Aug. 10, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:04
4163 "Do you have any questions which aren't race-baiting?"
Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern speak with an Australian Journalist about their Australian tour - and almost immediately the question decent into absurd race-baiting. Watch Molyneux and Southern reasonably answer unreasonable questions and leave the journalist increasingly befuddled as the interview progresses.Your 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
How would you guys describe yourself in terms of, obviously not white supremacists, but would you say white nationalists?
Thank you for linking that term with us right up.
That's wonderful, very objective.
No, how would you define yourself?
I'm a philosopher. I follow reason and evidence, first principles, Socratic method.
Would you say that you attract some people who would describe themselves as, if not white nationalists, then proud of their white identity, would you say?
I really don't track the ideology of the listenership.
No? How about you, Laura?
It's difficult to be put into a category these days when you're a truth seeker because whenever they try to put a category on or label on people that are in the more right-wing side of politics, the Goalposts shifted immediately.
So alt-right used to just mean alternative media, and then during the election it kind of switched to be more white supremacist or white nationalist.
Conservative used to mean you actually wanted to conserve things.
Now it basically means liberal.
So these terms lose their meaning so quickly.
So to really attach myself to one ideology, one name, I don't think it's a smart idea, and in a few months it may not accurately describe me anyway.
If I did have to say, maybe a large chunk of my listeners are nationalists.
Certainly a lot of white nationalists and people that would be considered supremacists don't like me.
Some do. I don't care.
Those aren't the ideas I espouse for the most part, but the media will call you what they will.
The other thing, too, it's so easy to create fake accounts and pretend to follow someone that, you know, is saying, well, you know, there's some guy who's got bad opinions who seems to follow you.
It's like, nobody knows if that real could have been created by you.
I'm not saying it would, but it could have been created by you for the purpose of an interview.
So I prefer to look at the arguments themselves rather than try and figure out the psychic phenomenon of the followers who may or may not be real.
Right. Okay. But certainly, like, particularly for you, Lauren, there definitely would be...
There would be some quite obvious people who do attach themselves to you.
People don't have a right to attach themselves to me and say that they stand for my ideas.
They don't have a right to speak up for me or speak for me.
I speak for myself and myself alone.
And if we're going to attach everyone's followers and make them responsible for their own followers, we could spend all our days questioning the left-wing media who have People in Antifa, people who have been pedophiles, people who have been criminals, murderers, that have enjoyed their work or shared their work.
I am not responsible for the opinions or the actions of the people who watch my work.
I'm responsible for my own language and my own opinions.
I've seen a lot of professors get interviewed on the mainstream media.
Now, I was taught by out-and-out Marxists when I was in both undergraduate and graduate school, and in America, in some of the disciplines like anthropology, 30-40% of the professorship aligned themselves as outright Marxists.
Now, Marxism killed about 100 million people in the 20th century alone, but I've never seen a mainstream media ever confront a professor saying, are there a lot of Marxists?
Do you have a lot of Marxists around?
Marxism killed a lot of people and so on.
None of our followers have ever killed anyone, yet we get these questions and mainstream professors don't.
It's just one of the biases that's hard to see.
Fair enough. So in terms of university, do you guys have a view on self-censorship among conservatives at university?
What do you mean self-censorship?
Do you think conservatives are censoring themselves?
At university, so undergraduate at university.
Of course, because they want to pass.
Yeah. I mean, it's very lefty in the university.
And I have no problem with lefty.
I have no problem with lefty as long as it's reason and evidence.
The left, as I said in the last interview, the left have very viable criticisms of the military-industrial complex and imperialism and so on.
Fantastic. But when it's lefty, like, I've had people call into my show and say, here's the assigned reading.
You can only quote in your essays from this assigned reading.
You cannot go outside of it.
That's just straight-up indoctrination.
So, yeah, of course. I mean, people get calls from agonized University students all the time who say, well, I don't agree with it, but I don't trust a teacher to grade me fairly if I disagree with her or him.
And so there is a massive amount of self-censorship because higher education has devolved into largely encouraging people with the bait of high salaries to fund their own indoctrination.
Terrible stuff. How about in terms of political organization among conservatives?
Do you think at universities this still is?
Do you think there is a reluctance to organize publicly?
Absolutely. You see every single day stories about kids having drinks poured on them, being attacked, punched in the face just for wearing mega hats at schools.
This even happens in Canada where we don't kind of have the same insane violent debates that they do in the left or with the left in Antifa in America all the time.
All over, kids are being oppressed, kicked out of classes just for right-wing opinions.
I myself experienced it.
I'd get worse grades on my essays in women's studies class if I didn't come to the same conclusion as the professor.
Professors kick me out of classes for my opinions.
That's part of the reason that I kind of backed off from university and decided to just go figure out things for myself in the real world because my professors, they weren't just not allowing me to explore different ideas.
They were failing me and kicking me out if I even tried to or tried to bring up the discussion in class.
So this isn't It's a very sad reality and it's an unfortunate thing for left-wing students as well because I got to have my views challenged all throughout my education.
Throughout high school I had teachers telling me I was wrong, giving me the different points and all throughout university I had to write essays about opinions I disagree with.
I always have to defend my views.
The left-wing students never have to do that.
They never have anyone criticize their views and therefore they never get to strengthen their views Or consider different ideas.
So they're really given less ammo in the real world for when they participate.
That's why I find it very easy to debate lefties for the most part.
It's fun. I mean, it's not just ideological as well.
It's race-based. I mean, so you can have...
Every ethnic group organizing for their own particular interest in university, right?
You can have a Hispanic group, you can have a black group, and it's all perfectly fine.
But if you try to set up a white group, you're immediately, you know, KKK nationalist, Nazi, whatever it is, white supremacist.
And that's, you know, frustrating, of course, for a lot of people, because...
They want to get together and say, you know, maybe this whole narrative about white privilege has got a few logical and empirical holes in it.
Maybe we should push back against it.
Maybe it's kind of a racist idea, which it is.
But if you try to organize as a white group, you will immediately be branded as Nazi and white supremacists, which occurs to no other group.
And so it is not just conservatives, but it's also whites who are having a very difficult time getting their particular perspective across or fighting back against particular injustices that they see on campus.
Do you see any of your guys' popularity as coming from conservative, particularly young people, being unable to express their political views publicly and amongst their peers?
I mean, it's a fairly recent phenomenon to have these sort of internet-based writing people, and it's sort of coincided with the rise of Well, I mean, both Lauren and I have experienced the media trying to absolutely destroy our lives.
Without a doubt, like to attack your source of income, to try to destroy your reputation, to go after, I mean, just the worst possible things.
And so people do say, thank you very much for speaking up.
You can do it. I will lose my job.
I will lose, you know, my income.
I could lose my family.
I could lose my friendships.
I mean, so people are very much afraid of this sort of leftist troll hate mob that will try to dox them, that will try to contact their employer and so on.
And it is a very, it's a terrible situation.
Trying to destroy someone's life is not an argument.
If someone's wrong, prove them wrong and be civilized and move on.
But trying to destroy someone's life, well, this is what the left does.
This is what they do when they don't have power.
When the left does have power, they tend to put millions of people in ditches with bullets in the back of their head.
Yeah, we get to be a voice for the voiceless.
And in some cases, people that, like in South Africa, we were just at a rally for white South Africans where they are being oppressed by their government.
And there's not a single media group in South Africa.
The government aren't speaking up for them.
The universities won't tell people what's going on.
So we get to be a voice not just for conservatives in America who don't have a voice, conservatives in the West who don't have a voice, but also All these issues worldwide that different populations are facing that the media doesn't seem to care about.
Certainly a lot of white populations that are being replaced, where their culture is being destroyed, the mainstream media won't talk about it.
And so we get to be a voice for those people who are so ignored.
And it's an insidious level.
People know that this is going on.
They know that there are migrant riots in Greece and people being attacked on the street.
They know there are mass rape and gangs going on in Cologne and Germany, and those things are covered up.
So, not only do we get to be a voice for campus conservatives, we get to be a voice for people all over the world who the media has been ignoring and whose problems have been covered up.
Do you think that...
So, do you think a lot of the popularity of, let's not say alt-right, let's say the new right, It's tough without a label, isn't it? Just about people with reason and evidence.
How about we just talk about people who follow reason and evidence and provide a truth?
You don't have to get us a label that puts us in some category.
Well, I mean, I'm just trying to use it as a broad stretch, which is difficult.
You can say the new media, right?
Because, I mean, this is kind of a new form of media.
Well, no. I mean, particularly the conservative side, because I don't want to bring in the left to this point.
Particular question. Once I ask the question, you might get the idea.
Do you think that a lot of people, especially younger white men, might be drawn to some of your ideas because they're alienated by the left?
Do you have any questions that aren't race-baiting?
I'm just kind of curious about that because you're very much into, well, do you think white nationalists might support you and young white men might support you and this and that?
I mean, this seems like a bit of the same question over and over.
No, I'm saying, do you think they're supporting you because they feel alienated by their peers?
They're supporting us because we tell the truth.
It's not some tribal thing.
Do you genuinely think they believe everything you say?
Why on earth would they believe everything we say?
I don't agree with a single news organization.
We make arguments and people think for themselves.
That's the whole point, right? There are people who agree with some of my videos and disagree with others.
The ones where I put together very solid arguments, I have people of all races, genders, and creeds that say, well damn, I guess you're right.
I have Muslims in my comments section that will comment on my criticisms of Islam and say, I may come from a community that's Islamic, but you made a good argument and that is an accurate conclusion.
It doesn't matter what their race is.
Yes, there have been a lot of young white men that the government has told them, you are evil, you're an oppressor, you're this, that, and the other, and they say, objectively, I am not those things.
Objectively, I am not privileged, so I'm going to look for different answers of what is actually going on here.
And if they're brought to us, it's not because we're saying, white men, come here, I am your representative, I love white people, it's because we give them an explanation that makes sense.
Okay, cool. Okay, so if you had a scale of where 1 is left, 1 is extreme left, 10 is extreme right, can you put these publications on that scale for me?
Sorry, these publications. Can you give me a definition of extreme left and extreme right?
Because I want to make sure we're talking about the same things.
Right, let's go.
How far left can you go in terms of something that...
So what would be an extreme left, say, political country?
Are you talking Chairman Mao?
I mean, what are we talking about? Well, no, not in that sense.
I meant more like sort of Western media left.
I don't mean like as in advocating killing the rich.
It's like an MTV, everything is rape culture, everything is white privilege kind of left.
Yeah, like the left of Huffington Post, I don't think.
And extreme right, what is that?
Extreme right, let's say Breitbart.
Well, I think that's...
Okay, so we've got Huffington Roast and Rayward.
No, no, it's not Pride Bart, actually. No, no, it's not Pride Bart, sorry.
See, the definitions are tough, right?
As in, like, that's actually one of the ones where I wanted you to put that on the scale of it.
So let's say, okay, let's say Fox News would be a 7.
What's a 10? Yeah, what's a 10?
What scale would we welcome it here?
Nuthouse conspiracies bring back slavery.
Let's just say that. Are you saying that we want to gauge Fox News on its proximity to bring back slavery?
Come on. I'm not doing this question.
I'm sorry. We can't even come up with a definition of the term, so I can't rank people accordingly.
And I hate the whole left-right thing.
I know we use the terms from time to time, but I'm interested in, for me, the non-aggression principle.
Do not initiate force against others.
That, to me, is a free society.
All societies that advocate for the initiation of force, whether it's communism or Nazism or slavery or any of these kinds of things, they're on the immoral spectrum.
So the problem at the far left, you end up with, you know, at the extreme left, you end up with communism.
On the extreme right, you end up with Nazism.
Funnily, it's national socialism, which is also collectivism and a big tyrannical government.
So you end up with these, like, two things that are supposed to be opposite.
But they're both collectivist and tyrannical and utterly destructive to human freedom.
So you're asked to choose between two evils and end up wishy-washy nowhere in the middle.
So I can't do anything on the left-right spectrum as far as judging things.
Okay. What are your views on the size of government?
Would you, in general, say you're a big government sort of person in terms of funding?
Zero. Zero? Yeah.
Well, we have some different opinions on this, but I am a voluntarist completely.
Government is an immoral violation of the non-aggression principle.
It is a collectivist agency with the right to use force against usually legally disarmed citizens.
It is a moral agency, and government is like slavery.
It's just something we need to reevaluate and hopefully outgrow.
And I have a lot of similar beliefs to Steph.
However, this is one thing that we disagree on.
I believe that we need a government just big enough to protect our freedoms from more authoritarian states.
So I think our government, our taxes, everything needs to be cut down massively, way more than the average person, way more than the average right-winger.
I started as a libertarian.
I want a government small enough to drown in a bathtub, but just big enough to defend us from more authoritarian governments.
Right, but that's quite big, because there are some big authoritarian governments.
Well, we can cut out...
90% of the social programs that we have that are actually useless.
National defense is like 2 or 3% of the government, so we're talking about a very big reduction.
It's still quite large, though.
Well, I'm talking about getting rid of 90% of the government.
So how about agricultural subsidies?
Oh gosh, no. No, we don't need subsidies.
If people are doing a good job, they'll thrive and succeed.
You also don't send foreign aid to other governments to subsidize their agriculture so it can be imported cheaper, right?
So you let the free market decide.
Alright, so how about in terms of immigration, for example, in Australia, we have lots of temporary skilled migrants because we don't have enough people to support IT infrastructure.
You absolutely have enough people.
To support our IT infrastructure.
You absolutely have enough people. The market simply bids up the prices where there are shortages and then more people go.
You can have five people in the country, you have enough people, they'll just end up being paid a lot.
Right, but what do you do in the intervening time when we have an enormous skills gap?
What do you mean? As in, there aren't enough people who understand how computers work well enough.
How do you know? Because we bring in...
No, but how do you know there aren't enough people?
Because there is a job gap.
How do you know? We can't fill the...
No, you can fill any job.
You just bid up wages, right?
Right, but if they're not trained in IT infrastructure, then they can't do the job.
Right, and that's because, see, normally what happens is, when there's going to be a skills shortage, businesses know that ahead of time, right?
Because businesses have to...
I've been a business owner, right? I guess I still am, right?
So businesses plan five, ten years down the road at a minimum, right?
You have to do that as a business owner.
So what you do is you say, okay, how many people are studying the essential skills that I need, right?
And if there aren't enough people who are going to be coming through whatever training program is necessary, whether it's university or trade school, maybe just self-study as well, what you do is you say, okay, well, we're going to have to talk to the universities.
We're going to start offering people salaries, higher salaries coming right out of university a couple of years down the road, right?
What that does is it sends a very clear signal to people who are figuring out what to study.
Say, well, if I go into feminist theory, then I'm going to make an average of 25k coming up.
But if I go into IT, maybe I get 75k, a guaranteed job.
This is how business and education used to work.
My father got his PhD in geology by dealing with a company who said, okay, we'll pay for your PhD, but in return you give us a work commitment after.
You graduate. And that's how businesses work with education to make sure that skills gaps get closed off.
Now, if there is a genuine skills gap, it means that there has been some miscommunication usually interfered with by the government between businesses who need the skills and the universities who train people to fulfill those skills.
And why on earth you should have mass migration because the government has messed up at the price signals is utterly beyond me.
That's saying, well, the government has screwed things up.
Let's have another giant government program called immigration to cover up the mess.
And also, why are people graduating from 12 years of government schools without good skill sets?
Why do they even have to go to university?
In 12 years, you can go from being someone who knows nothing about being a doctor to being the most amazing surgeon on the planet.
You get students for 12 years.
Why aren't they being trained to function in a modern economy?
Because the government schools are terrible.
So again, you have another giant government program called immigration to fill in For another terrible government program called education.
Let's stop fixing things from the root rather than constantly applying these terrible band-aids.
I just want to add to here, it's also fascinating to me that we have a lot of panic from the millennial generation who say, oh my goodness, I'm never going to be able to have a family because it's going to be so difficult because both the man and the woman are going to have to work.
You need a double income because you can't support a family.
Yet, we're saying we also have a crisis of not being able to fill jobs.
Before, You could have a man having the entire income, before women even came into the workforce, and he could pay for his entire family.
He could get a house. The wife never had to go for work.
How come there wasn't a panic over more workers then, and yet people were being paid more?
And then when women joined the workforce and doubled the size, suddenly everyone's getting paid less.
It's exactly the point.
It's about, you add more people to the workforce, wages are going to go down.
And sorry to give you a whole lecture here, I apologize for that, but just very briefly.
The entire financial system, which is not a free market system, but central government, it's a currency as a giant government program, relies on the value of real estate staying high.
And we saw what happened when there was a little bit of a dip in the value of real estate in America in 2007-2008.
The entire system almost came apart, and they had to pump $700 billion of taxpayer money into the bank office, which was an utterly immoral and wrong thing to do.
So, when you have a baby boom, you get huge demand for housing.
Of course, we know this from the boomers after the Second World War, and that creates a big burst in housing and all of that.
And then you get a hollowing out with the next generation, and that's going to cause the value of real estate to drop, which is what millennials should be experiencing, because there's fewer of them than there were of boomers.
But the problem is that the banks right now have their assets in real estate.
So if the demand for housing goes down, then the value of the bank's assets goes down, and they usually have a 30 to 1 asset to lending ratio.
And so they really have to call in a lot of loans, they have to pull back on their economic activity, or they go bankrupt.
And so one thing that immigration is doing is by constantly bringing people into the country and giving them taxpayer money with which to buy housing, you're propping up the value of housing, of cheaper housing, and then people fly out of those neighborhoods because they're dangerous or unfamiliar, and it pushes up the whole price of housing, which maintains the asset value sheets of the banks.
Now, if there is a drop in the value of housing, the whole Ponzi scheme of modern finance falls apart.
So immigration doesn't have anything to do with skills shortages.
It has to do with just, we need to prop up the value of real estate, and we need to create this delusion that somehow there are going to be enough workers to pay for the boomers' retirements because the governments have promised things that they can't pay for.
And generally what governments do when they make promises they can't pay for, when the bill comes due, they go to war.
Hate to take you back to that IT example I gave you.
Sure, sure. That's my field, man.
I'm an IT guy from way back, so...
So if, for example, you were just to reject, like right now, hypothetically, if the government said...
No immigration. Four, five, sevens, not anymore, anyone who's got one, on a plane back home.
Yep. There's going to be a long teething period.
Why? Why? Because there aren't enough graduates to fill those positions.
But why do you need graduates? I ran an entire IT company, never took a course in computer science.
Do you really think it would be seamless to transition?
I don't know what seamless means.
As in, like, you don't think there'd be an enormous shock given that the IT basically...
The market is incredible. Do you know, there was this question, right?
So let me give you a historical example about how well the free market deals with stuff.
At the end of the Second World War in America, there was a whole government program set up because they said, well, we've got millions of guys coming back from war.
Who's going to hire them?
How are they going to get jobs? Where are they going to go?
And there was this whole government, massive government department set up to deal with all the problems of the GIs coming back from war.
By the time they issued their first mandate, everybody was employed.
The free market will solve these problems so rapidly, it's insane.
But we're so used to, it's got to be all managed by the government.
We've got to have all our ducks in a row.
While everyone's talking, the free market will handle it.
You don't know what the skill set is of Australians.
For me, like I ended up, I wrote software that sold for millions and millions of dollars.
I ran an entire... I was chief technical officer of the software company, had dozens of people reporting to me, building the most complex software for environmental issues that you could imagine.
Never took a computer science course.
You don't need Necessarily, all of this formal education, you need skills.
I, myself, loved computers from the age of 11.
When I got a little bit of inheritance, the first thing I did was buy a computer and figure out how to program back in machine language.
So there's a huge amount of untapped skills in there.
You're just burying it with all this external stuff.
You're quite a big outlier, though.
If you were 11 years old and used your first savings to buy a computer, that's not typical of the rest of the population.
I mean, I have to teach.
Yes, but you work for a government-funded organization, so you may not be on the cutting edge of skill sets here.
Yeah, but I've done the unemployed paper.
The younger generations spend most of the days on computers.
Computers are becoming our new method of communication, our new method of work, education, everything.
Everyone is figuring out and adapting to the jobs and the culture that we are coming into.
And it's a really scary prospect for me as a millennial to think of if they just opened the borders to anyone to come in to take these jobs, there are Millions, millions, millions of people that are going to come in and they'll do these jobs for $5, for $3, for $2. And what's going to happen to all of the workforce that the liberal far-left governments claim to support, claim that they are standing for them?
Well, they're going to disappear.
We're not going to be able to get...
To get good jobs, because there will be people that will literally be willing to do it for slave labor wages.
We criticize China for that, and yet we do massive business with them without good trade deals.
You want to bring that into this country?
Here's the thing, too. If immigration is reduced, let's say, You are giving a massive pay rise to everyone in Australia.
Because when immigration is reduced, the price of real estate goes down.
And also, you're giving people back their time because, as you know, immigrants overwhelmingly live in cities, right?
They don't go... It's not like people are immigrating into Australia to farm the back 40 of the outback, right?
I mean, they're coming to the cities, which means infrastructure burdens, which means traffic problems, which means health care issues because, you know, they're going to get sick and they're going to rent.
So if you say, okay, well, we're going to nurture a homegrown talent, then your requirement for all of these things goes down.
The traffic will go down.
Real estate prices will go down.
Everyone benefits from that in the long run.
Is there going to be a transition?
Well, sure. But you'd be amazed at how well people will learn things and how quickly they will learn things if there's a pot of gold.
On the other side, I think the Australians that I've met so far, yourself included, intelligent, resourceful, energetic, curious, they'll cover the skills gap in no time at all, and everyone else gets the bonus of lower real estate prices.
I mean, the place that we're staying...
Well, not everyone. What about the people who already own the houses?
That is a very fair point.
But they're not selling their houses.
That's a paper loss. Only if they sell their houses does that loss manifest.
But the place that we're staying is like some old factory And I won't get into any details, but it's kind of rickety, kind of creaky, kind of old.
$1.1 million for one of these places.
That is mental. And there's absolutely no reason for it.
We have a baby bust.
The prices should be falling.
Right, but you're not, I mean...
A lot of Sydney's and Melbourne's price hikes are because, not migrants, but because it's Chinese.
Sure. And can Australians go and buy up a lot of China, or is that not allowed?
Can Australians go and move to China and live there?
You don't have reciprocal agreements with these countries that I'm aware of.
So it's a love-sided, one-sided deal that is to the detriment in the long run of Australia and to the advantage of China.
Why doesn't your government negotiate reciprocity agreements so that there can be a back and forth of these kinds of resources?
I don't think that's happening.
Maybe I'm wrong. Well, no.
We can't exactly negotiate something on the equal term in China because we're entirely dependent on them for trade.
That means that they're dependent also upon you for trade.
Of course you can negotiate with them.
Oh, so if you can't negotiate with the country, why the hell are you letting its citizens buy up your land and country?
If you can't even negotiate with them, then you can at least block them from buying up all of your land and country.
Australia was the only Western country that didn't go into a recession during the GFC. No, no, that's not true.
Canada did not go into a recession.
Okay, we had the highest growth rate out of the West, and it was almost entirely because we dug up shit from the ground and sold it for China.
Good. Well, then you can trade with China.
That doesn't mean that you have to allow the Chinese to buy it.
We can sell to China, but only if they want it.
Sure. As in, they're setting terms.
We're not going to the table as equal partners.
Do you think massive foreign ownership of significant resources in Australia from a pretty hostile government that has been known to spy on Western governments like crazy, do you think that that's going to pose any problems?
Do you think it's worth having a recession maybe just to not have that as a problem in the future?
I mean... Having a totalitarian dictatorship own huge sections of your country?
That just seems like... I'll take a recession over that myself.
I mean, there are checks and balances to foreign ownership and have been rejected several times in terms of foreign ownership.
Now, who's rejecting them and who's funding that rejection?
The government, based on intelligence agencies' assessments of national security risk.
Do you think that the average white Australian would prefer there to be less Chinese ownership of Australia?
Probably, but that's you bringing the race into it now.
You brought up China, not me, man.
I said Chinese, which is a country, not a race.
Oriental would be the race, or East Asian.
It would be. We do have to leave very soon.
It's a great debate, but let's move on.
I know, I know, I'm sorry.
Do you think social policies like universal healthcare raise the costs of immigration?
Of course. Okay.
And not only do they raise the cost of immigration, but immigrants as a whole generally consume far more resources than they produce in taxes, and therefore it is not only raising the cost, but it's also lowering the per capita paying into the system as a whole.
What do you think the average person can do to make a country a better place?
Research the facts, tell the truth, and don't back down.
It's actually been proven.
I've been doing a lot of talks about multiculturalism, and people ask me, they say, oh, Lauren, but Canadians, they want multiculturalism.
Australians want multiculturalism.
When actually, when they're polled, and this is an Angus Reid poll, it shows when Canadians are given the data on immigration and how many people are coming in when they're given the data on the lack of assimilation, 70% of Canadians want less immigration and more assimilation.
I wouldn't be surprised if that data was the exact same for Australia.
So, when Stefan says we need more education and people just need to tell the truth, the truth will save us from these nightmare futures.
Absolutely. And the data shows that.
What is your idea of the nightmare future?
A nightmare future would be balkanized states within a previously well-functioning, free, democratic, western country that are competing with each other as factions fighting for different types of laws, different values, different religions, which leads to violent bloodshed, race riots, cultural riots, and fights for the future of the nation.
Yeah, like Lebanon. Do you have a favourite country in terms of a model, the closest you'd like to see your own country?
Well, I work in the realm of philosophical ideals, so my favorite country exists in the future.
Okay. You?
Well, this is the thing. I can take bits and pieces, but I would never take the whole country.
But I think in terms of protecting identity and nationalism and putting our country first, Japan does a pretty good job of that.
You don't see a whole lot of people criticizing them for it either.
We haven't got a great history of Japan, so...
And in terms of, say, a market, as in the size of government, do you think, say, the U.S. has it right, or is there a country that you think has it right?
No one has it right. The smaller the better.
The more voluntary interactions that we have in society, the better, and the government is by definition a coerced interaction.
No. Again, see the thing, if you try and pick anything, I'm not saying you're laying this trap, but for the audience as a whole, if you pick some country and say, that's my ideal country, then what people do is they say, well, they've done this bad and this bad and this bad, and therefore you approve of that, and that's why I stay in the realm of principle.
So, okay. That makes it quite easy for you, though, doesn't it?
In that you're like, no, my idea is so good, it'll be perfect, you just have to wait and see.
No, I mean, this is what we're doing.
We're not using coercion with each other.
We're using voluntary interactions.
I'm just saying everybody's...
The utopia is Y-O-U, right?
Nobody reasonable and civilized use violence in their personal interactions.
You know, if you want your wife to cook you a meal, you ask nicely.
You don't threaten her with a club.
You know, if you want a job, you don't kidnap someone to get the job.
If you want to have sex with someone, you ask nicely and wait for consent rather than rape them.
So we have this consent-based life in our private lives.
I'm just saying that should be our societal life as well.
It's not a mystery like some that we've never experienced.
We're experiencing it right at this table.
Right, but like that on the macro level.
It works personally, but...
There's no historical or present example you can point to where it's just like a little bit more like that.
No, because you could say, well, the founding of the United States was a very small, limited constitutional Republican government, but the problem is it had slavery, which is a vile violation of human rights.
So every place you look to, you know, we're still polishing.
We're still working on the moral journey of mankind.
We can look at a few things here and there and say they had the right idea, but it was so horribly compromised, and we're just working to iron out those compromises so we can move forward to a more free future.
Right.
Okay. Hypothetically.
Okay, it's going to be the last question, right?
We've got to... Yeah, okay. Maybe it's not worth it then.
It might just be a little bit too much color.
Wait, we're going to take that out of context to you.
You know that, right? Yeah. No, don't.
Don't bother. It's a bit too far.
Sorry. Maybe I'll get it to you by email.
Wait, give it to me. Give it to me quick.
If you were to find, so an island rises out of the sea, no one claims it.
You claim it. Stefan claims it.
And you bring people there, you get a population.
Is the water public or private?
The fresh water. Is the freshwater public or private?
Oh, I'd want to keep it as private as humanly possible, so that it could be available to everyone.
Because the moment it's public, people start overcharging it, they start grabbing it, the problem of the commons, which I'm sure you're aware of, shows up.
You want to keep it as private as humanly possible.
Have you ever seen the difference between a toilet in a public place versus a toilet in a private place?
They're very different situations.
So the first person who finds it claims it?
And then if you invest your labor into it, if you homestead it, you'd need to purify it.
That's labor and that's providing value.
And the only reason people would do that was so they'd be able to sell it and then they would be wonderful.
Have you ever heard of the stories about Karl Marx's and Adam Smith's graves?
Funny story, they've actually privatized Karl Marx's grave, and you have to pay $2 to go in and see it, and it's got perfectly cut grass, beautiful, perfectly preserved, and it's public property, Adam Smith's, and it's a disaster.
Absolute mess there. A very, very sad story for both of them.
Well, look at the security we had to go through to get in here.
It's very private. It is.
We didn't do this on the street.
Why? We get bomb threats.
Right. So you want to keep things private as possible.
That's the way to keep them available to people and reasonably priced.
