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Hi everybody its Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.  This is a debate that I had with Michael Badnarik the 2004 Libertarian Presidential candidate in Philadelphia on Sunday, July 5, 2009.  I'm afraid there have been a few audio problems the first few minutes are fairly low quality but it does improve after that.  Thank you for your patience as we have wrestled with the technical difficulties to stitch this “Frankenfile” together and thank you so much to Paul the expert sound engineer whose gentle spectrographic caresses has resurrected this file to a fairly high level of quality and thank you so much for your patience and to the organizers of the event at Drexel University and I hope that you enjoyed the debate.  This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio and Michael Badnarik, constitutional scholar, debating the proposition or the question: How Much Government Is Necessary?

 

 

Michael Badnarik:  I want to welcome everybody today and especially thank you for being here.  I have been trying to light the fire for many years and introduce as I see things turn around and moving in another direction and I want to thank you especially for me here.  I mean it…when this shows this much public interest and abstract and highly intellectual debate by anarchy versus minarchy, it's like…wow, I mean they’re not like watching Jerry Springer.  They here are today.  This is very good news and again, I want to thank you for participation.  Any discussion or debate obviously will lead to defining terms and I'm sure that Stefan and I will be enhancing those definitions as we go on.

 

As a start, I would like to offer that an anarchy is basically is an absence of government, 0% as opposed to say perhaps a totalitarian dictatorship would be 100% government and so somewhere in the middle, I would like to propose…minarchy is at the low end, maybe 5-10% at maximum, I'm not sure what that percentage would be and that currently today we exist with…95% of an…we're a complete totalitarian dictatorship, but you know, I think that might be argued we’re moving in that direction.  Well, anarchy and minarchy are very close to each other and most of you are familiar with what currently have which, you know, is a plethora of government.  Far more than we need and so from the existing point of view, looking back down the scale towards 0% and 5%, anarchy and minarchy are going to look and feel to be very, very close to each other and Stefan and I will try to do our best differentiate the two one them.

 

And as kind of a metaphor, I was a chemist and as a high school chemist one of the things I found interesting was distilling ethanol.  I don't know if anybody else had that interest, but…when you distil ethanol—alcohol, the maximum that you can get is 95.6% alcohol.  That's the maximum and 4.4% water, because you just can’t distill anymore water out of the alcohol and, you know, so 191 proof is basically the maximum you can get.  You know, we usually call it ever clear and as far as I'm concerned, anarchy is that theoretical absolute that we’re always trying for and we can try to distill as much of the government out of it as possible, but we’ll always have just a little bit of government and this is an issue that the founding fathers certainly addressed. 

 

I consider myself the stepfather of the Constitution.  James Madison was the father of the Constitution.  He died in 1836.  Since then the Constitution has been pretty much abandoned and orphaned and so I’ve adopted it, the Constitution, and will protect it as if it were my very own.  So a father of the Constitution, James Madison wrote, “It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government, but what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature.  If men were angels, no government would be necessary.  If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.  In framing the government which his to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this, you must first enable the government to control the government and then in the next place oblige it to control itself.  The dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government, but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

 

So as much as I would like to have…anarchy, I don't think that we can actually achieve it, because there are some things that are necessary for anarchy to…to exist and one would be widespread intelligence and adherence to a high ethical standard.  One that I try to achieve myself.  In the ’50s and ’60s, we have stories about people leaving their doors unlocked, you know, leaving keys in the car because neighbors were dependent each other and you just never expect anybody to walk into your home or go take your car.  Today, you know, we have people putting bars on their windows and locking everything and even your laptop has to have cable in it these days.  Another thing that anarchy requires is self-sufficiency and, you know, dependence on yourself.  Currently less than 10% of the families in the United States living on farms and can produce their own food.  The general population is completely oblivious as to where their utilities come from.  They assume a gas station, where they pay for their gas and we have a black out.  Suddenly we're in the dark and a woman came rushing in and said, I can’t pump any gas.  I informed her that we’re in a black out.  She goes, “But I have cash.”  I said that had nothing to do with it.

 

Being completely and totally self-sufficient may be possible, but it means that you're standard of living is lower, because there'll yet be responsible for everything yet do you know your shelter, your own protection, your own food and your entire life becomes devoted to keeping yourself alive and so even if we have people arrive on a deserted island and the first thing that they do is they start to cooperate.  You go to find firewood I'll build a hut and you go look for fish and you have this mutual cooperation that will improve everybody's standard of living. 

 

You know you go catch the fish and we can cook the fish over the fire that I built the question that I suppose really that amounts to does mutual cooperation equal government.  How formalized does that cooperation have to be before we give it the label of cooperation and finally in order to have anarchy we have to have mutual trust in each other and again maybe just human nature I don't believe that we do have trust in each other.  Most of the laws that are created are created by our neighbors to control us and by us control our neighbors the general idea is well of course I can carry a gun because I'm adult and responsible but I'm worried about my next-door neighbor. 

 

I want the government to have concealed carry permits to moderate my neighbors behavior because I don't trust my neighbor and the end result is the government creates a law for me against my neighbor and creates a law for my neighbor against me and we keep creating more and more laws against each other and we all basically lose.  So we all struggle to stay alive knowing that eventually we're going to lose that struggle and we will all eventually perish but that doesn't stop us from struggling to prolong our lives.  Liberty is something that we should always continuously strive for knowing that even if we were lucky enough to achieve it we would almost certainly start to lose it immediately and anarchy I would equate to a utopia yes I am definitely trying to move away from the massive government that we have too far far less in direction of anarchy and given human nature I'm not quite sure that we can achieve it thank you.

 

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Well thank you very much for the chance to speak and thank you for the very kind introduction.  I will be speaking about a different kind of anarchy than Mr. Badnarik was speaking about which seems to be similar to the Stone Age.  I don't think that you need self-sufficiency to be and an anarchist - I can't find anything in the fridge without my wife pointing it out - so I think we will be talking about a little different kind of anarchy.  I am what would be technically known as an anarcho capitalist and that I try to profit from anarchy it's that I believe in I think what everybody here would believe in witches property rights or absolute self ownership and property rights and the non-initiation of fought is a moral absolute.  And I'm sure that most libertarians most minarchist would agree that property rights are double plus good and initiation of the use of force is very bad.

 

The question or the difference or the divergence between an anarchist and minarchist I think would be along these lines that an anarchist looks at the principal of property rights and the non-initiation of use of force and says those principles are inviolable.  We are not willing take those principles over our knee and bend them backwards until they break in order to achieve some pragmatic objective.  The men are just in general will say yes it would be great to have a utopia where everybody was perfect and they believe that anarchist do not recognize the reality of human corruption in human people and I would say the exact opposite is true. 

 

I believe that an anarchist understands the reality of evil, the potential of evil and the human psychic and it is because an anarchist recognizes reality of evil that we oppose the creation of a monopoly of legal violence within society.  It's like circuit will have a propensity for addiction to alcohol or drugs or whatever and an anarchist who recognizes that metaphorically says well we're not going to push a distillery in their living room because they are drunkards or they are alcoholics and human beings, many human beings, love to maximize their resources at the expense of others it's a mere net gain calculation.  What can I do in my life that's going to gain me the most resources in an amoral situation?

 

Most people are in biological creatures that's what we do we maximize resources from the government is a terrible, powerful, ugly, and violate tool to maximize your resources at the expense of others and since that's what human beings like to do we can't have one.  Power corrupts human beings like to get things for free and human beings like to have power over other human beings, we are a tribal society, Darwinian evolution is why we are here today.  Which is gaining power over others and gaining things in the amount of effort because human beings have that tendency and the anarchist recognizes that we cannot have a government because that will immediately be inhabited by immoral people would use it to their advantage at the expense of the majority.  It is my view that minarchism is very dangerous philosophy and not because I don't want that government of course I do I want that government two point at nothing in the same way that I don't if I'm sick I don't want less sickness I want no sickness that's my job.  But I think minarchism is a very dangerous philosophy and I will tell you why. 

 

Either the minarchist is going to succeed or either the minarchist is going to fail.  If the minarchist fails then the philosophy means nothing and the government continues to grow which you can say it's what's been happening for the past say 10,000 years but if minarchist succeed and I believe that they did succeed in 1776 I don't think that you can come up with a better Laboratory experiment for the success or failure of minarchism than the creation of the American Republic.  It is a beautiful theoretical laboratory proof of the possibility and practicality of minarchist and what has happened since then we are all aware of and that's why we are here because we went from the very smallest government which was about 1% or 2% or whatever it is, we went from the very smallest was government in 1776 to the very largest, most powerful, most terrible most destructive government the world has ever seen. 

 

The government with the power to destroy the world many times over first time in history that has happened never had a government that big and powerful before.  Is there a relationship between a small government at the beginning and a big government at the end and I would say that there is because a small government that respects to a large degree property rights and opposed initiation of course 381 it creates a free market once you have a free market you get staggering explosion and wealth once you get in a society a staggering explosion of wealth more money is available for taxation and more money is available for the military and more money is available for the endless or hoard the social programs and social engineering that bureaucrats and politicians love to do. 

 

When you get the smallest possible government you create a free market which builds wealth, which builds wealth, which builds power which then government swells to take over it becomes a gold mine for those who want power over others.  If a man makes $100 a year and you tax them at 50% he will revolt because he can't live on $50 a year but the man make $100,000 a year and you tax them at 50% you won't rebel which is why we are here and not in the streets because we can survive on what's left over because there is so much wealth in society so when you start with a very small government you create the conditions for a massive explosion in wealth that creates the greatest prize that politicians can get a hold of which is the productive energies in wealth of a free prospering industrious free-market society that's why I think monarchism is so dangerous.

 

 Another way to look at it, if you don't mind stepping into metaphor land and hopefully I won't get too much of it on my shoe, it's a guy comes to a doctor, two doctors in a row.  Dr. Minarchist and Dr. Anarchist and yes that would be a great super hero villain don't you think and the guy comes in he's got some honking tumor hanging off the side and he says Dr. Minarchist can you help me with this tumor he says it keeps growing and it keeps growing and I have to get it cut and I have to go to chemotherapy and my hair all fallout and it's just terrible what happens and Dr. Minarchist says well I can cut it down I can shave that thing down 80% maybe I can get it down and the guy is like but that has happened 20 times before.  I got my tumor shrunk down 80% it just grows back and I get sick and I have to go to chemotherapy so what can you do it's nothing best I can do he says well can't you just cut the tumor out completely and he was like oh my God no, that's utopia.  That's crazy if I cut out your tumor you are going to get spontaneous tattoos on your forehead, Mohawks, you're going to be riding around motorcycles with Mel Gibson and it's going to be chaos and anarchy and dogs living with cats and all kinds of horrible things. 

 

Scare stories abound if I cut out your tumor completely.  He says: “But if you cut it down it's going to grow back!” he says to Dr. Minarchist.  Dr. Minarchist says, “Don't worry I have a plan.”

“What is your plan?”

“I'm going to cut your tumor down by 80% - but when I'm in there I'm going to take out a magic marker (magic being the operative word) - I'll lean over and I'm going to write on that tumor: don't grow - and I will call it “the Constitution” because we all know tumors respect constitutions, right?  And then it just grows back.

 

Now this man goes to Dr. Anarchist and Dr. Anarchist says: “Out it comes! It's a tumor, it's always going to re-grow, it’s happened hundreds of times in the past, and it's going to happen again, so we are not failing to compromise, we are going to cut it out because I know it's going to re-grow!”

 

And that is the way that minarchism looks to an anarchist.

 

It is a tumor. There are about 230-odd countries in the world today, and not one of them has a government that is not growing or has not grown considerably since it was designed especially to stay small.  There have been hundreds and hundreds more through our history from the ancient Egyptians to the ancient Romans to the ancient Greeks to Magna Carta – which was actually more rights to the nobles - and you ended up with feudalism for another 500 years.  Every single culture, every single country, has designed a government to serve the people and to be small and to protect property to oppose violence every single time - we have 5-600 examples of this and never once has worked because it breaks principle.  We say we oppose violations of property and personhood and in order to achieve that we are going to create an agency endowed with the special unique monopolistic ability to violate persons and property. 

 

You cannot protect persons and property by creating an agency with the monopolistic power to violate persons and property.  We all understand that when a parent leans over a child and says, “Don't hit your sister.” that that is a contradiction.  It's the same thing you can create an agency with a monopoly of violence to oppose violence it never works, it tracks the principal right up front and I think the very, very important thing that I would suggest is that one of the most important virtues and pursuit of wisdom and knowledge is humility.  I fully accept that the founding fathers were stone geniuses whose intellects that we can all hope to maybe someday emulate and some smallest manner and they genuinely were the cream of the crop of the Enlightenment and some of them are brilliant men of the age and well-versed in history and philosophy and political science and they did some amazing work to come up with the best conceivable balance and powers and ways to keep government small. 

 

Separation of church and state, brilliant and it has been tried many times the British revolution of the 18th century was supposed to be there government small serving the people what happened? It grew just as the American Empire did into the British Empire which grew over the third of the globe.  Subjugated hundreds and hundreds of millions of people.  You may the government small and grows, the smaller the tumor starts the larger and more quickly it grows.  Humility is very important I do not believe for one split second that I had any kind of capacity to create scribbles on a piece of paper that is going to stop evil forever it doesn't work.  It can never work. 

 

How many of you would get a copy of a law written on a piece of paper walking down an alley and some guy comes running at you with a knife and you’re like stop.  What's he going to do? It doesn't work because the Constitution do nothing they are pieces of paper.  Yeah but the Constitution restricts the government, no, the Constitution brings down a tree or two and uses up some ink.  Nobody goes into a shooting match saying look I'm invulnerable right it's just a piece of paper.  It's not a solution to the problem of violence and I do not imagine for a moment that I'm going to be smarter than the 500,000 geniuses who try to solve a problem of violence in society by creating a monopoly of violence. 

 

You can give me 1000 years and 8000 helpers to try and come up with magic spells and magic words on a piece of paper that would stop violent people for ever from doing wrong with institutionalized violence I would never be able to do it that is called humility.  Can't be done, recognizing what's impossible is the first step to wisdom.  And the last thing that I would say, what's my time 1 min.? The last thing that I would say which I will say very quickly is that the belief is an constitutionality and Republicanism and limited government is that if you get the right words on a piece of paper that evil people will no longer do evil and they will come into government and go oh alright no evil okay no evil but if we can come in with magic words on a piece of paper that will stop evil people doing evil we don't need a government because the goat the Mafia and say here is a piece of paper that says don't do evil to go oh okay okay I will stop doing evil.  Or we go to murder and we say okay you did kill but sign this piece of paper that says don't do evil and he goes okay I go free if I signed a piece of paper okay here you go. 

 

We all understand that that will not stop the murder and it will not stop the thief from doing evil, the pieces of paper will not stop people from doing evil things if we can come up with such magic paper and such Harry Potter wonders we get everybody in society to sign it and there will be no more evil we don't need a government but we all understand that that is not how the world works that evil people will find anything you want in order to get away with it and that's what will happen in any on Minarchistic constitutional society.  If we can do something wonderful with a piece of paper or stock you will permanently in its tracks we get everyone in society to sign it lo and behold there is no evil and be don't need a government but if we doubt that that will work and how was it going to work with politicians.  It is not work with the Mafia then how was he going to work with an even more organized set of criminals called politicians you understand we don't stop the market in its tracks by getting them to sign a piece of paper with rules on it if it's not would work with the Mafia and it's not will work with the murder it is not going to work with politicians and recognizing that basically reality is where the creativity of coming out with a statement society but how a society works in the absence of government is all about.  I don't like, you seen this cartoon you know someone has got this equation on the board and then he comes up with an answer and there is a cloud in the middle called then a miracle occurs and then somehow it comes to the answer here and then some guy who comes up and says you might want to slash that bit out of little because I'm not too clear on that well to me it's like we want a nonviolent society for a society that opposes violence and support property rights and to me the Constitution and monarchism is like then a miracle occurs and yes this be a wonderful society that part doesn't work and so we need to find another solution and of course my podcast if you're interested they're all free you can look into that there are lots of creative solutions about how we can have national defense police and all the things that we need because there are bad people in society.  It's a lots of ways to do it that don't involve this magical Golden gun that's going to turn and make everyone good and is never going to attract that people trying to control it and I think it's that's where to spend our creative energies rather than the standard feedback that pieces of paper will stop bullets.  Thank you.

 

 

Moderator:  So, the second category is now beginning.  Which society would build the roads most sufficiently or any public good for that matter, and Mr. Badnarik, if you would like to take the question first.

 

Michael Badnarik:  I don't understand which society would build the road.  I figured it would be pretty much the same there's no reason in having a Minarchist a small government implies that there are a lot of things that the government doesn't do so I think it will be pretty much the same if you don't allow the government to build the roads in a Minarchist environment it would turn out to be the same way in an anarchist, both ways it can be private and as I try to explain and express in the beginning from our current point of view from where we sit now with government monarchy and anarchy are going to be almost identical and it's going to be up to Stefan and I to really kind of distinguished how they are different.

 

Moderator:  Are you all ready for a bad pun? Question of the road because I consider myself a bit of a road scholar.  Hello is this thing on hello? Take a moment to enjoy that joke shall we.  You know it's funny the environmentalist who have a lot of good things to say are strangely addicted to avoiding this topic of the fact that taxes pay for roads is one of the worst things for the environment because people don't have to pay their driving in that sense right I mean yeah they pay for gas taxes but you wouldn't be able to drive if the government hadn’t built all the roads.  Roads are pretty simple I mean they existed prior to the government it wasn't like there were no roads before the government. 

 

There were private policies in the 18th century in America which all worked fine until the government took them over.  If you want to go build a housing development you're never going to sell the houses unless there is a road to it and the roads are pretty easy to solve and even if you don't accept the technology now where you can actually track where people drive and send them the bill.  When I used to have a real job I went on a highway which was entirely private and I paid a toll and it was beautiful I mean it was like an airport landing strip it was fantastic where of course the public highway is stop and go choked up.  So absolutely rules will be much more better much more efficient and those roads which are not supported by the traffic will fall into disuse and there'll be changes and people will drive less or work at home one.  You end up with a much more efficient use of resources without all these crazy government subsidies and effect of course they don't charge you for peak usage is crazy so you know that way people all drive to work at nine o'clock and so much more efficient use of resources and I think you would agree that that should be a private function monarchy or not. 

 

Moderator:  This next question is from Michael Badnarik also remember that rebuttals are allowed after your allotted time.  Michael, Is individual freedom compatible with government no matter how small it is?

 

Michael Badnarik:  Is individual's freedom compatible with..

 

Moderator:  Compatible with government no matter how small the government is.

 

Michael Badnarik:  Yes it is compatible because we have individual rights.  The basic premise of my book and my Constitution class is the difference between rights and privileges.  We the people have unalienable and individual rights we don't have to ask for permission a privilege is something that someone allows you to do and they can revoke that privilege at any time and most of us are not really clear on the concept that we have individual rights and we give the government privileges, article 1 section 1 clause 1 says all legislative powers here in granted.  Well when we are granted legislative powers it implies that they are privileges and we can take those privileges away from the government any time we are brave enough to do so and my supporting evidence would be the declaration of independence which says that when any form of government becomes destructive of your rights, the right of the people to alter or abolish it and I think we can all agree that it is time to alter the government and you know again we have the option if we want to to abolish it and to establish a new you know and to provide new guards for our future securities.

 

Moderator:  I think it is important to remember that the disparity of power between citizens and government now is very different than it was in the 18th century and in the 18th century we had musket versus musket I mean it was a relatively similarly armed opposing groups.  What's that old Bill Cosby thing where they loop the coin toss the British loop the coin toss and their handicap is that they all have to march in a row with big x’s on them and the revolutionary force can live in the woods dressed in tree branches and shoot from wherever they want but back then it was relatively equal right because there were no nuclear weapons, there were no spy satellites, there were no I don't know brain flying lasers from UFOs and stuff the amount of hardware and technology that is available to a state dominated citizens now not to mention the computer, deductions, the source of income tax, and so on it's now all how much you can be tracked and controlled because of the technology that was largely developed under free-market is what I'm saying. 

 

Small government means free-market and free-market needs innovation and government takes over the innovation and uses it to control citizenry you're creating the weapons that are used to keep you down and so in the future not everyone is going to have a nuclear weapon obviously but the government will because usually Minarchist say government is for national defense.  How are you supposed to conceivably no matter how many six shooters you have how you supposed to stand up to F-16s and M1 tanks and nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers and spy satellites is simply impossible that's why you can't have a government now because the disparity between average citizens strength of mite and the state is simply far too great citizen never can control the government and the government will always be that well armed that's why we have to get rid of it as an institution completely.

 

Moderator:  Stefan in the efforts of government law how would you constitute that?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Hand to hand combat and that I think why this is going to go in about 3 min.  not yet the conflict resolution of course it is essential I mean the reality is that people are going to disagree, people are going to cheat, people are going to steal, people are going to do bad things with good promises and that's the reality which of course why we can't have government because people will also warm to the government while they have monopoly of force.  There's lots and lots of different ways of coming into it something that's really, really powerful in society is ostracism right it's a really, really powerful thing. 

 

I think Michael is completely right interdependence is the key to wealth division of labor we all are so dependent on each other.  I mean if I had to grow my own food I would end up eating my feet which would be crazy right and I'm not that flexible but we are so interconnected that if we are not allowed to participate in economic life it is a complete catastrophe for us and so I have a bunch of articles and podcasts and a book called practical anarchy which you think is an oxymoron but I don't which is available for free on the website which I have these dispute resolution organizations I don't know how it's all the work because I can't find the future down to the last detail and no one can but it's a way it could work.  If Michael and I enter into an agreement to do stuff together right if he sells me an iPod I'm going to give him 100 bucks then we have insurance so than 2% of that goes to the insurance and if he doesn't ship me the iPod I get the hundred dollars from the insurance company and if I don't pay him and he ships me the iPod he gets 100 bucks.  If we trust each other we don't have to have that and then we have no recourse and so on. 

 

Any time you sign a contract we both nominate an objective third-party who's going to mediate the dispute and we agree to abide by that ruling and if we don't abide by that ruling we are no longer to allow to participate in contracts these dispute resolution organizations simply won't allow it to continue in contracts until we deal with the problem and then we face the problem ostracism and a society where to be ostracized is to go to the Stone Age caricature of anarchy Mr. Badnarik portrayed a little earlier.  The interdependence of human beings means we have an enormous amount of power and influence over each other without using violence this by saying I'm not going to do business with you if you break a contract, that is a disaster for people and of course right now contract conflict can't resolve it all.  Anyone here ever tried to use the court system to resolve a contract conflict? Anyone how did that go was it a productive and quality use of your time was it efficient, was it positive, was it useful.  So right now we have the best of both worlds we don't actually have an effective conflict resolution but competition is band and if we can survive this we can sure as heck survive it where competition flourishes in the productive resolution of disputes to the benefit of the just party.

 

Michael Badnarik:  I agree if we have contract dispute we can go to arbitration.  There is a saying that in Texas he needed killing is about defense fortunately that's not necessarily true but that's what it all boils down to I don't know why and wish that it were not true but in human nature you get enough people together you're always going to find somebody who is crazy or somebody who is evil and that's what it all really boils down so I'm not worried about the 98% of the people that kind of go around and mind their own business we’re where we about the lunatics that are going out to hurt others.  It is a necessary fact of life that at times you need to use violence to quell the violence, you fight fire with fire and the question ultimately revolves around where is that going to happen. 

 

Now if you want to do anarchy and have everybody resolve these violent things themselves I mean I would be happy, let me wear my shoulder holster and I promise only to shoot the guilty people and you know even my friends are going to go oh wow we want to let Badnarik do that that would be a little bit extreme and so the purpose of having a government a monarchy is to have a dispassionate use of force.  I am obviously emotionally involved in whatever the issue is and it's like you're guilty kill him and the idea is we go whoa Badnarik were going to calm this down we’re going to take it slow were going to have a jury of our peers to evaluate this and if we finally decide many years later that the person did commit murder then we can do a lethal injection or electric chair or something like that and so this is where there is no good answer.  I would really like to never have to kill anybody you know it's like why can't we all just get along I don't know because people are strange that way and so I am content to have a very small government say okay were going to use force to protect your property because most people won't.  John Wayne in the shootist said most people will flinch or hesitate before they pull the trigger he said I won't. 

 

I went to front sight training and you have all these guys out there dressed in camouflage with all the extra ammunition hanging around there looking like little Junior rambos and I said okay you look really impressive but you're shooting at a paper target I mean do you really do you really have the courage to pull the trigger and take another human life and suddenly it got although quiet because they realize that in most cases they don't and certainly a vast majority of people won't do that and they need to be protected and they want an organization to do that.  There is no piece of paper which is going to be perfect, we were discussing this last night how can we write the Constitution so that it is perfect, how can we write a piece of paper so that this won't happen any another 223 years and the answer is it's not possible.  The cost of liberty is eternal vigilance it's up to us and again there is no good answer either I have to kill him or we have to have a government do it and we're going to keep on bouncing back and forth between who is going to have that power and ultimately I know the government will not protect me efficiently which is why I am a very strong second amendment supporter.

 

 

Moderator:  My question is for both hypothesize what might the world look like if the U.S.  Constitution had never been ratified? Would the number of deaths throughout the world be larger or smaller without the US government? We will start with Stefan first.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Good.  Nice theoretical question.  Well if the US Constitution had never been ratified there would want to go out on a limb and say that there would be little to no federal government.  Would that would mean is that the competition among the states to keep their productive citizens would be very high because originally there was 13 sovereign nations right like Germany and England.  So what would happen if the Constitution was not ratified there would be no federal government.  There will be individual countries and those countries would compete to have people stay and not move and not leave because it's really hard to control the movement of people in the 18th century right and it wasn't even any passports until the first world war because people would sail away and come here and there was no electronic this that and the other and you could just go wherever you want it for the most part so it would be that aspect and that competition to keep people would mean that taxes would be slower to rise because the left centralized things are and the easier it is to move between things the more competition there is right because it's like a bunch of farmers with the cows can go wherever they want you have to provide them with some good gravy in order to slaughter them later and attack metaphorical sense right but there would be greater competition, oh now hungry, I will eat later.  There will be greater competition for livestock which I think will help things there could have been a civil war that would have gone on but it really was nothing as bad and I doubt it would have actually happen because I think as we all know not having going with the Schoolhouse Rock version of history we know that the war was against the South in order to extract further tax concessions and had nothing to do but slavery that would have not occurred. 

 

Slavery would have died out as it did because they would eventually figure out that the slaves were not only completely immoral but economically unproductive so slavery would have died out just as it did in the rest of the world simply by governments no longer cashing slaves.  That's all you have to do to get rid of slavery you don't need a stupid Civil War as they did in Brazil the government just said okay they're not going to catch no slaves anymore because they sally became too expensive to run off you own slaves all a time so slavery just ends and the government stops enforcing it so it would have died out relatively quickly because you wouldn't have been able to compete with the slave free societies who have more agricultural productivity.  You for sure wouldn't have the first world war because the first world war, America was involved in the first world war which is a very strong argument that American involvement in the first world war led directly to the second world war but Americans sent over huge numbers of troops it tip the balance of power against Germany so much that Germany had to had to agree to the Treaty of Versailles otherwise they were just fighting to a standstill and they would have going home and there would have been no Treaty of Versailles because Germany agreed to the Treaty of Versailles they had to pay off all their debts which meant they printed money that Germany would have originally been had been paying up into the 1980s from the first world war if the treaty had been honored.  Because they had to print so much money they ended it with hyperinflation which destroyed the middle class radicalized the Germans who would then turn to Hitler for salvation. 

 

There was hatred of the Jews because the Jews were perceived as the international bankers striving to hyperinflation so that hatred escalated and so if you didn't get a first world war without the federal government it's very unlikely you would have had the second world war or so I would say that the Constitution and a very obviously abstract theoretical way the blood of millions seeped into its imparchment and without that the history of the world I think would've been a much more peaceful and benevolent place that's not even to count the things like, do we really think that Delaware would have invaded Iraq on its own of course not of course not you have to have the federal government's and the reason you had the federal government it has the tax livestock which gives it the fee of currency power to fund wars through preying on future generations right. 

 

So you would not have had the wars in Iraq, you would have had Korea, you would have had Vietnam, you wouldn't have had all the proxy wars around the world, you would have extraordinary renditions, you would have the torture camps of Guantanamo Bay, you wouldn't have Abdul Glade, there would be enormous amount of peace because the more you give people the power.  What is the slogan of government free evil that's what it is.  You get to do evil and other people will pay in cash and in blood and the more abstract that you are from those you rule the more you would you can commit and that's why if you're going to have a tyranny you want it right by your side not overhead in the sky dominating everything so I think it has a seriously negative effect on world peace.  Sorry that is a real sprint to history and I'm not going to say you agreed with everything but that certainly is the perspective that I would take.

 

 

Michael Badnarik:  I love a really good debate so I'm going to agree with Stefan [laughing] either that or agree with the truth and again anarchy and monarchy is going to be very, very close with one have to search hard to find some of the differences I mean I teach a class on the Constitution and the Constitution is far from perfect article 1 section 9 clause 1 you know allows slavery to exist until 1808 I mean there is definitely problems with it.  The colonies were trying to repay the Revolutionary war debt.  The 13 colonies were printing money like it was going out of style and with printing money you get hyper insulation and the economy stops and so the people in the colonies went wow we really love freedom but the economy sucks we want you to go to Philadelphia and modify the articles of Confederation and that's not what they did.  They went they through the articles in the trash and they came out with a more perfect union more perfect then the articles of Confederation presumably and an established a more centralized government Alexander Hamilton was a Minarchist he didn't like King George the third but but he thought that King George Washington would be a really great idea and fortunately Washington rejected the idea. 

 

Alexander Hamilton's followers were nationalist a one-to-one strong centralized government he knew they wouldn't go for that and so he labeled his team of supporters Federalist which is a lie and Thomas Jefferson's followers were Federalist they wanted a loosely distributed or loosely organized government but that label Federalist had already been taken and Hamilton said well we were Federalist and your the opposite of us you must be anti-Federalist which make it sounds like so basically what Hamilton did was switch the labels you know good guys and bad guys switch the labels in order to get the Constitution ratified not a surprise that our politicians lie to us the surprise really is that 200 some odd years later when we talk the strong centralized government in Washington DC we don't call it a national government which is what it is we go oh that's a federal government you know. 

 

So Hamilton was such a good liar we’re still follow for the lie to centuries later so if we had stayed with the articles Confederation the articles required unanimous support the unanimous vote of all the existing states and try to imagine 50 states united together and getting a unanimous vote for 50 states how big you think the federal government will be? It would be a trivia question okay for four tickets to the local concert got to identify the city where the national government is and they will go oh gosh I used to know that.  So we would be better off, we want to make that government small and again it is up to us to make sure that it stays small that's what eternal vigilance is all about. 

 

You don't go out and cut the lawn and go wow I really got a well manicured lawn and this is the last time this summer I'm going to have to cut the grass you know you get a good rain and you know your neighbors are going to be complaining because the grass is a bit tall the government is the same way.  Thomas Jefferson suggested that we need a little revolution about every 20 years and then kind of trim back the government that has grown up the problem is it's like earthquakes in California in California we like earthquakes about every six or 12 months because when you have earthquakes often everything vibrates you go wow did you feel that that was pretty cool and nothing bad happens you know it's after five or 10 years when you haven't had an earthquake and all that pressure has built up now you get 6.2 on the Richter scale and you know not down buildings and roads so I think we are at that place politically we haven't had enough revolution in a while and if we do in fact have one were going to be knocking down some buildings.

 

 

[Silence] [0:49:53]-[0:50:11]

 

Michael Badnarik:  If what had been, if, oh socialism?

 

[Silence] [0:50:15]-[0:50:25]

 

Michael Badnarik:  Short answer.  No any questions

 

[Laughter]

 

Michael Badnarik:  Most Americans imagine this huge political dichotomy between the Republicans and the Democrats either red or blue and that is a false dichotomy.  You know the Democrats want to control your life and the Republicans want to control your life I me what the heck is the difference the real dichotomy is between individualism and collectivism and any decision about your life easy you can make a decision or the government can make the decision for you and anybody with half a brain pretty much agrees that I'm smart enough to make my own decisions without the government helping so.  Socialism and Communism are inherently evil as Stefan pointed out private property very important it’s the number one answer in my Constitution class.  You know every question about the Constitution openly derives you know the answer is property.  Communism has 10 planks and the first thing is to abolish private property.  You have no private property you have no rights and Socialism is just Communism is little sister Socialism is the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles.  Communism is presumably the perfect implementation of those principles and I'm opposed to collectivism you know I defend everybody's individual life.

 

 

Stefan Molyneux:  The roads of defense and I agree with what you are saying and it really is frustrating when you are a communicator about freedom and liberty and antiwar and anti-violence and anti-torture and anti-the great rooms of modern state is prison and so on and people say way yes there is the blood of millions and there is the enslavement of millions and there is the starvation of millions through statism but you know we can't be free because people need to drive places.  It's such a strange perspective that because we have problems with how we going to defend the geographical area we must all be slaves and sheep and tax livestock and herded around indoctrinated at schools and dangle a few coins in our old age because these problems are so insoluble but they really not.  I think national defense is something that comes up oh if there's no government is no such thing as national defense to quick answers and there's more and podcast and in books if you're interested.  First the foremost national defense the weird thing about when you use violence and solve problems you freeze those solutions in time think of public education we almost was went to public schools right.  In 1860 or 1870s they were nationalized they went from the free market to the state.  In 1860 you had a classroom with a teacher who had a piece of chalk and a blackboard. 

 

150 years later with the Internet with virtual reality with homeschooling with pen tablets with every kind of communications transformation that you can conceive of and a few that you can never conceive of what do we have 150 years later? We have a blackboard a piece of chalk and a teacher right.  It freezes solutions in time when you wrap them in violence a freeze in time.  The problem with state is fundamentally is that it's a solution that's old as human times it's fundamentally tribalism on a national scale.  So it's at least 10,000 years old if you look back at 5000 years or 7000 years the ancient Egyptians had governments, they had national defense, they had taxation, they had inflation, they had currency, all of the staggering destructive sites that statism represent.  We don't use medical technology from the ancient Egyptians, we don't use popirus from the ancient Egyptians, but still we supposed to use this concept called the government which is so old.  National defense has been superseded by technological advances no country has owned even a single nuclear device has ever been invaded ever. 

 

The four proxy wars right England and Argentina in the Falklands we have Russia and America and Vietnam and Korea and so on but no country that had a single nuclear weapon has been invaded why is Europe at peace for the first time in 10,000 years because they had weapons of mass instruction and the leaders, these brave political military leaders, silly seem to find a lot of restraint when they are in the crosshairs right when they had to send young people to be slaughtered but they themselves could get hit with a nuke suddenly they seem to find a lot of restraint and the capacity for peace. 

 

So what you need to defend a geographical area a couple of nukes what is that going to cost you? Hundred million dollars a year it's a buck or two per person per year to guarantee that you're not going to be invaded.  Anymore you are going to start causing trouble overseas which get people flying planes into your buildings so you don't want any more than that you want as minimal a possible defense completely easy in a free society.  Second point which I will keep brief is that, let's use our moderators just very briefly, the guy in the suit is the status society and the guy without the suit who should really be unshaven is the anarchy society.  So I'm the evil third-party dude who has a military and wants to invade right why is it that I want to invade another country is it to sightsee? Of course not.  It's because I want to take over the tax structure of that society. 

 

All right you could that society has tax livestock to produce consistent money which I can then spend.  So if I go invade this guy then I can take over his tax structure which is of course what every conqueror does they go when they take over the government they continue to extract the taxes from the population.  So I can go and invade this guy, this guy country out I would say, I go invade this guy country and I can take over the tax structure of his state.  But this crazy anarchy dude right his country has no tax structure.  There is no tax collection is the difference between time to take over a really well organized farm that's very productive and wondering into a swamp no disrespect.  He actually smells great.  I'm going back for just one more but that's the real difference if you have an anarchy society there's nothing to invade because there is nothing to take over there is no tax structure.  There is no Fort Knox that you go and create there is no national Army. 

 

Why did Hitler going to Western Czechoslovakia because of the Skoda ominent works which was created by the state so we can take those over to get the hundred thousand soldiers to get the 20,000 tanks to get the artillery unit that's why you went there.  If it was a stately society those things, those fruits, those benefits would not be there to take.  So you don't have to burst a couple nukes you don't have to worry about being invaded is your anarchistic society because there is nothing to take.  You're not taken over a farm and getting the milk and the eggs and then just wondering into a forest where there is nothing to take.  There is no sane person ever going to invade an anarchic society plus of course you don't know who has what weapons which is a little different any status society.  Trying to invade a status society particularly in Europe there is a population that is disarmed.  Even the greatest military in the world is having a tough time standing up to our Iraqis who are arming themselves because there is no disarmament of Iraqis because they are just bringing arms and from other country.  So you simply going to not worry about national defense is going to be a couple of bucks a year and even that's going to pay the way.  No one is going to want to invade you because there's nothing to take and they don't know who's armed and you just are not going to have to worry about it but we still think in the same old way as when that kind of statist solutions seems to be essential for everyone it's really not the case.  Technology and events and weapons of mass destruction have overtaken that need.

 

 

Moderator:  next question this is for both speakers.  Imran once wrote in a capitalism unknown ideal that anarchy as a political concept is a naïve and distraction a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal that came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare.  Stefan and Michael please argue for or against Imran status society.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  First of all I just wanted to mention I am a massive fan of Ian Ran [phonetic] [0:59:41] I think she is a stone genius describing liatus [phonetic] [0:59:45] and without her I probably still be some muttering Canadian socialist, Canadian anarchist isn't that weird? Is like the two words you would never expect to hear together like Finnish entrepreneur or military intelligence or Something like that right.  It’s just weird.  You’re an anarchist, you must be from Bolivia.  No, Nicaragua, anyway.  So I have huge, huge respect for Ian Ran, two things that I disagree with her approach on ethics though of course I agree with almost all of her conclusions.  Not that that means anything.  It doesn’t prove anything it just means that I do agree.  So just the hugest respect for Ian Ran, as one of the greatest philosophers that ever lived.  I think her stance on anarchy is irrational.  I know she’s going to come and haunt my dreams but she says that some gang is going to take over society but what are, the question what are they going to take over? What are they going to take over? There’s no tax structure in place.  There’s not this constant money spigot coming out of the government control of citizens and if there is this incredible desire for domination over other human begins, how does the existence of government solve that problem? It’s a huge plumb prize for every evil person to grab a hold of to control other human beings because it’s already in existence, its already self funding. 

 

The military, the weapons, the control, the police, the prisons, the prison guards, the truncheons, the court system, everything, the indoctrination system through the children for the most part, although though I know she wouldn’t agree with that.  It’s already in place you just have to step in and take the money but in a free society, a truly free society with no state, those the apparatus for control and profit simply do not exist.  You can’t just go around creating them.  I have a whole section in this book about say some defense agency, you pay so defense agency, how they wouldn’t they just become another government and it is complexly illogically impossible, economically impossible.  I won’t go through the whole argument because I’ve got my guy here keeping me on time but have a look at it.  It’s a really, really strong argument how of course there is a danger of human domination.  That’s why we can’t have a free existing structure that is expressedly designed for human domination hold the state.  If that’s not there, people will be bullies in their private lives but they’re not going to take over the whole society of hundreds of millions of people and take half their incomes at the point of a gun because that gun simply won’t be there and you can’t just snap your fingers and create it in a free society. 

 

 

Michael Badnarik:  I also want to say that I’m a huge fan of Ian Ran.  I think that logical thought is the only way to come to any reasonable conclusion.  In an early metaphor Stephen was talking about government as kind of this cancer and you suggested that you don’t go into the doctor and ask him to cut out 80% of the tumor, obviously you’d want to remove all of it.  What that metaphor overlooks is that the tumor had to rise spontaneously the first time.  It would be presumed that it had to come from somewhere and I believe that is true about government and again if we could eliminate all government and again we haven’t actually defined what government is.  I mean I don’t know if we established that mutual cooperation with nothing written down is anarchy and then it’s only when you write stuff down that as soon as we start to have contracts, you know we write contracts on paper because we presume the papers not going to change. 

 

If Stephen and I agree to something verbally and shake hands and are really good friends and we come back a year from now and I go you said, he goes no that’s not what I said and if we don’t have anything written down you know we can end up arm wrestling or getting into fist to fist to try to debate what was done.  If we have it written down we can go ah here it is on paper, that’s what we agreed to so and even that is not a perfect cure because you know those contracts can also be misinterpreted or reinterpreted later.  But again one of the factors that makes anarchy so wonderful but impossible is human nature. 

 

Most of us, I’m going to just roughly estimate you know 98% of us just want to be left alone, you know I really, really like you but I have no desire to interfere in your life whatsoever.  I mean I’m busy trying to run my life and I’m not doing that real well so I don’t have enough time to try to control yours but for whatever reason there are people in society who just think that they know how to run your life better than you do.  All you go to do is and they’re more than happy to spend their part of the day doing things to control you and they can formalize it and put in paper and you’ve got government and if you don’t nip it in the bud there it’s going to grow bigger and bigger and eventually you will have a huge organized system of plunder that you know somebody else could come in and take over, at least you hope they can take over.  If its impervious then were in trouble because we do have a very huge, powerful government right now that is euphemistically known as the United States and if we the people don’t stand up, it’s going, I mean it’s already out of control and it’s easy for it to get more out of control.  In my constitution classes I ask my students hypothetically if Chinese people have a right to life and the answers obvious to me but they have to think about it awhile and go yeah well they do have a right to life but they don’t have a constitution, they don’t have a bill of rights and they also don’t have a government that respects their right to life.  Not a piece of paper that gives you your rights you know and what would happen if that 1.5 billion Chinese people, that’s 1,500 million compared to our 300 million here.  What would happen if overnight one and a half billion Chinese people just stood up and said, hey enough is enough you know, communistic dictatorship.  We’re not going to do that anymore.”

 

It would end you know we are in an ideological war.  It is a war of ideas and the socialists and the communists are currently winning, you know they have most of us convinced that they’re in charge and you know we need to follow orders.  Why does communism work in China? Sadly because one and a half billion Chinese people think that’s the way it’s supposed to be.  They accept it, they allow it to happen.  The same argument can be used here in the United States.  Three hundred million people allow this to happen.  All we have to do is stand up tomorrow and go freedom.  Enough is enough and we will be able to take back this government and have a lot more liberty and a lot more freedom. 

 

 

Michael Badnarik:  Three questions.  This is basically what I’d been alluding to, one or two questions ago.  It’s all about the unfortunate human condition that some people are evil.  Violence is going to happen and in many cases the only way to stop that violence is with additional violence force.  I mean if you can throw a tarp over somebody and subdue them without violence all the better, but somebody sadly, somebody is going to have to use force and/or violence to stop the bad stuff from happening and again if we want to have anarchy, just let me know.  Ill strap on my .45 and you guys don’t have to worry about my property, I’m willing to take care of myself and anybody tries to take my property and I guarantee, that I will not hesitate when I pull the trigger.  Most of the people in the world, specifically most of the people in the United States are not willing to do that.  They are not willing to engage in violence, they are not willing to even use violence for self defense which is a concept that boggles my mind but that defense needs to happen, most people want to subcontract that out. 

 

You know they want someone else to you know take care of them or want it done responsibly and again that’s this theoretical monarchy that which you know always protects, uses force to protect your rights and never uses force to violate your rights.  I don’t know how we get there when it’s like flipping a coin and having it land edge on but that is the goal.  I think that Stephen and I will agree that what we have now is way too much government, you know let’s start cutting back on government, minimizing it, making it smaller and smaller and smaller and when we get to the 5% monarchy mark we can reanalyze it and think well maybe we can go that last 5% and get anarchy.  I’m willing to learn but we’re never going to get to anarchy if we don’t get to monarchy first.  It is our responsibility; it is your responsibility to take control of your government. 

 

 

Stephen:  So 2% evil, we’re just trying figure out who in this room is.  I mean, yeah there are evil people in the world as I said in the beginning.  There’s no question of that.  I have never heard a satisfactory answer because of his point, amount how if there are 2% of evil people and the evil people want two things; they want money for free and they want domination and power of others.  That is the exact definition of what a government does.  So if there are only 2% of evil people in society, let’s say that’s true where are they going to want to be? They’re going to want to be in the government.  The government is a rocket propelled boost to evil.  It’s like giving evil that nitro thing in the car movies you know.  It just allows evil to go that much faster.  You can’t keep evil people out of government, you can’t do. 

 

Everybody thinks there’s evil people in the world so we need these shiny virtuous people to protect us from the evil people, but I don’t want power over others, I’m not that ambitious for money because I do this crazy thing for a living but I recognize that there are lots of people out there who are hungry for power over others, who are hungry for free money.  You have a government; government is a monopoly of individuals with the legal right to initiate force, frankly at will because the constitutions’ got nothing.  In fact constitutions are dangerous because you think that they will save you from evil people right.  If you believe the lies of evil people you are at their mercy.  A chamberlain goes to Unic in 1938, from Hitler look he said he’s not going to invade any more countries, they believed him and what happened? If you think that pieces of paper will control evil you are setting yourself up to be dominated by the very evil people who are the only people who want to have that kind of power over you and the government is a readymade place for them to go where they have that dominate capacity.  Of course if there are no evil people in the society, we don’t need a government.  If everyone’s evil no governments possible.  If a majority of people are evil then you can’t have a democracy because they’ll just vote in evil people right.  If a minority of evil people which I believe is the case, then you can have a government because that’s exactly where it will draw them like a black hole draws matter.  That’s exactly where they will go.  So this problem which, if you remember the question vauguely. 

 

The problem of who will watch the watchers has never been solved and to me, saying how will arbitration and how will conflict resolution be performed in a free society is like saying who will determine the value of a good.  Well the competition, optimization and the efficiency of the free market determines the price of the value of a good, no simple planning can do it.  How do we find the best and most creative ways to solve problems without institutionalized violence which leads to war, inflation, eradiation and destruction? I don’t have all the answers, nobody does but I know the answer is not institutionalized violence.  I know the creative intelligence of human beings which is compulsively restricted from solving these problems throughout history.  We didn’t have a state created from us; we inherited state from the original species like we inherit superstition. 

 

We don’t any long say I need rain; I’m going to do a rain dance because we understand I don’t have rhythm but we inherited a state from the primeval ignorance of the species the same way that we used to think that the moon was made of cheese and the sun was made of ping pong balls or something but we now understand that slowly and painfully we have gotten towards a more scientific and rational understanding of the world. 

 

We have to give the superstition of statism, the fantasy that we can give a small group of people the power, monopolistic power of initiating violence to make the world a better place, the superstition that we inherited.  Like slavery, we inherited slavery from the origin species and we outgrew it and we don’t sit there and sit there and say oh my god slavery’s about to come back right because we all understand that its immoral, it’s not coming back.  So the same with statism, we inherited it from the origin species.  It is a primitive, dumb, stupid, violent and ugly way to solve human problems because it doesn’t solve human problems, it just makes them worse.  It rewards evil people at the expense of the virtuous and I can’t spend my life running around saying is the government getting any bigger?

 

What stand am I going to take today to make it smaller? I don’t want the life of eternal vigilance against the growing power of evil.  I want to remove the apparatus which feeds it which is the monopoly of statism.  The very fact is that people don’t want to spend their whole life caged with a rabid tiger saying what they’re doing today, how we’re going to make it smaller, how am I going to control it? No, get the tiger out of the cage and live free.  You don’t have to circle around this thing called the state and try and control it and make sure it doesn’t get any bigger because we can’t.  It’s never happened before it will never happen in the future.  We just get rid of the whole thing as a concept because it is an erroneous concept.  Calling people to government does not change their moral nature, putting a guy in a uniform does not mean its moral for him to kill.  Putting a guy in a funny hat doesn’t mean that he can fly.  Calling someone to government does not give them the moral right to initiate the use of force, it is a logical and moral error to talk about a government at all and so who will solve it? Free individuals voluntarily, not those with power and coercion.

 

 

Commentator:  Next question.  Michael, should an individual be able to succeed from the government without repercussion?

 

Michael Badnarik:  Oh, I certainly hope so.  Succession is a topic that comes up frequently with a lot of my 27 states doing 10th Amendment proclamations these days and we were discussion the war of northern aggression last night and there is a miss, wide spread misconception in the United States that only Texas has the right to succeed.  I don’t know where that came from.  Maybe because we’re just really stubbornly independent in Texas but anybody, any state has the right to succeed and again in our conversation recently, somebody tried to suggest that the Civil War proves that States cannot succeed and I was like so you don’t know or believe in or respect the declaration of independence. 

 

They’ll go yeah that’s my favorite document.  Well the Declaration of Independence was a succession document.  We succeeded from England and basically the only difference is that presumably we won the American Revolution and the southern states lost the battle for southern independence.  You know you can have an idea, again, this is an ideologic war and sometimes you have to stand tall and defend your ideas.  You may or may not win those ideas but yes I do believe that philosophically an individual should, my parents are both alive, I love my parents, but at my age I don’t ask mom and dad for advice.  I talk to them frequently, they don’t try to tell me what to do if fact mom bemoans the fact that Michael you’re just going to do whatever you want to do and I’m like yeah that’s pretty much true, stubborn and independent. 

 

So if I’m not going to allow my parents to make decisions about my life, why on earth would I allow a government to make decisions about my life.  So what we need is a lot more people standing up and being independent and for whatever method you want for declaring a succession from the federal government and you know we just need to have enough of us to make it stick.  If I go up against the federal government by myself, I may be very valiant and I may be very courageous but I’m pretty much going to end up looking like a pepperoni pizza.  We need to have a majority of people holding these same ideas and defending them.  If Stefan and I are walking through the jungle, I’m guessing that Stefan and I both agree that cannibalism is bad but if Stefan and I encounter cannibals in the jungle, I don’t think it would be a really good procedure for us to stand on a soap box and go well you know guys, this cannibalism is really, really bad because were going to be the first ones in the pot.  So you need to have enough people, you have to have a good idea to start with and you have to have enough people supporting your idea to be able to defend it and make it work.  You know the constitution I think is a, you know a really good idea, better than most, not perfect but you know right now in the United States we don’t have enough people defending it and government is way out of control. 

 

 

Stefan Molyneux:  I haven’t eaten enough today because when you start talking about cannibalism, I just total Buggs Bunny moment.  You know all I did was I just looked over and I saw a drum stick in a suit, you know with the aromatic 19:36 and I’m going up there.  You see the fade in and fade out.  But enough about me, well should an individual be able to succeed from the government?  I think it’s very important for us to be precise and accurate in our own language.  I’m on a libertarian forum with Consuela, and Block and a couple other people, quite a number of other people and we got into a very fierce fight and there’s a whole video on this because they couldn’t quite understand the concept because they’re trained in economics and their trained in political science they’re not trained in philosophy, so it’s a bit of an educational milestone because they’ve been saying the government this, the government that, the government the other. 

 

Should the government be able to do this, should the government be able to do the other and that’s like asking should unicorns be allowed to play soccer and really that is very real way of looking at it because there is no such thing as a government.  It is a concept that does not exist.  Right, we all say okay there’s a crowd here.  You all brought your invisible friends which is great.  But there’s a crowd here right and if you all leave there’s no crowd and you can’t take a photograph of a family with nobody in the picture because it’s just a conceptual thing, it doesn’t exist in reality.  There’s no such thing as government.  What there is is stuff written on paper, some very well oiled and quick to be pulled guns, there are aircraft carriers, there are buildings, there are flags, those things all exist.  There is no such thing as the government.  There are people with guns, there are prisons, there are people who fear for their lives if they cross their government or do not pay its extractions, but there’s on such thing as the government.  It doesn’t exist.  So to me saying should I be able to succeed from the government is like should I be able to walk out of middle earth.  It’s a meaningless question. 

 

Do I have the right to live free of others initiating violence against me? Absolutely.  Of course but do I have the right to succeed from the government is a meaningless question because it presumes that the government is a conceptual tag with any meaning what so ever when it’s not.  It’s just a bunch of people with guns, that’s all they are.  No such thing as a country, right.  There’s Earth, there’s trees, there’s air, but there’s not such thing as a country.  No such thing as a government.  I can’t succeed from it because it doesn’t exist.  I do reject divided by the people to initiate violence against me.  That includes the people that call themselves the government but I can’t succeed from that which does not exist.  As long as we continue to believe that it does exist, we think that we’re obeying something other than people with guns but that’s really all that’s three, is the people with guns.  There’s no such thing and I cannot succeed from that which does not exist.

 

 

Moderator:  Okay, so for the final question, the United States of America has been called an experiment.  What would be the hypothesis and what would is your conclusion?

 

Michael Badnarik:  That’s a good question.  I like the way that’s raised.  The experiment is self government for countless centuries.  Governments across the world were all controlled by a king, an emperor, some monarch that and I don’t know how we got there, but everything was derived from the concept of the divine right of kings.  You now without going into a lot of detail, God comes down with his magic wand, smacks some guy in the head and says you’re the king, you own everything.  You have all the rights and you can distribute privileges to your subjects.  They owe you their life; they owe you…I mean you’re…

 

Unless you can pick both feet up off the ground at the same time, you’re standing on my land and you know basically I own you and so we came to the North American continent and decided you know this is really not a pretty good way and the declaration of independence establishes the idea that we are going to be blessed with rights ordained by our creator and so instead of God hitting the king in the head and we get privileges second hand, now we are sovereign.  We are kings and queens and my book is entitles Good to be king to express that idea.  We have 300 million kings and queens in the United States and we have rights.  We can own property, we don’t have to get our privileges from someone else and this idea was so unusual, so unorthodox, so what’s the word I’m looking for, revolutionary that you know most of the countries around the world goes my god this isn’t going to last you know. 

 

Twenty years tops and it’s all going to fall apart and so okay we’ve got 223 years, it hasn’t been the best of times but it certainly hasn’t been the worst of times either and by distributing the power instead of having one person have that power, you know life has been pretty good.  The standard of living in the United States ahs exponentially increased, but we lost sight of the concept.  You know the concept is individual rights and personal responsibility.  Everybody wants their rights.  You watch the news and every other day you have somebody banging on the podium demanding their rights.  Well if everybody wants their rights, how come were struggling? How come we don’t have wall to wall liberty? Well it’s because nobody wants the responsibility.  You know you own your body, you’re responsible for feeding yourself, you know sheltering yourself and oh by the way, you are responsible for providing for your own retirement.  Our parents and grandparents were lied to, you know the government said, were bigger and smarter than you, you give us your social security money and when you’re ready to retire, you’re going to have more money than you know what to do with.  How many times have you heard the conversation, “yep, mom and I are going on vacation again, we just can’t spend that social security money fast enough.” Nobody on social security feels secure and that’s because we have given the responsibility of our retirement to the government which is a really, really sad thing so I think the experiment started out real well but because we didn’t understand that the cost of liberty is eternal vigilance, we didn’t realize that the founding fathers didn’t set it up to run in perpetual motion, it is our job, our responsibility to provide for ourselves and to protect each other’s rights and to keep the government small and because we’ve allowed it, you know we’ve allowed the tiger out of the cage and now we are in trouble.  We’re trying to figure out how to get it back in the cage so at this point the experiment may be ready to go extinct which I think is very sad. 

 

 

Stefan Molyneux:  I think that the difference is you want to put the tiger back in the cage and I want the tiger skin head.  I think that everybody recognize, sorry about that image everyone.  Would you like to take a moment to put your lunch back? I think that every person who studies and thinks about these topics recognizes that America was on paper, a noble step but what a great experiment in attempting to create a government by and for the people to protect the rights of citizens, we create this government to secure our liberties and I think that I certainly believe that it was a great and noble experiment.  I can’t imagine that the circumstances will be better.  Maybe when we go and live on other worlds, you kind of need virgin territory to create a new society because unfortunately there are so many people indebted and depended upon state as large hand outs and teaches the postal workers to retirees to welfare recipients to military industrial complexes to executives to banks to now car companies you name it.  But you simply can’t pry that power out of people using politics so maybe we can go to a new country or a new planet we can start something. 

 

As a new land mass arises we can colonize it and start something new but I think there was a really unique set of circumstances that gave rise to the possibility.  It was a conjunction of new land mass, tyrannical government in Europe and other places around the world that caused the best and the brightest to flee as they always do and you had the peak of the enlightenment philosophy, you had the printing press which allowed for the easy dissemination of amazing writers like Thomas Pain and other writers, John Lock and all of these great philosophers.  So you had an incredible alignment of the planets to create the greatest possibility for statism and let’s remember that the American Revolution was still a statist revolution, it was not let’s get rid of government…for a small little bit that occurred.  I think in Pennsylvania which Mary Rockba [phonetic] [01:29:26] writes about but it was a statist experiment.  I doubt ever there will be a better set of circumstances to test the theory of statist but let’s look at where it started and where it ended because there is a bit of a myth.  You know, did a lot of studying in history and one of the things that you learn if you study history, especially at the graduate school level is that the winners, sorry I’m going to walk in front of you, the winners write the history.  The victors write the history.  Obviously if Hitler and won there would be a whole different set of history about the Second World War and we do see the American Revolution and the American statist experiments through the lens of you know I hate to say it but rich white land owners.  They wrote the constitution, they wrote the declaration of independence, they furthered the laws.  I mean there weren’t a lot of black women who were on the federal court system in 1820.  And we forget by just looking at this small group of incredibly privileged and brilliant and I think mostly honorable men that there’s a lot that’s missing from our conception of how America started.  I’ll give you a small statistic.  In the 16th century the population, the native population of the Americas, North and South America was estimated at about 24 million soles.  By the late 18th century it was about 2 million. 

 

All right that is a greater than 90% reduction.  Can we call it genocide? I think at some levels we can because there were bounties put out by the federal government and the local governments that if you killed Indians you got paid.  It was a professional mafia hit jobs of the native population.  Was some of it somewhat accidental, small pox blanket? Well yeah you could argue that it is but it did start on the, America rests on the graves of those who were here and that aspect of things also started the slavery.  I’ll do 30 more seconds if that’s alright, started the slavery and started certain aspects of the genocide.  That’s where it started.  No rights for women, no rights for children.  Slavery, genocide where did it end? The largest most powerful futile government particularly oversees that the world has never seen the most powerful and brutal empire and I think we can do better.  I don’t think we have to stay within that pyridine, that we start with genocide and end with empire, that there’s another way.  So there’s no good answer of government but we need to start asking different questions which is not what kind of government we have but why do we need it at all now that we have the technology, the communication, the wisdom, the knowledge that we have now.  We need to start asking smarter questions.  Not how do we tame the tiger but why do we need the tiger?

 

 

Stefan Molyneux:  No government.  No I don’t, I mean I know…I’ve been preacherifying and I’ll not go on because I really do want to get the audience questions but there’s an old saying that if the powers that be can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don’t care about the answer, that you’re just completely in the wrong ballpark.  I do believe that there’s two reasons why we do this fundamentally.  There’s pragmatism and there’s idealism.  So pragmatism is like I need to mow my lawn right, or do a thing.  I could either get a nice lawn mower or I can get some toenail cutters and if I use toenail cutters to cut my lawn I’m not immoral, I’m not evil, I’m not, I’m just not very productive right. 

 

So if we’re going to do things for pragmatic reasons, then were going to do things for pragmatic reasons than questions of morality and right and wrong, virtue and evil and good and bad, they don’t come into it at all because we’re just about getting things done.  That’s, I believe that we want to do things partially in questions of institutionalized violence and organization of conflict resolution within society.  Those are all fundamental moral questions.  How do we live in a virtuous, free, noble, peaceful society? How do we eliminate war? How do we eliminate imprisonment? How do we eliminate torture? These are all essential moral questions.  When your going to go from the realm of pragmatism into the realm of morality you can’t erase your principals.  The whole reason your there is because of the principals.  Mr. Badnarik and I, and minarchist and I would agree, cell phones, to property rights to non-initiation of force are the moral principles that are most sacred, the most important, the most vital.  I would argue the most pragmatic principles to hold, we can’t have a moral goal while the improvement of mankind, reduction of violence and social war and murder and then say in our very first towards that were going to break those moral principles and were going to create an institution that has the right to do everything that we consider immoral.  If we want to build a bridge towards virtuosity, we have to go in that direction. 

 

We don’t say it’s so important, it’s so moral to go north the first thing I’m going to do is head south.  You can’t break the principle in your very first step.  Maybe toward the end when things are really hellish but not at the very beginning and if you want a peaceful society as we all do and you want a society that respects persons, property, then you stick to those principles and you don’t break them the very first time you step forward your solution and say yes, property rights are important so let’s create new institution with the perfect power to destroy them.  Yes self ownership is so importation so let’s create an organization with the power to own people through taxation, through laws. 

 

Yes the non-initiation of force is the most important principle so let’s immediately create an institution which its very definition is to break that principle.  Let’s not sell out the first step.  Okay maybe the hundredth step when were offered a lot of money, but not the first step and that’s the consistency that voluntarism or anarchism or a dedication to nonviolence and to self ownership give you.  You stick with your principle.  If you are going to abandon your principles, why even bother being in the moral arena to begin with and so let’s not look to a violent institution to solve the problems of violence. 

 

Let’s not look to a monopoly of the initiation of aggression to solve the problem of human conflict.  Let’s not give up on our principles, the very first time we utter our solution but let’s stick consistently with those principles because not only are they true and not only are they moral but damn it they work and this debate which is completely nonviolent and this audience who is a perfectly delightful is a perfect example of that.  Everywhere you look you see spontaneous social organization without violence.  You see it in the marriage market, you see it in the job market, you see it in the educational market.  You see human begins coming together to solve problems and as long as they’re in a peaceful manner anarchy is what we live.  Statism is the exception.  People say well what’s proof of anarchy?

 

They say oh can you prove to me that anarchy works? Look in the mirror.  When was the last time you used violence to get a job? I have never used violence to get a job.  Postal workers accepted..  When was the last time you used violence to get a date? I’ve never used violence to get a date so you negotiated.  You worked peacefully.  Does that mean everyone’s like that? No, of course not but that’s why we can’t have a government.  Do you think, people think it’s an argument for the government; it’s the exact argument against the government.  We work volunteeristically [phonetic] [01:37:40], peacefully in every aspect of our lives.  If you want to look at anarchism look at 99.999% of everything that you do as voluntary and peaceful and cooperative.  Yeah you’ll get disagreements, yeah you may raise your voice, yeah you may get mad at people but you don’t pull out guns and shoot people. 

 

That’s the vast majority of people and I’m not going to give up my freedom because there a few evil people in the world.  I’m not going to allow the few of people who say you need a government to protect you from the evil people.  I don’t want to give up my freedom, my daughter’s freedom, and my wife’s freedom.  I don’t want to give yup that freedom because there are bad people in the world.  Isn’t that surrendering something essential of importance because there are bad people in the world, I need to get into a cage called statism.  Doesn’t that mean they win? That’s a shame.  I don’t want that.  I don’t think you want that either.  We have to come up with more creative solutions than I hear something in the bushes let me get into a cage for the rest of my life.  I’m not that scared of bad people.  I’m really not, to the point where I’m going to huddle in a cage.  You know like a frightened Chihuahua because there might be a beast out there in the bushes because every time I go out I don’t see a beast and I see that het people who are telling me there’s a beast are the ones who are the actual predators.  Alright, say well you’ve got to get into the cage because the government is so, because there are predators out there but the only guns I see are the governments.  They’re not protecting me from someone else.  They are the people who are threatening me.  I will take my chances that what’s in the bushes is a squirrel rather than hide in a cage because I’m afraid of bad people.  I don’t want to surrender my liberties to the mere potentiality of evil and I don’t think you should either.

 

 

Michael Badnarik:  Capitalism usually gets a bad rap.  We look at the economy; we’ve had a trillion dollar bailout, a mutli-trillion dollar stimulus package being planned.  You know we’ve got like a triple trillion dollar budget planned for next year as if anything with 12 zeros left of the decimal point can accurately be called a budget and you have to say see capitalism doesn’t work.  Well we don’t have capitalism in the United States, not really.  I mean we have an economy that is almost universally controlled by the government. 

 

You know we just lose that interstate commerce clause and the general welfare clause and we have a population that doesn’t understand the constitution and they can pretty much get anything by it.  It’s like you know we’ve got a president whose handsome and articulate and promises change and people are standing ovations, applause, applause and it’s like you wonder why were having problems.  When I give my presentations I will ask for a show of hands, how many people are patriotic Americans? Not surprisingly it’s unanimous.  Everybody’s a good patriotic American.  Like okay, show of hands how many people know how many articles are in the constitution? Rarely, rarely does anybody have any clue and then my question is like, what constitutes a good patriotic American? You know how to dress yourself in the morning? That’s the criteria you know you got your shirt buttoned correctly so that makes you a good patriotic American.  I think the standard needs to be a lot higher than that.  You know we have a lot of criticism about the constitution but the constitution doesn’t work, well no not if you don’t use it. 

 

Most people have no idea what the constitution says so they wouldn’t recognize unconstitutional government when it falls on them.  Now if most of what my government does is unconstitutional, I find that unconscionable and totally unacceptable and with the last breath I ever take I’m going to do my best to restore a constitutional republic to protect your individual rights, to protect your private property and to limit the abuse that government has monopolized on it.  It may not be the perfect answer but we have government because a wide vast majority of people really don’t want anarchy.  I’ve already discussed one topic is the conscious abhorrence of violence. 

 

You know like I don’t want to hurt anybody in fact a lot of people I know they don’t even like verbal confrontation.  I mean I enjoy talking with Stefan and getting into all of this.  You know my favorite thing is philosophical debate.  I love it.  You know arguing back and forth.  You know examining the ideas.  Most people, a lot of the people that I know don’t even like to do that.  It’s like oh, oh your raising your voice, just can’t handle confrontation, I want everybody to just hug and love each other.  Well you can want it but it’s not likely going to happen, not in the universe.  So you know most of you will not accept anarchy because it’s going to require you in some circumstances to perform violence and most of you are not willing to pull the trigger to kill somebody that’s trying to kill you.  The other thing is that we do, as Stefan said earlier, we like property and we like the easiest way to accumulate it and instead of working for it, if I can take yours, that’s just a whole lot better.  I let you go out and work in the field and grow all the corn and I’ll just show up at the end and you know walk away with the wagon. 

 

Most people do not understand the difference between rights and privileges and it boils down to you can do anything you want with your property.  You can do nothing at all justifiably with my property.  It’s my property.  I was speaking to a college audience and one young lady raised her hand.  I was the presidential candidate and she wanted to know what I was going to do about Medicare and Medicaid.  I said there theft, they’re gone and she was like horrified.  You know apparently I didn’t understand the situation, she had to let me know that her mother was elderly and ill and had all of these medications that she needed to buy and I said well do you love your mother? Well yes of course. 

 

Would you help your mother buy her medications and she doesn’t say yes or no she immediately tries to divert the questions.  She goes but what about that SOB up on the hill, yeah that guy, you know the guy with the big motor home in the driveway with more money than he knows what to do with and the first thing I did was question her, how do you know that he has more money than he knows what to do with? Apparently he knows exactly what to do with his money, that’s why he’s got the motor home in the driveway but ultimately I said okay your mother needs these prescription drugs which we all acknowledge are expensive.  Are you going to take a gun and go up there and take that persons money? No I’m not going to do that.  Why not? Because that would be theft.  And I said oh I get it you want me to go up there and take that persons money and give it to you for your mother’s prescriptions so you don’t have to risk lead poisoning.  You want the booty but you don’t want to take the risk. 

 

You want other people’s property and you want the government to do it for you.  I am opposed to theft of any kind.  I am opposed to individual theft and I’m opposed to government sponsored theft.  We have individual rights, their all based on private property and I think that liberty does have a chance because the basic idea is private property and even a two year old understands the importance of private property.  What’s a two year olds favorite word? Mine.  Mine, I want it to be mine so I can be in control.  Well a two year old doesn’t understand the concept of yours, and we’ve got to convince them that no you’re not allowed to play with Tommy’s toys unless you get permission. 

 

Our government is currently acting more like a two year old.  They want to take your property and go mine.  We call it eminent domain.  You know in Texas we have the Trans-Texas corridor, Texas government was planning to steal 584 thousand acres of private land to build some monstrosity highway.  Now I’m not a, you know, Luddite.  I don’t want to like keep really low on technology.  I travel in a real fast car.  I like highways.  I want them to be smooth and straight but I don’t want the government steal property and then allow a Spanish company to monopolize the profit from that.  No, no that’s not going to happen.  Not in Texas. 

 

So anarchy is again, I believe anarchy is a wonderful ideal, kind of like you know absolute, 100% alcohol.  Unfortunately the laws of physics don’t allow you to have 100% alcohol and I think that human nature prevents us from getting to anarchy.  You know one you don’t want it because it puts too much responsibility on your plate and two because there’s always somebody sadly who thinks they know how to run your life better than you do and so I don’t think that we can avoid government. 

 

You know you can’t make an omelet without breaking a couple of eggs.  I don’t think you can have active society without somebody kind of putting down some formal rules and we just have to make user that those rules do not subjugate one part of the population for another.  Again there are no easy answers but that’s our challenge.  That is our challenge to be intelligent enough, to be moral enough, to find and identify what the ideal, what the perfection would be and move in that direction as often as we can and maybe, maybe we’ll get to it.  Maybe we’ll achieve anarchy someday but at the moment I don’t think that anybody knows which direction anarchy is. 

 

You know, if you’ve never memorized the Bill of Rights, you don’t know how many articles are in the Constitution and so I’m doing my part to educate the population, you know tell them, teach them the difference between right and privileges and hopefully and I believe it is true.  I believe people are waking up and I believe that people are more and more prepared to take responsibility for their own life because you know frankly, the government is screwing it up so bad, you know nobody likes to get this style of government that we currently have and so I want to thank Stefan, I want to thank Drexel University and I want to thank the audience again for being so patient and being so intelligent to be here and listen to us discuss this high level intellectual concept.  Thank you very much.

 

 

Commentator:  Alright, were going to hand off the microphone back to Adam and were going to come around and get your questions and hopefully keep them in order going around the room.  I’m going to give them the other microphone that they can…so they don’t have to pass back and forth.  First of all I just wanted to remind everyone, we are accepting donations in the back of the room so please take what this event was wroth to you and please give that back if you could.  Were paying for this out of pocket so we’d really appreciate that. 

 

Audience Member:  This question is for Stefan.  I think one of the road blocks in trying to explain the conflict of anarchy and how it can sort of triumph over the limited government approach is dispute resolution and how you would get compensation if someone broke a contract and to use the extreme example, if someone murders your son or something and in your example you would say this person would be ostracized from the society, they would have a hard time having an economic transactions and just having a life style and I would contrast that approach with the Hoffa’s and you would say—

 

Stefan Molyneux:  All right, what?

 

Audience Member:  I’m sorry, Han Sunman Hoffa’s approach, I’m sure you’ve read.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  I haven’t read a huge amount of Sunman Hoffa’s; I’ve just read some stuff on national defense so feel free to expand.

 

Audience Member:  Well he basically says you have an insurance company and the insurance company can sort of seek compensation if it's justified and I think just taking the approach of this individual would be ostracized from society, it’s kind of difficult for people to grasp because if someone has this huge bank roll or whatever and they’re able to be ostracized and are okay with that, what’s to stop that person from breaking your contract or committing acts of violence and I’m wondering why you don’t take that approach on discussing how you would compensate people, I suppose for…

 

Stefan Molyneux:  All right, an excellent question.  The state of solutions to the problem of violence, if this kind of rape, of murder, or assault, the state of solution is very, very tempting of course because it seems like it’s a real solution right, but of course if theft is so bad then property rights are absolute then we can’t have taxation because it’s a violation of the principle of front so I’ve sort of reject that as a solution.  It means that we then have to go to more creative places to solve that problem.  I’m in no way, shape or form even remotely intelligent enough to attempt to reproduce the creative intelligence of millions of people to solve this problem so the solutions going to be infinitely better than anything I come up with as people compete to try and solve this.  The first question if your thinking about an anarchic solution or a status solution to a problem like that is what would satisfy me.  So let’s say, I’m really going to ask that question but what is it that if you were looking at someone to protect you from murder or protect those around you from murder, what would you want them to do if let’s say your wife or your girlfriend, let’s say your wife was killed, murdered by some dude, we’ll call him Bob because Bob is our usual guy.  If Bob killed your guy what would you want as your ideal solution to that? If solution is the wrong word, restitution or how would it best be handled for you as a potential consumer of someone who would provide services in this area?

 

Audience Member:  All right well my approach would be to try to prevent that from ever happening.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Agreed.

 

Audience Member:  And the approach that I think needs to be taken is that the person knows that there is going to be extreme retribution or compensation in that event so just by taking that approach off the bat you would kind of avoid that situation.  The situation could still occur and I don’t, you know I don’t personally know just like you said many millions of billions of people are going to have better solutions to this but I would definitely…

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Sorry but what would, let’s say, sorry I’ll keep this short.  Let’s say I’m a hero and I’m trying to sell you my protection services right so I’m doing a show and tell, dog and pony show.  What of this would be the most appealing to you as the solution to violence committed against you or someone like you? Would you want that person killed? Would you want money from that person? Would you want them to be incarcerated or imprisoned for 30 years and pay you half the money they made at forced labor? I mean what is it that would be, nobody says this is great, but what would be the most beneficial thing that I could offer you to get your business as a dispute resolution company?

 

Audience Member:  I would want, you know I would want everything back that was taken from me and if it was impossible…

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Yeah that’s impossible because we're talking about murder right.  I mean what is it that, like this is how it would work in a free society is that we would as a dispute resolution organization I would be going around saying how can I make this right for you? What it the best possible solution? So, I know it’s hard to talk about, let’s just talk about maybe she gets knocked on the head or something.  Let’s not go with like…

 

Audience Member:  No that’s fine.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Okay so you want to go with the murder.

 

Audience Member:  Yeah because you’ve got to explore the extreme possibilities.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Go with the extremes, absolutely so your wife gets murdered.  What would be the best, weird way to put it but what would be the best possible outcome of that for you as a potential consumer of protection service?

 

Audience Member:  I would want some sort of monetary contribution but I think you know it would be different for everybody.  Maybe I’d want the person committing the act of murder…

 

Stefan Molyneux:  It is different for everybody and that’s why we need competition right.  It is different for everybody.

 

Audience Member:  Yeah and me personally I might want that person to conduct many hours of community service you know or something nonviolent that wouldn’t, I just don’t want them to go into a jail cell and rot, it’s not good for anybody.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Right, and then when they come out they’re crazy, right? I mean jail is a terrible solution right.  Even for evil people, jail is a terrible solution right.  Like jail is a terrible solution for drug addicts and it’s a terrible solution for people to do evil because they just come out and do more evil right and then the repetition rates for criminal in a status prison system is 80-90%.  It’s ridiculous right so you want a better solution than that right.  And you said that you want to, you said that the best thing you could do for your wife’s memory if she was killed was to get money to replace the income that would be lost in the support that would be lost and you know so your kids could get a good education and you can pay off your house.  You’d want that kind of money right because it’s a significant loss of income to look at it at a coldly calculated economic level, forget the emotional stuff that can’t be fixed.  You’d want money back and you’d also want to be damn sure that this wasn’t going to happen again.

 

Audience Member:  Right.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Right.  Now a status society is never going to provide you either of those things.  You’re never going to get money from the criminal and 80-90% is going to be a re-commission of offence.  Yeah.

 

Audience Member:  So my original question was why, how come you opt to say that this person would be ostracized from society and not be able to conduct commerce…

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Right.

 

Audience Member:  instead of saying that…

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Sorry, sorry.  It’s not just that you can’t, were going to go to a complete abstract here.  I’ll try and keep this short but there’s more about this in practical anarchy but very briefly, you can’t rent an apartment, you can’t buy food, you can’t travel on anyone’s property because everything’s privately owned.  You can’t go to a restaurant, you can’t even use someone’s drinking fountain, and you can’t participate at all economically in the society.  That is what I guarantee you; all of the protection agencies are going to work with. 

 

So this guys either going to have to go out and live in the wilderness and gnaw on tree bark and rabbit legs and stuff that he’s not going to do right or he’s going to have to submit in order to regain his status as being able to participate in society, he’s going to have to submit some punishment, in order to regain his status as an economic actor in society.  So he’s either going to go out and live in the wilderness and be nowhere near anyone in which case you don’t get any money but at least he’s not killing people or he’s going to have to submit to some sort of punishment and hopefully cure or whatever ails him and so he’s, the punishment is going to be you have to work at some job, you get half of his salary, 40% of his salary goes to imprison him and 10% goes to the profit of the DRO or whatever, he’s going to go through anger management, he’s going to go through psychological counseling, he’s gong to go through whatever it is to try and get the evil out of his heart so he doesn’t do it again, he’s never going to be released until people can figure out as best they can, give the inexactness of the science. 

 

So it’s not just you know you can’t get a job, I mean you actually can’t function in society if people don’t want to do business with you.  We have computers and the internet so you walk into a store and try even to use cash, they’re going to be like murderer, murderer, murderer and if they give you a meal and you’re a murderer they also, the restaurant will get pulled from the system right.  So it’s the best, I mean is it the perfect solution? I don’t know but it certainly is a viable and potential one and it’s a lot better than what the state is going to do for you right now.

 

Audience Member:  All right, thank you.

 

Michael Badnarik:  Can I respond to that? My name is Don Colion [phonetic] [01:59:05] and I’m so glad that there’s no government and I’d like to offer another solution to your problem. 

 

 

Audience Member:  That is where I was going to go…

 

Michael Badnarik:  I will personally make sure that the family is wiped out.  All you have to do is kiss my ring and promise me a favor in the future.

 

Audience Member:  That was right where my question was going to go.  If DRO, if I’m shopping around for DRO, this man just killed my wife.  I want his family dead, I want his house, I want his bank accounts, and I want him dead.  I want him dead; I want him buried upside down on a pike.  Now if you the DRO won’t do that I’m going to look for a DRO that will.  How did this jive with the non-initiation of force in an anachronistic society?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  You are actually saying that you want his family dead.  Not really, I bet that is what you just want, you think I would be just?

 

Audience Member:  You are talking to somebody who just had his wife killed.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Sure.  No, I mean…I understand.  I'm just saying I don't think a DRO is going to be…I am going to take out the gene pool.  Right, I am going to drop a bomb on the city where the guy…no, they are not going to do that right?  They are going to say “Yes, that’s an extreme response and that is a shame, but we are not going to do that, sorry.”

 

Audience Member:  So how do you feel go after somebody who might do something close to that, you know or whatever?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Right, okay, let us put things…yes, you can come up with some crazy guy wants to wipe out the whole family.  How does the free-society handle that?  Well, first of all by not making him a god damn president, right?

 

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Right?  Those guys do exist; maybe you’re one of them who wanted to nuke the gene pool right?  But okay, let’s not give him the nuclear weapons, air craft carriers and B52s right?  So, there is going to be a punishment for the evil people but let’s keep the problem in perspective, right?  The murder rate in the Wild West when the government was very small and remote was absolutely tiny, you could go five, ten years in a town without a single murder.  Some towns went as long as 20 or 30 years without a single murder.  Okay, so yes, is there a challenge dealing with the problems of murder in a free-society?  Absolutely. 

 

Will murders be fewer in far between?  Absolutely right, because there won’t be cops who would go nuts, they won’t be better in returning the battle stars and PTSD, right?  And there won’t be that kind of violence in the home from those kinds of situation which leads to further violence down the road.  There won’t be prison guards who become dehumanized in beating up and controlling the prisoners, there won’t be prisoners who are in jail who are getting beaten up and raped and shivved who are then released back out in the streets, because it will be a different society where we don’t use the initiation of force to try to solve these complex and psychological and difficult problem.  So we are talking about in an average town, you know, where a murder or two every 5 years.  Right?  And will the society find some way to provide restitution for that?  Absolutely.  Will everybody want to wipe out the whole gene pool?  No, of course not, they will be angry in the moment and the DROs will provide counseling and grief management would get them through that difficult time.  But the alternative to this as solution is, that the state gets an army, the state gets prisoners and the state gets to use whatever force it wants at will against anybody, anytime, anyhow, anywhere.  Right?  So it is important to put these problems in perspective.  Do we want maybe one out of ten people having excessive response to murder every 5 years, which means we face this problem in every town once in every 50 years or do we want the CIA and the FBI and the US military with 700 bases of receives to poke and sticks and perpetually causing the murders of 100’s of 1000’s of people?  Right, so again will anarchy solve everything?  Of course not.  There are human problems which will be impractical, some people will go on a rampage and shoot the whole—absolutely.  But given that potential exists, the last thing we is a centralized military and police force and prison system. 

 

Audience Member:  I would like to make a little…sorry, a little side note here.  Essentially with the DRO as you mentioned, it wouldn’t be lucrative for them to go around and kill the whole family, you do that and well, then maybe you would get repercussions from maybe the family’s DRO and what no, but on a side note, what we actually want to talk about is that the two of you are very concerned with rights one from the objectivist’s moral point and the other from the constitution, where do you all think these rights come from?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  I don’t believe in rights at all.

 

Audience Member:  Good Man!

 

Stefan Molyneux:  No I don’t believe in rights.

 

Audience Member:  Alright!

 

Stefan Molyneux:  To me these—you know what rights are?  This is rights.  Please don't hurt me.  That is all it is.  It is a quest for those in power, that’s all the right is.  I too believe in the objective universal absolute morality and I have a crushingly boring book available for free called Universally Preferable Behavior which if you ever have trouble sleeping put it on the low murmur, a little Barry White in the background the trouble then is waking up not getting to sleep.  No, I don’t believe in rights.  I don’t believe that they are imbued within us, you know, I don’t believe that they are weak atomic forces that cling right to the inners that are, I think they are properties, we don’t have rights.  We have properties like we are ambulatory for the most parts, we breathe oxygen, we are carbon based, we are the rational animals…sometimes.  Right so we have properties and those properties biologically universal which is how we’re classified as homo-sapiens so we don’t get ourselves confused with sea anomies. 

 

We have properties that are universal and I think those should be respected as biological and physical facts, but we do not have rights.  No government can take away the fact that I have mass, no government can take away the fact that I have scalp, no government can take away the fact that I have breathe oxygen and am carbon based.  Right?  So those are just facts and properties of human beings, but the governments can take away the rights and the rights are just purely illusory, and of course begging people to leave you alone never works, because they are like, “Oh you want freedom?  Great, then I’ll start taking it away so that you’ll give me stuff because that is what you really want.”  It’s like saying thanks to a torturer, “You know, it really hurts when you do this.”  Well, what does a torturer want to do?  Bam, bam, bam!  So I don’t believe in rights.  I think that you have a different approach, certainly you do, but I don’t think they exist anymore than fairies do.

 

Michael Badnarik:  A difference!  We discovered a difference!  When Stefan was down on his knees begging, he wasn’t begging for rights, he was begging for privileges, you know?  Rights…..

 

 

Michael Badnarik:  Rights are not, “Please don’t hurt me.”  Rights are, “You will not hurt me.”  Thomas Jefferson said, “You only have the rights you are willing to, you know, fight for.”  I have the freedom of speech not because they wrote the…and ratified the first amendment in 1791; I have freedom of speech, because I have never met anybody big enough to shut me up.  So we spoke at the Independence Hall yesterday and I mean of all the places in the United States, Independence Hall, 4th of July, I mean it was the best 4th of July, the best Independence Day I have ever had.  You know, to be looking at Independence Hall, then I discovered that as I am speaking on this little podium, there is this little concrete square which was a free speech zone.  We’re celebrating independence and the government is going to allow me my opinion on this concrete pad?  Are you kidding?  Anywhere I happened to be standing is a free speech zone.  The government doesn’t tell me what I can or cannot say.  The government doesn’t tell me where I can or cannot say it.  So rights do exist!  You cannot…you cannot take somebody’s rights away.  You know, you can take their life, but you can’t take their right to life, and, you know, if rights don’t exist then I am not sure exactly what the philosophical discussion is about.  What is it that we are trying to protect?  You know, life, liberty and private property that are the whole point of having written the constitution at all.  Imagine…imagine a hypothetical conversation between Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, the sky is shining—the sun is shining, the birds are flying and, you know, butterflies, the crops are growing, the children are laughing and giggling.  I mean it is pretty much heaven on earth.  Can you imagine a conversation that said, “You know, what we need is a government. 

 

 A government that is going to oppress us, raise our taxes; I mean everything is like too perfect, I mean we just get bored.  If we at least had a government to oppress us then we’d have a reason to wake up in the morning.  It would keep us like, you know…”  I can’t even imagine that as a concept.  More to my reality is that, you know, life is nearly perfect, almost heaven on earth, and they said, “You know, what we need?  We need a system to protect it just the way it is so that we can maintain this type of perfection, this type of heaven on earth, to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.”  It’s a goal, a laudable goal, we may never achieve it.  We certainly have, you know, gotten further from it today than we used to be but we really do, we need to continue working on it.  It’s a constant process, you know, philosophy, you are constantly everyday learning new philosophy, honing it, making it, you know, better, eliminating any contradictions that you have.  I think the same thing is true with governments, it may never be perfect, it may be okay today, but we have to keep monitoring it and constantly making it better and not letting it, you know, grow without supervision.

 

 

Audience Member:  John, Thank you, pardon me.  Stefan and Michael, great presentation today.  Stefan, I want to direct a couple comments towards you and then ask you a quick question if I could.  First one of your statements, I used the scare tactics to say that we do not have the ability to fight our governments, our large arsenal of bombs, arms, weapons and super-duper through down weapons to stop us, but at the same time you said, “Well we can’t even stop the insurgents overseas.”  And I find that pretty fascinating that a bunch of people who live if you will in clay houses can stopped the most tyrannical governments in the world.  So certainly we as a people have the ability to go ahead and change our destiny no matter how big our military force and this government is.  And secondly the second comment that I want to bring up was an anarchy society that does not have the tax basis, not one that is going to be desirable from a tyrant’s point of view and I will argue that point by saying that if I were looking to take over at this organized society that did not have a tax base, that would be a no brainer because I would march right in there, take over their rights, probably tax them whether they have a proper tax base or not and then probably through them into servitude.  So whether they have a tax base or not does not make them undesirable for a tyrant.  Now, I will ask you one more thing on the DRO, and that is any time you give some one more responsibility or more power than the people have, they themselves will become tyrannical just as the government does.  So the question I have for you is, is you giving these people to be judge, jury and hangman at the same time, how do you keep their powers to a minimum without—so they do not overstep your boundaries.  That is the bottom line, pretty much instituted government at that point.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Yeah, I am not saying that I convince you, I am not saying that I closed the case.  I am just saying that there is a possibility that it may not be as bad as you think and that’s as far as I can get.  I want to be disrespectful to other people's questions.

 

Audience Member:  Thank you very much!  About the government

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Thank you.

 

Audience Member:  The wonderful topic of the day.

 

 

Audience Member:  One thing that I haven’t seen come up yet, thank you everybody who is here cause it's great for people to have an open mind not matter what philosophy, we won’t know what we know until we hear it.  So it's good to hear all different sides, whether we agree with or not, to find out whether we do agree with it, cause hearsay you don’t know what you are getting.  I heard I needed garlic or something to come near you because you were a, you’re going to bite.  You don’t really bite do you?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  I don’t even chew.

 

Audience Member:  Alright.  One thing I haven’t heard come up yet is…is something to do with the world.  The world is going to follow our anarchist form of non-government.  What would happen if, I don’t know, South Korea decides they’re going to nuke Hawaii and we don’t—if I understanding right, we have no government.  We have nobody in power, we have nobody to make the decision for our landmass.  How does that work cause we are not going to lay down and roll over it and take it?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Yeah, that is a great question, I guess the first question I would have is why does South Korea want to nuke Hawaii now?  Or why are they threatening to do so?  Why are they threatening to nuke Hawaii and not Switzerland?

 

Audience Member:  Yeah.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Yeah, it is not because of why they are threatening to nuke Hawaii rather than China or some other country local to the Far East where they can actually get their rockets?

 

Audience Member:  Cause they can maybe?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  No, the reason that they are threatening—the reason that Al-Qaeda, the reason that these are the countries threaten the United States is, and I am certainly not defending the retaliatory use of force in these situations which is going to be almost certainly against defenseless civilians, but the reason is that the American government is using—deploying massive amounts of force overseas.  Right, that they are…they have black ops, they these 700 plot military bases overseas, they have funded—the US government the largest arms seller in the world, so it is like having a police protection agency that is actively taking your money to arm criminals who they claim to be defending you against.  And so, because the United States is taking you tax money cause it's the government and going and doing all these terrible things overseas, funding dictatorships, arming dictatorships, funding oppressors, overthrowing governments, invading, conquering and undermining societies around the world, there is a hatred of America and they can’t strike at the American government. 

 

They strike at the American people which I don’t agree with of course, but the reason that we don’t need a government to protect us from North Korea, North Korea is only threatening us because of our government and I use the word “our” to be Canadian.  But you know what I mean right?  The solution to statism is not more statism.  The problems by statism should not be why we rely on statism, we should really try to solve the problems at the core, you know, rather than say, “Oh, Al Qaeda hates us because we were free.”  Well, Americans were hell of a lot more free 100 years ago and Al Qaeda’s missiles didn’t touch us at all.

 

Audience Member:  But if it happened.

 

 

Stefan Molyneux:  But it’s not going to happen if you don’t have a government.

 

Audience Member:  No one is ever going to aggress against us ever?  What if it happens?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  What do you mean what if it happens?

 

Audience Member:  Could it happen?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  No, it’s not going to happen because no country has ever—

 

Audience Member:  We have force field around us now cause we’re anarchist?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  No, because as I said earlier, you have the two part solution.  One is that no one is going to want to nuke you for the hell of it, because you have nukes and can nuke them back.  So it just…it’s the…it’s what—

 

Audience Member:  Who is in charge of the nukes though—on our part to nuke them back?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Well, you would have defend agencies who would compete among people to provide them the cheapest and the most effective deterrents to invasion, but you would not have as you currently have massive forced, feared currency funding of aggression overseas, because nobody would want…I mean the people are for the Iraq war, well, it’s well, you take the bill, right?  Don’t send me the bill if I am against it.  So people would not be funding aggression overseas.  They would be funding the cheapest and most effective form of deterrents to avoid an invasion and that could take many, many different forms, but I don’t believe that some madman would just suddenly up and want to come and nuke people.  That just doesn’t happen in history.  There are very specific circumstances that lead to that kind of anger and aggression toward the US government.

 

Audience Member:  This question is for both Stefan and Michael.  You both express approval of privatization of roads and other currently public or what I consider to be the commons…common territories.  What would the effects be on the individual?  Individual rights or step on of sorts privileges.  Let’s look at a road for example, if a road were privatized, could there not be constrictions on the individual to say that you must have a license, you must have two headlights present on your car, and you must have a good moral account in your local town.  I mean all of these different precautions so to speak or…liens could be put on the individual.  How do we address that in the effect that, I mean take it one step further when…when entire towns are privatized, in order to live there you would have to relinquish your rights of free speech or your right to religion.  These are real contradictions to a free society in which you have to deal with privatization; I…I…I would like to hear both the speakers' responses.

 

Michael Badnarik:  Does everybody realize that Saddam Hussein started out as president of a Home Owners Association and kind of like worked his way up to tyrant?

 

[Laughter]

 

Michael Badnarik:  I don’t deny that, you know, society needs rules.  I mean we are social people, we all have, you know, different opinions, different values, different ethics and, you know, we need to figure out a methodology of co-existing in the same relatively, you know, small space without killing each other.  You know, that's…and in the study of any philosophy that would be in the political level.  You know, you have your personal ethics and you exist in a society with other people whose ethics are different from yours and again we need to co-exist.  So there need to be certain accepted rules, there is no right reason that the government has to establish those rules.  You know, speed limit, most people don’t follow the speed limit.  You know, everybody kind of…I think the general rule is what?  Ten miles per hour over, you can probably do that for a long time without getting a speeding ticket. 

 

But, you know, there is another traffic rule that says you don’t drive on the left side of the yellow line, you know, and I don’t know many people that violate that rule, not because there is a squad car around every corner, but probably because if you drive on the left side of the yellow line, probably going to end your life here real soon.  So…again, there’s not always going to be an easy answer, the answer is always property, but when you get to water and air, okay?  We’ve agreed that I own this piece of land and has a stream going through my land.  Okay, what water do I own?  This is my water, its moving it’s moving oh gosh!  Okay, so I own Stefan’s water and it’s moving, you know it’s a difficult process but just because it is difficult doesn’t mean that we don’t need to come up with the answer.  As far as private roads, most roads were private.  You know, I have some store or facility, I want customers to get there, I build the road to make it easier for you to, you know, get to my store.  The government under the constitution is allowed to build post offices and post roads, the reason for the roads was to get the mail from one spot to another.  Everything else was kind of like naked trail.  There were all sorts of historical examples of private investments, you know, working. 

 

The Eerie canal was supposed to connect…like New York city with the rest of the country west of the Appalachians and so they privatized it completely, you know, private investments, they dug this canal 100 miles or something like that and it was making a profit for the investors before it even opened.  So, you know, we need to have some organization, we need to have some rules, it doesn’t have to be government and people say, “Well, yeah, that’s true, but we have to government in control of the police.”  No you don’t.  “Well, yeah, how would you do it?”  How about Beverly Hills?  You pay to have your own security guards.  You know, I am sure that the Beverly Hills police drive around in their cars, but if you have got enough money; you pay to have your own security guard.  My own personal police officer sitting there at the front gate, you know, to check people coming in and out of my property.  You know, if you are poor, you can’t afford a security guard at the front gate so you go out and buy a Saturday night special.  What’s a Saturday night special?  Well, it was any gun that you could afford.  You know, people who lived in the ghetto are the ones most likely to need self-defense and so the government basically says, “Well, okay, you can have any gun that you want except the one that you can’t afford.”  Saturday night special is just some arbitrary label, you know, on inexpensive pistols that make it socially unacceptable for poor people to defend themselves.  So, you know, there are lots of different solutions and again it’s your life, you have the responsibility of feeding yourself and protecting yourself…and we need to come up with other solutions other than big government.  

 

 

Stefan Molyneux:  I have a sort of unique experience to bring to bear in these kinds of political questions, I have had a pretty varied career, I've been an entrepreneur and when you are an entrepreneur and when you want to create business and almost all the business need investment, you go to investors and you have to…it is crazy.  You have to prepare so much stuff and you have to do your market research and you have to talk to potential customers and figure out exactly what they want, you have to research the competition and you have to create all these really boring charts that say where you land on the X-Y of various competition and features Yes, we’re more expensive, but people really want these features and here’s the demographic we’re going to appeal to and that is how you get investors.  And investors will see, right, let’s say that you’re going to build roads right?  Investors will be specialized in investing in road companies and let’s say that we need to build a road from this podium to this podium, the investment community will literally have a dozen companies come through saying, “Give us $100 million to build this road.”  And the investors will ask—oh it’s horrible, it really is, it’s like swinging light bulbs when they ask you every single conceivable question under the sun to figure out if you have really done your homework and your research to please your customers better than everyone else that is presenting to them, that day, that week, that month, that year.  It’s a really grueling process.  This is exactly how it will work in a free-society.  Every rule that you apply to a road overhead that someone has to pay for. 

 

So if you say that you have got to have both your headlights, then you have got to verify that, you have to have people checking it out, you have to have punishments, and you have to block people from coming on to your road or give them some DRO.  There’s got to be overhead to it and so when you go to the investors and you say, “I want two lights on every car.”  They are going to say, “How much is that going to cost.”  Right?  And you are going to say, “Well, it is going to cost me an extra $200,000 a year,” “Well why would people pay that?”  They are going to say.  “Well, because it cuts the accidents by 20% and we’ve done the market research, we’ve talked to 500 or 1000 potential clients and they’ve all said I will pay $5 more a month happily to get 20% reduction in my possibilities of accidents.”  Alright, that’s how things work in a free-society.  It’s hard for us to remember that, I mean for must—unless you have been in that situation you wouldn’t know much about it.  I am sorry, that is knowingly contradicting, and I really do apologize but it was a shock to me when I first went through that whole process a couple of times.  So every time you want to impose a rule on whatever it is that you are building in a free-society, everything from collective defense to roads to healthcare, you have to prove to incredibly annoying, hard bitten, skeptical investors why your solution is something that customers will want more than every other thing that they could conceivably invest in that year.  So you have to do such a staggering amount of homework, you have to build your case, you have to have done all the research and so when the road finally comes into existence, the rules are never arbitrary, they are designed to be as effective as human possible based on the greatest value it will provide to consumers that you have verified by actually asking them.  Right, so…that’s a long answer, but it is really, really important.  Things just don’t pop onto existence in a free-society; they go through an incredibly grueling process of ensuring that the maximum value at the cheapest price has been created for every single consumer. 

 

It will be the case with defense DROs, it will be the case with healthcare, insurance, property protection.  Everyone has to go through this annoying, horrible; you know, it’s like it makes a frat initiation look like a tea party, but you have to go through to get people to invest in you in a free market.  So I guarantee you through that process which you never get from the government you get quite the opposite, through that process you will end up with the roads and the hospitals and the schools, and everything will be incredibly tuned and re-tuned and re-tuned to meet exactly what gives people the most value at the cheapest price.  And that is the inevitable process of trying to get funding and trying to get customers in a truly free and competitive market and it’s so hard for us to understand when we look at government monopolies what is possible in terms of tuning yourself your market, but there will be the exact right amount of rules and if people stop wanting two light then you will go to one light and you will drop their rate by $5 a month because that’s what they expressed a preference for.  Does that make any sense at all?

 

[Pause]

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Well, I am sorry, legal and moral code, I mean we were talking about roads right so the legal and moral code is a whole other issue and maybe we can talk about that afterwards cause I want to make sure we get to other questions if that is alright, but I was really talking about just two lights on a highway kind of thing.  Another question?  Who’s got the mic?  Oh, mic?  Yes, you had a question for a while?

 

Audience Member:  Thank you.  My question is actually for you Mr. Badnarik, earlier you mentioned that the reason that we needed government to protect people in issues of like disputes is because nobody wanted to initiate, force themselves, people cringe at the idea of initiating violence and I wonder if you disagree that part of that is actually a symptom of the collectivist society we have like there’s been social experiments to show that when someone collapse on a subway, if there is a bunch of people, nobody helps.  If there is one person, you feel like they are more dependent upon you, you are more likely to help.  So you think that’s possible as the reason people…don’t want to take on the…like you said you would be willing to, you know, arm yourself and defend your property, but most people wouldn’t.  Do you think that it is a symptom of the fact that we have been ideologically or socially conditioned to believe that that’s not our responsibility, that’s the government or the police force?

 

Michael Badnarik:  I do think that the collectivist tendency in the world is because people don’t want the responsibility themselves.  You know, we want…and I think it stems fundamentally from our origins in family.  When you are 5 years old, you don’t make your own decisions, mom and dad make those decisions for you.  They feed you, they shelter you and, you know, life is really good because you are protected and you have no responsibilities.  You know, the epitome of that is when you get to college, you know, gosh life is really good, you get to make your own decisions, you get to decide when to go to bed at night, you get to decide what you watch on TV, how much alcohol you drink, and wow, this is really great.  But you know, car insurance is due and then you go, “Dad, I need a check for my car insurance, I need a check for my tuition.”  So, you know, college is utopia, because you have all the benefits and none of the responsibilities, you know, and so I think that having done that, we, you know, mom and dad finally go, “Thanks, you’re out of college, our responsibility is done, you know, get your own apartment.”

 

 You know, and, you know, we go, “Wow, life used to be a whole lot better when I had somebody taking care of me,” and I think we have the identity to want the government do that.  I don’t know if it is true, but I’ve always believed that Winston Churchill–I’ve always heard the quote attributed to him; if it’s not him, I apologize, but the quote is that, “If you are 20 years old and you are not a socialist, you have no heart and if you are 40 years old and you are still a socialist, you have no brain.”  And, you know, the back on that is that, you know, socialism has such great marketing.  It’s like, everybody’s going to have everything.  You’re going to have food, you’re going to have shelter, you’re going to have education, and you’re going to have health care.  Life is going to be wonderful.  You know, it’s just kind of like, you know – that the marketing is great.  Who wouldn’t want that?  It’s like, “Yeah”, I mean, that sounds like heaven on earth.  I want that.  But then you realize that, “Oh, wait a minute,” you’ve got a job and all of a sudden, the government is taking taxes out of your pay check that you work so hard for.  And, you know, you can’t buy the stuff that you wanted because taxes are so high because you’re paying for other people’s health care – other people’s education – other people’s stuff.  And you go, “Oh, wow!”  I mean, that…you know.  You reach maturity and you go, “Wow, this pretty much sucks.”  It’s a redistribution of wealth.  And so, you know, the – socialism is really wonderful, but the problem is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. 

 

Audience Member:  Mr. Badnarik?

 

Michael Badnarik:  Yes. 

 

Audience Member:  I appreciate you trying to inject liberty into a political process, as it seems to be against liberty.  You mentioned “eternal vigilance” several times, to protect that liberty.  The only option I see is to spend my life trying to convince one hundred and fifty million, plus one, to my way of thinking.  That level of eternal vigilance isn’t free.  It sounds like being enslaved to freedom.  So, you did say I am free.  If I’m free to do what I want with my property, I should be able to look through a brochure and decide what government serves my needs the best and who gets access to my property.  I know that it is anarchy, but I do not want to spend my life creating or chasing after different government packages.  Millions of people with good ideas routinely success, selling their products and services in the free market.  You spoke of monarchism as a possible path to anarchy.  I ask whether your ideal government would allow and work with competing institutions for what you define government functions to be. 

 

Michael Badnarik:  Well, I mean…the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.  I mean, I don’t like it anymore than you do.  I mean, we’re supposed to be able to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  And, you know, I mean, I’m happy to do it but that’s not my pursuit of happiness.  I’m a sky diving instructor, you know.  I want to jump out of perfectly good airplanes, you know, drink beer and chase attractive women – that’s the way I pursue happiness, you know.  And I can’t do that, you know, because my government is taking…when I lived in California, my federal, state and FICA taxes, totaled 48 percent. 

 

And I don’t know where you guys went to school but when I was growing up, that was half, and there was absolutely no way I am going to give half of my productive output to the government.  No way!  You’re going to have to come and take it.  So, because, you know, previous generations have allowed the Government to get this far out of control.  I mean, it’s not my fault, I didn’t allow, you know, the new deal.  I didn’t, you know, encourage Vietnam, you know.  It’s like, I just looked around it was like, this is the hand I’ve been dealt; this is the government that is here.  And I can sit and, you know, complain about it a lot, but that’s not going to solve the problem.  So, I’m destined to travel across the country, teaching people the difference between rights and privileges, and, you know, hopefully with my eight-hour class, motivate people. 

 

You suggested that I have to, you know, convince one hundred and fifty million, plus one people, to my way of thinking.  Yes, that’s what I mean when we say that this is an ideological war.  This is a war of ideas and I am promoting the idea of individual rights and private property.  And the sooner three-hundred million people in the United States adopt that idea, the sooner I can, you know, like pack my suitcase and go back to the airport and jump out of perfectly good airplanes.  And right now, I am vastly – vastly out-numbered.  Most of the people in the United States are socialists; they don’t know it but they like the government handout, you know.

 

Audience Member:  Well, assuming you could get that one hundred and fifty-million and one, and then your ideal anarchist society, would you allow free competition against government services?

 

Michael Badnarik:  Yes, absolutely.  The–and we’ve already got a demonstration of that.  The post office…I mean, most of you aren’t even old enough to know the post offices that I went to.  It’s kind of like the witches house in Hansel and Gretel.  I mean, they were dark and dirty and, you know, kind of like a scary place to go.  Mom would say, you know, “Michael, I’d like you to go buy some stamps” it was like, “No, please,” you know.  Now, post offices are pretty clean; they’re fairly modern.  You’ve got the, you know, new blue logos.  It didn’t always used to be like that.  The post office had to literally clean up its act when Federal Express started being, you know – if you absolutely, positively, have to get it there overnight, use Federal Express and people did.  It was expensive but it worked.  True Story…went into a post office and there must have been forty people waiting ahead of me.  And you got to take that little number like you’re at the meat counter, you know.  And I sat down and I’m…they actually have park benches in the post office because they know you’re going to be there.  I mean, you may as well take a book.  And now, you know, when I get frustrated, I also get a little bit devilish and devious.  And so, I was sitting on a bench next to some guy and we were just sitting there and I kind of looked at my little slip and I said, “Mine says Tuesday, what does your say?”  And he looked at his slip; he thought he was going to have to come back tomorrow.

 

[Laughter]

 

Michael Badnarik:  And the sad thing is the post office is the most efficient Federal agency we have. 

 

Audience Member:  Would the post office be a function of your ideal anarchist government?

 

Michael Badnarik:  The post office is one of the things specifically listed in the constitution.  That doesn’t mean we can’t get rid of it, you know.  You want to come up with a privatized solution – hey, I’m all in favor of it.  I mean, newspapers are going away.  I mean, most of your newspapers are having trouble just, you know, staying funded because…like, who wants to, you know, pay for all that chopped up tree?  Most of us…many, many more of us are now getting our information, you know, from the internet.  You know, we’ve got…I thought I saw an iBook here.  You know, everything is electronic; we’re going away from paper, you know.  And the people who are newspaper editors, you know, may feel a little bit threatened by that.  But, I’m sure that the people who operated the delivery stable for years and years, you know, for generations, felt a little bit threatened when, you know, Henry Ford came up with this like motorized little buggy, you know.  Progress happens; deal with it. 

 

 

Audience Member:  Yeah, no, I have the mic up here.  This question is for both.  I’ve really enjoyed the back and forth of this…how much government is necessary.  But I don’t think we’ve ever really defined what government is.  I mean, it isn’t…

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Government is that which is unnecessary.  Sorry, just kidding. 

 

[Laughter]

 

Audience Member:  Well, in response…

 

 

Audience Member:  In response to Karen’s question about Korea or any country nuking us, you said that the Defense agency would be responsible for any retaliation.  If that’s not government, what is it? 

 

Stefan Molyneux:  The government, technically, and I think that we would agree on this – that the government is the conceptual label for a group of individuals for whatever time period, who have the legal right to initiate the use of force within a given geographical area. 

 

AM Okay.  Can I stop you there, and just ask you…?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  You certainly can. 

 

Audience Member:  …a question?  Okay.  If I, as an individual, have the right to use force in defense of myself, when does it become a government, okay?  Because I can use force to defend myself.  If I group with one other person, we’re walking down the street and we see five people with their weapons drawn coming towards us.  Obviously, we both, together, have the right to use force in order…

 

Stefan Molyneux:  It depends. 

 

Audience Member:  …to protect ourselves. 

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Absolutely.  I think…

 

Audience Member:  So…

 

Stefan Molyneux:  …I see where you’re going with this.

 

Audience Member:  So, when does it become government?  How many people are necessary…

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Well, no…

 

Audience Member:  …to join together…

 

Stefan Molyneux:  …that story, there’s two functional characteristics of government, right. 

 

Audience Member:  But…

 

Stefan Molyneux:  It’s just that it…fundamentally, that it initiates the use of force and it does that for two reasons – to prevent competition and to take money.  I mean, there’s other things like regulations and so on.  But, the fundamental thing is that you can set up a competing police agency in the current system.  You can set up a – you can set up a competing post office if they let you, though I think that you still can’t charge less than the post of office, which is heavily subsidized.  You don’t have the right to initiate the use of force as an individual or any number of groups.  You have the right of self defense, which is universal to all people. 

 

Audience Member:  Well, you’re just answering the question under our basic current system, okay.  You’re not answering it in a more general sense. 

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Okay, sorry, what am I not answering?  I must have missed it…I apologize. 

 

Audience Member:  When does…how many people acting together does it require to become defined as government?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  None. 

 

Audience Member:  Okay, so…

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Anybody who claims the right to initiate force is wrong and a criminal if they act upon that premise.  No matter how many people get together – they can call themselves the government – it is just the mafia, by another name.  Because that which is moral or immoral for the individual, does not change depending on how many people get together, which I’m sure we all agree on. 

 

Audience Member:  It…

 

Stefan Molyneux:  So, it never becomes valid.  Now, the mafia that wins will call itself the government, will indoctrinate the children to worship it, will bribe all the people in the world, with all the productive people’s money to gain allegiance.  We’ll start wars, we’ll do all of these terrible things and they’ll call themselves “the government” but that just means best mafia; mafia that won.

 

Audience Member:  I would agree with that, okay.  But still, we haven’t defined what government is, as far as…

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Oh, we have.

 

Audience Member:  Huh?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  We have. 

 

Audience Member:  That was…the agency assigning the right…

 

Stefan Molyneux:  We said it’s the legal right initiate use of force in a given geographical area. 

 

Audience Member:  Okay.  Well, I had the – I didn’t make…I had the right to initiate force if I feel that someone…if somebody has a gun pointed to my head…

 

Audience Member:  That’s not the initiation.  That’s self defense.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Yes, I mean, they used to initiate force to prevent competition and to take money.  Alright, that’s the definition of it, and they obviously claimed a legal or moral right to have to have all pomp and circumstances, because you can’t…I mean, they had to put the gun in velvet, right.  Because you see the gun and you’re like, “Oh, I’m a slave,” right?  And so they have to put all this nonsense and drape the flag and parades and blah-blah-blah, right.  Because nobody wants to see this, right – because that makes you feel humiliated and you might want to change.  But, so, yeah, there’s no group of people who would inevitably gain that moral right.  But there is a group that claims and acts upon that moral right to initiate force, usually within a geographical area.

 

Michael Badnarik:  Well, I said at the very beginning in my opening thing, we need to define, you know, establish definitions and those definitions may change as we go along.  You know, my question was, does mutual cooperation, you know, constitute government?  In your hypothetical, as I understood it, you know – you’re walking along all by yourself with a gun, for self defense.  And I think your question was, “How many of you standing shoulder to shoulder in a row, constitute government.  Well, if you’re all there independently, with your own gun for self defense…I mean, I don’t think that it does constitute government. 

 

My premise earlier, is that it’s a hypothetical, you know.  And I would certainly be happy to carry a gun to defend myself, but most people won’t.  And so, you get a lot of people who say, you know, “I don’t want to carry a gun.  I’m afraid of guns, I don’t know how to use guns.  I want someone else to do my protection for me.”  And so, we’re going to hire the security guard to stand out at the front gate, to presumably, shoot the bad guys.  You know, the question is when – I mean, how big of a security force do you have to have.  And I agree with Stefan, the initiation of force is never legitimate.  I mean, bench – George Washington said that government is not reason.  Government is not eloquence, it is force.  And like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. 

 

We create this government to protect us, but we’ve got to kind of watch it so that it doesn’t, you know, outgrow, you know, the original purposes.  You know, the government that is supposed to protect you, can grow big enough to threaten you and become, you know, a greater threat than, you know, the problems that you were worried about, originally.  So…I mean, I’m curious as to what your definition of government is.  If Stefan and I, you know, get a voluntary cooperation, I’ll help him protect his property; he helps me protect my property.  Do we actually have to write something on paper for it to be a government?  You know, if we create a one-page, you know, contract and we go, “Okay, this looks pretty good” and you know, “If I see anybody taking your stuff, I’ll shoot them” and we both sign the contract – does that constitute government?  I mean, I don’t know what – and we would have…well, I don’t know how many people we have in the audience but I’m sure we can come up with, you know, probably a dozen or more different definitions of what constitutes government. 

 

Audience Member:  Okay.  Well, I guess my question is what would those agencies be called if not government?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Well, it would be called a company, right.  It would be a…

 

Audience Member:  So, what’s the difference?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  It would be a company.  It would be a company with a tank. 

 

Audience Member:  Then what is the difference in its force?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  It does not have the right to initiate or to abstract money from a disarmed population and it doesn’t have the ability to initiate costs to prevent competition.  But the government, by definition…

 

Audience Member:  You’re assuming that…I didn’t agree with that all.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Yes, of course it doesn’t actually have, if we use the word right – locally, it doesn’t have that right but it exercises that right as a…I’d say where as a DRO agency would not because free market, volunteerism and you would obviously, I mean a DRO would say, “Look, if I ever have one bullet more than I’m supposed to, I’ll pay every one of my subscribers ten thousand dollars, and they’ll be an independent audit,” and all the safeguards and checks and balances, which never worked with government really do work in the free market.  I’m sorry we…let’s continue this if you want, after, but let’s make sure we get the other questions in because…no, not you, Jean.  No, I’m just kidding, just kidding, go on. 

 

[Laughter]

 

Audience Member:  A tough question…is anyone after me?  First, thank you both for coming.  I’ve really enjoyed this discussion today.  My question is for Michael, and I know we’re sort of struggling with the definition of government.  And I think a lot of what we’re “disagreeing” about here, it maybe a matter of semantics.  What I wanted to ask you, Michael, is if we – if you’re saying we need to have a government…a minimal government, what are those minimum government functions that are essential to have a government for, that could not be provided better under free market system?  And I’m not talking about a collective defense because that’s not a government.  I think the…when we say, you know, government, we are talking about initiation of force.  So, in that context, what would be these essential government services be?

 

Michael Badnarik:  Well, the purpose the constitution and the government we’re supposed to have, is to protect our life, liberty and property.  That’s the goal – how we go about it is basically a procedure and you know, if this procedure is not working, you know, when any form of government becomes destructive of your rights, we can establish a new one.  And again, I mean, I like the individual responsibility thing.  I mean, I don’t want to have to pay for your education and I don’t need you to do my defense.  I am perfectly happy doing it all by myself, but most people aren’t.  And so, the things that are basically necessary are to provide services for the people who don’t want to provide them, themselves.  I mean, I have a right to communicate with you.  But Philadelphia is a little bit long distance from Dallas and I don’t want to have to get in the car and travel twenty-seven hours every time I want to hand you envelope, you know.  So, there is a system available where I can, you know, scribble an address on the envelope, drop it into a box and somebody else will pick it up and, you know, do the traveling for me, you know.  I would like that; it saves me a lot of time, having to come back and forth – I mean, I love Philadelphia, and I come back frequently.  But, you know, it would just be inefficient in my life.  And so, it’s partially, Division of Labor. 

 

All of us have a higher standard of living.  You don’t have to do everything for yourself.  You know, you get really, really good at one thing and then you pay for other people’s services who are really better at – about those things than you are.  There are certain things that we don’t want to do, and I give self defense as one of them.  I mean, there are probably others.  So, you know, if we had people who were smart enough and responsible enough to want to do everything for themselves and just do everything on a, you know, voluntary interactive basis, it would be like, “Wow, this is wonderful.”  But, people are not that smart.  People are not that ethical and people are not that responsible, you know.  So, that’s the direction I want to move, you know.  So, at this point and time, you know, the founding fathers did their best to say, okay, most of the government is going to be at the local level so that you can go down to the, you know, City Hall and, you know, like smack your representative upside the head.  You know, the State government is going to handle most of the things.  Murder is a state issue; it’s not a federal issue – and the Federal government is supposed to be really, really small, you know, to handle the things that are just not practical, you know, for each State to get into.  You know, it’s a commodity of scale.  We’re going to have one Army, you know, that will defend all fifty states. 

 

We can have a really good Army and, you know, that way, we don’t have to have competition.  Most of you are probably not old enough to remember ATT was the only company and it gave really great service.  And then the government tried to help us and broke then down into smaller baby Bell companies.  And, you know, it’s like it took a long while before we…but we still have people going, “Well, you know, Verizon and AT&T” and these different companies, you know, it is, you know, the free market.  It…you know, some people have better service than others, depends on what area you live in.  But, you know, and it may not have all the advantages that, like one phone system network might have had.  So, I mean, I really don’t care; society will figure out those things.  And, you know, as soon as everybody grows and be responsible enough to do their own thing – yeah, then we can probably get rid of government.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  I don’t have anything to add to that. 

 

Moderator:  You guys have any, see any tired arms?  You might have a better view than I do. 

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Oh yeah, there’s a gentleman and the lady in red…No, the guy here, right in front of you. 

 

Moderator:  Red?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Yeah.

 

Audience Member:  Just a follow-up to that response from Michael.  You mentioned that we wouldn’t be very productive as people if we all had to do everything that we needed, ourselves; and you mentioned the Division of Labor.  My question is, how come we can’t just let other people fulfill our need for self defense in an open market?  Why…it sounded like to answer his question, you wanted to give the government a monopoly on self defense. 

 

Michael Badnarik:  I don’t believe that’s what I said.  If that’s what it sounded like, I certainly didn’t intend that.  Again, I’m happy to do, you know, defense on the open market, and I gave an example of Beverly Hills is where people do that.  It’s an open market – you’ve got the police.  You’ve got the public Hollywood Police Department out there with their black and white cars.  And, well, you know, for rich people, that’s not good enough and so they hire private security.  If you’re really rich, you can hire a body guard that will follow you around and, you know, presumably beat up anybody that tries to hurt you.  You know, I don’t need a body guard, don’t want a body guard, you know.  I would really like – one of my issues is the second amendment, and I would like to be able to carry a gun.  I mean, for the most part, nobody messes with me anyway, just because of the attitude that I carry. 

 

 

Michael Badnarik:  But, you know, my attitude would sure like to be backed up by, you know, a .45 underneath my shoulder, I’d be happy to do that.  And, you know, people are really, really polite.  There’s a saying that “an armed society is a polite society.”  And if you’ve never gone to a gun show…I mean, you know, everybody at the gun show – I mean, you’re walking down the tables and you’re looking at the different things and you bump into somebody and it’s immediately, “Oh, excuse me, sorry.”  You know, just trying to walk around; everybody’s like, you know, they don’t want you to think that I was, like, trying to violate your space or anything.  You know, in my personal experience, the people that I really like – the people that I’d like to have around closest to me – not always – but usually turn out to be gun owners.  It’s like they are the people who are, you know, calm and confident.  They have nothing to prove, you know. 

 

And on the other end of that spectrum, I have a personal friend – really good friend – I love this guy and we co-exist as friends because we’ve got a mutual agreement not to talk about politics.  You know, we, that’s the one issue that we don’t talk about because, I mean, I can’t…my arm doesn’t reach far enough to the left.  So, my car was in the shop, he picked me up for work about four days in a row, and during those four days, it’s like, you know, I think twice – three times he came, you know, picked me up and he’s just seething in the morning, you know.  It’s like, “Good morning.”  He goes, “Man, I almost called you last night.”  “Really, what for?”  He goes, “I was so pissed I wanted to come and borrow your gun and blow some son of a bitch away.”  I go, “Oh, no wonder you’re afraid of everybody having a gun because you think everybody thinks the way you do.”  You know, if you think that you want to go out and blow people away and you assume everybody else, then yeah, it would be pretty much a blood shed alley.  Most gun owners are not like that.  You know, I am not a violent guy.  I’d much rather give you a hug, you know.  Just, you know, don’t try to hurt me.  And I want to put a real good guarantee on that by, you know, carrying my shoulder holster. 

 

Audience Member:  I have a question for Mr. Badnarik.  We’ve talked about the constitution and, I guess, the original intent was to have an indirect tax to fund the government’s operations.  Could you talk a little bit about how the government would fund its operations.  What you’ve perceived in going in the future, of how this would work.  And (b), would you be able to, as a citizen, opt out of funding a government?

 

Michael Badnarik:  This is like one of the most common questions I heard when I was running for president of the United States.  You know, it’s like, my statement as a libertarian was that we’re going to…I mean, we’re not going to lower taxes – we’re going to eliminate the IRS, you know.  And when people like recover from the shock and, you know, like would catch their breath, and go, “Well, how are we going to pay for all this government if we get rid of the IRS?”  And it’s a trick question.  It presumes an answer, you know.  If I ask you, “Do you still beat your wife?”  The question presumes that, you know, either you did beat her and you’ve stopped, or you are continuing to beat her; but, either way, at one point in the past, you did beat her.  Well, if you ask me that question, I’m sorry, I can’t answer the question because I’ve never been married.  So, when you ask the question, “How are we going to pay for this government?” it presumes that this government is legitimate and should be paid for.  The real question is, “What is it that we should be paying for in the first place?”  We signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776.  The IRS and income taxes didn’t happen until 1913, so by my arithmetic, that was well over one hundred years where we had no income tax, no IRS and the United States government had more money than it knew what to do with. 

 

How did that happen?  Well, at least for the beginning part of our country, government was limited by Article 1, Section 8, and congress wasn’t doing anything outside of that list.  And so because the federal government was really small, there really wasn’t a whole lot to pay for, and so the founding fathers paid for that very limited government, using excises.  And it wasn’t like, well we like your country, so you’re only going get five percent excised; but you know, this country over here doesn’t play ball with us, so we’re going to raise it to, you know, like a 50 percent import tax.  You know, it was just kind of…I don’t know what the percentage was but just hypothetically, five percent for any country or foreign company that wanted to sell here – you know, you’re not collecting a lot of money, but you also don’t have a whole lot of federal government to pay for. 

 

Audience Member:  Okay, so what you’re saying is that there would be some kind of sales tax if products were being imported.  But again, the question is, what if I don’t want to pay the sales tax?

 

Michael Badnarik:  Well, the constitution identifies two types of taxes – direct taxes and indirect taxes.  Direct tax is basically one that you cannot avoid, sometimes called a capitation tax.  This is the tax and you can either mail it in or we’ll come and get it.  The other type of tax is an indirect tax, which is very much like a tax on gasoline and your choice is, “I don’t want to pay the tax on gasoline.”  Okay, ride a bicycle. 

 

Audience Member:  Okay, so, the capitation tax – are you going to collect it?

 

Michael Badnarik:  The capitation tax?  Again, there was…the way the constitution is supposed to work – Congress sits down and decides we’ve got Project X, you know, whatever it is.  And again, hypothetically, we’ve got good, honest politicians representing us, you know.  And we really need something – something that the people would actually want.  And Project X is going to cost a million dollars.  Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 says that representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned to the several states.  So that…okay, how do we know how many representatives in the House, each state gets?  Oh, my God, we’re going to have to count everybody in the country?  So, California has ten percent of the people.  So they get, you know, 10% of the representation in Congress and, you know, that would–we got 435 members, you know, 10% of that would be, you know, 43-1/2 and unfortunately they don’t let me cut a represent in half, so California gets 44, okay?  What would prevent California from just like, you know, buggering up the census numbers and let’s say they manage to double the number of people who actually live in California?  What would prevent them from doing that?  Well, the founding fathers understood checks and balances and it says, “Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned.”  So when Congress, you know, approves project X for $1 million, Washington D.C.  would then a send a bill for $100,000 or 10% of that to Sacramento and so Sacramento decides how they’re going to pay it.  If they’ve got $100,000 in the treasury, they write a check, mail it to Washington D.C.  and the people of California, you know, I don’t know, I don’t care.  You know, Sacramento could also send out a postcard, you know, to the I think 30 million people in California and say, you know, “Write us a check for $0.25, you know, mail it in with a $0.45 stamp, you know, and we’ll pay it.”

 

Audience Member:  I think…I think…I hear what you’re saying.  The question I’m asking is once you decide what to tax is going to be, don’t you need an enforcement arm to collect the tax whether you call it the IRS or you call it whatever.

 

Michael Badnarik:  Right.

 

Audience Member:  Don’t you need an enforcement arm?

 

Michael Badnarik:  Well, yeah.

 

Audience Member:  …to force compliance?

 

Michael Badnarik:  But…but presumably, again, this is a completely hypothetical situation, we have representatives that are only collecting taxes for things that we want.  So there’s not going to be a real big problem with enforcement.  Most people are going to be voluntary sending it in and…and yes, you–that would be a legitimate tax.  Article 168 clause 1 says that Congress has the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, impose and excises for three reasons.  It doesn’t give, you know, for like every April 15th or any damn thing they way.  So, again, I mean I have no problem with people say, “Well, I don’t want…I don’t mind paying taxes, I just want to pay the lowest amount of tax that I can.  I want to like make it real cheap.”  And I say, “I don’t mind paying taxes either to a constitutionally justified government.”  But that’s not what we’ve got.  As soon as you get the government to start following the constitution, I’ll be, you know, a lot less upset about having to fill out at 1040 form.

 

Audience Member:  [Indiscernible] [03:02:47 – 03:03:02]

 

Michael Badnarik:  You know, again, whatever the project was for.  I mean it would be probably pretty rare.  I mean whatever the federal government is doing, they would be funding it using the…these excised taxes.  So, you know, it’s kind of catch-22 question.  You know, it’s like God can do everything.  Really?  Can God make a rock so big that even he can’t pick it up?  It’s like I don’t know.  I mean…and I’m happy to sit down and discuss these things, but, you know, whenever you get into the position like this, people are always, you know, creating questions that are like well, it’s hypothetical.  I don’t know what would happen to be there, but…you know, if you want–if it’s a legitimate thing, the tax is going to be really low and I think that most people would, you know, voluntarily pay it and if, you know, you’re one of those hold outs that doesn’t want to give anything, eh, don’t arrest him, I’m pay it.  You know, we’ve got a…a free…a free market, a capitalist society.  I’m making so much money, I got you covered, don’t sweat it.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Next?

 

Speaker 5:  Yeah, we have about twenty minutes left in our official schedule.  So…you know, we’ll do that.  You know, we’ll scheduled to end at 5:30, but…if our debaters would like to stick around, if you have the availability, I don’t want–

 

Stefan Molyneux:  I view this an extremely pleasurable, brilliant questions, great audience.  So I’m happy to stay as long as people want to stay.  So…let’s get the next question.

 

Moderator:  Great, fun.  Sure.  You guys?  You want to point out the questions from now on.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Yeah, you had one.  You…commi’s not cool, dude.  There has to be at least one guy at every libertarian meeting who’s beard is longer than his hair.  That is a fact of life and it’s good to see that you’ve filled that niche.  Thank you.

 

Audience Member:  My question is actually for Michael, I support you a lot.  I got your book right here.  Basically, like every question, I have a couple questions, but basically everything that’s been directed towards you, you’ve been no government, no government.  Shouldn’t you be anarchist then?  I mean everything you’ve been saying has been no government and…also…what exactly do you propose would be government and how exactly would you pay for it like?  Like Pat Buchan says, “Oh, this country tear us not our country.”  But aren’t they individuals?  Shouldn’t they not be forced to pay things also?  Aren’t…everyone’s an individual so just not our country, and also…our founding fathers, what gave them the right to write a document over me?  Did I give them permission for that?

 

Michael Badnarik:  Which document?  The Declaration?

 

Audience Member:  The Constitution.  I didn’t give permission to anyone to write a document over me.  Founding fathers or not.

 

Michael Badnarik:  Well, nobody…nobody gave the founding fathers permission to write the Declaration of Independence.  They just did it and I’ve already said that the Constitution, they didn’t have the authority to write the Constitution.  They were sent to Philadelphia to modify the Articles of Confederation.  They closed the doors and they basically shit canned the Articles of Confederation which I think would have been better in many cases.  I mean not as good in others…and they came out, you know, I mean…everybody knows that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission, you know? And I don’t know exactly how it went, but it was probably, you know, Benjamin Franklin spilled his beer, you know, on the Articles Confederation, the ink smeared, we couldn’t read it, and you know, so we just kind of wrote down and, you know, set this…sat down and wrote this Constitution and we know it’s not what you asked us to do, but all you have to do is ratify the Constitution and all will be forgiven.  You know, well, it wasn’t by the numbers, but, you know, eventually all thirteen states did ratify the constitution.  One of the things that my students in my class usually stun…to discover is that, you know, if you want to burn the Constitution, if you want to shred the Bill of Rights.  I don’t care.  You go but the Constitution says.  I said, “Well, I don’t care.  Don’t tell me what the Constitution says.”  Most of the time they’re telling me what some state statue says.  You know, Michael, you’re telling me you got a right to keep and bear arms, but they’ve got these laws.  They’ve got these 23,000 gun laws that say–I don’t care.  I don’t care what it says.  After Kilo…or not Kilo.  Heller versus Washington D.C., a Supreme Court decision–first Supreme Court decision about the second amendment in I don’t know how many years…I got like a dozen phone calls that morning.  Oh, Michael, Michael, I want to be the first one to tell you about Heller.  You know, the Supreme Court voted five to four in favor of Heller.  So?  Well, we thought you would be excited.  Why would I be excited?  Well, because the Supreme Court identified the second amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, as an individual right.  So, I didn’t know that before?  Do I need a Supreme Court vote of five to four to let me know that I have a right to life?

 

Audience Member:  Exactly, but why do you need government to tell you anything then?  Why not let that be up to you and every example that’s come up to you, you have non-government solution to it.  So why not just be non-government?

 

Michael Badnarik:  Alright.  Let me say this again.  I would be happy with anarchy.  You want to get all the government away and make it go away?  I’m fine.  I’m happy to mutually–but…but that’s not going to happen, because most of you out there don’t have the courage to pull the trigger and defend yourself.  You won’t kill somebody else who’s trying to kill you.  You want somebody to do the job for you.  You don’t want to take the time to learn all that science, to learn all that math so that you can exercise your responsibility to teach your children.  So you’re going to go–and I mean I’m not the one that’s been sending my kids to a government controlled schools for over fifty years.  Parents…parents have the responsibility to teach their children all the skills and values that child needs to be a functioning adult.  Parents will send their Johnny and Susie off to college, let the government and let the teachers do the reading, writing, arithmetic.  Now a days–I mean in 1953, Americans were number one in math and science.  We are now twenty-ninth in math and science.  So even the department of education was constitutional, and it’s not, we should stop doing that because we’re going in the wrong direction and so parents, the children are graduating from high school, they are functionally illiterate, they can’t read the diploma that you just handed them and mommy and daddy have the audacity to complain that well, my child just hasn’t learned the values I wanted them to learn.  Why the hell not?  Because you gave that responsibility away to the government.  So don’t blame me.  I’m a skydiving instructor.  Who do you think packs my parachute?  I do.

 

Audience Member:  But–but it’s also…it’s also a thing of principle.  Just because…the war in the Middle East isn’t going to go away, do I have to support it just cause it’s not going away?  No, if it’s government, I’m not going to support it regardless and I’m going…I’m going to speak on that.  Just not because, oh, it’s not going away so I’m going to support why this should work.  No.  If…if…if the war in the Middle East isn’t going away, I’m not going to find a way to support it.  I’m still going to be against it just like government.  It’s…you can say it’s not going to go away, but you can still speak out against it.

 

Michael Badnarik:  I am…I am trying to eliminate as much government as possible.  I don’t know, you know, who else is running around talking about these things.  I don’t know, you know, we have people here, you know, disagreeing on whether or not anybody has any rights.  I’m pretty clear that I do and will physically defend those rights.  You know, most people–when I teach my class, you know, I ask why do we have any government at all?  Why not anarchy?  Let’s just get rid of all…and they all go into seizure.  It’s like…oh my God.  We can’t do that.  Like why not?  Well, you know, and then they come up with all these reasons why they don’t want it.  Well, okay, if we have to have government.  Why did the founding fathers pick a constitutional republic?  Why not socialism?  Why not communism?  And basically, again, the purpose of the government that they designed was to protect your life, your liberty and your property.  Well, it’s not doing that anymore.  Well, it’s not the constitution’s fault.  You know, again, capitalism gets a bad name because we’ve got a really lousy economy.  Well, we’ve got the really lousy economy because we’re not using capitalism.  You know, the constitution is getting a bad rap, it’s like oh my God, look how terrible.  We got all this, you know, evil, corrupt government, well, it’s not the constitution’s fault.  Not the constitution’s job to protect you.  It’s your job to protect the constitution. 

 

You know, you only have the rights that you are willing to defend and, you know, most people are not willing to take the responsibility.  You know, we were talking about moral decisions before.  Well, you can only make a moral decision if you’re intelligent enough to know what is moral and, you know, excuse me, but those of you that are watching Dancing with Stars and Jerry Springer and, you know, American Idol and Lost and all these other “reality” television programs, it’s like excuse me, you know, like go to a museum, pick up a book.  You know, I just cannot…I can’t feel a whole lot of sympathy for people that, you know, I mean I had people order…order copies of my book, copies of my DVD and I look at this stuff, the order blank and everything is in lower case.  You know, it’s like you never learned grammar?  You never learned how to spell?  You know, no wonder you can’t read the constitution.  So we need to…you know, we need to remove the government.  You know, there is no education system.  It’s an indoctrination system in this country, you know, and we’ve got like a whole lot of government to get rid of before we can talk about whether we can get rid of all of it.

 

Audience Member:  I…this question is for Michael.  This is obviously a debate on how much government is necessary.  So I’m going to assume, even though I haven’t read your book, that you’re going to bring your most powerful point to bear today.  Now, what I’ve heard is that…and country to Stefan, that we need people because people are not willing to…are not comfortable defending themselves.  I will possibly bet that everyone here is more than willing to defend their family violently with extreme force if they have to right?  Isn’t that–no one here would not defend their family right?  Also…I am quite happy with the fact that everyone here would be uncomfortable using a gun.  That makes anyone here who raises their hand and is happy killing somebody or is comfortable; I don’t want them by me.  So I think that’s amazing that most people are not comfortable doing that.  Now…with regards to, and the other point was that we’re not–that the vast majority of people are not intelligent enough…or not educated enough to…to have an anarchistic society based on the free market, but you are traveling the country trying to educate these stupid people.  The thing is though, is that…are you trying to raise an army or are you trying to educate people to be happy?  Do you want people to stand up against the government and die or do you want them to be happy in the here and now?

 

Michael Badnarik:  I would love to have people happy.  Most people aren’t, you know, most people don’t even know what they need or want in order to be happy.  You know…having this free and open society is an ideal and there are just people…I mean…I don’t know how to answer the question without alienating certain groups.  I mean…you need–I mean if you go into the ghettos, I mean there are people in the ghettos that they don’t have very much, you know, they’ve lived four generations with this welfare state, they have come to believe the sincere belief that, you know, we owe them a living.  The government is obligated to…to give them food and…and, you know, education and all that stuff.  Well, I mean you can want my property all you want, but you know, you’re not going to get it.  Not if I can stop you and, you know, I’m happy that people think that they would be willing to defend themselves.  If somebody comes up and starts choking you, I don’t think that anybody could just stand there and let it happen.  People will claim that they’re like non-violent, but…you know, self preservation is going to kick and when you start gasping for air, you’re going to start at least squirming.  You’re going to make it difficult for somebody to hold on to you.  You know, maybe start scratching their eyes and just doing something to make the other person go away.  It may be very, very bold and make everybody feel good to say that, “Oh, sure, I would use deadly force to protect myself.”  Well, I was out at Front Sight gun training.  These are the people who are, you know, just all Rambo, you know, these are the people who I think are most likely to physically defend themselves and I’m telling you, they won’t.  You know, when it’s only a paper target, you know, they can be real macho and “Yeah, you know, I scored all these head shots.”  But, you know, it’s really difficult to think that, you know, you’d have to take somebody’s life and I think that it would disturb you for a long time.  Most people don’t like the reality the fact that in our society, that maybe necessary.  I think the NRA reports that there are 2.5 million times a year that somebody uses a gun to defend themselves or their children.  Fortunately, 90% of the time, they do that without pulling the trigger.  You know, just merely displaying the gun makes the bad guy go away.  Well, I’m not going to get into a great big long second amendment discussion, but…you know, if you think that you would defend yourself, oh, okay, I’m happy to let you think so, but it’s not as easy as you might think.

 

Audience Member:  Okay.  My question–

 

Stefan Molyneux:  No, no.  Sorry, I don’t know where you are all living, but you might want to move.  This is like, you know, choking and people with guns.  The most aggression I ever faced is politicians tell the media to say bad things about me.  That’s…that’s all I face, but sorry.  You had a question in the back?

 

Audience Member:  Yeah.  It seems like…we just woke up in this socialistic nightmare and we have twenty years before the only way out is going to be a collapse and I was just curious what your comments are on that idea.  I know Louis Von Nevis [phonetic] [03:18:41] said that, actually mentioned it a lot, at the very end of his book on the book of socialism and I was just wondering, I heard some of Stef’s podcast where he makes the comment where, you know, you’re chains will magically dissolve and everything will go forward.  It’s going to be dramatic, but blah, blah, blah.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  I’m sorry, but what did I say?  You changed the–?

 

Audience Member:  Your chains–your chains will dissolve.  You make this argument that philosophically if you present these ideas to people they will understand them and then we’ll no longer be tax slaves and it just doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen that way.  It seems like…it seems like in this socialist nightmare that we’re a part of the only way out of this thing is to let the system collapse and then move forward from there, and I guess what I am asking is there anything you can do to…prepare yourself.  Ron made an argument that the best defense is to surround yourself with like minds, she also makes arguments that that’s even more powerful than surrounding yourself with guns…and I guess, I’m just sort of opening up and asking…you know, suppose the scenario happens, the only way out of this collective socialist nightmare is a form of collapse.  Let the system collapse, is there anything you guys are doing for yourselves personally beyond what you’re currently doing trying to make people aware to go through this stage of what’s probably going to be very dramatic?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Yeah, I mean the collapse is inevitable.  I mean anything which mathematically cannot continue, will not continue.  I mean that’s just the basic facts right?  There’s no fuel in the plane, we don’t know when it’s going to hit the ground, but it’s not going to stay up.  So…this is very, very crucial and critical time which is why…I mean for my, you know, like I can’t get that interested in another software release relative to I think trying to do some real good in the world in these kinds of topics.  The collapse is going to happen and it’s too late.  We hit the iceberg like two generations ago.  The ship is going down, but I think that what we really want to do is to get people to understand why the collapse occurred.  We want to get people to understand that the reason that the collapse is occurring is because of violence, because of institutionalized, organized, status predatory violence, ugly and evil coercion, because people are constantly told that volunteerism is calling all our problems.  Greed of the bankers, right?  It’s stupid.  The bankers were as greedy fifty years ago as they are now.  Why now?  It’s like blaming a plane crash on gravity.  So I think it’s really, really important to keep hammering on people and I know this sounds like an ugly way of doing it, but keep repeating to people as positively and emphatically as possible that the problems in the world stem from violence, right?  Stem from the initiation of force and fraud and so on, and that way when things go wrong and Iran is…is…is getting a remarkable–well, not that remarkable resurgence in her popularity, because [indiscernible] [00:21:24] predicted all of this stuff with pretty eerie–well, not eerie, stunning accuracy like fifty plus years ago.  So I think you want to be right.  You know, that’s really, really important obviously and you want to make the reasonable predictions.  You want to remind people that the world is going downhill rapidly, because of increases in violence and the violence occurs in many, many ways be it currency, income tax…debt.  We all know it, right?  Keep telling people there’s a gun in the room.  There’s a gun in the room.  There’s a gun in the room.  Society is run on blood.  Society is run violence.  State-ism is forced.  There is a gun in the room cause if people can’t see the gun in the room, then there’s people just falling over that don’t know why.  Oh my God, it’s a microbe.  Oh, they fainted, right?  There’s a gun in the room that’s being pointed at the human race, at the human face and if we keep point it out and we keep–cause people are already accepted violence doesn’t solve problems because they don’t go for a job interview and take the guy hostage to get the job. 

 

They already understand in their own lives that violence will not solve their problems.  If we get them to understand that society runs on this kind of violence and they understand–they can make that connection, well, it doesn’t work in my life, it’s not going to work in society as a whole.  We get them to make that connection then when things go bad, they’ll stop looking for the bankers and they’ll stop looking for the capitalist and they’ll stop looking for the multi-nationals and they’ll start to look at where the violence really is which is the initiation of force represented by the state.  That’s the first place they’ll look.  It’s not the only problem in the world of course, but when you look at societal collapse or societal problems, people have got to start seeing and drawing the conclusions between the violence that never works in their own lives and the violence that cannot work socially, but until they see that violence and have it repeatedly, patiently and positively pointed out to them there will be a great mystery and then bad people will say, “Freedom has failed.”  But freedom never fails.  Violence fails and we keep reminding people of that.  Then when the crash occurs, they’ll know why and we can start to build something better out of what comes after.

 

Michael Badnarik:  I agree that the economy is going to fail, the structure is going to collapse and it will always be replaced by something.  Well, I said a number of times that we are in an ideological war and what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to win what we replace, you know, after the collapse.  You know, I want people moving in the right direction.  I want them moving in…in the direction of protecting private property and they can’t do that if they think that the government is the answer.  You know, the government is not the answer, it’s the problem and so…I’m doing my best to…to change the way that people think and to get them to, you know, acknowledge the individual rights of everybody and take the personal responsibility that it’s going to require to make it happen.

 

Audience Member:  Alright, my question is for Michael.  As a former presidential candidate, obviously you wanted the job.  So let’s just assume that you won.

 

Michael Badnarik:  No, let’s not assume that I won.

 

Audience Member:  Well, if you did win.  What president–what services would you want the government to provide ideally in your utopian society? Would it be none?  Would it be just defense?  Would it be roads?  What’s the base line?

 

Michael Badnarik:  Article 1 Section 8, you know, when people were talking to me, it’s like well, you know, what was…you know, assuming you get elected, what’s the first thing that you would do?  Well, I would eliminate the Federal Reserve, eliminate the IRS, you know, send executive orders to the IRS telling them to come to work, make a pot of coffee, start dusting off your resume, because you guys are going to be out there. 

 

Send a letter–an executive order to the…alcohol…alcohol, tobacco and firearms, which really should be a convenient store and not a government agency.  You know, and let them know that if they take a gun away from anybody that is not at that moment committing murder or robbing a bank, that I will personally, you know, see to it that they are prosecuted for violating somebody’s individual rights and I gave…I did an actual book signing at a book store.  It was kind of impressive and I answered all these questions and, you know, one lady says, “You know, okay, so what are you going to do like after the second two weeks?”  I said, “Well, play golf I guess.”  It’s like, “Well what do you mean?”  I said, “My job is to keep the government really small and after we get this list of things, there’s not really going to be a whole lot for me to do and I don’t know, probably go out and play golf.  You know, do photo ops.” 

 

You know, as president of the United States I don’t have the authority to go around and send troops to anywhere I want.  So…and again, to address that first statement, no I didn’t want the job.  The only question that I resented as a candidate, was well, you’re not going to win so who are you going to vote for?  It’s like would you ask George Bush who he was going to vote for?  You know, I’m not doing this because I want to be president.  I’m doing this because I don’t want the democrats and republicans to be president.  I don’t like their idea, you know, of that job.  You know, I cannot vote for the democrats and republics and respect myself in the morning.  So if you don’t like the way the other guy is doing the job, you just got to do it yourself.  I’ve got time for about one more question.  I think I have…I actually have to head back to Texas and…my ride is going to be leaving here very soon.

 

Moderator:  Does anyone have a question specifically for Mr. Badnarik?  Okay, great.

 

Audience Member:  You’ve made it very clear you’re a minimalist and you don’t believe anarchy works realistically.  So I guess my questions is that well, it goes throughout history it seems that people progressed and we’ve gotten less like totalitarian governments like…we’ve had like kings and emperors and dictators and it seems as we’ve considered life getting better, we’ve moved from absolute monarchies to constitutional to democracies and republics.

 

Michael Badnarik:  We don’t have a constitutional democracy.  You can’t find the work democracy in the Declaration, Constitution or the Bill of Rights.  We are a republic and there’s a significant difference.

 

Audience Member:  Alright, but…it appears though as we’ve moved to a…like people have more say in their government, life’s gotten better so what I’m saying is maybe it’s less government that’s made life better and made it possible to advance.  So why not just shed government entirely and just argue for that rather than just trying to keep it minimal when it seems to be the problem?

 

Michael Badnarik:  Anarchy is just not possible because most people don’t want it.  People…my original metaphor was alcohol meaning you can only distil alcohol so far and you always get a little bit of water in it.  You know, I think the standard of living goes down if you don’t have any government at all.  I think that there…I mean it’s a necessary evil.  You know, it…in…the convention in Atlanta, I said that, you know, fire’s a dangerous servant and a fearful master.  We need fire to survive.  We need it to warm the house.  You need it to cook your food, but anytime the fire gets outside the fireplace, you know, it’s a bad fire cause it could burn the house down, and I suggest that the founding fathers understood that a little bit of government is necessary just to kind of, you know, keep everything, you know, organized rather than doing the mafia thing and let the mafia decide, you know, how to resolve the murder of your…your loved one.  So…you know, the founding fathers understood that a little bit of government was necessary, but it’s got to be a place for it and they wrote the constitution. 

 

Any government that is within the constitution is a good government.  Any government that’s outside the constitution, you know, is a bad government and needs to be stomped down.  So again, I’m trying to whittle the government down to the size of the constitution, specifically Article 1 Section 8.  You know, once we get government, you know, actually controlled and the Constitution, the piece of paper is not going to do it, you know, I love Stefan’s metaphor.  You know, I hold up that piece of paper like, you know, it’s only a piece of paper.  You know, it’s only a collection of ideas and those ideas are only going to triumph if most of the people here share those ideas, but unfortunately most people think that they can just vote for the candidate that’s going to give them the most free benefits and when we operate as a republic or as a democracy instead of a republic and, you know, people don’t have the ideas.  They’re ready…the girl who’s mother needed prescription drugs, you know, she was happy to have me become president and steal money from somebody else and, you know, give that money to her for her mom’s drugs.  You know, people live in contradictions all the time.  You know, I’m trying to, you know, protect my own life, liberty and property and in the process of doing that, you know, I’m accidently fighting for your life, liberty, and property too.  You know, kind of a fringe benefit.  I can’t help it.

 

Moderator:  Okay, could we have a round of applause please.  Michael Badnarik.

 

 

Michael Badnarik:  I…I really want to thank everybody.  I…I…I…I want to echo Stefan’s comments.  I love this kind of stuff.  I just eat it up.  I could sit here.  I tell my students that I can answer questions about the constitution longer than they can ask and they almost beat me to it last Saturday.  We stayed up till about 1:30 in the morning talking about the constitution.  My website is constitutionpreservation.org.  My email address is there if you would like to send me a question about the constitution.  It’s kind of like one of my favorite things to do out of my 200 email a day.  Those are the ones I answer first.  So again, thank you for your interest and actually being willing–whether you agree with me or with Stefan, just being here to listen to the debate.  Thank you for giving me hope for the future that anybody even cares.

 

 

Stefan Molyneux:  We’ll pick up one or two more if anybody…you know, you can stay or leave but we had one or two more questions that I will attempt and then we’ll stop talking all about Michael.  Go ahead.  You can leave.  Sorry…and I’m sorry.  I’ll try and imitate him if I can.

 

Audience Member:  Okay.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  I’ll sit over here.

 

Audience Member:  Speaking about all of us being in this room caring today, actually caring about what happens with our life…what…what are things that we can do to combat apathy in so many people that we encounter every day?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Well, what people most want–and it’s an old argument, goes way back to Greek philosophy.  What people really want is happiness.  I mean it’s the one thing that we…we try to get for its own sake, right?  Like we get on a bus to go somewhere, we’re buying a car to drive something, but happiness we don’t do for something else.  We do it for itself.  The most motivating thing in the world is joy.  It’s happiness.  It’s enthusiasm and that is infectious.  Now, not everybody want to be happy.  Some people look at a happy person and they get all kind of…you know, that bad Iran characters, you know, just they hate it or whatever, right?  But for those people who really do like being happy and feel inspired at joy, I believe that the equation is something like this, right?  Reason equals virtue equals happiness.  Right, you have to think and you have to non-contradictory ideas.  You have to have rational ideas.  You have to put those into practice as best you can and nobody’s perfect, but you have to do that and what comes out the other end is happiness and the best way to get people I think interested in philosophy is to live your values as rationally, as consistently, as joyfully as possible and then people will see, dang, she’s happy, right?  And if you’re happy, people want to know like if you live in a world of really overweight people and you’re relatively slender, some people will go…I hate those thin people, right?  But some people will go, I like some of that and they’ll say how did she get–like if you want sell people a diet, and so if you want to get people interested in…in reason and evidence and philosophy and thinking, you have to live the values to the point where you’ve become really happy yourself and then people will be interested in how you get there and I think that’s how cause you know people don’t like the Fed, and we’ll get rid of the Fed and we’ll, you know, if you have currency and that’s stuff very interesting.  It’s fascinating, right, but it’s not what people get up in the morning really wanting to do is to study the Fed or get up and read a book by Thomas Woods or Ron Paul or whatever.  Great though they are and interesting though they are, what they want is to be happy, to be connected, to be in love, to be enthusiastic, to be joyful about their lives.  The more you live your rational values, the happier you will become and then for those people who want to be happy, who still have that spark of enthusiasm to want to go out and get that joy in life, they’ll want to know how you did it and you’ll say, “Stef told me.”  No, you’ll say…you’ll say, “I…I’ve been thinking.  I’ve been really thinking and reading and I’ve lived my values and these are the values that I live and I consistently apply them and that results in happiness.”  And that’s I think the best thing we can do is be happy and enthusiastic to show people empirically what the results of rational and happy values are and those who want to become happy will really want to do that.  I know that’s a real hippy-dippy answer in a way, but does that make any sense at all?

 

Audience Member:  Yeah, it makes a lot of sense actually.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  And we can control that.

 

Audience Member:  …advertisement.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Yeah, you know, I can’t…I can’t control whether there’s a Fed or not, but I can control whether I live my own values consistently and if I’m not happy, I should look back and say, “Okay, well, what did I do that…what part of my wife’s commandments did I disobey that I’ve ended up not happy?  Why am I cold?  I didn’t take a jacket when she tells me to.”  Right, but you want to be happy and enthused–not fake, you know?  You know, like some of those damn Christian pictures with the family that looks like…you know, but genuinely happy and people will really become interested and then if you talk about things like the Fed or the economy, Austrian stuff, this, that and the other, people will say, “Well, she’s happy and that’s good.  So other things she say have credibility.”  But a lot of libertarians are like…they’re like golem.  you know, they are like…you know, evil, evil and so people are like, “Well, they might be right, but…but I don’t want to be that.”  Right, so…so…so I think you want to try and be a person that people have…you have something of real value to offer called happiness and…and…and then they will be interested in how you got there and that’s I think the best way to…to…I certainly am doing a lot better since I really began to live my values which took entirely too long.  Then before where I was right, but only in a really abstract way.  You want to really personify I think rational happiness and then people will want to get there, because you can control that.  You can’t control the Fed, right?

 

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Oh, that makes me so happy.  Now, I’m more right.  You haven’t had your question yet.  That was the other guy right?

 

Audience Member:  Hi, Stef.  I had a question for you I think…I had a question.  I think somebody asked you about the American Experiment.  You said it was a great stride philosophically for the founders to set up this republic or democracy or whatever.  I know someone else also mentioned Han Copy [phonetic] [03:37:38] he also has another book called Democracy, The God that Failed.  I don’t know if you read it or not.  His basically–he points out that most people regard democracy as a procession up the ladder of civilization like a good thing, whereas you would argue that monarchy had meaning redeeming qualities over democracy such as…like in democracy there is every war is total war.  People say we’re invading Iraq.  We’re not.  People are calling themselves [indiscernible] [03:38:06].  Monarchy doesn’t have a case.  People would like go up to the castles walls and watch the people battling and have popcorn and things like that and…I was just wondering…what you thought about this.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  The idea that a monarchy is they own the country right?  So democracy nobody owns anything and everybody can prey on everyone now, but in a monarchy, the aristocratic families, they actually own the peasants, they own the land and so they have an investment in continuing that value which in democracy that you just don’t have and…and the other point, which in case you didn’t hear is that in a democracy, the war is total war, right?  In the aristocracy it was like a couple hundred inbred idiots whacking each other with swords while everybody sat around and watched.  War…wars were you’d never have more than a couple of thousand people, but it was the democracies that started the ten million plus genocide of the first world war and the forty million plus of the second world war.  So I mean I think those are great arguments.  The problem that I have with that, and I’m not claiming to be any expert on…on…his argument, but the problem I have with that is that it certainly is true that…war has become total, but I would argue it’s more a function of technology than democracy versus aristocracy.  I mean if you had bombs and planes and machines guns and this, that and the other in the 15th century, they would have just borrowed and done that and killed more people that way.  I think the other problem that that argument ahs is that when the aristocracy did not…almost inevitably did not raise the wealth of the average serf.  I mean you look from, you know, the fall of Rome, sort of 400-500 AD till…you know, 1400 AD, you know, you got–that’s all aristocracy.  No democracies in Europe at all there, and living standard are, you know, a complete catastrophe that whole time period.  When you do start to get some of the liberalization of the economy which went to some degree hand in hand with democracy, what happened was you started to see a rise in living standards, because the serfs are affixed to the land like a tree, right?  Whereas workers can move around and there’s some competition for them.  So living standards under a democracy generally tend to go up and…living standards under a monarchy tend to be flat, if not declining.  So is it the additional wealth of democracy that makes it possible to wage more total war?  So is it the technology that comes out of the free market that comes from a democracy?  I think that’s arguable, but I don’t think–obviously, he’s not saying that monarchy is the solution.  He’s saying that there is a kind of private ownership, but I don’t it translates to any benefits for those in the middle or the bottom which in democracy it tends to if that makes any sense.

 

Audience Member:  I think that just might be a function of there happens not to be any free markets under anarchy–not anarchy, but monarchy sorry, but…if there were free markets under monarchy, I could–I mean I think Hop would argue that we would be better off cause kings also have less incentives to tax, cause they don’t want to have rebellion cause it’s really easy to just kill a king, you know, and set a new one.  Right, I mean if someone wanted to kill Obama they wouldn’t accomplish anything, because then Biden would just move right in and he doesn’t, you know, but…I also wanted to add–sorry, I also wanted to add that…even if they did have, you know, like…air jets and things like that and weapons of mass destruction, the kings had more of an incentive not to involve the populous, because the populous did according to Hop anyway, you know, they viewed the king as more something they had to tolerate and not some, you know, the king had his own business.  He took care of his own affairs and things like that and they just kind of paid their due or whatever.  I mean so I’m not sure what you have to say about that.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  One of the beautiful things about being an anarchistic is you can’t answer questions like how should things be funded, right?  With all due respect to Michael, it was not a clear answer right?  Well, it is forced, but you don’t actually have to pay them because I’ll cover the guy who can’t right?  So you don’t end up in that kind of muddy stuff.  The other thing you don’t have to do as an anarchist, is you don’t have to say which of these lesser of two evils would you prefer, right?  Democracy or monarchy.  Which is better?  It’s like, well, they both suck.  They may suck in different ways to different degrees, but as an anarchist, you just have to say I don’t want to be shot either kneecap, thank you very much.  If you make me chose, I guess I’ll chose one or the other based on whatever criteria I prefer.  You know, do I want to live the life of a drudge, you know, like the Monty Python guy?  You know, he must be a king, he hasn’t got shit all over him, right?  You want to live the life of that drudgy slave but have a less of a chance of being killed in a war or do you maybe want to have a chance for a better life with an increased income, with a greater chance of being killed in a world war?  Those are like…I’d love to have a society where neither of those choices exist and that really is the state of society in my opinion.  So I think they are interesting questions, but you know, to me that’s like which shit pile do you want to wallow in?  I say let’s go forward where we don’t have them and not worry about which one was better or worse under which circumstances, but I think they are very interesting theoretical arguments for sure.

 

Audience Member:  Yes, hello, check, okay.  Hi.  My question has to do with for lack of a better term, international relations and how…an anarchist territory can’t be the world initially, it has to be part of some land mass and that there’s going to be disagreeing peoples at some kind of a porous border that disagree and they’re going to…like let’s just say it was the territory of America…that there would be some point where people said, “Oh, I’d rather be part of the nation of Canada or I’d rather be part of the nation of Mexico.”  For whatever reason–

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Sorry, in which country is anarchist in this?

 

Audience Member:  America.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  America is anarchistic.  Okay, no, that’s fine.  I’ll come there.  I’ll come here if that’s the case.  Okay.

 

Audience Member:  So…my question is…also in relation to that like how the United Nations or other countries will sometimes they say don’t legitimately recognize a nation like if they have a new government and they say, “Oh, we don’t recognize that nation.  We aren’t trading with them.”  What I was wondering is, obviously there isn’t a government so if people were trying to trade internationally, they would be trading with private companies or individuals in that there wouldn’t be any governments trading–or would governments outside this territory trade with individuals or–

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Well, remember governments–sorry, governments don’t trade with anyone just to be precise, right?  It’s companies that trade with other companies and so–

 

Audience Member:  Yeah, so would that dynamic and stuff like…how would an anarchist country…deal with like if governments that passed laws that said private companies can’t do business with an anarchist nation or like all these kind of questions.  I’m new to this stuff so I have explored it.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Yeah, no, that’s a great question.  There’s an old economic argument maybe you’ve heard of, maybe you haven’t which is to say America and Japan, right?  It’s a question of do we, you know, you always see trade wars–tariff wars right?  So you’re Japan and I’m America and you say, “You can’t import wheat.”  I can’t export wheat to Japan and then I say, “Well, you can’t export rice to America.”  Right, and we get into this escalating war.  It’s completely ridiculous right?  And I’ll give you an example.  Let’s say, I as America, come up with a cure for cancer and you as Japan come up with a cure for AIDS, right?  And you say, “America you can’t sell your cure for cancer in Japan.”  And then would it be rational for me to say, “It’s better for my population who already have this access to this cure for cancer, if I block you from selling your cure for AIDs to my population.” 

 

It would not be adventitious right?  So the fact that one country is imposing trade barriers on another country in no way, shape or form implies that that country should then retaliate.  It just means that unfortunately, the people who want to sell wheat to you are kind of out, they have to sell it somewhere else or switch crops or something and so if a foreign government says you can’t export your stuff–no government is going to say reasonably–they’re going to say to their own citizens, you can’t sell to the anarchy country, because how would they know in a way right?  I mean there’s no border that we would take care of as an anarchy country and so…you would lose out to some degree not being able to trade into a status society, but you would still be way better off letting the status society trade with you and just trade internally for the things that you weren’t allowed to export.  It would still be vastly beneficial to the anarchy society, but not reliant on the foreign government to allow us to trade outside.  I mean we still get the advantage of them trading with us.  If that makes any sense.  The last question maybe or are we completely…did we completely run dry?  Oh, does the camera person have a question?  Why is your forehead so shiny?

 

Audience Member:  I just have a…a general question I guess.  In your definition, what is an anarchist?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  A bad person, right.  Evil.  Again, I get the reptile head right?  Well, an anarchist, obviously there’s many, many different definitions of it.  That’s why I sort of said the anarchocapitalist variety.  I certainly–and I think the basic requirements of an anarchist is to recognize the legitimatacy of the state and I think that most anarchists would not recognize the…the political or moral legitimaticy of the state.  Anarchists certainly do…respect authority.  As Buchan said and somebody has this on my forum, he said, “What does it mean to say I reject all authority when it comes to dealing with a shoemaker?  I respect his authority with regard to the shoes.”  So it’s not a rejection of authority, it is a rejection of the moral authority of organizational violence.  Now, there’s a lot of complicated nonsense about anarchy like people say, “Well, we shouldn’t have property, and you know, we’re an anarchosocialist and so on.”  I don’t like any of that stuff fundamentally, because it seems to me that if you want to be an anarchosocialist, an anarchocapitalist is your best friend, because you don’t have to exercise property rights.  It’s optional, right?  If somebody steals my car, I don’t even have to report it.  I can just say, “Hey, it went to the collective good and who ever needs it can use it and fantastic.”  In a free society, if you want to set up some hippy-dippy, flesh pit, bong smoking whatever house of infinite carnal knowledge, you can do all of that.  You can all get together and have group hugs and spread whatever bacteria you want back and forth, but you can have that collective ownership.  You cannot exercise property rights.  You can collectively work the land.  You can, you know, raise naked children, whatever you want, right?  And there’s no way that free society, I mean maybe you should get involved with the protection of children maybe, but it is not going to say you have to exercise your property rights.  An anarchosocialist society to me could only exist if it specifically opposes the exercise of property rights.  Now, what agency is going to propose–is going to oppose the exercise of property rights?  It would have to be an agency that has some sort of compulsion, right, i.e.  I want to keep this, no, you can’t, because you’re not allowed to keep anything, right?  And so you simply have a big contradiction there, right, because you have to have–you’re suppose to have no authority, but in order to enforce nobody exercising property rights, you have to have some authority. 

 

So I think that whole system just doesn’t work at all.  I think one of the reasons why anarchosocialists don’t like anarchocapitalism is that they know in a free society, very few people are going to end up in their hippy-dippy, you know, commune farm nonsense right?  Cause people are going to go like, “Man, I got to get something done with my life.  I got to go do something and be in society and maybe gather together some capital and air conditioning is nice and I like my food irradiated perhaps.  I like fluoride, I like to be able to visit a dentist.”  Like all those kinds of things right?  Like the second generation Amish, you know, it thins out a little bit and I think they know that if they’re in a free society and they have to in a sense compete with a private property society, that they’re just not going to be able to sustain themselves and that’s why I think they want to create this…you know, the whole country is a hippy commune or whatever, and I’m being a little disrespectful to the views, but I think that’s the major differences.  You have to reject the institutional authority of violence and after that, I would say you have to logically sustain property rights, but not everyone agrees.  Alright.  We can do two more.

 

Moderator:  Okay.  Two more, okay, two more questions.  Coming all the way over here.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Oh, we said two.  You can’t see behind can you?  No, no, sorry.  We’re going to take this lady’s.  Just teasing you, go, okay, no go.  Sorry, go ahead.  No, no, not you.  Look it’s chaos, it’s anarchy right now.

 

Audience Member:  Just curious, in an anarchist society, how would you think to deal with child abuse?  I mean a child obviously can’t go to an independent agency and say my, you know, my rights are being taken away from me by my parents.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Right.  No, I mean that’s–I think that really is and we always wait to the end to be essential questions, right?  Because you cannot have a peaceful and free society where a significant proportion of children are mistreated and unfortunately, a significant proportion of children are mistreated even in the current society and we have one of the more enlightened societies with regards to the protection of children.  So you simply can’t have a free society if a lot of people are coming in are hyper aggressive, damaged, unable to concentrate and so on from difficult households.  I think that…parents are going to want to have legal protections for their children’s actions.  I think that’s going to be pretty basic right?  Cause if your child goes and I don’t know, throws a rock through someone’s window, you’re going to want to have some kind of protection.  You’re also going to need to have medical…insurance or some kind of medical protection for your child.  If you send your child to school, which most people will in a free society cause school–I mean homeschooling is a desperate measure based on how bad the schools are, right?  But in a free society, schools will be incredibly well tuned towards the maximum capacity of teaching children.  So if you want to go to school, you’re going to need to have some sort of immuno protection for your child, immunizations, whatever it is it’s going to be.  So children won’t make the contracts themselves, but children cannot escape–parents can’t escape the necessity of having their children in some kind of social net of…of…of contracts and obligations. 

 

Now, DROs are going to want to minimize as much as possible, how expensive it’s going to be to insure children, right?  Like everyone right?  Like if you’re a nonsmoker, you get better rates from the insurance company and so DROs are going to say, “Look, if you want to save as much as humanly possible on your child’s insurance which you’re going to need to have your children function in society.  We’ve done all the research, we’ve compared all the possible parenting methods, you know, pay us $200 for a parenting class or $2000 for a parenting class and you will save, you know, $300 a month on your child’s insurance, because we know that people who parent this, this, this, and this way and we’ve got the evidence and it’s empirical and it’s scientific and it’s proven, that this is the best way to parent children so that they’re peaceful, they’re nonviolent, they’re not, you know, poking other kids with sticks and so on and they’re less stressful, they’re less likely to get sick and so on.” 

 

And so you have agency which is the state which has nothing but status, especially no interest in protecting the rights of children other than of course some dedicated individuals like the super heroes of the child service agency, but with DROs who want to…to…to make it as cheap as humanly possible to insure the health and safety of children, they’re going to do the research to figure out what kind of parenting best keeps children peaceful and best allows them to accelerate their education, gives them the best social schools, produces the fewest bullies and so on, and so they will offer huge incentives for parents to get involved in the styles of parenting that are most effective and they may be different for different cultures and different for different types of children and so on, but there will be very, very strong efforts minimize the cost–the destructive cost children have in society, because of course children who go wrong, I mean not only are very expensive when they’re young, but I mean the social cost is huge.  Now, at the moment it’s borne by tax payers who can’t do anything about it, but you can also say as a DRO, you know, when your kid turns eighteen, if you followed this particular plan, we will also insure them at half price and so it’s a huge net savings.  Is it going to be perfect?  Of course not, there’s going to be people living the woods who beat their kids and that’s terrible, but you know, we’re trying to put a system in place where things can be as productive and positive as possible and I think–that’s a real rough sketch.  There’s more about that in the book, but does that make any sense about how I think it could be more proactively handled?

 

Audience Member:  Yeah, but are you saying then that you would force people to get insurance for their children?

 

Stefan Molyneux:  No, no, no.  It’s not forcing.

 

Audience Member:  Okay.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  It’s not forced, right?  Like so for instance, I mean I know there’s debate about immunizations, but we got Isabella immunized and we want to send her to a private school because public schools suck and I’m not going to try to reinvent educating children.  At least–I mean some people do and I just don’t think it’s right for me, and they have said, “You know, we want her immunization records in order to attend–when she comes to attend the school.”  They’re not forcing me to get her immunized, but if I want to send her there, then I have to get her immunized and they have every right to request that, right?  So, nobody’s forcing parents to do anything, right, but what they are saying is that if you want us to extend protection to your child for damage, for health care, for whatever, then you need to–then you can pay full price and you don’t have to take any parenting courses, right, but if you want to save half price or 75% then…take these parenting courses and it will be a good investment for you.  It’s like, you know, go for your driver’s license, if you’ve taken particular courses, you can get reductions on your insurance and if you haven’t pay full price.  So it’s not forcing anyone.  There’s just valences of incentives if that makes sense.  I think there was…there was a gentleman at the back and then maybe–he seemed quite eager.  That was a great question though by the way.  I’m sorry.  Very important.

 

Audience Member:  I have a…one big question to ask.  I don’t quite understand how you would be able to maintain anarchy, because I kind of really think that you’d always have your…your getting back to Michael Corelone [phonetic] [03:56:40] idea that there will be groups that will pop up and they will try to control other groups of people violently and these groups can spread, they can get funding from other countries…they could take on–they can get…they can be self sufficient, have their own corporations and just expand and be a government that, you know, that minimalistic government that, you know, Michael was talking about.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Well…sorry, were you here?  Cause this question came up once before.  Was it that my answer sucked for you or you weren’t here?  I mean either one is fine, I’m just wondering which one it was.

 

Audience Member:  I may have missed it…but I may have not understood, you know, your answer.  There was a question about, you know, what constitutes a government and I–maybe I didn’t quite get a clear answer to that…but I do–I totally can see how a group of people can come in and start a gang–a gang or just like how’s the government’s a gang itself.  They would start their…their own gang and try to control people.  You know, right now we have gangs because of, you know, drugs are illegal, but…but if drugs weren’t illegal, there would be no gangs, but there would still also be the…the trafficking of people in one way or the other making them work as serfs if you will.  How do you prevent, you know, this from happening.  You’re talking about these…these organizations, these insurance companies if you will…kind of…making you work in society in a particular way that’s constructive to everybody, but I also think that…at some point, if I do something bad and I get turned away from all these insurance companies, there’s always going to be another insurance company.  You know, I don’t care what you did in the past, you know, come on in, you know, you can order food here.

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Sure, now let me just take that last scenario.  I did answer the first one earlier.  You can look at the book and again you may not agree with everything I’m saying.  I’m sure you won’t, right, cause you’re a thinking person and I’m certainly not going to say I’ve got everything right, but let me just deal with that last point and then if you’re not satisfied with what’s in Practical Anarchy just give me a shout or, you know, come by the Sunday show and we’ll talk more.  So the issue and it’s a great, great, great point that you raise.  The issue is some guy gets kicked out of a DRO because he’s a total jerk or something, right?  He’s just a nasty guy that doesn’t keep his contract and so there’s going to be some other lower tier, you know, trailer park DRO who’s going to come forth and say, “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, right, I mean I’ll insure you no problem.”  And there will be that aspect of things for sure, but remember DROs are only valuable to the degree with which other DROs will work with the, right?  So I can print my own currency nobody cares right, because no…no store will accept it.  Right, I could come up with a credit card that one model railroad store in Nunivak accepts and nobody’s going to…cause it’s only useful in one store, you might as well use cash, right?  So…so…so it’s the interoperability of a cooperation of the DROs that makes it…that makes them valuable and so if I have some low rent DRO that sidles up to criminals and says, “I’ll represent you,” no other DRO was going to want to business with me, why?  Cause there’s no point having the punishment called ostracism if you then cooperate with the DROs who pick the ostracized people.  Then it’s not punishment at all and I would not be able to sell that to my customers saying, “Don’t worry ostracize people who…who don’t…fulfill their contracts and then now do it.”  People would just stop using me as a DRO and I would go out of business.  So I have to have some standards of behavior and interoperability and all DROs would have the same incentive and so if you have some DRO that will pick up criminals or whatever and try to insure them, the problem is no other DROs will deal with them and so they’re kind of useful and they would just have to be enormously expensive, because no other DROs–so they would have to duplicate everything that all the other DROs were doing.  So I don’t see how that could practically work just because you have to have that interoperability for DROs to work.  I have to be able to take my DRO money from…Philadelphia and go to Scranton or to Columbus or whatever and use it there too.  If those DROs don’t recognize that DRO, it’s not really worth anything to me, right?  So there has to be this interoperability for them to be a value at all and those criminals who…who…who are ostracized, the DROs who pick them up will themselves be ostracized and therefore won’t have any value to the people that they’re representing.  Does that make any sense?  It is a good answer.  One, yay!

 

 

Stefan Molyneux:  I did my personal best today.  One good answer, beautiful.  I should stop now.  Oh, wait you had one more.  Here, I’ll just give you the mic.

 

Speaker 1:  Thank you…personally, I’d like to say your patience for our questions or sometimes not questions is awesome.  So as an anarchist trying to live my principles…sometimes I find it overwhelm…I feel overwhelmed by the fact I’m living in a world that’s so embedded with bedizen and our economic and social realms and here…just turned college grad and trying to move out of the house and…having a trouble getting a job, the only job I could get was a for a company that has lots of government contracts and I mean I’m trying to switch so an environment that’s better suited for me, et cetera, et cetera.  Sometimes I feel a little guilty about this company that I work for.  What advice do you offer for…how you draw the line or for what you find acceptable or what you resist?  Thank you.

 

Speaker 1:  That’s good.  An easy question at the end.  That’s great.  Young anarchist.  Oh, you’re so screwed.  Wait until you can get a podcast and then come out as an anarchist.  No, I’m kidding.  No, that’s a great question.  So the question is you graduated from school, look I took government contracts when I was an entrepreneur and I was already a staunch objectivitist and anarchist and this and that.  So…you did not create the world that you live it.  Right, obviously if you’d had the choice, you would not had the status creditations infesting and infecting the society that you live in.  You have to make your way in the world as it is, right?  We can’t live in the future, we can’t crawl into the books of an anarchic blueprint and live there.  Fun though as it would be to try. 

 

Right, so you have inherited the world from people who unfortunately just have not done the work necessary to clarify and work to eliminate the violence that is inherent in the society that we live in.  That’s not your fault.  Obviously, right, it’s not your fault that you have inherited this society where you can’t be a purist right?  I can’t–I mean people come to me and they say you’re so…and you against the government and you have a podcast.  No, you partnered with the Department of Defense in ’60s. 

 

Yeah, okay, so what?  I’m suppose to just like not breathe air because…you know, the government defined the standards for air conditioning or something?  I’m not going to be that kind of purist, because that is to take on the sins of the whole world and say, “I’m completely responsible for them and I can’t breathe and I can’t live and I can’t eat food, because government farmers–or because farmers get government subsidies and I can’t drive on the road because the government has produced the road and the busses and stuff.”  Like you can’t–you couldn’t do anything.  Anything in life and that to me…that can’t be right. 

 

You know, like I’m not sure exactly all the reasonings why, but just standing there not consuming oxygen until you die can’t be the only way to live morally in society.  That’s self destruct–and what kind of world would that leave to people if we don’t have enough to eat and we don’t have a way of getting access to the internet or buying books, of learning, of reaching out to other people, of…of washing, you know?  I’m an anarchist, you know, I haven’t bathed in four months because the government supplies the water.  It’s like…you could be right, but I don’t want to find out right?  No, you got to shave, you got to, you know, whatever right?  I mean you’ve got to live in…in…in the society that you find yourself in.  Like a, you know, if we’re born doctors and it’s a time of plaque, we just do what we can.  I mean, yeah, we risk–we take risks and…and…and so on. 

 

I would say very much this is what I found with my professional life, I made lots of mistakes this way and hopefully a few of my scars will give you some useful tips.  I would not…I would not bring…political, voluntary anarchism into my conversations about government contracts at work.  It’s just…you can do it, right, but…you know…it’s going to be really, really tough and I think that that’s not productive.  Like I think you need to eat, you need to educate yourself, you need to live a happy life within the confines of the society that you live in. 

 

I think that you need to dedicate yourself not to the sort of fruitless opposition of abstract thing that you can’t control, but really focusing on living as many of your values as possible within your own sphere of influence, right?  Within your own personal relationships.  Professional relationships, you’re not paid to be an anarchist at work, right?  You are paid to be…alright, so you do help desk at work, fantastic.  So they’re paying you for help desk.  Anarchy not translated to help desk.  So…it’s not like now that I’ve solved your software problem, let me tell you about the society that you live in–there’s another guy in the room.  Like…but they’re paying you–that was my first podcast, I never published it. 

 

But they’re paying you for your help desk right?  So you provide the help desk service and they’re not paying you for anarchism.  If you can find a job per tell that’s advertising about anarchism, fantastic, go to town.  Right?  It’s a hard road, but it’s well worth it if you can work towards that, but be professional in your job and do that which you’re paid for, right?  I mean if my doctor was against the healthcare system, I’d still want them to write me a prescription, right?  I don’t want them to lecture me about the healthcare system and send me out with my infection intact right?  I want them to do their job and their job is not to talk to me about anarchism and neither is your job at work…yeah, some of your paycheck is going to come from government, but there’s no way to escape that unless you want to go live buried out in the woods. 

 

 In which case we abandon the world to the bad people, right?  If all the good people say, well, I have to be so pure that I can’t function in society, we just leave the future, the children and the world to the worst people in the world who don’t give a crap about integrity and virtue, right?  So we fight the tough, ambiguous fight. 

 

There’s a certain amount of what you can live with that no one can tell you right?  I mean there maybe some government contract that comes up where you’re just like oh, man, I can’t do it and no one can tell you whether or when that occurs and I don’t think there’s any objective line, I really don’t.  Okay, maybe…front line culture…I don’t know, right?  But…but…you just have to be sensitive to how your processing stuff.  Right, there’s only a certain amount of stuff we can watch before we just go…you know, you just can’t do it anymore, right?  But I would certainly not create some abstract rule that says I can’t do any job whether it’s government money ever involved cause then you can’t have any job at all, right?  If you’re a whaler, some guy might be an IRS agent, but you don’t know.  You then become paranoid, right? 

 

So I wouldn’t…I would say it’s more of a guy sense and a gut feel, but I think the thing–the thing as I was saying to the lady before…who didn’t leave, but nats?  Was that right?  No, I’m just kidding.  Sorry, just looked like you were, “Huh?”  But so as I was saying before, you know, don’t…don’t let the evils of the world and institutionalized violence of society bring down your spirit, right?  Because it is in the indomitable will and joy of our spirit that we are going to lead human beings to a higher place. 

 

You know, if we’re going to be those kind of lighthouse leaders who like help people in from the far seas of state-ism, we have to have that kind of joyful, happy integrity.  Don’t let the evils that have accumulated through history, that you’re not all responsible for, crack and break down your joyful spirit and your pursuit of a better world and an elevated species, right?  That stuff doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t matter that bad people made shitty decisions in the past, right?  That doesn’t cling to us.  That doesn’t cling to our souls.  We stand as tall and as firm and as proud as we can without taking responsibility for the sins of the past, right?  State-ism is Catholicism, right?  You just have to reject it.  There’s no original sin that way, right? 

 

We struggle to do the very best that we can for the sake of joy not for the sake of changing the world, because you can’t change the world without joy.  You aim at changing the world, you get frustrated and miserable and don’t change anything except your own level of happiness for the worst, right?  So I would stand tall with the joy and integrity of…of the true and the virtue that you have.  Don’t let the slings and crap of state-ism that you didn’t event and not responsible for stick to you.  Be sensitive to what you can take emotionally and be aware of where it just becomes too unpleasant and, you know, work to figure out that within yourself and change what you need to be, but the whole purpose of…of evil is to make good people feel guilty for breathing, right, and I just don’t think we have to feel that way at all.  We have an incredible gift to bring to the world, the gift of truth and of reason and of evidence and of virtue and of happiness and of peace, right?  And we have the key that unlocks a really golden and beautiful future and if we feel stained by the sins of the past to the point where we become ashamed of being the most reasonable and I believe the most virtuous people around, we’re just surrendering to the darkness a light that we just don’t have to.  So I hope that gives you some…sense of at least how I approach it and that was a great, great question. 

 

Speaker 2:  Alright, thank you very much, Stefan, for coming out here to Philadelphia.  We greatly appreciate it.

 

 

Stefan Molyneux:  Thank you.

 

Speaker 2:  Just another reminder, thank you everyone for coming and also, just please, please if you can donate I really ask that you would…I appreciate it and thanks for coming.