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Jan. 10, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:51
53 War Part 2
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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It is Thursday the 12th of this January, 2006.
You know, you can imagine how my checks look at the moment if I'm having trouble with the month, let alone the year.
So, I hope you're doing well.
Now this is my second stab at War Part 2.
The first stab that I took at it was more of a sort of wild swing than a stab.
I lost my temper and I began sort of biting my microphone in two as I began talking about the evils and the predations of war.
I mean, as those who've listened to my podcast for a little while before know that, you know, my own personal family has suffered.
Grievously through war, and I guess that sort of hit me pretty hard when I was doing my podcast.
So I'm going to try it again, and I'm going to try and stay a little less volatile so that hopefully the message can make it through the passion.
I mean, as you know, I'm a big fan of passion in communication, but not necessarily where the point where the passion overwashes the communication.
So here it is.
Take two.
So, I wanted to correct something that I had talked about in the first, in War Part One, wherein I had said that, you know, when has the Americans ever taken on an enemy who can fight back?
And, of course, I'm sure that, you know, that you, on listening to that, you probably thought, well, you know, the Japanese could fight back, the Germans could fight back, and so on.
What I meant by that, and I apologize for my poor communication on that matter, what I meant by that was that American politicians, politicians in general, never take anyone who can strike them back personally.
Almost never, let's say.
And so America is not so keen on taking on nuclear armed powers, right?
So they don't take on China, they don't take on India, they don't take on
uh... pakistan they don't take on uh... russia and the soviet days of the soviet empire but hot if you are a poor little iraq that has no uh... weapons of mass destruction then you are you know you find that little bullseye slides right over your forehead and that is because no uh... and no political leader of a nuclear power has ever declared war on another nuclear power of course war uh... nuclear power was a great problem
for warmongers because they themselves could be targeted, right?
They themselves could lose family members, lose friends.
And so it wasn't just, you know, the poorer classes that they heard after war and everybody they know gets rich off the profit.
It was something that they were going to have some real repercussions to.
And that's something that, of course, I remember as a teenager during the days of You know, brain-squeezing nuclear terror in the 70s and 80s.
I do remember being sort of baffled by the fact that these countries like Russia and China, Russia in particular, were our enemies and yet all we could do was give them Wheat, and foreign aid, and technology, and, you know, it just seemed pretty strange to me, like, why would you be doing that?
And of course, you know, they were held hostage by the instability within the Russian economic system to the point where they felt, well, you know, if there's another starvation, maybe there's somebody that will get control of the nukes, or...
You know, maybe they just wanted to keep their enemies strong, to keep the domestic citizens in line, who knows?
But I did find it sort of strange, as a kid, that we were so friendly towards those who were our enemies, but were powerful, and, you know, not so much towards those who were not.
So, of course, America, if you look at the list of countries that America has attacked over the past 50 years, and this is, you know, by no means a comprehensive list, right?
But if you look at Korea and Vietnam, And Nicaragua, which is more of a funded situation.
If you look at Haiti or Grenada or, you know, all of the sort of shenanigans they've gotten into in some of the South American countries.
And if you look at the funding of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and so on.
These are all meddling in countries that can never conceivably strike back at America.
You know, one of the things that, as I began to become more aware of the war, it became clear to me that there was no possibility... I think this is before it even came out, but there was no possibility that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and we know that because America only attacks countries that can't attack back on the American soil, right?
So it's one thing to attack the Japanese on, you know, some distant Pacific Island.
It's very different than having, you know, Washington turned into a mushroom cloud because it's just not personal.
It's not the same.
So So this is why, you know, when you see this sort of evil troll Madeleine Albright talk about how the murder of 500,000 Iraqi children, in her view, was worth it.
You know, it means nothing.
It means nothing to her.
It's just, as Stalin said, a single death is a tragedy.
A million deaths is a statistic.
And it's true.
What does it mean?
It doesn't mean anything.
I see disturbing pictures on the television, and I see disturbing pictures on documentaries, and it's very sad.
But these aren't people that I know.
I sort of go back to my day.
I have my lunch.
And there is just no substitute for direct experience when it comes to the horrors of war.
And, you know, I say this, you know, with all due knowledge, that I myself have never experienced war.
I've experienced violence, but it's domestic violence at the hands of my mother and brother.
But I have never experienced war.
I have heard horror stories from both sides of my family about war.
And it has all of the emotional energy of unprocessed experience, right?
Where people can't talk about it because it's too raw.
And because it's too raw, they can't talk about it, so they skirt around the issue.
They do resent questions, but that's a fascination.
You know, you get the same sort of four stories over and over again, but with exactly the same amount of emotional intensity each time, which means that the emotions aren't being processed.
Because war, modern war in particular, simply destroys the nervous system and the psychological systems of human beings.
It's far too much stress and stimulation.
The fight or flight just goes off the charts and there's nothing That usually can be recovered from the experience other than, you know, blunt trauma to the nervous system.
So, yeah, I just wanted to sort of point out that I know that countries attack other countries that have military power, but they just don't attack those that can directly strike the homeland.
So, to continue with the topic of war, we were talking last time about Who are the real targets of war?
And I find that to be a very interesting question, because like most things, when you begin to dig into it, the propaganda is the complete opposite of the truth.
So, the interesting thing is the question, is the question, why attack another country?
I mean, it's a very interesting question.
This knowledge that the free market was the opposite of militarism was well-known in the 19th century.
People directly attributed the Hundred Years' Peace in Western Europe from the fall of Napoleon in 1815 to The rise of the First World War in 1914, a lot of people directly ascribe this to the free market.
And they said, I can't remember who said it, but some famous gentleman said at one point, where goods no longer cross borders, armies are sure to follow.
By that, of course, it's obvious, right?
Where there's no trade.
You can have a war, but where there is trade, you can't have a war.
And that's for a number of reasons.
Because part of your economy is tied to it, and also there's much less incentive for a war, because your taxation on the flow of goods is supplying the insatiable maw of the violent state.
And so you really don't need the predations on the mystery targets of war, which we'll get to shortly, Because you're able to tax goods moving back and forth.
Also, you know, the languages tend to be more similar or at least there's more people who know each other's language when there is a trade because there's a business necessity.
You have people traveling back and forth all the time.
There's knowledge of each other's culture and there are strong Relationships among usually quite powerful people in the capitalist world that are going to resist the war that might be sort of fermented by some people because they are going to, you know, directly lost.
There's sort of an economic stake in both the state and in the private sector to maintain good relationships with another country rather than, you know, just go around invading it.
So then the real question is, well, what do you hope to gain?
What do you hope to gain if you're a political ruler by invading another country?
I mean, it seems like such an obvious question, but I really don't hear it asked that much.
And, you know, of course the leaders are always going to say the same thing, right?
They're always going to say, well, it's the protection of the citizens.
And, you know, I've got that, uh, more messages than I'd care to count in my inbox that make exactly that same case.
Well, the state, the society is all well and good, but we have to protect ourselves.
We need a state because there are other bad states.
Simply know that this is all based on propaganda because there's no evidence for it.
All I'm trying to get people to do is to say, well, forget about what you're told.
Forget about what people say.
I mean, that used to be pretty common human knowledge, right?
Actions speak louder than words.
Judge people by what they do, not what they say.
And, you know, our blindness to hypocrisy has made us fall prey, I think, given us a weakness for those who are eloquent, to those who are passionate.
Not reminded us that eloquence and passion are a dime a dozen.
I mean, turn on the Old Time Preacher channel any Sunday morning.
You'll have people chewing up the scenery with their passion.
And it doesn't mean anything.
It's just completely irrelevant how passionate someone is about something.
I mean, if passion were the criteria for truth, we'd all be living in a schizophrenic universe, because if you ever want to see passion, You know look at a schizophrenic or a paranoid and they're very passionate.
One of my mother's dementias includes paranoia and oh my heavens is she passionate about what is her theories of things.
So it doesn't matter.
It has no interest to me no relevance to me how passionate people are about it or how much they think that it is the case that something is the case.
And so when you think about why invade another country All you ever get back is, to protect our citizens.
And there's no reason whatsoever to believe that is true.
Absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe that it is true that other countries are attacked to protect the citizens of the country that's attacking them.
And So, it really can't be that it's the other people who are the targets, that it is the citizens of that other country who are the targets.
Because, really, what's to be gotten from them?
What is the state going to get from invading that it could not get through, say, liberalization?
Well, If you look at the history of violence, of state violence, and of war in particular, wars more often occur when the treasury is depleted and taxes cannot be raised any further.
I mean, you're talking about the Roman Empire, the Greek Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, The French Empire, if you count the British Empire as well.
When you are a government and you are facing resistance from your own citizens towards an increase in taxation.
I mean a significant block to the increase in taxation.
Like you're afraid of economic collapse and civil war and losing control of the state apparatus and so on.
And yet you can't liberalize, you can't liberalize, because those who put you in power own you body and soul.
You know, these tend to be, you know, the special interest groups, the, the, um, the mercantilists, the, the monopolists, the unions, the, the state agencies, the, you know, whoever owns your sorry political hide is not someone that you can turn into a They hold too much power over you, right?
So, as I've mentioned in the story about unions, right?
Why does the government grow?
The government grows partly because unions need more people and unions are very big in the public sector, right?
So the unions are always pressuring for more people and making people more inefficient so that they can hire more people so they can increase their union dues.
And so, if you are a political leader and you can't liberalize because you already have such a convolutedly mixed economy that liberalizing will cause you to be thrown out of office lickety-split, right?
I mean, if there's a reason why politicians never take on farmers and politicians never take on the poor and politicians never take on the old or they never take on, you know, the big corporation.
I mean, they never take these people on because these people will just shaft them into oblivion.
I mean, if the argument for morality is true, and I believe that it is, which is that morality runs the world, and control of morality is control of life, of society, then, you know, they can't reveal themselves as hypocrites, right?
The politicians can't reveal themselves as hypocrites, so they can't turn on the special interests that could put them in power, because they'll lose power.
The special interests will just mess them up, and they will just lose power.
Or, at the very best, even if the specialists don't, then they're saying, they have to say, well, I was put into power because of, you know, X, Y, and Z Corporation, and, you know, 15 unions, and whatever, the Association of Retired People, or whatever.
They put me in power, but, you know, I've changed my mind.
I think that we need to liberalize this stuff anyway.
Then, obviously, you're just a hypocrite.
Nobody's going to believe anything you say.
Because you didn't say to people when you were campaigning, oh yeah, well, you know, I mean, I'm being paid to do this by all these special interests who I'm going to give favors to afterwards.
No, you went on these thunderous trumpets of noble-sounding phrases and all that.
So, you know, when you get to a situation wherein your mixed economy is bleeding the treasury dry, your economy is faltering, your If public debt is reaching unprecedented heights, then how can you raise taxes?
How can you further expand?
Well, you have to go to war.
You have to go to war or there's an economic collapse, right?
Now, the Soviet Union didn't even have enough money to pay its troops, so obviously it couldn't go to war.
But if there's still enough left, enough money left, then there's a sweet spot where going to war is the most economically advantageous thing that you can do.
Because as the mixed economy grows, more and more people are siphoning off resources from the state.
I mean, the state is like this vat of liquid gold, and there's like 10,000 hoses running out of it, draining it dry.
And you have a problem.
People don't want to pay more taxes.
So you can't just jack up taxes.
I mean, and that's also because your economy will collapse.
And the U.S.
is particularly in this position because the greenback is being supplanted by the euro and other currencies, the Chinese currency and so on, as the currency of choice, because everybody's recognizing that the U.S.
deficits are becoming lunatic.
And so once the demand goes down for U.S.
dollars, then trade will collapse.
And, you know, there's lots of convoluted reasons we can get into another time why It's very important that high demand for the dollar continues.
But, you know, if investors lose confidence in the American government's ability to pay back its treasury bonds or its debt, or at least the interest on its debt, then, you know, all hell will break loose.
So when you face that kind of problem, suddenly it becomes worthwhile to invade another country.
And why does it become worthwhile to invade another country?
Because you get to stomp all over the property and civil rights of your own population.
The one thing that always happens, that always happens, when a country goes to war, is it enslaves its own population.
Either incrementally, as in the Patriot Act, or exponentially, in the case of the draft, or in the case of, say, Nazi Germany, or the Roman Empire.
And so, that's a very important thing to understand in war.
There is no value to America, economic value to America, as a whole, from invading Iraq.
So, for instance, what, you know, oh, they're going over there for the oil.
Well, that's just economic illiteracy.
They're not going over.
If they were going over for the oil, I mean, it would still be immoral, but you could at least respect the pragmatism.
They're not going over there for the oil.
I mean, what conceivable way could they get the oil into America without destroying their economy?
So let's say there's, you know, 50 billion barrels of oil lying around in Iraq that they can just ship over to the U.S.
tomorrow.
Well, that's just going to cause all the domestic oil producers to collapse.
You know, as Churchill said about the Treaty of Versailles, it's a disaster because you simply cannot transfer goods without destroying your own producers.
So let's say we get Germany to send us over, you know, 50 billion pounds of gold bullion.
Well, all that happens is our currency inflates.
Because, you know, we're on the gold standard and more gold means our currency is worth less, right?
Or, if you take, let's just take shoes, right?
So we take two million pairs of shoes from Germany and we dump them in England, all that happens is the British shoemakers go out of business.
There's no way that the government can transfer goods or resources from another country to its own country without destroying itself.
I mean, if you look at Spain, Spain was, you know, the economic powerhouse in the 16th century.
I mean, that's where they got all the money to go and invade the New World with.
I mean, some of the most skilled artisans and capitalists, a very strong Jewish lending population and banking population, highly educated classes, and some form of the free market that really worked.
And what happened?
Well, the government takes all that, goes over and pillages the New World, and brings back inflation.
Because they bought all of this gold back from the New World, when gold was the currency of Spain and of Western Europe.
And they bring back all this gold, and it destroys the Spanish economy for 200 years!
And that's just bringing back gold, let alone goods!
So what are they going to do?
If they go over there for oil, what are they going to do with it?
Are they going to bring it all back?
Is the American government going to undercut all of the oil interests that gave it lots of money to go there?
No, of course not!
It could be that they went over there to Make sure that Saddam Hussein didn't sell any more oil, and that would drive up prices.
But, I mean, even that's not nearly as productive as just, you know, being efficient in the free market.
Blocking another competitor is, you know, paying lots, millions and millions of dollars to the government in, you know, whatever favors.
Let's just say the oil companies did do it.
You know, buying the government to have it go and squash Saddam Hussein, it's really not economic.
You just invest the money and, you know, improve or whatever, right?
Of course, the oil companies are a little stymied.
There hasn't been a new oil refinery built in America in the last 30 years, and they can't drill in the Arctic, and they can't drill anywhere in America because, you know, the eco-Nazis are all over the place.
But, no, they didn't.
They absolutely did not go there for the oil.
I mean, they can't bring the oil back and sell it at cheaper than the oil companies are selling it at, because all they'll do is destroy American jobs, right?
Of course, the idea that the government can produce and transport anything for cheaper than the free market is ridiculous.
I mean, there's just no way that a bunch of sort of bullet-headed soldiers are going to go out there and be, you know, hyper-efficient oil executives and, you know, the government simply can't reproduce the free market.
So they didn't go over there for the oil.
They can't bring the oil back.
If they bring the oil back at a lower price, they'll harm American jobs.
If they bring the oil back at the same price, what's the point?
And if they bring the oil back at a higher price, nobody's going to buy it.
So, I mean, I wish it were the oil, if it were anything, but there's just no way that you can transfer that back to America without harming the economy.
Now, of course, you could say, well, maybe the government can sell some of the oil on the black market and, you know, this and that.
Oh, come on, people, the government can't run the free market or operate within the free market to save its natural born hide.
There's just no chance of that happening.
So then the question sort of still remains, well, why did America go to war in Iraq?
I mean, it's a larger question, right?
And if you look at the natural consequences of what happened, well, you know, they dusted off the almost no layer of dust on the Patriot Act and put that in place.
You know, the deficit has just gone skyrocketing.
They have a unified country that is so frightened and compliant and sort of insanely loyal to the macabre world of the military that you have a population that is not rising up with an illegal war.
I mean, That was true under Clinton as well, right?
Like, the American military before Clinton got in had been dispatched, I think, six or eight times overseas, and Clinton dispatched the military overseas 44 times in his presidency, right?
And then everybody gets upset because he happens to be treating one of his personal assistants like his own little geisha.
Like, that's the big problem, right?
Like, people are dying in the world because Bill Clinton's getting a hummer.
And I just find that stuff ridiculous.
But I mean, you have a population that is so awed and frightened by the power of the state that they're just flocking to this, you know, sick god of government because they're just frightened and overwhelmed, right?
The shock and awe is not against the Iraqis.
I mean, it is against the U.S.
population.
I mean, the real targets of war are not the citizens of a foreign country.
Because the government has no power, really, over the citizens of a foreign country.
I mean, I guess it can tax them or whatever, but generally after you bomb a foreign country back into the Stone Age, it's not really worth taxing it, because it's got no economy.
Right?
I mean, they didn't go in there to start taxing the Iraqis because it's a net loss to the government, right?
I mean, war is insanely not profitable to the economy as a whole.
I mean, I know there's this fallacy out there that, oh, war's good for the economy, You don't hear that so much anymore because it's just so patently a load of crap that, you know, no sane sort of self-respecting human being is going to sort of say that kind of stuff unless they just say it and they get corrected once, right?
You know, the destruction of property does stimulate demand, but so does the possession of property, right?
I mean, you know, supplies are finite and desires are infinite of all things, right?
That's why you have a science called economy.
are called economics.
And, you know, human beings are always wanting more, and everything is finite, so optimization is always there.
And nobody ever has a big enough house or a perfect enough... I don't travel instantaneously to work.
I still have to work.
I mean, there's so many optimizations.
I'd like to live forever.
You know, I want to jump to the moon.
I mean, there's just no limit to the cap.
There's no cap on human desires.
And so there's no problem with stimulating demand in an economy.
Demand will always be there, right?
Until I have an mp3 player that I can psychically control that has absolutely perfect sound and requires no maintenance or uploading, then I'm still going to want more features in an mp3 player.
And when that comes along, there'll be some other thing, right?
So there's just no limit to human desire.
So you don't need to destroy things to stimulate desire.
Desire is always there.
You know, what war does is it stimulates one section of the economy by stealing from everybody else's, right?
And of course, you know, we all know this in our personal life, you know.
We don't say to ourselves, you know, I think I need a raise.
I'm gonna go crash my car.
And people don't understand the degree to which economics is the same all the way up the chain, right?
As Adam Smith said, right?
I mean, what is prudence in the affairs of every household can scarcely be folly in the affairs of a great nation, right?
So, I mean, what makes sense for you is exactly the same as what makes sense.
Now, if you go crash your car, you don't get any more money, but the car dealer is happy.
But, of course, the money you spend on replacing your car is simply taken out of the economy.
From where you would have spent it elsewhere, right?
That's the broken window fallacy.
So if you break a window, it's like, yeah, great, I get to buy a new window and the window maker is happy, but everybody else that you would have bought from has lost, right?
And so you basically, you've sort of spent money to restore something to an equilibrium, whereas you could have been spending money to, you know, expand the market, make things more efficient, buying stuff that you really wanted.
So there's a huge net loss to the economy.
Now, there is a net gain to the economy for people like arms manufacturers and so on.
So the people who are directly supplying the needs of the warriors are the ones who are making lots of money.
And of course the government is making lots of money because it gets to borrow and print money and, you know, run up the debt and raise taxes and it gets to do all that great stuff for the government.
So, you know, the question is, if it is so economically destructive, War?
Then why is it ever done?
Well, the reason that it's done is because it allows you to steal more money from your own population.
That's why.
It's the only reason.
It's the only way that makes it economically beneficial.
Right?
If every time I crash a $10,000 car, I force you and you have to give me $20,000, I'm going to spend all day crashing cars.
Right?
But without the equation of you giving me the $20,000, it's not worth it.
It's a stupid thing to do.
And that's really what I want to get across when I'm talking about war and I'm talking about taxation.
The only thing that makes war profitable for even the sliver of the economy that benefits from it is because of the predation on the taxpayers.
Without taxation you simply cannot have a war.
And I don't just mean that like you can't pay for it.
It's not worth having a war.
It's not worth me crashing cars into a wall unless you pay me $20,000 for each car.
And if you're only going to pay me $20,000 for each car I crash into a wall, then I'm going to crash cars.
And if the only way I can get the $20,000 out of you is to crash cars into a wall, then I'm going to crash cars into a wall.
And that's why I'm so passionate about taxation and the evils of taxation.
Taxation is the cancer, is the root of the cancer of war.
Taxation so distorts the transfer of money and power that it becomes something as insane as war becomes a good idea From a pragmatic, amoral economic standpoint, it becomes a good idea for pretty significant and powerful sections of the population.
The real target in war is the taxpayer.
It's not the people overseas.
Because the taxpayer is the only thing that makes it profitable for anyone.
Even if it's revenue neutral, nobody's going to care about it.
I mean, If I crash my car, and I immediately get a new car, and my insurance never goes up, and I'm not hurt, and there's no negative effects or whatever, right?
I still don't want to do it.
And that's why it's so important to talk honestly and openly with people about taxation.
You are the target of George Bush.
Not Saddam Hussein.
Not Al-Qaeda.
Not Bin Laden.
There are means to an end.
The end is your wallet.
The end is your children's future.
The end is your freedom.
Actually, forget it.
They don't care about your freedom either.
They just want your money.
They just want your obedience.
The power is nice, but in the end it all comes down to money, right?
I mean, they want your money.
And so, when I talk about taxation, I mean, yeah, I'm talking about the welfare state, yeah, I'm talking about ending the war on drugs, but you know the thing that is the most important, the thing that is the most horrible, and if there's anything to be learned from the 20th century, it is the fact that this plague called the state, and this state which can only exist on taxation, killed 170 million human souls from one end of the century to another, and plunged generations of humankind into the most abysmal misery that you can imagine.
And the fact is that the majority of people all around the world live this kind of wretched, disgusting, ape-like animal existence, cowering in terror, fearful of every day, of every step, because of the state.
And it is spreading to the West, and it is spreading to the West as a result of taxation.
Why did Hitler declare war on everybody?
Because the Weimar Republic didn't work, right?
Germany was the first country in the history of mankind to institute a welfare state, and unemployment insurance, and old-age pensions, all of that stuff under Bismarck in the 1870s.
And the First World War, body blows.
And then the hyperinflation, the Treaty of Versailles, all of which destroyed the German economy.
And that's why Hitler declared war.
He had just enough money to invade, and through that he got to pillage everybody else of their final savings.
This is all impossible without taxation.
There is no benefit whatsoever in the destruction of property unless the cost of replacing it is borne by other people and a profit is also made thereby.
The guns are not aimed OUT of the country.
The guns are aimed IN the country.
The guns are aimed at you, and the guns are even more aimed at your children, because they're the ones who are going to grow up economically crippled and with no opportunities, because there's been such a horrendous amount of debt and economic destruction, because of the transfer of money from the destruction of property and lives to those who can profit from it through the control of the state.
The war is not against Iraq.
The war is only tertiary in Iraq.
The war is against you and I, my friends.
We are the targets.
Our lives, our children's lives, our economic power, our freedom, all of the fruits of our labor, that is the target.
Iraq is the excuse.
Iraq is the means to the end.
We, our lives, our wealth, our independence, our freedom, that is the end.
That is what the government is aiming to get at.
So when we talk about war, let's be clear what we're talking about.
There is no state in the history of the planet that has ever waged war in the supposed protection of its citizens, where those citizens have become more free or even retained their freedom, the same level of freedom after the wars they had before.
So it's absolutely impossible That the goal of war is the protection of citizens' freedom.
Because if it was, they'd stay free!
But it's not.
The war is a ratchet process wherein a little less freedom, a little less freedom, a little less freedom every time.
There was less freedom after the First World War than there was before the First World War.
There was less freedom after the Second World War.
Less freedom after the Korean War.
Less freedom after the Vietnam War.
Less freedom.
Less freedom.
And now under Al-Qaeda, it's one step further.
What is the one constant?
The enemy never gets defeated, and the citizens always lose their freedom.
It's the endless war for endless peace, as somebody wrote.
Oh, the next war is going to absolutely... We're going to win it, and there's going to be peace forever.
World War I. Make the world safe for democracy.
Wilson's 14 points.
Never enacted.
Never even close.
The Second World War, the war to end war, the war to free everybody, the war for liberation, the war... and this is the war for the Middle East, the war to bring freedom to the... It's never gonna happen.
never in a million million years will killing people bring freedom.
So it's not interesting to me or accurate for anybody to tell me that They believe that the government is trying to protect them.
All they have to do, and I open this challenge, I really want to be right on this.
This is a very important issue.
I don't want to just shoot my mouth off.
I want to be correct.
If you can tell me a time where a war was declared and the citizens retained the same level of freedom after the war as before, I will absolutely retract everything I'm saying and start from scratch.
I have not been able to find a single historical example.
War is always provoked.
Wars are always lied about.
I mean, in American history, it's constant.
The Civil War was not about slavery, but it was said that it was.
The Spanish-American War had nothing to do with the Chesapeake blowing up in that bay.
I mean, they said it was, oh, the Chesapeake, because the Spanish blew it up, is not the case at all.
It had a boiler malfunction.
You know, the First World War, nothing to do with threatening American interests.
The Second World War, Japan was surrounded, and Japan had a blockade, and Japan knew that it could not survive as an island with limited resources unless it broke through that blockade, and it was the American Navy that was causing it, and FDR was throwing American shipping into the danger lanes of German submarines.
Trying everything he could to get into the war.
The German war against Poland.
The Gestapo actually went into a radio station on the German border and shot people and dressed them up in Polish uniforms to pretend that we were defending ourselves against Poland.
You know, it's constant, all the time.
And even when states are supposed to protect their citizens, they don't.
Did France protect itself against the Wehrmacht?
Did America protect itself against Japan?
Did America protect itself against Al-Qaeda, if that's even what happened?
Of course not.
You have the most sophisticated air force in the history of the planet, and they can't respond within an hour or two of planes getting hijacked.
It's ridiculous.
The radar was down.
Nobody phoned anybody.
I mean, it's not there to protect you.
It's not there to protect you.
It's not there to save you.
It's not there to keep you safe.
How can the government say... Okay, this is the part that set me off last time, so I'll try and keep my temper here.
How can the government say to you, we need to protect you?
And the way that we're going to protect you is we're going to hold a gun to your neck and steal money from you through taxation.
And if that's not enough, then we are going to hold a gun to your neck and we're going to march you off to some foreign country.
We're going to stick a gun in your hand.
We're going to turn you loose on people you've never met before, who've never posed any direct threat to you.
And we're going to say to you, you shoot them or they shoot you.
How can a government claim that they want to protect people when they expose them to the draft?
When hundreds of thousands of American men get drafted in the Second World War and in Vietnam, how can they say that they want to protect you when they're out there funding foreign governments and playing their little black ops games with all of the foreign dictatorships and terrorists in the world?
How can they say that they want to protect you?
America is already protected!
It has friendly neighbors to the north and south.
It has huge oceans on either side.
It's already protected.
How can the government say that they want to protect you when they pass laws making drug use illegal?
How can the government say that they want to protect you when they have such a convoluted tax code that they can nail you for something at any time and throw you in jail?
How can the government claim to protect you when if you don't decide to fund all of its horrible overseas murders and adventures that you get thrown in jail?
I mean, please, please, people.
We have to wake up.
We have to wake up out of this dream of propaganda that's just been draped over us like so many layers of sodden fog.
They're not here to protect us!
And you know why we know that?
Because they never asked us if we want protection.
Nobody ever said to me and said, you know, do you feel safe?
Do you need me to take your half your income?
Do you need?
Is there anything that I can do?
I mean, Alarm Force or whatever company you might have that protects.
They come to your house and say, do you feel like you need protection?
Would you like it?
Yes or no.
You can go and compete.
You can choose this.
You can choose that.
They never do that.
Nobody ever asked me if I wanted protection.
They just take my money and hold a gun to my neck.
And if things get bad enough, then they'll take me away from my wife and they'll take me away from my future children and they will throw me down in a jungle or in a desert.
They'll put a gun in my hand and they say, you shoot that guy or he's gonna shoot you.
Or they'll stick me in a trench as bombs rain down overhead.
And that they call protecting me?
I mean, please.
People.
People.
It's not true.
If somebody says to me, you need protection, just as a priest when they say to me, you need saving, I know that is the person who I am most in danger of.
That is the person who is absolutely threatening me the most.
They know this in the mafia circles.
Protection money is a joke.
You pay protection money from those who will hurt you.
They're not protecting you from anyone but themselves.
And they're not even doing that in regards of the state.
It's a kind of joke.
Somebody says, I'm going to protect you, they're the ones who are threatening you.
That's completely evident and obvious.
England, did it protect its citizens from the Nazis?
Of course not.
Hundreds of thousands of British people were killed.
Children ripped away from their mothers and sent to live in the countryside.
Rains of bombs.
Two million British soldiers killed.
Entire generation half wiped out.
Did they do a good job of protecting the British citizens from the Germans?
Of course not!
They funded the Germans!
They gave loans to the Germans!
They ignored the growing threat of the Germans!
They imposed the Versailles Peace Treaty on the Germans!
They don't protect anybody!
Because they threatened them!
The only reason the government ever invents a danger is to pick more of your pocket.
And until we wake up, I mean, life will continue to be, for most places on earth, a living hell.
They can't fund the war without your money.
And that's why you have to go to the source.
You have to argue for the end of taxation.
Not because the free market is more efficient.
Not because welfare causes the breakups of families.
These are all things that are survivable.
Trust me, I know.
But we have to argue for the end of taxation so that we can free human beings from the mad slavery and misery of dictatorship and war.
So few of those dictatorships in foreign countries would ever have survived without the tax money that gets ripped from our wallets and sent to them in terms of foreign aid and loans and guarantees and weapons.
All the weapons in the world that are used by militaries are almost all made by governments, and traded by governments, and sold and shipped by governments, and all of that is based on the fact that we pay the bills for all of this.
Weapons would be supremely unprofitable, to the degree with which they are made, without the taxpayers footing the bill.
So when I talk about taxation, you can just say, when I say I don't want taxation, that taxation is a moral crime.
It is because it is the root of most of the major moral crimes, if not all of the major moral crimes around the world, are founded on taxation.
And when I say that taxation must be ended, it's because war must be ended, because totalitarianism must be ended, because torture must be ended, brutality must be ended.
And these things in the absence of taxation are almost a non-existent form of social interaction because they are supremely unprofitable.
Unless funded and fattened by state violence.
So I hope that this has helped clarify my position on war.
I'm glad that I got through it without chewing my microphone in two, or screaming at the top of my lungs, which I didn't do last time, but I was a bit more excited and passionate.
I hope that this is clear what the stakes are that we're playing for, and what it is that we need to get done in life, and why I am so passionate about the free market and the end of the state.
This place we call the earth can be a paradise.
It can be heaven on earth.
But we have to strike at the core of what is evil in the world these days, and that means striking at the heart of the state.
That means using the argument for morality, and that means putting those who prey on honest citizens finally, finally on the defensive.
Because once they're on the defensive, it won't be long before the whole thing comes down.
Thanks so much for listening, as always, and I hope you're doing very, very, very well.
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