All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 16, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:01
462 Government As Cover For Predators
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I would just like to say thanks.
I'd like to say well thank you very much.
Well thank you to the gentleman who sent a vast amount of cash today.
Thank you very much, and I hope that you are doing fine.
Yeah. Podcasting in the bottom.
Thank you so much to the fine, fine gentleman who sent me a smack dab-a-doodle amount of cash today.
It raises my spirits, yay, verily.
Through the roof, so. And for a large donation, you will hear me burst into song, and if you know the source of that song, I tell you, you know some serious musical arcana.
And for an even larger donation, I won't sing thank you.
How's that for a deal? Anyway, I wanted to talk today about the question of sort of what is government sort of in its fundamentals.
And I know maybe we should have sort of gone over this before.
Maybe, maybe, maybe, perhaps.
But I just wanted to talk about it for a few minutes.
I have a fairly short commute today.
And the sort of content of it is there is something that's been posted, it's sort of floating around in libertarian circles today, which is the shocking discovery that when there is a shortfall in municipal tax collection, sort of running out of pillaging money to get a hold of, shockingly, almost incomprehensibly, they actually...
Increase the amount of parking tickets and speeding tickets and fines that they give to motorists.
And this is after controlling for population and youth and all the registration of cars and so on.
So the tax money goes down for a municipality and lo and behold, the amount of fines that they increase on citizens goes up right now.
Now for those of you who have been following some of, or at least a few of these podcast series, I am now going to give you a question.
To see if you understand the nature of the state.
Now, the question is, my good friends, if the government increases the amount of fines that it charges when it finds itself short of tax revenue, does it then correspondingly decrease the amount of fines it collects when, lo, its tax revenue doth increase it?
And I'm not even going to let you guess on this one.
Of course the answer is, bend over, you're screwed.
The answer is, of course, that the government will increase its robbery of the citizens to cover a shortfall.
When that shortfall is covered off by an increase in the general tax base, the additional predations upon the citizenry are in no way diminishing.
So that's a fairly important example to understand about how state power grows and why state power always grows.
When the government raises its predations or increases its theft because it's a little bit short of money, then what it does is it expands its spending requirements so that when additional money comes in, it's always going to need more.
And this is very, very sort of important to understand, that government is never going to shrink of its own accord, right?
It's like one of those jacks that you use to jack up your car if you ever get a flat.
It's only one way.
It only goes up.
There is no down in government, right?
This is sort of a very fundamental thing to understand.
And one of the things that we've talked about sort of briefly before is this problem sort of with the special interest groups, right?
Special interest groups. And the problem with special interest groups, of course, is that each individual recipient or beneficiary of a special interest lobbying effort is going to get an enormous amount of money for his or her own pocket.
So, somebody who is lobbying to get a loan of $300 million, or a grant, or, you know, they're always grants, whether they're loans or not, is going to the government to get a grant of $400 million for his business.
Stands to gain an enormous amount if that lobbying effort goes through.
So, he is going to invest an enormous amount of money In the political process to get a hold of this $400 million.
Now, on the other hand, you and I, assuming that we're both fine citizens of the good old USA, which I believe just this week is passing $300 million?
$400 million? $300 million, I think.
I could be wrong. We stand to lose, oh, about a buck.
And since it goes into the national debt, we actually don't stand to lose really much of anything, right?
Basically, there's a deficit that occurs, and it may come out of her hide in drips and drabs over the next five or ten years in the form of inflation, right?
So, when the government creates a grant, or when the government agrees to give a grant of Let's say $300 million for a corporation.
It doesn't sort of say to the rest of the government, sorry dudes, you have to reduce your spending by $300 million.
Of course not. What it does is it says that it just prints the money.
It just sort of enters it into a key account at the Fed and distributes it out to this fine business, which dilutes everybody else's money by a fairly infinitesimal degree, at least at first.
So it either goes into the national debt, it's borrowed from foreigners and there's an IOU stuck, or the government simply prints the money or whatever.
But in no way, shape, or form, when the government says, sure, go ahead, here's $300 million for your business, in no way, shape, or form does it actually reduce its spending elsewhere, right?
So every time that somebody asks the government for something, and this is the whole purpose behind special interest lobbying, is that, of course, it's a negative-sum game overall.
It's not a zero-sum game.
I mean, a zero-sum game is like Some magical elves that require no payroll nor resources...
...spirit the numbers away from one computer account to another...
...that would be a sort of zero-sum game.
But, of course, the time and effort that is spent lobbying...
...the time and effort that is spent transferring...
...the time and effort that is spent changing the budget numbers...
...the time and effort that is spent whining and dining by the waiters...
...all of this stuff is a net loss in productivity to the economy as a whole.
Lobbying is ferocious in terms of consuming...
Often fairly talented people in this wasted, shadowy predation upon the body politic.
So, I just wanted to sort of point this out so we can talk a little bit about the fundamentals of government, just so you sort of understand it from a real, you know, sort of base practical level, not sort of ideological, not even sort of anti-state level, and sort of put aside our moral outrage and just look at the facts and the features of the system and the situation.
Well... When you look at the imbalance of incentives that occurs, that somebody who lobbies successfully for a $300 million grant is going to get that money, is going to be able to spirit away at least, at least a couple of million dollars from that.
Because, of course, money always goes missing from government grants.
The shrinkage in government money is astounding.
It makes an unguarded convenience store during a race riot look like Fort Knox.
And So, when you see this sort of disparity of incentives, that lobbying for this grant is going to get you millions upon millions of free dollars, and that being on the sort of giving end of this grant is going to cost you pennies in the unforeseeable future and, you know, whatever, your grandchildren, maybe a couple of bucks, then, of course, the incentive of the person to pursue this lobbying effort...
It's very high. And the incentive of the people who are paying, sort of, quote, paying for it to prevent it is very low.
Now, the government is going to give out more and more and more money every year.
The only question is who's going to get it, right?
So, of course, the other reason that there's a very strong incentive to get this money is that if you don't get it, your competitor will, right?
So if you're some steel industry and you want this money, then...
You are going to lobby for the government to give you that money.
And even if you're some sort of hyper-ethical libertarian dude, or dude-ass, then you're still going to face this problem, which is that if you don't get the money, then your competitor is going to get the money.
And that, of course, a competitor is going to be destroyed by this money.
Everybody who takes government money...
In a substantial way.
It's destroyed. So, you just look at the way that the businesses work when they get government money is they get bloated and inefficient and destructive.
The good people leave, the bad people stay and feast, and then the company becomes completely dependent on government money.
And when that government money...
Alex Jones, that's the guy.
My throat's a little raw today. Alex Jones is the guy.
I was trying to remember him this morning.
But, yeah, these businesses become completely and totally dependent on government aid.
It really is. It's a kind of heroin.
Fun to begin with, but drives good health and good people out of your organization or body.
And then you become completely dependent on...
The government largesse, you become completely dependent upon the political process.
And you can see this if you just look at sort of the 19th century, quote, robber barons and their competitors, who got government loans, subsidies, grants, tariff protections, mercantilist walls of every single kind, favorable regulations, and so on. They never survive, right?
As soon as the subsidies were withdrawn, these things completely collapsed.
It absolutely corrupts an organization to be receiving significant amounts of government money.
And, I mean, directly in the form of grants.
If it's sort of for services, maybe not so much, but definitely where you want to be facing is in the least regulated, most consumer-facing kind of businesses to avoid this kind of corruption is what I like about the software field.
Oh, and those of you who have any concern, and maybe there's one or two of you who might have mild concerns about the ethical status of my business career, I can absolutely tell you with joyful confidence now that I will not be selling to the government anymore.
The software that I'm involved in now would have no utility whatsoever for the government.
And the software that I'm involved with now It has the potential to add billions of dollars to the world economy.
I'm very pleased about that. I think that's going to be very good in terms of giving people additional income.
P-V-E-L-O-C-I-T-Y.com, just in case you're interested.
Website sort of sucks at the moment, but I'm working on improving it.
Anyway, so...
If you don't get it, your competitors will, and what that means in the long run is your competitors are screwed, but what it means in the short run is that investors who just look at, you know, balance sheet information, cash-to-assets ratios, and so on, are going to say, holy crap, this guy just got a $300 million grant, so that's up their value by $300 million, which is a whole lot of sales that you'd have to make in order to get that grant, right?
That's billions of dollars of sales at 3% to 5% profit, which is the general sort of thing for most manufacturing companies, 5% being good.
But that's billions of dollars of sales that this person is just scooped up by getting government money, and so the investors are going to dump your stock and go to your competitors, and there's going to be a lot of problems.
In the long run, you'll do better by not taking the government money, but in the short run, like, it totally and completely sucks.
And you'll get tossed off as a CEO. You'll get tossed off the board if you don't at least make a good honest run at getting a hold of this amount of money.
So when you sort of look at this particular sort of situation, then the government is just an enormous and violent income transfer mechanism.
I mean, I think this is just the basic and most fundamental thing to understand about the government.
Everybody sort of talks about, oh, the government helps the poor and the government protects the country and the government heals the sick and levitates and beds old maids and stuff like that.
But when you kind of look down to the one thing that always occurs in government, the government is a massive, shadowy instrument for transferring wealth through the discreet and hidden use of violence.
I mean, there's really a fundamental aspect of the state.
is that it's a giant bloody trailed shell game wherein money is stolen from the future whereas money is stolen from cash in the form of inflation Money is stolen from the present.
Money is stolen from the savers and is given to the spenders.
Money is stolen from the taxpayers and given to the special interest groups.
Money is stolen from the general population and put to the service of the political class.
Money is stolen from the productive and given to the unproductive.
That money is the entire root and purpose of government and Government's purpose solely in its fundamentals, right?
And the one thing that it always does, government is fundamentally an entire fantasy instrument by which money is transferred from good people to evil people.
When you are charging in a war, you want to fire off some sort of smoke howitzers to cover where it is that you're coming from.
You want to be camouflaged.
And government is a massive camouflage for theft.
It's a massive smoke screen under which a war is perpetually being waged.
It says that government is peace and so on.
I mean, the government... Oh, anarchy would be violent.
One thing to understand is that government is the shroud under which murder occurs.
Government is a massive smokescreen for the violent transfer of wealth.
And it is nothing more than that in its fundamentals.
Or in its fundamentals. If you are a pickpocket, of course one of the things that you want to do, if you want to take a watch or something from someone, if you're a pickpocket, what you need to do is to create a distraction.
We already talked about this in terms of magicians.
So if you're a pickpocket, you want to bump into the person, you want to have someone else bump into that person, you want to stumble up against them, you want to do something in order to disorient them and to distract them from you slipping their watch from their hand.
Well, their wrist, I guess.
And government is the distraction.
If you are going to attack a facility, then you wait till night...
You put your black paint on your face, and you put your balaclava on, and you make sure that you're well camouflaged, you sneak through the bushes.
You want to make sure that you're obscured from sight and camouflage.
You're going to break out of prison, you do it at night.
But camouflage is essential.
For predation, right? The lion, of course, the lions would starve to death if there were no tall grasses for them to hide in, to slink up against and attack the antelope.
At predators, the success of predation is founded on camouflage.
This is pure biology.
Even sharks, right?
If you look at sharks, they have the white underbelly so that when the fishes are looking up, the fishes, they can't really see the sharks.
And above, they are dark and mottled so that when they're swimming below the fish, the fish have a tough time seeing them then as well.
So when you look in nature, the most fundamental aspect of predation is camouflage.
And government is the ultimate camouflage for predators.
And what might be even a better metaphor would be that the most virulent of diseases are those which do not cause your immune system to be triggered.
Or, if it causes your immune system to be triggered, it overstimulates it to the point where it exhausts you and wears you out.
So, of course, when you look at a variety of ailments like AIDS or cancer or whatever, the problem is that they do not trigger a sensible and proportional response from the immune system.
So cancers grow, the immune system doesn't target them, and they just continue to grow until they overwhelm the body.
And so in this sense, the most virulent of illnesses are those which bypass the immune system.
And in the same way, the most virulent of thefts are those which are perceived to be virtue, or at least perceived to be morally neutral at best.
Ah, the government's there.
What can you do? And so government is a combination of predator and cancer.
It's a combination of predator and it relies on the camouflage of the state to hide the violence from sight.
I mean, of course violence is occurring, but because of the overwhelming capacity of the state to inflict death and genocide, destruction, murder and so on on people, because of that, people obey and the violence is camouflaged.
But the person who is going to get the $300 million grant from the government isn't taking his own gun, putting on his blackface and balaclava and beret, and sneaking up and holding up a whole series of rich people to get his money.
He's not putting guns against anyone's head.
He's not, you know, stiletto-ing anyone.
He's not doing some monkey-gets-fruit-death-grip jujitsu move.
He's just going and filling out some paperwork, taking some people for dinner.
He doesn't see the violence.
He doesn't see the violence.
People who are getting welfare.
Somebody else goes and gets the money for them at the point of a gun or threatens, and they just get a nice little check in the mail.
It obscures the violence.
And in so doing, it bypasses our horror of violence.
They always say, well, Vietnam was a media war.
The reason that America lost Vietnam was that people actually got to see what war was like.
And once they saw that war was actually involved people getting killed and it was right in their faces, then, you know, oddly enough, they ended up not being so much for the war.
And basically, the government is that which obscures the violence involved in the generalized transfer of wealth.
And so, because the government is so overwhelmingly, omnipotently violent, It has the capacity to destroy at a universal level these days.
Everybody just obeys, and so the violence is completely obscured, which means that the natural horror and reactions that people have towards violence are obscured as well.
And it is this very deadening of our horror at violence that is so important And in my mind, it's sort of one of the reasons why there's quite a lot of violence in the media today, because we get that our system is increasingly being run by violence and that we're increasingly susceptible to violence.
But we can't really find a way to...
Get this into our consciousness, right?
So it becomes exaggerated in things like video games and movies and TV shows and so on.
Violence just gets more and more exaggerated because we're trying to wake up.
We're trying to wake up to the violence that is consuming us as a society.
But it's very hard to see it, right?
So you have intelligent people who will say, no, the state is not violent.
Don't be silly. You're exaggerating.
Whereas they can't see it.
And so the state is the camouflage for predation.
And to use the cancer metaphor, it bypasses the natural defense mechanisms that people have.
Not a lot of people can go out there and stick a gun in someone's ribs and say, give me your money or I'll shoot.
There's not a lot of people who can do that.
very much in the minority even with the corrupt upbringing that we have these days so there's not a lot of people who do that but there's a lot of people who are very comfortable doing things like lobbying because it seems very civilized right You're going out and attempting to use political influence to get things that are of value to you and your shareholders and your employers and so on.
Employees. And that seems all very civilized, right?
Taking a congressman to dinner, donating some money to a campaign, whatever else.
I don't know what other sleazy stuff goes on in the realm of influence peddling.
But it's all pretty civilized.
It's all pretty civilized.
The central character in my historical novel, Just Poor, which takes place during the agricultural revolution, cries out at one point when she's asked why she's so volatile.
She says something like, the world is just so astoundingly full of lies that I can't look at it without flinching.
Everyone says how beautiful this church is, and all I can see is the blood in the mortar of the people who died building it.
To me, it's a cathedral of blood.
And... She sees this kind of stuff very, very clearly.
She sees the violence that is inherent.
You know, she says the stained glass, the glass is all stained with blood, not with color and not with reverence and not with beauty.
And she sees the violence very clearly within her society, although it is obscured by a general appraise of the aristocracy.
And the same thing is very much true in our society.
We desperately need to see the state and the violence that it entails.
And that it covers up and that it bypasses through a universal obsequence out of fear.
And that's something that's very important to understand.
When you're talking about the state with people, it may well be worth putting them through the 20 questions to get them to understand what the state is.
Oh, the state's all about helping the poor.
Well, great. That's a testable hypothesis.
If the state is about helping the poor, let's see what happens when the state wants to help the poor and fails.
Does the state then stop trying to help the poor?
Well, no, of course not. So it's obviously not about helping the poor.
You know, the only thing that something is about is the thing that it always does, basically.
And we can talk about this maybe more tomorrow morning.
But I think this is a very important thing to get and to sort of understand so that when you're talking to people about the state, you can avoid the sentimentality and the propaganda that we all get about the state.
It's also nice and wonderful and cuddly and cozy and so on.
And just sort of deal with it in a real kind of context and based on its essence and its nature and its purpose.
Which is to facilitate the transfer of wealth under the cover of ethics and compliance and obedience.
I hope this has been helpful.
Thank you once more to the two generous donations that I received today.
One was just wonderful. The other was also wonderful.
But I don't think this gets you off the hook.
If you have been listening a lot, I would certainly appreciate donations as well.
▲
Export Selection