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June 9, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:25:10

2717 13 Tough Libertarian Questions - Answered!

Stefan Molyneux answers thirteen tough libertarian questions including: In a libertarian society, what can be done to help people in third world countries? What is the relationship between anarchy and capitalism? How would anarchy handle the issue of a violation of private property? How would anarchy prevent the emergence of a state??

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	I'm just gonna start off with a brief introduction about yourself.
	Okay, so Stefan Molyneux is the host of Freedom Radio, the largest philosophy show in the world.
	Prior to launching Freedom Radio, Stefan spent 15 years as a software developer, manager, and entrepreneur.
	Now full-time parent and philosopher, Stefan speaks regularly at conferences all over the globe.
	His speeches cover subjects including politics, philosophy, science, economics, relationships, parenting, and how to achieve real freedom in your life.
	With more than 2,700 podcasts, 10 books, and 65 million downloads, Stefan has spread philosophy to listeners throughout the world.
	Okay, so I'd also like to give you a brief introduction about ourselves, Stefan, if that's okay.
	This is Students for Liberty at Queens College.
	We have approximately about 20 students present here and students from Columbia University as well.
	We basically work to harvest an intellectual discussion on campus about freedom and what freedom means, liberty and what it means as well.
	So now we're gonna basically, we have a queue here with Students who want to ask you questions, but I would like to get the ball rolling just to set up the tone.
	I wanted to ask you, basically, hmm.
	So a lot of people question, you know, anarchism.
	They usually run off and say, oh, anarchy.
	If we have anarchy, we're going to have a chaotic world.
	We're going to have a violent world, and there's going to be disorder.
	No organization whatsoever.
	When you talk about anarchism, what do you mean?
	What do you mean by anarchism?
	And is it consistent with these ideas?
	And if not, why?
	Well, thanks.
	I just wanted to mention that it's not Freedom Radio.
	It's Freedomain Radio.
	F-R-E-E-D-O-M-A-I-N. No problem, though.
	So Freedomain Radio is the website or youtube.com forward slash Freedomain Radio.
	So anarchy is one of these really difficult words that I refuse to abandon.
	I would rather resuscitate the victim than let it lie fallow.
	And anarchy technically simply means without rulers.
	All it means is without rulers.
	And people forget the R. Not the first R, the second R. So they don't say, well, anarchy means without rulers.
	They say that anarchy means without rules.
	And that is two fundamentally different things.
	So without rulers and without rules are very opposite concepts.
	I would argue, and I think a lot of anarchists would argue, that when you have rulers, you don't have rules.
	So, for instance, right, Obamacare...
	It has been modified hundreds of times since it was passed by Congress.
	You have rule by fiat, you have rule by decree, and contra the entire Constitution, you have exemptions from the law that are handed out like candy to Democratic favorite groups, unions and so on.
	Even the IRS, which is responsible for enforcing Obamacare, the unions there are desperately trying to get out of it.
	So if you look at something like Obamacare, you really have no rules.
	You have a command by fiat.
	And you have the debt which, of course, the young people in the room are going to be currently laboring under for the rest of their lives.
	I mean, tragically, you all are born into about $1.4 million in unfunded liabilities that you didn't vote for, that you didn't choose, that you didn't receive the benefits of.
	And that is no rules.
	Being able to automatically assign debt intergenerationally to people who've never signed a contract is no rules whatsoever.
	The Congress has gone to war, or the United States government has gone to war dozens and dozens of times over the past 200 years, and only three times has it ever actually declared war.
	And so the requirement from the Constitution is that the Congress declares war, but the President is continually committing U.S. forces and military hardware overseas without asking Congress.
	So here again, you have an example.
	There are no rules.
	In the current system, even if you look at the curriculum of schools, it's this, it's that, it's, you know, it's whole word learning, it's phonetic learning, it's common core, everything just changes all the time.
	So here's the situation of no rules.
	Rules are spontaneously developed to the mutual advantage of participants.
	I mean, think of something like chess, thousands of years old, the game is thousands of years old.
	There's no central chess authority.
	People who want to play chess just agree on the rules and that's how they play.
	And if somebody doesn't play by the rules that are advantageous or objective, then you simply don't play with them.
	Kids do it all the time.
	You go outside and you play.
	As kids used to do.
	I don't know if it happens so much anymore.
	I think it doesn't.
	But kids go outdoors and they play.
	And what you do when you have 10 kids is you say, well, what do you want to play?
	And you all negotiate to find something that works for everyone.
	And this is why the development of empathy and negotiation is really bound up with free play, unsupervised, non-adult time play for kids, particularly in the outdoors where they get to arrange their own rules.
	So, the anarchist argument is when you have rulers in a society, in other words, when you have an oligopoly, when you have a hierarchy, when you have a group at the center of society, like a government, which has the obligation to initiate the use of force pretty much at will, Then you don't have rules.
	You have rulers.
	And you have the choice between the two.
	You can choose to have rulers, in which case you're not going to have rules.
	You're just going to have commandments by decree enforced at the point of a gun, arbitrarily changing, exploitive.
	Or you can have no rulers, in which case society can begin to spontaneously develop mutually advantageous rules.
	Does that help at all as a sort of introduction?
	Yes, yes, thank you.
	That was very informative.
	I'm going to transition over to Kai, who wants to ask you a question as well.
	That's fine.
	Hi, Stefan.
	Hi.
	Okay, so first and foremost, I'm kind of obsessed with you, and I have to thank you.
	I know, no really.
	But I've actually called into your show a few times.
	I am currently at Columbia, and I called into your show, but I have to get up early, so I always had to hang up because I was always at the end of the queue.
	But basically, I found libertarianism and voluntarism through you a few years back.
	I read Real Time Relationships off of Free Domain, the website.
	And just so you all know, all of his books are free and they're amazing.
	And since then, I've eliminated people who I felt like our relationships weren't congruent with the philosophies that you talked about.
	And since then, I can definitely say that my quality of life has improved dramatically.
	Give me a chance to slip into something a little more comfortable.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Alright, Sivan, so I know that libertarianism has a huge kind of stance on international policy, how we don't interfere internationally for the most part.
	But myself, I do like international work with kids with class palette, and I do a lot of it in Africa.
	So one thing I've been following lately is the...
	Tragedy that's taken place in Nigeria with the hundreds of schoolgirls that basically have been enslaved because they're trying to pursue education.
	So my question is, from a libertarian and anarchist stance, what would you say to that?
	Because it is an international issue, and I almost feel wrong that we're not doing anything about it, but I also don't feel like our government is maybe that competent to do anything about it, so...
	Yeah.
	What do you think is about it?
	So, is your question sort of how can we best help people overseas?
	Exactly.
	Yes.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, I applaud your work with the Cleft Palette.
	I myself sponsor some kids overseas.
	I recognize that I was extremely fortunate in the environment that I was born into in the West, so try and sort of spread the love.
	The first thing to recognize, of course, about the world and international relationships is that the US, the UK and Russia and to some degree China are the biggest arms sellers in the world.
	So this is insane.
	Fundamentally, it is like it's so insane.
	I don't know how the people in the future are going to wonder how we got out of bed without putting our head through a window.
	It's so mad.
	I mean, if you hire a security company to guard your factory and then you find out that your security company, has been selling arms to criminals You would be absolutely appalled, and you would recognize that the security company was simply trying to create enemies with which to sell their services, right?
	To create a dangerous world and then say, hey, look, you need a security guard because you need security companies because the world is so dangerous, when in fact they had armed the very criminals they were claiming to protect you from.
	So with America, and this recently happened in Benghazi, right, or in Libya, During the tragedy of September 11, 2012, it turns out, of course, that half a billion dollars, 500 million dollars worth of weapons, the NATO led by the U.S. had allowed to be shipped into and sold to Al-Qaeda members through the United Arab Emirates and through Qatar.
	And so this is sort of an example of, look, there are dangerous guys in Libya.
	We need to go and fight them.
	And it's like, well, why are they dangerous?
	Because you keep selling weapons to them to the tune of billions and billions of dollars a year.
	This, of course, is the great tragedy of the third world.
	It's sort of twofold.
	One is that we, and I use the sort of the statist we, we keep selling weapons to the dictators.
	We keep selling weapons to the dictators.
	Saddam Hussein in Iraq was armed by the United States and was sold the chemical weapons that they claimed he later used on his own people, on the Kurds.
	So, you know, the first thing to do is if we don't have a government, then we don't have a profit center which can make massive amounts of money by billing the public, largely you, in the form of debt, and then selling weapons to sociopathic monsters overseas.
	That's number one.
	Number two is that we keep giving foreign aid, what is called foreign aid.
	Now, where does foreign aid go?
	It goes to the governments.
	And what do the governments do with that money?
	Well, they buy weapons.
	So you steal from the taxpayers in order to give the money to third world dictators who then use that money to buy weapons, the cost of which is also stolen from the taxpayers.
	It's a massive criminal racket that is unholy and has massive negative effects on the third world.
	The last thing, I guess it's three, the last thing is that we have these crazy agricultural policies where we basically pay farmers to produce food that can't be sold and therefore gets dumped into third world markets and what that does is it destroys local agriculture.
	This has happened even in Mexico, it certainly happened in Africa all over the place.
	And the farmers can't compete with free foods, free subsidized food from Western farmers and so what happens is the farmers flee, the farmers leave, they have no money, there's a dictatorship so they don't have any economic opportunities, they can't become entrepreneurs and so they tend to become warlords, they tend to join the military, they tend to become predatory from that standpoint.
	So, you know, as far as how to help, first I think we should stop, quote, helping them at the moment using force-selling weapons, dumping food, and bribing the dictators there to pretend to pursue U.S. interests.
	So I think let's stop helping them using the power of the state, and then they'll do a lot better off without that, quote, help, without us arming them and dumping food and all that.
	And then you can get private charities who can go in there.
	I mean, Bill Gates...
	When he quit, Microsoft became a sort of philanthropist and he wanted to get things like mosquito nets out there and DDT. DDT is actually quite a remarkably safe substance.
	It was banned as the result of this hysteria from Rachel Carson's 69 book, The Silent Spring, which said that all these birds were going to die, which turned out to not be true.
	So the world banned DDT and that has cost the death of about 60 million people.
	You know, 10 times the Holocaust is something we should pay attention to as the result of a completely false policy designed to protect people.
	We're protecting you from something that isn't dangerous, which is going to kill 60 million of you.
	And Bill Gates found that the aid that was going out there from the government, nobody measured it, nobody tested it.
	And so he basically said, look, you've got to measure what's happening.
	You've got to provide me results.
	You've got to validate them.
	And people were kind of shocked.
	So I think private charity is going to do a lot to help Open borders for trade.
	Trade with these people.
	We don't need to treat them like children.
	We don't need to be big, white, imperialist, help them out kind of people.
	We can just allow them to trade.
	Open up borders.
	Open up trade opportunities.
	Stop arming their governments and allow private charity to do its work.
	I think that it'll be less than a generation before their living standard begins to approach that of the West.
	Awesome.
	Thank you.
	Here's our next question.
	Hi.
	Can you see me?
	Because I can't see myself.
	Right.
	I don't know how I'm going to follow up the enthusiasm.
	That's really an issue of self-knowledge.
	I'm sorry.
	Go ahead.
	Alright, so I don't know how I'm going to follow up the enthusiasm of the last ask here, but my question is basically what is the relationship between anarchy and capitalism?
	Is the relationship sort of intrinsic or is capitalism sort of the most efficient thing that might result from an anarchist society or you know what I'm saying?
	What's the relationship there?
	Well, I think that there is efficiency in capitalism, but I don't think that's fundamentally why anyone pursues it, because it's really not very efficient for politicians.
	Capitalism is really not efficient for politicians, because capitalism...
	Is foundational on two principles, which I would argue morality is foundational.
	And the first principle is called the non-aggression principle, which is you should not initiate force against other people.
	I mean, if some guy's coming at you with flaming lightning shooting nunchucks, then you can, you know, disable him in some way, shoot him in the leg or something.
	But you can't initiate force.
	Self-defense is fine.
	You can't initiate force against others, which eliminates government.
	I mean, you say you can't initiate force against others.
	Sorry, you cannot morally have a government.
	Government relies, depends upon, the initiation of force in the form of taxation and tariffs.
	And laws which are not specific around self-defense and trade barriers, subsidies, debts, fiat currency, you name it.
	It's all the initiation of force.
	You and I go and print our own money.
	We're counterfeiters.
	We go to jail.
	The Federal Reserve does it and they get respectful editorials in the New York Times.
	So it's all complete nonsense.
	So when you get rid of the initiation of force, you get rid of government.
	Through the rejection of the initiation of force, you also create the boundaries of property rights.
	Property rights rely upon self-ownership.
	You own yourself and you own the effects of your actions.
	So if I go and build a house, I have created that house.
	The house belongs to me.
	If I go out and strangle a kitten, I have created the death of that kitten and the moral blame then falls on me.
	If some guy strangles a kitten, we don't throw his hands in jail.
	We recognize that his brain controlled them and he's responsible.
	So self-ownership, owning the effects of your actions, which are property rights, and the non-aggression principle all combine in one tasty sundae-based souffle to create the opportunities for a free market.
	Now, capitalism always sounds like you have to.
	You have to go and work for people.
	You have to accumulate capital.
	You have to invest.
	You have to be an economic agent.
	None of that is true.
	Anymore than if the government forced people to get married to each other and then we said, hey, let's not have the government force people to get married.
	They can choose to get married, to not get married, whatever.
	You'd see a whole multiplicity of marital arrangements and people would choose to go in and out of them as they saw fit.
	So when you have a free society, you can have communes, you can have collectives, people can, in the sort of zeitgeist, what they call the resource-based economy, they can get a whole bunch of land and they can create their Marxist, mommy-tit robot cities as much as they want and see how they work out.
	Nobody is going to compel you to engage in market-based activity or to buy and sell or to trade.
	You can go on barter, you can call what's called agorism or Which is fundamentally not using currency for your exchanges.
	You can do anything that you want, but you cannot initiate force and you cannot violate property rights in a free society.
	So does that help at all?
	Yeah.
	Thanks.
	Who wrote the third one?
	Okay.
	Hey, Stefan.
	Sorry, you've gone pretty quiet.
	Can you hear us?
	Oh, yeah, that's better.
	Okay.
	So my question is, how would anarchy handle the issue of a violation of private property?
	Okay, so the way – I mean everybody wants to be protected against something like theft, right?
	So let's just say someone – like I buy a car.
	Well, I'm going to have insurance probably for that car.
	car.
	In fact, the people who create the roads and maintain the roads would probably require me to have insurance to gain the right to use their roads.
	And we do this all the time, right?
	You go rock climbing, you sign a waiver that says you're not going to sue and all that.
	So you can enter into sort of temporary contractual arrangements with people so that people say, look, if you want to use our road, great, go for it, you know, have fun.
	But you got to have insurance.
	So you're going to have insurance for stuff like that, if it's economically efficient, right, which it probably would be.
	And you also will have insurance against your car being stolen.
	Now, if somebody comes and steals your car, then you call up your insurance agency.
	And the insurance agency says, oh, bummer, man.
	Sorry to hear that.
	You had your car stolen.
	And they kind of leap into action.
	Maybe it's got a GPS embedded in it, which will cause your insurance costs to go down because they can always find the car.
	And if you want the privacy, you just pay more, right?
	Because then it's harder to find.
	And you can also have a GPS that would only talk to the insurance company only after you initiated the claim, you know, all that kind of stuff.
	And they would then go and find the car.
	Now, they either find it or they don't.
	Now, if they don't, they just give you the money back to buy a new car, and that's the deal.
	If they find the car, and let's say they find a guy named Bob who stole it, then they go to Bob and they say, look, Bob, you're in possession of a car.
	And he's like, oh, you know, I stole it or whatever.
	Let's just make it as easy as possible.
	Well, then he obviously has to return the car, and he has to pay restitution.
	Now, if he doesn't return the car and he doesn't pay restitution, then morally, the insurance company, or what I call the dispute resolution organization, since it's more than insurance, would have the right to go and get the car by force, right?
	Because the car had been stolen and you can, you know, it's the initiation of force, it's fraud, and therefore you can go and get the car back because it's actually yours, right?
	But I don't think that they would want to do that because force is really...
	It really is letting the evil genie out of the bottle once you start bringing the guns out.
	So if I were running such a dispute resolution organization, what I would do is I would say, look, Bob, if you don't pay restitution and if you don't return the car, I'm going to tell everyone in society that you are a known thief, assuming he's confessed.
	Otherwise, it would be through a trial, probably.
	And then what would happen is society would know that you're a known thief and I would imagine what would be most productive is everybody would choose to stop doing business with Bob, right?
	So his landlord would say, oh, you've been marked as a thief and therefore you can't live in the apartment anymore.
	And then the grocery store would say, oh, you're a known thief, therefore you can't buy groceries and they're not going to deliver electricity to his house or water or pick up his garbage.
	And basically people will no longer allow him to interact with them from an economic standpoint.
	Economic ostracism is an incredibly powerful tool in society that is not used because there is the state.
	Well, I shouldn't say it's not used.
	It is used in a couple of places, right?
	So eBay, which is the world's largest employer with hundreds of thousands of people making their full-time living from eBay, who have no access to a government court system, rely on economic ostracism.
	In other words, if someone cheats you, you mark them down.
	If they get enough marks down, people are probably not going to do any business with them.
	So this economic ostracism is an incredibly powerful way to work on this.
	Visa does this, too.
	Like, if you cheat Visa, they won't process any Visa from you, right?
	So they ostracize you that way.
	If you break the terms of service for PayPal or for YouTube or Google, they'll just close your account and so on.
	So economic ostracism is a very powerful way to deal with violations of persons and or property.
	And I'll try and keep this as brief as possible.
	I know we've got lots of questions.
	I think that we won't need to worry about this in the future.
	I know that sounds all kinds of utopian, and hey, you just snap my fingers, human personality and nature changes, and my system works.
	But that's not what I mean.
	What I mean is, right now, scientists are currently debating whether to destroy the last...
	Remnants of the smallpox virus.
	Why?
	Because it's been eliminated from the world.
	Smallpox in the 19th century was a...
	Well, 19th century and previous 10,000 or 100,000 years was a huge curse and a plague on humanity, like polio.
	Now, we don't worry about polio.
	We don't worry about smallpox because we have inoculations and they've been eliminated from the human population as dangerous.
	As far as violations of persons and properties go, we know scientifically what...
	The way to prevent these things from occurring is, which is simply you treat children with respect.
	You don't treat them with violence.
	You treat them peacefully.
	You raise them without spanking.
	You raise them to negotiate.
	You raise them without aggression, without yelling at them, without intimidating them, without using your size, strength and power and legal authority to force them to comply to your wishes.
	If you raise children peacefully, then they will not be thieves.
	They will not be violent.
	They will not be rapists or murderers.
	They won't assault people.
	They're very unlikely to become any kind of addicts.
	And so right now we don't have any social agency that is going to profit from improved parenting.
	In fact, I would argue that the entire public school system would grind to a shuttering halt if children were raised peacefully because you simply can't get 30 or 40 kids sitting like zombies in rows listening to the endless squeak of chalk on blackboard or marker on whiteboard unless they've already been traumatized and forced to comply before they even get to school.
	But in the future, of course, since society, since these dispute resolution organizations will only make money or will make the most money if people don't commit crimes, then they will be, I think, quite proactive in trying to help people be better parents and offering them discounts on insurance for their children if they attend parenting classes and if they can talk to the kids and say, how's your parenting going?
	So, right, I really hope and I think that the most fundamental way to maintain a free society is to have economic Entities that are invested in peaceful and positive and negotiation-based, respectful-based parenting.
	And then, it's true, a few people will go off the rails, they'll get brain tumors or struck by lightning, or they'll get some sort of concussion, which will change their personality.
	But it's going to be so rare that I don't think we're really going to have to worry a lot in the future if children are raised well about things like murder and assault and rape and theft and so on.
	Does that help at all?
	Yes, it does.
	Thank you.
	I guess I just kind of have a couple follow-ups.
	My name's James.
	Just one at a time, because I'm old.
	This is really one.
	I like the idea of anarchy, but when we were talking about Bob and economic sanctions against him, what happens if he has a lot of friends and they have a lot of guns?
	Isn't that the formation of another state, the seed of it happening?
	And how do you prevent that from taking shape every time, let's say, you could institute an anarchist society?
	Okay, so what you're saying is that Bob is a complete sociopath, and he has lots of friends who are also sociopaths, and they want to take over society?
	Yeah, like the guys down on Mulberry Street in New York.
	I'm sorry?
	Like the Mafia.
	Well, no.
	First of all, the mafia is a creature of the state.
	The mafia is not a creature of freedom.
	So there was no mafia in America in the 19th century.
	The mafia came over specifically when alcohol was banned.
	That's when the mafia came over.
	This is when Al Capone and all these guys came over.
	It was during Prohibition.
	The mafia came over from Italy and from Sicily.
	And the mafia makes money because the government is interfering with peaceful trade in terms of drugs, in terms of alcohol, in terms of gambling, and in terms of prostitution.
	That's it.
	So the mob is a shadow cast by the state.
	When the state bans things, then it drives up the profit and the danger of supplying those things.
	And therefore, people who are immune to fear, in other words, sociopaths, can work very nimbly and very well in those areas, and then they can bribe the cops and all that.
	So you can't sort of say, well, what are our concerns about the mob in a free society?
	because the mob is always and forever a product of the state, which is, of course, itself a kind of mob as well.
	Just anyone who'd rather...
	So, first of all, these people have to exist.
	In other words, they have to have been raised so brutally and so abusively that they have become sociopaths.
	And, you know, creating a sociopath is tragically not that hard.
	You just have to beat, abuse, rape, and neglect a child, particularly from infancy, and expose it even to a lot of stress prior to being born.
	So, the idea that there's going to be a whole gang of these people that has somehow gone through the entire social process and the DROs who are interested in helping parents raise their children well, that they've completely escaped everyone's notice, I consider to be not possible.
	But, you know, fine.
	Okay, let's say that that happens.
	So, what are they going to do?
	How are they going to take over society?
	Right now, governments take over other governments in order to get access to the tax base.
	Right.
	So governments go and invade another country to take over the tax base.
	And so there is no tax base in a free society.
	So what are these guys going to do?
	Are they going to go house to house trying to get people's stuff?
	Well, those people could be armed as well.
	So it's not very profitable when everyone is armed to try and be some sort of mob, right?
	Things are not going to be illegal, like drugs, gambling, prostitution, and so on.
	So there's no massive profits for them to get, massive rewards they're going to get for not experiencing fear and empathy and guilt, right?
	Right now, banning stuff makes it incredibly profitable, and it's basically a massive subsidy and reward for sociopathy, which isn't going to exist.
	So what are they going to do?
	What are they going to go and take?
	And if such a ban did emerge, all of the existing DROs and power structures and defense agencies would be like, whoa, if these guys take over a bunch of stuff, if these guys take a bunch of people's stuff, we're going to have massive insurance payouts to happen, so we are going to go and get these guys right away.
	And I don't know.
	I mean, I have no idea.
	You can develop a disease in a lab that targets somebody...
	Specifically, their genetics, their DNA. So would they release that, which wouldn't harm anyone else and would simply disable this person or the leader or these people?
	I have no idea.
	But I would much rather take my chances with that kind of scenario than right now, where half my income is taken by force, the healthcare system is terrible, the educational system is abusive, and my daughter is born...
	I'll take my chances with the Mel Gibson mob 200 years from now who have somehow escaped everyone's notice, have never been intervened with, have never been ostracized and have no central tax base to take over.
	I'll take my chances with them.
	Okay.
	Thank you.
	You're welcome.
	Thanks for the question.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Okay, a few things.
	Well, really one thing, but first I just wanted to preface it by saying that I agree with you that Mel Gibson is a sociopath.
	I caught that and I thought it was a very good reference.
	But beyond that, beyond that sort of thing...
	You know this means I can't use the phrase sugar tits in this entire conversation now, right?
	Let me just make a note of that.
	Yeah, definitely keep that written down.
	Beyond that, I also agree with you with a lot of your criticisms about the state and about the atrocities that are committed through the state, not only internationally, but here domestically.
	Where I disagree is that I'm sort of a more left-wing persuasion.
	So I kind of view these private actors as sort of equally problematic in some scenarios.
	So to take the example of Bill Gates...
	I would agree with you that in a scenario where everything started off sort of fairly and equally, we could abide by these sorts of rules of property and fair play and the market and all these things.
	But with Bill Gates, I see someone who sort of privatized things that were once in the public domain through the force of the state and as such has accumulated great wealth.
	So my question is, why in a free society should we respect his ill-gotten goods?
	You mean, so Bill Gates gets a lot of his money through selling to the state and also through copyright and patent protections, which I don't believe would ever be enforced in a free society.
	And I think one of the major blocks to human progress is patents and copyrights.
	And so is your question, how would we deal with wealth that had been accumulated in a state of society when we became a free society?
	Yes.
	I personally would not want to go in and steal or initiate force against people.
	You'd have no way of redistributing that money back to its original owners.
	You don't even know who those original owners are.
	The beautiful thing about a free market is it generally transfers money from incompetent people to competent people.
	And so, you know, it used to be called, you know, rags to riches to rags in three generations.
	Like the immigrants come, they make a lot of money, and then their kids are lazy, and they blow all the money, and they're poor again, right?
	So family fortunes are maintained through the power of the state.
	If you look at the Bush fortune, the Clinton fortune, the Rothschild fortune, they are all maintained through the power of the state, particularly through central banking.
	So, in a free society, I'm not worried about people who have made their money unjustly prior to a free society, because very quickly, they will have that money transferred to more competent people.
	People who have made their money through the state, and that is the majority of people who are rich these days, they've made their money through the state.
	I mean, even movie stars, right?
	One of the reasons they make their money is everything's copyrighted.
	And so...
	Those people have developed skills, like people like Bill Gates or those people, they have developed skills, sometimes unwillingly, around buying congressmen, around gaming the system, around dealing with patent trolls or being patent trolls themselves.
	Those skills are going to be completely useless in a free society.
	It's like learning how to sing in a register that only dogs can hear, you know?
	There's no audience of canines, you're kind of out of luck.
	You're just annoying people and breaking their wine glasses.
	So, I don't care what happens in a free society.
	Very quickly, the money is going to go out of the hands of incompetent people if their primary, prior competence has been gaming the status system.
	When that's gone, ah, forget it, you know?
	It's like being a gymnast and then suddenly going to Venus, right?
	It's kind of a, well, Venus is the same size.
	It's like being a gymnast and then suddenly going to Jupiter and not having as great a time because you've adapted to one environment, now you're in a different environment.
	So, all the people who have gained their money and power through the state, pfft, Let them have it.
	In a free society, they will quickly dribble away through their fingers and go into the hands of more virtuous people.
	As far as equality goes, you know, we're not equal.
	People are not equal.
	It's a fundamental reality.
	In a religious context, people say, well, everyone's equal because there's a soul.
	But philosophy doesn't really recognize the immaterial, and it just has to recognize that people are different.
	Some people are tall.
	Some people are short.
	Some people have great singing voices.
	Some people have great intelligence.
	Some people are very pretty.
	Some people are, you know, drawn towards wisdom.
	Some people are great with numbers.
	Some people can learn foreign languages much more easily.
	There is just a wide scattershot of skills, talents, abilities, and deficiencies in the human race.
	And you can't change that.
	I mean, I guess you could try and force, you know, like that old bed in the ancient, what was it, Diogenes?
	That old bed that you had to stretch people out who were too short and cut the legs off people who were too tall and try and fit them all in the same bed.
	You can't fix that problem.
	I don't even think that it's a problem.
	If everyone was the same, then, you know, nobody would be headlining Vegas and nobody would be cleaning houses.
	So we are different.
	We are born different and we all make different choices about how hard to work.
	Some people choose to take it easy and I think that's fine.
	Other people like me have been pretty much workaholics and that's fine too.
	So I respect people's choices, I respect the biological and genetic diversity of the species, and expecting everyone to end up with the same stuff is, I think, it's utopian.
	I think it's anti-biological, anti-empirical, and therefore unachievable.
	Thank you.
	Violet?
	By the way, it's a pro-crustean bed.
	And also to make people equal, you have to promote some people to leadership, to authority, to give them power.
	So the left-wing idea of, well, there's poor people, there's rich people, let's take some of the money from rich people and give them to poor people because we want everyone to be equal, doesn't work even logically, let alone economically or morally for that matter because they're initiating force.
	Because if you want to make people equal and to achieve that, you have to promote people and give them a monopoly of violence and currency and Then they're not equal.
	You automatically create a super deity form of human hierarchy in order to make people equal.
	So I think it's equal before the law.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Absolutely equal before the law.
	But equal in effect...
	I don't know.
	That's like saying everyone should win American Idol.
	Well, you know, some people work hard.
	Some people have naturally greater voices.
	Some people have a greater pitch and they've worked on it.
	Some people are more musical.
	You know, some people are going to win and that's how you get the best quality to the people.
	I guess my question is bringing it back to what we were discussing before.
	It's like a human rights question.
	The first question talked about issues in other countries, but what if we have issues closer to home that if...
	We know that there's people suffering, like if there was a group that was kind of like a cult, like FLDS, especially religious cults that have almost like a moral standing to justify what they feel to be right.
	So don't we think that there should be a state responsibility to handle those kind of issues?
	Well, okay.
	So we create the worst case scenario.
	So there's some cult, some religious cult or some whatever cult.
	It's those guys who wanted to cut off their own testicles and jump on the halibut comet.
	So let's say there's some cult and they're harming people and maybe they're even children getting born there and the children being harmed, right?
	And your question is, could a state not deal with that kind of issue?
	Yeah, that shouldn't there be a responsibility for a state operation to go in there and to help those people?
	Well, first of all, governments don't do that now, right?
	I mean, you can have a cult in America.
	I mean, I just know this.
	There was some Dr.
	Phil where there were some cults where, and they bought up their land and they had their cult.
	Well, the government doesn't go in.
	So, the idea that the government is going to go in and deal with these things that you find objectionable, and which I actually find objectionable too, creating a government to deal with that doesn't happen now.
	I mean, cults operate all over the world, some of them with a great deal of legitimacy.
	And the governments don't deal with them as it stands.
	So that's not going to happen.
	The second thing, even if a government could deal with this, how on earth are you going to create a government and give all of this power to people, all of this weaponry, all of this power?
	There's armies, the police, the prison system, the court system, the taxation system, the debt system, and most likely a fiat currency or central banking counterfeiting system.
	How are you going to create this giant monolith of power and then say to it, now, only deal with cults that I find wrong?
	They're not going to do that.
	The moment you give people this kind of power, they're going to start using it to punish their enemies and to reward their friends, to enrich themselves and to impose their wills on everyone else.
	Political power, and this has been shown in repeated psychological studies, political power...
	It's incredibly addictive.
	It is more addictive than cocaine, which kind of makes sense.
	Like, evolutionarily, the ownership of other human beings was incredibly profitable.
	It gave you lots of money, it gave you a harem, and so on.
	So we're kind of biologically driven to have power over others, which is why the moment you give a state...
	You're basically, you know, bringing a distillery to a bunch of drunks.
	You're basically bringing cocaine to a bunch of coke addicts and then saying, now be responsible.
	It's not going to happen.
	People lose their minds when they go into politics.
	Like they literally become insane, which is why people do incredibly stupid and risky stuff, which is why they start wars, which is why they lie so easily.
	They go mad.
	They're addicts.
	Political power is a dangerous addiction, well, the most dangerous addiction that I would say, because at least if you're smoking crack, you're only harming yourself, but with political power, you're destroying the world.
	So the idea that you can create a state which is addictive and a mind-altering substance of concentrated violence and then say, well, it's only going to do what I want it to.
	You know, it's just like those old stories where you summon a demon and expect it to obey you and it ends up ruling you.
	That is how it works.
	You might want it to just deal with cults.
	Never going to happen that way.
	It's just going to continue to roll, continue to aggrandize, continue to build its power base and continue to lie and manipulate and buy votes and just trundle along.
	That's the nature of this kind of power.
	Okay.
	Alex.
	Hi.
	My question has more to do with organization structure, and I agree a lot with your points about sort of the distinction you made between ruler and rules and sort of the popular misconception that anarchism or anarchy means chaos or something like that.
	As famous Russian anarchist Volin, he pointed out that anarchism is really a question of organization, not one of non-organization.
	So as it pertains to that, a lot of anarchists Of course, well, all anarchists would be against the state, but more than the state, it's what the state is rooted in, structurally, which is a sort of hierarchical formation.
	Given that many anarchists would also be opposed to capitalism on the same grounds, with top-down structure, how do you respond to that?
	How do you respond to the point that capitalism is an inherently, or is a hierarchical structure, and is thus not consistent with anarchy or anarchism?
	Well, I mean, I would just say that they don't understand anarchism and may, in fact, be idiots.
	I hope that none of them are in the room, but they may just be idiots.
	Look, Bakunin said, who was a famous 19th century anarchist, who was, I don't think, any particular friend of capitalism, he said, so I'm an anarchist.
	Does that mean I reject authority?
	Of course not.
	I bow to the authority of the man who makes my shoes because he's way better at it than I am.
	So hierarchy in terms of authority, yeah, you know, I go to the dentist and she cleans my teeth.
	I don't sit there at home with, you know, a fork and a laser saying, I'm sure I can get these guys pearly white.
	I submit to the authority of the people who build my house or who maintain my car.
	They say I need something.
	I might get a second opinion.
	I submit to the authority of my doctor.
	So the fact that there's hierarchy in human society, that there's expertise and that there's obedience to that expertise if freely chosen.
	That's called the division of labor.
	If you want to get rid of hierarchy, then you have to get rid of parenting, right?
	Because parenting is the ultimate hierarchy.
	I mean, my daughter is five years old, and she can barely do a damn thing for herself yet, right?
	I mean, other than Xbox and tablets, right?
	She can't cook her own food.
	She can't go to the grocery store.
	She doesn't have any money, right?
	So I am an authority with regards to her.
	And, you know, until children are born fully grown, that's kind of how...
	It's going to be.
	So people who say, well, I am against capitalism and I'm against the government don't understand the moral basis of anarchism.
	Anarchism is the inevitable result of the non-initiation of force.
	The non-initiation of force.
	And if I set up a lemonade stand in front of my house and I say, lemonade, 10 cents.
	And people drive by and they don't Take my lemonade.
	They don't give me their dime.
	Have they initiated force against me?
	Absolutely not.
	If people stop and they say, yeah, I got a dime and I'm pretty thirsty and that lemonade sure looks good.
	And then they give me the dime and I give them a cup of lemonade and they go on in their way.
	Has anyone initiated force against anyone else?
	Has there been any fraud, any deception, any theft, any violence, any rape, any murder, any assault?
	Absolutely not.
	If I find a woman attractive, I ask her out, she can say yes, she can say no.
	I'm not initiating force against her.
	We get married, we don't get married, we have kids, we don't have kids.
	Nobody's initiating force against anyone.
	So, if people want to get together and combine their skill sets to offer a service, Nobody is initiating force.
	As long as they're not using force to compel people to consume that service, if I go start a restaurant, I can't build the whole damn thing myself.
	I can't cook the food and be a waiter and seat and do the books, whatever it's going to be in a free society.
	I can't clean it.
	One person can't run a restaurant.
	So let's say 10 people run a restaurant and they put ads out and they say, come eat at my restaurant.
	Well, they're not initiating force.
	They're simply offering a service, right?
	Yes, they used to say, run your flag up the pole and see who salutes.
	Well, it's not really an example of volunteerism, but...
	So people come into my restaurant, or they don't.
	They come in, I serve them their food, they pay, they leave.
	It's all voluntary.
	So the idea that you'd be sort of against the free association of people from an economic standpoint, whatever that results in, is it going to look like what there is now?
	No, we don't have capitalism now.
	We haven't had capitalism really ever in the world fundamentally, but there have been different degrees.
	But capitalism is where nobody's initiating force or at least a tiny minority of private criminals are initiating force and the vast majority of people are respecting that.
	We've always had governments.
	We've always had taxation.
	We've always had wars.
	We've always had debts.
	We've always had coercive control.
	And companies have always tried to go to use the government to gain resources because that's what they have to do.
	And if they don't do it, they go out of business and the other guys who do it end up running the industry.
	So people say, well, I'm against rulers.
	Fine.
	Well, somebody who opens a goddamn restaurant is not a ruler of you.
	They can't sell your children to foreign banksters into economic slavery.
	They can't goddamn well start a war on your behalf.
	They can't force you to pay for the indoctrination of your own children.
	To name a few of the many crimes, they can't force you to pay for arms that they're going to sell to criminals.
	They're just a restaurant.
	And so people who say, well, I'm against a state and I'm against capitalism is like saying, well, I'm against forced association and I'm against free association.
	So what the hell kind of association are you for?
	Psychic association?
	Vulcan mind melds?
	Group hubs in another dimension?
	No, it's either forced association or it's free.
	There's no other kind.
	Okay, well, what I mean specifically...
	Can you hear us?
	What I mean specifically is the way a given social formation is structured.
	I don't mean necessarily a doctor having authority because they have some sort of knowledge or expertise.
	I mean for example a workplace being governed in such a way where let's say you have 50 workers and only one person is the owner and that person has all the authority and say the other 49 people there do not have any say whatsoever.
	Isn't that against the principles of anarchy in the sense that people do not have a way to participate in the social formation that they are a part of?
	Wait, wait, sorry.
	Okay, so let's say I have a factory.
	How do I have all the authority?
	Because you own it.
	Okay, let's say I own it.
	I still don't understand how I have all the authority.
	You own it.
	And people there, because there's chronic unemployment, because even under conditions of full employment, there will always be people unemployed, have to stay there and work.
	And on top of it...
	Why do people have to stay there?
	Because they depend on it for their livelihood.
	No, but I don't understand.
	Like in a free society, they can go pretty easily start their own business.
	They can go work from home.
	They can go join some other company, right?
	So I don't...
	Why would they have to work at my place?
	Because it's their means for existence, just like it is today.
	Oh, come on.
	Sorry, I've actually run a business for 15 years.
	Let me tell you, it's really hard to find good employees and it's really hard to keep good employees.
	This is why we did profit sharing.
	This is why we took them on whitewater rafting vacations.
	This is why we gave them bonuses.
	This is why we did everything we could to keep the employees happy.
	As an owner, you're very dependent upon competent people.
	You can't make money if people hate working for you, if they don't want to show up, and if they're just doing it grudgingly, you are going to lose out to someone who makes their employees fairly enthusiastic to come to work.
	I can only assume this comes out of your inexperience.
	I don't mean this in a negative way.
	It's just you've only had theoretical understanding of these things.
	But from a practical standpoint, as a factory owner, my factory is a massive liability.
	I've got to heat it.
	I've got to maintain it.
	I've got to keep the machines running.
	I've got to trim the bushes outside or mow the lawn or sweep it up.
	I have to keep that factory running.
	It's a massive liability if the factory is not as productive as possible.
	Now, to have productive workers means that the workers have to kind of enjoy being there.
	They have to contribute.
	They have to do kind of cool stuff.
	They have to have their own ideas.
	And the more self-starting they are, the more self-initiating they are, the fewer managers I need.
	And therefore, the more profitable the factory is going to be.
	And this has been replicated many times, that the more participation the workers have, In the jobs that they have, then the more productive and the more profitable the place tends to be.
	So this idea that one guy has this mystery rule over 50 people because he happens to own a factory, boy, I tell you, as a boss, I felt sometimes more like a slave to my employees than their master because they could just pick up and leave anytime they wanted because they can go work anywhere in the world in a free society.
	And especially if they're competent, other people are going to be constantly offering them jobs.
	People who were my most competent employees, the most enthusiastic employees, were constantly being offered other jobs.
	And I constantly had to find a way to improve their working environment to keep them here.
	So, yeah, this idea that some guy just magically has this economic cage in a free society around his workers, I think, is just a Marxist fantasy and has no relationship to any real-world economic situation.
	OK, thank you.
	OK, next.
	Hi, how are you?
	Big fan.
	I'm well.
	How are you doing?
	So, one of the things is whenever I debate with anybody and we talk about private property, there's always the problem of, we talk about oil spills or nature being deforested, that kind of thing.
	So, for me, I want to ask, do we have to section out parts of the ocean to people?
	How do we privatize everything?
	How do we have everything Somebody owned property for everything.
	Good question.
	Can you be that person?
	Because then we can pretend to be debating with him.
	Uh...
	Do you want to roleplay?
	Roleplay?
	Did I just blow your mind?
	Tasha, do you want to do it?
	Okay, so I would say to this person, you can respond in character if you like, but I would say to this person, okay, so do you feel that environmental protection is working well at the moment?
	Yes, says the pretend person.
	Yes.
	So the pretend person would say yes?
	Yes.
	Okay, and then I would say, so then we don't have a problem with global warming, we don't have a problem with deforestation, we don't have a problem with military activity throughout the world causing massive environmental destruction and degradation, we don't have the use of depleted uranium shells in the Middle East, and we don't have that kind of stuff, right?
	So we don't have oil spill.
	So right now, we don't have any problems with environmental management.
	So I guess the answer is no, then.
	Right, so no, it doesn't work right now.
	It's certainly not ideal right now.
	And this is really important.
	So people say, well, how would this work in a free society?
	And they kind of have this weird belief that it's somehow working now.
	Like, how would the poor be taken care of in a free society?
	Are they really being taken care of now?
	Absolutely not.
	I mean, one in five people, one in five families in America has no person working.
	The amount of human capital, potential work ethics and habits and educational requirements that are being destroyed is staggering.
	And of course, they're, you know, running into debt.
	They're living in these terrible societies, ghettos.
	The kids are going to terrible schools.
	So they're not being taken care of at the moment.
	So there's this weird thing like, how would a free society do as well as the government in taking care?
	Like we were talking with the lady earlier about the third world, right?
	Well, how's it happening right now?
	It's terrible.
	So when it comes to environmentalism, and there's a lot to talk about, and I'll keep this brief.
	Um...
	First and foremost, fiat currency drives economic consumption.
	People buy stuff to some degree because their money is melting in their hands.
	It's turning into powder.
	It's bursting into flame in their hands because when you print more money, you get inflation and prices and everything goes up.
	So people have to buy now because their money is worth less next year, which is one of the reasons why there's such rampant consumerism in countries with central banking.
	So privatize the currency and immediately people will be rewarded for not buying now because their money will generally gain in value over time, like bitcoins do.
	They gain in value over time.
	And so people will defer purchases because they'll, like, you know, nobody wants to buy a computer because you know six months from now the computers are going to be way better, right?
	So that's one thing to do.
	The second thing to recognize is that the best way to maintain the value of something is to give it to someone.
	I mean, we've all driven down streets and you see these nice houses, nice houses.
	Then there's one lot that nobody owns and it's a shit heap, right?
	I mean, it's got old shopping carts in there.
	There's like old oil drums and barbed wire and junk and crap and coffee cups because it's nobody's, right?
	So when something is unowned, its value tends to deteriorate because nobody profits from its ownership.
	The more stuff is owned privately, the better it's going to be taken care of.
	And so deforestation occurs when a forest company is only sold the logging rights and is not sold the actual land.
	Right?
	So if you bought the right to pick If you bought apples from fruit trees but you didn't buy the fruit trees themselves, you wouldn't care about maintaining the trees.
	You'd just go in and pick all the apples and be gone.
	It's the same thing with land.
	In Canada, you can buy the logging rights, which means clear-cutting, but if you buy the land rights, which is how it would work in a free society, then you always replant in the same way that a farmer who buys land is always going to replant.
	It's not just going to take all the crops and then bugger off because whoever can replant can get a longer-term greater value.
	Out of the land and therefore we'll be able to bid more for it and the land will accumulate to those people.
	So sustainability is economically productive, is economically profitable.
	A renewable resource will always make you more money than a one-time resource, all other things being equal.
	So we want to privatize as much as possible, not just the resources but the land itself.
	So I think that's important.
	Why are we so dependent on oil?
	Because after the Second World War, particularly in North America but also in Europe, governments paid for all these roads.
	And they did that because they wanted to be able to move troops around in the event of a nuclear war or an invasion.
	And so we got this crazy car-centric culture because of governments.
	And what would that look like in a free society?
	I don't know.
	But that's another reason why we have so much environmental predation.
	Population growth, right?
	I mean, the more wealthy people are and the better educated they are, the fewer children they have, right?
	The best contraception is industrialization.
	And so we want to make sure that we contribute as much to the wealth growth in society because then society has enough wealth to put scrubbers in the smokestacks and to recycle and all the kinds of things that are considered beneficial to the environment.
	So these are just a few ways in which our existing environment is being completely preyed upon with almost no sense of the future or for the future because of government policies and because of limitations on the private ownership of resources.
	So I'll give you just one last example.
	So for 400 years, there was a giant, incredible, amazing cod fishery off the east coast of Canada, off Newfoundland.
	I actually visited it when I was 16, back when there was still one of these things.
	And the first people who discovered it, they wrote in their diaries, they said, it's weird.
	I feel like I could walk from a half mile offshore To the island.
	Because there's so many fish here.
	It feels like you could just walk on the backs of the fish and get where you want to go.
	And this lasted for 400 years.
	No problem.
	With private management.
	Right?
	Which is, you know, everybody in the village kind of agrees how many fish you can take and anybody who takes more fish is ostracized and they don't want to do that because they live in a village with like 50 other people.
	You don't want to be ostracized because you've got no one else to talk to.
	So this lasted for 400 years.
	No problem.
	Well, the government came in and the government started assigning quotas And once the government bypassed or blew away the existing social controls and gave all these quotas, and they gave more quotas because they said, don't worry, we've got it down to a scientific art.
	You guys have been under fishing.
	And people are like, great, well, if I can fish more, and my neighbor's fishing more, so I might as well, then I can make more money.
	So they bought votes by upping the quotas.
	Within a couple of years, the card are gone.
	A multi-hundred-year resource is completely gone and will never return.
	Well, this is an example of replacing spontaneous private control with coercive centralized control.
	I'm sorry?
	Nothing.
	Go on, go on.
	So, yeah, so I would say that the best chance is a free society, the best chance for the maintenance of resources and the protection of the planet.
	Okay.
	Thank you, Stefan.
	Do you want to go next?
	I mean, we've got time since nobody's there, so go ahead.
	Great questions, by the way.
	Thank you.
	I wish I'd gone to school with you guys.
	Bunch of socialists up here.
	Oh, God.
	I'm having flashbacks.
	Hang on.
	Okay, I'm back.
	Hi.
	I kind of have a follow-up to that because, I mean, part of what you're saying does make sense, but there are certain aspects of environmentalism and ecology that aren't necessarily contingent or have not a lot to do with the market.
	While I do agree that sustainability is a great economic incentive, what about things that are kind of without economic incentive?
	Because if you look at sort of ecologically, Environmental systems are sort of dependent on certain keystone species, and what's to stop people from sort of tampering with these systems in ways that aren't necessarily involved with the market, like in preserving certain endangered species, things that sort of need to be regulated.
	Otherwise, we're going to have sort of the decimation of species that don't necessarily come into play in our lives in a direct way, such as with the economy.
	How do we protect those in a way that's effective?
	Can you give me an example?
	I mean...
	Eagle?
	Well, I mean, there are certain animals that people have a sort of random attachment to, like eagles, but decimation of sort of marshes, wetlands, and...
	I mean, I'm trying to think of more specific species.
	There are...
	The monarch butterfly?
	Sure, monarch butterflies.
	I mean...
	I don't really know how to sort of direct it more.
	So just pick any other.
	Well, you care about those things, right?
	I mean, but don't you think those endangered species should be given some credence?
	I mean, there are tons.
	I mean, the West Indian manatees who are being completely decimated because of just carelessness, generally.
	I mean, there's...
	Well, okay, but let me ask you this.
	Let me ask you this.
	How does it work now?
	I mean, people are being sort of careless and they're going against certain regulations and, I mean, in a free market...
	Regulations don't work particularly well, right?
	Yeah, but how can we improve that under...
	I mean, what kind of incentives would you sort of implicate to try and control people who are destroying natural ecosystems?
	Right.
	Well, buy them.
	Buy them?
	Yeah.
	Not the people.
	Buy the wetlands.
	So you would go to people and you would say, look, we really need to protect this wetland.
	Because, you know, we can't get our necessary mosquito base without it or whatever, right?
	So we need to protect these wetlands.
	And so you go to people and they donate, they help out, they volunteer, and you buy that land.
	And then once you've bought that land, nobody can come and destroy it or build on it or anything because you own it, right?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Who has more money?
	People who constantly need land to make products, people who want to decimate this land because they don't really care about the ecological integrity of the land.
	If you get outbought by someone who wants to decimate it to build a factory on it, there's no real chance for you.
	The environmentalist doesn't have as much money as the active capitalist.
	You don't have the money.
	No, no, no, no.
	Okay, sorry.
	Sorry to say no, no, no.
	First of all, it's not a matter of money, fundamentally.
	Human beings are not, they're driven by incentives, but those incentives are not always centered around money.
	So, I mean, nobody has kids as a profit center, right?
	It's ridiculously time-consuming and expensive to have kids.
	It costs like $200,000 or $250,000 these days to raise a kid to adulthood.
	Why do people have kids?
	Because they want to have kids.
	They love kids.
	They want to share life.
	They want to watch your mind grow.
	They want to whatever, right?
	Mentor.
	So money is not the fundamental driver.
	If money was the fundamental driver, there would be no people, right?
	Because nobody would have kids.
	It's a ridiculous decision to make from an economic profit standpoint.
	But isn't money the fundamental driver when you're buying something?
	If you're choosing between two, all right.
	Well, no, what I'm saying is that it's more than just economic drivers that run society.
	So let's say if I wanted to buy up a bunch of wetland, first of all, who's going to want to build there?
	It's a marsh, right?
	So nobody's going to want to build a factory in a marsh, right?
	I mean, so you can buy that land fairly cheap because it's already swampland.
	I'm just using one example.
	But let's say there was some land that someone wanted to build some godforsaken factory on.
	Well, you start to bring social pressure on that person.
	You say, hey, man, if you build there, we're going to organize a boycott of your products.
	We are going to spread through social media far and wide that you are an uncaring Mr.
	Burns-style environmental rat bastard.
	Who wants to build a factory crushing these precious monarchs and we're going to have pictures of monarchs on your workers' boots dying.
	We're going to make your life incredibly difficult if you choose to build there.
	I'm telling you, that is an incredibly effective strategy because then it means that they're going to say, okay, well, I'm going to get some profit.
	Maybe from building here.
	But I'm going to have huge losses and incur the enmity of a significant portion, a loud portion of the population.
	So it's going to make more sense for me to build somewhere else.
	Right?
	So there will be environmental groups.
	And whoever wants to build anything that can be environmentally hazardous, if they've got half a brain in their head, are going to meet with those environmental groups and make sure they have their okay.
	Because the amount of economic damage that can be done to a company...
	Right now, companies who supply to the US government, companies like Boeing and they supply to the military, they don't care about consumer boycotts because they're not going to get boycotted by the military.
	But when everything is private, consumer boycotts have a huge, huge effect.
	And, of course, if nobody cares about it except you, then nothing's really going to change.
	But nothing will change in a government society either, because you need to have a majority of very interested people who are willing to go out and research and make speeches and vote in order to change government policy.
	And if you have that majority in a government, then you don't need the government.
	Because you can organize economic boycotts.
	And you can even have it programmed in.
	When people start paying with their cell phones or their Bitcoin wallets on their cell phones or whatever, you could just set up a database and say, these companies are not...
	We're not happy with their environmental performance.
	And anyone who believes you and subscribes to that will automatically simply not buy, reject it, will not buy, either from the end product or from any company that supplies to the end product.
	It can be incredibly efficient to organize economic boycotts and companies who want to sell goods, which is companies who...
	I think it's going to give the environmental activists the most power to have private end consumers driving economic decisions rather than government purchases which are kind of immune from boycotting.
	Does that help at all?
	I mean, I definitely, like, I agree that, I mean, I totally believe that boycotting, I personally, in my life, I boycott, I don't purchase from institutions, from companies, corporations that I don't think are ethical, but, I mean, if that were the case, that would be something that could be implemented now, but it's not, because it involves sort of a complete reorientation of, I mean, more general ethics that people don't really have.
	No, it's not that.
	No, sorry to interrupt.
	It's because everyone thinks the problem is being dealt with.
	No, they don't.
	Why aren't there spontaneous self-organizations of community schools?
	Because the government's taking everyone's money and, quote, solving the problem already so people don't think about it.
	Now, if the government stopped taking money for schools and the schools immediately were turned over to the free market...
	Then the amount of energy and spontaneous organization that would occur would be enormous.
	But there's this big giant monolith of state power in the way which nobody can change.
	At least no individual citizen can change.
	And so people just don't focus their attention on it.
	It's like, well, I'm paying my taxes, there's an environmental protection agency, everything's being taken care of, and maybe I'll just vote for a green candidate.
	And so there's this incredible sloughing off of responsibility that occurs when you have a government.
	People are forced to pay for the government solutions.
	And they then therefore, it's very painful for people to think that they're being forced to pay for something that's terrible.
	So one of the things that they do is they ex post facto justify being forced to pay for stuff by saying, well, at least the kids are being educated.
	Well, I don't like my taxes, but at least the environment is being taken care of.
	And then they don't really give it another thought.
	Because the idea that they're being forced to pay for something that's harming children and harming the environment is kind of unbearable to people.
	But if you take away that state power, then people actually have to look for productive solutions that...
	The huge amounts of human creativity are opened up.
	The government is this giant logjam in the eternal river of human potential.
	Take that away, and what can occur is amazing.
	But right now, people just shrug and say, well, it's there.
	I'm forced to pay for it.
	I'm sure it's doing fine, so I'm going to go watch American Idol again.
	Something like that.
	Thank you.
	I'm late for a quiz.
	Sorry.
	Thanks.
	Okay, thanks.
	Quick final question.
	So, based on the workings of the non-aggression principle and everything that's been said thus far, isn't everything that you're saying based on a reliance upon a general agreement that human nature is inherently good?
	I don't think human nature is inherently anything.
	It's like saying, what's the shape of water?
	The shape of water is whatever container or trajectory or friction it happens to be surrounded by.
	You pull water into a vase, it's a vase.
	You pull water into a cup, it's the shape of a cup.
	Human nature adapts To its environment.
	This is our fundamental strength and weakness as a species.
	So you grow up in Thailand, guess what?
	You're going to speak Thai and you're going to be part of the Thai culture.
	You grow up in New Jersey, you know, you've got a whole different story.
	You grow up in a military family where you're spanked or hit or yelled at a lot, you're going to come out usually a particular kind of way.
	You grow up in some hippy-dippy family, I guess sort of like mine, where you're reasoned with and negotiated and nobody yells at you or hits you, you're going to come out another kind of way.
	So we are an adaptive species.
	We have great capacity for evil if we're traumatized when we're young, which is why we can't have a government.
	We have this capacity for evil.
	But if human nature were innately evil, we couldn't have a government because the government will attract all the evil people to run it.
	If human nature is innately good, then we don't need a government.
	If human nature is mostly good but a little bit evil, then we can't have a government because the evil people will use the government to dominate the good people.
	If human beings are mostly evil and only partly good, we still can't have a government.
	Because it's certainly not a democratic one because all the evil people will vote for evil policies and the good people will have no chance because the evil people will be in the majority.
	So there's no scenario in any blend of good and evil in human nature wherein a government can be justified.
	But again, as I sort of mentioned, it's really all about the parenting.
	You raise peaceful people.
	You won't need criminals that the government can pretend to protect you from.
	You won't get people who want to work as government enforcers either in the military or the police or the prison guard system.
	The world will be The world which relied on slavery was about the same for 50,000 years.
	The standard of living was terrible.
	The average life expectancy was like 20.
	People died of tooth decay.
	Women died in childbirth all the time.
	That was the world of slavery.
	If you get up to the 15th century, you'd say, well, I guess there's been a few improvements, but it's still pretty crappy.
	But that's the society of slavery.
	Now, once you end slavery, at least as a formal institution, then you get the 20th century, which, with all of its horrors of state wars and murders and democide, had unbelievable advances in science, in medicine, in the economy, in technology, in standards of living, in longevity, life expectancy, quality of childhood, massive, unprecedented, incredible, skyrocketing improvements.
	Now, the next barrier is the state.
	We had slavery, and it made society crap for 50,000 years, and now we have a state, which freedom and voluntarism is in combat with.
	And if we eliminate the state, we recognize its moral injustice the same way that we recognize the moral injustice of slavery, we get a world that is as incredible to us As the 21st century would be to somebody from the 15th century.
	Incomprehensibly, astoundingly, you can carry all of human knowledge in your pocket.
	What we get in 100 years after this date is so astounding.
	Like, we literally can't conceive of it.
	Everything we can conceive of, it will be a million times better.
	The same way you say to someone from the 14th century, what is the next 600 years going to be like?
	Imagine your very best scenario.
	Everything that he could imagine would have been vastly surpassed.
	And so this is sort of my fundamental argument that the state isn't a moral institution, just as slavery was.
	When we got rid of slavery, massive amounts of human potential and creativity were unleashed.
	It's the same thing that's going to occur with the state.
	And let's not say that there's no sun because there's a few potential sunspots.
	It's sure better than the midnight we currently inhabit.
	Okay.
	Just one more question.
	Thank you.
	Was that it?
	One more.
	Hi, Steph.
	How would you say the non-aggression principle and atheism relate?
	It's a good question.
	So the non-aggression principle would include things like death threats, right?
	Like I can't say to you, listen, I'm going to blah, blah, blah, right?
	And so you can't morally say that to children.
	You can't morally say, if you don't obey me, my invisible sky ghost is going to roast you on hot coals and pee on your eyeballs for all eternity.
	I can't go and threaten another adult with torture for failure to comply with my belief system.
	And the non-initiation of force is also the non-initiation of the threat of force, and the threat of supernatural force is by far the greatest threat that can be made.
	You know, if I threaten to torture and kill you, at least you're going to be dead at some point.
	But eternal torture is something so psychotically immoral that to inflict it, particularly upon children, as a threat is...
	It's immoral.
	It's wrong.
	You cannot morally tell children that they're going to burn in hell for failure to comply with a belief set.
	This is absolutely immoral.
	So that's number one.
	Number two is that in a free society, I cannot tell someone that they have an imaginary illness and then sell them a cure for a lot of money.
	Like if I say, oh my God, you have limited gibbets and that's going to kill you.
	But I will sell you the cure for $5,000 a year.
	Well, if there's no such thing that I can prove as flippity gibbets, then I've just defrauded you to the tune of $5,000 a year.
	And so, if someone goes to a child and says, you are born in sin, but I will cure that sin for a lifetime of allegiance and $5,000 a year paid to me, Well, clearly telling children they're infected with an imaginary illness and then demanding allegiance and money when they get older for the rest of their lives is a fraud that we would not allow in the medical sphere in any way, shape, or form.
	I mean, if someone just came to my kid and said, oh, you have flippity gibbets and it's going to kill you.
	You're going to die.
	Oh, and then be tortured forever, by the way.
	But obey me and I will snap my fingers, wave a magic spell and save you from this imaginary illness.
	We would recognize that this would be a pretty unholy, literally, thing to do to a child.
	So if you take away the moral legitimacy of punishment, of the threat of punishment, And you take away the moral legitimacy of telling the child that they have an imaginary illness called sin.
	And if you take away the abuse, say, of saying, this greatest being in the universe died because you were bad, died for your sins, Jesus.
	And you take all of that away.
	And you also can't really promise rewards as well.
	I can't sell lottery tickets and say the reward will be something after you're dead.
	That would be wrong.
	Because I can't promise anything like that.
	So if you take away rewards, you take away punishments, you take away threats, you take away guilt, you take away sin, all of that kind of stuff, then you have the challenge for religious people of attempting to convince their children of religion.
	Without being able to bribe them, without being able to threaten them, without being able to guilt them, without being able to manipulate them.
	It'll have to be just a straight factual argument with no emotional threats or bribes or consequences or punishments.
	I think that's kind of a challenge.
	So, it is the initiation of force to threaten someone.
	It is fraud to bribe someone with something that cannot be proven and you don't possess.
	You don't possess heaven.
	You don't possess God's good graces.
	You can't promise that those things are going to occur because they can't be scientifically validated or anything like that.
	Belief in religion, everyone's allowed to believe in things that philosophy rejects, but to inflict it on others, particularly children who are dependent upon you and who do not have independence, either legal or moral or intellectual, whose brains are immature, is obviously wrong.
	If I ran a home for people who were developmentally handicapped mentally...
	And I told them that they had to obey the rules or demons were going to come and hit them with hammers while they slept.
	They would be terrified beyond words, and this would obviously be demonically abusive towards people whose brains were not mature.
	I don't see how applying that same line of thinking and, quote, argumentation to children is any more moral.
	Does that help at all?
	Yes, it does.
	Thank you.
	Wrap it up, Donald?
	Thank you.
	I have one last question and we're going to wrap it up after this one.
	Wait.
	Sorry, we're going to do some rap?
	Wait.
	No.
	Good one.
	Have I looked wider?
	Hang on.
	Let me just look at my video here.
	Okay.
	Never mind.
	Go ahead.
	When you do rap, you just throw your hands off like this.
	Like that?
	Okay, so all right.
	All right, home fellows, let's do one more question.
	Okay, so if I understand correctly, You're suggesting that human nature is neither good nor bad.
	However, a lot of your arguments are suggesting that there is some wrong and there is some right.
	So isn't that presupposing some sense of human nature being good or there being some intrinsic quality of human nature?
	Because then in that case, it kind of undermines a lot of what you're saying.
	Can you just clarify that a bit more?
	I'm not sure how to respond to that yet.
	Okay, so my understanding is that you suggested that human nature is neither good nor bad.
	But a lot of the arguments that you're making, particularly the state, the non-aggression principle, and that it's immoral, you're suggesting that it's immoral, isn't Isn't making those arguments presupposing some intrinsic quality of human nature being good?
	So if not, it seems like it would be undermining everything you're saying.
	And I agree with you a lot.
	However, I'm very contentious of that.
	There has to be...
	Okay, I think I understand.
	That's a great question.
	Okay, so let's say that I told you, and you believe me, let's just say, let's make that easy.
	I said, the world will be free when everyone speaks Swahili.
	Then we will have no war, no debt, everything will be free, and we can all ride unicorns to cloud castles of infinite pleasure for our daily bread, right?
	All we have to do is everyone has to learn Swahili.
	So if you believed that, what would our plan be?
	Learn Swahili.
	Learn Swahili.
	You're thinking of those cloud castles.
	Yeah, I'm there too, man.
	Yeah, so you'd say, okay, well, we need to teach everyone Swahili, right?
	And that's how we get to a peaceful world.
	So, we want people to negotiate rather than to either use force or submit to force, right?
	I mean, that's win-win negotiations is, you know, the sin qua na of a free society.
	So, if we want people to negotiate...
	To speak the language of negotiation rather than dominance or submission, then clearly as parents, we need to teach children through negotiating with them rather than imposing power or imposing force or saying because I said so or because I'm bigger or just because, right?
	We always have to negotiate with them.
	And then when they grow up, they won't know what it means really to bully or to be a victim because they will have been negotiated with respectfully throughout their entire lives.
	So they speak Swahili, if we sort of say negotiation is Swahili.
	And so my plan, or at least the plan that I proposed, lo these many years, is we, you know, reach out with reason and peace to as many people as we can, and we focus in particular upon parenting.
	Because freedom is like a language that we speak.
	And if you hit your children, you threaten your children, you say they're going to burn in hell, you use your might, your force, your authority, your hierarchy to make them do what you want them to do.
	I'm just doing an interview after this with a man who just did a study that shows that children are hit almost a thousand times a year in America on average.
	Well, by God, of course they're going to grow up worshipping the state and worshipping war and worshipping violence and being patriotic and bonding with authority figures and not having their own preferences and not knowing how to negotiate and bullying each other in schools.
	You're hitting children a thousand times a year.
	From seven months old to four years was his study.
	So you can't possibly have a free society when you're trying to build on a population who've experienced that level of violence growing up.
	And to say that that's human nature is incorrect.
	Because that's human nature when you hit children a thousand times a year.
	That's what you call human nature.
	Now, if you can get parents to stop hitting their children, to stop yelling at their children, to negotiate with them, then what is human nature going to look like?
	It's going to look vastly different.
	Vastly different.
	And...
	That's what we need to teach.
	The language that we need to teach people to teach their children and to learn with each other, which is why I have books about relationships and getting along and negotiating.
	That's the language we need.
	Once we can negotiate, then we don't need force.
	Once you can negotiate, you don't need to steal.
	Once you can negotiate, you don't need to rape.
	Once you can negotiate, you don't need to murder or assault or vote.
	That's really the fundamental goal that I'm talking about.
	So, yeah, there will still be occasional evils in the world.
	Of course.
	I don't know.
	Nobody knows, finally, what is the link between environment and genetics when it comes to something like sociopathy.
	Maybe there'll be a few sociopaths born.
	Maybe, as I said before, people get brain damage or a brain tumor and they become murderers or serial killers because something is fundamentally wrong with their brains.
	Will there be capacity for human beings to do damage to each other in the future?
	Of course there will be.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Will it be a hell of a lot less than now?
	You bet it will.
	Absolutely.
	Because it won't be legitimized, it won't be legal, and it won't be accepted as what is necessary for society to function.
	So we teach children the language of negotiation, we can get a free world.
	We teach adults the language of negotiation, and we reject people who want to dominate us through force, either directly through abuse or indirectly through the state.
	And then we can build a movement that can build a free society, but I don't think, given the current level of abuse that children are experiencing, both through religion, both through destructive parenting, which happens in so many families, and the public school system itself, which is incredibly destructive to children.
	No negotiation with kids in public school.
	And so until we start to really find ways around those systems or ways that children can be raised peacefully despite those systems, I think all the theory in the world won't put a single bullet out of a chamber.
	Awesome.
	Thanks a lot, Steven.
	And we're going to...
	Stefan's...
	Pardon me.
	Stefan.
	We have a Steven here that we call Steven all the time.
	So he's also a huge fan of yours.
	So kind of like subconscious thing.
	But nevertheless, it was a great discussion.
	Thank you a lot for being here with us.
	And actually, we have someone who wants to take a picture with you real quick.
	Everybody.
	You too.
	Everyone.
	Do you mind taking a screenshot with us real quick?
	Wait, everyone come in.
	No, go for it.
	Awesome.
	Back it up.
	Back it up.
	Anyone else?
	No.
	I've got this looming giant big brother head in the background.
	Anyone else?
	All right.
	Command shift.
	Hold on.
	Where is it?
	Smile.
	Let me know when we're about ready because otherwise my smile is going to freeze.
	Okay.
	Oh, there we go.
	All right.
	In three, two, one, go.
	Is that it?
	No?
	Hold on.
	That wasn't it, Stefan.
	Hold on.
	Command.
	Shift.
	You're really trying to make me look like I'm away at it now.
	We got it.
	We got it.
	You didn't smile.
	Are you ready?
	Yeah, let's do it again.
	One, two, three.
	Wait.
	Yeah.
	Fail.
	We got to know.
	It took like four or five.
	It's okay.
	We're good.
	With the pocket protector.
	All right.
	That'll be all, Stefan.
	Thank you, Stefan.
	All right.
	Thanks, guys, so much.
	Great questions.
	Enjoy your day and enjoy your youth.
	Thank you.
	Take care.

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