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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:01
Jon Stewart's 19 Tough Questions for Libertarians!
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So, we have Jon Stewart's 19 questions to libertarians.
I will attempt to answer them succinctly.
Number one, is government the antithesis of liberty?
No.
That is like saying that a dragon is the antithesis of biology, or a ghost is the antithesis of a human being.
Governments and dragons and hippogriffs and unicorns and ghosts do not exist.
They are really only people with guns and people running and hiding from them.
And so, the initiation of force is the antithesis of morality and of liberty.
The government is simply one large example, but there are many others.
Rapists, thieves, murderers, assaulters, and so on.
So no, government is not the antithesis of liberty.
The initiation of force is the antithesis of liberty.
Two, one of the things that enhances freedoms are roads.
Infrastructure enhances freedom.
A social safety net enhances freedom.
Absolutely.
And allowing rape enhances the freedom of a rapist.
But freedom is not the goal.
Morality is the goal.
Jetpacks give you freedom from gravity, so to speak.
That doesn't mean that they're moral.
So yeah, for sure, social safety net enhances freedom.
But of course, these things also enhance the freedom to make bad choices.
So for instance, free roads from the government, and they were free for those who bought them because they were all financed through deficit spending.
So the bill was simply paid forward to the future generation or billed forward to the next generation.
It allows you to make bad choices.
Welfare allows you to make bad choices, like not completing your education, like not getting job skills, like having too many kids when you can't financially pay for them.
It's really, really bad for the children.
Roads allow a society to make really bad decisions, like have urban sprawl and use massive amounts of energy, as opposed to looking for alternatives.
It doesn't matter what the results are.
Slavery enhances the freedom to trade for slave owners, yet we would not say that is moral.
3.
What should we do with the losers that are picked by the free market?
Well, there are two kinds of losers.
I don't really like to use that phrase, but let's use it.
There are two kinds of losers.
There are people who have problems in and of themselves, like some mental deficiency or some sort of physical handicap that significantly impedes their economic productivity.
And this is a very small percentage of the population.
And Americans already give hundreds of billions of dollars to charity, as is the case with most of the Western world.
So there's no reason to believe that that won't continue.
And so those people will be taken care of.
They will have family, they will have friends, they will have charities, and all these kinds of things to take care of them.
But there are other people who are losers, who are not picked by the free market, but are losers as the result of their own choices.
Right?
So they have sex without protection, get pregnant, and bingo, bango, bongo, they have a significant impediment to their future productivity.
So, people make mistakes.
They make bad choices.
People can choose to invest in only one stock, some speculative mining stock, and then they get wiped out.
Well, that's the result of your own choices.
I mean, freedom is risk.
Freedom is responsibility.
And people who choose to take risks in order to make lots of money, and I have no problem with risk-taking.
I mean, it was risky for me to quit my secure career as an IT executive and entrepreneur to do this crazy stunt for a, quote, living.
And if that had blown up in my face and I'd ended up starving to death or having to go back to my old career, eh, these are risks for me to take.
Losers that are picked by the free market is to externalize the reality of people's choices.
Do we live in a society or don't we?
Are we a collective?
Everybody's success is predicated on the hard work of all of us.
Nobody gets there on their own.
Why should it be that the people who lose are hung out to dry?
For a group that doesn't believe in evolution, it's awfully Darwinian.
Well, It's really a shame when people who don't understand science use scientific metaphors.
I think it's Ayn Rand who observed that if people call capitalism a dog-eat-dog world, but dogs don't even eat each other in nature, let alone in the free market.
The free market is predicated on win-win negotiations.
This is a praxeological foundational fundamental truth, that if two people engage in voluntary trade, both of them anticipate or expect to be better off at the end of that trade.
There's simply no way to get around that.
If I have five bucks and you have a pen, I give you five bucks in return for the pen.
You want my five dollars more than you want the pen, and I want your pen more than I want my five dollars.
So we're both better off.
It is win-win.
That is not the case with a lion chasing a gazelle.
That is win-lose-and-eat.
Darwinian doesn't apply to the free market.
If your business fails, you don't get eaten by predators.
The idea that nobody gets there on their own, well, sure, but that doesn't mean that... It's true that somebody who succeeds has some participation, they have lenders, they have investors, they have employees, they have the people who heat their building, they have the people who make their computers.
But the difference is that we voluntarily trade to gain all of these benefits.
The fact that Steve Jobs is successful because I bought an iPad, it doesn't mean that I am somehow owed some part of Steve Jobs' fortune.
No, because we voluntarily traded.
His company gave me an iPad in return for the money.
I wanted the iPad more than the money, they wanted my money more than the iPad.
Voluntary exchange.
So we trade for those things.
We don't expect that because somebody is successful while we've been sitting on our thumbs that we somehow owed some portion of their success.
In a representative democracy, we are the government.
We have work to do, we have a business to run, and we have children to raise.
We elect you as our representatives to look after our interests within a democratic system.
These are all just words.
This is exactly what was said about the Soviet Union under Stalin, that it was representative of the will of the people and it represented the interests of the proletariat and so on.
But that's not how the government works.
That's not what the government is.
The financial services industry over the past few decades have contributed over two billion dollars in campaign contributions.
So they have bought and sold the politicians who should be running around with Logos of the companies stitched all over them like NASCAR drivers because they're owned.
So the only people we get to vote for are people who've been bought and sold by special interests beforehand.
The financial services industry has donated more to political runs for office than the healthcare industry, than the defense industry, than a bunch of other industries all put together.
This is all just like jailhouse rock elevated to a description of reality.
We're not the government.
We're not the government.
We say to the government, oh, we want you to regulate this financial industry.
Well, all that means is that the financial industry buys the people who regulate.
They write the laws.
Because, you know, we always think that, I don't know, regulators are like parents and the companies are like, the corporations are like children.
But quite the opposite is true.
Because if you're really, really smart in the financial industries, you don't go to become a regulator.
You go make a billion dollars on Wall Street.
It's the dumb people who go into the regulators.
It's the bottom of the class.
It's the lower IQ.
It's the less skilled, the less competent.
They're the ones who become the regulators.
They're outsmarted, outmaneuvered, outbought, outbribed by everybody in the financial services industry.
That is the reality of what happens.
And going back to grade school imaginary propagandistic nonsense to describe this predatory system is childish and ridiculous.
is government inherently evil?
6.
You know, should we take a dragon to trial for eating virgins?
Well, no.
No, that's a fairytale.
The government is a fairytale.
The initiation of force is immoral, and those people who initiate force is immoral.
Fraud, I think, would be punished in a free society, so those people who lie and misrepresent will face negative consequences, whether they're financial or some other matter.
Again, to say government is inherently evil is to create a red herring.
It's like saying, you know, are black rapists wrong?
Well, it's just one category of rapists, and government is just one category of the initiation of force, so forget about the government.
It doesn't matter.
I mean, people say to me, well, you're an anarchist, you're an atheist.
None of this is true.
I mean, the reality is that I'm a philosopher, which means I pursue truth, and I'm sorry if imaginary things get knocked over by my mad drive towards the pinnacle of truth, but They're not there to begin with.
So, yeah, the government is not inherently evil.
That is prejudicial.
You've got to be more specific, more precise.
I mean, if I say black rapists are evil, I've only confused the issue.
No.
Rape is evil.
It doesn't matter.
The initiation of force is evil.
I don't care if government does it or anybody else does it.
It's just a reality.
Seven.
Sometimes to protect the greater liberty, you have to do things like form an army or gather a group together to build a wall or levy.
Yeah.
But see, these are all terms of voluntarism.
Gather together, voluntarily form an army.
People can do all of that stuff voluntarily.
I mean, if the majority of people can act in an intelligent way, which is how the myth goes in a democracy, if the majority of people can act in an intelligent way to vote people in and understand all of the issues that the politicians are going for, I know how politicians should act in health care and national defense and education and roads and debt and foreign policy, I'm smart enough to... Well, then people are smart enough to do all these things voluntarily, with voluntary free association.
Eight, as soon as you've built an army, you've now said government isn't always inherently evil because we need it to help us sometimes.
So now, it's that old joke, would you sleep with me for a million dollars?
How about a dollar?
Who do you think I am?
Well, we've already decided who you are, now we're just negotiating.
Well, again, in my free book, Practical Anarchy, available at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
Tons of solutions in Huntsman and Harpy and the Mises.org and Libra.
You can find all of these places.
Great examples of private defense solutions that don't require a government.
So, you can build an army without a government.
You can have a defense agency without a government.
It's a logical fallacy to say that because the government does it, if the government doesn't do it, it won't get done.
It's like saying, slaves pick the cotton, and if we get rid of slavery, nobody will pick the cotton.
No, because the goal is to pick the cotton.
The goal is to pick the cotton, and if you take away one methodology, which is immoral, called slavery, to do that, other methodologies, far superior, far more moral, will be created and brought to bear.
Easy peasy.
Solved.
You say government, that government which governs least, governs best.
But those were the Articles of Confederation.
We tried that for eight years.
It didn't work and went to the Constitution.
Government is immoral.
Sorry, I just already corrected myself on that.
It is easy to slip into these colloquialisms.
Initiation of force is immoral.
They don't care what form it takes.
10.
You give money to the IRS because you think they're going to hire a bunch of people and so if your house catches fire, they will come there with water.
First of all, you don't give money to the IRS.
Saying you give money to the IRS is like saying you make love to your rapist.
It's a contradiction in terms.
It's like saying that you are charitable towards your thief, the man who is robbing you.
There were private ways of putting out fire.
Did the government come up with sprinkler systems?
No.
These were all done by private companies.
So yeah, tons of ways to keep fire at bay.
You don't have to have a government to do it.
Why is it that libertarians trust a corporation in certain matters more than they trust representatives that are accountable to voters?
The idea that I would give up my liberty to an insurance company as opposed to my representative seems insane.
Representatives are not accountable to voters.
They're not accountable to voters.
Do you have a contract with your political representative?
Is he bound by law to fulfill the pledges or the promises that he makes to you?
Do you have any recourse if he breaks his word to you?
If he does not do exactly what You asked him to do, or what he promised to do.
No, you have no recourse.
I mean, you have recourse if somebody doesn't ship you an iPod on eBay.
You have no recourse if politicians break promises to you.
The politicians don't even know who voted for them, and then you say that they're accountable to voters.
It's madness.
Again, libertarians trust corporations more than they trust government.
It's a misnomer.
Of course, corporations are an effect of state power.
Corporations don't exist in and of themselves and never would in the free market.
I've done lots of videos on that.
But it's like saying, do you prefer voluntary interactions or do you prefer violent interactions?
I mean, this is the reality of it.
I mean, a private organization that is providing a good or service voluntarily Do you feel more comfortable saying no to Apple or do you feel more comfortable tearing up a letter that you get from the IRS?
Do you feel more comfortable not returning a phone call from a telemarketer or do you feel more comfortable not returning a phone call from your local government?
12.
Why is it that with competition we have such difficulty with our healthcare system and there are choices within the educational system?
Well, the basic reality is we have difficulties in our health care system for two reasons.
One is that there will always be people who have difficulties with their health care system.
There will be people who choose not to have health insurance and who then get sick.
And those people are in trouble.
Absolutely.
And there are people who die without life insurance.
Does that mean that we should all be forced to pay for everyone's funeral?
You make choices in life.
You make choices in life.
And you're responsible for those choices.
So there are people who make bad health choices.
I mean, I don't like to work out particularly.
I don't like to spend money on a home gym or going to a gym or time or energy away from doing other things that I would rather be doing.
It's not that much fun sitting there.
I've got a bike machine in the basement with a couple of weights and so I go and work out.
And it's a bummer.
I would love to eat more cheesecake.
I would love to eat more things.
I love to eat, but I don't because I want to stay healthy.
And so exercise and eating well is my choice.
Other people don't choose.
They choose not to exercise.
They choose to eat really badly and so on.
And those people, you know, pay me now or pay me later.
I mean, I choose to not do that.
Other people choose to do that.
So why should I have to pay for other people?
I mean, if they ask me, right, maybe I'll help them, you know.
People make bad decisions and, you know, I shouldn't die for them.
But the reality is nobody can force me to do that and I can't force other people to subsidize my preferences or my choices.
Because force is wrong.
And so people are going to make bad choices.
They're not going to have health insurance.
They're going to not take care of their health.
They're going to get sick.
Other people get sick.
Like, you know, Michael J. Fox gets Parkinson's.
God help him, right?
I mean, that's terrible.
And I'm really happy to help those people.
I really am.
Because, you know, it can happen.
So there's always going to be problems with health care.
Because people are going to make bad choices.
But the reality is that, I mean, in the U.S., more than 50 cents on every dollar is controlled by the government.
Regulations are controlled by the government.
Payouts are controlled by the government.
I mean, it's nuts, right?
So the more violence you put into a system, the worse it's going to get in the long run.
The better it is in the short run, of course.
It's like heroin.
It's good in the short run, it's just not good in the long run.
Would you go back to 1890?
It's just comparing apples to oranges.
The advancements that have occurred since 1890 are scarcely the responsibility of the initiation of force.
It's like saying, would you rather have no slavery and no pyramids?
Well, yeah, of course.
Because if they hadn't had slavery, we'd all have a much more advanced world right now.
14.
If we didn't have government, we'd all be in hovercrafts and nobody would have cancer and broccoli would be ice cream.
I mean, I don't even know what to say about that.
15.
Unregulated markets have been tried.
The 80s and 90s were the Robert Barron age.
These regulations didn't come out of an interest in restricting liberty.
What they did is came out of an interest in helping those that have been victimized by a system that they couldn't fight back against, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, so unregulated markets have scarcely been tried.
There's certainly been more and less regulation and so on.
The Robert Barron Age.
I mean, you can read Tom DiLorenzo for this sort of stuff, or any reasonably competent libertarian historian.
I mean, this is all just lies and nonsense.
I mean, we live in this 1984 world of, you know, everyone in the back was an evil, you know, Monopoly figurine with a top hat and a bald cat and swirling their pencil-thin mustache out of a steam bath of evil.
It's all nonsense.
I mean, the people who made a lot of money in those days made money through voluntary trade, because they lowered prices, because they were insanely competitive, because they worked really hard.
I mean, do we call Steve Jobs a robber band?
Now, of course, Steve Jobs did employ some pretty gruesome labor practices in China and so on.
That's for another time.
But Steve Jobs did say to Barack Obama, listen, you've got to loosen The violent control that governments have in America over the creation of factories.
He much rather would have had factories in America than go over to China.
And the problem with the factories in China is the lack of the free market in China.
This is not exactly a free market situation or environment in China.
Do we look at this guy as an evil guy who stole from everyone?
No, I don't think so.
Although he was a real patent troll and I think that was a real mistake.
Again, blame the game, not the player.
Blame the rules, not the players.
Patent trolling is so profitable and so essential in many ways to modern high-tech companies, because if you don't do it, somebody else is going to do it, to blame people for using that.
to blame the powers that be who create these rules, not the individuals who are forced to live within them and attempt to profit within them.
But, yeah, I mean, the...
I think it was the guy here, Rockefeller, he saved the whales!
He saved the whales!
You don't hear that about 19th century capitalists, right?
So when they came up with the kerosene for people and reduced the price so that people could use kerosene instead of whale oil to light their lamps, people switched to kerosene and the whales were saved.
You don't hear about Robert Barron saving the whales, because it doesn't fit into the narrative.
Why do you think workers that worked in the mines unionized?
Well, I think they unionized because they had terrible working conditions.
Absolutely.
And they should unionize and people should unionize and they should voluntarily get together and they should strike if their conditions are not to their satisfaction.
I think they absolutely should.
I don't think that they should beat up scabs who want to work for, who are willing to work for less money because I care about the poor.
But yeah, unionizing I think is fantastic.
You don't need the government to unionize.
You don't need a government for everyone to get together and say, we're not going to show up to work tomorrow unless this and this is addressed.
You don't need that.
Or for the workers to get together and say, listen, let's all quit and we will take an offer to the bank to buy the mine out, if we want to, based upon all of our knowledge, all of our productivity.
We'll go to the bank and we'll say, listen, you guys who are financing this mine operation, or whoever it is, we're all going to quit tomorrow, or next week, or next month, or whatever.
And we will do X, Y, and Z to take over.
I mean, these things are all possible and they've been done before.
But you don't need a government for people to get together and make decisions.
17.
Without the government there are no labor unions because they would be smashed by Pinkerton agencies or people hired or even sometimes the government.
I don't know what to say about that.
18.
Would the free market have desegregated restaurants in the South?
Or would the free markets have done away with miscegenation if it had been allowed to?
Would Martin Luther King have been less effective than the free market those laws sprung up out of a majority sense of in that time that blacks should not blah blah blah, the free market would not have supported integrated lunch counters?
I mean, please.
Oh my God, what do you say?
What do you even say?
All right.
I just, I mean, this is too ridiculous for words.
And again, it's just a moment's thought.
First off, I mean, the whole beginning of the civil rights movement was The woman who got on the bus and crossed over and blah blah blah.
Restaurants want customers.
And a restaurant where there are blacks who want to eat there is a restaurant that is serving cheaper food, because the blacks had a lower income at that time.
So do you really think that cheap restaurants, fast food restaurants in a sense, and bus companies want to piss off blacks who are going to be a big source of their customers?
No, of course not.
They were forced to segregate.
It was the government that made them segregate.
So the idea that segregation somehow gets blamed on the free market is ridiculous.
They were forced to be segregated.
But let's take that away.
Let's pretend that historical fact didn't really exist, doesn't really exist at all.
Doesn't really exist at all.
And the government didn't force anybody to segregate.
It's still complete nonsense.
Because all you have to do is ask yourself one basic question when you look at society as a whole and you have problems with it.
It's a basic, simple question.
You just have to ask yourself, Who the hell was educating these children?
These children who grew up to be bigots and racists in the South.
Which agency was responsible for their education, for the most part?
Was it the bus company?
No, I don't think so.
I think it was the fast food.
I think, I think pretty much these kids went to government schools and emerged as racists.
So the idea that you're going to blame the tenor of society, the morality of society, on some free institution, when children are compelled to go to school, their parents are compelled, by force, to pay for that education, that indoctrination really, is ridiculous.
It's like the government forces all the children to go to school and learn French in France, and then you say that you blame voluntary and free market and peaceful associations for the fact that children speak French in France.
I mean, it's madness.
Everybody glosses over government schools and their responsibility for the education of the young, and how much children's minds and morals and values and ethics and worldviews and natures are shaped By this coercive institution called government.
Education.
Using the word in the loosest possible sense.
Anyway.
19.
Government is necessary, but must be held accountable for its decisions.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think that we should all summon pink flying lisping unicorns to cure cancer.
I mean, I think that would be great.
Can you imagine?
You can If you live in a world of words, you can manipulate your fantasies any way that you want.
The matrix is language.
Government should be held accountable for its actions.
Well, what do you even say about that?
You can't say anything about that, because there's nothing of any reality in there.
An imaginary entity should be held accountable in some imaginary, undescribed way for the actions which itself, as an imaginary entity, it can't even take, since the government doesn't exist, it doesn't act.
It's like Citibank, right?
So Citibank got dinged for $500 million in fines for bundling up all of these toxic securities and selling them while shorting them.
Right, so it was selling all these securities to people while at the same time betting these securities were going to go down.
It's complete fraud.
Complete lack of disclosure.
And what is it?
2,500 Occupy Wall Street protesters have been arrested so far and zero bankers for anything that happened over the past few years.
Zero bankers.
Score, bankers zero in arrests and Wall Street protesters over 2,500.
That's what we call government justice.
And the reality is that people say, well, Citigroup did a bad thing, and Citigroup got a fine, and Citigroup had to pay that fine, and that's called holding Citigroup accountable.
Completely ignoring the fact that Citigroup doesn't exist.
It's not a real thing.
It's not a building.
It's not even electricity or energy.
It's words on a piece of paper.
It's an imaginary artificial construct, like a country.
It doesn't exist.
You can't see it from space.
And so the idea that Citigroup is somehow held to account, it's held to account, you see, because Citigroup had to pay a fine.
No, Citigroup didn't have to pay a fine.
You know, if you're a kid and you do something bad and you say, it's my invisible friend who's going to get in trouble.
Kid's fine.
All you need to do is encourage that kid to get more bad, do more bad things, because only his invisible friend is getting punished or accepting any consequences.
It's madness.
Citigroup didn't pay any fine.
Because it doesn't exist.
Now, if people had said that the 500 million dollar fine...
It has to be paid by the executives and the traders who executed these decisions from their own personal bank accounts.
If their houses have to be seized, if their own personal bank accounts have to be seized as a consequence of their decisions because they profited, they took money out of this fictional construct called Citigroup.
They took real money out, fiat money out, of this imaginary construct and put it in their banks and used it to buy real things.
And so if Citigroup has to pay a fine when they took the money out, well the money has to go back in because there was a fine but that never happens.
Those people get to keep all that money and who pays the fine?
Shareholders will accept less value in their shares.
Employees will have to accept lower or less raises.
Or customers in one form or another will pay, either in reduced income or they'll raise their fees for managing whatever they manage.
I don't know if they do in mutual funds or whatever, but they'll just raise their fees.
They don't pay.
The idea that Citigroup is going to pay anything is ridiculous.
It's a fantasy.
There's no such thing as Citigroup.
They're people with money.
And the people who got their money out don't have to pay these fines.
Other people have to pay these fines.
What is it?
Bank of America was floating this idea that you now have to spend five dollars a month to use their Interact card?
Well, that's called accountability for the Bank of America.
Bank of America got hit with a bunch of fines and so now they just pass the castle on to their customers.
This is called justice in a state of society.
And what can you say?
What can you say?
You have to declutter and demystify your mind and your language and your words have to be precise and your words have to wrap Like a Christmas present wrapping around real things.
And do not lift up a box that is empty and think you've received a gift.
If somebody gives you a word like government, collective, corporation, society, country, God, these are mere empty syllables rattling around in our minds.
They do not represent anything that is true.
They do not represent anything that is real.
Two-year-olds understand this.
Give a two-year-old a present.
Have her open that present, and there's nothing inside, and say, No, no, I've really given you something.
The child will cry.
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