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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:46
Information Will Save Us? Ask Aaron Swartz...
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I wanted to discuss with you an essay I wrote a few months back.
I truly believe it's one of my best.
You know that you and I, well, I don't think we've ever discussed economics, but I am a capitalist.
I do believe in the free market.
But a young man, I don't know if you've ever heard of this case.
I thought it was a very intriguing case.
Aaron Schwartz wrote a... Yes, yes, thank you.
In fact, Jeff and I did a show on Aaron Schwartz a couple of months ago.
Yeah, we did a 30-minute tribute to him, didn't we, Stefan?
Yeah.
Uh, so, you know, hearing his case and how he, you know, downloaded all these scholastically, uh, journals, you know, hacked into JSTOR, downloaded all the journals, and was gonna, you know, distribute them among third-world nations, you know, particularly Africa and the like, and seeing that Carmen Ortiz and somebody else's name, I can't recollect right now, really brought the hammer down hard on him, which disgusted me, because the sentence he got, I think, was way too gross for his offense, especially when you take into account That he did return the intellectual property to JSTOR, and they didn't even want to press charges.
I think MIT may have wanted to do something, but the legal action they would have wanted to take was punitive in comparison to what Carmen Ortiz grabbed him by the throat with.
But hearing Aaron's story and seeing what he was all about really inspired me to believe, well, I am a free market capitalist economically, but information-speaking and knowledge-speaking, You could almost say that I'm kind of a socialist.
I do believe in what Aaron tried to do.
And I did some of my own research for this essay, and particularly in Africa, we find, at least according to the research I've done, that one in three children living in Africa will drop out of school.
98% of people who are illiterate and lack writing skills are residents of developing countries.
And lastly, it is estimated that 30 to 50 percent of children in developing countries who leave school at four to six years are neither literate nor are they numerate.
So you can really see the gap in terms of the human capital, you know, in these developing nations.
And I go on and on about it.
Pretty much, Stefan, my question to you is, what do you think about Aaron Schwartz's goal?
And pretty much what I have pretty much gift-wrapped and put a bowtie on it of, you know, information socialism to really increase human capital in these developing countries which in turn may help their markets economically.
Well look, the first thing to recognize is that the patent system is socialist.
Anything which relies on the initiation of the use of force for the transfer of income is fundamentally socialist in its facts.
So when you say that you're sort of anti-IP but pro-socialist, I would argue that you're in fact pro-free markets when you're anti-IP.
IP is a socialist program designed to reward the media in return for the media's allegiance to the state.
It gives them a monopoly, on their products and therefore they're going to not question or oppose or attack the state in the same way that getting government unions, government protected unions, into the media makes sure that unions are usually not criticized.
But look, the sentencing of Schwartz, he was facing decades in jail.
The sentencing of Bradley Manning, the hysterical calls for the death penalty, basically the assassination of Julian Assange.
Let me, this is an article written that you, I just looked up while you were mentioning this.
This is an article written by Michael Moore and he's got some great stuff to say about this stuff.
So this is Bradley Manning.
Now I can't remember, I think he got a couple of decades in jail.
So he wrote, when his sentencing is announced tomorrow, he wrote this before the sentencing, we'll all get a good idea of how seriously the U.S.
military takes different crimes.
So for instance, Colonel Thomas M. Pappas, the senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, and the senior officer present the night of the murder of Iraqi prisoner Manadel al-Jamadi, received no jail time.
No jail time!
But he was reprimanded and fined, ooh, $8,000.
Pappas was heard to say about al-Jamadi, I'm not going down for this alone.
Sergeant Sabrina Harmon, the woman famously seen giving a thumbs up next to al-Jamadi's body and in another photo smiling next to naked hooded Iraqis stacked on each other, in Abu Ghraib was sentenced to six months in prison for maltreating detainees.
Specialist Armand Cruz was sentenced to eight months for abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and covering up the abuse.
Specialist Stephen Riborty was sentenced to eight months for being an accessory to the murder of four Iraqi prisoners who were bound, blindfolded, shot, and dumped in a canal in Baghdad in 2007.
Four murders he gets eight months.
Specialist Belmore Ramos was sentenced to seven months for conspiracy to commit murder in the same case.
Sergeant Michael Leahy Jr.
was sentenced to life in prison for committing the four Baghdad murders.
The military then granted him clemency and reduced his sentence to 20 years with parole, possible after seven years.
So after seven years, this man can be released from prison for murdering four helpless detainees.
Marine Sergeant Frank D. Woodridge received no jail time for negligent dereliction in the massacre of 24 unarmed men, women, and children in 2005 in the Iraqi town of Haditha.
Seven other members of his battalion were charged, but none were punished in any way.
Marine Lance Corporal Jerry Shumatey and Lance Corporal Tyler Jackson were both sentenced to 21 months for the aggravated assault of Hashim Ibrahim Awad, 52, a father of 11 and grandfather of four, in Helmandandia in 2006.
Awad died after being shot during the assault.
Their sentences were later reduced.
Two more.
Marine Lance Corporal Robert Pennington was sentenced to eight years for the same incident but only served a few months before being granted clemency and released from prison.
Marine Sergeant G. Hatchius III was sentenced to 15 years for murder in the Awad case, but his conviction was soon overturned and he was released.
No soldiers received any punishment for the killing of five Iraqi children, four women and two men in one Ishaqi home in 2006.
Among the U.S.
diplomatic cables leaked by Bradley Manning was email from a U.N.
official stating that U.S.
soldiers had executed All of them.
When WikiLeaks published the cable, the uproar in Iraq was so big that the Nouri al-Malaki government couldn't grant any remaining US troops immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts, thus forcing the Obama administration to abandon its plans to keep several thousand US soldiers permanently.
All the US troops were removed at the end of 2011.
So this is just an example of The idea that there is no such thing as the rule of law.
There is the random, fiery, Balrog-style whips of those in power.
And those in power relied upon torture, or believed that they needed torture, in order to get information.
Torture is incredibly counterproductive, even if you take aside the unbelievable moral horror of torture.
As far as a way of gaining information, it is completely and ridiculously counterproductive.
Not even unproductive, it's counterproductive.
Because most times you're questioning people, they don't know.
They don't know the answer, because any intelligent person when faced with torture is just going to fess up.
So they don't know the answer, but what happens is they make up an answer in order to avoid torture, and then the government spends all of its resources chasing these ghosts, these imaginary things.
It's all a bunch of kaiser-so-say nonsense.
And so there's no possible productivity in the realm of torture, but the government doesn't have smart, intelligent, market-driven enough people to actually go and pursue criminals in productive ways.
So it just tortures because they're a bunch of sadists and it likes torture.
So people who are caught for torture get slaps on the wrist, get fines, get sentenced to lengthy sentences, which are then commuted.
People who murder, because it's the foundation of state power, is violent.
So it's never going to prosecute violence.
However, the exposure of state crimes goes against state power, right?
The capacity to torture, murder, extraordinary rendition, all of that, that is foundational to state power.
So there'll be a slap on the wrist for the sake of public appearance.
But anybody who actually Shows the crimes of the state, releases and reveals the crimes of the state.
Well, they must be punished in a truly hysterical, you know, witch hunt, Salem, Massachusetts style.
And this just tells you that there's nothing objective that's going on in the realm of the state when it comes to punishment.
Aaron Schwartz was punished for a wide variety of reasons, but mostly the government is terrified.
of exposure.
The government can record you going everywhere in the world.
The government can get your GPS signals.
The government has CCTV cameras everywhere.
But you try pointing a camera at a cop, at a government official, you try recording, and you are usually in a whole heap of trouble.
And one of the great positives, of course, is that there is enough recording equipment out there that people like Antonio Bihler and others can actually Get video evidence exonerating them of the historical crimes that they're accused of.
So yeah, I mean, this all started for me and I'll just touch on this very briefly.
I remember during the Bill Clinton scandals of the early 90s, where he was found to just be a truly repulsive and deviant and perverse sexual predator.
I remember thinking, oh man, you know, boy, society, this guy's gonna be impeached and disbarred and his career is gonna be over by the end of the week because we just came out of the Clarence Thomas thing where Anita Hale was complaining of his sexual harassment because he may or may not have made a joke about pubic hairs on a Coke can, none of which was ever proven to my knowledge.
I mean, this just went on for years and years and years and his nomination was going to be barred.
And of course, it was just left wing attacks upon conservatives.
But having just come out, I was still mistakenly thinking that there were some principles in society because you know, it was 20 years ago, you know, cut me a break, you know, I was I was still a baby in arms when it came to philosophy.
And so I remember when all of this stuff came out about Clinton inserting cigars into the poor vagina of his personal geisha and while on the phone doing official business, getting blowjobs and stuff, I just remember thinking, oh my God, given what happened to Clarence Thomas, he's I just remember thinking, oh my God, given what happened to Clarence Thomas, he's going to be out
I just remember thinking what an incredible moment in history this is and seeing what happened with a little bit of wiretapping and how Nixon was hounded out of office for something that LBJ and JFK and everyone had done before him.
I just remember thinking, my God, I mean the feminists and they're just going to go completely nuts because this is about a billion times worse than what happened with Clarence Thomas.
And then what happened?
Almost nothing.
Almost nothing!
The man still speaks!
He's paid a hundred thousand dollars to speak at events!
He's a respected elder statesman!
My God!
We live in a psychotic world of sociopathic manipulation of rules for the sake of creating punishment and guilt among the livestock.
It has nothing to do with any principle.
So the prosecution of Aaron Schwartz?
Yeah!
He's a guy who can shine a light in dark corners and therefore he must be punished in order to avoid other people from revealing the crimes of the state.
Now, the state is criminality, but of course Most people stay in the matrix and assume that the government obeys its own laws.
The more that people can dig into the data and show that it doesn't, you'll just see that if the government fears exposure, cockroaches don't like sunlight.
And if the government fears exposure, they will lash out hysterically and punish it as nothing to do with any rules.
All it has to do is that self-protection and uh... you know it's like saying well you know that that that that that the mafia head who killed the accountant who was about to cooperate with the feds is doing it on a moral basis uh... for justice and law and so on now it's just that he could reveal the secrets of the mafia to the to the government and therefore they gonna kill him and if the same thing is is obviously occurring with all of the people who are exposing government crimes Okay, end of rant.
Sorry, Jeff, if you'd like to... And I feel like your commentary, to me, really illuminates a very important point, and that's that I feel like our media in this day and age, it's like living in the modern allegory of Plato's cave.
You know, we're all making shadow puppets and only very few of us come out and we see the sun.
We have to go back down and, you know, tell everybody else about it.
But, you know, my thing is, your whole commentary and your sentiments on torture and coercion and a state that, you know, props itself up with the use of force, that to me just really raises even more so the critical importance of what Aaron Swartz is doing and what, you know, I wrote in this essay again, you know, information socialism as I called it.
But my question is, and this will be my last question on the matter, what is the best route to take because I can understand people who are opposed to my course of action because, you know, you're talking things like essays and scholastic journals or, you know, intellectual property.
I would go on some formal databases.
Some papers to download cost $50.
But I feel like the information to people in the third world is so invaluable.
I don't want to make any money off of my essays.
You know, part of my goal in being a philosopher, for me personally, was making the field and making the discourses that I started accessible to everybody, no matter the level of education, no matter the level of anything.
So, if we want to make information this powerful revolutionary tool, and again, you made a great video that I watched just the other day, the 55-minute commentary on Syria, which I recommend that everybody go watch on Steph's YouTube channel, it's StephBod, just a quick plug for you there, I really enjoyed that video.
That's the stuff that I think people need to be listening to, because that's stuff that empowers, that's stuff that engages, that's stuff that enlightens.
So how do we do it, Steph?
How do we please our philosophy of the market so that people can still get their money's worth, so to speak, on their intellectual property, but we still achieve the aim of enlightening those around us?
Is it a full-hearty goal, or is it something that, like I'm trying to do now, that we should just continue to pursue and see if we yield any results?
Well, I can't possibly speak better on IP than Jeff, so Jeff, would you like to?
I'm glad this subject came up.
I had a friend write me a couple of days ago and say that he had written a book and he wanted to distribute it in a libertarian way.
I wasn't sure what that way was.
He said my sense is that I need to give it away for free and then ask for donations.
And I said, well, if that works for you, that's great.
But just remember that the way to do things in a libertarian way is to not use the state.
Okay, maybe that sounds very obvious, but people forget this.
So there's nothing wrong with taking a non-scarce good, like the information in a book, and charging for the scarce delivery of that book, if that works out to be a good thing.
You know, when you buy an MP3 from iTunes, you're not really buying a song.
What you're doing is buying an increment of service use, which is, you could argue, is a scarce good.
It's the same thing with buying a copy of a book off Amazon or Kindle.
You're not buying really a book.
What you're doing is buying an incremental service delivery in which this non-scarce good called a book is delivered to you.
Maybe that's a good way to do it and it doesn't necessarily require the state at all.
At Laissez-Faire Books, we started a subscription model for books that are entirely published in the commons.
So one of the conditions I made when I went to work for Laissez-Faire Books, I said to these people who run Agora Financial, I said, you know, I just can't in good conscious use I don't want to use the state in any aspect of our business.
I don't want to use copyright.
They were a little bit alarmed by this and confused by the implications of it.
I said, I don't think it's going to make any difference to our business model, but it is going to make a difference in terms of the moral status of the products we produce.
So everything we produce is in the commons, but what we're attempting to do is charge for the delivery of this product, of this service in which we give I hope that that's clear.
This is a little bit of a tricky distinction for people.
It's something like 100 bucks that you can get for like 10 bucks.
These are mostly all new books with new introductions and things.
So I'm not using the state at all.
But just because you're not using the copyright institution doesn't mean that you can't charge for the service.
I hope that that's clear.
This is a little bit of a tricky distinction for people.
People get a little bit confused about this.
It might be the right thing to give away the product.
I think that's a nice thing, but just because you're charging for something doesn't mean that it has to be copyrighted.
Those are really different kinds of issues.
Aaron Schwartz was particularly outraged that JSTOR was using the state to restrain access, to prevent access to these
scientific literature that had been mostly written at taxpayer expense, you know, and was being withheld from the masses of people and being only allocated to specialists in a very strict area, a tiny elite, and their access to JSTOR is being provided again by tax dollars.
It's just insane.
So it was a very unjust system and he smashed it.
It was just a beautiful thing that he did.
And, you know, we talked about Oscar Wilde earlier and his effect on history.
It's the same thing with Aaron Schwartz, you know.
So he was driven to despair and took his own life.
But, you know, within a few weeks after his death, JSTOR made open access a general policy.
More and more you see that JSTOR is opening up further and further and further.
So this moral example is having an effect on the future.
He was dedicated to open source, and let's never forget what Aaron Schwartz was working on before his death.
He was working on a new model of politics, an open source program that allowed all of us to have direct access to the people who purport to be in charge of our lives and give us a greater voice.
It was kind of a revolutionary project, a political project he was working on, and I believe that's ultimately why they went after him.
I completely agree, Jeffrey.
And to me, Aaron's work was just so inspiring.
And when I heard his story, I actually got chills down my spine thinking about how similar he and I were in terms of our ambitions and our, you know, ideologies concerning life.
My thing, ultimately, with information socialism, and I'm going to shut my trap here, is that, you know, I'm vehemently against, Stefan, egalitarianism, you know, purported by John Rawls.
I talked about him on my second appearance on your show.
We talked about his veil of ignorance in his social contract.
What I think is distinct about information and socialism, and here's the example I use.
If we're talking about socialism in the economic sense, and you have three people sitting around a table, and you have to distribute $300, and that's your $300 to start with, you're gonna lose $200, 'cause you have to give 100 to each guy.
But if you're teaching those three people what two plus two equals, and they learn that it's four, you don't forget that it's four.
So to me, you don't lose anything, really, when you distribute this information.
If anything, you know, speaking economically, you're bringing more people into the pool to know how to apply that knowledge to ultimately enrich the market.
And, you know, maybe that's a naive point of view, but that's really how I examined it when I was writing this essay.
And I just really hope it's something that can catch on and, you know, like you making your videos and me writing my essays, people will start really not being afraid to making these kinds of contributions and not be so wary of the consequences because I think in the long run, it makes for a healthier society and it certainly makes for healthier markets.
So that's just what I wanted to say about that.
I would certainly argue that where knowledge has a moral dimension, then it is philosophers are the doctors of the species, right?
I mean, the doctors of the mind.
And so if I had a painless cure for AIDS that I could produce for free and people could consume for free and I withheld that from people.
I think there would be a moral dimension to that.
It doesn't mean I'm evil.
It doesn't mean that nobody gets to initiate the use of force against me.
I'm not evil if I don't.
If I'm a champion lifeguard and there's some kid drowning ten feet off the shore and I don't go in to help him, I'm not evil.
But I'm kind of a real jerk.
Like, I mean, there's an aesthetic aspect to ethics that I think is really important.
You can be incredibly wrong without being evil.
And from my standpoint, if I was telling, I don't know, fun stories about camping.
I mean, there's not a moral dimension really to that.
If I was like Bill Bryson and just wrote these cute stories about hiking trails and stuff like that, fine, right?
Or enjoyable.
There's no moral dimension to it.
Although he did actually have a great point about people in Arkansas who rejected evolution, that they were not so much in danger of being descended from apes as overtaken by them, which I thought was some wonderfully witty lines.
But so not like art, which has no particular moral dimension.
Fine, fine, fine.
But art which has, or communication, literature, speeches that have a moral dimension, are the medicines of mankind.
For me to say, and this is, you know, I'm not saying this is a universal moral thing that I'll defend to the death, but if I have the capacity to bring some light of reason and virtue to the species, obviously it's good for me that it gets distributed as widely as humanly possible for people to think rationally, for people to think critically, to think ahead and so on, to avoid mistakes, and if they listen to me about things like circumcision and not hitting your children, not yelling at your children, not violating the NAP with regards to parenting,
Great.
Even though it costs me nothing fundamentally to create and produce that and it costs nothing to distribute it, if I were to charge for that, to me that would be like charging a fairly unsupportable amount for people who could be cured for free.
And to me there's a moral dimension to that.
And I thought about this a long time.
It's a very hard thing for me to think about.
Like when I decided six years ago to release my books for free, that was a hard decision.
But I felt that if the books are helpful in bringing people to reason, to thinking, to virtue, to a better world, to withhold them and to charge for them when I could survive without doing that, there would be a moral dimension to that.
I mean, the guy who invented the polio vaccine, he never patented it.
He never made a penny off of it.
Salk, I think his name was.
And he just released it.
And it was incredibly cheap because of that.
He didn't sell it to a pharmaceutical company.
The guy could have been a multi-multi-millionaire.
If he'd held on to this.
But think of the amount of good.
I mean, polio used to be an unbelievably terrifying disease for people.
I mean, it was like the AIDS that didn't kill you.
I mean, you could stick in iron lungs.
I mean, you'd be paralyzed.
And public pools were a huge transmitter of these.
Kids were terrified to go swimming.
Their parents kept them in all the time.
When there was a polio outbreak, everyone stayed inside.
And they were terrified.
I mean, it was an unbelievably terrifying disease.
And to say, well, you know, you got to give me 50 bucks for the vaccine.
I mean, yeah, I get it.
I know I'm not a capitalist and all this, but to me, if you can survive reasonably well and give it away for free, I mean, I think you kind of should do that.
Again, I'm not going to initiate force against you if you don't, but I would make a strong case for if your work has moral dimensions to it, just try and get it in as many people's hands as humanly possible.
Even if you never make a penny, you'll grow up and live and die in a better world than you found it.
If you have kids, they'll grow up in a better world.
There's a lot of selfish reasons for doing it.
But I think when you have something that can literally save people's lives, I think that charging for it when you can survive without charging for it has a moral dimension to it.
And so it's one of the things I – I mean I take the work that I do enormously seriously.
I take the work that other libertarians like Jeff do very seriously.
We are saving lives.
We are protecting people from war.
We are protecting people from the enslavement of debt.
We are very much vanguards.
We are the first line of defense against tyranny and very often thinkers are the last line of defense against tyranny because if the thinkers fall there's nobody left to protect people from the state.
I take it very seriously and to me the idea that profit should be a primary motive in the distribution of security, safety, peace, protection and virtue to me is I think taking the market too far, if that makes any sense.
That's fascinating.
That's fascinating.
That's a very interesting moral commentary and I find it persuasive.
There's an additional point that in the digital age There's no keeping information private anymore.
Information, as the left often says, wants to be free.
And there is that element.
Information is the non-scarce good.
The driving force of history is ever more revelation, ever more openness, ever more reverse engineering of what we know so that the predictive power can be put into everybody's hands.
Whether it's through 3D printing or YouTubing and creation, artistic creation, in every area we're moving to a world of radical availability of information and openness.
And there's nothing that's going to stop that.
And to me it's one of the most inspiring examples of how human action and the impulse and the push towards liberty ultimately will overtake the state's efforts to restrict and restrain and contain and censor.
It's an unviable project.
The state itself is an unviable project, but this particular aspect of the state is particularly unviable and unsustainable over the long term.
Wow.
Great.
Thank you so much, Jeff.
I know you have another commitment, so we are going to let you go.
Thank you for a wonderful morning's conversation.
It's really invigorating and energizing.
Drinking deep from the well of Jeffrey Tucker will always put a spring in your step, so thank you.
Well, listen, I've learned so much from you, from your guests, from the venue.
It's been very inspiring for me, so let me just express my profound thank you to you.
It's been an honor to be here, and I hope we can catch up again very soon.
All right, thanks.
And it's LFB.org to go and check out Jeff's.
LFB.org forward slash Stefan if you want to sign up for the book club which I'd highly recommend.
Thanks again.
Have yourselves a wonderful week everyone.
I love you guys.
The most incredible listener conversations.
The most incredible conversations that I know of that are recorded and broadcast at least.
So thank you everyone.
Thank you Jeff.
Thank you Mike.
If you'd like to help out fdrurl.com forward slash donate and please do share this video if we can Make a measurable change even if it's small in public opinion.
We literally could do a good day's work in saving thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives.
So thanks everyone.
Have a great week.
I will see you Wednesday night for the 8 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time show and for the next Sunday show we are 7 days minus 2 hours.
Have a great day.
Thanks.
Bye.
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