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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:11:09

Will America Descend into Civil War?

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	Hey everyone, welcome to Triple D. It's Mike Shanklin.
	Today I'm joined with a special guest.
	You know who it is. It's Stefan Molyneux.
	You guys can tell from the title on top of the video anyway.
	But Stefan, how are you doing today?
	I'm very well. How are you doing, Mike?
	I'm doing pretty good. I can't complain.
	Just got a bunch of questions here for you and a few of my own and a few from other people out there that From all walks of life, so we have stuff coming from anarcho-syndicalists to huge statists to voluntarists, so it's going to be all over the place tonight, but I think it's going to be very enlightening, and I think a lot of people are going to get a lot from this.
	For those of you who don't know Stefan Molyneux, he's been one of the largest contributors, at least to my mindset, and helped me at least, if you want to call it awakened to the real world, the reality around us, and philosophy, rationality, Reason, a touch of economics, and a little bit of education on militarism here and there.
	It all comes together for a pretty good mindset, a positive mindset, actually, towards a non-aggression principle.
	He's written numerous books.
	You guys can check out his works over at freedomadradio.com.
	So going into this stuff, on some of these questions I want you to know are from – people wrote long paragraphs, and so I tried to summarize it.
	So if I didn't get your question exactly perfect, if I didn't have the correct intent, I apologize.
	But I think we might have something working here.
	Stefan, if you could, real quick, I know every time you go on to a show, you have to talk about what voluntarism and non-aggression is, because some people might just be coming to this video for the first time.
	If you could really quick, maybe a minute or two, summarize what we are even here for while we're even talking on this video, and that we can move on from there.
	Sure. Well, voluntarism is...
	The idea, the radical idea that we should not use violence to achieve our ends.
	It's not a huge amount more complicated than that.
	Like the free market, it has – like once you stop using violence – Amazing, complicated, wonderful things happen.
	You know, multi-year contracts, cell phones, alarm systems, quantum physics, computers.
	Amazing things happen when you stop using violence.
	And people mistake the complexity of what happens when you stop using violence for the complexity of the system itself.
	But once you lay down your weapons and you start negotiating with your fellow human beings, wonderful complexity emerges.
	But the system itself is very simple.
	The system is... That's really all it comes down to.
	So, respect for property rights, the non-aggression principle, that's it, really.
	Everything that flows out of that is incredibly complex, but...
	It really is very simple to explain as a concept, as an idea.
	And it's something that, I mean, just about everybody accepts anyway.
	Everybody accepts that violence is not really a very good way to achieve your goals within society.
	So that is good.
	I mean, from that standpoint, we're doing really great things.
	Because... When you started to oppose slavery, everybody thought slavery was necessary and good and virtuous.
	But in this situation, everybody in their personal lives say, yes, it's not a good idea to go and knock over a bank when you want to raise.
	Yes, it's not really a very good idea to slip a date rape drink into some woman's martini rather than ask her out.
	Yes, it's not a good idea to go kill someone you disagree with.
	And so we already accept all of that and all we're saying is, okay, well, if that's true, then let's just believe that that's true for everyone and that takes a lot of sacred cows out of the equation, you know, like the state.
	So it's really a very simple thing which we all accept and we're all taught in kindergarten.
	The radical thing about voluntarism is not the ideals but the actual seriousness with which universality is taken.
	Like if this stuff is true, then it's just plain downright true.
	And let's make it universal and let's start pretending that we can create some magical group of people immune to the most basic moral laws.
	Right. I completely agree with you.
	All right. In one of your recent videos, something I actually – I think it's something more people need to see.
	I wish people would kind of share this a little bit more.
	I put it on my Facebook page the other day and I don't think – but maybe 10 people liked it.
	I don't think – it takes a little while to get through it.
	It's 58 minutes. But it was talking about violence in America – And you were kind of linking the welfare state to gang violence and some...
	I want you to kind of explain, if you could break that video down into a one- or two-minute thing where you were kind of referring to the government taking over the role of the father.
	Sure.
	I mean there's been a movement really over the past 40 or 50 years and in particular 30 to 40 years where the economic foundations of the family have fundamentally changed.
	So the economic foundations of the family is the man goes out to work and the woman stays home and raises the children and because of that, there's a whole neighborhood of people who do that, right?
	And therefore you have over-the-fence neighbors, people who can watch your kids and you have something close to what we're supposed to have historically as an evolution of our species which is about four adults for every one child in terms of how the ratio of education works in society.
	That's really changed substantially.
	So of course, there was a big strong urging from a largely state-sponsored, state-funded and academic-based feminist movement to say to women, go out and work.
	Oh, that's great for the government because the government's goal in expanding its tax base is to convert non-taxable labor to taxable labor.
	Raising children is not taxable labor.
	And if you can get women to go out and work, then women stop raising children and they start making money, which can be taxed.
	And then they have to put their kids in some daycare, which the government runs and can tax.
	Plus, the government gets to indoctrinate the children even sooner than otherwise possible.
	So for the livestock tax owners, it was a fantastic deal.
	And of course, you know, I mean, women should have every opportunity and blah, blah, blah.
	I mean, there's no problem with equality and so on.
	It's just that it became being a housewife was, you know, being a mother was denigrated and being a career woman was elevated and And so because of that, you had – and sort of in simultaneous with that, you have a huge amount of resources that need to be poured into the family.
	Dissatisfaction with marriage was enormous.
	When you have a highly contested divorce sequence, right?
	So like you have to prove fault.
	You have to prove abuse or affairs or whatever.
	Then people stay married because it's too hard to get unmarried.
	When no-fault divorce came in along with the welfare state, families basically exploded.
	I think this law came in recently in Chile where you could get a no-fault divorce.
	The divorce rate is currently 80%.
	And so what happens if a family split up?
	Well, you still need resources.
	Somebody's still got to raise the children.
	Somebody still has to take care of breastfeeding moms and somebody still has to bring in the bacon, so to speak.
	And if women and children, Men are working.
	And if a lot of families have split up and there's a huge rise in single motherhood, then the state, of course, is more than happy to buy votes by wallpapering up the craters left by family disintegration and the abandonment fundamentally of children to be raised by strangers.
	This has hugely dysfunctional effects on children.
	And so violence in America and violence around the world really needs to be understood as a problem that arises when traditional family structures are detonated.
	And they're detonated fundamentally by the state.
	When you replace the economic drivers of the family from the need for productivity and togetherness on the husband and wife to let's go petition the government for free daycare, free health care for my kids, free babysitting in the form of public education or free kindergarten, then the state is happy to provide these things in terms of, hey, I'll give you then the state is happy to provide these things in terms of, It's an exchange for votes.
	But, of course, what happens is the children grow up in increasingly atomized, solitary and dysfunctional environments.
	So, I mean, one brief example is that instead of there being four adults for every one child, which is kind of what's necessary in terms of our evolution, you end up with one teacher to 20 or 30 children.
	And so what happens is it's not the adults who are educating the children anymore because there's just too few adults around.
	What happens is you get a peer or horizontal, quote, education, which is why peer pressure becomes so strong and why gangs form a Particularly in houses where there are no fathers, the boys are all educating each other in the rough-and-tumble Lord of the Flies nonsense that goes on.
	They're not being civilized.
	They're not being calmed down.
	They're not being turned into productive citizens.
	So the violence that America faces is largely a function of fatherless children.
	It is not a function primarily of poverty because if 80% of American gun violence is based upon gangs – Well, gangs arose with single parenthood, gangs arose with the war on drugs, and gangs arose with the welfare state.
	And so it's been catastrophic, particularly for the poor, but gangs weren't around in like the 1950s or the 1940s, at least nowhere near.
	And people were poorer than they were in the 70s and 80s and so on.
	So it's not poverty that produces it.
	It's family dysfunction driven by short-term vote-buying and greed-based government programs.
	Yeah, so basically...
	We now have, we used to be just had government and then the mafia that was the gangs.
	Now you have government, mafia, and these inner city gangs on top of it.
	No, good stuff. And I think we can look at the education system with its revisionist history as, you know, what we sometimes refer to it as.
	It's not as if a public education sector can actually reach the rational conclusion on the non-aggression principle, correct?
	Can you just rephrase that question?
	I wasn't sure. I want to make sure I got it.
	It's basically the public education system will never be able to fully expose the non-aggression principle.
	It won't be able to teach to its rational conclusions because it is built up inside of a system.
	Oh, God, no. You can't.
	You can't have teachers saying to children, Johnny, you can't use violence to get what you want.
	Now, I have to go on strike because I want a raise.
	And your parents are going to have to pay for my salary whether they like it or not, whether you're here or not.
	And if they don't pay for my salary and my benefits, then lovely cats in blue are going to kick in your door, hopefully not shoot your beloved pet and drag your parents' asses off to jail.
	And I will be cheering and applauding this from the sidelines.
	So violence is really, really wrong to get what you want, but it is essential in getting what I want.
	I mean the hypocrisy of the public school sector is why ethics fundamentally cannot be discussed in the public school sector because the very foundation of it is evil, which is the initiation of force against peaceful people for the purposes of dragging their children away from them virtually by force, indoctrinating them and paying.
	You always want to get the not-so-bright intellectual class on the side of the state because if you're not so bright, you're pretty comfortable teaching propaganda because you're too dumb to even recognize how dangerous and how deadly it really is or even to notice that it is propaganda.
	So you capture the really dumb pseudo-intellectual class in the form of teachers and statistically this is true.
	It is the bottom 10 or 20% of all college students who go into the teaching profession just the way you want it, right?
	And the smarter people, you ensnare with academia, right?
	So you get the smarter people all by giving them access to politicians in the realm of the media.
	So you want to make sure that you capture as many intellectuals as possible on the sticky, flypaper, brain-rotting goo of status propaganda.
	And unfortunately for the state, fortunately for the future, the internet has changed all of that.
	Yeah, definitely. Hey, I got a question from somebody else I want to read real quick.
	A guy named Isaac Freeworld.
	That's his Facebook username.
	Obviously, I don't think it's a real name, but he can call himself whatever he wants.
	It says, ask Stefan what he thinks about anarcho-cynicalism and cooperative business models.
	So, good luck.
	Well, I mean, that's fine.
	I mean... There's no moral content to anarcho-syndicalism or business.
	So if you want to have a cooperative business model and when I was a business entrepreneur and a business owner, I ran a business that was incredibly cooperative where all decisions were collective and I certainly didn't hide my salary and so on.
	So I tried to do it that way.
	I think it's fine. There's going to be a constant experimentation on the best way to run businesses and those ways are going to change depending on the business, depending on the Technology, depending on the market and so on, and depending on the availability and skill of the labor.
	So I think it's fantastic.
	If people in a free society want to set up a hippie commune where they all pick lice out of each other's hair and Have group sex with penguins?
	Okay, except for maybe the penguins.
	Fine. As long as you're not initiating the use of force, if it's consensual penguin sex, I think that's really what I'm trying to get at here.
	But if it's not the initiation of the use of force, fantastic.
	Go to town. Experiment.
	Go nuts. Marry robots.
	I don't care. Once you cross the line into initiating the use of force, that's fine.
	You certainly can't say everyone has to do it this way or you get thrown in jail.
	Like everyone has to have a commune.
	Nobody can respect property rights.
	You want to all get together and not respect each other's property rights, so to speak, own everything in some kibbutzim kind of – Common, fine, fantastic, go for it.
	I don't care fundamentally because I don't know what's right or wrong in terms of the best way to organize everything in society.
	Nobody does. That's why central planning doesn't work.
	So yeah, if people want to experiment, that's fine.
	If they say this is how society has to be, well, then suddenly we switch to opposite sides of the tennis match of good and evil because then they want to initiate the use of force to achieve their ends and that's not acceptable.
	Okay, now think about it this way.
	Don't people have to – I'm in total agreement with you here but my question a little – Anarcho-communist, anarcho-cynicalist over here is saying, in Shanklin, you've got to buy the property before you can have the ownership of it so that you can give it up, because you can only give up what you have, right?
	So wouldn't they have to at least be able to answer the needs and wants of the society around them so that they can earn whatever to barter for the land?
	Wouldn't that still exist?
	And what would you say to anarcho-communists about, you know, tragedy of the commons obviously is one thing, But they don't even see it that way.
	To them, it's just, well, property is theft.
	I mean, obviously, you've had this discussion before, but I hear a lot in the circles, and there's a big...
	Yeah, I don't even know if anarcho-capitalists, if you want to even label them that, voluntarists, can coexist with people who don't believe in public property.
	I mean, some of these people even say they will outright attack us once the government's gone.
	I've heard that before. So what do you have to say about that?
	Well, that's... That's a lovely way to open a debate.
	I mean, not from you, but from these people.
	Okay, so Mike, what percentage of the U.S. do you think is populated by people?
	Well, like actually having a person standing in that one foot by one foot section?
	Well, no, no. I mean like it's really owned and used.
	I don't mean like government owned.
	I mean like real owned, like farmed or has a house built on it, has a fence around it, has a city on it.
	What percentage of the U.S. do you think is populated by people who are exercising personal property?
	I have no idea.
	I'd probably guess 25%.
	I don't know. Last time I checked, which is a while back, three and a bit.
	Three? Three.
	Wow. Three percent, four percent.
	In fact, you could take the entire world's population, give them a little bit of land, and fit them all in taxes.
	It's really hard to understand because most of us live in cities where we're squished up people, basically as that comedian says about riding on the subway.
	Hey! Since our groins have been pressed together for half an hour, do you want to start a family?
	But we don't understand really just how empty this planet really is.
	I mean I live in Canada and dear lord, you take people, spread them out evenly across Canada.
	We can't find each other with howitzers.
	So I don't think there's going to be any problem if one of the – Most sort of energy and population and resource-rich places in the world, like America, is still only managing to populate its country 3%.
	I think there's going to be room for people to set up their own communes without having to buy the land, right?
	Because we think of all the land is owned because there's this magic government flag that owns, like, people, moons, Mars.
	I don't know what the hell it is that's magic spear that they stick in the ground with their piece of cloth.
	And woohoo! We own everyone!
	I wish I had one of those.
	So they're going to have room to do their funky communal experiments.
	That's fine. But look, forget land.
	Land doesn't matter. It's unimportant.
	The reality is where you start talking about property is people.
	Do we own our eyeballs in communities?
	Common, right? In other words, if I lose an eye or both eyes, do I get to take one of yours by force?
	Of course not. We all understand that's immoral.
	If I drink my liver into a smoky grave, do I get to take half your liver, attempt to regrow it and put it in my side with a spoon?
	Of course not. If I lose my thumb, do I get yours?
	No, of course not. So at a personal level, the stuff that we grow and build and tend and take care of, which is our personal bodies, we own and other people don't get to take that stuff from us.
	They don't get to snip off things that they want from us.
	You've got a reasonable head of hair there.
	Let's trade, right? I mean that's not how it works.
	So, it's the same thing with land.
	I mean, it doesn't matter what land.
	What matters is what you grow and what you produce.
	And there's no fundamental difference between a crop that you've planted and grown and your body that you water and feed and rest.
	There's no difference between your pet and your pancreas.
	There's no difference between your wheat and your skin.
	So if you work to create something, whether it's physically in your body and attached to you or something that otherwise wouldn't have been into existence if you didn't make it, no difference whatsoever.
	People want to create these artificial distinctions because we have this weird thing in our head like if you steal my eyeball, that's really bad.
	But if I build a house and you steal that, that's somehow not as bad.
	And of course, in a way, I'd rather have a house stolen than an eyeball.
	But fundamentally, there's no moral difference between the two.
	So, you know... Keep your hands off my eyeballs, you stinky hippies, and go find some place in the woods to go do your thing.
	That's really my message to the anarcho-syndicalists.
	By the way, by stinky hippies, I mean I want to be there Saturday night because if you want to go to a good party, stinky hippieville is the place to go.
	I completely agree. This question comes from Jamie Troutman.
	They ask, if there was a stateless free market society on earth existing among societies such as communist China, Could the free market remain stable if the consumers buy goods from a business that exploits China's cheap labor force?
	In other words, obviously, since it's going to be an insaneism over in communist China, since the economy is so bad, it's basically like forced-wave slavery, I guess, is what they're saying.
	Wouldn't that allow for a company to become a giant corporation like Walmart?
	Wouldn't that lead to such a company acquiring smaller companies and conquering a huge portion of the market?
	Wouldn't that allow for a monopoly to exist So I want to kind of go over maybe monopolies too and talk about how maybe a free society could work next to a status society if that's possible.
	I know obviously a person like me, I'm trying to bring freedom to the world just like you, but I'd like to hear your ideas on these topics.
	Yeah, I mean I think it's a bit of an artificial question like a lot of these things because if a country has become stateless, it's because Children have been raised peacefully.
	There's a general understanding of the virtue of ethics.
	in the number of people's exposure to the toxicity of government propaganda through public schools.
	There are so many things that have to happen before, you know, to sort of wake up and have a stateless society.
	There's so many things that have to happen before, so many dominoes that have to come down that you're not just going to have, boom, tomorrow, you know, next to Tibet is now a stateless society in China.
	But the big problem with being next to a stateless society is going to be immigration, right?
	Because let's say that you are, I think Tibet is next to China.
	So Tibet becomes a stateless society and China isn't.
	And China is – it's semi-repressive, post-communist, fascist nonsense that it is right now where you're only allowed to have one kid.
	Well, maybe you want more than one kid.
	Most people do, which is why there's a law to only have one.
	Well, the first thing you're going to do is go to Tibet because there's going to be no immigration controls in a stateless society because immigration is recognized for what it is in a stateless society – It's called moving.
	That's all it is. It's just moving from one place to another and there's no controls.
	Oh my God, you can't come to this street, right?
	So just move wherever you want. So there would, of course, be an East-West Berlin kind of problem where everyone who's in the state of society who's got any gumption at all is going to want to get like hell out of that state of society, stream over the border into the state-less society.
	And, of course, that's going to provoke a lot of problems.
	Like if you...
	If, in a sense, you buy a...
	A farm next to some guy's farm and then you break down all the fences, all of his livestock are going to come stampeding over to you, especially if they know there's no slaughterhouse there and they won't get milked.
	So the problem is going to be with immigration in this sort of artificial scenario.
	But of course, we're talking about things so far in the future and after such an unimaginable change in human consciousness that it's really hard to… It's like being in the 15th century trying to figure out what the internet might look like.
	It's just not something you can really productively do.
	But as far as the monopoly argument go, I mean, of course, it's an old chestnut and it's sort of trotted out pretty regularly.
	First and foremost, if people are concerned about a monopoly, then they have to be anti-statists, right?
	I mean, the state is a monopoly.
	It's like a guy being riddled with cancer, right?
	This makes your cancer gone tomorrow.
	And he's like, well, okay, but what if it comes back in 40 or 50 years?
	Be like, dude, you're going to die of cancer in three days.
	Are you really worried about cancer coming back in 40 or 50 years?
	Of course not, right? So, I mean, maybe you're worried about it, but not to the point where you're going to refuse treatment or not take the pill.
	So if you're worried about a monopoly, then be an anti-statist.
	If we can get rid of the state, of course it's not going to come back.
	Slavery ain't going to come back tomorrow.
	Nobody's going to start subjugating women in the West tomorrow.
	Absent Sharia law, right?
	So none of this stuff is just coming back.
	Nobody's sort of going to get political power in America by saying, let's bring back slavery and serfdom and let's ban women from having any occupation.
	I mean, when we make progress, it doesn't tend to slide backwards unless there's some huge catastrophe.
	So it's not – and the other thing too, companies – you can't just go and buy up companies to dominate a market.
	It doesn't work that way because what happens is let's say there's five companies in the market.
	So the first one buys the second one for $100 million.
	Well, the problem is that the next three are not going to cost you $300 million because every time you get one more company, the price goes up because you have that much more of an incentive to buy that company.
	Because if you end up with a monopoly, you can charge monopoly rent prices and all that and your rent seeking has all done you a fabulous service.
	So everybody who's selling these companies is going to be like, whoa, man.
	First of all, he just knocked out a competitor.
	That's fantastic. If he's going to come for us, we're going to raise our price like crazy.
	So what happens is you end up taking on such a – if you really do want to buy everyone, you take on such a huge amount of debt and such a huge amount of liabilities and you have the problems of trying to integrate all these five companies.
	If you've ever worked in IT, disparate IT systems, disparate cultures, disparate histories, lots of people are going to say – Well, screw this.
	I didn't want to work for Megacorp, Walmart, Potato Head.
	I don't want this company, so I'm out of here.
	I'm going to start something entrepreneurial.
	All the contacts, all the customers leave.
	It's not like playing Monopoly and buying houses when you're in the free market trying to take over companies.
	It is a huge, big problem.
	So it's not going to happen and nobody as far as I understand it in the past 350 damn years has ever been able to show a perpetual or even remotely long-lasting monopoly that has not come about because of some sort of government grant or favor or license or some sort of special treatment or tax break or subsidy or outright dominance of the field granted to it by some sort of government fiat.
	So if you're worried about a monopoly, you're worried about two things, A, the government and B, companies that the government is giving monopoly power to.
	In the free market, it has never proven sustainable to try and create a monopoly.
	So it's like saying, well, in a free market society, what about the dead rising from the grave and strangling everyone?
	It's like I'll take my chances.
	Well, not only that, but let's say somebody tried to collude and form a cartel.
	They would also have – let's say 30 people came together and they all signed this agreement in this closed room because they're going to jack up rates.
	They have an incentive to undercut each other and always do so.
	So there's no way that any of these crooks that are going to be crooks are going to be doing this in the backroom anyway.
	They're going to crook each other out back into the market and people, as long as there's open competition, people can enter this market any time they want.
	I completely agree with you. The other thing too is to remember, and this is, you know, complaints against a quote monopoly like the Rockefellers or the Carnegies or people who were doing Really well.
	The complaints never come from the customers.
	The complaints come from the competitors.
	So it's not the customers who are upset at somebody who's doing really well in business.
	It's the competitors that lodge these complaints because they can't compete with these business geniuses.
	And so they're like, well, okay, we got to break this company up.
	But it's not the customers who are complaining.
	It's always the competitors.
	And that tells you... Exactly where the trouble is coming from.
	And to your point, there's ample evidence that this is a completely repetitive process, that the people who want to create – like if you want to raise prices, the way you do it, if you're smart and evil and there's a government, is you get the government to impose barrier to entry costs, right? So licensing or whatever nonsense it is, ridiculously high educational requirements like that, Daily show about some woman who had to spend 300 hours learning how to braid someone's damn hair.
	So you go to the government and you raise the barrier to entry and then you get licenses and you get the government to force everyone to do this.
	And the reason you have to go to the government to get monopoly prices is because monopolies don't work without the government.
	As you say, if everybody colludes to raise prices, the first guy to break ranks is going to make a killing and possibly take over the entire market.
	So the higher you raise the prices artificially, the more everyone breaks ranks.
	This has been shown over and over and over again, which is why Yeah, and then they get rewarded with political contributions on the side, too. Good stuff. I have another question here from Matt Meyer.
	He asks, constitutional government, the opposite of what we currently have, obviously, or straight to voluntarism, what will it take to achieve either?
	So... Go to town on him.
	Say that again? Yeah, he's basically asking, constitutional government, the opposite of what we currently have, or straight to voluntarism, what will it take to achieve either?
	That's what he asked. Well, you can't achieve a constitutional government because there's no such thing as a constitution.
	There's a piece of paper.
	I guess you can draw on.
	You can probably draw money on it if you want to be a modern constitutional government.
	But there's no – I mean constitution is just a piece of paper.
	It's like saying let's be ruled by origami.
	It doesn't mean anything.
	It's just people.
	There's just people and there's guns.
	And that's all that society in a status scenario amounts to.
	Pieces of paper don't stop governments from growing.
	Magic spells don't stop governments from growing.
	Killing chickens in ritualistic manners with arseless chaps, they don't – I mean for the chickens, of course, because otherwise it would be kind of kinky.
	This doesn't stop government from growing.
	Government grows inevitably because once force is used in a universal sense in the equation of the economic affairs of mankind, once you introduce the element of force, it is always going to grow because it is so vastly profitable.
	This is basic public choice theory, right?
	It's so vastly profitable to use violence to get what you want from a productive population that it is inevitably and always and forever going to grow.
	From the moment you introduce the idea of force in general in society, it's just going to grow.
	And society – history shows this with unbelievable like drumbeat, we will rock you, brain-deadening regularity.
	You get a little bit of freedom like in the Roman Empire or the British – the pre-British Empire or the – you get a little bit of the American Empire.
	You get a little bit of freedom and woo, we get a huge amount of money that comes out through free trade.
	And everyone – parties till dawn and makes lots of money and trades and the division of labor goes on and resource optimization and efficiency, capital infrastructure.
	gets put in place.
	It's all beautiful and everything grows and then the government says, whoa, that's great food for the cancer we call ourselves and they then start to take that over and tax it and then they overwhelm it and they collapse it.
	I mean it's the same thing that happens over and over again.
	So there's no point.
	There's no point going back to a constitutional government.
	As I said before, that's like opening someone up who's about to die of cancer, cutting three-quarters of the cancer out, Don't worry, it's not going to grow back because I wrote the word constitution on the cancer.
	Clearly, that's changing the nature of the cancer.
	Well, it hasn't. You're just going to set the cycle back and start again.
	Forget that. Let's get off this goddamn treadmill of big government, small government, big government, small government.
	Small government, big government, collapse.
	Small government, big government, collapse.
	Forget it. We owe the future a little bit more than the same repetitive bullshit of the past.
	What we want to do is promote a form of humanity that It's not domesticatable.
	And the way that we do that is we don't teach children the language of statism in the home.
	The state, and I'm certainly not the first and probably not the last to talk about this, the state is fundamentally in effect to the family.
	If you treat children in an egalitarian fashion, in a consultative fashion, in a negotiating fashion, and you don't use aggression, you don't use abandonment, you don't use threats, you don't use punishment, then children grow up not speaking the language of statism.
	And then they're about as threatening as a Japanese kabuku clown yelling at you from across a river.
	It's just not scary because they don't speak that language.
	They haven't been broken, subjugated, and frightened to the point where someone comes along and wants to break, subjugate, and frighten them.
	They're like, oh, I know what this is.
	I'll do it. So it all starts in the home.
	It all starts very early.
	We raise an undomesticatable group of human beings and the state will simply not have any power over time because, of course, if you raise children peacefully, you get almost no crime.
	I mean so much of crime, 90 to 95 percent of addiction and other forms of crimes have been traced directly back to child abuse.
	So you raise children peacefully, then we won't really have to worry about criminals.
	Yes, okay, some guy is going to get a brain tumor once in a while or struck by lightning and he's going to get all Stephen King on everyone, but it's so rare that we don't really worry about it.
	Don't buy a lot of insurance for getting hit by a meteor.
	So we raise children peacefully and we almost have eliminated the problem of crime and without the problem of crime, And without the problem of poverty and without the problem of dysfunction, without the problems of drug abuse and so on, what do we need a state for?
	We need to protect you from all these people who are just, what, sipping mint juleps in the sunset.
	So we race short and peacefully, and that's the only way that we're going to outgrow the state.
	And anything else to me is just a distraction.
	No, good stuff. I have another question from Adam Rigaud.
	I think I'm pronouncing that correctly.
	He says... Do you think there's going to be a civil war in the future of the United States, at least some type of secession?
	What are you going to do about the future and when do you think the economy is really going to start taking the hammer from inflation?
	Obviously, we're on an unsustainable path going into the future with the debts and everything else that we're building up around us.
	Do you think it's going to turn into a war?
	We're not. Do you see us...
	Obviously, it feels like we're already living in a World War III scenario.
	It's just kind of more of a big bully picking on a bunch of smaller little regions.
	But what about here domestically?
	Do you see any kind of...
	There's people raising arms about, you know, if you take my guns, we're going to get together and fight you guys and the rest of this stuff.
	And it looks like they're going to try and push some kind of national gun legislation down our throats within the next three years.
	What do you see coming down the road for America and the economy?
	Well, unfortunately, it's – and I, of course, go out on a limb here.
	I think I said about five years ago that it was going to be five to 15 years.
	Five to 15 years in the future, we're going to be the make or break time.
	There is a depressing amount of predictability about these kinds of things.
	If you move in libertarian circles and among gun rights activists, it's easy to forget just how placid and compliant most people are in the face of authority.
	Study after study has shown this.
	I mean if you look at Milgram's experiments and Zimbardo's experiments in the 1960s and beyond, if people in a white coat and a lab – when you're holding a sort of a clipboard and if they're in a white coat, if they tell someone to deliver fatal electric shocks to somebody with heart problems, the vast majority of people will just do it.
	I mean, they'll just do it. I mean, this is how shattered and broken the spirit is of our once noble race.
	It's tragic. Most people will simply obey.
	Fascism is not something that comes in the future.
	Fascism is something that is already all around us.
	I mean, how many cops will refuse to obey an unconstitutional law?
	Very few. In other words, we already have fascists who will do anything the government says in the form of law officers, in the form of immigration officers, in the form of IRS officers, FBI, CIA, Army, you name it.
	They may not feel comfortable.
	I mean, how many people refused to disarm peaceful citizens in the New Orleans-Katrina debacle?
	No, they just all went door to door.
	The fascism is here.
	The orders haven't been given, but there's no doubt whatsoever that the fascism is here already.
	This may sound like hyperbole.
	It's absolutely not. This is entirely grounded upon decades of scientific research.
	They have replicated this study where – and you can look at Milgram's experiment.
	They've replicated this study around the world, and it is almost universally consistent that almost everyone – We'll kill someone that someone they perceive to be an authority tells them to do it.
	War tells us that. Hey, go shoot that guy.
	He's a bad guy. Off they go, right?
	So the ingredients for fascism have not been solved.
	We had this whole goddamn 20th century bloodshed of hundreds of millions of people fighting communism, fighting fascism, and the shit is still all around us.
	It's in remission.
	Because there's not somebody – there's not a credible threat to drive people into the arms of the inevitable demagogue who arises during times of crisis.
	But the fascism is all around us.
	The orders haven't been given, at least not many of them relative to how bad it can be.
	But there's not going to be any resistance to the expansion of government power.
	I mean government 20 or 30 years ago was like 20 percent of its current size.
	It's grown five times with almost no protest.
	In fact, with the enthusiastic participation of both of the major parties in the U.S., And so if there's a crisis or whatever and we see this with the Patriot Act and with these horrible wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's a little crisis.
	9-11 relative to world history, 3,000 people relative to the 300 million people, a democide or more in the 20th century.
	That gave people – I mean they freaked out enough that they gave up huge amounts of rights in the Patriot Act.
	They cheered on the beginning of a decade-long war that's killed over a million people.
	There's no doubt that when the orders are given, the cops will obey it and the people will comply.
	There's no reason to believe anything different because the studies are universal around the world.
	That people are so shattered and broken up, squished, crushed and stripped of their soul and ethics and virtue and potential and happiness and love and intimacy and capacity as human beings.
	It is so crushed when they're children that they become It's programmable, programmed fascist drones by the time they're probably in their early to mid-teens.
	It's probably the end of the road.
	We don't understand. This image from The Wall, the movie The Wall, I don't know if you've ever seen it.
	The kids all fall into the hamburger.
	They fall into the meat grinder.
	This is what is called statist education.
	This is what is called religious education.
	People are so broken that when the orders are given...
	They will comply and they will obey and they will enforce.
	And yeah, there will be a few people who will resist, of course, but it won't matter.
	If you move in the libertarian circles, it's easy to forget that 150,000 new statists are coming out of government schools every single month on average.
	Sure as hell aren't getting 150,000 new libertarians every month.
	So, sorry to sound kind of dire, but I try to stay as empirically true to the facts as possible.
	And the facts are that the fascism, all the ingredients for fascism are already perfectly around us.
	And a crisis and a demagogues is the only match and flint that it takes to set the whole thing up.
	Yeah, it feels like we're, you know, when wrestling came out years and years ago...
	A lot more people at the time at least believed that wrestling was real.
	You asked somebody today, and I think it's only down to about 8% believe it's still real, the fake wrestling, obviously.
	But it feels like that way for statism.
	The next thing we have to do is kind of do what most of the fans of wrestling had to do, which was kind of like realize that it was just a dream, it was a fantasy world, and that they're really not hitting each other with their buddy-buddy in the back room.
	That's what it kind of feels like when you're looking at politics, because Obviously, sure, you have the bickering between the two parties, but really, government continues to grow, just like you're saying.
	I want to continue on here. We've got a lot to go over in a little time.
	Valerie Rumor asks, she says, ask Stefan if there is any one thing that he thinks we can do to bring people towards more anarchism, altruism, agorist thinking.
	Ask him what, in his opinion, is the biggest obstacle to the movement at this time.
	Those are great questions.
	This is off the top of my head so I won't defend this when I'm sober or I may not.
	But we need to become a community that people envy.
	We need to become a community that people envy.
	And I don't think we are a community that people envy yet.
	I don't think that we're very effective at dealing with bullies within our own community.
	I don't think that we hold ourselves to the highest standards of human interaction in our own community.
	I think that we can be self-indulgent, petty, vindictive, vicious.
	I think that our public personas are sometimes entirely out of sorts with our professed goals of nonviolence or at least of the non-aggression principle.
	I think there's ridiculous infighting.
	I think there's a lack of willingness to address essential questions like, does the non-aggression principle apply to spanking?
	I mean, I've written articles about it.
	I've talked about it for years.
	And I've yet to find many people in the libertarian movement who are even willing to think about engaging on this as a practical topic.
	But Jesus H. Christ is on a stick.
	Spanking is something we can control.
	Federal Reserve, we can't do shit all about.
	We can't control foreign policy.
	We can't control government policy.
	But we can control whether we initiate the use of force against our own children.
	If we were to examine Our own behavior rather than focus solely on the people over the hill whose actions we can't even approach, let alone change.
	I think we could do something truly incredible.
	If we were to have the highest standards of behavior on the internet, that would be pretty cool.
	People would say, wow, there's a movement where people actually behave respectfully and intelligently towards each other and they don't indulge in flame wars and they ask questions and they're curious and they're intelligent.
	I think that's really cool.
	I kind of maybe want me some of that.
	Or if we have, as a community, a commitment to nonviolence within the family, my goodness, we would have some pretty smart children.
	My goodness, we would have some pretty amazing children.
	We'd have children that people would go like, wow, there's a peaceful family.
	There's a family where people really enjoy each other's company.
	I want some of that.
	I don't know crap all about fiat currency and inflation, but I can see a productive, peaceful and happy community and I can accept and understand that and I can apply that.
	There's a community that's really into self-knowledge.
	This is the oldest commandment of Socrates.
	Know thyself. Know thyself.
	Here's a community that is really committed to peaceful communication, to negotiation rather than aggression.
	Here's a community that supports each other, that encourages each other, that is willing to confront and clash intellectually in pursuit of the truth, but not in insulting, vicious, or denigrative ways.
	That would be such a departure for most people from particularly societies on the internet or societies that they may have known or whatever that people would just like – it would be like, whoa, I think I see a slice of the future.
	I like it because every time we come up to people or we present ourselves as a community, what people perceive is, what they receive is, these people want to run my life.
	I know that's not what libertarianism or anarchism is about but this is what they perceive is that these people are coming to want to run my life.
	So when you see a bunch of Nazis walking down the street, you know that they want to run your life.
	You're like, well, I don't want these people running my life.
	Pretty scary. Pretty volatile.
	I don't want these people running my life.
	I don't want these people in charge.
	I don't want these people to organize society.
	I don't want to live in a society that these people like.
	Because if they're Nazis or communists, I don't want to live in the society that they like.
	But the question is, do people want to live in the society that libertarians like?
	Well, the first thing is that we have to show what that society looks like.
	Which is not blog posts or abstract crap.
	It's how do we treat each other?
	How do we treat each other?
	And how do we deal with bullies?
	Because we say, well, we don't need the state.
	Well, if we can't even manage our own community and deal with bullies in some way, either through reform or ostracism, then who the hell are we to talk about what works in society?
	First thing we want to do is show all of these principles at work within our own communities, within our own families, within our own interactions.
	What if libertarians had by far the lowest divorce rate?
	Because they really got along.
	They knew how to negotiate. They didn't use aggression.
	What if they had the smartest, best behaved, most accomplished kids because they didn't use any aggression against them?
	They homeschooled them, whatever it took to raise this crop of healthy human beings for the first goddamn time in human history.
	What if there was an intelligence and a...
	A negotiation and a nonviolent confrontation where necessary about differences of agreement within the community, wouldn't that be amazing?
	We've got to show people.
	We can't argue them based on reason.
	People don't even know how to reason.
	We might as well be shouting at an ant in Mandarin when we bring arguments from Austrian economics to the average person.
	But they can appreciate what they can see tangibly.
	And so people who act abusively or aggressively in public part of the libertarian movement, they're just feeding the state and starving the future.
	Well, I think a lot of it also has to do with, which I agree with everything you said, just to add to what you're going towards, a lot of people don't see how the violence inside of the home, domestic violence, can actually stump the brain.
	It brings up a memory of an abused dog.
	Whenever you go to touch an abused dog, they always have that jerk reaction.
	And when you have, like, my dogs, they'll come up to you.
	They love everybody. They'll lick you in the face.
	They don't care. You know, it's just love everywhere.
	And it kind of reminds me of the difference...
	Most people don't see from a statist household and why people become statisms when they're raised in an aggressive environment versus a more freer, more peaceful environment.
	I guess it's really hard to get people to understand that when they're raised inside an environment that's aggressive.
	Do you agree on that? Yeah, for sure.
	I mean, 90% of parents are still hitting their children.
	90% of parents are still hitting their children.
	What if the remaining 10% We're all libertarians.
	I mean, wouldn't that be an incredible pitch to say, listen, we're into the non-aggression principle, and here's, you know, yeah, the Fed, blah, blah, blah, but here's where you can really implement it in your own life, and here's, we're going to show you how, we're going to help you how, we're going to communicate how, we're going to coach you on how, we're going to encourage you on how, and boy!
	I mean, I get letters literally every single day.
	I get a letter or two or three from people saying, I've stopped yelling at my kids, I've stopped threatening my kids, I've stopped punishing my kids, I've stopped hitting my kids, and it's amazingly great.
	It was a tough transition, but oh my God, this is paradise compared to what it was before.
	Those people are doing a hell of a lot more than the publishers of even the most popular books on history and economics because this is where...
	The human mind is truly forged, is in the first few years of life and in the childhood and in the home and this is what we need to be doing as a community but instead we focus very much on abstract topics we cannot control and we won't have the conversations, tough that they are, I get it, tough that they are. We do need to have the integrity to our principles to say, does the non-aggression principle apply first and most importantly to the actions that I can control?
	Right? And does it really matter about the things I can't control?
	Because if you see people who are thunderingly positive about a particular principle and then only apply it to areas they have no power over and refuse to even discuss it on areas they have power over, people don't understand that 90% of communication is nonverbal.
	That shatters credibility to everyone.
	This is why we can't grow. Well, I've got a question for you.
	Actually, I think Valerie Rumor had this second question, annotation in there.
	She was asking...
	For parents who are now, you know, they've already had kids who are 10 years old or so, so they might have missed that opportunity to fully implement your non-aggression parenting.
	What is something they can do at this point to kind of maybe help fix the problem if there is an issue there?
	Is there any way to correct it at this point other than just, you know, trying to do what we're doing from the start and they just try to implement it when the kid's 10 years old or so?
	Well, I mean, just to be clear, it's not my non-aggressive parenting.
	Even Dr.
	Benjamin Spock in the, I think, early 1950s, he published some 60 years ago, was opposed to spanking the American Medical Association, Association of Pediatrics, all against...
	So it's not just me.
	This is like I'm barely significant in this.
	I'm like a firefly in sunlight, right?
	But if you have made mistakes, I mean, gosh, I mean, I think we all kind of know what to do about mistakes, which is to apologize like crazy and make amends as much as humanly possible and to accept the responsibility of knowing that according – if you held true to the non-aggression principle and spanked, In the past, then you don't really have the excuse of ignorance.
	Obviously, when you're spanking, you are initiating the use of force against a child.
	Violence is only acceptable in self-defense, and spanking is not an act of self-defense.
	I think it's tragic that you were in a community that didn't remind you about this basic I think it's really tragic that Nathaniel Brand doesn't seem to have done much to address it.
	I think it's tragic that Murray Rothbard and all these people haven't had the topic of parenting come up.
	I mean, it's really tragic.
	But it's also very, very encouraging.
	Because if parenting had been tried and we were still in the same damn position, I'd be out of answers.
	We tried everything.
	We tried political action.
	We tried infiltrating academia.
	We tried writing books. We tried publishing blogs.
	We tried starting TV stations.
	And we tried parenting.
	Well, we're out. Until space aliens come along and remove governments with beneficial lasers that turn politicians into traitors, then we're done.
	But this is the one thing that has been consistently avoided.
	It's the one thing that scientifically is...
	Certain to work. Not a doubt.
	It's certain to work. So it's the one thing that's been consistently avoided that is certain to work.
	So yay!
	That's fantastic. We have something we can do.
	So you apologize for not thinking it through.
	You also can get a little upset at your community for never bringing it up.
	If you have been somebody who squelched discussions or avoided discussions about this stuff in the past, you can also get mad at yourself without necessarily beating yourself up, but it's okay to get frustrated about something that was obvious that you didn't do.
	You apologize like crazy.
	Maybe you go to family therapy with someone to see if you can work out some of the damage that's been done by violence and aggression within the home.
	There's things that you can do, but admitting there's a problem, admitting you made a mistake, admitting you didn't live up to the values that you were portraying or that you only lived up to them in areas you couldn't I couldn't change.
	Dealing with the fallout, repairing the relationships wherever possible, I think that's the best that can be done.
	And to parents who do that, oh, I mean, that's fantastic.
	Any change never catches anyone at the beginning, right?
	Almost never, right? I mean, it's always in transition.
	Some people are older, some people are younger.
	Like, so, you know, if we privatize everything tomorrow, there's some people like, Three days from retirement, you know, in the public sector, they're screwed, right?
	I mean, that sucks. Sorry, bud.
	You know, you had a shitty career waiting for the pot of gold, which, you know, freedom has now taken away.
	Sorry, bud. But the reality is that we have to slice this sausage at some point, right?
	And, you know, sorry if you're further down the road, but you did have the principles and unfortunately you didn't have a community that really wanted to talk about this stuff, which I can understand.
	Childhood stuff, parenting stuff, family stuff, it's volatile as hell.
	You know, fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
	That would be me. But it's still, it's the only thing we haven't really tried and it's the only thing that scientifically is certain to work.
	So, dear God, let's screw our courage to the sticking place and get her done.
	Good stuff. Okay, I have some very important questions here.
	I personally want to ask you this, but a guy named Colin Grant asked, what do you think about anarchists who run for office and use the Do Not Vote For Me platform?
	I know certain anarchists like Nick Coons who ran for office but was simply using the pulpit to spread ideals.
	Would you ever run for office on an education-only platform?
	Yeah. Yeah, I mean, nobody votes anyway, right?
	I mean I don't know the exact numbers but I mean like 50 or 60 percent of people don't vote.
	So like 10 or 20 percent of people vote for the winner and of those 10 or 20 percent of people, half of them or more are simply voting for government benefits that have been promised to them by whoever, right?
	So when you talk about people who don't have a conflict of interest who are actually voting, it's 5, 6, 7, 8 percent.
	And if you take out of those people, people who don't have a freaking clue about anything, you don't know their ass from a hole in the ground, couldn't name you an Austrian economist and don't know anything about fiat currency or anything like that.
	I mean, nobody votes fundamentally.
	I mean, almost nobody votes. So the idea that we should – and I'm great for like, let's not vote.
	I mean, that's great. I think if you're going to use a political platform to talk about Peaceful parenting, great.
	I just haven't seen any of that yet, right?
	But I think that trying to spread the ideas of...
	Being against politics by entering into politics is like trying to use a slave army to defeat slavery.
	It's just such a contradiction at the base of it that there's so many better ways to do it.
	Don't waste your time.
	Don't waste your money.
	Everybody wants politics to solve it because if politics solve it, we don't have to have, as I've mentioned before and will mention again, the tough conversation about aggression, violence, spanking, hitting, assault, abuse, verbal, on the internet, wherever.
	We don't have to have those tough conversations and confront people within our own community.
	If someone can bungee in from politics and save us all, woo-hoo!
	Don't have to do the heavy lifting of implementing bullshit in my own life.
	So it's very tempting. It is, but that way, madness and defeat lie.
	Good stuff. And this next question comes from Eric Bickford.
	He says, as an atheist, should I spend my time debunking religions?
	Well, because religions are voluntary associations, besides children, of course, usually...
	Is my time more wisely debunking statism?
	Yeah, of course, children, religions are not, as I mentioned, right?
	Religions are not voluntary organizations because they're indoctrinated on helpless children who don't have the independence or rational cognitive abilities or perspective or history or sometimes even reading ability to differentiate truth from falsehood.
	So it is indoctrination.
	I actually once was really interested in a Christian woman.
	I was dating her kind of, kind of.
	Anyway, we really – but we had a great degree of intellectual compatibility in many ways.
	And so we started talking about how to raise kids before we didn't really start dating because I wasn't an idiot even back then.
	Maybe I am now, but I wasn't back then.
	And I said to her – She said to me, my dad's an atheist.
	He just sleeps in on Sundays, so you can do that while I take the kids to church.
	I said, no, no, no. If we have children together, they can't be taught religion when they're young.
	If they want to become religious...
	When they get older, well, that's their choice, right?
	I mean, of course, right? But you can't teach them that religion is true when they're too young to differentiate or understand what it is that you're talking about, the options, perspectives.
	Like you don't sort of lay out all the 10,000 gods that people believe in and then throw a dot at this one and say, good, that's Jesus, that's us.
	So that's why we're Christians.
	So anyway, I didn't quite put it there floridly.
	And I remember very clearly she said no.
	No, no, no. The children have to come to church with me when they're very, very young.
	She was like, you know, like a laser.
	And it's like, okay, I'm sorry we won't be dating anymore, but thank you for illuminating the process.
	And we never did, of course.
	I never did date again. I mean, she didn't become my enemy or anything like that, but she sure would have if we'd gotten married.
	So, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
	I mean, fighting religion, I think that has some value, of course, right?
	I think that it's important to put truth, reason, and evidence first and foremost on But the reality is that religion is not the fundamental differentiator between peace and coercion.
	I have friends in the libertarian movement.
	I know they're religious. They know I'm an atheist.
	But they're great with their kids.
	And so it's like, you know, you can follow the tooth fairy for all I care.
	Just don't hit and yell at your kids.
	I would have much more in common with, you know, some anarcho-syndicalists who raised his children peacefully than from some anarchist who spanked his kids.
	Because I'm all about the ethics you implement.
	I'm not about the ethics you talk about.
	I'm not about the ethics you blog about or the ethics you fantasize about or the ethics you debate about or the ethics you read about.
	I'm about the ethics you live.
	And somebody who is living the ethics of nonviolence and non-aggression within their own lives is much closer to me in terms of compatibility than somebody who's not doing that.
	So, I think fighting religion is fine.
	I think it's a good thing to do.
	But again, it just all falls secondary to parenting.
	Now, of course, religion has its component within parenting and that's a complex topic and so on.
	But I really wanted to point that out.
	I mean, I definitely will take my swings at religion or as the religious people call it, you just bash Jesus, you know, like some sort of celestial pinata.
	But the reality is that I'm really, you know, whatever promotes religion, Peace and parenting, I'm for.
	Of course, there's problems in the Bible with parenting, right?
	Spare the rod, spoil the child.
	The Bible is very keen on having children who question their parents stoned to death.
	So there's lots of problems.
	If you follow the biblical commandments on parenting, you're like a stone evil guy who will rot in jail for the rest of his life.
	A couple of problems with that, but of course, there are very few Christians, if any, who do that.
	I have the next comment or question, I should say, comes from Philippe Ozewski.
	I'm sorry, Philippe, if I got your last name wrong, there's some hard pronunciations out there in the world, especially as we have different nationalities coming together through the internet.
	But he asks, what are Stefan's thoughts on antinatalism?
	Antinatalism, which is, he says you're a pretty pro-kids guy and he'd like to hear your reasoning on why it's a good thing to give somebody life.
	Yeah, I mean, I guess I've heard these kinds of questions.
	I find them a little hard to process.
	So, antinatalism is the idea that it's immoral to bring a person into the world, right?
	I mean, clearly there's a contradiction in that you're only alive to make the argument because someone brought you into the world.
	So, if life is the problem, then there's lots of remedies involving high buildings and so on that you can take.
	Not that I recommend them, but There are things that you can take if life is the problem.
	But if you're arguing that people shouldn't be brought into existence, there's of course a self-detonating argument.
	It's like yelling into someone's ear that there's no such thing as sound because you're kind of alive.
	Now, the argument often is around the consumption of natural resources and so on.
	Like if you have a kid, it's going to consume so much more energy and all this kind of stuff.
	But I don't know that that's necessarily true.
	True.
	I mean what if your kid invents a USB drive which would save more paper than all of the environmental organizations in the world ever put together?
	What if your kid comes up with a great way to negotiate relationships so that far fewer people get divorced?
	What Well, divorce, of course, is a huge consumer of natural resources, two houses, two cars, lots of driving.
	And so if you can cut down divorce, you cut down natural resource use.
	Maybe he's going to come up with free energy.
	Maybe he's going to be somebody who finds some magical way to promote voluntarism and restrict the statism to the point where everything becomes much more efficient and we can work from home.
	I don't know.
	Like you don't know that your kid is going to be a consumer of resources or a genius or even just a smart guy who's going to find some magical way to minimize the use of resources through some sort of entrepreneur.
	What if he invents a teleporter?
	We don't need cars or airplanes anymore.
	So you can't really make the argument that everyone who comes into the world consumes resources because some people come in the world and make resources incredibly more efficient than they used to be.
	So, I mean, do you download – do you drive to the CD store like you're in some Barenaked Lady store?
	Do you drive to the all-night record store on a Tuesday night and pick up your albums or do you just click on a button and download them from the internet legally and, of course, paid for?
	So, no, of course, right?
	I mean, do you have to drive to go to college or can you take the courses online?
	I mean, lots of amazing things that have been done to minimize resource use and consumption.
	So I think gamble on life.
	I think that there is, of course, a time where you have so many children, you can't give them the requisite individual attention.
	I don't exactly know what that number is, but it's, you know...
	Some are less than 20 and some are more than zero.
	So I think you can certainly make an argument that too many kids is detrimental to each child's experience, but the idea that you should be against having kids on principle fails on almost every level that I can think of philosophically.
	Yeah, good stuff. I think what he was really trying to hammer on was, I guess some people call life safe slavery, and I know one time you had a rebuttal where you said that Basically, if you thought your life was slavery and it was that bad of a condition, I guess you could commit suicide, put your money where your mouth is.
	If you really think that parents are enslaving people by giving them birth, that's kind of the mentality.
	Some people say you have no choice but to be born, right?
	Yeah, well, of course...
	Everyone who's alive chooses to continue the conditions of their birth, right?
	I mean, so it obviously can't be that bad.
	And I'm not sort of saying to be true to your principles, go jump off a bridge.
	I'm just saying that this is logical problems.
	But the other thing I think which happens in the libertarian movement is we are so rapidly approaching a crisis in society that I do not want to have a child at this point.
	And... I mean, more than the natalist sort of fundamentalist argument, I certainly have some sympathy with that.
	But I choose to live like there's no state.
	That's the freest I can be.
	And I really genuinely believe that if you live freely and loudly, the loudly part is important.
	If you live freely and loudly, you're doing the best service to virtue, to philosophy, to freedom, to the future that you can possibly do.
	If there was no state, I'd be a dad.
	I want to be a dad because I love my wife with every atom and fiber of my being and I really didn't want to be a dad until I meet her.
	Children come out of love for your partner.
	They don't come out of I want a kid.
	It's because I love this person so much that I want us to share something together and I also want to see how great she's going to be as a parent.
	And my wife as a parent is stupendous.
	I struggle to catch up sometimes.
	And so if you love your wife and if there was no state you'd have a kid, then the best way to live in a stateless way is to have a kid.
	I mean the best way to live in a stateless way is to act as if there's no state.
	Yeah, pay them off. Fine.
	Take money. But if the mafia is going to come and shake you down at $500 a month, give them the $500 a month if you want.
	If you can't move, if you're stuck there, give them the $500 a month.
	But then don't waste two days or two weeks or two years bitching about the mafia.
	Then they've taken a lot more than $500.
	Give them your money. Pay them off.
	Pay the bastards off. Fine. Take the money.
	Now I'm free. I paid you off.
	Now I'm free. So make the same decisions that you would make without the government because that's the best way to show people what the future looks like and that's the best way to live free of the government.
	Yeah, good stuff. Next question coming up here is Franklin Nicole Voluntarist asks, what's the next step for Freedom Main Radio?
	What does the community need to do To go from a one-person organization to a huge network?
	Maybe is there going to be a free-domain radio university someday or something to that end?
	What do you see for the future of free-domain radio?
	Where's the next step?
	Do you think it's just going to remain...
	I mean, obviously, you have help in the back, you know, people that take care of some technical issues and stuff like that, but it's mainly Stefan Molyneux.
	Everything you see is Molyneux's work.
	What's the next step for free-domain radio?
	Well, we're attempting to clone Pee Wee Herman and Max Headroom to take over the show because we genuinely feel that that would be largely indistinguishable from my august presence.
	But no, I mean, absolutely.
	The show, of course, has grown beyond anything I imagined.
	I was just hoping to keep body and soul together at the beginning and now it's kind of grown into a big thing, which is good.
	I mean, I'm very happy about that and I certainly appreciate massively everyone's attention, time and support to make that happen.
	I'm currently working on a documentary which is a way to introduce the ideas of philosophy and ethics and the way in which ethics is dictating the world's problems or our lack of attention and focus on ethics is causing all the problems in the world.
	So I'm really trying to make this a matrix unplugging kind of movie and I've got some animators, got a completely brilliant musician working on the score and so that's all.
	Coming together, the script has been done for a while.
	We're just going through the final phases of animation, and so hopefully in the next month or two months, two and a half months, it'll be done.
	So that's the key for that.
	The next thing I want to do is a documentary on...
	It's called The Bomb and the Brain.
	It's the series that I've done on YouTube, people can check it out at fdurl.com forward slash bib.
	I really want to make the case so that people understand the effects of aggression on children so that you really can see all the science, get all the experts.
	So I'm going to do that and then the third documentary is going to be how we get there, things that we need to do as a group, as a community to get – to actually start making tangible, measurable, empirical process.
	I'm a business guy.
	I'm a business guy, so everything for me has got – you can't manage it if you can't measure it.
	And we kind of run politics like just another government program in the movement.
	So I'd like to make the case.
	I could be completely wrong, but I'd really like to make the case.
	In the third documentary about what we need to do and hopefully from there get lots of energy and focus on getting people enrolled and finally getting this stone rolled away from the Lazarus Cave from the future so that we can really get out and enjoy some free air as a species for once.
	Yeah, no, I completely agree.
	Gordon McGill, he asks, what is your strategy for when the mainstream media and the state notice, I mean, you start, what do you add now?
	15 million hits on YouTube, I think is what I saw.
	Somewhere around there, you're close to it.
	And 15 million on your podcast online is obviously the largest philosophy radio show or podcast in the world, so congratulations on that.
	You're going to, someday, they can't ignore you, you're going to have 100 million, 200, maybe a billion hits within the next couple of years, I'm thinking.
	I mean, there's got to be a point where they start talking about you.
	Everybody's going to be talking about it around the talking heads, at least.
	They'd have to at least bring it up.
	So what is your strategy?
	I'm not talking about RT America, and that stuff's great.
	I love you on there. Don't get me wrong.
	But I'm talking about, like, the big boys.
	Like, Fox News someday will have to address you.
	Maybe it's 10 years down the road.
	What is it that you're going to have to do?
	There's going to have to be some inevitable step.
	They're going to try to discredit you.
	They're going to try to knock us down and make us look silly.
	Wait, wait. The media might try to discredit me?
	I've never heard of that before.
	Yeah, yeah. If that were ever to happen.
	Well, look. I mean the mainstream media, I mean you're talking as if they're going to be relevant in 10 years.
	I mean the level of support and trust in the mainstream media is diving down catastrophically.
	I mean when you want news, do you turn on CNN? Of course not, right?
	I mean at least I would assume.
	I don't think that it's going to be particularly relevant where I go on the mainstream media in 10 years.
	I don't have anything in particular to say to the mainstream media.
	I mean, they're focused on politics 24-7.
	I have nothing but an empty contempt and boredom with politics.
	They refuse to discuss child abuse in any productive way.
	essential to building a free society.
	So the media will scream bloody murder over some completely inconsequential or virtual non-threat to children, but they cheer on war, which gets millions of children killed, and they cheer on sanctions against Iraq, which have been demonstrably to have shown to have killed 5 million which have been demonstrably to have shown to have killed 5 million Iraqis and children, of course, just in So the mainstream media is – the state is the physical abuse.
	The mainstream media is the verbal abuse component of the aspects of power.
	So not only would I – don't think I would have anything really to say to the mainstream media first and foremost, but more importantly, I don't think I would have anything to say to the mainstream media's viewers.
	I think that's – there would be so much in the matrix that I would just look bizarre and perhaps evil to them or whatever it is, right?
	So – I think that I would much rather work in the medium where I can have direct contact with people and the idea that I would go on and try and promote volunteerism in the mainstream media, I don't know.
	I just – I can't imagine a situation wherein I would really want to do that or where that would be really productive.
	So we'll cross that bridge when we come to it but it's certainly not on my radar at the moment.
	Good stuff. Good answer. All right.
	I want you to give the viewers out there maybe your website, your YouTube channel, URL, other pieces of information you think you'd like them to see, a place where they can donate, because obviously you and I, we're paid on donations.
	So if you guys would like to help support Stefan and I, Stefan has his own website you can donate to.
	Obviously, you can find mine at voluntaryvirtues.com.
	What's the top three, four URLs you like to plug usually, Stefan?
	Go ahead. Well, I'll start with a resource that's not mine, but which I really like.
	Lfb.org forward slash Stefan, S-T-E-F-A-N. They've got a great laissez-faire book club.
	You get really, really great goodies, 99 bucks a year.
	I hope that you'll go and sign up for it.
	Globalescapehatch.com, if you'd like to check that out.
	I'm going to be speaking there.
	It's in Belize in March if you want to come out.
	It's not going to be recorded, so I will be there for the whole week if people want to – with my family, if people want to come by and chat.
	I love to spend time chatting with listeners, fans, critics, and foes alike, so if people want to come out to that.
	My website, freedomainradio.com, of course, youtube.com forward slash freedomainradio for the videos.
	Yeah, I mean, donations are welcome.
	Dig deep, gorge yourself since it's at the Buffet of Philosophy called This Show.
	And if you'd like to donate over time, that's fantastic.
	And yours is voluntaryvirtues.com just for my listeners.
	If they like your work, which I'm sure they will, then they go by and feel free to share the goodies.
	If you're torn between donations, donate to Michael because his show is on the up and coming and I'm sure you could use all the encouragement that you could get.
	So that would be my suggestion. Well, thanks, Stefan.
	And I would encourage everybody to donate to Stefan because if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't even be standing here today.
	So thank you, Stefan, for everything you have done for us, let alone joining me on the show tonight.
	I appreciate it. It's been my pleasure.
	Thank you for a great conversation.
	I'm going to have you on as soon as I can again, okay?

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