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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:48:05
"How to Win Political Arguments" Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio Speaks in New Hampshire
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I actually met, you know, this is Stefan Molyneux.
I met this man for the first time a couple nights ago.
I ran up to Jack Shimmick's room to grab a beer, and I grabbed it, and I had to run back downstairs, and I was running, hustling, and there was Stefan Molyneux.
He was waiting for the elevator, and it was just going to be me and him, and I introduced myself.
I'm Jesse Maloney, and he's like, oh, hey, how are you doing?
And I'm like...
You know, and I'm getting all sweaty and, you know, sweaty palms and all that.
And I was really excited and, you know, then I got in the elevator and, you know, I was just, I got all sycophantic.
I'm like, oh, I'm like your biggest supporter.
And, but he was, he was a very, very, very nice gentleman.
I had dinner with him later on and he was, he was very down to earth.
Like, like Chris said, there was no prima donnas and He was so real.
And I think his intellectual rigor is something that's going to resonate and echo for hundreds of years.
Right now, we all quote Rothbard and Voltaire and Proudhon and all these philosophers and thinkers from the past.
And I'm almost positive 100 years from now, people will say, ah, but Molyneux said.
And so without further ado, I would like to introduce Stefan Molyneux.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate that.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
I'm wireless, and there's a lot of cameras.
We have an AV group, like everyone here was in the AV society in high school.
And so many cameras, I feel I should be protesting that I did not have sexual relations with some woman.
Somewhere.
Somehow.
Maybe you.
Anyway.
Well, thank you.
That's a very kind introduction.
I really do appreciate it.
As I said, my name is Stefan Molyneux.
I run a podcast, which usually translates into Not Good Enough for Radio.
And hopefully, I'm more used to doing just one camera, a red room, and just me.
So there's a lot of eyeballs here.
I'll try not to let it goose me.
I actually wanted them to build a red room.
Up here, I do the talk and just wave from the top, but apparently that wasn't going to happen.
So, yeah, sorry for those who've got the cameras.
I just like to walk a little, so I'll be moving.
You won't know where I am.
I'm the wind.
So I'm going to do a talk today about what I hope is going to be some very powerful and effective ways for you to take more of an offensive position when it comes to debating not anarchism versus statism, really, but freedom versus coercion.
Because what we do, if I may go out on a limb here, what we do as individuals is we fight evil.
And I know that sounds like a superhero description, but it is.
Right?
Because if the future is going to be free, it's going to be free because we don the silly tights and the capes of philosophy, reason, evidence, empiricism, and win the battle of ideas.
That is the only way that freedom is going to exist in the future, where we can build a bridge to the libertopia we all wish we could live in today.
But all we can do is lay down our time and energy in building that bridge to the future.
And I've been having these kinds of political debates and arguments for about 25 years, and I've made such a staggering number of mistakes in a university.
You know, when I say we should take the offensive, I've certainly been offensive to many, many people, and that's not exactly what I'm talking about.
But I've made so many mistakes that I thought it worthwhile circling back, looking at some of the people I accidentally ran over, learning the lessons so we can drive better.
And so I've developed an argument and an approach called the against me argument.
And I'll go a little bit into that, but I don't want to talk for the whole time.
It's not like the world is 1500 podcasts.
It's not like the world is short of me talking.
So what I'd like to do is I'd like to just go over the theory of the against me argument and then If you would like to grab a microphone, I'd like to take it for a spin with the devil's advocate position from people in the audience.
So if you have some, you know, some, we all have at least one of these.
I have like a dozen.
The arguments that you just always seem to get stuck on when you're speaking about freedom or voluntarism or peaceful solutions to social problems.
It sticks like a hairball, you know, you just can't ever quite get that.
And I'd like to take the against me argument, run that through so you would then bring this position up.
Everyone who does it can get if they want.
I'll hand out a book.
This is my little incentive.
So I'd like to just do a little bit of the theory.
And then let's try some role plays, put it to the test and see if it works.
And if it doesn't, full refund.
So.
So we fight evil.
And one of the great challenges with fighting evil is you can't fight evil.
And the reason you can't fight evil is that the moment that people see that it's evil, it loses its power.
So if we said, you know what we should do is we should bring back slavery, everybody would say, well, no, no, that's evil.
So it would never happen.
So we don't actually fight evil.
Because you can't fight evil.
What we fight is evil that people think is good.
That's the real challenge that we face.
Because if everybody said, well, the initiation of the use of force is evil, statism is evil, we'd lay down our arms because we'd be done.
So the challenge is to get people to understand that what they think is virtuous It's in fact evil, the initiation of the use of force.
I think we would all agree as the foundation of that property rights and the initiation of the use against the initiation of the force and for property rights, which are really two sides of the same coin.
So the against me argument is designed to be a kind of talcum powder.
And what I mean by that is, if you're seeing movies where there's some invisible guy, right, some guy you can't see, and all you see is, you know, like something moving around because he's picking something up or whatever, and then something always happens in the movie.
There's like some dust or some talcum powder or something, and you see the outline of the guy, right?
And what we're trying to do is to get people to see the gun that's in the room that nobody talks about, which is the initiation of the use of force that is at the core of the statist philosophy.
And it's really hard to get people to see That gun in the room.
It's like going to a bunch of fish and saying, you're swimming in water.
And they say, what water?
We don't know because it's all we know.
It's our entire environment.
People can't see it.
And the against me argument is really designed to show the violence that is in people's advocation of status solutions to social problems.
Because there are two characteristics of evil that I think are really, really important to understand.
The first is that it's really, really, really effective.
I mean, it works really, really well.
If you want to cow a population, if you want to take their money, if you want to put their children in these lack-of-concentration camps called public schools, if you want to rule them, the gun works everywhere, always, beautifully.
But it only works if people won't look at it.
Violence is incredibly effective as a tool of ruling what of course I call the human tax livestock.
But it's only effective to the degree to which people don't look at it.
Because the moment people see the coercion that is at the root of statism, they see that it's immoral.
And statism as a philosophy falls.
So the first characteristic of evil is that it is incredibly effective.
And we all know this, right?
Is it six years now that this Iraq war has been going on?
Six?
It's longer than the Second World War, right?
It's actually, I think, coming on for longer than the U.S.
involvement in the First and Second World War.
And it's amazing.
It's the incredible invisible war.
There are no bodies.
Six years, you can look at the mainstream media and you can't see any of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who've been killed or driven out.
You can't even take a photograph of a flag-draped coffin coming off a plane at Andrews Air Base.
That's not legal.
Is it?
Did they change that?
Okay, good.
So in year six, you can now maybe take a photograph of a body.
But what you see is you see these yearbook photos of these guys, you know, the guys who've fallen like they tripped.
So when we Look at something like a war, you hear patriotism, flags, you know, protection of the realm, defense of the homeland, service to the nation, and this and that.
So you hear all of these amazing, morally eloquent terms, but what you'll never see is the reality of war, which is people being disassembled by machinery and bullets.
And that's very clear why they would not want you to see that.
Because if people see violence, they oppose violence.
So the violence has to be hidden in order for it to work.
And the argument that I'm going to lay out for you is designed to help you show the hidden violence that is in the statist position.
And to take the offense, right?
Because generally, and I'm going to generalize here, but maybe I think it'll make sense.
The way that we approach a statist argument, somebody who's advocating a statist position, or when we propose a voluntarist position, is we'll take one of two approaches.
There's either the pragmatic practical approach, it doesn't work, or there's the abstract moral approach.
The initiation of the use of force is wrong, the government is an agency which is a monopoly of individuals who claim the right to initiate violence in a particular geographical area and that's very abstract and that's very hard for people to connect with in a visceral way.
Because another thing that's true about violence is that there's very few people who want to do it directly.
People will support it in the abstract as long as they don't connect it with what is actually happening at the other end of the bullet or the bomb.
But there's very few people who actually want to do it directly.
So that's what we need to do is to bring this violence that is inherent in the system that we live in to people's understanding.
When you take the pragmatic approach, right?
So you argue the welfare state, right?
What if someone says, oh, the welfare state is great or necessary or good or whatever.
The pragmatic answer is to say, well, but you know, there were these friendly societies before we had the welfare state.
They did a much more effective job.
There's private charities.
And by the way, the number of poor was declining 1% a year until the welfare state came in in the early 60s.
And then it leveled off and now it's increasing.
So it doesn't actually solve poverty and so on.
And you end up arguing statistics, which can always be criticized for bias or interpretation, you end up having to be the libertarian Googlebot research robot, right?
Where you sort of like, oh, intellectual property rights!
Let me go and study intellectual property rights, and then I'll come back, and I have to become the master of everything, and I have to understand everything, and I have to know every statistic, and here are my charts, and here are my graphs, and here... I mean, it's exhausting, right?
And you can't ever become An expert at everything.
And when you finally do have the ironclad case as to how the welfare state contributes to the problems of poverty, people say, well, but it's a social contract, so... I'm glad you did all that research.
I'm not giving you a degree, and I'm going to walk away from the argument anyway.
And maybe there's, I mean, anyone... We've all done that, right?
So we've all... And it's not a lot of fun, right?
I mean, after a while, you sort of feel like, man, this wall is really beginning to...
Now, the second approach is where we take the abstract argument.
Well, you see, the welfare state relies upon the initiation of force against usually legally disarmed citizens.
That's immoral.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
And what do people say?
Anyone?
What do people say to that argument?
Well, it's not the initiation of force because it's a social contract.
You can leave at any time.
You vote.
You can change the system.
You can get involved.
You can do this.
You can do that, right?
So it's not force because, you know, When you're in my house, you do as I say, right?
I mean, that's what people say.
That's how they view the government, right?
And then you can argue about the social contract, which is a real quagmire, right?
It's really hard to pin people down on the social contract.
So, I have not found those two approaches to work, and I've poured an embarrassing amount of time and energy into just those approaches to making these arguments.
So in desperation, you know, when you're looking over that cliff saying, if I have one more argument like this, I'm going to jump.
I started to try and take another approach, right?
Because I like to be so proactive that I wait until I'm really desperate before I come up with a new approach.
So my third approach doesn't rely on any statistics.
Oh, praise be to the heavens above.
I don't have to look up everything all the time.
And then just have people say, well, those come from the Cato Institute.
Come on.
Might as well be quoting from Hitler.
And I don't have to have all these abstract documents against the social contract and go into that quagmire, which never seems to come out particularly effectively.
So I wanted to come up with a third way.
And I'll give you an example of this in action, and then I'll give you a tiny bit of theory, and then, you know, grab a mic and let's take this thing for a spin and see how it works.
So in a call-in show that I do every Sunday at 4 p.m.
Eastern, A listener brought a friend.
That's always exciting, because you've always got to start from zero, right?
And his friend, this was a woman who was a teacher, and she said, I'm really for the surge in Iraq.
I think it's going to work.
I think it's good.
I think it's going to be effective.
I'm really behind it, and I hear that you're not.
I was like, well, it's not that I'm against the surge.
A doctor isn't against one cancer.
And my old way of arguing would have been, ah, 913 lives started the Iraq war, and it's imperialism, which is really bad, and the troops are paid by aggression against citizens, and, and, and, and, and, right?
In other words, trying to move her like the four-ton piece of cheese through the grater of education in libertarian principles.
I see other people know that grater, right?
We've all had our fingers, right?
Ow!
Ow!
But you can't.
You can't push a camel through the eye of the needle, right?
You can't.
Yes, you just need a big needle.
I don't have that big a needle.
So I took another approach.
And I'll just run through the argument briefly.
We'll then apply it to stuff that works, hopefully, for you guys.
What I did was I said, so you're for the search, right?
And I didn't say, but this is the fifth surge, and there were four before, and they didn't work, right?
And I said, that's fine.
I said, I completely respect your right to be for the surge.
You like the surge?
Go hug the surge.
I'm fine with it, you know?
Take it out for dinner.
Buy it some flowers.
Whatever you like, you know?
I said, and I would never, never think of using force against you because of your opinion.
I would never dream of hiring guys in costume to come to your house and cut you off to some torture chamber because you like The Surge.
You're free to like The Surge.
I respect your opinion.
She was a little surprised.
I thought you were an anarchist.
Are you supposed to yell at me?
And so I then said, I don't agree with The Surge.
Do you give me the same respect and consideration to be against the surge as I'm giving you to be for the surge?
What you gonna say?
No.
I want the guys in costume to come to Europe.
Because we have to, you know, you've got to use the levers that people already believe in, the ethics, right?
And people already believe in freedom of expression, right?
So if I say, look, I'm allowed to disagree with you, right?
You don't advocate the use of force against me because I disagree with you, right?
Of course she's going to say no.
Of course I don't think that you should.
She said, you shouldn't be aggressed against because you disagree with me.
I said, excellent.
Progress.
I'm not used to this.
Let me get used to this.
I'm dizzy.
And so then I said, now it wouldn't make any sense at all, logically, if I was allowed to disagree with you, but I could not act upon that disagreement.
That's an illusory right.
It's like our right to money, right?
Like if, I don't know, I had some daughter in the Middle Ages, and I said, you are free to marry whoever you want, but you have to marry the man I choose.
Okay, we understand that would be a logical contradiction, right?
That you can't be free to disagree with someone, but not be able to act upon that disagreement, right?
That's like having the right to a free press, but not the right to type anything, right?
I mean, it wouldn't make any sense.
And she said, yes, it wouldn't make any sense if you were allowed, if I said, it's okay for you to disagree with me, but you can't act on that disagreement.
Excellent.
I'm even more dizzy now.
Like, how can we be?
This should be three months down the road.
And I said, okay, so if you like the surge, you like your surge, no problem.
Then you should take out your checkbook, and you should write, I think he goes by Don as well back then, Donnie Rumsfeld, here's my money, because I'm so down with the surge, here's my cash, right?
Because you should be free to support the surge.
So, pay the money, if you like.
Clearly, since you have already agreed, That I am free not only to disagree with you, but to act tangibly on that disagreement, because there would be no right to disagreement otherwise.
I'm allowed to not write a check to Donnie for something I disagree with.
And there was a pause.
And you know, somebody's brain hangs in the balance, you know?
Like a pendulum, you know?
A big wet thing going back and forth, you know?
Reason!
Propaganda!
Reason!
Propaganda!
It's like one of those claw things where you're trying to get something out of the, you know?
Come on!
Fall here!
Fall here!
Actually, there.
There.
So, she finally said, well, yeah.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
If you're free to disagree with the surge, then you're free to not pay for it, right?
And shockingly, that was it.
Now, that doesn't teach her volunteerism, obviously.
It doesn't teach her the theory.
It doesn't teach her all of this lovely stuff that we sit and dream and reason about and think about and talk about and read about.
But what it does do is it puts her on the defensive.
And this is the core of the against me argument.
Right?
So the welfare state.
We'll do that one.
Then we'll do anything that you guys want to talk about.
Because I know it's really tough to get a room for libertarians to grab the mic.
But if you can, somehow, find it within yourself to want to speak.
We'll have some fun.
So the welfare state.
Okay, so someone says the welfare state's good, right?
So I say, well, I respect your decision.
You'd like the welfare state?
I respect it.
I would never dream of using violence to prevent you from acting upon your beliefs, your values, your virtues, what you consider to be moral, just, right, and good.
Never dream of it.
Gun is safely in its holster.
Will you accord me the same respect that I am according you?
Am I free to disagree with you without violence?
Am I free to not like the welfare state without you thinking I should be thrown in jail?
Am I free to disagree?
Because if we don't understand that in a free society there's a plurality of solutions, statism is this fantasy—well, it's not really a fantasy, let me—statism is the belief that there's one solution Sorry, honey.
That was enthusiastic, I feel that.
Statism is the belief that there's one solution, right?
So we either have to have a welfare state or we can't have a welfare state.
We either have to have social security or there's nothing.
It's binary.
Like economic planning in the old Soviet Union, right?
There's no plurality of solutions.
If people like the welfare state, send the checks.
If people don't like the welfare state, which I assume is most of us here, are we free To withhold our consent, our economic consent, from the welfare state.
The amazing thing, and I've done this so many times now, but the amazing thing about this, I hope you can get a sense of how it puts you on the offensive, and you don't have to look up anything.
You don't have to look up anything.
You don't have to become the master of time, space, dimensions, statistics, charts, fields.
You don't have to become the PhD in everything, which is our constant temptation.
Ooh, with a little more knowledge, I can change the world.
With some more numbers.
So the against me argument puts you in the offensive, because you're extending a courtesy to people, which says, you're free to believe what you believe.
I respect your right to believe what you believe, and I respect your right to act on it.
Will you accord me the same respect?
Now, this is a volatile argument to make.
Just so you know, right?
It's volatile.
Try this with family members.
Do you support the use of violence against me for disagreeing with you?
Because that's really what statism is.
Am I allowed to disagree with you about the war?
Am I allowed to disagree with you about the welfare state?
Am I allowed to disagree with you about Social Security?
Am I allowed to disagree with you about Homeland Security?
About the need for a passport?
Am I allowed to disagree with you without you advocating the use of force against me?
Now, a few people will openly say, oh no, force is good against you.
It will.
I mean, shockingly, it happens, right?
A few people will say, yeah, that's the deal.
You disagree with me about the welfare state?
Yeah, I support you getting gunned to your temple and thrown into a jail.
Now, you know, you can't wrestle with someone who's got a bazooka, right?
If you're not going to play by the rules, right?
I don't like to serve up a tennis ball to somebody with a shotgun.
No lasers, right?
If somebody is going to openly say to you, yes, I advocate the use of violence against you for disagreeing with me, there's no civilized debate or interaction that is possible at all.
I would never debate with somebody, and I've had that.
People will say that to me, in which case it's like, bye-bye.
Because I'm not going to pretend to debate with somebody who's got a gun.
I'm not going to pretend to debate with somebody whose final reasonable position is me being thrown in prison for disagreeing.
I'm not going to give that violent premise the appearance of a rational conversation.
That's the withdrawal of consent.
I am a big fan of objectivism.
So, this against me argument really comes down to when you hear a statist position, you don't have to talk the person out of the statist position.
That's a statist premise, that we have to talk statists out of their position.
Am I free to disagree with you?
Without you advocating the use of violence against me.
Because remember, I said earlier, violence, the more abstract violence is, the easier it is for people to live with it.
That's why you don't see pictures of bodies in the newspapers.
The more abstract it is, The easier it is for people to support it.
So we need to, this is the talcum powder on the invisible man, the invisible gun in the room.
Not, statism is coercion against legally disarmed citizens, which it is, but that's for most people who don't have the same relationship to Between concepts and reality, we have this weird, special pipeline.
You know, like, most people have a relationship between concepts and reality, like, lower intestine, you know, like, it just goes all the way around, takes forever.
We're like those ads for antacids, you know, this one tube and a... One tube and a stomach, that's all it is, right?
So, we get, concepts go straight through us.
This is a really bad metaphor.
I'm sorry, I just...
Sometimes when you wing it, it goes really well, and other times you're some immodium ad.
So I'm sorry about that.
This is why I'm walking around, you see.
But we have a very visceral and strong relationship, right, between concepts and practice, between theory and practice.
Most people don't.
So in order for them to understand that what they're advocating is the use of violence, you have to have the eyeball-to-eyeball.
Are you actually and honestly going to sit there and advocate the use of violence against me for disagreeing with you.
Against me!
Not some abstract citizenry, not some social class, not some contract from the gods, but against me.
Would you, are you advocating the use of force against me?
That makes people a little uncomfortable.
But, you know, frankly, haven't we spent enough time being a little uncomfortable that it's time to make other people feel a little uncomfortable?
It's tough for us to look like the reasonable ones, right?
It is.
Because we're so far outside what people accept as true and real and virtuous that, you know, we look a little like we should come with tinfoil, right?
I mean, we do, right?
But when you can say to somebody, I support your right to disagree with me, do you return to me the same mature, civilized respect for disagreement without violence?
We become the reasonable ones, the ones who are giving respect to a difference of opinion and validly and morally asking for the same respect in return.
And when we point out that ours is the pluralistic and peaceful solution to the problems of poverty, of education, of security for the aged and the infirm, that ours is the peaceful, pluralistic, positive, rational, empirically valid, moral, approach to solving these problems.
If we keep reminding people that violence is the very worst conceivable way to solve social problems, then we are the reasonable ones.
We are the ones who accept plurality of opinions within society.
We are the ones who will not pick up the gun unless there's a bullet arrowing its way right towards us, which, you know, has not happened on my show yet.
That's why I have my compound in Canada.
We are the reasonable ones.
We are the ones who will say to people, I respect your difference of opinion, will you respect mine?
We point out that they're holding a gun.
And in any debate, the first guy to pull out a gun, he might win in a way, okay?
But he loses the battle of ideas.
Anybody who says, well, we have to force people to be good, obviously doesn't believe in virtue, doesn't believe in rationality, doesn't believe in reasonableness, in which case, why debate?
But anybody who debates obviously understands that reason and evidence are the way to go.
And this argument, the against me argument, it's really scary to do.
At least it was for me.
Maybe you're all more courageous than me.
But it's really scary to do because it really It puts your relationship with whoever you're talking about.
Could be some guy on a plane, could be your brother.
Puts your relationship to a real test, right?
Because when you stay abstract, and you stay statistics, and you stay social contract, and you stay what Jefferson said, right?
Whatever, right?
The Fed is whatever.
I agree with all of those, right?
But when you put it down to eyeball to eyeball, are you saying that you advocate the use of force against me for disagreeing with you?
That is a hot moment in a relationship.
Right?
That is a scary moment in a relationship.
Because what if they say yes?
I mean, that is a challenge.
Now, of course, if they say yes, you can give them a little bit of time.
It could be the heat of the moment, and so on.
But this argument I have found to be, after 20 years of, as you can clearly see, shredding my hair against the wall of other people's indifference to statistics and abstract arguments, this I have found to be an incredibly powerful argument, and an incredible argument for, especially if you're debating with other people around.
Because other people will then see that you're the one who allows for plurality and peaceful solutions and the other person is the one using force.
That is an incredibly powerful moral position to be in because when people see the gun, they reject the gun.
So the entire point of the statist approach is to talk about everything but the reality of the situation, which is someone's getting a gun to their head for disagreeing.
Whether it's with the general opinion or the opinion of some politician or whoever.
Someone's getting a gun to the head.
Anybody sees that, statism collapses completely.
And it's our job, I believe, since life is short and we have a long way to go, to be as effective as humanly possible in pointing this gun in the room out over and over and over again.
Because when it's seen, you beat evil by getting people to see that it's evil, right?
And what is the government?
The government should come with a a trademark or a slogan, government, free evil.
That's what the government is, free evil.
And we want people to see that violence.
When they see that violence, they will reject that violence.
That doesn't mean that they'll, you know, all the way over to our position and so on, but at least they will get that violence is involved in the state of solution and violence is at the core of the state of solution.
And we are the ones who want a respectful and rational plurality of opinion, a free market of ideas to triumph in the solving of social problems, which are very large and very serious and which we need to address.
So that's it for the speech part.
So the next thing is, if you've had a chance... Question?
Oh, stretching?
Devil away!
Devil away!
Do you want a mic?
I didn't mention this, I just wanted to wait for the first volunteer.
At the end, we do a duet.
If you've never heard me sing, you might think that was a bad idea.
I've taken my stab at that a few times, too.
Is this an argument that you've had before that's kind of nutty-makin'?
It's related to an argument that I've had before.
Do you agree that the difference between a democracy and a republic is that in a democracy, people make decisions about government policy directly, and in a republic, we choose people to make those decisions for us?
Well, I mean, my first response is to say that the difference between a republic and a democracy is the illusory paperwork.
But...
Let me explain why I bring this up.
Yeah, sorry.
Forget my parents.
Assuming that you think that we live in a republic or some vague approximation of it, I understand the elections don't work quite the way they should and the press doesn't work quite the way it should, but assuming that we did for a moment, Somebody whom you choose to make those decisions might, within the scope that you think is proper, within government, make the decision in a direction differently than you personally would make it.
Sorry, let me just make sure that's a bit of a cheese grater for me.
Let me just make sure I get through that one.
So, if I elect Barack Obama because I like his policies, then... Now, let's imagine you elect Ron Paul because you like his policies.
Let's imagine that I elect Ron Paul because I agree with his policies, and then Ron Paul does something that I disagree with?
Is that... That's right.
Right.
It is entirely possible that the person whom you have chosen would make a decision that is different from the decision that you would have made if it were up to you.
When you say entirely possible, do you mean completely inevitable, or is that something that's a little different?
Even Ron Paul, right?
Because nobody agrees with everyone on everything.
That's why we need a free society, right?
Well, so just if you can get to the question, I don't want to give a response before.
Okay.
The thing that you are proposing, which is that you wish the freedom to act upon your beliefs, which is to say not to pay for those government policies that you disagree with.
Doesn't that make it rather impractical to have a republic in which the decisions on policies are not made individually but they're made by elected representatives?
Doesn't that become impractical if you actually wanted to run a government that way?
Yes.
Well, I mean-- The only way that what we call democracy could conceivably work in any free society is, and we do this all the time, right, if we have specific legal triggers where control over our estate or our decision-making passes to someone else.
We have a contract with someone to negotiate on our behalf, a real estate agent, a doctor, a lawyer, whoever it is, right?
And so if someone has such wonderful ideas, like Ron Paul, about how we should all live and what we should all do, then people can sign contracts saying, you know, Ron Paul's going to call me every morning, you know, and he's going to say, okay, 9 o'clock, that's what you're going to be doing, and then 10, whatever it is that people want to do, that's great, right?
And then they may be bound by that contract.
And then if Ron Paul suddenly says, you know, I want us to go and invade Cambodia, I say, well, let me check my contract here.
No, no, imperialism, not so good.
So I'm sorry, I'm not going to do that, right?
So democracy is a kind of social contract.
Clearly, I can't enter into a contract on your behalf, right?
I can't go buy a car and send you the bill, right?
Unless I'm in Congress.
So if people want a contract with experts and leaders, which we do all the time, I don't go and drill my own teeth, right?
But if they want to do that, that's great.
Then they can do that on an individual basis with a specific contract with a specific individual.
But if you like Ron Paul and I like Joe the plumber, for whatever reason, there was a Joe plumber here.
Wasn't there?
I saw that in the... Am I wrong about that?
Okay, not the same, no.
Then you can have that contract with that person, and I'm free to disagree with your contract with that person, or to have no contract, or to have a contract with someone else, if I want.
And so, I would never interfere.
If you wanted to follow Ron Paul's advice on how things should be done, then you would fund his foundation, you would obey what he says, and have a contract with him, but I would be free to disagree with that.
I would never use force to prevent you from Following a leader that you felt to be very powerful and helpful and important.
Similarly, of course, I would expect the same respect in return that you would never use force for me choosing another leader or no leader at all.
We do have a mic just because I know we're recording.
Are you going to host that like a boomerang?
Oh, sorry.
Gentleman at the back.
Let's pretend for a second that we're all the classic perception of libertarians, which of course means you're for drugs and guns.
Hang on, that's this side of the room.
It seems to me that both of those issues end up with a position where the other side feels the moral superiority of saying, "Yeah, I'm okay with the use of a gun because, after all, drugs harm kids, and it's okay to take away your gun because you're going to use it against me." So I don't see how that argument that you're saying, the against me argument, works in either of those cases.
Okay, moving on.
Sorry, that mic cut out a little.
Okay, so let's do this.
Okay, so can you be like the drug czar guy?
Okay, give me the acumen.
I'm happy.
Well, you just want to go ahead and you want to unleash this anarchy, and we're going to have kids using all kinds of horrible drugs and ruin their lives, and you're perfectly fine to go ahead and ruin your own life, but you're going to ruin the lives of others, and so therefore, yes, I would feel comfortable using force against you because you're a menace to society.
Right, what about the children?
Absolutely.
Okay, sorry, I can just see you're Afro, I can't actually see you.
I keep wanting to call you Hagrid.
I don't know why.
Don't worry.
I have my own share of names.
Kelsey Grammer.
That's okay, because I commented to Angela, I said when you started talking about the violence inherited in the system, I basically flashed on Monty Python.
What is it somebody said?
I didn't know Phil Collins was an anarchist.
That ties back to our duet that we're doing.
Okay, so the argument is that the legalization of drugs results in drugs being given to children and that's the initiation of force or poisoning of children and therefore it's okay to use violence against those who sell any drugs anywhere whatsoever, right?
That's an excellent, excellent point.
Let me just run that through my own little cheese grater here.
Talk amongst yourselves.
Because the old me, right, the me who just was a masochist with his forehead, would have gone to something like this, to say, well, but children drown in swimming pools, and therefore we should ban all swimming pools, and before drugs were illegal, they never went to kids, but now they go to kids because they're so profitable that they get free samples to get addicted, and I'd go down all that route, which leads to a whole big pile of nowhere, at least in my experience, because it requires people to have knowledge of history that they don't have, right?
I would say that people who poison children are initiating the use of force against children, because children are helpless and relatively, and they don't have the long-term reasoning skills to consequences of blah blah blah, right?
This is my form of parenting.
So yes, people who give drugs to children, which harm those children, are responsible for that violence, right?
But you can't use force against everyone because some people do bad things.
Right?
That is a collective guilt approach.
Right?
That's like saying, well, some Mexicans steal, so let's round them up and throw them all in jail.
Right?
I mean, obviously that would be unjust.
And people would say, well, yeah, that would be unjust.
Right?
So because, let's say, some crazy nutty people will give drugs to kids and so on, then that's like saying, let's shut down Halloween because a few nutjobs put razor blades in candy bars.
Right?
I mean, you can't do the collective guilt thing.
And so I would not support that.
And that's not specific to the against-me argument, because the against-me argument is really for more general social policies, but I would definitely ask if that person believed in collective guilt, or whether individuals should be punished for individual behaviors, or whether there's this original sin that somehow spreads like a squid ink in the social water.
And I think that the person would probably say, well, no, you can't punish people collectively for the actions of specific individuals, and then you're back to, well, a guy smoking pot in his own basement is clearly not poisoning children, right?
And therefore, using force against him would be illegitimate.
Does that...
Okay, let's do that, right?
Okay, so then they would say, well, you see the moral imperative.
We'll get back to the against me argument if that initial thrust doesn't work, which is great.
Then I would say, okay, well, you believe that everyone who takes some kind of illicit substance should be thrown in jail, should have a force used against them, should be punished violently, thrown in jail where they'll be beaten and all sorts of godforsaken things will happen to them, right?
They'll get big tattoos, they'll try and break out.
And then I would say, well, I disagree with you.
And then I would say, am I allowed to disagree with you?
You would obviously not sell, this is devil's advocate, you would not sell drugs to anyone.
You wouldn't have them, you wouldn't write.
Now, is someone, anyone, maybe you wouldn't say you, because you look like some creepy drug dealer, right?
But, not you.
You still look like the friendly giant, but I'm talking about Drug dealer.
They say, but is someone allowed to disagree with you if they're into recreational drugs or this or that or the other?
Are they allowed to, you know, whatever, without you advocating the use of force against them?
Now, if this person says, yes, anybody who touches weed should be, you know, thrown in jail and violence and force, then it's not a debate.
Right?
It's not a debate, because this person's already got the gun out and will point it at anyone that disagrees with them.
And then I would withdraw from that debate because I would say, well, look, you've already got the gun out.
You're already willing to point it at anyone who disagrees with you.
So I'm not going to pretend that we're debating here.
Now, if the person is interested in reason and evidence, then you can... I'm not saying this is the only argument, right?
I'm saying this is what my first draw is.
It doesn't mean that I don't have, you know, shivs in my shoes and stuff like that, right?
But so does that... I know that's not a perfect, perfect answer, but...
Oh, absolutely, yeah.
I'm not saying this is the only thing.
Like, throw out every book you've ever read and just use against me, against me, against me, against me.
Oh, that wouldn't be bad.
But I mean, I think it's a first place to start.
But yeah, it's not the answer to everything for sure.
But I would really, you know, for the really, really big, big issue things, it's where I would start.
Oh, sorry.
What I'm trying to do is find the person furthest away from the mic handler.
I thought you were going to do, like, somersaults over the audience.
I wonder if, you know, you come to that point where they say, yeah, they should use violence.
Can you zero it in onto them and say, would you be the person to kill the pot smoker?
Would you pull the gun out?
Yeah, that's a fantastic point.
I'll sit there.
You finish up here now.
That's a completely fantastic point.
I mean, I'm British, right?
So for me, social confrontations, I'd rather rip my own toes off, you know?
If you're comfortable with that, that's a very powerful argument to make.
It really is like, would you be willing?
I think all of us, if we saw someone being horrendously assaulted, would do a lot to stop that and would sleep well that night.
If we employed some sort of violence, some old lady getting beaten up or whatever, we would deploy some level of coercion if we were comfortable and able to do that.
And we wouldn't sit there racked with guilt about, oh my God, I did something that was violent.
We would recognize that as third-party self-defense based on universal ethics is valid.
So I think that if we were in a violent situation, we'd be able to say, yes, I would.
I wouldn't want to be in that situation.
I'd rather it didn't happen, but if it did, this is what I would do.
And I think that that's an excellent, excellent point.
If you can do it, I mean, you may be a braver soul than me, in which case more power to you.
I have a tough time with that one.
But it is that question, would you pull the trigger?
Because really, it does come down to that.
If you support the use of violence, I support self-defense, therefore I would be willing to pull the trigger if I were ever unfortunate enough to be in such a position.
So I would pull the trigger and I would regret the situation, but I would not lose sleep.
And so that is, if you support the use of violence, would you be willing to pull the trigger?
I think that is a very, very powerful argument.
Now I don't have a speech for next year.
Now I gotta come up with something new!
Thanks, man.
Okay, who's... Sorry, I haven't been keeping track of who's next, so... Why don't you just hand me some people and we'll rub some brains?
All right.
You're in a crowd, obviously, with people who go through these sorts of things all the time, so you're probably getting very good advocates for the devil here.
But while we're at it, let's do land property, all right?
Land property?
Land property.
Let's do it.
All right.
So I think the government should own all property and land.
I think that all property and land needs to be owned by the government and preserved for the use of all people, or at least in some sort of fashion that results in equality Across the land.
Right.
I don't agree.
And I fully respect your belief in this socialization of dirt.
I'm down with that.
You want to nationalize the soil?
That's fine.
That's your prerogative to believe that.
I don't particularly agree with that at all.
In fact, I would violently disagree with that, though without using any violence.
So, and I respect your right to have that opinion and to advocate that position.
Would you, I mean, we assume that this is not a completely closed case, that this is a debatable issue.
Sure.
Right?
And so if we assume that it's a debatable issue, I assume that I have the right to disagree with you and to act on that disagreement, that you would never advocate the use of violence against me for disagreeing with you.
Absolutely.
I do.
Fantastic.
Then we will leave it open to debate and let the free market of ideas carry us forward.
So you disagree with the notion that the government should operate land and ensure some form of equality, right?
Sorry, if you're interested in equality, I don't see how a minority of people controlling all the land results in equality of rights.
If you'd like to step me through that sometime, that's fine.
If you have a piece of land, then, that you claim ownership over, would you advocate violence against me if my belief is that I can operate that piece of land as well?
Yes.
I mean, I believe that you can't have a right without the right to exercise it.
That's sort of a theoretical pointless thing.
So if I have property rights and you invade my property and harm it, then yes, I believe I have the right.
Now, of course, I understand where you're going with this, right?
Which is that if your position is right, then you can initiate the use of force against me.
Right?
Because if everyone owns the land by the government, and then I want my little corner here, right?
And then the government can initiate the use of force against me because the government owns everything and I'm trespassing because I'm alive, right?
Right.
In which case, you would be advocating the use of force against me for living.
But, I mean, aren't we sort of equally advocating the use of force against one another?
You're saying that you own land, and if my belief... So I can almost ask you, would you advocate the use of force against me for my belief that that piece of land belongs to everyone?
And if you say no... Yes, I absolutely would.
I absolutely would, and I would pull the trigger.
- I'm afraid that this debate is always-- - Security doesn't have a problem.
Row four.
I'd say the guy with the beer, but that doesn't narrow it down too much.
That is an excellent, excellent point, and I knew this crowd was going to be exciting.
But there is a difference, in my opinion, which is that you are granting a select group of individuals a monopoly right over everything.
Whereas somebody who has homesteaded or otherwise gained control of a piece of property is an individual who has to do something in order to get that property, right?
You know, to sort of say, I want Wyoming.
Well, you never say that anyway, but California, maybe, or someplace that you'd want to be, right?
Sorry, anybody here from Wyoming?
Who's armed?
I want to know if anyone's here from Miami who's armed.
Just Boston and T-Pot.
Just Boston and T-Pot.
Quite a few.
OK.
I knew it.
You know, when I said I wanted that red room, I also wanted it bulletproof.
That was important for me.
But yeah, so I would say that if you're going to give people a small monopoly over an entire country and the right to initiate force against everyone who's not them, right?
Then that is not a logically consistent position, right?
And so I would pull out my universally preferable behavior argument and say, what is different about these people that they get the right to own everything and nobody else gets the right to own anything without their permission?
So I would do that kind of backup.
Because yes, I mean, that's an excellent point and the against me argument Flips, right?
And which you just, in a very evil way, completely did to me there, right?
Because it flips, right?
You also have to say, yeah, I would support the use of force against you if you invaded my home and, you know, wanted to do nasty things to my cat with a fork or something, then absolutely, I would use that, right?
Sorry.
Second bad metaphor of the day.
If I can keep it down to two, it's a massively successful speech.
That's all I'm saying.
Sorry, we can talk more about, you know, you should really call in.
Let's do a show about this.
Call FDR, because we should do this in more depth, because I can't do all of property rights and the issue of force in this forum, because it's really tough.
But no, call in, we do this.
I'd like to do more of that, because that's an excellent, excellent point.
I support the roads.
Wow, you must be tired.
That's my second Monty Python reference, right?
Now appearing as a central tunnel support in the New Victoria line.
Okay, gravel.
You support the roads, so tell me more about that.
Well, I'm willing to pay for them.
How are you going to get around if you don't own them and support them?
Okay, so you believe that the roads should be run by the state.
Well, yes, they are run by the state.
Okay, but you believe they should be, not only that they are.
Oh yeah, I believe they should be.
So, you believe that the roads should be run by the state, and it is your preference to act on that belief, right?
Right.
Obviously, because if you have a belief you can't act on it, it's sort of pointless, right?
So, if you believe that the state should run the roads, I fully support that belief of yours.
I would never dream of using force to prevent you from acting upon your belief that the state should run the roads.
Right.
Would you extend to me the same courtesy, if I have a different opinion, that I am allowed to disagree with you, act upon that disagreement without the threat of violence?
Well, how are you going to get out of your house?
No, no, no, no.
We're not talking the how, right?
We're talking the virtue, right?
We're not talking the practicality of, well, how would Rhodes exist without, right?
And I have a, just by the by, I have an example in the book Practical Anarchy, right?
Sorry, I'll come right back to it.
It just sort of struck me and I can't hold a straight thought to save my life.
And I said, well, imagine if we said Rhodes had to be enclosed, all of them, and they had to be air-conditioned.
And they had to be landscaped.
And they had to have stores on either side, right?
Roads, ways of getting around.
We would say this kind of happened, right?
But we have malls, right?
Ways of getting around that are enclosed and air-conditioned.
But anyway, so I would say that if you want to support the roads, if you feel that the state is the best, most productive way to support the roads, I would never dream of using force to prevent you from doing that.
I would hope that since we're having a civilized discussion, that I am free to disagree with you without you advocating the use of force against me.
And if I want to find an alternative way or support a different way, of having road construction achieved, that you would respect my right to work to achieve that without threatening me with violence?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
But what about in today's world where the government owns all roads, how are you going to get out of your driveway?
You guys are like some sort of team.
Passing notes back and forth.
I'm done with him, you take over.
He looks tired.
Go for it.
Well, but see, but people will always try to drag us down to the practical consequences of what we advocate.
And this is nothing new, right?
So I would say something like this.
Let's say that you and I were debating slavery in 1840 or something, right?
And I said, you know, slavery is a moral abomination.
It's evil and blah, blah, blah, right?
And you said, well, but if we get rid of slavery, How will they get jobs?
What will they do?
You know, I got 500 slaves on my plantation.
You tell me, what jobs will they have after we get rid of slavery?
Clearly, nobody knows.
Right?
And it's completely immaterial.
Right?
So how things happen when a gun isn't being used doesn't really matter.
Right?
If we had a system of forced marriage, and I said, you know, we really shouldn't, that's just institutionalized rape.
We shouldn't really have a system of forced marriage.
and people said, "Well, how would my sister get married then?" I'm sorry she looks like a troll, but it doesn't mean that everyone should...
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter what happens when we stop using violence.
The important thing is that we stop using violence to solve problems.
There's an old joke, you may have heard it before, down the rounds, of free market thinkers, where there are two Russian women in a line-up, one of these endless Stalin line-ups to buy bread, And one woman turns to the other and says, oh, I spent half my life lining up to buy bread.
And the other woman turns and says, yeah, but you know what?
In the capitalist countries, the government doesn't even distribute the bread.
But that's the answer, right?
Well, how would we get bread if Stalin doesn't give it to us?
Yeah, I totally buy your argument.
I mean, but I guess the only reason I'm bringing this up is because it's, people have argued that to me.
Well, you know, roads exist.
How, you know, if you don't support... Don't go there, yeah.
Don't, I mean, sorry to be annoying, but as always, don't go into the practical consequences.
Now, I say this having written a book with some practical consequences, but in debates, you have to get the ethical agreement.
Without that, it just becomes an argument about the what, rather than the why.
Nietzsche said, give a man a why, he can bear almost any how.
If we have the moral certainty of pacifism and virtue as the solution to social problems, that is a passionate and powerful message that works.
How we build roads in the absence of a state will put most people to sleep, and tends to be a red herring, which just gets you bogged down in, well, you know, there were tunnels in 1830, and the roads worked, and then the government took them over, and that's, you know, it's an interesting fable, and it's true, but it doesn't really move people in the way that virtue and ethics does.
Of course, if you wanted to be really rude to the person, you'd say, well, if you're not creative enough to figure out how millions of people with money could get roads, then I'm not going to explain it to you.
When I said go on the offensive, this is an example of what I didn't mean.
I'm running out of vowels.
No, consonants.
You know, you can't make a mistake in a libertarian audience.
Oh, no, no, consonants.
You're wrong!
What is it?
There's another joke that I just love.
It was a cartoon, and a guy's on his computer, and we've all been there, right?
A guy's on his computer, and he looks more tired than me with a new baby, right?
And his wife comes in and says, Honey, my God, it's three o'clock in the morning.
Come to bed.
And he's like, I can't.
Somebody's still wrong on the internet.
I've got the time.
I must fix it.
Yeah, we've all been there, right?
Don't bother, he's a troll.
So, yes, I am pointing a gun at you during this debate.
Wait, wait, sorry, I'm in New Hampshire, so we're still talking theoretically, right?
Okay.
It's kind of a metaphysical thing.
So, you know, and I've won the debate because I'm going to point the gun at anybody who comes to me.
Right.
And so what are you going to do about it now?
Because I don't care about you and your friends who decide not to point guns.
I point guns.
Well, no, I mean, that happens, right?
I mean, you get people who have this insane consistency, right?
Who aren't libertarians.
They have this insane consistency where you put them to that point where there's a gun at your head and they're like, rather than admit there might be something wrong with my argument, right?
I'm just going to hang in there and, you know, go all the way to the shotgun place, right?
In which case, I think that, you know, one of the most powerful tools in the human canon, so to speak, is moral condemnation, right?
And I would absolutely let rip with what you're talking about is completely evil.
What you're advocating is the root of the greatest human evils in the world.
Right?
Be they institutionalized violence, wars, prisons, abuses of every kind.
Your willingness to use violence to get your way is complete stone evil.
And I'm not going to participate in that kind of debate.
Because it's not a debate.
You pull out a gun, you've lost.
We can be ferocious with our moral condemnation, right?
And again, that's explosive, right?
That's really tough for people to hear, right?
And, you know, I prefer to do it by phone because I'm all kinds of courageous.
Oh yeah?
You're mean!
Because I'm all about the courage, that's why I podcast, right?
I know that's not a perfect answer, but to me that would be the most powerful thing to do in that.
It really comes to the issue with, well, I hate to go with the extreme example, but Hitler putting people on camps.
You know, it's like he believes in the gun.
He believes in the gun.
The followers believe in the gun.
But my argument would be that if enough people had pointed out the gun, then it never comes to be, right?
If enough people had pointed out that Hitler was more than willing, which they knew from 1923, the Beer Hall Putsch, that he was willing to kill for his beliefs, and he'd written all about it in Mein Kampf, if people had been fully focused on the gun in the room, the gun in the room never comes to be.
You can't fight evil because the moment people see evil as evil, it vanishes.
It's like a bunch of roaches.
You flip the light on, you know they all spread.
I grew up in government housing.
So you just keep pointing out the moral condemnation and people, you know, you won't change the lunatic who's willing to use guns, but you will change, I think, or at least give something to think about the people who are around in that situation, whether it's a message board or some sort of public place or some debate you're having at a dinner table, at least you will be in the morally superior position of preferring pacifism and the person wants the gun.
Well, I wouldn't have someone like that in my orbit.
I mean, you know, we kind of say we want to get rid of the state, but I'm real happy with this gun tote and nut job in my life, right?
Sorry, go ahead.
Alright, so some things in society are just so horrible.
And, you know, issue... put any issue here.
And the issue is... I like that.
It's very discriminatory.
Anything.
Anything.
Pokemon.
Segregation.
Segregation is just... it was so terrible.
And there was no way to end it.
And the government was able to end it.
And they did end it.
And nothing else was working and you know I know you're big on property rights and stuff but I mean it's okay like we violated some property rights in that but I mean this was something that was so evil and now all these people in society are more free because they can eat where they want, they can get a job where they want, they can go to school where they want and
I'm just trying to be the reasonable one here and you're saying that you're willing to live in a society where people can't Do what they want.
They can't go where they want.
They've got to check a sign on the door and see if they're allowed to enter because of their skin color.
Right, right.
No, and that's an excellent point.
And there is, of course, that question that to right historical bigotries or injustice in societies, are we justified in appointing people to violate particular rights from people we would generally disagree with, like horrendous racists or whatever?
Sorry?
Point of order!
order it.
Go on.
Right.
That's what I was going to say.
Yeah.
The first thing, I mean, if somebody, yeah, I mean, I think the important thing is that, uh, you would, I would start as your excellent point, the facts of the matter, right?
So, So in Montgomery, in the 50s, the bus companies did not want the blacks to sit at the back of the bus.
They did not.
In fact, they fought to not have that be the law.
Why?
Poor people take the bus.
I was a student until I was way too old to talk about, right?
So poorer people take the bus, and blacks at that time were poorer than whites, and so blacks were the primary customers of the bus companies who did not want to fend and waste half the bus for like three white people and like 20 black people in the back, right?
So the bus companies did not want segregation.
The companies, the restaurants that catered to the blacks in the South did not want segregation because it offended their core customers and whites didn't go to Harlem anyway, right?
So what I would first of all, I would attack the premise that we need to violate property rights in order to end segregation because I would say that the historical evidence is overwhelming that segregation resulted from a prior Violation of property rights.
And what the government needs to stop doing is to violate property rights.
Let the free market decide in which case segregation would end.
It's like slavery.
Brazil got rid of slavery.
How?
Government stopped catching slaves.
That's all they did.
They didn't have any laws.
They didn't have any civil war.
They just stopped catching slaves.
Because if you've got to catch your own slaves, it doesn't work so well.
Have you ever had cats?
No, but if you have to... That's why it's free evil, right?
Because you can offload the costs of segregation.
If you're a bigot, you can offload the costs of segregation, which is considerable, to the state.
So it's a violation of property rights in taxation.
It's a violation of property rights in use of your own property that results in segregation.
And I think we could make a very strong argument, and that's a big topic for another day, that the use of the political process to address prior imbalances, whether it's by the Japanese or by the Irish or by the blacks, no work.
So that would be my, sorry, go ahead.
That's usually the route I go.
And as a follow-up, I say, socially, stores and country clubs go at a great length to sort of advertise and indicate what their clientele is.
Like clothing stores that are hip and popular and young crank up the music and play with the lighting to make it clear to people as they're coming out of their intended age that they're trying to market to that, you know, this is not the intended use anymore.
And I'm not saying I suggest that for race issues.
Right here.
I'm not saying people already do that freely.
They say, hey, this is what our product's for.
This is who we advertise to.
And because you want that, because that's who we advertise to, we try and discourage other people from doing that.
Right.
No, it's just like discos look really bad on bold heads, like the lights.
So they're really so discriminatory.
Where's the mic guy?
Right here.
I'm just standing up because I want a free copy of your book, actually.
I'm a fan of the videos you've done I really appreciate how you are able to deconstruct a lot of statist arguments.
And so if I have to play devil's advocate to raise this issue, please bear with me, because this is going to be a bit of a challenge, given my perspective.
But here goes.
Go.
I believe in the necessity of collective self-defense in the current military, as it is in the United States.
And therefore, we need a military capable of an aggressive posture to serve as a deterrent, as well as nuclear weapons.
Right.
Okay, I would give a one-two.
And again, I know you're military, so I'm going to do it from up here.
Just so you don't get to see me crying.
I'm one of the few people not armed in the room at the moment.
Sorry.
No, I think you're just lethal in general, right?
So, like, you're registered.
Well, I mean, the first thing, there's a logical problem, right?
And we all, I think, understand the logical problem of collective self-defense, right?
Because they say, well, we need an army, and we need the police, and we need the judiciary, and so on.
Because, you see, people should have their property and their personhood protected.
And how do we fund that?
By violating people's persons and property.
Right.
That is just one of those complete short circuit, you know, like, reboot, can't figure it out stuff.
So I would start with that.
Like, if you want to protect property, how do you do that by giving people the right to universally violate property at will?
I mean, it just doesn't work, right?
It's like, you know, you don't cure a headache with a guillotine.
And the second thing that I would say is that... Unless you work for the government.
Unless you work for the government.
Right.
And the second thing that I would say is that you believe in these things.
You believe that your property should be protected by ceding rights to your property to other people, which we all do with contracts, right?
When we work for someone, we cede our time to them and our productivity to them.
And so if you want to sign up with some agency and say, you people can take whatever you want from me, whenever you want, whenever you think that you want to, whenever you find it necessary, Because it's so important to protect my property, so I'm going to cede you the right to steal whatever you want from me.
If you want to sign that contract, I think that's great.
Myself, I would rather invest in an alarm system, a moat with alligators and flaming sharks and stuff.
I would rather get, I would rather have, you know, stupid things that should have been done years and years ago, right?
Like your television should be voice activated.
So if somebody steals your TV, they can't use it.
I mean, how tough is that?
I mean, it's ridiculous, but of course, because the cops are involved, there's no incentive for them to do this kind of preventative stuff, right?
Your bicycle should run off your BO, right?
I mean, whatever, right?
I mean, it would certainly work with me, let me tell you.
I have dripping power.
But no, whatever it is, right?
Like, we have thumbprints for computers that if you steal them and you, you know, don't steal the thumb too, right?
Then, okay, maybe that's not the retina, only the eyeball, whatever, right?
But there's ways of protecting property that don't involve just giving a bunch of people the right to take your property at will.
If you want to do that, you know, more power to you, I would never prevent you from doing that through force if you want to sign a contract with some group to whatever.
I assume that you would allow me the respect of pursuing other ways of protecting my property than having your will imposed upon me.
Well, part of my concern is that the way that people go about justifying this argument leads to the kind of disastrous consequences that we have in our foreign policy today that put the rest of us voluntarily not engaging in that at greater risk.
We still have people in this country who don't pay taxes, don't join the military, and yet suffer the consequences of people, in a sense, or would be suffering, even if we had a voluntary system, based on the mentality of most Americans who support the corrupt system that we live under.
And you know, that's an interesting point, just to prevent, because it looks like some really smart people have answers, so I'll just keep talking.
But, you know, it's interesting because in the past, and I would say before 2000, 2001, and certainly since the Iraq War.
In the past, people used to say, well, but we'd all get the benefit of the shield without paying for it.
We'd all get the benefit of the shield, of the nuclear shield, of the military shield, and then the people who wouldn't pay for it, and that's really bad.
But what you're saying, I think, what more people are beginning to understand, which is that we now have the negative of what's called the shield.
It's not that we're getting some benefit without paying for it.
It's that we're being blamed for stuff we don't even support.
And that is a very different perspective than used to be around in the past, and I think that's only to help us.
so right guy hello you are the wind I thought I was going to be dodging alright so I have a quick comment sorry I have a quick comment before a question to the guy who supports the roads Mr. Atlas Michelin man right when people bring that stuff up with me when I'm saying that I don't think that government should run the roads or anything else they'll say okay well in your world how would it work
And instead of getting into any of that at all, what I say is I would be a hypocrite if I were to start saying how I think this stuff should or could be run, because the whole idea behind what I think is that there's no one man who can actually run the world.
That's an excellent point.
It's much more effective.
It's hypocritical to even get into that.
That's a point that can be made and it's pretty well accepted.
Just so people understand, because we talked about this the other night, if one person could figure out how everything would work in a free society, it would actually be a great argument for a dictatorship.
It's the same thing with economic planning.
If one person could figure out what everybody wanted from every conceivable good now and in the future, That person should run the economy, right?
But it's completely impossible for any one person to come up with even a tenth of a percentage point of all the solutions that millions of creative, intelligent, involved, and engaged people, acting in their own self-interest, could come up with.
So it's sort of like if everybody asks you to solve all the problems of a free society, say, if I could, I should run everything.
But I can't, and that's why we can't have a government.
I can't, and neither can anybody in the government.
But we just know that violence is still not the way to go.
Sorry, go ahead.
Alright, and this is something that struck me in the first example that you used with regard to the Iraq war, and he touched on it pretty well, but it was basically that you're saying that the against me argument is you are, within my world, perfectly free to send money to goons who want to go over and kill brown people, and I would never even dream of initiating force against you, and would you extend me the same courtesy?
However, I sort of doubt that you or anyone else in this room thinks that it's morally all right for people to be going over and shooting brown people with a gun and that we would actually be within our rights under the moral structure that we adhere to to defend those people or help them in their defense.
It seems sort of disingenuous.
Yeah, this is where I get really sleazy, so this is important.
This is a transition point.
You're absolutely right.
There is a reality that, of course, if somebody says, I support the surge, as I said at the beginning, you should send your money to Donald Rumsfeld and I would never dream of it.
But, of course, if you're paying someone to put out a hit on Iraqis, that's not a moral thing.
We understand that you're a corrupt participant in the evil of the initiation of force.
Of course, the reality is, and we all know this based on basic economics, that if people did have to send checks for the surge, there would be no surge.
We all understand that it's easy to play fast, loose, and tough with other people's money and guns.
It's like, I give this example in Practical Anarchy about the drug war, which I think is, correct me if I'm wrong, not that I have to tell you to do that because you're libertarians, but it's about $20 billion a year that's being spent on the drug war.
Is that right?
Is it more?
What have we got, 40?
Do I hear a 40, 50, 50, 50?
You're going 50. 72 billion.
Okay, we're going to say 100 because my math sucks.
So let's say it's $100 billion.
Yeah, we don't know what's going on over there, right? - Yeah.
But of course, yeah, we all understand that if it's $100 billion, right, let's say half the Americans don't care that much about the drug war, right?
And so if you all have to write a check for your support of the drug war, immediately half the people are dropping out, right?
So $100 billion is going to the other half of the people, right?
That's their bill, right?
Now, how many of those are going to drop out?
when they see the bill for, what would it be, $50,000 per household or something like that?
Some horrendous of some, right?
They say, oh, my God, $50,000, suddenly I don't care about pot that much, right?
So more and more people drop out until the last guy gets stuck with an absolutely monstrous bill and somehow finds it within his heart to be tolerant, right?
So we know it is a bit of a sleazy, tricky argument, which I don't think is bad.
It's not like statists are always up front, right?
But when we talk about, you know, fund it yourself, We know that it's not going to happen if people fund it themselves.
What will happen is we will get roads.
We will have what I call dispute resolution organizations.
We will have productive and positive ways of resolving disputes.
We won't have an empire, because empire is catastrophic for the economy as a whole.
Of course, as we know, it only profits a small class.
So it's a bit of a sleazy argument to say, I fully support your right to pay for something that would never exist unless you could force me to pay for it too.
So it's a bit of a bait and switch.
So it works logically and morally, but it's not quite as upfront as it could be.
I've got a question here.
Well, if you could just address the both parts because I would like to have Well, let me just go ahead.
Stop again.
All right.
I think that guns are just dangerous and they they need to be taken off the streets, you know, they're killing children and This person says he wants to advocate the use of force to have those guns taken off the streets.
And this person says that force should not be used to take them off the streets.
How do you address both of those angles?
So the argument is guns are dangerous.
Guns magically pop off the shelf and kill children because that's just what they do.
They're possessed or something.
And someone is saying we should use force guns to oppose guns.
We should use cancer to kill cancer, okay.
We should use guns to get rid of guns.
And another person is saying we shouldn't use guns to get rid of guns.
Yes.
Okay.
Well, I would say that obviously we have to start with basic reality, right?
Guns don't kill people, right?
People kill people and so on, right?
So the problem is not guns.
The problem is people shooting guns.
And it's a similar argument that our friend Hagrid had at the back there, right?
Which is the collective guilt thing there, right?
Where he said that the elves and the... No, wait, what was it?
So obviously the people who use guns illegitimately or in an evil or corrupt manner should have sanctions against them and the people who don't, right?
But it's not the guns that are the problem, it's the people who use them to commit crimes and so on.
It's the magic bullets.
That's right.
So I would say we wouldn't want to classify moral sanctions against people who are responsibly using guns for self-protection or sports or hunting or whatever, right?
So that would be my distinction.
No collective guilt, right?
So the other thing that I would say is that if you want to live in a community that has No guns, then you should be perfectly free to live in a community that has no guns.
And what that means is some developer will buy up a whole bunch of land and will sell you your house on the condition that you promise not to put guns in there.
This happens, right?
I mean, when my wife and I bought her house, they said, you can't put your FDR logo on the garage.
Shocking.
So I put it on the roof.
Because the mere space station guys, we get them, we get everyone.
So you would have a conditional sale of the property that says, you can buy a house in this neighborhood, but you just can't have guns in it, right?
And if people wanted to do that, nobody would, right?
Everybody kind of wants the umbrella protection of guns around, but a lot of people don't want guns in their actual house, right?
This is an argument from Harry Brown, right?
If you don't have a gun in your house, but the criminals don't know who has guns, you get that umbrella protection, because they don't know, right?
But if you wanted to live in a gun-free neighborhood, you would make that choice to live in a place, or convince all your neighbors to get rid of their guns, or have them sign a contract, then you would be perfectly free to do that.
And I would never dream of using violence against you if you wanted to live in a gun-free neighborhood.
But if you wanted to use guns against people who were peacefully possessing guns, that is the initiation of force.
Yeah, that's a bad idea.
I would hope that you would extend the same respect to other people who want to have that tool in their life as I would extend to you who don't.
Would that be?
Yeah, I'm going to tell them that's a bad idea.
I give the example of the Brady people who are there that went off in a cabaret time.
This is a gun-proof house.
You were robbed.
Oh, no kidding.
So basically, if I don't want to have guns, I should move someplace where guns are the gun-free zone.
Well, if you don't want to have guns, nobody should force you to buy guns, right?
I mean, that's the basic thing, right?
And then second, if you want to live in a neighborhood without guns, then go to it, right?
Then if there's enough market demand, then developers who always want to sell houses will sell, you know, magical gun-free houses, right?
Maybe with landmines, I don't know, right?
But they're magical gun-free neighborhoods, and then you would go and move there, and you should be perfectly free to do that, but you can't force other people who merely have chainsaws, guns, power tools of every kind, nail guns, anything you could use to kill people.
You can't cast that wide a net and shut down Home Depot, right?
Thank you.
Your responsible use of chairs, that's right.
I mean, hell, my podcast could be a problem.
They suck the oxygen out of a room.
I just have a question about, let's see if I can get my thoughts together.
People tend to be pragmatists.
The argument that you're using on morality, someone that's open to reason, they're going to make that aha connection.
But someone that stands to benefit from that force, it's going to be like two magnets of the same pole.
Yeah, the opposing poles, right?
So how do you show them how they can personally benefit from this moral approach to eliminate that resistance, but do it in a way that you don't have to look up all those thousands of facts and figures?
How do you present this to a bureaucrat?
Well, you know, that's an excellent question.
I mean, the against-me argument is, again, pretty volatile.
It's either going to make you a great friend or a great enemy.
There's not going to be a lot in the middle, right?
But I think that's okay, right?
Time is short and we want to do as much as possible.
I don't know.
Do we have... You're not even going to raise your hand.
Do we have any bureaucrats in the room?
Anyone who works for... No?
Okay.
Well, we might.
We don't know.
They're incognito.
But the fascinating thing...
Yeah, I don't know if you guys talk to a lot of bureaucrats.
I do get some who call into the show and I'll talk with them.
And it is amazing.
I'm not going to say I have my finger on a huge pulse, but I definitely do get a lot of people who interact with me through email, YouTube and all that kind of stuff.
They hate the government.
Bureaucrats!
Teachers!
Oh my god, get a teacher started on how much fun it is to be a teacher these days.
And this is very different from when I started.
Ah, way back in the Mesozoic era, right?
But this is very different.
When I first started, bureaucrats loved working for the government.
Ah, you know, you don't have to work that hard, you get great benefits, you get six weeks off in the summer, and so I was slaving away as a waiter.
But it's really changed.
Statism is fantastic in the beginning.
It's like heroin.
You get all of these people trained in the private sector.
Like when you first socialized medicine in Canada, you had all these people who'd grown up in the free market.
All these doctors who suddenly got socialized with all of their amazing free market habits.
They already were hard workers.
They really cared about their patients.
They really fought to get the best possible care despite the bureaucracy.
So you get socialized medicine with all these free market trained doctors.
It's fantastic!
It's like why NASA did something for the first 10 years and then nothing of any use afterwards.
But then what happens is you get a whole new generation of people coming in, the next generation, who had nothing to do with the free market.
And they suck!
Technically, they suck.
You find an old doctor, like some guy who's 900 years old and he remembers what it was like to care about patients.
You get some younger doctor, they get you in and out, here's some pills.
The same thing is true with bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy gets worse and worse, exponentially worse and worse as time moves forward, and I've actually found it quite easy to discuss how government sucks with people who work in the government, and I found it actually quite easy.
I mean, the toughest are the abstract intellectuals, because they just live in complete fantasy land, right?
They're just riding unicorns into the sunset, into the happy land of violence equals virtue.
Right?
I'd like them to ride unicorns, but not that way.
Third worst metaphor of the day.
I think we got three.
The sad thing is that actually would be a violation of the unicorn.
So, but, so, So I find that dealing with teachers, wouldn't teachers love to have an environment where they didn't have 12,000 bureaucrats and an indifferent and hostile union and alienated single parent kids who didn't care?
They hate public schools, at least the teachers that I've talked to.
They hate the system.
Now, that doesn't mean that they'll immediately go, yay, you know, let's go to the free market.
But you are definitely starting with some real traction that people within the government, especially those who are not, you know, those at the top, you know, they're just a bunch of jackals and predators.
But the people who are the peons in the government, they really don't like the environment that they're in, at least the ones that I've talked to.
And if you talk to them about, you know, the reason you got into teaching or the reason you got into whatever it is you're doing in the government was to actually teach kids or to whatever, right?
And helping them to understand how the free market could give them back the idealism and the achievements that got them into that field in the first place can be a really powerful incentive for them.
Of course, you know, some 55-year-old teacher two years from retirement who's just hanging around, of course they know they're going to lose out in the free market system, but, you know, you play, you lose, right?
Does that help?
I would take that approach rather than the gun thing which is so volatile.
I would try and help them to understand how a free market system could get them back in love with their career rather than just fighting all of this sludge that's in the government at the moment.
You got her right here.
I really think there should be a social services backed by the police force for all these bad parents out there, For instance, there's a family up the street from me that homeschools, has bread like bunnies, and has turned their household into a John Waters style porno child ring involving their children.
Of course, I have no money to pay for this, but my ideals are so lofty that all the other people with money should, of course, pay for this.
And sadly, that's all we have time for today.
Thank you for coming.
Thank you for coming out.
Off I go with my unicorn.
Okay, so I'm just trying to... You had like a multi-dimensional interstellar problem there, and I just want to make sure that I... So, John Waters was doing kiddie porn in some house up the street.
I think I got some of that.
So basically you're talking about really, really bad or abusive parenting that's going on in your neighborhood.
Is that right?
And we should have social agencies that can use force to repair these parenting problems.
Is that right?
For the children.
Well, I mean, it's one of the reasons why I certainly do appreciate the invitation here.
I know I'm a little controversial, and it's not actually that easy to be controversial in the libertarian community, so I consider it quite an achievement.
The non-aggression principle applies to children.
In many ways, in my view, it applies the most to children than to anybody else.
You can leave a country you don't agree with.
You can't leave a family if you're a kid.
You can't hitchhike off.
If parents are abusing their children, I personally have no problem with people going in with force.
To extract the children, right?
We would extract hostages from terrorists, right?
And if parents are that nasty and abusive to their children, and I'm not talking, you know, like they yell at them or anything, right?
Oh, that's not great.
But if they really are just doing nasty, nasty things to their kids, yeah, I'm signing up.
I'm with you, right?
So I wouldn't have a problem.
With that I don't think that being a parent gives you the right to initiate force Against your children and again.
I'm not talking you know correction or whatever right, but I mean you know when they're really bad So I would I would be down for that now was that what you were talking about or was it something that was difficult?
Take away the mic sorry Oh Someone has to pay for it sure sure Well, I don't want to fob you off on an essay, but no, I do have an essay, and it's in the Practical Anarchy book.
I do have an essay, which is how a stateless society protects children, which is it actually protects children rather than what happens now, right?
What happens now is they go and embody tag the kids, right?
I mean, we all know these tragic stories where the parents have just complete nut jobs and the children get really harmed or even killed.
It's the dismal trail of child protection services for the past 12 years.
Nothing gets done.
The children don't get protected.
There's lots of ways in which a stateless society really can protect children.
This has to do with the fact that in a free society, what I call dispute resolution organizations, which is just my theory.
It's not an answer.
It's just a framework that could work.
Crime arises to a large degree from child abuse, right?
There's very, very few people who are raised in a happy, loving, secure environment who end up, you know, criminals, right?
And if they are, it's probably because they've got some ill schizophrenia, some brain disorder.
So, crime is very expensive for a society.
At the moment, the state doesn't have any incentive to really reduce crime, right?
Because crime serves two benefits for the state.
The first is that it scares the crap out of everyone, and so they run to the state, right?
Look, jackals!
Okay, I'm with you.
And the second is that it allows the governments to expand crime-fighting, whatever the security agencies that they have, police and so on.
Whereas in a free society, crime is really horrible and very expensive to dispute resolution organizations, to those who do protect your property and personhood.
So what I would do is if I ran one of these things and somebody wanted to sign up with me, I'd say, great.
I'm happy to have you sign up.
You have kids?
Great.
I'd be happy to extend the protection to your children, the insurance against theft and violence to your children.
But you've got to take a parenting class or two.
And, you know, we really have to make sure that your kids are growing up well.
Because if your kids grow up badly, and then they end up attacking all these other people, that costs me a whole lot.
So I'm going to be proactive and intervene and try, you know, and without being invasive or intrusive, because people wouldn't want that as part of that contract.
But the agencies which protect life and property would have a much greater incentive to proactively work to prevent Child abuse, because of the huge cost to society down the road.
And that's just not the case in the current system.
We have these agencies, which, as we saw from this great presentation on the FDA, do the exact opposite of what?
Are the governments supposed to protect the rights of the children and the health of the children?
And you've got the welfare state, which contributes to lower IQs in children.
I mean, if somebody was feeding a drug to kids that lowered IQ by 10%, we would have those people thrown in jail.
But a social agency does the same thing.
Gains massive support from people who don't know what it's really like.
Of course, public schools are incredibly damaging towards the intellectual and emotional and moral development of children.
I could go on and on, right?
The problems which result from these, the agencies don't even protect the children anyway.
So we have both the reality of destruction of children and the illusion of the protection of children.
It's the worst possible world.
In a free society, children would be, as Whitney Houston sings about, and I won't, the greatest treasure, the future, the wonders of the world.
That's what they are.
But unfortunately, the way that we deal with the protection of children is the exact opposite of what should happen because, as we all know, violence always achieves the opposite of what you want.
I know that that's a long-winded answer, and you can have a look at the essay.
If you disagree with anything in the essay, just let me know, whatever.
I'm there for Steve Rose, too.
My point was that you do have to start explaining to people about Steve Rose and the force.
And it's going to go right after the head.
Yes, but I think that if you were playing devil's advocate position, like, should we use force to protect children, I was in agreement with you, so I don't think that would be a huge debate.
Now, if they then said, and therefore we need a government, then that would be another approach.
And then I, sorry, and I skipped around your point, but you hit one of my trigger points, of which there are only about 12,000. .
But what I would say is I don't agree with the existing way that governments educate and protect children.
I want to explore alternatives which are much more productive.
And would you agree that I have the right to do that without you suggesting that I be thrown in jail?
And if they would say, no, you have to go with child protection services or I support you being thrown in jail, then, you know, canon of moral condemnation comes out.
I back away from the debate and hopefully leave them looking not too good.
If they agree, then we're friends and there to help the children and all is happy and good.
I understand if I stand up, I get a book.
Understanding is a complex term.
I was debating education on healthcare, but Steph, as a Canadian, you know that healthcare is too important to be left to the marketplace.
And we need socialized medicine.
The government needs to take care of all of us because it's just way too important.
Sure, sure, no, I understand that.
Well, I mean, there's two very brief arguments that I would have against that.
It's like, first of all, we need food more than we need medicine, right?
Can we agree on that?
Like, we can live without medicine briefly if we're not really sick, but we can't live without food for more than a day or two, right?
So food is more necessary than healthcare.
Water is more necessary.
Shelter, particularly in Canada, particularly this time of year, though here as well, is more necessary than health care, right?
So if you're going to look at the list of things that are necessary for human beings that the government should provide, health care would be like number 10 on your list.
So let's get the government to run all the housing, all of the food production and distribution.
Let's get them to run everything, gas, oil.
Let's get them to retire everyone's cars in the winter.
Let's get them to do all of that, and then let's get to health care.
Now, if somebody actually wants to say that the government should run all the farms, and has never heard of Chairman Mao, and has never heard of the famine that killed 10 million in the collectivized farms in Russia in the 1930s, then they're too uneducated to have a debate with, and you should not bother.
But that's absurd.
I mean, we're already getting food at the grocery store.
We're already getting water.
We're just, you know, getting really crappy health care.
It's really expensive, and I want it to be cheaper.
I want it to be free.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Well, what I would ask that person is, I would say, what do you do for a living?
And give me some response.
I'm a doctor.
Oh, great.
Look down at your hands.
No, I mean, so let's say the guy was a lawyer, right?
And he said, I think we should have free health care.
I would say, well, tell me what legal services you provide for free.
Right?
If everything that doctors provide should be free, then you should lead the way in the free provision of services by not charging anything for what you do.
And then once you've done that, and you've got everyone else to do that, then you lead by example, not by argument.
That's my general approach.
So I would say, and if the person says, well, I can't work for free, it's like, well, then don't talk to me about free healthcare, because there's no such thing.
But of course, if you say healthcare is too important to be left to the market, And I say, well, let's put food in the government control.
You say, well, we already have this great supply of food.
But that's the free market, right?
So how can you say that health care is too important to be left to the free market?
But food, which is even more important, must absolutely be left to the free market.
Again, that wouldn't make sense.
But again, the against me argument I'm sure you could go into is like, I disagree with you that violence should be used in the provision of health care.
Am I allowed to disagree with you without being thrown in jail?
Blah, blah, blah.
But there's lots of different approaches to that.
But yeah, because it's a tough question.
And I think you guys are going to have to pass through the valley of the shadow of socialized medicine in order to come out from the other side, because that does seem to be where it's going.
But so, you know, stay healthy.
The government pays it, right, right.
It's free.
So I just discovered I'm a violent lunatic.
Are we devils advocating or are we just talking now?
From what you're saying, anyway, so I guess you're going to be pulling a shiv out on me, but I'm pleased to hear that you support property rights and that you support covenants and restrictions and so forth on the deeds of the property, because I'll tell you what I believe.
What I believe is that people should have the right to mutually agree to that kind of a property owner's association, or a government, and that I can choose to remain within the boundaries of a government if I so wish.
Right.
Well, I love the way you snuck in that little completely opposite term there, you know, I believe in consensual lovemaking and rape.
Well, because a contract is between individuals, right?
We can understand that, right?
A government is not a contract between individuals.
It can be.
Well, if it can be, then it's not a government, right?
I would assert that if you enter into a government as part of a property owners association, then you are no more or less Uh, forced into that mood that you are, uh, when you decide, I'm gonna go and subscribe to that constitution, that form of government.
Yes, okay.
And this is a great argument.
Anyone heard this one before?
You're born into it, you can leave if you want, if you stay.
I've got a series on YouTube called The Trial and Death of Socrates, where I act out the whole thing now.
Here, I'm Athenians.
But it is an argument as old as Socrates.
Socrates makes the exact same argument, and it is a very effective argument, despite being completely not true.
And I won't go into a huge amount of detail.
Yeah, sorry, it's not true.
Contract is voluntarily signed by individuals.
They have to be of legal age.
A four-year-old can't sign a contract.
We've tried with my daughter.
No pooping on daddy's arm.
Well, but legally we would generally understand that you have to have some sort of age of adulthood and you can't...
Well, I think even in a free society, there'd be very few agencies that would approve of a three-year-old signing a contract, right?
So, there is no contract that you sign with the government, right?
And we are born into a contract, this sort of pseudo-social contract.
We're born into it, and you can't sign a contract when you're young, and therefore the contract is not binding when you're young, right?
And you can't be evicted from your property if you have not signed a contract that you're violating.
But if I take your example of property and association, the property has to pass to you.
So you can either choose to accept that property or you can choose to leave.
That's an excellent question.
Let me just make sure everyone understands the argument.
Going back to the gentleman in the back, he said no gun ownership.
I'm in some place where I buy the house saying no guns and I don't have guns on my property.
Then I die and I have a kid who then inherits that house.
Then that kid is that kid bound by that contract which says no guns.
Well, if the kid isn't bound by the contract, then you can't guarantee no guns for everyone in the community.
And if the kid is bound by the contract, that's an argument for the social contract, like you're born into a country and therefore you have to humina humina, right?
Well, the difference is that in this example, there's one house, if the kid doesn't like the contract, there's one house he can't live in.
Right?
No, no, one house.
Oh yeah, but he's not going to go buy another house in that community if he wants guns, right?
Right, right.
So there's one place that he can't live, right?
One house that he's inherited that he can't live in, right?
But that's very different from an entire country, right?
An entire country that you can't live in if you disagree with something that the government is doing.
But we have hundreds of property owners associations in hundreds of countries.
Right, but what I'm saying is that if there's one house that I can't live in, that's a very different proposition from saying, here is five million square miles that I can't live in anywhere.
Right?
I mean, I'm not saying that this is a clincher of an argument, but those are very different things, right?
Like if I say, you can't come and stand up here, that's very different from saying you can only stand here, right?
No, it is.
It is different because what you're saying in the first instance is that there are property rights to this one house that are not overlapping with anyone else's.
But in the second instance, you're saying there are two conflicting property rights to an entire country.
So there's the house that people live in individually.
That they have property ownership too.
But then there's this other layer of property rights.
This magical penumbra of property rights called the government owns everything, which are directly in conflict.
Because if I want to live someplace and not aggress against anyone else, then I have the right to do that according to classical liberal property theory, right?
But if there is another set of property rights that the entire government has, or basically a small group of individuals has, that is in complete conflict, then we have two opposing sets of property rights.
And I think the person who's...
Well, no, because the government is the ultimate arbiter of those property rights, according to... Until you revolt against it.
Yeah, in which case you would generally get a new one.
I think that the person who says there's an individual property right to a house, and then there's an overall number of property rights that is held by a small minority, that is for everything that could be completely in conflict, they have to make that case.
I would never assume that case to be made just because it sounds familiar, and we've heard that argument before.
So I would put the onus, because that's an extraordinary claim, right?
To say that 300 million people own stuff, right?
And then 500 people also own everything, right?
And those property rights can be in complete opposition.
I would be very interested to hear someone step me through the logic of that argument, because I don't think it can ever be sustained.
But that's a big question.
So if you wanted to call into the show again, I know I don't want to bore everyone who's not interested in the intricacies of property theory.
All right, I don't want to take everyone's entire day, but maybe we can do one or two.
Two more, and then we've all spoken or fallen asleep.
Sorry, I know that was not a perfect answer, but it's a huge topic.
In your original argument, when you said, would you kill me in defense of your beliefs, what if I were to say, well, you believe in anarchism, and anarchism is chaos, and more people would die in anarchism than if I killed you right now?
The shoot Hitler argument, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I haven't argued with someone like that for a while, but I certainly know that they're out there.
Okay, so I would say that, you know, can you step me through that, right?
I'm a big one for play dumb, right?
and sometimes I'm not playing.
Well, no.
If you analyze it, this won't work.
There's no societies that survive.
Yeah, there's no societies that survive in a free market society, and why don't you all move to Somalia or ancient Ireland or Iceland or whatever, right?
Well, the first thing that I would do, there's a whole chain of reasoning in what you said there, right?
As I'm sure you're aware, right?
Anarchy is chaos.
Like, that's a huge logical leap, right?
Chaos equals death.
Therefore, you're advocating death.
Therefore, it's the self-defense of the future people you're going to kill to shoot you now.
So it's a big back-to-the-future argument that blows my mind, right?
But I would say to the person...
I don't understand what you're saying, because I really don't.
I learned this from a guy I worked with in business who would get these big convoluted answers from salespeople as to why they didn't make the sale.
Well, you know, it was raining and then there were frogs coming down from the sky.
And he would say, like, I don't understand.
Explain it to me like I'm three years old.
Like, and there's nothing wrong with playing dumb, because statism is such a bizarre thesis when you break it down.
It is a bizarre magical theory that there's this golden gun somewhere in the world, that if someone who's just good and great enough picks up that gun and waves it around, we end up with utopia, right?
I mean, that's such a bizarre theory, right?
I mean, you might as well say that Aragon from Lord of the Rings would make the perfect king, and let's do that, right?
And so I would say to that person, I would say, okay, so tell me what you understand by the word anarchy.
And if he says chaos, it's like, well, that's actually not true, right?
It's not, it's not the meaning of the word, right?
Because we already have the word chaos and we're not that redundant in the English language somewhat, but not hugely, right?
So it's not a synonym.
So I would say, well, what do you mean by chaos?
And if he thinks anarchism is You know, Mel Gibson with a Viking helmet riding around shooting people for gas, right?
Then I'd say, well, that's a good movie idea.
Maybe we can talk about that.
But that has nothing to do with the theory and practice of nonviolent society, right?
So I wouldn't go into the argument.
I would just explore what that person meant.
And you'll come across one of two things, right, in my opinion, in my experience.
One is that the person hasn't thought at all, right?
Hasn't thought at all.
Even a little bit.
And they're just using prejudicial terms, right?
In which case, they're probably not going to start thinking now, right?
Because, you know, best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, right?
If they haven't thought by now, they're not about to turn that corner.
The other is that they have thought about it, but they've just made mistakes.
In which case, you can help step them through those mistakes.
So I would question every premise that that person is putting forward and see what their level of understanding and curiosity is, and then you can hopefully have a fruitful discussion that will put the safety back on.
Is that useful?
But play dumb.
You know the Columbo thing?
I don't understand.
I don't follow.
You wouldn't know, you're too young.
The Colombo thing, you know, it's like, I don't understand.
You know, I don't follow, you know.
If you can get an old raincoat, it's so much the better.
But have something on underneath.
I found that out pretty early.
That's important.
I don't understand.
Debate's over.
Sorry.
We had one more, sorry.
Last guy.
My comment is back to the property and, like, can contracts pass on to your kids, essentially.
And I would say they can't, but in the free market, I don't think it would be... I think the very simple solution is that if you have a property, like, where there's gun control assigned to that neighborhood, it would just be in the contract that any transfer of the property, whether it be willed or, you know, sold, they would have to accept the contract.
Yeah, and sorry, it's very much like a rental unit, right?
In which sense, this is the traditional argument for statism, that the government owns everything we're just renting, right?
So in that case, if my mom leaves me a condo, I don't get to go in there and start a grow-up, unfortunately.
But I don't get to go in there and start Hells Angels, biker, shoot-the-ceiling parties, right?
Because they have noise restrictions, which are a condition of ownership.
It's not free and clear, perpetual ownership.
You can do whatever you want with it.
It's the same thing with bullets.
I can have a bullet, but I can't put it in somebody else.
So it would be very much like you're renting the property, and the condition of ownership is guaranteed as long as you don't have guns in the house.
And that would be a condition of ownership in any other kind of rental situation.
Exactly.
So I think that would be probably the closest.
People do mistake that kind of voluntary rental situation, which is a condition of ownership that is voluntarily entered into and can be transferred like any property.
They confuse that with statism as a whole by giving a few people the magical power to create a renter's ownership of everything, which is, you know, wonderful if you can get people to buy it for you, right?
But it's just, it doesn't hold any water logically or morally, so.
Okay, thank you.
Well, I guess we're done, and thank you so much.
I'm glad that we wasn't just talking.
Thank you.
And thank you for such great questions.
I knew that coming to speak to Libertarians was going to be a challenge, and you guys had by far the best questions I've ever had from this kind of conversation, so kudos to you as well for your thinking and reasoning skills.
Thank you.
I'm blown away.
It was excellent.
Thank you.
Better than I expected.
Yeah, but your expectations were really low.
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