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March 10, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:27
135 Pens and Swords Part 2: Parasites
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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is twenty past five on March the 10th, 2006.
I hope that I'm going to make it home.
I'm driving on vapor at the moment.
I'm heading to an aerobics class with Christina for It's six o'clock and I don't want to stop to get gas because where I am the only gas to get to is quite knotted up with traffic.
So my gas light is on and we're coasting on fumes and hopefully it'll only be a half hour podcast.
And not something considerably longer as I wait for the Automobile Association to come and get me out of the middle of traffic.
So I hope you're doing well.
I'm going to continue chatting about the gripping, nay, almost death-defyingly exciting world of government finances, just because I do think it's a very interesting topic.
And it is something that sort of permeates like a food coloring in water.
It permeates into our very lives and colors all of our decisions.
And it's something that, when you try to understand the real effects that state coercion have, The obvious ones, the drug prison gulags, the obvious ones are there, they're in your face and you can understand them.
But that's not really the purpose, that's not really the main purpose of the state.
The main purpose of the state is to tinker in a corrosively, insidiously, underhanded way, to tinker with everybody's finances and to steal, with as little imposition and as little violence as possible, the sort of lifeblood from everybody.
And that's really where they get their greatest power.
Because where they can do things like manipulate the money supply, they get enormous benefits without having to pay the overhead of the police.
This is sort of very important.
In the cost-benefit analysis, the state, those who run the state, or let's just talk about the state as a logical entity, because I'm not saying again that there's any nefarious mustachioed twiddling evil bureaucrats with the white board talking about the general taxpaying population using little sheep images to figure out how best to shear us and drain us from our existence.
But the state as a logical entity, it wants to gain the greatest amount of resources as a sort of parasitical entity.
It wants to gain the greatest amount of resources with the least amount of effort.
And the best, by far the best way to do that is through something like the manipulation of the money supply or through deficit financing.
Oh, that's a big favorite because the existing taxpayers might fight back.
Future generations aren't going to fight back at all.
I mean, when I say fight back, I don't really mean take arms against the government because it's so completely unnecessary to take up arms against the government.
I mean, the Soviet Union fell because Well, I mean, a variety of reasons, but sort of briefly, it fell because it was called evil, finally, openly, by Reagan.
And I'm not going to give him much credit for anything other than that.
But he absolutely and openly called it evil.
He told Gorbachev to tear down this wall.
He wasn't just giving them wheat and trade subsidies and making posturing noises about how bad the Soviet Empire was.
And also, because the younger generation who grew up in Russia didn't grow up with the same belief in this silly system, or this evil system, that their parents had.
I mean, the first generation of revolutionaries is really committed to the revolution.
The next generation, a little bit more so, they've been sort of raised as firebrands and they still believe in some of the possibilities that the socialist or fascistic or totalitarian revolution can provide.
But the last generation, Oh, they grow up in a squalid crap hole, and they know it's a squalid crap hole, and they have no loyalty from an ideological or moral standpoint to the system, and therefore they're more than happy to give the slight push that such a rotting system as communism takes to go down.
They'll just give it a push without really looking back.
And if you have any doubt about this, and again I'm not talking about the people whose, you know, dads are in Iraq or anything, But if you want to sort of verify this, just talk to younger people and probe their belief in state virtue.
It's really not very strong.
I was sort of surprised at this.
I was at a party of... It doesn't really matter.
What do you care?
I was at this gathering and I was doing my normal asking people questions about ethics and politics, which get me invited to so many parties I can barely even tell you.
And I noticed that the younger people, when I would talk to them about the evils of socialized medicine, they were like, yeah, I mean, sure.
I get it.
I mean, we can't change it, but I can understand that it's a pretty bad system.
So they're hopeless, but they're realistic.
They're realistic about the virtue and hopeless about the solution, which is a step forward, I think, because at least they are no longer buying into the virtue of the system.
They recognize it as a situation where Power is what is holding the system in place.
Once you get people to start disbelieving in the virtue of violence, then the days of violence are numbered.
It just happens.
To talk about how much the state wants to put out in terms of effort, rather, compared to how much it wants to take in in terms of money, there's really nothing better than deficit financing and then the preying upon the general citizen's income through things like inflation and printing of the money supply and so on.
Everything else sort of a means to an end to that.
If it wasn't for that, the state would really have a tough time surviving.
The state would really have a tough time flourishing if it wasn't for those two things.
And we know that because the government always eats up the future by preying upon these two things.
So I think it's important to understand that the state primarily rests upon financial manipulation.
So, for instance, and I'm trying to remember all the podcasts I've done before.
I don't think I've talked about this particular run-through, but if I have, I do apologize.
I'll try and keep it under 5.6 or so minutes in length, so that you'll know exactly how to fast-forward.
Go!
The idea of state manipulation of currency is something that is as old as the government.
It's as old as the state itself.
Let's look at something like the Roman Empire.
What happened at the end of the Roman Empire?
Well, at the beginning, you know, it was a free trade and it sort of had a A capitalist base to it in some ways, and so the only reason it flourishes, the only reason any society flourishes is because there's freedom.
So they had the freedom, and that was good, and then they ended up growing and growing and taking over more and more of the countries in this sort of mad imperialistic way.
And in the beginning this was beneficial, much as it was in the British Empire.
It was beneficial in the beginning, and the reason that it was beneficial in the beginning is that it threw down trade barriers.
Carthage and the Peloponnesians and all these people who surrounded the Roman Empire had all these ridiculous trade barriers.
And so uniting Rome under one currency, one set of trade rules and so on, did actually create an enormous amount of wealth.
So that's one of the reasons that the ancient world had some respect for the Roman Empire and there weren't revolutions all over the place.
There's an absolutely hilarious scene in an absolutely hilarious movie called The Life of Brian, which I'm sure most of you are acquainted with, or if you're not, stop listening to this podcast.
Go out right now and rent it because it's hilarious.
Where these revolutionaries are saying amongst each other, what has Rome ever done for us?
And one of them is like, Nothing.
And another one's like, yeah, all they do is steal from us.
And another one says, wine.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, the wine.
They gave us the wine.
Peace, roads, good order, government, the market, currency.
And they went through all these things.
And they're talking about all the benefits that Rome has brought to their civilization, or the Roman Empire.
And finally, one of them says, okay, except for wine, the roads, common currency, productive trade laws, blah blah blah blah blah, what else?
What have the Romans ever done for us?
And one guy's like, the aqueduct!
Which I thought was just hilarious.
So this is the kind of, the reason why that's funny is that there's a certain amount of truth in it.
Human beings have no loyalty to their local masters.
They have loyalty to better conditions.
And so, when you get something like the British Empire coming into India and getting rid of things like the sutti, which is the burning of the wife when the husband dies, It's not like the wives are really disappointed.
People think there's all this loyalty to existing power structures.
There's really not.
There's loyalty to a better life.
If there was all this loyalty to existing power structures, you'd never have immigrants.
You'd never have people fleeing the old world to come to America because they'd be so all fired up and loyal to the old order.
People are not loyal to the old order at all.
And that, I think, is quite important when you start thinking about the effects that empires have when they spread in the initial benevolent stages, right, where they're sort of throwing over the old and corrupt local state systems and oligarchies.
I mean, in India there were like 5,000 princes and principalities and It was a complete mess.
You couldn't transfer goods across any of these boundaries without significant taxation and tariffs.
And this was all destroyed by the British and they sort of put in a wider trading area and so on.
So I'm not saying that the Empire is good, but a lot of times it's better than what's gone on before.
So Rome had this initial flourish of money and arms and prowess that came around from the free market within southern Italy.
And then they spread that free market through military means, which can happen if you're going into a very corrupt surrounding area.
And then, of course, what inevitably began to happen, as is happening to the American empire right now, is that you create this political class of people who make their money off military conquest and so on, the military-industrial complex.
And so what happened in Rome was that Rome relied on a forced army.
So they had conscription and you would sort of get taken away for 20 years to go and serve in the Roman army, which was a pretty crummy life.
And they also could really only gather up these people from cities.
So the only way that they could really coerce young men into joining the army was to scoop them up from cities.
Similarly, given the primitive nature of communications and transportation in the Roman Empire, they could only gather taxes.
from within cities as well.
And that's sort of important to understand, that taxes could only be gathered from cities.
So, if you're a Roman ruling senator or senatorial republic, you are absolutely dependent and you absolutely require that people live in cities, because that's where you're getting your soldiers and that's where you're getting your taxes.
And those two are not unrelated, right?
The fact that you're scooping up soldiers from your own population means that you don't have to pay for mercenaries.
Mercenary armies are very expensive and also they tend to be a little bit uncontrollable because they tend to also pillage pretty significantly.
So you want to get your soldiers through your draft and you want to be able to pay them through taxing the people in the cities.
So as Rome began to increase its uh... empire uh... sort of horizontally or geographically that was one thing and it was relatively cheap to do it because the people who were in the surrounding countries were like okay so they've got funny kilts but the Rome has given us the uh... the roads and the wine and the currency and the protection from local despots and we have actually appeals to a court of law and Roman law is fantastic and it really was an enormously immense
and powerful and wonderful achievement of human thought.
The sort of initial rounds of Roman jurisprudence which were then rediscovered in the 14th century as the cities began to expand throughout Europe as well.
But they had access to a kind of justice that they just hadn't had access to before, and they kind of liked it.
So they were kind of happy.
Now, when Rome ran out of its capacity to expand horizontally, as it always happens, the lines of supply get too long, you start running into external enemies that are larger than you can take on, and so what happens is this military-industrial complex expands horizontally.
and takes over more and more territory and then it runs out of the capacity to expand and then it starts expanding vertically.
And by that what it means is it begins to increase taxes among its own population.
So it gets more taxes by conquering more people and everybody's relatively happy, right?
Because the wave of expansion goes past you and all the soldiers keep moving past you and you're just left with the civil administrators and the bureaucrats and the judges and so on who aren't the end of the world, at least compared to what you had before.
Which were the petty local princes who were just, you know, monsters.
So, as the Roman Empire spreads, or as all empires spreads horizontally, things are relatively okay.
It's relatively cheap to keep the empire going and, you know, things are chugging along all right.
Now, what happens then is you run bump up against the edge of your empire and you still have this incredible need, this insatiable need for revenue.
Because you've got a state that was growing because you were conquering new lands and getting new taxes.
And then when you run up against the edge of your bathtub, so to speak, you then start filling the bathtub vertically because you've got no spillover anymore.
So you start to increase taxes and regulations upon your existing citizens.
And this is where the fall of the empire always occurs because of sort of two reasons.
The first reason is that you begin a death spiral, because it's relatively cheap to run an empire if you are a relatively benign and just ruler.
So if your taxes are low and the law court system is good, then people are like, well, okay, they're Roman bastards.
But, you know, it's still better than it was before.
We can live with it.
But when you run up against the edge of your empire and then have to start expanding vertically, then you have to increase taxes and increase regulations.
And you have to start passing more and more bad laws, both to oppress the population into giving you more taxes, and also to create jobs for bureaucrats.
And also bureaucrats at this point aren't getting any more money, so they like to pass bad laws so that they can get bribes and stuff like that.
So, whereas the initial wave of Roman conquest washed away the destructive local lords and the petty principalities, what happens later is that Rome begins to infest all of the local areas with these Byzantine rules and high taxes.
And they also start plucking the sons of the lands they've conquered up for 20 years to put them in the army to attempt a battle against the Goths and all the people who are outside the empire.
That they're having trouble conquering.
And so, what initially starts as, oh, thank God, they got rid of the local sultan and gave me a much better system of justice and property rights.
And now, it's really nice.
It's sort of back to square one.
Now, two of my sons have to go into the military for 20 years.
And my taxes have gone up, you know, to triple what they were 10 years ago.
And so suddenly, it doesn't seem like such a good idea to be in the Roman Empire anymore.
So you start to get resistance.
You start to get people either actively resisting, slingshots to the centurion's head, that kind of stuff, or you start to get them passively resisting.
And what that means is that they start to slither away from the cities and enter into the gray market and evade taxes and bribe people not to collect taxes.
And so you have to send more troops there to quell both the overt and the covert rebellions to round up the people who are evading taxes.
And so what happens is your tax base begins to diminish at the same time as your costs of Policing the empire begin to go up, and this becomes an enormous vicious circle.
So the more you have to send local troops and local centurions, local garrisons in to quell both overt and covert rebellions, the more people both want to overtly and covertly rebel, and therefore the more you need to send in in terms of troops.
And so this is where the first death spiral really comes into empires.
The second death spiral comes into empires through this mechanism, which is that because you're scooping up your centurions from the cities, and you're also scooping up your taxes from the cities, what happens is that you begin to have young men move out of the city.
So you say, okay, well, I'd really like to be a cool bohemian chic writer in the middle of downtown wherever.
But instead, I guess I'm going to have to go and be a farmer and get out of the city and go join my brothers on this farm where we've got slaves to do the work, we're kind of in the middle of nowhere, and it's not quite as chic and bohemian as being in the city, but it's a heck of a lot more chic and bohemian than being dragged into the army for 20 years.
So you get people beginning to move out of the cities because they really find that the draft is too oppressive and the taxes are too high.
So they move out of the cities and they give up on all the trade and they begin to become more self-sufficient.
They give up access to Roman law but Roman law has become pretty predatory so it's really not that big of a sacrifice.
So what happens then?
Well, Rome needs lots and lots of troops to quell the rising covert and overt rebellions within the empire.
But unfortunately, one of the covert rebellions that's occurring is young men are moving out of the city, which means that they can't scoop them up for the army.
So they have a big problem because they then have to start paying mercenaries.
And they have to start paying mercenaries to replace the young men who aren't so And the problem is that their costs are then going up really quickly.
Because instead of being able to just snatch up men and use them as slaves, they now have to pay them, and mercenaries are pretty expensive.
And mercenaries are also kind of dangerous, as we'll find out in a few minutes.
So...
At the same time as your cash requirements are going up enormously, because you have to hire a mercenary army to replace the people moving out of the cities, the people who are moving out of the cities are also not paying any taxes, right?
It's worth sending a tax collector to a town to pick up a couple of thousand denarii, or whatever the heck they were.
Shekels?
Armstrong X Leppa?
It's also worth sending it to a city.
It's really not worth sending it to a farm.
It's not worth sending some guy to a farm.
Because, you know, like has happened in China, sometimes the tax collectors go to pick up the money from the farm and they don't really come back so much.
And the pigs have something to eat.
So they really don't find it very valuable.
It's not very cost-effective to send tax collectors around to farms where they could just sort of go missing, or not get paid, or the people just aren't home.
And what's it going to do?
Camp out on the doorstep.
But if you send it to a city, and you've got regulations, and you've got merchants who are trading, and you know where they live, and they can't survive without you, and you've got their bank accounts, or whatever, then you can do it.
But you really can't collect taxes in a rural community.
So they're facing this catastrophic situation in Rome towards the end, where they can't get the slave labor they need to run the armies through the draft, they have to behire all these mercenaries, so their costs in terms of cash outlays are going up enormously, and at the same time their tax base is shrinking, and they need more military to quell the rising covert and overt rebellions.
So, there's just simply no... I mean, this is just a time bomb.
There's absolutely no way that this can continue whatsoever.
And so, you know, what happens?
Well, the inevitable occurs, as you would exactly predict.
The mercenaries, the hundreds of thousands of mercenaries that are now in the pay of Rome, are out fighting the Visigoths and the Gauls and all of the people at the edge of the empire who are pushing back from its inevitable expansion.
And then one day, the Roman senator wakes up and wants to send his wagon loads of pay out to his mercenaries, and he opens up the treasury, the vault, at the center of Rome, and finds nothing but a couple of IOUs and a couple of dust bunnies, and that's about it.
So he stalls as best he can, but he can't pay the military.
Now mercenaries, they may enjoy war, but they don't do it for free.
So what happens is the mercenaries don't get paid.
And so what happens?
The mercenaries say, OK, I've now been fighting for you for two months, or three months, or four months, waiting for my pay.
You owe me 200 shekels, or denarii, or whatever you want to call them.
I guess you're not going to send them to me, so I'm going to come and get them from you.
And so all of the mercenary armies turned and joined up with the forces that were opposed to Rome, went to Rome, and sacked the living crap out of the city.
They stole everything that wasn't nailed down, and I guess a number of things that were, and that was really it for the Roman Empire.
And then, of course, you say, well, you know, you end up with, oh, a thousand years of the Dark Ages and blah blah blah, and of course, yeah, it was pretty dark, but gotta tell ya, the end of Rome was not that much fun either.
So, for a lot of people, they became freer when Rome fell, when all these mercenaries and their own legionaries and centurions hanging around, They did better after the fall of Rome, because Rome at this point was a sort of Soviet dictatorship, right?
So it may not have been that much fun in Albania after the fall of Russia, but it was a heck of a lot more fun then, after the fall of Russia, than it was under Stalin, right?
So you've sort of got to compare things prior to post.
So, why am I talking about the Roman Empire?
These kinds of financial manipulations are at the heart of what it is to be a government.
So, in the Roman Empire, they tried all the same tricks that they're trying now, as every empire has done in history.
They tried watering down the gold.
They tried making the gold coins a little bit smaller.
They tried shaving here.
They tried shaving there.
They got the welfare state going, so people kept getting voted in.
They extended the servitude and increased the taxes on all the people.
They tried deficit financing.
They tried...
They tried running up the currency.
They tried producing more coins.
They tried counterfeiting.
They tried everything that you could imagine to just sort of stretch things out a little bit longer.
And it's hard for us to really picture this because we don't have the capacity to print money or anything like that.
Or if you do, you might get caught.
The government never will get caught except by the markets and by reality in the long run.
So, these kinds of financial tricks which governments use to prey upon the defenseless is the real heart and core of government.
And it is the area where the violence that the government has is the most volatile in the long run.
So, guys getting dragged off to jail for inoffensive drug charges, pretty bad, but fairly obvious.
People who have their entire livelihoods destroyed and their entire creative abilities undermined and wrecked because the government has undermined the economy by printing too much money or deficit financing.
This is where the real horror of society is.
At least if you are a drug dealer and you don't agree that the cops can arrest you, you can fight back and you can run away and you can do this.
But the problem with manipulations of the economy is that it's in the air.
It's like air pollution.
You can't get away from it.
You can't escape it.
You can't fight back.
You are just immersed in this vat of dissolving corruption and you can't get out or can't get away.
And so this is a real problem with governments.
This is where the real heart of government corruption is.
And this is why, of course, governments self-destruct.
You can't bribe your way out of it.
You can't make a deal with anyone.
It's just inflation is inflation.
It destroys your income and that's that.
So that's a very important thing to understand when you're opposing state power, opposing the brutality of the state, is to understand this insidious form of brutality, this insidious form of taxation, corruption and violence that takes place in the form of money manipulation and cash and stock manipulation.
cash manipulation and deficit financing and all this kind of stuff.
It's the real core because it's the highest gain and the lowest risk and the lowest visibility of violence that the government can achieve.
So of course the government loves that stuff a lot more than it loves everything else.
And everything else is kind of for this.
And the government is pretty smart about this stuff.
So for instance, I mean, you know, inflation was, or you may or may not know, depending on your age, Inflation was a terrible thing in the 1980s.
Your credit card was 26%.
My brother bought a condo from his father-in-law and his interest payments, his mortgage, was paying like 16% or 15% mortgage.
That's insane.
I got like a 4.5% mortgage and it's wonderful.
But he was stuck in this condo for years paying this ludicrous interest.
Now, of course, I'm sure you're fully aware now, having memorized my podcast from this morning, and we know for a fact that interest rates rise because inflation is rising.
So what happened was the governments began, they'd run up so much debt and they didn't want to raise taxes, so they're just printing off all this money.
And what happened was the markets kind of got smart.
So when the markets are kind of dumb, they'll sort of say, oh, I guess inflation's going up, doi doi doi.
Whereas if the markets are smart, then they kind of figure this out.
And once the game is up, you can't play it anymore, right?
So once the rules are known.
So what I mean by that is that there was a number of prominent economists, I think Milton Friedman was one, but I'm not positive, who basically proved that inflation is caused by the overprinting of money, the money supply, right?
And this is both the overprinting of overt money, I think sometimes called M1, which is the amount of money currently in circulation, and then there's also the money locked up in capital accounts and so on, which is the money in reserve, so like potential and kinetic energy.
And they prove that relationship between government financing, or overspending, or the printing of additional money, and inflation.
Now once the money markets figured this out, then the government didn't get that nice tidy two-year lag in the increase in inflation.
So what would happen before is the government would increase the printing of money, and it wasn't always the printing of money, but let's just say, the government would increase the printing of money, and then they'd get this nice two-year lag where they'd get to spend themselves into oblivion, and then there'd just be this inflation because it would sort of mysteriously appear in the economy as people sort of slowly began to dawn on them that there just wasn't that and then there'd just be this inflation because it would sort of mysteriously appear in the economy as people sort of slowly began to dawn on them that there just wasn't that
So what would happen is about halfway through a government's term, they would start campaigning for re-election or they'd start campaigning for the next guys or their parties for re-election.
So they'd start printing all this money and the economy would boom and everyone would be happy, and then they'd get re-elected and then the hangover would set in and then the economy would crash and there'd be a recession and everyone would be unhappy and then they'd be out, right?
So they tried this thing.
So what happened was, The markets finally figured this out relative to or based on the benefit or experience or explanation of a number of prominent economists.
I think the Nobel Prize was awarded for this particular stroke of genius.
So once the money markets figured this out, they kept a real close watch on the money supply.
And when the money supply increased, they'd go, oh, OK, well, let's hedge against inflation right now.
So they'd start raising rates and all that.
So it didn't work anymore.
So governments stopped doing it.
They also stopped doing it because what happened was, here in Canada it was ridiculous.
We have the highest per capita national debt except for the Italians, which is not a company you want to keep.
But what happened was, the government has this ridiculously high debt and when they printed all this money to pay off the debt and to pay off their government workers and all that, when they printed off all this money, what happened was inflation went up pretty quickly Now, when inflation goes up, interest rates go up, of course, and because interest rates went up so high, the government was paying an unbelievable amount of interest on the government debt.
It was like over 40 cents on the dollar was going just to pay the interest on the government debt.
So, of course, the government was like, OK, we had no problem screwing the taxpayers, but now we're getting screwed, and that's no fun!
So the government began to just cut back on the money supply.
And, of course, the markets responded and said, OK, you're cutting back on the money supply, so inflation's going to be less, so we can lower interest.
So they lowered interest rates, and so the government ended up paying much less on the national debt.
And, you know, everybody was relatively happy about that.
Except for the taxpayers, who were still shafted, and the future taxpayers, who were going to get further shafted by the national debt.
So these kinds of financial shenanigans that go on, this heavy, heavy corruption that goes on in these financial markets, very, very important to understand.
This is really right at the core of where government corruption has the worst effects of all, and the most insidious and destructive effects.
So it's very important to understand this kind of stuff, because when people talk about government corruption, they're often talking about like crooked cops and stuff like that, and all that stuff is pretty vile.
But it's kind of obvious, and you can also avoid it.
I mean, you can avoid going to jail by just obeying the laws, I mean, for the most part, assuming you're not caught up in some sort of accidental net.
But you can't avoid government manipulations of the money supply unless you end up just bartering goods, which of course nobody really does.
So there's just no way to escape this kind of stuff.
The government predations that go on in terms of the military and in terms of the police have a cost factor associated with them, which is the military and the police.
And of course, if the government ever really pisses off the military and the police, well, how long do you think Trent Lott's going to stand up against Norman Schwarzkopf and his armies, right?
Not very long.
So there's a risk also with this kind of stuff, as the Roman senators found out when they couldn't pay the mercenaries and the mercenaries came and killed them all and sacked Rome.
There's a certain amount of risk in the military.
However, punching in a keyboard and depositing $10 billion to some government account that you can then just start spending, you know, it's pretty risk-free.
It's, you know, you're not creating an army that might overthrow you.
It's going to be like no sack of Ottawa or sack of Washington DC by, you know, the numerical digits within the computer or the accountants who run them.
Not going to happen.
Fairly safe that way.
And the profit is enormous because the labor required to run an army and keep them paid and all that, it's pretty significant.
The amount of labor it takes to type 10 digits or 12 digits into a government bank account and say, hey, look, we just made some money.
And start spending it?
Well, that's pretty, you know, nothing, right?
So it's just perfectly counterfeiting.
It's a perfect transfer of goods based on illusory numbers.
And so really that's the core of government.
That's the core.
If you only want to get to the core of the evil that is within government and why governments exist.
It is exactly for this kind of corruption.
It is exactly for this kind of fraud and violence.
And of course I say that it's violence because if you try and do it yourself, right, a government can print money, fine.
It's actually legal.
It's a legal tender.
If I print money, I get thrown in jail, right?
So this is the turf that they really want to protect in the government.
This financial manipulation, this stuff that we were talking about this morning, the stuff that I've talked about with Rome, all of this stuff is right at the core of what we talk about when we talk about government.
And it is how government grows so much.
It is why government exists in the first place.
The military and all that, that's just an effect of all of this, right?
You can't have a military that just preys on the local population without all of this financial manipulation.
So the military is just a cover for the financial manipulation.
It's a reason for it.
If you look at the amount of money supply printing, or the printing of money, the increase in the money supply that's going on since the beginning of the Iraq war, you'll see that the worst legacy is not even going to be the wounded.
The worst legacy is going to be the destruction of the economy.
Thanks so much for listening, as always.
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