June 20, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:49:24
4125 Immigration Derangement Syndrome | Dave Smith and Stefan Molyneux
From Rachel Maddow crying empty crocodile tears to Peter Fonda advocating for the kidnapping and assault of President Donald Trump's child - the left has lost their collective minds over the enforcement of immigration law. Dave Smith joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the false pretense that the left cares about children, population replacement, Peter Fonda's derangement, anarcho-capitalism, how borders could work in a free society, disagreements with libertarians and much much more!Dave Smith is a stand-up comedian, political commentator, the host of the Part of the Problem podcast, the co-host of “The Legion of Skanks” podcast and his debut comedy special 'Libertas' is available now. Gas Digital Network: http://www.gasdigitalnetwork.comWebsite: http://www.comicdavesmith.comTwitter: http:/www.twitter.com/comicdavesmithYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hope you're doing well. Back with Dave Smith, an excellent stand-up comedian, political commentator, and the host of the Part of the Problem podcast, the co-host of the Legion of Skanks podcast, and his debut comedy special, Libertas, is available now.
You can check him out on the Gas Digital Network at gasdigitalnetwork.com.
The website is comicdavesmith.com and twitter.com forward slash comicdavesmith.
Dave, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Oh, thanks so much, Stefan.
It's great to be back with your giant brain and audience.
So, we were just talking before the show and Dave has graciously agreed to let me wrench the wheel of the proposed topics to talk about one, Peter.
Fonda. Now, Peter Fonda is part of an acting family, including his father Henry Fonda and his sister Hanoi Jane Fonda.
And I really haven't tracked them very much these days.
It's been a while since I guess they've done anything big.
I think he was nominated for a movie called Uli's Gold, I don't know, close to 20 years ago or something like that.
But he has, I guess, emerged into the public eye as a whole overnight.
And what happened was, I'm going to just, we'll do a couple of tweets of his.
Which, in and of themselves, are vile and hideous, but I think show a certain level of deranged satanic commitment that is worth examining.
So, as you know, the left is ginning up all this hysteria about children being separated from their parents at the border, even though 10,000 of the 12,000 kids came over unaccompanied, even though there's not a lot of documentation sometimes to figure out whether they are with their parents or just some...
Coyote, some drug mule, some gun runner, who knows what.
Even though if the parents don't apply for asylum, what happens is they're caught, the family is caught, and they're basically deported within a day or two, and they all go off together.
But if the parents apply for asylum...
Then that's a different matter. I have no idea why you can apply for asylum if you come into a country illegally given that that's actually...
I'd love to come to your country.
I've already shown that I'm not going to obey the laws.
Do you want me? It's like a woman says, you must be monogamous.
I'm not going to be monogamous.
Do you still want to date me?
So there's this hysteria going on, which I think is a big cloud, right?
Because the left has weaponized the FBI.
And whenever the FBI's credibility gets damaged, the left gets really upset and wants to create a giant distraction mechanism so they can continue to attack people using the pseudo justification of the FBI.
So I think there's a lot of that going on.
But in the midst of all of this, with Rachel Maddow spouting crocodile tears like a deranged broken sprinkler, one Fonda, Fonda the younger, has written this.
We should rip Barron Trump from his mother's arms and put him in a cage with pedophiles and see if mother will will, sick, stand up against the giant asshole she is married to, 90 million people in the streets on the same weekend in the country.
Fuck! And that is his...
Now, this has been reported by Melania Trump to the Secret Service, and I'm sure he'll be getting a conversation just like Madonna did.
And we'll do a couple of his other...
Tweets, but man, can you imagine being in the state of mind where writing something like this, thinking something like this, writing and publishing it, how immune are these people to consequences?
It's amazing, and it's like, it's...
The phenomenon of Donald Trump, the Donald Trump moment since he first, you know, became a candidate for president, it really is, he's driven the left mad.
And in this madness, this Trump derangement syndrome, They expose themselves in a way that nobody else has ever been able to bring out of them.
It's really unbelievable.
So this is the side that's what you're defending, the innocent children in your mind?
Well, they made no choice, right?
Wasn't this the whole argument with the DACA thing?
I mean, they made no choice.
It was their parents' choice.
But now I guess Barron Trump is guilty.
It's unbelievable. Well, normally, see, this is the way it normally works, is the left appears relatively sane and concerned and caring and so on.
And you don't get the mask ripped off and see like the true horny satanic...
Visage underneath until they actually get power, right?
Until they control the government.
And then when they control the government, the mask comes off and, you know, people are getting lined up and shot in ditches and so on.
So it's weird to see the mask being ripped off before the left actually gets power.
And I guess it's because Trump is, to their mind, probably in reality, standing between the left and power.
Can you imagine if Hillary Clinton had gotten in and had full control over the weaponized DOJ and FBI? Good God, it would have been a police state.
Like it would have been like living in the EU. I mean, it would have been completely mental.
So it's weird to see this kind of rage and hostility and murderousness and just psychotic, demonic, monstrous, evil sentiments revealed before they actually have control of the power of the state.
That's normally when you see it.
Yeah, well, they're so used to everybody playing by their rules.
Even the Republicans, you know, they always kind of play within the left wing rules.
This is why you saw Mitt Romney on his hands and knees apologizing for the binders full of women comment, the least offensive comment that's ever been said.
You know, I wanted to hire more women.
And they're like, you referred to us as binders.
And he's apologizing.
And Trump is just unapologetic.
And this drives them absolutely insane.
And man, I mean, those comments are truly revealing about what type of just vile, just hostility you have inside of you.
I mean, oof. I can't imagine.
This is the same guy. Peter Fonda is the same guy in 2009.
He said that Roman Polanski was not a criminal.
So a guy who did actually rape, anally rape a child.
Is not a criminal, but now Trump's.
And also his sister knew all about Harvey Weinstein for decades and did nothing.
Nothing. I mean, it's funny because I'm kind of on the edge about all of this stuff, Dave, because part of me is like, oh, that's so hypocritical and that's so this and that.
But on the other hand, when you look at something like Rules for Radicals, which is kind of the Bible of the radical left, they say, well, we don't have any principles.
Our goal is power. We know that other people have principles.
We're happy to pretend to have principles.
We're happy to hold others to their own standards.
But you can't really hold us to any standards because we don't have any.
And so the fact that they openly say we have no standards...
They're very clear about where they stand or don't stand, which is, you know, single-minded pursuit of power.
You know, like some drug addict in search of a drug.
They're hysterical. They need their fix.
It's like, they don't have any principles. They do a sleep with anyone and steal from anyone, lie to anyone.
It doesn't really matter, right? So they openly say, we have no principles.
And then the rest of us idiots run around saying, they're being hypocritical.
They're contradicting themselves.
They claim to care, but they've already told us they don't have any principles.
So why do we even bother? Yeah, it's like you almost have to tip your hat to them in their evil brilliance, because as you pointed out on one of your most recent videos, what they do is, particularly with this thing of separating children from their parents, is they play on your decency to turn you onto their side.
It's like, whew!
Man, it is really – it's hard to combat.
And they're – yeah, they know what they're doing.
I mean there's a bunch of useful idiots along the way.
But there are people out there who know exactly what they're doing.
And if you do like rules for radicals or even if you just watch say like MSNBC, which I'm one of the seven people who turns on MSNBC to get annoyed by it.
Trapped on a Velcro wall in an airport.
You just can't escape it, right? Yeah, right.
But I mean, just, you know, I need to work myself up and get angry sometimes in the morning.
But they brag about this stuff.
They brag about the fact that they're importing voters, that there's going to be this brown wave that Republicans won't be able to get elected anymore.
So they know exactly what they're doing.
And yeah, of course, as You know, it's like the situation that's going on here is tragic.
It's not that there isn't.
Look, it's tragic just that people are born into some of these countries.
I mean, it's a nightmare.
And all of us who are decent people are like, man, that's a terrible situation.
But the hypocrisy from the people who are outraged about this is overwhelming.
I mean, of course, just the basic point that This was going on during Obama.
And nobody cared about it at all.
You have Laura Bush coming out and saying she's outraged.
A Bush? Of course, because there were no humanitarian rights violations under Obama.
George W. Bush's administration, right?
I mean, Barack Obama can destroy entire nations like Libya, and nobody seems to have a problem with that.
Could you imagine if Obama posted a picture with his daughters and somebody was out there on the right saying, you know, these type of things should happen to the Obama daughters?
I mean, it's like it would be the number one national story for the year.
And yet the Trump supporters are completely demonized as like these evil people because they want border control.
Well, there's that picture.
I don't know if you've seen it. There's a picture of a bus with baby seats in it.
And like this is a baby seat jail bus and all this kind of stuff.
And it's like, no, it's not.
This was actually for 4 to 17-year-old children.
This was the bus that was used to take them to the zoo, to take them to the park for nice daily outings.
And, oh man, it's just crazy.
I mean, the danger that the children are going through.
Like, 80% of the women are raped along the way.
Probably more, but that's what...
And the journey, right?
Controlled by cartels.
Cartels that will sodomize people with wood, wooden sticks, if they don't pay their tribute to the cartels along the way.
It is human trafficking.
It is an invasion.
It is people coming in, willing to break the laws and sit on welfare.
It is a disaster. But then the left says, but it's about the children, because the left cares so much about the children, you see, Dave, that they've been really, really keen on making sure that the welfare state is reformed so that women can actually have men in the household so that the men aren't separated from their children.
They're really, really interested in making sure that divorce law and family court law is reformed so that...
Parents aren't ripped away from their children.
They're really, really interested in making sure that child services doesn't abuse its power and take children away unjustly from their parents.
They're really, really interested in making sure that schools are really safe for children and you make sure that you do everything you can to keep children safe.
You know, like in Broward County where they refused to put this guy away, Nicholas Cruz, despite the fact that he had dozens of run-ins with authority and did things that were not just wrong in the school system but illegal as a whole?
They don't care about the children.
Now, anybody who's, oh, it's about the children.
Rachel Maddow. Oh, if you care about the children, I've got a great idea.
How about we stop ladling children with over a million dollars in national debt and unfunded liability before they even draw their first breath?
And here we've got these people pretending to care about the kids.
The left just cares about the kids as ways to make sure that money comes through.
The teachers unions and the children's future economic productivity can be used as collateral to borrow against to buy votes in the here and now.
This ridiculous idea that they care about the children.
Ah, what can you say?
Yeah, it's just, it's unbelievable.
It's like we're living in a simulation or something, man.
Like this is all one big joke on us.
I don't know. But can you, I mean, from like your perspective, can you imagine, right, as somebody who's been talking about the issues with immigration and open borders and all this stuff for a while now, it's like, can you imagine people lecturing Stefan Molyneux?
To care about children.
You're a philosopher. The center of your philosophy has been the peaceful and loving raising of children for like over a decade.
You've been talking to your huge audience about this stuff.
And then also on top of that, now they're going to look at you and go, no, no, no, but Stefan, you don't understand.
When there's a government law, it's backed up with force.
You've probably never really spent any time thinking about this, but you know that they actually, they throw people into cages.
Are you aware of this?
Well, here's the thing, Dave, and I shouldn't laugh because it's not particularly funny, but here's the reality.
So for, I guess, 11 years as a public figure, I have actually been standing up for the rights of children, pushing back against spanking, child abuse, and all this kind of stuff.
So I know what actually happens when you stand up for children.
And what happens when you stand up for children, you see, is you get viciously attacked, largely by the left.
You get called somebody who tears apart families.
You get called a cult leader for saying, "Hey, you don't have to be in relationships with abusive people," which is kind of what I was taught when I was a kid, but I guess the feminists never expected to blow back against abusive moms.
So I know what it is to actually stand up for the protection of children.
And if you're not being viciously attacked by the left, you're not standing up for children.
Right.
That's right.
And it's such a weird thing.
I did this episode of my podcast a couple months back.
And I think that the title was like a hit piece or something like that.
And I was talking about the Southern Poverty Law Center's piece on it was specifically about you and my friend, Michael Bolden, who runs the 10th Amendment Center, which is like a state's rights organization.
And it's amazing.
You know, they want to make all this stuff out about, you know, I forget what they called you, like a scientific racist or something like that, which was just a hilarious term right away.
It's like, well, if it's scientific, then what's really the problem here?
But it's like, and I made the point on my podcast, it's like when they're describing you, they wouldn't want to start with A philosopher who's advocated for the peaceful raising of children and the non-aggression principle for over a decade, because that would kind of make you sound like the good guy.
It's hard, so they can't even, like, really address that.
And, right, of course, like, It's horrible that children are in any of these situations.
But as you pointed out, even when they're being separated, number one, it's a lot more complicated than they want to make it out to be.
Number one, even when they are separated from their parents, they are almost undoubtedly going to have a far better life than they would have had if they had stayed in the third world country that they were in.
And in many cases, these aren't their freaking parents.
And because they're undocumented, we really have no way of knowing.
And so the hell on earth that they've faced in the country that they were born in and on the journey over here, I mean, that's the real moral outrage.
And, like, I'm sure I'm all for fixing that, but that's not an easy fix.
And as you've pointed out for years, the only real fix to that is for them to be raised in a loving and peaceful way.
And that can't really be done.
There's not a law that we can write to make that happen.
Well, I mean, Mexico is number two in child pornography after Thailand.
Mexico, what is it, $24 billion a year from child trafficking?
I mean, the child abuse in Mexico is off the charts.
Age of consent is ridiculously low in many places.
I mean, it's a pretty wretched place for kids.
And... How do you fix that?
Well, you've got to try and convince the parents to treat their children better.
You've got to remind the children when they grow up that they don't have to be in relationships with abusive parents because if there's no volunteerism in relationships, there can't be inequality.
We know that from the IRS and the DMV and all that.
There's no choice with government schools.
If there's no choice, there can't be inequality.
So let's look at another tweet this guy put out.
And he's talking about Border Patrol agents, ICE agents, ICEs.
So he says, we don't have to take the agents' kids.
We only need to surround their schools and scare the shit out of them and worry the fuck out of the agents from CBE, ICE, and regular Border Patrol agents.
We need to scare the fuck out of them, need to make their children worry now.
Targeting children.
See, in this scenario, Dave, in Peter Fonda's mind, The adult Mexicans or Central Americans who bring their children illegally across the border voluntarily are in no way responsible for the resulting separation.
You know, like you and I team up together and rob a bank.
We're in no way responsible for being separated from our families if we go to jail.
No way.
So the parents are in no way responsible.
But let's target the children of these people.
I mean, it is just of the agents.
I mean, it's astonishing.
It really is like you think you're at the bottom.
You know, you think, well, you know, it really can't get much worse than this.
And then it's like, okay, well, let's talk about throwing a child into a cage with pedophiles.
Let's talk about criminally harassing the children of these kinds of agents.
And it's like, wow, you know, every time they go that low, everybody recognizes, okay, so if this is where they are, because, you know, harassing children is not an argument.
If this is where they are, then either we recognize that that's where things are.
And people who are opposed to them say, oh, okay, well, if they're pulling out this weapon, if we don't, well, we're in a losing game, right?
I mean, when people escalate, you know, what do you do?
You either surrender or you also escalate.
And this is the amazing thing that they're doing, you know, that doesn't seem to be any particular weapon that they won't use in their single-minded pursuit of power.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, I don't even know what to say about that.
Is there just no sanity left?
When you're openly arguing for terrorizing children, maybe take a step back and rethink your position here.
That is like, hmm, I may not be the good guy in this situation.
There is this very, very strange dynamic, and it's really become, like there was always, in my whole lifetime, there was always hostility from the left toward white men.
That's kind of always existed.
But man, over the last like seven, eight years, it's just become completely naked.
Like they don't even hide it in the slightest.
And I remember reading Pat Buchanan's had a piece during the election where he made this point that really kind of hit home with me.
And he said, you know, he said when Donald Trump made his comment that Mexico is not sending their best, And that a lot of the people coming over here were not great people.
And he said a lot of them are rapists, a lot of them are killers, and some are good people.
You know, like, that was his comment.
And the media was outraged about it.
It was just, that was the entire campaign was dominated by that quote.
And then Hillary Clinton turned around and said that half of Donald Trump's supporters are irredeemable deplorables.
And it's like, whatever.
It's like, that's fine.
You can insult our people all you want to.
But if you insult the Mexican people, somehow this is like a grave, you know, offense.
And it's like, well, just look at the state.
By the way, 63 million people voted for Donald Trump.
So you're saying half of them are just irredeemable deplorables.
And it's like, why is it okay just to say that about this group of people indiscriminately, but it's not okay to insult this other group?
I mean, look at America and look at Mexico.
Is it that crazy to just say like, yeah, there's kind of worse things going on over there than there are over here?
Well, but this is, of course, going back to the thing which I continue to wrestle with, Dave, which is what is the point of pointing out hypocrisy of people who say I'm openly hypocritical?
You know, it's like calling the KKK guy kind of racist.
It's like, yep, that's why I'm in the uniform.
I mean, you know, that's why.
Because when it comes to this kind of stuff, it is...
Openly stated that they don't have any interest in any kind of consistency.
It's sort of like if you have someone you know, right?
Hopefully you wouldn't know them very long or very well, but someone you know.
And they're some kind of drug addict, right?
To cocaine or something like that.
And they go and steal cocaine from someone, right?
And they're like, yes, I got my cocaine.
I didn't have to pay for it. That's great.
And then someone steals the cocaine from them.
And they call you up and they're like, I can't believe it, man.
Someone stole my coke.
That's so wrong. That's so bad.
That's so immoral. Don't I have any property rights?
And you're like, well, you kind of did steal it to begin with.
I don't care. They took my...
It's like, they're drug addicts.
They're not going to make any sense.
Yeah. Yeah, no, I've thought this for a while now, but if leftists were consistent, they wouldn't be leftists.
So that's the whole thing.
There's another one. I guess we'll do our unholy trinity of tweets here.
All right. So for those who don't know, this is an old Britishism that, you know, vulgar words for vagina, there are just...
It doesn't seem like there are worse words to me in the English language, like the see you next Tuesday word and all that.
So there's one in England.
I don't know if it comes from England, but I remember hearing it when I was a kid because it was the 70s.
So it was a very, very dark period.
But the word is gash.
And gash, I think, refers to a female.
Generally, it refers to the vagina.
And it is... Obviously, the equation of the vagina with some kind of wound.
Anyway, so gash is, I don't know if it's the British version of the See You Next Tuesday word or something like that, but it's about as horrible a word for a woman as you can come up with.
So, Peter Fonda tweeted out, Christian Nielsen is a lying gash that should be put in a cage and poked at by passerby.
I guess plurals are challenging when you're typing, well, having done a lot of drugs in the 60s.
He goes on to say, the gash should be pilloried in Lafayette Square, naked and whipped by passerby while being filmed for posterity.
Now that is truly astounding.
I mean, that is like medieval Islamic kind of punishments coming out of a guy who considers himself a progressive.
And this idea that somehow the left is...
Trying to help the black community.
No. They're trying to keep the black community dependent on the left for votes.
The idea that the left is somehow pro-woman, this guy is talking about a woman who should be naked and whipped in public.
Why? Because she disagrees with him politically.
And yet, of course, the great moral crime was Roseanne Barr's joke about Valerie Jarrett on Twitter, right?
Like that was this horrific thing to make a joke about, oh, this woman looks like that character from Planet of the Apes and the Muslim Brotherhood had a kid.
But this outright, you know, advocating for, you know, this just...
Yeah, like you said, the hypocrisy is just outrageous.
Roseanne did say that she didn't even know the woman was black, which I actually believe.
I mean, I can't prove it, obviously.
It's a sort of state of mind thing.
But I believe it because you wouldn't make that joke if you knew the person was black.
And then there was that woman, Kimberly Guilfoyle on Fox, that someone was saying, oh, she just just go pick grapes or something like that.
And she's half Puerto Rican.
And apparently, that's a slur against Puerto Ricans.
And the woman was like, oh, I didn't know she was Puerto Rican.
It's like, OK, well, off you go then.
No problem then.
I mean, that's fine.
And if you only understand morality enough to use it as a weapon, horrible stuff.
So here's the thing that drives me a little bit crazy.
So I was probably about 10 years ago when I put out this thing called the Against Me Argument.
I don't know if you've heard it, but very briefly, the Against Me Argument is, let's say that you want marijuana to be legalized.
And let's say that some friend of yours thinks that it should be illegal and you smoke marijuana, whatever it is.
Well, the reality is that by wanting marijuana to be illegal...
Your friend is saying that you should be arrested at gunpoint and thrown into a cage where you may be raped because you want to smoke marijuana.
And it's like if somebody supports a law that puts you in harm's way, they are supporting.
The use of awesome, virtually infinite, institutionalized violence against you.
And that's sort of a basic reality.
And once you point out the gun in the room, hopefully your friend says, wow, you know, gosh, I guess I was really thinking of this in a very abstract sense.
But now that you point out the reality that I want to look you in the face and say that you should be arrested and thrown into a potential rape cage prison because you want to smoke marijuana, hopefully that shocks your friend into like...
I don't want that. I don't want you, my friend, thrown in jail because, like I might say, you shouldn't smoke marijuana, here's the studies, here's the advantages of not doing it or whatever it is, right?
But you shouldn't be thrown into a cage.
And that reality, that when someone supports a law that puts you in harm's way, Bringing that emotional reality to people.
And at some point, you know, sit there with your friend and reason with him and so on.
But if he's like, if he looks you in the eye and says, why, yes, I do believe that you should be thrown into a cage at gunpoint or potentially raped because you smoke marijuana, can you really consider that person your friend at that point?
I mean, it's a very sort of real thing.
I mean, you can... So...
I put this argument out, and everybody was appalled.
Horrified! You know, like, oh, you just want to cut everyone off who disagrees with you.
And it's like, no, I want the freedom to disagree with people.
I want the freedom to disagree with people about the use of pot.
I don't want them thrown in cages at gunpoint for smoking pot.
And the libertarians in particular were just appalled!
Appalled at all of this! Now, the one thing that's interesting is that the left, certainly before, and definitely afterwards, Has pulled out this ostracism weapon saying, you know, like, there's articles on various websites, very popular ones too, saying, I'm not going to date a Trump guy.
Do not be friends with a Trump guy.
Cut off relatives, divorce people, get rid of people from your life who are Trump supporters.
Now, the left is not really railed against this at all.
And this kind of ostracism is very common in the left.
There's a reason why all of these arts faculties and universities end up so relentlessly leftist.
It's because the left won't hire anybody who's not on the left.
And, you know, if you want to work for television, Ben Shapiro writes about this, that he wrote a script, I think it was for The Good Wife.
And, you know, then it was like, oh, I'm sorry, I checked out your blog, you're not on the left, we can't possibly hire you.
And it's like, they really are relentless in this kind of Ostracism.
And it's really annoying to me when you know that something's going to work.
You know it's going to work, but it's going to require some real commitment and integrity on the part of people around you to actually take their value seriously.
And you say, we should do this.
I gave speeches back in 2010 at Libertopia detailing all of this.
I did tons of podcasts about all of this.
And it's like, wow, man, you're just a terrible guy.
And then the left does it, and they work.
It works. And if all I wanted to do was join the winning team, I'd join the left.
I mean, this is the horrible thing.
They're willing to do whatever it takes.
They're willing to bend their principles and not really have any.
They're willing to be as emotionally manipulative as humanly possible, which tragically, in this sophisticated age, works really, really well.
And they're willing to ostracize.
They're willing to attack. They're willing to bully.
Now, I don't like the attacking and the bullying, and I think that the ostracism is far more powerful than that.
own team on exactly what is needed to win and they're like, think you're the worst guy in the world.
And then you see the opposing team, so to speak, using all of that and it working out really, really well.
I tell you, it's a little tempting.
It's a little tempting because if they do win and you're not on their side, your life becomes not only troublesome, but often quite short indeed.
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
And there's no question like they are winning.
They are winning. I mean, you can you can look at the four trillion dollars a year that our government spends.
You can look at any inch of the culture that you want to.
And you're absolutely right.
And let me just say that not only am I familiar with that video that you made, but it is still to this day one of my favorite that you've ever put out.
And it had a profound effect on my own, like the way I view the world.
And I you know, I was a libertarian like a Ron Paul I remember seeing that and thinking that was really amazing because it is this kind of like where philosophy, where the philosophical rubber meets the road.
This is what we're actually talking about in reality and it's the best way to phrase things to make people realize what they're actually advocating for when they're advocating for statism.
And in terms of what you're saying about the left using Shame and ostracizing people.
Oh, this is the whole thing. This is why they're winning.
As soon as they'll stand up against slut-shaming or fat-shaming or something like that, which are two things that probably ought to be shamed at least a little bit in society because they're kind of objectively unhealthy behavior.
But no, they're masters of this.
Back to the stuff I was saying about Mitt Romney saying binders full of women.
If you step out of their They are lame.
Please shame everybody back into it.
And so, look man, I completely agree with you on this, and it's like...
If you don't want to take Coach Molyneux's advice on this, then get ready to continue to lose because that's the reality.
Well, I mean, the fat-shaming thing to me is quite interesting.
It has nothing to do with body acceptance or anything like that.
It's just fat girls don't want to have thin girls around.
So they want to remove any barrier to women becoming overweight.
And of course, because women have basically married the state, they don't need to stay trim and in shape.
If you want your wife not to gain weight, just go make a lot of money.
And that's kind of how it's going to roll.
So to me, it's, you know, I mean, you can either try and make yourself more attractive or you can try to convince other people to become less attractive.
And that's all the...
You know, like body piercings and weird hair and like rolls of fat and so on.
And it's like, well, nobody's going to want me unless I make everyone look like me.
In which case, you know, they don't have much to choose from and I guess they'll end up choosing me.
And that to me is one of the horrible things as well.
Plus, you know, I mean, if you want people to breed less, then just make them overweight because they'll get in fewer sexual relationships.
Their periods may become irregular.
They will have trouble conceiving and trouble raising healthy children and all that.
So... It's just another one of these horrible things that is occurring that is pretty obvious when you sort of see the mechanics behind it.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And it's just amazing that something, especially with like what we have an epidemic of obesity in this country.
I mean, it's like there's major, major health problems around this.
And sorry, but bad behavior, oftentimes shame is kind of the best corrector.
Oh, I mean, the power of ostracism is so astonishing.
Let me give you a statistic.
I haven't totally verified this, but I've read it in a couple of places, so let's take it as a potential given.
So, your increased chances of mortality, like dying early.
If you live in a place with a significant amount of air pollution, it's 5%.
If you are obese, it's 20%.
If you are an alcoholic, it's a little bit higher.
But if you're socially isolated, 40-plus percent.
And we are a social animal.
You know, we are dogs, not cats.
We are a social animal. We need other people.
The withdrawal of approval from those around you is the most powerful corrective mechanism known to man, and it's peaceful.
Yeah. And it's peaceful.
And you want people to shame you rather than have a heart attack.
You know, you can survive shame.
Massive, you know, Twinkies stuffed into your heart veins.
You have a little bit more trouble. You can't just push through that.
And so social ostracism is this incredibly powerful thing.
The left really, really understands that.
And they're very, you know, what do they work to do?
I mean, this is polarized, like freeze your target.
This is Zelensky. Freeze your target, polarize it, isolate it.
Isolate your target. Which means surround them in such a negative body of adjectives that people don't want to get close to them.
And they understand because they're collectivists, right?
So they understand just how powerful isolation can be and what an incredibly powerful social corrective mechanism it is.
And that's what we want in society is something that is really powerful and not violent.
The ostracism is not violent.
And when I talk about ostracism as being the mechanism by which society should run, now, not saying everyone should ostracize everyone, but as far as corrective mechanisms go, we have that.
And the left actually applauds ostracism in a lot of ways.
They enact it all the time.
They won't hire you if you're on the right.
And they say, ostracize Trump supporters, don't date them, divorce them, dump them, And they really, really understand the power of ostracism, but they use it to gain political power.
But if we have a society run on voluntarism, a stateless society, now, for some of people, this may be like kind of shocking, because they've known me kind of orbiting the political world for quite some years, but I come out of anarcho-capitalism, voluntarism, anarchism of the non-leftist variety.
Dave is in a similar state of mind.
And the idea, of course, that you can have a society, not can, should have a society without a state is incomprehensible to people.
And I really want to talk a little bit about one of the biggest issues that people have with a stateless society, which used to be things like, you know, police and law courts and the military and so on.
But now it's borders.
Borders. How can you have borders?
A society that continues to function if you don't have a state enforcing borders.
And some of these questions are kind of Natural, but inconsequential.
It's sort of like, hey, let's get rid of slavery.
Oh, yeah? What, you think the cotton's just going to pick itself?
Who on earth is going to pick the cotton?
We need clothes. Who's going to pick the fruit?
We need food. You want everyone to starve to death without slavery.
You understand, right? No, you just, other solutions come pouring in where there's a great need, and the solutions are better and more effective, like, I don't know, farm machinery, things like that.
So what are your thoughts on how a stateless society could retain its geographical integrity?
Because it's not like you snap the fingers and the whole world becomes stateless.
Right. Okay. So I think that the biggest misconception about, say, true libertarian anarchism or anarcho-capitalism is that there are kind of these...
The mainstream libertarians, if you will, the same ones you're saying are like, oh, well, we can't, you know, who are shunning you for basically pointing out these philosophical truths.
Well, it's kind of funny because they say ostracism is bad, so we better not talk to that Stefan Molyneux.
Well, that's right. Yeah, exactly.
Okay, never mind. Right.
So they'll kind of – they'll talk about these kind of vague ideas of rights and freedoms like freedom of speech or freedom to travel, things like this.
But really what true libertarianism is about is about property rights.
It's about self-ownership and respect for property rights and this is stuff that you've been breaking down forever.
I would say probably better than anybody else I've ever seen do it.
The truth is that if there's not like some abstract freedom of speech, like you can't go to a movie theater and start shouting obscenities.
It's like, well, somebody else owns that movie theater and this is not part of the agreement here, so you can be asked to leave.
Wait, were you actually in the audience when I went to go see Frozen?
I guess it's a real world example.
But I would say, if you own that movie theater, you actually can sit there and shout obscenities.
I mean, if you're just like, hey, this is Dave's movie theater, and this is part of the deal.
If you want to come here, I sit here and shout obscenities.
Now, I probably wouldn't do very well, but, you know, like...
Well, I think that there would be an implicit contract.
Like, you'd have to say, when people were buying their tickets, by the way, if it's a Michael Moore film, Most specifically, if it's a Michael Moore film, as opposed to a Dinesh D'Souza film, I'm looking forward to that one.
But if it's a Michael Moore film, Dave Smith is going to be in there.
He's going to be uttering expletives that will literally make your ears turn into tiny volcanoes.
So then that's fine. But if there's this implicit contract, like, you know, you don't expect them to do that, then people can say, well, I want my money back and so on.
But yeah, if it's there, go for it.
Yes. Agreed. Agreed.
But that's right. But if I were to let this be known and then therefore it's not part of the implicit contract, sure, I have a right to do that.
So the non-aggression principle and private property really is all about borders.
It's all about private property borders and the fact that people don't have the right to trespass or to violate your private property.
So the major problem, I mean, in terms of immigration, there's Look, in an ideal anarcho-capitalist society, and I think you talked about this years ago, and It's basically moving, immigrating.
So as long as you got yourself an apartment or a house, you have a right to go there and nobody should stop you.
However, the flip side to that is also that if you were not invited, you don't have a right.
So in the same sense that if somebody said to me that they wanted to, say, rent a room out in my place and I say, OK, great, pay me five hundred dollars a month or whatever, and I'll give you this room.
Fine, nobody should come with a gun and stop that person from being allowed to move in.
But the flip side to that is if they say, hey, I'd like to rent a room and I say there's no room for rent here, nobody should come with a gun and force me to let somebody else in.
So a lot of the problems that we have with immigration, like pretty much all of the problems that we have with immigration today, are all involving the state.
And it's the fact that Democrats are basically importing future voters.
And by the way, a lot of present voters as well.
If you really look into it, there's a lot of illegals who are voting.
We really have no way of knowing how.
And then the fact that as soon as they come into the country, they get the benefit of everything that the domestic population has been taxed for already.
So as soon as they come in, they're getting access to police protection.
They drive on the roads.
They go to public schools.
They go to emergency rooms and many more things.
And by the way, if you don't pay your taxes, if the domestic population does not pay their taxes, they get separated from their families by being put in jail.
So it's exactly what, you know, the threat of that is exactly what funds all of these services.
Now, if that wasn't the case, and some local community, let's say in LA somewhere, said, we want to take in these people from Mexico and we will assume all financial responsibility, You know, they can't vote your freedom away.
They can't use services that you're forced at the threat of being removed from your family to pay for.
Then, okay, that's no problem.
Let them do that. Now, the truth is that then they would actually have to assume all of the responsibility.
And my guess is, my guess, which I don't know, is that there'd probably be less of it.
Because even if you look at California now, I mean, look at the problems that have been caused by bringing it.
I mean, they have more poverty than any other state in the union and the middle class is fleeing by the millions.
So, what you can assume, we never know exactly what's gonna happen in a truly free society, but what you can assume is, when you see all the problems currently with immigration, and then you see 63 million people rising up to vote for Donald Trump,
who, you know, the central issue of his campaign was cracking down on immigration, You can pretty, you know, pretty safely assume that if people were free and we did live in a voluntary society that a lot of these people would much more effectively protect their communities and protect their own culture and traditions and religion and all that stuff.
Yeah, I mean, we don't have a lot of hypotheticals to work through, Dave, because all you have to say or all you have to ask yourself is why aren't there problems with illegal immigration into gated communities?
In other words, why aren't migrants setting up camp inside of gated communities, inside of privately owned areas?
Why? You know, there's this hypocrisy that you see all the time from these celebrities.
These celebrities who are all very pro-open borders and pro-migrants-moving economic invaders, whatever you want to call them.
They're all very pro that. And then people say, well, how many have you put up?
Right? And the answer, of course, is always no, even though there's some British woman who's like, oh, I would, of course, I would love to have my house.
You know, then it's like two years later, like, no, maybe a maid.
Right. But so the question is, why don't the migrants move into the rich people's houses?
Why don't they move into the gated communities?
Why? Because it's private property.
So they don't go there. And so we have already the example, and all I have to say is gated community becomes a very large geographical area.
Say, well, everything is privately owned, so you can't be there without the permission of the local population.
You can't be there without the permission of the local population, because nobody's going to rent you, nobody's going to enforce your contracts, nobody's going to let you drive on the roads, nobody's going to sell food to you or give you electricity, because everything is voluntary.
And that's real democracy.
That's real democracy where the local population gets a say.
Now, that to me...
Is very powerful. Because I remember, and this is my failure, I suppose, one of the big failures is, ah, Dave, you know, I've had so many conversations.
So I basically was an objectivist from the age, I don't know, 15 or 16.
So that was like tiny, tiny government.
No income tax, maybe a couple of tariffs to fund police, military, law courts, maybe the prisons, who knows, right?
So, you know, the state small enough to drown in a bathtub kind of thing, right?
That was sort of my position for, I don't know, probably 20 years.
And then in my 30s, just engaged in one conversation, I was like, whoa, goosebump time.
I think I could figure out how we can have all of these great things without requiring the state at all, because it always bothered me.
That the ban on the initiation of the use of force was exempted for taxation.
The initiation of the use of force is really bad.
Well, except for a couple of tariffs.
And I know that that's not a big inconsistency, but a big tumor starts with a small tumor, so how about no tumor at all?
So it always bothered me, like a splinter in my mind's eye, that there was this inconsistency that just seemed to me like a failure of imagination.
Slavery is totally wrong!
But we do need a couple of slaves to man the borders.
And it's like, can we just, you know, that consistency was, it always really bothered me.
And so in arguing against this kind of stuff, and people can read my books at freedomainradio.com, Practical Anarchy and Everyday Anarchy, lots of examples of this kind of stuff.
So I was engaged in all these arguments, Dave, and I'm...
People come up with all these crazy scenarios, how the stateless society handled this or that or the other, whatever, right?
And I never once, during these many, many years of debates, I never once said, okay, but let's turn it around the other way.
What if, just come with me on a journey of potential hellscapery, what if the government decided to start printing money and taxing money and using it to bribe people hostile to your culture to come in and then pay them to have as many children as humanly possible,
thus eventually consigning you to be a minority of Because that's a pretty convincing argument, right? Because people would have said, wait, what?
The government would then pay for a population to be replaced?
Like, well, that would never, like, I had never, nobody I'd ever known had ever considered that or talked about that.
I guess there was The Lives of the Saints, which was a French book written some decades ago.
But in general, it was not part of the libertarian conversation.
And the failure to sort of even imagine any of that kind of stuff was one of the reasons why those debates were tougher than they should have been.
Because if you'd been able to convince people of that as a possibility, they'd have said, oh, well, then it's a stateless society, or almost certain cultural replacement and destruction.
And, you know, it's the old, well, there's a risk in a stateless society.
Yeah, you know, there's a risk jumping from a plane over water when it's low, but when it's heading straight into a mountain, I guess you take that risk.
But because the negative consequences of the existence and growth of the state, particularly with regards to population replacement and immigration.
Immigration is a big government program.
It's not the free movement. It's not free movement at all.
It's bribed movement. It's, I don't know what the, it's not open borders, because open borders is just wandering around.
This is like bribed, imported, political weaponry, weaponization of people, not just politically, but in terms of racism as well.
Because it's one thing to bring a bunch of people from the third world in and have them sit on the taxpayer's dime.
It's quite another one to bring those third worlders in and then say all white people are evil racists and you should be really angry at them and, uh, They're out to exploit you and they hate you and so on.
It's like provoking all of these problems that's going to end in civil war one way or the other.
And so because I never really conceived of just how bad things could possibly get under the state, I felt like I was always fighting a little bit at a disadvantage.
But now seeing how things have rolled out over the past, I don't know, Six years, seven years, eight years.
It was going on before, but until the internet, it wasn't really talked about.
Boy, I wish I'd had that.
And we should have had that little time flash saying, oh, no, here's a headline from, you know, 2018.
This is where we're heading.
Do you think ostracism might be worth it now or not?
Right, right. Yeah, there's so much there.
And I really agree with all of it.
I mean, there's so...
A lot of times when you get into arguing about a stateless society or just putting that idea out there, what people get concerned about – and I understand this.
I get it because I had the same concerns when I was first transitioning from minarchist to anarcho-capitalist.
Is they go like, but what if?
You know, like what could possibly go wrong?
I mean, how would this work? How would that work?
And of course, naturally, we don't understand how every nook and cranny, every single industry would work.
That's actually the whole point, is that there is no one person.
Do me a quick favor and reproduce the highly incentivized creative genius of millions of people in your answer and be able to predict the future to the point where you could just guess the Apple stock price five days from now and be a multi-zillionaire.
Right, of course. But what people also, and this is when people advocate for the state in any area of life, this is what they always do, is they'll look at one potential failure of the market, and then never really have to justify the state.
It's just like, oh, market failure, so state, right?
Like, that's the obvious. If you look at it as a state, it's like, well, what are the risks of having a state?
I mean, maybe you, you know, it's like, yeah, is it kind of crazy to rely on, you know, like an anarcho-capitalist society to rely on voluntarism in order to solve our problems?
Yeah, it's a little bit crazy, but it's also kind of crazy to, you know, have like world wars where tens of millions of people die to start, you know, remaking the Middle East in our image and this idea of spreading democracy to a region that is completely It's completely unworkable and have hundreds of thousands of people die and now be dealing with the consequences of that and destroying Libya and now having a migrant crisis into Europe.
And so, yeah, there are problems, but it's like you have to compare them to the problems that come along here.
And in terms of getting back to the immigration issue, as you said, this is a problem of statism.
Through and through. So when people on the left will point out, and I know you've talked about this a lot, but people on the left will point out like, oh, well, we're a nation of immigrants and we can all look at, you know, not too far back in our family history to find immigrants.
It's like, well, yes. And what we had was pretty much, relatively speaking, no welfare state and easy borders, maybe not completely open borders, but borders that were a lot easier to come through.
And a third of the people went back.
Because they came over, those who wanted freedom and wanted to work came over and it didn't work out for a lot of them.
And those ones had to go back.
And this is how we built up a cohesive, you know, like very well functioning society.
And now what percentage of them go back?
None, none go back because you just get on the dole.
So there's, when you have the state involved, it ruins this.
It's, you know, there's something so sad about it because it does actually, you know, the kind of world that people on the left will say they want, we're like, oh, well, we want, you know, open borders where people can move in.
It's like, well, because you have this giant state, you ruin the possibility of having that for any of them, for having that for the good people who would come over here and contribute to society.
And as you've pointed out before, When you rely on the state and you rely on this democratic process in the state, The exceptions don't matter anymore because in the free market, okay, well, let's say like, you know, you come from a society that maybe does on average have a lower IQ, does on average have a far worse culture, but maybe you're the exception and you can come over and do something really great.
Well, great. We want that guy.
We want the guy who can come over and contribute and be a good, you know, member of society.
But if you're voting, it doesn't matter because majority rules when you're voting.
So it just kind of wipes out the individuality.
Well, imagine like, you know, you invite me over for dinner, right?
Let's say I'm a single guy, right?
You invite me over for dinner and I say, well, I'm going to bring my girlfriend.
And I show up and I say, this is my girlfriend, Vixen, with three X's.
And she's like, total hourglass.
And, you know, and I hand her like, I don't know, 500 bucks in front of you and saying, well, this is the price to stay for dinner and so on.
And you say, dude, did you bring a prostitute over to dinner with me?
And I'd be like... No, this is exactly the same as my prior girlfriends.
And it's like, well, but you didn't actually have to pay your prior girlfriends to come over with you now, did you?
So I think this is a little bit of a different category.
And sort of subsuming these two categories into one giant blob of people who are with you voluntarily and people who are paid to be with you.
That's quite a little bit of a difference.
And in the past, of course, immigrants came over and they had to work hard and there wasn't free stuff there for them to scoop up and so on.
Whereas now, the majority of immigrants come over and sit on the taxpayer's dime and consume far more resources than they produce and so on.
So it is the difference between dating and having an escort.
You know, the two are just not the same categories.
And trying to point this out is like, it's kind of kind of different.
Yeah, no, it absolutely is.
And I know that a lot of libertarians, when you started talking about this immigration thing, had this like, oh my god, Stefan Molyneux turning his back on his anarcho-capitalist principles.
And the thing is that it's really just recognizing, as you said before, it'd be very hard to imagine this, that the state would do this, would replace the local population, would bribe people to come into the country.
But it's like, well, no, it's just it's accepting the reality that there's an enormous violation of the non-aggression principle going on with the current immigration system.
And it is a difficult it's a difficult position because I think, as you've mentioned before, With the existence of the state, there is going to be some violation of the non-aggression principle one way or the other.
But if you just look down, you know, the barrel of this, of what's happening here, there's no pathway.
There's no pathway to an anarchist, voluntarist society going with the current status quo of immigration.
It's just not gonna work.
No, it's gonna go quite the opposite direction.
If you look at the values of people coming into the West, they are in no way Synonymous with small government libertarianism and so on.
And this is the fundamental issue that I have is nobody's asked.
Nobody's asked. Like the local populations in the West, nobody's actually asked them.
In fact, I mean, when Ted Kennedy sponsored the 1965...
Immigration Act, I mean, they specifically said there would be no changes to American demographics, which is exactly how you know that they were planning changes to American demographics.
But, you know, I mean, if you're your average white person in Canada or in America, and people come to you with the facts.
I'd say, well, you're going to bring in cultures that have no particular history with Western freedoms.
They generally come from lower IQ groups, which means that it's going to be tougher to educate.
It's going to be tougher for them to succeed in an increasingly automated economy.
And your taxes are going to have to go through the roof to pay for all of this stuff.
And rents are going to go up, property costs are going to go up, and you're going to have less access to medicine, whether it's semi-private in the US or public in the rest of the West.
You're going to have less access to it.
And there's going to be a lot of cultures who are going to marry their cousins, which is going to cause a lot of birth defects and IQ issues.
And also, they're going to start agitating for removal of freedom of speech, and they're going to start agitating for all of this other stuff.
And also, by the way, there's going to be a lot of affirmative action programs that are going to pretty much guarantee that you and or your children are going to have extremely diminished access to the job market.
It's going to drive your wages down or it's going to buy you from the job market completely.
Like, if you were to say all of that, and people were then going to have to vote on that, I mean, who would say yes to that?
And so this is what frustrates me about the libertarians.
It's like this is a giant government-imposed program called the mass subsidization and importation of third-worlders who have no history of particular respect for Western freedoms.
And taxes go up and access to healthcare resources goes down and educational costs go up and crime goes up.
90% of the increased violent crime in Germany is the result of migration.
And so who on earth would say...
I mean, unless you were some pathological altruist and had some sort of medieval monk-like self-lacerating guilt, who on earth would say, yeah, that seems like a great plan.
Sign me up! I'm in.
And so this is a giant imposition.
On the domestic population.
The domestic population is desperately trying to find a way to slow or stop this.
I mean, this is why they voted for Trump.
This is why they voted for Brexit. This is why there is the AFD in Germany.
People are desperately trying to We're good to go.
The domestic population.
And so this massive imposition is somehow defended by a lot of libertarians as free movement.
It's like, no, it is entirely dependent upon massive violations of property rights.
Yeah, no, absolutely. And just to your point, we say nobody ever got a vote on this.
I mean, as you said, really, Trump was the kind of in a way the first time they got a vote on this because it was the first time that a candidate actually made this the centerpiece of his campaign.
And came back and said, hey, we are going to roll this back.
And he got more votes in the Republican primary than any Republican has ever gotten.
And then he got 63 million people to come out and vote for him.
And he won the presidency.
And just to your point, the idea that nobody got to vote for this, a lot of times it's interesting to see how candidates run To get a feel for what people actually want.
So John McCain even said, right, in that career, he was like, build the dang fence or whatever when he was running.
Obama talked about cracking down on immigration.
Bill Clinton talked about cracking down on immigration.
Hillary Clinton said, just because you come across the border with your children doesn't mean that you won't be sent back.
That's right. And you see why this is kind of at least represents a large portion of the American people.
And if we care about property rights and we care about volunteerism, right, it's not just freedom of movement.
It's voluntary transactions.
We've got some pretty large evidence that says, at least for a very large group of the population, this ain't voluntary.
They're like, look, we're not agreeing to this.
Americans already give more money to charity than any other nation in the world.
They're already giving a lot to charity.
And one of the big dynamics that's happened in the country, and I will give him some credit, even though he...
His prescriptions for everything are wrong.
Bernie Sanders did, to some degree, diagnose.
I mean, he was always so weak, like he wouldn't take it to its logical conclusion.
He would say things like, you know, hey, in this recovery, you know, whatever the numbers are, he'd be like 90% of the new wealth has gone to the top 5% of the people.
And when you look at a lot of the people who voted for Donald Trump, whether it's in the Rust Belt, in the South, a lot of these people, they didn't participate in the Obama recovery.
Yeah, I was talking about this the other day on one of my videos, but you know, you look at those maps where they say the richest counties in America, and it's like six of the top 10 richest counties are right outside Washington, D.C., and a whole bunch of the other ones are right outside of New York City.
Well, this isn't because Washington, D.C. is like...
We're producing a lot in the free market.
It's not because there's all these factories or there's like Silicon Valley there.
It's like, no. Well, Obama's recovery was record high government spending.
And who got the profits of that?
It was the politically connected.
And all the stuff going on in New York City, I know to the layman, they may be, oh, that's capitalism.
That has nothing to do with free market capitalism.
That's That's Richard Nixon going off the gold standard.
That's Bush and Obama bailing out these banks who made all of these bad loans.
So these guys get bailed out.
They get all the money from it.
The people in the Rust Belt are still living in the recession of 2008.
And now they're sitting there and saying, well, we're also going to force you, as you were just saying, to keep giving all this charity.
I guess it's not... Charity if it's forced, but we're going to keep forcing you to subsidize all of these other groups of people.
And it's like, look, we would love to solve all of humanity's problems, but people tend to rightfully worry about their own family and their own communities first.
And so, like you said, it reminds me of the issue with the wars, where, you know, it's like nobody ever supports this stuff.
The candidate who wants to get us out of these horrific wars always seems to do very well, whether it's Donald Trump or Barack Obama running against the wars, even George W. Bush in the year 2000.
You know, we're not going to use the military for nation building.
And when people have the option, they tend to vote for that.
But Donald Trump was the only one who seriously It was believable that he was actually going to do something to crack down on immigration.
Well, I mean, there's the whole lie about how these wars are sold, right?
They say, well, we know he has weapons of mass destruction.
We know exactly where they are.
Remember Donald Rumsfeld's, oh, they're north, they're east, they're west, some damn place.
And, oh, it's going to cost $50 billion or $25 billion, and it's going to be done in three months, and everything's going to be great, and you're going to turn the Middle East into this Jeffersonian democracy, and it's like, the way that these are sold has nothing to do with what actually happens.
I mean, if people had really understood the ramifications of going into Iraq, that you were going to use weapons that were going to genetically destroy entire populations, that you were going to destroy the infrastructure, that you were going to unleash ISIS, that you were going to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and turn the Middle East against you, and from that, You can destabilize Syria.
From that, you can destabilize Libya.
And then people are going to pour into Europe.
What's promised versus what is delivered is, I mean, it's not even close.
You say that you're going to fight an evil, and all you're doing is sowing and spreading evil.
And the blowback is astonishing.
And, of course, the media as a whole just lies and is the court bloody boot-licking toadies of the state as a whole.
And, I mean, this is the same lies that we've seen before.
Now, of course, it's like children in cages is the reason why you can't have a country or any rule of law.
And, you know, it takes Democrats to rail and cry and scream against the Republican who's enforcing a law passed by the Democrats.
But and before this, it was that the kid on the Turkish beach who was washed up and was face down in the surf, even though the father was trying to get to Canada for dental care, I think it was or something like that.
The boat was way overloaded and it was all nonsense.
Before that, it was the Iraqi troops were taking children out of incubators and taking the incubators, throwing the babies on the floor.
And the woman who was crying about all of this was politically connected.
And of course, the recovery has gone to the rich because it's a government-driven, government-mandated recovery.
It's based on debt. It's based on favoritism.
The middle class is the ballast of freedom.
The middle class is what centers.
It's the keel of freedom.
It's what keeps the ship balanced.
The poor, and this is a big generalization, but in general it's true, the poor love the state because it gives them free stuff.
The rich love the state because they control a lot of the state.
They can donate. They can give gifts to politicians that politicians can give them.
In return, gifts from the public treasury.
And investing in politicians is one of the most productive, quote, productive investments that any business can make.
It produces hundreds of times worth of value in terms of contracts to help fund a politician.
So yeah, the rich love the state.
The poor love the state.
The middle class are terrified of the state, which is why the poor swell when you get a big government.
The poor swell, the rich swell, and the middle class gets eaten up.
And once the middle class are eaten up, then it's a war of the rich against the poor, which just turns into usually either some kind of freedom or a terrible dictatorship.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And in terms of, you know, the stuff you – the way that this all connects to the immigration issue, particularly in Europe, right, is that – so you have – Like, the welfare state in Europe has existed for a very long time.
It's been going back for over a century.
There's been, you know, some degree, and it's gotten bigger and bigger.
Islam, all the problems with radical Islam, that's, you know, a few thousand years old.
This isn't anything that was brand new.
What really made the two- What really brought the two together in this horrific situation now was the wars and destabilizing this entire region.
And now you have these people flooding into Europe and getting on to welfare.
And, you know, OK, so there's people like you who have basically been preaching this whole time.
We shouldn't be destabilizing the region.
We shouldn't be fighting these wars.
Also, by the way, Europe, you shouldn't have this welfare state where you've been preaching against all this stuff for forever.
But now we're here.
Now we're in this moment here.
And it's like there's no way to make all this work by just opening up the borders and saying, like, OK, so to me, I mean, the And I do struggle to see what exactly the solution is.
But to me, the best part is like, well, end these wars immediately.
And I must say, I've been very disappointed with Donald Trump that he hasn't moved quicker on this and bombing Syria, sending more troops into Afghanistan, still propping up the Saudis.
I agree. And I don't want to interrupt what you're saying, but the only caveat I would say, Dave, is that if it wasn't Donald Trump, we'd already be at war in Syria, America, and maybe even other Western countries as well.
But sorry, go ahead. No, look, I mean, Hillary Clinton ran On a no-fly zone in Syria, basically ran on going to war with Russia in Syria.
So no question about that.
It would be worse. And I think the mix of the fact that she's such a hawk and the fact that she's got this like, you know, woman complex where she'd have to prove how tough she is right away.
Hillary Clinton would have been an absolute disaster.
So I agree with you completely on that.
But I will say that I just thought Trump had an opportunity And it seemed to me like Trump's instincts on these things were very good.
I mean, he even, you know, in the campaign, I mean, he said, like when he said Obama and Hillary created ISIS, that was like amazing because nobody was talking about what should be the biggest freaking story, which is that these guys funded ISIS intentionally, intentionally to overthrow one of the last secular three piece suit wearing, I'm cool to the Christians dictator in Syria, Bashar al-Assad.
They wanted to overthrow him and they said, oh, we'll restore the balance between Sunni and Shiite because oops, when we knocked off Saddam Hussein, it looks like we gave Iran too much power.
So now we'll go in there and oops, this created ISIS and is destroying, you know, just untold amounts of damage done by that.
And so Trump just had all these instincts that were correct.
And I don't know, I mean, if it's the fact that all the good people who he brought in were systematically removed basically through the media and the deep state and basically Everybody who didn't want to go into Syria, you know, like Flynn and Bannon and all those guys, well, they got kicked out pretty quickly.
And now he's surrounded by some not so great people.
But anyway, I wish he had moved quicker on that.
But still, that is the move, is to end these horrific wars.
And hopefully, you could somehow find a way to end the welfare state, but there's got to be something to slow down the mass immigration.
Otherwise, this is going to go very, very bad.
And I must say, I'm curious to, you know, your opinion on this, but I don't know That we're not too late with this whole thing.
Like, I don't exactly know.
I mean, maybe some type of mass breakup of the United States or big secession, which I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to, but I don't know how you put this toothpaste back in the tube.
I don't know either, Dave.
I don't know. I would not put a lot of money on a peaceful solution.
Now, I mean, my particular goal with people like Trump or Brexit or whatever, I mean, I knew Trump was going to be good for the economy.
That was a no-brainer.
And as far as finally getting someone competent, In there to negotiate trade deals.
I mean, this guy is the negotiator.
That's what he does. You buy the guy.
You try and get the guy with the biggest best-selling business book on negotiations to do your negotiations for you.
I mean, that's not that complicated, right?
So I knew he was going to be good for the economy.
Now, when the economy begins to heat up, then what happens is people get off welfare and get jobs.
Now, when they're off welfare and they're Paying taxes rather than receiving money from taxes, then they have a greater incentive to reduce the size and power of the state.
And like right now, the fewest number of people are applying for disability than has occurred for quite some time, the fewest number of people on food stamps.
And food stamps are, by the way, just terrible.
The number one item bought with food stamps is sugary pop.
I mean, it's just like you couldn't design a system that would make people fatter and less able to work and less able to concentrate and so on.
So if you can sort of tilt, you know, those lava things that tilt back and forth, you know, go back and forth, right?
Like me in slow motion doing sit-ups.
But if you can get people off dependence and onto productivity...
Then you can start to talk about diminishing the need for the welfare state.
You can start, and people will be much more keen on that.
Because as you already have the empirical example of the economy is doing better, therefore people want jobs rather than, and most people want to do something productive rather than just sit around all day.
I mean, I think that's, you know, it's kind of fun for 20 minutes or whatever, and then it's like, okay, kind of born to be productive here.
So I think the goal is to just try and get as many people into the working environment as opposed to being on the dependence environment.
Because then you have the example.
Say, okay, well, we keep heating up the economy.
We're going to get as many people as humanly possible off the welfare state and into the realm of the productive.
Now, then what you can start to do is you can start to say, well, there's fewer people left on the welfare state.
We can start to talk about replacing the welfare state with charity.
Because the problem is, as we all know, when you get more people working, the government, you know, and I'm excluding Trump when I talk about the general mechanics of the government, it's something like this.
Wow, a lot of people are paying taxes.
That means we can grow like crazy.
And so being productive just kind of feeds the tumor of the state, or even more ideally, rather than spending the money that We're good to go.
They have a very, very tough time fighting against it, which is why the left is so sentimental, and sentimentality and brutality are just two sides of the same coin.
But if we sort of remind people that the state, by initiating the use of force to transfer property, is an immoral institution, it can no longer be made moral any more than rape can be made moral any more than Slavery can be made moral.
It is just immoral. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean you snap your fingers and everyone's free and, you know, we just let the chips...
I mean, maybe there's some way to manage this transition.
But if you don't know where you're going, there's just never any way to get there.
And people are just so used to managing all of this crazy stuff.
And aren't people getting tired of it, too?
Like, I wonder about this, too.
Let me know what you think of this, Dave.
I was just thinking the other day.
Like, just 20th century.
You know, just look at 20th century to 21st century.
Just a quick run-by. You know, you've got...
I mean, crazy government schools from the 19th century onwards, which is one of the reasons why that...
First World War was possible because people bond with whoever raises them and that's a state and state says jump and you say how high and says die and say how many.
But just look, First World War results, well first you get the going off the gold standard, you get international, these central banks and all this kind of print your own money kind of stuff.
And then you get the First World War, it's a complete and total disaster.
It was one of the things that was the real stake through the heart of Western civilization.
And then you get, after that, the disastrous Treaty of Versailles.
You get this really uneasy peace.
You get this massive bubble going off in the 20s.
You get a 13-year depression or a 14-year depression that ends up in the Second World War.
That's what you get. It's the Second World War.
Germany goes through hyperinflation and then a massive crash and then votes in a national socialist like Hitler.
And then after the Second World War...
You get massive expansion to the welfare state, you get old age pensions, you get a Cold War!
Yay, Cold War!
And then you get the Korean War, and then you get the Vietnam War, and then you get more Cold War, and then you get massive strikes in England where I remember being cold because you couldn't afford coal.
And then you get a massive boom in real estate in the 80s, followed by another crash, followed by a massive boom in the 90s in tech, followed by another crash, followed by 9-11, followed by invasions, followed by destruction, followed by another crash in 2008, followed by massive indebtedness, followed by migration policies that are disastrous for the local population.
Like at some point, are we going to get tired?
Of all of this bullshit.
I'm going to get tired of just staggering from one disaster to another disaster and say, good God, it's time to reevaluate from the ground up because this sure as hell ain't working anymore.
Yeah, you would think so when you put it like that.
But it looks like people are like, let's keep going with this.
One of my favorite quotes of yours ever was, and I probably will butcher it a little bit, but you were like, the state can convince people to give up half their income, sacrifice their kids in wars, sacrifice their grandchildren, debt burden, and we can't convince people how roads would be built.
So it's like we're...
We're like, really, you know, but it really is unbelievable.
And I guess there's like a little, you know, the thing that's difficult is that they are, and you got to tip your hat to them, as evil as they are, they are brilliant in their propaganda.
And I guess there was what they call the Vietnam syndrome, right?
So like after Vietnam, where they were like, you know, there's this weird syndrome where people just don't want to send their brothers and sons and fathers over to have a leg blown off for some war we should never be a part of to We're good to go.
At least what's going on here is that there is a big moment in the fact that something's got to give.
We don't know exactly when this is going to come about, but there are these unfunded liabilities that we're coming up on.
This is not too far down the road.
The baby boomers are really retiring in numbers.
These bills are going to be coming due.
The wars have been going on forever.
And the bright side is that there are these voices like yours who are out there now and have huge platforms where in the past, you would have, I mean, without the technology that you have, you would have absolutely been silenced.
I mean, no one would have felt the need to refute any of your arguments, as many of them still don't, but they would have just been like, nope, persona non grata, you are not allowed in the club, and now you can work around that.
So I guess we have at least a fighting chance Of trying to wake some people up and seeing if maybe we can have a smooth transition.
I will tell you, and I know that you've discussed this before, that I used to kind of almost just root for the collapse.
I was like, well, when the collapse comes, then we'll have a chance to wake people up.
Yeah, but now you're going to be a father, aren't you?
That's right. Time frame shifts just a little.
I can wander the wasteland armed only with a crossbow and a thong.
It's like, well, now you've got kids.
It's like, eh. I could handle civilization lasting just a smidge longer if you don't buy it.
That's right. Now that I got a kid on the way, it's like, oh man, I really want a smooth transition into whatever we're going to have next.
And the truth is, and this is an unfortunate reality, and this is what some libertarians who will...
We'll argue for open borders, say, well, good, they'll come in and crash the welfare state.
You know, like, great, it'll bring it down.
And the problem is you go, so what do you think the odds are that if a huge economic crash was brought on tomorrow, that a libertarian society with respect for peace and property rights is going to rise up out of those ashes?
I mean, Actually, if you look at history as any bit of a guide, this is when the worst of the worst rises up.
I mean, this is when things get really, really bad.
And I will say that you can already see little hints of it, both on the left and the right in America, that if things get really, really bad, what's going to rise up is going to be the worst elements, not the most rational voices.
In particular, in a multiracial society.
You know, I mean, it's funny because the left claims to be so secular and against creationism and so on.
We are for evolution. It's like, well, you know that evolution works on genetic in-group preferences, right?
Starting with your own family and then it's racial, maybe ethnic and so on.
And it's all, you know, we can all...
Kind of get along when the buffet is full.
You go on a cruise ship or something, the buffet is full, and everyone's like, yeah, go ahead.
I'll stand nicely in line.
But man, when there's like one sticky bun left and 3,000 people, it's like nobody's standing in line anymore, my friend, and things are going to collapse into rank tribalism.
And it is going to be a big mess.
And whatever we can do to try and avoid that, we should.
Again, I mean, the demographics being what they are, there is a case to be made for the collapse sooner rather than later before the demographics get even worse.
But, you know, that's perhaps a topic for another time.
So let's close maybe with just a couple of examples.
Because I was chatting with a friend of mine's son the other day.
And he's like, yeah, okay, I get, you know, The consistency with the stateless society.
But how are you going to enforce contracts, man?
How are you going to enforce contracts in a stateless society?
Well, first of all, you have terms of service on Twitter, but if you're on the left, you don't really have any terms of service.
And also, for the people who say, well, without the government, how would we enforce a contract?
My first question is, Have you ever tried to use the government legal system to enforce a contract?
Have you ever even imagined it?
Have you ever talked to anyone who's done it?
Because this fantasy that somehow things are working and we are presenting some wild deviation from what's kind of working at the moment.
I don't know. It's all like, well, I've got this car.
It's a bit of a jalopy gets from A to B. And now you're talking about some explosive jetpack.
Well, I already have some. No, it doesn't work.
You can't use a state to enforce...
The state is used to bully people, to intimidate people.
You know, there are 15 million lawsuits filed in America every year, like 95% of them against people of high net worth.
It's just a shakedown. That's all it is.
Shakedown for lawyers and so on.
You know, you get a divorce. It doesn't work.
It works fairly well in Europe. Except if you're trying to divorce the EU. But you get a divorce, you know, quarter goes to you, quarter goes to your wife, half goes to the lawyers.
I mean, it's a big, giant mess.
And so you can't use the government to enforce contracts at the moment as it stands.
So whatever we propose is better.
But, you know, I think the general idea is you and I get into some kind of contract and we just nominate a third party and say, OK, well, if we disagree, we can't resolve it among ourselves.
We both agree to abide by the decision of this third party.
And there'll be a bunch of different companies vying to be the most efficient and the best and the least overhead and the least time and the least hassle to give you adjudication.
And then people say, well, what happens if you don't decide to abide by the third party adjudication?
It's like, well, then what happens is nobody will insure you anymore.
Nobody will insure your contracts.
Nobody will say, yeah, be happy to adjudicate your next contract dispute.
And nobody's going to be able to enter into new contracts with you.
So you are going to have to.
Abide by. Otherwise, economic ostracism, you know, the webs that we're enmeshed in, just momentarily, day by day, the webs that we're enmeshed in, just to be able to get out of bed and turn on the tap and, you know, have a fridge and stuff, I mean, the electricity, the internet, like, if nobody wants to do business with you, you can't really function in that society.
Now, people want to do business with you because you're profitable, but if you're not profitable, if you don't abide by the rules you say you're going to abide by, well, you have a contract score, a contract rating, the same way you have a credit rating.
And it's going to be efficient.
It's going to be like one phone call, a day or two, they're going to adjudicate, they're going to figure out what's fair, and they're going to impose whoever has to do it.
Now, say, oh, well, what if I'm in a contract with Dave for a thousand bucks and he doesn't fulfill his side of the contract?
Well, I want an insurance policy that says the third party is going to Pay me the thousand bucks if you don't, right?
And then they're gonna try and get back the money from you.
And if you refuse, then they'll put you in that database of like bad contract people and nobody's gonna, all your costs for contract are gonna be a lot higher, like if you smoke and try and get life insurance.
There's so many different ways it can work.
And people say, well, I wanna see it down to the last detail.
And it's like, that's the whole point of freedom.
You don't know. I mean, if I could tell everyone everything the way it was gonna work, then yeah, put me in charge.
I'll take Satan's offer and be in charge of the planet.
Nobody knows. We have some ideas.
But the idea that you can figure out what happens when people are free is incomprehensible.
We can't even figure out what happens when people are enslaved other than they get miserable and entitled.
But these are just some possibilities.
There's so many different ways it could work.
But the most important thing is the only antidote to corruption is competition.
Because corruption is overhead.
And competition shaves down that overhead to the point where corruption becomes unprofitable or becomes obvious.
Like if some contract agency has to charge you double, it's because they're taking a skim and they won't be able to compete.
Have you sort of run through these kinds of scenarios in your head?
How would you sort of answer this? How are we going to have contracts in a free society?
Sure, sure. Well, it's interesting because just the dynamic, the irony of what you were saying.
It's like, exactly, like if we could figure out all these things and we knew for absolutely sure, we wouldn't need a free market and we wouldn't need, it's like, right, you could just put the person who knows everything in charge, but of course we don't.
So, no, we don't exactly, right.
So you start from understanding, right, we don't know everything and of course there will be problems.
But you can also logically deduce that the problems will be way worse if you have a state.
So in other words, the issue that we're worried about here, it's like contracts, which are basically voluntary agreements within respect for property rights.
So number one, you wouldn't want to create an entity that can violate anybody's property rights at any time.
And number two, the concern is like kind of a free rider problem, like somebody could rip somebody off.
And of course, again, the state will we know for a fact that the state will be worse at this.
But I would say what you look to in these examples are the examples that we already have.
And as you mentioned in the free market, insurance is this really beautiful creation to mitigate risk.
If you actually look at free market insurance, of course the The term insurance has been corrupted largely by the state.
But if you look at free market insurance, it's an amazing, amazing, beautiful tool where people are able to mitigate risk.
If you look at what insurance really is in the free market, it is essentially people who have money Pooling it together.
It's people with pooling money together to help somebody who's in a bad situation.
And they all do it together with this understanding that we're all taking a little bit of risk and this is how we mitigate that.
And then on top of that, right, like even with the state that we have, even with this huge giant bureaucratic state that spends four trillion dollars a year and regulates every nook and cranny of the economy.
You still have private arbitration going on because it's just more effective and it just works better.
All these big corporations who have these huge deals, they rely on private arbitration because, yeah, exactly.
What are you going to go to the state?
You're going to go – I mean you just look at this suit, this antitrust suit that was just – that Time Warner, AT&T ended up winning.
And the state is still threatening that they could appeal and then basically break up this merger just because it'll take so long.
By the way, it looks like the merger is going to go through.
I guess it went through at this point.
But yeah, so you have all of this.
And it's not that nobody would ever rip anybody off.
Surely there will be people who do.
Like you look at, I know you've used this example before, but look at eBay.
I mean, people get ripped off on eBay.
It's like, okay, somebody violates an agreement and it's like, okay, you lost one there.
That person immediately gets a bad review.
Their score immediately goes down and the problem is fairly well controlled.
So it's not that there will be no problems.
My personal experience with this was I had a trader many years ago, pretty sure he was churning my account, like doing trades to generate commission.
And yeah, called up a lawyer and said, well, we can take this guy to court.
And he said, yeah, you could.
Cost you about half a million bucks and take 10 to 15 years.
Right. Or there's this private arbitration, cost you about 10 grand to be done in a month.
I'm like, huh, government solution, non-government solution.
It really wasn't that hard to figure out which one was possible.
Right. And these solutions are all around us.
I mean, you don't even have to, you know, imagine a hypothetical world because even in the real world, even with the state, the state is so horrifically, you know, just like, as you were saying, I mean, you're going to spend so much money and waste so much time that people find these free market solutions all the time.
And I would just say to, you know, much like on the immigration issue, that a lot of people, they see these phenomenons as being problems with the market, but they're really not.
I mean, even if you just look at how much state control there is in media, right?
And how, you know, there were these channels that needed government licenses, these television stations, and they had a monopoly on the news.
And now the free market has figured out these solutions through technology where you can have your enormous audience, which is, by the way, Way bigger than one of these propaganda MSNBC shows.
And now what's going on? The free market solved this.
And now the state's trying to get in and put all this pressure on Google and Facebook and all these other parts.
It's like, oh, you got to start cracking down on the fake news.
The market will solve so many of these problems.
And then, of course, as you mentioned, They will also come up with far better solutions that me and you are just not capable of of foreseeing because there has to be it's not like one guy's brain there have to be all the millions of people's brains interacting together figuring out solutions, but we can be Damn sure positive that the solutions will be far better without a state than with one.
Yeah, and with regards to, I mean, it's kind of an oxy-born, a stateless society national defense, but some geographical area where people want to prevent invasion.
Yeah, okay. My constant invitation, Dave, is to say to people, instead of being the problem bringers up, be the problem solvers.
So instead of saying to me passively, well, how would the stateless society handle defense?
You know, say, okay, pretend that you are somebody trying to sell me.
A defense system, a defense scheme, right?
And what would you do? Well, obviously, you'd want it to be as cheap as possible and as effective as possible.
So how would you do that?
And instead of being the guy who just puts up roadblocks and says, well, how about this?
And expects other people to solve them.
And then it becomes, you know, you move the goalpost.
Well, how about this? Well, how about this?
Be the person who tries to solve these problems.
It's much more fun, much more creative.
And you get into the mindset of freedom.
So the first thing with national defense is why do countries invade other countries?
Well, they invade other countries to take over the tax base.
What was the first thing that happened when Germany went into other countries in the 1930s?
Well, they took over the tax base.
It's the difference between invading a functioning farm and invading a wilderness, right?
There's no tax base to take over.
And everyone has, if they want, has weaponry and, you know, unless they're in communities where they don't want that and then they can choose to do that as well.
But there's no tax base to take over.
It's really unprofitable to take over a free society because you can't just scoop up trillions of dollars and take over the tax base.
So that's one thing.
The second thing is, you know, weapons of mass destruction.
Well, there's a reason why the invasion is happening through Immigration now.
It's not open borders. It's bribed borders or hoarders or, you know, W-H-O-R. Because you can't invade a country that has weapons of mass destruction.
I mean, that's why they went for Iraq.
That's how you know a country doesn't have weapons of mass destruction.
People are willing to invade. It's why they're not going into North Korea.
And so weapons of mass destruction might be enough of a deterrent.
There could be lots of different ways to assassinate the leader of an army that's about to invade you might be a better response.
Because all we see is big giant governments, armies smashing up against each other in these World War II Battle of the Bulge, which is World War I's kind of scenarios.
And, you know, so we think that's how war has to be.
But if you look at Iraq, you see the biggest military in the world being bled to attrition by, as Eric Prince talked about, a couple of guys in flip-flops in the back of a pickup truck with something they picked up on the black market.
I don't know how national defense should work or local defense should work.
But I do know that in the free market, it will be as efficient as possible.
And people say, ah, yes, well, you fund some army.
And the next thing you do, the army takes you over and then becomes the new government.
And it's like, yes, everyone's aware of that as a risk.
So if you are trying to sell people defense agencies, provisions or services, how would you allay that fear?
How would you deal with this fear?
Well, what I would do is I'd say, okay, well, I'm going to put $10 million into escrow.
I'm going to openly publish everything that I'm doing in terms of here's the weaponry and here's the bullets and here's the tanks and whatever it is, here's the weaponry I've got.
And if I ever go over it by one bullet and anyone finds out about it, you get the 10 million bucks.
So you post a reward.
There's lots of different ways. Because if you suddenly want to start amassing more weaponry and more armies than people want you to have, you're going to have to do it secretly.
Now, you've got to pay for that somehow.
So you're either going to have to raise prices like crazy, or you're going to have to borrow more money.
Now, why would banks want to lend you money if you're going to take over?
And who knows what's going to happen to the property rights of the banks?
And why would customers want to pay twice what the other guy is charging for defense because you want to create some giant robot army or something?
There's so many different ways to push back against this.
And all legitimate human concerns are dealt with in the free market, right?
So when kids are opening bottles of medicine because they look like candy and eating them, then you get these childproof containers that apparently now only children can open.
But there's so many different ways that you can deal with these kinds of things.
And the free market will have great solutions that are sustainable.
And the government creates this big giant incentive called, you can take over the tax base, creates this big giant military that is always focused on the last war, never the next war, and tends to lose against insurgents and flip flops.
Right. Yes. Right.
Absolutely. And so, okay.
So for the defense stuff, right, like right away, you'd look at like the example in the Middle East or look at Afghanistan, where the most powerful state, the most powerful military that's ever existed without question, nobody could even debate.
There's not even a second place to the United States of America's military right now.
The Taliban has control of more territory than it did in 2001 right now.
And they did it to the Russians before they did it to the Americans.
So two giant militaries defeated by guys in flip-flops.
The Taliban are like hicks of Afghanistan, okay?
These are like goat herders with guns that are marching around, holding off the largest army ever.
Now, if you think That Afghanistan is difficult to hold down because they have some armed militias there.
Try it in Texas.
Good luck.
Good luck going into Texas and taking it over.
So with the current dynamic, okay, we have something in the neighborhood of 300 million plus guns in this country.
And that's with all the gun control and restrictions that already exist.
So you get rid of that. My guess is right.
Like you said, there'll be some communities that don't want to have guns, but there will be a lot more that will have guns.
You're going to have hundreds and hundreds of millions of guns in this country.
We got two giant oceans on the side of us.
The idea that there's any threat of another country invading the United States of America, it's just...
It's silly. And also, as you said, basically, since nuclear weapons have been out, people don't really attack nuclear-armed countries, even our country, for all the wars we've fought since World War II. We don't really mess with other countries who have nukes.
I mean, maybe a little bit of drone strikes in Pakistan, but then when they told us to knock it off, we kind of did knock it off because, you know, they've got nukes.
You don't want to mess with them. We mess with Gaddafi.
We mess with Saddam Hussein, the ones who don't have these.
Weapons, even when they claim they do.
Now, on top of that, when people say the idea that, right, some big corporation basically just builds up an army and then they become a government.
So the obvious number one Point to that is that if the worst case scenario of not having a state is that it could end up in having a state, that's not a great argument for having a state.
We can get rid of your cancer, but your cancer might come back.
No, no, I'll just stay with the cancer I have then because I don't want to roll those dice.
Right. So just leave it then. But I always ask people when they say this, it's like, take me through it.
Just logically take me through how we achieve an anarcho-capitalist We've achieved a stateless society.
Take me through how Walmart starts building up an army.
It's one of the things that people don't realize about the market, particularly people on the left when they talk about business.
As if like, you know, business owners are just dictators.
You know, business owners are slaves to their customers, okay?
They're slaves. This is why Walmart exists because it's not that Walmart shut down the mom and pop stores.
It's that customers shut down the mom and pop stores.
Customers said, we prefer Walmart.
So they went to them. And you've probably seen those bad comics, right?
Who are like, hey man, that was funny.
You're supposed to laugh at this.
That was hilarious. The last crowd laughed at it, you bunch of hicks.
And it's like, that is like, no, you are a slave to your, if they're not laughing, you're not doing your job.
And you yell at them, it's not going to help you do your job.
And of course, with what you do in a lot of ways, like if you weren't adding anything of value to your audience, then they leave and you've got nothing.
The whole thing is you have to constantly be adding value to them.
So take me through it. So Walmart now, they've successfully, you know, they've been Walmart.
They've had a real successful business.
So now they decide that they're going to build a military, okay?
So now I don't know if you're familiar with how militaries have been built, but they're not cheap.
I don't know if you've seen, you know, the United States of America, we're spending, I don't know, some estimates as high as a trillion dollars a year, but at least six, seven hundred billion dollars a year on maintaining this army.
So and also it can't be done in secret because nobody's ever built up a huge army in secret.
The public knows about it for every military that's pretty much ever existed.
So Walmart now starts Taking their profits and spending just ungodly amounts of money building up this military.
Now, of course, right away, their whole model revolves around keeping prices low.
So that's going to start going up because they have all these- The shareholders are going to be, where's my dividend?
And they'll be like, Don't worry, we're getting tanks.
And they'll be like, I don't really want you guys to get tanks.
I just like some dividends for my stocks, if that's all right.
Exactly. So now all of the shareholders, all of the customers are aware that this organization, which is now raising their prices, is building up this military.
And all they have to do to shut it down, they don't have to vote for Barack Obama, who promises to end the wars and then expands all the wars.
All they got to do is just stop shopping there.
Well, can you imagine the competitors, like the ads you would run?
You know, I don't know if Kmart's, I don't think they're still around, but whatever it is, like some Walmart competitor just runs ads saying, hey, you know why our prices are so cheap?
Because we don't want to have tanks and bombs and take over your entire society and enslave you.
Look, low prices and no enslavement.
You know, like that's a pretty easy pitch to make.
This, this stuff would be shut down in a day.
So it's not so, so there, there are lots of market solutions for this.
And then of course, if you even, I mean, it's, it's just absurd, but if you said, so what's the greater chance of us getting into a war, uh, Well, see...
I don't know if people haven't been in business.
I know you're an entrepreneur. All comedians are.
But if you've ever been in business and presented something to a board, I just can't even imagine.
This is all people who don't know how business works.
I just can't imagine being the guy, all right, I've been CEO of Walmart for about 10 to 15 years.
I've been CEO of Walmart. But, oh, bored, I find myself getting a little restless.
I'm kind of tired of just making money by servicing customers and giving people what they want and having, you know, reasonable employee standards and so on.
So, you know, we're doing well, making money, you know, a couple hundred mil a year, and everyone's happy and so on.
But I want to shake things up a little bit.
And you know, he's got some PowerPoint or something like that.
He's like, current trajectory, satisfy customers, be profitable, make money, make lives better, particularly for poor people.
And like the next slide is, you know what I see?
Go with me here. Just like, let's brainstorm a little here.
I see mustard gas, flamethrowers, dark helmeted stormtroopers, and radiating across the country, shooting people who disagree with us.
Because... Change is good.
I'm going to upsize us to giant bombers that drop bombs on people who disagree with us.
And they'll be like, where's the profit?
I mean, even if we went with the morality of it, it's completely immoral.
Where is the profit going to be?
Now, for the government, there's profit because they can print their own money.
They can tax like crazy. They can go into debt.
So they can scoop up the general vat of money.
They can scoop up trillions of dollars and make a bunch of money.
Where does Walmart make money accumulating weaponry?
Like, how on earth are they gonna profit from that?
Even if nobody found it horribly immoral, which it would be, where's the profit in that?
And literally, if you presented this to a board, I mean, they'd be like, they'd take you out of there in a rubber suit.
I mean, they would be like, that is completely insane.
How would we sell this to the shareholders?
Why would the employees stick around?
Why would anyone come and shop at ours?
Not only would we not make any money, you would completely destroy the entire accumulated value of the company.
And if somebody tried to do this secretly, some CEO just found some way to do it.
Well, he would be sued into oblivion.
And personally, too, there wouldn't be any of this corporate shield.
The corporate shield is just bullshit invented by the state to protect the ruling class from personal responsibility for liability.
So it'd be like, okay, you have now destroyed the value of the company that you're contractually obliged to protect and maintain and grow, and therefore, you are now going to be poor to the fourth generation or something like that.
It can only be conceived of by people who don't have any history of working in the free market.
Yeah, that's right. And of course, as you said, there is just the moral point of it too, which is that we kind of, at least in Western civilization, People really have accepted the non-aggression principle and private property rights in just about every inch of life except for the state where we carve out this exception.
But the truth is that, yeah, people and of course, there will be there are evil people out there.
There are predators out there.
But the major difference Between somebody violating the non-aggression principle in the market and the state, well, there's two, okay?
This is how I see it. At least there's two major differences.
Number one is that none of us perceive it as legitimate.
So if somebody gets mugged, if somebody gets raped, if somebody gets beaten up, nobody around perceives that as being legitimate.
We all recognize it for what it is and that that's immoral.
And number two is that you have recourse.
So if you have shoplifters coming into your store, you hire an extra security guard.
You adjust for this problem.
You can fight back. But when you're getting taxed once a year by the government and they're essentially shoplifting 50% of your goods or the value of them, There's no recourse, and there's nothing you can do.
So even if there are problems where somebody is being violent or trying to take someone else over, well, then the market adjusts for that, and you hire security, and you deal with that threat, and it's perceived by everybody as being legitimate.
Well, of course, I mean, to me, the stateless society is the foundational recognition of the reality of evil in the world.
Because there are evil people in the world, and that's why you can't have a government.
Because that's the first place they're going to go.
People say, oh, what do you do with psycho killers in a free society?
It's like, I don't know. How about we start off by not giving them a big giant army with which they can go and invade and kill millions of people around the world?
So, of course, it's a recognition.
There's this weird thing where people say, well, we're going to create this massive entity with almost omnipotent power.
To create, to destroy, to transfer, to steal, to sell, to future generations offered, to debt slavery and so on.
Massive agency of violence.
But it's only ever going to be inhabited and controlled by really good people who have everyone's best interest at heart.
It's like, no, power corrupts.
But power draws corruption as well.
So if you think there's only a tiny minority of evil people, well, then you can't have a state.
Because they're gonna then use the power of the state to dominate over the good people.
If you think that there's a lot of evil people in the world, you can't have a state because then people who vote are gonna vote for evil policies on the state and so on.
So, I mean, if you have only evil people in the world, you can't have a state because they're only gonna be managed and controlled by having competition with each other over their evil doing.
And if there are all good people in the world, you don't need a state because everyone's gonna take care of problems in a moral way anyway.
But the very idea that you're going to protect your property by creating a giant predatory agency called the state that has the power to violate your property rights at will is like, I don't know.
I'm going to protect myself by hiring a bodyguard who beats me up every day.
I don't know. It's weird. So...
Any last thoughts you wanted to mention?
Because I know for some of my audience your exploration of this topic might be a little surprising.
Certainly from... I haven't talked about this for a while, but this is not where I started as if I'm not there anymore.
This is exactly the same position that I've had ever since I went public.
I have had to dip my...
Toe into the political stream from time to time because I still have the same goal of a truly free society.
But is there anything that you wanted to mention in terms of upcoming projects or where you're going to be touring next and all that kind of good stuff?
Well, I'm actually, I'm working out the new tour right now, so I'll keep you posted on that, but I would say that I've started doing, because I've never really done YouTube stuff before I do my podcast, part of the problem, but I've started putting out daily videos over at my YouTube channel, youtube.com slash dsmithcomic, so if you guys want to check that out, it's like a It's like a condensed, not as well-educated version of what you do, but with less research and more cursing.
Well, no. I mean, don't be overly modest.
I mean, it's very funny stuff and very passionate, powerful stuff.
So I really want to check out. Well, thank you.
Can you give that website again? Just youtube.com slash?
Slash dsmithcomic.
Dsmithcomic. Yeah, check that out.
Subscribe to that for sure.
Can I just say, Stefan...
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off, but just to say, I mean, it really is great to hear because, you know, I came up like, you know, on your stuff and listening to you talk about these ideas.
And I love, you know, like hearing you flesh this out.
And I think there is like I think a lot of the confusion around people who feel like you you like like, you know, Stefan Molyneux left these old principles that he was talking about to me.
And please correct me if I'm wrong, but I really I see the transition in your work.
Being a transition from trying to elevate society to the next level and the refocus almost being on protecting what we have.
It's not a transition in any of your principles.
It's just that you start to realize that what we already have is really under threat and that that needs to be protected and that we still want to get to the next level.
None of this has changed.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that it's really a thrill for me and an honor to have these conversations with you.
Well, thanks. You know you've just uncorked a tiny little rant in me.
Okay, yes. Come on. This is what I wanted.
I'll try and keep this as civil as possible.
Have you ever dated a woman?
And she ends up dumping you, like, in a pretty horrible kind of way, right?
And you're like, OK, well, I guess this relationship isn't working out.
I'm going to go date someone else.
And I'm not going to rub it in your face or anything.
I'm just, you know, I'm online.
I'll post pictures of my new girlfriend and all of that.
And she goes kind of crazy on you.
What do you mean you're dating someone new?
That's terrible. You have abandoned our relationship.
It's like, well, you kind of broke up with me.
So I'm going to go date new people.
Like it's kind of, you know, it's a little bunny boiler to kind of do this.
Now with the libertarian community, yeah, love libertarianism.
I think it's, you know, it's close to where it needs to be.
It's a good gateway drug to a stateless society and respect a lot of libertarians.
But, you know, came up with a great theory of ethics that stood the test of time.
Eh, they kind of trashed all over it, didn't like it, didn't really care about it.
It's okay, well, you know, don't like that, that's fine.
Came up with peaceful parenting.
Eh, you know, didn't really like that so much, kind of shadowed me all over that kind of stuff.
Came up with the against me argument, was somewhat critical of Ron Paul's candidacy.
Not because I dislike Ron Paul, it just was never going to work, right?
Right. And the idea that libertarians say, well, all we have to do, see Dave, or staff, all we have to do is educate people on the free market and they'll love the free market.
And my rebuttal to that was, there are a lot of libertarian academics that Who are well steeped in free market principles, who still take money, protection, and power from the state in terms of being academics.
So even if we give everyone a PhD in Austrian economics, they're still going to love the state because a lot of people with PhDs in Austrian economics take the power and protection of the state, even though they know it's immoral.
So I was like the Socratic gadfly saying, okay, well, libertarianism has been around, classical liberalism, for about 150 years, and you all keep losing.
So, you know, what they say, when you keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, you're kind of crazy, right?
So I was like, yeah, peaceful parenting and the against-me argument, and let's stop focusing as much on education and start focusing more on how we live these values in a personal way, become the shining beacon.
And of course, I think that if libertarians had listened way back, sort of 10, 11 years ago, then we'd have a whole generation of libertarian kids growing up who would have superpowers relative to other children.
We would have abandoned this mere education thing and become more passionate and powerful in living our values and we would have put our personal relationships to the test and we'd have a really powerful growing movement.
And if libertarians had listened to the arguments against open borders and had helped broadcast those arguments rather than fighting me tooth and nail, maybe we wouldn't have a migrant crisis.
Maybe they wouldn't, like who knows, right?
Any number of things. And so when people say, well, you're no longer part of the same milieu that you were 11 years ago, it's like, well, they kind of broke up with me.
I mean, it's not like they had really good rebuttals to my arguments.
They just didn't like them and got emotional and got ostracizing because ostracism is, as I said before, pretty bad.
So it's like, OK, so working with libertarians, They don't want to listen to new advice from someone who spent 15 years in the free market and has been studying philosophy since the age of 15 and I'm not bad at it.
You know, I'm really not that bad at it at all.
I'm pretty good at public speaking, pretty good at making arguments, original and creative and so on.
And so it's like, okay, well, this team doesn't want to be coached.
You know, they want to keep losing.
And so it's like, okay, well, I'm not going to coach this team.
I'm going to try and coach other teams that are more interested in winning and who are more willing to listen.
And it's like, well, why aren't you coaching us?
It's like, you said you hated me as a coach and you weren't going to change anything you do.
And I kind of want to have an effect in the world because life is short.
My abilities are great.
And I want to make sure I get the most traction out of them before I shuffle off this mortal coil.
So when people are like, well, you're not the same as you used to be, it's like, well, yeah, I'm coaching a new team now because the old team didn't want to listen.
And they still keep doing the same stupid stuff, and they still keep denying race and IQ, and they still open borders like a lot of them.
There's some differences and all that.
And they still think it's all just about blogging and educating, and they don't want to live their own personal values, and they haven't argued back against universally preferable behavior, which is kind of what the world needs to have ethics without the state and without God.
But, you know, so they kind of broke up with me.
I'm dating someone new and they're getting all kind of like, well, that's terrible of you.
It's like, well, you know, maybe if you'd listened.
You know, there's this whole thing. It's an old Jerry Seinfeld joke.
You may know it or not. Every time I'm on a plane, I think of it.
You know that curtain between...
First class and coach, you know, the way that stewardess just closes it, right?
And Seinfeld is all like, you know what she's saying?
It's like, well, maybe if you just worked a little hard, you know, it's like, well, we could still be buds.
And, you know, I'm still open to overtures.
I mean, if libertarians and all these people want to like, you know, Guess we're not winning, and you're doing, you know, we've got more than half a billion views and downloads.
Things are going pretty well. I'm always open.
I mean, I would never make enemies permanently unless they've done some really egregious harm, but, you know.
And also, you know, when I was attacked by the mainstream media, libertarians just kind of...
All I saw were these wily coyote holes in the wall kind of thing, right?
Whereas other people have been standing by me much more as attacks naturally are going to continue in this kind of thing.
So there's my little rant.
If you break up with me, don't get mad at me.
If I date new people, otherwise everyone knows then why you broke up with me.
I mean, the psycho girlfriend's like, I can't believe you're dating new people.
I'm going to key your car. And it's like, I think that's probably why he broke up with her.
We thought that relationship didn't work out.
So thank you for giving me the chance to get that.
I'm glad. I very much enjoyed that.
And let me just say that I completely get where you're coming from, but that there are quite a bit of us, and this is part of the reason why you have such a large audience, Who were in the libertarian world and and I mean I remember first hearing your your peaceful parenting uh argument and being like I think this is the most brilliant application of libertarian principles to to real life that that I've ever heard from anybody and um of course that and upb and all the stuff and I love that and and I very much uh you know like I I completely get where you took those libertarian principles and went after things like feminism and and the you know the the You know,
the race mongering stuff from the left and a lot of it.
So anyway, I really very much enjoyed hearing that rant and keep up the great work.
And it really is an honor to be with you.
Thanks, Dave. I really appreciate that.
Just want to remind people, but put the links to this below, gasdigitalnetwork.com.
The website is comicdavesmith.com and twitter.com forward slash comicdavesmith.
Give me that YouTube one more time, brother.
It's youtube.com slash dsmithcomic.
dsmithcomic. All right. Well, thanks, man.
Thanks for the lengthy chat.
I know that people really enjoy it when we go.
We go deep, baby. We just go deep to the hilt.
So thanks for your time.
I look forward to talking again soon and best of luck with your next project.
