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June 21, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:40
292 Freedom Through Debt
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Good afternoon, everybody.
We are going to add to your toolbox today, just a little bit, a possible argument that you can use when you are chatting amiably and pleasantly and with a great deal of rabid and fascinated and gentle curiosity with our good friends, the minarchists, minimal state, maximum error.
And that is that, you know, we actually don't have to make much of a case to the minarchists to getting rid of the government.
We don't actually have to make a case, really, to anybody about, you know, we should get rid of the government.
It absolutely is not required.
You don't have to be an anarchist to say that the government should be gotten rid of at all.
So I'd like to read to you some statistics and then go over this argument with you, and you can let me know if you think it's nonsense or, in the best of my podcast, tradition-only medium nonsense.
That would be exciting for me.
We aim for the medium. And so we're going to pick on the United States.
The majority of my listeners are American.
Hi to...
in Sri Lanka. But...
We're going to pick on those. Any country, it's the same thing, though.
Canada is similar. England is similar.
France is similar.
But these are just the easiest numbers to get are the United States ones.
So, in the magic land of national debt, right now, as of 4.59pm on June the 21st, 2006, national debt estimated at $8,355,000.
$347,106,301.37.
It's important to be accurate.
Share of national debt for each U.S. citizen, $27,941.39.
National debt share for breadwinners in a family of two, $55,882.79.
Family of three, $83 and change.
Family of four, $111,000 and change.
Family of five, 139,000.
Family of six, 167,000.
And if you're a Mormon with many wives, you actually owe about the state of Utah.
Now, of course, these numbers are interesting, I think, because we'll sort of go over a little bit about what they mean.
And then we'll talk about how you can use these numbers to detonate the state without converting anyone to our position.
It's just for funsies. You can try it out, see if you like it.
You can throw this national debt grenade into the bunker of statists and just see who wants to stay in and who's going to come squealing out.
It's for funsies, you know, it's worth giving it a shot.
I found it to be not too unhelpful, so...
So here we go. So this is the national debt, of course, as estimated by the U.S. government.
And we know, of course, that all governments lie to protect themselves.
So I would imagine that when we actually figure it out, we're going to find that this is understated by orders of magnitude.
There have been credible estimates in my recent Lou Rockwell article.
By the way, number three for the month of May.
Thank you so much to the user who suggested turning space aliens from Luxembourg into an article if you haven't listened to the podcast.
Might I recommend doing so?
But my Lue Rockwell article, there was relatively credible estimates that the total indebtedness or unfunded liabilities of the United States government totaled $47 trillion, which is, what, six times the national debt, which would put the national debt, or the, I guess, unfunded liabilities for a family of four at, I guess, $444,000, or just under half a million dollars.
Not... Not likely to get paid off anytime soon, right?
So these are taken from the U.S. Treasury, so they're not sort of made up.
And you can have a look at this National Debt Clock, which is a nice little JavaScript application I trawled the web for on freedomainradio.com.
But this is an interesting number when you start to break it down.
And I tried looking for some of this stuff on the web, but I couldn't find any.
So maybe it's out there if you know where it is.
I'm just going to have to talk theoretically.
And I've actually kicked off my shoes so that in case I need to go over 10, I will be able to manage the calculations.
But if you take the national debt of any country and you divide it by the number of adults, it doesn't really...
What does it mean? Well, it means that...
You have the total number of adults and you can divide it in and get the national debt per person, which, you know, what does that mean?
Well, it means that we assume that everybody has a job and works and can pay this off, right?
What does it not mean? Well, if you've got a bunch of students, that doesn't count, right?
So in university, that doesn't count.
Not only are you adding to the national debt by being in university because you're not paying off your debt and, of course, there are lots of publicly funded things in universities, But you're also probably getting into debt yourself.
I think the U.S. total debt, not including, like from the $8 billion plus everything else, $44 trillion is a number that I've read.
So big, right?
Big, big. If you want to sort of get a visualization of this, I think about $8 billion is $47.
If you stack the dollar bills vertically, you get a pile of $47.
So, it's big.
And of course, you can get this as long as it's not too windy and you don't mind the Van Allen belt.
But aside from that, you're good to go.
So you have to subtract the students, of course.
You have to subtract single moms to a large degree.
I mean, there are some high-earning single moms, but not a huge amount of them, of course.
So they're mostly net negative in terms of their contribution to the economy.
They're taking a lot of public services and usually not having the highest amount of money that they're making.
So they're not going to be too available to pay off the national debt.
That's sort of what I'm talking about.
People who are currently going through a divorce, well, all their money is going to lawyers.
Even if they're, unless they've got the wealth of Midas, they're not likely to be too useful in terms of paying off the national debt.
So I think we can largely exclude those people.
People who are currently ill, alright?
People who are currently on vacation, well, people who are currently ill, yes, on vacation, but that's, I guess, coming and going.
But people who are currently ill are also not going to be very helpful.
In paying off the national debt, so that's not good.
People who are mentally retarded, not too helpful in terms of paying off the national debt.
It's fairly unethical to break them up for parts, so we'll have to count those out.
And, of course, there's the mossbacks, the greyhairs, the fogies, the mutterers and whittlers and complainers about the government that they grew like a wild fertilizer during the courses of their lives as citizens, which we'll talk about in a podcast soon.
So you have to eliminate all the old people.
You have to eliminate politicians because, of course, there's not much point saying, yes, I will contribute to the national debt when your salary is adding to it and you're paying for the national debt out of your salary that's adding to it.
So then you have to get rid of public servants as a whole.
You could sort of keep 5% of them for the stuff that the free market would reproduce, but they would probably be at a far lower salary.
So... You have to get rid of between a quarter and 40% of the population as a whole.
So you also have to get rid of people who are in state-supported unions, some portion of their income which would dip down, right?
Because... Anyway, so there's lots and lots of people that you have to eliminate when it comes to paying off the national debt, simply taking the numbers of adult people.
And also there's the dingbat guys in their 30s still living at home and working part-time.
There's all the people trying to be actors, right?
All the people trying to be, what is it they call it on Seinfeld, the M.A.W.'s, models, actresses, whatever, a newscaster maybe.
So, all those people who are chewing up capital, living hand-to-mouth in pursuit of a dream...
So, there's just tons and tons of people that you're going to have to eliminate from being able to pay off the national debt, right?
So, the public servants and the old, the students, single moms, anybody who's living sort of hand-to-mouth, who doesn't have a whole lot of excessive income to throw into the national debt thing.
So, you know, when it comes down to paying the national debt, I think it's you and me, brother.
I think that's it. We're going to take this $8 trillion.
Carve it up between us, declare bankruptcy, and we're pretty much done.
Now, the national debt is obviously completely enormous, absolutely uncontrollable, unsustainable, unrecoverable from.
So... The other thing to remember, too, is that there's no possibility.
It's like three or four times the gross national product of the United States.
I'm not positive about that, but it's some huge amount, much larger than the ability to pay it off.
I think, you know, there's just no...
I'm sorry, the reason I'm pausing is I'm pretty sure that the $8 trillion is not...
The $2 trillion would be way too low for the GDP of the United States, so I think that's wrong.
But it's some... I remember 400% of something where it was something to do with paying it off.
See, this is the kind of quality statistics you come here for.
But boy, if I didn't have to drive right now, I would look it up.
But you can look at it. It's some ridiculously unpayoffable amount, right?
So... The budget of the government in the United States, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4 trillion.
The national debt, 8 trillion.
That would be it, which is what I'm thinking.
Three or four times the current total national spending.
Of course, when you are in debt to this degree, you're paying...
Three, four hundred billion dollars a year in interest payments.
The actual Department of Education is spending sixty billion and it's three or four hundred billion to just pay off the interest payments.
So you're in a total slide here, right?
So you can't just sort of say, okay, we'll take two trillion a year to pay off the national debt because it's going to increase to, it's not going to be four years, right?
You have to sort of pay more on it, right?
End up how much you finally end up paying for your house after 20 years, you get sort of a sense of this, right?
So, to pay off the national debt, right?
I mean, you can make a very strong argument that paying off the national debt, the only way to do it is simply eliminate the government.
And if people are uncomfortable with that, right, then you just say, okay, well, we've got this $8 trillion national debt.
We have $47 billion in unfunded liabilities.
Oh, and sailing into the future, of course, we have far fewer people working relative to retired people and relative to those not working and a smaller population of economically productive citizens relative to the not-so-economically productive citizens, to put it as nicely as I can think of.
So from that standpoint, it's even worse per person, right?
You look demographically over the next 50 years and so on, the birth rate is down and, you know, the things aren't exactly looking well.
You also have to take out the Amish.
I forgot about the Amish, the Mennonites, the people in the caves in Montana, the Ted Kaczynski's, the criminals.
You have to take out the criminals from the equation.
Boy, they're just, you know, flowing fast and fertile, these exclusionary elements.
So you have to take out the criminals because they're not going to be paying their share of the taxes.
You have to take out the people who work in the grey market, right?
So the 10 or 15% of the population who works in the grey market.
You have to take out the smugglers. Oh, don't forget the Native Americans.
You can take those out.
The people on welfare, people on unemployment insurance.
Seasonal workers are not likely to be able to contribute a huge amount to the national debt.
These are just things that are sort of popping into my head, I'm sure.
You could go quite a bit further in this analysis, but let's just start with that kind of stuff and sort of see where we end up.
Now, the question is then, well, how do you pay this off?
So you've got some statist guy, right?
And he's saying, well, we need the government for this, we need the government for that.
Well, it's worthwhile just memorizing a couple of the figures for departmental budgets.
And say, okay, well, we've got the state.
You think the state is a great thing.
And maybe you're right. Maybe I'm just completely talking out of my ear hole.
Maybe you're totally right.
The state is the best thing since sliced bread.
The only thing that I guess that I have some concern about is this, you know, this sort of national debt thing.
And... What I'd like to sort of understand is how you're going to pay it off.
How are you going to pay it off, right?
You can't really raise taxes, right?
You can't really raise taxes because that destroys jobs and you end up with, according to the Laffer curve, which is fairly well validated now, you're going to end up with less taxes.
You're on the event horizon, right?
You're on the event horizon of taxes.
You just can't raise them. Anymore.
You just destroy jobs and drive more people into non-economically productive areas, and it just doesn't work, right?
So what are you going to do? Well, you have to cut government spending, right?
You have to cut government spending, and you're going to have to do that pretty significantly if you can do it aggressively.
And so if you are the head of the government, what are you going to cut?
Now, they can't sort of dodge that question and call themselves any sort of politically aware kind of person, right?
They can't sort of use the, I'm going to get the rainbow magic Fed to print all the dollars to pay off the national debt because everybody's perfectly aware of that strategy and that will destroy the economy quicker than the hyperinflation it did in the 1920s in Germany.
So, if you get the Fed to start paying off dollars, all that will happen is people will raise interest rates to make up for the inevitable inflation.
And that will make people not want to buy any treasury bonds, which will cause the government to collapse, right?
Because when inflation rises, treasury bonds become pretty unattractive, so nobody's going to buy them.
So the U.S. will then have to raise the rates of treasury bonds that it's selling, and blah, blah, blah.
So you end up having to borrow.
You end up with further liabilities.
You know all this kind of stuff.
Nobody's fooled by this printing of the money kind of thing.
Even though the Fed has stopped printing the M1 money supply, people are pretty aware of it.
So, what are you going to do? You can't print the money.
You can't raise the taxes.
So, what are you going to cut?
What are you going to cut?
Now, of course, the left-wingers are going to say, well, you just cut the military budget, right?
They're going to have a bit of a tougher time with that, but yeah, okay.
So, let's say you cut the military budget.
Well, then you have a whole bunch of unemployed people.
So they're just going to apply for unemployment benefits.
And they're, of course, I mean, let's not even deal with the political issues around they're going to not vote for something which is going to cause a collapse in the industry that they work in, and they're going to lobby like crazy to have the funding restored so they don't have to retrain and blah blah blah.
We sort of talked about this a number of times.
But let's just deal with sort of the facts of the matter around paying off the national debt.
So, okay, well, that's fine.
So then Boeing and Lockheed Martin and all these sorts of companies lay off, you know, thousands upon thousands upon tens of thousands of workers.
And you have all these soldiers who are no longer able to do that homicidal thing overseas and get to import it back home.
All this R&D, all this Northrop Grumman, all these kind of companies are going to fold.
And sure, that's going to release...
Stuff into the private sector.
And that might help, right?
You can get rid of defense.
And you can get rid of this, that, and the other.
But of course, the great thing about it, from this standpoint, is that, let's say that you meet someone who says, well, let's just get rid of defense, right?
Let's just get rid of the defense budget.
Well, of course, then what they're doing is they're implicitly saying, well, we don't need the state to do defense, right?
Or that defense could be handled for so much less money.
So we bring all our troops back from overseas, we disband, I don't know, Homeland Security, we disband the CIA, we disband the FBI, we disband the Standing Army, all of this kind of stuff, and we end up with a military that's like one-tenth the size of what we have now, or one-twentieth. Well, that's interesting, but of course, what happens in this kind of debate, if you're talking with someone about this, is they say, well, okay, well, we need just that much smaller...
Of a military. And so you're saying, okay, so basically the society as a whole, like forget about government, society as a whole can get by on a whole lot less military spending and military hardware and so on than it has now.
So we need that much less government.
Once you start to shrink government down quite a bit, you really start to get into the question of, well, why not just get rid of it?
I mean, this is the interesting thing about the minarchists.
The ideal minarchist government is one guy, right?
With, I guess, a pager and a lot of phones.
If one guy is the government, well, of course, if one guy is the government, just get rid of that.
So the smaller government gets, the more open people could be, or should be, I think, to getting rid of it.
For two reasons. One is that it's not that much of a stretch.
And two is that...
If you're talking to a statist who says, well, I'll get rid of 95% of the Department of Defense, then you'd say, okay, well, so for the last hundred years, the government has been ripping off people and going to start wars around the world and has been running up this incredible national debt and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Is that a risk we want to take for the next hundred years and this could all happen again?
So the more people want to cut government and the more areas they want to cut government in, the more you can make the case for no government because it's obviously overpriced.
This is something you know if you negotiate the price of anything.
If you're dealing with a used car salesman and he says $20,000 for this used car and you say, you know, I really don't think that I want to pay that.
And then he says, okay, it's not $20,000, it's $1,000 for this car.
Well, are you going to want to do business with this guy at all?
Well, of course not. Because if you just drop the price 95%, he's a crook.
So the more that people want to cut government, the more that we should get rid of government, because it's obviously hyperinflated itself at the expense of citizens, to a completely criminal, even by status standards, completely criminal government.
And of course, it can easily happen again.
So, the less you want to cut government, the more justification there is for government.
So, if you say, well, we should just cut the government 5%, there's a little bit of corruption, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
So, I think we cut 5%, we should be fine.
That's fine, but then you still have the problem with the national debt.
Okay, so you don't want to cut government, but how are you going to pay the national debt?
Well, we have to cut government.
Well, we have to cut it a lot then, right?
Well, if you're willing to cut it a lot and say society will survive, then obviously the government is heavily bloated, heavily corrupt, heavily ripping off whoever it can lay its hands on, and so it's much harder to justify the continued existence of the government in that scenario.
So it's one of these things that you can't ever come out of this debate with a...
Good equals government kind of thing, right?
Once you start to bring the national debt into the equation, then what happens is you're starting to put the onus on other people, right?
And I sort of always really preferred this kind of thing, right?
So it's much, much easier to debate when the burden of proof is on the other person.
I mean, so if somebody says, well, you can't have a proof that a non-government society would ever work, blah, blah, blah, it's like, okay, well, let's forget that.
Let's forget that as an option.
No problem. Because you can approach these moral questions any way you want.
You can end up with the same conclusion, right?
If you measure the distance between two cities using a plane, a car, a bicycle, and a tapeworm, you're still going to end up with the same distance, right?
I mean, it doesn't matter which way you approach these things.
When it comes to rationality, all roads lead to the right conclusions, just as in the ancient world, all roads led to Rome.
So you say, okay, well, yeah, let's give up on the whole market anarchy thing.
What I do want to ask you, though, is what are you going to cut to the government to pay the national debt?
I mean, it's just things that nobody ever talks about with politicians, right?
You have 800,000 billion reporters and pundits and, you know, White House room questioners constantly asking about all of this bullshit about minutiae and trivia and so on.
And, of course, nobody's ever saying, well, what are you going to cut?
To pay off the national debt.
That's a question that politicians can't be asked.
And they'll talk vaguely about optimizing efficiencies and this and that and the other.
But the basic question can never be asked because it's going to piss off some constituent to do that.
Or it's like the B-52 bomber.
A piece of it is made in every single state, so there's just no possibility of getting it out.
It's like trying to get shrapnel out of yourself to get that disembedded from...
From the constituents, so you'll never be allowed back into the room if you ask the politician those questions.
Or, you know, if you don't perform this ritual where you say, well, what are you going to cut to provide the national debt?
We say, well, we believe that a fiscally responsible approach of timely but prudent tax cuts combined with the innate growth of the economy, combined with finding inefficiencies and getting rid of particular kinds of waste within the government, will be a good start We're good to begin to deal with this terrible problem that we've inherited from prior administrations of the national debt.
You don't even have to think about this kind of stuff.
You're like the guy in Yes Minister or Yes Prime Minister.
It just rolls off the tongue.
We all know how to bullshit in this kind of way.
And of course, if you say, well...
I've been sitting in the room for 20 years hearing the same stuff.
Can you give me some specifics?
Do you actually have a plan to get rid of the national debt?
Yes, we have a plan, a fiscally responsible, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, no, no, no. Do you have a plan?
It's like saying, think of me as an investor, right?
So, if you're...
If I want to invest in your company and I say, well, I'm thinking of investing $10 million in your company, what's your plan?
And you say, well, we have a plan to grow the product base and further satisfy clients and expand our market share and this and that and the other.
It's like, well, yeah, of course you do.
But the question is, how?
Give me specifics. Give me cash flows.
Give me hiring plans.
Give me how you're going to do it.
Give me how you've got the expertise to do it.
Give me your competitive analysis.
Give me your growth projections.
Give me all of this, right?
I mean, just saying, yeah, we plan to grow our business is, you know, you'd get laughed out of the room, right?
I mean, you'd be revealed this is a rank amateur who hadn't even probably finished grade 12, right?
I mean, so you say, no, no, no, give me the numbers.
Like, what specifically are you going to cut, right?
A trillion dollars, plus interest, plus decaying interest payments and debt payments.
So you've got 8 to 50 trillion dollars that you've got to cut.
So how are you going to do it?
Give me some specifics. If you cut the Department of Education and privatize the entire school system, then you've got 60 billion of the 8 trillion right there.
So a couple of percent. But give me some numbers.
Give me something that I understand.
Well, that's a complicated topic.
We'll get back to you. We've got people working on it.
We're working on a big plan. Be revealed in due time.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, well then you say, okay, then you don't actually have a plan right now.
You have an intention.
And an intention is very different from a plan.
It is my intention to marry.
It is my plan to marry Christina in two months.
And here's the budget and here's how we're going to do it.
And by the way, I've kidnapped her cat, so I think she's going to say yes.
That's a plan, right? An intention is quite a bit different, right?
An intention is just a vague, windy generalization designed to shut people up.
But We don't have to accept that from the people that we're debating with, right?
Because they're not politicians.
So we can just say, okay, well, you don't want to get rid of the government.
That's fine. But then just tell me how is the national debt going to be paid off, right?
Because if you say that the government should continue to exist, then obviously you've put some thought into how it's going to continue to exist, right?
So it's not your intention that the government continue to exist, because that's just like saying, I would like nobody to get sick and kittens to have wings so they'd look cute batten against my window.
It doesn't mean anything. The question is, you obviously believe the government should exist and not in some sort of airy-fairy, abstract, it would be nice if everybody gave the world a hug kind of way, but in some kind of specific way, right?
So if you say, it's my intention to move to Baltimore, and then somebody says, great, so how are you going to do it?
And you're like, well, I don't know.
I don't even know where Baltimore is.
I have no idea how to get there, and I don't want to talk about it.
Then when somebody says, it's my intention to move to Baltimore, they might as well be saying, it's my intention to fry my scalp using fish oil on the moon at night in a rubber suit.
I mean, okay.
Good luck with all of that.
But you've absolutely vaulted yourself out of the realm of rational debate, right?
So... So you can say to people, okay, well, so what are you going to cut, right?
You think the government should continue.
More power to you. You could be absolutely right.
Obviously, it can't continue in its current state, right?
No doubt, no question of that.
It cannot continue in its current state.
So how are you going to help it to continue?
So, you know, if you go to a doctor and the doctor says that you're dying of cancer, that your cancer is like metastasized into something the size of Idaho, and you really don't have long for this world, and then you say, well, what's your plan?
Well, the doctor says, well, my plan is to have you live...
Until you're 80. And you're like, great!
Oh, thank God, you gave me all this terrible news, like I'm about to die.
And then I say, well, what's your plan?
They say, well, my plan is to have you live forever, or at least until you're 85.
And you're like, oh, thank God, that's another 55 years, and here I thought I only had two days to live.
Fantastic. Well, you tell me how that's going to happen.
It's like, uh... What?
Says the doctor, what do you mean how that's going to happen?
It's just my intention that this happened to you.
Well, what's your cure? I don't know.
I don't have a cure. Well, can you operate?
No, I can't operate.
Why are you asking me these questions?
Well, because you said I was going to live to 85.
No, I just want you to live to 85.
I've got no idea actually how to make you do it.
Well, you'd obviously recognize that this doctor was deranged and a fake and murderous and bizarre, and you'd probably not feel like it was a really good thing to have this doctor have anything to do with your cure, and you probably wouldn't have any idea that this doctor would have any kind of competence in the field of medicine.
So, when people say that they want a certain situation to continue, and it obviously can't continue, then the onus is upon them To come up with the plan, right?
So somebody says, yes, there should be a government.
Be like, fantastic! Because there's no government, there's going to be no government within like 10 or 20 or 30 years, right?
We all recognize that government's going to go bankrupt.
So we're all on the same page as far as that goes, correct?
Government's going to go bankrupt, so we're going to get our wish.
You're not going to get your wish in terms of the government continuing if the government is so great.
So obviously if you think the government should continue, you've got some kind of plan, right?
You've got some sort of thing that nobody's thought of, right?
Because lots of people have put their heads together on this issue.
You've got some sort of plan.
About how this family debt of $111,000 to $444,000, depending on how you count it, how is this going to get paid off?
And if they say, well, I don't know, we'll then be like, well, I'm not sure that I understand then what you say by you mean you want government to continue.
Because it can't continue, and you want it to continue, and you know it can't continue, but you have no plan about how it can continue.
So, I mean, how am I supposed to look at you except as a rather retarded child who is saying, I want a million dollars?
Well, how are you going to go about getting a million dollars?
Well, I don't know. I just want a million dollars.
I mean, wouldn't you look at somebody who said that as, you know, well, that's very nice, Bobby.
We hope that you get your wish.
You sort of walk away, right, shaking your head, because it's a perfectly retarded thing to say, or even no plan.
So... You can just say to them, well, you tell me how this is going to sustain itself.
You tell me how this national debt is going to be paid off.
$111,000 to $444,000 per family, not even counting all the people I listed before who aren't going to be part of the equation.
So it could well be double debt, right?
So, you know, quarter million to $900,000 per family.
It has to get paid off.
After they're paying their existing taxes, after they're paying their living expenses, after they're saving for their kids' retirement, after this, after that, after the other, how's it going to happen?
You tell me you want this thing to continue?
Tell me how. Because I've got to tell you, I don't see how it can continue.
I mean, not even I can't.
It can't continue.
Mathematics don't lie. You can't cheat the laws of reality.
Debt will cause repayment or bankruptcy.
No question about that.
Repudiation or repayment.
That's all it comes down to.
Or Market Anarchy, where we just reject the whole debt.
Well, we'll get to that another time.
So it's like, okay, well, you tell me.
How's this all going to work?
Now, if they start saying, well, I'm going to get rid of this, I'm going to get rid of that, I'm going to get rid of the other, I'm going to get the current budget down to like 10% of what it is, right?
It's like, okay, well, that's, you know, obviously that's a plan, right?
And there's certain difficulties. I really respect you for having thought this through, and I would certainly say that, because it is not the easiest thing in the world to come up with a budget that will work.
P.G. O'Rourke has a pretty good one.
At the end of, I think, Parliament of Whores, and Harry Brown came up with one.
But it's not the easiest thing in the world to do the math and figure out how the government can work.
Well, then, of course, the question is, well, if the government was 90 or 95% too large, and this went on for 30 or 40 years, and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars were ripped off from the taxpayer, do you really think that that's a moral institution that we should just restrict and not eliminate?
Well, that's a perfectly valid question.
The other question, of course, is given that everybody who's involved in this kind of reductions are going to get thrown out on their ass with no relevant skills compared to where they were coming from, how do you think this is going to happen politically?
Right? So, if somebody says they've gone all the way through, they've done the numbers, they've crunched this and that, and they say, okay, I can pay off the national debt this way or this way or this way, and you say, okay, great!
There's going to be challenges, but you've got to admire somebody who's put the time and effort in to actually substantiate something that they've come up with.
Fantastic. Good for you.
More kudos. Kudos, kudos.
But then, of course, then you say, okay, so you're going to crush the government by 95%.
You don't want to talk about how that sort of makes the government 95% evil over the past 20 or 30 years.
Let's just say, fine, we'll bypass that.
And then you say, okay, so you're going to crush the government politically 95%.
You're going to reduce 90% or whatever, right?
Okay, well, how is this going to happen politically?
Because everyone's aware that the government increases, increases, increases.
There's no limit to the size of increases in government precisely because of the problem of lobbying and the fact that you can get other people to pay your bills and walk away with all the cash and all this kind of stuff.
So everybody recognizes that as an issue.
So you say, okay, so you figured it out financially.
Good for you. You have dealt with all of the fallout that comes from shifting around that kind of spending, paying off.
The spending is now not accumulating to the economy.
So you've dealt with all of those issues.
Good for you. Fantastic. Now, if you would be so very kind, what I would like you to do is to tell me then how this is going to happen politically.
So it's not just a wish list.
We don't just want a wish list because that's silly.
This is back to the retarded kid saying, I want a million dollars.
And then you're saying, well, how are you going to do it?
You say, I'm going to get a job as a brain surgeon.
Right? With an IQ of 70.
Well, okay, so you have a plan, but that plan isn't really very feasible because it's not really possible to achieve it.
So you have a plan, but I'm going to get to Baltimore, and the way I'm going to get to Baltimore is I'm going to fly.
And I don't mean in a plane.
I mean, I'm going to get to Baltimore, and I've got it on the map, I've got the direction, but the way that I'm going to do it is that I'm going to flap my wings and fly.
I don't exactly have the wings, but don't worry, it's going to work.
Then you say, well, you're still, you know, I appreciate that you figured out where Baltimore is, and you now have a plan on how to get there, but I'm not sure that I agree with the feasibility of your plan.
And you can't hear, you know, if you're a statist, right, you can't wave the magic wand and say, oh, well, okay, so the way it's going to happen, you see, in terms of this, right, the way it's going to work, I've got it all figured out, there's going to be a huge enlightenment.
There's going to be, right, people are going to start taking responsibility for their government.
People are going to just wake up to the danger, and people are going to just start doing the right thing, and everything's going to be turned around because some magic moral elf is going to wave fairy dust over the heads of the general population, and everyone's going to leap up and say, by golly, this national debt is a catastrophe!
Apparently it is in England, too.
So you can't have a sort of, you know, there's this funny graphic that goes around in the business world.
You may have seen it. And what it is is a project plan that obviously is going completely awry, completely awry.
And then there's this one sort of cloudy box near the end which says, a miracle occurs, right?
And then the project is completed.
Well, you can't allow that to a status, right?
So you can't say, well, when people realize it, they'll wake up, they'll make the sacrifices, they'll do this, they'll do that, right?
You can't just sort of wave a magic wand and say, well, I'll just will myself to Baltimore, right?
Or people in Baltimore will wake up and realize that I need to be there and come and carry me.
Or, even better, they'll actually move Baltimore to where I am, and that's how I'm going to get to Baltimore.
I mean, all of this stuff would be like, okay, so you still haven't exactly come up with a plan that's executable.
So, you know, given the political realities, given what's happened, given this, given that, how on earth is it going to happen politically?
I mean, these are questions that people need to answer.
And there's no magic wand, right?
There has to be a plan, and the plan has to verify some sort of existing information, right?
So, if I'm selling a software company and I say, well, we made $5 million last year, but next year we're making $50 million, Well, if I don't have a really specific trendline, market analysis, customer testimonials, sample POs, and growth, if I went from $5 to $5 million the previous year, then I might have a stronger case of going to $50 million.
I really do have to reference some sort of past reality in order to create my future projections.
And the past reality, of course, is that everybody wants government spending to increase.
Everybody wants government spending to increase.
Everyone who's politically relevant.
Because it didn't just grow on its own.
They didn't put a whole bunch of debt notes into the treasury vault and they multiplied like rabbits in some sort of bizarre financial porn scenario.
So... The trend has been that the government spending increases because people profit from it, and the political system is set up to cause that increase to exacerbate itself over time because of lobbying and special interest groups and getting the taxpayer to foot the bill for stuff that you're spending.
So that's a fact.
It's a fact of democracy.
So they have to come up with something.
And of course, basically, it's totally impossible, but they don't know that.
They think that, well, the government should continue.
Like, I should live for a thousand years.
Well... Are you going to get some sort of cyborg thing going there?
How are you actually going to make this work?
So, I think that this actually does really help because, of course, if people do end up cutting the spending of the government to the degree required to pay off national debt, then you can turn them into anarchists just by one little blow, right? Because they've already admitted the government is a complete rip-off agency and that it's 95% too big or whatever.
And so... This particular approach can be very helpful.
If we just take it for granted that the state will continue to exist and people can say stuff like, well, we need a government.
It's like, well, maybe, right?
I mean, a guy dying of cancer might say, well, I need health, but the question is, how do you get there?
So, given that the government is on its last legs...
I, for one, would not take anything for granted in terms of chatting with people.
I wouldn't sort of take for granted at all that it's valid for people to say, I am going to advocate for the continued existence of the government, and that's a valid thing to say, because the government can't continue.
And they either have to start giving you some answers, or they have to recognize that what they're asking for is a complete fairy tale, right?
Because right now what they're doing is they're talking about, you know, the way that most people talk about government relative to its current sort of debt status and financial status is they're kind of talking about, you know, well, maybe we should tweak your diet a little bit to a guy who's like, you know, redlining from a heart attack, right? maybe we should tweak your diet a little bit to I mean, this is what people don't see, right?
Because they live in this world of abstracts, like the government exists somewhat independently of its financial status or, you know, it's just this entity that's out there.
But when people start talking about, you know, the government and we should tweak this and we should tweak that, it's sort of important to understand that they just don't have any concept how much on its last legs it really is, right?
I mean, you look at these debt statistics that are increasing, right?
I mean, they're not decreasing.
And you can say relative to GDP and this and that and the other, right?
But GDP is another one of these nonsense calculations that includes things like government-to-government transfers and public sector contracts and so on.
But people don't sort of realize that they're talking about, you know, I think this guy should keep living forever when he's redlined from a heart attack, so you better do something fairly extreme, right?
You need defibrillators, you need to aspirate him, you need to intubate him, because I watch my house, so I know this kind of stuff by now.
And they've got to come up with some pretty radical solutions if they want their beloved state entity to continue.
That would sort of be, I think, a fairly rational thing to ask for.
It's like, oh, so you do want the state to continue, but you do realize that it's virtually dead, right?
So what are you going to do to ensure that this entity that you love so much is actually going to continue?
Put the onus on them to tell you how it's all going to work, right?
Because obviously it can't work and you're not insane for saying it doesn't work.
So please come by, give me some donations.
I'm checking on the hour, every hour, even at work, to look for some donations.
I'm really looking forward to getting some.
It's been a little bit of a dry spell after a nice monsoon, so please come by and give me some dollars.
I think it will be the right thing to do, and I think you'll feel good about it.
And I'll certainly feel good about it, and of course that's your major concern, as I'm well aware.
Also, if you could sign up to the FeedBurner email notifications, I'll get an even better sense of listenership.
And last but not least, we do have ye olde magical listener review, which I'm really looking forward to spending some time this weekend digging into and getting responses to, freedomainradio.com.
Click on the five-minute survey.
And last but not least, sorry about the board going down last night.
We have such a high degree of activity on the board, 145 members all pounding away with the fascinating, fascinating questions and answers.
So sorry that the board went down.
I've talked about it with GoDaddy.
They've built up lots of indexes.
We're sharing a server, of course, at the moment.
Once the donations go up some more, I'll rent a server.
But right now we're sharing, and, of course, we have a hyperactive board.
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