The Eternal Struggle Between Liberty and Power

0:00We can make a distinction between producers who produce things and engage in voluntary exchange and what we might call parasites. Parasites being those who resolve and expropriate producers. It is easy to see that one can imagine a society that consists of nothing else but producers. All people produce and exchange. It is not possible to imagine a society that consists solely of parasites. Parasites of course need a host. Those people who rip off other individuals, expropriate other individuals, can only do so as long as there is some amount of production going on.

0:55Let me just describe some of the problems of being a parasite. It is easy to imagine that one individual can steal or enslave another individual. It is far more difficult to imagine how 100 parasites can engage in parasitic action on one producer.

1:42If you try to do this, parasites will likely not need a very comfortable life. The most difficult task, and the task that all parasites can, if they are bright enough, can recognize, I recognize that that would be the crowning achievement, would be to have one parasite and you have 100 or 1000 or 10,000 hosts. This is obviously the most enviable position that the parasite can have, not to just have one. I don't know if you suck the blood out, but you have a large number of them.

2:27But if you try, if you think about this, you also recognize immediately that there is a fundamental problem, a very great difficulty to do something like this. The problem is this. If you imagine that the hosts, of course, are not all that happy to be bothered by parasites, they might resist this. If you have only one parasite and 100 hosts, if you assume that people are roughly equally armed to figure out what the arms technology is, It is inconceivable how one individual can expropriate, exploit 100 individuals without running the risk of being quickly killed.

3:28So something else is necessary in order to achieve this wonderful position. And it cannot be just sheer violence, because 100 people will be able to leave to the ground a single ruler. This single ruler, ruling over 100,000, 100,000 people, must have more than just arms and sheer force, brutality on his side. He must have some sort of cooperation, some sort of willingness to go along, and in order to do this, he needs ideas, he needs ideology, he needs to hire intellectuals that tell people that being exploited, being ripped off is not really being exploited.

4:31and I will come back to this particular point in a minute. Now let me take stock so to speak and analyze or briefly describe the current world in terms of how much liberty, natural order do we have, and how much parasitism do we have. Before I come to one additional remark, I can also see somehow how the ups and downs in human history come about.

5:25Obviously, if the number of parasites per host increases, or if the degree of parasitism increases, This would explain how civilizations decline, and on the other hand, if we have a situation where the host somehow understand the phenomenon of parasitism and get rid of them, then we get flourishing civilizations. So now, what about the current state of parasitism? Now, what we must notice for this, for the last 250 years or so, just taking the United States into consideration, we have an almost uninterrupted constant increase in the degree of parasitism taking place.

6:3040% of produced income of people is ripped off by government that exceeds the degree of exploitation that existed in slave societies. Most people who have tried to estimate what the degree of exploitation under slavery was come up with numbers like 25 to 30 percent. So we have long ago surpassed this record. In addition to the amount of taxation being taken from individuals, Private property rights have been restricted in far more ways through regulation and legislation.

7:25A flood of legislation is passed from year to year. Nobody knows anymore what laws are in effect, what he is permitted to do and what he is not permitted to do. Toparchy can be expropriated by stroke of a pen. We have observed that in terms of money, which I just tried before to be initially commodity money, commodity money has been destroyed, governments, the institution of parasitism, Governments have found that commodity money stands in the way of unlimited counterfeiting and have made over hundreds of years great progress in getting rid of commodity money and achieving complete counterfeiting autonomy by instituting a taper money standard, which allows them to create money out of sin here, just like any private counterfeiting gang, except that they don't even have to compete against anyone in this area.

8:55In addition, there are not peaceful relationships between people trading with each other. We have constant war, and the United States government has become the biggest bully of all bullies, trying to rule the entire world, discovering Hitler's everyday new ones that need to be suppressed in order to preserve our freedoms. Now, the next question is then, what is the explanation for this rise of parasitism that we can see, given that, as I explained before, it's very difficult to become a parasite, to become an organization of a very small number of people, 15-20% in the United States, is ruling, exploiting, expropriating, ripping off 80 or 70% of the population.

10:16As I said, in order to do something like this, sheer force is not enough. You need to have people who more or less voluntarily enforce those things that the government demands us to do. How do you get these people to cooperate with you? How do you get people to help the central government that has only a very small personnel so to enforce all of these decrees? And as I said, the ideas are of utmost importance in this respect. Now, what is the idea that makes most people more or less voluntarily cooperate, at least not resist the government in its attempts to expropriate us or exploit us?

11:20The idea that gives government legitimacy, what is this idea? This is the idea of a protective state. The idea is this, if it were not for a state, there would be chaos, breaking out, people would be killing each other, everyone would be at each other's throats. In order to find out whether this idea is true or not, I have to explain, of course, what the definition of a government is.

12:12The definition of a government creating peace among mankind is this. Government is not just a normal firm or not just a normal individual. Government is an institution that distinguishes itself from all other institutions based on two criteria. The first point is government is a compulsory territorial monopolist of jurisdiction. You can only come to one agency if you want to find justice. You cannot turn to anyone else except government.

12:59Secondly, this monopolist of protection has a right to tax individuals in order to fulfill his protection job. Now, Murray Rothbard has explained to us what is wrong with this idea. It's actually a very foolish idea. What is wrong with this? It's the following. If you imagine that your protecting agency can determine unilaterally how much money it needs from you in order to protect you, you cannot decide how much you want to pay for protection.

13:49They decide unilaterally how much is necessary to do with this. Now, what will an agency like this, of course, find? They will find that the more money they collect from you, of course, the better they can protect you. And secondly, they will find that actually protecting you is, of course, a pain in the neck, Because everybody tends to be lazy and prefer not to work rather than work. So what they will do is they say, the more money you will pay, the better. And on the other hand, the less I need to work, that is, of course, the very best solution to the problem.

14:40So what you will see is the price of protection, what you must pay, will constantly go up. And on the other hand, the amount of protection that you will receive will constantly go down. Again, we emphasize that this is something that is almost, I would say, is impossible to refute this type of argument. Once you have an institution that has this right to determine unilaterally how much you must pay in order to be protected by this agency, then this is an absolutely necessary consequence. They will collect as much as they can and they will produce as little as possible.

15:26The second problem is once you have a monopoly of jurisdiction, this is a key idea of a state, it's a key idea behind the American Constitution. Once you have a monopoly of jurisdiction, you cannot turn to anyone else, then you can again predict with absolute certainty The consequence of this will be a constant deterioration in the quality of protection. Obviously, the idea, for instance, that you have a constitution, courts, all sorts of appeals that you can make, and that that can limit, so to speak, the power of government, does not work.

16:16gives the interpretation of the Constitution, gives the interpretation of what is right and wrong, is done by this very institution all the time. Of course they will pervert justice constantly, and they will gradually reinterpret what private property means in such a way, in such a way that it means it is whatever they say and whatever you say is of relatively minor importance. So what I try to point out here is that this idea of a government itself, Once you accept this idea, and once you have certain parasites in power, they will take advantage of it.

17:16And the public has by and large no alternative anymore available to them. They have already given away their principal argument. Now what is the solution to this problem? The solution is to recognize that the idea of the government is a fundamentally false idea. No monopolist or every monopolist will always take advantage of this position. Every monopolist of taxation will always increase taxation. We have to reject this idea completely, root and branch, and what that means is that we would have to withdraw consent from the government.

18:12Again, recall what I tried to explain at the beginning, that if it were not for the fact that we somehow voluntarily, or more or less voluntarily cooperate with the government, it would not be able to enforce its laws upon us. If that is the case and we only cooperate so to speak because deep down we think there is some legitimacy in the idea of government. If we come to the conclusion that there is nothing to it, there is no legitimacy in government at all and withdraw our consent, withdraw all of our cooperation with government, then this government will not be able to enforce its laws.

19:07We emphasize at this point that even the most heavily armed governments, let's say the Shah of Iran or the former Soviet Union, We saw that these governments could collapse from one day to the next. Why did they collapse from one day to the next? Because those people who had previously enforced their rule on the public, the military, the police, and the various other people on which you have to rely, that they fulfill what you order them to do that these people all of a sudden said, I won't do it. Without voluntary consent you cannot enforce your laws.

19:57Now we have to recognize that in order to bring about such a situation, withdraw from government, stop cooperating with it, This encounters, of course, a problem that the mass public has been brainwashed and recall all parasites, especially parasites who rule over large numbers of people need intellectuals, need propaganda because of that, of course, government as one of its first tasks always takes over the education and the education system, and we live in a world where the educational system has achieved to make the brains of most people rot and even produce a large number of, how I can say, welfare bonds is deliberately producing people who are incapable of understanding even the most simple ideas.

21:21So this brings me then, of course, to us. There must be people, there must be an elite that awakens the masses of their slumber and also tries to persuade them to stop cooperation and consent with respect to the government. Let me just give you a quote from a French political theorist, Etienne Delahoye-T, for several hundred years ago.

22:07It's one of Murray Rothbard's and Mises' favorites, who described the role of the elite in the social revolution in the following way. In a way, he said, there are always a few better endowed than others who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot restrain themselves from attempting to shake it off. These are the men who never be contained under subjection and who always, like Ulysses on land and sea, constantly seek the smoke of his chimney, cannot prevent themselves from hearing about for their natural privileges and from remembering their ancestors and their formal ways. These are, in fact, the men who, possessed of clear minds and farsighted spirit, are not satisfied, like the brutish mass, to see only what is is at their feet, but rather look about them, behind and before, only and even recall the things of the past in order to judge those of the future and compare both with their present condition.

23:31These are the ones who, having good minds of their own, have further trained them by study and learning. Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. For them, slavery has no satisfaction, no matter how well disguised. Now, just as there can be no social revolution without an elite, in the way that Boehy describes it, there can be also no revolution without some form of mass participation. That is, this elite cannot reach its own goal of restoring private property rights and law and order unless it succeeds in communicating its ideas to the public openly, if that is possible, and secretly, if that is necessary, and thereby then awakening the masses from their slumber by arousing, at least temporarily, their natural instinct to wanting to be free.

24:48Mises said in this connection, the flowering of human society depends on two factors, on the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories and the ability of these and other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority. So accordingly, the decision of members of the elite not to cooperate with government must always include also the resolve of engaging in or contributing to a continuous ideological struggle. Because if the power of government rests on widespread acceptance of false, and as I tried to explain, indeed absurdly false, foolish, almost ridiculous ideas, then the only genuine protection is the systematic attack of these ideas and the propagation and the proliferation of true ideas.

25:55Yet, importantly, as one must always be cautious and careful regarding one's own material investments, so, and maybe even more so, must one be eternally vigilant and selective in one's ideological investments. In particular, this investment in ideas, it is not sufficient to merely criticize or support critics or criticisms of specific government policies or specific government personalities for even if this criticism would be correct and even if it is popular, Any such criticism does not really penetrate to the root of the problem.

26:47If I want to use the terminology of the New Left, any such criticism is imminent to the system and is because of that harmless to the system. Any support given to these efforts, just criticizing particular policies here or particular policies here or there, any such support and any such efforts, however well-intentioned they might be, are by and large only wasteful, And at worst, they even increase the power of government, because government can then say, look, I mean, how tolerant we are, we're criticized, we can be criticized, we tolerate all of these criticisms, no problem whatsoever.

27:39What is necessary, then, is criticisms and critics of government may start out with specific policies and with specific personalities. and they might even have to start out with specific policies and specific personalities in order to find interest but every critic and every criticism that is worse of any support will have to go much further than this. Every critic and criticism deserving support must proceed to explain each and every particular government Policy and Failing as symptomatic of an underlying flaw in the very idea of government itself and I don't want to go into this tonight, in particular, of course, of democratic government.

28:39In other words, no critic or criticism is worthy of anyone's support unless it goes on to identify and expose as intellectual fraud the two pillars on which all government power rests. That is, the belief that the protection of private property is uniquely among all goods, so to speak, necessitates a compulsory monopoly that is a non-voluntary membership organization. For any other area, production of milk or bananas or whatever it is, we all know that monopolies are bad, that they lead to rising prices and to deteriorating quality.

29:38In the most important areas of all, to be protected from aggression, we believe that this can be done by a monopolist. Until we get rid of this idea, until we recognize that this idea is obviously foolish, this is the most dangerous, the most important area of all. How can this be provided by a monopolist if a monopolist cannot even provide milk efficiently? Until we get rid of this fantasy, we are obviously in deep trouble. And the second idea that we have to realize that we must recognize as foolish is that private property and protection are best secured if this monopolistic organization allows free entry into it.

30:39That is, a democracy, as we had years ago, we have free entry into the position of the monopolist of protection and law and order. But if we have free competition, so to speak, in something that is bad, then free competition is bad. Free competition is not always a good thing. Free competition in trying to gas people, you would not necessarily say that this is a beneficial thing. So free competition in entering government must not necessarily be a good thing. In fact, it is advisable that we should never have even the slightest wavering in our commitment to an uncompromising ideological radicalism or, we might as well say, extremism.

31:34Not only would anything less be counterproductive, but more importantly, only radical and indeed radically simple ideas can possibly stir the emotions of the dull and indolent masses. And nothing is more effective in persuading the masses to likewise withdraw from cooperation with government than the constant and relentless exposure and desanctification and ridicule of government and its representatives as moral and economic frauds and imposters, as emperors without any clothes and the butts of all jokes.

32:22Now only if and only if and when the members of the elite, so to speak, have fully absorbed and grasped this lesson and begin to act accordingly will liberty have again a future. Only then will we have done what La Poétie several hundred years ago advised us all to do. That is, to resolve to serve no more. And you are at once freed. I do not ask you that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over,