July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
05:11
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| And now, for a special edition of Exposing the Gun in the Room with Stefan Molyneux. | |
| Why is this a special edition? | |
| Isn't everyone with him special? | |
| Well, because in this case, the gun is already exposed. | |
| And in Washington, D.C., It just feels like we're surrounded. | |
| We are, by people with guns who think they have the right to tell you what to do. | |
| And I know no one better at using philosophy to get at the cold, hard reality of a situation, no matter how difficult or unpopular, than Stefan Molyneux, host of freedomainradio.com. | |
| Stefan, thank you so much for joining us tonight. | |
| Thanks Adam, it's great to be here. | |
| So, what is the actual role of the police force in our society? | |
| Well, the first thing to understand is that, philosophically speaking, the police are magic. | |
| Because they have particular training, which anybody can do, they put on a blue costume and a little hat, and suddenly they have the moral obligation To do that, which is absolutely illegal for everyone else, to initiate the use of force against usually disarmed or under-armed citizens, so they can go around collecting taxes. | |
| More than 40,000 regulations and laws were enacted by state legislatures last year. | |
| They can all be enforced by the cops. | |
| You've got a 17,000-page tax code with five and a half million words that can all be enforced by the cops. | |
| And it doesn't matter how well-meaning any individual cops are. | |
| Okay, but why? | |
| Why, Stefan? | |
| Why does it... | |
| Why is our system set up this way? | |
| Well, because it's very profitable to have very few sheepdogs and a lot of sheep. | |
| Human beings submit to force around the world throughout history. | |
| If you can scare people through threats of jail, despite the fact that violent crimes in the U.S. | |
| have declined for the last 20 years, You have 3% of the U.S. | |
| population either in jail or on parole or being monitored. | |
| The U.S. | |
| has the highest incarceration rate in the world. | |
| That frightens everyone. | |
| The U.S., per capita, has almost as high an incarceration rate in 2011 than Russia had before the Second World War under Stalin in the gulags described by Solzhenitsyn. | |
| It is a terrifying situation for many Americans, and so people will shut up and pay. | |
| Well, what about those cops that genuinely want to help people? | |
| As you mentioned, I mean, there are cops that, on the beat, that really think that what they're doing primarily is providing for the public safety. | |
| They're there for noble reasons. | |
| They want to enforce the laws that are based on real justice. | |
| Some of them, like even we have Law Enforcement Against Prohibition have come out and said, we don't want to enforce some of these unjust laws. | |
| I mean, how does that fit in? | |
| Well, I mean, the key is not which laws are cops willing to enforce, but which laws are they not willing to enforce. | |
| There are, of course, hundreds of thousands of laws and regulations on the books that can be used to attack just about every citizen ever. | |
| And so the important thing, I think, is the call needs to go out to the police, to the honorable and noble defenders of liberty, to say, look, what laws are you not going to enforce? | |
| You know, 20% of convicted inmates in 2002, which is the latest year that statistics are available, were in for violent crimes. | |
| Everyone is in for nonviolent crimes or tax evasion or some sort of other non-crime. | |
| And there's been credible estimates that if you got rid of the war on drugs, you'd have 10,000 or more fewer homicides every year. | |
| So even those who are in for violent crimes, a lot of that violence is to do with the drug war. | |
| So the important thing is that cops need to look in the mirror and say, what laws is it not going to fit my conscience to enforce? | |
| Because it takes them to lay down their weapons in peaceful situations like somebody having a particular piece of vegetation in their pocket for us to become just a little bit more free. | |
| Now, Stefan, you've got some incredible concepts, some ideas about how we could address some of the issues around law enforcement if we had a voluntary society, how we would get the things that we think we're getting, or at least in the sort of social mythology of what cops are supposed to be, what we as the people are supposed to be getting from cops, from dispute resolution organizations, voluntary means of cooperation. | |
| Can you explain? | |
| We've only got a minute left, but I know that's a huge challenge, but can you explain how that would work as an alternative? | |
| Yeah, look, I mean, we obviously want to prevent violence. | |
| Prevention is far better than cure. | |
| But unfortunately, under the existing system, there's no money in prevention. | |
| There's only money in the pseudo-cures of incarceration. | |
| So what we want is a system that intervenes in troubled families. | |
| The roots of violence go down into child abuse, according to the latest research that's available. | |
| We need a society that's going to intervene and help parents who are aggressing against their children to raise more peaceful children. | |
| That will reduce the crime rate enormously, repeal the law on drugs, Get rid of minimum wage laws, open up the economy so that there's more opportunity for people to work rather than get involved in a life of crime. | |
| There's so much that we could do to make policing much more effective, much more peaceful, much more sustainable, and far less corrupt. | |
| And that's where we need to be moving. | |
| Well, we can only hope that we get to that someday. | |
| Are you as hopeful as I am, Stefan? | |
| Good always wins. | |
| It's just a matter of when. | |
| All right. | |
| Well, keep up the good work, Stefan. | |
| Really appreciate the work you're doing. | |
| Thank you so much for joining us tonight. |
Export Selection