All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 14, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:10:45
2483 Questions You Should Ask Hypocritical Libertarians - Rebutted!

Libertarians have a problem. An endless slew of terribly written articles slandering them with baseless and vicious assertions. Stefan Molyneux dissects "11 Questions You Should Ask Libertarians to See if They're Hypocrites" by RJ Eskow.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, it's Evan Molyne from Freedomain Radio.
Let's play another game of Spot Fallacies.
This is an article entitled 11 Questions You Should Ask Libertarians To See If They're Hypocrites.
We aren't suggesting every libertarian is a hypocrite, but there's an easy way to find out.
Let's see what they've got to say.
This is from Alternet by RJ Eskow.
Libertarians Well, there's a poisoning the well kind of statement, isn't it?
Billionaires and corporations.
Let's see now.
How popular are billionaires and corporations?
I would imagine, for most people, not entirely popular.
So, saying that libertarianism has been revived by billionaires and corporations for political utility immediately puts a negative slant on libertarianism.
He goes on to say, and yet libertarianism retains the qualities that led to its disappearance from the public stage before its reanimation, zombie words, by people like the Koch brothers.
It doesn't make any sense.
Libertarianism doesn't make any sense.
Well, they call themselves realists, but rely on fanciful theories that have never predicted real-world behavior.
Fanciful.
So I guess if you put the word fanciful in front of the word theories, then you've disproved that.
Wow.
So two and two make four is fanciful.
Wow, this is easy.
The world is round.
That's a fanciful theory.
Wow, that word has some real power.
God, I wish I knew how to do this before spending 30,000 hours studying philosophy.
I just needed to learn the word fanciful.
Really never predicted real world behavior.
Let's see, so back in the 1940s and early 1950s when Ayn Rand was writing Atlas Shrugged, she predicted that the welfare state was going to grow, she predicted that science was going to get corrupted by government, she predicted that the military-industrial complex was going to invent wars, and she predicted that North America would be a bit of a holdout But Mexico, South America, and Europe would go first, kind of in that order.
How did she do?
Well, the welfare state did grow, corrupted the lower classes, trapped them in poverty.
Mexico, South America, and Europe kind of went in sequence.
South America a little first sometimes.
And America is kind of holding out.
North America...
So actually not bad as far as predictions.
Peter Schiff...
Let's see, did he ever have anything to say about the housing crisis based upon his Austrian economic analysis of the Federal Reserve money printing extravaganza?
Hmm.
Let's see, I wonder if Murray Rothbard or Hayek, the road to serfdom, was there any idea that becoming dependent upon government bit by bit would end up with the government becoming more and more tyrannical and beginning to become obsessively concerned with tracking its own citizens?
You know, I think he's right.
I don't know if I can find any way in which libertarian theories have ever predicted, oh, what about Bastiat?
What, 18th century?
Frédéric Bastiat.
Well, he said that when government got more and more power, people would get more and more interested in bribing government officials.
No, no, no, never mind.
Okay, it's way off.
Okay, I'll accept that.
They claim that selfishness makes things better for everybody, when history shows exactly the opposite is true.
No!
So not only should we learn the word fanciful to discredit a theory, but the two phrase, history shows.
Ooh, isn't that great?
History shows.
So if you can say history shows the exact opposite of what you say, you don't actually have to cite any historical examples.
Why?
Because history shows.
You know, if I'm flashing you my penis, you don't need to look at a picture of another penis, because you've already got one hanging there right in front of your eyes.
So history shows.
You don't need to look it up, don't need to cite any example, because it shows.
You see, it shows.
And of course, this idea that objectivism and...
Libertarianism, that they have anything to do with selfishness fundamentally.
I know, I know Ayn Rand wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness.
But the idea that it's somehow founded philosophically on selfishness is...
It's not entirely invalid.
Acting for the benefit of oneself when oneself includes those that you love.
Acting selfishly in a business means pleasing your customers.
Acting selfishly to keep your wife means making your wife happy.
Acting selfishly to want to be thought a good dad means treating your children well.
For me, acting selfishly to give you quality conversations is important to me.
This is why I'm now doing two call-in shows a week, because we were getting two booked for one, and I love talking to the listeners.
It's a selfish pleasure of mine to talk to you and to make these videos.
The fact that I can make a couple of coins doing so, fdrurl.com forward slash donate, if you would like to add to one or two of those coins, is great.
I mean, so the idea that we should give up That which makes us happy, the idea that we should do that which makes us unhappy, is kind of a fundamental philosophy of a religion and of Kantian ethics and so on.
It's not unimportant.
It was not an unimportant trial to take on.
But the idea that they just used the word selfishness in its pejorative way, i.e.
the sacrifice of other people to your own greedy needs, like a thief is selfish, like a murderer is selfish, like a rapist is selfish in its pursuit of sexual pleasure.
The redefinition of the word selfishness in the objectivist camp was very specific and very grounded, but to use the word selfish in its common coinage without pointing out that objectivists have a very different definition than the usual use of the word, it's just lazy and false.
But anyway, this is quite common.
They, i.e.
libertarians, claim that a mythical free market, oh my god, the word mythical!
Fanciful?
History shows mythical.
So much easier than actually analyzing an argument, don't you think so?
They claim that a mythical, oh, and scare quotes, free market is better at everything than the government is.
Yet, when they really need government protection, they're the first to clamor for it.
So, a mythical free market is better at everything than the government is.
Well, no, I don't think that there's any libertarian or voluntarist or anarchist or freethinker or economist who says that the free market is better at everything than the government is.
The free market is really not better at war.
It's really not better at starting and maintaining wars than the See, one of the ways that the government is able to start and maintain wars is by forcing you to use their currency, right?
If there were five or ten different competing currencies, With an exchange place that would exchange them all for you so it would be transparent.
If there were five or six different currencies or ten different currencies and the currency A said, well, we're going to start a war, so we're going to have to print a whole bunch of money and devalue everything, everyone would just move out of that currency immediately.
The fact that you're forced to pay your government bills in a certain currency and you're forced to declare your income in a certain currency and you're forced to pay taxes and so on in that currency means you're forced to use it.
Because you're forced to use it, devaluing it.
is not really a big concern for the government, whereas it would be if it was a private currency.
So, the government is really good at national debts.
You can't have national debts from the free market, right?
I mean, because in a free market, the debts that you incur are signed with your signature, and you can't sign, say, I'm not even a fetus yet, X, and therefore borrow money on the future productivity of those who are yet to be a twinkle in their daddy's eyes.
So it's not really very good at national debt.
It's not really very good at war.
It's not very good, really, at forced income redistribution.
Walmart generally doesn't have a whole host of armed guards roaming around the country taking money from people at gunpoint.
So there's lots of things that the government is much better at than the free market.
They just happen to all be evil!
So the government is better at evil than the free market.
Let's see.
There is no reason not to work with them on areas where they're in agreement with people like me.
Okay, in fact the unconventionality of their thought has led libertarians to be among the nation's most forthright and outspoken advocates for civil liberties and against military interventions.
Wow, isn't that interesting?
So being for civil liberties and against military interventions is now called unconventional, radical unconventional thought.
Civil liberties So, in that way, the founding fathers, who were very for civil liberties and very against military entanglements, or what they called foreign entanglements, they would be radical and unconventional.
All right?
All right.
So, Merriam-Webster defines hypocrisy...
As feigning to be what one is not, or to believe what one does not.
Wow, look, we have a definition!
But it's not a definition of libertarianism, it's not a definition of the free market, which is simply trade without violence.
But now we have a definition.
Well, that's great!
So, the one word that people are most likely to know is the word hypocrisy.
The one word which they're going to be, there's several words they're going to be confused about, old phrases, free market, selfishness, libertarian, and all of that.
No definitions.
Alright, so there's an easy way to find out.
There's a kind of libertarianism that's nothing more or less than a strain in the American psyche, an emotional tendency towards individualism and personal liberty.
A strain in the American psyche?
What is he making a soup?
An emotional tendency towards individualism and personal liberty.
Oh, okay, okay, so the mountains are very complex statistical and rational and historical and political arguments in favor, the praxeological arguments in favor of the non-initiation of force, which is fundamentally what libertarianism is about.
Thou shalt not initiate force and the corollary, which is thou shalt respect property, and there is only private property, there's no other kind of property.
Like, nobody collectively owns your kidney.
It's just your kidney.
And nobody has the right to take your kidney from you, even if somebody else has no kidneys.
And you have, too, that can't drug you and take it out with a Sheriff of Nottingham-style rusty spoon.
So we all understand that, but this is all libertarianism is.
It just says that basically your money...
Kind of on the same status as your organs, right?
I mean, if you want to give a kidney to someone you love, or even someone you hate for that matter, you're welcome to do so.
But nobody can force that kidney out of your body.
They can't cut you open, they can't chloroform you, they can't dump you in a toilet cubicle after doing so.
That's immoral.
But it's your choice to do with your kidneys as you want.
Your kidneys are your property.
You grow them, you feed them, you water them, you exercise them, you keep them hydrated.
And that's your property.
And you can dispose of it as you will.
And the same thing is true of the money that you earn through labor, through charity, through whatever it is.
However you get the money, other than theft and deceit and so on, well, it's your money.
It's the same way as your kidney.
That's all it's about.
Non-initiation of forced respect for property.
So all of these stacks of books that go around explaining all of this and getting people to understand all of this, really, you can open up all these books and they just say, I have an emotional tendency towards individualism and personal liberty.
It's an emotional tendency.
There's no arguments.
There's no facts.
There's no principles.
It's just an emotional tendency like, I like Chinese opera or jazz or ice cream or rubbing myself naked up against a Chewbacca costume.
Only one of those is a personal one.
He says that's fine and even admirable.
Well, how nice he admires emotional tendencies.
We're talking about the other libertarianism, the political philosophy, whose avatar is the late writer Ayn Rand.
It was once thought that this extreme brand of, oh, let's add that to the pile, history shows And now we have extreme brand of libertarianism.
A brand is one of these words like it's a marketing word and also how you mark your cattle.
So again, two negative connotations.
One that celebrates greed and even brutality.
It was once thought that this extreme brand of libertarianism, one that celebrates greed and even brutality, celebrates greed.
I'm not sure what that means.
See, if you produce something, you know, like I make this particular show and I put it out there into the world, how is that a manifestation of greed?
I'm not eating too much.
I'm not stealing from somebody else.
I've paid for all the equipment through your kind donations and all the books that I read and all the education that I pursue is all paid for.
Honestly, I haven't stolen anything.
So how is that a manifestation of greed compared to, say, offering public sector unions massive benefits and pensions and health care 20 years from now in return for their votes in the here and now?
Isn't that kind of stealing from those who aren't even born yet?
Stealing from children who can't even vote yet in order to bribe bullies in the here and now?
See, that to me would be a manifestation of greed.
I want political power and I'm willing to sell off the unborn to get it.
Production and trade?
I don't really know.
Basically, it's saying lovemaking is brutal.
With no mention of the word rape.
Now, rape is brutal.
Lovemaking is not.
Lovemaking is greedy.
No, no.
Rape is greedy because you're selfishly taking pleasure at the traumatic and life-altering expense of somebody else's happiness and peace of mind.
But it celebrates greed and even brutality.
Any examples?
No.
Many rand acolytes.
Ooh, acolytes.
I love that word.
Oh, that's a great word.
Because what that means is people just are emotionally drawn to the smoky Russian gravel-voiced vixen for subterranean unconscious reasons of mad passion.
There's no rationality.
It doesn't convince you with any rational arguments.
Just acolytes.
It means that you follow a culty whatever, right?
Many Rand acolytes had already gone underground, repressing or disavowing the more extreme statements.
Oh, there's the word extreme again.
Wow, two times in one paragraph.
It's an extreme use of the word extreme.
The more extreme statements of their youth and attempting to blend in with more mainstream schools of thought in respectable occupations.
There was a good reason for that.
Randian libertarianism is an illogical, impractical, inhumane, unpopular set of utopian ravings, which lacks internal coherence and has never predicted real-world behavior anywhere.
Wow.
Let me tell you something about this kind of writing.
I mean, like all jokes aside, there is a malevolent golem troll-like glowing-eyed, lava-tongued viciousness.
To this type of writing.
And the reason why it's used, the reason why it's effective, is that we are tribal animals.
Now, normally, two people, if two people in a tribe, let's just say me and Bob, Bob just hates me, and I just hate Bob in a tribe.
Well, the likelihood is that one of us is going to kill the other one, or it's going to chase him off.
And that's what happens.
A tribe can contain really visceral, vicious, bottom-of-the-gut, you know, make-your-fingerticks-tingle kind of hatred.
And so if two people in a tribe really, really hate each other, then they're encouraged usually to fight, or one of them drives another one off, or whatever it is, right?
And so there's a certain style of argument that's incredibly common these days.
It really is the default style of argument.
And you'll see this when you watch political debates on television.
You read articles like this.
And what it is, it's like filling up like a puffer fish.
You know, the puffer fish.
It's filling up with venom and hatred and like this coal-eyed, smorgue, fire-breathing, verbal abuse torrent.
of subterranean cowardly viciousness and you just you spit this tsunami of venom at a particular target and It's ad hominem.
Ad hominem is usually specific to an individual, but it's ad hominem to an entire belief set.
And what it is, is you see the same viciousness in competing religions and when they're in conflict.
And of course, it's great that libertarianism is being attacked because, you know, first they ignore you, then they fight you, then you win.
And so we're in the fighting.
It's good.
It means that we are actually worth taking notice of.
But you see this discharge It's like those cobras that spit venom.
And it's designed to get people to like, whoa, okay, this guy really hates these libertarians.
And this goes into a whole tribal thing of, therefore, I'd better back away and see who wins.
Therefore, one guy is going to kill another.
I don't want to get involved.
This is what it really hooks into a very deep part of us, which is when you see these kinds of conflicts, They're usually religious or political conflicts within a tribe.
Usually there's going to be a big, vicious battle.
You know, one priest is going to kill the witch doctor, or the witch doctor is going to kill the imam, or whatever it's going to be.
And so people, it's a way of arguing that just spews a huge amount of hatred and venom at a particular target, which scares everyone away.
And there is this kind of corollary that, in a way, like, I don't care why he hates these guys so much, I just don't want to get in the way, because there's going to be Some sort of insane conflict that comes out of this.
And so, you'll see this all the time, all the time, when people disagree.
They just swell up with this venom, and they spew these laser-targeted, bottomless streams of cowardly bitterness and brutality and verbal abuse at this.
I mean, look at this.
It's so evil, it's got a kind of purity to it.
Randian libertarianism is an illogical, impractical, inhumane, unpopular set of utopian ravings which lacks internal coherence and has never predicted real-world behaviour anywhere.
I mean, that's just a big bag of venom spewed directly at a target.
No argument, no evidence, no quotes, no citations, no analysis, no nothing, no data, just bleh!
I hate this!
And people are like, whoa, okay, well, I guess that's not good.
I'm going to back away because it's going to be a horrible fight.
That's why, reasonably enough, the libertarian movement evaporated in the late 20th century, its followers scattered like the wind.
But the libertarian movement has seen a strong resurgence in recent years, and there's a simple reason for that.
Money, and the personal interests of some people who have a lot of it.
Well, that's one reason for it.
Another reason may be the fact that Western societies are collapsing under imperialism, a widening gap between the rich and the poor, staggering debts, unfunded liabilities in the hundreds of trillions of dollars, collapsing schools, a dumped-down public, people who can't reason in any way, shape, or form, but who claim an important megaphone in the public sphere like this ass-clown.
So it could be that there's a few other reasons why people are a little bit more interested in libertarianism other than just there was a bunch of money.
Once relegated to drug-fueled college dorm bull sessions.
Oh boy.
I've heard that cliche so many times.
Oh my god.
Oh yeah, it's like these all-night college dorm room bull sessions where everyone's just yapping and nobody knows anything and it's fueled by drugs and it's like...
Oh my god.
I mean, what a cliche.
What a cliche.
So in other words, conversations you have in college are always idiotic.
But everyone should go to college, right?
The revival is a coke that's the coke brothers fueled, not coke as in cocaine fueled, that exists only because in political debate, as in so many other walks of life, cash is king.
The Koch brothers are principal funders of the Reason Foundation and Reason Magazine.
ExxonMobil and other corporate and billionaire interests are behind the Cato Institute and the other public face of libertarianism.
Financiers have also seeded a number of economic schools, think tanks and other institutions with proponents of their brand of libertarianism.
It's easy to explain why some of these corporate interests do it.
It serves the self-interest of the environmental polluters, for example, to promote a political philosophy which argues that regulation is bad and the market will correct itself.
And every wealthy individual benefits from tax cuts for the rich.
What better way to justify that than with a philosophy that says they're rich because they're better, and that those tax cuts help everybody.
Alright?
So, basically he's saying that there is funding which is voluntarily put forward by corporations for pro-market publications.
Right.
So the principle behind this, you see, would be that to propagandize people is bad, right?
I mean, and we should really look at the money that is behind this kind of propaganda and figure out where it comes from.
It's all bad, right?
It's really bad.
So let's just Let's just do a little thought experiment here, right?
So, would you rather, say, fund some relatively obscure magazine, Reason?
I like it, actually.
Reason.com has got some.
It's relentlessly and banally political.
Never talks about the family.
Never talks about child-rearing.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
That's standard for libertarianism.
But does the NAP, does the non-aggression principle apply to spanking?
Oh, my God!
We can't talk about that.
Let's talk about how...
Republicans are welfare whores for the military-industrial complex.
Anyway, so would you rather, if you wanted to sort of influence society and you wanted to propagandize people, would you rather be able to fund some relatively obscure magazine with a pretty small circulation and cross your fingers and hope that changed the world?
Or would you say want to get a hold of children For, say, six to eight hours a day?
From about the age of four or five until about the age of 18, and would you like to force their parents to pay and force the children to be in these indoctrination centers at the point of a gun?
What do you think would be more influential in the world?
Forced government public school indoctrination or the voluntary funding of obscure magazines?
Because you see, this guy has a real problem, a real problem with propaganda, and he says that The interests of people who pay the bills call the shots, and it's incredibly corrupting.
That's his bill.
Well, the government pays the bill for public schools.
Do you think people grow up with an objective view of government?
Expecting government teachers to be critical of the government is like expecting the ad agency that services the Coca-Cola account to produce ads talking about tooth decay and pH balances.
Anyway.
The rise of the Silicon Valley economy has also contributed to the libertarian resurgence.
A lot of internet billionaires are nerds who suddenly find themselves rich and powerful.
And they're emotionally and intellectually inclined towards libertarianism and its geeky and unrealistic vision of a free market.
Oh, so the words which you can use to discredit arguments now includes geeky.
Because, you see, you say it's geeky and it's wrong.
You know, you say that it takes eight minutes for the sun's rays to reach the Earth.
But I say that's geeky and unrealistic.
I win!
Victory, victory, victory, victory, all right.
In their minds, its ideas are heuristic, autologous, and cybernetic, all of which has inherent attraction in their culture.
I've never heard those words used to describe libertarianism in any way, shape, or form.
Oh dear, oh dear.
All right.
I don't know if we're going to do the whole article.
This is like swallowing shattered intellectual glass sideways.
The only problem is, it's only a dream!
Dream, dream, dream!
At no time or place in human history has there been a working libertarian society which provides its people with the kinds of outcomes libertarians claim it will produce.
Okay, great.
So, what you would do now, if you wanted to, is libertarians have proposed a large number of societies wherein you are going to see libertarian principles at work with predicted outcomes.
So, he says there's never been a working libertarian society.
Libertarians have promoted many societies which they say are closer to libertarian principles.
Oh, he doesn't provide any examples.
He just says there's no time or place in human history has there been a working libertarian society.
Okay?
But libertarianism's self-created mythos claims that it's more realistic than other ideologies, which is the opposite of the truth.
See, that's great, because you can just say there's never been anything, it's the opposite of the truth.
Do you see the pattern?
There's no argument here.
This is all condiments and no food.
There's no actual arguments here.
There's a bunch of adjectives, a bunch of bitchy, cowardly, you know that line from the intro of Berno's, you know spies, bunch of bitchy little girls.
Well, you know intellectuals, bunch of bitchy little girls.
This is like...
You know, and he's all this, and he said this, and I said that, and the other one said this, and you know what he said, and I can't believe she said this, and then she's all like, ah.
This is like literally how 12-year-old girls fight.
They just say mean things.
They can't reason their way out of a paper bag.
No appeal to evidence.
Just bitchy, nose-curling, immature, vapid, vacuous, retarded, empty language.
And this is an embarrassment that this is written or published.
The slope from that contradiction to the deep well of hypocrisy is slippery, steep, and easy to identify.
Okay, so here we go.
Having said nothing, we will now put it to the test.
So that's where the libertarian hypocrisy test comes in.
Let's say we have a libertarian friend and we want to know whether or not he's hypocritical about his beliefs.
How would we go about conducting such a test?
The best way is to use the tenets of his philosophy to draw up a series of questions to explore his belief system.
The Cato Institute's overview of key libertarian concepts mixes universally acceptable bromides.
Oh, you see, bromides!
What a great word!
Is it true or is it false?
I don't know.
Cool story, bromide.
Like the rule of law and individual rights with principles that are more characteristically libertarian and therefore more fantastical!
You can't use the word libertarianism without throwing an insult in because you actually haven't made a case for anything yet.
This is the equivalent of...
Being the prosecution in a law case and just screaming guilty and perhaps fugly and then tripping and falling on your glasses and then thinking, wow, I'm just the best lawyer ever.
Since virtually all people support the rule of law and individual rights, it is the other concepts which are uniquely libertarian and form the basis of our first few questions.
The Institute cites spontaneous order, for example, as the great insight of libertarian social analysis.
Cato, not the orator, but the Institute, defines the principle thusly.
Order in society arises spontaneously out of the actions of thousands or millions of individuals who coordinate their actions with those of others in order to achieve their purposes.
To which the discerning reader might be tempted to ask, like, where exactly?
Libertarians define spontaneous order in a very narrow way.
It's narrow, you see.
It's not right.
It's not wrong.
It's not logical.
It's not illogical.
It's neither supported nor rejected by the evidence.
It's narrow.
You know what else libertarian theory is?
Polka dotted, slightly moldy, and it wears really uncomfortable shoes.
It's pear-shaped, and has like a giant pimple on its chin, and one of its teeth, like right here, totally crooked.
Its belly button is not an innie, but an outie.
And it has bacne.
So I guess I win.
Oh god.
Libertarians define spontaneous order in a very narrow way, one that excludes demonstrations like the Arab Spring, elections which install progressive governments, or union movements, to name three examples.
Okay, I don't know what the Arab Spring has to do with economics.
There are economic evaluations of elections, but they're mostly to do with the fact that a company can get over $200 in return for every dollar it invests in lobbying because the government can steal, print, or borrow money and pay off companies with that because governments spend a lot of money that they've stolen, printed, or borrowed. or borrow money and pay off companies with that because And also because governments can pass favorable legislation.
Like if you're a sweater manufacturer, they can ban all sweater manufacturers from any place that produces it cheaper than you.
So elections have nothing to do with the free market.
Elections are about, they're only and forever and always about interference in private property and the free market.
The whole point of elections is you vote people in and you want them to do stuff to your neighbor instead of having your neighbors do ugly stuff to you.
And so it's all about violations of rights and property.
So all the elections are selling is violations of rights and property.
Union movements.
Union movements...
I mean, unions are fine.
If I've got, you know, 50 of us work in your factory and we hate the working conditions, we can decide to strike to improve or to get more money or whatever.
And if we're valuable, then you're, you know, maybe grudgingly or whatever, but you'll change.
And if we're not that valuable, you'll just fire us and get 50 new guys.
So a union is fine.
But when your union can bar anybody else from working, When they're on strike, then that suddenly becomes a monopoly.
It's a government-sanctioned, government-enforced, violent, thug-like, Tony Soprano-style, brutal monopoly.
So unions are fine, but forced association is a violation of freedom of association.
We get that, right?
You can't force a woman to marry a man and call it a marriage.
It's just an institutionalized rape.
You can't force someone to join a union.
You can't force scabs to never take the place of union workers or anything like that.
So, again, these have nothing to do with the market.
And yet, each of these things are undertaken by individuals who coordinated their actions with those of others to achieve our purposes.
Well, so...
Fuck!
Excuse my French.
Coordinated their actions with those of others.
Okay, so car thieves will often coordinate their actions with those of others.
Does that make them free market paragons?
No.
They're just thieves.
You know, a pickpocket will have someone brush into you while he steals your wallet.
Oh, look, they're coordinating their actions with those of others.
You know what?
Lions, when they're hunting gazelles, often will coordinate their actions with those of others.
Does that mean that they're free market paragons?
Oh, man.
Oh, flocks of birds will coordinate their actions with those of others.
So I guess birds should be running the Federal Reserve.
Actually, that would be an improvement.
So our first hypocrisy test question is, are unions, political parties, elections, and social movements like Occupy examples of spontaneous order?
And if not, why not?
Spontaneous order is what arises in the absence of coercion.
Repeat after me.
Spontaneous order is what arises in the absence of coercion.
Unions rely on political coercion.
Political parties rely on political coercion.
Elections rely on political coercion.
Social movements like Occupy?
Yeah.
As long as the people in Occupy are not getting welfare or unemployment or, you know, student loans from the government, which means all stuff that's stolen from other people, then sure, if they're all just getting together to protest, more power to them.
Fantastic.
Also, if they are gathering on public property, which is to say unowned property, then that property is reserved from actual productive private use by government fiat and government coercion and so on.
But to me, this is the fundamental insight, which is hard to get.
I mean, I do sympathize.
It's hard to get.
This is a fundamental insight of voluntarism or the free market.
Just non-coercion.
People think that voluntarism or anarchy is like a system of no rules.
But the real insight, the real insight to get from all of these philosophies, I believe, is fundamentally this.
When you have rulers, you have no rules.
When you have rulers, you have no rules.
They're contradictory.
They're convoluted.
They're impossible to follow.
I mean, just look at the tax code.
Look at the penal code.
There's an average of three felonies a day committed by the average American with no knowledge of what's going on.
There's no rules.
The rules will change.
The rules will come.
The rules will go.
There are no rules when you have rulers.
When you have rulers, you have manipulation, you have politics, you have power, you have violence, you have debt.
There are no rules when you have rulers.
The only possibility for rules to emerge is spontaneous negotiation and customer service and things like insurance and private agencies voluntarily trying to please customers.
That's the only way where rules and standards will ever emerge that are consistent and long-lasting and simple enough to be obeyed.
While strong enough to achieve the social purpose.
It can never come from giving a few people a monopoly of power and violence over a geographical area.
Right?
When you have a ruler, you have no rules.
Cato also trumpets.
Oh yes, he trumpets.
This is a way of making the argument appear ugly.
Trumpets what it calls the virtue of production, without ever defining what production is.
Economics defines the term, but libertarianism is looser with its terminology.
This was easier to get away with in the industrial age when production meant a car or a shovel or a widget.
I don't know that that's necessarily true, but anyway.
So, they say they never define what production is.
So, is he sure of that?
Did he call Cato and say, could you point to me where you may or may not define what production is?
And he's talking about libertarianism as a whole.
And he's saying that in the entire canon, in the entire library of libertarian books, which must run into the tens of thousands by now, no one anywhere in libertarianism has ever defined what is meant by production.
Ever!
But you see, this man, he lives in a cloud castles of words.
It has nothing to do with the real world.
Today, nearly 50% of corporate profits come from the financial sector.
That is, from the manipulation of money.
Right.
Right, because it's Goldman Sachs that manipulates money, not, say, central banks, not government-controlled money supplies or government-controlled interest rates.
It's Goldman Sachs, you see, that is able to create money out of thin air with no legal support from the government.
It's Goldman Sachs, you see, that supports the monopoly on government currency that is pretty much the only thing that sustains its value.
If we weren't forced to use government money, we would flee it like rats off the Titanic for the same reason.
It's more difficult to define production and even harder to find its virtue when the creation of wealth no longer necessarily leads to the creation of jobs or economic growth or anything except the enrichment of a few.
I completely agree.
The financial sector is largely parasitical upon the violence of the government.
But they can't change the violence of the government, they can't stop the violence of the government, so they're going to profit from it because they have a responsibility to shareholders and to their employees and to their own pocketbooks to make money.
And if money is to be made by preying onto lending money to the government and profiting from the government's rules, from liberal manipulations, from knowing what the M1M2 supply, money supply is going to be next month, people will make money from that.
You can get mad at that if you want, but I guarantee you, if you take an airplane, or a helicopter, say, and you get a million dollars worth of $50 bills, and you shake it over a really poor neighborhood, people are going to grab that money, and I would not imagine that a huge amount of it is going to find its way back to your helicopter.
It's just the way people are.
People will take free stuff.
If there's free money to be had, people will take it, which is why you can't have a government, because that's what governments do, is they create free money.
If you give anyone the power to type whatever they want into their own bank account, they're going to abuse that power.
There's no human being alive, not me, not you, not anyone else, who would not end up abusing that power for whatever good intentions we could say we wanted to do to achieve, to help the poor and the sick, the old, the needy, whatever.
So I completely agree.
The financial sector is horrendous, bloated, parasitical.
But it is not the cause of the problem.
It is merely the effect of the problem.
It is the shadow cast by the statue.
It's not the statue.
You can get mad at the shadow cast by the statue when you can hit it with a shovel and you can shine a little flashlight on it from time to time.
It's not going to change.
You want to change your shadow cast by the statue?
Get rid of the statue.
Take away the statue.
Get rid of the shadow.
Almost all of what you see that's deleterious or negative in the free market, what's left of the free market, is the shadow cast by government power.
Violations of the non-aggression principle, violations of property, cause almost all the evils in the world.
Which seems to be the point, Cato says.
Modern libertarians defend the right of productive people to keep what they earn against a new class of politicians and bureaucrats who would seize their earnings to transfer them to non-producers.
Which gets us to our next question.
Is a libertarian willing to admit that production is the result of many forces, each of which should be recognized and rewarded?
Is the libertarian willing to admit that production is the result of many forces, each of which should be recognized and rewarded?
Dear God in heaven, I mean, Reed, Lawrence Reed, director of Fee, friend of the show, I think, he's been on a couple of times.
He's written a wonderful little pamphlet called I Pencil, which basically says no human being knows how to make a pencil.
You might know how to form the wood, but you don't know how to make the lead or the graphite or whatever's in the middle.
You might know how to make the paint, but not the wood, nor the eraser, nor the little metal bit that goes around.
You may not know how to brand in the...
Nobody knows how to make a pencil.
Production is the result of many forces?
That's foundational!
To any free market economics, foundational to economics as a whole, the division of labor is one of the foundations of wealth.
If that is not followed, no wealth is possible.
If you have no price, if you have no free trade, and if you can't get division of labor, you can't officially allocate resources, nothing works.
Is a libertarian willing to admit that production is the result of many forces?
It's like saying, listen man, here's what I'm going to do.
I'm gonna corner a radical feminist, and I'm gonna force her to admit that there's such a thing as a patriarchy, because they hate that!
Oh, no, wait!
Forget that, forget that!
Okay, I'm gonna...
I'm gonna corner a Marxist.
I'm gonna breathe heavy fish fumes, like a full-on filet of fish stuck between the fish, between the teeth.
Fish fumes in his face.
A goddamn Marxist up against the wall.
I'm gonna grab him by his ratty little lapels, and I'm gonna even let the pictures of Lenin and Kropotkin and all these people stab into my fingers, And I'm gonna get him, I'm gonna force him, this Marxist bastard, I'm gonna force him to admit that workers are exploited in a capitalist system, then I'm gonna get him!
Once I can get him, the one that's in court is like, dude, that's the whole foundation of the ideology.
The whole foundation of the ideology is that production is the result of many forces.
That's the natural result of the division of, anyway.
Retail stores like Walmart and fast food corporations like McDonald's cannot produce wealth without employees.
Okay?
Don't these employees have a right to coordinate their actions with those of others in order to achieve their purposes?
For example, in unions.
Of course they do.
Of course, everybody has to.
You can go and quit a job.
You can go and convince all your friends to quit a job.
You can say, we should be paid a million dollars an hour, and if we don't get it, we're out of here.
Of course you can.
Absolutely, you should be able to have that right, have that power in a free market.
Wonderful.
What you should not have, what you should not have the power to do, my friends.
Is to force people to join your union or not have them be employed at all.
And you cannot, you cannot prevent through violence other people from taking your jobs if you go on strike.
That is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
Forcing people to join your union or denying them a job is exploitation.
It's violence.
Because if they come to work between the employer and the union, sorry, between the employee and the employer is an involuntary contract.
Guy comes to work and then you use force to prevent him from coming to work because you're on strike, that's a violation of the non-initiation of force principle, the non-aggression principle.
Anyway, so yeah, absolutely.
Unions, wonderful.
Fantastic.
Just no violations of the NAP. Is our libertarian willing to acknowledge that workers who bargain for their services individually and collectively are also employing market forces?
Yeah, as long as they're not using force, as long as they're not calling on the government to pass favorable legislation, which is another kind of initiation of the use of force, go for it.
I encourage you.
Hey, employers can be assholes and, you know, go fight for it.
All right.
The bankers who collude to deceive their customers as US bankers did with the MERS mortgage system were permitted to do so by the unwillingness of the government to regulate them.
The customers who were the victims of deception were essential to the production of Wall Street wealth.
Why don't libertarians recognize their role in the process and administer and their right to administer their own affairs?
I don't know what that means.
Libertarians for many, many, many decades have been saying that the government is going to be ineffective at regulating the financial industry, that the government is the source of the power of the financial industry through its manipulations of currency and interest rates and debt.
and selling of bonds and so on and by forcing people to invest in the stock market who damn well don't want to be there by threatening to take their money if they don't invest it in the stock market right through 401k or other kind of retirement savings plans so the government is the source of the problems in the financial sector because the government is so powerfully interfering with The financial sector, people in the financial sector, want to give money to the government in return for favorable legislation and immunity from prosecution, which is fundamentally what a corporation is.
A corporation is a legal fiction created by the state to reward the rich with immunity from prosecution.
And immunity from loss, right?
If a corporation makes money, the rich can take the money out.
If a corporation loses money, hey, it's a one-way street, right?
The corporations are in the fascistic fundamentals, nothing to do with the free market.
They're legal fictions created by governments.
Anyway, so libertarians have been saying, look, government's got too much power and too much influence over the financial sector, which means the financial sector is going to want to give lots of money, donations, and pressure governments for favorable legislation, immunity from prosecution.
Therefore, this is all going to blow up.
And the unwillingness of the government to regulate them.
The government is not unwilling to regulate them.
The government just gets too much money from them to regulate them.
The only reason Barack Obama got elected at all was because he got so much money from the financial sector, and that's why there's been no one going to jail for all of this corruption.
It doesn't work.
That's what we're saying.
That right includes the right to regulate the bankers who sell the mortgages.
Libertarians say that the free market will help consumers.
Libertarians believe that people will be both freer and more prosperous if government intervention in people's economic choices is minimized, says Cato.
But victims of illegal foreclosure are neither free nor more prosperous after the government deregulation, which led to their exploitation.
Oh man, here we go again.
There was no government deregulation.
I mean, regulations increased about 75% under Bush after Clinton in the early 2000s.
The US banking and financial sector is by far the most regulated sector of the economy.
What's a lot less regulated is the software industry, which does not have a huge amount of corruption and theft involved in it.
So the government has increased its power and control over it at the front end or the source through its control of money supply, interest rates, debt, bonds, and forcing people to invest who don't want to invest.
And on the other side, by creating all these rules and regulations which Favour the bigger and bigger banks.
And banks figured out what too big to fail means.
It means that if you're a small bank, you're screwed.
And if you're a big bank, you'll get bailouts, which is why banks have become bigger and bigger.
They're all buying each other up.
They're not idiots.
Is our libertarian willing to admit that a free market needs regulation?
Well, of course, a free market needs regulation.
Absolutely.
But why would we imagine that regulation could come from government?
That's the fundamental question.
Does marriage need regulation, so to speak?
Well, of course.
And the regulation is you can leave the marriage if you're abused.
If you're disgusted, if you're bored, if you don't want to be there anymore, you can just leave.
That's how you regulate marriage.
You don't force people to get married and they're free to leave if they don't like it anymore.
That's how you regulate marriage.
Simple.
But saying marriage needs to be regulated, therefore, we need a government agency of marriage that forces people to get married and then only lets them get divorced if it says that's okay.
If it approves their divorce, they can get divorced.
They have to beg and prove and show and whatever.
Yes, things need to be regulated, but why on earth would we imagine that a violent monopoly on power is the way to do it?
It's crazy.
Digital libertarians.
Alright.
But few libertarians are as hypocritical as the billionaires who earned their fortunes in the tech world.
Government created the internet.
The government did not create the internet.
There was some technology that was put in place that then was commercialized by free market entrepreneurs.
We don't know.
I mean, for sure, a worldwide network of information sharing is so valuable that it would have come about without the government.
No question of that.
And it probably would be a whole lot better.
I don't know if, what, 25 billion spam messages a day because of the way the government built the internet to begin with is the best way.
Should it be a penny per email?
I don't know.
You can't do it now.
But is it the most efficient way to run a global communications network?
I don't know.
The government created it and then, rather than reinvent the wheel, the wheel would have been invented by the free market in the most efficient manner possible and refined before it became universal.
But the government had this stuff and it kind of grew out of that.
The government did not create the internet.
The government stole a bunch of money and used it to create a digital communications network that was designed to survive a nuclear strike.
Is that the best possible way of doing it?
Did the government create what we now call the internet?
Did the government actually provide YouTube to you and Facebook and Google Plus and all that?
No.
Government financed the basic research that led to computing itself.
No!
Government finances nothing!
Government has no money.
Whenever you see someone say, the government paid for this, or the government created that, no, the government has no money.
Only thing the government can do is provide money that it is stolen through taxation, that it is stolen through inflation, that it is stolen through borrowing.
That's the only, the government has no money.
Government has no money.
Anybody who tells you the government did something or created something or paid for something is an idiot.
or just, you know, evil status troll.
So Peter Thiel made his fortune with PayPal, one infamous rant.
Oh, it's a rant, you see.
You don't have to argue if you call it a rant.
Thiel complained about allowing women and people he describes as welfare beneficiaries to vote.
Since 1920, the extension of the franchise to these two groups have turned capitalist democracy into an oxymoron.
Well, there is a conflict of interest in modern democracies, which is that people who are on the receiving end of government spending get to vote about government spending.
Are you likely to be objective about voting on whether government spending should increase or decrease if you are a direct recipient of government spending?
That's called a conflict of interest.
That would never be allowed in the business world.
You are not allowed to participate in decisions where a material interest is reasonably going to affect your decision-making process.
You simply are not allowed.
That's called a conflict of interest.
Well, I guess you are in the psychiatric slash pharmaceutical world where just about everybody gets paid off by drug companies to say that drugs are really necessary.
But there is a conflict of interest.
You can't be objective about how much money the government should spend if you are a net recipient of government money.
You just can't be objective about it.
So the fact that there's a conflict of interest in this area is not shocking.
It's only shocking to people who are propagandized.
It's not shocking to anybody who lives in reality.
And if he thinks that's not a problem, then let's get rid of all conflict of interest rules.
You don't have to state your conflict of interest.
There's no such thing as insider trading.
Let's just get rid of all conflict of interest rules.
If democracy and welfare, and it's not just welfare, military-industrial complex spending, as I pointed out in a recent video, the congressmen and congresswomen who were pro-Syrian war got 83% more money from the military-industrial complex than those who were against the Syrian war.
That's a clear conflict of interest.
It happens in the military-industrial complex.
It happens in the welfare state.
It happens with government unions.
It happens with private sector unions.
Nobody can be objective about government money when that government money materially affects their income to a huge degree.
So that's all he's saying.
It's not controversial.
It's not crazy.
This is just reality.
With this remark, Thiel lets slip something that extreme libertarians prefer to keep quiet.
A lot of them don't like democracy very much.
Well, actually, a lot of people throughout the world don't like democracy very much.
I think Socrates, not such a big fan of democracy after his afternoon high tea, was substituted with hemlock, and he asked one of his friends to sacrifice a crow to a particular god, which you sacrifice to when you've been the recipient of a gift, and he viewed death as a gift rather than living in a democracy.
Oh, founding fathers really hated democracy, which is why they founded a republic.
So if he considers this radical or weird or extreme, then he's probably living in the wrong country because a lot of people recognize that democracy, the poor outnumber the rich, the poor vote to take away the money of the rich, the rich retaliate by taking control of the political system, the gaps between rich and poor widen and society falls apart.
The middle class dissolve and then you get fascism or communism or Nazism or something like that that comes out of it.
So yeah, I'm sorry to say, democracy has a huge problem.
You know who else has a huge problem with democracy?
A woman and two rapists voting on whether the woman should get raped.
Ooh, I'm outnumbered.
Well, I guess it's not rape then, because I'm happy to go.
Alright, so does our libertarian belief in democracy?
If yes, explain what's wrong with governments that regulate.
Governments that regulate, it's the initiation of force and violation of property rights that are wrong.
Alright.
How did Peter Thiel and other internet billionaires become wealthy?
They hired government-educated employees to develop products protected by government copyrights.
Oh, so you can't criticize the government because you're forced to go to government schools.
Boy, I wonder if this guy's written A really great blog post saying that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian dissident who wrote A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, who wrote The Gulag Apicalago and other fantastic books exposing the prison camps in Russia under Stalin.
See, how can he criticize those prison camps?
Because they fed and like housed him and gave him a productive job for like 10 years.
I mean, how could he possibly, possibly, write against them?
I mean, he was educated in a Soviet school, for heaven's sakes!
How could he write anything critical of Soviet Russia?
They paid for his education!
It's crazy!
How could people write anything negative about concentration camps in Germany that fed and clothed them, and those people were educated by the German government?
Government-educated employees, like, they had a choice.
Everybody's forced to be educated by the government.
Products protected by government copyrights.
Those products use government-created computer technology and a government-created communications web to communicate with government-educated customers in order to generate wealth for themselves, which was then stored in government-protected banks, after which they began using that wealth to argue for the elimination of government.
Well, I mean, if government educated employees are so fantastically valuable, then clearly what we should do is Not have it as a monopoly.
It's a huge overhead to enforce a monopoly.
You've got to enforce all this tax collection, property tax collection, and you've got to make sure all the kids end up in school.
You've got to track them, register to give them the social security numbers and green cards and whatever it is, right?
There's a huge amount of overhead to maintain a monopoly.
And you see, if government-educated people and employees are so freaking valuable, then we clearly don't need this monopoly.
So let's give everybody their money back.
Who is paying it to support government schools?
Let's disband all government protections for government teachers.
And let's let a thousand flowers bloom in the educational market.
People can choose to stay home.
And if one of them stays home, they should get significant tax cuts and benefits for that, right?
Because you get those tax benefits and cuts if you go to work.
So if government-educated employees are so great and such a value, then let's let education run free, run wild.
Let's let everybody experiment and try lots of different things.
Homeschooling, unschooling, Sudbury School, we can all send them to Peter Gray's house, anything.
Because you see, they're so...
But if you force people to go to government schools, don't goddamn well claim it as a virtue later.
If you force children to be indoctrinated in government schools, and it is forced and it is indoctrination, because as he said, people who pay the bills call the shots, and if it's indoctrination for the Koch brothers to fund Reason magazine, it is by God indoctrination for the government to fund public schools.
That's always different, isn't it?
By that standard, Thiel and his fellow digital libertarians are hypocrites of genuinely epic proportion.
As far as copyright goes, there's a huge debate, huge debate in the libertarian circles about the validity of copyright.
Lots of libertarians, Steph Kinsella, Jeffrey Tucker, and on the other side, everybody who's wrong.
Myself, I'm against IP. And a huge opposition to IP in the libertarian and voluntary circles.
So, anyway, does a libertarian use wealth that wouldn't exist without government in order to preach against the role of government?
Well, just because governments build the roads doesn't mean that I can't oppose the government.
Even though I've driven on government roads.
We understand that's just setting up a situation where nobody can criticize the government.
Because everyone's been touched by the government.
I went to government schools.
They taught me how to read.
Absolutely.
And a prison will give you food.
That doesn't mean that's the meal you want or it's the best meal for you.
Many libertarians will counter by saying that the government has only two valid functions to protect the national security and enforce intellectual property laws.
What?
I'm sorry, I should have read this first.
He said, what now?
Government has only two valid functions, to protect the national security and enforce intellectual property laws.
Again, no quotes, no citations.
I have never, ever heard.
I've heard national security.
I've heard police, law courts, maybe prisons.
But saying army and the patent office or the copyright office, that makes no sense to me at all.
If the mythical free market can solve any problem, including protecting the environment, why can't it also protect us from foreign invaders and defend the copyrights that make these libertarians wealthy?
Yes, and if he knew anything about libertarianism and voluntaryism, there would be quite a debate on how far we can go with these things.
I am on the absolutist or consistent side and other people are not.
For that matter, why should these libertarians be allowed to hold patents at all?
If the free market can decide how best to use our national resources, why shouldn't it also decide how best to use Peter Thiel's ideas and whether or not to reward him for them?
After all, if Thiel were a true Randian libertarian, he'd use his ideals in a more superior fashion than anyone else, and he would be more ruthless in enforcing his rights to them than anyone else.
Does our libertarian reject any and all government protection for his intellectual property?
Well, the problem is that governments currently enforce intellectual property.
And most companies are not that interested in protecting IP or getting involved in patent troll wars until they get hit with a whole bunch of patent stuff.
So Apple and Microsoft didn't really...
Microsoft a little more so, but Apple certainly didn't care.
That much about their intellectual property until they got hit with a whole bunch of patent trial lawsuits.
And then they began to get involved in it.
The problem is that's just the standard.
If you want to get involved in business, you have to get involved in IP. It's just a defensive protection measure.
It's just a defensive protection method because if you don't copyright your work and if you don't maintain copyright over your work, someone else can come and copyright something like it and sue you for infringement.
So then your business is toast.
It's just the environment you live in.
I'm sorry if it's the lowest common denominator.
To act with perfect integrity and never touch anything to do with the government would be to not exist within society.
And that's just ridiculous.
I mean, that's just ridiculous.
Anyway, so to be in business means that you have to get yourself involved in IP because if you don't, you're going to get trolled and hammered by it.
You won't get investments.
You go out of business and you have a responsibility to your employees and to your customers and to your investment in the business and to yourself.
So it's just the way it is.
Now you can't.
You can't be against slavery, you see, because you're wearing a cotton shirt that was picked by slaves.
You can't be against slavery because you're wearing a cotton shirt that was picked by slaves.
I win!
All right, we're almost done.
Our democratic process is highly flawed today, but that's largely the result of corruption from corporate and billionaire money, and yet libertarians celebrate the corrupting influence of big money.
What?
Oh my god.
I shouldn't be surprised.
I mean, you know, basically this guy's digital avatar is going to come out of his screen and just poke me in the eyes and slap me in the nuts.
I don't like being poked in the eyes.
Libertarians celebrate the corrupting influence of big money.
I mean, he's obviously analyzed in depth the philosophy of Ayn Rand, and she continually raged against the degree to which big businesses could corrupt government for their own anti-market ends.
The fight against the corrupting power of corporate money in business has largely come from the libertarian threat.
It sure as shit has not come from the Democrats or the Republicans.
It is the libertarians who keep pointing out that unfair advantages at the expense of customers and often at the expense of employees and certainly at the expense of the future and at the expense of growth comes from corporations buying politicians and getting favorable legislation.
As P.G. O'Rourke said, when politicians have the power to buy and sell, to control buying and selling, the first thing to be bought and sold will be politicians.
No wonder, since the same money is keeping their movement afloat and paying many of their salaries.
But aside from the naked self-interest, their position makes no sense.
Why isn't a democratically elected government the ultimate demonstration of spontaneous order?
Does our libertarian recognize that democracy is a form of marketplace?
No, democracy.
Just because stuff is bought and sold doesn't mean it's a free market.
Stuff was bought and sold in Soviet Russia.
Slaves were bought and sold.
Does that mean it's a free market?
No, because the slaves weren't free.
It was a violation of persons and property rights to have slaves.
It was completely immoral.
You can buy and sell children on the pedophile sex slave market.
Is that a form of marketplace?
No.
That's the initiation of force.
It's the foundation of that and you're buying the products of violence and you're buying human beings.
Democracy is the buying and selling of human beings, particularly the unborn.
You give people money and then a generation from now it's stolen from people who don't even exist yet.
We're told the big government is bad for many reasons.
Not the least of which is that it is too large to be responsive.
But if big governments are bad, why are big corporations so acceptable?
I've got a good idea!
Maybe because big corporations don't have guns.
Walmart, you can walk past a Walmart store and the greeters will not jump out under the sidewalk past the hot dog vendors and the children's slides and grab you and stick a gun to your neck and say, you're shopping here today, punk.
Blow it at your ass.
What are you waiting for?
Christmas?
They don't do that.
Now, if you don't, say, renew your driver's license, and you drive around, the cops will stop you, and if you resist arrest, they can actually shoot you, if you resist arrest wrongly enough.
So, one of the big differences between, say, a corporation and a government is the fact that governments have all the guns and weapons and bombs and aircraft carriers and spy satellites and torpedoes and nuclear submarines and hand grenades and siren gases and you name it.
All the known weapons in the known universe, they are actually With the government.
They're not with McDonald's.
You can walk right past McDonald's, and if you don't feel like eating there, there's nothing that they can do about it.
Right?
They don't put cocaine in their food.
You can decide to quit.
I don't drink pop.
I haven't done it for, other than when I was going through chemo.
I don't drink pop.
I haven't done it for a long time.
Coca-Cola can't do a goddamn thing about it.
I can choose not to go and eat at Subway or KFC or Taco Bell or Pizza Pizza or Pizza Hut or anything.
They can't do a goddamn thing about it if I don't want to go and partake of their businesses.
Now, what if you don't want to partake of the rules of the government?
What happens?
Well, my friend, you get letters and then you get more letters and then you get rings at your doorbell and then people come and take you away and if you resist arrest they will shoot you and then they will put you in a cage and if you try and break out of that cage They will throw you back in, they will beat you up, and they will shoot you if you're on the verge of escaping.
And then you will be taken to a trial where you will be threatened with 10 years in jail unless you plea out.
And you will never get your day in court because you'll be told you'll only get 8 to 12 months with a time out in 6, or you'll get 10 years or maybe even 15 if you go to trial.
So you will basically be railroaded and stuck in a cage where, if you're in America, 200,000 people, not even just reports, 200,000 men report getting raped every single year.
More men are raped in America than women.
That's what you face.
Now, you tell me how McDonald's can inflict that upon you if you say, I'm not really in the mood for a Big Mac.
I think I'll have an avocado veggie sub instead.
They cannot come and arrest you.
They cannot send you letters demanding that you pay them for a meal you never had.
Despite the fact that even if you don't have kids or don't send your kids to government schools, you have to pay them or they will fucking take your house and they will throw you in prison.
McDonald's can't do it to you.
An airline can't do it to you.
The government can do it to you.
There's a gun in the room with the government.
There's no gun in the room with corporations.
Now, corporations work through governments, blah-de-blah, but I'm just talking about corporations.
If the government went away tomorrow, corporations would simply adjust their behavior.
They wouldn't all just start hiring armies.
It would be ridiculously inefficient.
Whoever started hiring an army would have to raise their prices so much they'd go out of business immediately.
Anyway, these massive institutions, what is these corporations, have been conducting an assault on the individual and collective freedoms of the American people for decades.
What, McDonald's has been assaulting my individual freedoms?
How?
What, I really wanted to drive through the middle of that parking lot, but now there's a McDonald's.
My god, I'm enslaved!
My car is snared!
Might as well be a bear trap!
Why isn't it important to avoid the creation of monopolies, duopolies, and syndicates that interfere with the free market's ability to function?
The government is a monopoly.
People who say, well, in the free market there might be monopolies.
There might be peaceful monopolies in the free market that might raise prices.
First of all, no monopoly has ever survived in the free market because I've gone into this.
I can't do this argument again.
But let's say that it could.
Let's say that there could be a McDonald's around that charges $100 for a Big Mac and people still want to eat Big Macs.
Fine.
Okay, fine.
So you've got a McDonald's that charges $100 for a Big Mac.
Somehow it stays in business because people want to pay $100 for a Big Mac.
It's ridiculous stuff.
So let's say that monopolies you see are really, really bad.
Just terrible.
Monopolies are just terrible.
But those are peaceful monopolies.
I mean, they're just offering stuff for sale at a price.
You don't have to go and buy anything.
You don't have to get off your couch.
So how is a peaceful monopoly, even if it could be created and sustained in a free market, how is a peaceful monopoly somehow this big terrible thing?
But a violent monopoly called the state, with the power to indoctrinate children, with the power to start wars, print money, enslave the unborn, throw people in jail where they get raped on a whim, how is that violent monopoly Somehow infinitely more preferable to a McDonald's that somehow is able to charge $100 for a Big Mac.
You people are insane.
Libertarians are right about one thing.
Unchecked and undemocratic force is totalitarian.
A totalitarian corporation or a totalitarian government acting in concert with corporations.
A totalitarian corporation?
You show me a corporation that operates prison camps with no Funding with or protections from government.
Send that to me and I will eat my hat.
I will actually literally eat a hat right here on the show.
If you send me an example of a corporation that runs prisons or prison systems or prison camps with no funding from the government whatsoever and no protections from the government, I will eat my hat.
Otherwise, shut the fuck up about totalitarian corporations.
You are literally saying peaceful rape.
A corporation is, I mean a company, a trading company, is a free association of people offering goods and services to the public who are not forced to buy them.
That's all it is.
That's all it is.
It's just like you going to the bar with makeup and chaps on.
Okay, that's my outfit.
You may go looking somewhat different.
But a company, all it is, is people getting together peacefully and voluntarily, producing a good and or service which they then provide to the public who are not forced to buy from them or to do any business with them.
So calling totalitarian voluntarism shows that your brain doesn't even work badly.
Your proposition is not It's not even coherent enough to be wrong.
It's just a random grab-bag word salad.
You might as well be reading off, you know, you should throw a badge of magnetic words on a fridge and read that off.
It's not even wrong.
It's not even coherent enough to be incorrect.
It's just completely self-contradictory.
You're like somebody going to a math conference and screaming that two and two make banana unicorns.
Anyway.
Totalitarian corporation is at least as effective at suppressing the spontaneous order as a non-corporate totalitarian government.
Does our libertarian recognize that large corporations are a threat to our freedoms?
Anyway, there's more.
He's got extra credit questions.
I think I'm full to the brim of eating this parasitical, maggot-ridden brain vomit.
It is tragic, but it's great.
You know what's great?
It's that basically the self-delusion of somebody who writes like this is so fundamental and profound that it literally is like Danny DeVito jumping in the ring with Mike Tyson in his prime saying, I can take this guy with one hand tied behind my back.
He's just ridiculous.
▲
Export Selection