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April 17, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:33:28
2362 Is Government Inherently Immoral? Stefan Molyneux Debates Tom Willcutts
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Welcome to my show Tonight on History So It Doesn't Repeat, we discuss the concept of government by force with attorney Tom Wilkutz and philosopher Stefan Molyneux, who debate whether or not government, by its very nature, is immoral.
Though some say it's a necessary evil, we'll be covering whether or not it is necessary, as government has traditionally relied on force, fraud, and coercion to maintain its power.
Learning's the answer.
What's the question?
Here's your host and navigator, Richard Grove.
It's time to study history so it doesn't repeat.
Welcome back to History So It Doesn't Repeat.
I'm your host, Richard Grove, and tonight we have a very special debate between Stefan Molyneux and Tom Wilkutz.
Guiding us along our way tonight via Skype is James Corbett from the sunny climes of western Japan.
He's the host on his own end of all things Corbett Report, but tonight he's the moderator for this debate.
James, I'll turn it over to you and you can do the formal introductions of our guests.
Well, thank you, Rich.
And thank you to TragedyAndHope.com for hosting this.
And thank you to all the people out there for tuning in for this conversation.
I have no doubt it's going to be a stimulating debate.
And tonight, as Richard mentioned, we are talking about the question, is government by its very nature immoral?
And to debate this question, we have...
Two people who you may or may not be familiar with, so let's introduce them one by one.
And rather than me belaboring an introduction, why don't I allow them to introduce themselves in one sentence or less?
So first up, we will talk to Tom Wilcutts, who is a practicing attorney and also a member of the Tragedy and Hope Forum, where you can find some of his writings on these topics.
Tom, thank you for joining us.
Tell us one interesting thing about yourself.
I think probably the thing that gives me the most experience to talk about this that I have myself is that some of my principal cases are against Wall Street, so they're sort of a major player on the government scene, and I have that experience.
Other than that, a degree in philosophy and physics in college, so that helps a little bit, I think, so we'll see.
All right.
And next we have on the other side of this debate, we have Stefan Molyneux, the host of freedomainradio.com and a general man about town.
Stef, thank you for joining us today.
Thank you.
It's my pleasure.
Would you like to say one sentence about yourself before we begin?
Alright, it's going to be a pretty run-on sentence, but I'll do my best.
Well, of course, it's Stefan Molyneux, host of Free Domain Radio.
I have a master's in history, focusing on the history of philosophy, and I run the biggest, most popular philosophy show in the world, with over 50 million downloads, and I'm enormously pleased to have a chance to have this conversation, and thank you so much to the host, moderators, and to Tom.
All right, excellent.
Well, let's begin the debate.
Once again, the question being debated, is government by its very nature immoral?
And arguing on the affirmative side of that, that it is immoral, is going to be Stéphane, and on the negative side, Tom will be arguing.
Against that idea.
So we have decided that Tom will go first and Stéphane will follow.
The order of tonight's debate will be as follows.
There will be an opening remarks section of ten minutes each, followed by two rounds of rebuttals of five minutes each, followed by questions from myself that will last somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 minutes, followed by questions between Stéphane and Tom for each other of 25 minutes, and we will be concluding with a five-minute concluding statement from each.
So, without further ado, let's get into tonight's debate.
And we will start with the opening remarks from Tom.
And I will be timing this, and we will not be particularly strict with the timing, so I will simply ask the speaker to start wrapping up their statements once he reaches the 10-minute mark.
And when I say begin, you can begin.
So, Tom, take it away.
You may begin when you are ready.
Thanks, James.
As I understand it, there are two principal arguments that anarchists make to demonstrate that government is inherently immoral.
One of these arguments is presented as sort of a logical proof based upon reasoning alone.
The other argument is an empirical argument that is based upon reviewing the historical facts.
I'm going to address both of these arguments tonight, and I will start with the first one that attempts to use reason and logic alone to demonstrate that government is inherently immoral.
One obvious flaw in such a claim is that government is a thing or a tool, it is not a moral actor.
To say that governments are inherently evil or immoral is like saying that guns are inherently evil or immoral.
Although over the course of history both governments and guns have been used to do many immoral and evil things, it is not these tools themselves that are immoral.
If a person uses a gun to commit a crime, it does not make sense to say that the gun somehow was morally responsible for that crime.
The gun is merely a tool.
A person who wields that tool can use it for an immoral purpose, such as a crime, or the gun can be used for a moral purpose, such as protecting the innocent.
The same is true for governments.
A government may be used for an immoral purpose such as oppression, But may also be used for moral purposes such as resisting oppression.
You will find both examples during the course of history.
The analogy between guns and governments is actually a good one precisely because they are both so potentially dangerous if used for the wrong reasons.
In fact, I've heard Stephan make the analogy between a government and a loaded gun himself.
Stephan has said that if you want to protect yourself against evil people, then the last thing that you'd want to have is a government, which is like leaving a loaded gun on the table for these evil people to grab and use against you.
Steffen's argument in this regard is remarkably similar to the arguments put forward for gun control.
When Second Amendment advocates speak of the inalienable right to self-defense, the gun control advocates respond by saying, it is far more likely that the criminal will seize the gun and use it against the honest citizen rather than it being successfully used in self-defense.
Gun control advocates will also cite to all the crimes and killings that result from guns as another reason for banning them.
Anarchists make precisely the same argument against government, inciting historical instances where government has engaged in immoral or evil conduct.
In both instances, these are very attractive arguments.
Stephan confesses to be a reformed socialist and I will confess to being a reformed gun control advocate, which dates back to when I was in college and John Lennon was assassinated.
While the arguments for banning guns and banning government have a lot of common appeal, they both suffer from the same flaws.
Stephan has correctly rejected arguments put forward for banning guns, and if I do a good job this evening, perhaps I can get him to connect the same dots when it comes to banning government.
In the case of guns, Stephan understands that if you unilaterally give up guns, then you are at the mercy of those who retain them and can use them against you.
The same holds true for government.
Government is an organizational tool that is potentially powerful depending upon the strength of its organizational structure.
Just as you can have weak guns and powerful guns, you can have weak organizations and powerful organizations.
In fact, when it comes to a group defending itself, the strength of the group's organization can easily be more important than the strength of its weapons.
What you can easily imagine, if you have an army that has marginally weaker weapons but a stronger organization, Would you prefer that over an army that had stronger weapons but was a disorganized mob?
The success of the Roman army can largely be attributed to that principle.
The roots of our own political and legal systems can be traced back to the need to have better organization For the existing society for effective self-defense.
Before England was united under a single monarch, it was divided into different regions, each having its own ruler, often claiming the title of king for his particular region.
These rulers later became united under a single king because, acting alone, they could not effectively fight off the Viking invaders that had raided Britain for hundreds of years.
To effectively repel the Vikings, these regional leaders agreed amongst themselves to organize under a single king, which enabled them to defeat the Vikings and gave birth to the modern British state.
But there later came a time when the British nobles felt oppressed by this government that they had created, where they were at the mercy of the king's taxes and the king's laws, and so they rebelled against the king.
This rebellion could have dissolved the government altogether, but instead they decided to reform it with the Magna Carta.
The Magna Carta contains several features that should be near and dear to any true-hearted anarchist.
The nobles stripped the power from the king to levy taxes upon them and placed this power instead in a body comprised of their own members, which they called Parliament.
In terms of their being subject to the king's laws, the nobles also created the right to a trial by a jury of their peers.
And peers meaning fellow nobles.
Under Magna Carta, the jury not only had the power to decide if the evidence proved guilt of the crime charge, but also the jury had the specific right to decide whether or not the law itself should be enforced, regardless of the evidence.
In other words, the jury could decide that the law itself was unjust and should be rejected.
This is often described as jury nullification and the jury still has that power today in our legal system.
Magna Carta was the beginning of an ongoing struggle that continues today as between the propensity for government to become oppressive and the efforts to keep that from happening.
Now what the anarchists in effect advocate is that this struggle should be abandoned.
That we throw in the towel and simply admit and accept that government is a force beyond the ability of the people to control.
Thomas Jefferson warned that people must be forever vigilant if they are to keep government under control, and if one concludes that the people are simply not up to such a task, well then one can make a reasonable argument that the people should give up this tool altogether, which is the position of the anarchists.
Once again, the same argument can be made with respect to a gun.
If you are truly unable to learn how to use your gun, then arguably you should not own one.
But even if you are unable to effectively fire a gun, there is still an argument that your mere ownership and possession of a gun has a useful deterrent effect on would-be criminals who know the gun is within your reach and they are uncertain as to whether you might be able to grab it, fire it, and cause them harm.
This, I think, describes where the people are today in relation to their government.
Not enough people understand how their government is being manipulated against them, nor do they appreciate the actual people who are behind manipulating the government against their interests.
But still, the powers that be are restricted insofar as this government is still within the reach of the people and still could be used against them.
And so, as a result, they've constructed elaborate charades to hide The reality about the government so that they've created this charade in terms of the current political system involving these two parties, the Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, and pitting the people against each other.
Also, another example of charade is they couldn't pass a central bank, so they created this ruse for the Federal Reserve.
They don't have the political power oftentimes to go to war, so they create false flag attacks.
So, if the people who are running the government, controlling the government, If they weren't afraid of the people being able to retake that power, you have to ask yourself, why are they involved in such charades?
So one problem I see with Stephan's position in the anarchist in general is that, on the one hand, They see government as this evil force and we just need to get rid of it.
On the other hand, there's a lack of an analysis of who is behind this government and what happens to the people who are ruling it if you simply get rid of it.
My contention would be that the real power behind the government is the multinational corporations.
Ten minutes, please wrap up your statement.
Sure.
There's a lot of evidence of that.
And if you don't address that power, you simply eliminate the government and don't address the power that's behind it, the power wielding that tool, then you're not really solving or addressing the problem.
All right.
Thank you for that, Tom.
And let's go to Stéphane for his opening comments.
Stéphane, when you start speaking, I'll start the timer.
You have 10 minutes.
Well, the first thing I would suggest to the people who are listening to this debate is that the way that I learned how to debate way back in the day in college was to start by definitions.
Now, Tom put forward some I think faulty analogies.
The government is like a gun.
My love is like a red, red rose.
But what I would argue is that we need to begin with precision.
We need to begin with definition.
So there are three main things that need to be defined in this conversation.
The first is, what is a government?
I mean, the problem is if you think you know something when you don't, then you will always go astray.
If you think that you're looking at a compass and you're actually looking at a whirligig, you're not going to go the right direction in the woods.
So what is a government?
The second thing that needs to be defined is morality, specifically good and evil.
Because if we're saying that the government is or is not evil, we need to know what the government is, we need to know what good is, and we need to know what evil is.
Then we can make a comparison.
And people who put forward analogies prior to definitions are usually up to something fairly tricky.
So please check that you still have your wallets and your watches on your person's.
So I will provide the definitions that should have been provided already.
The first is the government is a group of individuals who possess the legal right to initiate force in a given geographical area.
Let me say that again to make sure it sinks in.
I don't think this is a particularly unusual definition.
It's not, you know, pulled out of some left field.
Barack Obama has said the government is force.
So the government is a group of individuals with the legal right In fact, the obligation to initiate force in a given geographical area.
So that's what a government is.
Now, as far as good and evil goes, obviously that's a very, very big conversation, and so I'll just touch on it very briefly here.
I think that most of us will accept that the initiation of force is immoral.
That's, I think, pretty essential.
Violations of property rights are just a different way of initiating force.
Now, you may disagree with that, but the reality is that these are things that the government bans in its legal structure.
Almost all governments across the world and throughout history have banned these kinds of things.
So, for instance, they have banned They have banned the initiation of force and they have banned violations of property rights.
So what we can say is that the people who inhabit the government themselves view the initiation of force as immoral and themselves view violations of property rights as immoral.
So by the government's own standards, by the legal framework's own standards, by the legal precedents that Tom is mentioning, the initiation of force and violations of property rights are immoral.
And if they're not immoral, then the government is immoral for enforcing them, so there's no way to make the government moral if these things are moral or immoral because the government enforces them.
If the government enforces the non-aggression principle and the government violates the non-aggression principle, then the government is immoral.
If the government enforces their respect for property rights and then the government violates, The negation of property rights, then the government is, by definition, immoral.
So, if we accept that the violations of non-aggression principle and property rights are immoral, then the government is, by definition, immoral.
I would certainly reject the idea that the government is like a tool.
You could say, well, the government is just a relationship.
Well, the government is just an abstraction.
Well, sure.
But slavery is just an abstraction.
Slavery is just a relationship.
Rape is an abstract category.
The act of raping is a relationship between an assaulter and his victim.
So we are, of course, speaking of a category in the same way that we're speaking of a category called murderers.
Now, murderers, of course, is an abstract category, but it describes a specific relationship which violates the non-aggression principle.
In the same way, yes, of course, government is an abstract concept and government is a relationship, but government is human beings acting.
Government is human beings acting.
And that is very different from a gun.
A gun is an inert object.
It is a thing, of course, as Tom so perceptively points out, but it is not a thing acting.
So recently, of course, in Cyprus, the government decided to hoover out between 7 and 10 percent of people's bank accounts.
I know that there are some very Well-sophisticated, well-equipped guns with laser sights, and they have scopes and all that kind of stuff.
But there's no gun that I know of that will wander into a bank and take 7 to 10 percent of your income.
That is the choice of individuals acting under the concept called government.
Now, concepts, of course, don't particularly exist, Plato notwithstanding.
And so when we sort of wrap human beings in this concept called the government, It's just creating an artificial category, like creating slave master and slave is creating an artificial category.
They're all human beings.
The people in the government are human beings.
Calling yourself the government doesn't give you the chance to fly.
It doesn't let you breathe underwater.
It doesn't let you enjoy Justin Bieber songs.
It doesn't actually allow you to do any things which are generally impossible to human beings.
But it does create an alternative moral category.
So if you go into the government, if you call yourself the government, then suddenly you're able to violate people's property rights by initiating the use of force in the form of taxation, in the form of regulation, in the form of warfare, in the form of national debts.
You're allowed to counterfeit, which is specifically banned for individuals.
You're allowed to print whatever money that you want.
You are allowed to create these magical evil entities called corporations, which are legal fictions created by governments for the purposes of hoovering in and grabbing the financial classes to their own evil chests so that they will continue to get loans.
It's a way of artificially taxing people by pretending you're taxing something called a corporation when in fact there are only people who get taxed one way or another.
So sure, corporations are bad.
Sure, governments are by definition evil since they initiate the use of force.
That is their very definition.
Their very definition is that they violate property rights and all of their actions are specifically banned to everybody not in this magic bubble called government and who gets thrown in jail for doing exactly what the government does for counterfeiting, for I cannot I cannot say to Tom, I bought a car and signed your name to it, so I can't enforce some third-party contract he wasn't part of, but the government can, through something called a social contract, which is just an imaginary deal with a very real devil.
So...
I reject that any moral claim, which is supposed to be universal, which is then reversed for a particular group of individuals, is a valid moral claim.
So if the government says, well, the initiation of force is wrong, you go to jail.
If you do it, counterfeiting is wrong.
Entering people into Contracts against their will is immoral and so on, but that's the very definition of what the government does, then of course the government by its very own definition is immoral.
And it is not an abstract thing, it is a very real, guns to the neck relationship to the citizens, and it is not an inert thing, it is not a tool, it is a relationship that violates the very moral principles that it claims to uphold, and thus by definition it must be immoral.
And I know I've only gone seven and changed, but I think that's really all I had to say for the intro.
Alright, yielding back the time.
Okay, thank you for that, Stefan.
So, let's move on to the rebuttals.
Again, we have two rounds of rebuttals, five minutes each.
We'll start with Tom's first rebuttal, and when you begin speaking, I'll begin the timer.
Okay, thank you.
Well, where I would start off is with Stefan's statement that corporations are a creation of government.
I recently listened to Stephan speak with an anarchist legal scholar, Stephan Kinsella, and I thought that that had been explained and accepted, that a corporation is something that I mean, insofar as governments have a role with corporations coming into existence, it's simply that they require corporations to register and provide them essentially a license.
But there's nothing about a corporation that requires the existence of government.
And Murray Rothbard, a very well-noted anarcho-capitalist, made this very clear.
And there's a good reason he did, because Murray Rothbard, being a good capitalist, understood that no free market system that he advocated for was going to be competitive if you excluded corporations.
So he explained how it is that a corporation would exist in an anarchist or voluntarist state.
And this is because a corporation is just a series of contract rights.
There's absolutely no need for there to be an existence of the government to have a corporation.
And moreover, if you did away with government, you certainly would not be doing away with corporations.
And if Stephan thinks otherwise, I'd like to hear him explain how that's going to happen.
I'm going to, there's a quote from, I'm going to read from a former president of Columbia and winner of a Nobel Peace Prize about corporations.
A corporation, like a government, is an organizational tool.
And that's a problem.
You get rid of the people's access to an organizational tool, and the people's access is government.
They're going to have no organization to counter the power of corporations, which is an organization that will survive removing the government and they will have to deal with.
Nicholas Murray Butler, I weigh my words when I say that in my judgment the Limited Liability Corporation is the greatest single discovery of modern times, whether you judge it by its social, by its ethical, by its industrial, or in the long run, after we understand it, know how to use it, by its political effects.
Even steam and electricity are far less important than a limited liability corporation, and they would be reduced to comparative impotence without it.
This is no exaggeration, for without the privileges and immunities of the corporate form of economic organization and property tenure, the industrial system as we know it could not have developed and could not exist.
So fundamentally true is this, that we should do well to follow the suggestion of Mr.
Burrell and Means and speak not of the capitalist system, but of the corporate system.
So, in my experience, there is only one organizational tool that even has a chance to stand up to the power of the organizational tools of corporations, and that is government.
You take away the government and the corporations will absolutely have free reign to exercise their power any way they see fit.
Right now, they exercise that power to a large degree by controlling the government.
Take away government and they won't have to worry about controlling it.
They'll just be unrestrained.
How am I doing on the time there?
We are at 3 minutes and 47 seconds.
You have 1 minute and 12 seconds if you want.
Sure.
Okay, so another point to be made is, you know, listening to Stephan talk about the society that he would like to put in place, he's not doing away with authority.
He's not doing away with the legal system or the right to use force.
What he is doing is just substituting a new system.
And this is one of corporate contracts, where corporate contracts now become the new law and corporate Arbitration becomes a new court system.
And the idea that the free market can provide checks and balances on that power is, in my view, in my opinion, if you studied it, if you had the experiences I've had, I think that's just simply delusional.
And so I'm sure we'll speak more about that.
I'll drop it there rather than start a new thought.
All right.
Okay, thank you.
And let's move on to Steph, your first rebuttal.
When you begin speaking, we'll start the timer.
Well, I'd like to rebut, but I don't feel like I was rebutted.
I mean, I put forward a definition of the state, which was not addressed.
I put forward a definition of good and evil, which was not addressed.
And so I guess I'll deal with what Tom was saying, but I would invite him either to quibble with the definition or to quibble with the definitions of good and evil, the state or good and evil, because otherwise the proposition that the state is evil is...
It's proved logically.
Anyway, so, yeah, corporations, of course.
I mean, contracts, you can contract for whatever you want in a truly free market, in a voluntary society.
And there may be limited liability companies in a free market.
Who knows?
I mean, it's impossible to know how society is going to self-organize in the absence of a central coercive monopoly.
And that doesn't really matter.
It doesn't matter what happens in the future.
After we identify and begin to dismantle the immoral power of the state.
It's like saying, how will the cotton be picked a hundred years after slavery?
Well, who knows and who cares?
The question before us is, is slavery immoral?
Is statism immoral?
If statism is immoral, then we don't care about the consequences.
Of course corporations have a certain amount of power at the moment, of course.
If you compare it to the power of the state, it's inconsequential.
Corporations do not have nuclear weapons.
Corporations do not have aircraft carriers.
They do not have a prison industrial complex stretching the length and breadth of the land.
They don't have the capacity to indoctrinate children for 12 years of their existence.
They don't have the capacity to tax at will.
They don't have the capacity to counterfeit and print money at will.
These are all powers held by the state.
Now, corporations, of course, because this power exists, have responsibility to shareholders, to bondholders, to employees, to customers, to make use of this power.
Because if they don't, somebody else is going to.
So once this power is loose in the world, then corporations, by the natural laws of what's left of the free market, are going to be drawn to use this power for economic advantage.
Otherwise, they're going to go out of business and not be able to succeed.
And I know this as a guy who was a software entrepreneur for 15 years.
And if we did not take tax breaks that came from R&D tax credits, if we never looked at any possible government contracts, we simply would have gone out of business.
So, of course, when you get this corruption in the center of society, corporations are going to donate massive amounts of money to politicians in return for political favors, economic favors, contract favors later on.
Of course, no question.
But, you know, the point that Tom didn't mention, which I think is quite important, is you don't want to blend economic power together with political power.
You don't want to put together, to sort of co-mingle the power.
That's like co-mingling marriage and rape.
This is completely wrong.
We'll call them corporations.
I think, you know, free market companies is probably a better term, but we can call them corporations.
A large corporation may have a good deal of economic clout.
And how do they get that economic clout in a free market?
By satisfying their customers.
If they start doing things the customers don't like, guess what the customers are going to do?
They're going to stop doing business with that corporation.
And so if people don't want a corporation bullying and throwing its weight around and so on, then they'll just boycott, stop doing business with that corporation.
And this is very regular.
I mean, of the 100 companies that existed 100 years ago in the Fortune 100, only four or five of them still exist today.
New paradigms come along.
The mail service is overtaken by email and all that kind of stuff.
The landlines are overtaken by cell phones.
It's all very common.
It's natural.
So, the only economic power that a company has in a free market is the approval of its customers.
And if it begins doing things the customers don't like, then the customers will simply stop doing business with that corporation, which everybody at the head of that corporation is fully aware of, and so corporations will have to avoid doing things wrong.
What happens when the government stops doing things that the people approve of?
Well, nothing in particular.
The approval rating of Congress is 6%.
Is Congress changing its course in any fundamental way?
No, of course not.
Because they can print money, because they can steal money at will, because they can start wars at will, because they can imprison virtually at will.
I mean, what is it, 96, 97% of all convictions are based upon threatening people with massive jail sentences unless they just cop a plea to whatever comes their way?
So, no, I mean, there's no justice, no fairness, no virtue in the existing system, which is exactly what you'd expect from a moral system.
And the idea that you can co-mingle economic power, which comes from being attractive to your customers, is like saying that being Brad Pitt is the equivalent of being a rapist, because Brad Pitt is attractive to women.
No, a rapist forces himself on his victims.
Brad Pitt is just attractive to women.
And a corporation in a free market simply attracts customers by providing goods and services that they prefer.
Whereas the government will force itself on you either directly through stealing your bank account, as they did in Cyprus recently, as I mentioned, or indirectly by simply printing a whole bunch of money and stealing your fixed income that way.
So it's really, really important to recognize the difference between voluntarism and force, and I call anyone who's sophist who commingles these two concepts.
I will assume you're yielding your four seconds of time.
Okay, and let's move on to Tom.
Your second rebuttal, five minutes.
Okay.
Well, so...
This notion that government acts for its own ends and does all these bad things, like one example that's often discussed is war.
To demonstrate, to get to the facts and demonstrate that the government is just being used as a tool for the people who have the interest in engaging in such wars, have an economic interest in engaging in such wars, we can just look to The comments of General Smedley Butler,
who was a career Marine who rose to the highest level of the Marine Corps, and after he was finished and retired and looked back, he commented upon what it is he did in the foreign ventures that he was involved in.
And I'm going to quote General Butler, quote, I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers.
In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I helped make Mexico and especially I helped, especially Tamako, say for American oil interest in 1914.
I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.
I helped the raping of a half dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.
I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902 to 1912.
I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interest in 1916.
I helped make Honduras right for the American food companies in 1903.
And China in 1927, I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.
So then the question becomes, these large multinational companies, if you remove government, are they all of a sudden going to stop using force and coercion to get their way?
I mean, they're doing it now, clearly.
So, if you want to say that by removing that single tool, they will stop doing it, I think you have a burden of coming forward with evidence to suggest that.
So, under Steffen's, under the anarchist society setup, Now you have what they call DROs that either work with a security force agency in an arbitration group or they may combine into a single entity.
And one of the things these DROs can do, if someone breaks a contract They will decide who broke the contract and then they will, if necessary, exercise force to uphold the rights of the contract.
So all you need to imagine when you listen to General Butler, imagine in the modern day scenario you have Hugo Chavez down in Venezuela sitting on all that oil.
I know he died recently, but...
So imagine when he was alive.
Venezuela certainly didn't develop all that oil.
I'm sure there were, and I don't know all the particulars, but typically the oil companies are involved in doing that.
So all these oil companies have to do in this system, now that they're not constrained by government, is to say they breached their contracts with us, they damaged our property rights, they took control of things that we built, that by the homesteading principle we developed and we owned, We've tried to negotiate with them.
We've done everything possible.
They can use their corporate media to get across that PR message.
And now that we've tried everything and it hasn't worked, we're going to use our private defense association to go down there and recover our property.
What might that private defense association be comprised of?
Do the names Halliburton, General Dynamics, Blackwater, Crowell Associates, companies like that sound familiar?
In the absence of government, these companies could simply...
They're not going to just shut their doors.
There's no reason to.
They could simply merge And take care of this.
Now, the question is, well, wait a minute.
Isn't war expensive?
You know, would they do this?
I mean, first of all, there's no more corporate taxes.
There's a study that shows that you can fund the military on corporate taxes alone.
So that's sort of a wash.
Also, you're not bribing politicians anymore and running the government in that respect.
But in any case, it doesn't matter because the Venezuelan oil is more than going to pay for this venture.
You no longer have to explain why you're going into a democratic country and why you're using American men to do that.
History shows that the American people would not accept that.
Sure, but now that you're under this corporate paradigm, you can simply say they broke their contract, they usurped our property rights, we have the right to go in there and do this.
And so, there's how war continues in this new society.
Thank you.
Let's move to Steph.
Your second rebuttal, five minutes.
Well, again, I'm not really having the chance to address any rebuttals to my arguments.
I mean, we have a rambling discourse, which has nothing to do with anything that I said.
So, you know, once again, we have to define government.
We have to define good and evil if we're going to come to some sort of resolution about this.
But to respond to what Tom was saying, yeah, I've read the Smedley Butler article in one of my shows, and what is essential to understand about that is the mechanism by which all of these predations through the corporations was achieved.
Which is the centralized coercive capacity of the state.
The corporations all try to gain the power of the state to inflict their own economic agenda where they don't or can't compete in the free market or where competition in the free market becomes impossible because someone's going to grab that gun or not.
And so the idea that these corporations are going to make their own armies and they're going to just go and get, I mean, this is crazy.
I mean, this is just not what happens in the real world.
The reality of being able to print money, of having an existing army that can be used, of having an existing police force that can be used to do all these terrible things, that is the violence that is in the room that is going to attempt to be controlled by corporations.
In the absence of that, they're not all going to develop their own armies Because it's a massive overhead.
I mean, just imagine.
Okay, so imagine you're Standard Oil and you want to go and take some of your competitors' gas stations.
Well, you're going to have to start buying an army and training an army.
That's going to add to your overhead.
And your shareholders are going to be aware of it.
And they're going to say, wait a minute, I don't want you guys to have an army.
And you're going to have to start raising the prices of your gas to pay for this army that you're developing.
And it's going to be all over the internet and nobody's going to want to.
Yeah, sorry, Skype is crashing here and there, but I'll just finish up.
Alright, so these corporations are not going to develop their own armies because they're going to have to raise their prices to pay for these armies.
It's going to be completely evident to everyone that these armies are being raised, and of course it creates an arms race among all these different corporations, which is going to be financially impossible, and none of the customers are going to want it, so the customers are going to stop doing business with anyone.
Who's developing an army?
Now, there will, of course, possibly be armies or defense agencies in a free society.
And the first question that any entrepreneur who wants to sell a defense agency contract to any group of people, the first question that entrepreneur is going to have to answer is, well, why should I give you a thin dime?
Because maybe you'll just turn around and become another government.
So they're going to have to show people and they're going to have to prove to people to the best of their ability how they're going to guarantee that they're not going to turn into another state.
So, I mean, I don't know exactly how that's going to happen.
I'm, you know, no individual can replicate the genius of the free market, millions of billions of people interacting to their best potential benefit.
You know, one possibility is, I promise to tell you every single bullet and every single person that I'm training, every bullet I'm buying, every person I'm training, every shell that I'm buying, And make sure that I don't buy one thing more, and I'm going to put $50 million in a third-party trust, and if anyone finds me buying more bullets than I say, then I'll give them $50 million.
I mean, there's lots of things you can do to make these kinds of arrangements with people.
And if anybody tries to buy hidden stuff, then they're going to have to raise prices to deal with it, and that's going to be a market signal that they're doing something nefarious and so on.
So that's all possible.
As far as the use of coercion goes, I think it is possible that coercion may be used in a free society.
Certainly self-defense is a valid concept in a free society.
If someone's running at you with three lightsabers and a chainsaw, yeah.
I mean, you can use violence in terms of self-defense.
In terms of contract, I imagine what's going to be the case is insurance, because insurance is a lot cheaper than having people armed and going out and shooting people.
And violence is very much going to be a last resort.
Yeah, I'll just finish my sentence and turn it back.
And violence will be very much a last resort in a free society.
And what I think will be much more common will be economic ostracism, which means that nobody will do business with you in terms of selling you groceries, delivering electricity, delivering water, or anything like that until you make restitution for whatever wrong you've done.
And I think ostracism is a much more peaceful, much safer, and very much more effective way of bringing people back in line with general social ethics than having a bunch of armed people running around with the ability to violate property rights and personhood at will.
So, yeah, there's lots of different ways that these things can be solved.
Nobody can guess how it's actually going to work.
But what we do know is that the initiation of force is immoral.
Government is defined as the agency which initiates force.
You know, therefore, the government is immoral.
Alright, that brings us to the conclusion of the rebuttal rounds, so we move into the question rounds.
The first question round will be questions from me to the debaters, and in this round it's going to be around 15 minutes, but that will not be strictly enforced.
In this round I will ask the question at a specific person, but after that person answers, the other person will have a chance to make a comment on the answer as well.
So let's start with a question for Tom.
Stéphane has raised the point that he has provided a definition for government in tonight's debate, but it seems that so far you have provided only an analogy about government being a tool or being a gun or other analogies like that.
What would you say positively as your definition for government?
I actually looked that up once.
I mean, the idea that government has...
A monopoly over initiating force.
I mean, I never heard that definition until very recently, so it's a relatively obscure definition.
I don't think you'll find it in the top five in any dictionary.
But what I would say, James, is that whatever that is supposed to mean, it's not a difference between government And the society that Stephan is supposing, I mean this anarcho-society.
You're just changing the players.
Where Stephan says the government has the right to initiate force, under his society this DRO system would have the right to initiate force.
Now, when Stephan says that he has participated as an entrepreneur in the free market system, I have participated in the litigation systems, both the court system and the arbitration system that Stephan describes when he talks about this alternative legal system.
And I can tell you that That system is terrible.
It was mentioned that this is my second debate.
I had a debate with Larkin Rose where we discussed this thing, and Larkin said, well, the arbitration system would have to be fair because there would be organizations like Consumer Reports to ensure that it was fair.
Well, after that, I searched on Consumer Reports to see if they took a position on these corporate arbitration systems, and they do.
And it's a short summary that I'll read.
From Consumer Reports, the deck is stacked against consumers.
Companies choose the arbitration firms and can reward them with repeat business for favorable results.
There's no judge, jury, or public record, and the courts cannot set aside a decision just because it's capricious.
Companies can delay or hold the arbitration anywhere in the country.
They have a presence, so consumers are locked into a privatized justice system with no accountability or transparency.
Consumers Union, which runs Consumer Reports, says, we believe that consumers should not be forced to sign away their day in court as a condition of doing business.
And that's basically it.
There's no point for Consumer Reports to rate these arbitration systems because the consumer has absolutely no choice.
These things are written into standardized clauses in corporate contracts.
They're not a consumer of this service.
The corporation is a consumer.
So this is the system that would define what the law is and then enforce the law.
It's just a handover to corporate power.
So, I don't know if that answers your question.
These DROs would have the same right to initiate force that government has.
There's no conceptual distinction to be made from these two systems in that regard.
Well, I mean, Tom neither disagreed with nor agreed with the definition.
He just said it was non-standard in ways that are unspecified.
That is intellectually lazy, to be perfectly frank.
I mean, you can either find a logical fault with the definition, or you can't.
I mean, just to say, well, it's not in the top five that I've heard of, and...
And then just move on.
What on earth does that mean?
I mean, either it's accurate that they have the legal right to initiate force in a geographical area, or it's not.
If it's not, then please enlighten me, and if it is, then accept the definition.
So this kind of stuff is, you know, wandering off into other things.
I mean, okay, so let's say that the existing arbitration system is not great.
Okay, fantastic.
So, what a wonderful opportunity in a free market system for people to solve this problem.
Is it possible for them to solve the problem in the existing system?
Well, clearly not.
I don't know why.
I guarantee you there's some government regulation or some government monopoly that stands in the way.
But what a wonderful opportunity.
I mean, if I was in a free market system and there was a need for this kind of arbitration, then I would say, look, I am going to not get paid by the corporations.
I'm not going to get paid by the individuals.
I'm going to take 50-50 pay from either of them to make sure I don't favor one or the other.
I mean, there's just so many different ways that you can approach this to find a way of solving it.
Arbitration systems in non-quasi-legal terms are all over the place in the free market.
I mean, look at eBay, one of the world's largest employers.
More than 350,000 people get their full-time living from eBay.
And eBay has an arbitration system.
As does PayPal.
As does Visa has an arbitration system.
I was in Vegas last summer listening to another lawyer who was talking about how he got ripped off in South America and he just phoned Visa.
I mean, because phoning the local police would have done nothing.
You have reputation system.
You have arbitration systems.
None of them involve force.
None of them involve law.
None of them involve courts.
Because the only person who imagines that you can get any kind of justice or access to the legal system is somebody who generally hasn't tried it or a lawyer.
I mean, certainly in the past, when I had a legal issue, I could either go to private arbitration, which I could get done quickly, or, as my lawyer informed me, I could try to go to court, which would take me about a quarter million dollars and probably eight to ten years, was his estimate.
If you look at the law courts in terms of family law and so on, I mean, it's just completely ridiculous how slow, how inefficient, how ridiculously expensive it all is.
So yeah, I mean the idea that you can't have any kind of ways of arbitrating these things, having arbitration outside the government is delusional because there's huge amounts of arbitration that continually occur in non-legal systems that are incredibly effective, that keep hundreds of thousands if not millions of people employed.
And of course the purpose of a truly effective justice system in the future is prevention, not cure.
In the same way that the best medicine is prevention, not cure.
And so if you are a company That regularly rips off its customers.
That information with the power of the web and the power of the media will be available to just about everyone.
In the same way that if you decide to order from someone on eBay or PayPal who has a really bad rating, you know in advance what kind of risk you're taking and you're likely to steer away from that kind of person.
Contract rating agencies, personal integrity rating agencies, credit rating agencies not controlled by the government as they are now.
We'll be all over the place.
And so if you make bad decisions, maybe you'll be able to rip off one or two people and maybe those people won't be able to get restitution from you.
Maybe they'll have insurance from someone else.
Who knows?
But the reality is that your actions will very quickly become known and the economic price you will pay for your lack of integrity will be much greater over the long run than what you can possibly make from ripping off a few people.
All of these things are in effect now.
In the interest of moving on to the next question, why don't we wrap that up there and let's move on to a question for Stéphane.
Stéphane, in tonight's debate, for example, Tom was talking about the possibility that he could set up or propose a government system or there could be envisioned a government system that would be better as an organizational tool for society than an anarchical society.
So let's imagine a possible future universe for the sake of arguments in which You get one planet Earth to work with, and Tom gets another, and Tom is able to organize society along the lines of a government that he thinks would be beneficial for the people, and you are able to oversee, not that there would be any meaning to that, an anarchical society on another planet.
Let's imagine those two worlds play out and no matter what type of arbitrary objective criteria you use to measure the happiness or the amount of equity or whatever it is in the society that you think would be a valid measure of something that we could objectively look at, And we find that the government system does, after all, work out for the better.
Would that invalidate your argument against the morality of government?
And if not, why not?
I mean, that's quite a mouthful.
Well, okay, first of all, we don't need these alternate planet scenarios.
I mean, we have, say, the software industry versus government-run schools.
Software industry is continually innovating, continually making things better, continually coming out with new products that just blow people's minds.
Now Samsung has a phone out that you can swipe around by moving your eyes around and so on.
And you compare this to the government-run educational system, which is continually declining in quality, where 80% of recent New York graduates from high school can't even read.
So we already have these two planets set up.
The government runs a whole bunch of stuff, and the free market, or at least what's left of it runs a whole bunch of stuff, and the tech stuff works really well, Now, if the idea is that somehow violence can produce good effects, what you're basically saying is, let me set up an alternate universe where if you rape a woman enough times she will end up loving you.
Would that invalidate the concept of rape?
Well, first of all, it's going to be impossible.
You can't rape someone into loving you.
And secondly, Because it's impossible, it's never going to happen.
And secondly, even if it did happen, it would not invalidate that rape was immoral.
Let's say that some rape victim had some Stockholm Syndrome and said, oh, my rapist is a great guy, I'm going to get married to him.
That does not invalidate the fact that rape is immoral.
It does not invalidate the fact that the initiation of force is immoral.
So even in some alternate universe, communism worked, fascism worked, centrally planned economies worked, central banking worked, fiat currency worked.
The government never grew.
The government didn't continually collapse.
The government wasn't continually expanding and preying upon more people.
Let's say that didn't happen and some particular paradise came into being, it still would not invalidate the basic reality that you would still have beneficial effects from the initiation of force.
So I would argue it's not possible, but even if it were possible, it would not invalidate the immorality of initiating force and violating property rights.
Sure.
I mean, you know, one of the For reasons given that government is hopelessly a failure, the United States has not turned out like we would want it to.
If you look at that in a historical context, that's like a first draft of this new concept of government being run by the people.
Did they make some mistakes?
They made obvious mistakes.
And they knew that they were making some of those mistakes when they made them.
They could not resolve the slavery issue.
They knew that was a problem, but they were switching from a monarchy to a representative government.
There are certain compromises they made.
Another obvious problem that they made or problem they failed to solve was the problem of the currency.
They couldn't agree to that, so they just left it blank.
And we know what happened.
The private banking interest took control.
All you need to do is read President Andrew Jackson's veto message of the effort to re-charter the Second Bank of the United States.
Stephan would love it.
He talks about, he vetoes that charter and says this is terrible, this is a monopoly, we can't allow this.
Now, he succeeded, but barely.
And the bank went to war against him on its own admission.
These private bankers declared war on the president and pulled all credit, created a recession to try to make him unpopular.
There was also assassination attempt against him.
Recently, when they do the same thing, when they go to government and say, look, you either do it our way or we can yank the credit and freeze the monetary system, now it's not 1830 any longer and that threat is real and the politicians succumb to it.
So this was a major problem in the design of that government and it is a problem that exists in the private sector.
And for Stephan to say that the bankers cannot, that the free market would prevent them from counterfeiting, I mean, it never has.
James, on one of your recent shows, you put out there that the price of gold, if not for duplication of commodities contracts, which is not caused by government, this is what these traders are doing, the price would be $50,000.
They're overselling these contracts.
They did the same with mortgages when they packaged it up and securitized them.
They took the same mortgage and sold it many multiple times.
And they can get away with it.
I work in this field.
The only real way...
Without government courts or without honest state regulators, which you sometimes get, like when Spitzer went after him, you are not going to be able to take these people down or expose them.
They just have too much power.
Who's going to do it?
I mean, not the common man.
So, no, I think that there are clear improvements that you can make.
I mean, Stephan doesn't like public education.
That's fine.
There's no requirement in government that that exists.
There's no requirement of victimless crimes.
There's no requirement of taxation.
William Still, you know, his documentaries like The Money Master's The Secret of Oz, Bitcoin, these are all examples of how you don't need to tax the people to have a currency.
And you also don't need to inflate.
So you're just identifying problems and saying, we've identified these problems, therefore we have to get rid of this thing.
It's not a solution at all, in my view.
All right, well, we are brushing up against the 15-minute window for this period, so let's open up the floor for questions to each other.
If you don't have any questions, I certainly have more of my own, but why don't we allow Tom to ask a question of Steph, anything you'd like to ask?
It's interesting how Steph describes his legal system as being different from the one in place, and I was wondering if I could Play a small clip where he describes in a practical example how this legal system operates so that we all have a better idea of it, and I can then maybe ask him some questions on that if that's acceptable.
If the man is found guilty, he will receive another visit from his DRO representative.
Good afternoon, sir, the agent will say.
You have been found guilty of rape, and I'm here to inform you of your punishment.
We have a reciprocal agreement with your bank, which has now closed down your accounts and transferred the money to us.
We will be deducting double the costs of our investigation and trial from your funds, and will also be transferring half a million dollars to the woman you have raped.
We also have reciprocal agreements with the companies that provide water and electricity to your house, and these will now be cut off.
Furthermore, no gas station will sell you gasoline.
No train station, airline, or bus company will sell you a ticket.
We have made arrangements with all of the local grocery stores to deny you service, either in person or online.
If you set foot on the street outside your house, which is owned privately, you will be physically removed for trespassing.
Of course, you have the right to appeal this sentence, and if you successfully appeal, we will transfer our costs to the woman who has accused you of rape, and pay you well for the inconvenience we have caused you.
If, however, your appeal fails, all additional costs will be added to your debt.
I can tell you openly, sir, that if you choose to stay in your house, you will be unable to survive for very long.
You will run out of food and water very quickly.
You can attempt to escape your own house, of course, leaving all of your possessions behind and try to make it to some wilderness area.
If you do successfully escape, be aware that you are now entered into a central registry and no reputable DRO will ever represent you.
Furthermore, all DROs which have reciprocal agreements with us, which is the vast majority of them, We'll withdraw services from their own customers if those customers provide you with any goods or services.
You will never be able to open a bank account, use centralized currency, carry a credit card, own a car, buy gas, use a road, use any other form of transportation, and gaining food, water, and lodging will be a constant nightmare for you.
You will spend your entire life running, hiding, and begging, and will never find peace, solace, or comfort in any place.
However, there is an option.
If you come with me, we will take you to a place of work for a period of five years.
During that time, you will be working for us in a capacity which will be determined by your skills.
If you do not have any viable skills, we will train you.
Your wages will go to us, and we will deduct the costs of your incarceration, as well as any of the costs I outlined above which are not covered by your existing funds.
A small amount of your wages will be set aside to help you get started after your release.
During your stay with us, we will help you because we do not want to have to go through all of this again with you in the future.
You will take courses on ethics.
You will take courses on anger management.
You will take psychological counseling.
You will emerge from your incarceration a far better person.
And when you do emerge, all of your full rights will be restored and you will be able to fully participate once more in the economic and social life of society.
You have a choice before you now.
And I want you to understand the full ramifications of that choice.
If you come with me now, this is the best offer that I can give you.
If you decide to stay in your house and later change your mind, the penalties will be far greater.
If you escape and later change your mind, the penalties will be far greater still.
In our experience, 99.99% of people who either run or stay end up changing their minds and end up that much worse off.
The remaining 0.01% commit suicide.
The choice is now yours.
Do the right thing.
Do the wise thing.
Come with me now.
Okay, that's it.
I gotta tell you, that sounds positively scary to me.
I'm glad.
I think it should.
Well, okay.
I mean, I think that we're heading in the direction of that kind of interconnectivity, but we haven't gotten to it yet.
And, I mean, some of the things...
I mean, we do have some private prisons, and I think the studies on that show that those prison systems who make profit by operating prisons lobby in favor of drug laws, illegal drug laws that Where do they get most of their work from?
You describe a system where they're going to recover two times their cost.
That sounds like a pretty good profit.
It's also kind of scary that a woman who accuses someone of rape, if they simply fail to prove their case, which doesn't mean she wasn't raped, she gets a bill for Tens of thousands of dollars.
I mean, as if there's not enough deterrence to...
In the interest of time, I'll ask you to ask a question of some sort.
Oh, sure.
Yeah, okay.
So, yeah, yeah, all right.
So, anyway, I guess the main interest I have is how this system...
I mean, it just strikes me as Big Brother, unless I'm missing something.
Yeah, I'm still not sure what the question is.
You're talking about a system where if someone on the run stops at a restaurant and they decide to serve him food, I think what you said is that they would be shut off forever from their DRO system, which is basically, if you don't have a DRO system in this society, as I understand it, you are just out.
But I mean, sorry, that's exactly the same as what happened.
If you ate and abet a felon, I mean, you're in trouble anyway.
I don't know why that's so different.
No, it's not.
I can tell you it's not.
Serving someone at a restaurant is not aiding and abetting a felon.
No, no, no.
I mean, obviously the restaurant owner would have to know or whatever, right?
And it would, you know, I mean, if he just paid cash, who cares, right?
So, okay, so as far as the private, the sort of prison systems that you're talking about, of course, there's massive corruption.
And I think, I can't remember, somewhere in the U.S., some judges went to prison for sending, I think, young offenders to a private prison.
But how were the private prison paid?
By state funds.
By state funds.
So this is not a private prison system.
This is a fascistic prison system where you have private profit and public money, which is also a good description of a fair amount of the medical system in the United States.
Whenever you have public money in, you are no longer in a free market system.
So this is not...
Not a valid comparison.
Yeah, this is harsh, of course.
Yes, I mean, but a man who is a rapist should go and get help.
And see, according to the psychological knowledge that I have, they can't be fixed.
But if there was some way to fix them, fantastic.
They should get help and they should be taken out of society until they do better.
Yes, of course.
If a woman turns out to have falsely accused a man of rape, yeah, of course she should pay a penalty.
I mean, false accusations would be a crime.
There are some people who say, Dr.
Warren Farrell says, that if you falsely accuse someone of a crime, then you should receive the sentence that the criminal would have received if you had succeeded, because there is, of course, some false accusations of crimes in a wide variety of circumstances, among some of which are rape.
So, and you understand, I don't have the answers.
This is just one fictional possibility about how it might work in that kind of situation.
But of course, the major goal of a freed society is not to cure criminality, but to prevent criminality.
And there's a very easy way to prevent the vast majority of criminality, which is simply to reduce the amount of aggression that is enacted against children when they're very young.
The vast majority of criminals come from abusive backgrounds, and at the moment we don't have any agency that profits from the good parenting of children.
In fact, you have agencies, tragically, which profit from the bad parenting of children.
Pharmaceutical industries, some of the government agencies which supposedly come in and help families that are having troubles, and so on.
And so, in a free society, of course, given how expensive child abuse turns out to be for society as a whole in terms of criminality, there would be huge amounts of profits to be found from people who educated children, from people who provided insurance for parents for their children's activities, To make sure that children were being raised peacefully, you know, without spanking, without yelling, without intimidation, without beating, without molestation, all these kinds of things.
And there would be a huge amount of interest and creative ways to make sure that parents raised their children very peacefully.
Vast majority of rapists were sexually abused as children.
Is there nothing conceivably better than we can do?
to try and reduce the appalling occurrence of this crime.
Of course there is.
It's just right now there's no particular economic incentive and sadly we still do have that as a necessity for a lot of human action.
There's no particular economic incentive in the prevention of crime.
So this is a case in which an egregious situation might be dealt with, but the whole purpose of a free society would be to make sure that best practices were performed in the raising of children, empirically best practices, scientifically validated best practices, moral best practices, So the children didn't end up being so traumatized that they ended up attacking, assaulting, raping, thieving from or murdering others.
So that is something that is not present in the current society and is really the greatest complaint I have against the state of society.
Stefan, your question for Tom.
Well, I guess I would question, if we accept, even if he rejects the definition that I put forward of the state, does he recognize that the state bans people from doing what the state claims as its moral right?
So, for instance, I can't go to my neighbor And demand a percentage of their property value so I can send my kid to school, but governments can.
That I can't go and slap tariffs on goods coming in and take the money and do other things with it.
Whether they be good or bad things doesn't really matter.
Tom, do you at least recognize that the government specifically bans that which it explicitly permits for itself?
Sure.
I mean, but, you know, the problem with that, Seth, and again, I mean, you know, saying all corporations, all governments are bad or good or all corporate, I mean, you could have a charitable corporation that does nothing but charitable deeds, and on the other end, you can have Blackwater and Halliburton.
So, I mean...
Who take government money.
Well, I don't think it matters.
I think they would be happy to take Standard Oil money as well, financed by Citigroup.
Yeah, but Standard Oil would not require them to fund the invasion and slaughter of the Iraqis, right?
I mean, this is not what would be in their business plan.
I mean, the fact that they take government money, you can't just co-mingle those with people who have voluntary customers.
I'm not sure I understood your point there.
The real question is, I would agree with you that there shouldn't be coercive taxation.
I would agree with you that there shouldn't be compulsory public education.
You know, that's like saying I would agree with you that, you know, the Nazis shouldn't have abused their people.
As an evil state, were they able to do that?
Yeah, of course.
Yes.
So, if a government is designed with evil intent, or if a corporation is designed with evil intent, it's going to commit evil.
But you can design a corporation that does nothing but good.
That's not a guarantee that, you know, someone who's unethical won't take over and steal the contributions.
But, yeah, I mean, that's just definitional.
If you want to say, I'm going to define for you a bad government.
Now, do you agree that this government is doing bad?
Certainly.
Going with James's question, as part of the challenge of my getting into this, I designed what I think is a good government and easily better than this free society that you described.
I was quite surprised to hear you say no coercive taxation, which is sort of redundant, but no taxation.
So your government would not have the capacity to initiate force against others?
Well, you know, it's not by definition coercive.
I mean, people can get together and decide that they want to agree on taxes.
And in fact, that's what a...
I mean, if a developer develops a track of land and builds houses and they create a housing association, That's an agreement that runs with the land, and it includes an elected group of people who can pass rules that include how the properties are maintained and so forth,
and they can charge their members money to do that.
And that can be in the future.
And if you inherit such a house, You're bound by that.
And that can be enforced by putting a lien on your property and taking it.
So, I mean, you know, this can happen privately and it can happen by government, but to answer your question, no.
You don't need There are plenty of examples that can be given as to why you don't need, government doesn't need a course of taxes or taxes at all to fund itself.
I mean, Ludwig von Mises is the one that seems to be, that I identified, he seems to be behind this.
You know, he was convinced that the only money that you should have is commodities, and that since the government doesn't have a commodity currency, it would have to tax.
But that's That was just his particular view.
You don't need a commodity currency.
Yeah, of course, the difference with the private developer is the private developer is actually putting his or her own earned resources into the acquisition of the land and the building and everyone who moves there, moves there voluntarily.
And that is very, very different, of course, than some group who does not invest, who does not create, who simply takes it force, claiming a right to a geographical area with people who've never chosen to live there, who just happen to be James,
how are we doing on time for our 25 minutes?
We have nine more minutes in this discussion, so either you can continue with that or we can move on to another question.
I'm happy to take a question from either James or Tom.
The one thing that fascinates me about the anarchist system is it seems to be universal that they all say, well, we want to use Common law courts, or we want to adopt the common law.
Murray Rothbard says this.
James, I actually heard you mention it once.
Can you explain for me what you understand that to mean, Stephan?
That the system would adopt the common law?
Well, sure.
I mean, again, I certainly would defer to your legal expertise, but my knowledge is that the common law was a system of law that was developed voluntarily, without being imposed by an external third party, but was developed as a way of resolving disputes among various tribes and groups in a voluntary fashion, and had the goal, of course, of prevention, had the goal of restitution.
There were wereguilds and ways in which you could pay off debts that you'd had.
And so it's sort of a voluntary way of creating law.
Now, it's extremely primitive relative to what is possible now.
I mean, of course, the Internet and the information sharing that's available through the Internet, I mean, has changed everything, I think, with regards to the necessity of the state.
If you can get a hold of people's past reputation and past level of integrity in business and past level of criminality, you know, really at the click of a button, You can just take a photo of someone and get their entire, hopefully objectively measured or as objectively as possible, their sort of ethical standing, their ethical history and so on.
I mean that produces a huge amount of information that was impossible before.
So I think that the idea behind the common law system was that it was voluntarily developed, it was fine-tuned over of course millennia to be as effective and efficient as possible.
And was sort of taken over by the remote, centralized state and then, of course, morphed into the, you know, millions of pages of regulations and laws and tax codes and, you know, to the point where you're doing three things illegal before you've finished your eggs for breakfast.
So I think the idea of a communally developed, voluntary, continually refined, minimalist approach to law Which is not imposed by an external third party was, I think, the idea behind why some people find it valuable.
I think that we could go even more minimalist with the information that's available these days on people, but I think that would be my answer, but I certainly wouldn't want to speak for anybody else.
That's the first I've ever heard the common law described that way.
I mean, the common law is very, you know, just go to Wikipedia and look at it.
The common law is the law that developed in the English legal system.
The common law was developed by English judges originally and has been carried on in the American legal system by American judges and other commonwealths that had the English legal system like Australia and so forth.
And Murray Rothbard refers to this, and he says, boy, this thing was great.
I mean, in fact, most of the anarchists, including Kinsella Rothbard, who refer to the English common law, said they really did a great job.
These judges...
We've developed this law in such a logical and reasoned fashion.
And it's so beneficial for both society and for commerce.
And so, rather than reinvent the wheel, we're just going to adopt the common law in our new legal system.
This is how I understand it.
And when I hear that described, it reminds me of...
I heard you address...
You've had some interaction with the Venus Project people.
And you made an observation which I think is very similar to what we're discussing here with the common law.
You said, well, so if I understand you, you're going to take existing factories and resources that were developed through the free market And then you're going to get rid of the free market that developed those systems.
Because that's exactly what the anarchists proposed, and you had a little bit of a problem with that.
And that's what the anarchists proposed to do with the common law.
The common law is always changing.
So if someone signs a contract with a DRO that says, we're using the common law as developed in a certain jurisdiction, when you sign that contract, You're signing it not knowing necessarily what the law is going to be down the road.
You're handing over authority to another party, not only to tell you later what the law is.
And no consumer, by the way, is going to shop on the basis of studying the different legal approaches that these different DROs are taking.
So they probably wouldn't know what the law is if they tried to look it up, and if they looked it up, it would change.
So they are handing authority over to these DROs to not only tell them what the law is, but Adjudicate those disputes for profit and then send in their security force team to enforce it.
Which includes, I mean, we went over that rape case, but this would also be true for breach of contract.
In fact, anarchist professor Walter Block and Murray Rothbard both believed, as I understand it, that you could morally justify bringing back debtors' prisons.
People who are unable to pay their contracts, just like you described in that little segment where the DRO tells them, come work for us and we're going to, you're going to work for us, we're going to keep your money until your debt is paid.
That was a rape though, not a debt.
But my problem is, that's fine if it's a rape, but I don't see any logical or legal reason why this system that you described could not also be applied to breach of contract.
The anarchists, as I understand it, describe breach of contract as a theft of property which justifies the use of force.
Well, again, I can't speak for other people as far as their thoughts about it.
I mean, one of the wonderful things about a free society or a stateless society is My opinions will have as much weight as my capacity to be a consumer, right?
So I might have the best idea about how to adjudicate contract disputes, and either I can become an entrepreneur and find ways to sell my solutions to people, in which case, if people agree with me that it's a great idea, then I'll get lots of customers and be a wealthy benefactor to reducing conflict in human society.
Or they think I'm an idiot, in which case I lose my money and my startup costs.
Or I can choose some company which I think is closest to what I think is right, and I can give them my contract for adjudicating disputes.
But the adjudication of contract disputes, my particular belief is that it will start off small, right?
You'll have a paper route or whatever it is, and you'll have very small costs because it's just a tiny little bit of stuff that's being guaranteed.
And if you're honest with that, then you go a little bigger, you go a little bigger until you get older, and then you're able to do You know, 50-year leases for 100 million dollars.
I don't know.
Because you've sort of shown yourself and your character all the way up.
And I think the way that it would work is through insurance, rather than through violence.
I mean, violence is really all that people have to go to when they say there ought to be a law.
I mean, law is just a bunch of people with guns running around based on the opinions of the majority.
Not very safe, historically speaking.
I think it would be much more minimal, the use of violence in society.
I don't think that debtor's prisons is the way to go.
I think that there's a moral hazard for the creditor as well as the lender.
I think it's important.
The person who's borrowing as well as the person who's lending, they both have moral hazard.
I mean, if you lend to someone who doesn't pay you back, well, you've lost some money.
Is that quite the same as somebody coming in and stealing from you?
No, because you chose to lend to that person, so you've got a moral hazard involved in that.
So I think it would be very different from pure theft from that standpoint.
I think you just buy insurance.
And the insurance for somebody not paying your debt back, which is when the insurance company would pay your debt back, would simply be based upon the risk of the person not paying your debt back.
I mean, you mentioned, gosh, I mean, let me just go through the list very briefly.
Okay, yeah, okay, so, um...
So I think we just want to keep it as minimal as possible.
It's the choices of the enlightened majority who are raised in a peaceful environment who will be determining how these conflicts are generally resolved in society.
There's no way to predict in advance how it will happen.
My guess is probably maybe slightly better than other people's because of my history in studying this stuff.
But still, it's going to have nothing to do with what's actually going to happen, which is going to be the choices of the majority.
The dollar democracy is much more valid than the political democracy because the dollar democracy doesn't enforce its will on others.
Okay, well, we will stop the question time there and we will move on to the concluding remarks.
Once again, each speaker will have five minutes to make a final statement and we'll start with Tom.
You know, I'm going to address this issue of insurance because it is a fundamental part of it seems like any anarchist who talks about this alternate legal system.
We're going to solve all these problems with insurance.
I really am wondering whether there's anyone in this anarchist movement that has any practical experience at all with insurance, because I do.
I have nearly 30 years of litigation experience, including with Wall Street, including with insurance companies.
AIG is an insurance company.
I have had plenty of cases with them.
I can tell you that insurance companies are one of, the idea of them being the guardians of contracts is just funny because they are one of the worst serial abusers and breachers of contract that exist in the modern world.
In fact, I'm going to give a practical example of that.
Insurance companies sold life insurance, and going back a hundred years, they would sell life insurance to people.
Now, the interesting thing about life insurance is the person you make the contract with has died, and usually they leave the money to people who can't necessarily provide for themselves, like children and widows and so forth.
And the insurance companies just across the board denied every single claim.
And it was easy for them to do it because they would have the person fill out a medical questionnaire that was so incredibly vague that you could easily find an answer to a question that you could challenge by going through their medical records.
And this was so bad that the legislatures got together and said, look, If the person has died two years or more after they bought this insurance, you can't claim that they defrauded you.
And they call this the two-year incontestability period.
And I got a case where a woman came to me.
Her husband had died in his 30s, just short of that two-year period.
And they denied the claim.
And she had gone to several other lawyers before she came to me and they said, they looked at the contracts and they said, I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do for you.
And she came to me in tears.
I mean, they had bought this insurance because they had adopted a child from Eastern Europe who turned out to have mental problems.
And so, I mean, it was just a terrible story.
And I took the case on.
I knew the way to get around their contracts.
I needed a good, honest judge to do it, and we succeeded.
But I called up the insurance company when I first got the case, and it was a $250,000 policy.
I said, you have one week to pay that amount, and that will be the last chance you get.
They didn't offer anything until the judge turned down their motion and we ended up collecting $545,000 for this woman.
And I can tell you that in any arbitration system that simply would not have been possible.
It was only because that corporation stood to appear in front of a jury of six honest citizens that we were able to do justice in that case.
But there's your insurance companies.
I mean, the idea of handing society over...
Insurance companies, by their very nature, is a very large financial organization.
It has to be.
Because you have to pull together enough money that you can divide that risk.
So, you know, these are companies that one don't think...
Don't think twice about cheating widows and orphans, and we're going to entrust justice, law, and our welfare and property to these behemoth financial companies.
That's a really good idea.
Except that it absolutely would be a disaster.
I mean, I really think, when I listen to the anarchists imagine how they're going to completely redo society, I think, I can't help but thinking of the Marxists.
I mean, they had a great idea.
I mean, they saw oppressors in the capitalists in the industrial age.
And they said, these guys are evil people.
If we just get rid of them, everything will be fine.
Those kind of simplistic solutions almost never work.
The anarchists, they look at government, they go, these are really abusive people.
If we just get rid of them, everything will magically be fine.
But you have to look at the people behind government.
And this is simply what the anarchists don't do.
The people behind government are the large corporations.
That was actually the finish of my sentence.
Thank you.
Okay, and let's move on to Stefan.
Five minutes for your concluding remarks.
Well, gosh, I'll just touch on some of the, I think, very silly things that Tom said.
First of all, he said that insurance companies are the worst serial abusers of contract.
Well, of course, you vote for people who tell you what they're going to do, and then they do the complete opposite.
There's no capacity, you have no capacity to enforce your contract with the politician you vote for.
They can go and do whatever the hell they want after you vote from them.
In the 20th century alone, governments killed a quarter of a billion people.
I think that the worst serial abusers of contract tend to be governments.
He said that insurance companies deny every single claim and that this is a bad thing.
One little Google search here.
Medicare denies more claims than private companies.
Medicare denies 6.85 percentage points of insurance claims from people.
The denial rate of private insurance is about 2.7%.
So, of course, he's got a few of insurance companies that comes from fighting them, which, of course, I can understand that insurance companies do some bad things.
But it is still almost three times better than governments, the people he wants to put his trust into.
And so, a couple other things where he mentioned that, well, Steph just doesn't like public schools.
I mean, what a ridiculous misinterpretation of absolutely everything that I've said.
My personal preferences, my personal likes, my personal dislikes, my personal imaginations about how a system might work are completely irrelevant.
They're interesting thought experiments.
I think they're fun to look at.
We can all imagine how cotton are going to get picked a hundred years after the slaves are freed if we're sitting around in 1800 drinking mint juleps.
And pretending to be Tennessee Williams characters.
But the reality is that the central objection has still not been addressed.
We've had lots of back and forth, lots of misinformation, lots of avoidances of definitions, and lots of avoiding rebuttals.
The reality is that governments are by their very nature, as Tom admitted, violators of their own universal claims of moral goodness, right?
So they say that the initiation of force is wrong, and they violate that very principle through their very existence.
Tom.
So, I mean, I don't know how you can continue to wind around like smoke in a high breeze and talk about various things that just aren't true or relevant when you've admitted the basic thing, which is that governments claim that the initiation of force is wrong, they claim that violations of property rights are wrong, and their very existence, as you yourself admit, violates both of those moral principles.
Violations of both those moral principles for private citizens is the very definition of immorality, is the very definition of evil.
Violations for people who claim to be the government who have no substantive Physical, emotional, psychological, biological differences from those they claim to rule over are exactly the same.
People are people wherever you go.
It doesn't matter whether they put funny hats, tea cozies on their heads, or whether they wrap themselves in anacondas and lie on a bare skin rug.
It doesn't matter.
They're still people.
And so you cannot give, morally, a group of individuals the right, the capacity, the obligation to initiate the use of force against their fellow citizens and call it moral.
If it's evil for the private citizen, it is evil for the government because the government is just another private citizen with a slightly different label and no substantive difference whatsoever in any moral sense.
So I think that the anarchist position, like it or not, has really carried the day, but I certainly do thank you for the interaction.
All right, well, assuming that you're yielding the rest of your time, that does bring us to the end of tonight's debate, but it certainly does not by any means bring us to the end of the debate in general.
I'm sure that will continue to rage on, and this is the point of the debate in which, if this was a live debate, I would ask the audience to thank you for your time this evening, and you can imagine instead, since we're doing this online, the Applause and or catcalls from the audience for your participation tonight.
So I want to thank you both for your participation.
It has been a very interesting debate and certainly has stimulated a lot of interesting ideas and questions and thoughts from my own head.
So I trust that the audience feels similarly.
And of course, again, since this is an online debate, we don't have any immediate mechanism for gauging the feedback.
There will be no vote on this proposition and whether or not either side won the debate.
But, of course, that discussion will continue to rage on in the various threads, fora, and discussion areas where the debate can happen.
And, of course, the Tragedy and Hope community is one such place.
I also, of course, welcome all feedback to CorbettReport.com.
You can contact me there, and I will be And on that note, I think we'll bring this to the end, but I would just want to once again thank TragedyAndHope.com and Richard Andrew Grove and everyone behind the scenes there for hosting this debate and making this possible.
So I will turn things over to Rich for any final thoughts.
James, thank you so much for doing a superb job moderating tonight's debate.
Tom and Stefan, thank you so much for your time and preparation.
I know it's not an easy thing to try to communicate your message in five to ten minute chunks.
I think you both did an excellent job.
I would also like to thank the members and subscribers of the Tragedy and Hope online community who inspired this debate with a little forum discussion, a little blog posting within the community.
Finally, with some logistics, we end up having a great discussion that can be shared in a meaningful way for many years to come.
We'll see you next time on History So It Doesn't Repeat.
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