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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:44
Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio Interviewed at LibertyFest West 2012!
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If you could just kind of give maybe a little bit about what you're going to be talking about this evening?
Sure, sure.
Well, I mean, I'm going to be hosting, so I'm sort of doing a little bit of MC work, which is just the lubricant in the moving machinery of the conference, and then I have a speech closer towards the end.
I'm really passionate about finding better ways to communicate the ideas of liberty to people.
There's this paradigm, which is really annoying, which we all face, I think, when we talk about this stuff, which is, we say, well, we're against the welfare state.
And people, you know, the machine goes off in their head, and they say, well, that means that you don't care about the poor.
You know, or we're against social security, so then people think we want all old people to live on cat food because we're just callous Dickensian monsters or something.
And so I really want to find ways that we can align ourselves with the goals of all just and reasonable people in society.
You know, we want the kids to get a great education.
We want the old to live in dignity.
We want healthcare to be affordable to people.
But recognizing that just because people think that the state is sort of solving the problem at the moment, that's the only way or the best way.
Really want to try and find ways that we can align ourselves with people's just and fair goals and show them that there are far better ways of doing it than the state.
In fact, the state is about the worst way of doing it.
The state is like taking morphine for a toothache.
You'll feel better in the moment, but whatever is happening is going to get worse under the surface.
So I'm going to try and give some techniques that I've developed over the last A couple of decades in communicating the ideals of liberty to help people align themselves with the goals.
We're on the same side.
We all want a just and fair and rational society.
We want peace.
We want good schools.
We want healthcare.
We want a general improvement of the human condition.
And to align ourselves with those goals means that we may have a difference in means, but our goals are the same.
And to not have our goals misunderstood or misrepresented.
So that's really my goal.
I'm going to try and talk about ways to do that tonight.
Is that what you've been doing primarily for the last few years, is working as far as communicating on a broader scale to people that might never have considered certain political, philosophical approaches just because they felt sort of out of the sphere before?
Yes.
There is, you know, they used to say that social security is like the third rail of American politics.
Ethics are like the third rail of human communication.
I think that ethics are the most powerful thing in society.
And whoever controls the moral discussion decides almost every major decision in society.
And if you can get people to accept the moral argument, in a sense you almost control them, because I think we're really driven by our conscience, we're really driven by ethics and virtue.
Reshaping an ethical discussion is a huge challenge, but I think it's the most important powerful thing to do.
Once somebody accepts that something is virtuous, They will do it.
I mean, to take a really dark example, Hitler got all of his troops and his SS guards and so on to swear loyalty to him.
And that was a moral good and a moral going to swear allegiance to the fatherland.
And they were willing to march into a war that caused the deaths of 40 million people.
Because they accepted the ethics of that oath.
And getting those kinds of moral decisions across to people when you're trying to reshape a system of morality is really challenging.
And so, what I try to do is I try and start with the moral principles that everyone accepts in their personal life, right?
We all accept that non-aggression is a good way to get things done.
You know, if I want a job, I don't go kidnap someone's kids and say, give me a job and I'll release them.
I mean, you know, I go and I interview or whatever and try, if I want to make a sale or if I want someone to have me come and speak at a conference, I don't, you know, kidnap their cat and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
So, the way that everyone Most people interact in their personal life is through peace and voluntarism and reason and argument and deal with the inevitable disappointments of rejection that voluntarism has.
And what I'm trying to do in general is to get people to understand that ethics doesn't suddenly change when you go to the macro from the micro.
So if the non-aggression principle is a good way to live in your personal life, it doesn't suddenly turn into the opposite when you go to the social level.
The non-aggression principle is plumb line.
It's valid all the way from the top to the bottom.
It is a universal principle, which means there are no exemptions.
But that's really hard for people because we've all been trained and conditioned to say violence is bad for us.
But what the state does is called law and order and it's different than the initiation of force.
But technically and factually and empirically it is the initiation of force.
Anything other than immediate self-defense is the initiation of force.
And unfortunately we've come to a place in society where we believe, we accept, we value, we treasure, we think is good.
Initiating force to solve just about every problem.
Every time you see a problem, people say, well, we need to have a law, we need to have a regulation, we need to have another government agency, we need to do X, Y and Z. And my argument is to say, look, if it doesn't work at the personal level, it doesn't work at the political level.
Violence is bad for us as individuals, violence is bad for us as a society.
And once we understand that, then we can understand why things keep getting worse, why things keep going wrong, why we end up with more debt, why we end up with more poor, why we end up with more violence in our foreign policy and in our domestic consequences of those foreign policies.
Why are children less interested in school?
Why do we have to drug more and more children just to keep them in school?
Why is the dropout rate approaching 50% in American schools?
Well, it's because we're using violence to solve these problems, and that just makes things worse in the long run.
That's a very challenging conversation for people to have, because they think they live in a virtuous society.
When you point out that most of the major decisions are decided through the force of the state, it really turns people's perceptions of their society on their head.
It's very disorienting and upsetting for people, so it's a great challenge, but we just have to keep reminding people that we want the goals of all just people.
We just have empirically better ways of getting them.
on more kind of a more community scale and sort of a grassroots.
Is this your first time in sort of West Texas area?
It is.
I've been to Texas before in my former life.
I was a software entrepreneur and executive for about 15 years off and on.
And so I came to Houston quite a bit for business.
I worked in the environmental sector and I love Texas.
We had dinner last night in a barn.
I thought that was the coolest thing ever.
That's what I was wanting to hit upon.
The time that you've sort of been talking to, because people were talking about their personal concerns right here in their neighborhood.
Has there been any sort of interesting conversations that have popped up either during your interview yesterday or last night or maybe with some of the other guests that have brought in here that might have given you sort of a new take on your background through the sort of filter of Of people right here sort of struggling for their own concerns.
Yeah, I mean, I actually got into a debate with a reporter at the television station yesterday, because what's happened recently is the Libertarian Party here has opposed making texting while driving illegal, right?
And so the reporter was upset about that and said, well, the Libertarians, they have no problem with people texting while they're driving.
And that's not true.
I think we all recognize that texting while you're driving is detracting from your driving skill.
I mean, you can't make two heads, one texting and one driving.
So it's not that libertarians don't care or have no problem with people texting while driving.
Libertarians just don't agree that using government force is the way to solve it.
I mean, so, I wanted to align myself with her and say, I can't speak for libertarians as a whole, of course, but I certainly care about people texting and driving.
I'm a father, you know, my daughter's going to be on the streets at some point.
She's young now, but she's going to be on the streets.
I don't want drivers to be distracted while they're driving, but I don't agree That using the state to ban it is going to make anything better.
It's going to make things worse.
Because what happens is, when it's legal, people, you know, they're doing this while they're driving.
At least they're somewhat close to the road.
But when it becomes illegal, they start texting down where their knees are, and it's even more dangerous.
And so, I want people to not text while they're driving.
I think that would be great, but using the state is not the way to go.
And so, and once we got that out of the way, we could actually have a conversation about other ways that that could be achieved.
And there's so many powerful tools that we have to achieve things that we want in society.
I mean, at the extreme end is social ostracism.
You know, if I will not drive with you, says the wife to her husband, if you text while you drive.
Because I don't feel safe.
I don't like it.
Well, he's not going to do that, right?
I mean, unless he's a completely bad husband, in which case there are more problems than texting, right?
You could say to insurance companies, I want you, I'm going to shop around for an insurance company that will not cover accidents that occur while somebody is texting.
I mean, that's a completely voluntary way to do it.
And that way, people will be less likely to text because they fear the economic consequences rather than just some ticket, right?
Because if it's just some ticket, then a rich guy is not going to care about it, right?
But if it's, you know, if I have an accident, I'm liable for everything if I'm texting because my insurance company won't cover it, and you can check that quite easily with, you know, logs on the servers for the cell phone companies or whatever.
That's another way to do it.
And so we were just able to brainstorm about ways that we could achieve what we want in a sustainable way, rather than having yet another legal layer piled on top of people that adds cost, that only causes people to change behavior in a non-productive way.
Statistics seem quite clear that if you ban texting, you actually end up with more accidents because people hide it more, rather than finding other ways to solve the problem.
So, yeah, looking at some of the local concerns, I can certainly see why people I mean, that's what's been used for thousands of years to solve problems, but that doesn't mean that we can't think of new ways of solving them.
I would say that there certainly are some differences between myself and mainstream libertarians.
Mainstream libertarians are very interested in the idea of the state as a valid social entity that should be kept as small as possible.
This is a founding father idea, that the government should be life, liberty, and property, or life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
So the government governs best, which governs least, that there's a good role for government in three major areas, which is the defense of persons and property, the police force, and so on.
Courts to adjudicate and perhaps prisons to punish.
There certainly are some differences between myself and the mainstream Libertarians.
Mainstream Libertarians view the government as not just valid but essential for the good order of society.
So in major areas, three major areas, that Libertarians promote the use of government.
First is in the police force, legal and police system, to protect persons and property.
Courts to adjudicate disputes.
Perhaps prisons.
There's some public or private prisons, there's mixed opinions on those.
But prisons to punish and national defects from military and so on to defend the region.
And that is the mainstream approach.
So what they're interested in doing is returning the government back to its constitutional roots and to get rid of all of the extraneous stuff that started with Fabian socialism in the early part of the 20th century that was really sort of supported and fed by the fiat currency creation made possible through the centralized banking through the Federal Reserve.
And which really blew up during the Great Depression through massive government intervention in the economy.
And then the government got even bigger, of course, during the Second World War when it took over most sections of the economy.
And then it collapsed, of course, quite a bit at the end of the Second World War for about 10 or 15 years.
And then, you know, they got huge again with the welfare state and the entitlement programs under Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.
And then you had the EPA and OSHA in the 70s.
But it's really grown.
I mean, the federal government is five to six times larger now than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
And so for most libertarians, the problem is the government has gotten too big.
And that's not my particular perspective.
My particular perspective is, you know, I'm a philosopher, I'm a moralist.
I come from first principles, not from what seems to make sense or, you know, what has worked for some point in the past.
I come from first principles.
Non-aggression principle means you can't have a state.
Because the state is by definition a monopoly of people with the right to initiate force in a geographical area.
You can't get around that.
You can't put magic into the solar system.
You can't put a finger of God somewhere in physics and say, here's where the magic happens, where we can reverse the rules.
The non-aggression principle and self-ownership and property rights means that you can't grant people the right to violate the non-aggression principle.
You can't grant people the right to violate personal property through taxes and tariffs and regulations.
You just can't do it.
And so, most libertarians would say, you know, we want freedom and the best way to have freedom is to have a small government.
I'm not saying that the libertarians aren't principled, but my approach from really first principles, take no prisoners, don't compromise, is we have to find a way that we can make the case for a stateless society, which is completely bizarre to people.
It's like saying, I want to repeal gravity.
I mean, because this is what we've always done in societies.
But major human institutions of oppression have been eliminated in the past.
I mean, there used to be slavery.
Now, not so much.
I mean, you could say it's transmogrified a little bit, but formal human ownership has been banished from the West.
Women used to be not even second-class citizens.
Now women have, fortunately, rights equal to men.
We do make major changes in human institutions that have been around since humans have been around, and the state would seem to me just another one that we need to challenge.
And I think there's many, many examples of how you can run things beautifully without a statement.
Look at eBay.
eBay has 350,000 employees.
It's the largest employer in the world, and it has no state.
I mean, there's no way to adjudicate disputes using the court system in any practical way through eBay.
It's all over the world, it's anonymous, but it runs beautifully.
So there's lots and lots of things.
Half the world's workers, and this is truly tragic, half the world's workers operate outside of a legal framework.
They operate in the grey market or the black market.
They have no access to a legal framework.
Now that's not what would happen in a truly free, stateless society.
In a stateless society you would have access to a framework of dispute resolution.
These people are specifically denied access to a monopoly on dispute resolution, and yet they actually managed to get things done in a fairly effective way.
So, again, there's tons of examples of how you don't need a state.
Even if the state bans anything else from solving the problem, the problem still gets solved.
If the state wasn't banning things like alternate ways of resolving disputes, if the state wasn't banning other ways of defending yourself against aggression than having, you know, massive military and aggressive foreign policy, there's so many solutions that come into play.
And so I am enormously encouraged by the fact that people even can get things done without a state around.
Even if the state is interfering with things, they can still get things done.
If there was no state and all the problems and solutions could be out in the open, I think we'd get things solved very quickly.
But that, of course, is where a big difference is between myself and mainstream libertarians.
And, you know, we're engaged in that debate on a continual basis.
Of course, one of the results of that is that if you believe that the state is valid, but needs to be shrunk, then you're more drawn towards using political activism to try and manage the state back down to some smaller size.
I'm not a big fan of political activism.
I think that it doesn't actually achieve what I want.
We've poured, as a movement, hundreds of millions of dollars into it.
We've poured at least four decades into it.
And the government is monstrously bigger than it was when we first started.
So I have, you know, I always go back to the data.
I'm just an annoying empiricist that way.
Is it working now?
Maybe there's another way that hasn't been tried, that could be tried, but it hasn't worked yet.
And so I sort of look for alternate ways to try and foster a more free society.
Okay.
And again, what you see is something that everybody that seems to hold.
One or two, like a quick sort of sound bite that among all of the people that are, let's say tonight, that are going to be on taking stage or in the audience, what you seem to seek sort of consolidates them all together.
Well, it is a desire to be free.
It is a desire to be free.
With freedom comes responsibility.
It's true.
It's an old caveat.
It's the fine print of freedom is responsibility.
And I think everybody in the audience has had an experience with authority that has been negative, that has been destructive, that has been problematic.
And we yearn to make decisions that are peaceful without being aggressed against.
I think that is the dream that human beings have as a whole.
I don't get to, I don't have the right to make the decision to strangle some guy.
I mean that, because that's, you know, that's imposing my will on his in a violent way.
But where I'm making a decision in my life that is not aggressing against anybody else, I yearn to have the freedom to make that decision and I'm willing to accept the consequences if that decision goes badly.
But I want to finally be an adult.
You know, I feel like in our society you're never allowed to grow up.
I mean, as a kid you're told to go to school and you're told what to learn.
You're not given many choices.
And then you go to college where you're given curriculum and courses.
And then you go into the workforce where you're told what to do.
And then you've got all these regulations and laws and controls.
You're told what to do and the tax code is like three and a half million words long.
I think last year there were 4,000 new regulations that came down that people have to obey and it's like you're never allowed to make a peaceful decision.
That has no negative impact on somebody else.
You're never allowed to make that decision as a free and sovereign adult.
We're never finally allowed to grow up.
We live in this Peter Pan world of micromanagement by everybody.
And I just want to drive people back and say, I want to be free to make my own decisions.
I'm willing to accept the consequences of those decisions, but I am a 45-year-old adult, well-educated, intelligent, articulate.
I can make my own decisions and I really insist upon the right to be allowed to make those decisions free of force.
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