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Jan. 12, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:41
54 Economic Choices and 9/11

Some thoughts on 9/11

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Pump up the freedom, pump up the freedom, dance, dance, dance, wah, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, brothers and sisters.
Yeah, this is another way of me saying I really need some theme music, but I don't really know what the licensing requirements are, so there you have it.
Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph.
It is, oh good heavens, it's before eight o'clock and I'm heading to work.
My career has taken a rather exciting turn of late.
As I mentioned in a podcast a while back, the company that I work at is, she is going down like the Titanic and I am sticking around and I've sort of known this from a business perspective.
This was easy to see for the last six to nine months.
But I'm sticking around for a variety of reasons.
There is an enormous amount of value to be gained from the dissolution of a company.
This is where you can get great ownership potential, because, you know, the customer base is still solid, and it has good support revenue, and it would be a good basis to build a new company out of, but you kind of have to stick around and go through the fire, and since I'm the lead technical Actually, I'm the Chief Technology Officer.
I got a promotion, which is great, you know?
As the captain heads for the lifeboat, it's like, hey, you're the captain now!
Excellent!
I now run the Titanic.
So, anyway, there's a lot of excitement that's going on in my career at the moment, and I'm sort of tossing around with the Chief Marketing Officer, who I have an enormous amount of respect for and thoroughly enjoy his company.
We're tossing around ideas about how to Excavate some value from this the smoking ruin of bad management that this company has Sort of manifested over the past little while so that's my level of excitement had a lovely dinner last night It's interesting for me to see how people make bad economic decisions so for instance even in a minor level Christina's a vegetarian and And Lecto's intolerant, which makes her sound pretty hypochondriacal, but that's not the case at all.
She's very robust.
So I've become mostly vegetarian now.
I haven't quite figured out how to be a vegetarian and lift weights at the same times.
So, you know, without wanting to feel like I don't have the energy to work out, I still have a little bit of meat.
But we ordered a... I ordered a... I had soup and salad last night because I wasn't too hungry.
And Christina ordered some gnocchi.
And, you know, she told the guy, lactose intolerant, pure vegetarian, no meat, no meat, no meat.
And he's like, OK, OK, OK.
So then he comes to us.
He comes to us with the food, and the gnocchi looks suspiciously red, the sauce, right?
So she's like, is this a meat sauce?
No, no, no, no.
There's just some bacon in it.
You know, which is like that line from my Big Fat Greek Wedding.
I'm a vegetarian.
Okay, I make a lamb.
And so, you know, we're sort of silent, and I say, no, Christina said, she's perfectly able to speak for herself.
She said, I'm sorry, I can't eat this.
I mentioned that I was vegetarian.
And the guy's pausing, right?
Now this is an entree that's $16, right?
So let's just assume 50% markup because it's a restaurant.
So he's looking at $8 a profit that could go down the tubes.
In other words, the meal as a whole is a net sort of break-even for him, right?
He gets paid $8, which costs him $8 to produce, so it's a net even.
But he still gets the profit on everything else, right?
And for a $7 salad, which I assume is more than 50% markup, Then he's still up ahead on the meal, and of course the wine is very expensive.
So he is going to lose, you know, six or seven dollars, you know, but make still twenty, if he replaces the meal.
But he's pausing and he's hesitating.
And, you know, Christina says to me, well, why don't you eat the gnocchi and I'll have your salad?
Because I'd ordered an Andes salad so she could eat that.
And so, you know, that seemed fine.
We didn't want to get into a big fuss and fight on her anniversary, and I was fine with it, she was fine with it, so that's what we did.
And so, and it was entirely, you know, I think if the guy had said, no, no, no, if he'd insisted, you know, no, no, no, you absolutely, I will make you a new meal and so on.
Well, the reason we went to this restaurant is because it's where we met or where we went for our very first dinner together.
But of course, you know, we're not going back now, which is the wonderful thing about the free market.
You don't have to be rude and you don't have to fight with people.
You just don't have to go back.
Which, you know, is why it's so different from the government where you can fuss and fight and scream and you still are forced to deal with these idiots.
So, you know, in terms of economic calculation, just, you know, what a bad restaurateur.
You know, I mean, you just say, you know, whatever it takes, because, you know, 90% of restaurant business is repeat business.
And if you can get people to have a thing about your restaurant, to feel like they're treated well, and so on, then they'll always come back.
And if they feel like you're choosing, you know, especially when he made the mistake, clearly, right?
So if you feel like with the restaurateur that you're choosing That he's choosing an $8 profit over your happiness as a patron, then you know that he's not going to provide you quality meals, or that the quality meals are going to be inconsistent and unpredictable, and so you'll just go someplace else.
So this is just sort of an example for me of bad economic calculations in everyday life.
So if you own a restaurant, take heed, you know?
Always keep up the price of the meal for the sake of satisfied customers.
So I'd like to talk about, as we had mentioned before, or as I had mentioned before, the real targets of war.
Very, very interesting question.
And, you know, you've probably already guessed it, so I'm not going to pretend that I have some sort of sixth-sense surprise waiting for you at the end of the tunnel.
But the targets of war, for me, the targets of war are those against whom violence is consistently exercised against.
Those against whom violence is consistently exercised are the real targets of war.
And that is, you know, that's a pretty logical formulation of the problem.
And that's something that is important to recognize when you're looking at an economic analysis of war.
So, as I mentioned last time, you know, the transfer of income from the public sector to the private sector, you know, in hundreds of billions of dollars, always occurs during war.
And, you know, that is the much more common factor in the The pursuit of, you know, a sort of quote, enemy.
So if you look at, you know, terrorism, and one of my email contributors has, and now twice, and I apologize for not doing this before, but has twice pointed out that I keep talking about 9-11 as if it were a fait accompli, that the terrorists simply did what everybody said they did, even though there's a good deal of evidence against this possibility.
You know, that There's simply no way that a steel structure could collapse based on a fire, right?
Steel melts at 1600 degrees.
The fire never got that warm.
There were buildings that were never even hit by the planes that collapsed as well.
The buildings were able to withstand.
I mean, if you saw when the planes hit the Twin Towers, They barely shook, right?
I mean, the buildings could absolutely withstand all of this, and that the demolition was far too vertical for it to be a sort of melting sag of the central steel skeleton.
You know, the buildings kind of went down, and also that there's suspicious plumes of smoke that rise up from the base of the buildings right before they come down, and so on.
You know, there's a Hunt the Boeing site where they talk about how it's just impossible for the damage to the Pentagon to be created by the airliner.
And there are no, you know, the photos were taken.
The photos that were released were inconclusive and, you know, hinted at other things like the white smoke that came out of the back was more indicative of a missile.
And also that all of the security camera videos from shops across the way were sort of removed by the FBI, that everybody went along the ground picking up debris.
And, you know, so I absolutely, fully accept that, you know, it seems very strong probability, if not close to certainty, that what happened on 9-11 is not the official events.
And, of course, that would be completely consistent with war in the past, right?
I mean, in the Spanish-American Civil War, the Chesapeake was supposed to have been blown up by Spaniards when it wasn't the case.
It just had a boiler explosion that nobody could figure out where it came from.
You know, with World War II, the surprise attack by the Japanese was not exactly a surprise.
With Germany, its invasion of Poland, they actually, I think there was a radio station along the border that the Gestapo came in and shot it up and then left, you know, Czech weaponry there, so, Polish weaponry, so they pretended that Poland had attacked Germany.
And that it was a response in the Korean War in the Gulf of Tonkin when the American ships were supposed to be struck.
Of course, nobody says, what the hell were our ships doing in the Gulf of Tonkin to begin with?
But even that is the case.
It turned out to be not at all the case that it came from the Koreans.
But it was internal to the U.S.
As I mentioned in a podcast before, and mistakenly mentioned American submarines rather than German submarines, but I'm sure you got the point, that FDR was constantly trying to put American shipping in the danger zone of German submarines and hoping for an incident that would provoke a war.
So it would certainly be completely consistent with the history of warfare that either The sort of, quote, terrorists were funded by or, you know, the US had knowledge of or strong indications of.
And, you know, the fact that the planes were like, I think, only 25% full when they're normally 75% full that particular morning.
And there were a number of people told not to fly.
I think Salman Rushdie was one of them.
And so, you know, the fact is that there are strong indications that You know, the official story is not the case.
And I mean, that would not shock me at all, that the official story was not the case.
There's also some indications that the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1992, I think it was, or 93, that that was funded by and with the full knowledge of the FBI.
So it would not be at all surprising to me to find out that what really happened had no relation to the official story.
I'm sure it has no relation to the official story, but the degree to which it has no relation to me remains unknown.
The thing that I just conceptually have trouble getting around in my head is what happened to the bodies of the planes that were We're down.
You know, like if it was remote-control planes that flew into the Trade Center, as you can sort of see from this sort of bulge underneath the lid, and if there was a flash that occurred before the planes went into the Trade Center buildings, which you can also see, that would be an igniting flash and so on.
And if it all was a complete setup, then, you know, then the U.S.
government would have sort of authorized or You know, the incineration of all of the people on those planes, and I would not find that at all surprising in a sheer dictatorship, but I would think that would be a risk that would be too high for the US government with the current You know, level of freedom, which is not inconsequential, still.
And, you know, the fact is that there is an internet and there is an alternate media and so on.
So I do find that to be perfectly consistent with governments, right?
That they're more than willing to kill their own citizens, as we can see with Pearl Harbor, in order to achieve a war.
But I think that if they actually did incinerate hundreds of their own citizens, In order to produce these sort of charred bodies You know lock him in a room and set off a bomb or whatever.
I think that that's simply too risky and Not not particularly necessary There's lots of people who will do the dirty work of the state that you can pay in sort of unverifiable transfer situations and so I just I can do another podcast on this which gives a bit more detail, but I do find that it is a It is a stretch for me to figure out exactly how that is a good idea.
And you know what?
Actually, let's dump the war thing, because I've spent like 20 minutes on non-war stuff, so I'll do war this afternoon.
But, you know, there's this question, and I'm certainly open to trying to figure out if anybody has, but this is purely from a sort of anthropological level of interest because nobody has to convince me that the state is stone evil.
I don't need proof of complicity in 9-11 to figure out if it's stone evil.
I just know that because it uses force against its own citizens.
And, you know, for instance, the FDA has been responsible for keeping drugs off the market, which are perfectly legal in other countries, that have resulted in the deaths of, you know, 62 or more thousand Americans.
You're So, that's something that we don't need any conspiracy theories for a proof of.
You know, what were there, sort of hundreds of, over a hundred thousand Dead in Vietnam, a war that had nothing to do with anything other than, again, an escalation of the military complex and transfer of wealth from the public sector to the private sector.
World War II, completely criminal.
World War I, completely criminal.
It caused an imbalance in Europe, which was altered in World War II.
The levels of taxation that are against the citizens, the incarceration of two million citizens for mostly non-violent crimes.
I mean, you could go on and on, but for me, the evil of the state does not rest upon 9-11.
And the problem with investigating 9-11 is that it puts forward a thesis that is so counter to what people believe that it's going to require an enormous amount to educate them on what happened, and nobody has any conclusive answers.
So, that's the problem that I have with investigating this kind of stuff.
I do find it very interesting, and I have watched a number of documentaries on this, and it is fascinating to me the levels of inconsistency that remain unreported by the media, which is also true for the Oklahoma bombing as well.
I don't find it particularly surprising.
I mean, the media is not at all free.
You know, the FCC controls licenses.
There's regulations aplenty.
There are, you know, always a threat of antitrust suits.
There's, you know, manipulation of the stock market.
The media is, and of course, it's far easier and cheaper, right?
It's cheaper for the media to sit in the press room of the White House and report what people say than to actually do investigations, right?
I mean, it's one of the things that has occurred.
And it's not exactly the free market, but it's sort of like the free market that The government has grown so large that if you go through the newspaper, you'll see that 80%, 70% of the stories are on the government, and the rest of them are mostly on the effects of government.
And if you look at the letters to the editor and the editorials, they're all about, you know, the government should do this, the government should do that.
So, it's much easier to sit there and review government policies and come up with opinions than it is to actually go out and interview people and reveal the truth and, you know, go down blind alleys, which You know, may or may not pay off.
So, it's not any shock to me that the media is a complete lapdog of the state because it's tightly controlled by the state and its revenues and licenses are entirely dependent upon, you know, a permission to operate which is granted by the state.
So, it's no shock to me that the media is simply taking the easy route out and, you know, simply reporting on the state rather than coming up with its own investigative ideas and thinking.
So, the fact that 9-11 remains so under-investigated and under-reported on, except in the internet media, which is not subject to licensing by the government, that is no shock to me at all.
In fact, it would be a complete shock to me if anything that was vaguely truthful did come out.
But I just find that in talking with people, it is much easier to get them to understand that
you know taxation is violence uh... that the state state taxation is is you know brute coercion of the population because they pay their taxes every day and there's no large investigative time that they need to invest in figuring out what happened in hearing all sides and the pros and the cons and everybody's opinions and of course you have to be a building engineer and a physicist and uh... you know a student of history and all of that to to start to put things like nine eleven into
The mindset where you can begin to conceive of such a thing occurring.
You know, just from many people raised on state propaganda, the idea that the government is, you know, would sort of openly encourage, pay for, or act out the murder of thousands of its own citizens in order to, you know, start a war on terror that would enslave everybody further, I don't consider it impossible at all, but it's taken me a long time to get to the place where I can look at the state as that kind of evil entity.
So, you know, most people you're just asking them to do a complete reversal on their mindset.
And, you know, it sort of doesn't matter that you're right.
What does matter is if you want to talk to people who aren't sort of in the movement and open to these ideas already, then you kind of need to recognize that you're trying to turn A supertanker, right?
Like, you know, it takes like, I don't know, six miles an hour to turn around a supertanker.
And, you know, what you want to do is begin to nudge people based on their own experiences towards things that are more true for them and that they can understand.
So, you know, state compulsion that they're subject to every day through taxation, people can understand and they don't need a lot of theory to get it, right?
They just need some basic intellectual honesty.
So that has, I think that is productive in terms of conversing with people, but if you sort of sit down with them and say 9-11 was a hoax and the government killed all its citizens, you're asking a lot from people to swallow.
Who just takes a long time to get there, right?
I mean, when you are a surgeon, right, they don't put you on the trickiest brain surgery your first day, right?
They sort of scale you up, right?
It's like, here, you know, peel this apple with one hand or with a knife.
I don't know what they do, but, you know, they're gonna start you off easy and then progress towards, you know, that which is more difficult.
And so that's all I'm saying.
When you're talking about 9-11, in terms of the government's complicity in it, Even if you had hard proof, it's just a lot for people to take on.
That's a pretty advanced reversal of opinion to place on the shoulders of somebody who's new to these ideas, and I think that it's more than most people can accept.
So I do apologize for not doing more to sort of Recognize this idea and to talk about it honestly and it is definitely you know an intellectual Lapse on my part because I did know about these 9-11 things and I didn't explain sort of why I just mentioned the terrorists But of course everybody assumed that I meant the Islamic terrorists, but of course I could have meant the government terrorists but yeah, it's definitely a lapse and I do apologize for that but
You know, the reason why I just called the terrorists or whatever is because I just don't think it's that helpful to the movement to start examining this.
Now, of course, it's a different matter for the people who are, you know, suing the government because they lost loved ones in 9-11.
All power to them, and I wish them, you know, as much as an atheist can wish Godspeed to their cause, I wish that for their cause, because, you know, the terror and horror and agony of losing someone you love based on, you know, state violence is terrible, just terrible.
But, you know, if they want to really solve the problem of state violence, they need to be opposing taxation, particularly income tax, right?
Because without taxation you can't, you know, fund the CIA, you can't fund all these foreign adventures, you can't pay these dictators to stay in power, you can't, you know, fund these freedom fighters, you can't sell arms to these lunatics overseas, you can't do... Even if we accept the sort of basic libertarian premise that
9-11 happened because we were meddling in foreign affairs and it really was al-qaeda and so on then You know even that's all we need to accept to oppose taxation You know my my concern is that if you don't go for the root of the problem like let's say that you're able to prove to someone that 9-11 happened because of You know, because the government wanted to put in the Patriot Act and wanted to start a war in the Middle East.
Even if you could come up with a complete proof for that, my concern is that people would then take from that the conclusion that You know, we need to put in bodies to monitor what the government does and make sure it doesn't get involved in all of this stuff and, you know, just another layer of regulatory agency and, you know, oh my lord, that's horrible, let's have a watchdog agency and a new bureaucratic, you know, dungeon to throw people into if they act badly.
So, even if you were able to convince people that The government was responsible for 9-11.
The conclusion that they might have would not be, probably not be, well, great, let's get rid of income tax then.
I mean, that wouldn't follow, logically, from that.
They would say, maybe, let's throw the horrible Bush administration out and throw somebody else in.
You know, even if it's not the Democrats, let's stop voting for anybody.
The Green Party, you know, the Socialists, anybody!
Right?
Because, of course, Socialists are very keen on criticizing America for its foreign policy because they would rather that You know, the violence be used at home rather than wasted overseas because the beneficiary of overseas violence is multinational corporations through preferential contracts in, you know, third world countries.
And they don't like that, right?
It's not that they don't like the government force, they just prefer that it be used for the people they like, which is the poor, rather than the people they don't like, which is multinational.
So...
You know, people who hear, like Noam Chomsky talks about the evils of American foreign policy at great length, and he's right, right?
But his solution is wrong.
In fact, his solution would make things worse.
And of course, it's no solution at all, right?
You can't Give the government this fabulous power of taxation and so on.
Give it trillions of dollars a year and expect that you can control what happens after that.
Of course it's going to be foreign adventures and gun running and drug smuggling.
Of course, there's absolutely no question that that's going to happen.
You can't control the government after you give it all this money.
You can't control the government at all.
So, you know, the left-wing sort of idea that you can sort of say, oh, let's criticize the American foreign policy so that it no longer meddles overseas.
It's like, I mean, that's just pure fantasy land.
I mean, the sort of Michael Moore stuff that he talks about, too.
It's like, let's get control over American foreign policy and stop meddling in other people's affairs.
It's like, yeah, okay, and I'm gonna wag my finger at this tsunami and get it to stop in its tracks.
I mean, you can't give people the power of violence and expect it to be used well.
I mean, it's simply impossible.
I think P.G.
O'Rourke, who said that giving money and power to governments is like giving bourbon and car keys to teenage boys.
So that idea that, you know, communicating about things like 9-11 is going to get people into a libertarian state of mind is not accurate.
I mean, there's no way to say, even if you can prove to people that 9-11 was, you know, a government-run atrocity, there's simply no way that you can predict What people's response to that is going to be.
It also may be, you know, shock, horror, cynicism, and a withdrawal from political conversations.
I mean, that's certainly what's happening up here, is that, you know, everybody's rolling their eyes, nobody's bothering to vote, because they know that whoever they vote for is just, you know, lying, is already lying to them, and, you know, there's every single election for the past, you know, 150 years has been a bunch of promises followed by an increase in taxes and state power, so, you know, people are sort of figuring it out.
So if you drive them into apathy... I mean, the government is perfectly comfortable with apathy as well, right?
I mean, apathy is great.
If you are going to prey on people's incomes, you want them to be as apathetic as possible.
That's the approach that you want to take.
So, you know, the farmer likes the cows that are the most docile, right?
Which is why they don't like breeding season particularly, because they're at risk from the bulls.
So, there's no guarantee that if you convince people about 9-11, you know, with ironclad proof and, you know, all of the documents and the signatures and the trail of blood all the way back to the White House, I don't believe that it actually helps the libertarian cause.
I think that what you want to do is to talk to people about the violence that they themselves experience every day, talk about the future of the world that they want to build for their children and what they expect to happen when the national debt hits the wall.
Talk to them about what they experience from the government, right?
I mean, down to as petty as, you know, do you ever notice when you're driving along and they're doing construction that there are 19 guys holding the sign or picking their nose?
And doesn't that bug you?
And just that stuff that they experience every day.
And you don't need to educate them on a lot of theory, or they don't need to look up, you know, 15,000 web pages to figure out all the arguments.
So, I just think that what you want to do is talk to them about, if you do want to talk to them about 9-11, to talk to them about, you know, the underlying roots of the story, even the official story.
You know, which is, you know, why did they attack us?
Why was it people from Saudi Arabia?
Do you know that, you know, the Bin Laden was funded by the CIA?
And all this stuff that's, you know, that's factual.
That's like in the New York Times.
That's not stuff that they're gonna have to go through like crazyconspiracy.com to figure out and just sort of weigh their evidence themselves, which is a lot of time commitment.
But just say, you know, do you realize that we wouldn't have these problems?
if the government didn't have the money to fund all of these overseas initiatives.
You know, like, I mean, why is it that, you know, throughout the entire 19th century, when America was much more free than it is now, that nobody had a big problem with American freedom to the point where they were going to come to Ellis Island and blow themselves up, right?
So, I mean, the idea that it's freedom is not.
You can dismiss that idea pretty quickly.
But you can get them to a point where they just recognize that taxation is the root of the state, is state evil, right?
I mean, taxation is the basis of the state, right?
That violent transfer of money is why all state evil occurs afterwards.
And you need to cut it off its source, right?
You need to cut off the evil at its source.
You can't reform the evil once it has the power to take money from citizens.
You can't then say, use that money wisely.
Simply not.
It's not going to work.
And so...
That's sort of another reason why I don't particularly worry about communicating the predations or possible predations of 9-11 for people that I'm chatting with or talking to.
I mean, I have enough radical stuff that I'm putting out there, but at least when I put stuff out there like, you know, soldiers and murderers, it's something that People can at least think about without doing a lot of research, right?
Like, what do they do?
Well, they kill people.
Well, isn't that murder?
Yeah, kinda, unless it's self-defense.
Well, is it self-defense when they're ordered to go to some country that they've never even heard of or don't know where it is on a map and go shoot people that have never threatened them personally?
Well, of course not.
Therefore, you know, you can get that logical sequence going with people just in a conversation, right?
It's the Socratic dialogue.
But you can't, other than sort of blowing their minds or finding like-minded people, you can't, I think, productively talk about State violence at the 9-11 level and find that you're getting people to where you need them to be, which is, you know, let's get rid of the income tax and let's look at a stateless society, because they may just want more controls put on the government, which are never going to work.
So anyway, sorry that we didn't get to war.
We will this afternoon, or unless I have time at lunch, I absolutely promise.
So I've now got to think what I'm going to call this podcast.
I'll figure it out.
Thanks so much for listening.
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