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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:19
Beautiful Freedom
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Hi everybody, it's Stephan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
This is the resource, the FAQ of freedom, as we could call it, which is to answer the common questions raised about a truly free society.
A society without a government.
So I hope I can answer some questions, and not with the idea of deconverting you from hierarchical coercive statism in one short video, but at least pointing the way towards solutions that might make it more enjoyable for you to pursue the topic.
It's a very, very important topic.
So, probably the most common questions that advocates of a stateless society, or really of a society where all human beings are equal and none have the legal right or obligation to initiate violence against others, which is what the state is defined as an entity, Barack Obama has clearly stated this and it's really well understood.
The state is a monopoly of individuals with the legal right and obligation to initiate the use of force against others in a geographical area.
So we say that if all human beings are in fact equal then none should have the right to initiate the use of force against others and therefore as a consequence of this reasoning governments are illegitimate morally and frankly unpractical economically.
People say, well, how will poor kids be educated?
And who will build the roads?
And how will there be national defense?
And how will children be protected?
And blah blah blah blah blah.
And I'm sad to say that These questions don't matter at all.
Completely irrelevant to the fundamental question.
I know that may sound shocking, because we're just so used to social engineering, that the idea that you have to have a way of answering these questions, which of course are impossible to answer anyway, but it doesn't matter.
And the analogy is, it's like if I come up to you in the 17th century and say, we should abolish slavery, and then you say to me, well, how will the cotton be picked if there are no slaves?
And I say, well, don't worry about it, because I know that 70 or 80% of us are all involved in agriculture right now, and there's almost no machinery to pick cotton.
But don't worry about it, because in the future, only 2 or 3% of us are going to be involved in farming, and there will be these big, giant, horseless carriages that consume Oil sucked out of the ground thousands of miles away and they will wade in their mechanical way through cotton fields, picking things automatically and depositing them as freshly pressed shirts on people's backs at the end of the row or something like that.
I'm not a farmer.
Then you would say to me, well, that's just ridiculous.
Giant machines, robots doing human work.
I mean, and so we would get into this argument.
But you understand that it, it doesn't, it doesn't matter.
Who picks the cotton after the end of slavery doesn't matter.
It's a tangent.
It's a way of avoiding the moral issue.
The moral issue, of course, is that slavery was a vile stain upon the ethical character and landscape of humanity.
That's all you need to know.
How cotton is picked in the absence of slavery, it just doesn't matter.
The only question is, is slavery right or wrong?
Statism is a violation of the non-aggression principle.
Thou shalt not steal doesn't change if you have a little business card from the IRS.
It doesn't change.
So the question of how things will be achieved in the absence of the state, how social goods will be provided in the absence of the state, It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
We can't know.
We can't guess.
It's unimaginable.
There will be amazing, brilliant, wonderful, magical solutions put forward when the true genius of human entrepreneurship is applied to the problems of the provision of education for the poor or health care for the aged and so on.
But it doesn't matter how these things are going to be provided.
It doesn't matter who builds the roads in a free society.
If people want roads and they can be provided in a way that people want to pay for them, then they'll be provided.
And if not, then people will work more from home, or they will find alternate means of transportation, or giant robot harvesters will pick up people and deposit them somewhere in helicopter pads.
But it doesn't matter, understand?
It doesn't matter.
The other thing, too, is that when we're talking about the society of the future, most of what people are trying to solve The problems that people are trying to solve when imagining the future are only problems that exist because we're not free at the moment.
So let me sort of give you an example of what I mean.
So if we were in 1850 trying to design the healthcare system of the 21st century, we're sitting around and drinking our absinthe and so on.
We're trying to create a healthcare system for the 21st century.
We would have a debate like, well, you know, what are the big things?
We've got to worry about polio, and smallpox, and typhus, and diphtheria, and, you know, all of these things that we don't have to worry about in the first world anymore.
And so, if I were to say to you, we don't need to design a healthcare system that deals with any of these, because these magic little potions are going to be invented that get injected in people's arms, and they will never get sick from these illnesses.
We'd say, well that's not a solution.
But that is in fact what happened.
Polio was terrifying.
People kept their kids away from public swimming pools.
It's a terrifying disease.
Up until the polio vaccine was developed by Alexander Salk.
I think it was in the 1950s.
Guy gave it away for free.
Kind of a hero to humanity in my opinion.
You don't need to worry about how the healthcare system of the future is going to work, because it's going to be in an environment we can't imagine.
The healthcare system that you would design in 1850 for the 21st century environment would not be able to guess.
It wouldn't be able to guess AIDS, and it wouldn't be able to guess obesity, because most people in 1850 were kind of hungry.
And it wouldn't have guessed all of the illnesses and diseases that had been gotten rid of by, you know, proper plumbing and sanitation and vaccines and all of the other kind of proper nutrition and all these other kinds of good things.
So, whatever you would design, it would be completely irrelevant to what actually came about.
Now, another common question that comes up is, well, national defense.
How are you going to have national defense in a free society?
Well, again, if people want it, and of course it can be provided, then It will be provided.
And people then all say, well, what about the free rider problem?
Like, if my neighbor pays for national defense and I don't, I'm getting a free rider, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, of course, if you're worried about the free rider problem, the government is the first thing you should be looking at.
The government is the ultimate free rider, because it gets all of its income through coercion.
And it's like the problem of the commons, right?
The problem of the commons, everyone's going to despoil the commons.
Well, The commons and government finances are completely despoiled and pillaged every day in the state.
The state doesn't solve the free rider problem because the state is a free rider.
The state does not solve the problem of the commons because the commons includes the state which is continually pillaged from all sides.
But national defense Can be provided pretty quick, pretty cheaply.
I mean almost no nuclear power has ever been invaded.
They fight these sort of proxy wars like the Falklands or Vietnam or whatever.
But you don't invade a nuclear power, so a couple of nukes and you're fine.
You're set.
So, and of course there's really nothing to invade in a free society.
The reason that countries invade each other is to take over the tax system.
So that they get all of the income from the people.
If there's no tax system in place, just a bunch of people armed with who knows what, and no central system for robbing them, then it's really not worth invading a stateless society.
And the way to counter that is pretty easy.
Other things people say, well, what are you going to do with sociopathic psycho killer murder bots in society?
Like just crazy people who want to go kill other people.
Well, there's no way to know for sure, except I think the first thing we want to do in a free society is not give these lunatics armies, and navies, and nuclear weapons, and rendition countries to send people to, and the right and capacity to pretty much create and start wars at will.
I think that would be the first thing that we would do.
We wouldn't give them prisoners in the prison system to beat up on, and we wouldn't give the cops every law on the book that they could arrest anybody at any time for just about any reason.
So the first thing we would do with such people in a free society is not give them access to political power, which is where they generally want to go if they're kind of evil and cunning, right?
So that's the first important thing.
Statism does not solve the problem.
of criminal murders.
What it does is it legitimizes them and gives far more power than any free society would ever give such a lunatic through the power of taxation and counterfeiting and money printing and the capacity to stop wars and so on.
So again, statism only makes the problem worse and it really won't be a problem in a free society.
Now, I was talking earlier about how when we design the healthcare system of the 22nd century, we won't have to worry about most of the illnesses that are around.
There may be a few new ones, but we can't even imagine how it's going to be.
But if we look at the past and we say, well, look at all the illnesses that we don't have to worry about, that they had to worry about 50 or 100 or 150 years ago, we'd say, well, we have these inoculations, so we don't have to worry about how to deal with polio anymore.
But the truth of the matter is that scientifically and psychologically and factually, we know how to inoculate human beings against the virus of violence, against the illness called evil, against the dysfunction called aggression.
It's very, very simple and it's been proven repeatedly.
All you have to do to inoculate human beings against The scourge of violence, of criminality, is to raise them without violence.
Aggression, violence, it's a language.
And if you grow up in a house speaking Mandarin, you're going to speak Mandarin.
And if you grow up in a house of violence, you're going to speak violence and you're going to act violence, for the most part.
And so if we don't teach kids Mandarin, they're not going to suddenly magically learn Mandarin from someplace.
They're just not going to speak that language.
And if they come across someone speaking that language, they'll go, huh?
I don't know what they're talking about.
So we raise children peacefully.
We raise them without spanking, without aggression, without bullying, without threats, without raising our voice, without screaming, without, you know, we just raise children without aggression.
They don't grow up speaking the language of aggression and aggression is no more part of the landscape of the future.
As polio is now, we have the inoculation to violence.
It's peaceful parenting, which is why I continue to hammer on this topic.
We have the inoculation.
So the society of the future that gives up on the ancient predations of the state is going to be a society populated by people almost completely raised without violence.
So they're not going to just out and start killing people.
There will be a few people who will do that because they get some brain injury or some brain tumor which changes their personality.
But we would deal with those the way we would deal with anybody else who had a medical ailment that was causing them to act out.
There would be restraint.
There would be all of these kinds of good things.
People say, how are you going to protect property in a free society?
Well, right now, probably 50% of your income is stolen from you by the state, and the rest of it is diluted and reduced in value through inflation, and you're sold off into debt slavery, and your kids are sold off into debt slavery, and their kids are sold off into debt slavery.
So I don't really think that you can claim that statism is doing a very good job of protecting property at the moment.
Because this is a general pattern, right?
People say, well, how is this going to work in a free society?
Which is just a way of avoiding the moral issue about whether it's right or wrong, to grant individuals the right and obligation to initiate the use of force against others.
Of course it's wrong.
Of course it's wrong.
We all know that's wrong.
So just deal with the moral issue.
Slavery is wrong.
It doesn't matter who picks cotton after we end slavery.
Slavery must be ended because slavery is immoral.
People say, how are things going to be done?
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter who builds the roads.
And we only have a society dependent on roads because governments all built the roads for quote free.
So we ended up with this car based society.
So to say that we need to continue this mistake by having all of these great roads in the future, I'd love to see fewer roads.
Love to see fewer roads.
And of course there were lots of private roads long before the governments came along.
How will the poor be educated in a free society?
There will be far fewer poor people in a free society.
When America was at its freest economically, from sort of the 1950s to the early 1960s, poverty rate was cut in half.
And the welfare state was put in to prevent people escaping from poverty, because more people come to the middle class, less support there is for the government, because people have the means to help each other to save for their own retirement and so on.
So the government had to intervene to prevent poverty from being eliminated to continue as a justification for the power of the state.
There'll be almost no poor people in a free society unless you want to be poor because you're writing the great free society novel or something.
So you don't really have to worry about poverty.
The idea that everybody needs to be educated for 12 years in a row of, you know, five by 8 chairs with somebody droning away and squeaking on a blackboard or a whiteboard for 12 years.
It's all nonsense.
Who knows how kids are going to get educated in the future?
Maybe they will educate themselves through the unschooling approach.
Maybe they will be homeschooled.
Maybe they will download their data through their eyeballs, like the Matrix.
I don't know.
Nobody knows.
That's the point.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
What matters is it's immoral to initiate the use of force against individuals in the form of property taxes to pay for education, in the form of income taxes to pay for interest on the debt used to bribe, for the money used to bribe prior generations of voters.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter what happens to the money after it is stolen.
It only matters that the money is stolen.
It doesn't matter what happens to all the slaves when they are freed.
It only matters that slavery is immoral.
It doesn't matter how the cotton is picked.
After we end slavery, don't it matter that we end slavery?
So the general pattern is, say, well, how will this thing be done in a free society?
Doesn't matter.
And who even knows if this thing needs to be done, and who knows what society is going to look like in a hundred years when all this comes about?
Doesn't matter.
So I hope that this is just a little introduction.
There's lots of great writing about a truly free society, which is, I mean, we're going there, we're going there, we're going there.
You can either, you know, get on the bus or get in the way, but we're on the way.
We are going to the promised land, brothers and sisters.
It's inescapable, it's irresistible, because the extension and expansion of human rights is always consistent.
You know, it goes to minorities, it goes to women, it's currently being gradually and grudgingly extended to children, and that is the final moral revolution.
It's going to go forward.
And the last thing that I would say is the protection of children in a free society.
Well, of course, children aren't protected at the moment.
In fact, they're harmed by government schools and government agencies.
So, again, we're not trying to reproduce a system of status perfection in a free future.
When children go for checkups, which they will of course in every society, brain scans are very easy and brain scans can very quickly see which children are being abused.
Abuse shows up pretty clearly on brain scans because it physically alters the brain.
So that's going to be, there's going to be an intervention.
Parents who are subject to this will of course be offered parenting classes and in return they will get reduced costs for insuring their kids' damages against others.
The schools, if schools exist in whatever form, are going to require that children be non-traumatized when they come in because otherwise it's going to take a disproportionate amount.
of the teachers time to deal with these people, these kids.
And so there's going to be lots of intervention that occurs really early because abuse to children are extremely expensive, in the hundreds of billions of dollars per country, extremely expensive for society.
And so all entrepreneurs want to help you reduce costs And so they will offer you reduced costs in the same way that if you take driver's ed, you get reduced insurance.
If you take parent's ed, you will get reduced insurance for your kids.
There'll be lots of early intervention, lots of ways of dealing with these things.
So I hope that you will look into this.
Sorry, this is such a brief overview, but I really appreciate your patience in this absolutely essential area and issue.
I've got some free books on a free society on anarchism or anarcho-capitalism, whatever you want to call it.
I don't think so.
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