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Oct. 5, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:52
879 Rome, Moscow and Washington...

The pathologies of late empire

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Hi everybody, it's Steph.
Just wanted to let you know before the show begins that my book, On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion, is now also available as a PDF download and also an audiobook, which you can pick up at freedomainradio.com.
The PDF is only $11.95 and the audiobook is only $14.95 and they're available for immediate download, so I hope that you will drop by and pick them up.
And now, on with the show!
Good morning, everybody. I hope you're doing well.
It's Stefan Molyneux. It is October the 5th, 2007, 10.35 in the AM. And a wee plug, just before we begin, the book On Truth, The Tyrion of Illusion.
It's now available in three, count them three, formats if you want to get your greedy hands on a philosophical work that really helps you to understand and apply rational principles of ethics to your own personal life, to your family, to your friends, in a positive and productive way.
The book is available for I think $18.95 for the book itself and if you want to read it more rapidly or get a hold of it more rapidly you can download a PDF version for $11.95 or for $14.95 you can get the audiobook which I think you'll really enjoy as well.
I had a great deal of fun recording it and I hope that you will enjoy listening to it.
The book UPB, Universally Preferable Behavior, Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, will be out next week.
I don't know if I'm going to do exactly the same way of releasing it, but let me know if you have an opinion.
Oh, and you can get a hold of On Truth by going to my website at freedomainradio.com.
So let's have a tour around a couple of more.
I've gotten some very positive feedback and thank you so much everyone who's written in to say that they have found the recent series on history to be somewhat interesting and actually helped make these interminable videos seem slightly shorter, which of course is a good thing.
So I thought we'd just take one last stab at looking at history and seeing how we can use it to help understand things that are going on in the present because human nature doesn't really change that much And statism and violence and militarism always have the same effect in the long run.
The government is a cancer, which continually swells until it destroys the host society, or at least attempts to, of civilized and peaceful intercourse between people.
So, the fall of Rome.
The fall of the Roman Empire is a very fast...
Oh, just wanted to mention, too.
You may be shocked. Don't be frightened.
I do, in fact, own a shirt with a collar.
I know. Just try and breathe and stay with the program.
We're moving ahead. Soon it will be a tie and a thong.
Just... So, the Roman Empire fell in the first third to first half of the first millennium AD, and there was lots of highly complicated things, and Edward Gibbons killed 20,000 trees per book to explain it all to you, but I can give you the expedited version.
Because what we really want to do is look at history and help extract the principles from history to help us understand the present.
The only purpose of history is to help us understand the future.
We can't change the Roman Empire.
We can't change the past.
We can't undo the election of George Bush.
We can't undo the setting up of the Fed in the past.
But what we can do is learn those lessons to change how we...
Behave and make choices, or the choices that we do make in the future.
So, let's have a look at what's useful in the fall of Rome and help us understand what always happens to imperial powers.
So, we'll do the fall of Rome, we'll do the fall of Russia, and we'll do the fall of the United States.
Wait, that is in the future, but not too far.
So, let's take a quick sprint through it, and I'll try and keep it non-tangential, and all of the jokes will be of the highest quality, which means there will be no jokes at all, because I can't do those ones.
So... The fall of Rome.
Well, as you know, Rome was a massive empire that originated out of Italy, spread across most of the known world at the time, and was originally something which was designed to sort of conquer, set up rules and free trade, and allowed for the flourishing of the ancient world.
One of the reasons that the Industrial Revolution never happened in the ancient world, both in Greece and in Rome, who were sophisticated, philosophical, technological, and so on, but the Industrial Revolution never happened because of the existence of slavery.
You kind of have to get rid of slavery for the Industrial Revolution to occur, because labor-saving devices don't really mean that much to you.
If you've already invested in slaves, then investing in labor-saving devices isn't really that productive.
The price of labor has to increase in order for technological advances to be practical from an economic standpoint.
Plus, the government is not really very keen on labor-saving devices when you have slaves around because that tends to throw slaves out of work.
And a lot of young, able-bodied slaves in a country where the weapons of mass destruction are a sword doesn't tend to be very good for the ruling elites.
So there's an active discouragement of investment in labor-saving technology.
And so what happened was the empire spread as it did and it spread some free trade and some positive benefits with it as well.
The Roman law is that very famous scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian where they're talking about what have the Romans ever done for us?
It's like the aqueduct brought peace, brought wine and so on.
But what happened was as the...
As the empire spread, more revenue flowed into Rome.
As more tax revenue flowed into Rome, it began to attract, like a massive steaming pile of caribou dung in the woods, the flies and buzzing insects of political power began to buzz towards Rome.
So as the treasury filled up in Rome, due to the increased efficiency of taxation, increased collection of taxation throughout the empire, All of these sociopaths began to gravitate towards Rome.
This is why government power always escalates and increases.
It follows a sort of plague-like transmission schedule or a sort of cancer-like growth.
And so what happened was the ruling elite swelled as the taxes increased, as a country becomes wealthier.
The danger of totalitarianism always becomes greater.
As a country becomes wealthier, there's more money in the treasury and more of these sociopathic leaders and political types will want to sort of suck on that money and suck on the teats, or rather the throats, of the general population.
So the increase of wealth, which always seems great, always ends up with increasing taxation revenue, which then draws all of these people into the state where they then work to expand their empires and so on.
So there was a basic problem that occurred with the ruling elites.
As they begin to tax more, what happens is the economic growth begins to decline.
So they get all of this tax revenue from increased trade.
They then use that to increase and start to regulate trade more.
So you get all of these artisans and craftsmen who begin to apply to the state for restrictive licensing so that You can't just go and be a plumber or whatever.
The state will buy you from doing that.
All of these people start to glom onto and attach themselves to the state rather than doing something productive with their lives.
They use the power of the state to keep foreigners out, to keep competitors out, to raise tariffs, to raise taxes, to begin to manipulate.
The economy for their own gain using the coercive monopoly of the state and unfortunately through taxation charging the consumers.
That's why the state is a massive mechanism for offloading the costs of violent enforcement onto those you're enforcing against which is why the escalation of violence always occurs so considerably in the more of the state.
So what happens is, as more and more people get attracted to the state, the state begins to tax and regulate more.
That's how you gain power in the state, is either regulating or giving exemptions from regulations, taxing and so on.
The sort of lobbyist situation that we're all familiar with in the modern world.
And so the economic growth begins to decline.
It begins to slow down.
These tangling netty webs, these Gordian knots of regulations and control, begin to inhibit people's actions.
And the economy just begins to slow down.
Almost imperceptibly at first, but then it accelerates over time.
More and more people get thrown out of work.
And so what happens is, the unemployment goes up, and then the government becomes scared of a possible revolution.
And so they begin handing out Panem a circum or something like bread and circuses, right?
I think one of the famous Roman leaders said that what the people want is bread and circuses.
You give them free bread and you give them, I don't know, the deaths of religious minorities in the amphitheater under the claws of a lion and they're happy.
You give them bread and circuses or welfare and celebrity news as we would call it in the modern world.
And, of course, to pay for the welfare which bribes the unemployed to not work for social change.
It's not because they care about the unemployed.
It's not because they care about the unemployed.
That's what they always say, of course.
But if they really cared about the unemployed, they would do all the research in the world to figure out how to better create permanent and full employment, which is to stop regulating and taxing and, frankly, to get rid of the government completely.
But that's not what they want to do, right?
That's not in their self-interest.
So what they do is they say, well, we care about the unemployed, and so we're going to give them But, of course, once you give people stuff, you lock them in the same behavior that they were doing before you gave that to them.
So you end up with a swelling underclass of people who are underemployed or unemployed, who are attached to the power of the state and can be voted on to support the state, because now they've become dependent upon the state.
This, of course, raises the requirement for more taxation.
As you raise the requirement for more taxation, the economy slows even further.
Which means that more people are unemployed and then available for public largesse, welfare or handouts or something.
And so you get into this vicious cycle where in order to pay off the people not to demand social change, you have to Inflict the same problems on the economy that generated this underclass in the first place, right?
So you get this growing underclass of people dependent on the state who will always come out and cheer the state.
And, of course, you see this in voting and so on at the moment, right?
There's clear conflict of interest in every area except voting, whereas if you're on the receiving end of government largesse, you clearly have a conflict of interest when it comes to voting.
But that's for another time.
So here, what happens is you then begin to need more military.
As you start to run out of being able to just hand out cash all over the place, the population starts to get more restive, more sort of unsettled, angrier.
And so what happens is you have to start investing in the military.
And so you will pay, sorry, the first thing that you'll do is you'll try to enslave people to be a military, right?
So you've got this boiling underclass of underemployed youth, so the first thing you want to do is to draft them into the military.
And then you can use, because you've got this underclass of people who are physically fit and strong and angry, you draft them into the military, you can use them to repress everyone else.
And this is, of course, what the Romans did.
They began to draft all of the angry young men into the military.
And the military was unbelievable.
It was like the Russian military draft.
You would literally be dragged off into the military for like 20 years.
And then you'd be sort of kicked back with a small pension and so on, right?
So this is sort of how they initially did it.
They began harvesting this underclass to create a military army and so on, which they would use then to quell rebellions within the Within the empire.
You can sort of see the similarities to where we're going.
So then what happens is people who are sort of young look at the prospect of being dragged off to spend the majority of their youth and strength.
And remember, this is a time when the average life expectancy was about 22.
You have an average life expectancy of about 22.
Now, of course, that includes infant mortality, so if you make it past that, it's longer, but It was a rare person who lived much beyond 40, so if you were drafted at the age of, say, 17 or 18, basically your whole life would be spent in the military and you'd have no family, you'd have no wife, you'd have no occupation other than being stationed out in some godforsaken desert and killing the locals who rebel against the Empire.
Boy, how much has changed, huh?
So, what happens is the young people say, okay, I'm going to do anything I can to get out of this military service because I'm not going to spend my whole life holding some sword and sweating to death in some Roman legion.
So then what happens is they begin to move out of the cities, right?
So one thing that's very important to understand about the Roman Empire is despite their fabulous roads, communication was a real problem.
The only way that you could effectively tax people was if they lived in cities.
The only way that you could effectively harvest these young men and enslave them in military service is if they lived in cities.
Right? So, it very quickly becomes evident that if you live in a city, you're screwed.
You're going to get taxed to death.
Your kids are going to get dragged off to serve in the military.
They're likely going to get killed. You're never going to see them again.
And, of course, for parents who make it past 40, they need their kids around them for their old age, right?
So, they don't want their kids to get dragged off.
Plus, of course, they love their kids and so on, right?
So what you start to see in the Roman Empire towards the latter part of it is people fleeing the cities to escape the taxation, to escape the draft.
They start fleeing the cities.
And so what happens then is the Roman leaders start to see their tax base begins to erode, right?
Their tax base, because the requirements that they have for taxation and military service are so high that people just leave the cities.
They say, screw this up. It's nice to live in a city, but not to the point where I'm going to pay such high taxes and have my kids sent off to the draft.
So they leave the cities and they start to have farms in the country, they start to have more remote and smaller communities, and basically the whole system starts to decentralize as people flee the tyranny of taxation and the military draft.
So here you start to get a vicious circle.
They need more taxation, people start to flee and evade taxation more and more.
And so they need more taxation.
So what they start to do is they start to take their dwindling reserves, the Romans, they start to take the Roman leaders, they start to take their dwindling reserves, and they start to buy all of these mercenaries, called Blackwater-um.
So, wait, no, I said only good jokes.
Please erase that one in your mind.
So they start to hire mercenaries, rather, because they can't get a hold of the people that they need for the draft, because everyone's fleeing the cities.
So they start to hire all these mercenaries to keep the population down, to keep collecting the taxes, and so on.
As they hire the mercenaries, the abuses in the local areas becomes even worse.
Because what happens is now you have a situation where a lot of the tax collectors are paid as a proportion of revenue.
So they just come through and strip everything.
And so people flee the cities even more.
Even the few people who are left start to flee the cities even more.
So the tax base further erodes.
So you've got diminishing taxation and you have increasing costs.
You're paying out all this welfare.
You've got this whole military thing which you're using to maintain your empire.
And so your costs are enormous.
And the more people who drop out of society, the less is your tax base and the more you have to pay mercenaries because you can't get the young men in terms of the draft.
So what happens there? At some point, you can't pay your mercenaries anymore.
Now, of course, in the Roman Empire, late Roman Empire, they turned a lot to the Goths and the Gauls and sort of Western Europeans for the mercenary armies.
So then you just run out.
And of course, they try all the usual late empire tricks of debasing the currency.
And at one point, the silver coin was just like a nickel with a little silver sort of outline.
So the currency had been completely debased.
So the economy was completely toast.
Bubbles followed by crashes, again, all the things which we have no experience of in the modern world.
And so at some point, you simply don't have enough money in the treasury to pay your soldiers, your mercenaries.
So what happens? Well, the mercenaries come looking for payment, they sacro, and that's about it for you, right?
And then the whole of Europe and a good chunk of the...
falls into the Dark Ages, which lasts for, you know, 700-800 years, depending on when you believe the resurrection of Western civilization began.
Quattrocento, lots of different places where people place that, but...
This is the kind of stuff that occurs, right?
This is the escalation. This is why I say the governments are a cancer that continually grow until they consume and destroy the whole society.
And of course, once we identify it, we can change the outcome.
And if we don't identify it, then basically these civilizations are just like photocopies.
The same thing happens over and over again.
The details are different, but the overall picture is still the same.
Now, let's move to Soviet Russia, which, as you know, fell in the 80s and was replaced by the Mafia.
In Soviet Russia, there was a similar but mildly different situation.
So, what happens is, as the economy Begins to decline, right?
So as you need to pay out in terms of supporting your military, in terms of your welfare, your old-age pensions, whatever it is that you're using to both bribe and terrorize your population, right?
It's the good cop, bad cop, right?
It's the carrot of free and easy money and the stick of gulags and imprisonment that keeps people.
That's why they always have welfare and militarism, but the same thing, right?
I'm sorry, there are countries which have more welfare but less militarism for sure, but internally it's still the same.
Internally it's still the same. As long as you increase your welfare, then you have to increase your self-policing because you're looking for cheats, you're looking for people who are trying to bypass the system or who are double dipping and this kind of stuff.
So the government grows even if it's not a militaristic government as in the case of the US and England and other countries.
If you look at some of the Scandinavian or Swedish models, what happens is the internal policing of the society grows because they are now in a predatory relationship with their own taxpayers, right?
So you build very high fences when you treat your livestock badly because they're always going to try and escape, right?
So this is what inevitably occurs inside.
So, in the Russian situation, what happens is, from the inside, right, from the inside, from the Politburo, from being inside the Fed, from being in the Roman Senate and understanding the currency and knowing all the stuff that you and I don't know, as you may have heard, the Federal Reserve in the U.S. stopped printing the M1, like the money supply numbers, because they're printing like mad, and we'll get into that in a sec.
So, in Russia, what happens is, in the Soviet Union, In the late 70s, everyone who's in politics in a totalitarian system has a political lifespan.
Maybe 20 years, maybe 10 years, maybe 30 years.
It depends when they reach their pinnacle of power.
But at some point, they can see these intersecting lines, these intersecting lines that occur within their own economy, wherein their payments And their income are going to cross over and they're going to go bankrupt.
And they can see this coming many years before you and I can see this coming, right?
So they have all their internal projections.
They have, as you know, the government has two sets of numbers, right?
The ones that they hand out to everyone else and the ones that they keep for themselves, which give them the real picture, right?
Where they don't lie. They lie differently.
And so when people see these intersecting lines where the government is going to go bankrupt, what happens is...
As long as that's going to happen a generation or two out, you know, it's like, okay, well, so what?
I'm going to get mine. I'm going to get out.
I'm going to give to my family.
I'm going to retire in comfort, and so I'll just keep doing what I'm doing.
That's not the same escalation.
Now, the escalation is occurring because by giving People with lots of welfare money and buying lots of military hardware, you're actually changing their behavior, right?
So if you only have 5% of the poor and you give them a lot of money hoping to eradicate that 5%, all you'll do is create more poor, right?
The welfare state is not designed, and never will, and it's inconceivable that it could ever get rid of poverty.
What it does is create a permanent underclass.
That's why the welfare state.
People say, well, without the government, what would happen to the poor?
Well, they sure as hell wouldn't get screwed and destroyed and trapped in this horrible underclass in the way that they are now.
So that's why I'm much more passionate about helping the poor than any welfare state socialist democratic guy on the planet who believes that the government can do anything other than pray on and enslave these people.
Violence can never create positive solutions to problems other than in radical moments of personal self-defense.
So, what happens is they see these intersecting lines, right?
And they know that within their own career, it's going to run out of money, right?
So let's say that they say, okay, 15 years out.
So I'm 40, I've got some power in the government, and I get that we're 10, maybe let's say 15 years.
We're 15 years from this, right?
And you can do that based on projected demographics, and you can figure out when you're going to run out of money.
So then what happens is, 15 years out, suddenly changes, right?
Because it's 15 years out if these lines stay the same, right?
So if the steady growth in expenses and the steady decline in revenue continues on a straight line, it's going to be 15 years out.
But the moment that people realize that within their own careers, the government is going to go bankrupt, when the political people realize, the ruling class realizes that within their own careers, The government is going to go bankrupt.
Then they start to panic.
And what they start doing is they start grabbing everything in sight.
They start grabbing everything in sight.
And that changes the equation quite considerably.
Now it's no longer 15 years.
Now it's 10 years. Now it's 5 years.
Because people realize it's like if you find some Indiana Jones-style Aztec treasure of gold and this and that and the other, right?
And you've got all the time in the world, you're going to be very careful about bringing it out and so on, right?
But if you get this rumbling and the dots come out and the balls start rolling down the tubes and you realize that the door starts coming down, What's going to happen is you're just going to grab everything that you can, get your hands on and sprint like crazy.
And this is what happens when this intersecting line becomes visible to people and it is going to occur within their own careers.
The line shortens considerably because people realize like If nothing changes, I'm never gonna make it to the end with all the money still staying there, right?
So they just start grabbing everything they can.
Everything that they can. They start grabbing everything that they can.
And that changes. So where the initial projections are like 15 years, they become 10 years, 5 years, sometimes even shorter.
And there are a number of ways that you can justify this within the population, right?
Because when the government starts grabbing everything, People get a little concerned, right?
Even in a communist dictatorship.
So what you do is there's a couple of different ways of doing it.
We won't get into all of them, of course, but the major one is war, of course, right?
I mean, so when you realize that your treasury isn't going to hold out past your career, that the treasury that you're paying on is not going to last past your career, Then the first thing you want to do is try and start a war somewhere.
And when you can do that, then you can pillage the treasury, right?
Because you can escalate like crazy the amount of money that you're pulling out and you can bribe people and you can get kickbacks.
And so it's a free-for-all.
It's like a... Sharks will eat a fish slowly when there are no other sharks around.
But when there's a lot of other sharks around and only a couple of fish, it'll be a feeding frenzy and the fish will be eaten very quickly.
This is what occurs to government finances in a late empire situation.
So then what happens is you declare a war and you get everybody patriotic and you get everybody riled up.
But what happens is basically the war is just a massive mechanism of transferring money from the public purse to the private purses, right?
The left-wing analysis, in my view, of war here is bang on.
Of course, the left-wingers want to point guns not at other people, foreigners, but at their own citizens through all these social programs.
War is just a massive mechanism for transferring money from the public treasury to private pockets, right?
Because they certainly don't pay the soldiers anything, but the money goes to private contractors, it goes to defense contractors, and so on.
So, that's one of the ways in which you can really pillage the treasury.
Of course, another way that you can pillage the treasury is to create environmental scare stories.
So, of course, this has been going on since the 70s.
It's sort of my particular belief that this has been fairly known since Well, actually, let's not get into the details, but there has been a number of environmental scare stories since Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring in the 68, I think it was.
So, I mean, there's been acid rain, there's been global warming, global cooling, there's been, we're going to run out of oil, we're going to run out of food, right?
All these panics, right? And all these panics allow governments to increase taxes to pay for the EPA. And again, the EPA has nothing to do with protecting the environment.
The government is by far the worst polluter.
Around the world, governments are by far the worst polluters.
It's like entrusting your health care to a hitman to say that the government should take care of the environment.
The environment should be taken care of.
The government will never do it. The government will just rape and pillage the environment because they don't even have any private stake or ownership in their property that they're supposed to sort of manage, right?
So you start to get all of the creation of these government programs, and it's not because anybody wants to help the public.
It's just because the more programs you create, the more you can pillage the treasury.
So you get war, you get environmental scares, and then you have things like the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on illiteracy, massive panic around public education.
Whatever panic you can create that a disaster is about to occur, And the only way that we can avert that disaster, which we did not create, is to tax you further.
Whatever people can make up in terms of the ruling class and their participants in the media.
The media is not controlled in America in the same way that it was in Russia.
But the vast majority of news now comes out of the government.
And if you piss off the government, you don't get access to the news anymore.
You don't get invited. You don't get the interviews.
You don't get on the mailing lists.
And then you actually have to go out and do some real reporting.
And see, that's kind of expensive relative to just reprinting government press releases.
So... So this situation occurs where you end up with all this war.
You end up feverishly debasing the currency, right?
So you pay for the war through debasing the currency, which causes inflation.
And, of course, inflation is this horribly insidious tax, particularly on the lower classes, right?
So it's a complete pillage of the lower middle classes in particular.
So inflation causes a drop in the value of everybody's currency.
All the money you have in your savings and so on all goes down in value and the difference between where it was and where it is is a tax and a very insidious tax, a taxation without representation because it occurs for everyone.
Except for those who get to spend the money first, right?
If the government magically creates a billion dollars, they get to spend it and that ripple effect only shows up later.
So they get the full value of that billion dollars and everyone else ends up with a lot less than a billion dollars collectively.
So that is what occurred in Russia.
And that's why nobody saw it coming.
Because, of course, nobody could see it coming.
It was specifically designed to be hidden.
So this feeding frenzy that occurs at the public trough, when people realize that the...
Actually, I did get this from a friend of mine who is Russian, who's read a lot of this stuff.
He's quite fascinated by the fall of the Soviet Empire.
He's read a lot of this stuff, and the Russian's not available in English, unfortunately.
Otherwise, I'd give you some sources.
But we've talked extensively, and he's sort of given me a lot of information about this, which I've sort of tried to fashion into a kind of theory.
So, yeah, the feeding frenzy that occurs when people realize it's not going to last is ridiculous.
And Gorbachev has, what, three homes around the world?
I mean, if you look at his paycheck on paper, it was a pittance.
He should be living in a, you know, a sort of a walk-in brownstone in some small town.
But he's got three... Because these guys just make a fortune.
They make out like bandits.
They just pillage and steal everything they can get their hands on, everything that's not nailed down.
And so you can see this in a late empire phase, this escalation of public spending.
Not because anybody wants to bring stability to the Middle East or wants to get their hands on oil.
I mean, that's all nonsense. Basically, all of this stuff is invented so that people can take and rape more money out of the public treasury.
And that's, of course, what's occurring right now.
And that's how you know that in America, of course, you can see all of the same sort of stuff occurring here, right?
Here I'm in Canada, but you know what I mean.
So here we have this rape of the treasury that's occurring, this debasement of currency, and of course you can see this in the fact that American currency has now become less valuable than Canadian currency, and I can remember when Canadian currency was like 40 cents, it was like 60 or 70 cents on the dollar for a U.S. currency.
They're debasing the currency.
The reason the war is not ending is because the war is serving its intended purpose, the war in Iraq.
The war in Iraq has nothing to do with freeing Iraq or anything like that.
The war in Iraq Is to transfer money from a failing public treasury to private hands before everything collapses, right?
And that's why you have private military, right?
Because somebody's getting paid and somebody who's giving them that contract is getting kickbacks.
I mean, it's all a big shell game and we're the ones who get screwed, right?
I mean, so... That's the way to understand the war in Iraq.
It's perfectly serving. Anything which continues is serving its intended purpose.
Any human institution or interaction that continues, where it's voluntary, and it is voluntary for those in power, is serving its intended purpose.
So people are all baffled as white and they pull the troops out and so on, because that would interfere with the profits that they're making.
And I use that term profits not in the free market capitalist sense, but in the mercantilist sense of a zero-sum game or a negative-sum game.
So, and then when you look at something like the prescription drug program, it's not because they care about old people.
Yeah, they want to buy the votes and this and that, but more fundamentally, it's because why would a president want to buy the votes in his last term?
Well, fundamentally, it's because when they put the prescription drug program in, they get to pillage the public treasury even more, because nobody can figure out what's going on, and that's why, oh, it's originally going to cost $400 billion, and then $500, and then $600 billion.
That's what the purpose of the prescription drug program is, not to get pills to old people.
Not to give pills to old people, but to take money from the public treasury.
So the way that you see this kind of hysteria in a late empire situation Whatever people will sort of buy from a population standpoint, whatever people will accept or buy, oh, war will have you not throw us out for raping the public treasury?
Great, let's start a war.
Is it pills for old people?
Let's give pills to old people.
Is it more crime, more people in jail?
Let's put more people in jail.
The jail industry is another way.
Why are there many, many more people in jail right now?
Because a lot of people make money.
From putting people in jail and keeping them there.
I shouldn't laugh because it's horrible.
But when you understand the mechanics of it, this is what governments do.
They point guns at people and they transfer money.
I mean, there's a mafia. It's disorganized crime.
So this is what is occurring in the world around you right now.
This is why you see all of this feverish speculation and these bubbles and then we'll keep the interest rates down and then we'll jack them up and then we'll take them down.
It's all just manipulation to get as much money out of...
to get as much treasure Out of this Aztec cave as possible before the wall comes down.
And it will come down. I mean, mathematically, anything which cannot continue will not continue.
And the multi-tens of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities that the US government has can't conceivably pay it off.
I mean, I think the debt per working person is like $140,000 or something by now.
And this is only the stuff they're telling us about, of course.
It simply can't continue.
So this is why I'm so urgently putting out all of this information.
I can't change everything all on my own, but with your participation and understanding of these things and sort of taking away this veil of rhetoric and sophistry and sentimentality that is always cloaked around these rapings of the public purse, We can understand it's not going to continue.
The real question is, what is going to happen?
What decisions are we going to make when this stops working?
When this whole shell game, this Ponzi scheme called the government, social security, welfare, the whole militarism, the military-industrial complex, when this stops working, what decisions are we going to make?
What decisions are we going to make?
Are we going to say, well, what has failed is coercion.
What has failed is the government.
What has failed is using violence To achieve your ends.
That is what has failed.
So the solution is to put down the gun and start dealing with people on a voluntaristic, rational, humane basis, which we can do.
We can absolutely do that.
I'm completely and totally positive society can absolutely flourish without a government.
Societies will always self-destruct when you have governments because they're a cancer.
Societies will perfectly flourish when there's no government.
I know people don't believe me on this and that and the other, but just look at your own life.
How often do you use force to get what you want?
There's a reason that you have to invent the government to make all this stuff work.
You have to invent the government to make all this stuff work because people wouldn't buy it without the government.
You have to invent God if you're a priest to tell people what to do because nobody's going to obey you.
You're just some guy. You've got to invent this God.
Because people won't listen to you if you're just some guy.
You have to invent governments to justify theft because nobody wants to steal directly.
Very, very few people.
Still a minority, but who cares, right?
So... If we understand all of this, when this whole thing comes crashing down, as it will, not just my opinion, this is a mathematical fact, when the whole thing comes crashing down, we don't want to pull the Weimar Republic, we don't want to pull a 1920s Germany, 1930s Germany, and say, well, what has failed, you see, is freedom and voluntarism and capitalism, so we need central planning, we need totalitarianism, we need the government, we've tried freedom and it failed, and so on.
No. What fails is violence.
What always fails and ends up as a rot, a cancer, and the complete destruction of an existing social order is violence.
It's pointing guns at people and whatever guys you want.
Oh, helping them with old age pensions and blah, blah, blah.
Helping the sick and this and that.
It's all just nonsense. Because when there's a gun, there's just a gun.
When you're forcing people to do your bidding, it's called evil.
It's called abuse.
It's called destruction. And as long as we continue to fantasize that that will ever achieve anything but more destruction, that's all we will get.
The price that we pay for our illusions is destruction.
The price that we pay for fantasy...
is destruction and we will continue to pay that price until we see the truth for what it is and stop believing in the nonsense that we're fed and understand the mechanics of what governments do which is rape and pillage the average person for the profit of the elite.
Thank you so much for watching.
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