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Dec. 28, 2005 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
51:38
30 Why State Violence Always Grows

An analysis of the escalation of state power

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Dear sir or madam, good morning and welcome to your morning podcast.
This is the 28th of December 2005.
It's Stefan Molyneux, flopped on a couch after going to bed very late and eager to chat with you about one or two little topics.
First of all, just before I begin, I was sort of lying in bed last night listening to my podcast from yesterday about the 10 questions to ask religious people.
And like most hyper- and perhaps hyper-threaded intellectuals, I am a somewhat light sleeper on occasion.
Actually, more than on occasion.
And I was sitting there listening to my own podcast.
I used to go to bed or go to sleep listening to audiobooks.
Now I go to sleep listening to my own podcast, which I'm sure will sooner or later give me weird and narcissistic dreams.
And as I was listening to the podcast, I noticed that, you know, in haste or eagerness or excitement or, you know, just generally being a hyper guy, I would transpose words or say things that were illogical, like a woman who had never been married to her husband or something like that.
And I was sitting there lying there going, well, you know what I should do?
I should go downstairs since I'm not falling asleep anyway.
And I should, you know, surgically snip out the words that are incorrect and substitute words that are more correct and so on.
But on rewinding and listening to the passages, I sort of realized that I spoke so quickly that to substitute one word for another in the general fax-like babble would be somewhat akin to trying to pluck a bullet out of midair with your hand.
So I decided against it.
In consequence, I hope that you will forgive the occasional word flip or word substitution.
I still think that the sentences are, in general, understandable.
But, you know, I hope that you will forgive me for these lapses and understand why I don't go back and fix them up.
So, again, I will try speaking a little more slowly today so that I won't make those kinds of word flip errors.
So the topic for today, with your gracious attention, will be why does violence always spread?
And what I mean by that is why does violence through the state, or state violence, or state-sanctioned, state-supported violence always spread?
And I got this idea while reading a newspaper article about an 85-year-old economist whose name, if I remember rightly, was Thomas Schilling.
It's hard to remember these guys because they are pretty forgettable.
But he came up with a theory about how neighborhoods get segregated.
So if you have a bunch of different races all living in the same neighborhood, here's theory that predicts that within a relatively short period of time that neighborhood will end up segregated.
And it won't end up segregated because You know, everybody's a racist and hates each other, but simply because there is a small preference that people have for living among people of their own culture or race or whatever.
People like themselves.
And even with a very small preference for that, neighborhoods get segregated with fairly astonishing speed.
So that's his big theory.
He says he came up with it when he sort of came home and was looking at a checkerboard of You know, black and red pieces.
And, you know, perhaps it's the Nihilists and the Communists, who knows?
And he just was playing around with them and pushing them around and saying, what if there's just a slight preference and so on, and that's his sort of, you know, I guess, pleasant little homespun anecdote about how he came up with this theory.
Now, two things struck me about this theory.
One of which would probably be the subject for another podcast which is just you know how astonishingly intellectually useless academics in general are and how much and how much energy they squander on this inconsequential minutiae and how amazingly they are rewarded for that.
I mean it's not amazing that they are.
I mean basically academics are to a large degree, you know, civil servants, right?
So they come up with elegant solutions, elegant and overcomplicated solutions to inconsequential problems.
That's almost the definition of a bureaucrat.
But it just astounds me, you know, with all of the problems facing, let's just say Western society today, healthcare systems about to crumble, welfare through the roof, government debts that, you know, could choke the productive energies of two generations.
You know, growing state power, over-regulation of business, you know, Millions of people thrown in jail for, you know, non-crimes like drug possession.
With all of this going on, it really is a case of watching academics fiddle while Rome burns.
And just in case you're going to email me and tell me that that is a myth because the fiddle was not invented until 1500 years after Nero's death, I know.
But still, it's a turn of phrase which everybody understands.
And, you know, this was my own experience within academia that I sort of plowed my way through a master's degree and, you know, it took me forever to find a thesis advisor because nobody wanted to touch the thesis that I was working on, which was basically that people who believe in higher realities must always advocate dictatorship as the ideal political model.
And people who advocate, you know, truth is derived from empirical reality Must always end up advocating the free market as a ideal political model.
Fairly ambitious, of course, two thousand years of history and I took three major philosophers from either camp.
And, you know, this is the idea that I thought was pretty powerful and well worth working on and oh my lord you would not believe, well actually if you're in academics you probably would, but you would not believe the amount of stress and strain and, you know, fighting and kicking and screaming I had to go through to get a thesis advisor.
You know, who, you know, gave me no practical advice of any kind and, you know, I had absolutely no way of knowing whether I was going to pass or fail.
I didn't get my degree until long after everybody else because he couldn't decide whether he was going to pass or fail me.
He ended up passing me and saying, well, it's an interesting idea.
I don't know if it's true or not, but you obviously put a lot of work into it or something like that, which is, you know, sort of like a pat on the head for the idiot child, right?
And, you know, after that I just thought, wow, you know, I've really been beating my head against the wall for the past, you know, five years or so in academia.
Do I want to do it for another five years for a PhD in a field where there's not a lot of demand, where, you know, there's a government edict against hiring, you know, whitey boys like myself?
So I ditched academics for the sake of the software world and the entrepreneurial world and the business world, which You know, it was, I think, a much better idea.
I certainly have more fun in the free market than I do talking about the free market to people who are hostile to the idea.
You know, both colleagues and students.
So, I think that it's not possible to undo the effects of sort of state-sanctioned or state-run propaganda, probably even within the course of a semester with a relatively intelligent group of students, because, you know, what they're hearing in your course is the exact opposite of what they're hearing in all their other courses.
And this is not to mention even the social conflict that's going to come in when you teach things that are diametrically opposite to what everyone believes.
And I think it's possible to teach about the free market as a sort of morally neutral stance, right?
The free market is more efficient, and so and so.
But the moment you begin to touch on morality, you really start to handle some pretty explosive issues.
So, I mean, if you say that people who oppose the free market and prefer government intervention are advocating violence, you know, students have every right to ask You know, do you then say that your colleague so-and-so is morally corrupt?
And, you know, what are you going to say?
I mean, these are the kinds of thorny issues that you get into when you start to handle the explosive gelignite of moral principles, which is, you know, the foundation of all social decisions of any consequence.
So, I mean, I've had some direct experience on how inconsequential academia can be, and Monarch can be, always is, and so I was quite surprised that this interesting theory about how minor preferences, one way or another, can very quickly segregate a decision tree so that everybody with a minor preference one way ends up over on the left-hand side, and everyone with a minor preference to the other way ends up over on the right-hand side.
So I thought a much more interesting application of this theory is in the realm of state violence.
Because, you know, for anybody who reads the paper, it's very clear that, you know, government violence always spreads.
It doesn't ever stabilize.
It never...
You know, the government never gets to 26.2% of the economy, of control of that amount of the economy, and then just stays there in perpetuity.
I mean, it always grows and spreads, which is exactly why, you know, I generally liken it to a cancer.
It grows and spreads until it destroys the host organism, which is the productive taxpayers of society.
And this is why it has to be opposed, absolutely.
I mean, you don't say, let's have a little less cancer, let's control cancer.
I mean, if you have a malignant and explosive growth tumor, you just, you cut the whole dang thing out.
You don't just try and limit it or put it in a box or control it.
I mean, state violence will always grow.
And I think that Thomas Schelling's game theory is an interesting approach to this.
And, you know, if you're mathematically apt, or at least more so than I am, which probably isn't hard, you know, you may want to take a swing at this and let me know how you do.
So there are two reasons why, in my mind, there are two main reasons why state violence always grows.
The first is the imbalance of economic incentives for those who gain control of state power and those who do not.
Now this I think is a particularly fascinating area which we'll all be fairly familiar with because it involves something we read about every day which is pressure groups.
So let's take one that we're probably all familiar with and look at farmers.
Now, I'm a farmer, let's say, and you're a taxpayer.
Now, for whatever reason, let's just call it rural sentimentality, the government and the taxpayers have a soft spot for farmers.
They kind of picture these, you know, craggy, sunburnt-from-the-shoulders-down guys sitting with baseball caps on their tractors, staring off into the sunset, shedding drops of tears over the loss of their family farm and so on.
I don't think that's true at all, but this is what people believe, and farmers do have a psychological hook on people.
We all feel vaguely like we should be doing things more with the earth, and we all feel so dependent on farmers.
We all have such a sentimentalized view of life on the farm and so farmers have a pretty good hook to get into our psyche and get us to feel like they should be treated separately from everybody else who produces stuff in society.
So let's say I'm a farmer and I go to my politician my local politician with a bunch of other farmers and we say you know well we're doing really badly we need subsidies because you know it's a bad year and don't you know why if we if we can't farm properly you know if we can't make any money we might go out of business and then you're gonna have to import all your food and be dependent on foreigners and you know the price of food is going to go up which is gonna
hurt the urban tax base, which is, the urban voters in particular, which is a much more powerful group than any farmers, right?
But basically politicians like to subsidize farmers so that the price of food is controlled so that they are not viewed as, you know, people who can't manage the basics of the economy by the urban voters.
But you know for whatever reason, we can go into that another time, but for whatever reason I as the farmer have a hook into the political process and you as the taxpayer don't in the same way.
You may have them for some other reason but not in this particular case.
So let's just say that my income as a farmer without any state intervention is a hundred thousand dollars.
And yes, I know, if I'm a single farmer with a single farm it's probably a little less, but let's just, you know, for the sake of, you know, the fact that we have ten digits on our hands, that's how we think, let's just work with nice even ten base numbers.
So...
I make $100,000 without government subsidies or price controls or tariffs on foreign goods coming in.
Like in the States, for most of the 20th century, Americans paid 500% more taxes, more for sugar than anybody else, which of course distorted the entire economy because there were just enormous import duties on sugar coming in from other countries.
So however I go about it, I get some sort of preferential legislation as a farmer from the local legislature.
And let's just say that it increases my income by 50%.
by 50%.
So where I was formerly was making $100,000, now I'm making $150,000.
And I have 10 other farmers, and we all went to the legislature together.
So, you know, there's half a million dollars between us that we get extra in perpetuity.
I mean, we're assuming that this isn't just a one-shot deal, but once you get the government in, then... I mean, government... people in the government have a natural tendency to maintain economic benefits for politically significant sections of the population, because if you've ever tried taking candy from a baby, You'll have some idea of what happens when, you know, people who feel that they're entitled to other people's money see a hand straying near the source of their income, their illicit income.
You know, they bite it and beat it and, you know, scream blue murder.
So we together, the ten of us, get half a million dollars more a year between us in perpetuity.
Right, so if I'm 30 and I'm going to work for another 30 years, then I'm looking at getting about 1.5 million dollars extra in income over the course of my life.
Right, so 15 million dollars for this group of 10 farmers.
So, you know, the sort of cost-benefit ratio then becomes Well, if I spend a certain amount of time lobbying the government to get the subsidy, then that time has to be divided into an extra $1.5 million of additional income per year for me and $50 million for my group of ten farmers.
You know, how much work is it to get 1.5 million dollars?
Well, you know, most people would say that's quite a lot of work.
I mean, if you're trying to save that from a salaried income, that's going to take you decades.
You know, assuming that you have sort of a middle class salary, it's going to take you decades to be able to save 1.5 million dollars.
So, it's quite a strong incentive.
I know I would do quite a bit of labor for 1.5 million dollars.
I mean, I know that when I was an entrepreneur in the software world in the freewheeling days of the nineties, you know, 70-hour weeks was certainly not uncommon, you know, combined with a large amount of travel.
So, I would say that people will do quite a lot for 1.5 million dollars.
They will certainly spend, you know, Hundreds of hours to lobby people in the expectation of getting that kind of benefit.
So on the farmer's side, there is an enormous incentive to lobby the government.
And this is simply on the assumption that all they're going to get is a 50% increase in income.
And this, of course, is true for just about anybody who lobbies the government.
This includes the people on welfare.
Not that they're getting $50,000 a year, but, you know, as I've mentioned elsewhere, the difference between $0 and $15,000 a year is the greatest difference of all in all of the economic spectrum of income.
You know, $0 to $15,000 is the big deal.
$15,000 to $30,000 is much, much smaller in terms of its effect, right?
One is the difference between life and death, and the other is the difference between You know, one or two televisions.
So, farmers then, or those who lobby the government, who are receiving benefits from the general body of the taxpayers have an enormous incentive to spend time and money and energy and political capital and so on to try and get the money that they feel is theirs by right.
Now what is it like on the other side of the fence though?
What is it like on your side of the fence?
So you read in the newspaper that farmers are mounting an intensive lobbying campaign I mean, okay, it's doubtful you'd ever read it because nobody wants to print that stuff, but let's just say you did.
You found out on the internet through Lew Rockwell or something like that that farmers are mounting this huge lobbying campaign to get the government to give them an extra $50,000 a year.
I mean, it's never put in those terms, so let's just... Actually, let's say it's a little more realistic what you read about, that farmers are having a hard time and are asking Washington or Ottawa for aid.
Well, first of all, if you wanted to oppose this, you would have to start digging through all of the rhetoric and try and find out exactly what was being proposed in terms of the sums that were being talked about.
I mean, if the lobbying effort is for You know, $500 a year, it's probably not worth your time.
$50,000, perhaps.
Well, we'll get into whether it is or isn't in a moment.
But you would have to start having access to some of the backroom, sort of smoke-filled room deals that are going on where the actual sums are being talked about.
Because what's talked about in the media is never what actually occurs once the legislation is passed.
So, you know, how would you do that?
Well, nobody is going to want to give you access to that kind of information about how much money is being proposed.
So you'd have to sort of, you know, befriend a farmer or claim to be a friend of the farmer who had access to political capital that could help them.
I mean, you'd have to sort of become an undercover subsidy cop or something and go in, sort of, and try and understand what was really going on and what was actually being proposed and so on.
Because, you know, by the time the legislation is being voted on, when it's sort of public, you can't have any effect at that point.
So this would be time-consuming and difficult and expensive, and of course you'd have no access to this information unless you were part of the political process of some kind.
And if you're part of the political process, it's because you don't have any values already, so it's really not going to be possible for you to find out what is on the table before it gets passed.
But let's say that you could.
I always have this habit of saying, OK, well, I don't like stopping after the first objection, because the first objection might not convince someone, so let's just keep going.
Let's say that you could figure out what was being bandied about in the political backrooms between the farmers and the politicians, and you found out that it was, in fact, $50,000 a year for each farmer in perpetuity.
As I've mentioned before, the farmers have an enormous incentive to lobby the government to gain an additional $50,000 a year.
What is your incentive to fight to block this?
I'm not going to do the math, but it's fairly clear that for a farmer, a group of farmers to gain $50,000 a year is going to cost each taxpayer like $7 a year, let's say.
Let's just say $10 a year.
Let's round it up.
Actually, that would be... Okay, $7.5.
Let's round that up.
So, farmers stand to gain $50,000 a year And each individual taxpayer stands to lose $10 a year.
So obviously the economic incentive for the farmers is, you know, asymptotically higher than the financial incentives of the taxpayers.
So the incentive for the farmer to get $50,000 a year is very high.
The incentive of the taxpayer to try and save $10 a year by resisting the farmers Lobbying is very small.
I mean you write one email or one letter and you've kind of burned up your ten bucks and anything else that you put in is sort of a net loss for you.
So I think it's fairly clear to say that one of the reasons that violence always spreads is the imbalance of The incentive between those who are lobbying for subsidies or price controls or supports or trade barriers or whatever, the incentive for those people to lobby the government is very high.
The incentive for the average taxpayer to oppose their lobbying is very low.
Now, of course, if it's only the farmers, who cares, right?
I mean, ten bucks a year I can live with.
However, because of this imbalance, You have to recognize that there are thousands upon thousands of special interest groups who are all lobbying the government because they have the same economic incentive, and that each one of these thousands of groups gets a disproportionate benefit from the taxpayers, and the taxpayers get a disproportionately small amount of harm from each one of these groups.
So, it's sort of like, you can fight a lion, but you can't really fight, you know, a forest full of mosquitoes.
So, you're a lion, you can climb a tree, you can take a club, you can run away, and you're safe.
But if you're sort of tied to a tree in the forest, you can't really fight, you know, an endless swarm of mosquitoes.
I mean, you can try, but you're not going to win in the long run, because, you know, there's just no There's no balance in terms of the incentives for each.
So that's one of the reasons why state violence always spreads.
And that's not particularly associated with Thomas Schelling's game theory about how small preferences will end up with complete segregation of communities, but I think that there is an application of the theory towards this.
If it's the case for small preferences then it certainly would be more the case for large preferences like subsidies versus being taxed.
Now the second reason that violence always spreads is that violence is a zero-sum game.
As you probably know in economics, in the free market every transaction that occurs benefits both parties uh... it simply has to otherwise the transaction will not occur so if i give you two hundred dollars for an ipod then you know we know without having to examine our motivations that
We both benefit from that transaction, and we know that we benefit because I am voluntarily willing to give up $200 to get an iPod, whereas you are perfectly voluntarily willing to give up your iPod in exchange for $200.
So, without a doubt, we know that both parties are better off.
It's a win-win situation, and they're better off because they have exchanged their goods or services or money voluntarily.
So, you know, that's sort of fairly clear and one of the basis of economics.
However, in a violent situation such, let's just look at a simple situation like a mugging, We know that it is a net loss to the person who is being mugged and a net gain to the person who is doing the mugging.
So we'll just call it a zero-sum game for now, although it's a little more complicated than that.
But, you know, if somebody takes my Rolex at the sort of point of a gun, then we know for sure that I have not benefited from the transaction because a gun was involved.
I mean, if I was struck by some powerful charitable impulse and wanted to give my Rolex to, you know, some seedy-looking character on a street in the hopes that he would turn his life around as a result of my sudden largesse, then we would know that I had benefited from the transaction.
I mean, at the time.
Let's sort of forget about buyer's remorse and all that.
That's, again, more complicated and sort of subjective and not necessarily the case.
But we know for sure that if I have not voluntarily given my Rolex to the seedy guy on the street, but instead he pulled out a gun and said, give me your Rolex, that it is not a transaction in which both of us benefit.
Why?
Because a gun is involved and therefore I have not freely chosen it as a benefit.
And of course it's a net loss to me.
I now have no Rolex.
Whereas it is a net gain for the thief because he now has my Rolex.
And I would also point out that it is a net loss to the economy as a whole because all of the time that the thief has spent buying the gun and staking out his corner or his alley where he robs people and so on, all of that is lost to the economy.
Similarly, The time that I spend reporting him to the police if I sort of feel like wasting my time, the time that I spend complaining about it at work, the time that I spend calling my insurance company, the money that the insurance company has to pay me, the paperwork, the resources, the electricity, everything that is consumed by this act of theft is a net loss to the economy because it's not things that people are doing that is productive and the result of voluntary exchange.
Now, if you contrast this to the $200 in the iPod, you know, we know that it's a net gain because both people are voluntarily transacting and therefore prefer whatever comes out of it to not doing the transaction.
So, you know, that is sort of the result of a net gain.
And, you know, violence is both a zero-sum game in terms of the transfer of goods and also is a net loss in terms of the energy that is spent performing the transfer and dealing with its consequences, doing the mugging and dealing with the consequences, violence is both a zero-sum game in terms of the transfer of goods and also is a net loss in terms of the energy that is spent performing the transfer and dealing with
To take a sort of slightly different example, I'll talk about two women I've gone out with this year.
This is sort of a bit of a flip from bland economics to something that I've sort of personally experienced where I went out with a lady who was, let's just say, a tad on the critical side.
And whenever there was a conflict, basically one of us had to be right and one of us had to be wrong.
There was no way to approach this from a sort of win-win situation.
So if something occurred, like if I was supposed to meet her at a certain time and, you know, either I... Let's just say I was supposed to meet her at 7 o'clock and I came at 7.30 because I thought it was 7.30.
There's no way that we could just laugh and say, what a silly error.
Does not worry about it.
But, you know, it had to be that, you know, Not only had I mistook the time, but I always mistake the time because I'm irresponsible on this and that.
Don't ask me why we went out.
That's a whole other question.
And this happens in marriages, you know, where if somebody forgets to take out the garbage, then both parties within the marriage get very tense because somebody has to get blamed.
Somebody has to accept the blame.
And not only will they accept the blame for this particular instance of not taking out the garbage, but it becomes something that is added to the mythology of the marriage so that, you know, Let's say it's the husband who gets blamed for not taking out the garbage, then the husband now is the guy who doesn't take out the garbage, and that's an indication of some much larger fundamental psychological problem that he has around responsibility, and not being committed to the family, and not being involved in the household, and blah blah blah.
So this can also happen in relationships, where you get this zero-sum game.
Where at the moment there's a conflict or a problem, both people become pretty aggressive or defensive and they get tense and they know that, you know, bad things are afoot because they can't sort of laugh about it and say, you know, well, let's not assume there's a problem until there's a problem, right?
So if I, let's say that I was supposed to meet my wife somewhere and, you know, five times in a row I was late by half an hour or more, then she would probably say, you know, listen, let's sit you down and talk about your mother or something like that.
But, you know, in a healthy relationship you don't assume that there are problems until there's empirical evidence for them and, you know, one swallow does not a summer make, so to speak.
So that's sort of another example of, you know, that would be sort of like more emotional, not exactly abuse, but definitely emotional aggression that's not productive where people who've never been mugged but who've been in relationships where, you know, when there's a problem everybody gets tense because somebody has to get blamed.
And somebody has to take responsibility and that responsibility then accumulates so that there's this mythology built about them that they're always this or always that and you know that sort of zero-sum game people are pretty aware of who've had relationships like that.
And if you're in one of those, get out.
Yeah, that's another podcast.
So let's have a look at another reason.
Sorry, so the reason why violence grows is because Because violence is a zero-sum game, you are either benefiting from it, or you are losing from it.
So the iPod and the 200 bucks, both people benefit.
The mugger, one person benefits, and a multitude of other people lose.
So because it is a zero-sum game, I believe, and I certainly have no empirical evidence for this, but I think it stands to reason, that Our biological instincts kick in, right?
I mean, if it's a zero-sum game, then we want that sum to accrue to our genetic pool, right?
To us and our family, rather than to sort of unknown others.
I mean, because, you know, we're biological organisms.
We sort of fought our way to the top of the food chain by survival of the fittest.
Therefore, when there is a zero-sum game going on, we tend to grab the resources for what is ours and what is mine, rather than allow the benefit to be grabbed either by others or accrue to sort of unknown strangers.
So, for sure, when there's a zero-sum game going on, people are going to want to grab the benefits of that zero-sum game to themselves rather than be on the losing end, right?
I mean, if you see me buying the iPod for 200 bucks, what do you care, right?
I mean, it doesn't affect you in any way.
Nobody's taking anything from you.
It's just me and some hyperactive future shop salesman having a transaction.
So, there's no... this has no effect on you.
I mean, you can watch if you want, but it's going to be pretty dull, right?
Me drooling a little and handing over some cash.
Actually, I shouldn't say that.
I'm a Creative Labs kind of fellow.
I have a Zen Extra that I think is just wonderful.
But, you know, the fact of the matter is it doesn't affect you at all.
However, if there is an economic transaction where somebody has to win And somebody has to lose, then for sure everybody is going to be drawn to be on the winning side.
I mean, not everybody, but everybody to a statistically significant degree is going to want to be on that winning side.
So that's very important.
We are drawn to take resources rather than lose resources.
And so if violence is in the air, And it's sort of, you know, grab or be grabbed from.
You know, most people will gravitate towards being the grabbers, right?
So that's another reason why violence always grows.
Whereas in, you know, Thomas Schelling's theory, there's a minor preference to being around people who are like yourself, and that results in a completely segregated neighborhood.
You know, imagine how much quicker the creation of a zero-sum or negative-sum violent transaction will gravitate people towards wanting to be on the receiving end.
of that transaction rather than being pillaged from.
And, you know, if you take into account the fact that there are some people who simply can't be on the violent end of that transaction for whatever reason, they're too weak, they don't have any political influence or whatever, then for sure, you know, there is going to be a real stampede of those who are able to get on the pillaging side of a violent transaction and away from those who are going to be pillaged from.
Now, there's one other factor to this which I think is very interesting, which is that we generally talk about, or at least I generally talk about, those who want subsidies and those who pay for those subsidies through taxation.
However, that really is not the sum total of the economic transaction.
Now, of course, the sum total of the economic transaction would be a ridiculously lengthy discussion, because economics goes, you know, from here until the end of time, from the top of the sky to the bottom of the earth, and, you know, everywhere in between.
But to talk about one other significant factor in the economic transaction of sort of modern
violent state democracies we have to look at the third party right so there's there's the farmer who gets the subsidy there's the taxpayer who pays for the subsidy either directly through taxes or through the increased price of the farmer's goods through tariffs or the destruction of those goods so that the price gets raised or whatever but that's not of course the only two People who are in the equation.
I mean, if it were, it wouldn't really be so bad, right?
So some farmer could come to my door and say, you know, give me ten bucks and I'd say, not so much, right?
And then, you know, maybe there'd be a blazing gun battle or something, you know?
So farmers would be less likely to do it.
The reason that the state is so destructive of civil intercourse in society and so destructive of any sort of pacifistic or win-win negotiations is because there is this third party and that third party is the state who handles the money.
Right, so... And that's what makes it all possible.
I mean, please understand me.
I mean, farmers are not violent.
I mean, the fact that they can offload the violence to people they can't even see so that they don't... They just get a check in the mail for making some speeches.
I mean, that seems pretty civilized, right?
Farmers themselves are not bad or violent people, right?
They're just in a situation where, in return for making some speeches and writing some letters and lobbying the government, they get checks for, you know, 1.5 million dollars over the course of their career, and that seems like a pretty sweet deal and a pretty good thing to do.
So, you know, don't misunderstand me about farmers or anybody who does lobby.
I think that they are willingly blinding themselves to the moral evil of taking this kind of blood money from others at the gunpoint.
But given that everybody is raised to ignore that and to be blinded to that fact, there's some... I have some sympathy for it.
Although, of course, if you're a farmer and you've heard this podcast, you better stop taking those checks because now you know and you're fully responsible.
So, the problem is not particularly with the farmers.
The problem is not particularly with the lobbyists.
As one gentleman has said, the problem is not the abuse of power, but the power to abuse.
So, the real problem is with the state, and in particular the bureaucrats and the policemen.
So, for instance, in Toronto here, we've had about 70 gun deaths by shootings, largely within the black community, and to my understanding, largely within the Jamaican community, within the black community, and largely associated, I'm sure, with drug running and so on.
And so, of course, in the paper today is all of the community leaders of the black population And they're all saying, well, you know, the reason that we have all of this gun violence is because the youth are alienated and, you know, therefore they turn to violence because they don't have enough, you know, enough basketball courts or, you know, whatever is supplied by these sort of community centers, these state-subsidized community centers.
So, you know, it's fairly clear that these community leaders are very interested in getting government funding and more government funding.
And we know that because they say that the only solution to the problem of gun violence is, you know, more government funding.
Which, of course, will be handled by these community leaders and doled out and, you know, they become the sort of little Don Corleones of their Racial fiefdoms and, you know, that's a great thing for them.
I mean, they get all of this money and power with just having to make impassioned speeches, you know, which seems like a fairly good deal.
So, you know, there are the supposed victims, i.e.
the young men who are alienated, you know, and that's a wonderful term because nobody has any clue what it means, right?
I mean, there's no sort of objective test for alienation.
This person is 72% alienated.
So, you know, and basically it's a shakedown, right?
I mean, basically the sort of...
leaders of the community are saying that if you don't give us money the violence will increase.
And that generally is what the Mafia does, right?
I mean, something bad might happen to your shop.
And I'm certainly not saying that these community leaders are, you know, in close communication with these drug gangs or these, you know, violent youths, but certainly it is saying that, you know, bad things are going to happen unless you give us money.
That's, to me, that's pretty funny and just so transparent it's ridiculous.
But these are the people that are very important to recognize in terms of understanding why violence always increases in the state, in a state situation, in a violent situation where there's this negative sum game.
Because you don't only... it's not a question of the money going directly from the taxpayers to the farmers, but rather that the money goes from the taxpayers to the administrators Now the administrators, or the bureaucrats, use part of the money to pay off the group.
that uh... you know started lobbying to begin with and they use part of it to pay for their own salaries and they use part of it to pay for the police to enforce right the taxpayers uh... the robbery of the taxpayers now that is very interesting and this is how a terrible form of justice works in the world so for instance the farmers uh... they get all of this uh... lobbying and subsidies and isn't that going on
And, you know, for the first, you know, 10-15 years or so, everything's great.
I mean, all of the debt is then farmed off to the next generation, right?
Because it's not like they raise taxes immediately to pay for any government program, because they want to make sure that it gets entrenched before anybody realizes just how much it costs.
So they always borrow the money, or defer the money, or move the money from somewhere else to pay for a government program to make sure that they set up this bureaucratic class, and they get people dependent on that job, and they get people to make
to be completely embedded in the transfer of this money and that's how the taxpayer is enslaved pretty quickly although it's generally the future taxpayer who has to pay the debt but what happens is this slavery that is you know initially imposed upon the taxpayers very quickly I mean within a generation or so gets turned upon those who are the descendants of those who lobbied Well, what do I mean by that?
Well, for instance here...
There are all of these, you know, nonsense and communistic or fascistic state organizations like, you know, the Canadian Wheat Board, which, you know, you have to sell your wheat to this government board and then that government board will sell it for you and the government sets the price.
I mean, any farmer with a shred of human dignity is just appalled by this situation.
And, of course, farmers have been arrested for selling wheat on the black market, you know, otherwise known as the free market.
I love the terms that they use for these things, right?
Like, the white market is the one that the government robs from, the grey market is the one that the government can only partly rob from, and the black market is where the government doesn't rob from at all.
So it's, to me, the complete reversal of the moral shades that you would expect.
But what's happened now is, you know, the first generation of farmers who got The wheat board going probably made a pretty comfortable living.
But the second generation of farmers is completely hosed because they can no longer escape from the wheat board.
And the reason that they can't escape from the wheat board is that the true lobbying has now transferred from the farmers to the bureaucrats.
So the farmers themselves, you know, they've had protests, they try and wriggle out from under these things, but, you know, they're going up against the combined political weight of the people whose entire career it is to run the wheat board, or to run the, you know, the dairy board, or the egg board, or, you know, all of this ridiculous fascistic organizations that control food production, supply, distribution, and prices.
So, you know, that's the Faustian bargain that the first generation foists on the second generation.
First generation, eh, things are pretty good.
You know, lots of money, not a lot of debt.
The second generation...
gets hit with both the debt right so all of the money that was stolen from the public purse to pay off the farmers and to set up the bureaucracy that the debt for that hits the second generation but also the second generation is now completely enslaved by the bureaucrats that the first generation set up to benefit themselves and that bureaucracy is very very important when it comes to understanding why violence always grows because the bureaucracy itself does not directly
have a hand in the violence, right?
The bureaucracy believes, you know, they tell themselves all these nonsense fairytale stories about how they're only doing good and, you know, the farmers have to obey for the good of all and blah blah blah.
But, you know, the fact of the matter is that, you know, the taxpayer's money comes to them and they then redistribute it to the farmers.
And it's that coerced herding of money to a group of bureaucrats and then the handing out of that money, of course, of all political power I mean, if you look at how the Native Inuit and Native Indian or Native North American population is handled by the government, it's completely clear as to why this ghettoization and balkanization and
Enslavement of the native population continues, right?
Because the government hands all the money to the chiefs of these tribes, who then distribute it as they see fit.
I mean, this is the basis of all political power, right?
As Mao said, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
So, to gather to yourself the forced largesse of the general population And then redistribute it to those who please you is the basis of both political and military and criminal power.
And the degree to which, of course, you can offload the enforcement of this, in other words, the central robbery that makes all of this possible, is the degree to which you can claim success as, you know, a violent political criminal organization.
So it's very important to not just look at the people who are getting the subsidies and the people who are paying the subsidies.
I mean, of course, that's a zero-sum game.
But the zero-sum game that becomes much more important in the second generation is the zero-sum game between the entrenched bureaucracy and those who receive the subsidies and those Who are paying for the subsidies.
And if you miss that sort of hidden bureaucratic nest of vipers, you really won't have much luck.
supporting the reduction of subsidies.
If you oppose the farmers and you say to the farmers, well you people shouldn't be getting these subsidies and blah blah blah, well now the farmers are in the same position that the taxpayers were in the previous generation.
So in the previous generation the farmers are attacking the taxpayers by creating a A bureaucracy to feed the money from the taxpayers.
But in the second generation, the bureaucracy has become a self-sustaining and self-feeding entity unto itself, which is now preying on both the farmers and on the taxpayers.
So the farmers and the taxpayers are natural allies.
And the bureaucracy, of course, wants to keep itself as hidden as possible from people's minds so that, you know, we'll fight amongst ourselves rather than fight the real enemy, which is, you know, the state, the taxpayers, the bureaucracy, the military, the police, and all the other violence and entitlement that goes along with that.
Because the second generation doesn't benefit nearly as much as the first generation from this forced transfer of income because more and more of it gets sucked into this bureaucracy and less and less is left over for the supposed recipients, right?
I mean, this is clear across the entire political spectrum.
I mean, you have, like, no matter how much money gets spent on education, education always gets worse because, you know, the vast amount of the money is taken up by the bureaucrats.
And so the teachers may have initially lobbied Like, way back in time, and they're all dead and gone now, the teachers may have initially lobbied for state control of education.
And, you know, they got great benefits and long holidays and all of that.
But those benefits are all long gone.
I mean, you talk to the average teacher now, you know, who's competent at all, and they would say, you know, geez, this bureaucracy, this unionization, I mean, it's, it's, you know, they feel pretty trapped.
Because now both the taxpayers and the recipients of the subsidies are controlled by the bureaucracy.
And it's that particular aspect which is why state violence always spreads and grows, even if both the taxpayers and the supposed recipients of the benefits of state violence oppose it.
Because now you've created this bureaucracy Wherein there is no cause and effect that can change its minds, right?
So if the farmers say, we want all these subsidies because it benefits us, and then they find out that it doesn't benefit them over the long run, then they'll say, well, you know, we don't want these subsidies anymore because it no longer benefits us, right?
I mean, we've got access to new markets, we'd love to sell in China, you know, whatever.
India is now open for trade.
So we don't want this marketing board anymore.
We want to go back to being able to trade for ourselves.
Even if it's the simplest, we've had a really good year and now the price that the government is offering for us is not as good as the prices we could get on the free market.
Now they don't have that option anymore.
The cause and effect, the sort of economic calculation for the recipients of the subsidies is completely vanished.
And it doesn't matter if it's a good deal or a bad deal for them anymore.
Because the real economic calculation now is the paycheck and the power of the bureaucrats, which is always constant.
There is no economic calculation wherein a bureaucrat benefits from giving up his job.
There are economic calculations wherein farmers will benefit from getting rid of subsidies and getting rid of state control over production.
But there is absolutely no economic scenario wherein a bureaucrat will benefit from losing his career, his paycheck, his history, his political connections, his power, his influence, you know, all of his, the sum total of his economic life, will be entirely wiped out if this particular marketing board, say the wheat board or whatever, were to be terminated.
Now you could say that his children will benefit because wheat will be cheaper and so on but I mean that's really not an economic calculation that makes any sense because his children sure as heck aren't going to benefit if he's out of a job, has to spend a year or two retraining and start again in some new field.
So, there's simply no way.
And this is why, you know, state programs always last, because you've got this bureaucracy which is no longer open to any cause and effect, because there's always a net loss when the bureaucracy gets shut down, and they will fight to the death.
You know, there's no changing circumstance that will ever change their mind, whereas the recipients of such state largesse will always be open to new opportunities outside of state largesse, and will eventually find out that it's not working for them and want something different, but by then it's too late, because we're all enslaved by the bureaucrats and the police that they pay to maintain their paychecks and their privileges, which go from 100% to 0% overnight if that state control is eliminated. which go from 100% to 0% overnight if that state
So I hope this has been helpful, I do find that it's very interesting to look at why state violence always grows.
These are just sort of two particular ways of approaching it.
There's many, many more, but I think these are the two of the most compelling.
So if you're out there and you're mathematically inclined, I would suggest have a look at Thomas Schelling's Game Theory and see the degree to which it can be applied to this kind of transactional analysis.
I would certainly be fascinated to hear the results and more than happy to publicize them as best I can.
So thanks again.
Again, I hope you had a great Christmas and have a wonderful day.
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