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April 5, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:19
2356 Panel - Stefan Molyneux, Jeffrey Tucker and Stephan Kinsella

Stefan Molyneux, Jeffrey Tucker and Stephan Kinsella answer questions about compulsory education, the non-aggression principal applied to children, the drugging of children and more at the Liberty in the Pines event in Nacogdoches, Texas.

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I'm going to give them one of the microphones so they can pass around because we don't have five of them.
And I'll hold the mic for those of you who want to ask questions.
We're just going to be very free for them, however you guys want to do it.
You're welcome.
Put it here in the room.
You're the master.
My name is Jordan.
I'm Thunder.
I was just curious, how do you know that we are going to win?
I'll tell you, here's the thing.
To the extent you see progress at all, it's due to markets.
Bureaucracies are inherently reactionary.
The rules are all based on the past.
Do you understand what the state is, really?
I ask that question because people are often times very confused about this.
The state is not the newest guy who's elected president.
He may or may not have anything to do with the state.
Do a mental experiment in your mind.
If you shift off Congress Would the state stop functioning?
Would it shut down?
And I think we all understand the answer is no.
I mean, the state is not really the people we elect.
That's just the veneer.
The real state is the kind of permanent bureaucracy.
It's the thing that we heard about earlier called the nation state, which is a specific state.
It's a kind of, they imagine it to be an immortal being that continues to live this The state is really not just the people who are there, much less the people who are there.
It's the accumulation of Crap.
That's been going on for like a hundred years.
It's this big, crufty computer.
You know the term cruft?
It's a code word.
I mean, it's like, when you're writing software, if it gets too crusty, I mean, it's like, got too much old code and too many hacks in it, then it stops working.
So that's what crust is.
The state is like this gigantic, crusty machine.
And it's continuing to enforce laws made You know, a hundred years ago and everything from then up to now.
And all these laws are regulating essentially the past.
That the state is in control very much of the physical world, and only the physical world.
The future that began to be invented in 1995 is about not the physical world, it's about the digital world.
And the digital world, the realm of ideas and information, is a completely different thing.
It operates according to different metaphysical principles.
Everything that flows in and out of it is malleable.
It's immortal.
It's infinitely copyable.
None of which can be said about the physical world that the state controls.
So we have a huge advantage.
So every time you see some sign of progress, think of it as a surprise we've seen from One for Life, where it says every time there was a bell ringing or something, that means an angel or something like that, right?
So every time you see some element of progress, count that as a victory.
And I take this to a certain extent.
Like when McDonald's came out with the new Fish and McBrides, I thought, ah, this thing is good.
Progress.
I mean, because all progress in this world is driven by you and me and other people like us.
All progress comes from human action and choice.
Everything bad in the world, you can pretty much trace to the state in some way or another.
So every time you see some evidence of progress, that's evidence that we're winning already.
And we'll continue to, for the reasons I just laid out.
Mr.
Kinsella, you gave a beautiful analogy on how somebody came to your daughter's birthday party to sing and if they didn't there would be damage reparations that they would have to pay and if they did that you would have to pay them.
How does that analogy apply to To a steady job.
So I go in and I work at McDonald's or Starbucks and if I don't come in one day, they have no way of penalizing me monetarily, but they lose profit from that day from a lack of Okay, so in the birthday party scenario, I'm assuming that it's important to the parent that the singer show up.
So to guarantee they're going to show up, you want to more than incentivize them.
You want to give them a penalty as well.
So you negotiate that ahead of time.
So you say I'm going to pay you $1,000 if you show up, and if you don't show up, you've got to pay me $2,000 or $500 or something.
Now if you do that, then you're imposing a cost on the singer, so you might have to pay them more money than otherwise.
So they're getting $1,000 if they show up.
They're taking the risk that they get sick or their mom gets sick and they can't show up.
They're going to have to pay you a penalty.
So it's a price if you're willing to pay for it.
That's fine.
In the employment situation, usually the default desire of both parties is what's called at will.
So you want to be – the employer wants to be free to fire you at any time.
I mean if he suspects you of dishonesty or something, he wants you out of there right away.
He doesn't have to pay you anything for that.
And likewise, you want to be able to quit whenever you want to.
Now in some cases, you could negotiate something else, and employers do that sometimes.
So for example, if an employer hires a high-valued employee and they move them, they pay a moving package and a sign-on bonus, which happens sometimes.
Sometimes at McDonald's up in North Dakota right now.
The employer will say we're going to pay you $15,000 sign-on bonus and $10,000 of movie expenses, and it's really like a loan which we will retire after a year of employment.
If you leave after six months, you've got to pay us that back, and you sign on the dotted line.
It's a contract.
I've known people that – companies either pursue them or work out a settlement.
So sometimes if it's important that you show up, the employer could negotiate something like that.
So it's really just what the parties negotiate, but just the nature of the employment relationship usually is at will.
This is for you as well, Steve.
I totally agree that IP is a joke, and I'm starting to warm up with the idea that what you're talking about is labor is not property, it's an action.
And I was trying to relate that to my life working, you know, a lot of menial jobs, get through school.
And just for an example, I want to give a micro and a macro questions.
Like, working and dish digging all day, your labor, OK, it's not your property.
What about the time you spend there?
Would you consider that as a property?
And then in general, do you consider time as property?
I don't think time is property.
I don't think you don't own time.
You can't transfer time literally to someone else.
I mean, do you agree that time has value?
I think in a sense time is scarce.
We only have so much of it.
But it's not really something – it marches on no matter what you do incessantly.
It's really the chronological succession of events in your life.
Action presupposes time because action aims at something in the future.
But I don't think it's a scarce resource in the sense it's something that can be owned or sold.
At least I can't imagine how you can do that outside of a science fiction novel.
Didn't you used to believe that time wasn't scarce?
I don't think it's a scarce resource, but it's scarce in the sense that there's only a finite amount of it that we have.
It's not scarce for the universe, but it's scarce for us, right?
Right, yeah.
Oh, that's great.
I thought they were like that, they're billing systems.
So you're saying that if we lived forever, then time wouldn't be scarce?
Okay.
But we know, like, we're mortal.
And that makes time scarce.
It's a finite resource.
And the opportunity costs everything we're doing with our time is everything we're not doing with our time.
Except we don't know we're mortal, and even if you were immortal, you couldn't know that either.
Okay, thanks David.
First of all, thank you all for taking your time to be with us today, especially personally.
I think it's a new venture for me, and I've learned much today.
Coming from an education background, I've been particularly interested in a few seconds on for answering some questions for me at lunch.
But I have learned that libertarians are More than disillusioned with the public school system, I have the straight black school, the public school, and then university teaching, and I would tend to recruit you there on new fronts.
And we've discussed some alternate educating systems, unschooling, homeschooling.
But for the majority of the children that are now taught in public school, that may not be an option.
Resources, time, parent knowledge.
So what is our solution for those children if there were no public schools?
Do you mean in a free society, kids who couldn't get educated because their parents were too busy or something like that?
Well, I mean, charity.
I mean, I give away all of my educational resources, all my books for free.
So, and there's the Khan Academy, there's lots of things, you know, public libraries that I'm sure would give internet access or whatever charities would help out and so on.
But the other thing too is that, you know, we've got this idea that childhood needs to be walled off from adulthood, like it's in this enclosure, and that means that you just learn stuff.
And childhood wasn't like that for most of human history.
For most of human history, children learned how to do stuff by being with adults and doing them.
So Dr.
Philip Zimbardo has written out a book, which I really recommend, called The Demise of Guys, about problems that men are facing, young men in particular, are facing.
He pointed out that throughout most of human history, you would have four adults around for every child.
For adults, because you'd be in this extended community, aunts, grandparents, uncles, kids would have models all over the place, and they'd be out there in the fields doing stuff with their parents, learning, you know, how to...
Clow the back 40 or whatever the heck people do to get food to my table.
And that's how they would learn.
They'd be out there doing stuff.
So childhood was not this enclosure.
You put these kids in this biosphere and you just give them books and pencils.
Kids would learn out in the world doing things.
And you got remarkable child prodigies coming out of this.
I meant to look this up, but there's a medieval court astronomer who was 11th.
I mean, if you look at the intellectual achievements of a lot of the great people, most of them didn't live very long.
Galileo's kind of an exception.
They did remarkable things very early because they were out there doing things.
And so, again, what has happened is the state has walled off childhood in this enclosure, and then we think, well, how would that enclosure work in a free society?
We don't know what childhood would look like in a free society.
It certainly wouldn't look anything like it looks right now.
Adolescence was completely invented.
Basically, it's just a way of...
I personally think it was invented as a way of keeping young, able-bodied people out of the workforce to compete with middle-aged guys who didn't want to have the competition.
Just keep them in high school, and that way they can't compete with you installing a toilet.
I think it's a big mess right now, but childhood would be very different.
I think it would be more practical, it would be more engaged, and it certainly would not be the opposite of what it was throughout history, which was one child to four adults.
Now you have one adult with 25 children.
I mean, this is all a Lord of the Flies mess.
I mean, the children are socializing horizontally.
They're not learning vertically.
They're not being imprinted or instructed vertically.
They're learning with almost no social skills.
They're learning from the lowest common denominator around them horizontally, which is why we're seeing such a breakdown, I think, in society.
So, sorry, long answer, but it would be very different.
Who knows?
But I certainly have enough faith that human beings would take care of the children who couldn't.
And it certainly would be better than what the recent statistics that came out about high school students in New York, 80% of them who graduate can't read.
I mean, let's say the free market can get that down to 75%.
Do you know what the literacy rate was before public schools?
98%, 97%.
I mean, Moby Dick, have you ever tried to read that book?
Moby Dick!
I mean, my God, this was the most popular.
Thomas Paine, did you see those quotes?
That language is like an angel weeping into your eyeball.
I mean, it's beautiful.
It's beautiful stuff.
And this was incredibly popular books before public school.
You watch the literacy rate.
If you do the analysis of politicians' speeches, they go from a grade 10 level.
So it started at grade 12 level, even as late as the 50s.
Eisenhower, grade 10.
Now you have to speak at a grade 6 level.
And slowly, like Obama does, right?
Because the literacy rate is declining abysmally, catastrophically.
I mean, we are a post-literate society, which is one of the reasons why this room is not full, because this requires some cognitive skills, which you're just not going to get watching Wife Swap.
Anyway...
I actually have something to say about it.
You know, I homeschool my three children.
And I have, you know, I spend a lot of time making excuses.
You know, well, they're in church groups.
Oh, we go here.
We join the homeschool group.
Because people look at you like, well, how do they learn to be around other people?
And I have stopped doing that.
The truth is, I don't want to take my undisciplined, unsocialized little beast and stick it in a school with 400 other similarly unsocialized, undisciplined little beasts, and then we wonder why we have adults who are so juvenile.
You know, I work with people who whine right to the guy who writes their checks about the simplest test.
And I think, like, where do these people come from?
You know, and I think it has a lot to do with just throwing all these kids in there.
My children learn, you know, from adults, from the adults around them.
They can go and converse with any one of you here on an intellectual level.
I mean, clearly they would not have, you know, the same understanding.
But they could make sense.
Jonathan can attest to that.
I have smart children, you know, and they can speak to adults.
I think that that's important.
And the other thing I wanted to say is that I really do believe that the public school system subsidizes lazy parenting.
And you know, yeah, we do look and we have like a whole generation of kids that, you know, what would we do if the schools closed down tomorrow?
And, I mean, that's sad.
You know, I think people would clean up the mess.
If there were no public schooling, private schooling would probably be a lot cheaper.
But, you know, also maybe a generation hence, you wouldn't have women willing to spit out six kids because at age three they can stick them in preschool, you know, and they don't have to deal with them anymore.
So I think that it does a lot to give us unwanted children as well.
We should also name two terrible things.
One is compulsory education.
Which is a relatively new institution.
I mean, you hardly ever hear libertarians talk about it, that it's not an outrageous institution.
The state's forcing kids into school.
And the second thing, which is so cruel, was the imposition of child labor laws in the New Deal, which, as Stephan said, was really this design I mean, the problem is the unemployment rate is high.
So FDR had this great idea, let's just make it illegal for a whole class of workers to work, and then we can reduce the unemployment rate.
I mean, you know, to me, childhood should just be completely restructured.
You should learn stuff until you're like 12.
And then...
And she's going to work.
And there's plenty of great things that a 12-year-old can do.
And you work between the age of 12 and like 17 or something.
You don't stop learning, but you also combine it with commercial experience, real valuable things you're doing.
And then at that age of 17 or 18, you decide, well, what kind of things do I want to do?
Do I pursue a vocational life?
Do I want to go back to academia?
In which case, then you can really sort of dig in and And a study for higher education.
Whatever you start plotting in life, at least you can make an informed choice, and you have a lot of different skills, and you've hung around the real world, which kids don't know anything about anymore.
And it's very interesting to me, ever since we cut kids out of the workforce, they still want to do cool stuff.
They just don't want to sit at a desk.
So what have we done in our public school systems?
I mean, it's weird what's happened.
Now, when you get into junior high and high school, The education element of it, like learning stuff in classrooms, really is an increasingly small part of life experience for the kids.
What they're actually doing is tennis, basketball, football, chess club, choir, band, on and on.
All these new systems that are Large part funded by parental money and booster clubs and stuff like that, built on top of this lower structure, a very thin structure where they pretend to educate people.
So it's like we're reinventing a kind of child labor, except it's not in the commercial world.
We're doing other things.
We've come up with artificial systems to keep them busy for as long as possible.
So I'd love to see libertarians actually start talking about the problem of child labor.
I mean, as far as I know, I'm the only guy who ever talks about this.
And whenever I start talking about it, people want to un-point the microphone because it mortifies people in some way.
I got my first job at nine.
Yeah.
I did, and it's been great.
And it's increasingly difficult to get jobs for kids.
And even when I was 13 or 14, I could go out and lead wells and things like that.
It's almost impossible.
I got a job at a bookstore when I was 11.
I got free books.
It was fantastic.
Yeah, it's only child actors who are allowed to work anymore.
Well, they make lots of money for adults.
Yeah.
Let me add one point.
I agree with everyone here, and I don't have anything deep.
But one thing I've observed, I've noticed since I have a kid in school that there's these conference days and things where the kids don't go to school on a Friday.
And I've noticed that a lot of parents, they hate it, partly because I think there are so many dual working parent couples nowadays, partly because of taxes and regulations.
I mean almost no one can afford to have someone stay home anymore with the same standard of living as they used to.
So they use the schools as daycare.
And they hate it.
I mean, like, if my school announced another day off of the kid, I will go find something new.
We'll have fun another day off.
I don't care.
But some people, I've seen them get upset about this.
Oh, no, not another conference day.
Yeah, that's part of the pressure for year-round schooling, too.
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, I actually remember talking to a lot of parents who when kids would come home for summer they'd complain like, oh shit, what am I going to do with these kids all day?
Right.
You didn't have to have them.
They're not sent to you by God.
I mean, it wasn't like the stalk got shot down over your house.
Mayday, mayday, drop the kids.
What are these things doing here?
Sorry.
You can still have sex and you don't get pregnant.
Can you show us a little bit about...
You don't have to involve anyone else.
I think he created a vision on his own.
You know, I mentioned the non-aggression principle relating to children.
And his response, and I'm sure everyone else saw here, was that if it's wrong to have sex with a five-year-old, then it's okay to hit kids.
Yeah, I mean, the logic is exciting, to say the least.
Because what he's arguing is that we have higher standards of behavior for children when it comes to sex.
So what is consensual for an adult is not consensual for a child.
I completely agree.
Of course, children can't understand the ramifications of sexual activity, so you can't have sex with children.
I'm glad that's not controversial because it's a case I don't even ever want to argue because it's just anybody who's against that.
I just want to not be in the same room as...
So to say, well, we have a higher standard of sexual licensure with children, right?
So we have higher standards of ethics with children, and then to translate that over to say, but when it comes to hitting, we can have far lower standards, is not a rational argument at all, right?
And I think, I mean, I don't know, you can speculate as to why he would make that argument, but it doesn't hold any water to say, well, children by the definition need more protection, so we should hit them more.
And then the justification that if you try to get someone off the bridge, then you're kidnapping.
I don't know.
Well, yeah, I mean, so that argument is, if you see a blind, like you see a guy with headphones on wandering in front of a bus, you can tackle him to stop him.
And I think few of us would say that that's immoral.
And therefore you can hit children.
I mean, again, I find that to be somewhat...
Because as a parent, you're running into traffic and stuff, but as a parent, you're responsible to not have your children in spaces where they can run into traffic.
I mean, that's the whole point.
Build a fence, for God's sakes.
You're going to have to hit your children, right?
They're reaching for something on the stove.
Well, use the back burners.
You know, there's lots of options to not hit your children.
And he did say, which I don't agree with, that his child learns about X, Y, and Z when you hit them.
No, that's not what hitting does.
Hitting is aversion therapy.
The child learns that it hurts to get hit.
They don't learn anything else.
Other than fear of the authority figure and that it's painful to get hit.
So it's not educational.
I won't get into all the other stuff about the studies that it lowers IQ, harms social abilities, harms concentration, and so on.
I agree with him that we have to have higher standards with regards to sexuality for children than we do for adults.
I disagree with him extremely strongly that that somehow translates into having infinitely lower standards for the physical hitting of people with regards to children.
I think that it would be exactly the same.
To hit a child is worse than to hit an adult.
An adult has self-defense.
An adult has legal recourse.
An adult is in your life voluntarily.
Children are not in your life voluntarily.
I think about this every day with my own daughter.
She's not here by choice.
She didn't choose me as her father.
I've used this analogy before that if my wife was assigned to me By some religious or secular authority, and I really wanted her to love me, I would have to behave to her even better than if she chose me.
Because I'd have to overcome the involuntary nature of her relationship to me by being assigned to me in some way.
And my daughter didn't choose me, so I have to treat her the very best to overcome the involuntary aspect of our relationship, so that I try to act as a father that...
In such a way that if she could choose any father any day, she would choose me.
Like if she could choose to switch anyone, she would choose me.
Because she doesn't have that choice, but I need to act as if she does, otherwise I don't have any right to her love.
So I think that we have to have much higher standards with regards to children than any other, because it is an innately involuntary relationship.
We have to overcome that.
You can't change that, it's biology, but you can work to overcome it.
And I think that by lowering the standards, you're doing the opposite of that.
You know, I'm going to say something about Stephen's point about this.
I just want to say publicly that I think he's been a very brave man in pioneering this new application of libertarian ideas and really ethics to children.
If you had told me ten years ago that I would have come around to the view that he now has espouses, I wouldn't have believed it.
But he's gradually persuaded me, and I think he's right about it.
And it's not as if...
He has made these points as preaching to an already convinced choir.
You know, you really went out there.
I pushed hard on this.
It's been a brave campaign, and I must say for myself, I've been very much persuaded by it.
It used to make me kind of uncomfortable when you talk about this stuff.
Now I'm really glad, you know?
So I think that we've, I think you've been personally responsible for some degree of human progress in our time.
Thank you.
I agree, Jeff.
I just want to add that ever since I've had a child, I've always been against spanking myself, but I sort of thought it was not aggression for convoluted arguments.
But you convinced me, I don't know, nine months ago on the phone, and so I agree with you.
It's aggression.
It's a bad idea.
And there's one argument that drives me nuts.
It's this.
I was spanked when I was a child, and I came out all right.
I mean what kind of argument is that?
Because some people overcome robbery.
I mean I hear a similar argument with taxes from liberals or socialists.
I'm happy to pay my taxes.
Or they'll say, no, you're taxed half your income, but you're living a pretty good life.
It's the same as the submitting area.
Anyway, I agree.
Okay, I agree too.
All my first boys were spanked, but I have never had to spank my daughter.
And I've never wanted to after watching.
I really do.
And I really like what you said about the involuntary nature of it.
They're not there by choice.
That really makes me think.
And they can't leave.
Right.
I mean, so, boy, you've got to have them.
Isn't it that the parent-child relationship is potentially abusive because you have a kind of natural power?
It's a monopoly.
It's a mini-state.
You're like, potentially a mini-state.
I mean, you know, I must tell you, too, something else, thinking about your points, is maybe realize something about the state.
I used to have this view that The state represented some kind of unique evil.
And now I realize the state is just the most aggressive and entrenched embodiment and most imperialistic of a kind of universal evil.
Do you know what I mean?
It's not like it's some unique beast that appears out of nowhere.
It's the aggregation of the beast that's within all of us in the worst possible way.
So if you're going to stamp out the evil of the state, You really can begin, in many ways, in stacking out that same evil in your household.
Did I say that?
No, that's right.
If governments have to have a constitution to limit their dangerous power, maybe parents need to have a constitution, a social contract with the child.
That makes sense.
And you breach it if you aggress against them.
You know, really, it's a new understanding for me.
I mean, I did go through this change in my conception of what the state is and does, realizing that it's kind of this crappy thing that just grabs every bit of human evil in all of us and puts it in one institution and says, we're in charge.
You know?
That's a different way of conceiving of the state, I think.
And I think you've helped me to come to that realization.
It's a different way of looking at it.
I'm not even sure if Rothbard looked at it that way, actually.
He touched on it.
I mean, he wrote Kids Lib, and so he touched on it, but I don't think...
I think that libertarians' focus on where the state comes from is largely political, but I think there's a lot of good work out there from psychologists, and the psychohistory.com is a really good place for this, where they talk about how the hierarchies in society reflect very early childhood experiences, because the state is so irrational.
How could you possibly look at this institution and have it make any sense unless you'd had some prior experience of that relationship?
There's a problem when some libertarians view, you know, liberty ends in the moment where you're no longer loving your kids.
And I've gotten that kind of backlash from certain libertarians in this country, which is really problematic.
Because they see their kids as poverty.
Well, I think there is something to be said.
I mean, there's got to be a nuance there where how involved are we going to ask the state to be in the raising of children, too.
Who stops that?
I think that Jane had made a point, at least last night, when we were talking about if you see something wrongful, a violation of natural rights happening, even on someone else's property, that they, by violating the natural rights, have kind of lost their defense and that you can go on and rightfully stop that.
And I think, really, if you go back a long time ago, you know, before the state was so involved, people did that within communities.
I know that my own grandmother raised three children who were not able to be raised by their own families.
You know, they were in a farming community, and people just took care of other people.
You know, but that's been replaced by this incredibly intrusive apparatus.
I mean, I know for my part, I don't want The child family welfare bureaucracies are mainly interested in perpetrating themselves, right?
So that's the main goal.
That's why they would typically pick on the cases that are going to make nice, high-profile media things or whatever, and foregoing the really abusive systems that are all around them.
So the same thing that afflicts the state and every other area really is a dynamic that works also in the child and family area.
If you're looking for research projects, I'm not sure how many of you are interested in pursuing a kind of academic career in a sense, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done on libertarianism and child and family law.
We have very few resources on this subject at all.
I'm actually a former child protective services investigator.
Great.
It was the most corrupting worst thing that's ever happened in my entire life.
The only moral thing you could do as an investigator was to break the law.
Because hitting children wasn't really considered abuse, but it was considered abuse if a five-year-old was allowed to ride his bike.
I had reports where a five-year-old, no, I don't report where a nine-year-old is riding their bike down the street.
And I had to go ask this child, has he ever been sexually molested?
What does that have to do with it?
It's absolutely abusive.
The whole system is like a form of child abuse in itself.
Yeah, of course.
And the whole system where we could take people out of the houses, stick them in foster homes, where for every diagnosis the child got, the foster home would get more money.
I won't get on the soapbox, but I just wanted to mention that the profit that comes out of child abuse is tragically huge.
In a free society, there would be huge losses for child abuse because kids like that are harder to teach and to insure them against property damage or future criminality would be very expensive.
But if you think about it, why do people feel that they need the state?
They feel that they need the state because they're afraid of aggression from other people.
And for the most part, we know very scientifically where aggression comes from.
It comes from aggression against people as challenges.
So if children were raised peacefully, there would be almost no criminality.
And so we would say, well, protection from what?
You know, it's like, can I sell you insurance protection against vampires?
Well, no.
Because, you know, they're not around that much, right?
So if criminals became a sort of species of unicorn, we really would have much less desire for the state.
Because trauma in childhood produces two things in general.
It produces criminality and overcompliance.
And these two things are essential.
The criminals are used to scare us and the resulting piece of overcompliance, we heard, towards the supposed protector.
And this is not even to mention the fact that, can you imagine public school, how it could even function 25 to 1 ratios with healthy, independent, intelligent, skeptical, questioning, confident children.
The system would simply collapse.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, no, but then the whole school is in detention.
And, of course, the whole pharmaceutical industry and this horrible drugging of children, which we've talked about in my show before, simply couldn't exist.
This is all wallpaper all over trauma in childhood.
So I've sort of argued for many years, and I'm not the only one to do it, but the state is, in effect, of the family.
You can't solve the state without solving the family.
I've got lots of ideas about that.
But anyway, get on with other questions if you want.
Thanks for bringing that up.
So this is a little tangent to the child issue.
And you can go out to any panel if it feels comfortable answering this question.
There's contradictory, but I am in the Army, and I've become like the token libertarian guy in the unit.
And so, you know, and engaged.
First of all, get a haircut.
It's reserved.
I like to say.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Anywho, a lot of these guys are deployed.
I always get a lot of crap because I'm not a nationalist.
I don't pledge any sort of relief.
I do my job.
In the military, especially in the Army and Marines, this nationalistic kind of prideful view of this public service, if you will, is a lot worse than civilians.
and I just want to know what is the best way to combat this other from a military or civilian perspective you know give the allegiance you speak over it takes about 15 years are you speaking about in the reserves or in the it doesn't matter where you go it definitely shows its place I would expect it to be more intense in the reserves just because they don't have as much experience you know with I mean how do The best libertarians I've ever known did two tours in Afghanistan.
Do you want me to take it?
Well, why don't you play one of these guys and I'll play not one of these guys.
Alright, so you got a mic?
Yeah, okay.
So they would say what?
In response to...
No, no.
So they would give me a little nationalist thing that they would say.
Alright, if I said...
So if we were talking about, say...
Going into Iraq.
That was a whole mistake.
And they say, well, you know, I've been out there once or twice and I think that it was perfectly valid because we are promoting democracy and we're just trying to help them stabilize themselves after that terrible regime or say something about oil issues or whatever the case may be.
And I would say...
Well, no, no.
Let me do the other part.
So I would say, well, you understand that some people don't agree with that, right?
And would you accept their right to disagree with that?
I mean, yes.
You can disagree with whatever you want.
Okay.
So, now, would you accept their right to not just disagree with you in theory, but in practice?
Right?
Because there's not much point saying, well, you can disagree with me, but you can't change any of your behaviors, right?
So, would they allow...
So, let's say somebody's conscience or somebody's argument disagreed with the value of going into Iraq.
Would they be free to act on their conscience?
I mean, I cannot tell anyone what they cannot do.
Yeah, you can't order people to, right, they're not in the army, right?
So if I'm that person who disagrees with the war in Iraq, then clearly I should be free to withdraw my financial support from that because I have to be able to disagree with you in a practical, material sense.
And by that, you mean tax decision?
Yeah.
Right.
So their view obviously is not the same.
They do-- No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
But we just did a logical thing, right?
We just did a logical thing where they said, I like this.
Like, I remember having a conversation with a woman on my show.
She was really for the surge.
It's like, great, send them a check.
If you're for it, fine.
If people don't like the imperialism, surely they have to be free to not be forced to support it.
Because that goes against their conscience.
And you have to be free to act with regards to your conscience, otherwise you're just a slave.
That would affect people like you and me, but we don't have the opportunity.
No, no, no, no, no.
I would ask this guy, does he defend that right?
Would he accept that right?
The freedom to disagree.
Because this is what the soldiers always say.
I fought for you to be free to disagree with me.
It's like, great, then I can stop paying your salary.
Thank you for the job.
Yeah, but it's the worst than that.
They don't even want you to complain.
Because they'll say, I fought for your right to criticize us.
And I'm like, well, let me do it.
Let me honor your service.
I'm taking government right now and my government teacher, I got demonizing class as a class idiot for refuting when I got demonizing class as a class idiot for refuting when he said that it's either the government or the And I raised my hand.
It's a pure lecture class.
He never takes questions or anything.
I just kind of raised my hand and put it up.
I think it's a gray area there for a community of people to enter a social contract to kind of check one another.
You know, they have their own swallows of the small government, et cetera.
And I would want to know what any of you guys would say to that same statement.
And clarify, I'm not discovering a teacher.
You handed me a mic on the first time I don't quite understand what the question was.
I understand the scenario.
Can you restate the question?
It's the Hobbesian argument, right?
Like, you have a government, oh, you have Nature Red and Tooth and Claw.
There's nothing in between.
Yeah, what would your response be to that statement?
It's the government or the jungle?
The law of the jungle, yeah.
In my book, I actually have a reputation of the law of the jungle.
I don't memorize it, but...
They call natural law the law of the jungle.
This is what some of them do.
It's like saying that you don't have any...
It's like saying natural rights can't exist.
I don't know.
I mean, my whole talk is a reputation of that.
That natural rights can't exist.
I mean, the fact of the matter is, if you've got people in the jungle and they're violating each other's rights, then that's wrong and it's criminal.
And so when he says jungle, what he's saying is anybody can do whatever they want.
And the truth is, anybody can do anything they want now, and the government does anything they want now.
And so it's kind of the law of the jungle.
If the government has the whole power to do anything they want, it's the law of the jungle for them, right?
But, I mean, if that's what you mean by law of the jungle, you can do whatever you want.
That's what's happening now in the government.
And the fact of the matter is that some people are right, some things are wrong in the jungle or out of the jungle in the government or society or whatever.
That's what he did with the Hockey and Argonauts.
There are no natural rights in the state of nature, right?
The response is, well, I don't buy that.
There are natural rights in the state of nature.
Yeah, there's natural rights in both states.
Well, and, you know, there was the whole, you know, if men were angels, we wouldn't need government.
But I think that now we can see that men are not angels, and therefore, why would you give them a bunch of guns and say that you have...
I mean, if he's so worried about the jungle, I mean, are special people going to be occupying the halls of government?
Or is it going to be the same people he's scared of in the jungle?
I mean, that's what you should ask him.
You could also ask him, so if there was no government, would he just start killing people?
No, it's a serious question.
Because he's talking about humanity, which means he includes himself.
I would do this after you get your grade.
But sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.
But it's like the people who say, if there was no God, then we would just say, okay, so if you became an atheist, you'd just go around strangling hobos?
I mean, throwing cats in blenders?
I mean, is that your primal desire?
Do you wake up in the morning and say, oh, I wish I could strangle my students, but there are these laws.
I mean...
No, no, okay.
And if he says yes to that, then he's revealed his moral nature.
And you can ask the other students in the class, I mean, how many times do you want to, you know, put drill bits through people's heads with nail guns or whatever, but they're just restrained because there might be cops around.
And very few people actually want to do that.
Remember, sociopathy is only 1 in 25 people.
Most people have a conscience, and most people don't want to do evil.
It takes a huge amount to actually get people to do evil.
There's a reason you do all that basic training and shred people's personalities, right?
So statistically, he's just way off the mark.
Most people have empathy.
Most people have a conscience.
And fortunately, the people who don't have them end up in charge.
And if you doubt that, you know, one thing, you can look at this great plane, you know, Stephen Kinsella and I were driving here, we drove, you know, three hours on the highway, and all these people driving around, these huge steel contraptions all over the cars, you know, all over the road at 70 miles an hour, 80 miles an hour, and we're somehow all staying within each other's lanes, we're letting each other pass, and we're more or less getting along.
It was a state of anarchy, really.
At any one moment, anyone, any driver could just blow off the whole system.
You know, just by swerving the riot and calling a pilot, it doesn't tend to happen.
It sometimes happens, but it doesn't tend to happen.
We were joking about this belief that government magically keeps society together.
And we imagined that, like, there would come a news broadcast, you know, on the radio that says, government has been abolished.
And then, what would happen to the drivers?
Like, oh my god!
Put the blindfold on!
I'm going 80!
I'm going 80!
I would also just point out that the mistake is that society and the state are the same, and the state is foisted this myth on this, especially since the modern nation state.
So they're trying to give you a contrast.
You either have chaos, which is the lack of society, or the state.
So they're identifying state with society, and, of course, the state is the enemy of order in society.
Society has always existed in human history without the state, especially without the modern state.
Societies clearly exist without the state, so the choice is… The state being a predator on society and order and making things worse, not chaos.
Yeah, and the Hobbesian theory doesn't explain things as obvious as eBay, where you can't resolve your disputes with the government.
It's all based on rating systems, all based on voluntary transaction.
eBay is international.
The sums are so small, like PayPal, that you can't explain this.
They live in a stateless environment.
All of their disputes, 400,000 people get their primary income off eBay.
None of them have access to any government, any court, to resolve their disputes, and it all works fantastically.
I mean, they're not cannibals.
Mostly.
I don't do a lot of eBay trading, but very few bite marks from my PayPal account.
And even states are in a state of anarchy with respect to each other and even internally to the state itself.
So how does Hobbes explain this?
I mean, if you have to have a super lord contract enforcer above society to make people abide by rules, who's making the international states of the world respect each other's rights?
And even if you say, well, we have to have one super state, who's making the people in that state obey each other's rules and orders and And this.
There's no one above that, so if you don't need it for states to exist, you don't need it for us to exist.
That's why people are either reasonable or not, right?
That's how it boils down to.
They're reasonable and respect to rights, or they choose not to, and then you respond.
Yeah, Alfred Kuzan has a great article, Do We Ever Get Out of Anarchy?
And the point is everyone is always an anarchy.
What kind of anarchy do we want?
Do we want the anarchy of the state, or do we want a private property anarchy?
Okay, well, we've got the last question of the conference, so no pressure.
The last question of the conference, right?
It all comes down to this.
Thanks, bro.
Thanks all for being here.
It's an honor to be all of you, by the way.
I wanted to talk about, just go back to the parenting thing really quickly.
My parents are traditionally in Vietnamese, so, you know, it was obviously there was a fine line between spanking.
But that's not really my question.
My question is, you know, there's this big problem that middle-class Americans If I could,
I'll just do a very brief thing.
Do you know that children, there's one circumstance under which children do not, even when diagnosed with ADD symptoms, there's one circumstance in which children do not display ADD symptoms, particularly boys.
Anyone want to guess which circumstance that is?
Yes, maybe, but that's not the one.
No?
No.
No.
The father.
When they're with their fathers.
Right?
I mean, as we all know, there's been a massive catastrophic change in families throughout the West, the result of the welfare state and a variety of other things.
This psychotropic drugging of children is largely, if not almost exclusively, correlated with no fathers.
Right?
I mean, we've had this weird experiment where we just said, okay, well, one parent can do the job of two.
And that doesn't work.
I mean, as many, many studies have pointed out, there's no single more negative predictor for your outcome in life than coming from a single-parent household.
I mean, it's more important than race, it's more important than how wealthy you are, it's more important than your physical appearance, it's more important than your health even.
So we had this experiment where we said, okay, let's get rid of the dads and let's put the government in its place.
And that has produced a pretty wild crew of offspring, particularly, again, particularly among the boys.
And this is also because corporal punishment is used much more strongly and harshly in single mother households.
And so this, of course, adds to it as well.
And so, you know, there's no short-term solution for it.
I think that we have to recognize that it's really bad social policy to do anything which promotes fatherlessness.
I mean, I just read this statistic.
Half of children now are born out of wedlock.
In America, it's 48% or something like that.
And I'm not a Christian, but I do love the Christians for bringing this up repeatedly.
I mean, every time I go to websites, Ann Coulter hammers this point mercilessly, and she's a staunch Christian.
And every time I go to websites pointing out the issue of fatherlessness and its effects on children, they are religious websites.
And God bless them for doing it.
I think it's fantastic, because you don't see a lot of this stuff on the left.
So if you really want to start dealing with the drugging of children, you have to look at the behaviors that are causing children to be in need of drugging.
And yes, the schools are getting worse.
Ever since they put the rule in which you can't fire teachers in the 60s, educational standards have declined.
There's been a strong focus.
Christina Hoff Summers talks about this in Who Sold Feminism?
There's been a very strong realignment for the needs of girls in schools at the expense of what boys like.
So there's a lot of sitting and memorizing and chanting and not a lot of getting out and doing stuff, which appeals more to boys, which is why boys are doing so terrifically badly in school.
And there's no outcry about this, which is horrendous.
So yes, education is a problem for sure.
And the last thing I'll say is, at the same time as we have, the free market is working to give children the most amazing toys in the history of the world.
I mean, the things that are available for kids, right?
I mean, lump my phone to this lovely lady's completely wonderful home, unschooled children, you know.
Good job.
Well done.
Excellent.
So they're getting, the free market is stimulating them, right, with iPads and Nickelodeon and the movies, 3D, stereoscopic, 900-inch televisions that basically invade your living dreams.
I mean, they're just incredible things that are going on.
So the state is becoming more boring.
I mean, like, I think only 7% of U.S. schools now have regular recesses.
I mean, so they're locked inside in these horrible sardine can rows, incredibly boring, uninspired teachers.
The boys are incredibly bored.
And that's the one side that's getting worse.
On the other side, they're getting this unbelievable stimulation and education and gaming and all of this stuff from the free market.
So this is a real polarity for kids that is just incredible.
I think they could stand school a lot more if it wasn't compared to their life outside of school in the free market where these toys are just unbelievably great for them.
And I think it's going to double the Flynn effect in a generation.
Six-point gain in IQ every generation.
This is going to be the smartest group of kids and the kids who, if you talk about how crappy school is, they've got a real comparison with what they've got outside of school.
I don't know if it's true all over the country, but in Alabama, the kids in high school all have smartphones and they're allowed to carry them and then they invent their own little world for themselves, digitally.
You know, it's like Snapchat every two seconds.
This is what they do with each other.
They form their own communities that exist on top of the existing public school structure.
I think there would be some kind of, like, prison revolt if they tried to confiscate all the smartphones.
Yeah, yeah.
I just want to address a different aspect of this, and this has to do with the Democratic Now, Ritalin, drugs you give in kids, you're intensively changing their minds.
I mean, just interfering with the natural integrity of their minds.
And I don't think it's possible that so many children need this drug.
And you're changing the way they react to situations and the way they feel about things.
Probably for the rest of their lives.
Generally speaking, I think in medicine, people tend to confuse the intention of the treatment with the treatment.
In surgery, they tend to think it's like changing spark plugs in a car when you cut into a person.
Actually, all these interventions are very serious and disrupt the natural order of the body.
You might tend to think that, then you go in for surgery and you'll find out with all the complications.
That it really isn't like spark plugs, okay?
And it's the same thing with these drugs, you know?
And so, you know, it has to do with the burden of proof again.
You know, the doctors have a burden of proof to say that the side effects, you know, that there's no serious side effects.
And so I think there's a very serious crime going on here in pumping these drugs on these kids and what's going on with their minds.
And they're not treating anything.
There's no test for any of this stuff.
They're treating a metaphor.
Well, thank you, panelists, and thank you for coming out.
Yes, thank you, everybody.
I dropped in a box of books that I brought with you.
I would love to see them vanish.
If you want to pay, they're 15 apiece, but I really don't want to keep them, so if you just have a burning passion for them and you don't want to pay, just walk out.
I won't consider you the thief.
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