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April 21, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:29
2366 Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio Talks in New York!

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, takes audience questions at the event Anarchy in the NYC!

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Stephan Molyneux, ladies and gentlemen, is standing however many feet away.
Point of caution, when you're up here, there's wires everywhere, so please be careful.
People are on podiums and shit, so just gotta be careful.
Stephan Molyneux is the founder of and host of Free Domain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophical show in the world.
With more than 2,300 podcasts, 10 books, 50 million downloads, you've definitely spread the cause of liberty and philosophy on listeners throughout the world.
Good job, can we make this room? - I want to ask for him.
- Yes? - Woo! - And if already needed, he needed something there.
He needs to know this.
Like, are you familiar with him or are you not?
So he knows how to address the audience.
Try to help him out.
Do what an embassy does.
Prior to the launch of Free Domain Radio, Stetham built a thriving career as a software entrepreneur and executive.
In 2006, he left his work in the tech industry to devote efforts to the Free Domain Radio.
Thank you for doing that.
Now, a self-identified full-time parent and philosopher, Stefan speaks regularly at Liberty-themed events all over North and South America.
The speeches cover subject, I'll just, am I good here?
Alright, where?
Stefan speaks regular Liberty themed events all over, I already read that part.
You know who Stefan Maladu is.
I'm not gonna do this shit.
Give it up to Stefan Maladu.
I'm not gonna do this shit.
Oh wait, wait, wait.
I do want to address something.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Get up here with me.
Because I don't want to just write off what he does as shit.
I just mean like, enough.
Like, let's hear and talk.
That's what I mean.
But I do have to point this out.
Because you have a nice track record.
Stefan has been a guest radio on television programs such as RT. America is breaking the set with Abby Martin.
Adam vs.
The Man with Adam Kokesh.
The Kaiser Report with Max Kaiser.
And will soon reach the peak of his career when he's a guest on the Mike Salve's World Podcast.
Please give it up for Stefan Molotov.
Hello, New York!
How are you doing tonight?
It is great, great to be here.
Thank you so much for the invitation.
And so I was trying to figure out what to talk about today, because, you know, I'm always short of topics.
And, you know, the central planner in me came out, and I was like, I better come up with a plan for what it is I'm going to talk about.
I better make a list.
And then I shook my head and said, wait a minute, I'm a bunch of anarchists.
I don't want to plan this, so I can do a speech, if you like.
I've got a couple under my belt.
They're not podcasts, they're kind of new.
Or, which would be my slide preference, I can just do a back and forth.
Questions, comments, issues, challenges with communicating, freedom, all that kind of stuff.
What is your preference, my friends?
My speech, alright, good.
Okay, questions.
So, look, it's a challenge talking about freedom with the muggles.
I mean the statists.
I mean the deluded.
I mean the matrix dwellers.
So, we could talk about that, you know, challenges that you have.
Like, I was listening to the radio the other day.
Anybody enjoying the Bitcoin rollercoaster?
Bitcoins, they come with their own financial barf bag.
But do you actually do refresh that every five minutes?
You know, to see what kind of mood you're in.
I'm happy.
Oh, God.
I'm happy.
Oh, God.
And so on the radio they were saying, well you know what, the problem with bitcoins you see is that they're used to purchase weapons.
And it's like, do you know what federal reserves are used to buy?
They're used to buy fucking wars, not just weapons.
So it seems to be amazing.
This is the double standard we always face.
Some guy might use a couple of bitcoins to get a Saturday night special for self-protection.
Anybody know what the final tally is over the next 50 years for the war in Iraq?
$47 trillion!
$6 trillion.
Anybody remember what the original estimate was at the cost of the war?
$50 million.
And a handjob.
Crazy.
No, it's men, right?
So this is the double standard, right?
You can buy a gun with a Bitcoin, but you can buy an army with a Federal Reserve note, and somehow Bitcoin is singled out as the problem.
This is the world we live in.
I don't know how people tie their shoes.
I don't know how they put one foot in front of the other.
They're living in such diluted lower intestine spaghetti strands of irrationality.
Anyway, enough of my talking.
Who has a question, a comment, an issue that we could jaw about?
Can't see anything beyond these landing lights.
Yes, sir?
What do you think age of consent is?
I know you talk a lot about parenting and things.
What do you think the age of consent is for someone in a voluntary parenting situation?
Age of consent for what?
For anything, for self-determination, for something like that.
At what point is the child their own person where you're not stepping into making the decision?
Okay, so the question is, at what point is a child able to make his or her own decisions?
Well, I don't think it's a black and white thing.
You know, my daughter has really great judgment about what she can do physically.
You know, and I keep telling her, I said, Daddy's stuck in the past.
Sorry.
Like I am, because I was around when she was a baby, and I've been raising her with my wife for over four years, so what happens is she wants to jump from the fourth step, and I can remember her not being able to jump from the first step, so I'm like, no!
And I have to keep telling her, sorry, that's old dad, dad from the past two when you were smaller, so she can make those judgments herself.
She can make judgments about who she wants to be friends with or doesn't want to be friends with.
She's fine with that.
So I think that, you know, giving the child the trust.
I just had Dr.
Peter Gray on the show.
He's written a really, really good book called Free to Learn.
And he says that we are the least trusting generation of parents in the history of the natural universe at a time when children are outside of government schools about the safest they've ever been.
So, I think that you would keep that expanding as it goes forward.
I think for things like sexuality, because there are such ramifications emotionally, biologically, psychologically, I think that would probably be later.
I mean, I don't know the exact date or, you know, exactly when it would be, but I think it's, you know, the maximum amount of freedom that they can handle, which, you know, but the important thing is to teach them to make their own best judgments, because my daughter, when she's faced with something new, she will come and ask me about it, because she knows she doesn't have Experience with that, right?
You see some freaky-ass rainbow berry in the woods, and she's like, Daddy, can I eat this?
And I'm like, let me snort it first.
Sorry, I thought it was Adam for a sec.
So she will ask me if she doesn't know, and I think that's how she's the judge of when she's capable of making those decisions, I think.
Any questions?
Anyone else have?
So, I've noticed a lot on my Facebook feed, it looks like there's a lot of sort of status bashing going on from the volunteers community.
And I'm just wondering if there's a shit status say sort of a Facebook thing.
I'm just wondering if you had any thoughts on how we could be more amiable with the status.
I'll be happy to put down my verbal assaults if they put down their prisons.
No, seriously, look, statists are doing a damn fine job of winning, right?
They're completely kicking our ass, right?
I mean, if the state is a tumor, we're more tumor than person these days.
And I, you know, I think we reach out with kindness and with gentleness, like recognizing that they are, they're programmed, right?
Like I just did a show the other night, it was an hour and a half of like grueling statist sandstorms straight to the face, you know, just like, I mean, you feel like one of those astronauts, you know, with your cheeks flapping high centrifuge.
Every single ridiculous, you know, Somalia, Rhodes, you know, everything that you could imagine, you know, just the boom, boom, boom straight at you every single time.
And it was driving me mad.
But they're atheists who've been raised in government schools.
Now, if they were Jehovah's Witness and they had spent 12 years, six to eight hours a day being indoctrinated into the Jehovah's Witness religion, they would understand that they had been Programmed.
They had been, you know, brainwashed or whatever it was, right?
But they don't see it in the state.
They don't see it that they've been in a government school for six to eight hours for 12 years and they can't think outside of that paradigm.
They don't understand that all that they watched is Coke commercials so they don't know that Coke's bad for your teeth, right?
Because you don't see those in code commercials, and you don't see the downside of the state in government schools.
So I think, and we try to approach it, I think, gently as possible, but I think we've got to move to the moral argument as quickly as possible, wherever possible.
Because, you know, and I get sucked into this again, you know, what's that Al Pacino line every time I try to get out?
Pull me back in!
Because they're all arguments from a fact.
Who would take care of the poor, the roads, who will make the windmills, who will catch the rain, who I don't know.
And you get back to the ethics of, well, it's immoral to initiate force.
I don't care who picks the goddamn cotton, slavery is wrong.
I don't care how the fruit gets picked, slavery is wrong.
I don't care who gets married to whom, but rape is wrong.
So just keep going back to the moral argument, because I think we're kind of in a triage situation.
It's late in the day, but it's still very early in the movement, which means we've got to be triaged.
You know, like if you're on a battlefield doctor, he can make it, he can make it, he can't make it, he can't make it.
You've got to keep moving, keep moving.
I know this is tough in friendship, so that's another category, but if you're talking to the general person, I would get to the argument from morality, is it immoral to initiate the use of force?
If it is, then you can't create a magic exception called the government.
I mean, you can, but then you're in your own little pocket of unreality, right?
So get to the moral argument, and if they're like, whoa, you know, they have that Keanu Reeves face, you know, if you're getting some crossed wires, sparks, you know, they trip, you know, some sort of seizure, then good, then you've, you know, you've disrupted some program.
But if they're just like, Ooh, sailing right past, don't even notice, can't even slow down.
I would say move on.
You know, life is short and ignorance is eternal.
Yes?
We have more choices in soda nowadays than we do in government.
You know what budgets are for advertising for soda, Coke, Pepsi.
If you were a pitch fan for Liberty, which I think you are, I think all of us are very thankful for it, what would be your 30 second pitch?
For Liberty?
For Liberty.
Drugs, hookers, love.
Oh, sorry.
If I were talking to another audience, you mean?
Oh, the watermelon you can bang.
No, I think so.
If I were to say, it would really depend on the audience, but one I think that it can be quite helpful is to say, hey, that's a nice new cell phone you got there.
Do you like upgrading things?
Do you like having new things?
Would you like to use a piece of technology that's approximately 6,000 years old?
Do you like an abacus or a calculator?
Do you like smoke signals and carrier pigeons, or do you like a cell phone?
Do you like these things that get upgraded?
Did you drive a car recently?
How do you like movies?
3D is cool, right?
See, all of these things are new, and the new displaces the old, except in a few places in the world.
A few places in the world, the old never gets displaced.
150 years ago, before the government took over education, 40 kids in a room, 30 kids in a room, and a blackboard.
What's changed since then?
It's a whiteboard, come on.
They've upgraded the color.
So some things don't change, right?
Why are they two months off in the summer for kids?
Yeah, because you know, 90% of Americans were involved in farming.
And now what's the percentage?
2% I think now.
Doesn't change.
Doesn't change.
So the things that don't change are the things that are circled by force.
Things that are circled by weaponry, things that are violent, don't change.
Because violence is a kind of repetitive compulsion.
That's post-traumatic stress disorder, right?
Just doing it again and again and again in your head.
So what if we could have a social organization that advanced as quickly as computers rather than stayed stuck in the Stone Age?
Just a possibility.
And that's a way of just having people think about things not like the state is like gravity.
People think it's like physics.
They think we want to repeal gravity, for God's sakes.
They think we want to turn the stars into laser pointers and geese into ICBMs.
I don't know what they're thinking, but they think we want to change the law of physics, but we don't.
We just want to apply the value of voluntarism to everything.
I mean, why not continue to expand what is possible?
Why not continue to expand, you know, what the definition of humanity is?
Because in the past, there was no humanity for slaves, right?
Just slaves.
No humanity for women.
We're still working on kids.
Still working on kids.
In Canada, you can hit your child from the age of 2 to 12.
Except in the face.
Mad.
Madness.
But so we continue so that the progress of humanity is expanding the definition of what is moral and what is human.
And God help us, we're going to have to extend humanity to politicians and the IRS too and include them in the moral sphere of virtue, which means to take away their guns lovingly and hopefully peacefully.
So that would be, I think, one way of approaching it.
But there's six million ways you can do it.
I'm sorry?
Carla, we talked about your heckling.
You're only allowed to heckle my hairstyle.
Alright, so we have another question, comment, issue?
Yes, sir.
So say you were speaking to a statist and they're presenting you in a hypothetical situation.
And they said in the absence of a state, someone decides to go and kill another person on their private property.
And then hauls ass and drags the body back to their own private property.
Who would have jurisdiction to come in and investigate a murderer or something like that?
Anything like that?
So anybody know what the death count in Iraq is?
One million.
One million.
They don't know.
Nobody knows within a couple hundred thousand.
I've heard estimates from six to eight hundred thousand to 1.5 million.
So if people are really concerned about murder and death and lack of consequences, the last place they'd look to the state is right.
So this is important because there is this idea that we have to be as good as the government in some things, right?
And so if people are really concerned about assholes who get away with murder, then let's take away the armies from the sociopaths, right?
What do they say?
I was asked years ago, what do we do with the sociopathic murderer in a stateless society?
Well, number one, let's not give him an army.
We're not aiming to be as good as the state.
So that would be my first question.
Because what they do is they say, well, the state is doing it well now.
How would you do it as well as the state?
Right?
And so the first thing is to recognize that if this is their concern, the last thing they should be is a statist.
Anybody know the body count, democide, 20th century?
People killed by their own governments?
250 million.
And they don't even know within a few tens of millions.
Two hundred and fifty.
Quarter of a billion people murdered outside of war by their own governments.
So that'd be the first thing.
The second thing is, how the hell does someone end up being a murderer?
I mean...
We don't worry that much about polio anymore, because we know what causes polio, and we have an inoculation against it, right?
I don't know, they don't still do that inoculation, do they?
Smallpox polio?
No, no.
Anyway, so what we know what causes violence, for the most part, other than brain tumors or brain injuries, violence is caused by child abuse.
I mean, this is why somebody becomes a murderer.
This is what these sociopaths are doing in Boston.
I mean, they just had terrible childhoods and they were not protected or saved by anyone.
And they live in an uncaring society that doesn't lift a finger to help them.
And then they turn into really nasty people.
So a free society is going to want to make sure that it prevents murder.
Who profits from protecting children these days?
Nobody.
In a free society, children who are traumatized to become violent and destructive are incredibly expensive to society.
Incredibly expensive to society.
You know, 15% of everything you buy is a shoplifting tax because so many people steal from stores, right?
Happy people don't steal.
Well-raised people don't steal.
They don't kill.
They don't murder.
So you're going to have a whole society that is going to place the cost of harming children on the parents.
And you wouldn't believe how virtuous people can get with the right financial incentives.
You know, the war on drugs costs, what, $20 billion a year?
Love to have a vote.
Hey, if you're in favor of the war on drugs, you get a check.
Sorry, you get a bill for the war on drugs.
And if you're not in favor of the war on drugs, you don't have to pay it.
So immediately, half the people are going to drop out.
Everyone gets a bill, and they're, oh, it's a little more.
I don't want to indulge my conscience at that rate, so that more of them would step back.
And then the last idiot standing gets a bill for 20 billion dollars, and I think he would find tolerance for a little bit of weed in his heart after that.
So, these things are all preventable.
It's just that we don't have a society right now that allocates the costs of harming children correctly.
So, this would all be allocated properly.
And I've got stuff in my books about this, so I won't go into it in more detail.
Anyone?
Oh, you're closer.
One thing I find mildly encouraging about talking to people about the non-aggression principle, they're usually very accepting until we hit the point about what constitutes self-defense.
What short of being physically assaulted by somebody do you consider validating self-defense?
So if a guy looks at me funny, I can't shoot him, right?
Okay.
If a guy has a gun to my head, I can shoot him.
Okay, so somewhere in there, there is, you know, you obviously don't want to be a second from dying before you act.
At the same time, some guy looks at you funny or some guy's walking behind you, you don't want to turn and blow him away, right?
So, there's no clear answer, right?
These would be circumstantial based.
At the extremes, we could see that, you know, obviously this is justified and some guy looking at me funny is not justified.
So, the way that I would imagine is that you would not be, you would not face any negative repercussions for self-defense.
But you would for preemptive, over-preemptive self-defense.
In other words, where it was not clear that you were going to be harmed, but you took preemptive and very aggressive action.
Because some guy looks at me funny in a bar, I can just leave, right?
So you have to be kind of cornered, it has to have been sort of unavoidable, and you shouldn't really have been in the guy's face screaming and spitting and, you know, whatever, right?
So I think that in a free society, these rules would be laid out by the people who would be, you know, judging whatever you did that was violent.
And they would, as long as you stayed within those boundaries, then you would be fine.
And if you went outside those boundaries very far, you would have a problem.
But I think that would be spelled out.
I don't know what the exact answer is, because the great thing is you've got Millions of people who would be trying to figure this stuff out to be as optimal as possible.
But again, a free society, please remember, is all about avoiding and preventing these kinds of situations from coming into being.
Yes, sir?
Can you give a checklist of what you know you should start defluing?
So defooing is the argument that if you have very abusive parents or very destructive parents that you have the choice to be or not be in the relationship.
So the analogy is if you are in an abusive marriage you have the choice to leave and there are a number of psychologists and I sort of echo that that say if you are in an abusive relationship with parents, which is different, right?
If a marriage is chosen, a parental relationship is not chosen, at what point would you have the choice to leave?
And I don't have an answer for that.
It's sort of like saying when...
I mean obviously if you're in imminent danger, an axe murderer or parent or whatever, right?
Sure.
But my argument has always been if you have issues with anyone in your life, you know, friends, family, parents, you sit down, you talk about it with them, right?
The first virtue is honesty.
If you don't have that virtue, nothing else is really possible.
But you talk about your issues.
You know, isn't it sad that we...
We're all committed to truth and to virtue and to courage, but so many of us will sail through life.
I don't think so much in this room, but so many people sail through life without unpacking their heart to the people around them and really speaking honestly and openly about our experience, both positive and negative, of those around us.
So I think you stay in conversation, you stay in conversation, you attempt to break through, and at some point the relationship will, if it's going to break through, great.
If it's not, I think you'll know that.
But the important thing is to continue to be honest with people, to continue to say, This was my experience.
I don't have a great answer, but I'm troubled by X or I'm happy about Y. Really continue that conversation and if people respond positively, if they don't, well, volunteerism is volunteerism, right?
right?
Good answer, good answer.
Yes sir.
Recently I heard some libertarians talk about abortion and Walter Block was and he was saying that the libertarian answer to abortion was that you develop a technology that's able to remove the fetus and then put it somewhere else and sustain its life until it can support And for me, I don't get that at all because technology can't be philosophy.
Philosophy has to be consistent and able to do whatever, whenever, without whatever kind of technology ever.
Advancement or non-advancement.
I'm almost a little concerned when people say the libertarian answer is.
I mean, it's all supposed to be negotiated within reasonable moral grounds.
I mean, abortion is, I mean, I think generally, obviously, is a pretty bad thing to happen.
It's a tragedy, and the women I've spoken to who've had it, say, you know, every year on the supposed birthday, and every day they think it's just, it's wretched.
I mean, my goodness, this Marxist relativist assault on the family that's been going on since the early 1960s has been just brutal.
Reproduction used to be managed much more socially, right?
In terms of social standards and so on, but you get the welfare state come in and the economic incentive to manage reproduction for both young men and young women from a social standpoint, from a social pressure standpoint, from a religious standpoint, or how it was going to be enforced has really diminished, right?
So parents take less of an interest in their own kids because they don't have to pay.
And so there's been a very great dissolution in the family.
And this is one of the things, like I don't know whether childhood is getting better or worse.
Because in some ways it's getting a little better, but in other ways, in terms of the fatherlessness and the effects that has on criminality and drug use and addictions and abuse, I mean, it's wretched.
So, clearly a baby that's born deserves to live.
I'm not so much about, you know, a couple of cells in the belly morning after RU486 pill.
I have a tough time seeing that as a potential life.
But I think that the answer would be, you know, there are women who are pregnant who don't want to raise the child.
And there are lots of couples out there, you know, 10% of couples have fertility, significant fertility problems.
It seems to me that's a match made in heaven.
But why can't we do that?
Because you can't pay for a baby.
I know, a baby seller.
But the reality is that if the woman had financial incentive to bring the child to term and she had a contract to say, I don't want to raise this child, but, you know, for 20,000 bucks I'll have the baby and you can have the baby, I mean, that seems like win-win for everyone.
So I think it's the absence of a market that usually creates these kinds of problems.
Does that help it out?
Being from someplace where I feel volunteerism is not popular, did you ever struggle with ostracism when you were first introduced to the idea And if so, how did you get out of that, of the fear of ostracism, being ostracized?
Well, I like ostriches.
Always start emotional pain with a joke.
That's my rule.
No, it's, you know, you come from a place where voluntarism is not popular.
Does anybody come from a place outside of this room where voluntarism is popular?
Blue Ridge people, stand up.
Park Fest!
Ostracism is the most painful aspect of the truth.
I mean, it is the most painful.
You know, I grew up with people, I was just asked at lunch about my childhood friendships.
I grew up with people, I was friends with them for 30 years.
I asked them to choose between The truth and virtue and me and the rapacious, bloody, murderous state.
And it's pretty horrible to watch them go this way, right?
Towards a state.
And to turn away from truth, from compassion, from empathy, from reason, from virtue, to chase after that which is destroying them.
It is horrible.
I mean, it's like somebody choosing a horrible drug over a loving relationship with you.
It's not like.
It is.
It's exactly the same, except that when they choose their drug, you don't end up with a huge national debt.
So, it's incredibly painful.
Being a voluntarist is like being, you know, this is like a gay bar in the 50s, you know?
Because you can't really come out a lot of places.
Don't worry, we'll be getting the dance moves going in just a moment.
But it is very early in the day, and there's no way for society to get used to something without a few people getting the shit kicked out of them, frankly.
I mean, you stand up, you take your knocks.
And it's the same thing that happened with the gay movement, same thing that happened with the suffragette movement, same thing that happened with the abolitionistic movement in the 18th century.
You've just got to stand up and all the hounds of hell are going to come breathe fire down your nose and you've just got to stand there and take it because that's the process it seems to me it always has to go through.
I actually...
I kind of like it.
So, I don't know, masochistic of something?
No, I feel that there's an enormous amount of privilege to be very early on.
Because later it's a whole lot easier, you know?
Is it tough to be gay in Toronto during a gay pride parade?
No, but the guys who did it in the 50s, man, and the men and women who did that, who really took the shots, They're the real heroes.
Now, again, I mean, it's not easy, but it's a lot easier than it was.
So I think we get a lot of honor for that.
Not from the present, unfortunately, but it will be there.
And at least what we're doing now is much more visible because it's recorded and will be around forever.
So I don't have any easy answers.
The only thing that I can say is that for the people who choose evil over love, it's heartbreaking, but I'm better off without them.
Do you have an explanation of the egalitarian and social welfare impulse in people that might help you argue, you know, kind
of like an against me argument with them so that you might be successful arguing on their terms, in terms that sort of understand maybe the psychology or personal history autobiographical, you know, their history that led them to believe a certain thing rather than rational, you know, coming to their history that led them to believe a certain thing rather than Do you think that there's an interpretation of those impulses that will help you argue better against it or convince them to better be?
How many younger siblings do we have in the audience?
Anyone?
Who's the youngest?
When you were a kid, did you hate it that your older siblings got to stay up later and they got to get a little bit more pocket money or allowance or whatever you call it here?
Was that just my experience?
Because people who wanted things to be equal, I think they feel lower.
Right?
Like, Bill Gates doesn't want everyone to have the same income because he's doing pretty well with what he's got, right?
I mean, you know, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar doesn't want everyone to be the same height because, you know, his height serves him pretty well.
But I think the people who feel diminished, who feel less, they feel that they want to even things out because they stand to gain, right?
I mean, if, you know, the old idea that you've got some flat income, some national guaranteed income of $20,000 or $40,000 a year, well, if you're making $5,000 a year, you want that.
If you're making $100,000 a year, you don't want that.
I mean, again, there's lots of other things.
So I think people who feel diminished, who feel too small, who feel that they don't have opportunities, who've lacked encouragement, who've lacked people who believe in them, who dig in and really get behind them, I think they feel that they need to even things out because they would stand to gain from that and they don't feel that they can do it of their own accord.
Or they don't feel that even if they did, it would be a lot of work and they'd never get past that median point.
So I think it's a lot of crushed spirits that want to just even out and don't feel that they can do it.
And I think that comes from pretty early childhood stuff.
I mean, human beings are capable of such unbelievably incredible things and the amount of potential that is squashed through indifference and neglect and abuse and avoidance and TV and video games and all the stuff that just has you do stuff that's entertaining and empty and useless.
I think that if we have a society that really does get behind people and help really to unleash their potential.
I was an idiot when I was a kid.
Like seriously, I had no intelligence to speak of.
None!
And when I had philosophy, I could actually organize my thoughts.
They weren't just like catching mosquitoes in a whirlwind.
I could actually start to build some structure.
You can't build a skyscraper without knowing architecture.
And so I think without principles, without understanding, people are just confused.
And they can't build anything in particular.
And they feel helpless in the face.
We're like savages in the social universe.
We don't understand course and effect.
We think raindance brings the The rain and the volcano is erupting because the fire god is angry.
This is where people are in their thinking.
It's wretched.
And this is after 2500 years of philosophy.
My god, it's embarrassing.
But so the reality is give people more principles, give people more control over what it is that they can accomplish in their life.
Give them standards, give them morality, give them principles, right?
Non-aggression principle, respect for property rights.
Boy, that's not that hard.
But if we give them all of that, then I think that they will not feel that they have to use this slithery kind of nasty egalitarian thing just to get something because they'll feel they can earn it themselves.
I think that you should keep the beard.
I also have some serious to say that.
I want to push back a little bit on the ostracism question.
I understand that if you're in an abusive relationship, that ostracism is fine.
But when it's just a political thing, I still have kind of a problem with ostracism personally.
You mean you ostracizing someone else?
Yeah.
Okay.
Especially because as a former neocon of about a decade, that was my entire childhood.
And into my college years, I took political science, international relations, and I was still a neocon.
And now looking back as a radical libertarian, I feel as though I was kind of left in the dark by my libertarian brethren who could have been out there saying, you know, think about this with a smile, you know?
And I feel as though there's not quite enough out there of that And the idea of pushing ostracism, or just mentioning it even, without the counter saying smile as well, I guess.
I don't know, I just have a problem with that.
Well, I certainly did say be friendly up front.
You know, I mean, those of us who have, and I think this would be everyone in the room, we have morality and rational arguments on our side, which means that we go around the world like evil little fairies creating evil in our wake.
I'm sorry, but it's true, right?
So if I invent some radical new laser that cures some horrible leukemia, then Everybody who, like once it's been proven to work, every doctor who doesn't use it is a bad doctor.
Right?
They weren't a bad doctor before it was invented because it wasn't invented.
But now it's there.
If you don't use it, you're a bad doctor.
When we expose people to arguments for morality, when we expose people to the truth, to virtue, Then they now have a choice of morality which they didn't have before.
Right?
So I think we have to be gentle and friendly with that and recognize that we are creating a choice.
Right?
I mean, if somebody told me, hey, you know, click your heels three times and you can float, I'd feel like an idiot for succumbing to gravity all these years.
And then I'd lose my bone mass.
But that's another story.
But if you don't know that there's a choice, then I think you have to be gentle with that choice.
But I will tell you this.
When it comes to ostracism, nobody beats a statist.
No, seriously.
Let's say you're a statist, and you're an asshole.
But I repeat myself.
No, I'm kidding.
So let's say you're a statist, and I've given you all the arguments, and you can't counteract them, and I've given you weeks to think about it, maybe even a month or two, maybe even three.
We talk about it.
And let's say you simply refuse to accept rational arguments, but you also can't find a reason to reject them.
Now, if you look at me as the ostracizer, that's completely inaccurate.
Ostracism means I'm just not going to talk to this guy anymore.
What does a status do if you disagree with him?
What does he suggest?
Locks you in a fucking hole.
Now that's ostracism.
I mean, he can go anywhere he wants, he just can't come and talk to me, right?
But a statist says you go in a little hole with a big beefy guy and he will lock you up for years.
That's not ostracism.
That's enslavement.
That's torture.
That's brutality.
So let's not forget the reality that a statist can disagree with us.
That's fine.
If we disagree with the statist, guys kick in your door and take you to a hole in the ground and lock it up and throw away the key.
So when it comes to ostracism, They are not on the sunny side of the street when it comes to that.
I don't choose to have people in my life who want me thrown in jail for disagreeing with them.
I don't choose to have people in my life who will call an airstrike of cops down on my house because I disagree with them.
I do not choose to have people in my life who are willing to cheer the initiation of force against me for following my conscience.
I gotta have some standards.
Next.
Yes, sir.
I feel whenever I talk about these ideas with people, there's a lot of just preaching to the choir and I'm trying to use just every argument and it just continues to be preaching to the choir.
Do you have any suggestions?
Wait, wait.
But when you say preaching to the choir, you mean you're talking to people who already agree with you?
Yes.
Well, talk to different people.
I mean, what can I say?
In terms of only reaching...
Oh, only reaching certain people?
In terms of not being able to persuade them.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, because you think you have control over other people and their receptivity.
You have a little bit of influence.
You know, you go up and grab people in the subway and scream voluntarism into their face.
You may not be batting a thousand when it comes to bringing people to the movement.
On the other hand, you know, if you're just nice and, you know, just send a couple of Facebook things, but it's no big deal, you know, I'm just not, again, you know, I'm not really for shooting people who disagree with you, but it's not a big deal to me, right?
So, somewhere in between the two, right, where you have conviction, and I think the most important thing is that, you know, the question is why are we doing this stupid stuff?
Like, why are we here?
I mean, I don't mean the existential on the planet.
I mean, what the fuck are we doing in this basement?
You know?
Talking about how people are gonna hate us for telling them the truth.
I mean, this is an insane thing to do.
So why are we doing it?
I mean, I know why I do it, because working is hard.
No, I mean, I do it because I benefited from all the people who did good stuff in the past, right?
We have some free trade.
We have some technology.
We have airplanes and, you know, all these great things that came from people taking on the vested powers in the past.
You know, we have some racial equality.
We have some equality between the genders.
We have tolerance, if not encouragement, for homosexuality, which is wonderful.
Yay!
You know, fantastic.
So I, you know, the pay it forward kind of thing.
I think if people get that you want the world to be a better place, you know, like, God, People say, oh, you libertarians, you don't care about the poor.
It's like, we're not laden down with debt.
We're not sending them off to goddamn wars.
We're not creating a permanent underclass.
We're not trapping them in shitty schools where they graduate unable to read.
We do care about the poor, and that's why we want the state out of their way.
Can you pass it back?
Regarding the electoral process, is there an ideal relationship that an anarchist should have with that?
Is it something that could be reformed to work with?
Or should it be dismissed and subverted completely?
Well, the question is what relationship should an anarchist have to the electoral process?
The ideal relationship is it should be a fucking horror story you read to your grandchildren where they go, "Ooh, I can't believe people ever lived like that." Politics is just another government program.
Don't take my word for it.
Look at the Libertarian platforms.
You can find them online.
For the past 42 years, they have been promising us freedom if we give them lots of money and go vote for Libertarians or Ron Paul or Rand Paul or Ronald Reagan or whoever, you know, Barry Goldwater, whoever the libertarian issue is, they tell you that they're very confident that they're going to get you freedom if you send them 20 bucks down some lawn signs and scratch something in a box somewhere.
And I'm an empiricist, right?
I come from a business background, which means I don't care what you say, show me the facts.
Show me the facts.
And the government was about 15% its current size when libertarianism failed to control it.
Now, come on, if a guy can't lift ten pounds, there's no point tossing a hundred pound weight at him, right?
So I'm all, you know, hey, if politics could set us free, fantastic.
No ostracism, no conflict, no fights, no nothing.
I think that would be wonderful.
I just don't see the evidence.
They always say, do this and we're going to become free.
And then what you end up is with a bigger government.
But how is that distinguishable from any other government program you name?
You know, give us your money, we're going to help the poor.
Oh shit, now we've got more poor.
You know, give us your money, we're gonna educate the young.
Oh shit, the young are retarded now and uneducated, right?
So, give us your money and we'll get you political freedom.
Oh shit, the government's five times bigger and there's a huge national debt and 80 trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities and 1900 wars going on around the world.
So I just have I think we have a right to be a little bit skeptical and say maybe we can put our resources somewhere else.
So I look in the family, I look at peaceful parenting, non-aggression principle with regards to children and all that kind of stuff.
I think, boy, if they'd started that 40 years ago, we'd have some fantastic examples of how freedom and voluntarism worked in the world.
but right now we've wasted our time in politics, so I look for alternatives.
Outside of the balance of religion and the state, what's your thought about marriage?
About marriage?
Marriage is hot.
Well, marriage is generally has evolved out of the fact that we have these ridiculously retarded children.
I mean, it's embarrassing how stupid our children are, and I say this as a child who was himself stupid.
I think other than whales and elephants, we have the longest, most ridiculous 25 years it takes for the brain to become mature.
The amount of investment that human beings have to put into raising their children is Almost second to none in every other species in the planet.
And that's partly because, you know, we're born early, you know, we're supposed to, we're actually supposed to be another trimester in the womb, it's just the big giant head and I count myself in the melon head category.
A little hard to get out the hoo-hoo when you've got a head the size of a bowling ball.
So we're born early, we have this ridiculously extended childhood, so the reality is that it takes a huge amount of, and I say this as a stay-at-home dad too, a huge amount of energy and commitment is taken to raise children.
And so the marriage contract, the marriage idea is, hey, let's have a kid and I will stay.
And I think the reason it's important, the reason you get married with your tribe, your friends, your family present, is, you know, if you're just dating someone, you've been dating for a couple of weeks, and you say, I don't really think I like her, your friends will be like, oh, okay, so I don't see her, right?
But if you publicly said, I'm going to stay with this person until we're both fucking dead, and we're going to have 19 kids, and I'm going to take care of them all, and then if you go to your friends and you say, I'm not really that happy, what are they going to say?
You get back in there.
You get back in there.
What's that...
I'm trying to think of that Ray Liotta film about the gangsters where...
Goodfellas.
Goodfellas, yeah.
So Goodfellas, right?
The guy's like, he's got this woman on the side and the other mafia guys come over.
It's like, hey, you can have the guy on the side.
You've got to get back to your wife.
So the social pressure is to stay together, absent destructive abuse and addictions and so on.
So when you publicly say, it's a public contract that says to people, if I'm going to screw this up, help me fix it.
As opposed to, it's just a flame, so it doesn't really matter.
So I think it's, you know, it's for the community to know how serious you are and help you fix it, and also to make sure that you have at least a verbal contract with community approval for the raising of children.
I think, from that standpoint, what is very important, the government involvement is just the usual shit, right?
Is that a high five, or five more minutes, or?
A last question, okay.
Thanks, everyone, by the way.
Great questions.
Does a parent have the right to beat their child, or more specifically, does somebody else have the right to come onto their property and point guns at them for doing so, or do they have to lock them in a cage, or threaten to take their children away from them?
So the question is, does the parent have the right to beat the child?
Well, I think the non-aggression principle answers that.
Does anybody beat a child in self-defense?
Discipline.
That's like calling government school education.
No, listen.
We don't appeal to history or emotion in this.
We appeal to principles, right?
Striking a child is the initiation of force.
Now, we're either going to create an exception for children.
It is.
Striking a child is the initiation of force.
Now, we can create some exception if we want.
But then we no longer have universal principles.
And we've created an exception for the most vulnerable people in society.
In other words, you can't hit an adult, because that's wrong, but children...
But the children who can neither protect themselves nor leave...
Well, you can hit them, right?
So you can't have lower moral standards for children than you have for adults.
That's insane, right?
I don't mean everyone who believes it is insane, but as a principle, it's insane.
And so, yes, striking a child is the initiation of force.
It's immoral.
Now, I say this with the full understanding.
I mean, the statistics are still horrible.
Percentage of parents who still hit their children.
Anybody know?
80 to 90%.
Percentage of British mothers who strike children less than one year old?
Eighty.
Number of moms in America who hit their children three or more times a week when the children are six years of age and under?
Two thirds.
So tell me, a child being hit by his primary caregiver, by his nurturer, by his sustenance provider, by his loving arm and harbour in the world, being hit 150 to 200 times per year, do we not think this is going to have an effect on our perception of violence as an adult?
Do we not think...
Do we not think that when the government says, We need to control you or you do bad things, that this is not an echo of our histories.
Or when somebody looks at the government and says, well, they're allowed to have different moral rules because mom would hit me for hitting other people.
And then she'd be in the right and I'd be in the wrong.
So they're allowed to tax, but I'm not allowed to steal.
They're allowed to counterfeit, but I'm not allowed to counterfeit.
It all comes from the childhood, the hand of the rocks and cradle rules the world.
Now, I don't believe that most, I think most people are in a state of nature with regards to this issue.
Not, again, hopefully in this room because we have the principles, but I think that most people have yet to understand the moral argument, they have yet to understand the scientific argument, the destructive effects, spanking shaves off IQ points, spanking creates aggressive tendencies, spanking causes addictions and dysfunction, spanking causes oppositional defiance, spanking disrupts social capacities and so on.
So they may not know the science and they may not know the ethics, which is again what we're doing when we're providing these arguments is we are sadly creating immorality in our wake and people don't usually like that.
I don't believe that going and hitting the parents is the way to solve the problem of the cycle of violence.
I think education and consequences is the way to do it.
I'm a big fan of privatizing the family.
Because I think if you can't privatize the family, you can't privatize anything.
And privatizing simply means that the family is a voluntary institution.
Family is a voluntary institution.
If you love your parents and they love you, fantastic, wonderful.
If your parents beat the crap out of you, ignored you, were drunk half your childhood, you don't have to see them.
That's voluntarism.
You cannot improve something without making it voluntary, without injecting the principles of voluntarism in it.
You can't go to the post office and say, hey, everybody should just do a better job.
They don't care.
They can't get fired.
We have this Judeo-Christian ethic, honor thy mother and thy father.
Where's the honor thy children?
Oh, sorry.
Children don't vote and they don't pay tithe.
So we need to, I think, promote volunteerism within the family.
That is the only thing that will reliably improve the quality.
If you want to improve the quality of the post office, what's the one thing you've got to do?
Privatize it.
Make it voluntary.
That's quality.
There is no quality without voluntarism, and that's my argument with the family.
My daughter is going to owe me zero, nothing.
My entire privilege and joy as a parent is the time I get to spend with my daughter, but she owes me nothing.
She doesn't have to come to my deathbed.
She doesn't have to write me a birthday card.
She doesn't owe me a damn thing.
I chose to be a parent.
She didn't choose to be my child.
I live, hopefully, I'll end with this.
And every day, literally, I get up with my daughter, and I will say to myself, when I was shaving, I don't want to do that.
But I will say that my daughter didn't choose me, but my goal and my hope is to be the kind of parent that if she could choose any parent in the world, she would choose me.
And this is the same thing with my wife, right?
So she could walk out with me tomorrow.
But I try to be the kind of husband to her.
I try to be the kind of friend to my friends.
I try to be that if anyone could choose anyone to be their husband, their friend, their father, that they would choose me.
That's the greatest volunteerism.
Now, my wife has that choice.
My daughter doesn't, which is why it's even more important for me to live that way with her.
Thank you, everybody, so, so much.
One more time.
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