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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:03
Common Arguments Against Voluntarism Rebutted
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Hello, hello, Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
So these are the voluntary FAQ questions that I receive a lot about a stateless society, a voluntary society, an anarcho-capitalist society, whatever you want a term to use it, non-aggression principle, respect for property rights.
The first is, dude, you are a dreamer!
Because it is human nature to be violent, it's human nature to be aggressive, it's human nature to dominate.
Our society with a state and an elite class and prison guards and soldiers and policemen, this all represents an accurate reflection of human nature.
And if you attempt to wrench society away from human nature, it's like throwing a rock in the air.
It might be up for a little bit, but it's going to come right back down.
It's like disturbing the surface of a lake on a calm day.
It will return to its original shape and form.
So if you attempt to take the hierarchy out of human society, because humans, like all apes, are innately hierarchical, all that's going to happen is society is going to reform around The nature of man which is going to be a hierarchy and it's going to be propaganda and it's going to be win-lose and the use of force that's cloaked in quote social concerns and so on.
So trying to change society away from human nature is like trying to come up with a communist paradise where people have no property and they all work hard no matter their wins or loses and no matter what their incentives are It's just you're going to get a whole bunch of people killed, society's going to go right back to where it started, and it's going to be a massive and dangerous waste of time, energy, blood and treasure.
Now that's a fine argument.
And certainly if voluntarism, the idea that we can't have a government because it violates the non-aggression principle and violates property rights, taxation is forced and so on.
If voluntarism is a kind of utopianism, then it is highly dangerous.
Toxic.
Virulent.
It's like a virus.
It's dangerous as hell.
Horrible.
So, the first thing we want to make sure of is that the voluntary society is not a violation of what is called human nature.
Because, as I said, if it is, that's double-plus ungood, and literally you can get hundreds of millions of people killed in the way that communism and fascism and so on did.
So, a fine question, shows a great concern for human life, and is to be respected, in my opinion.
Now, there are several problems with that argument, which is that the one thing that is true of human nature is not the content, but the form.
It's not human nature to be a Muslim, but oddly enough, if you grow up in an Islamic country, you are, usually.
It's not human nature to speak English, but if you grow up with English-speaking parents, what do you know?
It's a miracle she speaks English!
And so, human nature is adaptable.
That's the most fundamental characteristic of humans.
That's why we're the most successful species, because we are, like, crazy adaptable.
We can adapt to deserts, we can adapt to Igloos, I mean, crazy stuff.
We can adapt to lots of sun, no sun, lots of rain.
I mean, we can adapt like crazy.
So, if you look at the mindset of the 21st century person and compare it to the mindset of the 5th BC person, as somebody wrote about when talking about the world of ancient Greece, like their mindset is so unimaginably distant from ours, it's hard to really figure out exactly what was going on or what they thought or how they thought.
It's so foreign to us.
And human nature fundamentally adapts itself to the ethical norms of the society.
And then there are these random annoying genes like me and lots of others who come in and attempt to redefine the moral conversation.
But if you were writing in the 16th century or thinking in the 16th century, you'd say, well, it's human nature to own slaves.
Master-slave relationship is human nature.
All societies at all times throughout all of history have owned slaves.
Or surfs, or whatever, but that is nature.
And by the way, human lifespan is 21 years old, on average.
But what it is to be a human being, and what it is to think like a human being, changes radically.
Changes radically over time.
From absolutism, to moral relativism, to fascism, communism, socialism, democracy, republicanism, you name it.
So that's a very, very important thing to understand.
Human nature is fundamentally adaptable.
It's very inert.
The personality, as Carl Gustav Jung said, is extremely inert.
It doesn't change except under the most radical pressures or most radical willpower.
A workaholic may spend more time with friends and family if he gets cancer.
A neurotic may calm his nervous system if he gets therapy and meditates.
An angry person may cool his jets if he works very hard.
But the personality is incredibly inert.
The inertia of physical mass applies even more so it seems sometimes to the personality.
So the personality is inert but the personality adapts to the dominant culture almost universally.
So saying that what is reflects human nature is not accurate.
Human nature adapts to what is.
That is what explains the empirical differences in belief systems according to different cultures.
It's not like everyone who's a Muslim just happens to get born in Islamic countries.
It's that everyone who's born to Islamic countries responds to the pressure to become a Muslim accordingly.
So, I mean, that's the fact.
So, we would expect, of course, in Ancapistan, which would not be a country, but rather a planetary freedom zone, we would expect and understand that in the same way human nature adapts to Islam, Zionism, Americanism, nationalism, in the same way that human nature adapts
Almost seamlessly and almost universally to the dominant culture, there's no reason to believe whatsoever that it would be any different in a free society.
That the values and virtues that make up a free society would be dominant in that culture, which would not be culture but in fact philosophy.
And everybody would adapt to that with a few, you know, very minor exceptions.
And I think that This would be all the more true because the ethics and social structure of a free society would not be so ridiculously embarrassing.
We wouldn't have to explain all this crazy stuff that we do in the modern world like war and unjust imprisonment and national debts.
I mean, just crazy stuff.
So you have to look at human nature as a liquid that pours itself into the vessel called culture.
That's what human nature is.
No doubt about that.
And saying, well, this vessel is in the shape of a bowl.
Therefore, human nature is a bowl.
Therefore, the nature of water is bowl-like.
It's bowl-ish.
Bowl-derama.
No.
The nature of water is to adapt to the vessel that it's in.
So, in a free society, which is shaped like a free society, water will adapt to that.
Human nature will adapt to that.
In the same way that human nature used to adapt to slavery, used to adapt to subjugating women, and now, certainly in the civilized areas of the world, that's not the case so much, if at all.
So, the argument that society reflects human nature is incorrect.
It's definitely putting the cart before the horse.
Human nature adapts to society, which is exactly what you'd expect.
You don't know where your genes are going to be born, you don't know into which tribe, under which belief system, under which hierarchy, Your genes are going to be born.
Patriarchy, matriarchy, religious, scientific, rational, freedom, capitalist, communism, you don't know!
And so the best chance you have for survival is to sniff out the social ethical smoke drifting around and adapt yourself to that, to turn yourself into a ghost, to live in the haunted houses of historical prejudice.
That is what human nature does.
So, you could then reply and say, wait a second, If human nature adapts itself to its environment seamlessly, then why do some social systems, like communism and fascism, kind of not work?
Well, that's important.
There are technical reasons in the economic sphere, and to some degree in the ethical sphere, why something like communism doesn't work.
But, of course, the majority of people who were Who grew up in a communist country.
Gosh, wouldn't you know it?
They tend to be communists.
That's the dominant ideology.
That's what people adapt to.
Particularly when the price of not adapting to it tends to be pretty catastrophic.
So, it doesn't mean that all belief systems are equal.
It means that we adapt ourselves to beliefs.
Now, some belief systems are easier to adapt to and produce less neurosis and fewer problems in the psyche because they're more rational.
A republic-style, free-market-ish environment is saner to adapt to because it's more universal in its ethics than some crazy, culty, whatever.
You know, everybody lives in each other's feces and fleas, commune in the middle of nowhere, or some communist country where the ethics are entirely contradictory and so on.
So there are some societies that are saner and some societies that are crazier.
The saner societies are easier to adapt to and produce fewer neuroses, psychological problems, and tend to be more functional over the long run, i.e.
generate more wealth and all that kind of stuff.
So I'm not saying, just because we adapt to all cultures, I'm not trying to say that all cultures are equal.
Some are more rational and some are less rational.
Cultures which have not passed through an enlightenment phase, like the Islamic culture and so on, the African cultures, they tend to be pretty primitive and messed up.
Cultures that have had the piñata sideswipe of philosophy on the candies of rationalism that have scattered on the grass of the future?
Oh, I think I hit that metaphor one time too many.
The cultures have gone through the Enlightenment, an Enlightenment-style thing.
Rationalism, criticism of superstition, and so on, tend to be healthier, at least for some time.
So, I'm not saying they're all equal.
And some are less survivable, and some are more destructive, and some are less sustainable.
The totalitarian dictatorships, obviously.
But everyone adapts to that.
There was a 60 Minutes, I think, show where they were interviewing children in North Korea, right under the dictatorship.
And the parents were freaking out and coaching the children to not say anything that basically would get the entire family tree wiped out by King Yong Il, the dictator.
And this is, of course, how we adapt through punishment and reward, through Abuse, generally.
We adapt.
We adapt to abuse, and we then call that abuse culture, because you can't call abuse culture any more than you can call taxation theft, or the Federal Reserve organized counterfeiting.
Well, actually, pretty disorganized counterfeiting in many ways.
You have to make up new words, so we call the scar tissue from abuse, we call it culture.
And that way, we don't have to think that it's true.
We only have to think it's rich and deep, and all this sort of nonsense.
Everything that is rich and deep is crap.
It's funny, we'd no more buy a cell phone from 20 years ago than we would buy a computer from 20 years ago.
But for some reason we're very happy to have ideologies passed down for thousands of years and consider them the very best thing there is.
Hey, I have a 2,000-year-old recipe for toothache.
Do you want it?
No?
Okay.
How about ethics and how to raise your kid?
Would you go for that?
Yes!
Yay!
Culture survives and thrives and breeds.
Like a virus.
So, the argument that society reflects human nature is not true.
The other thing which we can say is that The degree to which children are propagandized and threatened is the degree to which whatever their resulting belief is, is not natural.
So, if you have to send your kids, say, to government-run schools for 12 years straight in order to get them to believe that the government is both necessary and virtuous, then you know for a fact that the government is not necessary and virtuous.
The more lies you need to stuff into children's heads, the more unnatural is the belief system that results.
So human nature is that which is independent of environment.
It would have to be, right?
So almost all teenagers have high sex drives and almost everyone likes chocolate more than broccoli.
The standards of beauty tend to be fairly universal.
And so these things we can call Human nature, if you want, right?
Innate.
They're innate.
Puberty is something that happens.
It's just how we develop.
You don't have to go to four years of government school espousing the virtue of puberty, sit down and concentrate really hard to make the naughty bits pop out from the side of your thigh.
I had an odd puberty.
We don't have to get into the details.
So that which is natural does not need repetition and social threats and bullying and detentions and punishments and F grades and going to hell and go to jail and whatever is natural to human beings does not need to be propagandized.
Whatever needs to be propagandized is the opposite of what is natural.
My daughter has never shown an urge to hit, punch, kick, bite.
She's never been exposed to it.
She can be a bit possessive of her toys, which I think is fine.
I mean, she's an only child, so she's gonna have that.
And also, you know, property is important to children.
I mean, they really don't have much of it, right?
They don't get to choose where they live, they don't get to choose their parents' cars or anything like that, but their toys, they're their toys.
So I don't accept the argument that if you change society, It would reshape itself back to the current system which always represents the perfection of human nature.
Now, one thing that is true, which I certainly will agree with, is that if you were to get rid of the state right now, a lot of people would kind of freak out.
Right?
A lot of people would kind of freak out and you would see an urge to re-coalesce society along existing lines.
But that is only because there has been existing propaganda.
It was hard to end slavery because so many people still believed in and profited from slavery.
It would be very hard to begin slavery now because so few people believe in it.
But there's a transition point.
So I think that's an important thing.
So there's kind of like a grain, enough truth in it To make the poison taste not so bad.
In that, if you were to snap your fingers tomorrow and get rid of the state, there would be a number of people who would find, who would have a strong urge to put it back in.
And those people would be people who are currently profiting from the state, of course, the big corporations, and the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, and people on welfare, and people on government retired pensions, and so on, right?
So, there would be people who would want to re-coalesce the state for economic reasons and there would be people, although I would never say that, of course society needs organization.
I want a pension I haven't earned.
But there would also be people who would want society to have a state again because they would feel anxious in a state of freedom.
Right?
This is very very important to understand.
People would feel anxious in a state of freedom And therefore they would want a state to come back so that they could reduce their anxiety.
So if people believe the propaganda that without the state, you know, you have gangs of tulip gang painted faces of teenagers rolling around on scooters with laser tags calling in airstrikes from high hormone satellites overhead.
All would be chaos, madness, theft, robbery, and so on.
Then if this imaginary protection was taken away, they would feel a great deal of fear and anxiety, and rather than deal with that fear and anxiety, they would like the oppressive mechanisms to be put back in place so they could feel safe and secure, because they've been told that this is what is necessary, that this is what is needed, and without it all these terrible things will occur.
And so rather than wait for these terrible things to occur, or see if they will occur, they just want, they would want the police, they want taxes back, they want all this back!
So that, you know, good things could be sustained and bad things wouldn't happen.
So when people are propagandized, and when people have economic incentives, they are addicted to have an investment in, financial and psychological, in the existing system.
And an attempt to change that will create a backlash.
And if they're successful, then people would say, Aha!
You see?
We tried to get rid of the state.
Chaos, fear, panic erupted.
Then we had to have a state come back.
So, everybody needs a state.
But, that's like force-feeding kids an addictive drug.
Taking that drug away from them, and they freak out, panic, go on shooting sprees, and then you say, aha, you see?
We need that drug.
Well, it certainly is true that for the people who are addicted to that drug because they've been force-fed it as children, they kind of need it, or at least they need a gradual transition plan for getting off it.
But it is not human nature to need that drug.
So we have a drug called statism, which we're force-fed as children, which people believe is virtuous, necessary, good, right, just, fair, and the container and shield to all things terrible, chaotic, and anarchic!
And so, lo and behold, people, because, you know, propaganda works, and the ruling classes know what they're doing, so, people need it.
They feel they need it, and so on.
So, if it doesn't tell you anything, other than that propaganda works, if it doesn't tell you anything about how society should be, So, like in the past, there were all of these arguments about how you had to have slavery because blacks were like subhuman and always weirdly sexually promiscuous.
I remember reading in a book, Black Like Me, about a guy who put on basically coal face to go travel the South, about how he was hitchhiking with some guy who obsessively asked him about black sexual practices.
Because in the South, Christianity creates such a distortion in the sexual natural sexual mechanisms of the human mind and body, that all of the sort of natural lusts have to be projected into the other, and often tends to be the black community and so on, which they're hoochie-koochie bum-dancing and so on, as it's called.
So blacks were considered to be, you know, dangerous and predatory and this and that, so you had to have slavery because they can't fend for themselves and they'll just turn on you.
Well, it's not really true.
I mean, particularly if you look at black kids raised in a non-black family, like adopted, higher actually capital pay incomes than whites.
Caribbean blacks are physically indistinguishable from American blacks.
Even the second generation have higher per capita incomes than whites.
Remember, America's so racist.
All of these things were talked about, and of course there's this idea in the Islamic world, in some aspects of the Islamic world, where female sexuality, unless you keep a very tight, violent lid on it, is going to run wild and so on, right?
Women are lavish and tempting and seductive, and therefore we've got to veil them and, you know, whatever.
And this is, I mean, this is all just scare stories.
Scare and bribe stories are fundamentally about propaganda.
Because if you have a scare story, then you don't actually have to have an argument, right?
And if you have a bribery, then you don't have to have an argument.
So whenever you're threatened or bribed, I guarantee you, you are in the grip of some hellacious indoctrination system.
So it simply can't be the case that we can accept the argument that society reflects human nature.
But if you could snap your fingers and take away the state, there'd be a massive clamor to bring it back.
And everyone would say, Aha!
You see?
Human nature.
And then the experiment would not be tried again for another thousand years.
Which is why you can't go too fast with these things, people!
This is why it's an intergenerational change.
Multigenerational change.
Has to be.
Do it too quickly, people are gonna freak out.
And demand back the immorality that they're used to.
Give a man poison for long enough, and cream tastes like crap.
So, sorry, I can't do the human... I can't do the human nature argument.
Now, another argument which is made is, what is the difference between a DRO and a government?
So for those who don't know, DRO is one possible proposed mechanism that I have talked about, and as it turns out, a lot of other people have too, so... And what it is, is a dispute resolution organization.
So it's a voluntary organization that will mediate disputes between individuals.
So, if you and I enter into a contract, I'm going to deliver you 500 widgets for $500, and I take your $500 and never produce for you the 500 widgets, what do we do?
Well, of course, in the current system, you do nothing, because you can't possibly get any kind of court judgment of any value for $500.
Maybe small claims court, who knows, right?
But in business, you have virtually no access to the legal system.
I mean, this is what's so tragic.
People always say, my goodness, well, who will resolve disputes in a free society?
It's like, well, who resolves disputes now?
You can't go to the law system.
The law system is designed to profit lawyers and benefit big companies who can afford to have legal departments.
I mean, that's it.
Nothing to do with justice, nothing to do with fairness, nothing to do with anything like that.
And the only people who think you can get justice out of the legal system as it exists are people who've never tried to get justice out of the legal system.
I mean, it's like trying to pull whipped cream out of a lemon.
With your teeth!
So, in a free society, if you and I are doing business for the first time and we don't have a record of keeping our deals, we may choose to buy insurance if each other welches.
And so if I send you the 500 widgets and you send me the 500 bucks, obviously we're happy and we don't need to invoke it.
But I may want to buy insurance.
So if I send you the 500 widgets, you don't send me the 500 bucks.
I lodge a complaint with the DRO.
And the DRO says, oh, no problem.
We'll give you the 500 bucks.
And we're going to mark down this guy for not keeping his deal after they, what, investigate and so on, right?
And the reverse can happen too.
So, right?
So if you send me the 500 bucks, I don't send you the 500 widgets.
You go to the DRO that we've both agreed to use ahead of time.
And the DRO says, oh, OK, no problem.
I'll, you know, I'll pay you for the 500 widgets.
And then they go to me and they say, whoops, did not keep his deal.
Now, what's that going to cost?
Well, think of it like buying health care in reverse, right?
You buy health care when you're 80, it's pretty damn expensive.
You buy health care when you're healthy 20, like insurance, and it's pretty cheap.
So, if you have no record, no history, then it's going to be more expensive.
So it might be 2 percentage points of the deal, right?
10 bucks.
for that insurance, representing the risk of welching.
And we would either pay that or we wouldn't.
You pay it or you don't.
It's a choice.
You buy life insurance or you don't.
Buy health insurance or you don't.
If we don't, then we swallow our losses.
If we do buy it, then we both pay ten bucks and we are insured for each other welching on the deal.
And obviously we would choose to buy a company with enough resources, with enough track record, with enough successful customer resolutions and as fewer customer complaints as possible to ensure that we had the best chance of getting paid back for whatever.
I mean, you know, is it 100%?
God, no.
Of course nothing's 100% equal.
We'll be hit by an asteroid tomorrow.
Who cares, right?
But it's as good as you can get.
Government ain't 100% either, brother.
Minus 100%, maybe, over time.
So that's what a DRO is.
And DROs can function in a wide variety of ways.
And they're always looking for cost savings.
They're always looking for value.
They're always looking for better, cheaper, faster because that's what companies do to outbid each other in contracts.
And so that's how disputes get resolved at an economic level.
At an economic level.
And that's most of what you're going to deal with in your life.
Very few people are the victims of violent crime.
But everyone gets involved in contracts and economic dealings.
So that's going to be 99% of the stuff you need to resolve in your life is going to be resolvable through DROs.
DROs are optional.
You can always take the risk of trusting someone.
And DROs get cheaper over time.
The government gets more expensive over time.
DROs get cheaper over time.
As you consistently fulfill your obligations, pay off your debts, fulfill your contracts, Then it's like a credit rating.
If you keep paying off your debts, then it gets cheaper to borrow money.
If you don't, well, what do you know?
More expensive.
So, favors the virtuous and punishes the indiscreet and the overly flexible in their commitments to contracts and so on.
That's what you want, right?
You want to reap the rewards of virtue.
Quite the opposite of the current system.
The more virtuous you are, the more you're stolen from.
The less virtuous you are, the more you're given.
So, that's a DRO.
You say, well, what's the difference between DROs and governments?
Well, it's the difference between lovemaking and rape.
It's the difference between theft and charity.
It's the difference between assault and surgery.
I mean, the voluntary is all that matters.
It's the only thing that matters.
It's the only thing that matters.
Is the voluntary.
Voluntary doesn't mean perfect.
Voluntary doesn't mean no regrets.
Voluntary doesn't mean no bias, remorse.
Just like every time you have sex with someone, you're not always jumping up afterwards and saying, that was the best thing I ever did!
But it does mean that it's voluntary.
So a DRO is voluntary.
And I'm quite convinced that after a certain amount of time, nobody's going to bother, except maybe for the very largest transactions.
If you've had 20 or 30 years of fulfilling your contracts, nobody's going to demand a DRO insurance on the next one.
It's the eBay model, right?
If you've been running your business for 10 years and have no complaints, people are going to feel secure to buy from you.
You didn't do all of that just to screw someone on Day 10 years plus one.
So that's what a DRO is.
It's optional.
It's constantly striving for efficiency.
There's competition.
Voluntary.
Gets cheaper the more virtuous you are.
All of which is the opposite of the government.
So please do not confuse the two.
The only people who are really going to get upset about DROs are people who want to live consequence-free.
Who basically want to screw people.
Actually, they can kind of do it okay with the government.
But you really wouldn't be able to get away with it in a free society.
So I question the benevolence and I question the motives quite strongly of people who try to conflate these two.
Because they are complete opposites.
And the people who want to conflate the two want to scare people away from voluntarism.
And the only people who want to scare people away from voluntarism are the people who are profiting in some manner.
economically or psychologically from statism.
Now, the other question I get, of course, is how would society deal with violent crime in a free society?
Well, of course, the question is how do people deal with violent crime right now?
How does it get dealt with?
Well, terribly.
Just terribly.
So, I mean, theft is ridiculous.
I know a guy, he had his Porsche stolen.
His Porsche had a GPS tracker on it.
He went to the cops.
He said, my Porsche has been stolen.
It's got a GPS tracker on it.
I know where it is right now.
I can tell you where it is right now.
The cops were like, fill out this paperwork, we'll get back to you.
And they never did go.
You know, just have a vacuum cleaner stolen.
Call the cops and see what happens.
Do they leap into action?
No, of course not.
We'll write it down.
I guess insurance will take care of it.
So, theft is certainly not being dealt with now.
I mean, look at LIBOR.
Look at the bank scandals.
Look at the Federal Reserve.
Look at inflation.
Look at national debt.
Theft is not being dealt with now.
Theft is being actively protected and encouraged.
I mean, it's pretty tough for me to steal half a million dollars from every household in America, but the national debt's managed to do that with the approval, blessing and protection of the police.
So, theft is not being dealt with.
Murder, well... The government is reactionary.
The government is about pretending to solve a problem after the fact.
A problem which it has usually created.
The government is not about prevention.
The profit is in prevention, you understand.
The profit is not in cure.
It's a lot more profitable to you and to society as a whole if you don't get diabetes.
Now it's profitable to specific individuals if you get diabetes and they can get you to pay for treatment or whatever management of it.
But it's a net loss.
So the guy who operates on your heart, if you have a heart attack, he makes a lot of money, but society as a whole loses it, because that guy's expertise and so on has been basically spent patching things up, right?
Keynesianism should be promoting heart attacks and diabetes, because that adds to the national wealth, right?
Broken window, how about the clogged artery fallacy?
You know, Michael Moore is outraged that health care spending is considered part of GDP and then he advocates stimulus packages.
Dude!
Same thing.
Mending things that are broken is not the same as creating wealth.
So the government makes no money from prevention.
The money is made from pretending to react to a problem and never solving it, right?
What about rape?
It's not the government that's brought down violent crime, it's better parenting.
According to some statistics, 40% of rape complaints, of rape accusations, turn out to be false.
Generally, the people who make these accusations are not punished.
So there's that injustice.
It's really hard to say the government is great at protecting people from murder, because the US government's been involved in causing the deaths of a million Iraqis.
It's kind of hard to say that's a good thing.
If we understand that the war on drugs is a war that initiates violent crime, violent criminal activity against peaceful people, right?
We strip the law of its supposed majesty and the cops of their blue-coated legitimacy and its donut-sprinkled mustached guys Taking people away at gunpoint and locking them in a cage.
Kidnapping and imprisonment.
This is not a solution for violent crime.
Forcing people to pay for schools that are terrible is a violent crime.
You don't pay your property taxes, they will take your house.
You defend yourself, they will gun you the hell down.
Don't fool yourself about the reality of that.
So the government initiates Millions of violent crimes.
Hundreds of millions of violent crimes just in America per year.
So the idea that we need a government to protect violent crime is like saying we need a guillotine to protect us from a hangover.
Except I guess the guillotine does actually get rid of the hangover.
But it's nonsense, right?
So first thing to understand is the problem is not being solved but rather being exacerbated by the state.
So that's the first thing to understand.
The second thing to understand is that in a free society the greatest profits are made from prevention not from cure.
The etymology of violence is quite clear.
in general arises from child abuse.
Now, violent adults come from child abuse.
Not all people who are abused are violent, and there are, sure, a few violent people who weren't abused.
Who knows what the genetics are on that?
But in general, the pattern is quite clear.
That violence as adults come from violence as children.
Violent children are very expensive.
Why are there so many violent children?
Because the costs are socialized.
And Because the cost is socialized for violent children, so you don't pay more if your child is violent.
Now clearly, if you put your child in school and your child is violent, or aggressive, or disruptive, or abusive, or whatever, then it's going to be more expensive for the school to have that child in the classroom.
It's going to require more teacher attention, it's going to reduce the quality of education for other students, it's going to require a higher teacher-to-student ratio, and so on.
Lower teacher-to-student ratio?
The better one!
More teachers, fewer students.
It's going to cost you a lot more.
So instead of it being $3,000 to send your kid to school, it's going to be like $15,000.
And the way that you would solve this is through a DRO.
I mean, this is the first business model I would put into practice in a free society.
I would tell the parents, I guarantee that your school costs will never be more than $3,000 a year.
Guaranteed.
Guaranteed.
In the same way that, you know, if you buy health care, then your health care costs will never be more than X, usually the premiums, per year.
And then I would work my ass off finding out how to keep children from becoming violent.
And I would teach the parents how to do that, and make sure that they did that.
Which is, people say, oh my god, that's outrageous.
Well, it's not outrageous.
I mean, if you want health care insurance premiums in a free society, then they're going to need to measure how healthy you are.
Of course, right?
Of course!
I mean, when I was an executive, we had to have executive insurance and they came and they took my blood and they asked me all these questions and they took my urine samples and all this kind of funky stuff.
I mean, if that's invasive for you, then my God, then don't take it, right?
And then take the risk that your kid is going to grow up aggressive and you're going to School bills, if you can even find a school for the little monster, are five times higher than everyone else.
Or more.
So you guarantee that you will pay any excessive school bills, and you will also guarantee to protect the parents against any destructive actions of the child.
If your child goes and steals a car, we will deal with all of the costs.
If your child punches another child, we will deal with all of the costs.
So you would insure your child against excessive school costs or not being in school at all and requiring some sort of private tutor in a suit of armor or something.
And you would also want to be indemnified against the liability of your child going and doing something destructive, nutty, and so on.
Stealing or hitting or whatever it was going to be.
And in a free society, that's what you would do.
And in fact, I would go even further.
I would offer people lifetime immunity from any costs or problems associated with criminal behavior on their part, or on the part of their children.
If your son becomes a serial rapist, I will handle all of the costs associated with that.
And That would be another service that I would be very, very keen to offer because I'm very confident that I could offer a model of parenting and parenting coaching that would be hugely beneficial and would almost eliminate the possibility of criminal actions on the part of children when they grew up.
Very confident about that.
Are you offered that from your school?
Are you offered that from your government?
That we will move heaven and earth to create the most peaceful, non-violent generation the world has ever seen?
Of course not.
Government profits from criminality.
Without criminals to scare and dysfunction to scare you with, I mean, what are they selling?
Can't sell protection.
I can't sell you lion insurance if you live in Scotland.
Blue ball insurance, yes.
Lion insurance, no.
So in a free society, remember, it's all about prevention.
And it would also be very important to understand that it would probably be an interesting service to say, and if you want, we'll put your name in a directory, to know that you are taking these classes on how to raise non-violent children and you're submitting to the best psychological and philosophical expertise in the raising of your children.
And that way, if there's somebody around who's not doing that, they're immediately going to be suspect by others.
Ooh, they're off the grid, they're not getting insurance.
Why?
Why are they not getting insurance?
Protecting us from their children.
Why?
Because you understand, once the principles of peaceful parenting are spread this way, unfortunately they can't be spread this way yet, Once the principles of peaceful parenting are spread this way, then buying insurance against a violent child will be like buying insurance against being hit by an asteroid pennies a year.
Just, you know, be this kind of parent and not one child in a million becomes violent.
If they've got a brain tumor or whatever, God knows, right?
But it'd be like buying insurance for malnutrition.
It would be so ridiculously cheap that anybody who didn't take it would be suspect.
But if you did take it, then your children, of course, and your parenting would need to be checked and verified, which is exactly as it should be.
In other words, your kids need to have the developmental tests, the kids need to have their brain scans to make sure their brains aren't going dark from particular kinds of trauma, and so on.
And so, I mean, again, it's purely voluntary.
You don't have to have any of this stuff.
You cannot let a single person in.
Nobody can force you to become part of a DRO.
But it's so economically advantageous to, and you end up doing smart and intelligent and wise things as a result of it, that the whole point is still not to say, well, what are we going to do with all these axe murderers in a free society?
The point is to not have axe murderers in a free society.
And the methodology for achieving that is not that complicated.
It's actually quite well understood.
So I hope this answers some questions about how a free society will work or could work.
And I certainly look forward to your feedback if you enjoy these shows.
Freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
Thank you!
Have a great great Christmas.
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