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Oct. 18, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:13
464 The End of War

What will the bloodshed cease? The answer is easy.

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing most excellently.
It is Wednesday the 18th.
Ooh, I think I actually got that right.
Wednesday the 18th of October 2006.
Show 365.
That number means something.
I can't really fit it into.
I guess I've been going for a little bit...
Under a year now, I guess I started November of last year, mid to late November of last year, reading off some of my Lou Rockwell articles for the sake of trying out the whole podcast thing.
And I sort of very clearly remember the first time that I went off book thinking, ooh, can I do this?
Can I do this? I think I can.
I think I can. And finding out that, yay, I think I can.
So, I'd like to talk this morning a little bit about sort of incentives for war, right?
There's all this question about when is the war in Iraq going to end, right?
I mean, it's a very central sort of question.
And this really is related to the question, you know, when do wars end as a whole?
What is it that brings about a cessation in conflict?
And the one thing that I think we can say with some degree of certainty is that, in general, there is a cessation of conflict When you stop paying people to wage war, and that would seem to be a fairly sensible approach to the question, and that seems to be somewhat in line with what we know about human beings in terms of motivation and so on.
So, given that we're stopped in traffic, cost of Iraq war, September 2006.
That's fairly recent. This is budgetary costs, not interest or future costs.
And we have $378 billion U.S. through the first half of fiscal year 2007.
Of course, there's 2,709 U.S. soldiers killed in the Iraq War.
Nearly 20,500 U.S. soldiers have been wounded in the war.
And the war is essentially financed through deficit spending, so interest payments over time could amount to another $100 billion.
Or more, health care costs and disability benefits may also exceed $100 billion.
Wouldn't be that unusual? Before the war began, administration officials projected that the conflict would cost only about $50 billion.
Well, that's shocking. Shocking, I tell you, that it is ten times what the government has anticipated, because, of course, that never happens.
Huh. Traffic has simply ceased to move.
Well, that's all right. The latest national intelligence estimate states that the Iraq war is, quote, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq allowed foreign elements into the country.
Now there, these foreign jihadists are using Iraq as a training ground.
And the increased role of Iraqis in managing the operations of Al-Qaeda in Iraq might lead veteran foreign jihadists to focus their efforts on external operations.
And of course, the U.S. is less prepared for a natural disaster at home.
When sort of looking at all of the troop deployments that are over there, I guess the entire lane has stopped.
Give me just a moment.
For those of you who forget that I'm in a car, I want to make sure that I can get out of this lane, but of course everybody's screaming past on the left, so give me just a second.
Ah, and the guy behind me also wants to, oh, lady behind me, also wants to pull around.
I really think that it should be the people in front who get to go, but that rarely seems to be the case when there's a big traffic jam like this.
So I'm going to have to be assertive.
It's a shame, but true.
Ah, it's a stopped car.
That will do it. And I'm sorry, my friend, but I'm going to have to invite you to ram me if you wish to not let me in.
Sometimes civility needs to be slightly more assertive, or people's better natures need to be slightly more prompted.
So, if you look at, and this is based in 2005 dollars, if you look at the war as a whole, You are really looking at a conflict that right now has escalated to cost about roughly more or less half what the entire Second World War cost.
And you are also looking at a conflict that costs about half what Vietnam costs.
So you're kind of getting less bang for your buck as time goes along, if that makes any sense.
So... That issue or that problem that the war is costing an enormous amount of money is sort of important to understand.
Everybody knows that the war is a huge and fundamental rip-off and so on.
I'd sort of like to talk a little bit this morning.
There are also issues.
This is from a Reuters Foundation report.
Iraq, corruption and poor security stem flow of investment.
$65 billion pledged to Iraq for aid and redevelopment since March 2003.
Only $20 billion has been spent.
And, sadly, about 15% of the money spent in Iraq are simply missing.
Right? I mean, they're just simply missing.
And so this is what I say when I talk about the fact that war is simply a massive redistribution of income.
I mean, that's really the fundamental, all of the nonsense about honor and so on.
It all really comes down to one thing, which is that war is fundamentally and essentially designed to transfer income from one group to another, basically from future taxpayers to current taxpayers.
And when you look at 15% of the monies spent in this area in Iraq, it's just missing.
I mean, this is the 15% that people just can't even find.
You know, let alone the percentage that is misallocated, that is charged in $500 hammers back to the state, that is put to projects that have no particular viability except for Except for fattening the purses of government contractors and so on.
This 15%, and this is the tip of the iceberg, of course, as far as corruption goes, but 15% of it is simply missing.
That's really quite fantastic when you think about it, but not surprising.
And this is the 15% that they know is missing.
So you could do an enormous amount of increase in that number and probably be still fairly on the mark as far as the overall corruption goes.
The amazing thing as well, when you think about Iraq, relative to what occurred, say, in the American Revolution.
This is how far America has drifted from its founding principles.
The idea that the government builds a country is really quite astounding.
This is the way that when you get an economy You want to get it up and running pretty quickly, right?
I mean, that's sort of the idea. And the amazing thing to me, though it's not amazing philosophically, but it's amazing that nobody has really commented on this, the idea that what you do when you go and occupy a country...
Is you basically go and pour enormous amounts of government spending in, and you have your engineers go in, your army engineers, no less, go in and build schoolhouses and other sorts of buildings.
I believe that they're spending $1.5 billion to build a US embassy in Iraq.
I guess the barbed wire alligator motes and, I guess, barbed pits and Bornean men with blowguns are relatively expensive to keep the people who'd want to kill all the people inside, outside. But...
To understand why war continues, you just sort of have to follow the money, right?
This is a pretty solid way and a pretty certain way to start answering any question.
Who's profiting? Follow the money.
So, you think of the billions upon billions upon billions of dollars that are going along with This war, the enormous amount of misallocation, the fundamental misapprehension that the army is the institution that is used to build freedom.
I mean, that's just astounding.
It really is astounding.
It's like saying, I do my customer service with a billy club, with a spike on it, because that's how I win over customers.
I date with a mace, a baseball bat, and a couple of date-rape drinks.
Because, I mean, the army is about killing people, right?
And the army, you know, in its zest to get closer to killing people can build pontoons and temporary bridges and can build barracks and so on.
But the idea that the army is going to build any kind of quality assets for the long haul that are sort of consumer friendly and so on is patently ridiculous.
And you just sort of have to go back to the American experience, right?
It's all about freedom, as they say.
So you have to go back to the American experience and say, okay, well, how was freedom achieved in America?
And, of course, when you could say that the army took control of America, After it ejected the British, after the War of Independence.
And so in a sense, you know, relative to the...
I mean, given that they're just people, right?
Relative to the British Army, it was kind of occupation.
Fairly reasonable to assume, I think.
And how did they go about then building the country?
Did they then say, "Well, what we need is to ensure a massive amount of government spending?" Did they enormously run everyone into debt?
And did they have the army going around building everybody's schoolhouses?
And did they have the army going out and laying down the railroads?
And did they have the army going out and building everybody's house and building them a nice, you know, refinishing their basement, and that this was all paid for through deficit financing and so on?
Well, of course not.
Fundamentally, of course not.
That's not at all how either the British or the American experiments in freedom paid off.
What happened, of course, was that the army left.
The army, you know, went away.
And so I would say that it's important to understand just how ridiculous a situation it is that is going on in Iraq, that you have a massive sinkhole of
government corruption and theft, and at the same time you have this claim that the military is going to go about rebuilding a shattered economy, right?
Because you don't want investment, you don't want freedom, you don't want property rights.
You want trigger-happy guys trained to kill who were about 18 years old who may or may not have completed high school, but if they did, it was a government high school, and I bet you they didn't get A's.
You don't want investment bankers.
You don't want entrepreneurs.
You don't want far-seeing capitalist visionaries.
You don't want the, quote, robber barons in there making life better and easier for everyone.
What you want is a bunch of pimply, trigger-happy sociopaths roaming around with their pockets stuffed with cash.
And that's how you're going to rebuild an economy.
Well, it's absolutely ludicrous, and it's the complete opposite of how America achieved freedom.
And this, of course, and this is known, right?
If you say to people, did America achieve its economic miracles and did America become free because of a massive amount of government spending and U.S. soldiers rolling all over the place building everything for everyone, and people would say, well, of course not.
This is not unknown.
It's just unspoken. But it's not unknown.
This is not a mystery. This is not some esoteric, you know, what was Catherine the Great's middle name.
This isn't any sort of esoteric historical fact.
Anybody who's even taken a remote bit of education, especially in the States, would say no.
It wasn't a massive program of government spending that got America on its feet after the Revolutionary War.
And you can also say, of course, that this occurred, it would take a slightly more detailed amount of economic knowledge, but not a huge amount more, to understand and appreciate that after the Second World War, they didn't have the army come home and start building the suburbs, right? The Levittowns, I think they were called.
They didn't have the army, they didn't say, pardon me, They didn't say to the army, well, you've got to come home from Italy and from Germany and from Japan and so on, and we're not going to put you back in the civilian workforce.
We're not going to decommission you.
We're going to keep you there, and what we're going to do is we're going to have you start building all this stuff.
So they didn't really take that approach, of course.
What they did was they just decommissioned everyone, and they squabbled in Congress for about a year to 18 months about how to reintegrate everyone back into the labor force.
This is a prime concern, of course, of governments, how to reintegrate soldiers, because A congressman can't really take down a platoon of marines who don't get paid, so this is where they really do get concerned about unemployment, is to make sure that the soldiers get paid, or at least aren't expecting pay.
They learned the lesson from the fall of the Roman Empire.
And so... When it comes to the Second World War, sorry, minor reboot.
We're back. I tried a little bit of a later route.
It's sort of 9 o'clock. I'm trying the public roads.
I once more got suckered into trying getting any value out of my taxes because, as I mentioned yesterday, I have a little bit of trouble sometimes with pattern recognition.
So I'm trying to save a few bucks by not using the private roads, and instead I'm chewing up a few bucks with my brakes.
So, eh, zero-sum game, except it takes longer.
So in the Second World War, of course, Congress squabbled for a year to 18 months about how to reintegrate the soldiers back into the economy.
And when they looked up, everyone had gotten back into the economy.
It's a fundamental fact, as I said, that the war ended, the Second World War ended the U.S. Depression.
It's not the case at all.
The Depression really only lifted after the war.
And it was only because the government rescinded an enormous amount of spending and fiscal controls and regulations and tariffs and so on that were put in place under Hoover and FDR.
So, of course, because they relinquished all of this stuff and there was real economic freedom, and again, it didn't have that much to do with the court system.
What people need is economic freedom.
A court system is pretty tangential.
A court system is sort of a playground for people with really unstable and problematic personalities.
It's not really a useful thing for anyone to actually try and get any resolution of any disputes.
It's for harassing people.
It's for threatening people.
You know, threatening a lawsuit and so on.
It's, as sort of was recently pointed out in California, when a bunch of lawyers went around and offered not to sue people for $5,000, like not to sue businesses, then the most taut-happy state ended up being the state with the first legalized lawyer shakedown.
So the court system as it stands is for harassing people and for threatening people.
And it is really designed to help those with deep pockets stay in power, right?
Because if you have a couple of lawyers on staff and you're a big corporation, then you can threaten patent lawsuits.
You can threaten, you know, whatever, infringement lawsuits.
You can threaten harassment lawsuits.
You can threaten unfair competition lawsuits, monopoly lawsuits, whatever it is.
You can threaten all of those stuff to your competitors.
And, of course, you can absolutely threaten...
Smaller businesses with lawsuits and get them to stay out of your territories.
So it's an instrument for harassing and controlling the minority by the opulent.
It's got nothing to do with justice.
And that was still fairly true even in the 50s, right?
So just so you understand, right, it wasn't because there was an excellent and exquisite legal system that the economy boomed so much in the post-revolutionary period in the early 19th century and also in the post-war period in the 50s.
It was simply because, as we've talked about in some of the stuff on economics before, it was just because people put down the guns, right?
Right? I mean, I've always sort of had this, I guess not always, sort of over the last little while, I've had this sort of vision of a cartoon or a skit or something of, you know, the legislature sort of gets down and they all sit down at a big log mahogany table with nice little white china coffee cups and so on.
And sort of one of them looks up and says, right, gentlemen, ladies, who are we going to shoot today?
That's the essence of government.
Who are you going to shoot today? Well, what happened in the 50s, and also what happened at the end of the Revolutionary War, was that violence was withdrawn from the economy, and as a result, of course, the economy flourished, and everybody did beautifully, and it was all great, and everybody was doing well.
And so from that standpoint, it's just sort of important to understand sort of what was going on and what was continuing, and what of course is not happening at all in Iraq.
I mean, the recipe for growing an economy is very, very simple.
You know, you just stop shooting people.
And they could do all of that as well, right?
I mean, if they liberalized the economy and, you know, they took the soldiers off the street and so on, there would be certainly an increase in economic activity.
Now, the degree to which this would be harassed and destroyed by the insurgents being funded from outside, I don't know.
But I can certainly guarantee you that what is occurring is absolutely hampering any possibility of economic growth.
It may not be, and I certainly couldn't even imagine, don't know enough, couldn't guess the future, don't speak Arabic, and can't figure out the It may not be the case that if they liberalized the economy, everyone would do well, though I believe very strongly that there's tons and tons of historical examples to show that that does occur.
Just look at Japan. Japan had this psychotic, martial, top-down, emperor-based, incredibly conformist, kadashi kind of economy and culture.
And the moment they were liberalized, they all went for the bucks, right?
So that was all pretty juicy.
So there's lots of evidence in history.
And, of course, when you look at the genocidal blood fest that Nazi Germany had become, Then it's, I think, somewhat easy to understand that if you have an economy that has had, I guess by 1945, had had 70 or 80 years of a welfare state, had an incredibly strong war footing economy, and yet when...
And you still have people loyal to Hitler, right?
Hitler youth sort of shooting soldiers all the way up to the end of the fall of Berlin.
The basic approach or the basic fact was that when the guns were withdrawn and people were allowed to fend for themselves, then they actually became wealthy, capitalist, free, liberal relative to where they were before without an enormous amount of transition.
And all that occurred was that the existing barriers to trade and the accumulation of capital and the transfer of property and the retention of property, they were all dismantled.
All of the ridiculous fascistic laws in both Japan and Germany and Italy, of course, for that matter, were dismantled.
And then, of course, they grew back over time because they're still socialists at the core and still trained in state schools.
But that initial transmogrification from a totalitarian economy to a relatively free economy Occurred without an enormous amount of violence.
And again, I'm no expert on what's going on in Iraq and where these insurgents are getting paid from.
But for sure, they're not doing it for ideology.
They're doing it for pay.
All soldiers are fundamentally a mercenary.
All the talk about honor is just a sort of distraction away from the transfer of income.
And so they're really not that interested in bringing freedom to Iraq.
Because there's tons of historical examples about how to do that, and the way that for sure it's never occurred is massive amounts of government spending and twitchy soldiers running around with the basic carte blanche to pump lead into whoever crosses them and to rape whoever they take a fancy to.
That's anarchy, right?
What they have there is, in the classic sense of the word, in what people really fear about the word, that is anarchy.
And, of course, it's entirely the opposite of economic growth.
And it's anarchy in the way that I believe that the term should be used, which is an executive hierarchical hegemonic structure like the state with unlimited power to tax and pass its own laws and pass its own regulations.
That's really anarchy.
That's a state where you have, or a state, sorry, I only used the word twice.
That is a situation where you have no rules and an incredible disparity in power structures, citizens versus government, which of course is never going to, never we're going to win, never going to get anywhere.
And that is never going to achieve anything positive.
That is real, that's real anarchy.
That's the real anarchy that goes on in society.
So, I think that it can be very important to understand that there's no question that anybody is even remotely interested in bringing about a peaceful, prosperous...
Society in Iraq. They know how to do it.
This is not a great mystery.
There's tons of historical examples.
You ask just about anybody with any education, they'll know that it was not government spending and having the military going around building things that regenerated any economy throughout history, especially a post-war, post-invasion, post-occupation economy.
So, of course, it has nothing to do with that, right?
Because that would be...
You're not asking people to invent the wheel here.
So the economy in Iraq, or the society in Iraq, is certainly...
Nobody has any interest in making people prosperous and free.
What they do have is an enormous interest in becoming wealthy, as most people respond to incentives, a basic principle of economics.
People respond to incentives.
And, of course, the fundamental incentive that occurs in Iraq is the transfer of massive amounts of money.
Money literally gets shipped there In cubic blocks of hundred-dollar bills.
Money gets put into people's accounts to spend by people typing on a computer screen.
The magic generation, and of course the whole thing is funded through deficit financing.
But of course the magic of deficit financing It's like knowing that you have three months to live and buying a beautiful house on a mortgage, right?
So you'll pay a little bit in terms of interest up front, but you'll be long gone by the time the bills really become due.
Other people will end up having to pay them off.
Or, more fundamentally, people will go bankrupt.
But, of course, the people who will go bankrupt aren't those at the moment who are currently taking, right?
Because Iraq, if you get to shovel away a million bucks or half a million bucks out of Iraq, You can go and buy goods with it, which are all real goods that work, that are valid.
You go buy a house. It's your house.
You've got the deed. You go buy a car.
You go put your money in a Cayman Islands account.
You've got that Swiss bank account and so on.
So you are transferring fantasy cash.
It's like the printing of the money that the Fed gets into.
You're translating fantasy cash monopoly money.
...into the real stuff, which is tangible, fungible goods.
Transferable, or at least tangible goods.
And really, that's what's occurring in Iraq.
There's this sort of money spigot that everyone's bathing in.
There's a daily lottery ticket that just about everybody wins.
And what occurs then is this constant flow.
And what it does is it draws more and more people into making more and more of a fortune in Iraq.
So it's the destruction of an existing, brutal, horrible totalitarian society and replacing it with a cashocracy.
Replacing it with a shell game of extraordinary money transfers from the future taxpayers to existing people on the take, in the know, and so on.
So it's really the mafia gone wild on an entire country.
That's the basic story of Iraq.
So then the question sort of becomes, when will the war in Iraq end?
Well, if you don't understand the basic fact of cash transfers being the fundamental reason for the war in Iraq, then it's going to be very hard to come up, I think, with a sensible criteria about how and why the war in Iraq is going to end.
It's a fundamental misapprehension.
If you have this sort of fundamental misapprehension that you think, well, the purpose of the government in there is to stabilize Iraq, and therefore when Iraq is stable...
It will be over.
They'll withdraw the troops and they'll come home.
Or when the Iraqis take over their own, as they stand up, we will stand down.
So then there's this thing about when Iraqis will stand up and take their own defense on, then the American troops can be withdrawn.
Who knows? I can't remember all the future reasons, but it's always in the future and it can never quite be quantified in any practical way.
That's a very important thing to understand about war.
All these reasons are nonsense.
As I've talked about before in other contexts, you have to look at what always occurs.
What always occurs in war is massive transfer of income.
Of money. From the future to the present.
And from those not in the know and without the guns to those in the know and with the guns.
And so I can absolutely guarantee you one thing.
That the war in Iraq will only cease when the government runs out of money.
That's the only reason that the war in Vietnam ended, right?
It almost destroyed the U.S. economy.
And that's why you had, you know, these price controls and so on, stagflation.
I mean, it just almost wrecked the U.S. economy.
So when the ruling classes realize that the gig is up and they're out of money, and they're either going to have to start raising taxes and get thrown out on their ass, or they're going to have to start cutting spending and thus get thrown out on their ass, then they end the war, regretfully.
Pardon me, I don't know why I've got such a frog in my throat.
I do apologize. I know I could edit the video, but that's frankly too much hassle for me.
I hate to say it, but with two a day running 45 to an hour, I don't mind doing the recompilation of them to 100 megs to fit on YouTube, and I don't mind uploading them, and I don't mind annotating them, I don't mind creating the MP3s, and I don't mind editing the XML, but I'm not going to go into editing the video, so I do apologize for the slight frog in my throat, and I hope it's not too, too unpleasant.
So that's when war ends, right?
And the way that you ask that of yourself is you just ask for yourself, when are you going to quit your job and not take anything else, right?
So I'm sort of embedded in the software field as a professional in sales and marketing and coding and management and so on.
So when am I going to quit my job for no reason and not take another job?
Right? I mean, never!
Never! I mean, and not take another job.
I'll do it if the donations to Free Domain Radio stay at a sustainable enough level for me to be able to do this full-time.
Sure, I'll do it then. Absolutely.
But when am I going to quit my job and go and work for, you know, go and work at a donut shop or go and work as a waiter at a dive?
Well, never! That's a fundamental fact about human motivation.
When do people voluntarily give up enormous amounts of income and prestige and power and liberty and so on?
Well, voluntarily, never.
I mean, yeah, every now and then you'll get someone who reads the Brothers Karamazov and wants to be an Alyosha or something, but for the most part, people don't give up that kind of stuff.
I mean, there's the Ted Turner gifts to the UN and crap like that, and Richard Bronson gifts to global warming crap and stuff like that.
But that all comes with a whole load of strings, and that's really for prestige, and it's not like it's money they would have spent otherwise.
I mean, it's simply far too much money to spend in that kind of context.
But I think it's a sort of very important thing to understand that people aren't going to give up the war in Iraq because it's simply so profitable.
It's simply far too profitable for people to end it.
I sort of want to pry off any scabs of hope that you might have growing over this wound of truth, so to speak, and get you to understand that it's about the transfer of income, which means that it doesn't end until the income can no longer be transferred, for whatever reason.
Obviously, it has nothing to do with WMDs because they didn't find any and they're still there.
Now, obviously, it doesn't have anything to do with Iraq being stable and prosperous because they know exactly how to do that.
But if they did that, they would not make any money.
It's a fundamental thing to understand.
If the army can get contracts, then military contractors can make a fortune.
If the army builds the schools, then people can make a fortune out of this.
People cannot make a fortune if the private sector comes in and builds stuff.
I mean, if it's not paid by the state, right?
I mean, when it's paid by the state, it's all nonsense.
It's all complete waste and destructive allocation of resources.
But if the private sector does it outside of state control, then it's productive and positive and voluntary and good exchanges and so on.
But nobody makes any money in the government and in the military and in the military contractors.
Nobody makes any money if the private sector comes in and builds stuff and does stuff, right?
So it has to be paid for by the state so people can make money.
There's nothing really that complicated about it, and it's not that hard to understand.
You just have to sort of forget about all the nonsense propaganda.
So if you had...
Like, when are you going to quit your job is the answer as to when you are going to...
When the war in Iraq is going to end.
Or let's say that you were in Iraq and you had some magical device, some, I don't know, some magical device or sequence, some Project X, that would end the war in Iraq within a month.
And you were some contractor who came up with Project X that would make everybody go home.
Well, people would say, well...
Thank you very much. We'll take it under advisement.
And there would be no incentive for them, given that they're making like $10,000 a week in pure profit sort of individuals out there, right?
And, of course, the soldiers are livestock.
The soldiers are getting paid 110th or 120th what the private contractor is getting paid, but they're being charged out, right?
I mean, the private contractors who drive around all the time delivering cheese and eggs, they get free protection from the military, which otherwise they would have to pay for themselves and so on.
And they get paid for these trips, which, of course, are driving eggs from here to nowhere because it's all government stuff, so who cares?
Is it not optimal or anything like that?
So they end up going down that road or that route, and they get all this free protection from the military, which means that they don't have to pay for it themselves.
So the private companies have no incentive in reducing the troop count, Of course, right?
All this free protection. So it's not a fundamental thing to understand about war.
Wars end when the treasury runs dry.
Wars end when the treasuries run dry.
And you can look at any war in history, and you can pretty much see that...
I mean, it just makes sense, right?
As long as you can keep paying your soldiers and buying more soldiers, then you're going to continue the war.
But all the wars in the 20th century ran out when the coffers were exhausted.
And this also involves bribery at the top levels on either side as well, and don't underestimate that.
Don't think that all the corruption is simply within your own group.
The corruption that occurs as well, like you had the top echelons of U.S. society were illegally selling oil to the Nazis throughout good portions of the war.
It's one of the things that Ben-Gurion hung over the ruling class's head in order to get them to support Israel.
It's not a corruption that occurs.
It's international in scope.
It's domestic in the majority of its rampant exploitation, but don't imagine for a moment that The Saudis are obviously getting hugely bribed from the U.S. and billions and billions of dollars of financial aid.
So there's an enormous amount of money transfer from the upper classes on either side of these supposed enemies.
So that level of corruption is also very high as well.
It's why in the absence of the war you have the creation of enemies.
And if you have enough resources you can simply bribe people not to attack you or bribe people to attack you in a way that you can still defend yourself against.
I mean the amount of corruption that goes on in war would stagger the imagination.
I can't even picture it. I just know, based on a variety of readings and researches, that it definitely occurs and it seems to be fairly constant.
So, war ends when you run out of money, right?
When does an alcoholic change?
When he runs out of, he's got no money, he's got no family, when does an addict change his behavior?
When he hits bottom, right? So, this stuff is not wildly complicated as far as that goes.
It's not a huge head-scratcher about when the war in Iraq is going to end.
You can tell exactly when it's going to end when the U.S. runs out of money.
And if you still have any doubt about that, you can just sort of circle back.
And when you're talking to people about this, I think it's useful.
You know, when are you, if you had an invention, this sort of Project X, that was going to put your entire business out of business, right?
So if you're a computer programmer, and you come up with some thing that's going to put you and all of your friends out of work, and you're not going to get paid a penny for it, are you going to release it?
Well, of course not. I mean, who would?
It would be ridiculous, right?
And, you know, hence the electric car thing, right?
But I don't know anything about that other than rumors.
But there's sort of an important question, right?
If you came up with some invention that was going to put you and all of your friends and all of your companions out of work and reduce your income by like 90% and take you from a job that was enjoyable to a job that was simply crap, Would you release it if you weren't going to get paid a penny for it?
Well, no, of course you wouldn't, right?
I mean, this is how a huge amount of human progress is stymied in the world, right?
Is that people have negative incentives for progress.
And certainly, of course, if you look at the...
If you look at war, then there's an enormous negative incentive to peace, right?
Which is simply the profits that are made from war.
And that war is really an instrument to absolutely abuse the word profit.
I apologize for that. But war is an instrument of profit.
It is an investment followed by a return that no other single agency, no other single state or situation can provide, as I talked about in, I guess, many podcasts ago.
This sort of question.
About how much profit sort of gets made during war.
It really is absolutely staggering how much money gets made by corporations.
Profits in the free market hover around 3% to 5% if you're managing everything well and doing a good job.
Of course, profits in the war sector, 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 100%, it's simply absolutely without limit.
The profits that you make in wartime So to blow the ceiling off, because there's no competition, there's no accountability, and this is, of course, funny, right, that the government passes Sarbanes-Oxley.
It's inevitable, but it's funny that they pass Sarbanes-Oxley in a huge amount of economically strict rules for private companies because we don't want them cooking the books and all this kind of stuff.
And that is absolutely what occurs perpetually in the state.
So I just sort of wanted to point this out in general that there's no great mystery about when the war in Iraq will end and when the war in Afghanistan will end.
There's no incentive for it to end.
There's every incentive for it to continue and to keep continuing.
And it's really going to end when they run out of money, when the alternatives, when the profit can no longer be legitimately or reasonably made from the war itself.
Now, there is a possibility of popular resentment towards the war and so on.
That's somewhat possible, but most of the people who profit from war aren't voted in, so I have a certain amount of skepticism towards that.
Although, I guess Congress does have the power to withdraw funding, and maybe they feel that their own longevity as congressmen are threatened or whatever.
Maybe that's all possible, and I certainly would be willing to entertain that.
But most fundamentally, it really only comes about, because of course these guys will just get bribed to have the war continue more than they could make, unless they're totally just addicted to power, not to money.
But generally, it really only ends...
When the money spigot dries up, when the cupboard is bare, that's when they stop eating.
And there's no possible incentive for it to occur before that that has anything to do with the stated reasons for the war.
And I just sort of wanted to point that out.
It's probably quite interesting to have these conversations with people to see if you can sort out their thinking or maybe even your thinking in this area.
But once you follow the money, everything becomes relatively clear.
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