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Sept. 16, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
56:48
The Path to Freedom! Dr Walter Block and Stefan Molyneux
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Well, hi, everybody. Back here with our good friend, Dr.
Walter Block. Now, I guess I brought reinforcements because this is going to be a challenging conversation, I guess, for some of you who followed me on the more sort of Trump-libertarian political analysis side of things.
But way back in the day, when we both had hair, I started on this journey, which was on Lou Rockwell's site.
My first The essay was called The Stateless Society, An Examination of Alternatives.
And I, of course, having tripped over the idea of a stateless society in a debate with a co-worker once in the software field, I thought I had, you know, stumbled across something truly revolutionary and unthought of before.
And then, of course, I began diving into the literature and realized that a large number of very smart people, Dr.
Block, of course, had been there long before me.
And I... You know, begin reading some of the literature that's out there, which is really quite considerable.
If you haven't imbibed it, I'll put links to this in the final show notes.
But, you know, Dr. Block and lots of other people, Murray Rothbard and Mises kind of got in that direction fairly heavily.
It's well worth checking out.
It is a very shocking thing to think of.
A society without a government.
It just seems like...
Crazy town. It feels like a Halloween that never ends.
And I guess I wanted to get Dr.
Block to talk about sort of his journey towards it and the basic arguments for it.
I'll pitch in a little bit of my own.
We will take...
Questions from you, because listen, when you hear this idea, I don't know if it's just human nature or because we're kind of programmed this way by the powers that be, but we have like, objections, objections, objections, can't work, can't work, can't work.
Now, of course, from an anarchist perspective, if you had a truly free society without a state and people said, well, you know what we need?
What we need is a concentrated group of sociopathic people to gain control of all the guns in the known universe, subjugate everyone else, and from that, paradise and peace would emerge.
And... If you were in a free society, you would see all of the problems in that formulation, but because we're kind of going the other direction, the objections kind of float up from our existing mindset.
You know, whatever we're used to when somebody proposes a radical change, we want to push back against it.
I don't mind that. It's a very fair thing to do because society can either go American Revolution, it can go anarchist revolution in a sort of free market sense, or it can go French Revolution And you end up with 40,000 people's head on a stick, which is pretty bad, right?
So I think it's good to push back against proposed social changes.
And with that having been said, you know, gather your objections.
I will read them out and we'll respond to them as best we can as we go forward.
But after that, I guess, brief intro, Dr.
Block, if you could tell us and I guess the world a little bit about your journey towards it and what are to you or were for you the most compelling arguments in this direction?
I wasn't expecting that question, but now that you've asked it, I'll answer it.
Expect the unexpected.
Yes. That's all I can tell you. Always fun here.
I was a friend of Bernie Sanders.
We went to high school together for four years.
We're on the track team together.
We're sort of friendly. And I had roughly the same views as him.
Ayn Rand came to Brooklyn College to speak, and I came to boo and hiss her because she favored free enterprise.
And everyone knows that free enterprise, you know, it's fascist, that everyone will die, starvation, horrible.
And then they announced at the end of her lecture that there would be a lunch for anyone who was interested in this stuff.
And I didn't get enough booing and hissing.
And I came there. And there was this long table.
Ayn Rand was ahead of it.
And Greenspan and Leonard Peikoff and...
Nathaniel Brennan were all there, and I was relegated to the other end of the table, and I turned to my neighbor and I said, hey, socialism is the way to go.
What do you say? And he said, I don't really know that much about it, but the people who do are at the other end of the table.
So I went there. And I stuck my head between Ainz and Nathan's and I said, there's someone here who wants to debate someone on socialism and capitalism.
I was maybe 19 or 20.
I was a junior in college.
Brandon, maybe 35, ran 50.
And I said, who wants to debate me on socialism and capitalism?
And Brandon said, I'll do it.
I'll go to the other end of the table on two conditions.
One, you don't allow this conversation to lapse until we settle it.
and two, you'll read two books that I recommend.
Two books, Ratliff Shrugged and Economics and One Lesson by Henry Haslick.
I read the books and after four or five visits to Brandon's house, to Rand's house, I was converted.
I was the free enterprise, but not an anarchist.
I was a free enterprise, like Rand.
I didn't follow the rest of her, but I liked her economics, which came from Mises and Rothbard, so that was good.
Then Larry Moss was a fellow student of mine at Columbia and he said, you must meet Murray Rothbard, he's an anarchist.
I said, what? Anarchists?
I don't want to mean anarchists.
You know, they're crazy. You know, killing people and all the...
They started World War I. What are you talking about?
Right, right. Everything bad.
Their own smell, you know, it's anarchism.
Everything is bad.
Anarchism is bad in every way.
And I didn't want to mean it. But finally, he and his roommate, Jerry Wallace, ganged up on me and said, you must meet Murray Rothbard.
And I was expecting some guy with, you know, like a rifle and a shotgun and, you know, six foot three and, you know, muscles all over the place.
I think of a description that's less like Murray Rothbard, but all right.
We all know what Murray Rothbard looked like.
It wasn't exactly like that.
Close, but not exactly.
And Murray converted me into anarchism in about 10 minutes.
What did he do? He used Henry Hazlitt's arguments.
Henry Hazlitt would say, look, the reason we have pretty good shirts and pretty good shoes is if you don't have a good shirt or a good shoe, you go broke.
And if you have a good shoe or a good shirt, you expand your base of operations.
That's why we have a good economy.
Well, now let's apply it to the police, army, and courts.
And all of a sudden, you know, what?
Apply everything that I had known from Hazlitt to this?
And he got me.
And it was just 10 minutes and I saw it.
And then I started reading stuff and I was an anarchist.
So that's how I came to it, through Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard.
Now, for you, 10 minutes in argument here or there, and of course, you and I and everybody else who's really arguing for foundational human freedoms, we've sometimes spent years, sorry, that was a very long drawn out syllable there, but we spent years,
years, years trying to get people to wake up to this kind of stuff, and it always has struck me as strange how easily sometimes it comes to say you or I or other people, and yet For us, it's a slippery slope, right down to the happy jello pit of truth.
For other people, though, it is like climbing Mount Everest using their teeth.
Over your years, have you sort of found any pattern behind any of this, any kind of key that opens the lock faster?
Well, you know, I can't answer your question, but I'm a professor, so I'm never going to shut up, so I'll answer another question.
The other question is Austrian economics.
It took me years to get there.
Murray tried and maybe it was because I was in graduate school and I thought I was going to get my PhD.
I had to stick with my neoclassical stuff.
I was a student of Gary Becker and Other neo-classical people.
So it took me years to do that and I don't know why, you know, anarchism was like falling off a log.
Austrianism, especially this idea of the synthetic a priori where something is absolutely apodictively necessarily true and yet has something to do about the real world, I was brought up in the idea that if it's necessarily true, it's just the tautology and you have to do empirical experiments to see if something is or a hypothesis confirmed or not.
So I was wedded to that and it took me really years To get there.
And I don't know why. Here I am, one person.
One thing I got in 10 minutes or 15 minutes.
The other thing took me years.
Who knows? I'm not a psychologist.
Maybe only a psychologist would know that or a sociobiologist or somebody like that.
I'm just making a note. Next show to talk about your mom.
Okay, that's... You'll obviously have to sit back a little bit for that show and we'll get there.
But one of those is an argument from efficiency for which there is masses of economic and empirical and historical and personal evidence, right?
Like the DMV versus FedEx, you know, that kind of stuff.
So one is just calling upon your irrevocable, undeniable personal experience of the government versus the free markets.
I think that kind of clicks into place.
But the other one, if it's sort of the praxeology idea that, well, hey, man, if you've got a certain amount of goods and services and you double the money supply, you are necessarily going to increase the price of everything in terms of inflation.
This sort of praxeological stuff, though, it's not something that you usually have direct experience of in the same way that you've had direct experience of working with free market versus government institutions?
That could account for it in my case, but I'll bet you there are other cases where somebody got converted Austrianism in 10 minutes, and it took them years to go into anarchism.
People are strange.
The human animal is complicated.
So I don't know of any experiences, but that would be an interesting thing to ask people, how did you come to anarchism?
How did you come to Austrian economics?
Was it quick? Was it slow?
Was it the same for you?
Well, and there is this aspect, there are some people who are very comfortable with contradictions, ambivalence, and so on.
And there are other people – and it is a kind of fetish.
It is a kind of OCD. Who knows?
Maybe it's a kind of autism.
It's like if I can have a mental construct that is A to Z consistent, that to me is a kind of – like I get a thrill of dopamine.
It's my heroin. Like if I can just iron out inconsistencies and end up with a sort of pure shining edifice structure of consistency, that to me – I'm sure it's – scientists have the same thing where they can say, oh, what if the speed of light is constant?
Or – What if we put the sun at the center of the solar system and then everything just kind of clicks into place and you get this happy joy-joy juice in the brain that just kind of keeps you going down that path?
And for me, I mean, I was with you, like the Randian idea that, you know, you have a government, that it does police, it does military.
Law courts, maybe some prisons, depending on how you work things out.
And that's really seductive because it solves the most difficult problems returning to the armed might of the state.
You kind of have this magic spell called, okay, the non-aggression principle is fine to violate for these because these are really difficult questions to answer.
And when, for me, I was in a debate with someone about how a society could handle air pollution, And I had been over a decade in the software field at this point.
Now, in the software field, I think it's true of economics in the software field.
What is the software field is constantly applying logic to problems to try and make things more efficient because software is fundamentally logical.
I mean, computers only do what you tell them to.
And I think that training as a sort of core programmer, research and developing programmer gave me that kind of like, it's got to be consistent.
It's got to be efficient. And then in this debate where I was like, well, you I guess you could have insurance for air pollution.
And then it was just like, it dominoes from there.
It's like, okay, well, if air pollution can be solved, because that would be under the Randian thing, that would be under law and all of that, the courts.
And then it was just from there.
And I got this rush.
I still remember sitting in my office and I jumped up like some crazy guy explaining the shooting of JFK, diagrams up on the wall and equations and like logic trees and all that.
And I was like... By God, it could work!
You know, and I had this eureka moment and I think at that point it was like the countdown, like, you know, the sand, hourglass sand was kind of turned over and the countdown to the end of my software career was kind of on its way because it was just better.
But you get that consistency, the non-aggression principle, do not initiate the use of force.
Anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, we can call it to differentiate ourselves from the warlords of Chaz, but anarcho-capitalism It solves that problem.
Like you have the non-aggression principle, consistent and universal, and you don't have this big castle which you've got to kind of take the river around and kind of ignore, which is, you know, the courts and the military and legal system and so on.
And you just have this consistent thing and it's harder to defend.
But it's so much more pure.
And I know purity is a very, very dangerous notion when it comes to intellectual – we saw this, of course, in the 20th century, the pure race and so on.
But purity in terms of a consistency to principle – because if you're going to have a principle and then you just kind of break it where it gets tough, it's like I might as well just be a socialist.
I might as well just have a lot easier principles than these really hellish ones.
You know, it's interesting. My son had the exact opposite experience of you.
He is now a computer nerd.
Much more profitable sometimes.
But he credits libertarian theory for helping with that.
Whereas you're the opposite.
that you credit programming for helping you in our field, namely libertarianism, broadly conceived.
So you've talked a lot about the sort of cause and effect stuff.
Where do the ethics, and I know ethics and economics sometimes can be a dangerous substance introduced in the same conversation, but where do the moral sort of moral arguments, non-initiation of force and so on, where do they sit in the mental infrastructure that you work with?
Well, they're right at the core.
I mean, to me, the essence of libertarianism is really two or three things, whether it's opposite sides of a coin or a three-sided triangle.
One is the non-aggression principle.
Keep your mitts off of other people and their property, unless you have their permission.
It's okay to enter a boxing match or voluntary sadomasochism, if they agree.
But other than that, keep your mitts to yourself.
I mean, most people aren't going to say, oh, no, that's a crazy principle.
Most people would adhere to that principle.
The second basic principle of all libertarianism, namely anarcho-capitalism, is the only one that does it consistently, is private property rights.
You're wearing a shirt.
If I came over and grabbed that shirt, the question is, have I initiated violence against you?
It all depends on who's the owner of that shirt.
What you've initiated is one hell of a show, and maybe we can do that next time.
We'll be like the mud wrestling, ripping off the shirt, flexing our muscles, all that kind of stuff.
But the point is that if you stole that shirt from me yesterday, I'm just repossessing it.
So we need to have a theory of property rights, which Murray Rothbard and John Locke started with mixing your labor with the land and you get to own it by homesteading it.
And the third one, I guess, is a voluntary free association.
Nobody should be forced to associate with anyone against his will.
So we rule out slavery and rape and stuff like that.
And that's sort of the basic three things that all libertarians would give lip service to.
However, only anarcho-capitalists, as you quite properly said, would adhere to it fully, consistently, logically, whereas the Randians would make an exception for armies, courts, and police.
Milton Friedman and Hayek would make exceptions for a few other things.
Even Mises and Ron Paul would make exceptions because they're not total anarchists.
It's only we who are logically consistent, and we get this aha principle when it all clicks into place, and it's just an exhilarating experience.
But I think you're quite right that we have to distinguish ourselves from the Chaz anarchist or the Chomsky, Nolan Chomsky is an anarchist, but he's a left-wing anarchist.
It means he's a socialist anarchist.
Yes, he doesn't want the government, but he wants to make a law against having money or profits or, you know, markets or free trade or anything like that.
So he's a very strange sort of an anarchist.
I've never, I mean, I've even had him on the show a couple of times to discuss this and I've never been able to penetrate this Mobius strip honeycomb of justifications around voluntary, coercive, tribal, non-state anarchy and all that.
I mean, that's like the pablum that Marx hangs out, like the little carrot at the end of the totalitarian stick.
Oh no, the state's going to wither away at some point.
Do you have that last step?
If you could break that out a little bit, Carl, that would be fantastic.
No! Just trust me, man.
It's just going to give you a full totalitarian state apparatus, but don't worry.
It's just going to wither away.
It's like, I'm going to inject you with deadly poison, but don't worry.
It's just going to diffuse in your bloodstream, I'm sure.
It's like, I really like that.
Before we do the first part, can we get a breakout of the second part?
Now, I think, for me, it comes down to this one R, the R that really is really challenging for people, right?
So, I mean, the technical term, as you know, anarchism means without rulers.
And, of course, everybody forgets that second R and think that means without rules.
And that difference is really, really important.
So I think the argument, Tim, tell me how far you go down the road with me on this, but I think the argument is pretty clear.
If you have rulers, you don't have rules.
Because it's whim-based.
And even if the rulers are democratic and say, oh, well, it's the majority.
Yeah, but the majority is kind of propagandized by the schools.
The government is heavily susceptible to special interest pressure groups and re-election and the media hit jobs and so on.
And so when you have a state, you don't have rules.
I mean... If you imagine somebody appealing their whatever, they've got some problem with the tax authority or whatever, and they bring in all the books that you have to adhere to.
And it's like, what is it?
100, 120 books of small...
There's no rules in that.
The Federal Register has over 100,000 pages of regulations on the correct temperature that you have to transport cauliflower in and all this kind of...
Like there's no possibility that anyone knows all of those rules.
And so everybody feels a little bit illegal all the time.
I think Tom Woods got a pretty good book on this about the five felonies you commit every day or something like that.
And so when you have a government, you don't actually have rules.
You'll have a lot of laws, but the laws tend to be subjective and arbitrary.
And also access to the legal system is very complicated insofar as you've got a problem with someone and you want a lawsuit.
Okay, well, strap yourself in for a five to seven year journey that's going to cost you $200,000 and has a sort of very uncertain outcome.
And I remember once getting involved in a lawsuit against someone who had done me significant wrong.
And I was talking to the lawyer and I said, let's just go to the full courts.
And he's like, yeah, five to 10 years, maybe a quarter million dollars.
I'm like, really?
This is what I'm paying my taxes for?
Something that is completely inaccessible to the average person?
And then through the discovery process, I actually found out that the people admitted that they'd done wrong.
I'm like, boom, man, open and shut case.
Let's not settle. Let's go for the maximum amount because we went for arbitration.
And he's like, hmm, I wouldn't do that.
And I'm like, why? They've admitted fault.
I mean, sure. He's like, yeah, you know, they've admitted fault.
But if there's one thing I've learned about in my many years as a lawyer, you never know what's going to happen in there.
And of course, I had this idea based upon courtroom dramas and TV shows and so on that the law, you know, they just, hey, man, they just read the law.
And they got to do that.
Like they're programmed like a computer, right?
And that's not the way the law works.
And we see this with General Flynn, right?
The DOJ says we want to drop the charges and the judge is like, nope, we're just going to keep on going.
It's like, how is that? Or the way in which, of course, we see that the law doesn't apply to, say, a Clinton as opposed to somebody else where it applies much more harshly.
And so this idea that you live under a system of rules generally is only believed in by people who've never tried to use those rules to achieve some sort of justice at a personal level.
And that was really quite instructive to me.
And in hindsight, actually, it actually happened fairly shortly before I went into this.
Well, there are no rules under the current system.
Because, yeah, a lawyer was basically telling me that.
He says, it kind of depends which side of the bed the judge gets up on.
And I'm like, hmm... Ooh, that doesn't seem like a very good system.
And I think it was then, I guess, mentally I started casting about for other things.
But this idea that you have no rules if you don't have a government, it seems to me kind of the opposite of the truth.
Like if physics were subject to committee, we wouldn't say there were any laws of physics because people would just be trying, like fat people would try and dial down gravity and, you know, people who wanted to go scuba diving would try and dial it up or whatever and it'd just go all over the place.
You'd say, well, there are no rules of physics.
It just depends on the whim of the majority or the moment.
And it's the same thing with rules in society.
We don't have anything that we can study objectively in a sense because it all just goes through this subjective political machination.
I agree with you enthusiastically.
You said something very interesting before, a couple of minutes ago.
What you said is that if we started with a free society and we told people, hey, let's start up a government and we're going to give the Joneses all the guns and let them decide everything and they can tax us as much as they want, people would say, you know, are you drunk?
Whereas if right now people say, oh, you can't have anarchy because, you know, we'd have chaos.
And a lot of people use chaos as a synonym for anarchy.
And I would say it's almost the opposite.
So let me give you an example where right now we have anarchy.
We have it. And nobody really wants to get rid of it.
Where do we have anarchy? We have anarchy.
Look, you and I, if we got it, the argument for the state is you and I might get into a fight.
And if we got into a fight, we need somebody to break us up and determine who is right and who is wrong.
So you need a government. Well, Canada and China are in a state of anarchy with each other in the sense that there's no world government above them.
Brazil and Burundi are in a state of anarchy with each other because there's no world government.
Every country, and there are about 130, 150 countries, are in a state of anarchy with each other.
And the only way to get out of it, like...
Between you and I, we need a government to make sure we behave.
Well, then we need a government between Brazil and Spain to make sure that they behave.
Well, what would that be?
It would be a world government.
But nobody really wants a world government.
Now, the U.S. is trying to become a world government.
It's got, I don't know, 800 military bases in 130 different countries, although Donald Trump is trying to reduce it a little bit.
But we don't have a world government.
You know, I'm Jewish, and my people are always running from somewhere.
This country is no good.
We run there. If we had a world government, There'd be no place to run.
Mars is not habitable yet, and the Moon, you know, so we certainly, speaking as a Jew, I wouldn't want a world government, but even as a non-Jew, nobody wants to have a world government.
If we had a world government, and it was democratic, and by the way, you talked about democracy.
Hitler came into power through a democracy.
Hitler did not come to power through a coup d'etat or through violence.
Hitler came to power through a democracy.
So, you know, just because a lot of people vote for something doesn't make it right.
I'm sorry, just to interrupt for those who don't have a very, very brief history.
Hitler tried to gain power through a putsch and ended up in jail, which is where he wrote Mein Kampf.
And he basically said, okay, forget this overthrow putsch stuff.
That doesn't really work at all.
The way we want to do it is legally through democracy.
And that's exactly what he did.
It was kind of a neck and neck race between the national socialists and the international socialists, the communists.
But yeah, he was like, no, no, I forget this putsch.
It's really, really risky.
But what we can do is just, you know, frog march our way up there through the democratic process.
Right. He didn't have a majority, but there were three or four or five parties, and he had a plurality, and he took power democratically.
Look, if we had a democratic world government, India and China, between the two of them, would pretty much run the world.
Do we really want a world that's sort of like the Indian or the Chinese government?
No. A lot of people don't want that.
So the point is, when you say it's very hard to convince people to try something new, what we can do is try the international sphere and say, look, we have anarchy internationally.
Do you really want to have a government?
And sort of undermine that Well, and of course you end up, if you do, as you know, there was the League of Nations in the 1920s, 1930s, which to me was one of the key reasons why the World War II happened because everyone thinks the problem is being solved by some international organization.
But the important thing to remember when it comes to governments is whatever wonderful thing you dream up, excuse my French here, you have to accept that sooner or later it's going to be populated by the worst assholes you could possibly think of.
They're going to be in charge. That's an absolute given and guaranteed over time because, you know, sociopaths seek power.
They're very manipulative and they're very glib and they're good at sophistry and convincing the worst argument is the better as the old Socratic thing goes.
So whatever you come up with, like, oh, I tell you what, let's have a United Nations, which is kind of like a world government, and we're going to have a whole international commission on human rights, right?
Okay, it's like countdown to Saudi Arabia and...
The old Libya being in charge of these things.
You know, pathological racism in your society, white privilege everywhere as a white supremacist, and capitalism is evil, and it's like you're going to spend half your life either educating children yourself or trying to undo the damage that the government indoctrination system is doing to them.
And no matter what you come up with, sooner or later, and emphasis usually on sooner, it's just going to be populated by the worst possible people you can imagine, and they're going to have a huge amount of power over you.
Absolutely true. I agree with you enthusiastically.
Very much at the outset, people say, well, what do you have against government?
Government is a voluntary institution.
I'm glad you laugh at that, but a lot of people would say, you know, the IRS, whenever they announce, you know, they say it's a voluntary institution.
Taxes are voluntary. And the point is, and what they'll say is, look, if you join the golf club or the tennis club, you have to pay dues.
So shut up and pay your taxes because it's just like dues.
And the obvious difference is that when you join the golf club or the tennis club, you joined, you agreed.
And if you want to avail yourself of the golf or the tennis benefits, well, you have to pay your, not taxes, but you have to pay your dues.
Well, but the United States is not like that.
And Canada, you're in Canada.
Canada is not like that. No country is like that.
There was no country where they started and they all agreed.
Like in the United States, there were 13 colonies and there was a majority.
I think nine of the colonies agreed.
But in each of the ones, it was only a majority vote.
So there were people who were forced to join whether they wanted or not.
But there's nobody who is in the golf club or the tennis club that was compelled, frog-marched into it.
Can you imagine you go to your mailbox one day and there's some friendly golf club down the road and they send you an invitation and the invitation goes something like this, Dear you, Welcome to your new golf club.
We will now be taking your dues by force.
If you decide that you don't want to pay us, we are going to send armed guards to collect.
If you resist them, we will gun you down.
And if you don't want to pay these dues, we're going to kick you out of the country.
That would be a fairly aggressive and really difficult to maintain kind of imposed One-sided, quote, contract.
And this social contract is complete nonsense because it's not a contract.
It's an insult to contracts to call coercive.
You know, it's like saying, hey, man, it's true you're a slave, but, you know, there is an underground railroad that can take you to Canada, so you're not really a slave because you can always, you know, take your chances and balk for it in the middle of the night and all of that.
I mean, it's crazy. And you and I... Can't impose social contracts on other people.
Like if I can't pay my visa bill, I can't just go to my neighbors and take money from them by force and say, hey, no, it's not theft.
It's a social contract. And so when the government forcibly prevents you from enforcing any kind of social contract yourself but claims the monopoly right to do it themselves, I think that gives people a sense of just how crazy the logic of the system has become.
Absolutely, absolutely.
You know, let's just talk about the so-called civil war that they had in the U.S. in 1861.
First of all, it's not a civil war.
A civil war is where both sides want to run the whole country.
In Russia in 1917, the Red and the White Army each wanted to run the country.
That was a civil war. 1936 in Spain, the fascists and the commies each wanted to run the Spain, that was the Civil War.
What the South wanted to do was to secede.
The South didn't want to run the North.
The North wanted to run the South.
And it had nothing to do with slavery, because Lincoln very famously said, according to Tom DiLorenzo, my mentor in this, Lincoln said something like, paraphrase, if slavery will keep the Union together, I'm pro-slavery.
If... Getting rid of slavery will keep the union together.
I'll get rid of slavery.
Namely, I want to keep the union together.
But secession is a crucial part of libertarianism.
It's the part where we talked about free association.
No one should be compelled to associate with anyone against this will.
So the South wanted to secede and the North didn't want them to.
But I would say that right now there's no slavery.
And I'm in Louisiana, and I would say if Louisiana wants to secede, they should be able to secede.
The national government shouldn't come into Louisiana and say, look, you're staying as part of this, whether you like it or not, we should be allowed to secede.
But then... I'm in New Orleans.
New Orleans should be able to secede from Louisiana because, you know, the rest of those Louisianians are bums and we don't like them.
But then, you know, I live in the Garden District in Louisiana and the Garden District should be able to secede.
But then I live on this one block on St.
Charles Avenue. This block should be able to secede from the Garden District and I should be able to secede from that group.
So, you know, we anarchists, we really favor seven and a half billion governments, one for each of us.
And if you want to ask a girl out for a date, you just can't ask for a date.
You have to get your foreign minister to ask her to get together.
But in other words, another defense of anarchism is secession down to the individual level.
Why should it be just session down to the state or the city or the neighborhood level?
Each person should be free to associate or not associate.
Now, when I secede from the block and the block secedes from the neighborhood and the neighborhood from the city, it doesn't mean we can't trade with each other.
It doesn't mean we can't interact with each other in a peaceful way.
It doesn't mean we have to be hermits.
But we wouldn't have any arcy.
As you quite well said, anarchy, the prefix an means against.
So what is anarchy against?
Arche. Well, what is arche?
Unjustified rule. Now, we libertarians believe in rules or laws or whatever, namely no murder, no rape, no theft, the non-aggression principle.
That's our only rule or our only law and implications thereof.
So I would say another way to convince people who are not anarchists is to look at them and say, do you really want to compel people who associate with you against their will?
And hopefully the answer would be no.
Well, I mean, in many societies, there are elders who determine how marriage works, right?
Who gets married to who. And sometimes it's more coercive and sometimes it's less coercive.
But, of course, if the government told you who you had to get married to and enforced that marriage and you couldn't get divorced, you couldn't get out of the relationship, and then people said, you know, it would be really nice if we could just choose our own marriage partners.
And then people would say, are you kidding me?
That would mean there'd be no families.
That would mean that there would be no children.
That would be the end of society as we know it.
Because there's this idea, of course, as you know, if the government does something and then the government doesn't do something, that thing won't be done.
And, you know, hey, man, the government educates the children.
And so if the government doesn't educate the children, the children will not be educated, which is about the same as saying, slaves, you know, pick the fruits and vegetables.
And so if we don't have slavery, everyone's going to starve to death because the fruits and vegetables are just going to rot in the trees and on the fields.
And this idea that...
There is a desire for a solution in the general population and right now it's badly and violently performed by the state and if you don't have a state people will just go completely limp you know like Geppetto's you know cut puppets or something completely limp and nobody will try and figure out any other solutions and you can see this right now right now we can see this playing out with the schools and the pandemic people are um We're not able to send their kids to school now.
It's been like, you know, I mean, not counting the summer if kids were in summer school.
It's definitely been a couple of months.
So what are people doing?
Well, they're getting together and they're creating these learning pods where they hire a teacher and the teacher teaches, you know, eight or 10 kids or whatever, or they're homeschooling or they're all getting together in someone's garage.
And, you know, people want their kids to be educated.
And if the government doesn't provide it, A better solution will occur.
And this idea that if it's not done forcefully, you know, if the government told you what job you had to have, you know, like true Soviet style, and then it suddenly was returned to the free market, would people just never work and starve to death?
No, they would rush in to fill a real solution for the fake solution provided by the state.
One of the proofs of this, or another argument in favor of this, is that there's this...
I forget the guy's name...
R.J. Rummel wrote a book about the number of deaths caused by government in the last century, and he comes up with 200 million.
And this is apart from the wars that they're continually fomenting.
And now people say, well, if you had anarchy, the blood and the Crips and the Chaz people, they'd start killing people.
Well, yeah, look, under anarchy, there'd still be murders.
Anarchy would be comprised of people like you and I, who are flawed, and 1% of the people are murderers, and the presumption is that the private police forces would stop that.
But people say, well, you'd have anarchy, you'd have chaos, you'd have killings in the street.
Well, you have to compare. How many, you know, there's this joke, the economist was asked, how is your wife?
And the answer was, compare to what?
Yes, there'll be deaths under anarchy because people are people and, you know, some people are pretty vicious.
But the gargantuan number of deaths perpetrated by government is just horrendous.
And they don't even count the some 40,000 people who die on government highways.
And one of my books is on why we should privatize highways.
And in Canada, it's about one tenth.
About 4,000 people a year die on government roads.
And then they start saying, well, the cause of it is speeding or driver inattention or drunken driving.
But no, no, no. Those are just proximate causes.
The ultimate cause is the manager of the roads, the government, isn't stopping them.
So in this book I had, Privatizing Roads, Making the Hazlitt point.
The Hazlitt point is if we have competition, you'll have better shirts and better shoes and better roads.
We'll have competition. You'll run your road one way and I'll run my road the other way.
And I have more deaths than you and you'll advertise that and say, look, don't go to Blocks Road because it's not safe.
Come to my road and then I'll adopt your rules of the road, you know, the speed limits or whatever it is.
And then people say, well, you know, you have to have red lights.
Therefore, you have to have government.
Come on! You can't have private red lights?
I mean, is private enterprise incapable of making red lights?
I believe there are some red lights in Amsterdam that don't actually require the government, if I remember.
Well, those are different kind of red lights.
Different, different. Now, okay, so let's just do it, if you don't mind.
I've got a tiny, tiny little rant in because this just drives me crazy.
It drives me completely crazy, the argument that people have about this need for compulsion at the center of society, and it has to do with responsibility, right?
So, you know, you're a professor, you hold your students accountable.
You know, if they show up and they've been, you know, smoking weed and listening to Dark Side of the Moon rather than studying for the test, that will be reflected in their marks.
When I was at daycare, As a teenager, you know, we had a class of like 30 kids aged 5 to 10 and they were all responsible.
You know, some five-year-old pushes another kid, we hold that kid responsible.
We try to sort of bring accountability to the situation and you see parents with two or three-year-olds holding them accountable, holding them accountable.
And so we have this basic recognition that a lack of accountability is a lack of responsibility, a lack of maturity, and so on.
Now, clearly in the government, what is the major problem?
The major problem is if somebody dies on the highway, nobody gets fired in the government.
Nobody is personally liable.
if they've done a bad job of fixing a pothole and some guy flips out and ends up going through a tree, then, you know, you can't sue the guy who runs the – like there's no accountability.
And the one thing that's really confusing to people, and in this I side to a large degree with the leftists, not in terms of the foundational ethics of it but in terms of how it manifests, is, you know, corporations are not part of the free market.
Corporations absolutely completely and totally not part of the free market.
Corporations were instituted by the state and corporations are kind of like a one-way mirror, right?
You can pull all the profits you want out of the company, but if the company does something bad or illegal or wrong, then you can pay for your house using profits in the corporation, but if the corporation goes haywire, does something wrong, kills people, you don't lose your house.
It's a one-way thing. And corporations are these sort of legal fictions, and it wasn't the case at all.
19th century, the banking in America was pretty clear, man.
If you had a bank run, you lost your house if you were in charge of the bank.
And so they really sat on top of this stuff and didn't let things get too risky.
But corporations are this really devious and nasty way for the sort of political and really the financial elites to To gain all of the profits of collective action while exposing none of their personal assets, which are the ones that really count when it comes to the law, none of their personal assets are exposed.
And the veil of corporatism is something set up by the state.
I mean, would you want to do business with a bank?
If in a free society, if the bank owners would lose their house if the bank went under or if they could just, you know, take a jet to Tahiti and just chuckle away while having a Mai Tai on the beach, no, I'd want them to have some personal skin in the game and that's how things would be set up.
I wouldn't want to be doing business with people who have no accountability and this lack of accountability is the one thing that really gets my goat up when it comes to this kind of stuff, you know.
Who is responsible for all of the deaths being caused by the lockdown?
Who is responsible for coronavirus getting into the country and doing all the damage that it's done?
Nobody's responsible. Nobody's accountable.
Nobody's going to jail. Nobody's losing their house, at least on the state side, on the government side, on China or America or England or anything like that.
So to me, it's like, you know, you get an A no matter whether you study, no matter whether you show up.
There's no progress. There's no learning.
There's no... Risk there and the moral hazard aspect of the free market is really important, but it's something, of course, that everybody wants everyone else to have but not themselves.
Well, you know, Stefan, you and I agree on only 99.9% of everything, but now you've put your finger on one tenth of one percent where we disagree.
I think that corporations can be part of the free enterprise system, not when they're protected by government with crony capitalism and bailouts and stuff like that.
But I think that And not when they use violence against someone else.
And then they should be personally responsible.
But me and my buddies get together and we say, look, we're going to make shoes.
And you want to buy shoes from us?
Yes. And you want to sue us for a bad shoe?
You can only sue us for the amount of money that we put in.
Our homes, our cars, or whatever it is, are not part of the kitty.
And now you're free to deal with us or to deal with a non-corporate form of shoemakers.
And everything is cool.
So I don't see just because...
And we're not committing fraud.
We announced this very clearly.
We're not liable for anything.
We each kicked in 100,000 and there are 10 of us.
So there's a million dollars in the company.
And if you sue us for something like a bad shoe, you can only get a million.
You don't want to do it? Go to another shoe company.
So I don't see why it's intrinsically problematic.
Yes, it's problematic when the government steps in and protects corporations.
Fine, I agree with you there.
But you're... Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but you're taking a position that it's necessarily incompatible with libertarianism, and I don't agree with that.
Now, see, here's the beautiful thing, and we disagree on this area.
Now, in a state of society, only one of us can win, right?
So either I get my way or Walter gets his way.
But the beautiful thing about a voluntary society is this constant experimentation and constant navigation according to customer preferences, right?
So Walter may want to do business with that shoe company.
I may not want to do business with that shoe company.
Now, I would never in a million years say that Walter is forbidden.
It is verboten for him.
To do business with a shoe company that doesn't conform to my definition of what a corporation should be.
And of course, he would extend me the same respect.
And we kind of battle it out, in a sense, peacefully in the marketplace.
If his corporate structure produces more innovation, people are more willing to invest because they're not so personally liable, they're willing to take more risks, and they can produce better goods over the...
Then I'm like, hey, you know, that guy's the guy on the left here, who's not often on the left, referred to as on the left, the guy on my left on the screen...
He's totally got it. He's got it down and I'm going to start doing business with his kind of corporations.
If, on the other hand, you know, there's a lot of evasion of responsibility and people start cutting corners and bad things happen, he might say, you know, this lack of accountability over and above, blah, blah, blah, not so great.
So we can both get our way.
We can allow each other to have each other's preferences.
We can learn from each other's preferences because of this constant...
Innovation and experimentation.
There's not one final answer where the gavel of the state comes down and say, from this time forward, at least until we get some different argument from some more powerful person, this is how it has to be, and the experimentation stops.
We can both disagree in the same way that he may be a Mac guy, I may be a PC guy.
It's fine. He can do his thing.
I can do my thing. This live and let live aspect of society can only really be achieved in the absence of the state.
Otherwise, if it matters a lot to us, we've got to go and try and wrestle control of the gun of the state and point it at each other to get our way.
But we really do agree then.
I misinterpreted you.
You're not saying that intrinsically they are incompatible with libertarianism.
You're just saying that you prefer the non-corporate style.
I was ready to get you.
I was going to accuse you of triggering me.
I feel unsafe now, and I'm going to try to cancel you because you disagreed with me.
How dare you? But unfortunately, we agree, so I can't pull that crap on you.
Well, and this, so this, the analogy for those of you, I mean, it's real easy to explain, and for those of you who know a smidge of European history, right, for like 300 years, 250, 300 years, a lot in Germany and other places, too, there were these endless religious wars, right, that came out of Martin Luther putting his 94 theses on the door of I think?
Right? You had the Lutherans, the Spengalians, the Anabaptists, the Protestants, I guess the milquetoast Protestants, like my background.
And there was this endless warfare because the government ran religion.
And so if you were an Anabaptist who believed in adult baptism, you wanted to make sure that people didn't get baptized as children before they could understand the...
Religious or theological contract that they were getting involved in.
If you were somebody who was opposed to Anabaptism or the Anabaptists, then you would want to make sure that adult baptism was banned by the power of the state because otherwise people wouldn't get to heaven.
And in fact, the people who were against Anabaptists would grab them and drown them in a lake as adults saying, how do you like your adult baptism now?
Like it was really ferocious and things got unbelievably ugly.
There's an old story.
It's a real story about a traveler from England who was going through Germany I think in the 18th century, early 18th century, he said you could scarcely see a tree without a heretic hanging from it.
I mean, things got really crazy.
And the only way that Europe survived was separation of church and state, which is, hey, man, you want to have a child baptism?
Go for it. You want to have an adult baptism?
Go for it. This is no longer going to be legislated.
By the state and if you understand that economics in terms of the force transfer of trillions of dollars is happening around the world at the point of a gun through the state and you say separation of state and economics for the same reasons as separation of church and state is really really important so you can have disagreements without them becoming civil conflict and of course you know now that we're seeing this stuff going on in politics in America at the moment where According to Hillary Clinton,
Joe Biden should just not relinquish, like he should not accept if Trump wins.
Under no circumstances should he accept a Trump victory.
It's like, man, that's some pretty powder keg kind of stuff.
I mean, that's Guy Fawkes kind of stuff.
And if we are free to disagree, we don't come to blows.
But if there's only one forceful solution, then the most committed, which is often the most Passionate slash insane, they tend to win out and everybody else either subjugates or fights back.
And it's really brutal.
And we are facing economically, I think, in the West, what England and France and Germany and other European countries faced when the state and religion were one, which is, I mean, there's no way out of it other than mass extinction or a devolution of these powers.
Stephan and I have allotted one hour for this, and we're almost at the end of the hour.
Did you say that... Yes, yes.
Let's get a couple of cues in.
I appreciate that.
So let's see what we've got here.
Let me go back to the beginning, back to the start.
Oh, actually, I did peel off a couple of them earlier, so let's get those.
All right. Anarchy favors psychopaths.
That doesn't lead to ideal economic or social conditions as much as it reduces humans to a survival...
So this is the idea, the power vacuum idea, right?
So if you have no state, then the most innately cruel, soulless, heartless, conscienceless psychopaths will end up Genghis Khan-style running the society.
And what's your thoughts about that?
Well, Hayek wrote a book, The Road to Serfdom, and one of the chapters was Why the Worst Get on Top, something like that.
I might be paraphrasing it.
And he said it for the same reasons.
You know, there are certain people that have a will to power and they love to run other people's lives.
And then there are other people like you and I who believe more in live and let live.
And they gravitate to Washington, D.C. or Ottawa, in your case.
And I think you've put your finger right or you've...
Come on, right on the thing.
These people that are psychopaths, except for Ron Paul, and maybe Rand Paul, and there are a few other exceptions.
I once ran for office, and my heart was pure.
I ran for the New York State Assembly, and my motto was, disassemble the assembly.
And I would have been a good politician, but very, very few people are.
The majority have this will to power, and they're very dangerous.
All right. Pandemic.
Go. How does the free society deal with the pandemic?
Oh, that's a vicious, nasty question.
That's triggering me.
That's a tough one because, you see, as libertarians, we really have no comparative advantage in determining just how dangerous it is.
So when it first came out...
February and March, I took a sort of a view, an uncertain view, and I attacked both sides.
Some libertarians were saying, well, this is all nonsense, and the government shouldn't do anything.
And other people were saying, oh, you know, this is like Typhoid Mary.
Look, when... In the Typhoid Mary case, we were justified in using violence against her, even though she had no mens rea, she had no guilt, but she was spreading typhoid innocently.
And what we should do is say, look, you have to stay at home or we'll put you in a nice hotel, we'll give you food, but you can't be out there shifting off these typhoid diseases.
We didn't know how serious this was.
Nowadays, I mean, the whole thing is nonsense.
I mean, you know, they'll allow people to have a Black Lives Matter march, and they won't allow people in church.
In Nevada, they'll allow people in the gambling thing, but not in church.
And they want you to have six-foot distances, but it's okay for rioters.
So the whole thing is nonsense as far as I'm concerned now.
But initially when it came out, I was uncertain.
I was sort of an agnostic on that.
I didn't really know.
And my attitude was, well, we don't, we live in science don't have to answer all questions because some questions are empirical.
Is the COVID like the typhoid?
And if it is, then yes, the government or somebody should use force to stop people, make them wear a mask or six foot or whatever it is.
On the other hand, if it's not, they shouldn't.
And we as libertarians don't know.
We don't have any link to God or anything like that.
Immigration. Boy, these are nasty, tough questions.
Libertarians disagree on abortion.
Murray Rothbard is pro-choice.
Ron Paul is pro-life.
You can't get two more eminent libertarians than those two, and they're 180 degrees apart.
Happily, I've come along with this thing called evictionism, which solves the whole question, but we don't have time to go into that now, maybe some other time.
So it's a great argument. I'll put a link to your articles on it, because it's a really good argument that you have about that.
We'll do that another time. But yeah, okay, so let's stick with the immigration side.
It's the same thing with immigration.
There are some people like Murray and Hans Hoppe who say, no, no, no, you shouldn't have the free movement of people.
And there are other people that say, free movement of people if people don't cross borders, armies will, and you don't need a passport and anyone should go anywhere they damn well please, as long as he's invited onto other people's property.
My analysis of that in the one and a half minutes we have left is, We should have open borders, except we should privatize every square inch of the place.
And once every square inch of the place is privatized, then there's no more open borders.
Then if you want to come in, you have to get someone's permission.
But if we still have parks...
Look, suppose somebody comes from Mars and he lands in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, whether in Canada or in Wyoming.
And he starts homesteading.
Did he violate any libertarian, proper libertarian law?
No! Therefore, if somebody comes to him and says, you've got to get out, go back to Mars or wherever you're coming from, Africa, Asia, he's violating rights.
So my analysis of that is the key crucial aspect is, you don't want a million or a billion Chinese or Indians or Martians coming here.
Privatize every square inch, including Rivers and lakes and roads and parks.
Then we've solved the problem.
So Libertarian solves the problem that way.
Well, and of course, everybody who comes with a genuine desire and thirst for freedom, to me, would be very welcome.
And the people who come for free stuff through the state, probably a little bit less welcome.
And without the welfare state, this is an old argument going all the way back to...
Oh, it wasn't Hayek, but it'll come to me.
But, you know, you can either have open borders or you can have the welfare state, but you can't have...
You can't have both because then people are coming for free stuff, which undermines freedom.
And so, yeah, to me, yeah, you can't initiate the use of force to prevent people from moving.
But the more privatized the country is, the more that there will be negotiations about the best kind of people to have around.
And to me, that's just freedom-loving people of all stripes and hues.
It was Milton Friedman who said that.
That's the one.
I couldn't, you know, over 50.
I have a few blank spots, but I should remember that one.
Two senile idiots, the two of us, if I can speak for you.
But between us, we can come up with some good stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
Two heads together.
Okay.
Well, listen, I know you've got a hard hour, so I appreciate your time.
I'll put a link to your work, of course, especially The Evictionism Argument, which I would really, really recommend people.
And your work on the road is also very good.
For those who don't know, I have two free books on my website at freedomain.com, one called called Everyday Anarchy, the other one called Practical Anarchy.
I hope you will check those out.
The beautiful thing is you don't have to come up with solutions.
You only have to have moral principles.
You know, it's like if you ban slavery, you don't have to figure out exactly how everything's going to be picked and how every slave is going to get a job and what the world is going to look like 50 years after the end of slavery.
You just have to have that same basic moral principle to not initiate the use of force against others.
And that way, death, paradise, lies.
So thanks a lot. I really, really appreciate it.
Thanks for everyone for dropping by tonight.
We'll talk again soon, I hope.
You wanted to put something else in there?
One last comment.
I'm not really an anarchist.
I believe that the government should compel everyone to read Man, Economy and Estate.
Or, you know, start with the Haslett thing.
The Haslett book is, I mean, that man had a fluid pen.
It could dance across the page like a ballerina.
So I hope that people will check that out.
I'll put links to all that stuff below.
Yeah, Man Economy and State is killer.
And listen, there's a lot of audiobook stuff.
I think Jeff Riggenbach has read a bunch of audio stuff from Mises, from Rothbard and so on.
It's all free and Mises.org is a great place to get that kind of stuff.
Throw it on in the background, you know, like throw it on in the background.
It'll get into your brain and rewire it in a very, very productive way.
So, yeah, thanks a lot.
I really, really appreciate your time.
Thanks, everyone, for dropping by tonight.
Look forward to your feedback.
And have yourselves a great evening, everybody.
This is Stefan Molyneux, and we are all done with this.
Thanks, everyone. Take care.
Bye. Thanks for having me.
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