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May 2, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:02:39
DR BEN BURGIS vs STEFAN MOLYNEUX The Ethics of Capitalism!?! (HD)
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Good evening, everybody. My name is Stefan Molyneux.
I'm the host of Free Domain, which is the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world.
And I'm here with Dr. Ben Burgess.
We've been having some flybys on social media over the past couple of months, I suppose.
And Ben is a committed socialist, a full-on Marxist.
I am not.
And I've written a book called, of course, The Art of the Argument.
And Ben, if you could introduce yourself just a smidge and tell people about your book and what it is that you do, that would be great.
Sure. So one thing that we have in common is we both wrote books with argument in the title.
Mine was Give Them an Argument, Logic for the Left, from Zero Books.
And I was also a contributor to a book called Myth and Mayhem about Jordan Peterson, along with Matt McManus, who you've also had a conversation with.
Conrad Hamilton, Marion Trejo, and Slavoj Žižek wrote the introduction.
And I do a regular weekly segment of The Michael Brooks show called The Debunk.
And I've got a Patreon.
That's patreon.com slash Ben Burgess.
Maybe we can get into whether that's hypocritical since I'm a socialist.
And then I think that's probably about enough about me.
Let's get started. Okay, so we're going to actually have a little bit of a more formal debate than I have with some of the other debating partners that I've worked with.
So we're going to do seven and a half minutes, seven and a half minutes opening statements, and then seven and a half minutes, seven and a half minutes rebuttal.
And we actually did a twerking competition just to start.
I, of course, won because of my Irish heritage.
It gets my hips moving. And so I'm going to start and then Ben's going to have the last word.
So the moderator is going to be taking care of this in a chat window, which we have that's just for Ben and myself.
Let me just make sure I can navigate to that so I can see it.
But OK, so I'm going to start here and make sure I've got my own timer here as well to make sure I don't go over and cheat.
As, you know, apparently capitalists are wont to do.
So I'm going to start by saying, let's start with definitions.
You know, I believe that most conflicts can be resolved through clear definitions.
If you have clear enough definitions, you can usually agree.
Sane, sensible people can usually agree on a lot more.
So definitions for me are very, very key.
So capitalism, what do I mean by capitalism?
Well, I want to differentiate it.
From the current godforsaken mess that we have at the moment, sometimes called crony capitalism, more technically called fascism, which is public funding with private profits.
It's a godforsaken mess that has created untold suffering to millions or tens of millions around the world.
It's a debt-based system where the government controls the currency, the interest rates, the education, the health care, the old age pensions, the you name it.
And it is massively corrupt.
And you've got people buying congressmen and congresswomen left, right and center for preferential treatments for large companies at the expense of small companies and in particular workers.
You have...
A truly nightmare scenario where people can hoover money up out of the corporate legal fictions called corporations.
And then if the corporations go tits up, well, they get to walk away with all their millions and nobody can touch them through the corporate shield.
The entire corporate system is set up to protect the ruling classes, both in terms of military and in terms of finance and in terms of political power.
So I'm not talking about what we have going on in the world right now.
What I'm talking about When I talk about capitalism, I'm talking about a system that has been dreamed of by human beings for thousands of years.
And what I mean by that is a system which brings true and full legal and political equality to each and every human being.
See, I'm of the opinion, and I think it's more than an opinion.
I think most people accept this, that human beings cannot in any way, shape or form handle power.
Power is very bad for us.
When I was a kid, we had to put coins in the heating device, and sometimes we had to put actual pennies in the fuse box because it was a huge fire hazard and so on.
But human beings can't handle huge voltages of power, political power, any more than the pennies when I was a kid could handle electrical power.
They regularly melted and sort of dripped out.
Human beings get overwhelmed and blown out and corrupted by power, as the old saying goes, power tends to corrupt, absolute power tends to corrupt, absolutely.
So the whole question of human society, which is really, really important now, we're seeing the corruption of the FISA courts and the Patriot Act and the FBI and so on.
And I know Ben has had his opposition to the Patriot Act, just as I have.
See, reasonable people can find common ground.
Human beings cannot handle political power.
And the only way to solve the problem of political power is the same way that we solve the problem of slavery.
Eliminate it! Eliminate it top to bottom, back to front, A to Z, zero to infinity.
You must eliminate the state in order for human beings to have any capacity for equality and security and continuity in the institutions of civilizations that we all rely on.
To survive. And in this, I actually meet Marx's dream at its end, rather than at its beginning or at its middle, because Marx, of course, dreamt of and advocated for, though never really explicated how you were going to get there, a stateless society.
The government is a monstrous, power-hungry, lusty, evil violation of the non-aggression principle, and we have inherited it just as humanity had inherited slavery from prior We've inherited it and it just seems to make sense.
But just as the ending of slavery was the extension of self-ownership to all human beings, the ending of the state is the extension of the non-aggression principle to all human beings.
Now, we know from things like physics, from things like biology and so on, that when you extend principles that are universal to their true level of universality and absolutism, you get incredibly wonderful power over the universe.
If you hold the speed of light as constant, you gain the awesome power and terror of nuclear power.
Even if you just say that everything in the universe is subject to gravity and everything falls, you get an accurate model of the sun-centered solar system and you understand the universe probably for the first time.
When you take our immediate experience, that everything kind of falls.
If you take our immediate moral experience, that using violence to solve social problems is the greatest moral stain on humanity.
If you use our personal moral experiences, all the moral lessons that we learn in kindergarten, don't hit, don't punch, don't steal, don't lie, and you simply say, we're going to take these moral...
Absolutes that we're given as children, that we all accept in our personal lives, and we're going to extend them everywhere, across society, across the world, across time.
Well, a consistent application of the nonviolence principle.
And by that, I exclude self-defense.
So, you know, those of you who hear someone breaking into your house right now, please stop listening to this and go and deal with it.
You have full permission to use force and self-defense.
But if we take this non-aggression principle, this respect for property that we're all taught as children and we extend it to society as a whole, we will gain...
The third great revolution in the history of mankind.
The first was really just coming out of the swamps and coming down from the trees and having first basic human society, basic farming, basic property rights, the 10,000-year-ago explosion of calories that allowed us to develop a civilization.
The second was the end of slavery from, I mean, however you want to count it, 18th century, 19th century, and so on.
The end of slavery was the birth of the modern world.
That's the second one. The third one is the end of the state.
So first you end rank 8-like tribalism, second you end slavery, third you end the state.
Now once we achieve that, well, we know if you look at the continuity of Economic productivity throughout most of human history, it's a flat line.
Like, it's such a flat line, it sort of mimics Jeffrey Epstein's EKG these days, right?
But then, when you eliminate slavery, and you have private property, and you have free trade, free markets, you get this massive eruption in productivity that is continuing with a certain amount of staggering at the moment to this very day.
We will gain an equivalent burst in productivity, improvement in productivity, when we take our moral lessons and truly universalize them.
And we don't have what oligarchs have always had throughout human history, which is rules for thee, but not for me.
And I consider that the worst hypocrisy as a moral theorist, which is...
Well, you know, the Federal Reserve can create money out of nothing, and that's called sound economic policy.
But if you try and create money out of nothing, well, my friend, you're a counterfeiter, and you're going to jail.
And you and I can't use force to redistribute income.
That's called theft. Organized crime, but the government can, and that's called virtue.
So what if we...
Simply eliminate all of the hypocrisies, all of the contradictions in our absolute moral rules, our general moral rules, and we live out the dream of kindergarten.
It sounds like a hard way to put it.
But what if we simply said, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not rape, thou shalt not assault?
What if we simply take that and make that our universal standard for humankind?
Well, I believe that morality, like physics, only gains its true power when it is truly universalized.
And for that, we must negotiate with each other.
We must accept the reality of human evil and human corruption through power and eliminate the state as the great temptation to corrupt human beings and undo civilization.
Because what is civilization?
Civilization is the commitment to use reason rather than force, and the state as an agency of force is that which holds us back and drags us down to the apes.
And that is my introduction.
Alright. So, Stefan started with the definition of capitalism, and I think it's important to at least quickly touch on that issue.
So, capitalism is used historically by most people to mean a system under which There's a division between private owners who buy and sell the means of production, not the human means of production, but the tools, the space, etc., and people who work for a living.
So the sort of aristocratic ruling class that you had under feudalism is replaced by a ruling class of private capitalists.
Now, that contrasts to what Somebody Like Me wants, which is a system where the major means of production, at least, are in the hands of either the people who work at a firm or the larger community through mechanisms like nationalization, municipalization, or businesses being reorganized or started as workers' cooperatives.
Now, I'm perfectly happy to talk either way, right?
If you want to use the word capitalism to mean anarchist libertarianism, right?
You know, that free market definition.
Then, you know, we can have the discussion both directions.
I don't want to fight too much about words, right?
I don't think that's the main thing, as long as we're all clear about using them.
So the main...
I heard really two reasons there, right?
To support capitalism in the second sense.
And really, that's also going to apply to capitalism in the first sense, because even though I would use that term, unlike Stefan, to...
Apply to societies where you do have a state, right?
Every existing capitalist society has had one.
But really, I think the issue and dispute is whether you can move from the sort of society that we've got as far as the foundations of the economic system to the sort I'd want in ways that violate Stefan's conception of non-aggression and free markets.
Because I understand that from his perspective, he might say, hey, if it just turned out to be the case that, you know, through the operations of the free market, we just ended up in a situation.
It just arose within free market transactions where everything was owned by communes, worker co-ops, then that would, I'm sure, be fine with him.
But the real issue is whether we can move towards that goal either in short-term ways with reforms to the existing system to make things fairer and more egalitarian or in the long term by making those kinds of more radical structural changes that I'm talking about in ways that would violate the non-aggression principle as he understands it.
Because I think that's really the issue.
We heard a little bit, and I know this is an open statement, not a rebuttal, but just to get the issues out here, we heard a little bit about how the transition from feudalism to capitalism was a boon to humanity, and that's certainly true, right?
Nobody's going to deny that.
The real issue is whether we would be better off with socialism in that democratic sense that I advocate, or we are sticking with capitalism.
And then the real argument is going to be about whether making those sorts of changes, right?
If we, for example, to pick what I think is a really obvious example of an industry that would be usefully socialized, the Pharmaceutical industry, right?
We're all suffering right now from the fact that that's in private hands, because there's a reason why after SARS and MERS, there wasn't massive research into dealing with coronaviruses, and that's because there just wasn't enough money in that line of research,
right? If a Limit it from, you know, those constraints and have it be dictated by the priorities of medical experts rather than letting the market ships fall wherever they may.
So, would doing that violate freedom?
That's the real issue.
And the reason I don't think so is, one, I don't think that...
Trying to see the non-aggression principle, as libertarians understand it, as the foundation of human freedom or the kind of human freedom most worth caring about, I think is a mistake.
I think the kind of freedom most worth caring about is freedom of coercion, although coercion is...
Certainly all else being equal bad, right?
You know, that you need a good reason to justify it.
It's freedom from domination.
And one reason to think that this is a more fundamental kind of freedom has to do with one of Stefan's favorite go-to examples, which we just heard, is about slavery.
So We're good to go.
If they have relatively equal power.
I absolutely agree that power corrupts, which is why you need various democratic institutions and constitutional constraints on what a government can do, even under socialism, absolutely.
I'm a democratic socialist.
It's also the case, of course, that purely economic power corrupts.
And that without things, you know, just thinking not even about the contrast between anarcho-capitalism and democratic socialism, but even between anarcho-capitalism and the status quo, if we didn't have things like...
Workplace safety laws, sexual harassment laws, minimum wage laws, etc., etc., etc., then people are far, far more vulnerable to various forms of problematic domination.
By others, that an unrestricted free market is a situation in which people have their own little mini domains where they can treat the people under them in those domains like spiders trapped in a jar.
And so our best bet Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, well, I'm going to just, we've spread a lot of information out over a wide area.
I'm just going to pick out a couple of things.
So, with regards to, what, nationalizing the pharmaceutical industry?
Well, the pharmaceutical industry has been entirely corrupted by state power.
So this is one of the things that's kind of typical from a leftist perspective is government power creates all of these distortions and problems and weird incentives and odd little n-dimensional profit pockets that then they say, aha, you see the free market isn't working, we just have to take it over.
Completely. Which is, you know, like beating a guy to death and saying, well, now we have to put him out of his misery because, you know, he's not going to get any better.
So with pharmaceuticals, what's happened?
Well, of course, the government pays for a lot of pharmaceuticals, which means for a massive over-prescription situation.
The government enforces intellectual property laws.
The government creates massive barriers to innovation in that it takes about a billion dollars and 10 years to get a drug to market, which means that there's almost no incentive to go for smaller markets.
It's the government, because 800 babies got deformed during the thalidomide, scared when this was a medicine that women took to deal with morning sickness in the 1960s.
It produced birth defects.
And as a result of that, the FDA was brought into power.
Its power was extended to the point now where about 5 million Americans have been killed because the FDA has kept off the market drugs which are perfectly legal and safe in Europe and in other places.
But, of course, they have been corrupted by power.
The pharmaceutical industry, being paid by the state, being protected by the state, being fostered by the state, being regulated by the state.
It's turned into a massive, monstrous, horrifying problem.
So then saying, well, the solution, you see, is to nationalize it.
It's like, well, no, it's already gone rancid from violations of the non-aggression principle.
And therefore, more violations of the non-aggression principle is simply going to make it worse.
Now, when you bring up something like coronavirus, well, as a Marxist, of course, you're perfectly aware that China was founded as a communist country.
Of course, it has killed tens and tens and tens of millions of its own citizens.
And of course, it has helped facilitate the spread of coronavirus around the world.
So the idea that we need communism to save us from the virus spread by communism is just another one of these brain-bending Mobius strip mind fracks that I don't even know how to point out other than to point it out.
Now, as far as a slave beaten less is subject to less coercion, well, no, because slavery itself is a coercive institution.
Slavery is a state program in that when slaves exist, they exist in a state of enslavement because the government is willing to enforce slave contracts and will go and round up slaves who escape and bring them back on the public purse.
And in fact, I mean, one of the reasons why the average working class in the South in America hated slavery was A, because it drove down the wages and was really hard to compete and B, because they were actually kind of forced to go on these slave patrols and they had to go and catch slaves and it was just a horrible mess.
Now, of course, it helped out the rich, it helped out the powerful, it helped out the elites, but it was destructive, of course, to the local population, particularly the working classes.
So a slave who's beaten less, yeah, sure, they're lucky.
You know, it's like if you happen to get thrown into a Soviet gulag under Stalin and you get beaten less, the issue is that you're in a gulag, not how much you're beaten.
It certainly matters to your quality of experience how much you're beaten, but it doesn't matter as to the moral nature.
Of the situation.
So, with regards to what we need the government, you see, to handle things like minimum wage laws and health and safety laws and things like that.
Well, no, because it's called regulatory capture, right?
So what happens is when the government gets a certain amount of power, which it always does, What happens is the existing corporations move in to exploit that power for their own benefit at the expense of others.
You can see this in a micro example with the sugar industry in that the sugar industry keeps these massive tariffs going on to keep sugar from, say, Jamaica or other places out of America so they can charge more for sugar.
And what does that mean? Well, it means that Sugar becomes so expensive that you get godforsaken Satan sweat like fructose glucose being used and sucralose and aspartame being used instead and that's really, really bad for people's health.
So it is just a giant mess.
Minimum wage laws are there to cover up how absolutely shitty government schools are and how little they prepare people to be Even remotely productive in a free market situation.
In government schools, they'll teach you how to masturbate.
When you're five years old, they'll teach you about 57 genders, but they won't teach you how to raise money, how to start a business, how to compete with the existing business structures that's out there.
So, of course, people graduate barely able to spell their own names because they've been chewed up and spit out with their brains hanging out between their asses.
And then you say, well, you see, we have to have minimum wage laws because, well, people just aren't that productive.
Same thing with health and safety laws.
The way that you deal with health and safety is you make the owners of the corporations personally liable for deaths that occur through carelessness or lack of safety procedures in their business.
So they lose their goddamn houses.
Right now, you see a corporation, the executives all get to walk free and keep all of their ill-gotten gains a lot of times, whereas in a free society, I'd never want to do business with somebody whose executives couldn't lose their homes for bad behavior.
As far as health and safety laws have gone, and I'll just end up with this point, what's happened?
happened?
How safe are Americans?
Well, what's happened is the health and safety laws have become so Byzantine and so complicated, which is partly the politicians.
And it's also partly, of course, the fact that existing businesses who have big, big ass legal departments really want hyper complicated regulations because it's a barrier to entry for any small company that wants to compete with them.
But what's happened is it's become so impossible to do business as a manufacturing concern in America that all of the manufacturing jobs have headed overseas.
And And what does that mean? Depression, anxiety, suicide, drug addiction, the splintering of families to the point now where opioid addiction, which largely centers around the lower middle class that used to have jobs in manufacturing, now you've got an opioid addiction crisis in America that kills more Americans every year than died in the entire course of fighting communism in Vietnam.
And so it really hasn't turned out to be very health and safety focused to drive all of the manufacturing overseas and now have not just America's goods that are dependent upon the benevolence of a pretty psychotic communist regime in China, but also basic medical care, basic medicines have now been outsourced to the very source of the coronavirus and the regime that helped spread it around the world in strict defiance of the regulations that they had signed.
So, yeah, regulations are just a way of covering up government.
Incompetence and government bureaucracy and the government destruction of human capital, and so it's the old thing.
More government is always offered as a solution to prior government screw-ups.
All right. So I do like the comparison between somebody being beaten badly and then you say, oh, he's been beaten so badly, we should just put him out of his misery.
But I think what that would better apply to would be the argument that we just heard that because regulatory capture is a problem, right, it's a problem that The sharp edges of regulation are blunted by the political influence of big business.
Therefore, we should just put regulation out of its misery and go all the way to not having any of these regulations at all, hoping that people perhaps victims of everything from pollution to unsafe workplaces,
etc., We'll just win court battles with far wealthier parties in courts that, as I understand it, under anarcho-capitalism, both parties would have to agree to, about which I say good luck with that.
That government involvement in pharmaceuticals is somehow responsible for the pharmaceutical companies being more interested in short-term profit than in planning for things that should have been obviously coming around the pike when we saw SARS and MERS happening.
I don't really About coronavirus apparently starting in China, I'm not quite sure what the relevance of that is to anything, right?
So my position, as stated at the beginning, is democratic socialism.
I like democracy.
I like it so much that I want to socialize the major means of production and extend democracy into the workplace.
China was founded as something that, and again, as with earlier, I'm not too interested in arguing about semantics.
If you want to call it a radically different form of socialism that I advocate, I'm happy to talk like that.
If you want to say it's not socialism at all, because socialism would be...
I'm a classless society, and that's a society with a bureaucratic ruling class.
I'm happy to talk that way, but certainly nothing that even the most casual observer can mistake for socialist democracy.
Since then, they've kept the elements that I would object to, the lack of political democracy, and they've extended it And they've then eliminated the role of nationalized industry in the economy.
Not entirely, but at this point China is so capitalist in my preferred sense of that word, I know not Stefan's, that American companies We'll move there in order to take advantage of the poverty wages.
It's so capitalist at this point that actually there are European countries that have a higher percentage of nationalized industry in their economy than China does.
And when he says, oh, when I'm suggesting that one of the lessons of the coronavirus is we'd be good to nationalize the pharmaceutical industry, or I could add, follow the example of Spain and nationalize our private hospitals, they did that in response to the pandemic.
He said, oh, you're suggesting communism to save us Well, there's a pretty obvious equivocation there.
There's a term being used to mean two different things in two different parts of the argument.
In one part, communism means anything other than capitalism, right?
So it would include the kind of socialist democracy that I advocate.
And in the other part of the argument, it means...
This sort of system they have in China.
Now, whether or not you want to say that both of those are forms of socialism, you know, just radically different forms or whatever, is not really that interesting to me, although I have a hard time saying how you could call what exists in China today any form of socialism.
Again, I don't want to argue too much about labels, but you might as well say when Stefan proposes that we solve all the problems of the kind of capitalist society we've got right now by moving towards really free markets, the anarcho-capitalism, that he's suggesting capitalism to save us from capitalism.
As to the idea that slavery was super-statist because Because government enforced slave contracts and government did a lot of tracking down of escaped slaves, although slave owners acting privately also did a lot of that.
You notice that you can make a structurally identical argument that any sort of property is statist because government enforces the economic contracts and government We'll enforce the property claims by trying to stop you from taking away any of the property.
It's the same argument.
His claim that beating slaves doesn't subject them to more coercion seems to be a very odd fit with his claim that, well, let me give you a couple of quick examples of why I think this is an odd fit with some of his other views.
When someone like me says that we should raise the minimum wage to $15 or $20 an hour, would Stefan say, well, that's no worse in terms of the NAP. We could I would argue about consequences, but no worse in terms of the NAP, because as long as you're subject to the government setting a minimum wage, it doesn't really matter what it's set at.
That would be the equivalent of his response to the slave whipping case.
Or if I say, oh, we should raise taxes to pay for some social program, is Stefan likely to say that...
Well, raising taxes is no more of an NAP violation because the NAP violation, the coercion, is having taxes at all, not what the tax level is.
I don't think so either. Finally, as far as the NAP itself, this deserves more time than I have remaining, and so I hope we can get into it more later.
But I think that once you really start to dig in to To what it really means to say that you can't initiate force, where force actually means two things.
One is literal force against people.
One is any sort of violation of property rights, even nonviolent ones.
Well, the real question is, what property rights?
What counts as legitimate property, which is ultimately going to reduce to the question of what's your conception of distributive justice?
Any distribution of property has to be enforced.
So I think ultimately, again, we can get into this later, but I think the NAP is going to be pretty uninformative as far as any kind of substantive moral or political conclusion.
The NAP is going to be pretty uninformative.
That's your syllogism?
That's your rebuttal? Just ejecting a bunch of fog like a squid being grabbed by a scuba diver?
Like, what does that mean? I don't even know how to parse that.
Okay, I actually explained how to parse it, but I'm happy to explain it again.
Please do, yeah. So, the NAP, right, says you can't initiate force against people and you can't violate their property rights.
So the question is, what property rights are we talking about?
Now, obviously, it can't just be that anything somebody happens to currently be in possession of, they have a right to stay in possession of.
I know you know this, but just to spell it out really quickly for anybody who's curious about what I mean, one reason why no libertarian is really going to say that is if you start thinking about really simple examples.
Stefan steals my television.
He gives it to his friend Dave.
I go over to Dave's house to recover it.
I don't ask him.
I just take it. I am taking something he is currently in possession of.
No libertarian would say I'm violating the NAP. Why?
Why? Well, if you read people like Robert Nozick or Murray Rothbard, what they'll talk about a lot is entitlement, right?
What property you're entitled to, not what you currently happen to possess.
And then, so really, the question, what the NAP tells you about property, right?
Because it's not a question of violence versus nonviolence, right?
Men with guns might ultimately enforce taxation, even though in the real world nobody's going to get shot, right?
For not paying their taxes.
But men with guns, in precisely the same sense, even if nobody's shooting trespassers, men with guns are enforcing property claims.
The real question is not, do you have some sort of potentially forceful enforcement or not?
The question is, which property claims should you enforce?
And that's not going to be about the NAP pro or con.
That's going to be about what your theory is of who has a moral right to what property.
So you think that guns are not used to enforce state laws?
I actually said the opposite.
I said that ultimately, sure, that it's backed up by an implicit threat of force, but you could say the same thing about property in general.
A no trespassing sign is an...
Oh, come on, Ben. Come on.
No. Come on.
I know, oh, come on, it's not an argument, but this is so crazy.
Come on. No, hang on, hang on, hang on a sec.
Hang on a sec. That's like saying...
Okay, okay.
Let's clarify some of this property stuff because you seem to be...
One is a lot more likely to be backed up by actual lethal violence in the real world.
There are a lot more people who are shot...
For violating somebody's property rights by a property owner with a gun than there are who are executed or somehow shot in the course of a standoff with the police because they didn't pay their taxes.
Okay, but that's like saying that slavery isn't slavery because very few slaves get killed trying to escape.
I mean, it's the implicit threat that drives the whole system.
So saying that you can't see the violence that is inherent in the system, to quote the old Monty Python line, it's a willful blindness on your part.
Hang on, let me finish.
Let me make a point, then you can rebut, right?
I gave you a lot of space to make your point, all right?
A woman's vagina. We haven't talked enough about women's vaginas yet, right?
Which is generally where most debates should center around, right?
Hang on. So a woman who is resisting a rapist, right?
So she owns her body.
She owns her body. She has sovereign autonomy over her own body.
And she has the right to deny entry of a male penis to her vagina, right?
I think we would both accept that rape is an evil action and women have the right of self-defense against rape.
So if you're going to say that defensive property is the same as the initiation of the use of force, you're creating a moral equivalence between a woman fighting for her life to not get raped and the rapist who's holding a knife to her throat.
She has the right to protect her property called her body.
And he, by initiating violence against her and threatening to rape her, is the evildoer and she has the right of self-defense.
You can't say that the protection of property is exactly the same as the violation of property because then you're logically equating the rape victim with the rapist.
All right. Part of what you said is true, so let's start with that.
Okay, just make the argument.
Don't say what's true and what's false.
That's setting up the whole frame there.
Just make the argument. So the part that you got right is, of course, rape is bad.
We all have a right to bodily autonomy.
I don't think it's very useful or conceptually precise to think of the right to bodily autonomy as a property right, but if you want to say that's property, fine, whatever, I'm not going to fight about that.
But where theories of distributive justice disagree, It's not going to be about whether we have a right to bodily autonomy.
It's going to be about what, if you want to call bodily autonomy self-ownership, like libertarians do, I think that's confused, but if you do, then it's about ownership of external goods.
That's where the different theories are going to have different conclusions.
The point, you know, what I said was not that protecting property is a self-initiation of force.
What I said Oh come on.
Yo? The real debate is going to be about what property do we have a right to?
Under what circumstances does someone have a just right to some piece of external property?
We all agree that we should control our bodies.
The question is, which external possessions do people have a right to control?
A lot of libertarians will say, well, as long as Your possessions can be traced back by some chain of free market transactions, no force of fraud, to a just act of original acquisition.
There's Nozick's phrase, then you have a right to it.
You ask, what counts as a just act of original acquisition?
That gets a lot more complicated and a lot less obvious.
No, but it's not that complicated.
I mean, you have in your very book, Ben, which, by the way, you charge $20 for a 120-page book.
But hey, you know, whatever the market will bear, you have a statement of property rights right there in your book.
You've got a copyright. You say no one is allowed to copy the book or to use anything other than a brief excerpt in a critical essay or a review and so on.
So you have a very, very clear definition of property rights that you use in your book.
When you did review my book, The Art of the Argument, you accepted that it was my book that I had written, that I had produced it, and you referred it to as exclusively mine.
So, you know, all of this fiff-faff around how complicated property rights are goes in direct opposition to the way that you actually live, the statements of ownership that you put over your own books.
I mean, I hand out my books for free, but you charge your books because I guess you want to make a profit as a good Marxist.
But It's all so strange to me that people use property rights.
You're using exclusive use over your computer, over your webcam, over your glasses, your jacket, your shirt.
I don't know if you're wearing pants or not, but if you are, then you're...
So the way that you live your life is with a perfect and clear understanding of property rights.
But then when people start talking about taxation, it suddenly gets really complicated.
And who can figure out who owns what?
And it's like, well, how do you get...
If you don't know who owns what, how the hell are you charging 20 bucks and making money off a book you wrote?
Because you can't figure out who owns anything, right?
So your equivocating be about who owns what, right?
So does who owns what means who is in possession of something or even who has a legal right under the current system to be in possession of something?
Or does it mean who has a moral right to be in possession of something?
I was pretty sure we were going to get the hypocrisy charge at some point.
I have noticed that when you debate socialists, that you always spend a lot of time talking Okay, can you just make the argument?
I'm sorry to interrupt, but all of this, our time is limited.
Just make the argument, please. I've just let you talk for quite a long time, right?
So because you always do this, it's worth pointing out a couple things about this.
One, even if it were true, which it's not, that something about, you know, selling books or whatever is hypocritical, Then this would be sublimely irrelevant to whether I'm right or wrong about any of the things that we're arguing about.
If somebody's ideas are internally inconsistent, then that's relevant because it shows that they must be wrong about one half or the other.
If somebody's ideas are actually inconsistent with their behavior, that might just show personal weakness.
Now, are my ideas actually inconsistent with my behavior?
Well, no, not really, for a couple of reasons.
First of all, you'll notice that nothing I have said advocates the abolition of all acts of buying and selling, that no one should ever buy or sell anything.
In fact, I have even advocated the abolition of intellectual property, which you seem to sometimes.
So if that's the case, that if you...
Sell anything, right?
That then if we're going to play that game, right, you know, that you are charging anything for anything you ever do that's intellectual property, that might be hypocritical.
But secondly, in order to be hypocritical, I would have to be doing something that I advocate that others don't do.
And of course, as a leftist, as a socialist, I am not advocating that we try to bring about social change through individuals changing their individual behavior.
I advocate institutional and structural solutions.
So if a libertarian or conservative who thinks that the solution to people who can't get life-saving operations unless they can afford it is private charity and you don't give money to private charity, that might be hypocritical.
It's certainly not hypocritical for a socialist not to.
It might be hypocritical for a socialist to evade paying taxes To pay for national health care.
But also, because I know that you're very fond of doing this, it's probably going to come up at some point of asking people if they've ever run a business, which always strikes me as kind of funny because you criticize government bureaucrats, even though you presumably... No, no, no.
Hang on. Let me debate for myself.
Don't debate on my behalf, Ben.
I mean, let me debate and ask the questions myself.
I mean, then I might as well just go and take a shit and come back later, right?
So just, you know, just debate for you.
Publishing company charges for the book, right?
That the author makes a contract with the publishing company for how much they're going to pay him.
No, but you can give the book away for free.
When they pay for the books is an entirely separate subject.
Okay. Okay. All right. Okay.
So here's the thing, right? So this is from 2011.
Taxpayer subsidies that cover the operating costs of most colleges and universities ranges from about $8,000 to more than $100,000 for each bachelor's degree awarded.
Most public institutions averaging more than $60,000 per degree.
So, you have a PhD, which is probably about nine years worth of this.
So, you've taken about $100,000 at a bare minimum from the working class.
Now, they don't get to choose that, right?
Because they have to pay the taxes that go towards your education, right?
So, you're very much about, well, let's not exploit the working classes, but you have forced, through the power of the state, the working classes to support your education while you're going through and getting your PhD.
And in return, what do you do?
Well, you do a couple of things. The first thing is you write philosophical papers that are completely incomprehensible to the layperson.
So that seems like not a very good return and care for the actual working classes that have been forced to subsidize your education.
And the second thing you do after taking at least $100,000 through force from the working classes is you charge $20.
You don't even give them the book.
For free. And, you know, you could ask for donations and so on.
So this idea, well, I'm helpless as to how I charge for my book, that's nonsense.
I hand out my books for free.
Because I actually, I did take money from the working classes, although I come from the working class, that's neither here nor there.
I did take money from the working classes, and I consider that I really should use the education that was provided by the working classes to actually go out and really help Thank you.
that you hide out in a university protected by the state, which takes money from the working classes so that you can educate other people who are going to take money from the working classes so that you can all hand out these polysyllabic mishmash word salad papers that do absolutely nothing to benefit the working classes.
So yeah, if you're going to talk about your care and concern for the working classes and your absolute horror at exploiting the working classes, I'm just going to look up and say, you're actually doing a whole lot worse than somebody who's actually providing a job for people.
who Okay, Stephen. Look, let's take the slew of absurd claims just made and try to take them one at a time.
Yeah, framing again. Yeah, I am going to.
You've done quite a bit of framing yourself.
So, let's talk about this.
First of all, if you can't find my lectures online, you're not looking very hard because there are dozens.
There's a look at the Zero Books YouTube channel.
No, no, no, no, your university lectures, not stuff you've done in podcasts.
My university lectures, well, these days, you know, these days those are online too.
But look, I have...
Sorry, your university lectures are not online, is that right?
Well, I have actually put some YouTube lectures online.
I also prefer class discussion rather than me just lecturing at people all the time.
But also, what any of this has to do with anything is beyond me.
It's obviously irrelevant to whether I'm right or wrong.
About any of the issues that we're talking about for reasons that have already been explained, but just to dispense with a lot of the false things that you just said.
I did not, you know, say, oh, it's not true.
I don't control the price of the book because I could give it away for free.
First of all, I give away a tremendous amount of writing for free.
If you did any kind of Google search show, you know that.
Secondly, I've sent many people who hope they couldn't afford it free PDFs of the book.
I know my editor and publisher have done the same thing.
Third, it's not hypocritical to take in however indirect and horrible a system that it might be, money for education.
Because I don't object to taxation to pay for education.
In fact, I do exactly the opposite.
I want a whole lot more of it.
You know, I support Bernie Sanders' proposal to do what's worked well elsewhere and have taxpayer-funded free public education.
It's one of the public goods that I think should be supported by taxation.
Now, I know you don't want any public goods to be supported by taxation in Yet, I'm not going to accuse you of being a hypocrite for driving on roads built with taxation, or walking on sidewalks built with taxation, or even the fact, I believe we're in Toronto, last I knew, that I'm pretty sure that if you got COVID-19 tomorrow, you would be fast on your way to a hospital where your medical care would be paid for by taxation.
Maybe you would insist on principle on waiting until you got to the United States first, but I kind of doubt it.
And none of this is relevant.
Now, we've got less than 15 minutes remaining.
What I would strongly suggest is...
Well, no, I'd like to respond to at least the healthcare part.
...about hypocrisy that has nothing to do with the subject, that we actually talk about substantive issues, like, for example, the obvious contradiction between your professed libertarianism and the kinds of arguments that you use for immigration restrictions.
Well, we did immigration last time.
It would be kind of boring to retread it.
So with regards to something like healthcare or using the roads or using the sidewalks and so on, look, come on.
Ben, you understand that if somebody is imprisoned, you don't blame them for eating prison food.
Like if someone is unjustly imprisoned, you don't blame them for going to the prison doctor when they're sick.
When coercion has removed free choice from the marketplace, you do have to make do with what you've got.
And by the by, the fucking Canadian health care system almost killed me by misdiagnosing me for a year and allowing a lump that was not cancerous to develop into cancer, at which point I had to fly to the United States for life-saving surgery that was going to be delayed by another couple of months up here in Canada.
So, you know, I'm sorry for being a little pissed off here, but when people talk to me about how hypocritical it is for me to try and use the Canadian health care system, when it is specifically denied to me to use a voluntary market health care system without flying to the States, pisses me off a little bit.
So don't blame me for the fact that the government is not allowing me to have a private free market healthcare solutions or roads or anything like that.
We all have to make do with the system that we're in.
But where there are alternatives, Where there are options, you should avail yourself.
And I have to go to a doctor in Canada.
I'm not allowed to have a private doctor.
You don't have to charge $20 for a 100-page book when you've already been paid by the working classes for your education, and you should give something back.
Well, first of all, I give back for free all the time.
Secondly, I think that if you look at the results of Canadian versus U.S. healthcare, they speak for themselves.
There's a reason that life expectancy is higher.
And infant mortality is lower in Canada versus the United States.
The idea that a misdiagnosis is the result of who pays the bills for the healthcare system rather than a doctor making a mistake seems obvious.
Well, not just one. Not just one.
Okay. Several doctors making a mistake.
Doctors make mistakes in every healthcare system.
The question is, which system overall delivers better results And causes more satisfaction.
And I think it's pretty self-evident that there's a reason that in Canada, even the Conservative Party doesn't run on a platform of let's abolish Canadian Medicare because they know they'd never win another election.
That's an argument from popularity.
Hang on. That's an argument from popularity, which you specifically dismiss in your book.
The argument from popularity, that ad populum fallacy, is what you commit when...
The fact that the majority thinks something is irrelevant to whether or not it's true.
The argument that I'm making is the majority opinion on this in Canada is a pretty good sign that most people are satisfied with the system.
We want that kind of satisfaction of the population is one of the goals of a healthcare system.
I know you said you did immigration last time.
If it's at all possible, at any point in the next 10 minutes, there's a question I would really like to ask you about immigration, but it's your call whether we talk about that or not.
Okay, so the fact that Canadians like their healthcare system, you do understand that Canadians are subject to barrages of propaganda from government schools, from government paid-for and owned broadcast networks.
Now most Canadian media outlets get...
$140,000 a week from the Liberal government.
So the idea that Canadians have access to any kind of information that is objective or factual or moral about their healthcare system is one thing.
The other thing, of course, which you're very well aware of, I'm sure, is that all of the Western governments are heavily indebted.
And this, to me, is a big issue that's kind of cast over when people say, oh, well, this is a wonderful system, and we've got this great healthcare, and we've got this...
But the reality is that every human life on this planet then is sustained by $30,000 in debt.
So, yeah, it's pretty easy to bribe people with the unborn generation's future productivity and sell them off to banksters for votes, but that is an utterly unsustainable system.
The unfunded liabilities in America, which are, in fact, the result of your democratic system, the democratic system that you think is so wonderful, it is a democracy in America, technically a republic, but it's kind of operating like a democracy now.
We see how well the Constitution has withstood the COVID epidemic.
And so in this...
Democracy. People are very happy when the government prints money and borrows money and just makes up money out of thin air.
They're very happy to get, quote, free stuff at the expense of future generations, but the system is utterly unsustainable.
What is going to happen? When a bill that is much more, much greater than 10 times the annual GDP of America or other Western countries comes due.
Well, what's going to happen is people are going to say, well, I guess we got half a century of pretty good health care, and then the bill came due, and then what?
See, it's easy to look at the guy who's unemployed and just living off his credit cards and say, wow, that guy's really got it figured out until he goes to jail for fraud or non-payment of bills or whatever it is, right?
So looking at a snapshot is not looking at the continuum.
The system of democracy in the West is people voting for free stuff, the government creating and borrowing money for free stuff, and that is absolutely unsustainable.
And the fact that you want more of it...
I mean, come on, last point I'll make, and then I'll turn it back over to you.
So the current level of social spending is about 20 times larger than the entire economy at the turn of the last century.
Now, Marxists and socialists said, you know, if we get 40% of this economy, man, we can totally solve the problem of poverty.
And now they have about 10 to 20 times more money at the moment than they had back when they said a little bit more money will solve the problem.
And the problem not only is not solved, but in many ways, the problem of poverty is getting worse.
So if you have 10 to 20 times more money than you thought you ever needed to solve the problem of poverty, and the problem of poverty is still not solved, it might be worth re-examining the whole process that you're claiming is going to solve it.
All right. Well, this idea that...
I think that Marxists were ever saying that a bit more social, you know, just a little bit more social spending within the current system rather than a radical restructuring of the current system, which would solve poverty, is certainly a surprise to me.
I've never talked to a Marxist who had that view.
That sounds more like liberalism.
That Canadians can't tell what kind of service they're getting from their healthcare system, that they're so deluded by propaganda that they can't think for themselves, strikes me as fairly incredible.
And when it comes to the question of debt, you want to say...
Wait, wait, sorry. It strikes me as fairly incredible.
Is that an argument? I don't know.
Your personal incredulity is not an argument.
No. Well, it's an application of Christopher Hitchens' principle that's what's asserted without argument can be dismissed without argument.
But the idea that... Wait, do you not think that 12 years of propaganda matter to people?
That healthcare working much better in societies with socialized systems than it does in a society like the United States, that this can be dismissed as a short-term phenomenon by gesturing at debt, really ignores the specifics of the situation.
I know you said that you find academic papers on technical issues and logic incomprehensible, but in this case, we're just talking about...
No, no, that's not what I said.
No, come on, man.
That's not what I said. I said that they're incomprehensible to the working class layperson.
That's a difference. I see.
Okay. All right. So, in this case, we're talking about pretty simple arithmetic that...
If you have a socialized system like Canada's rather than what we have in the United States, not only does this not add, this is actually more efficient in terms of overall amount of money that's being spent.
That if you raise taxes to pay for it, it's still the case that because you have one big health insurance system rather than a bunch of competing ones that all have their own overhead, and there's profit seekers taking a big cut, it's a much more efficient way to pay for it.
And if you're comparing the taxes plus private insurance premiums, even a middle-income taxpayer is paying before the tax increase to pay for Medicare for All to what they're paying taxes after Medicare for All, even if it's a pretty regressive tax, they've still got more money in their pocket left over.
So there's absolutely no reason why implementing this system would actually have to add even a penny to the debt.
Just out of curiosity, am I going to get to ask that question about immigration or are we just not doing that?
I mean, I've done immigration so many times, it's not particular of interest to me.
But let's see if you wanted to bring up another topic.
Otherwise, we can continue on the health care issue.
All right. So here's another topic.
I watched a video that you did about the non-aggression principle, which we were talking about earlier.
And you made some really interesting claims in that video that I was hoping to ask you about, because you addressed, because you want to Universal principles.
That's the universally preferable behavior.
And the article that you were responding to made an objection to this, which is a classic objection to Kantian ethics.
What about the murderer at the door who wants to know where someone is so they can go kill them?
Surely you can lie to them, but lying is wrong.
So is lying really universally wrong?
And there are no exceptions.
And what I found interesting was earlier in the video, you'd said quite reasonably that defense of property rights has to be proportional.
You can't shoot someone just for trespassing.
But then you said, when you were talking about the murder at the door objection, that morality just ceases to exist, like a veil.
Vampire turning into mist in the sunlight when you're under a situation of coercion.
So what my question is, is how can it be true at the same time, all three of these things, that any sort of violation of property rights is coercion, that morality ceases to exist when you're subject to coercion, and that's the reason why the universal prohibition against lying doesn't apply in the murder at the door situation,
but also, number three, That even though morality has ceased to exist, when you have this coercive violation of your property rights, you also have to be proportional in how you respond to that coercion.
Is that not a moral requirement?
Okay, so, I mean, that's a big, complicated set of topics.
I'll be as brief as I possibly can.
So, the system of ethics that Ben is referring to is called universally preferable behavior.
And the book is available for free.
The audio book is available for free.
The PDF, the HTML, the video are all available for free at freedomain.com.
So, this is my argument for ethics.
And it divides actions into five categories, right?
So there's universally preferable behavior, respect for property rights, don't rape, don't steal, don't assault, don't murder.
And then there's aesthetically preferable actions such as, you know, being on time, being relatively polite and so on.
It's nice, but you can't force them at the point of a gun.
There's neutral actions like running for a bus.
Is that moral?
Is that immoral?
It doesn't really fall into the category.
And then like, you know, when you look at a lake, you look at a forest across a lake, there's like the forest trees going up and then there's a reflection going down.
You can kind of think of that, that each of these three categories, right?
Moral, aesthetically preferable, nice to have, and neutral have their negatives, right?
Their aesthetically negative actions and then banned actions like rape, theft, assault, and murder.
Now, the reason that universally preferable behavior bans rape, theft, assault, and murder is that they cannot be universalized, right?
So you can't say theft is universally preferable behavior because then you would be saying that everybody must want to both steal and be stolen from simultaneously.
But if you want to be stolen from, in other words, if you want someone to take your property, Then it's not theft, right?
So theft can only exist when something is asymmetric.
Now, in other words, I want to take your property.
You don't want me to take your property, right?
And so it's the same thing with rape and murder and assault and so on.
Assault is when you don't want it.
Like if you and I are play fighting or play boxing or whatever, and one of us gets injured, it's like, well, we kind of knew there was a risk going in.
Or if somebody's in a boxing ring, they're consenting to that kind of, it's not really assault.
You can't charge someone for assault.
So that is universally preferable behavior in a nutshell.
You can, it is absolutely logically and practically possible for everybody to respect property rights, to not kill, not rape, not steal.
At any given time in the world, it's all logically possible, whereas the converse is not true.
You can't say rape is universally preferable behavior and have it be logically consistent because rape is unwanted behavior.
And if everybody wants to rape and be raped, then rape ceases to exist as a moral category and it just winks out of existence.
So... With regards to lying, lying and telling the truth are not universally preferable behaviors.
They do not fall into the category of morality with regard, like, at the same level as rape, theft, assault, and murder.
And so, like, you should never rape, right?
But you can not tell the truth.
I mean, we do it all the time, right?
I mean, oh, yes, this dress does make you look slimmer or whatever, right?
I mean, it doesn't really matter, these sort of little niceties, these white lies and so on.
And so I've never said that lying or rather telling the truth is universally preferable behavior.
Now, with regards to proportionality, the question is, in a voluntary society, what kind of enforcement of rules do you want?
Like, if you want a real democracy, then you have companies competing for the best way to provide moral and legal and contractual services to people.
Like, I sent this guy 500 bucks.
He didn't send me an iPad. Okay, well, how do you want that to be dealt with?
Well, in a democracy, you have to run to the government and hope that the very rich trillionaire who got there first doesn't have a better ear of the prime minister or the president or the congressman or the congresswoman or whoever.
But what you do want is a whole group of companies trying to figure out how best and most efficiently to provide the services of things like contract enforcement and property security and all of those other kind of good things that we want from civilization.
And the way that you do that is you get a dollar democracy, right?
At providing these services in the same way that you vote for who's going to be the best at providing your cell phone services by signing up with one carrier versus another.
And they all work together the same way that these companies would when it comes to enforcement of contracts.
Now, I personally would not want to do business with a company that said, oh yeah, if somebody accidentally wanders onto your property, you can totally blow them away.
And like, I just wouldn't want that because it could happen to me.
My kid might wander onto there.
Property could be any number of things and nobody would want that because it would just be too much of a problem, too much of an intense issue to deal with.
I'm sorry, I'm almost done. I know it's a long time and I will absolutely shut up and let you take the help from here, but I'm almost finished.
So violence is very expensive and very risky and very dangerous in society.
Like, I mean, I had a friend of mine served on a jury duty and what happened was there was a guy in a bar and he got into some stupid argument with a guy about who was the best boxer and he just pushed the guy.
Right? And then the guy slipped on some beer suds, fell backwards, hit his head on the edge of the bar And ended up in a coma.
These little things, little bits of violence can cause massive lifelong problems for people.
There's that story, the photographer Marlon Brando, the actor, punched him.
The guy had to spend five years in dental offices trying to get his jaw and his teeth fixed.
So you want to have a society where violence is kept to an absolute, complete and total minimum.
So if somebody doesn't pay...
For something that they have bought from you, you don't want people going over there with guns.
What you do want is some sort of economic or social consequence, like on eBay.
If you don't ship stuff, you get a bad rating and it's bad for your business.
You want to explore all of the conceivable nonviolent solutions that you can find.
And the only way you can do that is not through the state, which is just one big giant gun pointed at society that's generally in control of the rich and powerful.
You want to do that through a series of competing agencies that can all figure out the best, cheapest, most peaceful, the most efficient way to resolve social conflicts, which are inevitably going to happen.
So with regards to lying, yeah, you can lie, you can tell the truth.
It's a little different if you're kind of under oath or whatever that would be the equivalent of in a free society.
Or if you've signed a contract, which is sort of a more serious promise, then yeah, I'll get round to it.
Honey, I'll fix that fence in the backyard one day soon.
Or fix it tomorrow, you don't get round to it.
And so when someone has a gun pointed to their head, morality is not part of the equation.
Because if you're going to bring morality into the situation where someone has a gun to their head, the first person you need to focus on is not the person on the receiving end of the gun, but the person actually holding the gun.
Because they're the person who has stripped free will and produced a binary option to the person at the receiving end of the gun.
So if we're going to focus on a violent situation, someone's got a gun to their head, the person we focus on is the person pointing the gun, not the person desperately trying to find some way to survive the encounter.
Alright, sorry for that long speech.
It was a big topic and I'm all ears now.
Alright, we might focus on the person pointing the gun, but does the person who the gun is being pointed at have a moral obligation to be proportional in their response?
I'm not sure what you mean by proportional in their response to what?
Okay, so your claim in the video was that morality just does not apply when somebody is subject to coercion.
And what I was originally trying to figure out, right, I mean, I understand you said that actually your view is that the prohibition of God's line is not universal, fine.
But, but you said that, that when somebody is being coerced, right, morality just doesn't apply to that situation.
It ceases to exist.
Well, for the victim.
For the victim, right.
So if I'm trying to figure out how this applies to the idea, if this is your idea, that's not just inadvisable, but actually morally wrong to shoot someone just for trespassing.
And if, because if morality doesn't apply to that situation, to the situation of the victim of coercion and any kind of violation of property rights is coercion, then it would seem to follow that morality does not apply to the property owner whose property is being trespassed then it would seem to follow that morality does not apply I'm so sorry. I apologize.
I lost the thread of that. And I'm sorry, not your fault at all.
But if you could run past that again, I'd appreciate it.
No problem. So if you think that any kind of violation of property rights is coercion, and if you think that when somebody is under coercion, morality does not apply to the person being coerced, then I think?
Yeah. Okay, so I mean, the question with morality is, and the question of proportionality would be something like this.
So if somebody is running at you with a chainsaw saying, I'm going to cut your head off, well, you are in imminent physical danger.
And this is why in just about every common law system of self-defense, somebody who is aggressing against you.
And is about to do something that could kill you or cause grievous bodily harm, that you're perfectly within your rights to kill that person in order to eliminate the threat.
And to restore the continuity of your life to its prior trajectory, so to speak, right?
And you're walking down the street and you've got every reason to believe you're going to make it to the end of the street without having a heart attack or having a piano fall on your head, Looney Tunes style.
Somebody comes at you with a chainsaw, then you have to protect your life because you're in imminent danger of grievous bodily harm or death, right?
Now, somebody who steps on your property, they're not about to kill you, right?
I mean, they're not about to kill you.
They're not doing any particular harm.
And so how do you gain restitution or how do you restore yourself to your prior situation?
Well, what you do is you say, hey, do you mind moving off my property?
Or, you know, if you're some cantankerous old character, get off my lawn, kids, or something like that, right?
So it's about restoring yourself to your original property.
Right? So nobody's done any particular grievous bodily harm or about to kill you just by wandering onto your property.
And you may not even care that much.
You know, like when I was a kid, we would go through people's backyards.
They didn't care. It was fine and all that kind of stuff.
Right? So it's a question of how much harm is being done to you by the action.
Guy with a chainsaw, guy walking across your lawn.
Now, if you have enough people walking across your lawn, then maybe you get one of those little, I don't know, bald patches of grass and you find that aesthetically unappealing or whatever.
So you can ask people to go around, you can put up a sign, you can put up a fence.
There's things that you can do. To restore the glory of your lawn to its lush green emerald state or whatever, but it really is a matter of the proportionality of the harm that is being done to you and what you have to do to restore yourself, your property to its prior unharmed situation.
Well, you obviously, the guy with the chainsaw can do significant harm, so you can use significant violence even to the point of lethality to protect yourself, whereas somebody walking across your grass is...
Doing very little harm and therefore excess proportionality would be unjust.
Okay. So violated proportionality would be morally wrong.
I'm sorry? So a more than proportional response would be morally wrong, even though you're the victim of coercion.
Even though you're the victim of coercion?
Well, sure. A disproportionate response is then you really become the aggressor because you're harming the person far more than they're harming you through their actions.
All right. So that does sound like morality doesn't disappear just because you're under coercion.
But no, the example I gave was somebody with a gun to their head, not somebody whose lawn is being walked across.
I mean, you can extend it to that if you want, but that's not the argument I was making.
Okay, well, the claim that you made, the exact words were, you know, because you're subject to coercion, then morality disappears.
If what you made is you're subject to the threat of lethal, you know, you're subject to, like, the imminent threat of lethal violence, you know, morality disappears.
That strikes me as a different claim.
I also- Well, hang on, hang on a sec.
Sorry. Let me clarify that.
So if, like, we all understand that if I kidnap you and make you rob a bank, who's morally responsible?
Like, I have a gun to your head and I say, or I go in, you know, and I make you rob a bank, are you morally responsible for my forcing you to do something?
No, but I don't think you have to say that morality ceases to exist when somebody's under coercion to say that somebody isn't morally responsible because the only reason they did something is they were under coercion.
But you're not morally responsible for what I force you to do at gunpoint, right?
Yes, if the only reason you did it was because of...
Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Well, yeah, okay, you're not robbing a bank unless I force you to.
Now I'm forcing you to rob a bank.
I'm the one who goes to jail and people say, gosh, you know, Ben, that was a terrible situation.
I hope you're okay.
Let's talk about it.
And man, you've got quite a story to tell and you get a lot of sympathy and maybe you'll, you know, get an award if you can help turn me in or something like that.
But so we're in perfect agreement.
If I force you to do something, we don't judge you morally.
Other than as a victim, in which case a moral judgment is sympathetic towards you, but people would judge me morally as forcing you to do something, so I'm not sure what we're disagreeing with here, because the morality for you is try and survive the idiot with the gun, right?
Again, I don't think morality ceases to exist.
The much narrower claim is that you're not morally responsible for things that you did only because you're under coercion.
We can keep talking about this.
I do want to point out that I think we've cut into the audience question time by about 10 minutes now.
Okay, yeah. I mean, whether you're not morally responsible or morality ceases to exist is just semantics.
I just wanted to point that out. Okay.
It's not just semantics, right?
There's a huge conviction between those two claims that you're not morally responsible for a certain category of actions that you do while you're under coercion because the person who's coercing you to do them is responsible for them.
And that nothing you do under, you know, in response to that coercion could be morally objectionable, which is certainly at least what it sounds like you're saying when you say that now...
Well, you know, sounds like it's a cheap way of saying that you're just going to strawman me.
All right. So let's go...
Hang on. Let's go on to the questions here.
Let's go on. So if you want to have questions for Ben or for myself, and I really do appreciate this conversation.
It's been very...
Enjoyable for me. And I know I say that sounds very enjoyable, but it really has been very enjoyable.
So if you do have questions, you can post them up on...
We're broadcasting to a whole bunch of different places here.
And you know what? I just wanted to point out, by the by...
First of May, right?
It's Friday. It's Friday night.
People could be out there doing a whole bunch of things, but we got like north of 2,000 people watching a debate on moral philosophy and free markets and the just organization of society.
I just want to blow a massive kiss to you guys out there.
This is a beautiful thing to see, and I really, really do appreciate everybody's attention.
I've been getting lots of messages all day.
Can't wait. And I really, really do appreciate We're on lockdown, dude.
That's right. So that you're not responsible for coming to watch our show because you see you're on lockdown.
That's very funny. That's very funny.
Good job. All right.
Let's see here. What have we got here?
I'm just waiting for people to come up with their questions and not insulting my appearance, which, you know, Is natural and understandable.
All right. Sorry, that's not what I wanted to show.
I'll hide these things again.
Not everybody could have my Adonis-like appearance, Stefan.
Yeah, that's true. I appreciate a man who combs his hair with an aardvark.
That's very impressive.
Better than TikTok. All right.
Stefan blows his audience a kiss.
Stefan is an e-girl, confirmed.
Do not make me take off my top.
Actually, if I am, maybe Ben will too.
And we'll flex. We'll flex.
All right. What have we got here?
Oh, here's one for you.
How does your immigration stance agree with libertarianism?
Now, did this come out right after Ben was typing off screen under the moniker Oliver Edelson?
How does your immigration stance agree with libertarianism?
I'm happy to answer that, but I did just do this actually twice with prior debates.
So let's see here.
Yeah, okay. So how does your immigration stance agree with libertarianism?
Okay. So, this is not my argument, and people do sort of mistake it for my argument, and I don't mind claiming when an argument is mine, but this isn't one of them.
So this is an old argument goes back to Milton Friedman, which is, if you have a welfare state, then people and many people will in fact come into the country not because they value your liberties, they value your values, they love the free market, they agree with the Constitution, they worship they love the free market, they agree with the Constitution, they worship the founding fathers, or they agree with the minimalist free market gun-allowing First Amendment kind of country, but because they can get free stuff from the
And so if you have people coming into a country who then generally swell the ranks of those in recipients of free stuff, then you create a very volatile, a very dangerous situation in society where growing resentment of people who are coming in from the a very dangerous situation in society where growing resentment of people who are coming in from the overburdened taxpayers, the people who are coming in and basically squatting on the taxpayers wallet, it creates a huge amount of resentment, huge amount of problems, and it is not how you
Now, for me, I'm very much a huge fan of open borders, for sure.
I mean, you know, throw America, throw Canada, throw all countries wide to the world, but if you have a welfare state, then you have a whole different set of people who are going to come in.
This isn't everyone, of course.
course, there are lots of people who come to America, who come to Canada, who love the free market, who want small government and so on.
But statistically, the people who have been coming in, particularly since the 1960s, when the Democrats really did shift immigration standards, statistically, the people who come into the country end up significantly higher on the welfare rolls, they end up with less sympathy for free speech, they end up with greater sympathy for they end up with less sympathy for free speech, they end up with greater sympathy for socialism and larger government, which, you know, is a lot of fun for people like Ben, but not a lot of fun for people who
So that's an old argument, you can have open borders, you can have a welfare state, you can't really have both.
Well, I'm actually, I'm really surprised by this argument, whether for Milton Friedman or for from you, because, you know, when libertarians, even, even minarchist libertarians, when libertarians, even, even minarchist libertarians, and they never mind anarcho-capitalists, go on and on about the worst things that states have done.
I would think, for example, about Stalin deporting entire nationalities to Siberia and It seems to me that you can make a structurally identical argument to the one we just heard for doing that, as long as the ethnicity of being, you know,
being deported from the country by state force rather than being kept out of the country by state force was one that was statistically more likely to vote for left-wing politicians or more likely, not being deported from the country by state force rather than being kept out of the country by state force was one that was statistically more likely to vote for left-wing politicians or more likely, not every individual he just said, right, but that the group, right,
If you wanted to hear more about that, watch Stefan's debate with Matt.
I don't want to repeat that territory.
But the point I wanted to make is if you say, oh, it's not a violation of the non-aggression principle to use violence to keep people from peacefully moving from country to country, as long as the people that you're stopping are more likely statistically to as long as the people that you're stopping are more likely statistically to vote politicians or to use social services, then I don't understand why you couldn't make a structurally identical argument for mass deportations of entire ethnicities
if you think that members of that ethnicity are more likely than members of some other ethnicity to vote for left-wing politicians or use social services.
Wait, you have no idea how that argument could be made?
Well, I do, actually, because you just said that the reason that it's okay to restrict immigration is that immigrants are more likely—you gave two reasons—to vote for left-wing politicians.
They're more likely to vote for social services, to need social services.
Well, in that case, by parity of reasoning, why not say if there's some ethnic group within the United States, within Canada— I don't understand.
Okay, well, I guess I can break it out for you pretty simply.
And I don't mean that as an insult.
It's just blindingly obvious to me.
So maybe that means I'm mistaken.
So let's say that I have a house for rent, right?
And there's a bunch of people who are...
Hippies who come up and they're smoking drugs and they're playing loud music and they're like, hey man, we want to come and rent your place.
Now, do I have the right to say no?
You can't rent my place?
I just choose not to rent to people who kind of look like They're going to wreck the place or cause a lot of trouble with the neighbors or have the cops come by or whatever it is.
In the same way that if some couple comes up and they're screaming at each other and they're about to hit each other and they're like, hey man, I really want to rent your place.
It's like, I don't really want to rent my place to some hell-fighting couple who's going to be beating up each other, screaming at the top of their lungs and having the police come by.
So, you know, that's not a violation.
I'm not initiating force by not letting those people into my property, right?
I mean, clearly they... They have already a place to live, right?
And other people have their own countries that they're already living in and so on.
So not letting people into your property is not a violation of the non-aggression principle.
However, if people are born in a country and that they own a house, me going in and kicking them out of their house and tossing them into some other country because I don't like their politics is very much a violation of the non-aggression principle.
So I'm not sure where the difficulty is in understanding the difference between these two things.
Well, the obvious difference between the two things is that deciding not to rent to someone is very different from using violence, sending, you know, like jackbooted border control patrol or ICE thugs to stop somebody from, No, no, no, no, it's not.
Look, if somebody wants to move into a place and they don't have a legal right to be there, of course you use security guards to keep them out.
Have you never tried to go into a mall when it's closed?
Of course you use security guards to keep people out of property that they're not allowed to come in.
I don't agree with the government owning the country or the taxpayers owning the country, but that's the situation as it stands.
That the government and the taxpayers and the people who've built the country and the people who are born in the country, they kind of own the country.
It's the way that nationalism works.
And so, of course, you use force to prevent people from entering property that isn't theirs, and there's legal ways to get into property.
You can rent, you can buy, you can...
How sit you can be lent the property or something like that.
It is the same way there are legal ways to gain entry to the property called the United States or Canada or Israel or whatever.
And so, yeah, I think the analogy holds just fine.
Alright. So I've been told that when you interrupt me that I start to continue to talk because you just interrupted me.
So we're both talking at the same time.
People watching on YouTube can only hear you when I'm muted.
I don't know why that is.
Oh, I don't mute you, by the way.
That's just something on the software. I'm not saying that you did anything to make that happen, but that is whatever the case for whatever reason.
But what I was trying to say before I was interrupted was that the obvious disanalogy is between what you would consider a free market interaction, renting or choosing not to rent a property, and even in an anarcho-capitalist utopia, Anybody could choose not to rent out property to anybody they didn't like for presumably any reason, right?
Even racial bias, etc., which is one of many reasons I wouldn't want to live in an anarcho-capitalist utopia.
Whereas you said that absent the welfare state...
That border restrictions would be a violation of the non-aggression principle.
They would count as an initiation of force.
And the obvious reason for that distinction is that what matters for the non-aggression principle, it's going to be in the weird position of the Marxists explaining the non-aggression principle of libertarian, what matters for the non-aggression principle isn't who is actually in possession of something as a matter of law.
If you didn't think there were unjust laws, what on earth would be the point of anarchism?
It's who has morally entitled to that as a result of one of these theories of just original acquisition, like If you can trace your ownership of something back through a bunch of free market transactions to someone who was the first one to see something or the first one to use something or the first one to mix their labor with it,
depending on what your theory of just original acquisition is, that last one always sort of struck me as a philosophical version of little boys spitting on something and saying it was theirs now.
I don't think that's a That's a very thoughtful or morally compelling way to decide justice in distribution.
But regardless, you clearly don't think that the government owns the country in the sense of being morally entitled to exclusive use of it.
No, but you're a big fan of democracy, right?
I'm a capitalist. You're a big fan of democracy, and I think it's last count, 80% of Americans want a complete stop to immigration.
Okay, that is an argument for popularity.
No, no, you're a fan.
That's why I prefaced it with you're a fan of democracy.
So you believe that the will of the people should have a significant sway over the policies of the country, right?
Otherwise, you're just a totalitarian, right?
Because you want a lot of government power, but with no input from the people.
So if the majority of people, the vast majority of people in the West, in America, want a complete start to immigration, which has, of course, been quite nuts over the past 40, 50 years, like a million plus people pouring into America, proportionality Sorry, from a per capita standpoint, it's even higher.
In Canada, there isn't the resources, there isn't the infrastructure, there isn't the educational system, there isn't the housing.
It's brutal on the existing population.
You've got multi-language issues, you've got multicultural issues.
I mean, in Mississauga, now this place where I live, there is the call to prayer is now being broadcast at massively high volumes five times a day and so on.
So these are big issues.
Challenges. And they're not challenges that the people were particularly consulted on.
They weren't asked.
And, of course, the other thing, too, it's brutal for young people because they can't afford housing.
I mean, housing should be dropping in value, in price, because the boomers are retiring and moving out of their big homes to smaller places, so the price of housing should be going down.
But because people are just coming in like crazy, the price of housing is going up.
They're also... The wages should be going up, right?
I'm sure you're aware, particularly true for blacks and Hispanics in America, people at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder are being brutalized by mass immigration that is driving down their wages, that is displacing them from their neighborhoods, that is increasing their tax bill.
And it's absolutely brutal.
And for those who have no question or concern or care...
For the hard done by minorities who are currently being eviscerated by mass immigration policies, I just got to ask you, where's your heart?
I mean, good heavens, the blacks in America have suffered so enormously under slavery, under Jim Crow, under segregation.
They were just beginning to pick themselves up and start to join the middle class enormously after the end of the 1950s and into the 1960s.
Then the welfare state came and eviscerated.
The single mother welfare state came along and eviscerated the black family, which just got trashed.
And then mass immigration came in and ground them into the dust when it came to just being able to earn money and support their families.
I mean, it's just been absolutely brutal and doesn't America have a special obligation to the blacks in America to ensure that they have as great a future as humanly possible?
Rather than pouring all the money into supporting every other culture, language, race and religion that wants to come into America and drive down the wages of the most vulnerable, the most persecuted, the most ground down group in American history are further being ground down by the left's greed for free and easy votes.
And I think it's absolutely unconscionable.
All right. So to finish up the answer that I'd started on the democracy question, saying the reason that it really is the ad populum fallacy to say that how many people support immigration restrictions is relevant here is because the question in dispute is not should there be a military coup to make sure that Nobody can enact any laws restricting immigration through the democratic system.
The question is, what immigration laws should be?
What would be moral for them to want?
And my contention, and Oliver's contention in the question, was that there's an obvious inconsistency between saying that we have this absolute deontological duty to the non-aggression principle and saying that we should have immigration restrictions.
And particularly, this is the case...
Because if you're going to make this argument, right?
Because listen to everything you just said, right?
All the stuff that you're talking about was about how There are supposed to be all these bad consequences of immigration, right?
Immigration is bad for jobs.
It's bad because apparently having people practice other religions is bad.
The call for prayer, I don't know.
But we have this absolute ontological principle, non-consequentialist obligation to the non-aggression principle, then you should follow it regardless of how bad the consequences are.
So you're just going to completely ignore everything I said about how disastrous this is for the black community?
Like you just don't care because, what, it's free votes for your socialist paradise?
Come on, man. Have a heart.
Have some compassion for this wrecked community in the United States.
God's sakes, where's your heart, man?
You should let me finish the point.
No, you did.
You trailed off.
of what you just said. It's not a representation of what you said.
It's an explanation of why what you just said was not relevant to resolving the obvious contradiction between your professed deontological libertarianism and your willingness to support violent enforcement and Of restrictions of who can move peacefully from country to country.
Your willingness to support violations of free market principles when it comes to stuff like, hey, employer X wants to give immigrant Y who's currently in Mexico a job.
A landlord X wants to give immigrant Y a place to live in the United States when immigrant Y is currently in Mexico.
If you believe in the non-aggression principle, you believe in not my principles, your principles, then you should say, yeah, the state has no business interfering with that interaction.
If it did, then we're back in the territory where you could deport entire nationalities.
I explained why the non-renting analogy to defend that didn't work.
But if you're going to say this is a deontological thing, you can't say, well, because of all of these alleged bad economic and cultural consequences, then we can support immigration controls.
So again, you just don't care about how harmful this is to the black community because it gets you votes for your socialist paradise.
I think that's really cold, man.
I think the blacks have suffered in America to such a huge degree.
That's just brutal. I don't even know what to say about that.
Okay. Notice that what you're saying is A, an ad hominem, right?
It is, as Stefan Molyneux put it, not an argument.
Right? You know, just attributing...
No, it's an observation that you don't care how brutal this is to the black community and the Hispanic community who are...
And the black community in particular has just been completely hammered by the welfare state and by immigration.
It's just wretched....against what I pointed out about the obvious inconsistency of your views and why none of these alleged consequentialist advantages to restrictive immigration resolve that obvious inconsistency.
Well, and you also said that you just disproven the example of the house renting versus me kicking someone out of their house.
You just said it, but you hadn't actually proven it.
All right, let's let's drop this because I'm, I'm sorry, like, it's not an argument.
Hang on. From the perspective of your libertarian ethics.
Yeah, yeah. Tell me more about my libertarian ethics, because you care so much about ethics.
You support communism and the death of 100 million people because you're just so concerned about ethics all the time.
I am re-explaining what's wrong with it.
What's wrong with it is that under free market principles, your principles, an individual landlord has a right to rent or not rent to whoever they want because they are I'm not just dismissing it without argument.
I'm explaining why, if we're taking your stated principles seriously, the analogy does not work.
Well, the only thing I can say, Ben, is that you didn't have your listening ears on at the beginning of this conversation, or maybe it's been a while and you've forgotten, but I said that I do not define the free market and capitalism as a current existing system.
So when you talk about all of this peaceful and free movement of people, well, when people move into a location, disproportionately take tax dollars and disproportionately vote for bigger and bigger government, that is not the same as just some guy moving in a free society next door.
So this conflation, when it's explicitly denied, and there was a damn good reason why I did that at the beginning, Ben, I explicitly denied that the ideals that I propose are applicable in a morally consistent way to the existing system I don't want the existing system.
I hate the existing system.
I think it's predatory. I think it's violent.
I think it's vile.
And I think in particular, it does harm the poor and minorities and in brutal ways that I think are very much going to lead to massive amounts of social conflict and perhaps even a civil war in America.
So when you say, well, how do your highfalutin libertarian ideals apply to this particular situation?
It's like, well, the answer is they don't.
They simply don't.
The current system is brutal and violent and indebted and predatory and counterfeiting and nasty all around.
And so when you say, well, but you have an issue with this, that or the other, it's like, yeah, because we're in a situation of coercion here.
And as I already talked about before, the greater the coercion, the less more responsibility for people trying to survive.
Maybe you can't put these two things together, but I'm pretty sure that the audience can.
All right, let's drop that and let's move on to another question here.
Well, actually, several minutes ago, the moderator told us that we were done with this portion, that it was time to move on.
Can we just see, just in case anybody has a yearning-burning that's not related to immigration?
If there is one, if not, we can, let's see here, the UK has introduced...
A point system for immigration to bring in the best people who improve our economy and not live off our benefit system.
Well, Colin, I mean, listen, I understand that.
I think that's very interesting and so on.
But here's the problem, is that the more you take...
Oh, hang on a sec.
I think I got hiccuped here.
I'm not sure if you guys can still hear me, but just a sec here.
Enter Broadcast Studio. Sorry about that.
I got hiccuped here. Can you guys hear me again?
Can you guys hear me? Oh, Ben, can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear you now. Okay, sorry about that.
I just got kicked off my own stream.
All right, so here's the problem with that.
And this is practical consequentialist stuff.
This isn't, you know, big abstract ethics time, although I think ethics are involved.
I dislike when first world countries in particular go in and just scrape and gouge essential resources out of, say, developing nations, third world nations, and so on.
I think it's pretty bad.
Now, it's bad enough to me when they go in and strip mine resources from third world countries, often using and manipulating some pretty iffy political systems and so on.
But the better the quality of the immigrants who come to the first world from the third world, the worse the future prognosis is of the third world.
Because if we go in as the first world and we say, ooh, we want all of the smartest and best and brightest and most wonderful people from the third world, what happens to those societies in the long run?
Well, you're taking the best and the brightest and the most productive out of those economies who desperately need those people to start businesses, to move the economy forward, to be great teachers and doctors and lawyers and whatever, writers, who knows, right?
And so what happens is, because the countries aren't doing particularly well, and there's lots of complex reasons for that, you then say, okay, well, we'll just take 5% smartest people, right?
Okay, so then that deals with the issue of having unproductive people come to the first world, but the problem is then the...
There's this Pareto principle or prices law or whatever where the square root of any productive group produces half the value.
So in 10,000 people, if you have a company of 10,000 people, 100 of those people are producing half the total value.
And of that, 10 of those 100 people is producing 25% of the total value.
So you've got 10 people out of 10,000 producing half the value of the entire corporation.
And this occurs in music, it occurs in sports, it occurs in the business world.
It's a pretty common principle across the world.
Now, if you say, well, we're going to take those 10 people from a third world country, we're going to bring them to the first world, or the 100 people, you're taking between 25 and 50% of the productivity of that group out of the third world.
Now, what is that going to do to that third world?
And I'm sorry to be using this.
It's just my particular phraseology that you can say developing nation or poor country or whatever.
But if you keep taking, scooping out these incredibly productive people to bring to your own economy, sure, you get a benefit for your own economy, but it is unbelievably difficult.
And what it's going to do is cause an eventual collapse of that other economy, the third world economy, and then you end up with situations like, why is there a big giant migrant crisis?
Well, partly because Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama destroyed Libya, partly because foreign aid has pumped up birth rates, but also because countries in the third world have become progressively less functional.
Because the first world greed is scooping up all of these people, and rather than building up their own economies in their own countries, those countries are being left in the dust, And people are finding those countries less and less functional to the point where everybody kind of has to flee.
And I think it is a real pillaging of human capital because everybody sort of notices when physical capital gets taken away, you know, like how they used to go to the end of the Second World War.
They literally disassemble entire German factories and ship them to England or Russia did it, of course, in Poland and so on.
And so when you strip physical capital, the means of production, it's pretty obvious.
You've got to put them on a truck and load them someplace and it's pretty bad for the local economy.
I think it's arguably and I think decisively much worse, infinitely worse in a way, to take the smartest and most productive people from struggling economies, bring them to the first world, everything decays and becomes a huge problem and you end up with specifically and ultimately Largely non-functional societies where people have to flee.
So that's why the better the quality of immigrants in the first world, the more problems you're creating in the third world.
So that's one thing I wanted to mention.
I don't know if you wanted to comment on that, Ben, or we'll do another question.
Let's do one last question and then let's go to closing statements because it's been about a few minutes.
Yeah, yeah, okay. Let's see here.
I have like three windows open with various kinds of comments, so let me just see what we got here.
Being homeless isn't practical because we don't have the ability to use public lands.
Should land be left for people to live off the land rather than forced to participate in the market?
Now that's an interesting question, is the relationship of public land to homelessness.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
Should we dip into that one quickly?
Sure. I mean, I, of course, think that the government should be in the business of establishing a right to housing.
I suspect that homelessness would be far worse in a situation with no subsidized housing or anything like that.
Of any kind, much less in a no-holes-barred anarcho-capitalist utopia.
But if I had to guess, I would say that you probably, I honestly have no idea what it would be, but I'm guessing that you have some reason to think that homelessness, like all the other problems of actually existing capitalism, can be laid at the feet of government intervention.
Well, I mean, when you have a government that controls just about every aspect of education and social life, it's hard to avoid that.
But I do think that homelessness has a lot to do with child abuse.
And I can't alter foreign policy.
I can't remake the centralized, coercive banks into the image of something more free market.
But what I can do, and as I have consistently done, and I'm sure Ben would Well, as Ben pointed out earlier, Most people don't have a SWAT team kick in their door and drag them off to jail.
I hope not.
At least I hope not during this show.
One guy did get arrested while I was doing a call-in show, but that's a topic for another time.
So where is it that we experience the most violence in our lives?
Well, the vast majority, it depends on ethnicity, depends on race, but the vast majority of parents still spank their children.
So when it comes to violation of the non-aggression principle, spanking is by far the most prevalent violation of the non-aggression principle that we're ever going to face in our lives.
I mean, there's all this systemic violence and you pay your taxes because of this or that, regulations and so on, but you don't generally have a cop come up and backhand you across the face.
So when it comes to practical philosophy, my focus for 15 straight years and for 20 years before that when I was not a public figure, my focus has been to show people how powerful moral philosophy is, not in the abstract, which is great, and you have to have the abstracts, you have to have the theory before you know the knowledge, you have to have the blueprints before you have the bridge, so I'm not trying to knock Abstract philosophy, that's what I found in the non-aggression principle.
But you want to give people the power of philosophy in their own lives.
And what I've consistently worked with, and I've interviewed subject matter experts on this, I've published the data, I've done entire presentations with lots of sources, is that spanking is not only immoral.
But impractical, doesn't work, which is why 40% of kids in junior high are still getting spanked, even though it's supposed to have solved problems from the age of toddler onwards.
So where you can have the biggest impact in reducing coercion around the world...
It's to not bully, not intimidate, and certainly not hit your own precious children.
That's where philosophy can have the biggest impact in your life.
Now, Gabor Maté is an amazing Canadian physician and I think quite an expert on psychology.
I've had him on my show a couple of times, and he's worked a lot with homeless people in what's called Vancouver's downtown east side.
It's kind of like the quote ghetto of Vancouver.
And, yeah, of the drug addicts that he's treated, almost all of them.
In fact, I can't think of a single instance in his theory or his books or his speeches...
A single exception to this basic rule that in particular, say, drug addicts to heroin or to other destructive substances, all of them were abused as children.
And in particular, the women were sexually abused as children.
That's one of the reasons why they end up needing these drugs.
They don't take the drugs to feel better.
They take the drugs to feel normal, to take away.
It's like morphine for a spiritual ache.
So, as we rail against the state or we rail against capitalism, as Ben would do, this is all a good thing to do.
We have to have a long-term destination, but you also need to know how to get there in the short run.
In other words, it's great to have a destination called Chile, say, but you still have to know how to get to the airport.
And so what I would say is with regards to something like homelessness or mental illness and so on, sure, the government has done policies that have fragmented the family.
A lot of single mother states have come out of the welfare state.
And that's, I can't do much about that other than talk about it.
But what I can do is really, really work hard to convince people that reasoning with your children rather than hitting them is the way to go.
It is the most powerful manifestation of the non-aggression principle that you can bring to bear in your own life and the one that will bring you the greatest long-term happiness and stability.
All right. Well, I certainly agree that people shouldn't hit their children, but I think that hoping for a very long-term cultural change so no one does that, even assuming something which I think It was at least an implicit premise of what we just heard, that child abuse causing psychological problems later in life is the main cause of homelessness, even if we granted that premise.
And I'm not sure we have any reason to do that, but even if we granted that premise, Then I would say that while we're waiting for some sort of long-term cultural change so no one hits their children, which would be good.
I'm against people doing that.
then it would be really good to have some collective institutional, and from my perspective, yes, government solutions to homelessness.
If Stefan wants to have the last word on this before we move to closing statements, he can do that, but I think we should move on to the closing statements.
Yeah, I mean, I think my closing statement is kind of just bundled up and everything that I have been talking about.
I think that the theoretical goal of equal morality for all is very essential.
The non-aggression principle, the non-initiation of force is a foundational principle of our personal lives, of a just universe, a state With the, not just the right, but the requirement to initiate the use of force against usually a disarmed population is a monstrous power to lay at the feet of anybody and will corrupt just about anybody who touches it.
And I'm not sure I would even exclude Trump from that because things, pretty bad things are happening with regards to that these days as well.
The only people who should be granted political office, says the old argument, are those who desperately don't want it.
But, of course, they don't show up these days.
And the concern that Ben and the socialists and the Marxists have in general—I'm not speaking for him—but the concern that I recognize is that your power does corrupt.
We have things to fear from corporations.
We have things to fear from abusive bosses.
We have things to fear from exploited bosses.
And at least those remain in the realm of two things— One is voluntary, and the other is there's competition.
And the best way to help workers is to increase the demand for their services.
The more businesses that can be started, the fewer barriers there are to starting businesses, the more that workers can start their own businesses, or if they don't want to or don't have the ability to, the more businesses will be competing for his or her labor for each individual worker.
And the best way to ensure the best outcome, if you want good health and safety, have lots of manufacturing plants where the worker can pick and choose those who have the best safety record or not feel that they're going to be out of a job if they complain or question.
If you want people to be independent of losing their health care, then of course you have to decouple health care and health insurance from people's jobs.
That is something that was put in during the Second World War as a result of government regulations that said you couldn't give people wages, so corporations started taking over payments for healthcare insurance, and then it became coupled to the job, which has lowered, as Ben has rightly pointed out, lowered people's negotiating power and so on.
So the best way To improve the art of workers is to raise demand for their services as much as possible.
Let people start business. Teach people how to start businesses.
Get rid of this godforsaken abomination called government schools, which simply trains people to be docile sheep and comes right out of the Prussian model designed to produce brainless We're good to go.
In government schools, raise demand for workers.
That will allow them to charge more for their services, to go to the best employers, and will put the bad employers out of business.
Doesn't solve all problems overnight, but at least you have a voluntary situation with the business and you have competition, wherein people who are inefficient, people who are brutal, people who are mean, people who are predatory, people who, quote, underpay.
Lord, we all feel underpaid, right?
But those people will generally go out of business.
And that is a long-term, multifaceted In a sense, multi-denominational solution to the problem.
Handing over massive amounts of economic, political and violent power to a small group of people called the state and crossing your fingers has never worked throughout human history.
I don't see that changing anytime soon, particularly now when handing power to the state, as we can see from China, as we can see from the increased surveillance that has occurred under the deep state, under the Patriot Act and other places in the West.
Now, governments have not just the power of violence, they have the power of near-infinite information technology to track, monitor, and control people.
I do not want and will never trust a small, oligarchical, power-hungry group of people, given the infinite power and violent capacities of the state, to do anything other than end civilization as we know it, and it's too great a risk for me to take.
But Ben, of course, will get the last word here, and I do appreciate his time tonight.
All right. Thank you.
I appreciate that you took the invitation to do this.
I think it's been a good conversation.
I want to kind of pull back and think here about the larger view of what we've been arguing about.
This whole time.
And, you know, remember what I said in the beginning is that when I talk about capitalism, think about a system in which we have an economic division of society between capitalists, right?
People who Own businesses and workers who have no realistic choice but to go to work for someone who owns a business.
And that's what I think socialism, even a very cautious, planned version of market socialism that tries to learn some lessons from what's worked and what hasn't worked, In various countries in the past would eliminate that division.
The way Stefan wants to talk about capitalism is as a certain set of moral or political principles about free markets or non-aggression, and that the real question Can we, in order to move beyond capitalism in the first sense, can we violate capitalism in the second sense?
I think so. I have given a couple of arguments for that.
The kind of freedom that we should care most about is freedom from domination rather than freedom from coercion per se, and that our best shot at freedom from domination is giving everybody roughly equivalent amounts of political and economic power.
And of course, we shouldn't give all power to an all-powerful state and cross our fingers that people would use it well.
In fact, I don't even, not only do I support all sorts of democratic and constitutional liberal limitations on the power of the state, right?
We both said we opposed the Patriot Act, for example.
But I'm so far from wanting to just Give people power and cross my fingers that they'll use it well that I'm not even comfortable with bosses in workplaces having the kind of power that they have over workers in the current system.
So, how can we address that power imbalance?
Stefan says that he wants to help people to start their own businesses.
Now, the charge that government schools don't give people the resource to do this is still a little odd.
I've never heard of a public university that didn't have an MBA program, but put that aside.
Sure, start your own business.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I think that it would be better if we had a system where the default model for businesses that was incentivized was worker co-op rather than traditional business.
But that doesn't mean you're a terrible person if you start a business that has employees.
I'm not interested in that kind of moralizing.
I'm interested in thinking about what a more just society might look like.
But the problem with just telling everybody to start their own business is that, and I know there have been some references to technical logical terminology being hopelessly confusing, but is that this commits what's called the composition fallacy.
When you say that because the individual parts of something have some property, therefore the whole thing has that property.
Like if you say every atom in the Brooklyn Bridge is invisible, therefore the Brooklyn Bridge is invisible.
Well, it could be that every individual, let's just ignore all of the barriers of entry that, you know, Stephanie was talking about, some of which we agree about, I'm sure, some of which we disagree about.
Let's ignore the fact that some people have, you know, are born into wealth and some to poverty.
That obviously makes a difference to how easy it is to get starter capital and start your own business.
Even if we accepted that any individual might, by striving hard enough, start their own businesses, this can't be a solution to structural poverty because it doesn't follow from any individual might have a shot at being one of the people who could do this to it being structurally possible to have an economy where everybody owns their own business.
And if you acknowledge that second point, then even if you agree that That, oh, people rise in the meritocracy because they're better, have better work ethic or better IQ or whatever.
Anything that we hear from the defenders of the current system, even if you accepted that, it would still be monstrously unjust.
In fact, if it really was because of innate abilities, it would be even more monstrously unjust.
To have a society where you're going to have this power imbalance because most people are not going to be business owners.
Because if that were the case, there would be nobody left to grow the food that feeds us all.
All right, last point.
And I know that he said he's bored by it, but I really feel like this is worth going back to.
About the discussion about immigration, because we heard a few things to try to paper over the obvious contradiction between Stefan's free market libertarianism and the idea that it's legitimate for the state to get in the way of free market interactions between landlords or employers who want to employ people or give them housing, who are currently in other countries, and those people accepted those offers.
One was this business about how people are going to vote for left-wing politicians or accept welfare services.
And if the mere fact that members of some group are more likely to do these things is a good enough reason to restrict their rights, then there's no particular reason unless you hold the premise that the state has a moral right to do whatever they want with the country they own, which would give you the opposite of anarcho-capitalism unless then there's no particular reason unless you hold the premise that the state has Those two things can't fit together.
And I was even more surprised when he started using these consequentialist arguments about how third world nations are disadvantaged because the best and the brightest leave, so that's a good enough reason to violently stop them from coming here, or about how third world immigration so that's a good enough reason to violently stop them from coming here, or
African Americans in terms of economic consequences, because if Stephan really thought that it was okay to violate property rights, anytime violating property rights had good consequences for black people in America or for people in the developing world, then he and I would disagree on far less than we actually do.
Well, thanks. I appreciate the conversation.
And thanks, everyone, for watching tonight.
And I look forward to the comments.
Take care.
All right.
Thank you.
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