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Jan. 26, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:05:43

2307 Essential Liberty!

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio - and winner of the 2012 Liberty Inspiration Awards - talks with Ben Lowrey about how any why a society will flourish without a state.

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	Stefan, how are you today?
	I am just great.
	How are you doing, Ben?
	Yeah, it's so nice of you to take the time to speak to us.
	I know my listeners are going to be thrilled to hear us speak today.
	Would you allow me just to explain to you and to explain to our audience what it is I want to talk about and why?
	Because something I've noticed is very easy...
	It's very easy to agree that there's all sorts of problems with government and the government's evil and why should they steal our money from us and all this stuff.
	But something that's a little bit more tricky that people want to understand is what is the alternative?
	How would the world work if we didn't have government?
	And that's what I want to discuss today.
	Is that okay?
	Of course, yeah.
	It's a great topic.
	Fantastic.
	So, let's begin with your book, Practical Anarchy, which I think is fantastic.
	Would you tell us about it?
	Why did you write it?
	Well, of course, when you're looking to shift a fundamental social paradigm, you get questions, which is, what on earth are you talking about?
	How on earth could this possibly work?
	Are you, in fact, quite mad?
	And these are all very good, very useful, and frankly, very wise questions.
	Human beings change basic social paradigms at great risk.
	I mean, yeah, maybe you'll get an Enlightenment, maybe you'll get a Renaissance, or maybe you'll get Nazism or Communism or the French Revolution.
	Or maybe you'll get the American Revolution, you know, it's sort of like rolling the dice.
	So whenever we talk about changing society in any fundamental way, it's really good for people to be cautious.
	I think societies that weren't cautious about that didn't do a lot to pass their genes on, so I think we come by that caution honestly.
	And so I wanted to write a book exploring some possible ways in which state-provided functions could be provided in the absence of a state.
	Because I think we all can understand that all other things being equal, we're better off without the government.
	I mean, if we could find a way to have roads and national defense and help for the poor and the sick and the aged and education of the ignorant and so on, provided without The coercion of taxation without the risk of a centralized agency that can send the entire resources of the country into a war without the threat of national debts,
	fiat currencies, unfunded liabilities, all of the corruption and mess that goes along with the state If we can find a way to provide services without the state, we're morally better off.
	I believe we'll be practically and pragmatically much better off as well.
	But of course, there is a lot of caution, so I wanted to write the book.
	It's sort of a companion piece.
	The first one is called Everyday Anarchy, just pointing out how we really relish A lack of coercion in our daily lives.
	And if anybody came in and said, you now have to get married to whoever the government says you have to get married, and you have to go to school wherever the government says you have to go to school, and you have to have an occupation that the government assigns to you, and you can only have as many children as the government says, we'd be appalled.
	I mean, we would just view that as monstrous.
	And yet, in various other spheres, we consider it perfectly natural.
	So, in our everyday life, we love the choice of voluntarism, but then when it comes to a social sphere, we kind of freak out a little.
	Well, now, everything has to be completely different.
	That which I value in my personal life, I cannot support in society.
	So, really, that was the major impetus behind the book.
	Right.
	Fantastic.
	So, one of the objections that I've noticed that people immediately raise Some people say that it's human nature to have a hierarchy.
	It's human nature for some people to rise to the top and dominate others.
	And it's just kind of in our DNA, you know, we're animals and that's just the way it is.
	And so therefore, we're never gonna, you know, just be equal.
	So what's your view on that?
	Well, of course, it is a natural objection to the idea.
	And remember, of course, a free society, and I'm going to use that in a cheating way, synonymous with a stateless society, but a free society is not a society that has no hierarchies.
	Hierarchies are completely fine.
	I tend to drive my four-year-old daughter around, not vice versa.
	And when I go to the dentist, I don't tend to argue a lot with how she does her work.
	So, I have no problem deferring to the expertise of people who know a lot more than I do, which is just about everyone about everything.
	So, there are hierarchies.
	In a free society, if you want to become a plumber, I imagine the way it's going to work is you're going to apprentice with someone and You know, that plumber is going to know how to do the plumbing thing and so, you know, he will be telling you what to do and there'll be hierarchies and all that.
	So, it's not a lack of hierarchy that we're looking for in a free society.
	It's simply a withdrawal of coercion, of coercive hierarchies.
	The state, of course, is a hierarchy based upon coercion and that's the major problem, is the violence, not the hierarchy.
	There'll be hierarchies without violence, but the hierarchies with violence I'm morally egregious and pretty catastrophic in the long run.
	But if people say, well, it's just human nature, then they have a great degree of difficulty answering some questions, right?
	So obviously up until, say, the 16th or 17th centuries, people would say, well, it's human nature to own slaves.
	I mean, everywhere you look, throughout history, all across the world, everybody has slaves.
	And so it's human nature.
	If you were to go back to, even further back, at a time where there was pretty much perpetual conflict, perpetual war, well, it's human nature to have perpetual war, or, you know, it's human nature to subjugate women, or if you look back to the Incan civilization or other civilizations, it's human nature to sacrifice infants, you know, by throwing them into a bay filled with sharks or splitting their skulls open on some altar.
	And so the problem is, if whatever you say...
	Human nature.
	Whenever you say that, all your being is very conservative and extremely unimaginative and don't have a sense of history.
	We have progressed an enormous amount since, you know, the Ten Commandments written down several thousand years BC. We have come a long way from that.
	I mean, in the Bible, of course, you were continually exhorted to rape The women of the cities you conquer and kill all the men.
	And we don't really do that so much anymore.
	I mean, we have terrible wars occasionally, but that's not generally the way things happen.
	So there is progress.
	So human nature is just a way of saying, well, what is It's a reflection of some absolute or fundamental in the species, but then you can't really explain how it changes so much all the time, and it changes across different cultures.
	Is it human nature to wear a sari or a habib?
	I mean, who knows, right?
	I mean, just all cause local cultural differences.
	And the other thing that's true as well is that if the state is a natural product of human nature, then why do we need to cloak it in such moral sentimentality?
	So, for instance, it's pretty common.
	I'm a vegetarian, but it's pretty common for people to eat meat.
	But they don't eat meat saying it's for the good of the cow.
	Basically, if asked, they say, well, you know, we're at the top of the food chain, meat tastes good, and I can afford it.
	So there you go.
	They don't have to layer in all this tricky moral sentimentality and say, well, it is for the good of the cow, and it is for the best of all possible worlds within this cow that this cow be eaten by me.
	I mean, they just say what it is very boldly.
	And if it is human nature to have a state and to subjugate yourself to a centralized state, Why do we need so much propaganda to obscure this basic fact from people?
	So if it is human nature for there to be a small, brutal group of people who can impose the initiation of force and violence and counterfeiting and theft and debt and war and imprisonment on everyone else, Then why don't we, you know, in public schools,
	why don't we just say to kids, well, you see, you're going to be tax cattle and there's a small group of violent people who can use force against you and you can never use force against them and, oh, by the way, you actually owe about half a million dollars to people just being born because this group likes to steal from people who can't fight back and you, since you were pre-fetuses, couldn't fight back so we have sold you to foreign bankers.
	Why can't you have a civics lesson just about What it is.
	Well, you can't.
	So, if it was human nature, then we would accept it and we would just deal with it the way that most people accept and deal with eating cows.
	We wouldn't need to propagandize it so much.
	That's the indication that it's not natural to us because we have to lie about it so consistently.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Perfectly clear.
	Let's move on to, let me think, some Some examples, some more common objections.
	When people like us suggest a stateless society, many people immediately think, you know, what about the rapists?
	How will we stop violent criminals?
	You know, everyone would be robbing each other and murdering each other and raping each other, etc.
	And so, could you kind of give us your thoughts on that?
	Well, I mean, there's two possibilities.
	Either that is fundamentally true.
	And then what they're saying is it is human nature to use violence for selfish advantage, right?
	Whether it's rape or theft or killing or whatever, this guy bugs me.
	Shoot him in the head.
	Now, if it is human nature, though, to use violence for advantage, for personal immediate short-term gratification of desires, of lusts, of whatever it is, Well, that includes the state, right?
	I mean, we don't have angels, a separate species.
	We're not ruled by lizardmen.
	You know, we don't have a separate species.
	It's not Klingons out there.
	It's not super apes with, you know, rainbow wings flooding around.
	They're the same people that you say will use violence to satisfy immediate lust the moment they can.
	Well, those people are going to be ruling us.
	Do you really want to give those exact same people, nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers...
	Bombs counterfeit your capacity to print as much money and type whatever they want into their own bank accounts?
	Of course not.
	So if you're saying, well, everyone's just evil, then we can't have a state because that is going to attract the most evil and most malicious and most brutal of people to run this hierarchy to the expense of everyone else.
	The other thing which you can say is either it is human nature to just be plain evil and take and steal and rape or whatever, Or it's not.
	Now, you can't credibly make the claim that it's human nature to do that because there are a lot of nice people in the world.
	I mean, the people who make this claim, I don't know what kind of parties they go to.
	I don't know what kind of ugly rituals they're up to in the deep, dark, government-owned woods.
	I don't know.
	But it's not a good circle of friends to be hanging around with if it seems to you that everywhere you look, the world is full of malicious people held back only through policemen.
	So it's not true that it's human nature to do this kind of stuff.
	But if the person says, well, there's a lot of people around who are like that, well, my question would be, that's more of a condemnation of the state than a justification for its existence.
	I mean, who is responsible for the moral education of the young?
	It is the government.
	It is the government and it is religion that is responsible for the moral education of the young.
	And so if there are lots of people who are out there who are really bad, Well, the government has to take that rap.
	I mean, if a medical school produces a whole bunch of really bad doctors, like half the doctors they produce are just terrible, at some point, aren't we going to say maybe we should have a look and see whether this medical school is doing a good job or not?
	So, I think it's a very unsustainable thesis.
	It certainly doesn't...
	It doesn't explain the changes, the growth in the moral sensitivity of mankind, you know, to the point where now we are against racism, and rightly so, and we are against sexism, and rightly so.
	And many countries now have passed bans on spanking children, whereas, of course, 100 or 200 years ago, you couldn't find a parent who would not be immediately jailed for child abuse based on how brutally and coarsely they raised their children.
	So I don't think that's a very good argument.
	No matter which way you cut it, it doesn't support the existence and continued value of a state.
	Yeah, got it.
	Perfectly clear.
	Some people that are new to these ideas are quite oblivious to some of the social problems that are actually caused because of government and because of law that are kind of artificial situations that wouldn't necessarily exist in a free market.
	Would you give us some examples of that type of thing?
	Sure.
	I mean, well, I mean, I think people are fairly aware that the war on drugs contributes a huge amount to crime.
	And I refer you to the second season of The Wire for more details on this.
	But, I mean, the war on drugs is responsible for gang violence.
	Gangland violence, which is strongly associated with the war on drugs, is about 80% of U.S. homicides.
	There was no mafia in the United States until Prohibition.
	That's when the mafia came across.
	There was no mafia in the 19th century.
	So the moment you start banning things, all you're doing is creating very lucrative profit centers for organized crime.
	And so the more that you ban, the more crime you create.
	And it's kind of counterintuitive, right?
	I mean, if I ban Candy Boss...
	If I ban candy bars from my house, I don't end up with more candy bars in my house.
	But that's not the way it works in society.
	In society, it's quite the opposite.
	That much you ban, you end up with A lot more of.
	Now, drugs are easier to get than ever, and it's actually easier to get drugs than it is to get alcohol for young people.
	That hasn't worked at all.
	It's impossible to ignore this as a factor.
	When talking about how problems might be solved in a free society, it's just so important to remember the problems that are created because of government, isn't it?
	It can't be ignored as a factor.
	And you can actually trace this quite well and quite empirically as well.
	So the worst areas in the world tend to be those most controlled by governments.
	I mean, obviously North Korea is a complete nightmare existence of perpetual police state, executions, murders, midnight raids, the concentration camps, starvation, and it's all government all the time.
	If you look at the inner city in America or the inner city in England, these tend to be where the government pays the moms through welfare and child support payments and free healthcare, free education for the kids and so on, where the moms are basically paid to have kids.
	I'm not saying it's the only reason the mom has kids, but it's the basic economic equation is there.
	And the government runs the housing.
	The government runs the roads.
	The government runs the schools.
	I mean, it is a kind of little area of mostly communism.
	And it tends to be, almost without exception, the most horrible areas in society.
	Like, if there's a place you don't want to be caught late at night in an expensive suit with a Rolex, it's wherever the government is running the show.
	Yeah.
	Whereas if there are other places where the government is much less present tend to be much more peaceful.
	And so – and the same thing is true if you look at reserves up here in Canada, you know, the Native Canadians or the Aboriginals or the First Nations people.
	I'm not sure what the term is these days, but, you know, the people who were here when the whites got here, you know, they have been put into government.
	Some people call them concentration camps.
	I think that's a little strong.
	But there are these reserves where the government pays for everything and they're just horrible.
	Horrible, horrible places with massive suicide and addiction and dysfunction, child abuse and rape and murder.
	I mean, it's horrible.
	And so if government was benevolent to society...
	Then we would imagine that where the government had the most power, we would see the greatest peace.
	I mean, what's the murder capital?
	One of the murder capitals in the United States is Washington, D.C., for heaven's sakes.
	That's where the government is at the federal level.
	And they can't solve the problems of murder right outside their doors.
	So, these are just, I'm not saying these are like ironclad proofs, but these are just, hmm, kind of Morpheus-style questions to ask.
	You know, if government is beneficial to society, Then why is it that the most violence occurs where there is the most government?
	Right.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Crystal clear.
	Also, the economic side of things always interests me in terms of the currency and the fact – obviously, the government's got a monopoly on the control and the issuance of currency and interest rates and et cetera.
	It's very popular to complain about the Federal Reserve or the central bankers.
	But for me, it's not the banking system.
	It's the fact that we're forced to use that banking system that's the problem.
	Because, of course, if we weren't forced to use it and weren't forced to pay taxation, we could use alternatives and we wouldn't have to suffer the terrible currency itself.
	Yeah, it is.
	And I think a lot of people overlook the problems in the stock market, right?
	I mean, most people are in the stock market in one form or another.
	You know, if they've got retirement savings, if they have a pension plan that's not purely government-based, if they're in a union, and of course, if they're trying to avoid through, I don't know what they are in the UK, but, you know, in America, it's the 401k.
	In Canada, it's called the RRSP. If you invest money for your retirement, the government will not tax it.
	And so, you're basically just hiding your livestock from the wolves.
	And so, There are so many people who are in the stock market who just plain don't want to be there.
	And if they could have a choice.
	They wouldn't.
	So that's sort of one reason.
	So much money gets herded into the stock market that you ended up with this bloated and monstrous financial sector which causes all kinds of problems which we can either get into or not get into.
	But it's got nothing to do with the free market.
	Nothing to do with the free market at all.
	And the free market, voluntarism is the key.
	You shouldn't have to give your money to a stockbroker otherwise some other guys in blue suits will take it away from you.
	I mean that's just a shakedown.
	And the vast majority of what goes on in the stock market is the result of that fundamental shakedown.
	The first shakedown is forcing all these people into the stock market who don't want to be there.
	And the second one is that people go into the stock market because of inflation, because their money keeps getting eroded every year, every year, every year.
	And national debt, of course, is just deferred inflation for the most part because people are probably going to try and print their way out rather than the default.
	And so because your money is being eroded, you have to find some – most people who are reasonably intelligent financially are going to want to find some investment vehicle that is going to counteract the effects of inflation.
	If you put $1,000 aside every couple of months for your retirement and just put it under your mattress, what's that going to be worth in 30 or 40 years?
	Well… You know, like the guy who in the Weimar Republic took out his life savings and bought a cup of coffee, that's going to be your life.
	So, the fact that the government is controlling inflation, the fact that the government is forcing all these people into the stock market creates these huge bloated monstrosities.
	It distorts corporate performance all over the world because corporations can start running after very short-term stock gains rather than the long-term building of value and customer relationships and product quality in the marketplace.
	What we look at is a complete mutant relative to a free society and it's really, really important for people to understand that nothing looks clear at sunset and nothing looks like freedom when you have a state this big and when the government controls the two fundamental aspects of the free market which is interest rates or the price of money and the quantity of money which is inflation because they're always printing more because printing money is easier than raising taxes and Unfortunately,
	not one person in a thousand really understands how that costs the poor in particular, those on fixed incomes.
	So nothing that you look at across in society has anything to do with the free market.
	There is a few sort of vestigial elements of it.
	But so what?
	That's like saying, well, these three toes of the leper don't have leprosy, so I guess he's healthy, or let's call the whole thing non-leprosy.
	No, the infection of money, the infection of control of interest rates, the infection of taxation and debt And the warping of the entire society based upon the weird financial incentives which increase the amount and prevalence of single-parent households, which increases the amount and prevalence of dysfunction in society as a whole, nothing we look at.
	So it's really tough to take what we have and say, well, how would that be reproduced in freedom?
	It's sort of like looking at a rape and saying, well, how would that be reproduced in lovemaking?
	Well, no!
	Once it's lovemaking, it's not rape anymore, and it's something completely different.
	Yeah, completely.
	And it's so frustrating that the free market aspect of it gets blamed for the mess that all the government coercion caused.
	Yeah, well, what are they going to do?
	Blame themselves?
	Of course not.
	They like having the free market around as a scapegoat, as a whipping boy.
	Of course, right?
	This is why you have this bizarre thing where people say...
	Well, you see, it was a lack of regulation that caused the housing crash.
	Regulation increased exponentially every year.
	The government has been running regulation on the financial sector for many, many years.
	And even if we say that were true, that's still a government problem because they had all this regulation which created this culture.
	Then if they did relax this regulation, which they didn't, that's still the government problem.
	You still can't blame the free market.
	For what the government does.
	I mean, of course, you always hear that.
	But remember, it's the people who lie about starting wars who are telling you who the scapegoat is for financial problems.
	If that doesn't give you some skepticism, I don't know what will.
	Right.
	Exactly.
	One of the other topics I wanted to move on to, I was listening to David Freeman.
	There was an audiobook version of – which book was it?
	Yeah, exactly.
	And I find it very interesting how he talks about dispute resolution organizations, and you do too in your book, and how private law and private arbitration and private security firms might cooperate without needing a central government to dictate the law upon everybody.
	How do you see that?
	Well, I see that because we're both talking here.
	Like, we're both talking here, which means that you and I don't belong to the same internet service provider.
	And yet, our internet service providers, without having a law passed by the government, are willing to exchange TCP IP packets, right?
	The same thing if you go to fire up a cell phone in Venezuela, you'll be able to call.
	I mean, it may cost you, but you'll still be able to call because the cell phone companies are exchanging data.
	I mean, Facebook, you can use your Facebook login on a variety of platforms and I mean, openness in that is pretty key.
	Because if you try to isolate yourself from the general trends of the business world, unless you have an unbelievably great case and making the bid to be the new standard, it's not really going to work.
	I mean, just imagine trying to say, I'm going to start an internet service provider company, but I'm not going to use IP. And I'm not going to use TCP IP. I'm going to use something else.
	People are like, why?
	Why?
	Well, it gives me 5% better performance.
	Not on zero data, it doesn't.
	Right.
	Or if you say, well, I want to start building railway trains, and what I want to do is I think that the axles are too close together.
	together i'm going to widen them by eight inches so that it gives its better balance it's like well which tracks is it going to go on well no these tracks these trains are going to be so good that everyone's going to widen their tracks by six or eight inches to like no they won't so just go with the standard that is because it's so much more efficient right it's most it's most advantageous for us individually to cooperate with each other than to be stubborn and not cooperate right Yeah, for sure.
	And there is a basic aspect of anarchism or of freedom thinking, of free market thinking, which says...
	That ethics is strongly correlated to economic efficiency.
	And this is a very fundamental thing, I think, for people to understand.
	And it's tough, because we're always told that economic efficiency is about greed and screwing the workers and having poor little Chinese sweatshop laborers faint over their Adidas shoes and stuff like that.
	Of course, that's all the state.
	But economic efficiency is highly correlated to virtue.
	So, I mean, for example...
	It's better to prevent diabetes from coming into being than it is to cure it.
	And it's not just better like it's economically efficient and so on.
	It's like morally better.
	Because if you let yourself get diabetes, I mean, if you have kids, then that's going to interfere with your time with your kids.
	If you have a job, it's going to interfere with your responsibilities as an employer or as an employee or whatever.
	And of course, you are then consuming medical resources that otherwise could be used.
	For other people, right?
	So like 70 to 80 percent of human illnesses are lifestyle related.
	And what that means is people do stupid stuff and get sick.
	And we can clearly understand that for society as a whole, it is far more economically efficient to prevent diabetes than to cure it.
	Much cheaper, way cheaper.
	I mean, the entire Mexican healthcare system is currently in the process of being brought down by the incredible prevalence and growth of diabetes in Mexico.
	And so, the beautiful thing about a free society is that there are two things which work towards morally beneficial ends.
	One is competition, and the second is the profit motive.
	So, in a completely free society, you know, I would obviously probably want some healthcare insurance because, you don't know, you get hit by a bus or an asteroid or something or you have some weird genetic thing that messes you up.
	So, you buy healthcare insurance.
	Now, the health company in a free market, don't confuse it with this nonsense they have in the U.S. or anywhere else, in a free society, the healthcare company, the insurance provider, is going to make the most money out of you being healthy, right?
	So, what's their incentive?
	It's to keep you as healthy as possible, to make sure you get your checkups, if they discover anything early, to use prevention rather than cure.
	And if you don't listen to the advice of your doctors, then they will not insure you or your rates will get so high that it's meaningless, right?
	And I mean, do you know that more than half of people, at least here in Canada, who receive doctor's orders about things like managing diabetes don't do it?
	I mean, it's astounding!
	I mean, in a weird way, it's all paid for, right?
	So, in a free society, competition and the profit motive and insurance All combine to make sure that you're going to get the best possible outcome, which also happens to coincide with the most moral outcome.
	So, for instance, if you think about the Twin Towers on 9-11, as I know a few libertarians have over the years, but if you think about the Twin Towers in 9-11, there was an insurance company and there was the US government.
	Now, the insurance company lost, I can't imagine how many hundreds of millions of dollars or more, billions of dollars, who knows, on the fall of the Twin Towers.
	And so, obviously, they had a very strong economic incentive to make sure that there was no attack or no – things didn't pulverize down to the ground.
	On the other hand, the US government, how did it fare out of 9-11?
	Well, you get the Patriot Act.
	You get the Department of Homeland Security.
	You get the takeover of airport security.
	You get massive tax increases.
	Actually, you get two new wars.
	The tax increases are deferred through debt and money printing.
	But you get to talk the population into two wars.
	And trillions of dollars goes missing in the wars.
	It gets hoovered up by every...
	A scumbag piece of cockroach that floats around the military industrial complex.
	And so if you just look at these two situations, the private industries, the insurance companies lost huge amounts of money through this catastrophe.
	The governments gained enormous amounts of money in power over these catastrophes.
	And I'm not saying everyone in the government wants these catastrophes, but the financial incentive is clear.
	One of the basics of economics is people respond to incentives.
	Every time there's a disaster, The government blames the innocent, defends the guilty, and expands the power of the malefactors in response.
	And so the government has no fundamental incentive to prevent problems from coming into being because it's so profitable.
	When problems do come into being, and we can see this throughout history, the governments will invent problems.
	The Gulf of Tompkin, which led to Vietnam, completely made-up incident.
	The supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, completely made-up incidents.
	The Reichstag fire under the Nazis was set by the Nazis in order to Get rid of the vestiges of parliamentary democracy.
	Governments profit so much from crisis that they will repetitively invent them or exploit the ones that their previous policies have brought into being.
	And this is just not how we want society to be incentivized.
	Look, if there's mayhem, death, man, and destruction, I get lots more money and power.
	I mean, that's just not how we want it.
	But this is the way the state is.
	You can't escape it because it has monopoly violence.
	And rather than competitive voluntarism, and its profit, unfortunately, is catastrophe.
	I mean, I didn't see the police departments in any age in history working really hard on shoplifter prevention measures or home security alarm systems or anything like that.
	That was all provided by the free market.
	And it was provided by the free market because the police is pretty much useless.
	I mean, anybody who thinks...
	My goodness, you know, without the police, boy, everybody would just be stealing everything.
	Don't understand that the police can't help you if you get stolen anyway.
	You know, as the old line goes, when seconds count, the police are hours away.
	I mean, it's always after the fact.
	I mean, they can't prevent you from getting mugged, and they can barely ever catch anyone who mugs you.
	They can't prevent you from getting stolen from.
	They can barely catch anyone who steals from you.
	And they can't prevent shoplifting.
	If you happen to catch someone, I guess they'll come and make their life difficult.
	But that's not what the free market has done.
	What the free market has put those little ink things on and the radio receivers are on the exit of the stores that, you know, whenever my daughter grabs something and doesn't put it back that I don't know about, tells them that someone's walking out without something.
	This is all the stuff.
	The pin cards on visas, I mean, that's all put in because the government can't do anything to save or prevent you from theft.
	And the last thing I'll mention is I listened to a talk in...
	I gave a talk in Las Vegas at Freedom Fest this past.
	And I heard an excellent talk where the guy was saying, you know, I was in, I can't remember, some restaurant in South America and they overcharged me for whatever.
	And all I did was I went back home and I called Visa and I said they overcharged me and here's why and here's what.
	Visa handler, the whole thing got him his refund.
	Now, if he'd called the local police station and said, listen, I'm a tourist.
	I think these guys overcharged me.
	I mean, what do people think would have happened?
	How on earth do disputes get resolved in the absence of a state?
	Just look at eBay, for heaven's sakes.
	Just look at PayPal.
	They have very complex ways of dealing with disputes, and it works out really, really well.
	eBay is one of the world's largest employers, and there's no court system that applies to it.
	Yeah, it's incredible.
	I just really want to make this clear to our listeners, just in case they're new to these ideas.
	It's the incentive of the competition.
	Competitors in the free market are incentivized by trying to make profit, whereas the police have got no incentive because they just get paid anyway.
	So it doesn't matter to them whether they protect you or not as such because the taxation is going to be collected anyway, right?
	No, no.
	They have a negative incentive, Ben.
	That's sort of my point, which is that if there's a crime wave, what happens to the police force?
	It gets bigger.
	Yeah.
	They get to – and this is one of the reasons why every time you turn on the 6 o'clock news on the telly – oh, did you see me working there for your local audience?
	What happens is you'll see all of these reports of crime.
	Crime in the U.S. has gone down about 50 percent over the last 10 or 15 years, violent crime in the U.S. School shootings are down, but of course that's not what you hear.
	What you hear is you turn it on.
	You get all these terrifying scare stories about how dangerous society is.
	And lo and behold, then, when the police say that we need more money, you'll say yes.
	Or, you know, how many times do we hear, well, the reason that children are doing so badly in school is because the teachers don't have enough money.
	It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
	That's not how it works.
	That's not how it works.
	How it works is you're supposed to provide a good service and then you get paid for it.
	You don't get to say to people at the point of a gun, I've provided shitty service and now give me even more money.
	And especially now that this has been going on for the past 40 years, that scam is mostly up.
	You don't see a lot of calls for new spending in schools because they have so much money to spend per student and the scores remain flat or declining.
	So it's a negative incentive.
	If you can say, well, the kids are doing really badly, you'll get more money.
	If you can say, well, crime is really rising, you'll get more money.
	As opposed to, well, you guys should be getting less money if you're doing a bad job.
	I mean, that's the way it works in the free market.
	If I poison half my customers in a restaurant, I don't get to say, well, I'm going to double the price of my food now.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	So one of the points that you make really well in the book that I really like is the government can only build an army and wage wars and stuff because it collects taxation through force.
	And if people were left to their own devices, they wouldn't voluntarily choose to fund, you know, to build an army to go invade in the world.
	People wouldn't want to voluntarily pay for that.
	And so this whole war problem would just vanish and evaporate, right?
	Yeah, there's an old saying that says war is the health of the state, which means, of course, that whenever there's a war, the state grows enormously, and I don't think we need to prove that.
	That's just evidence that's everywhere.
	But it's more than true, I think, to say that the state is the health of war.
	If you were to go and try and do a fundraiser for the war in Iraq, say, the war in Afghanistan, It's one thing to scream patriotically and pin flags to your car and stay glued to CNN and, you know, whatever, sing the national anthem every commercial break, when it's not your money on the line.
	And it's not, because whether you do that or not, stuff's going to happen.
	The government's going to do what the government's going to do.
	I mean, Congress's approval rating in the U.S. is at about 6%.
	What does that mean?
	Nothing.
	They still keep doing what they're doing, still keep getting more and more power.
	So, if you had to go and make the case and you had to go and say, listen, I want you to send me £45,000 for a war.
	And people would say, well, things better be pretty damn desperate and you better have a pretty damn good case if you want £45,000 of my money to go and fight some war.
	And you'd really have to make a good case.
	It would have to be ironclad and you'd also – there'd be a whole bunch of other people who would say, I can solve the problem for £40,000.
	I can solve the problem for £30,000.
	There'd be a bidding down as there always is in these kinds of situations.
	And someone else would say, hey, you know what?
	Pay me £10 and I'll go find out if there really is a problem or not.
	Right.
	I think that person would get the money and then they would go and interview all the Iraqi scientists and they'd check over all the satellite spy maps or whatever and they'd say, well, you know what?
	There are no weapons of mass destruction.
	So everybody go home and that only cost me four pounds so he has six pounds back.
	And it's the same thing with the war on drugs.
	If you really want a war on drugs, fantastic.
	Pay the bill.
	If you don't want a war on drugs, you shouldn't have to pay the bill.
	And then what will happen is people, I think, will suddenly find a lot of tolerance.
	If they've been sent a bill for £5,000 every year for the war on drugs, a whole bunch of people will stop paying that, which means the next year people will get £10,000 or £20,000 or £50,000 until at the very end, one last guy is really getting in the shorts with a...
	Multi-hundred billion dollar or pound bill.
	And so it's easy to get morally righteous when you're not on the hook individually in a perceptive way or perceptual way for whatever it is, whatever moral crusade you want.
	I mean, oh yeah, let's go get those Afghanis.
	Let's go get these Iraqis.
	Okay, so that phrase will cost you £20,000.
	Oops!
	I meant to say, go Hornets!
	I meant to say, I really like that woman on American Idol.
	I didn't mean go...
	But the problem is once you have, particularly when they control the money supply, then they pay for war through the printing of money.
	And the printing of money to pay for the war is one of the reasons why the financial system exploded.
	Because, I mean, they didn't raise taxes.
	They just printed.
	And printing really screws up the delicate machinery of financial stability.
	Yeah.
	So it's not something that people can underestimate the degree to which if you don't have a state, you can't have war.
	You can have rational defense.
	You can have national defense.
	You can have punishments for rapists.
	You can have all of these kind of things can be worked out.
	No problem.
	No problem at all.
	But if you have a state, then you will have war.
	You will have a permanent underclass.
	The government loves to make people dependent upon itself because that way it guarantees votes.
	I mean, the welfare state loves to make people dependent upon the welfare state.
	I mean, imagine if someone came up tomorrow and said to the entire welfare state bureaucracy, I have a magic solution to solve the problem of poverty.
	Who's with me?
	Who wants to work themselves to the bone to get themselves out of a job and out of a career?
	Well, nobody.
	Of course not, right?
	And so you didn't see a lot of horse and buggy manufacturers investing in car companies and so on, right?
	You didn't see a lot of Pony Express people investing in the mail system or the mail system and the internet or anything like that.
	So these things will be solved.
	Of course they will be.
	But right now, they aren't being solved.
	But because there's a government, people think that they are, which is sort of like...
	Taking, you know, a fundamentalist Christian approach or Muslim approach to the question of the creation of the universe or the origins of the species and so on.
	Saying God did it doesn't do anything and it gives you the illusion of an answer which is really dangerous because you stop looking.
	Saying, well, let's have the state handle it is exactly the same thing.
	It's a magical, illusory answer that prevents you from looking for more real solutions.
	Yeah.
	When I start to think about how much more progress we might have made if...
	You know, we'd have had a free market.
	It's just staggering to think where society could be in terms of technology and evolution.
	I mean, we won't know, of course, because there's no way of testing that, but my God, it's just...
	Yeah, we know some of it for sure.
	So, I mean, one of the things, I'm just working on this new documentary, and I was working on some of this over this last week.
	I don't know exactly what the stats are in Canada, but in the US, the problem of poverty, involuntary poverty, right?
	I don't mean grad students, artists, and monks, but the problem of poverty was being solved in the post-war period, and the poverty rates were declining.
	By about a percentage point every year.
	You know, like 20 to 15 to 10.
	I mean, poverty was on its way out.
	And this was particularly true for the blacks in America.
	Which period?
	They were doing relatively well.
	Sorry?
	Which period was that, did you say?
	In the post-war period, 1950, late 1940s to early 1960s, early to mid-1960s.
	So, black wages in various sectors doubled relative to white wages and so on.
	It's just huge.
	And black illegitimacy has always been higher than white because of the history of slavery, I would assume, and, of course, vestigial racism.
	But marriage among blacks was even better, higher than whites, and marriage, of course, is a great predictor for stability and success for children.
	And so we know for sure that unless an asteroid had hit the world, turning us all into nuclear atomic shadows, that the problem of poverty would have been largely solved probably by the late 1970s, and we would not have an underclass.
	That was all occurring, and that was because there was a significant rise in freedom after the Second World War.
	I mean, particularly in Germany and also in America, they demobilized.
	And a lot of the controls that were put in under FDR in the Great Depression in the 1930s and the controls that were put in through the war, the only benefit that came out of the war was it smashed a lot of socialistic economic controls that were put in place.
	Before the Second World War, and as a result, because of the productivity of the free market and the colorblind values that the free market has on anyone who's productive, you had a huge reduction in poverty, the like of which we haven't seen since, except in places like India and China, where you have about 700 or 800 million people over the past 10 or 15 years have escaped poverty.
	Don't see a lot of poverty activists flying over to figure out those lessons because that goes against the government argument, right?
	They went from socialist to capitalist, more or less, in very broad strokes, communist to capitalist.
	And almost a trillion people – sorry, almost a billion people have come out of poverty over the past 10 or 15 years just in China and India.
	I mean this is staggering.
	We should be cheering every day in the streets about this.
	But because it goes against the central narrative of statism, we don't hear about it.
	It can't fit.
	So we know for sure that there would have been no – almost no involuntary poverty left in the West if we had not put in all of the welfare state programs, great society programs and all of that.
	So, there's some things we do know, though, of course, that's just following existing trends.
	We certainly don't know.
	I mean, we might have teleportation now.
	Who knows, right?
	But we could be, you know, free rocket ships to Mars in every second box of cornflakes.
	Who knows?
	But we do know some things for sure, that the reason we still have all this poverty, which is sad and critical, and is only going to get worse because all of the deficits and debts the governments have...
	But accrued is deferred.
	Tax is deferred poverty.
	So even though we still have about the same number of poor as we had in 1960, except we have all these national debts that are much higher, so it's going to get a lot worse.
	So those things we know for sure.
	We would have almost no poverty left.
	One argument that I heard once was that you do need the government in order to enforce things like intellectual property, whatever it's called, copyright, whatever you call it.
	And the example that the person cited was something like Apple computers or a car manufacturer or whoever.
	You know, they need to rely on the fact that they can research something and, you know, and protect, you know, that.
	And otherwise, they wouldn't be able to create the iPad, etc., because it wouldn't have been viable.
	And so, what's your response to that argument?
	Well, I mean, there's lots of ways to respond to it.
	I mean, if you want to protect your intellectual property in the computer realm, I mean, you can...
	You can encrypt it.
	You can make sure you never release the source code.
	I mean, there's things that you can do.
	Look and feel of a software.
	I mean, what is it now that Apple says that they have a monopoly on rounded corners on phones?
	I mean, this is stunning.
	I mean, what are they going to impound the Etch-A-Sketch next?
	I mean, it's kind of ridiculous, right?
	And Apple, of course, like most companies, didn't want to get involved in this stuff to begin with.
	Apple didn't do a whole lot of patent trawling early in its...
	It's just that they got hit with a bunch of lawsuits from patent trolls, and as a result, they ended up doing this stuff in the same way that Microsoft wasn't really interested in government, and then they ended up getting hit by these monopoly stuff like IBM before them from the Department of Justice, this antitrust stuff, and then they got all kinds of interest in government, and shortly after that, Bill Gates left, holding his nose, I'm sure, from all this nonsense politics that they had to get involved in.
	So, obviously, it's kind of silly for people to just say, well, I can have everything that's with rounded corners, or I have a trash can on the desktop screen, and that's my now forever.
	I mean, that's all kind of silly, and there's no particular limit to how that goes.
	But like most things, when people look at the state, they look at the visible, quote, benefits and not any of the hidden costs.
	So, for instance...
	Sure, okay.
	Let's say, I don't think it's true, but let's say that the iPad came about because of intellectual property.
	Fine.
	Okay.
	No problem.
	How many iPad competitors did not come about because of that?
	Right?
	How many small companies said, ooh, we'd like to get into tablets?
	And then they went and talked to a lawyer who said, well, I'll need about $5 million just to research the patents for you.
	And they went, oh, man, forget that.
	I'm...
	How many times do companies use this as a club to keep smaller, more nimble, more creative competitors out of the market?
	How much do we know...
	Sorry, how much have we imagined has been lost because of this IP system?
	There's some great examples as well, and you might want to check out...
	I actually have an audiobook reading of Jeffrey Tucker's It's a Jetson's World, where he has a whole chapter on this, so just very briefly.
	You can actually see quite clearly...
	The countries during the great classical period of musical creation, the sort of post-medieval pre-industrial revolution, the countries that had the strongest intellectual property laws regarding music produced almost no great music.
	Because everybody was so scared of, you know, trying to create some song that might have been a rip-off of someone else or whatever.
	And I think one of the songs that Men at Work did like 30 years ago was still being sued about.
	I mean, it's just horrible.
	Whereas the countries that had no IP laws regarding music came up with the most amazing stuff, the most wonderful stuff, the stuff that's really lasted the test of time.
	So not having this stuff seems kind of counterintuitive.
	I mean, I'm certainly an example that I can certainly keep a roof over my head and body and soul together, and I give everything away.
	I don't charge for interviews.
	I barely ever charge for speeches.
	I don't charge for my books.
	I don't charge for membership on the message board or for any of the podcasts or videos.
	I don't even have any ads.
	So it can work.
	Who was it?
	Radiohead released an album where it was pay what you want and they did fine with it.
	So it can work.
	Just think of the cost, the overhead, the fear, the restriction, the soul-crushing anti-creativity of the larger corporations that have managed to hang on to this stuff and just ask again whether it's absolutely necessary, whether it's something that could not be enforced through contracts because there will of course be contracts in a free society.
	They just won't be enforced by putting guns to people's heads and whether we think it's a great use of the most creative people's time to shuffle paperwork around patents and threaten each other with lawsuits all the time.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Fascinating.
	Just moving on, one of the topics that I'm really interested in is I strongly believe that there would be no need for punishment, physical punishment in terms of locking people I believe that social pressure, social ostracism, revoking benefits, revoking services, cutting people off would be a sufficient deterrent or punishment for violent criminals.
	Do you concur with that?
	Yeah, I mean, I'm not so concerned about the violent criminal thing because it's sort of like saying, you know, so in the 1920s, 1930s, polio was a huge problem, particularly in the US. Franklin Roosevelt was actually obviously in a wheelchair because of polio.
	And public swimming pools were terrifying and people would end up sort of sitting in iron lungs or dead or permanently disabled because of polio.
	And It's sort of like saying, well, how are we going to deal with the huge problems of polio in a free society?
	Oh, look!
	There's a vaccine!
	And polio, like smallpox, is now a thing of the past.
	And that I think is really, really important to understand that there's no particular incentive for governments to create a vaccine for violence because governments profit from violence on so many levels.
	They profit from violence because they need people willing to commit violence to be soldiers and policemen and prison guards and all that.
	And they also need violence in society to justify their own existence and power.
	And so there's been no incentive for governments to take a huge strong stand to vaccinate people against the virus of violence.
	In a free society, as we mentioned earlier, prevention is far more profitable than the cure.
	And there is a vaccine for violence.
	It's been known about for at least...
	40 to 50 years.
	It's been scientifically studied in exhaustive detail, and it is in almost 100%.
	It's better than condoms for the prevention of pregnancy, and that is simply for children to be raised without aggression.
	I don't mean without assertiveness, but without being yelled at, screamed at, punished, hit, kicked, beaten.
	You know, 70 to 80% of parents are still hitting their children.
	I mean, they call it spanking, but it's hitting, of course, right?
	And so it's been very well studied and I've got a whole series with expert interviews on the web called The Bomb and the Brain.
	It's on YouTube.
	You can go to fdurl.com forward slash bib.
	It's all free.
	And it goes into, I hope not mind-numbing, I hope engaging detail about the effects that early trauma has upon the developing mind and the developing physiology.
	So we have a way of inoculating against violence.
	It's just that governments and religions don't really want to pursue it because if there was no violence and no fear...
	Then what would they be selling you?
	Salvation from what?
	Protection from who?
	So, in a free society, the whole of society is going to be focused on inoculating children against the virus of violence, and they will be doing that in a variety of ways.
	Obviously, if you're a parent who takes some parenting courses and has your kid occasionally scanned for the brain problems that are very strongly correlated with violence, which is no different from having your kid weighed to see if they're Suffering from malnutrition at the doctor's office, well then, you won't really have any violent people coming out.
	I mean, yeah, okay, occasionally a guy will get some brain tumor that will make him violent, but you know, I think society as a whole can live with that and find some way to survive that.
	But in a free society, peace is so much more profitable for society as a whole than violence.
	negotiation is so much better than aggression and voluntarism is so much better than violence that all of society will simply be focusing its resources on making sure that children are raised so that they won't be violent and it's not that hard to do in fact as a parent myself it's quite easy to do it's a lot easier to negotiate with your kids than to scream and yell at them all day or hit them so that's what society will do
	and then we you know we won't have this massive infestation of axe murderers wandering around society because it's been cured right and Yeah, exactly.
	Crystal clear.
	And I was listening to you talking to Mike Shankly the other day.
	You made a really great point.
	You're all about the freedom that we actually implement and live in our own lives as opposed to just talking about.
	Yeah.
	I guess that's why you're so passionate about the parenting, right?
	Because that's a real thing that we can do in our immediate lives.
	Without worrying about the government, without worrying about the Fed, we can begin in our own home.
	Is that right?
	Well, yeah.
	Yeah, and I mean, that is really worrying about the government because if we raise children, neither subjecting them to arbitrary and brutal authority, nor giving them the power of arbitrary or brutal authority, which means don't bully them or turn them into bullies, which is kind of two sides of the same coin.
	Well, they don't fit that well in a state of society.
	And that's the best thing I think we can do for freedom.
	I mean, it's obviously moral.
	I mean, we obviously want to execute our ethics, if I can put it that way.
	We want to execute our ethics in the areas we can affect.
	We want to do that where we can affect things, right?
	I mean, we all understand this, that this would be kind of bad comedy, right?
	So, if I were 350 pounds and put out a diet book, It would be like silly because people would say, well, wait a second.
	Either you are following your own diet and it doesn't work or you're not following your own diet but you're lecturing other people in which case, who gives a shit what you're saying?
	Maybe you're right but who cares, right?
	It would be silly.
	And I challenge you to find any serious book which has, say, you or me on the cover of a hairstyling book or the average British person on, here's my best dentistry work.
	No, I'm kidding.
	Or just a fat person or I challenge you to find anyone who is a boring motivational speaker or… Or I challenge you to find anyone who goes out and gives lectures on how to quit smoking who demands that an ashtray be installed on his podium.
	I mean it's ridiculous because when people tell us what to do and when people tell us what is the best thing to do, we damn well have the right to expect them to do it themselves first.
	You know, hey, this is the very best way that you can protect yourself against a cough.
	Right?
	I mean, it's ridiculous.
	I mean, it's embarrassing that we have to make this case in the libertarian or freedom community.
	And so we don't have any control over the Fed.
	We don't have any control over who invades who.
	We don't have any control over interest rates or a tax policy or anything like that.
	I mean, yeah, we can't do that.
	What we can do is control where our hands end up.
	I think that's quite important.
	And so if our hands end up regularly smacking our children on the butt or the head or the back or whatever to the point where they're upset and crying or whatever, Well, that's a violation of the non-aggression principle, isn't it?
	I mean, aggression can only be used, violence can only be used in self-defense, and spanking is not self-defense.
	And so, we are lecturing, we are a 350-pound guy lecturing everyone else on diet and exercise while chain-smoking and telling them to quit smoking.
	And if we don't understand as a community how ridiculous we look, then we really are doing a huge disservice to the ideals that we espouse.
	We need to, as a community, dedicate ourselves to non-aggression in the spheres that we can control, not in the spheres that we can't control, because that's just ridiculous.
	And the ideals are there to be acted upon, not to be yelled at, not to be pompously proclaimed, not to be self-congratulatory espoused to the indifference of the blogosphere, but to actually be acted upon.
	That's what these ideals are for.
	And that's, fortunately, nature and history and society has provided us...
	A wonderful canvas in which to paint.
	I mean, it's like, I'm the best artist ever.
	I actually just like to paint air.
	But trust me, it's beautiful stuff.
	It's like, no, no, no, I have a canvas for you.
	Oh, I don't want it.
	No canvas.
	Just air for me.
	Only air.
	No canvas.
	It's like, wait a minute.
	Come on.
	I have the best singing voice you could ever imagine.
	I will never, ever sing.
	It's like, well, how do you know?
	How can you sing?
	Then sing for me.
	No, no, no, no.
	Only when nobody's here.
	No recording or whatever.
	Well, this is exactly how silly we look.
	We are for the non-aggression principle.
	Let's put it Where we can to work at our homes.
	That's going to be challenging enough.
	We can take it from there afterwards.
	Right, yeah.
	That's great stuff.
	That's really great.
	I've kind of run out of points, all the list of things that I wanted to ask you.
	We've been going about an hour, so I guess we could wrap up there.
	Is there any final comments you want to leave us with just before we finish up?
	I think the only thing I'd like to say, this is for people who are New!
	New to the conversation!
	Welcome!
	Welcome to this little slice of the future being beamed back in time.
	It's...
	You know, it's an alarming thing to think about these things.
	People freak out.
	Hey, I freaked out.
	I mean, I get it.
	I mean, it's like, whoa.
	You know, it's like you end up in the Matrix, but with no cool spaceships, and you can't travel through telephone.
	So I guess we are, in a way, meeting of the minds.
	But it is alarming.
	And the one thing I always want to prepare people for is that, I mean, people make this mistake, and it's understandable.
	I mean, this is what we're taught all the time.
	But they think the state is...
	You know, something up there, right?
	It's not.
	The government only exists because we, the slaves, are willing to attack each other.
	And you may doubt what I'm saying, but bring up the concept of a truly free, voluntary society at your next dinner party or, you know, at Christmas or whatever, and people will freak out and they will call you crazy and they will laugh at you and they will call you misguided or an idealist or, you know, where you're getting all these crazy ideas and that's not the way the world is and human nature and blah, blah, blah.
	And if you keep pushing it, then people will almost inevitably get very angry with you and they will attack you.
	And it is actually that attack which is the state.
	The attack that we are willing to inflict upon our fellow slaves is the only thing that gives the master his power.
	I mean, they can't control us.
	There's very few of them, and there's very many of us.
	They are the grasshoppers to our ends.
	And so they can't control us.
	But what they can do Is they could set up conditions wherein we are going to attack each other for questioning authority, for speaking the truth, for suggesting that the essence of society be reexamined, for even contemplating a radical break with the evils of history and war and imprisonment and debt and indoctrination and confiscation.
	The moment that Your fellow slaves attack you for questioning what is, for offering alternatives, for suggesting peace over punches.
	That is when you have seen the true reality of the state.
	Everything else is just an effect of other people's mob mentality, of their flashpoint aggression upon you for daring to think for yourself.
	And that, tragically, is really what we're fighting.
	And there are a number of ways to fight it.
	You can ride it out.
	out, you can continue to stay curious and you can hope to break through their aggression to some softer caramel core on the other side.
	Or, you know, and I think that's a very worthwhile thing to be doing.
	But unfortunately, I believe in good and evil.
	I don't just believe in it.
	I know.
	I know that's good and evil.
	And there is going to be a fight.
	I mean, some people we can win over.
	Fantastic.
	You know, I try to be as enjoyable and hopefully not too dull with these abstract topics as possible.
	And that wins a lot of people over.
	But unfortunately, you know, when the truth comes, some people embrace it.
	Some people hesitate.
	And a lot of people run.
	And a lot more people sometimes throw whatever they can to the light to put it out.
	And there is going to be a fight.
	Some people we can win over, and that's fantastic.
	But the people who harden against us, the people who harden against the expansion of peace and voluntarism in the world, it's going to be a fight.
	And it's going to be a tragically horrible medieval fight of willpower.
	It's nothing to do with violence, of course.
	But it's going to just be, you know, whether the storms, the slings and arrows of...
	Outrageous calumny and the inevitable, he's crazy, he's bad, stuff that you'll see on the internet from time to time about anybody who talks about freedom.
	Hey, all of my heroes were accused of corrupting the young too.
	But there is a fight that is going to be there.
	And I would really suggest to people to look within your own heart and try and figure out if this is something you want to do.
	As I've said in my show many times, when you start to think for yourself, philosophy, which is really what we're talking about here, It starts as a sort of series of steps, you know, and it's like, ooh, I wonder where this goes.
	And what happens is it very quickly turns into a luge, but except you don't have a sled, and you're naked, and you're backwards, and there are spikes in it, and fire-breathing dragons, and at the bottom who knows what.
	But it rapidly accelerates when you begin the process.
	So just forewarned is forearmed if people want to get into these kinds of topics.
	And I hope that They do.
	I really, I mean, I hugely congratulate you, Ben, for your work in this area.
	I mean, this is what makes the difference.
	This is the only thing that makes the difference.
	The future belongs to those with the greatest staying power and the greatest truth.
	But I think the two are kind of coincided.
	But it is a very challenging road to go down.
	I certainly invite people to explore it, but recognize that it is going to bring you into...
	The state.
	Into conflict with the state.
	You know, people always say to me, well, what's the government going to do about you?
	Well, nothing, because I'm preaching priests.
	I'm preaching peace.
	So, nothing.
	But, you know, it's not the government I'm scared of, so to speak.
	It's, you know, everybody else who's going to get mad at me for asking basic questions and suggesting voluntarism rather than the coercion of history.
	But that is what is going to occur for people if you keep going.
	I hope that people will.
	I'm glad you do.
	But that is how it shakes out and it's better to know ahead of time than to be surprised by it.
	Yeah, sure.
	I feel very encouraged by the amount of social events that seem to be increasing because when there's that social element and the fun and all that type of thing with people that share these common values, that seems to me like it's going to be more sustainable and it can grow on that basis.
	Yes, and I also think that the focus on what you can act on is much more inviting for women.
	And no movement can survive for very long or certainly can spread without the involvement of women.
	And I think women have a healthy skepticism about the windy words of abstract dudes and looking for like, can we put these tires on the road at some time and take them for a spin?
	Well, of course, I think this is why I think about 40% of my listeners are women, which I think is pretty high for Libertarian Philosophy Star Show.
	And I think that's because, I mean, I've got a whole book about relationships and I'm really focused on child raising and so on because that is, I think, where the healthy, non-abstract, rubber-meets-the-road aspect of women can really help the movement and keep us out of, hey, I wrote another blog post about the Federal Reserve.
	Are we any closer to freedom yet?
	So I think that could be very helpful as well.
	Exactly.
	Have you seen the Voluntary as Vixens page on Facebook yet?
	No, I haven't.
	Is that Vixens with three X's?
	No.
	Just one X, but I'm doing my best.
	Fantastic.
	I will spread that in the video and podcast to this.
	Yeah.
	Let's just mention your books.
	I know you accept donations.
	You don't get paid for any of this.
	You're speaking to me for free.
	You speak on YouTube for free.
	There's no ads.
	The books are free.
	If people want to donate, you put in a lot of effort and energy in order to bring us this information.
	And so I'd encourage people to donate.
	I donate every month because I highly value what you do.
	So, yeah, just tell us the web address and stuff.
	Oh, thanks.
	What you do is you send an email to kidneys at freedomainradio.com.
	And interestingly enough, a man with a van and a spoon will come by and extract one.
	We appreciate a minimum amount of squirming, if you don't mind.
	And also, if you could lay down a little tarpaulin in the front hallway, that obviously helps with the cleanup.
	And we can get a fair amount for that on the black market.
	So kidneys...
	No, I'm just kidding.
	Just go to freedomradio.com.
	There's a donate tab.
	And you can sign up for a couple of bucks a month or whatever people like.
	Hugely appreciated because I'm grinding my way through this documentary.
	So it eats money like a coke habit.
	Actually, I wish I just developed a coke habit rather than a documentary.
	I think I'd be better off.
	Although the visions would probably be about the same.
	But yeah, thank you very much.
	And for my listenership who want to get...
	To your work, where should they go best?
	Oh, benlarry.com.
	I'll do an edit and put it on the screen as well, if you like, if that'd be easier.
	Fantastic.
	Yeah, cool.
	Steph, thank you so much for your time.
	We're all looking forward to the documentary.
	I can't wait to see that.
	And so, yeah, we'll all keep our eyes peeled.
	Hey, I'll send you the first 12 minutes after this so you can have a look at a draft.
	Oh, brilliant.
	That'd be fantastic.
	Thanks, Ben.
	I appreciate your time.
	Take care.
	Bye for now.
	Stay strong, brother.
	Bye.

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