Recently, I debated the far-right Canadian YouTuber and self-described libertarian Stefan Molyneux. While Molyneux holds some distinctly un-libertarian positions on Donald Trump and restricting immigration, and he spent much of the debate trying to wiggle out of that obvious contradiction, he does make all the standard libertarian arguments against socialism.

One of those has to do with the corrupting effect of political power. In his opening statement, Molyneux argued:

Human beings cannot in any way, shape, or form handle power. Power is very bad for us. Y’know, when I was a kid we had to put coins in the heading device and sometimes we had to put actual pennies in the fuse box because . . . it was a huge fire hazard and so on but . . . human beings cannot handle huge voltages of political power any more than the pennies when I was a kid could handle electrical power — they regularly melted and sort of dripped out. Humans get overwhelmed and blown out and corrupted by power.