 Hello, my friends, and welcome to the 15th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. I am your host, Steve Patterson, and today I'm going to have some fun. So as you know, I am all about the basics, and every field of thought, I want to examine the basics. Before we dive into advanced topics, we have to understand the fundamentals. This is true not only in the world of ideas and philosophy and politics and economics and so on. It's also true when you're trying to learn a practical skills, if you're trying to learn how to draw. If you're trying to do jujitsu or the martial arts, or music, or knitting, or car repair, you have to grasp the fundamentals before you deal with the advanced stuff. And today I'm going to dive into the basics of my own political philosophy. I'm going to be talking about libertarianism. There are lots of different shades of libertarianism. My own political philosophy is the most extreme of all of them. I am a libertarian anarchist, and I want to walk through just the basic concepts, the basic ways that anarchists view the world. So whether or not you're sympathetic to libertarianism, I think you're really going to enjoy this. So for one, if you're not a libertarian, this will help you understand your opponent's argument that much better. You'll know what you're refuting. If you think these ideas I'm about to talk about are totally nuts. Two, if you are a libertarian, everybody brings their own different flavor of their own political philosophy to the table, so who knows, we might both learn something. It's always good to revisit the basics. So I'm going to deal with some of the central ideas just in political philosophy in general and give you what I call the anarchist intuition, ways that we think about these topics. So with any political philosophy, there are central concepts. You might call them foundational principles that get applied to different specific concretes. So you have the abstract theory, and then that theory gets applied to the concretes. I'm going to be talking about the theory and some application to concretes. So let's start at square one. Political theory is really about one question. How should humans interact with each other in society? How should we structure society so that we're not all at each other's throats and killing each other? We all share a general goal of having life not be nasty, brutish, and short. So what's the best way to create that kind of society? When there are conflicts in society, when there are disputes or violence or plagues or external threats, what's the best way to respond? One of the pillars of libertarian philosophy, some would argue really the pillar of libertarian philosophy has to do with private property. It's something I'll talk a little bit more about later. Private property simply means that you have actual ownership of something. It means that if you own a lawnmower, your neighbor can't just walk over and steal your lawnmower and say that it's his. You have some kind of cultural norms, you have some kind of institution, some kind of ideas that make it unacceptable to steal from other people. Of course, even the notion of stealing presupposes the concept of private property. You can't steal something that doesn't belong to somebody else. Things don't belong to other people unless there's private property. This concept is not just unique to libertarian philosophy. Of course, this goes way, way, way back, thousands of years, people have been talking about the importance of private property. Very closely related is the phenomena of the marketplace. Several years ago, I dove into the world of economics. Had I not immersed myself in this topic, I would not have the political beliefs that I do. It was really primarily based on my own research of economics and market dynamics, free market dynamics that I came to realize, oh, I think all forms of government are unnecessary. Libertarians almost universally view the free market in very, very high regard. There's really good reason for that. One of the central problems that plagues all societies is scarcity. It's material scarcity. We all want and need things. We need food. We need water. We need shelter. We need housing. We need all kinds of different things. We want all kinds of things on top of that. We want some degrees of wealth, some degrees of comfort. Things, unfortunately, do not pop up spontaneously in the world. You don't just walk through the woods and boom, there you find a house all built by itself with a garden out back which tins itself. No, we live in a world of scarcity, which means that not everybody has everything that they want. This is a really, really big problem, and up until the last few hundred years, people have been living in what we would consider abject poverty for all of history. People have been spending most of the time working in the fields just to try to have food on the table. Now what happened a couple of hundred years ago was the popularity of an idea. That idea was what libertarians would call the free market. This idea that we should have minimal tariffs, no tariffs, low taxes, and the freedom for people to trade with one another in a marketplace. Now I don't mean a physical marketplace, although that helps. I mean that if I specialize in something, and I'm really good at growing radishes, and somebody down the street is really good at growing berries, then we need to be able to be free in our society to trade with one another. If he wants radishes and I want berries, then we trade. It's a win-win. Now this simple phenomena that all of his experience, probably multiple times throughout the day, is something that is utterly revolutionary. Now what happens is over time, if you have this ability to freely trade with people and freely create value for one another, you have what's called the division of labor. People get better at better at producing their own particular product, making it to market, making profits, and they're able to produce more for society at a lower cost, which means more people can consume the goods that we're producing, and so on. In other words, you eventually get car manufacturers and you get factories that just manufacture bolts at a really low cost, so that everybody, when they need bolts, they can go to the store and get one for dirt cheap. Of course this isn't just true for bolts, it's also true for apples and oranges and planes and software and socks and shoes and every conceivable thing that you find in Walmart, for example, did not happen spontaneously by itself. It happened through this incredible phenomena of the marketplace. For reasons I won't go into right now, the less hampering that you have in the marketplace, the less government regulations and taxes and tariffs, the more wealth gets created. This is not true just theoretically, this is also true empirically. So those difficult problems that we have in society about living in a material world are most effectively solved by the free market. And it's not even close. The free market blows all the alternatives out of the water. Those alternatives being, you know, central planning or pure self-sustenance. Now a lot of people worry about, oh, what happens if you have greedy businesses that go out there and they pollute the water or they make sandwiches that are poisonous? Well these kind of objections are very easily resolved just by understanding economics. Businesses don't want to harm their customers and they will face dire consequences if they harm their customers, meaning they'll go bankrupt and they'll no longer have the resources available to harm their customers. By far, way more damage has been done by regulation that could possibly have been conceivably done by private entrepreneurs trying to serve their customers. But that's neither here nor there. Just understand when you're, when trying to gain an anarchist intuition or a libertarian intuition, the default is always let the market handle it. Not just because it's more efficient, because it's more ethical. It also has to do with maximizing human freedom and minimizing human coercion. Okay, so the next central concept I want to talk about is, again, a foundational one in all political philosophy. And it has to do with legitimacy. What makes a government legitimate? What makes government have legitimate authority over its citizenry? I live in the United States right now and you'll notice a remarkable phenomenon. For some reason, U.S. citizens don't follow the laws of Canadians. Now I know this seems obvious, but think about it for a minute. I'm in upstate New York right now, it's just a few hundred miles from the Canadian border, just a few hundred miles away. There's a completely different set of laws and if those people don't follow the laws then they're going to be thrown in jail. Yet nobody thinks that I would be subject to Canadian laws as a U.S. citizen. Now granted, I'm not that far from Washington, D.C., which is supposed to be the place where my laws come from. But people in California are, the people in California are much farther away from Washington, D.C. than the people in Canada and yet the Canadians don't have to follow the rules that come out of Washington, D.C. This is very peculiar. For some reason, Californians believe that the government of Washington, D.C. has political legitimacy while Canadians do not think that the government of Washington, D.C. has political legitimacy over their lives. So this is where a lot of people would bring up the notion of a social contract. But the social contract sounds great maybe in political science class, or maybe it sounds good if you don't really examine it, but what really is a social contract? It seems like a necessary part of the validity of any contract is that the contract applies to those who have signed it. And I guarantee you nobody in Canada has signed their social contract. Nobody in the United States has signed their constitution. And yet those documents supposedly still apply to us. Now just metaphysically speaking, that's a remarkable phenomena. And it doesn't take too much imagination to think that might be a bad idea. Just because a few hundred years ago some people got together and signed a contract, maybe that doesn't give legitimacy to the modern day. And what happens just as a thought experiment, if the people who are in government claim that they get their legitimacy from a social contract. And I don't like their behavior. What options are given to me to change the political system that I find myself within? Ultimately, I didn't choose my political system, I was born into it. Some people say, well, if you don't like your political system, why don't you just get up and leave and move to Somalia? Well, Somalia is a whole another issue we can talk about at some point. But why should it be that just because I was born in a particular geographic location that I did not control. Supposedly, if I don't like my government, I have to give up everything that I own. All of my connections, all of my property, any land that I have, any family ties that I have, and up and I have to leave. Wouldn't it make more sense, just theoretically, if we could actively choose the governance structures that we agree with? Now if that's the case, ultimately, that's anarchism. If you can opt out of political systems, that's what anarchists want. It's not that we don't want any governance system, it's that we want it to be, ultimately, voluntary. So you can take the traditional political theory route and try to bend over backwards talking about the remarkable powers of a social contract that somehow apply to people in California, but not those in Canada. And even if you don't agree with them, they still apply to you. And even if you didn't even live in the country until 10 years ago, the document that people wrote 300 years ago and signed, well, that still applies to you too. I mean, yeah, you can try to bend over backwards and try to justify those things. I think you have a very difficult time doing that. Or you can take the common sense approach. Let's have a system whereby people can voluntarily agree to the rules of the game. And if they don't like the rules of the game, they don't have to sign up. As long as their behavior is peaceful, let's not force anybody into any social contract, any political system that they agree with. If they're living by themselves on their own property, we don't need to force them to pay taxes to our political system. That seems like a pretty common sense approach to structuring society. And it also gives you part of this market dynamic again, right? Because then you have competitions for legal systems. You have competition for competing governance systems. Those systems which work, which create more value for people, will be more popular. And those systems which people don't like and destroy value will become less popular. That seems like a really positive benefit. But that's not at all the system that we have now. If you don't like your political structure tough, it's that way, and it's going to get worse and you can't really do anything about it. And some people might say, oh, but you can vote. Yeah, well, the chances, the actual chances of your voting, making any difference whatsoever are virtually zero. You have a better chance of winning the lottery, right? In order for your vote to make a difference, it has to be an exact tie. And the only reason the tie is broken, ah, it's because you went to the polls that day and voted. Well, given just the amount of voter fraud and lost votes, I mean, really, your vote doesn't count. So for any election that actually matters, your vote really doesn't count. You just have to accept the decision that is made on your behalf. Wouldn't it be silly if we made other decisions this way, like where you're going to go to college? You know, you have one vote, but the community decides for you. And if 51% decides you're going to this college, even though you despise everything about that college and it's not how you want to live, oh well, the 51% of people in your community voted for that to be the case. I mean, yeah, maybe we could do things that way, or how about this, you go to the college that you wanna go to, or don't go to college, which would be my recommendation. Other people shouldn't be making those kind of decisions for you, even if it's a large group of other people. Now this gets down to one of the other central concepts that I wanna talk about related to political legitimacy, related to political theory at a foundational level. And it's the nature of government itself. All political decisions, all political actions, all laws are ultimately backed up by the use or threats of the use of force. Everything from a simple parking ticket to getting charged with murder, everything is backed up by the use of violence. And I don't think that's a particularly grand way of ordering society. Think about it, if you park incorrectly and get a parking ticket, or a meter maid had a bad day and just could do a parking ticket for the hell of it. What happens if you don't pay that parking ticket? Well, you get a further fine in the mail and they say, oh, well, now the amount you owe is doubled. And if you ignore that, oh, now you have to show up in court at this due date and the amount is doubled again and you're really in trouble. And then they suspend your license and say, now you can't drive on public roads anymore and now you owe an even greater amount. And if you don't show up in court by George, if we catch you, we're going to arrest you. And what happens if you then resist arrest? You say, no, I'm not hurting anybody. This meter maid was just being a jerk. You resist arrest, well, then what? You get tased, you get shot. They'll throw you in jail or they'll kill you. This is how everything is ultimately backed up. It may seem innocuous at first, it's a $10 fine, but if you keep ignoring the whole idea of government, is that you enforce the law by force. Now these kind of circumstances, I think it'd be entirely avoided just by having a voluntary governance structure. Okay, so I want to hit on another big issue here. Let's take a concrete example of something like drug laws and then we'll abstract from there. So the real world effect of drug laws are absolutely horrendous. Millions of people find put in jail, put in prison, unable to get jobs because they've committed some felony offense for selling drugs, for example. Families torn apart because fathers are thrown into jail because of drug violations. Kids taken away from their parents because of them deciding to smoke pot in their basement. Violent Mexican drug cartels that get inordinate amounts of money based on the illegality of drugs. The list goes on and on of the horrible effects of drug prohibition. Well, the anarchist solution, the libertarian solution, but the anarchist solution is very simple. As long as people's behavior is peaceful, it should be legal. It does not make sense that society would be structured in such a way whereby peacefully ingesting a plant would get you thrown in jail at what you get your kids taken away from you. As long as people aren't harming somebody, as long as they're not driving into somebody's house because they're drunk and they're driving or somebody's torching somebody's house because they're high on PCP or something crazy. It's those acts of violence which need to be punished, not the peaceful acts. And you don't have to be a policy expert. You don't have to get politics involved in anything. You don't have to have moral platitudes being thrown about. The resolution's very obvious. Let's live in a society where you are free to do as you please as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else. And if you make bad decisions, you are going to pay the consequences for those decisions. If you make good decisions, you will reap the benefits of those decisions. We're not going to subsidize bad behavior. We're not going to punish good behavior. Doesn't that seem like a good society to live in? So that is this principle of human freedom. Freedom is, to an anarchist, a political end in itself. That is a political goal. That is a political goal is to achieve human freedom. But freedom by itself doesn't equate to happiness or living your life in a great and satisfactory way. It means you pay the consequences, you reap the benefits. This is not cold. This is not atomism. This doesn't mean there's no social cooperation. There's no voluntary social safety net. It just means that the system in which you choose to exist is going to be that, which you have deliberately and explicitly agreed to. If you're going to live in a society without a social safety net, then that's your decision. You're going to pay the consequences. If you want to live in a society with a voluntary social safety net, then great, you'll live with the consequences, which means you have to pay annual dues or whatever. Well, I think some libertarians and a lot of left-wing political theorists get confused is when talking about freedom, they have the notion of positive freedom. It's freedom and equality that's enforced by government. And a great example of this recently in America is Christian bakers who are being forced by government to bake cakes for gay weddings. Now, as libertarians and as people who take a very laissez-faire approach to the world, it seems obvious, yes, of course. I mean, so what if you disagree with somebody's personal beliefs? Yeah, bake them a cake, it's no big deal. But there's a gigantic difference between enforced freedom and actual freedom. Enforced freedom isn't freedom at all. Meaning you have to think about the rights of that individual person baking a cake. Right, for the government to say you must sell your services to person X is essentially conscription. It's saying you do not have a choice in who you can sell your labor to. We, the government, the moral leaders of our society are going to decide you must sell your labor to these particular people, even if you don't agree with their lifestyle. Now, if we're going to be consistent, this also means that the black baker must be forced to bake the cake for the KKK Klansmen and the Jewish baker must be forced to bake the cake for the Nazi. But it doesn't make any sense. What actual freedom means is the freedom to enter into voluntary agreements with people, to enter into contracts freely, and to not enter into contracts freely. To voluntarily associate with people and voluntarily not associate with people. That is freedom, there's no buts about it. If you unpack the concept of voluntary association, what you'll find is voluntary discrimination. In other words, by choosing to associate with some people, it is necessarily the case that at that point you're not associating with other people. That decision should be entirely your own. You will reap the benefits, you will pay the consequences. Now, socially speaking, if people are being objectively racist and bigoted and they're not gonna bake cakes for black people because they don't like black people, well, this is not a political problem. Getting politics into it is not the appropriate resolution for the libertarian or for the anarchist. The solution is through market dynamics. It's through the freedom not to patronize the bigoted baker. It's the freedom to boycott. It's the freedom to speak freely and post on Facebook and say to all your friends, look, Joe over there is a bigoted jerk. He's not baking for black people because he's an outspoken, backwards racist. Don't buy his cakes, isolate him, right? So that's a natural pressure. That's a natural way to positively influence people's behavior without having to resort to the use of force. Because again, think about it from a system level. If it's the case that the principle is established for a government to say you must give to these people, you must patronize these people, then that power can and always is eventually abused. Another way to illustrate this is the idea of a benevolent dictator. To a libertarian, imagine a political system where you had a pure autocrat. What he said went period. It just so happened that he had a bunch of good ideas and he said we must have a free market and you must not have regulations and you must do that. And we'd agree with all his conclusions. Yeah, so this is great, great, wonderful. We have a libertarian autocrat, isn't that great? That's not libertarianism because the principle is set up for that system to allow the radical infringement of human freedom. What happens when that dictator dies? What happens when the next person replaces him? If the systems of government are set up in such a way where you've already allowed the principle for some autocrat to declare his will and that's somehow law in society, then again it doesn't take too much imagination to see how that can and will always be abused. So the libertarian answer is to say hey, rather than hope we're gonna get some moral electorate or moral legislators or moral autocrat, let's just get rid of that system in society. Let's get rid of the legitimacy of governmental authority in these areas and that way it's not a political issue. We don't have to worry about the will of the people. We don't have to worry about autocrats abusing their power. There's no power to abuse, right? You've de-toothed the tiger. This principle applies to literally every issue which is a political topic, whether it's gun control or abortion or gay marriage or taxes and regulation or the environment or immigration, every single issue which is out there. You run into the same problem which is once you win the election, once your people win and now the rules are structured the way that you want them to be structured, yeah, that's a victory. Well, what happens in five years? What happens in 10 years? What happens when that institution which you have granted so much power in society is now controlled by people that don't like you or that don't agree with you, that share different ideas? The only way to avoid that, as far as I can tell, the only way is by simply removing the legitimacy of that institution altogether. If you don't want to worry about elections, you don't want to worry about the ignorance of the masses, you don't want to worry about ambitious politicians abusing the behavior, the only sensible way I can see of doing it is just by saying, look, let's get the government out of this altogether, let's delegitimize the authority and therefore nobody has this power. Okay, so the last thing I want to talk about is a bit of radical metaphysics in political philosophy. I'm going to ramp up the level about 100 fold here. So rather than talking about standard libertarian or standard anarchist stuff, I want to talk about the metaphysics of government. Now I realize this sounds crazy up front, but hear me out. I think in a very real way, we already live in an anarchist world. And I mean that very precisely, that we have to understand what government is essentially. Government, we say, is an institution. What is an institution? Well, it's a group of people and other people recognize and have this having some legitimacy. Okay, well, it's a group of people. What is a group of people? Well, a group of people is really just a bunch of individual people that we label as a group. We put the boundaries around those group of people and say that's a group or that's an institution. But really, the only thing that's there, it's just people. Groups are abstractions. Governments on top of that are abstractions. So in a very real sense, government doesn't really exist. Or if we want to be very precise, government doesn't exist separate from other individual human beings' existence. What government is, I think, is just an idea. Government is the idea that there's some individuals out there that can control other people, that can dictate how other people should live their lives. It's an idea that there's such a thing as political legitimacy. There's such a thing as the chieftain that must be followed in our society. That's all it is. It's not the buildings in Washington, D.C. It's not the suits that the politicians wear. Politicians are just people, but those people are in a peculiar circumstance because they, I think, have the idea and certainly the people that are around then have the idea that somehow those politicians are special. They're special individuals. And they can act in ways that the rest of us can't. They can make the rules for society that the rest of us have to follow. If I were to say on this podcast, everybody listening, these are the rules. You have to follow in your life. And if you don't listen, I'm gonna send somebody to your house and throw you in jail. You wouldn't listen to me. You'd laugh. Every Wednesday you have to wear a blue hat. Say, what the hell are you talking about, Steve? And that's good. I think that's healthy. I don't have political legitimacy over anybody's lives. I don't want that. And what I'm suggesting is that's actually what could happen with government. The only reason that governments have legitimacy is because people give them legitimacy in their minds and their heads. All it would take for government to completely evaporate from the face of the earth is a change in people's beliefs. It's having the same belief towards politicians that you have towards me. View the politicians through the lens of they're just individuals who are moving their mouths. That's it. The only reason they get away with what they get away with is because people allow them to. They believe that there's some kind of inherent, intrinsic political authority that these people have. And I'm suggesting it's mistaken. We don't need to live our lives this way. I don't think we need to structure society this way. And all I think it would take for a radical change in how the world works is simply a change in people's ideas. That's it. It's a bit like the boogeyman, right? When a lot of people believe that the boogeyman exists, he has some kind of power. He'll change your behavior. He's in your mind and you're worried about him and you're going to sleep with one eye open because of the boogeyman. The only thing that it takes to destroy the boogeyman completely is a change in beliefs. It's a realization of the facts of reality, which is that the boogeyman doesn't exist. Or to the extent the boogeyman exists, it's only in your mind. I'm suggesting the same is true of government, although we're very, very far from, I think, any kind of public awakening to this realization. I realize that sounds radical, so that's probably a good time for me to stop. But let those ideas percolate in your mind and I think you might end up persuaded about some of the things I've been talking about. So thanks for listening, everybody. I hope you enjoyed it. I intend to do a lot more of these things in the future. Have a great one.