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Dec. 18, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

22:31

2562 Childhood Gifts and Property Rights

Stefan Molyneux discusses the long terms effects of violating a child's property rights and the connection between property rights violations and pleasing those in positions of power.

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	Hi everybody, it's Fan Mullen from Freedomain Radio.
	Question from Deb.
	My family used gifts as weapons of manipulation.
	If I did not do what they wanted me to do, they threatened to take away any gifts that I had been given by them, such as video games, television, computer, etc.
	trip, they would threaten to sell them or even destroy my property as punishment.
	I was hoping that you could talk about gift giving, the expectations and motivations behind gift giving.
	Also, if any obligations exist or ought to for the recipient.
	Currently, I view gift giving as a sort of selling of material possession for the sum of zero dollars where the recipient then rightfully and completely owns it as his or her property.
	Am I hitting the nail right on the head with this, or does my view need reevaluation?
	Well, that is a fine question.
	My daughter obviously received gifts from us.
	Parenting is a relentless series of gift-giving.
	You give...
	Resources, food, shelter, time, energy, sleep.
	You hand all of these things over to kids, and I don't get to take them back, right?
	You know, one of the things when you view irrational things, Behavior among adults.
	The first place to look for, and it's such a strong place to look for it that like 95% is the only place you need to look.
	The first place to look for it is that same behavior inflicted on a child.
	Now, as children, parents will give them a gift.
	Let's say they give them an iPod.
	And then if the parents are displeased with the child, The parent often says, well, I am going to take away your iPod.
	Or, here's an Xbox.
	Well, now you're not allowed to play with it because I'm displeased with you.
	And we think that this is relatively harmless because most of us steadfastly avoid seeing the effects of authority on children with the effects of authority on adults.
	And most of what the government gets away with, it gets away with because the precedent has been set by parents with their children.
	And there's sort of a parallel between these two, right?
	So a lot of parents shifted, sadly not too many, still only 5 or 10%, but a lot of parents shifted from spanking To time-outs.
	Time-outs where you sit and usually for a minute per year of the child, the child has to sit in a single spot and be basically confined by words.
	So a lot of parents have shifted from spanking to time-outs.
	In the same time frame, a lot of schools have shifted from hitting to detention.
	You see sort of the parallels, right?
	Now, The way that it works for adults with kids, for the most part, is the child's property is only his property if he pleases his parents.
	If he displeases his parents or breaks some rules, which he had usually no say in the creation of, if he breaks some rule, then his property ownership is revoked by his parents unilaterally and aggressively.
	Let me sort of repeat that, because I want to make a case here that may be a little startling.
	So, the child's property ownership is conditional upon him following the rules of his parents, and if he ceases to follow those rules, breaks those rules, then his property ownership is revoked.
	In other words, he has no right to property.
	He has the privilege of property To the degree with which he pleases his parents.
	Now, I'd like to say follows the rules of his parents, but a lot of times parents have rules, but then just impose punishments because they're irritated or annoyed or had a bad day or have a headache or whatever.
	They just kind of lash out.
	That's important.
	Your property as a child is not your property.
	It is a use of privilege or privileged use until you displease your parents in which case your property is taken away.
	In other words, you don't own your property as a child.
	Your property is allowed to be in your possession or this object is allowed to be in your possession until you displease your parents at which point it's taken away.
	Now think of taxation.
	Think of your house.
	People say, I finally own my house, but this is not true at all.
	The government owns your house and rents it to you.
	And the government can increase the rental on your house at any time.
	Even more so, like for a lot of regions, there's rent control, right?
	Which is a great way of producing shortages in housing and an excess of condo building.
	Shortage in rental housing.
	But there's rent control, which means you can't raise the rent by more than 2 or 3 percentage points a year.
	But governments regularly raise property rates, property taxes, which are...
	Rent, right?
	So you don't own your government.
	Sorry, you don't own your house.
	You get to use your house as long as you don't displease the rules of your government.
	Right?
	And you get to drive your car as long as you don't displease the rules of your government, at which point your car...
	your ability to use your car is effectively...
	Destroy it, because you lose your license and then you can't drive your car.
	And this is all very important.
	How is this believable?
	How is it that we don't own anything except that which we are allowed to use as long as we please our government?
	Well, because this precedent is set in childhood, that the child does not have the right of ownership, but he only gets to use stuff as long as he pleases those in authority.
	Well, this is the precedent by which the evils of taxation remain invisible to us.
	You understand?
	Every crazy immoral thing that adults accept as natural only feels natural or only seems natural or the immorality of which remains invisible to us precisely because we have been conditioned to this crazy belief set as children.
	If Isabella wants to break one of her toys...
	I remind her that it's her toy, and she can do with that toy what she wants.
	So we built some model airplanes recently, and she says, I would like to paint them.
	And I said, these are yours, right?
	We'll build them together, but they're for you.
	They're your model airplanes.
	And she said, I would like to paint rainbow wings on them.
	Is that all right?
	I appreciate her asking.
	It's a nice gesture.
	But I said, they're your airplanes.
	You can do whatever you want with them.
	I want her to understand that when something is hers, it is hers.
	And she can do with that what she will.
	And I would not revoke the right of property from her.
	I mean, not that she would, but if she was about to bash me in the head with some toy, then I would prevent her from doing that.
	But whatever is hers is owned.
	Now you say, okay, well, so we get taxes and property taxes and sales taxes and all this, right?
	You can buy it as long as you obey the rules of someone in authority.
	But in terms of war, and particularly in terms of the draft, it's a very dangerous notion to say that everything you have is yours only if you please the government.
	And if you don't please the government, the government can take it away.
	Well, this is money, this is liberty.
	This is free thought, right?
	If you go to basically what have all become government schools, I mean, almost all universities these days are government schools.
	They rely so heavily on government funding and they prepare people so heavily for a government-based society that they are, in effect, government schools.
	And you only get your degree if you please those in authority.
	Not if you have facts on your side, not if you have reality on your side.
	Like in the United States, in many fields, like only 3% of professors are Republican.
	Not like Republican is facts, but this is the, you know, the bichromatic lopsided non-diversity we call free inquiry in modern universities.
	Free inquiry is, well, is socialism better than Marxism?
	You know, is 80% government ownership better than 100% government ownership?
	This is the wonderful spread of free inquiry available in modern universities.
	It's tragic.
	Wretched.
	I mean, it's about the same in the media as well, with the exception of Fox News.
	So, if you don't please the person in authority, then you don't get the degree.
	And this has been well commented on by people like Noam Chomsky.
	That you have to follow the professor's ideology or you are not going to get the degree.
	And then you've wasted years and hundreds of thousands of dollars and have a big hole in your resume.
	I mean, it's fairly disastrous to spend a couple of years in college and then not get the degree.
	And so even your free thought, free inquiry, freedom of expression is yours, so to speak, unless and until you displease someone in authority.
	And then you're right...
	To freedom of expression is effectively taken away.
	Say, well, but you can still write papers praising capitalism and the free market.
	That certainly is true.
	And you will suffer the negative consequences of having spent time and money for nothing.
	In the same way that you could say, well, if there's a fine for...
	If there's a fine for writing pro-free market blog posts and that fine is, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars and four years in a very pleasant prison, they say, well, but you still have the right to do it.
	Well, certainly you have the right to do it, but the consequences are dire.
	It's like saying you have a right to murder.
	It's just that the consequences are, you know, 30 years in prison, a death penalty, or a medal.
	But at an even more significant level, if we look at the draft, Because there's no fundamental difference between property and your body.
	I mean, I've argued this for many years.
	There's no different world outside your body.
	You own your body.
	You own your vagina.
	You own your penis.
	You own your brain.
	You own your mouth.
	You own your hands.
	You own the effects of your actions.
	You own your kidneys.
	They are yours.
	Somebody who rapes you has stolen your vagina or your butt, in prison particularly.
	Right?
	Somebody who steals something from you has stolen your time.
	Someone who harvests your kidney has stolen your kidney and left you with a scar and diminished capacity.
	And so your life itself, when parents use this kind of, you know, we will incarcerate you in the tiny jail called timeouts, we will We will hit you.
	We will take away your stuff.
	I mean, these are the seeds of totalitarianism.
	The government cannot get away with anything the parents do not enact beforehand.
	The state is an effect of the family.
	If you wish to fight totalitarianism, if you wish to fight increasing state power, if you wish to fight arbitrary and brutal state power, you must fight arbitrary, increasing, and brutal parental power.
	And a lot of parental power...
	I mean, parental power is basically founded on the violation of person and property.
	Violation of personhood through spanking, through time-outs, through the withdrawal of food and affection, through confinement, through taking property, and so on.
	You're grounded, okay?
	Well, now your prison is the house.
	And it's really quite unnecessary.
	I mean, yesterday we got home very late.
	I had some friends visiting.
	Yesterday I got home very late.
	And my daughter wanted to go and check on something in the garden.
	I have a couple of toads living by our house.
	She wanted to go check on her toads.
	But it was really late and she still had to eat.
	And she needs her sleep.
	And this can turn into sort of a five or ten minute thing.
	And my wife had already called me to tell me that dinner was on the table for everyone.
	And so she said, can I go and check on my toads?
	And I said, no, dinner's on the table.
	And she said, I'm going to go and check on my toads anyway.
	And I said, well, that's up to you, but I would like you to come in for dinner while your food is warm and blah-de-blah.
	And with everyone else, too.
	I told her what I would prefer.
	And she said, too bad, I'm going anyway.
	I said, okay, I'm not happy, but you can go ahead.
	And I went inside, well, with our friends.
	And that's the reality.
	I'm not going to control her.
	I'm not going to punish her.
	I'm not going to tell her what she has to do.
	I'm going to tell her that I would like us all to eat together, and I would like, she likes her food warm, and, you know, my wife had spent a lot of time making a great meal.
	And anyway, so it turns out that she just said fine, and she came back in with us and went to dinner.
	There's no need for all this punishment.
	Just tell her what I feel, what I think.
	And she, I mean, not like she always does that, but that's what we do.
	Because that's exactly what I would do.
	I can't forbid my wife to do something.
	Can you imagine?
	I want to go to the mall.
	No!
	Not allowed.
	And if you do, I'll punish you.
	Take away your visa.
	For three days.
	It would be ridiculous, right?
	And I certainly don't want my daughter to get used to people in her life who punish her for disobedience.
	You know, I gave her my reasons, I told her how I felt, and then she was free to make her choice.
	And I'm glad she made the choice she did.
	And if she hadn't, I would have been a little upset, but, you know, it would have been fine.
	Because since there's no fundamental difference, to return to the argument, between your body and your stuff, in terms of self-ownership and ownership of property, you own yourself, you own your stuff.
	Whenever a parent violates property rights, they're laying the foundation for war on two levels.
	One is that war can only be funded by violations of property rights in the form of taxation, in the form of disallowing competing currencies.
	I mean, can you imagine if there was a competing currency to the government currency, which was perfectly legal and which you could pay your taxes with and so on?
	And the government said, I declare war.
	Of course, the government rarely does that.
	The government just goes and does war.
	It doesn't declare war anymore.
	It hasn't for the...
	The Second World War, the US government has declared war twice, but been involved in like 50 wars.
	But can you imagine if the government said, I declare war, and it's going to be paid for through inflation and debt and tax increases and so on, and all the other currencies said, well, we're not going to have anything to do with that war, so good luck, Mr.
	Government.
	Can you imagine what would happen to the value of Of the government currency, it would collapse.
	People would just sell it off, like, oh my god, they're just turning wine into water, so I don't want to invest in this winery.
	So, violations of property rights, i.e.
	your ability to use whatever currency you want and trade it however you want, monopoly of currency is a gross fundamental and One of the most evil violations of property rights, since it makes so many other violations of property possible.
	But you lay the foundation for war because violations of property rights fund wars, taxes and money printing and debt and so on.
	Debt is the violation of future property rights.
	If I borrow $10,000 on your behalf, Without your knowledge or permission, and then someone comes to you and says, pay me $10,000 plus interest, well, I have violated your property rights when that person comes and demands the $10,500 or $11,000 or whatever it's going to be.
	So war is funded by violations of property rights, and in particular, Which involves the draft is the violation of property rights in that the draft violates self-ownership.
	And so children must be conditioned by violations of property rights for years and years and must accept that as normal and virtuous and good and perfectly just and fair and right for those in authority to enact upon them.
	They must Be exposed to that mess for years in order to normalize it.
	Culture and crazy statism and religiosity and so on are normalized through grim repetition in childhood.
	Grim, endless, punitive repetition.
	Oh my god, like my tensions in podcasts just struck me.
	I've been punishing my listeners.
	I'm sorry, please reward me with money.
	And if people are not conditioned to that, I mean, it just can't happen.
	It just can't happen.
	I mean, children can't follow the craziness of statism.
	They can't accept and praise the craziness of statism unless the very principles have been enacted and inflicted by parents, priests, and teachers for years beforehand.
	Public school is a violation of property rights because you're ordering children where to go, right?
	Children should get to use their own property in the way that they best see fit.
	And that means not ordering them to go someplace they don't want to go and forcing them to stay someplace they don't want to stay and punishing them should they not do that.
	If I said, go and work as a fry cook at McDonald's for eight hours a day, and oh, by the way, I will keep your wages.
	Oh, and if you don't go, I will lock you in a cage.
	I mean, that would be illegal.
	That would be ridiculous exploitation and the threat of kidnapping and all this kind of stuff, right?
	But we send children off to public schools in pure violation of their self-ownership and wretched and egregious and all that kind of stuff.
	But we don't think twice of it.
	I mean, the foundation of a free society is a respect for the self-ownership and property rights of children.
	If we want to have a society where self-ownership and property rights are respected as absolutes, duh, we have to respect the property rights and self-ownership of children as absolutes.
	I mean, if we want our children to grow up speaking English, we should teach them English.
	When they expose them to English, teach them English when they're growing up.
	It's not hard.
	If we want our children to speak the language of freedom, of the non-aggression principle of respect for property rights, then we need to give them freedom and respect their property rights and respect their self-ownership and not initiate violence against them.
	It's not hard.
	I don't know if people just think that we all just sort of pop like some Greek god out of the forehead of ourselves when we're 20.
	Or 25 or we get into political discussions or religious discussions like we just are there with no prior train tracks or grooves or cobwebs in our heads, like we just have no history.
	And no principles were absorbed by us as children that might trip us up as adults.
	No irrationalities were repetitively inflicted on us and we Stockholm Syndrome up when we were children.
	But human beings, the content of our minds, and particularly the principles which are not openly discussed.
	Like, parents don't say, I am stealing your toy because you've upset me.
	Because that would be...
	Parents don't want...
	There's an explication of what they're doing on a principle basis to be described to their children because then they lose moral authority and the children can then go to school and say, well, I'm going to take other kids' toys because they're upsetting me or have broken my rules.
	Or he's training a mafia.
	Darn, right?
	Or enforcer, I guess, more accurately.
	I mean, and parents don't get to hit children saying, well, you broke my rules, I don't like what you're doing, so I'm going to hit you.
	Because then children are going to make rules and They say, well, they have to make up this moral story that justifies what they're doing, but they can't call it for what it is.
	And then are we surprised when children grow up and can't see taxation for what it is?
	Or the war on drugs for what it is?
	No, of course, because everything that has been inflicted on them has been lied about, right?
	Lied about.
	And the lie has never been mentioned.
	It is implicit.
	And you are punished for making it explicit, right?
	So anyway, I hope that makes some kind of sense.
	Great question, as always.
	Thank you.

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