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June 8, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:32
273 Government Corruption and Reparations

Some subtle and explosive topics...

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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It's the 8th of June 2006.
You are enjoying, perhaps if you can hear this in the background, the fabulous sounds of airplanes and my neighbor mowing and some construction that's going on on the road because it's so nice to live out in suburbia where it's so quiet.
Actually, it normally is very quiet, but today's kind of loud.
So, in the spirit of not having to drive, I have a couple more news articles to deal with or to chat about.
One that I think is quite delightful is that yesterday there was prosecutors up here filed allegations against 17 accused under the Anti-Terror Act.
This is quite fascinating.
I'm going to read you a little bit and sort of tell you what I think.
So, in Brampton, this is Brampton, Ontario, a lawyer for a Toronto-area man arrested under anti-terrorism law says his client is accused of plotting to storm Parliament Hill, kill the Prime Minister, take hostages, and behead them unless the group's demands were met.
Gary Battasar, the lawyer for 25-year-old restaurant worker Stephen Chand, also known by his Muslim name Abdul Shakur, He emerged from court yesterday to tell reporters that Crown prosecutors had provided him with an eight-page summary of the charges against his client and 16 other men.
My client is being accused of plotting to storm the Parliament buildings, take hostages, and make demands to remove Canadian troops from Afghanistan and free Muslim prisoners.
This guy said he's supposed to have planned to behead hostages if his demands weren't met and to want to behead the Prime Minister.
The last thing was that they were going to storm the CBC building downtown in Toronto to take over communications to broadcast their message.
Mr. Chand is one of 17 men, all Muslims, who were arrested on Friday and charged with planning a terrorist attack somewhere in southern Ontario.
Police said the men were planning to build a simple but effective bomb using fertilizer and diesel fuel.
So, I just think this is quite fascinating.
It turns out one of the guys is also an ex-military fellow, and that's sort of interesting as well.
He used to be in the army. And I just think this is a very, very fascinating thing to look at.
If you just sort of look at the language of how this is reported.
So, of course, plotting.
To storm Parliament Hill, kill the Prime Minister, I mean, this is all very violent language, right?
Anti-terrorism laws, plotting, killing, beheading, the group's demands were met, and so on.
Now, this, of course, is how the media, which, of course, is closely allied to the state, this is how the media...
It talks about the issue of violence.
How does the media deal with the issue of violence?
So the fact that Canadian soldiers are out in Afghanistan and also in Iraq murdering Muslims is a noble defense of the realm.
This is the language that always frames these kinds of things.
And the Prime Minister, who orders these people against the will of a good majority of the Canadians to go to Afghanistan and to Iraq to go and murder Muslims, Canada, of course.
This is all, you know, noble and heroic.
And if you remember a little while back, I was talking about the praise that was being handed out to the sharpshooters who were murdering people from a mile or so distance.
This is all, you know, wonderful.
It's like golf. They're saving American lives and so on.
So you can go and shoot the guts out of Muslims or shoot the brains off the head of a Muslim out in Iraq.
And out in Afghanistan, if you're Canadian, and be praised.
It's all wonderful stuff. You can also go against the wishes of a good chunk of the Canadian population, send all these troops out.
You can threaten us with being thrown into jail and rape them if we don't pay our taxes to support the troops.
And that's all sort of noble, wonderful things.
But here, of course, we have, you know, that they're going to storm and murder and behead and so on.
And I just think it's just wonderful when you look at how this language is put together.
It really is quite fascinating to see how little objectivity there is in anything to do with this kind of stuff.
Now, of course, the other thing that's occurring as well is that this, of course, is the kind of violence that is most terrifying.
To the people in charge, politicians in power.
This is the kind of violence that is the most terrifying to them because they train these guys to go and kill whoever they point their fingers at, right?
So you go point over in Afghanistan, you get guys who'll hop on a plane and go and shoot whoever you call the bad guys over in Afghanistan and Iraq and so on.
So you get these cadres or groups of these sort of homicidal thugs who kill anyone that you point your finger at, and of course the great fear that you have, or that all political leaders have, is that one day these guys wake up and say, you know, I'm actually going to start acting.
Against those who have told me to go and kill people, right?
So this, of course, is going to be quite interesting to follow, and I will keep you posted as we go along with this particular process.
but I think it's going to be a very interesting thing to follow to see just how the violence gets reframed when instead of it being overseas and aimed against those who are designated as enemies when in a sense the gun that the politicians use it threatens to go off in their hand it'll be just fascinating to see how this violence is now rebroadcast as something unstable and crazy and beheadings and so on as if it really matters how somebody gets killed
I mean really whether you're beheaded or you're shot in the desert and left to die under the sun for an hour or two or a day or two beheading might be considered more humane so it's just fascinating to see the violence of the language that is occurring here it says here sources have told the National Post
this is the newspaper that reports this that the men were in an advanced stage of planning two attacks a truck bombing to destroy a significant building and an attack involving opening fire on a crowded public place So it's an attack, you see, when people fight back.
But when we go over there and kill Muslims, it is noble, bringing them freedom and so on.
But the moment that they even consider fighting back, that it is an attack.
And I just think that's wonderful, of course.
The violence is not justified on their side by the violence that is occurring on their country.
But... It's just fascinating to see how the language changes.
The moment that the gun gets turned back on us, suddenly the moral horror against violence comes out in a venomous spew.
So they're all very brave.
Dave, when it comes to sending fighters overseas to go and kill people in a distance where there's no personal threat, and yet when, of course, it comes back to their own soil, then they're horrified about violence and condemn it in the strongest possible terms.
It really is, to me, quite funny.
I mean, given the power imbalance between even the Canadian Armed Forces and this bunch of guys...
It's just funny to see that there's this horror of violence.
It really is like a black belt guy picking on like a 12-year-old bespectacled boy, and then the 12-year-old bespectacled boy manages to land a punch by sucker-punching the guy, and the guy is like, oh, how dishonorable, how horrifying, how violent, right? I mean, it really is quite funny to read.
So I'll keep you posted on how this develops.
But the fact that this guy was a reservist, and I think served for four years in this capacity, and underwent training at the hand of the state on how to use violence, and now is turning it against the state, it's just immensely funny to see how this hysteria and this absolute appalling opposition to violence, or this appalling approach to the problem of it's just immensely funny to see how this hysteria and this absolute appalling opposition to violence, or this appalling approach to We trained him to use violence, of course, but we meant for it to be pointed overseas, never, never, towards us.
This gun never is supposed to go off in our hands.
It's only supposed to be used to kill other people.
All right, so here's another tale about a Yusuf Yukana, who lived from 1949 to 2006.
Now, you probably don't know this gentleman by name, but I'm going to read to you a little bit about him.
And I want to sort of point out how a life can be completely destroyed by the state, or by a combination of state as power, so that the next time you hear somebody talking about how wonderful the state is and how it helps everybody and its cousin and its dog...
And keeps people safe and all that.
But you can think about this gentleman who went through some rather unpleasant things at the hands of the state in one form or another.
And I think it's worth understanding just how a human being can be ground into oblivion through the power of universal coercive state guns.
So, Yusif Yukanez was born on July the 1st, 1949, into a comfortable life in Zaku, Iraq, a small city that straddles the Kaaba River in the northern part of the country, about 10 kilometers from the Turkish border.
Yusif's father was a mayor of one of the outlying villages and ran a small lumber company, wealthy enough to send his son to school and later help him establish his own business as a contractor.
Yusif was bright and well-liked.
He learned four languages, Syrian, Arabic, Kurdish, and English, which he taught himself from words he picked up on the street.
Now, I don't know what your ability is in terms of language, but I don't think I could pick up four if you paid me a bazillion dollars.
So, this guy is fairly bright, obviously, and capable and ambitious.
In 1970, Yusif married Selma Warder, and they began building a large family.
They had two sons and two daughters.
In 1982, the family moved to Baghdad, where Yusif set up an alcohol distribution company selling alcohol to stores and baths in northern Iraq.
Life was good, says his son, now 26 and a carpenter like his older brother.
They had a large home, much bigger than the typical Canadian house, and a car, which was a luxury at the time.
So, this guy obviously has some entrepreneurial, some business skills, He's mostly self-taught.
He's obviously producing something of value to people that they want to go and have a drink after a hot day of Ramadan, I guess.
Just kidding. I know they can't drink alcohol, but, I mean, there was some place where they could sell this up here, I guess, in the Kurdish areas.
But Yousif's life and the country he knew changed forever in 1990.
With the first Gulf War, Iraq was thrown into a depression.
Business dried up, it seemed.
His two sons would surely end up in the military if the family stayed in Iraq.
Over there, there were no jobs.
Everything was going bad, says Ayman, one of his sons.
Yusuf decided the family would flee.
So, this is, of course, not exactly the first problem that he's facing from the state, but a pretty significant one.
He's got four daughters, a big house, a successful business, a car, and he's doing very well.
And then, out of nowhere, this, you know, from his standpoint, with no control, this Iraq-Gulf war is set up, of course, now.
There's lots of contentions about the start of this, and I want to get into this in great detail, but...
Apparently, Saddam Hussein believed at least that he'd received permission from the U.S. ambassador to go and invade Kuwait, which was originally part of Iraq, which was also doing this slanted drilling to take away the oil from the reserves that were nominally under Iraqi soil.
So this guy, his whole life is thrown into chaos.
His job dries up and everything changes.
From northern Iraq they set out on foot through the mountains towards Turkey.
It was dangerous to remember Ayman, who was eleven at the time, so I was scared.
You don't know who's going to come and kill you.
The army? The people walking you?
You don't know. Yusuf made sure that his family was safe by paying off the men who were guiding them through the mountains, with a group of about 150 others.
They arrived at a Red Cross camp in Turkey two full days after leaving Iraq.
There it was decided that the family would move to Canada, where a cousin could sponsor their immigration application.
In September 1992, so this is two years after the start of the war, so just an enormous amount of time and energy that's just wasted with having to flee one government and being sheltered in Turkey through another government and then having to go through all this paperwork to just go and move to a land owned by another government.
So, he arrives in Canada.
It was safe, but not exactly what he had imagined.
For 12 years, the family lived in an apartment building in North Toronto.
Life was hard, and Yusuf struggled to find work that suited him and his training.
He drifted between as many as 50 different jobs, once at a meatpacking plant, once as a delivery man.
The work was tough and not what he was accustomed to.
A few jobs paid more than $7 an hour.
He was struggling, says Ayman.
He used to work for maybe one week.
But then he couldn't work. He wasn't able, maybe in his mind, maybe it was the conditions.
In recent months, he had been on welfare.
I mean, it does sound, I mean, it's not a lot of information to go by here, but it does sound like this guy kind of had his spirit broken, wasn't able to find his feet here, and who knows what had occurred to him psychologically through all of these changes and brutalities that he had experienced.
At times, Yusuf's situation in Canada troubled him, but he was at least glad to be safe and glad that his family was safe.
His sons were working and I was busy.
So, okay. In Iraq, Yusif had had many friends.
One day, while out buying food, he was arrested by the Iraqi police.
Again, here we have sort of state intervention.
Not an uncommon occurrence at the time, but still something to be feared.
It could mean getting involuntarily drafted into the army.
His wife was away, attending a funeral, so he assured his children, don't worry, I'll be back in five minutes.
Sure enough, he came back not five minutes later.
He had told the police he would call a well-connected friend of his if they didn't release him, says Ayman.
That's how well-known he was back home.
He used to get away with everything. In Canada, Yusif led a more solitary existence, keeping to himself and occasionally going to Woodbine Race Track to watch the horses.
In recent years, he started playing bingo.
My dad just wanted to kill time.
He didn't have much to do, says Ayman.
Yusif played bingo alone and often came wearing a suit and tie, says the owner of the Finch Bingo Country, where he played a few times a week.
He was always friendly and quiet.
On the night of Friday, April 7th, Yusif won $1,000 at the bingo hall, not the biggest sum that night, but still one of the top prizes.
At 10.10pm, after collecting his cash winnings, he left for home.
Yusif likely did not notice the four heavyset women who followed him from the bingo hall into the parking lot.
As he approached his car, they confronted him and demanded his money.
When he refused, they punched and kicked him repeatedly and ran away with the cash.
Yusif managed to make his way back inside the bingo hall, but minutes later he died.
He was fifty-six.
Six months earlier, Yusif had had heart bypass surgery and had not fully recovered.
The exact cause of his death is still not known.
At week's end, his attackers had not been found.
Now...
The relationship between the welfare state and bingo, or the welfare state, and gambling, of any kind, lotteries, bingo, and so on, is very, very clear, at least to me and the people and the research that I've done, that the lotteries which are maintained and licensed by the state,
and in Canada, at least, lotteries that are run by the state, the relationship between people on welfare, which is a kind of economic grey area or fantasy land, And the other grey area fantasy land of lotteries is pretty well known.
I did do some follow-up research on this story, and it turned out that one of the women a couple of weeks later turned herself in.
The police did nothing, of course, to try and find these women for a variety of reasons, but mostly because there's no incentive for them to get paid any rewards for finding this guy's killer.
These are the killers of this guy.
They were a mixture, I think, three black women, one white woman, all heavy set, all at bingo.
I guarantee you, probably, well, I guarantee you they're all in welfare, and I would be very shocked if they didn't all have a bunch of kids between them without fathers in the picture, all of the sort of typical hallmarks of the welfare state.
And so they went and tried to shake this guy down for what would amount to $250 a piece for...
For each of them, they killed a man.
And so the final indignity of this man's life is not only was he killed by those who were raised by the state in terms of state education, whose life choices are completely warped by state intervention in terms of the welfare state and child support, child supplements, and so on.
But also, even after he gets murdered at the hands of these welfare people, He ends up with the police not lifting a finger to go and find his murderers.
Even though...
I mean, how bright do you have to be to kill a guy in a place where you're frequented?
What would it take? It would take, like, three questions to ask who these people were and to go and arrest them.
It would really take no time at all.
The other thing, of course, is that these people...
There was a videotape of all of this kind of stuff as well, and so the police could have just looked that up.
But, of course, what's their incentive?
What do they care about? They're not going to lift a finger.
And so this guy dies, is murdered by these four women, and the only thing that ever occurs is that one of the women turns herself in, and she'll probably get some sort of horribly reduced sentence and not have to worry about too much of anything.
And so I just thought this is a very sort of simple example of how somebody's life...
I mean, this guy's never going to come.
I mean, you get one life. You get one life, and this guy's life is completely destroyed altogether.
By a variety of state systems.
And I just think that's sort of important when people talk to you about the benevolence of the state to think of this gentleman.
Now, this gentleman's life is reproduced millions upon millions upon billions of times the world over.
So, in India, you know, if you want to go and start a business, it takes years of red tape and bribery and so on.
So, you know, there are, you know, hundreds of millions of people in India who probably have, or at least millions, tens of millions of people in India have great ideas for jobs and they can't We're good to go.
It doesn't benefit them, and it certainly doesn't benefit us.
All of these people who are ground down into a fine mental dust by all of this brutal state power, they could be inventing cures for cancer, they could be coming up with the next iPods, they could be doing an enormous amount to make our lives better and more fun.
And healthier. And they're ground down into these sort of horrible little state pastes by the grinding gears of state power.
And this is billions upon billions of people the world over are simply ground down and abused into this kind of claustrophobic, stifling, tiny, destroyed little lives.
And this is the reality of state power.
I mean, this is what you get when you sign up to have the state help.
You with prescription drugs and so on, you end up with this kind of stuff.
And I think that's just something we need to remember when we're talking to people.
Now, there's an article here.
These are all from the Maclean's.
This is from the Maclean's of May 29, 2006.
This, I think, is just wonderful.
There was a gentleman who was a high-level bureaucrat in Canada a little while back, George Radwanski his name was, and he ran up these unbelievable travel and hospitality expenses, all on the taxpayer's dime, of course. And in 2003, his half a million dollar in travel and hospitality bill expense accounts finally came before a parliamentary committee in 2003.
So, of course, the politicians shun him.
Editorialists formulated Fraser, this woman who runs the Auditor General, her name is Sheila Fraser, was called into audit Redwansky's expenses, and the RCMP, acting on flagrant abuses she uncovered, opened their investigation.
And this is, of course, wonderful.
So there's a huge scandal about the amount of money that the government is spending, the amount of taxpayer money that the government is spending.
And so, as I've mentioned before, what happens is people say, yes, this is terrible, mistakes were made, but we've got a system in place now that has made everything better.
And then, of course, there's not even a pause in the amount of spending that goes on under the hood.
So I thought I would actually give you some sort of evidence of this theory of mine or this approach of mine.
So, this scandal, pundits and politicians assure us, has produced a cultural shift.
No more meaningless junkets, no more boozy dinners as proof.
They point to rules passed by the Paul Martin government, as the Prime Minister prior to the current one, requiring all senior bureaucrats, cabinet members, parliamentary secretaries, and ministerial staff to post their travel and hospitality expenses on departmental websites.
It's called proactive disclosure, and it gave Canadians their first ever chance to scrutinize at the click of a mouse The airline tickets and meal tabs of their top-level federal employees.
For this and other reforms, Canadians owe Radwanski a debt of gratitude, declared Pat Martin, a new Democrat, that's like our Democrats as the left-wing guys, who sat on the Commons Committee that uncovered his misspending.
People are far more scrupulous with expenses now, he told the Ottawa citizen.
If anything, the pendulum may have swung too far...
Right? So, these are all the people saying, well, look, we've passed new rules, you see?
And now we're just being more careful, right?
So, this is just words, right?
Easy to say. Actually, a closer examination of the thousands of expense reports online suggests that the proverbial pendulum has barely swung at all.
So, between December 2003 and December 2005, 99 senior officials spent more than $100,000 each on travel and hospitality, including nine who topped $200,000, and one, the ambassador of France, who broke the $300,000 mark.
But good luck finding that figure on a government website.
Parliament's idea of disclosure is to post a melange of unrelated, unaudited, and in some cases incomplete figures that offer neither context nor comfort.
No grand totals, not by individual, nor by department, and certainly not government-wide.
A citizen curious to know how much senior immigration officials spend on travel and hospitality will need a few spare hours and a calculator.
So, this magazine combed through the data, used the spreadsheet to tally rank and average the expenditures of more than 1,700 senior ministers and civil servants, totaling $46 million.
Buried in the online filings is an array of dubious purchases, from a $12,000 plane ticket to South Africa, to scores of pricey airfares of a senior civil servant who commuted between Vancouver and Ottawa.
There's a $7,600 bill for a cocktail party at $12,000.
A dollar bill to send a special envoy from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to a meeting on the remote Pacific shores of Easter Island.
Departmental audits show similar patterns of access and bungling among rank-and-file employees, justice officials upbraided.
For paying out a $16,000 fee after the last-minute cancellation of a conference at a luxury hotel.
Fisheries workers spending $81,000 more than they should have on plane tickets that could have been had for a fraction of the price.
Missing receipts, unapproved claims, trips that look suspiciously like holidays, all part of a billion-dollar travel and hospitality regime that after more than a decade of attempts at reform, federal bean counters still admit they don't fully grasp.
So, the federal government has a $1.2 billion travel budget.
The government lacks the tracking and discipline any company spending a modicum of that amount would employ to control the outflow of cash.
It's a recipe for abuse, say critics, and for taxpayer anger.
There's a price to be paid for exploited behavior by civil servants, says Arthur Schaefer, director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba, a public servant himself, of course.
And that price is public trust.
Civil servants are in a trust relationship with the Canadian public.
And that's much more important than the actual cost of first-class travel or fancy wines or decadent dinners.
So see you have a professor of ethics saying that civil servants are in a trust relationship with the Canadian public rather than civil servants will shoot you if you don't pay for their expense accounts.
So that's sort of like saying that a rape victim is in a trust relationship with her rapist.
Because I suppose he's supposed to be gentle.
Maybe bring her some flowers before doing what he's there to do.
So this one guy, a former regional director of Indian and Northern Affairs in BC, his name is John Watson.
He was asked to come and work at the Capitol for a year.
So actually, he spent more than two years using airlines, as you or I might use a subway, commuting between Ottawa and his home in Vancouver, which is, I guess, a four- or five-hour flight.
An astounding cost to taxpayers of almost a quarter million dollars.
I mean, that's really quite remarkable.
So how would that work?
So you get a... You get a job for two years away, and you get to charge other people for the commute that you spend to fly back and forth between your job and another city.
Fantastic. I think that what you do to create these kinds of names is you just basically reach into a grab bag of random words, and there it is, your justification.
Donna Petrchichenko, a senior fisheries official, spent $112,000 visiting Pacific Rim countries over two years as Canada's representative at and for a time chairperson of a little-known APEC group called the Integrated Oceans Management Forum.
Her travels, including the $12,000 trip to Easter Island, were part of an ocean conservation initiative.
To date, however, the group has produced little more than vaguely worded reports.
While I don't think that's really fair, It's also produced a number of wonderful memories for Donna Petrichenko.
And has really enhanced her travel photo album, and that's certainly worth it to me.
And of course, it's wonderful to hear the justifications that these people come up with.
September the 20th, 2005, Anne McClellan, then the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, and a bunch of other people, ran up almost $2,000 at Noche, a posh Toronto restaurant, during a four-hour dinner meeting to discuss the Windsor border file.
When contacted by McLean, Swartman described the dinner as a rare opportunity for department heads to, quote, hash out this issue together.
Wine was served, she said, but it wasn't charged to the public purse.
Still, that means each person's dinner cost taxpayers an average of $167, not including alcohol.
I recognize that, Swartman said when told that some Canadians might be offended by such a hefty bill.
Had I known it was going to be as expensive of a restaurant, I probably would have gone elsewhere, but you don't really find that out until you get there.
Now that, to me, is wonderful.
This is the Minister of Emergency Preparedness, and she can't figure out ahead of time how much a restaurant is going to cost or when she gets the actual menu, find out that it's a little bit more expensive and do something to respond to this emergency.
This is the Department of Justice, of course.
This is just wonderful. The internal auditors discovered other deficiencies in the Department of Justice.
In March 2005, after examining 91 hospitality files, they found that 35% contained not a smidgen of proof that the event in question was authorized.
Travel policies were also ignored.
Before leaving on a business trip, every bureaucrat is supposed to fill out a travel authority and advance form, TAA, a standard document that outlines who, what, where, when, why, and how.
Auditors examined 331 such forms, including that every single one failed to comply in one way or another with Treasury Board rules.
Among the violations, nine employees flew business or executive class, but they were not entitled to that privilege.
So all this, I think, is just wonderful and is a good example of how it's amazing to me that people say that the government should, for some reason, manage the issues around private businesses.
It's what happens when people get lost in this fantasy of omniscient and benevolent authority, which, of course, is based on both parental corruption that is hidden from the child and religious corruption that is hidden from the child.
There's this idea that there's this sort of authority out there that's perfect and virtuous and only interested in your No particular self-interest.
There's no self-interest of its own.
I think that's just hilarious because, of course, it's got nothing to do with that.
All you need to do is look at the facts.
And, of course, if the government follows its own rules to the letter and is enormously respectful of waste, then you could make the argument that there would be something that private businesses could learn.
But when people see this kind of stuff and then get focused on things like Tyco and World Crossing or whatever it is and Enron and so on, it's just kind of funny, right, to say that The Mafia should take care of guiding your property is just pretty funny to me.
Now, there's also another, I guess the Queen of England is turning 80, and I wanted to just spend a few minutes talking about this.
I have some knowledge of this, having grown up as an ex-aristocrat within the British system, gone to boarding school, and of course my family has a pretty, I guess you could say, a fairly distinguished heritage, and going back to quite a ways in the past.
And one of the things that I think is very interesting about people who are focused on something around corruption, Parasitism or the unjust transfer of wealth are always heavily focused on the dictatorships and also the Walmarts and the Ikeas and all this.
If you're more of the socialist perspective or the Bushes who have these sort of relationships with the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia and all of this kind of stuff wherein people are very concerned about With the issue of the unjust transfer of wealth, the unjust possession of wealth. Reparations, of course, and slavery is a hot topic of discussion in the boards, which you can come and have a look at if you like.
But the one thing that I always find amazing is that people don't generally take on the royal family in England, which, of course, is one of the most egregious examples of corrupt and brutal accumulations of wealth throughout history.
Of course, the royals, however acute they may be in their big hats and their print dresses, the royals, of course, have inherited wealth that is absolutely criminal in nature.
And, of course, reparations need to be made.
If you're going to go down that route, it's a little bit more clear to find the wealth that has been accumulated by the Queen, who I think recently and graciously has agreed to pay income tax.
Oh, how wonderful. See, you get to accumulate the wealth and then you're willing to pay tax on it.
However, those who have to pay tax to begin with have a little bit more trouble accumulating the wealth.
The corruption at the heart of British society is one of the reasons why...
This corruption of the royals is one of the reasons why English society is so class conscious and one's proximity to royalty or to aristocracy is very much...
Considered to be one's social value as a human being.
And I know this from sort of my own experience having gone to both public and private schools in England.
I find it just amazing that people who are interested in corruption focus on capitalism rather than focusing on something just a little bit more obvious, which is the wealth that has accrued to the royal family in England, of course, the other royal families around the world, based on their historical exploitation and enslavement.
Of peasants and, of course, money that was transferred through enormous wars that were bloody and destructive.
And, of course, a good deal of the aristocrats' money also came out of the mercantilist relationships, which were the foundation of the economic incentives behind the British Empire.
And so, of course, by granting monopolies to sort of the East India Company and so on, they managed to skim a huge amount of profits out of...
The increased price of goods that occurred because of these mercantilist monopolies, which were then passed along to the consumer, and of course people then often didn't have enough money for protein because they were too busy buying carbs in the form of bread.
And so I find that to be kind of funny, that people who are very interested in this kind of corruption focus, as usual and as always, on people who can't fight back, right?
Who don't have any friends, right?
I mean, picking on the people who don't have any friends is never a particularly...
A strong mark of bravery.
And that, I think, is sort of important to understand.
So, if you pick on Bill Gates, well, Bill Gates doesn't have a lot of defenders, so you can be all brave and waving your sword around and shaking your shield at this tiny little dragon that nobody likes.
And that's one thing.
And so, to be against Saddam Hussein, that was a bad guy, is one thing.
But, of course, to be against George Bush is not always the easiest thing in the world.
And if you're very interested in exploitation, it would seem to me to be a little bit more valuable to sort of take on things like the royal family before you would go around taking on sort of private enterprise and so on.
But of course, oh, those brave warriors, they never really start dealing with that kind of stuff.
Because it would, to me, I think, be quite valuable to...
And this, of course, is not about to happen, and I'm not even suggesting how it would happen.
But to me it would be quite valuable to take all of the land and goods and capital away from the royal family and say, well, you guys didn't earn this through your own productive labor or the provision of goods and services to a willing customer base.
You came across this sort of stuff or you own this sort of stuff because you have a brutal clan history as being efficient murderers and cold-blooded killers and genocidal maniacs and so on.
And so, given that this is all the proceeds of a crime, then it's well worth distributing this to among the British people.
I bet, of course, you have the problems of those.
Oh, what about those who just came?
Well, if they came from India, then I'm sure they were ground down by the East India Company and so on.
But I just find that stuff kind of funny, that everybody wants to pick on those who have no friends, and nobody wants to pick on those where other people have a certain sentimental streak in terms of their value.
And, of course, this does bring us to the sort of final topic of the day, which is the issue of reparations.
Now, I don't have anything particularly exciting to say about reparations.
It is a very complex topic, reparations for slavery and so on.
And there is a great deal of debate about this, and I certainly understand that those, for instance, blacks who have descended from people who were owned as slaves do have, of course, an utterly legitimate complaint regarding the amount of wealth that was taken away from them and moved over to certain of the whites in the South and others and so on.
But, of course, it's much more complicated than that.
It wasn't just like there were sort of the whites in the South who got the money from slaves and used it to build their big plantations and keep their women repressed and so on.
Of course, what happened was slavery was legal the world over, so tracing the effects of slavery over the long haul is almost impossible because until the 18th century, slavery was legal the world over.
And I think the British Empire began to outlaw it in the late 18th century, and then it sort of came down around the world.
To the degree that now it's only serfdom in the form of taxation and not outright slavery, at least not yet.
Although there are, of course, places in the world where slavery still exists.
But tracing the profits of slavery is a monumental source, a monumental objective.
And this is not to say that it shouldn't be done.
I mean, if you could theoretically wave a magic wand and find all of those who profited from slavery and have them return money, The money to the originals, I think that would be a very interesting thing to explore.
And so, I would be thoroughly behind that kind of research.
I think it's patently impossible.
And the problem with reparations is that, you know, if you are interested in reparations, I would say that the first thing you'd want to do is to trace the modern issue with reparations.
So if we say that the reparations is the restitution of property taken unjustly by force, then, of course, there are lots of, you know, billions and billions of living taxpayers the world over who should have their money restored to them, right?
I mean, I've paid, I don't know, how many hundreds of thousands or maybe it's over a million dollars in taxes in my life overall.
And we'll probably pay another million dollars before I retire or close to it in taxes, right?
And so I've had two million dollars forcibly taken from me in my lifetime.
So I would say the reparations should start with the living taxpayers.
And of course, that's going to be rather tricky because the money has dissolved into the bureaucracies and it has dissolved into, as Harry Brown used to put it, propping up the Russian ruble for another 15 minutes 10 years ago.
And so that money is all dissolved into the general ecosystem of those feeding on state largesse.
And so I would be very surprised if anybody could track where my $2 million will have gone by the time I retire and go and get it back from – go and get it back.
So, for instance, I mean, if somebody took my $2 million, just to sort of make a – to take an example.
So somebody took my $2 million and they went and tried to build a sugar factory in Kazakhstan in – Well, they went and built the sugar factory, and nobody wanted to buy the sugar because it was too expensive, and now the factory sits there as a ruin and a blight on the landscape, and it's actually going to cost money to tear it down.
Well, where did my $2 million go?
Well, of course, it went into the hands of those who built the factory.
Now, can I then go and say, well, you people built the factory with money that was stolen from me and then sent as a foreign aid project overseas, and therefore it's absolutely wrong for you to have this money.
You should have the money back.
So I go to these poor workers in Kazakhstan 20 years after the fact who built the sugar factory, and I demand my money back but the problem is that they have used it To feed their children, and now their children are grown, so they took some of my money that was given to them after it was taken from me in taxes,
the Canadian government lent it or gave it to this guy overseas to build this factory, and now he's used it to pay the workers who have now fed their children, so the money's gone into the bones and cells of their children, so now do I say, well, I own your children's arm or something?
I mean, it really does become almost impossible to trace this stuff down and to actually get the restitution effects that are going on.
To take another approach, we could look at it this way as well.
I have had to, and I suspect that you have had to as well, spend an enormous amount of your own time, money, and energy pursuing the kind of education in rationality and political science and just sort of basic common sense that should have been given to you in about five weeks when you were about and energy pursuing the kind of education in rationality and political science and just sort of basic common sense that should have been given to you in about
Now, that, of course, is a great tragedy, and we have to spend a good deal of energy unlearning all the bad things we've learned when we get older.
Now, all of the time, money, and energy that I have had to spend in pursuing my own expansion of my educational knowledge and learning how to think things through and reasoning and learning how to write properly and learning how to think clearly All of that money I would like to have brought back to me.
Now, of course, do I then go back and say to all the teachers who taught me when I was a child, well, you all took blood money and I ended up having a really bad education at your hands and so...
I think that you should now give me back all the money that was paid to you through my parents' taxes, which otherwise would have accrued to me, either in the form of inheritance or in the form of better education.
And so that's going to be rather tricky as well to figure that sort of stuff out.
Now, in the realm of historical injustice, of course, we can go back as far as we like.
As a former member of the British Empire, of course, I had a bunch of nasty Italians that about 1,700, 1,800 years ago came along and took a whole bunch of property and resources from my ancestors, at least that would be the theoretical case, If we go back even further, then I was...
Actually, no, sorry. If we go back not quite as far, my ancestors are supposed to have come across as William the Conqueror through the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and then would have taken...
That's why my name is French, because I come from the French aristocracy from that side.
Then, of course, my ancestors would have taken property from a large number of British and Irish people And so they would then have claims against me.
So I guess I would present a bill to the Italians, and then the British and the Irish would present a bill to me, and then we'd sort of work it out that way.
But of course, it's all pure fantasy to figure out exactly how much this stuff could go.
Now, this is again not to say that if you can legitimately trace property through restitution, that it would not be moral to deploy it back.
It's just that Capital gets diffused into people, right, generally, right?
So capital gets diffused into education, right?
So if somebody takes my money and goes and gets themselves educated and becomes a doctor, then do I own the brain cells that they then wire together with medical information based on my money going through in taxes?
It's all rather hard to figure out, of course.
And so that's just if we look at it in the current sphere.
We can go back historically, of course, as well.
That having been said...
I think that if it can be figured out, this would sort of be my final argument in this sort of area, I think that the hesitation that I have about these kinds of arguments has nothing to do with the just restitution of property.
Of course, if we wanted to figure out the profits from slavery, then I think that's wonderful, right?
Let's go and figure out how many blacks should have restitution from how many whites.
And, of course, then we also have to figure out how many whites are going to get restitution from other whites, because the fact that there were slaves, of course...
Drove down the price of labor and made a lot of laborers in the South that much poorer than they would have been otherwise.
And of course we have to go and figure out...
How many of the blacks in Africa were paid by the Europeans to sell them the slaves, which they then transported to the New World, and so on.
And so it's going to be quite an Oreo restitution strategy, I guess you could say.
It's not sort of white to black, white to white, black to black, black to white, and so on.
And so that, again, let's dig in and see if we can't figure it out.
There's nothing wrong with that in principle, if we can sort of sort it out.
I think the only hesitation that I have, and that lots of people have who are more into the...
Small to no government frame of mind is not so much that the principle of restitution for stolen property is wrong or bad, but rather that this is going to be something which is going to be run by the state, right?
Now, once it gets run by the state, then it is going to be to the detriment of everyone except the state, right?
So, I mean, if you say, let's say we snapper finks tomorrow, and we get some big restitution bill passed, then by the time the special interests and the wranglers and so on get through with it, It's because, of course, we don't control the government.
You and I can snap our fingers and say, yes, let's have the government do restitution, but by the time it actually gets rolled out, it's going to be an insulting and degrading pittance to those who actually suffered.
It's going to be an enormous source of wealth to those who are managing it.
And it is going to be an enormous rip-off to those who didn't contribute to the problem.
So there's absolutely no question that it's going to end up taxing the nouveau riche who had nothing to do with it.
It's going to end up being aggregated enormously to the bureaucracy, and it's going to end up paying a pittance out to the people who it's supposed to benefit, and which, of course, is going to be paid out in such a manner that it's going to make it worse for them.
And I can't tell you exactly how that will occur, but having looked at dozens of government programs over the past 20 years, I can guarantee you that that will be the case.
So I think if we want to come to some sort of, I guess, rapprochement regarding restitution, then I would say that, yes, of course, if we can figure it out, fantastic.
There's no way in God's green acre that the government is ever going to be able to figure it out.
So the best thing that we can do is to create an anarchistic society to get DROs cooking on the idea, to get economic historians to dig into coming up with algorithms and finding some sort of way of figuring this stuff out and getting DNA Paternity Alliance to figure out who was there and who's now there.
I've got some sort of share in a possible transfer of income, but of course the first thing that we're going to have to do is not deal with stuff that happened 300 years ago, in my humble opinion, but we're going to have to deal with stuff that is absolutely measurable, which is, for instance, my taxes and your taxes, the paucity of the educational quality.
That we've received and so on.
And all of the opportunities that were taken away from us by high taxes lowering our wages in general and not just after the fact in terms of deductions at source.
So, yes, let's get it going.
Let's get restitution going right now for taxpayers.
And then when that's dealt with, we'll start working our way back through history until such a point as it gets so grayed out that we can't follow the trail anymore.
And as long as this is all managed and done with through a private enterprise institute or group...
I think it would be fantastic.
And paucity and impoverishment that the black community went through.
Of course, we could say, we could say, I know this is a little volatile, so I'll just sort of throw it out there.
But we could say, if you were sort of sitting down with a black person in Africa, say, 200 years ago, and you were saying, okay, so you've got these two choices, right?
One, you can get grabbed by these evil, you can sold by black brothers to these evil white Europeans who are going to take you over and there's going to be slavery and so on.
And you're going to have to go through that generation or two or three, and then there's going to be some sort of kind of freedom, and then you'll have some opportunities and so on, and you will end up with sort of the highest living standard of blacks anywhere in the world.
Or the alternative is that you don't get taken to America, and you will get the wonderful opportunity to see how you fare staying in Africa, say, for the past 200 years, where I think there's now up to 25 million African Americans have now died from AIDS and of course it's continuing to escalate over time.
None of them live in what we would call a capitalist system.
There's very little democracy and the standard of living of course is completely wretched and hasn't changed largely due to the largesse of the West.
Over the past 50 years.
Of the two, I think that it's hard to say with any degree of accuracy, but I think a strong case could be made for, you know, if I could get onto those slave ships, I think that would be about the best thing that I could do for myself and my bloodline over the long run, I guess you could say.
And so, if we're going to look for restitution for blacks, the first thing that I would focus on is not the blacks who came to America, or were dragged and forced to come to America 300 years ago or 200 years ago.
What I would focus on is the blacks whose lives have been destroyed by their mostly black rulers in Africa over the past 100 or 200 years.
I would focus on that restitution, because those are the blacks who are suffering enormously.
If you want to look at the suffering of the blacks throughout the world, it's those who are currently in Africa I mean, who cares about their race is being ruled over by a bunch of genocidal maniacs who just want to get them killed and keep them enslaved from here to eternity.
So that's where I would focus on restitution towards blacks.
If sympathy needs to be given to blacks, I would say that, of course, sympathy needs to be given to those who have descended from slavery.
But, of course, sympathy much more so needs to be given to those who are currently living in the most appalling conditions in Africa.
I hope that that's helpful.
I certainly look forward to your letters of outrage, and of course you know where to send them.
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