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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:54
Love it or Leave it! - A Rebuttal
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Alright, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
This is going to be an unapologetic rant fest against one of the most retarded arguments.
And there are more than a few.
But one of the crown jewels in the retarded arguments for statism is the love it or leave it kind of argument.
Which sort of goes something like this.
She... If y'all don't like the way things are done around here, you can take your skinny old white ass, get down to Somalia and see how you like it without no government to tell you what to do to keep you safe from the robbers and the rapists and the pillagers and those who dare to violate your intellectual property.
You kiss the soil or you take off.
In one of your little futuristic anarchist jetpacks.
Why don't you take yourself off to medieval Iceland or medieval Ireland if you like it so much.
You get yourself a bucket of leeches for your average pain in the ass, which you are now to me.
There are people who fought to defend the freedoms that you get to spit on because they shed blood to keep you safe from everyone who would stop you from presenting your opinions forward, which are an insult to those who protect you for the ability to protect your...
I believe you may in fact get the idea.
There is of course a pompousness, a belligerence, a...
Wonderful, brain-dead, cannonball-weighting of all the momentum of dumb art history in this.
How difficult is this argument to rebut?
Well, not really very difficult at all.
And all the arguments that are easy to rebut that have lasted a long time Have an enormous weight of emotional abuse and emotional history.
I mean, the only reason that people believe this is because this is a family that they grew up in, right?
My house, my rules.
I pay the rent out around here.
You do as I say, or you find yourself some other place to live, youngin'.
And, of course, it's reinforced in the schools and so on, right?
Once you get the government to provide resources to children, then the children will have an innate tendency to bond with said government and then defend it in the same way that all the young defend their parents, particularly humans.
So how tough is it to rebut?
Well, I think a good way to rebut it is an analogy.
And there are two analogies that come to mind, a short one and a long one.
Let's flip a coin while we're driving and figure out which one we should do first.
Oh dear, the coin ran into my eye.
So let's do the short one first.
Listen here, Mr.
Warthurg. If you don't like it in this here zoo, you don't like it in this here cage if you all want to be free and not be in a cage.
Well, I invite you to go and move to any one of the other cages in the zoo and see how you all like it.
Maybe even you can move to another zoo on the other side of town or some other town somewhere else on the other side of the country and go to a cage in there.
If you don't like the cage that you're currently in, maybe you can go to another cage, see if you like it better!
I believe these accents are going to hurt my face.
And, of course, the sensibilities of anybody who knows accents.
I am no Meryl Streep. I don't pretend to be.
But... Saying to an animal in a cage in a zoo that you are welcome to go to another cage...
If you wish to sample freedom is obviously ridiculous.
An animal who doesn't want to be in a zoo, the opposite of being in a zoo is being in the wild, not being in a zoo.
And to say that you must like your cage because you don't want to go to another cage is not comparing being in a cage to being free.
It is comparing being in a cage to being in another cage.
What?! What, y'all don't like Prison Cell Block 666?
Well, son, what we have here is a failure to elucidate.
Y'all don't like Prison Block 666?
Y'all are free and welcome to get on a paddywhack and go to the cell block 667 or 668 or maybe even 665 if you're feeling particularly risk-averse.
Y'all can solve what it's like in another prison block.
Bet you want to come crawling back to this prison block now that you got all your friends here.
You know what the food's like. You got your wet spot at the gym you can work out in.
Oh, you don't want to go to another cell block of which ye know little?
Well, I guess you must love this cell block more than being free and not being in a cell block stall now, don't you?
Right, we would all recognize that...
If a man was told, who was in prison, that he had been unjustly convicted, that DNA evidence had exonerated him, and he was now free to go to a prison cell across town, he would say to the parole board, this word freedom...
I do not think it means what you think it means.
Right? Going to choose another cell is not the same as being set free from prison, right?
And the love it or leave it argument is basically saying, if you don't like statism, then you are free to choose another country which is statist.
Right? Right? I mean, just take Somalia out of the equation for a moment.
Somalia is not an anarchist society.
Somalia is a failed state society.
And it still is in many ways more successful.
It certainly is more successful than it was when it had a government, and it's more successful than most of the statist countries in most of the metrics around it.
And of course, the argument, love it or leave it, originated from Long before there were even quasi-stateless opportunities that are perceived.
And of course, the point is to bring a free society to you so that you can enjoy all the benefits of having grown up in a country, of having friends, of having family, extended family, and of...
Having all your business contacts, having familiarity with the language, with the culture and having a home and all of that, right?
The point is to bring freedom to you, not to say that you're free if you have the opportunity to go to another country and leave all of the value and relationships and history and contacts behind, right? Let's say there was some stateless country.
Even saying, love it or leave it, you know, you should go to this stateless country.
Let's say that Mauritius became a stateless society and you could just go move there.
No immigration restrictions or anything like that.
Well, first of all, there would be a rush of people who wanted to move there, which would drive the prices of real estate and all that enormously high.
And also it would be, you know...
A slight problem, to say the least.
But of course, given that it's very unlikely that all of your friends and family and business contacts and all that would want to move to Mauritius, you would then have to go probably on your own or maybe with your wife or with your wife and kids.
And that's not really that great, right?
Or maybe your wife doesn't want to go.
Well, you know, that's – and of course, trying to leave is tough because there's usually restrictions on what you can take with you, right?
I mean, the U.S. will tax you anywhere you go in the world and may even impose a tax if they believe that you have fled the country for tax reasons, which means whenever they want because there's no objective way to know, right?
So, it's similar to giving...
Let me launch into bad accent time again.
Similar to giving a speech to a slave.
Similar to this. Well, it ain't slavery so much now, is it, boy?
Because y'all can try and escape through this underground railroad, which I don't believe actually does go underground.
I think there's something kind of funny going on with that little nomenclature.
Now, it's true that the Underground Railroad will pretty much only take you.
You can leave your wife and kids behind, your mother and your papa, and your friends, and your aunties, and your uncles, and your first, second, third, and seventh cousins.
You can leave it all behind, and you can make your way through the Underground Railroad and get to a place I believe is called Canada, where they grow donuts in igloos, if I remember my geography correctly.
So... Y'all must be happy to be a slave if you don't want to take the Underground Railroad by your lonesome all the way up to Canada and maybe be attacked by...
I think they got beavers about nine feet tall there and their teeth are made of swords.
So if y'all don't want to go up there and pretty much freeze to everything you touch for about six months of the year on your own with nowhere to go and no one to know...
And all the hazards of going through the Underground Rail, well, I guess you choose to stay here, which means you must love being a slave.
This obviously would not be the speech of a great emancipator, right?
But the speech of somebody who wants to justify slavery by providing the pretense of a choice to his slaves.
Look, there's an impossible choice.
You have chosen to stay here, therefore you must be in love with slavery.
But there's a better analogy, which is the divorce analogy.
Now, we're born into governments, and we are indoctrinated by governments.
But let's say...
That we wished to reform divorce law to match the love-it-or-leave-it paradigm.
Because, you know, I mean, the love-it-or-leave-it paradigm is the best, right?
And so, I'd like you...
I'm not going to do... It's going to be a long speech.
I'm going to do a funny accent for it. But imagine...
Okay, maybe Scottish with a blend of Jamaican and a tad bit of Klingon.
No, no, forget it. Anyway, but...
Imagine running for office and going to the National Organization of Women, sort of conference for the year, going there and making the following speech.
Ladies, ladies and ladies and manginas, I would like to propose to you that the existing divorce laws are not in accordance with the highest moral values of love it or leave it.
So I wish to reform divorce laws to reflect and empower women in the following way.
First, women must be married to the person that the government chooses at about the age of five.
In the same way that we put children into government schools and begin indoctrinated and forcing a relationship between the state and the child at about the age of five.
So if this is good enough for education, then by golly, it must be good enough for marriage, which is even less important than education, right?
We say that everybody needs to be educated, but we don't say that everybody must get married.
So if everybody needs to be educated through a compelled relationship with the state at about the age of five, then it would seem to me that this would be great for women too.
So the government will choose for them a suitable man in the neighborhood to marry the five-year-old girl off to.
Now, the enforced relationship...
With the teacher, the status teacher and the child, it has a difference of at least 20 years.
So naturally, we would want the 25-year-old men to be marrying the 5-year-old girls.
And then we will spend the next 12 or 13 years indoctrinating the girls on how wonderful it is to be married...
By the state through the use of force to somebody not of their choosing, of course, in the same way that we indoctrinate the children on how great it is to be educated by the state in a school and a teacher not of their own choosing.
So, you know, we genuinely and generally believe that by the time these five-year-old girls grow up, they will be perfectly satisfied and they will in fact even defend and advocate the practice of marrying through force Girls off to men, because we'll have had 12 or 13 years, as I mentioned, to indoctrinate them on how virtuous this is.
So they will defend this practice vociferously, vehemently, vehemently.
There we go. And this we can consider, of course, a wonderful, great thing in advance to society now.
Now that I am assured, since you all are big fans of public schools, that you have no problem And we don't mind banning sex.
Of course, there are only five, right?
I mean, we ban sex between teachers and students, though.
It still happens from time to time.
So we have no problem with the marriages banning sex with the adults and the five-year-old girls that we marry off.
I have no problem with that. I mean, who knows what's going to happen behind closed doors, just as in schools, since public school teachers molest, harass, and rape school children a hell of a lot more than...
Priests do, but it's banned, of course, in all situations, so we'll ban it.
That's fine. We obviously wouldn't want to be gross about it.
Now, it could be, you know, I can see a few hands raised in the audience, some purple necks, some trembling pearl necklaces.
I sense the indignation in the room, and I want to respect that, and I can understand where this indignation is coming from.
So the indignation is, well, what if, you're going to say to me, Mr.
Politician, what if one of these formerly girls, now young ladies, what if one of these young ladies at the age of 18 or 19 or 20 or 30 decides that she does not want to be married anymore to a man 25 years her senior?
What then? What?
Well, I think that naturally we should have the right of love it or leave it.
We should have the right of divorce for women who've been forcibly married for 12 or 13 years.
After said period, they should have the option, of course, of not being married anymore.
And the way that it would work...
I think that our citizenship laws give us a wonderful template that I'm sure everyone in this audience would vehemently and vociferously defend, and it would go a little something like this.
So if you wish to leave your current husband, that is okay.
There will be a massive tax on a woman who wants to leave her husband.
And a woman, of course, can only leave her state-appointed and state-enforced marriage if she immediately gets married to one of a couple of hundred other men that the state will allow her to marry.
She cannot exist in an unmarried state, but she can choose to swap out her husband to another husband approved by the state.
Because in the same way, you know, I mean, obviously when it comes to citizenship, you are not allowed to not be a citizen of any country.
If you want to leave one country, you must immediately take up citizenship in another country.
The UN actually specifically bans, to the degree with which it is able to enforce, but nonetheless it is still a principle.
The UN bans people from being stateless.
You are not allowed. You must always be owned by some government, and in the same way, of course, if a woman wishes to divorce her existing husband, she must!
Must immediately be owned by another husband.
She cannot exist in an unowned state in the same way that citizens cannot exist in an unowned state.
They must always be owned and the property and the citizenship and the control and the taxation and the regulation and the legal subjugation of a government.
And of course, if this is good enough for citizenship, then it clearly is a high moral ideal and must be applied to divorce.
So if we understand that, then we understand, to run over the principles once more, a woman will be forcibly married to a husband of the state's choosing, chosen from the local district, which – and her parents will be forced to pay for the marriage in the same way that property taxes are forced to pay for a wide variety of government services, including – including state education, which is enforced upon most children throughout the world from about the age of five onwards.
So the parents will be forced to pay for the girl to be married off to a man of the government's choosing in the same way that children are forced into a relationship where the state is teacher, 20 or 25 years their senior, at the point of a gun.
The girl will then be indoctrinated for 12 to 13 years on how wonderful arrangement this is.
If she somehow survives that indoctrination and wishes to divorce her husband, then this will be a multi-year process involving hundreds and hundreds of pages of paperwork and waiting and delays.
And it will also take years for her to find a new husband who is willing to take her.
And she will probably have to pay a significant dowry, probably $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 and wait for years to get her new husband.
Now, she can't just leave her existing husband and exist without a husband any more than a citizen can leave his existing government and be without a government that is incomprehensible, can't be allowed.
And so she will be taxed upon exiting.
Oh, and I forgot to mention too, the other thing that's the case is that if she chooses a new husband, then she must move to...
The other side of the country.
And she also must move to a section of town where they do not speak her native language.
This is very, very important.
So if she is white and speaks English and lives in New York and wishes to divorce her husband, then she must move to Chinatown in San Francisco.
And anyone who wishes to visit her must get permission from the government, a visa, we could say, in the same way that if she moves to another country, then she must...
Those who wish to visit her must receive visas and significant travel costs to go and visit her and cannot stay for very long.
And so she must move.
She can't simply divorce and then live in the same place and marry a new husband and have him come into her house.
No! No! That would be incomprehensible.
That would be...
I mean, citizens who wish to renounce their country have to leave the country.
And women who wish to renounce their state-appointed husband must leave their place of residence and take up residence thousands of miles away, at least to some degree embedded in a foreign culture after paying.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, in resettlement fees, and she will have to, of course, invest a huge amount of money in the new town that she's coming if she wishes to do it in anything less than, say, half a decade.
She must renounce her passport.
She must renounce her friends, her family, who will only be permitted to visit her when they get 14-day rubber stamps costing significant amounts of money from the government.
Ah, and in this way, you see, we can extend to the fairer sex, to our lovely women, we can extend to them all of the rights and privileges of citizenship, which is so vehemently and vociferously defended by just about everyone, that citizenship and patriotism and love it or leave it are just the highest possible moral ideals.
And must be that which we shape society around.
You know, because...
I mean, we can't have conflicting moral ideals.
I mean, we... We can't impose massive, benevolent, beneficial restrictions on people in one category of being, one legal category called citizenship, and then deny them those same wonderful restrictions and benevolent controls in another area of life called, say, marriage.
Oh, one last thing, ladies, I just wanted to mention, and I can see a lot of you really coming around.
I mean, you would not want to question the values and controls and fascistic nature of citizenship, and therefore, I'm sure that you're overjoyed to recognize how beneficial it will be to extend the same rights, privileges, and restrictions of citizenship to marriage and to women in marital situations.
I can see you all coming around.
I really see that I'm going to get your vote and this is going to be a wonderful thing because I forgot to mention really the very best thing.
The very best thing.
Which is that the woman, let's say she goes through all of these hoops.
She makes the application.
She overcomes the propaganda.
She pays the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
She submits to all of the taxes.
She waits for years to divorce her husband, and she finally gets a divorce and is immediately whisked off after choosing one of the 100 or 200 pre-approved men that she's allowed to get married to now by the government.
She then goes immediately and is married on the plane on her way to San Francisco and is now subject to the new husband and the new controls and the new restrictions on divorce in the new marriage.
And she goes and settles thousands of miles away in at least what is locally a foreign culture.
And she...
She then accepts the restrictions on being visited.
Other people have to pay thousands of dollars and get little visa stamps from the government to go and visit her.
She is willing to abandon her friends, her family, her business contacts, her career, all of her social situation, her house, her neighborhood, everything that she's familiar with.
She's willing to sacrifice all of that.
You know, the wonderful thing is, the best thing about it is, well, immediately, in her new environment, Once her daughters reach the age of five, do you know what happens?
I mean, it's just wonderful. What a perfect mirror of how fantastic citizenship is.
When her children reach the age of five, well, they will get married to a government-approved man immediately.
And if she attempts to stop this, of course, then we will arrest her and throw her in jail and take her children and throw them into the grinding blood-soaked machinery of CPS and all that other wonderful stuff.
But her children will then be taken from her and the dowry for the wedding and for the maintenance of the children in the marriage will be taken from her by force through property taxes just in the same way that schools are paid for through property taxes.
And if you resist paying the property taxes for school, you are now in a state of illegality and you will be ripped from your house, thrown in jail, your children will be taken away.
So the wonderful thing is, even if she goes through all of this, her daughters enjoy the same marital benefits analogous to those of citizenship from about the age of five when the government chooses to put them into government schools and the government also chooses to de-arrange marriage.
With the husband of the government choosing who, you know, we say no sex.
Who knows what happens? 20 to 25 years for a senior at least.
And so even if for some reason she has some problem with this wonderful arrangement of government-enforced marriage, her children at the age of five will be forced into exactly the same arrangement.
And if she resists it or tries to flee or tries to go to a place where she is not married at all and attempts to protect her children from this wonderful benevolence and this wonderful system of arranged marriages slash marriage, Citizenship.
Well, then we get to arrest her at gunpoint, throw her in jail, take her children away.
So I really believe that even if she has some weird mental hiccup or problem with this wonderfully benevolent system, that her children will come around.
And I think that's really the best way that we keep this perspective and this argument going.
So remember, remember, the next time that some crazy libertarian wants freedom from status control and you tell that crazy libertarian slash voluntarist to love it or leave it, that you are advocating exactly this same situation with women in divorce.
And I think that if it's good for the goose, it's good for the ganderer.
So let's get out and proselytize.
Here are all the pamphlets, ladies.
Let's go and ring the bell of freedom and make sure that we give the same privileges and restrictions of citizenship to women who are five.
Right, cheers, yay, now we understand.
Well, can you imagine giving a speech like that?
Can you imagine what people would think of you if you...
Even dreamed of applying the same restrictions of citizenship to marriage.
If you forced little girls into marriage, well, you forced them into a relationship with the state and into status propaganda through public schools.
You force them into an economic relationship with banksters and foreign governments and bondholders and debt holders and financial services companies by using them as collateral, using their future productivity as collateral.
They're born into debt. They're born into an enforced relationship into hundreds of thousands of dollars at least of debt.
You force them into schools.
You force them into debt. You use the birth certificate process as a way of registering them as collateral, as loan instruments.
And sexual predation in public schools, I mean, you're approximately 800 times more likely to be the victim of some kind of sexual predation in public schools than you are relative to being an altar boy in the Catholic Church.
You're forced into a relationship with the state at an early age.
And if we were to analogize this or create a parallel situation wherein it was about as difficult to extricate yourself from a marriage as it was to extricate yourself from citizenship, We would go insane.
And we would immediately recognize how insane, evil, and unjust such a restrictive system was.
I mean, even if we throw aside that you get married at the age of five by state decree, which is analogous to, of course, directly analogous to public school education.
If we get rid of all of that, and let's just say that, yeah, you can choose to get married to whoever you want as an adult, but getting out of the marriage is as difficult and as complicated as getting out of citizenship.
We would go insane.
Whether it's for men or for women.
I just use women here because you get the additional provocation of that.
Which only exposes the injustice of it even more.
But if we were to make marriage as difficult to get out of and as impossible to stay out of as citizenship is impossible to get out of and impossible to stay out of we would immediately say That this is incredibly unjust.
And if we created the same restrictions on exiting a marriage as we do on exiting citizenship, would we then say that every woman who remains married remains married because she loves her husband?
I mean, could you imagine making that argument?
Yes, it is impossible to not be married.
Yes, it takes years and moving across the country and hundreds of thousands of dollars and you must immediately get remarried.
But every woman who is married is married because she loves her husband.
I mean, boy, if she didn't love her husband, why wouldn't she just leave him?
I mean, do we get that if we made that argument, if we had the same restrictions on exiting a marriage as we did on exiting a country or exiting citizenship...
That to make the argument that every woman who is married must be married because she loves her husband, because if she didn't love her husband, she would just leave him, when we have made it virtually impossible to leave any particular husband, when we have made it virtually impossible to leave any particular husband, and absolutely impossible to Now, further imagine.
that you as the government would have forced lesbians to marry men.
Well, that's pretty much like making libertarians wed the state or making voluntarists wed the state, particularly their children.
I mean, that would be just an additional layer of injustice and violence and exploitation and the evisceration of sexual identity.
I mean, that would be horrendous.
So, I mean, the next time that you hear the argument, or, God forbid, make the argument of, if you don't like it, you can always leave.
Just, you know, run the zoo analogy through your mind, run the marriage analogy through your mind.
And if they still come up sane and reasonable...
Then I really think that all you can do is cross your fingers, hope for massive advances in medical technology, and maybe put yourself on the list for a brain transplant with a chimpanzee of above-average intelligence because that would make you more fit for rational discussion.
Thank you, everybody, so much. Have a wonderful day.
Stefan Molyneux from freedomainradiofdrurl.com forward slash donate.
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