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July 9, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:25:37

2426 The Edge of Morality

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, speaks with a listener about flagpole scenarios and he rough edges of morality.

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	Hello, hello.
	Hi Stefan.
	How are you doing?
	I'm pretty good.
	How about you?
	I am fine.
	I am fine.
	Can you hear me well on this?
	Yeah.
	This is actually one of my first times using Skype, so I'm not 100% sure on how good the sound is, but it sounds pretty good to me.
	Yeah, sounds fine to me too.
	Awesome.
	So, what's on your mind?
	Well, I don't know how much you remember from my original email to you, but I'm going to be starting a master's thesis in the fall.
	And the subject is basically libertarianism as a broad, basically a broad set of ideas.
	And I think when a lot of people talk about libertarianism, they think of it as being monolithic, right?
	So they think it's either this or it's that.
	And I don't know if you share this interpretation, but for me it's a body of ideas, and they're often at odds with each other, though there's fundamental similarities.
	But there's basically a lot of debate and a lot of diversity within libertarianism, and I wanted to sort of explore that and the implications of that with you.
	With me?
	All right.
	With you.
	Sounds good.
	Sounds good.
	So, I think we'll start off with something that isn't particularly...
	Sorry, just before we start, do you want me to be like annoying thesis advisor guy who's going to be cross-examining, or do you want to just have a discussion?
	What would be most useful to you?
	Well, you know, I've got a few questions which I think sort of strike at the fundamentals of moral and political theory.
	And then I've got a few questions which we could do maybe in a bit more of like a fun lightning round.
	You know, you give me your 30-second soundbite politician answer as to… All right.
	Let me just slip into my reptile suit.
	Okay.
	Ooh, chili.
	Okay, go ahead.
	So, I'll start off with something that isn't a particular To libertarians or libertarianism, but that I think anyone who's interested in philosophy should be interested and should be focused on.
	And that's the question of meta-ethics and moral realism versus moral anti-realism.
	And you've obviously talked about this a lot.
	How can we know what is moral and how can we know what is right and what is just?
	And I guess...
	I guess my question for you there is, every time I have this discussion with people who are sympathetic to moral anti-realism, they basically say to me, look...
	Alright, for those who may be listening to this at some point, just in case it ever becomes a podcast...
	If you could just break out the terms a little, because otherwise people would be like, I don't know what that means.
	Right, sure.
	No, absolutely.
	So moral realism is a position in philosophy which asserts that moral propositions can be true and false.
	So when I say, you know, Hitler is evil, that's not just an opinion.
	It corresponds to some fact about good, bad, virtue, so on and so forth.
	Moral anti-realism is the opposite of that position, which asserts that everything is subjective, there is no such thing as objective value, there is no such thing as good and bad, only preferences, and there's no preferences more valid than another, basically.
	Would you say that's a good description?
	Yeah, I mean, yeah.
	So, ethics is a kind of aesthetics.
	You can't say that jazz is bad and rock is good, right?
	I mean, some people like jazz, some people like rock.
	And all the people who thought Hitler were good were right because there's no objective opinion.
	And the mistake that people make is to think that their subjective ethics somehow relate to some objective truth or reality or whatever.
	Exactly.
	Yeah, I think that's right.
	And whenever I talk to people, and I think to a lot of people, it sounds absurd to suggest that you can't say things like Hitler is evil.
	That's just like saying, as some moral anti-realists would say, it's like saying vanilla ice cream is bad, right?
	Yeah, or it's a form of prejudice.
	It's like saying blacks are inferior.
	Right, exactly.
	It is the imposition of a universal standard where none exist.
	Which is a form of prejudice, right?
	Exactly, it is a form of prejudice.
	But I guess the challenge for those of us who are moral realists is how do you...
	So it seems like the moral anti-realists are really clinging to a really indefensible position when they say that we cannot say with any confidence that rape is evil, torturing babies for fun is wrong.
	But how about when you get to things that are a little bit more difficult?
	For example, I've had philosophers, in discussions with philosophers, I've had people say, you know, there's no objective standard for according more weight to liberty than utility or equality or anything like that.
	So basically, how do you make the argument to people that liberty is objectively more valuable than certain other values which people also hold near?
	Right, right.
	Well, and to reinforce that argument, the standard welfare state argument is that if you make a million dollars a month and I tax you a thousand dollars and give the thousand dollars to someone who has no dollars a month, the disutility of you losing a thousand out of a million is almost none.
	You barely notice it.
	Whereas someone going from zero to a thousand is the difference between life and death.
	So you've got a net plus.
	You know, this is the pragmatic calculus, right?
	Which is that if you take from those who have more than they need and give to those who don't have enough, you end up with a net positive.
	There's a great line from King Lear, you know, nothing new under sun and moon, right?
	It says, the distribution should undo excess and each man have enough, right?
	So from a sort of calculus standpoint, it's kind of indefensible to say, No.
	The guy who's starving should not get the thousand dollars from the guy who makes a million dollars a month.
	And we can make it even worse and say, the guy hasn't even worked.
	He's a Trastafarian.
	He didn't even work to make that million dollars a month, right?
	Right.
	He just inherited it.
	And this fat, Rastafarian guy is just sitting around smoking doobies while people are starving on the streets.
	Let's distribute a bit, right?
	So from the calculus standpoint, if you throw aside moral considerations and simply View resources as like chess pieces to be moved around.
	It's a pretty good case to be made for it.
	Right.
	But the case sort of how is liberty become a higher value?
	Well, the distribution thing is always euphemized, which is the only reason we have hope for the human race is that nobody wants to talk about the gun in the room, right?
	The only way that we know that we've got a chance as a species is that we have to use euphemisms, right?
	So because people say distribution Or they say redistribution, like it somehow got distributed at first and there was a mistake and it needs to be, oh, sorry, you got two pieces of pie.
	Let me just take one of those away because you're only supposed to get one.
	But it's the agency that is supposed to do the distributing is the agency of coercion, right?
	So when people say, well, you know, we should move money here, it's like, I think you should make that case.
	I think you should go to the rich guy.
	And you should say, look, here's a starving guy.
	You have more than you need.
	Give him a thousand bucks and you should go and make that case.
	Absolutely.
	But you can't go in there with a gun.
	Sorry, because then you have just created opposing moral absolutes.
	In other words, some people should use the guns to achieve virtue, to initiate the use of force to achieve virtue.
	But for other people, the initiation of force is immoral.
	Right.
	So, once you create these opposing moral absolutes, then forget about the ethics.
	Let's just talk about the logic of it.
	How can that logic possibly work?
	I mean, that literally is a scientific method which says gravity attracts and repels under exactly the same circumstances simultaneously.
	Well, that's just a fail.
	I mean, we don't even have to go into, there's no ethics to a scientific theory, but if your logic of your ethical theory doesn't even pass the smell test, Then there's not really any place for you to go as far as the UPP approach goes.
	Right, right.
	But I think there's a lot of philosophers who will say, we shouldn't talk in absolutes.
	So basically, in certain...
	Right, and they've already failed.
	We should not talk in absolutes.
	I mean, this is like, how do you even say that with a straight...
	Not you, but how do these guys even say that with a straight face?
	It's a kind of con, right?
	Right.
	Well, I don't know if it's a con in the sense that I think what they mean by that is in certain situations, is it not reasonable?
	They would argue that in certain situations where you would have an increase in utility of 100 million and a decrease in liberty of one.
	I mean, in situations like that, is it really so morally clear that liberty is to be preferred morally?
	Well, okay, but if you're dealing with a sane human race, and if you've got a 10 million plus utility and a minus one, then people will do it voluntarily.
	Right.
	No, I mean, no, but I think that's the problem with these kind of extreme hypotheticals, right, is that they are unlikely to arise.
	But I guess, and I think this actually kind of brings me to my next question, is I don't know if you're familiar...
	I'm sorry, sorry, just before we jump off that one, too.
	The extreme examples, of course, and I mean, I get it.
	So in science, you can't have an extreme example that breaks the theory, at least in physics.
	In biology, I guess you can, right?
	But in physics, you can't.
	And so people will always try and set up these crazy numbers, you know, like a billion utility plus and then minus one utility for freedom and so on.
	And that's because they want to not deal with the principle.
	And the problem is, too, you know, I understand that there's a logical fallacy called the slippery slope argument, you know, Well, if we allow gays to marry, next thing you know, penguins will be raping pigeons or whatever it is, right?
	But there is a slippery slope argument that history completely confirms, which is that once you give an agency the power to initiate the use of force in a given geographical area, literally all hell breaks loose within a couple of generations at best, right?
	That there is no way to contain the disproportionality of Violence that you grant to a monopoly like the state.
	And so you can say, well, we're just going to take one little piece of liberty away here and make all this good over here.
	But it never stays that way.
	Of course, power corrupts, right?
	So it's never a one-time thing.
	It's not a fire and unload kind of weapon.
	Right.
	No, no.
	I see what you're saying there.
	I don't know if you're familiar with the work of a philosopher at the University of Colorado, Michael Humer.
	He recently wrote a book entitled The Problem of Political Authority.
	And the basic thesis of the book is that political—he's an anarchist, so a libertarian anarchist—and the basic thesis of the book is that no form of coercive centralized authority in the form of the state can be justified.
	And that aspect of the thesis is very appealing.
	To anarchist libertarians.
	Appealing is not a good word for philosophy, you know that, right?
	It tastes good.
	I'm just pointing out that if the moment you say an argument is appealing, you're basically not evaluating it logically.
	You are looking for confirmation bias.
	Well, that appeals to my sensibilities and therefore, therefore, right?
	I just wanted to point that out.
	I was just using it just in the sense that I think it is an argument that anarchist libertarians listen to and feel very like, of course that's true.
	Sure.
	But so that's the aspect of the thesis that's proved to be quite – that anarchist libertarians have been very receptive to and basically feel that humor has really made that case perhaps more comprehensively and compellingly.
	But how does he make the case?
	Well, he basically goes through a series of – Justifications for the state and basically, you'd have to evaluate it on your own, but his argument is I've shown that none of these justifications succeed and the state is fundamentally immoral because essentially it does things that if individuals were to do them it would be wrong for the individuals to do them and we have no reason to believe that when the government does them it suddenly becomes
	okay.
	Right.
	So, I mean, there's an argument that's floating around now.
	I made it on the Peter Schiff Show recently, and it's a really, I think it's a very powerful argument, which is also not a very rational term, but which is to say that all you need to do to convict a CEO of a corporation is to find an employee who did something illegal and then put whoever's above him on the org chart, he will go to prison.
	Right.
	It doesn't matter whether you know or not.
	It doesn't matter whether you're informed or not.
	It doesn't matter whether you approved it or not.
	If you're above someone who did something illegal on the org charge, then you go to jail.
	You do not pass go.
	You do not collect $200.
	And then, of course, that's what the government inflicts on corporations.
	And then, of course, what's the ultimate defense for the government?
	When someone does something illegal, I didn't know.
	How could I have known?
	I was not informed.
	So this is, I mean, it's all silliness, but I mean, and brutal.
	But that's, so that's an argument, I guess, that would, whether one of them or the other is justified, it doesn't matter, but they're completely contradictory.
	Right, right.
	And, but, so that part of his thesis, I think, is, and I think you would be, you know, you obviously have made arguments, I think, similar arguments about basically the idea of why are people okay with things that You know, if people did them on the street, they would go, my God, that's horrible.
	But if the government does them, suddenly, you know, suddenly it's okay.
	But the book is also a challenge, I think, to libertarians of your persuasion because in the book, humor...
	Ooh, persuasion.
	I hope...
	Oh, man, you're killing me.
	I hope that word's okay.
	I hope you don't take too much offense.
	No, no, because look, I mean, you know, it's either good philosophy or it's not.
	I don't like the isms in general.
	I'm trying to say anarchism, libertarianism, objectivism.
	I mean...
	You know, it's either good philosophy or it's not.
	And philosophy shouldn't be of someone's persuasion.
	That sounds like a sophist trick, like, oh, he's really convincing, and I'm persuaded by his argument.
	It's like, no, no, it's true or false.
	Anyway, but it doesn't matter.
	But basically, his argument is he criticizes the sort of Murray Rothbard tradition of libertarianism, which treats the non-aggression axiom as being absolute, as being something...
	As being something that no matter what circumstances we're faced with, we have an obligation to follow the moral rules contained within the non-aggression axiom.
	And his argument basically is that libertarians should repudiate the non-aggression axiom and replace it with a non-aggression presumption.
	So the idea being that there is a very strong moral preference for voluntary action and that coercion is almost always wrong except to defend individual rights.
	Except that there are certain cases, he mentions emergencies, but he even says that it's conceivable that it would go beyond emergencies whereby the non-aggression axiom would be abandoned because the consequences would be so atrocious if we followed it.
	And I'm just wondering, What your thoughts are on how consequence sensitive we should be when we're formulating our theories.
	Because a lot of libertarians have responded to Humer's book by basically saying that that's very problematic when you move away from non-aggression.
	Does he have like a ticking time bong terrorist kind of thing that he uses as an example?
	Well, he...
	I read his contribution on Cato's website a few months ago, but yeah, it's not ticking time bomb, but sort of situations along those lines.
	If you're familiar with the work of Brian Kaplan, Brian Kaplan says— Oh yeah, he's been on my show.
	Yeah, I was going to say, I think I saw him on there to talk about his book once.
	But he says, you know, it's morally absurd to think that you wouldn't steal a penny to save the world.
	And humor saying, if we agree with that as being true, then from there we can think of other cases which are not as extreme, but that would still justify abandoning the non-aggression principle.
	Sorry, and I mean, I've got an article called The Ethics of Emergency Source.
	I can't remember, that's probably Ayn Rand's article, but the case was put forward, you're hanging from a flagpole, would you not kick in someone's window and break into their...
	Apartments rather than fall to your death and leave a mortally perfect stain on the sidewalk, right?
	But the reality is that ethics doesn't exist like physics does, right?
	Whether Newton defines the law of gravity or not, things fall down, right?
	In fact, if things didn't fall down, we wouldn't be stuck to the planet long enough to evolve into Newton, right?
	So, for me, let's say that it would never be permissible Oh, sorry, it would be completely permissible to steal a penny to save the world, right?
	Right.
	Okay, so let's say someone takes a penny from my coin jar and then can prove to me that they have saved the world, right?
	Who would ever prosecute them?
	Right.
	Like, nobody would ever...
	We'd cheer the guy.
	We'd build statues to the guy.
	People would write love songs to his toenails.
	Because we're all alive and not dead, right?
	Right, right.
	So the issue is, I mean, ethics doesn't kick in.
	Somebody has to be aggrieved and somebody has to bring action and so on, right?
	Some guy kicks in my window rather than fall to his death.
	I'm like, dude, great choice.
	Like, hey, I'd like it if you could fix my window.
	If you can't, that's not the end of the world.
	But damn, I've got a great story now.
	Right, right.
	I'm not going to prosecute the guy.
	But let's say I do prosecute the guy.
	Right.
	For the price, you know, a couple of hundred bucks it takes to fix my window or whatever.
	So he's alive.
	Great.
	You know, has he done something evil?
	No, he broke my property.
	It wasn't my fault he was hanging on there.
	He'll fix the property, right?
	Right.
	He doesn't go to jail for years or anything like that, right?
	So ethics has to be something that people want to act upon.
	And so somebody steals a penny to save the world, not a single human being is going to want to throw that guy in jail.
	But rather it's going to praise him from here to eternity.
	So I don't see how, even if we accept the premise, any of that stuff would kick in.
	Because it's not physics.
	It has to be the choice that somebody is offended and wants to do something to punish someone who has violated a moral standard.
	And if the pluses are so overwhelming and the minus is a penny, who'd bother?
	Right.
	Yeah, I think that is a good point.
	Here's a good situation.
	I don't think he uses it in his book, but I think it is a good example.
	You could imagine a situation where somebody's plane crashes in the desert and they've been lying there for days and they need water or they're going to die.
	And somebody happens to come by with water and they say, and you go, you know, this is wonderful, right?
	I've got my water.
	I'm so happy.
	And they go, what do you mean you've got your water?
	And you go, you have water right there.
	And he goes, why do you assume I'm just going to give it to you?
	And you go, well, I guess, you know, you're not a horrible person.
	And he goes, well, you know, how much money do you have?
	And you go, what do you mean?
	I don't have any money.
	And he says, well, do you have money at home?
	And you go, yeah.
	And he goes, okay, well, if you offer to write me a check for everything you have, I'll give you this bottle of water.
	But otherwise, good luck, pal.
	In that sort of situation, I don't think anybody would feel that it would be morally unjustified.
	I shouldn't say anybody, but I don't think most people would say that that is the sort of situation where you would have a moral obligation to refrain from using force.
	Well, okay, so that's an interesting question.
	Again, it's completely outlandish.
	You go to a restaurant, they'll give you free water or whatever, but okay, let's say it's possible.
	Well, if people would generally find that to be morally abhorrent, then the bank would not honor the check.
	Right, but since we are talking hypothetically, if you're in that situation, or if I'm in that situation, do you think I have a moral obligation not to grab the water from him?
	You mean if you're dying of thirst in a desert?
	Of course you're going to get the water.
	So basically, he's making me an offer, right?
	He's saying, like, you can give me all your money, and you'll get the water.
	But do you think I have a moral obligation to agree to that, since he's basically making me an offer?
	He's not putting a gun to my head.
	No, he's not putting a gun to your head.
	I mean, frankly, I would just...
	Here, here's a check.
	You know, fine.
	I mean, I don't know why I have a check and no water.
	Or whatever, right?
	But...
	But here, give me the water, right?
	And then later I'll just deal with the situation and I'll say, look, this asshole wouldn't even give me a sip of water without charging me a million dollars or whatever it is, right?
	Right.
	And no one would honor that contract.
	Right.
	Did you understand?
	Like nobody would say, oh yeah, that's a valid contract.
	Right?
	Because, I mean, he's being such an asshole.
	Right.
	That there's nobody, no bank, no DRO, nobody would honor that contract.
	In fact, if somebody tried to do that and it was proven, I mean, I think they'd face some really negative repercussions in a free market society.
	Right, but I mean, I guess I just feel like, you know, if we assume for the sake of argument that there would be some bank out there, or your bank, whatever, would be willing to cash that check, to extend the hypothetical further, and you really would be wiped out and you really would have nothing.
	It seems to me that in that situation it would be very reasonable for you to say, look, that's just ridiculous and unacceptable and I'm just going to take the water and I'm going to drink it and I'll never see you again and go to hell.
	Yeah, I have no particular...
	I mean, given that it's going to happen once every 10,000 years, given that no...
	See, no one is going to go out into the desert with a bunch of water hoping to find someone dying of thirst.
	Like, this is so outlandish.
	But, you know, okay, that's the theory.
	I'd, again, punch the guy.
	He's being a dick.
	Right.
	But that would be an exception of some sort, then.
	Well, no, because I would argue that, you know, that he's killing you.
	Well, he's not really killing me, though, in the sense that he's not initiating any force against me.
	He hasn't done anything to me.
	He hasn't made me worse off.
	Well, no, I understand that.
	But you are in a helpless and dependent situation.
	Right.
	Right.
	So let's say somebody is drunk and they climb into my house.
	Right.
	And, you know, they pass out in the basement or whatever it is, right?
	Right.
	And I just got the door locked, right?
	Right.
	And I don't then do anything.
	I don't go and unlock the door.
	I mean, they starve to death in my basement, right?
	Right.
	Now, they've done something.
	They violated my property.
	Aren't I just a little bit of an asshole for not unlocking the door and the guy go out?
	Just a little bit.
	You could say, well, look, the guy, he can't break out of your house because it's violating the sanctity of your property.
	He can't break your door down, right?
	Right.
	And I didn't do anything wrong.
	The guy just went into the wrong house.
	But if I locked the door and let him starve to death in my house, I mean, everybody would be morally repulsed by that.
	Right.
	I think, I would certainly hope so.
	I don't know if, just to expand this a little bit further too, because I think what you just said there was really interesting.
	There's a political philosopher at Georgetown by the name of Jason Brennan, and he's one of the main writers, I don't know if you're familiar with this, the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, or Bleeding Heart Libertarians.
	I think I've heard of it.
	I may have read an article a while back, but I don't know any of it.
	I think it's a really interesting blog.
	He puts forth in one of his posts, he says the difference between a bleeding heart libertarian and, for lack of a better term, an orthodox libertarian, or a hard libertarian, to use his particular terminology, is he says that a bleeding heart libertarian believes that for coercive institutions to be legitimate, they have to be sufficiently to the benefit of all people.
	And he then offers a hypothetical and he says, imagine if we had a Nozickian minimal state or a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist system of social organization.
	And under both of those systems or one of those systems, you had – so basically the whole thought experiment here is free market economics totally fails.
	Your empirical – Libertarian empirical assumptions and beliefs about the way that markets work proved to be totally wrong.
	And you find yourself in a situation basically in which there's mass starvation, you know, the entire everything we believed, everything Hayek said, everything Von Mises said about markets and prices just turned out to be wrong and it's just utter misery under either a libertarian minimal state or a libertarian anarchy.
	He says that A bleeding heart libertarian would look at that and say, this is absolutely immoral, we have to move away from it.
	Whereas an extremely rigorous Rothbardian or Nozickian would say, look, it's really unfortunate that the consequences turned out to be so bad, but we have an absolute moral obligation to respect private property rights.
	And even if that Leads to not only less happiness, but absolute misery.
	Morality demands that we respect property rights.
	So essentially the question is, in that sort of situation, would you not abandon a belief in private property rights in favor of an alternative system?
	Well, that to me is even beyond the bounds of what could be conceivable.
	It's like saying that we build a bridge according to all of the known principles of engineering, and then it turns into a school of piranha when a school bus is crossing it.
	What would you do?
	Because, I mean, to have a system of ethics that is universal, that is rational, that is in accordance with reality, that conforms to self-ownership and owning the effects of your actions, I mean, that's I mean, it's like saying we have a medicine that cures AIDS and it works in 100% of double-blind experiments and it's worked for 20 years, but what if it turns into a deadly virus the next time you use it?
	Right?
	I mean, that's just outside the realm of possibility.
	I can't imagine how...
	Okay, another way of putting it is like saying, okay, let's say we get rid of slavery And the crops all die in the fields, should we bring slavery back?
	Well, no.
	I mean, the fact is the crops were half dying in the fields because of slavery.
	You know, let's say that we stop raping women, but instead woo them.
	And let's say that that makes everyone miserable.
	Well, no, the whole point of rape is that it makes people miserable.
	It certainly makes the victims miserable, right?
	So I can countenance the other one stuff as being, but I can't countenance like If we follow all objective rules of reason, science, evidence, philosophy, and logic, and then get completely insane and irrational results, that to me is bending reality too much.
	That's just saying that rationality can produce irrationality.
	And I just can't see how that could be sustained as a thesis.
	But given the fact that if you look at the last few hundred years of, well, not just Western history but international history, we haven't had We haven't had not only a great many anarchist states, we haven't had any anarchists.
	Well, we've had Somalia, but that's not a fair example.
	So basically, countries like Canada, US, Britain, Australia have had governments for as long as anybody can remember.
	And if we moved away from that, is it really so crazy to suggest that it might not work out well?
	Well, it certainly won't work out well for some people, of course.
	I mean, you know, when you got rid of slavery, all the slave catchers, all the slave transporters, all the people who liked whipping slaves, they hated it.
	You know, because their sadistic evil impulses didn't get their full play.
	Sure, I mean, I get that.
	You know, when you say to women, hey, you can have a divorce without going through an act of parliament, which happened in Canada in the 60s, I think.
	All the asshole husbands who like to beat their wives weren't so happy that their wives got to get out, right?
	Right.
	So, I mean, there's no doubt that for the sadistic and brutal and sociopathic and psychopathic and so on, a free market society is not to their benefit.
	But, you know, not that we'll ever get there if there's still a significant proportion of the population who is that way aligned.
	But, yeah, I've no doubt that, I mean, Barack Obama, how well would he do in a free society?
	Would he have the kind of power and influence that he has now?
	Of course not.
	I mean, does he love that kind of power and influence?
	Yeah.
	I mean, he doesn't have to work a day for the rest of his life.
	He still chooses to do all this nonsense, right?
	So he loves this stuff.
	So certainly for some people, it's going to be a significant negative.
	I mean, you know, you invent the car and all the people who clean up the horse shit on the sidewalk don't have a job, right?
	So I get that creative destruction is going to cause some problems among some people.
	But the idea that if you remove coercion from human society, that somehow things are just going to get disastrous, I mean, that just doesn't make any sense.
	I mean, that really is like making the argument that if you stop raping and start lovemaking, everyone's going to get miserable.
	I guess one of the things that people would point to is...
	Well, let's maybe shift it a little bit into a question of how a purely market...
	Sorry, just before we do that, I had one other thought about the guy with the bottle in the desert.
	Sure.
	Right, so you could take the guy.
	You could go take his bottle and just drink it and say, you know, hey, I'll send you 500 bucks the moment I get home.
	You could do that.
	And he could, and he would be legitimate in saying, this guy stole my stuff.
	Sorry, is this the desert though?
	Yeah, the desert and the water, right?
	So you're dying of thirst, this guy's got a bottle of water.
	So you can go and take this guy and drink it down, right?
	Right.
	And you say, I'll send you 500 bucks the moment I get home.
	Right.
	And he then can go back and say, this guy stole my bottle of water.
	And he can press charges against you.
	Because you have violated property rights.
	I mean, but the reality is that nobody would pursue that.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, I think, okay, so, I mean, obviously we are talking at the level of hypotheticals, but it seems to me that if you choose that situation or the flagpole situation, this is where I get a little bit concerned about the implications of the non-aggression principle and other associated ideas,
	is I feel like If I fell and my hand was on a flagpole and I smashed my way into somebody's apartment and the person who owned that apartment just happened to be a pathologically misanthropic, hateful person, And he said, you know what?
	I would have been fine with you dying so I want $10,000 because it's my property and that was a nice window or whatever.
	And you say in a reasonable free society people wouldn't enforce that but presumably this guy is a billionaire and I violated his property rights and how hard do you think it would be for him to find a bunch of people who would beat the shit out of me because he told them to?
	I guess I just feel like Wait, wait, wait, wait.
	Sorry.
	He's going to hire hitmen now?
	No, he's going to—obviously, in an anarcho-capitalist society, we would have private protection agencies.
	And what would stop him from hiring them or just some thug off the street to beat me up?
	Because he could say— Well, I mean, come on.
	It's reputation.
	I mean, nobody is going to want to deal with a protection company that a rich guy can hire to beat people up.
	Like, everybody would just cancel their contracts immediately, that these people had gone insane.
	Like, nobody would want to deal with that.
	Nobody wants that element in their society.
	No, but I just mean that, basically...
	No, no, hang on, hang on, because I feel like you're jumping past this one.
	This is a pretty important point.
	Nobody wants a protection agency where some rich guy can just pay them to go have people beaten up.
	No, I certainly don't think anybody wants that, but I don't see anything that would prevent our horrible, misanthropic billionaire friend from hiring maybe not one of the protection agencies, but just a bunch of people off the street to beat me up.
	Oh, sure.
	Yeah, of course.
	You can go pay some guys to go beat you up, for sure.
	But that is going to be a violation of his contracts with everyone.
	Right?
	Nobody is going to want private vigilante pay guys to beat people up in society.
	And what that means is, so this rich guy is going to be incredibly dependent upon all of his contracts.
	He's got to have food.
	He's got to have electricity.
	He's got to have water.
	He's got to have some place to put all his billions of dollars.
	He's going to have property all over the place.
	He's going to have a car.
	He's going to have investment accounts all over the place.
	He's going to be incredibly sensitive to contracts, right?
	And the contracts are all going to be dependent on don't hire people to beat people up.
	You know, that's going to be in there somewhere.
	Of course, right?
	Because the whole point is people don't want that kind of vigilante justice.
	They want objective proof.
	They want verification.
	They want maybe a trial by jury or whatever they come up with.
	Who knows how it's going to run in 100 or 200 years.
	But he is going to be so enmeshed and immersed into the necessary contracts to maintain his wealth and standing that nobody is going to...
	Like, if he tried to do something like that, He'd forfeit his bank accounts.
	Nobody would give him food.
	Nobody would deliver electricity to his apartment.
	He'd forfeit his ownership.
	This would all just collapse around him.
	People would want those kind of safeguards, I'm sure.
	I would, anyway.
	That's interesting, because I think if you look at...
	I think you have a very optimistic view of people, and I think that's great in a lot of ways, but...
	Wait, wait, wait.
	This is a characterization, right?
	I'm making an argument.
	What is optimistic about people not wanting random violence in their neighborhood?
	Well, I would just point you to the way that, Stefan, that companies all around the world today invest in some of the most abusive regimes and countries and do terrible things to people.
	And you don't see stockholders going, you know, this company is actually hiring armed thugs to murder villagers who try to start unions.
	So you know what?
	I'm going to divest.
	I mean, I'm sure there are some people who do that.
	Look, I can guarantee you.
	I mean, I've been an entrepreneur.
	I've had investors.
	And I mean, I was in an environmental company and everybody wanted to know the greenness of what it is that we did.
	I don't know.
	I mean, the guy from Abercrombie& Fitch just made fun of fat people and had to go on Facebook to apologize.
	Chicken Filler made some fun of homosexuals and they had to back down and apologize.
	Boycotts and this kind of stuff can just be horrendous on companies.
	And, you know, Apple's going in and reforming stuff.
	But remember, of course, I mean, you know, the whole problem with the Apple factories fundamentally is that you go to jail for 12 years if you even try to start a union.
	It's the local governments that are oppressing the workers.
	Unfortunately, it's just the logic of profit-driven remnants of the free market that there is exploitation in that area, but that's because the brutality is outsourced to the local governments.
	It's not paid for directly by the corporations.
	If the corporations had to pay directly for brutalizing people, it would not be profitable.
	It's only profitable because it's outsourced to the state, right?
	But I think that if the point that you're making is that once people found out companies were doing terrible things or people were doing terrible things, they would not want to be associated with those companies.
	I'm not saying you can't find instances in which that's borne out in reality, but I think you can also find countless instances in which people go, You know what?
	I'm getting my check at the end of the month.
	I'm getting my dividend.
	And you know what?
	If you guys want to murder union organizers, whatever.
	I think people at the end of the day will either...
	Wait, so sorry.
	I just want to make sure.
	So you have a theory or a situation in which somebody is trying to unionize in a company and the company murders I'm just referring to the fact that you have a lot of Western corporations in countries all around the world and when people try to unionize there have been countless instances
	of documented violence where those corporations either collude with the government or hire private Private groups to intimidate, beat up, and sometimes even murder union organizers.
	And you don't see people en masse leaving those companies and saying, I will have nothing to do with this.
	Okay, so is it your argument that private companies could engage thugs to go beat people up?
	And people wouldn't leave those companies.
	Or they may not divest of those companies.
	I just, I think my contention...
	I mean, sorry, but the whole point is that you simply can't compare a status society to a free society.
	Like, you can't say, well, you know, it's like saying, well, you know, the problem is, you see, we can't end slavery because blacks are unmotivated, right?
	You know, there was this mental illness called drapedomania, I think it was, which was, it was considered a mental illness in the 19th.
	Right.
	And it was a slave's irrational desire to escape his slavery.
	It was a mental illness, right?
	You say, well, you see, the slaves, they don't even bother to learn how to read, man.
	They can't do math.
	They just lie around all day.
	They don't do anything unless you prod them and poke them.
	So you turn them loose in the free market and they're just going to lie there and starve to death.
	Right.
	You can't compare a voluntary environment with an involuntary environment.
	And you can't look at, for instance, when it comes to like Labor unions and labor law and government controls and minimum wage and all of the stuff that came out in the 30s to do with giving unions more power, public sector unions and the government control of I mean, you can't compare that to, well, you see, it's going to be like that in a free market but less kind of thing.
	Well, let's take a situation that – and I suppose you could argue that this wouldn't occur in a free market, but I think it'd be a bit of an uphill climb analytically.
	There was a case reported That I was reading about a professor, admittedly certainly a left of center guy, far left of center, but I don't think anybody disputed his facts.
	He had a story up on his blog a while ago about workers at a, I don't know, one of these food manufacturing plants.
	And the company had a policy because the company was concerned about, you know, they wanted to produce as many of whatever they were producing as possible.
	So they told workers that there would be authorized bathroom breaks.
	And, you know, they could go to the bathroom when the company said.
	And in practice, these bathroom breaks were just so ridiculously restrictive that you had people every single day pissing themselves and worse while they were working.
	In the story, the people went and they bought some sort of tissue to deal with that problem.
	It wasn't a tissue, I don't know.
	It was some sort of thing.
	Over time, it proved expensive to purchase this, so they started switching to some even cheaper brand.
	There were cases of the soaked urine and whatever they were using causing infection.
	And eventually, these people sued whatever the name of the plant in question was, and they won the lawsuit, and the government created a set of rules basically creating a situation in which these people were no longer suffering the severe indignity of pissing themselves on the job.
	And I guess, you know, from a libertarian perspective, you know, free markets...
	And where was this?
	In California, I believe, was the state.
	And when was this?
	This was years ago.
	The lawsuit...
	How many years ago?
	I think...
	I'm just curious, like 150, 20?
	No, no.
	This was, I believe, 99.
	1999, okay.
	That the lawsuit was actually launched.
	And I guess...
	And these can't have been legal workers.
	They were legal workers, yeah.
	So legal WASP workers with high school educations and so on, who are standing there pissing their pants rather than get a job at McDonald's.
	Well, I don't think they were WASPs.
	I think they were, you know, a lot of very poor people who were, you know, in need of a job.
	And...
	Were they, I mean, were they...
	I mean, if you could look this up, I'd really appreciate it because I find this quite a stunning story.
	Sure.
	And my spider sense is tingling that there's more to this than meets the eye.
	I mean, I can't imagine that fully legal, documented workers would even remotely stand for something like that.
	I mean, why?
	Especially in the 90s.
	I mean, the 80s and 90s, manufacturing was still doing pretty well in the U.S. I mean, why wouldn't they just get a job somewhere where they could take a piss?
	Right.
	Let me...
	Yeah, check it out if you could.
	I'm happy to wait.
	We can edit this part if we need to.
	Sure.
	It sounds to me like some sort of, you know, and if you try to get another job, I'm going to tell immigration, like there's got to be something here that keeps these people in this unbelievably wretched situation.
	That can't be just regular old workers.
	Okay, so I've got it up here.
	So it's Cory Robin, Laboratory and Liberty is the name of the post.
	And he says, in their 1998 book, Void Where Prohibited, Rest Breaks and the Right to Urinate on Company Time, Mark Linder and Ingrid Nygaard of the University of Iowa trace the long and ennoble history of the struggle for the right to pee on the job.
	In 1995, female employees at an Nabisco plant in Oxnard, California, maker of A1 steak sauce and the world's leading supplier of Grey Poupon mustard, complained in a lawsuit that line supervisors had consistently prevented them from going to the bathroom.
	Instructed to urinate in their clothes or face three-day suspensions for unauthorized expeditions to the toilet, the workers opted for adult diapers.
	But incontinence pads were expensive, so many employees downgraded to Kotex and toilet paper.
	Which poses severe health risks when soaked in urine.
	Indeed, several workers eventually contracted bladder and urinary tract infections.
	Hearing of their plight—and this is great—hearing of their plight, conservative commentator Art Emmett Tyrell advised the workers to wear special diapers used by horses in New York's Central Park carriage trade.
	So, to me, when I hear something like that— Sorry, again, I'm just trying to understand.
	Why wouldn't they quit?
	Well, I'm not aware.
	Because you know the free market answer would be.
	The free market answer is that you give these workers some consideration and they're going to be loyal.
	They're not going to get sick.
	They're not going to hate you.
	They're not going to hate coming to work.
	They, you know, give them some power and control over their own environment and so on, right?
	And you can woo these workers away easy peasy, nice and easy, right?
	I mean, someone's going to come in and give them better working conditions.
	And, you know, thus retain loyalty and retention, because everybody's got to be clawing their way out of this, looking for other jobs as much as humanly possible or whatever.
	Right.
	But I think here, Stefan, I think this is a blind spot for a lot of libertarians, is that, and I'm a big believer in markets, but there is a certain point where people who have very limited skills and don't have a lot to offer in terms of economic value aren't in a great position But that's statism.
	I'm really sorry to interrupt.
	So these are adults, right?
	They're 18 plus years old, right?
	And that means that they've been in the government schools for a decade or more, right?
	So why don't they have any skills?
	Because the government has been systematically stripping them of reason, confidence and skills Since they were about five years old or earlier.
	I take your point.
	I take your point.
	And I think, you know, I'm a big believer in, you know, in expanding the domain of autonomous choice.
	And I think you do that by empowering people, you know, through school choice and other forms of choice.
	And these people would be better off if, you know, government schools weren't the way they are.
	But I do think that, you know, there's a great, rich, beautiful, but often troubling diversity of talent in the world.
	And by troubling, I just mean some people just unfortunately, you know, you give them the best schools, the best tutors, whatever, and they're just not going to be in a position to demand a lot.
	I mean, they're just, well, they're not people who are, you know...
	No, it's okay.
	Look, I mean...
	When Queen reformed for their tour, they didn't ask me to come be their lead singer.
	I'm not the best rock singer in the world, and they wanted somebody else and somebody better.
	So I suck at singing relative to the guy they got, that guy from Free or whatever.
	And some people are just not that smart.
	I get it.
	I took dance in theater school, and I mean, I sucked.
	I was terrible.
	And some people, they just got up there, and they just kind of did it naturally.
	And, you know, maybe they'd done it before or whatever.
	But, I mean, there's a wide variety of talents in a wide variety of things, for sure.
	Right.
	But, you know, at the end of the day, you know, you're not good at dancing school, but you're a smart guy.
	I think you were in computer programming, right, before you did this?
	Yeah, I mean, I started a computer programmer.
	I ended up as a manager, as a business owner.
	And I think, you know, for the vast majority of people, I think a pure free market would work out quite well because they would be in a position to secure some sort of minimally decent life.
	Even if it's not, you know, a huge mansion or whatever, they would do okay.
	But I do worry that in a purely free market with no labor regulations, there would just be some people Who would just have so little to offer and companies really would feel like, you know what, man?
	You know what?
	You don't like it here?
	Go somewhere else.
	You're going to be back here in a week because it's going to be the same.
	And just in my experience, I've worked in a few minimum wage jobs.
	None of them were great.
	I didn't suffer any indignities like these people did.
	But talking to friends, talking to people, there's just lots of cases of people not being treated all that well at work.
	Oh, sure.
	I mean, I got my first job when I was nine.
	I've had a whole series of crappy jobs throughout my teens.
	Oh, yeah.
	And, of course, the problem is that the good managers don't stay at the low-level management positions.
	So it's the people who aren't really good at managing, either because they're new or they just aren't good at it.
	But they have marginally more skills than the workers or at least they're willing to work a little longer.
	The worst managers tend to congregate at the lower end.
	So you have to kind of break through that to get to better managers who might help develop your skills and all that.
	I'm fully, yeah, absolutely.
	I'm completely aware of that, for sure, and I think a lot of people would care about that.
	I mean, do you not worry?
	I just, I feel like, you know, there's, there's, well, I'll give you one example, and I don't know what the laws are elsewhere, but I know that, I know that where I live, and I think this is true of everywhere in Ontario, once you've been working for, it's either four or five hours, by law, you get a break.
	The company gives you a break.
	And the reason that that was introduced is prior to that, people were standing on their feet far longer and not getting breaks.
	And it's just basically because when people's options are constrained by the absence of abilities on their part, it's just not difficult for people who have a lot more power to say, you know what?
	You don't have better options.
	So what are you going to do about it?
	And I think that in certain cases, not many cases, the opposite has happened, but I think in certain cases you've seen the government act in a way through regulation that has improved those people's lives and allowed them to have some sort of, to secure some sort of decency at work.
	And I just feel like...
	Oh, I have no doubt of that.
	Yeah, and there are women who've had...
	Six kids with six different men and the government services they provide make a world of difference to those children.
	No question.
	Absolutely.
	I have no doubt about that whatsoever.
	The government has acted in ways That have benefited people significantly.
	Yeah, but I think the problem with your example there is that you could say, you know what man, you've had six kids.
	You're acting in a way that's reckless and as a result you're having problems.
	Whereas in my example, if somebody is not particularly intelligent, They're going to find themselves, even if they do act responsibly, even if they don't do drugs, they don't go and have sex with a million people and have a bunch of kids as a result.
	They're just honest, hardworking people.
	But if they lack those abilities and are therefore so low-skilled, it doesn't strike me as absurd that they're going to be in a situation where they're going to be just not treated very well because there's just no incentive to give them anything better because they don't They don't produce enough for the company that the company is going to say, okay, we'll give you better conditions.
	Look, I completely accept that.
	I mean, I would never argue against that.
	In a free market society, people of low value may be treated badly.
	I completely get that.
	But I don't understand what that has to do with statism versus freedom.
	Because the reality is...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Sorry, I was just going to say, but you jumped, you said people of low value, and what I would suggest to you is there's people...
	Low economic value.
	Low economic, right.
	Brad Pitt gets his own trailer, the extras don't, right?
	Right, but I guess, from my perspective, I don't have a problem, morally speaking.
	I like the fact that the government has taken actions to ensure that people can secure a minimal standard of welfare.
	We're repeating the same point here, so let's move on to the next point.
	Is that not an important point though?
	No, it's not an important point because the whole point of looking at things holistically is not to look at the benefits to the few.
	Because that's, you know, it's like saying, well, subsidies are really great for people who get subsidies.
	Or, you know, the broken window is really great for the guy who repairs the broken window.
	I get that, but that's not, you know, you're going into a monstrous here, right?
	You've got to go a little deeper, a little wider.
	I can appreciate that, but I think, you know...
	And let me just sort of mention what it is that I mean, and then you can tell me if I'm way off base, right?
	So, if you're going to give a monopoly of violence to people...
	Then, yes, you will get some preferential legislation that will benefit some people in some manner, right?
	But you also get things like people having their skills stripped of them through government schools.
	You also get people getting their asses thrown in jail because of the war on drugs or because they've not complied with any of the 10 billion regulations that infest Like multitudinous flies on the shit of the state, right?
	Or how about wars?
	You don't get people getting their heads and legs blown off because the government has decided to go play Rambo in some foreign country.
	I mean, you could go on and on, right?
	But the idea that you're just going to get these benefits to some workers who have low skills and not get all this other stuff is delusional.
	I don't mean you're delusional.
	I just mean that the argument itself is delusional.
	Because if you're going to have the state and think, well, I'm only going to get this good stuff, which I like, It's like saying, well, I'm going to arm this guy, but he's only going to steal things that I really want and give them to me, and it's not really going to harm anyone.
	Well, no, he's just going to go on a rampage.
	So the guy's going to go and steal a whole bunch of stuff, and the people who replace all that stuff are going to be happy, but the fact is he's going on a rampage.
	So you're not going to get these little things that you like from the state without, say, for instance, national debts, Selling off the unborn or manipulations of interest rates or massive collapses in housing values or the massive dumbing down of the general population or control of the interest rates or inflation which robs the poor more than any capitalist could ever do.
	You're just not going to get these little tidy nice things that you want without this massive thunder ball of crap.
	No, I think that's a powerful point.
	I think a lot of people on the left make the error of thinking you give the government power and it's just going to use it for good.
	That is empirically shown to be quite false.
	I feel like the problem with a lot of libertarians is that – and again, I don't want to caricature libertarians, but by and large, middle class, upper middle class folks, and it's very easy to talk about – You know,
	free markets when you're living a good life, but when people are at the very bottom and they're struggling and they're just being treated like subhuman crap every day at work, and in that situation, I feel like if, you know, the government intervenes, because we have government right now, right?
	So we're not getting rid of it.
	So it's not like, get rid of these regulations and lose everything else and on net we benefit.
	We have government right now.
	I feel like Those people to me, when I go to places and I see, and just overhearing the way bosses talk to people who don't have many options, I feel like it's just way too easy for libertarians to go, ah, you know, like some people win, some people lose, when you're not the one losing.
	Well, particularly academics who can't be fired.
	I don't usually wave around my working class hero credentials, but I mean, you know, I come from a broadcast single I'm a parent household in the middle of a ghetto, basically.
	And I've been busting my ass since I was nine to build...
	So, I mean, I know I have some good abilities and all that, but that came about not just...
	I wasn't born with them.
	You develop these things.
	You work at these things.
	And so, I mean, I don't like to wave that stuff around because it's not statistically relevant, right?
	I mean, but, yeah, I don't want to be put in the category of the guys who, you know, born with a silver spoon in the mouth who say...
	Capitalism is easy.
	Look at the factories I inherited.
	They're not tough to manage.
	I do get that you can make significant changes and so on.
	For me, the people who want workers treated better, it's not that hard.
	If you care about it, start a company that treats them better.
	Only invest in companies that treat them better and make the case to other people that they should be treated better or only buy from companies that have a good housekeeping, we treat our workers well and don't make them pee in their shoes kind of stuff, right?
	If there's a demand for workers being treated well, then the free market will provide a way for people to satisfy that demand.
	And if there isn't, then a democracy isn't going to help anyway because nobody's going to vote for it.
	Yeah, I think that's the reason I said you were optimistic earlier.
	It's not that people are bad people and they don't care that workers are being treated badly, but I just think we're so immersed in our own lives.
	And I just think, Stefan, that when you say you could have labels saying that this is an environment, this is this, this is that, I think at the end of the day, a lot of people want The cheapest product.
	And, you know, that's what they care about because they're immersed in their own lunch.
	Okay, but sorry, but okay, so let's say that people don't care that much about, let's say you're right, people don't care that much about how other people are treated and they just want to get through their day and do their own thing.
	Well, that's the biggest argument against the state that I can think of.
	Because the state is then going to continue to encroach upon them, and they're not going to lift a finger because they're so busy with their own lives.
	No, I mean, it is a good argument.
	It is a good argument.
	All I'm trying to say is that I think that a lot of libertarians have too rosy a view of how things would work out.
	Don't give me the utopia thing.
	Come on.
	No, no.
	You can't give me the utopia thing.
	You can't tell me that there's no difference between daytime and nighttime because there's sunspots.
	Of course there are going to be problems in a free society.
	People are going to fall down wells, people are going to stub their toes, and people are going to get treated like crap.
	Of course!
	But what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
	That's like saying, well, some people, if we end slavery, some of the slaves might not get great jobs.
	But the whole moral thing, right?
	It's a moral thing.
	Slavery is immoral.
	The initiation of force is immoral.
	Centralized coercion is immoral and destructive.
	And the destructive part, who cares about?
	I mean, we're all trying to theorize.
	Basically, we're trying to theorize what computers are going to look like in 150 years.
	I mean, it's a fun thing to chat about, but it doesn't mean anything.
	We don't even know what the price of gold is going to be tomorrow.
	I mean, if we did, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
	We'd be frantically phoning people to buy or sell gold, right?
	No, and I think the libertarian critique, whether it comes from Hayek who believed we needed some government or whether it comes from people like yourself who believe we should just do away with the whole thing altogether, is a powerful critique.
	I think central planning has proved to be a failure in so many ways.
	All I'm saying is I think an honest discussion of these things, of these topics, has to begin with an acknowledgement that libertarians often are very uncomfortable acknowledging that for some people, and innocent people,
	and this is what you could say, well, yeah, for the company that loses its subsidy, but I just mean innocent people who aren't super talented, who aren't super intelligent, In what you call a free society, a society without any labor regulations, I think those people...
	No, no, no.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	What do you mean a society without any labor regulations?
	Because regulation is one of these words that sounds kind of nice.
	It's like government or governance.
	I mean, there are labor regulations in that all the capitalists are competing for the skill sets of the workers.
	And so there is an upward pressure To provide more of what the workers want, subject to the laws of supply and demand, right?
	So there are later regulations, to be clear about that, right?
	No, no.
	People say unregulated, like suddenly up is down, black is white, physics reverse themselves, the sun turns into obsidian or whatever, right?
	I mean, there is still regulations on The part of the workers and that's actually a really good econ talk which you might want to look up from a couple of years ago about a guy who went to work at Walmart for a couple of months as a reporter to sort of figure out why these people were there and what they were doing and so on.
	They were all perfectly aware of what the benefits were and what the costs were and Walmart paid for them to upgrade their skills and they were really interested in Walmart.
	Walmart really wanted them.
	In fact, they paid them.
	They didn't even have to punch out.
	They just paid They would pay them to go and take these little computer questionnaires and quizzes to learn more about Walmart and they could set up their own little local sales and they were really trying to encourage them to do all of this funky stuff to up their profits and so on.
	And it's a really interesting article to look at just in terms of somebody going in thinking that these people are exploited and then finding out that this is just the life that they prefer.
	They work to live.
	I do my eight hours and then I go and have my fun.
	They didn't really care about their careers or anything like that.
	That's just the way they are.
	It's what they want.
	There's nothing wrong with it.
	Maybe it wouldn't be my choice, but it certainly is fine for a lot of people.
	But the idea that there's either regulation which is coercive Or everything is chaos.
	As you know, I mean, it's a false dichotomy, right?
	Do you believe, though, Stefan, that when you look at corporate, you know, what corporations do around the world, do you not, even in cases in which the government isn't involved in rigging the game, do you not see instances of exploitation?
	I mean, I don't know what you mean by exploitation.
	I mean, it's like saying, you know, when you look at slave trading in the 17th century, aren't you really concerned that the free market isn't working?
	No, what I'm suggesting to you is that there's...
	I think the article I just read is a good example of exploitation.
	I'll look more into this because I remain really skeptical that this was all documented legal workers, that there was no government interference or whatever it is.
	Because, you know, one phone call to the Labour Relations Board and these guys would all go to jail.
	I mean, it just seems to me like not a very believable story, even given the sort of existing...
	Well, no, because prior to the lawsuit being launched, there was no laws on the books saying that you had to give employees reasonable...
	Basically, what the company was doing in terms of its ridiculously restrictive laws concerning those things, there was no laws against that.
	So they could do it under the law.
	Again, I mean, and I say this not due to any malfeasance on your part, I've just had some serious conversations where I remember with Sam Seder, what if he brought up the Cayuga River was on fire and that's the free market, and it's like, no, no, no, it all turned out to be government.
	So, I mean, I just, I don't know enough, I can't answer it, I can't answer it at all, but I'm just, I remain skeptical, and that doesn't mean that you're wrong or that you're completely right.
	Just every time I hear about these nefarious tales, like, you know, this, this, this, This factory that collapsed in Asia recently, it's all government crap and the government wants them to do all this stuff.
	Every time you hear about this free market stuff, you lift the lid and it's like state cockroaches are swarming all over the place.
	Again, I'll look into it a little bit more, maybe put something at the end of the show.
	I guess all I'm saying is I just feel that there's a lot of libertarians who basically – and there's left libertarians, people like Roderick Long and others, if you're probably somewhat familiar with.
	Rod Long?
	He's got the best libertarian porn name of any country I've ever seen.
	He really does.
	Until Dickens get his tenure, you know.
	Anyway, go on.
	But he's just basically been saying that he thinks there are cases where companies treat workers badly and libertarians are just a little too quick to apologize for that.
	And he's basically saying that libertarians should take the concept of worker exploitation seriously and not just dismiss it as a sort of Marxist invention.
	Well, okay, but let me give you, if you don't mind, just a minute or two on my solution to worker exploitation.
	Okay, so in my, and I think it's not just mine, but we'll just call it mine for the moment, in my sort of ideal future, right, how do we get to a free society?
	Well, we get to a free society by practicing the non-aggression principle as consistently as humanly possible in the sphere of influence that we have in the world, right?
	Okay.
	Bottle of water in the desert.
	It's fun to think about, but, you know, for instance, spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	And 70, 80, 90 percent of parents around the world are still spanking their children.
	In fact, two-thirds of American moms still hit their children three or more times a week when their children are six and under.
	Eighty percent of British moms still hit their children before their children are even one year old, which can't be considered discipline in any way, shape, or form, even if you twist the concept to permit it.
	So, we have a massive series of violent assaults upon children, where children under six years old, the vast majority of them are getting hit 150 times a year at least.
	Hit!
	Right?
	So, do we not think that being hit 150 times a year, you know, over a decade that's being hit 1,500 times, that this is going to have an effect on human development, and one's capacity to stand up to authority, and one's capacity to question authority, and one's capacity to be independent?
	Of course, you're just brutalized, right?
	So in my ideal, right, you say, well, yes, the initiation of force is immoral.
	Do I care in particular about people hanging from flagpoles?
	No, because there's people hitting their kids all over the world all the time.
	It's this constant thunderclap of hands on tender little bodies, right?
	So if, for instance, we stop hitting our children, that's something that we can do, and I've been pushing the libertarian community literally for years, very uncomfortably, I and my dad, on the receiving end, in this position, to say, let's stop talking about all this abstract stuff, and let's start talking about what we can do in our own lives to enact the non-aggression principle in the area where it is most violated.
	I mean, most of us aren't out there getting into fistfights with random strangers, But still, I would imagine the majority of libertarian parents are still spanking.
	Statistically, that would be the case.
	In which case, let's actually live our goddamn values and stop hitting our children, at least, and stop yelling at them, and maybe stop putting them in public schools and so on.
	So in the future, in terms of worker exploitation, children who are hit have significant developmental delays.
	They lose IQ points.
	They lose social skills.
	They get either passive or aggressive.
	Either one is not good for getting into any kind of productive economic situation.
	So even if we could simply stop hitting our children, the amount of human capital that they would retain out of that piece would raise the value of them multiple times.
	Multiple times.
	And I'm not even talking about the other things that happen to children on a ridiculously repetitive basis.
	Being abandoned, like being neglected, like being yelled at, or verbally abused, or physically or sexually abused, even if we go beyond spanking, right?
	So if we treat children well, then if we negotiate with them, like I'm a stay-at-home dad, my daughter's four and a half, we've been negotiating for like three years.
	And so by the time she gets to be 18, she will never have been aggressed against, nobody ever raised a voice to her, and she will have had thousands and thousands of hours Of negotiating experience.
	How is that going to serve her in the marketplace?
	Well, it's going to serve her hugely well, as if I'd just been drinking beer, scratching my belly, and hitting her on the head whenever she just...
	How would that factor into?
	Like, the capitalists can only exploit the workers because the parents have abused the children.
	And to think that we can solve it somehow by yelling at the capitalists, I think it's a fine idea, and maybe we can do it with a few, but the reality is we really need to start dealing with the parenting if we want to raise The human capital that the kids have.
	And this is not even, and so let's say that the kids don't get hit, don't get yelled at, don't get told they're stupid, or don't get told that they're idiots, or don't get told that they're clumsy, or don't get told that they're bad all the time, don't get told that they're born evil and they're going to go to hell unless they lick the blood of Jesus or whatever the hell they do.
	Right.
	Let's say that we don't do any of that to kids.
	I think that's great.
	Let's say that in a future free society, children either self-educate, right?
	There's a guy who set up a A set of computers in India facing a street.
	They were just little touch tablets.
	And the kids, they couldn't even read these kids.
	And they figured out these computers in about three days.
	They delivered boxes of computers to remote African villages where people had never seen English before.
	They were solar-powered computers.
	There were no instruction manuals at all.
	And that wouldn't have helped them even if they did.
	And within a couple of days, these kids were downloading apps.
	They were sending emails.
	They were learning how to write.
	They learned how to draw.
	And within a month or two, they had routed the operating systems to bypass restrictions that they'd built into these things.
	They were designing their own applications.
	I mean, the amount of things that kids can figure out for themselves is astounding, right?
	Of course, we lock them into these stupid ass sardine brain-mashing school tunnels and watch their brains rot from on high.
	So if kids are not aggressed against and kids are actually allowed to learn and create and school, however that is, I don't know if it's self-education or collective education, if they're allowed to, as Dr.
	Peter Gray has written recently, he was on my show, mingle in terms of age so that they can get more mentoring from other kids slightly older and also get to mentor kids who are younger.
	The amount of human capital that will come out of childhood, then, will be almost impossible to exploit.
	They won't have any fear of authority.
	They'll be really good at negotiating.
	They'll have had tons of mentoring experience, so they'll know what a good boss looks like.
	That, to me, is how we solve the problem of worker exploitation.
	Running to the state is simply putting a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound.
	All right, end of rant.
	No, I mean, I think that was excellent.
	And I agree with you.
	I think a lot of the reflexive acceptance of what the state does, you know, I've had a lot of people tell me, you know, I don't use any drugs, but I've defended the right of people to do so.
	And they'll go, well, that's against the law.
	Why does that matter?
	Because it's the law.
	What is the relevance of that?
	You would make a fine German in 1930.
	Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, and I don't even think that's hyperbole at all.
	I mean, because really, that's the essence, you know, the essence of the attitudes that led to the regime, is, you know, this idea that we just, you know, we respect whatever the state tells us to do, no matter what.
	Well, why do we allow the state to be so hypocritical?
	Because our parents will hit us saying, don't hit people.
	Or our parents will say, do as I say, not as I do.
	And then when the government breaks its own rules, we don't even notice it because that's how we've been conditioned.
	Yeah, no, I think that's a really important point.
	And I think, you know, certainly keep making it.
	Why don't we end with the lightning round, and you can be Stephan Molyneux, the politician running for office.
	All right, let's speak quick.
	I'm actually out for a stroll, and I'm getting a little chilly, but let's do a few.
	Okay, let's do a few.
	So, child labor, one of the favorite objections to anarchist society.
	What would prevent parents from forcing their kids to do child labor?
	What would prevent parents from forcing their children to do child labor?
	The fact that in a free market society, the economy is so advanced that children are not even going to be remotely productive enough to hire.
	Okay, we've got that one checked off the list.
	These are actually questions people wanted me to ask you.
	There's a historical precedent for that, right?
	The moment that in the Industrial Revolution, The moment that parents could start pulling their kids out of work, they tried to as quickly as possible and get them into school.
	The government trailed after that with legislation.
	Once you have great robots and kids, what the hell are they going to do?
	They're not going to be productive.
	Related question to that is, how would a libertarian anarchist society ensure that parents treat their kids well?
	So basically, what if there were parents who didn't want to educate their kids and just kind of kept them at home and mistreated them, how would that be addressed?
	Well, if parents didn't want to educate their children, But they were sort of part of society?
	Right.
	Well, you know, ideally, of course, parents are responsible for the costs that their children occur in society, right?
	I mean, if I have a dog and I beat my dog and my dog goes and bites someone, I'm liable, right?
	Right.
	So if my children grow up feral and they go break people's property, set fire to things, then I'm going to be liable.
	Right.
	So it will be in people's interests to have their children raised well, because that's economically efficient, to have them raised well, again, outside the sort of moral considerations which we're not dealing with because you've got asshole parents on the radar here.
	So, sorry, when you're born, right, I mean, you know, I would imagine there would be some kind of kid insurance, right?
	I mean, insurance for things that your kids do that would be problematic, right?
	They go and stab some neighbor's kitten or whatever, and you don't End up going to jail for that because somebody else will pay your costs.
	But in order to keep your insurance costs low, you would have to parent reasonably well, right?
	In the same way that if you want to keep your car insurance costs low, you have to drive reasonably well.
	And if you take a driving course, you get lower insurance costs.
	So, you know, there's going to be economically productive and positive and peaceful ways to parent which are going to be encouraged by a system of insurance for what your children do.
	That would be my particular guess.
	Would people slip through the CACs?
	Oh, yeah, absolutely, for sure.
	But we wouldn't have an entire cluster of ghettos and armies like we do now.
	Nuclear weapons.
	Do nuclear weapons have to disappear before we can have anarchy?
	And if not, how do we transition from government possession of nuclear weapons to private possession or no possession or what have you?
	Well, if the...
	I'm reading this audiobook by Lloyd DeMoss, which is available at freedommainradio.com called The Origins of War in Child Abuse, which I'm sure you can guess what the content is from the title.
	If children are treated well, war is not going to happen.
	I mean, if children are treated well and there's no government, war is impossible.
	I mean, psychologically, economically, morally, it's not going to happen.
	So, but of course, you know, not everyone's going to develop the whole, not all societies will develop at the same time, same rate and all that kind of stuff.
	I don't think that nuclear weapons have to disappear.
	They can't.
	I mean, you can't ring the bell.
	You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.
	I think nuclear weapons are incredibly efficient.
	I am absolutely certain that without nuclear weapons, we already would have had a World War III, which would have been even more brutal if there had only been conventional weapons than World War II, right?
	It would have been between the Chinese and NATO or Russia and NATO or America and China or something like that.
	Right.
	So the fact that we've had nuclear weapons has brought, you know, what?
	70-plus years of significant peace to Europe for the first time in thousands and thousands of years, right?
	What about restrictions?
	See, I told you I was out for a walk.
	That's a motorbike ride.
	I don't have any particular hostility to nuclear weapons.
	I think that they have done some real good in the world.
	The mutually assured destruction, you know, the fact that the leaders can get blown up along with the followers meant that a lot of leaders have magically found their inner peacemakers, right?
	Right.
	Do you have any concern about private groups with fanatical agendas seeking nuclear weaponry or other less devastating but still quite devastating weaponry with nobody to stop them?
	Or would there be, in an anarchist society, would groups be justified in preventing certain people preemptively from acquiring certain weaponry?
	I would certainly want to live in a society where Precautions were taken against nutjobs getting nukes?
	Sure.
	Absolutely.
	And I would be happy to kick in some funding for that given that if nutjobs did get nukes in my whole house and neighborhood and county got vaporized, my property wouldn't do me much good at all.
	Are we justified in taking preemptive action to prevent them from getting nukes?
	You mean like some cult wants to get a nukes kind of thing?
	Oh yeah, I've no doubt.
	I mean, anybody who had nuclear technology, I would want them to be very tightly regulated and controlled.
	And that would happen through, you know, everybody would want that, right?
	So anybody, let's say that there was some defense agency that wanted to use nuclear weapons as the cheapest way of defending against an attack.
	And I don't even think it's worth invading an anarchist country because the reason you invade a country is to take over its tax system, right?
	I mean, that's the farm that you're taking over.
	And so in an anarchic system, There's no tax system to come in and take over.
	When the Nazis in May of 1940, they went and invaded France, why did they do that?
	Well, to get the weapons, but mostly to take over the tax system.
	There's no tax system in a free market system, so there's not really much to take over.
	But let's say that somebody wanted to, and Bob's defense agency said nukes is the cheapest way to do it.
	Well, great, and maybe it is.
	But I sure as hell would want to make sure that they never abused their nukes and that they never, ever Let anyone else get a hold of them or whatever and so on.
	So I would want some sort of guarantee from them that they would take every reasonable precaution about that and there'd be lots of entrepreneurs trying to figure out the best way to show people how that would work and how that could happen and the smartest and best solution would win and the usual.
	Stefan, it was a great pleasure speaking with you.
	It's been really fun.
	I think this is going to be great when I go to sit and write some of this stuff down because I think I think you're provoking debate and that is always good and doing so in a civil way.
	There's so much mudslinging online and so on and so forth.
	I've never heard of that.
	What is this mudslinging in which you speak?
	Maybe I have one time.
	No, and look, with all due respect as well, I really appreciate you bringing up the workers.
	There are a fair amount of...
	Fat whitey libertarian guys who can't almost imagine why anybody would have trouble in the free market.
	And there are a lot of broken souls out there that are exploited by people, I think primarily for psychological more than economic reasons.
	But you've got to be a pretty cold ass sadist to make people pee their pants for a few extra widgets.
	That's not even economically fundamental, that's just being a complete sadist I think.
	But it is important to remind us all of these people because, you know, we don't want a society where people are getting bladder infections because they can't go to the washroom.
	That sucks.
	It's funny that you say that because I've brought this example up with many libertarians and they just told me that, you know, the people would be worse off otherwise and the company didn't do anything wrong.
	No, I would, you know, I would not.
	I mean, you could...
	There is something wrong with making people pee their pants.
	Whether you throw people, I don't know.
	But that is not good.
	That is not how people should be getting up and going to work.
	It's painful.
	We've all had those experiences.
	I remember being on some small ass plane with no bathroom for two and a half hours after having some ridiculous big gulp monstrosity of a drink.
	It's really not comfortable at all.
	And you don't want people to have to go through that every day.
	That's monstrous.
	And so, no, I'm with you as far as that goes.
	I mean, it is important to work as hard as we can to try and find ways that these situations don't happen.
	And just to sort of look at people like they're just some sort of, you know, those inside each other Russian dolls, just interchangeable and so on.
	No, these are people with real hearts and minds and bladders and all that.
	I mean, they're real human beings.
	You know, try getting a bunch of college professors to not take a bathroom break for six hours and see how well they do, right?
	I mean, they'd be pretty outraged.
	Yeah, and I guess, you know, for me, I became a libertarian because, you know, I just, you know, I read Kant and just the idea of people as ends in themselves, I mean, to me, If you truly believe in that idea, I think broadly libertarian conclusions flow from that idea.
	You and I might disagree on the precise ordering of the institutional arrangements that would best promote the realization of that value, but I think we both certainly agree on the idea of the supremacy of the individual.
	Yeah, and the great thing about freedom, of course, is that we can't disagree, and both Explore those options.
	In the state of society, it's kind of binary, right?
	Right.
	But the multiplicity of solutions, you know, if I have a better idea or you have a better idea, we can both take it to the marketplace and see how many people we can convince of that.
	And that continual experimentation.
	I've just, you know, what breaks my heart about the state is the greed which just ends the necessary experimentation about optimal social solutions.
	It just, you know, everything gets stuck in like a flying amber.
	It just gets stuck in time, you know, which is why schools look about the same as they did 140 years ago.
	I mean, it's brutal.
	Yeah, it really is.
	Well, it's been great agreeing and disagreeing with you.
	And, you know, thanks so much for taking the time.
	I'm really happy we got a chance to do this.
	My pleasure.
	Yeah, thanks for the great questions and a really, really enjoyable conversation.
	You had me sweating.
	Well, you were walking, so I don't think that was all me.
	But yeah, thanks so much and I will continue to follow your writings and your YouTube videos.
	Always gets me thinking, whether I'm saying I have disagreements here and I would contest this, this and this, but I'm always stimulated.
	I'm always thinking and to me that is the mark of great philosophy.
	So thanks so much.
	Thank you so much and best of luck with your masters.
	Alright, I'm sure we'll talk sometime in the future.
	You bet.
	Take care.

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