Let's say a couple were to enter into some contract with a woman to maybe use the male sperm and the woman's eggs in order to get a baby, and the baby then, in a sense, would be contracted, maybe money would exchange.
Therefore, the baby is bought and paid for, and is this UPB? In other words, can a couple pay another woman to conceive and carry a child, and then the custody of the child would be transferred to the new couple, and is this UPB? Now, of course, there's no force that is being deployed in the contract, right? So everybody is voluntarily putting themselves in the contract. And the argument is, and I understand the perspective, and I obviously really respect the question, but the baby is not consenting. The baby is not consenting to the contract. Now, of course, I've made this case before, but it's been a long time ago. Is a contract valid if you can't consent at the time, but you do consent later?
0:00 - Surrogacy and Consent
1:42 - The Dawn of Free Domain
7:21 - Using Property to Save Lives
12:48 - Consent and the Baby
15:48 - The Imposition of Life
19:30 - Human Life and Consent
25:10 - The Problem with Utopias
27:31 - Designing a Utopia
34:12 - Motivation by Consequences
37:21 - Child Abuse and Liability
The lecture delves into the complex ethical considerations surrounding the concept of surrogacy, particularly focusing on the issue of consent, both before and after birth. The speaker explores whether it is morally acceptable for a couple to pay another woman to conceive and carry a child for them, considering the lack of consent from the baby. The discussion delves into the broader philosophical question of consent and the implications for contracts and decision-making.
Drawing on various analogies and hypothetical scenarios, the speaker discusses the importance of considering the well-being of children in designing societal structures and norms. The concept of parental liability for harm caused to children is highlighted as a potential solution to prevent abuses and ensure accountability for parental actions.
The speaker emphasizes the significance of consequences in shaping behavior, suggesting that the threat of legal action and financial responsibility can incentivize better parenting practices and reduce the risk of harm to children. The lecture also touches upon the idea of creating a utopian society centered around the well-being and protection of children, rather than focusing solely on economic or political structures.
Overall, the discussion navigates through moral dilemmas surrounding consent, parental responsibility, and the societal implications of ensuring the welfare of children. By addressing these ethical complexities, the speaker encourages a deeper reflection on how to create a more just and compassionate society, especially concerning issues related to the upbringing and care of children.
[0:00] All right. Good morning, everybody. Sorry for the slightly rough voice, but I have had a very persistent fellow, which I appreciate and admire, who's asking about a surrogacy when it comes to children. And the idea being that, let's say, a couple were to enter into some contract with a woman to maybe use the male sperm and the woman's eggs in order to get a baby, and the baby then, in a sense, would be contracted, maybe money would exchange.
[0:32] And therefore the baby is bought and paid for, and is this UPB? In other words, can a couple pay another woman to conceive and carry a child, and then the custody of the child would be transferred to the new couple, and is this UPP? Now, of course, there's no force that is being deployed in the contract, right? So everybody is voluntarily putting themselves in the contract. And the argument is, and I understand the perspective, and I obviously really respect the question, but the baby is not consenting. The baby is not consenting to the contract. Now, of course, I've made this case before, but it's been a long time ago. Is a contract valid if you can't consent at the time, but you do consent later?
[1:37] And I think it's a more important question than it sounds, and it's less abstract than it sounds.
[1:43] So I'll give you the reason why I first created this argument, and hopefully it will make some kind of sense. So this is sort of way back at the dawn of free domain, back when the appendix radio was in the title, because I'd never learned from RadioShack, which when RadioShack was first, as an electronics store, or when it was first created, radio was a big deal. So, or 2001, audio-video seemed pretty cool in 1985, a little less cool in 2010. So back in the day, there was a fellow who put forth the proposition that you can petition the Lord with prayer. He put forward the proposition that if you're hanging from a flagpole, you're on the roof, you slip, you fall, you hang from a flagpole, and the only way to survive is to kick in the window of the apartment and climb to safety. Otherwise, you're going to fall to your death. And the argument is, if you say, well, then you can't violate the person's property rights by kicking in his window, let's say he's not home, right? So if you kick in his window to save your life, then clearly human life is more important than property rights.
[3:03] And therefore, we can use coercive redistribution to save lives.
[3:08] And it's, I know it sounds a little ridiculous. It's not a bad argument at all. I think it's quite well done and it's quite clever. You know, if somebody is stealing $5 from you, are you allowed to shoot them? And most people would say, well, no, man, just let the $5 go. Okay, so then you're saying that human life is more important than property rights and therefore coercive redistribution is justified.
[3:32] And again, I know these sound like silly arguments. They're actually quite good arguments and they do convince a lot of people. Now, to return to the flagpole, my answer went as follows, that if you own the apartment, and let's say you could pause time, just for a moment, right? Say you could pause time, and you could phone the apartment owner, let's say Bob owns the apartment, Jim is hanging from a flagpole. So Jim calls Bob and says, hey man, I'm hanging outside your window. I really need to kick in the window or I'm going to fall to my death. And then, you know, every time you look out your window, you'll look at the flagpole and remember me falling to a brutal demise, right? Well, what would the apartment owner say to that? What would Bob say? Well, Bob would say, of course. I mean, I'd appreciate it if you fixed the window afterwards, but absolutely, please, kick the window in and get to safety. He would say that. He would say that. I mean, if you ran this experiment, right? If you ran this experiment and you asked people this scenario, they would say, well, yeah, of course you should. You should absolutely kick in the window to save your life so what that means is that can you use somebody's property to.
[4:56] If they agree to it after the fact? And the answer is, of course, yes. It doesn't matter when somebody approves of the use of your property, again, if you have a reasonable belief. So let's say that there's a bunch of children who are drowning in the bay, and you come across a tied-up rowboat, and you don't ask permission. You untie the rowboat, and then you go and save the children. And if you were to say later to the rowboat owner, I used your rowboat to save five children, he'd say, that's really cool. I'm so glad you did that. Whereas if you didn't, right, if the children all drowned because you were afraid to use the rowboat, and you were to say to the guy later, well, the children had to drown because I didn't want to use your rowboat, the guy would say, are you insane? You let children drown rather than use my rowboat? That's awful. I can't even look at that rowboat anymore. Now I have to give it away. I have to destroy it. I don't even want to sell it. I want to profit off this. The rowboat is completely spoiled to me because now I don't look at the rowboat and think that's a cool way to go fishing. I look at the rowboat and see five dead children. I would infinitely have preferred you grabbed my rowboat and went and saved the children.
[6:12] Think of a burning building, right? There's a burning building with helpless people inside and there's a hose in the next door neighbors he's away there's a hose there can you jump the fence crank up the hose and put out the fire so it's not of course everybody would say absolutely you should use my hose my gosh of course you should so would a reasonable i know reasonable sounds like a bit of a fudge but i'm telling you i mean unless you've been around complete sociopaths your whole life absolutely people would say, for heaven's sakes, use my property to save lives. Of course they would. Of course they would.
[6:53] So, if you get permission retroactively, that's the same as getting permission ahead of time, if that makes sense. I'm sure it does, right? The permission to contract is independent of time, right? It's not evil to use someone's property to save lives, for instance, if a reasonable person would expect them to want you to do that, and they would be appalled if you didn't do that.
[7:21] Like if you if you just hung off the flat pole didn't want to kick in the guy's window to crawl to safety and fell to your death the guy would be horrified and he would probably not even want to live in that apartment anymore because every time he looked out the window he'd remember that that was the place where you fell and died like you've actually harmed the value of his property because now and then who's going to want to buy that oh yeah that's the flagpole apartment where the guy plunged to his death right outside the window who's going to want like you've actually you're harming his property by not kicking in the window and you're pleasing him and by the by not only, maintaining the value of his property by not dying right outside his window or falling to your death from that height but also because now it's kind of like a cool apartment like a little plaque on the wall hey this is where the guy kicked in the window in order to save his life because he fell from the ceiling onto a flagpole. It's kind of cool.
[8:21] Now, I assume that the guy who kicks in the window also will pay to repair the window. And if for whatever reason, let's say he's completely broken homeless, okay, well, you know, I don't know about you, I'm sure you're not a creepy, weird psycho, but if it's like some guy kicked in my window to save his life and it cost me 200 bucks to repair the window, though, well, even if I'm completely cold-hearted and don't care about his life, I still retain, the value of my property because it's not the place where the guy plunged to his death outside.
[8:58] And even if nobody else finds out about it for whatever reason, I, in living in that apartment, have to look out that window and remember the guy plunging to his death. I don't like the apartment anymore that much, right? I'm sure this makes sense. I don't want to belabor the point, but it's an important point. It's an important point. Is it right to enter somebody's house without permission? Well, when does the permission occur? occur, right? So, let's say your girlfriend is away, and she's been away for a while, and you decide to surprise her with a beautiful meal when she comes home, and you're cooking it at her house because you want her to be able to relax and unpack and just have a wonderful evening. So, you use your key. Now, you don't technically have permission. You didn't ask her for permission. The key is not necessarily permission, right? I mean, when I grew up in apartment buildings, The superintendents had keys, but that didn't mean they had complete permission to enter your house.
[9:58] Or let's say that, and we'll take it a step further. Let's say that you knew that she had a key hidden in a fake rock in her backyard, right? She'd mentioned it once or whatever, right? Now, knowing the location of a key does not give you explicit permission to enter her house. Just knowing where the key is. we know that because if some thief hid in the bushes and saw her hide the key and he knew where the key was that would not give him permission to enter her house this is really important stuff again i know this sounds like lifeboat scenarios one in a million stuff but the edge cases is where the theory is truly tested and if the edge cases don't cause a violation of property rights then neither do other cases as well so it's really important sorry to lecture about this but i do you think it's really important so so let's say you know where the fake rock is you you go and you cook her a great meal you clean up the place and all that and she comes home and you surprise her now she's probably a little alarmed maybe you find somewhere you leave a note on the front door by the way don't be alarmed i'm in here i've made you a lovely meal welcome home blah blah blah now she is she going to call the cops right well no right not going to call the cops. She's going to be thrilled that you did such a thoughtful thing, right? She's going to be happy. She's going to be thrilled.
[11:23] So she gives you permission after the fact. One last example. Is it wrong for a bunch of people to enter your house without permission, without direct and explicit permission? No. Well, okay, but what if you give them permission after the fact? Well, what would that mean? Well, let's say that they come into your house because they want to give you a surprise party, right? And that's giving you endless fodder for stupid sitcoms where you say something embarrassing. Surprise, right? So, you know, 20 people enter your house without permission in order to give you a surprise party. Well, are you going to press charges against them for breaking and entering? Of course not. Even if you don't particularly like surprise parties, you're not going to do that, right?
[12:10] So, if permission is granted after the fact, it is the equivalent of giving permission permission, before the fact. So if somebody has a little lifesaver, you know, those little floaty hoops, right? Somebody has a lifesaver, someone's drowning, you grab the lifesaver, you throw it. Well, you're using somebody's property without permission. But when you say to them afterwards, hey, man, sorry, I had to grab your life. He's like, hey, that's what it's for, man. I'm glad you used it. Absolutely. Absolutely. Good for you. I would sure hate to have that kid drown rather than you grab my lifesaver, right?
[12:48] So if you get permission after the fact, that's equivalent to getting permission before the fact. So you say, oh, well, but the baby can't consent to the custody being transferred to a new couple. The baby can't consent. That's absolutely true. You know what else the baby can't consent to? Being born at all. And this is sort of the antinatalist position, right? The babies can't consent to being born. How dare you inflict life on the baby, right? So babies cannot consent to being born and babies cannot consent to a relationship with their parents.
[13:25] Right. So the idea that babies can't consent to the transfer of custody is a smaller subsection of the fact that babies can't consent to anything.
[13:37] Babies can't consent to vaccinations. Babies can't consent to bedtime. Babies can't consent to what they eat. Babies can't consent to where they live. Babies can't consent to the relationship they have with their parents. Babies can't consent to anything. Does that mean that anything that is imposed upon a baby, including life itself, is immoral because the baby can't consent? And it's not a pre-birth, post-birth thing because we impose, I mean, everything we impose on a baby is imposed without the baby's consent. Everything we impose, almost everything we impose upon a toddler, we impose upon a toddler with almost no capacity for the toddler to consent. I mean, you can start to bring a little bit of consent in, you know, do you want this food or that food and so on, but babies, toddlers, kids, they can't consent to much, and the whole point is to grow them to the point where they can consent later on, to keep adding choice and consent as you go forward. But I didn't choose to be born. You didn't choose to be born. I didn't choose my parents. You didn't choose your parents. I didn't choose where I live. You didn't choose where you live. I didn't choose where you went to school. You didn't choose whether you went to school or how you were educated. I didn't choose punishments. You didn't choose, like, none of this stuff is agreed to by the baby, the toddler, the child.
[15:03] So if consent is required from babies in order for any circumstance to be valid, then the human race is over. Because you can't get a consent from a baby to even be conceived, grown, and born. So that means life is a contractual imposition that violates the choice and contract rights of the baby. And if life is a violent imposition against the will of the baby, then we got no life.
[15:34] This is the argument that if your position that the consent of the baby is essential to every imposition, then we don't have to worry about morality anymore because the human race is over.
[15:49] Because it's a violent imposition of will or a corrupt or immoral imposition of will to get pregnant and give birth. But if permission is given after the fact, then it's valid. So I am absolutely, completely, and totally thrilled to be alive. I am incredibly grateful to my parents for giving me the gift of life. I am. I am. I mean, everything that they chose was pretty much terrible, but the automatic biological process of pregnancy and birth, and, you know, obviously I was kept alive as a child, not super well but I was kept alive so I am incredibly grateful and how do we know that I'm incredibly grateful for being alive well I say it and I'm still here right and I'm still here we've all had situations where we enter into a contract and regret it later and one of the ways empirically we'd know that we regret it later is we cancel the contract if at all possible we cancel the contract. Cancel the contract. But you don't like your cell phone contract. Maybe you pay a penalty, maybe you don't, but you cancel your cell phone contract.
[17:01] Don't like where you're living, you're renting, you cancel the lease. You don't like your house, sell the house, cancel your contract with the bank, transfer it to someone else.
[17:09] So whether somebody gives permission beforehand or after the fact is not relevant. Now, it could be the case, of course, that someone is born in perpetual agony. This is really bad luck. You know, they just have every congenital problem and defect known to man, God and the devil, and they're just in constant pain and maybe when they become of age they kill themselves or maybe they kill themselves at some point tragic horrible massive sympathies to everyone involved but that's someone where the consent to life is withdrawn after the fact but if you look around the world, there are relatively few suicides which means the vast majority of people are grateful to be alive doesn't mean they absolutely love their lives doesn't mean they're happy all the time but because they don't cancel the contract called life we accept that they are happy to be alive because they choose to stay alive i mean that's just that's just an empirical fact right if you continue to renew your cell phone contract then you're relatively happy with your cell phone contract you're not happy enough to cancel it i know this sounds all kind of cold but i'm i'm sorry for it to be that way but we have to work at the analytical realm at this in this instance we were talking about contracts.
[18:31] How else do we know that people are happy for the gift of life well they tend.
[18:37] To give it to others, right? Still, I don't know if it's the majority anymore, but in the past, for sure, most people chose to have children. And if you're choosing to recreate something, then you can't say that you hate it or don't want it. You can't say that you hate life if you have children. I mean, I wish I was never born is not particularly congruent with let's have a bunch of kids. I mean, you could say, unless somebody's a total sadist, I get all of that. But there's easier ways to be sadistic than... raising kids. Again, there are edge cases. People are nihilistic. They do kill themselves, and we'll sort of get to that and the whys, but it's just important to know that, human life itself is an unchosen imposition on the baby or the baby is brought to life with no permission on the part of the baby.
[19:31] However, because most people go through their lives, they take care of their health, they go to the dentist, they go to the doctor, and they're not thrilled if they get some horrible disease. They're not like, yay, finally an end to my suffering. I mean, I'm sure there's a few, right? But in general, if the doctor says, you know, you got a deadly disease, most people are kind of down about it, which means they value being alive.
[19:56] So if human life can't exist without unchosen obligations on the baby, the obligation of life, or the condition of life, then we can't say that the consent of the baby is essential because the baby only exists through a lack of consent. That which exists through a lack of consent cannot have the requirement of consent as its manifestation.
[20:19] That's like saying language is incomprehensible. I'm using words to communicate that, so clearly it's not incomprehensible. It's a self-detonating argument. So, yes, conditions can be imposed upon the baby without the baby's consent. The consent of the baby comes later, and there's nothing wrong with consent coming later.
[20:47] Nothing wrong with consent coming later. Nothing wrong at all. That's a condition of life. There's no life without consent coming later. And since you're interested in moral questions, which I admire and I think it's wonderful, and human beings require being alive in order to even discuss moral questions, well, you get it. I don't need to flog the old dead horse. Okay, so we can't impose things on babies without their consent because that's why babies exist. Now, the question is, can the baby provide consent later? Well, of course. Again, that's life, right? Obviously, my daughter's very happy to be alive and I'm sure she's appreciative of the parenting and so on. So that consent, and it's fast approaching, right? She's an adult in a couple of years. And she could go off and live her own life and do what she wants, and I guess she could technically emancipate even earlier, but yeah, so her consent is, her need for consent is diminishing.
[21:53] So, if my daughter, when she grows up, enjoys spending time with her parents, invites us to partake in her future family as grandparents, then clearly the consent is retroactive. She then consents to being born she consents to us being her parents and continuing in her life and she affirms some kind of value in what it is that we're doing because she wants to continue to voluntarily have our relationship and so on and of course she has a complete out because i said you don't have to spend time with toxic and destructive people so i couldn't exactly say well that's wrong if you know for whatever strange reason she didn't want to to see me so with With regards to a woman giving up custody of her child to someone else or to another couple. Let's just say another couple. Well, of course, the woman could be desperately ill. The woman could be a drug addict. The woman could be in some massive amount of physical pain through some injury. There could be some reason why the woman could be physically unable to care for the child for some reason. and a physical debilitation. So the idea that the custody of the child can be transferred or the custody of the baby can be transferred, well, of course, that's the essence of all adoption that occurs outside of dual parental death.
[23:22] You give up custody of the child.
[23:25] Of course, in divorces, often the children's time is spent between the mother and the father. It's split, right? So the custody is penduluming back and forth. That's not the choice of the child, but it's imposed.
[23:41] Saying that's great but that's just the way it works and if you don't want to have that then you've got a whole bunch of other problems outside of this permission after the fact is valid permission it doesn't matter whether you give permission before or after the fact with the caveat that if you get permission before the fact it's 100 if you're 99.9 after the fact okay there's there's a problem and so on but you having a problem with someone doesn't mean that that person has a problem, right? If you're a waiter and you want to be tipped 50% and some guy only tips 30% and you complain, other people are just going to roll their eyes, right? And if you were to try to sue that person for under tipping, everybody would say, well, that's kind of ungrateful. 30% is a pretty good tip. So just because you have a problem with someone else doesn't mean that they have a problem because you have to convince other people that it's a problem. So if your mother is some I'm a strung out drug addict and she gives you up for adoption, you dump to a really nice couple that takes great care of you. And later on, if you say, I'm so angry because although this couple was great, wonderful and loving and kind, I wish I had stayed with my strung out heroin addicted mother, people would say, I'm not sure that's the wisest thing. And of course, if your step parents, if your adoptive parents were kind and loving and thoughtful, then you wouldn't say that, right?
[25:10] So this is foundational to the question of utopianism for me, right? I'll just make the case here. So I've always been fascinated by utopias. I must have read Thomas More's Utopia when I was in my mid-teens like half a dozen times. I just remember it really fascinating. Here's the Ideal Society, Plato's Republic, an Ideal Society, Aristotle's Ideal Society, Gold Scotch, Utopianism, the Ideal Society.
[25:35] As the class of society. I'm absolutely fascinated by utopianism. I mean, of course, I wrote my entire utopian novel called The Future, which you should really get at freedomain.com slash books. Fascinated, absolutely fascinated by it. What is the ideal society? And how does it function? Hobbes' case for the ideal society, which is state, and Murray Rothbard's concept of an ideal society, a stateless society, all fascinating to me and all completely enraging because in just about everybody's conception of.
[26:12] Utopia it's all about what's your relationship to the means of production and is there free trade or is there a centralized authority or is there a dictatorship the proletariat or what is gold used for do we have charity like it's all about capital economics machinery political power power, means of production, all this garbage. All completely irrelevant, brain-rotting detritus that distracts people from our only chance to actually get a utopia. Because I've never, ever, ever read a utopia that talks about parenting. Now, I get it. So in Plato's Republic, children are raised in common without any sense of who their parents are, which means, of course, that you could get sibling and cousin marriage and all kinds of gross practices. But it's just, you know, children are raised in common, but there's no details about that. It doesn't mean anything. It's like saying, it's like Marx saying that the means of production are owned by the proletariat. Nobody knows what that means in any practical sense. I mean, the guy had never run a business in his life and was a failure at every job he applied for, but he's supposed to tell society how to handle the means of production. I mean, it's laughable, right? Except it's not, because 100 million plus people get slaughtered over this stuff.
[27:32] If we were to design a utopia, we would hold one North Star. We would hold one thing absolutely constant in our calculations. And what we would hold is what is best, safest, and most moral for the children. What is best, safest, most moral for the children. We would design our utopia not around the means of production or the use of gold or whether children should be raised in common with no specific details as to how they'll be raised at all or how should the children be educated or what is the role of money and what is the role of the state. Like, that's all nonsense. It's all complete, errant, distracting, brain-voided nonsense. The only thing that matters is what is best, safest, wisest, and most moral for the children. That's it. If you get that right, everything else follows. If you get that wrong, everything else becomes a disaster. So if you were to say, design a society for that which was best for children, you would recognize, of course, that the fundamental challenge of society is that children are in an involuntary, powerless state, and human beings don't handle power very well. Power corrupts, and everyone's, oh, this is Lord Acton's talking about political power. No, he's not. Fundamentally, the power that corrupts is the power of parenthood. And what's the solution?
[29:02] Well, we know the solution to corruption is choice and consequences. One C battled by two Cs. Corruption is battled by choice and consequences. Now, children don't have choice, so parents have to have consequences. So, in part three of Peaceful Parenting, I've been talking about the brain damage done measurable physical brain damage done by repeated instances of verbal abuse particularly from the mother acid womb tongue, that's the deal and it's measurable physical brain damage now we have a standard in law that says if you damage my health and my income or my income then you are liable for these damages and I can sue you.
[29:48] Of course, is if you say false things about me that stress me out, cause me damage to my health, cause me economic losses that are relatively objective, then I can sue you. So that's consequences. So how would we design a society wherein children would have the greatest protection from parental corruption? Well, for sure, we would not exclude any adult from the principle of civil restitution. The principle of civil restitution is what you did was not necessarily a criminal act, but it harmed my health, my financial interests, my peace of mind, something, right? So it is dealt with in civil court, not criminal court. It's not illegal, but it's harmful.
[30:37] So we want to universalize this, right? So if I kidnap a man, I don't want to make it me. If Bob kidnaps... So if Bob kidnaps a woman and locks her up for a year, and this is obviously very harmful to her, I mean, she can't really sue him because she's locked up in the basement with no access to communication. She has the right to, but she can't exercise it. But when she is free, then obviously that's illegal and she can sue him, right? Like O.J. Simpson was cleared in criminal court but lost in civil court. So she can't exercise her rights to restitution to civil restitution i mean there'd be criminal stuff too but civil restitution but that's it right so you don't generally go to jail for defamation but you have to pay for that right that's a civil matter so consequences so in a rational society, we say all adults have the right to sue for harm to their health, wealth, and peace of mind. All adults have the right to do that.
[31:48] This occurs irrespective of time. So if, let's say, the child at the age of 12 recorded the parents repeatedly and consistently screaming at the child, there's other solutions, but let's just talk about this one, then the child, as an adult, can sue for emotional damage.
[32:11] And, of course, we also know that verbal abuse has a significant negative effect on income, like your confidence is down and you can't be assertive and you're appeased too much out of fear, so it's kind of tough for you to be an effective employee or a confident, know-my-value business person. Person so there's peace of mind has been shattered there will be for sure if the verbal abuse was significant and particularly maternal there will be measurable damage to the brain so you allow the children to sue the parents if the parents harmed the children as the child was growing up now please understand this ain't perfect but if you're going to say that these lawsuits would be unjust or immoral because they happened in the past. Well, all lawsuits are about what happened in the past, right? Because you need evidence that only exists in the past. So you can't say it's not because of the past. You can't say it's not because children, because then you're saying as choice is reduced, as power is increased, the chance of lawsuits go down, right? So that would be like saying a woman could sue a man for misbehavior on a weekend she chose to be with But she can't sue him if he kidnapped her. It's like, well, no, kidnapping is much worse, right?
[33:33] So you would have all lawsuits occur in the past, and then you'd have to say, well, children can't sue because in the past, they had less power, and they were essentially coerced to stay within the home. You know, put leg irons on them, but that's just the nature of childhood, that you don't have a choice about where you live, particularly when you're very young. I mean, as a teenager, you can choose to hang out with friends more and all of that, but generally, you got to go home. You got to go home. That's where you sleep. And then we would say, ah, yes, but the children's perceptions can be wrong, and the children can make things up, or some adult can make things up about what happened to him as a child.
[34:13] Well, but that's why you would need objective evidence, the objective evidence being any potential recordings or eyewitness testimony or physical scans of the brain to show damage from whether it's sexual verbal physical abuse neglect whatever there'd be brain scans for this stuff and there would be a baseline of course because you'd have the brain scans as the children were growing up in a free society right so the consequences would be that if you harmed your children's physical health and economic interests they could sue you as adults so that would that would change things it would change things in the present because if you know that you're incurring a liability by harming your children a potential liability that they can sue you then you're going to change your parenting because clearly abusive parents are not motivated by virtue and where people aren't motivated by virtue they are motivated by consequences that's sort of a free market thing, right? Not everyone enjoys the productivity and social utility of laboring, but you need to get the fiat pellets in order to buy your food pellets, and so you go to work. There's consequences. And those who can't be instructed by morals will be motivated by consequences.
[35:29] Of course, people who are abusing their children or neglecting their children, which is another form of abuse, of course, are not motivated by morals. Therefore, they have to be motivated by consequences.
[35:38] Now, I fully understand that one of the problems with this is that the 12-year-old has to wait until he is 18 or whatever the adult thing would be in a free society, probably around that. The child has to wait six years and continue to be abused in a sense, except that's not the case.
[35:56] No child is going to have to wait. for the positive effects of this kind of liability to change the parenting. You say, oh, well, what about the kid that's occurring? Well, you know, every day, you know, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of children turn 18 around the world. I'm talking about a free world, right? And so if parents have been abusive and there's empirical evidence and clear evidence and brain scans and recordings and eyewitness testimony and all this kind of good stuff, stuff good stuff for battling immorality and corruption then the adults who just turned 18 will launch their lawsuits and it will be reported upon and the parents will be held liable, and that will change the parenting for the 12 year olds because the parents will be like oh, wait a minute we better sort this out right so you can't ever go back in time so all the people People who are adults who have empirical evidence of child abuse who want to sue their parents will sue their parents. And that would change the parenting of the parents who are dealing with their own 12-year-old or 5-year-old or whatever, right? It just changes. We know that, right? We know that.
[37:12] Deplatforming sends a message. Everybody else restricts their speech. Deplatforming and censorship are kind of the same thing. So it sends a message, right? So it sends a message. it.
[37:21] Now, if there's a way for the 12-year-old to gain access to resources, well I've talked about this before in the past about how.
[37:32] The dispute resolution organizations, will help the costs of child abuse accrue to the actual abusers, right? So, you understand, the society as a whole is so designed that child abuse expenses are externalized, right? Child abuse, I mean, there's some exceptions. There's a couple of the school shooter. I think just, certainly this year, the woman got four 15-year sentences for her contribution, as the court said, to her son shooting and murdering four children, although he was 15 at the time, I think. Those sentences, I think, at that state are to be served concurrently, so she's got 15 years.
[38:17] Unusual, and certainly will not be applied evenly. But in a free society, the DROs make money, the more peaceful and reasonable society is because they want to provide as lower costs as possible for keeping people's persons and property secure. And so the fewer criminals, the more profit they make. So they have a direct financial stake in preventing criminality. Now who else has a direct financial stake in preventing criminality certainly not the courts certainly not the police certainly not the prison industrial complex certainly not the state as a whole not the teachers and not the parents they have no stake no personal financial stake in reducing criminality so without that it's largely noise and nonsense i mean outside of voluntary adult-child-parent relations.
[39:16] So until we have a system wherein the people who produce criminals, which is in general abusive caregivers, whether they're priests or teachers or parents or whoever, grandparents doesn't particularly matter, abusive caregivers produce criminals, and until those abusive caregivers are held personally liable, personally liable for the production of criminals, for the social costs of, you know, understand, like if you beat your dog and then your dog bites someone, then you're liable. Even if you don't beat your dog and your dog bites someone, you're liable. It's your dog. You're responsible for making sure that dog can function well in society and not bite people. Actually, a friend of mine from early in the show was telling me a story about how he got bitten on the leg by a dog and his father sued the dog owner and got a settlement.
[40:09] In terms of like, do children at the age of eight get direct access to lawyers? Can they launch their own lawsuits and so on? That seems unlikely. And that's fraught with problems, which children are very susceptible to lies, falsehoods, propaganda, and manipulation.
[40:25] So there's an incentive to cause trouble for the profit of lawyers, especially if they're paid for by, obviously it wouldn't be paid for by the children. Children, but a social agency that profits from the protection of people will profit from fewer criminals. And therefore, it's worth applying. I mean, the social costs of criminality are staggering, staggering, certainly trillions upon trillions of dollars around the world, social costs of criminality. Who's paying for that? Well, a lot of it's been paid for through debt. The money printing, of course, taxes the unholy trinity of income excavation, but not the people who are actually producing the criminals who are the abusive parents. So in a DRO system, in a voluntary system, you finally have a social agency that has some authority that is financially invested in reducing the production of criminals, and therefore they will, you know, require for DRO certification so you can operate economically in society. Society, they will require the brain scans of the children, they will require measuring the cortisol levels, they will interview the children in the presence of the parents so that any discrepancies can be resolved, and so on, right? So they will be active patrollers of the borders of virtue around the children.
[41:49] So regarding surrogacy and so on, if the child is happy to be alive, and if the child is happy at the parents that they were given to, then there's no problem. They are giving consent after the fact, just as they're giving consent to live after the fact.
[42:06] If the mother, the biological mother, births a child and gives the child to dysfunctional parents, then the mother will be liable, and the dysfunctional parents will be liable. So I think that solves the permission after the fact issue. So I hope that this helps and I really do appreciate it. It's a great question and I really do appreciate having the opportunity to talk about it. Sorry about the voice quality again, but it's very sultry, I think. So we'll sort that out over the next couple of days. Thanks a million so much for everyone. Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show. Hugely appreciated. Lots of love from up here. My friends, I will talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
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