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Jan. 24, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

17:45

2598 Who Really Owns the United States of America?

Stefan Molyneux answers listener questions about property rights, homesteading and who owns the United States of America.

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	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyne from Freedom Main Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	A couple of questions from a listener that I will try and knock off as best as I can.
	So, somebody says, point one, in a previous show, I heard you have a dialogue similar to this.
	You were asked, what should happen if property was homesteaded immorally, 300 or more?
	Years ago, let's say a native had some land and then he was shot and the land was stolen.
	Then the land was sold and it's been traded 20 times.
	Since then, you said something like, all those people are dead, so there's nothing you can do about that.
	The people who have the contract now are the legal homesteaders and we should move on.
	Is this accurate?
	Well, like so many things in philosophy, yes and no.
	The immoralities of history...
	are interesting to examine.
	They are not particularly helpful.
	If you go back far enough In human history, when we start to blend into our ancient chimpanzee cousins, then we can say, well, you know, one monkey killed and ate another monkey, and that's murder, and, you know, blah, blah, blah.
	So at some point in the past, ethics fade into mere biological survival, and there really isn't a question of good and evil in the interaction.
	Now, then at some point, we start to develop ethical theories.
	We start to develop philosophy and concepts.
	Philosophy really only started having any real impact in human thought, at least in the West, about 2,500 years ago, around the time of Socrates.
	So it's kind of new.
	Now, philosophy has...
	Really not gone very far in 2,500 years.
	It's still fairly tragic.
	There have been some advances, for sure, but most of those have been in the realm of aesthetics than they have been in the realm of ethics.
	So, for example, there's no debate yet, really, on whether we should have a government or not, even though the existence of a government clearly violates the non-aggression principle, which we apply everywhere else in life.
	Philosophy really is the goal of taking principles and just damn well extending them.
	Take principles and damn well extend them.
	That's really the tagline for the show, whether you like it or not.
	Non-aggression principle applies to children.
	It applies to the police.
	It applies to the military.
	It applies to taxation.
	Sorry, it's a principle.
	Like scientists don't get to say, all gases expend when heated, except for my own personal emissions in Philadelphia during a full moon.
	No.
	Gases expand when heated, that is universal, and you really can't make exceptions.
	If you do, you're no longer a scientist.
	And if you start inventing exceptions for a principle, such as do not initiate force, then you're no longer a philosopher, you're no longer a moralist.
	And that tragically is the reality of where humanity is.
	We are still in a stage of prehistory when it comes to ethics.
	We are to ethics as the early Middle Ages was to the scientific method.
	In other words, it's kind of over the horizon.
	And that's just the reality of where we are.
	So when people kill and steal and take stuff in the past, well, did they have a strong ethical understanding reinforced by society as a whole about the morality of what they were doing?
	Well, no.
	You know, what was one of the major justifications used for taking money from the natives?
	Well, they're godless heathen who have not been brought to Jesus, and therefore they are, right?
	So it wasn't philosophy that caused these problems, but rather, you know, primitive superstition that was responsible, who funded So philosophy is opposed to superstition, so philosophy is the enemy of that.
	Who funded all of these predations into the new world?
	Well, governments did.
	A philosophy, a rational, consistent philosophy, has to be against centralization of oligarchical, violent power called to state.
	Otherwise, we throw out the non-aggression principle.
	No one should initiate force, except for this group over here, with the flag.
	Well...
	Various flags and costumes and uniforms not particularly relevant to philosophical discourse.
	So, for somebody to be morally wrong, they have to have a clear and deep understanding of the ethics of the situation, which is why there's such a thing as an insanity defense, which is often what you see in political debates.
	But it's really hard to take current moral principles and apply them to past situations.
	When somebody is violating a moral rule that he himself has proposed, then you can get them on hypocrisy.
	I mean, if someone 20 years ago said, don't spank your children, and they spank their own children, you get them on moral hypocrisy, but for the most part, the predations occurring in property transfers through war, through feudalism, through serfdom, through conquest, through colonialism, through imperialism, All of that is openly publicized.
	People who want to go murder other people usually keep it on the DL, right?
	They keep it on the down low, whereas if you want to go, say, murder a million Iraqis, your troops are sent off with fireworks and fanfares and you inform the media and there are parades.
	Nobody hides it.
	And this is one of the ways in which you know people are not morally responsible.
	I mean, the act of hiding something means that you know that it's wrong or at least disapproved of and fear the consequences.
	So, where there was open predation in the past, where it was celebrated and publicized and was handed down in song and dance and hand puppetry, then it's really tough to say that It was immoral.
	Morality is a kind of technology.
	It is a kind of knowledge.
	You don't get mad at a 15th century doctor for not prescribing antibiotics because they didn't exist yet.
	Universal, consistent morality is at least two generations away from where we stand.
	I think we're making some inroads.
	This show is the biggest philosophy show around.
	We're doing...
	A couple of million downloads a month.
	So, yeah, we're spreading it much to the annoyance of people because when you give them universal principles, they are then responsible.
	And who likes more moral responsibility?
	Well, I do!
	And maybe you, but a lot of people don't.
	So, what is the ethics of property transfers in history?
	Well, they were...
	mostly did not conform to a rational standard of ethics that nobody accepted because they were taught by priests and ruled by warlords.
	Point two, what is the difference between a private resort and a state?
	If I own a private resort the size of Disneyland, do I have the right to decide how that resort is controlled?
	Could I just have my own management team?
	Could I run it myself?
	Could I let no one control it?
	Or to entice new homebuyers, could I say that the resort would be run like a democracy where everyone would have a vote and 51% rules all?
	The resort would be run now like our current government?
	No!
	That's not the case.
	In a free society, would this be acceptable if I owned all the land?
	Then for people to buy the land, they would know this up front and enter into the contract voluntarily.
	And they would have the knowledge that if anyone stays in this private land, they are bound by the rules of the land or they can leave.
	Well, no, I mean, look...
	States arose out of murder.
	States arose out of slaughter and war, right?
	What is the border of a country?
	The border of a country is where one violent, homicidal, psychopathic warlord ran up against another violent, homicidal, psychopathic warlord that he could not beat.
	And so they just had this imaginary line of like, okay, here's where my murder...
	My murder geography ends, and your murder geography begins, at least until I get more murderous to expand my murder fest.
	So that's not how that works.
	If you want to buy a big piece of land, and you want to set up some kind of community, and you don't sell the land to people, but you lease it in perpetuity, if they agree to abide by certain rules, well, that's...
	Fine.
	I mean, nobody's forced to be there.
	You're not stripping the land and the homes of the people who are there.
	You are not sending Mongols in, firing poison-dipped frogs from arrows on the backs of centaurs.
	You are just buying up some land and building some stuff, right?
	You can't take someone's land and impose, and they can voluntarily sell to you if they want, but you can't just take someone's house and impose your rules on them.
	You have to take an area of land that's not I mean, you can go and you can...
	Build that, and you can set up contracts.
	Not a state, though, because everyone is moving there voluntarily.
	They have to actually proactively move there voluntarily.
	They can leave there at any time, and you do not get to initiate force.
	You're not propagandizing their children by forcing them into government schools or anything like that.
	So it's really not the same as a state.
	I mean, the initiation of force is the key.
	You know, the mechanics of rape are not wildly dissimilar than the mechanics of lovemaking.
	The mechanics of stabbing someone in some ways are not wildly dissimilar than an emergency tracheotomy or appendectomy, but the ethics of the situations are entirely different.
	So the fact that someone's in charge of a territory and people have to obey those rules, well, it's about as similar to a state as lovemaking is to a rape.
	There are some similar mechanics, but the ethics are completely opposite.
	So, point three.
	What if I immorally homesteaded some piece of land around 350 years ago and called my land USA? So all the people who took the land immorally are dead and the people now have a legal homestead.
	If I called my resort USA government and the land is run like a democracy, surely that is the same as what we now have in a free society.
	We don't have a free society.
	So what right do we have to remove the land owned by the company called USA government if they are the legal homesteaders and everyone else is just their leaseholder?
	Well, again, right now the federal government claims to own about a third of American land.
	American land is owned by the U.S. federal government in particular.
	Okay, so who is this?
	You point to me the person who is the US federal government.
	There is no person who is the US federal government.
	Is it the politician?
	Well, he goes in and then he goes out again.
	Is it some civil service worker, civil servant?
	Well, they retire and the new ones get hired, right?
	There's no person.
	You can say, well, a corporation can own blah-de-blah, but a corporation is just another state fiction, like the state itself, so that's not really a great analogy.
	Who is it?
	Who owns it?
	And how did they earn it?
	How you earn it is pretty important.
	There's no individual in the federal government who now earns that land.
	Let's say that 500 years ago, one of my ancestors in Ireland was killed and some British guy took his land.
	Well, the British guy at least has been working the land or has the land or whatever now.
	It can actually be traced to him And he has invested in capital improvements.
	He's built irrigation ditches.
	He's planted crops.
	He's built a house.
	He's actually invested his labor.
	You tell me any individual in the federal government who has invested that kind of labor in a third of U.S. land.
	It hasn't existed.
	It doesn't exist.
	So I don't see how that's analogous.
	The government is a religious, fundamentally religious fiction, that is invented to cover...
	Over the problem of the commons represented by the state.
	The problem of the commons is a whole bunch of farmers have a whole bunch of cows.
	There's an area of common land, and therefore they all have an incentive to overgraze that land, and that's the problem of the commons.
	The idea that you solve this with a government is ridiculous.
	The government is more subject to the problem of the commons than anything.
	Like, the government can print its own money.
	Is that going to cause any problem of the commons?
	The government can go into debt that other people have to pay off next generation who never voted for it.
	Is that a problem of the commons?
	And, of course, The idea that we need a huge public entity to solve a problem of small public land, like the common land where all the cows graze, is truly insane.
	I mean, that literally is like saying you have a pea-sized cancer, so rather than take it out, we're going to put an elephant-sized cancer up your ass.
	And I'm sure that there'd be a number of TSA agents who would be competent at that.
	But...
	You don't solve a problem of, you know, a small amount of public ownership or un-ownership causing problems by creating a state, which is a massive and violent un-owned resource, but exploitable resource, so it doesn't solve the problem at all.
	So, point four, I heard you say that the difference between a state and private land is that a private piece of land would not be the size of a whole country, but at what size does something become immoral?
	Can a size be a principle?
	I don't think that I've ever said that the only difference is size.
	It's not the case.
	A philosopher can't say that size matters, trust me.
	It's my living candidate, it's called.
	And, um, size doesn't matter in philosophy, any more than it does in calculations of gravity, right?
	I mean, the size of a mass matters in terms of its gravitational pull, but the equation doesn't, right?
	Um, the inverse square law, it doesn't matter how far you are away, it still is the same law, right?
	Uh, so, um...
	The size doesn't matter, right?
	Kill one guy, it's murder.
	Kill two guys, you have two murders, right?
	And so on.
	So the size of the land doesn't matter.
	I don't think I've ever made that argument.
	If I have made it, then please let me know where, and I will review and correct it, because that's...
	I can't imagine how that would be the case.
	So let's see here.
	He says, I know that property rights can be a slippery topic, and I'm not trying to catch you out with this.
	I just want to find out the weakest point of every philosophy so I can make it stronger or change my views.
	And let's see here.
	I hope you're having a great 2014.
	Very glad you're all healthy again.
	Yeah.
	2014, you know, given that I had cancer last year, that was very aggressive and extremely dangerous.
	I am enormously glad to be saying the words 2014 and not have them carved perfectly.
	sticking out of my forehead.
	So yes, I appreciate that.
	I hope that these questions are helpful.
	I know it's not an exhaustive review of the topic, but I think it is a good place to start.
	The initiation of force, once it is understood as immoral, there is moral responsibility for it.
	Right now, for the vast majority of the moral decisions made in society, the insanity defense is perfectly valid.
	In other words, people have no idea what is right or wrong.
	They believe that a law is automatically right.
	And they believe that the exact same actions taken by somebody not in a green costume versus in a green costume That the morality of those actions are completely immoral, right?
	A man goes to a foreign country and kills someone who's not aggressing against him.
	In a Hawaiian shirt, he's a criminal.
	In a green costume, he's a hero.
	He gets a ticket tape parade and a pension.
	So we are, as a culture, we remain...
	In a state of moral insanity.
	Because not just that there are these insane oppositions that if I go up and down the street with a gun saying that my neighbors must pay for my child's education, that is immoral, and I go to jail for that, but property taxes to pay for Government education is considered the foundation of democracy.
	It's not so much that we have these contradictions that makes us insane, morally.
	It's that we have these contradictions and nobody notices them.
	Nobody even has any problem with them.
	They never arise.
	In fact, to point out these contradictions...
	Two people in society is to be labeled insane.
	This is how insane society remains, that anybody who points out logical opposites in the most essential human topic of ethics is considered to be insane.
	The crazy people look at the sane person and all chant, you're mad, you're mad, you're mad, while covering themselves with the fecal matter of historically destroyed minds as a result of the plague of anti-philosophy known as historical thought.
	But that is the reality of where we are.
	We work to expand consciousness.
	We work to give people better arguments and to start to provoke them out of the Brahmin cow complacency of looking at a world that is insane and not even shrugging or noticing that it is insane.
	This, of course, is what the truly insane do.
	They imagine that everyone around them is crazy.
	Or, as Nietzsche said, those who were dancing were thought mad.

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