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Jan. 8, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
23:40
47 Emails of the week!

Excellent comments from brilliant listeners!

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Time Text
Good afternoon everybody, it is the 8th of January 2006 at 3.11pm.
I've taken a break from the endless rounds of painting and I figure that I can do an excellent, if slightly hallucinogenic podcast while the paint fumes are still fresh in my brain.
So, for your pleasure, let us go on a journey.
Now, I got some emails that are interesting that I'd like to respond to and a number of sort of interesting corrections and questions.
And I'm going to... Now, if you do send me an email, I'm more than happy to use your name if you'd like to sort of hear your name on these wavelengths, but I won't use your name unless you let me know, so I'm going to keep this anonymously.
And, of course, I had some thoughts about the drug wars a couple of weeks ago, and a gentleman sent me an email, or a lady, you know, to really keep it anonymous, and he said the following.
I respect your faith in sobriety, but your repeated characterization of dope as harmful misses the potential of smart drugs.
I'm convinced that psychedelic impressions yield immediate and long-term intellectual gains, and that these personal gains translate into societal gains.
I mean, IEEE is selling my computational grid paper for 20 bucks a pop on their site, so the mental hazard is not necessarily what you suggest.
So then he gives me some suggestions, you know, marijuana analog stimulates brain cell growth, and so on.
And I guess I just wanted to sort of clarify my position on this, which is that this person who wrote me the email has not mischaracterized what I said, so I'm not attempting to correct his perceptions, but rather to clarify my communication, which is where I think the fault is.
So, you know, I talked about, you know, people who waste their lives stoned on drugs, that, you know, that's a bad thing to do and so on.
And, you know, I think pretty much that is, right?
I mean, it's still bad to spend your life stoned on religion or socialism or collectivism or, you know, any kind of addiction.
But I certainly have no problem and recognize that, you know, exalted mental states can result from drug use.
You know, as you may or may not know, I'm sort of a big Queen fan and Freddie Mercury, you know, they sort of trundled along doing fairly, you know, average songs, good songs, but not great songs, until Freddie Mercury started taking cocaine and immediately out comes Bohemian Rhapsody, which is, you know, I mean, a gloriously innovative song.
So, and there's lots of other examples of that, where people who begin taking drugs do enter exalted or alternate stages of consciousness, which really help their creativity move it to a new level.
And, you know, they usually have sort of five to ten years of peak creativity before they revert back to their sort of original state.
That's sort of a cycle of an artist, right?
You get maybe 10 or maybe 15 years of peak creativity and after that you sort of recede back to your original state, no matter what drugs you take or whatever.
And, you know, some of the bands that I like, Pink Floyd and so on, they're very big on drugs and, you know, this has not affected their creativity except perhaps to enhance it.
So I certainly have, you know, A good deal of understanding, from an artistic standpoint, how this can really help open up people's minds and make them a lot more creative.
Now, that having been said, I've never tried any drugs and, you know, there's sort of two reasons for that.
One is that... well, I guess three reasons.
The first is that, you know, I think I've got A fairly energetic brain, I guess you could say, and, you know, I didn't want to try messing up any neurons since I'm fairly satisfied with how they're firing at the moment, and sort of that's one reason.
The second is that, you know, I sort of did an analysis in my own head of the sort of cost-benefits of drugs, and I thought, well, I'd only want to take the risk of addiction if the drugs were really good.
I mean, if drugs are just kind of like, okay, then it's not really worth, you know, the illegality and the potential for addiction and so on, then it's not really worth it.
But if drugs are just fantastic, like if they just shoot you skyward, like from a cannon, you know, as they say in the movie Trainspotting, it's like take your best orgasm and multiply it by a thousand, well that seems pretty good, right?
So that would be an incentive to risk the illegality, but of course then you have a much higher risk of addiction because it is so good.
So I just couldn't really do a cost-benefit analysis in my own head that would justify the pursuit of that kind of drug use.
That having been said, I'm certainly more than keen.
When I'm, you know, very old, I may try heroin because it is supposed to be great, right?
But I'm going to wait until it's not going to interfere with my development, you know, that much.
So, you know, that's sort of the second reason.
The third reason is that there's a strong history of mental illness in my family.
And so, you know, I didn't particularly feel comfortable with entering into alternate states of consciousness.
You know, it's like, it's nice to go down the rabbit hole as long as you can come back up.
And I wasn't sure that in my family there's a strong gene for looping back and coming back out.
I mean, my mother was institutionalized, my father was institutionalized, went through electroshock therapy.
My brother is sort of crazy and sadistic, and so because there is this strong history that goes back a number of generations of mental instability in my family, well, A, I was quite interested in philosophy and rationality, you know, and B, I just thought that, you know, given the sort of genetic history that I've been Oh, that I have received, that it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense doing anything risky in that sense.
Now, another gentleman wrote to me, and he said, as I usually do every day, I made my way to lourockwell.com this morning.
That is where I first saw an article of yours, which led me to your podcasts.
And once again, I have found an article that extols the virtues of Intelligent Design and Knox Evolution.
I believe in evolution as firmly as I believe in free markets and individual liberty.
But it makes me wonder about lewrockwell.com.
If the editorial opinion of the site believes so strongly in something that I think is wrong, how do I balance that against the other opinions that they have that I do agree with?
In other words, if they're so wrong about something, can it trust in their other findings?
I think this, and the intelligent design argument, would make for an interesting podcast.
Well, I agree with you about the intelligent design argument, but that's a topic that is a little bit more complex than what I want to get into today, and a little bit longer.
But, you know, this question of how do you relate to people who have beliefs that overlap with your own to some degree, but have sort of fundamentally opposing beliefs in other areas, such as they believe in intelligent design and so on.
I mean, that's an interesting question, and I would sort of say that there's two responses to that.
The first is that it doesn't matter.
I mean, there's nobody who's going to believe what you believe down to the last degree.
Everybody has constantly formulating and growing and changing opinions, and sometimes decaying opinions.
And so there's absolutely nobody in the world who's going to believe everything that you believe at the same time.
I mean, I'm not sure I believe exactly what I believe from one day to the next, because I'm sort of growing and changing with my thinking.
So, given that there is no perfect concordance of ideas, even within one individual from one day to the next, Then it would make sense to me that you cannot place your sort of intellectual agreement with people, but them having to agree with you about everything.
That's kind of dictatorial and unrealistic.
However, and of course it doesn't matter to some degree in technical areas if people disagree with you or not.
You know, there could be a Christian who works for me who is an excellent programmer, so I'm going to manage him as a programmer and not criticize him as a thinker.
And, you know, if I go to the doctor, I don't care if he's a socialist, I just care that he can diagnose my ailment correctly and give me proper treatment.
So, you know, in sort of professional and technical matters, it doesn't matter if people don't believe you.
However, it really does matter in fundamental areas that you both have the same beliefs.
The two people who are trying to work together towards a common goal both have the same beliefs.
I mean, I, for instance, publish on lewrockwell.com.
I had no idea that they have a strong Catholic bent or a strong Christian bent and I've not seen a lot of evidence of that in the site itself or in any of the articles that I've read there but I have had a number of Christians well, I should say I used to have a number of Christians who wrote to me appreciating the fact that I argued for the free market and then perhaps made their way over to my podcast and found therein the echo chamber of the Church of Satan which wasn't particularly to their liking and then
You know, I had some people attempt to convert me, and I, you know, pointed out to them if they could help me to understand the contradictions in the Bible, you know, which neatly kept them at bay.
So, I do publish on lewrockwell.com, and through that I hope to get people who have similar ideas about, you know, the argument for morality, the argument for the free market, and the other things that I publish for published on lewrockwell.com.
That I hope then to lead them to my podcasts and to help them to understand that, you know, what we call rationality, empiricism, the truth is a whole package deal.
You can't just sort of pick and choose.
You can't say, you know, I'm going to be a free market guy because I believe in, and a scientific guy when it comes to dealing with material reality, but then with ideas and philosophy I'm going to go back to faith.
I mean you can do that of course, obviously free will is the ability to make mistakes by definition.
But you can't do that and claim to be rational, objective, or objective.
And of course, if you do have mysticism at the heart of your belief structure, you won't have any effect convincing people about the free market.
That is an absolutely sort of axiomatic fact in my view, because If you have irrationality at the heart of your belief system, you can't make an objective case for morality, and so you're stuck with the argument from effect, and you're stuck with the argument from economic efficiency, which, as I've sort of droned on and on about, doesn't move anybody.
So, you know, I would say in technical matters, if there's something you agree with that comes out of the mouth of someone you disagree with in another area, you know, so what?
Take what you can, right?
You know, take the wheat and throw away the chaff and, you know, add to your own knowledge thereby, but be aware of what you're doing.
But if you're going to join together with someone for a larger cause, you know, you're going to sort of, I don't know, found a political party or start some website together, then you'd better have the same rationality and methodology for determining truth from falsehood all the way through, because otherwise you're just going to end up with endless disagreements.
You're not going to achieve anything anyway because your thinking and your communications will be fundamentally and maybe even unconsciously too full of contradictions to be able to sway anyone.
In order to get someone to change their minds and to join you on the lonely but vital planet of rationality, you have to really offer them the full package.
At least that's my view.
And the degree to which you allow contradictions into your thinking is a degree to which it's really not worth having the ideas at all right so if you're both a Christian and a free marketer then you are saying well you know objective value needs to be determined in the free market through rational appeal to value but in you know epistemological metaphysical and ethical matters You know, you can just sort of pray for guidance and believe in crazy books.
Then, to me, you know, then don't bother being the rational.
Don't bother with the rational part, because it's just going to make you uncomfortable with other people.
But, you know, it's not going to sort of save your irrational part, but your irrational part is going to make sure that the rational part never gets anywhere.
So that's sort of my particular approach to that.
But I would also say that the intelligent design argument is an excellent topic for another podcast, but I'm not going to try and jam every single thing into this podcast.
Now, my email inbox has gone interestingly quiet over the last couple of days, and I think it has something to do with the sort of quite personal nature of...
I don't mean personal in terms of me, but I mean personal in terms of you.
The personal nature of the podcast that I've been putting out lately about religion and about one's relationship to those who practice Christianity and the possibility of, you know, moral problems or crimes that they may be committing through their practice of Christianity.
So in order not to, you know, I'm not chickening out of the topic, trust me we'll come back to it, but in order to give my listeners a break from something that may be making them feel uncomfortable, we're going to tootle back to a relatively innocuous but I think intellectually very interesting topics.
The first is I just wanted to mention a few more things about unions and then I wanted to talk a little bit about the Great Depression.
So unions, I sort of did two podcasts on unions that were in my car where I had, you know, perilously little access to facts.
I try not to look up anything on the internet while I'm actually driving because it's a little tough to guide my car just by listening to horns and screams.
So here's just a couple of facts about unions that I think is sort of interesting.
Two economists, I can't remember their names, have sort of looked up and tried to calculate the net economic effect of unionization over the past fifty years in the American economy and they found that
They believe, and I think they're pretty complex and I think good economic calculations to prove this, they believe that unionization, in the form in which it has taken shape in the American economy, which is, you know, the state protects it and the state subsidizes it and it subsidizes the state, and you have this sort of horrible intertwined relationship between unions which fund the Democratic Party, which in turn give more legal powers to unions and so on, that this sort of unholy relationship
has cost the American economy over the past fifty years fifty trillion trillion dollars which is quite staggering of course on on so many levels and they also did some research into unionized sectors of the economy and they found this is sort of interesting and it ties into something that talked about about two weeks ago those who have
access to unions and the part of the union protection racket that goes from the state do have fifteen percent higher wages than those who are not in unions, right?
So that's... I don't think that's counting the union dues that they pay, but their wages are fifteen percent higher.
However, because of this sort of massive negative effect that unions have on the economy, the economy is thirty or forty percent smaller than it should be.
So that's sort of what I was pointing out a couple weeks ago that the people who start state programs for their own benefit do get a short-term benefit but then they, or at least the next generation, end up enslaved to this bureaucracy and doing a lot worse.
So here, for instance, you know those who got fifteen percent higher wages before the effects of unionization made their way across the whole economy did pretty well, right?
But you know what everybody else inherits later on is, you know, a net sort of 15 to 25 percent loss in wages, not even counting the taxes and so on.
So, you know, that's, I think, a very interesting approach to look at unions, that they will give people specific benefits, which they can see, right?
Like, oh, my friend over there who's not in a union is making 15 percent less, but you don't realize, of course, that you could be making 15 to 25 percent more if you weren't unionized.
You don't see that.
Like, there's no number on your paycheck that then is reduced because unions exist.
So that's sort of another example of having a look at the indirect or hidden losers, which is sort of the in economic transactions that are based on force, which is one of the points of having an economic education.
And, you know, one sort of example To sort of show how this works, I mean, again, we always want to work with empiricism, right?
So sort of the early to mid-19th century, only 3% of the workers within the American economy were unionized, but wages increased 50% in 40 or 50 years.
That's pretty good, right?
That's an example of what happens when unionization is small.
And it's private, right?
It's not subsidized or protected or pushed by the state.
Then wages just go very high, even with a small union movement that's private.
So I think that's important.
And the last thing that I'll say is that unionization in the free market, as I talked about in the second part of my On Unions, In the private sector, the free market will always get rid of unions because unions will provide specific benefits but with a lot of overhead.
And so capitalists will realize that those benefits are going to have to be given and they can either do it voluntarily or they can do it with all the difficulty and overhead and paperwork of having a union.
So they're just going to give those benefits away and then prevent unionization.
Right?
So if unions give you 10% higher wages but there's an additional 5% that the capitalist has to pay because the overhead of having a union in the shop and all the regulations they have to learn about and all of the paperwork there and the grievance process and so on, then the capitalists will just give 10% up front and prevent unionization.
Now, that's true in the private sector.
And so, as you can see in the American economy, and this is true for most of the Western economies, what unions have done is given up on the free market and given up on the private sector, and they've burrowed into the sort of sickly hill of government labor, right?
So, So now they've sort of given up on the free market where they're pretty useless.
uh... and where they face competition from overseas and what they've done is they've moved into the public sector right which is why you have such powerful public sector unions where i think the largest union in the world is the american teachers union and of course what unions do that okay there's one last thing that i'll mention here unions one of the things that when they're taken when competition is taken out of the market when it comes to unions what they want to do is They want to get as many workers as possible.
Each worker is a source of income for them because they get a couple hundred bucks a year in union dues out of their workers.
So they want a factory or a bureaucratic agency or a state department.
They want to have as many workers as possible.
So, their interests are completely opposed to anybody who's interested in efficiency.
If you're interested in efficiency, you want to have as few people producing your goods as possible, which is bad for the union.
Fewer workers means fewer union Jews coming out of those workers' pockets.
Whereas unions want the complete opposite.
They want people to be as inefficient as possible so that they can make the case for as many people having to be hired as possible, which means that they get more money.
So this is sort of one of these artificial situations where, especially in the public sector, the goals of the union are completely opposite from the goals of anybody who's decent in the organization and also those of the taxpayers as a whole.
And so, you know, if your goal is to hire as many people as possible, you're going to have a negative incentive towards things like efficiency and intelligence.
And you're definitely, streamlining is something you're going to be completely opposed to.
The introduction of machinery, the introduction of computerization, the introduction of outsourcing.
You are going to sort of fight to the death any economic efficiency that can get put into the workplace, if you're a union, because that's going to reduce the number of people who are needed.
And thus reduce your union dues.
So that's a very interesting, like in this sort of world of negative economics, in the world of, you know, up is down, black is white, the unions are very strong forces in, you know, destroying efficiency and undermining economic productivity, you know, which is all pretty abstract.
I mean, the fact that they use violence to do it through the power of the state is evil, but it's interesting because, I mean, there's nothing wrong with economic inefficiency.
I mean, I'm actually You know, performing an act of economic inefficiency right now because I'm doing a podcast that I'm not going to get paid for, you know, rather than going out and delivering papers or something or shoveling people's sidewalk.
So, you know, there's nothing wrong with economic inefficiency.
But, you know, we should recognize it as such that the use of compulsion and the forced union Jews and the closed shop mentality and the closed shop legality does produce a situation wherein unions want, you know, stupid, inefficient people around.
And that's why unions, especially in the educational sector, just hate the idea of means tests, of tests for teachers.
I mean, let's just sort of take one example.
Let's just say that I'm some genius teacher who everybody wants to come and listen to.
So I'm teaching, I don't know, like Philosophy 101 or something, and everybody wants my course, and there's some doofus down the hall who's just bad and confused and doesn't know what he's talking about.
Nobody wants his course.
So what's going to happen?
Well, you know, the only limit to the people who are going to want to come to my course is the size of the auditorium that they can put me in, right?
I mean, if it's going to be the Sky Dome, which I don't think is until about 18 months from now, but if it's going to be the Sky Dome with 55,000 people, then that's what it's going to be!
And so what's happening then is because I'm very good at communicating and I'm a very good teacher and so on, lots of people are going to want to take my course, and so they're not going to take other people's courses.
What that means is that they need fewer teachers, right?
Because I'm so good at what I do, I can just reach more people.
Now, of course, I'll need TAs and all that to help me mock stuff or whatever, but You know, when you get efficiency, especially in the realm of communication, you need fewer people.
And so you don't want that if you're a union, right?
Because, I mean, not only am I not going to pay union dues, but if there are only, you know, ten excellent teachers in a university or a high school, then that's no good for the union.
What they want is, like, a hundred mediocre teachers that nobody can choose between and, you know, who just everybody has to sort of get slotted into their classes.
You know, efficiency in communication is reaching more people with fewer people, and that's something that unions never want to do, which is why they want, you know, the worst and stupidest teachers around pretty much at all times.
So that's sort of, I'm just going to touch on that part.
I didn't want to do a whole new podcast on it, but that's an interesting aspect to unions, and you can see this all over the place.
They don't want any sort of bright or innovative or creative People who know anything about efficiency, because that's going to lower the number of Union Jews' livestock that they can put on the factory floor.
So what I'm going to do, I'm just at 23 minutes and 16, 17, 18.
Okay, I don't have to keep doing that.
Seconds.
And so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to stop this one, just call this like emails and bits of Union stuff.
And then I'll start another one, which is what I want to talk about this afternoon, which is The Great Depression in the U.S.
during the 1920s to the 1930s because, you know, that's gripping.
There's lots of gripping pick-up lines in this one, you know, to help make checks.
Thanks, it's Steph.
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