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Oct. 18, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:30
2511 The Future: Pessimistic or Optimistic?
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A very far phone line from here that reaches all the way up to Canada, the land of the free healthcare insurance, is my buddy Stefan Mullin.
Are you there, Stefan?
I sure am.
How are you doing, my friend?
Stefan, can you settle something for us before we get started here?
Absolutely.
Is it Stefan or Stefan?
I actually prefer my Roman name, Master of Time, Space and Dimension, but I actually will answer to either of those.
Okay.
Because we had a little debate on that, because I was saying Stefan and someone else saying, no, it's Stefan.
I'm like, okay.
Yeah, I'm fine.
You know, life's too short to correct people and minor things like that, so whatever you guys want to go with, I'm fine with.
Alright, so I'm just going to mix it up.
Sometimes we'll call Stefan and sometimes we'll say Stefan.
I just may say my pal up there in Canada, whatever.
But you are going to walk in Master of Time, Space and Dimension a few times, right?
Yeah, we'll work that in.
So how's the feeling up in Canada tonight?
Is the whole world, are you guys happy?
I know you were waiting on the edge of your seat to see if our government was going to, you know, because the Panda Cam's been out now for I don't know how many days over there in Washington, D.C. Well, I got to tell you that I really was not on the edge of my seat, but rather buried deep in the marshmallow of my hammock because there was zero fundamental doubt that it was going to go the way that it was going to go,
that the Republicans were going to cave, and what's going to come out is they're going to say, well, okay, we'll raise the debt ceiling, but you people better put some tax cuts in, and the Democrats will say, okay, man, we'll put some tax cuts.
Maybe we'll even put some spending cuts in.
And then the debt ceiling will be raised, just as has happened so many times before, and neither will there be tax cuts, and neither will there be spending cuts, except for those silly spending cuts where they say, well, we were going to grow at 6%, we're only going to grow at 5%, so we'll call that at 1% spending cuts.
So, no, there was no doubt.
It's still, you know, mathematically it's going to stop, but I just don't think quite yet.
You mean it's going to stop because it's going to be forced to come to an end?
Well, I mean, the Federal Reserve is going to continue buying these $85 billion worth of Treasury bills and toxic mortgages until they start to drive hyperinflation, and they're going to have to stop doing that at some point, and then people are going to stop lending the U.S. government money, and then the U.S. government is going to have to cut.
On the plus side, they've openly admitted that 13% of their workforce can go home and nothing changes.
And then, of course, in the next breath, they say, we've cut to the bone, man!
There's nothing left to cut!
It's like, can you just send 13% of people home and everything's fine?
So how about those people?
Stephan, who do you blame for this?
Do you blame these politicians in Congress?
Because I don't.
But I want to know who you blame.
Well, I fundamentally blame the philosophers.
You know, we lost track of the fact that government is force.
We lost track of the fact that the law is an opinion with a gun in the hands of the state.
We lost track of the fact that we're supposed to be free and not dependent on our political masters.
We lost track of the fact that we're supposed to be adults And not eternal begging mongrel children, which is an insult to both mongrels and children, and demanding stuff for free.
We lost track of all of that stuff.
We let the government take over the education.
We let the government take over the healthcare.
We let the government take over old age security.
We let the government take over everything, because we let loose that weasley impulse that we all have to want something for nothing.
We let go of reason, reality, evidence, sanity, and virtue, and I think the philosophers didn't remind us.
That we should really hang on to those things or we lose everything that's worthwhile living for.
I don't know, Stefan.
I think you're too generous here.
I mean, do we really need philosophers to figure this stuff out?
You know, I remember my mom telling me this kind of stuff when I was, you know, two, three, or four.
Things like, you know, ask permission before you play with the other guy's toys and mind your own business.
I mean, is it really that complex?
Well, all we've proven here is that your mother is obviously a philosopher, for which you should be eternally grateful.
How wonderful.
I mean, whose fault is this?
I mean, see, some people like to get upset with the politicians.
And, you know, it's fun to be upset with the politicians.
So I gotta say, I get sucked into that every now and then.
But it's really not their fault.
These guys don't just fall out of the sky and into the Congress.
Do we ever blame the morons who put them there?
Well, the morons are acting in rational self-interest.
Once you have the capacity to shovel boatloads of money around at the point of a gun, of course people are.
Business people are going to use that to get competitive advantage.
People are going to use that to try and get stuff for free.
Government, public sector unions are going to use that to try and get pay raises and monopolies and retirement pensions that would make a cat explode with cat food.
So, I mean, once you have this mechanism of state power and the amount that it can actually control and the money printing, I mean, if you let people type whatever they want into their own bank account, can you really blame them for adding as many zeros as their keyboard will handle?
That's just the nature of reality.
The system is the system and we forgot about the immorality that's at the essence of the system and the danger I mean, that's what George Washington said.
You know, the state is an agency of violence.
It's incredibly dangerous.
You've got to restrain it at all times.
A republic, they said, if you can keep it.
And everyone forgot that and said, hey, free goodies, let's go.
And the results are all around us.
You can't blame the politicians for responding to the voters.
You can't blame the voters for wanting free stuff.
You can't blame businesses for wanting advantages over other businesses and wanting government contracts.
I mean, you can't blame the Fed for liking free money.
Who wouldn't?
So I think it's just the ethics of the system we just need to keep reminding people of.
And Stephen, we didn't really get into this.
We kind of went into the show right away.
A little bit about yourself here.
I've pulled, of course, things off Wikipedia, but you may want to tell a little bit more about yourself than what I just pulled.
I know you run Free Domain Radio, and it's a podcast, political philosophy, atheism, personal relationship issues, and things of that type.
You're an anarcho-capitalist.
Is there anything else to say about yourself?
No, I mean, I have some training in this.
I have a master's degree in history focusing on the history of philosophy from the University of Toronto, which is like Canada's Ivy League.
I was an entrepreneur for about 15 years in the software industry, started and co-founded a company, grew it and sold it and all that kind of stuff.
So I've got some market experience, I've got some intellectual experience, and for about six or seven years I've been doing this show, which It seeks to bring philosophy as much as possible to people's lives in whatever context, political, business, economic, personal.
Philosophy, of course, is the all-discipline, and there's nothing under sun or moon that can't be shoved into philosophy somewhere.
So it's a pretty wide-ranging show.
Yeah, it's freedomainradio.com, and I hope people will check it out.
It's all free.
My books are all free, and so I hope people will have a look, and I guess that's the short and skinny on me.
Yeah, and by the way, I've got to say, you know, Free Domain Radio and And the work that you do up there, I think is absolutely fantastic.
I mean, I've listened to a decent amount of some of the things that you've set up there and some of the work you've even done sort of outside, a little bit off the beaten path of just the freedom thing with, namely the Trayvon Martin issue, which is something, you know, as a criminal defense lawyer, I've had occasion to speak about quite frequently.
And it really was pleasantly surprising to me How well you, as a non-lawyer, handled all the various legal issues involved in the Trayvon Martin situation.
You did such a very good job sort of taking the passion out of it and just analyzing it from a rational basis.
So I would really encourage everybody to just check out Free Domain Radio.
And what else?
Stephen, how can people find you if they want to contact you, ask you a question?
Oh, sure.
Well, I do two call-in shows a week, which is Wednesday night, 8 p.m.
Eastern, and Sunday mornings, 10 a.m.
Eastern.
They can email me host at freedomainradio.com or operations at freedomainradio.com.
And, of course, the website is there.
They can go to youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio.
If they like, I was recently on Joe Rogan's show.
I don't know if you know the guy, but he was very cool.
And we hit number one on iTunes.
It was, you know, more Joe than me, but that was very nice.
So people can check that show out.
That's on the YouTube channel as well.
Fantastic.
You know, we both have an interest in philosophy.
It was a minor of mine in my undergraduate studies.
And, you know, it was surprising to me as I was at my kids' high school the other day looking through their electives.
You know, there wasn't even one elective On the high school level for all four years at a major high school here in Arizona, not one philosophy elective class.
What is it that we've lost our way to the point that we don't even offer philosophy anymore until you get to the undergraduate college level?
And even then it's not a required class.
Yeah, I mean, there's so many things that should be taught in junior high and high school or even earlier.
I mean, ignorance of the law is no excuse.
There are no required courses on law.
We're supposed to vote on complex economic issues.
There is no course that is required on economics or politics or political theory or critical thinking or logic or any of the things that really are the foundation of our entire success as Western civilization inhabitants.
So it is tragic.
We're tougher as a group, like the Western civilization people of all races and creeds and all genders.
We just used to be a lot tougher.
We used to be able to criticize our institutions in very positive ways.
But now what's happened is, you know, I don't know if it's political correctness or whatever it is, but now you just, you can't offend anyone.
And the problem is, if you're afraid of offending people, then you can't really think, because all you're worried about is the effects of your thoughts on other people, not whether you're actually pursuing and achieving something rational and true and healthy and virtuous and moral and consistent and all that kind of good stuff that philosophy It's supposed to have.
And I think that, you know, we are the race that overthrew the monarchs.
We are the race that rebelled against the papacy.
We are the race that separated church and state.
We are the race, and I just mean sort of the Western, not the white race, the Western culture.
We are the culture that brought reason and evidence, that invented the scientific method, that advanced medicine, that did all of these great things.
And all of those things offended and annoyed a lot of people.
And over the last I don't know, 50 or 60 years, we've really given up on really having the capacity, having the cojones, having the spine to speak truth despite offense.
And I think because of that, the lowest common denominator and the victim mentality and the offended mentality and, you're wrong because I'm upset, that has sort of dominated our discourse and really cheapened it beyond almost all recognition.
You know, some people attribute this to more of a sinister A type of a notion.
Hey, the government has taken over the public schools and the government really doesn't want you thinking outside the box.
Their interest is that you, you know, continue to be a loyal supporter of anything called the Patriot Act or the Patriot this or that and that you sing songs about freedom rather than actually think about freedom and keep paying your taxes and voting for, you know, the left or right wing of the bird of prey and that's really, you know, their interest and so this is more of a sinister plot.
Others I think, well, maybe we've just sort of strayed from these important ideas because there are so many other things to talk about now.
You're busy playing video games or watching sports or something.
What's your take on why we have strayed?
And I was sort of surprised to hear you say it was only really the last 50 or 60 years because I think you could make a case that it goes back much further than that.
So why has this happened to us as not just Americans but as civilized people?
Yeah, I think it sort of peaked over the last 50 or 60 years.
But before that, you could say stuff that upset people and that was okay.
And of course, now, I mean, we're faced, like, the big crisis now is we might have to cut $2.7 trillion worth of government spending down to $2.6 trillion worth of government spending, and everyone's freaking out.
I mean, we took out the Nazis, for heaven's sakes.
We won the Cold War.
You know, we used to have some Some spine.
We used to have some guts, and we used to have some courage.
And now, what are we talking about?
You know, we are basically a culture that lived on a starvation diet to fight evil, and now people are saying, well, we might have to cut three sesame seeds off our Big Mac bun, and everyone's completely freaking out.
Like, this is the worst thing ever.
So, I think we kind of lost perspective on what having a tough time or sacrifice or, you know, they call this in Europe the austerity.
Austerity measures are going in, and I mean, government spending is still increasing.
They're just calling it austerity.
I think we've lost completely this idea of what it means to actually sacrifice for the good of the future and for the rise of virtue and so on.
I don't think that there's any sort of backroom, smoky deals where the guys say, let's make sure we don't teach the kids how to think.
Let's make sure we don't teach the kids how to reason and how to be skeptical of authority.
I think it's just natural.
I mean, if you're a government teacher, can you really point out to children That government is force.
I mean you can't because if you point that out then the kids are going to say well then so your salary and your privileges and your summers off and you going home for three o'clock in the afternoon and me having to go to daycare that's all the result of force so you basically are profiting from force because you're forcing my parents to pay for your salary and you're forcing me to be here and you're forcing me to pay for your retirement and your health care down the road so how could any teacher have any kind of authority Over children who
she would introduce or he would introduce the basic idea that the state is forced.
They know they're in a government school.
They know that there's a government teacher.
So you just naturally, nobody has to tell anyone to do anything.
There's no memo that has to go out.
It's just a basic reality that teachers don't want to say, hey look, I'm representing evil.
Now do your homework and it's just not going to happen that way, right?
Yeah, but you know, that's been the case for a long time.
The reason I'm interested in this is because it's difficult to right the ship if we don't know why the ship has gone adrift.
What do you think it is?
I don't know.
I'm a little bit confused about it.
I don't know if we've just gotten sort of fat and happy and we're distracted by things or if it's been that the government now is in charge of just so many things.
We don't feel that we could even survive without the government.
I think every day this This little dinky government shutdown went on and on, I think, is a real danger for the government because people are slowly figuring out, hey, my life's going, the sun rose in the morning, and still I was able to feed myself.
So we're going to go to a commercial break, and on the other side of that break, it's going to be more with Stefan Molyneux.
And I want to get into his thoughts on health care when we get back.
Okay.
We'll be dancing in the moonlight, smiling.
Yes, I do.
We are back with Stefan Molyneux, my good friend, good philosopher, anarcho-capitalist, libertarian, Canadian, and supporter of big government, Well, maybe not.
But anyway, Stefan, we were talking.
We're talking a little bit before the break about sort of how the ship has run adrift here, and I'm wondering, in so many different areas you can look at, and healthcare is one of these, and look at how we have drifted in the healthcare world.
We've gone from a free market healthcare system to, you know, regulations, and then we got into the government approving medications, and then certain things are illegal, and you need prescriptions for certain things, and then we got the government running free healthcare for poor people and for elderly people, and now we've gone...
All the way to a government system that appears like it's going to be a total 100% complete takeover of healthcare system.
And we're still running this humongous drug war on illegal drugs that costs about $70 billion a year and causes the United States to be the leader in the world's incarceration rate.
All for drugs that injure about 1% of the people.
It just doesn't make any sense.
And so you guys in Canada are ahead of us in the United States.
How's that working out for you up there to our north?
Well, government healthcare is exactly like the difference between a washroom at the Hilton and a washroom in a public park.
I mean, if you break your leg, they'll fix your leg up, right?
So stuff that is obvious and not technically complicated, they will do.
And I think that stuff's relatively okay.
Wait lists for more complicated procedures are 6 to 24 months.
You get misdiagnoses all the time.
You get massive delays in treatment.
One of the women who was in charge of the NHS in England just died after her operation was cancelled for the fourth time In a row.
I myself have had to fly down to the United States and pay out of pocket to get any kind of decent healthcare.
So, no, I am not a fan.
I work out a lot.
I eat well.
I try to make sure I stay as happy and stress-free as possible.
And that is all because the idea of getting caught in the slimy maw of the Canadian healthcare system It's kind of like a Kafkaesque nightmare to me, so it is strategy.
But of course, the American government, they have to do something.
I mean, 50 plus cents on every dollar that is spent on healthcare in the U.S. is spent by the U.S. government.
Medicaid as a percentage of GDP has doubled in only 10 years.
You simply cannot take on any kind of government spending without taking on the military-industrial complex and entitlement spending, because that's the vast majority of what the government spends its money on.
When you take on the military-industrial complex, everyone freaks out, like America is suddenly dangerous because you have, I don't know, 710 rather than 720 military bases overseas, when in fact those military bases are the ones causing people to hate America and feel oppressed and want to fight back.
And they have to do something about healthcare costs.
Now the rational thing to do about healthcare costs Is to free physicians and free customers and stop with all the regulations, stop licensing everything, stop putting all these restrictions on the spread of medicine and make sure that the FDA stops making it cost hundreds of millions of dollars to get any kind of drug approved.
That will cause a massive collapse in healthcare prices and would be enormously effective.
But unfortunately, you know, pharmaceutical companies and doctors and they all go on strike and they all cause huge problems and so, you know, they're kind of stuck in this horrible system that, you know, the politicians didn't invent, the people didn't invent, but the logic of it or the illogic of it keeps rolling forward.
They have to do something to try and crush down healthcare costs, and the best way to do it, they believe, is to get the healthy to subsidize the sick, and that's of course what Obamacare is all about.
Get the young healthy people to subsidize the old sick people, get men who relatively, at least when they're young, don't use the healthcare system, subsidize women who do, particularly when they're having kids and so on.
It's just a massive transfer.
It's the same thing that's happened before where you try and get the rich to subsidize the poor and everyone ends up broke.
So it is a catastrophe and it will end up with either a repeal of government control or a complete takeover.
Yeah, and you know, we have sort of a perfect storm brewing in this healthcare system now that we've got, you know, we have pharmaceutical companies that are making so much money.
I heard a stat the other day that said About 50% of all adults are on some type of prescription medicine now, at least once a week.
I mean, it sort of raises the question in my mind, how did we ever survive all these years without these prescription medications?
And we've got hospitals and doctors are constantly packed, and we lead, I don't know if we lead the world, but we're certainly very, very close to the top in heart disease, in cancer rates, in diabetes, and all this stuff is exploding and moving out of control.
And yet, you know, you threw out this concept of you eat right.
Well, the government taught me when I was growing up that to eat right meant drink lots of milk, because milk is good for strong bones and teeth, and to eat my meat, right, as much meat as possible, because meat's important for protein, and there were lots of oils, right, and to eat my Captain Crunch in the morning.
Is that what you're talking about, Stefan, when you say eat well?
Oh no!
No, I mean, if the government tells you to eat it, run.
Run from whatever they're suggesting you eat.
I mean, the government food chart is almost completely dominated by special interest groups, which is why you get all of this nonsense that's in there.
You know, there's that old saying that, you know, believe nothing until it is officially denied by the government, and then you know it's true.
And in the same way, I mean, Looking at government recommendations, it's just like having an opposite compass, you know?
You want to go north, it says south, okay, well, you know, head that way.
You want to go north, it says north, well, head the opposite way.
So government is just opposite land, so yeah, whatever they recommend, do your own research and don't follow that stuff.
I assume that a government diet will simply do you much more harm than good.
So I'm just guessing that you have an opinion about what eating well means, so lay it on us.
Well, I mean, I'm a vegetarian.
I will occasionally, occasionally eat meat just because I'm, you know, I mean, B12 and all that kind of stuff.
I lift weights.
I play sports and rock climb and all that.
So, yeah, there's plenty of energy for that.
So, I generally tend to be on the vegetarian side.
I have a bit of a weakness for carbs, so I'll indulge in that.
And I try and keep sugar down to a minimum.
And that's, you know, I think that works out pretty well.
I weigh pretty much what I weighed 30 years ago and I have lots of energy and all that kind of stuff.
So that's sort of my suggestion.
I mean, everyone needs to do a research based on their own.
But, you know, cut down your sugar.
That's usually never a bad thing.
I don't have any particular aversion to fat or anything like that and I don't think the carbs are, you know, Satan's fingertips trying to gouge my nutritional eyeballs out.
But I think just keep it, mix it up and keep a variety going and all that kind of stuff and, you know, different ethnic foods can really mix it up.
So that's sort of my Yeah, you know, I recently had a huge paradigm shift on our show.
We had Dr.
T. Colin Campbell, who is the author of The China Study, which I read and really blew me away.
And we also had Dr.
John McDougall on our show, who has, I guess, been involved in vegetarian, healthy, sort of outside the norm.
They say these things that I always thought was sort of heresy, you know, stay away from cow's milk and things like that.
But as I did my own research, I came to exactly the same conclusions that you did.
And I eat now pretty much what I would like to call whole food plant-based diet, which is mostly vegetarian, with maybe a little bit of whatever I want in there, maybe 5% or 10%.
Have you read the China study?
No, no, I haven't.
I had Dr.
Robert Lustig on this show, on my show, where he talked about the evils of sugar and that sort of made me a bit of a convert.
I'm a British, I grew up a bit of a sweet tooth and all that, but no, I, you know, but I think I understand the idea, which is basically that if you look at the longest-lived and leanest populations that have the least incidence of cancers and heart disease and so on, that you will find a lot of rural populations who eat a lot of plant food.
And that, I think, is important.
I think people just need to find a diet that has some decent health recommendations that they can just live with.
Because, you know, a diet is a lifestyle change.
I mean, you just have to just commit to the whole thing.
Like, you don't exercise for four weeks and then think you're going to be healthy for the rest of your life.
You just have to keep exercising.
It's the same thing whatever diet commitment you make.
You just have to really find something that works for you, talk to your doctor, and just stick with it, I think, is the key.
Yeah, but what you're laying out doesn't provide lots of revenue for the powers that be.
And it's interesting, you know, our healthcare system is such a misnomer because really it's all about disease care.
Everything we talk about, we're talking about Obamacare and the pharmaceutical industry and all these various lobby groups, you know, the meat industry and the milk industry.
None of this stuff is really about being healthy.
If you walk into the doctor's office and say, hey, I'm feeling great today.
I'm super healthy.
What can you do for me?
They're going to be like, what are you doing here?
We don't even want to talk to you until you come in with some problems.
Yeah, no, and this is the huge issue up here in Canada, too, is that the system only makes money when you get sick.
There's only profit when you get sick, and if you get sick and stay sick, Then they have a perpetual money machine out of you.
I like the old system in China.
This is sort of before communism.
So in China, the way it used to work is you'd pay your doctor every month until you got sick.
And then he would have to treat you for free.
And I mean, that's sort of the basic insurance idea.
And that works really well, because then your doctor's coming by every month saying, hey, are you overweight?
Are you smoking?
What are you doing to stay healthy?
Because I really want to keep making money off you.
So you should be making money off people staying healthy.
But we have this insane system that you couldn't conceive of a more destructive system than a system that makes money when people not only get but stay sick.
And this is why you have all these conditions where people will just keep taking these drugs.
And people have this weird idea that you'll take a pill and you'll get better.
You know, like 75% of Canadians will not follow doctor's orders, even if it means they're going to end up with diabetes or have their foot cut off or something, because people have this weird idea that there's going to be this bungee medicine that's going to come in and save you, and 70% of all healthcare issues are directly the result of lifestyle choices.
What you eat, what you smoke, what you drink, whether you exercise.
70% of healthcare, and yet we have this system that does nothing To change people's habits, but rather only makes money when they get and stay sick.
I mean, you couldn't design anything worse.
You know, Stefan, I don't think I've ever done a show where I haven't squeezed some kind of disagreement out of somebody, so I'm starting to get cranky because we're halfway through the show and I haven't found anything to disagree with you on, so let me try my hardest here.
I'm not going to talk about the drug war because I already know that you being a rational person, because no rational person It supports this drug war, so am I going to go there?
But let me ask you about this question.
This is something that I think, and maybe this is more of a definitional problem than anything else, but you refer to yourself as an anarchist, right?
Yeah.
So, I mean, do you really think we can get by with no government?
Is that really what you're promoting, or are you saying we need some version of limited government, or tell me how that all fits together?
How long do we have until our next commercial break?
I just want to make sure I time my answer.
It's actually one of the questions that we have too.
I just want to make sure I time my answer right.
Someone want to know your plan to transition from a society with a government to rational anarchy.
What do you mean by rational anarchy?
Okay, so the first thing to understand is that government is not law.
Government is not order.
Government is force and government tends to be pretty arbitrary and government continually expands.
So the history of the United States is basically the history of a social experiment, a political experiment, a philosophical experiment in creating the smallest possible government the world has ever seen.
Now, when you create a really tiny government, what happens?
Well, a government that enforces property rights to a large degree and facilitates trade and blah-de-blah, you end up with wealth because it allows the free market to operate and the free market creates wealth.
Six, eight, ten, twelve percent per year growth in income is pretty typical.
So what happens is when you have a government then that's really small, you get all this wealth, and then the government says, ooh, great, ooh, yummy, I love all this wealth.
I'm going to start scooping it up, and I'm going to start taxing people.
Now, I mean, if you remember, there was these riots called the Arab Spring in Egypt a couple of years ago, and that happened because...
The price of wheat doubled.
And of course, if you're living on two bucks a day and the price of wheat doubles, you can't eat.
So the government can't really tax you when you're broke because you'll have a revolution.
But when you get sort of rich, kind of middle-classy, the government can keep taxing you and you don't really revolt.
And also because the government has you as a collateral, like your future tax receipts become a collateral, which is basically what the national debt is the government can borrow based upon your future productivity.
Which is, you know, guaranteed to at least maintain itself, if not generally increase.
And so whenever you have a government, the best situation is a small government, but a small government plants the seeds for a huge government.
Because the government can tax you more and the citizens don't revolt.
Because of the increased standard of living, the government can use your future tax, the receipts they're going to get from you, as collateral to borrow and basically end up enslaving you.
And then the government has all this power, starts handing out favors to corporations, starts becoming like an empire.
I mean, the country that was really first with free trade was England, and England was a small government, and then it became an empire.
And all of the empire taking that happened in the Western world from sort of the 16th, 17th century onward was the result of some aspects of free trade creating wealth which allows government to fund all of these imperialistic ventures.
So I don't think it's an accident That the American experiment, where you have the smallest possible government, or at least the smallest government the world has ever seen, has now turned into the very largest, most destructive, most powerful government that the world has ever seen, with the capacity to destroy life on this planet many, many times over, and which some estimates have put the tag of the empire after the Second World War, U.S. imperialism, at 20 to 30 million people dead, which is, you know, half to three quarters of the death count of the Second World War itself.
So, if you want a free society, and the idea is, well, we'll just get a small government and keep it small, I think it's impossible.
People get lazy about restraining government when they get wealthy.
Governments take control of currency, and who the heck knows how to fight against that?
I mean, they take control of currency, and then they just can print whatever money they can counterfeit, they can borrow, and they can hide the actual cost of government from the immediate generation, which gets all these free goodies for nothing.
And so I don't think there's any rational way to keep a government small.
I mean, that's sort of one practical argument.
The other argument is the non-aggression principle applies to government.
The non-aggression principle, thou shalt not initiate force against others, means that taxation is immoral, means that any agency which initiates force to eliminate competition is, by definition, Immoral.
And it's an irrational system.
To create a moral rule and then create an exception is the fundamental of hypocrisy.
And so you can't have a non-aggression principle as a moral absolute, as a universal moral absolute, and allow for a government.
Because a government is a monopoly on the initiation of force in a given geographical area.
And so if you say, well, we shouldn't use force to get what we want, to take stuff, to force other people to do stuff, then by definition you can't have a government because that's defined as the initiation of force.
It's like saying, we need to get rid of slavery, so let's have a slave army to do that.
Let me stop you there, because you're kind of getting into an area where maybe I can pry a little bit of disagreement out, because I haven't disagreed with anything you've said thus far.
As a libertarian, isn't the enemy really not government at all, but coercion?
Shouldn't we just say the enemy is coercion or initiation of force, rather than government?
Agreed.
Yeah, agreed.
And this is why my show is kind of far-ranging, right?
So I have experts on the show About spanking, saying, look, spanking is a violation of the non-aggression principle because it's not like you're self-defending against your four-year-old or something.
And so I think that there's tons of areas where we can apply the non-aggression principle in our relationships, in our business relationships, in our parenting relationships with our children and so on, where, you know, you and I can't overturn the Fed, but we can say, look, I'm not going to aggress against my own children.
I'm going to find other ways to work with my kids other than aggression.
So, yeah, the government is simply in many ways the most intrusive violation of the non-aggression principle, but there's tons more that we can do a lot more about in our relationships than just opposing the government, which is a little bit like, you know, banging your head against the Berlin Wall.
Well, assuming we could find a peaceful way to fund this, What would be the problem?
Look, I'm busy being a lawyer.
You're busy being a philosopher.
I don't have time to patrol my property to make sure bad guys aren't trespassing on me and stealing my things.
So what's wrong with me hiring a group to watch for bad guys and when they find bad guys is defined as people who initiate force against other people, grab them and take them away and give them a fair trial to determine whether or not they indeed initiated force And then if they can't be made to live among us in a way that they don't initiate force anymore, and there are people like that, lock them up in a cage.
I mean, do we have to call that government or can we call that government?
As long as it doesn't initiate force, what's the problem?
Oh, but you see, you're making, with all due respect, you're making a fundamental error, which is to assume that having armed guys grab guys and throw them into jail after a trial is the right way to do things.
I don't know.
I don't know if it's the right way to do things or not.
I have no idea.
Because that's what the government does, right?
And so I don't know if it's the right way.
There's lots of other ways that it could be done.
Sorry, go ahead.
Let me just throw this out there, because I've been doing criminal defense for 20 years.
And most of the people, in my opinion, who are in the justice system shouldn't be in the justice system.
They are victims of an aggressing government, people involved in the drug war who are non-violent, and there are lots of them, people involved in prostitution.
There's lots of crimes that shouldn't exist.
But on the other end of the spectrum, there are really very violent, anti-social people out there who are very happy, just for the fun of it, to smash in your front door, shoot you dead, Take your TV set and go down the street, and that's a badge of honor.
And there's nothing you're going to be able to do to convince those people to be peaceful.
Let's assume we've got people in the world like that.
No, look, I completely agree with you.
One in 25 people is a sociopath.
And sociopaths, they have no empathy.
They'll just take what they want.
They have little problem with violence if it's practical.
So you can't have a civilized society with that many sociopaths, I think, in society.
Now, of course, the problem with the government is they all just go to the government and then have the power of the police and the military over you as well.
But what I would ask is, where do you think the bad guys come from?
Because this is the most fundamental question.
Like, if I want a safe society, and we all do, I think all reasonable people do, then I would rather find a way to prevent bad guys from coming into existence than arm a whole bunch of guys hoping to take out bad guys.
So if there's a way that we know, To stop breeding bad guys in society, that would be much better, right?
Because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right?
So I would really want a defense agency or whatever it is to figure out where these bad guys come from.
And I think that science has pretty good answers to that.
Well, let's agree that that's definitely the preferred course of action.
Let's try to minimize the amount of initiators of force out there.
When we talk about bad guys, that's what we're talking about, right?
We're not talking about people who choose to live their lives in ways we might think is immoral or bad or unhealthy or unwarranted or something.
We're talking about people who are happy to initiate force against other people.
But let's assume, at the end of the day, At the limits of science, at the limits of good parenting, and all this other stuff, there are just some people in the world who joy for sport, smacking people on the head and taking their things, and there's just nothing we can do to convince them not to do that.
Indeed, look, there are people who believe, and it may very well be in their self-interest, to aggress against other people.
Look at the people at the top of the political food chain.
I think you're going to have a hard time convincing Barack Obama that his life would be better Living in a non-aggressive type of a way.
He lives pretty good right now.
Yes, but Barack Obama...
What are you gonna do with those people?
I mean, at some point, assuming we've tried everything, can't we lock them away and put them in a cage?
Well, you could.
I think what's better, cheaper and more efficient is economic ostracism, right?
You can't live in a city unless people are willing to trade with you.
And if enough people recognize the dangers of having, you know, murderous thieves or whatever around, the best thing to do is simply not have anyone deal with them.
Then they have to leave the city because they can't get food, they can't rent.
That's one possibility.
I don't know if it works for sure or not.
Unless they're good at just taking things.
I mean, they don't have to worry about trading with anybody because They're smashing in front doors and taking what they want.
Well, no, because I think in a free society, naturally, you can own a weapon.
So I don't think that a lot of thieves are really that keen on kicking in doors when people are armed inside.
That's sort of, I think, the lesson of a lot of the research.
Even Harvard has come out now recently with research basically stating that gun control adds to crime rates.
But I think if you look at...
My mom supports my right to have an AR-15 in my house, which I do have, and I keep loaded at all times just in case that bad guy comes through my front door.
But I can't convince my mom to keep an AR-15 in her house.
She's not interested in doing that.
So all these guys really...
We know who has the weapons, so that's sort of the unknown, right?
But the genesis of evil, right, the genesis of sociopathy and psychopathy and the people who grew up without conscience is pretty well understood in science.
I mean, Barack Obama had a terrible childhood.
He was abandoned by his dad.
He was beaten.
I mean, he just had a really violent, ugly, and disrupted childhood, yanked from place to place and so on.
And so the idea that he would grow up with Let's say a somewhat deficient sense of empathy is pretty well understood by science.
If we could, like we're always only about three years away from a virtuous society, which is if we could just get parents to treat children peacefully, respectfully, without coercion, without aggression, without abandoning them to daycares, to just get parents, mom or dad, I don't care, both if you can.
Stay home for three years, breastfeed your kids and treat them gently and with love and with empathy and with caring and concern and so on.
I mean then we would have a free society.
We wouldn't, you know, almost all criminality would be eliminated and people would be charitable, kind, generous, they would negotiate and all this kind of stuff.
Now, I get it.
I mean, it's not you snap your fingers and you can't just make it happen.
But that definitely is the path towards the society that we want.
There will still be bad guys around, sure.
Some guys are going to get brain tumors that's going to make them aggressive.
Some people are going to get head injuries like these poor NFL players with their concussion injuries.
They're going to turn aggressive.
They're going to be nutty and crazy.
But those people are going to be so rare.
That they're not going to impede the functioning of a healthy society, but I think fundamentally it comes down to parenting, that the best thing we can do is encourage, like if we have kids ourselves, be gentle and peaceful and calm with them, and raise them lovingly, and if we don't have kids or we don't have kids yet, talk about that as a value.
I think that is the best way towards getting a society where People don't want to dominate others.
They don't have the delusion and the entitlement and the narcissism of wanting something for nothing.
All of this comes out of highly disrupted infancies in toddlerhood, at least according to the experts I've talked to and the research that I've done.
And for those listeners who are interested, there's a FDRURL.com forward slash BIB. I've done a whole series called The Bomb and the Brain, which goes over the science of how evil develops in the mind.
And, you know, we know fairly well how to cure it.
We just have to have the virtuous willpower to...
Put those things into practice.
You know, Stefan, I'm doing my best to try to get some disagreement here, and you're not helping at all.
So we're going to go to a break.
On the other side of the break, I'm going to ask you one of my favorite questions.
Are you optimistic or pessimistic for where this ship has drifted into?
We'll be right back with more of Stefan Molyneux.
Lord, I can't say.
all everyone's in a while by the planet get it in on me because we've just a lot of standard for about thirty years now I've got to admit, he's kind of bringing me around a little.
It's growing on you, right?
It is growing.
It's taking 30 years for me to start liking Freebird.
I still wouldn't put it in the top.
This song comes out really high in the greatest rock and roll songs of all time.
I don't know why it does, but it must be all those people with the brain tumor Stefan Molyneux was just talking about.
Oh man, you just want to get some email from the Leonard Skinner fans now, don't you?
Devin, I'm getting desperate here to get some disagreement, so let me just throw something out.
Is Led Zeppelin the best rock and roll band ever to walk the earth?
Oh, that's a good question.
I think they're pretty damn high.
I lean a bit more towards the Queen side because I like the variety, but they had some pretty amazing stuff.
Well, I'm not going to let you just wimp out like that, Stefan.
The question was, are they the best?
Not, are they pretty damn high?
Now, do you mean hard rock?
He means any genre, anything.
Well, hard rock is too easy of a question.
I mean, there's no argument.
Of course they're the best hard rock band ever to watch.
There's no question about that.
The question is, are they the best, let's just say, rock and roll band ever?
Yeah, you know, I'd really have to think about that.
I'd have to go through my collection, I'd have to mull it over, I'd have to weigh all of these things, so I'm going to completely spineless out and jellyfish my way back out through the exit.
I'm going to go in through the outdoor and avoid that question.
But you've got to weigh it against the Rolling Stones.
I mean, there's so many...
No, they're much better than the Stones.
The Stones are one-dimensional.
Come on.
All right.
We'll let them think about that a little bit.
But back to where the ship is addressed to.
You know, this is the question...
I gave a speech at Doug Casey's event a couple of weekends ago in Tucson and it was about the police state and we sort of turned it into are you optimistic or pessimistic and first I decided to lay out the case for pessimism and man I didn't think I could recover from that because I could have just kept going on and on and on but at the end of the day I found myself being sort of optimistic and so I'm just curious what Stefan Molyneux thinks about where we're heading.
Yeah, I mean, the optimistic and pessimistic thing I have trouble with just because it seems like you're giving your power away.
So I think that the world can change for the better.
I know that the world can change for the better because it has in the past.
We got rid of slavery, equal rights for women, you know, like separation of church and state.
We've done some seriously great stuff.
That equal rights for women thing is still a matter of debate.
Yeah, but they can sign contracts.
They can go to higher education.
There's things that are an advantage.
Yeah, I know, with the government, it goes too far, and now they've got too much power.
I get all of that, but that's just the government messing up what the good people want, like race relations.
They've just gone too far the other way, and now it's become ridiculous again.
Some great things have been done throughout history, and who is it done by?
It's done by people who care, who are willing to stand up, who are willing to defy that Japanese proverb that the tall poppy gets cut down, the nail that sticks up that gets hammered down, just willing to stand up and be annoying and be inconvenient to society.
There's a great George Bernard Shaw quote where he says, the reasonable man Adapts to his environment.
The unreasonable man expects his environment to adapt to him.
Therefore, all progress is the result of unreasonable men.
And I think there's some real truth in that.
Where is society going to go?
Well, frankly, it's where people like you and I want it to go.
Most people are passive.
Most people go with the flow.
Most people are conformist to the presence and therefore invisible to the future.
But the movers and shakers, the people who get things done, the people who are willing to take risks, to speak out, to stand up, they're the ones who decide where society is damn well going to go.
Now I am one of those people for better or for worse and I believe that the greatest lever that we have in society is philosophy and I'm putting all of my muscularity behind moving that weight and therefore moving society.
I do know that there's nothing that moves society more in the long run than what people believe is good.
I think we've fundamentally lost and reversed our definition of what is good.
We've allowed evil people to define service to power And subjugation to authority as the good.
And we have to reclaim that.
Evil people simply can't honestly talk about what it is that they want and what it is that they prefer and the methodology with which they're going to get it.
They always have to hide.
They always have to dissemble.
It's like trying to nail jello to a wall to get a bad person to define their terms.
So we can be clear.
We can be forthright.
We can say property rights, non-aggression principle, equality under the moral rule.
We can be very clear and very forthright about what it is that we want.
So of course we're going to win the future.
Is it a straight line?
Is it a painless line?
Of course not.
Everything that is worth doing is hard and there's nothing more worth doing than saving the future from the prowling beasts of prey that masquerade in human form and run the world.
But of course we're going to win.
I'm completely optimistic about what's going to happen in the long run.
I'm certainly not optimistic that it's going to be always fun, or that it's certainly not optimistic that it's going to be easy, but I'm the kind of person that, good!
You know, when you were a Marine, you didn't want to do one push-up on a spring.
You wanted it to be hard, because that's what makes you strong, and that's what makes you successful, and that's what makes you stand out in the future, which is not a bad thing to aspire to.
Fantastic.
I agree with everything you said there, brother.
But I know there's one thing I want to point out.
I think that our battle isn't just against people who are evil and who are initiators of force.
There are people on the other side who completely disagree with us, who are people of good faith and believe they are doing the right thing.
Like, for example, those who would say, well, we can't just let sick people who can't afford to pay for their health care.
We can't just let them die.
And you and Stefan Molyneux...
We just let them rot in the streets.
And I think they are acting in good faith.
They are acting from the heart.
They're kind people.
They're wrong.
And we need to do a better job explaining why our vision of a free market where people are not entitled to live at the expense of their neighbor, even if they're in dire need of help, why that's a better position.
So what do you say to that person, the person with good intentions, who supports big government?
Well, I would say that Bastiat made this point hundreds of years ago.
I would say, look, you're confusing society with government.
Society is people of goodwill who want to take care of each other.
We know that that's the case.
People have children.
You don't have children for economic reasons.
They're ridiculously expensive and inconvenient, so you have children because of whatever reason, but it's not an economic selfish reason.
Americans give hundreds of billions of dollars a year to charity, and people support the welfare state as a concept, which means people really want to help the poor.
That's people doing stuff.
That's called society.
Now, when the government takes over something, It sort of elbows everyone else out the way.
So there used to be all these friendly societies and insurance societies and charities that were run by churches and local groups, the Shriners and all these sorts of alliance clubs and so on.
They all used to help people.
Government came along and elbowed them all out of the way.
And now what's happened is people think that because the government does it, only the government can do it and only the government can do it well.
And for the people who say, well, I care about the poor and so on, well, yes, libertarians care about the poor.
We really care about the poor, which is why we don't want them trapped in an awful welfare system, which is why we don't want them trapped in underachieving terrible school systems, which is why we want to make sure that there's enough economic opportunity to get everyone out of the lower classes who wants to be there, and why we don't want to sell them off Wholesale to foreign banksters in the form of the national debt.
We really care about the poor.
What is going to happen to all these poor people when the welfare checks stop running, which they will, because mathematically it simply cannot continue.
What is going to happen to all the sick people when the government can't pay for their healthcare anymore?
They are really going to hit the wall.
You know, it's like a drug addict saying, well, man, if you don't give me cocaine, you don't care about my happiness.
It's like, I do care about your happiness.
That's why you should stop taking cocaine, because when you crash, it's going to be really bad.
So we're trying to get people away from the addiction to force, which is unsustainable, creates incredibly artificial things in society that can't possibly last, and we need a soft landing.
The only people who care about the poor are the people who want to free them from the state And free their economic opportunities.
I mean, 40% of Americans need permission from the government to do their job.
How much does that keep poor people down?
The war on drugs is incredibly oppressive towards poor people because it destroys local businesses and it creates perverse incentives to pursue a life of crime.
90% of people in American jails are there for non-violent offenses.
They're there for made-up crimes of aesthetics.
So we really do care about the poor, and just saying you want to care about the poor and hand them over to the power of the state is just a self-serving hypocrisy.
People who really care about the poor do the research, figure out what is actually best for the poor, which system has actually benefited the poor the most, and they know it's the free market if they do the research.
So I just say to those people, don't just wave a flag and shout a slogan and read a pamphlet from the government.
Actually find out what benefits people.
Stefan Molyneux, you are truly a giant in the fight here for freedom.
And you're a Canadian, but you're probably one of the best Americans I know!
Thank you.
And I say that, of course, not in the geographic sense.
We've got more non-Americans living in America today than I think we've ever had.
People who don't have any concept of the notion of what America is.
Really was supposed to be about and what many, and I don't want to say all, but many of the founders of our country, at least those who had the guts to send that declaration over to King George III and say, hey, guess what?
You don't own us.
We're free now.
Those are real Americans.
And I've often said it doesn't matter where people live.
It doesn't matter if they're born in America or not.
Real Americans say and believe the kinds of things that you were just talking about.
And so cheers to you, Stefan.
Tell us Tell, for all my listeners again, tell us how people can follow Stefan Molyneux, track what you're saying, learn more about you.
Lay it on us.
Well, I hope people don't care about me, just care about philosophy.
But yeah, freedomainradio.com is the website.
You can subscribe for the podcast.
You can get the books.
They're all free.
I do call-in shows Wednesday nights 8 p.m.
Eastern Standard and Sunday mornings 10 a.m.
Eastern Standard.
And youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio for the shows.
And I really wanted to say thank you so much for the invitation.
It was a really enjoyable conversation.
I think the first show we've done together, I hope we'll do another one.
It really was a great pleasure.
And for my listeners, I know you're attorneyforfreedom.com, but where can people listen to your show?
Well, you can always find me at attorneyforfreedom.com, and I always...
I invite and really love the criticism, so if anybody's got something they disagree with, please send it in.
I'm always open-minded.
Bring it on.
Yeah, bring it on.
Stephan, we'll be in touch with you soon.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Mike, who we got next week?
Next week we have Ben Swan coming on.
I want to say one more thing to Stephan before he left.
I posted a picture of Stephan, I don't know if you remember, from Libertopia on Facebook.
You and I put our heads together and we made an ass out of ourselves.
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