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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:36
The Question Libertarians Just Can't Answer - Answered!
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Mollinger from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well. So, we have an important question from Slate Magazine, which I think is deserving of a highly sophisticated philosophical response.
I'm not going to do that.
We're going to do another kind of response.
The question libertarians just can't answer.
If your approach is so great, why hasn't any country anywhere in the world ever tried it?
So why are there no libertarian countries?
If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early 21st century is organized along libertarian lines?
First of all, way to misunderstand libertarianism up front.
That's just, that bodes not well for the article to come.
First of all, libertarians do not claim to be correct in how best to organize a modern society.
The whole point of libertarianism is I don't know what is best for other people.
I don't know who you should marry.
I don't know how you should educate your children.
I don't know which career you should pursue.
I don't know how many leg lifts you should do.
I don't know how the fuck you should part your hair.
I don't know how often you should go for dental checkups.
I don't know! That's the whole point.
Rational humility is the essence of the libertarian position.
I cannot figure out for the life of me half of how I'm supposed to spend my goddamn day, let alone dictate to other people through the awesome power of law and violence how they should spend half their money in most of their days and all of their children's income through national debts.
So the reality is that libertarian humility is that we don't know how other people should live, and you cannot organize a society.
If we had a society where the government forced everyone to get married and they say, well, libertarians have a different idea of how people should be forced to get married, the whole point would be libertarians don't know who you should marry.
So we're not going to force anyone to get married.
That's the whole point. The second trick is then they say, oh, well, you're anti-marriage if you don't want to force people to get married.
You know, like people say, libertarians say government education is bad.
Oh, you must be against education because I'm anti-rape.
Somehow I'm anti-sex.
Anyway, so, this is good.
This is a good cardio workout for me, reading these kinds of articles.
And, of course, the reality is that countries in the past have specifically tried libertarian principles.
So the founding of the United States, with the not insignificant exception of slavery, was, and of course, no franchise for women and poor whites.
But for the most part, economically at least, there was a laissez-faire attitude.
Why? Well, they proclaimed a virtue of having a laissez-faire economy because they didn't actually have the strength and power to do what they're doing now, right?
Broke away from England in the late 18th century, they had almost no power, no money, they were in debt, and so they left you alone because they didn't have the strength.
The moment they got the strength and power, you know, it's like a vampire is nice to you when the sun is out.
Anyway, so let's go on.
So then he goes, you know, there's lots of countries and so on.
Wouldn't at least one country have tried it?
Wouldn't there be at least one country out of nearly 200 with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state, and no public education system?
Well, that is a fine, fine question.
Why, in modern democracies, with the power to print money and go into intergenerational debt, Why is it that politicians act in ways that get them elected?
God, that's a puzzler.
Okay, let's see if we can work through this.
So, to get elected, a politician must offer things for free to his constituents or her constituents.
That's how you get elected.
You don't get elected on principle.
I mean, public school scrubs any kind of rational moral principles out of your brain the third day that you're in there.
So, people aren't voting based on principle, and as Winston Churchill once said, the best cure for any idea of a legitimate democracy is five minutes conversation with your average voter.
I talked to a guy once who said, oh, I voted for Pierre Elliott Trudeau because Margaret Trudeau was cool and hung with the stones.
Yes! That gives you the right to control my child's education in half my life?
Of course, she's cool. She hangs with the stones.
But politicians offer you stuff.
For free. I mean, all political platforms, with the exception of the Libertarian Party, all political platforms are, I'm going to give you free shit and don't worry about where it comes from.
I mean, that's all it is, right?
So the idea that somehow politicians would rise to prominence and power by not just talking about, like Ron Paul talked a lot about reducing government spending, but he was one of the biggest pigs with his nose in the trough of government spending and sending it back to his constituents.
That can be imagined.
So, you know, people don't mind it if you bullshit about freedom.
They do care if you don't give them stuff which they perceive to be for nothing.
So politicians get elected by offering free stuff to people.
You know, it's bribery.
I mean, that which is illegal in the private sector is always praised as good policy in the public sector.
So it's illegal to bribe people in the private sector.
You can go to jail. But the government functionally runs on bribery.
I mean, if politicians either couldn't promise stuff for free or had to send a bill to their constituents for everything that they'd promised, the whole facade would collapse, well, more quickly than it's collapsing slowly, as Nietzsche said, that which is tilting over ought to be pushed.
But the idea that politicians would somehow get into power by...
Harming the immediate economic self-interest of those who become dependent on state debt and state fiat currency and state inflation and state theft, the forcible transfer of income.
It's like asking, why do politicians who want power act in such ways that they can get power?
Why don't they act against such ways that they can get power?
Or it's like saying, well, if the war on drugs in America is such a failure, why don't they just cancel it?
Well, because cops like money and power, and politicians like money and power.
It's not that shocking. Oh, I got another one.
If animals do better in freedom, why don't zoo owners...
Let all of the animals out.
Well, you know what? Zoo owners, they don't seem to let a lot of animals out.
Therefore, animals must do better in the zoo.
The idea that somehow the government reflects the will of the people is mad.
The free market reflects the will of the people.
At least some majority of people want to buy stuff that's produced by Apple or Samsung or Rogers or whoever because they're not coerced into buying them.
The government reflects exactly what the people don't want to do.
How do you know that? Because there's a gun to the people's heads in the form of taxation, in the form of imprisonment in government-run and often privately run rape rooms, government paid for privately run fishistic rape rooms of prisons and so on.
Everything the government passes that it is law is directly what people don't want.
I mean, you know, in terms of like fiscal stuff, it's exactly what people don't want.
People desperately do not want the government to have a monopoly on currency and for the semi-private Fed to have a monopoly on currency and interest rates because you get thrown in jail for trying to compete with them, for trying to come up with your own currency.
It's exactly what people don't want.
How do you know it's a rape?
Because there's a knife to the woman's throat.
That's how you know she doesn't want to have sex, right?
So the laws that force people to do stuff is a reflection of exactly what people don't want in society.
Okay. So when you ask libertarians if they can point to a libertarian country, you're likely to get a baffled look.
Well, that's a great argument.
Followed in a few moments by something like this.
While there are no purely libertarian countries, there are countries which have pursued policies which libertarians would approve.
Chile privatized social security, experimented Sweden, gives vouchers in schooling and so on.
But this isn't an adequate response, he says.
Libertarian theorists have the luxury of mixing and matching policies to create an imaginary utopia.
Well, no. No, you see, libertarian theorists don't mix and match policies to create some sort of Frankenhead freedom-running monster through the fields.
No, what...
I think we're good to go.
Very much in short supply these days.
But the whole point is that we have this thing called the non-aggression principle, which means do not initiate the use of force to get what you want.
The fact that we have to TRUMPET this from the very rooftops of a decaying semi-physiastic society only tells you how far society has fallen from reason and virtue and how corrupt and monstrous society has become, you unbelievable propagandists with intestines for brains.
The whole point is that libertarians look at various government policies and compare them to the non-initiation of force or to the provision of some sort of choice on the part of parents.
So, for instance, Public schools force parents and non-parents to pay for these propagandistic brain-mashing mills of lack of concentration camps, and they also force children to go there.
So the fact that force is being initiated against parents and on children, kind of not on the moral side of things, just a little bit.
So we compare...
Government policies to the non-initiation of force and to a smidgen, a bare remainder of free choice on the part of individuals, both parents and children, just in the field of education.
And so, you know, this country that gives some, what was it, Sweden?
Sweden gives some vouchers to parents to let them choose a little bit of their education.
Well, okay, so that's slightly less initiation of force than forcing parents to send kids to the local school.
So it's comparing government policies to ideals which we all accepted in kindergarten, which is do not hit other kids and take their lunch money, and that's how they're evaluated.
It's not picking and choosing in some sort of random way.
You know, if you've got five guys in a lineup and you can clearly identify the guy who keyed your car, then he's the guy who did the bad thing.
It's not just assembling badness out of thin air.
You're actually identifying somebody who violated the property right principle and so on.
So, let's see here.
So, some political philosophies pass this test.
For much of the global center-left, the ideal for several generations has been Nordic social democracy, what the late liberal economist Robert Heilbrunner described as a slightly idealized Sweden.
Other political philosophies pass this test, even if their exemplars flunk other tests.
Until a few decades ago, supporters of communism in the West could point to the Soviet Union and other Marxist-Leninist dictatorships as examples of really existing socialism.
They argued that while communist regimes fell short in the areas of democracy and civil rights, Fell short?
They proved that socialism can succeed in a large-scale modern industrial society.
Now, first of all, I know that almost every intellectual has a leftover 20th century hard-on for communism and still can't quite believe that the dictatorship of the proletariat didn't quite work out as well as we thought.
But my God, let us set the fucking record straight.
Excuse my French, but this is a really important topic.
If you're offended by my language, let's at least turn to the There's a massive pile of human bodies left over by communism.
Seventy million in Russia alone, more tens of millions in China and Cambodia and you name it.
The countries that experimented in communism were over a hundred million, perhaps closer to 150 million people dead.
Do you know the entire of the Second World War?
Was 40 million dead?
And we have... There are not many people who say, well, Nazism, you see, fell a little goddamn short on the areas of human rights.
If only Nazism had been tweaked a little bit, might have been a whole lot better for the Jews.
No. We recognize Nazism as a pestilent evil that rolled across the landscape, killing more people than most diseases throughout history.
But somehow people have this lingering semi-morning boner for communism.
And you can still wear a little...
I used to see this in debating societies when I was in college.
People would wear these little badges of Marx.
Marxism-Leninism is still taught very positively and proactively in college.
Again, in college I took a course called The Rise of Capitalism, The Socialist Response, by a truly evil care-bearer Nazi of a professor who was all big and hard-on for communism.
This was... Even after the fall of communism and therefore was even more inexcusable.
You can still wear these little badges of Marx and nobody really gives a crap.
You wear a little badge of Hitler and everyone goes insane.
Of course, Hitler was responsible for far fewer murders than communism ever was.
So the idea that this ass clown says, oh, you see, communists, or he says, people argue that communist regimes felt a little short in the area of civil rights.
Can you imagine saying that about Hitler felt a little bit short in the area of the protection of Jews?
People would go insane. But you can say all this crap about communism.
Anyway, so while the liberal welfare state left with its Scandinavian role models remains a vital force in world politics, the pro-communist left has been discredited by the failure of the Marxist-Leninist countries it held up as imperfect but genuine models.
Libertarians have often proclaimed that the economic failure of Marxism-Leninism discredits not only all forms of socialism, but also moderate social democratic liberalism.
Well, does extreme, you know, unbelievably violent rape – that's evil.
We all understand that that's evil.
What about a sexual assault that doesn't involve penetration?
Well, that's still evil, right?
Because it's on the same continuum of the initiation of force.
You know, killing one guy is evil.
Killing two guys is more evil.
But, you know, so saying, well, killing two guys, somehow libertarians believe that killing two guys discredits only killing one guy.
Well, so, of course, communism is 100% ownership of your salary, whereas modern socialist democracies are only 50 to 60 to 70 to 80% ownership of your salary.
So it's like saying, well, you see, 100% slavery is really bad, but 60% slavery is fine.
Well, that's just mad.
I mean, it's completely insane.
You understand that there's a moral continuum.
There's a black and white, right?
Not initiating the use of force is fine.
It doesn't mean that you're moral. It just means you're not immoral.
Initiating the use of force has various degrees in it.
But once you cross that line from sunlight to darkness, once you cross over that big chasm from not initiating force to initiating force, yeah, there are differences of degrees.
And more violence produces worse results than less violence, right?
If you beat your child every day, you produce a more traumatized child than if you beat your child every month.
I got it. Of course, the initiation of force that is only 50% of your income is really like beating your child every other day.
And so when children who are beaten every day end up as monstrous or whatever, which is tragic and usually inevitable, children who are beaten every other day are less monstrous.
So I think it's fair to say that more evil discredits less evil, because sometimes it takes a little bit more evil for people to see that bad things are going on, and then it scales back.
It's the initiation of force that really is the violation of property rights that is the problem.
So let's see here. But think about this for a moment.
That's a really annoying thing to hear, like you've never thought about things for a moment.
Just think about things for a moment, and then you'll see what my point is.
In other words, anybody who's interested in this topic has obviously thought a lot about politics and so on, and say, but think about this for a moment, and you'll see, and it's just like, oh, it's so condescending, it's ridiculous.
If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn't libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world?
Okay, if communism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, And you know, again, failure is not the right word to use with communism.
I don't really say that, you know, if racism is discredited by the failure of Nazism.
No, racism is discredited because racism is an immoral, it's an evil prejudice to have in the head.
It doesn't mean it's evil. We can all make illogical collective judgments about people, and that's wrong.
Racism in its actions, like lynching and so on, is obviously evil.
Failure of communist regimes.
They didn't fail.
They were slaughterhouses of starvation, murder, gulags, rape.
I mean, massive. Oh, my God.
Read the Gulag Archipelago and just get a sense of the evil.
Although, in fact, of course, America now has more people in prison than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin, largely as a result of the drug war.
Communism didn't fail.
Communism slaughtered people by the tens of millions.
That's not a failure.
You know, like I may fail to catch a bus.
That doesn't mean that I'm stepping on the bodies of millions.
Anyway, if socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn't libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world?
This is complete apples and oranges.
It's complete apples and oranges.
In other words, if you have a visible failure, That is not the same as a...
You can't use that to compare that to a theoretical success.
You know, like if everyone raped everyone and I said, you know, it would be a lot happier if we bought some roses and some chocolates, maybe a glass of wine, and wooed and allowed the woman or the man to say no to sex.
Say, well, the fact that rape makes people unhappy, that discredits rape.
The fact that rape is violence, well, that discredits rape.
But... If everyone's raping, well, if we voluntarily have sex, we make love.
Instead, if there's none of that around, say, well, that discredits that as well.
No, no, no. The presence of an act of evil discredits the evil for anyone with eyes to see.
The fact that the act of evil is eclipsing the possible good does not discredit the possible good.
Anyway, I don't know. So communism was tried and failed.
Libertarianism has never, ever been tried on the scale of a modern nation state, even a small one, anywhere in the world.
Well, that's not, I mean, that's just not true.
I mean, there are countries that in the past we would consider quite libertarian, with obviously significant problems, but countries in the past have been quite libertarian.
In fact, really the modern wealth was founded on libertarian principles, respectful property rights, free trade, and the non-aggression principle.
Alright, so then he goes on to ranking people by economic freedom, and he points out that there are no libertarian countries in the world.
Percentage share of GDP in the US and other similar OECD countries is around 40%, nearly half the economy, and of course this is not counting debts, which is kind of important.
Economic freedom country rankings are biased towards city-states and small countries.
So the top five are Hong Kong, a city, not a country, Singapore, a city-state, Australia, New Zealand, and Switzerland, small population countries.
And then, anyway, so he goes on.
You can read this. And then this fellow goes into a comparison of the United States of America and Mauritius.
Now, Mauritius, for those who don't know, is a tiny set of islands, like thousands of miles from anywhere, in the middle of nowhere, in the ocean.
And... Also, Mauritius happened to be a colony of a variety of European powers up until the late 60s.
So Mauritius, like, you know, 40 years of independence.
In other words, they've had local tax farmers rather than remote tax farmers.
And so he says here, the U.S. spends more than Mauritius, 5.4% of GDP in 2009, compared to only 3.7% in 2010.
For the price of that extra expenditure, which is chiefly public, the U.S. has a literacy rate of 99% compared to only 88.5% in economically freer Mauritius.
Now, this is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.
So, for instance, America, massive amounts of natural resources, friendly neighbors to the north and south, immunity from wars, and has not been colonized for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Mauritius, on the other hand, islands in the middle of nowhere with all of the massive problems that that produces in terms of resource consumption having to be shipped across hundreds and hundreds of miles of ocean makes a slight dent in your capacity to trade with the world if you are a tiny island in the middle of the ocean.
Also, a valid comparison would be, say, America 30 or 40 years after the Declaration of Independence or after the Independence War had been won with England.
So we look in sort of the early 1800s and look at the literacy rate there, because Mauritius is a pretty new country, free of foreign domination.
And the Western exploitation of third world countries during the empires was wretched.
I mean, from like 1800 to 1950, when England was in charge of, was dominating and exploiting India, the average Indian's income didn't budge.
I mean, 150 years.
They just got raped and pillaged in every six ways from Sunday.
This happened all over the world. So comparing America with all of its natural resources, all of its friendly neighbors to the north and south, and its whole Western philosophical tradition with an island in the middle of nowhere, with almost no natural resources, massive barriers to trade, and only recently freed from foreign exploitation.
Not exactly very fair, comparing a country almost ten times older.
That's sort of like saying, well, you see, in a libertarian country, there's a five-year-old, and in a socialist country, there's a...
50-year-old, and the problem is, you see, the 5-year-old doesn't read as well as the 50-year-old, and therefore libertarianism fails.
Oh, you know, as a 3-year-old in some libertarian country, can't bench-press as much as your average 30-year-old in a socialist country, and therefore libertarianism doesn't work.
That, literally, is the level of logic that we're dealing with.
But we're not dealing with logic, we're dealing with propaganda.
Anyway. So, anyway, it's...
So let's end here.
So it's a seductive vision, enjoying the same quality of life that today's heavily governed rich nations enjoy, with lower taxes and less regulation.
The vision is so seductive, in fact, that we are forced to return to the question with which we began.
If libertarianism is not only appealing but plausible, why hasn't any country anywhere in the world ever tried it?
Well, I mean, he's wrong about that.
I mean, so basically wrong to question everything that he writes, including his capacity to write.
But it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what countries are.
Countries are not there for the benefit of their citizens.
Politics is not there for the benefit of citizens.
We all start off as children, and if politics and societies were there for the benefit of citizens, we would expect them to be there for the benefit of children, first and foremost.
So, for instance, you wouldn't force children into ridiculously bad, underperforming, destructive schools and force their parents to pay for it at the point of a gun.
That would be one thing that would be kind of important.
If you're really interested in children as well, perhaps not legally allowing parents to hit them might be something that would be quite beneficial for children as well, which is certainly the case in Canada and the United States and England and some parts of Europe, not so much.
And also, for instance, what might be useful if countries were really interested in their citizens and therefore would be most interested in the welfare of their children would be to not have social policies designed to strip fathers out of families, which is almost universally the most destructive thing that could be done to children.
Or, for instance, last but not least, perhaps not using the unborn as economic chattel, selling them off into slavery to foreign banksters largely in order to bribe discontented, greedy and narcissistic populations of voters in the here and now.
Maybe not so much national debt.
If, you know, governments and politicians and social structures that exist were really interested in the welfare of citizens.
The majority of people don't want a war on drugs.
Yet the war on drugs continues and escalates.
The majority of people are incredibly skeptical of the war on terror because, you know, it's really hard to wage war on a word.
But... Yet it continues.
The approval rating of Congress is about 6%, which is mostly congressmen, their families, their mistresses, and everyone who depends on them for a living, the lobbyists and so on.
So almost nobody in America approves of what Congress is doing and the fact that Congress is there at all.
Yet Congress continues to expand its powers.
The majority of people in America are lied to about basic things like how much Obamacare is going to cost and so on.
And then the consequences of these lies never fall upon those who make the lies.
So the majority of people in America fundamentally believe that the country is going in exactly the wrong direction.
And yet nothing ever turns around because the purpose of power is to gain power.
The purpose of power is to gain money and resources without actually having to work, because it's a lot easier to jibber-jabber than it is to actually create something productive and useful to people.
I say this as a guy who is no shortage of jibber-jabber.
Countries are tax farms.
That's what they are. They are farms which indoctrinate children into the value, virtue, and necessity of government, which is fundamentally a pre-Stone Age institution.
The hierarchy and the violence that was used to organize Stone Age tribes is something that has lasted.
It's one of the only things that has lasted into the modern world.
Rape as a form of reproduction has at least morally been condemned and damned in the modern world.
The subjugation of various races and so on has, at least in the West, been morally condemned.
Slavery is one of the ancient institutions that has not made it through to the modern world.
Government is an ancient institution that has made it through to the modern world for a variety of reasons, mostly to do with the propagandizing of children.
Even religion tends to be falling away.
There are a lot of people who are up here in Canada.
Two-thirds of those 60 and older are religious.
About half of those in the middle age are religious and only a third of the younger people are religious.
So that's beginning to fall away.
Statism, because we are stuck in these brain-scrubbing, like cheese grating on the brain cathedrals of state worship for 12 years in a row when we're kids, this is something that's very hard to do.
12 years of programming is really, really hard to undo.
For somebody to hear the language of libertarianism And not have the automatic rebuttals of statism come up in their head, which have been programmed into them from a very early age, is literally like you going to a foreign country, having somebody speak to you in your native tongue, like English, and have you not understand it.
I mean, that's just what you've been, quote, propagandized or acclimatized into speaking, so you can't not understand English if you know English as your native tongue.
You can't not understand it if someone speaks it to you.
We all speak this language, this forked tongue, this devil-speak of statism, And that's our programming.
And so when someone comes up to you with libertarianism, you simply can't not hear the rebuttals of statism.
And this is what this guy is hooking into.
And this is why so many people are liking this article, despite its obviously ridiculous, false and excusing of evil in terms of calling communism as a mistake.
Communism fails morally, of course, because it is a monopoly of force on the part of the state.
It is the state exercising property rights which are then denied to everyone else.
It breaks the test of universality, which is the most essential test of morality.
And the power corrupts, we all understand this.
As governments get bigger, more and more corrupt people are drawn to its blood-soaked peak of the pyramid.
And the fact is that this guy is excusing evil.
So it doesn't work at a moral level.
It doesn't work at an economic level because, as Joseph Salerno has pointed out many times, and Mises and other people, without prices you simply cannot have any kind of efficient economic calculation.
So this excusing of evil and this bizarre comparison of recently emerged from foreign dominance, tiny islands in the middle of nowhere compared to a very robust and old economy with lots of natural resources in the United States, it only seems to make sense because of propaganda.
When you look at it with the clear eyes of reason, you see it for what it is, which is this guy is stoking the furnace in which we feed our children and we better stop this shit soon.
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