March 17, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
12:06
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| All right, Stephan, I'm going to unmute you. | |
| You've got your 15 minutes now to respond. | |
| I appreciate that. | |
| Thank you. And thank you very much for that good introduction and a fairly decent gallop through the history. | |
| You know, it's tough to get up to speed on something like anarcho-capitalism. | |
| It actually significantly predates somebody like... | |
| Murray Rothbard, you go back to Lysander Spooner and the Constitution of No Authority in the 19th century and so on, but I don't want to start off by nitpicking, although I guess I kind of just did. | |
| So let's go over some of the basics about it. | |
| So you're right, the non-aggression principle, also known as kindergarten morality, don't hit, don't steal. | |
| That's really the essence of morality. | |
| And the genius of the anarcho... | |
| The capitalist position is both very simple and very complex. | |
| So the simple part is to say, what if we just had a moral law and made it universal? | |
| Because, you know, morality gains its power through its very universality. | |
| It's different from, I like the color of blue and you like rhubarb pie. | |
| Morality is considered universal and binding, which is why I called my book on secular ethics universally preferable behavior. | |
| You can get that for free at freedomain.com forward slash books. | |
| But anyway, so the question is, what happens? | |
| If we take a moral absolute that we all accept, thirst for, desire and wish to enact in our personal lives. | |
| Nobody wants, as he pointed out, to get knocked over the head and have their wallet stolen. | |
| No woman wants to be raped. | |
| No man wants to be assaulted. | |
| Nobody really wants to be murdered. | |
| So, what if? | |
| We took the kindergarten morality of don't steal, don't hit, don't initiate the use of force, don't violate property. | |
| What if we took that and made it truly universal? | |
| It's an incredible thing and it's hard. | |
| For people to conceive of what this means, but there's great power in it. | |
| I mean, if you look at the great advancements in science, in history, and so on, well, we know that there's evolution in animals through selective breeding. | |
| What if there's evolution in people as well? | |
| What if that's a universal principle? | |
| It blows our mind and we get Darwinism. | |
| What if we say not That rocks fall or leaves fall or rain falls. | |
| What if everything falls? Well, then you get the sun-centered solar system. | |
| You get the sun floating around the galaxy. | |
| You get all other kinds of cool stuff that is an accurate view of the universe. | |
| It really is very, very powerful. | |
| And when ideas get really, really complex, you generally have gone pretty, pretty badly wrong. | |
| You know, I've talked about this before. | |
| The Ptolemaic system of ancient Greek astronomy Which considered the circle perfect and the Earth the center of not just the solar system, but the universe, came up with ever increasingly complex ways to describe the motion of the planet, particularly the retrograde motion of Mars, until people put the Sun in its proper place and put the Earth in its proper place. | |
| And then you got this wonderful universality. | |
| Everything falls! The Moon falls, Jupiter falls, the Earth falls, and even the Sun falls around the galaxy. | |
| If you just take a principle and you universalize it, that really is the great power that we have as a species, our capacity to conceptualize, to universalize, and what more important thing, what more important idea or activity to universalize than ethics? | |
| Because, you know, I worked at a daycare for many years as a teenager, and you know what we didn't do, or at least I didn't do, I don't think anyone did, What we didn't do was we didn't say... | |
| I had like, I don't know, sometimes 25, sometimes 30 kids aged 5 to 10 kind of crawling and leaving footprints on the ceiling and so on. | |
| What we didn't say was, okay... | |
| You're not allowed to steal a toy from another kid unless, you see, that other kid has more toys than you. | |
| No, no, no, we didn't say that. | |
| We didn't say, you're not allowed to steal from another kid unless you can get a majority to agree with you that the theft is good. | |
| Like, you can steal the bag of M&Ms from that kid if you hand it out to the majority. | |
| And they say, we didn't say that. | |
| You know what we said? Don't steal! | |
| That's what we said. Don't steal. | |
| Don't hit. We didn't say, don't hit the kid with the candy unless you really want candy, unless he's got more candy than you, unless you're really hungry. | |
| We just said, universal statements, don't hit, don't steal. | |
| So a respect for property rights, a respect for non-aggression. | |
| If that is universalized, much in the same way that if you look at the speed of light and make it constant, our entire view of the universe changes into something that is accurate and predictable and universal. | |
| What if we just said... | |
| Hey, don't hit, don't steal. | |
| Why don't we make that universal? | |
| Well, the reason why it's such a challenge, of course, we've inherited all of this stuff. | |
| And I'm going to give you an example in the past of what we inherited and what we did with it and how it improved society. | |
| For 100, 150,000 years, as long as human beings have been around, There has been slavery. | |
| Slavery, of course, characterized the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. | |
| It characterized the Muslim world and still does in certain Muslim countries. | |
| It characterized, of course, the South in America. | |
| It characterized the indigenous population who regularly enslaved each other. | |
| It characterized the aborigines in New Zealand and in Australia. | |
| It was just a constant and universal feature of human society. | |
| And then, by golly, Some moralists, some circumstances, we can get into the complexity perhaps another time, people said, hey, you know what? | |
| What if we universalize self-ownership? | |
| Hmm, isn't that interesting? | |
| Because we've all inherited this godforsaken, horrible state program called slavery. | |
| Slavery was enforced by the state. | |
| What if we just made self-ownership and property rights a universal? | |
| Now this was, of course, a big tangle with the founding fathers. | |
| The founding fathers said We really want life, liberty, and property, but we can't say property because we got slaves, and you can't both be property and own property. | |
| You can't have both. | |
| So, for a variety of reasons, a lot of Christianity, some Enlightenment thinkers, and a lot of very passionate people pursued the abolitionist movement. | |
| I really haven't drunken anything. | |
| I should get this word. The abolitionist movement was pursued, and then, starting in the 18th century, 19th century, and so on, First in the British Empire, and then in many places around the world, in a combination of mostly peaceful, but sometimes violent, and in particular, of course, the Civil War, slavery was eliminated, and by golly, you had a universality of self-ownership. | |
| Now, of course, there was segregation, there was Jim Crow, there was all of these other issues, but it was baby steps towards an actual equality of self-ownership and property rights among humanity. | |
| The people who were the abolitionists, they didn't say, well, what are the consequences going to be and how things going to play out? | |
| And by gosh, if we don't have slaves, who's going to pick the cotton? | |
| Who's going to pick the fruit? How are we going to have vegetables? | |
| We're going to run around naked and starving. | |
| We're going to get horrible diseases like scurvy because there's just not going to be any fruit. | |
| They just said, you know what, slavery is an immoral institution. | |
| I don't care how old it is. | |
| I don't care how universal it is. | |
| I don't care how tough it is to conceive of a society without slavery. | |
| I'm not going to sit there and say, well, but there'll be another form of slavery that might emerge down the road. | |
| And they just said, you know what, slavery is wrong. | |
| Let's end it. Let's universalize self-ownership and property rights. | |
| And that, of course, is the anarcho-capitalist case. | |
| What if... Don't initiate force. | |
| Respect self-ownership. | |
| Respect property rights. What if those became universal moral rules? | |
| Well, the big challenge, of course, is that that invalidates the moral legitimacy of the state. | |
| Now, that, of course, for some people is a bridge too far. | |
| They can't conceive of society without a state. | |
| Well, so what? I don't care. | |
| I don't care. Because the only reason that we're able to have this conversation is we, as a society, were mature and wise and moral enough to get rid of slavery. | |
| And we didn't sit there and say, well, I can't conceive of a society without slaves because, boy, we've had slaves for 150,000 years. | |
| Well, we've had oligarchical collective tyrannies masquerading as democracies, masquerading as republics, masquerading as, well, not even masquerading as tyrannies, being playing up tyrannies. | |
| We've had communism, we've had fascism, we've had you name it. | |
| And it's all had one thing in common, that you've got a small group of people right in the center of society who claim not only that they're immune from the universal moral rules respecting persons and property, but they have the moral obligation to do the exact opposite of what everyone else can do. | |
| You! You cannot print money without being called a counterfeiter and landing in jail. | |
| The government, though, through central banking, can print up all the money that it wants. | |
| You cannot enter into a multi-generational contract with other people against their will, but the government can create national debts and sell off the unborn to foreign banksters of every stripe and hue. | |
| You cannot, even if you are in want, go and knock over a convenience store and take goods and services and food and you name it, but the government Can go and rob that convenient store of money on your behalf and hand it to you, usually in return for your vote and pretty much eternal intergenerational subjugation to the sticky swamp of the welfare state. | |
| So the anarcho-capitalist project, otherwise known as the ending, the final vestige of human slavery, which is the free-range tax livestock that characterizes the modern world, we say... | |
| Well, no, it's an individualistic movement. | |
| I shouldn't say we. I say, I say, my friends... | |
| The kindergarten morality is the universal morality. | |
| What we say to children, we should say to our political leaders. | |
| What we say to the most vulnerable among us, we should say to the most powerful among us. | |
| That stealing is wrong and taxation is theft. | |
| That oligarchical power is wrong and we should reject it. | |
| That we need to take the final leap forward in human freedom and have a stateless society. | |
| Now, what does that look like? | |
| How does it work? The whole point is nobody knows. | |
| But that's like saying, well, we can't get rid of slavery because how a crop's going to be picked. | |
| Well, funny story. Turns out, if you want to look at things like wheat and so on, well, you get these giant machines that, half an acre wide, that go up and down the fields and run on the crushed tree juice of dinosaur-style plants. | |
| And pick it all for you. | |
| You don't know what's on the other side of freedom. | |
| You don't know what's on the other side of morality. | |
| You cannot predict the consequences of moral actions. | |
| Because then you can sit there and play this imaginary 3D chess of good and bad outcomes. | |
| It doesn't justify anything. | |
| What justifies the moral path for mankind is the universal commitment to nonviolence. | |
| My esteemed debating partner says, well, we don't want to solve social problems through violence. | |
| Well, what the hell do you think the state is, my friend? | |
| The state is... | |
| The legitimate agency for the initiation of force. | |
| And if you don't believe me, you can go look Barack Obama on YouTube saying exactly the same thing. | |
| George Washington said exactly the same thing. | |
| Every competent political theorist understands exactly the same thing. | |
| The state is an agency that legitimizes, permits, and encourages the violation of the non-aggression principle. | |
| It is allowed to initiate force and fraud and debt enslavement at will, at whim. | |
| It is as immoral an institution that we have left over from our slave days. | |
| It certainly deserves to be open to question and fear-mongering possible consequences is just a way of avoiding the essential moral questions. |
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