April 10, 2026 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:13:26
Ethics Unsucked! A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics
Stefan Molyneux dismantles traditional ethics by proving that actions like murder and theft fail the "universally preferable behavior" test, as they require non-consent. He introduces the "Kalma test," arguing a comatose person cannot commit evil, and critiques historical philosophers for serving state power rather than liberty. Molyneux asserts individuals own their action's effects, proposing voluntary intellectual property contracts and friendly societies to replace state healthcare. Ultimately, he concludes that applying the non-aggression principle eliminates most crime while exposing government systems as mechanisms designed to provide "free evil" instead of virtue. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Objective Statements and Reality00:12:52
Well, thanks, of course.
I just wanted to mention it's really been great to meet all the listeners to Freedom Aid Radio who say it's kind of weird to see you in the flesh.
So, just for them, I'm offering for you just so it feels like a true internet experience.
Now, Pixel 8.
Oh, you know what?
That gives me such a migraine.
So, I get all the casso, and then, no, that's not good.
So, if you remember from this morning, ethics.
Sucketh.
I think that's where we left off this morning.
Ethics suck, but they don't have to.
So that's what we're going to try and work on a little bit this afternoon.
So, this is Philosophy 101, real quick.
I'm sure a lot of you are aware of this.
This is how philosophy, I think, should be taught.
So, it's this audience participation afternoon, so feel free to jump in.
Okay, so let's say I say I do not exist.
Still here?
Yeah, okay.
So, I do not exist.
What's wrong with that?
Yes, performative contradiction, right?
Self detonating statement.
If I say I do not exist, you're not going to believe me, right?
Okay, who here has never donated to Freedom Inc. Radio?
Janet.
Okay, good, because I don't want to smoke any donators if I'm wrong.
If I say you do not exist, does that make any sense?
I guess if I hadn't donated, maybe.
Yeah, you don't exist, I'm going to pay my PayPal account, and that's to me the same thing.
So if I say you do not exist, that really makes no sense, right?
Because I'm pointing at you and saying, identifying you as a discrete entity saying, You do not exist.
So, I do not exist, you do not exist, makes no sense.
How about language has no meaning?
We're getting a little tricky now, aren't we?
Language has no meaning.
Does that make any sense?
Why not?
I have to pick specific words that have meaning in order to communicate that language has no meaning.
Sound!
Does not exist.
You can't say that.
Yeah, but you can, but then I'm just contradicting myself, right?
I mean, I can make up whatever nonsense I want, and I've certainly been accused of that in the past.
But sound does not exist.
It's like mailing someone a letter saying letters never get delivered.
Okay, so this is, to me, the essence of philosophy.
Everybody knows this old Hume thing.
You can't get an ought from an is.
You've ever had that one in front of you?
It's as boring as when somebody says correlation doesn't equal causation.
Anyway.
Of course, when you say you can't get an ought from an is, you've just got an ought.
Which is your ought not to say that an ought exists.
Anyway, but what it means is that there's nothing in reality that sets how things should be.
Human beings need food to live, but that doesn't mean that human beings have to eat.
Right?
Okay, so let's move on with some of our self-detonating statements.
There is no such thing as truth.
There is no such thing as truth.
What if anything is wrong with that statement?
The statement is an assertion of truth.
The statement is an assertion of truth.
You get a free podcast.
Yeah, if I say there's no such thing as truth, I have just asserted the truth.
And that's how it deafens.
Sorry for those who are filming me.
I'll be random.
Random motion.
Like my thinking.
Anyway, so from these basics, I would argue you can get philosophy and you can even get that juicy little tidbit of future salvation we call rational ethics.
Rational ethics.
So, if I say to you there's no such thing as truth, then I am making a claim of universality, that there's no such thing as universality.
So, what is truth?
Ah, the old question.
What is truth?
Life and time are easy because they're magazines, but truth is tough.
Pause for laughter.
Anyway, so.
If I say what is truth, well, truth is the correlation between my internal state of mind, my propositions, my thoughts, my theories, and what's going on out in the real world, right?
If I say this is a screen, you know, it's not a seagull, it's not an anvil, it's a screen, so what I'm saying has some validity to what is going on in the world.
So truth is relative to what is going on in the world.
It has to be verifiable.
If I say I had a dream about an elephant last night, I can't verify that.
But you can verify stuff that I'm saying about the external world.
Now the external world is objective, it's rational, it's sensible, and you know, let's just cast aside quantum physics for the moment.
Just cast it right aside.
No, because the reason is that philosophy has nothing to do with quantum physics.
Quantum physics, the quantum flux and all that, they all resolve itself before you get to sense data, before you get to, you know, this kind of stuff.
So, you know, subatomic stuff is weird and unstable, but this, if not me, are not.
So reality is objective and empirical and told that's kind of good.
Randian objectivist stuff.
Yeah, I'm down to that.
I think that seems perfectly valid.
We are, of course, always capable of making mistakes.
There's no mistakes in reality, modern art notwithstanding.
But there are mistakes in our heads, right?
We can make mistakes.
We can make mistakes in reasoning.
We can make mistakes in counting.
We can make tons of mistakes.
And so we need a discipline called philosophy to validate the mistakes.
So when you engage in conversation, when you engage in argument, when you engage in a debate, There are a huge number of bundled and implicit assumptions, universals, that are included in what you're doing.
The idea, when you debate with someone, you don't debate usually whether pistachios are better than peanuts.
I mean, you can have a sort of joke debate, I guess, but it's not really a cornerstone of a moral dilemma, right?
I mean, is ice cream better than Frovia?
Who knows, right?
So you don't have to debate about stuff that's subject.
You have to debate about stuff that is object, that is in the real world, that is tangible, that is material, that is provable.
And what happens is people get confused because there's lots of things that are in our heads that don't exist in the real world.
Right, so think of a forest.
What is it?
A bunch of trees, some undergrowth, a couple of hunters diving away from each other.
You've got a forest that is all just a bunch of trees and stuff.
There's no such thing as the forest, the concept that's out there in the real world.
Does that make sense?
You can't take a picture of a family with no people in it.
Does that make sense?
I mean, it's a weird thing to think about, but it's important.
So when I count four coconuts, there are four coconuts.
There's not the number four.
In there, sprayed on or hanging off, or the shadow of the number four, or anything like that.
So, all these concepts in our head that don't exist in reality.
And because they don't exist in reality, people think that they're subjective.
But they're not.
Well, whether there are four coconuts or five coconuts, it's not subjective.
The fact that the number four is in my head and not out there in the real world doesn't mean that it's subjective.
So, matter and energy exist in the world.
Does the scientific method exist in the world?
No.
The scientific method doesn't exist.
I mean, you could write it down, the atoms and the woods, but the scientific method doesn't exist in the world.
What it describes exists in the world, but the scientific method itself does not exist in the world.
Is the scientific method subjective?
No.
The whole point is it's reproducible, it's testable, it's, you know, according to measurements that aren't, it feels true to me.
You know, it has to be, right?
People get confused and in philosophy, I've had this conversation, you know, man, I don't know, what sounds like a hippie you can say.
You know, man, just because it looks brown to you doesn't mean it looks totally brown to me.
You know, it could be kind of rust-colored, man, it could be whatever.
And, I mean, the technical term for color is not color, it's wavelength.
You bounce a wavelength off, you get the same number no matter what.
The fact that we see different colors, our eyes are slightly colorblind, doesn't matter.
Color is a subjective term, wavelength is an objective term.
So, concepts we derive from reality.
I see four coconuts, the number four is in my head because there are, in fact, four coconuts.
Just the fact that the concepts exist in our head but not in the real world does not make them subjective.
If you want to know something about the physical world that is true, you've got to use a scientific method.
Use a Ouija board, and you can ask a bureaucrat, you can rip out chicken entrails, you can read tea leaves, you can use any sorts of nonsensical things that you want.
But if you want to know something about the material world that is true, you have to use the scientific method.
If you want to know what the true price of something is, what do you do?
Stop people pointing guns at each other when they trade.
Then you will find the true price.
So this is all very deeply related.
To ethics.
So, the way that I approach it, I think it's a good way, we'll find out.
Smart audience, let me know where I go astray.
Universally preferable behavior is the term that I use.
Now, universally preferable behavior is an umbrella term for, for me, philosophy.
Because philosophy is the art, the science, the discipline of comparing what is in our heads that makes claims about the real world to the real world.
You know, if I like unicorns, and I do, my daughter's free, I see a lot of them.
So if I like unicorns, that's fine.
I'm not making an objective statement that unicorns exist.
But if I make an objective statement about reality, well, reality.
If I make an objective statement about reality, then it has to be objective.
That's sort of a.
The true is objective.
So, there are two tests for truth.
The first is.
Internal consistency.
Put a mathematical theorem out there, put a scientific hypothesis out there, whatever you want to call it.
The first test has to be, is it internally consistent?
So if I hand you a 200-page mathematical thesis, and on the first page it says, for this thesis to be true, 2 and 2 have to make 5, 4, a pi, and a unicorn at the same time, how many pages in it are you going to get?
Well, one, I guess, just to read that.
You're not going to go any further, because I've set up a contradiction at the basis of my thesis.
It doesn't matter what happens on page 200.
If page one is a contradiction.
So the first thing we look for is internal consistency.
And the second thing we look for, if internal consistency is proven, is empirical validation.
So, what if I say to you, there is no such thing as universally preferable behavior?
There is no such thing as universally preferable behavior.
Does that make sense?
Why not?
Because that statement is an equity, an assertion of universally preferable behavior.
Right.
Yeah, if I'm saying there's no such thing as universally preferable behavior, I'm saying that you should not say that there is because it is universally preferable for us to say true statements rather than false statements, and your statement is false and does not conform to reality, and it is universally preferable for our stated thoughts to accord with reality.
I cannot say there's no such thing as universally preferable behavior.
Universally Preferable Behavior00:15:44
It's similar to saying, I do not own the effects of my actions.
What's wrong with that?
It is tricky stuff, so if it's foggy, I do not own the effects of my actions.
Well, you don't see the best arguments are the ones where you don't have to bring anything from the outside in.
How am I contradicting myself when I say I do not own the effects of my actions?
My argument is an effect of my actions.
My argument is that I do not own the effects of my actions.
But my argument is an effect of my actions, which is talking and holding a microphone and right.
You understand?
This is the foundation of property rights.
I've had people literally argue themselves blue in the face with me.
Saying, Steph, your argument that you own the effects of your actions is incorrect.
It doesn't make any sense because they're identifying it as my argument.
Did you see?
It's not that hard to make sense of philosophy.
And the reason I started off with philosophy sucks, sorry, ethics suck, well, philosophy is all that.
Ethics suck is because I don't think that ethics are that complicated.
Because if they're that complicated, we can't be bound by them.
How many people feel morally bound by, what is it, 200 books of tax law?
Anyone?
Right.
I mean, because if we can't understand the law, we can't be bound by it.
This is the problem with ethics, is that if ethics is so complicated that 3,000 years of brain-bending, forehead-melting, hair-eating human thought has not produced a system of ethics that we can understand, how could we be bound by ethics?
If it's so complicated.
We can't get an answer that makes sense.
We can't be down by it.
It's asking the impossible.
So, ethics can't be that complicated, but it's really hard.
You all get into ethical discussions, I'm sure, all the time.
Doesn't it feel like you're rolling down a barrel with rabbit LSD monkeys biting your eyes out sometimes?
It just feels really crazy and complicated.
I don't think it's because ethics is that complicated.
I think it's because of what we talked about this morning that ethics was invented to serve evil, and we're not allowed to.
Actually, universalize that which we're told is universal.
So it's like trying to do a math problem with two people yelling numbers in your ears.
It's hard to do because we've got so much propaganda.
But what if ethics is actually really, really simple?
So I'm not going to go through the whole proofs for this, that, and the other in the book.
But I wanted to point out that the first thing that we do when we start a debate, if we want to really be intelligent, I would argue about it, is we think about what it means to actually have a debate.
Well, it means that there's an external standard of truth.
There has to be, otherwise you can't have an event.
There has to be an external standard of truth, otherwise it's believe because I say it.
So there has to be an external standard of truth.
It has to be objective, it has to be rational.
And truth is infinitely preferable to falsehood.
I mean, all these things are implicit in the very act of having a conversation.
You don't have to believe any of these things.
You can be some type of musician character, live in the woods your whole life, and so on, but who cares, because you're not part of the social discourse, you haven't debated with anyone, so you don't show up and it's not on the radio.
But when you debate, you're accepting all of these implicit things.
So, ethics.
This morning we talked about the four major double plus ungood human activities that ethical systems need to work with.
Aristotle made an argument, a really good argument I think, which is to say, if you come up with an ethical system that can prove that rape is virtuous, I don't care what you've done, you've done something wrong.
You know, like that is not right.
Now, I mean, I know we come up with ethical arguments that say that taxation is theft, and for a lot of people that seems Quite as bizarre.
But I do sort of agree with that.
You cannot come up with an ethical system that says, yay murder, yay theft, yay rape.
I mean, this is not working.
Because we all have these ethical instincts, right?
It doesn't mean that you have to be a philosopher.
I mean, a dog can catch a ball.
He doesn't have to know physics.
So here's where we get to the audience participation part.
This kind couple, not an actual couple.
These nice two people have agreed if you can come up.
I'm going to take you through a couple of the proofs of what I would consider being a good approach to ethics, and then you'll see if it makes any sense.
Yeah, come on.
Now, you may end up on YouTube, but it's okay.
It's tough to get on YouTube, so they really are.
They're really passing over a high hurdle here.
Okay, so before having them act out various ethical scenarios, I have actually checked that they're not married.
Because sometimes that can go awry.
Okay, so universally preferable behavior, well, first thing is it has to be universal.
And what that means is that it has to be achievable by everyone all the time.
It has to be achievable by everyone all the time.
It has to be a behavior, not a thought, because thoughts are not empirical, thoughts are not scientific, they can't be tracked, they can't be traced.
You can trace behavior, you can't trace thoughts.
So universally preferable behavior.
So let's look at, let's start with murder.
All right, I couldn't get my props, I'm afraid, through customs.
Anyway, so if you could just turn to this lovely young lady here, and just, if you could put your hands on her neck.
Gently.
But pretend.
But gently.
Okay.
So here we have not good.
Right?
Here's hoping there aren't security guards in the hallway.
We've got to call someone.
Alright.
So here we have so let's put this, thou shalt murder, through universally preferable behavior.
Thou shalt murder.
Let's see if that can work.
No, try.
No, okay, don't.
Okay, so this guy is his joke in the fine young lady here.
So he's able to achieve Thou Shalt Murder, right?
He's in the university preferable.
He can do it.
He can achieve university preferable behavior called Thou Shalt Murder.
Now, if you could take your hands and put them on his stubble.
Excellent.
Look at that.
It's a sadist hug.
So now they're both achieving thou shalt murder.
What's wrong with this?
Well, yeah, okay.
They might, okay, it's unlikely that they'll both kill each other at the same time.
They could, theoretically, I guess, possibly at the same time.
Will their hearts stop at the same time?
It can't be, but they're actually not killing each other yet, they're just trying to.
So right now they have this murderous, the death thing, right?
Otherwise it's assaults or whatever, right?
The murderous when the person dies.
So, right now, this guy is not able to achieve thou shalt murder because he hasn't killed her yet.
She hasn't been able to achieve thou shalt murder because she hasn't killed him yet.
So, they can achieve universally preferable behavior called thou shalt murder.
But there's more.
Sorry for this guy.
Alright, so, it is impossible empirically to really achieve thou shalt murder.
Does that make sense?
But it's impossible logically to achieve thou shalt murder.
Oh, this one's tricky.
You'll see it and be like, of course.
But, and we'll want to take a guess as to why, even if they kill each other at exactly the same time, why can they not logically achieve thou shalt murder?
The definition of murder is the same as killing someone.
You can kill someone if they're trying to kill you and not be considered murder.
Tell me a little more.
I just want to make sure I understand that.
If you were trying to kill me right now.
Do you want to come up to you?
No.
No, thanks.
I have no ill feelings towards you.
That's good.
Yeah, you were trying.
As this man is trying to kill this lady, if she kills him to prevent him killing her, it's not considered murder.
Yeah, that's self defense, right?
Okay, but we're talking about can they both achieve, forget self, if murder is the good, right, then self defense won't be the male.
But the reasons, anyone else wanted, that's a good point.
It's not quite the true rational reason, because again, that's bringing in an outside argument called self defense.
You don't even need that.
Why can they not, if you want to have a, if you can speak?
She would have to resist me.
Oh, yeah.
This is a man who knows a little bit of something.
So I'm going to stay over here while he.
Okay, well, listen.
So, tell me more.
Well, for it to be murder, she would have to resist.
Otherwise, it's something else.
Right.
So, if it's not murder, if she wants to be killed, it's euthanasia.
Right?
Right.
Like, if you steal something from me, I don't want you to steal it.
It's theft.
If I don't mind you borrowing it, right?
So, the reason, not only can they not physically.
Kill each other at the same time, but it's only murder if the lady doesn't want to be killed and he does.
So murder cannot be universally preferable behavior, because it's only murder if the victim doesn't want it.
They can't both want murder at the same time, because then it's not murder.
Does that make sense?
I know this is tricky.
You want to try with another example?
The next one is called Greco-Roman Rest Night.
Big hot oil.
Okay, sorry, just one more thing.
I might want to say that.
Okay, that's fine.
All right, so you have a lovely cupcake.
What about theft is universally preferable behavior?
Oh, that's YouTube cupcakes.
I knew I kept you for a reason.
There we go.
All right, so theft is universally preferable behavior.
So you both desperately want each other's cupcakes.
Drool a little if you eat it up.
So you both want each other's cupcakes.
You can achieve it physically, right?
I mean, you could both steal from each other at the same time.
I think it's not universal because theft is an act of time.
Once you've got it, you're not stealing it anymore, right?
But why can't it be achieved that they can take each other's cupcakes and have theft a universally preferable behavior?
So, it's only theft if you don't want it to happen.
So, you can have theft as UPB only if she doesn't have theft as UPB.
Because if she doesn't want you to steal it, that's what makes it theft.
But if she does want you to steal it, it's not theft.
So, if you both have theft as UPB, theft cannot occur.
Does this make sense?
Okay, we're not going to do the red one.
I won't even tell you the props I had for that, but the batteries are too expensive.
But assault is the same thing.
It's only assault if the other person doesn't want it, right?
Then it's some SM dungeon thing, whatever, right?
But thanks, I think that's great.
Thanks for that, I appreciate that.
So these are just some examples of how you can come up with a system of ethics that says, yeah, you can achieve don't steal.
Consistently.
Two people in a room with one iPad, or two iPads, I'm not sure, can both achieve universally preferable behavior called don't steal.
And they can do that just fine.
You can have don't murder, don't assault, don't rape.
These things can all be achieved by everyone all the time.
No problems.
But neither empirically nor conceptually can the opposites be achieved consistently.
So, in the book, which again is free on the website, I propose something which is a good.
It's a good rule of thumb.
It's not perfect, but it's a good rule of thumb.
Called the Kalma text.
Can a guy in a Kalma be doing evil?
No, I don't think so.
I mean, I can't imagine how he could be doing evil.
And I think that's an important thing, right?
So if a guy in a coma can't be doing evil, then actions which are defined as good that are positive actions are kind of problematic, because it means that he's doing the opposite of a positive action.
So if you have, thou shalt murder is the good, Then the guy in the coma is doing the opposite of that, because he's not murdering.
But he can't be doing evil, because he's in a coma.
So I think that's a reasonable test.
It's just sort of a first-class test of an ethical theory.
Now, I said that ethical theories need to be internally consistent, but they also need to accord with empirical reality.
That's the test.
That's a good test.
So if somebody comes up and says, Thou shalt steal, Well, that is not even remotely internally consistent.
Now, what happens to an engineer who tries to build a bridge based upon inconsistent calculations or contradictory calculations or incorrect calculations?
Well, it doesn't always fall down.
Sometimes you build it way too much, right?
But it's not going to be optimum for sure.
And most likely it's going to fall down, right?
So we would expect that societies which don't follow the four basics, right?
Bans on theft, rape, murder, and assault to not do very well.
Right?
So communism is pretty much thou shalt steal from the state, right?
I mean, according to the state, right?
And so it is a bridge built on a contradiction.
Because only some people are allowed to steal, those in the Politburo, and then everybody else is not, and all this kind of stuff.
So we would expect that society to not do very well.
Because it is a bridge built on incorrect, inconsistent, contradictory principles.
As we as a society lose track of the basic moral principles that in many ways are sort of the common law foundation of Western civilization, how well are we doing as we continue to have thou shalt steal through debts, through counterfeiting, through all of this sort of nonsense?
We are doing progressively less well as a society.
I mean, it's all masked over by massive amounts of debt and being forced to use this monopoly money that they pass off as real money.
Flawed Social Contracts00:13:53
But we would expect that societies that Proposed behavior that is more contradictory, that have universal standards that are more contradictory, that are more problematic, for that society to get worse and worse.
And quite the contrary would be true as well.
That when societies put in these basic ethical rules no stealing, no killing, no raping, no murder that those societies would generally tend to do better.
I think that's the big view of history, as you probably know, and all libertarians here, and most of them.
So you've got this subsistence, subsistence, oh, an empire, oh, black man.
starvation, like death, and then, you know, starting in the, it depends on when you measure the agricultural revolution, sort of 13th century, industrial revolution, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, massive, massive increases in wealth to the point where we can have these kinds of conversations and not, you know, be hunting for the last starving rabbit in the forest.
And it's because we have, to a large degree, begun to, more so than in the past, respect, Things like property and things like bans on assault and so on, right?
Now, I mean, a lot of it has been displaced to a lot of statist mumbo jumbo mockery in the financial world and in currency and so on, but we have done a lot to bring about these basic moral rules in society, which is why we've had this massive increase in wealth.
I mean, if you look at the basic rights of property available to the average citizen in modern Canada versus ancient Rome, I mean, it's night and day.
I mean, ancient Rome, I don't remember the percentages.
It was, I think, 60, 70, or 80% slaves.
So, massive violations of thou shalt not steal.
Stole the whole person's life, turned them into property.
You know, there's that old.
Okay, one tangent.
There is an old saying, or an aphorism, that they were concerned that the slaves were passing themselves off as citizens.
And so one of the Roman senators proposed that all the slaves be made to wear yellow armbands so that nobody could get into any place where slaves weren't allowed.
The other Roman senator said, You crazy?
Then they'll know how many there are.
I'll be just trying to put those yellow armbands in.
So a mistake that people make when talking about ethics is to focus on specific actions.
I make the case that's not a good idea.
And then you can tell me where I've gone completely astray if I had to.
How many people have been directly robbed by a mother?
Not cement.
How many people have found themselves paying taxes?
Alright, those who didn't put their hands up, talk to me after.
Are you in more danger from an evil actor or an evil theory?
An evil theory.
Are you afraid of the mugger who can take your property, or are you afraid of Revenue Canada who can take your property?
What are you saying?
Well, no, this is a problem for us, yes, but not for the majority of people.
Right?
Because if you say, I got mugged, people are like, oh man, that's terrible.
You okay?
You must be so traumatized.
Is there anything I can do to help?
What happened?
April 16th runs along.
I just paid my taxes.
Oh, you okay?
That must be terrible.
Do you need to talk to someone in trauma counseling?
Yes, I do.
It is the ethical theories that are the big problem in this world, not the ethical actors.
The unethical actors, sorry.
It's not people doing evil that we have to worry about.
It's the people who are doing evil by believing in a theory they think is virtuous.
That is not virtuous.
So that's a long sentence.
But does that sort of make sense?
So, you know, if I say to you, man stabs woman, do you know evil?
Don't know evil.
Don't know.
Maybe he's a surgeon.
Well, no, but this is what I mean.
Or maybe I was joking on something that he got to cut me open, emergency tracheotomy, whatever, right?
Man stabs without anesthetic.
You can create these scenarios, right?
Man takes bite without permission.
Is he a thief?
No, maybe he's taken back his bike from someone who stole it.
We all get drawn into conversations about immediate, tangible, ethical actions.
But I don't think that's where the power of ethics is.
I think it's a huge waste of time.
And this is where we get confused in terrible ways.
Rock falls down.
Is that a scientific theory?
No.
I mean, a dog can catch a frisbee.
They know where it's going to go, they know where it's going to land.
That doesn't make them a scientist.
As scientists, a scientific theory is something that claims universality.
All objects fall to Earth at 9.8 meters per second per second or whatever.
That's a scientific theory.
Gases expand when heated.
That's a scientific theory.
Mass has gravity proportional to its size.
Whatever.
Universals.
Science doesn't bother with individual tests.
Except insofar as they reflect on the truth or falsehood of a general theory.
So you can test the theory of gravity by dropping a rock, but dropping the rock is not the theory of gravity.
It's just a simple individual test for it.
And so when you're talking about ethics, my argument, my focus is to focus on the theories that are presented and look for the logical consistency in those theories or logical inconsistencies in those theories.
Don't think about the individual actions.
I think that's a red herring, that's a huge distraction.
And what you really want to look for based upon what we were talking about this morning is that mean little flip.
You ever see those guys?
I always find magicians annoying.
I don't know, this is maybe just me.
It's like, stop messing with my head.
Tell me how it's done.
But they're really good at this.
This direction, right?
They've got the balls, they've got the things that women in tights and they've got confetti cannons and doves and all this sort of stuff and lighting and music just so you can't see when they switch the card from one hand to another or something comes out of their sleeve or something like that.
It's the same thing when you, in ethical arguments with someone, is that there's this flip that we talked about that you're never allowed to discuss.
Universally preferable behavior is universal for human beings.
We're in a special moral category.
We have reason, we have choice, I argue for free will, we have all of these kinds of juicy tidbits that tadpoles and bald eagles and so on don't have.
But you will find that people will set up these arbitrary distinctions that we talked about this morning.
Theft is bad for you.
Taxation is good for society.
You cannot go to your neighbor's house with a gun and get $4,000 from them to send your kid to school.
But when the government does it, it's moral.
It's good because we care about our children.
There are these flips.
And it's so absurd when you think about it.
It's so absurd that we think that a costume changes the moral essence of a human being.
This would be as absurd as me going to a biology conference with a whole bunch of frogs saying, these are all amphibians, except that blue frog, he's a mammal.
People say, what?
What on earth does the color of his skin have to do with his frogginess?
Right?
And there's no answer to that.
But we somehow think, when we put a guy in a blue costume or a green costume, that we have changed their moral nature.
We have no more changed their moral nature than we have granted them the ability to fly.
or to stand on the surface of the sun unharmed.
Universality means universal to all human beings, irrespective of costume.
You and I cannot enrich yourselves by placing the unborn in debt.
Ah, but if you're the government central bank.
But this is the ethical theories that we need to attack.
Everybody recognizes theft is wrong in the personal.
But it's up to the status to justify, which they cannot do, how that which is immoral to the individual is moral to another individual.
How do you get to flip that morality and not even openly say, that's the sneaky part, that's the subterfuge, that's the slate of hand that sells off our freedoms and our future?
Theft cannot be morally justified.
Rape, murder, assault cannot be morally justified.
Because they cannot be achieved by everyone all the time, either physically or conceptually.
It is a moral theory that is entirely self contradictory, that creates entirely arbitrary distinctions between different human beings.
And then they say, oh no, but you see, it's a social contract.
It's voluntary, it's a social contract.
Social contract theory is equally easy to undo with UPP.
Anyone want to try this, Laden?
You guys still in there?
Are you with me, brothers and sisters?
All right.
So, social contract theory says that.
You know, if you choose to live in this society, then you choose to participate in the tax structure and you choose to participate in the social programs and you choose to, you know, you can get a volatility and if you don't like it, you can go to some other place.
Well, a UPB would say, okay, if that is a moral proposition for human beings, then it's a moral proposition for everyone.
In other words, everyone can impose a social contract on everyone else.
What happens if everyone imposes a social contract on everyone else?
It's like giving everyone the right of taxation.
I tax you $10,000.
What are you going to do?
Tax me $10,000 back.
You can't get anywhere with it.
You all have to pay me money or leave.
I want you to sit around and say to me, Steph, you have to pay me money or leave.
And we can't possibly achieve it.
Not to mention the fact that it's a complete violation of property rights to say a small group of people who've homesteaded nothing on the whole planet and the whole country and can haul you off at will.
So that's, again, there's six million holes in what it is I've said today.
I mean, it's a whole book.
Please download it.
It's free.
Review it.
Critique it.
Tell me where it can be improved.
But this is a very brief example of how we can build a system of ethics that doesn't require a deity.
It doesn't require you have to obey it or you go to jail.
It simply requires large-scale consistency in proposals for universally preferable human behavior.
It solves the problem that ethics has always had, which is ethics has always seemed to be like a diet book for thin people.
I mean, how many evil people are really interested in ethical theories?
I've never met, I don't really know any evil people, but I don't imagine a lot of them are reading through a lot of Aquinas.
Right?
So people who are interested in ethical theories, they kind of tend to be good to begin with.
And people who want to really do harm only study ethics to use it to manipulate, bewilder, control, and subjugate everyone else.
So this solves that problem.
Because you have an ironclad argument.
Ethics can only be binding if it's universal.
If ethics is universal, then it's binding on everyone.
If it's binding on everyone, then everyone has to follow the same rules.
And you can't have rules that promote theft, rape, murder, and assault.
And you probably write, it's very much related.
You own yourself, and therefore that's the violation.
You own the effects of your actions, and so on.
We don't have to talk about that necessarily right now.
It comes right out of the theory.
But what I like about this theory is it goes straight for moral theories.
It goes straight for moral theories.
Those are the great dangers of mankind.
What kills people?
You know, the lady up here was earlier, what is the most destructive thing that human beings have ever invented?
It's not bombs, it's not germs, it's theories.
It's moral theories.
Because it's the moral theories that get people killed.
It's the moral theories that get people killed.
It's the patriotism that drives volunteering for war that gets people killed.
It's believing that there's this brain-bending set of geniuses at the top who can wave all the guns in the world, never get corrupted, and produce nothing but good.
Destructive Moral Theories00:05:05
It's the idea that theft is wrong for most and right for some.
That murder is wrong for most and right for some.
that counterfeiting is wrong for most and right for some.
We are building the bridges to the future on contradictory falsehoods.
Of course they're going to keep falling down.
Of course society is going to keep going through the same damn cycle over and over again, where we achieve some bits of liberty, some bits of freedom, some bits of free trade, and generate some wealth from there.
And what happens then?
What happens when we poor serfs manage to scrape a few shackles together?
Government says, hey, collateral.
I can use that as leverage to borrow and bribe.
This is why freedom I mean, this is why one of the reasons for a practical consequence why I'm an out-and-out anarchist.
Because if you crush the state back down to something tiny, you get a huge amount of economic freedom, huge amount of economic productivity, growth, wealth, prosperity, yay.
And then the government uses it to raise taxes, and the government uses that as collateral to grow bigger and bigger.
It's no accident that the very smallest government in history that was ever designed, the American government, has now grown into the largest, most powerful, most destructive government in terms of its capacity that has ever existed.
Freedom while you have a state.
Freedom is food for the cancer of the state.
This is why we keep having the same cycle.
We get some freedom.
Who was one of the first countries in the modern world to have free trade?
England!
17th, 18th centuries.
What did England become?
An empire.
America, 19th century, prices went down, wealth went up.
What did America become?
Anyone know why they first built the roads in Rome?
Free trade.
Free trade first.
And because of that free trade, the government gathered enough wealth from the citizens to have an empire, which then cancers grow until they overwhelm the body politic and kill it.
And then we go into these dark ages, and then we scrape a little bit of freedom together, and then we get more wealth, and the governments take it over, and it all just happens again and again.
Can't reduce this thing.
That's the government.
So when you look back at the history of philosophy, we just talked about this a little bit at lunchtime, look back at the history of philosophy, there's no history of anything that's subjective, obviously, right?
I mean, the story of history goes to the winds, right?
I mean, you may have heard this myth that the great stock market crash was brought about by free trade, and then the government stepped in to try and rescue capitalism, and then it was only rescued by the war came.
You know, this is what people are or have you heard this one, that the recent financial crash was a result of too much freedom?
Deregulation.
Right?
So history is the future.
Whatever you believe about history as a culture is what the future is going to do.
If you believe that the financial crash was caused by deregulation, the only solution is going to be regulation.
The philosophers that we know of in history are not a random selection of thinkers.
They are all approved of by the rulers.
For the most part.
It's different degrees and so on.
How many people had ever heard of Lysander Spooner before they got into libertarianism?
I hadn't.
I mean, the guy's brilliant.
Stone genius.
You don't get him.
You get John Locke who says, obey the laws.
I mean, he's got civil disobedience in there, but you get Thomas Hobbes who says, obey the laws.
You get Hegel who says, obey the laws.
Oh yeah right, obey the laws.
Kant who says obey the laws.
Socrates who says obey the laws.
Aristotle who says obey the laws.
Plato says there's nothing but laws.
And live the lie.
The original matrix.
I mean even Rand Rant.
Love her to death, that smoky Russian vixen.
She said obey the laws.
What's the end about in a shrug?
Oh, spoiler.
Let's go back and rewrite the Constitution.
This time we're going to get it right.
Was there a government in Galt's Gulch?
No!
Read your own book, woman.
You had 13 years.
Might have noticed there was no government in Galt's Gulch.
But the philosophers that we hear of, you know, why do we hear of Keynes and not Mises?
Because Keynes was incredibly useful to the people in power.
Oh, we get to borrow in your theory and spend in the here and now and buy votes?
Ownership and Responsibility00:10:47
You're a genius.
Oh, under your system, we're evil and we can't do a thing to bribe anyone to give us power?
Oh, well, we're not going to talk about you.
So that's why, you know, when I'm reading philosophy, I'm looking with a skeptical eye.
How did this serve the interests of those in power?
Because there was not a lot of philosophers out there in the past who were able to write and speak who didn't help those in power.
We're either banned or put to death, or now there's this soft censorship of funding and tenure and publications and junkets and sabbaticals and all this kind of stuff.
But I think that's an important thing to recognize.
If you're skeptical about the history of philosophy, always look for when the philosopher says you must obey the law.
Right?
Render under Caesar.
You must pay your taxes.
Taxes are the price we pay to live in the civilized society.
Same usual trash.
All the superstructure, I think, is all just about obeying taxes.
And nobody will ever talk, very few people will ever talk about the violence that is required of the rulers and forbidden free.
Because that can't be talked about.
The moment that's talked about, it's very simple.
So these little ethical demonstrations that we had up here, this is why I'm saying I don't think ethics is really that complicated.
You can't have a thou shalt steel rule.
It doesn't work.
It doesn't work conceptually.
It doesn't work physically.
It doesn't work in terms of economic consequences.
You can't have a thou shalt motor rule.
It doesn't work.
It fails the test of logical consistency.
It fails the test of empirical verification.
And it didn't take that long.
And there were relatively few casualties.
Few cells up and neck.
But it doesn't really take that much time to go through it.
And that's why I think we can be binding to people as a whole.
If it's not that hard to understand, then we can be bound by it.
I mean, one of the fascinating things about being a stay at home dad is teaching ethics to my daughter.
Daddy's always hard.
No, you're not.
She's got it.
But maybe she's really great.
I mean, I'll give you one example.
And to me, if a two and a half year old can get it, it's not that hard.
So, you know, like all parents, I think, most parents, I try to keep my word to my daughter, you know.
I'll take you swimming in the morning and then the morning comes and it's like hail and it's like okay.
But you know, I try not to lie to her or forget things, whatever, right?
So anyway, she was going through this phase around two and a half.
She's experimenting with lying.
Which I think is great.
I want her to have the ability to lie.
You know, she may need that at some point.
I think we all do at some point.
How many of you have games with customs?
No, I don't think you have.
But it's a useful skill to have.
It's not like I want to know, I don't want her to know how to murder someone.
I don't want her to know.
Anyway, so you know, trying to explain why lying is bad to a kid is challenged because I don't want to just say, well, it bugs daddy.
Feelings.
That's not being very objective and so on.
But I did say, do I lie to you?
When she was about two and a half and she did think about it.
She thought about it because I knew she wanted to lie and I knew she was enjoying lying and she just, it's a long pause.
She said okay daddy, you can lie to me.
She could universalize at two and a half that she could not claim the right to lie if she did not give me that same right.
She universalized lying at two and a half.
Ethics is not that hard.
If someone who's two and a half can do it, it's not that hard.
It's just hard because we've got so much propaganda to the contrary.
All right, so I think we're at time.
Where are we?
Yeah, okay.
So thanks, everyone.
I will be around this afternoon and for dinner.
Please pepper me with objections.
And this is a huge, important, I think, essential project.
I don't think we can ask people to give up. theological ethics if we can't give them something new.
We can't ask them to give up the state if we can't give them some new way of processing ethics that don't require necessarily prison cells and hell and so on.
Ethics has sucked.
I think that there's ways to make it not suck.
Let's have it not suck together.
Thank you very much.
We have about 10 minutes if you don't have any questions.
Yes.
You know what?
I'll stay here.
You take the mic.
I think it's a pretty straightforward question, but I just want to take on Baschat and the law, because we were bringing up philosophers from the past, and that one seems a little bit different.
Well, it reminded me of what his, it's been a long time since I've read him, so what was his sent along, Emily?
Well, it was kind of like the central argument that brought about libertarianism, from what I can tell.
I only listened to what made it three times and I haven't come across a copy to read, but the premise is a lot of the whole non-aggression principle in action and fundamental human rights as laws.
Yeah, I think that's, I mean, there's very few people who say my theory of ethics violates some people's rights.
I mean, there's not many people who say that, even though obviously it does, right?
In the UN, they say you have a right to education which turns educators into slaves.
I mean, obviously, if you have a right to somebody else's labor, they're your effective serf.
So, you know, if they talk about equality, I think that's great.
Keep your eyes peeled.
And I actually just picked up a copy of the laws from La Séfère Books when I was down there talking at Freedom Fest in Vegas.
I can read through it again.
Look for that flip where suddenly he says, we need this equality and we need the government to maintain this equality.
Because then you've just broken universality and you've got theft and you've got rights.
So, again, I don't want to disgust yet because maybe he doesn't do that switch.
Almost everyone else I've read does do that switch.
Rough part, not included.
Sir, it's not one that you've analyzed yet.
It's not one that you've analyzed yet.
No, now it's not.
Okay, never.
No, but it's a good one because I know he's very important to the libertarian community.
Yes, sir.
Hey, just like to say that your response is brutal.
Oh, thanks.
I'm sweating.
I got philosophy sweats on.
I need to calm down afterwards.
I have three questions.
Your discussion at the beginning on the ownership of effects caught my attention.
And I saw three questions surrounding that.
Just give me one at a time because I'm over 40.
Okay.
So the first question is, does that quote game, like, is that significant to your UPB argument?
I didn't see the connection.
Is there one or one of that?
Well, you can't have morality if people don't own the effects of their actions.
Because if I go strangle some guy, I own his death.
I have created, I have produced, I have homesteaded his force, so to speak, right?
If we don't own the effects of our actions, you can't charge anyone with morality.
So it's a difference like this crazy shooter in Colorado.
Let's say they found out he's got some giant brain tumor, you know, that has completely fried his brain.
Well, that's a different moral situation than elsewhere.
So if we do, we can't have any ethical system or any responsibility.
And you also can't debate if somebody doesn't own.
The effects of your argument.
So if I responded to Dr. Block, like if I said, hey, Walter, that was a great point you just made about blah, he'd be like, hey, that was my point.
Like you can't respond to Walter.
So you can't even debate unless you're responding to the points that the person is making by recognizing that they own the effects of their actions.
So, you know, and this is the true, you know, if you create, you know, you go harvest some cherries or whatever, you've kind of created them as a usable good.
We own the effects of our actions morally in terms of property and so on.
So it is pretty important to the theory, yeah.
Okay.
And the reason why I'm curious is I think you've explained it now, something about meaning, and when I think of ownership myself, I typically think of property, physical goods, and you have ownership in the property because you're trying to avoid conflict.
And so I was thinking, well, how exactly does that translate into ownership of something that is not physical, that you cannot grab and say, hey, don't take that, that's mine.
And what you, I think, mean is you have an own estimate.
Sort of a categorically different idea of ownership in terms of the results of your actions, in the sense that no, it's not like we're potentially in a conflict here, you're just saying taking responsibility, that there is a sign of a responsibility for an action as opposed to an ownership that we think of in terms of poverty.
Yeah, i'm very much against consequentialism.
You cannot judge the value of a theory by its effects, right?
You don't say, is the theory of relativity true or false?
Because it produces atomic weapons, and that's no meaning.
You can't judge the theory by its consequences.
You can judge it by its internal consistency and the empirical evidence.
But you can't say it's good or bad.
So to me, you said, okay, well, property reduces conflict.
Well, so does a dominant state that forces everyone to pay to the point where everyone just hands over their money.
That reduces conflict, too.
So I'm not a big one for property as a reduction of conflict.
I think it does reduce conflicts, but it's not just or fair because it reduces conflicts.
I think it's a happy byproduct of a rational system of property rights.
But no, I don't think it's good because it reduces.
Oh, that's interesting.
And then the final question was, if we concede that there is ownership in the effects of our actions, and one action might be, hey, discussing a new idea that I've got that you didn't have yet, and now you've got it, it's on me, as a result of my action, my presentation, do I also have the ability from this, does it follow, or does it not, that I can claim ownership of my ideas, and the IP is therefore valid?
Well, you can claim ownership of anything that you want.
Is it valid or not?
IP is a big topic, and you probably want to talk to somebody much better at this.
Another staff out there called Excel that you probably want to have more.
I've done some shows on IP.
To me, if I write a book and sell a book, I can include in that, don't resell it.
That could be a condition of sale.
And then if you resell it, you've broken a contract.
So to me, IP is not something that should be centrally enforced, obviously, by by a state, but it should be a continuously evolving system of contract law, and of course it's optional.
I choose not to copyright my stuff, it's all available for free, and everything I do is a donation-based model.
But if people, you know, they're free to put a contract in, say, if you buy the CD, don't copy it.
And then if you copy it, but of course nobody can ever find these people, it's all unenforceable.
Intellectual Property in Freedom00:03:09
So I would be very fascinated to see what would happen.
I'm very taken by some of Jeffrey Hunter's arguments, which you can read about in Interjection's World, about the degree to which, say, classical music had incredible leaps forward.
where there was no IP and no copyright.
And in the countries where there was IP and copyright.
That's an argument from effect, but I think it's still an interesting one to go.
So I do definitely think that taking somebody's music, obviously it doesn't diminish their original thing.
It's different from taking somebody's kidney.
No, I mean, property is my body too, right?
I mean, I have grown my property in the same way that I write a book, but it's still not quite the same thing as somebody lends my book to someone to read it versus somebody takes a spoon and carves out my kidney.
So, I would be fascinated to see what IP would look like in a free society.
It wouldn't look anything like it is right now.
And I think that the creativity of the planet would be much benefited thereby.
Anyone else?
Last question.
I mean, the way I got interacted with you is I heard you ripping up Ron Paul in one of your speeches.
And I only listened to the first 10 minutes, and I wrote this blistering attack on you, which is in my book, Chapter 12.
I was hiding that in my own tears, actually.
I've been trying it a little jarring.
Then what happened is we communicated with each other, and we agreed to debate formally these issues, give me a law review or a libertarian journal or something.
And then I kept saying, well, when are you going to send me your reply?
And finally, you never sent me a reply, but what you did is you pretty much caved in and supported Ron Paul, so there's no need for a debate.
Is my recollection correct on this?
Let me know if this is off topic to anybody else.
I believe, look, there's no one alone, I think, has any clue how we can prove how we're going to achieve freedom.
I mean, I have my arguments, people have political arguments, and so on.
But I do believe in commitment, and so I believe I wanted to give as much ammunition to the Ron Paul supporters as I conceivably could, putting myself in their shoes to make the case as strongly as possible for supporting Ron Paul.
And that way, if they do all of that and it doesn't work, I think they may be free of an illusion that it can work.
So I really wanted to get behind and help people because, look, I could be wrong.
Maybe Ron Paul will, political action is the way to go, and my sort of peaceful parenting thing is not going to work.
But so I'm fully committed to what it is I'm doing.
I really wanted to make sure that the people who were supporting Ron Paul had as many.
Quivers in their intellectual, as many arrows in their intellectual quiver as I could think of.
I didn't change my stance on political action, but I definitely wanted to encourage people to really go full-till boogie towards that because I think there's no freedom from illusion like commitment.
So, does that, didn't that help?
Hi, Stephen.
Just wanted to thank you once again for coming to Vancouver and to the other speakers.
My quick question is, and might be kind of silly, let's go back to the Galt's Gulch scenario.
Charity in a Free Society00:02:51
This sort of microcosm of a libertarian society.
Let's pretend that one of our protagonists gets a debilitating disease.
And let's just say that he doesn't have any savings, but he worked hard his whole life.
What is to happen to him in that microcosm of that libertarian society?
Would it be like that movie, The Beach with Leonardo da Taprio, where they just stuffed the guy in the tent, let him die, and ignored him?
What do you think it would be in that microcosm?
What is the philosophical?
Well, there's two.
Ways to help people in a free society.
I mean, there's insurance and there's charity.
And both of these have been proving incredibly effective in the past, right?
So insurance, there were these things called friendly societies, which occurred before the welfare state, where poor people would get together and they'd all pool their resources and requirements and they'd come up with a big collective bargaining agreement, so to speak, with an insurance company.
And it was incredibly cheap.
I saw this in Libertopia two years ago, and don't quote me on it, some crazy sum, like $100 a year in current dollars, got you really decent healthcare.
So, of course, you want healthcare to be as cheap as possible, which means a free market.
You want friendly societies to emerge to fill the vacuum.
That's a risk.
We never know when we're going to get sick or what's going to happen.
So people band together to deal with those risks.
And for people who have never had a community, have never paid into insurance and have no money, doctors used to give, I think it was a day a week sometimes, they used to give for free, or they'd be paid in chickens, or they'd be paid in kind.
And there were charitable organizations and so on.
And yes, it certainly is conceivable that some people will fall through the cracks.
But as we all know here, what is it, a third of Canadians can't find a primary care physician, they can't get a family doctor.
People are waiting up to two years for cataract surgeries.
It can't be worse in a free society than the way it's going right now.
And this is even if we don't count the fact that the healthcare system is ridiculously underfunded, incredibly in debt, what's going to happen when I can't pay the bills at all anymore?
So, you know, again, it's not a perfect society in a free society, but it's a lot better.
You know, maybe you'll be unemployed for a week or two after you stop being a slave, but it's not better than being a slave.
So, yeah, I think charity, prevention, all these kinds of things are the way that it goes.
You know, if the Canadian healthcare system or socialized medicine reflects the true will of the people, then people care about sick people.
I believe, I mean, who wouldn't care if someone guy's sick and he needs some help?
I mean, they're all chipping, right?
I mean, that's what people do.
If people don't do that, then democracy needs nothing because we have all these systems that nobody wants.
But if democracy does represent what people want, then people do want to help the poor, and they do want to help the sick, they do want to help the old, so we don't need the ridiculous overhead of the state where 80% of the money goes to bureaucracy and crap, and only 20% of it ends up with the poor.
It's much more efficient to give your money to a private charity, and that's how people can really be helped.
Reducing Laws to One Principle00:04:58
We're going to do a duet, aren't we?
I'm looking at that suit.
Feeling.
Here's a question.
I would ask you to elaborate a little bit.
Sorry, just repeat that first bit again because I never get that.
Just one more time, but slowly.
You want me to collaborate?
2,500 podcasts.
I'm being asked to elaborate.
Beautiful.
All right, let's try it again.
Yeah.
You, as far as I understood it, you meant to say that you disagreed with the idea that laws, these some laws, should be observed.
And I happen to be a lawyer and a copyright lawyer at that.
So I'm just trying to understand.
I'm just trying to understand.
I think with laws, it's the opposite of a diabolical for anything or evil.
It's diabolical for nothing.
Or people who try to get there.
So if I misunderstood you, I'd like to clarify that.
And if I understood you correctly but didn't get you on the basis of that, that would be, again, a.
Do you mean sort of modern status law?
Modern state law, is that what you mean?
Like it's only applied against those who are doing wrong, is that?
Yeah.
But it's not.
I mean, vast majority of people in nonviolent.
That's the reason we have any garbage laws, lots of laws we have.
No, but even the whole process.
Does anybody know what percentage of American.
Cases actually ever get to trial?
Three to five?
Yeah, three to five percent.
Everything else is plea bargained down because they pile these ridiculous threats on you and people just came.
And I can understand why.
I mean, so we have an illegal system at MOM.
I mean, we have a legal system that's just threats and coercion and semi-fascism.
I mean, in my opinion, you don't know the guilt or innocence of anybody in that system.
Once you get caught up in that machinery, you're just going to get, you know, you can't bribe a judge, but you can threaten someone with 20 years and then get them to confess because that's not bribe-bribering you with your freedom versus $10,000.
I mean, it's crazy.
Sorry, that's nothing.
But isn't that the result of the government's failure to actually fulfill one of its primary roles, which is to have a system of courts that works?
Well, I would not argue that the purpose of the state is to fulfill any good obligations.
The purpose of the state is to provide free evil to those who want it and to have a system where you can avoid the consequences for the wrongs that you do.
You can do unbelievable evils in government and retire with a gold plate pension and health care.
So, you know, there is this idea that the government has this noble purpose and has deviated from it.
I don't share that particular opinion because the government is founded on the initiation of force, which is an immoral concept to begin with.
And I don't think you can, you know, you can get roses out of fertilizer, but you can't get virtue out of the shit of the state.
Then, two questions.
Should there be any enforcement?
And if yes, what would be the basis of that enforcement?
You mean for contract law or violent crimes and so on?
Yeah.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, we all want protection, all these kinds of things.
And of course, the majority of protection in the world is provided by private companies, security guards, all this kind of stuff.
So that can all continue.
You know, not to go too much off topic, but the roots of human violence are pretty well understood now.
I mean, it's abused childhoods, produced criminals.
Not all abused victims become criminals, but almost all criminals were abused as.
So if we can apply the non-aggression principle to children, what a shock, you know, where we can actually do good, right?
Spanking is a violation, I argue, of the initiation of force, so is global bullying, global abuse, and so on, neglect, and so on.
If we have children raised peacefully, you know, the estimates are 80 to 90% of crime will vanish.
And the only people who will remain are the people who want to start up the government again, and I think you will not pay much attention to those.
So we're only going to have a free society when children are raised peacefully, in my argument.
And once we have that, the problems of random crime will be, it'd be like taking out insurance for an asteroid strike on your car.
I mean, you could if you want, but it's going to be so rare, we don't really need to worry about it.
Isn't that about just reducing the number of laws to just one?
Reducing the number of laws to one denied aggression, but it's still a law.
No, that's a principle.
A law is something that is enforced by a monopoly.
And no, you would have a series, I mean, you would buy protection for your contracts, and yeah, well, if you welch on my contract, some insurance company will pay me, and the cost of that will go down, the more honorable we are for the longer we are.
There's lots of ways to protect yourself against debt pollution.
There's, you know, Walter Block's done some great work on this, as Mario Rothbard and all these other people have as well.
So you can look into all of these free market solutions to all of these kinds of problems.
There is a great temptation.
You know, we have this big stick called the state, which we think can wave away problems.
Nationalizing Medical Care00:02:43
I don't think it can.
I think it causes many more problems than it solves.
And I'll take my risks with voluntarism over the certain growth and eventual collapse of civilization that statism engenders.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Last question.
Sorry, I'm going to start with some information, Stefan.
We keep talking about how a private healthcare system would work, but we forget that in Canada we actually had one and it was nationalized.
I had my first child before the government nationalized healthcare, and we had insurance.
We paid a portion of our fees, but I grew up in Kitchener.
There were free clinics every week, doctors did pump over work.
There were free, you know, not fertility, but the opposite.
Horses control, thank you.
Sorry, I lost that.
Clinics, doctors had a varied mobility system.
If they knew or thought that your family was a little bit less able to pay, they charged you less.
Sometimes even forgot to invoice you.
And those who had more money paid a bigger price.
They didn't necessarily get headlined, but they might have.
And in Ontario, and I don't know what the stats are for the rest of Canada, only 10% of the population was uninsured at the time they nationalized the system.
So they started by making it a welfare thing, set up a whole healthcare system standing over 10%.
Somebody in the back room said, all the money is going out, none's coming in.
What should we do about that?
So they nationalized the insurance companies.
You know, there's a terrible thing that happens when you nationalize something.
Like, so the doctors who, in your day, not that this is from my day, but the doctors in your day, you know, they made house calls, you know, they were working 78 hours a week.
They were incredibly attuned to their, you know, they stayed the same patient.
They had that detailed knowledge.
They really worked to prevent.
When you nationalize, you still get all those doctors with that work ethic that they developed in the free market.
You know, it's like NASA.
They hired all these private engineers, they put a man on the moon in a couple of years, and then for the next 40 years, you've got like two spaceships.
Right?
So when you nationalize something, you get all the free market work ethics and you get the free market structure that's really closely tied in terms of price and responsiveness and even the distribution of doctors, all ties with the free market.
And then slowly, like, you know, you get those binoculars, you can turn them out of focus slowly.
Slowly, what happens is it drifts, and then you get a new generation of doctors who never made a house call.
In their life.
And they start to replace the original doctors.
So, for the first people, you get the government paying for everything, usually through debt and not even through raising new taxes.
And you get all of these great doctors with a great work ethic that's closely tied in.
For them, it's a complete bonanza for like a generation.
Funding the Welfare State00:01:18
And then the sucking comes in really slowly, but it seems almost irreversibly.
And then you end up with the system that's unrecognizable to people that you've won before.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And actually, the other point when we were talking about charity, governments committed a yearly takeover charities that are successful, tried to universalize, like Jade DeFranstadt.
And in so doing, they literally destroy the ability to be charitable, and they tear down the system that already exists.
Five years later, when we get the budget for it, it disappears from the community.
So it isn't just that charities aren't turned back to government, government destroys charities because it's not social.
Yeah, the last thing I'll say is libertarians are often accused of not caring about the poor, but putting the poor, entrapping them in this underworld of unsustainable poverty, reducing the quality of their education, reducing their opportunities through things like the minimum wage, and creating a system where inflation robs those.
Hardest who have the least money and those on a fixed income, and creating all of this in a system which can't possibly sustain itself.
What is going to happen to the poor when they can't fund the healthcare system?
What is going to happen to the poor when they can't fund the welfare system?
That is where the benevolence of the libertarians will be truly revealed.
And I would say the inhumanity of the status will be revealed, but I'm sure it will be painted quite the other way.