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Feb. 16, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:40
105 Environmentalism Part 3: Public/Private Greed
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Time Text
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane.
Yeah, who says I have an arts degree?
Hi, it's Steph.
It's 1741 on the 16th of February 2006, and I'm heading home, and I want to talk a little bit about DDT, because I think it encapsulates a lot of what has gone on in the environmental movement over the past 30 or so years.
So let's have a little chat about our favorite mosquito killer and supposedly eggshell thinning, bald eagle killing, peregrine falcon falling, brown pelican decimating chemical.
So it was first synthesized.
I got some of this from JunkScience.com just because I want to give credit where credit is due, of course.
It was first synthesized for no purpose in 1874 by German scientist Othmar Zeidler.
In 1939, Dr. Paul Muller independently produced DDT.
He found it quickly killed flies, aphids, mosquitoes, walking sticks, and Colorado potato beetles.
The Geiger Corporation patented it in Switzerland, England, and the US in the early 1940s.
Now the first large-scale use of DDT was in 43.
500 gallons were produced and delivered to Italy to help squelch a rapidly spreading epidemic of a louse-borne typhus.
And then in 1943 the armies issued small tin boxes of 10% DDT dust so that you could get rid of head lice, body lice, and crab lice.
I guess this is before the half-life crowbar.
And Muller won the Nobel Prize in 1948 for his work on DDT.
And then, in 1955, the 8th World Health Assembly adopted a global malaria eradication campaign, based on the widespread use of DDT against mosquitoes and of anti-malarial drugs to treat malaria and eliminate the parasite in humans.
So malaria, of course, is a widely fatal disease, often for children and sleeping sickness and so on.
So it's a terrible, terrible disease.
And as a result of this campaign malaria was eradicated by 1967 from all developed countries where the disease was endemic in large areas of tropical Asia and Latin America were freed from the risk of infection.
The malaria eradication campaign was only launched in three countries of tropical Africa since it was not considered feasible in the others.
Despite these achievements, improvements in the malaria situation could not be maintained indefinitely by time-limited, highly prescriptive, and centralized programs.
Not sure exactly what that means, but let's not worry about it.
To only a few chemicals, this is a quote from the National Academy of Sciences, to only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT.
In little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths due to malaria that otherwise would have been inevitable.
It is believed that malaria afflicts between 305 million people every year, causing up to 2.7 million deaths, mainly among children under five years.
Now, then some mosquitoes became resistant because people just sort of hand-bombed it and so on.
But that didn't matter too much, because just because you're resistant to something, It doesn't mean that it stopped working effectively.
So, for instance, mosquitoes would associate malaria with a certain situation.
They would develop these biochemical, physiological mechanisms of resistance to the chemical, but it means that they would not go into or rapidly exit from sprayed houses, and so it's still useful.
Even if they develop a resistance to it, they're going to want to stay away from it.
And, you know, of course nobody wants to kill mosquitoes.
They just want to keep the malaria out of the human system.
So in, gosh, 1962 there was a book written by Rachel Carson.
This isn't well known to the older listeners, but to the younger ones maybe not so much.
A woman, Rachel Carson, wrote a book called Silent Spring.
And so she talked about it, thinned the eggs and killed the birds and blah blah blah blah blah.
And I mean, the numbers are just wrong, right?
So she wrote, Dr. DeWitt's now classic experiments on quail and pheasants.
...have now established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction.
Quail into whose diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs, but few of the eggs hatched.
Now, if you have a look at the 1956 article in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, just have a look over there on your night table, I'm sure it's there, the different results are there for sure.
What happened was quail were fed 200 parts per million of DDT in all of their food throughout the breeding season.
DeWitt reports that 80% of the eggs hatched compared with the control birds, which hatched 83.9% of the eggs.
The control birds are the ones who aren't fed the DDT.
Carson also omitted mention of DeWitt's report that control pheasants hatched only 57% of their eggs, while those that were fed high levels of DDT in all of their food for an entire year hatched more than 80% of their eggs.
So yes, I guess it seriously does affect reproduction, but positively.
Now, population control advocates blame DDT for increasing third world population.
Now, this is zero population growth.
This is stuff I remember from being a very little kid, that this was a big deal, that we were all supposed to stop breeding because it was going to make a real mess out of the entire planet.
So, in the 1960s, World Health Organization authorities believed there was no alternative to the overpopulation problem, but to assure that up to 40% of the children in poor nations would die of malaria.
As an official of the Agency for International Development stated, rather dead than alive and riotously reproducing.
So, of course, this is just a massive advocacy of genocide.
Something which is entirely preventable, which is allowed to happen, is a form of immorality, of course.
And the environmental movement used DDT to increase their power.
Science journals refused to publish and actually launched attacks against anybody who criticized the criticism of DDT, who was sort of pro-DDT and so on.
And in 1972, the new U.S.
EPA, one of its earliest actions was to ban DDT.
Environmental activists planned to defame scientists who defended DDT and so on.
Extensive hearings on DDT before an EPA administrative law judge occurred during 1971 to 1972.
The EPA hearing examiner, Judge Edmund Sweeney, concluded that DDT is, quote, not a carcinogenic hazard to man.
DDT is not a mutagenic or teragenetic hazard to man.
The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife.
Overruling the EPA hearing examiner, EPA administrator, Ruckelshaus, hey, there's another German, banned DDT in 1972.
Ruckelshaus never attended a single hour of the seven months of EPA hearings on DDT.
Ruckelshaus's aides reported that he did not even read the transcript of the EPA hearings on DDT.
After reversing the EPA hearing examiner's decision, Ruckelshaus refused to release materials upon which his ban was based.
So there's a lot to go into.
You can have a look at this article on JunkScience.com.
through the Freedom of Information Act, claiming they were just internal memos.
Scientists were therefore prevented from refuting the false allegations in the Ruckelhaus' opinion and order on DDT." So there's a lot to go into.
You can have a look at this article on JunkScience.com.
It's JunkScience.com/DDTFAQ.htm.
Well, why am I rambling on about EPA decisions from 40, 35 odd years ago?
Well, I think that it says a lot about the environmental movement.
And I, as I mentioned at the beginning of all this, I like nature.
I like hiking, I like rock climbing, I like all the good things that nature has to offer.
Not so big on the sharks and lions and malaria and so on, or HIV, but, you know, a lot of stuff that's found in nature is very, very nice.
But you have to wonder when you have a movement that vociferously and aggressively pushes for the banning of a drug that is proven not dangerous, and the banning of which results in the deaths of nearly 3 million people a year.
Now, one of the things that is awful... I mean, simply words can't describe it, and I'm not even going to try to describe the sort of moral horror that this represents.
But if you look at the simple facts of the matter, that the banning of DDT alone resulted in the deaths of about 60 million people.
Now just take a moment, and I promise I won't start crying, but just take a moment to think about that.
60 million people.
I mean, if you watched one death a second, how many years would it take for you to... hundreds of years would it take for you to view that?
And these numbers, of course, are being added to by three million people every single solitary year.
Now that is absolutely staggering.
I'll give you some sort of comparisons.
We all know the comparison of the Holocaust, where you had six million Jews, homosexuals, political dissidents, gypsies, and mentally retarded people, and so on, all killed.
Six million.
Okay, so one-tenth.
This is about two years of banning DDT.
Look at some of the other slaughters in history.
So the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks in the turn of the century, turn of the 20th century, We're talking 2 million people.
That's what DDT wipes out in about 8 or 9 months.
Sorry, the ban of DDT wipes out in about 8 or 9 months.
Let's look at the mass starvations of the Russian population during the 1930s, during the forced collectivization of the farmland under Stalin.
10 million people.
Gosh, that's about 3 years and a couple of months of DDT.
Same thing with the starvation of the peasants under the same.
Brilliantly forced collectivization program under Mao in the 1950s, I think it was.
Well, you have the same kind of deal.
It's about three years of banning DDT to be able to do that.
So, well, what does this mean?
I mean, let's just mull this over.
It is an astounding thing.
It's so important to recognize how little people understand morality.
And I talked about this during my chat about the soldiers and empathy, decadence and empathy.
But it really is absolutely essential to understand how little people understand about morality, and how racist it is, and how bigoted it is, and how, you know, we're important, they're not important.
It is.
Can you imagine if a hundred thousand... Let's just keep the numbers low.
Can you imagine if a hundred thousand American children We're being killed every year because of some illness.
I mean, look what happened with AIDS.
Look at the billions of dollars that were put into trying to deal with the problem of AIDS.
And how many people did it kill relative to malaria in one year?
Couple of percentage points?
And was it killing children?
No, it was killing people who, to some degree, were at risk.
And some people, of course, it was purely accidental.
But some people that were killing who had engaged in at-risk behaviors and so on.
Whereas we're talking about a disease that attacks children and destroys their lives while their parents are trying to keep them alive.
And why does this happen?
Why is the entire world's population not rising up and crying out about this?
Well, of course, because there's nothing that can be done, fundamentally.
I mean, it's the government.
As I mentioned before, it's shrouded in this bloody fog of violence, and therefore there's not a whole lot that can be done to try and alter this kind of behavior.
But what does environmentalists mean?
What do environmentalists mean when they say, let's get rid of DDT?
Right?
What's that song from Joni Mitchell?
Hey, farmer, farmer, throw away your DDT, man.
Leave me... I'll take the spots on the apples, leave me the birds and the bees.
Right?
So they think that they got... This sort of nonsense.
I remember I grew up and I was very frightened of DDT.
I had a very negative emotional reaction to DDT.
It was one of these things like thalidomide that was considered to be just horrendous and really bad for you and all this sort of mess.
So what does it mean that they worked so hard and focused so hard to get rid of DDT And they got rid of DDT, and of course they had already eliminated malaria in the sort of Western countries, and then they got rid of DDT, and that just caused the deaths of lots of, you know, brown-skinned poor people in countries that nobody really has any emotional connection to.
One of the things that is quite astounding to me about environmentalism is the degree of callousness, the degree of coldness that it has towards the poor.
And I mean, I'm not just talking about this in the third world, I'm talking about this in the first world as well.
But the degree of Indifference it has to the poor is just astounding.
So DDT causes the deaths of millions and millions of children and other not-so-children types of people.
And what happens?
Is there a reaction against this?
Because it was banned and was no longer allowed to be produced and sold by by companies.
So this is what happens.
Is there an absolute outcry over the numbers and millions and millions of people who are sentenced to an ugly painful death?
Well no!
Now there are some lunatic fringe environmental nutjobs out there and I don't know how fringe they are because I don't really, I've never really dipped much into the environmental movement itself.
All I've done is sort of read up the statistics and know a little bit about, well I guess know more than a little bit about the regulations that go on.
But there are a number of sort of fringe lunatics out there who believe that humanity is a cancer on the world, and that cancer needs to be eradicated, and views the death of children, as was mentioned by one of the people quoted in the article I was just reading from,
And genuinely believe, or seem to believe, or at least say, that it's far better for these children to die than to grow to the point where they can reproduce, because that's just going to make everything worse.
I mean, this kind of eugenics is just astounding, and something that you think would not be particularly common in the world, you know, after the sort of fall of Nazism.
But it really does occur at this level that they would rather watch people die than work to save them.
Now, there's lots of complicated psychological reasons about all of this, which I won't go into just now, because I think that may be the topic for another podcast and is subsumed underneath a larger psychological problem that we can talk about another time.
But it is astounding that we talked about at the very beginning environmentalism is sort of related to how well human beings survive within a particular environment.
And that does include the survival of other members of this environment.
But, given that malaria is an out-and-out killer of human beings, well, it does seem to me astonishing that now, only now, I think the DDT is only now under review for being allowed back into the world.
But to imagine that this ten times holocaust can occur and people simply don't care about it.
That this is the first thing the EPA did.
I mean, this is sort of what I want to understand when I've been sort of hammering off and on about this point that the government is not interested in protecting people.
It's interested in increasing and subjugating and expanding its influence and getting more money.
Basically it's around getting more money.
But the first thing that the EPA did was to begin the process of banning a substance in the United States, which of course prevented a lot of companies from producing it, even for export.
But the first thing that the EPA did was it put in place a regulation that resulted, to a large degree, in the deaths of 60 million people.
Now, let's look at one other comparator to this.
10 million people died in World War I, which is, again, about three years of DDT.
You have 40 million people dying in World War II, considered to be one of the greatest catastrophes, if not the greatest catastrophe, certainly the greatest man-made catastrophe in history.
And you have 40 million people dying, which is about 12-14 years of the ban of DDT, which has been going on for many, many years.
So, that really is quite amazing when you think about it.
You think about all the movies, and all of the horror, and all of the pain, and all of the novels, and everything that is mentioned about the Second World War.
And you then look at the complete absence of popular knowledge, or literature, or movies, or any kind of understanding about a topic that is far more destructive.
The ban on DDT is 1.5 times the death toll of World War II.
Ten times the Holocaust.
Ten times World War I. Ten times the starvation in the Ukraine and in Eastern Europe and Russia in the 1930s.
Six times the death toll from the starvation in China during the 1940s and 1950s.
It is ten times the Holocaust!
And where is the literature?
Where is the popular understanding of it?
Well, it doesn't exist.
It's flushed into the memory hole.
It's something which is continuing to go on.
I mean, I'm not even going to try and do the math in my head, but how many hundreds of children are going to die unnecessarily by the end of this podcast because the DDT can't keep the mosquitoes at bay?
Well, where is the popular outrage about this?
There isn't any.
There isn't any, because it's out of sight, out of mind.
I used to have these arguments, because I've spent some time in Africa.
I used to have these arguments with people in university.
Of course, Africa was the whipping boy of the Western elites and intellectuals of the 1980s and, I guess, early 1990s.
And people would say, oh, apartheid is the worst thing in the world, because it was a clear divide, right?
I mean, it was a black-white thing.
And therefore, you know, you could project yourself emotionally into the realm of the white and the racism and blah blah blah.
Because racism, sexism, and homophobia are sort of the unholy trinity of postmodern political correctness.
So Africa was considered to be, oh heavens, it's the worst thing in the world.
Those Boers, those whites, they're just terrible.
Now, was apartheid racist?
Was it bad?
Of course it was bad.
Of course it was racist.
But let's get some perspective, people.
One of the things that I would sort of ask about people who would complain about the treatment of blacks in South Africa is, I would say, well, the question is, they're allowed to leave, right?
I mean, blacks are allowed to leave, so why don't they leave?
Why don't they just get out?
Well, they can't, blah blah blah, they don't have no money or whatever.
People just make up stuff, right?
They don't say, well, that's an interesting question.
I wonder why they don't leave.
That would sort of make sense, right?
If I'm in jail and the door's ajar and they're unjustly, I'm out of there.
But of course, people never do.
They just make up stuff, right?
They have these prejudices and the moment you start asking any questions, they just make up stuff.
But of course, I would never leave it at that.
And I'd say, well, one of the things that's interesting about South Africa is that pretty regularly you can pick up reports of black people who have been mauled to death by lions in the Serengeti or the Kenyan National Park.
Well, the question is, of course, what the heck are they doing there?
Why are they in this national park where lions run free and getting mauled and eaten and so on?
Well, the answer, of course, is that they're trying to escape from the rest of Africa.
That blacks will do almost anything they can to get into South Africa, which is very interesting.
When you think about it.
So the blacks prefer the white rule over the black rule.
And that doesn't mean anything other than to say people prefer less violence and oppression to more violence and oppression.
Does that justify the violence and oppression in either side?
Of course not.
But again, you do have to understand the relative problems that are going on in the world.
Otherwise you're just going to end up fixating on things that are irrelevant and watching your life get frittered away in a sort of waste of nonsensical and chimeric pursuit of nothingness.
That's sort of very important to understand.
Why is it that the Holocaust is so fixed into popular consciousness?
Well, of course, it's because the Jews are among us, and the Jews are artists, and writers, and so on, and they fund, and they are entrepreneurial, and they're very well educated, and they hold positions of influence, which is, you know, great, good for them, fantastic, wonderful.
But that's one of the reasons that we understand the Holocaust at an emotional level.
Whereas 10 million Chinese people die, we really don't know much about it.
We really don't care much about it.
And when 10 million Russians die because they've been starved to death, we don't view that as a genocidal thing.
It was a bad thing.
It's just a number, right?
As Stalin said, and as I've mentioned before, a single death is a tragedy.
A million deaths is a statistic.
So, when we look at the effects of the EPA decision in 1972 to ban DDT, we see 60 million people who have died.
Possibly the greatest slaughter in human history.
Do we know about it?
Is it part of our popular culture?
Have there been any movies about it?
Do we understand anything about it?
Do we have any empathy for those who have suffered and died in the dust and who have held their children as their children have expired in their arms?
No, of course not, because they are not like us.
They're not like us.
This is what I was talking about the other day when I was talking about empathy and environmentalism.
Environmentalism is a fundamental manifestation of a lack of empathy and possibly one of the most destructive.
Possibly one of the most destructive.
And that's one of the reasons why it's important to understand the effects of environmentalism.
And by environmentalism, again, I'm not talking about taking care of nature.
What I am talking about is allowing the government to control property.
Allowing government to control the disposition, acquisition, transfer, purchase and sale of property.
Because let's look at the logic of this.
Just straight out logic.
We can get away from the emotional topics of a ten times holocaust and we can just have a look at some of the logic of the environmental movement and its relationship to the state.
Because I don't care about environmentalism and its relation to private citizens.
If some guy wants to go join the Bruce Trail or the Appalachian Trail restoration group and spends his weekends out there cleaning up trash, I say good for him.
I got no problem with that.
I think it's a wonderful thing to do and don't you know what?
I just pick up trash when I'm hiking as well, so more power to you.
I really don't care about environmentalism as a private hobby or as a group of citizens who get together without using the state to do whatever it is that they want to do to preserve the environment that they like.
Fantastic!
More power to you.
No skin off my back.
I might even donate.
So, environmentalism as concern for the earth?
Fantastic!
Let's all get on board.
Environmentalism as a political movement that uses the guns of the state to achieve ends?
Evil, stone evil, horrible, horrendous, destructive, and vicious.
And perhaps the most vicious thing that we have going on in society today, other than public school.
Public school always wins, because public school is the brutalization of children, And you know what though?
I mean, I can't even defend that logically.
Because it's better to be brutalized and alive than, you know, bitten by a mosquito infected with malaria and dead.
So let's just say that as far as headcount goes, it is the greatest evil.
And I'm just talking about... I'm just talking about DDT.
Just one.
Just one thing.
So the state is the worst, right?
The state is the very worst thing.
And environmentalism as a tool of the state is pretty much the second worst.
The worst thing that has ever occurred to human society.
But we'll get out of that topic.
Just have a look at the logic of it.
Have a look at the logic of it, because I do think it's quite fascinating.
So, let's look at the mind, the zoological mind of an environmentalist.
Now, an environmentalist believes that nature should be defended and that the free market won't do it.
But that the government will.
I mean, that's sort of very important.
If an environmentalist believes that the environment cannot be saved, then, I mean, I guess he's sort of a pessimistic and nihilistic environmentalist, but we don't care about him because he's just going to sit in his Birkenstocks in his parents' basement looking at his milk crates full of Joni Mitchell CDs.
And say, well, we can't do anything, it's all gonna fall apart, who cares, who cares, woe is me, the black night of depression descendeth upon my soul and I'm not even gonna get up to go and pick up my joint that is smoking away on the saucer over there.
So, we don't have to worry about those sorts of people.
So, an environmentalist who believes that neither the public sector nor the private sector can do anything to protect the environment is not gonna do a dang thing, he's not gonna get off, he's not gonna leave the vicinity of his bong, and we don't have to worry about him.
An environmentalist who believes that the free market can deal with the problems of the environment is completely on our side.
All hail to him.
He is a wonderful person and maybe he should sit down and write a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist or something like that.
And before you email me and say that's a good idea somebody already did, yes I read it.
So, thank you.
But in this other category is the demon himself, the devil himself, the genocidal apologist for power, the homicidal propagandist.
This is where we find this species, the most dangerous man in the world.
It could be said the man who says that the free market cannot deal with the problems of the environment but the government can.
Fantastic!
Let's have a look at his thoughts and see if we can't pull them apart and see where this evil insanity lies.
Now, the government, of course, is composed only of people, and so is the free market.
There's people, and there's people, and... Oh, over there's some people.
Now, if you're going to say that people care about the environment, well, that's great!
Then you don't need the government to deal with it, because people care about the environment, and therefore people are going to take care of the environment.
There'll be just as many people in the private sector as in the public sector who care about it.
Consumers will care about it, and so on.
So you don't need any government programs if people care about the environment.
If people don't care about the environment, then they're not going to care about the environment in the government either.
Again, you cannot create these artificial divides between people and say, over here we have the good people and over here we have the bad people.
I mean, unless your categories are the good and the bad people.
But something like public-private sector, eh, forget about it, doesn't matter.
It's not a moral term.
I mean, I guess you could say it's a moral term and that those who live in the public sector live off blood money and so on, but let's not get into that right now.
There's no category of morality in this sense, in the environmentalist sense, called public versus private sector.
So what you are saying, if you are an environmentalist and you are interested in the government, is you're saying people do care about the environment, but they only care about the environment in the government.
And that's a fascinating thing.
Again, if you were really interested in protecting the environment, all you would do is you would sit down and go, well, that's an interesting theory.
Okay, so people in the public sector care about the environment, people in the private sector don't.
So, let's have a look and see how well the government keeps property up versus the private sector.
Well, it seems that the private sector does a pretty good job of keeping property up.
And where they don't, it's because the government has twisted things through regulation and selling only timber rights rather than timber land and subsidizing fishermen in Newfoundland and so on.
So, it doesn't seem to me that the public sector is that great at dealing with the environment, so let's get everything as much as possible out of the public sector and into private hands.
That would be the 90-second logical sequence that anybody who really cared about the environment would go through.
But that's not, of course, what they do, because they are evil little gnolls who are run by sadistic ideology.
They say, well, the private sector seems to do a lot of bad things to the environment, so we're going to turn to the government to stop them.
Well, that's fine.
So now you're saying that there are some people in the public sector who are really great people who love the environment and don't care a fig for their own self-interest.
And on the other hand you have the private sector people who just love buying up land, turning it into ash and then selling it for a penny an acre.
Because they bought it for a hundred dollars an acre and all they want to do is get rid of their investments.
Like everybody, right?
Everybody just wants to go and take their money and burn it in a big pile on the front lawn because that's human nature to destroy as much value as humanly possible.
So they say in the private sector people do bad things.
They do bad things to the environment.
So those people need to be controlled by the virtuous people in the public sector.
Well, the question then becomes around one of self-interest.
So you're saying, you know, this environmentalist guy is saying that the people in the private sector are going to ruin the environment because it is beneficial to their self-interest, to their, I guess you could say, economics or power.
Let's just talk about the money.
So people in the private sector are going to make more money by mucking up the environment than the people in the public sector.
Whereas the people in the public sector, obviously you have to ascribe the same motive for them, right, money or power, as you do to people in the private sector, because there's no different species.
And even if there were a different species, you'd still have to prove that they had intrinsically different motivations than any other biological species.
In other words, the increase of resources for the minimum effort.
So, if people in the private sector Capitalists are interested in destroying property because it makes them money.
Again, something which is logically very hard to defend, but we talked about that in the last podcast.
But let's just say that this is what all capitalists want to do is buy something that's worth a lot and it's a renewable resource and destroy it completely and turn it into ashes and dust and nothing but faded memories on old photos.
Fine.
So capitalists love to destroy property because it's in their immediate short-term self-interest to make as much money as possible.
So that's their motivation.
People in the public sector have the same motivation, right?
So what the people in the public sector want to do is, just like the capitalists, they want to maximize their power and they want to maximize their income by dealing with whatever the means at their disposal to maximize their income and their power.
Well, that's very interesting.
So, what would you expect to happen then when you give these people in the public sector the power to regulate other people?
And also, how do you think it is that they're going to deal with their own property?
Well, the first thing that you're going to recognize or you're going to see happen, and this is perfectly predictable and nothing that anybody with any shred of logic isn't going to be able to follow, which is indicative of just how much effort the environmental movement is putting into these sorts of things.
So if people really like to maximize their resources with a minimal amount of effort, Then the question is going to be, what is the EPA going to do in order to justify its budget, to create increases, and how is it going to best deal with the problems that are faced by the environment?
Well, the people in the EPA want to maximize their incomes and their political power and maximize their career paths and so on.
And so what are they going to do?
Well, they're going to try and spend as little money as possible.
They're going to try and raise as many scares as possible.
And they're going to try and pass as many regulations as possible.
But those regulations aren't really going to do a whole heck of a lot, because what they're interested in doing is not in protecting property, but in maximizing their power, their revenue, their career, their political influence, and so on.
So, what they're going to want to do is they're going to want to eliminate things.
This is sort of similar to the FDA, right?
They're going to pass regulations that are very expensive for other people and not so expensive for themselves.
The reason they're going to pass regulations that are very expensive for other people is because they want to be able to levy fines on those people and the reason that they're going to make other people comply with them but not themselves is because the EPA is going to want to maximize its own budget and so have as few outlays as possible and get as much money as possible and so if you pass really complicated regulations that only affect other businesses then that's exactly what you would expect.
I mean that's exactly how they maximize their income.
So, of course, in my business experience, I knew companies that had millions of dollars of fines, 10 million, 20 million, more or more, and the EPA successfully lobbied to get the custodial responsibility for environmental catastrophes The spiral all the way up to the board members of the corporation, which means that they can be personally liable and even if the company goes bankrupt they can still be sued, the EPA can take their house, pillage their children and so on.
I think that they could take a kidney if you read the fine print too.
So the EPA is going to want to put a whole lot of complicated regulations in that it's going to need a lot of people to enforce and to chase after and that nobody's ever really going to be able to understand fully and that they can then drop down and levy fines on people and so on and you know of course kickback schemes and that you would naturally expect would be part of this whole process and that's exactly what has happened.
So, are they going to be interested in protecting property?
No, of course not.
Environmentalists have already argued that capitalists aren't interested in protecting property, even when they themselves will gain the value of protecting that property.
So, I mean, an environmentalist has to understand that a capitalist who buys a piece of land isn't going to want to turn it into an ash heap.
He's going to want to be able to resell that land or at least keep the resource on it that's renewable.
So even if he's a strip miner, nobody's going to want to buy that land when he's done with it.
So he's going to want to plant some stuff and get some nice woodlands back in there, or at least some grass, so that he can sell it again.
He's not going to just destroy it.
He's not just going to nuke it for the sake of his business requirements.
So, even with the incentive of wanting to maintain the value of an asset, the capitalists will just pillage and destroy it for their own selfish evil greed.
But people in the public sector don't even have the incentive of the return value of keeping that asset in good condition.
They don't make any profit over selling the lands that they take over.
If they mess up an area of land or despoil it, then they have no I've absolutely no interest in getting it cleaned up.
And, of course, the most polluted lands, as I mentioned this morning, are the government lands.
And don't even get me started on what the U.S.
Army does to its lands.
Oh my god, it's unbelievable the stuff that they dump, the toxic waste that is left behind in U.S.
Army sites.
It's just astounding.
But of course, you'd expect that the army gets away with quite a bit, right?
I mean, they are, after all, fairly well armed.
So you would expect, for the EPA, that what it wants to do is it wants to pass a whole lot of complicated regulations that nobody can understand, and whether they do any good or not, who cares, right?
They're going to want to start to make sure that the costs of the regulations that they pass are borne by other organizations than themselves.
So, for instance, the EPA is not going to pass a whole lot of regulations around what to do with waste paper, because, of course, as a bureaucratic agency, that's what it produces.
The EPA doesn't run factories, and has no smokestacks, and doesn't make cars, and is not in the manufacturing business, and therefore you would expect that the EPA is going to pass all these regulations on all of these sorts of Private sector, ripe for the plunder, can't fight back kind of organizations and that's of course exactly what the EPA has done.
It's passed all these regulations which affect everybody except itself.
You would also expect that the government is going to enforce regulations in the private sector to the degree to which it can get fines out of people, but it is not going to enforce them in the public sector.
And that's exactly, of course, what you do find.
That you don't get government agencies being hauled up for violations of EPA standards, unless somebody falls into particular disfavor with those in power.
But you do find that everybody in the private sector keeps getting zinged with these very expensive lawsuits, and that's one of the ways the EPA collects money and goes around plundering everybody.
So, if we take the environmentalist position that people want to maximize their returns, and even if we discard the fact that the capitalist is not going to maximize his returns by destroying his property, then we are still left with the problem that those in the public sector who the environmentalist has now given a monopoly of the use of force to, is going to
Maximize his or her career and money and political power and the way to do that is to pass a bunch of useless regulations which they can ding people for for tens of millions of dollars that aren't applicable to itself and whether those regulations have anything to do with helping out property it doesn't matter.
You still have a resource called The private sector or environmental regulations, which the public sector agency like the EPA now has care over, and just as the capitalist is, in the environmentalist's mind, going to prey on and destroy, with no thought for long-term consequences, the property that the capitalist has, well, that's exactly what's going to happen to the regulations in the EPA.
And the only way that you could alter that would be to create some fantasy camp or fantasy land where everybody who works for the government is really great and then everybody who doesn't work for the government is sort of bad.
However, one of the things to understand is that the government created the EPA after popular pressure.
Because in the 1960s there are all these hippie dippies who wanted to Get close to the Gaia and get close and nustle up and suck at the earth teat of Mother Earth.
And they lobbied and pressured and got all this stuff going because they had lots of subsidies in their education.
One of the things that was a desperately bad thing for American culture was the GI Bill after the Second World War, which got lots of people into the bizarre world of higher education.
And the fruits of their loins, the kids who grew up in the baby boom generation after the Second World War, They grew up into the hippies and freaks and the Vietnam wannabes in the 1960s, and this is where the government took its great leap forward, right?
So they got the parents coming home from the war, stuffed them into higher education, where they got exposed to all of this European-style socialist, collectivist thought.
Then those people had kids and taught them all this stuff about collectivism and how great the government is, which they'd all imbibed from the Universities and the universities themselves, of course, in North America were stuffed full of refugees from Europe who'd ended up settling in North America because they wanted to escape the consequences of their theories in Europe during the Second World War.
So they all came over to America and then they taught all of the American guys who, men and women, who came back from the Second World War and took advantage of the GI Bill.
And then their kids turned into the hippie-dippies and you know you've had this sort of really sharp slide in the quality of American culture after the Second World War.
So, the EPA was created through popular pressure, which meant that lots and lots of people were very interested in the environment.
Now, of course, the government had no desire whatsoever to take care of the environment, but it certainly recognized a good avenue for expanding its power when it saw it.
So, I mean, of course, people in the government love to expand their power, and the first thing they do is they love a good bout of popular uproar, because then they get to create another agency, and they get to further pillage the taxpayers while doing absolutely nothing to respond to the taxpayers' real concerns, because, of course, the taxpayers' real concerns are taking care of the environment, which the government is never going to do in any way, shape, or form.
So, the logic of it really doesn't make any sense.
If enough people are interested in the environment to create an EPA, then you don't need to create an EPA because enough people are interested in the environment and will do the right thing.
If not enough people are interested in the environment and therefore the environment is going to be handled badly, then creating the EPA won't do any good because The voters won't ever let it happen, or they'll vote it out, or they'll repose it, or they won't care.
And then the people who snarf the EPA aren't going to be composed of all of these wonderful idealistic guys who love nothing more than to go and wipe Smokey the Bear's butt when he's done with his morning dump.
I mean, there may be a couple of people like there in the EPA, a couple of real naturalists and real gung-ho environmentalists, but that's not how politics works, right?
So there's some doctors who really like to take care of the sick in the Canadian healthcare system, but that's not how the system works, and they'll be quickly ground into pessimistic dust.
Their idealism is like...
Dream big, because there's nothing that the world loves more than the sweet taste of eaten dreams.
So, you know, they're going to get into the system and they're going to get just completely wrecked.
Their idealism is going to be ground up and snorted up by the sluts of power that run these kinds of bureaucracies.
So, the environmentalist has no leg to stand on.
When they invoke the need for the state to take over property or to regulate the use of property in order to protect that property, they are falling prey to exactly the same kind of bullcrap that we've been talking about for the last couple of weeks, which is the elevation of the government into a kind of virtuous, abstract, godlike entity That is always going to be wise and just, and isn't populated by fallible human beings.
It's exactly the same communist fantasy, which goes straight back to the fantasy about God, right?
There's this all-powerful concept that's just so wise and virtuous, going to take care of everybody.
And we call that the government, and we want the government to do this, we want the government to do that.
When, of course, what we're really saying is we want Bob to do this, and we want Jane to do that.
Why do you want them to do that?
Well, because people are corrupt.
Well, do you mind if I ask, doesn't that sort of strike you as stupid?
That we need to give people a lot of power to protect us from people who abuse power.
I tell you, you know, when you break it down to its component parts, it really is a kind of astounding joke.
We need to give people lots of power to protect us from people who abuse power.
Well, who are these people who abuse power?
Well, it's the vast majority.
Oh, Lord, what are you people thinking?
And, I mean, just as a sort of by-the-by, and I've done fairly well.
I haven't had really that many segues in the last couple of podcasts.
Oh, give me one, it won't kill you.
Oh, what was it now?
I think I might have forgotten.
Wait, it's coming back.
It is funny to me just when you start to talk about this kind of stuff like an intelligent human being, and by that I don't mean any kind of genius able to carve stones with his mind.
I'm simply talking about basic common sense.
When you start to break things down to their base elements, and it's just a matter of uncomplicating all the nonsense that we're taught.
It's not anything particularly difficult.
You break it down, it really is kind of funny.
When you look at the morals that are being presented to the world in the guise of high virtue, it's kind of funny.
It's desperately sad, and people die, and don't get me wrong, I'm just talking about the ideas.
It's kind of funny that people would make that kind of argument.
People are corrupt and selfish and mean and bad, so we need to give people power.
I need to stop that.
I mean, my god.
The people in the private sector are bad enough when they're playing with their own money and property, apparently.
But by golly, the people in the public sector are just so great when they're playing with other people's property and money.
Oh, that doesn't corrupt them at all.
Or another way of putting it, if you want to make it even more ridiculous sounding, I mean, not ridiculous sounding, because it is ridiculous, but if you really want to understand the foolishness of all of this, we'll say, people who are acting peacefully are corrupt and selfish.
People who are not using violence are corrupt and selfish.
Therefore, we need to give people monopoly of violence to stop that.
We need to give people a monopoly of violence to stop people who are peaceful from acting badly.
I mean, isn't that amazing?
Oh my god!
I mean, it makes you laugh, but it also makes you cry a little, doesn't it?
But I won't, because I'm not talking about a soldier's conscience.
So, think about that.
Just think about that.
This is sort of where the environmentalists and just about everybody who talks about state regulation is coming from.
Because people acting peacefully are bad and selfish and corrupt and short-sighted and greedy for money and power, because people who are peaceful are greedy for money and power, we need to give people violence to solve that problem.
Well, good God!
If people acting peacefully are hungry for money and power, even if we accept this ludicrous argument that capitalists are going to voluntarily destroy the value of their own property, They're doing it peacefully, at least.
They're not shooting anyone to get that property.
They're not passing any regulations, or forcing people to subsidize them, or forcing people to invest, or forcing people to work for them.
I'm not talking about state agencies here, or those who suck off the big business welfare schemes.
We're just talking about free market companies, because this is who they really have a problem with.
So, nobody's forcing anyone to do anything in a free market company, but those are the people you really have to, because their selfishness is just so destructive.
Their voluntary cooperation is just so destructive.
And the way to solve that problem of corruption and destruction and the destructiveness that arises out of the lust for power and money is to give people guns!
And not just guns, but all the guns!
We need to give them the guns, we need to give them the Air Force, we need to give them the Navy, we need to give them the Marines, and the Ground Forces, and the Scuds, and the helicopters, and the aircraft carriers.
If we give people all of these unbelievably destructive toys, up to and including atomic bombs, Then don't you know we've really solved the problem of the corruption of power?
Oh my god, it's just too funny for words.
Oh man.
People, people, people.
The things that we believe, with a straight face.
I mean, I gotta tell you, it's pretty funny.
At least I find it very funny.
We're going to solve corruption with the ability to kill at will.
We're going to solve the problem of the lust for power with giving people the power to kill whoever they want.
No, it's just too awful.
And when you think about these, the effects of this have of course been exactly what you would anticipate.
Human beings are susceptible to the lust for power and greed, which is exactly why you need a free market.
People are susceptible to bribery.
People are susceptible to letting money and power go to their heads.
People are corrupted by force.
They are corrupted by the ability to use violence.
Everybody always and permanently has this susceptibility.
And why?
Well, because we're organic beings and organic beings always want to maximize their intake while minimizing their output, right?
You want to maximize the amount of resources you can get under your control while minimizing the amount of effort that you have to put into getting those resources.
And violence bypasses the natural interaction of that and becomes a win-lose situation where you take property and resources from other people Through the threat of force, or force itself, with nothing to recompense them with.
And therefore it's a parasitical but valid biological strategy which always corrupts.
Because the first thing you have to do is destroy empathy.
Because when you use violence, and we'll talk about this more in another podcast, when you use violence you are automatically destroying your capacity for empathy.
Because you are using violence which says, I want resources for free.
Well, of course, the person that you are using violence against, if you are correct, also wants resources for free, but isn't able to get them.
So your needs have to be satisfied, while other people's needs have to be entirely thwarted and destroyed.
And therefore you no longer have anything logically or morally in common with any other human being, and that's why violence produces such unbelievable isolation and addiction, and horror at the self.
I had, after I did decadence and empathy, in which I talked about the conscience of a soldier, Somebody wrote to me, who was a soldier, completely destroyed.
And it wasn't, of course, mine.
I'm just pointing out the facts, at least as I see them.
But this poor gentleman was basically saying that he wasn't prepared to do something like adopt Iraqi children, because he has to believe that his life just sort of has a reason which he can't understand, which makes everything is going to make sense.
He just has to be patient and so on.
And really that is just a nihilistic waiting for death kind of attitude that is just absolutely horrifying and speaks of the amount of destruction that occurs within a human soul through the use of violence.
And so the idea that you're going to solve the problems of lust for power and lust for control and lust for resources through the granting of monopolistic violent power is just unbelievably hellish.
And it is an illusion that we as a species pay for with the deaths of hundreds of millions of people every single century.
And it's the plague.
It is the plague.
This belief that you solve the problems of peacefulness with violence, that you solve the problem of corruption with violence, that you solve the problem of exploitation through the granting of a monopoly of the use of force is the grandest and most destructive and vile of human illusions.
If there was a devil, this is exactly what he is whispering into the ear of every human being.
That you solve the problems of corruption with brutality.
That you solve the problems of pacifism with violence.
That you solve the problems of choice with coercion.
And the free market is the exact opposite, and that's why it's so important to keep talking about the free market as the solution to these problems.
And it also does speak, I think, very strongly to the grip that this illusion has upon us as a species.
This is the cancer.
This is the cancer of our species, this illusion.
And until we work to really identify its cause and uproot it and let go of salvation fantasies like God or the state or entities like that, we will simply continue forever to eat our own children to strike out against ourselves perpetually and eternally.
Environmentalism is one of the greatest of these sorts of problems and just one of the bare statistics that I've quoted today should give anybody pause who's thinking about the value of human life or the value of the environment.
Because it's not like the mosquitoes are a whole lot happier because they get to kill all those children.
But I can guarantee you that the empathy that we should feel for the parents in this situation should vastly outweigh any concerns we have about letting the free market take over the disposition of property.
Because the government is never going to be able to do it.
Force will never solve the problem of corruption.
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