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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:27
Sorry Libertarians, Capitalism Requires Government - Rebutted!
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
This is an article from longtime Ayn Rand associate Harry Binswanger and it is published at Forbes.com and it's called, sorry libertarian anarchists, capitalism requires government.
And the article goes like this, as it says next to my picture, I defend laissez-faire capitalism.
Laissez-faire, for those who don't know, is the term, laissez-nous faire, leave us be, when the French king asked all the merchants what he could do to further trade, they said, leave us alone, stop trying to help us!
Anti-government is the term leftists use to smear This position, and amazingly some calling themselves libertarians, are indeed anti-government across the board.
They argue for what they call anarcho-capitalism.
This is non-initiation of force and a respect for property rights.
The non-initiation of force, according to the anarcho-capitalist position, which I would count myself in that camp, is basically if you can't initiate force, you can't initiate force.
It's kind of a tautology, but it seems to confuse a lot of people.
So if the government is initiating force, and government by its definition must initiate force through taxation, through banning competition in the area of police and law courts and military and so on, then it's an initiation of force, and the principle must hold, though the sky falls.
Free competition works so well for everything else, these anarchists say, why not for government services, too?
That's not what the anarchists say, at least none that I've ever heard of.
I mean, it's true that free competition is really great, but that's merely an effect of the cause, and the cause is universal propositions on the non-initiation of force, the non-aggression principle, and respect for property rights is just universal.
So, sorry, government violates the non-aggression principle, Taxation and the banning of services that compete with it, therefore it is immoral by its fundamental definition.
So it's not an argument from efficiency, it's an argument from consistency and fundamentally of morality.
You can't give a group of individuals the moral and legal right to initiate whatever force they want.
within a given geographical area and still say that you're for the non-aggression principle.
That's like saying, I don't like rape.
Rape is completely immoral.
So let's centralize it and give a small group of people the right, nay, the obligation to rape at will.
And they say, ah, yes, but it's not at will.
There's the Constitution.
We have a constitutional lawyer, sorry, a constitutional scholar who's also a lawyer.
I think he's been disbarred, though, Barack Obama.
A constitutional scholar in the White House!
How's that working out for the Constitution?
Paper, no stoppie, the bullets!
So, he continues but says, but that argument comes from an anti-capitalist premise.
Like the Marxists who prayed about exploitation and wage slavery, the anarchists are ignoring the crucial, fundamental, life and death difference between trade and force.
Well, I wouldn't want to do that, so let me Get schooled!
He goes on to say, Marxists claim that capitalistic acts use force.
Anarcho-capitalists claim that acts of force can be capitalistic.
Though they come at it from different directions, both ignore or evade the fact that producing and exchanging values is the opposite of physical force.
Maybe.
Maybe I have missed all of this, but let's find out.
He goes on to write, production is the creation of value, and trade is the voluntary exchange of value for value to mutual benefit.
Fantastic.
Force is destruction or the threat of it.
It may be the destruction of a value, as when a hoodlum throws a rock through a store window, or it may be the destruction of destruction, as when a policeman pulls a gun on that hoodlum and hauls him off to jail.
Actually, I'd like him to be hauled off to court, but that's not necessarily a deal-breaker.
But in either case, it is the opposite of wealth creation and voluntary trade.
Yes, the non-aggression principle is the non-initiation of force.
You can respond to force with force.
Self-defense is perfectly valid.
Force, properly employed, is used only in retaliation.
But even when retaliatory, force merely eliminates a negative.
It cannot create value.
The threat of force is used to make someone obey, to thwart his will.
The only moral use of force is in self-defense, to protect one's rights.
No problem.
This is from Atlas Shrugged, which if you haven't read, turn off your computer and read it.
Einran writes, it is only as retaliation that force may be used, and only against the man who starts its use.
No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality.
I merely grant him his choice.
Destruction.
The only destruction he had the right to choose, his own.
He uses force to seize a value.
I use it only to destroy destruction.
A hold-up man seeks to gain wealth by killing me.
I do not grow richer by killing a hold-up man.
The wielding of force is not a business function.
In fact, force is outside the realm of economics.
Economics concerns production and trade, not destruction and seizure.
So the wielding of force is not a business function.
That is a statement, not an argument, O Harry of mine.
So what he's saying is that you can't have a business that offers you protection services.
So what he means is that all security guards are illegal in a free society.
The wielding of force is not a business function.
Force is outside the realm of economics.
I don't know exactly why.
The economics is a study of costs and benefits in human action, and force certainly has those costs and benefits.
So he goes on to say, ask yourself what it means to have a competition in government services.
It's a competition in wielding force, a competition in subjugating others, a competition in making people obey commands.
That's not competition, it's violent conflict.
On a large scale, it's war.
No, actually, on a large scale, it's governments who do war, not private actors.
So it's competition in wielding force.
Yes, absolutely.
In a free society, I want a thousand people to try and sell me their police services, to try and sell me protection from violence, so that I know that they do it as cheaply as possible, as effectively as possible, and frankly, if you're going to do something as cheaply as possible, Then you want to do it as non-violently as possible.
Like in Detroit, there is these security firms now that offer you protection.
The guys aren't even armed.
They make it work, but they're not even armed.
Because force is very expensive.
I mean, you go shooting someone, you've got medical bills, you've got an inquiry, you've got to determine, obviously, guilt from innocence, you've got to reassure the people that it was justified.
It's very expensive to use force.
I want companies who are going to offer to protect me, who have explored the very cheapest, least violent way to protect me.
And I believe that those security companies are going to be focusing on parenting, because if you raise children peacefully, they don't turn into criminals or hold-up men or stick-up men or thug artists or whatever you want to call them.
They turn into peaceful and productive and happy people.
The science on this is almost universal.
That peace in childhood results in peaceful and productive adulthood.
So what I want is for people to figure out not just how to deal with crime like a guy breaking in through my window, but how to prevent it in the long run.
And the science is very clear on that.
And the government doesn't have an incentive to do that.
A private company is going to do that.
So somebody who insures me against being stolen from I pay them, and if someone steals something from me, they replace it, and so on.
They're going to want to make sure that as few criminals get produced as possible, so they're going to be very proactive in providing good resources to parents, and blah de blah de blah, to make sure that they raise their children without spanking, without aggression, with breastfeeding, with close maternal bonds, blah, all that kind of good stuff.
That's what I want.
I want people constantly innovating and constantly competing on how best to deal with the initiation of force in society.
I don't see why that would be outside economics or something which must be monopolized and why competition in finding the best ways to protect people from force is bad.
Because what he hasn't said is how it violates a moral principle.
This is all consequentialism or utilitarianism or pragmatism, I guess you could say, which is, ooh, I wonder if this future stuff is going to have good or bad benefits, which is also known as pulling psychic orbs out of your ass and pretending you've got a third eye.
Nobody knows how freedom is going to work in the 50 to 100 to 200 years it's going to take to build a stateless, free, voluntary, peaceful society.
Nobody knows.
Nobody knows.
You tell me what the price of Apple is going to be in a week, either the fruit or the company, and I will listen to you about your predictions.
But nobody even knows that, so we have a veil of ignorance about the future.
When you have a veil of ignorance, you have no landmarks.
When you have no landmarks, you have to sail or navigate by principles.
When you're out of the ocean, you can't see land, what do you have to do?
Look at your compass and guide yourself that way.
We do not know how the future is going to work.
We can only make decisions to approach that future based on principles.
The non-aggression principle is the most essential one.
He has not told us how competition in providing protection from violence violates the non-aggression principle.
He's associated it with violent conflict or war.
Well, this is poisoning the world.
He's not actually making an argument.
You know, I mean, your argument is Hitler!
Your argument is Mao Zedong!
You're in lie!
Haha!
I win!
Silly, right?
So he says the shootout at the OK Corral was not a case of competition.
Actual competition is a peaceful rivalry to gain dollars.
Dollars paid voluntarily in uncoerced trade.
Yes, Harry, exactly!
Uncoerced trade such as finding the very best, most effective, most cost-effective security agency to provide you with safety.
Governments are necessary because we need to be secure from force initiated by criminals, terrorists and foreign invaders.
But what Harry, which I will accuse him of significant sliminess, Harry does not explain, maybe he does further down, but he does not explain how governments by their very existence do not violate the non-aggression principle.
Right?
Let's find out, shall we?
He writes, The genius of the American system is that it limited government, reigning it in by a constitution with checks and balances and the provisions that no law can be passed unless it is necessary and proper to the government's sole purpose to protect individual rights, to protect them against their violation by physical force.
Tragically, the original American theory of government was breached, shelved, trashed long ago.
But that's another story.
No, Harry!
Harry, it's not another story.
It's THE story!
This was the very best minds of the Enlightenment combining together in a true Starbucks Frappuccino of limited government goodliness.
And they racked their brains, these geniuses, to come up with the very best possible way that we could protect ourselves from the growth of the government.
Right after it!
It was put into place.
George Washington is riding down the Pennsylvania farmers with soldiers to collect his whiskey tax.
Got slavery!
Ooh!
Little footnote!
More than a footnote to the slaves, my friend!
And what did you get?
Eighty years, you got a massive civil war with over 600,000 people murdered, a fascistic Lincoln imposing his will, and then you got the invasion of the Philippines, and then you got the subjugation of Hawaii, and then you got the creation of the Federal Reserve and the institution of government schools, and then you get, after the creation of the Fed, you get the great boom of the 1920s, after Wilson lied to get everyone into the First World War, then you've got a massive 14-year depression,
that is ended by another lie to get into the Second World War which is the attack on Pearl Harbor and then right after that you've got the Korean War and then you have the 60s with Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty and then you got the stagflation of the 70s with Nixon at the helm decoupling the American dollar from gold in 71 and then you got the housing boom of the 80s a couple more wars in the 90s you have the stock boom in the 2000s you have the bitter fruit
50 years of US imperial foreign policy in the Middle East, with the tax on 9-11, and then you get a greater imperial presidency, you get massive government spending, exploding debt, you get a housing crash that has wiped out 40% of America's wealth, and then you get an even further imperial presidency with Barack Obama reaming off thousands of pages of legislation which never passes under the scurrilous anteater, lobbyist-sucking noses of congressmen!
So, yes, it is part of the story that it utterly and completely failed.
The experiment was, for those who missed it, the experiment was in the Enlightenment and with America, let's create the smallest, most self-contained, unable-to-grow government the world has ever seen.
And what happened?
The American government is now the largest, most indebted, most powerful government the world has ever seen.
That is part of the story.
And for those of us who have become a little skeptical of the American Revolution, it is really quite an essential story.
The destructive power wielded by the US government is larger than any other government ever throughout history.
No other government has been able to maintain 750-odd military bases around the world for 60-odd years.
No other government has been able to use the productivity of the population as collateral to pick the pockets of the unborn and sell generations down the road into debt slavery to domestic and foreign banksters.
Yes!
That really is part of the story, Harry!
The anarchists do not object to retaliatory force only to it being wielded by a government.
Why?
Because they say it excludes competitors.
No, the exclusion of competitors does not violate the non-aggression principle.
Right?
I mean if I buy 50 acres and I put a mall on 10 of those acres, I'm excluding competition by not allowing another mall within those 50 acres.
At least I assume I would.
There's nothing wrong with excluding competition.
A tiny little town might have room for only one drugstore.
That does not exactly exclude competition.
It's not that it excludes competition.
It's that government, to fund itself, must initiate the use of force.
Whether it's taxes, or it's tariffs, or it's duties, or it's customs duties, or something like that, it must initiate the use of force to fund itself.
Violation of the non-aggression principle.
So, he says, why, because they say it excludes competitors.
It sure does.
It excludes vigilantes, lich mobs, terrorists, and anyone else wanting to use force subjectively.
Oh, you see, because we have a piece of paper called the Constitution which means that governments can never ever use force subjectively, right?
Objectivists have a faith in paper that's greater than a fundamentalist Christian's.
Ayn Rand writes, a government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control, i.e.
under objectively defined laws.
Who's to say that the laws will be defined objectively?
They're not laws of physics, they're man-made laws and they can be altered at whim.
Who is to say that the law is defined objectively or enacted objectively from here to eternity?
Because human beings never want to get stuff for free, right?
Power never corrupts human beings, right?
The right to initiate force in a given geographical area is never going to lead to any problems, right?
Because we've used the word objective.
You see?
Magic!
There can be only one supreme law of the land and only one government to enforce it.
State and local governments are necessarily subordinate to the federal government.
There can be only one supreme law of the land, and only one government to enforce it.
See, statements is not philosophy.
You should know this.
Ayn Rand called it philosophizing in midstream, and that's not philosophy at all.
This is a bumper sticker masquerading as some sort of philosophical insight.
Also, if there's only one supreme law of the land, and only one just form of laws, then really we're talking about a worldwide government, right?
Because only one government can adhere to a perfect standard, therefore all governments, or governments which don't adhere to it, must be immoral and unjust, right?
So we're talking about one world government here.
Could conflict among competing governments be taken care of by treaties?
Treaties enforced by whom?
By the customers.
person by customers.
I mean, there can only be one cell phone company because they're never going to exchange data.
Who would enforce them?
Who would make them do that?
The customers make them do that.
There can only be one ISP, you see, because ISPs will never ever exchange data.
There can only be one email provider because email providers will never exchange data.
Who will force them to?
The customers will force them to, Harry.
Of course they will.
I mean, if I buy security from some company, I don't want that company to be a guy in his basement playing with a water pistol.
I want that to be guaranteed when I go abroad.
I want that to... They're all going to have to have treaties and contracts.
They're all going to have to be ratified.
They're all going to have to be customer reviews of how well these companies do.
Come on!
I mean, seriously, governments?
Go to... I heard a story from a guy.
He was in South America, some country, and the restaurant ripped him off.
He said, oh, it's a daily special.
It was marked outside, so he went in, ordered a big dinner for all his friends, and they charged him full price.
And he said, but it was a special.
They said, oh, not today.
But the sign was out, and the waitress told me about it.
So what, was he going to go to the local government to get the problems solved?
Flew back home, called Visa, disputed it, and Visa got him his money back.
One phone call.
That's private justice.
You try getting that from your average local constabulary or government.
So it's the customers who would enforce these treaties, these collaborations among various groups, of course.
He said, I once asked Ayn Rand about the feasibility of such treaties between sovereign competing governments.
She looked at me grimly and said, you mean like the U.N.?
The U.N.
has nothing to do with private defense agencies.
The U.N.
is a government-created monstrosity, funded by force, whose edicts are largely unenforceable.
It's just a place where you park the loathsome spotty behind of middle-aged bureaucrats so that they stay out of harm's way.
and regularly get the world into harm's way.
But what would that have to do with the UN?
That's literally like saying, well, if we had voluntary, private, parental funding schools without government control, monopoly, property taxes and unions, you mean it would be just like government schools now?
No, that's the whole point.
The customers would drive it.
Whatever the customers want, It's provided.
Maybe he's not spent much time in business.
I spent 15 years there, and I guess I've spent six or seven years running this philosophy show, so I'm kind of used to providing what the customer wants and likes, and maybe he's just not done a lot of that, but the dominance of the customer in business interactions is essential.
A proper government, he says, functions according to objective, philosophically validated procedures.
As embodied in its entire legal framework, from its constitutions down to its narrowest rules and ordinances.
Yeah, and I think that rainbow dragons in Dragonvale probably have two hearts.
Because sometimes you can get them with, like, two heads, and for those two heads you would absolutely need two hearts.
And I think that orcs have an enlarged spleen in Middle Earth because, you know, they're grumpy and their teeth don't give... I mean, what are they eating?
Are they just, like, eating, like, candy hobbits all day?
I mean, this is crazy.
They look like broken tombstones.
I can make up anything that I want.
But a proper government, you know, but there's no such thing as a government.
There's only people.
And people like to get stuff for free.
That's why we're not in the caves.
We invented all these labor-saving devices because we really don't like to work that much.
And there's no better way to get stuff for free than to use the power of the state.
Human beings, as mammals, will always be drawn to getting free shit and calling it virtue.
And the best way to do that is to create a government where you can proclaim virtue and have people salute you as you rifle through the pockets of their fetuses.
So, the idea that this government is not going to be inhabited by power-seeking mammals is a delusion.
You're creating some artificial construct in an alternate dimension and saying, well, see, that's how it's going to work here.
But that's not how things work here.
The example of America might be somewhat instructive in this area.
Once such a government, or anything approaching it, has been established, there is no such thing as a right to compete with the government, i.e.
to act as judge, jury, and executioner.
Nor does one gain such a right by joining with others to go into the business of wielding force.
Oh, so you're just saying stuff?
Well, I think there is a right.
Checkmate!
It's not an argument.
To carry out its functions of promoting individual rights, the government must forcibly bar others from using force in ways that threaten the citizens' rights.
Private force is force not authorized by the government, not validated by its procedural safeguards, and not subject to its supervision.
Ah!
Okay, I think I understand it.
Harry does not think that private citizens should ever use force.
Private force is force not authorized by the government, which is bad, right?
So self-defense is bad, right?
So if a guy's rushing at you with a knife, you should dial 9-1-1, you know, make the sign of the cross and open your heart to him.
That would be the logical extension of the argument.
If private force is force not authorized by the government, then self-defense, security guards and self-defense, would be unauthorized, because that, you see, if you shoot a guy who's coming at you with a knife, you're competing with the government, because that's the policeman's job, and you as a private citizen are not authorized to use force.
Therefore, self-defense must be made illegal, as it is a direct competition to the government's right and duty to protect you.
The government has to regard such private force as a threat, i.e.
as a potential violation of individual rights.
The threat of force is force.
In barring such private force, the government is retaliating against that threat.
Except that, if I offer to protect my neighbors, and I do not violate the non-aggression principle, then it is not force.
I mean, if the private citizens have the right to use force and self-defense, then they have the right to gather together and patrol the streets and use force and self-defense.
That which is permitted to one is permitted to all.
That which is denied to one is denied to all, unless you're going to create these crazy schizoid call of Soluthu opposing moral categories on a whim, which I think he seems to be doing.
Note that a proper government, proper government, does not prohibit a man from using force to defend himself in an emergency, sorry he did get to it, when recourse to the government is not available.
But it does properly require him to prove objectively at a trial that he was acting in emergency self-defense.
Similarly, the government does not ban private guards, but it does properly bring private guards under its supervision by licensing them.
Ooh!
Really?
Government licensing?
That's where objectivism is these days?
And does not grant them any special rights or immunities.
They remain subject to the government's authority and its laws.
They cannot make their own laws.
Absolutely!
Fair enough.
So this is exactly true for the police, this is exactly true for individuals, this is exactly true for security guards.
The police use force, they're going to be subject to this kind of review.
So why is it possible for a policeman to use force and for a private citizen to use force? - Yes.
But not for a group of private citizens to band together and use force.
Is it like, okay, so one person can use force.
Can two people use force to defend themselves?
Three?
Four?
Where do you reach the tipping point where suddenly it becomes, you know, a great evil which must be protected by a monopoly on violence known as the state?
But again, these are not arguments from first principles.
These are just assertions and not particularly good ones.
So Ayn Rand wrote in Capitalist and the Unknown Odeal – read that too, I would suggest – there is only one basic principle to which an individual must consent if he wishes to live in a free civilised society, the principle of renouncing the use of physical force and delegating to the government his right of physical self-defence for the purpose of an orderly, objective, legally defined enforcement.
Or, to put it another way, he must accept the separation of force and whim, any whim including his own.
How is the government Not subject to the problem of force and whim combined.
How is the government, which is populated by people... She's very concerned about people using force on a whim.
So how is the government, which is populated by people, And which has infinitely more power than any individual or group in society, not going to be subject to the problem of force and whim.
Now, the objectivist argument is, no, you see, there are laws.
But laws are man-made constructs, open to change, open to alteration.
People lie about them, they bypass them, they do underhanded things.
There is no physics superhero of morality that is going to catch these people.
If a defense company or a protection company doesn't do right by its customers, those customers will stop doing business with that defense company.
And I'm not going to get into all the complexities of what if the defense company gets all these weapons and becomes another government.
I've dealt with that question so many times, you can read about it in my free book Practical Anarchy.
But, you see, the principle of renouncing the use of physical force.
Now, she's got a dichotomy here, right?
An individual must not use physical force, must not initiate physical force.
And delegate into the government his right of physical self-defense.
But the government is just people, right?
So we have people outside the government and people inside the government.
The people outside the government can't use force, but the people inside the government can use force.
What kind of magic, face-bending, moral universe imploding penumbra do they walk through in order to get to the different moral universe where force is great to initiate if you're in the government, but it's not if you're outside the government.
Sorry!
This all sounds like Ptolemaic reasoning.
You know, they said, oh, God loves a perfect circle.
The whole solar system must be in circles.
Oh, crap, the retrograde motion of Mars is really screwing us up.
And, you know, until Copernicus and all that came along with the sun-centered model of the solar system and allowed ellipses and it all made sense, right?
It's making these opposing moral categories.
In all philosophy, when you read the word government, you have to read the word people.
It's people.
So, since the government is composed of people, there's no such thing as a government, it's a concept.
There are trees, there's no such thing as a forest, like a big fog all around the trees, gathering them together in a concept.
So once we understand that the government is people, silent green government, people.
We can read the sentence and see if it makes any sense.
So this is from Ayn Rand.
There is only one basic principle to which people must consent if they wish to live in a free civilized society.
The principle of renouncing the use of physical force.
People must renounce the use of physical force and delegate to people the right of physical self-defense.
People must renounce self-defense and delegate to people their right of self-defense.
That doesn't make any sense, right?
Because if you create this artificial construct called the government, you can assign it any kind.
It's like, you know, how many spleens does an orc have?
You make up whatever you want, but there are just people.
The attempt to invoke individual rights to justify competing with the government collapses at the first attempt to concretize what it means in reality.
Picture a band of strangers marching down Main Street, submachine guns at the ready.
When confronted by the police, the leader of the band announces, Me and the boys are only here to see that justice is done.
You have no right to interfere with us.
According to the anarchists, in such a confrontation, the police are morally bound to withdraw on pain of betraying the rights of self-defense and free trade.
Okay, so let me see if I understand his agreement.
So there's people with guns going down Main Street.
What are they doing that's violating the non-aggression principle?
Having guns is not a violation of the non-aggression principle, right?
I mean, I've got knives in my kitchen.
That doesn't mean that I'm a stabber or a surgeon for that matter.
So why are they being confronted by the police?
Me and the boys are only here to see that justice is done.
You have no right to interfere with this.
I don't know what that means.
Are they saying they're going to go and kill people?
I don't know.
Well, if they say they're going to go and kill people, that's a violation of the non-aggression principle, right?
So, I mean, anyone, any group of people and all that would be able to stop them using whatever force that was necessary.
So I don't see how that... and of course he's completely mistaking it because the police is a statist entity and so according to the anarchists in such a confrontation the police are morally bound to withdraw.
There are no police because the police are corrupt and the police are ineffective and the police are so easily bribed and the police basically in the modern world are well-meaning thugs who will arrest and put away anyone that their leaders point at.
So no, I mean There's a better solution, right?
Police to the security forces of the future are like an abacus to a cell phone.
You know, there's a tiny bit of the same function, but it's a huge upgrade.
In fact, of course, then he says, regarding the purported betrayal, one can only respond, if this be treason, make the most of it.
You could respond with a better argument, but all right.
In fact, of course, there is no conflict between individual rights and outlawing private force.
There is no right to the arbitrary use of force.
No political or moral principle could require the police to stand by helplessly while others use force arbitrarily, i.e.
i.e., according to whatever private notions of justice they happen to hold.
Anyway, I think the article, I think it goes, does it go on and on?
Oh, no, no, actually, we're very close.
Okay, all right.
Bear in mind that, in fact, In fact, those who would be granted the right to enforce their own notions of justice include leftists who consider government intervention in the economy to be retaliation against business activities that the leftists claim is economic force.
It would include Palestinian terrorists who claim that random slaughter is retaliation against Zionist imperialism.
It would hold that those who hold abortion to be murder and bomb abortion clinics as retaliation in defense of the rights of the unborn and Islamists who clamor to let Sharia law operate within Western nations.
Well, I've done a whole podcast on how Sharia law would not operate, would not function in a free society, because people would have to pay for it, it's very expensive, and they'd find cheaper ways to do it.
Well, the Palestinians, you know, they are kind of fenced in.
They are required to have passes everywhere they go.
Lots of bad stuff going on there.
But, you know, the objectivists are, you know, kind of pro-Israel for a variety of reasons, not least of which is Ayn Rand's Judaism.
But to simply say, well, the Palestinians are the only terrorists in the region is specious, to put it as nicely as possible.
Incomplete.
In any society, disputes over who has the right to what are inescapable.
Agreed.
Even strictly rational men will have disagreements of this kind, and the possibility of human irrationality, which is inherent in free will, multiplies the number of such disputes.
Excellent!
Okay, so we know that there is human irrationality, and those people who are the most irrational and power-seeking and dominance-seeking Are going to be the ones who clamber to the top of the bloody pyramid of political power and start lashing their whims upon others as we see in the later stages of all Western, formerly relatively free countries.
You know, like a hundred years ago in America, there was no income tax, you didn't need a passport, you could go work and travel, and I mean, this is crazy how fenced in we've become.
So yes, there's human irrationality and massive problems.
The issue then is how are political and legal disputes to be settled?
By might or by right?
By street fighting or by the application of objective, philosophically validated procedures?
There is no such thing as the application of objective, philosophically validated procedures.
There are only people making decisions.
There is no third hand of divine, smoky, Russian goddess fingertips that will push these laws around.
They're going to be created and inflicted by people.
And those people are going to have their own self-interest and there is no such thing as the application of objective, philosophically validated procedures.
That's like saying that the scientific method, and not scientists, is going to determine the outcome of a particular experiment or its validity.
But there's no such thing as a scientific method.
It's a procedure followed by flawed people with their own self-interest.
So there is no application of objective, philosophically validated procedures.
There are only people acting in their own self-interest.
And if we're going to say that we have a society – I think this is the objective of this argument – if we have a society where those in power are philosopher gods who act for the very best, noble, most objective reasons, despite the fact that power corrupts, the worst among us go to the top of the political pyramid.
So if people at the top of the political pyramid are people who apply laws objectively and rationally and consistently and philosophically, and they're the worst among us, then we don't need any laws at all.
Because if the worst among us are in charge to resolve disputes, then all the better people are going to find peaceful ways to resolve their disputes anyway.
If we are overseeing groups of people who keep wanting to use force to get what they want, those people are going to gravitate to the government and use the government to do it.
It doesn't work even remotely logical.
If human beings are angels, we can have a government, but we don't need a government because human beings are angels.
If human beings are devils, we can't have a government because the devils will swarm to the top of the government and use its power to inflict their will upon the whole world and the future, the unborn.
If human beings are a mixture of good and evil, which of course is true, then the evil people will scurry up the political pyramid and use their power to emasculate the possibility of virtue among the good.
We can't have a government!
It's a magnet for evil.
There's none of this objective, philosophically validated procedures that go marching around like the books don't go marching around the courtroom.
The anarchists object to the very idea of a monopoly on force.
No, the anarchists object to the very idea of force, the initiation of force.
That only shows that they cannot grasp what force is.
Force is monopoly.
To use force is to attempt to monopolize.
The cop or the gunman says, we'll do it my way, not your way or else.
There is no such thing as force that allows dissenters to go their own way.
I don't quite follow.
So if a man wants to have sex with a woman who doesn't want it, only one of them can have their way.
It's either back off, Or rape.
Either way, it's a monopoly.
Okay, so force is a monopoly.
So the government is force, and the government is a violent monopoly.
That violates the non-aggression principle.
I don't know how to explain it more simply.
A violent conflict ends in the victory of one side and defeat of the other.
Peaceful trade is the opposite.
No side is vanquished.
Both parties to the trade gain.
Absolutely.
Trade is win-win.
A business profits by selling the buyer something he would rather have than the money he spends for it.
Barring a mistaken decision, both parties benefit.
Yeah.
Fantastic.
So yeah, there's an anarchist do-talk.
You can read the last couple paragraphs yourself.
The anarchists, there is a market for liberty, of course.
I think it's going to be great.
I think it's going to be exciting.
I think it's going to be interesting to see what ways can be solved.
I think that violence in a future society is going to be built upon the peaceful parenting practices in the present.
Boy, that's a lot of peace!
Palindrome.
Okay, one more.
So I think that we're not going to have to really worry about violence that much in a future society.
Like, you don't really worry about polio now, right?
Or smallpox or leprosy in most of the first world.
You don't worry about these things, right?
So, in the future we're not really going to have to worry about the plague of violence because we'll be parenting peacefully and therefore we won't have to worry about it and this is all nonsense.
By the time we get to a free society the initiation of the use of force is going to be so rare that it's like saying we can't go outside until we build a massive metal dome over the sky because of all of the lightning.
Well, lightning is pretty rare and you can stay in when it's necessary and that's going to be like violence in the future.
Not going to be such a big deal.
So this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Thank you so much for listening.
I appreciate that.
And Harry, you're certainly welcome on my show anytime.
Please email me and we can talk further.
I hope you have a great day, everyone.
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