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Jan. 9, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:28
590 White Collar Crime and Other News

Shockingly, some actual current events...

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Good morning, everybody. It's Steph.
It is just before 8 o'clock on the 9th of January, 2006.
Thank you so much for tuning in once more.
I had a wonderful response from Greg on the board.
What a writer. He had posted a response to my chat yesterday about my concerns or, more frankly, my fears of burdening children with the knowledge of the world and the nature of their family when they're too young.
So he said, I wanted to urge you to rethink your fear of burdening children with the knowledge which you believe they are unprepared to hear.
I couldn't disagree with this more.
They already know. By avoiding contact with them, we're simply allowing them to labor under the assumption that they are alone in their understanding.
I can say from experience that I already knew I was trapped.
I already knew I was in some kind of inescapable prison.
Thanks to my education and a general lack of self-knowledge abundant in my family, I couldn't articulate it back then.
But I definitely knew.
And I also knew that I was absolutely alone in the knowledge.
While everyone else in my age was keeping track of how long it was until each summer vacation, I used to keep a running set of notch marks in my binder all the way back to eighth grade, counting down the number of total days left until I graduated high school.
Every single day was like one long tick on a cosmically slow grandfather clock.
That's what life is like when you can count on one hand the number of words you've spoken aloud in any given day.
By my second or third year of high school, I wasn't even looking forward to graduation.
With only a subsistence-level capacity of human interaction and barely any internal motivation at all by the time I graduated, I couldn't even make it through three complete semesters of community college, forget about holding out any hope for a degree.
Back then, I wasn't even sure I deserved to consider myself smart enough for an advanced education, so I just gave up.
Twenty-five years down the road now, I often wonder what might have been possible if I'd had access to the right kind of encouragement and nurturing, if I'd had a proper mentor back then on whom I could lean, when I was in danger of losing faith in myself, someone who could help me maintain some lust for life and not let me resign myself to simply drifting along, just waiting around for the terminal end.
And it's taken since then to scratch my way out of that mental black hole, basically on my own, with the most notable exception of the last twelve months.
My parents weren't blind.
They saw what was happening to me, though they often ridiculed me for being listless, unmotivated, and apathetic.
Fascinatingly, my father liked to compare me to his older brother, who apparently had a penchant for sleeping till noon.
Whether out of ignorance or malice, they never thought it was enough of a problem to seek outside help.
So the despair you detected in my remarks derives essentially from wishing I could go back and whisper the right things into my own ear twenty-five years ago.
Yes, you need this.
No, don't give up on that just yet.
Seek out kindred souls.
Follow the fear, don't run from it, and so forth.
Therefore I at least feel like I'd be committing a kind of injustice by not now trying whatever method I could think of to reach into that blackness as far as I can, to offer at least some kind of candlelight flicker of hope to those who already know they're in a prison and who are starting to believe that life is just one long sentence of solitary confinement.
Is it wrong to be impressed by the artistry of the writing?
Probably. But it's beautifully written and movingly put and admirably honest and wonderful.
So, I agree that you can't wait until people are in their 20s to start talking to them about freedom.
I've been thinking about some ways to work on a series on philosophy that would be aimed at younger people.
But, I mean, there's no time.
No time whatsoever at the moment.
And the plans for when this is all going to start to kick in has much to do with donations, which have been just a little scanty of late.
I would assume that people have blown their budgets a little for Christmas.
So, we shall see you.
I keep waiting for the surge, and then we shall be able to do something more proactive, a proper radio show, maybe a television show, something like that, but I do need some indication that I'm not going to be eating my own kidneys within three months.
So, yeah, I mean, I'm absolutely convinced, and my experience of high school was Very similar.
I was not as silent, well, as you can imagine, but it was sound and fury signifying nothing, my speech at the time.
It went nowhere, it did nothing, and it was just the competition of jokes that occurs when you're with a funny and nihilistic crew.
So I absolutely and totally understand.
So there have been some airstrikes in Somalia this morning.
I just heard this on the radio.
I don't know the context.
I do know that, like all foreign violence, it is being blamed on terrorists.
See, we had to attack Somalia because there are terrorists there, and those terrorists were responsible for this bombing or that bombing from eight years ago.
I think the bombing is in West Africa.
I mean, please, please, oh please, oh please, do you expect anyone with a half shred of intelligence to imagine that the US intelligence services and military services, absolutely unable to see 9-11,
absolutely unable to do anything other than murder millions of Vietnamese for no concrete reason, absolutely unable to figure out that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, utterly unable to To win the war in Iraq or even to get out.
Do we imagine that this bunch of inchoate incompetence is somehow able to follow the thread of where terrorists are over the course of eight years in a foreign culture when they can barely speak Arabic?
You know, it's one of the worst things about this war on terror, is it's just carte blanche.
Anything you want to do when you're in the government, Oh, there's a terrorist at the end.
Oh, okay, great. Well, good for you then.
I wouldn't want to be seen as pro-terrorism.
And that, I think, is really the wretched thing that is occurring.
And I don't know what's going on in Somalia.
I do know that a lot of people are using it to dismiss anarchistic ideas.
I do know that there's a good deal of evidence that foreign governments are inciting conflicts as they want to do.
I mean, there's people who just like to go in and start conflicts.
There are borderlines and sociopaths, these people who do foreign policy.
You have to have something fundamentally broken in your soul to work in foreign policy because you just get so many people killed.
There has to be something essential missing in your humanity if you are willing to do something like work in foreign policy.
So I don't know what's going on, but I can absolutely guarantee you that the agency that couldn't figure out 9-11 and WMDs and took victory for standing around when the house of cards that was the Soviet economy fell down, that this bunch of...
Ass clowns, in no way, shape, or form, was able to trail these terrorists for eight years in Africa when they all spoke Arabic and were trying to hide.
I mean, they can't even find Bin Laden when they knew where he was a month ago, a week ago.
Do you really think that they're going to be able to have trailed these guys to Somalia for...
What, eight years since 98?
No, six years. Eight years.
For eight years? Almost nine?
Please, it justifies the imagination.
It was a hit on someone for sure, right?
Somebody wanted someone killed.
If you tell the U.S. military that a terrorist is in X location, you know, they do a pretty good job of wiping them out for you.
And just get a couple of people to corroborate, and I doubt they even need that.
They certainly didn't worry about corroboration for WMDs.
So, I just thought that was...
I mean, it's sad and it's funny.
It's funny because anybody who believes after this massive amount...
I mean, do these people think that Alias is real and that the CIA is not?
It's just amazing. Just amazing.
And then you hear Conrad Black is now being charged...
Because in 1998, he may have been in a chatroom promoting his stock with the intention of short-selling it.
1998. Eight or nine years ago.
This is the hand of justice at work.
Ha ha ha! People who had their retirement savings siphoned by this guy to the tune of $80 million, which is like one second's worth of the Iraq War.
Oh, it's just amazing.
Somebody was posting on the board who's a gentleman who's going through a minor crisis intellectually, rebelling against evolution and finding himself unable to answer the question that is posed to him by someone, which is...
Well, in an anarcho-capitalist society, who will protect you if you're a shareholder from falsehoods by corporations?
Who will protect you if you're a shareholder from falsehoods by corporations?
It took eight or nine years For them to bring charges against this guy.
Now, how is it that they're able to get charges against this guy?
Well, I'll tell you. I don't know the details.
I heard this on the radio this morning, but I'm absolutely willing to go on record to tell you that this is what is happening.
One of Conrad Black's business colleagues, the phrase that was used on the radio was, Has pled guilty to a similar charge and is now cooperating with the authorities.
Has pled guilty to a similar charge and now is cooperating with the authorities.
It's exactly the same as saying, although not nearly as horrible, as saying the woman has decided that she doesn't want to get stabbed and is now cooperating with the rapist.
The phrase means that they have thrown all the shit in the world at you.
They've come down on you like a ton of bricks on a little fern.
And they're throwing so much crap at you that something's going to stick.
What was it, Michael Milliken? They threw 400 charges against the guy.
And they got like a couple of them to stick based on the coerced testimony of other people.
I mean, this has nothing to do with justice.
It's just a kangaroo court, right?
It's just a vengeance trip. He just pissed somebody off.
It's the great thing about Prison Break, right?
How it shows how beautifully, if you want someone robbed out, just manufacture charges against them and let the government do the rest.
And make it as high profile as possible so some DA or some prosecutor is going to want to make his name.
That's how Giuliani got his stud.
You just dangle people in front of the jackals and they'll snap, they'll bite, they'll drool, they'll chew, they'll eat.
And they'll digest and they'll shit out some press releases just for you.
So it means that one of his colleagues got terrified, and who wouldn't be, by the government saying something like, we already have the proof against you, but it's up to you to plea bargain your way down.
If you don't cooperate with us, you're going to get 20 years in prison.
And if you do cooperate with us, you'll get six months in a minimum security prison.
Or it's 20 years.
Or some nonsense number.
In a maximum security prison, we already have the goods on you.
We already have confessions from other people.
We already have the paperwork that implicates you.
And this guy doesn't know what the hell's going on.
Who can remember what details occurred in business transactions from eight years ago?
It's nonsense. So he's just terrified that his life is now over, or he can just plead guilty.
Or they say, if you don't plead guilty, we're going to put a $500 million fine on you and wipe you out and your next generation out completely.
Or you can plead guilty and we'll only levy a $20 million fine on you or something like that.
I mean, this is how government justice works.
They don't do research anymore.
They don't do forensics. They don't do this kind of stuff.
All they do is grab people and threaten them with outlandish punishments until somebody confesses.
It's a Soviet style of justice.
Actually, it's a little...
It's the white-collar Abu Ghraib.
This is where we are with our justice system internally.
And why is it that radio stations are reporting on a minor white-collar crime from...
I mean, minor in comparison to, say, a multi-trillion dollar debt?
You know, $80 million.
Okay, in 1998 it was worth a little more, but why is it?
Well, because... It's a wonderful fairy tale.
His name is Conrad what?
Yes, Black. Conrad Black, yes.
He's evil. He's a capitalist.
He's evil. It's all insider trading.
You can't get ahead. Everyone else has it.
But your noble government is riding to the rescue to bring down the evil ogre of the fat cat capitalist, and his name is Black.
Did we mention his name is Black?
His colleague has pled guilty.
I swear to God, I live in a bad soap opera.
Mustache-twisting villains and damsels in distress and the noble heroic workers and oh man.
Oh man, oh man.
And of course, Conrad Black, he ran a vaguely right of left of center, which is considered to be fascist in Canada, a newspaper called the National Post.
And he took a peerage from England, which offended many Canadians, because we prefer to have our dictatorships a little bit more local.
And so he just did something to piss somebody off.
Does anyone think that the industrialist in Russia who was put in jail because Vladimir Putin who makes jokes about the virility of the Israeli Prime Minister who is charged with rape?
Ah, he raped ten women.
We are all impressed.
That's generic foreign accent in case you're tracking these things.
Does anyone think that the guy who ended up in jail for some sort of security nonsense, that Vladimir Putin, who praises the virility of rapists or potential rapists or people who charged with rape, is very interested in the justice of abstract white-collar paper crimes?
No, the guy just didn't pay somebody off.
The guy just pissed somebody off, didn't knuckle down.
And the beautiful thing, if you're a criminal, is that you have this voracious, ready to pounce, pursue to the end, make a name for yourself, get famous, get rich, get into politics, entire system of this, quote, justice system.
Just jump all over everybody.
I mean, we think that it's all about the army.
We think that it's all about the army who goes and points guns at people at foreign lands.
Well, the police are the same.
The police and the justice system are the same.
It's ridiculous.
O.J. Simpson murders his wife, gets off.
Robert Blake murders his wife, gets off.
Ooh, but Martha Stewart makes a phone call.
BAM! She's in the Diva Dungeon.
It's a bunch of political jackals.
And everybody gets just how wild this is.
And everyone gets just how if you get the BDI of the state focused on you, you're doomed.
You're sucked into a Kafkaesque nightmare world of double-crossing and blackmail and sociopaths screaming that they're going to lock you up for 20 years.
A future without your wife, without your family, your life destroyed.
You're going to get raped every week.
For 20 years. This is the apicalago that is moving through us.
This is the dictatorship that is moving through us.
The U.S. has a far higher population in jail per capita than China.
Than China.
Where they only let you have one kid.
China! Oh, but don't worry, folks.
We've won the war against communism.
We're now nuking Somalia, throwing white-collar criminals in jail for stuff that happened eight years ago.
Can't quite get the murder rate down, though.
Can't quite deal with the crime in the streets.
But don't worry.
We're working on those dusty old files.
Cold case. It's too funny for words.
It really is. You know, with the exception that this is an entire machinery of terror, that if you have never had it pointed at you, and I never have, but we can be eternally grateful if we haven't, if something were to happen wherein they just wanted to manufacture something against you, don't even think for a moment they wouldn't do anything that they wanted to get that stuff done.
If somebody said, you just find Joe Bob X and you just nail him, they'd find something.
They'd go searching, they'd go sniffing, they'd go, they'd find something.
And if they couldn't find something, they'd plant something.
With me, they'd just figure out where I was going to work based on my home address and my work address, and then they'd just charge me with podcasting while driving.
So anyway, that was just some stuff that I thought of this morning or that I got this morning from While I was shaving at Chan's radio station.
Commentary. But it's wonderful that people still need to put out reasons for this kind of stuff.
That is good. That is good.
At the moment, they no longer have to put out reasons, rationales.
Oh, don't worry. We're striking against suspected terrorists.
And nobody has any problems. They have to say suspected terrorists, right?
Because if they say, we strike against terrorists, people would say, well, where's the proof?
And then there would be repercussions.
If they nuked, then they, oh, don't worry, absolutely, there are terrorists, in the way that they said, absolutely, there are WMD. Oh, wait, there are no repercussions for that either.
But there would be, at least at a personal level, some embarrassment, some possibility of repercussions.
And, of course, if they say that they are, we know for sure that the terrorists are in X, people will say, well, where's your proof?
Where's your proof? You know for sure.
But then they say, what they do is they say, well, they're on the move, we suspect that they're here, we've got decent cooperation, and now's our only chance!
Now may be our only chance.
These people are responsible for all the evils in the world.
They bringeth the rain. They maketh the frog hail down upon people in rather odd movies.
But if they say it's as they're suspected, I mean, isn't that wonderful that you can impose the death penalty on not just individuals, but people in the vicinity of individuals?
That you can do this on suspected stuff.
As somebody posted on the board, and I think it's entirely true, foreign policy is where the government finally gets to be itself.
It gets to kick back without all that pesky local press and irritating questions from people.
We finally get to be ourselves.
Kick off our shoes and just start spraying gunfire around.
This is what they do when they're overseas.
Do you not think that they do this when they're at home?
I think that you should check that if you think they are.
So this is the agency that this gentleman who's having problems both with evolution and people...
This is my sort of rough theory.
I don't know anything in terms of particulars about this gentleman, so I'm just going to put this out as a rough theory.
But people's false vanity gets pricked by evolution because there's no specialness.
If you're just evolved as protoplasm, which I am, which you are, if we're just incredibly evolved synthetic and symphonic matter, then what's so special about us?
Well, nothing innate.
Innately, I'm about as special as an amoeba.
It's what I do with my capacities that may or may not make me special.
It's the courage and commitment with which I pursue virtue that may make me special.
But I'm not special because I'm here.
I'm not special because I'm alive.
And evolution, people don't really like that so much.
Everybody wants the unearned.
Again, I'm not saying anything about this gentleman.
It's odd to me that somebody who's into libertarianism would have a problem With evolution, but then, of course, maybe he's still religious, I don't know.
But religion, of course, as well, is this addiction to specialness without having to earn it.
I am a special soul of God's, and he loves me, and he thinks about me all the time, and he watches me while I shower.
He also, for a similar sort of reason, when people say, well, who is going to protect you if you're a shareholder, and you invested a corporation in a free society, who's going to protect you?
Well, there's just so much that's wrong with that question and the implications.
Who even knows where to begin?
But let's try. First of all, why should anyone protect you?
Who the hell are you that you are so special that other people have to run around protecting your investments?
Who the hell are you that you are so special that everyone has to drop whatever they're doing and watch your little investment and make sure nothing bad ever happens to you?
You'll notice that these are not the kinds of people who say, you know...
I've got an investment watch community and I send out regular emails because I really care about people and their investments.
So I'm regularly checking up on companies and sending around free emails to people who invest in those companies to make sure that they understand what the company is up to.
So they're not providing this service to others.
They want it provided to them.
Take, take, take, take, take.
Selfish, selfish, entitled, entitled.
Everybody must run around and provide to me.
Everyone must run around and do things for me.
Me? Do things for others?
Inconceivable. So, these kinds of people, if they really are so concerned with the safety of investors, then they should do something about it.
Oh no, they don't actually want to do something about it.
They just want to get the service for free.
So they're greedy. Everybody who invests in stocks is greedy to some degree, in my sort of humble opinion.
Not that there's much wrong with that.
It's just a little dangerous. But they want the payoff, but they don't want the risk.
So they want the high returns.
And of course, if you invest in IBM and Microsoft, you're probably going to do okay.
But this guy doesn't want stuff like Enron to go on.
And so he wants the government to go around checking up and to give him this service for free.
Because only 20%, 25%, 30% of people invest in stocks.
And so when people say, well, I want the government to protect me from unscrupulous corporations, they want a service for free.
If they really care about this, they provide it to other people.
That's the amazing thing. Now, the second thing that's interesting about this is that people don't want the government to protect the value of their investments.
They want them to protect their money, basically.
They want the government to protect their money.
Now, there's a wonderful little word that this gentleman has probably heard of, but maybe he doesn't make the connection, the gentleman who was arguing with the guy who posted on the board, who is all I'll be talking about now.
There's a little word called inflation that you may have heard about, wherein 90% to 95% of the dollar, the US dollar, say, has been erased over the past 100 years.
This from the agency that is protecting the value of your money.
This from the agency that is all about making sure you, sir, don't get ripped off.
This gentleman also, maybe, maybe, has heard about a little thing called the national debt, which at some point is going to strip the few shreds of pennies left in his dollar to nothing.
And this is the agency that has run up this government.
It's the agency that has run up this catastrophic, massive national debt That has wallpapered the entire planet with IOUs that cannot be redeemed, which has 40 to 60 trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities over the next couple of decades.
This is the agency that's all about protecting the value of your money.
Oh my god, I can't believe that anybody expects this stuff to be taken seriously.
The agency, the government, Which has hundreds of military bases all over the world, stick and sticks into the wasp's nest of radical and insane theology, provoking attacks, provoking fear, provoking endless lines at airports.
Up to the 1970s, you could take a gun on a plane and nobody cared.
And there were no hijackings, of course.
The agency that got 270 people 270 million people killed in the last century, even outside of wars.
Probably double that for wars.
Half a billion people killed.
The agency that, when united with the church, got a billion people killed throughout history.
This agency of slaughter, of oppression, of genocide, this is the agency that you want to protect your money.
He might as well say, I'm handing my car, my Maserati, over to Tony Soprano for safekeeping.
Thank you.
he might as well say, well, my daughter is going away for a week with Colin Farrell, but I'm sure it's just platonic.
No offense to Colin Farrell.
So the question to ask people who say, well, how will...
I mean, let's not even get into the question of the government involvement in Enron, which we've done before, and WorldCom, that the government provokes these kinds of monstrosities.
And the government was already protecting him when these things occurred.
That's what's so funny. There's so many ways in which this statement is so completely ridiculous.
The government already was protecting him when all of the catastrophes of the 90s and early 2000s occurred.
The government has endless rules about accounting standards and what's allowable and what's not allowable, and has auditors and has reviews and requires companies to publish their earnings and has audits that are required and have to be signed off and have criminal punishments for people who sign off on false statements.
The government was already protecting him when all of these things occur.
The government can't protect you.
In fact, it has every incentive not to protect you.
You're just another juicy prize.
You're just another fat chicken to be plucked.
Your little life savings are just another aggregate in the endless feast of state corruption.
What conceivable reason would the government have for wanting to protect you?
What they do want to do is collude with the capitalists to steal your money, and then when you get outraged, they then go through this pantomime of attacking their former friends and throwing them in jail and thus saying, well, we need more taxes because look at how many prisoners we have in jail.
I mean, it's how it works.
Ken Lay was a friend of Bush's.
Oh, well, now we've sucked you dry, Mr.
Lay, and the population is howling for your blood.
Hey, you know what we're going to give them?
All of your blood. This is how these people operate.
It reminds me of a scene.
I only watched, I think, one or two seasons of The Sopranos.
And there's a scene...
Or a series in which this guy who owns a sports store ends up gambling with the mafia, gets into horrible debt, and then the mafia, they come in and they start forging checks and they start stealing his inventory and then they burn down his store for the insurance.
And he's wringing his hands and he's upset.
He's like, you guys, you just come in and destroy stuff.
And Tony Soprano says something like, hey, that's what we do.
We're termites. That's what we do.
That's Robert De Niro if he was vaguely gay.
So that's what they do.
They come in and they just eat up everything and they spit out the husks.
There's nothing left. That's what they do.
That's the government. People who are interested in building stuff don't tend to point guns at people.
People who are interested in negotiating and win-win negotiations, not so much with the guns.
So, this fantasy that somebody's out there who's going to protect you, well, of course, it all comes from religion, right?
I mean, so much bad statism comes from the family, but some of it also comes from religion.
So, of course, I mean, there's this devil.
In almost every religion, there's this devil.
And whether the devil is some external thing like Satan, or whether it's some internal thing like the Buddhist failure to live in the moment and stuff like that, As if you could live five minutes ago.
Excuse me. So you have this devil and this devil is going to tempt you with bad things and something fundamentally wrong with you, your original sin or susceptibility to mortal sin, venal sin, sin in the here and now, sin in the future, sin in the past, sin, sin, sin.
Or you don't live in the moment.
You're not at peace with yourself. You're not at one with Vishnu.
You're not in nirvana. You're not in perpetual bliss.
There's always some damn goal that you've got to be chasing that you're never going to achieve, right?
I mean, that's how you get perpetual income from people.
It's the EverQuest business model.
And so there's some damn bad force in the world that is completely not associated with the force of infinite good and benevolence, the God and whatever.
Of course, if there was a God and there was a devil, you would immediately assume that God made the devil so that people would give money to priests.
Oh, no, wait, sorry, that's priests who invented God and the devil so people would give money to priests.
So there's this bad force loose in the world.
There's this infinitely good God who just cares nothing except about your welfare and wants nothing but for you to be safe and secure and happy and good and wants to take care of you.
Like those cops on TV that are divorced because of their slavish and virtuous and almost despairing devotion to Two catching crooks because they're just all about the virtue, right?
The guy in prison break is much more realistic, obsessed because he's guilty for murder.
So there's these bad people in the world, and then there are these really great people in the world who just want to help you and just want to make sure everything's going to be okay for you, and they just wake up night and day doing nothing but thinking about how they can serve you.
And they don't even really care about getting paid and they don't even really care about eating or shaving or personal hygiene.
They just wake up every day thinking, how can I serve you?
What can I do to make your life better?
You know, like the soldiers and the DAs and the cops and the...
Bureaucrats and the government. Unfortunately, it's no one you ever meet at the DMV, but they're out there.
They're out there. All these people who just want to make everything great for you, want to make everything wonderful for you, want to protect your property, want to protect you, want to make sure that you're never threatened by terrorists, want to make sure that you're safe and secure.
And, of course, that's what they tell you all the time.
The first job of a government is to protect its people.
We're just all here about protecting the people.
Maintaining the virtue of the Highland, upholding the Constitution.
Just these mindless drones of altruistic virtue.
And those people exist, but unfortunately, the complete opposite type of people exist too.
The greedy people who just want to take your stuff, who lie to you, who will grab your, defraud you, and these slimeballs who just exist all over the world and So they're on that side, and then on the sunny side of the street are all these virtuous, blank-eyed robocops who are just programmed to do nothing but protect you and ride in like the cavalry.
And you can't support that fantasy without religion.
You just can't. It's one of the reasons why you can't get rid of the state until you get rid of religion.
You just can't. And this fantasy of an infinite virtue that you have lying around that is going to be uncorruptedly attacking in perpetuity and with infinite justice all of the evil in the world, if people believe that, then anarchism makes absolutely no sense.
Freedom makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Not even a tiny bit of a shred of a sense.
And what that means is that we have to smash this idea of abstract virtue, virtue unconnected with people.
Once you begin to smash this idea of abstract virtue, the virtue that just floats around, that is out there, that is accessible, that is like this big, bizarre...
Star Wars force that you can just get good things out of, which is really fundamentally predicated on a god, and of course also on the virtue of parents, disconnect from parents.
My parents are good no matter what they did.
This platonic idea of the good, I mean, it's the root of dictatorship, that there's this good out there that can be invoked and put into place and put into power that is uncorruptible.
Well, if that exists, if such a thing did exist, it would be completely insane to be an anarchist.
It would be absolute madness to be an anarchist if there was in fact this wonderful pool of robo-virtue denizens that would ceaselessly attack evil without becoming corrupted.
Well, of course you'd use it.
I mean, of course you would, right?
If you had an anti-cancer drug And that drug would only attack cancer cells and would never attack healthy cells, then not taking it would be madness,
would be suicide. So the way people see the body politic is that there's this cancer of evil and corruption and nastiness and white collar and drug gangs and bad people of all descriptions.
There's this cancer attacking society.
And we have the antidote.
We have the antidote.
And the antidote is the government.
The government is the cancer cure.
And so, you crazy anarchists, what you're saying...
Is that we should die of cancer and not take the antidote.
This thing which will only attack the cancer cells.
Never the healthy tissue.
Save your life. Make everything great.
Feed your puppy. Breastfeed your baby.
Breastfeed you if, you know, that's what you're into.
And so that's why people point to things like Somalia and other places where they say, you see, without a government it's all destruction.
Everything gets destroyed. It's madness.
It doesn't work. And where would they get this idea?
Well, they certainly wouldn't get this idea from empiricism, right?
From any kind of view of history.
So it's always important to know when you're dealing with a fairy tale and when you're dealing with any kind of reality.
You don't look at history and say, you know what's really great is the government, and you know what's really bad is voluntary cooperation.
Because if you look at the two pillars of voluntary cooperation, capitalism and science, by far the most successful.
Human institutions, by far the most successful human institutions that have ever been conceived of.
We just look at the last two, three hundred years compared to most of human history.
The difference is freedom, the free market, and capitalism, and science.
It's the only two things that changed.
It wasn't democracy. They had that in ancient Greece.
Property rights and the scientific method.
The two massive advancements derived finally from Universally preferable behavior, and really derived fundamentally from the laws of logic.
So you'd look at those things and say, well, okay, science, voluntary cooperation, no central body of authority, people negotiate to find out what the truth is, what the best thing is, it's objective, and man, oh man, does it ever provide the most amazing advances, some of which are the ability to listen to this podcast.
You say, oh, well, free market, okay, well, it raises everyone's standards of living enormously.
It has incredible abilities to bring people out of the dark ages, and it produces the most amazing things, and there's no central authority that makes everything run.
So, I mean, in terms of the allocation of goods, right?
We'll forget about property rights for the moment, which aren't really enforced by the government anyway.
Then you'd say, okay, well, that's pretty good.
Now let's look at governments. A billion people killed, half a billion people killed, 20th century wars and democide.
Well, that doesn't seem so good.
And, of course, governments, the bigger they are, the worse things are.
They don't ever stay very small.
So then what they'd finally, if you look sort of empirically at history, you'd say, okay, well, government is the cancer and freedom is the antidote.
Force, violence is the cancer and freedom is the antidote.
But what has occurred is that people believe the exact opposite.
And they believe that because of religion and because of their parents, right?
And because of state indoctrination and so on.
But people believe the exact opposite.
They believe that freedom is the cancer and government is the antidote.
And then they wonder why...
The government keeps failing against, and you saw this starting in Hill Street Blues, as I mentioned before, where you finally began to have cops who could no longer hold back the tide of evil that was swamping society, just getting swallowed up in the undertow.
And so if the government is failing to protect people, what must that mean?
Well, it must mean that the evil is getting stronger.
Evil is getting more powerful. So we've got to give more power to government.
Because it's the government that's making the evil more powerful, right?
Lord, it's all too silly for words.
Anyway, I hope that this Ramblefest and the shocking inclusion of some actual contemporary pieces of information have been pleasant and helpful.
I am certainly looking forward to some donations.
If you could do your part to end the drought, I would certainly appreciate it.
And all the best.
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