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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:25:30

Freedom, Fascism and Statism - Stefan Molyneux Debates Sam Seder

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	Good evening, Polypop. Welcome back to TBD. Tonight, featuring Sam Seder and Stefan Molyneux, hosted, as always, by Hip Hughes.
	Take it away, Keith. Hey, guys.
	Welcome to Polypop's 12th To Be Debated.
	This week's episode is brought to you by Warner Bros.
	The Campaign. Starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianaris, and this is coming to DVD October 30th, and we have a debate for you.
	So let me introduce our guests.
	I think most of you guys probably know who these cool cats are already, but we have Sam Sater and we have Stefan Molyneux.
	So Sam, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do.
	Well, my name is Sam Seder, and as you can see from the end, this time I figured out how to do the lower third.
	I do a daily show called The Majority Report.
	It's live from 12 noon Eastern on a daily basis, and it's available as a podcast, and that's about it.
	I also do a weekend radio show, but it's not available online.
	And I have a YouTube channel.
	YouTube.com, Sam Seder.
	Sam, we're really lucky to have you back for your second TBD, and we're really lucky to have for our first time on Polly Pop, Stefan Malnews.
	So, Stefan, tell us a little bit about yourself.
	Well, I like long romantic walks on the beach, Frank Sinatra, and chilling out to Beethoven.
	And I run actually the biggest show in the world, Free Domain Radio, and you download.
	So I've got a YouTube channel, youtube.com forward slash Free Domain Radio, just in the middle of sort of a big speaking tour from Brazil all the way to Vancouver and Toronto.
	And I'm really, really happy to be discussing these most essential ideas with your great community.
	Well, I have to confess, guys, that many times I call myself the debate moderator.
	I don't know how much I have to really debate you guys, because I know a little bit about your histories, and I know You guys can talk to the cows from home in a really academic way.
	So I guess my first question, and I'm just going to let you guys take over, is really kind of a governmental philosophical one.
	What do you see, we'll start with you, Stefan, as kind of the role of government in the free market?
	I know it's a really broad question, but I know you have really strong opinions about it and a clear vision.
	So go ahead. What do you say, sir?
	Well, hopefully nobody's interested in my opinions.
	Anything I can prove will be of value, I hope.
	But the government, as we all know, is a group of individuals who claim and possess the moral right to initiate force in a given geographical area.
	The government is an ancient institution which was inherited from Stone Age tribes and inflicted by a wide variety of very nasty people throughout history.
	But it's one of these weird things that's old but escapes moral questions, right?
	So the other institutions which we inherited from prehistory, like slavery, the subjugation of women and children and so on, these have managed to be questioned and discarded.
	But as far as the state goes, you know, we sort of stare up to the apes at the beginning of 2001 staring up at that big giant obelisk just going, ooh, that's big and powerful and alien.
	And I sort of take Voltaire's approach, you know, an 18th century French writer who wrote a whole series, it was quite a popular genre back then, wrote a whole series of stories of what French society would look like to one of the, quote, savages who came over from the New World and examined it.
	And in the same way, I think it's really important for us to look at all of our institutions and question, relative to the generally accepted moral principles of society, whether they're good or bad or indifferent.
	And we have something in society called let's not initiate force against each other.
	You know, self-defense is very rare, but, you know, it's something which can be discussed.
	But we don't like the initiation of the use of force.
	Now, if we just expand this...
	called the NAP, the non-aggression principle.
	If we expand that to include all of humanity, then tragically, or perhaps wonderfully, the moral underpinnings and justifications for the state as a whole collapse, and we end up with a universality of ethics and a universality of the non-aggression principle, which allows us to examine the mind-bending but deeply exciting concept of a society where spontaneous organization takes the place of centralized coercion,
	because this cycle Of the rise and fall of states, the rise and fall of fiat currency, the inevitable collapses that are so repetitive in history of democracies and of the tiny little bits of free market activity that is generally taken over by corporate and financial fascism.
	Really interested in breaking that cycle, and I don't see any way that we can do that while we include the state as an unquestioned, centralized way to organize society.
	Sam, I'm going to turn it right over to you, but I think that's probably the most eloquent kind of definition of libertarianism I might have ever heard.
	Sam, you can respond directly or maybe start with your own philosophy.
	Well, you know, I think there's, I'm definitely in favor of questioning our institutions.
	I mean, I feel like I do that every day.
	I'm not sure that we have always had states, as it were, or governments in the way that we have, let's say, in, I mean, I know Stefan's from Canada, that we have in Canada or the United States.
	I mean, I think certainly throughout history we've had Feudal systems, which are maybe not necessarily spontaneously organized smaller communities, but I think it's certainly worthwhile of an endeavor to question these institutions.
	And to strive to make them more responsive and more effective.
	But I think at the end of the day, there's a reason why we have central authority on some level.
	And that is because as much as I would like that we all share this non-aggression morality, the fact is that history is borne out, that there's absolutely no reason to believe that everyone is going to share this at any given time.
	To the extent that we feel that there are other sort of competing codes of morality that, well, that we shouldn't have slavery, let's say, or that we should have some measure of equality amongst men.
	Perhaps even property rights, for that matter.
	You need some type of central authority.
	And, of course, these governments only exist to the extent that they meet some basic expectations of the people and the vast majority of people.
	I mean, this is how we have revolutions.
	And so I think there's value to it.
	And I think from an academic perspective, it's a wonderful...
	I think that's very problematic because when you begin to undercut the pinnings of government, when you begin to say that government as an institution is fundamentally wrong,
	you... You sadly begin to basically just create a vacuum of power, which at least in this day and age in the United States, I think what we're experiencing, is that's being filled in many respects by corporations, which, you know, they... In some instances, I guess, they do have their own paramilitary forces.
	But the fact that they don't have a monopoly on force is really no great shakes.
	As an institution, the corporation, I find to be something that needs to be curtailed.
	And government, I think, is the best instrument in which to do that.
	Go ahead, Sam. Respond directly.
	I'm sorry. Okay, so the idea that feudalism was a self-organizing system is, I'm sure, just a misstatement.
	I mean, it was very top-down and heavily inflicted, and the serfs were considered like crops to be bought and sold with the land and then kicked off the land during the enclosure movement.
	But the idea that voluntarism or the idea that we not only should...
	We can't morally have a government.
	You often hear this when you propose this idea, which is that, well, if everyone agreed to be nonviolent, then we could have that kind of system.
	But actually, quite the opposite is true, if you really think about it.
	There are significant advantages to violence in society.
	You get a lot of resources, you scare a lot of people into obeying you, the sort of ownership of human beings, whether directly through slavery, sort of secondhand through feudalism, or indirectly through taxation.
	The owning of other human beings' labor and the harvesting of human labor has been a constant threat.
	It's incredibly profitable.
	There's nothing better to own than human beings when it comes to gathering resources.
	So we have this drive and this desire and a great biological, if not moral, profit from the use of violence.
	It is our very tendency to want to use violence to achieve our ends that makes the state so dangerous.
	In other words, it's not that everyone needs to be good for us to have a state of society.
	We can't have a state of society because people And the bad people inevitably lie to the majority, get hold of the reins of power, you know, sell off the unborn for the sake of bribing current generations into voting for them, and you end up with this catastrophe.
	So the idea that property needs protection is...
	I would say is not the case.
	It's kind of a contradiction to say I have to create an entity which has the legal right to take my property virtually at will in order to protect my property.
	The maintenance of property rights is sort of another question.
	It certainly does not necessarily need a state.
	And the last thing that you mentioned was that the corporations.
	Ooh, the big C. Well, of course, corporations are a statist business.
	Franken-monster from hell.
	Corporations are not free market entities.
	They are specific personhood granted to aggregations of economic power.
	The general idea, I mean, this is very, I think this is fairly true.
	The general idea behind corporations is That it creates an entity of indirect taxation, so you tax the corporation, and in return for submitting to that taxation, you allow the oligarchies of power, the economic overlords, to be free of legal repercussions for their actions, right?
	So if the corporation does something wrong, you sue the corporation.
	You don't take the houses. So it gives them a legal shield, and in return, they're willing to pay for that, but it's fundamentally a fascistic, anti-free market institution.
	So something that the government creates, and then saying we need to have the government protect us from that which we create, to me, doesn't make a lot of sense.
	I mean, I appreciate what you're saying, but it sort of begs the question, I mean, where has this utopia existed?
	I mean, if there is an inherent benefit to people to exercise violence, I want your property, I'm going to take it.
	I want your labor, I'm going to take it by enslaving you.
	What do you propose Where the rubber meets the road.
	I mean, philosophically, yes, I can appreciate what you're saying here, but in the context of politics, which are very earthly, I don't know exactly what you're talking about in some respects.
	I mean, historically speaking, what you're talking about, as far as I know, has not existed.
	In any grand, in any significant scale.
	And, you know, I suppose it could, but you haven't really addressed the problem of the fact that there are going to be people who are going to come by and take We're good to go.
	But there's a lot of people who won't.
	And I mean, I guess I don't see the...
	I mean, maybe we have a different notion of what is moral in that world, but that's not exactly a place I would want to live.
	Well, this argument, and I know that this is a metaphorical trick, so I don't mean to put you in this corner, but it's an analogy that I think is worthwhile.
	So if you and I were debating 17th century abolitionism, right, the end of slavery, then your position would be analogous to saying, well, you see, slavery has always existed.
	You show me this utopia without slaves, and all that will happen is if the government doesn't enable it and regulate it, then...
	And people will just start enslaving each other left, right, and center because there's a slavery vacuum.
	And if the government doesn't manage it, then other people will just do it in a more violent way.
	But what happens, of course, is that when people generally accept and understand a moral principle, then there isn't a power vacuum right afterwards, right?
	So it wasn't like...
	Oh, sorry, in the long run, at least.
	So when slavery was abolished throughout most of the free world, and I I think it was only the U.S. that required a civil war.
	In Brazil, they just stopped catching slaves and it was all said and done.
	When slavery has ended, there's not a slavery vacuum.
	There's not a serfdom vacuum when you end serfdom.
	When you give equal rights to women, there's not this, I have to go and subjugate.
	It's not natural that we just will always subjugate.
	It's just that we have to keep extending our moral understanding of personhood.
	And we've, of course, extended it to minorities.
	We've extended it to slaves.
	We've extended it to serfs, to women.
	We're in the process of doing so to children.
	It doesn't create a vacuum.
	An extension of moral understanding is something that actually moves us up a ladder.
	It doesn't just shift us from one side to another.
	Understand that the initiation of forces is immoral.
	Sorry, go ahead. Well, certainly there have been societies that we can point to throughout the ages where slavery hasn't existed.
	I don't know that I can say the same for what you're proposing, but I think you've misinterpreted the idea of there being a vacuum in terms of controlling certain forces amongst us.
	I mean, we can actually achieve less slavery.
	In other words, I can have a state in the context of the United States that is free of slavery, let's say.
	Or I can have a region or there can be countries that exist while the institution of slavery may exist somewhere else in the world.
	And I would argue that to a certain extent, look, you know, there was a vacuum.
	I mean, to a certain extent, you know...
	I'm not sure where this clothing was made, but it's arguably made by slave labor.
	Maybe perhaps not in the exact same form, but there's a very good argument that much of what we enjoy in this country is a function of, while maybe we could quibble over what the payment is, but maybe it's indentured servitude.
	I think there's an argument that we haven't quite fully abolished that dynamic.
	But the idea of diminishing the amount of it in no way brings about something that is problematic.
	As we diminish the size of government, unless you're speculating that one day everyone's going to wake up on the same day, and say, no government, we'll just all self-organize.
	As we diminish the power of government, what we're diminishing is their ability to put a check on those forces in society that want to exploit other people The commons, if you will, all of our resources.
	And we slowly, and frankly, I'm convinced that's what's happening to a certain extent.
	So as we diminish the power of government, or we corrupt government, we're going into, we can contract the size of government if you want, but I don't know that we can ever get to a place where there is no government.
	I don't know how you organize, let's say in the United States, 300 million people In spontaneous groups of organization.
	Stephen, go ahead. Maybe you could describe what that looks like for us.
	Well, sure. Let me just address one thing, though, Sam mentioned, and for those who may not be familiar with the exciting, gripping economics behind it, the problem with the commons is the idea that everybody has sheep or cows around a central unowned area, and then everybody has an incentive to let their sheep or cows graze on that area, and it turns into something balder than my...
	But the problem, of course, is you don't solve the problem of the commons with the government, because the government isn't owned by anyone.
	And as we can see, the government exploits.
	The idea that you go to the government to save you from exploitation is, to me...
	It's not logical, not historically valid, not rational.
	The government, of course, is the greatest predation and exploiter in the world.
	The government is the one who can enter you into debts against your will.
	The government is the one who can...
	is the biggest arms sales in the world.
	The government is the one that throws people in jail at a rate in the U.S. that is now approaching the Stalin-esque gulag era.
	The government is the one that forces kids into these horrible...
	Brain-deadening public schools where they drop out rate, at least up here in Canada, I think it's similar in the U.S., it's close to 50%, and where the people who graduate need remedial courses to fill out a college application.
	The governments around the world in the 20th century, excluding wars, were responsible for the outright and direct slaughter of over a quarter of a billion people, not even including wars.
	That's just your average famines and all of that.
	And the U.S. foreign policy has killed 30 million people since the end of the Second World War.
	I agree. But these governments are not aliens.
	I mean, they are made up of individuals.
	And to the extent that they have used these institutions for immoral purposes or purposes that we would disagree with, you can also argue that governments have developed penicillin.
	Governments have freed slaves.
	Governments have diminished poverty.
	Governments have increased the health of its citizens.
	I mean, all of these things...
	I'm not arguing that governments only do good.
	And I don't know that if it's a...
	I believe that it's a...
	I mean, it's not even a question of...
	How we balance out whether or not government does good versus bad is a question of what is our better choice?
	And we're talking about this in very theoretical terms.
	I mean, I agree with a lot of what you said that is reprehensible about what governments have done.
	Religions, too, have also been...
	In fact, any...
	Organizations, groups, I mean, look, the KKK was also spontaneously organized by people, and they did not do good things either.
	I mean, any time I think people...
	No, no, no, the KKK was the militant arm of the Democratic Party.
	The KKK was a militant.
	Well, the Democratic Party is not a government.
	The Democratic Party is not a government either.
	It was one of multiple parties at that time.
	So however people organize together in one form or another, there's always potential for them to do immoral things because some people tend to be immoral.
	And the question is, how do we mitigate that?
	Well, you can't create a monopoly of force.
	You can't create a monopoly of force within society and expect it to be manned only by angels.
	Of course, that's not going to happen. When you create a monopoly of force in society...
	You can't create a dispersion of force within society and expect people to be angels either.
	Well, let's move out of the theoretical into something more practical, and I won't bore everyone with gruesome anarchic history, but there have been examples of multi-hundred-year societies that have existed without a state, medieval Iceland and Ireland and so on.
	Of course, you can look at something like eBay.
	eBay is one of the world's largest employers.
	Over 350,000 people get their full-time living out of working on eBay.
	And there's no government. I mean, they have a rating system or a reputation system, which is where people get their economic value from, and there's lots of competition as far as that goes.
	But to my knowledge, it's virtually impossible to resolve a dispute.
	But it exists on a platform that was developed by government.
	You mean the Internet? Yes.
	Okay, so we already have it.
	I mean, it's not like we blow up the roads if we don't have a government, so I don't see how that's...
	But it was, of course, only commercialized by the free market or by the remnants of the free market.
	Right. But I'm giving you an example of how 350,000 people can have hundreds and millions, if not billions, of economic transactions per year relying on rating, on reputation, and not...
	Requiring a central coercive agency to resolve their disputes.
	I mean, it's not a perfect system, but I'm just saying if you were looking for an example of one where that can work, PayPal has a resolution system that doesn't involve courts or the state.
	I definitely think we can do online auctions without, you know, an explicit monopoly of force.
	I mean, I think that you can't, I mean, I don't know eBay well enough, to be honest with you, and if you can continually engage in fraud, I would hope that eBay would prevent you from engaging in that in the future, and so they have the ability, I assume, to shut your account down.
	Which seems to me to be analogous, at least in the context of the eBay world.
	But the fact that eBay exists and that there were a couple hundred years in the history of what we would consider maybe...
	I'm sure also you could argue that people would just self-organize in certain periods in American history before it was America.
	But I don't think that there's anything that resembles a full-on society that has operated over an extended period of time that has functioned that well.
	I mean, I suppose if we went back to some type of agrarian society, it might be a little bit easier, but that's not going to happen either.
	Sorry, let me just finish this point.
	Sorry to interrupt. But this is the very exciting thing, I think, about modern technology and so on.
	I mean, I am not a primitivist in any way, shape, or form.
	I really like dentists.
	I'm a big fan of modern stuff.
	I mean, this technology included.
	But One of the great things about the modern economy is that we have such incredible value from participating in it and if we do bad things we can be ostracized or excluded From the immense value of participating in an economy, right? So in eBay, I mean, if you keep cheating people, you'll get downrated, you'll get complaints, and then eventually, I don't know, eBay will shut down your account.
	It's the same thing with PayPal.
	If you keep cheating people with your visa, I was listening to a lawyer when I was speaking at Freedom Fest.
	A lawyer was giving a speech about how he was down in South America.
	He got ripped off by a restaurant.
	Now, he goes back home to San Francisco.
	What's he going to do? Phone the Bolivian police and say, hey, this guy, nothing's going to happen.
	But he phones Visa and he says, these guys ripped me off and Visa investigated and just cancelled the payment.
	That's a way of a non-coercive interaction in the same way that down ratings or having your account suspended or cancelled in PayPal or whatever it is.
	There's such an immense value and wealth really in participating in a modern economy and we have a way of information sharing about cheats and liars and thieves to exclude them from that process that they really can't last very long and from an economic calculation standpoint it's way better to build your reputation and be honest.
	Now, I mean, does this Yeah, I'm not saying these are mutually exclusive propositions.
	Serial murderers and rapists and so on, but here we have a way.
	These aren't mutually exclusive propositions.
	I think that, yes, it's good that we have, you know, online rating things to sort of say, this is a bad business, don't go there.
	These guys are, you know, when they, I don't know, dry clean your jackets, they keep putting stains on there.
	But... But there's so much more to a society than these type of transactions.
	Okay, give me the list.
	We'll knock them off. Well, I mean...
	It was like a pragmatic example of something like a band of thieves or maybe a law and order issue.
	But Sam, specifically, what do you want to ask Stefan about, like an example?
	Well, I mean, how would we say, for instance, I mean, I'm sure you know about the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, which was, you know, some people credit it as being sort of the main impetus to create the EPA.
	This was a river that was literally catching on fire.
	And I suppose, you know, if we had the Internet at that time, we could say, don't light a match near the Cuyahoga River, or we could say...
	I mean, how would it work?
	Honestly, how would we, Stefan?
	There's a good example for you, Stefan.
	So explain how...
	I'm fine. Look, I know.
	Look, I mean, I'm just saying, oh, Sam, but I mean...
	Okay, look. I mean, the history of this is, I actually think, quite interesting.
	But so we all know about this terrible smog in the 19th century in England with these satanic mills and so on.
	But the true history of that is actually very interesting, that there were lots of apple orchard farmers and other kinds of farmers in England when these mills were going up and belching out all this filth.
	And common law is very clear, and common law is that which is developed outside the state to just handle disputes.
	The state usually takes it over and makes it really complicated and ugly.
	The common law was very clear.
	If you damage my property, you owe me restitution.
	If you cut down your tree and it hits my house, you go build me a new house.
	And if you throw all your smoky crap on my apples and make them unsellable, then you owe me restitution for that.
	And so what the farmers did was they would take all these big smokestack monsters to court And unfortunately, the government at that time was getting a lot more tax revenue from the capitalist people who were making all this crap than they were from the apple farmers.
	And so they simply said, well, we're not going to enforce that.
	That's excluded and so on.
	And whether they were bought off or there were campaign donations, it's the usual junk in a state of society.
	So the state actually prevented this stuff from coming into being.
	I can guarantee you that this was unowned land, right?
	The great problem with pollution is whether someone owns it or not.
	The government is the biggest polluter by far on the planet.
	Soviet Union, before it fell, had the most environmental regulations of any country, all of which were tossed by the wayside because nobody actually has a direct material investment to protect anything.
	So I guarantee you, this river was publicly owned.
	Nobody had... You know, you try doing this where there are a whole bunch of cottages, I mean, you'll get lawyers crawling up your armpits faster than a rocket goes to the moon.
	No, but wait a second. Stefan, Stefan, look, the idea that the river was publicly owned, no.
	There was a riverfront that was owned that was private.
	We see... For instance, I mean, if you want to talk about privately owned rivers, we see in just in mountaintop coal mining that takes place in West Virginia.
	You have privately owned lakes full of sludge.
	That basically are poisoning the earth around there for what will be decades.
	I mean, they're taking parts of these places and making them completely unlivable.
	But let's get back to the Cuyahoga.
	I mean, there was no EPA. There was no federal government that was dealing with this.
	The state agency was incredibly weak.
	What do you do?
	What do you do in that instance?
	You mean if somebody's polluting the land that you have?
	Well, I'm saying that the river was so polluted by so many different entities who all had access to the river, who had a riverfront, who probably owned part of the river that they were putting the sludge into.
	And it catches on fire.
	And none of those, I mean, unless you have a government that sets up the courts that says that this is in some way illegal, I mean, because, again, you can say about this idea of the apple orchards being poisoned, but doesn't it take a, I mean, who's going to, what entity is going to enforce this court?
	Well, I'll tell you what I would do.
	So let's just pretend I have a house that's backing onto this.
	What was it? The Cuyahoga River.
	Cuyahoga River. So let's say I've got a house in a free society.
	And, you know, I know that's begging the question.
	A free society, let's say that I have a house that's backing onto this river.
	And what I want to do is I want to buy insurance from some company or some organization or some group that says, I want my water to be clean because I like to swim there, right?
	And so I pay whatever, you know, 500 bucks a year or 200 bucks a year to make sure.
	And I try to get as many of my neighbors to do this as possible and so on.
	And, you know, we all have gatherings and we get together and figure that out.
	And what happens then is if junk and crap and three-headed fish and human body parts and bicycle wheels will never come sailing down my river, I call up the local, I call them dispute resolution organizations or DROs.
	I call it up and I say, listen, I'm getting all this pollution.
	And they leap into action.
	And I have an insurance policy which says if my river gets polluted, then you've got to clean it or you've got to move me to a really beautiful place or you've got to pay me a million dollars or whatever.
	And what happens then is this organization with this insurance company is going to be testing the water regularly because they have personal significant financial exposure if this pollution takes root and spreads in a way that the EPA doesn't.
	If something goes wrong with the EPA, nobody loses their house, nobody loses their income.
	Usually they just get a bigger budget.
	So you'd have a company that would be financially invested in...
	Keeping the water clean and would pay an enormous amount if it didn't.
	And then they would make sure. They would say, look, if they'd go buy land upriver, make sure nobody built anything there that was going to be polluting.
	If somebody started building stuff there, they'd say, hey, listen, we're going to pay you some money to not do this.
	We'll pay you to move because, you know, it's going to be cheaper for us than if you pollute the river.
	And these overlapping insurance companies are ways of insuring.
	I want people to have financial incentives.
	I don't rely on altruism.
	I don't rely on the better angels of our natures.
	Human beings, economically speaking, respond to incentives.
	And I want people who are going to make money if the river is clean are going to lose money if the river is dirty.
	That's the way you set up incentives in a rational society.
	Well, I mean, the problems with that is, one, it's predicated on the idea that we need to have clean water.
	You need to pay for it in terms of getting insurance.
	But I've got to say, just based upon what I know about insurance, that's a horrible business model.
	I mean, in this country, in fact, the federal government has to subsidize all the insurance for people who live on the coast in this country because they cannot get insurance on the private market.
	I find it impossible to imagine that an insurance company would actually say, like, we are going to insure you for a million dollars, let's say, I mean, if we can put a value on that, that your water will be clean there.
	That these finite resources that we all need in this planet will be clean.
	I don't know how you necessarily put...
	I'm sure they could put a dollar figure on it.
	And then Dow Chemical starts to dump the stuff in there.
	You know what? I mean...
	Maybe Dow Chemical finds it worthwhile to pay that million dollars.
	Aside from the idea that I think that's a horrible business model for insurance, I can't imagine that there would be anybody who would engage in something like that.
	On the flip side, you also have Dow that would step in and say, there's a cost of doing business.
	We're going to pay so that we can light the Cuyahoga River on fire.
	Well, okay. First of all, the wonderful thing about the free market, Sam, is that it's the combined genius of hundreds of millions of human beings.
	So the great thing is that it doesn't rely upon your capacity to imagine something.
	That's the wonderful thing about it.
	No, that's important. Speaking about my limits of my imagination, my imagination also, there is no free market.
	We'll get to that argument in a sec.
	We'll get to that argument in a sec.
	And second. To the free market question.
	Go ahead, Steph. Yeah, yeah. So, look, no, but I want to point out, the stating, well, I can't imagine how it can work, is irrelevant.
	I mean, it's irrelevant to the argument. Well, but no, but your point is that you like to...
	No, let me finish, let me finish.
	Don't finish, then we'll go right back.
	I mean, if we end slavery, yeah, you know, it's like saying, well, I can't imagine how the crops are going to be picked if we end slavery.
	Well, you know, if I said, well, in 100 years, there'll be these giant robot machines that will drive through the crops with these massive freshers and they will be running on the crushed tree juice from 30 million years ago, you'd just say, well, that's completely – but that's not a solution.
	But that's actually what happens.
	So our lack of imagination is no limit to what is technically possible or financially possible.
	Yeah.
	Go ahead, Sam. Well, sure, of course, right?
	So you could then...
	No, I understand.
	But as far as Dow Chemical or whatever, well, if they're going to have to pay tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, they're going to move somewhere else.
	I mean, of course, right? I mean, if they can equally move their plant anywhere, they're going to go to a plant place where they're going to be contained.
	And also, there's a whole community of people who really don't like pollution.
	I'm actually one of them. I've worked in the environmental industry as an entrepreneur for about 15 years.
	I really just like... I really dislike the degree that it's happening at the moment.
	But, I mean, Dow Chemical in a free society is going to be working in an environment of people who want their environment clean.
	And people will boycott them.
	People will downsell them.
	People will shun them.
	And companies will refuse to insure them.
	Well, no. But, Stefan, the sad thing is it doesn't take any imagination for me to know that this is not the case.
	I'm intimately aware with how Dow gets away with all sorts of these things.
	And it's not necessarily a function of...
	It is a constant battle with the EPA. There's a lot of regulatory capture.
	That's true. But, I mean, you say to me, your response...
	When I say to you, I can't imagine, and forgive me for saying imagine, I don't know that you can spell out to me the business model where an insurance company is going to ensure that massive corporations don't pollute.
	It's just a losing model.
	But aside from that, if I use your example about people who cannot imagine the Well, I would simply respond to you.
	What you need to do is imagine a government that is not corrupted by these forces.
	Okay, so now let's look at your utopian vision, because I think that's a very important point.
	And I've studied this stuff for 30 years.
	I may have missed something completely obvious.
	I'm perfectly ready to be schooled on this, because, you know, I and others who think like me, we're called utopians all the time.
	But provide to me an example of a government that hasn't grown, swollen, become corrupted, gone into debt, started wars, all this, you know, kind of nonsense.
	So what is sustainable, in your mind, in the examples of history for a state?
	I think you've just proven my point.
	My absence of being able to do that just shows that the idea that I could say as a point of argument, the idea that this is unimaginable for both of us, is no argument at all.
	The idea that it was unimaginable for people that slavery could go away is no proof, Stefan, that your vision is actually realizable in the real world.
	Wait a minute. Let's back up a second here.
	So I'm asking you saying, imagine a government that has not become corrupted.
	I was saying that. I was just mocking your mode of argument.
	That's all. I was doing the same.
	So everything that you're suggesting has ended in failure.
	Every solution wears a centrally coercive argument for a state.
	In history, you can't provide to me an example of one where that doesn't really pretty much end in catastrophe.
	Well, I mean, I think there are plenty of states in Europe that are not in catastrophe now.
	I'm sorry?
	Europe? I mean, have you seen their debt charts?
	Are you kidding? Well, I mean, what is catastrophic about this?
	Until you start to impose austerity on these people, where is the catastrophe?
	You think that the debt is, what, illusory?
	Well, I think, I mean, I think in certain circumstances the debt is not as dire as, certainly the American debt, but is not as far less of an issue than, I think, European debt.
	But I mean, you're saying that simply the existence of debt is a catastrophe?
	Well, when the debt begins to reach over 100% of GDP, and when the government has to force cuts on people who aren't prepared for it, which is going to harm the poor, or they print their way out of it, causing inflation, which also harms the poor, when they can no longer pay for the social programs everyone's begun to rely on.
	Yes, where you've got youth unemployment in Greece at 50%, with Spanish unemployment in the youth at 40%, where you have massively underutilized human capital, economic capital.
	I mean, yes, I think this is, what, 60 years after they slaughtered 40 million of their own citizens and all the way through the cold.
	I mean, this does not seem to me like a rolling chunk of success.
	Well, no, I'm not saying it's a success, but I mean, you're talking about, I think there are certain things, frankly, that Greece should do.
	I mean, I don't want to take this to Greece so we can talk about it in terms of the United States.
	I mean, I definitely think that we're problematic here, and I think the things that are more catastrophic, It would take place under some administrations versus others.
	But the idea, the existence of debt, I mean, there's plenty of examples in history where people have simply defaulted Okay, so if you default in Europe, then what happens is everyone stops lending you money, and you want to talk about a quick drop off the cliff of austerity.
	The governments are propped up by people printing and lending the money, particularly the European Central Bank.
	So if they default, I mean, the reason they haven't done that is that...
	You have to leave the EU, but let's take this back to...
	Which means that their exports are going to drop by 40% right away, and there's going to be massive unemployment, and people are going to start running out of food.
	This is not, to me, a high arc of a successful society.
	I mean, Iceland's done well with sort of basically sticking it to the banks in terms of the debt.
	But, I mean, there are examples of this.
	Iceland, I think, is obviously one that is not ending in catastrophe.
	But the point being that, getting back to my original point, the reason why I say to you...
	Imagine a government that is better is because the argument that people couldn't imagine slavery going away, and of course there were people who could, but the idea that perhaps I in a debate would have a tough time imagining a big...
	Tractors, yes, that's the case.
	I like to think I would have argued, take a little bit less in terms of profits, and just simply pay your workers on some level.
	But that is not an argument.
	I keep asking you about this, what I perceive as a utopian vision, and obviously others have said that to you in the past, and you've been obviously working on this for 30 years, even prior to the Internet.
	So give me an example.
	What is that in real terms?
	What does that look like?
	How do we get from where we are now to there?
	If it's going to require a mass...
	Guys, I'm going to interject for a second.
	I've been pretty quiet and pretty good because you guys are fascinating and you're all filled with facts.
	But we planned on talking about something like an entitlement, like a Social Security or a Medicare.
	So taking that model, and I'm sure that I'm going to let Stefan you go first, about...
	How do you approach that from a volunteerism or a capitalism society?
	How do you deal with the elderly who can't afford to live?
	And then, Sam, I'm going to allow you to try to defend the system, which I'm sure Stephan is about to take down.
	Go ahead, Stephan. Yeah, I mean, as far as trying to find a free society, just before we dip into that, it's as simple as looking in the mirror.
	I mean, Sam doesn't use violence to get what he wants.
	I don't use violence.
	Well, you probably do, because there's no way you could afford that much gel without shoplifting.
	But most of us do not use.
	It's just envy. You know that, right?
	But most of us do not use violence to get what we want, and the vast majority of people I've ever met in my whole life do not use violence to get what they want, with the sole exception that 80 to 90 percent of parents still spank their children.
	That's perhaps another topic, but most people, when they're adults, they don't use violence to get what they want, with the exception of people who use the large canon of political power to get things done.
	Now, as far as Social Security goes and so on, yeah, I think that it's very important that people live out their old age with as much dignity as possible and with access to cheap and effective health care and so on.
	And to that end, I think it's very important to have as wealthy a society as possible and, you know, the more freedom generally, the higher rate of growth of the economy, to give, you know, as much incentive to saving as possible, which means not have a centralized bank that keeps mucking about with the interest rates and screwing up the economy that way.
	We want to get rid of the idea of corporations so that corporations and the amount of money that gets herded into the stock market, literally at gunpoint, you know, the 401k plans and We're good to go.
	You can make a lot of money making short-term gain, long-term pain decisions as a capitalist.
	And having been in that world, I know this sort of fairly firsthand.
	So you want to have a stable economy with higher interest rates, encouraged savings for people.
	You want to have a system where people are rewarded for good health behaviors, of course, because 70% or so of people's healthcare issues are lifestyle choice related, if not directly caused by lifestyle choices.
	So yeah, you want to have a system where people are encouraged to save and to live well and live healthy.
	It should be pretty easy then for people.
	And also people should, you know, I generally encourage, you know, be part of a community, be part of a church, be part of a Lions Club, be part of some community.
	Don't live too much in isolation, sort of a modern thing, so that if you do run into trouble that you can't handle by yourself, that you have a community to fall back on.
	Stay close to your family, stay close to everyone around so that you have a buffer.
	But the idea that some centralized coercive agency is going to take money at gunpoint from you for your life and then magically return it to you in your old age in good condition is, I mean, factually completely false, right?
	Money was taken from everyone for Social Security for, what, 60 years now?
	There's nothing in the Social Security kitty other than a bunch of dusty IOUs, which is really just a noose around the economic neck of the next generation.
	So what we have now is pretty catastrophic, and I think that that comes because the use of violence may produce short-term gains, but in the long run, it always makes things fall apart.
	Well, first off, Social Security has been an incredibly successful program.
	I'm sure maybe there are more successful programs than Social Security, but I'm not aware of them.
	And the idea that the $2.5 trillion in the trust fund First off, A, you want to say that it's just IOUs.
	It would be the first time in the history of the United States where they would default on their obligations in that respect.
	I don't know really that, you know, in this society it's basically a piece of paper that is earning interest, and they're paying the interest every year.
	And even once the trust fund expires, Social Security will still pay out 78% of its guaranteed benefits until basically our kids are talking about their little kids.
	Little kids, their grandkids.
	And to the extent that you wanted to close that budget gap, it's quite easy in terms of just raising the cap on Social Security taxes.
	But it's a wildly successful program.
	The idea that there's just a file cabinet with IOUs, which was George Bush's famous line, is ridiculous.
	I mean, to the extent that I say I have something in the bank, I don't...
	They don't have my money in there.
	They simply have a ledger that says that this amount of money is Sam Cedars.
	And if they don't give it to me, then I, you know, obviously I go.
	I guess people either stop going to that bank in your world, although I'm screwed out of my money.
	But in this world, I rely on the monopoly of force of the government to say, hand over his money.
	And so, but the fact remains is that the money is there.
	Social Security is probably the most imaginable thing in the world.
	It's the one thing that people can count on, in this country anyways, to be there at the very least, like I say, 78% of benefits starting in 2033 until our kids are grandkids.
	I mean, so... I certainly will agree with Sam that it is about the most successful government program that can be imagined.
	On that, I think we are exactly on the same side of the fence.
	Of course, when the government takes money from you for your retirement over the course of a 40-year career, they spend it.
	They spend it and they replace the money that they took from you with treasuries, which is the promise to tax your kids to pay for your retirement.
	So they take your money, which means you can't save for your own retirement, or at least it's much harder to.
	They mess up the economy so that you've got massive stock booms and busts and housing booms and busts, which makes it really hard for people to have any rational prediction within the economy.
	And then when you retire, there's no money to pay you.
	The treasuries are simply a promise to tax the next generation.
	They're not actually assets.
	The government doesn't produce anything.
	The government only has the power to tax and print and borrow.
	It doesn't actually produce anything in the way that, you know, a private company does or semi-private company these days.
	So, I agree. They took money from people.
	They spent it to buy votes or do whatever they wanted.
	Maybe they spent it to, you know, bleach nuns habits.
	Maybe it was really good stuff. It doesn't matter.
	But the money is gone. And what's left is the promise to tax children.
	Now, the problem, of course, is this is a massive transfer.
	Well, yes, that's how it's just – yes, of course.
	Yes, I mean, that's exactly the way Social Security was designed.
	It was designed where current day workers essentially will be paying for future generations and current generations in retirement.
	That's exactly how it was designed.
	I think, Stephen, what you have to do is you have to dismantle the fear that Sam has that old people are going to die on the streets.
	I'm not sure. I don't want to dismantle his fear.
	I'd rather just deal with the facts of the situation.
	First of all, that's not how Social Security was designed, because there was no increased taxes on the young to pay for Social Security in the beginning.
	Social Security was supposed to be that you give the money to your government, it puts it in some place safe, and then gives it back to you when you're old.
	What happened was the money was taken forcibly from people, it was spent on stuff, and now we have this incredibly regressive tax for the most part, where the young, who have few assets and Thank you.
	Unfortunately, because of more government involvement, massive student debts and diminished job opportunities.
	I mean, as we know, in the great heyday of expanded government power, income disparities have increased.
	Wages have stagnated and fallen at the same time as we're looking at about a half a million dollars per household of debt piled onto people by the government.
	And now what's happened is all the young people coming out of college with big debts, fewer prospects, lower wages, now have to be taxed to pay for what is statistically the richest generation in history's retirement.
	This is completely unjust.
	You know, look, I agree with you to the extent that we should lift the cap.
	Right now it's at $110,000, and I think that the very wealthy in this country are getting away with it.
	But the fact of the matter is it keeps two-thirds of our elderly out of poverty.
	It will keep two-thirds of this younger generation out of poverty when they are senior citizens.
	It is the most reliable and effective Anti-poverty program, like I say, maybe perhaps in history.
	I mean, these are just the facts, and you can speculate that in the future that there's somehow going to be a problem, but there won't be unless all of a sudden everybody just stops working and paying their taxes, which I guess is imaginable, but highly unlikely in my estimation.
	So yes, it was designed, in fact, to function exactly like this.
	That's why when pensioners started getting money, there were less people paying into the system, and they had to ramp it up slowly over the course of 10, 12, 15 years as they started to add more people to it.
	I mean, you can question the validity of U.S. Treasury bonds, but it would be the first time that we've ever defaulted.
	And yes, In the future, we are in some way counting on continuing to take taxes from members of society.
	I mean, you and I have a disagreement as to whether or not that's oppressive.
	I still have...
	Don't have a sense outside of eBay of how the society works, how, frankly, even currencies would work without having some type of central body that has a monopoly on force, I guess, within the context of any given society.
	But I'm sure you've studied that.
	Go ahead, Stephan. Well, I mean, there's a lot there.
	I guarantee you that Social Security was not sold to the first generation with saying, we're going to tax you like crazy, and we're going to spend all the money on stuff now.
	There's going to be no money there, but we're going to tax your kids to pay for your retirement.
	It was not that. It's an insurance program.
	This is not how the program was designed.
	It's an insurance program. No, it's a Ponzi scheme.
	It's not an insurance program. No, it's only a Ponzi scheme, Stefan, if there's no one else paying into the system, and that will not happen.
	There will never be a time where there will be no more investment.
	Well, all Ponzi schemes last until nobody pays into the system.
	No, Ponzi schemes last.
	All Ponzi schemes last until people stop paying into the system.
	Hey guys, I don't want to push to a topic too quick here.
	I think that you guys have made some really good points on both sides of the fence here.
	There's a lot of comments that are kind of flowing below the video a little bit.
	Yeah, let's hear from the listeners.
	We could just approach one.
	Ski Bowl 100 points is out there, and he's yelling about prisons.
	So first to you, Stefan, I guess a lot of the commenters are asking...
	Like, what's the libertarian answer to prisons and law enforcement and kind of the anarchist capitalist model?
	It's asteroid mining, baby, all the way.
	No, I don't know. Look, I mean, crime is a huge plague in society, but crime is actually one of these things that science and psychology is pretty good at knowing how to solve.
	We just don't have a mechanism which is so frustrating in place to solve it.
	So criminals come out of abusive childhood.
	They come out of usually physical, verbal, sexual abuse within childhood, which is, of course, distressingly common prevalent, right?
	I mean, according to the statistics of self-reporting, you know, one in three girls and one in five boys experiences some form of Molestation as a child and spanking, as I said, which is not exactly the same as what's called rampant child abuse.
	But the aggression against the young is huge and problematic.
	We have incredibly dysfunctional societies with single moms and ghettos, and this is the same thing here in Canada as well with the native communities, just messed up stuff that keeps on producing dysfunctional people.
	We don't have a system in place at the moment where there is strong incentives to deal with or prevent aggression within the home, which leads to criminality, not inevitably, but not like...
	You know, it's not like everyone who's abused becomes a criminal, but at least to my knowledge, just about everyone who is a criminal was abused.
	So in a free society, it's all about prevention, not cure.
	And in a free society, of course, you would have ways in which you could have financial incentives for parents to parent well, right?
	I mean, if you want insurance for your kid's behavior, then you have to take The parenting class disorderly proved that you know the concepts.
	You can see in brain scans that children are being abused because it distorts, you know, the amygdala, the neofrontal cortex, all changes based upon child abuse.
	You would scan for that and you would provide remedial courses or you would face problems within your community.
	Schools would find it much easier to educate children who were brought up in a peaceful, positive, and rational manner.
	And therefore, if your child wasn't behaving well, your school fees would increase, but they'd offer you a discount if you took some parenting classes.
	You might have systems in place where because of that...
	Are there prisons in the libertarian society?
	And then we'll go right to Sam. Well, I don't know.
	I have no idea. I mean, one thing that could happen is if you do something significantly harmful to people, I imagine that there would be some sort of dispute resolution organization that would, you know, probably a group of them, like the way that visa companies all process each other's bills.
	They would all work together the same way the cell phone companies transmit each other's data.
	They would all work together, and if somebody was found guilty of some significant crime, they would have to pay restitution.
	If they didn't pay restitution, they would be ostracized from that society and taken out of the equation.
	I mean, and to pay off that restitution, they may go to, I don't know, they may go to a prison.
	I mean, I have no idea how it would work.
	But in the absence of child abuse, criminality would be, you know, like getting struck by lightning.
	It would just be so rare and so preventable that it wouldn't really be a factor in society.
	Sam's shaking his head no.
	Well, no, I agree with the idea that in the absence of child abuse and if children, you know, aside from perhaps any type of genetic distortions or You know, problems with chromosomes that may cause that.
	I think in the main, what Stefan is talking about is probably the case.
	But short of a magic wand, you haven't really outlined how this is going to happen.
	We have communities that are going to do brain scans on these kids, and then you're going to get some type of financial incentive.
	You used examples of telecommunications companies using each other's wires, all of which has been completely...
	Made possible because of government regulation and governments sort of coming in and using their monopoly of force to provide easements in situations so that everyone could get electricity or phone services.
	and in some instances which I disagree with, in some instances in which I do agree with.
	I'm not saying there's a panacea for anything, but from an operational standpoint, this is sort of the problem, I think, with the society that you're talking about.
	Now, I personally feel that much of what goes on in this country in terms of the prison industrial complex is a racket.
	I think the drug war is a tremendous racket, and I think the cost to society is immeasurable in terms of, well, it's measurable in terms of money, It's trillions of dollars, but it's immeasurable in terms of what it does in terms of laying waste to people's lives.
	Sadly, the vision that you're outlining is simply One that I don't think is in any way realistic.
	And when it comes to the actual rubber meeting the road of your proposals, they're glossed over.
	Look, I agree. If we had the capacity to make sure that every parent did not abuse their child, we could certainly eliminate a lot of, I think, sort of the dysfunction in society.
	But I I just don't think that that's possible.
	I mean, I think there's also, you know, I also like to think that some of the parents or the pedophiles are not, it's not just a question of if you paid me money, I would stop.
	I think that there are some people who are simply damaged and they're either damaged psychologically and I suppose you could go back generations I guess in your world, we would have to have some type of slow transition to the brain scan where the community incentivizes you not to abuse your child, and somehow we would stop this cycle.
	But frankly, it all seems, and I say this with all due respect, because you've clearly studied this stuff for many years, it all seems completely fantastical, and I get it.
	That there are other things in society that have seemed fantastical, but surely there are some things that are in fact fantastical.
	You know, I mean, surely there are some things that just because people couldn't imagine someone walking on the moon 75 years ago doesn't mean that the vision you're outlining is possible because I don't think that there's any real sort of operational aspects to this that you've been able to describe.
	Stephan, let's give you a chance to defend.
	Please, go ahead. Well, I'm not sure.
	I feel I'm in this no-true-Scotsman logical fallacy where I'm given 35 seconds to answer and then criticized for not pointing a complete society in the future that's very different from our own society.
	Yeah, of course. Look, I'm just a guy who would really like the non-aggression principle to be extended within the home, to be extended across society, to be extended overseas.
	It's a multi-generational change.
	I have no doubt about that whatsoever.
	It is a multi-generational change, and it starts, I believe, in applying the non-aggression principle within the family.
	I promote and am a very strong advocate of non-aggressive ways of parenting, and I've got dozens of experts on the show to make that case.
	But it's not unthinkable in any way, shape, or form.
	If you look back at history, the way that children were treated in the ancient Aztec world, where they were regularly slaughtered, look at the treatment of children in the Bible, for heaven's sakes.
	I mean, it's just monstrous.
	And if you look at the treatment, a psychohistorian, Lloyd DeMoss, has had a reward out there of, I think, $10,000 to anyone who can find an example of a child before the 18th century whose parents would not be immediately arrested for child abuse, for doing what the society considered normal.
	Now we have societies where spanking is almost, well, it's certainly outlawed, and it's very rare, and we have ways of dealing with children that are much more rational and positive.
	I mean, there's a huge amount of change that has occurred.
	So the idea that this is unthinkable, but it's gone from like...
	All under the auspices of governments.
	Yes, and it rains under governments too, but government doesn't cause the rain.
	I mean, you've got to get your cause and effect straight here, right?
	So there's been a huge movement towards better treatment of children.
	So saying that that can continue, I think is not at all unthinkable.
	Saying that we can get rid of the government before people become mentally healthier as a result of better changes, I think that's unthinkable too.
	Saying we can erase the government by snapping our fingers tomorrow is unthinkable as well.
	But, of course, as a philosopher, I try to take the long-term view and to have a goal that's more about, you know, let's repeal X or Y in the next election, or let's impose X or Y in the next election, which to me is just fiddling while Rome burns, which is a historically inaccurate metaphor, but I thought I'd throw it in.
	I think that's obviously, I mean, I think that's more than valid.
	And from a philosophical standpoint, I think that's wonderful.
	And, you know, I think I have a seven-year-old daughter myself, and I suspect that our parenting techniques are very similar.
	And, you know, when that day comes where we've been able to obtain, obviously, we've been able to progress this far under governments with the way that we treat our children.
	I mean, in this country, it was a government that imposed child labor laws.
	On society, which I think had quite a bit of benefit and provided, you know, there are some instances where, you know, perhaps maybe kids on farms should be able to work when they're a little bit younger.
	I don't know. But I think on the main, it was a great push forward.
	And our government provides food and protection for children in the meantime and probably increases the odds of those kids who can actually Deal with the abuse that they have dealt with.
	Maybe very small, but obviously we've seen progress through generations, like you said, under the auspices of government.
	My problem with the philosophy of libertarianism is that there's too many of your adherents, and not necessarily of yours, per se, but on my show, I invite libertarians to call me...
	You'd be surprised. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that because many people have told me that we should debate, but libertarians call into my program all the time, and I've debated other libertarians on other libertarian radio shows, and they want to take these ideas from the sort of philosophical realm and actually impose them On our society in a rather large way.
	They want to see what they call less government.
	Now, I don't know what that even means, less government.
	And they use these terms, more freedom.
	I don't know what that means.
	I know that if I got health insurance in the same way that you did in Canada, I would feel a lot more freedom in terms of what I need to do for work.
	You know, I'm facing COBRA payments starting in January, and they're going to cost me a tremendous amount of money.
	And, you know, it really has inhibited my life in a fundamental and real way.
	So I would much rather, you know, some type of Medicare for all in this country.
	And so that, to me, would enhance my freedom.
	We're really going to do Canadian healthcare?
	Okay, I can do that. Well, I don't really know Canadian healthcare.
	No, no, it's worth it because, I mean, everything looks good on the side of the fence, right?
	Well, look, I mean, the question of healthcare obviously is big and complex.
	Maybe we can reconvene for that.
	And I'll just give a short thing and then we'll go to our listeners because I really want to get some feedback from the people watching.
	But healthcare was, you know, there were these great worker societies at the turn of the last century.
	They're called friendly societies. They lasted sort of up until the end of the First World War where workers got together and they pooled all their resources and they bought healthcare for everyone.
	And it was really fantastic.
	You could get a year's worth of health care for a day or two's wages.
	And what happened was the doctors were really unhappy that their services kept being bid down by these collective groups of workers.
	So they went to the government and said, we need licenses, we need restrictions, we need controls.
	And since the wedding of the medical industrial government complex, costs have simply gone through the roof.
	I I mean, even in the 1960s, a hospital stay would cost you a couple of days' pay and insurance was pretty cheap.
	What's happened, of course, is as doctors have gotten more involved in government and as government has gotten more involved in healthcare, costs have just gone up and up.
	You know, in the U.S., like more than 50 cents of every dollar is spent by the government in healthcare.
	Governments licensed doctors, governments licensed nurses, healthcare practitioners of every kind.
	And governments have hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations.
	Governments run this crazy tort system where you can get sued for putting a dot wrong on a form.
	I mean, it's just a really bad situation, but I think that we can't reasonably say that as government involvement has grown and grown, to push all the blame of that upon the vestiges of the free market I think is unfair.
	But anyway, if we wanted to get to some...
	Well, I know that Medicare is far more efficient than private insurance in this company in terms of In this country, in terms of how much every dollar is spent on actually delivering care.
	And the cost of medical care grows at a slower rate under Medicare than it does in the private insurance market, very much because it's that same process of people banding together and driving down costs, which is why I would love to see Medicare for all in this country, or at the very least an opportunity to buy in at an earlier age, if possible. But it's...
	Seems unlikely. Which means you'll just get rationing by the state instead of by the market.
	Anyway, so we got some stuff from the listeners.
	Do we have questions or comments? He muted himself, so I'll just pretend that I'm him.
	Let me just go over to this. Well, I think you're right about that, but I think your point about rationing by the state instead of the free market is true.
	I think there's definitely a problem there, except for that seems inevitable.
	And frankly, when we see rationing by the market, it is far more profit-driven than it would be under a government.
	Now, you could argue that it opens up the opportunity for some form of corruption and whatnot and corporations influencing more power.
	But, I mean, if we have the ability to diminish government, I would certainly like to diminish the rights of these corporations, which you very...
	Very correctly, in my mind, is a creation of government and therefore can also be ended by government.
	Yeah, and I mean, of course, I've heard you speak about this on other shows, and I mean, we might as well, well, our host, I don't know, changes his suit, maybe he was sweating.
	But I think something that we can agree with, although...
	I'd probably still go further than you would.
	I mean, this monstrous soul leprosy of the military-industrial complex is one of the most damaging things that happens to any...
	I mean, to me, it's a kind of tragic cycle, just to keep it really brief.
	And I've seen this happen before.
	It happened with France.
	It happened with Germany. It happened with England.
	It's happening with America, where you get some little bits of...
	Less interference in people's right to voluntary and do business with each other.
	And this produces a lot of growth.
	This happened in England in the 17th century.
	They were the first to experiment with free trade and getting rid of all of the crazy limitations on crop use and sales of the medieval period.
	They got, oh, look, we got all this money.
	Woo! And then what happens is the government says, ooh, lots of money.
	Let's start spending. It's like Greece when they get to hook onto the credit rating of Germany.
	Let's start spending. And usually what happens is you start an empire because you've got all this money from the free market.
	And then the empire reaches over the free market, collapses on top of it, and you end up really crushing that which fed you.
	And this is why freedom is such a challenge.
	I remind libertarians of this all the time.
	They think that, well, first of all, they think you can go back to 1776, and that was a great society, which I guess it was if you weren't black or a child.
	Or a native or a woman.
	I mean, that's not, you know, any kind of positive, you know, role model for me.
	But also they think if you go back, it won't just go forward the same way.
	As long as you have a state, if the state is small, then you get more freedom, more economic growth, which means a state can then hoover that up and start an empire.
	And if the state is big, everyone's miserable.
	So anyway, I think our, did our dude unmute?
	I wish I could accuse. Anyway, sorry.
	If you wanted to mention something on that.
	But I agree that this military-industrial complex is just monstrous.
	And the biggest arms sales in the world come from Western governments.
	And it's just, I mean, imagine the police arming Europe.
	Well, we've seen that too, right?
	Yeah, I mean, we're in agreement with that.
	I mean, I think ultimately for me, the answer to a broken or flawed government isn't no government.
	It is to work and put, and this is what I like to think I do at least, Put your energy towards fixing it and making it better.
	I mean, in this country, we've certainly seen where the pendulum has swung in a certain direction, and my hope is that it can change about 40 years ago, frankly, right around the time of the Cuyahoga River catching on fire for the final time.
	It had done it multiple times before, and the development of the EPA in this country, the Chamber of Commerce Commissioned a white paper by Lewis Powell, which is popularly known as the Powell Memo, and it developed essentially a network of reactionaries and corporations who then made a huge push to roll back government influence.
	Powell ended up ultimately sitting on the Sitting on the Supreme Court, was appointed by Richard Nixon.
	And since that time, we've seen a stagnation of wages in this country.
	We've seen a dissolution of unions in this country.
	We have seen an increase in poverty in this country.
	We have seen an ever-creeping regulatory capture in this country.
	And it's been very problematic.
	And... I guess it's possible at one stage we get to the point where I see that the only solution is in some way to I mean, again, it's perhaps my failure of imagination as to this alternate solution.
	But in the meantime, the idea is to fight back against this.
	Ultimately, again, I think I was alluding to this earlier, that the concept of smaller government It really, in my mind, opens up a vacuum for more corporate ability to corrupt that government.
	We see it on a local level.
	We have two states right now where there's a lot of people who are protesting against the XL pipeline, which has been deemed a common carrier, although it's not carrying anything to the United States.
	It's just carrying stuff through the United States.
	And so the state of Texas was rather easy for them to buy off, and now they've taken people's property through eminent domain, which I'm sure I would imagine you have a problem with.
	Well, eminent domain, yeah, I mean, it's just taking stuff through force, right?
	I mean, less government, I mean...
	There's this thing, right? So people think that voluntarism means no rules.
	What it means is no rulers.
	What it means is no centralized coercive agency within society.
	The problem, of course, is I think it limits our imagination.
	I don't mean yours. I think I was a very imaginative guy.
	It limits our imagination in solving problems.
	You know that old saying that, If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
	And our solution to every social problem seems to be these days either pass the law or find some new agency.
	Oh, we've got problems with security.
	Let's have another Department of Homeland Security like we didn't have the CIA and the FBI and the military and all of this stuff.
	It just seems to be if we have a problem, let's have more government.
	I think the idea that the U.S. government has gotten smaller over the past 40 years I think is not correct.
	And the other thing too is that corporations are nasty, but man, The unfunded liabilities that the U.S. has taken on are upwards of $70 trillion on a $15 trillion a year economy.
	The corporations are nasty in some ways, for sure, and I don't like them.
	I'm sorry? What are you including in that $70 trillion worth of unfunded liabilities?
	I've heard that number before, and as far as I know, it projects Social Security and Medicare out by 70 years to the end of the century, but it presumes that nobody's going to be paying into the system during that time.
	No, this is...
	I'll just look it up here, but the way I've read about it is that the unfunded liabilities are everything that the government has promised that it does not have the money based upon current projections to pay for.
	I know what that means, but...
	If there's no money coming into the system, that's including the money coming into the system.
	I'm sorry, actually, it says here $84 trillion.
	That's it. But $84 trillion, what does that include?
	There's only 12%, 15% of the U.S. budget is discretionary spending.
	In other words, the rest of the budget is made up either in defense or in Social Security and Medicare.
	The idea that we have a $70 trillion or $84 trillion unfunded liability We can throw out that number, but unless you can tell me what it is, I mean, because I've seen it as adding up the liabilities that we project for Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, and it presumes that no one's paying in.
	I know what a liability is.
	I know what an unfunded liability is, but I've looked into that number, and I've seen it on right-wing sites, but unless you can tell me what it is...
	Sure. Well, I mean, it would also include things like public sector pension plans that are unfunded because, of course, they took big hits in the recent sort of financial crash.
	And, yeah, but include, I think the healthcare ones are fairly substantial.
	But let me just look it up.
	Most of the state pensions at this point have recovered, not totally, but significantly, and you're right.
	It was a function of not so much that they were underfunded as much as they took a hit in the stock market.
	It's quite possible the stock market doesn't continue to grow at the supposed whatever it is, 6% or 8% annual rate.
	But those are state pensions for the most part.
	And yeah, it's a function of the economy.
	I mean, if we have an economy that functions like the economy is functioning now for the next 70 years of that horizon of those underfunded liabilities, yes, we're going to have problems.
	I would agree with that. All right, so the federal government faces unfunded liabilities totaling $84 trillion with more than $30.3 trillion owed to public debt holders, federal employees, and current...
	Oh, yeah, okay, so it's public debt holders, right?
	So people who got treasuries and all that bonds and all that.
	And Social Security and Medicaid benefits.
	So overall, the fiscal imbalance is equal to five points.
	But that presumes that people aren't going to be paying into Social Security and Medicaid, and that's a fallacy.
	Unless everybody shows up at age 65.
	No, I mean, I can tell you, I can tell you almost verbatim what the Social Security Trust Fund report is.
	And I can tell you that it is completely funded until 2033.
	And then at that point, just based on the revenue, it does not come out of the general fund.
	It is completely separate to a system.
	Just based on the revenue it takes in at 6%, 6.2, whatever, 1% on workers, 6.1% on employer, that will pay itself 78% of promised benefits.
	But it's only funded, you can only call it funded if you don't count a treasury, if you count a treasury as an asset rather than a liability.
	The trust fund is going to run out in five or six years.
	It doesn't matter. If you want to say that the treasury bills are just worthless pieces of paper, then you're at 78% of benefits just based upon the amount of people who are working and paying into the system.
	I didn't say that. I said they were a liability.
	Yeah, no, I understand that, but you asked me to get you the facts.
	So in 2011, the federal government reported owing $10.2 trillion in public debt, accrued federal employee pension and other retirement benefits of $5.8 trillion, and other federal liabilities of $1.5 trillion, totaling $17.5 trillion in liabilities, or more than 117% of GDP. But they're only unfunded if you assume that nobody's going to pay taxes in the future.
	Yes, that's... Well, let me just keep going, because you're absolutely right about that.
	When Social Security and Medicare payments are owed to current retirees are counted, $12.8 trillion is added to federal liabilities, bringing the total to $30.3 trillion, or 200%, of GDP. Isn't this so exciting?
	What a great show to read blogs.
	I'll read news online.
	and the remaining expected obligations to non-retirees for Social Security and Medicare, along with other federal obligations, and the tally rises to nearly $84 trillion.
	If policy changes aren't made to meet these obligations in the long run, and this is a nonpartisan report, at least according to this news site, the government would have to raise taxes by 30% from its historic 50-year average of 18% of GDP.
	The growth of the economy will slow as a result, making it more difficult to meet the federal government's unfunded obligations.
	The report states.
	So, yeah, I mean...
	Who put out this report?
	I will tell you in just a sec.
	I mean, this is the Nonpartisan National Center for Policy Analysis.
	So, I mean, I don't know about them.
	It's called the Nonpartisan National Center for Policy Analysis.
	This isn't my, I just happen to type it in and whatever, right?
	But the fact of the matter is Social Security.
	Social Security, you may have an argument that there's a liability, but the only way that it's not funded is if you assume that people are not going to be paying into Social Security until they get 65.
	Only retirees Well, there's a disability aspect to Social Security, but the great majority of it is for retirees.
	You can't be 65 or 67 and retire unless you've been working during that period of time.
	And so the idea that it's underfunded is a complete misunderstanding of the way that Social Security works.
	Sorry, the argument against that would be to say or to point out that people don't pay into Social Security.
	What happens is they pay into a general fund.
	The government spends that and then replaces what's in Social Security or what was paid for Social Security with the Treasuries, which are a liability.
	I mean, I suppose you could argue that at some point, and you could argue that people are looking for more services than they're getting out of government.
	And so the government is raiding the Social Security Trust Fund.
	But the fact of the matter is that statutorily in this country, the Trust Fund, the Social Security, does not come out of the general revenues.
	And it is...
	I mean, to the extent that the U.S. government borrows against Social Security, I mean, it has the same value as anybody who buys Treasury bonds.
	I mean, we hear quite a bit in this country about how we're going to owe all this money to China.
	Well, frankly, why are we concerned about owing this money to China if we're afraid that we're not going to pay ourselves?
	I mean, you can't have it both ways.
	Buys Treasury bonds. Yeah, I mean...
	Is he back?
	Good job, moderator!
	Yeah, actually, we just said...
	I'm moderating myself with a watermelon.
	You know, you can't have it both ways!
	Is he back? I think he muted himself.
	We can't hear you. I mean, so, you know, those figures, like I said, they're counting the liability, but yes, they're underfunded because those people haven't reached age 65 and haven't been working for 40 years yet, but presumably they will if they're ever going to retire.
	All right, gentlemen. I think we've circled back.
	We'll settle this entitlement argument this evening.
	You know, this has been a very stressful interview for you, our conversation, because clearly your hair has all come out.
	It's been terribly stressful.
	I don't have anything left.
	You know, you're just clawing at it like a cat in a bag.
	Well, gentlemen, I think it's about time to wrap this up.
	Do we have any... I'm happy to take...
	All right.
	I don't know if we had any yearning burnings from the audience.
	I'm happy to answer a question or two.
	The question was, how do we turn towards non-aggression without regressing into statism?
	Gently, with a rose between your teeth and some heavy rap playing in the background.
	Well, my sort of argument, and I recognize that ideas can change the world, but it's a little bit like a slow breeze turning a supertanker.
	It does take its time.
	My focus, and I'm sure that we can end on a note of agreement here, I think that as you said, Sam, I'm a stay-at-home dad with a three-year-old.
	Your daughter is seven, and I'm sure we raised them reasonably and peacefully.
	The non-aggression principle is great to talk about when it comes to how to organize society as a whole.
	It's certainly not imminent in that way.
	You know, it's all revolutions.
	It's always earlier than you think.
	But there's so much that we can do in our own lives to apply philosophical principles of reason, negotiation, non-aggression.
	We can do it in our personal lives.
	We can do it in our business lives.
	We can do it in our online lives.
	We can do it with friends.
	We can do it with our pets.
	We can do it with whoever, where we make a commitment to not use aggression, to not use violence, to not use verbal aggression or whatever.
	We can make that commitment.
	That we can achieve. That old statement from the environmental movement, I think, is fantastic.
	Think globally, act locally.
	We can all make a commitment to nonviolence.
	That will not change the world tomorrow, but, you know, like the tortoise and the hare, it is those slow steps that I think will bring us to a world where we can say goodbye to organizing society as we have inherited from a most brutal history around a central coercive agency and look at finding ways to resolve social problems without the appeal to force that is innate in the call to government.
	Yeah, I agree with most of that.
	I would say also in the meantime, though, I think we need to attempt to influence our government and uh...
	make it more uh...
	make sure that it is uh...
	providing more justice uh...
	and frankly you know from my perspective economic justice uh...
	and that uh... we need to broaden our perspective of what uh...
	freedom is to to live fulfilling lives uh...
	that if we can actually uh...
	gain more freedom in some respects uh...
	by uh...
	having uh... government in least in this country uh...
	it's it's happened to a certain extent in canada uh...
	but recognize that uh...
	Healthcare should be a right in a civilized society.
	That should not be contingent upon the luck that you have based upon what zip code you were born into, who your parents were and what advantages they had and their parents before them.
	It should not be a function of your ability to pay, and neither, frankly, should a good clean air and clean water and Real food should not be a function exclusively of your ability to pay because we all know that You know,
	in this country anyways, we can predict how much money you're going to have with an incredibly accurate rate just based upon literally what zip code you're born in.
	And that's a shame.
	We need to expand the opportunity for people and not just the opportunity, but frankly, in some instances, the outcomes.
	All right. Love the ideas all around.
	And thanks to Polypop and thanks to Sam.
	It was a real pleasure. Yes, thank you guys.
	And Stefan, it was a real pleasure. Like I say, a lot of people have told me that we've got to get together for a long time.
	All right, well, thank you everybody for joining us.
	And don't forget to like and subscribe to Sam's channel, to Stefan's channel, and of course to Polypop.
	If you're watching on Google +, this video will be available there.

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