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Jan. 6, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:25
46 Voting
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Time Text
It's so easy, but I can't do it.
So risky, but I've got a chance at it.
So funny, there's nothing to laugh about.
My money, that's all you ever want to talk about.
You say you know exactly how I feel.
But I'm no fool.
It's in the lap of the gods.
Man, you just gotta love that old Queen stuff, don't you?
I'm a huge Queen fan, and I hope that you don't mind me butchering Freddie Mercury's beautiful songs and beautiful voice, but man, oh man, sometimes I'm just in the mood to howl.
So I promise, I make a promise to you, not to never refrain from bursting into song, but to ensure that I'm going to stay absolutely and rigidly on topic.
There will be no deviations today.
We are going to stay on voting, and nothing but voting.
So, to the task at hand.
Voting.
What is voting?
I know that libertarians, some of us, have a sort of mixed feeling about voting, insofar as we know that, you know, all the candidates are nonsense, except for the libertarian ones, of course.
But, you know, we also feel perhaps that if we don't vote, then If we don't vote then it could be entirely possible that people could criticize us and say, well if you don't vote you have no right to complain and blah blah blah.
Now voting is, in my mind, one of the absolute strokes of genius of the predatory classes.
It is absolutely brilliant and I can't say enough about this idea of unlimited capitalistic democracy and how much money It has been responsible for transferring from the productive citizens to the parasitical political overlords.
So you just have to stand back and admire it as a shining edifice of evil.
It is just beautiful.
We can admire a Black Panther, even though it is very dangerous, because it has a lightness and a leanness and a grace to it that, you know, perhaps not when it's mowing down on us we're going to appreciate, but, you know, seeing it at the webcam on Pete's Pond, you can actually admire it.
And that's how I feel about democracy.
It is a absolutely beautiful predator.
And I'll sort of tell you why I think that is the case, but let's look sort of back at history just a little bit.
And sort of say to ourselves, what was it like to be a parasite or a ruler in the past?
Well, you know, the Roman senators, you know, they had a certain amount of... I mean, they had food and they had shelter and they didn't have to work very hard.
But, you know, they had infant mortality that, you know, was ridiculously high.
Their women died in childbirth.
If they had surgery, which would, you know, kill them, they didn't even have anesthetic.
They had no...
They had to get their teeth yanked.
I mean, they had no dental floss.
They had no deodorant.
They had no mouthwash.
They had no cars.
So I think you get the idea.
You know, if you could exchange being in the bottom fifth percentile of poor people in America with being in the top fifth percentile At any time prior to, say, 1950 or 1940, I know what I would take.
I would absolutely take being a poor American over anybody else in history.
I mean, there's this old story of Louis XVI, I think it was, in France, who opened the palace.
When he was staying at his little palace in Paris, he opened up the windows to drink in the view and literally fainted from the stench, right?
This is when people just poured their raw human sewage out of the window into the gutter.
And, of course, the diseases were just rampant.
I mean, you know, anybody, you know, who's read anything about history knows just how wretched things were in the past.
And that's what you got to rule, right?
You were like a lord of shite, as the Scottish would say.
And that's sort of important to understand, that rulers were suboptimal, right?
The parasites were suboptimal in the past.
I mean, just amoral, economic, biological view of the matter, that the rulers had really not figured out the best way to steal.
Because they sort of over-stole, right?
So they took away so much property and freedom that the free market never developed, that, you know, the riches that they could pillage based on the free market just weren't available.
So, you know, bad rulers, right?
I mean, a bad parasitical organism.
If you simply look at how well rulers do under a system of capitalistic democracy, I mean, it's infinitely better than the rulers did in the past, right?
So, you know, that's one of the things that's important to understand when you look at voting.
That voting is an absolutely brilliant way to make sure that as a ruler you get a fantastically better lifestyle than any ruler in the past had, but without all of that messy, voluntary, actually deal with people as customers and exchange value for value stuff.
So, just as all living organisms strive to better their response to circumstances, human beings do have the ability, of course, to generate our own circumstances and the rulers.
Oh, genius!
So, you know, the general pattern, in my view, throughout history is that In the, you know, you've got sort of the prehistory where it's just tribal and nothing happens.
And then you have the rise of the ancient civilizations.
I mean, the Egyptian civilization never got very far because there was just no free market and everybody was just on subsistence starvation.
Slavery and war and, you know, wanton evil of the worst kinds.
Mysticism and so on.
And then you, and sort of all the death worship that you would expect from a mystical cult, right?
Where you have all of the great edifices, the pyramids and so on, are for the dead kings, right?
So all the worship of death that you would expect, that is sort of emotionally resonant to an irrational society, right?
The rationality results in death, and so if you have an irrational society, you're going to have death cults and death worship everywhere.
This sounds like a tangent.
I know you're thinking it's a tangent, but it's not.
Just be patient, and I will.
Give it a shot to tell you how this is staying on track.
And so then you've got the Greek and the Roman civilizations where you have the first faint stirrings of democracy and of course it was unlimited democracy insofar as they could all cast their little pottery shards and put Socrates to death and there were no limits on the amount of predations that the state in the name of the majority or as a result of the votes of the majority could perform.
They could do anything.
So, of course, you have the same kind of, you know, Dionysian death cult worship that goes on wherever you have strong irrational streaks within society.
You get this kind of stuff.
And, you know, you have the endless pillaging and rape of the surrounding communities and, you know, death to Carthage, right?
Carthage was the trading town and, you know, Rome was at war with Carthage and destroyed it because You know, trading towns generally tend to not fit into the mind, the mental map of those who are sort of part of these irrational, collectivist, death cult religious worshippers.
You'll notice that in, you know, sort of three major areas of fantasy or fiction, there are no traders, right?
There's no traders in Star Trek, other than the, I guess, the later Ferengi, who are just sort of Jewish caricatures.
And there are no traders in Narnia, right?
It's just warriors.
And there are no traders in Lord of the Rings.
I think the only traders is the guy who's got the patch of mushrooms.
I think that's about it, right?
There's no mention of currency really, of trade, of property rights and so on, which is why it's so, you know, such a sickening death worship.
Where, you know, in Lord of the Rings it's funny, right?
I mean, it's like you beat Sauron and you install a king.
In his place.
I mean, like, of all the stupid things to think about, right?
But of course, that was a premonition, right?
That they defeated Hitler, right?
Hitler, obviously, is Soran.
I mean, he was writing this during the Great War.
So, Hitler is Soran, they defeat him, and then they set up socialism in its place.
So, I mean, it was very much a premonition of what occurred after the Second World War.
And so when you look at voting in the very, very ancient times, sort of prehistory, a vote was simply based on brute force, right?
Like if the king, if enough young males wanted to beat up and depose the old king or the old tribal leader, then that's what they would do.
So of course the tribal leaders had to enlist the priests to tell them that touching the king was evil and so on, make up all these imaginary ghostly god-like bodyguards that stand around the king at all times and strike you down with curses should you touch him and so on.
This goes all the way to the Macbeth myth, right, where as Macbeth you can go and slaughter 10,000 peasants with your bare hands and nobody says boo, but if you stab a king, the king who ordered you to do it, you know, all of reality and the universe goes to rack and ruin.
So, that was sort of the original democracy, was just hit him with a flat rock kind of stuff, and if we outnumber him, then we win.
And then, you know, democracy became a way of removing the physical combat from the deposition of the transfer of authority.
So obviously the people who are old, right, the old in society, and again we're talking, you know, amoral prehistory or early history, The people who are old in society don't want tests of strength to determine who gets to be the king, or who gets to be the ruler, or the leader.
Because, you know, they're old.
You know, their arms are, yay, unto cooked spaghetti, and they have, you know, muscles akin to porridge, and so on.
And so, because they're old, they don't want to give up power.
So, what they want to do is, you know, create all this imaginary stuff like the service of The tribe, or the group, or the state, or the city, or whatever.
And then they want to ensure that the transfer of power, which of course is the transfer of resources over the long run, that the transfer of power is determined through elocution and emotional persuasion and cunning and, you know, all of the stuff that You know, older people are sort of better at than young people, right?
I mean, I don't know about you, but when I was younger, I never had much luck at... I still don't have much luck at manipulating anybody.
But, you know, I generally understand that sort of youthful strength and naivety and sort of over brimming with animal vitality is sort of one stage of life.
Whereas another stage of life is as you become weaker, then you have to learn to manipulate more.
And again, that's just part of biological survival.
And this is especially true for men, right?
Because men can continue having children as they get older, right?
So there's a strong biological bias for the old to retain their power, which is why it tends to be a patriarchy and not a matriarchy.
There's no biological benefit to an older woman gaining the power because she can't have any more children.
But for an older man to gain and retain political power is a great advantage because he then can have more children because his sperm is still vital into his old age.
So, you know, there's a strong bias on the part of the old people to ensure that The transfer of power or the retention of power is based on, you know, eloquence and emotional or linguistic manipulation or, you know, the authority of the parent or emotional power or whatever, rather than, you know, sort of brute physical strength, you know?
I mean, it's something kind of that struck me when I was at the gym the other day pushing some pretty heavy weights around and What is it?
Someone famously called it moving metal in a dark room.
Although it's not that dark, but... And I was looking up and Paul Martin, who is the Prime Minister of Canada, you know, he's the guy who I guess you could say is sort of responsible for, you know, taking half of my income.
And he's this old guy, he's like 68 or whatever, and he's, you know, he looks pretty feeble.
And, you know, I'm moving all this metal around at the gym and I'm sort of looking up at the TV and seeing this sort of old feeble waffle burger up there and I was thinking, you take half my money, I could take you down without even, like, one hand tied behind my back as a young vital male, I could just take you down.
And, you know, it's not your physical strength that is taking half my money, it's your ability to manipulate emotionally and appeal to the irrational and, you know, your sophistry and your eloquence and so on.
And so, you know, that really is the foundation of democracy, right?
I mean, in the very beginning, very few people live long enough to get old, but as soon as they do, then the old people want to retain power.
And so what they want is to have the definition of power to be based on emotional persuasion and a non-physical strength test like, you know, shards of pottery, votes in a ballot, and so on.
And so what they do with that, of course, is they take, through their eloquence, they claim the right to take money from the general population, and then they use that money to pay the police and the military and the law courts, the prison guards and so on, to enforce those and then they use that money to pay the police and the I mean, the first thing you have to do is persuade the population that, you know, morally they need to give you this money because you're the legitimate ruler and so on.
And so to do that, you enlist the teachers and you enlist the priests and, you know, sort of hammer everybody with loyalty to the leader or to the state early on, and then they sort of give up their money, and then that's sort of the sugar, in a sense, right?
We'll give you sort of moral approval if you give us your money.
And the second, you know, the stick, that's the carrot and the stick is if you don't, by the way, you know, we're going to come to your house and put a gun to your neck and drag you off to prison.
So, that is sort of the foundation of democracy, is sort of the biological imperative of older people, older men wishing to retain power, not having the physical strength to do it in the face of youthful vitality, and thus transferring the test of power or the right to retain power to a sphere that they're much better at, which is emotional manipulation and, you know, education and erudition, learning, sophistry, eloquence, and so on.
And, you know, they tried that in ancient times, right?
Ancient Greeks and Romans.
And, you know, it didn't work so well, right?
Because they never got capitalism going for a variety of reasons, right?
Some of which are around the fact that, you know, if you have a slave-based society, you're not all too keen on developing labor-saving devices, right?
Because slaves are cheap.
And also, if you do develop labor-saving devices, well, what are you going to do with all the slaves, right?
I mean, the last thing you want is an out-of-work slave population that's young and vital running around, right?
Because they'll just overthrow you.
So, I mean, there's a lot of reasons why capitalism never developed in the ancient world, but, you know, I think fairly central to that is the existence of slavery, right?
Wherever you have slavery, labor-saving devices aren't brought into being, as you can sort of see if you look at the agricultural history of the South.
In the U.S., from the 17th to the 19th century, they just didn't develop much labor-saving equipment because, you know, What's the point, right?
I mean, they already have labor-saving equipment.
It's called slaves, you know, and they're not about to improve on that in any significant way.
So, and of course, once you've already invested in your slaves, you don't want to create labor-saving equipment because that depresses the value of your slaves, right?
If you come up with something that does the work of five slaves, well, you just paid, you know, five slaves too much for a slave.
So, you know, there's a negative incentive for that.
So, I mean, this is how sort of corruption breeds corruption.
So you want to make sure that you have this sort of voting-based transfer of power.
And the problem is, of course, that there's no limit to the pillaging of the general population based on emotional manipulation and the threat of violence through the police.
There's no limit to that, right?
And so what generally happens is it sort of grows and grows and grows and then at some point, you know, as I've mentioned before with Russia and as I think is coming up with the US, at some point the The oncoming fiscal collapse becomes imminent enough that people begin to just pillage everything it's worth, right?
And it generally is when the state has between six and eight years left of money, then... And this becomes sort of known in the inner circle, right?
The people who actually know what the real books in the government are, rather than the books that they just tell us.
They know that they're sort of six to eight to maybe ten years left, so they just start grabbing everything they can because they know that they can't promise everything and they've, you know, four-year term.
They've got to be able to get the next guy in who's going to make promises that he's not going to be able to keep.
So, you know, basically what happens is the door starts closing to the treasure room, right?
I mean, if you're in a sort of Indiana Jones film and you've got all the time in the world to get the treasure out, you're not going to hurry, right?
But as soon as you trick a trap, trip a track, Trip a trap!
Then you're going to have to, you know, the door's going to start coming down and you're immediately going to start hurrying, like getting every bit of treasure out that you can because the door's going to close.
So as soon as it becomes fairly well known in the inner circles that the state is going to collapse, then you want to start pillaging the public purse as much as possible because the sort of the gate is closing.
So what happens is you say, oh we've only got 10 years left and then everybody starts grabbing and that becomes like seven or five or three or then it just collapses, right?
My particular opinion, and this is a tangent, officially sanctioned tangent, my particular opinion is that this is what the war in Iraq is all about.
That they figured out that they can't keep going for much longer and there's nothing better than a war to transfer money from the public purse to the private corporations, right, or private citizens.
So that's sort of the goal of the Iraqi war because what is actually happening is, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars are changing hands from the public sector to the private sector through the mechanism of war and that's really the point.
So then, you know, you get this general collapse.
Now, then you've got the Dark Ages and so on and, you know, there's sort of a big blank and boring aspect of history where, you know, there's a couple of minor inventions like in the 11th century they figure out that they can build a harness that doesn't actually choke the horse the more weight you put on it.
Like they figure out, let's put it over the shoulders rather than tying a noose around the neck of the horse so it can only pull like 50 pounds without choking to death.
They put This harness around the shoulders, and so they can plough more, they can go deeper, they can turn the soil much better.
That's sort of the beginning, and they sort of figure out crop rotation.
That's the beginning of the excess crops production that is required in order to be able to have cities.
And then they rediscover Roman law, and they start down that whole road of having a more civilized structure in civilization again.
But, you know, through this you have the succession, right?
I mean, it is absolutely essential if you are sort of a corrupt evil aristocrat or just an aristocrat.
You want to make sure that, you know, that it's a bloodline, right?
That it's your bloodline that is going to That is going to be who becomes the king next, right?
It's your kid.
You want it to be your kid, right?
That's a biological imperative, right?
That you want as many resources accumulating to your own gene pool as possible so that you can survive the famines and survive the plagues and so on.
You don't have to go into town and rub shoulders with people who are hacking cholera all over your skin and so on, right?
And given that periodic starvation was just rampant throughout Europe, throughout most of the Dark Ages and early Middle Ages, You really want to make sure that your bloodline is the one that stays in power.
And, of course, you enlist the priest for that divine right of kings and so on.
The king is dead.
Long live the king.
All that kind of stuff.
But, you know, for a variety of reasons, generally, because what happens is the priests are constantly causing problems for the kings, right?
Because the priests, because they have an irrational belief, they're constantly fragmenting and shifting and coalescing and breaking up and reforming all of these beliefs, right?
It just depends on who happens to be born with a particularly passionate capacity for advocacy, you know, who just believes something different, right?
So Luther, who was an excellent writer, And an extraordinarily corrupt but able logician and apparently a very passionate speaker.
He is the one who, you know, fragments Christendom into, you know, the Protestants and then the Protestants further fragment into sort of the Calvinists and the Anabaptists and the Lutherans and the, you know, the Baptists and so on.
And, you know, you start to get these endless wars, right?
Because as soon as A central belief that's irrational fragments where it has the capacity to control the state.
The first thing that it's going to do is it's going to start to try and grab control of the state and then, you know, sort of kill all the other adherents of the other religions, right?
So you get, after a couple hundred years of religious wars, you know, the kings kind of lose their credibility and of course their treasuries have been exhausted and so The nobles can begin petitioning for more rights and, you know, through that you begin to get the sort of expansion of suffrage or the expansion of political influence out from the kings, right?
So the kings rely on the priests to justify their claims to power, but then the priests all turn on each other and the kings drain their treasuries trying to manage or guide these religious wars.
And, you know, because they then need more money and they have no soldiers left to go and get it, they have to give concessions to the nobles in order to continue as kings, and then the nobles have to give concessions further down, so you begin to get the spread of suffrage and so on, and some sort of control over the political process gets more diffuse.
And so then you start to get back to voting again, right?
Because as soon as you have a lot of people who have some sort of capacity to influence the political process, you either have a civil war or you turn to voting, right?
And of course, generally, it's the older people who have the power, so they don't want a civil war because they're going to lose, right?
Because they're older.
And they don't have enough money to pay their mercenaries, so they go, hey, I know what, let's do voting!
Because, you know, that's a lot better for me.
And so you begin to get the spread of suffrage again.
And then you start to get the rise of capitalism.
You begin to get more suffrage.
I think it was 1834 or 1835 that British men who owned a certain amount of property or had a certain amount of income per year were allowed to vote, right?
And the arguments were very interesting back then, and sort of instructive as to how to understand what democracy means, unlimited democracy.
That, you know, they said, well, we simply cannot give the vote to everyone.
You know, we can't give the vote to every male, for instance, because, you know, the poor vastly outnumber the rich.
And now, this is the sort of direct quotes from the time.
The poor vastly outnumber the rich.
So, if you give everybody the vote, The poor will simply vote to take away the property of the rich and everybody will become poor.
So you'll destroy your economy.
And so they said that we're only going to let people vote who have a certain income because they're going to vote to retain property rights.
And why?
Because they actually have some property.
So as soon as you get people who have no property to speak of, right, who are renting or, you know, who are sort of living paycheck to paycheck, if you give them the vote, Well, they'll just vote to take away everybody else's property and then everybody ends up poor.
So this is sort of what you can understand about their concerns about democracy.
I mean, what we think of the problems of democracy these days are all very well known to people in the past.
So, for instance, the founding fathers in America They had no interest in democracy whatsoever.
They really, really disliked democracy.
Because it's so amoral, right?
Because it's just so easy to bribe people.
Because it's just so easy to peddle influence.
And because there's no moral reason why the majority has any more sense than the individual.
In fact, it could be argued quite the reverse, right?
I read somewhere some explanation of democracy wherein someone said, you know, so you, I, and another guy are hiking to the top of a mountain, but you get really tired and you want to camp the night before the final push.
And we say, no, no, we're going to go on.
And you say, well, no, I don't really think so.
And we say, ah, let's put it to a vote, right?
And then we vote, and then we say, no, no, we're going to push on.
And you say, no, look, I'm really tired.
I'm going to stay here.
And we're like, well, if you do, we're going to shoot you.
Because we've put it to a vote.
I mean, that's sort of a simplistic but telling example of what it means to be in a democracy, right?
I mean, if the majority voted for what was right, then there would be some weak argument for its moral efficacy, right?
Because lots of people believe in similar moral rules, so if everybody voted for what was morally right, then that would be one thing.
But the fact of the matter is that, you know, people who vote don't vote for what is morally right.
There's a story that a friend of mine told me, which I think is very interesting, that he knows somebody who was running for office.
I'm sort of going to strip out any identifiable details.
Somebody who was running for office in the U.S.
and was doing pretty well.
And then what happened was he sort of owned a building, an office building.
Yeah, an office building.
And so some guy comes up and parks right in front of the office building where you're not allowed to park.
And this guy, you know, he's got a bit of a short temper, so he sort of comes storming out and tells the guy... He gestures from his window that the guy should move, and the guy just smiles coldly at him and gives him the finger, right?
Which makes this guy pulse.
The guy's pulse shoots sky-high.
And then what he does is he goes out to the parking lot, and he's sort of yelling at this guy and telling him to move his damn car.
And this guy is basically telling him to F off and get lost and all that kind of stuff.
And this guy is incredibly rude.
And so the guy who owns the office building, the guy gets out of the car and starts pushing him.
So he pushes back, and he starts to get involved basically in what used to be quaintly termed fisticuffs.
So he gets involved in a physical fight.
Kind of unusual, but hey, you know, I'm not particularly short-tempered, but I understand that those who are are susceptible to this sort of thing.
So then what happens is a cop shows up very quickly, breaks up the fight, brings them both down to the station.
And then this office manager guy finds out that the guy who pushed him and who he ended up fighting with is pressing charges for assault.
So he's pretty shocked and he's pretty, you know, whatever.
He's going to fight it.
He's a fighter.
That's, I guess, is clear from the story.
And then he gets a call that night from, you know, the shadowy gentleman who says that, look, he says, this guy is going to press charges.
You are going to end up with a criminal record.
There's no way in hell you're going to win this election because, you know, fist fighting and a criminal record is not going to get you elected.
And we absolutely know for sure that we're going to win this case because of X, Y, and Z. However, if you withdraw from the running race, You will, uh, everything's gonna go away.
You know, this guy's gonna drop the charges, nothing bad's gonna happen, and everyone's gonna go back to the way, everything's gonna go back to the way it was before, except for the difference being that you're not gonna run anymore.
Now that's a really amazing story.
And of course the guy did drop out of the race.
What can he do?
He can't get a criminal record.
He wasn't going to win anyway.
So he sort of fell into this trap wherein some underworld figure probably who has strong connections with the other guy who's running.
I won't reveal the ethnicity, but if you've ever watched The Sopranos.
So, you know, this guy, they obviously, you know, the guy who told me the story said, you know, it was amazing that this just sort of happened, you know, that they guessed right.
And I said, well, there's no reason to believe that this was the first thing that they tried, right?
They might have tried a lot of different things to find the one thing that made him click.
But without a doubt, they sort of talked to people or found out that he was kind of hot-tempered and that was his weakness, right?
Maybe his weakness would have been, you know, a pretty girl, in which case they would have tried that.
Or his weakness was drugs and they would have tried that, but they would have tried something.
And it's amazingly efficient, right?
Just, again, from an amoral standpoint to look at it, you have to admire the efficiency.
That all that someone had to do was to risk, you know, a sort of bloody lip and a push in a tussle.
And, you know, in return they have shifted their entire enforcement over to the state, right?
Which is pretty efficient now because they've got the state, you know, they're pressing charges and this and that.
They don't have to worry about threatening this guy at all, right?
They don't have to stay outside the law at all.
All they did was provoke him into a fight and now they can use the government The power of the state to do everything else that they need done.
So they don't have to have a lot of investment in, you know, threatening this guy and, you know, stealing his dog and everything like that.
They've turned the entire process of threatening over to the state.
Which is, you know, a lot more common than you might suspect, I think.
But that's sort of an example of, you know, what is at stake in sort of a modern democratic environment.
And, you know, the reason that, you know, the people who vote are always, you know, bitter, and, you know, you talk to anybody up here, it's like, yeah, they're all a bunch of crooks, and, you know, the amount of cynicism that goes on, and everybody realizes that the government is not there to serve them, and, you know, that they're sort of livestock, and, you know, it doesn't matter who you vote for, the government's always going to get in, and nothing's going to change, and, you know, they're going to break all their promises, and it's like, well, of course, I mean, I mean, to be bitter about that is like sort of being angry at a lion.
I mean, I can understand you want to fight or flight with the lion, but that's the lion's nature, right?
So if you set up a system wherein there is a general pillaging of the public purse for private profit, of course you're going to end up with a system where, you know, everybody lies and so on.
And sort of as I mentioned in the podcast where I think I had initially started talking about voting, You know, the only people that you're going to see on the ballot are people who've already been bought and paid for by special interest groups.
And why is that?
Well, because it takes a lot of money to run for office, right?
Like, there's a reason why in 96 the American labor movement gave between 350 million dollars and 500 million dollars worth of labor and services to the Democratic Party.
Right?
It's not because they have any sort of high ideals.
It's just because if they buy the Democrats, then the Democrats are going to give them all of the goodies that are going to give them all the power to collect more money.
Far more money, right?
Unions collect, what, $17 billion a year?
So for half a billion dollar investment or less, you get to maintain a $17 billion a year income.
Well, that's not too bad, right?
That's exactly what you would expect from a sort of amoral economic advantage standpoint.
So, you know, because it takes so much money to run for office...
You need a lot of money, and the only way you're going to get money from people is in return for political favors, right?
So, you know, Bombardier is going to give you some money so that you'll give them some tariff protection, and you're going to give them some subsidies, and, you know, Joe Blow is going to give you money because he wants to open a big real estate development, and he needs you to smooth through the paperwork, and, you know, there's like an infinite variety of reasons why people are going to give you money, but it's all to do with
You know, either wanting to use the power of the state to increase their income, or wanting to use the influence of the state to avoid the power of the state, right, to get you past regulatory hurdles, which, you know, are generally put up just to raise money, right?
I mean, you don't put up hurdles to sort of save people because the free market does that, like save them from danger.
You put up hurdles because that way people will pay you to bypass them.
And so that's sort of another reason why people will give you money, so that you will help smooth out their passage through various regulatory issues.
So, you know, the only way that you get the money to run is by selling your influence to people who are giving you that money, to sort of major public and private concerns.
So everybody that you see on the ballot, their interests, their economic and career interests, are already aligned with people whose interests are directly opposite to yours.
So if you're going to give a $100 million subsidy to company A, and that's why the guy even got the money to run in the first place, well, then everybody you vote for Their interests are already diametrically opposed to yours.
And there's nobody on that ballot whose interests are not diametrically opposed to yours.
So, you know, there's no reason to become educated about politics in that standpoint, like to figure out one guy's stance from another, because it's all sophistry, right?
I mean, there's nobody that you're ever going to be able to vote for who's for you, right?
They're always against you, unless you're the guy who's actually... unless you're the head of Bombardier or something.
They're already, you know, they've already got their hands in your pocket and it's just, you know, well, which guy do I want to steal from me?
That's your choice.
That's it.
You know, but to me the sheer genius of this, as I mentioned at the beginning, you know, it's important to admire this, I think, and to respect it from a sort of dangerous adversary standpoint, is that, you know, most people sort of think that they're free and they're in enough property rights that That we do produce, right?
That we can trade and we do produce.
Whereas before, the governments put, you know, they controlled things too much and they never got any wealth generated.
Sort of since the Industrial Revolution, most Western governments have figured out that you're going to do a lot better as a ruler if you give people some freedoms at least.
And so that they'll produce and sort of mentally participate in the system by voting, quote voting, that you're going to get a lot more resources.
Right?
You know, there's that idea that if you lower taxes, you get more money, right?
I think it's the Laffer Curve.
But, you know, to me it's equally true that if you give, like if you're a ruler, there's sort of a bell curve of resources, right?
Like, say, if you give people no freedoms, then you get very, very little resources.
The more freedoms you give people, the more resources you get.
But then the problem is that when you give people too much freedom, I mean, from the ruler's standpoint, What happens is that, you know, you're getting down to tax rates of 10% or 5% or 1%.
Well then, you know, your pillage goes down, right?
So there's an optimal amount of freedom from a ruler's standpoint, which is, you know, free enough that people will produce for you stuff to steal, yet not so free that you don't end up with any stuff to steal.
And that is, you know, a very important thing to understand about democracy.
And, of course, you know, to recognize that it's never a stable situation.
Because, you know, the number of promises goes up, the debt always goes up, right?
Because the people you really want to steal from are the next generation, right?
You don't actually want to steal as much from the people who are with you, as I've mentioned before.
So you absolutely want to make sure that you steal from the next generation, which ensures that You know, everything's going to come crashing down at some point.
So I think that's sort of important to recognize about democracy.
That the way it is set up is that there's never going to be anybody there who's going to do anything other than pillage from you.
That there's no honorable person on the ballot and everybody who you can conceivably vote for is, you know, somebody who's absolutely already bought and sold and committed to stealing from you.
So to call it any sort of ingredient to freedom I think is a complete misnomer.
So, hey, quick drive for me!
I hope you're doing well and I will talk to you soon.
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