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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:10:45
Ending the State in 30 Days! | Stefan Molyneux at Freedom Summit 2010
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About a year ago, a year and a half, it was December of 2008, there was a video that was done.
It was called Statism is Dead, The Matrix Part 13, right?
Is that what it's called? Something like that.
Close enough. And I saw this video and it was sent to me because I get a lot of stuff from a lot of people around the country.
And I looked at it and I watched it and I went, oh, yeah, baby, that's what I'm talking about.
So what we're going to do is I wanted to emphasize this concept that would be so basic and fundamental that it should be taught to children.
And I want to tell you this one little story to introduce Stephan so you understand why I have him here and why I think it's so important you hear what he has to say.
My wife and I have just become grandparents.
We had our granddaughter.
For the first time, I saw firsthand what the state is trying to beat out of the next generation.
My granddaughter likes playing with the remotes.
I mean, if they're out, man, they're getting gnawed on, they're getting pushed, you lose all your DVR programs, you're screwed if you leave your remote laying around.
She goes around, she's playing with one of the remotes and such and everything, and I go over to, you know, take the remote.
Mine! The first word.
When? I don't know if she said mine, but she definitely would, that's what she meant, okay?
So she pulls it back, starts screaming, and I'm going, wow.
Wow. The concept of dominion over property and yourself.
And that is so early, I recognized it in an eight-month-old baby.
That one of their first social concepts was mine.
This is mine.
What is the first thing the state tries to beat out of you?
Oh no, it's everybody's.
Oh, everybody collecting in first grade, everybody puts all their pencils and paper and everything, and then we'll, you know, that you got, and you went to Target with, and you're with your friend, your mom, and you got one.
Oh, first day of school, I got my protractor and my compass, and we're going to put it on tape, and we're going to equally distribute it to everybody.
They have to beat this concept of ownership out of you to make their system work.
And we have to get, we have to uncover the secrets.
Expose the lie of them doing that so that we have lost in our heritage and our culture even the concept to be able to be free.
And no one better does that than I've seen and get to the root of this than Stephan Molyneux.
I am so glad to give him the extra time here at the summit, and you'll see why he's here, and he's going to change your life.
Hi, everybody.
How are you doing?
You having a good weekend?
Isn't it great? Thank you so much to all of the great speakers for some illuminating and inspirational conversations.
Just before we start the actual content, I wanted to point out that we have an AV crew here who has donated time and money.
This is why we're streaming live on the internet.
If you want to donate a little bit to help cover off their costs for the people online or even here, If you go to, I should have memorized this, bit.ly backslash freedomsummit2010, they have informed me that without donations, they're going to have to hitchhike home.
Now, don't get me wrong, they're pretty enough to pull it off, show a little leg, and they're good to go.
But they've also, we've been working ahead of time, there's a little button, if you're online and you find this too shiny, there's a little hair button, which fleshes me out with a full-on rainbow afro.
We did get that working, right? So we're all set for that.
So, I'm going to start with a parable or an analogy which is how to get rid of the state in 30 days or less with no revolution and no violence.
It goes a little something like this.
We just need one rule.
We just need one rule and it doesn't even have to be a law.
It can be natural law. It can be something that we do socially.
And the rule is You don't get any technology newer than the oldest technology you love.
So what's the oldest computer you guys can think of from back in the day?
A what? A TRS-80.
Oh no, we can go further back than that.
A what? A UNIVAC? Did someone say UNIVAC? I think UNIVAC is the oldest one, right?
Okay, that's older than I can go, so if we're going back to Abacus, that's...
Okay, so if you say that the UNIVAC, that the 1950s was the peak of computing and the UNIVAC was the best system ever, you don't get a Pentium.
Right? It's like clear out your basement, here's your forest of vacuum tubes, you can go to town.
You don't get any technology newer than the oldest one you worship.
Why is that important? Well, the state is just a kind of technology.
It's a way of organizing things, it's a way of getting things done.
And you could make the arguments, and I think it would be a reasonable argument, that we can look at the earliest state in the way that we would understand it now, like post-tribalism, 6,000 years ago or so, maybe a little more.
The Egyptian government was the earliest state.
So if you only get to use the oldest technology that you love, then statists shouldn't get to use anything Invented after, 6,000 years ago.
Now if we take that approach, and we can enforce this socially.
Join me, brothers and sisters.
We can enforce this socially. So let's say you get an infection or some health issue, whatever, right?
And you go to your doctor.
And your doctor says, freedom or statist?
And you say, freedom, volunteerism, non-violence, that's my bag, baby.
Well, what are they going to do? They're going to say, well, great, we go to this cabinet.
And in this cabinet, we have MRIs.
We have x-ray machines.
We have bacteria-eating fungus monkeys.
I don't know what they're coming up with these days, right?
But you have everything in the sun that you can imagine and dream of over here in this cabinet because you're into voluntarism and freedom, and that's what it produces, is new technology, new ways of doing things.
Anesthetic is in here. You're going to love that.
But... If you say, no, no, no, not freedom.
Statism. Well, then we go to the other cabinet.
And the doctor leans over and he's like...
Dusty.
Dusty as hell down here. You go down.
Let's look at what we got for your infection here.
Well, got some monkey brains, but that's not for infection.
We got an ostrich egg, but that's just for head injuries.
Hedgehog scalp, that's for baldness.
Ah, here we go. You're all set.
Stata says, what the hell is that?
Well that, my friend, is your bucket of leeches.
Soon you will be all better.
This, I think, would help people reevaluate their addiction to solving problems with incredibly ancient technology like statism.
What about if you need to travel?
The freedom line at the airport leads you, without security, because it's not security, it leads you to an airplane.
Or, I guess, 12 minutes after freedom is implemented, a jetpack, because that's what we're all holding out for.
And in that line, you can go blowing yourself through the sky at 20,000 feet with in-flight entertainment and probably a back rub from a masseuse hanging off your back.
That's the freedom line.
And the statism line, oh, I'm sorry.
Airplanes are far too new for you because you like the state.
So if you go down this line, you need to get to Phoenix, a couple of thousand miles, you get to use an ass.
And people say, an ass?
What do you mean, like a donkey? No, no.
Just your ass. Stop walking, statist.
Birth control. Ah, the younger people are perking up now.
Huh? What? Birth control? No, no, see, you don't get a pill, you don't get condoms or anything like that.
You're a statist, so you like old technology.
You don't even get a sheep's bladder or whatever the hell they used back then.
You get prayer.
And not just after the fact like the rest of us, but beforehand.
That's all you get. You want to get online?
Oh, no, no, sorry, that's far too new for you.
We've got some smoke signals that you can use back here in this line.
Uh, Maybe we'll be very generous and give you a carrier pigeon.
Maybe two yogurt cups and a piece of string.
But no, computers. It's far too newfangled for you.
Counting. Well, you can go to 10 because it's not until next year that we figured out how to take our sandals off and go to 20.
But this is a way that I would suggest that we get rid of it.
And the final straw, I think, that will change people's minds from status into freedom is if they go in the line to the dentist.
Right? I won't even go down there because I think we all know where that leads.
It's not pretty at all.
So this analogy is just a way of looking at how to break cycles of thinking, habits of thinking.
The human mind and human culture in particular is so impressionable it gets these grooves worn into it.
Whatever is old It takes on an air of legitimacy just because it's old.
And it's what we're used to, and it's what we've grown up with, and it's what we're habituated to.
You have a thumb through those...
You see them online now, I guess.
But when I was a kid, I had sort of a book of deities, right?
And you sort of go to those Indian deities with like 19 arms and an elephant's head, and they're blue, and you're just like, well, that's weird.
But of course, to the people who grew up with that God, it's like, that looks like Jesus.
It just looks weird to us.
So, what I want to do in this talk is to try and give you two particular tools that I have found most effective in breaking people out of this cast.
I mean, it really is like you're trying to chip a cast off somebody's arm when you're trying to get them to break out of the little worn grooves of habitual thinking and I've got some good tools for that.
So, one of the things that I run into all the time, and I'm sure that you guys too do as well, is this weird belief that if you have a monopoly that is providing a service, if you get rid of that monopoly, what do most people think will happen to the service?
It goes! It vanishes!
It's completely gone! And that is insane, obviously, right?
I mean, there was a time when agriculture was run with slaves.
And I'm sure that there was some, probably more than some, probably a lot of people arguing this.
People said, well we should not have the government enforce slavery.
And people would say, but without slaves there won't be any food.
And of course we know that the exact opposite is true.
That when slavery was ended, what do you get?
Do you get mass starvation? No.
You get combine harvesters.
You get improved fertilizer.
You get irrigation. And you get the lowering of the number of people involved in agriculture in the US from the turn of last century, 70% down to 3% now, with far greater productivity.
You can use this metaphor, I found it helpful with people who are stuck in this mindset.
Think of a stream, right?
And you got a big honking rock in the stream.
Statist thinking would be to say that if you lift that rock out of the stream, there's still going to be a hole In the water.
It's still going to rush around a vacuum because nothing's going to rush in to fill it.
But the reality is when you break a monopoly, you unleash, it's like rubbing that gene, you unleash human potential to solve problems, which is not going to happen otherwise.
I mean, if the government ran marriages and said, you have to marry this person, you have to marry this person, or you go to jail and you can't get divorced, what would happen to dating sites?
They would all go away, right?
And then people would say, after one generation, well, we have to have the government assign marriage partners, because otherwise nobody would get married.
Because how would they meet each other?
They can only meet each other through the government.
But this is the kind of mindset that we need to break people out of, and it's really, really tough, but I think I've got some good tools to help.
As we all know, what happens when the monopoly of government puts its boot on the neck of freedom, it displaces solutions that otherwise would be there So at Libertopia, recently I gave a speech and saw some fantastic presentations there.
Really, really worth checking out.
Next year, and one guy was talking about these friendly societies.
Have you guys ever heard about these?
Okay, you can tune out for a few minutes then.
Friendly societies, like before there was government healthcare.
Oxymoron, but we have to use their language for the moment.
There was these horizontal societies of insurance, and 95% of the poor had access to catastrophic health care as part of these friendly societies.
Because everyone recognizes you can get a bad illness for no fault of your own, or even if it is for a fault of your own, you still need to treat it.
And 95% of people had access to this healthcare for an incredibly cheap, I can't remember the sum, but it was really, really cheap, even relative to their income at the time.
And this, this was at a time when you could get some seriously bad stuff.
I mean, you don't remember this.
Does anyone, do you still get smallpox vaccines if you're younger people?
Do you still get them? I remember getting them.
Smallpox, you could get smallpox back then.
Only through the military, right?
Guinea pigs. Anyway.
But you could also get tuberculosis.
And the cure for tuberculosis was like lounging at Club Med for like two years.
That was expensive to deal with.
Polio, you could end up in an iron lung for years or you could end up in a wheelchair.
And so even with all these terrible illnesses, you could get healthcare through voluntary associations for pennies compared to what you...
In the research that I've done, and I've done a Death of the West series on YouTube and on my podcast tracing sort of what happened to the Western culture since the 18th century, I found this fascinating research, it's documented in the video, that education in the 19th century was so innovative that there was this organization called the Lancashire Schools Where they would teach the older children how to teach the younger children, so every child didn't need to teach them.
Because, I mean, if you're teaching grade 12 physics, you need a different skill set than if you're teaching grade 3 math.
So they taught the children to teach the younger children, and this blew my mind and continues to blow my mind, but I verified it six ways from Sunday.
You could get a year's worth of education at one of these schools Okay, you guys got to guess.
How much do you think it costs to get a year's worth of education for a child at one of these schools in current dollars?
Twelve dollars. Twelve dollars.
There's always one.
There's always one.
It was forty dollars.
Forty dollars.
Anybody know what it costs to get a public school education per child, an average in the US?
It's like $12,000, $14,000 even if you take the government accounting, which you shouldn't without a clothespin on your nose.
So, we encounter these prejudices, we encounter this, can't think of solutions because I've always been provided with an absolute solution.
How do we chip away, how do we break, how do we strike at the root of this kind of thinking?
Well, The first thing that I would suggest is that we're trying to sell freedom.
I used to do a lot of sales.
I used to be an entrepreneur and traveled all over America and China and Europe selling software.
And the one thing I really understood was that selling is a subservient position.
Particularly if what you're selling people don't really want.
Right? We've all... We've all been in those, yeah, if you ever did those timeshare, hey, free vacation, oh no, I'm pinned down by three salesmen who are trying to jam a timeshare down my throat.
But it's a subservient position, and that's what's tough for us, is that we're trying to sell people freedom.
We know it's good for them, we know that they'll be happier if they have it, we know that society will flourish if people accept it, but people continually reject it, and I felt like a long time, like I just had to kind of beg people, like, please, you know, you'll love it, trust me.
But it is a subservient position and I don't think that works.
I don't think you can change the dominant paradigm within society from a subservient position.
We need to switch that. I'm going to tell you how.
First thing to recognize, people have a highly, highly, highly ambivalent relationship with freedom.
The basic reality of the human soul is that everybody wants everyone else to be free except them.
That sounds a bit weird. Let me explain to you what I mean.
Because if you don't understand these hurdles, I think it's going to be harder to be an effective communicator.
If you're the only thief in the world, how easy is your job?
It's pretty damn easy, right?
People aren't going to lock their cars.
They're not going to lock their houses.
There's not going to be, you know, passwords to anything because there are no thieves.
People would just assume they misplaced something if it gets stolen because there's one thief in six billion people.
So the thief wants everyone to respect property rights, but for him to be the exception.
Not counting the Fed, if you're the only counterfeiter in the world, you have a pretty easy time of it.
Why? Because there aren't going to be any counterfeit detection machines, because it's not worth it.
There aren't going to be those squiggles and, I don't know, Illuminati symbols or whatever the hell they have on those bills, because it's not worth it.
So, you know, a couple of people lose a couple of bucks every hundred years, it doesn't matter.
So everybody wants everyone else to be good except for themselves.
There was a guy, I can't remember his name, talking about the sugar producers and how they have these huge tariffs on sugar coming into the country.
Now imagine there are no tariffs.
Imagine there are no tariffs.
So imagine that there are no tariffs and the sugar producers go to the Congress and say, we want 50% tariff on all sugar coming into the country.
And the Congress says, well, okay.
But we're into universal property rights and law, so if we do it for you, then we have to do it for everyone, so there'll now be a 50% tariff on everything.
How attractive is that to the sugar producers?
Well, it's nothing.
It's a wash, right? In fact, it's a negative, because you've got the government overhead.
Because they get 50% more money, but everything they buy costs 50% more, so it's pointless.
So, they want everyone else to be in the free market, but they want themselves to be exempted.
Because if nobody else is in the free market, they're not getting goodies and innovation and cheaper things and anesthetic and those infection-eating fungus monkeys.
By the way, stay tuned for my later business plan.
It's really cool. So recognizing that people have a highly ambivalent relationship to freedom, that they want freedom for everyone else but they want to be exempted from freedom themselves because it's so profitable, is a very, very important thing to understand.
That's why they have this resistance to it and yet they kind of want it.
They say, we want freedom in the abstract, you give it to them In the tangible and include them in freedom and they're like, ooh, suddenly I don't like it quite so much.
But there is a way to change this.
And it is breaking the habit that I think we all have.
And look, if you're not, then tell me and I'll stop talking.
But the habit is this, that we come and we say, such and such should be privatized.
Well, education should be privatized.
What do people say?
What's the first thing they say? How will the poor be educated?
And then what do we have to do?
We have to go and research.
And we have to go and find arguments.
And we have to go and find historical examples.
And we have to go and find the statistics.
And we have to build the most boring PowerPoint in the history of the planet to try and convince people.
And what do they say then? Yeah, it won't work.
Or, hey, I've got some counter statistics, dude.
Or, you know, in Iceland in the 4th century, there was an uneducated kid.
What about him? Sophistry.
Sophistry. And it's a complete waste of time.
Well, actually, it's worse than a waste of time.
Staring at a sunset is a waste of time.
This is more like slowly cheese grating your head into a fine powder.
Slowly. And we end up doing all the work.
I swear to God, half the traffic in Google is libertarians coming up with counter arguments.
We run, like we are responsible for most of the internet traffic through Google, I think.
What do you think? Okay, well what did happen in Ireland in the 7th century?
I mean, we're the only people who ask that question because we feel that it's going to somehow convince people.
How well does this work for people?
How well does it work?
Hands up if this is a very effective technique for you.
You're either eating or you agree with me.
I'll take either one. We end up doing all the work.
We end up doing all the work.
And whoever is doing the most work in a relationship is automatically subservient.
Which is why we can't climb on top of the social paradigm.
If you have a doubt that selling is subservient...
I don't know about you. I remember back when I was, I don't know, 12 or 13 and just breaking into the dating scene.
And... Did you have these, I don't know if they're still around these days, these gym dances?
Did you have those? So you have, I don't know how it breaks out now, I think women or girls are a lot more confident than they were in my day, but in my day you'd have like, one side of the gym would be all the boys, right?
And then on the other side of the gym would be all the girls.
And if you were a boy, and I was, then you have this Marianna death trench of humiliation to cross, right?
So you've got to cross over, and you're looking at the girls, and you're thinking, Oh man, don't blow it.
I've got to pick a girl. This is how shallow we were.
It's sad but true. I've got to pick a girl who's attractive enough that my friends aren't going to make fun of me.
But not so attractive that she won't dance with me.
And you do all these calculations.
Incredibly rapid how we do this.
And then you go and you try.
And you ask. And maybe she says yes and maybe she says no.
If she says no, your problems are just beginning.
Because then... You've got to make it back over here conspicuously alone to face the mockery of your peers.
And then your troubles even escalate because then you know that if you're going to go back, all the girls over here are thinking, okay, so I'm not his first choice.
He struck out. I guess I'm somewhere down on the list for him.
And so you're even more likely to strike out.
So when you're trying to sell something, whether it's your hunky little 12-year-old self or anything else, you're in a subservient position.
I'm sorry, I'm just going to let you dwell on that image for a moment.
So how do we change this?
Well, I'm going to give you two strategies.
One is called flip it, which wasn't my first pronunciation.
There's flip it and there's no, you sell me.
Now flip it is when you flip roles with the person you're trying to sell freedom to.
Let them do a little peddling for a while.
Let them do a little bit of work for a while and have them try to sell you.
So I'm not a minarchist because I actually had a comment on YouTube recently.
I thought it was the most succinct argument.
I said, minarchists are Boromir.
That's really good. I don't know if you guys know Lord of the Rings references.
Half of you are going like, I get it.
Half of you are going, what?
So I believe that geographical defense, you can't call it national defense if you're an anarchist, but geographical defense should be provided by voluntary defense agencies or whatever, right?
Now, if you've ever heard this argument say, we should have competing defense agencies, what's the first objection you always hear?
It won't work. I'm sorry?
It won't work. Of course it won't work, but why?
What do they say? It won't work. One of them is going to turn into the government, right?
They're going to go down into their basement, they're going to work out, they're going to get blank helicopters, they're going to get everything of them swarming up through your chimneys and take over.
Absolutely. Plague of locusts, for sure.
And then what I typically used to do was I'd say, come up with all these arguments and then people would just shoot them down and you'd end up in this, right?
So what I do is try flip it.
So who gave me that?
Was that you? You, lady in red.
You're the guy, right? You gave me that answer just now?
Yeah, okay. Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you with my question.
Stay with me, people. It's only been a few minutes so far.
It just feels longer. So what I say, and I used to pitch business ideas to investors, right?
Because after you've done that Mariana death trench of humiliation, nothing is ever that bad again, so you can do that kind of stuff.
And the investors would ask all of these tough questions.
So what I do with people who I say, voluntary defense agencies, and they say, well, they're just going to turn into a government, is I say, well, let's flip it around.
Because I've done this a million times, but you should learn how to think like somebody who's free.
You should learn to think outside of the chattel slave box you were born into.
Okay, I think that. I don't say that.
You know, I remember it's how to go on the offensive without being offensive.
That second part took me a while to learn.
And so we flip it around, right?
So I say, okay, well let's pretend that I'm a skeptical customer and you're the defense agency, how you doing salesman?
I don't want to buy your service because you're going to turn into another government and you really want to sell me something, so how are you going to sell me?
Take out an insurance policy.
The minute I start stocking up on tanks and airplanes, you know, if it wrecks me out, I'm going to get a lot of money.
And that's going to be an incentive for me to not become Durant Gold.
Alright, so just because we don't like to repeat for the mic, so your answer is that I should take out insurance against you.
You will take out insurance.
Well, no, because then I'm going to say, well, you taking out insurance, the insurance company is going to be paid by you, they're going to be run by you, they're not going to give the truth to me, I don't buy it.
You just came here to sit and...
I just assumed that's coffee in your glass, I'm not sure, but...
I don't want to put this guy on the spot.
I mean, anybody can come up. So, I don't buy the insurance thing, so what else have you got?
I mean, I want protection, because, you know, don't worry, there are no governments anymore, so there's no war, but there could be really malevolent space aliens.
Actually, that's not true. There's no way that we're, you know, all of these, sorry, tangent, official tangent, here we go.
Remember, I'm standing here, I'll come right back.
The official tangent is, you know all these movies where these space aliens come down to make war on us?
There is no conceivable way that they can have a government and go interstellar.
There's no conceivable way.
There is no way.
Do you know the only thing that space aliens are going to unroll when they visit Earth is a mall?
Because only if they're traders are they going to have the technology to visit us.
And it will be easy gold-based credit.
Anyway, yeah, the idea that they're going to come and wage war is if they're still having wars, they can barely get off the ground, let alone to other planets.
Anyway. Okay, we're back.
Alright, so I don't buy that the defense agency getting insurance, which the insurance companies then beholden to them, I don't buy that that's going to work, right?
So how else are you going to do? You can stop paying for it.
You can. Well, yeah, I could stop paying for it, but I still need that service from someone, so someone's going to have to come up with something creative.
Yes? An auditor.
Alright. Now, you got my goosies going.
What you got? Some third party.
They come and they go through all the warehouses, right?
And they look for sharks armed with lasers and whatever you're coming up with, right?
Maybe the infection-eating monkeys have gone bad or something like that, right?
Okay, so there's some third party who's going to go and inspect and blah blah blah, right?
So maybe that's it. But maybe that's not enough, right?
Maybe you could come up with...
Yes? That's good.
A posted reward, right? So if I, as the defense company, am amassing more weapons than I have contractually required or obligated myself, then whoever finds them gets $50 million or something like that, right?
And that's open to anyone.
And I have to have all of my books open.
I have to have all my warehouses open.
And anybody who finds, you know, one bullet more than I'm supposed to have gets huge cash reward.
Yes? Oh, they'll all try and find each other's, right?
Whatever, right? For sure, for sure.
So, I mean, you can come up with a million and one.
Where am I supposed to get all this money to amass this massive...
Did you read my book?
No.
Oh, good. Yeah, for sure.
So a defense agency that says, I'm going to get laser-guided spaceship aircraft carriers manned by rabid rhesus monkeys on crack, because that's my plan for world domination.
Oh, shoot. I shouldn't have said that.
They're going to have to buy those or make them or something, which is going to be pretty obvious, and They are going to have to increase their costs to the consumers to pay for that stuff.
So anybody who starts coming up with more than they need is going to have to charge the consumers more which is going to drive away business and blah blah blah.
But the purpose is if we stop giving the answers.
Effective teaching is not giving answers.
We know that, right? Effective teaching is not giving answers.
Effective teaching is having the other person understand the parameters and answer the question.
So I think that we, and I use this collective, and look, if it doesn't apply to you, I apologize in advance, but we do have a habit of giving people lots of answers, rather than stimulating them, giving them the parameters, being the skeptical Teacher, that you have to explain it back to me.
You have to come up with the answers.
And look, I mean, I'm as guilty of this probably more so than anybody in the room, but this is my sort of hard-won, hard-won lesson.
Let's try Rhodes, shall we?
Because we all have to become, dare I say it, Rhodes scholars to answer this question.
Oh, did we enjoy that?
It's everybody's food coming up just a little bit again.
Because it's the roads, right?
Why can't we be free?
There's tarmac in the way.
Isn't that hideous? You know, why did the chicken cross the road?
Oh, he can't, sorry. It's been privatized and it's a million dollars to cross.
So, okay, so somebody says, well, so we say privatize the roads.
And people say, well, how will roads work, right?
And our temptation, because it's easier but not as productive, our temptation is to give lots of answers, right?
But I say, turn it around.
And say, okay, I am a skeptical investment firm and you are the guy who wants to take over the government roads.
Pitch me how you are going to make these roads great.
Pitch me! And pretend that your life depends on it.
Your children are starving.
Your house is hanging by a thread.
You need a new kidney.
You need to close this deal.
Right? So, anybody want to try that?
Or should I just pretend to debate with myself?
You know, to have any service that would be a benefit to anyone, or I'm going to try and make an argument that I'm going to do it, the one that I get the most kind of thing is that there is a universal need that they've put into their head or something that they want provided, and because I want it, I need everybody for your own benefit for you to contribute so that we could have it.
Now, if I'm going to do it myself, I have to get some kind of ownership of it or provide it.
I'm going to need some kind of a sanction or monopoly granted by the king in order for me to be able to do that.
How can, in a stateless society, an individual grant this monopoly for me to operate that?
I mean, any time, I mean, that's why you're probably having a difficult time from, you've got a bunch of hardcore, no-compromise libertarians here.
They haven't even thought that part.
They're not even a salesman.
Right? But that's good, because if I wasn't giving you new information, you wouldn't be here, I hope.
So, sorry, did somebody want to...
Yeah, gentleman in the back. All right, so let's pretend that you're pitching me.
You got a haircut. I'm having a hard time following you, because...
The question I have to people is, well, let's privatize the road, and they're coming back.
No, you have to have the government do this.
You can't have privatized roads.
We'd never be able to do it.
We have to have the government tax everybody, force everybody to pay in.
So how are you flipping it back to them?
They're not going to sell me on privatized roads.
They don't want privatized roads.
They don't believe in it. They must have, if they can think at all, and we try not to debate with people who can't think.
In the same way, I try not to play pat-a-cake with guys who have no arms.
But if you have arms, right afterwards we're on.
So anybody who says it can't be done must have some argument as to why.
Because people resist freedom either because...
They are skeptical of freedom, which is good.
Skepticism is good. We encourage skepticism.
Or because they're just not very bright and can't think.
And they're just resistant because they can't do it.
And the way to find that out is to put the ball back in their court.
So let's say they say, as Ernie said, there's some argument that says, well, you have to have a monopoly because otherwise there'll be free riders or you can't track who uses it.
There's some argument that they have, right?
And let's say, so what you say then, whatever argument they come up with, say, let's pretend that's impossible.
Let's pretend that you want to own these roads.
Let's just, you know, let's play make believe, right?
That's where a lot of creativity comes from.
Let's pretend that you're asking for money to take over these roads.
How are you going to solve that problem?
Now, if they say, well, the problem just can't be solved and it's impossible, then they can't think.
In which case I'd say, you know, flatline, move on, right?
But they're going to come up with something, right?
Because we're triaged, right?
I mean, new status are pouring into the world every day from government schools, from people who are doing the nasty, right?
We are getting status pouring in all the time.
And we are like triage surgeons, right?
And triage is those who will not make it no matter what you do, those who will make it if you help them, and those who can wait.
So that's all we do. And so I think we need a lot more triage and a little less two-year debates that we have with people.
That's my opinion, but I think we need a lot more triage because we're always falling behind because status are pouring in.
It's like death by monkeys if you've seen Toy Story, right?
The status is coming in and burying us.
So... Whatever they come up with, there has to be some argument and say, well, how would you overcome that if there was no government?
Did you have... No, you were asking for solutions to fix the roads, correct?
Yeah, so if you have to pitch the roads, what's your pitch?
I'm going to form a cooperation or a mutual society and me and all my neighbors in my community, we're going to get together and we're going to pitch some money in and we're going to buy all the roads.
And if there's a department store that wants to come in, They can join our co-op or they can build their own road and they can tie all together and we'll all be a happy family.
Right. So the department store you're going to have to sell your roads to.
How are you going to guarantee that department store that you're not going to sell them a road and then quadruple their rates next year when they've already set everything up?
Because the people in my society are going to want to use their road if they're...
If we're going to quadruple the rates and cut their road, then the people that own the co-op are not going to be able to use that road because the department store is not going to rent the road from us anymore.
That's one answer. Another answer would be it's a 20-year contract.
With a guarantee of open books and, you know, cost plus 5% profit or whatever, right?
There could be lots of ways of doing it.
Like, you know, you get these crazy arguments about roads.
Like, okay, so I build a cottage.
Some guy's going to build a road all the way around it like a moat and then he's going to charge me a million dollars to cross it.
Well, how are you going to avoid that? Well, you have contracts with people who fund the road saying you're never going to do that.
Or you buy the land around where that is going to be.
There's lots of ways to do it.
Other things you can do, like if you want to improve road quality.
I mean, that's not about the roads.
This is about thinking like an entrepreneur.
Because freedom runs in an entrepreneurial fashion.
It doesn't mean everyone has to be an entrepreneur, but the problems are going to get solved through entrepreneurial thinking.
Just one sec, let me finish this. Three things that people want from roads, right?
They want less congestion, and how do you get less congestion?
If you privatize roads and you're trying to pitch your road company, how are you going to get less congestion on the roads?
You know, interestingly enough, more lanes will never do it.
And does anybody know why more lanes don't work in roads?
Well, people build further away.
Because people want to be out in the country.
They want to be away from the city. A lot of people do.
So if you double the roads, if you double the lanes, all that happens is you get a short burst of better traffic.
But then what happens is people build more and more houses further and further away and you end up with the same congestion.
Any other? How do you reduce the congestion?
So you're pitching, right? Go ahead. I'm an ignorant statist that has the luck of sitting down with Stefan Molyneux and you put me in this role-playing situation.
Yes. And I'm going, how do I... I'm playing the role now of one of those evil, greedy, capitalist entrepreneurs.
Exactly. And I'm thinking, all right, how do I pitch it to the rest of the sheeple that I... No, no, no.
Sorry, you're pitching...
You could say to the sheeple, but...
To the government. No, to the investor.
Why should I give you the money to buy the roads rather than this guy?
Or to the government to let me buy the roads in the first place...
Well, no, because the government isn't interested in the efficiency that you can provide, just in the brides you can give them.
So, an investor is going to be interested in return, a government is just going to be interested in, you know, backsheesh.
Okay, so I'm coming from a perspective where this is crazy and ridiculous and impossible, but...
Think of all the cool things we could do if I was in charge of the roads.
We'd raise the speed limits.
And we'd make sure that the people patrolling the roads that I'm going to be in charge of, they're not jerk cops.
They're actual safety officers.
And then I start thinking, wow, look at all these cool things we could do if the roads were actually...
The way we built roads and conducted roads would be based on the needs of the people like myself who travel on roads and go, wow, it sucks because the government is doing this, that, and the other.
And all of a sudden I go, wow, now I want to make this possible.
Tell me how this is possible.
Now you're thinking like a free human being. And you're getting the status to think like a free human being.
That is, it's like an explosion in their head.
That you can't come back from.
That's what I'm talking about. Just get them to try thinking about solving problems.
I had a conversation with one guy.
He said, you know what just struck me?
You know, you have these shoulder lanes on roads and you have them because of accidents, right?
What if we got huge hunkin' helicopters, huge hunkin' helicopters, to pick up the cars so that you could use those lanes not for accidents but for traffic?
And I was like, and perfect, because the government's going to be selling lots of big, huge, honking helicopters, because there won't be an army.
They'll be cheap.
The question that I always throw back to people that say, well, what about roads, you know, if there is no government?
I said, well, how do you think Lewis and Clark got across the country?
How do you think Marco Polo went from Europe all the way to China?
There was no government road.
You know, and look, I appreciate that.
The problem, I think libertarians as a whole, this is a genuine criticism I have of libertarians and of myself, because I do it too.
I think we use the past too much as an example.
And I think what happens is then people think, so you want us to travel in canoes?
Like, you I think that's where people are thinking.
So we go back a lot to the past rather than engaging people into the future.
Another solution for roads, which some guy came up with when I gave him this, he said, well, it doesn't make any sense that high use times cost exactly the same as low use times.
There is no free enterprise system in the world where that would be the case, right?
So why is traveling at 2 a.m.
the same as traveling at 8 a.m.?
Makes no sense. Well, the reason for that, of course, is that businesses don't pay because the way that that is paid for is in the time of the employee, which never shows up in the prices of the goods that the business is selling, right?
So if you had triple costs for traveling in rush hour, people would stop.
Traveling in rush hour to the point where it would even out.
And businesses would stagger their start times so that the roads would be much better utilized.
And that would be part of the incentive that you would give to your employees, and there's no reason why everybody has to be at work at 9.
The only reason that it happens is because the roads are subsidized.
That's another answer that somebody gave when I started.
And this was a pure statist, starting to think about how these problems can be solved in the absence of a state.
Instead of using this infrastructure of sensors, What you do is you turn those sensors around, such as speed enforcement, and now, based on the throughput of the highway, you actually increase or decrease the speed At the given time, given the number of cars that are driving through, to actually make it safe, see?
We're using this technology to make it safe, not to raise money for the state anymore.
That's exactly right. And the other thing, too, is that you could, because you would obviously have, you have to pay for the road, so you have electronic tolls, because you don't want to stop everybody 20 feet and throw a few pennies in a jug.
And you would simply say to people, look, we know how fast you traveled because there was an entrance and there was an exit.
So we know how fast you were going.
You just charge people more for speeding.
You know, that's just a price, not a ticket, because that's a punishment.
This is just a simple charge, right?
Or you could charge them more for going slow.
It depends on whatever highway system you have.
And again, this is not about the roads in particular, though I think it is a very interesting discussion to have.
But it is about us not answering the question of how freedom would work, but engaging people into thinking about how human beings can solve problems in the absence of a monopoly of force.
I'm sorry, you've been waiting a long time.
I apologize for that. Rhodes?
Where we're going, there aren't any Rhodes.
Well, in your example of Rhodes, there's the exact opposite example.
That the government used to destroy freedom, and that is the building of dams to generate electricity.
They took our money, they built all of these dams, power stations to generate electricity, and now we've got to buy the electricity that we paid to create.
So the government uses exactly the opposite of your scenario to keep us so we can't be the investor and the buyer of the roads to purchase our freedom.
That is an excellent point. And I mentioned this, I gave a talk at Drexel University about six or seven weeks ago, so I'm sorry if you've heard this very brief story.
I mean, this is really esoteric libertarian footnote knowledge time, but who knows why we have an interstate highway system?
Department of Defense. Department of Defense, exactly, for Eisenhower.
Does anybody know why Eisenhower was so interested in highways?
Autobahn. This is even more esoteric.
Autobahn. That's true.
In 1919, Eisenhower, who was a young corporal in the army, he was charged with driving across the country to assess the roads.
That was his job. To go from Washington to San Francisco, it took them 64 days at an average speed of 4 miles an hour.
And he remembered that as a young man, and that's one of the reasons why he was very interested in this national defense system of roads.
Because we have this system of roads, we think that they're necessary, we think that they're inevitable, and we also think that they're going to look the same if we don't have a government.
But they won't. When you get rid of the government, the infrastructure that the government has developed is going to radically change.
I mean, roads subsidize huge amounts of travel that otherwise wouldn't be there and it's not necessary.
You know, we've developed this kind of interdependency which is not particularly healthy in some ways and is not good for the environment because, anyway, because of these roads.
So it's going to look very different and try to engage people, try to engage people in solving problems from an entrepreneurial standpoint because it engages their minds and it lets them do the work.
It lets them learn how to think like a free man, like a free woman And you get to sit back and be the critique.
Wouldn't that be great? I mean, don't you dream about that at night?
I used to have dreams where I was like sitting back and critiquing other people's ideas rather than just going bang, bang, bang against other people's indifference.
Because it's really stupid to just throw up objections.
It's not intellectually engaging.
It's not valuable.
Like, it takes a lot of skill to be a NASCAR driver.
I know this because I've played Pole Position.
Anybody know that old game?
That's old. Thank you.
It takes a lot of skill to be a NASCAR driver.
Traveling at Mach 12 or something around a track.
How much skill does it take to hurl a tire onto the road?
Zero! Yeah, it could happen accidentally.
So we're like the NASCAR drivers trying to swirl all around these obstacles and we're not engaging people's minds if we simply let them throw up barriers rather than engage them In how to think like a free human being, how problems can be solved without violence.
Put the onus on them to solve the problems.
That's how to make a libertarian.
Not give them endless answers that they can knock down or reject for no reason at all.
I mean, that's happened too, right?
You've answered every conceivable objection.
They're like, I just don't buy it.
Maybe they don't stand exactly like this, but that's how it is in my mind's eye.
But they just say, I don't buy it.
Why? I just don't.
And that, I mean, that to me is just like, forget it, I'm done, right?
I mean, that's just too exhausting.
And you can find those people very easy if you ask them to start solving problems.
Look, here's another one.
If this one doesn't work.
There was a tradition in French literature.
Oh boy, there's a sentence that usually gets people's interest.
Please don't let me sit next to him at lunch.
But it's very interesting.
There was a tradition in French literature in the 18th century, 19th century, which was very powerful at exposing the ridiculousness of society.
And Voltaire wrote a number of these, and so did other writers.
And what they did was they pretended to be somebody from the New World, Coming to France and trying to understand the society.
To take a foreigner's perspective who knew nothing about France and they would ridicule and lambaste and lampoon and rip apart the ridiculousness of their own society simply by imagining explaining it to somebody who knew nothing about it.
This is a highly underutilized but extremely powerful technique.
Go to a statist and say, pretend I'm from Mars.
Pretend I'm from some other world.
Pretend I'm from Borneo.
Explain to me how this system works, pretending I know nothing about it.
You won't believe how quickly It becomes like a freaky monkey-in-a-barrel acid trip for people to try and explain.
Because you break it down to what's...
And I'm not going to give you the whole thing because I'm low on time and I want to make sure we have time for questions.
Can you imagine? We get ridiculed for saying we should use peace and voluntarism to solve problems.
We've got this problem called education.
So what we're going to do is we're going to give a small bunch of guys all the guns in the world.
And they're going to solve the problem.
I mean, that is just insane when you think about it.
Because the number of holes you can shoot in that is going to make Swiss cheese look like tungsten.
That's a weird metaphor, but anyway, I just go with them as they come.
But, I mean, so a bunch of guys are going to give a bunch of guys a bunch of guns, and that's going to solve the problem.
I mean, that is truly magical thinking.
It's like, well, if they have all the guns, why would they be interested in solving problems anymore?
They already have the guns!
Well, they are responsible to the people.
It's like, okay, who educates the people?
The guys with guns.
Are you kidding me?
What happens if you don't agree with the system?
You get kidnapped and you get thrown in jail.
Well, why won't these guys just do all the evil in the world and threaten everyone?
Well, because there's voting.
So wait a sec. So you think that these small number of guys are going to solve the problem of education because the majority of people want the problem of education to be solved.
So why do we need the guys with guns?
If the majority of people want the problem of education to be solved, why do we need the guys with guns?
Well, because there's some people who don't want the problem of education to be solved.
Well, how do you know those people aren't going to end up being the guys with guns?
And won't these guys with guns just indoctrinate everyone rather than educate them and pretend that there are no guns and pretend that it's a social contract?
That it's voluntary when in fact it's violent?
Anyway, I mean, you can go on and on with that kind of stuff, right?
So people say, well, the majority of people, they vote and the majority is good.
The majority is moral. It's like, well, if the majority is moral, why do they need to be ruled by a bunch of people who are gun-hungry and power-hungry and probably not quite so good?
Anyway, and since evil people want, they want two things.
They want something for nothing and they want to escape the consequences of their actions.
Which is pretty much the definition of what government is.
Government is a giant magnet for evil people.
And you give them all the power in the world over good souls.
And so you understand that if you approach the state as an alien, and not the kind of alien we were talking about Friday night, if you approach the question of the state and you say to the state, explain to me how the system works like I'm three years old, like I know nothing, like I'm going to have to, God help me, explain it to my daughter.
Because I don't want to give her my conclusions, but I have to be honest, right?
Guys with guns run the world and we call them founding fathers.
But explain it to me like I know nothing about it.
It's a very powerful technique.
Because you then are in the position of being the skeptic who is poking holes in a truly cosmically ridiculous system.
Rather than being the person who's crossing over the trench of humiliation to beg people to be at least a little bit interested in freedom.
That is very subservient.
I think that if we stay on our knees, we're not free.
And we're not going to be effective at freeing others.
If we are begging, the future will fall.
The future will fail.
We have to take a more commanding position.
We have to be teachers Not really shifty sounding salespeople, right?
We have to have that credibility.
We have to evoke and provoke and stimulate thought in others.
Not give them answers which with the easy big bat of cultural history they can just swat down without a moment's thought.
We have to teach people how to think, giving them answers.
It's never going to do that.
It's never going to do that. So I hope, and I don't want to go over, I want to make sure we have time for questions.
Just remember, when you're in a debate that is so frustrating that your teeth are just about to start rotating, and you're about to say, F it, switch it to flip it.
Flip it around. Let the other person try and solve the problems that he's raising.
Because people can. We all negotiate.
We all come up with voluntary solutions in our daily lives.
It's not like we're asking people to suddenly break into flu and Esperanto with no training.
We're just saying, the way you solve problems in your business, the way you solve problems in your marriage, the way you solve problems as a parent, the way you solve problems in your garden, with your car, just do that with other things.
We're not asking people to do something they're not already doing.
So it's not an unfair thing to do.
So flip it and, no, no, you sell me on statism.
So that you can poke holes in statism and take it out of the default position that just feels right because it's all we've ever done.
I think those two I have found to be enormously helpful and powerful.
I think it's time for us incredibly hard-working intellectual advocates to put our feet up just a little bit.
And other people work to convince us just a little bit.
I think that will turn it around.
I think it is very essential that we try to turn it around because as a movement, you know, success has not been tattooed on our forehead.
Nick has some questions from the audience.
We have a lot of people watching online and they're commenting in chat room here.
I'll let Nick go ahead and do that.
Okay, there's one On topic with what we were talking about earlier with the roads when we were trying to describe that.
It's from in the Fed Ed.
He said, who oversees the acquisition of new land for new roads?
And what about my house that is in the way of the road?
And I'm not going to sell it for any price.
That's the question from the internet.
Right, right. Well, any price, yeah, okay.
You could come up with a situation where I guess somebody is 900 years old and, you know, because in the future we'll all live like Methuselah, but Yeah, okay, we can come up with that.
Well, you can't break contracts.
You can't just go and take someone's land.
You can't. I absolutely guarantee you that people are not going to sign up with protection agencies in a free society that say, we'll protect your land unless we get a really good offer.
Then, you know, it's in with the howler monkeys and you're out of there, right?
That's not going to happen. So people are going to want inviolate property rights subject solely to their discretion about selling.
So other alternatives will have to be found.
Maybe you can subsidize the guy and go over if you have to.
Build an overpass at some height that it doesn't matter.
Maybe it's jetpacks and we don't care.
Again, we don't know what's going to happen in the future and I hesitate to provide an answer.
But I guarantee you that people are not going to want defense agencies or protection agencies that...
Can break property or contract at whim, those services will never be sellable.
So I think that it will be inviolate and alternatives will simply have to be found.
Of course, people, I mean, it is only the government that begins planning a road saying, well, we can use eminent domain if we have to, so let's just start building the damn thing.
In a free society, if you say, I want to build 200 miles of road, what's the first thing the investor is going to ask or your board is going to ask?
Do you have rights for the property?
Have you arranged for everybody on that route to sell to you?
And if the answer is no, well, we don't approve it.
It is only in the government where one...
A giant turd head can make a decision and inflict it on everyone.
In a big corporation, and I use that word advisedly given that it won't look anything like it does now in a free society, but in a business enterprise, decisions, and I know this, I've been on boards, I've done all of this kind of stuff, decisions are very collective.
And before you invest a penny in research and development or expansion of your business or trying to penetrate a new market or a new advertising campaign, You have to come up with n-dimensional spreadsheets that will blow up your computer.
And you have to come up with presentations so boring that they can put Alvin the chipmunk to sleep.
You have to collectively work together with other people And they will ask you a million and one skeptical questions to make sure that you know exactly what you're doing and you have all your ducks in a row, you've dotted all your I's, you've crossed all your T's.
That's how things work in a free society.
That's not how things work in government.
Government is like trickle-down fiat diktat, right?
Where a small shadowy group of conspiratorial...
Totoramas can inflict their will on the people.
That's not how things work in a free society.
So I guarantee you in a free society that problem will never even arise because you will have your contracts all in place before you start building that road.
You'll have to or it won't happen.
Go ahead. Okay, I promise to answer the next question more succinctly.
You can solve the education problem by homeschooling your child.
That is a great point, and if I'd had more time, I would have dipped into that, but as always...
The government problem, the military problem, the police problem, everything can be solved by that.
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
The question is, like, who is going to provide schools for the poor?
The question is, well, who says that we even need schools for the poor?
Right? I mean, in the Middle Ages, there were 11-year-olds who were court astronomers.
Why not let the children free of the shackles of sitting like grain-fed cattle in a stall being droned at?
I don't want to talk. Let's free the children to explore their own knowledge and to gather their own wisdom and to be there to facilitate them.
Why do we even need schools? That's the question that I always ask is how do we even know that the government solution is going to be anything close to what's going to work in a free society?
Okay, I've got one more from the internet here.
It's from Vegan Mikey.
It says, as a follower of your work, I know you're a student of history.
You spoke Friday night saying that you believe the elite will never implement fascism or totalitarianism due to the need for the tax cows.
But as a student of history, can you explain why they keep trying to implement it and if it is the ultimate goal is a technological revolution that will finally be able to accomplish it?
I don't quite understand the last part of the question, so if I don't answer it, he can clarify.
Look! I should be listening.
In the post-war period in India, the great curse that the British left India was never even socialism, because a lot of the British intellectuals were over there and a lot of the intellectuals who ended up running India were educated at British schools where socialism was the thing.
So we left them socialism, which was a big, bad, nasty curse, which did arguably more harm than the British Empire ever did.
They have begun to throw that off, and there are tens of thousands of people every single day rising out of poverty in India because they've embraced the free market.
Not perfectly, but a heck of a lot better than we're doing.
Same thing is happening in China.
Do you know that the Chinese government runs less of the economy than the British government does?
And they're the communist totalitarian dictatorship, right?
So a third to a half of the world's population has figured all of this out.
They've understood this, and they are moving towards freedom.
We don't see this, right? So it's like a seesaw, right?
One culture goes down, one culture goes up.
They have given up on that.
Remember, communism and fascism was supposed to be better livestock management than freedom.
The ruling elites were like, hey, if freedom is good, imagine how great it's going to be with fascism or communism.
It's going to be way better. The promise of those systems was better growth, better stability, more money.
For the elites. They get that it doesn't work.
They get that it doesn't work.
There's no alternative now for the elites to get their money other than to free the productive classes and tax the hell out of them.
They know that. Because that's what's happening in countries which have no history of the free market.
I mean, China has no history with the free market.
India has no history with the free market.
Lots of Asia have no history with the free market, but they're implementing it because they understand our elites are no different.
They're just shackled by all these dependent classes.
And please, I'm not arguing for sympathy for them.
They're shackled by these dependent classes that they have inherited, just like we have, and they have to find some way to escape from that, you know, suffocating dependency.
But for sure, that's where the world is going, even with no history of the free market.
We as a culture have a strong history with the free market, so it's much more likely to happen here.
I think I did all of that in one breath.
Sorry, just wait for the mic if you can.
You had mentioned the fact that you don't think they're going to want to kill off us milk cows, you know, the producers.
Yet historically we have the precedent of the night of the long knives.
So how are we going to stabilize the entitlement class when they have a meltdown, when their checks stop going out?
Well, first of all, and I thought about this since Friday, so I'm going a little more into detail about what I talked about since Friday.
I talked about them cutting off the checks on Friday, but that's not what's going to happen.
What's going to happen is inflation is going to cause the value of those fixed checks to go down, and that's how they're going to diminish what they're paying off to those classes.
The dependent classes are required...
So that you get slave-on-slave violence, right?
The dependent classes are required so that whenever the productive classes talk about wanting to be free, we get the poor hung around us, you know, like, I can't climb the mountain because I got a millstone called the poor hanging off my neck, right?
As if the government solved the problem of poverty.
So they still need a dependent class so that we'll all attack each other when we talk about freedom, but it's just way too big.
So they're going to cut that back and they're going to drug them with patriotism, right?
I mean, the dependent classes are as susceptible to this propaganda as everyone.
So they're going to say, well, our new battle is financial stability and we have to whip inflation now, so you're all going to have to double up and you're going to have to pull together as a team.
There's only a certain number of people in the team.
But we all have to pull together as a team, and that's why, you know, you have half rations and I have double rations, because we're all a team.
But just appeal to patriotism and cut them off as far as that goes.
But no, I don't think there's going to be any culling, because the culling frightens the productive classes too much, and then they stop producing.
One of the problems we have with the government road system in New Mexico is the politicians can't stop manipulating the Department of Transportation to conveniently relocate interchanges close to property that they own.
Because of obvious commercial benefit for the value of that property.
It then has the benefit of the traffic and increases in value for that.
Next thing you know, hey, you could put up billboards.
The value of your property increases with roads being built around the edges of it or even through it.
And I've thought about this in the future.
If we get to the system, we'd have a much more dispersed network of roads built on serving people and increasing property value.
And so To that argument that is raised, well, what about people that object?
You know, we see in this traditional model with a centralized system, the government mandates, the road goes from A to B, and we're going to claim everything in between.
But in a system based on freedom, won't people be begging to have their property developed into roads?
Well, yeah, for sure. That will be one benefit.
Tom DeLorenzo talks about this in one of his books, how when the roads, the government roads, sorry, the government railways were built in the 19th century, that they look pretty much like your lower intestine as far as directional efficiency goes because the politicians would all beg and they'd get the roads to come up here and the railroads to come up here and then go down here rather than the straight line, which is why they always lost money.
The free market roads...
Sorry, the free markets and railways went in a straight line because they had to answer to investors, not to political pressures for raising property values so they were much more efficient.
Hi. I'll probably be the room status, so to speak.
You know, outside of this room, I'm the anarchist.
In this room, I'm probably the status.
I'm probably more of a pre-Lincoln 10th Amendment person.
So, from that perspective, obviously, I don't want to be the world's policeman and all that.
We have to get rid of government in that realm.
However, there's the old parable of one stick being weak and multiple sticks being you can't break.
And I guess the question is, at what level?
I understand we need freedom, and by breaking down society into at least smaller groups, you have more freedom.
But at what point do we as Americans, under that freedom...
What model you're proposing, do we become a target of the hawks outside of America?
Because ultimately, the old Roman parable is divide and conquer.
And that ultimately is what, in some ways, my fear is of more of a purist anarchist movement.
Right. Okay, and I'll answer this very quickly.
I'll refer you to my book.
This will be the last question, so you can use this to sum up.
Yeah, so it's a great question.
So we have a free society in America, and I use that term advisedly.
I try not to refer to my tax farm as anything other than a tax farm.
But, okay, so we've got this country in America, but Canada is a socialist hellhole, and Mexico is a fascist hellhole, and aren't they going to want to come in and take over all this wealth and so on, right?
Well, the first reality is that no nuclear country has ever been invaded.
You've got nukes. You have no worries about invasion.
There's no historical precedent for that.
And so running nukes, I can't imagine, would cost more than a couple of hundred million dollars a year to have them there, to have the systems that you would need for deterrence.
So in a population of 300 million, you're charging people a dollar a year for their Defense budget.
I mean, I think we could all dig deep and cough that up.
Could you imagine finding your defense budget in the cushions of your couch?
I mean, that, to me, is a beautiful world.
So that's one answer.
The second is, you can't invade an anarchist country because there's nothing to take over.
The reason the countries invade another country is to take over the tax system.
So if there's no tax system, and you don't know what weapons people have, and Lord knows by this crowd you've got some weapons, right?
And I have my rapier-like wit, which I'm sure would deter anybody.
But you can't take it over, right?
So if you're looking at two places to invade in just land, one of them is a farm.
And the other one is just a wilderness and you don't know bears and snakes and what the hell is going on in there.
You're always going to invade the farm.
Why? Because the livestock are already domesticated, the buildings are already there, the milking system is already set up, the distribution system is already set up.
If you go into the woods, you're just going into the woods.
There's nothing to take over, no structure to take over.
So you think of a country that has a government like a farm, you can take it over and be immediately productive.
Think of an anarchist country.
There is no tax structure to take over.
There is no tax collation. There's no deductions at source to take over.
So the incentive is very, very small.
In fact, I'd say it's negative to take over.
And as I think, somebody pointed out that insurgency was always very powerful and effective.
So that's not going to work for you.
But taking over another farm is going to work.
So that's why countries invade other countries but won't invade an anarchist society.
And again, you can go more.
I've got these free books online that go...
Well, that's because the Native Americans didn't have any nukes, right?
If they'd have had nukes, we might have stayed outside the 20-mile limit and negotiated a little bit more, right?
That's what I'm saying. I think we are completely out of time, right?
Okay, thank you everybody so much.
I hope that it was enjoyable. I really appreciate your time and attention.
I also want to thank very much to Ernie for having me here, and thank you so much for the people who took a mic.
I know it's like really putting you on the spot, but you did fantastically.
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