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June 26, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:25
298 The Aged

Anarchism and the elderly... (note: shouted out for your listening convenience!)

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Good morning, everybody.
I hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It is 8.28 in the morning on the Monday, the 26th of June, 2006.
I hope you're doing fabulously, and I hope you had a great weekend.
This is show number 298.
So one more this afternoon, and then you will hear...
Actually, you won't hear that. What you will hear is Podcast 300, which I think is going to be enjoyable for you.
It's a bit of a departure, but I think you'll enjoy it.
Well, this morning I would like to talk about a topic.
This has been on my list of things to talk about for quite some time, almost since the beginning.
But I really wanted to take time to sort out my own feelings around this.
And my own feelings are...
Complicated in this area because, well, you'll see why as we go forward.
And so I wanted to make sure that I wasn't projecting any discontent that I had in my own history on this topic, which is always a very difficult thing to do to make sure you're not projecting, to make sure that your judgments...
I'm not clouded by any of your own history, or as clouded as little as possible.
I guess it's very hard to have it not clouded at all, because even if you can end up with a just view of the topic, the topic itself might be generated by your own history.
So, without wanting to get overly complicated, it is a Monday morning after all, I would like to talk about the old.
The aged. The aged P, as one gentleman calls his father in Great Expectations.
And it is a challenging topic, I think, because whenever you start to talk about the elderly or the retirees, I can scarcely really call anybody under 80 the elderly because...
You see 70-year-old people.
I got my pants whipped off me by a 70-year-old man playing squash when I was like 25 because he had such precise placement.
It was dazzling. And all I did, my youth and vigor helped not at all because I was maybe five times healthier but doing ten times the work.
So it didn't really matter.
So it's really hard to me to think of these people as the elderly.
Like for me, elderly is when you can't get around your home and are crippled by arthritis or something like that.
And so, you know, we're really not talking about the vigorous people, the people who are working into their 80s and enjoying their careers still and so on.
But we are talking about the people who've become dependent upon government largesse.
And so I'd like to start off the topic by looking at two sort of moral poles of the situation.
So, the first moral pole of the situation is somebody, some guy who's now retired and he's poorly, and his whole life he rejected government money, he stood on his own two feet, he maybe used charity once in a while,
but got himself up and got himself running and raised his family or did whatever he did, and he would love to have saved for his own retirement, But the Social Security Ponzi scheme, which would be completely illegal in the private sector, where you can't have a rolling payout, you can't say to people, give me $1,000 now and I'll give you $2,000 in a year, and to use the intervening time to recruit more people to give you $1,000, which you then use to pay the extra money, to the people who gave you money earlier, that's illegal.
It's a pyramid scheme.
And it's illegal in the private sector, and that, of course, is exactly what's happened with Social Security and the retirement benefits of most, if not all, major Western democracies, which is that people have had money taken away from them for their whole life, and it's been spent by the politicians who took it many, many years ago, as Harry Brown used to say it.
Your retirement savings were blown to prop up the Russian ruble for another 12 minutes, and it's all gone and dispersed among the world.
And what's left when you retire is the money of the younger generation.
It's completely unjust, of course.
The current generation of retirees is by far the richest segment of human life that has ever existed.
And, of course, young people, when they're starting out, don't have a lot of money.
People at the end of their life usually have a lot more money in assets.
And yet we are taking from those who are starting out with fewer assets.
We're taking from the poor and giving to the rich.
And why? Well, because that particular segment of rich happens to vote quite a bit.
And, of course, it's very hard for anyone who's young to talk about Social Security in a clear manner because there is always this complication of knowing that you're kind of dealing with your parents psychologically.
So it's very tough to say, let's pull an Inuit and leave them out in a snowbank, which, of course, wouldn't be my suggestion either.
But it's a complicated topic.
And, of course, The old Mossbacks are very good at parading out both righteous anger and high suspended helplessness in terms of arousing both sympathy, pity, and resentment that can't be activated in any way.
So it's a challenging topic, let's say.
And so let's just start with this one guy who would have saved, but the 7.5% that's taken from his paycheck and the 7.5% that's taken from his employer To pay, sort of, quote, pay for his retirement.
He would have loved to have saved it, but with all that money being taken away from him and other taxes, he just couldn't.
Man had to eat.
Man had to give his children vittles.
And so he ends up old and dependent upon the state.
Not something he wanted, not something his pride sort of welcomes or appreciates.
So now he's in a position where his income has been severely curtailed throughout his life, and now he's dependent upon the state.
And on the other hand, you have someone who's sort of bummed around most of their life.
They did a little bit of...
They were an actor for a while, and maybe a gold pattern.
Maybe they did comedy for a bit, and maybe they tried this, that, and the other.
And... They never really paid much in taxes, and wherever they could get away with not paying taxes, they did try and get away with not paying taxes.
They were a socialist and supported the whole scheme and felt that everybody was entitled to whatever they wanted.
They took government grants and took welfare at times.
Art grants, I mean.
So they did lots of things to sort of pillage the system and said that everyone was entitled, and they never contributed smack to the whole kitty.
And then when they get older, they loudly demand their retirement benefits, and, you know, they've supported the whole thing.
They think it's absolutely fine.
They've hated capitalism, and they've put on endless plays and performance pieces about how evil the free market is, and now they demand that the free marketeers...
Generate the income to provide them with Social Security because, God knows, if they themselves had been a template for everyone's economic existence, there would be no conceivable thing such as Social Security because we would have living standards somewhat in the Middle Ages.
So these are two sort of opposite poles of the situation.
Now, I think the important thing to understand about Social Security and how you might be able to approach this problem of what happens with the aged is, of course, to forget about the government, to forget about this idea that the government took your money and this and that and the other.
And just treat it as any other Ponzi scheme.
So if I had been part of, let's just say that it was wrong to have money taken from me.
That there was this mafioso who took 15% of my income throughout my life with the threat of...
Kidnapping my children. And what happened was I paid the money grudgingly.
I couldn't go to the cops. The cops were in on it.
The cops got half the take.
And so I had all my money stolen from me, and this amounted to half a million dollars over the course of my life.
Well, when the new sheriff rides into town, right?
So the cops get a new sheriff.
Well, the key thing, of course, and these new sheriffs don't have the power of taxation, Well, the key thing to do, of course, is to work with restitution.
I mean, that's the logical thing to do when it comes to figuring out how to get money back to people.
And so, if this guy, who's had half a million dollars taken from him his whole life, suddenly finds himself in Libertopia, then DROs will, for a percentage of the take, offer to go and collect his money for him.
And the wonderful thing about the modern economy is that there's records of just about everything.
And you can trace quite a lot of it, even if you don't have the person's permissions.
That's the wonderful thing about having had a government, is that you have all these records, that you'll stumble across the empty FBI headquarters after Libertopia arises.
And if you want, you'll find these records that are sort of in the public domain.
You can return them to the person who had them stolen from him, or her, but that person can then say, yeah, use these records to get me my money back, because I don't have any money.
Now, Harry Brown's answer as well is, I think, an excellent one, which is that there's lots of public lands which have public assets which have existed for, well, since the founding of the Republic or most of the foundings of the Western democracies that have been in the public sector.
Well, you sell those off and you turn the money over in annuities to the people who have been retired.
I think that's an excellent answer, but I also think it's, I mean, in terms it's very clever and it might work, but...
It's somewhat problematic because it's a violation of property rights.
The people who are retired don't own the public assets.
So seizing all of the public assets, selling them and turning over the money to Retirees is clever and might work, but I can't see it as really a just solution under the rubric of property rights because it would indicate that these people owned this federal property and therefore were able to give the proceeds back.
And I think that that's true to some degree.
I think that's true to some degree, but of course the proceeds should return to the people who paid taxes, proportional to the taxes that were paid, because this was all money that the people in the government stole money from everyone, and therefore that money should be returned to those people.
So, anytime that you're involved in any kind of scheme where your money is taken from you by force, then the best that you can hope for is for restitution.
So, you can't get restitution from the general tax base because that's...
Adding theft to solve the problem of theft.
And that's not a moral solution, and of course that would never work because you'd need a central agency which would be able to go and take money from people, so it would mean you'd have to have a government, which means you wouldn't be solving the problem.
The problem would just get corrupted.
So, I mean, the other problem with Harry Brown's solution, in my humble opinion, is that it requires a government, and the government would never take that money and hand it over to the elderly.
The amount of skimming that would go on, the amount of, uh, well, I'll sell it to you for five bucks and we'll pretend nobody else bid it, and then you pay a million dollars under the table.
I mean, the whole thing would evaporate.
All of the value of the public assets would evaporate, and the agent would end up getting an insultingly small check, which might get them one more tin of cat food, which they might not feed to their cat.
So I don't think that's going to be a practical solution.
As soon as you get monopolistic violence involved, you can't get anything done other than enrich the corrupt.
You can't get anything done in the government other than enrich the corrupt.
And the only thing that you can get done is the things that they need as well, right?
So you'll get some level of healthcare, you'll get some level of roads, and you'll get water, and you'll get electricity, because they need them as well, but of course all of these things will be horrendously in debt and will collapse, and so on.
So, all you need to do is, if Libertopia arrives tomorrow, then of course people aren't going to get their Social Security checks.
People are going to say to me, and it's going to be a lot of passion in it, and I understand this passion.
They're going to say, well, I paid into this system my whole life, and this money was taken for me by force, and how can you cut off my social security check?
I'm going to die. I can't live.
I can't work. I got arthritis.
I'm in a wheelchair. I can't do this.
I can't do that. So, absolutely.
Absolutely. All that is perfectly valid, and I feel a huge amount of sympathy.
For the aged.
And I will be more than happy to help out.
I mean, I'm going to have, like, triple my income in terms of real wages.
So, heavens, Betsy, I would be more than happy to set aside 10 or 20% of that increase to help the people who are going to have to wean themselves off state largesse.
Or, in the case of the elderly, like the old and infirm, I will be more than happy to help them out with the knowledge that they're not going to weed themselves off.
And I will even help if they shake their narrowly old fists in my face and say, I'm entitled!
You give me that money!
I'm entitled! I will be more than happy to give them money anyway, and most people will.
Of course, there are children who are addicted to their parents and all over the world, and so it seems to me unlikely that these people are just going to I want my independence.
It's like you want your independence.
How about my goddamn independence paying taxes for you when you're getting three, four, five, six times out of Social Security what you put into it?
My independence. What about my independence?
What about the independence of everybody else who's out there trying to start a family, worrying about their cash flow?
You all had your independence.
You all got to collect your assets when taxes were like a half or a third or a quarter, what they are now.
So don't talk to me about independence and sell your house, move into a small condo and live off that.
But that's something else that we can talk about another time.
I just thought, I want my independence.
It's like, yeah, so I have to be a slave so you get to be independent.
That makes sense. And I will do this to help the elderly to survive and to continue in their current lifestyle, perhaps not exactly to the lifestyle to which they've become accustomed.
And they can take their chances with that, right?
And they can take their chances with the generosity of their children, of their extended family, of charities, of churches, of All of these sorts of things.
They can take their chances with DROs hunting down the people who profited from Social Security, taking that money and submitting it back minus a small percentage to the old.
And they can take their chances with all of that.
And we can have a sort of managed...
If they want.
Now, if they don't want, that's fine too.
I mean, everybody is free to choose, and the elderly can choose not to have a managed transition that relies on the benevolence, generosity, and bounty hunting capacities of the DRO societies.
They can choose not to do any of that, and of course all work restrictions will be lifted from them, goods will be half their current price, property taxes will vanish.
I mean, look, it's not going to be...
I bet you that they will end up with more money in their pocket after the government goes away, even without Social Security benefits, because everything is going to be so much cheaper.
But they can take their chances with this managed transition into a free society, or what they can do is continue to pound their fists on the table, not too hard, and they can say, I'm entitled, and I've got to get this money, and I'm in medicine, and this and that.
And that's fine. And then in 10 or 15 years, when the whole thing goes bankrupt, then there's no managed transition.
There's no managed transition. There's just no money in the bank.
They don't get their checks or their checks bounce.
And then they can figure out how to survive without anybody helping them with the transition, right?
Because it's not going to last.
I mean, we'll talk about this more a little bit later.
But this 10 to 15 years thing, it sort of doesn't come out of my head out of nowhere.
I have some rationales behind it.
But we can talk about those another time.
But the old people can either say, okay, well, this course of action isn't going to work, right?
So I can hit the brakes now, get out and walk to the Libertopian bus, which will now take me along, or I can just keep hitting the gas and the car's going to get faster and then it'll all be over at once.
And You know, it's a choice.
It's a choice. I've got to tell you that if they're completely resistant to any kind of managed transition to a freer society, that will be enormously more beneficial for them.
The price of their medicines will be cut by 80%.
Everything they pay for will be cut by at least 50%.
They won't have to pay any property taxes.
They won't have to pay any sales taxes.
They won't have to pay any income taxes.
They won't have to pay any dividends taxes.
The old are going to do far better under a free society than they do under the current system of Social Security.
And they would be, if they were intelligent and kind and compassionate and wise, then they would recognize that the system can't last and that they don't want to be preying off the young like leeches and that they did kind of get a system going that they benefited from considerably relative to their children and that it's not going to last and they We need a managed transition and things are going to be better for them.
Or they can just keep hitting the gas until we go straight into the wall.
And then it's going to be every person for himself or herself.
And it's going to be a whole lot harder to make this managed transition.
And that's fine. I can understand that.
I mean, if you're 75 and in poor health, you can try getting off heroin.
But you can also just ride the horse into the sunset, so to speak.
It's a choice. It's up to you, right?
You can stay addicted and escalate your addiction and see what happens.
Now, the thing that I would ask for, I'll do it either way, just personally in terms of generosity to those who are old and unable to work and so on.
I'll do it either way.
But the one thing that I would like from the aged is just two little words.
Two little words. We're sorry.
Wouldn't that be nice?
Wouldn't it be nice if we had had...
Just a few more people fighting against the state when the state was growing so enormously in the 60s and 70s.
So the people who are retiring now, you know, they were in their 20s and 30s, I guess, back then, in their 30s.
And, boy, it would be nice if they had managed to fight the state.
It's not that they would have won, don't get me wrong.
It's not that they would have created Libertopia.
It would be unlikely.
It's possible. I'm not saying that because they would have won.
But what they would have done is if they had raised their voices and said, you know, there seems to be a whole lot of expansion of state power.
Tax is a heck of a lot higher than when I was younger.
The national debt is growing like crazy.
We need to really work to make this turn it around for the next generation, right?
So it's not so bad. And I do get emails from older people who feel terrible about the national debt and so on.
And I understand that and I appreciate that.
And for those people who, you know, there's record.
They wrote to the editor. They talked to this debt and the other person.
And everyone remembers them always railing against the government.
And, you know, we need to be free and the national debt is pillaging and so on.
Good for them. And I'll double their benefits just in my own personal donation checkbox.
For those people who ignored the whole government thing, who talked a whole lot of trash about the government helping people and we need the government, we need the government, the only thing that I would like, and I'll pay either way, but it would sure add a little bit of sugar to the medicine, would be just for some older people to say, Oops!
Sorry, we kind of missed that whole fascism thing growing while we were voting.
We voted for a whole bunch of people who made government bigger, and then we loudly said that government needs to be bigger, we need more government power, and we've kind of handed over to you, the young, A system teetering on the edge of fascism, and we've stacked the odds just a little bit against you.
We've created whole tribes of great brigades that are dependent upon state largesse and are going to fight tooth and nail for their benefits, their entitled benefits.
And sorry, we just, we kind of missed the bus on that one.
We kind of left you with a real mess.
And it wouldn't have been that hard, it wouldn't have been the end of the world, for us to speak up just a little bit.
To speak up just a little bit and talk a little bit about how this was a bad thing that was occurring.
So if Milton Friedman was still alive, or if Murray Rothbard were still alive, then I would be like, hey, here's a million dollars a year.
You guys made the debate a whole lot easier than it would have been otherwise by injecting some ideas into the mainstream in order to help people to understand the violence and coercive nature of the state.
It would be nice.
It would be nice to just hear a little bit from those who just talked a whole load of trash about the value of the state, to just get a little bit of, oops, sorry, that really wasn't the right thing to do.
And it's something that I've always felt about people who feel entitled.
Entitlement is a great challenge to break.
It is a great false self, false argument for morality, megalomaniacal, Narcissistic thing, which is that I am entitled to X, Y, and Z just for breathing.
You owe me just because I'm breathing.
And that is a very, very desperately unhealthy mental state and something which covers an enormous amount of violated rage and is a very difficult thing to deal with.
And it is an incredibly sweet thing for the true self When entitlement is broken, and entitlement is usually only broken by an argument for morality, right?
Because entitlement is one of the greatest false arguments for morality that exists.
And it is only broken by a firm and resolute true self and a true argument for morality.
And... It is a very sweet thing for the personality when entitlement is broken.
It is a wonderful thing for the personality because it's so liberating.
It's terrifying because now you actually have to provide value.
People who are entitled have unbelievably low self-esteem.
They don't think they're worth anything at all whatsoever.
And so they don't believe that in any situation where voluntary value must be exchanged in order for a win-win negotiation, they feel that they have nothing to offer, nothing whatsoever to offer in the realm of personal value.
Entitlement grows out of feeling that there's no value that can be accepted.
I can't bring anything to the table.
I bring nothing to the table.
I'm difficult. I'm horrible.
I'm mean. I'm cold.
I'm distant. And I've never confronted myself on these things.
And so, rather than attempt to sit down and figure out how I can bring more value so that people will voluntarily want to deal with me, then what I do instead is I sit down and tell people that they damn well owe me something.
I'm entitled. You owe me.
And that is the value that I bring, is bullying.
And it is a difficult thing because you do see a lot of this among old people.
They say, well, you know, we had no control, but they did go out and vote, right?
The old go out and vote in large numbers, and they sure as heck don't vote for anything which involves a restructuring of society.
Now, I don't know the degree to which people who are elderly responded to Harry Brown's thing about selling off and getting this and that, but I think that a more effective approach with the old is simply to say, look, you're...
This system can't last, for sure, and it's not going to be as long as you think.
I'll talk about that a little bit more this afternoon.
It's not going to be as long as you think.
For sure, this can't last, and we don't know how long it's going to last, but it's not going to be nearly as long as the math indicates.
So, given that this thing can't last, how is it that we are going to find a managed transition, right?
Because you slow the car down before you hit the wall, right?
So you don't die. I mean, that's the idea.
Because if you just drag this thing right out to the end, then all we can do is look upon it as a kind of self-destruction.
I mean, and that's a tough thing to turn around psychologically, right?
So if the elderly sort of say, well, yeah, this thing can't last, but I'm going to just crank as many benefits out of the system as I can, even though I know that I can't survive without the system, then you're just looking at somebody taking more and more heroin and more and more crack.
I mean, yeah, they're going to end up dead, but isn't that...
I mean, isn't that an unconscious motivation?
It is a suicidal impulse to continue to escalate behavior that is going to result in your death, or in your severe harm to your self-interest, let's say.
And if everybody resists the managed transition to a freer society, if all the old people resist, or a number of them do, Well, it's going to be kind of tough to figure out what to do with these people, because obviously they've been so corrupted by their addiction to state power throughout their lives.
It means that they have praised and licked the boots of fascistic power, and that's really corrupted them to the point where they've just become hateful against life and freedom itself, and so they're just going to be a force.
They're a very nihilistic force, right?
Don't imagine that the old are any less subject to vices than the young.
The young nihilists turn into the old nihilists without significant intervention, which is what we're trying to do here.
Without significant intervention, the personality remains extraordinarily stable from sort of the five to seven-year-old range of your life to 98.
I mean, the personality will remain enormously stable And of course there's some alterations that go on and the brain finally sort of settles into its regular patterns and stops growing in sort of your early to mid-twenties.
But the personality remains stable and there is this problem of people who are just really addicted to state power and state largesse just ending up...
Wanting more and more and more, even though they know that it's going to be self-destructive.
Well, it's kind of hard to figure out how to manage that gracefully.
Because they're just, you know, they're against their anti-life.
They're taking all the necessary steps to ensure their own self-destruction.
And these are the people who are going to rail against any change in the system.
And then the moment the system changes, they're going to rail against any charity that's trying to work with them.
And they're going to rail against their children.
And they're going, you know, there's not much you can do with these people.
They are self-destructive, and maybe you'll have some way of dealing with them that I don't, and it's not our responsibility, right?
I mean, if people are absolutely hateful and push away every plate that's offered to them, then you just wish them luck, right?
So I'd like an apology for what we've been left with, which is not so much the government size, but the level of discourse that we have to turn around, the level of definitions that we have to work on redefining is pretty considerable.
So I'd like an apology. I'll help them either way, but it would sure help to get an apology from the older people.
Say, wow, holy crap, did we ever leave you guys with a mess?
I mean, forget about the environment.
We can clean up the environment, but the bad ideas in everyone's head about state power, that's a lot harder to get out of people's minds than soot is out of the sky.
So I hope that this helps.
I hope this has been useful. I guess that's a conclusion to show 298.
And we will be doing $2.99 this afternoon, which will be why it is that I think, or why it is that I take the approach of 10 to 15 years.
Arguable, of course, but at least you can understand my logic.
And then we will do Show 300 tomorrow morning, or at least I'll post Show 300 tomorrow morning.
Thank you so much for listening.
As always, I hope you're doing fantastically.
I had a couple of very nice donations this weekend.
I hugely, hugely, hugely...
I hugely appreciate that.
And I hope that it does you the kind of good that it does me.
I think it will. Because as I mentioned a couple of podcasts ago, it is something that helps your unconscious to realize that you're kind of serious about integrity and philosophy and honesty, which is going to do yourself enormous good in your life.
So thank you so much for listening.
I look forward to more donations. And if you could sign up for FeedBurner and take the listener poll, I would hugely appreciate that as well.
Thank you so much for listening.
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