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Jan. 26, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:28
621 Arms

What would you do with your DRO?

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It is the 25th or 26th.
Definitely, it's a Friday that much, I am absolutely convinced of, of January 2007.
I hope that you're doing well. Actually, it's the 26th.
And here we must, my friends, go to a rather dark place.
And it's something that I've been holding in my back pocket.
To bring out, just in case there's a few of you out there who still feel that the state is a valuable source of protection or is something that we should keep around because of the dangers of other governments, foreign governments and so on.
So I'd like to have a little chat about a little piece of state capitalism that's actually quite important to understand.
And I'm going to start it off, as I am going to do, with an analogy.
So let's say that there's some magical intervention and we achieve Libertopia, a stateless society.
And the first thing you say is, well, I own a small convenience store or a large convenience store or whatever.
I am Abu. And I need protection because there's, you know, there could be crime.
There could be crime. So I'm going to need protection.
So what I do is I find a good DRO with a good reputation and I sign up with that DRO. And things are fine for a while.
Cost is cheap.
It's like 1% of my income to pay for this protection of my property or to pay for the DRO. But then what happens is the crime starts to increase.
Nothing major at first, right?
Somebody graffitis the wall and My DRO cleans it up.
My premiums go up a tiny little bit, but not much, right?
Not the end of the world. Ah, well, isolated incident.
Who's going to care? Maybe my premiums don't even go up because it's so isolated.
And then, I get a rock through the window.
And that's pretty expensive.
Big plate glass and so on.
So I decide to phone the DRO and say, what's going on with crime?
They say, well, crime does seem to be increasing a little bit.
So we're going to have to up your premiums a tad, but I'm sure it's temporary.
We're doing everything we can, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's going away. And then my car gets vandalized.
And then I notice a crack pipe in the parking lot.
And then I notice the shrinkage in my store, the mysteriously disappearing inventory that is the bane of all retailers, that my shrinkage is increasing.
Stuff's going missing.
And then...
I get robbed at gunpoint, and it's a big honking gun.
So I'm calling up my DRO, and I'm like, what the hell is going on?
You people are supposed to be protecting my property?
It was fine for years, and now?
What the hell is going on?
Oh, there's a surge in crime, sir.
It's a real problem.
It's happening all over. It's the Muslims.
Really, they're the issue.
We've had some Muslims move into the neighborhood, and those Muslims are...
They like either hashish and they're kind of violent.
So, you know, terribly sorry.
We're going to have to triple your premiums just to deal with this crime wave.
But it's temporary.
We will secure liberty.
And blah-de-blah-de-blah.
Well, next thing you know, I get robbed twice in one week.
Get another brick through my window.
And there's a drive-by shooting.
Doesn't hit anyone. Just people spraying bullets.
So I'm like, oh my god, this is terrible.
I mean, my customers don't want to come into my store.
I don't want to work there.
I'm frightened. And then I decide I want to switch DROs, so I start doing a search for DROs and so on.
And I find a website.
And this website is run by my local mafia.
And my local mafia is quite proud that they have been receiving money, weapons, and training weapons, and training from my DRO.
And they got less there of all of the sales that have occurred, They sold them bombs and guns and Rocket-propelled grenades and lots of other juicy stuff.
And they've funded them.
And they're also selling them drugs very cheaply.
Of course, drugs are very cheap because it's Libertopia, but they're selling them even cheaper.
And I'm absolutely aghast.
And so what I decide...
Is that I should really get behind my DRO and give it more money and power.
Oh wait, sorry, that would be voting.
Would you wish to switch to another DRO or would you wish to take your chances with no DRO? Would you be a big fan of continuing your economic relationship with your existing DRO, who is funding, training, and arming the very selfsame people that they claim their sole existence is to protect you from?
I doubt it rather considerably.
Since 1992, the United States has exported more than 100 $142 billion worth of weaponry to states around the world.
The US dominates this international market of arms, supplying just under half of all arms exports in 2001, roughly two and a half times more than the second and third largest suppliers, England and Russia, I think.
U.S. weapon sales help outfit non-democratic regimes, soldiers who commit gross human rights abuses against their citizens and the citizens of other countries, and forces in unstable regimes on the verge of, in the middle of, or recovering from said conflict.
U.S.-origin weapons find their ways into conflicts the world over.
The United States supplied arms or military technology to more than 92% of the conflicts underway in 1999.
The cost of the families and communities afflicted by this violence is immeasurable, but to most arms dealers the profit outweighs the lives lost, of course, because the taxpayers that the state is supposed to be protecting are forced to pay for the arming of others.
From 1998 to 2001, over 68% of world arms deliveries were sold, or given, to developing nations.
Well, lingering conflicts or societal violence can scare away potential investors.
Of course, except for those ones who are all heading over to invest in Iraq.
Loss of investment opportunities overseas, billions of dollars to support weapons exports, and, let's just say, a fairly hot-tipped M16 poke around in a veritable hornet's nest of hostility.
The US military has had to face troops previously trained by its own military or supplied with US weaponry in Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, and now in Afghanistan.
And Iraq again, I guess.
This is a little bit old, this.
Due to the advanced capabilities these militaries have acquired from past U.S. training and sales, the U.S. had to invest much more money and manpower in these conflicts than would otherwise have been needed.
So, this is really quite important.
Um...
Total arms transfer agreements.
Official arms transfer agreements.
God knows what the reality is, but it probably is far, far worse.
Over $25 billion.
Almost 50% of that was the United States.
And the second largest is England.
The third largest, I think, is Russia.
The US arms trade is 19 times larger than China.
Communist, evil, ooh, spit on them, China.
Fairly important thing to mull about.
Half of the world's governments spend more on defense than healthcare.
Of course, they shouldn't be spending on either, but it does give you a sense of priorities.
The International Red Cross has estimated that one out of every two casualties of war is a civilian caught in a crossfire.
How safe do you feel with governments protecting you?
The US arms industry is the most heavily subsidized after agriculture.
Your tax dollars at work.
2001, world military expenditures prior to 9-11, not counting the 9-11 increase, were almost a trillion dollars.
If you were to count by one number every second, it would take you 11 and a half days to reach 1 million and 32 years to reach 1 billion.
839 times 32 is a big frickin' number.
These are billions of dollars.
Iceland has no military and no military expenditure.
There are 300,000 child soldiers around the world.
that are active in 30 wars or conflicts.
The U.S. sells two and a half times more than the United Kingdom.
Almost ten times the amount of exports registered by France, and as I mentioned before, 19 times the level of exports registered by China.
The US spends over 35% of the entire world's spending on arms, and of course a vast amount of that is shipped overseas to foreign governments and to other homicidal psychopaths who want to kill lots of people.
Now, there's lots of facts that you can look up for this kind of stuff, and I won't bore you with all the details because the details aren't particularly relevant.
Is it 839? Is it 830 billion?
Doesn't really matter. The fact of the matter is that training, funding, and hellish weaponry is actively sold to people overseas, and to say the majority go, almost 70%, go to the developing world.
Is there any particular question or Bafflement out there as to why the developing world seems to get stuck rather in the developing side of things and not so much in the growth side of things.
Now, there are tons of arguments, all of which are justifications, because when you look at the amount of money that is involved, Lockheed Martin is a $17 billion company, heavily subsidized.
The government taxes us to buy weapons.
It taxes us to subsidize those who make the weapons.
It taxes us for the postage to ship those weapons overseas.
Those weapons are then used to kill one out of two people who are innocent civilians.
And guess what, folks?
Oh, guess what?
Do you not think that Made in USA is all over those weapons?
Either carved in or just common knowledge and that if your wife gets murdered by some nuts with weapons, how hard is it do you think it is to find out where those weapons came from?
But they hate us for our freedoms, right?
Because we're just so free and they're just so bitter and angry and negative.
And this is the protection that we are receiving.
Our government points guns at us to take our money, which it uses to buy guns from others, which it uses to ship overseas to wars.
What is it?
Over 90% of the wars are using American-made weaponry?
Really? 90% of the wars in the world are just?
I doubt it. And only the side that is just is using those weapons?
I doubt it.
So from the outside world, from the people who are struggling...
To find any kind of peace and security in their lives, let me tell you what the United States looks like, and England, and Russia, but we must deal with the largest malefactor, which is the U.S. government.
It looks like the source tributary to a vast, foaming, thundering, bloody river of death.
And that is how the United States looks just on the arms sales alone. .
The other very interesting thing, and for some reason, and maybe it's to do with this, this is the little clues that your brain leaves you.
I read a book when I was in my early to mid-teens called Han Solo at Star's End.
And this is complete non sequitur, I apologize.
It's a very, very obscure little book.
Because like most kids without a father, I was fascinated by Star Wars and lightsabers.
No phallic symbols there.
And in it, he was talking about some carbine, and he said, you know, you can leave...
The great thing about this carbine, saith Han Solo, is that you can leave it leaning up against a tree, come back in ten years, and it'll still work perfectly.
Well, that's really true of ARMS. Very, very much true.
A little bit less true of some of the more powerful and sophisticated weapons like an advanced jet or something like that.
F-16 or whatever.
But these weapons, especially something like an M-16, they will last for years and decades and decades if properly oiled and cleaned and cared for.
They're like landmines.
Lay them down, they last and they last and they last.
So when you sell weapons to sociopaths, and trust me, only sociopaths want these kinds of weapons, no matter who they claim to be fighting for, you are mixing blood in the coffee.
You cannot unmix blood from the coffee.
Oh, you didn't want blood in your coffee?
Let me take it out. I'll get some tweezers.
They're in, boy, and they stay.
And let's say you do find the most noble and virtuous side in a conflict and you arm them because they are just such desperately, wonderfully good people.
Well, let's say that they win.
Let's say that they lose. What does it matter?
The weapons are still there.
They don't lease them.
You don't go and get them back.
They're just out there.
They're out there and they're out there and they're ever accumulating.
And people wonder why the 50 trillion dollars spent in the last 40 or 50 years in Africa has done squat to bring peace.
Well, my friends, I'm sure it's no great shock to figure out that if you keep flushing mad amounts of high-tech weaponry into an unstable society, you don't seem to get a whole lot of stability.
Can you imagine how this policy, if consistently applied to America, would look?
Well, we have the Bloods and we have the Crips, you see, and they're fighting over turf.
So what the United States government is doing is it's going to pick the Crips and it's going to arm the Crips and it's going to fund and it's going to train the Crips and it's also going to arm and it's going to fund the Bloods and it's going to give them rocket-propelled grenades and it's going to give them tanks and it's going to give them helicopters and it's going to give them guns and bombs And flak jackets and all of the other paraphernalia that is regularly sold overseas to tribal warfare groups.
And then what happens is the Bloods and the Crips, with all of their advanced weaponry and training, begin to rule Los Angeles.
And so...
What America does is it says, the American government, the federal government, it says, oh, wow, okay, well, let's start sending more welfare to Los Angeles.
And you know who we really need to get this welfare to is we'll send it to the Bloods and the Crips.
We'll send all of this welfare money.
And we're also going to send them more weapons and military training.
And that's the solution to the problem of increased bloody and almost endless violence in Los Angeles because of the hyper-acceleration of the arming and training and funding of these criminal gangs.
If this were put forward in a State of the Union address, how would you feel?
Would you feel like, yeah, that's thinking outside the box.
Inside the coffin, but outside the box.
So that seems to be an excellent way.
Let's find all the criminal gangs in the world that are fighting in America.
Let's get the Five Families, the Bloods and the Crips, Hells Angels, whoever.
And let's just train them in all of the advanced weaponry.
Let's give them night vision goggles and sniper rifles and incendiary bombs and airplanes and that way we should solve the problem of violence.
How would you feel if you lived in Los Angeles and you heard this announced that all of the violent gangs in the city were going to get training and weaponry From the federal government.
Would you think, wow, that's great.
Boy, I can't wait to live in a really peaceful society.
How would you feel? Would you think like, that's it, we're moving.
We are moving. I am not staying in this hellhole.
Well, what if you couldn't move?
What if you couldn't move and the weapons and the training and the funding and the bloodshed kept escalating and escalating and escalating and you never got any of the money that was given to the gangs and you never got a hold of any of the weapons that was sold to the governments or was sold to the gangs.
And everywhere you walked there were landmines and everywhere you went there were thugs with guns driving around in American-made Jeeps.
Wearing American-made sunglasses and living fat off the land of American-style foreign aid.
How would you feel? Would you think like, wow, America's really done some great stuff for me.
Do I ever love that good old USA? I doubt very much that you would feel that.
I think that you would feel that America was a tyrannical, disgusting, morally obscene, horrible, and hypocritical.
Oh, we're all about the freedom.
We're all about the peace. And then when somebody struck a blow against this deathmonger, this mercantilist Shylock from hell of weaponry training and funding, somebody struck a blow against it, and the American people all went, now we must flock to our masters.
We must flock to our masters, because they will protect us.
And they started giving up more money to this hellish institution that was sowing demon seeds, as Bono says, sowing demon seeds around the world and raising flowers of fire.
The killing field sowed with U.S. taxpayer-funded weaponry and training and funding.
How would you feel?
Would you feel like, wow, those Americans, they really get it?
I think you would feel enraged.
That Americans were one click away from figuring out what was really fundamentally wrong with the world in terms of violence.
That Americans were a couple of clicks about how long does it take to find these statistics.
It took me about 20 seconds.
It's not like you've got to go to the library.
It's not like you've got to risk your life.
This is not an episode of Alias.
This is just a sit down and click.
So If you don't think that it would be a good idea for the United States to pump billions of dollars of training, funding, and weaponry into the organized criminal world within the United States,
and with what horror and despair and rage you would view such a policy, then when you get that, when you try that on for size and you really sink into it and understand what it means, And how much blood is on the hands of these arms dealers that your government is enabling and funding and allowing to be.
This would not be a particularly significant trade in a free market.
Because in a free market, I mean, let's just say that there are no moral people in the world who would be interested in business and no investors who would have any problem.
Sorry, there would at least be some investors who would have no problem investing in arms, right?
I mean, companies that spill toxic waste in a rainwater barrel see their stock price crash because investors get active.
Companies which have even a hint of sweatshop labor use in Indonesia see their stock price crash because of the ethical investment funds.
But let's assume that even this would not be an issue.
The problem with selling weapons is it's diminishing returns, right?
The more weapons that you sell, the more the economy of the country you're selling to collapses, and therefore the less money there is available to pay for the weapons.
So it's not likely that it would be a very significant business.
In the free market, there would be some weapons sales to DROs, but DROs would be much more about prevention than cure.
And there would be personal handgun sales, I'm sure, to people until such point as the society became peaceful and reasonable enough that you no longer needed these things.
But sales to overseas governments, overseas DROs, I don't think it would be a big thing.
It's a market which shoots itself in the foot, if you'll excuse the metaphor.
So either it's not going to be a big trade or if it is a big trade and you're growing, then your market is automatically shrinking because without subsidies and funding, people who have lots of arms in their country don't have the economy to support further arms purchases.
The economy collapses.
But we keep these beasts alive, right?
Our governments keep these beasts alive.
We don't let their economies die through funding, foreign aid and so on.
And we loan them enormous amounts of money.
And then we keep arming them even when they can't pay for it.
So we keep these corpses alive.
Not the corpses of the people, but of the social structures that they live under.
We keep these corpses alive.
And what a murderous nightmare.
What an absolutely, completely and totally murderous nightmare we are creating and providing for.
In this world. And this is the protection that our governments provide.
And my sort of question to the monarchists out there, or to those of you who still believe in the virtue of the state, is, you know, what is it going to take?
Do you have to be waist-deep in blood and limbs?
In order to wonder whether or not the state is an effective agency?
What about chest-deep?
Eyeballs bobbing around, people's heads blown off, children's limbs.
Do you have to be waist-deep in that blood?
Do you have to be neck-deep?
Do you have to be on your lower lip?
At what point do you taste the blood that is the essence of the state?
How many landmines have to be sowed?
How many innocent civilians have to be murdered?
How many arms have to propagate throughout the world?
92% of conflicts are using American-made weapons.
Do you think all of those conflicts would be existing without the weapons?
No. Ray Bradbury used to talk about how human beings hate each other so much that you give them guns, they'll kill each other with guns.
If you take away the guns, they'll kill each other with guns.
Their hands, cut off their hands, they'll bite each other, tie them all up, they'll simply stare at each other and fill the air with hatred.
I don't think that's true, although I certainly did enjoy writing when I was younger, but I don't think that's true.
There's a cost-benefit calculation to hatred, just as there is for anything else, and anything you subsidize increases, and anything you tax decreases.
So when you subsidize brutal foreign dictatorships, gee, they tend to do quite well, don't they?
And when you subsidize hatred through weapons and direct pay and training, then it seems to do quite well.
Human beings are simply doing a cost-benefit calculation, which is being completely skewed by the state.
So my question is for the minarchists or for those who still think that the state is providing them some sort of protection or there's simply no other conceivable way that any other possible way of organizing society could be valid.
What is it going to take?
What is it going to take?
Your government is selling billions of dollars of high-tech murder devices to sociopaths around the world.
Who know perfectly well and whose victims know perfectly well that it is your government that is doing it and you feel that the government is somehow required for your protection?
You feel that this makes you safe?
What, oh what, oh what would it take to give up this fantasy?
Because, my friends, my general and great fear is that we may not give up this fantasy.
Until it is too late.
The greatest devil in the world is fantasy, and the greatest devil is designed to keep you blind to the truth until it's too late to do anything about it.
And then the truth is revealed to you, and you get the evil of the state when you are in jail unjustly.
Then you go, wow, you know, the state's really bad, but then it's too late to do anything about it.
Then the scales will fall from your eyes.
When it's too late. And of course the goal of philosophers is to point out that we don't have to go there.
We don't have to wait until we are terminal in order to figure out that we are ill.
And that's what I really hope that you get out of these conversations as I continually strive as hard as I can.
To remove these scales from your eyes, the propaganda blinkers from your face so that you can see, and it is a terrible thing to behold, but you can see the evil that is centralized, monopolistic, oligarchical violence and all of the hell that it unleashes along the world indiscriminately, endlessly, purposefully, and that there is no managing this tiger.
People may confuse the state with a DRO, but people may also confuse a dolphin with a shark.
It still doesn't mean that it's safe to swim.
Thank you so much for listening.
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