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June 6, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

24:23

2992 The Myth of Small Government

If there was a government which provided a standing military (only for defense) and a basic court of law - would you support such a government? Stefan Molyneux examines the myth of small government.

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	Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Made Radio.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Question from a listener.
	I know you're an anarchist, but if there was a government that simply provided a standing military only for defense and provided a basic court of law, would you support such a government?
	Well, that's a great question.
	And I know I overuse it on the Lord of the Rings analogies, but simply read the books, for heaven's sakes.
	If you don't, my goodness, you're missing out on a great experience.
	It is tempting, of course, to feel, or to believe, or to think, that we, We can control the ring of power, and that power will not corrupt, and that we can take a snapshot of an ideal government and maintain that snapshot from here, yea verily, unto an eternity.
	And that is the great temptation of political power, to believe that it can be managed and controlled and contained and so on.
	And I just have never seen that occur in history, which is not disproof.
	Slavery was legal throughout history until it wasn't, right?
	So that's not an argument from here to eternity, but...
	I do think that it should give us some pause when we think about the degree to which political power can be contained and controlled within any institution or any mindset or any particular structure or configuration.
	So that's sort of my first shot across the bow of the argument.
	But there is a great temptation When one ignores principles to attempt to shape something that is emotionally desirable and therefore much more compelling to pursue.
	And this, of course, is the minarchist argument about the minimal government possible.
	People have said, you know, national defense, law courts, possibly prisons, but we just keep the government that small, and wouldn't that be great?
	And yes, it would be interesting, but it is not possible.
	It's not at all possible.
	When you have a government You have created a society in which a group of people have the moral obligation To initiate the use of force against others.
	You and I cannot impose taxes on others.
	You and I cannot sign treaties with foreign governments.
	You and I cannot compel other people to pay for some defense solution that we believe in.
	You and I cannot impose our laws on other people.
	And Therefore, if you create a state-centered government, and trust me, once you create a government, it is a state-centered society.
	Sorry, not government, society.
	Once you create the state, or justify the state, then your society revolves around the state.
	It's like trying to create a...
	A society with a state that's not centered around the state is like trying to create a solar system without a sun in the middle.
	It just doesn't work.
	So, you have one group of people, the vast majority of people, who cannot initiate the use of force.
	Another group of people who are in the government, who must initiate the use of force.
	This does not work.
	It does not work logically.
	Now, you can say, well, but it's for pragmatic reasons and it doesn't really matter about the ethics of the situation.
	We're just looking for the most positive effects and so on.
	But then you've thrown away ethics.
	And once you've thrown away ethics, what are your laws supposed to represent?
	What are your laws supposed to represent?
	Represent, if not ethics, right?
	So, if you say, well, okay, I'm willing to violate the non-aggression principle in order to have a government, then you're saying, okay, well then, we don't have any moral absolutes, we don't have any moral principles, and all moral principles should be sacrificed for the sake of expediency, for the sake of what I think will be beneficial for everyone in society.
	Now, if you're going to take that route, you have, first of all, you've broken principle and you've thrown out ethics, and if that doesn't trouble you, Then you really shouldn't be talking.
	You're like a doctor who throws away the principle of promote health and diminish illness, right?
	I mean, if you're a doctor who doesn't believe in health, you shouldn't be a doctor.
	And if you're a thinker, or in particular a political thinker, since politics is about the use of violence, then ethics and violence...
	Our natural cohabitants in that they're antagonistic and they are opposites to each other.
	Wherever you have questions of the use of violence, there must ethics be most central to the analysis.
	Because ethics and the initiation of violence...
	When I say violence, I mean the initiation, just for shorthand.
	Ethics and the initiation of violence are opposites.
	And in fact, really, it is mostly...
	Because of the initiation of violence, our capacity to initiate violence, that we need ethics.
	And so if you want to talk about politics, which is the initiation of violence, and you don't want to talk about ethics, or you've thrown ethics out of the window, then you are not in any valid way talking about violence.
	Again, it's like talking about medicine, surgery, prescriptions, and so on, while saying health and illness as concepts are thrown out the window.
	Well then, on what basis are you evaluating medicine?
	It's fundamentally corrupt to enter into an arena And then relativize the most important principle in that arena or throw it out.
	It means you're not qualified or competent to talk in that arena and in fact you're dangerous.
	If someone goes in and starts talking about medicine, health, prescriptions, while specifically denying that there's any difference between health and sickness, then that person is dangerous because they will get people to follow their advice to bad effect.
	So, no.
	If you throw out ethics, then you have no basis on which to found your government, other than something called expediency.
	And once you have thrown out ethics and you have focused on expediency, you really open up a whole slippery slope, rat's nest, of escalating corruption, as we'll talk about in a minute or two.
	We're going to talk about that in a bit.
	So, once we accept that we need to have ethical absolutes as the foundation of our evaluation of behaviors in society, then we simply cannot.
	And this is very hard for people to accept.
	Trust me, I get it.
	Hard for me to accept.
	But it is nonetheless how this works.
	And it's the only way that it can work.
	Imagine a times table.
	Like when I was a kid, I don't think kids do this anymore, but when I was a kid, we had to memorize the times table, which was 1 times 1, all the way to 12 times 12 is 144.
	We had to guess because of Baker's Dozen, I guess it was useful for tradesmen, but we had to memorize the times table.
	Now, can you imagine having one exception to the times table, which made no sense?
	You know, 9 times 9 equals unicorn.
	10 times 9 is 90, right?
	But 9 times 9 is unicorn.
	Or 9 times 9 is the opposite of 81, or whatever, right?
	So, it would make...
	But the rest of it would all be thrown into question, and you would, of course, need to say why you had an arbitrary opposite inside a structured set.
	Why?
	How could that be?
	In every discipline that claims any kind of objectivity or rationality, You cannot create an arbitrary opposite inside a structured set.
	In other words, you cannot say all x except for this subset of x, which is the opposite.
	All x equals y except for x1, which is the opposite of y.
	x bracket 1.
	An array!
	So...
	That is kind of foundational to logic.
	You simply cannot create an arbitrary opposite inside a structured set.
	Now, if you have a structured set called The Initiation of Forces Immoral, which, you know, if you want to know how that's derived and established, you can get my free book, Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics at freedomainradio.com slash free.
	It's very expensive.
	It will be, just not in money.
	But if you have a moral rule, which is no initiation of force, you cannot create something called government.
	It isn't just that that rule doesn't apply, the opposite rule applies.
	Thou shalt not initiate use of force, except government, thou shalt initiate use of force.
	All people, no initiation of force, except magic category government must initiate force.
	That is 9 times 9 equals the opposite of 81.
	You would have to explain that.
	And of course, if you tried to do that in any math quiz, you would be You would be wrong.
	You say, well, I wrap it in a flag.
	Well, that still doesn't make 9 times 9 equal the opposite of 81.
	Well, I give it a flag.
	Nope.
	I give it a national anthem.
	Nope.
	I get everyone to agree that 9 times 9 equals the opposite of 81.
	Still doesn't make it the opposite of 81, right?
	You understand all of this.
	You simply...
	To arbitrary exceptions.
	And you could say, but it could potentially be useful and helpful for people to believe that 9 times 9 is the opposite of 81.
	And people would say, the perceived utility of that belief is irrelevant to its truth value.
	And this is sort of the fundamental opposition to utilitarianism or pragmatism.
	The perceived utility of violating the non-aggression principle is irrelevant to whether one can actually violate the non-aggression principle.
	Because the moment something is violatable, it's not a principle.
	Then everything becomes subjective and arbitrary and you have an appeal to consequences.
	And the problem with utilitarianism and this kind of pragmatism, well, it would be beneficial to everyone to have a government that small.
	That's not true at all.
	That is not true at all.
	There's a weird kind of collectivism involved in an appeal to consequences, which is this belief that somehow people as a whole would benefit from a smaller government, that it would be optimum.
	And it would not at all be optimum.
	I mean, what is it?
	The Clintons have made $120 million or something since Bill Clinton left office?
	And that is, well, quite a lot of money.
	If they were just lawyers in a free society, they wouldn't make 1% of that money probably.
	Ah, maybe 1%.
	But if she was just a lawyer in a free society, how much would people pay for her first book?
	You know, the one that sold, not the last one that didn't.
	How much would people pay attention to Barack Obama if he did not have the awesome power of the state pretty much at his imperial presidency back in a call?
	Well, no, these people wouldn't do very well.
	Everyone who gives money to political campaigns, who lobbies, who donates, they expect to get vastly superior benefits out of those donations, right?
	One of the biggest investments and most productive investments you could make as a corporate executive is to get political power on your side.
	I mean, it's astonishing just how much the payoff is for that kind of congressperson purchase.
	So, the existing power structures, the existing wealth accumulations, both among the rich and the poor, it's middle class in general who pay, it's the rich who profit, and the poor who profit from the state.
	Well, how would they do in a free society?
	You've got to think of the transition, right?
	If you were to have a state that small, the military, given that America has peaceful neighbors to the north and south and giant oceans on either side, pretty easy to defend.
	I can't imagine the military budget would be more than 1% what it is right now in a free society and probably less than that.
	And so let's just go out on a limb and say 99 soldiers would have to leave the military out of 100.
	Well, would those soldiers want that?
	Yeah, maybe a few.
	But they would not be hugely happy, for the most part, about that turn of events.
	Especially if they weren't going to get a pension.
	Which, you know, in a transition to a free society, they wouldn't.
	I mean, when a structure gets...
	Transitions from public to private, in general, I don't see how the public contracts could be honored.
	Anyway, that's a topic for another time.
	And to take an extreme example, and I'm not comparing all American military people to this, but they didn't pay Nazi guards their pensions when Nazism fell.
	So that's sort of the first challenge, which is to say, well, there is, you know, it's positive and pragmatic and beneficial.
	It's utilitarian for there to be a small state and so on.
	Yeah, I mean, in the long run, for the majority, yeah.
	But, so what?
	So what?
	All that means is that the benefits of a small state are both diffuse and long-term.
	And that's the worst combination for incentives that you could possibly imagine.
	So, just wanting you to understand this.
	Concentrated immediate benefits are what motivate people the most.
	Concentrated immediate benefits.
	Now, the further away the benefits go...
	The harder it is for people to stay motivated, and the more diffuse the benefits become, the harder it is to stay motivated.
	So the benefits of freedom, being both diffuse and long-term, are the least motivating, whereas the benefits of state power, being both concentrated and immediate, or close to immediate, Motivate people the most.
	And this imbalance of motivation is what continues to drive the expansion of state power.
	I mean, just think about the founding of America and the Articles of Confederation, wherein Congress did not have the ability to tax and had to rely on donations, so to speak, from the states, which were late and slow and all that.
	Well, they didn't feel that they could have a functioning government when Congress didn't have the power, the federal government didn't have the power of taxation, so They created the Constitution.
	Constitutor means a person who takes over somebody else's debt.
	Constitution is the taking over of debts.
	It's a way of forcing the states to pay the debts of the Revolutionary War.
	And it didn't take long for all of this nonsense to start occurring, wherein rights began to fall away and power began to centralize and so on.
	It's simply too profitable.
	It's too immediate.
	It's too concentrated a set of benefits to gain the power of the state, to gain the favor of politicians.
	And so the idea that you can keep a government small is...
	To say that you're going to open two stores.
	Let's just say they're store A and store B. Now store A gives people 50% off their goods right away.
	Whereas store B gives 5% off people's goods in three years.
	You pay it now and in three years they'll mail you a check for 5% of your goods.
	Now it doesn't take A PhD in economics to understand that the store that gives 50% off right now is going to get customers, and the store that says 5% off in three years is not.
	And the reason why the 5%, obviously meaning freedom, is that the benefits are distributed across the entire population, even people who don't shop at the store, which is the benefits of freedom.
	And so anyone who thinks, like if you see a store have the same goods, one 50% off right now, the other 5% off in the million check in three years, everybody knows that every single person would go into the store which gave them 50% off now.
	If I can't convince you of that, then you are in an ideological bubble, which reason, light, evidence, airflow, oxygen, renewal, and facts cannot penetrate, so you need to go and do something else.
	And given that human beings respond because we are mortal, therefore we prefer things now rather than later, and because we are self-interested, because it requires individual effort, and individual effort which benefits a collective is counter to evolution, individual effort which benefits oneself or one's genes.
	That is what makes sense.
	That's how we've been evolved.
	It doesn't mean we can never overcome it or anything, but that's just why we are the way we are.
	So we prefer benefits to accrue to ourselves and we prefer and that doesn't mean selfishness.
	That's just we prefer benefits that accrue to ourselves and we prefer benefits proximate in time rather than distant in time.
	So So, political power, this is why political power is kind of like crack, right?
	Literally, political power, gaining access to political power, whether directly as a politician or indirectly as a lobbyist, We are hardwired to prefer the fruits of political power over just about anything else, because it reduces risk, it increases benefit in time, and it concentrates benefits in individuals who are doing the lobbying and so on.
	So, there's simply no way, unless you can rewrite human nature to somehow have been undeveloped through evolution.
	And I know, sometimes I talk about no human nature and so on.
	But the fact that people respond to incentives is not human nature.
	That's biology.
	I mean, that's just biological, right?
	So, the idea that we can have a small state that's going to stay small is irrational and interestingly enough because people say, well in the free market people respond to incentives.
	And so we need a small government, but people respond to the incentives of gaining control of a concentrated political power.
	The power to pass legislation favorable to yourself and harmful to your competitors.
	That is irresistible to say, ah, but we won't allow people to do that.
	Well, the problem is that concentrated motivation almost always wins out against diffuse and distant motivation.
	It's the great, resounding syllable, meh.
	You know, meh.
	And again, if you doubt me on this, then, you know, you can conduct a simple experiment if you're willing to spend a little money, which, you know, but as a mind experiment, it's helpful.
	Let's say that you give an individual and you say, I have a winning lottery ticket here.
	I'll give it to you and you can go and cash it right away for $1,000.
	But, do recognize that the money is created out of nothing, right?
	And so, because, you know, it's a government winning lottery ticket, they don't actually have the money, they're created out of nothing, so it's going to drive inflation across the country, you know,.0000001%, right?
	And then just see, and of course imagine if this was a million dollars, right?
	Here's a million dollar winning lottery ticket, but remember, Because the government doesn't have any money to pay this fundamentally, it's going to drive inflation.
	So you'll get a million dollars, but it'll shave a dollar off the value of your money and a dollar off the value of other people's money.
	How many people do you think will say, I don't want the million dollars because it'll shave a dollar off the value of everyone's money?
	People would look at you like you were mad.
	And this is the way that people work.
	This is why we are successful to the degree that we are as a species, and this is why political power can never be contained.
	If you could get people to say, ah, yes, well, you see, I do see that the government doesn't have any money, and therefore it will drive a dollar's worth of, shave down 0.00001% of people's value of their money and so on, so I will not, of course people are going to take it.
	Of course people are going to take it.
	And because we know all of this, and this is not just, you know, I mean, I talk a lot about dysfunctional behavior based on childhood trauma and all that.
	And that's, yeah, but still, people are going to respond to incentives.
	You know, the fact that we can overcome, hopefully at some point, childhood trauma does not mean that people are going to end up being non-biological organisms who do not respond to incentives in any way, shape, or form.
	So...
	No, I can't support a small state.
	I can't.
	It's a violation of principle.
	It's assuming that there's a collectivization of self-interest in society, a collective self-interest, which there is not, and it is assuming that people are non-biological organisms that will not respond to incentives.
	It's assuming that concentrated proximate self-interest is somehow going to be trumped by diffused and Long away self-interest.
	So for these and other reasons, it's simply not something that we could even remotely accept as thinkers.
	I mean, it is very tempting.
	I get it.
	It's a lot easier to people.
	It's a lot easier to try and argue people into small government as opposed to no government.
	But it's simply not going to work.
	All this happens, small government, as I said before.
	The small government is going to get bigger and bigger.
	And...
	But while it's small, wealth in society is going to grow to the point where the very smallest government will end up turning into the very largest government, which is what we've seen with America.
	So I hope this helps.
	Freedomainradio.com slash donate.
	I respond to incentives, and one of those is your donation.
	Thank you so much for listening.

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