping to keep, you know, body and soul together at the beginning and now it's kind of grown into a big thing, which is good.
	I mean, I'm very happy about that and I certainly appreciate massively everyone's attention, time and support to make that happen.
	I'm currently working on a documentary, which is a way to introduce the ideas of philosophy and ethics and the way in which ethics is dictating the world's problems.
	So our lack of attention and focus on ethics is causing all the problems in the world.
	So I'm really trying to make this a Matrix unplugging kind of movie.
	And I've got some animators, got a completely...
	Brilliant musician working on the score.
	And so that's all coming together.
	The script has been done for a while.
	We're just going through the final phases of animation.
	And so hopefully in the next month or two months, two and a half months, it'll be done.
	So that's the key for that.
	The next thing I want to do is a documentary on...
	It's called The Bomb and the Brain.
	It's the series that I've done on...
	YouTube, people can check it out at fdrurl.com forward slash bib.
	I really want to make the case so that people understand the effects of aggression on children so that you really can see all the science, get all the experts.
	So I'm going to do that and then the third documentary is going to be How we get there.
	You know, things that we need to do as a group, as a community, to get to actually start making tangible, measurable, empirical process.
	You know, I'm a business guy.
	I'm a business guy, so everything for me has got to, you can't manage it if you can't measure it.
	And we kind of run politics like just another government program in the movement.
	So I'd like to make the case.
	I could be completely wrong, but I'd really like to make the case In the third documentary about what we need to do and hopefully from there get lots of energy and focus on getting people enrolled and finally getting this stone rolled away from the Lazarus Cave from the future so that we can really get out and enjoy some free air as a species for once.
	Yeah, no, I completely agree.
	Gordon McGill, he asks, what is your strategy for when the mainstream media and the state notice, I mean, you start, what are you about?
	15 million hits on YouTube, I think is what I saw.
	Somewhere around there, you're close to it.
	And 50 million on your podcast online is obviously the largest philosophy radio show or podcast in the world, so congratulations on that.
	You're going to someday, they can't ignore you, you're going to have 100 million, 200, maybe a billion hits within the next couple of years, I'm thinking.
	I mean, there's got to be a point where they start talking about you.
	Everybody's going to be talking about it around the talking heads at least.
	They'd have to at least bring it up.
	So what is your strategy?
	I'm not talking about RT America, and that stuff's great.
	I love you on there.
	Don't get me wrong.
	But I'm talking about the big boys.
	Fox News someday will have to address you.
	Maybe it's 10 years down the road.
	What is it that you're going to have to do?
	There's going to have to be some inevitable step They're going to try to discredit you.
	They're going to try to knock us down and make us look silly.
	Wait, wait, the media might try to discredit me?
	I've never heard of that before.
	I'd be shocked if that were ever to happen.
	Well, look, I mean, the mainstream media, I mean...
	You're talking as if they're going to be relevant in 10 years.
	I mean, the level of support and trust in the mainstream media is diving down catastrophically.
	I mean, when you want news, do you turn on CNN? Of course not, right?
	I mean, at least I would assume.
	So I don't think that...
	It's going to be particularly relevant where I go on the mainstream media in 10 years.
	I don't have anything in particular to say to the mainstream media.
	I mean, they're focused on politics 24-7.
	I have nothing but an empty contempt and boredom with politics.
	They refuse to discuss child abuse in any productive way, which is, of course, something that is absolutely essential to building a free society.
	So, you know, the media will scream bloody murder over...
	Some completely inconsequential or virtual non-threat to children, but they cheer on war, which gets millions of children killed, and they cheer on sanctions against Iraq, which have been demonstrably to have shown to have killed 5 million Iraqis and children, of course, just in staggering amounts.
	So, the mainstream media is – the state is the physical abuse.
	The mainstream media is the verbal abuse component of the aspects of power.
	So, not only would I – don't think I would have anything really to say to the mainstream media, first and foremost, but more importantly, I don't think I would have anything to say to the mainstream media's viewers.
	I think that's – They would be so much in the matrix that I would just look bizarre and perhaps evil to them or whatever it is.
	So I think that I would much rather work in the medium where I can have direct contact with people and the idea that I would go on and try and promote volunteerism in the mainstream media, I don't know.
	I just...
	I can't imagine a situation wherein I would really want to do that or where that would be really productive.
	So, you know, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, but, you know, it's certainly not on my radar at the moment.
	Good stuff.
	Good answer.
	All right.
	I want you to give the viewers out there maybe your website, your YouTube channel, URL, other pieces of information you think you'd like them to see, a place where they can donate, because obviously you and I, we're paid on donations.
	So if you guys would like to help support Stefan and I, Stefan has his own website you can donate to.
	Obviously you can find mine at VoluntaryVirtues.com.
	What's the top three, four URLs you like to plug usually, Stefan?
	Go ahead.
	Well, I'll start with a resource that's not mine, but which I really like.
	Lfb.org forward slash Stefan, S-T-E-F-A-N. They've got a great laissez-faire book club.
	You get really, really great goodies, 99 bucks a year.
	I hope that you'll go and sign up for it.
	Globalescapehatch.com, if you'd like to check that out.
	I'm going to be speaking there.
	It's in Belize in March if you want to come out.
	It's not going to be recorded, so I will be there for the whole week if people want to, with my family, if people want to come by and chat.
	I love to spend time chatting with listeners, fans, critics, and foes alike.
	So if people want to come out to that, my website, freedomainradio.com, of course, youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio for the videos.
	And yeah, I mean, donations are welcome.
	Dig deep, gorge yourself, senseless, at the buffet of philosophy called this show.
	And if you'd like to donate over time, that's fantastic.
	And yours is voluntaryvirtues.com just for my listeners if they like your work, which I'm sure they will.
	Then they go by and feel free to share the goodies.
	And if you're torn between donations, donate to Michael because his show is on the up and coming.
	And I'm sure you could use all the encouragement that you could get.
	So that would be my suggestion.
	Well, thanks, Stefan.
	And I would encourage everybody to donate to Stefan because if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't even be standing here today.
	So thank you, Stefan, for everything you have done for us, let alone joining me on the show tonight.
	I appreciate it.
	It's been my pleasure.
	Thank you for a great conversation.
	I'm going to have you on as soon as I can again, okay?
	All right.
	Take care.

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