How to Handle Libertarianism: Refuting Principles with Praxis.

okay let's let's start at the shallow
end of the swimming pool because for most of you watching this video it's at the shallow end that you're gonna have your struggles in life that you're gonna be splashing water on one another um how do you handle the issue of menarche ism libertarianism anarchism anarcho-capitalism how do you handle these types of claims whether we think of them as political economy political philosophy how do you handle them when your loved ones tell you that they sincerely support or represent the position how do you handle them well maybe your co-workers and colleagues come to you stating these these convictions my own thoughts about this end of the swimming pool shall we say have not changed in 20 years but what has changed for me is that I've had more and more experience targeting people face to face or sometimes through a medium like Skype over the internet with people who sincerely you know advance these views and I think that most of them have in a sense never really put their own beliefs on trial have never really tested them against any reasonable standard precisely because they're they're just shocking enough that people who disagree with them will tend to shut up and slink away that most people just will not want to have the conversation and because the their political platform is just removed enough from reality it's just enough steps removed from anything that could be implemented in real life that they don't really think it through and it's in its practical implications nor were they drawn into debates or forms of political activism where they they would have to they would have to prove the practicality or the implement ability of their political vision so by contrast if you make the very broad statement that you think poor people should not be deprived of the right to have surgery say a life-saving surgery just because they lack the ability to pay they lack the money right away someone can reply to that by saying oh well yes but do you that you should actually implement single-payer health care or some other do you believe that the government should be able to intrude into the private sector in order to force doctors to provide surgery for free they may ask any number of questions that then immediately challenge your belief not in the question of is this or is this not a good belief in some isolated and abstract sense but they're challenging you to take your belief and prove that it has some practical value if it were to be implemented in this real world as as policy so that's the type of thinking I think that anarchists and integral capitalists really lack exercise in doing and even the more respectable counterparts of those philosophies libertarians and in Minorca they really tend to lack that kind of practical experience so um start with an allegory but it's an allegory that that overlaps with with the case I want to talk about here there was a brief fad for anti debt hysteria and anti banking hysteria and this was a little bit more left-wing but certainly included a lot of libertarians this happened back in the the the the we are the 99% movement the Occupy Wall Street movement and there was another movement that to some extent tried to co-opt that that excitement to some extent really was part of that movement referred to as the zeitgeist movement so again some libertarians were involved that some leftists some kind of recovering socialists looking for a new a new hat to wear and the sort of thing definitely some some anarchists too so those movements had in common a deep hostility towards bank loans and debt and I had a fairly long dialogue with a proponent of that view at the time so someone who was really chuffed by the success the short-term success of that movement that it had these street protests that many people attended and I said to him simply I said so so the view you're presenting of the world is that it is an advantage not to have access to bank loans you know you've just explained to me that you think it's a terrible thing that it's a blight on humanity that it's a form of enslavement for people to receive a loan for people to go into debt you know so so you actually gets disadvantageous for you know middle-class people or working-class people to to receive bank loans so so within the history of the United States of America we have a very clear test case here under segregation under racial segregation in the United States after the end of slavery but before maybe nineteen eighty African American people did not have access to bank loans credit cards debt home loans etc the same way that white people did they didn't have absolutely zero access to banking this is an incredibly well-known incredibly well attested you know fact it's one of the reasons why was very difficult for black people to become business owners and home owners and so on in the post-world War two period but even going back before that let's go through the whole period of you know so-called segregation slavery is over but black people don't have a quality yet in unit states in this long period of time if if you believe this theory you should be able to point to that history and say what a tremendous advantage african-americans had because they did not have these loans they did not have access to debt now that discussion in and of itself I can say was devastating for the other person I was debating now what am i doing in that debate this is not Socratic method this is not even debating with them the merits of their belief or their political position it's not questioning whether or not their beliefs or their values are good because that's what they're used to what anarchists are used to debating is whether or not their ideology in a sort of packaged form separated from reality and its consequences if we're implemented whether or not it is it is good in an abstract sense so this is like you know taking a tool out of the contents taught out of the context of the workshop and placing it in a display case in a museum and saying is this a good tool or not well we might be able to judge whether or not it looks pretty when it's on display in a museum in an art gallery but that's not really what I want to do I want to take it back into the workshop and see see what the outcomes are see whether or not it can scratch and cut whether or not it can and can do the job shall we say of cutting and polishing gemstones when we when we put it to the test and it's remarkable to me the people who really deeply and passionately have these sorts of convictions for example the conviction that debt and banking is some kind of terrible blood and humanity how quickly those deeply held beliefs fall apart when we just invite them to take a few foot steps down the road of proving the concept just thinking through what are the necessary consequences if that were true and if that were taken seriously within the remit of mainstream politics and of course you know it is not now in the same way I had a debate or discussion not too long ago with an anarcho-capitalist with a sincerely believing in ergo capitalist via voice chat similar to Skype and I presented him with the the very clear parallel within the history United States America so what you're saying is what you as an anarcho-capitalist are claiming and again he anarcho-capitalism in many ways is a more rude and transparent presentation of the same set of values and priorities that can appear in the guise of menarche ism or libertarianism especially right-wing libertarianism left-wing libertarianism - to some extent so the the case you're presenting to me is that people would be much better off that have tremendous advantages if they were not burdened by access to government provided health care access to government provided education access to government provided roads electricity you know and these these other services and I said though you know and and that and that basically the less of these things they have the they would be not to mention of course taxes but you know there - the whole issue of Taxation is fetishized and unbelievable extend these these ideologies said so tell me when you look at the history the United States over the last 500 years do you see evidence that indigenous Americans Native Americans American Indians sorry I'm just filling the way some people watch these videos English is not their first language I mean groups like the Navajo people who were you know indigenous to North America before they were conquered by by Europeans people like the Navajo and the Mohawks so on and so forth do you see that those people have had tremendous advantages or tremendous disadvantages when you compare their communities to the white European settler communities there in some cases adjacent to them that had much more much better access to those same government services now this is a case-by-case issue but especially if you're talking about over 500 years there are many many cases where you can point to a native reservation and see that it was from a from a left-wing perspective from a mainstream leveling perspective the native reservation was in a state of neglect you say it was not receiving government health care was not receiving electricity or running water in pipes or sewage and sewage treatment we still have these problems in Canada still this day that they either were not receiving education at all or receiving very little education or only education provided by charitable Grob charitable groups like Christian missionaries but not government education and then step by step again for talking with the full 500 years obviously within the last thirty years there's been an effort to try to catch up and provide indigenous peoples in their reservations even with colleges but for a very long time there were these government services were either lacking or were really absent you can find examples trout peoples who were really completely neglected with these government services if you believe this as an integral capitalist if this is your doctrine when we have two people living adjacent to one another one of whom is being given these government services that you say are bad and another whom another group being deprived of them we should see all the benefits that you're claiming you're claiming our society would have these benefits in future if we lacked those government services this this should be proof positive for your Radiology so why do we see that or why why do we not see that now the the fellow I debated that with that anarcho-capitalist you know to be honest I think he was just too stupid and too ornery to really take it on board but he had no answer for this he really could not deal with a simple real-world example like the history of Native people within its own country it's very obvious when you just glance at this you can again you can look at adjacent communities it's not the case that the privileged white people are being oppressed by being provided with sewage sewage treatment running water drinking water electricity access to health care schools etc whereas the Native Americans nearby are being liberated or have some advantage by being deprived of these things that has just not been the case and to some extent still today it's not the case today there's a general situation of trying to catch up in some cases try to overcompensate by providing exactly the services that work that we're lacking for so long on indigenous reservations so any of these ideologies if we just draw them out into the workshop of ideas away from the museum of ideas and into the workshop of ideas very quickly they start to they start to fall apart with both you know with libertarians and anarchists and these other flavors like America isn't in between I have I have very rarely heard any intelligent response to to simply questioning how do you plan to deal with sewage treatment or indeed even if you want to do it a little bit more of an abstract way dealing with the virtues the question how in what sense is it immoral for government to get organized and deal with water pollution in the form of soot stream why is that immoral because many of them use these very extreme bold statements that any kind of government intervention like this is theft and as a crime and is terribly oppressive well people need to get organized and make sure that they're not poisoning themselves by having sewage dumped into the river and then end up drinking that same water further down the river among other problems is cholera this is not the only health problem you're gonna have through improper handling of sewage and improper management of your drink water so a central authority to organize and manage sewage and the sources of drinking water and to enforce standards for both obviously this is going to be handled by a government which all around the world many many governments do a very good job of or it's going to be handled by another organization that will resemble the government in practically every sense so if you lived in a society that didn't have government water quality assurance drinking water and sewage treatment if you just imagine what are the necessary features the agency that does this well it needs have a centralized Authority it needs to collect a small amount of money from everyone who's benefiting from the service so if it's not taxation it's going to be a type of fee for drinking water and using the toilets which will resemble taxation and it's gonna have to have special rights and privileges to dig up pipes to you know suddenly make repairs and snoop around and install things like sewers and sewage treatment plants it's going to need a sense of they're going to have to be extraordinary legal privileges given to this agency that's managing sewage treatment if it is not the government so if you imagine a deeply Catholic society if the Catholic Church took over sewage treatment and the provision of clean drinking water the Catholic Church would step-by-step start to take on many of the characteristics of a government and if it were not the Catholic Church if were a corporation a huge corporation like Samsung in in South Korea well Samsung would start to resemble the government process because they'd be involved in in this type of operation and with collecting the funds to support and so on and so forth so even if it were privatised were not really escaping the same the same questions whether they want to phrase them as justice and injustice or just questions of practical implementation if you had two adjacent countries over a period of 100 years and one of these countries was fastidiously adhering to a minner cast doctrine some inner chasm is basically anarchism light or even libertarianism light midair chasm is kind of the easiest the most presentable of these ideologies menarche ism is the idea that you should minimize the power and authority of the state have government reduced to essential functions some people like to say that the government serves as a night watchman so you still have police and the military and probably you know some infrastructure role like roads and electricity but you strip the government to the great you strip the government down to its minimal essential aspects as much as possible and of course this again if you guys are familiar this resembles what libertarians often say and what an especially integral capitalist but many types of anarchists will say so when they're not talking about completely eliminating government minimizing government in a sense if we had a contrast between two adjacent countries where in one country people lived with the sort of terrible neglect that indigenous people of America had certainly for at least the first couple centuries of their history after they were forced onto native reservations no access to health care or education running water electricity if they had even the same kind of neglect that African Americans had when they were put in to get ghettos and when they were settled as sharecroppers after the abolition of slavery but before that achieved the real civil rights inequality if you have one country where this wasn't the status of the oppressed minority but was the way the whole country ran if this would be montork ism this would be live arianism or anarcho-capitalism where they were just left to to sort things over themselves in this manner and indeed you know where they were lied on therefore the source of Education Christian missionaries or other charitable agencies do the lack of government involvement in these things um and that they're next door there was a country with the same kind of shall we say mainstream moderate democracy policies that you see in in Denmark and Sweden the government providing schools hospitals roads electricity infrastructure that the government pursuing excellence by building up an expansive and expensive welfare state if you have the welfare state adjacent to a mineral estate for a libertarian state over a period of 100 years which society will perform better in all the ways that really matter this may sound a little bit too hypothetical for you guys but we've actually just lived through a long period of history when tremendously powerful political forces conspired openly conspired to make this sort of experiment happen what do you think the arrangement was the created the contrast between East Germany and West Germany it was a very open political arrangement between the Soviet Union and the United States primarily England and other countries were also involved it was an arrangement in which both sides thought that they would prove the strength of their ideology by showing how much better they could rebuild a Germany what what the new site what sort of new society they could create in the rubble and ashes of Germany after World War two and you will note that during periods of time when there was outright starvation in the Soviet Union and China there was not starvation in East Germany where people were starving in the Ukraine there were still rations of rice wheat and what have you being sent to East Germany I very I recently read about even China's involvement of that that's why I mentioned rice it's actually China exporting rice to the east there was overall a sense that East Germany had to be the showpiece for the success of the communist system the success of the socialist economy the command economy that they had to make you know the quality of the apartments and the food and the life that people were enjoying in East Germany they had to be able to show this to Western Europe and say hey see how much better life is in East Germany the western me now you know I don't even have to insert a footnote here from my perspective life in East Germany was horrible you can watch there have been several actually very good movies made by people who grew up in East Germany about what life was like documentaries and fiction films talking about the subtle ways in which it was horrible however they had a budget this was trying to show off how wonderful communism could be and meanwhile West Germany that's the side of Germany you guys are more familiar with was the capitalist paradise and to some extent Western powers were putting time and attention and money into rebuilding West Germany to be a bit of a showpiece for how good the Western European model the Democratic capitols Malka p and guess what both sides of the Cold War were delighted with this arrangement they said great we have two countries adjacent to each other proving their respective ideological systems peacefully competing in showing who has a better ideologies so they decided to do it again they decided they would do again in the partition of North Korea versus South Korea and that's a partition that still endures to this day they decided they would do it again in the partition of Taiwan from mainland China and in the earlier period of American involvement in Taiwan one of the main forms of CIA involvement was actually improving the farming technology in Taiwan they wanted to make sure that Taiwan had the best pineapple farms in Asia and this kind of thing they wanted to show because a lot of the Communists cared a lot about farming and agriculture they wanted to show that in Taiwan the farmers were prosperous and you know there this is marvelous quality of living and very productive while people were as it turns out starving in communist China but Communist China the Soviet Union they also they were obsessed with having highly productive farms and their results were of course tragic but that's what they were trying to achieve and it's hilarious to read it won't know it depends on your sense of humor it's hilarious or it's tragic to read the perspective of Richard Nixon when he's complaining that all he was trying to do in Vietnam was the same thing that they had already done in separating North Korea from South Korea the the ending to the war he was trying to arrange at least an Israeli they said oh well why couldn't they just divide Vietnam into North Vietnam and South Vietnam and then likewise act out this already familiar script of having two adjacent countries the two political systems so this is actually a very overt part of political history in the 20th century and now the 21st century the idea of on an experimental basis having the same ethnic group of people the same language group of people the same culture divided into two halves with two ideological systems two political systems and see how it plays out see who wins have a sense of nonviolent competition between political ideologies so in this sort of scenario I just say whether you're talking it through with a libertarian an anarchist an intrical capitalist or a men are kissed I don't think that anyone working this through in a pragmatic level could possibly believe that if you have a North Korea versus South Korea sort of contrast that a poorly governed country is going to outperform a well governed country that's ultimately we're talking about that a country where government takes no positive part in education where it takes no positive part in expanding infrastructure supporting the progress of science where the government takes no positive part in for example prisons and prison education trying to reform and improve people who have committed crimes and end up in prison where the government takes no positive part in dealing with drug addicts and trying to reduce or eliminate drug addiction these things can become an epidemic quite easily there are many historical you know examples of this countries where the percentage the population who are organics gets way out of control um the myriad ways in which government can be positively involved in shaping the future development of society I mean yes of course there gonna be some examples that look a bit absurd did the United States really need to send a man to the moon did Canada really need to be build the the Grand Trunk Railway the ground Grand Trunk Railway is a famous you know failure of Canadian Canadian history Canadian infrastructure projects when I was a boy we still had government debt in the books from building that railroad you know yes there are boondoggles there are laughable failures and so on but what we're really talking about in embracing libertarianism and mannerism is basically the idea that rather than trying and failing it would be better to to not try at all and in the in the in the laboratory of ideas and the workshop of ideas in terms of testing and proving these things I think it's very clear that the outcomes would be would be much much worse now I just end this video by saying both the museum and the laboratory sorry both the museum and the workshop have some positive role to play and talking about this kind of political philosophy either a policy is bad in itself it's just bad regarded in isolation and abstract or you think it's bad merely on account of who is carrying it out right so I do think that is a bad idea to have the Catholic Church run prisons I think it's a bad idea to have the Catholic Church run schools for children however I do not think that schools are a bad idea in themselves I do not think that prisons are a bad idea in themselves I understand that many people who are on the anarchist and libertarian end of the spectrum really sincerely have so much apprehension and hostility towards government that they regard the concept of government-administered schools as something as as odious as threatening as I might guard a Catholic run school and guys in case you're watching this and you're baffled that I would be afraid to put my kids into a Catholic school how would you feel about putting your kids into a Muslim school how about a Muslim fundamentalist school how about a school that's run by the Taliban this really exists in Afghanistan and elsewhere how about a school run by the Muslim Brotherhood or any other fundamentalist Muslim group well now think about how I would feel putting my kids into a Catholic school I'm not comfortable with it I'm not comfortable with children anywhere being raised under the religious authority and educational authority of the Catholic Church that's deeply problematic I think that's deeply problematic and if you don't think that about the Catholic Church then you must think it about some religion whether it's Islam or Hinduism or some hypothetical cult group you just have to imagine you can't possibly be satisfied with any and every ideologies running schools nor any and every ideologies running hospitals prisons sewage treatment plants being responsible for testing and ensuring that the the drinking water coming out of your tap is safe um and it is a peculiar thing to say that the concept of government controlled services is vindicated precisely because a government is not beholden to any one ideology or to any one religion that ultimately it is beholden to the people and that's the puzzle of democracy that we've all been struggling with since Aristotle lived and died and passed us the torch to carry ahead but ultimately a prison or a hospital or a school run by a government it may be as bad as that government but it also may be as good as the people can force their government to be and I for my part and very confident that I have more bargaining power with my government I have more lobbying power with my government I have more purchase and democratic principle to influence my government then I could ever possibly have and try to influence Islam or Catholicism to reform and teach principle that are contrary to their deeply vested interests okay guys thanks your time this has been Believe It or Not the single most requested video of my channel in the past two years many many people wrote in asking me to speak on libertarianism they asked for so long that I forgot that I hadn't yet gotten around to doing it thanks to your time the usual links are below this video hit me up on patreon follow me on Twitter write to me by email hit me up