The Monopoly on Violence (2020) - full transcript

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! DON’T 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 shouldn’t 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. They’re 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 you’re 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 fed’s 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 hasn’t 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 it’s 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 Obama’s 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.

We’re 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 Hume’s 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 person’s 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 person’s 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.

I’m 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, you’ll 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 cop’s.

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 can’t 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.” Bakunin’s 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

Proudhon’s 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,

you’re 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 Émile 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?

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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.

It’s 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

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. That’s 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 we’re gonna have roughly like 20 and stuff like that.

So we're gonna, between our first two albums we’ll 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.

NARRATOR:  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?” That’s how clueless we were. We didn’t 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 we’re awesome, I don’t 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. They’re 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,

it’s 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 worker’s 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 GunsMatter 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 they’re 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 they’re politicians or whether they’re clergymen, and women or whether they,

you know just OG guys that did some time, got some credibility.

They love what we’re 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.