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June 25, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

25:13

2731 You Need Government! Freedom is Slavery!

Why does the state do more harm than good? If we all use the public things provided by government, aren't we consenting to taxation? Can social progress be made without government? How do big businesses help the poor? Do they do a better job than the government?

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	Alright, so questions from an interviewer.
	Why does the state do more harm than good?
	Well, when you talk about the state, you simply have to talk about violence.
	The state is the centralized legal right to initiate the use of force, which is specifically denied to everyone outside the state.
	So, you can vote for policies which force everyone to pay for your children's education, and that's legal and virtuous, but I cannot, as an individual, go up and down with a gun to my neighbor's house and say, pay for my child's education.
	That would be extortion, right?
	So, when you talk about the state, it's important to understand that you're talking about centralized coercion.
	So, why does violence do more harm than good?
	Well, I think we all understand that.
	With violence, there are people who benefit and there are people who pay, right?
	I mean, if I go and rob you in an alleyway, I get your wallet and you...
	Lose your wallet.
	So I gain and you lose.
	Violence is a win-lose scenario, whereas trade by definition, voluntary trade by definition, is win-win.
	So if you have a pen and I have a dollar, and I want your pen more than I want my dollar, and you want my dollar more than you want your pen, we trade.
	I take the pen, you take the dollar, and we're both better off.
	Now, of course, I'd like the pen for free, you'd like the dollar for free, but it's win-win.
	The moment that anything is voluntary, it's win-win.
	The moment that it's coercive, it's win-lose.
	And individual coercion is bad enough.
	But organizational, country-wide coercion changes incentives fundamentally.
	So imagine...
	Let's talk about Marxism with a CK rather than an X. Let's say that you are in college.
	And in college, everyone gets their different marks.
	and what happens is that the college says that the marks from the smart kids or the successful kids are going to be shaved off and then given to the dumb kids or the kids who didn't study or whatever, right?
	And so those who get an A now get a B minus and those who got an F now get a C plus or something like that or those who got 98 now get 82 and those who got 62 now get 78 and you know, we kind of put everything into the middle.
	What we all understand what would happen is that this would fundamentally destroy the value of education.
	Now the people who got the marks immediately would be happy, right?
	They'd get to graduate and the people who used to study wouldn't study as much and the people who studied a little bit would study less, knowing that they would lean on the people.
	So basically everything would start to go down and then what would happen is people would graduate who didn't know the material.
	And so people who wanted to hire those people would say, well, I don't know who actually knows the material and who doesn't.
	I used to because some people used to fail and some people used to get A's.
	Now I have no idea who knows the material and who doesn't, so I'm just not going to hire anyone from this university.
	And therefore, nobody would want to go to that university.
	The value of that university's degree would go into the toilet, and you would have, through this redistribution of Marx, through this Marxism, you would have destroyed the value of higher education, and nobody would bother doing it anymore.
	And this is what happens, right?
	So there's a short initial benefit for the people who get stuff, but once the general trend and understanding goes out into society as a whole, there's a general loss and collapse of institutions.
	So violence benefits specific people.
	You know, it's vampirism, right?
	The vampire preys on a guy a night.
	The vampire gets to live, but, you know, 365 people die around him every year.
	Specific...
	Benefits and dispersed costs.
	And when there's individual crime, it's not too bad.
	Don't go into the alley, get a dog, get an alarm system or whatever.
	You can take steps against it.
	When it's the state, you can't take steps against it.
	When the whole world is run by states, you can't go somewhere.
	People say, well, love it or leave it, or if you stay, you're acquiescing.
	Well, it's not true, right?
	I mean, if the only option for an animal is to go from one cage to another and there's no option to be set free, you can't say that this is a rational choice or that the animal is choosing to stay in a zoo because they're not allowed to leave the zoo.
	It's just one cage or another.
	You can go from one country to another where you'll be subject to taxation, arbitrary laws, random arrests, and so on.
	So, second question, if we all use the public things provided by government, aren't we consenting to taxation?
	No, we are not.
	No, we are not.
	I don't think anyone ever made the argument that when Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in South Africa for 27 years, and he accepted food and water and medical care and shelter from the state, that he then supported apartheid.
	No.
	You can't get around without using roads, and the government has built the roads.
	Hasn't paid for them, that's all just debt, right?
	But the government's built the roads, you can't get around without using roads.
	If you are thrown into a concentration camp, you have to take the food and drink that is offered you.
	That does not mean that you approve of your Concentration camp, right?
	So no, you do not, especially when the government has a monopoly, you do not acquiesce to coercion by attempting to survive within the environment of coercion.
	That is a very, very close argument to saying that if a woman doesn't fight back violently when she's raped with a knife to her throat, then she's acquiescing to the rape.
	No, she's not, because she really is not Given any choice and at that time the man has a monopoly on her environment.
	Is it better to come to the conclusion of anarchy through philosophy like the non-aggression principle or through practicality like Austrian economics?
	I don't believe that practicality is ever a good methodology for coming to virtue.
	Because it is very practical to be immoral, which is why so many people do it and stay doing it and love it.
	I mean, if you look at someone like Bill Clinton, credibly accused of rape and definitely did some nasty things to his interns and started wars and so on.
	Well, he obviously loves politics.
	His wife is still in it.
	He got paid millions and millions of dollars.
	He now commands $200,000 plus for a speaking fee.
	He's speaking at Republican national conventions.
	He's considered an elder statesman.
	They send him off to North Korea to negotiate.
	Compared to just being a lawyer in Arkansas, Bill Clinton has had a glorious ride, and he obviously loves the attention and loves the power.
	Political power is physically addictive.
	They can see this happening in the brain.
	It's more addictive than cocaine, which is, you know, our species is designed to want to gain power in many ways over others because it's a lot easier to force someone to grow your food and hunt for you than it is to grow your food or hunt yourself.
	The greatest crop, the greatest resource in the world is other human beings, and politics is by far the best way of gaining control over those resources.
	So wherever there is a state, our natural inclination to want something for nothing is going to take us over, right?
	Wanting something for nothing is great.
	I mean, there's a reason why we have remote controls rather than get up to the TV all the time.
	Because we're lazy as a species.
	That's great.
	That's why we invent all these labor-saving devices.
	Laziness in the free market is innovation.
	Laziness in the state is predation and violence and incarceration and injustice and bribery and corruption and counterfeiting and all kinds of ugly stuff.
	So the non-aggression principle is morally valid.
	There are specific consequences as a whole to the violence of the state.
	But so what?
	I mean, human beings don't act as a whole.
	We don't think as a whole.
	We act as individuals.
	If there is the state, then eloquent assholes will gain power by lying to us and appealing to our vanities and our insecurities and manipulating us, as sociopaths generally tend to do.
	So, Austrian economics shows the practical results of, the negative results of centralized control of the economy.
	But so what?
	I mean, it's just negative for people as a whole, but it's incredibly beneficial to particular individuals who will fight tooth and nail to maintain the existence and power of the state.
	Is the war on terror self-defense?
	Well, there's no self in the war on terror, and you actually can't wage war on an adjective or a word anyway.
	But no, it is not self-defense.
	The Muslims, and people around the world in general, are very clear when it comes to Americans.
	They love Americans, and they hate the American government.
	Or more specifically, they hate the American government's foreign policy, which, as I mentioned earlier, has resulted in the deaths of between 15 and 20-plus million people since the end of the Second World War.
	So, the war on terror is fundamentally a war on the domestic population, and this is not a metaphor, this is fundamental to it, right?
	So, how is the war on terror paid for?
	The war on terror is paid for through taxation.
	What is taxation?
	It is the threat of throwing people in jail if they don't cough up a portion of their income to you.
	It's a shakedown.
	It is the initiation of force against peaceful citizens who've done nothing more than voluntarily trade and earn some income.
	The War on Terror, we always focus on the guns pointed overseas, you know, like we're some pirate ship with the cannons all facing outward.
	This is not true at all.
	There are some cannons pointed outwards, But the vast majority of the cannons are pointed inwards.
	And compliance with government taxation rules is necessary for there to be any kind of foreign policy whatsoever.
	I mean, to pay the soldiers, to pay for the battleships, to pay for the nukes, to pay for the 700-plus military bases the U.S. have overseas.
	It requires that you point guns at the domestic population.
	And people who buy American bonds and so on, they're giving the American government a billion dollars now so that the American government will give them $1.1 billion in X number of years or $1.05 billion in X number of years.
	And so the only way that the U.S. government can sell bonds is if people believe that The tax farming of domestic citizens is going to continue for as long as the bond is, right?
	So in Nova Scotia and Canada, they have 75-year bonds.
	Well, who's going to buy a 75-year bond?
	Somebody who believes and accepts that the Canadian government will still be taxing people in 75 years.
	So, no, the war on terror, everything the government does is first predicated on a war individually.
	What do you think is the most prevalent way that government aggresses against people in America?
	Well, through law.
	Law is an opinion with a gun.
	Law does not apply to politicians.
	I mean, Congress just recently excluded themselves from insider trading rules and so on.
	And politicians can impose taxes.
	I can't go and impose tax on a politician.
	So, through law.
	Alright, next, one of the things we discussed this year was progressivism in America.
	It took a long time before America finally legislated many of the civil rights that Americans have today, such as an end to slavery, universal suffrage, and workers' rights.
	Do you think we will lose these rights if the state is gone?
	Of course, there's no reason you believe you'll retain these rights, even if you believe in them, if the state continues.
	But, I mean, there's no such thing as rights.
	Rights is an idea, it's a concept.
	You know, there's a bunch of people in a square.
	You can call that a crowd.
	The individuals exist.
	The crowd, the concept is not.
	That only exists in our head.
	That's just an idea, a way of describing things.
	Red things exist, but the color red does not exist.
	That's the concept within our minds.
	Rights is a concept within our minds, and it does not exist.
	The idea that the government is there to protect your rights is logically completely invalid.
	And the reason we know that is that the government is there to protect your property rights.
	Well, but the government exists through taxation, which is a violation of your property rights.
	To begin with.
	The government is there to protect you from violence, but the government must initiate violence against you to fund itself.
	Therefore, it cannot be there to protect you from violence.
	It's like saying that your doctor is there to protect you from migraines and therefore he will behead you.
	Well, I don't think we would consider that good, good medicine.
	So what does it mean to expand rights?
	It means to diminish government.
	That's what it fundamentally means.
	I've done a presentation called The Truth About Slavery and The Truth About Abraham Lincoln II, I guess, where I talk about the degree to which slavery was subsidized and propped up by the state.
	The state went to go and catch the slaves.
	The state forced people to go and patrol for the slaves and so on.
	And so why couldn't women vote?
	Because the government banned them from voting.
	Once the government stopped banning them, in other words, stopped exercising arbitrary power, women got the right to vote.
	And so civil rights, well, The government, by withdrawing its force from society, creates more egalitarianism.
	The government's intervention in society is essential, right?
	So you all know the story of Rosa Parks, right, the woman who sat in the front of the bus.
	Well, why did she have to sit in the back of the bus?
	Was that because of the bus company?
	Well, of course not.
	Blacks were generally poor, and poor people used the bus more, so why on earth would the bus company discriminate against its most steady stream of customers?
	It didn't.
	The reason that Rosa Parks had to sit in the back of the bus was that the government had passed a law to force people to sit in the back of the bus.
	So, that's essential, right?
	So, naturally, I mean, she was trained as a communist and so on, and so they naturally want more government because they don't understand the degree to which it's the government that's keeping them down to begin with.
	The government's enforced slavery, government refused to let blacks testify in court, the Jim Crow laws, and all this kind of stuff.
	This was all exercise of government power.
	When you start withdrawing government power, Then people tend to become more equal.
	So the idea that we're going to have fewer rights when the government is gone flies in the face of historical evidence and reason.
	When the state is gone, then no organization with all the weaponry in their own universe is going to be able to arbitrarily initiate the use of force against us.
	I'll take my chances, I guess you could say.
	Can social progress be made without government?
	Again, social progress, let's say, whatever that means, this is a benefit or whatever.
	Without government, again, you use the word government, but you need to call things by their proper names.
	So it's like saying, can happiness be achieved without violence, without the initiation of violence?
	Can romance be achieved without rape?
	Can profitability be achieved without theft?
	Can economic growth be achieved without the mass indebted enslavement and counterfeiting of the Federal Reserve?
	Why is social progress made with the government bad?
	Why is romance that is generated through rape and imprisonment bad?
	Because the initiation of force is immoral.
	The initiation of force is immoral.
	That's all that matters.
	Now, if you're the mafia, and you're initiating a whole bunch of force and shaking down a whole bunch of people, then there are people who cater your weddings, and there are people who sell you the suits, and there are people who fix your houses and put swimming pools in your backyard, and those people all love you, because you give them, right?
	When you take a lot of money from a lot of different people, then you get a big pile of money in the middle, right?
	Right, so if I get a buck from every American, I get 300 million dollars.
	So they don't have a huge incentive to stop me because it's a buck, right?
	I got $300 million worth of incentive.
	Now, once I have those $300 million, there's a whole bunch of people who are suddenly very interested in me.
	They want to sell me cars.
	They want to sell me houses.
	They want to manage my money.
	Suddenly, I become a focus of attention and interest.
	And if I'm a megalomaniacal narcissist, then I'm going to love that and think it has something to do with me and all, right?
	So when you get a whole bunch of money concentrated together in the hands of the state, nobody's going to chase around trying to sell the Maserati to a guy who's got an extra dollar.
	Or, hey, I've got to manage that extra dollar for you, but once I get the $300 million, a dollar from every American, everybody's interested in me.
	And all those people want me to have that $300 million.
	Of course, they can't do anything with the dollar dispersed among 300 million people.
	But once it gets concentrated, then you can do a whole bunch of stuff.
	And so...
	Why is a democratic state just as bad as a totalitarian state?
	Well, it's not just as bad as a totalitarian state at all.
	I prefer to live here in Canada than I would under Stalinist Russia or under Chiang Kai-shek.
	Or Mao Zedong in China or under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
	I prefer, yeah, I have some liberties.
	We have some free market.
	We have some freedom of speech.
	We have some great stuff.
	So I would not make that argument.
	What are some historical examples of good states gone bad?
	Well, I mean, the traditional one to look at that I think has the greatest parallels is The Roman Republic, and I've done videos on the fall of Rome, so you can look at the parallels between that, particularly the ones that I've done with Leonard Reed.
	How do big businesses help the poor?
	Do they do a better job than the government?
	Oh, here comes the rant, bump, bump, bump, bump, give us the rant.
	Well, okay, let's just talk about the wealthy.
	The wealthy...
	Are your friends, whether they like it or not.
	Look, why do you have a cell phone that costs you 50 bucks?
	Because idiot, shithilled, wealthy people were willing to pay $4,000 for a cell phone in 1980, right?
	Rich people buy the really expensive stuff that provides the R&D money to get the cost of things down.
	Why are you able to buy a tablet for 300 bucks or 200 bucks?
	Because tablets 20 years ago cost four or five thousand dollars.
	And rich people bought them and big businesses bought them.
	And that gave market signals and R&D, entrepreneurial seed capital for people to begin to put the mass production in place to drive the price of things down so that you could afford them.
	Yay, rich people!
	Yay, big businesses!
	I'm very glad that they're the icebreakers taking the bullets of really expensive, specialized stuff so that we get stuff a whole lot cheaper.
	So how do big businesses help the poor?
	Well, they provide jobs and they drive down the price.
	You know that old thing, give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man a fish and he eats for a lifetime.
	Big businesses help the poor in a wide variety of ways.
	Again, fundamentally they create jobs and they drive down the price of things as a whole.
	So, do they do a better job than the government?
	Earth does this government care about the poor?
	I mean, there's basic things that you can just ask yourself.
	I'm a rabid empiricist.
	It means I don't care what people say.
	I don't care what the propaganda is.
	I don't care what the pamphlets say.
	I don't care what the party platform is.
	What I care about is what's the evidence.
	Does the government help the poor?
	Well, if the government really wanted to help the poor, then the government would have noticed that from the post-war period up until the 1960s, the poverty rate in America was being reduced by one percentage point every year.
	We were within a generation of there being no involuntary poverty at all.
	No involuntary poverty at all.
	So when the government put its welfare state programs in place, the decline of poverty stopped, and then it's been hovering, hovering, a little bit increasing.
	But if you count the national debt, it's still been increasing, right?
	Because debt is just deferred poverty, right?
	And we've got, all throughout the West, particularly in America, you know, what, 100, 150, I mean, no, 80, who knows?
	Trillions of dollars' worth of unfunded liabilities.
	What's going to happen to the poor when that bill becomes due?
	They don't care.
	They don't care.
	They don't care about the poor.
	Does the government care about obesity, let's say?
	Well, the government food pyramid has been shown by a wide variety of experts to promote obesity.
	But, you know, the dairy farmers and the cattle farmers and the grain farmers all donate a huge amount of money to the government.
	So guess what?
	Does the government care about you being exposed to dangerous medical devices?
	Is that what the FDA's mandate is going to be?
	Well, no.
	Very credible and detailed estimates have shown that five million Americans have died as the result of the FDA keeping drugs and treatments off the market that have been proven successful and are perfectly legal elsewhere in the world.
	Does the government care about children?
	Of course not.
	I mean, rather than reform a completely decrepit educational system, Three and a half million Americans, mostly boys, American children, mostly boys, are drugged for ADHD. Fifty percent of those diagnoses occur before the age of six.
	If the government cared about children, why on earth would there be a national debt?
	Again, I don't care what people say.
	I only care about the facts.
	I only care about the evidence.
	So, does the government help the poor?
	Does the government care about the poor?
	No.
	The government cares about creating dependence.
	Saying that the government cares about the poor is exactly the same as saying that a farmer deeply cares about the freedom of his animals.
	No, he doesn't.
	He'll give them some freedom if it makes them more productive, right?
	Like if they're banging their heads, the cows are banging their heads in those stalls, the farmer will let them out, let them roam around a little bit.
	Or if there's a market demand for free-range chickens, then he'll have some free-range chickens if he can charge more.
	But the next step between letting your chickens out of that little barn and putting them in a bigger barn or a field is not cutting down the fences and letting them run wild and free.
	So the government may give us more freedom, but the goal then is not for us to be free.
	So we're just more productive if we're free-range livestock rather than if we're really heavily enclosed livestock.
	So political freedom has been granted to us, economic freedom has been granted to us because it makes us more productive.
	Because the farmer says, oh wow, you know, the chickens lay three eggs a day.
	If I let them run free, then only one egg a day.
	Okay.
	So what does the farmer do?
	He lets the chickens run free and he now has three eggs a day.
	But the goal is not then to break down the fences so he gets no eggs a day.
	The growth of our political freedoms has been because with the illusion of freedom we're more productive.
	With some vestige of the free market we are more productive.
	And so we provide in the present we provide more tax income but more importantly because the future productivity is captured by the state.
	Then we are collateral for the government to borrow.
	And if the government can borrow rather than raise taxes, then it can bribe people with money that it doesn't have to take from them, which is how the illusion of the system keeps going.
	If I'm a politician and say, I'm going to send you a check for $1,000, but I need to tax you $2,000 to send you the checks for $1,000, I mean, the nonsense of the system is exposed.
	But if I can send you $1,000 because people will lend me $2,000 based upon your future taxability, then it appears that I'm sending you money for free.
	So if you're a farmer and you can say, look, I can get now three eggs a day for my chickens instead of one, then they can borrow a loan for like 10 years, right?
	But if the farmer says, but next year I'm setting all my chickens free, then nobody will lend to him, right?
	So you understand, the government can only borrow on us because the future coercion of the government is guaranteed, or at least predicted, right?
	So, of course, I mean, the government wants to create dependence, and the government wants to bribe you, and the government wants to create the illusion that they're adding something productive to the economy.
	I mean, and don't give me this, well, the government is needed for the law courts and the law systems.
	I mean, people only say that who've never tried using the law courts and the law systems, where things take...
	I mean, just look at...
	The family court system.
	I mean, look at the documentary Divorce Corps.
	I mean, it's everywhere, the degree to which government does not serve the needs of the people and serve the needs of those who profit from the exercise of power.
	So I hope that this helps.

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