All Episodes
Previous Next
July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:05:04
Freedom is Tyranny? Stefan Molyneux Debates StormCloudsGathering
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
So I wanted to do a little bit of an introduction.
This is with a fellow named Aaron from a website or I guess a YouTube channel called Storm Clouds Gathering.
And I didn't know much about him.
He wanted to have a conversation about the limitations of anarcho-capitalism.
Always a fun and fine topic.
And I just wanted to do a little bit of an introduction.
It was a challenging conversation to say the least.
When somebody asks, you know, how is crime dealt with in a free society or a stateless society, it's a big question.
And I was kind of hoping to get into laying out a framework, but he wanted to interrupt and talk about his experiences in Mexico.
Because his theory, I think, if I understood it correctly, is something like this.
So, I was out in Mexico and in the backwoods or the backlands of Mexico, there's not a lot of government around, so why aren't there all these free market institutions?
It's a tough case to make.
I mean, Mexico still controls the education, it still controls the law, it still controls the creation of businesses, it still controls the currency, controls the borders, and then there's the superstition of the church that has its hold.
It's not just the state.
It's all irrational thinking that philosophy needs to counter and there's a lot of that in the backwoods of Mexico, I would imagine.
He said there's not much of a welfare state in Mexico.
Actually, it's not true.
There's a huge welfare state in Mexico.
In fact, one of the things that's causing huge problems in Mexico is the prevalence of obesity, particularly among the young and the effect that it's having on the socialized medical system there.
And he said that there's not much government interference out in these backwards places and It still is like a 12-step process to get a business started.
It costs hundreds of dollars to get a business started.
It's a huge barrier, of course, to the poor and to the less literate, let's say.
What else did he say?
So, I guess as a whole, when you look at sort of backwoods areas of a country and say, well, there's not a lot of government around there, that really is not the same as a stateless society, as a philosophically rational society.
So let me give you an analogy, hopefully it will make some sense.
So let's say it's the 17th century, 18th century, and you're tooling around the south of the US, where of course slavery is legal.
And you come across a farm in the middle of nowhere that doesn't have any slaves.
Would you consider that a slave-free society?
Well, no, just because they don't have any slaves doesn't mean that it's a slave-free society.
So slaves are everywhere.
Slavery has corrupted the culture, the ethics, the morals, the humanity of the entire region.
And also the prevalence of slaves everywhere has prevented the investment into labor-saving devices that characterizes having to pay people for work.
Once you pay people for their work, it becomes more economically advantageous to invest in labor-saving devices, which is why there really wasn't much of an industrial revolution in the ancient world, because they had slaves and therefore All those who have capital invest in slaves, and therefore they don't want to invest in labor-saving machinery that drives down the value of their slaves.
So it's not fair to say, well, I found a couple of farms without slaves.
Why isn't there a 21st century society there?
Well, because they don't have access to the labor-saving machinery.
Because there are slaves everywhere, so nobody's investing in it.
They don't have the money to invest in it.
So I think that's really important to understand.
When you have a big government, and Mexico is a pretty big government, he said that Mexico has some areas that are more economically free.
And I said, well, let's look it up.
And he really freaked out about that.
I think he didn't want it looked up.
The reality, of course, is that Mexico ranks 50th on the Economic Freedom Index, not very high for a sort of North slash South slash Central American country.
No, it's not very economically free.
Another thing, of course, that has a huge impact on Mexico is America's war on drugs.
The war on drugs corrupts everything to do with the Mexican police force, and this has a huge effect on your access to basic services.
There doesn't have to be a gun in your face for you to know that there's a gun in the environment, right?
This is sort of really, really important.
You know, they call this thing in academia a chilling effect.
You know, when some guy gets fired for disagreeing with someone, everyone else is like, ooh, let's be a little careful about this now.
The chilling effect of having a government around, particularly if it's big and random, which is kind of synonymous in governments, this has a chilling effect on people's level of entrepreneurship.
If you have a big government around, you don't want to achieve a lot of business success.
You don't want to achieve a lot of savings.
You don't want to get a lot of capital, because that's going to attract the attention of the government.
So just because there isn't any government around, because people are poor, doesn't mean that there's no barriers to them becoming rich, because they know when they become rich, they're either going to obey the rules, which means they can barely start, because it's so expensive to get a business started in Mexico, or they're going to disobey the rules, which means they're going to get harassed, thrown in jail, or whatever, prosecuted.
So there's not much point Collecting capital, investing in yourself, and so on.
In Mexico, homeschooling is, in most provinces, illegal.
In most of the states, I can't remember what they call it, it's illegal, and therefore you have to put your kids in the government schools.
This, of course, has huge effects on how those children think.
Most people, of course, if they're religious, are going to put their kids in Sunday school and other kinds of religious education environments, which is, again, going to corrupt their thinking and so on.
So I think it's not really a very fair statement to say, well in the backwoods of Mexico there are a couple of places where there aren't a lot of cops around and that is exactly the same as a stateless society.
I think that's not...
That's not fair.
Like if some guy, it's like saying Robin Hood is an industrial capitalist because he was living in the woods and not subject to the power of the king.
No, he's still subject to the power of the king.
It's why he's living in the woods.
And if he chooses not to live in the woods, he's going to get arrested.
So it's not like he's free out there.
He's just escaping the immediate fist to the head.
But that doesn't mean that there aren't fists flying around just about everywhere else he turns.
So, I really sort of reject the thesis that if you sort of live in the backwaters and the state doesn't take any interest in you, that's the same as living in a stateless society.
No.
The state prevents competition.
Anyone who starts successfully to compete with the state will be smacked down, so you're not going to get the rise of alternate dispute resolution mechanisms.
I mean, you may get some.
There are some up here in Canada, in the U.S., and in Europe as well.
Private arbitration is a big business because the government is so inefficient, but it is not the same as living in a free and rational society, to say that you're too inconsequential.
for the state to bother with.
But the moment you become consequential, the state will stomp all over you.
That is not living in a free society.
So I want to really point that out.
There's something that happens in the end, and I'll talk more about this at the end.
So there's something that happens in the end that was, I mean, strange to me.
I don't think I've ever quite experienced that before.
So a couple of years ago, two years ago, I think, Or so.
I did a debate with a guy named Neil from VTV, which I think is Venus Television.
You know, the Zeitgeist guys.
The Jacque Fresco slash Peter Joseph guys.
I thought it was a fun debate and an interesting debate.
I've had lots of good feedback on it.
And so Aaron, the guy I'm debating with here, towards the end he starts insisting that I have What was it?
So around planned obsolescence.
I've always been opposed to the idea that the planned obsolescence is something imposed by companies on individuals.
This is something that the consumers as a whole choose, right?
Nobody wants a laptop to last a hundred years because it's, you know, obsolete in five.
So there's not much point having it last a hundred years.
So people choose the longevity of the components based upon the quality they want, based on a wide variety of... And now, of course, there's government interference and, excuse me, all that mess, but...
In general, in a free market, the consumers are the ones who ultimately decide how long something will last.
Because if they want something to last longer, and they're willing to pay for it, if it costs more, then they will do that.
And Aaron, I think that the Neil guy, again, I talked to him after the show to get this cleared up because I was kind of baffled by it.
It's not a huge deal, but it was interesting to me.
Neil was telling Aaron that I had watched a documentary called, I think it was called The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy, wherein all of these nefarious capitalists are planning to have things break, you know, 30 seconds after the end of the warranty period expires.
And that I had agreed with the thesis and that I accepted it.
And so when I was arguing against planned obsolescence, the Aaron guy, the Stormclouds Gathering guy, you know, got pretty aggressive and started saying, well, you already watched this documentary and you agreed with it.
And I had, I had and have no idea, no idea what he's, what he was talking about in the Times.
Like, I don't ever remember watching a documentary on light bulbs.
And since I've taken such a public stance against the concept of planned obsolescence from the capitalist side, It would be really surprising to me if I'd agreed with the complete opposite of the thesis I've been public about without anyone else calling me on it and saying, wait a minute, you just changed your tune, Mr. Molyneux.
Anyway, so it was kind of bad.
I didn't even remember the Neil guy because he goes by VTV and it's been years since I heard him.
But so apparently the story is that Neil says that he had suggested that I watch a documentary about hundred year light bulbs.
And I said, well, who would want hundred year light bulbs anyway?
I didn't watch the documentary, but it's like, who would want a light bulb to last a hundred years?
And by that, I probably meant, again, I don't remember the interaction, but I would imagine I meant something like, if it costs fifty times as much, or, you know, people move every five to ten years, why do you want a hundred year light bulb?
It's not like you take the light bulbs with you when you move.
It's the point, right?
Anyway, so Neil construed that, because I made that comment, I had watched the movie That he had suggested I watch, and agreed with it, which is not the case.
And he's got no proof of it.
He says the conversation has mysteriously gone missing.
Not mysteriously, because he's changed his operating system or something.
He doesn't have a record of the Skype conversation.
I don't remember it at all.
Guy pings me all the time, the fact that he can remember with extreme clarity one ping from two years ago.
I don't find particularly credible, but you know, I guess that's for everyone to decide.
But I have not watched the documentary, still haven't watched it, and I certainly don't agree with the thesis.
And in it, just so you know, there's a A lightbulb that's been burning for 100 years, but it burns at 4 watts, and it has a perfect vacuum seal around it, and there's a couple of other factors.
It's never turned off, and it's turning on and turning off that generally breaks the lightbulb, so the fact that one's been running at 4 watts in a perfectly sealed, temperature-controlled environment, where it's almost never turned on and off, is not to me entirely impossible, it doesn't say much about.
Much brighter, like, what, 80 times brighter lights in consumer settings.
So anyway, I mean, I'll probably get around to watching the documentary at some point, but that's, you know, the big thing that happens at the end.
And, you know, when the guy started calling me a liar, I just, what can I say?
I can't continue in that kind of conversation.
That's just silly, and I don't like to enable other people's negative behaviors.
Anyway, so we'll talk a little bit more afterwards.
I hope you enjoy the debate, and I certainly found it quite interesting.
It was frustrating, of course, because I tried to make theoretical points, and he basically said, but I've been to Mexico, and that's not how it is, even after I pointed out that that's not a sort of valid comparison.
Anyway, so here's the debate.
Thanks for your patience.
I hope that you enjoy it.
This is Stormcloud's Gathering.
Tonight we have our special guest, Stefan Molyneux of Freedom Main Radio.
Stefan is a very prolific video producer, covers a wide variety of topics.
A large percentage of his work focuses on the non-aggression principle, and I think he's one of the people who've Really brought that concept to the forefront for me early on.
I've been subscribed to his channel for about three years.
He also does a lot of work with child abuse, trying to get people to be aware of the psychological effects of child abuse and how it causes societal violence.
And I've always really appreciated that, having come from a family that was extremely violent and having lived through that.
I definitely can relate to that.
And then the other topic that he really goes into a lot is anarcho-capitalism.
And for those of you who are subscribed to my channel, you might know that I put out a video called Anticapitalism, why it's broken and how to fix it.
And subsequently, we got into some people wanting me to have a discussion with Stefan.
And so we've actually got the opportunity to do that.
And actually, that's a really good thing.
So there's a lot of topics that That we can get into in terms of stuff in anarcho-capitalism, but the ones that actually concern me, and I don't say this just to say it, I actually do have concerns about it.
I have concerns about what it would turn into if it were put into place.
Are the questions about criminal justice and security and, you know, whatever that may look like, law enforcement, the insurance, the ROs, and all these kinds of things, and defense in terms of private militaries and that kind of thing.
And I've seen a lot of explanations and justifications for these kinds of things, but none of them that I've really seen so far have given me a satisfactory explanation.
I'm kind of one of those kind of people where I have to hear it to where it makes sense for me.
So, I think this is a good opportunity because I can ask the questions that I have in my head directly to the person who has the answers from that standpoint.
In this discussion, I really, if possible, I would really like to get to the bottom of those topics, just to really get to the point where either we understand that we disagree or we agree, and either way, we come away with some clarity.
So, my thought has been that if we just started with a real scenario, say we're in Afghanistan, and there was a woman from a poor family in a poor neighborhood who gets raped and murdered.
What would happen next in our vocabulary system?
All right.
I'm sorry.
I just really wanted to say I'm really sorry about the violence you experienced growing up.
That's not fun.
I know this is not the topic, but I just really wanted to express incredible sympathy.
This is the last thing that anybody wants to be born into, and I'm really sorry that it happened.
Well, this is the challenge with examining these kinds of problems and I really do appreciate that you're bringing up the challenging cases.
That's, you know, any theory should have the test of extremity.
So, a woman in a poor family gets raped and murdered by someone, some ex-person or out there, right?
Okay, but we have to look, if we're going to give Ancapistan its proper due, then we do have to provide a context.
In other words, people don't just appear, you know, at the age of 30 in society.
They have a whole history in that society.
They're born into that society, and their parents have to make decisions within that society.
So let's, if you don't mind, let's rewind the clock a little bit to when the woman, or let's say the guy, let's just say it's a guy who's murdering him, or murdered her, whose name is Bob, raped and murdered her.
So when Bob is born, we're going to assume that Bob is born into some sort of, like he's not born into a hillside in Montana, he's not raised in bulrushes by the River Nile, he's in a city, right, or he's in a town, or he's in some proximity to people, is that fair to say?
I don't know.
I mean, I would give you multiple scenarios based on where we go from there, because we haven't actually caught the guy yet.
So, first of all, the first question is, we're here, and we don't know what happened yet.
We don't know who the guy is.
He could have been someone from outside of the country.
We don't know what his background is at all until we catch him.
But the first question is, how do you catch the guy?
How do you catch a guy?
Because these people...
You can't assume that rape and murder is just going to disappear from the face of the earth forever just because we removed the government.
I mean, if rape and murder has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, it's probably going to happen sometimes in a society like that.
So how does a society deal with it when it actually happens?
Well, okay, but this is sort of what I'm trying to build to, right?
So we can't just sort of assume that people just pop in out of nowhere and do stuff and vanish, right?
Because I think we can all agree that it's economically, in general, for society as a whole, more efficient if people don't rape and kill each other.
I mean... Yeah, but the people have been trying to stop it for hundreds of thousands of years.
I agree, but let's just try and stay within the realm of the scenario, right?
So if some guy is born, he's going to be born in a town or some area of civilization, because if he's born in the remote woods and never touches civilization, then it doesn't really matter, you know, what he does, right?
So he's in a town and his parents give birth to him in a hospital, right?
Of course, they would probably contact, you know, they have a rating agency, they have a DRO agency, and the DRO agency is there for their economic advantage, right?
So... What if he's poor?
What if he's poor?
Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Let me just give a scenario, then we'll come up with the six million objections, right?
Which are all fair, but... So, so...
The DRO is there for their economic advantage.
Now the poor people are very interested in economic advantage, right?
Because they want to keep things cheap.
So the best way to keep things cheap is to keep your word, is to pay your debts, is to show up on time, is to not strangle hobos and throw cats into blenders and set fire to your neighbor's car and stuff like that.
The best way to be cheap to, quote, insure against damaging other people or their property is to be a good person, a reasonably decent person.
That doesn't have anything to do with rich and poor in particular, right?
Rich people can be incredibly destructive, haliburton, or, you know, poor people can be incredibly noble.
My concern is, like, insurance is one of those things that in a state where it enforces it, which I'm not advocating the state, but something like Liability insurance for cars.
You know, people get it in the United States.
Most people get it, because if you don't, then they take away your license.
But if you go to a place like Mexico, you're supposed to have it, but the state is so weak, people don't buy it.
I mean, there's people who drive around with cars that you would never allow in the United States, and they don't get their insurance.
And they can't afford it, so they just don't get it.
So why would somebody who is poor buy insurance if there's no one who's going to enforce it?
Well, okay, I mean, there's a lot of things that are thrown in there.
I would definitely contest the idea that the Mexican government is weak.
I mean, the Mexican government comes from a heavily socialist-slash-communist background, as you may remember.
I think it was in 1937 that Leon Trotsky met his end there, because he was fleeing from Stalin, and he got an ice pick through his head, and he fled to... He lived there for a year and a half.
Yeah, but Mexico was one of the first communist or quasi-communist countries in the 20th century.
It's not a weak government, it's a corrupt government.
It doesn't even have control of all of its territory.
It has places where Spanish isn't even spoken.
I personally lived in a place where the police officers would personally approach me and ask me if I would grow marijuana and maybe they could They could guard it for me.
I personally was in contact with the Mexican military who would tell me, we don't go past those mountains over there because if we do, we get shot at.
They didn't have enough bullets to regularly patrol.
There was a town not too far from the town that I lived in where there was a family feud.
The people just killed each other.
The state didn't have the resources.
They weren't well enough armed to quell it.
The families just killed each other off.
I mean, that's my experience.
I've lived in that place, and it may be strong in Mexico City and in places like Querétaro and places like that, but out in the boondocks?
No, it's nothing like the United States at all.
There's absolutely no state presence in some places.
Well, yes, I mean, so this would be an argument against the state as an effective means of controlling people, but I think more fundamentally, I mean, we're going into sort of deep psycho-history here, but more fundamentally there is a, there was a sort of revolution in child raising in sort of the 19th and 20th centuries in the West that didn't happen in a lot of other cultures, so you still have a lot of violence, you still have people With hyperdeveloped amygdalas and shrunken neofrontal cortexes as a result.
So they're heavily impulse driven, heavily violence driven.
That has a lot to do with child raising.
It's not exclusively, right?
You can still have violence without it, I think.
I wouldn't say Mexico is more violent in those places than America.
And it's not saying that the state... I'm not saying that the state is the solution there.
But what I'm saying is that people don't buy insurance there.
I mean, people there... There's a saying in Mexico, In Mexico you can do whatever the hell you want, which means you can do whatever the beep you want.
Because the state really just cannot, it doesn't have the means to interfere.
So, I mean, I liked living there.
I felt very free.
I always carried a machete because I took responsibility for my own self-defense.
However, some people would not feel safe there because they don't have that police presence.
But what I can tell you is that in terms of driving on the road, People will just laugh at the idea of paying for liability insurance.
I mean, people would laugh at the idea of any standards of what you would do with your car when the government is going to do something.
Ha!
I mean, they're not going to do anything.
But sure, what's the incentive?
No, hang on, but you can't compare a free, sophisticated society in the future to a sort of backwater of a heavily socialist and incredibly corrupt statist organization.
I mean, that's just not fair.
You're calling Mexico socialist in a literal sense.
The government doesn't hand out handouts.
The taxes are virtually non-existent.
People don't pay income taxes there.
You can set up a business much easier in Mexico than you can in the United States.
You just set it up because the government's not going to stop you.
Most people in those small towns, they have businesses in every window.
They'll set up their...
Look, if we're going to head this direction, that's fine.
Then let's, let me just have a look at where Mexico stands in the Economic Freedom Index.
Mexico... Well, you can say whatever in terms of the regulations, but... I was hoping to do more theory, but if we're going to, look, if we're going to go into, you know, heavy detail around Mexico, that's not sort of what I was prepared for.
I was prepared to talk about more anarchic theory.
But if we want to go that direction, that's fine.
But that just means if you're going to make a claim that Mexico is not particularly socialist, then we just look it up in the Economic Freedom Index and see where My understanding of Mexico based on having lived there.
That's my experience.
There was no handouts being given to the people in the town that I lived in.
I mean, the way people kept each other afloat in the town that I lived in is the families took care of each other.
There was much less homelessness and those kinds of things.
There wasn't a government safety net, but the people took care of each other.
That was a big part of the culture.
They don't just put their people out on the street.
So I always place experience in the real world over theory, because those are the most dangerous things, when people put together a really elaborate theory about the way things would be, but if you don't check it constantly to the way things are when the conditions are similar, then it gets out of sync with reality.
Well, but I can't debate your personal subjective experience, right?
I mean, then you can have a conversation, you can tell me about, you know, I can tell you I like jazz, and you can tell me I like these things about Mexico, but it's not a debate, right?
Debate means facts, not your personal experience.
I mean, it is a fact.
If you go to Cuauhtémoc, Mexico, and you go spend time there, you will experience the exact same things, because there is no Socialism in rural Mexico.
That's a joke.
I mean, there's places where there isn't even a police station for miles around.
There's places you can't even reach with a car.
I mean, I've been on donkey paths to find little towns and valleys that barely have access to civilization.
These things exist.
Mexico is not a strong state in that sense.
It has a very strong presence in Mexico City, but the farther you get away from Mexico City, the weaker the state becomes.
And even in Mexico City, socialism?
You don't get any kind of protections or any kind of social safety net in Mexico.
Not at all.
Well, okay, but again, I mean, you can find tribes in the Amazon that don't have much to do with the government.
That doesn't mean that they're a modern, sophisticated, well-understood, philosophically grounded, reasoned and evidenced kind of society, right?
So the fact that they don't have much to do with the government doesn't mean that they're a sort of free, enlightened group of people.
Well, I mean, being a stateless society is kind of the criteria of what we're talking about.
It's the influence of the state.
But it's not a stateless society in Mexico.
There is a government in Mexico.
It may do a bad job, but it drives out competition.
It does hoover up resources.
It does manage land management.
And so we can't say that there's pockets where the government doesn't reach, and therefore it's like a free society.
No, because this government still runs everything.
They just run it badly, and they keep competition out of the mix.
Now you're leaping.
You're talking about how Mexico is.
You don't have any experience.
I have experience with it.
It's not being run by the government in the Mexican rural areas.
It's just not.
They don't have the resources.
They can't even catch murderers.
They just don't have the resources.
Okay, alright.
So let me just ask some questions then.
In the rural areas, how are the children educated?
Very little.
There's public school.
It's supposed to go to the high school, but most people don't finish.
They don't really think it that important.
So they just stop.
So they get 8 to 10 years of government school, right?
Or 6 to 10 years or whatever it's going to be, right?
It's a lot less than 10 years.
People generally just walk away from it after a certain point, and they just go start tending their cows and their beans and their corn.
It's just not something that's culturally important in rural Mexico.
Some people do.
I've met people who were going to the University of Jalapa, and they do look up to a person if they do get a university degree.
And if you go to the university level, this is one thing that is fairly socialized.
if you make it to the universal level, it's very cheap.
That's obviously subsidized at that level, but almost nobody goes, so it doesn't really matter.
Okay, so the governments run the schools, albeit badly, and they get subsidization if they go to university, and you would not consider that socialism?
Most people don't take advantage of it, that's what I'm saying.
Most people in Mexico have very little to do with the government and their daily life.
A lot of them don't even get the basic education.
They just get raised... I mean, if you go really rural, I mean, they will just... They'll teach their kids how to grow their corn, they'll teach them how to grow their beans, teach them how to milk a cow.
And what they aspire to there is more building up, you know, getting more cows, getting a piece of land if you can, go to the United States, earn some money, come back.
I mean, that's the Mexican dream.
When you say socialism, you can't just throw that word around because socialism actually has meaning.
I mean, it's talking about people being taken care of in a social difficulty, and that's just not...
No, no, no, no.
Come on.
Look, you've got to be precise about your language here.
Socialism doesn't mean taking care of people.
Socialism is a very specific socio-economic program.
It's not just taking care of people.
I mean, then people who go and take care of their grandmother is a socialist.
It's got nothing to do with it, right?
Don't tell me I'm not being precise and then just say socialism is about taking care of people, right?
Talking about a system that supposedly socialized medicine, socialized Food, making sure people are fed, and all these kinds of things, it's just not present.
Most people that I knew there didn't pay income taxes.
I mean, what's really interesting, though, is that Mexico, in a lot of ways, is very similar to Antioquia Capitalist Society because anything is for sale there, even the police.
If you want to, you can pay the police and they'll do what you want.
I personally paid a guy to skip all the processes in the government to get my water installed.
He wasn't supposed to do that.
I paid a guy from the government to do the measurements for my land, to get the boundaries done.
It cost a lot less, it was a lot faster, and he did it.
In a lot of ways, it's a lot more efficient than the United States in that sense.
But it is kind of a representation of it, because they don't have the resources to do things like that otherwise a lot of times.
So, in Mexico, if you have money, everything works for you.
If you don't, then everything is kind of difficult.
And that's kind of what I see the problem about anarcho-capitalism, because the people who don't have these resources to buy things, I mean, what happens to them?
Because they refer to this as a free society.
But in reality, I mean, anarcho-capitalism would only be free for people who have land.
Because if anarcho-capitalism says that every square inch of land is owned, even the streets, the rivers, the parks, everything like that, and if property rights are absolute, that means every single owner has absolute authority over his land, so he can kick you out if he doesn't like what you're saying, he can kick you out if you try to organize a protest.
So the conclusion is that if you only have rights on your land, if you have land.
And if you don't have land, you don't have any rights, really.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know what to say, because you're just giving me six million different topics, and I don't know how we're supposed to have a debate if you're just going to ramble and give me twelve million topics.
I started to try and lay out a scenario.
We go on to Mexico, and your experience is there, and now we're... you know, I mean, I'm not sure what you want me to say here.
Well, I mean, how can you be... Are we going to have a debate about anything in particular, or are you just going to tell me your sort of thoughts and How can you have a free society when you have absolute property rights and everything is owned?
And if you don't own property...
You don't have the ability to act.
How can you have a free... because you keep saying... Okay, but look, look, dude, dude, you gotta slow down here.
Look, you've given me about six million different pieces of information.
Either we're going to stop and try and deal with a piece of information, or we're just going to keep rambling on.
If we're just going to keep rambling on, I don't really want to have this conversation.
Because it's not a debate.
Okay, well, I tried to get you to answer a simple question in the beginning.
I asked you what would happen to that rate in response.
Yeah, and I was going to give you a scenario, and then we start talking about Mexico, and then we start talking about other things, then we start talking about socialism, now we're talking about something else.
If you're going to answer the question, I'd be happy to.
You're trying to give me a utopian answer as if murder and rape... How do you know?
You haven't even heard an answer I've tried to give you yet.
How on earth do you know what kind of answer I'm trying to give you?
Because if you had a real answer, you would have answered with what happened to that situation when it happened.
Not trying to find a way to avoid that situation ever happening.
If a woman is raped and murdered... I never said... Look, look, dude.
I never said that I was going to give you a situation which would avoid it ever happening.
If you're not going to listen, there's not much point in having a conversation.
That's my question.
What happens if it happens?
What happens now?
That's my question.
It's been the question from the beginning.
I don't want to go into a whole bunch of theoretical, how can we avoid it.
What happens when it happens?
If you can't answer that... Okay, I'll answer that if you want.
Okay, if you want to leave it at that level, that's fine.
We'll do that.
Okay, so this is what happens.
A woman gets murdered by someone and that someone is going to be somewhere in the society doing something.
And you can't survive in a modern society without other people's participation with you.
And so other people are going to have to sell you food.
They're going to have to give you shelter.
They're going to have to give you gasoline.
They're going to have to let you walk on their streets or their roads or their malls or whatever it is.
So if you're in a civilization, you can't exist or survive in that civilization without other people's economic participation with you, voluntarily wanting to do things economically with you.
Now, if there is a general horror against rape and murder in a society, which I believe there would be.
You can't really call it a civilized society if there isn't that horror against rape and murder.
then there's going to be an investigation.
People are not going to want a rapist and murderer.
Even if they don't care about the poor woman, they don't want a rapist and murderer rolling around in society.
And so there's going to be investigations.
And the investigations are going to either be covered by People's Insurance Against Violence or by charity.
Right?
Charity covers huge amounts of things that people can't pay for themselves, including my show, so I speak from some experience here.
And so there's going to be an investigation.
Now, they're either going to find the guy or they won't.
And the people who are going to find the guy are going to have a very strong economic incentive to do so, because the people who can provide the most security for people can charge the least for providing that security, right?
Because it's going to be the cheapest.
So they have a huge economic incentive, which the government doesn't have, in order to find and, you know, prevent or deal with crime.
But they only have an incentive if it's their clients.
If this is a poor neighborhood, if the people who are involved are not their clients, and if it's far enough away from their clients, which a lot of times if you have people who are poor in poor neighborhoods, it's farther away, demographically more poor on poor crime happens that doesn't actually affect them, so it's not going to be an economic advantage to go try to stop every crime that happens in a poor neighborhood if their clients are the people who have money.
Sorry, are you saying that people as a whole don't care about the poor?
I'm saying that people who have money don't generally want to... No, no, that's a yes or no question.
Are you saying that people... Don't accuse me of filibustering and then don't answer a question.
Are you telling me that people as a whole don't care about the poor and would ignore crimes in poor neighborhoods?
I'm saying people who have a lot of money and aren't in contact with them, yeah.
And that's based on my experience also.
I mean in Mexico, like the same thing, in Mexico City there's rich neighborhoods that have So how do you explain the fact that most people are very committed to the welfare state?
actually care about the security of the people outside?
No way, absolutely not.
They care about themselves, that's it. - So how do you explain the fact that most people are very committed to the welfare state?
Of course, there's a huge amount of socialized medicine in Mexico and of course in America and hugely in Canada, in Europe, almost all places throughout the world.
There's a huge amount of concern to make, whether it's effective or not, but there's an emotional concern that people really do care about the poor.
Why do we support public schools?
Because we think they educate the poor.
Why do we support Medicare and Medicaid and why socialize medicine where it exists?
Because we believe that the poor should.
Why do we have a welfare state?
Because we believe.
Why do we have all these support programs, food stamps, you name it?
Because we believe that the poor need a fair shake.
Because it's politicized.
Because a politician runs saying he's going to provide these things, and the poor people say, oh, we want to vote for that.
The politician uses his monopoly on force to get those things in place.
But when it becomes completely profit-based, and there's no one standing above there who can actually politicize and get all the poor people saying, oh yeah, give me the free stuff.
Then they have no motive to do it.
Wait, wait, hang on, sorry, so you're saying that the welfare state is only because the poor want stuff, it's not because anybody else cares about the poor?
I would say the majority of situations comes from people who want to be taken care of.
They want to have a social security net.
Now, if you're saying that these insurance companies are going to be this social security net that's basically going to arbitrarily provide security across the entire nation, and I guess only the rich people are going to pay for it, and then the poor people are going to get the advantages, then what's the difference?
I mean, that's just like our current system.
Well, no, because it doesn't involve the initiation of force, right?
It's quite an important difference, really.
I'm sorry?
I mean, you have to ask the question, though.
I mean, if you have a situation where the insurance companies are... I mean, this has already happened.
We've already had situations where firemen in the United States have refused to actually put out fires because the person hadn't paid for the service.
It does happen.
It does happen that people will refuse to give them a service.
I mean, I have a hard time believing that you're going to build an entire system based on the concept that a company that's 100% for profit is going to consistently go into neighborhoods that don't affect their client base and go straighten out crime.
No, no, no.
But look, do you not think that poor people want some kind of security in their neighborhood?
Yeah, but I don't think that it would come from the DROs.
You don't think that?
So, you know, let's just look at America, right?
Mexico is not a good example because Mexico is far from a free market and has never had the kind of free market and entrepreneurship that America has had for a variety of socialistic slash status slash corrupting reasons.
So, in America, The vast majority of poor people have, you know, access to a car.
If not a car, they have color LCD or televisions.
They have internet.
They have microwaves.
They have ovens.
They have indoor plumbing.
They have all these great things.
And this is, you know, the poor, right?
This isn't like, you know, the sort of lower middle class.
The poor have a huge amount of stuff, which of course would make them far richer than most people 50 years ago.
And so the idea that they wouldn't have a couple of bucks to pay for security in their own neighborhood is...
Not realistic.
I mean, if they've got enough money for a color television, if they've got enough money for cable and internet, they have a couple of bucks a month to pay towards security.
Now, the people who don't have that money, who genuinely don't have that money, well, yeah, of course, there's this charity is like over a hundred billion dollars a year just in the United States.
That's charity outside of the taxes that people are paying for the welfare state and all that kind of stuff.
So, yes, I mean, there would be people who would be trying to sell security for poor people to make sure that they were protected and so on.
And it would really be about prevention rather than cure.
And so it would be up to entrepreneurs to provide these kinds of services to the poor.
And you see this kind of stuff happening all the time.
There's a huge range of products going from the very rich to the very poor.
And so, you know, you'd have a million entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to provide security to the poor in a cost-effective manner.
And so there'd be no reason to believe it.
In the past, for instance, like about a hundred years ago... Before we go too far, we already know that that's not the case.
If you go to poor neighborhoods... I mean, I lived in the ghetto in Waco one time in my life.
We have to stop talking about the neighborhoods you've lived in.
I mean, seriously, because you're comparing apples to oranges.
We know how they handle security.
Gangs, guns.
This is how... In the neighborhood we lived in, Security was a question of having a gun!
You don't get it, look.
No, seriously, you don't get it.
You don't understand where this stuff comes from.
First of all, these neighborhoods are almost exclusively composed of low-rent single moms.
Right?
And we know for a scientific fact, a psychological fact, that boys in particular raised without fathers have a much higher chance of becoming criminals.
How has the single mom phenomenon come about?
The single mom phenomenon has come about for a wide variety of reasons.
A lot of it has to do with the welfare state.
A lot of it has to do with unjust subsidies.
A lot of it has to do with kind of the war on men in the courts and the breakdown of the family.
This is all the result of the state.
So what you're doing is you're looking at massive amount of state effect.
where the state is responsible for the public housing, for the public schools, for the breakdown of the family, for subsidies, and all these kinds of malincentives for people to not get married and not have stable lives.
And you're saying, well, this massive state environment is somehow representative of a poor society, a poor neighborhood, and a free society.
This is a massive statist prison.
These ghettos, these poor societies, doesn't have anything to do with a free society.
Would you charge your daughter for security?
No, no, we have to deal with this point.
These poor neighborhoods, which have a lot of violence, have to do with a lot of status.
I saw the same principle in Mexico, same principle in every poor area that I've ever lived in.
And it does come down to this.
Would you charge your daughter for security?
Would you charge your parents for security?
I wouldn't.
When people don't have a lot of resources... I'm sorry, I don't even understand the question.
Sorry, I really want to understand your question.
My daughter is four.
What do you mean, would I charge her for security?
Well, of course you wouldn't, because you wouldn't even think that the security is a product when it comes to your daughter.
Now, this whole paradigm we're talking about of creating security, private security, private justice as a product, obviously comes back to Gustav de Molinari's concept of the public versus private product.
But why make it a product when people can band together for mutual defense without the need of a third party?
I mean, this is how it was done for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
And this is what people revert to in poor neighborhoods and in poor situations.
That's what they do.
It's not a question of the state.
It's a question of instinct.
Taking care of your own.
Now, if you think that it's going to come down to, I'm going to charge my uncle, Well, I mean, you're going to be at a severe disadvantage.
I'm sorry, I don't understand.
I'm not trying to be obtuse here.
I don't understand what you're talking about.
What do you mean?
How would I charge my uncle for defense?
I don't understand that.
Well, the whole concept of moving this to a product, that this is all going to be something that we deal with in the market as a commodity that you sell, It doesn't match what people do in low-income situations.
It doesn't match what people have done for thousands of years without the state.
When there's a lack of the state, what people do is bind together for mutual defense.
It's just logical.
You don't need to pay somebody.
Why would you pay a company if you don't have money?
Why are you going to go try to find a way to get cheap security when you can just get a gun, have your uncle get a gun, have your brother get a gun, and defend yourselves?
That's how they used to do it in America.
That's how they used to do it before the states even existed.
109,000 years of human history was handled like that.
So what I don't understand is why animal capitalists assume that the best way to handle it was with a paradigm, this commoditization of security, that really was derived from the state.
That's where it began, is in the state.
And you're not really actually changing the paradigm when you try to move it to businesses.
Yeah, again, I'm sorry, I think what you're trying to say is why would people outsource their protection to other people or responses to their protection to other people?
Well, because it tends to be more economically efficient, it tends to be a whole lot less violent, and so I think neighborhoods where people wanted to just... I mean, and don't get me wrong, I hear people want to carry guns in a free society, I mean...
Of course, right?
I mean, there's no problem with that whatsoever, and that obviously does a lot to deter crime a huge amount, right?
I mean, if the woman was armed, she'd be a lot less likely to be raped and murdered.
So that certainly is, that's a very important line of anti-criminal defense, is to be armed and all that kind of stuff.
But, of course, the Hatfield and McCoy problem is that you need a third party to adjudicate disputes.
Of course, you also want a group of people in society who are very economically invested in preventing violence from coming into being.
And, of course, we don't really know what a society like that looks like because it hasn't ever come into being yet.
Societies have been so irrational throughout most of human history that the destruction of the child's cognitive ability seems to be job one in raising children for most societies.
And that, I think, continues to the present day.
In a sort of future society where people are, you know, rational and, you know, there are people who have an investment in making sure that people don't grow up violent, then I think people would just recognize that that's a good idea.
And so the guy, whoever it was that raped this woman, just to jump back and hopefully tie that knot off, well, yeah, I mean, there would be lots of people who would want to do that.
You know, when somebody gets sick, even in a poor neighborhood, lots of people chip in, they help out, they do food drives, bake sales, they come by with lasagnas, they donate money when kids are sick, even up here in Canada you see this happening.
And there were, of course, in the past, right, among the poor, There were these things called Friendly Societies that lasted from the dawn of the Republic until they were squashed by governments in the 1920s.
And Friendly Societies were the working person's answer to the problems of health care, old age insurance, disability insurance, sickness insurance and so on.
And more than 30% of workers were enrolled in these things and they were like social clubs.
You can still see the vestiges in terms of the Shriners and stuff like that.
And they made sure that, you know, people could get an entire year's worth of medical care if they wanted for one or two days' pay.
So there were all these people.
They got together.
They collectivized their – they sort of socialized their risk and all of that.
And they made sure that they pay a little bit in amount, you know, in these insurance things.
So these insurance things have worked wherever the government hasn't been there in the past, right?
There's huge amounts of historical evidence of them showing up everywhere where the government doesn't provide for things like disability insurance.
then these friendly societies show up and people pay into them And they have an incentive to keep costs low, but they also have an incentive to serve people, because there's lots of different people competing to provide these services.
So in the past where the government hasn't, you know, barged in and elbowed everyone aside, these societies spring up which are very positive, very helpful, and really do protect the poor in a much better way than the government does.
So I don't know that there's any particular reason to believe that there's an area where that simply would never ever happen, since it's happened in so many other areas in the past.
Well, it's significantly different when you're talking about justice, where people, for instance, if the consequences, which we haven't determined where these consequences are determined, because there may be four or five, say there's four companies that are operating within Afghanistan.
We don't know what the universal rules are going to be.
And the person can be tried.
This is where we need to get some answers.
I won't just put words into your mouth here, but If you're talking about murder, the consequences are much higher.
I'm sorry, I just lost you for a minute or two there.
I got kicked off Google, but I'm back.
Sorry, I was just talking about the friendly societies, if we could sort of pick it up from there.
Yeah, I actually heard where you finished off and then what I picked up was saying it's significantly different when you're talking about providing law enforcement and criminal justice where a person could be put in, I don't know, prison for life.
I don't know what the consequences would be or whether a person could be executed.
These are the possibilities we haven't talked about.
I mean, the first question I would have in this kind of situation is jurisdiction.
I mean, if you have four companies who claim to be providing criminal justice, meaning that if you bring a criminal to court, he's going to face consequences, how is jurisdiction determined when you have four people operating in the same territory?
Sorry, if you have four companies operating in the same territory and one of them, sorry, somebody's a member of one, but they just have reciprocity agreements the same way that ISPs do, the same way that cell phone companies do.
You can go to Paraguay and talk on your cell phone because they all have overlapping agreements to deal with these problems and ISPs all hand off data packets to each other, no problem.
I mean, because customers would demand it, because the first thing customers would say, I mean, it's a trick of the of the consciousness to get into this kind of way of thinking.
But instead of thinking the problems, you know, putting barriers up, think of how an entrepreneur would try and overcome these barriers, right?
So if I go and try and sell my, you know, protection from violence insurance to someone, the first question they're going to say is, okay, well, what if some guy attacks me and he's not part of the same insurance agency?
I call them DROs or dispute resolution organizations.
What if he's not part of the same DRO?
Well, I have to have an answer for that.
Otherwise, I'm not going to be able to sell anything to anyone.
So the first thing I'm going to want to do is hammer out reciprocity contracts with other agencies to make sure that these problems of jurisdictions would be dealt with.
Otherwise, you know, you wouldn't be able to sell anything.
And anybody who could hammer those things out would be the guy who'd get the sale.
So that's how it would work.
And again, there's 6 billion different examples of how this all works in the world.
And of course, countries have reciprocity agreements at the moment.
You've got extradition treaties, you've got, you know, this kind of stuff, right?
So this is tons of examples of how this stuff all works in the present.
Well, that's actually what I would have expected.
And that's why I presented that it would lead to cartels Because if you get a group of companies that are making agreements like that, then they can make agreements in other directions.
The question is, then... I'm sorry, what do you mean they could make agreements in other directions?
Well, I mean, for instance, they could agree to do things that aren't necessarily what the people want.
I mean, you see what happens... Well, like, for instance, Only enforcing certain laws, basically allowing certain people to get off because they own certain things.
There's all sorts of kinds of corruption.
No, sorry, sorry, just be a little bit more specific.
Do you mean letting the rich get away with raping and killing people?
Yeah, say for instance, the guy who did this, he was actually a son of a security mogul.
And say this guy actually owns two of the companies, and there's two other companies.
So he actually just gets off on it because he likes power.
It's not for any other reason.
And he just goes to the poor neighborhoods because he knows that there's not much enforcement or security around there.
So he goes and does that, and he has a couple of his goon friends who go do things like that.
These kinds of abuses always happen when people have the power to use violence.
I mean, Blackwater is involved in all sorts of abuses, and it's not because of the state.
It's the inherent power over the people, like we saw in the Okay, sorry, can you just, so can you just go through with this scenario?
I just want to play this out.
So you've got some rich playboy son of the CEO of one of these DROs and he likes going around sticking knives in people and stuff like that, right?
Sure, I mean, this kind of thing can happen.
Okay, sure, it can happen for sure.
So let's say that the DRO, the head of the DRO doesn't want to prosecute, right?
Or maybe he just wants to cover it up.
Okay, yeah, maybe he wants to cover it up.
Okay, so either the cover-up comes to light or it doesn't.
Now, it's going to be pretty tough for him to cover it up, right, because there's going to be a whole bunch of people involved in the investigation.
Now, if someone who runs a DRO... I'm sorry?
Have you ever been an entrepreneur?
Yeah.
Okay, so you know that there's boards, you know that there's shareholders, you know that there's lots of stakeholders in any large or medium-sized organization who are very invested Not on the field.
I mean, not out on the field.
I mean, you can get away with a lot of stuff out on the job.
Well, of course.
And all the customers in the world would be fully aware that you can get away with a whole bunch of stuff out in the field.
And so the company that came up with the best answer about how you deal with that possibility of corruption would be the one to make the sale.
But if the CEO attempted to cover up a murder, then, I mean, there would be so many people who would know about it.
And either you'd find out about it or you didn't.
Well, if you didn't find out about it, I mean, That could happen with the government, who knows, right?
This is a very, very rare circumstance and everybody would want those fail safes in place.
But if you did find out about it, then it would be, the guy would have to prosecute.
First of all, he would then be in violation and he would be prosecuted for failing to prosecute, right?
I mean, that would happen.
And secondly, everybody who was a shareholder and a stakeholder would immediately want this guy's head because even if they didn't have a moral horror of what he was doing, which they probably would, they'd be incredibly upset at the degree of damage he was doing to the DRO.
Because if a DRO that spent 50 years protecting someone turns out to be protecting a murderer and rapist.
Can you imagine what the competitors would do with that information?
The kind of ads they would run, the kind of discounts they would offer to get people to flee that DRO, the moral horror that...
I mean, people boycott Chick-fil-A or something like that, right?
I mean, they would boycott someone who openly protects a murderer and rapist.
The company would be out of business in about 18 minutes, and there's just no way that this would be sustainable.
Either they do the right thing, or they'd go out of business.
Either way, the corruption within the organization would be taken care of.
Sorry, go ahead.
But I mean, we see corruption, and it doesn't get taken care of.
I mean, you see corruption in all sorts of situations where if you hide it efficiently, you can get away with it.
I mean, especially in a situation where you have a chain of command, where the boss socially controls his employees, I mean, you see what happens in an organization like Blackwater.
I mean, there's all sorts of corruption.
That's nothing to do with a free society.
That's a crypto-fascist organization that has taken monies directly from the government, and the government is taking it directly from the people by force.
That is not an example of a defense agency that would exist in a free society.
That is an example of a fascist arm of the state.
If you need defense against, say for instance, you have the Republic of the Unabashed Statist living next door on your west side.
So these people actually want to invade you.
So you have to actually have a defense mechanism.
So you're going to have to have, in your society, you're going to have to have some kind of private military.
So that could be Blackwater.
We know No, no, no.
You're conflating a government fascist arm with what would exist in a free society.
Blackwater does not answer to the voters.
Blackwater doesn't answer to the taxpayers.
It doesn't answer to the citizens.
It doesn't answer to anyone.
And it doesn't have any competition.
So in a free society, there's like 10 or 15 or 20 different people all vying to provide the best defense services.
And they have to answer the questions which people are going to have, which is, well, if I pay you to get a whole bunch of weapons, why won't you just turn around and take over and become another state?
Or why wouldn't you collude with the other guys and come in and take all their stuff?
You would have to answer all of the objections that customers would have in order to get them to invest in you.
You'd have to have six million different fail-safe mechanisms.
You'd have to have external independent audits by five different organizations that all had the best reputations.
I mean, anyone who tried to...
Of course it's elaborate, because you need to protect yourself from the people who you're hiring to protect you.
Of course, that's the basic.
Who watches the watchers?
Well, no one can ever watch the watchers, which is why you can't have a state.
Because the moment you give people a monopoly on violence, they'll just start using it for all the nefarious ends in the known universe.
There's no answer to who will watch the watchers, other than the voluntary choices of customers and the natural competition of the free market.
That's the only answer that's ever worked.
No, no, that's not true.
There's a third answer, and the third answer is you don't create a third party with a great deal of violent advantage over you.
I mean, you could have... Sorry, which third party?
I just want to understand, you say you don't create a third party with violent power, but who is...
You're creating these businesses.
These private militaries are supposed to defend you.
You have ten of them, say, in your society.
Well, you've just given them a greatly superior violent capacity, obviously, because you're paying them to have this capacity.
Well, why do that?
I mean, historically, the only stateless societies that ever existed didn't hire their security or their mutual defense.
They banded together and they provided it themselves.
What are you talking like Stone Age?
Are you talking ancient Ireland?
What are you talking about here?
Well, okay, you're trying to make it look like it's a question of technology.
It's not a question of technology, it's a question of social structure.
I mean, in America they had militias before they had standing armies.
And this is because America was largely based on the Iroquois Federation.
There was other times in history that the Native American tribes, the 190,000 years of tribal societies that didn't have businesses that provided security, they provided the security for themselves.
They banded together.
Are you talking about the Native Americans?
I'm talking about 190,000 years of different types of societies pre-state.
These were not anarcho-capitalists.
They didn't hire a third party to do things.
They took care of their security themselves.
They banded together, and if they needed to protect themselves, they protected themselves.
And you eliminate the danger of the corruption and the need for this elaborate system of checks and balances because you don't create this third party that has all this power.
Sure, and look, if that's... and you could be right.
In the absence of a state, I don't believe so, but I mean, what do I know about what's going to happen in a couple hundred years?
You may be right.
That may be that people banding together to protect themselves is the best way to do it.
That's a wonderful thing.
As long as they're not, you know, initiating the use of force, then they're on the sunny side of the street morally.
I think, given the technological disparities between a militia and a sort of modern statist army, Particularly since it's funded through coercive taxation and can print money at will, usually with central banks, it tends to be a pretty formidable foe.
I think you're going to need a little bit more than some local militia in order to protect yourself from, you know, some monstrous statist army with God knows what kind of technology.
But maybe you're right.
Maybe, you know, hatchets and, you know, wigwams will be what people will use.
Question.
I mean, you're saying hatchets, as if just because the people were, had a particular level of technology, 10,000 years ago, that means that suddenly the social structure is going to be inherently affected by it.
No, I mean, 10,000 years ago, technology was weak for the status too.
You could have a different social structure to handle defense, just like for instance, the Swiss.
They have a much greater reliance on having the population be trained and having them keep their fully automatic firearm in their homes.
So they don't need a large standing army.
And because their population is so armed to the teeth and trained, it would be suicide to invade.
Yeah, and maybe that would be the best way to do it.
I mean, I can't, as I've said a million times before, not in this conversation, I don't know what the future's going to bring.
I think there's some examples you can use in the past, but we do know that in the absence of centralized coercion, people self-organize spontaneously.
There's, you know, I mean, I would bore you to tears coming up with all the examples that I've learned about throughout in history.
So, we don't need a central violent monopoly of force in society.
It seems like we do because it's pushed aside everything that was there beforehand and everything that would come in the future.
But people do spontaneously self-organize in the absence of central coercion because, you know, life is risky, there is problems of crime and violence and rape and there always will be.
I think they'll diminish considerably in a free society.
I think that, you know, we kind of know the cure for violence in the same way that we know the cure for polio or smallpox.
There is an inoculation called peaceful parenting, which means that they will be about as prevalent as smallpox and polio in the future as they are now.
So, yeah, maybe there will be.
I personally don't think there'll be much need for any sort of protection in the same way it's kind of tough to sell polio insurance these days.
But, you know, there may be, you know, some, I don't know, space aliens come by or something.
If you want to deal with that, that's fine.
But the reality is that none of the problems that you've brought up are solved by the state.
I mean, the idea that the state is going to be really good at... No, I understand that, but I think if you're saying, well, how would a woman who was raped, how would the rapist be dealt with?
Well, the rapist is dealt with by identifying him using people who've got a strong financial incentive to do so, which is not the cops.
Uh, and then, um, uh, how it could work.
I mean, I think the most economically efficient and safest and most moral way to do it, uh, is simply to impose airtight economic ostracism on that guy until, if he's found guilty, right?
Uh, to, to submit to that.
And he can only regain the massive, I mean, almost infinite economic benefits of participation in society after paying his debt off and, you know, going through whatever he needs to go through to become a better person.
That presumes a lot of things.
It presumes that people are going to automatically do that.
I mean, they don't do that now when they're faced with something like BP.
Sorry, automatically do what?
Ostracize a company, for instance, financially or a person financially for malpractice.
I mean, you look at Goldman Sachs.
I mean, everybody knows they're corrupt.
Everybody's still doing business with them.
It's not like it's actually hurting them.
Yeah, but this has nothing to do with a free society.
I mean, people do business with Goldman Sachs because people's money is forced into the stock market.
I mean, if you don't give it to Goldman Sachs or someone like them, the government takes it away.
I mean, they're held hostage.
People don't want to be in the stock market to probably one-tenth of one percent of the degree that they are.
They're just forced in by pension plans and 401k plans.
They're all forced in because if you don't give it to... I'm sorry?
To reduce the complexity, just BP.
I mean, I'm talking about immoral behaviors.
I'm not saying like the particular business that a company is involved in, but like BP.
But BP, I mean, why is BP out in the ocean?
Because they're not allowed to drill on land, because the federal government owns one-third of the land, and environmentalism is a very politically sensitive issue.
I mean, why are they out there drilling in 20 miles of water?
It's ridiculous, right?
So again, it's really hard to look at any of the situations that occur these days and say that they're in any way analogous to what would happen in a free society.
In a free society, there'd be much safer places to drill and much better places to drill than being out there in the storm-tossed seas.
Oil is limited, so eventually people are going to do that, but that's not the point.
The point was that their behavior, their activities, were immoral.
What they did was immoral, and they did not get ostracized economically.
That's what I'm talking about.
Right, because there's a government that is supposed to take care of all of that, so there are no alternative mechanisms in place to deal with these kinds of things.
But it's a social dynamic.
It's not like people saying that the government's going to take it.
We know now that the government's not going to take care of it, and people are still not boycotting them because it's economically not driving them to do that.
I mean, if you're going to boycott somebody, you have to, in a lot of situations, say for instance, if you're going to boycott the company that sells you The bread that you're used to buying.
I mean, if that bread was crappy, I mean, I've made this point in my previous video, but if the bread is lower quality and more expensive, then you're not gonna be tempted to buy it anyway.
So, if it is the bread that you wanted to buy, but if the company's involved in immoral behavior, then you have to make a financial sacrifice for your morality.
And people just don't consistently do that when they don't have the resources.
That's just... Well, sorry, but we weren't talking about a company.
We were talking about a guy who killed and raped a poor woman.
Well, I'm saying the same thing.
Or raped and killed, right?
We know a lot of these guys.
Would you... Okay, so for instance, if you're an employer, would you want to hire someone like that?
I wouldn't, but I know there's people who would.
Like Blackwater, for instance.
They hire people who are... Yes, this is the government thing again.
You keep tossing in examples which I thought we've dealt with, right?
So we have to deal a little bit more theoretically, right?
No, but here's the thing.
You're talking about We're talking about social dynamics and I can't use any examples of humanity because supposedly humanity is going to be different.
To me that sounds utopian.
Supposedly all these social dynamics are going to change because the state is not involved.
How would you boycott Blackwater right now?
How would you boycott Blackwater if you think this is a possible thing?
I'm not their customer.
So I'm not going to be the one who could block it.
So why do you keep bringing up Blackwater as an example of a failure of ostracism when it's impossible to ostracize them anyway?
Because their real customer are people like the Rockefellers.
These are the guys who really own the state anyway.
These are the guys who actually buy the products and services that the state provides.
We actually are living in a free market society.
It's just that the government is for sale.
And only if you can really afford it, can you buy it.
Okay, all right.
That's a remarkable statement.
So let's just stop right there.
We are living, you say, in a free market society.
If you can buy the state, then it is on the market.
So technically, you can buy that product if you have enough money.
Now I'm not saying it's... Okay, all right.
So let's just go back for a sec.
Let's just go back for a sec.
Okay, so a free market society Would be a society that respected property rights, property rights the essence of a free market.
Do you find that we live in a society that respects property rights?
No, not at all.
I don't say that we're living in a... Hang on, hang on.
A free market society would be a society where there's competition in the provision of goods and services.
Do you find that there's competition in the provision of goods and services in things like education for children, in things like roads, in things like the provision of justice, in things like the creation of currency, in things like interest rates, and so on?
Like I said, I'm not saying that it's your definition.
What I'm saying is it is on the market.
This is not my definition.
Come on, don't personalize this.
It's not my definition.
A free market society respects property rights and allows for the free exchange of goods and services.
The question is very, very, very, very pointed because not everybody has the same definition of what is a free market.
To say that Free market also implies all of these other social conditions is not necessarily everybody's definition.
How do you go with that definition?
Okay, well, can you tell me what your definition of a free market society is then?
Because I've never heard anything outside.
This is not something I just made up out of my own.
Well, okay.
I'm not saying that the definition of free market society, what I'm saying is that Government itself is for sale.
It is a product.
So, technically, it is one of the products that are available, just like any company.
Sorry, are you saying that the government is like every other company?
It's very much like every other company.
Yes, it has a top-down structure, it provides services, and it coercively forces you to buy it, which some companies do when they get in that position.
Sorry, how do companies coercively force you to buy things?
When companies have gotten in positions of monopolies, like for instance, say for a company has the control of all the oil supplies in a given region.
How does the company have control of all of the given oil supplies and how do they force people to buy things?
I'm just trying to understand because I think you're talking a lot of shit, frankly.
I think you're just making up stuff and I think you're refusing to back down from an untenable position, but I'm willing to hear you explain it.
Okay, you know what?
You're right.
How is a company like a government which has the power to print its own money?
No company has that power.
They have the power to tax.
No other government, no other company has that power.
I shouldn't use the word free market in that context because I understand you have your definition.
So you're right on that.
No, no, it's not my... Don't make this personal, like I just don't happen to like the kind of jazz that you like.
Either we're going to be precise or we're not.
Well, you have people like you have the Occupy Wall Street people who would say that this is free market and that's the free market.
People have different definitions of it.
What I'm saying is you keep using this term of the free society and what you're really saying is Somehow people are going to be free, but in reality, you're only going to be free in your society, you're only going to be free on your land if you own that land.
So I don't see how that's going to lead to people actually being able to do what they want in general.
I'm sorry, you're saying that, have I said that people are already going to be free if they own land?
Or are you saying that?
If you understand that Ann Arbor Capitalist proposed that all property is owned, right?
It starts with self-ownership and we're responsible for the effects of our actions.
Yes.
Property rights are absolute.
Every piece of property is owned.
Sorry, I hate to be annoying, but that's a tautology.
Every piece of property is owned, but property by definition is something that someone owns.
Every square inch of land is owned, right?
No, I don't think that's true.
No, no, because there'd be lots of land that nobody wanted to own.
No, no, there'd be lots of land, lots of people.
I mean, Americans represent, like, 2% of the country is inhabited.
I mean, why on earth would somebody want some piece of swampland in Florida that you couldn't do anything with, or the top of a mountaintop that nobody ever wanted to go, or a cave, or, you know, I mean, there's a whole bunch of massive amounts of things that would remain unowned because nobody would really care about them.
I mean, if you wanted to go live there, I'm sure you could and homestead it or whatever, but I think that it's no... Let's limit the range.
Let's say in a city.
We're in an inner-capitalist city.
You would admit that in most cities, every square inch is owned.
Except for the fact that there are streets that are in our current system.
Commons.
So you can walk down the street.
You can speak on the street.
You can freely assemble on the street.
You can go to a park.
You can do the same thing.
You can speak and all these things.
But in a capitalist society, these would be owned.
So people would own the streets.
They would own the parks.
They would own the rivers.
They would own the lakes.
All of these things.
And the property owner could assert his rights.
Absolutely.
He can say, you're doing this action right now.
You're speaking.
I don't like the way you're saying.
You leave my property.
Yes, of course the government can do that too and you have to get permits and you can get arrested anyway and anyway so but yeah okay so yes absolutely.
So you would only have rights on your property if you had property and if you didn't have property you would have no rights.
I'm sorry, I don't quite understand what you mean by the word rights there.
I don't know what rights actually means in this context.
Seek as you wish to be able to freely assemble, to be able to move around, to know that you're not going to be kicked off, to be able to freely travel.
If you don't have property, how are you going to do that in an anarcho-capitalist society?
If you don't have money, and somebody said...
Well, because people want you to use their...
No, because people want you to.
I mean, God, it's like you've never, ever worked in the free market.
I mean, because people want you to use their roads.
They want you to use their malls.
They want you to use their parks.
They want you to drive and walk along the sidewalk because there are businesses that they're building the sidewalks to deliver people to.
So they want you to use this stuff.
I mean, I don't know where you're getting this stuff from.
I mean, if you never walked in a city...
I'm saying if people don't like your political speech, they can kick you out.
See, it...
Free speech only matters when you're saying something that people don't like.
So you wouldn't actually have... I'm sorry, so where are you supposed to... I don't understand.
So if you go to a park and you're advocating killing Jews and you're a Nazi, the park owner can kick you off as being offensive?
That's extreme.
But what if you're protesting about the conditions of a business that that park owner owns?
He can kick you off too.
Of course he can.
Absolutely.
And I can't go up and do karaoke at an opera.
Of course.
Because that's not what it's for.
Does that mean I don't have free speech because I can't do karaoke at an opera or start singing at the top of my lungs during a movie without getting kicked out?
No, it just means I'm living in a civilized society with some reasonable expectations of decorum.
If every single square inch of the land is under those same rules, then you actually don't have any place that you can just speak how you want except in your... I'm sorry, wait, wait, wait.
Sorry, sorry, every square inch of land is under which same rules?
So, say if you're in this city, say this city where it's very developed, alright, so you have land up against itself.
Every single square inch is property of somebody.
If you want to speak, the only place that you can speak and not be worried about whether somebody's going to say, I don't like your politics.
You're back there.
So if your politics are controversial, so if your politics are controversial, so how you're, if your politics are controversial and you're the person that is offended, and I'm not saying anything about the content, it could be something that's, Perfectly normal for an average person, but for that particular owner, for whatever reason, he doesn't want you to speak, he can just tell you not to speak.
I mean, there's no universal rights when you're on a person's property.
Yeah, but so what?
I mean, I don't understand.
You've got the internet, you've got YouTube, which is, I guess, you've got Google Hangouts, you've got books, you've got tons of different ways that you can get things across, and you can go and rent a hall if you want to go and give a speech.
People will either come or they won't.
Now, if people will come to your speech, then the guy who's in it maybe pay, or if you'll just pay, then the person will put usually profit ahead of principle to that degree, unless he finds you just completely offensive.
So, yeah, I mean, just because you want to go and say something doesn't mean that other people somehow have to give you a platform.
You have to earn that.
You earn that through being entertaining or witty or enjoyable or erudite, and you earn that through, if you want, working somewhere else and then building up your audience until people will come and pay you for it.
But that's like saying, look, if you have a band and all the clubs are privately owned, there's no place for you to play, man.
It's like, well, no.
I mean, you play in your garage or you play out on a mountainside until you get really good.
And once you get really good, then the bands, the bars will love to have you come play because you'll bring people in to pay a covered price and drink some drinks.
So I don't understand why this is... This is not a free society.
If there's no place where people can If you can't move through society without having the money to provide to the guy who's going to basically offer up his private roads, so there's no way to move around, there's no place that you can be free in the public and assemble, then you really have no way to organize people.
So basically, the people who have the most resources financially... Wait, wait, sorry, you jumped around now.
Now we're not talking about giving a talk, we're talking about driving?
Is that what you mean?
No, I'm saying just free movement.
For instance, just in terms of political organization.
But a mall is privately owned.
Can you not walk around a mall?
I don't understand what you're talking about.
And they can kick you out if they don't like what you're saying.
Of course they can.
Why shouldn't they?
It's their mall.
I mean, does that mean that someone has to come into your house and tell you things that are unbelievably offensive to you, and scream at you, and you can't kick them out?
I mean, are you kidding?
Of course not.
Of course not.
And that's the thing.
The issue, though, is that you're talking about making a system where everything is owned.
So everyone has the same right for their property that you demand for your property.
How is that not fair?
I mean, you don't want people coming into your house and yelling at you things that you're offensive or not.
You want to be able to kick them out.
So that's a universal principle.
Everybody who has property has that same right.
How is that not having freedom and equality?
The question is, the place where you actually have the ability to organize people For instance, against oppressive conditions in a business.
Bring them to your house.
Bring them to your house.
Set up a wonderful YouTube channel.
If you own a house, a person who's poor may not... Bring them to your apartment.
And if your landlord says he doesn't want you to?
What?
If your landlord says he doesn't want anybody in your house?
If he says that he doesn't want you organizing political meetings at your house, he has absolute property rights.
He's the property owner.
He can tell you not to.
Well, that would be something that you would sign up ahead of time, and you'd be bound by that contract.
Although I can't imagine any landlord would ever want to pursue that or try and figure something out about that.
I mean, you can go to a friend's house.
You can go anywhere that anybody is willing to let you have.
But I mean, of course you have the right, if you own something, to not have it abused by someone or have it used by someone who you find offensive.
I mean, of course.
That's like saying, you know, I don't want my house kidnapped by people who are offensive to me.
I don't want my daughter kidnapped.
I don't want my wife kidnapped.
I don't want to be kidnapped.
I mean, this is assessing basic self-ownership and respect for property.
The idea that somehow people's property rights have to be violated in some manner so that people can assemble and do things that they find offensive, I mean, how would that be fair?
That's just you imposing your views on how other people should use their property and what they should or shouldn't find offensive.
I know what I'm saying is that the idea of having your roads and everything be completely into private property creates a situation where you are actually at the whim of multiple states.
Because each of those private property entities becomes a state.
It has all the powers of a state.
And that's actually what... Can they force against you?
Can they declare war on your behalf?
Sure they can.
Can they print money and debase your currency?
Okay.
Wait, wait.
So a road owner.
Okay.
If you're going to start talking this stuff again, we're going to pause and go through it bit by bit.
So you're saying that somebody who owns a road can declare war on your behalf, can debase your currency, can conscript you, can tax you.
I didn't say that.
I answered one question.
You said, can they initiate violence against you?
If you decide not to leave, yes, they can initiate violence.
If you don't obey their rules, yes, they can initiate violence.
On private property, if a person doesn't obey your rules, if they... Wait, wait.
So you're saying that if somebody breaks an entrance into your house, Then you don't have the right to self-defense?
Say you're on a road and a person says... No, no, no, no, no.
Forget the road.
We're just talking about the principle here.
If somebody breaks into your house, do you have the right to use force to defend your house and your property and yourself?
Of course.
Okay.
So how would that be different for anyone else's property?
How can you call it the initiation of force if it's okay for your house but not okay for somebody else's property?
I didn't say it was initiation of force to kick a person.
You said they have the right to initiate force against you if you are on their property.
If you're on their property, and if you're on a person's property, and they tell you to leave, and you don't leave, yes, they can initiate force.
No, no, no, you just told me it was self-defense for your house, right?
It is self-defense.
So how is it not self-defense for the other person?
It is, and that's what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is... So it's not the initiation of force?
You are initiating force against a person you want to leave because they weren't being violent necessarily, but you want them to leave because you told them to leave.
Yes, you have the right to do that in a private property standpoint.
I'm not saying you don't.
What I'm saying is if you create a system where everything is set up like that, then everywhere becomes state and to itself because the person has the ability to force you off of their property, to initiate violence, to get you off of their property if you don't want to leave.
So what I'm saying is by having no commons, by having everything be in that system, what you end up with is a collection of states.
And that's actually what Gustav Lomar...
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
You can't say, you can't say a collection of states.
I mean, you're just trying to slip in these things like, like somebody defending their own property from invasion is the same as like a homeowner defending his property from a home invasion is somehow the equivalent of a government.
I mean, that's just absurd.
Do you not feel how absurd that is?
If you have nowhere that you can go, That is not in that paradigm.
Like, if you don't have any place... But look, dude, the government owns everything.
How is it solved by having something in common?
I mean, right now the government can deport you for breaking any one of six million rules you didn't even know about.
They can... I mean, there are people in Canada who get sent back to Jamaica who were born here because of some problem that they've had with the law, some minor... I mean, So the idea that, obviously, I mean, you and I are both anti-statists, so we're not, you know, we know that the government doesn't solve it, but how on earth would you have a park that nobody owns?
I'm not sure how this problem, even if it is a problem, is even remotely solvable.
I mean, people want you to use their property if it's any kind of public place.
First of all, comparing the state to our current system... I mean, comparing our current system to inter-vocabulism isn't fair.
It's like comparing the current system of the states to ancient Egypt and saying, well, you have it great because you don't get lashed with an inch of your life and you have to push around heavy stones.
You know, Gustavo Molinari, who was actually the founder, or the person who came up with these ideas, he actually said himself, this is a quote directly taken from Gustavo Molinari and the anti-statist liberal tradition by David Imhart, and this is off of Mises.org.
He says, the future will neither bring the absorption of society by the state, as the communists and collectivists believe, nor the suppression of the state, which is the dream of the anarchists and the nihilists.
It will bring a diffusion of the state within society.
That is to recall a well-known phrase, a free state within a free society.
So he actually said those exact words.
He said he believed that it was going to become a collection of states, not a stateless society.
He wasn't actually an anarchist, and he was the one who actually originated this idea.
Yeah, again, I mean, if you can use the word state to mean anything you want, then sure.
But if the state is a geographical monopoly on force in a geographical area, manned by people who did nothing to earn it whatsoever, and sustained by the delusion that the state has opposite moral properties from every other human being in society, then no, you can't have a diffusion of states where people have private property and self-ownership.
And all recognize, in general, the non-initiation of force.
A multiplicity of companies who are trading voluntarily on the free market is not the same as a bunch of governments.
I mean, a government is a pretty specific thing.
It is a violent monopoly and that's just not the way that it works in a free market, a free society.
Well, we already acknowledged that these companies would form a cartel, that they would form agreements with themselves.
I didn't acknowledge that.
I don't know what we are getting out of that.
You said that they would form agreements in order to establish how... An agreement is not a cartel.
Look, I mean, an agreement is not a cartel.
ISPs who exchange data across TCP IP packets are not forming a cartel.
Insurance companies who have cross-border agreements are not forming a cartel.
Cell phone companies that agree to pick up signals from Paraguay are not forming a cartel.
It's called coopetition, right?
It's when you cooperate, but in a competitive environment.
And this is not a cartel at all.
Cartels are always put in place by governments.
There's almost I mean, people have studied this up the yin-yang.
They cannot find a monopoly that has ever existed in any economically significant way that was not put in place and maintained by the power of the state.
You know, I mean, fewer than five of the Fortune 500 companies that were around a hundred years ago are still around today.
And most of those are still around because they've got government agreements and cartels and monopoly privileges.
So this idea that you can somehow have some sort of monster monopoly in a free market is just not sustained by economic history.
You agreed that they would have agreements among themselves on how they did things.
They would have agreements based upon what their customers wanted, not based upon what they wanted.
So their customers get to decide how they run their company?
Yeah, of course.
I mean, isn't that what the free market is?
That you have to satisfy your customers?
Because we were originally talking about like four DROs and somebody committed a crime and the other guy wasn't a part of it or whatever.
And nobody would want that any more than I could sell an ISP that said, well, you can only go to my server, not the Internet.
And you can only send email through my server and from nowhere else.
I mean, nobody would – I mean, when you put that out as a business plan, people would laugh at you, right?
So, of course, the customers' demands would drive that.
Customer caution would demand that.
So, if some guy said, listen, I'd like you to pay me $10 a month to protect your property from foreign invasion, my first question would be like, how do I know what you're going to do with this $10 model?
What if you buy brain feasting robots that turn me into your willing conscription zombie?
And so he'd have to find a way to deal with my concerns and so on.
And if somebody said, I want to protect you from violence, my first thought would be, A, can I do it for myself cheaper?
And B, is there some neighborhood group I could join that, you know, everybody I know?
And C, what happens if somebody is not part of your group and they commit a crime against me?
And D, how do I know you're not going to take my money and buy a bunch of guns and come back and take my property anyway.
All of these things would be what entrepreneurs in a free market would have to overcome.
And I have no idea how they do it, because I mean, I have one-tenth of one-tenth of one-tenth of one percent of the genius of the free market on a good day.
But the fact is that the customers would drive that.
Entrepreneurs would have to satisfy these needs and answer these questions.
Or if people wanted to, you know, if they said, hey, you've got to come and live at the city, then maybe a bunch of people like you would say, well, I don't like the fact that everything is owned.
I want a bunch of stuff that's unowned.
And I'm really going to come and live in here and be part of your city if there's a bunch of stuff that's unowned.
Well, fantastic.
Then you'll get what you want.
And if I want everything to be owned, I'll go to some other place.
Where it's more convenient or more suitable to my taste.
None of us are initiating force by pursuing the kinds of societies that we want to live in.
There'd be continual constant experiments, which was of course the original idea behind the states in the US, and continual experiments to figure out what was the best and most satisfying arrangement.
Somebody would come up with something new that people hadn't thought of that would be wonderful and then other people would duplicate that model and so on.
So yeah, there's a continual set of experiments but, you know, to confuse Say, defense with the state, to confuse roads with the state, to confuse companies with the state is, I think, to overcome a very significant difference.
It's like saying, well, both rape and sex involve genitals, so they're the same.
It's just not the case.
Thank you for my filibuster.
That's all I wanted to say.
I appreciate you letting me finish that.
And I'll give you the last word.
Absolutely.
I appreciate the conversation.
So if you have these entities which are operating, and that was one of the questions I brought up, the question of jurisdiction.
First of all, who makes the laws?
This is a really important thing.
Like say, in a given region, how do you know whether you're going to get the death penalty or get put in prison?
And if the people Don't like how it's being handled.
It might be economically better for the company just to execute people for a certain level of crime.
And if they make agreements with each other saying, okay, we're all going to do that, that's kind of something that companies do.
They can't make agreements with each other.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
They can't just go making agreements with each other.
Well, you said that they made agreements with each other.
No, they make agreements with each other based upon what the customers want.
They can't just go making agreements with each other saying, well, let's just go execute people.
That's what states do.
That's not what customer-facing organizations do.
What they do is they'd start to say, well, we've had this idea that we're just going to kill people who jaywalk.
What do you think, customers?
And people would be like, are you kidding me?
No way!
And they'd say, OK, well, we won't do that because then you'll just stop paying us.
How many companies do you know that do that, though?
I mean, the companies that I know, when they form an agreement between each other, I mean, like, internet companies, it's like, they're not sitting there going, let's, you know, produce the highest quality, the fastest internet in the world.
I mean, Companies do.
I'm sorry, they're not doing that?
Why has internet speed continued to increase over the last 20 years if that's not what they're doing?
Of course they're trying to do that.
A better example actually is with light bulbs.
I mean, this is a debate that you got into with Neil Kierman at one point.
If you watch the light bulb conspiracy, they specifically, the companies got together and they made an agreement to make the light bulbs last less long.
They did.
And the light bulbs used to last 100 years.
If you watch that documentary, you can see that there's still a light bulb from 100 years ago that's still working, whereas light bulbs now, they don't last that long.
And that wasn't for the customer.
It was because it was economically better for them, because they sold more light bulbs.
So that a company can't get together and make an agreement that's economically better is just not true.
So, okay, so what you're saying is that there was a bunch of companies making light bulbs.
You already admitted this.
I'm aware of Neil Kierman and your exchange, and you said, well, who wants a light bulb?
I don't even remember this at all.
Well, you had an exchange with... Neil Kierman from V-Radio, he got you to watch Light Bulb Conspiracy, and you had said that planned obsolescence doesn't exist.
In the end, you watched the documentary and you came back and you said, Well, who wants a lightbulb to last a hundred years anyway?
So, I mean... I don't remember... Sorry, honestly, I don't remember watching any documentary about lightbulbs.
But certainly, what I have said in the past is that if making a lightbulb last a hundred years costs twenty times as much, then no, people probably wouldn't want that.
But the problem with monopolies, which has always happened in the free market... If we're talking about twenty times... I'm just saying, I don't know, because I haven't watched the documentary, but... You did watch the documentary.
I have no memory of watching a documentary about a lightbulb conspiracy, because I'm sure I would have done a show on it if it had come up before.
But it doesn't matter, because the point is that the reason that these kinds of things always end up failing is, let's say that you can get a lightbulb that lasts a hundred years, and it costs the same as a lightbulb that lasts one year, right?
Let's just say, I mean, I'm willing to accept that that's technologically possible, I don't know, but let's say it is.
Then the first company to break ranks with the monopoly and to start selling light bulbs, and they're going to put commercials out and they're going to say, our light bulbs last a hundred years for the same price as theirs that last only one year.
Who's going to get all the market share?
No, it didn't happen.
This is the fact.
If anybody wants to contest this, go watch the documentary.
They got together, they made this agreement, and it's been lasting for decades and decades and decades.
And they're not breaking ranks because it would be an economic suicide to break ranks.
Because if a lightbulb lasts 100 years, it's not even worth the competitive advantage you would get because they don't sell the same amount of lightbulbs at that point.
How many people would keep buying lightbulbs if they can buy one set of lightbulbs that last most of their lifetime?
I mean, the same thing happened with pantyhose.
In DuPont, they had developed pantyhose that would last incredibly longer periods of time, and they were forced to re-engineer it.
The actual chemists were forced to re-engineer it to make it last less long so that they would sell more.
And that is held.
It's held since they made that change.
And no one is breaking ranks because it is more profitable not to break ranks.
And that's the thing.
Oligopies are profitable.
They are profitable.
It's just, the state isn't involved in that at all.
There's no state involved in the group decisions that are made by the lightbulb companies.
In all sorts of types of technology, they do these kinds of things.
You can't blame the state.
It's not like the state is saying, well, you better do this.
If you make more money at it, it's obvious that a company is going to do it if it's more profitable.
Okay, so let's say, and again I can't speak to this in detail, but let's say that there is a light bulb that lasts for a hundred years that costs the same as a light bulb that doesn't last a hundred years.
Why wouldn't an entrepreneur go to a bunch of investors and say, We can corner this market, man.
I mean, we can make a killing.
And it's really good for the environment and all this and that.
Why didn't they?
Yeah, why didn't they?
Why didn't they?
Because they didn't.
They didn't because they didn't.
And that's the thing.
It happens.
Look, that's not an answer.
Come on.
No, it is an answer.
This is reality.
Everybody always wants to make extra money in the marketplace.
Obviously, they made more money.
What it would suggest to me is either the theory is bullshit, right?
I don't know, right?
Maybe it is.
Or there's some government monopoly that is provided, or there's some patent that is provided by the government, some intellectual property that is provided by the government that prevents competition in a free market environment.
But if you could find a way to make a product 20 times better for the same price, so much money would flow into that to make those sales.
But it didn't happen.
It would be around tomorrow.
But it didn't happen.
Right.
And so the question is why?
Why didn't it happen?
It didn't happen because it didn't happen because it was more profitable.
You're saying that people don't act towards their own interests?
That people don't want to make money in the free market?
In the lightbulb industry, it is more profitable, and it will remain more profitable, if you have agreements with everybody who's involved.
Even if you don't have agreements, if you come into the market, if you make your lightbulb last just a little bit longer, maybe, maybe just a little bit longer, maybe you could get a competitive advantage.
But, in the end, It is not to your advantage to make this light bulb that's going to make it where people don't buy your product every year.
If you want to keep selling product, I mean, it's not even a question of opinion.
This oligarchy has been existent and has been in place and has been working.
So the question is, why hasn't these principles that you're talking about worked?
Why hasn't it worked?
Well, I don't know.
You're asking me to come up with knowledge that I don't have.
I mean, I'll be happy to look it up and to put something in place.
But I do know for sure that there's no monopoly on the light.
You and I can decide tomorrow to go and start a lightbulb company.
Right?
And if you and I decide tomorrow to go and start... I'm sorry?
You're saying that me and you, we don't have the capital to do that, man.
Yes, but getting capital is easy.
If we can prove to investors that we have... Oh, I've done it before, man.
I've raised capital.
I've started businesses.
I know how this all works.
Trust me.
I've had experience in this, my friend.
This is my Mexico for you, right?
So, if you go and you have a business plan which says, These idiots out there are artificially depressing the longevity of their light bulbs.
We've got this plan.
We're going to go and sell a whole bunch of light bulbs.
We can sell them for twice the price because they're going to last a hundred times longer.
And then we go to a whole bunch of environmentalists and we point all this out.
And the environmentalists, they'll give us all the free publicity that we could conceivably imagine.
We would make, and unbelieve, we would make billions.
in the world.
Now, it wouldn't be a long-lasting market, because these light bulbs last a hundred years, but who cares if you get a billion dollars next year?
Do you really care what happens five years from now?
Not really.
So my question is, since capital would be unbelievably easy to raise, and since everybody loves a conspiracy story, of course, right?
I mean, and since it would fall completely into people's preconceptions about evil capitalists, monopolies, and so on, And the environmental movement would go insane.
I mean, they'd try to get these halogen lamps enforced by the government forever.
If they found a company that was going to produce light bulbs that lasted for a hundred years for just about the same price, you would make an unbelievable fortune.
Which is why it doesn't make any sense to me that you're arguing from economic incentive when the real money would be made with all the free publicity you could imagine and all the investments would be lining up, the real money would be made in getting the longer lasting light bulb out.
So I don't understand.
Yeah, exactly.
Your theory sounds perfectly great, except it didn't happen.
That's the thing.
Well, why don't you and I do it then?
Why don't you and I do it?
I will guarantee you I can get a hundred million dollars in funding in about a month if we can get this lightbulb thing going.
Do it.
I'm not interested in it, but if you want to do it, then prove it.
I don't think that you could.
I honestly don't think that you could start.
Why not?
Why couldn't I do it?
I just don't think you have the resources.
I mean, starting a lightbulb company requires a massive amount of wealth and technological understanding and connections.
You're not going to just walk into that industry right now.
No, but it's already, look, the work's already been done because you say there's a hundred-year lightbulb out there, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, so go do it.
I'm not telling anyone that they can't do it.
What do you think's going to happen to me if I do it?
I'm not saying anything would happen to you.
I just don't think you have the means to do it.
And I think if Wait, I've got an investment in sighted companies before, so why don't I have the means to do it?
Well, do it then.
I'm not saying, if you think you can come up with the millions of dollars and the technology to do it, but the problem is, what I'm saying is that it hasn't happened.
Oligopies can hold these positions for long periods of time.
They can do that.
And when you're talking about a question like security, you're talking about a question like the monopoly.
If a group of companies get some kind of agreement going between them and they're making these decisions in terms of life and death, then you've got a very serious question on your hands.
The premise was that the businesses will always orient their decisions, their agreements, internal agreements for the customers.
And what I'm just saying is that that doesn't match with reality.
Especially when you're dealing with something like the questions of violence, where these companies could easily do what we see mafias doing, where they put up extortion protection rackets Where they basically say, well, we just decided to switch this relationship.
It used to be voluntary, now it's mandatory.
Because we have the force, they have the means to do it.
So, I mean, what's to stop an oligarchy or a cartel of these kinds of defense companies from deciding, well, you know, on second thought, we actually do want to be a state?
Okay, well, I'm going to leave it here because, again, we're wandering into information that I don't believe for a moment, which you are very wedded to, which is, So, I'll do a little bit of research about this lightbulb thing and find out.
Now, if it turns out that you're not correct, of course, I would hope for a full recantation.
If it turns out you are correct, I will, of course, put forward a full recantation.
I know for a fact you watched that movie.
I know for a fact, because I was in contact with Neil Keirman when this all happened.
I know for a fact you watched it.
I have no memory of watching a movie about light bulbs.
I mean, it's a very interesting question and a big one for the free market.
You slipped out of it with him too, the same thing.
You didn't take down your video where it said that the whole thing of planned obsolescence was ridiculous, even after he showed it to you.
Yes, I fully support that the idea of planned obsolescence is ridiculous.
The people who plan the obsolescence in a free market are the consumers, of course, because they tell you how they want something to last.
I challenge you to watch that video again, if you really have that bad of a memory, watch it again and put up a video actually explaining how everything happened in that.
Because I don't buy it for a second.
I don't buy it for a second that you don't remember, first of all.
I think you're being dishonest here.
Oh, you think I'm lying about like I watched this?
Yes, I don't think it's possible that you watched that documentary and you're pretending like you didn't see it.
I don't buy it for a second.
Okay.
Well, if you're going to call me a liar, then I'm afraid we're done with this conversation.
And thank you so much for your time.
I appreciate it.
Okay.
Have a good day.
So there you have it.
That was the debate.
I then had a conversation with Neil from VTV to talk about what had happened and how on earth he'd ended up telling this person that I had seen a documentary and agreed with his thesis when I hadn't and all that kind of stuff.
I think he kind of missed the point of what I was trying to get at.
If he didn't tell Aaron that, but then Aaron publicly accused me of lying, then Aaron owes me an apology.
If he did tell Aaron that, Then he owes Aaron an apology, and then Aaron owes me an apology.
And if I do end up having turned out that I did watch it and did agree with him, then I owe everyone an apology for it.
Not really, because I just didn't remember, and I can't say that I remembered something that I didn't.
But anyway, so that's the end of that debate.
Here's the conversation that I had with Neil, and I think that probably is about enough analysis.
So I won't be seeing you on the other side of that conversation, but I hope it's interesting and useful to listen to.
And thanks again so much for your attention.
Hello.
Hello, hello.
Hey, man.
What's up?
All right.
It's bothering me, and I just wanted to talk about it and see if we can clear it up, right?
OK.
OK.
So you say that a year or two ago in a chat window, I said that I'd watched the documentary and agreed with it.
Is that right?
That's not what you said.
You said, yeah, well, who makes a light bulb that lasts 100 years anyway?
That was your response.
I mean, I'm not making fun of you.
That was the response that you gave.
Wait, sorry, did I say that I had watched the documentary?
That's what I got out of it, yes.
No, no, sorry.
Did I say that I had watched the documentary?
I asked you if you had watched the documentary.
The response that you gave me was, who makes a light bulb that lasts 100 years anyway?
So I did not confirm that I had watched the documentary?
It's been a long time, but that's what I remember.
But you can't remember, for this is a year or two ago, in a chat window or whatever, right?
Well, yeah.
But you understand that you're openly feeding a guy telling me that I had watched the documentary, that I agreed with it, and this and that, right?
This is not what you remember.
No, no, I didn't say that you said you agreed with it.
But you told him that I had watched the documentary.
Because that's what he said.
He said, no, you already conceded this point to Neil, that you had watched the documentary, that you agreed with it.
I mean, where's he getting that from?
That's the context I took out of the conversation.
I'm not trying to lie about you here, man.
I'm telling you, that's what I got out of it.
No, no, but what you got out of it is not what's important, because you're claiming that I said something.
So what you got out of it is a subjective experience, right?
Because you don't have a record of it anymore, so you're going off your memory, right?
For a year or two ago.
Well, yeah, that's what I told you.
I was openly honest about that.
Well, but, okay, so you don't remember much about it.
I mean, I said, I remember what you did say.
That's, that's the one thing, you know, whether or not the context is enough for you to feel that that was enough for you to say you had watched it.
That's, I guess, up to individual interpretation.
I also acknowledge it's possible that's not what you meant.
Okay.
So, um, because what he was saying to me was that I, I had watched this and had conceded this point.
Now he must've been getting that from you because I, he wasn't part of that, whatever chat we had a year or two ago.
Right.
Right.
I told him that when it happened.
I talked to a lot of people about that exchange, because people were curious what you thought about planned obsolescence.
They'd seen you make videos about it in the past.
Right.
That's why I shared the documentary with you in the first place.
So, what you shared, the chat, my chat response with him, is that right?
Like a year or two ago?
Yes, at the time.
Oh, so he may have a copy of it, right?
Because you'd have copied or pasted that, right?
He may.
I'd have to ask him.
So, there's no, I mean, I never said that I watched the documentary.
I just, like, I just want the, because I have no, I was just talking about this with my wife.
I have no memory of watching a documentary about light bulbs, especially in such a contentious issue as plant obsolescence, which I've taken a strong stand on.
I'm sure I would have probably watched it with my wife.
I talked about it with her and all that kind of stuff.
And she has no memory of it.
So I didn't watch a documentary on light bulbs.
And so I don't know how it could be, you know, construed or that I had suddenly, like, I never said that I watched the documentary.
It's sort of basic.
I haven't watched the documentary.
I never said that I'd watch the documentary, but I'm being accused of lying about watching a documentary.
That's got to be coming from you.
And I'm just saying, look, it's not very responsible to have a half-remembered chat from a year or two ago and then put these accusations out there.
I mean, I'm going to be fine.
I just think that you should be clear about the limitations of what is being talked about here, right?
Which is that it's not something I admitted to in a video.
It's not something that I typed out while I watched it.
I, you know, I agree with it.
And now I'm somehow, for some reason, backtracking or something like that.
Like, I just want to be clear that you're putting forward an accusation of dishonesty or disingenuousness on my part that is not backed up by anything, certainly not anything that I remember and nothing that you have any particular, like, even what you remember is not any kind of admission, so to speak, right?
It's just a comment, which you could take a number of different ways, right?
Right.
I gave you what I took out of the context of the conversation at the time.
No, no, no, no.
Sorry.
You're not understanding what I'm saying.
This is important just from an integrity standpoint.
It doesn't matter too much to me.
This is just some internet frou-frou.
But you can't just get something out of it and then say that it's true.
Right?
Those two things are not the same, right?
Like if I tell you I went abroad and you say, well, that means Paraguay.
Well, that's what I got out of it.
It's like, no, if you say I said I went to Paraguay, then either I said I went to Paraguay or I didn't, right?
If you got something out of it that was incorrect, then you need to own up that it was incorrect, right?
Or at least not decisive, right?
What I'm telling you, Stefan, is that it's likely or even possible, okay, I'm going to say possible, that we have a miscommunication about what took place.
That's what I remember.
Having had the conversation with you at the time is what I took out of the conversation, out of the exchange.
It's possible that that's not what you meant, which means it could very well be a misunderstanding.
That's why I just gave you... Again, you still don't understand what I'm saying.
I'm sorry to be annoying, right?
You can't just say, this is what I got out of the exchange.
And it's not a miscommunication, right?
If I type, who needs a hundred-year-old light bulb or something like that, I mean, I don't even, that doesn't, I mean, I don't even know why I would, why would I even say that?
I mean, of course it would be great to have a hundred year light bulb.
I mean, anything that lasts longer is better.
Because.
What I mean is that.
The reason.
Sorry, go ahead.
Okay.
The reason why it's not better to have light bulbs the last a hundred years is because you can't have a market for something that people are all going to buy and then not need again for a hundred years.
That's why they.
Sure, but we have a smallpox vaccine.
We have a polio vaccine.
Those things are one shot and they don't get used anymore.
This is what people do.
I mean, there's no problem with it.
The medical industry is very different.
But the point is, right, that if I made a comment about a hundred-year light bulb, that could mean any number of things, right?
So I could mean, who wants a hundred-year light bulb if it costs a huge amount, right?
Who wants a hundred-year light bulb since most people only live in a house for five or ten years, right?
It could mean that.
It could mean any, like in terms from the consumer standpoint, right?
These are just two.
I mean, I'm sure I could come up with another half dozen more.
But who would want a hundred-year light bulb if it costs $500 and you're only going to live in a house for five or ten years?
You know, when I was a student... They didn't cost that much though.
They actually didn't cost much for anything.
But you understand, if I hadn't watched the documentary, I wouldn't know that.
Right, so what I'm trying to say is that if that's what I said, and you know, it doesn't seem likely to me that even that's what I said, but if that's what I said, it could mean any number of things.
It doesn't mean I watched the documentary and I agreed with it.
It doesn't mean that I think that people, you know, that capitalism doesn't have any value in things that you only buy once and never buy again.
So, you know, I've put a lot out about planned obsolescence, about how it's the consumer who chooses, and I've put out a lot about how cartels are very hard, if not impossible, to sustain in a free market and so on.
So what I'm trying to point out is that what I got sort of publicly accused of, and now I'm being even more publicly accused of, is lying.
And that comes... You started that.
You called me a liar to someone who is now openly calling me a liar.
And you don't know that I lied.
I don't have any memory of lying.
I actually didn't call you a liar, Stefan.
I said... I told him about an interaction that I had with you, and then he decided to quote me in a debate with you.
I didn't then tell you that you were lying.
And that's why I said... Wait, wait.
You told him that I had watched the documentary.
Yes, because that's what I believe to be true.
No, that is not true.
What you recall of that chat window in no way indicates that I watched the documentary.
Do you understand the difference?
If I said I watched the documentary and then now I publicly say I don't, then I'm either misremembering or lying.
Right?
Okay.
I understand that.
But if I say who wants a hundred year light bulb, there could be 6 million reasons I would say something like that.
None of which have to do with any proof that I did or didn't watch the documentary.
Generally, if I ask you the question, did you watch the documentary?
And you give me a response, because that is the question that I do in fact remember.
Okay.
That you remember.
Honestly, you don't have a record of this.
I mean, come on.
You can't tell me.
You're on the internet a lot.
You ping me.
You ping a lot of people.
You probably have a thousand or two thousand chats every year.
I mean, you can't seriously tell me.
That you remember in detail what the question was and what the answer was from a year or two ago, thousands of chats ago.
I mean, seriously, come on.
You and I know that memory is fallible, that, you know, this is why you need proof.
And I'm not sort of saying you've got to provide me proof and I know you switched OSes and all that.
But you can't seriously say that you can hang your hat on something like that in terms of what you may or... Like, this is just such an uncertain thing that you're hanging on here, right?
It's a question you think you may have asked.
It's a response of mine that could be interpreted any number of different ways.
And then to go from there to say, to give this guy the impression that he can then publicly obviously call me a liar.
And that he's, you know, I think I put the quote in the chat window that he put in.
Let's see what he said.
Yeah, he lied.
I didn't let him slither out of it.
End of story.
Right?
You understand?
What's that?
But you set that in motion.
I didn't tell him I think you're lying.
Because I don't know if you're lying.
That's not the question.
Is it possible that you just don't remember?
I have acknowledged that possibility.
Okay.
I can tell you, I asked you if you watch the documentary.
That was the question I asked you.
Your answer was, why would anybody make a lightbulb over 100 pounds?
The question that you remember asking me may not be the same question that you asked.
It may have been, have you ever heard of a documentary about a hundred year light bulbs?
And I say, well, who would want a hundred year light bulb?
You don't know.
Honestly, you have thousands of chats every year.
This is a year or two ago.
Are you honestly telling me that you could repeat that?
I mean, that's just not credible.
Do you understand?
I can't remember chats that I had two weeks ago.
Okay.
I'm sorry you feel that way.
I've told you that, you know, what I suggest to you is to get past any of that and say, I don't recall watching this documentary.
Now that I have, this is my comment.
No, no, no, that doesn't matter.
Look, the important thing is that you put forward a claim that is not supportable, that is negative towards me, right?
And you need to clean that up.
You didn't do an honorable thing there.
It's important for me to note to you, I didn't call you a liar, Stefan.
I said that I remember giving you the link, and that's the response that you gave me.
I've also admitted that it's possible it was a misunderstanding, and that you did not mean what I took out of it.
That is the best I can give you.
I'm not just going to tell you that I don't remember it, because I do.
It was extremely relevant to me that Stefan Molyneux, somebody who I've just talked about planned obsolescence with, in my view, watched a documentary that I wanted him to watch about planned obsolescence, and then his reply was what it was, which to me was not really an adequate response.
But to me, basically, that's the reason I remembered it, because the response that you gave me was kind of weak.
I just let it go because we're both philosophers.
I have respect for your position and just let it at that.
I talk to him about it in casual conversation because I talk to him all the time, just like I talk to you.
I don't talk to you as often, obviously, but I bring you information.
I even spread links to your shows if people want to be conservative libertarians.
I say you're better off listening to this guy than Glenn Beck.
But that's my position.
Unfortunately, the way this exchange is going is going to change that.
I did not tell him to go tell people you were a liar.
I told him that this is the exchange I had with you.
Okay, so you didn't tell him that I had watched the documentary.
He came up with that on his own?
I told him that I felt, out of the exchange you and I had, That you had watched the documentary, because that is clearly what I understood after reading your response.
So you told him that I had watched the documentary?
That's exactly what I believe to be true, yes.
Okay, but it's not true, based upon our exchange, that that's any kind of certainty.
And it's certainly not my memory.
I have no memory of watching a documentary on light bulbs, right?
So you said something that is not true.
And now, I'm not calling you a liar, this is your memory, but when you sort of think back of it at all, and now that you've sort of given me the details and you've heard my sort of response about if this was your question and this was my response, these are the million other things that I could have meant, right?
So you understand that you jumped to a conclusion that I had watched the documentary, which is not valid.
Okay.
Well, I explained to you why I arrived at the conclusion that I did.
But it's not valid.
That's the best I can do for you.
You understand that now?
It's not valid because I don't have a screenshot of it?
Or it's not valid because, you know, even if you said, did you watch this documentary?
And I said, who needs 100 year light bulb?
It's not valid to to say that it's true that I watched the documentary from that.
Because there's 6 million other things.
And I just gave you a couple of examples, right?
Why would anybody want 100 year light bulb because they move every Three months on average or every year on average.
Why would anybody want it?
Because it might cost too much.
Why would anyone want it?
Because the ingredients might be too rare.
Why would anyone want it?
Because if you break it, it might be poison.
I don't know, right?
There could be any number of reasons I would have responded to that.
If you jump to the conclusion that that means I said I watched the documentary, that's an invalid assumption.
That's what I'm sort of trying to point out here.
If everything that you believe is true, you jumped to a conclusion.
Which is not valid, based upon the information and certainly based upon my memory of having never watched it.
And so this integrity thing that I'm talking about here, that if you set a ball in motion, it's not a huge ball.
It's not going to break the internet or change the course of history or anything.
But if you, this is sort of just a basic integrity thing, right?
That if you put forward something that turned out to not be true, you have to go and correct it.
You have to go clean it up, right?
And, and what you posted here.
You just commented the following, you said, I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt and say that it's quite possible he just doesn't remember watching the documentary.
That's not true either.
This is what I'm trying to point out here.
The honest statement is, there was an ambiguous response, I jumped to a conclusion, which is not valid.
Okay.
So what would make you happy in this situation?
The truth, which is that I never said that I watched the documentary.
You jumped to a conclusion based upon something I said with more information and with my complete lack of memory of watching a documentary and me explaining all the things I could have meant with my response, that you withdraw the idea that I watched the documentary and agreed with it or whatever, right?
I mean, that's just not, it's not a valid thing to say.
If I said I watched the documentary, And here was my response, and now I claim to have not watched the documentary?
Absolutely.
Oh, totally.
Absolutely.
Then you're completely in the right.
But if I say, who wants a hundred-year light bulb which could mean any one of six million different things that has nothing to do with watching the documentary, that's a different matter completely.
The reason that I got the context out of it, Stefan, is I can't imagine why you would ever answer a question was, did you watch the documentary with A comment that has to do with the content in the documentary, unless you had watched it.
That's why I came to that conclusion.
I don't remember.
You're saying you didn't watch it.
But I don't remember this conversation.
I don't remember typing about 100-year-old light bulbs.
I've never heard of 100-year-old light bulbs.
I'm just telling you, it's possible you may be misremembering.
You have no proof.
This is nothing I remember having anything to do with.
And honestly, I could be forgetting this too.
I don't think I'd forget watching a documentary about light bulbs, but I may forget typing something like this, but it is not a valid thing to say that I told you I had watched the documentary.
That is just not true.
This is not a true and supportable statement.
Philosophically, morally, right?
You understand that, right?
You may have jumped to a conclusion.
It may have kind of made sense at the time, but it's not a valid conclusion to jump because I never said I'd watch the documentary.
Okay.
I can correct might not have remembered, and I'll just put that it's possible that we have a misunderstanding.
Will that be sufficient for you?
Well, what would be sufficient to me would be Steph never told me that he'd watched the documentary.
I inferred that from something he said, but given that he has not watched the documentary and is not known to be a bold-faced liar, I jumped to a conclusion that was invalid.
Okay.
I don't, as I've already said, I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, and that you're not bold-faced lying anything, and that it's very possible that this is a misunderstanding.
I'm not going to make a complete retraction, because that's not what I got out of it at all, when I talked to you about it.
Okay, go ahead.
Well, but you understand that I could have meant, even if your recollection of this interaction from a year or two ago, out of thousands of chats that you have, is perfectly accurate, which I doubt.
And not because you're dumb or lying, it's just that human memory is ridiculously unreliable, right?
Eyewitnesses to things 20 minutes later misremember things, right?
You've seen these studies where the gorilla walks through the middle of a room and nobody notices it because there's a woman with big breasts sitting somewhere.
You understand human memory is incredibly fallible, right?
We all, I mean, you know that.
I'm sure you understand that.
But even if everything you remember is perfectly correct, it's not valid to say that I watched the documentary.
You may have jumped to that conclusion, but it's not a truthful thing to say.
I thought from the context of the conversation that he had, but upon further reflection and on talking to him, it's not a valid thing to say.
I can't say that he said he did.
You know what I mean?
You just can't get to that place where there wasn't a miscommunication because I said something which you then interpreted.
You just made a mistake, that's all.
I mean, look, I do it, you do it.
I mean, I've had to go on, I've had, I've done entire shows where I've corrected things that I've said that are wrong.
I've apologized on air to the entire gay and lesbian community for things that they found offensive that I've said.
You know, we just, we make mistakes and we go back and we, we clean them up, right?
Okay.
Um, I have told you that I am willing to post that I feel that it's, you know, entirely possible that there's a misunderstanding and I misinterpreted what you said to me.
Okay.
I mean, I can't say anything other than what I've said.
I understand.
All right.
Well, I appreciate you letting me talk about this.
I hope you understand this is not In particular, for my benefit, I don't particularly care.
I mean, I get called many voices on that, but I hope that it's for your benefit as well, so just be careful about it.
Well, it is for my benefit, or I wouldn't have bothered to sit here and listen to the whole thing.
Right.
Okay, look.
You and I, at least I hope, anyway, that it's true that we have a mutual respect for one another, and that's the reason why I'm willing to point out that it's very possible that this is a misunderstanding, and that I came to the conclusion that I did, based upon the context, but that still could, once again, be inaccurate.
Okay.
But I know that I don't generally make statements, particularly to friends of mine, you know, just based on nothing.
It's important to note that, you know, I came to the conclusion that I did given the context of the conversation.
Okay.
It could still be very inaccurate.
I mean, we didn't really talk about it in depth much more after that, but that's the reason I came to the conclusion that I did.
I don't believe you're a liar and I'll even be willing to tell people that if that'll help you make, at least to help you feel better about the situation.
But, um, I still think at the end of the day, particularly when it comes to the audience, your best bet is just to review the details and then just respond, and then be done with it.
You and I can have a conversation and exchange.
I just missed that last thing you were saying.
Could you just repeat?
Apologize.
Oh, sure.
My suggestion to you is, at the end of the day, just review the material in question and then give your response.
And then at the end of the day, what I said isn't going to matter.
Particularly the people who listen to your broadcast, With an exception of some of the very open-minded people that are out there, are not going to listen to a word I say anyway.
So it's not even relevant.
My advice to you, however, to handle any kind of damage this could have done in regards to your reputation with your audience is just to address the information and then make your own response and then move on.
I'm going to go ahead and give you the statement that I just said that I would make.
Okay?
That alone is not going to be enough.
That's what I'm trying to say.
Just go ahead and address the information and then you'll have a topic for a show and take it from there.
Oh, it sounds like a very interesting documentary.
And if it's a very credible attack on the theory that collusion is difficult in a free market, I welcome the opportunity to look at it.
It sounds very interesting.
Well, it's important to note that It's not to say that the state cannot assist in monopolies or cartels.
It absolutely could.
The question is whether or not the state is everything in regards to those things.
And I don't think it is.
I think that the state is just one weapon on the table.
And it is a very powerful weapon, but you can collectively just through having enough capital gather together.
It's a free association where people can decide we are going to offer this product only with these specifications.
And yes, it is possible that somebody could compete, and they even do.
And we talked about this in our debate.
You see it in oil companies when they compete by a few cents at the fuel pump, but they still can collectively get together and raise the overall gas prices and get away with it.
We see it in Michigan all the time.
And then compete by two or three cents, because it's still better for the entire oil industry if you're paying $5 a gallon or whatever.
I mean, it's never been $5.
It's still like $4.20 sometimes.
That's essentially the idea behind the cartel.
And yes, there will be competition, but they can all agree that they're better off, that their particular commodity is generally accepted in the market to cost at least this much.
That's the idea behind cartels within a free market.
Right.
Well, very interesting.
And I'll check out the documentary.
And I certainly do appreciate us having the chat about this.
It would have bothered me.
So I really appreciate you taking the time.
▲
Export Selection