All Episodes
Previous Next
June 16, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:57
282 United Nations Part 1: Theory
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good afternoon, people!
I hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It's 1648 in my highly military Volvo clock, and I'm heading home for a lovely weekend with the wife, and...
We have had our curtains installed.
I'm not, not, NOT a morning person.
And so when our bedroom seems to sort of have this...
It's like the center of the sun in the morning.
It's like being irradiated.
So I'll be very happy to get the hyper-darkening cave blinds which we have put in, which actually will suck light from the neighborhood around us, as well as keeping it dark in the bedroom.
I can't wait. That way I get to ditch my pirate cap now, which I currently wear one of those quiffy little sleeping masks.
So, what do they call it in WKRP? This disco bondage headgear, which I think is a fantastic phrase, and is actually quite appropriate if you realize just how many sparkles mine has.
So I think it's time to talk about a topic I've been trying to get to for some time, which is the UN. A fascinating topic.
There's so much that you can find out about governments by looking at the United Nations.
Because when you look at the United Nations, you're looking at government in some ways in its purest form.
And you also can look at the government without, or the form of the government in the UN, without being bothered by any nationalistic feeling yourself.
So let's say you were raised in the States or in Canada as a leftist or a rightist or whatever, and you have some loyalty to soldiers or you have some loyalty to political parties or politicians or you're a sort of, quote, country or whatever.
Well, if you want to really sort of find out what government looks like without all of the propaganda, then, assuming that you're not some sort of leftist loony who's heard nothing but propaganda about the UN, then the UN is a fascinating place to start.
You get to study government without propaganda, government without emotional hooks, and it really is quite a fascinating thing to see how it works.
Now, I'm not going to go into much of a history of the UN because I'm sure everybody's aware of it, but...
The United Nations founded in 1948, I think it was, or 1946, after the Second World War, right?
Because the whole purpose of governments is to protect their citizens from harm.
So after 40 million people got vaporized in World War II, what you need, of course, when governments have failed, is a government program to ensure that they're never going to fail again, right?
So once you have the Department of Defense in the United States, Sending all of its troops overseas to prop up dictatorships and invade non-nuclear countries, and you have the Air Force, and you have the Air Defense System, and you have all that kind of stuff that completely fails on September 11th, and America gets attacked, then what you need is a new government program called the Department of Homeland Security, which...
Must replace or shore up all of the failures of the previous government program.
Of course, there's never any question that the previous government program should be dismantled as a failure.
But rather, it's that I've done a really bad job, so I should get an enormous raise and a new department.
And then when I fail again, catastrophically causing the deaths of dozens or hundreds or thousands or in World War II, millions of people, then I should get a bigger budget.
That's really, I think, the way that this should work.
And it would be wonderful if it worked in the private sector.
I just need to go in and shoot a couple of my co-workers in order to get to the top.
I think that would be an excellent way to run the private sector, but unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be likely to happen because my co-workers can fight back, but not so much the case with most of the people who died, the civilians in World War II. A little tough to shoot back at the invisible Lancaster bomber over Dresden in 1944.
So, the United Nations is a government program that was put in place as a sop to the population, To help them feel that something was being done to make up for the catastrophe of not being protected by their governments in World War II. And this is standard, right? It's inevitable. It's standard.
There's no need for any surprise.
As long as you have governments, you will have this exact same thing.
Absolute catastrophic failures of state policies, followed by an expansion of state power.
We pay these people to kill us.
And when they kill enough of us, or the degree to which they kill us, we give them more money, and we are...
Surprised that they seem to be bad at their jobs, well, it's a matter of incentive.
If you're bad at your job in the free market, your income tends to go down.
If you're bad at your job in the public sector, your income tends, not tens, inevitably goes up.
And so it is, to me, quite understandable that government is going to grow.
Now, we don't pay them like in terms of we voluntarily sent them a check.
I know it's taken from us at gunpoint, but most people will pay them lip service in terms of how virtuous they are or how good their intentions are.
So the government gets a whole bunch of people killed and then uses that as an excuse to take more money, get more people killed, and so on.
And this only stopped when nuclear weapons came along and the possibility that a few of the people getting killed might actually be political leaders themselves, wherein miraculously they found that they were capable of not declaring war, which to me is Funny,
but sad, but funny. So, the United Nations, founded after the Second World War, of course, for those who don't know, and there may be a few of you out there who don't know, exactly the same thing happened, of course, after the First World War.
After the First World War, you had the League of Nations, Nations, Nations.
Which was a group of superheroes.
No, wait. That was a different League.
The League of Nations was exactly the same deal wherein you had all of these countries getting together to ban war.
You know, the Calabrian Pact in 1927, I think it was.
And you had all of these declarations of peace and desire and goodwill and so on.
Yet, sadly, inevitably, you get a war.
And wars get worse and worse until the politicians get threatened.
And then, miraculously, they get...
They become non-existent.
So the League of Nations completely failed to come up with any plan or any possibility of solving the problem of growing Nazi aggression and so on.
So the League of Nations, which sort of faded into non-existence in the mid to late 30s, was the previous government department that...
We're supposed to put an end to international conflict and make the world wonderful.
The war to end war, as the First World War was called, the war to make the world safe for democracy is the second one.
All of the omelets get broken.
You never get the egg, and everyone is keen to keep going until one of their own omelets gets broken.
Either one of their own eggs gets broken, and then they seem to be not so keen anymore.
So... So, the United Nations is founded, and there's five principal security members, security council members.
So, there's a security council in the United Nations.
And I'm going from memory here, so I'm sorry if I get some details wrong.
This is pretty close, though.
But there are five original security members.
There was England, France, the Soviet Union...
America, and I can't remember if it was China or some other damn country, at the end of the Second World War, and they have veto power, right?
So you get all these countries that get in there, and they all get a vote, but the victors in the Second World War, they get veto power, right?
Just like you and I have with the government.
We have veto power, right?
So as you know, like if the government passes a law that you don't agree with, You get veto power as well, so basically they just took that principle that is embedded within the citizenry and applied it to this democracy because they were using the argument for morality, which means that any time you feel that you want to be accepted from a majority rule, you get that right.
Oh wait, no, sorry, that's not a right that is available to the populations.
But it's kind of funny when you think about it, right?
So England says, well, I don't mind joining the United Nations, but any time the majority votes in a way that I don't want, I want a veto right.
I mean, that's what the British government says in order to join it, because they want to be able to wriggle out from underneath the will of the majority...
And yet, they claim to be interested in democracy.
It's funny, right? This is always the case that happens.
The mealy-mouthed, filthy-tongued political statements of virtue are never, ever applicable to the leaders themselves.
The sentiments that are put out, these treacly, revolting moral sentiments that are put out, they're strictly to shut us up.
They're strictly for our consumption.
They're never, ever designed.
To be inflicted upon the leaders.
My god, no heavens, Betsy.
That's not the case at all.
These enclosures are for the sheep, not for the shepherds.
We don't get the same rights that they demand for themselves in order to participate in a democratic institution.
So they need the veto power because they are afraid of the will of the majority and want to have the capacity to wriggle out of it, and yet they claim their legitimacy as a government domestically comes from the will of the majority.
It's predictable. It's sad and funny.
And of course, it's so obvious that it's inevitable that it's never going to be taught, right?
Everything that is obvious can never be taught in state schools, right?
It takes a lot of work to turn people into dribbling idiots who lash themselves when the state whip is not around, or the state whip hand is not around, to keep them whipping themselves at dinner parties and lacerating themselves when they're in chat rooms.
It takes a lot of work to do that, right?
The obvious can never be stated.
Because, of course, the interesting question to ask the moment that you hear about that the democracies wanted to have a Security Council wherein they got to veto the will of the majority is, the question is, well, why?
Well, the majority might vote them to do something that they don't want to do.
Oh. So, wouldn't that be the case for anybody?
Why is it just those guys?
Anyway, so I'm sure you get the point.
I'll try not to labor it too much, although I'm sure I'll return to it a couple of dozen times more before the end of the podcast.
Depends on traffic and whether I come up with...
Whether the rolling array of topics that spirals through my brain continues to pump its energy out until the end of the podcast.
We'll see. We'll see.
So, maybe we'll say goodbye.
Maybe we'll just say... Sayonara, or whatever it is that is the phrase for goodbye for now, for the moment.
So, the United Nations allows in anybody.
Any thug who can gain control of a significant segment of the population, excluding the mafia, gets to be in the United Nations, right?
So, it is a...
It is a gang of warlords, right?
It's like the five families sitting down.
There's some who call themselves the nice guys, and some who call themselves the not-so-nice guys.
The governments are composed of people who've accidentally inherited an intelligently designed farm that they get to exploit, and other people who were just out shooting up the livestock and having big feasts and then starving to death, right?
So, The democracies, which have some sort of respect for property rights and some sort of respect for human rights, they've inherited that, right?
All of that stuff was founded despite governments, they've inherited that, and so they're sitting on a motherload of money, which is being generated by the free market, a lot of wealth, and so they've got this intelligent farm where they get to tax really productive citizens who are wealthy enough to still be motivated by what's left over after the taxman takes his five-tenths or six-tenths or whatever.
Or you could say one-half or three-fifths, if you're fluent in math.
Whereas the dictatorships don't make as much money because they're farms.
They didn't inherit such intelligently designed farms, and they also can't generate those farms largely because of foreign aid, as we've talked about in the last podcast.
So you have the people who are pillaging the money based on the free market, and then you have the people who are pillaging the money from the people based on foreign aid and a pitiful amount of internal trade based on the remnants of property rights and people's desire to put food in their mouth.
So these are the two.
The thugs from the rich neighborhood who run a sophisticated protection racket But still, we'll break your legs if you don't pay.
And then there's the thugs from the poor neighborhoods, like the third world, who just break kneecaps and sell the legs or something.
I don't know, sell the blood.
But it's two sets of thugs, right?
Because it's always funny.
People talk about the United Nations.
They're all, well, there are the free countries, which is great.
And then, see, there are these nasty dictatorships, which is not great, right?
But that's... That's silly, right?
I mean, you have rich thieves and you have poor thieves, but to say that the rich thieves are good is not getting the whole concept of thievery in my mind, but we don't have to go into that to a great deal of degree of detail now because I'm getting more promptings from the spinning screensaver of new topics.
So the ostensible, of course, idea behind the United Nations, promote international peace and to create a dialogue, right?
They're all talking about creating a dialogue between the free countries and the dictatorships, right?
So you'll let any piss-anti-violent sociopath in to the United Nations, and they get a seat, and they get a speech, and they get a say, and...
You know, it's funny to me that any of them are considered good.
But even if we do consider that the free market democracies or the somewhat free market democracies are better than the dictatorships, which of course they are, then what you have really is a global police force, right? That's the idea. So there's a global police force wherein the majority of people are...
Are criminals, right?
So you have a global police force comprised mostly of criminals.
And to a small degree of...
Well, cops that are well bought off and therefore are going to be relatively peaceful.
And then you have the cops who are just out there doing that shakedown thing really directly.
And, of course, the idea that you can get virtue from a majority of evil people is...
Silly. I mean, obviously.
If you were to say that the problem with statist policing, the reason why it's not so effective, is because we don't have enough organized crime families...
On the police board, you would find that to be a funny thing, right?
Like a funny situation, right?
So if you had a condo and there were a bunch of drug dealers on the second floor or something, and you said, well, the problem with our condo, the reason that we want to get rid of the crime that these drug dealers generate, so what we want to do is we want to get the drug dealers on the...
And once we have that, then we can engage in a productive dialogue with the drug dealers and slowly turn them around to being, I don't know, lawyers or accountants or something.
So, that's the funny part about the United Nations as well.
Even if you accept that the democracies are mildly moral or however you want to put it, and I'm not saying that I do, right, but they're less evil than Syria, right?
Then you have a global...
government or a global police force dedicated to keeping the peace and to bringing forth democracy and freedom around the world.
And it's composed of sociopathic criminals, right?
So you have the United States, the UN Human Rights Commission has been chaired by governments of such noble Hi, it's Steph.
Yes, this is a badly spliced together podcast.
For some reason, I got cut off in the car at about, gosh, 17 minutes and 50 seconds.
So, sadly, I have to sort of continue.
I was talking about Syria.
I remember that, that the Human Rights Commission and the UN had been...
Chared by countries as repulsive as Syria.
And boy, I had some great stuff after that.
It was gold, baby! It was going to make me rich and famous.
But I guess we'll have to live with what I can come up with as a substitute.
So what I was talking about was the issue around the idea that if you have...
A minority of good people and a majority of bad people Is that a situation wherein the good people will permeate, their virtue will permeate all of the bad people and turn them into good people?
Because it's one of the ideas behind the UN, right?
So the UN in 1945, it starts with like 47 countries, now there's like 191, and it's not like all of the guys who've joined are the best and noblest countries in the world.
Now, to my mind, and I can't remember if I mentioned this before, so I'll keep it brief, to my mind...
The so-called good states are not good states.
They're not good states at all.
They are bad states.
The leaders of Canada, the leaders of the United States and England and France and Germany, they're all bad guys.
And the only difference, of course, is that they have a more productive economic system And so they're able to take money in taxes through a semi-pacifistic looking mechanism, whereas the guys who are in the open, brutal dictatorships are breaking kneecaps directly, rather than just threatening to and taking money.
But let's just take it at face value that the democracies in the UN are good, and all of the dictatorships are bad.
Well, of course, the idea that you're going to have a majority of bad people in a voting situation...
And then you are going to have a minority of good people who are going to be able to change them, to turn them around, which is one of the ideas behind the UN, that we open discussions with these other countries and we engage in debate with them and we give them a voice and we hope to influence them to become better people and blah, blah, blah. Well...
There are two kinds of truth statements, I guess, in this life, for me.
The first is, I guess, three, if you count axioms like I see a tree or something.
But there's theories, and then there's justifications.
Theories and justifications are two very different things.
So, if I steal your car, and then when I get caught, I say, oh, I thought you wanted me to have it, right?
That's a justification. And It's a theory.
If I think you want me to have your car, but I'm not sure, then I go knock on your door and you say, hey, do you mind if I take your car?
And you say, get off my property, you big chatty forehead bum guy.
Well, then I've had a theory that says, I think you want me to have your car, and I've tested it, and lo and behold, you don't want me to have your car.
But a justification is you get caught...
Or somebody asks you a question that you can't answer and you just come up with some bullshit to shut them up.
That's the idea behind justification.
So one of the primo pieces of bullshit that comes up in the UN discussions is that you've got to keep a dialogue open with the evil countries.
We'll make them good guys by giving them a forum and reasoning with them and this and that and the other.
And of course, it's a wonderful theory.
It's a wonderful theory. Now, I wouldn't say that the UN would be the place to start, though, if you had this kind of theory.
Like, if you felt that a minority of good people Could influence to a positive, in a positive way, a majority of bad people, then I wouldn't start at the UN. I mean, that's kind of tough.
What I would do is I would start at home, right?
I mean, so if you're someone who believes this is the case, then, as I mentioned in a previous podcast in another area, what you could do, or what you should do, is you should get a good friend of yours or two, and, you know, as a minority of virtuous people, you should go down Pay whatever money it takes to get this information.
Go down to where the mob bosses are meeting.
So go down to where the Gambinos and the Sopranos and all these fictional non-fictional.
Go down to where these people are meeting.
And sit down with them and talk them into being better people.
And if you can do that, I think that's fantastic.
What a wonderful thing, that if a minority of good people can influence, where they have no power, a majority of bad people, then I would say do that in sort of smaller and more controlled areas and slowly expand into sort of the whole planet.
You know, start off a little bit smaller, a little bit more localized, and then move out.
You know, once you've sort of cut your chops and just dealing with, you know, the crime families, dealing with...
Hell's Angels dealing with El Diablo, dealing with the Bloods and the Crips.
Just go and do that, right?
The other thing, too, is that if you believe that a minority of good people We're good to go.
What you need to do is just open it up and then the prison guards can use their influence and their words and give the prisoners a forum and so on, and that will make everything fine.
So that's how it would work in a prison situation.
Similarly, if you're a politician and you support the United Nations because you think that a minority of good people can influence a majority of bad people where there's no particular power, Then it would seem to me to make sense, like if you live in a condo, and you're a politician who supports this, or anyone, then what you need to do is you need to get a bunch of murderers and drug dealers and rapists on your condo board, and you need to be vastly outnumbered by the people on your condo board who are obviously openly violently evil.
And then you can use your magical powers of persuasion to turn all of these bad people into good people, and then that would be a good reason to support something like the United Nations.
So there's just ways that you can actually bring this about without having to do anything as risky and unverifiable as the United Nations.
Now, another way to approach the question of the United Nations is to say, well, what has actually occurred, right?
It's the old thing, right? If you've got a theory, you want to verify it, right?
Because when it comes to influencing ethics, right, a minority of good people who are in a crowd of a majority of evil people, you could say, as is the case with the UN, with the minority of democracies and the majority of dictatorships, you could say...
Well, the good people are going to influence the bad people into becoming better.
But it also does seem to be the case that the bad people might also influence the good people into becoming worse.
That seems to me a possibility as well.
And this is not something that you...
You can test this, right?
You could actually just test this.
It doesn't have to remain... All that theoretical.
So what you do is you say, okay, well...
The UN was formed in 1945, and the Western governments were a certain size, and dictatorships, well, you know, they're just kind of dictatorships, so they're just going to be that way until the end of time.
So the democracies, who are the minority of what is considered to be the virtuous states, are going into this United Nations, and there are all these bad countries out there, and...
So the question is, who's going to influence who?
Well, you can actually do this just statistically, right?
I mean, you just sort of say, okay, well, what was the size of the Western governments in terms of percentage of GDP or the size relative to the population?
What was the debt? And so on.
In 1945, when the UN was founded, right?
Because the whole point of these virtuous Western governments is to influence the corrupt and brutal governments into being nice, limited governments that respect property rights, respect human rights, and so on.
So you just measure this, right?
If somebody has a theory that...
That these good governments can influence the bad governments into becoming better.
You just measure it, right? You say, well, what was the size of the governments?
What was their respect for property rights in 1945?
The good governments, Western governments.
Was there a war on drugs?
What were the educational standards like?
What was the national debt like?
And all these kinds of things, right? And, of course, that's how you test this stuff, right?
So if the Western governments...
Who fought this world war to restore freedom to their people, and then ended up with governments two to three times the size.
So if they're virtuous, then they should shrink their governments back down to at least where they were in the 1920s or 1930s, hopefully.
And then they should stay small, and what should happen, of course, because of the benevolent influence of these good governments in the United Nations settings, is that the evil governments should begin to shrink, right?
I mean, that's the idea, right?
If you're saying that the virtuous minority of governments are like an antibody that you inject into some sort of cellular system to fight an infection or something, well...
You kind of want to find out if it's actually fighting that infection, right?
Because if it joins forces and then both of them start attacking you like the antibody and the virus then that's not good, right?
That wouldn't be much of a proof.
Now, of course, the actual results of this particular experiment are pretty disastrous, right?
I mean, you have massively increased governmental sizes in the Western governments, a complete disregard for the fundamental property rights that are required for innate to human life.
You have incarceration of millions of people, you have diminishing freedoms, you have enslaved public media, and you have...
I mean, you know the list, right?
So I'm going to go into this.
But that's... The way that you would look at this kind of idea and see, is it true or not?
I mean, people just say stuff to shut you up.
Well, you know, we've got to have a dialogue with the evil dictators, whatever, right?
And don't even call them evil, right?
You have to have a dialogue with the dictators.
And you say, why?
It's, oh, so we can help them become better countries and so on.
Well, it's testable, right?
Now the UN's been around for 60 years or so.
So it's testable.
You say, well, who's influenced whom, right?
I mean, have the evil countries become less evil, and have the good countries retained their benevolence or become even better?
No, of course not. I mean, the good countries have become, sort of quote, good countries, have become progressively more dictatorial, and it's not like the dictatorships have vanished from the world.
And so this is just the kind of thing where you just need to ask the questions, you know, what's the proof?
I'll tell you one other thing that I find quite impressive about the theory behind the United Nations.
And this is, I mean, this is really impressive to me, because it speaks to the question of confidence.
And confidence is a very interesting thing, right?
So if you see a bunch of people who are lined up to start a race, right?
So they're lined up and it's a 100-meter dash, let's say, and it's for a gold medal and groupies and money and so on.
Well, so you start panning down the line of people, and there's, you know, a lean guy here, a lean guy here, a lean guy here, and there's another lean guy who's got a baby elephant on his back.
I would say that if you see an Olympic...
Race, where one guy is willing to do the race with a baby elephant on his back, that guy's got some confidence.
That guy is an unbelievably good runner, because not only is he willing to compete at the Olympic level with the best runners, but he's willing to do it with a baby elephant strapped to his back.
You know, and then you sort of flip the channel and you see a downhill skier who's taken a run at a downhill ski jump with three pianos strapped to his back or something.
I mean, you just know that's somebody who's got some real ability and some real confidence in what they're doing, right?
Now, the reason that this is relevant to the United Nations is that the United Nations funds dictatorships and funds dictators.
And also, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but the blue helmets, you know, the guys who wander around the world, not able to shoot back at anyone and get killed or tortured or, you know, whatever, that the governments are paid to supply those guys, right? So, if you're Syria, right, and, you know, you can go to the UN, you say, I've got 500 troops that I will send out on UN peacekeeping missions, well, the UN will pay you As the head of government to supply those troops.
So what does that mean? It means that these troops are conscripted, or they're given some pittance based on what's left over.
But basically, it's a slave army.
The UN peacekeeping force is a slave army.
So what happens in the UN is you get lots of subsidies, lots of loans, and tie-ins with the IMF and all this kind of stuff, right?
And loans that are supposedly loans, but then Bono forgets that he's only good at singing and convinces everyone to not have to pay them back.
And so this is the amazing thing about the United Nations, which is...
Not only are the good countries supposed to be so amazing in their ability to communicate the benefits of virtue, so deeply wise and humane that they can turn back the tide of evil, that they can change people's minds who've spent their whole life being that they can change people's minds who've spent their whole life being sociopaths and grinding their population into They can change these people's minds with the sheer force of their personality, of their eloquence.
They can turn evil into virtue.
It's amazing.
It's a fantastic feat, even if you could just do it with no handicaps.
That would be something that would be amazing, something that you would just look at and be fascinated by.
But these guys are so confident at the UN, at their ability to turn this shit into gold, to turn these human devils into angels, that not only are they going to do it through the force of their eloquence and the force of their personality, but they're going to do it while that not only are they going to do it through the force of their eloquence and the force of their Right?
That, my friends, is rhetorical confidence that you can just...
I mean, you've got to put a welding goggles on when you look at that kind of self-confidence.
I'd never have that in a million years.
You've got to hand it to these UN guys, though.
They're sitting in a room surrounded by brutal dictatorships.
And the more brutal the dictatorship, the more money they get paid through the UN... The more they're willing to enslave people and send them out as soldiers in these futile UN interventions, the more they get paid.
So, not only are they willing to take on that they can change people just through their words, they're even willing to give themselves the additional handicap of paying them to be evil and then trying to talk them into being good.
I mean, that's having some gumption.
That's having some rhetorical cojones.
You've got to admire that.
It'd be like, you and I go off to the crime families of New York, the big meeting where the heads of the mafia sit down to do their business, and not only do we wander in there like Billy Crystal, but we wander in there not only...
Are we going to turn them into good people by sheer force of their personality?
But we're going to also bribe them to continue to be bad people.
So the more people that they've whacked, the worse the civilian population that these crime families prey on, the poorer and more wretched they are, the more money we're going to give them.
Because it's just not a challenge.
To turn evil people into good people unless there's a real handicap for you.
It's not a challenge, right?
It's like trying to play table tennis with a two-year-old, right?
It's not a challenge. You've got to make it challenging.
So the UN directly pays these murderers on the number of murderers, because the UN pays people based on poverty, and poverty is a result of violence.
So the UN is paying these murderers to be murderers.
And then it's expected that the force of rhetoric, so innately powerful within the representatives of the, quote, free nations, so amazing that they'll just turn around and be great guys.
I think that's amazing.
I can't wait for that experiment to pay off.
It seems to be taking, well, a little bit of time, but I have every faith, every faith that it's just around the corner that these guys are going to pull off this stuff.
And then there's, you know, last but not least, there's the The issue of UN corruption is not a slight topic at all.
I mean, just look at this oil for food program, right?
So a surtax is put on the oil that Saddam has.
First of all, he's not allowed to sell oil, and then everyone realizes that everyone's dying, and they use this as a pretext.
So they say that we're going to put a surtax on...
The oil that Saddam Hussein sells, and then we're going to tender this tax money out for people to deliver humanitarian aid back to Saddam Hussein.
No problem with that.
This is not a disaster in the making at all, that you're going to tax a dictator.
And then you're going to pay people to supply humanitarian goods back to that dictator, and he's then going to hand it over to his civilian population, right?
I mean, no problem.
I mean, I went with a business plan like that to a bunch of investors.
They would let me finish only for the hilarity of what it is that I was proposing.
But about $100 billion of goods went through this particular program.
Almost $2 billion was siphoned off Just going to nowhere.
It was like 22 different countries, companies incorporated in 40 or 50 different countries.
This is a pretty wide scam.
I think Kofi Annan's son was involved in this.
He's the Secretary General. And the fascinating thing is some people will say, well, that's only 2% of the total to $1.8 billion, I think it was, was siphoned off of this $100 billion program.
But what I want to know is that if $100 billion or $98.2 billion of humanitarian aid was...
I guess passed along to Saddam Hussein and got to the population through this program why on earth did half a million Iraqi children die in the 1990s for lack of exactly this stuff, right?
The medicines and foods and infant bottle formula and so on.
Because the truth of the matter is none of that stuff got...
To the poor, right?
I mean, none of it got to the people who needed it.
Not one shred.
Unless maybe it fell off the truck on the way to the eBay distribution center where Saddam Hussein had set up his cut-rate humanitarian aid sell-off store.
Because there's not one single chance in hell that these people got a hold of any of this stuff.
So what happened? Well, basically, Saddam Hussein sold a bunch of oil.
The oil price went up because there was a surtax on it.
And a bunch of people took this tax and pocketed it, and then maybe delivered some goods to Saddam Hussein, who then sold it.
And none of it reached...
I mean, it's a $100 billion boondoggle.
And this is the kind of stuff that the UN... It's supposed to be 29,000 people working at the UN, but two agencies come up with 40,000.
They have no clue what their budget is.
It's in the trillions, for sure.
They have no clue what their budget is.
No accountability, no responsibility whatsoever.
And it is really the ultimate synthesis, or it's a super form of government.
It is government without nationalism, which means that you don't even have the restraint of patriotic outrage over high taxes or inefficiency and so on.
It really is. It's like government on the dark side of the moon.
It is completely and hideously corrupt.
And it's full of exactly the same kind of moral insanity that you would expect from people who justify the transfer of trillions of dollars.
And, of course, it's become completely obsessed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, right?
I mean, there's lots of reasons for that.
The Muslim world likes it as a lightning rod to...
To keep their own population riled up and ineffective by getting them angry at Israel rather than their own political masters.
There's lots of Christians, particularly in America, who think that Israel needs to stay because it's part of the apocalypse that's coming, requires that Israel exist, and so there's lots of support for this kind of stuff in the UN. But anyway, it's nothing but resolutions about how evil the West is and how evil Israel is, and nothing at all, of course, about how The Muslim dictatorships are, of course, the majority, right?
Or at least they can swing enough of a majority to get this stuff through.
So it's really a farce.
I mean, it's a complete farce, just as you would expect from any kind of government program where there's no criteria for success, no voluntary participation.
It does give a lot of credibility to dictatorships, right?
I mean, to give them a place to speak, right?
And, of course, it did nothing to free the Soviet Union.
It did nothing to free China.
Everybody's worried about What happens in Rwanda and Darfur, these things are all completely evil.
I bet you if you traced it back, though, a lot of these guys bought the military equipment used to...
To oppress these people from foreign aid or from UN donations or loans or whatever.
I mean, so, you know, now we have to rush in to solve the kinds of problems that governments start, and, you know, innocent people who had nothing to do with it get killed, and those who had a lot to do with it retire to the Cayman Islands with all their millions.
It's the standard story about this kind of stuff.
But you didn't notice that the UN did a whole lot when, say, 40 million...
Russians were dying in concentration camps.
You'll notice that the UN didn't do a whole lot when 20 million Chinese people were being starved to death by Mao.
And now, of course, there's all this hue and cry about what the UN needs to do.
There needs to be a rapid response team.
They always need a new government program to solve the problems caused by the last government program.
And so, obviously, my view of the UN is that it's not at all a moral institution, of course, funded by force and full of lies and moral falsehoods, but even the very idea of the UN is morally false.
It is very core that you have a democracy of evil, right?
I mean, the democracy where the majority of the countries are run by sociopathic dictators, and that you have the The moral sort of, quote, legitimacy of the UN is dragging down countries which possessed some degree of virtue or governments which, relative to the dictatorships,
possess some degree of, or some lack of evil relative to the dictatorships, being dragged down into the sinkhole of evil, which is the case with all moral compromises, that whenever you make a moral compromise, the bad guys make out like bandits, and the good guys...
Thank you so much for listening.
I hope this is enjoyable for you.
I've got to tell you, I had this article published on Lou Rockwell and the International Society for Individual Liberty sites today, and it's quite a shocker to me because it's called Market Anarchism.
Sorry, Market Anarchists.
Are you guys crazy or just nuts?
And it's quite shocking to me because every single email is positive.
Like, every single email, and this is amazing, every time I write an article, I get like 50% attaboys and 50% flamethrowers.
And so this has been completely positive, quite remarkable.
I wish I knew what I was doing, because then I'd do it again.
So, but thanks to everyone on the board who helped provide feedback to this article.
I hugely appreciate it, of course, and I'm sure it wouldn't be Nearly as good without the feedback from people.
So I thank you very much for that.
I look forward to donations this weekend to keep me pumped about what it is that I'm doing.
And thanks so much for listening.
▲
Export Selection