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Feb. 16, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:25
982 The Government turns Everyone into a Tool...

Two examples of moral corruption...

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope that you're doing very well.
This is a video entitled, The Government Turns Everybody Into an Asshole.
And I hope that I can make the case for that.
And this is going to be, or this is, an unabashedly long video.
As I said to my wife when we were dating, hey...
You don't like it long? I'm not the guy for you.
And again, sorry, honey, for the huge disappointment.
On the honeymoon, I just meant long-winded speeches.
So, this is from the Sunday Star, February the 10th, 2007.
The article sounds dull, but give me a minute or two to whip it up into a good anarchic frenzy.
Developers' cost claims raise fears of legal chill.
Potential Ontario Municipal Board decision could make community groups wary.
Of opposing development plans.
So this is the article.
When a developer wanted to more than double the size of her village, Tanya Mullings did what she had never done before.
She got involved.
She joined concerned residents of Hillsdale, a group that saw the proposal for 473 new homes in the community northwest of Barrie as too big and out of place.
It doesn't really fit.
Says Mullings, 43, who provides daycare services.
It's like moving a subdivision in Barrie to the middle of the country.
Last month, concerned residents took their battle to the Ontario Municipal Board and became, critics say, the first victims of an alleged attempt to stifle ratepayer opposition to development projects, projects, projects.
I'm not going to read the whole thing, but let me just read a few highlights.
Damn, I missed the internet.
So here, this is the development.
You can sort of see it up here. So this is all the existing houses.
And over here, heaven forbid, they wanted to build new houses.
So what happened was the developer went through all of the legal loopholes, the environmental assessments and everything, to be able to build these new homes.
And then these people attempted to block it using the power of the government.
In late December, the company then asked the board to order ratepayers opposing the project and their lawyers to pay $3.6 million in legal fees and consulting costs for an OMB hearing that lasted almost four months.
The claim, believed to be the highest in board history, has sparked calls for the provincial government to intervene.
Critics argue the unprecedented amount sought will scare off ratepayers from opposing developments across the province.
So, yeah, basically what happened was the development company had gone through all the hoops to build the new houses, and the people who lived there didn't want the new houses to be built, of course.
So the people who lived there, the concerned citizens, went to the government in an attempt to use the power and force and violence that the government is capable of to prevent the new homes from being built.
Why did they do this?
Well, they did this, of course.
As we all know, what, of course, is not mentioned in the article, they did this because they don't want...
The inconvenience of having home construction go on, which is a couple of months and can be somewhat disruptive.
They also did not want the property values of their homes to decline because of a replacement of some green space by additional houses.
And the reason why this is so hideous...
It's that they talk about how they're being victimized by this big, nasty development company.
And this really is just shocking.
It's just shocking.
No, it's not shocking.
Until you look at it from an anarchist perspective, of course, it seems perfectly natural, but it really is quite shocking.
And it says, Rick Smith, head of an environmental group fighting the Lake Simcoe development, if this cost application goes through, i.e.
the infliction of reasonable recovery of costs for legal actions to the people who brought an unjust lawsuit against or an unjust injunction against a corporation, if this cost application goes through, there isn't a citizen on God's green earth that will ever go to the OMB ever again.
This is blatant bullying on the part of geranium, and the provincial government cannot allow this to continue.
And the Geraniums lawyer says, this is not a big bad developer.
This is a developer that is doing its best to comply with the rules, the science, with the geography, with the people, with the First Nations, with everyone.
And Smith's Environmental Defense, a Toronto-based group that helped finance the Innisfil District Association, the ratepayers Geranium is pursuing for costs, wants the province to apply for party status at the OMB cost hearing and argue against the $3.6 million claim.
$3.6 million, he says, is an unprecedented demand and would rightly terrify any ordinary citizen.
One suspects, therefore, that's what it is intended to do, do, do.
And the provincial government has an obligation to ensure the Ontario Municipal Board operates democratically, he adds.
Otherwise it's a fraud, Ruby says.
You don't expect crushing cast awards that frighten everyone so they never take part in the process.
This then becomes the developer's playpen where only the rich kids get a chance to play.
Anyway, this goes on.
The whole purpose of this stuff is to instill citizen chill and blah blah blah, right?
The threat is so intimidating.
Says this guy, former dean of the University of Toronto's Faculty of Management.
So, why do I say that the government turns everybody into an asshole?
Well, these guys who live there already don't want the houses to be built because it's going to be an inconvenience to them, though of course no infringement upon their property rights.
There's nothing that says nobody can build anything ever around you.
I guess if you want that privilege, then you would have to pay extra for the house.
You could easily do that.
You could get into a community...
Wherein you could build your houses and then you could simply buy up all the land around you and you would then just pay an extra 20 or 30% premium on your house and you would never have to worry about other houses being built around you.
Why? Because you'd bought the land.
But what these assholes want is they want to get something for nothing.
They want to pay Just for their homes, without buying any of the land around it.
And then, when the developer who actually owns that land wants to develop it into houses, the same developer that developed the houses they currently live in, they basically say fuck you to the developer through using the power of the state.
And they're attempting to use the violence of the state to prevent these developments from occurring.
And they don't want to pay for it.
If you want to, all you have to do is buy the land from the developer.
They just want to make a profit, whether it's building houses or selling land.
They don't care. Either way, it's money in their pocket, but they don't want to do that.
See, the homeowners don't want to actually pay out the money to buy the land.
What they want to do is use the power of the government to prevent The developer from developing these new homes.
Obviously, there is a chilling effect that is attempting to be imposed upon the developers.
Because, of course, if the developers go through all the legal hoops and then get stymied at the end because some residents of their existing developments don't want new houses to be built, then clearly the developers are going to feel a chill and not know whether or not it's ever worth going through all these very expensive hoops and paying out millions of dollars in legal fees in order to maybe possibly build a home if nobody conceivably objects.
I mean, that's But that's not the fundamental assholery of this particular interaction.
And this is sort of the core of my thesis.
And I'll sort of quote one other example, which will hopefully make some sense to do with that.
The core assholery here is not that the residents are attempting to use the power of the state.
I mean, P.G. O'Rourke talks about this at the end of Parliament of Horrors, which is an interesting book to read, as long as you don't mind the fact that he seems to want to make love to a Scud missile.
It's not that they want to use the violence of the state to get something for nothing, i.e.
to maintain the value of their property by preventing other people from building around them.
That's not the fundamental assholery that's going on here.
The fundamental assholery is that they have initiated the use of the government as a coercive entity to get what they want, to get something for nothing, to effectively steal the And how is it that they're stealing from other people?
Well, by limiting the supply of houses, they are artificially inflating the price of houses in the neighborhood, artificially inflating the price of their own home, which they have not justly gotten by buying up the land around their home so it can't be developed.
So they're imposing a kind of tax on other people and a tax on the future purchases of their own home by using the government's force to prevent people from building houses around them.
But the fundamental arseholery is that they have initiated this process where they're attempting to use the violence of the state to steal from people or to prevent things from occurring that they don't want.
And then, you see, when their initiative fails or hits a snag and the costs that they have imposed upon this developer, this $3.6 million, that the developer attempts to get back from them, suddenly they are the victim.
See, that is the fundamentally corrupt assholery that goes on whenever you have a government around.
It's this constant, slithery, eel-like manipulation.
Of ethics, of this concept of ethics.
Ethics used as a club, right?
Like you punch somebody in the face, and then when they raise a fist back, you're like, hey, hey, there's no need to stop being so violent.
I'm just a victim. You're chilling me.
I don't want to do this. It's that kind of bullshit that is the most stomach-turning spectacle when you look at the existence of a state and what it does to people.
I mean, if there was no government, then this would not be possible.
This fundamental assholery and this screwing up of any kind of ethical norms where if you start to use the government to impose your will upon other people, you are a concerned citizen who's only interested in the environment and who's an expert suddenly in municipal planning and who should build what where and so on and has no self-interest whatsoever in getting this kind of stuff going.
That is the fundamental hypocrisy that is so stomach-turning.
When you look at this kind of stuff, this pious, hypocritical, vile, slithery, disgusting, oily, mucus-covered self-interest that is portrayed as concerned citizens for the environment and for good, sound municipal planning.
I mean, the self-interest is naked and raw and disgusting and so covered up with pious platitudes and self-righteousness that it is fundamentally completely disgusting to watch.
And that's just in the initiation of these kinds of things.
When you look at the actual shock and horror when the costs that they have imposed upon an innocent party who has been obeying the law, when you look at the shock and horror and, oh my god, we're such victims here, when you shoot at someone and it misses, And the guy says, like, you shoot at a guy, this is sort of the, you shoot at a guy and it misses, and you break his window.
And then he comes back to you and says, you know, you really gotta pay for my window.
And suddenly you're like, oh, I'm a victim here!
Oh my god, I didn't, it's not my fault the window got broken?
Oh, they're being aggressive against me, they're gonna try and come after me for this window, and I'm just a victim here, and blah blah blah blah blah.
I mean, that is the fundamentally vile spectacle of debased and disgusting human corruption that you see whenever the state comes looming into the situation.
And you can see the same sort of thing occurring.
I just finished reading a book, not too great, not too bad, called The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Decline, and Fall of Truth in Bush's America, which has some stunningly interesting stuff that's going on here.
Of course, this is all about the yellow cake from Niger and Valerie Plame and the leak and the 16 words in the State of the Union Address and when did they know about the possibility that bin Laden might attack in the U.S. and when did they know that there was a possibility that the levees might break in New Orleans. this is all about the yellow cake from Niger and And it's all of this just ridiculous, to me it's ridiculous, interesting stuff because it's fascinating to see just the amount of emotional investment that people put into attempting to layer ethics over a criminal gang.
But I'll just sort of mention one thing here.
He's talking about the leak case about Valerie Plame.
The leak case, this is from page 184, if you're interested.
The leak case, he says, was about Iraq, not Niger.
The political stakes were high only because the scandal was about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a CIA operative who posed for vanity fair.
The real crime Was the sending of American men and women to war on fictitious grounds.
The real victims were the American people, not the Wilsons.
Isn't that amazing?
The real victims of the genocide in Iraq were not the Wilsons, but the American people.
The Iraqis who have to go with No clean water.
40% unemployment.
A destroyed economy. You are fleeing Iraq by the hundreds of thousands every couple of months.
Who've been slaughtered like pigs by the hundreds of thousands.
But the real victim you see here is the American people.
That's some pretty significant assholery, if you don't mind me sort of saying so.
And... The reasons that...
Of course, he spends some time near the end trying to crack the supposedly unbreakable Holy Grail cipher of why America went to war.
And he says...
There are, of course, many plausible motives for why America would go to war in Iraq.
For oil, for Israel, to avenge Saddam's assassination plot against George Bush's father, to finish the job left unfinished by that father in the first Persian Gulf War, to exercise American muscle in a slam-dink-dunk mission, a cakewalk that might intimidate the region's terrorists and hostile states into forever holding their peace.
All of these motives were present at the highest reaches of the administration, but which, if any, was the catalyst that ignited the crusade?
Writing in The Assassin's Gate, America and Iraq in 2005, the journalist George Packer calls Iraq the Rashomon of wars.
It's a reference to a Japanese play, I think.
Concluding that it still isn't possible to be sure, and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq war.
Even a former Bush administration State Department official who was present at the war's creation, Richard Haass, told Packer that he expects to go to his grave not knowing the answer.
And of course...
Not knowing why there was a war in Iraq takes a huge amount of self-deception, right?
And this is the kind of stuff. So his answer is that Karl Rove's plan, Afghanistan was slipping off the radar screen of American voters, and the president's most grandiose objective to capture Osama bin Laden dead or alive had capsized in Tora Bora.
How do you run as a vainglorious war president if the war looks as if it were winding down and the number one evildoer has escaped?
And so he puts basically that they wanted to get re-elected and blah, blah, blah, blah.
But that just begs the question.
Why do they want to get re-elected?
The arseholery then that floats around the people who are concerned about the evils that are being done overseas and domestically, of course, by governments, the U.S. and otherwise.
We'll just talk about the U.S. government for now.
The question of war, at least from an anarchist perspective, which of course I think is a rational perspective, is blindingly simple.
Why did America go to war in Iraq?
Well, America went to war in Iraq because...
The war is the best way to rob the public.
I mean, why did Russia go to war in Afghanistan shortly before its collapse?
Because the war is the best way to rob the public.
You can't introduce a $2 billion domestic spending program and expect people to vote for it.
It's not going to happen. But you can get $2 trillion, apparently, the final cost so far of the Iraq war.
You can't introduce a $2 trillion domestic program to rip off.
You can't raise taxes $2 trillion and get away with it in what is left of the American fantasy of democracy.
You just can't do that. But you can start a war and take $2 trillion out of the pockets of people.
When the reasons for something keep changing, then you forget about the reasons that are put forward.
Weapons of mass destruction, removal of a tyrant, of course that's George Bush looking in the mirror, right?
I mean, all of the stuff that's poor, the building of democracy in the Middle East, starting the reverse domino theory to bring peace and stability to an unstable region, all of that's nonsense, because all of that is ex post facto justifications.
So when the reasonings keep changing...
Then you know that there's some other root cause.
Like if I, I don't know, you're my girlfriend, and I say I want to break up with you, and you say, why?
And I say, well, because you keep speaking Spanish to me, and you say, well, no, I don't, and here's the proof.
And I say, well, it's because you were unfaithful.
She said, no, I wasn't, and here's the proof.
Well, because you're a redhead.
Well, no, I'm totally happy to dye my hair.
Well, well, right? If I just keep changing my reasons, then getting fussed about the fact that my reasons aren't valid is completely ridiculous.
I mean, all you're doing is avoiding the core reason.
The reasoning behind the war in Iraq keeps changing.
The justifications for it and so on.
And all that tells us, of course, is that there is a core justification that's not being talked about.
And when you want to look at the core justification that's not being talked about, you just have to look at what is continuing, despite all of the protestations to the contrary.
And of course, what is continuing, despite all of the protestations to the contrary, is the pillaging of the public purse, just as it was in Russia and Afghanistan, just as it is now with the wars in Afghanistan and particularly Iraq.
America is an imperialistic, military-based economy, like the Roman Empire, like the Thus, it needs to continually have war in order to pillage the public purse.
That's what governments do.
Governments take money from the general population and give that money in return for political support to favored constituents.
That's what governments do.
That's the entire purpose of governments.
It's to take a penny from everyone and give a million dollars to some guy.
I mean, that's what they do.
That's what they always do. That is exactly what governments always do.
And everything else that people talk about in terms of governments, helping the poor, educating, and healthcare, it's all bullshit.
Because all of that stuff comes and goes.
But the one thing that is constant is that governments take money, take a relatively small amount of money from a majority and give an enormous amount of concentrated cash to their constituents, to their political...
And in return for that, they...
So having all of this money puts you in the position of power.
Power is stored up income.
I mean, in terms of politics, right?
Power is the capacity to give money to people, right?
Money that you steal at the point of a gun through taxation and inflation and other forms of...
And inflation is enforced at the point of a gun in that you're not allowed to substitute alternative currency.
So, governments take a relatively small amount of money from the majority of people and give it in a concentrated amount to their supporters.
So, power, in this sense, is money.
The gun is the means to an end, and the means to an end is gathering the cash which you can then redistribute, right?
You can be the gift giver. That's the definition of a tribal leader, is the person who can give gifts to people in return for their support, right?
And the economics of it is quite simple, of course, that the motive to gather these trillions of dollars from the taxpayers is very high, but the motive for each individual taxpayer to resist it is very low, right?
So you take half of everybody's income, you give 5% of it to the people who enforce it, right?
The police and the... The law courts and the jails, you give a few percentage points of it to the people who will take this money at gunpoint, and you give the rest of it to all of you, the people who you keep going, right?
Who give you favors, who get you elected, who whatever, whatever, right?
And give you donations and so on.
I mean, so that's what governments do, and war is the most efficient way of doing that.
And, of course, it takes an enormous amount of willpower to not just see that simple basic fact.
What is the one thing that continues during the course of war?
Well, it's the transfer of money from the public To private interests, right?
It doesn't go to the soldiers who make next to nothing and are barely protected.
Everybody who's higher up who goes to Iraq goes into these tanks through the streets if they leave the green zone at all, whereas, of course, all of the actual soldiers have to forage around for scraps in junkyards to try and patch up their Humvees, right?
So, I said 80% of American casualties could have been reduced or eliminated if they had actually had some body armor.
So it doesn't go to the soldiers, of course.
Why would it go to the soldiers?
The soldiers are already bought and paid for.
They're constituents that are already dependent.
And this is why the welfare state always leads to war.
The welfare state always leads to war, maybe in a country that has not had recent experience of war, where the population is not traumatized, and which also has natural defenses, like America with peaceful neighbors to the north and south, and oceans to the east and west.
But it's because the government continually needs, like it's already bought and paid for its constituents, but it always needs new constituents who are going to give it money.
And so it always has to be handing out new goodies.
And so the war is...
Because the people on the inside, and this is exactly the same as was the case with the fall of the USSR, the war in Iraq is simply because The people on the inside, who know far more about the actual state of American state finances than you or I ever will, well, maybe not ever, but certainly before the crash, they know that it can't last beyond their careers, beyond their lifetimes.
So if you think of sort of the public treasury as this sort of Indiana Jones temple of gold or something, right?
It's relatively organized when there's tons and tons and tons of gold, right?
But when the door starts to come down, people just start grabbing whatever they can and sprinting out, right?
Throwing the gold out, you know, bringing sacks, just grabbing whatever they can and running.
And of course, the financial reality of the unsustainability of the system is...
Becoming more and more apparent even to those of us outside of the inner circle.
So, clearly a war is the...
I mean, the fact that the people think, well, the war in Afghanistan hastened the Soviet economic collapse, but of course that's not the case at all.
Because the Soviet economic collapse was inevitable, a war had to be invented in order to finish the pillaging of the public purse, right?
To grab as much as you can before the door of economic reality comes down and slams off the money pot, right?
So... And why Iraq?
Well, that's very simple, of course, right?
Why Iraq and not North Korea?
Well, North Korea has these massive guns that are pointed at a highly populated, with US troops as well, South Korea, right?
So if you went and attacked North Korea, Well, North Korea would cream tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers in about a day with its conventional weapons.
So you don't go there.
America and England, and to an earlier degree France, had been doing these flyovers over Iraq throughout the 1990s, which of course resulted in the deaths of about a half a million Iraqis, or the equivalent of about five million Americans in terms of adjusting for population.
So they knew that the military was bankrupt, that there were no weapons of mass destruction.
That had been confirmed repeatedly.
So why did they go and attack Iraq?
Well, because, I mean, that's like asking, why does the bully pick on the scrawny kid with thick glasses?
Why does he get his lunch money from that rather than from the head of the football team?
Because the head of the football team can fight back, right?
I mean, why does the bully go to the scrawny kid to get his lunch money?
Because the scrawny kid can't fight back.
And America and England, which were the two main...
Well, pretty much the two only people other than the 2,000 monkeys sent by God knows where, Mozambique or something?
Morocco. In the coalition of the piddling willing, the British and Americans knew that Saddam Hussein had no military whatsoever, that his military budget was a tiny, tiny fraction of a percent of what the American military budget was, let alone the British.
So why did they go and pick on Iraq?
Because Iraq was the one country they knew could never fight back.
So... Of course that's what they're going to go and do.
And the fact that the war is continuing despite the lack of the achievement of any of the stated objectives whatsoever is simply indication that the actual objectives are still being met.
That's so simple, it's so obvious that it takes a lot of work to not see that basic fact.
If all of the stated justifications for the invasion and genocide in Iraq, the mass murder in Iraq, the war crime, the international war crime of aggression in Iraq, if those objectives have not been met but the war has continued, it simply means that the war's objectives are being met, just not being talked about.
And, of course, the main thing that the war is achieving, or the main process that the war is sustaining, is the transfer of money from the public treasury to private interests, corporations, individuals, and so on.
That's all pretty clear, right?
So what does this have to do with arseholery?
Well, everybody talks about everything but the basic fact, right?
That it's about taking money from the public business, shipping massive bricks of dollars which you hand out, giving these huge contracts to everyone, getting jobs for your friends, kids who are just graduating from their university degrees and now are experts in running around.
I mean, that's what it's all about.
It's all about the transfer of money.
And to not see that takes an enormous amount of work.
Now, why does this make everybody who talks about this kind of stuff an asshole?
Well, the central issue here is that this is how a culture dies.
And the American culture, the American republic, it's dead and gone.
I mean, this is a Ron Paul supporter of people who are like, let's get back to the Constitution.
They're like this embarrassing, ridiculous doctor who's down in the morgue three days after the patient has died saying, push some epi, let's plug in...
I mean, it's ridiculous.
I mean, the culture, the moral justifications, the reality of...
I mean, the culture is so ridiculously long dead.
I mean, you could say that American culture died at the moment that the government centralized control of fiat currency.
You could say that the American culture died when the socialist swarm of academics from the...
From Europe, came over in the 1930s, and particularly after the war, when everybody got the GI Bill who'd been fighting in the war and went and got socialist propaganda from the European intellectuals.
You could say that it died with the foundation of the socialist horror force of the Great Society, sorry, of Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s, but you could certainly say, without a doubt, that the American experiment died with the creation of the Permanent Standing Army after the Second World War, The occupation and pillaging of the continued occupation, which continues to this day, and pillaging of Japan and Okinawa and the other 700 or 800 bases around the world.
But, I mean, the American experiment in terms of freedom and limited government is so long dead.
I mean, you could say it died in the Civil War, and 600,000 Americans had to die to extend the power and taxation capacities of the federal government under Lincoln, of which the end of slavery was an incidental byproduct and never the purpose.
So, the fact that people are still talking about freedom in the American sense is completely ridiculous.
And let me sort of explain what I mean, and I'll try to be relatively brief, but I hope that this will make some sense to you.
The problem is the kids.
The problem is the children.
The problem is the children.
So let's go back to this example that I talked about, this minor example of us, Hollery, this group of concerned citizens who want to get something for nothing by using the power of the guns of the government, and then cry victimhood and foul when just retaliation, like I can punch them, but if they attempt to, I can shoot at them, but if they attempt to get me to pay for their window, suddenly they're the aggressor and I'm the victim.
Well, what everybody sort of fails to understand is the moral hypocrisy and posturing, the vile self-righteousness and lying about ethics that occurs as a result of the government, which only exists because of the government.
In this sense, right? So the moral posturing that occurs, the fact that people just make up ethical stories, self-pitying, vile, corrupt, hypocritical, pompous justifications for their own corrupt actions, the most important effect that this had, the most important ripple effect that this has, is upon the kids, right? So this woman, what was her name?
The woman who got involved, right?
What was her name? Mullings.
Tanya. Tanya Mullings.
She got involved with this thing, and she's trying to get the government to shoot the developer if the developer tries to actually build the homes.
This is what it comes down to, as I've talked about before, or as the Oriental contingent talked about before.
So, what do kids see?
Let's assume that she's got a daughter.
Her daughter's name is Sally.
So, Sally sees Tanya, her mom, Pursue this action, which is going to prevent the developer that built their house from building any more houses.
That's kind of cold, right?
The developer didn't build their house.
They'd have no place to live. So clearly her mom is kind of hypocritical in this regard, right?
She's trying to stop someone else from doing exactly what she found valuable having, which is being able to buy a house.
And, of course, Tanya is not going to say, well, you know, I want something for nothing.
I want to maintain the value of my property and I want to avoid the noise or inconvenience of having people build houses and so on.
That's pretty cold and that's pretty selfish and all this and that and the other, right?
So, you know, she's not going to say, well, I want the government goons to go over and shoot the developer if he tries to build the houses so that I can shave a few extra percentage points in addition to my house value and avoid the inconvenience.
I mean, to be honest about that stuff is pretty vile for the children, right?
And it will make the parents kind of unbelievable and without credibility in terms of ethics, of course, right?
Yeah. So Tanya doesn't say, I want the government to shoot people so that I can get something for nothing.
Would make her a little bit tough to respect as a moral authority, right?
So what she says is, well, I'm concerned about the environment, and it's inappropriate, and I want to get involved, and this is democracy, and I want to make a stand, and the developers are bad, and blah, blah, blah, right?
So she lies to her child about her moral motivations, and the children pick up on it.
Children pick up on everything.
You can't hide anything from children.
They pick up on everything, because...
All the attention that we focus on the whole world, children only focus on their family, and they're born uncorrupted, right?
We have to work pretty hard to mess them up.
So, she starts lying to her child about her moral motives, right?
That's not good for the child.
Not good for the child at all.
And then, when it turns out that the lawsuit is unjust and the developer attempts to recover their costs, then the story shifts.
Because I wanted to inflict my will on somebody else using force, and now that person is attempting to get me to pay for my unjust claim against them.
Suddenly, I'm the victim, and they're the aggressor, and I was just trying to get involved, and this is going to have a chilling effect, and I'm only concerned with democracy.
These filthy lies!
That people tell their children when their children ask, what's going on?
Mommy, what are you doing? Why are you so upset?
Why are you so mad? Blah, blah, blah.
Well, this is how a culture dies.
I know this may sound like a stretch, but I'm telling you, this is how a culture dies.
I remember with my own mother talking about socialized medicine, right?
And when I was a kid, of course, you know, I was about 16, I read about Free market economics and so on, and recognized that force was being used to achieve these ends.
And she claimed to be a pacifist, and so you say, well, if you're against the use of violence to achieve ends, like if I'm not allowed to punch the scrawny kid to get my lunch money, then why is it that the use of force to achieve medical care is somehow moral?
And... Then you see the disgusting spectacle of your parents eating their own ass, fundamentally, when it comes to justifying these, coming up with all these sleazy non-sequiturs and evasions and avoidances and attacks.
I mean, it's vile.
It's like lifting the rock of ethics to see the motives underneath, and it's just a bunch of maggots feasting on a dead fish.
It's really, really disgusting.
And children know that, and they know exactly what's going on.
I mean, when the teacher in a public school says, you know, don't fight, don't bully, right?
It's like, well, then you say, well, aren't you paid because my parents will be shot or thrown in jail if they don't pay you?
How is that good, right?
Well, it's different, it's voting, it's democracy, it's just, okay, so if I get together with a bunch of other bullies and we vote to take the money from the scrawny kids, we're okay with that?
You're fine with that because it's democracy?
No, it's different because, right?
So all of this lying and this falsehood, it's not the effect that occurs outside the culture.
I mean, I'm not talking about the violence here.
I'm just talking about cultural corruption.
It's the trickle-down effect.
It's the trickle-down effect.
What happens to the children when this kind of moral lying goes on?
I mean, and let's just look at...
The last thing I'll do is let's look at teenagers, right?
Because... Teenagers go through this corrosive and skeptical phase, which is why I've tried to make all my podcasts free, because I also know that they don't have a whole lot of cash, and I'd like people to get a hold of anarchism, anarchist ideas when they're skeptical, right?
Because anarchism is skepticism compared to the religion of statism, in the same way that science is skepticism compared to the superstition of religion.
And the free market is skepticism relative to central planning, the central planning of the economy.
So, teenagers get all of these rules, right?
And people become very scared of teenagers, right?
Because teenagers, you can't bully them in the way that you could bully children, but you also can't bribe them in the way that people get bribed when they're adults by the system, right?
In terms of jobs and scholarships and so on.
So, especially 13, 14-year-olds, 15-year-olds, just when you're sort of coming into your own strength.
So, the society as a whole says, well, you see, murder is really bad.
Theft, really, really bad.
Rape, really, really bad.
Assault, really, really bad.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But patriotism, really, really good, right?
Supporting the troops and so on.
Of course, this is a massive contradiction.
Massive contradiction. How can a teenager conceivably respect a society, or respect his parents, or respect his community, or respect his teachers, or respect any elders...
Who are focusing on his moral transgressions.
This is the vilest aspect of the death throes of a hypocritical and sick culture.
Which is that, let's say, this teenager skips school.
Doesn't come to his classes for an afternoon.
Well, then he gets hauled into the principal's office and he gets stern lectures and threats and bullying and, oh, it's bad what you're doing.
doing.
It's immoral.
It's irresponsible.
Don't we all process at that level?
It's like, okay, so the head of this system just went and ordered a genocide against an innocent people.
Hundreds of thousands of people murdered, raped, tortured, robbed, falsely imprisoned, driven out of their country.
That's what the head of this system did.
And everyone's focusing on me skipping a class.
How can I parse that?
How can I make sense of that?
That this principle is not looking upwards at this murderous war criminal, George Bush, the senior cabinet, all these people.
Murderous war criminals.
His moral outrage is not focused upstairs, at the top of this power, of the person who killed, who ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
He's not focusing on that.
What he's doing, you see, is he's looking down.
He's looking down and he's looking at me and he's saying, you skipped a class.
I'm going to focus all my moral outrage on you because I'm so interested in ethics, you see.
I just, I only care about goodness and responsibility and respect for other people and respect for yourself.
And if you steal a candy bar, we're going to press charges.
Because we're so concerned with property rights.
And if you even write a story about violence, we're going to kick you out of school because we're so concerned about minimizing violence!
This guy, the war criminal, who orders the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, we don't even look over there.
We don't even look over there.
He's not in the room.
He's not part of the moral calculation.
He's not part of our thinking.
We don't focus on him.
What we focus on, you see, is the fact that you stole a candy bar.
You skipped school.
You took some lunch money.
When the crimes of the system overwhelm the consciousness of the citizens, Two million Americans in prison.
Massive public debts.
You stole a candy bar.
We're stealing your fucking future!
With these national debts.
But you stole a candy bar.
So we're gonna focus on fucking you up.
Humiliating you. Putting you down.
Morally castigating you.
Now we're saddling you with multi-trillion dollar debts.
But you stole a candy bar.
You took somebody's lunch money.
So we're going to attack you because we're so interested in ethics.
All of this is going to do is this is going to breed, and we can see this already occurring, is that this is simply going to breed an entire generation of nihilists.
The state turns everybody into a hypocritical asshole.
Because anybody who's focusing on any moral questions Who claims to be interested in social ethics or politics or virtue.
Anybody who's spending any time castigating other people for their moral shortcomings without looking at this war criminal, this genocider, is a monstrous and filthy hypocrite.
And the young understand that.
I mean, if you're the age, I get that you get that.
That morals are just used to bully you.
That nobody gives a shit about ethics in particular.
That virtue is just used as a club to put you down.
Like these...
I mean, like the Ron Paul supporters, right?
They're so concerned, you see, with upholding the law.
Because the law and the Constitution, the law...
That's really important.
And are they focusing?
Is Ron Paul saying, well, if we're interested in destructive and what is bad for the economy and destructive violations of American law, how about the guy who invaded another innocent country that did nothing to threaten the United States, killed hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed an entire society, shattered generations of people's lives over there?
Caused the deaths of thousands of Americans, the maimings of tens of thousands more?
Destroyed American credibility?
Without cutting spending in other areas raising taxes?
Massive debt to the future?
That guy? Anybody who's not...
Ron Paul's not talking about getting this guy thrown in jail.
A guy who violated the Geneva Convention by approving the use of torture?
Enemy combatants is no such thing.
It's a made-up term. Might as well call them aliens from Luxembourg.
No, we're going to focus, you see.
We're going to see how there's parallels.
We're going to focus, you see, on the illegal immigrants because it's the illegal immigrants who are really bad for the economy and they're breaking the law.
They're breaking the law.
They're not even citizens. Oh, this guy who's a citizen who ordered the deaths of millions of hundreds of thousands of people.
Permanent occupation in the Middle East.
Swell to the ranks of the terrorists.
Let Bin Laden get away!
Oh, he doesn't exist in the conversation.
He's not in the room.
The problem, you see, the goddamn illegal immigrants.
They're bad for the economy, not a two trillion dollar war.
The creation of a completely ineffectual and disruptive Department of Homeland Security.
Massive expansion of federal powers under the Patriot Act.
The destruction of habeas corpus, violations of the Bill of Rights.
This guy we don't talk about.
These guys are breaking the law.
This guy is undoing the law.
Oh, but these people are breaking the law, so we're going to focus on them.
In the same way that the principle is going to focus on you skipping a class, not this guy committing genocide.
And this is the complete, this is the death throes of a culture.
The culture is dead and gone.
Dead and gone. Done!
Done! Done! And you can either go down the drain of history with the awful and the shit and the hypocrisy of a dead, leprous and rotted culture, or you can just fucking flush and start to look towards building something better,
something new, something rational, something consistent, something benevolent, something considerate, something virtuous, something compassionate, something honest, something good.
Which is anarchism.
A stateless society where you may still have assholes around, but at least we'll have privatized being an asshole.
Which means it will be much less economically efficient, and so we'll get far fewer of them.
And that's something to aim for.
Thank you so much for watching.
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