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Aug. 31, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:51
Dr Walter Block and Stefan Molyneux: Freeing Police from the State!
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Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
Hope you're doing well. Here with Dr.
Walter Bloch, now ANCAP extraordinaire libertarian with flair.
He is a professor.
If you wanted to mention a little bit about yourself, Dr.
Bloch, just for those of us who haven't seen you in a while.
Well, I'm a professor of economics at Loyola University, New Orleans, and I'm always looking for good students.
So if you're a high school student or want to transfer from college, it's not just me there.
My whole economics department is all free enterprise Austrian economists.
I got my PhD in 1972, a while back, from Columbia University.
Here's my great t-shirt.
I have to brag about my t-shirt.
Murph Rothbard was a friend of mine and I'm a follower of Murray so I could be considered a Rothbardian.
Murray Rothbard, just for those of you who don't know, was another ANCAP, an anarcho-capitalist extraordinaire, whose political acumen and economic acumen was really only matched by the fertility of his pen.
That man could crank out articles like he was sneezing.
I mean, boy, six, eight, ten thousand words a day puts us writers to shame.
But you know what? So I haven't written much lately.
So what? Nietzsche is Shakespeare, man, as the old saying goes.
So... Okay, so we're going to talk about policing here, and boy, it just seems to be a constant thorn in the side of a wide variety of communities, of course.
While 81% of blacks in America want the same or more policing, there, of course, is a significant proportion of people in America, both blacks and others, who have significant issues with policing.
I would be one of them.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you would be one of them, mostly because status solutions tend not to be...
optimal from a moral or economic or productivity standpoint.
So let's throw caution to the winds.
We're going to assume that everyone understands since this, my show, and your teaching centers around the possibilities of small government, no government.
What can we talk about how problems can be solved in the age-old war or predation between criminals and their victims?
What to you are the major issues with government policing at the moment, and how could a free market possibly conceivably solve these problems?
Well, the way I see the policing, and it's changed a little bit since the riots, but the way I saw it before was There were three things.
One, the financing of government police, and that's highly problematic.
This comes from taxes, and taxes are coercive, and coercive levies are theft, in effect, so that's bad.
On the other hand, they do some good.
They try to stop murders and rapes and other bad things like that, or if they can't stop them, they try to catch the people responsible for them, and that's good.
The third thing that they do is not so good, and that is that they also try to catch victimless criminals, people who are engaged in voluntary consensual behavior around sex or drugs or whatever.
So it's sort of two-thirds against them and one-third in favor of them.
Now, that was my view before the recent riots.
Now let's talk a little bit about the recent riots.
And now I think the police are being unfairly accused of being racist.
Because in the US, blacks are some 13 or 14% of the population.
And the number of blacks killed by the police is something like half.
Half blacks and half whites.
So blacks are very disproportionately overkilled compared to their numbers in the population.
However, they're not overkilled compared to their contribution to crime.
Because blacks also contributed about half of all the crime.
So the police reaction to them is roughly proportionate to the amount of crime, and according to some statistics, it's even slightly less.
Namely, they're responsible for 50% of the crime and they only suffer 49% of the deaths or something like that.
So it's very close to being proportional.
So I think the police are unfairly being blamed for, you know, being racist or something like that.
And, you know, looking at blacks and saying, well, you're a black person, I'm going to go get you.
Nothing like that is occurring.
You have to be clear that it shouldn't be based on the proportion in the population.
It should be based on proportion of crime.
Look, I'm almost 80 years old.
80-year-old people are not committing crimes much.
We're too old for that.
Wait, wait, wait. What's the average age of the people on the Federal Reserve Board?
Because that might be a whole separate category.
No, you got me there.
I should talk about not white-collar crimes, but blue-collar crimes.
You know, our proportion of blue-collar crimes, you know, with a knife or a gun, is very, very small.
And our proportion of the population might be, say, 10%.
Well, you know, so to be fair or disproportionate, we should only be killed by cops to the extent of 1%, not 10%, our percentage of the population.
And I think that's what's happening with regards to black people.
Well, also, sorry to just jump in as well.
One way of clarifying this as well, I'm sure you've heard, is men can commit disproportionate amount, half the population, but boy, it's like 90% of the violent crime.
It's like, well, does that mean that women are committing equal proportions of violent crime, but men are just overlooking them because of low cut tops or something?
But this is why I'm not a cop, because that would be my impulse.
But yeah, if you look at the disproportionate number of men being arrested, it's relative to the amount of crimes that men commit, particularly young testosterone laced men who have, you know, the forethought of your average, you know, train in a tunnel.
So that's another way to sort of understand how it breaks down.
Yes, I think that's a very good analogy, even better than age, because men and women are roughly half the population, and men commit 90-95% of all the crimes, and therefore we would expect that the cops would kill 95% of men and only 5% of women, if our statistics are correct.
Now, you know, being a cop is a dangerous sort of a thing, because, you know, sometimes they shoot first, and we have to look at how many cops have been killed.
And how many cops have been shot and maybe not killed.
And, you know, it's a very dangerous kind of a thing.
And I think private cops would do better.
And by the way, in the US, I don't know about in Canada, but in the US, there are more private cops than government cops.
Not by much, but by a little bit.
You know, people in the malls or in the shopping centers or what have you.
And the benefit of that is if a cop does something bad and it works for a private company, well, the private company will lose customers.
But that doesn't work in the government sector, so I would favor privatization.
The other thing too, of course, and what's always frustrated me about when cops do bad things, as they certainly do, is that, okay, you sue the city.
Nobody's personally liable.
It comes out of the taxpayers.
It comes out of the bondholders.
It comes out of the future debts and deficits of the general population, at least if someone in a private company does something bad.
Okay, there's the corporate, annoying corporate shield thing that goes on, but at least the owners of the company are going to face some negative repercussions, but boy, it just doesn't.
What is some guy suing now for like $3 billion because his son got killed in chairs?
And it's like, okay, let's say he gets his $3 billion.
Well, nobody in government who made those decisions is going to lose one thin dime.
Well, no, they'll lose a nickel because they'll have to pay some taxes.
Although the way Murray Rothbard would look at it, you're right and I'm wrong.
They wouldn't lose a penny because we have to look at their salary net rather than gross.
So I think you were right on that.
They wouldn't lose even a nickel or a dime.
And the reason we have pretty good shirts, I was talking about my shirt before, is because if you make a good shirt, you'll make more money, you'll make profits, and you'll expand your base of operation.
Whereas if you make a lousy shirt, you'll tend to push to the side and you'll have to, you know, do something else.
So why shouldn't this insight that we have as economists with regard to shirts or shoes or wristwatches, why shouldn't we apply it to everything, including policemen?
Well, so let's talk about the public-private distinction as well, because one of the things that kind of blows people's minds about a stateless society is that there is no such thing as public ownership because there is no such thing as the government, which, of course, there is no such thing.
In fact, there's books, there's laws, there's guns, there's buildings, but government remains a rather elusive concept that has no particular life of its own.
It's not even a Frankenstein you can shock into existence no matter what you do.
But the idea, of course, that there not being public spaces, if you look at where these riots are occurring and why they're so hard to control, is there almost all of them occurring on publicly held lands.
So can you break out for the audience why that's an issue?
Well... One of my books, it happens to be on why we should privatize roads and highways and streets.
And as you say, well, only 99% of it is on the public sphere.
Some of it is trespass on private property.
Well, maybe 5%. I'm not sure what the numbers are.
The reason I wrote that book was mainly because of the number of deaths on the highways.
In the U.S., it's something like 40,000 a year, 35,000 in Canada.
It's roughly 10% of that.
And what I said is, you know, if you have a road and I have a road and now we compete and, you know, maybe we'll get better rules of the road.
You see, a lot of people say, well, the reason that we have deaths on the highways is drunken driving and speeding and stuff like that.
But what I'm saying is those are only the proximate causes.
The ultimate cause are the managers who are not stopping that.
It's sort of like if a restaurant goes broke, We don't say it's because of bad location or lousy food or it was dirty.
We say it was because the manager didn't locate the restaurant in the right place or hire a good cook or somebody with a broom.
So my main reason for writing that was, you know, the death A minor point was the traffic congestion.
If all the sidewalks were private, then these riots wouldn't be allowed in the first place.
Maybe they'd be peaceful marches, but certainly not riots.
And if there were riots, they would deal with them summarily, because if they didn't, they would lose money, the owners of the roads.
Whereas, as you say right now, who's losing money except for the poor victims who's mainly black-owned operations?
You know, the black people are very unhappy about this, and the NBA now is postponing their games, and the Major League Baseball is postponing their games, and they think it's because, you know, systemic racism or something like that.
But, as we said, it's proportional to the amount of crime.
And you know, it seems that only some black lives matter.
Namely, the ones that are killed by white cops.
But what about, you know, in Chicago, blacks are killing each other in gigantic numbers.
And in New York and in many, many places, a lot of that is due to the prohibition of drugs.
And if we legalize that, they wouldn't be fighting over drug turf.
But for some reason, you know, these people, and not just the athletes in basketball and baseball, but, you know, the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN, They are exercised whenever a white cop kills a black person.
And how many black people died at the hands of white cops?
Dozens? Maybe scores?
Maybe a few hundred per year?
I know. In terms of unarmed?
Because, you know, armed, you turn around with a weapon at a cop.
I mean, like, I'm sorry. Like, I mean, I don't know what to say.
That's just like you jump off a bridge and expect to fly.
It's not going to be a good day.
But I think over the last 12 months or last year, something like 11, 11 unarmed blacks.
And some of those were, you know, like they rushed at the cops or some of those were mistaken identity.
And some of them were definitely bad shootings and should be investigated, should be prosecuted and so on.
But it is a tiny, tiny proportion of theills currently facing the black community.
And but, you know, I mean, this is something I talked about years ago in the show that this is all the way back to the common term of the 1920s when the communists in Russia said, well, you know, what we're going to try and do is foment as many racial divisions and oppositions in America or throughout the West as humanly possible in order to destabilize the society. what we're going to try and do is foment as And, you know, even though the Soviet Union is dead, the process obviously aided and embedded by a rather heinous media still seems to be continuing.
And now we have to ask, well, why is it so much black on black crime?
And one of the reasons is because of the breakup of the family.
There's no father in many, three quarters of black kids are brought up with no father, a non-intact family.
And we have all sorts of empirical evidence showing that when you don't have a father in the household, the kids are more likely to be into crime or drugs or leaving school or unemployed or all sorts of negative implications.
Now you might ask, well, why aren't there black fathers in the household?
And by the way, it's not a black thing, it's whites also.
We've had fewer white intact families, but blacks are more vulnerable because they were more poorer and thus more susceptible to welfare.
Well, and as I've talked about with the great Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, he points out that the white community is maybe a generation or two behind the black community in family disintegration, which has gone up enormously, obviously, in the black community.
But yeah, the white community is also fragmenting and fracturing because the community...
People don't really understand the family is an economic organization defined and derived from the bottomless needs of children for resources.
And as soon as you start messing with the economics of the family life, which a welfare state does in its essence, you are destroying the bond.
We all think it's love and it's human bonding and it's oxytocin.
Those things are all important, but they all reflect the necessity to provide resources.
For children. I mean, we're both fathers.
We know that it's basically like coming home and you've got this endless chirping nests of birds.
You've got to regurgitate your financial worms into.
Sorry, that analogy may have gotten away from me a little bit there, but I think we kind of follow the process.
And when you start messing around with the economics of the family, in other words, when children are no longer consumption but production, in other words, it doesn't cost you to have children, but you get paid through the welfare state to have children, you've completely reversed the entire bonding mechanism and purpose of the family.
The example, the analogy I like to draw is if you put a frog in boiling water, it's metabolism as such that it knows to jump out.
But if you put a frog in cold water and you heat it up slowly, its metabolism is such that it'll just stay there and die.
Well, slavery was like boiling water for the Black family.
Yes, it broke it up during slavery, but in the aftermath of slavery, the Black family coalesced.
People were in the 1870s and 1880s saying, you know, Mary Lou, where are you?
This is Jim. I'm your husband.
Let's get together. My research showed that in the 1900, 1910, and 1920 census, the black and the white family are just about as intact.
The white family is 1% better, but what the heck.
Then what happened was LBJ with this great society in 1965.
He boosted welfare so high.
And I'm now channeling Charles Murray, not his IQ stuff, but his book, Losing Ground.
And the Moynihan Report also talked about this as a potential which played out.
And they were accused of being racist or some nonsense like that.
But if you want to solve a problem, you have to understand what the cause of the problem is.
And the cause of the problem is that the government was making a pregnant girl an offer, a financial offer, housing this, medicine that, way more than the father of her child could give her.
So it broke up the family.
And as you said, the white family is not too far behind.
In Sweden, they did the same thing.
There are very few black people there.
And the family is breaking up there.
So welfare is one bad thing.
Drugs is another thing.
Minimum wage law is another thing because it disproportionately employs unskilled workers.
Young black males are susceptible of that.
Their unemployment rate has quadrupled the unemployment rate of adult whites.
So I think there is such a thing as systemic racism.
And three examples of it are welfare, minimum wage, and drug laws.
Those are negatively impacting the black community very, very disproportionately.
I would also throw government education is pretty bad in the poorer communities, the black communities, and so on.
For a lot of the poorer communities, It's, you know, you couldn't design a worse system than try to raise money from the poorest people to pay for the education of their kids and not allow homeschooling, potting, or at least not practically allow it because you still have to pay taxes at the government school either way.
So that to me has also been a huge issue.
Oh, yeah, we could pile on, I don't say indefinitely, but there's a lot of stuff that the black community has been pulverized by, and yet they don't realize that.
And, you know, they talk about white cops, 11 people.
I mean, that's crazy.
I mean, every life is precious, and 11 innocent people who were killed is something horrible.
But, you know, you have to look at how many people are being killed in Chicago every weekend, black people, and it's probably more than 11, just in Chicago.
So there are some historical examples, and I did dip in prior to this convo to our good friend, the late Murray Rothbard, and he's got some, obviously, usually got great arguments about this kind of stuff as well.
So there are some examples of private police that are operating with a virtual monopoly, and one of them formed at the end of World War I with the railway police.
I don't know how much you've delved into this topic.
It's really quite fascinating. So...
There were, of course, you know, you remember seeing these politically incorrect movies that I saw and you saw when we were kids, you know, like the Cowboys and Indians movies.
And there always was a train robber back then.
You know, there was some guy in a black hat twirling his mustache and swirling his six-gun shooter and riding a Palomino.
And they would take over.
And this theft from railways was a huge, huge issue.
And so the railway police and pretty useless if you're out there in the middle of nowhere in among the tumbleweeds in the desert, you're not going to have some what's all this year then cop on the beat.
So the railways formed their own police at the end of World War I.
And within 10 years, freight claims for robberies were down 93 percent, 93 percent reduction in crime.
And because you had this situation where you had a private police force and you could compare their numbers and they really did hold on to their numbers and do a really good analysis of the numbers, you could compare that to the government police and the conviction rates were far higher.
Although the arrests were lower, the conviction rates were far higher.
So it was much more effective.
They were armed.
They could make arrests and so on.
And it really was a very powerful example of in a very difficult situation such as, you know, a train in the middle of nowhere, private police could do an excellent, excellent job.
And you don't see too much of this stuff going on even with security guards and night watchmen and so on.
It always seems to be some often victimless crime, some government situation and some place usually where a sort of private free market situation has not been allowed to occur.
That's when you start.
And this is what's so frustrating to me is that, OK, slavery, big giant government program.
Jim Crow, big giant government program.
Segregation, big giant government program.
Policing, big giant government program.
Welfare state, big giant government program.
And now it's like, at some point, can we get skeptical about big giant government programs and their ability to solve these issues?
Where's the commonality in the four things?
I don't know. I'll have to digress.
I've got to bend that out, maybe on some sand or something like that.
But have you heard of any other...
I know that there was a... Was it Robert Peel who introduced in England in the 19th century some private policing that did pretty well?
Because, you know, it does pretty well and the government's like, well, we can extend and expand this and make it much better.
It's like, no, you can't. You can do the exact opposite.
Not only don't they allow it, but they even...
Mitigate against it.
Take the case of the McCloskeys.
Here was a husband and wife, lawyers, middle class, upper middle class people, and a mob knocked down their gate.
And was starting a trespass, and they came out holding a gun.
And they, sorry, they spent, I think, 17 years restoring this incredible home, and they were just, you know, it was their baby.
It was their pride and joy.
Right, and it's not just that they were on the street.
They broke down their gate, which cost hundreds of dollars just for a gate, because they wanted to have the gate the same way the gate was, $100.
Years ago or something like that.
And they were just holding their gun.
And guess what? The mob did not attack them like the mob attacks other people.
And guess what the Attorney General does?
You'll never guess. I'm sure you're going to be shocked.
I'm glad you're sitting down for this because you will be shocked.
The government starts attacking them.
You know, so it's not only that they won't allow private police, because in effect these were self-protectors, sort of a semi-demi-quasi-private police, but the government is attacking them.
During Katrina in 2005 in New Orleans, where I'm from...
The government went around in private homes trying to get their guns away, and yet they wouldn't stop criminals.
You know, the cops have to stand down because, you know, God forbid the government, the cops should stop criminals because that might enrage the criminals.
So they stand down.
And they leave the victims alone, and then they try to take the victims' guns away from them.
So, you know, this is sort of like horrors to the cube or whatever.
Well, it is one of these sad situations where you have rights in theory, But in practice, you know, theoretically, I have the right to go and give a speech anywhere I want, except, you know, there's a lot of people out there who don't like what it is that I have to say, and so the right remains somewhat theoretical.
It's the same thing with the right to self-defense.
Of course, you know, to me, if a mob is approaching and threatening and, you know, we're going to do X, Y, or Z ban, yeah, I think it's okay to get out there and actually quite restrained to simply show a gun rather than use it.
That's supposed to be, you know, Second Amendment, all kinds of good stuff in the States with regards to that.
But do you actually have the right?
You know, I mean, what's being attacked now almost is do the police even have a right to arrest people?
I mean, that's a really, really interesting question because, I mean, you and I, having studied the state for many decades, it's like, yeah, it's comply or die.
And that is exactly what the moment the police decide they want to take you in, they will escalate until you comply or you die.
That is how it works.
That's always been how it works.
That's the nature of the state.
But now it's like, well, it doesn't matter if he resisted arrest.
It doesn't matter if he tried to run.
It doesn't matter as happened recently.
The guy is reaching into his car where I think there was a knife or something like that.
It's like, look, I mean, that is the that is the rule.
That's the only way that it can possibly work.
And you and I would like a nice free market solution to these kind of things.
But now it seems like even the right for the police to arrest people without facing horrible charges themselves seems to be very much at risk.
And this, of course, is why you've got people like Rand Paul last night and his wife being attacked by a mob of 200 plus people while the police are holding up bicycles to try and...
Serve as some sort of shield between them and the police because, like, why can't you just arrest people?
It's like, well, because the media is then going to, all these pictures, and if it happens to be a black mob that's rioting or protesters that are aggressive and so on, then suddenly the whole race bomb gets thrown into the situation.
And, you know, there really is quite a paralysis, and that to me is the worst of all situations.
I'd rather have a free market solution, but if you're going to have a government solution, let's at least not have that paralyzed as well to the point where it's just free reign on the victims.
And we even have a word for this now called the Ferguson effect.
Right, right. Because in Ferguson, Missouri, I think it was, you had this guy who was grabbing the policeman's gun, and he shot him.
And have this, you know, don't shoot hands up and all that nonsense.
This is a guy, 6'5 and 250, you know, a very strong young man.
He's grabbing the cop's gun and the cop shot him.
And somehow the cop is guilty.
And then there was another case where I think it was in Georgia where a criminal, a black criminal, took the taser away from the cop.
And started shooting the taser at the cop, and the cop shot him, and now they're accusing the cop of first-degree murder or something like that?
I mean, this Ferguson effect means that the cops are afraid to do their job.
Now remember, at the beginning of this hour, I said there were three things that Have to do with the cops.
One, they do good.
They stop murderers and rapists.
Two, they do bad. They try to stop victimless criminals.
And three, the way they have financed.
But at least let them stop murderers and criminals.
And then you have this thing.
There was a judge a couple of years ago, and they called him Turn Him Loose Bruce.
Bruce was the judge.
And whenever a criminal was in front of Bruce, he would turn him loose.
So the cops arrest a guy with a knife or a gun or something like that, and then he's out on the street practically before the cops have finished their paperwork.
So, you know, how can you expect the cops to work under the Ferguson effect?
And then, you know, what really bugs me is this gun control.
You know, Hillary and Nancy Pelosi and all those people are saying, well, we got to get rid of guns.
Guns are the problem. Meanwhile, those guys, those people have got armed guards with guns.
You know, if you want to have people divest of guns, let them start divesting first.
And, you know, these politicians...
Oh, Walter, good heavens. You can't possibly expect people to start implementing their own values in their own personal lives first.
That's what the poor neighborhoods are for.
You get to experiment all your social theories on the poor neighborhoods.
You don't want to... I mean, what if it doesn't work?
You're going to get shot. That's no good.
It's much better if other people get shot, right?
I apologize. Mea culpa.
Yeah, yeah. You must have gone crazy for a minute there.
Yeah, I apologize.
We shouldn't let them live under the rules that they want to impose on us.
What was I thinking? It's all your fault.
Now, let's talk about this as well, because for a lot of the poor communities, I mean, it does focus a little on the black community, but I think it's a lot of poor communities.
They kind of view the police as this occupying alien colonist force or whatever it is from elsewhere.
The really great thing about free market policing is...
If the community, the neighborhood are all getting together more or less and agreeing, okay, this is how we're going to do things, there is a buy-in.
They're not viewed as just like foreign colonizers, so to speak, from another dimension coming in and wrecking the neighborhood and arresting all the poor young men who didn't do anything.
I think having local ownership of policing seems to be very, very important when it comes to legitimacy.
Because if it is, oh, the cops are all racist, there's all this white privilege and blah, blah, blah, then the cops come in.
If they don't have legitimacy, in other words, if the majority of the citizens don't view the police as morally legitimate to a large degree...
Then, you know, you don't get any participation.
The witnesses will never come forward.
You can't ever solve anything.
Everything's hostile. Everything could escalate.
I mean, that's one of the issues that was going on with George Floyd was that the crowd was getting kind of angry and upset and escalating and they were really getting kind of concerned about everything.
And whereas, of course, if the cops are like homegrown, so to speak, like your local grocery store, you probably know the person, you know the family and so on.
If it's a local police force, that's just so much better for legitimacy.
And that means that crime is going to go down.
No, I couldn't agree with you more.
It's absolutely true.
I mean, they're seen as their sons and their nephews are the cops.
And, you know, you don't try to hassle or kill your sons and your nephews.
I mean, we have gated communities and they have cops.
And they're private cops and we have malls and the cops are not seen as an alien occupying force as they are sometimes.
But you know, it's interesting nowadays with the BLM, Black Lives Matter, they come into black neighborhoods and they start trashing black areas and then the black people say, get the F out of here!
You know, this is our neighborhood.
We don't want you. And a lot of white hippie types, lefty whites, are in the BLM movement, and they start trashing black businesses and black homes, and this isn't racist.
I mean, this is just horrible.
And, you know, it used to be that black people would vote for the Democratic Party, what, 95% or something like that?
I think that Donald is going to get something like 25-30% of the black vote this time around, because the black people are the ones who are being pulverized most.
They're the ones who are being disproportionately victimized by all these marches.
And, you know, they're going to say, hey, what's going on here?
Donald wants to send in troops to stop this?
And then there was this guy, Tom Cotton, who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times saying, if the local police lose control, we should send in federal soldiers.
And the editor of the New York Times got fired for allowing Tom Cotton, a senator from Arkansas, I think.
And yet there were people, commies and, I don't know, terrorists from the Middle East, That had the op-eds in the Times and nobody said squat.
So, you know, the rot goes much deeper.
It's not just police.
It's also the universities.
It's Hollywood. It's, you know, you've been in trouble with getting kicked off of Google or whatever it was, the electronic version.
The rot is very much deeper, as I'm sure you'll agree with me, than, you know, just the police.
It's the leaders of academia and the pulpit and everywhere else you turn to.
Well, I mean, it is the tragic Marxist answer, which is there are discrepancies in outcomes between different groups.
And it's a big, complicated question.
You know, in the black community, if you normalize for a single motherhood, black crime rates disappear.
In terms of like if you just say, okay, well, let's take the proportion of black households that have fathers and then you normalize that and the discrepancy disappears.
These are all big complicated questions.
Why are there economic differences between men and women?
Okay, yeah, there's childbirth, there's, you know, testosterone, there's aggression, there's the types of industries that men and women on average choose to go into.
There's just a variety of things.
It's all a very big, interesting, complicated question.
But unfortunately, the, you know, simpleton, sophist Marxists come along and say, well, we have the answer.
It's exploitation, racism, sexism, theft, predation, you know, and that just riles everyone up.
And it's, you know, like all simple answers, you know, hey, world looks pretty flat to me.
Sure feels like the sun and the stars rotate around the earth.
That's kind of how it looks.
And, you know, every simpleton idiot comes along and says, yeah, well, that's the way it is, man.
It's just, why is Jeff Bezos rich?
Because he's stolen from everyone and...
And it's such a compelling answer.
It's like a fairy tale.
And, you know, those of us who are like, yeah, you know, there's a lot of factors.
No, there are not a lot of factors.
There's one factor, exploitation and violence is the way to solve it.
And it's like, ooh, you know, those easy answers tend to be the most dangerous of all.
You know, you're absolutely right.
I hate to agree with you all the time, but what the heck, you know, if we agree, we agree, and we disagree sometimes.
Hey, bold lives matter. Anyway, go on.
I just wanted to support what you were saying.
If you look at black poverty of intact black families in single digits, And with this black, with this white, black and white, with the male and female pay gap, if you look at people, the male female pay gap is something like 30% or 25%.
But if you look at people who've never been married, not widowed, not divorced, not separated, nothing, nothing to do with marriage, there is no pay gap.
And if you look at ever-married people, people who have been either married, widowed, divorced, separated, whatever, then the pay gap is in any 25-30%.
It's more like 60%.
So an inordinate amount of the pay gap is due to marriage.
Namely, women have a disproportionate share of housekeeping.
More cooking, cleaning.
I mean, obviously breastfeeding and getting pregnant.
But in addition to that, when the kid wakes up at 3 in the morning, it's the mother.
Mother is shopping, cooking, cleaning, diapering, stuff like that.
So that's why there's a pay gap.
It's got nothing to do with this Marxist notion that men exploit women and whites exploit black.
It's just nonsense. Well, the funny thing, too, is that they say that this is all unpaid labor.
Like, really? Who's paying the mortgage?
I mean, it's not unpaid labor.
I mean, if the man is making $100,000 and he's given $50,000 to his wife to raise his kids, and it's probably more than that, That's not exactly unpaid labor.
I mean, if you factor in the money that women receive, you know, alimony and child support, or you just factor in the money that women receive simply through the man handing over the keys to the financial kingdom, I bet you it more than disappears.
There's a reason why more than 80% of domestic purchase decisions are made by women.
I mean, it's not because they only have 5% of the money.
I mean, it's because they are very good on average at running that stuff.
And yeah, somebody's got to breastfeed the kids.
It ain't going to be you and it ain't going to be me because we're all taps and no plumbing when it comes to the breasts, right?
This constant, someone's out to get you, and someone's going to exploit you, and someone's going to steal from you, and someone's going to hunt you down, and someone's going to shoot you.
And it's like, my God, people are just getting so jumpy, so paranoid, and any kind of sane, data-based, fact- and evidence-based discussions that have any...
But complexity, boy, you know, it's really getting tougher and tougher to get your voice out there.
But boy, I think we've got to keep trying because the alternative is that these riots escalate until, well, until dot, dot, dot.
You know, we don't want to go French Revolution.
We don't want to go Bolshevik Revolution.
We don't want to go Khmer Rouge.
We don't want to go Castro.
We don't want to go in that direction at all because people like you and I don't intend to do very well after the deluge.
That's true. I have to tell you a story about my family.
I once got into a dispute with my wife and I said, I'll bet you $10,000 you're wrong.
And everyone goes, whoa.
And then my daughter, she was six years old.
And she said, don't be silly.
They share money. That's right.
You know, she was six years old.
And we share, yeah, I mean, I'm sure you share money with your wife.
You don't buy services or whatever.
So they are being paid.
They're being paid probably not 50% of the 100,000, 90%.
You know, I have to tell you another story.
When my son got married, I gave a toast and I said, Matthew, you're in charge of all the important issues in the family.
What are the important issues?
Well, who gets elected? What about environmental policy?
Well, you know, what about, I don't know, police?
Andrea, you're in charge of all the unimportant issues.
What are the unimportant issues? Oh, where do you live?
How many kids do you have?
And whether everybody wears a jacket, but it falls below a certain temperature.
Yes. I mean, that's the way most families work.
So the idea that women aren't being paid, it's a team.
They share money.
Yeah. And they get paid through living longer with old age pensions.
All right. I know you got a hard stop.
So let's just real quick, I wanted to drop on one thing here, which is to ask people, and I'm sure you've had some thoughts about this as well.
Just kind of look around at what keeps you safe, right?
Like if you live in a house, do you have a security system?
Does your car have an alarm?
You know, when you go to a store, do they have those little clothing tags on them with the ink in them that if you don't get them pulled off correctly?
If you lose your phone, can you go to your computer and find out where it is?
Well, this is all stuff that keeps your property safe and secure.
None of it was developed by governments.
I mean, do you think the police would be like, hey, you know what would be really great?
If we had, we developed the technology so that people could have cameras that would phone us if someone broke into their house.
But the police don't do that kind of stuff.
It's not because they're dumb. It's not because they're lazy.
It's just there's no incentive for them to do it.
So if you look at the stuff that actually keeps you safe, it's almost all been developed by the free market, implemented by the free market.
And just imagine if there was no end to that potential for innovation.
No, again, I hate to be a wuss and a wimp, but I obviously agree with you that the free enterprise system is a voluntary system.
And as we said before, if you do a good job, you can expand your base of operation.
If you do a bad job, you're led as if by Adam Smith's invisible hand to go do something else.
Whereas that doesn't occur in the government sector.
I mean, that's why the post office is losing billions in the U.S., billions a year, and FedEx is making money doing roughly the same sort of a thing.
You know, they take comparative statistics on how much does it cost to remove a ton of garbage privately and in public.
And it's triple or quadruple.
It costs that much more in the public sector because of this weeding out process of inefficiency.
That's why the U.S. is doing a lot better than Cuba or the USSR or Venezuela.
And I think that the benefit of what we're now doing is we're It's sort of like what Henry Hazlitt is doing in his Economics in One Lesson.
He applies it to very basic things like shoes and shirts and corn.
And we're applying it to areas where it's not always applied to, and I think it's very important that it be applied to, namely roads and police and things like that.
Yeah, I mean, the analogy for me is always slavery, which was an accepted human institution for tens of thousands of years, just like the state has been an accepted human institution.
And there were always people who said, okay, well, look, maybe, just maybe we can get rid of serfdom.
And maybe slavery is bad for industrial concerns.
By God, to pick those fruits and vegetables.
We absolutely need slavery.
There's no other possible way to do it.
And then lo and behold, it turns out that you only get the modern world when you get rid of slavery and it becomes efficient to invent labor-saving devices because it saves you money.
Whereas if you have slaves, you don't want to invent labor-saving devices because it lowers the value of your slaves.
So what if...
The state was kind of like slavery that there's no place – because people have this like this last bit.
It's like, okay, okay, fine.
Education, no problem. Okay, I get that.
It may be courts, maybe prisons, but not the police.
That's got to be a state function no matter what.
It's like – but that's not a principled approach and we only have the modern world because people took a principled approach to self-ownership and banned the moral horror of slavery eventually, not just in their own countries but mostly around the world – If the same thing could be conceived of with regards to the state, that it's a moral principle, and that last place that you want the state to still function is like allowing vestiges of slavery to remain in your society, you know, the whole reason we have the modern world is people took that principled approach, and I would certainly invite the audience to take that as well.
Look, I think the government should be in charge of paperclips and rubber bands, and that's it.
If they have to be in charge of something, let them be in charge of that, but not police and not anything important.
Or maybe just they can be in charge of all of our competitors.
Can you just mention to people where they can find you on the web, and I'll put the links to the show as well?
Just Walter Block.
Google me. I'm all over the place.
Okay, it's a lot safer than Googling me.
All right. Thanks again for having me.
It's always a pleasure. Great pleasure.
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