All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 5, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:32
880 Stef interviewed on Antiwar Radio
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Alright, let's talk with Stephan Molyneux.
Am I saying it right?
Yes, you are. Can you hear me?
I can. Welcome to the show.
Well, thank you so much. It's very great to be here.
Another LewRockwell.com writer and a fellow anarcho-capitalist and radio host as well.
Isn't that right? That is correct, although it would be more accurate to say that I do a philosophical podcast.
It's called Free Domain Radio, and it was a top ten finalist in the 2007 Podcast Awards, and it is really centered around philosophy, but of course, any rational philosophy, I believe or would argue, ends up in the anarcho-capitalist sphere.
And of course, I'm virulently anti-war.
I've been published on antiwar.com, of course, so I thought it might be worth a chat.
Yeah. Well, that sounds great.
And the website then is freedomdomainradio.com, right?
It's freedomdomainradio.com.
Oh, free domain. Is that right?
Yeah, freedomdomainradio.com.
Okay, see, I'm sorry. I'm not as prepared as I should be for this one.
No problem. And help me with your last name one time.
Sure, it's Stéphane Molyneux, a silent ex at the end, a French legacy back to the Asian court invasions and the Battle of Hastings and so on.
So, yeah, it's a French name, although I was born in Ireland and grew up in England.
Oh, okay. Well, yeah, Molyneux, that's not that hard.
I figured it could possibly be much more difficult than that, but no, that turned out okay.
So, listen, hey, let's talk about mercantilism.
I got this theory that the problem here, more than anything, is the combination between state power And the vested private interests, the people primarily who are already successful, who've already made it in life, that they've all figured out that the best thing to do is to invest in congressmen and that way have the police power of the state ready to protect them at all costs.
And I want to kind of, I guess, beat on this drum as much as I can because I know that The liberal left in America, who are my allies when it comes to opposing American empire, they believe that the imperial system, which dominates in America and therefore the world, is free market capitalism.
And that's what's wrong with it.
And I would like to prove that there's no one more opposed to the American empire than devotees of free market capitalism.
Help me out. Well, I think that's entirely right.
And one of the things that people don't understand about the state, you know, there's this old quote that says that the government is a fantasy by which everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else.
The government as a massive and coercive agency of the forced redistribution of wealth Basically acts as a huge enabler for this kind of pillaging of the general population.
So what happens is the corporations who don't wish to compete or who are facing other corporations in other markets who are subsidized by their governments end up investing not so much in capital improvements and labor relations and so on, but they end up investing in the legislative process.
So, I mean, if I had some, I don't know, sweater manufacturer in Nantucket and I was concerned about goods coming in from China, I would have sort of two choices under the current system.
I could either try and innovate and find better ways of serving my customers or I could take all of my profits and instead of reinvesting them in my business, I could invest In a government legislation, and what that does is it pushes the costs of enforcement away from me and onto the general taxpayers who then pay higher for their goods and also pay through increased taxes.
And so without the government, it's impossible for me as just some sweater manufacturing guy to prevent the kind of inflow of competitive goods.
I can't block all the ports.
I can't set my own customs.
People would just bypass me.
They'd look at me as some crazy lunatic.
But once you have the state with its universal power of compulsion, what happens is you can offload the costs of this kind of corruption onto your very customers, which would be impossible in a free market.
And this, of course, works all the way up to war.
One example that is not war-based, which we all sort of understand, is the recent prescription drug program for seniors, which was effectively written by the pharmaceutical lobby.
And the pharmaceutical lobby invested about $10 million in lobbying efforts and have reaped rewards in the tens of billions of dollars.
And, of course, given this system, any CEO who didn't pursue that path would be kicked out pretty quickly.
But it's not the fault of the free market.
It's the fault of this overlap between corporate power, which buys off the political power, which inflicts these terrible and violent rules on the citizens.
And, you know, it's interesting in history how Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, while it had its problems with labor theory of value and other flaws, basically his Invisible Hand free market theory was It was being argued against, not socialism, but against mercantilism, against the belief that you have to have the government of whatever country you're based out of controlling the land where you're getting your resources from, or else you can't get them.
Well, I think that's right. That was the point that he was refuting back then, in 1776.
That's right. And it's an eternal curse that goes on not only between nations, but within nations.
So you have a localized form of mercantilism in the form of certain types of unions.
And I don't mean unions that sort of get together and want to improve the law of workers based on voluntary association.
I mean those kinds of unions that turn to government for the enforcement of things like licensing and clothes shops and the rights to beat up sort of people who want to break the strike and so on.
So you have a kind of internal mercantilism which goes all the way from the licensing of doctors through the AMA who sort of have a stranglehold on the production of doctors, so to speak, which drives the price up and then makes everybody yell for government intervention.
So you have, internally, you can look at something like the public school system, which is a very mercantilist kind of agency.
Any economic group that uses the government to artificially distort the free market process by restricting supply, by increasing demand, by keeping out competition, is essentially a mercantilist institution, and they are myriad.
Just look at the farmers' lobby.
They're myriad throughout society.
Well, I'm reminded of Harry Brown's old phrase, that it's really not the abuse of power.
That's in question.
It's the power to abuse.
And that, frankly, if you take the average amoral or even immoral businessman and you lay out for him a list of options, one of which is invest in congressmen who pay back extraordinary profits, that's an option they're going to take.
Oh, without a doubt. As long as it's available to them, they will invest in congressmen, right?
Senators two-bits and House members a dime a dozen.
Well, people mistake the free market for the profit motive, and the two are not the same.
In the old Soviet empire, you had a profit motive to join the Politburo, which was wealth, fame, and a nice Dachau on the Black Sea.
So human beings will always seek to maximize their gains, will always seek the profit motive, but it has a huge amount.
To do with the structure that people are operating in, the legal and political structure that people are operating in, which determines how that profit motive is deployed.
So in a situation where, as you say, you can go and buy a congressman and get a 10,000% return on investment, Then people will seek that out because they have the profit motive.
Because then, I mean, that's what you want to do when you're in business.
And if you can maximize your ROI, you're going to try and do that.
And so people then blame the profit motive which they associate with capitalism, even though this current system has, you know, companies like Halliburton profiting enormously over the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people.
And people somehow think that has something to do with capitalism when really that's just profit optimization in a corrupt framework.
Well, what about people who argue that, well, we have this giant national government, we're not going to be able to get rid of it anytime soon, and that what we need is more democracy, because we have these, you know, I mean, in Republican years, it's just impossible to overlook the fact that these criminal corporations are just, you know, emptying the U.S. Treasury at rates unheard of.
This corporatism and corruption, don't we need a good, strong injection of democracy so that the people through their representatives can limit the power of these criminals?
Well, I, of course, when I sort of see the question of democracy in action, I always turn to the operation of the free market.
The ultimate democracy, of course, is the free market.
So if you look at what's available in your grocery store, then what's available is what people actually want.
They vote with their dollars and that determines what the management of the grocery store is going to put on the shelf.
It doesn't mean you're always going to get your way, but that's the ultimate in majority rule.
You pay with your dollars and you get a, quote, democratic return.
There's simply no way to substitute a violent, coercive political system.
There's no way that you can ever get that to recreate or to reenact the subtle degradations that are involved in the economic choices of millions or hundreds of millions of people.
So I agree that we need more, quote, democratic choice, but there's simply no way to get that with a coercive political system.
Because the moment you set it up, and you know this from American history, I mean, a little over 250 years ago, they set up this minimalist government if we overlook things like slavery and rights of women and children and so on.
But for the average white guy, it was an incredibly free system.
No passports, no income tax, no federal tax.
And the government was like 2% the size that it is now.
And within a generation, you've got, well, actually, very shortly after, you've got the Whiskey Rebellion, which is put down by force.
Within a generation to a generation and a half, you have a civil war, which cost the lives of 600,000 people.
Then you have public schooling.
Then you have, you know, the Fed was created.
And then you have World War I. You have the expansion of the monetary powers of the government.
You've got the Depression. You've got World War II. I mean, you sort of could go on and on, but it never takes any time whatsoever for the government, whatever government it is, To break the sort of, quote, bounds of whatever restrictions are put on it, because they're just pieces of paper.
Whereas the profit motive combined with the universal power to use violence will always break any mere paper restrictions.
So I just don't think it's ever been proven possible.
And you couldn't get a better laboratory than the American Revolution.
I mean, you've never had a smaller government in history, and it took no time at all to sort of overlead its original restrictions and begin turning into another Roman Empire.
Yeah, good point. It has been really.
I mean, you know, I was born in the 1970s and so forth, but if you take a step backwards, you know, a couple of hundred years isn't very long to get from the Articles of Confederation to the biggest government ever anywhere.
Yeah, for sure. And this has been repeated over and over again.
This is why I get into the most vociferous and exciting arguments with people with regards to looking for a political solution.
That even if you look at the history of libertarianism and if you include classical liberalism, it's been about 150 years that people have been trying to find a political way to restrain The power of the state.
And all that's happened is the state has grown asymptotically over that time period.
And I'm not going to assume that I'm a smarter guy than von Mises or a better writer than Rand or a more astute politician than Ron Paul.
But the reality is that looking for a political solution has not worked despite enormous and incredible intellectual effort, personal talents, charisma, and so on.
It just doesn't work.
And I think that we need to find another approach It's sort of like an atheist can't go into the Vatican, try and become Pope, and then disband organized religion.
It's just never going to work, and I don't think in any way a person who's particularly interested in personal liberties can attempt to infiltrate the government and undo it from within.
It's just that the whole profit motive belies that possibility.
And, you know, philosophically speaking, I guess you have 20% of themselves who really consider themselves on the left.
And it's probably 20% on the right, and then most other people are somewhere in between, consider themselves some kind of moderate or another, centrist or independent of one stripe or another.
But pretty much everybody believes in our society.
Everybody believes in force, believes in government.
And you can have right-wingers who hate the IRS and yet promote unlimited war, You have left-wingers who, you know, oppose at every turn police murdering people in their neighborhoods and yet support sending IRS guys with guns to go and steal money from the rich people, what have you. Everybody believes in liberty for issue 1, 2, and 3, but they believe in force for issue 4, 5, and 6.
Yeah, I mean, that's what's so frustrating about people on the left, right?
Because people on the left totally get how aggressive and destructive foreign policy is, right?
I mean, we'll just talk about America, though.
It's not particularly true of America more so than any other country.
But people on the left have excellent, excellent analysis of the corruptions of corporate power and the problems of foreign policy.
The people on the left, they really hate guns being pointed at foreigners, but they really love guns being pointed at domestic citizens.
Guns being pointed at foreigners, and they really hate guns being pointed at domestic citizens.
And then you have libertarians and anarchists who say, we shouldn't point guns at anyone.
And people are like, oh no, that's a radical solution, you know?
The real battle in ideas, unfortunately, still remains, where should we point the gun that's in the room called government?
The debate has still to get to the place where people say, maybe we should put down the gun called government.
Now, when you recounted the massive and incredible growth of the American government over a very quick 200-year time span there, you mentioned they created the Fed and then World War I, and you seemed to imply there was some sort of connection there.
Well, sure, yeah. I mean, I think that's fairly indisputable that you simply can't have a war, especially a war that goes on as long as World War I did and killed so many tens of millions of people.
You simply can't have that without the ability to have a monopoly over the printing of money until there's a supply of international credit.
That is available to fund these wars, right? But yeah, you simply cannot have wars without fiat money.
This, of course, was proven very well through Lincoln, who financed the Civil War by printing these greenbacks, which escalated into the monetary equivalent of toilet paper relatively quickly.
You simply cannot have international lengthy wars without the ability to print money and corrupt the currency.
And isn't that what's happening right now?
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's funny in a sort of horrible way.
I mean, when you sort of climb to the top of your wise mountain and survey human history, and you see the patterns that just recur over and over and over again, you can absolutely see that the state control of the financial system, of course, is a central tenet of communism.
It's the funniest thing in the world.
When you think that the Second World War and the First World War were supposed to be fought against collectivism and resulted in vast expansions in state power, particularly nominal, like leaving control of the economy and nominally in private hands, but gaining control of regulation and taxation.
It's just horrendous.
You can't have... I mean, once you choose government, you choose oppression.
There's no way that you can decouple the two.
And there's this massive fantasy that everyone has that we can have a good government But it's like saying we can have a good rapist, we can have a good mugger.
There's simply no possibility that you can create a monopoly of people with the power to use force at will and create a utopia.
The idea that we can be bullied, cajoled, threatened and jailed into being virtuous is a completely mad fantasy and it's very hard to understand exactly where it comes from and why it's so prevalent.
But once you give particularly the monopoly of the money supply over to the government, I mean, you just...
things go mad. Like, in the 19th century, over a 100-year period, the currency increased in value, right?
There was a deflation.
And then if you look at the 20th century, after the government gains control of the currency, you have, like, a more than 95% drop in the value of the dollar because they just start printing like crazy.
And, of course, this created the bubble of 29.
This created the crash of 29 through the Depression, which really lasted through the end of the Second World War, which was pretty instrumental in getting Hitler into power.
So this kind of control and coercion over the money supply that governments have is one of the worst things.
If I could do one thing, it would be getting kids out of government schools.
But if I could do two things, it would be to privatize the currency.
Yeah, and it really seems to me that the inflationary money is – well, there's a myth, I think, that inflationary money really benefits the middle class because they get to borrow in dollars and pay back in dimes.
But it seems to me that Really, it's the working people and the middle class who suffer the most from inflation because the workers, as prices rise, the guys who work for their weekly paycheck,
you know, hourly paychecks, their wages are the last ones to catch up with the rising price inflation, and their retired moms who have their savings account, they're watching the value of the dollars in their savings account, Well, so they're not really collecting any interest on their savings.
Well, at the same time, the very rich, they benefit from creating the money out of nothing.
The banks, you know, have as much power to counterfeit as the Fed, well, granted by the Fed, I guess.
And of course, they also benefit when they have the eventual war against inflation, and they have the artificially high interest rates in order to check the inflation they cause.
Then all the people who are already rich just sit back and make a killing off the interest.
And it's the working people who are screwed coming and going.
Yeah, for sure, for sure.
In general, in the economy, particularly in an unlimited democracy like we operate, I'm up in Canada, but it's the same deal as in the U.S. by and large, the bulk of the transfers are from the very rich, I mean, in terms of services that are provided.
The poor get the short end of the stick.
The poor get pillaged, particularly in terms of paying for higher education for the middle classes.
And the rich pay a disproportionate share of their taxation in terms of, you know, they comprise 2% of the population and pay like 20% of the taxes and so on.
And this is, of course, exactly as you would expect, that when you look at the bell curve of people in the economic scale in society, that a majority rule government is going to steal from the extremes and give to the middle, because it's going to bribe as many people as possible to vote for it.
There certainly is, I think, a small elite of economic people who have the real inside scoop.
Like, you and I don't know when the Fed is going to change what rates.
But there's a group of people who do know.
And of course, it's illegal outside the government to engage in speculation.
But of course, when you work in the Fed, You and your friends know exactly what's coming down the pipe as far as economic decisions go, and those people simply clean up, right?
But in terms of what happens to the money after it gets out into the system, the majority of it gets plowed back into buying the votes of the middle class, and the very rich who are a sort of statistical minority and the very poor gets a disproportionate pillaging relative to what they pay.
And now, you mentioned utopia there.
Are you sure, Stefan, that the statists The moderates, the Democrats, the little d, you know, Democrat-believing people out there, that they're the utopians and that it's not you when you advocate for society without a state.
Well, I think so.
And over the last, I guess you're born in the 70s, right?
Arr, a young man!
But over the last 20 or 25 years that I've been debating this kind of stuff, I've sort of refined my approach to debating with status into a very, very short exchange.
And it really comes down to the gun in the room.
I sort of call this, I got an article on Lou Rockwell called The Gun in the Room.
And the idea basically is you simply say to people, like I was debating with a woman the other day who was very, she said, well, we should stay in Iraq because otherwise it'll destabilize the country and this and that and the other.
And I said, you can't argue that because that's, you know, that's Nostradamus and the crystal ball.
So who knows what's going to happen, right?
Other than it's going to be the opposite of what people in power tell you.
But you don't know, you know, where and exactly how.
And it really came down to, you know, I respect your opinion that you want the troops to stay in Iraq insofar as I don't agree with you, but I would not shoot you for saying so.
I would not shoot you for saying that the troops should stay in Iraq.
Would you shoot me for saying that the troops should leave Iraq?
And she said, well no, of course I wouldn't shoot you.
I said, okay, well then we're in agreement.
Because if I say that the troops should be out of Iraq, then clearly I should not be forced to pay for them staying in Iraq.
So you can't say that I have the right to disagree that the troops should be in Iraq, but then shoot me if I don't pay to support them, because then my opinion clearly means nothing.
And that gets the point across very quickly that if I'm allowed to disagree with state policy, then surely I should be allowed to do that in some economic sense and not be forced to pay for things that I disagree with.
Once you get down to that, you know, will you shoot people for doing X, you know, like you get into a debate on the war on drugs, I used to have all these statistics and this and that that I'd bore people to tears with, and now it's just like, well, will you shoot a guy who's smoking a joint?
I wouldn't. I don't think it's that great to smoke a joint, but I'm certainly not going to go shoot a guy.
And if they say, no, I wouldn't shoot a guy for smoking a joint, then it's like, well, then we're on the same page as far as...
And once you get it down to where you're going to point the gun, you find out that people really don't like the idea of pointing guns, and then they get much closer to the concept of a stateless society.
They're going to have all these questions, how would it work, and this and that.
But at least they understand the foundational moral argument, which is that violence is wrong.
Yeah, but wouldn't the average person say, yeah, but what are you going to do?
You know, this is Earth. And, you know, if some gang of folks with guns is going to run around being the enforcement around here...
At least we get to vote for the local sheriff, right?
Well, yeah, absolutely.
And if people are that cynical, then of course you can't do much to sort of lead them to the promised land if they don't want to get off the couch, right?
But basically what they're saying then is that violence is inevitable.
And what we should do is give a monopoly of violence to the biggest gang, right?
And of course, that kind of logic, it doesn't make any sense, right?
I mean, because if violence is wrong, then violence is wrong.
And if violence is right, then we should all go out and be violent.
When people start to come up with pragmatic or practical answers that says, well, you know, if we don't have a government, then it'll be a war of all against all and this and that and the other.
Well, that's just not the case, right?
I mean, you can certainly look and look at the 20th century after the Second World War and say, well, why is it that after 2,000 years of fighting, the European powers decided to stop going to war against each other?
Well, it's because they all got the atomic bomb and suddenly the leaders were now liable personally for destruction if they started a war.
And magically they all found ways of avoiding war once they and their friends could get killed.
And so we know that there are situations in which you don't end up with war, and it has to do with the balance of power.
The problem with the government is the government, by creating a vast monopoly of military power, It completely undoes a balance of power within society, and that's why you get such terrible predations.
You get the U.S., which has far more people in jail per capita than China does.
A massive percentage of the population ends up in jail because there's this massive imbalance between the people in the government and the people not in the government.
and they can just ride roughshod over whoever they want.
But when you have a system where you have decentralized power structures, then there is a balance of power that is achieved that results in peace.
Oh dear, I think I put him to sleep.
Can you still hear? Shit, I'm sorry.
I got my volume turned down, so you couldn't hear me clicking my mouth, and I forgot to turn it back up again.
No problem. I finished about 20 minutes ago, and then I just went into personal anecdotes.
No, I'm just kidding. Go ahead. Well, so I want to know how you think a society without a state would work.
I'm sure the first objection Is that if you get rid of the state monopoly, a new one will replace it sooner or later, that the free market demands diversity in bananas and computers, but the free market demands a monopoly in security forces to avoid a permanent state of, you know, as you said, Hobbesian war of all against all and so forth.
How do you get rid of the state and keep it rid of?
Well, for me, that's a similar argument to the question, how do you get rid of slavery and keep it gotten rid of?
And although we have certain forms of economic serfdom in the form of taxation and so on, there is no reasonable human being...
Anywhere in the world, or at least let's just say anywhere in the West, who says that we should have a return to slavery.
So the key issue for me is that I really strongly believe that human beings are run by moral arguments.
There's nobody who can ever say, This is evil, and I support it.
So it all has to do with gaining control of the moral narratives within society, or at least exposing the false moral narratives within society.
So the way that the abolitionists got rid of slavery was they didn't say, well, slavery is economically inefficient because it doesn't optimize investments in human capital, which, of course, I spent years trying to argue with anarchism and libertarianism and puts everyone to sleep.
What the abolitionists did for decade after decade after decade was simply thunder out over and over again that slavery is a moral abomination.
And then when that really began to take root in people's minds, then slavery was kind of done, right?
And in the same way, you know, feminists for many, many decades have thundered that women are equal to men.
I'm not talking about the more radical ones, but You know, the ones who are more into human equality.
And now there's very few people, particularly in the West, who would ever say that, you know, we need to get them barefoot and back in the kitchen again.
So really it's just about thundering over and over again about the moral evil of the initiation of the use of force.
And once you get that, then the whole justification for a government Falls apart.
And then people say, well, how would society work exactly without a government?
But that's like opposing the end of slavery because you're not sure how every slave will get a job after slavery is ended.
I mean, that doesn't matter. What does matter is that slavery and the coercive power of government are moral abominations.
And once people get that, then it's just a matter of time.
But we want to get that message out there Before, you know, the economic collapse, which seems not too, too far off, comes about because we don't want to pull a sort of Weimar Republic, have an economic collapse, and then have people turn to fascism as the solution.
Well, speaking of moral abominations, I'm sure you've seen the reports, and I don't know exactly how correct these numbers are, but there have been reports that over a million Iraqis have died violently since the invasion of 2003.
And that's crime and sectarian violence and, of course, bombing and raids and killings and battles and fighting by American soldiers on the ground as well.
And, you know, I was listening to an interview that Charles Goyette did.
I forget the guy's name now.
I'm sorry. I guess I should have taken a note for this.
The guy that wrote How Bush Became the New Saddam for McLean's last week.
Did you see that? Yes.
The Canadian paper there? And Charles is interviewing the author of this, and the author is explaining how, well, America is now going with the Baathist strategy, which is dominate the Kurds, and they'll do that with the help of the Turks, which is limit the influence of Iran by fighting them violently if necessary, and being more or less a friendly, allied state with the Saudis and the Egyptians and the Americans.
And Charles Goyette from Anti-War Radio, he just kind of got off into this emotional thing about, now wait a minute now.
You're telling me that the strategy now is the exact same strategy that Saddam Hussein had?
That these last years and years of killing in order to prop up the Shiite government allied with Iran is now over, and now we're just going back?
That all of these people have died for exactly nothing at all?
How's that for a moral abomination, no matter what color the uniform is, how snazzy it might look in the TV commercials?
Well, it's worse than for nothing.
The problem is it's worse than for nothing.
I mean, dying for nothing is one thing, and that's, I mean, of course, a terrible tragedy.
But dying to create massive resentment around the world for America...
I mean, there's one thing to just throw your life away and have it wasted.
And that's sort of one thing.
But it's quite another thing to kill and be killed in a situation that endangers the very people that you have sworn to protect as a soldier.
That creates additional resentment and festers the desire for vengeance inside of the Muslim community, which is not known for its rationality and stability.
It's worse than nothing.
Nothing would be bad enough, but this is worse than nothing.
This is dying to create additional problems and resentments.
It's hard for Americans to understand because it seems so foreign and it seems so far away, but I sort of say to Americans, remember how you felt on 9-11 when 3,000 of your countrymen were murdered in cold blood?
3,000 out of a population of a couple of hundred million, right?
Iraq has a population of about 27, 28 million, and we have reports, which are fairly credible, of a million dead, right?
So this for America, Would be about 10 to 12 million Americans killed.
So remember how angry you felt and what desire for vengeance and what desire for punishment you felt on 9-11.
Well, imagine if it were thousands of times worse how you would feel.
Very few people knew anybody directly who died on 9-11, who didn't live in New York or whatever.
But they say one in five Iraqis has had a family member be killed as a result of this invasion, this genocide.
One in five Iraqis has had a family member killed.
And of course this is particularly true among the young who've been not just killed but also imprisoned and tortured and released perhaps or not.
And 9-11, while an international crime of the highest order, did not involve long detainment and torture and occupation and grinding, invasion and staying there for years and years.
Al-Qaeda didn't come and build a mammoth facility to stay on and on.
So it's important to just understand that we're all the same deep down and the vengeance that we feel when we get attacked is dwarfed by an attack that is worse in terms of thousands.
that America has done to Iraq, so they've died to create, to sow the seeds for future destruction.
Well, I remember the rage I felt after September 11th, and I hate to admit this, but it's true.
My first concern was what an excuse this would serve for the Republicans to do what they wanted to do, and then I thought about The poor people on the airplanes and in the towers and all the death and carnage.
The first thing I did was think how terrible the response was going to be, the blank check that was going to be written.
But, you know, two days later, I think, the Ben Sargent cartoon in the Austin American Statesman had Uncle Sam with a dead woman in his arms and a look on his face like, oh, man, am I going to cut somebody's throat.
And I remember thinking just how strongly I identified with Uncle Sam in that cartoon, and it didn't work on me because my attitude was inoculated.
I wasn't going to follow the conclusion and help sign that blank check.
But I did feel that rage, and I can put myself in those people's shoes.
People, imagine that, Iraqis, human beings.
And I can imagine the kind of blowback.
Again, Charles Goyette interviewed at Chalmers Johnson yesterday, and that was the subject at the end of their talk, was what kind of blowback are we going to suffer from this?
I mean, this is going to go on without end now.
Well, and of course, people wonder why the U.S. has not been attacked since.
And of course, the U.S. has been attacked since, just over in Iraq.
I mean, what people don't understand about this whole 9-11 Bin Laden thing is that, of course, as you know, Bin Laden was trained by the CIA to break the back of the Russian economy by engaging them in a highly one-sided battle of attrition in Afghanistan, right? So... Up until relatively recently, it cost about the same to attack as defend in terms of economics.
But what's changed is that now you can bring down a $20 million plane with a $15,000 Stinger missile.
So to attack has become much more expensive than to defend or to harass.
And, of course, this is what we have understood in Iraq as well, that the U.S. is spending far more money than the insurgents are.
So what happened was the CIA trained bin Laden To go with the Mujahideen into Afghanistan to harass the Russians while they were there in the 80s, to the point where this was one of the key factors, not Reagan thundering around the world, but one of the key factors that brought down and crippled the Russian economy.
And bin Laden has applied exactly the same methodology to the United States.
His stated aim and intention is to say, look, we cannot beat the United States militarily, but we want them out of the Holy Land.
We can't beat them But what we can do is provoke them into fighting on our terms, on our soil, in our backyard.
And what we can do is create such an uneven war of economic attrition that will break the back of the U.S. economic system, which will then cause them to have to withdraw their troops.
And this is, of course, the reason that no one's attacked American home soil again is there's no need to, because the American government, the American government, is doing exactly what these Al-Qaeda terrorists want.
Well, I hope everybody was paying close attention and listening to that, because, of course, the facts bear that out.
I have actually right here in front of me The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, which is the road to 9-11.
And it talks about in here, he talks about Osama bin Laden's time in Sudan.
After the holy jihad in Afghanistan, and how he was going horseback riding, he was driving tractors in the field, and he was telling people that he wanted to be a farmer.
There was a jihad going on against the black animists and Christians in the south of Sudan, and he refused to take part in it, and said that he was going to be a farmer from now on.
But the one burning issue that kept coming up was that the American troops did not leave Saudi Arabia, as promised, after the Gulf War.
And that something had to be done, and here is Lawrence Wright says that Al-Qaeda's duty was to awaken the Islamic nation to the threat posed by the secular modernizing West, occupying West.
In order to do that, Bin Laden told his men Al-Qaeda would drag the United States into a war with Islam, quote, a large-scale front which it cannot control.
And so there you go.
The action is in the reaction.
The knocking down of those towers was the slap in the face to trick us into chasing them into their neighborhood.
And it cost Al-Qaeda about $150,000 to pull off that attack, and it cost the U.S., what, $400, $500 billion to respond to it?
It doesn't take a matter of genius to know where that ends, right?
Yeah, absolutely. And I have to say, though, you know, if I was a Lockheed executive, again, not a capitalist, but a mercantilist who makes his money from the U.S. Treasury, I would think, great.
You know what? Having, you know, enemy states is fun and is good money.
But having a stateless enemy with a boogeyman in a cave in the Hindu Kush that we can't reach, who, you know, might at least live another five or ten years if they're lucky, This is the greatest enemy a mercantilist could ever hope for.
It's the war without end, which is the holy grail for the military-industrial complex.
It's a war without a tangible enemy that you can conquer with a fear in the heart of the domestic population in a way that World War I and World War II never affected the Americans in the way that 9-11 did.
The other thing I think it's important to remember as well is that it's not just for purely religious reasons that these jihadists want the U.S. out of Saudi Arabia.
It's because they view the House of Saud as illegitimate, right?
Because it's funded by oil sales to the Western powers and they are pretty decadent.
It's a pretty decadent group of people who run Saudi Arabia.
And the fact that America is giving such enormous military aid It's considered by many of the more purist or fundamentalist Islamic people as keeping a corrupt and sort of rotting and Western decadent style dictatorship over the Saudi people.
And it's not because they want to replace it with any kind of free society, but this is what happens when you go in and start tossing billions of dollars around in a highly volatile region.
It just gets worse and worse.
At some point, you're going to have to withdraw in, quote, disgrace, and things are going to return back to the way they should be, right?
Which is, you know, people managing their own affairs in their own countries, and America, which has this unbelievable luxury of overwhelming military superiority, peaceful neighbors to the north and south, two oceans on either side, should be the one country in history.
That should never need to pursue military action overseas, and it's had 50 or more wars over the past 120 years.
This is just another example.
It doesn't matter how peaceful or what system you set up, the government will always grow into this cancer that just keeps attacking.
Would you get a load of this guy?
It's like the Canadian me.
He actually speaks English.
It's like you with subsidized healthcare.
Yeah, exactly. Okay.
Now, back to the abstract a little bit here, and obviously it all ties in.
You may be familiar with the book Tragedy and Hope by Carol Quigley.
No, I don't think I am.
Tell me a little about it. Well, he was Bill Clinton's foreign policy studies professor at Georgetown University, and the book is...
In a way, it's kind of the holy grail of the conspiracy theorists, because it's written by a Georgetown University professor, and it really has a lot of the secret history of the Anglo-American establishment from the turn of the century through the 1960s and the World Wars and so forth.
But that's not the point that I brought it up for.
In the beginning of the book, Stephan, Carol Quigley writes kind of a He has this whole section that's an analysis of all the different civilizations in the history of the world and their rise and fall, where he talks about how the West has luckily been able to reinvent itself several times,
from the pagan societies of Greece and Rome to then becoming Christendom, and then the Enlightenment era and the Industrial Revolution and all these things have kept the West the West, and I guess race probably has a lot to do with that as well.
But the Western civilization has not fallen in 2,000 years.
It has reinvented itself numerous times, but it hasn't gone.
And that's sort of secondary to the other point, which I'm really trying to get to, which is he says it's all about weapons.
He says it doesn't matter what your podcast says or how convincing it is when you advocate You know, secession and repeal and eventual, you know, free market anarcho-capitalism, and it doesn't matter how good your argument is.
Everything comes down to weapons, Carroll clearly says.
He says, in the era in Europe when the average guy had a sword, there was relative freedom and liberty.
Call it the Dark Ages or whatever if you want.
There was a lot of relative freedom in Europe at the time.
Then some jerk invented the saddle.
And once he invented the saddle, That was this new advanced weaponry that only the specialized, trained warriors could use.
And it could kick your ass up on horseback and you were on foot.
And it wasn't a generation or two before the people who were specialized in horseback warfare were the lords and the kings and the knights and the tyrants and enslaved everyone around them.
And then some genius invented the musket.
And the power balanced back out again.
And it was around this time that the American Revolution happened.
The American Bill of Rights was written and so forth.
And what Carol Quigley is the—I'm sorry for going on and on, but I say all that to say this.
His point was that we now obviously live in an era of specialized weapons.
Again, we have hydrogen bombs and Apache helicopters and Stinger missiles and all this stuff.
Specialized weaponry that only government has access to.
Probably most people are glad that only the government has access to them.
And what Carol Quigley says is the only thing protecting our liberty now is the law, as it was written by James Madison and the boys back in the day.
The tradition that we have, that the letter of the law, it says here that you have to bring the accused before a judge or what have you, because if it really came down to it, The American people, the Canadian people, everyone in North America tries to rise up against this tyranny.
They will shut us down.
They outgun us by so much that they can't really be faced.
And so I guess I just wonder what's your impression of all that line of reason there.
Well, I think it's right, though with all due respect to obviously a very brilliant fellow, I would say that there's some incompleteness to it.
I think that if you look at something like the printing press, I would view that as a kind of weapon because it was the printing press and the publication in the 16th century of the Bible for the first time in the vernacular, so you didn't have to know Latin, you didn't have to be educated to read it.
By Luther that began to break the monopoly of the Catholic Church.
I would say information is the most significant weapon because, as I said earlier, people are run by moral arguments.
Everybody feels the need to justify in some manner the way in which they live and the morals that they bring to bear on their life.
And I would say that information is a very, very powerful weapon.
And I think that's where it almost took, I would say, it may have even been a prerequisite, because the new printing press, the new Gutenberg Bible, is the Internet, right, where you can get information that does not have to run through the channels of power.
And, of course, that means that there's a whole bunch of nonsense out there, but there's some great stuff out there as well.
So the discussion that you and I are having with regards to bin Laden, you never see that on CNN, right?
So in the past, Everything that came to the people in terms of information had to be processed or validated by people in power or those who are dependent on them, right?
So you can't really criticize the government at any fundamental moral level as a news agency because then you won't get your news from the government.
They'll just stop inviting you places, right?
And your career is toast, and so people don't do it.
And the same thing is true with a lot of professors.
So I would say that definitely weapons have an effect, but I think that the most fundamental effect is the information flow and where people can get access to the facts that can breed new conclusions and more conclusions that have greater wisdom and understanding to them and particularly in terms of ethical arguments.
And if you look at what happened in Christendom after the invention of the printing press and the Gutenberg Bible, Christendom dissolved into these warring sects, right?
The Anabaptists, the Syngalians, the Calvinists, and so on.
The Lutherans, of course.
And then what happened was people got so sick of religious warfare that they had a separation of church and state.
So here you have, without a particular weapon, information being put into the hands of the population who then break into these sects and they all try and gain control of the gun of the government to oppose all the other sects.
After about 100, 150 years of religious warfare, There's a separation of church and state.
Now, I don't think we'll have to go through all that warfare bit, but I think there's an example of something that changed, which was more to do with information and knowledge than it was to do with specific weaponry, and the result was a vastly increased freedom.
Yeah, very interesting.
Well, LewRockwell.com is the center, as far as I can tell, of the anarcho-capitalist intellectual world.
And Stephan Molyneux is one of the greats there.
I urge everyone to check it out.
You know, you could just type in LEW for Lew in Google and it'll come right up.
LewRockwell.com.
And not everyone who writes there is an anarchist, but pretty much.
And it's anti-war, anti-state, pro-market, says it all.
And you're a great representative of the site.
And I urge everyone to please check out Stephan Molyneux's site.
Well, you say it, because I forgot exactly.
I should have written it down. Sure, no problem.
I have two books.
One is out called On Truth, the Tyranny of Illusion, which is how to apply philosophical principles to your personal life so we don't go nuts running around after the state and trying to bring it down, but can achieve freedom in our personal lives.
I have a book coming out in a week or two called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, and I have about 800 podcasts on various topics, all the way from psychology to aesthetics to philosophy to history, which are all available for the massive cost of zero.
All right. And we'll have all the links up, of course, when this interview is posted at antiwarradio at antiwar.com.
Hey, thanks so much for your time today, Stephan.
Appreciate it. Thank you. And sorry, I forgot to mention the website again.
It's freedomainradio.com.
Thank you so much for having me on. It was a great chat.
Have a good one. Bye.
All right, folks. That's antiwarradio for today.
▲
Export Selection