All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 14, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:55
2530 NASA, Taxes and the Value of Space Exploration - An Answer to Neil Degrasse Tyson
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, everybody.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
This is mailbag time.
Listener feedback, listener questions.
Thank you so much for everyone who submitted questions.
You, too, can submit a question, if your name is Bono, at mailbag at freedomainradio.com, because we're really trying to come up with email addresses that are so easy to make fun of, it's ridiculous.
If you're watching this on YouTube, please click on the subscribe button.
If you have additional questions, put them in the comments section below, and I will try to get to them.
So let's get started, shall we?
And thanks, of course, to everyone who sent stuff in.
First question.
Famous contemporary astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson claims that government is necessary for space exploration because private investors need more knowledge of the benefits and risks before they'll be willing to embark on a new frontier.
In his words, private enterprise in the history of civilization has never led large, expensive, dangerous projects with unknown risks because when you combine all these factors, you cannot create a capital market valuation of that activity.
He goes on to cite various past explorations led by governments that were later followed by businessmen who merely capitalized on opportunities already discovered.
I know that free market advocates need not have all the answers to how things would go in a free society, but where do you think his analysis about the necessity of government It goes wrong.
How might you suppose dangerous explorations would be carried out without government when there is no observable economic incentive to do so?
A very complex question, so I'm just going to skip it.
No, I will try to do something to answer it.
I think this is going to need a bit more Java, Java, Java.
The question is basically, are there benefits to using force to reallocate resources within society?
Which is like saying, are there benefits to using rape to reallocate the use of vaginas in society?
So, of course, there are pluses.
To forcing people to pay for space exploration.
And let's be very clear about this.
And now, this guy, I like him a lot.
I think he's a great guy.
I really love his communication style.
He's a great advocate for science, but he doesn't know much about philosophy and he doesn't know much about political science.
That's fine.
That's why he's a physicist, and I'm not an astrophysicist, I guess.
But he does like money to do the things that he likes to do.
I think we all do.
But he doesn't know more about philosophy than I know about physics, which is fairly rudimentary.
So, of course, when he wanders out of his field of specialization, he is going to make mistakes.
Of course.
I mean, it's natural, right?
One of the things that philosophy endlessly teaches you is the virtue of humility, which is to recognize how little you actually know.
Hopefully what you do know is important and valuable.
So when he starts talking about governments are necessary to do this, he thinks of governments in terms of like social collectives representing the will of the people who have a legitimate function in society and so on.
That's all matrix stuff and it's natural that he would say that.
So, you know, no disrespect to the guy, very smart guy, very nice guy.
But he is talking about the use of force.
And if you ignore the use of force, then you can make arguments about how we should use violence to allocate resources and people's lives and savings and money in society.
Economic incentives are not what drive people alone.
This is a common mistake that is made.
And it's kind of a ridiculous mistake to make when you think about it, and I'll sort of tell you why.
I'm a daddy.
I'm a daddy.
And having a child is a ridiculously unwise economic issue.
It's been estimated just up here in Canada, probably not too different in the US, that it costs about $650,000 to raise a child through college.
And that's not just direct costs, right?
That's all the money you spend on the child that you could have invested at a couple of points rate of return that would have earned you that much more and so on, right?
And we're not in a society now where generally your kids are going to support you in your old age because you can save in this government programs and so on.
So, the fact that we're alive is because people make ridiculously bad economic decisions.
I mean, there's no such thing as a human race.
In fact, there's no such thing as life at all.
If people don't have babies, if mammals and reptiles and birds don't have babies.
And having babies and courting and ritual mating and all of that is ridiculously bad.
I mean, how well could the peacock male do if he didn't have that giant ass Kim Kardashian-style tail to drag around?
I mean, all of this stuff is just ridiculously inefficient, but that's why life exists.
So people don't make decisions based purely on profit.
I mean, I didn't sit down with a spreadsheet with my wife saying, okay...
She has two kidneys.
There's the Silk Road.
If we break her up for parts, what can we sell my daughter for if we have one?
You make that decision based upon a variety of other factors.
But we are only alive because people make decisions against their own economic self-interest.
A Girl Writes What talks about this, I think, very well and extensively.
You can check out her channel.
That for a man to fulfill his own needs for survival is like an hour to a day, but once he starts having a wife and kids, then the amount of work he has to do just to survive goes up enormously.
So we understand that, right?
So saying that something won't happen If it's not economically productive, is simply false.
And we know it's false because we're here.
And the only reason we're here is because our parents made ridiculously uneconomic decisions about rubbing their naughty bits together and sparking off some fires of life.
So yes, it could certainly happen.
That people will pursue things for their passion.
People will pursue things for the joy.
People will pursue things for the love of the thing itself.
And there are philanthropists who are already funding space exploration.
I think SpaceX is one of them.
And so there's no reason why it couldn't happen.
It wouldn't happen in the same way as it happens with the state.
But there's absolutely no reason why it couldn't happen in a free society, and I think it probably would.
But one of the tricks of Philosophical, and particularly in economic thinking, is to see the unseen.
I guess they should know that in physics, too.
They're constantly hunting for this dark matter and stuff like that, and seeing the unseen like atoms is important.
But in economics, there's a really important trick.
You know, magicians do this thing where they have this big fluttering, sparkly dove in one hand, and that's what you look at, right?
It's called redirection.
Get them to look at this, and then they won't notice your hand doing something over here.
And the trick of economics is don't look at the sparkly dove.
Look at the pickpocket hand that's on the other side.
Don't look at the visible benefits.
Look at the hidden costs.
Look over, look past the sun to the stars of loss behind it.
And that's something that you just really have to discipline yourself to do when you're looking at society.
So the simple example is the government spends a billion dollars and creates 10,000 jobs or whatever.
And people say, wow, look, 10,000 jobs.
Yay!
You know, fantastic, right?
What you don't see, of course, is all the jobs that weren't created, because the government either took money from people directly and used it to create these jobs, or borrowed money, which meant that it was harder for other entrepreneurs to get access to capital and create jobs, or it printed money, in which case inflation destroyed a whole bunch of jobs and people's savings and so on.
So rather than look at the obvious visible benefits, the important thing is to look at the invisible costs.
Now, the other thing, too, in a democracy, those who gain benefits from state power are very vocal about it, and those who stand to lose the benefits of state power are even more vocal about it.
It's always Armageddon whenever government threatens to cut itself by 50 to 75 cents, whereas the people who would have otherwise benefited don't even know what they've lost, right?
So if you spend money to create 10,000 jobs through the government, Those 10,000 people are very happy about it, and you can see it, and it's visible, and if you say, we're going to cut this, they get very upset.
Whereas the 50,000 jobs that otherwise would have been created, well, nobody looks at their life and says, well, I would have had this great job except for this program, and I know that for sure.
They're just, oh, it's really tough finding a job.
They don't connect it to that program, and you can't ever connect it directly to anything.
You just know that it's there.
So, when you look at the surface of things, then government programs, from a pragmatic standpoint, look pretty legitimate.
They do stuff.
But when you look at the hidden costs of things, right?
So, my general sense would be to ask questions like this.
Would you rather have gone to the moon, or would you rather have a cure for cancer?
Would you rather have gone to the moon, or would you rather have a 20% more income, which you could spend on whatever you want?
Would you rather have gone to the moon or would you rather have actually convenient public schools that don't let kids out at 3pm and take summers off?
Or whatever, right?
So the question is not, would you like to have gone to the moon like it's Iceland?
Of course, yeah.
All of those things being equal, I think those moon shots are fantastic.
I think moon rocks are really cool.
I think that picture of Earthrise is really amazing.
And I think it's really fun to watch the guys in the big Michelin suits, Michelin man suits, bouncing around the moon, singing songs and playing golf.
I think it's cool to see what a flag looks like in one-sixth of Earth's gravity.
I think that's all super fun.
So the question is not, do you want that stuff or not?
Is it valuable or is it not?
In isolation, yeah, it's great, you know?
But you have to look at it in the context of everything if you want to be a responsible thinker.
I'm not saying he's not a responsible thinker, he's just not trained in this stuff, right?
So how would he really know?
So the, I don't know how many, billions and billions and billions, I'm going to break into Carl Sagan now, How much money is spent on this stuff?
Well, huge amounts of money.
And all of that money is spent and burnt up in rocket fuel and training and all that kind of stuff.
And what that means is that everything else has become more expensive.
Huge amounts of opportunities have never materialized because the money's been driven in that direction.
So saying that space exploration is good and therefore we should fund it is...
It's very short-sighted, very narrow-minded, and it's not natural to us.
We are trained to look at the tiger that's there, right?
Not at the crops that would have been there if we'd done something different last year kind of thing, right?
So we're just trained.
I mean, this is how we survive as a species, is look for the visible, not lament the never-created, the invisible, and so on.
But it's just something we need to do because it's a very real cost.
And, of course, fundamentally, it's a moral question.
I mean, this isn't interesting to talk about the economics.
It's a moral question.
Are you willing...
To use the use of violence and force and theft, the confiscatory powers of taxation, the counterfeit powers of central banking, are you willing to use force and literally steal from people to achieve what you call the good?
Now, if you ignore the theft part of it, Then you can discuss a whole bunch of things and completely miss the point, right?
The point, estimable Mr.
Tyson, is that violence is used to fund space exploration in its current form.
And you don't have the right to use violence against people, no matter how much you think it's great and useful and fun, and how much fun it is for scientists to be astrophysicists, and how much fun it is to get this Hubble Space Telescope up.
And those images are beautiful and wonderful.
I personally would pay for those.
I really would.
I would love to fund space exploration.
I just don't like the use of violence in order to achieve it.
I mean, people always say this.
They say it's market failure.
Market failure.
Well, I want this thing and the market's not providing it, so we must force people to provide it.
Like, there was a quote from someone in the government yesterday that just...
I don't generally get a facial tick because I expect this kind of crazy venom to be sprayed in my eyes from the endless infinity snake of the state, but...
This woman was talking about the Obamacare websites, the ones that only a few thousand people have actually managed to sign up out of the 15 or 60 million who visited, which means that there's going to be a general collapse.
They say, well, it's going to fail.
It's like, no, it's not going to fail because it's the government.
They can use force to do whatever they want, so, you know, it's not going to fail.
But they said it shows how much pent-up demand there is for insurance.
I mean, that's insane.
So many people visited the Obamacare website.
It shows how much pent-up demand there is for healthcare insurance.
I mean, I don't know if she remembers or not, but people are going to be stolen from and thrown in jail if they don't comply, if they don't go and get health.
Like, if they don't go and get this stuff, then they're going to be thrown in jail if they don't pay their fines or whatever, right?
So saying that there's pent-up demand for something you're forcing people to do is completely insane.
It literally is in the same moral continuum as the rapist saying what she really wanted.
She must have really wanted it because we had sex.
No, you're forcing people to do stuff.
Don't call it pent-up demand.
You're forcing people.
You know, it's a really interesting pent-up demand for cows to turn themselves into hamburgers because, look, they're all going straight up that slaughterhouse shoot.
I'm going to see that in slow motion in a GIF about three million times.
All right.
What is Stefan's opinion on the relation of protection of property rights and economic development slash growth?
Oh, people, please, please have no interest in my opinions.
I have zero interest in my opinions.
What I can prove or what I can at least make a good case for, I'd say I have some interest in that, but don't have an interest in my opinions.
A property rights is foundational to life itself.
This is not some invention from capitalism.
A squirrel takes nuts and stores nuts, hides nuts for the winter.
He only does that because he expects to retain use of them in the future.
He hides them because he knows there are thieves, and so property rights, a squirrel brain can figure them out.
Marxists, socialists, and other Marxism with robots, people have trouble with this concept, but it is foundational.
The fundamental property right as well of they're your children and therefore you will feed them and not feed everyone else's children and so on, foundational to life.
We have property rights built into our very DNA. Property rights are foundational.
Birds defend their nests, blah, blah, blah.
And cuckoos put their babies in other birds' nests as a strategy, but it's not a very common strategy.
So the idea that property rights are just some modern invention, I mean, they are the foundation.
They're not understood conceptually by animals, but so what?
And they're still practiced relentlessly by, I mean, a bear will guard their own cave because it's there.
They've invested in making it comfortable for themselves and so on.
So property rights is foundational to life.
There is no life without a property because all life requires the consumption of resources at a personal level, which is the use of resources and property and so on.
Turning property into life is foundational to the growth of life.
So protection of property rights is simply the formal recognition of that which is necessary for life to exist and grow.
Protection of property rights and economic development and growth.
Again, I hate to use the rape metaphor repeatedly, but the reason that I use it is because it is the one unambiguous crime that we can talk about.
If you talk about theft, well, you might be stealing back something that someone stole from you.
If you talk about physical aggression, it might be that someone's self-defense.
But rape is the one unambiguous crime that we can talk about where there's never any justification for it in any possible way whatsoever.
And so...
It is, you know, what relationship does banning rape have on the capacity of human beings to love each other?
Well, it's necessary but not sufficient, right?
So if people aren't raping each other, yay, great world, love it.
Will they fall in love with each other?
I hope so.
I hope that they'll have that experience.
But I know for sure that if everyone's raping each other, they sure as hell aren't going to fall in love with each other.
So violations of property rights are definitely going to lead to poverty and wretchedness and spiraling back into the eat your mud youngster world of the Middle Ages.
But if you protect property rights, then you have the capacity for economic growth if that's what people want.
Most people generally want economic growth because economic growth is simply the sum total of people's decisions when they're not aggressed against.
Like the dating and marriage market is simply the sum growth of everybody's experience and preferences when rape is no longer practiced.
And so when violations of property rights and personhoods is no longer Practice, then society is going to be what it's going to be.
I don't know.
I would imagine it's going to be generally economic growth because human desires are infinite and resources are finite and People like more and better and faster and stronger and so on, so I think that's probably what's going to happen, but it doesn't really matter.
The only thing that matters is we ban violence as a way of human interaction, and then whatever's going to happen is going to happen.
There does seem to be a very strong correlation between the protection of property rights and economic growth and development, as you can see from the examples of China in the 90s and India recently, where Hundreds of millions of people are climbing out of poverty as a result of greater protections of property rights and the rights of trade and so on.
Now, of course, protection of property rights is one of these things that is a dangerous phrase because it implies that you need a central agency of coercion to enforce property rights.
People will often say that you can't have a free market without the government to protect property rights.
The government cannot protect property rights at all.
And this is not even a question of evidence.
This is simply a question of logic.
An agency that is founded on the violation of property rights can, by its very definition, not protect property rights.
I feel like I've said this for years six million different ways.
It is hard to get because we just have so much propaganda.
But I will say it again.
It's really important to understand.
Government is an agency that is founded on the violation of property rights Insofar as it requires a monopoly on certain services, which means if you go and compete with that monopoly, they will throw you in jail.
It needs a monopoly on police.
It needs a monopoly on the law courts.
It often will need a monopoly on currency, on national defense, on prisons perhaps, which means that if you go and try and compete with the state and not fund the state for these activities, they'll throw you in jail.
So the state is founded on a violation of property rights.
So saying we need an agency founded on the universal violation of property rights in order to protect Property rights is like saying, I need to hire a security agency to steal my property so it can protect my property.
I mean, you understand, that's just a kaleidoscopic, mobius, strip, brain fart, clusterfrag of irrationality.
Can't get away from it.
Can't get around it.
So, there are ways to protect property rights that have to do with non-statism, and they're the moral ones, like just, you can't have an agency that initiates force in order to prevent the initiation of force.
But the best way to do it is to make violations of property rights very expensive.
Violence is very expensive.
It's very inefficient and very dangerous and very prone to error.
Violence is very much like a gelignite on a shaky train.
It is a very dangerous thing to have.
And because the state has a monopoly on it and is coercively funding it, people will want to use it all the time.
But when people actually have to pay for that violence themselves, violence becomes incredibly economically inefficient.
So a security company that wants to protect your property and personhood, who can figure out a way to do it without violence, is going to be able to provide rates of protection, elected charge for protection, much lower than an agency that uses violence a lot.
Violence is very expensive.
I mean, you've got to train people.
They've got to have weapons.
You might make mistakes.
It's just, and then you get sued.
I mean, it's wretched.
So if you can find ways to enforce social norms without using violence, that is far more economically efficient.
And I've gone into this in my free book, Practical Anarchy, Everyday Anarchy.
I'm not going to go over all the arguments here.
But we mistake the use of violence for economic efficiency simply because the government forces us to pay for it.
And therefore, since violence is so heavily subsidized, it only seems efficient.
Right?
So government builds roads everywhere, so we have a car-based society and everyone's made decisions on where to live and where to work and all based on the free roads and all that.
But that's because the roads were paid for through debt and coercion and monopoly.
So The efficiency of violence that is perceived by opponents of the free market only appears efficient because it's publicly funded, which means it's funded through theft, through debt, through counterfeiting.
But once you take the government out of the equation, then individuals will have to pay for violence themselves, and the cost of that will be, I guarantee you, extremely prohibitive, and it will not happen, because those who can figure out how to solve social conflicts without the use of violence will be much more economically efficient and will grow to dominate the market.
So, I hope that makes sense.
What are we at here, time-wise?
Okay, do one more.
I'll get into one more in a stateless society how do you see the reasonably probable incentive to monopolize Or, in other words, incentives to secure access to maximum amount of target resources and market share available in order to protect future profits and accumulation of wealth, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
So, this monopoly argument, you know, and I'm sorry if I sound a little impatient, but...
It is as wearisome to freedom advocates as, you know, the Hitler and Stalin argument is to atheists.
Look, they both had mustaches and therefore God.
And the monopoly argument, I'll just run through it very briefly here so that you have a concise place for it, but the monopoly argument that in a free society there may be monopolies.
A monopoly that results from free choice, Does not violate the non-aggression principle.
You know, when I got married to my wife, we said, only you for romance, sex, life, and all that.
And so we have a monopoly on each other.
And that's beautiful.
That's exactly how I want it.
Wouldn't want it any other way.
Never going to change.
So that is not bad at all.
So a monopoly that results from people's free choice.
In other words, let's say that somebody can provide electricity for one penny a year.
And everybody's like, damn, Mr.
Sun, I want that, right?
So they end up with a monopoly on the provision of electricity.
Because everyone else charges them like $500 a year or $1,000 a year.
This guy can do it for a penny a year.
Look, he's got a monopoly.
Great.
That's exactly what people want.
So this is really important to understand.
Somebody who provides a better service or product, cheaper, better, faster, smoother, whatever you want to say, they may end up with a monopoly.
But the monopoly is a result of people's free choices in trade and capitalism.
So what's wrong with that?
You can try and talk people out of that if you want, but you cannot use force to break up a voluntarily chosen monopoly.
That, again, literally is like raping in a monogamous relationship.
You cannot use force to break up a voluntarily chosen monopoly.
So that's the first argument.
Second argument is, if we say possible monopoly in the free market, therefore state, what we're saying is, I really don't like possible voluntary monopolies, so I'm going to put in a certain involuntary or violent monopoly called the state.
Because there may be some freely chosen voluntary monopoly at some point in the future, I am going to create a And advocate a certain violent monopoly in the present.
I mean, it literally is like saying, I might get a migraine at some point before I die, so I'm going to cut my own head off now.
If monopolies are bad, then obviously coercive monopolies are worse than voluntary monopolies.
And if monopolies are so bad, and coercive monopolies are worse than voluntary monopolies, and if certain monopolies are worse than possible monopolies, then creating a certain violent monopoly called the state now because of a possible voluntary monopoly in the future is completely irrational.
So that's number two.
Number three is monopolies have never been sustainable in the free market because if there's a collusion, right, so a bunch of Light bulb manufacturers get together and say, we're going to create 98-year light bulbs rather than 100-year light bulbs.
I'm being facetious.
Let's say a bunch of light bulb manufacturers get together and they say, well, we're going to raise the price of light bulbs.
And they all get together and they make these backroom deals and they all meet and so on.
So they start raising the price of light bulbs.
Well, two things happen, of course.
One is that a market opportunity opens up for people to sell light bulbs cheaper from overseas, from the asteroid mining space rocks cities or whatever.
But a huge market incentive opens up.
So what they do is they invite more competition into their market by artificially raising their prices.
That's number one.
Number two, let's say that there are five manufacturers or ten manufacturers of light bulbs that all collude to raise their prices.
Well, what happens is one guy, maybe there's a change in CEO-ship or maybe whatever, the stockholders get upset because people don't want to, they're buying fewer light bulbs.
They're harming their market, right?
Or they're switching to alternatives.
So what happens is for all of the companies that raise their prices, there is a huge market incentive to suddenly cut their prices without telling anyone else in the market.
In the cartel or whatever you want to call it.
The higher the prices go, the more market is going to be seized by somebody who suddenly drops their prices.
This has happened over and over and over again.
Yes, as Adam Smith says, there's barely an industry meeting that doesn't result in some conspiracy against the public.
Sure, capitalists want to make more money, and one way they can do that is to get everyone to raise their prices.
But because capitalists want to make more money, there's a huge incentive to drop those prices and grab more market share and look like a good guy.
And, of course, you can't be publicly criticized because it was a backroom deal that was against the interests of the public.
And so no one's going to.
So what happens is they try this and then one guy breaks ranks, snatches up a huge amount of market share, and it's just – it doesn't work.
So the only way that they've ever found – companies have ever found to raise price is through the government, through creating a fixed price, through restricting competition, through making sure that imports can't disrupt their plans, through creating monopolies, through various licensing, whatever it is.
They have to go to the government to enforce it.
It simply doesn't work in the free market.
Now, the other thing, and I've got a video called Four Myths About the Free Market Debunked.
You can find it right here on YouTube.
If I'm some company that wants to buy up all the other companies, let's say I've wanted five companies in the industry, I want to go and buy them all up, well, that's a big problem.
Because I buy up the first one at $100 million.
The second one's going to be worth that much more because people get that I'm going for a monopoly.
And the last guy is only going to hold out for a huge amount of money because I've just eliminated a whole bunch of his competitors.
I've taken on a whole bunch of debt, which means I've got to either become a lot more efficient or got to raise the prices of whatever products I'm supplying.
So it has a self-correcting mechanism.
Voluntarism is a self-correcting mechanism that has an almost infinite number of ways that it can play out.
But it just doesn't really work to try and create a monopoly.
Now people say, well what about some tiny town where there's only one grocery store?
Well, sure, that can work.
Now, we're going to assume that the grocery store is a monopoly, that there's no need for any other grocery stores in the town.
Well, first of all, of course, you can order your food online if you want.
You can order emergency supplies.
People can hold out.
Secondly, of course, the people who live and work in that store usually live and work in that community.
And if they start raising prices, their community response and ostracism is going to be pretty strong in terms of its effect.
Of course, if they continue to raise prices, it simply creates incentives for other people to come in, and it tends to make people really annoyed at that particular store, so people will simply starve it out because they don't like it.
But even if it is all possible for whatever reasons I can't think of, okay, so let's say they raise the food prices 20% or 30%.
Okay.
But you're living in a small town, so your real estate is that much cheaper.
So you're still doing fine as far as that goes, right?
It's like in Canada here, it's the same price to pay for postage all across the country, which is completely ridiculous.
Because to send a letter from one building to another building in a city is pretty cheap, right?
To truck it out using geese and magic carpets to some place like Lakina in the middle of nowhere.
I've been there, but it's ridiculous.
It's ridiculously expensive.
They say, well, it wouldn't be fair for people out in the country to have to pay more for their mail.
It's like, but they're paying a lot less for their real estate.
You buy a house out in the country for like one-fifth what you can buy in the city.
Anyway, the monopoly argument doesn't work at every conceivable level, and it's just a scare tactic.
It's a ghost story thrown up in order to get you to accept the power of the state, and I hope that you will dismiss it accordingly.
Thank you very much, everyone.
I really appreciate it.
Please keep your letters coming.
Mailbag at freedomainradio.com.
Don't forget to subscribe and check out the show.
Share it around if you can.
If you'd like to donate, we'd really appreciate it.
FDRURL.com forward slash donate.
▲
Export Selection