0:10 - Introduction to ANCAP Criticisms
14:50 - The Nature of Property Ownership
18:50 - Gender Equality and Economic Impact
33:37 - Enforcing Rules Without Authority
39:04 - The Flaws of Government Education
41:17 - The Problem of Consent in ANCAP
50:58 - The Reality of Capitalist Society
This lecture by Stefan Molyneux examines criticisms of anarcho-capitalism (ANCAP), especially regarding the relationship between property and state power. Molyneux starts by highlighting a common criticism from traditional anarchists, which posits that abolishing the state while retaining property rights essentially privatizes the state itself. He deconstructs this idea by asserting that the state embodies coercion, asserting any privatization that retains coercive elements inherently contradicts the principles of individual liberty.
Delving deeper, Molyneux explores the concept of public versus private goods, explaining how privatization often invokes fears of inaccessibility. He challenges the notion that transitioning public parks to private ownership equates to losing access. Instead, he argues that privatization can lead to better maintenance and community involvement, provided that individuals take responsibility for their access rather than rely on the inefficiencies associated with public funding.
A significant portion of the lecture addresses the moral implications of public goods funded through coercion. Molyneux posits that public parks, while ostensibly free to the public, end up being subsidized by taxpayers, rendering them expensive in the long run. He elaborates on the systemic issues of waste and corruption associated with state funding that can complicate access to these resources, ultimately leading to deterioration or misuse. He suggests that private ownership incentivizes better care and accountability, enhancing the overall quality of natural resources and community spaces.
As Molyneux discusses the enforcement of property rights within an anarcho-capitalist framework, he confronts the criticism that individuals might end up in a mini-tyranny if property owners establish their own policing and courts. He dismisses this concern, arguing that the need for protective services arises from a mutual desire for security rather than a tyrannical impulse. Moreover, he emphasizes that individuals in an ANCAP society have opportunities to create economic freedom through entrepreneurial endeavors, challenging the idea that there is a permanent divide between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
The lecture also critiques the feminist economic agenda for equality of outcomes, suggesting that forced equalization can lead to negative socio-economic consequences. Molyneux draws parallels between historical labor shortages and wage dynamics while examining the implications of mediating gender-based pay disputes through state intervention. He posits that the complexities of human relationships cannot be resolved through coercive means but rather through voluntary and consensual arrangements.
Towards the conclusion, Molyneux responds to common questions regarding dissent and conflict resolution within an anarcho-capitalist society. He presents historical examples of how communities enforce informal rules without formal authorities, thus making a case for ostracism as a powerful social tool for upholding moral standards. By recalling personal anecdotes from his childhood, he asserts the ability of individuals to self-regulate and uphold fairness without the need for coercive bodies, thus reinforcing the viability of governance based on consent and voluntary participation.
Ultimately, Molyneux persists that the dichotomy of state versus market is unnecessarily constraining and fails to capture the potential of a truly voluntary society. He encourages listeners to reassess the assumptions surrounding cooperation, property, and governance, advocating for a future where personal responsibility and moral principles take precedence in organizing societal structures.
[0:00] Righty, righty, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain, and this is an old Reddit, Arsk Philosophy, Arsk, Arsk Philosophy from 10 years ago.
[0:11] Interesting to see these criticisms, I appreciate them. One of the main criticisms of ANCAPS, this is anarcho-capitalism, this is a private property stateless society. One of the main criticisms of ANCAPS from a standard anarchist perspective is simply their views on property. Getting rid of the state apparatus without getting rid of property, simply speaking, is privatizing the state. Yeah, so we hear this a lot. Privatizing the state is a contradiction in terms. It's like turning rape into lovemaking. Right? It doesn't make any sense. Privatizing the state. The state initiates the use of force and controls your property pretty much at will and at whim. So privatizing the state is, privatizing is one of these things where, you know, it's public versus private goods. So when people talk about private goods, they think that it's inaccessible to them. When they talk about public goods, they think that those goods are accessible to them, right?
[1:19] And that's not really the case. So you say privatize. Oh, the road is going to be privatized. Well, formally, I could just go on the road and use the road and everything would be fine. Now, if it's privatized, I cannot get on the road. I cannot have access to the road. I cannot use the road. So when the word privatizing comes in, what most people perceive or experience or fantasize is that something will now be inaccessible to them. Formerly it was free and available and now it is inaccessible to them.
[2:00] So, privatizing the state. The state initiates the use of force. Private property respects the non-aggression principle and, of course, the principle of property rights. So, I sort of want to push back on this idea that if something's privatized, you lose access to it. If it's a public good, you have access. It's like a park, right? You lose access to a park if it's privatized because now you have to pay to access the park. Before, you could just go into the park, you go to the park, and now you see it's privatized and therefore you don't have access to the park. Now, I don't see that as true except as a snapshot. So this is what happens when people want to oppose a particular moral standard or moral progress or moral argument or idea. They just freeze it in time. It's the easiest thing in the world. Well, first they avoid principles. Number one, they avoid principles. and number two, they freeze the moral situation in time.
[3:15] So when we talk about a public park being privatized, what people do is they avoid principles. In other words, a public park is funded by coercion, right? A public park is funded by coercion. So they don't talk about the coercion, right? They don't talk about any of that. they don't talk about the coercion they simply say it is no longer available to the public it's been privatized so they avoid the principles the morality is it funded by coercion or not, and they also freeze the situation in time they freeze the situation in time and what that means is, there's no progress or process by which things develop over time. So if the government assigned husbands and wives to each other and forced people to get married, and then we said, well, we're not going to do that. We're going to let people choose themselves. Would people say, I no longer have access to husbands or wives? Well, first of all, you want access to love, not just to husbands and wives, right? And you're not going to get that with assigned marriages as much. And secondly...
[4:42] You will still have access, you'll just have to earn it.
[4:47] So with parks, let's just say a park in the city, right? It's a public park, which means it's funded through coercion, and it gets privatized and people feel, oh my gosh, I'm losing access to it. It's not true at all.
[5:02] Because if people use the park, then they care about having access to it. Let's say you go and have your picnic at the park, you go play baseball at the park, you walk around at the park, you have your dates at the park, you go feed the ducks at the pond, whatever. So if you want to have access to the park, then you're going to have to pay for it directly. And what's going to happen is, well, of course, you no longer have all the people who don't go to the park subsidize again. So let's say the park costs $5 million a year to run and maintain and groom or whatever it is. right? So all of the people in the city, let's say it's a city, a million people paying their taxes. So you have everybody paying $5. So you have a heavily subsidized park. So if you are going to go and use that park, then you'll actually have to pay for it yourself. You actually have to pay for the park yourself and you find out whether it's actually valuable. Now, the problem of course is that when the government pays for things, those things tend to get enormously expensive. Because there's padding, there's corruption, there's all kinds of nonsense that goes on, grift, theft, even sometimes. So if the government's going to pay for the park, the park is going to be ridiculously expensive, and the cost is going to be borne by the taxpayers in the city.
[6:32] And if you go to the park, it's, quote, free. But it's not, of course, because you're paying far more in taxes than you would a mere park entrance fee. So that's number one. It's only accessible to you because you're being taxed. And with taxation comes the inevitable problem of debt, right? Because the government wants to give people the illusion that it's providing value. And the only way it does that is to borrow or print money. Local governments can't print money, but they can sure issue bonds and they can borrow. So if you look at the total cost of the park, including the borrowing, the debt, then it's much more expensive. So you have the illusion of access to the park that's, quote, free because the government is forcing everyone to pay for it in a horribly inefficient manner. So you're losing far more money than you would be gaining. I mean, there's an old joke about Toronto. There are two seasons, winter and construction.
[7:33] And I mean, there's an area not too far from me where the construction has now been going on at a fairly major intersection for five years or so. And who knows? Who knows when it's going to be done? It'll be done. I don't know where the money runs out or they run out of excuses or something like that. So the privatized aspect of things shows up in direct cost that is far less than the cost of taxation and debt and corruption. Now, so they remove the principles and they freeze things in time. Now, what happens to parks in the long run? Well, parks in the long run get progressively worse. Homeless people show up, drug dealers show up, people having sex in the bushes, you've got condoms, needles, drug addicts, like they just get progressively worse. And then you have to chase people.
[8:38] Out of the park, right? This is the case with public toilets. There used to be, you'd have to, there was an old joke, because you used to have to put a dime into the stall in order to get into the bathroom, right? And there was an old joke or an old little poem. Here I sit, broken-hearted, paid a dime and only farted. Yesterday I took a chance, saved my dime, and crapped my pants. And of course this was considered disparate impact on the poor and therefore all of the washrooms were made free which meant you had people like George Michael in them, right? And drug addicts and all that. So it's not. It's not that you get endless free access to parks if they're public. You violate moral principles. It costs you far more in the long run and of course then what happens is, you have to police the parks you have to chase away all of the problematic people who you don't necessarily want your kids playing around.
[9:47] So entrance fee is automatic security that doesn't mean you don't need any security but you need much less security if anyone can wander in and use the park and everyone's been to, parks with a bunch of homeless people right and uh it can be uh unsettling dangerous right i mean especially if they're drinking or using drugs and so on, which often they are.
[10:10] So privatizing the state, people think, oh my gosh, it's free and I'm going to no longer have access to it, or it's free and I'm going to have to pay for it. But you lose access to the parks in the long run anyway, because they get overrun or the security requirements become so high that it becomes sort of prohibitively expensive. And of course, in the long run, and this may not be in the lifetime of the boomers, tragically, but the government runs out of money, and then they can't maintain the park, right? The government runs out of money, too much debt, and they have to cut the non-essential services and park maintenance and security is a non-essential service. So the park gets, there's no longer any profit in maintaining the park, it's just a cost. So people simply, the park gets abandoned, right? And then it gets overrun with problems. And so you're going to lose access to the park anyway. The only way to maintain access to things in the long run is to privatize them. So I just want to mention that. All right. So to go on and say, how is a large property owner going to protect their property?
[11:19] Hire some type of defense force that works as the police. The property owner also owns his own court and jail. So they can punish you swiftly. All right. I think that means listening to Taylor Swift. Essentially a mini tyrannical state or even a monarch if you own property. Right. So it's just real leap, right? Why would you want a tyrant? Right. So I mentioned this, of course, in my book, Practical Anarchy. But, of course, the first thing the property owners are going to be concerned about is that whatever agency they use to protect their property is going to become tyrannical and steal their property.
[12:02] That's their first concern. And whoever is going to sell property protection services to the population is going to have to deal with that issue, that concern. right? That concern. I mean, people are concerned when you have, if you have cameras in your house or something like that, people are concerned that the company that's managing the cameras or whatever, or gives you web access to the cameras is going to be spying on you. So there has to be all sorts of privacy standards and independent audits to make sure they're not spying on you and so on, right? So it's a funny kind of mindset to think that you as a customer are helpless. Maybe this is because people feel helpless with regards to their parents or their teachers or something like that, right? Okay, so basically say the property owner also owns his own court in jail. No, the property owner would not own his own court in jail any more than most people don't own their own email service or internet routing stations or something like that. That would be outsourced. All right.
[13:08] You really wouldn't have much freedom, rights, etc. if you didn't own property. Maybe if you had a benevolent landlord. But a landlord, as a renter, like if you, let's say you're renting, right? As a renter, you own property, sure you do, of course you do, yeah, you own property. I mean, you have to have some property to have something to exchange.
[13:34] With the landlord as rent, right? So you have to have some kind of income, you have to have some kind of coin or money or crypto or something like that, which you can then give to the landlord so that you can get, pay your rent, right? So owning property is a wide variety of things, right? I mean, obviously there's self-ownership, you own yourself, you own the effects of your actions, and you own your paycheck, and you own the labor that you sell in return for a paycheck, and you own the money you get for that. So lots of levels of property doesn't mean owning a building. It just means having the right to use the apartment, right? So the idea that property is only the means of production. Property is only owning the house, not renting the house. You can end up with far more property renting a house than buying a house. I mean, if, say, 2012, you had decided to take your down payment on a house, and invest it into Bitcoin, well, you'd be pretty wealthy by now, right? And you'd be able to buy, I don't know, 10 houses or something, right?
[14:50] So the deferral of gratification has a lot to do with.
[14:58] Owning property, right? So the idea that property is owning the means of production is not true. All right. So from here, a typical anarchist would argue that they don't want to get rid of the state, but they want to get rid of public government and do their own governing, whether fair or not. Their idea of consent and such has already been thoroughly criticized here. Ultimately, it fails to address, really, any hierarchical relationship such as sexism, racism, classism, etc., as well, mostly because the idea of absolute property rights is axiomatic to the ideology. Yeah. Well, I mean, a free market... Is realistic with regards to the strengths and weaknesses, let's just say, of men and women.
[15:47] So one of the problems, of course, that happens, which I've mentioned before, is if you aim for equality of outcomes between men and women, then you run out of people in about a century. And we're sort of on track for that. Certainly Japan is pretty close to on track for that, right? So if you say well women have to be paid the same as men even though in general women go into less, financially renumerative fields and they work a little less hard and they take time off to have kids and so i say well no no it's got to be equal then you end up vastly overpaying women to be in the workforce relative to what would happen in the free market and because you're vastly overpaying women, which means taking money from men and giving money to women as a whole, right, because you're vastly overpaying women at the expense of men, then men become broke and women are paid to stay in the workforce. If men are broke and women are paid to stay in the workforce, then men can't provide for their families. Women can't get the kind of financial security that they need in order to stay home with their children, and as a result, the birth rate collapses.
[17:08] So gender egalitarianism in economics is a warfare depopulation agenda.
[17:20] So, I mean, what should happen in a free market is if there's a decline in the birth rate, then wages go up and property becomes dirt cheap.
[17:32] I mean, I mentioned this in the show the other day that during the Black Death, there was a lot of deaths in Scotland, say. Which resulted in a tripling of the wages of the workers because there were fewer workers, you had to pay them more. You also had to give more concessions to the workers because they had a strong bargaining position. And because workers became so expensive, people started looking at labor-saving devices and so on. The shortage of workers also cracked the hold that the incredibly economically efficient and violent and immoral surf system, where you were sort of tied to the land as a surf. So you could break free of that because there weren't enough workers. Now, of course, we're not talking about the plus side of that many people dying of a horrible plague. But what I am saying is that there should be a natural heartbeat recycle that when there is a baby boom, then wages decline and the price of housing goes up, when there's a baby bust, which causes people to have fewer children, when there's a baby bust, then wages go up, and the price of housing goes down, and other things, and so people have more incentive to have more children.
[18:50] Yeah, the idea that you can have egalitarianism between the genders, equality of outcome coercively generated, coercively enforced, the idea that you can have egalitarianism coercively enforced between men and women and not end your civilization is a delusion. That's a delusion. All right. Somebody else says, I assume, I assume, we're talking about a stateless capitalist society, not a minarchism, i.e. a minimal state. That's a different beast. It's not entirely clear to me, and someone maybe can explain this to me, how an anarcho-capitalist society is supposed to deal with dissent. In a stateless society, we have instances of mandatory conflict resolution, the judicial system, and we have armed forces that deal with the enforcing of these mandatory conflict resolutions, police, and we're defending us from outside aggression, military. All right.
[19:51] In general, as a whole, most people who talk about the conflict resolution aspect of the judicial system have never tried to enforce conflict resolution through the judicial system. It's a theory. They've maybe seen a bunch of stuff on TV. TV, of course, gives you a completely deranged, fantastical view of the judicial system. I mean, there's a murder, and they have intense conversations with lawyers, and next thing you know, there's a courtroom trial, and next thing you know, there's a verdict, without, the reality being that it's usually years. Years and years, incredibly slow process, as you would imagine, right? Because lawyers make money when the process is slower. So, when people say, well, we have a dispute resolution system called the courts, you know, the first question to ask is, well, have you ever tried to use them?
[21:01] And inevitably, it's no. Well, it's like, well, then you've got a bunch of, I mean, the Dungeons and Dragons movie is more realistic about the Middle Ages, than courtroom dramas are about the legal system.
[21:15] Armed forces to prevent outside aggressors well, aggressors are those who come into your country and take resources, and how's that going, right? It's not clear to me how an ANCAP society is to deal with these issues Say that John builds an irrigation system for his lawn that makes my lawn flood John doesn't want to halt his system I want him to halt it What do? Well, you would contract to make sure that this would be dealt with. You'd have a contract with a dispute resolution system that would work with other dispute resolution systems in order to make sure that you wouldn't get flooded. And it would be efficient, and it would be preventive, and so on, right? Because you can't have efficiency without morality. You can't have efficiency without voluntarism, right?
[22:11] It's either lovemaking or it's rape. So, even if you establish the notion of a private court in which both me and John accept, a priori to accept the decision of a third-party arbiter, who exactly and how is supposed to coerce John or me into accepting the third-party decision that doesn't favor them without an armed force to enforce it? If John doesn't like the resolution, he can just stop recognizing the court. He agreed to respect in the first place. It's this unethical, sure, but who cares? People will do it anyway. Right, right. So this is the insight that I had many years ago, which I wrote about in Practical Anarchy and Everyday Anarchy and so on, which is that the enforcement mechanism is ostracism.
[22:51] Ostracism. And it's funny because I think that we have had a great falling back and falling down and collapse in liberty concepts over the last generation or so, generation and a half probably. So one of the reasons why I accept voluntarism as a moral and practical system is because that's how things worked for me as a kid. We did not have, because we grew up in a high-trust society, I could roam around the neighborhood, and I could go out of my apartment and my flat, I could go out of my apartment and I could play with any one of a dozen kids or more who were roaming around looking for stuff to do. And we did not have a central authority, we did not have an umpire, we didn't have any of that stuff at all.
[23:54] And we enforce our own rules. And how do we enforce our own rules? Ostracism. Which is, if a kid didn't obey the rules, you know, we'd talk to him and say, man, you've got to obey the rules. If the kid still continued to cheat, we would break up the game, and we would all whisper to meet somewhere else, and then we would go and play without that kid. And if the kid apologized, whatever, I was having a bad day, I'm sorry, we'd give him another try. But in general, we would just work through ostracism. And if we were playing and that kid came along, we'd break up the game and whisper meat somewhere else, just ostracize. It's not super complicated, but because kids now are in these heavily structured environments, right? Like I remember, gosh, this has got to be like a quarter century ago, I remember one of my old bosses complaining that when he was a kid he just roamed around, but now his kids always have to go to an arcade. They've got to go to Chuck E. Cheese. They've got to go to a mall. They've got to go to a food court. They've got to go someplace where it's always 50 to 100 bucks, like everywhere they go. And in those places, the rules are enforced by machines or people.
[25:14] I mean, if you've ever played the game Grounders, then you're supposed to not look. Or Marco Polo in the pool. It was a great favorite of my daughters and I's when we were swimming when she was younger. So we get a game going of Marco Polo. Now, Marco Polo, the person who's it, says Marco and everyone else says Polo and you're supposed to try and catch them without looking. And if people looked, you'd see it. And if you're playing grounders where you're supposed to not look when you're chasing people, if you see someone looking, you say, hey, you're looking. And if they say, sorry, I was afraid I was going to run into the fence or something like that, right? You have to have sort of, if someone's running towards something dangerous, you say, whoa, stop, turn around, right? But I clearly remember my daughter playing with some kids, some kids we just met. We never met them again. But I remember her trying to play grounders, and the person who was there was cheating. And so she stopped playing. And so this is how ostracism is, how rules get enforced.
[26:33] So, of course, because kids' activities now are so structured, centrally managed and controlled. So when I was a kid, and I write about this in my novel, Almost, which you should definitely check out at freedomain.com slash books.
[26:46] I wrote about playing war, we'd have little made-up guns and maybe an old tennis ball and so on, but you'd shoot at someone and say, I got you, and they'd say, no, you missed, right? And we'd have to find a way to resolve that. Now, that's very different than if you're playing Fortnite. In Fortnite, you shoot someone, and the computer controls whether you've hit them or not. They can't cheat. I mean, I know that there are cheats in the games, but in general, in the structure, of programming of the game. It is not enforced by the participants. It's enforced by the server and the clients, right? The programming. That's how you determine whether or not somebody got hit in a game. Whereas when I was a kid, we had to enforce it verbally. Now, it's the same thing. we've always had this in TAG, right? In TAG, the question is, did you touch just the hair? Or did you touch just a scrap of clothing that was flying free? Or did you touch the actual person? These were all very important and interesting questions that we had to figure out how to answer, right?
[28:00] Whereas now, of course, everything's centrally enforced, and kids have lost the idea that you can enforce rules without a central coercive authority through debate, argumentation, and ostracism. It was very effective. We had almost no cheating whatsoever when I was a kid.
[28:21] When we would go and play baseball, I played baseball and soccer, Saturdays and Sundays for years as a teenager that my friends and I would meet until we were no longer allowed to meet because they closed down the school soccer field. It's just terrible. Anyway, so we would meet and we would play soccer and we would play baseball. Saturdays was soccer. Sundays was baseball. It was great fun. Now, we didn't have any umpires. So was somebody in? Did they slide in? Were they in? Right? Was it a foul ball? Right? Did somebody tackle unfairly? Did somebody pull? Did somebody touch the ball with their hand, like Maradona Hand of God style? We enforced all of this ourselves, and it was not a problem. It was not a problem. Occasionally, we'd have arguments, but it was not a problem. All right, so we didn't have goals in soccer. We would just put two shoes a certain width apart. Now, did it go over the shoe? Did it like, was it in? I mean, we just would debate these things.
[29:42] And honestly, I mean, I played hundreds and hundreds of times, both soccer and baseball, with no umpires, no referees, and I do not remember a single time when we couldn't resolve a dispute, and I barely remember any disputes.
[30:12] Because generally it sort of went like if one team was up 5-3 and then the losing team had a sketchy goal, you just give it to them to make it more fun, make it more interesting. If the team that was up 5-3 or 5-2 had a sketchy goal, they probably wouldn't take it because then it's like 6-2 or 6-3 and it's less fun.
[30:31] And it's the same thing with Dungeons & Dragons, right? Dungeons & Dragons is the ultimate open source do-anything kind of game. You're not constricted really by anything and what's possible and what's allowable. We would have sometimes debates and arguments. But for the most part, I mean, I mentioned this once before, a friend of mine who was a ranger who was chaotic good hired an assassin to kill someone who was bothering, another player who was bothering him in the game. And I was the dungeon master and I said, you lost your ranger abilities because hiring an assassin is immoral. And so you can't be chaotic good, you've gone to chaotic neutral and maybe you can earn your way back. And, you know, we had this big debate and this was one that we couldn't resolve. And we ended up marching to a local library where a Gandalf-style elder player was supposed to help us resolve this dispute. But I don't remember really what happened. And, of course, it's like, gosh almighty, it's like almost 40 years ago. But other than that one time where I just wasn't going to back down. Like, that's just, to me, hiring an assassin to kill someone who's not threatening you directly is evil. And you lose your special abilities based upon you being good. Because rangers have to be good.
[31:53] So, other than that one time, one time in my whole childhood, I wasn't going to back down, he didn't want to back down, and I can't even remember what happened, but I think I ended up giving him the chance to rewind, to undo his action, because we just couldn't continue forward, otherwise I wasn't going to give up, he wasn't going to give up, and... I was the dungeon master, so I wasn't going to give him his special abilities based upon being good, and he didn't want to. So I think finally after a week or two of not moving forward and everybody wanting to continue playing, we ended up just having to undo that action, if I remember rightly. Which, you know, whatever, not the end of the world. I mean, the point is to have fun, right? So I think because so many young people these days do not enforce their own rules, they become quite delicate. They're not very good at negotiating rules and how to enforce them, and they're bad at ostracizing.
[32:56] And so, I mean, bad at ostracizing means they either don't ostracize or they ostracize for the wrong reasons. So I just wanted to sort of mention that there's a problem. Once you keep kids inside, once you don't let them roam the neighborhoods, once you don't let them self-organize their own games, Sometimes they become less accepting of the concept of freedom because they just haven't lived it. How are we going to enforce rules in the absence of a centralized coercive authority? How are we possibly going to enforce rules in the absence of a centralized coercive authority? Well, if you've done it for years as a kid, it's not even really a question.
[33:38] If kids can do it at the age of six or seven or eight, if kids can enforce their rules in the absence of a centralized coercive authority without umpires and referees and adults enforcing things and so on.
[33:59] Then it's fine. Now, the other thing, of course, is that if you've ever been around fistfights, that's another way in which rules tend to get pretty robustly enforced. I've only seen one or two of these over the course of my life and I've never been in a fistfight myself but, How do the rules get enforced? What are the rules? Well, no eye gouging, no biting, no punching in the groin or kicking in the groin, and no continuing to attack when the other kid is not fighting back or is surrendered or cried uncle or whatever. So those are the general rules. And how are they enforced? Well, there's not a referee in the way that there is in a boxing match. So how are the rules enforced? Well, the rules are enforced by the other kids, by a sense of honor, by a sense of you don't want it, like mutualism, right? So the reason why you say we're not going to punch in the groin is because nobody wants to get punched in the groin. So you just keep that eye gouge. And generally, you avoid permanent damage, right? Because permanent damage involves parents and doctors and police. So you have a fight and covered in dust and glory, as the old statement from Mark Twain goes. So yeah, there's those kinds of fights that happen and so on, right?
[35:28] So the bro code is another thing that gets enforced. If I talk about, I really like this girl, then it probably is not particularly nice for my friend to go and make a play for her and try and get her to date him or go out with him instead. That's not considered nice or good, right? Swooping in and taking away. And again, how are these enforced? There's no dating police that throw people in jail and so on, right? So unfortunately, because children are kind of cocooning, locked in home because of low trust aside, Because kids are cocooned with their video games and so on, they don't know how to resolve disputes, and they don't know how to enforce rules in the absence of centralized authority.
[36:22] And so when I see people, and it's just my particular way of looking at it, right? I think there's value in it, as I sort of made the case. But when I see people who say, I have no idea how rules can be enforced without, you know, centralized coercive authority, well, I simply, I know for a fact that they didn't get out much as kids. That they didn't roam a neighborhood and they didn't figure out how to enforce rules without parents or gym teachers or referees or whatever around. So...
[37:02] That's what I know. Because I, myself, as have others who grew up in my generation, or particularly in sort of where I grew up, we all knew how to enforce rules without centralized authority.
[37:18] And it's sort of like, it's the education question. Like, why, you know, without the government forcing kids to do X, Y, and Z, you know, nobody will be educated. But the problem is, of course, that the government forces kids to do stuff that the kids don't want to do, that they're not interested in, that they're not good at, that they'll never be good at, that they'll never be interested in, and that they never want to do for a living. I said this before, but I remember my guidance counselor when I was a kid. It was very funny, because my guidance counselor was, well, first of all, he had this tiny little office with no windows, back behind the main office, and it's like, why would I take guidance advice? Why would I take career advice from somebody who ended up as a guidance counselor in this little shelf closet, like utility closet, with a tiny desk? Like, you're back here. But I also remember talking to him, and he had a poster behind his desk, which is like, here are all the things. If you drop math, here are all of the professions you can't do.
[38:29] Accountant, mathematician. And there was a whole list of all of the jobs you couldn't do if you dropped math. And I'm like, yeah, I'm good with that. I don't want to be any of those things. And of course, I think there was a computer scientist up there, a computer programmer, which was a total lie. That wasn't an issue or a problem at all. I became a computer programmer and quite an expert one without a lot of math stuff. because computer programming is much more about logic than it is about math.
[39:05] So when it comes to school, they make you do a whole bunch of stuff that you don't want to do. I mean, I remember, of course, I had to learn French in school, and I didn't want to learn French. And the reason I didn't want to learn French is because I'd much rather get better at English because I knew how good I was at English and had some sense of how long it was going to take me to get good at French, right? And it was a long time, right? So I didn't want to learn to speak French because I also knew that I wasn't going to have much of an opportunity to speak French. And what's the point of learning something if you can't practice it? Doesn't make any sense. I mean, when I was taught how to play tennis well, I went and practiced, right? Of course, of course I did, right? And so what's the point of someone teaching you how to play tennis and then you don't pick up a racket for 10 years? You just forget it all. And it's even more true with language memory than it is with muscle memory, like the riding the bike thing. I still remember how to ride a bike.
[40:16] So all of that stuff drove me kind of nuts and so saying well kids don't want to be educated therefore we have to have the government force them to be educated just like no no no the kids don't want to be educated because government education sucks vacuum and blows into galactic chunks it sucks what was there some study in some study like over 95 of the stuff you learn in school you've forgotten and never use again. I mean, outside of reading, writing, and arithmetic instead of the basics, it's wretched. It's even worse now that it's like psychological abuse, woke garbage. It's even worse. So saying, well, you know, we have to have the government force kids to be educated because kids don't want to be educated. It's like, well, of course they don't want to be educated because government education sucks. All right. Should we do one more? Yeah, I think we'll do. We'll do one more. What have we got here?
[41:13] All right, what have we got here?
[41:17] One of the key problems an arco-capitalist failed to address is the problem of consent, so you don't have to address it. You just have to say the initiation of the use of force is immoral, and we own ourselves and the effects of our actions. All right, they tend to have an extremely narrow definition of what constitutes consent, and I find that they often show double standards when it comes to the application of their definition of consent. Excellent, all right. A very lazy critique of the NCAP position is that they don't like taxation in the state, then maybe they should just leave and go to Somalia. Isn't that the definition of paradise? They rightly point out that this is a ridiculous ask, and that the onus should not be on them to leave, given how costly that would be.
[41:53] What they're doing here, often without realizing, is approaching John Simmons' conditions for voluntary consent. The important conditions Simmons highlights are that for consent to be voluntary, and surely that's inherent in the concept of consent, dissent must be possible, and the cost of that dissent must not be prohibitively high. The way in which NCAPs can use this as a defense is that you cannot refuse, for example, to pay taxes without being incarcerated, and nor can you realistically opt out of the state by leaving given attachments such as family, job, friends, property, etc. And exit taxes. Thus, it is inaccurate to say that existing within a state constitutes consent and that there are viable options for dissent. Now, so far, we've seen how ANCAPs can defend their use of state infrastructure and benefits while maintaining their opposition to the existence of the state. But how do these same arguments work against ANCAPs? According to ANCAPs, a stateless and archocapitalist society would be a society based on free transactions and relations between consenting individuals. There would be no state to coerce people through taxation or whatever, and economic relations would essentially be equal relations between buyer and seller. The reality is that this is nonsense. Okay. All right. Oh, yes, nonsense. That's a great argument.
[43:04] In an ANCAP society, there would exist still the class divide between those who own and control the means of production and those who don't, the bourgeoisie and the workers. Nope. Absolutely artificial distinction. Total bullshit. Absolutely artificial distinction.
[43:23] So, I own the means of production in that I own myself, I own my voice, I own my mind and I own the arguments that I put forward. I am responsible for the arguments that I put forward, which is why when people didn't like my arguments, they cancelled me. Because they recognized that I was responsible for my arguments, therefore I should be cancelled.
[43:44] So, the means of production is your own body. Your own body is the means of production, and that's foundational. So everybody owns the means of production. Everybody owns their own body. Everybody owns the effects of their actions. It's responsible for what they create or don't create in the world. So the idea that there's this massive divide between the workers and those who owns the means of production, nope. Not at all. Not at all. Everybody owns the means of production, which is their own bodies. Okay, so let's see here. The bourgeoisie and the workers. Now, according to the anarcho-capitalist account, this wouldn't matter because the relationship between buyer and seller, bourgeois and worker, would be equal. If a worker does not like the terms of recompense offered to her by her potential employer, she needn't take the job. However, we know that there is a massive difference in negotiating power and option between the worker and the capitalist. The worker in a state The society has no choice but to accept the terms Offered by potential employers Why? Why? The worker in a stateless society has no choice but to accept the terms offered by potential employers. Now, these are just doofus, spotty behind city dwellers, frankly. It's all foolish nonsense.
[45:12] So, again, one of the great benefits I had when I was working up north was seeing just how much unowned land there is. It's crazy. I mean, I know it's sort of controlled by the government and this, that, and the other, but the unowned land situation is wild. Wild. I mean, 90% of Canadians are huddled along the US-Canada border, right? So there are absolutely staggering amounts of unowned land. Now, of course, in a stateless society, you can just hightail it out of there, and you can get your own land going, right? I mean, people will lend money to you if you needed money to get started, but most people didn't in the past, right? And so those people would go and start their own land, right? So that's a possibility. Of course, you can start your own side hustle, right?
[46:11] So when I was a kid, I did typing for people, or I put that up. I remember I would go and wallpaper because I had an electric typewriter and I wanted to practice my typing. So I put up, I will type your stuff, right? And I remember I ended up typing out somebody's entire PhD thesis and made a good deal of money for that, right? So you can put yourself out as you can shovel sidewalks and driveways of snow. You can mow lawns, right? And all of that, right? So, I mean, with regards to the shoveling, you need a $20 shovel and that's it, right?
[46:49] So the idea that if you're not...
[46:53] If you're not offered a job you can't make any money it's crazy i've never understood that at all my first job was painting plaques for the queen's silver jubilee in 1977 when i was 10 years old and um we needed some paint and some we need some paint brushes and paint and we painted it and we made that right so i don't know like why would you why this is just people who've never they have no entrepreneurial bone in their body so they can't imagine that there's anything other than being a worker and being an employer. I mean, my whole gig here has been, well, I got sick and tired of the business world for a variety of reasons. And so I became my own boss, right? I was not happy, particularly happy as a COBOL programmer for a large Canadian financial institution. So I co-founded a software company and did that. So the idea that, well, if you can't get a job, you starve. of, I don't know, it's just, I don't, I'm just like, have you never known anyone who's had a hustle as a kid, right? I mean, a friend of mine used to, well, I remember when I was pretty young, I don't know, early, mid-teens, I lined up overnight and I bought 10 tickets to Michael Jackson, and then I sold them and made some money. So, I don't know. I mean, it's just strange to me.
[48:21] It's like, do you not know anyone who's an entrepreneur? Do you not know any kids who have a side hustle? That's totally nerdy, right? All right.
[48:30] I mean, I weeded gardens for people, for money. There are job boards. You can just go and get temporary jobs. You don't, right? All right. The worker in a stately society has no choice but to accept the terms offered by potential employers. They have the choice between employment and starvation. And this is also sad because what it tells me is that they have parents who have no imagination whatsoever. So I would imagine, for the most part, these are parents who complain about their bosses and are too lazy or dumb or indifferent or whatever to start their own jobs, to get their own hustle going. Right. So, I mean, if you make this case, which, you know, it's a very sort of low rent, limited thought case, right? So if you make this case, your parents should say, no, no, of course, you can start your own business, you can farm your own land, you can get together with a bunch of people and start up something. You can, you know, I mean, there's a guy who started with a paper clip and ended up buying a house, right? You can take, you can, I mean, I, when I was in my early teens, I had a paper route and I would hustle to get more people to order the newspaper so that I could make more money.
[49:51] I didn't need to put out any money for that. Okay. They have the choice between employment and starvation, right? I mean, it's sad. I mean, have you never heard of any entrepreneurs or any kids with side hustles? That just tells me that you move in a very dull, witted circle. The objection to this is that starvation is a natural risk not imposed by the capitalists, but that's irrelevant. What is relevant is that on Simmons' account, there is no possibility for dissent on the workers' part as the cost is death or destitution. Yeah. I mean, I would go around offering as a kid. I was like, I don't know, seven or eight. I would go around to people's houses and ask them if they had any recycles or stuff to take back and all of that. And there's tons of stuff you can do. My gosh.
[50:41] It is perverse, then, to say that an anarcho-capitalist society would be a free society. It would be a society in which those lucky enough to own capital and property would be free. Well, the vast majority of people would be at the mercy of the property classes. For me, personally, that's one of the more compelling criticisms of anarcho-capitalism.
[50:58] If you want more erudite blah, blah, blah, G.A. Cohen.
[51:03] So, that's wild. You're just lucky. You're just lucky to own capital. You just happen to be fortunate to have that. It's just pure luck. It's like winning the lottery. That's crazy. Now, what he's saying is that those who have more power exploit those who have less power. Right so so the big problem here you see is those those evil capitalists who just, happened to luckily have a factory fall in their lap they didn't work for it they didn't earn for it they didn't sacrifice anything for it right i mean i built i built um i built two major businesses in my life and i've participated in the sale of three corporations and i can tell you that the people who start these corporations, I know this from personally, they work very hard. They take a huge amount of risks. And, you know, I've said this before, but I remember having to sign for payroll, having to sign payroll that I would be personally liable, not the corporation, I would be personally liable for payroll.
[52:09] And that was pretty alarming in my late 20s because it was a staggering amount of money that I would be and a few other people would be liable for if the business didn't make it. Then I would have spent years paying off, that sort of stuff. So yeah, it's a lot of work. It's alarming. It's risky. And also you get no money for the first, I think for the first two years of the business, I made almost nothing. And it started to get better after that. So yeah. And of course, this business for whatever we want to call it.
[52:43] So he's saying that those who are in possession of the means of production, which is almost accidental, right? If people don't understand because they haven't started business. Like, why would I listen to the economy? Why would I listen to anything about the economy from people who've never started a business? I mean, it's all just theoretical nonsense, honestly. I mean, I remember, who was it? Tom Wolfe. Was complaining about, was it John Irving, Son of a Circus, or something like that? John Irving wrote an entire novel set in India, and he'd never been to India. Like, foundationally, why would I listen to dating advice from someone who's never asked a woman out on a date? Why would I listen to diet advice from a fat, unhealthy guy? Why would I listen to exercise advice from a skinny, fat guy with no muscles? Like, I just wouldn't. So why would I listen to people talking about employers and employees and bourgeois and proletariat, if they've never started a business, if they've never actually started a business.
[53:51] Because they're talking about things they've never experienced. It's all bullshit, nonsense, book learning, dusty-brained idiocy, frankly. Why would I? I have no interest in listening to people about the relationships between workers and bosses. And calling them the workers and then there's this, the bourgeoisie, is itself a kind of slander, right? I mean, listen, man, this is the truth. and if you don't know this or believe this, it's because you've never done it. Nobody works harder than an entrepreneur. Nobody works harder than an entrepreneur. And so calling the entrepreneurs just accidental owners of the means of production, but they're workers. Like, that's just, I don't even know what to say about it. It was just completely insulting and full of resentment and sophistry, right?
[54:43] I mean, I can't even tell you the numbers of times I would work overnight. Night, like I would work all night through the next morning, alone, because the employees, my employees had gone home. And I have no particular grudge about that, but that's what you do. I mean, that's what you have to do if you want to make it as an entrepreneur, for the most part. I mean, maybe there's some exceptions here and there, but I mean, look at Elon Musk. Elon Musk works like seven days a week, 12 hours a day, God knows, right? I'm not taking time off to impregnate randos from Twitter, but he's a crazy hard worker. Is it just luck? No. He's brilliant, and he's principled, and he's very hard working. Entrepreneurs have to be principled, otherwise they don't get the kind of social and economic trust that is very efficient.
[55:36] So what this person is saying is a very common argument, is they're saying, hey, look, man, look, it's a fact that those who have more power exploit those who have less power. Okay, what about the state? What about politicians? What about the agents of the state? What about government as a whole? Does it have more power over you than your average entrepreneur? Who has more power over you? This is what drives me crazy about this stuff. It's just so, I don't know how people can't possibly see this. It's absolutely wild to me. Well, you know, your boss, you can work for him or not. You can start your own business. You can go and farm your own land. You can have a side hustle. You can do import, export. There's a bunch of stuff you can do. You don't need much capital, if any, to get started. But you see, your boss is exploiting you. And the way that you stop your boss from exploiting you, even though you don't have to work for him, you can work for anyone, You can start your own business, or you can live with your parents and save up money, or whatever it is. You can try and convince your parents' friends to invest in your big idea or whatever. So your boss, who has no coercive power over you whatsoever, your boss is a really dangerous exploiter because there's a power mismatch, right? But the state is totally safe.
[56:59] So people who are potentially writing you a paycheck incredibly dangerous they will mess you up man they'll just control and exploit and bully you but the people with all the guns in the known universe and the power to create money at will and throw you in jail virtually at will oh they're totally safe it's so bizarre it's so bizarre so anyway i hope this is helpful freedom.com slash donate we're getting close to the end of the month and if you could help out the show. I'd really appreciate it. I hope that you enjoy what it is that I'm doing. And if there's anything I can do better or differently, I would love to hear. You can email me, host at freedom main.com. And lots of love from up here. Talk to you soon. Bye.
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