The Monopoly on Violence (2020) Movie Script

These are opening stages of what
will be a broad and concerted campaign.
Here comes your
guardian policeman.
(Daniel Shaver)
Please do not shoot me!
(Officer Philip Brailsford)THEN LISTEN TO
MY INSTRUCTIONS! DONT TALK, LISTEN!
How can you be certain
that all the people killed
pose an imminent threat
to the United States?
(Barack Obama) There's no
doubt that civilians were killed,
that shouldnt have been
(Narrator) In your life you will interact
with many different social institutions.
There is one institution
that is unlike any other.
One where you're
subservient to others.
From the cradle to the grave, you will be
regulated, taxed, controlled, indoctrinated,
coerced, judged, and possibly killed at
the whims of members of this organization.
This institution
is called the state.
(James C Scott) Well,
if we're talking about
human history in the
largest sense of the word,
that is to say, Homosapiens has
been around for 200,000 years.
The state was invented only even
at the most charitable estimate,
8,000 years ago, and
then it only touched a
small portion of mankind.
So the fact is that
most of human history
has been a sort
of statelessness.
If you ask yourself how long
people have been ruled by states
a sort of massive
level, I ask myself
at what point in history do you
imagine that more than half of mankind
would have experienced
regular tax collections?
Like once a year or
something like that.
There might be plunder from time
to time, right, but irregular, episodic,
and the existence of a
state in most people's life did
not come into being for
more than a half of mankind
until around 1600. If we take
the history of mankind as a day,
the state comes into being
at about 11:30 at night, right,
and it becomes Hegemonic at
sort of 11:40 right 11:45 or 11:50,
and the the thing that
qualifies this, of course,
is that there's a whole lot fewer
Homosapiens around in these early days.
Even Western cities
until maybe 1800, 1850,
never reproduced themselves
by their internal population,
that is to say they were
so deadly because of
typhoid and disease
and epidemics and so on,
that they killed more
people than they
Their population could not grow internally,
that all of these cities grew by
bringing in more people from the countryside
because they had high rates of mortality.
The reason the state forum has
proven so durable and virtually universal,
is that it takes a
state to be a state.
And so if you think of the early
states, that is, the early states
were all founded in flood plains
where you had concentrated agriculture
and could concentrate a large population,
and that's why they tended to be
units that were more
powerful militarily than a
scattered and fragmented
countryside around them.
And in fact, they grew by plundering that
population, by enclosing that population,
bringing it in, having them
plant grain and capturing people.
So I try to show in AGAINST THE GRAIN,
that most of the wars of these early states,
were wars of capture, in
order to grab populations.
This is true for the
Athenians as well.
Grab population, bring
them in, have them
produce for the center
or work in the quarries.
(Narrator) Kingdoms expanded into empires,
dominant kingdoms expanded by conquest,
suppressing people in new territories.A
hierarchy of Governors managed the
increasing complexity of
empires. A new system appeared in
which power was given to
the people in the form of votes.
Democracy diluted the
absolute power of authorities, but
introduced demagogues
and the tyranny of the majority.
Civilization expanded. More
decision-making power was delegated.
Some political power became
subordinated to laws, but delegating
power especially military
power risked a return to Empire.
Combining features of a democracy with
a Republic, nations set up basic rights
subordinating more political power
to the rule of law. Over time, however,
special interests found a way
to use politics to their advantage.
JAMES C SCOTT: Within a
state, I think it's fair to say that you
have got the standard aspects of
what we all associate with the state,
which is tax collection,
a system of centralized
punishment, and centralized
monopoly over violence,
so that executions that are legal executions
can only be conducted by the state.
What's important to
sort of recognize, is that
until starting perhaps
with the French Revolution,
In which which was an emancipatory
movement, and the idea that
people in all of France
were governed by the same
law no matter who they
were, everywhere in France.
That there were no serfs
anymore, you were not under the
personal lordship of an
aristocrat or of the priestly control.
The French Revolution marks that point
in which the state comes to see as its
One of its goals the
collective welfare of the people.
Notice that the French
Revolution did two things
- it also made all
Frenchmen equal in theory,
took a long time for that to come
into practice, especially for women.
But it also made everyone
directly ruled by the state.
NARRATOR: As populations
increased States grew more sophisticated,
controlling not just law,
taxation, and the military.
Eventually education, social services,
central banking, and much of the economy.
Laws informed citizens what rules the state
has decided they will obey. What began
as a codification of norms became a way
for special interests to control others.
The Protestant Reformation
made people, the idea is
that everyone can interpret
the Bible on their own,
so they start thinking of moral decrees from
God, and now legal decrees from the state
as what's written down on
paper and issued by a sovereign.
This is the statist way of thinking
and it's not what law used to be,
until the modern revolution
of the modern concept
of the state, which is
only about two or three
hundred years old like the
Westphalian concept of the state.
So Madison is probably the
pivotal person in American
history as the Scrivener
of the Constitution,
as the chair of the House of Representatives
committee that drafted the Bill of Rights.
He believed, we know
this from what he said in
his retirement, that he
gave us a government
which was liberty of individuals
granting power. It wasn't
like in Europe where power,
Kings, reluctantly granted Liberty.
So in Madison's view the American system
was the inversion of the European view.
Unlike all the strictures imposed on us
by states, states themselves are chaotic -
states aren't required to
follow any rules. There's
no rule of law, that's a
mythology that we cling to.
States can do what they want and they
are the judge of their own actions. Theyre
the judge of their own criminality, they're
the judge of their own civil penalties.
I mean, this is a bizarre state of affairs
where maybe 1% of the population,
3 million or so federal
employees get to dictate to
the other 329 million of us
how things are going to be,
and they're the sole arbiter of their
own actions. This to me is chaotic.
NARRATOR: State education
produces people who believe
in and perpetuate the state's
preferred way of thinking.
The the origins of the American
education system start in
the 19th century with reformers,
so-called moral reformers,
people like Horace Mann and others
who went to Prussia and found a system
of education there that they wanted
to emulate in the United States,
which they did, and they
brought it back here and
they established the modern
public schooling system,
and the idea of a
modern industrial capitalist
curriculum, and they
explicitly stated at
the time, these reformers who established
the schools in the 1830s and 1840s and 1850s,
they said at the time that what we need
is to create citizens with these schools,
which meant people who knew how to work under
under industrial capitalism in a factory,
and soldiers - people who are
willing to fight and die for the country.
So they needed to instill in
people a regimentation - the idea
that people can be made... can
and should be made into machines,
functionaries for a new
civilization. A new modern
civilization where there were
large factories and large armies.
So the school system was designed
purposely that way, and that's why we have
the bell system, where the students
move from class to class through the
day, just like on an assembly line,
and they are filled with one piece of
information here and then filled
with another piece of information there.
So they become both products of the assembly
line and they become the managers of
the assembly line, ideally. It's compulsory
and universal, the education system.
So youre obligated by law to send your
child to a school that is approved of by
the state. Now it can be your own school,
but it has to be approved by the state.
Most of us don't have that luxury
for various reasons, and especially
poor people and working-class
people, so they have to send their kids
most of them to government-run
schools where they are
obligated to stay by law from
8 a.m. to 3 p.m. no matter what,
and if they leave they are truants.
They become criminals and their
parents are liable to arrest and
prosecution and imprisonment,
and the job of the
teachers, sure is to educate
them with whatever the
state deems to be a proper
education, but it's also
to keep them in those
seats and in those rooms
and in those buildings.
If the kid decides to
get up and be a free
human being and leave
that building, the teacher
is the first person tell
him to stop, the first
person to call security
to force him to stay.
That's prison. It's a day prison, it's
a minimum security prison, but it's a
prison. If I don't send my son to that
school, I go to prison or I can go to prison.
He, if he leaves the school, plays
hooky he will probably get picked up by
the police, detained, labeled a truant,
and then brought back to the prison.
NARRATOR: Services offered by
government are not based on voluntary
contract. The state expropriates its
subjects wealth by compulsory taxation.
So why are they taxing us at all?
That's a good question. I think it
goes back to the idea of taxes
as a tool of compliance and terror.
A budget is you planning ahead, and
taxes is a method of procuring funds.
So a budget means I sat down, I thought
out my enterprise, it accounts for about
this much, this is what I need over this
period of time to account for my operations.
When you have a method of procuring
your budget by just yanking more, you get
to use ignorant excuses like well we're
not succeeding so we need more money.
That's not a correlation.
Maybe these people are
incompetent, and they're
squandering your money
further, you know. It
kind of it doesn't make
sense when you start
breaking all the things down.
The corporations don't
pay taxes, business
entities don't pay taxes,
only people pay taxes,
because a tax is a
burden. It's something that
we bear almost in a
physical, visceral sense.
It's a way to ensure
that Americans are docile
and that Americans
are frightened of their
government, because that's
the number one interaction
most people have with
the federal government,
is their annual tax
form. The amount of tax
revenue that government
takes in doesn't cover
everything it spends,
and so to make up the
difference, obviously
they sell Treasury debt.
So you know as bizarre as it
sounds, if a portion of the federal
government's budget can be funded by
debt, arguably the whole thing could be.
We could have no
income taxes and the four
trillion dollars that the
US Fed gov spends every
year could could be
financed via Treasury
debt, and then ultimately
monetized by the Fed.
NARRATOR: Central banks have
significant control over the economies
they govern. The Federal Reserve,
the central bank of the United States,
determines interest rates, controls
the money supply, picks winners
and losers, and enables nearly
limitless government spending.
Increasing money supply
keeping interest rates low, it turns
out that is very beneficial
for the federal government.
The federal government
whenever they spend more
than they take in in
tax revenues, they have
to borrow, and just
like anybody else has to
borrow, we have to
go to the credit markets,
and we have to
borrow at the prevailing
interest rate. Well when
the federal government,
who has the ability to tax, they already get
a lower interest rate than the rest of us.
They're able to borrow more, when
already the servicing on the debt, the
interest payments on the debt, are
already one of our biggest expenses,
with the debt, what is it now
23 trillion dollars? With that kind
of debt anybody else's credit
would have run out a long time ago.
They are able to keep on doing this
because the interest rates are low. So
the feds role in allowing the government
to overspend on all kinds of things,
but the biggest one would be military,
on these wars, endless wars. They're
able to keep doing that because
they're just able to borrow at lower rates.
Absolute monarchs, when
they got into wars, sometimes
they'd run out of money.
The Treasury would run dry,
so armies could not be paid, and
they would stop battling in the field
and go back. War is extremely expensive.
Had Americans been forced to pay
by taxation for the Vietnam War, it
would have stopped a lot sooner than
it did. America could simply print
money and buy the things that needed
to fight the war without having to
raise taxes. So it's because it spares
people from having to pay a visible
price for the war that the war can go on.
NARRATOR: State
military conflicts destroy
human lives, pollute the
environment, impoverish
millions of people, and waste scarce
resources in pursuit of state political goals.
Regardless of whether they
admit it or not, through all sources,
about a trillion dollars goes to
the so called defense budget.
Now that not only includes a six or seven
hundred billion to DoD, but also State
Department, a lot of US aid. A lot of other
things in the federal budget are really
defense spending masquerading as
something else. Well government is too
big and we need to cut spending.
If they're not talking about defense,
if they're not talking
about entitlements,
they're not being serious.
There's no amount of
cutting we can do in
any other part of the
government there would
make a meaningful difference.
As Randolph Bourne famously
put it, war is the health of the state,
right, the state benefits in lots of
ways, directly and indirectly from war.
I mean, everybody remembers
Orwell's 1984 and the idea that war
was so endemic that you didn't
even know who the current enemy was,
and they kept switching it
around right so people didn't care.
They just knew that they were
constantly in a state of warfare,
which of course, you know, allows
the state to justify a lot of infringement
on personal and community liberty
that we would normally not tolerate, right.
Oh well, we're in a time of war so we have
to read your emails, and we have to spy on
what you're doing and make sure that the
enemy hasnt infiltrated, you know, our midst.
The reason that most people go
along with that, albeit, you know,
with some some grumbling, is
because they have been told we're at war.
We're at war with
terrorists who would want to
blow up airplanes and
want to hurt you etc, so
you've got to sacrifice
some of your liberty
for the security that we
the government offers.
Well, this this is an example
of the US government creating
problems that it has the
appearance then of solving.
We created a problem in Libya with
our foreign policy of regime change
of the Gaddafi regime. When we
did unleash hell on the people of Libya,
the chaos broke out, as could be
expected, as could be predicted, as
we predicted, and that also then
in turn requires more intervention
because you had jihadists moving into
Chad and Niger and elsewhere, so you had
to create more intervention to solve the
problems that your intervention creates.
But the US uses jihadists, they
use extremists as cat paws. They use
it in Syria. They use the most
violent Islamist extremists in Syria,
places like Syria to overthrow
a completely secular regime,
government, and so how many
hundreds of thousands have died.
The global war on terror is
ramped up and ramped down as
Washington needs new enemies
or doesn't need new enemies.
In the most it's fabricated,
in the very least its
something that's created
by our foreign policy.
It's the same thing from the Reagan,
years the Clinton, years and really
some during the HW Bush, but
especially during the Bill Clinton years,
and then again during Bush and
Obama. America uses these jihadi,
saudi-backed, Sunni suicide bomber
terrorists for American imperial ends.
Our government hates their
adversaries more than they hate our
blood enemies who have slaughtered
Americans by the thousands,
and American soldiers by the
thousands in Iraq war two as well. This
is how crazy their priorities are
compared to what the American people
believed they were giving them the
writ to do - to protect us from these
terrorist groups. And of course
Obamas support for al Qaeda in Syria
led to the rise of the Islamic
State. In 2013 they conquered all
of eastern Syria, in 2014 they
rolled into all of western Iraq.
All of Iraqi Sunni Stan and the
Islamofascist Caliphate that had
been bin Laden's wildest dream
from the Attic he was hiding in,
and had been George Bush's
most phony propaganda from
the era of his terror war
in Iraq had become true.
Bush opened up Western Iraq
and then Obama backed them to
the hilt in Syria, to such a
degree they were able to erase
the sykes-picot border between
Syria and Iraq and declare a brand new
Islamist caliphate. And they had seized
a territory the size of Great Britain
which they held for three
years before America had then,
guess what, of course had
to ally with the Shia in Iraq.
The bata Brigade, the Iraqi
Shiite army, and all of those
iranian-backed militias.
America flew as their Air Force.
The same guys our government
wish they hadn't fought for in Iraq
war two, they ended up fighting
for him again in Iraq war three.
And even now our special operations forces
are embedded with these, well certainly
the Iraqi army, but essentially one degree
away from these very same Shiite militias.
The ones that Donald Rumsfeld
had used back in 2005 when he called
it the el salvador option. His
desk was to hunt down the Sunnis.
Were playing that same game right
now. And so America is on both sides of
this terror war all over the region.
Same kind of thing is going on in Yemen.
The war in Yemen is against Iranian
backed group called the Houthis,
who have taken over the
capitol city and it has put the USA,
with our Saudi and UAE analyzed,
again directly on the side of al Qaeda,
flying as their air force, against
their primary enemies the Houthis,
and even the AP and CNN have
reported about Al Qaeda embedded
with UAE forces driving American
MRAP IED resistant vehicles
and participating in the slaughter of civilians
in that war. Again with America flying
as al-qaeda's air force against an enemy
that has a friendly relationship with Iran.
Not that Iran attacked us. At
this point it seems like through
the Clinton Bush Obama and
now into the Trump governments,
to see that this bait-and-switch
continues on should mean to
the American people, to any
of us libertarians or anyone else,
that this government
is not fit to be our
security force. Our
security is not its priority.
NARRATOR: Democide is when a government
kills its own people. In the twentieth
century, it's been estimated to two
hundred and fifty six million people
killed by their own
government. That's six
times greater than the
amount who died in wars.
Government and the military,
the US military and other
militaries around the world,
but primarily we want to look at
communist countries and or socialist
countries who killed vast numbers
of their own populations. I think
that's the greatest indictment
against socialism and communism,
is that the Soviet Union killed
millions of its own people,
starve them to death with famine.
They did the same thing in
Red China where tens and tens of
millions of their own citizens
were killed off, and so government,
particularly when you see
where the level of government is
highest, and that's in socialism
and communism in particular.
Cambodia is another example
where a high percentage of
the Khmer Rouge regime
killed off millions of Cambodians,
so the biggest problem in the
world in terms of modern history
has been communist dictators
killing off their own citizens.
NARRATOR: Numerous arguments
have been used in attempts to justify
the state's authority. For a time
it was the Divine Right of Kings.
More modern justifications argue
the state's authority comes from
the consent of its people, often
referred to as the social contract.
There are basically three three
versions of social contract. There's
like the explicit contract theory
the complicit contract theory
and the hypothetical contract
theory. The explicit contract theory
might sound like a strawman
but it's not. So it's a theory that
some people actually literally got
together and said to each other Hey, let's
establish a government like they literally
explicitly agreed with each other,
either writing it down or saying
it in words. That might sound
like a strawman, nobody
thinks that that really happened,
but actually John Locke thought that
that happened. He thought that with
all of the cities there was a time,
like when a city was first founded,
there was a time when the
founders got together and explicitly
agreed that they were going to
set up a government for their city.
Okay, um, and then, so it was
explicit for first generation then
according to Locke it's only
implicit for the later generations okay,
because he's not totally stupid. The
explicit contract theory, um you know
that's basically not true. So though
like the governments that control
the land existing today, almost all of
them got it by conquest or usurpation.
This is discussed in David Humes
famous essay of the original contract.
So conquest meaning like a bunch of people
sailed from Europe over to this place
we're in now and they just kick the
shit out of the people who are living there
and take the land, and that's
how we have control of the land.
Okay. Usurpation is where,
you know, there's a government
and then somebody just like
takes over the government by force,
like there's a military coup
they set up a new government.
The hypothetical contract
theory is a theory that well, people
would agree to set up a
government. this didn't actually happen
because like you weren't actually
given a choice, and there was already
government when born, but if somebody
asked you, and if you were rational,
you would have agreed to
have a government, right, and
then so that makes it okay to
impose a government on you.
Okay now there are some cases
where a hypothetical agreement is valid.
Mainly it's valid if it's impossible
to actually ask the person,
and you have good reason
to believe that they would in
fact consent based upon
their actual beliefs and values.
So there's an accident victim
who's been brought in to the hospital
and they're unconscious, and you
need consent to operate on them
but the persons unconscious, the
doctors go ahead anyway, and the argument
is Well look, almost certainly this
person would consent to be operated on,
because almost everyone values
their life, and etcetera. But it doesn't
work if first of all, you can ask the
person and you just don't want to
because you're afraid they're gonna
say no. Okay so then you cannot
appeal hypothetical consent.
Secondly, it doesn't work if you say
well they would consent if
they had different philosophical
beliefs from their actual beliefs.
So no, you can't do that, right.
So, and that will be required
for the hypothetical consent to the
government, because there are
actual people, they're called anarchists,
who we know would not consent. Okay,
but that's not really legitimate. So like
if you have a patient who you know
they wouldn't consent to be operated on,
because like they've said
that many times when they
were conscious, you can't
say oh they would consent.
Also, if you have the patient
and they're perfectly conscious
and you just don't want to ask
them, like that's not legitimate.
You can't say I don't want to ask
the patient because I'm afraid he
might say no, so I'm just gonna
argue that you probably would say yes
we're just gonna like yes, I'm
gonna do the operation. You can't
do that, right. Okay, that's like
the situation with the government.
Why is the government not, like, they
could ask us. They could, like, the IRS
when they send out your tax turn they
could have a question on it that says
do you agree to the federal
government of the United States?
And then if you say no then
you get a full refund of your taxes.
I wonder why they're not doing that...
and it's not because they already know
everyone would agree. It's because they
know too many people would not agree,
and then they would have to give back the
money, and they don't want to give it back.
So when a young person reaches
an age of consciousness where
they might be able to reasonably
think about and read about
the nature of government for
themselves, their friendly local
city councilman, or congressman,
or governor, or whomever,
doesn't come over and say well
hello young citizen X. Pleased
to meet you. I'd like to offer
you my governmental services
which will include road and police
and fire and courts and colleges, all
kinds of wonderful things, and in
exchange, here's some contract terms.
If you sign this, you know, you
agree at let's say at the state level to
pay an 8% annual income tax, and
there'll be some sales and property taxes
along with it, but you
know, it's all gonna work out
swimmingly for you, and
you're really gonna like this.
And so this this young person
takes a look at it and says well,
you know, that's interesting,
you know. I appreciate this,
and you haven't stuck a gun
in my face, at least yet, but
I'd like to shop around a bit.
Well, well hold on a minute.
It turns out there is no
shopping around. It turns out that
this contract being offered
to you is kind of one-sided.
We have a monopoly provider
for these services and it turns
out that the price you're
going to pay for these services
can be changed almost at will
by the service provider himself,
and his cronies in the
legislature. So all this would be
a very odd form of contract
for most people. And then if it
turns out that you know, even
when you couldn't shop around,
you couldn't even say no.
In other words if this young
person said I'm gonna go
live out in the woods by myself
and I'm not going to use your roads
and I'm not going to use your schools.
I'm not going to use your fire and
police and I'm not going to pay.
That sounds fair, right? I'm not
using your services, what you're
trying to impose upon me. Well
it turns out that even then, no.
You still have to pay your 8%
tribute as a citizen of state X.
So this is a very odd form of
contract if we look at it that way.
NARRATOR: Some argue that democracy
is what makes a state authority justified.
People who appeal to democracy,
usually they appear to have a simplistic
view, like all the laws that are
passed are authorized by people,
so that to begin with is really
questionable. It's very possible
to have laws that are not not
accepted by the majority of people.
So obvious cases would be like in two
thousand eight to nine, the bailout of the
big banks was very unpopular among people
- among both Democrats and Republicans,
but just the voters, not the
politicians. It was popular
among the politicians,
and they passed it anyway.
And that's just an illustration of the
fact that, you know, however you want to
account for why this happens, laws do
get passed that most people don't support.
Okay. Second thing to say is who cares
if most people support it? Right? So,
you know, the question is if a larger
number of people want to do something
that would otherwise be morally wrong,
does it become morally permissible because
there's a larger number of people who support
it than are against it, so generally not.
Right? Like, there's no other case in
which you would say that. So you know,
there's five people in the room, four
of them want to beat up the fifth person,
they decide to take a vote on
whether beating up the fifth person is
okay. Only one person opposes
it. No, I'm against beating me up.
And then oh, so now the
four people can beat up the five,
because there are there were
more of them, it's a majority rule.
Okay so nobody thinks that that makes
it okay to beat up the person. Nobody
thinks that that suspends the persons
rights. You can just go through any,
like any other circumstance that doesn't
involve the government, you wouldn't say
an action that was initially wrong, becomes
okay if a majority of people support it.
So as the great Tom
woods always says, it's my
favorite analogy ever,
he said well, imagine
Walmart ran all the
schools and you had to send
your kids to an
institution run by Walmart,
and every morning they had to
pledge allegiance to Walmart, and
you had pictures of all the
Walmart CEOs all around the room,
and they would tell you all these
fantastic, you know, tales well
the first WalMart CEO never told
a lie... and you know like all this,
just the outright lies and
propaganda, and then you had
a society that was, um, you
know, really favored Walmart.
You're like why do you
think they liked Walmart
so much? Cause,
well, it's because they're
being propagandized from the time they were
children, and you know, propaganda works.
What the states keep out of
history textbooks are the things
that call into question the
existence of the states themselves,
that call into question the existence
of our form of governance, that call into
question the existence of a nation state
to begin with, they call into existence,
call into question the existence of borders,
governments, police, prisons, anything
that calls into question the existence
of the system those schools belong to.
NARRATOR: State
overreach is a perpetual
threat to individual
liberty. The state insists
on scrutinizing lives
of its subjects but
resists reform, transparency,
and accountability.
The individual actors in government
are not bearing the costs, the net costs of
their actions. So if you want individual
rationality to lead to group rationality,
you need some mechanism such
that when I take an action, I bear
most of the net costs. I get
the benefits, and pay the costs.
And on the market, that's mostly
true, they're not perfectly true, ordinary
private market. But in the political
market it's almost never true,
that if I vote for the bad candidate
and he gets elected, the costs of
that are distributed around at least
my country, and maybe the world.
If I'm a judge and I make
a decision that sets A bad
precedent, I'll never know
that it was a bad precedent.
Im imagining a precedent which
changes the legal system just a little bit,
and a very small change in the legal
system might produce costs of say,
100 million dollars a year. Huge amount
of damage for one person to, to make.
Commerce Clause, for example, which
gives Congress only the power to regulate
interstate commerce, and which to
Madison, regulate meant to keep regular.
Marshall and his colleagues and subsequent
courts have interpreted it to allow
Congress to do nearly anything it wants.
The color of your shirt, the thickness of
the soles in your shoes, the pigment
on the paint, the brightness of the lights,
the curvature of the lens, all these
things are absurdly regulated by the feds.
So, I think there's really two reasons
why businesses feel the need to
lobby and interact with the state.
So one, they want to get privileges,
over their competitors, and they
want to try and get some sort of
subsidies, tariffs, restrictions,
monopolistic grants of privileges
over their competitors, and
they want to try and get some
sort of subsidies, tariffs,
restrictions, monopolistic
grants of privileges that
can give them an edge over
their competitors, so they
act as political entrepreneurs.
that can give them an
edge over their competitors,
so they act as
political entrepreneurs.
The other tendency is that their
competitors are also doing the exact
same thing as well as other
interest groups, so various ideologues,
reformers, socialists, unions
etc, and they feel the need to
basically block hostile regulation
that's coming in threatening.
So then other words have to play both
the offense and the defense. So they're in
the political arena to secure benefits
and shape regulation to their advantage.
I remember one time that a
cop said to a friend of mine... he
caught a friend of mine, we were
14, and he said he smelled weed.
And we actually weren't smoking
weed. And, you know he could have
easily caught us like an hour later
and we probably would have been,
but we weren't smoking weed. And
my friend was really scared, and he got in
his face and put a flashlight right in
his face and he said are you scared?
I want to watch you piss your pants
in front of me to a 14 year old child.
If a police officer stops you,
you don't have, even if you know
that you're innocent, you don't
have the freedom to tell them
no, I don't want to deal with
you. No, they have a monopoly
on force - they can initiate
force, initiate violence,
up to and including killing you if you
do not abide by what they have to say.
A pretty close state to absolute power
in the dynamic of a cop, particularly
a cop with a teenager, but in
general a cop. I mean what, you know,
like even then, youll be lIke well I
didn't consent to that search. Well,
what happens if a cop says in court
you did? It's your word against the cops.
Who are they gonna
side with? They side with
the cop every time. So
there's two dynamics,
there's one that power corrupts, and so you
give people this power, none of us do well.
NARRATOR: International law
is a legal system that is created
without an overarching sovereign.
In a sense, it mimics anarchist law.
It's a bunch of different states
and they interact with each other
in an environment where there
isn't a higher power that hands down
what the rules are of the game,
and how everyone shall behave.
The international system is
self governed in the sense that
all the states work together
at least ostensibly as equals.
So international law, I believe
can serve as a model for
how we could imagine the
possibility of a stateless order,
because we do have 200 citizens
of the world, which don't have an
overarching super sovereign. So it's
possible to have peace among actors
that are decentralized and
that are sovereign with respect
to themselves, and don't have
an overlord that forces them
to comply with some kind of set
of rules. So the Hobbesian idea
that you cant have order among
the individuals without a government
to tell them what to do, is sort
of disproved by the existence
of the international order
and the international law.
Question is how would we apply
that then, down to a lower and lower
level, and the key issue would be
just to keep adding more and more
choice among people actually
living in these places in terms of
different legal systems that they
can choose from, different societies.
Anarchism can be difficult to define.
In spite of often being incorrectly
used to mean chaos, the word actually
comes from the Greek word anarchia
meaning without a ruler. The
earliest traces of anarchist thought
date back to ancient Greece and
China, where many philosophers
questioned the legitimacy
of the state. Taoist sages like
Lao Tzu and Shangzhou developed
a non-rule type of philosophy
that would eschew any type
of political involvement. Ancient
Greece also gave rise to some
early anarchist thought. In 300 BC,
Zeno of Citium founded
stoicism. Heavily influenced by the
cynics, his Republic advocates
for removing all state structures.
Gerrard Winstanley, who was part of
the Diggers movement during the English
Civil War, would become the foremost
prominent proponent of Christian anarchism.
He published a pamphlet in which he
drew upon the Bible claiming that the
blessings on earth should be common
to all, and that none lord over others.
He argued for communal ownership.
In 1703, Louis Armand, Baron de
Lahontan used the word anarchy
in his new voyages in North America
to describe the peaceful indigenous
people as having no state and no
prisons. Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
especially in his discourse on inequality,
had a strong impact on anarchism
- he argued that due to man's
good nature, state was
oppressive. In 1793, William Godwin
would write one of the first anarchist
texts inquiring and concerning
political justice. Around the end of
the 18th century, Godwin was the first
to use anarchism as the name of
a philosophy which would ultimately
be popularized by the end of the
19th century. Max Stirner who wrote
The Ego and its Own, Stirner advocated
for a more radical type of individualism.
Stirner argued we are all egoists
doing everything for our own advantage.
Stirner did not believe there were
rights that transcended morality,
labeling such things as spooks,
created by the powerful to oppress.
Left anarchism has a rich spectrum of
ideas bridging ecology, labor relations,
social and sexual inequality. Authors
like Murray Bookchin and Noam Chomsky
were strongly associated with left
anarchism, particularly anarcho-syndicalism.
Emma Goldman was a prominent
anarchist activist, once known
as the most dangerous woman in
America. She was born in what is now
Lithuania, and moved to the U.S. in
1885. She heavily influenced and lectured
on anarchist philosophy, women's
rights, and social issues of the
day. She founded the anarchist
journal Mother Earth in 1906.
Voltairine de Cleyre was an American
anarchist and contemporary of Emma
Goldman, who ultimately advocated
for anarchism without adjectives,
foregoing descriptions such as individualist,
communist, mutualist, or collectivist,
she was staunchly against the state
and the existence of standing army.
foregoing descriptions such as
individualist, communist, mutualist, or
collectivist, she was staunchly against
the state and the existence of standing
army. Her contributions to anarchism
and her lecture named sex slavery
helped create the foundations of
anarcho feminism. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Her contributions to anarchism
and her lecture named sex slavery
helped create the foundations of
anarcho feminism. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
published his What is Property?
in 1840, which would prove
to become a highly influential
book on anarchist thought,
Proudhon argued property, as most
people understand it, is theft. That being
said, he also argued the property
that was a result of labor was legitimate
but property of unused land, or
that profits from rent or interest was
illegitimate. Proudhon argued to be governed
is to be watched, inspected, spied on,
directed, law driven, numbered,
regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated,
preached at, controlled, checked,
estimated, valued, censured, commanded,
by creatures who have neither the
right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do
so. His philosophy, which has influenced
anarchist thought across the spectrum,
was called mutualism. There
was also Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin
argued that freedom and equality
were inseparable. Bakunin said in
The Political Philosophy of
Bakunin, scientific anarchism, we are
convinced that freedom without
socialism is privilege and injustice,
and that socialism without freedom
is slavery and brutality. Bakunins
philosophy is called collectivist
anarchism. At the end of the 19th century
came Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin
wanted to synthesize communism
and anarchism, creating
anarcho-communism. Kropotkin argued
with those who sought to use
Darwin's new theory of evolution to
justify racial and class inequality.
Kropotkin argued that mutual aid,
rather than the dominant gene
and a species, that the defining
feature of evolution was actually
mutual aid. Kropotkin also wrote
The Conquest of Bread. This
book was hugely influential on
anarchists in Catalonia as well
as in the modern-day Rojava.
This created a divide in the 19th century
between anarchists who were communists
and those who were not. Mutualists
believed in individual property rights
but with equal access to lands
sans taxation - sans taxation and sans
profit. Anarcho-communists on the
other hand, believed the community
rather than the individual should
be in control of property, removing
all market transactions, and
would adopt the Marxist principle of
from each according to his ability
to each according to his need.
There were also anarchists in
America who were influenced by both
Proudhons mutualism as well as by
classical liberalism. Josiah Ward who put
his theories to the test with a labor
for labor store, Cincinnati Time Store,
in which trade notes were issued,
backed by the promise of labor. This was
the first store to function this way
and actually proved quite successful
before Ward decided to close shop
in order to pursue colonies based
on his understanding of mutualism.
Warren Settlement, modern times,
whose name would later be changed to
Brentwood, had no government, no clearly
defined laws, and no money, yet absolutely
no crime, and very little commotion.
Another American anarchist, Benjamin
Tucker, said of Warren, that he was
the first man to expound and formulate
the doctrine now known as anarchism.
Speaking of Benjamin Tucker, he was
another anarchist who described himself as
an unterrified Jeffersonian. Tucker's
focus was on his fear of central planning,
fearing that it may have destroyed
any hope for either anarchy
or central planning. A more
controversial claim of Tucker's
echoed only by anarchists hostile
to communism, was anarchism is a
word without meaning unless it
includes the liberty of the individual
to control his product or whatever
his product has brought him
through the exchange in a free
market, that is, private property.
Whoever denies private property
is of necessity an archist.
Gustave de Molinari wrote The
Production Of Security in 1849.
Murray Rothbard would consider
him to be the great innovator in
the market provision of security.
Then, we have Lysander Spooner,
who is influential to both left-leaning
anarchists as well as anarcho-capitalists.
Lysander Spooner was an
abolitionist and a constitutional lawyer.
In 1845, he wrote the
Unconstitutionality of Slavery. Spooner
used both legal and natural law
arguments to prove the Constitution
in fact did not support slavery.
He acknowledged the founding
fathers of America probably
did not intend to end slavery
but only the meaning of the text
and not the individual intentions
of its authors were enforceable.
He later wrote pamphlets
on jury nullification as well as
legal advice for escaped slaves, and
gave legal services to fugitives. The
debate between communist anarchists
and non communists would
become so hotly contested that some it
makes the case it may be why
some anarchists, anarcho capitalists,
reject socialism altogether,
often to incorporate classic
liberal ideals such as homesteading,
moving away from socialism,
and towards an anarchist
form of classical liberalism.
Anarcho-capitalism is a school
of anarchism that advocates
individual autonomy
and private property.
What happened was over the
last several centuries starting with
the 17th to the 19th century, we
had a march, an upward march,
not upward every day but basically
upward march of freedom, and the
death of the old order, which
was statism, and serfdom, slavery,
and the theocracy, and rising
up from this muck, the idea of
individual freedom and the
institution of individual freedom,
personal freedom, religious, freedom, political
freedom, economic freedom, free-market.
He had a really comprehensive
knowledge, not just of economics,
but political theory, philosophy,
and many other subjects,
and he had a tremendous
intellectual curiosity about
all things. He was constantly
coming up with new ideas.
He was very enthusiastic
about the new ideas he founded.
First is the non-aggression principle,
NAP. Keep your mitts to yourself
and don't grab other people with
their property, without their permission.
Now in boxing, if you and I are in a
boxing match and you punch me in the nose,
I can't say assault and battery because
I've agreed to be hit above the belt.
The second one would be
private property rights, and
we need private property
rights, because, suppose
you grab this shirt that I'm
now wearing. Did you violate the
non-aggression principle? Well it
all depends on who owns this shirt.
If I stole it from you yesterday,
you're just repossessing your property,
and I'm the bad guy. On the other
hand, it's my shirt keep your mitts off,
and if you grab it you're the bad
guy. So we have to know, who
is the owner of my shirt? And
the third one is free association.
No one should be forced or compelled
to associate with anyone against
his will. One of the direct effects
of the non-aggression principle,
the nap NAP, is no government.
That would be the purest libertarian
view. Why? Because government
taxes people against their will,
and we just got finished
saying that the non-aggression
principle says that you
shouldn't be forced to do anything.
You should be able to do anything
you damn well please, except
keep your mitts off of other
people. Well when they're taxing us,
that violates the non-aggression
principle and it violates
free association. They're
making us associate with them,
and where do we get that
from? I didn't sign the Constitution.
The idea that rights
are simple and clear,
and therefore you can
eliminate everything by,
you can solve all problems by
showing you can't do that because
it violates rights. And some
of those, I guess my favorite
counter to that, which comes
from Bill Bradford, who was the
editor of Liberty magazine,
he's no longer alive unfortunately.
But he was an interesting
guy and he says, alright, this is
my memory of his example,
you fall off your balcony on the
15th floor of an apartment
building, unfortunately. But
fortunately, there's a flagpole
coming off the balcony on the 14th
floor just below you, and
you managed to grab hold of
that, doesn't break, and you're
going hand over hand back
to the 14th floor balcony to get on
it, and get down, when the owner
of that apartment comes out of
his, comes onto his balcony. He says
that flagpole is my property, not
yours. Let go. Do you? Well if the answer
is that you don't, we have to either
say that's because you're a bad person,
you've just violated his
rights, or you have to say it is
morally legitimate to violate
rights when enough is at stake,
which is basically
what this comes to.
Once you've conceded that it's morally
right to violate rights when enough is
at stake, now you've abandoned the
moral argument against almost everything.
I know lots of people have different
visions of what this looks like, but
let's say we're talking about an extremely
decentralized covenant community,
where people just come together
and form communities where they sign a
contract, and I agree to live in
this place and follow these rules,
and as I argue in some
of my essays, is probably
the likely way that
most people would live.
A lot of people imagine that
oh well, I'll just go out and do
my own thing out in the countryside
and no one will bother me.
This, of course, is an extremely
naive way of looking at things, your
neighbors would probably just
come and try and take your stuff away.
So most people would congregate into a
group of some kind and then agree to give up
certain amounts, certain
prerogatives, in order to amass their
resources and put together
private security force and so on.
I think when it comes to
the most widely understood
cases of unjustified
aggression, there is a pretty broad
range of agreement. I mean,
yeah not everybody thinks taxation is
theft, but virtually everybody
thinks murder can't be justified.
Virtually everybody thinks you can't break
into somebody's house and take his things,
and that's the baseline
we operate from, and if
there are a handful of
people who don't accept that
well that's what we
have self-defense for.
I think it's just a numbers
game, like it's just how many
people believe in the moral
legitimacy of the ruling class,
because people say well, how do
we end this and how do we end that?
And you know there are
people using cryptos to
undermine the extortion
racket, which is awesome.
There are people who are big
on second Amendment rights, and
like, we need guns so, we
have the ability to forcibly defend,
if they do this, which I'm fine
with that too. But to me it's a
numbers game like if there's only a
few of us you know we're doomed.
You can run off and hide
the cabin in the woods
or something and you
might get away with that,
but I want to see the whole world
become free and rational and moral.
NARRATOR: Agorism
is the school of anarchist
thought developed by Samuel
Edward Conkin the third.
Conkin advocated for
peaceful counter economics
with the intent to starve
the state of funding.
Sam and Neil were driving
cross country actually, they were
at college in New York and
they were driving across country,
and they worked out
the details of agorism and
Neil put it into his
book Alongside Night.
If I recall correctly Sam
was supposed to have a
book come out, but he
couldn't find the publisher,
so Neil, who you know, he's
friends with Heinlein and a
lot of different authors,
he's a little more established
in the writing scene he put
out Alongside Night,and
that was really the
foundational text of agorism.
The main thing is just pretty
much bleeding the state dry, staying
out of the state in any way
possible, like not paying taxes,
cash transactions
and all that, but with the
idea of doing it to stay
away from government.
The white market, which is
obviously the acceptable market, you
know, everybody trades in that.
You know, taxes, regulations.
Then there's the gray markets
which is, you know, it's a legal
business, but you're maybe,
you're not paying taxes you know,
youre a tax evader or
whatever, and you know, you're
not claiming everything,
or it's not regulated.
Karl Hess was one of
the early agorists, he used
to be Republican. He
worked for Barry Goldwater
and he coined the term or the phrase
extremism in defense of Liberty is no vice,
and eventually he became
more and more of an anarchist
and he got in with Sam
Conkin and all those guys,
and he wrote Community
Technology, which is a little, I hesitate
to call it a book because it's
so small, it's really just a booklet
where he describes his
whole experience in the
Adams Morgan neighborhood
in Washington DC,
where he creates this whole
farm in an urban environment,
and what's really striking to
me is that if you can do that
in Washington DC you
can do that anywhere.
Nobody is capable by
revolutionary action of overturning
great social systems.
It has never been done.
There hasn't been a revolution by armed
force ever in the history of the world.
What we have had is changes of
management very often, but no revolution.
Crypto anarchy. So the idea
is essentially that the use of
cryptography will help us
subvert or undermine the state,
and I think that's absolutely huge
to where we are in the future, not
just in terms of blockchains, but
also like set in terms of Tor as well.
So when we combine the two,
again we have things like the Silk
Road where you can buy and
sell at will, whatever you want,
to whomever you want
without any form of regulation or
censorship by Congress, or your
governor, your state legislature.
Crypto Anarchy, is, that is
to me what's going to save us,
and I think the crypto
anarchists have become
essentially a wing of
the agorist movement.
Anarchy is just normal life
that happens all around us every
day. When we walk down the
street we all have a vested interest
and just having society
where we deal with one another
peaceably, and we deal with
one another in ways that we feel
are justified and win-win.
I mean anarchy is just it's
just in the air around us,
it's not something abstract,
it's just human beings
doing what they want to do
voluntarily, well, without
force without coercion.
We can distinguish between
individualist anarchism,
which is based on
private property ownership,
and other types of
anarchism that are more
communitarian, kind of, don't
recognize private property.
I think that by anarchist
societies, and by
anarchism in general,
compared to its popular use as
chaos, disorder, violence:, and so on,
the anarchism ought to be understood
as forms of cooperation and
mutuality without hierarchy.
I think that developers would
develop towns and cities,
and people that lived in
towns already and so on,
those would be the
public areas, let's say,
would then be owned,
almost as stockholders.
People in the town would be
stockholders in those public areas.
But I think you could have any
number of organizations where
people come together and form a
variety of communal organizations,
own communal property, have
communally owned towns and cities
and so on. Those could all
certainly meet the definition,
that I think, the key
component there is that you
would have a lot of choice
about where you would live.
NARRATOR: In 1860, Paul
mile de Puydt coined the
term Panarchy, which is a
system that recognizes the
individuals right to choose
any form of government
without being forced to
move from their current locale.
Panarchy, to me, is one
of the next stages of human
social evolution. Instead
of pure anarchy, okay,
which sometimes you might
think of anarchy, or some people
might think of anarchy, as just
being utopian, being fanciful.
Panarchy is a way of
describing arrangements where
we don't make any sort of
judgments about the kinds
of civil association that people
want to enter into, but they
do that rather freely. And
what's interesting about panarchy
is it's different from polycentrism
which is another fancy
p word that just means we're
breaking up power into smaller
jurisdictions and allowing for
people to vote with their feet. If
they don't like this jurisdiction,
they can go to the other one.
Polycentrism is this idea
and it's really important.
You can join your Republican
or Democrat or socialist
or what-have-you
association,and in your home. So
instead of joining a party
that fights over who gets to
control 350 million people,
say a panarchic state of
affairs would just be if you
believe in joining a kibbutz
or you believe in the
Singaporean healthcare system
or if you believe in some
other set of governance,
arrangements, be they hierarchical
or decentralized, you can join
those, and you can exit them if
they're not working out for you.
You get a market in
governance that is divorced from
territory. We have to ask
ourselves now, in this day and age,
why is it that rules have
to be attached to territory?
Always and in every
case they don't need to be,
and in fact, for most things,
the rules we live under are
an artifact of conquest,
are an artifact of, you know,
I was born on on this patch
of soil that long time ago was
conquered by somebody who
makes the rules on my behalf.
It doesn't have to be this way,
but a panarchist says let's try
different experiments and let's
see who joins what civil associations,
and then we can just have
mechanisms for settling
disagreements between
those civil associations
NARRATOR: Whether or not
anarchists should utilize politics
to try to shrink the state
is a hotly debated topic.
Recently, on the federal
level we got a right to try bill,
which says that if you are
suffering from a terminal disease
and there's some experimental
drug you might be able
to take, we're going to
give you the option to take it.
But that began on the state
level, as a series of states
began introducing right
to try laws. Now there's no
authorization for a right to try
law on the national law. They
were just doing it, and as it
turns out, they paved the way
for a liberation that
occurred on the national level,
and you can go down the
Tenth Amendment Center,
you can go down the list of
the various initiatives they have
and you'll see how many of them
there are on such a wide array
of issues that might appeal
to both left and right. If I look
through the history of
so-called states rights in the first
let's say 150 years of American
history, what do I find it being
used for well? I find it being used
to defend the freedom of speech,
to defend against unconstitutional
searches and seizures,
to defend against a military
draft during the War of 1812,
that was proposed that some
people like congressman and
then senator Daniel Webster
thought was unconstitutional,
but in fact they were even
used to fight against slavery.
And we see that not only
in the personal liberty laws
which were used to fight
against the Fugitive Slave
laws that existed in the
19th century. We have states
for example, refusing to
allow the federal government to
use its facilities, to use
its its jails to hold suspects
or to let any state
official take part in running
after a fugitive slave
or anything like that.
The whole thing is, the
principle of secession, I think is
very very good. I sort of lean
toward the nonviolent approach,
but I always support secession,
and I think the founding
founders made a mistake by
not having that in the Constitution,
because that would have
restrained the government. If we
could have as individual
states leave the United States
anytime we want, they would have
been much more reserved in the abuse
of the rights that the
states should have and
the rights of the
individuals within the states.
Secession is an approach
you take when you have
irreconcilable differences,
that's in fact what happens.
Right now in the United
States we have well over 300
million people, and we are
divided right down the middle
in how we look at the world.
We have radically different world
views, and instead of saying why
don't we work on an arrangement
where people who think one
way can just live according to those
ideas and people who think
another way can live that way?
Instead we feel like we
have to win and triumph over
our enemies. Well, there
has to be one way to think
that dominates the entire
country. And at some point you
should ask yourself is
that really the most civilized
way for us to organize
society? Is that the most
civilized way for human
beings to live with each other?
And I'm inclined to think that it
would be better if we said look
we we just don't have the same
vision for what society ought to be,
and instead of every four years
having a low-intensity civil war with each
other to see who's going to ram
ideas down the throats of the others?
What if we say why don't
you live your way we'll live our
way we'll see, you know, let
the best man win kind of thing?
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I think the idea that all
people just keep voting for
someone who's better than
the last clown that was in there
or the, you know, we just got to
wait for the Republican or Democrat
systems to reform themselves
and offer us some new candidates
that clearly isn't working.
People have been trying that for
a really long time now, and
so I think if you're disgusted
by the current system, and
you agree the current system is
crazy, the very least you
can do is stop legitimizing it by
voting every two or four
years, because that's
really the fig-leaf that
they hide behind is to say
oh well this system is
voluntary in a sense, because
look these leaders were
democratically elected.
So, I would just say I do
believe most of the victories
you're likely to have are going
to come at your local level.
You have no chance of
influencing the US Senate to do
anything, but on your local
level, well you could, you know,
you might even know
your local state legislator.
I mean he might actually
live on your street.
There is a possibility
that you could get some
tax repealed or some
onerous regulation repealed.
The next level of libertarianism
below that would be
minarchism Ayn Rand,
Robert Nozick, and there they
support the non-aggression
principle, but they
allow government, very
minimal government, to have
armies, courts, and police.
Armies, not to export democracy,
but to just make sure bad
guys don't come from abroad and
attack us. Police, not to
make people virtuous, but to
just make sure that murderers
and rapists don't do their
thing, and leave victimless criminals
alone, like prostitution and drugs.
Everybody's a minarchist,
you know, who's not an
anarchist. Joseph Stalin was
a minarchist. Bernie Sanders
is a minarchist. if you're
just gonna say well I think
the state should do XYZ
well why not XYZ and ABC,
and while we're at it EFG. It's
a whole bunch of other things.
I mean, either you're you're
guided by first principles,
or you're not, and you're just
in the realm of preferences.
And you know anarchists
get accused of being utopian
but there is nothing more
utopian than a minarchist.
The idea that a state
will stay restrained
because it just decides it
doesn't want more power. We're
gonna create a monopoly
on the initiation of violence
and they'll probably decide
we'll only stay, you know, a certain
reasonable size. Well, I mean,
how much empirical evidence
do you need to disprove
the idea that that's even
possible? And in fact there
is a pretty strong correlation
between relatively small states
becoming the biggest states.
It's not a coincidence that
the United States of America
which started as this experiment
in restrained government
with all these brilliant thinkers
who wrote all about checks
and balances, and divisions
of power.. Well, now it's the
biggest state that's ever
existed in the history of humanity.
The most effective strategy
for bringing about a stateless
society is not politics at all. I
don't think we're gonna send
our prayers up in the voting
booth and hope that the
authorities grant us this
kind of supreme freedom.
NARRATOR: Markets are
the most common way for
people to meet their needs.
Many anarchist theories
have offered market solutions
for services that are often defined
as public goods, such as law,
defense, security, and education.
The entrepreneur is sort of
the fundamental agent who
drives forward the market
economy, right. You know, look at
all the goods and services
that we have around us. The
chairs we're sitting in,
this building in which we're
doing this recording, the
equipment, the camera, and
computers and so forth that
we're using. Where did all those
things come from? They
have to be produced by human
beings, right, who exercise
forethought and planning
and have a deliberate
purpose, and use their ingenuity
and so forth to come up with
ways, you know, to convert
the inputs that are given
by nature, natural resources
and land and energy, and
then human labour and so forth.
Those have to be converted
or transformed into iPhones
and buildings and automobiles
and food that we can eat
and so forth. So the
entrepreneurial function is this taking
command of resources, and making
them into stuff that you can try to
offer to consumers in the
future, not knowing for sure
whether you'll be successful
or not. If you are successful,
if you're good at anticipating
future conditions, you
can produce a thing that
consumers will want and will pay
more than what it costs you
to make the thing, and you're
in a profit. If you're
unsuccessful, you earn a loss.
Its this constant pursuit
of profit and desire to avoid
loss that animates the
process of production and makes
all this stuff around us
available. As Ludwig von Mises
said it is impossible to
picture a market economy
or to have a picture of a market
economy without the entrepreneur.
This agent, this agency,
constantly pushing
and promoting and moving
the economy forward.
Technology is a good example
of that, where companies
are having to hire all
sorts of specialized labor
to interact with one
another, to try to come up with
improvements in the product
or improvements in production,
and so that's that's the
order that anarchy brings,
because it is all based
on voluntary activities that
are meant to be
efficient and meant to be
productive and meant
to be mutually beneficial.
That's what's really ironic
about that perennial question
of who will build the roads,
is in the current system
it's not usually that it's literal employees
of the state who are building roads,
it's just the state has contracts and
they farm it out to various bidders.
As it is now poor people
pay for the roads even though
they never use them or never
go anywhere, but people who
maybe higher income and travel
a lot around the metro area, or
travel to tourist spots and so on
they're using those roads more.
If you turned those into
toll roads, they'd have
to pay more and then they
would be annoyed by that,
whereas right now, you're
charging grandma to pay for that
road that she never ever
uses cuz she's like a shut-in.
And so that evens out
the cost, then for people.
On the I-10, which is a big
highway that goes past New Orleans
all the way from Florida to
California, the minimum speed is 40
and the maximum speed is
70. Well maybe it would be
better if the speed in this
lane was 50, and 65, and 80.
Would that reduce deaths?
I don't know! All I know is if
different people try different
things Now on your road
you're gonna make it 60, 70, and
80, and on someone else's road, it's
gonna be 65, 70, and 75 maximum
speed. Which one is better?I don't know!
I think that just as Ben Franklin
set up a private firefighting
service, there's no reason at
all that all the fire departments,
which also engage in a form of
protection, need to be government.
NARRATOR: Private
education solutions include private
schools, tutoring,
homeschooling, and unschooling.
We have the idea that Well,
you know, every child deserves
an education, it's impossible
to imagine the market
providing that level of
education, therefore it needs to
be provided by local, state,
national government, etc
Education is a special
kind of a good. People will
say well, maybe the market
can produce toothpaste
in appropriate quantities and
qualities but not education. Education
is a different kind of a thing.
It's a so-called public good,
can't be provided by the market,
must be provided by the state,
and we have to require that
every student get this education
and that's why we have compulsory
attendance laws. Ok look, I'm a
professional educator. Do I think
education in the abstract is important?
You bet I do, but education
is not a thing, right, there's
not just one homogeneous blob
of Education where everybody
gets one unit of education or
no education, right, education
is just like any other good or
service on the market, right.
We don't actually consume
education, something in
the abstract, but we read
books, we attend classes,
we, and as adults, right, you
can hire a consultant to educate
you on something, you can watch
a documentary film like this one
and educate yourself, you
can read a book, you can talk
to somebody, you can
participate in a discussion group,
you can go online, right.
There are all kinds of ways that
we get educated, but the
things we consume are specific,
discrete, marginal units of a
thing that I read, or a lecture
that I heard, or whatever,
and you know, are those things
bought and sold in markets?
Yeah, ask amazon.com or
any you know, or Hollywood,
or a college or university,
a for-profit college
university or school. Of course
people buy educational
goods and services all the time.
The current government
educational system emphasizes a
general curriculum where
everybody learns the same thing.
So you have survey courses in
college on Western civilization,
right. Everybody learns the
same thing, and you're told
what to think about it, and
also conveniently, studying
the course of Western
civilization which is important.
But you're told what to think
and you are not told about
the key factors of the
rise of Western civilization,
which is private property,
free markets, and sound money.
Those you know, if you taken
those classes. I took a couple
when I was in college Western
Civ one in Western Civ two,
and inflation was mentioned
once, even though it's the thing
that brings down
civilizations time after time,
and so getting back
to that I think you know
people would be exposed
to great ideas they would
appreciate great ideas and
even think for themselves.
NARRATOR: Private alternatives for
criminal justice are gaining popularity
due to the inefficiency and
unreliability of state courts and police.
Private dispute resolution is a
multi-billion dollar industry and
much of the security in society
is already produced privately,
in the form of security firms, neighborhood
watch groups, and private gun ownership.
Courts can be private.
We see that every day in
private adjudication
systems, in arbitration systems,
police, we see that every day in
the form of security, private security,
at places like Disneyland, and
as far as national defense goes,
I think it's largely a myth.
I don't think that the rest of
the world is particularly
looking to come invade America,
and even if it was, I think
that the notion that security
could be provided on the
marketplace is something that's
absolutely tenable in that
that we need to look at. Well,
I think there would be
lawyers even in a free society.
I think there would still be
conflicts. I think there would
still be contracts that would
occasionally be breached.
I think there would still be
disputes between neighbors,
disputes amongst, in business.
I think there's a lot of ways
in which lawyers would still
be a thing in a private society.
Might still have a market
function in drafting contracts
and representing people in what
we would hope would be some form
of common law courts, or
private courts, or private arbitration.
Well, for normals or police
services, I think the way people
would think of it nowadays,
just with private agencies
fulfilling those services, and
notice the big difference here is there
would be competition. So right
now, if just imagine a grocery store,
they hired an agency to crack
down on shoplifting. Some kid
puts a steak under his, you
know, under his coat pocket,
he starts around the door,
and the agency goes and
tackles him and breaks his
legs or shoots him cold dead,
that would be bad for business.
That particular agency would
go out of business, and so
over time you would see police,
what we think of as the job of
the police, would be handled by
competing private firms in a very
efficient but also humane manner.
You didn't have prisons for
example, in earlier societies,
which were much less state
oriented than the ones today.
Prisons are a relatively
recent development. Britain,
I think was the first to have
them in the 18th century.
NARRATOR: The idea of private
defense services was first suggested
by Gustav de Molinari in his 1849
essay The Production Of Security
When we think about the private
provision of military defense,
it's important to always use
an apples-to-apples comparison.
So it's true that a relatively
small city, no matter what
they did, wouldn't be able to
repel Nazi Germany for example,
but by the same token, neither
did France, and France used
a conventional state military
to defend itself and it lost.
So the claim from the anarchist
camp is always that for a
given group of people, other
things equal, they will be able to
better defend themselves
if their defense is left to
voluntary market provision, than
if the government monopolizes
and tries to take over that
enterprise. So as far as a
city of twenty five thousand
people defending themselves,
we don't know exactly what
they would do, but the point is any
money they spent on missile
defense or other types of defense
would be better spent because
we can see governments notoriously
spend way too much on, you
know, military procurement,
the amount they spend for
a given missile or bullets or
whatnot is more than the
private sector analog would be.
So for a given amount of
expenditure, a smaller society of
truly free people would get
more bang for their buck as it were.
Also the issue is they wouldn't
be an offensive threat to anybody,
so there would be no reason
for a state to want to invade them,
except perhaps for the
ideological one that it's awkward that
there's this free society that's
prospering. But in terms of
why is it the government's
largely go to war with each
other? Just like Switzerland,
for example, was able to go
through both world wars
relatively unscathed, and it's
partly because everybody
knows they're not a threat to us.
The problem with the state
provision of military defense
among other issues, is that
it limits the brainstorming to
just a few people who are
in the military hierarchy and
maybe some of the political
figures involved as well,
and whereas a genuine
open market relies on the
contributions and the insights
of the whole community.
And so when you have
the state running your
defense, you're putting
all your eggs in one basket,
and that was shown for example,
most famously with France
and the Maginot Line, you
know during World War two,
where that sort of system
wouldn't have occurred like that
under private provision, where
as yet, one company thought
oh let's just really have
these strong fortifications but
some other company might
say that's not a good idea let's try
you know having these other
systems to repel invaders.
And so that's really the
benefit of having competition
when it comes to military
defense, is that's the last place
in the world you want to
have one agency with one plan
and if the plan doesn't work,
then your country gets taken over.
NARRATOR: Entrepreneurial
innovation has done more
to diminish state power
than most political action.
Number one, 3d printers, right?
CNC millers, ghost gunners.
These are great, great
options for people who want to
be able to defend themselves
but not have to register with the
state or go onto a government
list. That's one of my favorites.
Also cryptocurrency
miners, right? Just if you were
mining for Bitcoin, you're
engaging in counter economics,
because you're helping
people avoid the banking cartel.
Also Tor. Look at what Tor
has done for people. Providing
encryption to protect them
from the CIA in the NSA. So if you
look at the market, the underground
market in Alongside Night,
that is the Silk Road. That is
what gave Ross the inspiration
to create the first truly free
and uncensored market.
That's also why the state
gave him double life +40.
Narrator: Anarchism is being spread
into mainstream culture in music,
comic books, animations, stand-up
comedy, film, and video games.
So there's this really
interesting thing that happened in
Hollywood, you know. John
Hughes, very famous director,
did a bunch of famous
movies in the 1980s when I was
coming of age. It was sixteen
Candles, Breakfast Club,
movies like that, they're really
popular with Gen Xers like me, and
those movies, I think invariably
poked fun at principals and teachers
in schools as sort of these
lame authoritarian figures,
right who the heroes the movie
would sort of, the whole movie
about them sort of escaping,
like Ferris Bueller's Day
Off, right. Thats a classic
example of that, right.
NARRATOR: Comic book creator Jack Lloyd had
discovered that crowdfunding and on demand
publishing was a recipe
for successfully delivering
entertainment and a principled
message to audiences.
When I was finishing up law
school, I was kind of just killing some
time thinking about what I'd like
to do as relates to my passions,
which involved the comic book
world, and also you know promoting
Liberty. I started to write it
and put it together and format it
and then think about what I
could do for a pitch, and then
I worked with an artist to
create the initial sketches
and I put that together for
presentation IndieGoGo, and
from there you know
Voluntaryist kind of took off.
I'm also working with a lot
of multimedia organizations to
produce a lot of good
libertarian content, and I'm quite
interested in producing a
video game. This has been a
fascinating thing for me
lately. Somebody made a meme
where they said like you know
Fortnite gets 400,000 people
to play it every day, or
something and the Libertarian Party
gets so few votes, and I was
like it's a great point. Why do we
not communicate our philosophy
through more modern enjoyable means?
Why can't we sell it through
entertainment? Some people would
want to do, you know not
everybody's down for a dry philosophical
discussion, not everybody's
down to argue economics
like we are, but everybody
likes video games, dude.
NARRATOR: Libertarian ideas are
being brought to a wide audience by artists
like Tomasz Kaye. Kaye earned acclaim
for his animation George Ought To Help.
ANIMATION NARRATOR: You want to
help Oliver out so you give him some money.
To your surprise, George doesn't
offer Oliver any help. You try to
persuade him, but it's no use.
Imagining yourself in this situation,
do you think it's okay to
threaten to use physical
force against George to
get him to do the right thing?
Now imagine a slightly
different situation.
This time, a group of
your friends take a vote
six out of ten are in favor of
threatening George to get him to help
Oliver. Does this democratic process
make it okay to threaten George?
NARRATOR: In 2017,
BackWordz, a new metal band,
released Veracity, filled
with anarchist themed lyrics.
The album spent many weeks on Billboard's
metal album chart peaking at number 20.
[Music]
That was our first album,
Veracity, and it was a hit. I
would have never imagined
that it would've got big as it did,
but now we're gonna be a lot
more, alright, you know we had, we
all come from different backgrounds,
and we want to make sure
we express that. So we've
already pretty much announced
that it will be sort of this
like double-sided type of deal.
We had 18 tracks the first
album, so our upcoming album
were gonna have roughly
like 20 and stuff like that.
So we're gonna, between
our first two albums well put
out, we're gonna put out more
music than you know people
that have three albums out,
you know three four albums, but
this time we're trying to just
get a little more, you know,
just, just mix it up a little bit and
I love it. I love the process and
also obviously with us being able to
talk about whatever we talked about,
because we don't have any
strings attached to us, right. It's
a lovely thing. A lot of
closet, definitely in metal core,
even though it seems to be
a lot, a really leftist dominated
sort of sub-genre, there's a
lot of closet libertarians in it
because they're like well
if I come out and say some
of that, man that's basically
the end of their career.
And this is why I think they're so
attracted to us and why and I talk about
all the time about the void that we
just simply fill, and just being for us.
The people who come up to us
like man you make music that
I enjoy, but man you adopt
the philosophy that I adopt,
and that's what takes it to
another level. And again,
there's people in these
bands that are kind of closeted,
but again, it's like they
don't think that it's worth
putting themselves out there
like that just simply because,
yeah, you get a target on
your back, you get a target on
your back because it's
against the norm in the industry.
Stand-up comic Dave
Smith brought his comedy to podcasting
in 2012, eventually hosting his
popular podcast Part Of The Problem.
He then made the jump from
stage to screen as A regular
on cable news shows, and
in his own comedy special
Libertas, which spent three weeks
at the number-one spot on iTunes.
They went oh why do they
hate us? Thats how clueless we
were. We didnt even know
there was a beef. Like if you had
asked us on September 10th,
you were oh, what do Muslims
think about America? That
were awesome, I dont know,
what else would they think?
And then September 11th
happened, and people were
like WOAH, why do they hate us?
And then people are like well
you know, you've been bombing
the shit out of them for
decades. And we were like what?
I'm obsessed with libertarianism,
and so when I'm doing comedy
it just kind of comes out,
and having the perspective of
being an anarcho-capitalist it
gives me a different angle than
just about any other comedian
has on the topic of politics
or government or even culture,
and there's just a lot of golden
material there. There's nothing
that that's more absurd and hilarious
than the idea of the
state, and it's something
that everybody accepts
and that's like comedy gold.
NARRATOR: Anarchists
utilize podcasting and memes to
spread messages, further
bypassing corporate media.
I was trying to figure out a
way that I could contribute
to the Liberty movement,
so I just decided to podcast.
I had been in music at
one point and I understood
recording, so I bought
some very basic equipment
and I laid out about 15
episodes of my basics of
voluntarism and
libertarianism, and just started.
I never learned about guns,
so I cover guns a lot in my
channel and the content that
I do. Now I love firearms and
I love learning about it
more, but growing up it was
something that I never had
experience in terms of culture,
or anyone in my family, or anyone
around me. One of the biggest
things that we're doing next
and this partnership together,
is we're focusing on dispelling
a lot of the myths that are
being perpetuated in the media
against gun owners specifically.
I was making memes for all
different types of groups and pages on
my own accord, because I just had
some technical skill in Photoshop,
and you know just you know like
entertaining people, but it really started
to take off when I was invited to join
the Anarchy ball team back in 2013.
Memes reach anybody and
everybody. You see, memes are
obviously popular with younger
people, but even older people,
boomer memes, you know.
They're getting into it too, and it's just
to see it. Theyre little seeds
that float all over the place,
and they just spike right into
people's minds, and even if
it's something that they disagree
with in the meme, because
you know usually memes
are pretty extreme with the idea
that they're trying to get
across, and it bothers people
or people really resonate
with it, but it sticks in their
head and that's what I
like a lot. That and it's funny.
Throughout history, there
have always been populations
that live outside the reach
of states. In Southeast Asia,
millions thrive without a state
to manage their lives. James
C Scott discussed these
anarchist communities extensively
in his book The Art Of Not
Being Governed I'm a South East
Asianist, and I was interested in
the history and the relationships
between hill people in Southeast
Asia and lowland people,
and the states exist in the
lowlands, and historically
one thought that the people in the
hills were in a sense the ancestors
of the people who founded
States. That they were the backward,
less-advanced, had not discovered
rice, agriculture, and Buddhism,
and so on, and it turns out
that it's much more complicated
and much more interesting
story than that. That the, and here
we're talking about an area of
maybe a hundred million people
spread all the way from the northern
boundaries of Vietnam and the
hills, through Thailand, Laos,
Burma, all into northeast India,
and I contend, and I think
the evidence is indisputable at
this point, that historically
most of the hills were populated
by people who were not always
there, but ran away from states in the
valleys, because of taxes, because
of epidemics, because of wars,
conscription, and so on. And
there they were, if you like, fleeing
States, and therefore and they
did, one of the things that they did
was to create social structures
that prevented States from
arising among them. It's
not that they didn't have order,
its not that they didn't
have Chiefs, but they
had a whole system of
preventing state formations.
NARRATOR: In Cheran
Mexico, citizens abolished
all political parties and
disbanded the police.
It's so very great, very chill
environment right now, and if you
compare it to something to an event
in United States or Western Europe
any place in the first
world, well there's little to
no security at all, and even
that could make you wonder
what if there's a
smart lost soul out there
that would think of harming
everyone in any way?
And that is easy, that's not
gonna happen because of
one simple reason. You
don't know who has a gun here.
(IN SPANISH)
NARRATOR: In 2014, the
Mexican Supreme Court ruled their
system of government as
constitutional, effectively ending
a four year long fight against
political parties getting back into the
community. It was a significant victory
that validated their efforts to rebuild.
To do so it must build a
thriving economy buoyed
by lucrative exports and
stable local businesses.
(IN SPANISH)
NARRATOR: Mutual aid is a
practice that combines individualism
with collectivism to meet
the needs of working people.
People in a locale pool resources to help
each other when temporary help is needed.
These are very old structures.
Mutual aid societies have
been with us since the
time of the Masons, the Elks,
and all manner of other aid
organizations where people came
together looked after each
other throughout human history,
and in fact there were at
one point one third of the U.S.
population at the peak of these
arrangements was a member
of a mutual aid society. So
the fact that these disappeared,
came about for a couple of
reasons. The first was that
the welfare state really
was ascendant in the 20th
century and these
associations were crowded out.
People could no longer afford to
both pay taxes and be members
of these organizations and
hope to get benefits out of it.
Instead, they became dependent
on the centralized welfare state.
ANIMATION NARRATOR:
In the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, one of the primary
sources of health care and
health insurance for the
working poor in Britain,
Australia, and the United
States, was the fraternal society.
Fraternal societies, or
friendly societies, in Britain and
Australia, were voluntary mutual
aid associations. Over one-quarter
of all American adults were
members of fraternal societies in 1920.
Fraternal societies were particularly
popular among blacks and immigrants.
A fraternal Society was a group of
working-class people who formed
an association and paid monthly
fees into the associations fund.
Individual members would then be
able to draw on the pooled resources
in times of need. There were a
great many societies to choose from.
Their most commonly offered
services were life insurance,
disability insurance, and lodge
practice. Lodge practice meant
that the lodge would retain
a doctor to provide medical
care to its members.
Members would pay a yearly fee
and then call on the doctor
services as needed. If members were
unhappy with the doctor, the
contract might not be renewed.
Most remarkable, was the
low cost at which these medical
services were provided.
At the turn of the century,
an average workers daily
wage would pay for a year's worth
of medical care. Much cheaper
than on the regular market,
yet licensed physicians
competed vigorously for large
contracts perhaps because
of the security they offered.
This competition kept members
costs low. The response of
the medical establishment
both in America and in Britain
was one of outrage. Many saw
it as a blow to the dignity of the
profession that trained physicians
should be eagerly bidding
for the chance to serve lower-class tradesmen.
Such low fees, many doctors complained,
were bankrupting the
medical profession. Socially
inferior people were
setting physicians fees.
(NARRATOR) Voluntaryism In
Action, a philanthropic organization,
raised over 250,000 dollars in
2019 for hundreds of people in need.
Food Not Bombs is a
decentralized nonprofit organization
that feeds the homeless. Food
Not Bombs continues to expand
to their local outreach and
service. Don't Comply is an open
carry organization based in
Texas. For nine years, they've
hosted the annual Feed The
Need Drive, where they issue
food and blankets to the
homeless. Based in Philadelphia,
Black Guns Matter, is a
grassroots gun organization that
teaches nonviolent conflict
resolution and firearms safety.
I started Black Guns Matter
because we saw a need, a
serious deficiency in Second
Amendment information,
firearms safety training and
education, and just the general,
you know understanding, that
we run this. That we the people,
especially in urban demographics,
so I wanted Black Guns Matter
to reflect that. To give people
an understanding of that.
And then it kept
snowballing and we've gotten
larger and larger, and more
people are down with us.
The leaders, whether theyre
law enforcement, and when I say
leader, I mean a woman or
man that is doing positive things
for and with and in the community,
whether theyre politicians
or whether theyre clergymen,
and women or whether they,
you know just OG guys that did
some time, got some credibility.
They love what were doing,
they think, they know what
time it is, they know the
racist routes of gun control.
NARRATOR: As the state expands,
it's easy to forget that everything the
state does coercively was once done
voluntarily for ourselves and each other.
(THADDEUS RUSSELL) If
you're interested in individual liberty
and personal freedom, I would
say the most important thing
is learning yourself, learning
what you want. I think some people
don't want freedom, some
people don't want personal liberty.
Some people want to be told
what to do, some people want to
be regimented, some people
want to be cogs in the machine,
or work in a cubicle for a boss,
or be a member of an army, and
there's nothing we can do
about that. That's just their values,
right. So, you have to decide
what your values are. What do
you value in life? Do you value
the freedom to move your body
wherever you want to move it
however you want to move it?
Do you value the freedom to say whatever
you want to say whenever you want to say it?
You don't have to worry about
having a huge number, you
don't have to get 50 or 60
percent of the people to agree,
you just need about 10 percent
of the people who are energetic
and are thought leaders,
and put the information out.
I think once you convinced
enough people that a free society
would work, it would be
preferable to the current one.
Whatever particular mechanism
is used to get there, it's just
gonna be a whole lot easier,
whether it's seasteading or secession.
If you were to tell somebody
in 1840 that we were going
to abolish slavery across
the West in the next 25 years,
it would have seemed crazy.
People worried who would pick the
cotton? Just like they worry
today Who will build the roads?
But we can go to a much
better place, we can actually be
morally consistent. You don't
have to live in this world where
you pick which criminal you
think is going to be slightly
better than the other one. We
all know they're all criminals.
We all know this. People don't like politicians,
they don't. People know who they are.
Yeah, everybody has these
skills I think, that they're good at.
Just go for it, like give it a shot.
Definitely in the age of social
media you can be a content
creator like tomorrow. You know what
I mean. Like just do it, just
give it a shot, see what happens.
If you fail, you don't do that
good, yeah yeah yeah, you know.
Or you never know. It may
be a hit with a circle of people.
Just go for it, give it a shot.
At this point I'm still young,
come on you know twenty eight,
but in the same respect if I'm like
hey man, this is something I
feel like I can do, I'm just gonna
go do it and if it doesn't work
out it just doesn't work out.
But that can apply to each
and every single individual.