Why Men Don't Want To Get Married

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Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio defends the honor of men, and explains exactly why men don't want to get married anymore.

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The History, Philosophy and Ethics of Gun Control

Did you know that 90 years ago, America still had 12 times the murder rate of the United Kingdom?

Did you know that criminals using guns are less likely to hurt their victims?

Did you know that citizens use guns to protect themselves against criminals over two and a half million times a year?

Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/guncontrol

Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

True News: The Connecticut School Shootings

"We come out of the womb in the present pointed at the future, not chained and enslaved to the past...not lashed to a Titanic sinking into history, taking us with it. We come out of the womb like a rocket, like a springbok ready to leap forward into the future, with no sense of history and no ties to the past -- FREE." -- Stefan Molyneux

Automation Causes Unemployment!

Machines throw workers out on the street, capitalists own the means of production, workers scramble for the scraps, the richer arise to heaven! Up your economic literacy before it is too late!

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Parents Religious, Me Atheist - Freedomain Radio Sunday Philosophy Call ...

2:35 Parents Religious, Me Atheist
1:14:35 Procrastination
2:06:20 My Mother Was Almost Killed...

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The Fascists That Surround You - Part 6: Ethics for Psychopaths

How to use ethics - universally preferable behaviour - to contain and tame sociopaths and psychopaths.

Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio on Rise Up Radio!

Stefan Molyneux, host Freedomain Radio, talks with John Bush on Rise Up Radio about the moral justifications for a free society, how to parent without violence, and the upcoming movie 'Truth: the Freedomain Radio Documentary'

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Everyday Anarchy - The Complete Book from Freedomain Radio

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Everyday Anarchy
by Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio, at freedomainradio.com

INTRODUCTION
It's hard to know whether a word can ever be rehabilitated -- or whether the attempt should even be made.
Words are weapons, and can be used like any tools, for good or ill. We are all aware of the clichéd uses of such terms as "terrorists" versus "freedom fighter" etc. An atheist can be called an "unbeliever"; a theist can be called "superstitious." A man of conviction can be called an "extremist"; a man of moderation "cowardly." A free spirit can be called a libertine or a hedonist; a cautious introvert can be labeled a stodgy prude.
Words are also weapons of judgment -- primarily moral judgment. We can say that a man can be "freed" of sin if he accepts Jesus; we can also say that he can be "freed" of irrationality if he does not. A patriot will say that a soldier "serves" his country; others may take him to task for his blind obedience. Acts considered "murderous" in peacetime are hailed as "noble" in war, and so on.
Some words can never be rehabilitated -- and neither should they be. Nazi, evil, incest, abuse, rape, murder -- these are all words which describe the blackest impulses of the human soul, and can never be turned to a good end. Edmund may say in King Lear, "Evil, be thou my good!" but we know that he is not speaking paradoxically; he is merely saying "that which others call evil -- my self-interest -- is good for me."
The word "anarchy" may be almost beyond redemption -- any attempt to find goodness in it could well be utterly futile -- or worse; the philosophical equivalent of the clichéd scene in hospital dramas where the surgeon blindly refuses to give up on a clearly dead patient.
Perhaps I'm engaged in just such a fool's quest in this little book. Perhaps the word "anarchy" has been so abused throughout its long history, so thrown into the pit of incontestable human iniquity that it can never be untangled from the evils that supposedly surround it.
What images spring to mind when you hear the word "anarchy"? Surely it evokes mad riots of violence and lawlessness -- a post-apocalyptic Darwinian free-for-all where the strong and evil dominate the meek and reasonable. Or perhaps you view it as a mad political agenda, a thin ideological cover for murderous desires and cravings for assassinations, where wild-eyed, mustachioed men with thick hair and thicker accents roll cartoon bombs under the ornate carriages of slowly-waving monarchs. Or perhaps you view "anarchy" as more of a philosophical specter; the haunted and angry mutterings of over-caffeinated and seemingly-eternal grad students; a nihilistic surrender to all that is seductive and evil in human nature, a hurling off the cliff of self-restraint, and a savage plunge into the mad magic of the moment, without rules, without plans, without a future...
If your teenage son were to come home to you one sunny afternoon and tell you that he had become an anarchist, you would likely feel a strong urge to check his bag for black hair dye, fresh nose rings, clumpy mascara and dirty needles. His announcement would very likely cause a certain trapdoor to open under your heart, where you may fear that it might fall forever. The heavy syllables of words like "intervention," "medication," "boot camp," and "intensive therapy" would probably accompany the thudding of your quickened pulse.
All this may well be true, of course -- I may be thumping the chest of a broken patient long since destined for the morgue, but certain... insights, you could say, or perhaps correlations, continue to trouble me immensely, and I cannot shake the fear that it is not anarchy that lies on the table, clinging to life -- but rather, the truth.
I will take a paragraph or two to try and communicate what troubles me so much about the possible injustice of throwing the word "anarchy" into the pit of evil -- if I have not convinced you by the end of the next page that something very unjust may be afoot, then I will have to continue my task of resurrection with others, because I do not for a moment imagine that I would ever convince you to call something good that is in fact evil.
And neither would I want to...

The Fascists Around You - Part 1

Did you know that over 60% of people will kill if ordered?

Sources: http://board.freedomainradio.com/forums/t/37427.aspx

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The Handbook of Human Ownership - A Manual for New Tax Farmers

Text/Audiobook: http://www.fdrurl.com/HHO

Audiobook: http://www.fdrurl.com/HHO_Audio

Hey -- seriously - congratulations on your new political post! 

If you are reading this, it means that you have ascended to the highest levels of government, so it's really, really important that you don't do or say anything stupid, and screw things up for the rest of us.

The first thing to remember is that you are a figurehead, about as relevant to the direction of the state as a hood ornament is to the direction of a car -- but you are a very important distraction, the "smiling face" of the fist of power. So hold your nose, kiss the babies, and just think how good you would look on a stamp.

Now, before we go into your media responsibilities, you must understand the true history of political power, so you don't accidentally act on the naive idealism you are required to project to the general public.

The reality of political power is very simple: bad farmers own crops and livestock -- good farmers own human beings...

---

A free book by Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web -- http://www.freedomainradio.com

Dayna Martin and Stefan Molyneux: Philosophical Parenting Part 2

A conversation on overcoming parenting challenges, including:
- How to peacefully lead your children away from eating too much sugar
- How to use humor to get your children to eat more vegetables
- How to help your children learn to manage money
- How to get your children to help out around the house
- How to avoid teenage volatility
- The endless pleasures of peaceful parenting

Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

Dayna Martin: http://www.daynamartin.com

Moral Hysteria and Environmental Genocide (Speech at the University of T...

Podcast: http://www.fdrurl.com/FDR2148cast Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, makes the case that we only really start worrying about social, economic and environmental problems when they are just about be solved by freedom.  Examples include the Cuyahoga River fire that sparked the Clean Water Act and the FDA, DDT and drug protection through the FDA. Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com FABLES OF THE CUYAHOGA: RECONSTRUCTING A HISTORY OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION http://law.case.edu/faculty/adler_jonathan/publications/fables_of_the_cuyahoga.pdf By 1969, efforts were already underway to reduce pollution and restore water quality in many water bodies, including the Cuyahoga. Subsequent federal efforts received more attention – and far more credit – but it appears the tide was turning well before Congress enacted the 1972 Clean Water Act.  One problem Cleveland faced was that the Cuyahoga was treated as an industrial stream, and state permits inhibited local clean up efforts. Public nuisance actions and enforcement of local pollution ordinances, in particular, were precluded by state regulation, while Federal laws protecting commercially navigable waterways went largely unenforced. Although the image of the 1969 fire is supposed to have spurred the nation to action, few Americans have ever seen a picture of the infamous event.  The fire was so quick that by the time local photographers arrived, the flames were out. There is a famous photo of the Cuyahoga River on fire.  It accompanied the August 1 Time magazine story. This striking photo of a fireboat fighting a river aflame is probably the photo some Americans remember and is most likely the photo that Carol Browner referred to above. It is also reproduced as “evidence” of the horrific 1969 fire.  Yet despite Time’s characterization, it was not a picture of the June 1969 fire at all.  Rather, it was an old archive photo of the river blaze of 1952, a true inferno that caused substantial damage. A city ordinance prohibited the release of oil into the river by refineries, but it appears to have been rarely enforced, and carried only a $10 fine. The River and Harbors Act of 1899 contained provisions barring the disposal of wastes into navigable waters, but it did not address most liquid wastes, which were responsible for the lion’s share of water pollution. As recounted in one prominent environmental history, “In 1881, the mayor of Cleveland called the Cuyahoga River ‘an open sewer through the center of the city.’ It remained so until passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972.” Yet contrary to popular perception, Cleveland officials began river cleanup before the 1969 fire.  The brief blaze may have prompted federal action to address water pollution, but local officials and community leaders were well aware of the Cuyahoga’s plight and had already initiated cleanup efforts, including efforts to remove flammable debris and upgrade local sewage treatment facilities.  “We were already doing the things we needed to clean up things there, and then the fire happened,” recalls Ben S. Stefanski II, Utilities Director at the time of the fire. It appears that the nadir of the Cuyahoga was well before the 1969 fire, perhaps around the time of the 1952 inferno.  In the days following the November 1952 blaze, local business leaders demanded action by the city.  In October 1959, the Cleveland Plain Dealer trumpeted the reappearance of fish in the Cuyahoga, which suggests there had been noticeable improvement in at least some aspects of river quality, but more action was still needed. The state had apparently expected to provide funding for pollution control projects, yet balked when federal support was not forthcoming.  Congress authorized substantial sums for Lake Erie cleanup, but then failed to actually appropriate the money.  Cleveland spent approximately $30 million on the construction of waste treatment facilities from 1967 to 1970. In the wake of the June 1969 fire, many city officials pointed fingers at the state of Ohio for creating a legal regime which made it unduly difficult for the city to maintain local river quality.  Specifically, officials pointed to the state water pollution permitting system which insulated permitted facilities from public nuisance actions and generally inhibited local efforts to combat pollution Stokes alleged that “[t]he State has capriciously been circumventing the laws of Ohio by issuing licenses to polluters and making no effort to prevent the kind of occurrences” that led to the fire. The state’s water pollution control board licensed industrial facilities along the river, providing potential immunity from suit.  “We have no jurisdiction over what is dumped” in the river, explained Utilities Director Ben. S. Stefanski II.  “The state licenses the industries and gives them legal authority to dump in the river.  Actually, the state gives them a license to pollute.” Mayor Stokes was even more critical, testifying before Congress that the state “issues water discharge permits at such a low level that industries and municipalities can virtually dump what amounts almost to pure garbage and only minimally treated effluents into the streams, the rivers, and the tributaries that lead into the lake.” In theory, the permit system was designed to enable industrial firms to develop and implement cost-effective pollution controls. In practice, it appears that once permits were issued, industrial firms were able to pollute with impunity. State officials acknowledged at the time that they adopted a relatively hands off approach to enforcement of permit conditions.  As Dr. Emmett Arnold, chairman of the Ohio Water Pollution Control Board, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer several days after the fire, he was unaware of the board ever taking “legal action – a fine or revoking of a permit” for pollution violations. Ohio courts rarely considered the reasonableness of activities giving rise to nuisance claims and Ohio courts were generally hostile to claims that polluters could acquire prescriptive rights if they had continually polluted for a sufficient amount of time before a suit was filed. In 1928, for example, a state court agreed to dismiss a private nuisance claim against an industrial rayon plant that had been sited before the development of nearby residential neighborhoods. In order to bring such a claim, a plaintiff must a) have suffered material harm that is b) different from the harm suffered by the public generally. Public nuisance actions, on the other hand, should have been viable, at least in some instances.  Under state law at the time, water pollution was generally considered a public nuisance. This would imply that individuals, or at least local government officials, could file common law actions against polluting companies and facilities for unreasonably interfering in the public’s rights in the Cuyahoga.  Under Ohio law, however, industrial facilities discharging effluent into public waters pursuant to a valid permit from the state Water Pollution Control Board could not be charged with creating a public nuisance. Ohio law declared that it was illegal to “cause pollution  . . . of any waters of the state, or place or cause to be placed any sewage, industrial waste, or other wastes in a location where they cause pollution of any waters of the state.” Such actions were declared public nuisances, “except in such cases where the water pollution control board has issued a valid and unexpired permit.” When private citizens tried to sue the city of Cleveland: The city argued, among other things, that enforcement of its municipal ordinances against the polluting firms would be “improper because of existing state licenses.” The city appealed the case to the Supreme Court of Ohio maintaining, among other things, that the plaintiffs could not obtain a writ of mandamus forcing city officers to enforce police regulations against specific parties and that such actions were preempted by state regulation.  In particular, the city argued that industrial permits issued by the state Water Pollution Control Board granted licenses to emit industrial wastes into the Cuyahoga, and that the city was powerless to prevent this pollution.  The Ohio Supreme Court eventually upheld this argument, leaving local officials and environmental advocates little ability to force river cleanup. In November 1965, President Johnson ordered all federal installations to provide secondary waste treatment at a minimum.  Despite this decree, federal facilities remained a substantial pollution problem.  In 1966, 237 federal installations continued to discharge insufficiently treated waste into domestic waters. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also contributed to the pollution of Lake Erie, depositing contaminated dredge from the bottom of the Cuyahoga into Lake Erie on a regular basis.  The Corps dumped over one million cubic yards per year from the Cuyahoga and Cleveland’s outer harbor each year in the late 1960s. The 1965 Federal Water Pollution Control Act aimed to force the Corps to clean up its act, but by 1968 there had been no progress on this front, and the Corps “continue to dump highly polluted wastes into areas of Lake Erie still relatively undefiled.” Although criticized for the practice, the Corps defended its actions as cost justified. Under the federal Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899, also known as the “Refuse Act,”  it was unlawful to deposit “refuse” from shore into a navigable water of the United States. Refuse was defined to include all pollutants, including gasoline accidentally discharged into a navigable river, save nonpoint source pollution such as runoff. The act provided for both criminal sanctions, as well as private actions for damages if a polluting company failed to observe the requisite amount of care. Yet prior to the 1960s, this authority was rarely invoked. DDT Over 80 percent of all infectious diseases afflicting humans are carried by insects or other small arthropods. These scourges, which have killed billions of people, include bubonic plague, yellow fever, typhus, dengue, Chagas disease, African sleeping sickness, elephantiasis, trypanosomiasis, viral encephalitis, leishmaniasis, filariasis, and, most deadly of all, malaria. Insects have also caused or contributed to mass death by starvation or malnutrition, by consuming up to 40 percent of the food crop and destroying much of the livestock in many developing countries. One of the first countries to benefit from the use of DDT for civilian purposes was the United States. In the years immediately preceding World War II, between one and six million Americans, mostly drawn from the rural South, contracted malaria annually. In 1946, the U.S. Public Health Service initiated a campaign to wipe out malaria through the application of DDT to the interior walls of homes. The results were dramatic. In the first half of 1952, there were only two confirmed cases of malaria contracted within the United States. Carson claimed that DDT was threatening many avian species with imminent extinction. Her evidence for this, however, was anecdotal and unfounded. In fact, during the period of widespread DDT use preceding the publication of Silent Spring, bird populations in the United States increased significantly, probably as a result of the pesticide’s suppression of their insect disease vectors and parasites. In her chapter “Elixirs of Death,” Carson wrote that synthetic insecticides can affect the human body in “sinister and often deadly ways,” so that cumulatively, the “threat of chronic poisoning and degenerative changes of the liver and other organs is very real.” In terms of DDT specifically, in her chapter on cancer she reported that one expert “now gives DDT the definite rating of a ‘chemical carcinogen.’”[16] These alarming assertions were false as well. The panic raised by Carson’s book spread far beyond American borders. Responding to its warning, the governments of a number of developing countries called a halt to their DDT-based anti-malaria programs. The results were catastrophic. In Ceylon, for example, where, as noted, DDT use had cut malaria cases from millions per year in the 1940s down to just 17 by 1963, its banning in 1964 led to a resurgence of half a million victims per year by 1969.[18] In many other countries, the effects were even worse. Attempting to head off a hysteria-induced global health disaster, in 1970 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report praising the beleaguered pesticide: To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It has contributed to the great increase in agricultural productivity, while sparing countless humanity from a host of diseases, most notably, perhaps, scrub typhus and malaria. Indeed, it is estimated that, in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable. Abandonment of this valuable insecticide should be undertaken only at such time and in such places as it is evident that the prospective gain to humanity exceeds the consequent losses. At this writing, all available substitutes for DDT are both more expensive per crop-year and decidedly more hazardous. After assessing all the evidence, Judge Sweeney found: “The uses of DDT under the registration involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife.... DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man.... DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man.”[20] Accordingly, Judge Sweeney ruled that DDT should remain available for use. Around the globe, Third World governments were told that if they wanted USAID or other foreign aid money to play with, they needed to stop using the most effective weapon against malaria. By some estimates, the death toll in Africa alone from unnecessary malaria resulting from the restrictions on DDT has exceeded 100 million people. It can be seen that far from declining, the number of birds encountered by each observer nearly quadrupled over the period in question. In the case of the robin, singled out by Carson as “the tragic symbol of the fate of the birds,” the population count increased twelvefold. And the annual data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey from 1966 (the year the survey was launched, in response to the public fear Carson had created about the effects of DDT on birds) through the end of the 1970s shows no obvious pattern of overall increasing bird populations as would be expected to follow the 1972 banning of DDT if it were truly harming bird populations. Eggshell thinning is a potential problem, but it should not be overstated. The levels of DDT required for malaria control are much less than those required for crop dusting as practiced in the 1950s. Furthermore, the problem does not affect every bird species — indeed, for some species, there is reason to believe that DDT has an overall beneficial effect, by protecting them from the insect-borne diseases that are a primary cause of bird mortality. The most egregious lie put forth by the anti-DDT crusaders was launched after Carson’s death, by Charles Wurster, a cofounder of the Environmental Defense Fund. In a note published in Science magazine in 1968, Wurster claimed to have shown that the presence of 500 parts per billion (ppb) of DDT in seawater would stop photosynthesis by phytoplankton.[46] Since phytoplankton are the productive foundation that supports all higher marine organisms, their suppression by DDT seemed to threaten the very existence of all life in the ocean, and possibly on the planet. This was truly an alarming result. However, the maximum solubility of DDT in seawater is only 1.2 ppb, nowhere near 500 ppb, so the scenario Wurster reported was physically impossible.[47] In fact, in order to get so much DDT to dissolve, Wurster had been forced to use not seawater, but a saltwater/alcohol mixture as the medium for his experiment. It is hardly surprising that marine algae stopped functioning when thrown into such stuff. In contrast, other scientists found no harm or loss of activity of the same species of marine algae that Wurster used when immersed in actual seawater saturated to the limit with DDT. FDA As many as 1 out of 3 people who have died from disease in the last 40 years did so needlessly because of a single law passed by Congress in 1962. For almost a decade after a definitive scientific study, the FDA forbade aspirin manufacturers to tell the public that their product could reduce heart attacks by over 40%. Because vitamin companies are not allowed to advertise how folic acid supplementation reduces the risk of birth defects, approximately 2500 children are born each year with spina bifida and many more are aborted. Prior to the passage of these Amendments, the FDA primarily regulated only drug safety. The Amendments gave the FDA authority over drug manufacturing, advertising, animal studies, and the design of clinical trials. The result was predictable: the time it took to take a drug from the laboratory to the market went from 4½ years to 14½ years. Because patent life was 19 years or less, manufacturers had insufficient time to recover their costs before a drug went generic. The amendments might have saved, at best, 7,000 lives. In contrast, many more died waiting the extra 10 years for life-saving drugs. According to my calculations, about 4.7 million people died over the last 40 years while the life-saving drug they needed was tied up in regulatory red tape! The death toll from losing half of our innovations from 1962 to 2003 is somewhere between 4 and 16 million people depending upon the assumptions used. Adding the 4.7 million deaths due to an extra 10 years of development time suggests that as many as one out of three people who died of disease since 1962 may have done so needlessly. The 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendments may very well be the deadliest law that Congress ever passed. In our fairly recent past a group of cancer patients sued the federal government for the right to purchase a drug in development that showed reasonable signs of either slowing the progression of their illness or putting their cancer into remission altogether. The court ruled that these individuals had no constitutional right to purchase a drug on the free market that could possibly save them. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

Canada Is More Free Than the United States!

For more on Liberty Now: http://www.libertynow.ca

Canada now ranks higher than the United States in economic freedom.

Canada cut fed spending from 17.5% of GDP in the 1990s to 11.3% in 2012?

All but one of Canada's 22 Federal departments received real cuts - fisheries, 27%, natural resources, 50%

Canada's debt as a percentage of GDP has been cut to less than 30% from over 67%.

Canada fired government workers, but unemployment went down from 12% to 6%.

Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

Sex, Playas and Single Moms - Freedomain Radio Sunday Show, 21 October 2012

Introduction - Review of Libertopia and the Liberty Cruise: 0:00
How to Tell If Someone Is Manipulating You: 3:25
The Emotional Difference between Abuse and Accidents: 25:50
What To Do If You See a Child Being Abused: 50:00
Why Playing It Cool with Women Is a Bad Idea 57:25
Why 'Rights' Are the Secular Equivalent of 'Faith' 1:35:10
The Morality of Economic Boycotting: 1:46:00
Masculinity, Fatherlessness and Russian Rape (a dream) 1:54:00
Outro; Thanks and a Documentary Update: 2:21:17

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Why Obama's Healthcare Mandate Will Fail

ACA: An Impossible Mandate
By John C. Goodman

Read with the kind permission of the Independent Institute - independent.org.

Most Americans will be required to have health insurance beginning on January 1, 2014. The type of insurance you have, where you will get it, and what you will pay will be determined not by you and your employer or by free choice in the marketplace, but by government. Here are the biggest problems the mandate will create. (For more details, please consult the book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis.)

Crowding Out Other Consumption

Health costs per capita have been rising at twice the rate of per capita income for the past forty years. President Obama did not create the underlying problem. Nor is this a uniquely American problem. The result: healthcare spending will consume more and more of our income with each passing year.

To make matters worse, the normal consumer reactions to rising premiums are going to be disallowed. For example, most people would react to unaffordable premiums by choosing a more limited package of benefits, or opting for catastrophic coverage only or relying more on Health Savings Accounts. But these and other responses are limited or barred altogether under the new law.

The provisions governing preventive care illustrate the problem. Everyone will have to have a plan that covers preventive care (mammograms, Pap smears, colonoscopies, etc.) with no deductibles or co-payments. Since there will be no out-of-pocket payment, no one will have any incentive to comparison shop and try to minimize the cost of these services. Could some preventive care be provided by a nurse at a walk-in clinic more cheaply than at a doctor’s office? Undoubtedly. But the new law will prevent you from being in a health plan that gives you economic incentives to economize and reduce those costs.

Crowding Out Wage Increases

Most people will continue to obtain health insurance through an employer. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the average annual cost of a minimum benefit package at $4,500 to $5,000 for individuals and $12,000 to $12,500 for families in 2016. Thus, the minimum cost of labor will be a $7.25 cash minimum wage and a $5.89 health minimum wage (family), for a total of $13.14 an hour or about $27,331 a year.

Imagine you are an employer. You certainly aren’t going to pay an employee more than his value to the organization, and competition from other employers will tend to prevent you from paying less. If the government forces you to spend more on health insurance, you will spend less in wages in order to pay for the mandated benefits.

For above-average-wage employees, this is all straightforward. Expect wage stagnation over the foreseeable future, as employers use potential wage increases to pay for expanded (and mandated) health benefits instead. At the low end of the wage scale, however, the effects of this new law are going to be devastating.

Crowding Out Jobs

Ten-dollar-an-hour workers and their employers cannot afford $6-an-hour health insurance. If they bought it, only $4 would be left for cash wages and that would violate the (cash) minimum wage law. This is not a small problem. One-third of uninsured workers earn less than $3 above the minimum wage.

Further, although health economists have known for decades that these are the workers that most need help in obtaining insurance, there are no new subsidies to help employees at Walmart or McDonald’s or Denny’s or any other restaurant chain buy health insurance. These workers and many others are at risk of losing their jobs.

Do We Really Need a Mandate?

The idea of a health insurance mandate has seemed reasonable to many people on the right as well as the left because of the free-rider problem: those who remain willingly uninsured will have extra money to spend, and if they become sick and need care they cannot pay for, they will look to everyone else to provide that care for free. Are we not rewarding them for being irresponsible and allowing them to be free-riders on the rest of society?

That argument seems persuasive until we ask this question: if we require everyone to have health insurance, what is the appropriate punishment for someone who doesn’t? The only practical way to enforce a mandate is with a fine. And if that is all we have in mind by way of enforcement, we do not need a mandate. All we need is a system that fines people who don’t purchase insurance.

In fact, the income tax already provides this “fine.” Middle-income families who have employer-provided health insurance (as opposed to higher wages) receive a generous tax subsidy. The flip side of that subsidy is a penalty: People who don’t have employer-provided insurance pay higher taxes as a result of that fact.

Why is it good not to have a mandate? Because once the government tells us what insurance we must have, every special interest imaginable will lobby Congress to become part of the mandated benefit package. This has already happened at the state level, where insurance plans in various states are required to cover providers ranging from acupuncturists to naturopaths and services ranging from in vitro fertilization to marriage counseling. All told, there are 2,156 mandates at the state level. They increase the price of insurance and have priced as many as one-in-four uninsured people out of the market.

Prax Appeal! Prax Girl Talks Praxeology on Freedomain Radio

Introduction: 0:00
What Is Praxeology? 3:35
Empiricism and Philosophy: 7:50
What Is Good? 18:20
Why Did Economics Shift from Praxeology to Empiricism? 28:30
Empiricism As A New Religion: 38:40
Choice in the Face of Coercion: 42:40

PraxGirl and Robert Taylor discuss Austrian Economics, elusive ethics and Ludwig von Mises on Freedomain Radio. For more PraxGirl: http://www.youtube.com/praxgirl and http://www.praxeology.tv

Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

Remember When You Were Three?

Okay, well Stefan it's been lovely here with you today - if you've got any grand philosophy from the mind of the Molyneux, please share it with the listeners.

Well, I was reading this article the other day, it was called "8 Questions Philosophy Will Never Answer" - I'll leave your listeners with this - and people can of course go to freedomainradio.com; podcasts are all free, no ads, free books, the forum is free, and people can - you know, 10,000 people chatting about philosophy, I hope people will check it out.

But one of the things, one of the standards that philosophy was never supposed to penetrate was: "There's no such thing as a better morality, there's no such thing as the right morality." You know this is cultural relativism, you know, "Everyone has their own way of doing things, and your way is not necessarily the 'right' way, and you have to be tolerant of other people's different opinions," and so on.

And - it really provokes my inner child - because this is what we say to adults when adults want to stand up for something that is right and true and good, like: "Hey, let's stop pointing guns at each other as a species to get shit done! Let's just try that! Let's just - I mean - let's try it as a thought experiment! What if we didn't have a violent control over the instantaneous creation of generation-enslaving debt ass-wipe paper money? What if we didn't have a violent monopoly on that? What if we didn't have a violent monopoly on the endless indoctrination of children by the powers that be, on how necessary the powers that be are and how you can never ever grow up from being a child? You can never save for your own retirement, you can never decide for yourself who you're gonna help or what kind of charities are appropriate for you. You can't even decide whether people should go mow down innocent civilians in foreign countries in your name! Unthinkable, that you should ever have a conscience to follow your conscience in those areas. You're never allowed to grow up."

But this is what we say to people who are adults - we say: "Eh, morality is kind of relative, you know it's - you can't be imposing your moral systems on other people..." And this is how we get dissolved in the spineless needy dependent entitled jellyfish screeching for the state to throw us a few more crumbs from the masters table, rioting in the streets if our goodies are even remotely cut off, if there's one less piece of bread and one fewer Christian-eating lion circus to entertain us with.

But - but - and this is the big but - and people who remember their childhoods will know what I'm talking about here - that is not how morality was inflicted or imposed upon us when we were children.

I distinctly remember, if I had the urge to push another child and take his toy at the age of 3 or 4, the other child who got upset and went to the teacher was not told, "Well, you can't impose your system of property on him! Nothing really is good or bad, it's - you know, it's cultural, it's different. You know, you have to not impose your 'wanting to play with that toy' on him."

No! I was told: "Give the toy back. Don't take. Don't push. Don't take his lunch money. Don't take his lunch. Don't splash him! Don't throw sand in his face! Don't use violence, don't use bad words, don't call names!"

That's what I was taught as a child - and there was none of this cultural bullshit rings of Saturn fog around the essence of morality!

I was taught two basic things: Don't take other people's stuff, don't use force, don't lie, don't call names - and I think that's actually pretty true! I think that if we just went back to the good old 'stuff that's on the wall of the kindergarten,' and sort of said, "Well, maybe that stuff is actually pretty good! Maybe a respect for property rights, maybe a denial of slander, maybe honesty, maybe a rejection of the initiation of force - maybe these are things that aren't just good for 3-year-olds - which we tell them with complete and perfect absolutes, as perfect absolutes of: this is right, and it is wrong to go take another kid's toy and it is wrong to push him in the dirt, and it is wrong to kick him down. It's wrong to take his coat! Don't mess up his artwork, and don't pee in his boots!

Whatever it is that's going on, we say this to children with all the moral righteousness and absolutism of dear Yahweh himself handing down the 10 Commandments to Moses!

We are certain of it, we know it - and then, when those children grow up and they say, "Hey adults – remember all that shit you told me when I was a kid about not using force and not lying and not hurting others and not stealing from other people? What the hell is it with this goddamned currency? Are you kidding me? Why the hell are all these wars going on? Why the hell were my parents forced at gunpoint to pay for a school where I was instructed never to use force to get what you want? Are you kidding me? Is this some sort of weird Satreian existentialist wet fart of a bad joke? Are you kidding me? It's mad!"

So - what if we just take those moral inscriptions in the kindergarten - which I think are right and true and good (I've got a free book on ethics called "Universally Peferable Behavior: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics" - takes y'all through the deep steps of proving that kindergarten stuff) - what if we just said, "Hey, you know that shit that was absolute when we're 3, maybe it can be absolute when we're 30 or 35 or 55 for 95 - or, if we truly get the free society we want, 335, because that's how long we'll be living without all the bad shit is going on -maybe that stuff is true, and if it is true, what does society look like if nobody gets to use force legitimately? Nobody gets to initiate force legitimately? If nobody gets to taken anybody else's shit at gunpoint, and nobody gets to push you down in the mud or piss in your boots or steal your artwork? What if you are truly free - just as you were told to be free and let other people be free in kindergarten - what with the world look like?

My god, it would be paradise on earth - and we can achieve it.

We just need to stay true to what we were told when we were three.

End the Fed!

My daughter falls down and gets owies. She doesn’t like them, and I explain to her that that’s sort of the point. She gets that now, she’s three. She says: “We like owies because they mean no more owies. Our bodies hurt us as a deterrent to doing dumb and self-destructive things. Like everyone under the age of 21 with a skateboard seems to have forgotten what wheels are kind of for, so they try to ride down railings and up stairs on skateboards. According to the YouTube videos I’ve watched, their bodies are repeatedly telling them to stop. There are probably some of you right here, now, in this very crowd – please listen – or don’t, perhaps I’m just too old…

Owies are very, very important. Outside of anaesthetics, anything that deadens pain is extremely dangerous. You don’t feel a burst appendix, you die. You don’t feel a toothache, you swallow poison and die.

Pain is our way of changing course, of saving ourselves from self-destruction. Getting rid of pain can seem like a good idea, but it’s really, really not.

The Federal Reserve – the Ponzi-scheme counterfeiting of money to enrich the politically connected at the expense of the poor, the weak, the old, and the sick – the Federal Reserve is a civilization-threatening drug.

Evil is costly – the initiation of force is expensive and risky. Violence makes enemies, starts turf wars, sickens the soul, kills love, ends lives…

What stops the growth of evil? The same thing that stops the growth of any sickness – pain, treatment and cure.

Evil is very, very expensive. War – the greatest evil – is staggeringly expensive. The Pentagon loses literally billions of dollars under its couches every single year. It uses a million bullets in to put just one bullet into another human being. War shreds economies, minds, hearts, relationships, health, wealth, freedom – war destroys civilizations.

What stops war? The same thing that stops any gambling addict – running out of money.

War is stopped only by poverty. When you cannot pay the soldiers, well - blessed become the peacemakers.

War is limited by economics, by costs, by the hard wall of hard currency.

Unless – unless war is - not free, but profitable…

This is where the Federal Reserve comes in.

Who pays for war? A defensive war, unprovoked and unavoidable, sure, we would all chip in for that. But a lying swaggering endless missile-hurling overseas mass murder?

To cover current government spending, taxes would have to be raised almost 60%.

We have wars and bailouts and untold bribery and tax cuts – paid for by what?

Who lends to a country hell bent on Empire? No one, because war and empire drain the treasury - look at England after the 2^nd world war – ran out of money, and closed down the Empire.

Lend to warmongers, what will they pay you back with? Broken pottery? Bloodstained bodies? Bones? Dust? Lamentations?

War is not profitable, it is not a growth industry. It grows like a tumor grows, at the expense of life.

How, then, is it fed?

It is fed, by the Fed.

China has lend the US a little over a trillion dollars. The Federal Reserve has lend and created almost 7 trillion dollars.

7 trillion dollars – that’s 8 times the spending on the Iraq war – 12 times the spending in Afghanistan.

Over the last 6 years, there have been very few new taxes – even though total fiscal spending has risen nearly $1 trillion per year.

For the Federal Reserve creates the free money that makes evil profitable.

7 trillion dollars covers the bills for a lot of evil.

If there was truth in advertising, the Federal Reserve would have this slogan:

Free Evil!

Or

The Federal Reserve: Turning Evil into Profits since 1913!

And is not just the overseas wars…

How long would the trillion dollar war on drugs last if everyone got a bill for enforcing it?

How long would 700+ military bases last if everyone got a bill for them? [finger snap]

So – what is the Fed relying on? How can letting the ultra-powerful type whatever they want into their own bank accounts possibly last?

The short answer is, it can’t. History is littered with the dry bones of hundreds of paper currencies – not backed by gold, or commodities, or anything more real than the vampiric promises of politicians.

But – how is it lasting?

It lasts because we do not love our children enough.

To avoid change, to avoid conflict, to avoid the peaceful revolution of real money, we are sacrificing our children. The children in pigtails, the children in the crib, the children in the womb – even the children who are as yet just a gleam in their daddy’s eyes.

We are Aztecs.

Our children’s futures are being sold on the auction block, to the highest bidder, to avoid conflict and virtue in the here and now.

Their futures have become “futures.”

They will be taxed at 60, 70, 80 percent or more to pay for this grand canyon of debt – and it will not be enough, it will never be enough, for the Lords of the New Serfs are insatiable my friends. Zombies get their fill and wander off. There is no logical end to the escalation of human greed save gulags, leg irons and mushroom clouds.

If a corporation were diluting baby food to the point where babies were starving to death, would we not act? If there was poison in the water that wrecked their livers and brains, would we not act?

Their futures are being eviscerated, but we do not act.

Paper money dilutes our responses, dulls our outrage, stokes our resentment against those who cry out for action, for exposure, for truth! “Gold bugs,” we call them. “Conspiracy theorists.” “Paultards.”

You can always tell the pioneers, not by the tans on their faces, but by the arrows in their backs.

Half the world is producing, and half the world is stealing. They steal through inflation, through debt, through public sector pensions and “free” health care and military industrial contracts and government bonds.

But they are not stealing the most from us – that is the greatest horror. They slither like ghosts into the crib and chain up the children, stamp and own them, sell their futures, their lives, all the productive joys of their future selves. A 30 year bond is a 30 year chain.

And yet we doze on, and do not act, because the pain of this horror is kept from us. We are drugged by easy money and soft living, by State power that only seems benevolent because the bill is still in the mail, by propaganda and distractions and the easy self-deceptions of the guilty.

I do not call for a revolution, since that relies on new values. I ask only for integrity, consistency with the lessons of our youth. Do not force others to suffer for your mistakes. Do not spend what you do not have. Don’t take other people’s lunch money. Do not sell people.

Let’s get back to the days before money grew on trees, or magically sprouted from keyboards, but had to be earned.

Money must be limited, for unlimited money is unlimited evil.

Let the price of injustice accrue to those committing it.

End war. End serfdom. End child slavery.

End the Fed.

Ron Paul, RNC Corruption And the True Political Education

Ron Paul's campaign has always promised an education, and by God I think we got one.

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses the recent betrayal of Ron Paul at the RNC in Tampa, Florida, with Bretigne Shaffer, author and daughter of Butler Shaffer.

Original Article: http://lewrockwell.com/shaffer-br/shaffer-br13.1.html

For more, please see http://www.bretigne.com/

Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

We Cannot Build Freedom on the Fascism of Childhood!

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, is interviewed on Decline to State about a variety of topics, including:
- How video games support the state
- How a free society resists a new government
- Why democratic elections are such a sham
- How government schools train us for passive totalitarian obedience

Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

Check out more  Declined to State podcasts here: http://www.declinefm.com

Satan Rules This World!

Satan caller starts at 1:32:37
Freedomain Radio Sunday Philosophy Call in Show, 8 July 2012. Why government funding is so bad for intellectual freedom and political equality. Are states the greatest aggressors in the world? Which group should be the first recipients of legal and political equality? Why are some people more rational than others? Also, a conversation with a fundamentalist Christian about the satanic influence over the modern world. Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

The Ethics of Atheism - A Conversation with Dr Peter Boghossian

Podcast: http://www.fdrurl.com/FDR2168

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, discusses faith, reason, philosophy and religion with Dr Peter Boghossian (apologies for the odd video color)

Dr. Peter Boghossian's main focus is bringing the tools of professional philosophers to people in a wide variety of contexts. Peter has a teaching pedigree spanning more than 20 years and 30 thousand students--in prisons, hospitals, public and private schools, seminaries, colleges and universities, Fortune 100 companies and small businesses. His fundamental objective is to teach people how to think through what often seem to be intractable problems.

Peter's primary research areas are critical thinking and moral reasoning.  His doctoral research studies, funded by the State of Oregon and supported by the Oregon Department of Corrections, consisted of using the Socratic method to help prison inmates to increase their critical thinking and moral reasoning abilities and to increase their desistance to criminal behavior.

Peter's publications can be found in Diálogos, Education Policy Analysis Archives, The Clearing House: Educational Research Controversy and Practices, The Radical Academy; Offender Programs Report, Teaching Philosophy, Corrections Today, Informal Logic, The Skeptic, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Inside Higher Ed, Essays in Philosophy, Federal Probation Journal, and the Journal of Correctional Education. If you'd like to learn more about his scholarship, his podcast interview with Philosophy News http://www.philosophynews.com/post/2011/12/05/Interview-with-Peter-Boghossian.aspx is a great place to start.

His work has been noted on The Huffington Post, The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason, and other media outlets; he was an invited guest on the Lars Larson Show, interviewed for the cover story of the Mercury, and advocated via social media by the Executive Director of the Skeptic Society, Michael Shermer, and bestselling author and head of Project Reason, Sam Harris.

Peter was a Councilman for the State of Oregon (LSTA), an advisor to Sockeye Magazine and The Weekly Alibi, wrote national philosophy curricula for the University of Phoenix and was a research fellow for the National Center for Teaching and Learning. Currently, he is the Chairman of the Prison Advisory Committee for Columbia River Correctional Institution, teaches Critical Thinking, Science and Pseudoscience, the Philosophy of Education, and Atheism at Portland State University, is an Affiliate Research Assistant Professor Oregon Health Science University, is Co-Director and Co-Founder (with Dr. Randy Blazak) of PSU's Center for Correction's Research, and a speaker for the Center for Inquiry http://www.centerforinquiry.net/speakers/boghossian_peter.

When he's not working, Peter spends time with his family, practices jiu jutsu, watches science fiction movies and television (Stargate Universe, Battlestar Galactica, Misfits, Fringe), and plays computer games (Star Craft 2, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Diablo III).

You can follow Peter on Twitter @peterboghossian. If you want to join Peter's mailing list and learn about his upcoming public lectures and debates, from your mobile phone text "DELUSION" + your email address to 22333, or enter your email address on the bottom right of this page: http://philosophynews.com/peterboghossian

Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

Liberty vs The Zombie Mob!

This has been a tough spring for Libertarian politicos. Ron Paul’s campaign has collapsed, and Rand Paul – after reportedly telling his father only 30 minutes beforehand, has endorsed the power-hungry neocon poster boy, Mitt Romney.

Romney’s politics reach a level of banal corruption only possible in the “small government big market” Republican party. After appeasing his home-state voters with Obamacare Massachusetts’s style, he then campaigns against the real thing, claiming that his only moral beef with fascist medicine is geography. “State’s rights” is a yawn-inducing moral horror, the brain-twisting claim that it is perfectly moral for governments to drive you out of your State if you hate their laws, but to drive you out of the country is just plain wrong.

Bashing the Fed – Government or Reserve – is a time-honored tradition among conservative politicians – it’s typically political and tragically believable among libertarians. Everyone who wants to be the boss claims to hate the boss; governors do their nasty business in their own states, and then defend their actions with the ridiculous appeal to “State’s rights.” States are not people, they don’t have rights; the immorality of violence is not zip code specific – the objections are all too obvious to bother pointing out. Also, States both need and drive the power of the Federal government – State A bribes its population with some goodie, thus making it less attractive to businesses, and so bribes business to set up shop with tax holidays and regulatory exemptions – and if these don’t work, it pushes the Federal government to mirror its own corruption across the country, so it does not lose out to other states.

Theories flourish as to why Rand Paul endorsed Romney. Some say he was threatened, which is perfectly believable (remember Ross Perot dropping out of the presidential race in 1992 after threats against his family?) some say he is angling for a VP spot. Some say he is laying the groundwork for a 2016 presidential bid (which really means that some people still can’t give up their fantasy of a political solution).

A VP spot would be the perfect banishment to obscurity. VPs rarely become presidents, and are perfect whipping boys for any fact or truth, as Dan Quayle found when he dared to mention the social problems caused by single motherhood. Those in the crosshairs are made VPs, in the age old commandment to keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

Threats are the very essence of politics – and with a vicious and hysterical media always ready to stroke and provoke the Christ-taunting mob, nothing factual need get in the way of the modern print lynching. Libertarians know this most of all – the moment that Ron Paul started to really gain in the polls, and the media was chided by Jon Stewart for ignoring him, they just started calling him a racist, and were done with him. All Ron Paul’s education and eloquence and obvious passion for libertarian solutions meant nothing. Floating reason and evidence in mainstream society is like trying to teach Latin to a sugar-crashing toddler. All you do is insult teaching.

Read any mainstream article on Ayn Rand – do you see any actual criticisms of her arguments? Hell no, you just read a steady pee-stream of bitter invective and cowardly insults. She’s had tens of millions of readers, sixty years of accumulating evidence – governments grow, the West collapses, Europe goes first – and you still cannot read two sensible words written about her. Look at your own life. When you make sensible arguments against the State, do you get any kind of semi-intelligent rebuttal? Of course not. You’re just a hater, man, you hate the poor and the sick, yer unpatriotic – and prolly a racist too!

Politicians in the past used schools to breed fools, knaves and scoundrels, to easier rule and bribe them. We are all left with the legacy of these hollow-headed indoctrinations. People who cannot think join mobs, in the fantasy that an aggregate of vacuity can produce gravity. They surge back and forth across the cultural wasteland like the zombies they are, sniffing for and feeding on any stray brains that cross their path. The broken attack the whole for exposing their brokenness; the rational strive to reason with the mob, the bored Borg, the haters who fear the only knowledge that really counts: self knowledge.

The goal of political action has been to try to appeal to self-interest of the mob. But the mob has no self-interest, for its members have no self – if they did, they would have fled the zombie army when it came to eat them. Libertarians say: “Freedom brings benefits to the collective” – as if there is any such thing as a collective. The moment a libertarian says that we should judge an idea by its value to individuals, he only feeds the State, since the State provides so many heady benefits to those seeking power. What kind of power would Obama have in a free, rational – but I repeat myself – society? None, because his empty rhetoric would be about as appealing as a gas station serving sugar water. His slogans would be laughed at – “the audacity of hope” makes about as much sense as mechanically repeating “the ricochet of profits” during a business meeting, or “the mobility of empiricism” at a physics conference. Zen headlines without reason and evidence would be such an obvious con that people like Obama would end up slithering through the underworld of petty confidence schemes, i.e. the Constitution.

So Obama loves the State. George Bush, Romney, Stalin, Pol Pot – they all love politics and power, because it gives their empty words violent form; from syllables to subjugation in the tick of a ballot box, how heady and addictive! Humanity has long been fascinated by magic spells, by the manipulation of physical reality through language alone – usually to ill effect – this is just an unconscious metaphor for political rhetoric, which starts fires and mobs and wars by stoking the emptiness it both breeds and feeds on.

So when Libertarians say: “we will all be better off when we are free” – this is a case that can only be made to each individual, and particular individuals – political individuals – are far better off with state power. Corrupt and lazy businessmen; charismatic and useless sophists; torpid and offensive artists; priests – the ultimate magicians in many ways – and those teachers whose heavy self-hatred gives them nimble fingers to disassemble the minds of the young – all worship the State. All benefit from the State, and all will oppose political solutions.

The Fall of Rome and Modern Parallels

http://www.fee.org

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, reads two articles by the great thinker Lawrence Reed. Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

Arachno-Capitalism On Ice! Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio interview...

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, is interviewed on Alaskan Radio about liberty, voting, financial regulation, philosophy, integrity, virtue, peace, South Park, and the hope for true human freedom in the future. Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the web - http://www.freedomainradio.com

http://patriotslament.blogspot.com

Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/radiofreefairbanks